Blasket Spirit Read online

  Gasping for breath, I sat on the bunk shaking. My chest tightened. The old feelings of fear and helplessness were back. They seemed to take control of me again, but for the first time there was some part of me that was aware of them and disengaged from their assault. I clung on, focusing all my attention on the blanket. I did not black out. It was at that point that I realised how much I had healed since my encounter with the two little girls. They had plunged their hands inside a hellish bleeding wound and had found me. They had pulled me out and restored me to safety. I looked at my trembling hands and legs and resolved that I was not going back there again, ever.

  Such irony – there I was witnessing the first calm, sunny day on that beautiful island in almost two weeks, and I was barricaded in my hut for almost three hours. In a huge bid to regain control, I began to look at my options. It was too late to head to the back of the island. Sitting outside was also impossible. People would stop and want to talk to me. I filled a bottle of water from the saucepan, wrapped Sue’s three-day-old scone in a sheet of writing paper and placed the water, the scone and a book in my backpack. I watched through the crack in the door for a break in the line of sightseers and then hurried out, pulling my towel off my makeshift clothes line as I went. Without a sideways glance, I set off. By then, I could have found my way blindfolded to the beach, dodging effortlessly every rabbit hole and nettle. A group of middle-aged English walkers marched up the path, armed with walking poles, sturdy boots and gaiters, compasses and laminated maps around their necks. Each one also carried an enormous backpack. Two of the female walkers scanned me disapprovingly as I sped by. I heard the word ‘hippie’ being uttered as I passed. Then it occurred to me that I had not looked in a mirror in over two weeks. What did they see? Bare feet and bare legs under a torn jungle shirt, and tangled long hair that had not been exposed to anything but sea water, wind and salt since my arrival. I headed straight for the beach, confirming all their suspicions.

  The beach was packed with tourists. People sat side by side on the sand, not acknowledging each other’s existence. It reminded me of being on the tube in London, where people manage to create their own self-contained bubble inches from another person’s face. In the most crowded place on the island, the beach, I found the most privacy. Nobody would invade my space here, pick up my journal, or take photos of me as if I was a museum piece. I sat back against the warm rock, forcing deep, calm breaths into my lungs. My feet were coated with hot, white sand. I opened the book on my lap and watched the activity from under the sanctuary of my hat. The Great Blasket Island seemed like a different place. Gone were the rain, the cold sand and the Beverley Sisters. In their stead were a South Pacific island, sparkling blue sea and dazzling white sand. A group of children fought valiantly against the incoming tide as it dissolved their sandcastle walls. Some American university students sat and lay around their tutor farther along the beach. Gradually, they peeled away from their tutorial, tempted by the allure of a yellow frisbee. Couples of various nationalities strolled along the tideline. An assortment of white male stomachs ballooned from the sand at intervals. Families and couples crowded the beach, all observing invisible boundaries that shielded them from their neighbours. The father and son who had barged in on me earlier came and sat against the rocks a few feet from me. I looked over. Both of them failed to acknowledge my presence now.

  During the afternoon the ferries ploughed relentlessly between the mainland and the island. Clusters of purposeful day-trippers landed and launched fresh waves of attack. As I paddled in the ripples, I looked up at the island. Most people in these landing parties seemed to follow exactly the same well-trodden routes – to the weaver’s house, the cafe and the toilet between the hostel and the cafe. Many ignored the climb up into the village and headed straight to the beach. Large groups were gathered outside the cafe on picnic benches, while a constantly changing gathering rested itself outside Sue’s door. Many, on leaving Sue’s house, stopped and orientated themselves by opening out large maps. They too followed well-worn paths that led them to the ruined homes of the island writers – Tomás Ó Croimhthain, Muiris Ó Súilleabháin – and, eventually, up to the hostel, which had once been the home of the legendary Peig Sayers. From there, most went next door to the cafe, once home to an islander known as the Buffer Keane, where they sat and watched for the return ferry.

