Cassandra Voices

Tag: Fiction

  • Fiction Reader’s Block

    We all see things with different eyes and it gets you nowhere hoping that one in a thousand will see things your way.
    J. L. Carr, A Month in the Country (1980).

    In his droll 1999 essay, ‘Reader’s Block’, Geoff Dyer describes suffering from what he calls a creeping condition whereby he finds himself staring blankly at his bookshelves noting all the books he hasn’t read and thinking “there’s nothing left to read”.

    Such was Dyer’s malady that even so-called “quality fiction” seemed a waste of time. He was forty-one. Back in his twenties he had imagined he would spend his middle age reading the books he didn’t have the patience to read when he was young. But it was not to be, and now he found himself resigned to leafing through the pages of the in-flight magazine when traveling abroad rather than reading the books he brought for the journey.

    Being roughly the same age as Dyer, I identified wholly with his piece back then, and in a way still do. But my malady, my “reader’s block”, is more specific: it was fiction that got on my nerves at the onset of middle age, and years later it still does. I don’t suffer from reader’s block, but rather fiction reader’s block, or to be more precise, novel reader’s block.

    Occasionally some fiction does slip through the net. Jennifer Potter and Ferdinand Dennis are on my bedside table alongside the handful of old favourites that I occasionally revisit: Sam Selvon, Chester Himes, Shelagh Delaney, Stuart Dybek, W.G.Sebald and Ann Quin. But it is to non-fiction that I mostly turn and have done for over twenty years.

    Currently I’m engrossed in Patrick Wright’s monumental The Sea View Has Me Again, an extraordinary telling of the German writer Uwe Johnson’s lost decade on the Isle of Sheppey.  Johnson drank himself to death in bleak surrounds of the Sheerness Sea View Hotel in the 1984.

    But what is this affliction? It’s not laziness or distraction, nor the inability to concentrate on anything that doesn’t offer immediate gratification. Patrick Wright’s multi-layered opus is a densely packed seven hundred page micro-history of both Sheppey and Uwe’s self- exile, and is not remotely daunting. Likewise, Speak, Silence, Carole Angier’s detailed study of Sebald’s life and work comes in at over six hundred pages, and is not a page too long in my view.

    In interviews the highly-regarded contemporary writers Kevin Barry and Rob Doyle can be interesting, but the preoccupations they display in their fictions are those of young men and are of no interest to me at all at my stage in life.

    Now to be sure, I’m of the wrong demographic for Sally Rooney or Nicole Flattery, but I can’t hack the imagined worlds of the Colm Toibins or John Banvilles either – in form and content they’re just not my cup of tea. It is of course a question of taste, but I can’t abide the narrative armature of story-driven literary fiction with those wretched character arcs – as Shakespeare fully understood, people do not change.

    My inability to read literary fiction doesn’t bother me, and I don’t need my ideas of the world to be shaped. My view of the world is fully formed and doesn’t need to be textually generated or reinforced.

    But I am a reader, and always have been, even though I grew up in a non-reading household. Even when I was boy, I knew where to look for my reading material. I was a discriminating reader. As an eleven-year old I knew Edgar Allan Poe was good and H.P. Lovecraft was bad. I could see that, unlike Henry James, William Golding wrote in clear, straightforward prose to elucidate complex themes.

    As a young adult in the counter-culture era of the late 60s, I recognized that Mervyn Peake was a singular talent and a great stylist, and that Tolkien was a dull and pedestrian writer. Jean Cocteau, even in translation was great and Burroughs’ debut Junky/Junkie was a fine example of taut, economical writing that surpassed his later experimental fiction.

    Recently I was chatting with an old friend. He’s an exiled Corkonian living in Italy, and an erudite man of letters. We spoke about my aversion to fiction and he echoed my sentiments. Somehow our conversation turned to Flannery O’Connor. I’m an admirer of her short fiction but now find myself confused and a little wary of her after the revelations in 2014 of the racist views expressed in her correspondence.

    My friend had never read O’Connor. Could O’Connor be saved from herself? I don’t have the answer, but her fiction can stand alone. I told my friend how in the 1950s reviewers were constantly vexed by her characters’ lack of interiority. My friend lit up at this: “I like the sound of that! I can’t stand being told what characters think and feel. I just want a description of where they go and what they do.”  Simply and succinctly put.

    In The Lonely Voice, Frank O’Connor wrote that for some reason he could only guess at, “the novel is bound to be a process of identification between the reader and the character. One character at least in any novel must represent the reader in some aspect of his own conception of himself”.

    It is this process, embedded in the mechanics of fiction, of identification and absorption into a psychological world, that in time becomes for me recognizable and tedious. So maybe it is a case that non-fiction – and certain rare types of fiction that bypass identification in favour of evocation of a world and its details – doesn’t use itself up in the telling. It stays with us. And so, in the meantime and undoubtedly for the rest of my life, I will follow my instincts, knowing that non-fiction will more likely give me what I want.

    Feature Image: Mark Venner

  • Into the River

    I can barely make out Richard´s handwriting on the piece of torn paper. 
    “Second left” I say, looking down at the words. “After the farm…with eh, the eh, big stables.”
    “I think we just passed it.” Richard says, looking behind him.
    “Eyes on the road dude!” I shout. “Please!” I´d almost reached for the wheel. “After the farm. So, the second left. Not signposted. Look! There! There there there! Second left! Second left!” 
    Richard takes a glance at the rear-view mirror, indicates, decelerates, and turns off the winding, narrow country road.
    “This is it,” I say, turning down the music. 
    “This might be it.” Richard says.  

    The boreen is a long tunnel of trees. Sunlight flickers through the thick leaves overhead, giving the passageway an intense golden-green glow. Stray branches and brambles tap, knock and scrape against the windshield, and drag against the worn-out body of the car, as we’re bumped and jolted gently in our seats. Richard is quiet, his forearms resting over the steering wheel, his fingers interlaced. We’ve been driving since morning, across the smooth new continuous sedation of the M7 motorway, from Dublin to Exit 27. But now, nearing the end of our journey, I’m becoming curious again as to where I´m being led.

    Richard sits back and steers the car slowly from out under the trees and into a sunlit clearing. In front of us, behind a low, grey, moss-mottled stonewall, squats an old shrunken cottage, tucked up in welcoming silence. Richard turns the key in the ignition and the rattling engine shudders and shuts off with a sigh.

    Once through its small front door, we begin to explore the dark little habitation. The air inside is cool, cavernous. Rough flagstones, slightly uneven, line the ground. Whitewashed stonewalls loom close in the wan daylight which struggles in through the deep-silled elfin windows. For some reason I was expecting a stifling humidity, a trapped reek of old country rot and neglect to greet us.

    On the right is the kitchen. A deep white porcelain sink and dim countertops domesticated with wooden containers, a red kettle, a wooden bread-bin, a blue cup-rack, and a stainless steel dish drying rack. From the ceiling of an arching alcove hang a confusion of copper pots and pans over a blackened range. Ahead, at the far end of the room, stands an old round pine table and three pine chairs. Behind that, and in front of a larger day-lit window, is a red cushioned, two-seater couch and small mahogany coffee table. To either side of the couch, tall leafy plants, dark and evergreen, creep up out of the farthest corners, as though the trees outside had somehow broken in. On the left wall is a small black stove and, beside it, an empty wicker basket for firewood.

    I follow Richard down the narrow hall that leads to two bedrooms, their open doors facing each other. In the smaller room I see a framed print of “Men of Destiny” hanging on the wall. Behind the last door, at the end of the hall, is an old grimy bathroom. I step around Richard and take a look inside. Its green-tiled gloom and old dirty white shower-curtain remind me of something out of a horror film.

    “She must have had someone in to do the roof,” Richard says, walking back down the hall and looking up at the newly restored wooden beams.
    “She keeps the place well, your aunt,” I say, following him. “I don’t know why I’m so surprised.”
    “What you think?” Richard asks, looking around.
    “I love it,” I say, “It’s perfect.”
    Richard looks at me.
    “Do you good to get out of Dublin anyway for a while,” he says. “Clear your head.”
    “You have no idea, Man.” I say, looking at him. “Thank you for inviting me.”
    “No worries,” he says, spinning his car-keys around on his finger. “Right. Let’s make this place our own.”

    Out back, in what we could reclaim for a garden, after I´d sheared away some dead dried branches of a gooseberry bush and Richard had strimmed some of the long grass, we share a light lunch at a small wooden table, sitting on two loose wooden chairs.

    It’s a fine spread. Various cured hams. Gorgonzola and Camembert cheese. Black pepper crackers. Green pitted olives. Sundried tomatoes. Crisp brown bread and a beetroot, grated carrot, broccoli and hazelnut salad for which Richard has whipped up his delicious honey mustard and Irish whiskey dressing. To top it all off, I´ve opened a none-too-chilled bottle of steely Chablis.

    In the warm summer air, we take our time and eat slowly, swatting wasps and midges away from our food and from our faces. I’ve had to move my chair out of the sun and into the shade more than once. I don’t want to get burned. The garden surrounds us. The creeping brown briars. The exhausted trees and their shade. The tall dry grass. All so overgrown. So still. So dense. So close to us. This is true summer seclusion. I look around and enjoy a deep sense of peace. This is our place now, to do as we please, to idly rusticate in, undisturbed, for a week.

    Richard is sitting back in his chair with his blue denim shirt open, sunning himself and chewing on a piece of bread. Under his straw hat he wears Aviator shades and with his Van Dyke goatee he is nothing if not the epitome of summertime cool. He smiles broadly at me and looks like he’s about to say something, or is thinking of saying something to me, but then just goes back to admiring his surroundings, leaning back on his chair. I drink my wine and listen to the insect hum in the grass, and in the trees all around me.

    “You know what?” Richard says after a while.
    “What?”
    “I found a bag of MDMA in these work shorts.”
    “Ha! Really?”
    “I think it must have been left-over from the barn-party in Kilkenny.”
    “That was some night,” I say, reaching for my pouch of rolling tobacco, suddenly nervous and certainly thrilled on hearing that night now being finally brought up again.

    I fumble with my rolling papers and with the tobacco. Part of me wonders if it´s true, if he’d really found it, or if he’d bought some especially for this trip in the hope of recreating something of that night, of that morning. Either way it’s welcome news. In fact, it’s exactly what I want to hear, what I’d been hoping for. I tap my rollie on the table, smiling, then light it up.

    Settling back down into my own skin again, I feel at ease. Recomposed and in control. I look at Richard as he takes a drink of wine and rests the base of his glass on his flat brown stomach. Then, with a finger, he lowers his shades, looks at me from under an arched eye-brow and, in a mock paternalistic tone says,

    “I was debating, you know, on whether or not I ought to tell you.”
    “Well, you’ve blown that now haven’t you? And sure why wouldn’t you have told me?”
    “You said that you wanted to get some work done down here.”
    “So did you.”
    “Ah, but that’s different.”
    “How is that different?”
    “Mine is just the monkey work. I don’t want to be a bad influence on you and, you know, hamper, or dampen, or darken even, your…” He searches dramatically, airily, with his free hand for the right word, “…your cogitations.”
    “My cogitations? Or do you mean, my brooding contemplations?”
    “Your country ruminations?”
    “Oh, my rural cerebrations?”
    “Exactly.”
    “Well, you won’t. Besides, I don’t plan on writing much. I’ll be reading, mostly.”
    “Mostly,” Richard says, smiling. “You brought enough books down with you anyways.”
    “I always do. Usually too many,” I say. Then I add, with a smile, “I just don´t know what I want sometimes.”

    Tapping the ash, I pass the rollie over the table to Richard.
    “You still only writing the short ones?” he asks.
    “Yup. And still only for myself and for the entertainment of my friends.”
    Richard blows smoke in the direction of some midges.
    “Too right. Nothing worse than a poet who publishes. So go on then. Give us one before we go back to work.”
    “Alright. Do you want a happy one? A sad one? A funny one? Or a sexy one?”
    “Surprise me.”

    I take my glass and raise it for a toast. Richard sits up, leans forward and raises his glass too. I can imagine that behind his sunglasses Richard has closed his eyes, cleared his mind and is making himself suitably receptive. Sitting up straight in my crockety chair, I look at him and say, in my smoothest voice.
    “I find myself again, cast into the ancient gaol of love. But this time I´ll remember that the cell door is always open, and the guards are always drunk.”
    “Beautiful” Richard says. “I was transported”
    “I’m sure you were.” I say, smiling.
    “I want more.”
    “You’ll have to wait.”
    “Well then, in the meantime,” Richard says, “Here’s to a poetical and festive week in the country.”
    We clink glasses.
    “Cheers.”

    We clear the table, bringing our plates, glasses and bowls back inside. My eyes have to readjust to the sudden cottage darkness. Sun-dazzled, and a little drunk already from the heat and the white wine, I find that I´ve wandered off in the wrong direction and start laughing to myself, at how disorientated I am. This is a crazy little domicile I’ve found myself in. Blinking and stretching my eyes wide open, now I´m standing by the table. I look down at my stack of books, at my notebook and my pens, all neatly laid out. There will be time. Plenty of time. I can feel it building already. Some good work is going to get done.

    Richard has plugged his phone into the speakers he’s brought and is playing a compilation of Italian Renaissance lute music. Its gracious simplicity fills the air around us with a homely sophistication. I put the two plates with my emptied wine glass down on the countertop and stand beside Richard at the sink. He washes. I dry. We listen to the music and fall into an easy rhythm. I notice that he’s even brought his own little bottle of organic washing-up liquid.

    “Man, that wine is choice.”
    “Goes down easy.”  He says.
    “Too easy.” I say, smiling. “So, time for a little daba-daba?”
    “Ha! You dirty drug fiend. I have to get up into those trees now…”
    “You doing that today?”
    “Better to get it done now,” he says, looking out the window. “Then I can relax.”
    “True,” I say. “Best to wait…To wait. To wait.” I add with a deep sigh. “Such exquisite restraint you display.”
    “All the better to torture with, my dear.”

    Richard smiles and hands me a rinsed wet plate and I come back to myself, dreamily, to the task at hand.
    “Will I open another bottle or do you want a beer?”
    “I think I’ll have a coffee,” He says, pulling the plug in the sink.
    “I’ll make it for you,” I say. “You go out and get started.”

    At the side of the cottage, I bring Richard his coffee. He points up at some low overhanging branches.
    “These are the ones she wants me to cut back I’d say,” he says.
    “How long will that take you?”
    “´Bout half an hour or so. But there’s probably more to do around the place.”
    “Well, I’m looking forward to helping out,” I say.
    “Don’t worry,” says Richard, “There’ll be plenty to do.”

    We step over the orange extension cable and Richard’s chainsaw, his clear-plastic goggles and his pair of old, dirty, heavy work gloves.
    “Bringing the hammocks was a great idea,” I say.
    “It was, wasn’t it?” He says, grinning. “We’ll put them up later. One there…and one…over there. If you could strim some more between those two trees that’d great.”
    “Yeah. No worries.”
    “And I was thinking of digging a little fire pit too, over there, for later on. If the nights are going to be as nice as they say, might as well stay outside for as long as we can.”
    “Sounds great.”
    “When was the last time you lay out in the night and looked up at the stars?” Richard asks.
    “I can´t remember,” I say. “There was even a time there when I couldn´t look up at them for long. Sometimes, I don´t know, it was just too immense. I´d get the fear, and have to look away.”

    At the rear of the cottage near a little back-gate we stop at a gap in the boundary trees. I look down over a field of high, lush green grass. Shielding my eyes from the sun I see the hazy banks of a river, more fields, other country houses, and mountains far in the distance.

    “We’re not too far from Ardnacrusha, are we?”
    “No,” Richard says, lighting a rollie, “It’s a few miles down to the right there.”
    “We should go for a walk then later, if you want?”
    “Sounds good,” Richard says. “I’ll get cutting.”

    On a narrow pathway, along the bank of the river, we walk in the direction of Ardnacrusha, passing my hipflask of whiskey back and forth. The calm country scenery, the cooler evening air and the sound of gravel pleasurably crunching underfoot mellows my thoughts. Up ahead, Ardnacrusha Bridge arches over the river. Nearing sun-down, the shadow of the bridge ripples on the orange and purple water.

    “So you’re serious…about leaving your studio in Callan, and never painting again? Say it ain´t so, Man.”
    “Well yeah, that´s the idea.”
    “Just had enough?” I ask, passing the flask back to him.
    “You saw the last work.”
    “I did. And I really liked it. Very zen. One fluid movement across the canvas. I always thought it looked like a tusk. You sold a few too.”
    “Three.”
    “That´s good.”
    “Not good enough I´m afraid. No, it´ll never leave me, but I need to take a step back. Or a step forward. I need to get out, get moving again.”
    “Where you thinking?”
    “The Camino first. Then maybe Mexico, for a while. Bring my ukulele.”
    “And write some songs?”
    “Write some songs and find my way. At the moment I think I´m being drawn to horticulture.”
    “Really? That actually makes a lot of sense,” I say, taking the flask back from Richard.
    “Yeah,” Richard says, “I think so too. Tend a garden and…”

    But I’ve noticed something up ahead. The diminutive form of someone standing up on the bridge. I pocket the flask and gaze on, thoughtlessly, not even wondering until, suddenly, that same body falls clear from the bridge and splashes into the water. I stop and grab Richard by the arm.

    “Fuckin’ hell!
    “What?”
    “Did you see that?”
    “Did someone fall in?”
    “I don´t know, Man. Either fell in or jumped.”

    Without another word Richard starts to run ahead. I keep my eyes on the water and watch as an arm, then a head, comes up to the surface, and disappears again. On the bank of the river Richard begins rapidly undressing: shirt off, boots off, jeans off, socks off.  He looks back at me, desperate for some sign of warning or encouragement. But I’m dumb-struck. Helpless.

    I stand back and watch as Richard dives into the water. Gathering up Richard’s still warm clothes, I hold them close to me, and keep my eyes on him as he swims out and dives under. Coming back up, he looks around, and dives back down again. Each time he disappears, I hear myself mumbling,
    “He’ll be ok. He’ll be ok. Come on. He’ll be ok.”

    I walk backwards to keep up with the displacements of the current. From the river bank all I can to do is focus on maintaining a line of living endurance between myself and Richard. Somehow, through my undivided attention, a fierce observance, I feel that I can transfer all my available energy and strength to him. That this will keep him safe. That this connection will keep him alive.

    Thrashing the water Richard struggles back to the riverbank, pulling the still body of a boy, a teenager, behind him. At the water’s edge I bend forward and grab hold of Richard. Once he’s up on the bank, I reach out and get a hold of the boy, grabbing him under an arm. I pull and drag him, with Richard’s help, up and out of the cold water. Richard collapses on the grass and turns on to his back. Grunting and gasping for air, he covers his face with his arms and struggles to speak.

    “He…He’s got something…in his pockets…weighing him down…”
    But before I can gather my thoughts Richard rolls off his back and gets himself up onto his knees. He leans down over the kid, tilts his head back and blows into the boy’s mouth. Richard stops, gasps, listens, and looks down. Nothing.

    Again he blows again into the boy’s mouth and I watch, horrified, as that chest rises and falls under his soaked, black t-shirt. Nothing. I turn away. All I see is the rushing, swirling brown surface of the river, and all I can think is that there must be more bodies in there, more bodies like this one, lost in those damnable depths, helplessly flowing by.

    A sharp and sudden intake of breath from the boy’s mouth startles me. Richard falls backwards onto his hands. We both watch as the boy’s body spasms and contracts on the grass. His eyes open wide as his pale hands clench and tear at the grass. He coughs and gasps painfully for air as dirty greenish rills of foul river-slime runs down the sides of his mouth.

    On our way back to the cottage nobody says a word. We trod through a field, having forgotten to take the easier pathway back to the cottage. Richard strides through the waist-high grass with all of his reach and strength, and still only in his boots and wet underwear, determined to get away from that river as fast as he can.

    The boy staggers behind me as though drunk. Lost to his surroundings. From the corner of my eye, I think I see him dropping stones out of his pockets. I think I hear them falling to the ground, one by one. I look his way but his head is down, staring into the grass. Mesmerized. Twice the boy snaps out of it to look up and take notice of where he is. I hear him gulp and catch his breath.
    “You ok?”
    “Yes.”
    “Sure?”
    “Yes.”
    “What’s your name?” I ask.
    But the kid says nothing.

    Our cottage appears up ahead from behind the cluster of trees. Up beside the chimneypot is a rusty TV aerial and a warped weathervane leaning silhouetted against the clouds in a fading purple and orange sky. Richard opens the barely hinged back-gate and the kid follows us around the side of the cottage. We enter through the small front door, one by one.

    The kitchen and living room smell of cool country evening air, coffee, and freshly cut firewood. Richard’s shaking, and without saying a word, walks down the hall and into the bathroom. Still holding Richard´s clothes, I pour a glass of water from the sink tap and put it down on the table for the boy. I ask him to sit, and he sits.

    “I’m Stephen.” I say. “And that’s Richard. What’s your name?”
    Sitting there in front of me, silent and stunned, he’s a rudely revived corpse shivering in his dripping clothes. Around his plain grey canvas runners, strands of slimy green river weed are still coiled. I try not to stare but can’t take my eyes off his narrow, mean-looking face. His long, thin arms are pale and his short dark hair is flattened to his head. He can’t be more than fifteen or sixteen.

