Inch Levels (17 page)

She had told them why, because she knew why: there was a fairy ring in the field along from their house; and her mother had told her why she must never go near it; and especially must never touch the hawthorn that grew there. ‘Because of the fairies, Miss,’ Christine had said. ‘Because the hawthorn is the fairy tree, Miss, and they don’t like us to touch them, or take a branch.’

‘Or take a branch; that’s right,’ said Miss McNamara. ‘Or anything like that. Now,’ Miss McNamara said, looking around the class, ‘who believes in all that? Who believes in the fairies?’ Nobody put up their hands; nobody at all, and Miss McNamara laughed. ‘Well, I don’t either – but I’m still not going to annoy them!’ Then she turned around to Maria Coyle and said, ‘Well, Maria, and isn’t that right?’ – and Maria, who’d looked like she was about to cry, to burst out crying, suddenly didn’t look like she was about to cry; she laughed instead, and Miss McNamara laughed and all the girls laughed. And Christine laughed.

I laughed too, she thought as she cycled along, and it was far better that Maria didn’t cry. She didn’t know, that was all; that was the only reason. Christine laughed again as she sailed down the lane: she laughed aloud, ducking her head from time to time to avoid snagging her hair into hawthorn branches that dipped and dripped into her face again, and again and again. It was far better that Maria didn’t cry; I was glad that she laughed instead, that Miss McNamara made us all laugh. That was ages ago, she thought: ages ago, now. Months and months ago.

In the school lobby this afternoon, the statue of Our Lady had been surrounded by red autumn leaves and red dahlias from the convent garden. In the spring it was May flowers: bluebells picked from the hedgerows and crowded together in those big glass coffee jars given in by Sister Perpetua’s brother who owned the cafe in town. ‘He’s a bit of a wheeler-dealer,’ her parents said. ‘A bit of a wheeler-dealer,’ they said, ‘that one.’ These big glass coffee jars were all over the school; they were always being used, all year long. In the autumn, the big girls rehearsed a musical, and the younger girls had to find branches and stems for the stage. And in the Christmas concert, for the local St Vincent de Paul, they had branches sprayed red and glittery white. And bluebells stuffed into the jars for the May altar.

The bluebells wilted fast. The jars were kept topped up with water, of course, but the bluebells wilted just the same.

And now, autumn leaves. Christine had hardly looked at them today: not that she was in a hurry, because she had time to kill. She just didn’t look at them, that was all. Instead she’d grabbed her bike, they’d all grabbed their bikes if they had bikes, they’d all turned this way and that way, heading for home. She’d free-wheeled down the main street, through the town square, over the bridge with the sea at her left hand, then up – what a puff – up, up, up the steep road that climbed from the lough, up to where her house stood on the crest of the hill, with its big garden. Plenty of room, everyone said, for a growing family. How many times had she walked and cycled up here? Oh, it was dozens, hundreds of times in her life; and now that she was a big girl, she was allowed to do it on her own.

There were houses, people, traffic coming and going. She was nearly home.

And now suddenly there was a van there on the lane, behind her, on the hedge-shadowed lane, where there had been no van a minute ago. Where did that van come from?

No time to wonder. Christine fell backwards and for an instant she felt pain as the back of her head hit the ground – and then, nothing at all for some time. Or almost nothing: a blur of pain, swimming in and out of pain; and water, and darkness. And movement: for a little while, it felt as though she was moving.

For a little while. But her head, her mind, were shattered: and before too long, she reached oblivion.

Robert on the railway, picking up stones.

Along came the engine and broke Robert’s bones.

Oh! said Robert, that’s not fair.

Oh! said the engine driver, I don’t care.

How many bones did Robert break?

One, two, three, four…

Two children squabbling in the hospital corridor: shrill voices raised – outraged, furious, complaining. A boy, a girl, two girls; the boy being blamed. And a mother’s ineffectual shush-ing.

‘Shush, shush! There are sick people here!’

‘But he –’

‘I never did!’ – the boy’s voice, raised and wailing in distress.

‘He did, he did!’

‘I didn’t!’

