Himself by Jess Kidd
For my father
Prologue
May 1950
His first blow: the girl made no noise, her dark eyes widened. She reeled a little as she bent and put the baby down. The man stood waiting.
She straightened up into his second blow, which knocked her to the ground. She fell awkwardly, with one leg crumpled beneath her. He dropped down with his knees either side of her, so that she would hardly see the light greening the trees if she looked up, but she didn’t look up. She turned her head to see her baby on the ground, with his face pale between the folds of the blanket. He’d kicked his tiny foot out, his toes all in a line like new peas in a pod. Because she couldn’t hold her son in her arms she tried to hold him with her eyes as she willed him to be quiet, to be saved.
She did not see the man’s hands as they moved but she felt each clear shock of pain in her dark little soul. She had once traced fortunes along the furrows of his palms with her dancing fingers. His hands could build walls, fell trees and turn a bull in its tracks. His hands could circle her waist, her arm, her ankle, to lightly plot her beauty. His fingers could play songs on her spine, or tuck a strand of hair behind her ear with a mother’s tenderness. His fingers had spelt out complicated love messages on her belly as it had grown, salving the marks there with quiet reverence.
His next blow took her hearing, so that she knew her child was crying only by the shape of his mouth. She heard nothing but an endless rushing. Just like when she swam underwater in the wild Atlantic, a sea cold enough to stop your heart.
His last blow left her without sight. She lay at the edge of the world, finally willing it all to be over. She turned the mess of her face to her beautiful boy, thinking she could see him still, even through the darkness, a dim gleaming rose of the forest.
She couldn’t have known it but it was then that her baby stopped crying. The void her son had fallen into without the cradle of her gaze was immeasurable. He lay as mute as a little mushroom.
The man held her. He watched with quiet devotion as each breath she took became a difficult triumph, flecking his chest with scarlet spume. He touched her hair, sometimes stroking it back from her forehead, sometimes turning the wet skeins about his fingers. And he rocked her, small in his arms, for the longest while. As she left the world she raised her hand like a dreaming child and with blind splayed fingers touched his chest. He kissed every one of her white fingers, noticing the curves of black earth under her nails.
When she was still, the man sheared her hair and took her clothes; he would bury them later, another day, another time. He couldn’t give everything away, not now, not yet.
He looked down at her; naked and faceless she could be anyone and no one.
He wrapped her in sackcloth, rolling her body gently, tucking her limbs in carefully, swaddling her tightly.
A thick silence grew as the forest surveyed his dark work. The trees stopped whispering and the crows flew away, speechless with horror. But the child watched everything, as quiet as a stone, with his eyes big and unblinking.
Across the clearing, through the trees, the man saw the place that he would bury her: a low-tide island you could wait years for and still never see. This wasn’t a coincidence; it was a benediction. He gathered her in his arms and carried her into the river.
He laid her in a well-made grave in the middle of the island. She was little bigger than a stillborn calf, but still he was sure to weight her down, for the tide was coming in.
He bathed, washing himself clean of her for the last time as the light began to die. Then he remembered that he must also claim their child or his work would not be done. He must make one final deep hole, wrap his son in a blanket and put him into the ground. The earth would fill his mouth and eat his cries. He took up his spade again.
But whilst the man had bathed, the forest had hidden the infant.
Great ferns had unfurled all around the child, tree roots had surrounded him and ivy had sprung up to cloak him. Branches had bent low over his tiny head and had shaken a blessing of leaves down onto him. Moles had banked earth all around him with their strong claws, swimming blind and furious through the soil.
So that when the man looked about himself he could not find the child, however hard he searched.
Chapter 1
April 1976
Mahony shoulders his rucksack, steps off the bus and stands in the dead centre of the village of Mulderrig.
Today Mulderrig is just a benign little speck of a place, uncoiled and sprawling, stretched out in the sun. Pretending to be harmless.
If Mahony could remember the place, which he can’t of course, he’d not notice many changes since he’s been gone. Mulderrig doesn’t change, fast or slowly. Twenty-six years makes no odds.
For Mulderrig is a place like no other. Here the colours are a little bit brighter and the sky is a little bit wider. Here the trees are as old as the mountains and a clear river runs into the sea. People are born to live and stay and die here. They don’t want to go. Why would they when all the roads that lead to Mulderrig are downhill so that leaving is uphill all the way?
At this time of the day the few shops are shuttered and closed, and the signs swing with an after-hours lilt and pitch, and the sun-warmed shopfront letters bloom and fade. Up and down the high street, from Adair’s Pharmacy to Farr’s Outfitters, from the offices of Gibbons & McGrath Solicitors to the Post Office and General Store, all is quiet.