Before the Fall Read online

  Before The Fall

  Centenary Edition

  Orna Ross

  Contents

  Reviews

  Preface to the Centenary Edition

  Plash: Norah

  1923

  Spill

  1995

  1923

  1981

  Reflux

  1923

  1995

  1984

  1923

  1984

  1995

  Swell

  1986

  1995

  1986

  1923

  1988

  1923

  1995

  1923

  Surge

  1923

  1995

  1989

  1995

  1923

  1995

  1923

  Crest

  1995

  Break

  1932

  THE END

  The Prequel & Sequel

  In the Hour

  I’d love your feedback

  Like to be a reader member?

  More Books By Orna Ross: Fiction

  More Books by Orna Ross: Poetry

  Acknowledgments

  Publication Note

  My Podcast

  Reviews

  BIBLIOFEMME.COM: “An incredible debut that will have the reader absolutely enthralled.”

  * * *

  SUNDAY INDEPENDENT: “The sort of book you could happily curl up with…A hauntingly captivating read.”

  * * *

  IRISH INDEPENDENT: “An impressive canvas…

  a captivating read…an achievement.”

  * * *

  EVENING HERALD: “A haunting tale…a gripping story.”

  * * *

  SUNDAY TRIBUNE: “Epic sweep…ambitious scope…

  an intelligent book.”

  * * *

  EMIGRANT ONLINE: “A riveting story…vividly brought to life.”

  * * *

  AMAZON.CO.UK: “It made me laugh, it made me cry, it made me think. It’s beautifully written. I highly recommend it.”

  * * *

  THEBOOKBAG.CO.UK: “I couldn’t put it down.”

  * * *

  AMAZON.COM: “Ross has written a masterpiece and,

  in this age of exaggeration and hyperbole, I hope I can convey

  just how exceptional her book is.”

  Preface to the Centenary Edition

  This is the second book in a trilogy about an Irish family and an unsolved murder in the past that causes great suffering in the present. Before the Fall picks up where After the Rising left off and continues to be narrated by Jo Devereux in the same hot summer of 1995. We now know who killed Barney, Jo’s great-uncle—or we think we do—but who killed the person who killed him?

  The answer plunges Jo back into Rory’s arms and further under the surface story of nationalist politics she’s been bequeathed, into a the far more primal struggle: that between men and women.

  For a century the 1920s civil war conflict in Ireland has been known as ‘The War of The Brothers’ but in this book, I wanted to pay tribute to the sisters: the many women who, in the words of Jo’s Granny Peg and my own Auntie Ag, also ‘did their bit’ for the independence struggle. And also the experience of the many women and men who, like Jo, like me and my family, find they cannot live on the island of Ireland, for whatever reason—but are none the less Irish for that.

  People emigrate from their home for all kinds of reasons. Jo cannot find love and a decent life within the legacy of what happened in the 1920s. She moves to London then to San Francisco in search of a life she can occupy and lands herself into the heart of the sexual politics—and the AIDs epidemic—of the 1980s.

  There she discovers that politics is not just the nationalist struggle she’s rejected, but the encoding of all kinds of power relations. Colonial politics, constitutional politics, diaspora politics, sexual politics, class politics, race politics, gender politics: all rise from the same root. In all cases, denial and suppression leads to destruction. There she also get to grips with another aspect of her inheritance: alcoholism.

  Her gender and addiction struggles mirror her ancestors’ national and intra-national struggles.

  Jo painstakingly articulates aspects of the female experience which never should be, yet so often are, forgotten. And she comes up against a key question for any progressive person: why does the push for positive, creative change so often disintegrate into negative, destructive conflict. That’s what happened in the Irish Civil War, that’s what’s happening in the TERF and BIPOC and BAME wars that are playing out online today, that’s what’s happening when a sensitive soul gets lost in addiction.

  As Jo puts it: “Rebellion has an energy that sweeps people up but what happens after the rising?” Her bid for escape and her getting lost in alcohol are inter-connected, just as the Irish Easter Rising and Civil War were inter-connected. You can't talk about one without the other. You can’t claim the glory of the Rising if you ignore the shame of what followed. You can’t walk away from your past, you must accept it as you work for a finer future.

  And so we come to now. How Ireland commemorates those years of 1922 and 1923, and what grew out of them, a hundred years on will be telling. The commemoration of the 1916 Rising has been both praised for being “well organised, sensitive, dignified and inclusive”, and also criticised for the opposite: glorifying a “narrow concept of Irishness.” 1 Which is it? Both, of course. And the only way to prevent conflict around two opposing sides on this is to allow all the other voices to be also heard, so that we see the larger truth beyond the nationalist story.

