Catchlights

by Niamh Prior

Genres: Friendship; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

'Each story is a perfectly formed jewel . . . vivid characterization, ingenious plotting and intelligent structuring amount to a most engaging read as we put the jigsaw of these lives back together' LIZ NUGENT

An Irish vagrant with a strange ability wanders Kew Gardens. She knows that the fine weather is going to break and the impending rain casts her mind back to a riverbank where a shady fisherman once asked for her help.

The same fisherman, years later, runs into a childhood friend and becomes intrigued by his wife. She in turn is charmed by his boldness and his confidence. One day she goes out for a walk and never returns.

In another time, in another place, a photographer notices two ghostly figures - of a man and a woman - on pictures developed from his vintage lens. The images become clearer with each roll of film, but his dogged investigation of the mystery could cost him dearly.

So spool out the lives in Catchlights: the past contains the present and future; shallow and deep acts of cruelty, love, selfishness and kindness reverberate for years.

Release date: June 9, 2022

Publisher: John Murray Press

Print pages: 224

Sample

Forecast

Have you ever been caught out in a surprise rain shower without an umbrella? Surely you have taken off your coat while playing in the sunshine on a warm day in winter, or wished you had one to wear on a chilly day in summer. Then you know that the weather here in the British Isles is unpredict­able. Even the Meteorological Office can only forecast around twenty-four hours ahead.

Miss Havers does not allow me into her tearoom, but she lets me go around to the open back door like a stray cat. She has put a stool at the counter in the scullery for me. When she comes in, I hand her 7d in ha’pennies for tea and my empty flask. She nods and returns with a bowl of soup and a plate stacked with bread. The soup, thick with vegetables, has a swirl of cream at its centre, topped with a sprig of parsley.

‘It would only go to waste otherwise,’ she lies. I do my best to be ladylike though I’m possessed by the smell of the soup. She turns her back to me, leans against the jamb of the open door, looking out. I wolf into the food. After a while, when my chewing and gulping has slowed, she says: ‘It’s a fine sunny day today, isn’t it? Do you think it will hold?’

I turn and look out and up at the sky. Mackerel tail high up. Stratus closing in from the distant west. ‘Bring in your washing, Miss Havers.’

She checks on her customers, then goes outside to the clothes line and fills her basket with nearly dry laundry. She returns to the tearoom. I’m finished eating and the sky is a solid grey mass, so close it could touch our shoulders. She hands me my flask, now heavy with tea, and a wedge wrapped in tin foil.

‘Black Forest gateau,’ she says. ‘For later. For saving my laundry. You’ve never been wrong yet.’ It begins to spit rain. ‘Stay here until it passes.’ She pats her curls and disappears again. I hear her talking with the ladies in the tearoom in hushed voices – too young to be living rough, outdoors does age the face, could be pretty with a scrub-up, if only . . . nice husband . . . take care of her – then the door shuts.

I close my eyes and listen to drops hit the windowpanes and the ground outside and the leaves that have recently begun to appear on the trees. There is no lullaby as soothing as the patter of raindrops. It reminds me of home, of falling asleep to the sound of rain on the windowpanes of the cottage and the flagstones outside. The wind coming in off the Atlantic. And I am back home in Kerry. I rise into the day and walk barefoot out along the cliff, lie down on a thick patch of seagrass, sink onto it like a springy new straw mattress. Sea pinks like fluffy lollipops nod beside me on their rigid stems. Ripples lap against rock and into small caverns, pushing the air out with wet slaps and gurgles. The sun is up and ­warming the grass and if I could evaporate I would return as a soft drizzle that dampens the cheeks of children, I would land on tree leaves and seawalls and on stone roads, I would moisten worms brought to the surface by my falling, I would decorate flower petals and leaves with magnifying droplets, reflecting little worlds. Miss Havers coughs. ‘You’ll probably be wanting to move along now that it’s stopped,’ she says.

