Stone Kingdoms Read online

  I dream it, half-remember it, long to feel the cool water wash over my burnt and broken skin. And then the voices all around me grow faint before they finally merge into the steady surge of the surf against the shore.

  2

  I grew up in a house that faces the sea. A squat stone house whose bulbous windows stare out over the grey bucking swell of the Atlantic. A house my father doesn’t own but which belongs to the Church, who allow us to live there while he ministers to the scattered congregations of north Donegal. A two-storey house with grey plastered walls, darker blotches on the gables where damp rucks have been replastered, and chimneys coped with sieved cowls. I sleep in a front bedroom and so I fall asleep each night and rise each morning to the shuffling ebb and flow of the sea, the white-frothed breakers which rasp the bevelled beach and tussocky dunes.

  There should be some magic in growing up by the sea, but I never feel my life touched by it. Instead there is only the constant sense of being under siege, as if the house is trapped between the mountains, the valleys of bogland and the unrelenting encroachment of the sea. So whether it is the fine slant of grey rain which mists almost invisibly in from the Atlantic, or the squalls rattling the loose glass of my bedroom window, it feels as if we are outsiders, interlopers whom the elements conspire to evict. I think my father believes it too, because each night after the repetitive ritual of his supper he tears the day’s date from the calendar, tours the whole house, his heavy steps squirming the floor-boards above our heads, and checks that every window and door is securely locked. Sometimes he goes outside and inspects the car, closes the little iron gate, as if in some public demonstration that our vigilance is eternal and not to be slackened by the advancement of night.

  We are outsiders in the community we live in, part of the declining Protestant population. They cling to their scattered farms or small businesses, only to watch their children move away in search of new lives. Outwardly we are good neighbours to the Catholic community but inwardly we are cautious, even suspicious. And as storms smack in from the sea, and the gulls are tossed skyward like days’-old confetti, our light flickers and shivers as my father disparages their religion and their politics. There is always the unspoken feeling that our future existence is under some vague kind of threat, and so we watch the world from behind our walls, hug the assurance of our certainties, the conviction of our election.

  I rarely play with the Catholic children of the village and am never allowed to join the pattern of their lives. An only child, I am often alone, shadowing my mother at her domestic chores, or thrown back on my imagination and the world of books and dreams. In the village huddle a post office, a general store, a garage, two pubs and a chapel. I do not go there without some express purpose and my play area is confined to the dunes and the beach. But they are too open, too exposed and wind-swept to allow even a hungry imagination to transform them into something better. So I crouch hidden amongst the sharp fluted grass and rabbit droppings, and spy on the occasional strollers who walk their dogs along the beach, or else I browse in the sea’s detritus – bleached tins, shards of glass, the bones of sheep – hoping, I suppose, for some message in a bottle, some object that will inspire speculation about other lives, other places. And when sometimes I chance upon the blackened embers of a fire, a spray of beer cans, I try to read the scattered remains like a book, gently touching and turning them with my foot, trying to piece together the clues. But there are never enough, never enough to help me begin to understand what shapes or colours might infuse the lives of other people.

  It is from the dunes that I watch my father swim in the sea. A strange lifetime habit. He swims three or four mornings a week, all year long. Maybe he believes it keeps him healthy. I squat in some little gulley or the crest of some dune and watch him cross the road in his towelling bath-robe and open-toed sandals. His white legs are bowed and blue-veined, his bald head shiny in the morning sun, and as the black-faced gulls swoop and cackle above him he kicks off his sandals, folds the dressing-gown carefully, and walks into the sea. He never runs, never tests the water with his foot but wades straight in, shoulders pushing like pistons, until the water reaches his waist. Then he swims out through the swell. Bald head bobbing like a seal, he rolls over on his back, stretches out his arms and floats, kicking up white spumes of water with his feet. From the dunes the water looks cold, but he never seems to be affected or deflected from his course. I wish he could have known what it was to swim amongst the coral. I think it could have healed him.