    “You should have a shower when Richard gets back.”
    A long silence passes between us before he says anything.
    “Don’t tell anyone I’m here,” he says.
    “I won’t.”
    “Don’t call anyone.”
    “I won’t.”
    “Swear?” He says.
    “I swear. What’s your name?” I ask again.
    “Daniel.” He says, looking at the glass of water on the table. “My name is Daniel.”

    Richard returns in a long grey woollen jumper, fresh jeans, and in his bare feet. He hands Daniel two big fluffy grey towels and walks him down to the bathroom.
    “There´s hot water,” I hear Richard say. “Try and get warm.”
    Daniel closes the door.

    Without looking at me, Richard goes into his bedroom and shuts his door. I go and sit down at the table and place Richard’s clothes on the seat beside me. I take my hip-flask from my back pocket and I drink from it. But the whiskey doesn’t taste right. It’s watery. Silty. I put my pouch of tobacco, filters and lighter on the table and just sit there, looking at them, without appetite, but it’s not even the pouch of tobacco that I see.

    All I see is Daniel, standing in his clothes under the hot shower, waiting to feel warm again. Then peeling off his wet clothes, like layers of a painless, un-protective skin. Runners. T-shirt. Socks. Jeans and underpants. Drenched, they fall and slop to the floor. Heavy. Sodden. And sad. I see him sitting down in the bath, under the showerhead, in the steam, his eyes closed. A tiny dot of darkness, peaceful and unthinking. And warm. Warm for a while at least. Until the water starts to run cold.

    In the living room candles are lit and pots of food simmer on the kitchen’s range. A fire rages silently in the stove. The mahogany table, on which Daniel´s clothes have been laid out to dry, has been pushed closer to the fire. Richard and I are busying around each other, almost as though we’re putting on a little show of domesticity for Daniel, who sits quietly at the table, in warm borrowed clothes.

    Richard opens a bottle of red wine while I lay out three plates. We’ve insisted he eat with us. There is no talk about today. Nothing. Richard pours wine as I spoon out steaming pasta shells and meatballs. Passing an aromatic roll of garlic bread around, I feel that me and Richard are doing our best, our utmost, almost telepathically, to make Daniel feel included and welcome at our table.
    Instinctively, I go to raise my glass for a toast but correct myself, and cover it, by just taking a small sip.

    “Tuck in.” says Richard. “Its good. It’s warm.”
    We all eat slowly. Small mouthfuls. We try to eat. There’s warmth and healing goodness in the food but there seems to be no real depth to our hunger. Still, we persist in silence. Shadows flicker close around us on flame-lit walls. Daniel´s shadow flits and frets on the wall behind him. When he burps, I think I get a phantom, silty taste of muddy water in my mouth. Daniel pushes the food around on his plate, then cuts a meatball into small manageable bites. Richard nods and sighs as though talking to himself in his head.

    After chewing on a piece of sauce-soaked bread for what seems like a very, very long time, Daniel coughs, clears his throat and looks up at me, then at Richard. In a soft, hesitant voice he asks,
    “Ye both…ye both from here?”
    “No,” I say, and clear my throat. “No. I’m from Sligo originally, but I live in Dublin now and Richard’s from Kilkenny.”
    Daniel nods and looks down at his plate.
    “Are you from Clare?” I ask.
    “Limerick.”
    “Oh right. Where abouts?”
    “Castleconnell.”
    “That nearby?”
    “Near enough.”
    “My aunt owns this place,” Richard says finally. His voice is distant, as if it were coming from somewhere behind him.
    “We thought we’d just come down and do some work around the place,” I say, “Help out his aunt, you know?”
    “Just the two of ye?” Daniel asks.
    “Yeah.”
    Daniel looks at Richard, then at me. I feel like he’s going to say something –
    “Would you like more sauce?” Richard asks, moving the ladle around in the pot. “There’s some left.”  “No.” Daniel says, pushing his plate away from him. “I want to go home.”
    “We’ll take you home after this,” I say. “Please. Try and eat something.”

    Attempting to lead by example, I try to eat but have to stop after a few mouthfuls. I sit back in my chair and turn my wine glass around by its stem, observing the marks left by my lips and the tiny bits of food on the rim. I’m unable to look at Daniel directly. I can’t watch him go through those mechanical movements of eating all alone. A density, of something incommunicable, hangs around him. It´s emanating from him. He saw nothing down there, in the murky underwater. No premonitory flashes or flickers of an afterlife. Nothing in those last moments but the shock of it, and the struggle against it. A last taste of terror before release. I watch as my wine glass becomes misty. Candle light flares into golden, watery shards. I turn my face from the table and discreetly wipe the welled tears from my eyes.

    We drive in the direction of Castleconnell in silence. It’s late, but not so late that Daniel’s parents might be worried. In the back seat Daniel sits in his own damp clothes.
    “You should make up something about today,” I say to him. “Say that you went out to Ardnacrusha for a swim. And eh, a group of lads or something threw your bag of clothes into the river and you had to swim out after them, to get them, you know, and you nearly drowned. And that’s why, if they say you look shook, that that’s why you look shook, you know?”

    “And you just went to a friend’s house then, afterwards,” Richard says, looking back at him in the rear-view mirror, “To shower and to calm down or something. But now you’re home. Safe and sound. And everything´s ok.”
    I turn around and look back at Daniel.
    “You know what we mean? Like a cover story.”
    “I know,” he says.
    “Practice it in your head for a while,” Richard says. “Convince yourself that it’s real.”

    We park outside Daniel’s house, a huge, warm-looking, many-windowed Bed and Breakfast just off Station Road. Cars pass by on the road beside us, their headlights shining in on us intermittently. I think about giving Daniel my number, but I don’t know how much more I can help. Then it just seems like a bad idea. Richard turns in his seat and looks back at Daniel.
    “You alright?” He asks.
    “Yeah.” Daniel says.

    But he just sits there. Waiting. Part of me is expecting him to say sorry to Richard, or to the both of us. Part of me is expecting him to say thanks. Part of me is expecting him to break down crying and part of me is expecting him to go absolutely ape-shit now. To start kicking and punching the back of my seat and screaming. Screaming that we tried to abduct him or kidnap him or…But he just sits there. Waiting.

    After a while he opens the door, gets out and slams it shut behind him. He doesn’t turn around, or say anything, once he is out of the car. We just sit there and watch him as he walks over the cow rail and makes his way up to his house.
    “What’s the name of the B&B?” Richard asks, taking out his phone.
    “Glenville B&B,” I say. “Why?”
    “´Cos we’re coming back here tomorrow. Or calling them.”
    “I really don’t think that’s a good idea.”
    “Why not?”

    But I don’t say anything. I’m watching Daniel as he walks up the long, steep driveway to his home. All I can think about now is what it’ll be like for him when, after he rings the bell and waits in the cold, well-lit archway for his mother or father or brother or sister to come to the front door, and they see him standing there, pale and shivering and alone. They won’t even have to look in to his eyes to know. Daniel. It’s Daniel. Something has happened to him.

  • The Perpetual Villa

    “Il y a longtemps,” I repeated. “A long time ago.” My French felt clumsier every minute.

    Renard Busquet, leading me through the pearl-gray dimness of the silent east wing, let his own native Poitevin French drop like a thin stream of Vouvray wine. “A long time… Tell me again how your honored ancestor sat in the back lawn.”

    “It was in 1871,” I recounted. (Busquet twisted the glass knob of the glass-paned door without a sound, and held it open for me, smiling amiably.) “―In 1871, my great-great-grandfather, Florian Busquet, was nineteen. He had made up his mind; he would not remain in Poitier, as his brothers and fathers, everyone in his family, had done from the time the family first received its arms from Charles VIII; he would go to America. He knew no trade; he had nothing but the small sum his father (your great-great-grandfather, recall, Monsieur) would settle on him; nothing but those francs and his own youth and boundless optimism.”

    Renard led the way across a pavement of terra-cotta-colored bricks. I had never seen such bricks, let alone been in France; and yet the remarkably clean, peach-hued bricks, tightly fitted without a weed or even traces of moss in between, gave me a fleeting sense of familiarity. “―It was evening,” I continued. “The evening of his last day at Villa Busquet, where he, and his father before him, and his father, were born and raised… dinner was over, and the family were sitting on rattan chairs on the back lawn. My great-great-grandfather’s older brother, the heir, Phillippe… always sat with his legs crossed; my great-great-grandfather remembered clearly every detail of the scene, the last time he saw his family, in the setting of their beautiful home. Phillippe sat with his legs crossed. The rattan table…”

    Renard gestured with an unhurried hand to the rattan chairs set on the uneven grass. “Take a chair, take a chair. Ah yes, Phillippe sat with his hands crossed, and the table…”

    He, the current heir of Busquet, sat down and crossed his legs. “Do go on!”

    “My grandfather was seated nearest to the terrace,” I said. “Then a funny thing happened. The dog… a little foxhound with plumy ears and tail, which they called Charlot, came around the corner of the house, just over there. He was carrying…”

    A small, energetic shape rounded the corner of the conservatory. A foxhound pelted gaily toward us, its feathery ears and tail waving; it bounded up to Renard’s legs, and―horrors!―it was carrying a very large, bloody rat.

    “Charlot!” scolded Renard. “Put that down, at once! Get away with you, ridiculous animal!”

    I could not have moved if Charlot had shoved the rat in my face.

    As Charlot slunk off with his quarry, the slim Poitevin, seated in the rattan chair with his legs crossed, invited mildly, “You were saying?”

    “Charlot was carrying a rat,” I managed, after a moment. “The ancient Charlot. In 1871. He carried a rat up to my great-great-uncle Phillippe, who was sitting with crossed legs, just there―”

    “I am told it is a family trait,” said Renard; he did not uncross his comfortable limbs. “Every foxhound here is called Charlot.”

    I did not tell him the rest of that scene, which my great-great-grandfather had remembered and recounted nostalgically so many times. What need was there to describe the rattan table with a plate of biscuits, the uneven turf and emerald-colored short grass, the myrtle trees and the cuckoos, or Phillippe’s graceful, deliberate figure―when they were all before me?

    I had thought all my life that I understood why Florian Busquet had left the Old World; but now I felt at my core his nauseous urgency, to escape the vacuum, the place without time.

    I had thought all my life that I understood why Phillipe Busquet had remained in the Old World; but now I felt at my core the overpowering seduction of the place without time.

    My cousin smiled amiably, and I was motionless in my chair, pulled in half.

    Feature Image: an Arcachon villa or Arcachonnaise.

  • Getting Away

    Margaret didn’t like Walls, so why had she agreed to go walking with him in the mountains, and afterwards for a drink in a remote hotel bar? She had no self-control, she broke all her promises, she was weak and gormless. Flaws she contemplated, unlacing her boots at the fireplace.

    “You should take off your socks too,” said Walls. “So that your feet dry off properly. Hang them off the mantlepiece, here.”

    “Can we just do that?”

    “Do you think we have to behave ourselves in this dump?”

    Margaret smiled with warm disapproval. It wasn’t a dump, but she liked that he wanted better for her. She felt nice; she felt a sense of belonging. It was the end of December and it was a strange, antique hotel – empty, save for some old people at the collapsing little bar. The chairs shook. The evergreen strung along the mantlepiece looked feeble, picked clean by time, and even the fish in the boxes on the walls were dead.

    “Evening.” A narrow-faced unsmiling man lowered a tray of hot ports to their table.

    “Thank you, Sir,” said Walls. “Hits the spot – we feel we deserve it, too. We were out at Glendalough today, hillwalking with the best of them. Busy, here, this time of year?”

    As the men found things to say Margaret cupped the port in her hands and dipped her nose to the bitter scent of liquor, lemon and cloves. She took a long drink, gazing affectionately around. The empty floral armchairs sat facing each other, backs reclining, arms outstretched as if caught in a ghostly confab. A grandfather clock sounded. The clock was strict, censorious, like a clacking tongue.

    “It’s just so pleasant here.”

    “It’s a nice place to come and disgrace yourself anyway.” Walls picked up The Shooting Gazette and read from a story about gundogs and winter grouse, making Margaret laugh. He propped the ankle of his desert boot up on his bulky knee and leaned back, testing all the strength of his chair. His legs were long and sturdy. How much were the rooms here anyway? She didn’t have to decide on anything yet. Margaret gulped her port, sinking back, sinking further inside an evening she’d never imagined she’d agree to.

    On Christmas Eve she’d sat on a kerb on Dawson Street with her bags of shopping spread around her and into her phone typed: “Not only do I not love you, I don’t even like you, now get away from me.” She sat in the sleety cold, reading back through all their texts: the block paragraphs of his voluble accusations alternating with her neatly edited retorts. She did not feel safe. The shadows of ruthless passers-by bore over her, feet thumped, her ass froze on the cold stone.

    Margaret pressed send, then put up her furry hood and fled the streets. Their love was over, and it hadn’t even been. On Christmas day, she kept her phone switched off for discipline with the benefit of also torturing him. On Boxing Day, she turned back on her phone to face three new emails from him. One sad belated Groupon offer for ice-skating – even the offer had expired. A press release for a pantomime, subject headed ‘Matinée with me?’ Then a sonnet, typed into the body of his email and evidently authored by him too in some dismal late-night rage: the couplet ended with the words ‘dishonour!’ and ‘suicide?’. (His punctuation).

    Then on the 27th of December, she wrote that she hoped he had had a good Christmas. He wrote back that it was awful. ‘Awful’, he wrote. ‘I’m sorry,’ she replied, not knowing what for. On the 28th they chatted all day about themselves. Now we find the former soulmates on the 29th December in a hotel with buffalo horns displayed in the creaking hallway – something about the Boer War, the unsmiling concierge had told Walls – and sullen photographs of aristocrats in sporting gear. Why had she come all this way? Because that morning she’d opened her curtains to a bright winter sky booming down on her. ‘Beautiful day’, she texted, and exactly an hour later she pulled into the traffic island opposite Donnybrook church, grinning and waving at Walls as if he was a friend. He got into the car, bulky and ungainly as the wrong jigsaw piece. He looked so suspect, checking around him – always guilty, stigmatised by some certain yet unclear wrongdoing. She liked the boyish glint, the boyish smile – he was terrible, incorrigible – he was her punished pupil. They got along well. They both liked walking in the mountains, they liked wine, books, planes. He liked politics, man’s worlds. Both liked the idea of causing trouble – of escalating something, shocking other people. He edited a little online magazine in his spare time and she’d been his intern and his girlfriend the past year. His protégée, unpaid apprentice, the weirdo in the corner of his study eying him while he worked, blushing at his glances, her amorous eyes – though never undressing him there and then. Their fantasies remained just that, ethereal, abstract ideas transacting between them, through a fug of newspapers, laptops, coffee cups, vape and sandwich wrappers. All physical sex was had after dark and in the dark. About once a week, or twice a week, one of them would say something pointed and disruptive and they would argue. Arguing would last hours or days. Arguing became yelling, slamming, became toxic waste – life was flammable and unhinged, something she couldn’t control. Once, on holidays abroad, he drove her drunk late and night and told her he had the power to kill the both of them. He speeded up the car and scared the shit out of her. Then he slowed down the car. She never asked him about it afterwards, she told the story only to herself, she reasoned with its oddness; it was all bluster, wind-up. A joke – just a stupid joke.

    At Glendalough, the surrounding hills were plush and velvety with deep colours, and snow lit up the mountain peaks. The cold air blanched her face as the soles of her shoes gripped the railway sleeper tracks along their path. They chatted happily, normally, like decent people, offering nods to ruddy-cheeked women and their dogs. The sky grew dark and the hikers dispersed, leaving them alone in the mountain ranges. She felt shy and elated; she wondered if they would touch. When her ankle turned on a rock along the track, she almost fell, but he grabbed her wrist and held her glove, looking at her with tender fright. After that she let him hold her ungloved hand.

    The man came carrying two more ports, and a Christmas cake, encased in white marzipan, with little mince pies in paper cases laid out on a doily, their pastry tops dusted with icing sugar. Margaret spooned whipped cream all over a mince pie and ate it.

    “I adore whipped cream! I think whipped cream must be my greatest pleasure. If I had cream every night I’d be happy for the rest of my life.” She licked her lips of cream and sugar powder.

    “We could actually eat before we go,” he said.

    “We could. But the ice. Would the ice be dangerous?” She had no interest in the answer to her question, a formality in the resistance she would need to provide. Her limbs felt heavy, her skin baked in the heat of the flames.

    “They have a table, if we want.”

    “Oh, you already asked them?”

    She tilted her head as if she was considering something. “I suppose I am very hungry.”

    The grandfather clock ticked, jaunty, like horses galloping. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-TICK, it went. So percussive, so repetitive it couldn’t possibly signal change, or progress.

    “Leave your boots.”

     

     

    The dining room was a solemn rectangle with every table set and nobody there. Serviettes were ironed into fans, candlesticks loomed unlit. Margaret admired a very big fork, and touched the white table cloth as if it was a sheet of gold. “This is all so nice!” She gave a histrionic shiver and at this cue, Walls took off his suit jacket and tossed it on her shoulder. The jacket buried her in warmth, and as the chill eased from her body a big bottle of red wine came. The bottle did seem bigger, fatter than an average bottle, and she assumed it was expensive. Getting home was going to be impossible, though they both had a history of reckless driving – she was chaos, did not take care with things. Food arrived with the rapid pace of an establishment with very little to do: scrolls of ham with out-of-season melon cut in half moons, thick slabs of game terrine. A blue fish with a crispy eye was placed in front of Walls and for Margaret, a duckling’s breast stewed in dark juices.

    “How are we going to make it back? I’m so tired for driving,” Margaret announced after a time.

    “Look, the rooms are fine, if you want.”

    “You think.” She let her voice trail off – she would not contribute any more to this discussion.

    “Only €75 a head, dinner included,” he said. “And it’s on me.”

    “You don’t have to.”

    “I owe you anyway.”

    “That’s separate.”

    “Sure.”

    He must have been referring to the fee he normally paid for two articles, for which she had invoiced him, and which he still hadn’t paid her for. She sliced a piece of meat in two and ate quickly and unhappily the morsels on her plate. Next week, she’d have to send him the invoice again, for the third time. They sat in silence for too long. Walls sloshed wine into her glass, and she drank as much as she could in a mouthful.

    “Let’s order dessert. Apple and rhubarb pie, sticky toffee pudding, blancmange, or – oh goodie. Baked Alaska. Or did you see the cheese on the trolly earlier? I think I saw cheese.”

    The door brushed over the carpet, and in came the serving lady and behind them, a tall fair-haired couple in handsome coats. Margaret’s head lifted and turned as the man and the woman crossed the room. Her eyes were tugged, locked, as the man pulled off his hat to reveal a face that was as familiar to her as it was intimidating, in its classic lines of beauty and clear, healthy skin. His name was Antonio, and he was the tech millionaire who had taken her to the party where she first met Walls. Millionaire, or billionare. Secret investor – someone of great worth, great wealth. She didn’t care about wealth, but. Antonio, she knew, moved easily in the world, had experiences. He had fulfilled more of his dreams than, for instance, Margaret.

    Walls was saying something.

    “Sorry, what?” she was dazed. “Sorry – It’s – did you see, who just came in?

    Antonio and the woman had seated themselves at the furthest corner, leaving a barricade of empty tables between them and the suddenly inferior, suddenly scruffy Walls and Margaret. Margaret touched her hair, damp and unbrushed, and seized a silver spoon to check her reflection – she had the face of a bumpkin, nose, lips, eyes blown up. She tilted in her chair, trying to catch Antonio’s eye while also paying Walls extra attention.

    “Did you see the dessert menu?”

    “All I saw was you staring at him.”

    As ever, it came in a single rough blow.

    “I wasn’t – ”

    “You were.”

    “But – ”

    “You were staring at him like a little girl in a shop window.” Her cheeks were hot, and her heart beat in a way that hammered, weighted her. Superglued to where they sat, stitched into the furniture, she felt that life would run on, this way, facing Walls, answering to Walls. She looked around her, so as not to have to look at him, and Antonio turned around just in time.

    “Ah!” He said, and stood from his seat.

    Both men faced each other, chests puffed as they shook hands. Antonio kissed Margaret’s cheek, and the other woman and Margaret kissed politely. “Pearl,” she said. “Pearl,” Margaret said, forgetting, for a moment, her own name. Pearl and Margaret talked for a few minutes about their jobs.

    “I’m hoping to specialise in equine law,” Pearl finished.

    Margaret dropped into her chair to see puddings and cheeses all laid out in front of her.

    “This is really great” said Walls. “I’d have to say the food has really been first class, you wouldn’t have thought it.” Hunched forwards, he sawed into his tart. “Taste, here.”

    Margaret recoiled. Like a child she shut her lips to the advance of his laden fork.

    “What? Oh, are you annoyed or something? Because I teased you for looking at Antonio? Come on, weren’t you? Don’t tell me you weren’t staring at him doe-eyed – don’t tell me you’re not mesmerised. I don’t blame you – he’s a handsome guy. You know, who cares. I’m not annoyed with you. Are you? Are you annoyed with me or something?”

