Читать книгу Notes from a Coma - Mike McCormack - Страница 9

ANTHONY O’MALLEY

Not a day’s gone by, not an hour, when I don’t think of him lying out there on that ship in the Killary.¹ And the thing that comes back to me are all the arguments we used to have. How he’d sit there where you’re sitting now, in that very chair, covered in diesel and cement after his day’s work. More likely than not he’d have a few pints on him, probably drinking since after work. And it’d always begin the same way.

“A consumer durable, Anthony, wasn’t that how it was?”

“Go to bed, JJ. Have you eaten?”

“Never mind eating, tell me the story. The bargaining process, tell me that again.”

I’d make him something to eat then, a sandwich or a bowl of soup, because likely as not he’d have nothing solid in his stomach since dinner time. But he’d have no interest in food. All he wanted to hear was the story, his story.

“Two thousand dollars, wasn’t that it?”

“Eat up, JJ, it’s past midnight.”

“That was the going rate at the time, wasn’t it? Over three thousand Deutschmarks or eleven hundred pounds if you could find someone to take sterling?”

It could go on all night. He could sit there teasing out every detail of it, hearing it for the umpteenth time and still, after all these years, bewildered by it.

“And what was the asking price, Anthony, what was the reserve? Was it stamped across my forehead or was there a little tag dangling from my toe?”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“So what was your opening bid? I’d say you came in low—low and hard. You wouldn’t want to show your hand too early. Eight hundred pounds, was that it? Not much more surely?”

“Go to bed, JJ, this isn’t the time.”

“Did you spit on your hand to seal the deal, like a proper cattle jobber.”

“It wasn’t like that and you know it.”

“Of course it wasn’t like that but it’s the truth, isn’t it? And a seller’s market too, wasn’t it? They couldn’t keep up with demand. All of us there up on top of one another in our slatted house.”

“It wasn’t a slatted house, JJ, it was an orphanage. Christ, you know all this, I’ve told you a hundred times. Why do you have to keep going over it?”

“It’s a story, Anthony, a bedtime story. Tell me about the wicked witch. We wouldn’t want to forget her. Tell me again about the wicked witch.”

I’d go along with him from here. He’d be so far into it the best thing was to get through it as quickly as possible and try to get to bed.

“Her name was Dragana, wasn’t that it?”

“Yes, JJ, her name was Dragana.”

“And she had a pair of arms on her like a butcher and a hooked nose with a wart on it. Her broomstick stood in the corner.”

“Whatever you say, JJ.”

This was where he’d start laughing, leaning forward in his chair, his favourite part.

“But you took no shite from her, isn’t that right?”

“That’s right, JJ, I put manners on her.”

“Witch or no witch you let her know who’s boss.”

“Yes, JJ, I sorted her.”

“You haggled with her, wasn’t that what you did?”

“Yes, JJ, I haggled with her.”

He’d be bent over laughing now, laughing or crying I could never tell from the tears rolling down his cheeks.

“Haggled with her,” he’d gasp, nearly choking. “This is the bit that kills me. You actually haggled her down to two thousand dollars.” The mug of tea or soup would be slopping down the side of the chair. “The going rate for a healthy child was two and a half thousand dollars but you haggled her down to two thousand.”

“Yes, JJ, I haggled her.”

“And shook hands on two thousand.”

“Yes.”

Some nights it might end here, the worst of it over, but most nights he’d want to take it through to the bitter end.

“It could have been a lot worse though, couldn’t it? You could have used the old barter system.”

“Yes, JJ, something.”

“No, not just something. Tell the story right, don’t be trying to get away from it. Cigarettes and televisions, those were the things, weren’t they? Explain the cigarettes to me again.”

There was no way out now—I’d have to see it through to the end.

“The place was in turmoil, JJ, the economy was a shambles and the currency was virtually worthless. The gold standard was a packet of cigarettes. A packet of Kent cigarettes traded at two dollars.”

“So you could have had me for a thousand packs of cigarettes.”

“If you want to put it that way.”

“I don’t want to put it that way but that’s the way it was, wasn’t it?”

This was where he’d sink back in his chair with that look on his face. This was where he’d start talking to himself.

“And no one thought it was strange. No one said stall the ball, this isn’t right. You can’t put your hand down in your hip pocket and hand over a wad of notes for a child. That day is gone. No one saw anything wrong with it?”

“You don’t know what it was like. The chaos, the violence, the conditions in those orphanages. You were lucky, JJ.”

