In Marilynne Robinson’s plangent novel Lila, the emotionally wounded main character observes, “When you’re scalded, touch hurts, it makes no difference if it’s kindly meant.” Throughout the impressive stories that make up In the Event of Contact, Ethel Rohan explores such human contradictions: the early injuries that compel us to recoil from the very contact we need; our hunger for connection counterbalanced by a longing to become our discrete self; the tension between solitude and loneliness; the perils of intimacy.
Most of Rohan’s subjects have been trespassed against: a philandering father rejects his son; “a bloated, middle-aged neighbour” abuses a child. Most of her main characters are grown up by now and, in some of the stories, their early injuries are a secret they keep even from themselves. But through subtly wrought metaphors and similes, Rohan draws us beyond the accommodations they have made in order to survive, and into the heart of their trauma.
A young man whose hurt seems unassuageable regards a cancer patient “holding the teabag by its white thread and plunging it in and out of the water, as if repeatedly saving it”. A troubled American-Irish woman returns home to attend a wedding, where she recognises a flurry of starlings as “fellow migrants … their split tails unmistakable”. In the same story, another woman is “shrouded in sunlight”. An aged priest detests fishing because “The unsuspecting creature opened its mouth to sustenance, only to be hooked by sharp pain and dragged from the water to a brutal undoing”.
The title story is narrated by “the oldest by ten minutes” of identical triplets. She informs us that her sisters are called Ruth and Mary, though she herself remains unnamed. “We were long and thin, with brown eyes, browner bobs, straight lips…” She describes herself and her lookalike siblings matter-of-factly, but a certain Mr Doherty pronounces them “Remarkable”. He has been summoned to privately tutor 12-year-old Ruth who, since the age of five, cannot bear to be touched. When friends at school touch or even brush against her, she screams and suffers seizures.
Our perplexed narrator wonders why Ruth’s “no-contact rule” extends even to her sisters: “why couldn’t Mary and I, her two-thirds … touch her?” She is unaware that being considered a mere fraction of a whole person, as opposed to one’s own unique self, might be the very source of her sister’s anguish. Their mother, also, seems not to comprehend that looking exactly like your siblings must foster a terrible confusion: where are the borders? “‘Carbon copies,’ Mam said, pleased with herself.”
Ruth in her fierce separateness is nearly a holy figure, so determined to cherish her independent self that she fashions her body into a cloister, or a flame: “To be beyond touch. It’s almost impossible to imagine. She’s like the sun,” observes Mr Doherty. And Mary tells the narrator, “[Mr Doherty] thinks there’s something extraordinary about [Ruth]. ‘Sacred’ was his exact word.”
But our narrator finds Mr Doherty’s devotion troubling: “I didn’t want Ruth to be alone with him. He was mesmerized while talking about her, that same shiny expression people got in church, praying before statues … ”
So the sacred and profane intermingle in this story. And fire prevails throughout. Scalded by circumstance, Ruth burns others, including the narrator, who cannot comprehend her sister’s growing freedom, and is “scorched” by it.
As its title suggests, Into the West concerns horses. It also concerns a shotgun, brandished by the main character’s mother in a successful attempt to scare away her cheating husband, after which “she’d remained married to herself”. Nine years later, Fintan, the main character, searches for his lost father and finds him working at a building site, a diminished, greying man, indifferent to his son.
As a result of these hammer blows, Fintan grows into someone who “hadn’t ever dared to love anyone” fully. And he betrays his wife as his father had betrayed his mother, compelling this reader to marvel at how doggedly so many of us recreate and repeat our trauma, as if returning again and again to dry source in a futile hope for water.
But the horses give us an unexpected glimpse of grace. Rohan describes them wonderfully: their heads “like question marks”, their eyes “the colour of wet acorns”.
All of the stories in this extremely fine collection portray trauma and the aftermath of trauma. Many are sombre but, in some, the characters approach a kind of redemption, especially when they begin to realise that autonomy and intimacy are not opposed, but are, in fact, the same thing.
Elizabeth Wassell’s latest novel is At the Villa Celeste