  The Rising was a theatre of insurrection, inspiring the “terrible beauty”2 of violent rebellion for a century, while simultaneously generating pride in a newborn nation. The Civil War was a less complex, but more terrible affair. A kitchen conflict. Far more everyday, far more personal, and far more frightening for that.

  And far more relevant to the Ireland of the 2020s, as Brexit politics energise the prospect of a united Ireland, as advances in women’s and LGBTQ+ rights teach us something about relatively peaceful revolution, as the never-ending movements of emigration and immigration show up our notions of nation.

  The question for us in these centenary years is: what might we now imagine into being, as a dispersed and diverse people, scattered across the globe but united by this strange, slippery, scintillating identity, this being Irish? What new ways await us? And what value does our learning, our positive, creative change, have for others?

  So I offer this story about the people of Mucknamore, this murder mystery that is also a love story, as my contribution to the multitude of voices, from within and outside the Irish identity, that we need to hear.

  Orna Ross, London, 2020.

  1 Dennis Kennedy. 2016. “Pride in ‘inclusive’ 1916 commemoration rings hollow”. Irish Times.

  2 WB Yeats. 1921. “Easter 1916”

  Plash: Norah

  1923

  Thirty-six hours she was in the coming. The pain of pushing my insides out, pain cutting me to blood. Two nights and a live-long day with no one to talk to. All I had was a cross old nun saying every few hours I'd be another while yet and getting annoyed with me because she wanted to be in her bed.

  Curses to the Lord. Curses on curses and pain on pain, for a night and a day and another long night. And when she finally came, she didn't come easy. Push. Push again. Push, for God's sake, push would you, push I said, push can't you? Push.

  At the very last, when I could do no more, Child took over herself.

  "It's coming, it's coming," said the nun. Out my daughter slithered in a rush of blood.

  She was given to me and �
�� oh! — all curled over, she was, from being inside me, her back curved like a bowl and her hands and feet like little cups. A black downy head on her. Arms and legs purple and fleshy. Bits of my body and blood stuck to her.

  And her eyes. Open so wide they seemed half the size of her face. I couldn't take my own off them. They drew me in.

  "Look how she's looking at me," I said to the nun.

  "Don't fool yourself," she said. "Newborns see nothing for weeks."

  She was wrong. I was being seen and it was opening my own eyes wide too.

  Too wide.

  They cut the cord. All for the best, they said. Hush now, stop now, all for the best now.

  They took her away as my bosoms were filling. Your milk's come in, the auld nurse said, when I told of the pain in them. Full hard fit to burst, longing for little lips to ease them.

  And beneath, my belly was shrinking, closing in round the space where she used to be. And me, leaking. Oozing from every soft spot in my body, blood and milk and tears.

  Spill

  1995

  Midsummer is past. The days are getting shorter again. Sometimes, it feels like I've never lived anywhere but this tiny shed, in this tiny village, on the edge of the ocean. My busy days in San Francisco — so full of to-dos and appointments — used to seep past without me, but here, my life is stripped down to six basic activities: sleeping and eating, writing and reading, running and relaxing. Time is mine again.

  Life likes to take it easy, it seems, and the only way to be properly alive is to slow your pace to match.

  So I find myself less bored than when I was busy, and less lonely than I've been for years, though I've never spent so much time alone. Solitude soothes me, along with the fresh air, the sound of the sea, and the past that I'm excavating with my pen. All are helping me to heal. I didn't know that was what I was doing when I came here, but I know it now, and I tell myself that's why I've stayed on, why I haven't yet left as planned.

  I'm reading an election leaflet of Gran's from 1923 when a voice from the door interrupts. "Jo Devereux, sometimes I think you're mad."

  I jump. Then I see who it is. Irritation, instant and involuntary, coils in me.

  I don't want to stop writing, certainly not to listen to my sister's views on my lack of reason. Yes, it is Maeve, come all the way down to Mucknamore from Dublin to visit me. She stands at the door of my shed, neat and slim in linen shorts and Ralph Lauren polo shirt, her car keyring looped over one finger.

  Living here as I have been since May, centred on the secrets I've been finding in my mother's family papers, I've long ceased to notice the dilapidation. Now, following my sister's eyes, I see what she sees. Flaking walls. A concrete floor. An unmade bed on one side of the room. Debris piled into the opposite corner.

  "What brings you here?" I ask.

  "Lovely welcome, I must say. Can I come in?"

  I hesitate, conscious of my shape and that I never did get round to telling her.

  It wasn't intentional. What I had planned was to go to Dublin, to see her there, and explain. I never thought I'd still be here in this shed so many weeks on.

  There's nothing for it now except to get up from my chair and step out from behind the table.

  Her eyes fall on my body, swoop in on my abdomen, then swing back upwards to my face. "What —?"

