On the twelfth of August 1999, a total eclipse will pass over Europe, from Cornwall to Bulgaria and on to India, plunging the continent into darkness for a few minutes as it goes.
I spotted it in the newspaper months beforehand, and it crept up in the manner of a cosmic Christmas: a fleeting moment of darkness before the bright lights of the twenty-first century, a hearty goodbye to war and oppression ahead of an assuredly happy future.
Eclipse-o, the two kids started calling it, like calypso. It was a new word for them, learned in school before the summer holidays. ‘Will it be cold, when the eclipse-o happens?’ Peter, my ten-year-old, asked, staring at me through a kitchen roll tube held up to his glasses like a telescope.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ve never experienced an eclipse-o before. I suppose it will be chilly for a few minutes, but then the sun will come back and it will be a normal summer day again.’ The cardboard tube came care of Blue Peter. Konnie Huq told them that if you hold a kitchen-roll tube up to the sky, and you have a sheet of paper underneath it, you can see the outline of the sun changing as the moon passes over. It was a nifty bit of craft. More to the point, it was cheap.
They’re great kids. That’s what everyone said at the afters, eating cucumber sandwiches, in black ties and grey blouses. They’re great kids. They’ll look after you. And they were looking after me, keeping themselves together while all else fell apart. You wonder how they do it, these small people, representing the future but comprised of memories. Nessa has the same fair hair as S did, and Peter the same pointed nose.
We were in a new house, staying at the home of a friend of mine, Denise, whose family were away for a fortnight on one of the Canary Islands. I hadn’t thought about holidays, not with everything else going on, but the pleasant thing about mourning in summer is that there are so many empty houses to do it in. People open themselves up to you and your glint of sorrow.
At home, I kept being hugged by acquaintances in the vegetable aisle. It’s impossible to imagine what you’re going through, they’d say, and I wanted to reply actually, you do, it’s not that hard to comprehend, it’s just really awful so you pretend you can’t. But you can’t say that, so I’d respond, we’re taking it day by day.
I was happy to head off, to find for myself a different town, a new set of streets. Perhaps that was all I needed to feel comprised of working parts again.
The kids seemed to like it too, having different coloured walls to look at, different TV channels on the cable subscription, different games on the PlayStation. It was a reprieve. They liked exploring the neighbourhood, though I didn’t like having them out of my sight. Perhaps it was more accurate to say: I didn’t like being left on my own. They made friends easily, latched onto the acquaintance of local kids who didn’t know them or any of their history – just the wonderful personalities I had bequeathed them, somehow. They were out on the green playing tennis with plastic racquets while I watched them from behind the front room curtain so they couldn’t see me, so they wouldn’t realise how much I needed them close by.
Three days before the eclipse, I was visited by my brother, Gareth, five years younger than me, with his first child, a one-year-old, in tow. Before you have kids, you don’t realise how short babyhood really is. You expect them to be babies for years, but it’s over before you really know it, after barely six months. Max was crawling and standing, not quite walking but probably only a few weeks away, pointing and vocalising, blowing raspberries and laughing at himself. He was a real child now, sturdy and full of ego.
‘He must be a lot to deal with,’ I said, over a cup of coffee. ‘You have to tie down everything that moves.’
‘You know yourself.’
‘I do. But you have help. That makes it easier.’
‘Yeah. Yeah, it does,’ he replied, not acknowledging out loud my own absence of help, the way it disappeared when things became too difficult, too marked with sadness to be worth continuing with. I knew of marriages that broke down when the wife became sick, but this was something else. ‘You probably need a little help yourself,’ he said, looking at me with pity. ‘Maybe I could take them?’
‘Take them?’
‘Just for the day, like.’
‘But you have a one-year-old! You don’t need my kids pulling out of you as well, asking you to buy you sweets.’
‘It might be practice for when he’s a bit older.’
‘There’s no such thing as practice for this stuff. You can never be prepared for what might happen.’
He looked down into his cup. ‘Yeah, that’s true. Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that.’
‘Oh, I know you didn’t. Yeah, go on. Take them for a few hours, go for a spin, get an ice cream. Thanks for offering.’
With the kids gone, the house empty, the clattering of just-washed cups echoing against nothing, an energy seemed to well up inside me, like I was a sunflower opening up to the air. I had hardly been alone for weeks. I wanted to scream, to pull the house and its strange furnishings apart – to run, run, run, though I wasn’t sure where. I felt it acutely: soon the sun was coming. I was like a primitive woman in a prehistoric tribe, driven by instinct and received wisdom.
I went to the car – to an arts and crafts shop, a place full of diligent type-A children, the air smelling of new paper and the hand-cut wood of jigsaws. I asked the man at the counter, hair ringing his bald head like an eclipse of his own, what kind of filter I would need if I was making glasses for the big day.
‘You need a strong UV filter,’ he said. ‘It dims the light of the sun by ten thousand times. I bought some in for the eclipse but most people haven’t bothered.’
‘That’s wonderful, I’ll take some.’
‘Isn’t that the most important thing in life?’ he said, putting the materials in a paper bag. ‘Sharing these moments with your children.’
‘Yes,’ I said, wondering what I had said that gave me away as a mother. ‘My youngest says the next total eclipse around here will be in the year 2090. He will be 101 years old.’
‘Fair play to him. And you and I won’t be here at all.’
‘Unless they put our heads in jars.’
He laughed, and I was on my way.
On the day of the eclipse, I pounced early. ‘Shall we make a day of it?’ I said, with slightly pathetic enthusiasm. ‘We could go to the beach? I made you these,’ I continued, handing them the cardboard glasses. ‘Now you can safely look at the sun.’ They looked with bemusement at me, like I was a fallen power line. Perhaps it had been a while, perhaps they had spent so long going through windowless hospital corridors, eating other people’s cooking, that they were unaccustomed to me trying to shine at full brightness. Then they grabbed the glasses.
‘I look like a granny,’ Nessa said, though I thought she looked more like a teacher.
Peter had the cardboard glasses over his real ones. ‘Look at you,’ I said to him, ‘six eyes. Where will we go? We could go to the park? Come on, we never get the chance to go out together.’
‘You made four pairs of glasses,’ Nessa said.
‘Yeah, I did,’ wanting to say that the fourth one was a spare.
‘Maybe we should go and look at the eclipse with S,’ Nessa said, ‘because you made a pair of glasses for her.’
‘Yeah, that makes sense. I did make glasses for her.’ And I want to squeeze her tight with relief, but seconds later the two kids are fighting, a cardboard pair of glasses is broken, there are tears, and I have to Sellotape up that one. That can belong to S.
We drive through the dreary expanse of another Wednesday morning, Livin’ La Vida Loca playing on the car stereo, the three of us exuberant within while the town goes on without. Workers are breaking up tarmac and postmen are on their rounds. Isn’t it beautiful, the gentle orbiting tedium of it?
At almost exactly twelve-midday, the three of us sit, eating packets of Tayto cheese and onion – foil packaging, which can also be used to look at the sun in the event of another glasses-related emergency – next to S’s grave, still covered in flowers and tributes from the funeral four weeks earlier. Graves are made to regulation but I remember the white coffin, how small it must be beneath all that grief.
The clouds thwart us. It gets dark, and then it gets darker, and we don’t know if anything has happened – but it is perfect, in spite of everything. It comes and goes like wind, like breath, like new joy. Everything fits in perfectly. It is impossible to imagine how it works, but it does.
**
This story was commissioned for The Telephone Exchange, an installation at the Cúirt International Festival of Literature in Galway in April 2025.
Soula Emmanuel 