    “No.” Margaret smiled politely, and then did something strange. She asked the serving lady for the bill, and she paid it using her credit card. She zipped up her wallet, threw his jacket on his lap.

    “That was very generous,” he said.

    “I’m feeling generous.” An eerie pause. She started to laugh. “Because I’m so happy. Really, you have no idea how happy I am. Because I remembered something, just there. I’ll never, ever have to do this again. I’ll never have to see you again. You have nothing to do with me anymore. You are a hole – you don’t exist. Oh, this is a relief” She tore a handful of grapes off a branch and popped the grapes between her laughing jaws. “And you know maybe I was looking over there. Maybe I wasn’t. I can actually look at people, ha ha, I can look at whoever I want, whenever.”

    Margaret hacked out a wedge of yellow cheese and lined up three crackers. “And you know I will think about all these other people, other men maybe. I might even kiss them too, on the lips.”

    “Yeah!? he goaded.

    “Yeah! I will probably go to bed with them!” Margaret flashed her eyes at her defeated lover. “And then, well, who knows what might happen? Once I’m alone with them.” She leaned over a debris of cheese rinds and blue crumbs and broken biscuits. “I’ll take my clothes off, everything. One by one. Down to my underwear, and then I’ll sit on the bed, with no clothes on, and they will look at me. Oh! I am so young, and you are not. I am so young and free, and you are so irrelevant!”

    Should she go on. Tell him all the things that she could do, with these imaginary men, or just carry on insulting him, get all the bile out on the table. No, someone had to drive them home. Margaret was over the limit. And she knew enough not to eliminate the fear that he could try and kill her, or at the very least, threaten to do so, which is also blood-chilling. She drew in a series of deep, imperious breaths, then picked up the wine bottle and upturned it in her glass. She drank the rest and sat up.

    “I’ve to go.”

    “Go,” he repeated. “Just go, just like that.”

    “Yes, now.”

    “And you probably want to go home without me, do you.”

    “Oh god yes.”

    “I booked a room. But you don’t care.”

    “Nope.”

    “That isn’t very nice – I thought we.”

    “Nope. Cut it out now. I want to go. Now. And you should drive, because I’m too drunk. And I don’t feel like driving.”

    Margaret handed Walls the key to her car, or rather, her mother’s car.

    In the dark of the courtyard, he turned the key. The engine breathed, and omitted a lengthy energetic death rattle, then cut out. He tried again. It cut out again.

    “Look,” he said. “I know you think I was out of order –”

    “Start the car.”

    “I was just going to say.”

    “Start the car.”

    He stamped his foot and the sound of pumped gas wheezed, then thinned into the night air. Tree branches crouched behind them.

     

    Later, under her duvet, fully clothed and shivering with adrenaline, Margaret’s head raced. With outrage, disbelief. Revulsion. She felt excited by the hate in her, enriched with its potency. She was free and alive, shot of him – what had she been thinking; of course, he never would have killed her, not like that.

    New year came, like a homecoming, a beneficent place of safety. And as the years passed, she still triumphed in the afterglow, the feeling of survival. But he came with her, he lived in her. His voice was in her mind, talking and lecturing and murmuring and making her laugh. It was his face that hovered in her dreams, his eyes that spotted her in a crowd, or narrowed on her in quiet moments. ‘Get away from me!’ But he wouldn’t get away. She couldn’t get away. She couldn’t get him out.

  • Homer

    He who fights with monsters should look to it
    that he himself does not become a monster…
    when you look into the abyss the abyss also
    gazes into you.
    Friedrich Nietzsche

    Day 1.

    On the question of the one against the many, as opposed to the many against the one, White was decidedly with the former after having proven, to himself at least, that his poor father was a lost one without any direction having given himself to the latter and now, after spending his life among his own, was fundamentally on his own more than ever, isolated more so than White himself was, for whereas White had taken the conscious decision to oppose the many by choice, thus accepting to lead a life of solitude, whereas his poor father by accepting to choose a life among the many, sharing their so called ‘core values’, White’s father, all his life, would go on and on about shared values; now, at the end of the day, nearing his end, ironically he was perhaps more alone now than he ever was! This was something that White, to a certain degree, could take satisfaction in. The fact that no matter what way you decided to lead your life, in the end, you always ended up on your own. Solitude was, in this sense, always the end result. Of course, this is something that White had always taken into consideration. It is, you could say, the reason why he chose to accept a life of solitude in the first place. If the truth were known, White was always intensely anti-political, which is why he hated groups. He always had. So, the idea of any kind of group consensus was anathema to him. Family being the first! The first group. He had always hated being apart of it, at least since he started to see through it. That is to say when he first started to question it when he was a very young man.

    Even White’s friends, some of whom were considered to be quite wild, were shocked by White’s initial coldness. White would refer to certain animals who would leave the family to fend for themselves. Why did humans insist on remaining in contact with their parents? Out of all the animals on the earth, only humans, as far as he could see, remained in such close proximity to their parents, and at what cost?

    Of course, White’s whole vision of the world had been profoundly altered or shaped by the tragic death of his brother. His brother had committed suicide when White was still a very young man, and this act had such an incredible knock-on effect on everything that White would do. This act had fundamentally altered White. Utterly, you could say. It wasn’t the only act to have had such a powerful effect on him, there was another, but it was the first event rather which was to have such a radical impact on his whole worldview, if one could say that White did have such a thing, a view of the world, as it were. I should probably say what the second event was now after having already alluded to it and in this way setting out the trajectory of the present tale. Building up the horizon, as it were.

    The second great event to influence White, after his brother’s suicide, was when he eventually was to separate from his wife, whom he was to eventually divorce. This was the second great event in his life. The second of the great Ds. So, first Death and secondly Divorce. Life was made up of a series of Ds, White had noticed. The 3 Ds, he called them. White being Irish, alcohol, or Drink, was the 3rd. It was a so- called coping mechanism. The results, of course, were disastrous as a man who has already been struck by two of Life’s greatest events, Death and Divorce, to then resort to Drink to get over them is simply asking for even more trouble, and of course this is what this story is all about. Stories all involve trouble, the interesting ones at least.

    I’d like to get back to White’s father now, after having presented you, the Reader, with an overview of the overall substance of the narrative of the following tale, having thus fulfilled, to a certain degree, the duties of the Author – ha, dead me arse!

    If there was one person in the world who was to have such a singular effect on White, apart from his late brother and former wife that is, it was the old pater familias. God, what an absolute cunt! A curse on his kind, indeed, as that is in fact what he was, White had surmised. The Patriarch! The cunt! The superlative arsehole of the Universe! The sum total of all his woes! As when it came to the Patriarch, the many were truly the One. They all conformed to the same depths of depravity. Hitler being the superlative. You had to nail your colours to the mast.

    Because of the dire nature of White’s relationship with his father, to a large degree White’s relations with men in general were pretty shitty. Indeed, it was rare that he actually liked one. Though not an impossibility too, having said that. He had had great friendships with some men, over the years. But, in general, White was more a Woman’s man than he was a Man’s man and this was primarily to do with the whole very complex relationship that he had had with his parents. White’s poor mother, for example, had been a martyr to all women as she had come from that very particular generation of women in Ireland who simply stood by their men, come hell or any amount of assorted high water! High water indeed, the expression was literally true now, now that they were all expecting a biblical like deluge to submerge them all due to global warming. Patriarchy and Fossil Fuels, now how many academic papers were headed in such a way in Humanity Departments in progressive universities all around the world?

    One could dream of Noah and his drunkenness. White saw again Uccello’s depiction, all cascading in glorious Rouge, or Reds….

    The fact of the matter was, no matter how you wished to look at it the situation was truly awful. The man had been the worst possible fucking cunt of his kind. There were no redeemable qualities, the more he looked the more shit was uncovered. How many could say the same? These shits, shits of their kind, this kind, this kind of shit kind, the shitty fucking shit kind, the kind of shitty fucking shit that you wouldn’t want to shit next to nor sit beside mind, that kind, mind your backside! The fucking shitty shitters and their fucking shitty shitting shits! Those kind of shitty fucking shitters… That Kind!

    End of Day One!

    Day 2

    Now White hadn’t always been an aggressive son of a gun. He had become one. His nature then was historic, you could say. Informed as it had been by the unending deluge of experience that had gone on over his time in the world. Planet Earth. What they had done to it! It was nothing short of disastrous. The so-called strong men. What a bunch of dipshits. Strong men my ass. Show me a man and I’ll show you an ass, that is what White would say. As he had lived with one. Oh yeah, he had survived him too. Mister Universe spinning around in his tight leopard skin briefs. Bikini briefs! God forbid. It was infectious. The briefs that is. “Be brief!” Puts a whole new context on it…

    When he thought about his childhood, which was rare, White remembered particularly the long torturous dinners which went on in the depths of winter. The family, all six of them, surrounded the table upon which the food had been placed. Every Patriarch worthy of the name has his place at the table and mealtimes are a particular pleasure for control freaks of this nature as these events allow for a certain element of theatricality and ceremony. Placing people at the table involves a whole network of categorisation. Hierarchy within families, for example. Directors on Boards. They all involve systems of power, and so invoke a little ceremony.

    White, for example, used to sit at the head of the table directly opposite his older brother who eventually committed suicide. White was the second in command, following the patriarchal hierarchy. His sister sat beside his mother on the left side, important detail, as you came in the door and then on the right- hand side sat the Father and on his right side his youngest son whom neither White’s older brother nor sister could stand. He was the porte parole while the eldest brother was the weakest link. White could see it all, how he had been set up to fail. As he was not a natural leader, White’s eldest brother. This had been his great tragedy and which was to kill him, literally, in the end. It would have been better, in many respects, if White had been the eldest as he had leadership qualities but then they had been acquired by White from a sustained practice of observation. This is how White seemed to have learned everything, from the point of observation. Seeing how Not to do something, typically then in everything in later life also the very point of departure.

    White could remember the hours spent at the kitchen table listening to the voice of God drone on endlessly about some subject matter. Omnipotence. This was a key idea in the pater familias. The all seeing all knowing One, like the Sun. The King without a throne. The King looking down at his subjects, all knowing, all condescending! And oh God how he would go on and on and on and on and on and on and on…in a monotone.

    Of course, the atmosphere around the table would be unbearable. I have read accounts of Hitler at the dinner table, apparently he gave these endless monologues talking for hours and hours and hours and hours. Omnipotent. All knowing, addressing all kinds of subjects. Not really knowing all of the subjects at all, and so talking absolute horse shite half of the time. Can you imagine it? One of the World’s Most Important Figures Talking Absolute Horse Shit. And for hours!

    Yes. In retrospect, White had been well prepared. All his life. For his Life. LIFE. In screaming capitals. He could take great pleasure in that fact. That it had all, all the horror, all the boredom, all the manic pain and apparently pointless suffering. It all had some kind of purpose, in the end! It was preposterous, really. And for what? By what grand design had it all been arranged for?

    Were there reasons for it all, after all? Some universal truth? There in the great black firmament, shot through with countless stars for millennia, in the great abstraction of the night of the cosmos was there, after all, some kind cosmic arrangement where the infinitely, infinitely small and inconsequential, most insignificant of beings finds a place after all in the great scheme of things?…

    No answer. Silence. The kind of silence that could sink whole nations. A Black Hole. You are on the event horizon. Don’t fall in. Or perhaps we are already in and have come out the wrong end? That would make sense.

    Platitudes

    The people who live here will never get bored with the beautiful views…
    The truth is they do, and this kind of explains the whole god-awful mess.
    Whether it is the young man who, having finally won over his ‘beautiful
    Princess’, starts focusing now on her bad breath and tiresome habit of
    Complaining already after only two years in and who will,
    After breaking up with her one year later, dreams only about bottling that
    Same horrendous breath and keeping it as a heady perfume
    To remind him of his most cherished memories.

    Loss, that great Optician, Loss, and absence its partner,
    Are the great rose-coloured lenses that truly help us to SEE
    The many-splendored colours of the world.
    Seeing through the cracked lens offers alone true vision.

    (There’s one  for SpecSavers!)

    Day 3.

    White never actually liked his parents, if the truth were known. How could he? His mother, after all, was not very intelligent. She was smart, and quite pretty. Actually, very beautiful when she was young, but she was also extremely subservient, not very curious, she could be a real bitch and was not at all tactile, so not prone to showing any kind of affection to White nor his siblings. This was hardly surprising considering the fact that her mother before her was a horrible woman who was hysterical, fanatically religious, cunning, cruel, malicious and spiteful. In fact, whenever White did think about her, which was rare, ugly was the word he would use to describe her. Such were his memories.

    As for his father… It was even less pretty, the picture. He was a profoundly vain and ignorant man and it was this twin display of vanity and ignorance that were particularly horrendous to behold; the latter of course cancelling any reason for the former to exist, you would think! But no, the ignorance was such that it apparently clouded all judgement in the so-called thinking subject, as it had no awareness of its own faults, and what was even worse, if it did, and sometimes it seemed to show some inkling of awareness (For example, when it was eating at the dinner table, it had the habit of chewing its food with its mouth open, a truly odious habit, and then, seeing that White was actually observing it, instead of closing its mouth like any normal person would, it instead continued to masticate its food in an even more exaggerated manner like some ghoulish creature, which is why I am speaking about it as opposed to him.) but even so continued its ghoulish behaviour nonetheless. That is when White started to think of his father in terms of the mythic creature fabricated by Homer.

    The Cyclops was, at least for White, the most truly amazing poetic metaphor in all of western creation. White never ceased to be amazed by Homer’s creative genius when he did think about it, which was a lot due to his particularly horrendous relationship with his father. White wondered was he alone, in this, and, by the fact that Homer’s metaphoric beast was being re-invented time and time again for generations and generations of people down through the millennia so that they too could understand the truly epic horror show that they were dealing with which was, in a word, PATRIARCHY

    There it was. The bullet stopped here. This ten- letter word fell off of the pen or the tongue with all of the monumental obstinacy of the one-eyed monster himself. The cave dweller of old, horribly blinded by the clever and equally intelligent Odysseus himself. It is this twin pillar of cleverness And intelligence that had made Odysseus the truly remarkable hero that he is and again this is a further testament to Homer, or the Greeks, their incredibly astute insight into man’s nature. In other words, what it meant to be a Man. A Real Man, that is, as opposed to some One-Eyed King of some barren cave dwelling along the coast. You could of course say, perhaps must, here we have the two kinds of man, in the end. The Cyclopean Monster, or what we would call in modern parlance – The Narcissistic Toxic Male. TNT M. Nietzschean dynamite. All metaphors being carved specifically from the finite, as good old Friedrich knew.

    Back at the kitchen table, White could only look upon the creature before him as the Cyclops personified. There before him, that grotesque vision of the creature masticating on the meat before him. Contemptuous, almost, of him. The beastly couldn’t give a FUCK look of him. I AM THE KING. The Cock-eyed face of power on him. Tunnel vision. Hence the voice. HMV. His Master’s Voice. Lacanian. Tripping on the Real. The lexical field filled with metaphors is far more really lasting then the mere sports field with all its associated bruises and weather stains, for they will all be memories. Whereas, the symbolism will reign eternal. Such then is the very potent power of poetry. This is why the intelligent princes feared it. Not only the Greeks but in every culture.

    White saw again his Irish Master incontinent with piss- stained grey pants, his face a travesty of a man. More a Terminator in decline, his rusting member leaking out like some old oil well. Grotesquerie. For teenage boys a male mockery.

    White would go home alone and strip and slip into his mother’s room would steal, like countless boys before him, tights and underclothes. Fetishes that he would take away to his cave where he would sit alone unmanned and Freudian.

    Enter the imagery of Salvador Dali. The Great Masturbator. Eros and Thanatos. Sex and Death. Such were the twin pillars guarding the Exit, from the mad man’s lair. Such was the wonder of her hair. The other worldly feminine. That offered some kind of safe-haven. From IT. From Him.

    Enter then the Muse.

    Feature Image: The blinded Polyphemus seeks vengeance on Odysseus: Guido Reni‘s painting in the Capitoline Museums.

  • Gull

    Try to envisage Odysseus, on stiff headland, on the Western Atlantic coast of Ireland, tilling the soil with an ancient looking hoe. His hands are dry, chapped and his thick fingers curled around a parched shaft, steady palms supporting the implement, with which he works effortlessly. The slap, jut, and pull of the short blade into the earth turns up an odd purple worm which twists its belly upwards to the hot palpitating sun; and a hessian sack, half-filled with grass seed ready for planting, is slung over his back; its strings stretched across his well-defined, sinew-led, shoulder. Small dragon neck swathes of lime-coloured samphire shoots slowly emerge in sandy verges of the high field where he works. There is not a cloud in the endless ream of blue sky.

    When he spreads grass seed, as he has done in the past, many times, the canvas bag becomes a sail and his hand arcs as minuscule seedy flints shoot out over fertile mother earth and come to land among waxy ribbons of grass.

    The man looks now over a fluttering Atlantic Ocean, and it could almost be the Aegean Sea. It roars, breaks, and shatters into lucidity and calm, with white horses crashing on out further, out towards the ellipsis of the infinite horizon of his gaze. Gleaming, smooth black cattle, way off to his right, graze in a greenfield, in a verdant county. A county older than the Celts. Even Mother Nature does not know of its name. The herd, glistening, serves as a bovine footnote of nature’s essayistic form. They bellow and holler at each other with an incongruity that floats on the air. A brocade of whitethorn keeps them penned in. The enigmatic cattle are dark forms, staples of a slowly sifting tenure and lenient to the west’s wilder ways and moods. It suits them to bellow here in the hull of infallibility, amid the streaming whitethorn, sea Campion, and sandwort. The whitethorn is in flower, billowing, and its scented blooms are carried by the wind.

    Atop these cliffs, sat Eoghan whose hands were worn, he rubbed the soil and clasped his hands together to smell the earth, the olfactory bulb flickers, antediluvian and almost pristine in a broken social world. He drew a deep draught and took in the living earth with one unbroken breath. These were the elements, indeed, the pastures of his making. After a few minutes of solitude, he heard the scrunch of footsteps on seashells and sandy screed in a lane nearby. Eoghan turned his head to see a girl in her early twenties walking towards him.

    “Hi-yah”’ she called out as she approached. He cleared his throat, smiles, and replies,

    “Hello there; nice day…”

    “Oh, aye, it’s a grand one, that’s for sure…”

    Coming closer, he noted her translucent plastic sandals, linen-white shorts and a sleeveless t-shirt of navy blue with white stripes. Her auburn hair, worn in a ponytail, danced and bounced as she walked in the golden sunlight. She studied him and then cast a glance at a shred of olive green kelp which had blown up from the shore and was now stuck to the barbed wire fence on the headland.

    “Bladderwrack… I believe they call it,” he said mildly.

    She turned to him with an almost startled look, her tawny eyes furtive and her lips thinning, then biting her bottom lip she said,

    “That’s a rare auld name for some seaweed, isn’t it now?”

    Eoghan nodded and smiled up at her in the summer sun. She dropped down onto her knees just in front of his sitting position.

    “I remember, the other morning, on Inch Island, disturbing an old heron that was in a settled way…” he began.

    “What happened?” She exclaimed, looking at him more attentively.

    “I was just walking past when he looked at me,” he continued in a quiet voice, “and rose, languidly, from a clutch of rushes and off he took, one foot trailing behind the other slightly and flapping away towards Lough Swilly.”

    “Sure. It must have made a good picture. Did you upload it on to Instagram?” She asked smiling.

    “No.” He replied, softly, “No Instagram.”

    “Then what use is that?” she said, giving him a look of yearning.

    “Mother Nature has the table ready and all we have to do is go and eat. When I rise very early in the morning and go out to nature, I like to immerse myself in the landscape, to see the countryside come alive and open up in front of me; to see bright buttery gorse flower flourish, to smell honeysuckle; to smell wild garlic in woodland, Nature’s larder.”

    She was quiet, looking nonplussed and uncomprehending. An uncomfortable silence then passed between them.

    “Are ya on Snapchat or Twitter?” She asks her voice suddenly brightening.

    “Twitter?” He tentatively queries.

    “Yeah.”

    “No.”

    “Why? Are you eighty, like?” Her teeth glittered with the brightness of the sun as her mouth curved into a cynical smile.

    Eoghan looked down from the headland towards the sea; the sea breeze caught his thoughts and corresponded with the ripples in the blue torn water. He drew a deep breath as if to acknowledge her persistence.

    “Well, I guess, I just don’t really like this modern stuff …is the honest answer,” He replied turning his blue eyes back on her hazel brown ones.

    “We live in an age,’ he began again, but looking at her, taking stock, he realised he did not know her name. She comprehended this and gave him the thought he was seeking.

    “Aoife.”

    He smiled.

    “Aoife, we live, as I say, in an age known to thinkers, and to those logical enough to figure things out, as Neoliberalism. In an age of instantaneous gratification, of wishes granted instantly. And this is a kind of curse, this culture is a throwaway culture, and it’s not really for me that stuff…these belief systems.”

    The imbroglio of her young mind sent her into a dream state. Yes, she thought this young man, this guy was, “Oh, Janey-Mac, pure gorgeous,” but she was still on the faltering line between being a young girl, and the precipice which would send her into womanhood, and which had not yet been delivered fully formed to her feminine threshold. Just then her phone buzzed. She shook off her teenage sensibilities and looked at the phone’s screen.

