Light Blind
The first false thing was the light.
It slid under the edge of the blind as if the window had learned a new way to breathe, slicing a clean seam across the trestle table and making saints of the dust. Ciara remembered leaving the blind half-down; she remembered the rough tug of the chain, the snag at the warped casing, the little patience-click as the slats caught. This morning the blind was raised higher than she’d left it, the light was winter-thin for April, and Daniel’s mug sat where she would never put it—right on her paint-spattered sketchbook, a brown ring drying into the cardboard like a stamped seal.
She touched the circle with two fingers and felt the cool tack of it, as if the coffee had only just stopped pretending to be wet. He’d been in here. He never came into the studio if he could help it; the smell of turpentine gave him headaches, he said. Yet his careful black coffee with no sugar had made itself a little altar on her work.
Her phone buzzed against the table, face down. She flipped it, hoping for the small heart which meant a message from him—still asleep, don’t forget to eat—but it was Niamh instead, sending a picture of Saoirse’s new school shoes, wide and earnest as boats. Ciara smiled anyway and sent back a row of stars. Then, because the light was wrong and the ring on her sketchbook felt like a trespass made official, she typed: Do you remember the trip Daniel and I took to Achill last spring?
Three dots pulsed and vanished. In the kitchen the kettle clicked off. Daniel’s movements travelled through the flat in their familiar order: cupboard, drawer, the soft reprimand of the fridge as it shut. The place was an L of rooms around the stairwell; sound found odd paths, whalesong through pipes, gossip under skirting boards. She pressed her thumb to the coffee ring until the sting of it became only pressure.
Niamh came back: Wasn’t it Dingle? You sent me the beehive huts. Wasn’t it autumn? You had the green coat. Why?
Ciara stared at the message until the words softened at the edges. The green coat was two winters ago. The beehive huts were Slea Head, weren’t they? Not Achill. Or was she mixing the day with the one where Daniel had stood behind her at a cliff and she, being ridiculous, said the two of them could be a lighthouse—two bodies thrown up by the sea to keep each other lit—and he laughed into her hair and called her a hazard to shipping. She had painted that laugh later, broad strokes over black, letting yellow show its teeth.
In the kitchen Daniel stood by the hob in his pale blue site-visit shirt, sleeves folded twice to the sentences of his forearms. He glanced up the way he often did, like a person checking the weather of her face.
‘You were in the studio,’ she said.
‘Only to leave that.’ He nodded at the mug still in her hand. ‘Didn’t want to put it in the sink with your brushes. You have a system.’
‘I do.’ She set the mug by the taps. ‘Do you remember Achill?’
He smiled with that wary affection he saved for the children’s big questions and Tom’s cryptocurrency lectures. ‘Achill?’
‘Last spring. April. The B&B with the peat fire. The bed that squeaked in Morse code. We walked to the cliff path and you made a thing of me being brave about the edge.’ She could feel it as she spoke—the wind stitching its fingers through her hair, his hand tucked into her back pocket like a private flag, a seal bobbing on a punctuation mark of water below.
Daniel stirred porridge, the spoon making patient circles. ‘We talked about Achill,’ he said. ‘You wanted to go. We looked places up. We didn’t go. Work went mad. Remember the week you primed thirty canvases?’
‘That was March.’ She gripped the counter. ‘We went in April. I can still feel the blisters from those boots. You wore that terrible hat your mother brought you from Boston. Detective from a soap.’
He laughed. ‘I haven’t got a hat from Boston. Mum went, yes, and bought you a blue scarf.’
‘No—she gave me a candle that smelled like cinnamon and regret.’ Ciara tried to smile. ‘The scarf was from a little shop in Keel. We argued whether it was teal or petrol.’
‘Ciara.’ He turned off the hob. Maybe there was pity in his voice; maybe she only heard it because the light had already told her something was skewed. ‘We didn’t go to Achill. We haven’t been west since…’ He searched for safe ground. ‘Since Galway for Patrick’s fortieth, which you hated because everyone shouted and the pub smelled as if they were boiling socks.’
She opened her mouth to make the day solid with details—the burnt ends of his toast, a sheep sneezing, the old man at the harbour claiming he fixed a boat with prayers and wire—but Niamh’s message pulsed at the back of her skull: green coat, autumn, beehive huts, Dingle. Images slid and would not catch. When she tried to bring the day to heel, it put its head down and skittered sideways.
