‘It’s funny,’ I mused, ‘but silence is an important part of my life now.’ There was another long pause. Her face looked like a wall. She must have thought I was going to bitch about being alone in Castlebar. ‘What I mean, Phil, is that silence is the thing I work with. All the time. Especially in the theatre. Silence is often where real communication begins. I find that very interesting.’
‘Jesus,’ Maureen said, ‘you only ever do voiceovers. You hardly get a single job in any year on the stage. And don’t call him Phil.’
Then we were all silent again and I tried to look out the window at the lake with as much dignity as I could muster.
It’s about an hour and fifteen minutes from the house on the hill above Lough Gill to Castlebar. I drove without putting on either a radio or a CD. All the way home I went, in silence. Just to prove something to myself.
Years ago, when I was in secondary school, there was a gang of boys who roamed the corridors and basements, and shower areas, and the toilets and landings beside the boarders’ dormitories, always looking for younger boys to terrorise. Stopping little first-years for questioning. Demanding cigarettes, information, radios. Humiliating them with orders; come here, stand there, don’t look at me like that. They shoved big fists into little tear-stained faces, and pushed heads down toilet bowls, and not a single teacher stopped it. No one chastised them; far from it, the bullies were usually good on the football pitch and so were praised by everyone.
I saw people go through life struggling with alcoholism, depression and anger just because they had been treated so brutally. Some committed suicide. One fellow jumped out a window on Christmas Day. And another walked into a lake. Another dived off a balcony in Bulgaria. I suppose I was lucky, because I wasn’t a boarder, and so I didn’t get the worst of it. Although I never togged out for football after the incident in the basements. On Saturdays I’d go fishing instead. I’d get a line and reel, and a little Voblex bait, and I’d toss it into the brown unknown of the lake at Foxford. The surface was often flat in the afternoons, with a cloud of midges hovering above, and a glorious silence blanketing the world, except for geese squawking on the far shore.
The fish didn’t like the baits. They looked at me with open mouths bleeding from the hooks. I tried battering their heads off the stones, to finish them off, but that gave me an uneasy feeling, so usually the fish lay dying at my feet for ages. And sometimes they didn’t bite at all, which made me angry.
‘Bite! Yis fucken bastards!’ I’d hiss.
My hands gripping the rod too tightly. Pulling the line too suddenly. And then the bait hooks would get lodged behind stones in the water, and I’d tug the line until it broke and so my Voblex would be lost, and I would curse the world and cycle home in a rage.
Maureen and I broke up in June. I arrived in Castlebar on Bloomsday and during that summer I would stand on the balcony all evening, listening to the arguments going on in other apartments around me. My wife used to say I was insensitive because I never touched her in a gentle way, and I was never spontaneously affectionate. That’s what she said. And I would say that I didn’t understand what she was talking about, and she’d say—
‘There, you see? That’s what I’m talking about.’
When the bones of three steaks had been tossed in the waste bin and the three of us had made it through the chocolate cake and a pot of tea I said I’d head off. Philip said, ‘I’ll see you to the car.’
We stood outside looking at my jeep and we made small talk about the size of the engine, because he had never seen it before. Then we fumbled to engage in a kind of hug, but it was a terrible piece of acting. Even when he was little it wasn’t something I ever mastered. I suppose it’s just a family trait. My father rarely hugged me. When he did, the bristle of his chin felt as rough as sandpaper. He had spectacles as monumental as the headlamps on a tractor and he was very old when he married. Beneath his grey suits he wore long johns and flannel vests, and all his teeth were false.
