Stopping wantless under cherry blossoms
He hears a girl singing from the sewer,
then harmonizes voices with some hums,
then sings the final chorus like he knows her,
their voices shaking red chrysanthemums –
but now the crowds of fading stars are fewer
and his voice grows weaker as the day glows nearer,
as he’s alarmed by the stirrings of the bums.
“Should I come up to see you on the street
so in the morning light we could now meet?”
A blossom plummets through the dewy grate.
Before he can reply I, an old class-mate,
pass by, asking why he’s standing here —
“for — for cherry-trees this time of year.”
______________
SONNET ON ANASTASIA
Like Martin Luther King she had a dream,
but lived out what the TV would prescribe.
She’d only ever be a psych-ward queen.
I know she might have equalized our tribe.
I whisperingly sing so soothingly;
Sometimes I wonder: would she still be gone
If she had measured my worth by my love, alone?
I could not heal her so distantly.
Like Martin Luther King she had a dream,
but lived out what the TV would prescribe.
She’d only ever be a psych-ward star.
We found her at the harbour, drowned. Her surgeon-
markered life-time thought-line equalled one long
wound — her legacy a traceless scar.
THE SONNET OF A PROPHET ADDRESSING HIS OWN COUNTRY
Canada, I came to you with my soul
and with diamonds, and you tried to collapse them
back into a vacuum, back into coal! —
Canada, remove your bloody diadem!
Canada, I came to you with answers
to inquiries you make in your lion-wild
dreams, where your wonder has been exiled,
where your wishes are kites so drawn to stirs
of the vortex of utopia, through
whose one end I blow, as though through a trumpet,
the prophecies you mock, despite sensing,
deep in your soul’s centre — you freeze —
the chance my drawn and quartered words are true,
these testaments to my theophanies!
____________
SONNET XVIII
So boa-constrictor-slowly you move,
exterminators of my humankind!
Some hardly feel their dying and approve
their deaths with stasis, silence; quarantined,
they cheerlead their own Gotterdammerung
while our exterminators now erect
the camps where Fidelitites — the unsung
saints, the Bride of Christ, the final sect,
dressed from head to foot in fealty —
will kneel before the pits; the humanoids
will jeer them from their seeming realty,
sore from their beast-marks – rabid with tirades.
So boa-constrictor-slowly you kill
those who’ll deny or receive you with full will.
THE SAVIOUR ADDRESSES A DANCER AT THE JUBILEE OF THE SECOND COMING (for Lenora Di Saverio)
Lone among the dancers, you mourn– despite Death’s adieu —
my Calvary anew, behind your sunglasses?
Woman, none stands alone so beautifully as you,
since, has the Kingdom not Come? You say your tears are dew?
Why now cry amid the trumpets and the brasses?!
Lone among the dancers, you mourn, despite Death’s adieu —
Mourn the dead Inferno-hours of the Risen Son, too?
O won’t you jive and join in chalice-clangs?
Woman, none stands alone so beautifully as you.
Why should you not waltz to a flawless few
Of Cecile’s tunes? Whiff this lilied wind that passes?
Lone among the dancers, you mourn, despite Death’s adieu.
I feel no sorrow; must my whippings ensue?
Should you not see family, upon my greenest grasses?
Woman, none stands alone so beautifully as you.
Behold the diamonding stars! Behold your halo-hue
supremely match the moon! To Lea! Raise your glasses!
Lone among the dancers, you mourn, despite Death’s adieu –
Woman, none stands alone so beautifully as you.
__________________
A SONNET AFTER MY WINTER SURRENDER
O Seraph who stands on sacred airs —
goldening the firmament with halo-
beams – illumining my soul with
rosary-stars, which supernova
after your Amens — you whisperingly singing
over me, soaring my soul like a whitening kite
triple-tied to an infinite string…
O Seraph who lands on burn-out back-
yards of this downcast world, when will this tempest end?! “Know: I only seem a Seraph! I am come, tonight, to witness your rebirth! Revere the spirit inside the whiteout; the snow foreshadows my Kingdom on Earth!”
_______________________
Featured Image: James Ensor – L‘entrée du Christ à Bruxelles
Feel free to turn up (or not)
wearing a full suit of armour,
or a hat with a big feather in it
and transparent trousers;
or to come dressed as a future
Bishop of Cork and Ross,
or as the prophet Isaiah’s
discredited older brother.
But this march is no wild ground
on which entrist dandelions
or buttercups will be allowed grow.
The Committee permits
no placards or literature
of a factional variety.
Most egregious those
with crazy words on them,
like “people before profit”.
So as not to put off
those not necessarily
in favour of people
(nor at all against profit)
our gathering will resemble
less a revolution
than a church group
on its way somewhere
to pray for a cure
for rheumatism,
or even better,
no cure;
so we can stand here
in increasing discomfort,
become such fixtures
even well behaved
dogs from Dun Laoghaire
start anointing
our legs as public conveniences.
Levi ‘Lev’ Driscoll, wrote the odd sentence or two when creativity revealed itself to him. This month, albeit at a snail’s pace, he’d immersed himself in Frank Herbert’s classic, Dune. How he relished reading the exploits of Paul Atreides and his mother Jessica, deep into the vast inhospitable desert on Planet Arrkais. Lev marvelled at how the novel’s plot had been devised to move the narrative forward – like the colossal sandworms burrowing at its centre, the sci-fi story tunnelled and lunged into a distant future, simply by devouring and expelling sand.
At age forty-five, Lev’s daily garb consisted of jeans and a plain t-shirt. When he was in the mood, he donned Cherry Red Doc Martins, or might dye his lank auburn locks an astonishing Hulk Green. In younger days, he’d sported the facial accoutrement of two studs and a nose ring. A soul-patch still featured below his lower-lip. He listened to Wayne Shorter, Van Morrison, and The Blue Room Jazz Sessions. Some Punk. A recent listen was that band called Idles. Lev watched what he ate, adding pomegranate seeds and blueberries to his a.m. porridge. A breakfast which steeled him for the day.
This morning’s thought had already been jotted down on a writing-pad, where he sat in the breakfast nook of his small Rathfarnham apartment, Good literary fiction is a desert citadel visited only a few times in one’s life. Breeching those stone walls brings with it a knowledge and invigorating power all of its own.
Turning on the radio he heard writer Colm Tóbín, talking about Irish writers’ fathers and their lives, whereupon Lev thought, Jazyhus, yer man Colm Tóbín’s voice sounds like it went off to Grasse in France for an apprenticeship in perfumery. Like it rolled in a field of lavender and chamomile!
Lev left his flat, caught the No.16 bus into town and went dandering about in Dublin city centre. He mooched for a few deals in Dunnes before deciding to walk the 8km home. It was late autumn and the sun was bright but the air very cold. Wind-raked dead leaves heaped at the sides of pavements with their muted browns, and October yellows.
Quiet were the white swans of Portobello, and their amorous dalliances on the Grand Canal went unnoticed by busy Dubliners in the early afternoon sunshine. He walked south of the city centre, into Rathmines and regarded a church’s chiselled proclamation, SUB. INVOC. MARIE. IMMACULATE. REFUCII. PECCATORUM (of Mary Immaculate, Refuge of Sinners, or possibly “Shinners,” as the IRA once stored weapons and ammunition in its vaults during the War of Independence). A Neoclassical colonnade and four columns stood proud as the façade, sprouting fleur-de-lis, under a copper-covered dome. The original burnt down in a fire of 1920 where a new one sits in its place, peeping over the skyline, in a shade of aquamarine flaring with copper hues and an impressive, oxidised jade patina. Rumoured to be destined for Saint Petersburg’s Russian orthodoxy, the impressive architecture conjured places such as Rome, or indeed, Russia, thought Lev. Yet, it seemed like an opal set in granite.
To get off the street, Lev didn’t even look up at the sign above its door before entering one Rathmines establishment. Without registering its high-windows, tables and chairs, or mute patrons within, what he wanted was a hot drink and to sit down. Maybe a freshly baked Danish, if there was one? And for some reason, at that moment, he mused about Vermeer’s chequered black & white tiled floor. Would it, he wondered, have been mopped, regularly? Also, he pictured Joseph Decker’s painting, Green Plums. Then Lev summoned from memory, some NASA photos he’d seen, of Jupiter’s meteoroid scarred moon, Europa.
Inside the café, a Gaggia coffee machine operated at full steam. Out of it gurgled runnels of a dark, bubbling, black gold. At its side, feldspar porcelain espresso cups piggy-backed on top of each other along with small white matching saucers stacked and ready for dispensing. An alluring aroma of roasting coffee beans permeated the café where chatter was subdued. The high-fi-system played Handel’s Water Music, seemingly on a loop. Not a flat-screen television in sight, and a sign stated that it was forbidden to use smartphones. Plastic mother-in-law’s tongue sat sterile in plastic pots. Fake ferns and philodendrons were fixed with grey pebbles inside sable-coloured wooden borders. A glass cloche covered some raisin-studded scones nestled beside the cash-register up front.
When his turn came to be served, Lev stepped forward and almost absentmindedly asked, “Can I have a cappuccino, please?”
