Andrew Bonner began life as an exiled Irish peasant-child in a South Manchester maternity unit in the penultimate week of the 1960s but relocated shortly afterwards to a Home for Unmarried Mothers in Blackpool, Lancashire. He won the Greater Manchester Police ‘Top of The Form’ Inter-Schools General Knowledge Quiz Championships in 1984, for which he was awarded a Marks and Spencers Special Edition Oxford English Dictionary.
abonn002@gold.ac.uk
The Five Acre
He drove his Austin Maestro back through Letterkenny, passing what was left of the Fiesta Dancehall on the Port Road, and turned at the new roundabout to climb the Lurgy Brack. It was wider now with an overtaking lane up its near-vertical, straightened slope and he was passed by thuggish, mud-caked Mitsubishis, Hiluxes, and Jeeps, as well as brand-new family saloons with Northern plates. Everything that came up the road was faster than his rusting Maestro and soared over the hill while he crunched her down into second gear. I can’t get her any lower, he complained, or she’ll stop altogether. Jesus Christ, come on to fuck, ye bastard yoke ye.
That morning, given that it was his first meeting with the solicitor, he had made an effort. He was dressed in his plaid jacket and the light blue Farah slacks, the ones he wore for golf club socials. He hadn’t worn them in a while and had been shocked when he struggled to get his trouser zip to close all the way. Of course he hadn’t brought any other smart stuff with him, just the old things he’d shoved in a bag or worn on the ferry over. So he had girded himself with a belt like it was baler twine and forced himself down to the office on Main Street. The solicitor was all cufflinks and charm, telling him about land valuations and auctioneers, and that Ireland was known as the Celtic Tiger nowadays, and they would have the English beat at their own game soon enough. The solicitor tried to size him up, asking him what he did for a living. He omitted to mention his twenty-five years as a ship’s steward in the Merchant Navy because people have a way of judging these things and said that he was currently a manager at a recycling facility in Cheshire. He had found that people never warmed to him as quickly when he told them he was a foreman at a paper-pulping plant in Ellesmere Port. He had been doing that for ten years since coming off the boats.
The solicitor had commiserated with him on his loss and given him a brown foolscap envelope full of receipts and odds and ends. He had then gone to the photocopy shop to blow up a photo of his father and to buy a frame, and by now all the effort to be smart was causing him no end of grief. The shirt and tie had him strangled, so when the Maestro got to the top of the hill, he undid the button at his neck, and pulled the tie all away from his throat. He loosened the leather belt, and his stomach, emancipated, rolled out over the top of the slacks until he was able to breathe again.
The old road had become a full-blown by-pass, paid for by the Europeans, and some time in the future it would go all the way over to Ballyshannon and Sligo. A good thing, it must be said, for the cars that could get above the eighty kilometres an hour, but for the Maestro, it would hardly matter either way. As he drove, he found that the by-pass had obliterated all the old landmarks; gone were Hartigan’s Bar and Undertakers, and Kelly’s shop that used to sit at the corner of the old bog road. In fact, he found that everything was so altered he couldn’t really place himself at all, and as he thought along these lines, he realised that he couldn’t even remember the last time he had been on this Lurgy Brack road. Well, that was hardly surprising, considering how rarely they had ever come to Letterkenny: they would only come this far for things that couldn’t be got in Balmafey, like doses for animals or the ironmongery for gates and gutters. Of course, his father couldn’t drive back in them days, never mind afford the motor car. And because it was always such a handling to get the length, he never liked it much when they got here. He always thought of their visits to Letterkenny as the completion of a kind of purgatory, a passage through pain and suffering purely for the bliss of finally making it home again.
He remembered that they would always need to be out by seven in the morning, when he and his father walked down the Dairy Lane to the Broad Road to catch the CIE bus outside Magee’s. The hell-bus bounced over a single track that in those days was the only route through their part of the country. The road contorted itself around Augheygault, Glenmaquin, and other townlands he never knew the names of, and stopped at the ends of farm lanes for passengers who chatted about the mild, or desperate, weather they’d been having. As the bus sank and lolled over hillocks and braes, his motion sickness would set in, and he would hate every hedge, hawthorn bush and humpback bridge. The bus would arise at the top of Lurgy Hill, tip itself over the Pass towards the view of Lough Swillyand the hills of Inishowen, and then plumb down this same, if in those days much narrower, Lurgy Brack road.
