Bianca was the only one who was talkative on the way to the theatre that night. They walked through the dark streets back to the north side of the river where they were to attend a production of a cla.s.sical Greek play. The rest of the group had toured the backstage of the Abbey Theatre and she was keen to give Maeve and Steph a blow-by-blow account of everything they had missed.
"Iphigenia at Aulis," read Bianca from the theatre notes "is a story of sacrifice." She stopped as she scanned the outline. "Euuww. This is so depressing. This dude, Agamemnon, he sacrifices his daughter so that G.o.ds will help him win the Trojan War. Gross. She"s only thirteen."
In the darkened theatre, Maeve watched uneasily as Iphigenia ran to greet her father. They"d been parted for a long time, and as soon as she saw him, she threw her arms around him, full of loving excitement. But her father was planning her death, welcoming her yet all the while plotting how to trick her mother into abandoning her so that no one would try to stop his evil plan.
After the show, the girls gathered in the foyer. Ms Donahue handed out some more program notes and asked the girls about the play.
"I hoped you noted the set design and the lighting, girls. They were brilliant. Any thoughts on the performances?"
"The guy who played Achilles didn"t work for me," said Steph. "But Agamemnon was amazing. So scary. It would be really disturbing playing opposite him. He looked so deranged. That scene where Iphigenia was weeping, begging him to spare her life, it really cut me up. Imagine having a psycho for a father."
Maeve thought of the picture of her father, those pale eyes, the craggy, sharp features. Margaret had said he was a chameleon, but did that mean he was a bit nuts? She couldn"t believe Sue would have fallen for someone evil, but what if he was just plain crazy?
31.
All the dead voices Maeve woke from a dream of ghosts. She was surrounded by them their big, pale bodies, their tiny mouths, their hot and angry breath. The ghosts needed something from her but she pushed them away and fought to escape. It was still dark when she woke. The heater next to her bed clanked loudly and she sat up, shivering in the icy morning.
Stephanie was slow and moody over breakfast, poking her fork at the poached eggs on her plate until the yolks bled over everything. Maeve wished they were out in the day, away from the close atmosphere of the B&B. Only Bianca was cheerful, humming to herself as she b.u.t.tered a piece of toast with a thick layer of raspberry jam.
The girls had a couple of hours for shopping before meeting up again for a workshop at a Dublin school of acting. Maeve couldn"t wait to get to a phone booth. If only her mobile would work here, she could call Margaret right away. She bit her lip, fighting down impatience. But after she"d finally slipped away from Steph and Bianca and found a public phone, she discovered she was trembling.
Margaret"s voice was warm and friendly on the other end of the line. "Now you tell him that your mother gave you this number before she pa.s.sed away. I"m not meant to be handing out private phone numbers, but as your mother was a friend of his . . ."
Maeve balanced the phone against her shoulder as she took down the number. When she hung up, she was breathing hard and fast. What if it was a wrong number? What if it led to the wrong Davy Lee? What if Margaret had made a mistake? Could he really be that one in a million? She shoved the paper deep into her pocket and started walking towards the theatre school. Suddenly, she didn"t want to be in Dublin any more. She ached with longing for Sydney, to be home, to not have this choice handed to her, this phone number in her pocket, this father so close at hand.
Ms Donahue was waiting at the bottom of a flight of stairs, chatting to a tall, lanky-limbed man in a dark tweed jacket. Stephanie and Bianca were already hanging around at the top of the stairs.
"Where do you keep disappearing to?" asked Steph.
"Nowhere. I was sightseeing."
Her two friends eyed her suspiciously but there was no time to chat. The cla.s.s was about to begin.
The tweedy man introduced himself as Patrick Ca.s.sidy, drama teacher, and he gathered the girls in a circle around him.
"To begin with," he said, "I want you to get a sense of your own self in the s.p.a.ce. Here you are, in this s.p.a.ce. We exist here, now. You have to know the s.p.a.ce you"re in."
He crossed over to Maeve and took her hand. "Your hand, connected to your arm, connected to your entire body." He dropped her hand. "Now, your mother may have told you it"s rude to point, but not here. Not in this cla.s.s. I want you to point to that chair." He gestured towards a bentwood sitting in a corner.
Frowning, Maeve pointed at the chair. She wished he"d picked on someone else. "And now to each and everything in the room," he said. "And point with both hands. With your whole body. I want you to feel this room."
Bianca began to smile. She looked at Maeve and raised her eyebrows.
"All of you make your place in this room. Know the s.p.a.ce. Come on then. What are you waiting for?"
Ca.s.sidy kept firing questions at the girls so quickly that they barely had time to think of an answer before he was asking something else. Maeve"s heart started to race and she could feel a p.r.i.c.kle of sweat on the back of her neck. She hoped he wouldn"t ask her a question. But then his sharp hazel eyes focused on her.