I remember the first time I said that to him, the look on his face. Like I’d scalded him or struck him with the back of my hand. I thought he was going to hit me. But he just slumped back in his chair and looked into his mug.

“I’m going to bed, JJ. You have to be up for work.”

“I’ll have a last fag, I’ll go then. Goodnight.”

“Don’t stay up all night.”

But of course he would. I’d find him in the morning slumped back on that chair you’re in now with an ashtray of butts on the floor beside him. He’d have stayed up all night smoking and mulling things over. About him being lucky and the haggling and about what he called his life as a consumer durable.

He looked anything but durable the first time I saw him. Lying in a crib he was with six others, them all up on top of one another like a litter of bonamhs only not half as clean. Like the rest of them he was scalded in his own water and looking out between the bars of the crib with the biggest pair of eyes you’ve ever seen on a child. They were that big I thought they’d jump out of his head and roll across the floor to my feet. And if there was any colour to them I couldn’t tell what it was from the bad light in the room. Black as coal they were and probably just as hard, I remember thinking. But that was just a trick of the light. I now know JJ’s eyes are a kind of deep ruby red, the colour of strong tea without milk. It’s not the type of colour that shows itself. You have to look hard to find it.

Standing there looking at him I thought the room was full of wasps; there was this buzzing noise everywhere. But it couldn’t be wasps. This was the middle of March, there was eight inches of snow outside on the ground—not even that demented city could have wasps and snow at the same time. And then I knew. They were grinding their teeth. The kids, every one of them, grinding their teeth down to the gums and making this buzzing noise that was filling the room. Sitting on their behinds, sprawled across each other, lying on their backs, every one of them working their jaws from side to side, chewing nothing but cold fresh air.²

So there I was pacing the room with my hands clasped behind my back, trying to look like I knew what I was doing, peering into the cribs like a cattle jobber looking at weanlings. But what did I know about finding a child—a forty-three-year-old bachelor from the west of Ireland with neither niece nor nephew? I hadn’t a clue where to start looking . . .

I took a few more turns round the room peering into the other cribs, not wanting to rush things nor give anything away. At the back of the room, just inside the door, there stood a woman with her arms folded across her chest like a bouncer. JJ calls her Dragana but I can never remember hearing her name. Like the hooked nose and the broomstick it was one of those details he made up. But he was right about the arms. She was built like a wrestler, her coat looked like it was going to come apart at the shoulders. This was a woman you didn’t want to mess with. This was her orphanage and these were her kids. If any of them were leaving the room it would only be through her. She was the one who would fix up the paperwork and exit visas. She was the one who would take a percentage of whatever money changed hands.

I didn’t want her forcing my hand so I just kept walking round the room. But those eyes kept turning me round and drawing me back to that little face pressed between the bars. He was wearing these big pyjamas with the leg ends frayed from dragging through the dampness and filth in the bottom of the crib. And if there was any colour or pattern on them under that filth I couldn’t make it out. But there was this look on his face, a look I’ve never seen on any child or adult before or since. It was like he was saying to me, “I’m the child you’ve come for, forget the rest. I’m the one you’ve come for.” He wasn’t saying he was any better or stronger or healthier than any of the others. All he was saying was that he was the one. And he was right; he was the one I had come for. I could have gone round that room a hundred times and looked in a thousand other cribs throughout the city and I knew I would have ended up back at that same spot looking down at that child with those black eyes and those filthy pyjamas. This was my child, big eyes, white knuckles and everything. We just stared at each other and there might as well have been just the two of us in that room. If there was a specific moment when our lives came together this was it. Something clicked between us. I felt like putting my hand out and introducing myself, saying, hello, my name is Anthony O’Malley from Louisburgh in the west of Ireland. You probably haven’t heard of the place but in a few days when everything is sorted I’m taking you out of here and you and me are going to have a long and happy life together. But of course I didn’t. Things were strange enough without me talking to a child who couldn’t understand one word I was saying. And then for one moment I had the feeling there was something wrong with him. He was sitting stock-still, not the tiniest movement out of him. For some reason I thought there might be something wrong with his head, his sight or his hearing or something. But it wasn’t that. I waved my hand in front of his face and his eyes followed it over and back. I shouted softly beside his ear and he started sideways. But there was still this stillness about him . . . The boss woman, Dragana, came up behind me and began telling me something. I didn’t hear her. It had dawned on me why he was so still; he was the only one in the crib not grinding his teeth.

The boss woman was pulling on my sleeve and talking away. She was telling me something, the child’s name, I think. But she didn’t have to tell me. I knew his name, I’d known it from the moment I’d first set eyes on him. His name was John Joe O’Malley and I was going to call him JJ.

