Heard
Part one – Coming Over
1972: Belfast ~ Liverpool
Andrea stood facing her father and because of the distance between them she could look over his taller shoulder and through the cabin window at the city she was leaving behind by sea. She recognized little. The small, claustrophobic, and deadly few miles where her father, mother and brother would continue to live were already hidden amongst the houses of Belfast. The City was grey, or the day has become grey in her memory, in the act of her recall.
Clifford Shea looked drawn and tired on the day he sent his ten-year-old daughter away. A troubled man. Yet his wet mud-coloured eyes shone for Andrea. Watching, she waited for him to speak. He had an unlit cigarette between his lips. He was furtive, half in hiding, submerged in his greatcoat, and trying to look relaxed. Heated, he took it off. He was tall, lean and neat in his brown suit, shirt and tie; dressed for work, in fact. On other days at dawn Andrea watched him receding from the house, walking deserted streets, to Shortland’s Printers and then (and only then) he changed into overalls – well, depending. The print shop was cover. They were fine about it, part of it. On active duty he would walk through the front doors and out through the back. As time went by and got worse, Clifford and others went straight through the print works more often, for months at a time and at one certain point, Clifford went through for good. Clifford was a product of, a participant in, the armed struggle and - much later – an architect of its cessation.
He clapped his hands lightly together and caught Andrea’s attention.
‘It is a fine ship’s cabin for such a young girl traveller eh?’
Andrea glanced at her mother with a sideward eye.
Eileen Shea looked like an exotic Jewess to her daughter. A slim, aquiline, nose rested above her gentle red upper lip, slightly parted from a full lower buddy. Her brown eyes were wide, warm, and enquiring (though much later Andrea would conclude that she was rather cold towards her children). Her hair was short and tied back. She had natural poise and elegance. As tall as her husband, she matched him in wit, and in politics. The Sheas were equal in the eyes of their children and united in the decisions they made. Eileen gave instruction to Andrea.
‘It’s a short crossing Andrea and you will be there after a night’s rest in bed. Don’t wander.’ After a paused she added, ‘You can read here,’ patting the bunk, ‘don’t you think Clifford? She can read here.’
Clifford Shea looked at his wife and held up his hands in ascent. All three paused.
‘Well I will see about food.’
Andrea watched her mother leave. Outside from the corridor came the sounds of passengers milling about with bags. Turning back Andrea saw that her father had sat down upon the bunk and looked for signs of him remembering to disembark. She kept one ear on any possible announcement. She waited. He rummaged a bag.
The formality, in which he gave his daughter the gift, echoed a presentation, a Head rewarding merit. He was stiff with the act, odd and slow. She thought of her prize drawing of muddy boots, left lying on the back steps of the house, composed over a weekend; of the careful lines, of waiting for evening to watch them in shadow and decide on pastels; a patient act. At home, it hung in the back hall. Her father put the gift in her hands and held hers with his. A book, expensive, covered, properly made. Freed again, Andrea looked at her hands and saw the gold inlaid writing on the green leather cover. She was unprepared for the ceremonial nature of what was happening, of the leaving, that it was happening, there and then.
‘Something more to keep you occupied.’
He tousled her hair. The book had the emblem of Shorthand’s Printers, where her father worked. Andrea frowned thoughtfully. Illustrated Flowers of British Fields. Her father caught the look on her face.
‘Something beautiful, on the flowers of the Isles, for a flower of the land.’
‘I will study this,’ Andrea told him, seriously.
Her father looked at the neat pile (in size order) of books arranged on the patch of table beside the head of the bunk. Moving to it he fanned the collection out a little bit and smiled at her. With her announcement ear, Andrea heard footsteps outside the cabin door, still ajar.
‘Though I see you have been busy with a small collection of activities of your own Ma, judging by the contents of the bag.’
At her father’s words Andrea turned to her returning mother. His voice was still in the air, ending. Andrea felt red hot, at the centre of matters. Her father’s mock disapproval of the fellow kindness of his wife released Andrea’s tears. She raised her face to her mother’s but did not need to make eye contact. Eileen Shea pulled her daughter to her. Andrea sensed the stiffening in her father she expected of him. He quietly exhaled. This released further sobs from Andrea and she felt a tightening of her mother’s hands around her. Andrea had not heard a question (and thirty years later, when she met him again, Andrea wondered if she had been right; did she ask the question or make a case?) because her father cleared his throat and spoke.
‘Yes you can, and yes you will.’
In the swaddle of her mother, in darkness, for a moment, Andrea pieced together the decision of her leaving. Her bedroom a few months before, when it was cold and fresh, Clifford came to Andrea and spoke to her about the war. It was after midnight when she heard the front door. Then later his movement in the kitchen, the sound of water. Then the squeak of the living room door. All of the doors had a noise, and they were never eased or oiled. They broadcast movement throughout the house. Finally the sound of his steps and the creak of the wood on the stairs. He scratched lightly on her door like a cat and popped his head around it. Seeing Andrea awake, he came in, in whispers. He smelled of drink. They chatted for a little while about the day, about small things of the house. Something about her brother Callum. Then her father became sombre.
‘I am going away again, except again I am not going anywhere but in my own city. The city is going to be my preoccupation.’
He paused and swallowed.
‘What I mean Andrea is that this place is going to take all my energy. And your Ma and I are worried about you and Callum.’
Andrea looked at him, uncomprehending.
‘Ma and I have discussed this,’ he began again, nervously.
Andrea watched his silhouetted figure against the light from outside the window. She knew that every light in the house was off, to give the appearance of an empty place. To discourage attention. She knew that there were soldiers on the corner. Clifford was bent forward and he looked tired. His eyes swept the curve and shape of the blankets as if scanning the details of a map. He ran his hand lightly across, smoothing the hills and valleys created around her curled legs.