    “I have to go,” she said, looking back up to him. “Me Mam wants me to look after our Daniel, a wee dote.” And she took off, saying as she went, “Hope to see you around sometime,” smiling. He smiled as he watched her disappear into the horizon.

    Early the next morning, very early, before any hint of daybreak, Eoghan was at the water’s edge in Inishowen, by Inch Island. He was in deep silence as images entered into his consciousness: yew trees; blue milk; a honey drop caught in pure amber sunlight, wheat-chaff which dances away in a furmy haze; three girls were strolling across a golden beach, past a wooden curragh laden with salt and beginning to crumble into wisps of wooden flakes that disintegrate in the hand. Insects given a firmer design by ancient runes with Neolithic symbolism, crawl, swirl and settle down to become geometrical shapes and patterns, known as Celtic Art. They retire and pass into the art and geometry of stone. A cow’s loin and flanks turn on a spit over a fire pit in the hill fort, Grainán of Aileach. The creature’s dead eye, bulbous, staring, almost bull-like, reminded Eoghan of the tearful eyes of sage storyteller, Paul Auster. Whose gaze could strike the bullseye of fear and desire among those he knew with big, wet eyes, like he had been crying. Bull-eyes.

    A crowd of screaming dark crows broke from branches where there was no tree trunk or tree and scattered across the immediate skyline of his memory’s eye. A spearhead of mackerel which were shifting and turned in a giant ball in the ocean; the sky darkening and rabbits and hares quaking in laneways; stars agleam in a bowl of night water strewn with a garnish of seawrack, seaweed, a mermaid’s shawl.

    He exhaled for a long moment and slowly opened his eyes; the sun continued to traverse its solitary hike towards the noon-time hour. He was down upon his haunches, almost kneeling, but had begun to rise. Feathers grew over his skin like a soft suit of pallid armour. He rose from the reeds, water dripping off his golden, feathery membrane, and gave out a loud piercing squark. He took off towards the beckoning sun which knew the bipedal, avian shapeshifter. This majestic bird that was soon flying high and then gone. Unwatched by man.

  • Halloween

    I’m sitting down on the steps of an old derelict townhouse, across the road from what used to be my old local. I’m rolling a joint, a packed-out little pinner, and looking at the carrying on that is going on outside the pub. Three kids on bikes have stopped to get a buzz off a guy, probably in his late forties or early fifties, who’s pissed out of his head and is holding himself up by a lamppost, around which he is slowly spinning himself. The guy´s wearing a shiny grey suit that has definitely seen better days. His white shirt, open at the neck, has a dirty big half-pint of stout stain down the front of it. With one hand holding the lamppost, stretched out at arms-length, and his feet planted against the base, the guy is leaning so far out that he´s at a near forty-five-degree angle. He spins himself slowly, around and around the lamppost. Like Gene Kelly in “Singing in the Rain”.
    “I´m a dirty swinger, Lads!” the guy shouts.

    It´s getting late in the evening and Halloween is fast approaching. Bangers are going off, booming like bombs in the distance, sometimes closer, echoing and reverberating throughout the streets. High above the pubs, takeaways, bookies and closed-up shops, fireworks screech up into the sky, pop and fizzle out. Reflected in the third and fourth story windows opposite, I catch bits and pieces of the soft explosions. Pulsating yellows. Exploding whites. Terrific blues. Glittering greens. Fountain-sprays of red. The smell of gunpowder and the barks and yelps of terrorized dogs enliven the chill autumn air. Gangs of kids, sometimes ten or twelve strong, drag pallets down the footpaths and street. Cars blare their horns and swerve around them but the kids just throw the finger and let loose a chorus of profanities. Sometimes, when a car has gotten a safe enough distance away, an egg or two are thrown after it. Pagan mischief has descended upon the city again and taken over the streets. And the people in cars know better than to stop.

    “I´m a swinger, Lads!” the guy shouts again, turning himself around and around on the lamppost. “I´m a dirty fucking swinger!”

    But the three kids on their bikes have lost interest. They are looking in through the window of a Chinese Takeaway, Shangri La, at the little Chinese woman who sits behind the counter, her head hovering beside that little golden kitty which perpetually waves it´s pawl. It looks warm inside the takeaway. Every now and then I think I get a whiff of food when a customer or a delivery guy enters or leaves: Spring Rolls, Chung Po Prawns, Roast Duck in Plum Sauce. But the thought of all that greasy food makes me a little queasy. One of the kids gets up on his bike and starts circling around his two friends.
    “I speak Chinese now,” he shouts, “Kim Poo Kak! Po Cum Kim! Chong Chong Chiny Chong!”
    Another kid starts to mimic the golden kitty, levering his arm up and down, waving and staring in at the woman behind the counter.
    “Gizza look inside your fortune cookie!” he shouts.
    “Cum Young Son!” shouts the third kid.
    “I´m a dirty swinger, Lads!” the man spinning around the lamppost shouts again, “And I´m going to box the fucking head off the next prick I see!”

    The few people who are passing up and down the street are paying no attention to any of this. Those who do see what is coming up ahead of them have marked it as trouble and crossed over to the other side of the street in order to avoid passing the guy. He’s still swinging himself around this lamppost, and the kids on bikes are now blocking the footpath. People have become weary of this part of town. It’s been so for a while now. And people are especially weary when night is moving in, especially at this time of year.

    A Brazilian student arrives at the bus stop just in front of me. He has white earbuds in his ears and is texting on his phone. When he looks up from his phone at the bus stop’s electronic timetable and seeing that it has been smashed in, he shakes his head and moves on. I light my joint and take three quick puffs on it. From my inside jacket pocket, I take out my naggin of whisky, spin the cap and drink down a good, deep, gut-warming measure, recap it and put it away. I’m invisible to those across the street. I have willed it so. But that could all change in a split second. I´ve packed out the joint and after two more quick hits off it has taken effect. I take another enormous hit and hold it in. Playing traffic lights with myself, I wait until I´m nearly lightheaded before slowly blowing out the smoke. I pull my thick woolly hat down snugly on my head.

    With a sizzling sparkler in each hand, a tall, painfully thin girl comes skipping right past me. No more than ten years of age, she’s dressed all in black and her long blonde hair is tied up in a ponytail. I lean out from the steps and watch her as she goes by. Wearing a little black leather jacket, she launches herself into the air, landing and springing up again. Her ponytail lifts and falls above the back of her black leather jacket, where white Coca-Cola style letters spell out “Trouble-Maker” over a red heart pierced by an arrow. Twirling her sparklers, this little impish cheerleader of mayhem skips on down the street, slowing only to turn right at O’Mahony’s butchers. She disappears around the corner where, in black marker on the white wall of the butchers, someone has drawn a huge cock and balls complete with four lines for the jizz spurting out in a graceful arc. In red marker underneath it, and probably by a different hand, is written, “Mandy is a fucking tramp.” And beside that in black marker, “The Pope is a pedo.” Staring at all this, I’m convinced that none of it had been there twenty minutes ago.

    A kid comes stumbling down opposite side of the street. By the look of his Seventies getup, I figure that he´s come from the rock bar, The High Stool, just a few doors up. The High Stool is one of the last few havens for young bands to play in and they’re known to go easy on I.D. The kid has long, curly black hair, a light bumfluff moustache and wears a blue denim jacket with band-patches sown on to it, and tight grey jeans. He is no more than seventeen. The rocker-kid totters down the street and stops. He takes out a twenty box of Marlboro red from his jacket pocket, puts one in his mouth and drops the box back into his right-hand inside pocket. Swaying slightly, he tries to light his cigarette, flicking his lighter in his cupped hand, before tottering off again, oblivious to where he is.

    Having lost interest in the Chinese takeaway, the kids on bikes lean over their handlebars in quiet conference. They look over their shoulders, up and down the street. Finally, the young rocker gets his cigarette lit. He becomes absorbed by it, puffing at it, then looking at it, then lovingly puffing at it again. Throwing his head back, he exhales huge clouds of smoke.

    The swinger has switched gears, and now using his right hand, slowly winds himself counter-clockwise, around the lamp post. Just as the rock-kid comes within range and, without breaking the momentum of his turning or taking his hand from the lamp post, the guy tips his weight in such a way that he picks up speed and, in one fluid movement, comes back around and throws a thick, meat-and-bone fisted punch, landing it squarely on the right side of the young rocker-kids face. The sound of it carries across the street.
    “Whoa!”
    “Ho-ho!”
    “Wha´?”
    One of the kids has had his back to it all but he turns around just in time to see the rocker-kid, blind-sided and stunned, staggering backwards a good four-to-five steps before his legs buckle and give out from under him and he falls back, down on his hands and ass. I missed which way the cigarette flew from his mouth.
    “Down in one!”

    The kids on their bikes roar with laughter and the swinger doesn’t say a word. Just keeps turning around and around on the lamp post. Eyes closed, he smiles to himself, his face serene. Miles away now. He’s Elsewhere. The Champ. First round. K.O. Raising his belt for the world to see. But on his third revolution the smile was gone. Opening his eyes, he surveys the street before letting go of the lamp post. He walks over to where the kid is lying on the footpath, propped up on forearm and elbow. He swings a kick at the kid’s face, like his head was a football hovering in the air, begging to be volleyed. The sound this makes sickens my heart. Thrown back beneath the bookie’s window, the kid’s face is ghost-white now. He opens his eyes wide and blinks once. By the second blink his eyes are heavier. Blood pours from where his nose and mouth used to be. When he closes his eyes for a third time, they don´t open again and his head sinks down slowly into his chest. He´s either out cold, or dead.

    “Job oxo, Lads,” the guy in the grey suit says to the kids on their bikes. The kids look at him, each of them now standing up straight, hands gripping their handlebars. They watch him as he walks back into the pub, my old local. The kids look at each other, then at the rocker kid on the ground. One by one they get up on their pedals and go cycling out blindly on to the street. Cars blare their horns at the kids as they go racing down the road, zig-zagging each other, shouting and hollering.

    The last two hits off the joint burn my fingers and scorch my lips before I throw it away. My eyes feel hot and bloodshot. I take another big drink from my naggin, to steady myself, but make sure there is enough left for three or four big mouthfuls later. I pick up my rucksack, stand up, and swing it around my back and over my shoulders. My legs feel feeble. Car lights zip past on the road. There is no one around, just an old man, bent-double, with a walking-stick on the opposite side, down by the boarded up Centra on the corner. He’s so doubled over that he can only look at the ground. So, it will take him a good ten minutes to cover the same amount of ground it will take me fifteen seconds. Despite waiting for a break in the traffic I nearly get knocked down crossing the road.
    Making sure my back covers us from the road, I hunker down in front of the rocker-kid, without touching him. His head is still slumped into his chest. The blood gushing from his nose and mouth has covered his chin. Three bloodied teeth nestle in the folds of his faded black t-shirt now darkened, drenched with his own blood. Looking around, I reach into his inside pocket. And in that very moment, when my hand clutches the package of cigarettes, to pull them free, I´m waiting for someone to walk out of the pub and see us, or for a heavy hand to fall on my shoulder. But, no. No one comes.

    Hurrying down the street, I stride past the old, question-mark shaped man who can see nothing but the footpath, his feet and the end of his walking stick, dog-shit and broken glass. My heart is beating so hard I can feel it in my dry throat. But I´m out. I´m gone. I´m free. I squeeze the box of cigarettes in my hand and I can feel by it that it´s pretty much a full, fresh pack. It´s the best luck I´ve had all week.

    I pass by a boarded-up pharmacy, the graffitied hoardings of a closed-down sushi restaurant and an African barber. Being open, the barbershop is still lit up, but inside, every chair is empty. Only two cigarettes have been smoked from the pack. Sparking one up, I turn down a darkened side street, and slacken my pace. A few of the streetlights have been smashed. A row of brownstone townhouses are uninhabited, their windows black and For Sale signs displayed on every facade. Near the street’s end, I stop beneath the fitful flicker of a streetlight. Leaning against the lamppost I smoke and wait for the calm to return. For my hands to stop shaking.

    There´s a church across the street I´ve never noticed before. Looking at it, I consider going inside for a while. A few minutes of peace and warmth. Maybe some song. A choir. Some candles, some nightlights, might be got. A reading from the Book of Jeremiah. Ezekiel. Or Ecclesiastes. A reading from the Gospel of St. John. A fiver, or a tasty tenner passed around in the tray. When goods abound, my brothers and sisters, parasites abound. But I come among you to pray. To shake the warm and clammy hands of other weary sinners. To ask forgiveness. To confess and to repent. And be not lost. Lord hear us. In your grace, Lord, hear us. To sit in silence. Then kneel in prayer. Close my eyes. A God´s body dissolving inside of me. And hope that, in prayer, my mind might be drawn toward higher things.

    Curious as to the name of the church, I search for the sign and behind the spike-topped black railings, I spot it. Spade Enterprise Centre. In the windows I see the ghostly glow of two computer monitors, the green hills and blue skies of their screensavers. Disgusted, I flick away the end of my cigarette and keep moving.

    My boots crunch against shards of glass on the ground from the smashed-in windows of the Citizen Information Centre. Spray painted graffiti, cryptic tags and slogans, run the length of the building, jump onto the next shop-front, and the next, and continue on across the battered iron shutters of an old, burn-out Post Office. “Take Back the Streets”. “Vote Maybe.” “God is Love.” “Take Back the Streets.” “Live Dublin. Die Young.” “Let it Come. Let It Go.” At the top of Smithfield, a pink pram has been left on the street. An empty pouch of rolling tobacco and a black woolly hat on its seat. Two pieces of bloodied white tissue paper lay on the ground beside it.

    Smithfield Square is all lit up. A Third Reich modernity about it. The green light at the top of the distillery look-out tower. The huge light-standards all lit up red for Halloween. If only the flaming torches on top of them were lit. Triumph of the Financial Will. Hotel room lights all lit up. Apartment windows all lit up. All warm and lived in. All the windows look down on to the Square. Smithfield Square structures the night and holds it at bay. People walk about across the Square. Going out, coming home. Groups of friends, couples, clutches of tourists. Going out to pubs. Going out to restaurants. A Halloween Horror double-bill in The Lighthouse. “What are you having?” “What you wanna go see?” “I´m getting this one in, put your money away”.

    I stand and watch the revolving ads on the motorized billboard. “Tell your girlfriend to get stuffed. Chicago Take Away Pizza” “You got a big future ahead. D.I.T. Open Day 30th November – Sat. 1st of December” “It´s the blend that counts. Tullamore Dew”. There´s more in my naggin than I´d thought. I take another drink and go around to the other side of the billboard and watch the ads roll up and roll back. In dramatic, eye-catching, black-and-yellow bio-hazard style design “Renting and worried about losing your home”.

    Outside the Fresh Store a woman´s white-framed bike, with a wicker basket on front, is stood up on its kickstand in gentle repose. Unlocked. But I´m tired. And the thoughts of being chased exhaust me. When was the last time I was even on a bike? And a woman´s bike at that. Across cobbles stones too. And nowhere to go or to bring it. Forget it. I go over to the tiers of concrete steps on the Square and sit down. From my jacket pocket I take out my black fingerless gloves and put them on. I light another cigarette and I look up at the windows of the hotel rooms and the apartments. The cold is starting to bite. Like a vampire I have a lust. I have a need. I have a want to be invited in. See me. See me. Come to the window and see me.
    Look down and wave.
    Invite me up.
    Invite me in.

    I sat here one night and watched a Conor McGregor fight on about half a dozen huge, flat-screen TVs mounted up high on the living room walls, through a number of the windows of third and fourth floor apartments. A lot of people were out on their balconies before the fight. Talking, laughing, drinking, smoking. Taking pictures. I was so close to shouting up at them. I could have shouted up too. “Hey! Hey! Can I come up and watch the fight? Came down without my keys and locked myself out like a spa. I know. Sickened. Of all the nights. I got some coke!” They might have taken me in too. For the laugh. More the merrier. Just to watch the fight. And why not. Neighbourly neighbours. Ah yeah. Good souls. Good skins. And I had it all planned out too. Get in. Get to the kitchen. Dump out some coke. Rail it out. Generous like. Grateful. Gratitude. Get that immediate friendly welcome then. Comradery on tap. “Help yourself, Man. Happy Days. Thanks for having me. Yeah, can´t get a fucking locksmith ´til tomorrow”. Accept a beer. Take a shot. Compliment the gaff. Get to the bathroom then when they´re all roaring at the TV. One-minute shower. Nick bit of shampoo. Bit of shower gel.  I could do it in forty seconds. Dry off. Bit of toothpaste. No need to be a total scald. I have my own toothbrush and everything. No one would have copped it at all.

    But I left them to it and watched the fight through the windows instead. And I could see a good bit of it too. Few bumps of coke gave a fluency to my own running commentary. I had a great time. I felt capable and alive. Mercifully distracted from the sharp cold of empty hours.

    Two kids walk past. One with his hands down the front of his grey tracksuit pants. They slow down when they clock the unlocked bike. They take a quick scan around and they see me, looking at them. They keep walking and I flick the end of my cigarette away.

    Tied by a luminous green leash to the chalkboard outside of Fresh is a little dog so small that I hadn´t seen it when I first sat down. I get a rush of recognition when I see it. My stupid blood thrills at the sight of that little fucking dog. That´s Aido´s dog. Definitely. Little Jack Russel-Chihuahua. And the red and the black brace around it for the leash. It fuckin is an´all. No mistake. I take off my woolly hat and let the cold air at my head. I take a look at myself. A once over. I fix my hair and smell myself. I stand up and stretch the tension, the anxious anticipation, out of my extremities. I start a little pacing then, to and fro, in front of the steps.

    “Aido. How are things? Alright Aido. Long time.”
    Speech doesn´t seem slurred. A cold shiver runs up my spine and I shake myself. Giddy as a fuck. Thought you were done though. Thought you were done. But this is chance happening. Street Magic. I sit back down on the steps. My right leg is jigging up and down with a kind of sprung rapidity. I slide my rucksack off my back without taking my eyes off the door and place it down next to me on the left. From my back jeans pocket, I take out my little baggy and, holding in down in between my knees, I tear off enough for two fat joints from the pungent bud. I put the makings, loose, in my right-side jacket pocket and put the baggy back in the pocket of my jeans. I suck the taste from my fingers, fix my eyes on the doors of Fresh, and wait.
    Sure enough, out walks Aido carrying a bag of shopping. Tracksuit pockets bulging too. He leans forward, talking to his dog, unties the leash from around the chalkboard and starts walking away.
    “Aido!”
    He stops and turns around. He peers over.
    “Who´s tha?”
    “Andy, Man.”
    Tugging on the leash, he walks over.
    “Alrigh?”
    “Ye man. Good, good. Good to see ya man. Been ages.”
    “Been a while, alrigh.”
    “Hello Floopy. Haven´t seen you around for a bit.”
    “Ah yeah, was away for a bit.”
    “Ah right. I never heard. You back into it?”
    “Ah, doin a bit you know. Wha ya after?”
    “Meant to ask you. Did your sister-in-law ever do that exam?”
    “Christina?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Fucked if I know, Man. They´re gone to Canada.”
    “No way.”
    “Yeah, over in Calgary. Doin’ the business.”
    “Nice…just eh, remember that, when I said I´d do those classes with her…for free?”
    “When was tha? A year ago?”
    “About that yeah, I think.”
    Aido sniffs his nose and spits a tangley mess of phlegm up on to the grass behind me.
    “And…you remember I said…I said I´d cash in with you sometime, when I was stuck?”
    “Wha, you got nothing on ya at all? I´ve nice stuff there for a score.”
    “I´m skint man. But here. You´d be doing me a solid. I won´t ask again.”
    “This shit doesn´t run, Pal.”
    “That´s alright.”
    Aido looks down at me and changes the bag and leash, behind his back, to the opposite hands.
    “You sick for it these days or somethin’?”
    “No…not at all. Are you still smoking?”
    “Yeah, course. But there´s no green around here man. Nothing for the last two days. It´s a fucking joke, so it is.”
    “Here…I have enough for two nice big spliffs. I was gonna save it. It´s the last bit I have…”
    “Do ya yeah? Where´d you get tha?”
    “An old mate of mine, Phil, in town, there. He harvested a batch last month and that is the last of it. He´s not doing any more. He´s getting paranoid.”

    Aido moves and comes and sits down on the steps beside me. He smells fresh, of deodorant and aftershave, of warm spin-dried clothes. Floopy totters across and smells my boots, and the ends of my jeans.
    “Blue Cheese.”
    “Is it yeah?”
    “Fucking lovely stuff.”
    “Yeah, I´ve had it before. Throw it out there.”
    I put the bud on the ground between us. Aido picks it up and smells it.

    A big, round-bodied young woman comes out from Fresh, carefully carrying a big Halloween pumpkin under one arm. With her free hand she holds the door open behind her for a builder in a high-viz jacket whose going in to the shop. The woman shifts the pumpkin around to her front so that she can carry it better, in two hands, and heads off down Smithfield Square. Every now and then she looks down at the pumpkin, making sure it´s alright.