It took four days to round up the paperwork: medical certs, exit visa and so on. They were the longest four days of my life. At first I thought it would be a simple job of handing over the money and walking out of there with him in my arms and getting a plane home. That’s how much I knew.

Now that I had chosen JJ I itched to get out of that city. I wanted to take him away from that orphanage, away from the filth and the dampness and the paint peeling off the walls and the smell of detergent that would choke you. I was so worried someone might come and lift him out from under my nose that I spent every minute of those four days standing over him and talking to him, just getting used to him. When I saw him a couple of days later he’d been taken from his crib and was sitting by himself in a separate cot at the back of the room. He was wearing a new pair of pyjamas and there were clean sheets under him. For the first time I had a clear view of him and I hardly recognised him with all the dirt stripped off him. His eyes were still dark but his skin was several shades lighter and I knew straight away that this was one thing that would set him apart when I got him home. Of course what I couldn’t see then were all the other things that would make life so awkward for him, all the grief and misery which has him lying out there today on that ship with pipes draining and feeding him.³ All I saw that day was a little boy who needed love and attention, a thin hardy boy with eyes round from hunger, eyes balanced over those high cheekbones like two marbles.

We got back to Ireland on the twenty-second of March, flew into Shannon at two o’clock in the afternoon and I was never so happy to see rain in all my life. One hundred and fifty pounds it cost to get a taxi from Shannon to the door here, 130 miles the driver told me. It was half six when I brought JJ O’Malley through the back door of the old house and he must have felt right at home the minute he got inside. You have to remember this is the old house I’m talking about—bad roof and damp walls and draughts coming in under the doors rattling the window frames. I stood there in the middle of the floor with him in my arms watching our breath cloud up in front of us and it was as cold as a grave.

We were in about an hour, the fire down and me feeding him a bowl of soup on my knee when the knock came to the door. I knew before it swung open who it was; he’d have seen the light in the window.

“Frank,” I called, without getting up, “come in.”

He was in the middle of the floor before he noticed JJ. You could see him nearly take a step backwards. I never let on.

“Take a seat, Frank,” I said. “Push out the door.”

Frank swung a chair out from under the table and sat down. I was pretending to fuss with JJ but what I was really doing was trying to put myself in Frank’s place and figure out what he might be thinking. We go back a long way, Frank and myself; neighbours and school together since we were kids and a long spell in London in the seventies and eighties. There’s not a lot we don’t know about each other but I could tell that evening I had him fairly flummoxed.

“You were gone a few days,” he said, not taking his eyes off JJ.

“A few days,” I said. “Out foreign.”

“Out foreign?”

“Out foreign.”

He wasn’t happy. He tried another tack.

“I thought there might be something wrong.”

He was still staring at JJ. He told me afterwards it was as much as he could do to stop himself from reaching out with his hand to touch him and make sure he was real. Leaning out on his elbows he was, staring at him. I turned JJ round to face him.

“Say hello to your new neighbour, JJ. Frank, this is my son, this is JJ O’Malley.”

I held out JJ and Frank drew back in his chair.

“Anthony . . . ?” He had his hand out, pointing. “Anthony . . . how, where . . . ?”

I could barely keep from laughing.

“I bought him,” I said casually.

“Christ!”

“Two thousand dollars, give or take a few pounds, import duties and all the rest.”

“For God’s sake, Anthony!”

“What?” I said, playing the innocent. “You don’t think it was a fair price. I thought it was a fair price.”

You could see the colour rising in Frank’s face. Go to the dresser, I said, and get the bottle. He poured two stiff ones and drew in his chair. It was my turn to start talking and now that it was I didn’t know where to start. The more I thought about it the more I realised that some stories are so daft it makes no difference where you start telling them. You might as well start at the end as at the beginning because one part is as far from making sense as the next. But I had to start somewhere so I just took it out of face. I told him how, after the cattle had been taken away, I’d had a lot of thinking to do. Six months before I could stock up again, what was I to do in the meantime? Night after night in front of the fire thinking and mulling things over, looking at the telly and trying to make sense of things. I told him how I’d seen the coverage of all those revolutions and those orphanages and how I’d got the idea of going abroad and getting a child of my own. Money wasn’t a problem, I had my own house—what else would I do with it all? So I told him about the trip to that bitter city and all the days spent traipsing from one orphanage to the next with no clue what I was looking for. And then I told him how I found JJ and the wicked witch and about the haggling as well. No more than JJ years later, Frank could hardly believe it either, you could see it in his face. But I wasn’t ashamed of it. I wasn’t ashamed of it then nor am I now and that is something I cannot explain. He was quiet for a while after that and then he shook his head.

