Colin Walsh – Kala
In the disorienting weeks after Kala went missing, this room took on its own nausea, the happy idea that – if I not touched anything at all – if I left everything just as it was, she will come back…. Her name echoing across the sky, voices along the train track, shadows under every bridge, answering the same questions from the guards over and over. No sleep or tears, just coffee, sandwiches and cigarettes.
‘What are you doing still up?’ you whisper, leaning against the counter. ‘Ah’, he said, and waves a hand in the air. ‘How is the prep going?’ ‘It’s going.’ You go to the kettle. ‘Fancy another cupper?’ Dad doesn’t answer. The whole room feels heavy. Creaking from upstairs, and you hear mam making her way from her bedroom down the stairs. She comes into the kitchen in a dressing gown, but she doesn’t look like she’s been sleeping.
‘Who’s this?’ ‘Aiden’, Aiden said hands on hips, ‘This is me cousin Mosh’ ‘Mosh?’, the mammy laughed, ‘What sort of name is that? And you, which one are you?’ ‘I am Joe, mrs. Lanan’, you said extending your hand. She looked at your hand for a moment and took it. Her hand was slender, but her grip was strong.
I know the time will come when we have to talk about it, straight out. Ask ourselves, if what happened to Kala was our fault. I’ll have to tell her and Joe about the photo Dodley said they found, Kala’s skull. But once I do this, I’ll have opened the door to something I cannot walk back from. And I know what Helen is like….
‘It was brave what you said to me earlier, about your mam. You’re so strong.’ That was the strangest feeling, hearing her say this. I knew something real had happened, sitting at the canal. I had felt it moving in Kala and myself. There was some sort of knot untight to open a space in my chest and that – even as I fell through it – that space within me was filling with a light that was fuller and brighter. And I knew that this light, coming from inside me was not mine, but it was Kala’s. It was my friend’s. And I knew in that moment that we were friends.
‘I know it’s hard.’ She touches your face. Pull your head back. She completely withdraws, purses her lips and glares at the road, rejected again. Silence. She’s upset now. Great. Just tell her what she wants to hear. You know how to do that. ‘Look, I had two drinks last night and I didn’t even enjoy them. My body practically rejects the stuff by now.’ She gives you this sad open face.
You remember here, this spot, one of the first times ever being stoned. You were with Mosh and Aiden, 17 years old. You don’t know why or how this could have happened. Because in your mind there is clean lines drawn between the childhood days friendship, the Kala days when you all touched the other place, and the aftermath days of silence, disintegration, avoidance. Your brain is a static thing, stodgy , old. And you need to hold everything in distinct blocks. But life isn’t like this