"Why were you late?" he demanded.
Maeve blinked. How could she possibly tell the truth? But he moved on to the next girl before she could even frame a response. He was forcing questions on every girl at gunfire pace, moving from one to the next. He didn"t wait for answers but the questions left the girls breathless and edgy. He strode across the room and came back with a shiny black box in his hands. Inside were sheets of paper and each girl had to take one and read its contents to the group.
"This is acting that"s felt, not acting that ill.u.s.trates," he said. "I want you to feel your story or poem in your body, feel your presence in the s.p.a.ce, in the world feel where you are, who you are."
Maeve wanted to call out in exasperation, "How can anyone know that!" She looked down at the story that she had pulled from the black box. At the top it said it was an excerpt from "The Song of Wandering Aengus" by someone called Yeats. She read through it quickly, anxious to get it right.
Though I am old with wandering Through hollow lands and hilly lands, I will find out where she has gone, And kiss her lips and take her hands; And walk among long dappled gra.s.s, And pluck till time and times are done The silver apples of the moon, The golden apples of the sun.
Maeve grew restless waiting for her turn to read the poem. She"d never been good at waiting. It was why she liked dancing much better than drama. She needed to be in motion. As she read the poem, she felt the urgency inside her growing. She had to find out where her father had been in his years of wandering.
When it came time for the break, Maeve wanted to leave and find a phone booth straight away. But as quickly as the feeling swelled, it broke again and she felt as uncertain as she had when she first wrote down her father"s telephone number.
"This is so cool," said Stephanie. "That guy is awesome."
"Scary if you ask me," said Bianca. "A total fascist."
Maeve shrugged. "Are you okay?" whispered Bianca, as Ca.s.sidy signalled for the girls to start up again. Maeve was glad there was no time to reply.
For the next activity they were each handed an excerpt from a play by someone called Beckett.
"This is the work of a master," Ca.s.sidy announced. "A master of the Irish theatre. Of the theatre of the world. I want you to listen, not just to the words, but to the silences."
He recited a fistful of lines, holding the s.p.a.ces between them as if each were a precious moment. "Now, girls, you take it, a line each, a line with the silences and the waiting." He strode around the circle, drawing a phrase from each girl.
"Take it, girls, again and again. "They make a noise like wings"," he intoned.
""Like leaves"," said Steph.
""Like sand"," said Bianca.
Ca.s.sidy snorted. "Feel the words! I want it to sound like an onomatopoeia, not just a noise from the back of your throat," he shouted.
Maeve looked up and said, "Like the noise of green water against the dock, the sound of tears falling on stone."
"You, stop Like the noise of what? This is Samuel Beckett, not something you mess with. You"re not to b.u.g.g.e.r it up with some bit of faddle from elsewhere. Your line was "All the dead voices", which you missed when it was your turn, I might add."
Maeve pulled back inside herself. She wanted to apologise but she couldn"t. For a moment, she"d felt as if Sydney Harbour was inside her, ebbing against her chest.
After the cla.s.s, the girls collectively breathed a sigh of relief. "That was so cool," laughed Stephanie. "It was wild."
"You just like being bullied," said Bianca.
"No, that was what acting should be about," said Steph. "He treated us like real adults, real actors, not just a pack of kids from a high school."
All of a sudden, Maeve wondered if she could ever be an actress or even an adult. It felt too much like being skinned alive. "I think I"ll stick with dancing," she said.
Ca.s.sidy came up to Maeve. Now that the cla.s.s was at an end, he was smiling, unlike the fiery taskmaster of the workshop.
"That line, the one you threw in. Now who wrote that? Where did you find it?" he asked.
Maeve bit her lip and tried to think where the words had come from.
"You should credit your sources, girl."
"I found it inside me. It wasn"t a "dead voice" or anything. It was my voice."
32.
The loudest silence As they walked back to the B&B, Maeve spotted a phone booth with an Eircom sign on the shiny gla.s.s.
"Hey guys, I"ll catch up with you," she said. Before Steph or Bianca could react, she"d disappeared into the crowds.
She stepped into the blue-and-white booth. She wanted to phone so badly. She fingered the folded piece of paper in her pocket. At any moment she could call and hear a voice and that voice might be the voice of her father. Her lost father. Her very own father. Not someone else"s father who said they loved her, but someone who was her own flesh and blood. The slip of paper grew warm as she held it inside her closed fist. All she had to do was unfold it and dial but it was too hard, too big, too difficult. Defeated, she pushed the door of the phone booth open.
