The devils diary, p.19
The Devil's Diary, page 19
October 10th
Yesterday I came across an old sand-eel hook at Burke’s that put me in mind of the sand-eel strand of my youth. I decided to give the motel a miss just for once, and as the moon rose I set off for the shore with the hook and an empty sack on my shoulder. The sky was clear and the moon so bright that you could count the furrows in the sand and the silver edges of the waves as they ran. I took off my shoes, rolled up my trousers, and walked out through the shallow water with the sack hanging from my waist. Suddenly I froze. Before me, facing the shore and the moonlight, stood a lanky man whose head and shoulders I could not mistake. My first reaction was to be on my guard. He reached out a hand. Without a smile I returned his uncompromising grasp.
‘I’m here to observe an age-old custom,’ I said.
‘So am I,’ said McDowd. ‘It’s the first year in ages that I haven’t had the sand-eel strand to myself.’
‘It’s big enough for both of us, and that’s just as well.’
‘If you stand and listen, you can almost hear the laughter and merriment we used to have in the old days here. Arty Bradley, Mary Rose, you and me. Father Johnnie never came, he was not our kind of fisherman.’
We both waded out behind the sand-bank until the water was up to our knees. Then I drew my hook firmly through the sand until the movement of the first sand-eel stopped it. The effect on my wrist had the immediacy of an electric shock. I stooped down, put my free hand in the water, and pulled the wriggling sand-eel into it with the hook. As I dropped the first fish into the mouth of the empty sack, I had a feeling of youth renewed, which was almost as intoxicating as a bottle of whisky drunk quickly for a bet. I was a growing man again. I had never spent a night away from home.
As I fished, I kept thinking about the sand-eels and what they had once meant in the life of Glenkeel. They are small eel-like fish that come into the bay in shoals every autumn, between the end of September and Hallowe’en. Best for fishing and eating are the green sand-eels that live in salt-water rather than estuaries. Some of them grow up to fourteen inches long. They are fished during the low ebb at spring tide, either at the new or full moon, but any fisherman with a glimmer of poetry in his soul would prefer the sand-eel strand at the clear spring. The sand-eels are easier to hook when they lie stiffin the sand at low water. At other times they wriggle and skite, making the fisherman’s task pretty well impossible.
McDowd and I fished side by side in silence for over an hour until the weight of the catch had begun to weigh both of us down. We carried our bulging sacks back to the sand dunes, emptied them, and returned to fish once more. I still kept thinking of the old days when the sand-eel strand was part of what Father Johnnie calls the living culture of the glen. It had a serious purpose, of course: it provided sand-eels to be smoked and salted and eaten for supper in the long winter nights. It also provided an occasion of fun for young and old at a time of year when the harvest was saved and relaxation and merriment were possible before the months of cold and rain set in. I dredged up a fund of memories, and now and again I looked at McDowd to see if he were looking at me.
We fished for another two hours, retreating before the filling tide which tugged at our legs and sucked the loose sand from under our feet. When we had each killed another ten score, McDowd said, ‘Time to make tracks. Think of the weight of the buggers on the way home.’
We trudged up the foreshore under our sacks to the place where we had dumped the first catch, and then we lit our pipes. We lay on the edge of the bent-grass, looking down on the silvery water and up into the clear night sky. A curlew expressed the loneliness of a long lifetime in one piercing whistle that seemed to retreat from the air like a great wave ebbing from an estuary, leaving bare, black mud-flats behind. Still McDowd said no word. It was a magic hour, a time out of life when two irascible contenders could sit silently side by side as the rest of the world slept soundly.
‘It was a good strand,’ I said after a while. ‘The moon and the tide were right.’
‘The sand-eels were a fair size,’ he replied after five minutes.
As he smoked, his full pipe glowed and his guts curmurred, probably because like myself he had not eaten since early evening. I thought it a pity that we should spend our lives in enmity, and I wondered if he felt the same. I waited for him to speak, because I had started the last conversation and it was now his turn. We sat for twenty minutes saying nothing, just listening to the rush and hiss of the waves and the whisperings of the breeze in the bent-grass behind us.
