Speaking With the Angel

  But now, fuck. I’m on the verge of giving out to her because she looks good. As if she’s to blame for being an attractive young one, as if it’s anything to blame anyone for. And I was never like that. I was always proud of her, always, all the way. And I’ve always liked the way she dressed. But now I’m terrified. Anything could happen out there. And it’s not just the predictable stuff. She could be hit by a car crossing the road, no matter what she’s wearing. I remember the first time we let her go down the shops by herself. It was a real event, that day. She was so proud of herself, you know. And so was I. She was just eight. I’ve always loved that, giving them the opportunity to be proud of themselves. If it was now though, if tomorrow was the day she was going to go the shops by herself, I wouldn’t let it happen. Not the way I feel these days.

  He drinks the last of the tea.

  Coffee in the morning, tea at night. Her idea. She’s worried about me. Which is about the only thing going right for me at the moment. Her worrying. It proves something – I don’t know what. Love, I suppose. Maybe not, though. But she likes me; I’m pretty sure of that. I see her looking at me and I want to shout at her to leave me alone but I’m grateful for it as well.

  I don’t know anything any more. I don’t seem to. And I’m getting pains in my chest. And my arms are stiff when I wake up. Numb, like I’ve been lying on them. And, let’s face it, I can’t have been lying on both of them. I remember in a film I saw when I was a kid, The Bird Man of Alcatraz, with Burt Lancaster in it. The warden, your man from The Streets of San Francisco – not Michael Douglas, the other one. Your man with the nose. Karl something. Anyway, he had a pain in his arm – Malden, Karl Malden – and Burt Lancaster, the birdman, knew that he was going to have a heart attack. And I remember being fascinated by that, that a pain in your arm was a sign that there was something wrong with your heart. It was great. And my father, of course – this was before he got the slippers – he wanted to know if a pain in your arse meant you were going to have a brain haemorrhage. That was always the sign of a good film in our house. It got us talking. But anyway. What do two numb arms mean? Two heart attacks?

  And it’s not just the body. I don’t give a fuck about anything any more. I really don’t.

  He nods at the book on the counter.

  I was reading it ten minutes ago, I’m two-thirds of the way through it, but –

  He reads the title.

  Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier. It’s good, you know. It’s very, very good. And I couldn’t care less. I’m reading it because it’s what I do. Given the choice between the telly and a book, I’ll usually go for the book. But now. I’m just doing it. I don’t care. She used to like that about me, the opposite, you know. She always said it. My enthusiasm. I was like a big kid, and she wasn’t slagging. She loved the way I listened to music. I leaned into it. I really listened. I never noticed, but she did. She said that she’d never really listened to music until she started to watch me listening, after we got married and moved into the house, and she saw how much I loved it. And it was the same with books, and everything really. There was once she made me read in bed, out loud, while she got on top of me, and I read right up to the second before I came – and it wasn’t easy, I’ll tell you, hanging on to the right page. It wasn’t a hardback, thank Jesus. The Slave, by Isaac Bashevis Singer. What a book that was. I’d never read anything like it before. Or since. It made me really regret that I wasn’t a Jew, because of the way the main lad, Jacob, struggled to hold on to his Jewishness all the way through the book. He was the slave in the title. The peasants were trying to get him to eat pork, to do everything that was against his beliefs, for years. And she noticed how excited I was getting, sitting up in the bed, and she asked me what was so good about it. So I read her a bit. About a party up in the mountains. Poland this was, four hundred years ago. I haven’t read the book since but I’ll never forget it. Jacob was sent up there in the summer months to look after the cattle, find them grass among the rocks, and the only other people up there with him were the village freaks, the products of brothers riding the sisters and the rest of it. Granted, the writer expressed it a good bit better than I can, but you get my drift. So I read her a bit. I can’t quote it exactly but they were all rolling around in the muck, grunting like pigs, barking like dogs, howling, pissing on the fire, hugging the trees, stretched out on rocks, vomiting, screaming, roaring. ‘It’s just like our wedding,’ she said. ‘What’s it about besides that bit?’ ‘Well, it’s a love story, so far,’ I said. ‘It’s fantastic.’ ‘Find us a different bit,’ she said. So I did. Where he describes Wanda, this peasant girl that Jacob loves. And that’s when it happened. I got through about a page and a half, which wasn’t too bad because it was very small print and long paragraphs. Anyway, I came and she collapsed on me. ‘Ah look it,’ I said. ‘I’ve lost me page.’ She laughed and cried, you know that way, and kissed me. ‘That’s the one,’ she said, into my ear. Meaning, she’d be pregnant. She took the book out from between us and looked at the cover, at the writer’s name. ‘We’ll call him Isaac if it’s a boy,’ she said. It wasn’t anything, actually. Not that time. But that’s how important it was to me, reading, music, even the job. I loved tiles. Holding them, lining them up. The word ‘grout’. Everything.

