Читать книгу Farewell to Prague - Desmond Hogan - Страница 8

‘What are you going to do now?’

‘Don’t know. Go to Africa.’

Robin had his arms about me and behind him I could see the mecca of dirty-black and nebulous South-East London high-rises.

We were on the eleventh floor of a high-rise.

As he held me, I was touching in my mind the great naked statue of David in Florence I’d travelled to once from University College, Dublin, having climbed steps to it, finding it wet from November rain.

I was in the same gesture with Robin as I’d been with a girl two weeks before, in a high-rise in Catford, who’d had the sudden inspiration to try to change my sexuality. A teacher from the polytechnic I had worked in part-time, she had stood, naked from the waist up, for this embrace. I was wearing a white sleeveless vest which had a theatrical ancientness. The woman who held me was from Antrim.

She’d told me that night about a young boy with a tattoo showing a gentian-violet swallow bearing a bunch of pink roses on his right arm. She used to sleep with him on the beaches of North Antrim the previous summer. He’d run around at night in the full regalia of the IRA, come home in the small hours when his mother would be waiting to give him a box on the ears. One night he went out in his regalia to inspect a place where he knew Semtex to be buried and was shot dead by the British Army.

Robin had a semi-troglodyte face that always looked as if it was going to apologize for something, sable curls barely held back from it. His cheeks had a high violet colouring and he had large lips, the lower lip always pulsating a little, which had been sealed by many people, men and women.

His mother had called him Robin because he was born in the year Robin Lee Graham had sailed from South Africa to California and to remind them all there was a photograph over the piano in Pulvensey showing Robin Lee Graham with sun-kissed hair holding up a dorado fish.

The cassette player was playing a Marvin Gaye song:

Has anyone seen my old friend Martin?

Can you tell me where he’s gone?

He freed a lot of people but it seems the good die young.

I just looked around and he’s gone.

From the corner of my eye, reflected in a mirror, I could see a buff-coloured dole card beside a few tubes of oil paint. The flat belonged to a friend of Robin’s. We had spent the night here, sleeping on mattresses a few feet away from one another because Robin was covered in spots he’d gotten from sleeping with a girl on the heath in Pulvensey. She had tried to kill herself when he wouldn’t intensify the relationship, slashing her wrists, was put in the mental hospital in Norwich, dyed her hair cowslip-pale and alizarin and haze-blue and escaped in a diseased bituminous fur coat, taking the boat to France.

Robin was teaching English at the moment in Hastings. He’d come to London for Friday night.

‘Well, I’m off to Prague in a few weeks,’ Robin said.

‘I’ve been to Prague.’

‘I know.’

Suddenly I started crying. I broke down crying a lot now. My mind seemed to stop and the world blurred. There were a few weeks when even walking was difficult, walking was walking through torpor and if not it was an intoxicating experience. A pendulum inside propelled me back and forth. There was no way forward, no further lap I could make, and the only thing that seemed possible was to exit, to finalize myself to save others trouble and to preserve intact achievement, totality.

Words had stopped for me, the ability to speak, the ability to express. And instead of words came images from childhood.

A drummer in the brass band who’d emigrated to Glasgow, a collector of cigarette cards showing athletes, always wore nice suits, sometimes floral waistcoats, became engaged to a member of the Legion of Mary in Glasgow, and then one day, inexplicably, in a suit, hankie in his breast pocket, jumped off a bridge into the Clyde.

A boy with a Teddy-boy quiff who’d chalked a billiard cue in the men’s club and played billiards the night his mother died.

Later he went to South Africa for a few years, then became a singer in England, turned alcoholic, lived as a tramp. Recently I had seen a scrawled sign for his singing outside an Irish pub in London. ‘It’s the crack here every Saturday night.’

His name had been Guy ‘Micko’ Delaney. ‘Micko’ for a father who had left his mother, gone to fight in the war, lived with a Russian woman in Crouch End and died – they said of drugs – in the late nineteen-forties.

Cocaine Bill and Morphine Sue

Were walking down the avenue.

He was in Berlin in 1945 and had brought home a girl’s Holy Communion wreath, lilies appliquéd on lace, that he had found in a wrecked house. Mrs Delaney had buried it with him when he died.

Micko was the bad element of our town. I was Micko now, or had become so these past months.

Robin and I said goodbye at Kennington tube station. An Alsatian, not too big, leapt into a youth’s arms in the waste ground nearby.

‘I’ll write.’

Flashy-coloured or old technicoloured postcards in my mind: a boy in mod clothes stealing the scene from a pair of nuns on Salthill prom; a guard directing traffic under Nelson’s Pillar.

I walked home. A baby was crawling around the window of a pawnbroker’s in Camberwell. Lampposts were swathed with posters for wrestling, a Mardi Gras incoherence about the way they were pasted over one another, a bricolage of names like Kendo Nagazaki and Ravishing Robbie Hagan, of mammal-like breasts and Titan heads in balaclavas.

‘I’ve got more scars on my back than I can count,’ a stooped old man was telling another old man outside a bookie’s in Peckham.

The Appleby Fair would be beginning just about now, black boxing gloves embossed with red satin roses hanging in the windows of vardos. I’d once known a boy from Derry who lived with an adoptive mother in Appleby for a while.

In Catford, outside a shop which had fluorescent green pens in the window, pictures of reclining nymphs in Scandinavian forests, cups with ferny patterns, Limerick Benny was singing.

He was wearing a black hat and, although it was summer, a black overcoat.

‘Tis not for Limerick that I sigh though I love her in my soul.’

Perhaps it was because I’d just left Robin, but I heard the words of an English folk song and the English folk song in turn conjured a landscape in Ireland with an insistent narrative.

Hurrah for the Scarlet and the Blue

Bayonets flashing like lightening to the beat of the military drum

No more will we go harvesting

Together in the golden corn.

I took the good king’s shilling

And am off tomorrow morn.

The landscape, like the words, was heraldic; the eighty English acres my father’s people had come from Tipperary to tend the time the railway station was being built, the coral-red station building against the bog.

In my flat I picked up a tiny photograph of a woman in a crisply fluted black coat and white saucer hat by a porch adorned with traveller’s joy, her legs like the legs of malnutrition. On the mantelpiece beside her was a framed photograph of two Teddy boys in the middle of a street, a row of council houses running behind them, a man bending his head into the distance and a row of trees in a conflagration of bloom. Close by was a snapshot of me and my parents in Bray in the early fifties. Behind us, advertisements for Bradmola and Dundyl.

I picked up a letter that was on the mantelpiece, partly for decoration, partly because it had never been resolved.

Hearty congratulations to you both on the arrival of your little son. I was delighted to get the good news, and aren’t you the lucky one not to have been kept waiting too long. I just got the news before the pater arrived on the 3 p.m. bus from Trim.

I am sending a wee frock for the baby. You know all the shopping one can do from a bed. I feel middling. The same routine still, from bed to school and back to bed.

A red bus to a house which has a white sifted feel where traveller’s joy comes in summer, a runaway bit of white fence in a field behind. There was also another bus in my mind. Eleanor travelling south in California, through a landscape of mustard fields, green mountains, blue skies, red earth, a landscape which had crowd scenes of people from India who had come here because rice and soya beans were grown in the area. It was some months after she had arrived in the States. She’d been living in Sacramento in a hostel mainly for Hawaiian girls and some days she did not have the fare for work. In her mind she was writing to me, telling me of her new life, her new religion.

Birds had gathered on the wires along the road.

I’d passed through Sacramento in the small hours this last Christmas, a woman with pigtails, leading her six little boys, all of them with chinquapin eyes and chipmunk mouths, off the bus.

I knew her to be in Berlin just now, with her second husband, out of reach. But at Summerleaze in Cornwall a few weeks before, where I’d gone with a group of Bangladeshi children, when I’d been pulled out to sea in an undertow, it was her image and the voice of a Bangladeshi child which brought me in.

‘Come on, Des. Come on.’

A girl with sculpted face, sculpted olive-yellow hair. I saw her in a café when I was in the sea, a German café whereas once it had been an American café, a red bulb over the upholstery of rich crimson at the door, a little picture of a village with rose roofs by a lake in a mountain valley by her shoulder, a solvent handbag beside her.

I was given a coffee after coming in from the sea, in a miserly-looking sand-dune café of white and teal-blue which had a big sign saying ‘Special offer on Tuesdays. Fish and chips £1.55.’

And then we drove away from the sea and visited a church in which there was a picture of a worried king, a gold and black check jerkin on him. Outside, a man in wine socks, fawn trousers sat on a bench, and harkened when he heard my Irish accent. I sat on a bench near him. The names on the graves were Trythall, Stoat, Willis.

After nearly drowning there were flowers I was grateful to see, tucked into the crevices of this town of big masculine buildings, like Clonmel in Ireland, where my father had once worked in the hosiery and shirt department of a shop.

‘We will give you a position at a salary of £3.10 per week. (Three pounds, ten shillings.) Please come soon as possible.’

I’d lost my part-time job after my breakdown, and now had to start anew.

By now, Robin would be arriving at the house he was staying in in Hastings, boats piled up under the castle nearby, gulls dropping mussels.

On her wedding day my mother had worn a froth of white lace on her head, her eyes frightened.

There was mental illness on both sides of our family. I had often imagined what it was like, but now that I was on the other side, that I’d lost what was most precious to me – flow – I was faced with what seemed an undifferentiated future.

I looked around me, wanting to be held by someone, wanting to be in someone’s arms, but there was nobody there, only the ghost of a girl’s arms, hopeless conjugality, of Robin’s arms, of a young Englishman with a face full of indigo grooves, and I thought of my first embrace, with a teacher of French on a sofa in 1968. In her flat.

There had been oak trees in bloom outside, and she had remarked on the abortion law which had just been passed in England.

Last night, as we walked the streets of Soho, we met a tramp who said he’d been a music teacher until recently in a South London public school. A horde of destitute people passed us, heads bent, most of their rucksacks sooty but one of them bright orange. And before we got a tube from Charing Cross Station we passed a tramp who was sleeping just outside South Australia House, a picture of vineyards in the window above him and two white seals snogging.

I met Carl Witherspoon in a café in Soho.

He lived both in Berlin and London, his mother a rich German woman, his father English.

He’d recently spent a few days in a town on the border of Portugal and Spain. Sunday morning in a café, a boy in holy communion costume, red rosette on his white shirt, water-colour blue eyes, a few men in dove-grey suits, an old man with a bottle of red wine in his satchel staring at him. A mosaic of the Immaculate Conception on the wall, a swish of royal blue sash over her white robe. St Martin de Porres among the vodka and port.

Outside was flat land where white ignited cauliflower shapes bloomed.

Carl had wondered what had brought him here, what he was doing here. He went all over the place, a tickertape of journeys, sometimes losing tickets, sometimes foregoing a journey to one place at the last moment in order to go somewhere else. His life felt wasted, hopeless. He wanted to die.

A woman came into the café and asked in a religious tone, almost bowing her head, for a religieuse.

I’d been to Carl’s flat in Berlin two years before. In the bathroom, on a cabinet, had been numerous bottles of milk of magnesia tablets from England.

Carl had tributaries of black hair which vaporized over his forehead and he had asparagus-green eyes which could assume a popping effect at will. He got up, took a few steps away from the table, then came back.

I thought of the mental hospital at home, three particular sister buildings, bony windows, high chimneys, a batch of dead elms brushing against the windows, some of the windows savagely latticed, the lattices painted gleaming white.

