Songdogs

  ‘I always thought it will be better than this, m’ijo,’ she said suddenly. ‘I always told myself it will be better than this.’

  And I – ten years old – thought she was talking about the hole in the wall, and said: ‘It’ll be all right, Mam, we’ll give it another shot in the morning.’

  * * *

  The ancestry of act – every moment leading up to haunt that one particular moment. Instead of Mam’s own body breaking itself down in the slow natural entropy of motherhood and age, it became something else altogether – destroyed for her in a strange sort of way. It wasn’t even a vagarious thing, or a whim, or an impulse on the old man’s part – it might have been easier that way. But he had planned it for a long time, I suppose. He wanted a memorial of some sort, an epitaph for himself, a packet of light to emerge and print itself indelibly on his life, to say: I was once great, look at these great photos I took, look how perfect they are, look how I once lived, I was alive! Maybe he laboured over that book, maybe he pored over all his contact sheets with a singular intensity, maybe he truly believed that it would reinvent things, or maybe he thought it was a gesture of love – that she could look in its pages and remember herself. Or some vision of herself.

  But something other than her life was on display – it was the moments of her body. Her neck and breasts and stomach and legs and spine and moles and pubic hair and ankles and eyes and raven-dark hair under mosquito nets, near fire towers, in a pine-pole camp, in a dark Bronx bedroom, screaming out for some sense of place, lost between the cheap covers of a book.

  * * *

  The night of the carnival in Castlebar. Eleven years old. The old man was still broad and big-boned, but heavier. A summer evening, and a gulf of men stood around under a marquee of lightbulbs, in white shirts, grey waistcoats, and gigantic red ties, chatting. They ran their fingers through wild emigrating hair. Some of them gazed longingly at a girl in a chartreuse jumper and blossoming lipstick who was selling toffee apples at a stall. Other men stood by and played darts at another stall, keen on the ace of hearts, which might have won them a tiny bottle of Paddy or an ashtray leaping with flowers. Their wives roamed around with plastic bags full of goldfish about to suffocate. From the big wheel – which, in retrospect, wasn’t very big – boys my age were sending down jets of saliva through the gaps in their front teeth on to the onlookers below. I wanted to be up there with them, but Mam had told me to stay with her. She and the old man had been arguing again. He was walking around, fulminating under a flat hat, taking pictures. But after a while he came up to us, camera across his shoulder, and asked Mam if she wanted to go for a spin on the chairoplanes. She nodded and smiled. I was stunned by the smile. There’d been a long period of silence in our house. Mam had stopped eating at the table with him. She was sleeping in the guest room. When they talked, the old man would give a shrug of the shoulders, like a twitch. She spent most of her time at the wall. The huge dark bags had filled out under her eyes, and I suppose they just kept up a semblance of themselves, for my sake, nothing else tying them to one another.

  Mam gave me a few pence to get a toffee apple. The girl at the stand had cheeks white as Styrofoam. I watched as the old man launched Mam on the chair, rocking and twirling the seat every time she came around, leaning into her, saying something. For a while she was actually laughing, I couldn’t believe it. Her skirt was flying upwards in the air. A chiffon scarf leaped backwards from her neck, a few silver strands of hair were in view from the scarf, a gasp of teeth all caesium-white. The chairoplane was moving in a circle, faster and faster, a spinning top. Each time she went past, Mam leaned out and said something to him, smiling. He was chuckling as he pushed her. But suddenly she didn’t lean out anymore.

  A group of older boys was gathered down by one of the tents, pointing at Mam. Her skirt was billowing and her thin legs were licking outwards under the billow, exposing her underpants. She blanched and shoved her fists down into the skirt to stop it from blowing upwards. As she went around she leaned outwards from the chair, towards the old man, and perhaps there was a bouquet of bile from her lips – ¡Vete al diablo Michael Lyons! – and the old man suddenly moved away, the chairoplane bringing Mam outwards towards a malachite night, around again to a muskrat-muddy ground where footprints ranged, around, around, around, gradually slowing, her skirt tucked and held between her knees now. The boys moved off, laughing, and my old man went down by the strongarm machine, with a cigarette stooping like a ladder down to his chin, the long sideways swish of his hair Brylcreemed down.