She sat in a park called St Stephen"s Green, watching the old-fashioned fountain. The past seemed everywhere in this country, as if history hung in the damp air like an invisible shroud. She"d always thought that hungry ghosts were a stupid superst.i.tion that those who were forgotten could haunt you seemed unbelievable. But just as the ghosts of her ancestors had been everywhere in Hong Kong, Ireland echoed with voices. All the dead voices kept telling her to get up off that seat, to leave the park, to go and telephone her father, but she couldn"t. What if he was horrible or crazy? What if he hung up on her? She shivered, even though the sunlight was warm against her skin. White tulips were in bloom all around the park, green and white. A bed of purple hyacinth, half unfurled and glorious, spread out before her. She sat, listening to her own small, breathless sobs.
On the bench opposite her, a man in a long dark coat leant forward, his head in his hands, as if wracked with tiredness. When he sat up straight, Maeve realised it was McCabe. Great. Now she"d be in trouble on top of everything else. He"d already lectured her once, this time he"d read the riot act.
But McCabe seemed to have a lot on his mind. He got up from his seat and started pacing back and forth, as if he was thrashing out a problem, oblivious to Maeve even as he walked right past her. When he strode back again, Maeve called out.
"Sir? Is everything okay?"
McCabe turned. Then, unexpectedly, he smiled.
"Maeve," he said simply. "What are you doing on the Green by yourself?"
"I asked you first."
McCabe sat down beside her and laughed. It was as if seeing her, seeing someone he knew, had changed him back into himself.
"I"m waiting for someone, but I"ve arrived too early and the wait the wait is interminable. Now you can answer my question. As you know you"re in trouble, the answer had better be good."
"You didn"t give me a very good answer. I"m waiting too. Except I"m only waiting to make up my mind about something. Something I think I should do, but . . ."
McCabe laughed. "Touche. We now know as little as we did when we b.u.mped into each other."
He started to look distracted again, pulling off his gloves and running his hands through his silver hair.
"I"m waiting for my mother, Maeve."
"I thought she was . . . like my mum."
"I grew up in orphanages. I was told she"d died. For years I fought to hold onto the idea that she was still out there, that she would come for me. Finally, I came to accept that she was dead and I was an orphan. And then, when we were organising this trip, I thought I"d try and find some other member of my family. I"d hoped I had an uncle or an aunt or cousins here in Ireland, someone who could tell me about my past."
"But you found your mum?" asked Maeve.
"Yes, I found my mother. She lives here in Dublin in a house near the ca.n.a.l. I spoke to her on the phone last night and she"s coming here today. I think we"re both a bit frightened of meeting."
"How can you be frightened of your own mother?"
"It"s not her. It"s the years that lie between. All those years I thought she was dead!" Maeve could hear the anger in his voice, saw the way his hands clenched and unclenched as he said it.
McCabe turned to Maeve and the anger dissipated. "I"m sorry, Maeve. I shouldn"t be burdening you with this story. I"ve found a lot more than I expected and I"m not sure how to . . . how to handle it. Serves me right."
Maeve looked at McCabe, at his long, sharp-boned face. A hank of silver hair fell forward as he put his head in his hands again.
"It"s great, sir," said Maeve. "It"s what I"d want, if I was you. I mean, I know it"s big and everything, but it"s just the best thing. To find someone you"ve lost." She clutched the sheet of paper in her pocket and felt her heart beat faster.
"She"ll be here soon." He glanced at his watch. "I haven"t seen her in sixty years. An entire lifetime. In about ten or fifteen minutes, she"ll be here."
"Do you want me to go away, sir?"
But McCabe didn"t seem to hear her. He kept checking the gate at the eastern end of the Green, glancing across the tulips and hyacinths. Suddenly, he stood up.
"I"d better go," said Maeve, but he didn"t reply.
A tiny old woman in a pale blue coat was walking up the path. Maeve quietly slipped away, heading for the park gates. As she turned into Merrion Row she caught a glimpse of McCabe towering over the small woman as they stood face to face, a blaze of spring flowers surrounding them.
Someone had spat in the phone booth and slag was running down the gla.s.s. Maeve thought about searching for another booth, but she couldn"t wait any longer. When she shoved the card into the slot, her hand shook so much she could hardly dial the number. She smoothed out the little sc.r.a.p of paper. It had grown damp and crumpled in her pocket. When a woman"s voice answered, she hung up without saying anything and then slammed her hand against the phone in frustration. She had to try. She had to at least find out if it was the right house. Laboriously, she dialled the number again.
"h.e.l.lo, I"d like to talk to Mr Lee, please. Mr Diarmait Lee."
"Hold on, he"s just here."
As soon as she heard him pick up the phone she spoke, before he had a chance to say anything, before she had even heard his voice.
"Diarmait Lee?"
She waited in the silence.
"Yes?"
Maeve couldn"t speak. She only wanted to hear him talk.