The young man at the next table was talking more intently, as if to drown us, about the best poem in Bengali about premature ejaculation.

Carl looked at me, and it was as if he realized that I wasn’t of his class, that his madness, unlike mine, was immured, and as if to dissolve the sympathy he suddenly said, ‘I’ve been offered a job at £750 a week.’

I walked to the South Bank after we parted and met a beggar boy, one of his shoes pink, the other blue, who told me how he’d run away from home in the Midlands when he was twelve. Recently he had gone back for his sister’s wedding in the village he was from, Ashby de la Zouch, disguised in the uniform of the Queen’s Own Regiment, posing as boyfriend to a cousin; no one had recognized him.

I recognized the village as being that of a fisherman who used to come to our town each spring when I was a child and teenager, a place off the route north to Holyhead and Ireland.

Further along the South Bank some men were doing Morris dances against the orange sunset. They were adorned in beads, sashes, and were waving batons. ‘The size doesn’t matter. It’s how you use it,’ one little man cried as he threw his baton into the air, a middle-aged woman tramp with silver spikey hair looking on from her array of rags which were dolled up by the sunset.

Limerick Benny sat on a bench in Catford Arcade shouting: ‘I believe in the controls of 747s.’ He looked up, spreading his arms out. ‘All the cunts singing and dancing up there and me on the ground.’ An old man limped by, a green plastic flower in his lapel, a green handkerchief in his breast pocket, a pheasant feather in his hat and an earring which looked like a Russian cross hanging from his right ear. Further along the arcade, under the huge papier mâché cat splayed above it, there were four evangelists who looked like the Beatles, crew cuts, polo necks, little bibles unerringly in their hands.

‘Latecomers. End of the day people. They hear the call too late. Try to enter by the back door but often find it’s jammed.’

I rang up J. M. Tiernan looking for a job on a building site. They had no need of anyone.

I went to Catford Job Centre looking for a job. A honey-haired girl looked at me as if I was crazy.

An evicted family huddled beside a cluster of Tesco bags.

A man worked a glove puppet towards the traffic.

A youth cycled by with a mongrel on the trailer behind his bicycle.

‘My life means something since I met Jesus’ and ‘Love is something you do’. billboards said outside a hut of a church on Stanstead Road, which was surrounded by lavender bushes.

Outside the ancient tram man’s toilet at the top of Stanstead Road a dispatch rider paused. He wore a red bandana around his right wrist.

‘The worst danger is scatty-brained women. They’re suicidal. Rob, he worked as a courier in London, in New York; was killed when he went back to work on the buildings in Rye, walking down the street. It’s time to go. The English girls are only alive from the shoulders up. I’ll pick up a girl in France and work on the vineyards. It’s time to go.’

A postcard came from Prague. Wenceslas Square, a haze of salvia on the front of the museum, trails of cloud having made it half-way across the sky.

I could hear Robin’s affected worry.

Went to this café where a really old woman in a long red wig and crazy clothes came up and sat beside me, batted her huge eyelids, and whispered ‘Lasst Blumen sprechen.’

She was wearing a ra-ra dress the first evening she came up to me, blue with white polka dots, a little black cloak with a gold clasp – the lining rose-madder. A little bunch of paper violets on the cloak. Her wig was ginger, reaching down to her waist, tressed in many parts, confluences of tresses in it. Block high heels were sawdust-coloured and harlequin stockings cream. She batted her false, mahogany-coloured eyelashes, some of the pearl around her eyes lit up, bowed, sat down.

As she waited for her drink, her head coyly turned to one side, she hummed ‘Ich Kann es nicht Verstehen dass die Rosen Blühen.’ ‘I Know Not Why the Roses Bloom.’

Some soldiers in sandy uniforms came through the café, inspecting identity cards, and took off a young bespectacled man, somewhat unshaven, in a vermilion T-shirt.

The band resumed then with ‘You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby.’ Behind them was a painting of the Three Graces – one of them elderly, her white hair in a bun – being attended by monkeys, a parrot hovering overhead.

You could still see the red of salvia through the lime trees outside. The neon signs on the opposite side of the street were quiet ones – Diskotek and Machino Export Bulharska.

The old woman’s eyelids accelerated every few minutes.

There were huddles of young men at a few tables, many rings on their fingers, striped trousers popular with them, tongues on their shoes. One young man with hair like Goldilocks kept looking over at the old woman.

When the band played ‘La Paloma’ she said, ‘My song,’ and sang with it.

Later that evening an accordionist played the same song at the top of Wenceslas Square, under the lime trees, and a couple danced and a man in a white workcoat let himself free from a sausage kiosk and put a lighted cigarette in the accordionist’s mouth.

The woman dancing was wearing a daisied navy dress and white bobby socks and I thought of Mrs Delaney who dressed this way when she was working for us. After her husband died she started getting electric shock treatment. She was very proud of it. Being strapped in, electrodes clamped on to her forehead. She used to walk in from the mental hospital, past the two-storey Victorian house beside an Elizabethan ruined castle.

Then one day her bones broke under the electric shock treatment and she died. That was the day her son played billiards.

The ninety-year-old lady who lived a few houses away from me was out sweeping the leaves the morning I left for Prague. ‘I was down in Margate yesterday, loafing around.’ She was eager to tell me. She wore a long adamantine necklace. Her husband was killed in the war and she still spoke about him as if he were alive. She frequently hummed ‘We’ll Be Lit Up When the Lights Go Out in London.’

Hedgehogs, owls, starlings lived in this grove.

She reached out her hand and touched my wrist. ‘Have a wonderful time wherever you go.’

On the train into London, in the middle of a conversation about work, a woman suddenly leaned towards a man and whispered, ‘You’ve got to suit the horse and the horse suit you.’ It was just as we were passing the tinker encampment, roses in pots that were swan-shaped outside modern caravans, and geraniums on ironwork above the doors of little huts.

In the latter part of 1968 there were two photographs in my room. One of Nguyen Thanh Nam, a prophet who lived up a coconut tree in Vietnam, and one of a woman, lamé stole around her neck, kneeling on the front of a tank in Prague, arms outstretched.

There were tanks at Prague airport the first time I arrived. Inside, people from sundry nations were having cocktails and beers. By the exit there were a row of stalls, one of which had matchstick angels with fluted dresses under glass. In a cavernous underground toilet there was a picture pinned to the wall showing a funfair by the azure waters of a Russian port.

I got the bus into the city. A broom stood at the back of the bus. An old couple walked by outside, holding hands, the woman holding a scarlet handbag in her other hand. Viburnum cut the avenue. A little man in a black beret and persimmon shirt kept consulting a little fat brown-covered dictionary he had with him. The high-rises on the way in were like the high-rises of the suburbs of Paris where I’d stayed in 1968.

Wenceslas Square on that first day: lime trees in bloom on a downsloping pavement; flanks of ice-cream awash with viridian syrup in plastic tubs in a window; fat creamy cakes called Budapest with wide-brimmed chocolate papal hats on them; a young man in shorts and white workcoat darting between buffets in a sudden downpour; amber make nude statues over a magazine shop; a man in a buffet cleaning up, a disabled hand outheld, like an unpeeled prawn; a dreamy-eyed woman in the same buffet, her white workcoat stained lemon, like butcher’s blobs. There was a young tinker in Lewisham called Foncie who had a pen-pal in Prague and one recent summer, according to legend, he journeyed to Berlin to meet her in Friedrichstrasse.

High-rise buildings, bluish, like another city, on the horizon, the yellow and green fields slightly carmined with poppies. I got off another red bus. There was a gypsy family at the bus stop, a gradation of them, father, mother, two sisters, a brother, tattoos on some of their wrists. It had rained torrentially and suddenly the sun came out, the grey sky with a rust tint like an orange galvanized roof on a shed which was part of the panorama behind our house in County Galway. A boy sat on a stool in the meadow, a plastic bag of orange in his arms. A woman with fungus-like veins on her legs stood by the bus stop, a little away from the gypsy family. And for some reason there were flowers in a glass jar, isolated, in the meadow.

I had to get away from London. I had a brother who’d been a monk in County Waterford. He left and came to London, followed me, surveyed me. You were compounded in clan. When he entered the café I frequented one day, looking around, an old lady tramp seated near him over tea, I dashed into the lavatory and locked myself in.

Some people said living in London was an escape from Ireland, but there were more people from County Galway in London than there were in County Galway. While I lived in Dublin I met middle-class people. In London I had to deal with family again.

Every day I saw the images: Irishmen with red faces, chipped noses, tottering along Camberwell Road; a tramp wearing a silver Bridget’s cross on a pendant playing at a UN squadron pinball machine in a café in Kilburn, a girl companion alongside her with a blue ribbon in her hair, her cheeks the red of the Virgin Mary’s cheeks on roadsides in Ireland.

Afterwards, when I had the breakdown, I dreamt of it over and over again, this place where I came alive after the not so much death-existence but fretful, shadowy one in London; sweet-peas, sunflowers, geraniums, hollyhocks in the gardens at the foot of high-rises; rabbits in pens; old people talking to one another from deck chairs; tarmacadam tarnished with spillages of coal; groundsel, elder, warts of poppies in the grass; young Africans wandering around in happy huddles; a woman in a T-shirt showing a fighter-jet wheeling a child; a song blasting out from a high-rise, ‘I Love Your Daughter, I Love Your Son’; washing decorating every balcony, pink the favourite colour; dead lakes in the distance. I lived on the eighth floor, in a bare room which had plywood walls. One day I looked out and saw what I had not noticed before – a field spanned by blue chicory.

I made love in this room to a long-haired boy called Radvj whom I met on a path in the fields. He was from Bratislava. He was wearing gooseberry-green bermudas and told me he was looking for somewhere to stay. He stood proudly in front of the bed before getting in, showing off his genitals. There was a tattoo on his left shoulder which depicted a cairn.

‘The quiet sculpture of your body,’ I thought.

‘You’ve got a beautiful body.’

‘Not as beautiful as yours.’

He told me of his favourite sexual memory, being fucked by an older boy in a field at night, season of the gathering of the hay, while he looked into the boy’s eyes.

I wanted to smell his buttocks. I wanted to smell the pink T-shirt thrown in a heap on the floor. I wanted to return to life.

I thought of Foncie, the tinker boy, my nearest connection to life in London. His twin brother, Vincent, had been killed by a car near the encampment when they were six. An uncle was supposed to be minding him. Later, that uncle went to Brighton and drowned himself.

Porridge every morning of his life; at seventeen a job with a cousin’s painting business; first sex with a Chinese prostitute on Lee Road; the pubs of the West End marauded in large, flashy groups.

With every wedding there was an essential video. Though born in England they often journeyed to Ireland – the occasion of the erection of a grandmother’s headstone, of a wedding. London tinker young mixed with the young of Ireland on hills in Cork city on Sunday nights.

There was a car dump near the encampment. A famous actress had gone there on a supposed errand to buy ginger ale, taken alcohol and pills and been found dead by a tinker dog.

Foncie too had felt the life being dragged out of him by London and, with a crest ‘Wild Ireland’ on the elbow of his jacket, he’d gone to Berlin and met a Czech girl on Friedrich-strasse. They never corresponded again. She’d been carrying white chrysanthemums. They’d strolled to the temple-like building nearby where two helmeted soldiers stood guard by the flame to the unknown soldier, the lime trees lit up, in the late afternoon August sunshine, in biblical incandescence.

