The Country of Our Dreams: a novel of Australia and Ireland

By Mary O'Connell

In 19th century Ireland - just one generation after the Great Famine had left a million dead and scattered the Irish across the globe - a new crop failure threatened the land and its people. This time round, a radical idea began to take hold: that famine was neither divine nor natural in origin but a political event, based on unequal power relations. From this, the globally based Irish Land League was born, led by the visionary Michael Davitt. Fanny and Anna Parnell's Ladies Land League would soon follow. Ireland, and the world, would never be the same again.

In 21st century Sydney, preparations are under way for Loyola Ryan's 50th birthday. Protective older brother of Vianney, Xavier and their sister Siena, Loyola wants his family around him on the big day - even their difficult mother Kate. But Xavier has gone missing. Given his history of addiction, the family are worried. Vianney's partner Hilary fears yet another Ryan family drama. Only Vianney is unconcerned. He says Xavier is busy working on his novel about their glorious ancestor, Michael Davitt. But he won't tell them anything more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tablo Publishing
• Release date: Nov 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781922355102

Mary O'Connell

MARY O'CONNELL is a graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop and the author of the short story collection, Living With Saints, and the YA novel, The Sharp Time. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in several literary magazines, and she is the recipient of a James Michener Fellowship and a Chicago Tribune Nelson Algren Award. She lives with her husband and her three children in Lawrence, Kansas.

Book preview

Part One

a right glorious name

               A is the army that covers the ground

               B is the buckshot we’re getting all round

               C is the crowbar of cruellest fame

               D is our Davitt, a right glorious name

               E is the English, who’ve robbed us of bread

               F is the famine they’ve left us instead...

Children’s mnemonic for learning the alphabet,

Kanturk branch of the Children’s Land League, 

Co Cork, 1881.

Chapter 1 - The most beautiful man in the world

‘Lolly rang yesterday.’ Hilary was careful to keep her voice neutral. ‘About his birthday party.’

Loyola Ryan was turning fifty. According to his (much) younger brother Vianney, you would think no one had ever turned fifty before. ‘You wait till it happens to you,’ Lolly had half grinned, half grimaced.

‘They want to invite Xavier to the party.’ Hilary raised her voice a little, although she hadn’t intended to. Vianney hated raised voices.

Vianney, however, gave no indication of having heard anything. He was nodding intently as the iPod whispered the Irish language encouragingly into his ears. His left hand clutched a bottle of Coopers. His glasses rested precariously on the top of his dark hair, falling across half his face, further obscuring her vision of him.

That hair, Vianney’s famous hair, now shimmered occasionally with a silver strand. The black, however, remained as darkly lustrous as when they had first met. And although he had trimmed it back over the years, he had never utterly surrendered its length.

His sister, Siena Ryan, said Vianney’s hair was a bulwark against the cult of Australian masculinity. For which resistance she – and Hilary – loved him fiercely. But they could not say so. Vianney defended his resistance through silence. He would not discuss his hair, but kept it curling over his collars.

‘Mo chara thú go daingean!’ he recited, at last looking up at her. ‘My Beloved, I hold you deep within me.’ And smiled, his words offered up simultaneously as sincere and parody, and then returned to the task of listening to the Irish mysteries, long legs stretched out comfortably along the couch.

Vianney’s Irish language class was putting on a bilingual performance of The Lament for Art O’Leary at the Sydney winter school. He had been declaiming grief and desire for some days now. Is ar mo chroí atá do chumha, upon my own heart is the grief.

Hilary still thought the Irish language sounded Germanic, or even like Arabic with its deeply guttural sounds. It didn’t sound like the lilting silver tongue you’d expect, redolent of soft rain and melancholy. It sounded determined, confident, at heart deeply humorous, as if the speaker were about to burst out laughing at any moment.

Vianney said the fact that Hilary heard humour in the tonal nuances of the Irish language was due to her deeply ingrained, possibly genetically encoded, WASP belief that the Irish were in themselves amusing. The comic objects of Empire.

Yet he knew, they both knew, the sounds of Irish had once enchanted her – when she had first heard it, on a warm fragrant Sydney evening, at a harbour side party, where the golden haired maiden had met the raven-haired prince. Mó ghrá thu agus mo rún! My love and my secret Thou!

‘Vianney?’

‘Mmm?’

‘Lolly wants to invite Xavier to the party’.

‘Well he can,’ he said, the very voice of reason, not looking up.

‘He doesn’t know where he is. And he hasn’t got an email for him -not since Xavier’s last one got hacked.’