  My father is always old. He was in his early forties when he married, almost fifty when I, his only child, was born. As a small child I am a little frightened of him – the bald bulb of his head, the rawness of his eyes, the strength of his body. And my father has two voices, one which he uses to speak to my mother and me, one which he uses when he speaks for God. Sometimes when I have done something wrong he uses this second voice. It is deeper and slower and has a cadence which rises at the start of each sentence then falls at the end. The words are polished beads strung on the sure line of his thought. It is this voice he uses in church when he stands in the pulpit above his tiny flock. A church that could have been built in any part of the British Isles with its font, polished pews, memorial tablets, and wreath of poppies. Sprinkled across the front pews sits an ageing congregation. I am the only child. When we sing, my mother playing the organ, the faltering voices fade into the vaulted roof.

  I suppose this is when I form my first impression of God as someone who lives in lonely echoing places and who speaks in two voices, someone who has slipped into old age.

  I hear my father preach twice every Sunday, the same message delivered in the same voice. After the early service in the village we drive inland, across the black seep of bog with its white wisps of bog cotton and purple heather, until we reach another congregation. Every other Sunday we drive up the coast and hold Communion for a small group of elderly parishioners. I come to know at an early age that my father is a disappointed man. Perhaps it is from snatches of overheard conversation, an expression glimpsed on his face, the set of his shoulders as he walks across the rippled sand towards the sea. I think he feels someone is punishing him, diverting his career into a forgotten backwater where he is destined to be passed over again and again. I know, too, there is never enough money, and in the house there is a constant scrimping and saving, an endless counting of pennies.

  Three mornings a week, and sometimes during the evening, he goes to his study and shuts the door. I suppose he prepares his sermons or writes letters. Sometimes my mother sends me with tea and biscuits on a tray and then I knock on the door and wait until he calls me in. When I enter he is sitting behind his desk, his back to the window, but there are no open books or papers, only the dark polished grain of the wood and resting on it his large hands. I think I am another disappointment to him. Despite what Basif says, I was never pretty. Thin, pale-faced, freckled across the bridge of my nose and round my eyes, a frizzy shock of red hair, wiry and coarse to the touch. I always have it cut short in a kind of variation on a bob that only retains its shape for about a week before sparking and jetting into its own crackling life. There is a dresser with a mirror in my room, the glass full of shadows and sky. I stand in front of it and try to dream someone else.

  My father is never consciously unkind to me, but because I never know him I never understand what it is he wants me to be. Our life together seems uncertain and fragmented. I scurry behind him on the beach, stretching my stride to step in his footprints, wondering why he always has to walk to the very end when the wind snaps my hair and stings my eyes. Sometimes he takes me with him when he plays golf. I pull the rusted trolley of mismatched clubs and he calls me his caddy and requests the clubs, calling out their numbers like announcing hymns in church. When a ball is sliced into the tundra bordering the narrow fairways we search until we find it or it is deemed irretrievably lost. He is pleased when I find a ball and he laughs and always says, ‘That which was lost is n
ow found.’ I think he is happy when he plays golf or when he swims. Mostly he plays the course alone, never replacing a single divot or ever marking a score card. When he plays well or is in good spirits he stops on the way home at Lavery’s and buys me a quarter of midget gems or clove rock. I always hope it will be midget gems as the clove rock is burny and sticks to the paper bag, but I never tell him this.

  I haven’t spoken yet of my mother. I find it harder to bring her into the open, to find the words which will draw her out of her world. Somehow it seems unkind, an intrusion into the privacy of her self, but I want to tell everything and she is a part of me that can’t be left out, if you are to understand, if I am to tell what I have seen.

  Eleanor Sarah Arnold is the only daughter of the Arnolds, who own a shoe shop in Dunglen. She is thirty-six when she marries my father, six years younger than him, and I do not know if she marries for love or because she knows that if she turns down his offer there will be little chance of any other. By sixteen she has left school and it seems that the parameters of her world are destined to be the same as her parents’ – a future of measuring children’s feet, selling slippers at Christmas, her life transmuted into a window display which changes with the seasons. She has a gift for music and can play the piano and sing. When he first comes to Donegal my father stays in a holiday home the Arnolds own. She meets him at church. She plays the organ in church and when the inevitable happens it is considered by all to be a good match, of mutual benefit, a prudent investment against the vagaries of the future. A congregation prefers its minister to be married. The wife has an important part to play in social functions, in administering those delicate aspects of pastoral care, where a woman’s touch is considered desirable and gives an impression of stability to a man.

