I Could Read the Sky Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Praise

  List of Illustrations

  Epigraph

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Preface

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  The experience of Irish emigration has never been more lyrically set out than in this novel, beautiful both for its words and for its images. It tells the story of one man’s journey from the West of Ireland to the fields and boxing-booths and building sites of England. Now, at the century’s end, he finds himself alone, looking back, struggling to make sense of a life of dislocation and loss and one of unforgotten loveliness.

  About the Author

  TIMOTHY O’GRADY is the author of the prize-winning novel Motherland and co-author with Kenneth Griffith of Curious Journey: An Oral History of Ireland’s Unfinished Revolution (Mercier Press, Ireland). He was awarded the Encore Award for the best second novel of 1997 for I Could Read the Sly.

  STEVE PYKE’S photographic books include Philosophers and Poguetry. His work and installations are exhibited worldwide.

  I COULD READ THE SKY

  “In this fine and deeply moving novel, Timothy O’Grady resists nostalgia … [it reads with] all the humour and intensity of a real life honestly recorded, and with the pathos mutability lends the past”

  LUCY HUGHES-HALLETT, Sunday Times

  “The direct symbolism of Steve Pyke’s stunning photographs matches O’Grady’s text beautifully”

  MARY LOUDON, The Times

  “If the words tell the story of the voiceless, the bleak, lovely photographs that accompany it show their faces … Fiction rarely gets as close to the messy, glorious truth as do memories and photographs. This rare novel dares to use both”

  CHARLOTTE MENDELSON, Times Literary Supplement

  “There is a power and beauty about this novel”

  DAVID HORSPOOL, Daily Telegraph

  “Richly atmospheric, the vivid and lyrical text and starkly beautiful black-and-white photographs bring feelings and images together like the act of memory itself”

  Irish Post

  “This isn’t just another Irish exploration of exile but a little masterpiece in which O’Grady has gathered true experiences, then meshed them into one delicate narration”

  ANNE SIMPSON, Glasgow Herald

  “The text is both minimal and musical, in a way that echoes Beckett”

  COLE MORETON, Independent on Sunday

  “There are not many books this year that seem to me written with comparable force, depth of feeling and sardonic pride”

  DAN JACOBSON, Sunday Telegraph

  “What Pyke and O’Grady have done is read our imagination”

  DERMOT HEALY

  List of Illustrations

  Field, County Donegal, 1991

  County Sligo, 1994

  Field, County Donegal, 1991

  Door, County Clare, 1994

  Peat, County Kerry, 1994

  Rosary, County Clare, 1994

  Three generations, Inishmaan, Aran Islands, 1991

  Inishmaan, 1991

  Inishmaan, 1991

  County Kerry, 1994

  County Kerry, 1994

  Cliffs of Moher, County Clare, 1987

  Cliffs of Moher, County Clare, 1987

  Mizen Head, County Cork, 1990

  Healy Pass, County Cork / County Kerry, 1990

  Farmyard, County Donegal, 1991

  Peat, County Donegal, 1991

  Horse skeleton, County Donegal, 1991

  Burren wall, County Clare, 1987

  Boundary posts, County Donegal, 1991

  Fields, Inishmaan, 1991

  Burren, County Clare, 1987

  Inishmaan, 1991

  Sheep gate, Sheep’s Head, 1991

  Throwing the bullet, County Cork, 1987

  Arlington House, London, 1996

  England, 1993

  County Sligo, 1994

  Dublin, 1992

  London, 1996

  County Sligo, 1994

  Dublin, 1992

  Dublin, 1992

  County Clare, 1994

  County Clare, 1994

  England, 1983

  County Sligo, 1994

  County Tipperary, 1992

  Hands, 1993

  Hands, 1996

  Inishmaan, 1991

  England, 1993

  County Sligo, 1994

  Scarecrow, County Sligo, 1994

  Scarecrow, County Sligo, 1994

  Fairground, Edinburgh, 1983

  Seafront, Brighton, 1986

  The Cage, London, 1981

  Wall of Death, Dublin, 1981

  Funderland, Dublin, 1981

  Ghost Train, Dublin, 1981

  Circus, London, 1981

  Kilburn, London, 1993

  County Sligo, 1994

  London, 1995

  Bonfire, Belfast, 1992

  Graveyard, Inishmaan, 1991

  County Cork, 1987

  Graveyards, Ireland, 1990–94

  Shrine, County Donegal, 1992

  Shrine, County Galway, 1987

  Dublin, 1990

  County Clare, 1994

  County Kerry, 1994

  County Clare, 1994

  Inishmaan, 1991

  Inishmaan, 1991

  Under the Thames, London, 1997

  Under the Thames, London, 1997

  Street race, County Cork, 1987

  Street race, County Cork, 1987

  County Clare, 1987

  Naas Road, Dublin, 1992

  Stairwell, Edinburgh, 1982

  Dublin, 1990

  Father and son, County Clare, 1994

  Bed, Inishmaan, 1991

  Deserted house, County Kerry, 1994

  Deserted house, County Clare, 1994

  County Donegal, 1992

  County Kerry, 1994

  Rosses Point, County Sligo, 1994

  County Cork, 1990

  Wall, Dublin, 1987

  “Everything was the stories my father told me about his life … it was as if he was in the room with me again … You have put down that feeling of terrible longing that I didn’t think anyone but me remembered”

  EILEEN GALLAGHER, in a letter to the author

  I whispered: memory hurts wherever you touch it.

