A Ghost in the Throat Read online

  To the three Eileens who lit the lantern I see by:

  Eileen Blake, Eileen Forkan,

  and Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill.

  We are an echo that runs, skittering, through a train of rooms.

  —Czesław Miłosz

  Dá dtéadh mo ghlao chun cinn Go Doire Fhíonáin mór laistiar

  Should my howl reach as far as grand Derrynane

  —Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill

  contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1. a female text

  2. a liquid echo

  3. to breathe elsewhere

  4. in the milking parlour

  5. an unscientific mishmash

  6. the dissection room

  7. cold lips to cold lips

  8. oubliette

  9. blood in mud

  10. two roads, each blurred

  11. blot. blot.

  12. omen – of planes and starlings

  13. to splinter the surface

  14. now, then

  15. a sequence of shadows

  16. wild bees and their fizzy curiosities

  17. how blurred the furze

  caoineadh airt uí laoghaire / the keen for art ó laoghaire

  acknowledgements

  further reading

  Copyright

  1. a female text

  thug mo shúil aire duit,

  thug mo chroí taitneamh duit,

  how my eye took a shine to you,

  how my heart took delight in you,

  —Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill

  THIS IS A FEMALE TEXT.

  This is a female text, composed while folding someone else’s clothes. My mind holds it close, and it grows, tender and slow, while my hands perform innumerable chores.

  This is a female text borne of guilt and desire, stitched to a soundtrack of cartoon nursery rhymes.

  This is a female text and it is a tiny miracle that it even exists, as it does in this moment, lifted to another consciousness by the ordinary wonder of type. Ordinary, too, the ricochet of thought that swoops, now, from my body to yours.

  This is a female text, written in the twenty-first century. How late it is. How much has changed. How little.

  This is a female text, which is also a caoineadh: a dirge and a drudge-song, an anthem of praise, a chant and a keen, a lament and an echo, a chorus and a hymn. Join in.

  2012

  Every morning of mine is much the same. I kiss my husband, feeling a pang as I do so – no matter how often our morning goodbye is repeated, I always miss him when he leaves. Even as his motorbike roars into the distance, I am already hurrying into my own day. First, I feed our sons, then fill the dishwasher, pick up toys, clean spills, glance at the clock, bring our eldest to school, return home with the toddler and the baby, sigh and snap, laugh and kiss, slump on the sofa to breastfeed the youngest, glance at the clock again, read The Very Hungry Caterpillar several times, try to rinse baby-spew from my ponytail into the bathroom sink, fail, make a tower of blocks to be knocked, attempt to mop, give up when the baby cries, kiss the knees of the toddler who slips on the half-washed floor, glance at the clock yet again, wipe more spilled juice, set the toddler at the table with a jigsaw puzzle, and carry the youngest upstairs for his nap.

  The baby sleeps in a third-hand cot held together with black gaff tape, and the walls of our rented bedroom are decorated not with pastel murals, but with a constellation of black mould. I can never think of a lullaby, so I resort to tunes from teenage mixtapes instead. I used to rewind ‘Karma Police’ so obsessively that I wondered whether the brown spool might snap, but every time I pressed play the machine gave me the song again. Now, in my exhaustion, I return to that melody, humming it gently as the baby glugs from my breast. Once his jaw relaxes and his eyes roll back, I creep away, struck again by how often moments of my day are lived by countless other women in countless other rooms, through the shared text of our days. I wonder whether they love their drudge-work as I do, whether they take the same joy in slowly erasing a list like mine, filled with such simplicities as:

  School-run

  Mop

  Hoover Upstairs

  Pump

  Bins

  Dishwasher

  Laundry

  Clean Toilets

  Milk/Spinach/Chicken/Porridge

  School-run

  Bank + Playground

  Dinner

  Baths

  Bedtime

  I keep my list as close as my phone, and draw a deep sense of satisfaction each time I strike a task from it. In such erasure lies joy. No matter how much I give of myself to household chores, each of the rooms under my control swiftly unravels itself again in my aftermath, as though a shadow hand were already beginning the unwritten lists of my tomorrows: more tidying, more hoovering, more dusting, more wiping and mopping and polishing. When my husband is home, we divide the chores, but when I’m alone, I work alone. I don’t tell him, but I prefer it that way. I like to be in control. Despite all the chores on my list, and despite my devotion to their completion, the house looks as cheerily dishevelled as any other home of young children, no cleaner, no dirtier.