Daniel set a bowl in front of her and put the spoon in her hand. ‘Eat.’
‘Do you truly not remember?’ Her voice came out softer than she meant. She was afraid if she raised it the day would fracture into colours and refuse to be a day again.
‘I truly don’t.’ His hazel eyes were as steady as bottled river water. ‘I would. It sounds…’ He picked a word that wouldn’t argue. ‘It sounds like us.’
Afterwards she washed the bowl and set it upside down and went back to the studio because the painting could tell her who she was better than a man at a table could. The round charity-shop mirror opposite the windows cracked down the centre like a hair caught under glass. She’d kept it because people brought themselves to a crack, reading drama into physics. She stood facing it and saw two versions of her cheek separated by a fault line, as if you could choose which side to live on.
The canvas wouldn’t help. It was meant to be sea, heavy-handed green remembering things, the horizon a promise. But the underpainting pushed through like old news, and the horizon wouldn’t lie flat. She sanded, sprayed, scrubbed, layered; the line refused to be good.
Her phone: Dingle, Achill, whatever, Niamh wrote. Maybe you did both and you’re blending? I remember you ringing from a car park shouting because Daniel wouldn’t get out till the rain stopped—very him. You all right?
I’m fine, Ciara typed. Just trying to get it straight for a piece. x
She dragged her sketchbook closer and flipped past studies—hands, doorways, Daniel asleep with his mouth open like a small astonished vowel—until she reached a page she’d left herself a tiny lighthouse on. She stapled keepsakes three times; three made a braid. In the margin she had written ACHILL—APRIL in her tidy block letters, and underneath, in her own hand, a smug little line: our lighthouse, us.
At the top of the page, hidden by the coffee ring, another hand had left two lines. Engineers’ letters, careful and square: Didn’t go. Talked about it. Saved for later. —D.
She stood very still, as if the air had become glass.
‘Daniel?’
He appeared in the doorway, sleeves still double-folded, collar careless. ‘Yeah?’
She held up the sketchbook. ‘When did you write this?’
He frowned. ‘Write what?’
She tore the page free. It came too easily; a corner fluttered down the back of the radiator like a petal. ‘This. You wrote it. The capital G—your curtain G.’
He took the page the way you accept an accusation. Turned it over as if the back might volunteer a better story. ‘I didn’t write that.’
‘Nobody else would write in my sketchbook. You hate that I scribble in your margins.’
‘I didn’t write it.’ He looked hunted for a second and covered it by being practical. ‘The G is wrong. Mine loops the other way.’
‘It doesn’t.’ She went to the corkboard and took down last week’s grocery list in his hand—onions, cumin, those biscuits you like, the ones with the jam—and pointed at the G in ginger. The loop matched.
Something wary flickered in his eyes. ‘If I wrote it, it was ages ago.’
‘April,’ she said. The month tasted like a lit match. ‘Achill.’
‘Maybe I wrote it when we decided not to go, so you wouldn’t put it in a show and talk about Achill if it was Dingle or Galway and your mother would have—’
‘She doesn’t correct me anymore,’ Ciara said, flat as a table. She saw hospice windows and gulls that looked like quotation marks, and held her jaw shut on the rest.
He lifted a hand, then lowered it. ‘I’m not trying to—’ He didn’t say gaslight; he never did. ‘I’m not trying to make you doubt yourself. I just honestly think we didn’t go.’
She dropped the page into the bin, then immediately retrieved it, smoothing its bend with her palm. ‘I know what I remember. Your mouth tasted like salt and smoke. The woman at breakfast said her husband spoke to angels. You burned your finger on a coal and swore softly so you wouldn’t upset her. I remember.’
He touched her cheek lightly. ‘All right. We’ll find the photos.’
They sat on the bedroom floor with the plastic tub of prints between them, knees touching, winter duvet folded off to one side. Skeins of their life slid into their hands—Niamh’s wedding, the flower girl sneezing all over the cake; Daniel grinning beside lengths of pipe, rain plastering his fringe; five-year-old Ciara held up by her father, the sky a cheap blue. They split winter from summer, city from coast, faces they loved from those they tried to love. They laughed at the terrible haircuts.