  George Seferis

  In remembrance is the secret of redemption.

  Holocaust memorial, San Francisco

  Preface

  I dare not go deeply into this book, for if I did, I would stay with it forever and I wouldn’t return. And then I wouldn’t be on this page, as I am now, on this page before the book begins.

  Is this a
book? A stupid question if ever there was one. What else am I writing a preface to? It’s a bastard. It has been made in the dark, as photos are made in a darkroom. It is to be looked at with the eyes shut, not the first time of course, but at all other times when you turn its pages.

  Sure, every book, like every blackbird, is different. And sure, when you read here, you hear a chorus behind the talking voice, O’Sullivan and Behan, O’Casey and Synge, Joyce and Jack Yeats (with the hooves of the horses drumming), Beckett and O’Flaherty, they are all here in the dark, protecting with their art the new voice, saving it from oblivion, just as they kept it company when it was alone and wandering.

  So what kind of bastard is it?

  Every joker knows that making them laugh depends upon timing. It’s much easier to make them cry, for sadness accumulates, whereas laughter comes with surprise. Always with surprise. Maybe in the next world it’s happily the other way round.

  Timing is the skill of playing with silence, of distributing it cunningly, of hiding it so that the listener comes upon it with surprise and delight – like the Russians hide painted eggs at Easter for the children to find. And in a story what is it that silence means? The unsaid, no?

  You find the unsaid all the while here. At the top of the page before the lines begin. At the bottom when they’re over. And between the lines, between the sentences. Often too it’s marvellously there inside a sentence. “When I lie in bed in the evening I think ever and ever of money and of Kate Creevy.” It’s the unsaid that makes this sentence go on twisting in the mind. Only the unsaid can dance with a sentence, and here in the dark they dance all the while.

  The silence of the unsaid is always working surreptitiously with another silence, which is that of the unsayable.

  What’s unsaid one time can be said on another occasion. But the unsayable can never be said – unless maybe in a prayer, and God would know that, not me.

  Before the unsayable we are alone. And this, I believe, is why stories are told. All stories are roads which end at a cliff-face. Sometimes the cliff towers above us, sometimes it falls away, sheer at our feet. But when a story leads you to the unsayable, you’re in company. That and that alone is the comfort.

  The unsaid and the unsayable.

  Now let’s read the pictures. Black and white photos. Why do photographers – among them some of the best – still persist in taking pictures in black and white, when colour film is so subtle and easy and cheap? Is it a penchant for nostalgia? For asceticism? For morality? Black and white, after all, is mightily moral.

  I think it happens for another reason. What does painting do – irrespective of its styles? It invites what isn’t there to become present. It starts with what can’t be seen. Ask any good painter. Painters study appearances in order to get closer to what lies behind them. Visual art is a chase after the invisible.

  The advantage of black and white photos is that they remind you of this search for what can’t be seen, for what’s missing; never for one moment do they pretend to be complete, whereas colour photos do. There are even colour pictures which are more “finished” than life itself!

  By contrast, the black and white portrait of a man in Kerry [see here] confesses that it can never be finished and against the face of the man from Inishmaan (it’s on the preceding page) pound all the high seas of the invisible.

  And so they work together, the written lines and the pictures, and they never say the same thing. They don’t know the same things, and this is the secret of living together.

  The photos are a reminder of everything which is beyond the power of words. Beginning with the first picture of the planks of wood with their grain and their nail and their padlock.

  And the words recall what can never be made visible in any photograph. Listen:

  He tells me then he’s heard about the music I make with the accordion and I want so badly to play for him to keep him there. He fades in and out like a radio losing its signal.

  He leaves the chocolates down beside the bed, and he stands up. He places his large warm hand on my brow and makes a cross like a priest giving the ashes before Lent. “Those people from home, any that remember me tell them I was asking. We’re the same you and me. Tell them we forgive them and they should forgive us.”

  He goes then, the bitter laugh he means for me breaking and falling behind him like a ring of smoke.

  Here in the dark you come upon a fusion of the unsayable and the invisible. It sounds tricky that, tricky and vague. But it isn’t. Because it’s all tattooed on the imagination, point by point, with a needle of longing.

  And if you don’t think about a book, and you think about a tune? The unsayable, the invisible, the longing in music, they all become clear. They are what music is about. Here is a book of tunes without musical notes. That’s why it’s a bastard and wrings the heart.

