A Star Called Henry Paperback - 2004

Excerpt

My mother looked up at the stars. There were plenty of them up there. She lifted her hand. It swayed as she chose one. Her finger pointed.

-- There's my little Henry up there. Look it.

I looked, her other little Henry sitting beside her on the step. I looked up and hated him. She held me but she looked up at her twinkling boy. Poor me beside her, pale and red-eyed, held together by rashes and sores. A stomach crying to be filled, bare feet aching like an old, old man's. Me, a shocking substitute for the little Henry who'd been too good for this world, the Henry God had wanted for himself. Poor me.

And poor Mother. She sat on that step and other crumbling steps and watched her other babies joining Henry. Little Gracie, Lil, Victor, another little Victor. The ones I remember. There were others, and early others sent to Limbo; they came and went before they could be named. God took them all. He needed them all up there to light the night. He left her plenty, though. The ugly ones, the noisy ones, the ones He didn't want -- the ones that would never stay fed.

Poor Mother. She wasn't much more than twenty when she gazed up at little twinkling Henry but she was already old, already decomposing, ruined beyond repair, good for some more babies, then finished.

Poor Mammy. Her own mother was a leathery old witch, but was probably less than forty. She poked me, as if to prove that I was there.

-- You're big, she said.

She was accusing me, weighing me, planning to take some of me back. Always wrapped in her black shawl, she always smelt of rotten meat and herrings -- it was a sweat on her. Always with a book under the shawl, the complete works of Shakespeare or something by Tolstoy. Nash was her name but I don't know what she called herself before she married her dead husband. She'd no Christian name that I ever heard. Granny Nash was all she ever was. I don't know where she came from; I don't remember an accent. Wrapped in her sweating black shawl, she could have crept out of any century. She might have walked from Roscommon or Clare, pushed on by the stench of the blight, walked across the country till she saw the stone-eating smoke that lay over the piled, sagging fever-nests that made our beautiful city, walked in along the river, deeper and deeper, into the filth and shit, the noise and the money. A young country girl, never kissed, never touched, she was scared, she was thrilled. She turned around and back around and saw the four corners of hell. Her heart cried for Leitrim but her tits sang for Dublin. She got down on her back and yelled at the sailors to form a queue. Frenchmen, Danes, Chinamen, the Yanks. I don't know. A young country girl, a waif, just a child, aching for food. She'd left her family dead in a ditch, their chops green with grass juice, their bellies set to explode in the noonday sun. I don't know any of this. She might have been Dublin-bred. Or she might have been foreign. A workhouse orphan, a nun gone wrong. Transported from Australia, too ugly and bad for Van Diemen's Land. I don't know. She'd become a witch by the time I saw her. Always with her head in a book, looking for spells. She shoved her face forward with ancient certainty, knew every thought behind my eyes. She knew how far evil could drop. She stared at me with her cannibal's eyes and I had to dash down to the privy. Her eyes slammed the door after me.

And what do I know about poor Mother? Precious little. I know that she was Melody Nash. A beautiful name, promising so much. I know that she was born in Dublin and that she lived on Bolton Street. She worked in Mitchell's rosary bead factory on Marlborough Street. They made the beads out of cows' horns. All day, six days a week, sweating, going blind for God and Mitchell. Putting the holes in the beads for Jesus. Hands bleeding, eyes itching. Before she walked into my father.

Melody Nash. I think of the name and I don't see my mother. Melody melody. She skips, she laughs, her black eyes shine happy. Her blue-black hair dances, her feet lick the cobbles. Her teacher is fond of her, she's a fast learner. She's quick at the adding, her letters curl beautifully. She has a great future, she'll marry a big noise. She'll have good meat each day and a house with a jacks. Out of the way, here comes melody Melody, out of the way, here comes melody Melody.

