Wild Chicory Page 4

  Nell wasn’t sure what that expression meant – she didn’t know how anyone could laugh out of the other side of their face, or if you could have any more than one side to your face at all. She only knew that it was nasty – that Mrs O’Neill was the nastiest witch that ever was. And so young Nell did the only thing she could do, in the circumstances.

  As the women argued and chickens flapped and squawked all around them, little Nell angled Maggie’s teat upwards from the bucket in her hot little hand, and she squeezed and pulled that teat with all her care – and squirted Mrs O’Neill smack bang in the middle of her fat red face. In fact, she got her right up the left nostril with a steaming jet of milk.

  Well, didn’t Frankie and Chris fall down laughing at that.

  Unfortunately, so did their mother.

  A full-blown feud broke out now between the families. The O’Neill boys, who never got off their lumpy backsides, surely got off them now. For pride is most often the most compelling and dangerous of things. No fists were thrown, but to the Kennedys’ horror, Stanley the stag-pig was found prematurely expired in his stall one dawn; and to the O’Neills’ great alarm, their haystack spontaneously combusted the following night.

  Even still, the police were got down from Tralee thrice on matters of more nonsense such as this before Brigid and Daniel Kennedy could bring themselves to agree: to say goodbye to Ballymacyarn. To find some other place to be.

  MAKING WAVES

  ‘Tell me what happened when you all went on the ship,’ I ask Grandma’s sad smile, trying again to get her to tell me one of her stories, to take us away, but she only looks away, out through the blinds. She’s looking towards town from the kitchen window. I don’t think she’s really looking at anything, though.

  I look down at my skirt: it’s green, with tiny white polka dots, and round the hem there are two rows of purple zigzag ribbon – rick rack, it’s called, and it’s wavy, like the sea. I remember asking Granddad, when Grandma finished it, ages ago, how she got the ribbon to stick on the skirt, because I couldn’t see any stitches in it, and Granddad winked at me and said: ‘Magic.’

  Grandma says now: ‘What did you say?’

  I ask her again: ‘Tell me about the time you all came on the ship, to Australia.’

  It’s a story she’s usually happy to tell, with Mum groaning, ‘Oh, not that one again.’

  But Grandma says, ‘Not today, Bridge love.’

  I don’t think she really heard me anyway.

  Her cigarette smoke swirls between the slats of the blinds and all along the window.

  When I look down again, the purple zigzag waves on my skirt look like the picture of the sea that Sister Regina drew on the blackboard in her history lesson just before we broke up for the holidays. She drew some sailing ships above the waves and told us all that Australia was stolen from the Aboriginals by the British Empire in colonial times. She got into trouble for that – someone made a complaint. Granddad shook his head at the fuss and said, ‘That poor, sweet sister is only a child herself – and she’s right.’

  I wish I could tell Grandma that I miss him, too.

  But I know my missing him is nothing to talk about. It’s just a drop in her ocean. I eat the rest of my burnt circle toast instead and then I go and sit on the sofa, to leave her to look out the window in peace. I remember the story of how she came to Australia. I can tell it to myself, today.

  ALL AT SEA

  Still with half a hope of finding a miracle that might allow them to stay, Dan Kennedy went round to Father Maloney, their village priest, to see what he had to say. Now, Father Maloney was not unlike Stanley the stag-pig had lately been, in that he was fairly much on retirement, only he was, on this occasion, slightly more alive.

  ‘Have you considered Australia?’ the old priest asked him straight out over a whiskey, in his little presbytery out the back of the church yard.

  And Dan Kennedy shook his head: ‘No, Father, I haven’t.’

  It was an odd question, so Dan thought. Why should he have considered going to Australia, when he thought Dublin was too far away at a hundred and seventy miles? He knew Australia was a long way distant. He knew of whole families that had gone there, whole chunks of Ireland removed during the famine in his grandparents’ day, and all the hard years after, never to return. He heard stories of those who had died starving and filthy on the long journey, too. But he didn’t know just how far away it was.

  So he asked the priest: ‘How far is it to Australia then?’