He was always close to vomiting, if he hadn’t already done so, by the time they got to Letterkenny, so he was glad getting off the bus to the feeling of solid pavement under his shoes, and the short walk up Main Street. He remembered cattle sales in the Square below the Cathedral, before the new mart was built in the late 1960s, when Letterkenny would be submerged by farmers and animals from Glenties, Church Hill, and Manor. It had a stench he never forgot: a combination of cigarette smoke, lorry fumes, and rubbish that overwhelmed tiny bins, all mingling with the air of cow piss and dung and, as the day wore on, the stale mould of booze. In the throng of the town’s bodies, he had held tight to his father’s hand, towed along in his wake, his arm stretched to twice its actual length by the strain of keeping up.
Sometimes in July, when workers returned from Scotland brimming with cash, the shopkeepers paid for zig-zags of bunting to go up between the lamp posts and telegraph poles, all the way down Main Street. They hung there all summer until they wore out and finished up looking like tufts of sheep’s wool snagged on barbed wire.
He remembered men sitting on windowsills outside Breen’s bar, basking in summer sun, near mad with gaiety and chat, cigarettes in one hand, pints of Harp in the other, and not really knowing how to respond when they asked him, “what’s the crack about Cullydawson these days?” Amongst the strangers, they’d also meet people they knew from their side of the county, and Mick stopped to chat about the price of heifers or stirks. Though never in the market for animals himself, Mick would know rightly what stock was good or bad and was happy to pass on a tip to the big boys if he saw a fine beast in passing.
Once, on a day of the fiercest heat you could imagine, when his father stood chatting to the men outside Breen’s and he had been given a fizzy orange pop to drink, he watched an old drunk propping himself against a telegraph pole a few yards away, swilling something brown and frothy from a pint glass, the dribbles falling over his grey cheeks. The old man wore a near-black tweed overcoat that hung enormously over his shoulders like Batman’s cape and was heavy enough to bend the man in two. When the pint glass was put down on the concrete pavement, the man struggled to get himself vertical again, and for what seemed like the next half hour, the fella clung to the telegraph pole, trying to straighten the spindle legs, and get himself upright.
As the man tottered like this, the tar in the telegraph pole melted and oozed like black ice cream on to the pavement, dribbling over his hands and fingers. If the man tried to step away from the pole, his lack of balance seemed near fatal; panic followed and the pole was clung to again until he mustered himself for another attempt; with a half-step, not sure where to place it, as if the pavement were about to disappear, and a quivering arm for balance, like a baby learning to walk. The man had stretched a hand towards him, looked him straight in the eye and pointed to the door of Breen’s. When the man’s jaw gaped silently in some kind of plea with him, he saw a few brown teeth inside it, like cigarette butts rolling around his mouth. He stepped back, into the protection of his father’s legs and jacket, revolted and fearing the slippery range of the man; yet whose reach and missteps were not enough to cover the five yards he needed to enter the front door of Breen’s.
“What are ye at?” his father had said.
“That old man is dying,” he said to his father.
“He’s just had a skinful. He’ll be fine enough in the morning.”
*
He had heard the priest give the sermon many times. It was the one about those Blind and Halt waiting by the Pool for an Angel to Descend and Trouble the Waters so That He Who Entered First Might Be Healed. And one day, Jesus came and found a Lame Man who had been waiting many a year for the waters to stir. If the priest had the time, this was indeed the sermon he enjoyed telling the most, and he relished describing to the town’s people what horrors were to be found in those cripples by the pool, with their leprosy, gangrenous sores, and dropsy.
The way he heard it, he always imagined the Lame Man as one of the patients from the Mental Hospital up the hill, who were allowed out of the wards once a year to stand behind their fence and watch the Summer Fair. “Thirty-eight years sir I’m sitting here, and not once did I get the length of thon pool,” said the Lame Man to Our Lord, “so you tell me how am I supposed to get in and me a helpless cripple?”
Jesus said unto him, “You make a good point, my fine, withered friend. There is no one here to help you, so why not try this instead: ‘Lift Up Thy Bed and Walk’. Don’t allow this anger to embitter you, making your situation so much the worse. Just make a resolution and turn it into action. Do it now. See what happens.”
