Also by Rebecca O’Connor
WE’LL SING BLACKBIRD
The paperback edition published in 2019 by Canongate Books
First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2018 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Rebecca O’Connor, 2018
The moral right of the author has been asserted
The lines from ‘Bluebells for Love’ by Patrick Kavanagh are reprinted from Collected Poems, edited by Antoinette Quinn (Allen Lane, 2004), by kind permission of the Trustees of the Estate of the late Katherine B. Kavanagh, through the Jonathan Williams Literary Agency.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 262 1
eISBN 978 1 78689 261 4
Typeset in Centaur MT by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd,
Falkirk, Stirlingshire
For my family
Contents
He used to walk by our house every day at the same time, up past Molly’s lane to the cemetery. No one took any notice of him so I didn’t much either.
I went up there most days after school. It isn’t far – about two minutes up the road, past a derelict cottage where wrens nest and tufted sedge grows out the windows. Past a car park, big enough for twenty or thirty cars. They parked right down by our house, in on the grass verge, for the bigger funerals. There were people who went to every funeral in the parish – the same familiar faces time and again, quietly chatting to one another as they strolled behind the hearse.
But he wasn’t one of those.
I thought I knew the place like the back of my hand – the stories behind certain graves, like the orphans who’d died in the fire in town all piled in together, thirty-five of them, without names. And next to them two separate graves for the nuns. Little framed ghosts in their Holy Communion outfits with their jaundiced, freckled faces. Names worn away, railinged plots with whitethorn and wild rose, black-flecked marble, old plastic wreathes with moulding notes of love and condolence.
It’s on a steep hill that leads down to the main road. At the top of the hill is a large stone cross on a block of slate. High black brambles behind that, thick with blackberries in late September, and behind those, fields for pasture. The prettiest plots are up there still, blanketed in snowdrops, and early spring primroses, and bluebells in May.
It’s always cold, even in summer. The wind feels like it comes from off the dark surfaces of the lakes.
I imagined sometimes I could see the sea off in the distance, though the coast is over a hundred miles away.
An ink-dark line of yew trees runs down on the left, along the path from the car park. Down the middle of the cemetery is an unsheltered shale path; and a smaller muddy track, seamed with dock leaves and grass, cuts to the right, through the older part. I convinced myself they were splints of bone and teeth I could feel through the rubber soles of my shoes – small as chicken bones, some of them, like those of children’s hands or feet.
A lone farmhouse, stuck to the top of a field beyond the road, used to offer the only glimmer of light between there and the next town over.
The first time I noticed him was one of those evenings that sucks the light slowly out of things. He was off in the far corner, almost blotted out by the shadow of the trees. I sat still as anything beneath the stone cross, my knees pulled up to my chest, watching him, waiting for him to leave, but at the same time not wanting him to. He stood there for what seemed an age, his figure elongating, expanding in the darkness. Then he turned, scraping the heels of his shoes on the gravel, and walked towards the gate. No sign of the cross. No genuflection.
I was frightened of him in a way – of his grief, his loneliness. He looked like the loneliest person on earth just then. I imagined he was the type of boy who wondered about things, as I did, who broke his heart wondering about things. Who felt inexplicably lonely hearing voices in the next room, or cattle off in the distance, or the sound of tyres on the driveway.
I remember that evening. It was dark by the time I got back from the cemetery. The white paintwork of the house was luminescent under a full white moon. I remember the sound my feet crunching on the gravel. I remember it because it was the only thing I could hear besides the blood gushing in my ears. That particular evening the lawn looked like a pale green glass. And I could feel eyes on me as I passed the laurel hedge separating our house from the neighbours.
The garden at the back was pitch-black. I could just make out the frosty tufts of grass glinting in the light from the porch. The swing creaked slowly from side to side, the blue twine gnawing into the branch’s old bark. If you swung high enough on the seat you could touch the lowest branches with your feet and see right out over the wooden gate onto fields, and to the river, which had burst its banks that winter. I tried not to look down, walking a tightrope of light from the porch, concentrating hard on my steps, and on the footsteps behind me of those little orphan girls in their white dresses, charred black at the hem.
Gran was sitting alone in the dark in the living room, her left hand slack on her lap, her head slumped to the side. The stroke three years earlier had left her with the notion that that hand was not her own, but my dead grandfather’s.
Lazy Bones, she called him. She was forever complaining about his nails that dug into her while she slept, leaving sores on her belly and hips that Mam would have to clean and bandage.
An empty sherry glass sat on the nest of tables beside her, the half-empty bottle underneath. Blue was sleeping fitfully by her feet. I switched on the light and pulled an armchair towards the fire, close to hers. She woke with a jolt.
‘Switch over if you like, love,’ she said. ‘I’m not watching this.’
But I couldn’t sit still. ‘I’ll make you a cup of tea, Gran,’ I said.
She