  Mam climbed off the chairoplane, smoothing the back of her skirt, hitching up some pantyhose at the knees, her voice a loom, interweaving with carnival notes, spinning out once again. ‘Come, Conor,’ she said to me. I pretended that I didn’t hear and tucked the toffee apple under my jacket so the lads on the wheel couldn’t spit down into it. The moths flared away under carnival lights beneath a massive burlesque of stars.

  I saw the old man walking towards the strongarm machine, a giant loping stride as if he’d just stepped out of an advertisement for very strong cigarettes, like he always walked – even when I hated him I loved him for the gigantic way he walked – shoulders swinging, everything in a loop around him. Mam went the other way, moving through the tents and the broken brown bottles. I stood there between them, by the toffee-apple stall, listening to a man play a concertina. I walked towards her as she moved through the sea of shirts and gypsy-fed eyes and faces lacquered with alcohol and – even before I was beside her – the hand, brown and slender, reached out backwards to take mine, a well used reflex. I took her fingers. The spindrift of carnival seeped outwards to further-strung lights of the town. Behind my back the old man was standing by the machine with the giant hammer in the air, against the backdrop of a red and white tent. The carnival clamour wilted as Mam and I moved towards the edge of the car park, and I was wondering if my father was the one sounding out the trilly muscleman bell as we tramped down weeds at the side of a field, Mam and I, circling around, waiting for him to drive us home. From the tents I could still see the boys peeping.

  She was famous by then.

  The books were censored in Ireland, of course – at first they couldn’t be found anywhere except in his darkroom, although O’Shaughnessy probably had some, too. Maybe it was O’Shaughnessy who showed them to people. Or perhaps they were found by emigrants in obscure European bookstores, sent back home in envelopes with fabulous stamps, young men stumbling across them in the corner of a Parisian stall, tentatively peeling back a cover, feeling the heart thump, looking over a thin shoulder, lifting the page higher. Maybe there were drunken miscreants in the backstreets of Liège who recognised his name on the shabby front cover – men with holes in overcoat pockets so they could reach all the way down to their articulate penises. Or curly-haired artists crazed against the sunsets of a plaza in Rome, denizens of vivacious dreams who loved the photos for what they were, sent them home, wrapped in brown paper to beat the censors.

  I had seen a copy. The door of the darkroom had been left open, the old man was gone for the day, and twenty or so were stacked in a corner. At first I didn’t understand that it was her. I just kept flicking the pages. A huge feeling of sickness rose up in me. I scoured quickly through it again, hands shaking. I remember feeling as if a big vacuum was sucking the air from me, dry-retching, a world churning in me, slamming the door, afraid to go home. I had a dream that night. The book was on the coffee table and my schoolteachers were in the house. They picked up the book and smiled, comparing different shots, bits of chalk circling around the pages, one teacher constantly circling her breasts. I kept grabbing the book and tucking it behind the pail of peat near the fireplace so that they wouldn’t see a leg leap from the glass of the coffee table, or a nipple emerge from under a plate of biscuits, or a belly button give an eye from beneath a teacup. But the teachers kept tut-tutting at me, taking it back, some of them holding it up in the air. A giant bamboo cane was raised by the headmaster and
I woke, tremulous, walked out into the landing and hunched down, inventing ways of killing my father: make him swallow his chemicals, thump him to a black and white pulp.

  Copies got through to people in town, or the rumour of the book did, so that the whole place swivelled and the postman was famous and the telephone operator was abuzz. Father Herlihy flapped in his vestments and made a veiled threat, saying, ‘Blessed be those who know the reasons for things, we must fling all filth out! Fling it out, I say!’ Men in peatbogs who had heard about the photos hailed the heroic eye of my father, caps raised up over centuried soil. Workers from the abattoir, blood-splattered, shit-splattered, passed by our house, looking up at the bedroom windows for a glance which would never come. And the women in their coffee mornings surely set about whispering, lipstick on their teeth, slapping their tongues against the news.

  ‘Listen up now, I heard they took photos in the bath.’

