Hanging with the Elephant (2 page)

The smell of chicken and onion wafted from a pot on the cooker in the kitchen.

That will make the place feel homely when she arrives
, I’d thought.

I’d bought the chicken in Scollan’s of Drumshanbo, a bright Gala shop that combines a family supermarket with a butcher’s counter and also provides hot dinners in a small restaurant at the front. For me and many others in Leitrim, it is a lifeline, a trading post, a kind of community centre. I’d brought the chicken home and put it in a pot with
carrots, potatoes, onions, parsley and soup mix, and let it boil slowly on the cooker the previous evening.

In the bathroom, I splashed my neck with Boss because I needed to smell good too. Who knows how ravenous we might be for each other by the time we got through a bottle of wine. I know men aren’t very reliable in matters of sexual performance when they pass the age of fifty, but it’s amazing what a period of abstinence can achieve.

I sucked in my stomach, powdered the underwear and squirted more Boss on all sides.

That morning the beloved planned to fly from Modlin airport in Warsaw at 9 a.m. and arrive in Dublin before noon. We intended to meet at the airport. Then we would drive home and I would lift the lid off the pot and she would see the amazing soup, with carrots and onions and potatoes and parsley floating on top and a plump chicken sitting in the middle.

And yet, I was sorry that the six weeks had come to an end. My solitary retreat was closed. Our brief separation over. The soup was in the pot. The bird was well and truly cooked.

I had everything prepared. I was trussed up as well as a pot-bellied old man of sixty can manage to truss himself, because I still harboured intense fantasies of an erotic nature and dreamed of fulfilling them with the lady wife when she returned and had washed down the chicken with a bottle of Bordeaux. I get excited when I’ve
been alone for a while, and then suddenly the day of her return arrives and I get an urge to hold her. Even though I usually just stand there at the airport like a gobdaw when she wheels her trolley through the arrivals gate after some of her travels. I say things like, ‘Well, how did you get on?’ as if she had only been away for twenty minutes looking for a particular book in the library. I want to hug and hold her but sometimes I don’t because it seems too emotional a risk in public. I am embarrassed to lash out all that girly feeling at an airport in front of so many men in visor jackets and peaked caps.

‘What exactly do you think is girly about being emotional?’ my therapist wondered one day. I couldn’t answer her. And when I thought again about airports, I had to admit that the arrival lounges are usually stuffed with men happily flinging their emotions in all directions. Men with sun-burned faces, short trousers, sandals and silly hats going way over the top emotionally, shouting their lovers’ names, grabbing their wives by the buttocks and pushing their uncouth tongues into their lovers’ faces like they were in an adult movie.

‘So what’s so girly about showing emotions?’ the therapist repeated.

‘Nothing,’ I admitted. Although in my neck of the woods, people are masters of emotional restraint. The conventional salutation in Leitrim among neighbours is a minimal nod of the head, and there are no lovers,
just husbands who after being parted from their wives for a very long time might just risk whispering in her ear something like, ‘So, there you are.’

I can cook, but I rarely bother. In fact, I am ashamed of all the meals I have failed to cook for the beloved over the years, because I was too busy playing the flute or watching television or working on another book or renouncing the world in one of those self-absorbing private meditation sessions that used to isolate me in my studio for hours and sometimes years. I know there are men who serve their lovers steak in lean slices, blood raw, with fresh salads drenched in exotic oils, and other men who have a reputation for tossing a few things around in a wok for three minutes and dazzling their lovers with the aphrodisiac spontaneity of their noodles. But I never got beyond doing a chicken in a pot of soup the way my mother used to do it. The chicken bent over, like a dead monk at prayer in a jungle swamp.

I think many men are glad when their wives or lovers go away for a while. It allows them time to play house on their own. To fantasise about what it would be like if they had remained unmarried. Being alone, they feel they have permission to surf the internet, check out porn sites and leave the bed unmade for weeks.

