Hanging with the Elephant (18 page)

I would use the back entrance because the damp had seized up the front door. I’d go through the Perspex sun room at the rear and I’d be assaulted by a stale fragrance of human senility on everything I touched.

The house was so resonant with the echoes of her broken
heart, the fragments of her personal history, the unspoken archive of her sorrow that I couldn’t bear to touch it when she was still alive and now that she had died it offended me to think of anyone else disturbing it. It was all a shrine to her departed ghost. How could I give a solicitor the keys or instructions to sell it? How could I do anything with it? Like any child who has lost a parent, I wanted to run away from my mother’s house and never open that door again, but I didn’t want anyone else to open it either.

‘So how are you now?’ a lanky countryman with a peaked cap asked me in the post office queue.

‘Not great,’ I said.

‘And what’s bothering you?’

‘The house in Cavan,’ I confessed. ‘My mother’s house. I keep getting phone calls from the solicitor wanting to know what’s to be done with it.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘you’ll not sell it. Cos it’s worth nothing in a recession. So I suppose you’ll be holding on to it.’

‘Yes,’ I said, and I thought about that for a moment. ‘Yes. That’s a good way of putting it. I’ll be holding on to it.’

T
HE MORNING I heard of the priest’s death, I went to Bundoran because I was suffering from cabin fever and I needed to get away from the leaking roof. It was a forty-minute journey through the deep glens of Leitrim, and the rugged swell of the sea is dramatic in a winter storm. I drove up the coastline near Mullaghmore, where young people cruised in 4x4s with cameras stuck out the windows to capture the rolling barrels of waves.

I parked at the waterfront, where enormous ocean breakers threatened the buttress wall and thumped on
the beach. I went to an off-licence and bought a bottle of Bushmills whiskey for later in the evening, and I left it back in the jeep. Then I sat on a bench, remote and aloof from the surfers who were daring the ocean, and I tried to figure out where time goes or what happens to the past when it is forgotten.

I walked back towards the centre of town and had eggs and sausages in a small café on the main street. All around me, young couples were devouring late breakfasts, as young ones do after sex. They were talking about the previous night’s fun in some nightclub. There was a clock on the wall that showed New York time, and another one told Irish time, which was helpful because one couple at the next table were so absorbed in each other’s eyelashes that I doubt if they knew what continent they were on, never mind what time it was. The woman’s face was transfixed, as if she were drowning in desire. As if she might just rip off her partner’s shirt at any moment were it not for the proximity of other customers. As if they might slip into the toilet all of a sudden and get it all done in five minutes over the wash hand-basin.

I suppose it’s encouraging to see young people filled with so much mutual desire that they don’t notice anyone else in the room. As a young man, I was always amazed at how much exquisite anonymity could be found in the sexual act. And even in places like Maynooth, where a university campus was situated in the middle of a Catholic
seminary, there were always dark corners, like the Student Union bar, and Saturday-night cider parties in the housing estates where the lay students lived, where if two strangers of the opposite sex were alone in a room for more than five minutes, they felt a moral obligation to try and ride each other.

And try they did, though few succeeded beyond a fumble in the dark or sleeping together with their underpants on. And the clerical students certainly didn’t make love in many toilets over wash-hand basins like in the movies as far as I remember because they were studying for the priesthood. But my friend, the dead priest, was academic, erudite and burdened with a brilliant mind, and he seemed to understand the sexual revolution in a way that we didn’t. He was modern; he had a car and money and he was already ordained. What did we know of his wide experience?

And I was just trying to be a poet. Not an easy thing either because, back then, poets were always serious men. Women sat beside them in silent adoration, or so the poets thought, as they smoked pipes and blathered in posh accents. I too sat at the feet of a few afflicted poets in Grogan’s and other Dublin pubs, listening attentively, and almost doting on their slim volumes of poetry that lay on the tables between the pints.