With Radvj I dreamt of tinkers on a cart passing a shield of oak trees just outside our town in County Galway and shouting after them a customary tinker farewell, ‘See you in Clare-morris.’ My eyes consumed then in a colour like the pink T-shirt of my guest, who left abruptly early in the morning.

The Prodigal leaving his father’s house, corn being loaded distantly, a glimpse, just as it was in a photograph, of an ancestor in a cloche hat bending over the grave of my mother’s youngest sister.

Rest in peace, O dearest Una

Thou art happy

Thou art blest

Earthly cares and sorrows ended.

The headstones are splattered with lichen and meadow barley grows in profusion in the graveyard.

Women bearing baskets of redcurrants across fields that were lime-coloured, poppies on stalks that had seized up in the field, men raking lime hay, an azure tooth of a small mountain above them.

A pudgy, slightly obese Christ child in a see-through gauze dress, the edges of the dress gilded.

Lambeth Palace, the foreign painter having endowed a pearly light to Westminster Bridge, a tiny figure in a red swallow coat supporting himself against a privet hedge, back turned. The main character in the little film I made was dressed like that. An Irish poet in London at the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth. His favourite song had been ‘Lillibullero’ and he’d drunk himself to death in Catford. On his tombstone in Lewisham you can read ‘Let fall a holy tear.’

An uncle of mine, my mother’s half-brother, had worked in a jeweller’s shop near Lambeth Palace in the mid-nineteen-forties. When he was a teenager he’d joined the army in Mullingar; the Twenty-seventh Infantry Battalion. Then he’d moved to England. Wrote a card home, ‘Rotten lonely here.’ A grey embankment scene with painted wallflowers on it. Fought in Egypt, wore a hat like a funny-shaped brioche and desert shorts. Returning to England he worked in the jeweller’s shop in Lambeth and became engaged to an English girl with lavish ginger-blonde hair. One night, when they were dancing in Forest Hill, just after the compère announced, ‘Please take your partners for the last waltz’, and the band started up with, ‘Who’s the lucky man who’s going home your way?’, the hall was hit by a doodlebug and the place confounded. He’d wandered through all the nearby hospitals looking for her, and eventually heard her screaming in one of them. But it was because she had toothache. He died a few years after the war. No one really knew why.

His sister, my mother’s half-sister, the woman who wrote to my mother on my birth, also died young. She died of tuberculosis two weeks after my birth.

An open-air dance in Prague. Two old ladies dancing together, one with white hair, the other black. The black-haired one is the taller, she wears dark glasses and her mouth grins like that of an American tough guy. There are men in suits, and men in white shirts and casual trousers. A gipsy woman, in white bobby socks, black high heels, black dress with a white belt on it, is the proudest dancer. She wears a white braid through her long, flattened black hair. The white-haired woman, who is quite frail, is almost throttled in an embrace by the black-haired woman. There is a wood of lime trees around the dance area. I had a black-haired aunt who wouldn’t behave herself when I was a child, dancing at the crossroads, especially with young men. Dances which were periodically interrupted by a ferocious display of Irish dancing by girls in dark emerald dresses and cloaks, in black tights. A few funfair swings near the crossroads.

She married a radio expert from Sligo. They opened a pub, but she drove him off. When my grandmother died my aunt wanted to look after my grandfather, in his little town house with the gipsy vardo in the front window, but my mother took him. My aunt became unruly and she died, in one of her reprieves from mental hospital, in her pub.

My first summer in London I stayed a few days with her husband. Walked down the Uxbridge Road on a Saturday afternoon, past a black people’s wedding, hair in cornrows, white roses in lapels, to a flat where there were beds in the kitchen. There was a mass card for my aunt, a camellia in her hair, beside a picture of St Bonaventure.

‘We put towels over the mirrors the day she died,’ a young man who had his shirt off told me.

The old lady in the ginger wig sat at the table across from me tonight, in sailor trousers, sailor top, sailor cap with gold braid around the peak, platform high heels, and kept nodding to me. The orchestra played ‘Hong Kong Blues’, ‘Jeepers Creepers’, ‘Two Sleepy People’, ‘You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby’, ‘La Mer’, ‘We’ll Meet Again’. Someone had told me that the old lady had owned a hotel on Wenceslas Square which was confiscated in the early fifties, when high-ranking officials were being thrown downstairs to their deaths in Czechoslovakia, when there had been mass rallies in Wenceslas Square, with people like tornado clouds, when trams ran up and down the square, when there was a rendezvous with Stalin’s profile around every corner, alongside posters of faded, aquatic-coloured cherries, for even then the Czechs had a fondness for communicating in pictures on the walls.

There was puce-violet kohlrabi in the little shop windows in Prague that summer, and peppers that looked like snoods. Some of the shop windows were mainly yellow, like a Dutch painting, with a few items in them. There were window displays of red hats with ladybird spots on them, and mauve trilbies. Men with satchels full of vodka beside them throwing bread at swans; old men huddling past alabaster-faced Marys with alabaster-coloured lilies, sequined in gold, in front of them. There was a poster for ‘The Mikado’ everywhere, a poster for Dvorak’s ‘Requiem’, a girl with one eye on it. There was a poster for a Goya exhibition with a man with a letter in one hand which he seemed to be giving you, the word ‘Expulsis’ on it, his other hand missing. Tram number seventeen brought you to Podolí, where naked men waited in the lemon light of a sauna as if for a ceremony, and where a jubilant body-building life-guard congratulated me on being Irish against the dazzle of a pool.

It was part of a journey East, a journey which had begun in Berlin the previous summer.

From the eighth floor of a high-rise, gauze curtains ruffling, it was a look back. It was a city which grew out of little tales I’d written, not knowing where they’d come from, whence a hotel, a crossroads.

It was a city which grew out of the punitive damp of a little flat in Catford. But in coming out of those things it also showed an alternative truth – that life is humbler than art and more loving.

Sometimes, early in the mornings especially, I spoke to her: Amsterdam, you woke crying. I did not know why you were crying.

She was looking at a painting of a huddle of women with hats like geese on them in the Van Gogh Museum and suddenly she turned to me and smiled.

Later that autumn I journeyed to Italy alone, to Florence. Walked along a street where there were salmon-coloured hearts with lace borders under a statue of Mary. I got accommodation in a dormitory in a monastery. There was a broom hanging on the wall at the end of the row of beds on the opposite side to the door.

She started having an affair in Dublin with a boy who came from the countryside near our town, a house with lily of the valley wallpaper in the sitting-room, a house always visited by the tinkers at the same time in spring. He had rooster-orange hair and the same colour was rumoured to be elsewhere on his body.

The following summer she left for the United States.

I heard Rodrigo’s ‘Concerto d’Arjuanez’ today as I was painting walls and it was a miracle. Afterwards I went to the Pacific at Cissy Field. It was very, very deep blue. There was an old Chinese woman there in red socks and I threw a pebble in for you.

Two years later I found her. She had joined a religious group. We stayed in Carmel, with an old Czech man who wore a black beret with a tongue on it. He gave us pancakes with strawberries. He’d left Prague when he was twenty-six.

Then we stayed with an Indian family near Arcadia, and used to watch the elk come down to the ocean, in the fog.

But when she came back to Dublin the following summer a girl, a supposed comrade, attacked me at a party. ‘You’re incapable of having full physical relations with women except with Eleanor.’ She raised a closed fist to indicate an erect penis.

I couldn’t make love to Eleanor any more. She went back to California and I left Ireland, carrying impotence, making stories, doing odd jobs.

Sometimes our cities connected up, and we were in the same place, or near one another. But she was always just that girl in the café now, behind a window.

9 August 1987. I sit in a café near the Vltava. Sunset on the edges of women’s hair as if on waves of the sea. Boys in asterisk-splattered bermudas skating across Maje Bridge.

‘Do you know Seamus Heaney?’ a worried-looking boy from a nearby table, who’s heard that I’m Irish, comes up and asks me. There are four boys with shaven heads at the next table. A man with a little bullion of a goatee looks as I answer the boy. A man in a beret with a tongue has his head bowed over an empty plate as if in prayer.

There is a boll of light to the left side of Prague Castle.

The orchestra plays ‘La Paloma’, ‘Melancholy Baby’, ‘As Time Goes By’.

Pictures of robins, clumps of pansies at their feet, ripple, in my mind, into advertisements for Kincora Plug.

There were dead aunts outside the windows of cafés at sunset, and against the Vltava visions of drownings in my town when I was a child, a chain of swimmers across the river searching for a body.

A woman opened a wallet beside me, and instead of the young Slavonic face inside I saw the face of a drowned Teddy boy.

‘I’ll be watching to see if you go to the altar tomorrow,’ his mother admonished him on the Saturday he was drowned, urging him to go to confession. He was laid out in a brown habit. At his funeral a phalanx of liquorice-haired girl-cousins had carried wreaths of purple-carmine roses.

Years later, his father, a widower, put a memorial in the Connaught Tribune, where the photograph looked tragically fashionable and the handsomeness savagely unrequited. ‘That we might meet merrily in Heaven.’

At night there were the cafés, the one with the lady in the ginger wig, the one by the river, the same repertoire of songs over and over again.

I was troubled by these songs. I could hear my mother’s voice through these songs. ‘At Night When I Listen to Late Date I’m in Dreamland.’

She and her boyfriends would go to Dublin and dance to Billy Cotton, Ambrose, Jack Hylton, Oscar Rabin.

Then she got tuberculosis, had her lung punctured, refilled. She broke off an engagement because of it but didn’t tell her boyfriend, and so left him broken-hearted and bewildered.

Her doctor was in Mullingar: Dr Keenan, Church View. It was while she was attending him that she met my father. He recoiled when he heard about the tuberculosis, but after a few months proposed to her and they became engaged. He told her about the funeral of his mother in 1926, how it was one of the biggest for many years in East Galway, the blinds drawn on every private house in town as well as on businesses.

Her friends in his town were three Czech sisters and their brother who ran the jeweller’s. They liked sweets a lot and in their honour I gazed at chocolate ducks with marzipan legs in windows. They used to leave gifts of boxes of chocolates in my pram.

They had arrived in Ireland after the First World War, orphans, and after spending a few years in an orphanage in Dublin moved around Ireland, looking after jewellery businesses. The brother was epileptic and had visions by the oak trees just outside town.

I shared his visions this summer: a fresco depicting orange trees on the wall; clouds of gnats under lime trees; a cobbled street, violet and pale blue cobbles, a water-pump with a high tiara of black iron-work around it in the middle of the street; a lock on the Vltava, a huge fan of surf in front of it, hundreds of swans just before the lock; a girl in a flowered bonnet and crimson dress in a painting; grapes by a goblet in an illuminated book; a vase with pink nude swimmers on it.

‘I see Czechoslovakia as a free spirit over which the body has no power.’

They thought they’d never grow old, but the epileptic died in County Galway. One of the sisters, in old age, married the driver she’d met on a pilgrim bus to Knock, the other two sisters moving to Dublin. The sister who married the bus driver joined them when her husband died. She died, and the eldest sister died, and a sister who permanently hobbled was left. She crossed Ireland to live in an old people’s home, a bungalow on top of a hill in Galway, called Ave Maria. She was visited often by my mother. Then she moved to another old people’s home on the sea coast outside Galway. When she died she left £17,000 for masses. The eldest one had left me a tablecloth which had yellow flowers on it and green leaves.