  She is stunned, her face so very shocked that I find myself laughing, that nervous laughter she always brings up in me when I've done the wrong thing.

  "Oh my God!" she gasps. "I don't believe it. Oh my God!"

  "Let's go round the back," I say, voice airy, as if I am a society hostess suggesting tea on the lawn. "That's the nicest place to sit."

  I take my rug from the end of the rumpled bed and, while she's swallowing her surprise, I lead her to the grassy patch where Rory and I have been sitting most long evenings of this long, strange summer. It's private out here, between the shed and the edge of the little cliff, and the sea is singing a soothing song today, as if it's on a go-slow, not really wanting to turn the waves over.

  "You should have rung Hilde to tell me you were coming," I say, flicking the rug out over the grass. "I'd have arranged to meet you somewhere a bit more comfortable."

  "I've been expecting to hear from you every day, Jo. You've been down here for weeks and not so much as a phone call. But," she breathes, "never mind all that...What about this?" She leans across as if to touch me, then changes her mind. "Look at you. My God."

  I gesture her to sit on the rug. "Would you like something?" I remember to ask when I'm down. "A drink? I only have orange juice."

  "Orange juice would be nice." She puts a hand on my arm to stop me trying to push back up. "I'll get it."

  "It's just inside the door, in the corner. The coolest spot."

  She comes back with two plastic glasses and hands me one. "That's quite a mountain of manuscript you've got in there."

  "I know. It keeps growing on me."

  "Am I allowed read it?"

  I shake my head. 'Not yet."

  "When?"

  "Soon. I have to type it up, and it needs a lot of tidying."

  She opens her mouth to say something, but closes it again.

  "Sorry the juice is warm," I say, when the silence stretches too long. "No fridge, obviously."

  "I really thought I was beyond being shocked by you, Jo, but you've done it again. Why didn't you tell me?"

  "I didn't tell anybody." Well, nobody except Rory.

  "Not even the father?"

  "No. Especially not the father."

  She dips her head down to her plastic cup, trying to stop the disparagement that's rearing up inside her. She is thin, I notice, too thin; her hipbones jut against her shorts.

  "What about you?" I ask her. "How have you been?"

  "Fine. Fine. Nothing compared to this."

  "Are you sure?"

  Her face creases. "Oh, up and down, I suppose." Then she tilts her head towards the house. "Two shocks in a row. What they've done to Mammy's house, to the shop...It's so different, isn't it?"

  "Unrecognisable."

  Our mother had died just as she closed the sale of her house to Hilde and Stefan Zimmerman, an efficient German couple who'd pre-organised planning permissions. They'd arrived to live here within a week of her funeral. Work had begun immediately and was well advanced already.

  "I wish it could have been kept as it was for a while," Maeve says. "It would have been nice to get used to Mammy being gone first, before we had to deal with this too."

  "It's been easier for me, I suppose, being here. Seeing it change day by day."

  "I still can't believe I'll never see her again. Can you? I think of things I want to tell her before I remember she's not here. And it hits me all over again."

  "Time helps," I say.

  "Is it helping you?"

  "It's not the same for me, you know that. I hadn't seen her for almost twenty years."

  "Still, she was your mother."

  I try again. "I do know the feeling you're talking about and how awful it is. Time really does help."

  "Your friend Richard?"

  I nod, gratified that she remembers.

  "Well, then, I wish time would just hurry up and do its thing."

  We both fall into a silence, looking out over the sea.

  How have I let this shed become my home-away-from-all-homes? That's the question my sister's arrival has thrown into relief.

  I was supposed to depart for Dublin a week ago. Yet still I sit, day after day, at my makeshift desk, sifting through sentence after sentence bequeathed to me by my mother and grandmother, telling myself I need to be here to do it when I know I'm really here for Rory.

  Though I told him I was leaving. Though I wrote it down to show him, to show myself, that I really meant it and though every word I wrote was right and true. If Rory's marriage was indeed so wrong for him, if our love — the first love — was what he wanted, then that had to be formally acknowledged. Properly
done. Slip-sliding into an affair was not an option.

  So, I wrote him. I was leaving. I was going to Dublin where my sister would help me organise an obstetrician. I would have my baby there and, as soon as possible afterwards, I was going to fly back to San Francisco to make a new home as a single mom.

  My letter set him free. "We missed our time, my love," it said and I can still feel how good it felt to write that, to break the will-we-won't-we game we'd been playing since I came back here at the beginning of summer.

  If his wife and family were not what he wanted — if what he wanted was me — then he was going to have to find a way to tell them and do what he should have done the first time, twenty years ago, when it was all less complicated. Come after me.

  I didn't quite say all that in my letter, but it was implied. "When we were young, I so wanted you to follow me," I said. "I wanted that long, long, long after there ceased to be any possibility that you might."