A Mad and Wonderful Thing (21 page)

‘You two were well matched.'

I look to Aisling and, without thinking, dispense a few lines of Kavanagh into the space between us:

I gave her gifts of the mind, I gave her the secret sign that's known
To the artists who have known the true gods of sound and stone
And word and tint. I did not stint for I gave her poems to say.

‘Exactly,' she says, and smiles.

‘You know, Aisling, all the great things in life begin as dreams and aspirations. It's what makes us human. It's what took us out of the trees. Can you imagine when that first ape took to walking through the savannah? Just imagine the abuse he took from the high branches.
Look at that eejit go
, they would have said,
making a show of himself, trying to stand up straight like a fool.
' I do an impression of an ape getting on its feet and looking out over tall grass.

She laughs. ‘That's an impressive impression. But then you mightn't have found it too difficult.'

I threaten her with a wooden spoon that I lift from a dish beside the range. ‘Careful there, Flannery, or I might have to deal with you.'

‘Did you know I'd be here today?' she asks, letting the humour drop. ‘Is that why you called?'

‘Yes.'

She sits beside me, and we are silent as we wait for the stew to finish heating, secure in each other's presence now the admission has been released, safe now in the knowing. After a while, I get up and take two bowls out of a cupboard and put them on the table.

‘C'mon,' I say, ‘let's sample this Flannery stew.'

We sit in the kitchen until evening, and I don't leave until she sings for me.

‘Don't forget Dublin,' she calls as I go.

I walk into town and visit Frank Boyle. Frank has settled down with his girlfriend, and has bought a house. He takes two cans of beer from the fridge.

‘Great value out at the border,' he says.

He shows me around the house: the tidy living room, the matching furniture, the new sofas and the cushions, the video player, the study full of boxes and no books, the bedroom and the fitted wardrobes. I sit on a chair in the kitchen, and drink the beer from a glass.

‘Galway Crystal, that,' he says. ‘Nice, isn't it?'

‘Yes. Lovely.'

I used to enjoy calling on Frank. Teenage Frank moved with a kind of bounce, and he spoke with energy as if he was trying to throw his words over some sort of height. His talk was filled with the latest music news; it was all Ian Dury or The Cure or The Pixies. But things have changed, I guess. We were such great friends, the four of us: Éamon, Conor, Frank, and I. Big Robbie joined us late. We spent the time together. We talked on the important details: school, the first division, the top forty, the hassle at home; the wish for a flat of our own, for money, for the weekend, for women. So many times we did nothing, but we did it together — the trips to nowhere, the football in the street, the bags of chips, the buying of clothes and records, the first few pints, and then the next few, the discos and the fun on the dance floor, the sweat-soaked shirts dumped on the floor for the mothers to revive for the next week, and so much to say. And I would stay in their houses and they would stay in mine, and we would talk and talk and talk. And as I sit at Frank's kitchen table, I know the years have passed. Not many, but enough.

I thank Frank for the beer, give my wishes to the girlfriend, and leave.

The price you pay for empire

IT IS MID-FEBRUARY. I AM HOME AGAIN, AND WE ARE IN THE COOKING
POT
. We are all there: Éamon, Big Robbie, Frank, and I. Conor is home from London, and introduces Sebastian, Kate, and Flossie — three English work friends he has brought with him. We drink beer, we tell stories, and we sing songs. We try to remember the songs we wrote in Conor's room, with Conor playing the guitar, Éamon writing down the lyrics, and Frank doing his funny dance. We sing the few bars we can remember of each tune: ‘Crossmaglen Maggie'
, ‘
Jenkinstown Joe', and our favourite, ‘I'm originally from Annagassan, but I'm all right now.'

I hear a call as someone enters the pub: ‘
An Phoblacht — Republican News! An Phoblacht — Republican News!
' I turn; it is Slime Sloane. It is a weakness in the IRA that they allow arseholes the glory of association. Are we that desperate? It is a flaw that proves time and time again to be fatal, and it fucking annoys me. Sloane doesn't see me. I look behind to see that only Bobby Boyd is keeping cover at the door. I rise quickly and take the back of Sloane's leaning leg. As he falls I catch him, turn him, march him to the door, and throw him out onto the pavement. Boyd has already scarpered.

