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He wasn’t simple, no matter what folk said. And for all they had no qualms about calling him so in his hearing, he wasn’t deaf, either. He wasn’t simple, he wasn’t deaf, his ma wasn’t half so bad a woman as folk liked to say, his da wasn’t half so good a man, and Seamie wasn’t fucking here .
He was dead. How could he be here if he was dead? Dead was dead, and no mistake.
But nothing had been the same since he died, though he didn’t quite know what had been, before. But he knew it hadn’t been this. Not quiet like this. Sitting in silence, air so thick with silence it hurt to breathe, no body daring to approach another for fear it might startle at what reached out for them from the shadows. No one speaking words into power for fear of naming the thing that wore his brother’s face and cried out in a banshee’s voice.
Ma and Da and anyone foolish enough not to leave well enough alone outside their walls didn’t think he remembered. Sure and he didn’t remember much else from then, or before, or a fair while after. But he remembered Seamie. How could he ever forget Seamie? Seamie who had been there from the day he was born, there more often than the sun and twice as bright?
Only when Seamie held ya did ya leave off cryin’ that first night , Ma had told him once. He didn’t remember when. But on the nights when he bruised and bloodied his brow against the wall to quiet the banshee’s screams, couldn’t drag in that air thick with things unspoken enough for even half a breath, bit his wrist until the metallic tang of the blood shocked him out of the salt flood of tears he choked on, he fancied he remembered that. Remembered being held, as he curled up, after the surging tide of wrong had ebbed into blank and weary fog, under the heavy quilt, the mockery of his brother’s embrace almost enough to make up for the pain of not knowing whether he had invented the memory or not.
Seamie hadn’t looked much like Tadhg did now. Sometimes he wondered if Ma had had the guts to get him on another man, if that was why Seamie was all Da needed while he had never been enough even before he gave up trying. Seamie had looked like Da and his strain, he had the look of the land in him as Da did, but there was something a bit fey in Seamie that didn’t smack of any of them. Something not quite of this world, not all in this world. Like the world knew Seamie wouldn’t grace it long and didn’t dare hold him too tight for fear he’d be unable to tear himself away. Tadhg remembered him pale, like the stone, like the first snows on the field. Hair dark of the earth and skin pale of the snow and stone: a fine pallor, tinged with blue like dreaming. Blue like his eyes. They were the sort of blue so bright it burned, sunlit sea and midday sky, leaching the colour from all around them.
For years he’d thought his own eyes couldn’t possibly be blue, because they weren’t the bright of Seamie’s. He still didn’t know what colour they were. He didn’t know whether it was worth caring. There was no one cared to look closely enough to tell him.
Dark blue stockings, darned at the heels. Soft blue shirt. Blue fingertips, blue lips, blue tongue sticking out. And bright, burning, bulging blue eyes.
That was the Seamie trapped in this room. That was the Seamie he remembered best. Seamie in his favourite grey trousers dark with wet between his legs, the room they’d shared since he was born stinking of fear sweat and shit, sick and sharp, and even as young as he’d been he was old enough to know what things ought to stay inside the body unless no force of will or act of God could keep them there. Things like piss, and fear sweat, and shit, and blue tongues. Seamie swung gently with his insides pulled out of him, and his toes were pointed down towards the floor. Scarce half a foot above it. Like at the last second he’d wished he hadn’t kicked over the chair that now lay forlorn on its side, had tried to reach for safe and solid ground.
God had no love for suicides. So said the damned priests, and the self-righteous men, and the dusty books he couldn’t read and didn’t want to. God spurned suicides. It didn’t seem right to him. A man would only take himself from the world if there was nothing and no one left for him in it. Wasn’t God the only thing he had, when there was nothing and no one else left? How could it be that a man, kicked and mocked at every turn, shunned from every earthly home, who tried at last to take himself home to God, should find his way barred and shut?
It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair.