And it’s a serious thing to leave a man alone at any time. There’s no telling what he’ll get up to. Men catch ideas like an open mouth attracts flies. They worry about things.
They rearrange the furniture. They make big decisions. They opt out of marriage. They plan affairs. They change jobs. They resign from the club. They drink beer, smoke dope and watch football. They use their wives’ toiletries in the bath and never clean up. In fact, it was when I was alone for a weekend that I once tried to shave my pubic hair in a fit of erotic passion after downing a bottle of wine while watching a programme on Sky about what young men do nowadays to enhance their sex lives. I lathered shaving cream all over the target area and then with a Wilkinson Sword triple blade scraped it all off, leaving myself tender and bald. It felt supersensitive. It reminded me of being a baby. But I anticipated vast increases of sensual pleasure during future orgasms. Or at least that is what the guy in the television programme had claimed would happen.

And it wasn’t easy explaining the results to the beloved when she arrived home from a friend’s funeral – and to be honest it didn’t even make any difference except that I got an ingrown hair, which created a boil of puss under the skin and I had to go to the doctor a few months later.

I remember one morning in the sauna gazing at a younger man whose chest was smooth but whose legs were as hairy as a gorilla and I suspected he may have shaved more than his chin. I was even tempted to enquire, there in the intimacy of the steam room, whether or not he had ever ventured between his legs with the razor and if so had he ever experienced any trouble with ingrown hairs,
but discretion is the yardstick in the steam rooms of rural Ireland, so I decided to say nothing.

I am one of those men who likes to think he can survive without women, even though experience keeps telling me the opposite. I find a liberation in my own smell, the masculinity of a full sink, the nonchalance of dirty underwear piled on an armchair in the sitting room, and the kind of personal chaos that makes women doubt their own sanity for loving such savages and makes women wonder if they were utterly mad the day they walked up the aisle of some church long ago in a big white meringue of silk and satin to pledge loyalty to a half-evolved Neanderthal with a fragrant penis. A solitary man in a house is an unfolding horror movie, like fungus in an unwashed cupboard or the blue mould that grows in coffee cups that have been abandoned under chairs or on the cistern in the toilet or hidden on the window sill behind unopened curtains and forgotten about until the morning of her return.

Not that I was entirely delighted when my beloved told me she was going off to Poland, because I had become dependent on her. Even though she would only be gone for six weeks, I would now be forced to stand alone – something I had done rarely since June 2011 when I had suffered a physical and nervous breakdown. Apart from a few weekends here and there, or the fortnight she spent in London, I had rarely been so completely abandoned.

Every so often, men get the urge to create sheds and special no-go areas, like rooms to meditate in or rooms to work in, but all that insulation never solved anything for me. I have a little studio in the back garden but I might only be there for five minutes, with an image of the Buddha or a book about theatre or a low whistle in the key of D, when suddenly I would be overwhelmed by the terror of being alone and my desperate need for company even if it was just to have a cup of tea with her.

And then her presence would relieve me from all my morose introspection. I wouldn’t have to worry about the meaning of life or the bleak prospect of death or any of the other great philosophical issues that prohibit me from washing dishes or making the bed, as long as I could worry about what she might want. When I told this to the therapist, she looked at me for a long time before saying that I wasn’t unusual.

‘Many men tend to orbit their loved ones like dysfunctional satellites,’ she said. ‘They obsess about the woman in order to avoid examining their own lives. The minutiae of the partner’s life becomes their agenda. When does she want dinner? How does she like her tea? What she prefers to watch on the television. All those things become a narrative that absorbs men beyond the scope of their own nostalgia. It’s the only reason why some men remain married. They find it soothing.’

And it occurred to me that perhaps this was precisely why the beloved needed to go to Poland. She needed a break. She needed to get away from me. I may have been driving her mad.

As a wise woman said to me one time: men spend the first half of their lives running away from women and the second half running after them. One way or another, I encouraged her to go, and I was glad when she bought her plane ticket. Because, beneath everything else, I had a real sense of purpose about being alone for a long period.

Not that long ago, depression had manifested in my life like my own private Dracula. I had spent months with him in the same room when I was ill and now, two years later, he rarely looked in the window. Although, I suspected that he was still lurking somewhere at the end of the garden, and I was always afraid that if I was alone for a long period of time, he might just knock on the door again. And that fear made me dependent on other people for company.