I catch a glimpse of myself in the window of Hartfield Haberdashery, but she is not me, that bag lady. No. Bag ladies are old and I am not old. I am young, but I carry my life in my bags. I go back to the river, the trees, as soon as I can, as soon as I have scavenged as much as I need.

My older brothers, boarding a boat to a dream life in ­America. We’ll tell Elvis you were asking for him, they say. My grandmother Mamó outside our cottage, bent double like a tree leaning away from the wind into the peninsula, picking stones from the earth, hoeing, harrowing, always busy doing something, spreading seaweed, baskets of thick heavy brown bladderwrack and dúlamán, pungent with brine and displacement, sea louse and sandhoppers scurrying and leaping from it over the soil – thick impermeable foreign terrain.

Me, this body, sixteen years old, in a maid’s uniform, in a big house in London. Yes, ma’am. No, ma’am. Meekly. Attic window my view of the world. From it I see a cockerel showing me from which way the wind is blowing – NW. Me in a maid’s uniform, climbing out on the roof to taste the sleet, to feel the wind on my skin, to smell the freshness brought by it that chases away the stale, stagnant city air. One does not climb on roofs. Yes ma’am, sorry ma’am. One does not walk in the snow barefoot. Yes ma’am, sorry ma’am. A maid does not stand under the cherry blossom like a halfwit when there is company. Yes ma’am, sorry ma’am (oh but it is so beautiful, petals drifting like snow with every breath of breeze, catching on my uniform, gathering on the ground forming pink and white velvet puddles). One does not bathe in the fountain (oh but it was so hot and the water so cool). One does not work here any more.

I bathe in the river before the rest of the world rises. I bob with my eyes half-under half-over water. Some days the horizon is as straight as a ruler, as if man-made, but now sky and water bleed into each other, like blue ink on wet blotting paper. In school, blotting ink when I was supposed to be writing. Seeing pictures in their shapes. A storm once tore away part of the village on the cliff, before I was born. It took the church with it to the ocean floor. Me swimming at the beach near the smugglers’ cave, with head under water so I can hear the church bells ringing.

In winter, nine winters now since the big house, I go to London where kind people take me into buildings with saints’ names, give me a bed for the night when I feel the approach of rain, ice, snow. They give me food. Hot water to wash.

Sometimes I sit with my hat out in front of me where people hurry to and fro. Bus stations. Train stations. In the big city I incite sympathy, apathy, disgust in people and am ignored, pitied, humiliated, hunted down by volunteers with soup and blankets at times, but these emotions, these reactions I incite, they are theirs, not mine. None of it touches me. Invisible rings surround me, keeping me separate to them. They do not even look up except when the sky darkens or it rains.

Me in Hartfield in the spring. Abandoned boathouse my shelter. I come here by train with coppers I collected in the city. I didn’t know where I was going the first time I came here. I boarded a train pointing away from the noise, the crowds, the big buildings, the imminence of stifling summer concrete heat. Down the line, I changed from that train to a smaller one. I got off where it was quiet, gentle, where land hugs the houses. There are ducks here – mallards and brown ones. They quack and waddle and get too close. My mother once said I was an ugly duckling, but I never grew into a swan. Just into me. She gave me to my grandmother when I was a baby. This village is a good place, full of good people. Along my walk, clutching my bags and my Black Forest gateau, the flowers are beginn­ing to close up for the night. Pink-tipped daisies fold like upside-down umbrellas, close their yellow eyes.

A bearded fisherman near the boathouse that is my shelter. My stomach says no no no, go. But he tells me be a darling and pass him his net because he’s holding a fish on the line. I turn, reach for it. Weight on my back, flips me over like a fish. Pins me down. Lying in the grass near the riverbank, I keep my eyes on the clouds and imagine as I used to when I was a child that it is me who is floating away, not the clouds. Those buttocks pressed into the mud are not mine, this place he jabs at is not mine. I am not this whispered word, ‘bag lady’. The ducks have scattered. The clouds, greyish puffs of cumulus mostly, shape-shift from mouse into eagle.