But of course the women were not doting. They were just waiting for their time to arrive. Waiting for new voices in the public world. Waiting for Marian Finucane and
other women to break the mould of the officious baritones on Irish radio. Waiting too for Maya Angelou and Sharon Olds and Sinead O’Connor and a legion of other poets and singers to spin the hurt and wound of their oppression, and weave new love songs and laments. In that patriarchal world of Maynooth, we hadn’t even thought about the female orgasm, never mind thought that such an event might require our attention.

But the world outmanoeuvred the priest and me. Ireland changed. The Catholic Church got morally cornered, its clerics disgraced and its teachings made absurd by the insistence of women to be heard. Divorce arrived and gay people’s private lives were decriminalised and young people in small villages began using condoms. The clergy with their gun-dogs that once traipsed the hills of Leitrim in search of pheasants were all gone. And the priest in everyone had been dead a long time before anyone knew it.

As I grew older, a woman became my compass and anchor, the ground and completeness of my universe. The beloved steadied me, but now she was not in sight. She was not near the windy beach in Bundoran that morning. She was probably in Poland having a morning coffee, or eating muesli with bananas, or heading off to some gallery or exhibition. She certainly was not with me on the windswept edge of the Atlantic. The clouds came fast in from the ocean and the wind flung leaves and twigs across the windscreen all the way back through Glenade
and Manorhamilton. The ugly wind turbines reared their heads on the mountain ridges as I passed Drumkeerin and a hen harrier hovered between two turbines watching for prey. At least the turbines didn’t seem to bother them. A hare crossed the road in front of me and I could see his bulging eyes reaching away from the jeep’s wheel. Then dogs came through the air, their teeth bared, and their eyes on me too for a moment before heading further in pursuit of their prey.

I lit the stove in the studio in the afternoon. Dead rose branches knocked on the glass windowpane. Smoke billowed down the pipe and flooded the room. It’s a north-easterly that comes down the chimney but the ladder was locked away in the artist’s studio and I couldn’t find the key, so I couldn’t climb onto the roof to cover the top with a bucket, which is the only solution. Instead, I endured smoke billowing out through every vent in the stove until I felt like a kipper and was forced eventually to abandon the studio for the rest of the day.

I
T FELT LIKE my beloved had been a long time gone and not a single word from her by phone or Skype or text. No doubt she was having a great time in some bohemian world of wild Polish painters, drinking vodka into the late hours and listening to Chopin on old LPs. Or perhaps she had lost her mind and gone wandering over the border into the Ukraine, unable to find her way back, unable to text me, or explain to the police who she was? I didn’t know.

Somewhere down in Laois, the remains of the priest were lying in a casket at the foot of the sanctuary where
he had said his mass for many years. I brought my bottle of Bushmills whiskey in from the jeep because I intended drinking a few shots later as a mark of respect.

And then, at about five o’clock, there was a knock on the front door. The shadows had already enveloped the spruces and the small copse of birch, alder and oak near the house. The beech trees still rustled with last year’s leaves. The ground was soggy. The mist had fallen on the roof. The fire in the sitting room was blazing, but I wasn’t expecting anyone.

The young woman spoke with a French accent. ‘Ah am very disappointed weeth you,’ she said when I opened the door.

She wore a long brown coat belted at her slim waist and the collar turned up against the wind. A black beret sat level on her head, its black rim crossing her forehead above her eyebrows and reminding me of paramilitary men who used to infest the borderlands years ago.

‘
Pardonnez-moi
,’ she said, intuiting my alarm and taking it off.

‘I thought you were a member of the old IRA for a moment.’

Her brown hair was parted in the middle but when the beret came off it fuzzed out in a big mess on both sides of her face.

‘Who are you?’ I wondered.

‘
Une amie du prêtre mort
. How you say? A friend of dee priest ooo eeez gone.’

‘Ahhh.’

‘
Puis-je entrer
?’

‘Of course you can come in,’ I said, more than delighted at the prospect of female company. I was practically on fire with the idea of a French woman in the house. She stood for a moment beneath the porch light, loosening her belt and opening the coat to reveal a black dress and ankle-high boots and a black jumper over her slim body. The wind was blowing the ivy leaf around the door and I beckoned her inside thinking how much she resembled some movie star from 1940.

