Visiting memories by the lake of shadows

THERE WAS A Loreto girl in my youth who abides with me yet. We used to sing hymns at folk masses, and smoke cigarettes up the chimney, when I was 16. She’d become tearful when speaking about someone she had a crush on, or about the rosy future where she imagined herself drenched with love and cherished by a perfect prince.

She had prominent teeth and long black hair and a lisp that made certain words endearing, like the word kiss, which she used a lot. I missed her when she went away to live in Inishowen. I’d hitch up to visit her sometimes, when I was in my 20s, and we’d sit in the bar in Buncrana, laughing at an old woman who used to put sugar in her Guinness. Eventually the Loreto girl married a shopkeeper and we lost contact.

But she still lives in Inishowen, and her hair is still black, and at 60 her weather-beaten face is full of grace.

Last week I went up to the lake of shadows, the dark-eyed twilight world around Lough Swilly, to see her again. We ate a delicious fish in the Beach House, and then walked through Swan Park. A shower came so suddenly that we sheltered at the gable of the public toilets, a spotless building on the waterfront, waiting for the rain to ease.

I said, “I’m still getting hot flushes.” It’s something I’ve been suffering for months as a result of chronic fatigue.

“Go you into the toilet and skite cold water on your face,” she said. “It’s the only thing that works.”

She told me that when she was going through the menopause, she used to get up in the middle of the night and go downstairs to the shop, open the sliding lids of the ice-cream freezer, and shove her head down between the Choc Ices.

Eight geese flew over our heads and on the shoreline the rocks were smooth and looked as oily and slippery as the back of a seal. Black green weed lay in clumps along the beach. The tide was out. And beyond the limp waves the sea was grey, and in the distant mist the hills on the far shore were a vague shadow, and the stillness of the lough broken only by a few cormorants patrolling the surface of the water.

“No wonder it’s called the lake of shadows,” I said. “It’s like a door into another world.”

She said, “It’s also called the lake of one thousand eyes.” Which reminded me of something I dreamt the previous night.

I was driving a car and as I came to the crest of a hill, doing high speed, I saw before me on the opposite side of the road a big white van, its rear end open and the big black eye of a speed camera looking straight at me.

“I’m caught,” I screamed, in my dream.

“And so you were,” she said. “For those who will not be led must be dragged. And those who don’t listen to their own heart will one day be ambushed by the unconscious; that all-seeing Eye, and like a monster breaking the waves it will come straight for you.”

I didn’t know what she meant so we continued in silence, the shadowy Lough Swilly on our left, until we came to a plaque marking the spot where a priest was beheaded 300 years ago.

All around us the land was substantial and eager with life – heather, willows, hazel and oak saplings – but the fog on the lough contained the ghosts of tall ships: vessels perhaps by which the Earls of Donegal and Tyrone left Ireland forever; or by which Wolfe Tone came home, by moonlight; or from which a certain slave trader disembarked after surviving the storm that changed his life, and inspired him to write Amazing Grace.

On the way back we walked past the red brick walls of the Fruit of the Loom, a gigantic mausoleum of shadows, its doors blocked up and its windows blinded with sheets of plywood, as if it might be holding secrets within.

Rain lashed the Victorian facades opposite an empty playground, and my friend said, “You look better now. Perhaps you’re cured.”

And I said, “Yes, the walk did me good,” and I began humming Amazing Grace, but the Loreto girl was gone ahead of me, and the fog had enveloped her, and I realised that she too had dissolved forever into the lake of shadows.