  ‘Go away out of that.’

  ‘Swear to God.’

  ‘You’re having me on.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Well, the water bill must be something fierce.’

  There wasn’t a whole lot of money in our house anymore – the old man had obviously paid to get the book published, and he never read from his notebook anymore. The silence at our dinner table doubled and redoubled itself. The idea of our trip to Mexico had vanished.

  Mrs O’Leary still supported Mam. She still went to the pub as often as she could – slinking through the bar quickly with her head down as barstools shifted and swivelled, out to the back garden where the chickens were. There were probably jokes made – ‘There she goes, Mrs Public Hair,’ the rat-faced comedian might have said, ‘would ya look at the swish of her!’ I figure that much, because Mrs O’Leary banned him from the pub. Over the bar counter she declared with a flourish of a fleshy hand: ‘Leave her bloody well alone! I’d do it myself, go bloody starkers, only they’d laugh at me best and whistle for more.’

  I continued to meet Mam at the pub after school, until one afternoon when birds were beating blackwinged against the sky and hay was on the wind and rain was dolloping through chestnut trees. I pulled the heavy door open, was met with curls of smoke. The man with the walrus moustache was sliding off his barstool, drunk. He looked at me as if surprised by my existence, curved his index finger towards me, ‘Come here a second, you,’ he said, ‘come here,’ leaning into me with a wink. His breath was stale with Woodbine, his eyes like apples just bitten into and discoloured, his moustache hairy over his teeth. He shifted himself on the barstool, looked around, reached forward, and out of his lunchbox on the counter, suddenly, like a rabbit pulled from a hat, came a picture of Mam which he held in the air and examined for a moment. He licked the hedge of Guinness off his moustache, rotated the photo between his fingers. He sighed, smiled at me, saying, ‘Look at this, look at this, would you have a look at this,’ and I looked, and she was there, staring out with sepia eyes from a bed overhung by a white mosquito net, beside an old lantern, beside a painting of flowers, beside a crack in the wall – Mexico – and the walrus man was twirling her in his fingers, incanting a low whistle over his lunchbox, and I stared at Mam, her breasts all soggy from lettuce and tomato sandwiches.

  Mrs O’Leary broke out from the bar counter, a greyhound from a trap, slapped the man with the walrus moustache, slapped him twice, so hard that his head moved, a wooden doll, side to side, the sound of it around the bar, ‘Get the fucken bejesus outa here!’ she shouted, then blessed herself for the blasphemy. ‘Sorry, Father,’ she said to the ceiling. She gathered me to her immense chest, held me there, turned to Mam, who had come in from the yard, and said: ‘I suppose you’d be best off leaving the young fella at home.’

  Mrs O’Leary wiped the topaz sleeves of her billowy dress across my face. She reached for a bottle of Guinness at the same time, took a slurp that dribbled down the front of her dress. Mam was fumbling at my anorak – trying to hold the steel teeth of the zip together to close it, hands shaking. Mam looked up and said sadly: ‘Yes, Alice, I suppose I should leave the child at home, should’t I?’

  * * *

  Geese out over the land, heading towards the sea. Long necks stretched, gunnelling their wings against the sky. They made a curious sound with their wings as they went overhead, like rifle fire. Spread their wings out to hover, settled down somewhere distant. Quite gorgeous.

  I got up off the wall and went back to the house to make a pot of tea, then went down to the river to see if he was doing all right. By the time I got to the river some of the tea had spilled down on to the tray and soaked into one or two of the biscuits. I picked one up and ate it. It felt like a strange Sunday communion melting on my tongue. He was sleeping in the red and white lawn chair and the rods had fallen down by his feet. All the rubbish still lay unmoving in the water, the same piece of Styrofoam that was there last week, stuck in the reeds. I thought that maybe I should clean the river up for him before I leave tomorrow – but instead I just sat down and watched its colours change as clouds passed through the sky.

  The old man was smacking his lips together – like Cici had once said, maybe he was eating his dreams.