The epileptic with his charcoaled face always veered towards the leaves outside town, to pause and see something. Maybe he was looking back at Czechoslovakia, some memory of childhood, the olive-yellows, the sap-greens, the pistachios, the rose dorés of Prague, the acacia trees in blossom, the molten rose of summer roofs above houses of tallow and primrose-yellow.

13 August 1987. The Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague. The graffiti outside said ‘Who is my love?’ ‘John Lennon.’ ‘AIDS.’ The headstones are a monsoon. Some are pink-coloured like the undersides of mushrooms. Some are white and with shapes like clefts of snow. Groups of them hug one another. Pairs of them in intimate proximity are like two men talking. There is a shape on one of the headstones like the palace in Snow Whiteand the Seven Dwarfs.

Women look down from the windows of the houses around, leaning on the windowsills. Gargoyles rise out of sun-illuminated webs. Alders protect the borders of these seas of headstones and in some places intrude among the headstones, the sun pocketing its way among the leaves above a density of headstones, turning the leaves to gold. Under a cairn on a headstone is a Munich bus ticket with the words ‘May the Jewish people find peace. No more oppression.’ Under another cairn is a note: ‘Life is short. Do what you can to enlighten the world so your epitaph won’t be written: Life lived in vain.’

An Ashkenazi Jew sits on a scarlet bench.

The eldest of the Czech sisters had marigold hair, sashes of it: She fell in love with an Englishman who managed the local pencil factory. He’d played the Baron Minho Zeti in the light opera the year the Pontevedrian Embassy in Paris fell down.

She wore brown alpaca suits. It was a brief romance, a winter one.

In Dublin, when the sisters lived there, up the road from Red Spot Laundry, Grace’s Pub, Costello’s Garage, I dined on that tablecloth, drinking tea from white cups with gold handles, and tried to recall how the romance ended but couldn’t. It was just an image, the elderly lovers walking out by the oak trees in the direction of the Railway Hotel, long converted into the local army headquarters.

14 August 1987. When I stayed in Paris in 1968, it was in a high-rise like this one. The Marriage of Giovanni Arnolfini by Van Eyck on the wall. Stashes of Wagner and Beethoven records and glossy magazines in their assigned corner of the room. I had held a woman who gave French lessons that spring. A woman who used to go to mass in a harlequin hat. Why did she talk about abortion so much?

She’d been having an affair with another teacher in town. A man who played rugby every Sunday afternoon in the asylum grounds. One Sunday, when she felt he had kept her waiting too long, she went looking for him and saw them showering in their brute, grey place, the rugby players of town. Why hadn’t she fled there and then, she asked? Why hadn’t she gone to the Prague spring or the Paris revolution? Why hadn’t she re-immersed herself in the pastels of Europe, Europe where she’d studied for a while? Why hadn’t she admitted to herself there and then that sex is sacred and of God, and that to find salvation we must not fool ourselves, just be adventurous and seek holy union with other people, not the animalistic sex of this small town.

The only thing that stood out for me about that summer in France was my first trip to Chartres, the twin spires rising above the cornfields on a grey afternoon. My first summer at University College, Dublin, I returned to Chartres, boys speeding on mopeds on the summer evenings. On one of those evenings I heard a black American girl sing ‘There Is a Balm in Gilead’ in the cathedral.

Towards the end of my time at university I visited Chartres again, with Eleanor.

‘How long have you been together?’ an English girl asked us on the bus from Calais to Paris.

‘Let’s All Go Search for America’ was playing.

Eleanor’s hair stood out, very blonde, against the windows of the cathedral. We held hands in front of the black pearwood Virgin who was dressed in gold. Afterwards, in Paris, we had chips in Montmartre, a prostitute with ghosted henna hair seated at the open-air table opposite us. We started kissing on the boat back to England and made love in a house in Barnes, dove-coloured squirrels in the garden outside.

I remembered what the teacher of French had said about sex and it seemed prophetic. In Liverpool three black children, Peter, Peter and Paul, sensed the thrall between us and offered to carry our bags to the boat. For some reason I felt a fear, thinking of what should have been exotic, chocolate over the froth of cream of a cappuccino in our favourite late-night café in Dublin.

I hear that the French teacher married a doctor in Galway, lives in a house in a miasma of white houses by the bay, has four children with deeply nationalistic names. I hear that her hair is still red, that she wears beautiful clothes to art openings, that there’s something beautiful and grieving about her face, and that she does charitable work with the tinkers, walking in a red coat down lanes where the tinkers are encamped, red being the tinker colour of mourning.

‘I was beautiful in the early days.’ From Florence I went on to Rome, a stubble of marigolds and leaf parsley on the black wetness of Campo de’ Fiori when I arrived at evening. In Mario’s I had a modest meal and got a yellow bill with burgundy stripes on it. Just as I was getting up to leave the table a boy from Dublin with a toothbrush moustache and wearing a Fair Isle jersey sat beside me. He was organizing the first Hare Krishna march in Rome the following day and he invited me to join them, which I did, chanting ‘Hare Krishna’ with some Italians, a Scots boy with chestnut hair in a ponytail and radically illumined cheeks, American girls with pigtails, all in salmon-coloured robes.

A middle-aged man in a silver suit came up to me in the crowd to say, ‘You are beautiful.’

We passed a bridge over the Tiber which the sun had turned into a carmine fog.

Someone told me in Dublin early the following year that the boy from Dublin had died in London from a drug overdose.

Later that year, Eleanor gone, I returned to London. Lived in a squat in West London. The trade of stolen colour televisions was negotiated at the Windsor Castle and Lord Palmerston. A girl who used to walk around barefoot was picked up and jailed for doing a bombing. In the kiosk at the end of the street I would wait for Eleanor’s calls. Early in the month of the Birmingham pub bombing she told me that she would not be coming back, that she’d joined a religious group.

25 January 1975. I saw a person in Berkeley recently who walked and looked like you – so much so that I stood in fascination with many emotions turning, thinking it was you.

26 November 1975. I have had many abodes since coming here. And now I am living away from San Francisco. There is a thrift store in the nearby town which is fun. I purchased a little mink for $1.50 and a crocodile handbag for $1. Last week down in San Francisco I accidentally met with some boys from Dublin – they’d met on an Alaskan pipeline. They were joking and laughing. It could have been in a pub in Dublin. One of them had a pet goat when he was growing up in Ballyfermot.

Auntie Dymphna had a goat which had been deported from the garden next door. She used to keep her in the back. Once she nearly sent her to the butcher.

It’s autumn now and there’s a crispness in the evenings and the swallows are gathered by day and all the sounds are set apart from one another by night. It would be great if you came to America. The places you mention are each wonderful and there are also other things that are wonderful too. I work in a drug rehabilitation centre. It’s very nice here, quiet. Northern California greatly resembles Ireland – the land is green and there are many trees and rivers. There are no lambs. This is not sheep country.

I’ll light a little candle for you – it is shaped like a mushroom. Blues and yellows and whites.

I think of candles around a golden Virgin in Chartres and a sanctuary lamp suspended in a convent chapel in Mayo.

You talk of Ireland and of England, of endearing landscapes as ‘a common country’. But something about being surrounded by my past – by mistakes – weighed me down in Ireland and in England. Each way I turned they would confront me, sometimes mockingly. Though I did not realize it for many years I had to be away from them.

It is an odd place, California.

I’ll fly now.

14 August 1987. An old Italian stands to attention in front of the Child Jesus of Prague. There are sea shells and jewels at the feet of the child and yellow irises mixed with gypsophila in front of him; what could be riverine flowers, yellow flag, hornwort, the bogbean flower, which were always a relief for a lone and stellar cormorant.

Messages are sculpted on the wall. Thanks from Michele, Toronto, Canada. Dékuji Adrienne 1944. Graci a Familia Cacho Sousa. In a frame a picture of the Church of Minino Jesus de Praga, Rio de Janeiro, palmettos outside it.

Further down the church there are angels with gold brassieres and batons under the blue and pink smoke of an Assumption scene. The Czech women had a reproduction of Poussin’s Death of the Virgin in their home in County Galway. A boy from the North of Ireland I knew in London, a carpenter, had the same reproduction on his wall. He had a row over some repair with his oily Greek-Cypriot landlord who reported him to the Anti-Terrorist Squad. They burst down his door and when they found nothing never bothered to apologize or fix the place.

A sunset over the high-rise. The sun is an isolated boll and a pale blue mist rises to meet it.

‘Where I live there’s a couple who have just come from Mexico. He’s French. She’s American. You would like them. The opportunities for going so many places offer themselves here – South America, the Orient, Russia, India.’

There’s a song coming from a ghetto blaster: ‘Running Away Forever with the Shepherd Boy Angelo.’

A tapestry has been hung from the balcony of one of the flats, showing night in El Salvador: bodies rising from graves, men in cowboy hats being tortured in police stations, devils pulling naked women out of houses, nuns in outlandish wimples kneeling outside confessionals, Indians praying by open coffins in their sitting-rooms, houses, under huge coconut trees, going up in fire.

In one flat I pass a group of young people, some in baseball caps, are huddled on the floor. A boy is playing an accordion. Its borders are tallow and green-coloured and its body is gold. There are bottles of red wine on the floor around. Cervano Vino.

In Paris in 1968 I went to a concert given by a guitar-playing priest in the basement hall of the high-rise in which I was staying and drank wine for the first time, red wine, coughing it up.

Eleanor was in Paris the same summer. She lost her virginity to the father of the children she was minding. She liked sitting in the cigarette smoke of tables on the Boulevard St Michel. When the first chestnuts came to the Luxembourg Gardens we were both preparing to leave. But she was returning to the three-tier trays of cakes in Bewleys and the prospective boy-lovers from Rathmines and Rathgar and Monkstown.

‘Remember you told me how that blond solicitor leaned towards you in the toilet in Toners. That French boy looks like him.’

She wore a white blouse the night before I left Prague, silver caterpillar brooch on it, a little black hat, spears of black lace standing up on it, black leaves imprinted on the lace. Her face was nearly that of a skeleton, powdered and pearled. She sat beside me, singing along with ‘La Paloma’ as usual, head bowed.

There were two lovers seated on a bench on Wenceslas Square, the girl wearing white bobby socks and a skirt of cedar-green with pink roses and ruby crab-apples and pale green leaves on it, her head inclined towards the boy’s thighs. Around them the humble blue and red and yellow of Traktoro Export, Machino Export Bulharska Telecom Sofia Bulgaria, Lucerna Bar, Licensintory Moscow USSR, Vinimpex Sofia, Licence Know How Engineering, Hotel Druzhba.

Next morning there were marigolds being sold all over Wenceslas Square before I got the Metro to Leninova.

Tinker boys in white shirts and kipper ties outside St Saviour’s Church of John the Evangelist and St John the Baptist in Lewisham as Sunday mass proceeds inside, looking like boys outside churches on Sunday in Ireland.

A plea for the Peru missions near the railings and a sign saying ‘Do you want to know more about the Catholic faith?’

One of the women has taken home a collection of pamphlets with saints’ faces on them – Blessed Margaret Clitheroe, Blessed Cuthbert, St John Fisher, St Thomas More – I notice on my next visit to them and when I feel uneasy and an intruder, as I often do on these visits, I browse through them.