    “Cheers, Pal.”
    Aido stands up then and my heart sinks.
    “I´ll be getting tar in the day after tomorrow. Twenty-five a pop, alrigh?”
    “I´ll defo take two, three off you for sure man, nice one. And I´ll have the cash…could I just get that one off you now though…remember when I said –”
    “Yeah, yeah, yeah…fuckin memory banks here.”
    Aido sticks a finger into his mouth as though he were going in to pull out a rotten tooth. He throws it at me. It bounces off my knee and falls right in front of the dog. Floopy goes for it too. But before she can get her little nose or tongue to it Aido pulls at the leash, hard, and the little dog yelps and runs back behind her master´s legs.
    “Ya thick,” Aido says.
    I don´t know if he´s talking to the dog or to me.
    “Thanks, Man,” I say, holding the little warm wet ball tightly between finger and thumb. “Thanks a mill.”
    “G´luck.”
    “See ya…and…yeah, day after tomorrow too, right?”
    “Yup,” Aido says, without looking back. “Twenty-five.”
    “I´ll have it man,” I say. “Definitely.”
    I wait until Aido has moved on, then get up and split from the square.

    There is music in me now. I´m in tune with everything. I look up to the sky to thank the stars but see only heavy grey overcast cloud. Thank you, I say, quietly to myself. To the beneficent spirit who walks beside me. Shouts and screams up ahead, from the playground area. A woman shouting. That woman I´d seen. She´s shouting in Portuguese on her phone. Looking around her for someone to help. She points down to towards the Smithfield Luas stop. I look and see the backs of two, maybe three kids on bikes, zig-zagging each other, quickly disappearing out of sight. People pass by the woman, ignoring her distress. On the ground beside her, the smashed-in head of her pumpkin, it´s bright, orange, pulpy sweet brains a mess on the cold, dark cobblestones. I veer away.

    A huge black and white mural on the wall. Dublin, City of Homeless Families. The Council won´t be long in coming around to attack that with their cherry-picker and grey paint. Can´t be having that.

    At the end of Burges Lane, that tough-looking fucker I always see around is holding himself up with a hand against the wall, and is bent over, retching, hosing the ground good with cidery vomit. He´s always in the same pale blue jeans and black hoody with the tacky design on the back of it: the silvery mountain wolf howling at a blue moon. When he finishes, he pushes himself back off the wall, wipes his mouth with his sleeve and stumbles backwards, staggering, cock-eyed. Hasn´t a clue where he is. He holds his arms out, then folds them around a body of air, as though he were embracing an invisible dancing partner. He staggers backward, waltzes around and around, babbling about something I can´t make out. He continues to stagger backward and is nearly clipped by a Luas too as it goes by, its bell ringing, its windows all lit up in the dark. The last three carriages of the Luas are all splattered and splashed with vivid pink paint.

    Down Coke Lane, I keep my eyes on the ground. One night, I found an eight of hash down here. Another time, two twenty-euro notes, folded into one another. Thought it was just the one. Double score. I scan the ground. Wide-eyed. Avid-eyed. Seeing all that I can see. If there´s something here I´ll see it. My eagle eyes are notorious. I´ve got this intuition. Divining senses. A compass. I can feel it. A magnetism for all the lost and forgotten things.

    Up ahead the red neon of Frank Ryan´s pub. People sitting at two cheap pine picnic tables, drinking beer and eating pizza from the pop-up, stone-bake oven housed inside of a brightly lit smoky white gazebo. Three people who look like they´ve been here since after work are drinking beside the big potted shrub. A guy stands on his own under the awning, smoking, looking down into the glow of his phone. I smell weed, not as good as mine, as I pass by and head straight in the backdoor.

    The old warm boozy tavern air hits me with a bang of beer, sweat and incense. Blues music plays loudly through the speakers. The place is dark. It is always dark. Save for the classic canopy light pulled down low over the pool table. This is the brightest part of the pub, just inside the back door. This pub is always dark and loud around this time. That´s why I like it. Drinkers sit around small tables and have to sit close in together, intimate like, to hear themselves talk over the music. The candles on the tables dazzle their tipsy, glassy eyes. Whether amorous or platonic, a little dancing shadow and candlelight on the face is seductive. It keeps them blinkered.

    What happened took no more than four or five steps to accomplish. My wits lit up the second I crossed over the threshold. No one, thankfully, had been playing pool. A couple were in the corner at the far end of the pool table, too busy canoodling to see anything but themselves. Their pool cues discarded on the table. On the right, as I walked in, were three empty bar stools at the wooden counter. Its own little alcove. Two near-empty pint glasses and a full glass of red wine.

    I don´t look out of place in a pub like this if I keep moving. Just passing through. Don´t catch the bartender’s eye. I narrow my way past people, polite and smiling as I go, standing back at times to let others pass by me. I set the now empty wine glass back down at the end of the bar, and follow a young guy out the front door who, without looking back, holds it open for me. The door bangs shut behind me, unexpectedly, and it makes me jump. A little red wine dribbles from my mouth down to my chin. Quickly across the road, between traffic and blaring car-horns, I am past the Dice Bar and half-way down Benburb Street before I swallow the last of the wine. They´re just lucky they didn´t leave a coat or a bag or a phone behind them. I look around behind me but I know I´m safe. And what of it? Five fifty. Six fifty a glass. Put the next round on your card. Not looking where I´m going I nearly trip over the stripped skeleton frame of a mountain-bike that, still chained to a lamp post, is lying dead on the ground. With a quick step and a skip, I right myself and look around. But no one has seen me. Goodnight, Ladies and Gents. Thank you and goodnight.

    When I get back to the bridge, I see that the light above the door of James Joyce House is still on. I´ll have to wait a while longer. I take up my place on the concrete seat in the middle of the bridge, look down into the river, at the ghoulish green lights under the arches of Queen Street bridge, and wait. I squeeze the pack of cigarettes in my hand in my pocket. Press my elbow against me to feel the naggin, still safe in my inside pocket. In my jeans pocket, I roll the little ball of powered warmth and comfort between my forefinger and thumb. Eyes become unfocused. I zone out. Soon the world and I within it become a seamless, pointless blur…

    This bridge over the Liffey, and this long stone seat upon it, is the day-time seat of the Dublin City Shadow Council. Each morning, between seven and eight, Franky, Charlie and Des appear, take up their seat overlooking the river and wait for the off-licenses to open. They buy what they need, then reconvene to the bridge again and are here, usually, and without interruption, until their curfew at six in the evening.

    Franky is the biggest one and the most silent. He looks like a medieval executioner who has lost his black hood. Not five minutes pass in the day that he doesn´t get up off the stone seat on the bridge and start looking down on the ground around him for something he seems to have lost, before sitting back down again and taking a worried drink from his can, squinting at the brightness of the day. Franky´s huge, about six foot three, fat, and has long black hair, balding on the crown. A big black grizzly beard hides most of his face apart from his brow which is smooth, pale, unfurrowed, unblemished, almost babyish. His t-shirts never come all the way down over his big pale beer-barrelled belly and, when he walks, it seems like he is being lead in every direction by his belly, behind which the rest of him must slowly follow. He´s gone through at least three pairs of cheap black runners that always seem to burst at the front so you can see his dirty socks, or sometimes his big, rusty brown-nailed toes.

    Charlie is smaller, about five four. Under his faded navy corduroy paddy cap, squats his small, soured, red face and those hard, bitter, pale blue eyes. A thin, little black and grey moustache. He walks stiff-legged, bowlegged and with the help of a brown walking stick. His clothes are always a motley combination of charity shop donations. Purple cardigans, grey jumpers, and dark blue jeans. He looks a little like Charlie Chaplin. All he needs is the bowler hat.

    Yesterday, around lunch time, Charlie was lying on the footpath, on the corner of the bridge, at the junction on the quays, right where people usually pause to press the button on the traffic lights and wait for the traffic to stop. A young guy in his mid-thirties, in a business suit, was standing over him and talking on his mobile phone. He was calling an ambulance, or the police. Charlie´s walking stick was lying on the ground beside him. As I walked past, I heard Charlie whining from the ground. “It´s shit. It´s all shit…and I¨m shit too.” And I kept on walking.

    This afternoon he was back on the bridge, sitting on his seat overlooking the river, a can of cider in one hand, his other hand balancing and steadying himself on his walking stick between his legs, his eyes tightly closed, and he was belting out a song I didn´t recognize. A middle-aged, curly red-haired woman was sat beside him with a freshly swollen black-eye that looked like a plum. She was singing too. They were having a great old time. Franky was sat beside them, squinting at the river and beside him was Des.

    Des is tall and thin. He never changes his clothes. He wears a faded black wax-jacket that´s covered in slobber and stains. Beneath his wax-jacket he wears a faded black suit, faded black trousers and his old black shoes are stained too. He has sore-looking red and brown-green scabs on his head and the few spare teeth he has are surrounded by browned and blackened tarry gum-holes. Des doesn´t drink. He sits cross-legged and chain-smokes rollies. He rolls them with too much tobacco. His shaky, agitated, black-nailed spidery fingers are smoked-stained, orange and burnished yellow. He never uses filters. He slobbers the end and puffs in silence. He usually throws half of the rollie away…and starts rolling again. Over the course of a day Des will usually only ask two questions. “Cigarette?” and “What time is it?” He will usually answer yes to any questions. “Are you cold Des?” “Yes.” “Are you tired Des?” “Yes.” “Are you alright Des?” “Yes.” By way of conversation, he may say. “I´m tired.” The most he´ll say is. “They should let us sleep on in the morning. Six a.m. Too early to be woken up.” Throughout the day, as the rest of the city goes on living busily around him, he´ll frequently say, to no one in particular, “I´m tired.” Sometimes he´ll stop smoking, lean forward and hold his head in his trembling hands. Des looks like a mortician that is slowly turning into a corpse.

    And so, if it´s company I want during the day, this is the company I keep. It´s the most regular company I have. It´s enough to come and sit among them. As long as these meetings of the Dublin City Shadow Council can continue each day, that they’re allowed to sit here, unmolested, and are allowed to continue their sessions, I can feel as though the balance in the world is being upheld.

    But this afternoon there was a new addition, someone I didn´t like. A properly dangerous fucker. Young fella. Shaved red hair. Vicious scar down the side of his head. Hate-filled-killer-eyes. One of his legs was gone at the knee. His tracksuit was rolled up and tied in a knot so it looked like a cocktail sausage. He had crutches, crossed over his lap. When I came and sat down, he was changing his sock. He balled up the old one and threw it over the bridge and into the river. As he was putting on a fresh sock, he took one look at me and said “Oi. Casper. Roll me a joint.”
    “I don´t have any.”
    “I know you do, you rangy fucker.” He took up his crutch and pointed it at my face. “I won´t tell you again. I know what you have. Roll me a fucking joint.”
    “I don’t have anything.”
    “I´ll cut your fucking leg off!” The sudden force in his voice and his look made the blood turn cold in my guts. I got up and walked away. He threw his crutch at me and hit me lightly on the back of my legs. “You´re fucking dead!”

    But I kept going. I wanted to go back though. Pick up his crutch and beat the fuck out of him. Continue what the scar had started and crack the rest of his fucking skull in. Force my thumbs in through his eye sockets and wriggle the jelly about inside. But I knew, just by looking at him, that he was connected to a network of murderous fuckers. That look he gave me stuck to me. It followed me across the road and into the Spar. Before I knew what I was doing I was back out of the shop and walking away from the bridge, down the quays, drinking from a naggin of whisky. Arming myself for a fight I didn´t want.

    A massive explosion in the distance shakes me out of my thoughts. The quarter sticks of dynamite are out now. The stone seat I´m sitting on is cold again. The light in the James Joyce House is still on. Another huge explosion in the distance. Kids are starting to put bangers in glass bottles, putting them out on the streets or up on walls and lighting them when they see people coming. Little fuckers have graduated to roadside bombs. IEDs. Some kid running home screaming, a hand covering his face, blood and burst eyeball gore streaming through his fingers. Happy Halloween.

    I look over at the house again and stare at it.
    That´s the security light that´s on.
    No one is in there.
    No one had been in there all this time.

    I get up off the concrete seat and leave the green-lit arches of the bridge and the lonesome cold of the night.
    “It´s shit like this that´ll do you in in the end…stupid prick…pay attention…fucking pay attention…or that will be the end of you…Do you hear me…? Pay-a-fuc-king-tention… Stupid shit.”

    I jump the spiked black railing at the James Joyce House and disappear down the iron stairs to the basement, out of sight from the streets. Doesn´t look like anyone has been down. Nothing seems to have been disturbed. That won´t last. But for now, it´s good. For now, it´s still mine. I start to get the place ready for the night. I cleaned up the mess that was down here. Spent a good long time at it too. Must be two weeks ago or so. Just before dawn and worked ´til the afternoon. Got two big black bags from the Brazilain guys over at the Spar. Filled them bags full of crushed beer cans and energy drinks. Plastic bottles and spirit bottles. Crisp packets and sweet packets. An old mangled umbrella. Two rancid condoms. An old weathered, sad-looking, mildewed, black Converse runner-boot. An old filthy election poster. Maire Higgins. Vote Labour. It took me a long time. Worried about getting spiked by a dirty needle, I went slowly through the carpet of refuse, picking up everything, carefully, between forefinger and thumb. Pulled up weeds too from out of the ground that had grown through the concrete and from out of the walls. Above my head, as I worked, morning traffic had picked up on the quays. People passing on their way to work. No one stopped to ask me what I was doing. A glimpse down might have suggested a landscaper, or a volunteer. I never turned my face to look up. Few people, if any, saw me. Maybe no one saw me at all. I had willed it so. Don´t see me. Don´t disturb me. Leave me be. Let me work in peace. I kept my eye on the prize. A clean, concealed space of my own. Off the streets. Easily overlooked.

    Got rid of the black bags into a skip in Burges Lane. Skip full of smashed concrete. Old cream-coloured computer monitors and keyboards. Old fire extinguishers. Telephones. Stacks of expired Yellow Pages still wrapped in plastic. Everything I needed and more. All on my doorstep too.

    After the big clean up, I was even able to get a loan of heavy yard-brush and dust-pan from the mechanics a few doors down. It was the mechanic’s mother who loaned them to me. Elderly woman, salt of the earth Dub. She reminds me of my grandmother. I´d known her to see. Out every morning, afternoon and evening, in her navy diamond quilted vest jacket, sweeping the ground outside of their garage. She keeps the place spotless. When I returned the brush and pan, she had a cup of tea and a ham sandwich waiting for me. She told her son, who was working under an old black Honda with white racing stripes on it, to let me use the toilet to wash my hands. “Go on” he said, without looking back at me. He wasn’t at all pleased.
    When I came out, he was standing under the car, working it´s oily guts back to health. I sat with his mother on one of the two seats she had brought out and set just inside the big, open, double doors of the garage. I took off my rucksack and sat beside her. I drank my tea and ate my sandwich, watching the traffic pass by on the quays outside. She didn´t pry. She didn´t look for reasons or explanations. She just knew. She just sat there in a way that let me knew that if I wanted to speak, or say something, that I could. But I had nothing to say. Despite myself I could still hear myself rehearsing responses, like “This crash was worst the last.” And, “I mistook myself for an exception.” She did say one thing though. “It´s a crime,” she said, “what they´ve done to this country…it´s an absolute disgrace.”

    After she had finished her tea, the old woman, I never did ask her name, got up and put her cup down on the chair, then took her brush that I had returned from behind the door and started sweeping the already spotless, smooth garage floor. I was careful not to get any crumbs on the ground around me or let slip any of the big slices of ham from out of my sandwich. I was careful too not to spill any of my tea. The cup of tea in my hands was like a warm prayer.

    I sat there, just out of the daylight, out of the fresh autumn sunshine and slowly made my way between my sandwich and my tea. Another small bite. Another few small sips of the good warm tea. I listened to the loud, short bursts of drilling coming from under the car and to the sound of the rough bristles of the heavy yard brush sweeping the smooth concrete garage floor. It was good to be indoors for a bit, with my bag off my back and sitting down. I made it last.

    “Thank you very much for the tea and sandwich.” “You’re welcome,” the old woman said, looking down at the brush as she continued to sweep. “You’ve been very good to me.” I knew she could tell something more was coming. “I was wondering, if by any chance, you might have some tarpaulin, or a heavy plastic sheet or covering…where I am at the moment, it’s a bit exposed…I just want to try and stay dry…I’m sorry for asking.” “Paul…Paul!” The drilling stopped under the car. I looked down at my boots. “Tarpaulin?” “What about it?” “Do you have a bit to spare?” “You serious?” I could feel them looking at each other. “Out back.” “Out back,” the old woman said, and she started sweeping again. “Thank you.” Paul disappeared again under the car. The clicking of bolt tightening began as I ghosted past him.

    Out back was a small concrete yard. High grey breeze-block walls crowned with loops of razor-wire. The yard was full of old dead car parts. Axels, exhausts, engines, batteries. Tall columns of thick black tyres. The shell of an old windowless and doorless rusty red Hiace van. Old signs from years ago that used to hang over the garage doors, propped up on their ends, leaning against the walls. An old, green, paint-peeled shed. It´s two windows covered over with black bags. The ground was strewn with rusty bolts and strews, nails and springs of various sizes. Some of the springs were huge. Heavy rusty springs with a deadly pointed sharp end that would do some serious damage.
    I found some tarpaulin behind the back of the shed, in the tight space between it and the wall. I pulled it out. It was grey and heavy and dry. It didn´t look old or dirty or torn and there was plenty of it. The fact the Paul hadn´t told me where it was and the fact that I had found it myself made it feel like it was now rightfully mine. I flung it out, like a bedsheet, holding it by the two corners, with my arms fully stretched and flapped it once, twice, and then laid it out on the ground. I couldn´t help but admire it. I squatted down and moved around it, smoothing it out as I went. The sun was warm on my back and my shadow was beside me, working with me, keeping me company. It was like laying out the groundsheet of my tent on the first day of a music festival.

    After a full and thorough inspection, I managed to fold the tarpaulin up and compress it so that it was no bigger than a suitcase under my arm. It was important to me that it looked neat and that I looked like I knew what I was doing. On my way back through the noisy, cool gloom of the garage, I was nearly back out of the big open double doors, after stopping to pick up my rucksack and sling it over my shoulder, when the work under the car stopped and I heard the heavy ratchet being put down on a stainless steel tray. My plate and cup had been taken from the chair I had been sitting on and the chair had been put away. The yard brush was stood up against the wall, just to the side and behind the garage door. “Here.” I stopped, turned around, tightened my grip on my tarpaulin and walked back to Paul. “Thanks very much for this Paul…I didn´t…” But I stopped when I saw the look on his face. Paul, the mechanic, walked right up close to me. “Listen to me carefully and keep your fucking voice down when you answer me, alright. Nice and soft, like I´m speaking. Do you get me pal? “I do”. “If I ever catch you in here again…or if I hear you´ve been coming round…I´ll cripple ye…do you hear me? Do you?” “Yes, I hear you. I wouldn´t…” “Shut the fuck up and let me finish…if you ever try and lift anything out here, I swear to God, I´ll burst you´re head open for ye. Do you hear that too?” “Yes, I hear you.” “Good. Now fuck off and don´t come back.”

    Bedding down now for the night inside my little compact tarpaulin hut, cosy in my cock-pit, my fox-hole, my bunker, now it´s all set up. I found two planks of wood down here when I was cleaning up so I kept those. I stash them close, lie them down on the ground, up against the street-side wall so no one can see them. I prop them up then every night I come down, stand them up and lean them against the wall. Then I take out the tarpaulin from out of a little hole in the stone wall, just under the iron stairs. It´s dry in there. I put the tarpaulin over the two planks of wood. There´s enough tarpaulin to give me a wall of it behind my back. Protection. Between my back and the stone wall. There is a little left over too to cover the ground so I´m not sitting on the concrete. There is just a flap then for the door, on the right hand side. The tarpaulin doesn´t reach all the way to the ground. Try and fix that tomorrow. Maybe redesign the whole layout. That´s where the cold gets in. And it is getting colder. But I´m off the streets. Out of sight. Down here in the shadow and the protection of the cellar of the gaunt, neglected house of The Dead. Natural shelter. Above my head, outside my little hut, sparse night-time traffic rolls by. Cars, buses, articulated trucks. But it´s getting quieter now. Dying down.
    I have a red bicycle light. Click once for red light, click twice for blinking red light, click again for darkness. I keep the red light on. Makes the place look like an underground club. Or a dark-room. Everything red and black. Warm colour tricks the brain. And my woolly hat too. It´s good enough. Sleeping bag on the ground under me. My rucksack to my right to block the draft and cold coming in from the door. I go through my bag every night. If I remember. If I´m able. I forget about half the shit I have sometimes. I go through my bag and keep one ear with me all the time while my other ear is up there, out on the street, keeping sus. Listening.