  Tunes played in the sad room of a glorious life. Glorious is neither irony nor hyperbole here. The word, having travelled the world, goes back to its simple origin: that which has glory.

  I’ll stay on this page. You go into the room …

  John Berger

  EXILE is not a word

  It is a sound

  The rending of skin

  A fistful of clay on top

  of a coffin

  Exile is not a word

  It is shaving against

  A photograph not a mirror

  Exile is not a word

  It is hands joined in

  supplication

  In an empty cathedral

  It is writing your own

  hagiography

  It is a continuing atrocity

  It is the purgatorial

  Triumph of memory

  over topography

  Exile is not a word

  Exile is not a word

  Peter Woods

  I COULD READ THE SKY

  1

  THIS ROOM IS dark, as dark as it ever gets – the hour before dawn in winter. I have sounds and pictures but they flit and crash before I can get them. The bedclothes are damp. The ache in my neck is bad. I hold onto myself for anchorage.

  Something stirs then, a little wind. It’s very gentle, a lark’s breath, but the thickened air drifts across to clear and I see it – the house set just nicely into the side of the green hill. The fuchsia bending around the window is red and the thatch so bright you’d think there was a fire in it. I am up on my brother Joe’s back painting the north door with my hands. We have the paint but we haven’t the brush. The green paint runs down through the little hairs on my arms, under the sleeve of my gansey and onto my chest. But I don’t feel it. I am four and Joe is seven. My hands are moving in big, wild loops over the door. There are drips of green on Joe’s shirt and the back of his neck. I look into the whorl of brown hair at the back of my head, at my black gansey, my trousers, my blackened feet. The way my face is you’d think there was nothing in the world only the door. I want to climb in behind that face but I can’t. I strain to hear some notes of a song from the kitchen. I push at the door. I grip myself tighter.

  This is me. I have a round bald head. My eyes are blue and watery and my fingers are stained with tobacco. I am alone here with a black dog. I sleep badly.

  The day of the Stations is a big day. The priest will be down in the evening to say Mass in the kitchen and our neighbours and relations will be coming in. We have loaves made. We have chickens cooked. We have whiskey and porter and sherry.

  But we forgot about the door.

  2

  JOE IN THE kitchen on Stephen’s Day got up like a scarecrow. Straw coming out of his sleeves and the neck of his shirt and a pointy hat on him. His face is painted blue. This is his first day hunting the wren and he got ten shillings going around the houses. Mary, Bernadette, Martin, Dermot, Vincent – all out that day. I am in because I am too young. Eileen is in too. She thinks she’s too old to be out with the Wren boys.

  I see my father through the window lean his bicycle against the wall.
His foot is bad since the fall he took during the potato picking in Lincolnshire. He has a stick to walk with. He’s loosened the right pedal on the bike so it stays still while he pushes with his left. He says these days he’s getting old and laughs, but he’s pushed the bike twelve miles all the way into Ballyconnor and twelve miles back again this Stephen’s Day morning. Powerful man. He could put an oar in through the beams of the ceiling and lift himself up over it ten times with each arm. If the foot isn’t mended by April when he’s to be back in Lincolnshire there’ll be no money coming into the house next year.

  He comes in through the door, a big smile on him and a canvas bag in his hand. It’s like a bag you’d use for cattle feed. There’s a coating of snow on the black curls of his head and across his shoulders. His face is sparkling the way water does under a bright sun. Every time I see him limp it makes me want to cry.

  He takes Joe over to a chair and lifts the hat off his head. Out from the bag he draws a cardboard box and from the box he takes an accordion, a small single-row Hohner. The shine on it. Marbled red with little stars and a gold trim. He leans over, his face alight, the accordion held like a baby in his big hands – a spalpeen’s hands, battered and scarred, the nails split, a finger crushed by a machine. The accordion cost half what you’d get that year for a heifer.

  Years later on visits home I’d hunt around under the bed or in the loft for the accordion. But I never could find it. I didn’t know it had gone to America with a nephew who couldn’t play. Nor that Stephen’s Day morning did I know about the fields going to rushes, the fallen walls. I didn’t know highways and machines and tunnels and scaffolding. It was a bright day, with the white snow.

  Joe takes the accordion from Da and smiles. But he never could play it. The music would come to me, not Joe.

  3

  “I CAN’T GO out the door for fear of that eejit Kane from Mulrany. If I take the bicycle he comes out from behind a hedge. If I go to a dance he ambushes the cart and pushes in beside me. ‘If you won’t have me,’ says he, ‘I’ll burn your house.’ The man is sixty!”

  Eileen with Maura Fogarty under my window on a summer evening. I can hear them laughing, high and clear, a sound like small bells. Maybe altar bells. Maura is back from the nursing in England. She wears a dress with little red roses on it and she talks real fast. I am in bed wide awake and I love listening to them.