On the windowsill is a girl dancing with sunflowers at her feet, a scarlet bow on each of her feet; two matchstick caravans; two toby jugs; a lampshade held up by an elephant who has foxgloves at his feet. To the right of the window a photograph of Vincent, the dead boy, beside a picture of Marie Goretti.

‘It’s all going back to the 1300’s,’ the youthful and even-voiced father says, and we discuss a recent court case in London where a girl was prosecuted for killing a rat. Now that winter is moving in there’ll be no more journeys this year for them. But I’ll be leaving Lewisham for a while before the end of the year. I am planning to go to the United States.

All this was a year ago. Now it’s summer. I am separated from every country in the world. I hold Robin’s card and grasp for seconds the last night on Wenceslas Square, the powdered salvia, the lights. But after having been nearly swept out to sea, and having toyed with the idea of suicide, there’s a decision, despite the emptiness I had to fight, to keep trying for a path.

I keep hearing the voices of ancestors which started up in Prague.

‘He’d never have become a priest but for your vigilance.’

I see a clutter of young, newly ordained priests cycling into a town, bunting strung up and confetti being thrown at them, a middle-aged priest walking behind them, throwing bonbons from a biretta to children.

My mother, deep down, had hoped I’d become a priest.

After her marriage, as she walked out the Galway Road wheeling me, her boyfriend passed, the one she forsook because she had tuberculosis, on his way to the Galway races. He stopped his car, admired me and said: ‘He’ll have to do great things, this child.’ When I was three I got a gift of a river boat for Christmas. Ultramarine and white, with yellow wheels on it. A fat little fellow, I was standing at one end of the long dining-room, holding the river boat, my mother standing on the other side, crying.

Last Christmas I went to the land of river boats, the Deep South. I’ll go back to Alabama I think, get a job hewing wood. Always, always, there is something keeping you apart in England. The ancient war. Always, always, there is something reducing you as an Irish person to thief, to criminal. They just want you to sweep the roads, to be squalid for them.

‘Take care, soldier,’ one boy said to another as they parted near the tombstone of Thomas Dermody in Lewisham.

Thomas Dermody was a poet from County Clare who lived in Catford. He met a recruiting party in a pub in Great George’s Street on 17 September 1794. Went to England with the 108th Regiment of the Earl of Granard. Fought in the first Napoleonic wars. Journeyed through France, Holland, Germany as second lieutenant in the waggon corps. Saw the graves of Abelard and Heloise in Lombardy and was injured, his face disfigured and his left hand rendered useless. Returned to England. Published verse and drank. His clothes were found by the Ravensbourne river one night and the people of Catford went searching for the body, with candles. But he’d thrown them out of Catford manor, having been given new clothes within. His final friend was an Irish cobbler at Westminster. There were still cattle fields in Westminster at the time of their friendship. He drank himself to death at the age of twenty-seven.

‘Degraded genius! o’er the untimely grave / In which the tumults of thy breast were stilled,’ Lady Byron wrote. This poem she sent to Lord Byron and it initiated their courtship.

In a pub in Lewisham in July a young singer from Belfast in a red shirt, his hair the colour of sun on chestnuts, a pendant around his neck and a few fake poppies hanging by his thigh, sang:

As he was marching the streets of Derry

I hope he marched up right manfully

Being much more like a commanding officer

Than a man to die upon the gallows tree.

A kind of rallying spirit, an unwillingness to lie down, an invocation of Ireland – a madonna with blue veil and saffron belt, country women with coil on top of their heads coming in for mass on Sundays – the ability, as if from a wayside Goddess, to immure yourself and look back, picking up the sequence of the last year.

There was a strong morning light behind the bus in New Orleans and a black woman was standing beside it, engulfed in a striped blanket, as if she was in Africa.

A card had come from Dublin a few weeks before, Jan de Cock, The Flight into Egypt; demons doing parabolas on mountain tops; Mary in a turquoise gold-fringed cloak; the donkey’s head bowed in meekness at his task; St Joseph’s flowing, rich red cloak forming a rosette under the donkey’s mouth.

In Alabama a black man at the back of the bus described an execution he’d seen, on yellow mama, the electric chair. He had metal attached to his body. The boy cried, screamed. They put twenty-six pellets in him. He passed out. Then he woke, coughed, threw up. It took him a long time to die.

We stopped at the Greyhound bus station in Montgomery. The woman behind the restaurant counter was addressed as Miss Mary. There were pictures of missing children behind the counter. The queue for mash and peas included a woman in a lustrous pink trouser suit and a scarf over her bouffant hairstyle, a girl on crutches, a black boy in a fuchsine baseball cap, a woman with a bathing cap on her head.

Two black women stood outside as the sun went down on a street in Montgomery. One with a straggly, Gibson-girl hairstyle under a straw hat with piping around it. The other in a wavy henna wig, holographic glasses which reflected the sunset, a snakeskin handbag in her left hand.

I was travelling to Columbus, Georgia, because I loved the books of a writer born there. We arrived at ten at night. The small Greyhound bus station there was full of teenage soldiers, most of them sleeping, some looking drearily at you as you came in. They wore cocoa-coloured uniforms, a kind of East-man-colour glow to the edges of their uniforms at night, a carmine glow. Near the Greyhound station I passed a red-brick, spired church, the bricks delineated in white. There was a church house with the same style of brick beside it. The streets were etiolated.

A snowman was held up by strings in a garden; the bird cages lighted with fairy lights; a lighted Santa Claus head up a tree.

I called to a little hut of a bar where men played billiards on two tables.

‘A glass of white wine.’

‘We’ve none of the hard stuff,’ the woman shrieked at me.

I stayed at the Heart of Columbus Hotel. It had a red neon heart graven on it.

Next morning a black woman with a forties scarf on her head cut my hair in Sherald’s barber shop. There was an advertisement for their mortuary near the washbasin. ‘Burial with compassion, dignity, integrity.’ The sunshine coming through the door and the window was pure yellow.

On a bridge over the Chattahooche which divides Columbus, Georgia, from Phoenix City, Alabama, a man was playing music on a Prince Albert tobacco tin, using it as a mouth organ, as a parade passed.

Mrs Wives of America stood up, very straight and stern, on front of a Pontiac. Drill girls marched by and more disparate boys in magenta letterman jackets.

A black epileptic woman was standing on the street beside a wig shop called Woman Tree, red kerchief on her head, her features protruding blade-like, her head rolling. She was quietly talking to herself.

I’d once seen a documentary in the town I was from in which young American GIs lined up to go to war, getting into a silvery-blue Greyhound bus.

The writer’s husband had distinguished himself with the Ranger Battalion in Anzio, Italy. Some years later he committed suicide. ‘Il est mort stoïquement,’ was his obsequy.

On the bus out of Columbus a black man had his arms around a box which contained his belongings, the words ‘Milwaukee’s Best’ on the side of it, a string tied around the box, holding his belongings down. Someone in the front of the bus said the name ‘Raymond’ in conversation and a woman at the back started shouting: ‘Raymond. Raymond. My son is Raymond.’

Georgia: the oak trees and poplars had turned gold, the sweet gums red, the maples electric scarlet; yellow ribbons around cypress trees and post oaks. Darkness in the bus, a last bit of the sunset reflected on a window and the headlights of cars lighting up faces. One black woman with a huge swollen eye in sudden illumination. At a filling station, just before we drove into North Carolina, the breeze fresher and even intoxicating, the radio played Willie Nelson’s ‘Always on My Mind’.

In the Midwest I visited an old couple who’d once hosted me in the United States when I was there for a sojourn as one of a group. A Chinese woman, a melon-orange shawl around her, wheeled an old man with wispish, almost albino hair, where he wasn’t bald, over an iced lake. They’d once driven me in the fall to a Quaker graveyard, the earth organza gold, a myriad of little unnamed rocks for headstones. That trip had helped me come through much trouble with my family.

In Wyoming the bus broke down in a snow storm. We were rescued by American Red Cross women in moon boots and brought to a hall where we were wrapped in blankets and given tea.

Going down the mountains into California was a boy from Basel, in nefarious black, who was running away. His stepfather had beaten him up. A bit of delicate knee was exposed.

A Cuban boy in damascened black sang ‘Silent Night’ in Spanish, cabaret-style.

In San Francisco, Christmas evening, I attended a party in a room dominated by Piero della Francesca’s La Sacra Converzione. A coterie of professors. As they talked I browsed through a book on Tuscany.

First weeks away from Dublin I took the train from London to Florence. It was November. I returned to the monastery with the broom hanging on the dormitory wall, pictures of St Gennaro, bishop, stuck to the wall of the street leading to it.

From Florence I went on a slow, grey-green train with wooden compartments to Assisi. We stopped at barrack-like stations. There was a picture of St Francis appeasing the wolf of Gubbio in front of me. The women wore black. ‘Fa lo scrittore lei?’ one of them asked me. There were fields of winter barley in the hills around Assisi. On the way back I lost my ticket and hitched through the mountains, arriving in Florence as it was snowing, warming myself in a café by the Arno where there were men dressed as women, in fur coats, resplendent wigs, one in a dress of many-hued bugle-beads. Marilyn Monroe singing ‘River of No Return’ was playing on the juke-box.

Perhaps it was beginning then, in a room in San Francisco, what had been overtaking me for years, a breakdown.

On the day after Christmas I walked the hills and looked into the face of an old Chinese lady.

When it came it put me with the ostracized of our town, the Mickos, the woman with the prematurely white hair and the apricot lipstick who used to shout out ‘Glorio, Glorio to the bold Fenian men’ on the street, and walk off with young men.

Mental hospital patients used to visit her and feel her breasts. Sometimes the price was tobacco. She lived in a house with a doll outside in a jersey of the Galway colours, maroon and white, and in the kitchen a portrait of Michael Collins. Sweet currant bloomed around it in May, and in the meadows at the back there was a refuse of broken bottles. Next door to her lived a one-legged man who was a veteran of the First World War. He sat in a cap and coat beside a pile of Hotspurs, Beanos and Dandys. Her business was stopped by the guards and then she sold holy pictures in the cattle mart before going to England. In a mental hospital in South London, in my mind, she was walking away on a street with a porpoise of a National teacher.

Other images of the fifties in Ireland came back in the mental hospital: boys marching to confession one side of the street, girls on the other; women queuing with Vincent de Paul coupons in a classroom on Fridays; turf mould disfiguring poor boys’ nails; emerald school buses, an armament of bicycles by their sides; Children of Mary stalking the town in blue and white carrying Virgin Marys with screw-in arms which they temporarily exhibited in the homes of prostitutes or the dying; barley being loaded on to barges on a canal; campanula in front of the convent statue of Mary, the stations of the cross in Indian-ink black on the white blocks of her rosary.

And an emasculate voice whispered: ‘Do you need confession?’

Years later I saw the prostitute on the tube in London. She was wearing high boots, transparent black stockings with black dabs on them, a crimson dress and a pearl necklace. She’d married a butcher and had two daughters. In a street which mixed nationalities and brands of exile the shop, which also sold Irish marshmallows, bore her husband’s name and the words ‘and daughters’.

Beyond the station from which the prostitute and Guy ‘Micko’ Delaney departed there was the bog with its cormorants, its bogbean flowers, its bog pimpernels, its St John’s wort, its near-violet stacks of turf, its manic plastic covers, its pervasive rainbows. Daniel, a friend at school, who had brown eyes and a sturdily moulded face, used to cut turf there in June and turn it in July to allow it to crust. He put it out in stooks and brought it home in a horse and cart before the dew of August came.