    Gloves to the left. Pack of Marlboros. Sixteen left. Lighter. The last of the naggin. My little bit and my weed. My own pack of rolling tobacco. Skins and filters. That´s all there. All sorted. Nice little pile. Still have my little handy length of wood. My beating stick. Don´t like knifes. Can´t stand them. Hate the thought of having to drive a knife into someone. Or getting stabbed in the side, up under the ribs. Or into the chest. Or having my neck slashed. Or my face. I prefer the stick. It´s heavy enough too. If there´s trouble I run. But down here I´m cornered. One on one, ok. Two on one, maybe. Three on one, I´m fucked. Has to be the stick though in all cases. Has to be fast and brutal. But not fatal. Well. That will depend. Three black t-shirts. Can´t smell them but they seem clean enough. One long white-sleeved t-shirt. Old red jumper. Two pairs of boxers. Three. Four pairs of odd socks. Toothbrush. Toothpaste. Need to get more. Deodorant too. And candles. Do all that tomorrow. Put all that shit over there for now. Copy of Dracula. Four euro eighty. From the Secret Book Store. Promised myself I´d read it before Halloween. Good edition too. Oxford World Classics. Nosferatu on the cover. Following the shadow his clawed hand up the stairs. Looks even better in this red light. Notes at the back. An Introduction. It passes the time. Going through my bag. Something about it I like. Something military about it. An orderly inventory. This is my bag. There are many like it but this one is mine. No bookmark in the book. No dog-eared pages. “…modern subjectivity, mysterious to itself, labyrinthine…” No. Save it. But read it this time. Sit in the park tomorrow with a coffee and read it. All of it. The whole way though. Start to finish. Don´t use it for bog-roll. Jesus, that was rough. Still. Had to be done. What one was that? Was that not newspaper? Torn up, shit stained pages. Here´s another one. William James? On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings. Jesus. Where did that come from? Lovely little book. Where the fuck? Hodges Figgis price tag. Six eight. No idea. Five little essays. “Is Life Worth Living?” Page thirty-three. “…to the profounder bass note of life. Let us search the lonely depths for an hour together, and see what answers in the last folds and recesses of things our question finds.” I need a pen. A pencil. Do I? No. I do. Front pocket of the bag. I´ll study this. But for now, put it to the left. What else is there? Pair of jeans. Raincoat. I have loads. More than most.
    “Ah! No way!”
    Kinder Egg. Nice! Bit melted. Bit dented. But still good. Forgot about that too. Found that, must have been the day before yesterday. On the ground, behind the Four Courts. Little surprise inside. Breakfast tomorrow. First thing when I wake up. Little mascot then. Hope it´s one you put together. Little robot or something.
    Bottom on the bag now.

    Still there. Still safe. Still wrapped in the Lidl bag. The old glasses case. Fresh works and the rest. Fucking Aido and his shit that won´t run. God bless M.Q. And the three other little baggies. Looking especially passable in this light too. And nothing but torn up, shredded Yellow Pages. Crazy how much it looks like fluffy weed. Learnt that from three Mexicans that ripped me off in Seattle. Years and years ago. Drunk of course. Downtown at three a.m. looking to score something. Anything. One of them had a bandage around his upper arm. “New tattoo?” “Got stabbed ese” He actually said ese. They seemed legit anyways. Hooked me up too. Took myself back to the Motel. Baggie all fluffy and soft. That was with Fergus. London Fergus. Lying on the other bed drinking gin and tonic and watching TV when I came back in. “We´re smoking tonight amigo.” “Fuck off. You actually found some? You fucking mad man!” Sat at the table, at the little desk in the motel room, and got everything ready. Then just looked at it. Properly. Stumped. Burnt. But impressed. “What´s up?” I looked at the stuff. Unrolled a soft shred of yellow-green something. Saw printed numbers and a dash. Looked like a bit of a phone number. “Well played lads. Well played. That´s actually fucking genius. I bet they call them tourist baggies. It´s Yellow Pages dude. Fucking torn up, shredded bits of Yellow Pages.” I threw the shit in the bin. Fergus was hysterical. Too right in fairness to them. Back when I had money to blow. But now. For me. That´s anything from a hundred to a hundred and fifty quid right there. My rainy day fund. Still a few more full pages folded up in the bag somewhere too. I can make what, a few hundred quid if I´m lucky and smart and space it out over the next few months. Can´t be going around flooding the market with Yellow Pages. Know my face. “That´s the guy!” Funny though how it always plays out the same way. The script and the product, in fairness, are golden. At night, under the street lights, to drunken eyes, it looks like weed. And to tourists. Only to tourists. Never hit the locals. Dame Lane is good. Andrews Lane. Down on the boardwalk. I´ll start varying places soon. “Should be fifty, Man but I have to get rid of it. Got mad bulk delivery and have to shift it. You´d be doing me a favour…Well, what can I say? You caught me in a good mood tonight. I´m feeling generous. Spread the wealth right. Can do it for twenty-five actually. Fuck it. Just need to get some cash to get a cab home. Fucking lost my wallet somewhere tonight. Come on we walk this way. Think I recognize some plain clothes there.” Quick exchange. Can´t be beat. But it´ll catch up with me one day. Always sprinkle a little bit of my own shit on the top. If they go sniffing while I´m still there with them. “Yeah man. Blue Cheese. Go easy on it man. Mad shit…Enjoy…Have a good night.” I´ll get something anyway for Halloween. Replenish the funds. Fifty to Aido and get that tar. Twenty-five walking around money. Sorted. Now. Everything back in the bag. One by one. This is a happy bag. This is my bag. Full of tricks and treats.

    Packed-out pinner rolled and put behind my ear for later. Cigarette behind the other. Nothing on my sleeping around me now. Just the naggin, pack of cigarettes and gloves. All belted up. Didn´t want to be back on the spike again and needle dancing. Fucking Aido and his shit. Fuck it. Still a bit shaky. Giddy hands. Giddier veins. Chill. That injecting workshop in M.Q. probably saved me from a few trips to A&E anyways. Or worse. Never knew you could shoot it up your arse. Don´t see that in the movies. Could try that with the tar. Bit of a waste though. This shit won´t be worth it, I´d say. But. If you´re gonna to shoot up, learn to shoot yourself. And if you´re gonna shoot, always, always, shoot in the direction of the heart. Right. Fuck it. Half. And see. Then half again. If you can. It´s been a while. Right. Might want to look away…just…ah…haha…o-kay…fuck…sweet Christ on a bike…Fuck me…quick…click of the light…dark…

    I´m standing with two or three or President Lincoln´s advisors by the window of a pinewood cabin. Out the window I can see a coastline far below. Two Pterodactyls fly over the surf in the distance. One of the advisors turns to me and says “Ah, I see the sharks are back…”

    I´m in an outdoor food market. Through the crowd I can see two old friends, Phil and Jo. Phil is wearing a black velvet jacket and old-fashioned grey tweed trousers. Jo is wearing a purple dress. They have bags of shopping and look like a couple out enjoying the weekend markets. When I see them through the crowds, I´m happy but feel embarrassed too, for some reason. When I get close, we greet each other and I say, “Don´t worry, I wasn´t following you…”

    I´m with someone´s father. I know he is anxious about his son. I know the son is in trouble. I know that the trouble is that the son is suicidal. I´m helping the father search a house. It´s day time. We move from room to room. There is a feeling, like a hum, a strange ominous hum in the atmosphere all around us. In every room. We go up the stairs and into another room. It feels like a new room, recently added to the house. It´s a big room. Bright. Out the window, I can see green trees. I can tell that this room is to be used as a walk-in closet. On the threshold, we hear movement inside. The son is in there. “We´re coming in,” the father says. “Don´t point the gun at us” I say. “And don´t point it at yourself, ok? Don´t point the gun at flesh.” The father follows me into the room. The room is bare besides the carpet. New, baby blue carpet. From behind an alcove the son walks out backwards, a rifle held in his two hands, one down on the trigger and one around the barrel. The barrel is pointed into his open mouth. We freeze. He walks backwards and stops. His head doesn´t move but his eyes look at us. He pulls the trigger. Nothing happens. But on the sound of the click his father beside me faints and falls to the floor.

    I wake up cold in the darkness…a sour reek of vomi
    …don´t know where I am…
    …voices…above my head…
    …up on the footpath…
    …three of them…
    …talking…
    …I hear them…
    “You say there´s anyone down there?”
    “Where?”
    “Down there. Look.”
    “Oh shit! Yeah! Look at that! Fucking hell man, it´s getting worse and worse around here, isn´t it?”
    “Come on to fuck will ye. It´s fucking freezing out.”
    “No. Hang on a sec.”
    “Shhh. There might be someone in it.”
    “What you mean shush? I hope they can hear me…Hey! Hey! Sleepy head! Wakey wakey!”
    “Dave, Man, shut the fuck up will ya and come on.”
    “Nah, hang on. Is there someone in it?”
    “Hey! Come here! Look! We´re after winning big in the casino tonight…we´d like to share our winnings with you…yes, You. You down there…come on out…I´ve enough here for you to buy yourself a big warm jacket…maybe up-grade you to a tent…No? No takers? Alright. Suit yourself…”
    “They´re going to be building a new treatment centre next to us here”
    “Another one?”
    “Triple the size of the one already there.”
    “For fuck sake!”
    “There goes the neighbourhood. That´ll bring down your value, won´t it?”
    “Maybe. I don´t know. Tenants are having an emergency meeting about it next week.”
    “Lads, there´s no one down there. Let´s go.”
    “I fucking bet there is man.”
    “Could be a fucking psycho, Man. Come on!”
    “Hey! Come on out! Don´t be scarred! We´re your friends.”
    “Lads, I´m going…”
    “Alright, alright.”
    “I´d say there´s two scaldy heads inside, sleeping together in their own filth.”
    “That´s rotten.”
    “´Member the one we saw outside Dara´s gaff? The silver paint all around her mouth from huffin´ and she was taking a shit outside his gaff…manky granny fanny on her…”
    “And the long pair of shitty granny knickers there on the street for weeks.”
    “The hack of her.”
    “Ah lads, for fuck sake. Will ye come on? I´m headin´.”
    “Come on, we all hop down and take a looksy. We´ll call down for a cuppa, a night cap, with our new neighbour…Here! Slap on the kettle down there will ya?”

    …I touch the place around me…through the darkness…feel the sleeping bag…feel the wet…I can´t…I wouldn’t be able to…my bag…where is it…no…be still…there is nothing down here….no one…nothing but peace…and stone…and darkness…nothing…emptiness…

    “Will we jump down?”
    “Nay, fuck that man. Come on. We´re just around the corner here.”
    “Finally!”
    “Alright alright…just give me a second…”
    “What are you up, Man?”
    “What the fuck, Dude?”
    “Are ye not recording this?”
    “You´re fucking tapped man.”

    …I hear it start to rain…raining on my tarpaulin…just above my head…pouring rain…pissing rain…it´s hosed down on top of me…he´s making sure he´s covering as much of the area as possible…up and down…and all around…foul musical rain…he must be writing his name…drawing shapes…piss-painting…a smiley face…marking his territory…it streams and flows and drips down outside on to the concrete…close to me…all around me…it sounds like another joins in…
    “Don´t cross the streets man! Don´t cross the streams!”
    …their piss thunders down aggressively…the force of it concentrated just above my head…I close my eyes and slowly…slowly…slide down onto my side….and slowly turn onto my back…I fold my arms like an X over my chest…like a vampire…palms flat…fingers touching my shoulders…I lie still…dead still…silent…and invisible…

    …´tis the season…for pissing on graves…smashing headstones…for general desecration…I bare my teeth…a quiet snarl in the darkness…I can barely hear the rain…
    …I´m drifting…
    …falling…
    …slowly dissolving…
    …behind my eyes I see fireworks exploding…colourful…dazzling…sparkling arrays…burning up bright in a night sky that only I can see…terrific blues… exploding whites…pulsating yellows…glittering greens…fountain-sprays of red…fizzling out…fading away…
    …just let me lie here…
    …let me sleep…
    …but come find my corpse…
    …on Halloween…

  • A Net Depends On Its Knots

    My arse was born before my head. I’m told I shouldn’t remember, but I do.  I recall my skull being stuck in the warm, wet cave that’d been home for nine months; recall, as well, starting the struggle to breathe. With all my infant might I managed to shimmy out backward, so the rest of me could join my bum in the chilly dominion of which it had become a citizen. The cold air was terrifying yet so sweet to my lungs when I finally slid free. My left foot was curled in, my left leg being shorter than its mate.  My left hip is dodgy as well. With my crutch I’m alright, indeed faster than many. That was my beginning, and curses on any who don’t believe me.

    Twenty years later I went through it again; the yearning, that is, to leave what was cosy and safe in search of a place where I could properly breathe. The cosy place was this place: Cobb’s Hole, North Yorkshire. Thatched cottages huddled together in the shadow of massive sandstone cliffs. At the bottom of our cobbled street yawns the North Sea, big and cold as the world itself. Tiny boats sliding about on its great black waves.  And there was I, stuck again in a womb on the edge of wildness.

    Father was a fisherman and mother was a mother. Near every house had the same matched set. The fathers spoke little, but when they did it was to say something that sounded thoughtful and wise. The mothers were worn out with work and worry.  Brothers joined fathers just as soon as they were big enough. Like all daughters, I was given a needle and taught to mend the nets. I’ve heard folk talk of weaving nets, but in truth it’s not so much weaving as knitting. Instead of two thin needles you have one fat netting needle and a gauge that decides the size of the mesh. The nose of the needle dips over and down, over and down, and the flax unwinds into this pattern, this web, that grows and grows beneath your fingers. It’s simple but not easy, if you see what I mean. You can’t be larking about.  A fisherman depends on his net, and a net depends on its knots. But here, I’ve gone right past the thing I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about when I was twenty.

    And Rosanna.

    Rosanna was a ladies’ maid at the Verinder estate, about two miles northwest of Cobb’s Hole.  She had Friday afternoons off, and the groom would bring the two of us into Frizinghall.  Rosanna might buy hairpins and bows. I’d get the latest issue of the Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser. If it was dry we’d sit on the grass in the park and I’d read to her about suffrage and strikes. Her small face would squint up at me from under her straw bonnet.  “What is to happen, Lucy?” she’d say, as if I was reading her a fairy story.  “There is such suffering in the world,” she’d say, and pull her grey cloak closer about her shoulders as if the thought made her cold. She had a way of making such remarks, simple on the surface, but coming from such a tender part of her heart that you’d shiver to hear them expressed in her tiny bird’s voice.

    When you’re young you think the world has only been waiting for you to turn up and put it right. We read with great excitement of the Chartist camp on Bingley Moor – so close by! The great crowds, the fiery speeches. Then the arrests. It was frightening and glorious to feel ourselves on the cusp of revolution, and we grew very dear to each other as we sat there, braiding blades of early spring grass, waiting for mobs of angry workers to march past us on their way to storm the Magistrates’ Court. I tell you, we could nearly hear their boots on the cobbles. “England is like a pot on the boil,” she’d say, into the green stillness.  They were champion, those afternoons with Rosanna.

    She was not beautiful; nothing so ordinary. Just good, through and through. She believed in a sort of sunlit decency that nothing in her experience gave her reason to expect. She was from London, orphaned when she was only eight. Her curled shoulders told of her suffering; her lovely fingers, gesturing, making ecstatic pictures in the air, told of her faith.

    I had shagged women already. Two, to be exact. One was much older than me and gave me lots of instructions. The other was my own age, and those meetings were much friendlier but fumbly and quick, usually hands under clothes rather than clothes off. From the first time I met Rosanna I felt if I could once sink inside her creamy flesh, could penetrate to the heat beneath that sweet nature, that it would change me. Would set summat free inside me. I don’t know how better to say it than that. It was a young sort of love, in which you want to have the person and be the person all at the same time. And somehow this will make everything right. Oh, why must I try to explain it? I loved her. With all I had, I loved her.

    I kissed her once. Just once. It was among the firs on the path that leads to the cove. Her back was to a tree and I pressed her into it, pinned her with my hips and chest and arms, felt her breath fluttering against my neck. Smelled her private smells, stroked her hair, lifted her chin with my hand. And kissed her. There was no surprise in her. She had known how I felt, had seen it, and had shown neither excitement nor revulsion but only a shy acceptance of my love. We had often held hands, embraced, even danced together playfully. But to kiss her. To open those pretty lips with my tongue, explore the inside of her, to breathe into that angel mouth. I feel it still.

    But our ending came wrapped in our beginning. For beneath my lips, my hands, I felt her submitting to me. Not desiring me, holding me; just allowing me to do what I liked with her. The world, after all, had done what it liked with her and I was merely a part of the world. Nothing more. She could take herself away, could make herself open and empty. I almost hated her for it. Why withhold herself from me, the one person who saw her true worth? Why could she not at least try to love me?

    The answer was Blake.

    Blake was nobody, some well-travelled third cousin of the Verinders who ended up marrying their daughter. Rich people always marry their cousins, they haven’t enough imagination for anything else, and besides, it keeps all that lovely money within the family. I met him once, and found him to be your standard upper-class halfwit. Not really a worthy subject of either her love or my hatred. But we were young. Our feelings were flames we couldn’t stop staring into.

     

    I still get a knot in my stomach when I remember that last day. Summer it was, and proper hot. Rosanna appeared in my room, and she was shaking all over and looked like she might be sick. She had seen something, some proof that Blake fancied the Verinder woman. I sat her down on my bed, and her breath turned to sobs. She wept into my shoulder because her love was unrequited. The irony! I suddenly laughed; a low, bitter chuckle.

    She backed away. Gaped at me, like a mouse who’s just discovered her best mate is a cat.  “How can you snicker at my broken heart?”

    I lifted her chin with my finger, reminding us both of our one kiss. “How can you ignore mine?” I asked softly.

    She looked away then. I knew it was hopeless, I knew. Still I pressed on, daft and love-struck as I was. “We should get away from here.”

    Her dark eyes widened. “What do you mean?”

    “To London. Together. I’ve money saved. We could live like sisters. We talk proper, write proper, we’re good with our needles. We could make a living. We could make a life.” It came out all higgledy-piggledy, I’d been wanting to say it for so long.

    Rosanna’s eyebrows went that high, they nearly disappeared into the black tangle of her hair.  Then she abruptly looked down at her hands. Her eyes grew wet. “Lucy, you are a dear friend.”

    “Give over.”

    “You’re kinder to me than anyone ever has been.” She raised herself, trembling, to her feet. “But where I’m going, you cannot follow.” And with that, she turned and left. I heard her footsteps going downstairs, heard the door slam shut.

    I didn’t cry. Sometimes summat hits you as though you’ve walked straight into the sea, and you’re left gasping, cold all over. I knew, somehow, that this was the end of Rosanna and me.

    When the letter came, arriving with autumn’s swollen moon, her small, careful printing on the envelope made my breath stick in my throat. Maybe, possibly, she was writing from someplace warm and bright. Maybe she was sitting in the grass, under a kindly sun, waiting for me. Cruel hope made me tear open the letter, only to learn that Rosanna was dead. By her own hand. The letter an apology and a goodbye.

    Everything was strange. The scars in our table, the salty smell of the broth my mother stirred.  My father’s tuneless whistle, carried by the wind up our narrow street. A cold wind it was, and the rumble of waves beneath it, and in among these things that meant home, I was alone.  The letter shook in my hand. The final line mocked me. I will forever be, your Rosanna.

     

    By year’s end, the blaze of revolt had gone to ash in the grate. The Chartists had largely given up. Men like Blake held the world like a ball between their soft hands. I’d have gladly belted Blake in the bollocks with my crutch. But to what end? It seemed there was no cause left to join. I had missed everything.

    Life had shown me what could be and then had shut the door. No, it said, you cannot have your love returned by a lass so gentle it’d make you weep. No, you cannot make things better for your mother or your father; take some of the worry off their brows, help them stand a bit straighter. No, you cannot put warm food in kiddies’ bellies or make sure the men get a fair price for their catch. That was all a joke, m’love. In truth, life is long, lonesome and grey and it reeks of fish, dampness and despair. Yearning gets you nowt but an ache in your ribs every time you try to take a clean breath. This is all there is, pet. Your fault for dreaming.

    All that winter I trudged along the shoreline, wind burning my face, sand stinging my eyes and gritting my hair. On the one side of me, cobbled paths and firelight glimpsed through windows, and chimney smoke rising like song over our little village. On the other, the sea.  Dark and wild and promising an end to remembering. Unable to choose between them, I’d walk until the ache in my hip was blinding me. Then, emptied for a time of sadness and longing, I’d hobble back to our house and up the stairs to my small bed.

     

    Mary Silkey’s husband Tom died in late December. He died on land – his heart, they said – so she was able to have him laid out proper, his red hair all tidied in the coffin as it never was in life. A body at a fisherman’s wake is a rare thing. With that and Christmas just past, the village was in a mood to give Tom a good send-off.

    Mary’s youngest, Jane, was stuck in Scarborough as the tracks were flooded, so the burial was delayed for her. Life arranged itself around the Silkey cottage for those three days. The mourning started out sombre but grew raucous, as it will do. I had played with Jane when we were little but had quite lost touch with her since; the rest of the Silkeys were, to me, fair and freckled nodding neighbours. There were sprigs of rosemary all around the coffin, for remembrance and to mask the scent of death. Nothing, however, to cover the sweat-and-whiskey smell of the living. There’s little worse than feeling lonesome in a crowd. By the time the music started, I was itching to be elsewhere.

    At the centre of things was Mary, her stout figure being helped into chairs, helped to a cup of tea or glass of whiskey or a bit of cake. May God forgive me, but I was fiercely jealous of Mary then. She who was waited on hand and foot. She who told stories about her Tom that’d bore the arse off the most Christian soul; yet the villagers greedily drank in every word. I had held my grief for Rosanna close, and it had pained me all the more for that. If Rosanna had been Robert, would I have been invited to share it? Would I have eaten cake and told tedious stories too?