  When I look at the few wedding photos she keeps in an old jigsaw box, I wonder what emotions hide behind the smiling faces, but there is no way of telling and it is a question I cannot ask. On that day I think she is beautiful, in the wedding dress made by her aunt which ripples round her feet like surf, and the white shoes that come from her father’s shop. A slight woman, her face pale as her dress, with wild roses in her hair – the hair she always lets me brush and comb. When I finish she brushes mine and when I complain about its colour, its shape, she shushes me and tells me it is beautiful and that if I were a nun in a convent out on the Point I would have no hair at all and that would be something to cry about. I’m glad she cannot see it now.

  She has a fine white seam of scar on her scalp, smooth to the touch, and I make her tell me over and over about the day she was knocked down by an American tourist, how he sent her dolls and presents every Christmas for years and years, and she laughs and says that every other child in the village hoped it would happen to them. But I remember too, the first time I find the whisper of grey filtering her hair and know that some day she will die. I hope she will not die before my father. And at night, as the sea gnaws hungrily at the shore, I torment myself with the fear of standing by her coffin, seeing her grey hair folded lightly below her like a pillow.

  My mother loves music and to my father’s irritation she has the radio in the kitchen going all day. Most evenings she plays the piano she has brought from her father’s house and sings. Sometimes she sings in Gaelic and then the soft-vowelled ballads conjure up romantic mystery that nothing else in the house can emulate. I sit beside her on the stool and watch her white fingers skim over the yellow-edged keys that look like fingers stained by nicotine. I don’t think my father likes her singing in Gaelic, but he never says anything and when he sits behind a book or a paper I know he is listening to her voice. If there is never any public display of emotion, they are always respectful and often kind to each other. They do not kiss or even hold hands in front of me – I am the only evidence of their physical intimacy – but I know they care for each other and, in their different ways, for me.

  Within the limitations of our world, the narrowness of our alloted space, I suppose we are not a particularly unhappy family. There are no bitter arguments or recriminations, no displays of petulance or passion. But it is also true that there are too many moments of silence. We exist in a sober, often sombre, world and although I have little with which to compare the quality of our life, I come gradually to feel that it has been absorbed in the greyness of the steely sea, and bleached of any vivid colour or experience. As I grow older I remain close to my mother, share the few secrets I can muster. But as I stand in front of my mirror I dream another me, dream another life.

  Only the summer months bring some respite, some unpredictable variety, as the coastline fills with holiday-makers and even our own stretch of beach spawns family clusters when the weather is good. Dour village shops suddenly hang out postcards and fluorescent buckets and spades, and the roads are full of caravans and camper vans. My father pretends to resent this sudden influx but I think he really enjoys it. His Sunday congregation swells to almost double its size and he delivers his sermon with greater gusto, performing for his audience with a fresher verve. It is in July too that he brings out his Orange sash and white gloves and marches with a black bowler covering the bald egg of his head. As he sets off down the road we watch from an upstairs window and press our hands to our mouths to suppress the rising giggles, and as his broad stride takes him further away we let the laughter come bursting out like air from a balloon. There is always something between us, an unarticulated conspiracy which strengthens as I grow older.

  My mother is the kindest person I have ever known. Kindness is a word that the world has tainted with sentimentality, infected with weakness, but now I know its strength, the purity of its resolve. Her kindnesses were unobtrusive, undramatic, uncelebrated, an intrinsic part of her being. I shall not tell you of them because they were secret, quiet things and if told I am frightened the clumsiness of my words would make them brittle, the heaviness of my touch break them into pieces. Only this moment will I tell, because it is my first glimpse of a world I have never seen and because all these years later it comes back again.

