A Dance in Time. Chapter One of Izzy’s Story
I’ll begin with my father’s journals, tumbling from their secret compartment at the back of the bureau, their unforgiving thump landing on the floor. One large, thick notebook, with red hard covers, born to be a shop ledger. And inside, four hundred pages of his familiar handwriting, marching through the vertical ledger lines as if they were not there. Five smaller diaries, with black soft covers, full of shorter notes.
My pulse skidded at the sight of that writing. I knew I had found what I was looking for, even though I hadn’t realized, until that moment, that what I was engaged in was a search.
A memory of him sitting at this bureau to write rose in my mind. The bent back hunched over, the thick fingers clasped around a skinny pen. Traces of him were all over these pages. Not just his words but creases and dog ears. Some kind of oil all over page 287. An ink spill on the cover of one of the smaller ones. Even those pages that seemed clean would have been brushed by his hand trailing across. His DNA could be reconstructed from these.
I turned back to page one, hand to my chest. August 6th, 1914. A new beginning for all of France and millions across Europe. On the inside cover he had stuck his conscription card and his medical records. I touched them and they came away, the glue dry and dead.
Yes, that’s where I’ll begin. I could start a little earlier, with the moment when I first spied the hammer sitting under the corner table in the kitchen. Left there since I nailed a sprig of holly over the kitchen door – my poor attempt at Christmas decoration - it had caught my eye when its two fingers, normally used for prising out nails, seemed to twitch. To beckon me across.
Something clicked closed in my head when I saw this hammer. I picked it up, tapped its flat head against my palm, felt the weight of what I was about to do. Pulling my mind shut - no more thoughts allowed – I let it swing, hard and fast, into the TV screen. Smash. Shards of glass went spiking through the air. Smash again. The glass cabinet this time. I regretted that Star and I had cleared the glasses and ornaments from the shelves a few hours earlier; I would have loved to unleash myself on them.
Thump. I brought the hammer down on the little side table but it only made a dent. I found myself throwing it aside, then running through the kitchen and out the back door. It was dry outside and not cold, not for December. The automatic security light came on, spotlighting the weeds that cracked through the gravel. As I jerked the bolt on the shed open, my hands slipped, grazing my knuckles. I sucked on the pain, my tongue moving across bone and blood.
I felt like a hurricane, like a snowstorm, like a wild and raging ocean. I was a wild throb of hurry, keeping thought at bay.
I found what I was looking for in the corner of the shed: the sledgehammer. Back inside, I went entirely amok. I smashed the coffee table and the sideboard. I smashed the fiddly occasional table that always wobbled, making us fearful for the lamp. I smashed the lamp. I turned my back on the piano - that I couldn’t destroy – and when I came to the bureau too, I hesitated.
My father’s most precious piece of furniture: bought in Paris and transported back to Ireland, his only relic of the time he spent there. All through my childhood, I had watched him sitting at this desk to write, or do what he called “the books”, the accounts that measured his income against his expenses, the largest of which – he never failed to remind - was me.
Smash. The lump hammer put a deep V into its top and the back folded apart. As it did, a torrent of paper tumbled out. Money. Hundreds of notes: old pound notes and fivers and tenners and twenties. One of my father’s secret stashes. He had them all over the house: in a biscuit tin under the floorboards in his bedroom, inside an old plant-food container on a high shelf in the back pantry and no doubt in lots of other places that I knew nothing about.
It was the other bounty, though, that made me pounce. The notebooks. I picked them up with both hands. What would it do to me to read them? The thought set my heart fluttering around its cage of ribs, as if he were still alive to catch me. I sat down in the middle of the devastation and opened the largest one, hand on my chest as I started to read.
It was quite a while later – I have no idea how long – when the doorbell rang. Since Dr Keane’s questioning at the funeral two days before, I had been half-expecting a call from the police, yet when I heard the bell, my thoughts flew unbidden to Zach. Could he have come back to me?
No, I immediately answered myself. No, of course not.
The bell rang again.
No.
No, I had made my choice and we both knew what it meant.
I pushed myself up from the floor and picked my way through the wood and glass and debris, the notebook in front of my chest like a shield. I moved slowly, with reluctance, because anyone else but Zach was an unwelcome intrusion. On my way, the bell rang a third time and when I finally opened the door, I saw from the faces of the two policemen standing there that I hadn’t done myself any favours with the delay.
“Detective Inspector Patrick O’Neill,” said the one who wasn’t wearing a uniform, flipping a badge under my face. “And this is Garda Shane Cogley.”
I tried to steer them towards the kitchen but the Inspector - with what detective instinct? - headed straight for the parlour. I stood with them in the open doorway, seeing what they saw: the mess, destroyed furniture, the fivers and tenners all over the floor.
The Inspector turned his world-weary, mind-made-up eyes onto me. ”What…?” he asked, pausing for emphasis. “What… in good God’s name has happened here?”
Without further preliminaries, he said he was investigating the murder of Martin Mulcahy – the full name, as if it was somebody I barely knew – and that he needed me to come down to the station to help with their inquiries.
“You’re not serious?” I said, knowing from TV what that meant.
“Just a few routine questions.”
Garda Cogley snapped his notebook shut and put it back in his pocket.
“Do you need to inform anyone?” the Inspector asked, as he turned to lead us out.
I shook my head, dazed. “There’s nobody to inform.”
“Your daughter…?”
“No, she’s not here.”
“When will she be back?”
“I’m not sure.”
“We need to know, Mrs Creahy.”
“Mulcahy.”
“Mrs Mulcahy.” His look told me this this was not the time to ask for Ms. “We need to know her whereabouts. She’ll have to be interviewed.”
“She’s gone traveling around Ireland. Sightseeing. She only left a couple of hours ago.”
“You didn’t go with her.”
“No, I thought I better stay and look after my father’s affairs.”
“Yeah?” He pointed an ironical eyebrow at the devastation. “Right, come on, let’s go.”