Scéalta Page 15

  My Christmas list for you: an undiluted consciousness, the prickliness and nettle-itch of fresh idea, pins and needles – this time – of boyish awe, the eager jump-start of each early morning, a mind you could strike a match on. If I could see it through sufficiently, to the point where I can say I haven’t failed you. To the naff soda pops and the too-much smoking. To the living gingerly, the chaperoned existence, the life as though in kid gloves. To the graceful retirement of the antihero and the point of diminishing returns. Not only reached, but recognized.

  NOW

  In a parking lot somewhere in New Jersey, amidst a sea of stickered bumpers (declarations of intent, pithy quips, statements of preference), one-stop wisdom shop of the New World –

  There are many vacancies in the motel of the mind.

  Handguns in schools: for or against?

  And marvellously: I’d rather be sailing to Byzantium.

  – there in the land of mobility and reinvention, simulation and submerged rebirthing, alien abduction and impregnation, of wishful thinking never content to remain so, one radical assertion of intransigence stands out, a lone (ironic) voice sagely, trenchantly satisfied with its lot:

  I’d rather be here, now.

  HOME

  Always when off the train. And at just that spot. Someone said it’s hard to leave here because of that configuration of mountain and shoreline, the curvature of one along the other and the way we’re lodged between. Concentric vortex of an embrace, poisoned chalice, gift tax.

  But always on returning from the capital it hits, the bashfulness that too much generosity inspires. Summer evenings especially, coming west by train. Three hours of hell, then … Carrick-on-Shannon, Boyle, Ballymote, Collooney … and knowing it’s coming, finding it there, stepping down onto the platform, a sort of guilty glee, as though I’ve skipped with the booty and this is it: being here. That strangely subterranean feel to the place, to being this little bit beyond the pale and harbouring the secret of where a thing is hid.

  Into the car then, down, down the hill and out of town, into the deepening quiet and the thickening dark, spelunking my way towards home. The same chagrin at my own dumb joy and just when I’m wondering what’s behind it, it’s there, in front of me, curving into view. That overly invoked mountain that two days ago I couldn’t get shut of fast enough, over my shoulder everywhere I went, like a cheap dick on my tail, always there, in whatever ham disguise: pink, green, black, cut cake, 2-D cut-out, tidal wave, hung curtain, bad landscape painting, noun demanding adjectival range I haven’t got. But now, seeing it afresh, I’m brought to heel, as corny as it feels. Just there. At Rathcormack, with the mountain on my right, the bay on my left, and that water-slide of a road, easing me into home. The plink of hit water. My own silent shout of delight.

  … WELL AS WELL HIM AS ANOTHER …

  or so it pays to pretend. Until such time, anyway, as the clear truth of its antithesis can be admitted: that parts, while consecutive, are by no means interchangeable. That a hierarchy of affection exists – complete with petty power struggle, cut deal, bloodless coup, the tenterhook of dominion near-divested, and the pathos of the monarch unaware of plot-simmer – theocratic or despotic or with the mind-bending intricacy of the most bloated bureaucracy, but never, ever populist.

  And always, long afterwards, the one we still talk about, the golden age of whatever our private civilization’s been.

  You? But could I ever know this before the end? Before all theory’s been tested and each variable assigned value. The temptation to believe some untried proof remains.

  If I’m even asking, it probably isn’t you.

  But your way of going on, like life was a game you’d deigned to play. Rather graciously, rather indulgently, all things considered (though granted, with an underlying gravity). Your figurative pose: winsomely awkward adult seated lotus-like in front of some board game with pretty coloured pieces and squares you can’t afford to land on. Eager player, player by whatever wacky handed-down rules, consulter of box top when arbitrating chaos – kids’ favourite bachelor uncle – but angling all the time to divine the grand design, the blackly comic hand of the creator (©Milton-Bradley) obvious to you at every turn. You’ve it sussed, you at your two levels, but to your credit aren’t pretending you’re not thoroughly engaged. Or that you don’t know your place; fetchingly – as relatively in the dark as anyone – you aren’t above availing of kid-wisdom.

