Emerald Magic_ Great Tales of Irish Fantasy - Andrew M. Greeley [16]
“You’ll come back with us tomorrow, then?”
“First thing,” Joyce said.
AND SO IT CAME TO PASS. I have no idea how one handles airline ticketing for dead people these days, but he was right there with us in business class the next morning, Saturday morning—critiquing the Swiss wines on board and flirting with the flight attendants. Two hours later, just in time for lunch, we were home.
A minivan-cab took us back to town. “Bloomsday early this year, is it?” said the cab driver to Joyce.
Joyce smiled thinly and didn’t answer. On June 16 of every year the city was full of counterfeit Joyces. “There was a statue of Anna Livia in town, wasn’t there?” he said.
“Oh, the Floozie in the Jacuzzi,” the driver said. “They moved it.”
“Where is it now?”
“North Quay.”
“Then that’s where we’re going,my good man.”
He took us there.We paid him off, and after he’d left, Joyce went over to the statue and looked at it rather sadly.
It had always resembled a dissolute, weedy-haired woman in a concrete bathtub at the best of times, when it had been installed in the middle of O’Connell Street and running with the music of flowing water.Now, though, sitting dusty, high and dry on wooden pallets in the middle of the stones of an unfinished memorial plaza, surrounded by marine cranes and dingy warehouses, the statue just looked ugly.
Joyce looked at it and frowned. “Well, we have no choice,” Joyce said. “For this we need the concrete as well as the abstract.”
He walked over to the waterside. The Eldest Leprechaun went with him. Joyce took off his hat and handed it to the leprechaun. Then he stood straight, his cane in one hand, and suddenly was all magician . . .
“O tell me all about Anna Livia,” he said in that thin, singing little tenor voice: and though he didn’t raise that voice at all, the sound hit the warehouses and the freighters and the superstructure of the East-link Bridge half a mile away, and ricocheted and rattled from building to building until the water itself started to shake with it, rippling as if from an earth tremor underneath. “I want to hear all about Anna Livia. Tell me all. Tell me now. You’ll die when you hear—”
The water inside the river walls leapt and beat against the banks, soaking us all. I began to wonder if we would die: I hadn’t seen the river like this since the last hurricane. Joyce spoke on, and the wind rose, and the stones under our feet shook. “Then, then, as soon as the lump his back was turned, with her mealiebag slung over her shoulder, Anna Livia, oysterface, forth of her bassein came—!”
“I hear, I wake,” said a tremendous voice in response. If you’ve once heard it, you will never forget it; Liffey in spate, a thunder, a roar between Her banks, lightning trapped in the water, a green-and-white resistless fury pushing everything before Her into the Bay.
She rose up. Those who had the sense to do so, covered their eyes. The rest of us were immediately showered with sodden sneakers, slime-laden Coke cans, ancient tattered plastic Quinnsworth bags, and much other, far less printable detritus of urban Dublin existence. She towered up, towered over us. She was water, water in the shape of a woman: Her hair streamed with water, streamed down and became part of Her again; Her gown was water, and the water glowed. She looked up Her river, and down Her river, and said; “Where am I?”
There was a profound silence all around that had nothing to do with the awe and majesty of Herself.
“Where am I?” said Anna Livia again, in a tone of voice that suggested someone had better F ing tell Her.
One lone voice that raised itself, unafraid, over the dead stillness.
“North Quay,” Joyce said.
There was a long, long pause.
“North Quay?” said the gracious Goddess, looking around Her. “What the F am I doin’ here? I was in O’Connell Street last time I looked out this ugly thing’s eyes, with wee babies playin’ in me in the hot weather! When we had it, which was not often. Remind me