  But his breathing was somewhat irregular and I moved up close to him, felt his breath against my cheek to make sure he was all right. It came loud and patchy through his nostrils. For a moment I moved to wake him up, shake his shoulder, decided against it. I sat and sipped at the tea, ate a few more biscuits, had a bizarre and hopelessly ridiculous notion – maybe I would feed him a damp biscuit while he slept.

  * * *

  Mam started buttoning up everything very high, even when we went to the beach, especially when we went to the beach. A long stretch of clean yellow sand, edged by rocks, studded on the ten good days of summer with deckchairs and bathtowels and coloured balls floating on the air. Men with farmers’ tans shoved the top end of matches into the ground, exhaling smoke generously to the sky. Older boys stood with binoculars on the dunes, itchy with lust for the sight of a porpoise, or a ghost ship, or a drowning, or a daring bikini.

  Along the hard edge of the beach a middle-aged gypsy whom I had seen in town was guiding a donkey. Beside him, on a motorbike, was Jimmy Donnelly from secondary school, older than me, going very slowly, no helmet on. Donnelly and the tinker nodded to one another, weaving in and out, hoof marks in a strange language amid the tyre tracks. A young girl stared at them, vanilla stream from an ice cream runnelling down the front of her chin. Dogs were unleashed and curious, and urinating by seaweed. A woman with toffee-coloured shoulders, wrapped in a towel, piled herself into a swimsuit, ballooning her breasts up with one hand. Mam sat on the blanket, wearing a white linen blouse buttoned up to the neck, a neck so thin and strained that when she took a cup of tea from the red flask and drank – sandflies jumping around on the rim of the cup – it looked as if it might be very painful to take it down, the striations furrowing down towards her bony chest. She rubbed cream on the smooth curve of her calf muscles where her skirt was hitched up, to the knee, never any further, not anymore.

  The old man was walking along the strand in his poppy-red togs, his belly plopping out over the drawstring, lifting up a jellyfish with a small piece of driftwood, turning the bell-shaped body over and over, leaning down to stare at it, his stomach creasing. Mam took a kitchen knife, from the plastic bag because we couldn’t find the hamper in the morning – he had stood by the door, shouting ‘Are yez coming or what?’, her fumbling, ‘Of course we are coming,’ him ringing the doorbell over and over, ‘Well, so’s bloody Christmas!’ – and she held the knife and unscrewed the lid from the honey jar, smearing it very slowly, precisely, over some slices of bread. She smoothed it out to the edges as if everything somehow depended on it, long slow rolls of her hand, stopping only to whip the stalks of hair back from her eyes. She wiped her fingers on the edge of the blanket. The motorbike beeped and Donnelly raised his arm in a gesture of glory, left a plume of smoke around the donkey. But the wheel go
t stuck in the soft sand. He toppled, looked up ignominiously from the ground. The tinker, riding bareback, reared in laughter. Donnelly suddenly started laughing, too, and pushed the bike through heavy sand to the applause of some old ladies.

  Donnelly and the gypsy started shouting, so that everyone looked up and listened, ‘Fivepence for a trot, ten for a canter, come and get it!’

  I moved down to the hard edge of the strand. Donnelly’s companion smelled like campfire and cider. He held the rope in brown fingers, leaned across, eyes green as silage, looked at me and said, ‘Are ya right, so? Where’s your money?’ ‘I don’t have any money,’ I said. ‘Well, fuck off, so.’ Donnelly started whispering something in the tinker’s ear. The man whipped his head back with laughter. ‘Come here,’ he said to me, ‘d’ya want a go on the donkey?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ ‘Fair enough, get your old dear down here to give us a blowjob.’ ‘What?’ ‘Your old dear, she gives us a blowjob, we’ll give ya a trot.’ Donnelly began laughing. I edged away from the donkey, and the tinker started whispering something in the animal’s ear, giving it some form of benediction. Is that what he means? I thought. I was eleven years old.

  I ran up the strand to where Mam was headbent staring at the ground, and the old man was standing with his arms stretched out, like Jesus crucified, arguing about no butter on the sandwiches – ‘Ya want me to eat these fucken things dry?’ – so I sat on the edge of the blanket and watched Donnelly and the tinker roll down along the beach again. A sandwich was laid in my lap.