  So far this morning, I have only crossed off school-run, a task that encompassed waking the children, dressing, washing, and feeding them, clearing the breakfast table, finding coats and hats and shoes, brushing teeth, shouting the word ‘shoes’ several times, filling a lunchbox, checking a schoolbag, shouting for shoes again, and then, finally, walking to the school and back. Since returning home, I have still only half-filled the dishwasher, half-helped my son with his jigsaw, and half-mopped the floor – nothing worthy of deletion from my list. I cling to my list because it is this list that holds my hand through my days, breaking the hours into a series of small, achievable tasks. By the end of a good list, when I am held again in my sleeping husband’s arms, this text has become a sequence of scribbles, an obliteration I observe in joy and satisfaction, because the gradual erasure of this handwritten document makes me feel as though I have achieved something of worth in my hours. The list is both my map and my compass.

  Now I can feel myself starting to fall behind, so I skim the text of today’s tasks to find my bearings, then set the dishwasher humming and draw a line through that word. I smile as I help the toddler find his missing jigsaw piece, clap when he completes it, and finally resort to the remote control. I don’t cuddle him close as he watches The Octonauts. I don’t sit on the sofa with him and close my weary eyes for ten minutes. Instead, I hurry to the kitchen, finish mopping, empty the bins, and then check those tasks off my list with a flourish.

  At the sink I scrub my hands, nails, and wrists, then scrub them again. I lift sections of funnels and filters from the steam steriliser to assemble my breast-pump. These machines are not cheap and I no longer have a paying job, so I bought mine second-hand. On my screen, the ad seemed almost as poignant as the baby shoes story usually attributed to Ernest Hemingway –

  Bought for €209, will sell for €45 ONO.

  Used once.

  Every morning for months this machine and I have followed the same small ritual in order to gather milk for the babies of strangers. I unclip my bra and scoop my breast into the funnel. It’s always the right breast, because my left breast is a lazy bastard: by a month post-partum it has all but given up, so both baby and machine must be fully served by the right. I press the switch, wince as it jerks my nipple awkwardly, adjust myself, and then twist the dial that controls the intensity with which the machine pulls the flesh. At first, the mechanism draws fast and firm, mimicking the baby’s pattern of quick suck, until it believes that the milk must have begun to emerge. After a moment o
r two the pump settles into a steady cadence: long tug, release, repeat. The sensation at nipple level is like a series of small shocks of static electricity, or some strange complication of pins and needles. Unlike feeding the baby, this process always stings, it is never pleasant, and yet the discomfort is endurable. Eventually, the milk stirs to the machine’s demands, un-gripping itself somewhere under my armpit. A drop falls from the nipple to be quickly sucked into the machine, then another, and another, until a little meniscus collects in the base of the bottle. I turn my gaze away.

  There are mornings, on finding myself particularly tired, that I might daydream a while, or make a ten-minute dent in a library book, but today, as on so many other days, I pick up my scruffy photocopy of Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, inviting the voice of another woman to haunt my throat a while. This is how I fill the only small silence in my day, by turning up the volume of her voice and combining it with the wheeze-whirr of my pump, until I hear nothing beyond it. In the margin, my pencil enters a dialogue with many previous versions of myself, a changeable record of thought in which each question mark asks about the life of the poet who composed the Caoineadh, but never questions my own. Minutes later, I startle back to find the pump brimming with pale, warm liquid.

  —

  When we first met, I was a child, and she had been dead for centuries.

  Look: I am eleven, a girl who is terrible at sums and at sports, a girl given to staring out windows, a girl whose only real gift lies in daydreaming. The teacher snaps my name, startling me back to the flimsy prefab. Her voice makes it a fine day in 1773, and sets English soldiers crouching in ambush. I add ditch-water to drench their knees. Their muskets point towards a young man who is tumbling from his saddle now, in slow, slow motion. A woman rides in to kneel over him, her voice rising in an antique formula of breath and syllable the teacher calls a ‘caoineadh’, a keen to lament the dead. Her voice generates an echo strong enough to reach a girl in the distance with dark hair and bitten nails. Me.

