Turning for Home
About the Book
‘Isn’t the life of any person made up of the telling of two tales, after all? The whole world makes more sense if you remember that everyone has two lives, their real lives and their dreams, both stories only a tape’s breadth apart from each other, impossibly divided, indivisibly close.’
Every year, Robert’s family come together at a rambling old house to celebrate his birthday. Aunts, uncles, distant cousins – it has been a milestone in their lives for decades. But this year Robert doesn’t want to be reminded of what has happened since they last met – and neither, for quite different reasons, does his granddaughter Kate. Neither of them is sure they can face the party. But for both Robert and Kate, it may become the most important gathering of all.
As lyrical and true to life as Norris’s prizewinning and bestselling debut Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain, this is a compelling, emotional story of family, human frailty, and the marks that love leaves on us.
Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Robert
from Interview 18
Kate
from Interview 23
Robert
from Interview 38
Kate
from Interview 42
Robert
from Interview 60
Kate
from Interview 66
Robert
from Interview 83
Kate
from Interview 88
Robert
from Interview 93
Kate
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Barney Norris
Copyright
Turning for Home
Barney Norris
For Charlie
i.m. Albert Norris
Wither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
William Wordsworth, ‘Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’
Robert
IN THE FIRST young years of the new century, a team of researchers affiliated with Boston College attempted to collate an oral history of the Troubles, recording the recollections of combatants on both sides. They persuaded their subjects to speak by telling them that their lives offered lessons to future generations, and that a record should be made of how and why things had happened in Northern Ireland as the people involved saw it, while their stories could still be captured. The subjects were given assurances that nothing they said would be made public while they were living, a necessary step for securing cooperation that perhaps, with hindsight, was asking for trouble.
The project was initiated by a small group of Irish journalists and historians, men I had known in the course of my work in Belfast. I admired what they were doing – it still strikes me as an important undertaking. After all, the bloody century I spent most of my life in has to offer some lessons to the years that will come after me; otherwise it will all just have been murder piled on murder, loss without meaning, and more bloodshed will surely come as a result of the failure to learn from those lives which were lost before. There is no task more important than asking people to rewind a moment, look closer, take stock. The world has been changing so fast all the way through my own life, and there have been earthquakes wherever I look all around me. People have a responsibility, I think, to learn to manage the aftershocks, as the endless churning of the world continues to accelerate, and generate new worlds, and overtake everyone. So I think the importance, even the necessity of a project like this one is self-evident.
But things didn’t work out as planned. Instead of explaining the motivations that had driven them into their war, as the project’s architects expected, the men they spoke to started confessing to things they had done in the past. They unfurled details of killings and the chain of responsibility behind them. Perhaps old men were settling scores, pointing out those they believed had betrayed them in the long ago, in the knowledge their testimony would become public with their deaths, and might then hurt someone they hated. Or perhaps there was a guilt weighing on them all, and the lure of the confessional took over whenever the Dictaphone started to record. Or maybe they simply believed they had nothing to hide any more, under the blanket of secrecy promised to them by the interviewer sent from Boston College. Whatever the reasoning, more was given up than could ever have been expected. Murder on murder was traced back to its source among those black and flashing spools of ribbon where the stories were spilled out like soldiers disembowelled.
After a while the Police Service of Northern Ireland got to hear of what was being said and, as a result of that, the project briefly became an international preoccupation.
Last week, lawyers acting on behalf of the British government issued a series of subpoenas to Boston College, seeking access to the recordings in order to assist Her Majesty’s Government in the investigation of historic crimes in Northern Ireland. I read the news of this latest earthquake cocooned in the comfort of my armchair, the story printed in the pages of the papers everyone else who lived in my village bought, not the briefing papers that had once been rushed to me by car and by night, letting me into their secret world long before anyone else I went to church with heard about their contents. I wondered whether anyone would call me about what was going on, whether I was going to be needed. Although no call came in the first week after the story broke, I kept hoping. No one wants to be forgotten, not in their own lifetime.
Then came the news, in yesterday’s papers, that Gerry Adams had been taken in for questioning on the strength of some of the interviews given to the researchers, and the Boston Tapes were briefly on everyone’s lips.
They called them the Boston Tapes in the papers, not discs, not sound files. I thought that was strange at first; it made me wonder how the interviews had been recorded. I suppose it’s just the phrase still echoing onwards, even though we’ve surely all left cassettes behind by now. There is something about a tape that means the image holds interest long after it has been rendered technologically obsolete. The idea of a ribbon of speech, a voice speaking one truth on one side and then saying something else completely different on the other, two stories that might have contained anything at all, separated only by the breadth of the tongue they were told by. That is magical. And I think perhaps it’s very human as well.