  Some near future, when I can take you with a grain of salt, stop concocting overblown metaphors for your existence. My fantasies now reduced to those of resignation, dead nerves, you having worn yourself thin. Once, though, it was like what I’ve heard of heroin: like being kissed by God. So I’m counting on the flat affect to follow. But that image won’t hold up; your grip on me will loosen, after all. To the point where it’s work to want you; already (sometimes), something more than simply waking is required. And after that – I hope – I’ll find you there. But without the power to call up anything at all in me other than that old sardonic warmth. And I will wax eloquent for you on the matter of my latest object of desire, your by now banal presence reminding me that he – like you, like all my other little gods – will fall.

  … ANOTHER

  Our first touch, the coy plucking of insects off of one another’s sleeves.

  Oh, and you’ve one too. Here, let me …

  Days earlier, before we’d even spoken, I’d sat three rows behind you in a half-full theatre, imagining your hand through your hair was my own. Following your attention to where it wandered. Feeling cooler when you shed your coat. Smiling when you looked left to display, for my benefit, your profile. I thought I felt you squirm under the creaturely scent-sniff of my gaze and suddenly liked you, very much, for submitting so civilly to my inspection.

  Later, when I referred to it, you surprised me by claiming that the whole mute exchange had been only in my mind. But I’m less convinced than ever. Your way of being, once I knew you, only confirming my suspicions. You were rare that way, how you could sit back and be enjoyed. Almost – I hate to say it – female, the way you gave yourself. Stealing the show like that: all object. I get it finally, the slavish love of beauty. The need to keep you in my sightline, and at my fingertips. The way, like an animal, I squirreled away sensations, stockpiling them for the cold spell to come.

  LOVE AND MARRIAGE

  In the kitchen of some too-long-married couple I know, I see they’ve retiled the walls. Over dinner, they conduct a tête-à-tête of injury and insult, the text from which they’re working so highly allusive the rest of us can only hum along. We’re all waiting for the split, for the relief of it. I, in fact, am betting they won’t see next week. But then I think about their kitchen. The forward march of it. The things people do when we aren’t around. Plugging away like that. Piling brick on brick. Surprising us with the way they keep rising from their deathbeds.

  SOLIPSISM

  Or a distant cousin of. Conundrum of unrequited love: that there is nothing so unlikely to arouse my sympathy or interest as your (unreciprocated) ardour for me. When what should please me more than passing hours in your company, pondering your unshakeable faith in my splendidness? Pining alongside you even, as we gaze into the near distance together, our four eyes trained on that superlative creature we’ve agreed is I. I – and I transformed by you like every other routine, workaday object when seen through your presently narcotised eyes – should be the sole subject of which I never tire.

  So how is it instead that what I feel is pawed? I love you, after all, just not that way. How is it then that your own love sits between us like an intrusive third party? A crasher at our table, a morose drunk, a mourner who’s so far exceeded the limits of our sympathy as to arouse resentment. Injecting into our otherwise gay little soirée the end of fun, a parental call to order, the killjoy knell of school bells, dawn. I watch, helplessly, as myself is extracted from myself. Yolk from white. Or decanted and given back to me as dregs, while you hold
on to what’s finest. You say I have ‘taken possession’ of you and yet it is I who feel owned. Where have I gone? And how can I give back to you the gift of indifference, the same indifference I once worked so hard to overcome?

  Thankfully, this tells me something. That the anguish I myself am so enjoying (over someone other than you) will never – however stubbornly it tries – create something where there is nothing. This is how I’m able to believe what beggars belief: that while I have not for one full minute failed to think of him, or performed one interior monologue but for him to hear, or sat still anywhere but that I envisioned his smiling, inexplicable entrance (never mind the fact he’s out of town, out of the country, has never heard of here, and doesn’t drive anyway), I – like some out-of-the-way eatery he often forgets exists – have not even occurred to him tonight.