‘Oh come on, Xavier’s around.’ Vianney took another slug of his beer and frowned with even greater intensity, as if the iPod was being very cryptic . ‘He’s just very busy working on his book.’

‘But where exactly around?’ Her voice was giving it away.

‘As far as I know, Xavier is still shacked up with that woman, down the South Coast. What’s her name? Rosie!’

Vianney returned to his study, as if he had answered all questions. Thugas léim go tairsigh; my first leap reached the threshold. She saw that he was barricading himself inside the Lament . His knees were drawn up, his whole body was silently emitting warnings, like the cat, William O’Brien. One more loud noise, one more rude interruption to my peace and quiet, and I’m gone.

But Hilary had promised Lolly that she would try. Xavier, contrary as ever, didn’t even have a mobile phone. Or not one they knew about. But everyone knew he kept in touch somehow with Vianney. The two youngest Ryan brothers had always been as thick as thieves.

‘Don’t you have any contact details for Xavier? Just an email?’

Vianney leaped from the couch like a man driven to the edge. An dara léim go geata; My second reached the gateway. ‘Jesus!’

‘We just thought -,’ she said hurriedly, cowardly.

His answer was to stand at the door, dark eyed. ‘Haven’t you worked it out yet Hilary? It’s not Lolly who wants it.’ His tone was full of accusation. ‘It’s Kate. She’s trying to nail Xavier down, as per bloody usual.’

And then, in a graceful, lithe and seriously offended swish, he was gone.

***

Kate Ryan, the Snow Queen of Lithgow, patron saint of tough love, mother of Loyola, Aquinas (RIP), Vianney, Xavier and Siena Ryan, had featured from their first courtship conversations.

In Hilary’s mind, she had heard the Ryan family story on the first night, the night of the famous Parsley Bay party, although Vianney always disputed this. ‘You were very hot’ he said, ‘Goldilocks in her little party dress. Why on earth would I have told you about my mother on the first fucking night? Give me some credit!’

But Hilary hadn’t been put off by the story of his tough-minded mother, the difficult asthmatic childhood, the family deaths – the little brother in the dam, the charismatic father lost in the bush. Far from it. She had been reeled in by the stories.

It may not have been on that night, but it was at a very early stage in their relationship, she would swear, that Vianney asked her if she had read Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men. She had not. So he told her the story of the bright peasant boy in an isolated area of China; his family's, indeed his entire village’s great hope that his cleverness would bring them out of their poverty and powerlessness. They all hoped and dreamed that the boy would become a mandarin, part of the great Imperial bureaucracy of power and patronage. And the boy had studied very hard, for years, for the privilege of sitting the gruelling three-day examinations. And he had passed them. Rejoice, honour, wonder and congratulations.

But the Qing dynasty was in reality dead. The examination was the last one ever held. Really it had only just rolled on from centuries of habit, the last twitches of the corpse of Imperial China. There was to be no marvellous career for him. Maxine Hong Kingston’s father emigrated instead, illegally, to America – to work in a laundry.

Ever since he’d read China Men, Vianney told Hilary, he’d understood his own story, and the deep delusions that his own village community – an isolated enclave of Irish Catholic Australia – had suffered under. They too had believed in a cultural greatness, a future as dramatic and glorious as the past. They had cherished this idea of greatness, of nobility and sacrifice. They had ignored all the signs around them of a new, meaner empire.

The Ryans had been a special family when they arrived in Lithgow, not just with their fancy names. Not just because of the little brother who had died. Or the mystique of their father, the one who had given them the surnames of saints for their first names. Those facts would have been enough to make them legends at St Patrick’s School. But there was another element adding to the family glamour.

The Ryans were descendants of Michael Davitt, father of the Irish Land League, protector of the poor, saviour of the starving 19th century Irish. Child of the Great Famine, evicted from his ancestral lands, maimed further by the dark satanic mills, Michael Davitt had yet turned his life and his country around - leading an unarmed revolution of the poor, the dispossessed, labourers and farmers, women and men. This was more than glamour. This was mythic Irishness, mystical Irishness.

Michael Davitt, Brother Joseph had told the class, was the inspirer of Gandhi, of Martin Luther King, of the Australian Labor movement. Davitt had included everyone in his vision of a new world of justice and peace. He had even included the English, which was possibly one of the main reasons he was not as honoured in his own country as he should be. But to the diaspora, he was a prophet and a saint.