“Did you submit Form 1A?” enquired the lady behind the counter. A pair of lacquered chopsticks held her brown locks in place and she sported tortoise shell-coloured glasses. White shirt. Black apron, trousers, and shoes. Her elaborately embossed name tag said simply, “Server.”
“No, I’m afraid I did not,” Lev was lost.
Pink slips of paper were piled high in an in-tray before him, but he hadn’t noticed.
“You still have to submit Form 1A.” She said glaring through her glasses at Lev.
“I just want a coffee,” replied the writer, now sheepish. She sighed.
Another customer stepped forward to order and Lev stood back a little, letting the other customer pay for and receive her green tea.
“There’s your receipt, and here’s my receipt, for your receipt.” clarified the lady in the glasses, securing her own slips in the till. Thinking about writing, Lev conjectured, You have to keep a full-stop dancing on its tippy-toes. He then moved forward again. At this, the lady clucked her tongue.
“I’m still waiting,” Lev reminded her. She looked at him again with an imbibing eye, imagining he was an outlier and hence, a troublemaker.
“Which street do you live on?”
“What does it matter which street I live on?” Lev began to show signs of incredulity.
“Because, Sir,” she snapped, “We only serve some streets on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and others on Mondays, Fridays and Saturdays. It’s all here in the rules,” She said, tapping a laminate posted at the till. And on it was a map depicting which streets were allowed to order coffee on what days. Lev found it all rather formal. Something about it didn’t sit well with his socialist perspective.
“This is wile bad craic, Hey!” He uttered, entirely exasperated.
“Now, you’ll have to fill out Form 1A. With adjuncts A1 and B1, Sir.”
What fresh hell is this? Lev pondered.
“Why?” was all he asked.
“Because, Sir, you fail to follow protocol.”
A speaker above the coffee-machine barked out, ‘More A32 Forms, immediately!’
On the counter was a box of black ink Biro ballpoint pens, and a photocopier behind the counter ran pink slips of paper which were bakery warm to the touch.
While all around him customers filled in their forms in quiet acceptance, he regarded the server in question and her carapace of harshness with a mixture of bemusement, anger and wonder. Was this Stalinist Russia or Thatcher’s Britain, where civil servants replaced all working roles with their applications and forms inhabiting long corridors to the sound of opening and closing doors behind which were row upon row of file cabinets filled with documents ranging from ordering a clothes peg, Form 2344ABX, to marriage vows, Forms 32 C & D. Entering here meant submission to an authoritative power and being controlled by it. Out in grey society, the faceless masses walked around with their heads drooped, proles going about their conforming lives. No individuality permitted. Conform through endless bureaucracy or go insane in the process. Few go insane. Most do conform. But, under no circumstances would Lev. He aimed for coconut shampoo, raspberries and cream, lemon-curd sandwiches, a three-day weekend with Habanero sauce. Peaking cream puffs and apple-turnovers. Falling popcorn, the fifth of November, and bonfire night. Dance music. Pubs. Freedom of choice. Not this, whatever this was.
“May I have a scone with my cappuccino?’ asked Lev.
“Oh, you want a fruit scone?’ She said with all the vigour of a congregating sloth at a sleepover in Connecticut. Lev sensed that his request was bothersome, but he would hold out to see how far this would go.
“Please move over to the other line. This line is for people with slips. The other line is either for those who have not made their minds up yet, or Sabos like yourself. That’s short for Saboteurs around here,” she explained. Lev saw no other line, but he spied a stand which read “Sabos.”
“Does this work the same way for a bacon sandwich?” he asked, arching an eyebrow.
“To have a bacon sandwich, you’ll have to make an appointment.”
“To have a freaking BLT?”
“An appointment with the chef.” She stipulated.
“Lemme get this right. To order a simple bacon sandwich, I have to make an appointment with the establishment’s cook?”
“His title is Chef Martine, Sir,” said the server, adding, “And yes, that’s the rule. There are no exceptions to the rules. Not here. Would you like to make an appointment?”
Stunned, Lev nodded his assent, as the server spoke into an intercom.
“A Sabo requests an appointment, Chef Martine.”
Lev stood for forty minutes before being ushered into a small yet neat stainless-steel kitchen where, with a square blade, the chef was decapitating a head of lettuce from its white neck. Luscious and wet, the green leaves fell open in that kind of surreal slow-motion Lev had only seen in advertisements on TV. This was the inner sanctum of scones and other closely held secrets. Chef Martine’s accent was fabulously French. “No. Get rid of dis, and dis, and dis. Out!” Pausing his pointing at which produce needed to be replaced or replenished, in less than a split second, he looked Lev up and down, before waving him away.
“I have no time to…to…to deal with the likes of you, Monsieur!”
Backing out to the café, again Lev attempted to ask for a drink and without the appropriate paperwork. He was denied. Lev wondered about the hivemind rolling over to authority. The weak-livered acceptance. Rising up, he steadied himself upon a table top and announced, “You! All of you!” Around twelve café patrons looked up from their flat-whites, green-teas and Americanos. “You have freedom of choice to come in and order a drink without having to fill in mundane forms!” No one dared to agree with his rebellious talk. “To spend your lives in cubicles fulfilling meaningless work just because it’s been set out for you, is a form of bondage and slavery! You in your Birkenstocks, reading gossip magazines full of middle-class morality and intolerance by the cart-load!”
“SIR! Can you calm down?” called out the server, white face contorted in confusion, indignation and trembling with anger.
“I WILL NOT CALM DOWN, you… COG! What kind of establishment is this place, anyway? What’s it called?”
“Sir, you are in Kafka’s Café.”
Something clicked and so he saw it all now. The endless bureaucratic processes. The strict adherence to these formalities. The authoritarian staff. The server’s clerkish comportment. He felt anger. Despair. Hopelessness. This was not just a comment on the establishment in question, but to a wider enslavement of human beings. Freedom of expression was viewed as distrustful and downright careless. Dangerous even. People like Lev were to be ridiculed and ignored. They were insane outliers who were not at all loyal to the state.
“Okay, I’ve read The Trial. The Castle and this…This is circumvented madness towards a form of totalitarian rule. I just wanted a fucking coffee!” said Lev out loud.
With a nod, the server sent a staff member out back to alert the relevant authorities. Stepping down from his table top pulpit, Lev sat quite still playing The Clash’s Rock the Casbah on his smartphone. Café personnel looked on and whispered at the bizarre behaviour of this madman. Lev did not hear a van screech up to the pavement outside. Nor did he notice as burly men in dark uniforms stormed in, until they grabbed hold of him. His phone was sent crashing to the floor, where its plastic housing cracked and scattered.
Screaming “Poseidon! Poseidon!”* Lev was brought out into the street by a balaclava-clad, snatch-squad and dragged into the back of a waiting van. His demonstrations were soon silenced by its doors when they were slammed shut behind him, before the vehicle roared off and disappeared.
The citizens in the café merely blinked as they began filling in their 1A forms again. The age of banality was long and continued unabated as, outside, a stroke of raindrops dashed the Dublin pavement, people filed along the streets where, once more, normality pervaded. The white floating petals of the swans’ feathers, the hue of hedge bindweed (Calystegia Sepium) drifted down the canal water’s surface and on into the diminishing autumn evening.
*Poseidon is a piece of prose by Franz Kakfa.
Featured Image: Egon Schiele, Self-Portrait with Physalis, 1912.
Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) reshaped the trajectory of modern literature. In acknowledgement T.S. Eliot famously called him ‘the Father of Modernism.’
Many monolingual English speakers might be unaware that, along with Shakespeare and Dante, Baudelaire has been instrumental to how we in the West perceive the world.
As an example, I think back to the early nineteen-nineties when I was living in Paris and the Austrian hosiery company Wolford were launching an advertising campaign using the photography of the celebrated fashion photographer Helmut Newton. I remember being on Place Concorde, not far from the Louvre, when his iconic black and white photographs of the giantesses were illuminated in the night sky, transforming the very street into a living interior of the exterior; just as Walter Benjamin had remarked about the arcades in his remarkable study of the nineteenth century French poet. This was pure Baudelaire in the late twentieth century.
Of course, the Baudelairean woman is a whole motif or trope in herself, and is certainly one of the principal reasons why readers, male and female, still turn to Baudelaire, as he is one of the few poets who can write about women and love in a truly remarkable way, and which still makes sense to us today.
Take the transversion of the poem ‘Sisina’ which I have transversed as ‘Wonder Woman’ in place of the name Théroigne, which according to my Flammarion notes is a reference to Théroigne de Mericourt (1762– 1817), who was involved in the French Revolution in 1792.
The poem makes reference to a particular incident which happened on a staircase. This same woman appears in the famous French historian Michelet’s Histoire de la Révolution Francais, and she is also found in the poet Lamartine’s Histoire des Girondins. Apparently, Baudelaire was inspired by a drawing by the artist Raffet that depicts the incident and which was published by Pommier & Pichois.
As this historical connection is likely to be lost on contemporary readers, I have supplanted it with the reference to the movie Wonder Woman. You have to choose your battles.