And now the mother’s voice. ‘James, that’s enough! Be quiet!’

And now a nurse’s squeaking shoes running: the family bundled away; and Robert opened his eyes. There was the room, the bed, the thin outline of his brother-in-law’s body under the blue coverlet, the beaky profile, the loose skin, the plastic tubes.

*

Run, boy, run.

The clearances were beginning. Belfast voices crowing. They were coming.

Stones rained. The families on either side of them had left Bombay Street in daylight, taking the advice of the priest, the police, their own bawling instincts. ‘Let’s go too,’ Robert said. He smelled fear in the air – but his mother was bloody-minded: and she’d dug her heels in. She’d not be thrown out of her own house by anybody. They’d take her out in a box, first.

That was her decision. She had a little time to think about its consequences.

First, for a moment when the kitchen window came in; then again, as they stood in the narrow hall, as the walls of the small front room glowed in the light of the flames. They were coming: the mob – though the firemen weren’t coming, they wouldn’t come, so they had heard. Bombay Street could burn, first. And it was burning as they left: there was a screen of young men and boys holding the line to the left as they scurried like rats to the right, to shelter, with bags, with bundles, with whatever they had been able to lay their hands on; screams and whistles and bellows.
Run, boy, run
: stones raining over the screen: and Robert turns to look, sees flames, sees crowds, sees a red light in the sky and a Red Hand and a union flag amid the smoke and the flaming light. And turns again, and sees the blood running from her scalp down and onto his mother’s face. A stone has met its mark; and there is a hotness of vomit in his throat. She stumbles, picks herself up, catches his hand and they run.

Run, boy, run.

*

They never went away: these memories, these sensations of humiliation. That little boy out in the corridor, pecked and blamed and scolded: that was it, in a nutshell. That was me, Robert thought, and he ran a hand over his forehead, over his skull. That was me.

Robert on the railway…

The skipping game – but he had run into the crowd, fists flailing. He had learned not to waste time in words. Yes, he had learned early to use his fists. His dreadful temper: he had never tamed it. Instead, the world flamed red before his eyes, and then black; and before he knew it, his fists met their mark.

How many bones did Robert break?
– many bones, in fact: many bones over the years, the bones of other people. He never broke his own. The little, petty humiliations year by year: well, the thought of broken bones had corrected the balance a little.

And now the figure in the bed moved, woke. Eyelids flickered, eyes focused, looked, and looked away.

‘Oh, what did I tell you?’ – a reedy voice, a petulant voice. ‘I told you not to come again.’

Robert leaned forward in his chair.

‘I came to say sorry. To tell you I’m sorry.’

A pause, a beat.

‘Don’t be telling me. Why are you telling me?’

Which was a point: why was Robert sitting in this over-heated hospital room? Why was he saying such things?

‘And I thought I told you not to come back,’ Patrick added. High, yes: reedy – an old man’s voice in a young man’s body; but still capable of loftiness, of a little of the astringency of old.

‘I mean I want –’ said Robert, but Patrick had already closed his eyes again, and now he moistened his dry lips and spoke again.

‘I know what you want. You want me to shower you with admiring kisses. But it isn’t me you should be apologising to. Go away, Robert,’ he said, mildly now. ‘This is pointless. Apologise to someone else – as if
apologising
will do it. And call the nurse: I want some tea.’

True: this was pointless. Robert grasped his coat and left the room.

*

Too much. Too much.

So Patrick thought. He opened an eye to check that the unwelcome visitor had departed – and yes, the coast was clear. Another bolt of material, duly stashed away. Too much material: this fabric going on and on, unfurling dementedly. Like, he thought, one of those rolled-up parchment maps flung across tables in adventure films, pirate films, revealing itself in a cloud of dust.

At least those rolls of parchment tended to show the way home, the way to the treasure, to Shangri-La. But there was no treasure trove, no Shangri-La at the end of
this
adventure, Patrick thought. My ma and Robert have taken care of that, between them. This adventure cost too much, too much in materials and labour and tears. Too much in consequences – too much for anyone sane to want to embark upon it.