Brother Joseph had been an enthusiast, a young liberation theologian, concerned with all the terrible suffering of this rotten world. The boys would have admired him more perhaps, if he had not sprayed so much spittle as he spoke. People fought to sit away from the front row in his class. Once Peter Hurley had boldly said they wanted the news, not the weather, and all the boys had laughed. Peter Hurley had been sent out of class. Brother Joseph was not, apparently, for the liberation of children.

It might seem hard to believe now, Vianney had smiled at Hilary, but he himself had been a very religious child. Sickly, sensitive, and deeply interested in questions of theology. He had had many fascinating discussions with Brother Joseph. He laughed as he told her this, but his blue eyes had darkened. Something had come in, or floated up from the depths. Memory or feeling intensifying their colour.

She held her breath until he came through, out of the enchanted forest, little boy blue. Most handsome prince.

‘When I was a boy I had constant colds and flus, bronchitis, breathing problems,’ he told her. It was those early days of confession and sharing, the vulnerability and the volubility of lovers. ‘I think it was my psychosomatic response to our move to Lithgow. To Dad going. To the coal in the air, to being on the dark side of the mountains. I was always coughing and blowing and gasping.’

Hilary had practically cooed in sympathy. His brothers, however, Vianney said, had found it all very annoying. It was hard for them sharing with a cougher and splutterer. On particularly bad nights his mother let him into her and Siena’s bedroom so that the other boys would stop complaining. So that clever Loyola, the eldest and favourite, could get sufficient rest for his schooling. Siena moved in to sleep with her mother, while Vianney lay gasping and ashamed in his sister’s small bed.

If he was still too weak to go to school the next day, his mother would bring him all the books of her childhood. The Six O'clock Saints, The Golden Legend, and little garishly coloured Lives of the Saints, where all the girl saints had ruby red lips.

‘You would have liked them Hils,’ he told her. ‘The stories of the saints are like your fairy tales. And they were all about us children. Ignatius Loyola, Thomas Aquinas, Francis Xavier, Catherine of Siena, and of course me, St John Vianney, patron saint of priests.’

His older brother Aquinas had drowned in the farm dam. Vianney had only been a toddler himself at the time. That was before the family had had to move to Lithgow. They said Aquinas had just wandered away, that he was lost in a split second. Must have unlocked the back gate himself. He was four years old. No one to blame. That was the collective mantra. No one to blame. His mother told them that Aquinas was now a special angel in heaven for the Ryan family. He had ‘been taken early by God’, as the people up at St Patrick’s Church said.

The phrase had haunted Vianney. As if God himself had taken Aquinas by the hand and led him there, taken the little boy to his watery death. ‘You know I have such vivid memories of lying in the bed,’ Vianney spoke softly, ‘puffed up by pillows, looking at the light move around the room, and feeling that God was somewhere out there, waiting in the wings, waiting to snatch little children away for some holy if obscure reason.’

‘Oh.’ Hilary had sucked her breath in, at the sorrow of it all. Little boy Vianney, his raven black hair and his cough, in bed in dark Lithgow with the red-lipped saints. Having to listen out for the divine killer of little children. While at his age she’d been out playing netball in the sunlight in Caringbah, in Sydney’s secular south. Not a ghost or a saint in sight.

'No, you don't understand' he said, not unkindly, but as if disappointed that he hadn't been able to make himself understood. She had practically sat up, waggled her ears and tail – to show her desire to understand – whatever it was he needed her to.

‘The thing was, Hils, it was all fantasy. Not just spiritual but cultural fantasy. Like Maxine Hong Kingston’s father, the empire we were reared for was already over. The Irish Catholic Church was gone.’ He said this laughing, brushing his hair behind his ears with his long fine fingers. ‘There was nowhere to go with my mother’s books of the saints. The time of the great faith and the great resistance was over.’

Vianney smiled. Whatever about the nonsense of the One True Faith, he had not lost his respect for that old culture of resistance. ‘But the village community around me, the Brothers up at the school, and Kate of course, the rosary addict, they all kept hoping the corpse would rise up.’ He laughed. ‘With my help!'

And who can blame them, Hilary had thought tenderly. It was so easy to see him as a luminous child visionary. You, the most beautiful man in the world.

***

‘No luck.’ Hilary reported back to Lolly/Claudia. Hilary had in fact rung Lolly but it was Claudia who picked up his phone. Lolly was out, she said, on one of his pro-bono nights with the St Francis refugee centre. What was it with these husband and wives who shared phones? ‘I’m afraid Xavier is still at large.’

