Whalesong, written by Barbara Leahy, is the third prize winner of the Francis MacManus Short Story Competition 2014.
This year marks the 26th anniversary of the RTÉ Radio 1 Short Story Competition, which over the years has proved to be the launching pad for many renowned Irish writers.
THE OLD MULVEY house had lain empty for years until the Russian moved in. Early one June morning, my father brought news of the arrival. ‘Thrown out of Russia for writing dirty books,’ he said. ‘A nice proposition to be landed in to us.”That house can’t be fit to live in,’ my mother said. She was stirring figures of eight into a pot of porridge. When she lifted the spoon, they dissolved.My father chewed the end of a crust as though it was a bone. ‘A summer up there and he’ll wish he was back in Siberia.’Angry bursts of steam spat from the porridge.‘Ma, it’s burning.’
She stirred the pot again. ‘He’ll miss his own people.’
The wedding clock chimed nine. My mother’s parents had refused to come to the wedding, and sent the clock instead. My father used to joke that it was really a timer for a bomb that would explode some day and blow him to smithereens so that my mother would have go back to Northern Ireland and I’d meet my Granny and Grandad at last. It was a beautiful clock with a picture in the centre of a lion and a unicorn, and pointed golden hands. My mother was like the minute hand, slender and quick. My father was the hour, squat and slow.
He stood and stretched. After the door clattered shut behind him, my mother nodded in the direction of the Mulvey house. ‘We’ll pay a visit,’ she said. ‘Go out and see if he’s there.’
I ran into the garden. The Mulveys’ house was at the top of our hill, the only two-storey, jutting like an eye-tooth from a bank of heather. In the front porch sat the Russian, dressed in a black suit, staring out to sea.
I went back into the kitchen. ‘He’s there.’
My mother wound a towel round her hand and lifted a pan of bread out of the oven. She washed her hands and dried them on her apron. Beneath her feet, the lino was worn into a grey triangle – table to sink, sink to cooker, cooker to table. I wondered how many miles she’d walked in the kitchen.
‘Come on,’ she said, tucking the bread under one arm.
She snagged fuchsia from hedges as we walked up the hill. ‘I think I might tackle the ceilings tonight,’ she said. She’d painted every room in the house that year. ‘Your mother will collapse if she stops moving,’ my father used to say, and I pictured her spinning through the house like a gyroscope, her balance dependent on her speed.
One of the Mulvey sons had built the porch; a botched job. Salt air grated paint from the wood, and damp settled in, rotting the window frames and rusting the catches. It was roofed with clouded perspex, mossy and stained. Two wicker couches, their cushions faded yellow, and an upturned apple crate served as furniture.
The Russian rose as we approached. My mother stopped outside the glass door and held out her offering. ‘For you,’ she said, and I wondered if the Russian would understand that she couldn’t help about her accent, over being from the north, and it didn’t mean she had an opinion of herself, no matter what the women in the village said.
He was an old man, with a long thin face. His white beard sprang wild like scrub from his chin, and his hair began somewhere around his ears, straggling low to his neck. A deep cleft ran upwards from the bridge of his nose so that his forehead seemed about to split in two. He rattled the door open and stared at the tea-towel.
‘Bread,’ my mother said, unwrapping a corner.
He reached out and took the loaf, holding it at arm’s length. Steam rose from the moist linen. Slowly he brought the bread close to his face and inhaled. Then he nodded at my mother, ushered us into the porch, and disappeared into the house.
We sat on the wicker furniture. I squirmed on the damp cushions. My mother raised a finger to her lips.
The Russian’s house overlooked all others on the hill. Each garden ran down towards the village like steps of a stairs. I could see our rectangle of grass split with a line of washing, and below that, past more gardens to where the village began, the chequered row of houses and shops, blues and whites and greens and reds, and the sweep of the sea wall facing them. I could even see the crescent of sandy beach, shrinking with the tide, and the sun-bleached pier reaching out into the water. From here, the Russian could see everything.
He returned, carrying a silver urn and set it on the crate. The tea towel became a tablecloth, the bread he cut in wedges as though it was cake. When he turned a handle on the urn, a stream of black tea, flecked with leaves, ran into my mother’s cup. We ate the crumbling bread and sipped the bitter tea.
Finally, my mother set her cup down on the crate and stood up. The Russian stood too, nodded once more, and we left.
‘So thin, poor man,’ she said as we walked home. ‘I wonder would he like some broth. Or a stew.’
We visited him often after that. She brought soups and stews, cakes and bread. He held each loaf the way he had held the first, breathing in the buttermilk and soda like a diver rising to the surface, taking a long sweet breath of air. We always sat in the porch, eating the bread, moist and brown as earth, and rarely speaking.
My mother slowed to a new rhythm with the Russian, an ebb and flow of tastes and smells, signs and gestures. In return for the food, he gave her gifts of things the tide had left behind: smooth jewels of sea glass, colours muted by waves; spiralling whelk shells traced with delicate pink whorls. He showed us pictures of his home town, a great bustling port. Once he showed us a curling photograph of a woman and three little boys.