    On the fourth day, a Sunday, Tom was brought to the churchyard and I went home, limping up the stairs to my room and shutting the door. I settled into the chair by the window and watched the little patch of sky that belonged to me. It was quiet, apart from the seagulls, the creak of moored boats, and the shush-shush of the sea, like a mother soothing her child.

    The needle was on the bedside locker, and then it was in my hand. The sheen of the flax against my fingers was truth, or what I know of it. And then the solid, warm wood of the gauge. The first knot stitched me to the work. After that, everything fell away but the practical dance of the needle. My hands were strong and quick and I fell into a trance watching them. It was as though there was a curtain of loops and ties that was there all along, a glimmer in the air that I could coax and tame into a simple, needed thing.

    Hours passed; the sky lost its shyness and deepened to an afternoon blue.

    A net works by trapping what’s worth summat and letting what isn’t move through. It doesn’t try to hold everything. It might be that as I sat there, the net growing length and heft and draping itself across my lap, I was also starting to let things move through. Maybe that was when my self-pity drowned; to the surface came the knowing that Rosanna was never for me, any more than Blake was for her. Oh, it still hurt to think of her. But it got to be less like a wound and more like a tender place. Summat I could maybe live with.

    A net gathers in what you need. As the light dimmed and the waves swelled, I thought I could feel mine gathering the broken parts of me from where they’d been scattered, across the ocean floor of my mind. During that sleepless night I fastened myself back together again. One strong knot at a time.

     

    When pink clouds marbled the morning sky, my father came to find me. He pushed on the door, but it couldn’t open all the way. Overnight, the net had crept across the floor and over the bed; it had filled the whole room. I’d tied the last knot and slipped the gauge free, and now was sat against the wall, my creation heavy on my legs. I felt peaceful.

    My father peeked round the door. He was amazed at what he saw. I knew this because one of his white eyebrows went up a bit and he began to stroke his beard. “Here,” he said. “What’s this?”

    “I’ve made a net.”

    “Aye, I can see that,” he said. “Did you not think to make it out of doors?”

    “No,” I admitted. I didn’t really think at all. How was the burial?”

    “Fine, lass.” He crouched down and rubbed the flax between two fingers. “It’s good work, is this.”

    “It’s a bloody queer size and shape.”

    “E’en so, we’ll make use of it. Mind you, we’ll have to get it nearer to the fish than this.” He stood up slowly, his knees stiff. “If I start from this end and roll it up, like a rug – if I roll it tight enough, we can shove it out that window.”

    And that is the end of the story, though it’s also the beginning of another. For, when we did push it out the window to the path below, who do you suppose was on that path? Only Jane Silkey, paying us a call during her visit home from Scarborough. The net unrolled a bit in the air and landed right on top of her. She screeched and fell backward onto her arse. From above, we could see her dark dress and yellow hair spread out, her arms and legs wriggling about beneath the mesh.

    “Flippin’ ‘eck,” said my father.

    I hopped downstairs and out the door. “Sorry sorry sorry!” said I, as I tried to free her.

    And what did Jane do? She could’ve cried. She could’ve boxed my ears, once her arms weren’t pinned. She could’ve said, “Lucy Yolland, I always knew you’d grow up to be a  heathen and a menace!” And I wouldn’t have blamed her one bit.

    Instead of which, she laughed. As I lifted the net’s hem over her head, she looked right at me with her lively grey eyes and she laughed like a mad thing.

    And I knew.

    Featured Image of the Great Chartist Meeting on Kennington Common, London in 1848

  • Fiction: Train Station

    Awarded one of the Tidiest Towns in the nation, the place was profoundly inept and utterly corrupt. Indeed disturbing, because winning the competition was proof positive that the town represented how things operated in the entire country. In terms of organisation, it was the stuff of nightmare. Everything had to go through countless committees, and the people you’d want absolutely nothing to do with were the kind who joined the committees.

    When he did think about them, White merely pictured those broken plastic corrugated sheets which had been haphazardly assembled to form a makeshift roof over the old train station. Effectively it was the first view any observant person would have upon arrival. What did this tell you about the country? Here was the town voted, again by countless committees, as being the Tidiest Town in Ireland, and yet the minute you got off the train, you looked up at the train station itself, at these gaping holes in the shattered corrugated plastic sheeting. It was pathetic, thought White, as it revealed the corrupt nature of an entire island. The whole nation, by voting in this way, or rather the Committees who had voted for the town, by recommending that the town should receive the highest accolade in the land, were actually complicit in praising the most mediocre of towns. Mediocrity was their aim. It was as if, for White, these loose panels of plastic, which during winter would let in buckets of rain, while every year the town’s commuters sheltered under the awful structure, getting wet in the process, had become symbolic of the country’s lack of rigour. Its shambolic state.

    He understood why large sections of people in the North wanted nothing to do with the place. Because the level of ineptitude and corruption was shocking. There it was. Visible for all to see, pondered White, who stood under the atrocity. I mean corrugated plastic sheeting! Who in their right mind was going to use such a material to protect the town’s citizens and visitors from the elements? It was the first of many signs that discreetly whispered, These people don’t really care about anyone in the first place. And, if a job was worth doing, it was worth doing badly. That was it, wasn’t it? The “Ah sure, it’ll do!” attitude his neighbour Stan was always banging on about whenever he spoke of the place. Stanley was rarely in country, spending the majority of his time working as a consultant around the world. About what, White didn’t actually know. It was kind of a mystery, but Stan made it very clear to White how much he hated the place and a lot of his fellow Irishmen.

    The open hole in the sheeting spread out in a star formation. It was frayed into bits. Where it was not broken, it was black with dirt, moss and other under growth. As if nobody had actually thought about cleaning it up, not to mention fixing it by replacing it with, at the very least, new sheets.

    “Ah, sure it will do!”

    “If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.” Stan would say. “Bunch of fucking morons!”

    Every word was spoken with that crisp nearly perfect enunciation that Stan possessed.  It would be the closing punch line in these sessions after having looked at and examined the problem from every possible angle. White had never before brought up the lamentable condition of the roof of the town train station with him before. You see, unlike White, Stan wasn’t a commuter. They inhabited very different worlds. Whereas White was grounded firmly in the everyday world that he saw around him, in other words that of the town, and the city beyond, where he worked, and which was only thirty minutes south by commuter train, Stan’s world was one of airports and hotels. Corporate zones. Stan was very corporate. He exuded the spirit and parlance of international corporatism. White was more about the local.

    Stan was unaware as to the everyday workings in a town where they both lived, and that never ceased to amaze White. While he looked at Stan with incredulity at times, about his innocence, Stan would throw White some pretty incredulous looks when in turn, his lack of savvy on certain matters at an international level was too obvious to ignore. Merging their knowledge of the micro and the macro, together, the two men were, in a sense, whole.

    But they discussed countless other issues together. No, the broken corrugated plastic sheeting hanging over the heads of commuters on the platform outside of the town’s train station was a topic from which he had spared Stanley. Smiling now, White, regarded the drab excuse for a roofing feature. The sheer gombeenism. The degree of decay on a shameless exhibition to all and sundry had to be seen to be believed.

    White put it down to Ireland’s post-colonial heritage. Casting a condescending glance at some of the town’s inhabitants as he did. For instance, if you looked at the actual railway station itself, apart from the roofing, it was a fine old building, as many of the old train stations were, having been designed and built by the former occupying power. There you had it then. The very infrastructure had been inherited. Nothing, not the laws of the land, nor the great buildings that housed their government and courts (bar one) had all just been taken over. That was a century and three generations ago. White’s own grandfather had fought in that war. The War of Independence, they called it. What a joke. They were no more independent of their so-called old enemy as the man in the moon.

    White looked at his watch. The train would be coming soon. He walked with a quick pace further down the platform. He wanted to get away from the broken corrugated plastic roofing. Another joke. And there were so many of them too. Sick jokes, that is.

    Once inside the train, White’s mood improved slightly. At least he had a seat. That was another thing. There were so few trains now that he noticed more and more people would have to stand, and starting with the commuters from the town just after his own. Imagine that, every day, five days a week, getting on the train with your commuter ticket that you had paid for and you would never have, or only rarely, the opportunity to sit down! That was more of it, the chronic sense that nobody really gave a shit about anyone or anything anymore. There was no sense of community. No civic pride. Why would there be? What had they done? In over a hundred years, what had they actually done to the country since their newfound freedom?

    While White sat there looking around him, the recorded voice came over on the intercom system. It announced the next town in Irish. Nobody spoke the language, or hardly anybody, and yet that was even more of it. The con. Our government printed every document out twice, first in Irish, which was the official language of the country, and then in English which was a language everyone actually spoke. Why they insisted on imposing the language in this way was all part of it. Keeping up Appearances. A great little nation, the Republic of Ireland, for keeping up appearances. Truth be told, White couldn’t stomach it. This Ireland created by all of its little committees. You couldn’t fart without some fucker complaining to a committee.

    He remembered reading somewhere that all revolutions were destined to fail. It was inevitable. Once a revolution had taken place, corruption set in from the word go. This was human nature. There would always be some kind of favouritism. And the types of people who got involved politically, no matter where you were, were always one and the same. Barring, of course, the very rare exception. Chancers who, for the most part, were merely looking out for number one. It was the same the world over. Why should Ireland be any better, or any worse.

    While the train slowed, pulling into the next town, White watched the disappointed faces of new commuters who boarded the train. And who had, as usual, missed the opportunity of sitting down. When he was much younger, White would no doubt have given up his seat to one of them. Women in particular, as that’s the way he’d been brought up. But not now. This was the age of equality. White looked hard at some of the women who were now standing up around him. Resigned faces staring out a window at the Irish sea. How did they like this brave new world? Sometimes, very rarely mind you, some guy would grow embarrassed and offer up his seat to one of them, but it was rare now. Pathetic. And all part of it. Everybody hermetically sealed in their own little bubble. Nobody speaking to anyone else. Addicted to their phones. Passive, they listened to radio propoganda or some endless podcast, or perhaps even watched a feature film. Not a sinner reading a real book.

    That was another myth, a nation of great readers! Ha! Cunts. Not one of them had read a book by James Joyce. His wife, an Italian who had studied both law and literature at university, worked in a busy solicitor’s office in the city centre. The ignorance of the people there had been appalling. Joyce was revered as essential reading, and yet here, in the cuntry of his birth, (a country from which he notoriously sought exile) hardly anyone at all had ever read him. Anything intellectual was immediately disdained. A myth? No, that was indeed the reality here.

    Joyce made White’s mind jump to an idiot who lived in the same town. He had met him under the plastic corrugated roofing on the train station one sunny morning. For some reason Joyce had come up in their brief discussion.

    “My opinion is as good as anyone else’s, isn’t it?” He had asked White.

    White just laughed, knowing that by the man’s own admission he’d hardly read him at all, and yet he felt compelled to ask such a ridiculous question. Not only that, but he genuinely believed it too. It simply beggared belief how stupid some people could be.  But as Stanley’s almost obnoxious North American drawl came crashing in. Every word was perfectly enunciated, to double the effect.

    “Bunch of fucking morons.”

    Just hearing somebody voice the truth out loud made White feel better. Smiling now from ear to ear, he decided that what made us human was the pleasure of sharing.

  • The Daymaker

    For my Aunt Josie.

    Mamma died today, last year, at this very hour. I took care of her “Like an angel,” she would say, and I would never cry within her sight, nor anywhere in earshot, so that, at her funeral, and she died on the eve of her fortieth birthday, my eyes felt like eternal springs.

    Earlier this morning, after Dr. Dziurdzy had just signed my Weekend Pass, I strode a mile to the mall where I buy blue roses, and a bouquet in hand, descended the stairs of the Hamilton Mountain. From there, I pressed on, a pied, all the way to The Holy Sepulchre Cemetery. I only stopped at Sassoon’s Cafe, just before the James Street Bridge – to make Mamma a card.

    Across from me, in the form of a marble statue of herself signed by Michelangelo, sat St Dhymphna. Typically, whenever we’ve completed an exchange, and it is time for us to part, she lingers with me a while, in one form or another, once even, as the lily-like scent of her long flaxen hair, perhaps to stave my loneliness.

    It was so sweltering in Sassoon’s café that I swear I saw some sweat-beads glisten on St. Dymphna’s smooth marble brow. A barista fanned herself with the menu, placing before me my café au lait. She sighed over her shoulder at the young man sitting stiffly in one of the booths, wearing a camouflaged hat. I surmised him to be “ the soldier” St. Dymphna had mentioned to anticipate, “the soldier who resembles your father in that photo of him in the viridian shirt – the one where he barely resembles himself.”

    Like other frequenters of Sassoon’s Café, the soldier was in mid-conversation; but what bothered the barista was that the seat he faced was empty.  In his white t-shirt, gray dress pants, and black Wallabees, he placed before him, on the table for two, an open notebook and what appeared to be an emerald-green fountain pen.  The soldier wore a week-old beard so handsomely I wondered if that was his intention; I wondered if it was a look he was going for, or if he simply did not shave that often. Beyond the notebook, and farthest from him, lay his laptop, closed and recharging.

    “Send one platoon west, and one platoon south; over,” he ordered, after which, for about ten seconds, he seemed to listen attentively to a response, carefully, his eyes barely blinking, but dilated; then, he continued his orders. The barista, with hands contrived on hips, took three steps, robotically stopped, then glared down at the soldier. With calculated firmness, she coldly stated:

    “Excuse me, Sir. I’m afraid, I’m going to have to…Ask you to leave”

    A loaded silence reigned in the room.

    “Why, exactly?” asked the soldier.

    “Why do I have to go?”

    Again the barista glared down at him.

    “Why?” he demanded of her for the third time, after some intense silence.

    “There’ve been complaints. More than one. About your…behaviour.”

    “My behaviour?”

    “Yes, Sir.”

    In the silence of Sassoon’s, that soldier and I simultaneously stood up. We were moving slower than two war-weary battle-horses who had once galloped wild. Lifeless as ping-pong balls, all eyes in Sassoon’s Cafe bounced between the soldier and me.

    “My name is Avi Baxter,” said the soldier with warmth, to the entire room.

    “I’m sorry, Sir. But you have to go.” continued the barista. “My manager makes the calls.”

    “Where’s the manager?” asked Avi.

    The barista nodded toward the kitchen’s swinging door, and from behind it the manager could be heard yelling.

    “I’ve called the police!”

    I’d been leaning on a pillar, but now facing Avi, I stood at attention.

    “My name is Carlo, Carlo Di Carra,” I said to Avi, alone. And turning toward the barista, “Leave him alone. He’s done nothing wrong.”

    “Do you have a Thursday edition of the Hamilton Spectator?” asked Avi, peering hard at the newspaper piles. “I’m in no condition to defend myself, cause I’m in and out, so…”

    The barista didn’t answer, but I darted toward the bunch of newspapers to locate the Thursday edition.

    “Avi, here it is.”

    “Thank you, Carlo.

    Anticipating the police, for a few moments I looked outside the window. When I turned around, Avi’s pupils were dilated again. In a tone as solemn as it was dolorous, he whispered a few words I couldn’t understand.

    “Avi,” I said. “Avi?’ I repeated, but he didn’t respond.

    I looked outside and back at Avi, whose eyes were now serene.

    “Could you please open the newspaper to A2?” Avi asked.

    “Yes, of course.”

    Opening the newspaper, there before me was a large picture of Avi in military fatigues. I showed the article around, from table to table, ensuring everyone could see the published picture of the very veteran among us. Avi stepped toward me.

    “Could you please read the article out loud? Cause, like I said, I’m in and out these days. I’d be forever grateful to you, Good Samaritan.”

    There was no time to answer, since the police were on their way. So I launched straight into the article:

    “The headline reads: The Language of Madness: A Conversation with Avi Lyon Baxter. Written by Kimberly Stone.”

    “Over coffee, I asked acclaimed Hamilton poet, Avi Lyon Baxter, 27, questions regarding literature, politics, and family, but it was when I asked him about the effects of warfare, that Baxter seemed most engaged, most ardent, and most poignant. ‘The years of warfare triggered what my doctor calls schizoaffective disorder, which runs in my family. I also suffer from PTSD.’ Baxter has been hospitalized for his conditions several times; during his admissions, he became acquainted with what he calls ‘the culture of the patients,’ and also ‘the struggle of the patients.’”

    I stopped for a moment and looked up at Avi. He’d slipped into another trance.

    “Through our conversation, a polarity arose. That of language as a saviour for those suffering from severe mental illnesses, like in Baxter’s case, and language as a dehumanizing force that is inflicted, often unknowingly, on the psychotically ill. ‘Too often, those who consider themselves politically correct loosely use words like psycho, nutjob, and crazy. Now, hear me: I think freedom of speech should reign supreme. I am against language policing, since I believe it divides people, as it is designed to do. Yet, at the same time, I have a huge problem with the hypocrisy.’”

    “The hypocrisy is that of how the so-called politically correct treat various groups in routine language, and the discrepancies in political correctness. While they treat many demographics with sensitivity, like people of the LGBT community for instance, the language of mental illness and, Baxter notes, specifically psychotic disorders, continues to colour their conversational speech. ‘If policing language, shouldn’t that extend sensitivity to anyone who needs it, not just to those dictated by a biased media?”

    “While I wouldn’t recommend injecting offensive terms into one’s vocabulary to correct the imbalance, those who do choose to be mindful of political correctness might consider how they cherry-pick which terms to be mindful of, and the message they’re sending to those left out of their apparently progressive dialogue.”

    “Baxter says the effect is that many of those who suffer from psychotic disorders ‘feel like people treat them as sub-humans.’ Especially in the context of individuals whose own minds are often frightening places for them, having others in society express to them, through their word choice, that their condition does not warrant sensitivity, is further dehumanizing.”

    “‘There’s no safe space for them,’ laments Baxter. ‘If you have been granted equality you have not received it. If you want equality, you must take it. True equality is something taken, never given.’”

    Here I paused and peered into the faces of the café customers and out the window. No police.

    “Why should we care? Well, because the connection between mental illness and creativity is not just one founded on an outlet for suffering. There is also an innate relationship between mental illness and creative genius, and this combination has historically brought great works of art, and important inventions of many kinds, into the world. The image of the brooding or unhinged artist has merit beyond the stereotype.”

    “Baxter explains, ‘there is an infinitesimally fine line between madness and genius since, recently, scientists have proven that the two share a similar genetic makeup, called Neuregulin 1. We revere and adore Van Gogh, Nash, Plath, Schumann, Beethoven, Cobain, Hemingway, Pound, Nelligan, Blake, and other great minds affected by mood disorders or schizophrenia. We love our mad geniuses. We’re eager to take their gifts, but we most often reject the very illness that spawned the gift, and thereby reject the person.’”

    A lump rose in my throat and I wanted to cry, but resisted my instinct. I searched everyone’s eyes, none of which were holding back tears, none of which shone with the dimmest twinkle.

    Confronted with an aura of indifference in the room, Ari’s eyes welled up before closing as he took a deep breath. I too took a deep breath. But when my head bowed the way an iris’s bloom will, when weighed down by too many dew drops, my eyes were open and staring at the image of Ari, printed on the page.

    “Those with the combined traits of creativity and psychiatric instability who can harness and channel them into careers are the fortunate ones, who were able to take challenging life states, and make from them a thing of beauty to share with the world. However, these are, more than likely, the people you avoid on the street, or snicker at on the bus, as they grapple with untreated psychotic symptoms.”

    “Baxter’s critically hailed debut book of poems, The Flowers of My Battles, became a bestseller in both Canada and the United States. The book won both the Governor General Award For Poetry and the T.S. Eliot Prize. He is currently nominated for a Trillium Award, the gala of which will be held this fall. In The Walrus magazine, critic and poet Dylan Yardly called Baxter’s debut ‘the greatest poetry debut of the past 25 years. Baxter is perhaps the most commanding and relevant war poet since Wilfred Owen.’ Last year he was awarded the Medal of Sacrifice, for his brave fighting during the War in Afghanistan.”

    “Though often debilitated, Baxter has established a career that allows him to share his insight, and lend his voice to others struggling with mental illness, so many of whom are silenced rather than celebrated.”

    I savoured that article to the extent I could, while all around me, a palpable aura of indifference persisted. When I checked on Baxter, he was beyond reach. Pupils dilated and tears streaming down his cheeks. That’s when, through the window, I spotted two police cruisers pull up and park.

    By the time both officers entered Sassoon’s, Saint Dymphna’s presence, manifested in the form of a marble statue had, alas, vanished. Avi was consumed by one of his hallucinations. And as for me, I encountered the kind of anxiety a blue iris must, when its growth flourishes from the protection of a private garden, to project out onto the unsympathetic surface of a well-traveled urban sidewalk. Mind you, unaccompanied by any other backyard blue irises and at the mercy of the masses.

    Or was it more that loneliness two horses might feel when, without warning, their riders steer them away from each other. Often so fast that neither has a chance to neigh good-bye.  Avi and I stood side by side. Solid as two pillars. Sympatico as high-school students passing doobies around a fire-pit party.