I was particularly impressed by the character in the film while watching it with my ten-year-old daughter, as I thought she made a very good role model for young girls. My choice, I believe, is in accord with the symbolism and underlining metaphor in the poem.
Baudelaire’s reference is to another actress Elisa Neri, who played the role of Théroigne, from what I understand, in theatrical productions during Baudelaire’s day. The poet came into contact with her through his attachment to Mme Sabatier, who was to have such an impact on him.
I am of course referencing the climax of the Marvel movie when Wonder Woman, played by Gal Gadot, confronts Ares the God of War – thus mirroring the original reference made by Baudelaire to Théroingne de Mericourt played by the actress Elisa Neri.
I expect Baudelaire would be entirely at home in today’s world where women have taken such a prominent place. After all, are the Gal Godot’s of today not the very same women of Baudelaire’s time? Women who showed incredible strength in the face of adversity.
Surely, it is in the role of the Amazonian that the Baudelairean Woman is most idealised, which the poem Sisina is an example of, though it certainly stands alone.
Spleen and Ideal is full of references to Amazonian and powerful women of which Lady Macbeth is one of the crowning figures, but first here is the poem ‘Sisina’ by Baudelaire followed by my transversion into English, which I have given the title ‘Wonder Woman’.
LIX.- SISINA
Imaginez Diane en galant equipage,
Parcourant les forêts ou battant les halliers,
Cheveux et gorge au vent, s’enivrant de tapage,
Superbe et defiant les meilleurs cavaliers!
Avez-vous vu Théroinge, amante du carnage,
Excitant à l’assaut un people sans souliers,
La joue et l’oeil en feu, jouant son personnage,
Et montant, sabre au pong, les royaux escaliers?
Telle la Sisina! Mais la douce guerrière
A l’àme charitable autant que meurtrière;
Son courage, affolé de poudre et de tambours,
Devant les suppliants sait metre bas les armes,
Et son Coeur, ravage par la flame, a toujours,
Pour qui s’en montre digne, un reservoir des larmes.
Wonder Woman
Imagine Diana and her gallant retinue
Charging through the forests bursting through the thickets,
Mane and throat to the wind, drunk on uproar,
Superbly defiant the best riders!
Have you seen Wonder Woman, lover of carnage,
Happily defending the down-trodden,
Cheek and eye aflame, enfevered in her role,
Assaulting, sword and shield in hand, the staircase?
Just like Gal Jadot! But the gentle warrior
Is as much a charitable soul as she is a seasoned killer;
Her courage, panicking in the explosions and drums,
Is to know when to put aside weapons before suppliants,
And her heart, ravaged by both fire and pain, is always,
For those who have some dignity, also a reservoir of tears.
My boss sent me looking for Luigi. One of his super-rich clients had been sucked in by a betting scam Luigi was running down at the dogs. Luigi took this dude for a lot of twine and you could maybe say that my boss was seeking… restitution. It was my job to stick close to Luigi, wait for him to slip up.
First stop, his apartment. He wasn’t there, but Dolores was. Five foot five and stacked, packaged in a singlet and daisy dukes. Biting that lip.
“Hey, Carter. You look good.”
She came up close to touch my cheek, then spun around and yeah, ground that tush of hers into my crotch. The glance over her shoulder said Follow me, and I did.
Dolores was juicier than a peach. Hungrier than a shark. When we were done, she lay on the bed like a rag doll. Zipping up my pants, I asked her, “Where is he?”
“Luigi? Oh, Luigi’s long gone.”
He’d been a busy boy … tying up loose ends, collecting debts. Generally making people nervous, like something big was going to happen. People were looking for him. But now, no trace.
A few days before, I was having breakfast at the Valhalla when my phone went off. Hamzy’s retread factory had gone up in flames overnight … and was still burning. Did a drive-by and sure enough, Fifteen engines plus cops diverting traffic. Smoke poured out the back of a building packed with enough rubber to blaze for days.
Hamzy liked the gee gees, but they didn’t like him back. When he’d burned through every legit line of credit to feed his habit, he had to turn to some pretty unsavoury people. He’d gazed into the abyss, and the abyss was gazing back. Desperate times.
Hamzy and Luigi shared a love of fishing, and it’s not hard to imagine Hamzy pouring his heart out during a day spent chasing snapper off Long Reef. Luigi had his fingers in a lot of pies, but now some of those pies had teeth. The brain trust’s coinciding interests might’ve come up with the idea of a new start, in a new state, for Luigi.
You could rely on Luigi to fly under the radar. He’d never been flashy, not even in the good times. He liked to do the rounds in a battered ten-year-old Commodore with multiple plates, driven by Dolores’ brother, Pete.
Pete was big. Not the sharpest tool in the box. A rangy guy with massive hands, he didn’t like me running around with Dolores. Not out of loyalty to Luigi, but because he just plain couldn’t stand the sight of me. One drunken night he let the cat out the bag when he says to me, “I wanna punch you in the face, Pretty Boy.”
I filled the boss in about Hamzy and how I thought Luigi was in the picture, especially given his history of playing with matches. A while later, the boss passed on scuttlebutt he’d picked up in the city: suspected arson, accelerant used. Police investigating. A two and a half million-dollar property insurance policy. No financial loss cover … maybe Hamzy didn’t want peeps looking at the books.
The boss pulled a few strings. His office was lousy with strings: like a cat’s cradle. He got me an in with Hamzy’s brokers…I was to be Hamzy’s quote unquote special adviser, sitting in on his meetings with the loss adjuster and lawyers. “Keep your mouth shut and listen,” he said. “Don’t fuck up.”
So, I got some cards printed…Lloyd Carter, Business Continuity Consultant or some such bullshit…and dusted off my only suit. I’d been spending some time on the weights, and the sleeves were tight as sausage skins. No way I could have buttoned up the jacket. Still, the fake credentials worked.
The law offices were located on a floor high above the harbour, and tiny sailboats way down below threaded around the ferries and gin palaces. In the boardroom, I sat with Hamzy across from the adjuster, a hatchet-faced Irish dude, and some other fuckers.
Hamzy had dressed to impress, black shirt and purple tie under a grey leather bomber. Hair slicked back, trailing a cloud of Drakkar Noir so potent it stung my eyes.
Hatchet Face was all business. “Mr Hamzy, I’d like to explain the process to you. If your claim is to be accepted, we need to determine the cause of the fire and rule out the possibility that you had any involvement. This will involve a physical investigation at the site, as well as a factual investigation. You and your staff will have to be interviewed, give statements and so on. At the end of that process, I will report to my principals and seek their instructions. Do you understand?”
Hamzy was smooth. Cucumber cool. “I understand. You have your job to do. I just worry about my guys, their families. Those poor kids…” I swear, his eyes welled up like he was chopping onions. Fuck, he was good. Here’s how Hamzy told it:
As usual, the factory closed at midday on Saturday. It was locked up tight, and the alarm activated. I was fishing all day. At 21:00 I got to the factory and parked my boat. The missus doesn’t like my boat parked on her driveway, so I keep it at the factory. That way on Monday morning, the guys can give it a good wash. So, I turned off the alarm, and put the boat inside, before locking up tight again and reactivating the alarm. Then I get a call at 06:00, about alarms going off like crazy, and authorities already alerted? I got back there at 07:15, and the place was already an inferno.
That’s all he knew. Then they put him through the wringer. For six weeks. They got nowhere. Forensics came up with nothing…too many chemicals in the place, so they couldn’t root out the accelerant. The employees knew nothing and Hamzy stuck to his story. The cops lost interest. The money men knew in their guts he did it, but they couldn’t find a (fancy word) nexus.
So back to the aerie over the sparkling sea, the boardroom was chock full of suits. I didn’t know who they were, but there was a guy down the end with a poker face, in a navy suit that cost more than my car. I thought, That’s the guy.
Hatchet Face said something like “You know that we know. We know you did it, and we can drag this out. Make you take us to court. It could go on for years. But the clients are reasonable people, so in the interest of harmony and goodwill, they’re willing to settle the matter by a final payment in full. One million.
“Thank you. Can I take a moment to discuss this with my adviser?” That was supposed to be me, but Hamzy didn’t need my advice. He just stood at the picture window in reception, staring all the way out across the sparkly blue to the Heads. Maybe he was thinking of snapper. We went back in.
“I want to thank you, Gentlemen, for your candour. I agree that it would be best to finalise this troublesome matter, so we can all get on with our lives. I would hate for us to go through the expense and inconvenience of legal action. The only winners are the lawyers, right?” A nervous chuckle went through the room. Not me. I don’t chuckle. Anyway, I was likely to split a sleeve if I did. Suit was quiet too, looking at his manicured nails.
“One and a half million,” said Hamzy. Hatchet looked at Suit. A signal. “We’ll send a release out today,” said Hatchet. “Thanks for your time, everybody.”
Boom. Job done.
Then I was back to core business, looking for Luigi. All roads led to Dolores. She would give me a lock on Pete. Also, Dolores was a rabbit hole I was happy to fall into.