It was too much. And he laughed, then, stretched in his blue bed: and it wasn’t as if he had all the time in the world, either. Which was the problem with memory, with history: too damned much of them both. They expand, they go on expanding, exponentially, especially once they are paid the smallest amount of attention. They’re like – and here he paused – yes: they’re like certain children and domestic pets I’ve come across, squalling, pawing and poking, running around hissing and flapping, like ganders in a farmyard. They can never be satisfied.

But the children analogy was hardly in the best of taste. He knew that too.

‘You know those balloons,’ he said to Margaret – this was lately, he thought; the days continued to blur now – ‘that people have trouble blowing up?’

‘She moved her chair a little closer to the bed. ‘I think so,’ she said. ‘You can’t start them off, sometimes, is that what you mean?’

‘That’s it,’ he murmured.

‘You need a bicycle pump.’

‘Mm.’

‘So, what about them?’

He said after a pause, ‘Well, once you get started, the things sometimes seem to go on and on, don’t they? It’s like you can never get them filled. That’s what it’s like.’

She looked at him. ‘What is?’ she said. ‘What what’s like?’

‘So I scratch myself,’ Patrick murmured, ‘and wonder what I have begun.’

‘What?’

‘You know, in Sisyphean fashion.’

‘What?’

‘Oh, nothing.’

She rolled her eyes, then, and edged the chair back again.

But Patrick was also aware of time ticking ever onwards, of the impossibility of resolution. So that he need not worry, necessarily, about the final product, about its shape, about consequences. And God knows, he thought, surely the consequences are clear already? I’ll just keep on rolling along.

Before he got sick – just before; in his mind’s eye, it was barrelling along the motorway in his direction – he had come across the theory about the butterfly’s wing. Everyone was getting excited about it and he could see why. He talked to one of his senior classes about this theory.

‘For the sake of argument, let’s say down there on the grass.’

Those closest to the classroom windows glanced out and down onto the lawn and then back at him again. The rest of the class just kept looking at him.

‘So, the idea is that the movement of a butterfly’s wing down there on that bit of grass here in Derry will, given time and the correct set of circumstances’ – and he paused for breath now, aware of the disinterest in the room, ploughing on through air that had the consistency of thick soup, ‘create consequences undreamt-of in the here and now.’ He paused again. ‘What do you think of that?’

They didn’t think much about it, apparently.

‘So,’ he said, ‘an iceberg calved in Antarctica, a flood in Australia, a dust storm in the Gobi –’

‘That’s in China,’ said one of the boys, unexpectedly.

‘That’s right. And if there’s a dust storm in China, a dust storm that maybe – what, say it stops production in one of their electronics factories. Say the sand gets into the air conditioning system. What does that mean?’

They were all paying a little more attention now.

‘It might mean – say it means that you won’t get the new Walkman you wanted. There might be a delay.’

A delay? Now he had their attention.

‘And all because a butterfly took it into its head to have a little spin on our front lawn. What do you think of that, boys?’

There was a movement through the class, a ripple.

‘Yeah. That’s pretty cool, sir.’

It
was
cool, he thought. I really
get
this theory: I really do. I really get it: I can apply it to my own life without even having to think about it.

It is the most appealing theory I have ever come across.

This was the point of history: that in the movement of a butterfly’s wing lay the potential for the world – or portions of it, at any rate – to turn on a pivot.

His father had understood this. The name of the theory had changed in the, what, quarter-century since that day on the beach in the summer of 1960, but the substance remained the same. His father said that that poor ship of the Spanish Armada wouldn’t even have
been
beating its way back home to Spain via Scotland and Ireland if it hadn’t been for a series of curious, frustrating delays back in Spain in the spring and summer of that year. The fleet was late taking sail: already, the commanders were doubtful about the whole enterprise. Then, as the Armada reached the Channel, the season turned with a snarl: summer ended abruptly, too early, and an autumn storm howled down from the North Sea: the great, top-heavy ships could not manage such narrow, stormy waters; the vengeful English navy went hungrily to work – and the rest was history.