Éilís Ní Dhuibhne – Trespasses

Tuesday, July 19, 2011 — Damian Kelleher

Éilís Ní Dhuibhne – Trespasses

Clara, the protagonist of Irish author Éilís Ní Dhuibhne's short story, Trespasses, seems to be either one step ahead or behind of life. She's never quite in sync with her surroundings, and is one of those people we suspect could never truly have a clean home or an unsmudged face no matter how hard they try. It's not that they don't want to, they just can't. Life intrudes, and nothing gets done.

Clara “looks a bit like what she is, namely, a beautician”, and what's more she's in a particularly frazzled state of mind because she is soon to leave Ireland for America to visit her son, who has arrived illegaly into the country and, though he studied Greek and Roman Civilization at school, has ended up as a bellhop. She doesn't exactly know what a bellhop is but then she studied Philosophy and that didn't do much for her life as a beautician. Nonetheless her son, who is alternately described as looking like a movie star and having dyed red hair down to his waist, comes across as much more grounded than Clara as he talks her through her disrupted day.

A number of awkward and vaguely sinister events occur throughout the day: her accountant has had a heart attack (though he's fine), she missed the last opportunity to take the garbage before she leaves for America, and an old couple hiss and spit at her for parking partway across their driveway. While bumbling through her day, Clara wonders about her town:

Such a haphazard sort of place. It looks as if all the roads and houses fell out of the sky and just happened to land on these unremarkable fields, miles from anywhere that makes sense. Miles from the city and miles from the mountains and miles from the river and the sea. Who would live here if they had a choice?

In a quote that captures the remarkable fluidity of her mind. She can't hold on to an idea; she trips over images and concepts.

Clara's obstruction of an elderly couple's driveway causes an extended argument which remains unresolved as she returns home to stew, writing letters of complain she knows she won't send. She becomes frustrated that her last days in Ireland, which should be happy and productive, have instead become dark and miserable. Like a child she whines to herself that it isn't fair, and resolves to finish the matter by visiting the couple again.

Here the story shifts dramatically in tone. Previously the narrative had attempted to mimic the careening nature of Clara's mind, bouncing here and there, ominous in places but mostly slapdash and distracted. The effect has been to create a strong impression of Clara as a woman bumbling through life, the kind of person who, looking back on a day (a week, a month, a year, a lifetime), wonders how she got to where she is and then shrugs it off and keeps on going. You wouldn't trust her with your savings not because she'd spend it but lost it, and she'd probably lose her own life savings along with it. But when she returns to the elderly couple's home the tone of the narrative becomes dreamlike and gauzy, and seems to fit the events poorly. Clara, perhaps unbelievably, discovers the hidden spare key to the front door and enters brandishing a cake, wherein she is promptly stabbed by the old woman.

Unhurt, she – again, perhaps unbelievably – manages to take the knife from the woman, slit her throat, and vanish from the house, all in the space of a few sentences.

It's quite a good quality knife she has in her hand. And when that knife is in Clara's hand, strong and deft and skillful, it slides easily into the old woman's scrawny throat – it slices through the bulging veins as smoothly as it would into the white flesh of a boiled potato.

The bulk of the above quoted paragraph relies heavily on the physical attributes of things rather than the shocking event these descriptions paranthetically encircle. We learn (for the second time) that the knife is a “good quality” knife, and immediately after slicing the woman's throat the narrative shifts back, distancing Clara and the reader from what has happened by invoking a boiled potato. Nobody would ever compare slicing a woman's throat to slicing a boiled potato, and yet that is what has occurred – we've entered further into the realm of the unreal.

The story continues apace. Gone is the effervescent lack of concentration from the start of the story. Everything is dream-like and shifted, dislocated from the immediacy of Clara to an abstract place where people aren't murdered but potatoes are sliced. It's interesting to note that Dhuibhne avoids reflecting on Clara's state of mind, instead juxtaposing a brief memory of the elderly woman with the paragraph quoted further above (the “miles and miles” sentence). Clara has done something that is both outrageous and not, for everything happened so quickly and without thought that, while the act itself is unconscionable, the events leading up to it are pure Clara. For Clara, this murder has been as unpremeditated and unexpected as absent-mindedly knocking over a wine glass during dinner, and we suspect that it will weigh equally as heavily upon her mind.

Dhuibhne's Clara is consistent but the story is not. Trespasses suffers from minimising the protagonist's actions in an effort to explore the limits of “kookiness”. If the world of the story were to be real then Clara would have murdered before (there is no hint of this), because for her, a murder is as much an “oops” as forgetting to take the bin out. These things happen and, to quote Clara, “C'est la fucking vie”.

The problem then becomes a moral one, for a person like Clara is reprehensible and not endearing, which is how she is portrayed through much of the story. Accidents happen, yes, and accidents can affect a person's life for ever, but this was not an accident. Instead, it was a natural extrusion of Clara's method of living. It was just as likely that Clara would commit murder as her and the old lady would, oh, wrestle or laugh and have cake or become close friends or start a fire in the kitchen. In short, the haphazard nature of Clara meant that anything could have happened and consistency would have been preserved, because we know that Clara's life is ramshackle and without focus, but “anything” didn't happen – a murder did. And one shouldn't just toss of a murder the way one would forget to water a plan.

Trespasses by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is a short story from the Dalkey Archive Press' anthology, Best European Fiction 2011

Author	Éilís Ní Dhuibhne
Title	Trespasses
Nationality	Irish
Publisher	Dalkey Archive Press
Availability: ---Amazon (US) ---Amazon (UK) ---Fishpond (AU)

Reviews

David J Single

Index

You are here

Éilís Ní Dhuibhne – Trespasses

Éilís Ní Dhuibhne – Trespasses

See Also

Reviews