I met with her at the Valhalla for a steak. She arrived in a white shirt dress; top buttons undone showing a fluorescent orange push-up bra. She had a side hustle, selling used panties to pervs on the net. She’d hooked up with someone in factory seconds who sold her the slow-moving stock dirt cheap. Which meant her lingerie was always…interesting.
Dolores was short-sighted but didn’t like glasses, so she walked in chin up and looking down her nose, like a queen. We sat side by side in a booth for ease of canoodling, and rejected the cat-piss House Red in favour of a nice Barolo. Went back to the place she shared with Luigi…cartons of knickers and packing materials all over the place, a vacuum sealer she got on eBay in the corner, to ensure freshness. She liked to look after her customers.
But at that particular moment, she was looking after me. Afterwards, I asked her about Pete.
They were close. He was eleven and Dolores just fifteen, when she woke him before dawn, her finger on his lips to hush him up. The two of them lit out, away from the busted furniture, dogshit and violence thrumming like a high-tension wire. They hitched rides to the Emerald City, where she took care of him, kept him safe.
It was only natural that he swung by to let her know he and Luigi had concluded some business. They were gonna make themselves scarce for a while. He and Dolores had no secrets, so Pete spilled the whole deal. Here’s how he told it:
Luigi and Pete were waiting at the factory when Hamzy arrived. Hamzy killed the alarm and opened up. While he messed with the boat and trailer, the boys headed out back and poured petrol all around the place. They half-filled heavy-duty plastic bags with petrol, hung them off machines. Luigi drilled a hole through the metal wall cladding and pushed through a short length of cordite, one end into a little plastic bottle of petrol. Everybody out, alarm on. Locked up. At 04:30, Pete and Luigi went back and lit the fuse. And presto! Inferno.
So, see Hamzy hadn’t uttered a word of a lie. No wonder his story held up. Next day Luigi and Pete hopped into the Commodore and drove west with a few bricks of fifties totalling a hundred grand; to be split 70/30, because Luigi was the brains.
“Pete called me,” said Dolores. “He’s in Broken Hill.”
I got on a plane along with all the miners in fluoro. Pete was holed up in a shitty motel on the Silver City Highway, drinking rum and Coke at ten in the morning when I busted in. “The fuck you want, Pretty Boy?”
I told him I knew the story but had no dog in the Hamzy hunt. What I wanted was Luigi. He laughed at me. “Luigi? Good luck with that; I reckon the pigs have him finished off by now.”
On the road, Luigi was excited, chatty, talking about the casino in Perth, and his plans for a lesbian double at the Golden Apple. Pete asked if he was going to bring Dolores out west. Luigi said he and Dolores were through: she was nothing but a cunt and a whore, just a set of holes to stick his dick in. He knew she was running around on him and she could go fucking rot.
I could picture Pete’s heavy hands tight on the wheel, his eyes on the road.
Luigi needed to piss, so he had Pete pull over. Luigi walked a little way off and was going like a horse when Pete came up from behind with a tyre iron from under the driver’s seat. Clubbed him to the ground, turned him over and bashed his face to jelly.
“You’d better keep your mouth shut, Pretty Boy.” I put up my hands and backed out, leaving him to his rum and Coke, his hundred thousand dollars, and his shitty motel room on the Silver City Highway.
Back in Sydney, me and the boss closed the book on Luigi. Not the result we were after, but restitution of sorts.
And Hamzy. For a smart guy, Hamzy was fucking dumb. His payout staved off trouble for a while, but soon he was up to his old tricks. They found his Sportsman drifting 20NM off the Heads. Open verdict.
Me and Dolores still fool around. Her and her crazy lingerie. She looks after me. And I look after her.
“Take me off!” Dad directed all his anger at Mi Sun, an Asian nurse who barely spoke English. But now she understood him perfectly. For Rage is a universal language. Frantic, she phoned my sister and managed to communicate that despite my father’s protests, she didn’t have the authority to halt a patient’s treatment in mid-dialysis. I was tired too and despite my weariness, found myself frying, flipping, and browning. Making meals up until the moment he would no longer be able eat. I’d no choice but to continue. My dying father was living for my cooking, and for lack of a better title, I appointed myself, “Chef Death.”
It was the least I could do. He’d been enduring four-hour-long dialysis appointments, three days a week, for the last seventeen years. Even in 97 degree heat, he would conceal the gruesome shunt on his arm, with the long sleeve of a heavy sweatshirt. I for one, couldn’t fathom what it felt like to have the blood drained from your body and rinsed “clean,” before then having it pumped back in again. He spent his last session screaming.
In his youth, he’d been an athlete, scouted by all three New York pro baseball teams. Turning his attention to drawing, he’d supported a family of six on a freelance artist’s salary. But at that stage he could barely walk, and those graceful hands that won art awards and fielded line drives, now struggled to pick up a fork. He’d had it. He’d had it with my sister too. She’d been living with him for five years, pleading that he adjust his diet, which might’ve made life easier between dialysis sessions. Unfortunately, what made him happy, made him worse. However, with death imminent, hospice gave him the green light for unlimited amounts of comfort food.
I’m the middle daughter of a Sicilian mother. One who got bitten by the culinary bug. On a white sheet which stretched the length of our dining room table, I watched my grandmother lay freshly made ravioli. My job was to close the ends of each ravioli with a pinch.
My mother was also a good cook, but her talents were wasted on my picky father’s pedestrian palate. Once it was me on the frontline, I was a sleepwalking waitress. A glorified short order cook who didn’t aim for extraordinary. I’d been helping him for months prior to his hospice kicking in, carefully commuting from Covid ravished Queens to pandemic plagued Jersey. My sister assured me these efforts were appreciated, “Dad said you’re great!” He said, “She cooks, she cleans, and she drives!”
Irony, you are one serious Bitch. This was supposed to be my “Summer of love.” I’d even burned foul smelling sage, while performing an embarrassing full moon ritual to declare this my “Summer of love.” But instead of primping for socially distanced dates, there I was, putting his preferred number of ice cubes in my father’s plastic cup. Once when I was roasting chicken, out of nowhere my father says, “Laura, I’m going to introduce you to…”I stopped breathing. Did he actually have a contact that could be the glimmer of a potential boyfriend? I was psyched as he continued, “I’m going to introduce you to … the greatest sandwich on Earth … liverwurst and onions!” I top off his Coke and cover my mouth. What was I thinking? He didn’t have any romantic contacts for me, and even if he did, physically he wouldn’t have been able to flip open his poor old phone.
We’d had a running sandwich feud over Levy’s Rye bread. Because I’d pronounced it, Levi’s, like the jeans. Every time he asked me to buy this bread, I’d say it wrong and he’d go ballistic. “It’s Levy’s bread, not Levi’s jeans!” Dumbfounded, I’d yell back, “Who cares, Dad? Do you have stock in Levi’s bread?” In the supermarket, eyeing eleven brands of rye, I don’t see the one he would want. About to give up, I spotted it, that glistening gem in a sea of plastic packaging. Levy’s Real Jewish Rye. I grabbed it like I was Leonardo DiCaprio in Blood Diamond, only to return home and commit the sin of mispronunciation. “Dad, I got Levi’s bread!” He was speechless.
When you’re ninety and stop dialysis, the expectation is that you’ll be dead in a few days, or well on your way to a kind of sleepy incoherence. This is what the hospice nurse had said in private. But my father’s mind was running at full capacity about his empty stomach. “I’ll take four pancakes, one at a time.” I obliged while he explained his reasoning. “If you give me two pancakes at once, by the time I finish the first, the second one is cold.” His pancakes also had to be five inches in diameter and I was careful to adhere to those measurements. He was even more exacting about maple syrup distribution and didn’t trust me with the task. As he took the bottle from my hand, I watched him start from the center, then pour a perfect circle around the piping hot pancake, as if he was putting the finishing touches on one of his water colors. Inhaling, I stifled my impatience. “Let me do it,” he said. “No one lets me do anything anymore. I can still do things!”
How horrible, trying to control the one thing he could and wanted do. My sister alleviated that guilt by reminding me I was sleep deprived. I’d been up since 5:45 am hunting for non-existent car keys my father said fell under his hospital bed. This wasn’t how I imagined my “Summer of love,” crawling around in my underwear to appease my father’s nightmare. As a result of the three Extra Strength Tylenol my sister-in-law had given him for his excruciating pain, he was hallucinating. Again.
We persuaded him to take Lorazepam, a hospice drug that alleviates agitation and induces deep sleep. As the night aide, Agar, wheeled Dad into his room, he placed his breakfast order, “Tomorrow, one egg sunny-side up and four sausages.” For all my father’s fascism about food, his soft side was equally extreme. Dad insisted his day aide, Sunday, a six-foot-two Nigerian man, abandon whatever he’d brought to eat on his break, in favor of sharing a meal with my father. I was raised by a working-class artist who never employed people. If he understood the concept, it was only to firmly reject it. Our rotating 24/7 aides were treated as any guest would be. Dad was delighted when they would break Levy’s bread and drink Margaritas with him. In this way the atmosphere here was less hospice and more of a Happy Hour.
