Windows to Europe

Also by Elaine Feeney
Poetry
Where’s Katie?
The Radio Was Gospel
Rise
Novels
As You Were

Prologue

Jamie said: When I grow up I will be as tall as these trees
and he sprawled fast like a salamander along a trunk. He
climbed to the first branch when Eoin said: Whoa, Jamie,
careful, and lifted the boy back to the ground.
Eoin, Jamie said, did you know that resin from trees
makes arrow tops and they are so hard they can go right
through you?
No, I didn’t know that, Eoin said.
Jamie nodded furiously then dragged his damp nose
along the red sleeve of his anorak, saying: Did you know
that trees turn into all the things?
Tall trees were Jamie’s current favourite: the Scots pine
matured fast, lived for centuries and housed red squirrels.
Jamie loved the colour red. He also loved patterns, books
with dust jackets, cats, rain that came with wind, the curvature
of objects, Edgar Allan Poe and rivers.
Jamie hated sunny days and the red sky that slung
about the trees today was a good sign that a shower threatened.
He liked rain pelting his face, soaking the layers
of his clothes until they were sopping and heavy on his
skin. Winter was Jamie’s favourite season, November his
favourite month, for November was predictable: nothing
happened but a heavy darkness covering the town like a
weighted blanket, and the sideways rain was ferocious.
Winter was bare and unburdened, leaves disappeared
from the big oaks and the River Brú, an unspectacular
river, grey on a grey day, blue when the sun shone, became
so white on a day of blanket fog, you could not see the
opposite bank, an infinite and uninhabitable space.
The white fog excited Jamie, like an infinity of ghosts
(though he did not believe in ghosts)
infinity excited him (he believed in infinity)
and ferocious things terrified him, setting alerts flashing
in the crevasses of his busy brain.
Soon Jamie and Eoin passed the stone-corbelled ice-
house.Its earthen domed roof was overgrown with tufts
of grass and knotweed. Here, the river bends and carves
into the horizon and Jamie liked to walk this far to get close
to the estuary. And though he had never been on a boat to
feel its energy beneath him, suddenly he was filled with
an urge to do so.
They watched a man sail past in a currach and wave
at them. Jamie considered whether the boat looked more
like a black slug or an upside-down sea monster. He settled
on likening it to a pirate hat he had to wear last year at
Terry’s sixth birthday party, just shortly after Terry arrived
in Emory. The party hat’s thin elastic pinched Jamie under
his chin until it burned his skin. He ran outside screaming
and eventually sat in silence at the end of their garden,
watching rumbling cement trucks roll past to new estates
until Eoin came and rescued him. And in turn, rescued the
party. Terry’s mam was saying: I am so sorry, and trying
desperately to hug Jamie, his face mashed up against her.
He spun on the heels of his wellies and said: Can
we come back tomorrow and go swimming in the river,
Eoin? I think if we swim out far, he said, busy waving his
arms behind his head, we can get to America. I’ll wear
armbands. . . Then suddenly he grabbed Eoin by the
back pocket of his denims: Watch out, Eoin, your laces
are open, and he thought about kids in school who called
them lacers.
Thanks, Eoin said, now ssshhh or you’ll wake the river,
and he put his finger to his lips and felt a sudden tightness
across his chest. He unzipped his jacket and bent down to
tie up his runners.
Jamie said: Rivers do not sleep, not the River Brú anyways
and he blew his lips out and said Brú again. He liked
the way it vibrated. It bursts sometimes, did you know
that? My teacher said when that happens it makes a mess.
And did you know that Brú means crushing? Jamie said,
slamming the heels of his hands together. Did you know
that? My teacher said that is what it means and that it is
good because rivers are important, but also bad, because
if it is strong, he dragged the nose again, it might crush
fish and rocks and boats and that’s not good, way way not
good if everyone is gobbled up. He looked at the river and
said: Or crushed.
Eoin was distracted by the band of pressure across his
chest.
And I looked up Brú in the irishenglishenglishirish
dictionary and it means hostel too, Jamie said, stopping
abruptly and pulling at some eyelashes catching his eye.
We have never been to a hostel, Eoin.
Jamie spoke to Eoin at length about various scenarios
in any given moment, yet for a chatty child, his teacher
said he did not like being among other children for sustained
periods of time. She also said that when he had
something to say, it was important he spoke fast in that
very moment. Eoin argued that this is the way of all children,
but nevertheless monthly targets were drawn up:Turn-Taking.
Wait and Listen Time. Develop and Maintain Peer Relationships.
Still, Jamie was often captured bysomething and blown off-guard
and there were numerousevents in his life that while often
beautiful and spontaneous,
were intense.