  ‘Twelve thousand miles, thereabouts,’ said the priest.

  ‘Twelve what?’ Dan almost spluttered his mouthful of whiskey all over the priest. He couldn’t imagine such a distance. Limerick, to him, was the furthest he’d ever been known to travel anywhere, eighty miles, and that was only once, to sow a wild oat before marrying – and there he’d met Brigid Sheady from Shannon instead, who was only there farewelling her brothers bound for Canada. His own brothers, all younger, were in America, in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh – five of them, left one by one across the 1890s, his three sisters all marrying men who did the same, and he’d never heard from any of them again, apart from a brief letter here or there, which Brigid had to read for him. It was something he didn’t like thinking about much less discussing – this heartbreak of illiteracy and distance. Well, that’s that done for a consideration, he thought. Australia might as well be on the bottom of the sea then. He couldn’t take his family there. If they were going to leave Ireland, maybe they’d just have to go to America – if they could get in. It was getting harder and harder to settle over there, he’d heard. It was getting harder and harder to see his way clear. Only one thing was certain: they weren’t going to Dublin – that city full of trouble and sin.

  ‘A man can make something of himself there, in Australia,’ Father Maloney went on regardless. ‘The sun shines ceaselessly, the trade unions are strong, and there are jobs aplenty as the government has lately thrown every black man and Chinaman out of work.’ He said that last as if God might approve, and added: ‘Do the work no Englishman can lower himself to do and you’ll rise above them. Wages for a dustman are highest across the Empire. Your boys will have the best opportunity there.’

  ‘But is it a safe place, free of trouble? A moral place?’ Dan Kennedy asked, thinking ceaseless sunshine, high wages and jobs aplenty was sounding a bit too good to be true.

  And yet the priest told him, ‘Oh yes,’ sitting back in his chair, a little bit the worse for drink but no less convincing for it. ‘Cardinal Moran has transformed Sydney into the Irishman’s Paradise – there’s a church on every second corner, and a pub in between. It’ll be the best thing you’ve ever done. My nephew over in Tralee, he’s with the immigration office at Customs House – he’ll get all the papers done for you.’

  And for a not insignificant fee that’s just what he would do, too.

  Brigid sighed when her husband came home and told her of the idea. ‘Well, my darling,’ she said, for want of having this over with, ‘let’s make it done then. You know I’ll go anywhere with you, and if we’re going to go anywhere, if we’re going to take such a risk, then why not take the biggest risk, take the biggest distance of all?’

  Dan nodded, tired of thinking about it, too: ‘Yes. Why not?’ Who was he to doubt the word of a priest anyway?

  ‘We’re going to Australia!’ All the Kennedy boys jumped around the kitchen, hooting and hooraying, especially young Dan – he hooted and hoorayed with relief. Anything had to be better than staying stuck here in backward, nowhere and nothing Ballymacyarn.

  Little Nell wasn’t so sure.

  ‘But I don’t want to go to Austra-whatever-it-is. I want to stay here,’ she said, but her small voice of trepidation could not be heard that day.

  Nor on the day they left Ballymacyarn, their papers in order, their little farm sold, the forge, too, their tickets booked on the train that would take them to the ship that would take them to Plymouth, so that they could meet anot
her ship that would then take them – into the black of endless night, Nell feared, although she didn’t quite know why beyond the not wanting to leave all that she had ever known, never mind the boggling terror the train whistle brought her as they pulled away across the Kerry countryside bound for Killarney, bound for Cork.

  Her father was quietly fearful himself as he held her little hand up the ramp of the first boat, a rusting mail packet going out of Cork Harbour; he could barely believe that he’d just spent almost all of their earthly worth on their fares and accommodations and fees – £243 in all – and that he was about to do something he never dreamed he ever would do: set foot in England. Dan Kennedy would rather have gone via Canada, or New York, straight across the Atlantic – he’d rather have gone via Iceland in a tiny curach with all his children piled up on his head and Brigid on his knee – if he could avoid setting foot in England by doing so, but it couldn’t be arranged.