There’s no open fire in the apartment. But I don’t miss it. I have an electric heater with one of those glass fronts that gives the impression that it’s a real coal fire inside, with a pathetic flickering light that even the cat knows is not a flame. The sun was shining when I signed the lease in June of 2006. The auctioneer was a boy in a light-grey pinstripe suit and a pink shirt and grey tie. I asked a lot of questions, and he looked constipated. I suppose he was used to stitching up East Europeans in small apartments with paper-thin walls and no fire doors, and wonky washing machines, without being asked too many questions. It was a warm day and the thought of a fire never crossed my mind. The sun was shining on the floors of imitation wood. The sofas were clean and crisp. There was a French window in the main lounge, which opened and allowed the occupant to lean on a railing, much like a balcony, although one was still standing in the room. It felt like a balcony. I still call it a balcony. And from there I can see children playing in the courtyard in the afternoons. I can see an old woman in the apartment directly opposite mine at midday eating her lunch. And I can see the Lithuanians every morning in the third-floor apartment to my left, watching television as they take their breakfasts. Cartoons. Always cartoons. The constipated boy in the grey suit and the pink shirt said the lease was for one year. Then we could sign another agreement he suggested. ‘And no pets,’ he said, as if I was a child. And already I’ve been here five years.
So I have a tray for Tiger 2, and she never gets out. I sit drying off at my electric heater after a bath, and she sits on the rug staring at me, and I stare at a photograph of my son on the mantelpiece. He’s wearing a mauve jumper too big for him and he is pushing a wooden horse on wheels through the snow. It’s the only picture I like. I think he looks lovely at that age, in the snow, and full of joy. Philip once asked me what I would like to do when I got old. I was reading the newspaper on the patio at the time. It was a Sunday morning and Philip was about eight. I said I think I’d like to just sit here on the patio and look at the trees when I’m old. I didn’t know what to say. I saw old men as remote objects of pity, passive animals, sucking pipes, holding the wall as they walked down streets, or gazing into ponds in public parks where they sat for hours on benches, or sipping glasses of Guinness in the corner bar, or strapped to wheelchairs at the doors of various nursing homes, while white uniformed women attended like angels beside them. That’s what I thought of old people ten years ago.
But age creeps up on all of us and then the imminence of death astonishes us. I have to admit that when I think about it now, there’s nothing I’d like more in old age than to kneel in the back pew of a quiet church mid-morning, when the rituals are over, and the great empty vault smells of incense and wine and flowers and polish. I would beg someone to forgive me. Anyone. But I may not be able to enjoy that consolation since the Church is now so disgraced that all the buildings will probably be Omniplex cinemas by the time I’m seventy-five.
I was astonished when my father died. I didn’t know where he went. It was as if his presence evaporated into thin air. As if the world he inhabited and which mattered so much to him turned out to be an illusion. When he was gone there was no world. It was just things left behind to be gathered in plastic bags and dumped in the rubbish. All those medicine bottles. And the radio. The clock. The slippers. The suits in the wardrobe. The bottle of Maalox for his stomach trouble. Every detail of a sick father’s room became meaningless when the suffering was over and he was no more. And when I meet old schoolmates now we talk of nothing else but blood pressure and prostates and urinating in the night, and the need for vegetables to keep the bowels in good order. We’re all terrified. But there’s not really much of that you can share with a young man.
At my son’s first holy communion there was a bishop in such glorious vestments that he reminded me of a peacock. He stood on the steps of the cathedral puffed up with compliments from mothers in white hats, and I almost envied him his flow and confidence and brazen might. But the last time I was in
Dublin I saw him walking down O’Connell Street in an old coat, fallen and graceless, his eyes watering, and nobody to bid him the time of day.
Before leaving my son’s birthday lunch, I gave him money stuck in a card. The wife smiled at me. For a moment I felt she actually approved. We were in the middle of those hideous T-bone steaks which I didn’t dare comment on. That’s when it started to rain and she turned off the barbecue machine and we went inside and sat at the long wooden table I bought in Ballina fifteen years ago, an old antique that she always maintained was full of woodworm, though I noted that she still has it in the house. Not that I would have wanted it. The apartment is far too small for that kind of table and besides, when I first hit Castlebar I began eating out at lunchtime and for about six months I spent the evenings in bars trying to meet new friends, until I finally realised that I was too old to have a future.