In between meals, my father asked me a sobering question; what will I miss when I die? I confessed I had never thought about it. But he had, “I’ll miss the trees.” This made sense. When he retired from commercial art, he painted landscapes for fun. Trees and sky were among his favorite subjects. “I’ll miss their leaves blowing in the wind.” His response seemed so simple, and even simpler that I could love him more for missing trees, even if his answer to that question wasn’t me.
Yesterday, he requested veal cutlets with A LOT of garlic. He spouted his specifications all day. “Go to the butcher. Have him pound the veal thin. Ask him to pound the cutlets very thin.” My sister bought veal at the supermarket where there was no real butcher. And they weren’t thin. Using the back of my knife, I pounded with Sweeney Todd vengeance. They were haemorrhaging as my father shouted, “Don’t pound! It’s too much work!” But as long as I pounded, he thrived. My nurse friend had warned me that his demise could get ugly. But we were over a week in and he wasn’t even puffy yet. My food was magic! I put in the extra garlic, parmesan, parsley, and breadcrumbs, combining ingredients until all the flavors came together. My hands worked independently of my body. All my life I’d hated my hands. They were my mother’s hands. It never made sense that my slender body should lead to these chubby, tapered elf fingers that didn’t match the rest of me. I felt my mother took control as I chopped, breaded and fried, finally internalizing why I inherited these hands from her. They weren’t meant to be pretty. They were destined for a purpose.
Delivering the cutlet to my father met with silence, until…“This is so delicious,” he said, almost like he was praying. He asked for another, insisting his aide Menoushka and I experience the same bliss. I hadn’t had this dish in twenty years. Welcome back to my mouth veal cutlets. You’re perfect.
As a girl, my father tucked me in to bed, so It seemed fitting that at the end of his life, I return the favor. Curling up behind him, I floated my arm over his body and sang, “Good night Sweetheart, ’til we meet tomorrow.” He joined in, ”Goodnight, Sweetheart, sleep will vanish sorrow.” Neither of us could remember the rest, but by then he’d fallen asleep.
The next night another role reversal occurred, when while spooning with him, I momentarily shifted my body. “Stay with me,” he insisted. We had a chat about breakfast. He wanted pancakes again, and for the first time, I told him my order. “I want one egg scrambled, three slices of bacon and one slice of Levi’s toast.” Through a garbled, fluid filled voice, he laughed hard. That was our last conversation.
My father lingered another miraculous fifteen days. I was with him when on his own, he took his final breath. The four oxygen tanks we’d stockpiled would benefit someone else. His last aide Dee, was there with us too, and after he passed, she said, “Your father really loved you, because in his dreams, he was always calling your name.” I said, “Dee, it wasn’t me he wanted, it was my food.” She was polite when she disagreed, “No Laura. I think what he wanted was you.”
To sit quietly and take in the view was unusual for Alexander Seymionovitch. His tall French windows flung wide open were like an extension of his arms warmly embracing the air of a new world which at least to him seemed astonishingly peaceful. Even though his thoughts circled like a pack of Siberian wolves, he felt his heart was full to overflowing with very positive vibrations. He watched the sea’s reflection of sprinkled sunlight dance above him on the ceiling and marveled at how it dappled the walls of his palatial home in celebration of his happiness. I love her. I love her. I love her. Perhaps he was being foolish to suddenly behave like a teenager. A man in his prime, armed with infinite power and unlimited money. A man used to calling the shots. At the ripe old age of sixty Alexander had fallen in love.
He found himself under a spell, and in that sense of powerlessness, he discovered fragility and fear, but also savored a sweetness. Until now he’d been content with his life. He was fine. Just fine. He hadn’t asked for this to happen. But now that it had, he couldn’t see any other way to live.
For the last ten years Seymionovitch had been a resident of Monaco. His seaside mansion with all the trimmings was in every way the sort of residence you would expect of a Russian billionaire. But only now did he notice something that even to the poorest of paupers cost nothing, if only they had one good eye. That the Mediterranean was indeed so beautiful. So blue.
Alexander was not unattractive, but muscular. Of medium build, he kept himself in good shape, believing that physical fitness kept him mentally sharp and gave him an edge in business.
Without meaning to, his gaze could be intimidating. His brown eyes radiated intelligence. And often people speaking to him felt compelled to avert their own eyes, for fear that he could read their thoughts. When he smiled, which occurred often because he was heavily invested in appreciating the absurdity of life, he displayed deep dimples which made him irresistible to women and men alike. In business he was famed for being brilliant, charming and brutal.
But now, he heard a rustle behind him and the faint sound of footsteps running on tip toes. Without even turning around to see who it was, because he knew, Alexander beamed. Slender silky arms clasped him from behind, and a soft cheek nuzzled his neck.
“Here you are!” she exclaimed. He pulled her over to sit on his lap.
“Let me have a look at you.” His wife of one month was approaching her twenty-first birthday.
“Did you notice how blue the sea is today?”
“Of course, but what is so special about that?”
“I’ve just never taken the time to absorb the fullness of its beauty before.”
“Oh Papa, everything is beautiful here!” She called him Papa, because she said he was not only her husband and her lover, but also the father she’d never had. Alexander harbored no doubt about how much Anna adored him, but he remained mystified as to why she didn’t consider their age gap an obstacle. “I could be your grandfather,” he reminded her.
“Don’t say that!”
When they met, he didn’t even register that she was a woman. To him she was a child. One who should be left to play with children her own age. This initial meeting occurred where she was working as a waitress in a Moscow café. Seymionovitch was preoccupied, dining there with a few young executives. Although she was striking, Alexander didn’t even see her. But the younger men couldn’t take their eyes off of her, and furthermore they said as much to her. Without acknowledging the compliment, Anna took their order with a blank stare.
When one day, he sat down at a table on his own, the woman in question didn’t waste any time.
“Mr Seymionovitch,” she said, “I’m scared of your young executives.”
He looked at her with surprise. “Why would you say that?”
“Because that’s just it. They’re young.”
Alexander was bemused. “But you are young too. It’s normal. There’s no reason to be afraid.”
“I don’t like the way they look at me.”
Now Alexander appraised her for the first time. He surveyed her for a solid minute and realized that those green eyes and high cheekbones pointed to a specific and highly desirable genetic marker. Must be some Mongolian blood in the mix.
“You shouldn’t be working in a cafe if you fear the gaze of young men.”
“But I have no choice.”
“You always have a choice,” said Seymionovitch, leaving her a generous tip and the salient memory of what no one in Monaco disputed was indeed a dazzling smile.
Seymionovitch didn’t give it another thought. Beauty was beauty, and where there is such a concentration of wealth, beautiful women will always be a dime a dozen. They came, married well, and then they went away. Where? Who cares! He wasn’t looking for anything. Business was a game that took him to faraway places. And when he wasn’t traveling, he spent most of his time in Monaco, where all the other oligarchs also found it convenient to base themselves.
Anna still marveled at the fact that she was married to Alexander Seymionovitch. It was like a dream come true, and she still enjoyed recalling the moment when fate reunited them. It was springtime and he gave a large party at his Moscow mansion. An army of waiters and waitresses had been hired for the event, and she was one of them. Anna waited until he was alone to approach him. She was carrying a tray laden with glasses of Champagne, and said in a clear voice, “Mr Seymionovitch, you were right!”
Giggling, she recalled his confused expression which seemed to say: “A waitress dares address me so directly? Who are you and what do you want?”
“Remember that moment?” She asked.
“I didn’t know who you were, let alone what you were talking about. Now, Anna, tell me the truth, you were after my money, you little gold digger.”
“Not so little.” Said Anna, cupping both of her cashmere covered breasts in two exquisitely manicured hands.
Anna grew up with her mother, Irina and grandmother, Natasha. She’d never known her father. She told Seymionovitch that men were a mystery to her. She was fascinated by them, but had always feared young boys. They were so cruel, brash, and never serious. When their hands weren’t chasing her, their eyes told her it wasn’t a question of if, but when.
“You know the way someone looks at you, and you’re certain what they really want is to use up your body and take your soul away?”
“No, I don’t know. Tell me!”
Anna laughed, “It’s hard to describe.”
“What about me?” asked Alexander, “What do you feel when I look at you?”
“I feel safe. I feel that I’m at home and everything is good.”
He pushed her gently away from his chest, so that he could examine her face.
“Now, it’s your birthday soon. Your twenty-first! I would like to do something special.”
“Do you have an idea of what you would you like to do?”
“I don’t know. But not a party. I don’t like parties.”
“I already know that.”
“You know everything about me!” cried Anna, kissing him behind his ear.
“Not everything,” said Alexander, overcome by a disturbing thought. This was too much happiness. It can’t last. Spinning around, she clocked the contemplative expression before Alexander could resume his legendary poker face.
“What are you thinking?” Without answering, he held her closer, in silence, and after a while, she said, “Surprise me!”
“Yes, Baby. I will.”
“We’ve got a gig,” said Jeffrey. “Good pay. But we don’t know nothing about it.”
“Whatever,” said Sebastian, “Just pay me. Where is it?”
“Monaco.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow morning.”
“In the morning?”
“Have to be there at 9.30.”
“Address?”
“At the train station there. We’re signing a confidentiality contract. None of us can ever talk about it.”
