Dark themes loom in debut novella by Carrigallen author

Damian McCarney

“My brother would say we were so poor we could only afford one parent,” jokes Chrisdina Nixon with a laughing acknowledgement it’s probably not in the best taste. Her humour can be a little dark, though maybe not as dark as her fiction.
A ‘stay-at-home mother’ on a busy Carrigallen farm run by her 21-year-old son Sean, Chrisdina warns the Celt she could be called away at any moment as we chat on the phone. They’re awaiting the arrival of a sheep shearer, but she has time to bring us back to the defining moment in her childhood. Chrisdina recalls living in Birmingham where her Dublin-born father, a chronic asthmatic, was always sick. A heart attack claimed him in the end. The tragedy informs the background of ‘Time By The Clock’, her debut novella.
“My father died when I was about eight. When you’re a child you’ll make up all sorts of stories of why someone isn’t there, and I used to make up all sorts of stories of why my father wasn’t there; he was a pirate or a spy or blah blah blah... In my own head I would be talking away to him the whole time, and I used to think, well if he can’t come home, and I can’t see him, where could he be? He must be in prison - any reality was better than him being dead.
“The day he died we were at school and we were brought home and my mother was crying and we were told he was dead. And we were sent away to an aunt’s house and weren’t brought back for a fortnight. So we never saw him as being dead. We weren’t there for the funeral or anything else.
“Then when my grandmother died, she was buried in Birmingham even though she was from Dublin - she was buried in his plot. So when she was being buried it was like going to his... it was the first time that you realised that he was dead even though you were an adult at that stage.”
Chrisdina’s family returned to her mother’s hometown of Carrigallen when she was 10. In later years her mother explained that when her father died, “everyone else took over” and “she had no say” about the kids missing the funeral. However this lack of closure seems to have opened up all sorts of possibilities in Chrisdina’s imagination, the darkest of which have squirmed their way into ‘Time By The Clock’. The main character is a young girl who suspects her father may have raped and killed young girls.
Her true recollections of her father are very different from that which she has portrayed.
“I don’t imagine him as that at all. To me he was a lovely man. I was eight when he died, so I suppose what you remember of someone... he may have been a horrible person,” she jokes. “He may have been a murderer. Who knows? How do I know?”
It’s a distinct possibility that he may not have been a murderer, the Celt deadpans.
She laughingly agrees: “I’m quite sure he wasn’t but nobody’s nice in my book.”
Did you feel bad portraying your father in this way?
“No I suppose because the man is dead so long, my father’s dead over 40 years and I suppose the person I knew is now almost like a fictional character.The emotion connected to him is no longer there.”
“It’s got nothing to do with him bar the fact that he is dead. The fact that he is dead, yes, but he has nothing to do with the character really.”

Clock
Chrisdina penned the story last summer when she was recuperating from a knee replacement. A photo her teenage daughter Maeve took of a clock reminded her of one which belonged to her paternal grandmother that would tick so loud it scared her as a child trying to sleep.
“I hated the clock,” she recalls. Years later, her grandmother gave it to Chrisdina as a present.She tactfully pretended to be delighted, but later, she smashed it off a wall. “I remember feeling so guilty I had broken her clock, I kept it for a very long time, because I thought she knew in some way.”
This memory brought her father and grandmother to mind and the seed of ‘Time By The Clock’ was germinated.
She admits to not having a writing background, although she’s always been a gluttonous reader.
“I’m Dancing at Lughnasa in the bedroom and I’m Benjamin Netanyahu in the kitchen,” she says of what she’s currently devouring. Given her love of Stephen King, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that her imagination should engage with a bleak story, but her style is far removed from her horror hero. The first two chapters are available to read for free on Amazon’s website, and display an unexpected talent and confidence from a first-time writer. Succinct sentences immediately involve the reader as the tale emerges in snatches from the shadows.
One online reviewer - a Californian professor - correctly writes: “Chrisdina firmly grabs your attention, then masterfully seduces and abducts your interest as she leads you, line by line, page by page, down the rabbit hole into a dark but parallel world of lies and complicity, tragedy and irrevocable pain.”
Chrisdina’s husband wasn’t as flattering, admitting: “I haven’t a clue what’s going.” But that’s alright, she knows it’s “so strangely written”. Readers can just accept they know as much as they need to, and the story will reveal itself in its own time.
“I want the reader of Time by the Clock to be as curious as I was when it first emerged in my mind,” says Chrisdina.
Her modest hope for the self-published book is “that people would read it”, but admits she’d be thrilled if a publishing house was suitably impressed.
“Then I could write another one. I would love to be able to sit down every day and just write.”
You’re unlikely to get the time on a busy farm, the Celt opines.
“We can all dream.”