Muglins
Dublin
JUNE 16, 1904
WE WALK ALONG BY THE LIFFEY AS FAR AS RINGSEND. THEriver smells like a pisspot spilling its muck to the sea. We stop by a wall, Jim in his sailor’s cap, looking like a Swede. Me in my wide-brim straw, trying to throw the provinces off me.
“Out there are the Muglins Rocks,” Jim says, pointing out to sea. “They have the shape of a woman lying on her back.”
His look to me is sly, to see if I’ve taken his meaning. I have and our two mouths crash together and it’s all swollen tongues and drippy spit and our fronts pressed hard and a tight-bunched feeling between my legs. His hands travel over my bodice and squeeze, making me gasp.
“Oh Jim,” is all I can manage to say and I step away from him.
“You have no natural shame, Nora,” he says, and he’s coming at me now with his thing out of his trousers and in his hand, that one-eyed maneen he’s no doubt very fond of. It looks, I think, like a plum dressed in a snug coat.
“No natural shame?” I say. “Don’t be annoying me. Do you think because I’m a woman that I should feel nothing, want nothing, know nothing?” But I dip my nose to his neck for a second, the better to breathe his stale porter, lemon soap smell. Span-new to me.
Jim squints and smiles. I kneel on the ground before him, my face before his tender maneen, glance up at him; Jim drops his head, the better to see my mouth close over it. The taste is of salt and heat, the feeling is thick and animal. I suck, but only for a spell, then I draw back and peck the length of it with my lips. I stand.
“There,” I say, “there’s a kiss as shameful as Judas’s and don’t tell me it isn’t exactly what you wanted, Jim Joyce.”
A groan. He wants that bit more, of course, but that might be enough for today, our first time to walk out together. We kiss again and he lingers in my mouth, wanting to enjoy the taste of himself on my tongue. His paws travel over me, front and back. Oh, but he’s relentless. So I unbutton him, put my hand into his drawers, and wrap cool fingers around his heat. A gasp. I work him slow, slow, fast until he’s pleasured, until my fist is warm and wet from him.
“You’ve made a man of me today, Nora,” Jim says, a coddled whisper, and I smile. It’s rare to have a fellow say such a thing and I feel a small bit of power rise up through me, a small bit of joy.
I wipe myself with my handkerchief and Jim fixes his clothes. I hold out my hand and Jim takes it and together we walk on.
Throwaway
Finn’s Hotel, Dublin
JUNE 20, 1904
A HORSE CALLED THROWAWAY WON THE GOLD CUP ATASCOT. This I’m told by a man whose hotel room I’m cleaning. The man shouldn’t be in the room while I’m here. Or I shouldn’t be in the room while he’s here. One of the two. But I’m so shocked by his attire that my brain can’t decide which it is. The man is wearing only an undershirt and, though it’s long, he appears to have no drawers on and he’s talking to me as if he’s in a three-piece suit crowned with a hat. I stand like an óinseach with a rag in one hand and a jar of beeswax in the other, trying not to gawp.
“Throwaway!” the man says. “Can you believe it?”
The man doesn’t sound Irish. He may be English. Or perhaps even American. His arms are white beneath a fur of black hair. The strands look long enough to plait. He has a gloomy expression, a father-of-sorrows way about him. His bare legs are bandy and fat, like a baby’s. I feel my face scald hot, so I turn my back to the man and look for somewhere to put down my rag and polish.
“A twenty-to-fucking-one outsider,” he roars and I jump. “And all my money thrown away on that damned nag Sceptre.”
He starts to laugh and it’s a mirthless sound. Then he goes quiet and I hear a click; I turn my head to see the man start to hack at his wrists with a razor.
“Sir, sir!” I shout.
But he keeps slicing at his arm until he draws red and I run to him. There’s not enough blood to fill a fairy thimble, in truth, but he holds up the dripping wrist and cries and shivers as if he might die. I take hold of his shaking arms and sit him on the bed, and I run to try to fetch the porter for he will surely know what to do. But, as I hammer down the back stairs of Finn’s Hotel a voice trails behind me, calling, “Throwaway runaway! Throwaway runaway!” on a long string of cackles. I open the back door and in apron, cap, and all I run and run and run until I can go not another step. At the river Liffey wall, my stomach lurches and I empty my breakfast into the water and watch it float off to the sea.
