Gavin Corbett: This Is the Way

The house is miles from the country. This is Dublin, we were Dublin, but we did not go to Dublin. We stayed in the house and we went down the shop for milk. We got on the roof, we worked in our garden. We fixed our car and we cleaned words off the door of it some boys put there. Some boys wanted to get me back for hitting them and they sat on our wall. Their daddies came and stood for a while. My father went out to speak with them and he shook their hand. You could not call these people country people though there is some that calls them country people. There is some that calls them buffers too though that is not a word I have known. My father did not use the words like buffer. My mother I think wanted to get out. I do not think this I know this from later. She wanted to be with her family that was out in the world. She wanted some day to be with the tall white stones of her dead in Rath.

My mother was happy to see her brothers come to the house when my cousin Paul made his communion. My father respected this and he gave Paul money. But he did not like my mother’s brothers because he knew they didn’t like him. They have come to the house as a message or a warning he thinks. They lived in houses too but it was different. They lived in houses were surrounded by their own. They did not like the Sonaghans and never would, it was natural. And they did not like a Sonaghan had moved to a house like this in a place full of buffers. They said the word Aubrey like they were playing in their mouth with a stone, the same as the word buffer.

Do you still do the fighting one of them says.

My father did not answer, my mother did not speak for him. My father moved around my mother’s brothers in the kitchen or he stayed watching the television or he went in the garden to work on the fountains. He made fountains. He wore gloves doing it because of his psoriasis of the skin. I heard my mother’s brothers say is he still making fountains. My mother says leave him to it and she was laughing. Her hand was holding up her head and she left a pot boil up for her brothers until the window was misted.

My father made great fountains. That is the one thing the people in the estate knew about him. He made a fountain for a man and a woman with a nude woman lying across the side. After this all them on the road wanted fountains with nude women lying across the side. He will do you a deal they had said about him. My father made a fountain for my mother after they got married. It had a nude woman but it also had a nude man on it. They were my mother and father and they were lying on a snake. The water came out a spout between my mother’s and father’s head and they had photographs taken of it.

I do not know how these people met. My mother will tell you a story. In it my mother will be in a nest on a cliff and my father will have climbed the cliff and stole my mother and maybe he will have killed some eggs. My mother came to think the marriage should never have happened even though her childer is made of both the Gillaroo and the Sonaghan. My mother has gone off with Beggy to the London Borough of Enfield and maybe she is telling Beggy stories now about the way Aubrey Sonaghan stole her from her people. Beggy will have to think about who she is and Beggy might think how this marriage came to be. She will think of her sister Margarita and how she got married young and went to live out west and even though Margarita did not marry back into the Gillaroos it was as good because she turned away from the life her father tried to make for her. She will think of me and maybe she will hear that I left the house too, and she will think of Aaron and the things that brought him down. She will think of us scattered and seeded and turned to the soil and maybe she will be right to think this marriage should never have happened.

But it is only a way of looking at it, it does not mean that this is the right way. Even my mother used tell a different story. Even around the time I am thinking, the time her brothers came with Paul, she might have told a different story. The real trouble did not begin until after Aaron killed himself. That as I says was years ahead.

Come close childer my mother says.

We were all of us childer in the one bedroom this night. Beggy got the terrors and she came in the bedroom to me and Aaron because Aaron was the boxer who’d look after her. In came Margarita wondering what all this was about. In came my mother saying there there childer. It is okay you curl up by Aaron’s feet she says to Beggy. Margarita and me were sitting on the bed our back on the wall. What is wrong little Kate my mother says stroking the head of Beggy. There there Aaron is here to look after you, Aaron will box them away. See this she says taking down one of Aaron’s boxing prizes, this is to ward off the ghosts.

This trophy here she says this is a sign of the strength of your father. Your father put all his anger away to bring two families together.

The Sonaghans and the Gillaroos says Beggy.

Good girl Kate says my mother. The Sonaghans and the Gillaroos it is. And you are very special childer you all are because you are the first childer in hundreds of years who’s made of both Sonaghan and Gillaroo. It’s been so long that the last childer like that wasn’t even people my mother says.

If they wasn’t people then what was they mammy says Beggy.

They was fish says my mother. The Sonaghans and the Gillaroos was all once fish. And you heard of this place Melvin where the families is from. All that’s there now is a pond but it was all once a lake where the Sonaghan fish and the Gillaroo fish did live. They lived together there and they was happy childer. It was more usual that the Sonaghans would keep to themself and the Gillaroos the same but sometimes a fish from one family would court a fish from the other. A fish from one family if they was trying to court another they would swim around them and the circle would get smaller until both fish was touching. And when two fish like that had babbies then if the father was a Sonaghan then the babby would be a Sonaghan and if the father was a Gillaroo then the babby would be Gillaroo. There was many new Sonaghans and Gillaroos came into the world this way and it was a happy world that lake in Melvin.

But there was a world outside that lake my mother says. Down the length of one shore of it was a farm owned by a fella the name of Dan his name was. The only idea the fish in the lake had of something going on beyond the lake was when Dan’s cows would dip their pink nose in the water to have a drink. But other than that they was two separate worlds. This Dan now was a crooked sort. Dan was only the second son of his father and so when his father died the farm should have been passed to the eldest. But you know what Dan did as his father lay dying on his death bed. It was a terrible thing childer, he murdered his older brother.

Did he throw his brother in the lake says Beggy pulling the blanket up toward her mouth afeard and the rest of us laughing at her.

No no Kate he didn’t throw his brother in the lake my mother says. So the fish did not know about it. They knew nothing, nothing yet anyhows. We’ll say Dan just buried his brother somewhere secret and Dan got the farm and the brother was forgot about. But no one ever gets away with murder childer you know about that. Murder is the blackest sin and leaves a black stain on your soul which is a reminder to the Devil to give you a visit to talk about how you might pay the debt of your terrible sin. And sure enough many years later the Devil did come to Dan. Came to him one dark day Dan was up in a back field by the shore of the lake. He seen this thing the side of his eye burn through the gloom against a blackened bit of wall under the brambles that was hanging down. And in this lonely corner this lonely farm wasn’t rightly his own Dan knew he was done for. He knew what all this was about. He hoped what he seen there in front of him might just have been in his head, might just have been the weight of his guilt grown and grown over the years until it became the shape of the Devil, but the Devil let him know it was him in this way. The Devil stuck his hand in Dan’s chest like this Anthony look.