Gráinne

by Keith Roberts

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

Winner of the BSFA Award for best novel, 1987 Meet Gráinne: blue-stocking seductress, darling of the media, painfully human yet mysterious as her great namesake, the proud girl-goddess who plunged all Ireland into war and shadow...

Release date: October 2, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 175

Sample

There is no point at which one recovers consciousness. As there is no point at which one can be said to sleep. The man in the bed reflects on this. Seen as a metaphor, its inference is clear. Birth and death alike are unremembered. What cannot be remembered cannot exist. It is not real. He wonders that he has never before understood such a very simple thing.

He keeps his eyes lightly closed. In the brownness behind the lids, faint colours swim. Soon, they will turn to faces. The young girl in her sky blue gown, the doctor with his beard and curly chestnut hair. He savours, without desire, the moment of return. Finally he moves his head. The young man says, ‘You are with us again.’

He smiles. He says, ‘I have never been away.’

‘Do you wish to talk?’

He inclines his head slightly on the pillow. ‘I will tell you what I see.’

‘And what is that?’

He considers. Finally he says, ‘A door.’

‘What sort of door?’

‘It’s a big door. Wide. Deep panels. It’s painted a light grey. The paint is nearly new.’

‘What’s so important about it?’

‘It’s closed.’

‘And why is that?’

‘Because I closed it myself.’

He stirs in the bed. The clean bed, clean at last; sheets to his chin, and warmth. An emotion enters him. He examines it with care. It is not happiness. But he does not wish for happiness. Happiness is imbalance. The raising of a Spirit, perhaps. The Spirit may be beautiful; but always a devil slips in, by the same unguarded gate. He does not wish that gate to be opened again. He has no need of it.

Contentment then? But contentment is a round-shouldered word, bowed through overwork. The shopkeeper is perhaps content when he bolts his doors for the night. Contentment is unawareness; the telly mouthing, bedtime cocoa and ageing without complaint. Unawareness is the true death.

Stasis. That’s surely it. But that can’t be right. Stasis is not an emotion, but a state of affairs. The halting, for an instant, of Change. He decides he must be confused. Perhaps he has always been confused. Though at times, briefly, events seemed to become more clear. A chink in a curtain, through which for an instant he might peer.

‘That’s a good metaphor.’

Good heavens, had he said all that aloud?

The voice smiles. ‘This is a place for saying things aloud. Tell me about the door.’

He closes his eyes. The door. So very much to say about the door.

It’s in a big building. A school. Silent now, though in his memory its corridors ring with voices. Hundreds of voices; and the rush and bang, the clatter, the indifferent flying of feet. The silence invites contemplation. He contemplates.

Beyond the door the corridor, grey-painted too with wainscotings of bright pink-brown, leads to the Hall. The Hall that doubles as a gym, the hall with its beams and bars, parallel bars that rattled once and creaked, gloss-grey as the rest. And the horse and box, the six great ropes hooked to the ceiling, worn leather at their tips, drawn gracefully aside. To shin a rope, that was manhood’s test, unspoken; climb and climb, to pat the coffering three storeys high. So the great ceiling grew faint ghosts of hands, though never his. The test defeated him; as the Swallow’s Nest defeated him, he couldn’t make the Swallow’s Nest, not ever on the ropes. They banged him on the back, low down; but he wouldn’t relax, let his body flop into the curve. Couldn’t, for fear his heels would slip from where they clung. While the Shirts wrestled v. the Skins at handball and the Roll of Honour hung above the dais, plain oak with its gilded columns of names, draped forever with its flag. Though that was over for him now, the fear, new term’s polish on the floors, new ink in the little cracked white and pale blue pots. Let thy Father hand be guiding all who here et-cet-er-a. They tore their caps up on the way out through the gates, black caps with the red and white proud Rose, scattered the road with sacking pieces and the stiffeners from peaks; but never he. He wore his home to hang it, mind empty, on a peg in the little anticlimactic hall.

‘It’s still important to you.’

The other smiles in turn. ‘The cranes are always flying.’

‘When was it? When are you thinking about?’

‘There is only now.’

‘Agreed. What date would others give it though?’

He considers. ‘Nineteen fifty two.’

‘What was the door?’

The man in the bed says without rancour, ‘The Head’s study, of course.’

