Marble Heart. Gretta Mulrooney
opened a new document, naming it ‘Martin’. She typed quickly, her eyes a little blurred.
‘You are beginning to understand that I left you not just because I am ill or contrary. If you are bewildered by me, well, that makes two of us. When you harbour a knowledge that cannot be revealed you feel set apart from the rest of humanity. There were times in the long nights when I longed to wake you, confess to you, beg your help. But I had no right to taint you.
‘Can you picture me in that pub? My hair was long and wild and sometimes I used to colour it so that it took on a hue like ripe red gooseberries. I wore pale pink nail varnish until Finn remarked that it looked cheap; he was a puritan about make-up although I expect he would have approved of the type of products you can buy now, recipes originating from far-flung populations of the third world.
‘That was a magic night in Mulligans; the kind of vivid experience you always remember with completeness: the sounds, the colours, the voices, the feelings engendered. On that night when I met Finn I started to feel a release of energy, a thrilling giddiness. It seemed to me that I had spent my days up to my eighteenth year in a timid stasis, waiting for something to happen. My mother’s message to me was enshrined in her stock phrase, “no fuss please, darling,” and my father’s self-effacement and premature death left a void.
‘In my mother’s shaded drawing room, behind ruched curtains, I had watched television pictures of Soviet tanks in Prague and rioting in the streets of London and Paris; demonstrations against the Vietnam War in Washington, civil rights marchers from Belfast with blood streaming down their faces, the reality barely impinging on me as I went about the discreet life lived in English suburbia, preparing to go to the tennis court or the library. I was dimly aware of Joan Baez singing “We Shall Overcome” and of the student power that was setting European streets ablaze. The only cold war I was familiar with was the one my mother had waged for years against my father, a series of frosty skirmishes that left me stranded in no-man’s land, unsure of who I should offer my loyalty to in any particular week. There were plenty of occasions when they communicated by leaving notes for me and I ran back and forth like a messenger between the trenches. My mother’s dugout was the drawing room, my father’s the potting shed. The events of 1968 took place while I was attempting and failing to broker peace somewhere between these camps, carrying communications written in codes which the two sides were doomed to misinterpret. If I paid any attention to them, it was with feelings of distaste and anxiety at such breakdown of order; locked as I was in the long disintegration of a marriage, I couldn’t face combat in the outside world.
‘In Mulligan’s bar I grew inebriated on the yeasty tang of stout and the fumes of golden hot whiskies in which cloves bobbed like tadpoles. I tried my first plate of boxty, the publican’s speciality, a dish that I became addicted to. It was hot, peppery and buttery and when someone said it was the food of the gods I agreed. A student who I later learned was Declan, the treasurer of Red Dawn, leaned across and asked teasingly if I’d heard that old rhyme:
“Boxty on the griddle
Boxty on the pan
If you don’t eat Boxty
You’ll never get a man!”
‘I smiled at him, registering that he had deep blue eyes but Majella reproved him, saying that we didn’t want to hear any of that old sexist claptrap. Finn took a spoonful from my plate without asking permission and declared that boxty was good, humble peasant food, the backbone of Ireland, the kind of dish that had its equivalent amongst working people in all cultures. A man stood up and sang a traditional ballad that brought tears to my eyes, a song about loss of land and family. Then Majella rapped the table and launched into a song that spoke of present injustice. She sang with such passion that I bit my gum through the boxty:
“Armoured cars and tanks and guns
Came to take away our sons
But every man will stand behind
The men behind the wire.
“Through the little streets of Belfast
In the dark of early morn
British soldiers came marauding,
Wrecking little homes with scorn;
Heedless of the crying children,
Dragging fathers from their beds,
Beating sons while helpless mothers
Watch the blood pour from their heads.
Round the world the truth will echo
Cromwell’s men are here again,
Britain’s name forever sullied
In the eyes of honest men.”
‘Afterwards, I asked her in a whisper if that was really happening and she said yes, nightly; men taken away and never charged, never given the chance of a fair hearing, their families left devastated. We were living in a tyranny but Bob Dylan was right, these were times of upheaval and change; this system of injustice couldn’t last, the people’s blood was up.
‘I understood that night that life had been racketing around elsewhere while I quietly occupied my little corner, mediating my parents’ antagonism and avoiding my mother’s censorious eye. In our tidy bungalow tucked away in a cul de sac it was a crime to leave an unwashed cup on the table, draw the curtains back untidily or spill a drop of liquid on the furniture. The background orchestration to my childhood had been the tight hissing from my mother’s lips as she heaped blame on my father or found fault with me. Now I was in a city where people opened their mouths wide to bellow their opinions and were willing to suffer terrible wounds, even death, for their beliefs. A sense of sheer animation, an impetuosity I would never have guessed at, was pulsing in me. I saw it reflected in Majella’s eyes, heard it echoed in her voice. The urge of something to aim for, something to risk everything for, that was what I wanted. The deliciousness of the boxty was giving me a taste for more flavours. I was ready for tumultuous change. I was ripe for falling in love and I did, with the scarred warring city and Majella and Finn.
‘When you are judging me, when you finally weigh up what you have learned, remember that the impulse was to do good, to create, to make a positive mark on the world. I fell far short of my own aspirations but I did possess them, and that remains some comfort to me.’
He looked in the bathroom mirror the evening Nina told him their life together was over and saw that he had a puzzled expression, like a child who doesn’t understand what it’s done wrong or a dog that suspects its owner is displeased. Then he did something he used to do as a child when he wanted to ease his troubles. He breathed on the mirror, wrote NINA in the condensation, then rubbed her name away hard with a flannel, making sure that none of the letters reappeared in the humid air. There, he thought angrily, morosely, self-pityingly; if that’s the way you want it, you can have it.
The next day he felt numb, as if his limbs had been shot full of Novocain. He prodded his arm; nothing. When he picked his hand up and let it drop it rested on his knee; someone else might have left it there. On the way home from work he stopped and had his right ear pierced in three places. The slap of the gun and the mild stinging helped him back into himself as did the burning antiseptic he had to bathe it in later. Nina didn’t notice, she was looking through him but when he fingered the tiny punctures and wiped the spots of blood he knew that he was real.
During the following weeks he stayed strangely calm. Maybe, he thought, he’d been expecting Nina’s decision for some time. She had always eluded him. Before she became ill she was light on her feet, fast moving. There she would be on the periphery of his vision, vanishing through a door or up the stairs. He would hear the car ignition and realise that she had left the house with no warning. She would come back hours later, cheeks flushed, or yawning, with puffy eyes. When he asked where she’d been she would reply