‘Father Johnnie doesn’t care for sand-eels. I’ll never get through twenty score on my own.’ I knocked out my pipe.
‘Why did you come then?’
‘To remember the old days and to see if I was still handy with the sand-eel hook.’
‘I like sand-eels,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you half a bottle of whiskey for the lot.’
‘You can have them for nothing.’
‘I don’t want them for nothing. We’ll carry them home now and drink the whiskey before we part. That way our little transaction will be complete – all in one night.’
This was peace with honour and it would have been curmudgeonly not to accept. He was as good as his word. When we got to his cottage, he opened a bottle of Paddy whiskey. Though I felt more in need of food than drink, I drank glass for glass with him till the bottle stood empty between us on the table. Even in our drinking we were contending, and I must have started at least ten conversations only to have them strangled at birth by one of McDowd’s quizzical generalisations.
‘Now our business is complete,’ he pronounced, as I emptied my glass.
‘Is it?’
‘I mean for tonight.’
‘Will you be going to the sand-eel strand again tomorrow night?’
Ignoring my question, he rose abruptly from the table.
‘Do you ever wonder why you continue to live?’ he asked.
‘I know it’s because I don’t fear death.’
I said good night because it was the only thing to say. Walking home, I felt flushed with excitement. I finally knew that what I had to do must now be done quickly. Father Johnnie won’t understand. What a pity we had to fall out – all over a matter of interpretation. Humbly, I shall enter his confessional and ask forgiveness for a certain capital offence that can’t be postponed any longer. If one’s opponent is Satan incarnate, surely God will overlook a temporary departure from the Queensberry Rules.
He sat on the edge of the bed in the empty room and reread the last sentence of the entry. That night, as he lay awake, he found that he could not pray. Now and again he dreamt of violence in a dark landscape and male and female figures dancing round a boiling pot on the Glebe. Towards morning his dreams became more peaceful. He walked in the shadow of a graveyard wall at midnight. A tired moon, no brighter than a candle flame, hung over him, and then he heard two voices from inside the graveyard saying, ‘Ceann domsa, ceann duitse, One for me, one for you’. God and the Devil counting souls, he thought; God speaking Gaelic (you could tell He was God by His accent) and the Devil speaking English with cut-glass precision. He peered over the coping of the wall and saw Hugo and McDaid dividing a catch of silver sand-eels.
In the morning he went to Burke’s, determined to confront Hugo. Burke’s was locked and there was no sign of either Hugo or his Land Rover. Next he called at McDaid’s cottage and knocked sharply on the door. ‘Are you there, Mandamus?’ he shouted. When he got no reply, he walked round the house and looked into the barn where a tub of sand-eels stood in the middle of the earthen floor.
Somewhat shaken, he walked back to the parochial house and picked up the telephone in the hallway. He wished to talk to someone, just to hear a normal voice at the other end of the line. He was afraid to ring the police and he was reluctant to involve Canon Hackler. He put down the receiver and stood by the window of the study watching cars passing and women with shopping coming from the village. One of the cars slowed down and crossed over the cattle grid in the gateway. It came up the drive and stopped in the shade of the trees. He could hardly believe his eyes when Dr Sharma opened the door. He almost ran to meet her. He stood before her smiling and grasped both her hands.
‘This is a surprise.’
‘I was touring Sligo and I thought it would be fun to look you up. Thanks for all your cards. Very cryptic. You haven’t changed.’
She was wearing a blue suit with a white shirt and red tie. She looked smaller and thinner now, her nose and chin more pronounced, her face darker with little lines of laughter round the mouth. She was in her mid-forties. Though her straight black hair and brilliant dark eyes hadn’t changed, in the two years since they had last met she had gone from what he used to think of as a late girlhood to an early middle age.
‘Why aren’t you wearing your black-and-gold sari? I barely recognised you in your suit.’
‘I thought my sari might attract too much curiosity here. Besides, a suit is warmer. The weather is finally turning cool.’