September it was, and summer already becoming autumn, long rise of the Avenue blueing nights and mornings. Tall wet-footed houses in their rows; then the great spire at the top of the hill, pines echoing from the cemetery where they put his Grandma just in time for the mock-O’s, the cemetery where once the whole town saw a ghost. And round by the Market House, traffic grinding close, ironstone wall where they dug with pennies, twisting, waiting for the bus to come. The ironstone yielded easily, gave up ginger dust; so they tunnelled and joined the tunnels, carved and sculpted inches deep. Drawing is for the mute, inchoate; so Grammar School boys made no graffiti. None on their desk tops, save initials sometimes; and none here, just holes mined deep and wide. A joyless exercise, some might think; but satisfying withal. The man, the patient, wonders if he marked their efforts jogging past that morning and cannot remember. But it doesn’t matter. He remembers now.

Strange to walk in through the empty gates, past the silent cycle lockers with their corrugated roofs. He crossed the Quad in sunlight. He was exactly on time; but why should he not be? Five years of walking the Avenue and he could gauge time to a second. He pushed the side door and it opened. Inside he halted, and maybe he was frowning. He saw the corridor, the big old oil of St. Peter blessing; beyond it the boards with the Oxbridge honours, the charter from Elizabeth that the High School nicked each year to read out at their Speech Day though they were only founded in ’04. It was an old chauvinist joke; but now it didn’t appeal. He held one arm awkwardly, across the jacket with its telltale Badge. He shuffled forward, straightened self-consciously and tapped the door. The Headmaster said, ‘Come in.’

The Mother dressed him, that bright morning; aye, dressed him, prodding and tweaking the great hulk of him that was clumsy because she pronounced it so, setting her mouth, staring with her bitter bright blue eyes. She twitched his tie straight, or straighter, produced finally the new black jacket. His Dad had won the cloth, and proud he was of the feat. ‘Barathea, Ducks,’ he’d said, stroking the warm black bolt. ‘Barathea, that is …’ While The Mother clicked her needles faster and said nothing, conveying, as ever, contempt by silence.

They’d gone widescreen, at the theatre where his Dad was Chief, where he ran his Box like the bridge of a spotless ship. The great curved backward-sloping plane intrigued him; he’d stayed on through the night while they laced it to its latticed frame, while the d/e stamped about in baseball cap and gardening slacks and swore. Borders were draped, green borders, because the motorized masking hadn’t come; and the d/e flung the cap down. ‘Like washing on a bloody line,’ he said, and cursed the day he ever heard of Rank. Lastly they pulled the speakers forward from the lined horn chamber. The backing cloth, vast as the screen itself, they slashed with carpet shears, up round the ten foot woofer box, again to let the twin-throat horn come peering through; and his father gathered it as it fell. ‘Barathea, boy,’ he said, the first of many times, ‘bloody barathea,’ and spirited it away to be made up by the little gnomelike man he’d somehow met, into jackets for them both. In the morning they rode home, six through the sleeping town, left the new screen standing proud, filling the hall with a scent of outer space. His father balanced the precious bolt on his handlebars, still gloating; and for once he didn’t see the church or School, calm against the bright-flecked sky. This was the other life he lived; the tinsel of it called him, from five or was it six, when they lifted him to see the carbon image flicker on the outside of a lamphouse, though then he didn’t understand. He puzzled his Dad; to him it looked like a picture of a little coat, hung up on a hanger. A moment of childhood, irrelevant; though it came back to him later, sitting in the study of the Head of Northerton Art. A detailed, immense drawing hung on one plain wall, the finest drawing he had seen in all his life, a picture of a walking dragline. ‘Gets in the blood,’ his Dad was saying proudly, while he sat stiff-backed and cringed again inside. ‘Gets in the blood, y’know …’ Something of all those million showbiz words, heard by his Dad with his elbow on the fader box, impinged on his awareness, surfaced at times like these; and so he watched the digger, the way one can watch a drawing, and tried to shut everything else away.

He hadn’t seen the jackets, didn’t know they were done. Till The Mother produced one, holding the shoulders, shaking it irritably for him to slide his arms into the sleeves, and at first his eyes didn’t light on the great gold-crusted Badge. He tried then to explain the calumny; how he hadn’t joined the Old Boys when the Second Master came round with his slips, how he couldn’t join with his fate still undecided and couldn’t wear their Badge, how he must put on the jacket in the hall with its faded red and white emblem, cuffs so honourably frayed. But The Mother, as ever, didn’t listen; was incapable, he sometimes thought, of even hearing that which might displease her, ruffle in any way her icy preconceptions. He had attended the School, had he not? And so he was an Old Boy. Why must he always argue? He saw the blue eyes spark and flash, the anger that was always there well up, and turned away, fearing perhaps not words but silence; the silence with which she would pay and punish him, the chill days that would follow even a minor infringement of her Law. With silence she controlled him from an infant; it was to be years yet before he broke free of her, answered with a silence of his own.