Well, there and then, the Lame man did exactly as he was told, and was shocked and amazed to find power returning to legs that heretofore had been stubbornly ineffectual. The poor creature was made whole by the mere suggestion of becoming it.
Now, when he was a child, he had always understood the priest’s lesson from this story to be not just of Jesus’s unstinting Kindness to Strangers and Cripples, but that He also had Unlimited Power over Sin and Disease. This had even comforted him, briefly, once, but when he asked his father that if it was the case that Jesus had been so powerful, then why couldn’t He bring his mother back, and Mick would be silent. He would press on, sometimes unsure if his father had heard him properly, and ask, no, but really, why the Son of Man couldn’t be called upon, just once, maybe even when his mother was still alive, to stop the meningitis from killing her. His father would usually give up trying to explain and said, “sorry, that’s just the way of it sometimes. We don’t always get what we want.”
He had carried on attending Mass until he could stand no more of the priest’s cheery chats about the wonders of Jesus’s love for lepers and outcasts. He resented the attention that those hopeless sinners had got from Jesus and though he had only retained three or four clear memories of his own mother, he could be sure that she never came across as leprous or outcast at all. So was this why Jesus didn’t care for her? She wasn’t a mess. She had been warm, and wrapped her arms constantly around him, and had once taken him to the Five Acre field just below their house for a picnic in the sun. He could have been no more than four or maybe five years old, and it was the last thing he remembered of her.
In his later teens, when rebellion took root, he began to think the whole story was just plain nonsense. Nobody knew when this Angel was supposed to come down to the water’s edge, so who could ever make a plan to be there at just the right moment of Holy Whim? How do you respond to the heavenly call if you’re just busy that day, or the car fails her MoT, or your bastard boss says you’re not getting the time off? The country was held hostage by angels that never landed and briskly psychotic priests. It was why he had left when he did, just turned twenty, with just a few punts in his pocket, when he had started to hate his father for not seeing through it all; for being the holy idiot; for not being as angry as he was.
*
The Maestro eased off her pace, and almost thanked him when the traffic slowed to a meander, snagging behind a John Deere tractor that was easily the size of one of the old combine harvesters he remembered. It was pulling a trailer of slurry, itself was big enough to take in the whole of his father’s old byre, but on wheels for feck’s sake, and blocking the whole road in front of them. And he noticed on the side of the road Sadie Elvin’s old single level pub and one-pump petrol station of Sadie Elvin’s. The pump was rusted and grown over with weeds, and the windows boarded up. Hers was the kind of bar that was open during the afternoon and you would as easily get a packet of Kimberley biscuits, or a loaf of Milford, as a pint of stout. Not that he was ever allowed that.
And he remembered again that he must have been nine or ten years old when it struck him on that baking hot day in Letterkenny how much the drunken old soak in front of Breen’s would have appreciated a visit from the Good Lord Himself, but Jesus was never coming to Letterkenny, not in a million years. So with no one helping him, the tramp on Main Street simply deflated, and slid towards the ground, onto his arse hugging the pole with tarry arms. Head and hair blackened, the old man closed his eyes. His empty pint glass was engulfed and fixed to the ground. People stepped around him and spilled their pints on his coat.
How could anyone be so incapable, so full of drink? His father, a lifelong pledger, would never have got himself into that kind of a state. But he stayed terrified that one day something like this would be his own ending. Neither did he forget that nobody reached out to help the old man. Instead, they had carried on talking about livestock prices, and what a disaster this heat was for the sheep and their maggots.
No, he would have to admit that he really didn’t care for Letterkenny at all.
And Mick would say, “Come on, sir, these messages won’t shop themselves.” So his father took him by the hand and they walked down the hill towards Alexanders’ Hardware Store. He would be pleased to find the universal force that made the journey home feel shorter than the journey out, and he looked forward to that point on the road when he would see their townland again, and their home-place at the end of the Dairy Lane, where hedges laced the green hillside, and you could even make out the shape of the Five Acre field.