Isn’t the life of any person made up of the telling of two tales, after all? People live in the space between the realities of their lives and the hopes they have for them. People spin myths from the quotidian roots of their experience, in order to create a small cocoon of space in which they can live between the dream they could never hope to grasp and the indifferent ordinariness of everything around them, in which they can tell themselves things might be about to get exciting, no matter how cramped the quarters seem, how dark the dawn, how low the ceiling. That is the duality in everything. The whole world makes more sense if you remember that everyone has two lives, their real lives and their dreams, both stories only a tape’s breadth apart from each other, impossibly divided, indivisibly close.
And still there’s more to it than that. There’s more that’s seductive in the image than only that; it wasn’t just about dreaming. It seemed to me once I thought about it that these tapes laced through with murders and remembering were a vision of the speeches and silences that defined every life, the all-too-human need to make a statement, to cage oneself into a set of words. They were about wanting to tell the truth. Wanting the days of your life, and the acts of your life, to be known to have happened, and to have had some weight, to have left some kind of meaning behind them, imprinted at least in language,
if nothing else. They were about laying out the mess of the self for others to unravel, trying to participate in the argument of the world after you’d left it, and longing to live for ever, to be clearer, to be seen and to see things as you thought they really were.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. At the start of the day, all this still waited like a bomb in the back of my mind, and talk of the Boston Tapes lay hours off in the future.
from Interview 18
[All interviewees’ names redacted to maintain anonymity]
I joined up after Bloody Sunday. A lot of us did. The Brits had killed a kid, for God’s sake, they’d shot this kid through a wall. They said they were returning fire from some IRA men up in this block of flats, and that’s where the boy was sleeping in his bed, and that’s when they shot him. He died in his bed. You hear that from a lot of occupying forces, you know – we were only returning fire from fellas who were hiding in among civilians. If you believe all you read, that’s what the Palestinians spend all day doing, hiding among civilians. I don’t know about it. For our lot, human shields, that’d be a disaster, wouldn’t it? We need people on our side. Anyway, there was this guy doing the rounds in the wake of it all, that week after Bloody Sunday, went from house to house asking whether now might be a time to think of joining up. I thought I should. I thought we all should.
Kate
PERHAPS WE HAD been running through a wood without end. Perhaps our teeth had fallen out. Perhaps the whole world had been reduced to the colours it was painted in, and there was nothing solid to anything around us any more, only brushstrokes, only torrents of feeling, soul after soul adrift in an ocean of blues and greens. Perhaps it doesn’t matter what the dream was. Days would be easier to get through if none of them meant anything, after all, if all life was only the ruffling of the surface of a lake. Perhaps in our sleep we glimpse that ease, that peace, and bite down on silence to taste it swilling round us.
I didn’t draw the curtains when I went to bed last night. Now, the light of morning paws catlike at my face and the eggshell blue of the room grows bright around me, beckoning. As if the house is opening its eyes. My hair’s in my eyes; my mouth is dry. I lie foetal in the middle of the bed, try to remember what I was dreaming, but the story has already vanished. All that remains is a vague unhappiness clinging to me, the feeling of someone having just left a room. Like the water on your shoulders when you’ve stepped out of the sea, light burning it away leaving only salt behind.
I have the feeling that in the dream I was one of many people standing in a line, but even as I try to bring the image to mind, it clouds over, falling away from me, the memory of the dream drifting back into the fog and shadow waiting always at the cliff-edge and the limit of my thinking.
I pick up my phone, see it’s still only seven-fifteen. Earlier than I’d wanted to wake up, but I won’t be able to sleep again now, not in the grip of this beautiful morning. I’d only hoped to sleep longer because I wanted to try and treat today as a kind of holiday, and sleeping in is what people on holidays are supposed to do. It’s always the same simple dream for me these days. I only want to be like other people. Surely that isn’t too much to ask?
It was the vibration from a text that woke me. Sam, as I knew it would be the moment I saw my phone light up. I went to sleep almost certain I’d get this very text from him by morning. Hey. I’m really sorry, but I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to make it today. Something’s come up and I have to be in Bristol. X. I don’t reply. I put the phone back on the table and lie very still on my side, staring at the wall, staring at nothing, and wishing I didn’t care so much.
Some people put their phones on silent when they go to bed, so that nothing wakes them. I’ve thought about doing the same. But I get nervous when I don’t know where my phone is. I can’t help myself. I’d feel too much anxiety turning my phone off at night, I think. I wouldn’t be able to sleep for fear of what I wouldn’t hear about until it was over, all the things that might pass me by.