“Intriguing.”
“Our instructions are to arrive by train.”
“I wonder why.”
“I don’t even know their nationality. That would influence what songs we prepare.”
“This kind of secrecy smells Russian.”
“A driver will meet us at the station. Oh, and they want a saxophone player.”
“A bit last minute isn’t it? Maybe Rich is available. He’s a decent sax player.”
“That’s not a bad idea. Hang on…” Jeffrey makes a call.
“Hey Rich, are you around? Will you pop into the cafe? Yes, something to discuss.”
“Does Raffi know?”
“Yes, and you know Raffi. He’s already busy getting his beauty sleep.”
The following morning the band boarded a train hurtling toward Monaco. Sebastian’s red curls cascaded down the shoulders of his fancy shirt. Holding his guitar, Jeffrey stretched his skinny legs to rest on the seat facing him. Raffi’s sunglasses blended almost imperceptibly into his long dark locks, as he regarded a Cajon lodged between his feet. Next to him leaned a saxophone case steadied by Rich’s right hand.
“Well,” said Jeffrey, “People are strange. You just have to go with the flow. We don’t know what kind of crowd will be there. But we will wing it as we always do. At least we don’t have to put up with a girl singer. Sometimes people ask for a girl singer, and that’s a pain in the butt. No matter how nice a girl is, it’s going to cause more problems than it’s worth.”
“I didn’t realize how sexist you are,” said Raffi under his breath.
“No, no, no,” exclaimed Jeffrey. “Don’t get me wrong. I love women. But it’s hard to work with them.”
“I wouldn’t mind being in a girl band,” said Sebastian, which brought the house down. Even Rich, who was half asleep, shook off his snooze and smiled.
“Blindfolded?” Perplexed, the musicians stared at the demure PA, whose slicked back obsidian hair nearly distracted them from her hasty clarification that for the inconvenience, Mr Seymionovitch was happy to pay each of them the tidy sum of €5000.
“That’ll be fine,” said Jeffrey, stifling his excitement.
Ms. Abramovitch seemed relieved as she indicated for them to follow her up a grand staircase and enter into the master bedroom.
“This must be a surprise birthday party. It’s pretty quiet.”
Ms Abranovitch looked past Jeffrey and his unfiltered assumption, in anticipation of Seymionovitch’s entrance via a terrace door. His PA wasted no time introducing the motley crew of musicians to their generous patron.
“It’s my wife’s 21st birthday, and she’s asked me to surprise her,” explained Alexander.
As the musicians nodded, their eyes darted around the room. No bedroom could’ve been larger or more tastefully decorated, mixing modern paintings with antique furniture. There was an atmosphere of opulence and luxury, yet one could still call it cosy.
“Ms. Abromovitch mentioned the blindfold, did she not?”
“Yes,” answered Sebastian, who had to stop himself from asking Seymiononovitch to explain why the blindfold was required.
“It’s no problem at all,” assured Jeffrey.
“Well, just now, she is in the bath.”
“Oh, Papa! Where are you?” A youthful voice filtered in from somewhere in the next room.
“It’s a surprise!” said Alexander, “I want you to make her cry!”
“Wait. If it’s her birthday, aren’t we supposed to make her laugh?”
“But she is happier when she cries.”
“Papa! Where are you?”
“I come now Baby, I come to you!” and with that, he hurried into the other room.
“What will we sing to make her cry? It’s impossible to know what we should play.” Befuddled, the band huddled together, whispering potential strategies worthy of a football team.
“No, not yet,” said Alexander.
“But I’m bored,” said Anna. Alexander sat at the edge of the bath.
“I have a surprise for you, so soak a bit longer.” Anna was covered in soapy bubbles.
“Shall I close my eyes?” she asked. Hearing the saxophone’s initial notes, she looked at Alexander.
“What was that?” And at that moment four blindfolded men entered her extensive bathroom. Anna nearly jumped out of her bath.
“Alex, I’m scared.”
“But Baby, they can’t see you.”
“Get them out!” Anna was crying.
Blindfolded, the band stood there, confused by the rapid conversation in Russian.
“It’s going wrong,” whispered Jeffrey to Sebastian.
“Get them out!” Not knowing what else to do the band started a song.
“Stop!” shouted Seymionovitch.
“Please wait for me in the bedroom.”
Being blindfolded meant they had to feel their way out of one unfamiliar room into another. Sebastian nearly fell over his double base as Jeffrey felt strong arms grip his shoulders and push him roughly out into the bedroom.
“Can we take our blindfolds off?” he asked. Seymionovitch snapped back at him in Russian.
Raffi whispered, “I’m not fluent but that sounded distinctly like Russian for Fuck you, Man.”
“I hope we’re still getting our 5K.”
“Don’t take the blindfolds off.” As Alexander was helping Anna out of the bath, a cloud of doves exploded into the air outside her bay windows followed by scores of red balloons, and Seymionovitch felt like someone had punched him in the stomach.
The band began to play, and Raffi sang “I’m So in Love with You,” his voice so clear, sweet and grave all at once, was carried by the acoustics in the high-ceilinged room to waft like a cloud of sound through the open French doors. At this point, Anna burst into tears.
“That’s it?” asked Jeffrey in surprise, when Ms. Abramovitch handed each of them an envelope, before ushering them out onto the driveway, where a uniformed driver was waiting to chauffeur them away.
“What the hell happened back there?” said Jeffrey.
“It’s all in here,” said Sebastian, recounting the cash in his envelope.
Rich stuffed his pay into the sax case without even checking it.
“She must be exceptionally beautiful,” said Raffi, who was the last musician to climb into the Rolls Royce Phantom, before the chauffeur shut the door behind him with that hushed thump reserved only for those who can effortlessly afford it. The Phantom then pulled away from Alexander’s sea side palace and coasted down his longest of private lanes, to turn toward the train station, after a discreet exit through the slowly closing Monegasque gates of an oligarch’s estate.
My Approach to Literary Networking after Francois Villon
Most days I’d rather be bundled
into the courthouse between
two hairy policemen,
with a highly debatable anorak
dragged over my face, and
blamed for killing Kirov –
the crowd lobbing big thick
spits and battering the van
as I’m carted off –
or be stopped at the Canadian border
travelling on a makey up Polish passport,
the remnants of a Dutch industrialist
and what I think was his second wife settled
unhappily in my glove compartment;
or attend my mother-in-law’s funeral
having been fitted with a wooden nose
because (everybody knows)
the other one fell off due to
third stage syphilis;
than ghost about the joint provoking
nods from gabardine coats
of great import and longevity,
grunts of approval
from fully clothed minor male poets.
Feature Image: Joseph Stalin and Sergei Zhadanov at the funeral of Sergei Kirov in December, 1934 (unknown author).
Over the treetops, along the edge of the upper lake, a merlin hunts a starling. Isolated from its flock, that starling fights to avoid the clutches of a small falcon. Fallen memories of past murmurations dance on the surface for a moment and then perish in the peaceful water below: it looks inevitable and only a matter of time, before the old wizard sinks its claws into the imperiled druid.
While the two brothers approached the water’s edge below, I dropped from one spent thermal; drifting in the sky, lazily looking to let another warm current lift me a little higher above the tree line to stalk their predestined path.
The lake stretched up the valley in a murky rectangle, darkened by peat-rich soil from the surrounding steep hills and cliffs. Although the minerals obscured its muddied depths, the lake’s surroundings reflected flawlessly on its curtained surface until a rare whisper of air turned the portrait of a fine day into a shimmering jewel, before still perfection returned once more: blue to silver to sky blue again.
Opposite the beach, through the valley, and over the mirror, a river cracked their impending trek in half. A high ridge overlooking one side of the lake followed all the way back, descending through trees, returning to the shore where the siblings stood.
Sporadic shadows of uneasiness splashed across my consciousness when sometimes the trees and dirt glistened like the vast liquid ornament, sitting ancient where only it could ever belong, in the middle of the upper glen.
Separated by six years, they stood close together now at the lake’s edge. Sailing in the void above the brothers, I watched them move together, trading gestures and pointing at the surroundings. I heard their voices bouncing back and forth and sometimes blending in unison as they overlapped and interrupted one another without hesitation; a complex, instinctive, fluttering dance; only possible with two people who have served an early life sentence in each other’s company.
Laid out before them in a glorious widescreen feast, they took a breath and surveyed the land. Paul, congratulated himself on the idea of coming to the mountains for the day, “Not a terrible way to spend a Tuesday afternoon Cormac, huh?” Trying to downplay it for as long as he could before falling short, arms outstretched, he blurted, “How impressive is this?!”
Cormac was kicking himself for not thinking to bring swimming shorts or a towel. He regarded a couple of Scandinavian backpackers. The sun turning the girls’ faces into shining beacons, their skin almost transparent, as they floated in the water. Any initial signs of shivering distress rapidly turned into cool relief. On this April day, a revitalizing dip was an enticing prospect. Best not get all wet before the hike, he thought, before responding to the brotherly bag of enthusiasm beside him, “It looks fucking magnificent, Paul, yeah.” Squinting up the valley in the distance, “I hope your itinerary for the day includes the top of that waterfall…”
Although neither of them had been here before, Paul, the eldest of three boys, assumed responsibility as rookie trail-guide for today’s excursion, perusing all of the hiking options before embarking, he of course felt obliged to select the most spectacular. “Yeah, we’ll follow the river right to the top, halfway around, I think”
Concerned Cormac might be put-off by the expedition’s wingspan, Paul added, “It’ll only take three or four hours to get the whole way round.”