When the bus turned on to the Broad Road towards Magee’s, his head would magically clear and he would enjoy the ride for those final few minutes. When they got off, he watched the back end of the CIE bus pull away through dust and sunlight, the noise of air-brakes and gear-shifts receding up the road, to be replaced by bird-song and wasp-buzz, and he and his father embarked on the final stretch, walking slowly for an hour up the Dairy Lane under their tunnel of trees. Sometimes he would hold his father’s hand, sometimes he would whack the long grass with ash-sticks, heroic as D’Artagnan or Zorro.
If the weather was good, before they got all the way back, they would climb over the iron gate into the Five Acre, walk up to the ash tree at the head of the field and sit on the grassy bank beneath it. The place where he thinks he last saw his mother, in fact, although it was just her favourite place for picnics and sun-bathing. He had very few memories of being indoors at all and remembers her always telling him to get out and get the fresh air. He always had this image of her under that ash tree, her black hair flowing and rolling around her face in the breeze, and her kneeling on a checked cotton tablecloth laid out with cups and a plate of fairy buns, shouting over to him, “Seamie, sweetheart, come on here and rest yourself.” And after she was gone, he and Mick would sit there on the few good days after their shopping trips, and his father would point back over towards Letterkenny, to show him the road they had just come along. He would point back, up and away behind them, and say, “That’s the way to Belfast” and then he would point to his right, and say, “That way to Derry”. With his left arm, he would point south, “Now that would take you through the Gap and on to Ballyshannon and Sligo.” He would wave in a vague, south-easterly direction and say, “That’s the way to England, but what would you need to go there for?” He would then point over to the far distance in front of them and pinpoint the shape of the two biggest peaks in the county, Muckish and Errigal, their summits like silver clouds anchored to the horizon. “And beyond them, sir,” his father would say “is your mighty Atlantic, and the wonders of America and Canada, but if you keep going straight by God, you’ll wind up all the way back here again”.
It was only when they ever reached the shelter of the stone-walled byres and their white-washed dwelling-house that he rediscovered what he really loved the most: their peace re-established after a day of noise. The babble from auctioneers’ loudspeakers and the roaring of a thousand cattle was done, and all he heard was the breeze that blew over the hill, and the shiver of leaves in the high beech branches. The pleasure was actually in knowing that the quietness had been here the whole time they were away; that when they chose to come back, it was always waiting for them.
The Austin Maestro had now come to the end of the Letterkenny by-pass, and the traffic slowed down dramatically as it approached a T-junction ahead. Now a long line of vehicles built up, waiting to turn one way or another and he found with a jolt that he was at a junction with the Broad Road, not far from Magee’s and the Dairy Lane. The shock of knowing where he was again made his heart palpitate and flutter.
Cars paused, then nudged forward. A red cloud of brake lights glowed ahead of him. A Jeep that had sailed past the Maestro while coming up the Lurgy Brack had broken down, blocked a lane, and put on the orange hazards. Haze of petrol fumes hung over the road.
He looked at the envelopes and the framed photograph of his father on the passenger seat and wondered which way he should go. As it turned out, the letter had reached him only four weeks before the funeral, telling him that his old man was very sick, there was no cure, and it was just a matter of time. But he had not hurried back, he had not reached out to help. He was so idiotically certain of his father’s immortality, just a few short weeks ago, that he had thought, “Sure, he’ll be fine. Time enough yet.” It occurred to him now, what a fool he had been for thinking that just because his father had been the one who always remained at Cullydawson, he should also be the one who could never leave. And whatever this feeling was, he had a sense that it would probably never leave him, no matter how he tried to drive it from his heart.
He looked again at the framed photograph: Mick wearing a black suit jacket over the crew-neck jumper, which hid his collar and tie. He must have been in his early sixties when the picture was taken, and he seemed happy in it, so it was the one they used for his Mass card. Copied and blown up, the man in the photocopy shop had also printed with gold letters across the bottom of the photo: “In Loving Memory”. Behind his spectacles, Mick’s eyes were squinting almost shut, and his mouth was held in a half-open smile as though he had been captured telling the photographer, “hurry the feck up.”
He reached into the brown envelope and found a stringed parcel label with a key tied to it. Handwritten in ink, the label said “Cullydawson Dwelling House”. The succession of vehicles danced with gentle sashays around the gulpin Jeep in the road. Looking hard at the driver as he slid past, he said, “That fecking shit bucket? What the fuck do you know?” At the junction, he pointed the Maestro north, and headed for home.