Songdogs

  He told me that brighter flies work better in dark waters, that the salmon will rise at the sight of colours.

  Curious thing, though, he said that salmon don’t eat when they’re in rivers, they’re just conditioned to respond – if you catch them they’ve nothing in their bellies. And when they leap it’s not out of any happiness, it’s just to move up fast water or to get rid of sea lice. But they’re clever bastards, he said – they know the real thing when they see it, and a badly made fly is about as good as a Hail Mary in an air raid.

  I pulled up an old crate and sat down, the deep lengthy smell of him around me.

  ‘Ya don’t overdress it,’ he said, pointing at the hook, ‘otherwise it collects too much water. But a big fly means a big fish, it’s all about balance.’

  He was having difficulty with a knot.

  ‘D’ya need some help there?’

  ‘Nah, I’m grand, I could do this with my eyes closed.’

  He wound two small chatterer feathers back to back. ‘For the tail,’ he explained.

  I noticed how much bigger his hands were than mine. They had stopped shaking and worked with precision. He reversed the hook in the vice and leaned down into it, sometimes with his glasses on, sometimes without, a bit frustrated. ‘Fucken hell’s bells,’ he said, ‘here,’ and he handed me a slim pair of scissors, got me to cut off some of the excess thread. ‘Get in here now, closer.’ I was surprised to see that he didn’t smoke at all.

  He made the body of the insect, wound on a long slender feather, and then he worked on the throat and the wing, put some golden-pheasant feathers on each side. He stacked the hairs so they looked wing-like. ‘Ya give the fuckers as much life as possible,’ he said. I handed him the hackle pliers, the scissors, and the tweezers. He enumerated each one as we went along. He had a large darning needle stuck into a sherry-bottle cork for the bodkin. And a thimble made from an old lipstick container that must have belonged to Mam. Each time I handed him something he nodded up and down, wheezed, approximating a thanks. But the rest of the time his breathing was still and even, in full and splendid concentration at the making of the fly – it was turning out something like a miniature Indian headress, threads and feathers and tippets. I thought of Kutch and Eliza, maybe bringing one of the flies back to them as a present.

  When he finished the first one he gave me a thumbs-up. ‘That’ll do,’ he said, ‘we’ll see if the bastard can resist this.’ He walked around the barn for a while, the coat on, strutting around, sniffing at the air, wiping his hands.

  He hummed a tune, rubbing the air against his lips. Sometimes he stopped to place the feathers in his mouth, or asked me to wipe bits of glue from the fly, or catch a piece of waxed thread coming through a loop, pick up dropped pieces from the floor, clip and taper, wind some floss around the shank. He pursed his lips into the melody again, the rise and fall of it around us as he showed me a few little tricks, how to tie in the tinsel tags, merge the colours into one another, make the head of the fly with black thread. Time moved with the rhythm of an insect wing – it struck me how a second of an insect’s life might be a decade of ours, the whole world shattered into prisms of vision, the concentrate of living, the vitality of each instant – and the old man could have been creating both the brevity and length of time. The hum became immutable so that I forgot it was there, sunk down into soundlessness.

  It was evening when he finally stood up, put the last fly in his hat, donned it, said, ‘I’m fucken starving, young fella, come on, let’s go.’

  He put the other flies in the tray and closed the lid. We went up to the house and there were midges out – he used to be able to dress up a midge, he said, but they’re too small and difficult for him nowadays.

  I cooked some spaghetti and sauce. ‘Do I look bloody Italian?’ he said, but he ate it with relish, talked about flies, an assembly line of chatter coming from him. Told me that some old guy in Donegal a hundred years ago was the first to make colourful ones, butterflies, made himself a fortune doing it too. He used to put feathers in donkey piss so they wouldn’t lose their dye. Could tie them with one hand behind his back. Someone even brought him over to London to lecture on them. There was genius in making colours for dark water. My father rattled on, intermittently stopping for a cough or to blow his nose, the words flowing from him again. At one stage, over pasta falling from his fork, he pointed at me sternly: ‘Tell ya what though, the only mark of a good fly is when ya catch something. That’s the long and short of it. Ya can make pretty ones until the cows come home, but if ya don’t catch you’re just taking a lash in the wind.’