“I’ve heard some good ones in my time but I can say in all honesty I’ve never heard the beating of what you’ve just told me.” He laughed. “And I never figured you for the fathering type, Anthony.”

I shrugged. “There it is, you see, you never know. Spend enough nights on your own thinking and you start seeing things about yourself. You see the things you’ve done and the things you’re likely to do and when you see that the balance of your life is already in the past you find you’ve got some hard decisions to make. You either face up to it or you settle down to pissing away what’s left of yourself. There were nights here when that fire never went out.”

It all sounded a lot wiser than I felt but it seemed to make sense at the time.

“He’s a fine child though,” Frank said. “How old did you say he was?”

“Two years old, he’ll be two years old in the middle of April. At least that’s what I’ve been led to believe.”

“And he’s healthy and everything?”

“He seems to be, there’s nothing wrong with his appetite.”

We talked on for another hour and it must have been near eight when Frank got up and put his glass on the table. Maureen would call over in the morning, he said. By that time JJ was flat out in my arms, his eyes closed and his mouth open. I put him in my bed next to the wall with two pillows outside him so he wouldn’t roll over in his sleep and end up on the floor. He looked comfortable in that big bed, all warm and peaceful with the blankets pulled up under his chin. I put the light out but left the door open and when I got back into the kitchen I saw the two empty glasses on the table. I was happy that on his first night in his new home someone had already drunk to his health and happiness.

Maureen came over the following morning. We’d been up about an hour, JJ was fed and the fire was down when she opened the door. She passed straight by me to JJ, picked him up and held him out at arm’s length to get a look at him. That’s Maureen’s way—cut straight to the heart of things, no beating around the bush. A lot different to Frank in that way; he has to know the ins and outs of everything before he can make a move. I suppose that’s what makes them a good team. Anyway, whatever it was she saw in JJ she took to him straight away.

“JJ,” she cooed. “Aren’t you the gorgeous little thing? Such dark eyes.” She turned him round so that the light fell on his face. “You’re going to break a lot of hearts with those eyes, JJ, isn’t that right, Anthony?”

Breaking hearts was something I knew nothing about so I kept quiet.

“How has he settled in, Anthony? Is he making strange with the place?”

As far as I knew he seemed to have settled in fine. I’d woken up that morning and found him sitting up in the bed beside me, looking around him. The poor fella hadn’t a clue where he was. I pulled him on to my knee and talked to him and don’t ask me what I said to him but whatever it was it seemed to put him at his ease. After he was dressed and fed he sat on the ground while I put on a fire. I’d just finished when Maureen came in. Of course she saw problems straight away.

“Does he have any clothes but these, Anthony? These could do with a wash.”

“Not a stitch but those.”

“Well, don’t go buying anything just yet. I have a load of things young Owen has grown out of. I know someone who’ll make good use of them, don’t I, JJ?”

It wasn’t the first time I was glad to have Maureen Lally for a neighbour and it wouldn’t be the last either. It was only a small thing, a child’s clothes, but it made me think for the first time that I might have bitten off more than I could chew. What did I know about a child’s clothes, or anything else for that matter? For the first time I had a feeling I had done something foolish. This wave of fright came over me. If Maureen had taken JJ away with her at that moment and told me I was never going to see him again I wouldn’t have raised a hand against her, that’s how spooked I was. She must have seen the look on my face. She handed JJ to me and laughed.

“Children are simple things,” she said. “Keep them clean and warm. The only thing they need after that is love.”

She came back an hour later and tipped a black rubbish bag of clothes on the table. After separating them out in little piles she went through them piece by piece, telling me what would go with what and holding up little sweaters under JJ’s chin and saying didn’t that go lovely with his eyes and doesn’t that suit his colouring and of course it was all lost on me. As long as he’s warm and clean I kept telling myself.

She stripped JJ then and put on a little sweater and blue pants and he looked a lot brighter in himself; I hadn’t realised how dirty those clothes were.

“We’ll bin these old things, won’t we, JJ?” Mauren said, throwing them into the black bag. “And we’ll get you a nice new coat and wellies so you can go outside and play with our Owen. Wouldn’t you like that, JJ? Of course you would. Anthony, you’ll have to bring him over this evening to meet Owen, to see how they get on.”

“I’m thinking of bringing him to the doctor tomorrow and getting him checked out. Tests and everything, whatever they do with kids. These health certs, I don’t know if they can be trusted.”