We sat at the fire in the front room. I poured whiskey into Waterford cut-glass tumblers and we chatted about the storms, the high tides, her purple Citroën and how she had got lost on her way from Donegal, heading for the funeral and then realised she was only a few miles from where I lived. Eventually we came back to the subject of the dead priest.

‘
Vous le connaissiez?
’ she said. ‘You knew him?’

‘I did. A long time ago.’

‘So.
Pourquoi
you will not be coming, how you say,
à l’enterrement
?’

‘Because I don’t like funerals. I don’t believe all that stuff. I don’t want to hear what they will make of him. Wrapping him up in sentimental nonsense about going to heaven and how he was such a devout priest. I can assure you he wasn’t
very devout when I knew him. But of course that was a long time ago. He may have changed.’

‘And do you not have, what is it,
peur de la mort
?’

‘Of course I am afraid of death. The abyss ahead of us all terrifies the shit out of me.’

‘But you have no faith?’

‘I’m confused,’ I replied.

She was staring into the fire. The flames flickered on her round spectacles.

‘So you are not a person who likes funerals. Because the abyss of death frightens you,’ she said.

‘Correct.’

‘And your mother?’

‘What about her?’

‘Did she die well?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It was an event of exquisite beauty. She lived in the moment, drew her breath, lay back and withered, vanished, like a leaf falling from a tree. It was beautiful. And I’m so grateful that I was there and that she was spared the religious trimmings.’

‘You are an angry man too,’ she said. ‘You are …
un chien dans la douleur
.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t know what that means.’

‘Like a dog in pain,’ she said coldly.

‘Who are you?’ I wondered.

She smiled but didn’t answer.

‘I better go,’ she said, ‘before this gets ugly.’

‘Please,’ I said. ‘One more drink.’

‘Well … OK,’ she said. ‘I will have, as you Irish say, one for the road.’

And if it had not been such a stormy night, I might have seen her as quite normal, and not some ghost flung up like flotsam out of my own dark unconscious.

But I did drink a bottle of whiskey with her, whether she was real or imaginary, this mysterious woman, this busybody in her little black dress and ankle-high laced boots. She might have been going out clubbing for the night for all I knew. She might have been working in Bundoran in a hotel. She might even have been heading for the funeral on the morrow. Nothing surprises me about young people. They wander where they will in the middle of the night and they’re not afraid to knock on anybody’s door.

I did it myself when I was in my twenties. I went to an island off the coast to visit a famous writer of the time. To knock on his door and declare myself a writer too and sit at his feet and learn the trade. I got a ferry from the mainland. The ferryman was a big bronze ox of a man, so firm in his limbs that he could barely walk. But when he was at the tiller, and had flung loose the ropes, and the wind was battering his brown leather face, he seemed like a formidable specimen of heroic masculinity.

‘Do you know any writers on the island?’ I asked.

‘I do,’ he replied, and spat into the Atlantic.

‘What do you think of them?’ I continued.

I was wearing shorts, tennis shoes and a sleeveless green T-shirt. With long hair flowing either side of my face, I was already uneasy that he might think me too effeminate to have on his boat.

‘There was a writer came to this island years ago,’ he said, ‘and he was here a few years and then he went away and he wrote a book about everybody.’

He paused.

‘And he never came back.’

He paused again. Thinking to himself about this man.

‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘if he ever appeared on the mainland and was looking for a ferry, I would certainly take him. But he would never reach the island.’

He looked out again across the swell and spat once more and I could feel him breathing like a bull as he ruminated on the offence the writer had caused by writing about people’s privacy.

Then he turned his gaze at my scrawny body, peeled my clothes off with a disgusted forensic stare and enquired, ‘What do you do yourself?’

‘I’m a teacher,’ I replied instantly.

So it wouldn’t have been totally unreasonable to suppose that this young woman really landed on my doorstep on a wintry evening because she had read some of my work, knew where I lived and wanted to talk to me about Kierkegaard or the qualities of modern Irish literature. At
least that’s the kind of thing I’d like to believe. That’s the kind of thing I might fantasise about. But it’s not the kind of thing that ever happens.