What age was she when she learnt the truth, when she found out that her life would have no music? The name was a lie, a spell the witch put on her. She was twelve when she walked into Mitchell's bead factory and she was sixteen when she walked into my father. Four years in between, squinting, counting, shredding her hands, in a black hole making beads. Melody melody rosary beads. They sang as they worked. Beautiful dreamer, awake unto me. Mitchell wanted them to pray. Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee. Was she gorgeous? Did her white teeth gleam as she lifted her head with the other girls? Beautiful dreamer, queen of my song. The woman on the step had no teeth, nothing gleamed. Like me, she was never a child. There were no children in Dublin. Promises weren't kept in the slums. She was never beautiful.

She walked into my father. Melody Nash met Henry Smart. She walked right into him, and he fell. She was half his weight, half his height, six years younger but he fell straight over like a cut tree. Love at first sight? Felled by her beauty? No. He was maggoty drunk and missing his leg. He was holding himself up with a number seven shovel he'd found inside an open door somewhere back the way he'd come when Melody Nash walked into him and dropped him onto Dorset Street. It was a Sunday. She was coming from half-eight mass, he was struggling out of Saturday. Missing a leg and his sense of direction, he hit the street with his forehead and lay still. Melody dropped the beads she'd made herself and stared down at the man. She couldn't see his face; it was kissing the street. She saw a huge back, a back as big as a bed, inside a coat as old and crusted as the cobbles around it. Shovel-sized hands at the end of his outstretched arms, and one leg. Just the one. She actually lifted the coat to check.

-- Where's your leg gone, mister? said Melody.

She lifted the coat a bit more.

-- Are you dead, mister? she said.

The man groaned. Melody dropped the coat and stepped back. She looked around for help but the street was quiet. The man groaned again. He drew his arms in and braced himself. Then he crawled one-kneed off the road, over the gutter. Melody picked up the shovel. He groaned again and vomited. A day and a half's drinking poured out of him like black pump water. Melody got out of its way. The stream stopped. He wiped his mouth with the filthiest sleeve that Melody had ever seen. He put his hand out. Melody understood immediately that he wanted the shovel. She held it out to him. She could study his face now. It hadn't been washed in ages and the specks and lines of blood gave him the look of something freshly slaughtered. But he wasn't bad looking, she decided. The situation -- the coat, the puked porter, the absent leg -- wouldn't let her take the plunge and call him good looking, but he definitely wasn't bad looking. He clung to the shovel and hauled himself up. Melody stepped back again to get out of his shadow. He stared at her but she wasn't frightened.

-- Sorry, mister, said Melody.

He shook his head.

-- Did you see a leg on your travels? he said.

-- No.

-- A wooden one.

-- No.

He seemed disappointed.

-- It's gone, so, he said. -- I had it yesterday.

Then Melody said something that started them on the road to marriage and me.

-- You're a grand-looking man without it, she said.

Now he looked at Melody properly. She'd only said it to comfort him but one-legged men will grab at anything.

-- What's your name, girlie? he said.

-- Melody Nash, she said.

And Henry Smart fell in love. He fell in love with the name. With a name like that beside him he'd find his leg, a new one would grow out of the stump, he'd stride through open doors for the rest of his life. He'd find money on the street, three-legged chickens. He'd never have to sweat again. Henry Smart, my father, looked at Melody Nash. He saw what he wanted to see.

I know what Henry Smart looked like. She told me, sitting on the step, looking down the street, and up, waiting for him. And later on when he'd gone for ever but she still looked and waited. Her descriptions, her words, stayed the same. She never let her loneliness, hunger, her misery change her story. Her mind wandered and then rotted but she always knew her story, how she walked into Henry Smart. It was fixed. I knew what he looked like. But what about her? What did Melody Nash look like? She was sixteen. That's all I know. I see her later, only five, six years further on. An eternity. An old woman. Big, lumpy, sad. Melody Smart. I see that woman sitting on the step and I try to bring her back six years, I try to make the age and pain drop off her. I try to make her stand up and walk back, to see her as she had been. I take three stone off her, I lift her mouth, I try to put fun into her eyes. I give her hair some spring, I change her clothes. I can create a good-looking sixteen-year-old. I can make her a stunner. I can make her plainer then, widen her, spoil her complexion. I can play this game for what's left of my life but I'll never see Melody Nash, my sixteen-year-old mother.