  After the food we had a few cups of tea and his hands started a little bit of the tremens. Went up to the room, said he’d fish the big one tomorrow.

  When I followed him up he was trying to tie himself another fly in bed, but he needed the vice, and he just laid the wooden tray down at the edge of the mattress.

  The flowery sheets were drawn around him. He started hacking up into an old handkerchief, which he folded very precisely after each spit into it. Turned it over and rubbed along it with his fingers as if he were enclosing a very important letter. Mucus oozed out the side at one stage, and he opened the hanky and re-folded it, twirling up the edges. He seemed fettered in by the room, turning his eyes to both walls, the ceiling, and back to the walls again, which seem to have buckled under the weight of the house. I sat by the bed.

  ‘Did ya hear that?’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘There was a knock on the door.’

  ‘No there wasn’t.’

  ‘Go down and see who’s at the bloody door,’ he said. ‘Maybe the postman again.’

  ‘At this hour?’

  I went over to the window and lifted it, stuck my head out.

  ‘Nobody there.’

  ‘I could have sworn I heard someone,’ he said.

  ‘Nobody.’

  ‘Maybe it’s Mrs McCarthy,’ he said.

  ‘No, nobody.’

  ‘Go on down and check, for fucksake.’

  A smell filled the room and I knew straight away why he had been trying to send me downstairs. The smell suffocated its way through the air, blocking out everything, the acridness of his breath, the unbathed effluvium of his body. He had some matches by his bed and he rolled over and struck one, coughed on it to blow it out, but I knew what he was doing, and even after the sulphur filtered off, the odour remained, hovered, mocked him with its pungency.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ he said suddenly.

  He lay back in the bed with an almost theatrical gesture of labour, but I told him that I just wanted to sit there for a while. He gave a quick flick of his head as if bothered by a real insect this time, reached across, flipped on his bedside radio. It gave out a steady diet of foreign wars and dying. He cursed and turned it off, leaned into his handkerchief, brought up another ream. His forehead was wrinkled in pain, and he put his hand on mine and said, ‘Conor.’

  I said: ‘Yeah, Dad?’

  It’s the first time in years I’ve called him Dad, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘That was a grand time, dressing the flies.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said.

  He shifted his body in bed and asked me for a smoke.

  ‘Don’t think you should.’

  ‘Look, I’m all right, okay? Haven’t had one all day. That’s a record.’

  ‘They’re killing ya.’

  He coughed again: ‘Wonderful. Let them kill me so. They’re over there by the bedside table.’

  I reached across but the packet was empty. He told me there were some downstairs, under the sink, he hides a few packets away for emergencies. Said to make sure to get the ones that were fresh, some of them had been down there since time immemorial and might crackle to the touch. I don’t know why, but I went down and got a packet, they were tucked way in at the back of the cupboard. When I came back upstairs he had propped himself up against the pillows – ‘Lovely, oh lovely, now you’re talking’
– and I turned one upside-down in the packet, the way he does for luck, handed him one. He never smokes with the wedding-ring hand, always keeps it in the right one, perched between his fingers.

  ‘Sure, a puff now and then does nobody any harm.’

  I waited until he had finished, in case he fell asleep and brought the house down with him, another fire, another echo. He pushed himself back against the bed and I heard him letting go again, but I pretended nothing had happened.

  ‘I’ll get Doctor Moloney out tomorrow morning,’ I said.

  ‘You will not.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s Sunday tomorrow and, besides, I won’t have anyone shoving anything up me rectum.’

  I laughed.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, nothing really.’

  ‘I heard they do that in San Francisco these days,’ he said.

  I was a little startled and thought for a moment of Cici in her whitewhite city. ‘Do what?’ I said.

  ‘Shove strange things up beyond.’

  ‘What d’ya mean?’

  ‘Gerbils and the like.’

  He chugged on the cigarette. ‘They said it on the TV. I was up at all hours one night, watching.’

  ‘You watch TV these days?’