  This is how I learn the necessity of giving up, through this grown-up game of Pass the Parcel.

  ‘RAPTURE’

  Which I first heard while sitting on your porch. That screened-in affair which seemed suspended in mid-air, the way it jutted out over a mini-valley, the path cut through the trees unfurling underneath us. The constant rain, the always-saturated earth, the vertiginousness of our perch, and the delicate discordance of Thirteen Harmonies.

  We felt straight out of Deliverance.

  Ice melting. Or that was what you called it. Falling apart, it felt like. And then later, watching, as I failed to fall apart.

  I’m thinking of a scavenger hunt, a game I used to love, and the list I’d need to help me find you: John Cage, Dusty Springfield, the Ford dealership on 202, resourcefulness, your own love of lists, that shade of blue, your spot-on send-up of the Stage Manager in Our Town, the library and the field beside – alive each night with lightning bugs, living by your wits, your own regained wonder (after the ‘intervening years of anaesthetization’), bicycles, Bonnard, a sleek black lap-top, and 1:26 of ‘Rapture’.

  CHRISTMAS

  Dinner and a long walk through Dromahair. Blatantly storybook, with winding lane, long spire perforating mist, duskiness congealing too quickly into night, and we seven – gloved and hatted – trudging smally through the stock-still hills. Barnacle geese in the marshy field, wintering here before their spring coupling elsewhere. And of humans? All with me in pairs, all six snug aboard the ark. Sweet platonic friendships I could frankly do without; company, under the circumstances, always worse than solitude. At home, at least, I’ve my familiars – undemanding silence, ritual of book and bed, arch-backed animal rising sleepily at the sound of my key turning – sticks to beat self-pity down. Self-pity, that ravenous ingrate that rises balefully at the simple act of ‘bucking up’ for company. Uninvited guest grossly feeding on itself. Asexual reproducer gone berserk, begetting and begetting with no apparent need for outside intervention (though the hospitality of friends will do nicely). Touch Socratic even, in its arrogance, how it runs rings round what I’m absolutely sure is reason.

  But there’s no reasoning with now. This time of year is cruel, and makes glaring all our lacks. You gone by then, and like a ghost beside me. You are anyone by now, though, and what’s glaring is your very lack of specificity. An absence generic as a presence never could be, though on the side of each this much could be said: if present, possibility personified; if absent, failure of same.

  This year’s lesson: that loneliness, like a sick cell, will reinvent itself. Mutate, strengthen, grow resistant to the old remedies. That there are strains I haven’t even dreamed of.

  INCANTATION

  Prayer at bedtime, Angelus for the secular set.

  From Malin Head to Howth Head to the Irish Sea.

  Swaddled in my bed, quick listen to the news, just before lights out, just checking: was there anything that happened I should know about?

  From Carnsore Point to Valentia to Erris Head.

  Sudden sense of smallness, shelter and inclusion. The fact that weather can be met, across the board, with only silence. Incongruous comfort of our collective ineffectuality – the few limits we do share. Why winter has always seemed the most communal of seasons. How death stymies – then binds – the living, levelling who’s left as well.

  From Erris Head to Belfast Lough to Hook Head.

  Quiet pang of guilt. For what? For being here. Cosseted by airwaves, by four walls from the audible wind, warm, dry, safe and, really, OK. For the dumb good luck then of being here, which on the best days seems surely a remarkable omission, or oversight.

  Rosslare. Roche’s Point Automatic. Valentia. Belmullet … 999 steady … 996 and rising slowly … Loop Head. Mizen Head. Carnsore Point. And on the Irish Sea.

