Trespasses

Louise Kennedy

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

The End of the World is a Cul de Sac

for Stephen, Tom and Anna

2015
THE IRISH FOR NO
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DÚIL
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CHIAROSCURO
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IN CALVARY’S FLOW
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WHEN I MOVE TO THE SKY
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

There is a melancholy blast of diesel, a puff of smoke which might be black or white.

So the harbour slips away to perilous seas as things remain unsolved; we listen

To the ex cathedra of the fog-horn, and drink and leave the world unseen –

Ciaran Carson, ‘The Irish for No’

Ah! That first affair, how well one remembers it!

Stanley Kubrick, Barry Lyndon

2015

They follow the guide, a thin, pale girl. She’s wearing a linen sheath dress in moss green, and there’s a fine spiky tattoo wound around her right arm that looks like barbed wire. Cushla moves to the edge of the crowd, away from the French and Italian tourists in expensive raingear; her own age – which stills surprises her. Away from the man on her left, pushing fifty, with steel-grey hair that’s greased back, small glasses and a soft wool jacket.

The guide stands slightly to the side of the next exhibit, a couple of feet from Cushla. This close, she can see the barbed pattern on the girl’s skin. It’s gorse, spiky tendrils of stems and golden flowers. Cushla likes her for it, for choosing the shrub that chokes the hills here, not roses or butterflies or stars.

It’s a piece of sculpture, made of resin, fabric, glass fibre. A white figure on a plinth, chalky, sarcophagal, a shrouded look about the face, features indistinct. The body is oddly sexless, though it is male; there is breadth in the torso, bulk at the chest. From the waist up he looks peaceful, sleeping head resting near the bend of an arm. There is something not right about the pose, though; his limbs are splayed awkwardly, have not been arranged.

The girl begins to speak. This work is from the seventies, she says. The artist was moved to make it when her friend was murdered. While the almost classical composition is a familiar representation of death, the disordered configuration is shocking, hinting at the violence of the moment of the subject’s murder and the chaos of the hours that followed. She gives us her friend as Everyman, yet his rather untidy bearing makes him human.

The others move towards the next piece, a structure like a Tardis fashioned out of six doors taken from Armagh Prison. Cushla hangs back and steps towards the sculpture. The girl with the gorse tattoo was wrong. The artist hasn’t shown Everyman. The detail is intimate, accurate even, almost as if the cast had been moulded over his body. The neat ball of fat at his middle. The slight raise of his right shoulder. A doughiness about the jaw. She looks at his face, afraid she will see fear or pain, but he looks just as he did when he was sleeping.

Trespasses

CONTENTS