    “And, furthermore, I bet you’ve been completely off your meds?” continued the first officer, who wore short sleeves.

    “Now listen, Avi.” began the second officer, who wore long sleeves, “I sympathize with you, for real. I’m saddened as hell by your tears. And I get why having to leave this café may be troublesome for you, but it is time to go now. One way or another.”

    The officers made eye-contact. As did Avi and I. On Baxter’s table, a book lay open to pages 33 and 34. It was The Soldier, by Rupert Brooke, and next to it was Disabled, by Wilfred Owen.

    “Do you really want us using force to get you out of this place?” asked the first officer.

    “Do you really want to rip away the integrity of a veteran?” I interjected.

    “I’m warning you, Boy. Shut it!” exclaimed the first officer. “Are you gonna leave this place peacefully, on your own, or do you want to be taken out of here violently, by two cops? Which would most certainly be bad for your integrity, too.” the first officer demanded of Avi.

    “We don’t want to have to call C.O.A.S.T. on you. You’re well aware that C.O.A.S.T. will cuff you. And drag you straight to St. Joe’s for psychological assessment. Oh, and then, they’ll

    send you for a grand ole stay at the Mountain Sanatorium.” pressed the second officer.

    “What is C.O.A.S.T.?” I had to inquire.

    “It’s a…Well, it’s a special police unit that comes around collecting the crazies. You know, psychopaths and such. So they can go to the hospital for …For treatment or whatever the fuck.” hissed the second officer to me, so Avi couldn’t hear. Anyway, Avi had zoned out again.

    “Uh…but what does C.O.A.S.T. stand for?” I asked.

    “Crisis Outreach And Support Team,” officer one said with a smirk.

    At that, Avi’s head drooped like a raindrop burdened daisy blooming on a starless, moonless night. Moments later, Avi raised his head. He gathered his materials and gripping his satchel, pivoted like a ship points to a lighthouse to lock eyes with me.

    The two of us paused in a dilapidated and vacant parkette, where we were surrounded by spiralling lilies shedding their wealth of pure white petals in the morning sunlight.

    “What’s your name, again?” Avi asked.

    “Carlo Di Carra,” I replied.

    “How old are you, Son?”

    “Nineteen.”

    A warm wind wafted.

    “Carlo, I feel a strange paroxysm of utmost thankfulness toward you, and utmost loathsomeness toward them.” That said, he spat into a nearby patch of grass, “You showed me more support in ten minutes than most people have shown me in ten years, and so: SALUTE! Salute to you! Salute to the mercy you shared with me! Salute to you, the Stranger’s angel!” Then, forthwith, his eyes dilated into a thousand-mile stare, while he commenced. “No, Sergeant, I am not a coward. I’m just human. There are civilians in that building. I cannot open fire as you have just ordered, Sir.”

    Then…

    “No! No! Stop pointing that at me, Sergeant! Please, Sir! Okay! Okay! Okay!” Avi screamed. Then he started aiming his invisible machine gun, whose trigger he repeatedly pulled, until finally, he emerged from his fugue.

    “Anyway Carlo, as I was saying, SALUTE to you, Salute to you and your blood of love!”

    After Carlo finished his exclamatory salutations, he paused, then started: “My will to electrify the Patients Movement is hella stronger now that I’ve endured what happened today .Thank God for this shock I feel. Which will, I hope, continue to numb me from the memory of what we witnessed in Sassoon’s Café. I must affix and delight in the numbness that a proper shock provides. Wretchedly, must I revel in an inner glade which exists between my… self, and what has occurred. Yes, the dictatorship of the psychiatric patient will be commandeered so much sooner now.  Do you, by chance, believe in God?”

    Yes, very much so.”

    “And do you believe Jesus of Nazareth to be the Messiah?”

    “Yes. I do.”

    “Ok. In the name of Jesus of Nazareth, swear that you will never repeat anything I’m saying here. Promise me. In his name.”

    “I swear, in the name of Jesus Christ, that I will not repeat anything you are saying here.  I promise. In His name.”

    “Say this: May I go straight to Hell if I repeat anything Avi Lyon Baxter tells me in this lilied parkette near James Street North”

    “May I go straight to Hell if I repeat anything Avi Lyon Baxter tells me in this lilied parkette near James Street North.”

    Avi sighed.

    “In the name of my own vengeance to a world that treats me as a sub-species. In the name of what I think is right and essential. In the name of any and all oppressed psychotics, the Psychiatric System will be dismantled and rebuilt. From within and without. There will be both predetermined and spontaneous uprisings at St Joe’s, and there will be simultaneous intifadas coordinated inside the world’s most prominent psychiatric institutions. In all three arenas, our revolution will detonate simultaneously and worldwide!”

    “Then the revolution, or shall we refer to it as The Rev? At any rate, under its own steam, the movement will spread to other sanatoriums like pollen does. In a vigorous wind. To neighbouring towns. All insurgents bound by sheer conviction to The Rev. To a common list of demands. Rights refrained, again and again, by ambassadors representing the revolution. And in these aforementioned, simultaneous, pre-plotted intifadas, guerrilla patients will take fellow guerrilla patients, hostage, consensually of course. Both hostage and hostage-taker will shadow each other into dual defense from our enemy. And, the revolutionaries, from Port-Au-Prince to Toronto, will be disciplined to shoot our enemies: security guards, soldiers, and officers. Below the waist.”

    “My cugino, Armando, a made guy who lives in Palermo, will arm our rebels. And may very well agree to advance us, in solidarity, whatever we need. See, he’s been hospitalized. Numerous times. For schizophrenia. He can fathom our marginalization.”

    “So you’re half-Italian. On your mother’s side, I’m assuming?”

    “Yes,” Avi replied. “Listen, Carl…”

    “It’s Carlo.”

    “Carlo, please. Don’t interrupt my precarious stream of consciousness. It’s the sole palisade between me and that trauma-induced platoon following me even as we speak.”

    “I’m so sorry, Avi. Forgive me.”

    Avi nodded his head, even smiling slightly.  It had been a relatively long respite since he’d fallen into a fugue.

    “I can’t wait to blow up the bubble rooms! To terrify the snakes of The System. Homicidal doctors signing off on premature discharges. Knowing full well they’ll end their lives thereafter! Rapist nurses fondling their way out of the night-room rounds. All of whom we will kidnap and try in a court presided over by psychotics!

    Our ransom for the prisoners will be a list of demands, including but not limited to:

    1) Swift implementation of a law worded as follows: That to be granted a psychiatric license, doctors must score in the top percentile on a standardized emotional intelligence test.

    2) Food service and accomodation to be modernized and upgraded so as to adhere to hospitality standards.

    3) Establishment of a fund dedicated to the disbursal of victim reparations, and immediate handover of similar criminals currently working under the evil administration, regardless of rank.

    4) Definitive discharges for select patients, such as political prisoners, for example.

    5) Smoking priviliges and designated areas for doing so to be reinstated.

    6) Redistribution of psychiatric authority, via the Vortex Accords initiated by me last summer.

    7) Pass executive orders composed by me on my bus ride to Montreal last year.

    “To be elaborated. Just so long as that list of demands can wrap my soul’s wide wound, like a bandage, the way forward seems somewhat possible. I’ll not, like a mummy, lie petrified inside the tomb that is my basement bedroom. If even a few of the uprisings succeed, the world would suddenly know the patients’ collective power, now wouldn’t they? Who would ever fuck with us again, if we executed what I’ve just proposed? Yes, us. Do you think I cannot see that you are struggling with your own psychosis? Who would still suppose the diagnosed insane are wholly powerless? We will assume our equality, which is the only way we can truly receive it. And the world, even the blasted, double-edged mass media, will finally see that we will no longer tolerate being abused, raped, and used by our own so-called ‘caretakers.” Shamed, despite the fact that it is we who open the doors of invention for humanity.”

    One glance at Avi’s eyes, twinkling as they were with zeal, and I saw his essential place in the universe.

    “I see a Million Man March of the mad!” Avi exclaimed. “And, as for the aforementioned Patient’s Revolution, I will recruit guerrilla-patients from the many online psych ward whisper networks. Plus, I’ll recruit my friends from Mad Pride, who know it is impossible for a person to be proud of one’s self, when not only openly, directly and indirectly, being discriminated against, but also scorned, mocked, hated, abused, mistrusted, beaten, and murdered.”

    Avi jolted, his mind seemingly struck by sheet lightning of afflatus, which is better than being struck by the vipers of his traumas. Again, he shook off the fog that dogged him to refocus anew.

    “You see, Carlo, not only will the psych world be faced with the patient’s revolution, but so will anyone outside the system. Who treats us as a subspecies. Who thinks we are not worth as much as the so-called sane. And that means a whole lot of motherfucking people. And they will answer to us. To the insurgents.

    “Reports of rape, assault, degradation, and other forms of ill treatment occurring in the Sanatorium never reach the minds of the masses. More and more mental health activists are therefore going underground. Radicalizing into revolutionaries. It is time for the Patients’ Revolution.”

    “I’ll seek out like-minded patients. O Carlo! O Patients! Hear my voice! We must leap from our closets, lest too many of us die by our own world-guided hand, to explode upon the world that jeers us! Like, who really cares about patient rights and their little lives? How many

    souls are suffering downtown in the streets, alleys, and alcoves; poor, dilapidated, ‘vile bodies’ for whom no one weeps.”

    “And so, now with intifada’s force, at last, at last, at last, the ‘Ship of fools,’ will dock at the Bay of Honour and Equality. At last, at last, at last, the ‘ship of fools,’ captained by revolving ‘crazies,’ will barge between the large and empty yachts of the fogless harbour, to crash ashore this society that has exiled us. At last, at last, at last, this listing and trimming of the ship will end and, for the first time, we will stand stable upon sturdy earth. This will be our Santa Clara!”

    “The hospital will soon be ours! A guerrilla unit of eighty patients! The world will know the patients’ powers! Viva la revolución de los pacientes!” Avi yawped, so the whole parkette could hear, though no one, besides us, was there. “Viva-a-a-a-a!” Avi bellowed, the echo of his voice blasting beyond the boundaries of the parkette.”

    Remember, you promised never to repeat anything I’ve said. Will you keep your promise?”

    “I will keep my promise because none of this can ever happen.”

    “What the hell are you saying, on?”

    “Don’t you see? If you do what you have planned, you will only FURTHER the divide, the apartheid, between those presumed sane and those diagnosed insane.  Avi, you will sow hatred in the hearts of the “Insane,” and shame in the minds of the “sane”.  Your idea is an understandable but regrettable one.”

    “Oh really? Well what the fuck are you going to do about it, Carlo?”

    “I want you to make a deal with me. A pact.”

    “What the fuck are you talking about?”

    “We are going to make a deal.”

    “A deal?”

    “Yeah. Look, I’ll, I’ll…“

    “You’ll?”

    “Ari, I’ll take away your illness if you promise not to carry out the Patients’ Revolution.”

    “What?” asked an almost ferocious Avi.

    Taking great strides, he headed for the gates of the parkette. That is until I caught up to him, and stopped Avi from leaving. I convinced him to return within the parkette, where we had been talking, among the still spiraling lilies.

    “Please explain to me what the hell you mean by proposing this pact. Like, what the fuck are you talking about, Son?”

    I sighed.

    “Listen, Avi. Inside that eerie bedlam by the bluffs, you could clean that place with all its tears, I struggle to fathom who I am. Rest assured, I’m going somewhere. So, anyway, check this out. I was born on Christmas Day, my mother on the Summer Solstice.  My Father was born on an Easter Sunday morning.  My father’s name, numerically, equals 137; my mother’s name, numerically, equals 137. I was raised on San Francisco Avenue, in the San neighbourhood, near the West Mountain Brow, where the streets are named after saints. The 33 Sanatorium bus still winds through these streets. It can be heard from my childhood home, at number 1101.”

    “Throughout my life, countless people have testified that I either; saved their souls, their minds, or their corporeal lives. In my boyhood, I endured a connective tissue disorder that ensured the onset of Pectus Excavatum, which means the malformation of cartilages, near my sternum. By age thirteen, this condition eventuated the grotesque caving in of my chest. An audible gasping for each breath deepened with every passing day. Gradationally, I was asphyxiating.

    And this body’s hideousness couldn’t have been more excruciating to my mind. Dashing what was left of my self-image, it spent my self-worth. To such an extent, that since I nearly never spoke, my nickname in high school became ‘The Mute.’”

    “For five years, not once did I smile, dragging myself through the days like a half blind horse too old to be drawing anything but air. At age eighteen, I underwent The Nuss Procedure. That being an experimental operation, to possibly truss the excavatum into convexity. A one-foot-long, one-inch-thick, bowed steel bar, was forced through my right side, then inside my pulmonary cavity, converting asphyxiation to easy breathing, concavity to convexity, disfiguration to beauty. After a week of recovery, I was released from the hospital just in time to celebrate my nineteenth birthday. Where my right side was penetrated, the Nuss Procedure left a 3-inch-scar. One still very visible.”

    Raising the hem of my shirt, I showed Avi the scar on my side.

    “Earlier this year I heard what identified itself as being ‘The Voice of the Father from the Three Personned God.’ He said…Well, what he said was this; that I would be henceforth transmuting into a secret being, whose identity I too, alas, would not know until my absolute transfiguration. Sublime and vivacious, this voice disclosed that I’d soon be in the hospital healing patients. It said that seraphim would shield me from demons. That soon, as I should be, I’d sermonize to the patients unfettered. And that I’d never have to worry about corporeal repercussions for voicing the Truth. For voicing His Vision. My family hospitalized me when I insisted this had been a direct correspondence with God.”

    On this note, I paused, taking a couple of breaths.

    “It was actually the morning of that massive storm, and just after one of my hour-long sermons, that the coda of The Voice was transmitted through me to the patients. We took shelter from the elements beneath a red-roofed smoking pavilion. It had been downpouring from tenebrous clouds for an hour and a half. Amid seemingly inexhaustible lightning which struck its riled electric vipers in such a way as to block our path. In these conditions we, who were out on passes, were waiting for the wind-whipped rain to cease, so that we could return to our respective wards.”

    “Which is when we were startled to see two demoniacs burst upon us, in blurs of wide spasmodic movements preternaturally generated by the notable force of the Devil. Screaming immeasurably discordant baritones, the rabid youths raged and rived the restless crowd, both asserting their Latin as petrifying as it was precise. At last, they alighted on the pavilion’s long picnic table. Forthwith, I shot toward the two youths, each foaming and seizing till apparently exhausted from the merciless exertion perpetuated by the power of the Devil himself.”

    “Firm, but calm, I lay my left hand on the one youth’s head, and my right hand on the other. O Satan, in the name of Jesus Christ, the Saviour of us all, and the Son of the Living God, flee from these two boys at once! Flee from these two boys at once! Flee from these two boys at once! I tore my crucifix from my neck then, and with the force of the Holy Spirit inside me, pressed it into each of their chests, imprinting it over their hearts.”

    “Just then, two shower-weary mountain vultures perched upon a nearby statue of some lofty lobotomist from the early 20th Century. At once, I cast, like two eternally long shadows, both demons, into the mountain vultures. The scavengers gyred higher and higher before zigzagging away to vanish over the cliff.”

    “However, overtaken by a whirlwind of rain, the gyre reunited in a dance puppeteered by ever greater gales, till both mountain vultures were at last, simultaneously slammed headlong into the cliff’s vertiginous summit. Lingering in the moments left of their lives, their miserable necks and bones were as blasted and shattered as is humankind.”

    “The two youths lay exhausted and unconscious on the picnic table. Lightning still struck everywhere around our pavilion. Even striking the stone body of the lobotomist. The lampposts were so tipped, it was as if  we were starring in an early expressionist movie. And whirlwinds whisked uprooted saplings heavenward, only to drop them back to the earth. Alas, the patients were ripped about, one to unconsciousness. A wind whipped woman wearing white screamed, ‘Make it stop!’”

    “That’s when, driven by the Holy Spirit, I leapt out into the gales, the rain and all that lightning, to lift my arms like a ladder, into the chaos of a spewing sky. O Lord in Heaven, hear this prayer. Please Dear God, put to death this pitiless storm! And within 3 minutes, the colossal storm concluded. Lightning lessened, gale calmed to wind and in the end, became but a breeze.”

    “Some of the patients panted, while others sprinted from the pavilion to the Sanatorium doors. Staggered as they were, I shadowed the patients swiftly striding ahead for what took about thirty seconds, after which we found ourselves bone dry. Only a drizzle resumed, during our dash back to the sanatorium doors. The rumour spread that I had dried a downpour, dismantled the wind, and annihilated lightning.”

    “The following day, some patients accosted me. ‘Might I heal their minds of illness? Would I lay my hands upon their heads?’ They had come to believe I possessed powers, that I was a channel, a vessel if you will, of the Lord. His mercy. And His words. ‘I will,’ was the only answer, as then I remembered what the Voice told me before my hospital admission.”

    “Laying my hands upon their heads, many reported they were healed; I was quite efficacious in exorcism, and at healing depressives and drug addicts. Some said they believed themselves healed, but only when my hands were upon them. More and more patients approached me expressing a vehement desire to be healed.”

    “I was released, readmitted, released, and readmitted again, eventually seeing a need to disremember the plausible miracles under my belt, along with deep wonderment about my identity, all of which exhausted the high spirit inside me. In a world where soulfulness is scrubbed from people like mildew, miracles are seen as absurd to all.”

    “So, on the evening of Holy Thursday Evening this year, after having wept for Christ, in particular I’d envisioned Judas’ betrayal and Jesus’ arrest, having seen Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth. My prayer to The Lord pleaded, ‘I do not know who or what I am. Can you please tell me? Give me a clear sign, even though my transfiguration is incomplete? After praying, I fell asleep.And on Good Friday I awoke to a piercing pain in my right side. It was coming from the place where the Nuss Procedure was performed. Where I still have the scar.”

    “As if I’d been stabbed, the throb in my right side was so severe, that I screamed out to the patients who slept in my room, amid miserable throes. Via electro-magnetic vibrations, a seraphim paid me a visit, to stress that by Monday Morning, my stigmata would fade and disappear. At which time the piercing in my side ceased.”

    “Avi, isn’t it true that you have been less ‘in and out,’ and more focused, than you were when we met at the café?”

    He didn’t respond. Instead, he started whistling Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C Sharp Minor with his eyes closed, his face not tense as it was when we were in the café.

    “I believe you, Carlo. And yes, I have been more present and more focused than when we met at the café. What’s happening?”

    “Listen, together you and I will start the Psychiatric Reformation, and apart, will never resort to revolution. Listen, you are slowly healing.  But this will speed up the process.”

    “I lay my cupped hands on Avi’s head, then prayed: “O Jesus of Nazareth! O my Redeemer! O Prince of Peace! O violet eyelight-beamer! I feel your sea-sky horizoned lips softly kiss my spirit! O Almighty Taskmaster, please whisper this away. Sing Avi’s madness to death. Tame his traumas until they die in anonymity as do the loneliest of winds at sea. As do the holiest of saints. As do those white and black Popes of the Vatican, reflected like a solar eclipse inside a yellow puddle of urine.  O Lord, I’d die for you as you have for me, so please. Please free this beauteous man, Avi Lyon Baxter. Free him from his tormenting traumas, O free him of his tormenting illness.  Please, please heal him.”

    I removed my hands from Avi’s head. Avi threw himself onto the grass where in the diaphanous dew, he wept. For a moment which then passed, he knelt and his head bowed.”

    “Why are you crying, Avi?” I finally asked.

    “I’m healed,” he whispered.

    Then, suddenly, he jolted to his feet as though amid a street fight for his life.

    “I’m healed! I’m healed, do you hear me, Bello!” he blasted, “I don’t hear voices anymore! The only voice outside me that I hear is my own echo, and the only voice inside me that I hear is my own! Carlo-o-o-o-o-o-o-o Di-i-i-i-i-i-i Car-r-r-r-r-a! No, no wait! Santo-o-o-o-o-o-o-! Santo Carlo Di Carra! I like the sound of that!” Avi smiled widely in the warm wind.

    ***

    CooOOoo-woo-woo-woooo! CooOOoo-woo-woo-woooo! call the mourning doves. Kneeling at Mamma’s grave, and before arranging the flowers, first I spread the babies’ breath I bought to festoon her tombstone. Over the past year, I’ve gotten attached to the cemetery’s resident doves. Their call is a sound that soothes my soul. I coo right along with them and in doing so, fail to fight back the fierce tears flowing. Droplets that are falling down. All over those brand-new blue roses.

    ***

    Like a couturier’s thread through the eye of a needle, I entered the revolving doors of the Sanatorium. High on it’s hill, I was out on our ward’s terrace, when I painted a watercolour called “One Blue Rose.” I posted a high pixel photograph of the $1,500 dollar painting, to the website of an online art gallery. It wasn’t five minutes before I received a notice on my phone, that a former buyer of mine had purchased the piece.

    Mamma relished a rose of any colour. But blue roses most of all. Because they were her mother’s favourite. Grandma Maria adored blue roses because she was an amateur inventor. In her mind, blue roses were humanity’s most ravishing invention.

    Mamma died today, last year, at this very minute.  Through the diamond patterned bars of the terrace cage, I pray to her and sob. My head droops downward like the bough of a Weeping Willow. One that has endured an ice storm.