can do, what men can do, what food can do to you. An actor Helen knew from the theatre in Dublin got shot in New York by his lover, he came back in a wheelchair. A neighbour of mine got lost in Goa and never made it back to his family. A woman Helen knew at school returned from Brazil, her husband ran away with another man, the same in reverse for a man I knew from Galway, his wife went off with his sister.
One of them brought back a story from Morocco. He was in a town called Fez, a narrow street no wider than a hallway. There were three young women wearing headscarves in front of him when a donkey came rushing by with panniers full of olives and boy rider whacking a stick. The donkey was farting on the way through. The girls, the young women in their hijabs, turned around, unable to help themselves. Their hands were up to their mouths, they were in tears holding on to each other, choking, doubled over in the street.
We are back from Berlin with our story.
What have I got to tell? A Nativity scene, with the Berlin Wall in the background. I became an overnight father, we returned to Dublin, Helen breastfed Rosie in the snug, a glass of Guinness for the baby. We got a place to stay, I took up a job in the native basement, we now have a second girl, Essie, our immaculate family.
Back where?
It makes no sense.
Back to where we first met? Back to the first words she spoke to me. Back to where Helen worked in a small theatre, back to the places I brought her on the Aran Islands, she didn’t speak the ghost language, she was a visitor, I had to translate my songs for her.
Back home? Back to my country? Back to where I am from – where I am only half from, where I have tried to be from, where I have never been from?
Back to where she is not from either?
Helen grew up in England. Her family lived in Birmingham before they double emigrated to Canada and left her behind. She was sent to boarding school in Dublin, still a child. They went to live in a town with a salt mine, by one of the Great Lakes in Ontario. Helen found herself emigrating in reverse, going back to Ireland, a country she didn’t know.
She is a piece of Irish soil in her mother’s shoes.
On Sunday night, she’s on the phone to Canada. She sits by the payphone in the hallway with her back to the wall and her knees up, playing with the cable. I stand in the bedroom listening to her, the children asleep, I have their shoes in my hands, pinched up off the floor. I hear her paraphrasing her life. She describes the ground-floor flat where we live, sectioned off in the hall with two separate entrances. She says it’s fully furnished, fitted with a pastel-green carpet, nice neighbours upstairs, not far from the sea.
I can hear the questions her mother is asking in Canada by answers Helen gives in Ireland. Everything is enhanced in her voice. Our lives are magnified out of proportion by distance. She converts everything around me into a fabrication. She puts the world into my mouth.
The school, the streets, the people upstairs are very funny, the Alsatian next door is enormous, the shopkeeper is always giving her the wrong change. The furniture auctions next door, the swivel-mirror she bought, the auctioneer took her name, a sticker attached – Helen Boyce.
Our surroundings are enlarged to fit the wider spaces of Ontario. Things that remain locally reduced in my head are brought to life with big-sky clarity by Helen’s enthusiasm over the phone. For over an hour, everything is released from the prejudice of reality, all previously undiscovered. Nothing is valid, nothing is true until it is spoken.
It makes me feel at home, listening to Helen describe nearby things in such a faraway tone. That same excitement with which my mother spoke to her sisters on the phone in Germany. I grew up in this removed story, never quite matching the place where we lived. I once asked my mother where she felt at home and she said it was where the postman delivered her letters. It was the letters coming from Germany that brought her home. Helen is the same, sending back the news, rerouting our lives to a place on the far side of the world.
I hear her telling her mother in Canada that we are settled down now. She says I have a good job in the music business. I am responsible for signing up new talent. She says she has a part time position teaching drama at her former boarding school. She has begun to teach yoga classes, we keep the front room clear of furniture. She says my brother is a good carpenter, my sister Gabriela gave us a porcelain teapot. I have a little brother who works in a bicycle shop nearby. My sisters sometimes come to look after the children.
We are living on the main street. On the bus route, same side as the veterinary surgery and a grocery shop, further down a pub on the corner. The house next door has been turned into a guest house. A white, double-fronted building with a terracotta path running up the middle and patches of lawn on either side, each with a cluster of palm trees at the centre. The palm trees give the street a holiday atmosphere. They are not real palms. A non-native variety pretending to be palm trees. They manage to grow well in the mild climate, up to the height of the first-floor windows. There must be something in the soil they like. They have straight leaves that get a bit ragged, with split ends. At night you hear them rattling in the wind.
The people upstairs are laughing again. They make me conscious of my life downstairs. I pull the curtains. I put the books back. I check to make sure the girls are asleep. I lay out their clothes for school in the morning. It all seems to give the people upstairs more to laugh at. They laugh until it comes to the point where I can’t help laughing myself. And as soon as I laugh, they go silent. I find myself laughing alone. I hear them putting on music. They always play the same track, which becomes a problem after a while only because I like the song myself. Whenever I want to play it, they get there ahead of me. The song I love becomes my enemy.
I hear Helen’s footsteps on the tiled kitchen floor. I can see the shape of her body in the sound of her shoes. Her straight back, her arms have no weight in them, she has long hair, apple breasts. I hear the silence as she moves to the carpet for a moment and returns to the tiles.
At night, the dreamy passengers on the upper deck of the bus can see right into the house as they pass by. They catch sight of us for a fraction of a second, we sleep on the floor in the empty front room, the mattress pulled in from the bed, with the fire on and the curtains left open. The passengers see nothing, only two people with yellow bodies staring at the ceiling, remembering things.
She talks about growing up in Birmingham. The garden around her house with the monkey-puzzle tree, her family packing up and leaving for Canada. The farewell party was held in Dublin, the landing of her grandmother’s flat was filled with suitcases. Her aunts and uncles came back from England and France to say goodbye. Everybody laughing and talking about Donegal and Limerick and Carrick-on-Shannon, then everybody in tears when one of the uncles sang her mother’s favourite song, how the days grow short, no time for wasting time, who knows when they would be in the same room again.
Normally it is the child who leaves the mother behind, but Helen got switched around. She found herself watching life in reverse, seeing her family off at the airport in Dublin, standing with her grandmother at the bottom of the escalator waving and her mother unable to turn around to look back. The streets were wet with recent rain, the lights reflected on the surface. Men with collars up going across the bridge, the river not moving much, only the neon glass of whiskey filling up and going dry again. Two buses back to the empty flat, staring out the window all the way. Her grandmother lit a fire and drank some brandy. They sat face to face in the bath, their eyes red, their legs dovetailed, two girls, twice removed. The pipes were creaking, a finger drawn through the steam on the tiles, flakes peeling off the ceiling. The soap was oval shaped, it smelled like smoked mackerel and cough mixture.
The term for emigration in the native language is the same as tears. An emigrant is a person who walks across the world in tears. Going in tears. Tearful traveller.
Some weeks later Helen was called out of boarding school when her grandmother was taken to hospital. Her uncles came back once more, they brought three bottles of brandy, one to be confiscated by the nurses, one to be drunk on the spot, the other to be hidden for later. When everyone was gone again, her grandmother tapped on the bed and told Helen to get in. That’s