‘Yourself and Callum are to go and stay with your grandparents a while in London. First yourself in the summer, and Callum by the time of school starting.’
‘What about Ma, is she coming?’
‘Ma will visit you.’
‘I don’t want to go, and why can’t we go to Cork like last time?’
‘Andrea, this is no place for a child, with bombs and guns going off everywhere.’
‘I don’t want to go and why are you sending me to the enemy then?’
Her father paid her closer attention.
‘Your grandparents are not the enemy Andrea, and neither are the British working people.’
‘What?’
‘I mean the other men, women and children there.’
‘Who is the enemy that wants me to go then?’
In her anger Andrea threw to the floor her bedside hair brush. The sound of the thud made her father wince and jump back a little. For there was a boy in the house where Clifford had just come from, a young boy of about ten or twelve who stood by as his father was shot dead. The boy’s father – a prison guard – fell back gracefully, gently waving his arms, to the settee that he had risen from at the sound of the door splintering, half of his face now gone. The boy looked at his falling father and then turned his eyes away to look at the floor. For a moment the only sound was of someone – perhaps it was the boy’s mother – descending half way down the stairs and stopping. The boy tilted his disbelieving head to Clifford in his heavy black coat and hooded face. The boy dropped to his knees before him. His expression was not pleading; rather someone recalling a fact, searching for an answer to a question, it having been asked. Clifford turned and left, lowering the gun to his side, and was three quarters along the front path when it occurred to him that he had not shouted the man’s name, that he had not stated the reason for the act. He slowed for an instant and then heard the engine start and roar. He got in and the lightless car speed away. In the dark, an arm from the back seat handed him a flask and he took a long drink to quench his parched throat.
On the end of Andrea’s bed Clifford, his throat parched again, looked at his daughter in shadow.
‘I want to send you from this place until the fighting is over, until the soldiers have gone. I want to send all of the children away but I have only the permission to send two. You and your brother. I want to get this summer over with because I think that times will get worse before they will get better. Better is coming, but it will only come at a cost. I do not want you to count as part of the cost.’
‘What cost?’ Andrea asked him.
‘People, my flower. Hearts will have to be broken before history will move.’
‘I don’t get it.’
‘You have seen and heard enough already I think.’
‘What will happen after?’
‘I don’t know exactly, we will be together again.’
‘What will I find in London?’
‘Loving grandparents. A creaky old house. An old man and a wise woman. Some distance from this cloudy place, a riverbank, and plenty of parks. Take some books; visit the gardens like you love to. I’ll stay here, kneeling amongst the weeds, in the evening sky, amongst the flowers like my girl.’
He played with her hair then as her mother did now, on the boat, in the swaddle of her, in the pleats of her clothes, in darkness but now with the engines started, rumbling through the ship.
Andrea lay alone on the cabin bed and counted the two hours gone and the eight remaining. She relaxed into the gentle shudder of the boat’s slow, measured, progress. A heavy sensation; it was regular and there was almost a signature rhythm to it, which Andrea tried to capture the essence of. The deeper, longer, lower sound suggested a determined push and led to a tak-tak sound in the outer wall. The movement of the diamond patterned panel. Tak-tak-click. A lighter sound – a kind of ship’s rising in her mind – then led to movement between the clearances in both her cabin door and the adjacent small cupboard table beside her bunk, on which her books lay. Finally there was a moment of what she imagined to be the peak of the boat’s rise; the point when the vessel seemed to have pushed forward and paused that caused a small incident of stillness. Then the deeper sound again.
Andrea counted these rhythms until the early hundreds but then the patterns changed altogether. Perhaps the ship had changed direction. She listened anew but was distracted by thoughts about the sea itself, and the boat within it. Eventually, fitfully, she fell asleep.
Later, in her paintings she would recreate this image of the struggling ship and the sleeping child. The ship is disproportionately miniature, lost in a large canvas of rough sea, and within its waves were painted the detail of events of a generation of fighting; floating like curious flotsam. A bombed, splintered, shop, Orangemen marching, protest murals, checkpoints, her father interned, her brother’s dirty, exhilarated face as he threw a stone at an RUC man (based on an actual family photograph), a group of men on a street corner by an overturned public bus (the driver among them, his cap and ticket machine still on), three boys approaching a smashed, shabby, British Leyland car - all three with outstretched arms and holding petrol bombs like winning athletes.
Andrea slept her night.
In the black drizzle the ferry had its shoulder to the wind and shuddered on. The corridors had quietened. The bar was dark. The lounge passengers, journey slumbering, were stretched out in seats. The breathing, the clearing of throats and shuffling movements were submerged in the hum of ship’s noise. A cleaner mopped a toilet, her bucket of dirty water gently shaking in the rise and fall. A girl in the cafeteria stood back admiring the neatly staked shelf of glasses she had arranged, and pulled on a cigarette. On the car deck, a man walked the bare metal floor, pouring sand from a red bucket over oil stains, and shifting traffic cones with his boot. In the lorry lounge four drivers played cards in silent well-known company. The ships radio dish turned slowly, humming. On deck four gulls shivered beneath a lifeboat and thirty feet away a lone passenger in a long overcoat stared out at the murky weather from beneath the rim of his hat, stayed upon his head by his gloved hand. In her dark cabin Andrea laid on her side, curled, her arms wrapped around the pillow, her book of flowers on the floor. In the morning she would stretch awake and turn her head each way into her hair. There would be no movement and a calm sea. She would be new again.
James A Bullion 2008
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