Eoin said: We’ve never been to a hostel because there’s
many people crammed together in dorms. You’d hate it.
How would you know if I have never been? Jamie
replied.
Good question. But I’ve been, Eoin said. And they’re
very packed.
Like when you were a boy stuffed up with other boys
in school?
Yes, Eoin said, like dorms and too much noise for a
busy boy like you to sleep. Besides, you love tents. Now
how about I bring you to the swimming pool tomorrow?
But unlike rainwater– Jamie hated the public swimming pool.
When Jamie began to speak in his third year, after
making hardly a sound at all until then, he spoke in
full and elaborate sentences, mostly poetry, and mostly the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe
He had found Poe in the library and was drawn to a bird perched on a blood-
Red cover. Jamie loved the library, the hum of the lights, the
red carpet, the plastic yellow furniture. It was warm and
smelled of feet. He gobbled up books and so his grandmother
Marie took him every week, and afterwards for
tea in the hotel on the Square with biscuits wrapped in
tartan plastic. Marie was drawn to books with women
on the cover and sometimes they were accompanied
by men with loose ties around their shirtless necks and
Jamie could never figure out how she read so many
pages in one week and managed to clean every house
in Emory. Walking home, he’d sing out: Whether tempter
sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore, Desolate yet
all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted
– until Mariebanned Poe.
On the day of Jamie’s birth, Marie rushed to Christ’s College
to alert her son that his girlfriend had gone into early
labour. It was an oddly sunny day for February and Eoin
was bored in a final-year Latin class. All spring everyone
was saying: Oh, your exams are just around the corner.
But for Noelle Doyle and Eoin O’Neill this turned out
to be untrue.
Noelle deferred her exams at the request of the girls’
school, who insisted pregnant students did not attend
class due to the message it gave to others. Her promising
swimming career was paused.
When Marie banged at the class door, Eoin legged it,
leaving his school bag and a lunch box full of chicken
sandwiches behind. He never returned. For in the hectic
moments after giving birth, Noelle Doyle’s blood pressure
rose. Machines beeped and the baby, swaddled like
a warm shoulder of pork, was handed to Eoin as Noelle
was taken to the Intensive Care Unit, where, fifty-
five minutes later, surrounded by her large family, she died.
Her family tumbled out through the doors in blind anger,
and screamed at Eoin who held the baby tightly in his
arms. One of Noelle’s older sisters, the one with corkscrew
curls, spat at him, then lunged at him in a half-hug,
half-punch,common with grief until security guards separated them
and he was still holding the baby when the
family walked out of the hospital without looking back or
noticing that underneath the small hat on his head, Jamie
O’Neill had a mass of auburn hair and furrowed brow,
just like his mother.
One New Year’s Eve, close to the countdown, Eoin was sat
by Jamie on the sofa. He muted the telly and watched an
old clip of Noelle competing in a swimming gala. There
had been hundreds of clips. Noelle laughing after school.
Noelle walking in the woods. Noelle soaked to the skin on
a picnic. Noelle pulling faces outside the cinema. Noelle
painted like a Dalmatian at Halloween with a black-
and-white hair wig. But after a rare night out with the soccer
club, Eoin, angry and lonely and drunk in his small, dark
living room, deleted the phone’s contents. After which,
he placed his phone on the laminate floor of the two-up-two-
down and smashed it hard under the heel of his foot.
After which, he vomited. After which, he passed out until
morning when he woke frantic and pacing about with a
dry mouth and a pounding headache, and in a lather of
sweat and overwhelmed with the desire to disappear. But
Jamie woke, crept downstairs and began asking so many
questions that Eoin had no choice but to recover and get
on with the getting on a young boy requires. And for years
after, Eoin replayed each deleted clip in his mind before
he’d fall into a fretful sleep, until the clips grew so hazy
and faint and there came a time when Eoin couldn’t visualise
Noelle’s face at all, and though he tried to (re)build it:
smile, red hair, eyes, freckled nose, wide shoulders
parts of her vanished until it was finally impossible to
recreate her.
The swimming-gala clip had survived as it had been
uploaded to her school’s website.
So Jamie, watching his father’s face change, grabbed
the phone to look for himself. And as 2013 arrived, the
year when he would turn seven, he met his mother, all two
minutes and eight seconds of her, for the very first time.
Noelle warms up by the side of the pool, whirls her arms
and stretches her shoulders back, lifts dark bug goggles onto her
broad face, fixes her hair under a red swimming hat, plucks her
red Speedo costume from her thighs, does it once more, hops three
times on the balls of her feet, finally moves her head side to side.
The spectators are filled to the roof in the stands, mostly in school
uniform, screaming her name, as though their lives depended on
this one mad brief moment, and she dives, and moves quick like
a red admiral in the summer sky.
Jamie watches it every day and just before the end
where she punches the air, he pauses the clip, then he plays
it, and she turns to Jamie and smiles.
Eoin said: Careful running, not too fast, Jamie.
The early life of the boy had perplexed Eoin. His own
boyhood experiences revealed a crude blueprint and soon
Marie gathered books in the library for him, too,
but nothing felt right. The closest he’d come to a book
making sense was Unconditional Parenting by Alfie Kohn.
The synopsis was agreeable: you’re a parent, deal with it,
love unconditionally. No star charts. No nonsense rewards.
The tall trees closed in and Eoin had a sudden urge to
leave the woods, filling with intrusive thoughts about catastrophic
moments–as was his habit, which meant he went out of his way to protect Jamie
from accidents and accidentally from the world.
They walked along the yellowing path
quicker nowthe boy bouncing and he ran ahead and hugged a tree
tightly and this gave Eoin time to catch his breath.
Jamie said: Eoin, on the law of averages, boys break
fewer bones than you think.
Not sure that’s a true statistic, Jamie, Eoin replied. And
let’s not chance it.
I am not sure of the statistics on this per se, Jamie said.
Per se?
Yes, Latin, by or in itself or themselves; intrinsically,
it is not these facts per se that are important. But it might be
nice to climb a tree and look out across Emory, it is a myth
what you always say . . .
What? Eoin asked.
The young lose their lives in strange and unimaginable
ways.
Eoin said: Another mouthful. But slightly more
accurate.
Jamie scanned Eoin’s face for clues. This was a finite
sentence. He learned this about human beings early in life:
sometimes people just stopped talking.
Soon Jamie grew tall and into the triangular shape of his
mother, unusually broad for a young teenager. He had no
desire to jump into the river or climb a tree. His mind wandered
into other spaces. They did not go to the woods so
much now as it was hard to get Jamie off screens and away
from the large board in his room where he worked out the
interconnection between much of what the day had given
to him, including delights and problems.
But there remained one developing obsession together
–watching films late into the night. And on nights when
Eoin falls asleep, Jamie lifts his dad’s arm up and escaping
from his clutch, he throws an old blanket over him, before
creeping upstairs to bed.