  He took a moment to reply, held his hand to his temple, scratched the bald spot. ‘Times have changed.’

  ‘You used to hate it.’

  ‘Every now and then in the winter.’ He scrunched up his eyebrows.

  ‘How about a glass of hot whiskey to make you sleep?’

  ‘Nah,’ he said, ‘I’m content with this,’ dropping the ash into the cup of his hand, then letting it fall out on the floor.

  I stubbed the butt end out for him and, just before he lay over to sleep, he sat up and leaned his head against my shoulder. I moved in closer to him, put my hand at the back of his head. When he pulled back from my shoulder there was a little bit of phlegm on my t-shirt. I didn’t want to move, but he saw it and, using the handkerchief, he started to wipe if off.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said, ‘ah, Jesus.’

  He rolled over to the far side of the bed, pretending he was sleeping. I picked up the wooden tray with all the flies in it, worked away at one of my own for an hour or so, trying to wind some thread on the shank, but couldn’t find the knack, kept dropping the damn thing. It seemed impossible, so finely tuned and delicate. I looked at the flies he had made during the day. They lay there in waiting, ready to burst into flight, and I took two small chatterer wings and flipped them together between my fingers as he dozed off.

  SUNDAY

  lord, i remember

  He woke early this morning, rummaging around before the sun rose. Heard him as he opened up his window, spat down into the grass, went to the bathroom and pissed in the sink. I went downstairs after him and he gave me a nod.

  ‘How ya feeling?’

  ‘Like a million dollars,’ he said. ‘Look.’

  He had the tray out open on the kitchen table and he was admiring one of the flies in particular. ‘Isn’t that a beauty?’

  Jazz bucked from the radio and he moved over to fiddle with the dial, fine-tuning it. He pecked rhythmically at the air with his head. Hair stuck out where he had been sleeping on it. He ate a little cereal, some toast with jam, said he felt great for fishing today. Reached for the fly once more, held it up. ‘You and me both,’ he said. I thought he was asking me if I wanted to go fishing with him, but then I realised he wasn’t talking to me at all, that he wanted to be on his own, him and his fly, so I let him be.

  He wore a baggy green crew-neck jumper and a fat red tie knotted up to his neck, mashing up over the top of the sweater. His head looked skeletal above it.

  ‘All dressed up?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said.

  He gave me a shrug.

  Before he left for the river I asked him – for a bit of a joke really – if he was going to go to mass, that Mrs McCarthy might be expecting him, down there in her rosary beads and headscarf. But he shook his head sharply and all he said was: ‘The Lord’s my shepherd, I shall not want him.’

  We stood at the door and I told him that I’ve never been much of a man for mass, either. A bit too much like a spiritual suppository. He cocked his head sideways in agreement, opened the door handle, turned around to face me, looked at the rods, switched them back and forth, touched the inside lining of his jacket where he had placed one or two of the new flies. He reached out to shake my hand, then drew it away quietly before I had a chance to shake. I was going to ask him why he wanted to do that, but he just turned away. He picked up the rods and left, shuffling slowly through the yard.

  It was strange the way he walked, stopping every few yards to catch his breath, hitching the back of his grey trousers, shuffling along, contemplating the sky as if he might try to reach up and shake its hand, too. I just went outside and sat on Mam’s wall and celebrated the lack of rain – it was a beautiful bright morning.

  * * *

  Lord, I remember. Mornings back then, in the mid-seventies, before it all tumbled down around them.

  Mam was building the low stone wall along the lane. She wore a yellow rain jacket, her silver hair woven back into a braid that touched the small of her back. She would kneel down at the half-built wall as if in prayer, sometimes singing a bit of a Mexican song. The wall wasn’t very well built, but it broke the land in a splendid way. Holes in it like rheumy eyes staring out at the fields. It threatened with topple – because she was always failing in one way or another, making it too high in places, too low in others, a little lopsided, a touch drunk. But she loved the building of it. She would start work when breakfast was finished, shortly after the morning swim. She stood and watched as my father and I fought the current, but even then you could tell she was itching to get started. Long thin fingers cracked against one another. As soon as we emerged from the water, she’d put her hand on my lower back and hustle me up to the kitchen, jogging alongside me, leaving the old man there. As I ate she pulled on her blue garden gloves and, just before my father breezed his way into the kitchen with his head wrapped in a towel, she’d lean to me and whisper: ‘Now, m’ijo, I will begin.’

