Landing by Emma Donoghue
"I've seen lots of dead people ... of course, I'm twice your age," said Síle with deliberate exaggeration, to punish herself for the moment with the hand. "Three uncles and an aunt, my grandparents—just on my dad's side, not the Indian ones—my art teacher ... not my mother, I was only three at the time."
The girl's chiseled eyebrows shot up.
"Diabetes," Síle told her.
"I'm sorry."
Síle smiled.
"Do you remember her?"
"Well, I do and I don't. I get images, but I know some of them must be based on photos."
"How weird!"
"These women I know in New York," said Síle, "they play a dinner party game called dead exes, and the winner is the one who's slept with the most dead people."
"That sounds like necrophilia."
"It does a bit." She slugged her cooling coffee, then wished she hadn't. "When Da visits his old village, in Roscommon, so many of his relations are dead, it's like Oisín come home."
"It's like what?"
"Oisín," Síle repeated. "Son of Fionn Mac Cumhaill, leader of a band of heroes called the Fianna?"
"Ah, Finn McCool, the guy the pubs are named after."
Síle nodded. "So Niamh of the Golden Hair trots by on her magic white horse, lures Oisín west across the sea to Tir-na-nOg—that's the Land of Youth," she supplied.
"Like Never-Never Land?"
She made a face. "They're not children—but they never grow old, so yeah, sort of. Well, life there is fantastic; every day they hunt and every night they sing. But after three weeks our lad happens to see a shamrock and gets homesick. He tells the lovely Niamh, 'I have to go back to Ireland, just for a day.' She's not happy; she says, 'Go if you must, but stay on the white horse and don't let your foot so much as touch the ground.'"
"Ah," said Jude, nodding, "the magical pull of the native soil."
The girl was quick; Síle grinned at her. "Well, Oisín passes some puny fellas in the road trying to roll a big boulder out of the way. He asks them where the Fianna are hunting, and they squint up at him and say the Fianna have all been dead for three hundred years. Now Oisín doesn't believe this mad story. But he thinks he'll help them with the stone, so he leans out of the saddle and gives it one great shove."
"He falls off?"
Síle nodded. "Finds himself in the mud, a shriveled husk, more than three centuries old, and he knows he'll never see Niamh of the Golden Hair again."
Jude shook her head. After a few seconds, she said, "Bet she regretted lending him the horse."
Síle burst out laughing. "That's right. Keep 'em tied to the bedpost, I say!" This came out far too sexily, so she turned back to her pain au chocolat. Another of those odd Silences. She knew she should check her watch, but she didn't want to end the conversation.
"So ... what do you reckon happened to him?"
The girl didn't mean Oisín. Síle shrugged. "In-flight deaths are surprisingly common, though that was my first; they think it's the stress of travel." One long-haul airline had recently added a corpse cupboard to its Airbuses, though she didn't mention that. "A friend of mine from college, he went climbing in the Macgillycuddy Reeks with his son, dropped dead over his egg sandwich. Apparently the altitude can hit the fittest people the hardest."
"You mean ... last night, it could have been the altitude?"
"No, no," said Síle, exasperated, "that was just an example of going quick and quiet. The cabins are pressurized, you know; it's just like being on the ground."
"It doesn't feel like it."
"Ah, you'll get used to flying, now you've taken the plunge. Suddenly shedding gravity—" Síle's hand mimed a sharp ascent—"it's better than a roller coaster."
"I throw up on roller coasters."
"Now that's a revolting image."
"I mean, afterwards," Jude corrected herself. "This one time Rizla—my ex—dragged me onto a huge one in Sudbury, I was nauseous for days."
"So is she a Luddite like you?"
The girl blinked. "Actually, it's a he. I mean, he's a guy, Richard. The nickname's from the cigarette papers."
Síle's face heated up. Haircuts could be so misleading. "Oh, I'm sorry."
"No, it's—"
"Rizla, right, cigarette papers, I thought the word was familiar," cried Síle. So much for her ability to read people.
"That's okay." Grinning.
Ah, thought Síle. So I wasn't wrong?
"What was your question?"
"Did I have a question?"