Another friend, an old Englishman, used to come every spring and fish in the bog river. He grew up in the Midlands of England and the bog reminded him of his childhood. He’d gone to university in Birmingham and afterwards taught in Chester. In his twenties he’d go to Norway every summer but then he found Ireland.

‘When I stand alone in this bog I can hear “Crimond” again.’

In my childhood you’d see Teddy boys in red jackets on the station platform against the bog. One Teddy boy was drowned. It was a man who used to steal suits in town and then parade in them on the prom in Galway, past the Grand Hotel, Commercial House, Donnellan’s pub, who recovered the body.

An Irish doctor pursued me in the hospital.

‘You’re clinically depressed.’

He’d follow me past young male patients with shaven heads who looked like Mayakovski.

‘Do you remember Olive White?’ Olive White was Miss Ireland when we were very young. She used to turn the wheel of fortune on the Bunny Carr Show, and afterwards she married English nobility.

‘Be careful you don’t end up chasing chickens into boxes,’ he said nastily one day when I wouldn’t listen to him.

He liked to summon up Brendan Behan’s last days, his companionship with a Dublin prostitute.

‘He always said moving from the tenements to a council house ruined his sex life.’

The young doctor was sitting under a view of the Isle of Ischia.

It was the dark side of the brain; walking through it was walking through Hell. It was the genetically mad side of me, the part that clawed at me. And the landscape I was walking through looked like the landscape around the high-rises in Prague. Or it may have been the landscape around high-rises on the suburbs of Paris. When I slept at night I saw people who were half-dead. They sat on benches, drooping. They looked like Czechs, women in floral dresses and bobby socks, men with eagle or turkey badges on their lapels. Sometimes the black woman from Columbus, Georgia, with the red scarf on her head, sat among them, nodding. There were marigolds at the feet of these people. Marigolds were one of the flowers of Prague. And sometimes, instead of the near-dead, there was a young soldier in sap-green uniform, with straw hair, at a café table, a girl on the other side of the table, the soldier looking out at the amber trams.

A mental hospital with walkways between the top floors of buildings; gargoyles coming out of corners; a coat of arms with antelopes on it; disentangled tapes blowing on paths; groundsel and wild garlic in the grass.

A woman in a scarlet flamenco dress, carrying Tesco bags in both hands, walked endlessly through the grounds, as did Rastafarians with floods of hair and girls with ecclesiastical purple hair.

‘Lesbian wants sperm. No commitments,’ a bit of paper said on a notice board at the entrance.

There was Hyacinth Ward, Bluebell Ward, Narcissus Ward.

‘Are you one of us?’ a man said, doubtfully, to the sound of ‘Hotel California’.

‘Don’t mind where I’m buried as long as I get to Heaven,’ a salmon-faced Irishman said to me. He also told me about holidays with relatives in Rhyl, about the hereditary thatched cottage which had gone to ruin at home.

‘PG Tips always tastes better with you,’ a Polish lady informed me. She had many stories: how she’d hidden under the covers on the back of a truck and got to Berlin just after the war; how she’d stayed in a house in Berlin with some of the rooms missing; how she’d moved to a camp where the Germans, even in defeat, would only drink freshly ground coffee.

‘All I wanted was fish and chips,’ one silvery-haired old man in a suit smiled as he told me.

There was a boy who, in his dreams at night, always walked in Catford, a lighted sign for the Catford Gold Cup in the background. I walked through a landscape after war. It was a bog.

You feel sick inside. You feel very sick, but there is something there even if it’s all over. They did everything in their power to stop you.

Just outside the mental hospital there is a drapery store with white lace roses on the suits.

I went to Brighton that spring to throw myself in the sea, like the tinker man.

First I had a coffee in a café in Soho. ‘Oh, I knew Madame Valerie,’ a woman was saying, almost hysterically. ‘I first met her in 1924.’

‘Welcome to Brighton’, a sign said by the railway tracks, under purple lilac.

Last time I’d come here was the January the Athina B was washed up on the beach. I was with a student from the Royal College of Art I was having an affair with. When I lost interest in him he wrote letters to friends of mine, asking if they were coming to his funeral.

Schoolboys in moss-green jackets had gathered in a bus marked Hove outside the station. A girl with cat’s-eyes glasses and a sixties bouffant hair-style led a shepherd dog with a Lippizaner haircut past a brandy-and-wine shippers.

There was a huge rubber reptile with green spots on him on the opposite side of the street to the beach. The sign said ‘Children under 14 only’.

An Arab girl with henna hair was making a video of her family with a huge camera by the sea, a woman’s and some girls’ faces hidden behind Moslem veils.

I went to the spot where the Athina B had been and instead of throwing myself in to drown I went for a swim. The water was already warm.

The tinkers could tell you that Judas hung himself from an elder tree. They could tell you that a tinker called James McPherson was hanged in Banff on the Scottish border in 1700. They could tell you about beet-gathering in Scotland not too long ago. They’d pick up the thread of a family tale out of the beet fields of Scotland. How a man raised himself up in society with a successful plumbing business, then, on a whim, stole a Ford Orion, and ended up in a jail by the sea on the south-west coast.

A girl, his sweetheart, described visits to him. The walk from the bus stop down a road by the sea. The lemon waiting-room inside. The warden with as many keys as beads on a rosary on a chain by his side. Red-brick buildings with turrets outside and cherry trees, like dirty Guinness when in blossom. Armies of prisoners coming out all of a sudden from the buildings opposite, in pale blue shirts and dark blue trousers, a kind of exhilaration about them, as if they were going on a pilgrimage.

A woman once a beauty queen in Kerry, ‘the year Canvey Island flooded’, killed herself in that encampment in May and was buried with a wreath of shiny red roses in the shape of a vardo and horses. When she’d been laid out, near a rhino in a sailor suit, there was a candle at her head.

I didn’t go back to the encampment after that.

Modern caravans, men hanging around as they hang around streets in Nationalist Belfast, one supreme vardo soon to be gone on the roads.

I blamed many things for this breakdown, but I could more or less directly trace it back to a night in Dublin, in the middle of an affair, a very vulnerable affair, a girl, erstwhile friend, screaming at me: ‘You’re incapable. Incapable of full physical relations with women.’ She’d heard on the Dublin grapevine of some sexual failure. If I’d have stayed in Dublin I’d have committed suicide.

After loss, when the crying stops inside, something else starts, an alternative world. It is peopled by a tinker woman, a mad aunt, an English poet. There are squats in Battersea, squats in Maida Vale where you live. You find a body upstairs in one, and ceilings fall in on bathrooms and bedrooms. But you keep going. For a while, in a very peaceful time, there’s a flat beside the heath in Hampstead. You spend a while in the United States, autumn 1981.

A Chinese lady who’d been locked for eight years in a chicken hut, where she could only write on toilet paper, was also there. Her hair was swabbed over her head and she wore jerkins and pants. She’d straddle with her fifty-five-year-old Chinese boyfriend past young Americans in shorts and T-shirts. Once she gave a reading. There was a Norwegian writer with a gipsy scarf on her head and in a décolleté dress on one side of her and a Philippine writer in an even more décolleté dress on the other side of her. The large hall was scattered by American feminists, some in crocheted hats, who ran vegetarian cafés and macrobiotic cafés which also sold turkey sandwiches. The little old Chinese lady raised her arms in the air and asked why the American army wasn’t there.

There was a Polish woman with steely hair in a ponytail. When she had travelled around the United States on Greyhound buses she’d keep loading tins of food on to the buses. She had studied medicine in Leningrad during the last years of Stalin. When he died they were asked to cry and they cried. A few days later they were asked to laugh and they laughed.

Your hostess was a Chinese lady who liked wearing shawls of lacquer red and pink. She’d hidden among the skeleton firs in the mountains near Peking during the Chinese revolution and then escaped to Taiwan.

We had parties on lawns at night. There was usually a fat lady in black – black dress, black shoes, black stockings – sitting on those lawns, holding a flotilla of black balloons. She was in love with a middle-aged Egyptian doctor, with black and ash hair which fell on to his shoulders, who later married a young Polish waitress. Later, she went to New York, where she’d stand around Rubens exhibits in galleries, because she reckoned that men who liked the flushed, flaccid bodies of Rubens would like her.

You had an affair there, with a boy you met at a discotheque mainly frequented by South American girls who’d been tortured, and by gays. It was on the edge of cornfields which Amish people rode through on buggies, the women in poke bonnets.

One morning, after having made love to him in the bath the previous night, you walked past a Catholic church with him in which a wedding was taking place. It was just about the third anniversary of Eleanor’s wedding.

Although it was only November, an imbecilic Santa was swinging himself on a swing in a shop window and a Virgin Mary with outspread auburn hair, who looked like an Italian starlet of the fifties, looked aghast at the Christ child in another shop window.

You made friends there with the Norwegian writer and the Israeli writer, an Arab Catholic. Afterwards, you visited the Norwegian writer in Norway. When you arrived at Oslo Central Station youths and girls in pale blue jeans and high boots were sweeping up the garbage with brooms. Two days later, Sunday, women in fur coats had come out of Karl Johans Cathedral which had chandeliers in it. The same day you took a train to the town in the country where your friend lived. Norwegian trains are very slow. Taciturn boys with tight pouches of pubic hair on pale skin sat endlessly in saunas. You went with the writer’s son to her summer house by a fjord and sailed in a boat with him out on to the lake, under the mountains. Snow came to the hilly town when you were there, falling on the houses which were set apart from one another.

You visited the Israeli writer in Jerusalem, just after the Sabra and Chatila massacres. He had a menorah in his room, five brown candles in it and two white ones with gold sequins on them.

Rabbis prayed, heads close to the temple wall.

‘We sit in solitude and mourn for the temple that is destroyed. We sit in solitude and mourn.’

I travelled around Israel. There had been soldiers on foot milling on the roads near the Lebanese border, an unceasing, onward march. In olive-yellow hills black goats had bits of white like wigs on their heads. Tanks had overtaken camels in the desert behind a deserted white-brick refugee town near Jericho. An old man had played an accordion by a field of melons.

Back in Jerusalem, in the Mea Shearim district, men with peoths, in fur-edged streimel hats, had walked by in the September light.

I took a bus from the Jaffa Gate to Bethlehem. The protruding-nosed bus was old and dusty and had no colour. Geese and goats had fled from its path and some of the passengers were geese.

There was a little blue and white flag on a mast in the middle of Manger Square in Bethlehem. Sweets had been laid out on tables on the little alleys that led away from the square: pistachios, hazelnuts, almonds in the yoghurt whites, saffron reds, pistachio greens. There was a framed photograph of Tracey Ullman on a wall above a bench on which men smoked honey-soaked tobacco.

I thought of Eleanor.

I thought of my new friend, Marek, whom I’d met in a school in the West of Ireland. His mother was a German actress and his father, from whom she’d long been separated, was a Palestinian surgeon.

I walked to the Mount of Olives one night, through the West Bank, and looked down on the Garden of Gethsemane, the Kidron river.

In Acca, by the Mediterranean, I had wanted to masturbate but didn’t.