Then the photo was there, as if it had been responsible the whole time and finally stepped forward.
They stood on a path with slate water shouldering far below, white stitches on its back where the wind pulled. Daniel’s chin rested on her head; their bodies pressed together a little too centre-frame for a stranger’s candid. A lighthouse rose behind them from rock like a white nail hammered through the day. The tilt of the land was west; the light said a wind that climbed your sleeves and redecorated your thoughts.
Ciara’s breath found a small sound. ‘There.’ She pointed to the lower right where her pencil-lover’s eye always went. Orange digits: 14/04/21. ‘April. Achill.’ She laughed—the relief was fizzy. ‘The universe still uses UK format. Bless it.’
Daniel didn’t laugh. He held the photo close, then at arm’s length like a man negotiating with prophecy. ‘That jacket,’ he said. ‘I’ve never owned that jacket.’
‘What?’
‘The brown one. Elbow patches. I don’t have one. And the watch—’ He tapped the tiny silver circle on his photographed wrist. ‘You gave me one at the end of that year. Your father’s. Not before.’
She looked at the white face catching light, the slim hands in their forever pointing. She looked at his bare wrist now—he hated wearing things to site. ‘Maybe you borrowed a jacket. Maybe it was the B&B’s. A rack in the hall?’
‘They didn’t have one. Because we didn’t go.’ He stroked his thumb along the edge of the print. ‘And the date—look.’ The final 1 of 21 leaned on its neighbour like a drunk waiting for a bus. ‘Printed.’ He looked at her. ‘You don’t print photos.’
‘I do,’ she said, hot to defend the small cosiness of envelopes and the lady at the counter with ten rings. ‘Sometimes.’
‘Us,’ she said, but the word felt skinnier than it should. She bowed the photo and saw the surface sheen break into the fine fish-scale of cheap finish. At the sky’s corner blue met blue and didn’t quite match; a seam.
‘It could be a bad crop,’ she said. ‘Or the light was odd. It was windy.’
‘Which day, Ci?’ he asked, not unkindly. Engineer voice: find the load; where does the structure bear too much?
‘April.’ She held the word like a child’s hand. She could see him pressing his forehead to the steering wheel because the rain sounded like applause on the roof. She could see herself under neon pub light the colour of boiled sweets. She could name the pubs—she tried, and they slid away, eel-smooth: The Anchor, The Sound, The Pilgrim, The—
Her phone again: Tom says the beehives are Slea Head, Niamh wrote, so that’s Dingle. And I think the green coat was after Mum died. Are you coming for tea? Saoirse wants to show you a dance.
Yes, Ciara typed. Tell her to be fierce.
‘Let’s ask Niamh,’ Daniel said, reading over her shoulder and pretending not to. ‘She remembers everything.’
‘She remembers Niamh,’ Ciara said. ‘Luxury I don’t always have.’
He flinched. ‘I didn’t mean—’
‘I know.’ She slid the photo inside her sketchbook. Pressed between pages it looked like a leaf trying to keep its colour. ‘We’ll ask.’
He nodded that contained nod of his, the one that belonged to a quiet country above his collar. ‘We can ask Mum too. She’ll have kept any messages. She archives things. Her beloved envelopes.’
Maura’s memory did have shelves and labels. Ciara felt her stomach skitter and kept the feeling; fear was data.
Niamh’s house smelled of laundry and cinnamon. Saoirse launched herself at Ciara’s knees and danced a pirate island saga, with an unfortunate donkey. Ciara filmed and sent the clip to Daniel, who replied with seven gold stars and a pirate flag, and for a minute the day went ordinary again, like a coin you’d checked by biting.
Niamh took the photo with the seriousness of an older sister raised to steady objects. She peered at it and tilted it to consult the light. ‘Lovely,’ she said. ‘You look like yourselves.’
‘Dingle or Achill?’ Ciara asked.
‘Achill, I’d say,’ Niamh said, drawing the vowel out as if buying time. ‘The way the land falls away. That’s a lighthouse. But—’ She sucked her teeth. ‘I thought you went in autumn.’
‘April,’ Ciara said.