Higher up, wispy mares’ tails promise a change. And I would willingly transform now. Let me melt into dew on the grass, let the sun warm me with its rays, stretch them out like maternal tendrils and stroke me, heat me up, raise me up, turn me to vapour, be part of the air, let me ascend into the sky, cool, become a cloud, let my mass be weightless and expansive, undefined, divisible by breezes, let winds usher me along, calm, let me hover like a bird and white and grey as its feathers, take these teeth, this hair, these bones, make them all vapour, make them nothing but a haze, a mist and let it lift, let it rise all the way up there, up until there is no more up; return to the sea, fall into it or flow that way, down the estuary, become salinated, cleansed with salt, let all of this dirt, this grime that lodges in the skin wash away. The grease from my hair, memories from my body.

Afterwards, I wipe away the tepid wetness with dock leaves, pull my clothes back on. Gather my things back into my bags. Except the hospital bracelet. He gives me a sandwich. Later, I feed it to the ducks. Me, leaving the village. Heading for ­London. To the houses with saints’ names.

Me, this body, twenty years old, in a hospital where it is warm, too warm and too dry and airless. It is too noisy with whines, screams, moans. My only comfort here is the sound of raindrops on the panes of glass like a lullaby, but this is torture too, because the windows don’t open and have bars on them.

If I could open them a crack, I could let in some air, touch the rain and soak it up, become cloud and float away into the peace of the sky.

One kind doctor takes me from the ward in a wheelchair though I can walk. He gives me clothes to put on instead of the hospital gown. He wheels me outside to a garden and we sit together on a bench. He smiles when I slide my feet out of my shoes and nestle them in the grass. He nods to a gate, puts a purse of money in my lap, and leaves me there.

Summer in the city is too hot, but I am never alone with a fisherman here. All around are people busy going from train to train. Here underground there is no sunshine and the only breeze is that of the trains swooshing by. I sit and wait for the clinks in my upturned hat in this wormhole where day has been walled out.

Me in the Thames, next to the giant garden, upriver from the bustling streets. Float on my back, let the water turn me like a compass needle, like the compass needle in my gut. I always know which way is west; some things don’t ever change. Like trade winds and cardinal points. I close my eyes and I am back in Kerry again. I climb down the cliff to where no one goes, no one knows, to the beach; in the cave I undress. Mid-tide. My feet meld into gravelly sand and shell, the shells yellow and every shade of brown and the dark purple ones, iridescent like jewels where outer layers have chipped off. Warm fragments of them stick in my skin when I lie on them and float off as I wade into the cold water. I feel a part of it, less apart than ever when my body meets the seawater, skin could dissolve and I and all my blood and organs turn the water red, my bones become sponge, red dissipating further and further, blanching with it as it does my name; the idea of me becomes no more than the echo of an oystercatcher’s cry rebounding off ancient rocks, a high-pitched pipeep that diminishes into the soundscape, into the rhythmic shushing of waves over shoreline, of wind combing everything it touches, releasing the land’s quiet voice.

Me in Kew Gardens, wandering flower to flower, barefoot, grass soft as the carpet in the big house where I was a maid, bags stashed under a bush. Freshly washed, clothes too. A summer dress too big for me, floating on the wind like a seed. One does not . . . but I do lie down. A black and red polka dot bead making its way diligently from one blade of grass to the next. Why do you not use your wings? Where are you going on your tiny, busy legs? If it were black it would be a repulsive beetle, but a pretty coat makes all the difference in this world. The bug parts its shoulders, splits its back in half, two semicircles open like a bridge and black fly-like wings emerge, crisp and functional and fast and it’s gone.

A man with a moustache talking to me. A kind man. It’s safe, my stomach says. Scarlet pimpernel, the man says and points to the open blooms. Charles, he says, points to himself.

The breeze nudges me in his direction. I step closer and look at the flowers. Their petals twitch.

