Adrian McKinty: Hidden River

And finally you stand and shake the stiffness from yourself and you’re about to walk back up the rocks away from the harmonic of wave and sand over the lines to the platform on the other side, but you don’t.

Something stops you.

The second part of the high. A wave. A big one. Spider’s been holding out on me. This is grade-one shit.

Jesus.

It smothers me. Makes me sit. Lie down.

Makes me remember…

Autumn fog drifted in from the water. The clock tower in the Marine Garden pointed at three different times. Leaves clogged the gutters of the drains. The swings in the swing park damp, sad. The castle shrouded in mist so you could see only the gate tower and the portcullis. The rain, a drizzle — soft, temperate. Full dark now. My watch said seven o’clock. I’d been here since six-thirty. Time ebbed slowly. Puddles formed. There was no one around. That kind of night. I let the hood fall on my duffle coat. Victoria wasn’t coming. I drank the rainwater. Watched the fog drape itself over the highway. At seven-thirty a car pulled in. Lights on, radio playing. She exited. She was still wearing her school uniform. Raincoat, umbrella. She came over. The car waited.

I stepped out from under the overhang.

“I’m so sorry I’m late but I was at a debate,” she said in that elocution voice.

“It’s ok. Is that your dad?”

She waved the car away angrily. Mr. Patawasti got out of the car, waved back.

“Hello, Alex,” he shouted.

“Hello, Mr. Patawasti,” I said. He stood there looking at us, grinning.

“Dad,” Victoria said desperately.

He got back in the car and reversed into the mist.

“Well,” she said, taking out a lipstick and applying it.

“Well,” I said.

“Sort of awkward, isn’t it?” she said, touching up the lipstick with her long fingers.

“Yes. Who won the debate?”

“We did. It was about the European Union. It was a Catholic school on the Falls Road and there we were in our red-white-and-blue uniforms.”

“Tough crowd.”

She nodded. I looked at her, her hair was wet. She was tired.

“What do you want to do?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, wiping rainwater from her dark green eyes.

“Do you want to just go for a walk, maybe talk a little?”

“I’d really like that,” she said, her face lighting up.

I wanted to ask what she’d done with Peter on their dates, but it wouldn’t be smart to bring him up. She’d gone out with Peter for a year and he’d dumped her for a girl in the fifth form. John had said that this was the moment to swoop in and ask her out. “Ok, she’s older, sophisticated, but now she’s vulnerable, she wants to show the world she’s ok. She’ll go out with you.”

And sure enough, a little late, but here she was.

“But, Alex, remember she’s on the rebound, she might just want someone to tide her through, till she gets her bearings,” John had also cautioned. Bastard had been right about that one, too. Peter owned a car, so they’d probably gone places — Belfast, the Antrim coast. They’d probably gone to pubs. I wasn’t old enough to get into pubs. I was only sixteen. What must this feel like for her? Walking around with some lanky wanker in Carrickfergus in the rain. A step down, tedious, a real sham—

“What are you thinking about?” she asked.

“Uh, poetry.”

“Poetry?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t seem the type.”

“What is the type?”

“I don’t know, but you don’t seem it.”

She was right, too. I didn’t fit into any of the cliques. I didn’t play rugby, so I didn’t fit in with the jocks. I wasn’t into Dungeons and Dragons, so I didn’t fit in with the nerds. I wasn’t sniffing glue, so I wasn’t in with the bad kids. Not tight with the creative types who worked on the school magazine. I didn’t quite fit in anywhere.

“Yeats, I like Yeats,” I said.

“You don’t find the fairy stuff wears a bit thin?” she asked.

“Uh, no.”

Silence again. And yes, there’s her back then and there’s me back then. Me, fifteen pounds heavier, no beard, tidy hair, clean and sober. She, Indian, beautiful, exotic. Me, of the hippie parents, the wunderkind with the discipline problem. She, the head girl. Both of us, though, outsiders. Aye. We were made for each other.

“It’s all Celtic mythology,” I said.

“It is?”

“It is. For instance, you know why Celtic crosses have a circle on them?”

“No.”

“That’s the symbol of Lugh, the sun god. That’s also why the Romans made the Sabbath a Sunday.”

“You know about that stuff?”

“Not really,” I admitted, and caught her tiny smile.

“I know a lot of Indian mythology,” she said.

“Tell me some,” I said, breaking into a grin.

“It’s pretty wacky. I’ll save it for next time,” she said coyly.

“Will there be a next time?” I asked.

“Maybe.”

We walked to the cafeteria at the swimming pool, watched the swimmers go back and forth in lanes. We talked about school and books. Still raining. I saw her home. She was soaked. We stood outside her gate. Her father’s big house. A thirties folly in white stucco with Romanesque windows, gargoyles, three floors, and a little Gothic tower on the roof. I’d heard about this place, but I hadn’t been here before.

The house had a name, the “Tiny Taj.”

“The Tiny Taj?” I said, trying not to grin.

She groaned.

“It’s been called that since the 1930s when it was built by a retired member of the Indian Civil Service. Of course Dad couldn’t resist when he saw that. It’s totally embarrassing. Living in a house with a name is bad enough, but the Tiny Taj?”

She laughed. Her face shone under the porch light.

“You’ll see me again?” I asked.

“I will.”

“We’ll talk in school?”

“Yes. We’ll go out next week. Give you a chance to actually read a Yeats poem.”

“It will that.”

“Ok. Night.”

“Night.”

She looked at me. Her eyes, dark, heavy, beautiful. Her lips full, red.

“Well,” she said, “are you going to kiss me?”

I didn’t say anything. I leaned forward and with great care, as if she were some delicate rose, I put my hand on her wet cheek and kissed her lips. She tasted of peaches. We stood there kissing in the rain and caught our breaths and she went up that big path to her house. And I walked home thinking, I don’t believe I’ll ever be this happy again.

I was right.

We hadn’t brought umbrellas. The day had started sunny. But it’s a funeral in eastern Ulster and who ever heard of sun for such an affair? Now from Donegal to the Mournes a smear of black cloud and thrashing rain. Raining so hard it makes divots in the clay.

St. Nicholas’s Parish Church, Carrickfergus, June 12, 1995.

Cold, hard to see what’s happening at the front. Impossible to hear. The funeral mass is in the style of the Church of Ireland. The simple pine coffin beside the font. Hymns. A memorial read by her older brother, Colin. The church dating back to the twelfth century. William Congreve and Jonathan Swift worshiped here. I stand there reluctantly. I didn’t want to come. The last funeral I was at … Ma. And where do you bury a Jewish atheist-humanist in Belfast? Not the synagogue. A rented hall. And who conducts the service? A man Dad met. An actor with a booming voice. Talking about Mum, whom he didn’t really know. He goes on forever until it becomes a farce. It is the opposite of catharsis — whatever that is.

“Shit.”

“Ssshhh,” John says.

The service, handshakes. Tears. John, Facey, myself squeezed soaked into Facey’s Ford Fiesta.