Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan by Ruth Gilligan

Author:Ruth Gilligan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Published: 2016-07-09T04:00:00+00:00

Sunday

Aisling wishes she had brought the book with her to the church.

It would have been incongruous, yes, absolutely, but it is the first time she has been apart from the thing in twenty-four hours and her whole body registers the absence, her hair still matted from sleeping with the flat of it beneath her pillow.

She has been awake since seven, though she was restless all night. The heavy fug of the electric blanket. The strangeness of the silence. Because on nights when she and Noah slept apart he would always make sure to Skype her and leave the laptop on the bedside table next to him; the rhythm of his breath as they nodded off, side by almost side. So by the time her father came looking for company this morning she surprised him by saying yes, any excuse to get out of the house.

He sits beside her now in the pew, the solid wedge of him dressed in his usual Ralph Lauren uniform: shirt, chinos, dress shoes. All the little horses, cantering across his limbs. In a better mood she would remind him it is supposed to be a day of rest. And she half-remembers they used to have a joke about horses and the priest, still the same grey-green stick-man then as today, his voice frantic like a commentator down from the pulpit, sprinting his way through the service:

And coming up the outside we have the Holy Spirit but begob the Lad himself is making a fine comeback, twenty furlongs to the home stretch and it’s winner all right! Winner all right!

He always had them wrapped up by five past one at the latest, over the road for pints and a roast or home for the dirty fry up, Clonakilty Pudding and all – the blood and spice that repeated on you for the rest of the day.

‘The Lord be with you.’

‘And also with you.’

‘And with your spirit.’

Aisling listens to the South Dublin accents around her. They are nasal, strangely Americanised; half of them garbling one response while the other half garbles another. She read that they brought in a new translation of the Mass a while ago, the old Latin having been deemed inaccurate. But it seems a lot of people just haven’t bothered to adjust, sticking to the old script instead, as if a few words here and there can really alter a faith.

‘Thanks be to God.’

She shuffles on the bench, the wood varnished stiff and cold. She stares at the plaque on the armrest, dedicated to the memory of one Frank O’Meara, Beloved.

And she wonders a bit about translation now, about what is lost in the process. Thousands of years and a handful of tongues and do the words still mean the same thing? Or close enough?

She touches the metallic indents of the stranger’s name, the shortest obituary in the world.

And then what about translating people – reconfiguring them in terms you can better understand? Like changing some aspect of yourself to suit the person

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