After walking to the Mount of Olives I met my Arab friend in La Belle Bar. There was a picture of a grey-haired Paul Kent on the wall and the jukebox played ‘We had joy. We had fun. We had seasons in the sun.’ That was the song that was playing in my mind June 1974 when I walked into Easons in Dublin, picked up the Irish Press, a little news item at the bottom left-hand side of the front page about the death of a sister of a friend of mine. She’d been killed near Lyon, hitch-hiking from Geneva to Paris. Shortly after that Eleanor went to see her brother, who was stranded in San Francisco without a valid visa.

One evening in Norway we had earthberries and cream just as Mr Haythornthwaite, the Englishman who visited our town when I was a child, would have had in Norway in the nine-teen-twenties.

As I walked up the hill after arriving at the station my friend was waiting outside her door. ‘Thought you’d never make it.’

An actress friend of mine died in Dublin that day.

‘Once hit by it you are haunted forever,’ a voice had said in a dream shortly after the girl had abused me and Eleanor had gone.

It was in Cairo, early in the summer, the muezzin’s call to prayer at dawn, gurkies on front of cars on October 6 Bridge, sag pipes played by the Nile as brides in glacial white were photographed with sudden flashes by Coca-Cola stalls like munition heaps.

In London you start recovering again. You start being well again.

An old man, a neighbour, face red as a lady tulip, stands outside his door. A trough of sanguine horsechestnuts beside the door, the last green of the year lit up. Sometimes he talks about Mabel Stevenson, a girlfriend he had before the war who used to live in the oatmeal and faded mulberry-coloured houses visible just above the hill; about meetings in Lyons Corner Houses all over London, an idyll on the Cornish Riviera. She joined the Wings and was killed. A last photograph. She’s standing in very high high heels, very straight, to the right of an army big band who are arraigned with their instruments in front of an aerodrome. In memory of her he observes a wartime diet in the evenings: Spam, Cheddar cheese, a slice of half-moon cake.

As a youth he worked in the Black Cat cigarette company in Camden Town. He did an evening course in photography and got a job in Whitehall during the war, working for the War Ministry. His task just after the war was blowing up photographs of quislings.

I sit on a deck chair with him on warm afternoons, beside the pineapple broom. He describes how the patch of road near us was once haunted by men taking bets. Now there’s an estate agent’s which is open on Sundays, painted viridian outside with viridian fluorescent lights in the window.

That autumn, at the opening of an exhibition by a Russian painter, I saw an old friend of mine – the boy who used to take turf home with a donkey and cart before it got wet.

The landscape of East Galway behind the cottage. Beds of pearl-like rock, riff-raff of cypresses, abandoned baths for cows to drink from, verdigris on thatch, sudden illuminations on the horizon.

The Russian painter wore a crimson caftan and as if drawn by that a woman in a crimson coat approached him. ‘May I introduce myself?’ He totally ignored her.

‘You’ll probably never meet me again,’ a very tanned woman with honey-coloured hair in a pigtail, in a black leather skirt, said in a kind of despair. ‘I’m off to live in Wiltshire.’ She was talking to a man with skimpy, shoulder-length grey hair, in drainpipe trousers, dicky bow with white mice on it, who was staring with infatuation at the painter. A woman with an entire batik trailing from her handbag very purposefully blocked his view.

I was at the party because I knew Vincent, the waiter with the canary-yellow quiff in otherwise dun hair, who was from Derry. He wore a tuxedo, a sleeper in his left ear. Then suddenly I saw Daniel. He had not changed. Walked out of school twenty years ago and had not changed. He wore a black suit, a shirt of blue and yellow and white. He still had that moulded face, brown eyes with flecks of gold.

I’d met him once since he’d left. He’d returned to town for a visit two years after first going.

‘Reason I left Ireland was because I wanted to fuck. You couldn’t fuck in Ireland.’

I didn’t approach him. Just looked.

This melancholic city of exiles, all races, vendors of Colombian star fruit and golden passion fruit, but always, in the wetness, the incipient sense of tribe.

Met Daniel in Salthill once and we went for a secret, naked swim. He had swabs of sores on his body and a soldier’s pectorals. His body smelt of Vaseline. The day was very grey and there was an alarming number of nuns on the prom.

‘I will always have Teampoilín in my mind,’ Daniel said as he swam. Teampoilüín was the ruined church by the river in our town where miscarried or aborted babies were buried, as well as illegitimate babies who died at birth.

Barry McGuire sang ‘Eve of Destruction’ from an amusement arcade which was painted in twin colours outside – tobacco brown, frog green – and Padre Pio’s face was nailed to a billboard outside the church next door.

On one of Mr Haythornthwaite’s final trips to our town, when he was sitting in the buffet at Westland Row Station, waiting for the train West, no other customers in the buffet, a woman in a sky-blue coat came in and sat at his table. There were many empty tables. ‘There are some very nice soldiers in Collins Barracks,’ she said eventually.

I visited him shortly before he died. A room in a row of council houses. It was autumn and there was a carton of Chesterfields on the cupboard – white and red with black lettering – a souvenir from the time he gave up smoking cigarettes.

In Dublin once, after you’d left Eleanor in Bewleys in Westmoreland Street, you saw a young male prostitute with blond hair, in pale blue denim, being fished out of the Liffey. You felt like giving that boy some speech, some memorial, in this city of Guinness-lubricated and Guinness-agitated speech.

I got a lift to Ireland that autumn with Vincent and a friend of his, Chris. There were cumulus clouds over an Italian villa of a pub called the Ocean Queen and over raspberry haemorrhages of council houses. Chris spotted a headline in the window of a newsagents which looked like a Royal Legion hut.

‘I’m not having an affair,’ says vicar. ‘I’m a pouf.’

Vincent had been a rent boy before he became a waiter. For a while he worked in a room full of out-of-order washing machines, where old men came to have tea and sherry and be whipped. His mother was a heroin addict who brought him over from Deny when he was very young. For a while he had a foster mother who was an East Kilbride Catholic in Appleby in Westmoreland. When he was seven or eight he confronted his foster mother in Louis XV heels with fancy bars: ‘You’ve lost a son and gained a daughter.’

Chris had hazel hair, a scimitar of freckles across his face. He wore a watch with teddy bears instead of digits. He switched all the time from a tough Dublin working-class accent to a camp South-East London one. He came over from Dublin when he was thirteen and went to school at Sedgehill. His first sexual experience had been with a girl who’d bestow herself for Cadbury’s cream eggs. Her father was a piper who played on Saturday nights in the Pipers’ Club. He played his favourite tune, ‘Speed the Plough’, in the house as they made love in a shed.

We stopped at a church in which one of the stained-glass windows depicted a crucifix made of lilies. There was a note beside a candle. ‘For my son Ben who is 21 today.’ The names of the First World War dead were ingrained in the wall outside. ‘Of your charity pray …’

We passed through a mountainous landscape of boarded-up houses, scattered rocks, dried-up rivers. Suddenly there was a Congregationalist church and beside it a Chinese restaurant, Po Lun.

Vincent had been born near the statue of Our Lady Queen of Peace in the Creggan. She had blue, upcast, lunatic eyes.

The boys in tartan kilts used come to Deny on Saturdays in buses to march.

‘Are you Irish?’ a soldier boy asked me at a disco the other night. ‘Why?’ says I. ‘Do you want some Irish?’

Posters for the Wolfe Tones and the Pogues hugged electric poles in Dublin. The trees were yellow.

‘Nice day in the shelter,’ a woman sarcastically said.

Some men were working on the pavement outside Trinity College. ‘Sure, they’ll be pulling it up next week.’ There was another driven bit of sarcasm from a passing woman.

Two women on a bus talked.

‘And I said to him it’s about time he’d be going to the altar.’

‘She boils a good egg.’

‘Mind you, it goes soft now and then.’

By the Grand Canal two prostitutes were fighting. ‘She fuckan cut her wrists and you don’t care.’ One was wearing a short crimson dress and carrying a handbag. The other was wearing a fake leopardskin coat.

On Percy Place Bridge nearby was scrawled: ‘Boo is a prick, but a cool one.’

There was a new motorway outside Galway city with the ruin of a castle on a circle of exhibition verdure in the middle of a roundabout.

You go back to the town you’re from. An ancient sign for Kincora Plug, on the gable of a town house where the town houses ascend in size, is a mirage of colour, mainly navy.

The legend is that while a local Moslem lady customary veil on her head, was preparing dinner recently a billygoat who’d run away from some English convoy people had intruded upon her in the kitchen.

‘Elizabeth Maloney Don’t know her. But I know her aunt.’

Now that I’m here, people who ran away are called up, an inventory. A woman who ran away with a circus artiste. The woman across the road who followed her example shortly afterwards: she’d always emulated her neighbour. If her neighbour bought a lampshade, she bought one. If her neighbour bought a carpet, she bought one. The second woman ran away on a country fair day. It could have been with any of four men.

‘Hope you get the weather you’re expecting,’ one of three men leaning against the bank corner tells me.

Once there was a virtually unbudging, save for a rota in the pub, row of First World War veterans here. ‘Rue di Doo Boys’ they were called, after Rue de Deux Bois.

A gargantuan one-legged man whose wife, a dress-maker, festooned him in right-fitting clothes.

One of them had deserted in the Judean Hills. They thought he’d been killed and sent home a body they believed to be him and he’d stood at this bank corner, saffron-brick then as it is now, watching his own funeral.

The smallest of them would shave his legs each year for about ten years after the First World War and box in the Con-naught Under 16.

Another little fellow became an idiot, would wander about town after his mental collapse, in a cap and coat to his feet, singing rebel songs and ranting about opposing sides in the Civil War, joined the circus, was killed in a car accident.

A fellow with pitch-black hair, face always charcoaled in stubble, called Joseph O’Meara after an illustrious Limerick opera singer, would sing arias – Puccini on verdant spring days – in his malodorous black coat on the side-line at GAA matches, arms outstretched.

The gargantuan fellow, despite his one leg, had gone back to war, in October 1936, to fight on Franco’s side in the Spanish Civil War. He’d never got, for some reason, very far beyond the coast of Galicia. In his last years he was the town crier. Would clang a bell on the anniversaries of Ypres and Givenchy, shouting, ‘Hear ye. Hear ye.’

Teddy bears having a tea-party in the window of a guesthouse; the news that a tinker who lived by himself in a caravan by the Ash Tree has died; a blonde-haired girl leaning against a wall asks me, ‘Are you Australian?’; a visit to the bog.

You feel like a trespasser, a bit of fuschia just visible in the gable window of a country house distantly, the kind of house which has a family of unmangled country boys.

He had a wife once, the tinker. She left him, ‘shipped herself out of Ireland’. He died of abandonment and a harsh life-style in the Regional Hospital in Galway, still in unresolved youth. There is a wake, and tinkers come from all over Galway, women in expansive head scarves like East European women, and Pakistani traders. He was a rag-and-bone man, used to collect scrap on a cart and pile it up beside his caravan.

During the war, when cars were disused and wrecks of cars accumulated in the fields about town, tinkers had a glut of scrap and made rings and brooches from those cars and initialled them. When I was a child he showed me one of those rings, which a sparkle of spring sunshine had just indicated to him in a meadow, initialled by an uncle.

He lived in a white, modern caravan full of Staffordshire and Chelsea china with a prominent picture of Our Lady, Comforter of the Afflicted. He had a mongrel dog, referred to as ‘a fool of a dog’, as companion.

A tinker girl in a maroon summer dress with large white spots in it sings ‘Four Country Roads Leading to a Town in County Galway’ and ‘The Fields of Athenry’ at his wake.