  As they left the Irish coast from the mouth of the Lee, Dan Kennedy held his small daughter’s hand tighter for seeing his green country disappear into the grey of the mist and the sea for the last time. There was no question of ever coming back; it was not in the realms of his imagination, nor practical reality, that he would ever raise the fare again to return. He would never again have a farm to sell – nor a Father Maloney to arrange for the church to purchase it at such a fair price as he’d got, or so he’d been assured. That his family had held on to that little patch of Ballymacyarn through famine that stole a million lives, and before that through generations of penury by taxes and rents charged by generations of lords who ruled over them, only for him to leave now in this whispering, dragging defeat smashed him to pieces inside. He felt so near to crying, his wife knew not to say a word to him as he gazed out across the Celtic Sea. Instead, Brigid allowed a fight to break out among Frank, Chris and Dom over their positions at the ship’s rail, which prompted the older boys to devise a distraction by applying their lips and great lungfuls of breath to their palms for a grand chorus of farting in farewell to Erin, which could not fail to make their father smile in gratitude for all he truly owned.

  And when they arrived in Plymouth, twenty-two freezing February hours later, Dan Kennedy could almost have wept for seeing the vessel that would take them onwards: the Orient Steam Navigation Company’s RMS Oberon was no coffin ship of old: it was sturdy and clean and new, with four bunks in each of their two cabin rooms, a great big dining hall and plenty of decent food. They would survive the journey.

  Although little Nell remained unsure.

  The potatoes were lumpy and floury, the stews were thin and the bread was always stale. Nell would never have made so much as a squeak of complaint at such things – she’d learned too well, even at the age of only lately turned six, that whining about food not being to your liking was a mortal sin. She kept her concern shut up tight behind her big blue, worried eyes, but worry indeed she did. She was sure that it was the potatoes’ fault her mother was sick the whole way on the ship so far – after all, they made Nell herself gag just about every day. But of course Nell couldn’t have known the real reason her mother was unwell: it wasn’t the potatoes; it wasn’t even the swaying and rolling of the sea. It was another baby coming, one not even her mother yet knew about.

  Whatever the cause might have been, to see her mother so poorly all the time, was evidence to Nell of the wrongness of the world opening up around and around her as the weeks unfurled. With each new glimpse of its wideness and strangeness – through Gibraltar, Toulon, Naples, Port Said, Suez, Colombo – with every wild sight and odd smell, Nell’s fears drove deeper. They churned and tumbled inside her, in a way she’d never known churning before. Her worries whirred in time with the ship’s engine and buzzed amid the clattering clamour of foreign tongues. She wasn’t sure where it occurred – it could have been Egypt or Ceylon – but a man with skin as rusty-brown as hot, steaming chicory and a turban as blue as the sky, bent down to her and, smiling a half-toothless smile, he touched her on the head and scared her almost half to death. She was with her brother Dan, and she hid straight behind his leg. Nell was not a hider behind legs, though. She was a girl who, despite her smallness, would always put herself up the front of the line. What was wrong with her?

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Dan, always the gentlest of her brothers. ‘You’re as strange to him as he is to you – he only likes your mad red hair.’

  ‘Well, I don’t like him,’ Nell said, and shrank further away. She didn’t mean to say such an awful thing – how can anyone not like or like a stranger? It was strangeness she didn’t like, in all its many colours, a small and silent burden of dismay she’d carry like a pebble from now on.

  ‘Oh my dear God,’ her mother crossed herself when they finally found Australia. She was reading a newspaper, in a place called Fremantle, with still several days’ sailing to go, and she’d just learned from the page she was reading that the Titanic had sunk.

  ‘What’s the Titanic?’ Nell scrambled to her mother’s side, searching the sea of newspaper words for sense, although she couldn’t yet read much herself.

  ‘A big ship,’ her mother said, more to her father than to her. ‘The biggest passenger ship in the world. She’s hit an iceberg – in the Atlantic. Fifteen hundred lost – oh, those poor souls!’ Her mother did something else then that Nell had never seen her do before: she allowed her eyes to well with tears and even let one of them fall down her cheek.