And for a few days after Philip’s eighteenth birthday I felt strangely attached to the cat. I even let her sleep on top of my duvet, which is not a good idea, because of all the hairs. And then on the following Monday, I got the letters. One was from her solicitors and the other was printed off a computer on blank white paper with her name signed at the bottom. It was full of the usual clichés about moving on and having found someone else, but the solicitor’s letter was the real deal. Vellum paper, gold letterhead and a few cold phrases about their client’s interests. So I waited until the following Sunday before calling her. There’s still a faint residue of silence in Sunday mornings and I thought it might be a good time to catch her. I didn’t want an argument. So I called her but the answering machine came on and so I just left a message.
‘Hi,’ I said. ‘It’s me. Just wanted to let you know that I have the letter and that everything will be fine. It’s whatever you want.’
There was a long pause. I presume she was away for the weekend with her painter friend. But I could imagine the kitchen in all its detail. The hum of the oil-fuelled Aga cooker. The tick of the clock that marked every breakfast and dinnertime when Philip was growing up. The wok from Cyprus and Angela’s coffee pot. Even Philip’s tin whistle is probably still in the knives and forks drawer. I wanted to say I think I might have prostate cancer, but the silence was choking me, so I put down the phone. There was a time when I used to walk around that house on Sunday mornings and think how lucky I was; a chicken in the oven and two firelighters underneath six turf briquettes in the open fire grate of the lounge and the sound of my little boy crying in the bathroom as Maureen lathered his head with shampoo. Cloudy days with wind blowing and rain from the west, and the gorgeous long-haired white cat in my lap. Not that I miss the open fire. Most of the heat went up the chimney anyway. But I do miss the cat. And I don’t think it was fair that Maureen got to keep her; no matter what the little fucker in the grey suit and the pink shirt said. Pets or no pets the cat should have come with me.
Godīgums
Keith Ridgway
He fled back to Dublin with his tail between his legs. Which was the phrase he used, in his innards, repeatedly. The words – the very words tail, between, legs – had come to him on the heels of the idea, the idea of returning, like a house-dog. Yapping and delirious. The vertiginous idea – the fear – and its pawing drooling house-dog, the sick little puppy of retreat, its bark. Tail. Between. Legs. It followed the words Dublin, return, humiliation, flight. It chased him through his panicked consideration of other options, other possibilities, each of which was rendered redundant and dropped, one then the other then the next, by the giddy imperative of the words home, Dublin, tail, legs. And his tail and his legs had been so often invoked in this frayed and sweaty – unbearable – month-long internal turmoil of the innards that he had begun to believe – to see himself – as a creature with a tail – a literal tail – and to hate his accommodating legs, and his awful, implied, retreating arse. And he could not dislodge the picture from his mind. A man. With a tail. Between his legs. A fault and aberration, a monster made of failure. A wretch of those sunken rooms. A misbegotten glitch, a derailment. A beast on the tracks. There was a whole language for his failure, a rich and picturesque imagery and lexicon of abasement, and he was flooded with it. And he wondered in his misery whether such a thing as a tail between his legs could be disguised, made use of, passed off for some sort of newly acquired cockiness, a thrusting appendage of success, potency, coming home with a hard-on that such a tiny place as Dublin could never satisfy or deflate. He decided not to tell his family. Certain that this would lead inevitably to him bumping into them at every corner he spent money that did not exist on tattoos. This was panic. Clutchings. As the ink was painfully pricked first into his forearm, then his shoulder, his inner thigh, and finally his left wrist, it occurred to him that tattoos would fool his family only if he bumped into them while naked, or in the event of his death and facial disfigurement. Did your son have any tattoos, they would be asked. Certainly not. So if this was not then, as it turned out, a disguise, what was it? He slumped and looked at his skin, his tail. This was a way of making his absence appear if not longer then deeper than it had in fact been. If he met his family he would pretend a mental collapse, a death, a murder perhaps, an earthquake. Anything but the tail. Or something at least that pinned the tail to him, that made of it an injury, an assault, not this