Hilary did not like admitting this failure, her powerlessness over Vianney, to her sister–in-law, who was successful at everything; career, marriage to a hardworking, steadfast and obedient man, two beautiful daughters, and an almost paid off mortgage in Sydney’s famously overpriced Eastern Suburbs. Not that, to her credit, Claudia ever said anything about any of that.

Claudia also made no comment about the fact that she seemed to have married the only Ryan family member who could hold down a job. She made no boasts that she had wisely chosen prudent sobriety over Hilary’s choice, the choice of the foolish virgin, metaphorically speaking, of physical beauty and creative promise.

‘Can you look up Vianney’s iPhone contacts?’ Claudia asked, as if that was a normal question.

‘I thought you were a lawyer,’ Hilary laughed, ‘not a detective!’

‘Well can you?’ Claudia was relentless.

‘He has a password lock.’

‘And of course you don’t know it.’ Claudia made it sound as if Hilary was an unusual case. Perhaps she was.

‘Remember, Vianney is a Scorpio.’

Claudia chuckled. ‘Is that what you call it?’

Hilary felt that old, hot, defensive surge – the desire to protect Vianney. It straightened up her body as she stood looking out the window, at the neighbours in the next block of flats. The Man was sitting on the couch, stripped down to his shorts. The relentless TV was on. The Woman was currently out of sight. ‘Leave them alone,’ Vianney would growl if she commented on them. He did not share her view of neighbours as entertainment. ‘Let them be.’

‘It is so disappointing,’ Claudia was saying, ‘especially for Loyola.’

There was a pause, as if Claudia were pondering how else it might be done. Does she want me to search Vianney’s emails, Hilary wondered, and suddenly saw it, felt it, saw herself hunched over the computer, the adrenalin rush. But how would she ever guess the password Vianney never gave away.

Vianney treated his passwords as if they were the Da Vinci code. He rarely wrote them down, and certainly never together. It was incomprehensible to him why Hilary kept her passwords together on one piece of paper in the kitchen drawer, where, as he kept saying, anyone could find them. But how else was she to remember her Visa, GE, Hotmail, Apple, Commonwealth Bank, PayPal, Qantas Frequent Flyer, Facebook, LinkedIn, ASIC, Amazon, Gmail, Digital Pacific, Credit Union, Book Depository, Drop Box, and Skype accounts.

‘But I wonder if -’ Claudia was thinking aloud, slowly, deliberately, just like Lolly. Two lawyers. Jesus.

‘So I guess Lolly will just have to deal with it.’ Hilary interrupted, suddenly impatient with it all. He’ll just have to eat his green aeroplane jelly alone.

‘No.’ Claudia spoke firmly. ‘It’s very important for Loyola to have all his family with him at his fiftieth birthday.’

Hilary suppressed a laugh at the pomposity. Claudia had no idea how normal people spoke, or what they did. Her father was a judge or something ridiculous like that. Clever country boy Lolly Ryan had gone to Sydney Uni on a scholarship, and married up. Into boredom, Vianney said. Poor Lolly, weighed down by his responsibilities – the King Man of the Ryans. The favourite Eldest Son. His mother had set him up for life, Vianney said. She had bowed Lolly’s shoulders prematurely, and the early balding was surely all part of the package. Loyola Ryan was a sad Prince Charles character under the lash of the unlaughing Queen. He had been doomed from the beginning.

Hilary decided to come clean. ‘Actually Vianney thought it was Kate asking for Xavier’s whereabouts, through you guys.’

‘Kate?’ Claudia sounded genuinely surprised. ‘I am organising this party, not Kate. It is at our house.’

‘Yes, but is Kate invited?’

‘Well of course she is. She is their mother.’

‘Well, you know Vianney may not want to come then.’

‘Hilary,’ Claudia was now speaking very firmly to the five year olds she was so clearly dealing with. ‘When is Vianney going to -’ she slowed down her words even further, for emphasis, ‘get....over....it?’

Chapter 2 - The prospects of this country were never so hopeless

Letters from Irish bishops to the Irish College of Rome, 1879

‘The last winter was the most severe I could ever remember. The cold has been accompanied by drought until the middle of May, and though the rain has finally come, the cold is persisting. The result is that the planting of the new crops is a month behind. I never remember to have seen such depression in trade and such universal poverty among the farming and grazing classes in this Diocese.’ 

Thomas Nulty, Bishop of Meath, May 29, 1879

‘The present year is one of unprecedented depression all over Ireland – town and country. Since the Famine time, there has not been such desponding along all classes as at present.’ 