  In the classroom, we are presented with an image of this woman standing alone, a convenient breeze setting her as a windswept, rosy-cheeked colleen. This, we are told, is Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, among the last noblewomen of the old Irish order. Her story seems sad, yes, but also a little dull. Schoolwork. Boring. My gaze has already soared away with the crows, while my mind loops back to my most-hated pop-song, ‘and you give yourself away …’ No matter how I try to oust them, those lyrics won’t let me be.

  —

  By the time I find her again, I only half-remember our first meeting. As a teenager I develop a schoolgirl crush on this caoineadh, swooning over the tragic romance embedded in its lines. When Eibhlín Dubh describes falling in love at first sight and abandoning her family to marry a stranger, I love her for it, just as every teenage girl loves the story of running away forever. When she finds her murdered lover and drinks handfuls of his blood, I scribble pierced hearts in the margin. Although I don’t understand it yet, something ricochets in me whenever I return to this image of a woman kneeling to drink from the body of a lover, something that reminds me of the inner glint I feel whenever a boyfriend presses his teenage hips to mine and his lips to my throat.

  My homework is returned to me with a large red X, and worse, the teacher’s scrawl cautions: ‘Don’t let your imagination run away with you!’ I have felt these verses so deeply that I know my answer must be correct, and so, in righteous exasperation, I thump page after page down hard as I make my way back to the poem, scowling. In response to the request ‘Describe the poet’s first encounter with Art Ó Laoghaire,’ I had written: ‘She jumps on his horse and rides away with him forever,’ but on returning, I am baffled to find that the teacher is correct: this image does not exist in the text. If not from the poem, then where did it come from? I can visualise it so clearly: Eibhlín Dubh’s arms circling her lover’s waist, her fingers woven over his warm belly, the drumming of hooves, and the long ribbon of hair streaming behind her. It may not be real to my teacher, but it is to me.

  —

  If my childhood understanding of this poem was, well, childish, and my teenage interpretation little more than a swoon, my readings swerved again in adulthood.

  I had no classes to attend anymore, no textbooks or poems to study, but I had set myself a new curriculum to master. In attempting to raise our family on a single income, I was teaching myself to live by the rigours of frugality. I examined classified ads and supermarket deals with care. I met internet strangers and handed them coins in exchange for bundles of their babies’ clothes. I sold bundles of our own. I roamed car boot sales, haggling over toddler toys and stair-gates. I only bought car seats on sale. There was a doggedness to be learned from such thrift, and I soon took to it.

  My earliest years of motherhood, in all their fatigue and awe and fretfulness, took place in various rented rooms of the inner city. Although I had been raised in the countryside, I found that I adored it there: the terraces of smiling neighbours with all their tabbies and terriers, all our bins lined up side by side, the overheard cries of rage or lust in the dark, and the weekend parties with their happy, drunken choruses. Our taps always dripped, there were rats in the tiny yard, and the night city’s glimmering made stars invisible, but when I woke to feed my first son, and then my second, I could split the curtains and see the moon between the spires. In those city rooms, I wrote a poem. I wrote another. I wrote a book. If the poems that came to me on those nights might be considered love poems, then they were in love with rain and alpine flowers, with the strange vocabularies of a pregnant body, with clouds and with grandmothers. No poem arrived in praise of the man who slept next to me as I wrote, the man whose moonlit skin always drew my lips towards him. The love I held for him felt too vast to pour into the neat vessel of a poem. I couldn’t put it into words. I still can’t. As he dreamt, I watched poems hurrying towards me through the dark. The city had lit something in me, something that pulsed, vulnerable as a fontanelle, something that trembled, as I did, between bliss and exhaustion.