‘You'll pay for this, Donnelly,' Sloane says, as he rises. ‘You're a dead man.'

I walk to him, grab him, and talk into his ear. ‘I don't think so, Slime. Good people haven't died for dickheads like you to ride the bandwagon. Now fuck off.' Well, what can I say? I know I should have ignored him, but this guy just pisses me off. He's too much to take.

I return to the group and relieve the tension by telling a few school stories of Sloane. Later, as the drink settles, there is talk of Britain and Ireland, of colony and rebellion. I don't contribute much. After the politics and history, we leave the pub and go to a nightclub, where we dance until early morning, and afterwards we sit in the small lounge in the hotel. Sebastian has had too much to drink and is unwell. Conor and Frank help him to his room, and then they go home. Kate and Big Robbie have disappeared, and I am left alone with Flossie. She is a big, chatty girl with big blonde hair and big red lips. She is all talk, she is all curves, and she is all flushed flesh. In the absence of others, desire — which has peeped from the shadows all evening — steps forward. I stand and I take her by her hand, and we ride the elevator to her room. The door is still closing as I push the blouse over her shoulders, as she unbuckles me, and I am lost to the pleasure and the frantic hunt. I push her across the carpet. I fold her meaty body over the bed as I take her from behind.

‘Hello, English girl,' I say, as I come out of her and run my hands down her shoulders, her back, and her hips, her raised arse offered and ripe.

I ease between the two halves of the round as she takes a quick breath, and as I enter, the breath catches in her throat before suddenly leaving her.

‘Jesus Christ, Johnny,' she says, when I finish and roll onto the bed beside her. ‘You might have asked.'

‘Well, chicken,' I say, as sleep takes me, ‘that's the price you pay for empire.'

A question for Anna

‘ARE YOU GOING TO THE DOCTOR? WHAT ABOUT THOSE HEADACHES?
Are you looking after yourself, Johnny? Please be careful with the drinking.'

I am at home with my sister. Anna worries excessively about my head. After the fall and the hospital and the burying of Cora, it was Anna who attended to my convalescence at home. For Anna, like most, my broken head was easier to deal with than my broken heart. With my head, she felt that she could do something tangible, say something useful, help. But my heart? I'm not sure about repairs for that kind of stuff. I think some broken things cannot be fixed.

But in many ways, I am a new man. In many ways, I am not the person I used to be. Just days ago, the surface of my skin was covered with a completely different set of cells, all of which have since died and flaked off. Just months ago, I had a completely different bundle of red blood cells flowing through me. Constantly, my body regenerates, replacing old cells with new ones. I am not alone. I am not superman. This renewal is shared with the rest of the species. But my brain is different. Not different from the rest of the species, but from the rest of my body. At birth, my brain came fully equipped with one hundred billion nerve cells. That's a lot of cells to get your head around — literally. There are more cells in my brain than there are grains of sand on the long beach at Schilling Hill. Again, I am not alone. Again, I am not superman. This wonder, too, is shared with the rest of the species. The same can be said for pitiful Bobby Boyd — and that really is difficult to get your head around. And because the human brain is so complicated and has so little capacity to regenerate it is vulnerable to the effects of damage. This I learned in the hospital as doctors spoke of ‘acquired brain injury'.

‘It's not just the injury caused by the initial trauma and the action of the brain inside the cranium; the damage from bleeding and augmented pressure within the enclosed skull can indeed be more consequential
,
' said the doctor to Kathleen Donnelly.
Oh, sweet hallelujah
, I thought. ‘Whatever the injury,' the doctor continued, ‘the material, cognitive, and behavioural effects can be multifaceted and complicated and may, I suggest, require monitoring and treatment.
'
Mam nodded away to him like a buck rabbit doing the business, but the doctor might as well have been speaking Japanese
.

