Ghosts of Stone
This space has cracks where mythology creeps in
This is a space where you can run your palm over any inch on the wall and feel out a memory there. The shape and the texture of things can be pressed and scored, interrogated, branded by the stiff crescent of a fingernail. Just like that wallpaper your da put up in the ’90s. The one with the puffy shapes and flashes of pink. You can remember the ironing board there in the middle of the room with the bucket of paste on it, the one you were let stir after fetching a stick from down the side of the shed. If you focus hard enough, you can hear the wet slap of the brush against the wall before the paper is laid neat by the stretching hands of your father and your mother’s father. It is a sunny day, as it always is in memories like these.
Your parents came here not-so-newly-weds. There was a post-marital spell with the parents of the bride until a house was found. Until one became available. This was back in the late ’70s when hope and potential were rolled out in new linoleum. Your father planted an apple tree, built a greenhouse, staked out the boundaries of his impending fatherhood. Your mother fixed a future with curtain ties, cradling the tassels in her palm before standing back and admiring not just a space: a room, a home. A place for living.
The life of this space appears to you in layers; polymeric prints of each remembered moment. From particular angles, in certain lights, one incident might shine through and catch a breath in your throat. A rare white Christmas morning. The Australian cousins piled onto the sofa. Italia 90, Jackie Charlton and Packie Bonner’s desperate signs of the cross.
This place has cracks where mythology creeps in. Increasingly, memories, or almost memories, are recalled with a net-curtain clarity; the kind that comes with too much time between all the thens and the one single now. It is hard to detect the embellishments. You have an instinct to make things better or worse than they really were. Camera obscura, you project yourself into scenarios where, at most, you stood quaking at the edges. When the army checked the culvert for the bomb, you weren’t even born, but that doesn’t always matter when you’re spinning a yarn across tables in foreign bars.
Though there are events that you can’t imagine yourself into: You never heard the thump of detonation when the post office went up, for example. Too much gratuity, even for you, to crowbar yourself into that situation. But you were jealous, weren’t you, that your friend’s windows were blown in. You watched her recount it at school; the story of her house, her space.
Then again, from this space you did see things. The neighbour’s car ablaze outside your brother’s window. Petrol bombed into the history of the estate. When you trailed your brother downstairs and out the door to hop the fence for a closer look, you were thrilled when the attending policeman said, ‘The way you jumped that fence I’d nearly think you done it.’
The house was built during the Bad Ol’ Days, the Troubles. A turbulent space within the even more turbulent space of the North, the house is a home for more than the people in it. Whole histories live there. It suffered soldiers crouching behind rose bushes and tinny English voices interrupting the news as the radio picked up the Army frequency from the nearby barracks. The Belfast Agreement flyers dropped through its letterbox, Martin McGuinness wooed votes at its door. Touring the county, a diffident Tyrone player stood in the kitchen with the Sam Maguire Cup, accepting his hundredth cup of tea as neighbours stuck to him like iron filings. The North is in that house as much as the house is in the North. This is why the whole country is full of ghosts. Every stone is a ghost. Every crumbling gable wall.
A space co-evolves with its makers: chairlifts and handrails, the front steps replaced with an access ramp. It cannot reinvent itself. It can be lost, archived, discarded, abandoned, gifted, concealed. One day this space will lie still. It will heave with quiet. The last of us will step over the threshold and give it up to another future. The multitude of things will lose shape and meaning without the gravity of us holding them together. Kitchen counters will be torn out and replaced; new arses parked there while a parent prepares a meal. Curtain poles will come down. The shed, the apple tree: neither are fit for a lawn. Little ghosts will prickle behind the veil: calendars pinned to the back of a door, a phone ringing on the handmade telephone table, a picture of the Sacred Heart above the corner where the telly was.
Pre-cognitive grief, you cannot bear to look at the ramp where a step used to be and think of the future makers of this space. They will tut kindly about the old soul who lived here before them; the man who was your father, who was young once too, hands in the soil as he planted an apple tree.