  Some individuals – though very few – seemed to step ashore with no predetermined plan. They ambled, allowing the island to unfold before them, wandering off the beaten track. One or two beat their way through the heather and bracken, heading straight to the top of the island. My heart lifted in anticipation of the thrill that awaited them: the islands to the west, the Sleeping Giant of Inis Tuaisceart to the north and the hazy pyramids of the Skelligs on the southern horizon. Each of these people, in their turn, stared and was still for a long time.

  Gradually the returning ferries drew the people from the cafe, the beach and the hillside. They spilled down through the village like an ebbing wave. The beach began to empty and I dragged my towel farther down as the shadow slipped across the rocks.

  A couple on front of me waited until the last minute. ‘We’ll miss it if we don’t go now. The children will be wondering where we’ve got to.’ The woman had her bag over her shoulder and stood waiting for her husband.

  ‘You’ll only be standing there waiting like the rest of them. It won’t go on time. Sit down.’ The man lay on the sand, his inflated stomach a nasty shade of pink.

  ‘The ferryman said half four. The blue ferry tickets return at half four.’ She stood there holding his shirt out to him. He ignored the shirt.

  ‘Look, he’ll say that to everyone so as to make sure that they’re all not going to turn up for the last ferry. Sit down or move. You’re in my sun.’

  ‘You know more than the ferryman then, do you? Well, maybe you don’t mind leaving the children on their own in Dingle for the night, but I do.’ With that, she flung the shirt onto his stomach and charged up the beach. She seemed to be bitter and angry. I wondered was it years of living with him that made her so? I watched the crowd on the slipway thin out as the dinghies moved in and out to the waiting ferries. A bit of me willed him to miss it, to make him pay for dismissing his wife’s anxiety. It was only when the last remaining dinghy made for the slipway that he moved. He waddled up the beach casually.

  I watched the last ferry disappear and, with it, the tension in my body. As my shoulders relaxed again, I was aware of how rigid they had been all day. I took off my hat and stretched out in the sand. The sandcastles had long since been swallowed up by the incoming tide and the waves dissolved and smoothed the footprints of hundreds of people. As I walked back up to the rocks, I saw a plastic bottle on the sand. I stared at it for a minute, then picked it up. I had no idea what I was going to do with it. After that, I spotted a crisp bag, another plastic bottle and a chocolate wrapper. Another wave broke and a plastic supermarket bag was sucked back into the sea. I imagined one of the seals choking on it. The water was up to my thighs before I managed to retrieve it.

  Laden with plastic rubbish, I struggled back up the cliff and into the lower village. Like someone returning to a former war zone, I was still cautious, on the lookout for a remaining sniper wielding a camera. I thought of my hut and wondered if the door had been pushed in. I tried to quicken my pace back up through the ruins, but my knees were still too weak. The various shocks of the day were quickly turning to anger and upset. How was I going to face this every day? Why could I not just get on with it like everyone else? So preoccupied was I that I did not see Sue coming along the path.

  ‘Well, don’t you look a sight!’ she said. I could have said the same to her. She also was clutching an assortment of plastic wrappers and a cracked yellow frisbee. ‘So how did you survive the Normandy Landing?’

  Cannibals

  It was a week later in the early morning. Sue was returning from her walk to meet the first ferryload of tourists and to open up her sh
op. I was escaping to the back of the island and had just locked my door. We met each other halfway along the north path. ‘They must be on their way, judging by the speed of you,’ she smiled.

  ‘Yes, first ferry has just set off. You’ve got twenty minutes at least before they arrive.’

  ‘I’d gladly swop with you today. It’s beautiful at the back of the island. You don’t fancy a day in the shop?’ She smiled as she said it, knowing it would be my idea of hell. As soon as the first ferry set off from Dún Chaoin each day, I padlocked my door and headed to the tower, the fort and the Bright Dwellings for the day, armed with my binoculars, my book and some lunch.

  ‘I might just pass on that today, Sue.’

  ‘It’s time we had a spell of bad weather. I need a break from the ferries.’

  ‘Are you running short of stock?’ I imagined that she needed a few uninterrupted days’ weaving at this stage.