  She gave me the job of naming the kids. She knew I’d give them names that were important, that meant something. That had a bit of magic in them. So the eldest is Sarah. That’s the name Wanda changed her name to after she ran off with Jacob, in The Slave. She read the book, last year, the eldest did, and I think she was pleased, even though it’s very sad in places and Sarah has a hard time of it. She said nothing, but I think she liked it, the link there, you know. Then there’s Oskar, from The Tin Drum. She wasn’t too keen on him being named after a dwarf but I persuaded her that if our lad got up to half the things that Oskar does in the book then we’d never be bored. Then there’s Mary, from Strumpet City and Famine. They’ve a lot in common, the two Marys; they’re great fighters. And we thought we’d go for something a bit more Irish, even though it’s not strictly an Irish name. So, anyway, she’s Mary. And the little lad is Chili, after Chili Palmer in Get Shorty. He’s actually named after me, Terence, because we knew he’d more than likely be the last and she said we should name him after me and my father, and I didn’t mind. I quite liked it, actually, especially when it was her idea. Even though I’ve been reading books all my life and I’ve never come across a hero or even a baddie called Terence. So, anyway, we usually call him Chili. And that’s Chili in the book, not John Travolta in the film, good and all as he was.

  Anyway, the point is, I haven’t always been the miserable poor shite you’re looking at. And, really, it wasn’t too bad until recently. And I don’t know if it’s just the rat. I’m just so tired, you know. And then this thing. How it happened was, we got up together one Saturday morning and found the kitchen flooded. An inch of water all over the shop.

  He stands up and goes to the sink.

  We couldn’t figure out how it was happening. We couldn’t see where the water was coming from. Anyway, I turned it off at the mains and then we found it, the source of the leak.

  He opens the press under the sink.

  There’s a rubber pipe back there that runs from the cold tap to a tap outside on the wall, for the gardening and that. And a mouse had eaten into it. The plumber, a pal of mine, showed it to us when he was replacing it. The teeth marks. ‘These things are supposed to be rodent-proof,’ he says. ‘Tell that to the fuckin’ mouse,’ she says. And that was that, really. No real damage done. I got some poison, the blue stuff – I can’t remember its name – and I put it up in the attic and I got a couple of new traps for in here. No problem. We always get a couple of mice in the house, every November or thereabouts, when they come in for the winter. And who can blame them? So anyway, they didn’t go near the traps but the poison was gone a few days later, and it drives them out of the house when they go mad for water. So, end of story. And
then I found your man and we realized that it was rat all the time, not mice, and he’d had the run of the house for God knows how long. So.