They drank tea and chatted like old friends. He felt secure and serenely happy. He asked her how long she planned to stay. When she told him that she was staying at the motel for the night and leaving early in the morning, he felt a stab of disappointment and disbelief.
‘Why not stay a week? The weather may be cool but it’s dry. You’ll love it here. There’s the sea, and then the mountains full of hidden loughs. You mustn’t behave like a day-tripper. You must live with us here for a little while.’
‘I must think of my patients. I’m sure they’re thinking of me.’
‘Then we’ll spend the rest of the day sight-seeing. We won’t waste a minute,’ he promised.
She helped him prepare a packed lunch while he told her about his wayward brother and his feud with McDaid. Finally, he told her about his suspicion that only one of them was now alive.
‘You’ve always had a vivid imagination,’ she smiled. ‘How can you think such thoughts in such a peaceful place as this?’
‘I’ll take you down to Scariff Island. All will be revealed.’
He felt excited as he drove her to Smug Rone Pier. He showed her Hugo’s boat as if it were tangible proof of all the things he’d been telling her about his brother and McDaid. She sat sideways on the centre thwart, chatting cheerfully about seals and sea birds and the majestic impersonality of the cliff faces that overlooked them from the land.
‘Are you happy now?’ she asked suddenly.
‘At this moment? Oh, yes. In a boat nothing matters except the sea, and that’s how it should be,’ he replied.
‘Is that how it is?’
‘Perhaps not. I can’t help thinking of the island and what we may find when we get there.’
‘I suggest we wait and see.’
He beached the boat on the sloping white shingle and hurried up to the top of the hogsback, leaving her to carry the lunch basket. He wanted to call out Hugo’s name; instead he heard distinctly those terrible words he had read again and again since that quiet July evening when he first opened Hugo’s diary:
nor is it possible for me to express the horror of my mind at seeing the shore spread with skulls, hands, feet and other bones of human bodies; and particularly, I observed a place where there had been a fire made, and a circle dug in the earth, like a cockpit, where it is supposed the savage wretches had sat down to their inhuman feastings …
‘Satisfied?’ she asked as she joined him.
‘Nothing’s changed. It’s as if time did not exist.’
‘What did you expect?’
‘Evidence of recent violence perhaps. To be honest I don’t know.’
‘You’re lucky to have such a peaceful place to come to.’
‘It’s a place I can’t get out of my mind. I think about it and I dream about it. I can hear the sound of the shingle rolling when I’m talking about something else.’
‘It’s an Otherworld. I’ll bet it has its place in local folklore.’
‘There’s a story that in the days of sail a merchant ship was wrecked here and kept the mountain people in Indian meal for over a year. That’s why it has an alternative name: Oileán na Mine, the island of meal.’
‘Now it’s an island of sea fowl. I’ll sit here and watch them for a little while.’
He ran down the slope and stopped above the shingle. The boat was lying peacefully on her side with a seagull perched on the outboard. It looked lodged and immovable as the rocks on every side. Talking to Dr Sharma above, he had known a moment of panic. Now he was almost surprised to find the boat where he had beached her. He walked round the island, combing every niche and cranny. Then he came back to the shingle and began searching among the stones.
‘What are you looking for?’ she enquired as she joined him.
‘Two beach stones I left behind on my last visit.’
‘The things you seek here have no bearing on your brother. The things you seek are irretrievably lost. You must reinterpret your history, confront your experience with a new vocabulary, and remember that there’s still life to be lived.’
He smiled ruefully. She had a weakness for summations that he did not always find apt and felicitous.
‘My mind is two quernstones grinding,’ he told her. ‘All my life I’ve been taking in other people’s corn. One day, if only for a day, I’d like to grind my own.’