John Power, Bishop of Waterford , July 3 1879

‘The weather has been and is still very cold in Ireland. The harvest will be late on account of the cold and continual rain. I trust in God we shall soon have a change for the better.’ 

Francis Kelly, Bishop of Derry, July 10, 1879

‘Our weather is very unfavourable, almost constant rain. If we have another bad harvest, our hopes will be blighted – and our people obliged to leave the country.’ 

Daniel McCarthy, Bishop of Kerry, July 14, 1879

‘Since the Famine years the prospects of this country were never so hopeless. There is an appeal for reduction of rent from one end of the land to the other: to be followed, I suppose, by the cry of distress and hunger when winter comes round. May God help our poor people.’ 

Rev Denis Hallinan, Newcastlewest in the diocese of Limerick, 

     September 18, 1879

‘I fear we are in for a famine in Ireland next year. God’s will be done.’ 

Patrick Dorrian, Bishop of Down and Connor, September 24, 1879

Chapter 3 - The greedy landlords of Coogee

Sydney was displaying her early autumn splendour. Flower litter everywhere. Crepe myrtles blushing pink, frangipanis scattering their creamy petals onto the pavements. The sea mild and blue and green and kind - glittering gently at the shore.

Siena Ryan loved Coogee Beach in all its aspects, from riotous, ridiculously overcrowded summer through to the pearly quiet winter. But it was these occasions; her sporadic dawn visits, which always took her breath away. The sense of freshness, of possibility, of a powerful yet infinitely gentle Universe lying right here in front of her, oblivious to the great struggle and grind and road and light rail rage behind. Siena loved the sea, and she longed for it, as maybe everyone must, she thought, who had endured a landlocked childhood.

Leaning over the stone wall above the beach, she could see the morning swimmers lapping determinedly across the bay. They would be doing the same determined laps up at Wylie's Baths. To her left and right, all along the northern and southern headlands, people were walking briskly up and down, or jogging or running. Sydneysiders, she thought, you have to give it to them. Always on the up and up, working for some invisible drill sergeant. Training for their own personal Olympics.

Why can’t they just stop and look?

She walked past the statue of the Digger and the surf lifesaver holding hands, and checked out the usual crowds at Barzura. How come they were always so packed. She knew the answer. The view, the view, the view. The view of the great wonderful ocean that Hilary's poor Planet does not have.

Yet by the time she came up reluctantly from the beach, The Planet was also full – of swimmers, joggers, walkers, silver haired retirees and svelte suited workers. This new Sydney of social breakfasts and brunches, of endless community. No-one eats at home anymore. All to the good of course for Hilary’s business.

Siena stepped up and into The Planet, met by the aroma of Sacred Ground coffee. Renata was this morning’s barista, a sullen but glorious tattooed girl with a great cleavage and determined wrist. She bangs the coffee grinds into submission. She looked at Siena with mild disdain. Hilary says it’s not personal, Renata is contemptuous of everyone, but Siena still feels unsure.

Out from the tiny kitchen where the heroic Pirate and his crew work, come plates of crispy bacon, corn fritters with spicy tomato salsa; ricotta, cranberry and apple pancakes; organic muesli with vanilla seeded yoghurt and cinnamon poached pears. Out the front in pride of place by the coffee machine lies a still-warm tray of Hilary’s famously huge buttermilk and berry muffins – all made to cherish and nourish the world.

Hilary works like a dog, Siena thinks, but her generosity attracts, and the financial returns do show positive. Not great, but good enough. As long as they can keep the greedy landlords of Coogee at bay. Every rent increase an attack on the social contract. Bookshops gone, bakeries gone. The local hardware shop just a memory. Still, we can always eat our cake. And muffins.

Yet even in sociable Coogee, not every café succeeds. There are occasional mystery patches, the half empty cafes in between the crowded houses. As if the populace has all agreed, made a pact, let’s not go in there. But why? Siena and Hilary are intensely interested in the failures. If not the rent, what makes a café go under? What makes the great intuitive, or is it unconscious, public turn away from one door and enter another? The person who cracks the mathematical code, the algorithm of retail, will surely become a millionaire. Maybe already has.

The Pirate brushed past her with a deep bowl of quinoa and black rice porridge. He likes to serve customers himself every now and then, to relate just a little. Hilary lets her cook do what he likes. She is so grateful to him for his loyalty. He held the fort when Vianney suddenly left the cafe business. Five years ago now, and they all survived. Thank god. No thanks to Vianney of course.