  My father had been taking part in some convention at the Guildhall in Derry. It is a Saturday afternoon, and when the meeting goes into private session I leave with my mother to do some shopping. Parked along a street is a line of taxis; the first one has its diesel engine purring, the musk of its fumes filtering into the air. The shiny black frieze of head-to-tail cars wears a transfer of the sky and buildings. A knot of men stands on the pavement, some leaning back against the first car, and as we walk towards them we hear their laughter and then the knot loosens and the men step back to form a circle. In the middle of the circle is a man. He is shouting, ‘Give it back, give it back!’ and I see the first glint of a yellow ring being thrown across the circle. It is a game which children play, but as we get closer I know it is not a game. The man clutches at air, his hand like a claw, and his voice splinters into swearwords like broken shards of glass. As it rises into a scream the mesh of laughter is a skein of hate falling over his head, tightening his loss of control. We are close enough to see the disturbed skitter of the man’s eyes as he jerks round, like some animal goaded and prodded trying to break out of the ring of pain which encloses it. His flailing arms convulse in the black frieze of the doors, and flecks of spit stipple the edges of his mouth. The men laugh louder and I pull my mother’s hand away but she walks on. One of the men sees her in the corner of his eye and for a second is distracted and the ring he is about to catch tinkles to the ground, then rolls towards us. I am frightened but I feel my mother’s hand tighten on mine and then she puts her foot on the ring, trapping it under her sole. One of the circle steps towards her, bends down to retrieve it, but she doesn’t move her foot. Doesn’t move at all, only stares at the men and says nothing until one by one they move to the side of the pavement, turn back to their vehicles. The owner of the ring is kneeling now, sobbing, and she helps him to his feet, takes his hand and presses the ring into his palm, and then we walk on and never speak of what has happened. br />
  As I grow I carry the moment with me but it is only now I begin to know its meaning. As I look back, there is very little I know about the world. The little I discover is pieced together from books or from the few fragments of my experience. When I bleed for the first time I am sick with fear and shame. I do not understand. And so I smuggle the stained knickers out of the house and bury them deep in the sand, placing a little pyre of stones on the burial place. Now I lie here, I want something to flow out of me, something that will tell me that everything is not dried up, tell me that I am alive inside and not that dusty, stony river bed. But I have no tears, no warm wetness to stir and course into life. All I have is words, more words than I have ever known.

  The evening my parents tell me I am being sent to a girls’ boarding school in Belfast, I say very little but am glad. School becomes like a journey into the future and I am grateful for the protective camouflage of a uniform; it affords me enough time to assimilate what I need to know, to simulate knowledge and experience where none exists. I listen and learn, absorb everything assiduously. I am a good pupil, conscious always of making up for lost time, cramming everything in. After formal lessons are over I learn what I really need to know from the other girls. I let my hair grow long and remember the nuns out on the Point.

  When I go home in the holidays it feels as if I am returning to the edge of the world. Donegal’s gaudily painted bungalows, the grotesque shrines at the side of the road, the unrelenting loneliness of the landscape. And if I instantly renew my friendship with my mother, it feels as if some permanent distance separates me from my father. He develops a stilted style of talking to me – ‘What is Naomi going to do today?’ ‘What book is Naomi reading?’ When I allow it to irritate me I respond in similar style, ‘Naomi is thinking of going for a walk.’ ‘Naomi is reading. . . .’ As the years pass he grows more morose, more disappointed. Only his swimming goes on the same. Sometimes I watch him from my bedroom window, his bald head bobbing in the water like a buoy, little flurries of white where his hands and feet slash the surface. I think he resents that I have broken away, discovered a life other than the one he presides over. Perhaps he is envious – I don’t know. He is a strong swimmer but there is an ugliness about his movements in the water. Where others seem able to give themselves to it, become part of the element they move in, he seems to be fighting against it, forcing a path through an unyielding barrier. I am older now, but as I watch him I realize I understand him no better than I did as a child and for the first time it is no longer important to me.