Read Online Tales from the Tower, Volume 2 by Isobelle Carmody - Free Book Online
Authors: Isobelle Carmody
Tags: Young Adult Fiction
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even though he detests the stuff, because it will be such a long night that he may need it.
She rescued his career from the brink of extinction. Everything he has become he owes to her. She turned his life around.
He didnât always like what it entailed, but he had been too long ignored to turn down the chance of a bit of attention. He hated the day of media training she arranged for him (and paid for), but he made good use of it nonetheless. The woman who was giving it took him through his âback storyâ, beginning with what he knew of his birth and anything he remembered from his childhood. She was thrilled to discover that he had been brought up on a farm in Tipperary, even when he disillusioned her with the information that it was not a miserable peasantâs croft but a large, two-storey farmhouse with a courtyard of cut-stone outbuildings, one hundred and eighty-three acres of prime pasture and a similar amount of lovely old native woodland. She picked out a few of the most interesting things and taught him how to introduce them into interviews, whether or not they were relevant to the question being asked. Like the big family running wild in the woods, or being rounded up to help with the shearing and the hay. Or the long walk every day to the village school. The boarding school bits didnât interest her so much, even though he had a string of hilarious anecdotes, but she loved the polio outbreak that hit two of his siblings but left him and the others mysteriously untouched. And she picked up on his fatherâs knowledge of horses and the people who came to him for advice.
âYouâd be surprised,â she said, âhow many people know about horses, and even people who donât are often fascinated by all the paraphernalia around them. Like ships. Horse and ships. Canât go wrong.â
Later, talking to someone from the press or the radio, he followed her advice, and even introduced a few funny stories to spice things up, like the time when he was first allowed to drive the Land Rover when he was twelve, and managed to overturn it in a ditch. But he told no one about another, more unsettling thing that her probing had exposed â a memory of the huge house and the silence in it. Of course, it was never really silent, except in the dead of night. There were seven children with only eleven years between them and they were boisterous and given to endless gangings-up and squabbling like all large families. Nonetheless there was a silence in the house that underlay all the noise, like a single, strong background colour, and it was the silence between his parents, who never spoke to each other at all.
He remembers his father asking them, Whereâs your mother? or, Whatâs your mother up to? He asked them that because she didnât tell him where she was going or how long she would be. He never told her, either, but she didnât ask. She either knew, or didnât care. She kept his dinner warm for him, and there were always one or two kettles on the range, at the boil or close to it. Everyone knew how to make tea and coffee.
The memory of this silence disturbed him terribly when it came. He mistrusted its sudden emergence and suspected that he must have manufactured it to serve some obscure neurotic purpose of his own. But when he phoned his older sister she confirmed it. Their parents had their own precisely delineated areas of operation and they hardly ever spoke to each other, right up to the time their father died.
It hurt him, this rediscovery of parental disharmony. But over the next few days, he scrutinised the memories more closely and came to realise that the silence was not, as he had leaped to conclude, full of anger and petulance. It was not a refusal to communicate but a demonstration of perfect communication. They didnât need words to understand each other.
He wrote several poems about it, and in the process came to understand that neither
She rescued his career from the brink of extinction. Everything he has become he owes to her. She turned his life around.
He didnât always like what it entailed, but he had been too long ignored to turn down the chance of a bit of attention. He hated the day of media training she arranged for him (and paid for), but he made good use of it nonetheless. The woman who was giving it took him through his âback storyâ, beginning with what he knew of his birth and anything he remembered from his childhood. She was thrilled to discover that he had been brought up on a farm in Tipperary, even when he disillusioned her with the information that it was not a miserable peasantâs croft but a large, two-storey farmhouse with a courtyard of cut-stone outbuildings, one hundred and eighty-three acres of prime pasture and a similar amount of lovely old native woodland. She picked out a few of the most interesting things and taught him how to introduce them into interviews, whether or not they were relevant to the question being asked. Like the big family running wild in the woods, or being rounded up to help with the shearing and the hay. Or the long walk every day to the village school. The boarding school bits didnât interest her so much, even though he had a string of hilarious anecdotes, but she loved the polio outbreak that hit two of his siblings but left him and the others mysteriously untouched. And she picked up on his fatherâs knowledge of horses and the people who came to him for advice.
âYouâd be surprised,â she said, âhow many people know about horses, and even people who donât are often fascinated by all the paraphernalia around them. Like ships. Horse and ships. Canât go wrong.â
Later, talking to someone from the press or the radio, he followed her advice, and even introduced a few funny stories to spice things up, like the time when he was first allowed to drive the Land Rover when he was twelve, and managed to overturn it in a ditch. But he told no one about another, more unsettling thing that her probing had exposed â a memory of the huge house and the silence in it. Of course, it was never really silent, except in the dead of night. There were seven children with only eleven years between them and they were boisterous and given to endless gangings-up and squabbling like all large families. Nonetheless there was a silence in the house that underlay all the noise, like a single, strong background colour, and it was the silence between his parents, who never spoke to each other at all.
He remembers his father asking them, Whereâs your mother? or, Whatâs your mother up to? He asked them that because she didnât tell him where she was going or how long she would be. He never told her, either, but she didnât ask. She either knew, or didnât care. She kept his dinner warm for him, and there were always one or two kettles on the range, at the boil or close to it. Everyone knew how to make tea and coffee.
The memory of this silence disturbed him terribly when it came. He mistrusted its sudden emergence and suspected that he must have manufactured it to serve some obscure neurotic purpose of his own. But when he phoned his older sister she confirmed it. Their parents had their own precisely delineated areas of operation and they hardly ever spoke to each other, right up to the time their father died.
It hurt him, this rediscovery of parental disharmony. But over the next few days, he scrutinised the memories more closely and came to realise that the silence was not, as he had leaped to conclude, full of anger and petulance. It was not a refusal to communicate but a demonstration of perfect communication. They didnât need words to understand each other.
He wrote several poems about it, and in the process came to understand that neither
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