“Good stuff.” Unperturbed Cormac scanned the way forward, “Which way are we doing it?” Glancing left and then right, but before Paul could answer, Cormac was already marching for the trees and the path counter clockwise around the lake. He turned his head back, “This way okay, yeah?” They moved off the beach leaving the bathers and picnickers in peace.
It felt like two lifetimes ago since I had last seen them together. The sight of the pair walking side-by-side was the harbinger of a misty solace. Still young men, one in his mid-twenties, the other in his early-thirties, they ambled between the trees in a familiar rhythm. It struck me as an extremely rare occurrence, like two celestial bodies lining up for an instant, with a third eclipsing, in the middle. Each one on their own, otherwise lonely orbit. A photon of bliss stretched out supernaturally; they carried on in concert along the path where time stood still and the planets ceased to spin; drawn together once more, not by gravity but by blood and time.
In tandem footprints left in their wake, was an unexpected gift. A whole spectrum of emotion swung heavily into my gut. Sadness to joy; plunged down into deep cold darkness before regurgitating into the light and warmth of the shallows, safe. As I watched and listened, I was drawn a bit nearer to them, getting closer to the tops of the trees and the earth below.
Sheltered in the woodland, still on the first segment of the ellipse, their voices were not completely clear; the conversation cutting in and out, almost like the leaves and branches obscured their voices as much as they shielded the light of the Spring Sun.
Cormac had just returned from Vietnam. He was paying a long overdue visit to family and friends for the next couple of months. After travelling around Southeast Asia for a spell teaching English, he’d settled down in Saigon with a local and had been working in a school there for nearly two years.
In an effort to try to reconnect with his baby brother, Paul took the day off work so they could get away from the city for a few hours and loiter in each other’s presence. He worked primarily in Dublin, where they grew up. Just after sloshing out of a long distance relationship, he felt the connection with his brother was also beginning to evaporate.
“They’ve chosen areas across the country where they’ll have a chance to thrive.” Paul had heard about a project that aimed to reintroduce wolves back into Ireland. They’d all been slaughtered centuries ago. “They’ve selected this place as one of those territories.”
“Apparently, once the Brits rid themselves of all their wolves, they decided to rid us of ours too.” Cormac stated matter-of-factly. “Thanks very much, Lads!”
“So where will the new wolves comes from? Russia or somewhere?” Cormac wondered aloud.
“Did I tell you about the wolf we saw in Colorado?” Paul inhaled and continued, “We woke up, before the alarm clock, in a motel in Pagosa Springs. We wanted to cover a lot of ground on the longest day of our road trip, so we surfaced at 5am. Ten minutes after we’d set off towards Durango, this giant wolf lumbered across the road in front of our car. Steam rising from its frame, we gave the smoldering demon a wide berth. We were still in shock about a mile down the road, when we see a deer, its demeanor faster to react, and flighty. We wondered if it detected the danger looming just up the road, in the morning gloom.”
The brothers were now halfway up the length of the lake, when on the opposite side, through the grey sessile oak trees and across the water, they spied a lone cave. In the middle of the day, that black hole stood out in its surroundings. Its main purpose, perhaps, to destroy any light that dared enter. On this brilliant day, it remained in constant shadow. Once glimpsed, it drew the eye to stare into its belly and locked their gaze.
“When he was a monk in the monastery, down at the lower lake, St. Kevin used to go up there for days on end. It’s known as St. Kevin’s Bed.” Patting himself on the back, Paul was again pleased with himself for researching the locale.
“Jesus, what was he running away from? Was the monastery not bad enough?”
“It’s the whole religious seclusion thing.” Paul started to ramble, “Like, didn’t Jesus spend some time in the desert on his own, sacrificing and praying and what-not…”
Neither of them had a considerable handle on religious history.
“I think that was Lent,” recalled Cormac, “Forty days and forty nights.”
“Sometimes I feel I’m doing my own forsaken religious sacrifice, but not by choice.” Realizing he was feeling sorry for himself, Paul swerved back onto his tour guide script, “There’s not supposed to be much room inside, not big enough to stand in.”
“Some of the most beautiful temples in Vietnam are in very unapproachable locations. Both Buddhist and Catholics have solitude in common. The whole way of life seems extremely bleak to me. I get that retreat is beneficial to a certain degree when life gets a bit too noisy and there’s no access to a volume button but to spend your time cramped in a damp cave for days on end could be taking it a step too far, no?” The Cu Chi tunnels popped into Cormac’s head. Just north of Ho Chi Minh City, he’d crawled through them, and saw the booby traps. In that light, he reassessed St. Kevin’s cell on his bleakness scale. “I’m not sure if I understand all that monk stuff. The never-ending stillness is hard for me to grasp.”
“At least the monks, whether Irish or Vietnamese, had their own pack to fall back to, even in all of these beguiling solitudes. I heard about a group of people in Japan, the Hikikomori, they completely isolate themselves from everything because I think they feel like they don’t belong in modern Japanese society. These people are living solitary lives whilst being suffocated by their own flock living all around them in massive Japanese metropolises. Locking themselves away in their tiny rooms – a refuge within four walls; the only place they are not totally lost. Now to me…That sounds bleak”
“We should try and get up here again before I fly back,” inhaling the earth around him, Cormac’s content demeanor reinforced his suggestion, “Bring the folks with us next time. They’d love it.”
“I was telling Dad that we were coming up, and he said he used to do drills in this valley when he was in the army. He mentioned a famous soldier, I can’t remember his name, he swam across the water under the cover of darkness and crawled up to the cave where he evaded capture. Perhaps the wolves should have tried something similar.”
They rambled on in silence for a time, breaking from their shelter of trees to approach the stony plateau of the Glenealo river; gushing towards them, in abrupt steps, from small bubbling rapids higher up, to man-sized waterfalls on the way down, until finally at the mouth, it all blurred into the stillness of the upper lake.
Before their ascent, they stopped at some old scattered ruins on the land between the lake and the falling river: an abandoned miner’s village from a time long forgotten. Paul stopped in the shell of one of the houses and started plastering sun cream onto the back of his neck. Cormac, although having fair hair, had no interest in sun protection, his nose already beginning to turn pink; another freckle materializing every few minutes, one after the other around his eyes and forehead; he was wandering around the broken house feeling the stone: Artefacts of an era he endeavored to visualize, but couldn’t quite render, no matter how hard he squinted in his mind.
Hanging drone-like, overhead, I could see them working hard as they began the steepest uphill section of the hike. As I meandered closer, through the air above, I could see the river was stuck in the same exact frame of motion. From far away, the cloud of motionless foam and spray deceived the beholder into thinking it alive. No sound emanated; stuck in one, ongoing split-second, the constant cacophony of slapping water with subtle gurgles was lost for the moment. Walking slower now, those two young men zigzagged up their hill, taking little notice as they followed the water’s previous beginnings. The ancient determination of the river to flow downhill was quenched somehow by a moment in time when only the brothers continued to move. I drifted down a bit closer.
They talked about other people instead of their own lives. Paul spoke of an old school friend, who was back home after finding out his mother had been in a car crash.
“I didn’t bump into him but he was over last week. His mother is in a very bad way. It was some guy driving a flatbed truck in front of her. Something fell off the back, on to the top of her car. One of those nightmare freak accidents. They reckon she’ll never fully recover. He only stayed a couple of days with her and then scurried off back to California with his mam a complete vegetable.”
“What the fuck is that about?” Cormac was wrestling with the thought of one of their parents getting sick while he was over on the other side of the world.
“I’m not sure what his work situation is over there, but you’d think he’d be able to take a bit longer off. Anyway, I’m shocked that you’re confused by this. I haven’t seen you in two years. Barely heard a peep since the funeral. Like a magician, now you see him, now you don’t … have a fucking clue where he is.”
Both of them were moving with deliberation up the slope where the trail was at its most arduous.
Cormac batted away his brother’s unexpected jab by continuing as if he hadn’t heard, “I ran into Sarah in town a few weeks ago and she’s convinced that he’s on heroin, hiding somewhere outside of Los Angeles. I wasn’t sure, like, he’s always been a bit of a dozy cunt. Looking back, didn’t he always seem to have problems with people? There was always some trouble stalking him from the near distance.”
Cormac hesitated before speaking, “I know this sounds awful,” he knew he wouldn’t be able to recapture the words once spoken, “But wasn’t he an altar boy for a few years?”
Paul’s body felt a little heavier. The day turned a shade darker although not even a wispy cloud existed to tarnish the sky’s fine blue covering. His first thought was, not a chance, but once sparked, the idea continued to crackle, like kindling in his mind.