  The wall ran two hundred yards from the house to the main road. It was anywhere from two to four feet high, serpentine, almost coiling by the time it reached the road, as if she wanted to extend it further and further, but could only make it loop into itself. It looked like an ancient set of grey teeth. Birds sometimes nestled in the gaps between the stones. Mam was forever dismantling sections, putting it back together again, replacing larger stones with smaller ones, juggling, shuffling. Men rode past on bicycles and hailed her with a giant ‘Senorita,’ and she quickly corrected them. ‘Señora!’ she’d shout. They’d wink: ‘Whatever you say, Missus Lyons.’ She’d bend down to the wall again, cramming in a flat rock, or chiselling the side of a sharp stone. She covered her eyes with a brown arm so sparks didn’t jump up at her when she worked. At lunchtime the men would stop again, and instruct her on the building of the wall. She’d make them cups of tea in large white mugs, listen closely, nod her head, braids swinging, then wave them off and continue as before, stubbornly, steadfastly. It was her wall. It belonged solely to her. She made it the way she saw fit.

  She spat when working – a continuation of the habit she had picked up working with the chickens in Mexico, when dust got in every pore.

  The wall made some sort of crease in her boredom – there wasn’t much else for her to do, the washing fluttering out over the bog, dishes piling up in the sink, ham and cheese sandwiches to be made for my school lunchbox. She was in her late forties by then. The world was growing older. The wall helped her whittle away the days until she could return to Mexico. They argued a lot, she and the old man. They stood in the kitchen and waved their arms, pointing fingers at each other. Shouts rang around the house. Sometimes he thumped a fist into the cupboard – a little row of indentations appeared li
ke puckered stabwounds in the wood. He saw no use for the wall – except as a place to crouch down to light a cigarette, or to take a quick clandestine piss. Maybe they were still in love, but it was a different quality of love than I imagine they had in the beginning – a pathic love, a brusque love, no magic there. When he was away on photographic jobs, a great grey silence descended around the house, and Mam sat me down and told me things. If she began in her native tongue, which I didn’t understand, she’d reach up to her grey hair and sweep it back, begin again in English. Bits and pieces of stories that began to mesh and merge for me, stories told to a child in a childish way, and Mexico became a country just down the road.

  In the kitchen she scrubbed pots and pans, watched the passing of the world through the window. Cars trundled by, women in headscarfs on their way to coffee mornings, the postman’s van eddying past without stopping, herds of cattle driven along with sticks.

  Her only friend was Mrs O’Leary. Mam went to her pub a few afternoons a week – it was a ship-pictured pub, old and creaky at the joints, much like its customers. Sometimes, in the summer months, she took me along. Mrs O’Leary kept chickens out the back, about a dozen of them pecking around. And Mrs O’Leary was not unlike an old chicken herself – with a great red face, a long beak of a chin and a wizened wattle abandoned underneath it. She must have been eighty years to heaven at that stage, a gigantic woman in chalcedony-coloured dresses, huge billows of breasts, a deep voice, always on the verge of a laugh. But her eyes were giving way, so that she could hardly recognise the labels of bottles anymore, sometimes mistaking Jameson’s for Paddy’s, Bushmills for Irish Mist, causing an uproar of universal sorrow among the men who stuck to whiskeys like limpets to sea-rocks. She couldn’t see the clock moving on the wall, walked into doorframes, could only read the headlines of the Irish Press, which served well for moppinig up brown spills on the concrete floor. What devastated Mrs O’Leary most was that she could hardly tell the sex of a newborn chicken anymore – a skill that required the eyes of a hawk, the patience of years, an awareness of the whimsical vicissitudes of nature. She sauntered up to our house one summer afternoon and said to Mam: ‘I hear you have a way with the nether regions,’ and, after a moment’s explanation, they both burst out laughing.