“Wait till Friday. Tomorrow is dole day, the town’ll be packed. Friday morning will be quiet, you won’t have to answer half as many questions.”

And that was another thing. How was I going to explain JJ? However hard it had been to explain him to Frank, it was going to be a lot harder to explain him to the whole of Louisburgh. Middle-aged bachelors don’t up and go to foreign countries every day of the week and arrive back with two-year-old sons under their oxter . . .

“How would you handle it, Maureen? If JJ was your child what would you say?”

JJ was standing with Maureen bending over him. She had him gripped by the shoulders and he was stepping forward awkwardly, pawing the ground with his foot like it might give way under him. Maureen looked up at me.

“He’s your child, Anthony, you’re his father now. What explaining is there?”

“There’ll be talk, Maureen, you know the way people are.”

“People will always have plenty to talk about. If talk is the only thing you have to worry about you’ll get no sympathy here. People will always find something to talk about, won’t they, JJ? One look at those lovely eyes and they’ll all be jealous. They’ll all want to know where they can get little boys like this.” She scooped JJ up into her arms. “If you want something to worry about you need look no further than that fire. The way this little fellow is going he’ll be up to every mischief in a few weeks. You need to screen off that fireplace as soon as you can.”

She left after that and we were alone together for the first time with a whole long day ahead of us. JJ had found his feet by this time. He was gripping the leg of the table and bouncing up and down, pointing out things around him. It was nearly midday and from what I could tell it was a mild grey day outside. I pulled a second sweater on him and a cap down over his ears and took him out into the yard to show him around. There was no cold in it but the sky was down on the ground and every place was running with water. We went round the sheds and barns and I told him what everything was for and what animals lived where, showed him where the calves were penned and bucket-fed in the winter and showed him where I kept the geese before selling them off before my trip abroad. I told him I’d never keep geese again because they were dirty things but that I might get in a few ducks because ducks were better company around a house. Then we sat up on the tractor—an old Ferguson 35 it was. He got a great kick out of that, twisting and swinging out of the steering wheel for a while. Then we stood under the bales of hay in the hayshed and looked out towards the sea, out towards Achill and Clare Island. I lifted him up on my shoulders and showed him that the sea was black and that that was a sure sign of rain. Sure enough as we stood there it came rolling in over the land, a dirty big shower, hammering off the roof of the hayshed and frightening JJ and setting him to cry for the very first time.

There was over a year between them. Owen was February and JJ was the middle of April. And from the beginning they were like brothers.

Maureen was in the kitchen talking to Owen in the sitting room when we went over that evening. Bring him through till we see how they get on, she said. Owen was on his feet gripping the side of the couch, running this plastic tractor up and down the length of it. I sat JJ in the middle of the floor and stood back to see what would happen. The two boys looked at each other, sizing each other up, Owen with this narrow frown on his face.

“This is JJ, Owen,” Maureen said. “Say hello to him, your new friend. Go and say hello to him, Owen.”

She took Owen by the hand and led him over to JJ. I was nervous then, afraid for JJ. It seemed to me somehow that the balance of his life hung in that moment. If he could only make a friend then nothing would be impossible for him.

I needn’t have worried. The two of them spent a few more moments sizing each other up and then Owen held out his tractor to JJ and JJ took it and turned it over in his hands and then put it in his mouth. And that’s how it was, their first moment together—one of them giving over his tractor and the other fella trying to take a bite out of it.

That was the first day of their friendship, a friendship that joined them at the hip as they say. And a lot of it was down to Maureen; she became the mother JJ never had. Everyone knows he spent as much time eating and sleeping in Owen’s house as he did in his own. But I didn’t mind that, I needed all the help I could get. Good neighbours are a blessing and I knew from that first day I could rely on her. Looking back now I don’t know how I would have managed without her.

Frank came in and saw them playing together on the floor. “The two men,” he said happily. “The men they couldn’t hang.”

* * *

JJ’s health checked out fine. His medical records listed shots and inoculations but Dr Ryan said he’d give him booster shots just in case. He took a blood sample from him and said he’d have the results back in a few weeks—he wanted to do some tests on him to see if there was anything like MS or whatever waiting for him down the line.

“But he looks healthy I have to say. A healthy lucky baby. He could do with a bit of feeding up but other than that there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with him. As I say we’ll know more in a few weeks. How is he feeding?”

“He eats whatever I eat, he seems to have no problem. Spuds and meat and vegetables, plain food.”