  ‘No, not at all. I need a couple of days of peace, walking and not talking to anybody. That’s what I love about the winter.’ I sat back against the wall of peat and heather that rose steeply behind us. My hands sank back into spongy moss and a cluster of beautiful little blue flowers. I touched their delicate petals. ‘That’s milkwort,’ she said. Every time I met her, she introduced me to something new. Already I was seeing bog pimpernel, meadow buttercup, tormentil and knapweed everywhere. Now I had learned another tiny plant’s name.

  ‘How do you remember the names of them all?’

  ‘I used to bring them back to the house and then look them up in my books. I’ve learned the names gradually over the years, like the birds’ names. Have you seen the cannibal plant?’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Cannibal plant… well, it’s called sundew. It closes as an insect lands on it and then secretes juices to digest its victim.’ I obviously looked disgusted at this bit of information: it sounded like something out of a horror film. Sue laughed and began backtracking up the north path. ‘They’re growing up here in the bog.’

  ‘Hang on – do I really want to see this?’ I recalled a giant clam that I had seen in a film, snapping its shell closed on the legs of a diver. Sue stepped out ahead of me. I had to run to catch up. Seventeen years on the hills of the Great Blasket Island create a fitness that is not easy to emulate. I followed her cautiously up into the bog. She stopped and bent down among mounds of dew-covered moss, picking a stem of bog cotton and indicating an innocuous-looking cluster of pink flowers, with star-like pointed petals.

  ‘Watch this.’

  She gently touched the centre of the flower, which responded by closing and pulling the stem inside. I touched another with a feather. I wasn’t going to risk my finger. I touched each flower and they all closed.

  ‘Great choreography, but you’ll have them all starving. I’d better get back.’

  ‘I’ll walk back with you as far as the turn, or would you prefer a bit of peace before the Normandy Landings?’

  ‘No, come on.’ We watched the skylarks spiralling above, and two determined-looking cormorants flying back in from Inis Tuaisceart. They were easily 150 metres below us, even more.

  ‘What will you do if the island gets busier and busier?’

  Sue said nothing for a moment and then stopped walking.

  ‘I’ll just move farther out ahead of them. Out to one of the other islands. I’ve landed on most of them with the lads over the years. I’d live on any of them… well, except An Téaracht – that might get a bit claustrophobic. You couldn’t walk anywhere. Inis Mhic Uibhleain or Inis na Bró would be beautiful. They were both lived on over the years.’

  ‘Whatever about Inis na Bró, I don’t think Charlie Haughey would be too keen on sharing Inis Mhic Uibhleain with you!’

  ‘And how do you know? We might be very happy.’ As she laughed, she trained her binoculars on a stonechat in the heather.

  ‘Have you ever landed on Inis Tuaisceart?’

  An Fear Marbh (Dead Man) or Sleeping Giant as visitors called it, rested three miles off to our left. The slumbering man pointed his mighty feet to America and his head to the Kerry mainland. Over his belly, his hands were clasped in repose. He had no intention of going in either direction.

  ‘I did once when they were moving sheep. At least the sheep were pulled up on ropes. I had to climb. It’s hard to land there and it’s impossible altogether in bad weather. Anyway, I wouldn’t want to spend a night on it. It was the one time I was relieved to get off an island.’

  Inis Tuaisceart – An Fear Marbh – viewed from near the signal tower on the Great Blasket.

  ‘How come?’ Sue had weathered some of the most appalling storms on the Great Blasket on her own.

  ‘Well, maybe it was because of what happened there, but I had a bad feeling and I didn’t even want to go into the clochán.’

  ‘I thought Páid had only made up that story just to scare me from going back up to the hut in the dark.’

  ‘No, it’s true. It was all recorded by a historian called Du Noyer. He interviewed the people just after it happened.’ I was shocked.

  ‘But didn’t the lads sleep in the clochán when they were shearing?’

  ‘They did,’ she laughed, ‘armed with a crate of beer, a lantern and a mobile phone. And they stayed awake all night. Brave men they are. I’d better run. Call in for a cup of tea later.’