Ireland
Finn’s Hotel, Dublin
JULY 16, 1904
TO JIM I AM IRELAND.
I’m island shaped, he says, large as the land itself, small as the Muglins, a woman on her back, splayed and hungry, waiting for her lover. I’m limestone and grass, heather and granite. I am rising paps and cleft of valley. I’m the raindrops that soak and the sea that rims the coast.
Jim says I am harp and shamrock, tribe and queen. I am high cross and crowned heart, held between two hands. I’m turf, he says, and bog cotton. I am the sun pulling the moon on a rope to smile over the Maamturk Mountains.
Jim styles me his sleepy-eyed Nora. His squirrel girl from the pages of Ibsen. I am pirate queen and cattle raider. I’m his blessed little blackguard. I am, he says, his auburn marauder. I’m his honorable barnacle goose.
“Nora,” Jim says, “you are syllable, word, sentence, phrase, paragraph, and page. You’re fat vowels and shushing sibilants.”
“Nora,” Jim says, “you are story.”
Goose
Galway
MARCH 21, 1884
I WAS BORN IN THE UNION WORKHOUSE IN GALWAY. NORAJOSEPH Barnacle they called me.
Mammy was a spinster—twenty-six years old already when Daddy lured her into matrimony, promising their life would bloom and rise like the bread he baked for a living. But the only thing that bloomed was Mammy’s belly and all that rose was Daddy’s hand to his gob with the next drink and the next. When I was three, and my twin sisters were born, Mammy sent me to live with her own mother, Granny Healy, in her quiet houseen in Whitehall.
“It can’t be helped that you’re a Barnacle,” Granny said, “but always be proud of your Healy and Mortimer sides.”
But still, as I grew, she liked to spin tales for me over bread and butter and bitter tea.
“You’re a seabird, Nora Barnacle. Born from a shell.” She eyed me over the rim of her china cup.
“Not born from an egg, Granny, like other birds?”
“No, not from an egg at all, loveen. A shell. For the barnacle is a rare and magical goose.”
“I like magic.” I tried to sip my tea the way Granny did, heartily but with grace. “Where does the shell come from?” I asked.
Granny leaned closer, broke a piece of currant cake in half, and put it into my mouth. The rest she chewed herself and she looked over my head, out the window into Whitehall, as if she’d forgotten me.
“The shell, Granny?”
“Well, girleen, that’s the most peculiar thing of all. That shell you came from grew like a fruit on the branch of a noble tree that stood by the Galway Bay shoreline. The shell-fruit got heavier and heavier until it dropped into the sea. There it bathed in the salty water until it bobbed ashore at Salthill.”
“Do you mean our Salthill, where we walk the prom?”
“The very place.”
I sat before Granny and imagined a pearly shell lying on the shore, nobbled like the conch Uncle Tommy gave me.
“Go on, Granny. Tell me more.”
“This beautiful shell burst open on the shingle at Salthill and inside there was a dark-haired baby, serene and curious. The baby smiled and smiled, and she had one droopy eye that gave her a wise and holy look.” Granny leaned forward and put her cool finger to my eyelid.
“Me.”
“Yes, my lovely Nora, it was you.” Granny set down her cup. “Your mother was walking the Salthill prom that day and, when she saw that fine shell, she tripped down to the beach. She clapped her hands when she found a baby inside, smiling up at her. She was so happy. Your mother picked you up and brought you home, her little barnacle gooseen.”
I settled back against the rungs of my chair. I lifted the china cup to my mouth and let the tea scald my tongue.
“All that trouble I took to be born,” I said. “All that falling from a tree and bouncing on waves and landing onshore and bursting from a shell to be scooped up by Mammy.”
Only to be sold off like a goose at a fair, I now think. Might it not have been better if I had come more naturally, I ask myself, to have entered the family with some portion of stealth? If I had managed that, maybe Mammy would not have given me away to Granny. If I’d managed that, maybe I’d still live among my sisters and brother and be part of everything in the house in Bowling Green. Maybe, if I’d come into life more naturally, Mammy would love her Gooseen well.
Heartbalm
Finn’s Hotel
AUGUST 1904
MONDAY AND I LIE ABED, THINKING OF JIM, WHEN I SHOULDbe up and getting into apron and cap. But divil I’ll get up until I’ve let my imaginings play out. My hands wander under my nightgown, I slip a finger into my crevice and press; I knead my bubbies and let my palms slide over my nipples, while keeping Jim’s sweet face fixed in my mind. He’s all I need in my head.
