We're delighted to present an extract from The Beauty of Impossible Things, the new novel by by Rachel Donohue, author of The Temple House Vanishing.
The summer Natasha Rothwell turns fifteen, strange dancing lights appear in the sky above her small town, lights that she interprets as portents of doom.
Natasha leads a sheltered life with her beautiful, bohemian mother in a crumbling house by the sea. As news of the lights spreads, more and more visitors arrive in the town, creating a feverish atmosphere of anticipation and dread. And the arrival of a new lodger, the handsome Mr Bowen, threatens to upset the delicate equilibrium between mother and daughter.
Then Natasha's fears seem to be realized when a local teenager goes missing, and she is called on to help. But her actions over that long, hot summer will have unforeseen and ultimately tragic consequences that will cast a shadow for many years to come...
I turned fifteen that summer which I never believed to be significant, though afterwards people claimed quite vehemently that it was. I was described as unfinished and open to powers from beyond – a dark ingénue. It is the kind of thing people like to write about young women, as if we were half witch. I should have found it insulting but in all honesty there was too much else to regret. I learned eventually to let their words go, along with much else that was whispered about me. Forgetting became an essential part of getting older and in this way I was exactly like my mother – one of the few traits we ever shared was the ability to avert our gaze from what had gone before. We understood very little, but stayed curious, which was something I suppose.
It is this forgetting which has led my therapist to advise that I return to that lost summer of thirty years ago. She is a very calm lady who I meet every few weeks in a small flat above a bookshop. She speaks about my endeavours to remember in the probing language of closure, encouraging me to retrieve my story and understand better who I once was. This requires some level of optimism and indeed strength of will and I fear I may have lost both along the way, although I don't say this to her as I have tried over time to become more accommodating to the opinions of others. She seems hopeful, which reminds me of my mother sometimes, a blind willingness to want better things for me. I would like not to disappoint her faith. I am reluctant only because it will be a lonely journey, for almost everyone who was there that summer is gone now, and I am quite alone with my thoughts on all that occurred.
When I think back my memories are bleached white, blinded out, as if the sun has erased parts of us. I have glimpses of my mother, distracted and evasive, her brown arm stretched along the back of a deck chair. There would be a glass of something cold in her hands, often wine, that every now and then she would put to her cheek, her sweat leaving a moist stain on the glass. And Mr Bowen, our lodger, his tanned, lean back descending the cliff steps to the beach every morning, a red towel over his shoulders. I see Lewis, always cycling away from me to the Ridge, the large hill that towered over the end of the promenade; his unseasonable black coat blowing in the breeze behind him. Marcus, of course, with his thick blond hair covering those alert, staring eyes and Dr Black too, his cream panama hat tilted at a jaunty angle, impervious to the heat and not a bead of sweat on his elegant brow.
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Listen: Rachel Donohue talks The Beauty of Impossible Things on RTÉ Arena
There was a heatwave that July, this is most definitely fact. It remains the exceptional month to which all the others are compared – we are only ever warmer or colder than that summer. Our small seaside town was heaving with tourists and day trippers. They jostled past each other, eating ice cream or drinking cold beer; their legs splayed as they sat on the side of the promenade, heads turned up to the sky, hoping for a tan; the smell of vinegar on the faint breeze. The sirens of the amusements would be exploding like guns every few minutes to the shrieks of children and at night there were small gorse fires on the Ridge, little spirals of blue smoke marking the evening sky.
It was a strange summer, even before it became tragic. The heat first of all, then the red sand that blew over the ocean from a far-off desert one June morning and dusted the garden. People worried that we were going to get a disease from breathing in its alien particles, with some even suspecting it was a Russian plot, though what that plot might have entailed was never elaborated on. And there were dead flies everywhere, you’d find clumps of them in corners of the room or along the windowsill in the mornings; people mostly blamed the red sand.
The liquid mercury never fell, the afternoons slow and sultry, the heat like a sedative, sucking the oxygen away and slowing your movements. Every step became a commitment you had to think seriously about, a negotiation with invisible forces that pressed against your body and demanded submission. Most nights were too hot for rest and when sleep did finally come, I had anxious dreams about death and the end of the world.