‘You sent me a November cup of tea and wrote that the wind could strip vowels out of a man’s prayer.’ Niamh grinned. ‘You were delighted with yourself.’
‘I don’t remember sending you that.’
‘You don’t have to; I do.’ Niamh scrolled, frowned. ‘Huh. I can’t find the tea. Maybe you told me on the phone.’ She brightened, having created a shelf for the missing cup. ‘Daniel should wear brown more often. This jacket suits him.’
‘He doesn’t own that jacket,’ Ciara said, hearing how childish it sounded and being unable to make it sound like anything else.
‘He’s a grown man. He can acquire a jacket without filing a report,’ Niamh said. ‘Are you okay? You sound… threadbare.’
‘Sometimes I put my head down and look up and the furniture’s moved,’ Ciara said. ‘I keep catching the light wrong.’
‘You’re tired. You get like this before a show.’ Niamh squeezed her wrist. ‘If you went to Achill, you went. If you didn’t, you will. It’s only the west. Not a pilgrimage.’
‘It felt like one,’ Ciara said, soft enough not to be heard.
On the climb back up to their flat, a cassette tape sat on the stairwell window ledge. Clear plastic, spools like round bones. On the label someone had written in block capitals: FOR THE ARCHIVE. She picked it up because objects wanted homes; she put it back because Daniel would laugh at her for rescue-adopting technology.
Maura’s house remembered wallpaper. Three framed Daniels lined the hall; a cross-stitched proverb about tidying presided over the kitchen. Maura hugged Ciara too long and assessed their bodies for evidence of care. ‘You look pale,’ she told Ciara, and to her son, ‘Are you feeding her? Engineers should have shoulders.’
‘Hello, Mum,’ Daniel said mildly. He put flowers in a jug because if he didn’t, she’d leave them in the sink. ‘We wanted to ask you something.’
‘After tea,’ Maura decided. ‘People ask better when they’ve eaten.’ She served, and told a looping story about Mrs Delaney of number twelve whose grandson got into Trinity and then into trouble because he stepped away from the people who knew him.
After tea Daniel produced the photo. Maura took it like a witness taking an oath. ‘That’s nice,’ she said. ‘I’ve always said brown suits you. You look like your father before the beard.’
‘Do you remember when we went to Achill?’ Ciara asked. She aimed for lightness and missed.
Maura’s mouth did something tight before the smile returned. ‘You didn’t go to Achill together.’
‘Mum—’ Daniel tried.
‘You went to Dingle, though,’ she told Ciara. ‘After your mother died. That was a good idea. Grief likes the sea; it can’t shout over it. You sent me a postcard with a lighthouse and wrote “We are trying.” I saved it. I save everything.’
They followed her into the spare room museum of mail. Boxes labelled by season and year lived under the window. Maura knelt, drew out 2021 Spring, untied ribbons, fanned envelopes like a magician. ‘Here.’ A soft-painted lighthouse. On the back, Ciara’s hand: We are trying. Mornings are hard; afternoons remember how to breathe. C & D. KILLARNEY postmark. 30 NOV 2021.
‘November,’ Maura said, pleased. ‘Dingle. See? I mind everything.’
‘Killarney isn’t Dingle,’ Daniel said, but his voice had surrendered to the house.
‘We went in April,’ Ciara said, helpless as air.
‘Then you went twice,’ Maura said. ‘You’re young; you can go everywhere twice.’ She set the card on the box like a small banner. ‘What started this? You’ve both got that tightness in the eyes.’
Daniel showed her the photo. Maura’s lips thinned. ‘That isn’t right.’
‘How?’ Ciara asked. The room was too warm; it was always too warm here, as if Maura expected snowfall inside.
‘That isn’t Daniel’s jacket. The watch is wrong. And the date printing—’ She put on glasses. ‘I don’t trust it. People can do anything with pictures. Put the Pope paddling the Liffey. Don’t bring me a photo and ask me to doubt my own head.’
‘We’re not trying to make you doubt,’ Daniel said quickly.
‘Aren’t you?’ Maura looked straight at Ciara. ‘Memory is a woman’s purse, love. Men think they can put their hand in and take what they want, but there’s always a safety pin. I know what I know. You didn’t go to Achill in April.’