Cormac continued, “It’s not out of the question that something could have happened. You hear all the stories, and it’s not farfetched. If something despicable happened, maybe it messed with him. Maybe that shit stuck to him like one of those nasty parasites. You know, one of those monstrous things that you don’t even realize you’re hosting. It just feeds on you and makes you sicker and sicker.”
The upper lake prospers on secrets and rumors. Shadow and light dance over the surface; old whispers long spoken and nearly forgotten, ready to plummet to the bottom at any moment. Some rumors remain, and with them an unbreakable tension.
Paul, stopped to take a breather, “You would think, in that situation, you’d say something immediately. But I appreciate it’s hard to put yourself into a specific circumstance like that”
“The act of crying out for help can be almost impossible sometimes…But fuckin hell, that’s a terrifying thought.” Cormac was trying to think of the exact reason why he was living half way around the world. He thought about the snippy comment Paul made about not seeing him since their brother’s funeral. Cormac didn’t think he harbored any guilt, leaving when he did, but thought he heard some resentment in Paul’s voice. Excess thoughts were flapping around in his head. “It would make sense that somebody, weakened by an experience like that or under the constant reminder of trauma would turn to drugs or run away from that completely, to another country.”
“Do you think you needed to leave here when you did?”
“I wasn’t talking about that. You know, I didn’t run away. There was nothing here for me at the time and I needed something fresh … Something just for me … to be on my own for once. But, yeah, I think he could have thought the exact same thing when he went to America.”
At the top of the route, they collected some water from the rocky froth. A dent in the stream was left unfilled where they had dipped their flasks. Each guzzled while surveying the terrain, trying to distinguish each trail, locate where they had come from and understand exactly how they had arrived to this absolute extremity.
“Certainly easier than staying to fight it and causing a fuss.” Paul probed, “Say, if we got stranded up here, would you want a rescue helicopter coming up to get us?”
Not lingering at the top, they crossed a bridge over the river and kept moving along the ridge back in the direction of the beach that had been their starting point.
“Definitely not an ideal situation, it would be on the news and everything, but yeah, I’d want it to come and get us”
“Sometimes it’s easier to stay silent. Don’t trouble anyone else with your bullshit. It would be too mortifying.” Paul seemed at ease with his position on this topic, but perhaps was testing his youngest brother, playing Devil’s advocate. “You’d never live the embarrassment down, having the helicopter sent up and everything. I think I’d just hole up somewhere and wait for the storm to pass.”
Cormac was baffled, “Why would you do that? It sounds unnecessarily risky to me. I’d say it would get really cold. You’d rather risk death than feel slightly unpleasant … Feel like a bit of a knob?”
“Nah, it’s Ireland, a bit of rain on a hill. Find some shelter easy enough; keep the head down until sunrise.”
“You’re downplaying a potentially disastrous situation where the mountain is the local priest and you have found yourself as the quiet altar boy. Family would be worrying about us, the car would be down at the entrance and we’d never have mentioned a plan of camping overnight…”
“I’d be okay”
“… Never mind in a few years it wouldn’t just be the weather you’d worry about. What about the wolves? What would you do when the howling begins in the middle of the night? You can hear them getting closer, crying up into the abyss, as they relay the exact position of their prey.”
“Maybe I’d shelter in St. Kevin’s bed, like that jammy soldier. It’s probably better in there if there was a big storm out here. Nice and cozy.”
I watched them consider the precarious situation as they tip-toed along the wooden sleepers on the trail high above the lake. Their thoughts becoming less complicated as they were forced to concentrate on each perilous step. Both of their voices were weakening. Cormac’s face was twisted in confusion. Paul’s expression was hard to see. Blurring. I had to go closer to watch, within a stone’s throw overhead.
Beneath them but above the waterline, lurked that cave. What in the world could even be inside that hole? Stones? Moss? Spiders? Some campfire remnants or an abandoned bird’s nest? What about the scrawlings of an ancient druid? Or is there something else living in there – a dying wolf maybe; another artefact, black as the darkness itself.
How deep is it really … If you were to properly investigate? I heard them saying that it’s very small but what if there was a crack in the corner and just enough room to squeeze in? If I had a light, I’d just take a fleeting peep.
I’d keep scraping and scratching at the dirt and keep going further into danger. Are there more ruins in this cave like the fading memories in my mind?
They reached a viewing platform perched all the way out on the edge of the high ridge. A perfect predatory vantage. They peered down at the lake and I followed their gaze. The water’s presence was at first reassuring, but I sensed it knew every thought in every crease of my mind. The shadows growing and retreating on the surface, thoughts and memories. Beware the underwater cliffs.
They discovered a spot to sit, looking down at where they began. An apple each was a welcome boost before finishing the last section of the trail. Crunching into the delicious fruit, they marveled at the fantasy backdrop, in which the lower lake and monastic ruins shimmered behind the beach. There was magic in this land: a mystical ether passed down by the druids before they were swallowed by the island’s monasteries.
“Those monks did have to put up with some amount of shit…And never mind the bloodthirsty Viking skirmishes. No wonder St. Kevin tried to break it up with the odd cave getaway”
“Yeah, it might have been a relief for him at times. Things appear to make more sense up here. The energy is different.” Considering the setting before him, Paul couldn’t resist embellishing – “Or maybe an evil wizard was pursuing the Saint, and instead of endangering the Sanctuary he built, St. Kevin would fall back away, lead the wizard into a snare, out here in the wilderness.”
The light lunch was long finished but they lingered, looking at the lake; pure beauty reflected.
For Paul, the day had many purposes. The main one was to spend some quality time with Cormac, before he headed back to the other side of the world. He missed his company, his mannerisms, and the scrunched-up expressions on his sun burnt face. He said to Cormac before he left the first time, to come back before making any big permanent decisions. Paul had been away for a stint on the continent, and it’s only when he came back, he realized how much he loved his home.
The other main purpose was to sell Ireland to him; give him an image to look back on and to remember fondly. A picture to clutch onto, that would not fade as quick as a few drunken nights out, down the local. He was desperate not to lose the only brother he had left.
Like boys, they skipped and swirled their way down to the bottom of the valley on wooden steps fashioned from recycled railroad ties which had been built into the slope.
Though Cormac’s only long-term plans involved making a life in Vietnam, he didn’t have the heart to break it to Paul just yet, because he needed to keep that connection. Thinking about the stones in the miner’s village, he didn’t want their relationship to exist on old memories, and promised himself that he’d make more of an effort with both Paul and his parents.
“Mac Tíre,’meaning wolf in the Irish tongue, translates as “Son of the country.” Sometimes, through no choice of their own, the sons of this country may feel they no longer belong to its soil. Ireland’s children have always had to keep moving, be on the go. They’ve thrived and prospered in other parts of the world. Our generation have been culled like the wolves before us. Leaving for better opportunities elsewhere or all too often, leaving this world forever.
So do I keep scratching and scraping at the dirt until I find something? What happens if something finds me first?
As they neared the beach, the terrain levelled out. I watched them ghosting through the trees close to lake level. Cormac stopped dead in his tracks, making Paul echo his sudden movements. Paul’s whole body was almost invisible now. It was a silvery liquid form, impossible to recognize anymore.
I drifted in closer, my toes nearly touching the soil. I strained to hear Cormac, his voice a faint whisper. “You nearly flattened it.” He paused, pointing around the base of a towering Scots pine tree. Then he looked up the trunk and spotted an old woodpecker hole. “It won’t survive.”
The baby starling lay waiting to be trampled on the forest floor between them. Very still, it was a ball of fuzz in an alien world, pink and exposed. Two varieties of feathers scattered around the baby signaled a frantic scrap. Its brooding mother attempting to lead the predator away from the nest. Cormac picked up the starling and stood at the base of the tree. Handing the pre-fledgling druid to Paul, Cormac freed his hands so he could climb on his brother’s back. Using the tree for balance, he managed to clamber up and stand steady on Paul’s shoulders.
I blinked my eyes until they hurt. I saw the foggy outline of Paul, hunched with the weight of his brother. Raising his arms he passed the bird up to Cormac, who took the starling into his tender hands, and steadied himself again, before reaching up to the nest to place the hatchling back into its home.
The beach was busier than before. The unexpected spring heat drawing opportunist paddlers to haunt the cooling shallows. I could just make them out in the crowd. Yes, there they were, together. The fine grains of sand barely reacting to their footsteps.
I touched the earth for the first time and they began to rise. Each soul on the beach lifting into the air around me in a slow steam. The sand was warm between my toes. Standing alone, the world started spinning again, with everyone who was left on its surface still hanging on to their delicate existence.
Above the lake, my brothers took towards their final tranquil passage. I was left alone on the earth, without them, no longer in the middle. I watched them leave: diving upwards, soaring over the valley back towards the source of the river. Both shapes dancing together. Two birds nearby, entangled in furious battle, threatened their cosmic journey. The brothers glanced a glint of magic upon the mid-air tussle. The merlin opened its talons and took off into the horizon. As my brothers vanished over the river, the valley held its breath while the liberated starling flew towards the tree line where her hatchlings nested in the old woodpecker cave.
And under the water, memories swim in a frenzy, not on the lakebed, but bubbling, murmuring just below the surface.