The Pirate’s real name is Nigel but they are not to speak it. Early in his life he faced down the challenge of a huge front tooth gap by sporting a large silver earring in one ear and a bandanna on his head or around his neck. It makes him handsome, dashing in a Daniel Day-Lewis kind of way. A plain man who can act handsome.

At this early stage of the day, customers are sitting in what Siena considers to be her own table at the back of the Planet, where she often marks undergraduate history papers. If she isn’t working on her own unending doctoral thesis. But that is usually in the afternoon. In return for the table, Siena will help Hilary out with drying the cutlery or wiping tables down. She enjoys the work. She always likes hanging out with Hils. Hilary is the sister Siena never had, the one she longed for in that bleak childhood of troubled boys and men. Hilary didn’t have a sister either, so the feeling is mutual. Or should be, but isn’t quite. Siena knows Hilary wasn’t looking for a sister. She was looking for Vianney.

Except Hilary isn’t here this morning. And the Pirate is looking stressed. Like he’s not doing this front of house service for fun after all.

‘What’s up?’ Siena asks the Pirate as he reappears with more food.

‘Nothing’s up,’ he says, pretending. ‘Hilary just asked me to mind the front of shop while she went home to check up on Vianney.’

‘What’s wrong with Vianney?’

The Pirate gives her a sharp appraising look. Before she can say I am his sister, he gives in. ‘Not so well,’ he mumbles as he moves on with the pancakes. ‘The black dog.’

‘Oh shit.’ Siena sighs. Not again.

***

Vianney looks at the patterns on the white embossed wallpaper in their bedroom. He’s still not sure if they're abstract designs or meant to be flowers. He follows the lines of one of the bulging bulb-like flourishes with silent intensity. His eye roves determinedly around every blemish and stain and bulge of the once bright wallpaper. Hilary’s choice. Like her hopes, once so shiny.

She’d wanted children for a while. They hadn’t always used contraception but she’d never got pregnant. He thought she’d agreed with him, to not go on and have all the tests, not to wear themselves out with the nonsense of IVF. Not to be like Lolly and Claudia, who had been like ravenous hunters seeking their second child. Just to accept the fates. Parenthood was hard anyway. Their own parents had failed at it, they told each other.

Sometimes it feels like he has spent his whole life gazing at wallpaper from a sickbed, starting with the blue carnations of the farmhouse bedroom. He had not known then that blue carnations were a fantasy. In his childhood illnesses those carnations had brought him comfort, along with the erratic attentions of Bran, his father’s dog, who would occasionally burst into his bedroom to check up on him. Bran and he would rub noses together and then the great brown creature would turn and spin out, unkempt toenails skittering on the old flagged kitchen floor, his mother calling out threats. She did not like the dog, any animal, to be inside.

Their father was far less strict. On the rare occasions Kate was out - up at a St Vincent de Paul meeting, or a Catholic women’s thing – Sean always let the big dog in, encouraged him, even let him onto the couch. All the boys, giggling, would be sworn to secrecy.

Later, the blue carnations of the farmhouse bedroom were replaced by the dark orange paisley wallpaper of the cramped Lithgow house. And no Bran. That zany wallpaper had made Vianney feel faintly nauseous, yet in a pleasurable way. His adolescent gaze would drill into it, seeking to penetrate, unlock its arcane meanings. There had to be some there.

Now, in Coogee, in another cramped over-expensive flat, he is back gazing at wallpaper, not so much exploring as hanging on to it for dear life. Inside him the dark river threatens to flood. It has been building depth and strength over the last few weeks. His attempts to struggle against it, to swim to some non-existent shore, to drown it with work and alcohol have only weakened him, not it. They do say nowadays, let go, let it come through. Yet to let the dark waters flow over his head – to cut off all air and light – that is a horror Vianney cannot allow. He gasps for breath, trying to bring oxygen and feeling back into his fingers and toes. If he can hang onto the wallpaper, he may not be carried away by the flood.

His father had suffered from bouts of depression too. There was no doubt a genetic factor. Funny thing is, that’s what they said Sean had suffered from, but in all of Vianney’s memories, except the very last, his father was boisterous, energetic, crackling with life. Full of jokes and songs, plans and stories. He was a treasure house of stories.

He was the one who told them about Michael Davitt their ancestor, one of the bravest men Ireland had ever produced. And that was saying something, Sean said proudly, because courage to the point of recklessness is a thoroughly Irish trait.

Michael Davitt had faced down the greatest Empire in the world, Sean