Chapter 1 (Extract )

Jamie played the day out in his mind,
and as his bedroom filled with rain sounds from a sensory
machine Eoin picked up in Argos, the walls lifted to
pink, reddened and reassured him that he was floating
inside a lava lamp.
He wished the day
Monday
being an even date
twenty-
six
in the year, however, of an odd number
nineteen
and an odd age, perhaps the oddest and most unlucky
age of all
thirteen
the day would go according to plan.
Since he was born at three p.m., three was his lucky
number, and he whispered Good Morning three times,
stretched, then ran his hand along his leg and counted
new hairs: Five. Six. Seven. Seven.
An odd number was no cause for celebration (unless
it was three)
so
he traced along a warm purple vein and pinched a
hair between his finger and thumb and plucked it out of
his body
– a body which was dangerously volcanic like
Kīlauea in Hawaii, a body that was erupting. He climbed
out of bed with his arms stretched backwards, gripping the
ladder like a gymnast before dismount. Jamie then ran his
hand on neat piles of books on his bottom bunk.
When he started primary school, a slew of birthday
invites arrived
– polite pattern of parents, but soon they
trickled to single figures. And by year two all the colourful
invites stuffed in his school bag with monkeys or clowns
and elastic writing in different-
coloured
inks, stopped
altogether, aside from new boy Terry’s outlier
– and that
had proved another disaster. At which time, the bottom
bunk of Jamie’s bed, once considered for sleepovers, was
relegated / elevated for Jamie’s Books of Great Importance.
The books were left in piles along the bare mattress
like tortoises with meticulous handwritten notes pressed
on their immaculate covers: Date and Place of Publication.
Date Started. Date Completed, Initial Reaction and most
pressing
– Jamie O’Neill’s Star Ratings.
The Star Ratings were harsh and among the piles, only
one book received five hand-
drawn
Jamie O’Neill Stars:
The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe.
From his bedroom window, he scanned the morning’s
sky over the identical tiled roofs. Marie’s car was gone
from next door and he stared at the sky ablaze with red;
Shepherd’s warning.
Shepherd’s warning.
Red sky at night
delight.
Jamie switched on his computer and sat in his pyjamas,
plucking the remaining hairs from his warm leg. Leg
hair perplexed him. Eyebrows stopped sweat and Marie
explained how pubic hair safeguards against infection, but
he could not understand why he had to grow leg hairs.
They were a nuisance, much like hairs on his top lip.
Maryam Mirzakhani’s lecture on Dynamics Moduli Spaces
of Curves opened on YouTube. She appeared, smiling. These
chalks are great, she said, and Jamie smiled back at the woman
with the pixie haircut and green jumper who made him feel
safe as she scribbled on the board and spoke in an inspired
flurry about flows of defined bundles while drawing beautiful
shapes. She was the first woman Fields Medallist, a mathematician
who wanted to be a writer, and when she worked,
her daughter said, it was as though she were painting.