When I was in the hospital, lying in bed and thinking my life was over and there wasn’t any point to me any more, only the occasional visitor to make me still feel part of the world, I didn’t feel able to use my phone a lot of the time. It was my link to everything that wasn’t that place, that room, that feeling, and I found I couldn’t bear the thought of all those things it stood for – all I believed I had lost. It didn’t seem to hook me into the world where my friends were still living, their songs playing on without me. It only showed me how far from them all I had drifted. I would look at my phone and see only the echoes of the life I’d lost, the places I could never revisit, the dreams I’d cherished that would never come true now, after what happened to me. So I left my phone alone, and the texts and emails of friends checking how I was doing went unanswered. After a month or so, most of them stopped trying. How many times can you tell someone you’re thinking of them, if all you hear back in return is silence? What no one knew, though, was that all the time I wasn’t replying to the messages people sent, I was reading them and rereading them like poems I was trying to learn by heart. I would stare with mad longing into the water of the world that seemed to glimmer at arm’s length from where I lay, fascinated by what was happening to everyone else, in love with the life of the person I had been, the person I had once thought I was going to become. I would read all the messages again and again, and the real world came to seem like a story I could follow, tuning in every day to find out what happened next as lives bled out little by little all around me. My friends seemed moth-like and beautiful as they tried to reach me, beating their wings against the screen of my phone. That’s why these days I feel like I can’t be without it. From the confines of the hospital, it came to seem like it contained the whole world.
It’s quieter here at Grandad’s house, and darker at night, and I slept well even though I was swaddled in a strange bed, not somewhere I felt I was really safe. I need a shower to wake me up, but in fact, lying still and thinking about it, I have to admit I don’t feel bad at all.
Sleep has come and gone in the last couple of years. I’ve battled with it. For a long time I hated sleeping on my own, it was the one thing I wanted to avoid more than anything else. But that loneliness isn’t as bad this morning either. Perhaps I’m getting better. It has occurred to me over the last few weeks that there’s been a small change in the way I’m feeling. Things don’t seem quite as frightening as they did in the dog days of last year. I can look at the way the trees have started flowering now the clocks have gone forward, and find it beautiful. I can stand and look at the green leaves budding at the fingertips of a tree, and lose myself for a moment in the sight, feel a quietness growing in the heart of me. It gives me hope. Perhaps as time passes it’s all going to flow back into my body, the life I thought had left me like blood pouring out from a wound. My desires can be everyone else’s, and I can try to be normal again. That was the test I set myself by coming here today – I decided to come back here and try to get through the day of the party, knowing my mum would probably turn up at some point, knowing I might have to talk to her, and see if I was strong enough, and see if it might just be possible to start slotting back into the life all around me.
Grandad has thrown these birthday parties all my life and longer. It was Grandma’s idea in the first place, so the story goes. She turned Grandad into a host, then kept him at it when he might have given up, if left to his own devices. Family was always important to her; I remember she used to seem like she lived for us and through us all, and she always loved to mark the little rhythms of the year, the birthdays and the holidays. They were the waves she swam over as she made her way out into the open water of her life. Her life always seemed to organise itself around preparing for the next celebration, the next wave rising to meet her.
She never made anything like as much fuss about her own birthday. Only Christmas really rivalled Grandad’s party for the work she put in. These celebrations were Grandma Hattie’s days
.
It’s the house that makes it all possible. You need a bit of space to really give anything the attention it deserves. That’s why all the best ideas happen when people are out walking – things flower when they’re given room. Like a body of water, a day will expand to fill the space it’s given, so moving into this big, rambling old house with its sprawling garden meant Grandma could fashion the occasions she dreamed of: a Christmas tree towering up through the stairwell in the hall, chestnuts and bonfires in autumn, the happy crowd of guests raising a toast to Grandad on the sunlit lawn each spring.
Grandad invites his whole family and all of his friends to the parties. When I was younger, that meant entertaining over two hundred people. He and Grandma used to hire caterers to feed all the mouths, and clear the plates, and stop the whole construction from collapsing. The stock of guests was topped up over the years, as couples from that first guest list had their children and watched them grow, and as new people came into my grandparents’ lives from other parties, other meetings, other days. But the list has mostly been shrinking again for the whole span of my life, because, of course, Grandad’s friends started to die, and once he was retired he didn’t meet as many new people. On top of that, once the parties were established as a family tradition, people started to feel like they could miss one every once in a while, if it was difficult for them to come. Everyone knows there will always be another gathering next year, after all. So these days there are always some faces missing.
This time, Grandma will be missing too. I can’t imagine what that’s going to feel like, not to see her here, not to hear her laughter. This will be the first year Grandad will have to live the day of the party without her. I’ve tried to imagine it, but I don’t really know how he’s going to get through. That is the other reason I’ve come here today. I need to be here to support him.