“There’s no way you’re mad, Ellen, only clairvoyant,” Liam said. “This thing is a gift; you shouldn’t be trying to blank it out with drugs.”
At first I couldn’t believe what he was saying. In my book hearing and seeing things that aren’t there is schizophrenia. Go back a hundred years or so and it’s possession. No part of me could accept, as Liam did, a world full of beings and things that were real as day but we couldn’t see. Even thinking a thing like that outside in the wind and the air with Liam beside me scared the living daylights out of me. Letting it creep in when I woke at night gave me the screaming abdabs. I’d grab hold of him and scurry into his body looking for refuge, only I didn’t go telling him that, I let on it was all appetite. The way I was reared, you didn’t say if something scared you—that was weakness. You didn’t let others see weakness, even your nearest relations. Weakness was a secret between you and God, who knew anyway, who wrote it all down in a big black book and judged you and found you wanting.
There was another thing about the way I was reared that kept smacking me in the face with Liam, and the more I tried to wriggle my way around it, the more it stood in front of me blocking my path. My mother was a woman with very strong views on what you did or did not do, and one of them was that it was just plain ignorant to remind a Catholic that he or she was a Catholic. Especially if you had time for them. It was something you left unmentioned, out of good manners.
And now here was Liam, as Southern and as Catholic as they come, and for the life of me I couldn’t turn round and say that believing there were things in the world you couldn’t see was Catholic, and seeing things that weren’t there was even more Catholic, which he was, but I wasn’t. More to the point, letting go and seeing what might happen would have been like deliberately stepping off from a narrow ledge to fall into bottomless darkness.
Suddenly all the comfort I’d had from Liam flew out the window. He was ignorant and superstitious, and that was the reason he’d listened so patiently to all my talk. I was better off with Robbie—Robbie didn’t live in a whole moither of strange half-notions; Robbie had his two feet on the ground.
But thinking of Robbie was as dangerous as walking into the heaving sea. I hadn’t phoned or sent a postcard, and today was the very last day of the time I’d said I’d be here with Brian and Anne. If I didn’t come home now he’d ring up my mother. No, he’d leave it a day or so longer because he wouldn’t want to admit that he didn’t know where I was. You’d think I’d have lifted a phone even then just to cover my back, but I didn’t. I’d got into a strange mood of fatalism and I didn’t seem able to act or make up my mind—all I could do was let things drift.
So I sat there on that wall of stones with my face turned into the wind and my hair flying back behind me, caught between the devil and the deep and not sure which was which. I kept my eyes fixed on the sea. The dog stuck his head under my arm and butted at it. He wanted sticks thrown, but it was way too rough, and anyway I wasn’t in the mood.
After a bit the dog left off nudging and threw himself down on the stones in disgust. Still I didn’t speak, though I knew that Liam was waiting. I didn’t speak because I couldn’t; it was as if my whole body was caught between these two men and what they were trying to make me be, and all it could do was freeze and refuse. Then the seal we had seen before came back and stuck its head up out of the water and stared at us. I looked straight into its eyes, and it looked straight back into mine. They were huge and soft, like liquid filling a glass right up to the brim and ready to spill over. The dog sat up beside me and started to mew; then he let a yap out of him, and the seal gave us this sorrowful pitying look and slid slowly down under the water. It must have gone motoring about under there because after a while it broke the surface again, only this time it was further over and closer in.
It’s the strangest thing, a big grey seal in a strong running sea, for it isn’t like anything that should be in the sea at all, it isn’t fishy or birdlike or scuttling, but a warm-blooded mammal with eyes more human than a dog’s. More human than most humans, if by human you mean full of speech and feeling. Yet it lives in the endlessness of the unbounded seas, and you can see that it can handle all that, even the loneliness. It can live down there where the pull and slide of deep water changes all colours and rubs out all edges; it can handle the fish world of swayings and scuttlings, then poke up its head and look with over-water eyes at our oxygen world, which is fixed and flashing with daylight.
And when it comes in close and swims around, staring, you can’t help feeling that it is like searching for like, searching for warm, milky creatures that know the beat of hot blood and suckle their young. If you speak or sing it draws nearer, and its kingdom looks out through its eyes and enters us through ours.
When I saw that seal I wanted to weep for myself, for I knew with a strange, strong knowledge that if I did as Liam said I might learn to be easy out there, I might even come to love the slide and suck of great moving masses of water far out in frontierless seas. But I knew as well that for any ease and joy I might have in that other kingdom, I’d always fear it, and I’d never stop wanting to be one thing only and undivided—I would never, ever get over the awful loneliness of being other. I didn’t want to see things or hear things or live under the sea; I didn’t want to be different or special like that, only to be special to some man who wasn’t broken and hard like Robbie and maybe have another Barbara Allen to hold in my arms.
But at that time I couldn’t seem to stay out of the other world nor find the courage to fully enter it either. I still can’t, I still live caught between the two, though at least when the underworld claims me now I know to hold my breath so I don’t come up near drowned. But back then, I sat on the stones with Liam knowing nothing beyond what I was reared to. I was the child who has only ever seen what is revealed by day, who hasn’t known that in darkness you lose what is near but you see beyond into galaxies.
I remember looking up at Liam from a long way off, and he got to his feet and stretched down and pulled me onto mine and we tramped off over the short, springy grass, which he said was called machair, with Dandy dancing alongside and the sheep getting up and moving off at sight of him, sheep with curling horns like my skull on the windowsill, and arses dyed indigo blue.
Boredom and fear belong to the mind, and pain and exhaustion belong to the body, but the spirit knows none of these things—the spirit knows only light. So we moved off, and the movement must have jogged me out of the mind and its fear and into the body—home of pleasure as well as pain—which still glowed with its discovery of Liam’s.
And maybe into the spirit as well, for it is amazing, looking back, how easily I sloughed off the seal and its dark warnings, and went skipping and dancing like Dandy into Achill’s shifting light.
“Marie and Dermot will be here on Thursday,” Liam said. “We’re welcome—for as long as we like—but I’d need to be thinking of getting back.”
Dermot was Liam’s friend, the one who’d lent him the cottage, which belonged to Dermot’s family on account of his mother being from Achill. He’d told me that much, but nothing at all about anyone coming.
“What day’s today?” I asked, blank as I could manage.
“Tuesday.”
I got up from the table and made a fresh pot of tea.