  So, I suppose, on top of everything else, my tiredness, the rows with the eldest – I suppose I’m just getting old, really – so the rat was the icing on the cake, so to speak. Not the first time I’ve seen a rat, by any means. I’d see them all the time on the job, and when I was a kid we used to hunt them. But before, when I saw a rat, they were always doing the decent thing, running off in the opposite direction. This guy, though. Granted, he was dead. But, how long had he been in the house? Through the open door, that’s how most of them get in, according to the pest control lads. Or up the drainpipe, and in under the roof. How long, though? Mice stick to one little patch of the house, but not rats. They have the run of the place. He came into the kitchen through a hole in the plaster, where it was drenched by the flooding and fell away from the wall. Grand, that’s that explained. He died two feet from the hole. But what about before that, how did he get in before the plaster fell away? Down the stairs? Why not? It’s shattering, thinking about it.

  But.

  Here it is. Here’s why I’m here now. Leaving aside the fact that I’m nearly always here at this time of night.

  He sits again at the counter.

  I’m taking the house back. I’m repossessing it. I’m staying here like this, now and in the mornings, and I’m doing it until it becomes natural again. Until I’m actually reading, and not listening out for noise or remembering our dead friend on the floor every time I go over there to the kettle. Until I look forward to my cup of coffee again in the morning.

  I’m not guarding the house. I don’t think that there are more rats inside. I don’t. Or even mice. And, to be honest with you, after what’s happened, the mice are fuckin’ welcome. I’ll get in some extra cheese for the occasion. No, I’m getting over that bit. That’s only a matter of time. The rat’s gone. We’re more careful about keeping the back door shut. I balled up some chicken wire and stuffed it up the drainpipes, so the chances of another one getting into the house are very fuckin’ slim. I believe that. And very soon I’ll actually feel it. To the extent that I won’t feel anything, if that makes sense.

  But – and here’s where the right words are really hard to come by. In a way, I am guarding the house. Not against a rat or rats or mice or anything else that shouldn’t be in the house. What I’m doing is guarding it against nature. All of it. The whole shebang.

  The only reason that life can go on in this house is because we manage to keep nature out. And it’s the same with every house. And nature, now, isn’t lambs and bunnies and David Attenborough – that’s only a tiny part of it. And isn’t bird watching and saving the whale. Fair enough, but that’s not what it is. It’s a lot rougher than that. Life is a fight between us – the humans, like – and nature. We’ve been winning but we haven’t won. And we never will. Nature will never, ever surrender. The rats, for instance.

  He points at the floor.

  They’re under us.

  He indicates a three-foot distance between his two palms.

  A bit more, a bit less. They’re down there. Fine. But give them a chance. And they’ll be back. They haven’t lost and they never will. There’s more of them than there is of us. We need the walls and the foundations to keep them out, to let them know – because they’re not thick – that we’re brighter than them and we’re stronger than them. We have to mark off our space, the same as the other animals do. And it’s not just the animals. It’s everything. It’s ourselves. We used to be cannibals. It’s only natural, when you think about it. We’re only meat. What could be more natural, for fuck sake? We probably taste quite good as well, the fitter, younger ones. But we sorted out the cannibalism years ago. It’s not an issue any more, it’s not a choice. Take the house away, though, take the farms and the roads and all the organization that goes into human life and it will be a question of choice again. If nature gets the upper hand again, we’ll soon be eating each other again. Or, at the very least, we’ll be deciding whether or not to. And then there’s sex. We’re only a couple of generations away from the poor freaks in The Slave. Brothers with sisters, fathers with daughters. It goes on anyway, sometimes. We all know that. It’s disgusting, but we have to admit it. And it’s walls and doors that stop it.

  It’s nothing new. I’ve always known it. Only, I’ve never had to think about it. And that’s what the rat did when it decided to die on the floor over there. It was probably trying to find a way out when it seized up. And I wish to fuck it had. We’d never have known. Or even, if it had died in the attic or behind the plaster. I mean, the smell would have caught up with us eventually, but it wouldn’t have been as bad. Rat in the attic? Shocking. Rat in the kitchen? Un-fuckin’-believable.