‘Three sons, all grown up,’ my mother said, as we walked home. ‘His wife died years ago.’
‘How do you know? He didn’t tell you.’ I was sullen that day. It was late August; the school holidays were nearly over. All summer I had hoped for something to happen but nothing had.
‘Not in words,’ she said.
One morning we found the Russian standing outside the porch. As we approached he lifted one arm and pointed. Down on the beach, a wreath of people circled a dark shape. ‘A lost whale,’ my mother said.
Later, I ran down the hill, my anorak puffing up with wind. I grabbed the sea wall and hoisted onto my arms. The whale was lying near the parched wooden struts of the pier. Its sleek black body was tipped to one side, so that one corner of its mouth was angled upwards, exposing deep white grooves along its throat. The tail was curled in an arc, lying like a propeller in the sand.
I skidded down the slip-way to the beach. Up close, the whale shone steel-grey and the sand around its jaws was murky with blood. Great rents scored its side, like slashes in tarpaulin.
‘Is it dead?’ someone asked.
‘If it was dead you’d know about it,’ a man said. ”Twould stink to high heaven.’
Two men in red wind-cheaters were taking measurements. They tapped rods into the sand with stones, and tied swathes of red plastic ribbon, circling the whale. ‘When the tide comes in, it will swim away,’ I said. The men never looked up, just kept tapping wooden stakes into the sand.
The whale didn’t swim away. Next day the men took more measurements, hammered more stakes. An ice-cream van and a chip van parked at the sea wall where a crowd gathered. Parents sat their children along the wall, fed them ice-cream and lemonade, and waited.
The whale still lay on its side, a slimy trail of red pulp dripping from its mouth and pooling in the sand.
One of the wind-cheater men was standing at the cordon, pouring tea from a flask.
‘What kind of whale is it?’ a boy asked.
‘A humpback. Near on forty foot.’
‘Are you going to save it?’
‘Gone beyond saving, son.’ The man flicked the dregs of his tea onto the sand.That night I woke to hear movement in the kitchen. My mother had always been restless by night. Often, when I crept along the passageway I’d find her lifting plates from the dresser, rearranging them, then changing her mind and replacing them as they were.
‘What are you doing up,’ she said. She was sitting in an easy chair in the kitchen. The curtains were open and a glow of light shone from the Russian’s window. She opened her arms and I climbed onto her lap. ‘He writes at night,’ she told me, wrapping her arms around me. She held one fist tightly closed.
It seemed to me then that somehow the Russian was writing her thoughts, that he could hear all the unsaid things inside her. He was a lighthouse, drawing her silently through the darkness towards him, and I wanted to anchor her in the chair with me forever.
‘Ma, why are you so pally with the Russian?’
She shifted beneath me. I felt something swell, then diminish within her. Her breath ruffled my hair.
‘He reminds me of my father.’
I wanted to ask her about her father, to find out all the Russian knew, but I was afraid the words would shake her, spill her secrets like seeds, and they would take root in the gaps between us and grow into dark, undeniable truths. I wondered if the Russian was watching our house from his window, or staring out to sea, or looking down onto the beach to where the whale lay.
‘Ma, is the whale going to die?’
She took so long to answer, I thought she was sleeping. Then she kissed the top of my head. ‘He says it cries by night,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that a terrible thing, to lie alone, crying at night?’
When she fell asleep, her fingers softened, and a chunk of sea glass rattled to the floor.
That night, I dreamed of the whale bounding through the ocean, singing to its mate, while all the time a snare of sharp rocks lay waiting for it in our bay. I woke next morning in my own bed. I thought of my mother sitting all night in her easy chair, watching the light on the hill, while below on the beach the whale lay dying in the darkness.
***
The Russian died that September. Finding the porch empty one afternoon, my mother entered the house for the first time and found him lying among his books. A week later I was helping her peg clothes on the line when we smelled burning. Our eyes stung and streamed by the time we reached the bonfire on the hill. One of the Mulvey sons stood stripped to the waist in the sunshine, feeding the fire with paper. For days afterwards we could smell the Russian’s writing in our clothes.
The whale’s jaw bones were polished and put on display in the harbour. They stood in a gleaming white arc, like an enormous marble wishbone.
Up close, the bones were grey and stippled with tiny holes. When I walked underneath them, it felt as though the whale was rising up out of the earth, swallowing me whole. My fingertips dragged on their scuffed surfaces, and although my father pointed out the grooves and hollows where the whale’s blood had once flowed, it was hard to imagine that something so empty had ever really lived.
Barbara Leahy’s stories have appeared in Crannóg magazine, on the RTÉ Ten website, and in various anthologies. She has won the Hungry Hill Short Story Competition, the Doris Gooderson Short Story Competition, the Wells Festival of Literature Short Story Competition, and the Words with Jam Shortest Story Competition.
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