"Luddites," Jude remembered. "No, Rizla's all about machines; he's an auto mechanic. And I love motorbikes, so I'm not a total Luddite."
"Aren't you going to finish your pain au raisin?"
"Help yourself," said Jude, sliding her plate over with a huge yawn. "How do you cope with the jet lag?"
"Oh, I refuse to believe in it; it's like allergies."
"You don't believe in allergies?"
"Not unless they're the kind that make your face swell up like a balloon. You Yanks—North Americans," Síle corrected herself, "you're always claiming to be allergic to this, that, and th'other, as if a sip of milk or a bite of bread's going to murder you."
"I'm not allergic to anything," said Jude, "and I bake my own bread."
Síle rolled her eyes. "You really are a dinosaur, aren't you?"
"Whereas you're a Rechabite."
"I'm a what?"
"They were the one tribe of Israel who wouldn't settle down," Jude explained. "They were doomed to dwell in tents."
"Well, my tent is a tiny two-up-two-down in inner-city Dublin—bought cheap before our boom, mercifully. But it's true that I'm always nipping out of the country on my days off," Síle admitted. "My friend Marcus gives me cuttings in little pots but they keep dying on me."
"I live in Ireland too, with my mother," Jude volunteered. "Ireland, Ontario."
"That's hilarious!"
"Is it?"
"Like Paris, Texas."
"Now that's a great movie. When he's talking to his lost wife through the one-way mirror, and he can see her but she can't see him..."
"Stop it. I've seen it five times and I always cry like a wee babby," said Síle. "So how small is your Ireland?"
"The population recently topped the six hundred mark for the first time since they shut down the train track back in the thirties."
"Oh dear."
"Actually, I like it."
"Me and my big mouth," said Síle, clapping her hand over it. "Anywhere near Toronto?"
"Two and a half hours. Pretty near, by Canadian standards," Jude added.
"I love the fact that there's nothing a tourist has to see in Toronto; the couple of times I've been there, all I do is go to films and eat like a beast. So what's made you get on a plane at last, Jude? Are you a student, doing Europe?" Belatedly, Síle remembered it was January.
"No, actually, I'm curator of the town's museum; it's a one-room schoolhouse. Curator translates as underpaid dogsbody," Jude added, "but still, I get to run things my way."
"What's your way?"
"Uncutesy, I guess," she said, after a second. "In North America we tend to Disneyfy the past into this sugar-coated nostalgia product, all bonnets and merry sleigh rides—"
Síle nodded. "The Irish do green marble shamrock jewelry, misty ruins, Enya whispering and moaning over the PA."
"Exactly! And let's nobody mention infanticide or lynch mobs."
The girl's vehemence delighted Síle. "So do you—" She broke off to check her watch. "Shite. Shite, I really have to run." She caught the eye of the waiter in the faux-Parisian apron with the enormous plugs in his earlobes, and gestured for the bill. "Unless you'd like another nasty coffee?"
"I'm good, thanks."
"But you still haven't told me what's brought you to England," Síle pointed out, flipping through the compartments of her bag to find some sterling. You could call it shameless nosiness, but she preferred to think she had people skills.
&nb
"Oh dear." Síle took the bill from the waiter and handed it back with a note, waving away Jude's protests. She wished she hadn't lifted this particular stone, just before having to dash away to check-in. Her fingers were tugging a card out of her purse. Never apologize, never explain: She tossed it down.
"Neat design! Thanks. But actually I don't do e-mail," said Jude, picking up the card that featured a small black swallow swooping over the words
Síle O'Shaughnessy
sí[email protected]
Síle frowned. "Surely your museum ... you must need to answer queries, look things up online?"
"Yeah, but I don't use the account for personal stuff. I think it's the lowest form of human communication."
Síle stared at her.
"I'm a freak, I know. Here's my real address, though. In case you find out anything more about Mr. Jackson..." Jude wrote on the back of her napkin in a precise, schoolgirlish hand:
Jude Turner
9 Main Street
Ireland, ON
L5S 3T9
Canada
"Thanks, but I never send anything by snail mail," said Síle, unable to resist some tit-for-tat. "Can't bear the lag; by the time it arrives it's not really true anymore."