self-generated, self-grown tumour of his own inability, his misfiring. He considered shaving off his beard but decided that what he needed now was the illusion not of youthfulness but of experience. He had his right earlobe pierced twice, his left once. The day before travelling he had his hair drastically and innovatively cut, aiming for the fashion of the place, the fashion he had spent the previous year rolling his eyes at. But something went awry, midway, some combination of the trainee barber and his own instructions, and the discomfort of sitting – perching, like a boy on the plank, like a tumorous goatherd – on such a preposterous tail. He emerged onto the street looking like something shocking new, something newborn into panic, slapped and scurrying into the crowds with his head alight and the Devil’s finger hysterically prodding his perineum. The journey exhausted him. The whole journey. The journey to his miserable hovel, the last of it, the journey through the nothing night, the journey through the air and over the land, and through the sick of the sea. His belongings implicated him in something banal. He took refuge in toilets at every opportunity – in stations, trains, airports, on ferries and their terminals, and sat for as long as he could bear, considering his tail. Its prominence, its tumescence, its stench. He tried to love it. He tried to find its loveliness, its purr. He savoured it and searched for ways of harnessing it. Of turning it. No! Of wagging it. Of altering, appealing, the condemnation of the phrase. Of putting it behind him. But the journey was long, and nothing in it worked. He stared at his hair and his scabby tattoos, and he wrestled with his story and he tried to hide his tail, and the sea disgorged him. Dublin looked like it should. The same at first, then hideously different, then interestingly so, then the same again, just as he had left it, as if he never had, as if he had merely slept late. It showed no sign of recognising him at all. Sullivan lived in the south of the city centre, near the canal, and he went there by way of buses and he was lost three times before he was finally weary enough to call for directions, and his accent was a sudden mess against the ones in the street and the one on the phone, and he didn’t know what to do with it. What a ridiculous-looking building. By a cube of stale water. Everywhere the wind smoothed out the grey flannel sky, and there were little birds, and taxis, and bicycles, and people, groups of people and couples of people and solitary people, and there were balconies and the wind and kerbs and cobbles and lamp-posts and the air full of misremembered things, and everyone stared at him, everyone stared, and he grappled with his baggage while his tail whipped his chest and he felt that if he did not find a small room soon he would be wrestled off the quayside – a monster taken by a monster, a blur of tentacle and splash – and he presumed himself dead already, back in Dublin and dead in
the water. Sullivan was furious. Not at the imposition, but at the haircut. You look like a fucking culchie. You look like a fucking culchie TD. You look like a fucking Fianna Fáil culchie TD. From 1978. It was all the rage, Michael told him, in other places, and Sullivan scowled and ran his hand through it and wondered if he could do a quick fix with the old clippers. And Michael realised with a wallop that this was the first test, the first tug on his tail, and he pulled himself out, dripping and spluttering, of the sulk into which he had momentarily sunk. You won’t fucking touch it you backward old shite what would you know about hair you’ve never been further than Bray. At which Sullivan smiled for the first time and gave him a proper hug and kissed his neck and flicked his earrings and opened a bottle of wine. Five years, he said. You’ve missed all the fun. And barely a fucking word, Michael. You know? And Michael nodded and summoned sadness and placed a hand on his old friend’s shoulder. I am no good at writing Sully, you know that. You know me. No good at distance. No good at staying in touch. Too many distractions. Too much. But you were always . . . and he placed his other hand where he thought his heart was. Sullivan looked at him, and sniffed, and nodded. Alright, he said. Alright. I missed you. I missed you very badly for a while. And Michael felt his tail coil round his middle and creep up his back and over his shoulder and around his neck like a noose, and he went and found a seat to sit in and he looked out the window at the low city and he tried to find his throat. I missed you too, Sully. But barely a word, I know. Barely a word. And he looked at his old friend and he thought, he seriously thought, for a moment, about putting his hands up, taking his shirt off, coming clean, showing and telling. Here