They had lunch on the high ground above the shingle, and washed it down with coffee from a flask. In his illness he had seen her as a confessor with whom he could share every thought and sensation, every desire and fantasy, no matter how extravagant or personal. She would listen sympathetically with a notepad on her knee as he sought to extricate himself from the obsessions that had risen to replague him in his fortieth year: the Game, the Termon Stone, Arty Brennan and Mary Rose. Exploring with her his early memories was an act of purification in which he sought to recover the serenity he used to feel after confession as a boy, when stealing turnips from a neighbour’s field was the most grievous sin he knew.
‘I suppose I come to this place to escape from the hippiedrome that the glen has become. Here are only sea fowl and the pure smell of the sea.’
‘You have the kind of imagination that will always stoke the inferno. The glen, from what I’ve seen, is a lovely and peaceful place, unspoilt by the twentieth century. There are no hippies defecating on roadsides. The fishmeal factory doesn’t stink all that much and the motel is almost quaint. The twentieth century is in your head. For everyone else it’s only a soap opera on television. Have you ever thought of going away and taking the twentieth century with you, leaving behind no eye that isn’t innocent?’
Her pupils glinted with secret mirth as she spoke. He could tell that she still saw him as one of her patients, just as a schoolmistress might continue to see a grown man as her pupil. He decided not to give her further cause for summary judgments.
They lingered on the way back to watch seals and cormorants and to inspect narrow inlets and channels between sea stacks. The clarity of the day helped to dissipate his sense of disappointment. He began to take pleasure in her company again and to share her obvious delight in the wildness of every cliff and promontory. When they got back to the parochial house, he gave her Hugo’s diary which she read with the help of a magnifying glass from her handbag.
‘He’s a bit of a showman, your brother,’ she said when she’d finished. ‘The interesting thing is that he seems to be more obsessed with your life than his own. I think you need not worry, he’s well able to look after himself.’
‘What did you make of it all?’
‘It’s difficult to say, it’s all distortion and refraction. I’d like to see the Termon Stone, though. It seems to have played a part in more lives than yours.’
They walked up the slope of the Crag of Cats past the sheep pen where he hid the last time the Game was played. He led her to an oblong block of granite, facing east. He laid his hand on the rough surface and with his penknife scratched away a patch of lichen to reveal a black sole underneath the grey.
‘It seems so ordinary,’ he tried to explain. ‘As I look at it, I sometimes sense that a mystery is about to be revealed. Then the moment of intimation passes and I find myself gazing at a nondescript stone. We have all fallen under its spell.’
‘Or the spell of your own lives?’ she questioned.
‘Does the stone speak to you?’
‘There’s no reason why it should. It has as much to do with my life as the Stone of Scone. Perhaps we should sit on it,’ she smiled.
He sat beside her on the edge of the block looking across at the north mountain with its S-shaped road, a calligraphic flourish that had been cut into its heathery flank. Below them the curving strand lay bare.
‘It’s a beautiful evening,’ she said. ‘I’ve been here only a few hours, and already I realise that the magic and the mystery are in the light. A minute ago that hill was blue. Now it’s purple. I feel foolish for having missed the transition.’
‘Enjoying the view?’ A mocking voice came from behind. McDaid stood before them with a creel of turf on his back and a black-and-white sheepdog at heel.
‘I was looking for you this morning,’ Father Jerry said. ‘You weren’t at home.’
‘I was at Corrloch fair. I’ve just got back.’
‘Was Hugo at the fair?’
‘I didn’t see him, and I didn’t expect to see him.’
‘Perhaps I misunderstood him,’ Father Jerry replied.
‘You’re sitting on the Termon Stone,’ McDaid smiled at Dr Sharma. ‘Don’t lie on it whatever you do. Those who lie on the Termon Stone go to the grave not as old men and women but as old children.’
‘It’s a distinctive stone,’ she conceded. ‘It’s rather warm to the touch. It would make a good penitential bed for a medieval monk who was more than half in love with himself.’
Father Jerry knew that McDaid would give a chew of tobacco to find out who she was. He laughed strangely and looked lingeringly at them both.
‘There’s no mention of medieval monks in the folklore,’ he said. ‘But men have lain on it who’ve become monks. Father Jerry will know who I mean.’
