Nellie did not care. The fine, heavy wool was warm. The heat it made on her body dulled the pain. She stood up in it at Aoife’s door and faced down the villagers when they came, all the angry women, even the priest. They went away, leaving the cottage unburnt. By then, Nellie herself was burning, burning and shivering by turns. The sweater became her only solace. She lay in it, hour after hour, not eating, not drinking, not sleeping, just being in pain. Pain is widely spoken of but it is impossible to convey how terrible it is. The sensation of the wool on her skin, its smell, its heat, its scratchiness, became the only things she had, other than the pain. Those things, and the pattern on the front panels. It lay over her chest and belly and groin, and she looked down at it constantly, like reading a book upside-down. Nellie could not read but she had seen Father Anselma’s Bible. She had even held it in her hands for a blessing once when she was a young child. The priest had come and he and her parents, who never agreed about anything, had prayed fervently together. He never came again. Yet Nellie remembered this about the letters in a book: they looked sharply different upside-down or right-side-up. She thought of this, or felt this, as her fingers traced out the pattern again and again: the ball, the rope, the grass, the cow’s hoof. How she was herself a book now, a white page. She saw the markings on the page one way; anyone looking at her would see it another. Which was right? The ball, the rope, the grass, the cow’s hoof: the cow’s hoof, the grass, the rope, the ball. Pain spread throughout her. It was her. Pain beheld her with another face. The ball, the rope, the grass, the cow’s hoof; the hoof, the grass, the rope . . .
The door.
* * *
Jim Conneely ran aground on an island that wasn’t there. Due north of Inis Mór, as far as he could reckon. When he spun around, confused, on the strand, he could see the north shore. Conneely was an impossible man and he had found an impossible island. Well, isn’t that just the way, now? he thought, and shrugged, and sighed.
Seconds before, he had despaired of his life. There had been a squall. His currach had been carried rapidly towards the mouth of the bay. Much as he struggled against it, his tiny boat was rushing towards the open sea. His bones would wash up, years from now, on the coast of Newfoundland. It was all over. Of course, he had furled his wee sail at the first gusts of unmanageable wind. The monstrous idiocy of having a sail in a boat as small as this had struck him forcibly. He had bailed and bailed with his soft skin bag, the only thing you can bail a currach with without breaking its fragile skin. He had given up trying to impose any will on the thing at all. The tiny fat boat swung round and round on the waves in a final, fatal reel with the sea. Jim Conneely hated dancing. It was one of those innumerable things people did to pass the time that made no sense to him at all. To die this way was infuriating, but, clearly, die he must. Praying was out of the question. When had it ever done him, or anybody, any good at all? At the same time, there was no way he was resigned. Resignation was not for Jim Conneely. It was a pointless state of being. To resign meant to give something up in favour of something else, or at the will of someone else. To be resigned was always to be resigned to. He refused flatly to be resigned to anything or anybody. God. Death. None of it had anything to do with him. He was his own master.
The one thing he had never been able to master was the strange art of being Jim Conneely. But that was the challenge, though, wasn’t it? Otherwise, he was one of those talented men to whom everything came easily. So, he had spent a lot of his time making things difficult for himself. The problem in this life, he thought, as the boat whirled sickeningly faster and faster as if on a potter’s wheel, is that nobody ever leaves you alone. It just seems incredible to them that you don’t want to master them, or be mastered by them, or whatever it is, that you might just want to confine yourself to governing what went on in your own head. Half the time, his head felt like a creel too full of fish, and wasn’t it like that for everybody?
So, his thoughts spun on and on. The boat spun on and on. It was ridiculous. He could fill a whole prayer book with his thoughts from just these few minutes. You’d think he’d be a bit busier when dying. His mind was just readying itself to go off on some other tangent when, right through the skin of the boat, he felt land under his foot in its thin pampootie. And that was impossible, as he’d been lost in deep ocean a second before. The boat bobbed and stopped whirling. He was in that situation that it is only possible to be in while in a currach, that of being on land and water at the same time. He felt rock under his feet stretched out before him while his buttocks bounced lightly on rolling waves. A currach is a mad sort of boat. He was a mad sort of man. There was nothing to do but get out of the boat. So he did.
* * *
Every person who has ever lived in Ireland has heard of Oliver Cromwell. Even the gods have heard of him by now. Insofar as the Arans are part of Ireland, always a matter for debate—for either they are islands entire of themselves, or they are the quintessence of Irishness, unless perhaps the two are the same—the people here, too, retain a deep and scarred memory of that terrible man. He and his army crossed Inis Mór in 1650. He incarcerated many priests on Inis Oírr, and you can still hear their ghostly orisons when the wind is easterly. So, it will surprise nobody that Cromwell left his mark even on Inis Caillte, the fourth Aran island, the lost one.
Thus, the first person that Jim Conneely met on Inis Caillte was a camp follower from Cromwell’s army. Of all kinds of human being that it is possible to be, a Cromwellian camp follower is one of the worst. Sex and Puritanism are hard companions. The Wars of the Three Kingdoms were hard on all of the men in all of the armies, but let it be said now that they were even harder on the women. It must be reckoned to Jim Conneely’s credit that he perceived this almost at once.
The first that he noticed of Meg Haylock was her scarred hand on his gunwale, pulling the currach gingerly in to shore. She had been cut by a sword and was missing her little finger. When he looked up at her face, he saw it was heavily scarred by what he thought must have been the pox, though it turned out to be the bubonic plague.
“Hup,” she said to him with a quick jerk of her head, indicating the rocky beach. He hopped out of the boat and collapsed as his frozen knees gave way. He crawled forward and helped her heave the currach gently over the rocks. It was so astonishing that the hide wasn’t ripped to shreds already that it seemed a shame to tear it now. The two of them got the little craft above the water line.
“Who are you?” he asked when he got his breath back.
“Meg Haylock,” she said. Her voice was deep and burry.
“Where do you come from?”
“Huntingdon.”
“And where’s that?”
“Near Cambridge.”
“You don’t mean to tell me that this is England?”
“No,” said Meg, “this isn’t England.” As it happens, she was speaking English, a language that Jim did not know. He only worked that out later. But the first rule is that all of the lost can understand each other. It’s an admirable rule.
“How did you end up here? Do you know?” asked Jim.
“One minute, I was being crushed into the mud by fleeing men, and then I was here,” replied Meg.
“And how did you feel?” asked Jim, as this seemed important.