“Good. Just mash it up for him or cut it into small pieces. I’m going to prescribe a small tonic. Once a day after his dinner. Other than that he seems to be fine. Bring him in to me if he starts running a temperature or anything. If anything comes up in the blood tests or if I need more information I’ll give you a call. If you don’t hear from me you’ll know everything is all right.”⁴

I didn’t get any call from him.

He was baptised about a month after that—that would have been about the middle of May. I didn’t know whether he was baptised or not or what religious background he came from so I decided to do it just to be on the safe side.

It was a Saturday afternoon, a lovely sunny day and there was good crowd in the church. Of course word had got out by then so everyone had turned up to have a look at him—his first public appearance so to speak. And he looked the part too. Maureen had come in that morning and smartened him up, put on his clothes and brushed his hair—a thing I could never do—and he was the smartest-looking little lad you’ve ever seen. He was six weeks with me by then and he’d come on in leaps and bounds. He’d got stronger and hardier and his face had filled out and as Maureen said it was the type of face that was quick to smile. Anyway, he walked hand in hand with me up the aisle to the christening font and there wasn’t a gig out of him throughout the whole thing. As good as gold he was. The same couldn’t be said for Frank, his godfather . . .

Maureen told me he was all nerves that morning. You’d swear it was himself that was being baptised, she said. Nothing would do him but to have a few stiff ones before he sat into the car for the church and I suppose the heat of the place got to him when he was inside because when he stood across the christening font from me he had this high colour in his face and a smell of whiskey off him that would knock a horse. Swaying back on his heels he was with a smile on his face like a man who was going to burst into song at any moment. Maureen gave him a shot of the elbow and that woke him up and he looked around him like he didn’t know where he was. Then he started rooting in his inside pocket and pulled out his tobacco and a box of matches. For a split second I thought he was going to roll up a fag and throw the match into the christening font. Maureen looked like she was going to split him. Father Scallen was looking at Frank and Frank was looking off into the distance like he had other things on his mind. Then he turns the pack of tobacco over in his hand and takes out this folded handkerchief from under it and blows his nose. The whole lot back in his pocket then and that was it. It was as much as I could do to stop laughing. But everything passed off smoothly after that. Frank and Maureen forswore Satan with all his works and empty promises and JJ was held out so that the holy water could be poured over his head. He lashed out with his hand and nearly drowned us and everyone got a great laugh out of it.

When all the fuss was over the five of us went for a meal in the hotel—Owen was with us as well. A lovely evening it was too, sitting round and having a quiet drink and the craic and people coming up shaking my hand and wishing us well. And when Maureen took the two boys home myself and Frank moved into the front bar and I bought a round of drinks for the house. It must have been near eleven when Frank gave us the first song. He could hardly stand by that time but no matter how drunk he is he’s still a fine singer. “The Streets of Laredo,” that’s his song. He got the hush and he just stood there with his eyes closed and one elbow on the counter and it was no hardship to listen to him. The odd shout of Good man, Frank, and Shhh and Give him a chance and then at the end a big round of applause and someone said Folla that and I was called to sing. And that was it for the rest of the night. We sang it out, one after another along the bar, some of us singing twice and the night ended where it began with Frank singing “The Parting Glass.” We were the last to leave—Johnny was wiping down the tables. When we stood out on the street the town was quiet, no one around except Sergeant Nevin standing on Morrison’s Corner with a flashlight in his hand. Goodnight, men, he said as we passed and we went on our way down to the bridge where the car was parked.

It was around that time I applied for this council house. John Ryan was the welfare officer at the time; he was calling round fixing up JJ’s medical card and children’s allowance and so on. It was him that mentioned it.

There was only two bedrooms in the old house: JJ’s behind the fireplace and mine at the other end of the house. It was big enough for both of us but you didn’t need to do much looking at it to know it was no place to raise a child in. There was a small bathroom off the back and a flat-roofed kitchen extension put on in the seventies that was never right. It needed rewiring and the roof needed to be redone. I talked about renovating the whole thing.

“That’s only throwing good money after bad,” John said. “The sooner you get in an application for a council house the sooner you’ll be out of this place. Take it from me this house will be down around your ears in a few years. It’s no use reroofing or rewiring, a house this old will always be an old house, dampness and everything. Do the job right or forget about it. A child in your care and site on your own land—the whole thing’ll be ready in a few months.”