‘We’ll show it to Donal,’ Daniel said later in the car, hands on the wheel like he might be able to steer certainty. ‘He’ll know if it’s been mucked about with.’
Donal’s shop off Parnell Street fixed cameras and made teenagers fall in love with metal and glass. He liked Ciara’s work and kept one small piece in the back because looking at it while he mended shutters made him too melancholy. He peered at the photo through a loupe and made approving noises like a kettle just before it sang.
‘Printed from a digital file,’ he said, ‘but not a phone. Too clean, too controlled. And that—’ He tapped the corner where blue failed to match itself. ‘Clone tool. Sloppy at the edges. Whoever did this didn’t think you’d show it to a pedant.’
‘Two different photos stitched?’ Daniel asked. ‘Us at different times?’
‘Could be three,’ Donal said. ‘Could be fifteen. You can make a man kneel in a picture who spent the day standing up. But I’ve seen that scarf on you, Ciara, and a jacket like that on him, and that looks like Achill to me. The question is not whether a place is real. The question is whether you did there what the picture claims you did.’
‘We were there,’ Ciara said. She almost managed steady.
‘And maybe you were somewhere else too,’ Donal said, gentle. He slid the print back into its envelope like a host back to the monstrance. ‘Mind yourselves. Photos are excellent liars, but sometimes their lies point at a truth you’d rather not hold.’
Outside, Daniel breathed out so sharply the cold turned it visible. ‘Right. So. Someone faked a photo of us at a place we did or didn’t go, wearing clothes we did or didn’t wear, at a time we may or may not have been there.’ He tried for lightness and sounded like a man translating for a jury he didn’t trust.
‘A cassette turned up,’ Ciara said, because keeping everything inside felt suddenly dangerous. ‘On our stairwell window ledge. Label says “FOR THE ARCHIVE.” Side A April, Side B November. Last night someone texted me: Did you get it?—A. Then: I’m trying to help. Remember to listen.’
Daniel stared at the tape in her palm as if it might grow teeth. ‘Is this a joke?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘A gimmick—are you doing a show?’
‘I paint, Dan. The last time I did sound I lived with Maeve and we recorded ourselves crying to see if it made us stop.’
‘We don’t have a player.’
‘The charity shop does,’ she said. ‘It’s had one since the recession.’
They bought the deck for twelve euro and the woman threw in four cassettes because sometimes hope did come bundled. Back in the studio the machine wheezed to life like an old man clearing his throat. Ciara slid the tape in. The spools caught and turned.
Hiss first, the soft burr of air telling on itself. Then a man’s voice, Daniel’s voice, warm and certain. ‘Are you ready?’ he said, and laughed, and it was the laugh she had painted—the naples yellow she’d dragged over black until it felt like heat.
‘Ready,’ her own voice answered from somewhere tinny. ‘Tell me what you see.’
‘Water,’ Daniel said. Wind worried the microphone; a gull pealed, which could be anywhere. ‘And you, wearing that ridiculous hat.’ He laughed again, unselfconscious. ‘God, I love you.’
Daniel looked at Daniel, as if the present could catch the past by the sleeve. His hand went to his bare wrist, as though the absent watch might tell him how to be.
‘Side A,’ Ciara whispered, though the machine already knew. ‘April.’
The tape made the room smaller. Hiss became weather, became a place to stand. Somewhere inside it a gate creaked and someone—Daniel—said, “I’ll race you to the end,” and she heard herself spit-laugh, the laugh that only belonged to versions of her holding on to him from behind. Her voice in the machine sounded lighter, a stone skim rather than a drop. If that was April, that was a day when time, for once, came when it was called.
There was a clatter as if he were patting his pockets for nothing in particular. “We should’ve brought a flask,” he said. “Remind me to marry a person with sense.”
“Bad luck to propose at a cliff,” her taped-self said. The way she softened the p of propose made her, now, want to put a hand over her own mouth. “We’ll do it at a kitchen table with the washing machine on spin, practical like.”
“We will, so,” he said, and then lower, off-microphone as if he’d turned his face into her scarf, “I would marry you anywhere there is you.”
The present Daniel flinched—as if an afterimage of the line had reached across and landed on his cheek. “I don’t—” He stopped. Under the hiss his throat worked.