Our old cream-coloured house stood aloof on the cliffs above the town, decrepit and sinking into a lethargy of simmering heat and late-afternoon silence as the summer wore on. The long sash windows staring dolefully out to the sea. A bottle of white wine would be stashed in a bucket of melting ice on the front steps, a blanket unfurled on the grass and a library book upturned and forgotten in the sun. My mother was painting again, so there would be an easel at the edge of the orchard, jars of coloured water at her feet and an unfinished, lonely canvas left aside to dry. She never seemed happy with what she painted and would retreat into the shade with a glass of wine, a large sun hat hiding her eyes, only occasionally throwing furtive glances at her work. She was thirty-three that summer, young really. She had studied art for a few months but never completed her degree, my birth a sort of fatal interruption, so painting was both an escape and a reminder of deep and lasting failure. There was always a brittle pain in her straight back as she stood before the white canvas.
I sometimes think we were made for doing little and completing nothing, and the heat brought out the worst in us both. There was an indolence at the heart of our very being which we always tried to hide, but never quite did. People said it was because we were creative, bohemian even, but I think we were mostly just idle. We were the products of money but the money had all gone, leaving us marooned in a fading dreamland of what once had been. We were an echo and barely real at all, the recipients of both a respect and a dislike that we didn't really deserve. The guests we took in every summer in order to survive were an inconvenience and an embarrassment; we failed them mostly, as we did each other.
Elizabeth, my mother, was probably at her most beautiful. I have come to understand that her face was one of the central, defining features of both our lives and that beauty is far from the superficial thing people like to suggest. It should really be studied more completely, and not by fashion magazines, but by psychologists. Men watched her endlessly, and I spent my life watching them. It became one of my habits. That year her hair was still black and very long, her skin brown with the sun and her eyes large and green, with thick dark lashes. We had Spanish blood and it came out most fully in her, a Mediterranean flavour to her being that she emphasized with colourful scarves and by drinking wine in the middle of the day.
She read books by French authors and talked to me about Marx. She thought exams were an anachronism and never bothered to turn up for parent–teacher meetings or school concerts, but she could be charming if she decided to be, so most people in authority of one kind or another forgave her. And of course she was very beautiful, it disarmed people, interrupted them. People lose themselves in beauty, they lie when they say otherwise.
My mother meanwhile cultivated the idea of freedom, believed that you could and indeed should live a life that did not impinge on others, which was ironic considering her beauty and the way it drew attention to us. She thought it was noble to need almost nothing, to turn your back on convention and be self-sufficient. Despite evidence to the contrary, my birth in particular, she had a sort of puritan’s soul. She imagined there was a grandeur and defiance in splendid isolation, in being apart from others. In practice this meant we grew fruit and would spend most of every September soaking, boiling and pouring congealed substances into jars before storing them in a dark cupboard. The house would be filled with the smell of plums, apples, cherries, and to this day the aroma of a stewed apple makes me think not of a pleasurable dessert, but of deprivation and the coming of a long winter.
We bought second-hand clothes and books, had a twenty- year-old car and travelled almost nowhere, though many an evening was spent talking of the places we were going to visit. She took me on a tour of the world from the faded couch in our sitting room, an atlas laid out on the floor, along with ageing travel guides. I was at least twelve before I realized we were never actually going to go anywhere, indeed that she had never been anywhere either. It was all a sort of elaborate dream.
She dressed our way of living up as a philosophy – even as a very small child I remember her talking to me about authenticity and freedom – but in truth much of who we were was driven by poverty and a profound sense of failure, shame even. Our existence was the opposite of freedom, we had few means and could do nothing. We were just eccentric and alone, with little money and ever subject to the scrutiny of those who belonged more easily.
My mother was not vain – I feel I should emphasize this – she held her face at arm’s length, like it was a terrible experiment in a jar that had to be kept under wraps for it could explode at any time. She never knew what to do with her beauty really, it was an inheritance that, like our house, was unearned and she felt she had to make up for her good fortune by not wearing make-up and reading about starving people in far-off countries. My birth was part of that in a way, a radical act of deflection, or even self-destruction. She had stepped outside polite society and could never return after my arrival. I too became part of her alternative philosophy for living, both reason and excuse.
It’s important to add that I did not look like her. My therapist explains, in kind tones, that perhaps I had a misconception about my external value and it was this that made me feel lesser, an awareness that propelled me to all kinds of strange actions. I try not to laugh when she speaks so, for you only needed a mirror to understand. Beauty is undeniable, one of the many systems of merit at play in a life. I accepted this early on and was never jealous of my mother. I thought she was wonderful, her beauty a kind of statement of intent. I just knew to have been born without a similar face was a particular kind of failing as a woman, as was not having a father, or indeed any money. My shields as a girl in the world were weak from the beginning, and so I had to find other ways to protect myself and find meaning.
It was this understanding of my precarious position that cracked open the summer I turned fifteen, and brought the sky down with it.
The Beauty of Impossible Things by Rachel Donohue (published by Corvus) is out now.