  Never more foreign than now. And yet, on hearing, of all things, the Sea Area Forecast, never since a child this tucked-in sensation. Crack of light under the door and life going on beyond it. Someone out there, with an eye on things. Parameters delineated. The compass-points of home. To be told where I am, and what bound by. Like the child’s incantation. Universe: galaxy: solar system: planet: hemisphere: continent: nation: state: city: street …

  … HOME

  Out the back, a biopsy of here. Field, hill and dale. Copse, the spire at Lissadell, hunkered shrubs cordoning off holdings, red-roofed barns and one stark white bungalow. The mountain – robbed at twilight of its contours – now a prow on the horizon. Through the keyhole view I’m given – this lens eye – pan here, then here, pull back, wide angle now, see a country echo in concentric rings of just this. Or fly over it. All like a doll’s house, down to diminutive detail, and knowable, you think, in one crossing. The human scale of things. The illusion therefore that you can grasp it. Learn the one thing you need to live here.

  TOURISM

  Moon over the back sheds on ink-blue nights. A rusty bike and wagon wheel propped against the side stone wall. The sheds, just shells of things. You see them everywhere. Candidates for conversion. But I like them roofless. The way the gable ends stand, regardless, as if holding up their end of the bargain. Every so often – out of the blue and never when I seek the thrill – it broadsides me, this scene in silhouette. I stare, like a tourist, into relative prehistory.

  And you, living in the shadow of that old abbey. When I’d asked and you’d told me – 1508, offhandedly – I was silenced. Centuries still strike me dumb, no matter what I learn, just keep seeming beyond my ken. As though I’m all jig time, quick-stop, planned obsolescence. What’s coming, rather than what’s gone.

  Constellations, first here, now here. The stars obscured for weeks by cloud cover and suddenly it breaks, and like the automated flick from one slide in the carousel to the next: a new view. Over and over, the strobing of the night sky. I step outside before bed and look up. Sometimes, even on the clearest nights: nothing: my own laziness of heart. A guilty inability to rise to the occasion. Sometimes, though, an awe that seems almost equal to the sight. A wholeness and no complaint. The knowing. And the not fearing not knowing.

  THE HALE-BOPP

  Zany name for what hung over us that summer, as though to keep us from taking miracle too seriously. Sounding to me like a dance my mother might have done forty-some years ago. Jiving at a mixer in West Philly. It used to hover, suspended dead centre above the straight stretch of the Donegal Road. And I, driving north, each time with the illusion of drawing nearer to it.

  You then too. There with me and eye trained skyward, you. Not another, not yet fallen nor ever will be. But with me. Two of us then, standing, with our simple mouths agape and my heart gone out to us. In that prolonged instant of afforded joy, in which the eye-blink of wish-time was arrested. When we stood, you and I there, in a state of continuous grace, under that one always-falling star which finally, that September, fell from view.

  ELAINE GARVEY

  Hammer On

  Pounding. On the move again, upstairs. Thumping across the floorboards on her fists and knees. I could defy her. I could list obscenities and shout them at her one by one. I could vandalise this house.

 
She said I could sleep in the room below her, as a temporary solution. I am still here. Did I travel in winter or perhaps through the night? Either way, I only recall being brought to this kitchen and the cake I was given to eat. She was watching me all the time but my bleary eyes hardly registered her. The next morning, the first morning, she tried to rouse me, rapping on the door as she walked in. I threw my shoes at the window in response, satisfied at the sound of splintering glass. You won’t keep me here, I said, I shouted, I whimpered. You won’t keep me here.

  It’s always the same day, none of this is news to me. I study the landscape, the direction of things: the river and its white foam, the road, attracting traffic, branching into crossroads and this heat, quiet and remorseless, which will turn into wet, which will turn into darkness. I do my rounds when the air is cooler, kicking at pebbles or nursing one along my instep. People pass by occasionally, nod in my direction, make their judgements. I can wait.

  Sing, she says. We are rolling pastry, inching it across the table like white lava. I am not a singer. I start to hum something mindless, but this won’t do. She releases her high, shivering voice, swaying her head to keep time. Songs about tea, bicycles and dear, sweet love. Upstairs, in her room, she is making a mould for me. I’ve seen its separate sections. For this. The line comes into my head and I whisper it to the baking dish: I belong to her.