  We had reached the turn. She waved goodbye and sped off to her house just as the first dinghy was leaving the ferry. I made a hasty retreat back along the north path and scampered up to the fort, where I sat back against the stones and gazed across at Inis Tuaisceart. I could see the eighty sheep dotted like baby mushrooms through the bracken. The belly of the giant was covered in plum-wine patches of heather. Through the binoculars I could follow Sue’s directions along rocks, heather and broken walls to the mouth of St Brendan’s clochán, the place where it had happened.

  It was 1848. Inis Tuaisceart was always used as a sheep station. Usually no more than one family lived on the desolate and windswept island. The only shelter to be found was the clochán, or beehive hut, built over a hollow in the earth. The underground chamber measured only 3.3 metres in diameter, and was reached by descending a number of steep steps. In the centre a fire burned constantly and the smoke escaped through a hole in the roof.

  In the autumn of 1848, a couple, Tomás Ó Catháin and his wife, Peig, went to live on the island to tend the sheep. Shortly after their arrival, the weather turned bad. The boats from Dún Chaoin and the Great Blasket Island, which normally called to the isolated shepherds with supplies, news and companionship, were unable to cross to Inis Tuaisceart. All that the Great Blasket Islanders could do was to keep a watch on the constant ribbon of smoke from the clochán of their storm-bound neighbours. This continued, unchanged, for two weeks, until one day a child raced into Teach an Rí to say that there was a fire lighting on the top of Inis Tuaisceart. The Blasket village gathered on the northern cliffs and watched the distress fire of Tomás and Peig. There was no let-up in the weather to get a boat across to them. After the day that the signal fire was seen, there was no further fire. There was no smoke from the clochán and no sign of anybody moving on the island. All the islanders could do was pray and wait. It took another month before a naomhóg could make the crossing to Inis Tuaisceart. In all, the couple had been stranded for six weeks.

  Three men rowed the three miles from the Great Blasket Island to Inis Tuaisceart. The talk in the boat faltered as they got closer to the island. They had no idea what trouble they would find with Tomás and Peig. There was talk of a broken ankle, a rock fall from the roof and flooding, stranded sheep, fever and even the mischief of fairies. As the men hauled themselves up the cliffs, they became even more anxious. The island looked deserted. They called out for Tomás and Peig as they made their way up the sheep path to the enclosure.

  There was no response. A ewe scampered out of their way as they came up to the clochán. Again they shouted to the silence.

  Seán was
the first into the enclosure. ‘In the name of God!’ He stood in shock. He had seen sheep savaged by dogs before, but nothing like this. The sheepdog lay outside the entrance, surrounded by flesh, bones and blood. The grass was littered with rotting remains. The dog hardly noticed the men as she ripped the meat of a bone between her paws. The other two men stared in silence. Seán called Tomás and Peig’s names again. This time, his voice began to shake. The younger man, Liam, stepped over the carnage to join him. He stopped and buckled to his knees, retching. The two other men turned and instantly recognised what he had found on the grass. In front of him was a human leg bone half-stripped of flesh.

  Seán and Séamus prayed aloud at the entrance before they bent down to peer into the darkness. The steps were sticky and wet. They could see nothing. Inside the clochán was dark, freezing cold and rancid. Neither could breathe with the stench. They pulled their jackets up over their mouths and stood paralysed with terror at the foot of the steps. Gradually their eyes adjusted. Through the dim light from the stairway and the chimney hole, they began to see the floor of the clochán, which was a bloody mess of putrefying lumps of human flesh. At the end of the steps by the men’s feet was what was left of Tomás Ó Catháin; a bloated torso with its limbs hacked off and missing. Séamus threw up and clambered back up the steps into the air.

  Seán stared into the darkness of the far wall. He could hear what sounded like a terrified animal under the fleeces and woollen blanket. Some kind of devilish animal had done this. In a fit of rage, he ran at it and tore the cover off the creature.

  It cowered there, matted hair caked to its blood-smeared face. The eyes stared out, but saw nothing. It took a while for Seán to recognise the young girl he had once danced with in Dún Chaoin. Peig Ní Chatháin lay starving, half-dead and quite mad.