So I took his advice, wired off a half-acre of land—this half-acre we’re on here—and filed for planning permission. Pete Mangan was peace commissioner at the time and he signed for it and the whole thing was in progress about two months later. It went out to tender that August and the foundation was dug and poured in the middle of September. John Finn put up the blocks and Ted Naughton—this was one of his first jobs—did all the plumbing and wiring. The promise was that we’d be in it by Christmas but between one thing and another it wasn’t till the first week in February we turned the key in it.

JJ was nearly three years old by then. He’d grown strong and hardy and he was running around and up to all sorts of devilment; it was a full-time job keeping an eye on him. Up on tables and ladders and you couldn’t keep him down off the old Ferguson for love or money. And one day, when my back was turned, he went missing. Owen came over looking for him and my heart came up in my mouth; I thought he was with him. Out we went looking for him, the whole lot of us; Maureen and myself going through the sheds and barns and Frank, grey in the face, standing on the wall of the slurry pit with a length of four-by-two in his hand. Then Maureen comes round the house with JJ asleep in her arms. Up on top of the bales she’d found him. How a three-year-old gasúr managed to climb up there with no ladder was beyond me but climb up he did. Up after the cat he’d gone and whether it was the heat of the hay or that he couldn’t get down Maureen had found him asleep with the cat curled up on his belly.

That’s when I put him into the crèche. I couldn’t keep an eye on him twenty-four hours a day, not with the few cattle I had and doing jobs and everything. Maureen mentioned the crèche but I was in two minds about it. The way I saw it I hadn’t taken him out of one institution to land him in another.⁵ Maureen laughed at me.

“It’s not like that, Anthony. It’ll only be for a few hours a day, and besides, all those other kids there, it’ll only be good for him.”

I knew what she was saying but I still wasn’t convinced. She must have read my mind because she told me then that she was thinking of sending Owen off for a few hours in the morning and afternoon just to get him out from under her feet.

That settled it. JJ and Owen were packed off to the crèche till two in the afternoon when Maureen and I took turns picking them up and bringing them home. It worked out well enough. We’d get our day sorted out before they came home in the afternoon and put everything up in a heap and, as Maureen said, it was only for a few months, before they were packed off to school proper in September.

JJ and Owen were solid buddies by then. They went to school together in the morning and came home together in the evening and sometimes it was as much as I could do to keep JJ here of an evening and spend a few hours with him. But he needed so little. As long as he was fed and foddered and had Owen, his right-hand man beside him, he didn’t want for another thing. Often, just so that I could spend some more time with him, I’d have Owen over for the dinner in the evening and the two of them would sit there at the table, laughing and talking and planning away together like two old men. Sometimes, looking back, I think it was Owen who reared JJ, not me. There was a brightness about him whenever he was with him, a glow, as if the happiness in his soul was coming out in his skin. Now with all that’s happened since I sometimes find it hard to find that happy JJ. All I seem to remember are the arguments and the heartbreak and the confusion we had later on. But for those few years he was happy and whatever part I had in it, if I never do another thing with my life, I will always be proud of that.

________________

¹ A child’s geography book will tell you that the Killary is the only proper fjord on the Irish coastline. Running six kilometres west–east through Ordovician sandstone and Silurian quartzite it forms part of the Mayo–Galway border. At one time its steep sides and sheltered waters called out for mineral prospecting, cheap holiday accommodation, mussel farming and marine leisure activities. Now hemmed in by protective legislation, it is the focal feature of an extensive national park and is marked down in tourist guides for sightseers travelling in this part of the world.

What no tourist bumf will tell you is that this inlet is suffused with an atmosphere of ineffable sadness. Partly a trick of the light and climatic factors, partly also the lingering residue of an historical tragedy which still resonates through rock and water down seven generations of fretful commemorative attempts and dissonant historical hermeneutics. Now think of grey shading towards gunmetal across an achromatic spectrum; think also of turbid cumulus clouds pouring down five centimetres of rainfall above the national average and you have some idea of the light reflected within the walls of this inlet. This is the type of light which lends itself to vitamin D deficiency, baseline serotonin levels, spluttering neurotransmitters and mild but by no means notional depression. It is the type of light wherein ghosts go their rounds at all hours of the day.

² In December of the previous year the Conducator stood on the balcony of the Central Committee building in Palace Square and addressed the crowd below. His voice, carrying in the sub-zero temperature to the back of the square, assured the crowd that the great collective experiment of the last three decades was in no way compromised by recent political developments in neighbouring countries.

As always on such occasions his wife stood shoulder to shoulder with him. Through four decades this has been her place—it has indeed been a great love affair. They have drawn strength from each other and they have needed every bit of it; together they have destroyed an entire country. Bearing in mind that the country was one of God’s masterpieces to begin with this is no small feat . . .