Although there is something in me that never stops craving solitude. So for six weeks in the spring of 2014, when she planned to be in Poland, I planned a journey to the interior. I was going on retreat. I would confront the unruly elephant of my own mind and I would use the ropes of meditation, discipline and single-pointed concentration to make that elephant sit still.

At least that’s what the various gurus on YouTube were
suggesting. ‘Depression is a lack of control,’ they said. You become filled with disturbing emotions, with anxiety, fear or melancholy, and that drags you down. But if you can control the mind – the great elephant of consciousness – you can observe all those emotions coming and going, rising and falling; and you can watch them, hold them, and allow them to be. You can wait for them to evaporate like soft clouds evaporate into the sky or let them rinse your body like clouds turning into rain. One way or another you can bear them and quieten them, until eventually your mind can become as calm as an elephant at ease with itself, or as clear as a blue sky.

I wanted to stop going about the world like a blue-arsed fly, from one pile of dung to the next utterly consumed with anxiety and occasionally possessed by Dracula. I wanted to be still and chilled and full of compassion for the universe. I wanted to be a blue sky. I wanted to be a calm elephant. I wanted to be what the wise ones in robes on YouTube said I could be. Surely that wasn’t too much to ask?

And if Dracula or any other personification of my anxieties knocked on the door, I would let them in and sit them down and gently accept them. I had read all the books on how to be compassionate with myself, and how to find a mindful path out of depression, and how to survive in the swamplands of the soul.

And when she came home, I would make a great splash. I would give her a great welcome. It would be like she was meeting a new man. And we would have a banquet. I would feed her one of Mister Scollan’s finest chickens in a soup of fresh vegetables.

W
E HAD BOTH ended up in a panic the morning she was heading off. I had booked the same hotel as we had stayed in on the night my memoir had received the Irish Book of the Year Award at the end of 2013. On that occasion, I had squeezed myself into a dress suit and clipped a dickie-bow round my neck with inflated pride, as if writing a book and winning an award were of some significance or that they might protect me from death. But when we returned to the same deluxe room of that Ballsbridge hotel four months later, it
was being refurbished, and the painters’ ladders lay in the corridor and the dizzy prize-winning ceremony seemed like it had all happened years earlier.

The award had been a transient moment. The book was nothing more than the tracks of an animal or footprints on a beach long since rearranged by the tide. The morning after the award ceremony, the blue glass trophy was sitting in the bath, for some reason I can’t remember. We shared breakfast in bed, and then I did a radio interview and then we drove home.

But now I was lying on the bed with a terrible hangover, and the heating had been on all night, drying my tongue to the texture of sandpaper.

She was gone. She was on the plane. ‘Thank Christ,’ I said with relief, speaking to my own image in the mirror across from the bed. ‘The panic is over.’

Those were the very words I used. I was still in the hotel an hour after she had rushed from the room. I was looking at the message she had texted from the boarding gate:

Just about got here in time.

We had decided to go to Dublin the day before the flight and stay over, rather than drive from Leitrim in the middle of the night. We’d had a Chinese meal in a very swanky restaurant near the hotel, early in the evening. The dumplings we had for starters were hand-made. They
would have made a meal on their own. The soy sauce just sprinkled on the rice was fit for emperors.

I suppose the restaurant would have been full during the boom. I could imagine government ministers on their way home dropping in, or bankers with grey hair and gold cufflinks entertaining their mistresses, or journalists swapping jokes with the oily-skinned bosses of corporate Ireland. It had the air of a film set where great things had been enacted. Where historical events had been dreamed up. But the good times were over. The pile on the carpet was still thick and soft, and the lighting was just as delicate and the white tablecloths just as starched, but there was nobody there. They even had an early bird menu so that ordinary folks like us could afford to eat between five and eight, but even with a special offer of won ton soup, noodles and a choice of three main courses for €23, the place was empty. A famous journalist with grey hair and a cream linen suit sat at a table across from us reading a book. I kept trying to see the title, but I couldn’t.