Look. I point west into the clear sky. Thunderstorm, I say, coming this way. We wait and watch until a dark anvil-shaped cloud climbing high in the otherwise blue sky appears. So there is, he says. Tourists surprised by the sudden tint to the light, the down-rattle of hail, the flashes and thunder.

It’s okay, I work here, he says, leading the way. Gigantic palace made of glass, nothing but windows. Warm inside, but not like the hospital. There it was too warm and dry. Here it is pleasant. We watch the storm from inside, surrounded by palm trees and plants I’ve never seen before. Every lightning strike charges this body, these eyes open wide, breathe deeply, scrunch shoulders, arms, legs, in exhilaration. I turn to him and we count slow seconds until the thunder trembles up through our feet, wraps around us from inside and we quiver like dewdrops.

Security guard arrives, calling Charles aside. Whispering. I am not those whispered words.

She is not a bag lady. She is my new assistant. And her name is – he looks at me. My hospital bracelet. The one I left by the river in Hartfield. The one that says ‘Jane Smith’. That is not my name anyway. My name is – and I remember it and I am this body – it’s Bláithín. My name is Bláithín. Bláithín is me.

In the calm, fresh smell of earth released by rain, everything is new and shining. Dust is washed away from leaves, now springing up as they shed drops, moving limbs. We sit in the sun together, soak up beams. Tell me about the cloud, he says. How do you know? I just do, I tell him. I feel it. You are like the scarlet pimpernel, he says. I stand up, close my eyes, spin around and around until dizzy. Stop, eyes closed I point. West. Wind at my back I lift my left hand, low pressure that way, I say. Tell me about tomorrow and if you’re right, I’ll give you a job. I look around, all around, and I close my eyes and I tell him.

He leads me to a white box on stilts that looks like a beehive. He opens one side of its louvred panels. Inside it has lots of gadgets, liquids that rise and fall inside tubes with the temperature, a cylinder that collects rain, dials with pointers, mechanical arms that draw mountain ranges across rolling drums of squared paper, like the green line on the black screen in the hospital. This monitors the weather, he says. Is this a picture of its heartbeat? I ask. He smiles. You are not – he speaks the words aloud – a bag lady. You are a born meteorologist. It is beautiful, all of it, he says, isn’t it, Bláithín? I run my fingers over the rainfall chart. I will make sure you see its full magnificence. Other climates, five continents. Places where the sun shines day after day after day and plants still thrive, thick and fleshy. Places where it rains all the time and the rain is warm and jungles sprout under it. Places where ice and snow never thaw and all the animals are white.

From one summer to the next he teaches me words that before I had only pictures for in my mind and feelings for in my body. He gives me a room to live in, a flat near the gardens. He teaches me to use the instruments. He pays me paper money for my work.

Autumn yielding to winter. Me on an aeroplane, in a new red coat with black piping. Charles’s hand holding mine. The rumble of the engine and then the roar and leaning back in my seat, the ascent, and out the little porthole beside me the world turns into a train set with toy-sized everything and I rise up and up and up and all at once we are straight again and outside the porthole turns white, dotted with drops and all around the plane is white. I look at Charles. Yes, he whispers, yes. I put my finger to the window. Right there, an inch from my fingertip, is cloud. All around us is cloud.

Snow is the only thing here, where we landed in the Arctic. If there is anything else, it is deeply buried. All around us glows. I am tightly cocooned in a big fur-lined coat over my new red one, mittens and hat with goggles to protect my eyes. We travel on a snowmobile over hills and along a flat plain. In the distance is a dark patch and a stream of smoke rising. Drawing closer I see the dark patch is rounded like the roof of a shed. The snow has melted from it. There is a metal structure with aerials and a ladder up it beside the building. In front of it people are taking measurements with weather instruments. As we approach, they gather to greet us. We remove our goggles and shake mitten-covered hands like teddy bears meeting. Welcome, they say. You’re just in time to help send off the weather balloon, one says to me.First a cup of tea. . .