She worked in the dark and damp all day. She squinted to fight back the light. Her hands were ripped and solid. She was a child of the Dublin slums, no proper child at all. Her parents, grandparents, had never known good food. Bad food, bad drink, bad air. Bad bones, bad eyes, bad skin; thin, stooped, mangled. Henry Smart looked at Melody Nash and saw what he wanted to see.

-- What's your name, girlie?

-- Melody Nash, she said. -- How did you lose it?

-- I haven't a bull's clue, said Henry.

He looked down at the ground where his foot should have been, and hopped away out of the porter he'd just thrown up. He wanted nothing to do with it; he was already a new man. He was thinking quickly, planning. She'd seen him falling on his face and then getting sick, one of his legs was missing -- he knew he hadn't been impressing her. But there were other ways to catch fish. He looked at Melody, and back down at the ground.

-- It was my good one too, he said.

-- Your good one?

-- Me Sunday leg.

-- Oh, said Melody. -- It'll turn up, mister, don't worry. Maybe you left it at home.

Henry thought about this.

-- I doubt it, he said. -- I lost that as well.

She felt sorry for him. No leg, no home -- the only thing holding him up was his vulnerability. She saw honesty. The men Melody knew showed off or snapped at her. Mitchell the rosary beads, her father, all men -- they were all angry and mean. This man here was different. She'd knocked the poor cripple onto the street, his face was bleeding, he'd no home to hop home to -- and he didn't blame her. She saw now: he was smiling. A nice smile, he was offering it, half a smile. He didn't look like a cripple. She liked the space where the leg should have been.

-- Will we go for a stroll, so? he said.

-- Yes, she said.

-- Right.

He wiped the blade of the shovel on his sleeve.

-- Let's get this gleaming for the lady.

He let the spade hop gently on the path. Melody heard music.

-- Now we're right, said Henry Smart.

He held out his arm, offered it to Melody.

-- Hang on, said Melody.

She took off her shawl and wiped his face with it. She dabbed and petted, removed the blood and left the dirt -- that was his own, none of her business. It didn't bother her. Dirt and grime were the glues that held Dublin together. She spat politely on a corner of the shawl and washed away the last dried, cranky specks of blood. Then she put the shawl back on.

-- Now, she said.

They were already a couple.

Media reviews

"A Best Book of '99"
—The Globe and Mail

"The best novelist of his generation."
—Literary Review

"This buoyantly imagined, lyrical but realistically detailed narrative has a blistering immediacy."
—Publishers Weekly

“You’ll find here all the vividness, humour, and emotional thrust of Doyle’s much-acclaimed earlier work along with a new historical density, a heft that ranks Doyle as truly one of the outstanding
novelists in the English language.”
—Elle Magazine

"Marvellous...bloody brilliant."
—The Toronto Star

"A startling achievement...a book where war can rage and love can burrow under the skin--. A fragment of a forgotten folk song and a worm's eye view of Irish history.... A grand thing of beauty."
—The Globe and Mail

"History evoked on an intimate and yet earth-shaking scale, with a huge dash of the blarney, some mythical embellishments and a driving narrative that never falters."
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"A triumph of craft and intelligence and toughness of mind."
—Hamilton Spectator

"A masterpiece."
—The Irish Times

“Doyle has [written an] Irish epic, and he wields the style like a sword, with the power and grace of a master.”
—The Village Voice

“Maybe the Great American Novel remains to be written, but on the evidence of its first installment, this is the epic Irish one, created at a high pitch of eloquence.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Astonishing…. Narrated with a splendor, wit, and excitement that lift Doyle’s writing to a new level.”
—The New York Times Book Review