It wasn’t fair that Seamie would never find a home with God when he couldn’t have a home with them. There’s only life on the land for one . He remembered that. Tadhg will have to emigrate . He remembered that, too. Only he hadn’t known what it meant when Da had shouted it, and Seamie had hit him the first and only time when he’d asked him. Hit him on the mouth with the back of his hand, hard enough he’d knocked out a loose tooth, and he’d wiped away the offending words with Tadhg’s blood on his grey trousers. Seamie had never hit him before. And the bright of his eyes had gone so dull and dark that he’d been afeared to ask again.
Something bad, it must have been. Something like leaving.
Only the thought of leaving hadn’t frightened him the way he knew it ought. The way it frightened Seamie. It felt right, in a way. Inevitable. Inevitable that if only one of them could stay, it would be Seamie. Should be Seamie. Seamie who was of the land, of stone and sea and sky. Seamie who was right. Seamie who was home.
Seamie had been home. More home than Da, who looked at him like he was a stranger. More home than Ma, whose mould he’d been cast from, only she was beautiful like a picture and he’d come out rough and ugly and wrong , with cracks edged sharp enough to cut and bits crumbling off. More home than the land, that didn’t shelter him, didn’t nurture him, didn’t even look at him, let alone after him, though he ground himself and his crumbling bits to bloody dust trying to carve in it a place for himself to fit.
Only to Seamie had he ever been more than bits. Only when he’d been Seamie’s had he been able to be his own, too. Not a scrap of another’s life. Seamie’s wee brother. The Bull’s other son. Someone else’s Tadhg.
Seamie had been thirteen years, six months, and twenty-four days. Tadhg had…been. He didn’t know for how long. Not then, and not now. He wondered if Seamie would have known, if he’d stayed. If he’d have counted. Not because he’d have needed to, for he wouldn’t have. But because that was what he did. He’d have made a game of it, like he so often had when they’d needed to disappear. Seamie would draw him up against the wall the bed was pushed against when Da shouted and slammed about, draw him down onto the grass of the field that was softer than any miserable bed when the day’s work was done, come on, Tadhg, let’s have a wee count . Count the clouds scudding across the sky, the stones nudging at their backs that they’d need to dig up, the cracks in the plaster of the wall and ceiling, the tears dripping from bright blue and pale blank eyes.
The numbers were, until they weren’t. Used to be they’d turned to laughter, the rhythm of the count pulling them both from the fog. Now they just turned to fog. He had never been good at keeping track like Seamie had. It was too easy to drift away. The fog was too close at his heels, winding around them and dragging him down. Down into numbness, into nothing, where nothing could touch or hurt him because he couldn’t think to be touched, move to be hurt.
It had always been Seamie who’d pulled him out, before. Thistledown in your head, Tadhg . He’d never called it fog. Never saw it, until it was too late, for what it was. You’d best have a mind, I mightn’t always be here to pull you back .
He hadn’t pulled Seamie back. He’d lost the track he’d never thought they wouldn’t walk together, and then Seamie was gone. Gone from all that should have been his, leaving behind a space shaped like him that Tadhg had twisted and strained and hacked away pieces of himself to try and fit into. He had lost Seamie to the fog before he had ever known it wasn’t just his to lose himself in, but Seamie had gone further in than he ever had, and there was no track anywhere to lead him back out. How could he have pulled Seamie out, when he couldn’t even find his own way?
There was no one keeping track anymore. No one to count the years and months and days he’d lost to wandering the fog. Trying to find Seamie. Trying to find himself in Seamie, the bits of his self that Seamie had taken with him. Because Seamie wasn’t here. But he wasn’t anywhere else, either. And Tadhg couldn’t be if Seamie wasn’t.
Thirteen years, six months, twenty-four days, and Tadhg had been but a fraction of them.
Maybe that was why he had been left behind, to live out almost twice Seamie’s span of life. Seamie had lived as the land lived, beauty worn hollow through wear. Right but for the rot at its heart, another’s life poured into it, another’s bad strain, poisoning it from the inside out. A husk left in its place, a shadow that had once had a life of its own. Or maybe it never had. Maybe it only had life when one who believed it could still nurtured it with loving hands.
Maybe he had lived Seamie’s span of life in his shadow and never stepped out of it because there was nothing of him left to find.
There was only life on the land for one
, but the one had gone and taken the bits with him. There could be no life on the land for none.