  We had already moved house twice in three years, and still the headlines reported that rents were increasing. Our landlords always saw opportunity in such bulletins, and who could blame them? Me. I blamed them every time we were evicted with a shrug. No matter how glowing their letters of reference, I always resented being forced to leave another home. Now we were on the cusp of moving again. I’d searched for weeks, until eventually I found a nearby town with lower rents. We signed another lease, packed our car, and left the city. I didn’t want to go. I drove slow, my elbow straining to change gear, wedged between our old TV and a bin-bag of teddies, my voice leading a chorus through ‘five little ducks went swimming one day’. I found my way along unfamiliar roads, ‘over the hills and far away’, scanning signs for Bishopstown and Bandon, for Macroom and Blarney, while singing ‘Mammy Duck said Quack, Quack, Quack …’ until my eye tripped over a sign for Kilcrea.

  Kilcrea – Kilcrea – the word repeated in my mind as I unlocked a new door, it repeated and repeated as I scoured dirt from the tiles, and grimaced at the biography of old blood and semen stains on the mattresses. Kilcrea, Kilcrea, the word vexed me for days, as I unpacked books and coats and baby monitors, spoons and towels and tangled phone chargers, until finally, I remembered – Yes! – in that old poem from school, wasn’t Kilcrea the name of the graveyard where the poet buried her lover? I cringed, remembering my crush on that poem, as I cringed when I recalled all the skinny rock-stars torn and tacked onto my teenage walls, the vocabulary they allowed me to express the beginnings of desire. I flinched, in general, at my teenage self. She made me uncomfortable, that girl, how she displayed her wants so brashly, that girl who flaunted a schoolbag Tipp-Exed with longing, who scribbled her own marker over layers of laneway graffiti, who stared obscenely at strangers from bus windows, who met their eyes and held them until she saw her own lust stir there. The girl caught in forbidden behaviours behind the school and threatened with expulsion. Th
e girl called a slut and a whore and a frigid bitch. The girl condemned to ‘silent treatment’. The girl punished and punished and punished again. The girl who didn’t care. I was here, singing to a child while scrubbing old shit from a stranger’s toilet. Where was she?

  —

  In the school car park, I found myself a little early to pick up my eldest and sought shelter from the rain under a tree. My son was still dreaming under his plastic buggy-cover, and I couldn’t help but admire his ruby cheeks and the plump, dimpled arms I tucked back under his blanket. There. In the scrubby grass that bordered the concrete, bumblebees were browsing – if I had a garden of my own, I thought, I’d fill it with low forests of clover and all the ugly weeds they adore, I’d throw myself to my knees in service to bees. I looked past them towards the hills in the distance, and, thinking of that road-sign again, I rummaged for my phone. There were many more verses to the Caoineadh than I recalled, thirty, or more. The poem’s landscape came to life as I read, it was alive all around me, alive and fizzing with rain, and I felt myself alive in it. Under that drenched tree, I found her sons, ‘Conchubhar beag an cheana is Fear Ó Laoghaire, an leanbh’ – which I translated to myself as ‘our dotey little Conchubhar / and Fear Ó Laoghaire, the babba’. I was startled to find Eibhlín Dubh pregnant again with her third child, just as I was. I had never imagined her as a mother in any of my previous readings, or perhaps I had simply ignored that part of her identity, since the collision of mother and desire wouldn’t have fitted with how my teenage self wanted to see her. As my fingertip-scar navigated the text now, however, I could almost imagine her lullaby-hum in the dark. I scrolled the text from beginning to end, then swiped back to read it all again. Slower, this time.

  The poem began within Eibhlín Dubh’s gaze as she watched a man stroll across a market. His name was Art and, as he walked, she wanted him. Once they eloped, they led a life that could only be described as opulent: oh, the lavish bedchambers, oh, the delectable meals, oh, the couture, oh, the long, long mornings of sleep in sumptuous duck-down. As Art’s wife, she wanted for nothing. I envied her her home and wondered how many servants it took to keep it all going, how many shadow-women doing their shadow-work, the kind of shadow-women I come from. Eibhlín dedicates entire verses to her lover in descriptions so vivid that they shudder with a deep love and a desire that still feels electric, but the fact that this poem was composed after his murder means that grief casts its murk-shadow over every line of praise. How powerful such a cataloguing must have felt in the aftermath of his murder, when each spoken detail conjured him back again, alive and impeccably dressed, with a shining pin glistening in his hat, and ‘the suit of fine couture / stitched and spun abroad for you’. She shows us Art as desired, not only by herself, but by others, too, by posh city women who –