He was a Teddy boy in my youth, a little older than me, long locks, sculpted mouth, a pale, almost a madonna face.

‘I have no mind for happiness. Just for peace of mind.’

There was a Polish woman who lived in this town once, the mother of a friend who had blonde, wavy hair and liked wearing black glasses with white frames. He had corn hair, loops of glasses, and I snatched at his corn hair outside the Boys’ National School one afternoon after school and pleaded with him to be my special friend. He would concede nothing.

I was invited to their house once, for a children’s party. She wore a necklace of sea-shells and a white dress with large black spots for the party. In their drawing-room was a picture of an Edwardian lady and gentleman in a chamber pot patterned with shamrocks.

The father died, and they headed to Durham in the north of England.

Years later I saw my friend on The Late Late Show, playing a cello.

The Polish woman came from a town near the site of a concentration camp. Recently, in Berlin, I saw a photograph of an entrance to that town, cobbled road, black lampposts, houses with dormer windows, where Jewish pedlars would gather daily before the war.

Her neighbours in the fashionable avenue in town, with its double-flowering prunus trees in the front gardens, testified that they would hear her screaming in the middle of the night.

Once a Polish film came to the town hall and she stood outside the cinema, in a black suit, for the best part of an hour, as if advertising the film, or as if in solidarity with people she would never meet again.

It’s just a memory of the dead now. But no … something asks me to return another time, tells me that there’s room for me in as yet dark, misunderstood places.

Just before Christmas I visit an old lady in Denmark Hill whose husband was Polish. She lives on the fourth floor of a mansion of flats. Beside it is a new apartment block in the shape of a lighthouse. She met her husband early in the war and had a son by him. His brother had been one of the officers killed at Katyn. After the war he deserted her, returning to Poland.

Her son manages a gay bookshop in the Midlands and rarely visits her.

Her husband lectured at an agricultural training college when he returned to Poland and in later years also worked as a courier for Polish tourists.

She met him again, by accident, summer of 1986, in Prague. She was with a lady companion and he was leading a band of Polish tourists in Wenceslas Square. They’d gone to that café, the three of them. The band had been playing ‘A Cup of Coffee, a Sandwich and You.’ Afterwards, they’d walked through back streets, women standing outside doors, lights above the doors. She’d seen an old Jewish man pass by a window with festoons in it, his back bent. Or was he a ghost?

Her husband came to see her the following year in London and afterwards she sent him food packages and many gifts but then he ceased writing.

Her legs are swollen and she goes to the window with difficulty, looks out on the winter sunset over a Georgian square in Denmark Hill and says, ‘£35 a week. We deserve better.’

An old Russian emigré is dressed as Santa in Tesco’s in Cat-ford, enthroned on a platform. A little Malaysian man lies on the upstairs floor of the café in Soho. He holds up a crucifix with one hand, and with the other throws rose petals, which he fetches out of a small brown paper bag. Some of the rose petals hit a baby in a romper suit patterned with clowns, held by a young man whose head is barely sheathed with hair, whereupon a Greek jumps up and starts beating up the Malaysian. The Greek chases the Malaysian out on to the street.

A little serving lady comes in with a bunch of Irish Catholics and for some reason starts spreading them on the spot where the Malaysian had lain.

Many of the Christmases over the last years Marek, the boy from Munich, came to my flat. He’s not coming this year: he’s got AIDS. He’s been HIV positive since 1983, the virus identified in 1984, but now he’s in hospital in Berlin. Heidi, a girlfriend you had after Eleanor, also lives in Berlin. Carl’s moved back to London. Eleanor’s moved on to Amsterdam.

You spend Christmas with the homeless, old men with their hair curling up like smoke from a country cottage.

As you watch old men lining up for soup you think of a funeral of a ninety-year-old uncle under an East Galway sunset; second cousins, a man and a woman who lived together in the country in East Galway, whose house burned down, killing them; your step-aunt and step-uncle who died young, buried in cemeteries facing one another in County Westmeath, a road between the cemeteries.

Not her own children, my grandmother used to throw saucers at them, and my mother would cry out, ‘They have a mother in Heaven too.’

My step-aunt went to the Immaculate Training College in Limerick. She taught at the Mercy Convent in Navan before she married, and later taught at a rural school where she worked right up to her death.

My mother got tuberculosis too, from germs under the bed of a woman with tuberculosis she visited regularly, but she recovered and married.

When I was thirteen she came into the theatre I’d constructed in the back-shed. I was standing in a turban with a turkey feather in it, with a tan I’d acquired from mixing some of her cosmetics, and she started beating me in a wild, frightened way, pulling down the sack curtains at the same time, pulling out lavender from jam jars.

‘All this was redeemable,’ Heidi said. ‘It’s Dublin that nearly destroyed you.’

Someone played ‘O Solo Mio’ on a mouth organ near Vauxhall Bridge. I remembered what the old lady had said about Christmas during her brief marriage, how the priest used to come to the house each Christmas Eve and break bread.

It was that girl. She’d wander around Dublin saying things like, ‘Lizzie Rossiter is a virgin.’ She was about six feet tall, had blonde hair tossed like a capuchin’s, underneath an infernal, dissatisfied face. She liked wearing a flowing lavender cloak and white rubber, barred forties sandals when she walked her aunt’s Irish wolfhound on Grafton Street and the surrounding streets. This dog was treated as a special guest in the Golden Spoon on Grafton Street. In her aunt’s house where she lived there was a display of ancient Ireland’s Owns, Freeman’s Journals, Irish Schools’ Weeklies, Weldon’s Ladies’ Journals on a low table in the middle of the sitting-room, and above the mantelpiece tasselled dance cards behind a frame. Elsewhere on the walls there were scenes from Ireland’s past in black and white – fields being staked out during the war – and photographs with a sweetheart from the National Athletic and Cycling Association, one taken on a laneway, the other in the Royal Marine Hotel in Dun Laoghaire. Green plants grew under pictures of St Athnacht, St Eanna and Napoleon in a maroon cloak, jabot, wreath on his head, and shoes of white with gold designs like those of Our Lady of Fatima.

The aunt wore a black mantilla or black cloche hat if she wasn’t in the blue and white of the Little Company of Mary. The girl went to get her a bottle of whiskey one day and came home and found her dead, whereupon she had the house to herself.

We were very happy, Eleanor and I, when Eleanor came back from California. But after wending our way to a party this girl let fly at me: ‘You’re incapable. Incapable of full,’ she raised her hand as it conducting an orchestra, ‘full physical relations with women. It’s your family. All because of your family. You hate women. With Eleanor, yeah.’

I believe that woman has a child of her own now with whom she lives in that house in Windy Arbour with its Irish, Catholic memories.

Berlin, 3 May 1991. I remember once taking the train west in Ireland on a summer’s evening. Past suburbs of Dublin. Lilies on the canal running alongside the railway tracks. I thought of Russia. I had suffered a great loss. A loss I could not comprehend or cope with. But I knew something connected me with Russia, something would bring me there. Someone was there.

I have been terribly, terribly lonely but now I must call up the child. The child is me, the broken inner part of me. When you went, my love, the imprint, the ectoplasm of a little boy was left. I have almost lost touch with him at times, but now he is close.

I left Ireland shortly after the outpouring, vowing never to go back. The wisteria blue of the mountains and the talmudic shapes by the docks are always part of me.

‘We teach all hearts to break,’ a sign had said on a wall under a flyover near Portobello Road on my arrival in London in the summer of 1977.

‘You smell of bitter almonds,’ a girl told me in a café in Dublin a few days before the attack. A beautiful, blonde girl from our town who liked wearing white dresses with black spots on them. She leaned forward as she spoke and had a dangerously vulnerable openness and an almost ringing enthusiasm.

She’d had a nervous breakdown and was sojourning in St Pat’s.

Now, I’m told, her mind has stopped completely, and she’s sealed off in some leafy hospital in a semi-Protestant town.

At night as I sleep and dream of that girl in London there’s an awkward pietà which forces it’s way through, mother and prostrate Christ. It’s at the entrance to the bad part of our town near where Daniel lived.

When we were fifteen, in 1966, a warren of lesbians was discovered in a factory by the Shannon in Athlone and Daniel went to England.

Discotheque in London. I meet a boy from our town. He has long Titian-red hair and wears a green jacket. He lists the gay venues of Dublin, where he lived until recently: the George, Minskys, O’Henrys, Fitzpatricks on a Thursday night.

In Czechoslovakia, because of 1968, the old mingle with the young, those among the old who did not conform and worked as stokers and road-sweepers. At discos in Prague you see older men sitting beside young people at long tables covered in white oil-cloth and laden with white wine as they watch videos shot in New Orleans on a small screen.

‘Many were good heroes – flame-like,’ a medieval chronicle said about the young men of our townland, and I see its sometimes undulating verdure caressed by pockets of rowan trees and bryony bushes aflame in autumn.

His mother had had a daughter before she married who was adopted by ah American family. She turned up recently.

‘When I was a child,’ she said, ‘when the doorbell rang I always pretended you’d come for me. My toy suitcase was always packed, ready to return.’

His family live in a cottage near an eskar, one of the strange hummocks created in the Western Midlands when the mountains were pressed down and the oak trees were razed into bog by ice. They now have an American flag flying outside their cottage.

An Italian in a shiny blue suit sold red roses on Wardour Street, the roses in a bucket at his feet. A little girl wearing a pearl necklace to her knees walked down Old Corrrpton Street. There were violets on Ladywell Fields and two black girls in black leather skin-suits, wild hair flossed out, both of them wearing identical sapphire-blue scarves around their necks and carrying skimpy Tesco bags, crossed the Fields.

I’d just received a letter. I was going to live in the Southern States in the autumn.

Life changes: the Tarot cards on the mantelpiece are young men pulling a boat out of the sea in Portugal with ropes; a nobleman with his arm around his pageboy, a ball in the nobleman’s hand, his outfit olive-yellow with patterns of girdles in it, a black hat with a silver coin on the front of it on his head; two men in thoabs and turbans conversing by a field of green barley, poppies scattered among the barley.

When you were at university your mother had you incarcerated in digs, so you celebrated your twenty-first birthday four months after the night in the flat of a friend. A woman who’d recently lost her husband and cried a lot came, a Mrs Lawlor. Two urchin boys with plum cheeks from Mountpleasant Buildings. The girl who later attacked you, in a fur coat, a blue and white striped gown like that of a concentration camp inmate, a slouch hat. You brought pictures of Bob Dylan, Carson McCullers, Katherine Mansfield, Anne Frank, the Isle of Capri and Chartres Cathedral, and pinned them on the wall.

‘It’s the happiest night since my husband died,’ Mrs Lawlor said. ‘I spend most nights crying and sobbing with tablets. Now I realize I’ve got to start living again.’

Shortly after that I moved out of the digs into the flat of another friend. He gave me as a gift a white, blue-embroidered Mexican shirt and not satisfied with the gift I took to wearing his clothes, especially a black leather jacket. I would sit in these clothes in Dwyers on Lower Leeson Street. I used to fulminate there – a new identity, a new shirt.

With change in Dublin you always recourse to the sea. I went every day to Sandycove, the sea at its most azure at Monkstown.

One night I went to a party held in the open air by the Forty Foot. Eleanor was singing songs and crying ‘My baby. My baby’, referring to a baby aborted in England, child of a ruffian songster.

In the yellow bracken he laid her down,