Eight minutes into the rally the crowd gets restless, a definite low-level hum begins to undercut the autarch’s speech. At first nothing more than a rustle but already it is the authentic sound of dissent, a sound without precedent in the annals of such occasions. It builds slowly, now clearly audible, strengthening under its own strength, three decades of shame and privation surfacing. The Conducator’s face twitches in disbelief, a fleeting shadow crossing the blankness of his cheekbones. His wife leans into him and quite audibly says, “Promise them something. Talk to them.” This is the precise moment when history fractures, the point at which a specific time has run its course. This moment separates before from after. A new epoch has begun, a new calendar starts from this moment.

Four days from this, on Christmas Day, the Conducator and his wife will sit in a child’s school desk in a military barracks arraigned before a hastily convened court. The charges against them will range from corruption and impoverishment of a nation to mass murder. Recording proceedings against God knows what sort of reprisals the video footage will show that as the charges are being read out the Conducator gazes at his watch like a man concerned with missing an important engagement elsewhere. It will be a moment of studied, elegant contempt. Refusing a plea of mental instability he will hold his nerve and say that he refuses to recognise the court and will answer only to the Grand National Assembly; an old hand at this sort of thing himself he will recognise a show trial when he sees one. When the death sentence is read out and as he is being led from the room we will hear him humming “The Internationale.” His wife, however, in a last outburst will brush aside a young soldier who reaches to assist her. Her last recorded words will be, “Take your hands off me, motherfucker.”

³ Registered to Interskan Shipping out of Antwerp, Le Soleil Noir, an eighty-metre cargo coaster, had for ten years plied its trade ferrying alumina trihydrate to the municipal water systems of coastal cities in the North Sea and Baltic. Detained by Dutch immigration authorities when a backload of pig iron from the Russian Federation was found to be bulked out with twenty refugees from Kaliningrad, the vessel had lain in Antwerp pending the trial of its owner, Hans Luyxx. Fifteen months later the liquidation of Interskan Shipping brought the vessel to the attention of the European Penal Commission. Its three-thousand-metre hold met the specifications of those architects on secondment to the EPC. Purchased at scrap value, renamed and registered, the Somnos spent the autumn of that year in Odense being refitted as a high-security neuro-intensive-care unit. On the twenty-fifth of May, after a three-week voyage, the Somnos was piloted into Killary fjord and dropped anchor in twelve fathoms of water. In line with naval protocol, captaincy of the ship was handed over to Norris Whelan, vice-governor of the Irish prison system. Three weeks of system checks followed, during which trial telemetry was relayed over the Astra satellite to Beaumont Hospital.

⁴ Too narrowly conceived as a notional boundary beyond which it is impossible to speak or relay information, the Event Horizon is more fully understood as a structure determined within and without the nature of the Somnos project itself, a structure which functions as an endo- and exoskeletal support which upholds and inscribes the project as a site within which identities as ongoing processes morph and shift through spatio-temporal planes. And while it is itself both speculative and conjectural and its arrhythmic moods are ever likely to falter and decay, it is an interweaving of shards and fragments linked by suggestive coherences we are compelled to reason with.

While the Event Horizon lies beyond an appeal to scholarship, evidentiary texts, archival research, the historical record, etc.—marginalia as a buttressing authority—as an attempt to describe a definitive circumference around any singularity it will always fall short as a final statement of containment. Any site wherein identities are stressed and deliquesced beyond their stand-alone sovereignty, any site which facilitates the neither-here-nor-there ontologies of imaging and information technologies, will always resist such delimitative attempts.

⁵ Footnoted beneath the Twin Towers collapse the Somnos takes its place amid the gathering iconography of twenty-first-century anxiety. Through reproductions on album covers and as a generative image in cultural studies it will achieve universal recognition. Filed in media memory it will become the nation’s first image of the new millennium to achieve such instant recognition.

Centered in the surrounding darkness of the fjord, the ship’s security and navigation lights give it the incandescent appearance of an alien spacecraft, strobing and numinous with first-contact immanence. Its pallid occupants have come among us with their refined metabolisms and liminal communiqués from some higher-order teleology beyond our imagining. And while they are unlikely to play out the classic scenarios—stripping the planet of mineral resources, conscripting our womenfolk into some ghoulish reproductive project—they have already started to assimilate a whole culture. With all media commandeered and their names on everyone’s lips there is already something worshipful in our gaze. We are ready to move on, beyond our childhood’s end, into some transcendent forgetting of ourselves.