We're delighted to present an extract from Neil Hegarty's acclaimed debut novel Inch Levels, published by Head Of Zeus.
In Inch Levels, Patrick Jackson lies on his deathbed in Derry and recalls a family history marked by secrecy and silence, and a striking absence of conventional pieties. He remembers the death of an eight-year-old girl, whose body was found on reclaimed land called Inch Levels on the shoreline of Lough Swilly. And he is visited by his beloved but troubled sister Margaret and by his despised brother-in-law Robert, and by Sarah, his hard, unchallengeable mother.
Each of them could talk about events in the past that might explain the bleakness of their relationships, but leaving things unsaid has become a way of life. Guilt and memory beat against them, as shock waves from bombs in Derry travel down the river to shake the windows of those who have escaped the city.
Certain memories emerged from this jumble of snatches and threads. A mild evening in late spring: the fields greening, everything growing as it should, a dry spell of weather, though not too dry; all well. Sheets floating on the line strung out across the farmyard, her mother sitting on the doorstep, a girl cuddled close – just the one girl. The hawthorn hedges lining the long driveway in bloom, white and creamy-pink, and their sharp and almost acrid scent filling the air. “Look, but don’t touch,” her mother said, as she had said so many times before. “Never touch – see the thorns?” The little girl saw the thorns, she nodded. “And never, ever break a branch and bring it in the house. Never, ever.” The little girl said, “why?” – but she knew the answer. “Because of the fairies,” said her mother. “The hawthorn belongs to the fairies and it belongs outdoors, where they belong. You don’t want to make them angry.” The little girl nodded. “Will you remember that, Sarah?” The child nodded. She knew the fairy ring in the field, that her father would not plough, that he skirted, walked around. A wide berth, he called it. “Give it a wide berth, Sarah,” he said, “and I will too, and that’s the best way.”
And now her father appeared, around the corner from the barn: he picked the child up and threw her in the air and caught her and set her down again, gently on her sturdy legs; and they were laughing together, young mother and young father and little girl, all laughing together, as the sheets floated in the soft evening air. “My great girl,” said her father, and he ran a brown thumb along the child’s temple. “What a great girl.”
This was what Sarah remembered – as if she herself had not been there, as if the cosy child was some other little girl, some other unrelated little girl, as if Sarah was hovering elsewhere, maybe near the floating laundry, watching. Perhaps this was why she remembered so well – because of this sensation of feeling like a viewer, a peeper, a watcher. There were other memories too and they were the same: as though she was touring a picture gallery, taking in this or that framed scene from history, in the days when her father still stood tall and upright, when he laughed and took her hand and her mother’s hand. It was all too long ago.
She thought, after some years had passed by, that perhaps it had begun with the farm. This stealth, this caution. Knowledge of the farm coloured the opinions of others, long ago. She was the child of a farmer; there was always plenty to eat; there was land; there was a natural advantage there, over other children, other families. A dead mother was a disadvantage – but being of farming stock provided a balance. She understood how people thought: and it made her wary.
What else: red-checked cloth on the table; and the gleaming copper bowl with a wide lip that was her mother’s pride and joy: set on the broad window-sill in order to catch the scant light. Her dowry, she called it once. “All I had with me,” she said ruefully, and her father laughed and gently touched her hair with a finger. “I wish this house wasn’t so dark,” she remembered her mother saying: only once; and her father sighed and nodded. “I know.”
The farm was not a pure blessing, in spite of what people thought. Much of their land was damp and low-lying: rushes sprouted instead of good grass; endless labour was required to keep the fields drained. And the house was low too, as well as dark; the chimney smoked. Her father took these facts to heart, more and more as time went on: he took them to heart as he took to heart her mother’s death: in silence, for the most part, though with occasional bouts of incoherent anger, with the heel of his hand punched and punched against the wall.
Sarah took them to heart too, in the shape of a recurring dream: of water seeping into a drainage ditch in her father’s fields. It is choked with rushes, this ditch, and very deep; and she is standing in it. The water rises, passing her ankles and her knees, her waist and eventually her neck. As it reaches her chin, she begins to scream: the rushes close in and stops her mouth. She woke always in a sweat, tears in her eyes. And around the table, after her mother died, conversation had come to dwell on drainage ditches: in their sparse conversation, in their thoughts, in their sleep. After all, their collective destiny depended on such facts.
All this she remembered.
Of course there were other events, other occasions to remember – years after her mother passed away, after Cassie had come to live with them; and not all of them sour and sad. A morning or a summer evening, say, on the beach. For they had their pick: beaches and coves below the fields; rocky foreshore, the lighthouse up the coast. Warm sand and calm, icy water, an apple pie spiced with a few cloves, knocked up that morning by Cassie; and out at sea, a ship slipping past on its way up to the docks at Derry. Or another spring evening, and the smell of green grass in the air and the noise of corncrakes calling, a creeeeak, a rasping in the long grass. Brendan sitting on the step, cleaning – something, his boots maybe; or sharpening a blade; Cassie on the step too, quiet, her face turned up to a bright sky.
And later, once the war began, the sound of explosions would bring them together. “Don’t worry, Cassie,” fourteen-year-old Sarah would say, “it’s a torpedo, it’s a ship, out at sea, it won’t come to us.” There was an echo of an echo in the walls, the faint breath of a vibration in the granite on which the house stood: the ship, the explosion was near, very near, and Cassie shivered in the bed. “A torpedo,” she whispered in the darkness, turning the word over and over, “a torpedo.” A ship was sinking, out there: in a day or a few days, bodies would wash up on their beach; anything could become normal, given time. “Go to sleep now, Cassie,” Sarah said; but the two girls lay awake in the darkness, and thought about the ship sinking, a few miles away; the fire and the panic and the rising water. In the next room, surely Brendan lay awake too; for the following morning, there might be something approaching tenderness, gratitude, palpable in the air.
Harmony springing from sources expected and unexpected, in other words – even if these episodes were few and far between.
Neil Hegarty was born in Derry in Northern Ireland. Previous non-fiction books include Frost: That Was The Life That Was, The Story Of Ireland and Dublin: A View From The Ground. He has contributed stories and essays to a number of literary publications, including The Stinging Fly and The Dublin Review, and his radio play The Story of Peggy Mountain was shortlisted for the RTÉ PJ O’Connor Award. Neil’s journalism, reviews and academic articles have appeared in a range of publications, including the Irish Times, Daily Telegraph, BBC History magazine and the Huffington Post.
