Free On Canaan's Side by Sebastian Barry Page A

we’re respectable people, and even if you’re in trouble, you know, at home, well, if you’re to make a new start here, you need to be married.’
    ‘We do,’ I said. ‘We’ll just have to decide which names to choose for that.’
    ‘Why did your father say you were brother and sister?’
    ‘I don’t know. It seemed like a good notion, in the great hurry of it all. But it was our real names anyhow on the ship’s manifest, and we don’t seem to be bothered much here. Maybe we can just go and be married as who we are.’
    ‘I don’t see why not,’ said Hannah.
    But Tadg didn’t think that was very wise.
    ‘We cannot do that,’ he said, that evening. I had fried up some wondrous big sausages for him, and he was devouring them, even though they looked a little lonely on the plate, for want of potatoes. ‘The new names are no good to us either. It would be a very poor thing to use them, and then someone thinking later we were brother and sister. And the old names might be the death of us. It’s a third set of names we need, Lilly.’
    ‘And can we do that in America?’
    ‘There must be some way here of getting names officially and I am going to have to look into it.’
    But he had little enough time to be doing that. At six in the morning he went down to his work, and in the cold evening he returned, and in a few weeks he grew thinner and darker. And stranger.
    We had a narrow thin bed for ourselves and we lay on it side by side in the dark, with everything we had heaped up on us against the cold. The lake wind blew down from Canada and in through the slats of our room, and played about our faces and hands, and snuck into our layers of socks, and found out our vulnerable toes.
    In our courtship we had kissed. It felt like a long time ago, sitting on the farthing seats in Stephen’s Green in the traitorous sunshine of the Irish spring, holdings hands in the threadbare heat, or withdrawing into the shadows of one of the bandstands there, and trying our chances in each other’s arms. And I had delighted in his kisses, and loved the big bloom of warmth in me they caused, and how in the summer, such as it was, we started to be baked by our kissing, my breast sweating against his chest, in a far from disagreeable manner.
    But here, in those first weeks, with the wind, and the sound of the lake massively beyond our window, a dirty gungrey in the darkness, and Hannah and her husband snoring the other side of the wall, when we might have gone at each other like the first lovers on earth, we lay close together but as utterly apart as if a priest had put a curse on us.
    And that I do think now was part of the terror, that though we were adrift in America – and for all we knew hunted, although Tadg
said
he was confident we might have slipped through – we were no longer united as we had been, but bizarrely sundered by the very threat of this intimacy.
    For my part I mightn’t have been so minded, because he was a lovely long man, but for that first while he was a person frozen, and fixed in an unknown intent. And maybe that was because, in some manner, with a death sentence on his head, he felt a little murdered already, at least his life greatly altered. He had not even had time to be in touch with his mother in Cork, and I don’t think he liked to think of her there, knowing nothing of him, or why he had disappeared.
    I don’t think he liked that at all, and it was then I began to wonder, did he blame me to some degree for our predicament, or rather, I began to wonder,
was
I to blame? I had made his doings in Wicklow very personal by being from Wicklow myself. He had lost the anonymity of the policeman working far from his own district, as policemen always do. I had destroyed his namelessness, and put a name on something frightening in the landscape, a lorry passing through with guns and maybe laughter and certainly reckless, ruined hearts aboard, and then the ambush, and the local boys killed, and the seeming