They started laughing at the same moment.
"Well. Enjoy your trampoline," said Jude.
"I hope your mother's okay. Go easy!" Síle considered risking a hug but waved instead, pushing her top-heavy trolley away toward the sign that said CONNECTIONS TO TERMINALS ONE, TWO, FOUR.
She put on her tiny earphones, then let herself glance back. Outside the Rive Gauche Airport Brasserie, Jude Turner was squatting down, tightening a strap on her small backpack. Not looking up, not scanning the concourse for Síle. Oh well, that passed the time. What was that punchline from Waiting for Godot? Yeah: It would have passed in any case.
Time moved differently in airports: It pooled, it gushed, it hung heavy on your hands and then knocked you off your feet. Síle spent her days looking after travelers who were bored, in a hurry, or both. As for the frequent flyers, she had come to the conclusion that constant transit could make a monster of anyone. Personal convenience was their goal, and their fellow passengers were only obstacles, flotsam and jetsam. Frequent fliers would push past the arthritic, step over crying children, let their seat backs down and lie with faces set like stone kings'. For their mother's birthday they brought the same duty-free perfume sampler as three years ago, and they always raided the fruit bowl for the yellowest banana on their way out.
Síle knew all this because she was a professional traveler herself; sometimes she felt like her passengers' jailer, sometimes their maid, but mostly she sympathized with their irritations and delusions. Didn't she know what it was like to walk through an airport, sealed off in a private bubble? The camera was always on her, and her private soundtrack playing. She was the heroine: the hijack victim, the brave doctor, the complicated spy. She glanced in every mirrored surface she passed.
What When Where How Why
My mind wanders like a bird which
is chased hither and thither.
—Mahabharata X 33
The Luton bus worked its way north, along strips of highway and winding sections of one-lane road. Everyone was driving on the left, it was a mirror-image world: Alice through the looking glass. Jude pressed her face to the chilly window. She watched the rain sleek down the green fields, polish the dark hedgerows. Strange to see a winter landscape without snow, the land gaudy with greens and ochres.
She'd put the Irishwoman's card away in her wallet. Síle's eyes were lighter than brown, she decided; nearer to pale orange, really. Was the woman this friendly with all her passengers? Maybe the Irish were like that. But there'd been moments, over breakfast ... that confusion over Rizla's gender, for instance. A warm brown hand resting on Jude's for a moment. Jude couldn't have imagined it, could she?
Not that it mattered, really. An odd little encounter, sealed off from real life like a bee in a jar. The name made the sibilant chuff of a train in her head: Site O'Shaughnessy, Site O'Shaughnessy, Site O'Shaughnessy...
Jude had the groggy sensation that time had pleated. According to Irish Eyes magazine, instead of fretting over what time it was by your body clock, you should adjust to the new zone fast by getting plenty of noonday sun. But what sun could push through this ceiling of English cloud? The world was going on as normal, but it seemed like none of Jude's business. What was it Gwen used to say was the basic test of mental coherence used in places like the Sunset Residence? Oriented as to person, place, and time, that was it. To qualify as sane, you were meant to know who you were, where you were, and what day it was. As if you were reporting on your own existence for a newspaper.
Last night's incident probably wouldn't even make the papers, Jude thought. She wondered how the Huron Expositor or the Lucknow Sentinel might have told George L. Jackson's story, a hundred years ago. "Man Expires in Flying Machine." Just the journalistic gist of the thing: the what, when, where, and how, and the why only if there were another half-inch to fill. The immigrants who'd come to settle southwestern Ontario had done a lot of falling through ice, onto hay forks, from topmasts, across train tracks, into fireplaces, down mine shafts or grain threshers. They swallowed buttons, got concussed in sleigh crashes, lost in blizzards, eaten by bears. Other people saw it happen: pointed, screamed, ran to help, ran away, did something. They never just sat there oblivious, reading the in-flight magazine.
