1


My first dead body was my grandfather’s. My mother and I sat in the funeral home at his wake in Ireland for two days while people I had never met came to pay their respects. I moved to the back of the room because I thought the blue in his eyelids might pierce my skin if I sat too close for too long.

The last time I saw him alive, he was in hospital. I kissed him goodbye and left the imprint of my lips lingering on his cheek. I wore bright red lipstick and it made his skin look grey. I tried to rub it away with my sleeve and he said, ‘Oh, leave it. I’ll keep it there, ’til you come back.’ I reached for his cold hand, fluttering on top of smooth sheets.

2

Before I came to Ireland, I was living in London. I was seduced by coloured lights hitting the river in the middle of the night and throngs of cool girls in chunky sandals who promised a future of tote bags and house plants. I thought that was the kind of life I was supposed to want. I worked in a bar every night while I figured out how to get there.

3

I never did go back to the hospital.

During my grandfather’s wake, I looked for the trace of my kiss on his skin.

I could not find it.

4

London is built on money and ambition and I didn’t have enough of either of those things. I felt as though the tangle of wires and telephone lines strung through the city were strings in a fishing net filled with bankers and nondescript creatives, shimmering in banknotes and holographic backpacks. I was something small and weak and undesirable. I was slipping through the holes and down into the deep underbelly of the ocean. I watched these people from my vantage point behind the bar. I noted the colour of their fingernails and the smell of their perfume and how many times they went to the toilet in one night. They did not notice me.

5

I am just another impossibility. Colourless. Unformed. You cannot imagine anything as fiercely small, as fiercely hungry as me. There is a splitting that has not happened yet. This is you before me. You are a daughter and not a mother. Not yet. And yet; there are invisible things drawing us close, even here. Fall into those molten afternoons, his hands all over your body. Spill towards me.

6

My grandfather was born in Glasgow. He and his brothers and sisters were small and soft beneath the tenement buildings. Their father went to the pub one day and never came back. Their mother died soon afterwards, ‘Of a broken heart,’ people tutted, shaking their heads and supping the tragedy from fingerprinted pint glasses. The children were shipped this way and that by strangers and well-meaning relatives. They ended up in an orphanage, where priests cupped and kissed them in terrible places.

They had an Auntie Kitty who lived in a small fishing port on the west coast of Ireland. She sent for them and they stayed with her and slept in the hay with her animals, warm dung sticking sweetly to their clothes and matting their hair. They walked along the dirt roads to school with bare feet and broke in wild horses while they were light enough to cling to their backs without being thrown off. They raced through long grasses and swam in the rough sea and learned to light fires by rolling oily twists of newspaper and drying out kindling in the sun.

Auntie Kitty rationed the hot water and made anyone who entered the house throw holy sand over their left shoulder, To Keep Away The Devil. Her husband was involved in the IRA and they housed members in their attic. In the springtime she marched around the garden with a pair of scissors, snipping the heads from any flowers that dared to bloom orange.

‘Just off out on me horse!’ she called as she wheeled her rusty bicycle down the hallway. She was a self-educated woman, and she taught my grandfather how to write and to read constellations in the salty night sky.

As my grandfather grew he worked as a gardener, pruning rhubarb and thatching roofs and occasionally mending leaky plumbing. When he was old enough, he travelled to England on the boat with the rest of the boys, looking for labouring work. He helped to build the Tyne Tunnel, spending his days deep beneath the ocean, installing lights so that strangers could see in the dark.

He found himself in Sunderland, among the crashing and clanking of the shipyards. He lived in a boarding house run by a gentle woman and her sharp and gorgeous daughter. He befriended Toni from Italy, who ate cocaine for breakfast and dreamed of running a café, and he shared a room with Harry from Derry, who played the spoons and had a crucifix tattooed across his chest.

He liked Johnny Cash, horse racing and Jameson’s whiskey. He always wore a suit and carried a packet of Fruit Polos in his inside pocket. He was at home by the water with the rust and the metal.

7

I am living in Burtonport, a tiny fishing port in County Donegal, on the north-west coast of Ireland. In order to get here, you have to travel through the Blue Stack Mountains. Time alters as you drive into them. They are brown and reassuring but appear blue in the shifting light, dripping navy and indigo into the valleys.

When I was a child, my mother, brother, and I spent dusky Augusts in Donegal. We felt safe when we had passed the mountains, cut off from the tumult of our lives at home. As soon as we arrived, my mother turned off her Nokia and put it in the glove compartment of her car. She didn’t switch it on until summer was over and we were back on the motorway.

As a teenager I ran from solidity and stasis and shades of brown. I wanted things that flashed and fizzled. Now that I am here, beneath the peat smoke and the penny-coloured skies, brown seems like a safe place. I can crawl into it and swallow fistfuls of soil.

8

When my grandfather died, I called the pub.

‘I’m really sorry, Deborah, but I can’t come in today.’

‘You what, babe?’

‘I think I need to go away for a bit.’

‘Speak up, will you? Line’s breaking up.’

‘I have to go to Ireland for a funeral. I don’t know when I’ll be back.’

‘Who is this?’

‘I’ll come in and see you when I’m back in town.’

I saw a chance and I grasped it. I texted my landlord and told him to keep my deposit. I put my books into boxes and gave all of my clothes away. I took the train north to my mother’s house, then we boarded an aeroplane and hired a car and now here I am.

9

I am creeping. The future unspooling. I am forming slowly inside you. Barely even an idea. There are so many ways in which you do not know yourself yet, blue-black and heavy like reams of crushed velvet. All the broken objects of our lives are stretched in front of us, gorgeous and unknowable.

10

My mother and I have inherited my grandfather’s small stone cottage, through the Blue Stack Mountains by the sea. It is tucked into a nook crammed with giant rhubarb and purple hydrangeas. There are wild potatoes and mangy kittens and clumps of shamrock clustered in the corners. The garden is very overgrown but if I climb onto the kitchen roof I can see the sea.

We arrived to find that colonies of mould and specks of damp thrived in my grandfather’s absence. They were splattered across the walls and ceilings like a sludgy Pollock painting. Tiny worms and mites had burrowed holes in the wooden furniture. The drawers and cupboards were crusty with rust and the fridge stank of sour milk. The mattresses were crawling with bugs.

In the months before my grandfather’s death, something between my mother and me was fractured. Her presence in my life had been solid and gold, then suddenly she was not there any more. I felt her pulling away from me. It hurt inside of my body, my intestines stretched and sore. I felt confused by love; the way it could simultaneously trap you and set you free. How it could bring people impossibly close and then push them far away. How people who loved you could leave you when you needed them most.

We talked about practical things when she called me in London; when the funeral would be and how I would get there. We listened to the radio during the drive from the airport and at the wake we chatted to my grandfather’s neighbours and friends. It wasn’t until he had been buried and everyone had gone home to their brandies that we were alone together in the silent cottage. The distance glinted between us, sharp and dangerous. We sat on a sheet of newspaper on the floor and looked around.

‘What are we going to do?’ I asked her.

‘Burn it,’ she said, blowing on a cup of tea.

‘You what?’

‘We’re going to have to burn everything.’

‘Burn it where?’ She paused.

‘In the garden.’

‘Everything?’

‘It’s the only way.’


Copyright © 2019 by Jessica Andrews