“Do you still think we didn’t go?” Ciara asked. She wanted to pour the question gently, but it came out like hot water from a kettle that didn’t pour right.
He held his hand near the speaker without touching it, as if checking its heat. “I think… I think that sounds like me. I think I don’t remember saying those words next to that weather.”
On the cassette the wind had a new idea and tried to climb into the microphone. “Now,” her taped-self said, stronger to fight it, playful authority she’d forgotten she wore. “Tell me what you see.”
“Your nose is red,” he said, laughing. “The sea wants naming rights to God. There’s a woman walking a dog that hates its coat. A hat in my pocket we’re pretending I’m too handsome to wear.”
“Put it on,” she ordered. “I want photographic evidence of your crimes.”
“Only if you promise to keep it forever. Your archive will need a villain.”
“Oh, I’ll keep you,” she said. “I’ll keep you and keep you.”
They both stood so still in the studio listening to her say it that something in the air went brittle. The machine whirred. Wind spoke its soft untranslatable language. Somewhere, distant, a bell clacked against a buoy like a spoon against a tooth.
“We took a photo,” she said, quietly. “We made proof.”
“We made something,” he said, as if proof and something belonged to separate species.
On the tape she could hear the arm’s-length distance of a phone held wrong for sound. He was teasing her about her artist’s refusal to centre anything. And then—oh, then—he said, with that ridiculous sincerity that made their friends throw bread rolls at him, “Let’s be a lighthouse, you and me. Shocking to ships, saving the foolish. Warning and welcome both.”
In the studio, both of them looked up in the same instant, as if expecting the room to answer. It didn’t. Paintings looked back with their patient animals and sad windows. The cracked mirror held two Ciara-throats, each swallowing.
He pressed stop. The click was surgical. The spools slowed and the room remembered it had walls. When he spoke he had to retry the words twice before they caught. “I do not remember saying that. I would have remembered saying that.”
“That’s the point of recording,” she said. Her mouth was dry. “It remembers for you.”
“Who is A?” he asked. “Who leaves a tape on a landing and writes to you like they’re a character from a dusty novel?”
“Aoife?” she tried. Old roommate, old friend. Aoife liked stunts. But Aoife had moved to Rotterdam with a man who lived in a tower made of bikes. The last time they spoke had been a birthday message angled at the wrong month. “Or—Archivist, if we’re being dramatic. The letter of a project.”
“What project names itself after a letter?”
“All of mine,” she said weakly, and gave him a smile she didn’t feel. It skated across his shoulder and fell.
He pushed the tape into its plastic case as if he might bruise it and set it on the table between an old jam jar of brushes and a postcard with a saint she kept for the loss of names. “If this is real, I have said things I meant and do not remember meaning in that place at that time.” His voice gentled. “If it isn’t real, someone has imitated me very well and it has landed inside you like a hook.”
He didn’t answer. He was looking at the cracked mirror. A hairline fracture makes its own branchings. You can watch them if you dare.
“Side B,” he said finally. “November.”
Her hand moved before the rest of her agreed. The tape went back in with the clatter of anything returning to what it thinks it is. When she pressed play, the hiss this time was interrupted by kitchen. The sonic furniture of a kettle. A clock too loud for a room that small. A washing machine spin—she could feel the floor under her in memory, a little dance.
“Good girl,” a woman’s voice said somewhere off, cheerful. Maura. “It’ll come out in the end. Stains do. Nothing wants to be permanent.”
“Don’t,” the recording-Ciara said, so quietly the mic almost missed it. “Don’t talk about me like that when I’m not not here.”
“Not not,” Maura repeated, amused. “I wouldn’t. I’m talking to the stain.”
“Mum,” Daniel-on-tape said, smoothing everything.
“Oh, I know what you’re doing,” Maura said. “You’re making a diary. Artists adore diaries. Very European. Hello future us! Send money.” A cupboard shut. “But some things don’t need recording to be true. You didn’t go to Achill in April because you had Covid the second week and then you were tired and then your father—” A pause that tried to be a laugh and in that crack grieved. “Your father needed the roof, and sure we couldn’t find a roofer sober after Easter, so you went up there yourself, and you,” to the room, to anyone who would stop her from worrying, “you stayed put and minded the kettle.”