Last night, when we walked to Ringsend, he told me he was called “farouche” by a lady he knows, one of those moneyed ones, no doubt.
“Farouche, Jim?”
“Wild, savage.”
He seemed hurt by the word. “Sure, isn’t your savagery one of the best parts of you?” I said. “Isn’t it what makes you the man you are?”
And he pushed me against a wall and whispered my name into my ear over and over and called me by his names for me: Goosey, Sleepy-eye, Blackguard.
He said, “I will make you my little fuckbird,” and my reason slithered to pulp when I heard that and I kissed him with all the fierce light of my body.
JIM HAS ME WRITE LETTERS TO HIM, BUT MY THOUGHTS ARE STIFF on the page—I’m not fond of writing; words don’t slide off my pen the way they do for him. I left school at twelve, like most people, and haven’t had much call to write more than a few lines since. But Jim wants to know what I think of when we’re apart, to bind us closer, but it seems to me all I think of is him and does he want to read letters that are all about himself? Perhaps he does.
I slip from the bed, gather my paper and a book I’ll use to help me write the letter—I need it, truly, for I don’t know what to be saying and am sitting here chewing my fingers and gawping at the blank paper. After much scribbling and mashing of spoiled pages, I come up with a few lines:
Nora
I scramble into my uniform and web it, lightning quick, to catch the post for I want Jim to read my words this morning; I hope he likes them. He’s right about jotting things down, it does make me feel closer to him. The letters are heartbalm.
Dublin
AUGUST 1904
JIM HAS A MARVELOUS WAY OF SPEAKING. IT’S NOT ONLY THElovely words he knows, a whole dictionary of them inside his mind, it’s his voice. It goes up and down but keeps itself still and contained, too. Jim sounds like a man on a stage, giving a speech. He could be saying any old thing and still he comes across as if he’s rehearsed lines and is now delivering them. Every sentence that falls from his mouth does so at the right time and in the exact right way. I see it as a God-bestowed gift that he has. And, because his voice is a fine one, like an orator’s—a Thomas Kettle or a Charles Stewart Parnell—you can’t but believe everything he says.
The girls I work with in Finn’s call Jim “posh” and they can’t believe he’s with me.
“You’d think the likes of him would be with one of his own kind,” Molly Gallagher said to me one day.
“But amn’t I good enough for any man, Molly?” I said, stung by her.
“You are of course, Nora,” she said, linking arms with me, but I could see the doubt in her face.
In truth, I too find it hard to credit that Jim would choose me above the educated ladies he knows, those Sheehy women and the rest. They, like him, have a grand air about them and they sound so fine, like creatures from another world. My voice, in comparison to all of them, is that of a honking goose, loud and fast and spilling out of me. But Jim tells me I sound “melodious” and longs to hear me speak.
“Speak to me in your western tongue, sweet Nora,” he says, when we lie atop Howth Hill, letting the cool dusk wind lap over us. I love to be by the sea with him, bathing in the salty air.
“What do you want me to say, Jim?”
“Tell me,” he said softly, “the siren songs of your soul. Let me hear the melodies of your mind, my little Galway rogue.”
That’s the way he talks. From another man, the things he says would come across daft, but Jim can sound like a poet and a politician, both at the same time. He has the perfect voice for himself, for who he is, a thing to admire and love about him. And yes, I do love him, I do indeed. I know it already because when I’m not with Jim, it’s as if I carry the whispering ghost of him wrapped around me. I feel him gone from me as if part of my body were taken. He never leaves me, head or heart. And is that not the sweetest of God-bestowed gifts?
Today, though, he chastises me.
“What sort of a letter was that, Nora?”
“How do you mean, Jim?” I roll on my side to look at him.
He pets my hair with his fingers. “It didn’t sound like you at all.”
I dip my eyes and pout my bottom lip. “I don’t know howto write like me.”
He tips my chin upward. “Yes, you do. Write as you speak, Gooseen. Isn’t that why I like you so much? Your gorgeous Galway voice and your funny little tales.”
“I’ll try, Jim,” I say, though I haven’t a notion how I’ll do what he asks.
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