I didn't need any monitoring or treatment. I just got better quickly, and everyone kind of forgot about my head and moved on with the other things that people move on with. Everyone, except Anna. Everyone, except Anna and me.

‘Do you ever wonder, Anna, about how our brain works, about how we come to think the things we think?'

‘Do you mean you, Johnny? Or the rest of us?'

‘I mean us all, Anna.'

A nun in the park

I AM AT HOME IN DUNDALK FOR THE WEEKEND. IT IS DRY AND IT ISN'T TOO
cold, and in the early afternoon I sit with Clara and watch television.

‘Hey,' I suggest, ‘let's get the bikes out and go for a spin.'

Within five minutes, we are on the Ramparts Road and heading for town. We take Distillery Lane, Jocelyn Street, and Roden Place. We cycle along the pavement at the Town Hall, on alongside the courthouse, and on we go around the benches of the Market Square — where I can't help remembering Cora — and on into Clanbrassil Street, and north to Church Street and Bridge Street, and there we turn east along the river. The tide is in, and the water is high and wide. I pass Siobhán McCourt, who is out running — she does this athletics stuff — and I stop and chat, and she insists on joining our modest adventure. So she sits on the bar of my bicycle and teases me, and we continue as a threesome to the park. We decide to go in and let Clara cycle around; it will be safer than the roads. A nun is entering the park as we reach the gate. She greets us all and says hello — I know her, as she is part of the same rosary militia as Mam. We return the greeting with smiles, and allow her to enter before us, and I watch her as she goes away from us with the light load of certainty carried in her gentle stride.

To fight life's battles, the Irish have two weapons in their arsenal. The first of these is the Mass, which is used as a kind of marker for any beginning or occasion or end. There are Masses for arrivals, weddings, and funerals — although I've never really understood the appropriateness of a Mass for a funeral, when the recently deceased gets but a brief mention in an event that celebrates another thing altogether, although nobody seems to mind but me — and there are the peculiar Irish Masses for the opening of a new football field, or club or community centre, or a new bus, or a fishing boat, or a factory, or anything at all. At school there were a gazillion Masses for all kinds of stuff: beginning of term, end of term, mid-term, for those students beginning, for those students leaving, for visitors, for exams, for more exams, for all the important saints, for all the Irish saints, for holy communions, and for confirmations. It was mad stuff altogether. And then there is the House Mass for no particular reason at all, other than a change of scenery perhaps. It's a bit of a travelling road-show, that one, like the Mission Mass that travels parish to parish and carries a bite, and lets the priests go those extra few yards into ecstasy and deliver the threat of damnation. And there is the Annual Novena, when half the country descends on Saint Joseph's for nine days, with Masses running around the clock, and stalls outside selling everything but Coca-Cola and popcorn. The Irish would be lost without the Mass.

The second weapon in the national arsenal is the rosary. This is a very useful weapon, as it can be carried concealed, needs no preparation, and can be whipped out pretty much anywhere and without any notice at all. The Mass is for everyone, but the rosary attracts the fundamentalist in the way that any kind of communal chanting seduces the vulnerable. Mam is a big fan, and belongs to a group who gather in Saint Joseph's to pray for the sins of the world and to end all vices, heresies, wars, vanities, and misfortunes through the intercession of miracles, the Celestial Court, and the abundant, divine mercy of God. You couldn't make it up, and I have to admit that it does add to Mam's vocabulary. The nuns of the local convent attend this group, and Mam has them around to the house every month. I try to avoid being home for these visits, as the thing can descend in no time from a cup of tea and cake to Mother Marys and Sacred Mysteries, and it's not good to be caught up in those.

I salute the nun as she walks away on the left path to circuit the park clockwise, and we pedal right towards the bandstand. We get off the bicycles, and I sit with Siobhán on a bench while Clara plays behind us in the bandstand. Farther along the path, on another bench, a woman sits alone. There is a dishevelled look about her, and beside her is a supermarket shopping-trolley filled with plastic bags.