Later, striding fast and anxious up the hill, he had time for second thoughts. He wished now that for once in his life he had resisted; for another thought had come, allying itself insidiously with the disgraceful Badge. The jacket was made from the backing cloth of a CinemaScope screen; wearing it he felt immense, clumsier even than she pronounced him. Small objects, surely, would fly from tables as he passed, struck by knees and elbows, his plunging, gigantic feet. He was defeated before he ever reached the School.

It was a ritual, this Reading of the Marks. A ritual, and for him a penance. The letter had announced its onset. ‘Your examination results have now arrived. If you would telephone my secretary and arrange an appointment I would be pleased to discuss them with you …’ Stasis was disrupted, as he had known it must be; he practiced with the unfamiliar, sweaty phone, juggling the buttons, A and B, six times before he chirred the digits through. While a woman knocked the glass, impatient, and mouthed at him to hurry. He had hurried, stumbling; as a result he was here.

‘Listening to the Head.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Are you not sure?’

‘Not any more.’

There had been an Acting Head; surgical-booted, huge in voice and gut. And an affair of a cut detention. A little enough matter; but he’d still been given a choice. Caning, or suspension. Though he realized in later years it had been no choice at all. The mock-O’s were looming; his record was first rate, The Pot didn’t have the right. Yet still he bent across a chair. For the first and last time in his life; and in this very room.

‘Mr. Wallis, you will witness that I am punishing this boy fairly and by his own agreement …’

But the old Latin master had witnessed nothing of the sort; he stood back obstinately turned, shoulders hunched and hands clasped behind him, and watched the traffic move on Bowling Green Road. The Pot stared at him with his angry, bulging eyes; for a moment it almost seemed he might speak again, but that moment passed. Perhaps it should have meant more than it seemed to at the time.

The locum didn’t swish the cane as he advanced; his sadism, if sadism it was, was of a different, subtler order. An insult was to be conveyed, a ritual debasement. His body was to be degraded, furtherance of a degradation already deeply felt; for his member was unruly.

How quickly it came on him; or so, in retrospect, it seemed. Once, books were his world; through them the pond-things swam, the batrachians and Dytiscidae, molluscs and crustacea, delicate shells that he fixed in lines to cards. After them sailed the ships of Nelson’s fleet; he knew them, knew their rigging, from chains to topgallants, bobstays to topping lifts. They towered and glided in his mind, while cannon roared defiance. The bright flags fluttered, ‘confides’ to ‘expects’, and England stung his eyes. Now it was swept aside, for Picturegoer; secret, guilty, the hint of a gravured navel. On swimming mornings his classmates dived and yelled, wool scraps round them, filling the Public Baths with din; rose hairless yet, showing the roots of pricks while he sat in the gallery, bulky and ruffled, excused time and again. He knew of course of sex, had always known; from his books, the courtship dances, spermatophores of newts. But he had stood aloof; while the High School filled and emptied, the crowds of bikes wheeled ticking, to and from the gates. The herds of them in summer gingham, belted macs, impinged not at all; till his classmates whispered, waving the note, gave it him finally to see. Even then he didn’t at first believe; but they hadn’t forged it, the neat looped backward-sloping hand was like no other he had seen. ‘Form 4Q’, whispered the words, blue ink on dark blue paper, ‘and he’s very handsome. His name is Alistair Bevan …’ He shrugged and dithered, dismissive; tucked it, for safe keeping, in his sock. Of all damned silly places, his sock; from where it warmed his shin and then the whole of him with burning radiance. He read it again that night, warm still, curved to his ankle; in his room, lamp on and the bedcover, wet wind skirling and the books in friendly lines, Sanders and Chingachgook, Legends of the Sea, Two Years Before the Mast; threepence and sixpence in Walt Keach’s warehouse, books that could never be the same again. He became aware of her, a girl called Paula, aware of her address, her father a bandmaster famous in the town, the bus stop where she waited after school. Past which he walked time and again in four. . .