  I mean, I recognize what’s going on in my head, what’s been going on for a while, actually, on and off. It’s middle age. I know that. It’s getting older, slower, tired, bored, fat, useless. It’s death becoming something real. It’s the old neighbours from my childhood dying. And even people my own age. Cancer, mostly. Car crashes.

  But you can still hang on. And I was doing all right. There’s little Chili. He’s been like a new battery. Just picking him up strips the years off me. I feel as young and as happy as I did when Sarah was born. And there’s music. And books.

  He nods at Cold Mountain.

  I’m going to start this one again. It’s not fair on the writer, claiming I’ve read it when I have no real idea what it’s about. And there’s herself. Jackie. We get on great. We have sex, although it always seems to be on Fridays. Which I don’t like, that kind of routine. Because I’m a bastard for them, routines. The slightest excuse, everything becomes a routine, and I’ve always tried to fight it. But anyway, we get on like – two houses on fire, really. I love her. Yeah, I do. She makes me laugh. And she knows I’m struggling, and she’s sympathetic. She gets a bit impatient with me now and again, but who wouldn’t. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is, up until – you know – I’d been coping okay. Enjoying life. My very educated mother just showed us nine planets. The world was a straightforward, decent place that could be simplified into a line of words running down a blackboard.

  And so it is. Only, it has to be protected. If you find a rat in your kitchen the world stops being a straightforward, decent place for a while. You have to take it back. And that’s what I’m doing. Taking it back.

  And I’m getting there. I don’t know how long it’s going to take, and I don’t care. This is for Chili, and the older ones. I’m no good to them the way I am. I have to be able to say My very educated mother, and believe it.

  It’s a matter of time.

  I bought a CD today. I went down to Virgin during the break. I was going to get one of the old ones, something I loved but didn’t have on CD. Dylan or Bob Seger or The Eagles or Bob Marley or Joni Mitchell – I could go on for ever. But I didn’t. I had Blue and Blood on the Tracks in my hand – I was going to get the both of them. But I didn’t. I went for something completely new. I bought an album by Leftfield, this band that isn’t really a band. They’re a pair of young lads who do this sampling and mixing, you know. Robbing other people’s ideas and making their own thing out of it. Dance music. Not Barry White dancing, more Trainspotting dancing – I’ll let her watch it; she’s well able for it. Anyway, the music. There’s a touch of reggae, a bit of Kraftwerk. At a knackering pace. It’s mad stuff. I put it on loud when were having the tea tonight, when I got home. And I love it. I got little Chili to dance with me, and Mary and Oskar joined in – he’s five foot ten, by the way. Even Sarah was smiling. There’ll be no stopping me now. Ecstasy, cocaine, heroin, Red Bull. No fuckin’ stopping me. But I’ll tell you one thing – the chips and the egg put in one almighty protest when I was bopping. You’d want to be fit to be a raver. Seriously though, I’m not trying to be cool. I wanted the music to be an announcement. To the kids, and to Jackie. That I’m fine. Because they can’t
have helped noticing that I’ve been a bit low, and restless. We never told them about the rat, by the way. None of them has a clue. But the music, especially me dancing to a thing called ‘Afro-Left’, sweating like a bastard, that was an announcement. I’m grand. And I think they got the point. It was nice.

  So.

  An album a week from now on. Not necessarily new stuff but back to listening. Listening properly. And sharing it. And not on the same day. I’m not going to go into Virgin every Wednesday just because I did it today. And not Virgin either because, frankly, it’s shite. If you don’t like Phil Collins or Celine Dion don’t bother your hole going into that kip. But, music every week. If I have the money.

  And I’m going to go into training to do the Dublin City Marathon. I’ve always said I’d do it. So I’m going to. I decided today, on the Dart home. I’m not deluding myself. I won’t be winning it; it’ll probably take me all day. I’ll probably hit the wall, you know, and shit myself in front of thousands of people, live on telly as well, knowing my luck. And on The News later on. But I’m going to do it anyway.