  Of course, Nell couldn’t have known that this tear, like all her mother’s disconcerting poorliness along this voyage, was only another sign of the baby who was on his way. No, to Nell, this was all more proof that whatever this journey was that her parents had embarked upon, it was the worst thing that could have happened.

  And after thinking about it for quite some time now, Nell realised that there was only one person in all of her family that could be blamed for what had befallen the Kennedys: and that was her small but wicked self. It was Nell’s fault that they’d had to sell up and leave their farm; it was Nell’s fault that Stanley the stag-pig was killed in his stall with his blood all running out into the mud along the edge of the stone path there and reaching towards the back step; it was her fault that they were all here now, tossed on the black sea, bound soon, surely, to hit a subtropical iceberg and plunge to the fathomless depths – just like the Titanic. If only she hadn’t teased and taunted Mrs O’Neill, and squirted her with Maggie’s milk.

  So, somewhere between Adelaide and Melbourne, and wedged as she was between two of her brothers, Tom and Jack, at the foot of her mother’s bunk, Jack, who was seven, whispered out in the night, half in annoyance and half in concern: ‘Nellie’s crying.’

  ‘What’s got you, girl?’ her mother was quick to sit up and hold her daughter to her as she sobbed, and quick mostly to try to prevent the other four boys in the bunk above from waking up at the sound.

  But Nell had dwelt on this so long, she fairly wailed it out to wake all of steerage up.

  ‘Nell, you silly girl,’ her mother said when her daughter had finished blubbering and carrying on. ‘You might be trouble, but you’re our trouble, and a slim package of it at that. We are blessed to have you in our hearts – never doubt that. But you didn’t cause us to come on this ship. It is arrogance to think such a thing – and arrogance is a sin. Be quiet now and go back to sleep.’

  Nell did as she was told, she quietened her tears and snuggled back down, but despite her mother’s reassuring warning of hellfire if she didn’t stop thinking everything was her fault, it had seeped into her soul as some kind of knowledge now, and her little pebble of dismay at strangeness became tight wound with threads of guilt.

  Small pebbles wound with thread or not are easily put away in pockets or tied in the end of your handkerchief, though, aren’t they, like a rosary bead or a Saint Christopher medal slipped off its chain, and such was Nell’s, so that in the photograph that was taken of the Kennedys by a curious immigration officer when they disembarke
d in Sydney, you couldn’t tell she carried a pebble at all.

  Her smile was the sunshine itself that glimmering, shimmering afternoon they arrived at Circular Quay. It was a perfect day of warm, bright light and cool, sweet breezes. Seagulls swirled; tram-bells dinged; there was a welcoming smell of fish and chips wrapped in newspaper, and although Nell has never known any fish and chips but those her mother had cooked for her, it smelled something like home. It wasn’t near as green, but it was vastly more blue – so blue, if the sky could shout out and throw its hat in the air, it would. It was the twenty-ninth of April, 1912, or perhaps it was the thirtieth – no-one could ever precisely remember the date – but they were here, somewhere, at last.

  OUT OF THE BLUE

  The sky isn’t very blue today: it’s too hot to be bothered. I’ve been staring out the window at it, with Grandma – not the same kitchen window as hers but the one along, above the sofa. I’m kneeling on the seat cushions, and even that doesn’t make her look at me. Normally, she would say, ‘Sit round properly or you’ll wear a hole.’

  I sit round anyway, and when I do I stare straight into the bright-blue eye of one of the peacock feathers in the vase that sits on the telephone table just beside Grandma’s bedroom door. The vase has an African lady dancing on it, and the flowers in it are pretend ones: golden wattle sprays, Grandma’s happy flowers, she always says, but she likes the plastic ones so they don’t make a mess everywhere with their pollen and make her sneeze. The peacock feathers are real, though. They stand tall in the vase, three bright-blue eyes above the wattle, their floaty edges always dancing, like the lady, even when there is no breeze. Granddad bought them for her: a man was selling them at Central station one time, where he changes trains for Fairfield, on the Cumberland Line, or so he used to, on his way to work. I don’t know exactly when he got the peacock feathers, but I wish I did know. I wish I could remember everything.