At the bus station in Luton, Jude stood in a rain-streaked glass shelter and smoked three cigarettes in a row to fortify herself. When she finally managed to hail a cab, it took only a few minutes to get to her aunt's tiny row house, which had puce trim. Jude couldn't remember who it was you weren't supposed to tip in the British Isles; was it bartenders or cab drivers? At the last minute she gave the driver 20 percent, not letting herself translate it into Canadian dollars.
"No, I've got it, Louise," she heard from behind the front door. Her mother opened it.
"Hey Mom." Relief made Jude grin like a clown.
"Jude! What on earth are you doing here?" Her mother's face was startled into severity, but otherwise she looked just the same as when she'd left on Boxing Day, her brown curls a little lanker, perhaps.
Behind her, in the hallway, appeared Louise, biting her lip. "What a surprise!"
But Jude was having none of it. She stepped into the dark cluttered hallway and put her bag down. "Louise said you weren't well, that maybe you could use some company for the return trip."
"What nonsense is this?" Rachel stepped out of the hug and glared at her sister.
"I just thought it would be nicer for everyone," quavered Louise, retreating. "Now I'd better get the casserole on."
Jude went into a small lounge with lace antimacassars. She patted the couch beside her; after a few seconds, her mother sat down. "What's wrong, Mom?"
"Nothing! I threw up my eggs yesterday, that's all," Rachel added, "though between ourselves I blame Louise's cooking."
So this whole trip had been a folly, as she'd thought. Jude subsided against the cushions. "I kept calling, I left messages—"
"Did you? Louise told me nothing. She always plays the big sister. I can't believe you've been put to such trouble and expense in the middle of the holidays," Rachel fretted.
"Don't worry about that."
"I insist on paying for your ticket."
"Forget it. Actually, it's been quite an adventure." And suddenly that was true.
"You must be wrung out after that awful flight," observed her mother. "My ears are still bunged up, and my nose; I can't smell a thing."
"A man died in his sleep, in the next seat." It just slipped out. "His head slid onto me."
Her mother's stare had as much revulsion as sympathy in it.
Jude shouldn't have brought tha
Rachel shrugged her narrow shoulders. "The plumbing's atrocious as ever. There's no such thing as a pound note anymore, only a coin, can you believe it?"
Jude smiled through a wave of fatigue. She was tempted to step into the kitchen and shout at her aunt, for dragging her all this way. She supposed immigrants often found themselves in Rachel's state when they visited the homeland: their nostalgia stirred, but unsatisfied.
"But shouldn't you see a bit of the country, as you've come so far?" asked her mother. "Buckingham Palace, at least?"
"There isn't time, I'm on the same flight back tomorrow as you are. Besides, I'm needed at the museum."
"Westminster Abbey, Madame Tussaud's, though the queues are shocking ... Stonehenge even. It's your heritage," said Rachel, "and you're so fond of old things."
"Next time, definitely."
"We'll have to book a taxi to the bus station."
Call a cab, Rachel would have said a week ago. It was odd to hear the old British phrases emerging. "I'll do that," Jude promised.
"Unless Bill drives us."
Jude held herself very still. She wondered if there was some allusion she'd missed. "Who's Bill?"
No answer.
Could it be a neighbour? "You don't mean Uncle Bill?" She waited. "Uncle Bill's dead, Mom."
"That's right." Rachel had the look of someone who might have left the oven on.
Jude's jaw was stiff. Had that really just happened? How could she say, Mom, have you forgotten that Bill died of prostate cancer twelve years ago? I remember the day because when you got the phone call from your sister, I burst out crying, even though I'd only met her and Bill once; it was just the idea of someone I knew being dead. I'd been cleaning the chicken house with Dad, I was thirteen, and it was the last time I ever cried in front of you, as it turned out, and you held me in your arms so tightly my bra strap left a red mark on my back.
Rachel was examining the slightly wrinkled hands that lay in her lap. Was she embarrassed by her mistake, Jude wondered, or mired in confusion? What other errors were infiltrating that head, still dark brown, still held at an intelligent angle? What other graves were cracking open? Mrs. Turner. Mrs. Turner. Do you know what date it is today, Mrs. Turner? Whose house is this? Can you name the current premier of Ontario? How many children have you got, Mrs. Turner?