are my bruisey tattoos, here is my tail. I have fucked it all up and I don’t know what I’m doing. And he was tired, and his body ached, and his earlobes throbbed, and his hair felt like the wrong hat, and he looked at Sully and he moved his lips, and he was about to say, about to say . . . But Sullivan stopped him. Oh well, he said. You’re back, you bastard, and you’re welcome, so forget it. What’s past is past and I’m glad to see you. And his tail slipped down again, and he smiled and raised a glass and nodded. I have so much to tell you, he said. You won’t believe a word. So they sat together in the grey sky and they drank and talked and listened. And he described the way it was, or the way it wasn’t, by way of the way it wasn’t, adjusted for the way it might have been, or might at least be believed. A complicated formulation this, taking the baseline of the truth, which he must obscure at all costs, which he did obscure, utterly, with a fiction, a cloak over the tail, impenetrable but nevertheless pretty plainly a cloak – which would lead inevitably to Why are you wearing a cloak? – and which he therefore had to in some way acknowledge, which he did, by drawing attention to it, even going so far as to point to the bump where the tail was, saying that it looked like a tail, isn’t that what it looks like Sully, look at me, penniless, homeless, sitting on your chair and drinking your wine with my tail between my legs. So that the tail might look like something else. Something mysterious. A love, a sorrow, something that had happened. And the words he dreaded were, You haven’t changed. The dread words. And Sullivan didn’t say them. Instead he took what he was given and nodded and laughed and frowned and seemed to show no doubt. And the details came and came, and Michael arranged them and rearranged them, and slid them around into shapes that seemed like living. And he was tired, he said, and therefore vague, and then specific, and then vague again, and there were things he said he could not talk about, and things he said he could not remember now, and things that sounded like triumphs but which he minimised and waved his hand at, and things that sounded like disasters, which he – and this, he realised was the way to do it – which he lingered over, regretted, live and learn, Sully, you know? Live and fucking learn. So he had been now, he discovered, a worker in theatre, and television, and he had lived for nearly a year in a city he had in fact visited for a week, and he had spent most of the past two years living, he was startled to learn, with an older lover, a television producer, but he didn’t want to talk about that, not now, Sully, Jesus, I’m only off the boat, I’m knackered, and I’m just back for a little while, out of curiosity you know, check on the family, change of scene, and I may stay a week or I may stay a month, and I’m grateful for the spare bed but I’ll get something else in a couple of days and leave you in peace, no that’s generous of you, Sully, but I’d rather get my own place, Dieter might visit, Dieter, yes, Dieter. Little Dieter I call him, I don’t know why, he’s not little, anyway. I haven’t changed, Sully. I haven’t changed. I haven’t changed a bit. And Sullivan looked at him, and cocked his head, and thought about that, and said nothing, and Michael took another wine and laughed lightly at the music Sullivan had available, and mentioned some acts that Sullivan had never heard of, one or two Michael had never heard of either, given that he plucked the names out of nothing, out of half-understood conversations, out of the rags of his memory, out of panic. I haven’t changed, Sully. What’s that? said Sullivan, seeing the inky hook of a long G crawling onto his wrist. Oh that one. I just got that one. That’s one of the new ones. What do you think? Sullivan held Michael’s wrist and pushed his sleeve up as if looking for tracks, and he examined it, and gave a low whistle. What does it say? HONESTY. In Latvian. And you have others you say? Ah a few. You pick them up. Over the years. Like a fool. I’ve made mistakes, Sully, you know? It hasn’t been all fun and frolics. I’ve fucked up royally a few times. Older and wiser. And Michael went on like this for a while, rolling out allusions to events he had yet to make up. Triumphs and disasters. Minimise the one, exaggerate the other. Hint at its opposite through misdirection. Sullivan listened and smiled, and looked at his wrist, and asked to see the others and was told no, not now, I’m cold, Sully, what sort of summer is this? And he made a subtle and terrible show of himself. I haven’t changed, Sully. Ah you have a bit now, to be fair, Sullivan told him. You have. And Michael found his bed then and fell into it and slept for thirteen hours, dreaming of the past and all that it could be.