Hanging with the Elephant (6 page)

My mother used to put the radio on at night when she was going to bed. Her favourite station was the BBC World
Service. She would put it on at full volume and it remained so until morning. Whenever I stayed with her, during her later years, I would try to sleep in the room next to hers, awake until maybe 4 a.m., listening to correspondents from the Sudan and Nigeria discussing crop failures, threats of drought and the ongoing casualties of war.

I asked her once why she kept it on. She said it helped her sleep. I think what she meant was that when the radio was on, she could hear nothing else. She wasn’t vulnerable to disturbing sounds in the night that might frighten her. If someone broke into the house, she wouldn’t know about it unless the robbers came upstairs and asked her to turn down the volume.

Myself and the beloved were not strictly speaking addicted to television. For there were many nights when we never turned it on at all. Hundreds of nights when she sat by the fire sketching or fingering her iPad or knitting, and I sat there at the opposite side of the fire, both of us cramped on dainty little armchairs and huddled towards the flames, because the house is so small, with our backs to the monstrous television set and I would just gaze at her in awe, and be amazed at how she could knit.

I was driving past the turn for Maynooth, thinking how wonderful it was that an academy once as intellectually stimulating as a wardrobe of dead flies had finally been transformed into a real university, bristling with young students. I imagined what it might be like to saunter
through the gates again towards the library, now probably full of beautiful young women and not the sad, pale-faced clerics who had sat there with me on creaking chairs reading books about Thomas Aquinas. And then suddenly the jeep drifted across two lanes as I daydreamed, and a car behind me blew his horn to get me out of the way.

T
HE ROAD TO Leitrim is straight and bypasses most towns, but I left the N4 at the Roosky exit because I wanted to visit an old friend, a long-black-haired poet whose wife was expecting a baby in the coming days. Both of them were at home and I went in and joined them for a pot of tea, and I said, ‘The beloved has gone to Poland.’

He was watching television. She was in the bedroom.

He said, ‘You will miss her.’

I agreed.

His long black hair was tied with an elastic band at the nape of his neck and he wore silver rings on his thumb and forefinger as he rolled a joint.

‘I feel fragile,’ I said. ‘I hope to do a bit of meditation when I’m alone in the house. I had this notion that I’d set up a nice secure nirvana, a solitude of calm abiding, and just sit watching the grass grow for a month. But now that she’s gone, I’m wondering if that is just a fantasy.’

‘Sure, she’ll be back in a couple of weeks, man. Relax. You’re fretting too much.’

‘I know.’

‘You’ll have a great time on your own,’ he said. ‘You’ll have a chance to check out things inside yourself. And don’t be afraid to go in there.’

‘In where?’ I asked.

He pointed to his head.

‘Get in there, man. Take the opportunity to go inside.’

I’m always alarmed when people begin talking like they were in an episode of
Star Trek.

‘I’ll probably just sit on my arse for six weeks,’ I muttered.

‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘you’re looking good. You’ve lost weight.’

‘But there’s another issue,’ I said.

‘What’s that?’

‘I get frustrated with myself. I think I have become domesticated.’

‘How do you know you’re domesticated?’

‘I got slippers for Christmas,’ I replied. ‘With a tartan pattern.’

‘Man,’ he said, ‘that’s not good.’

His wife emerged from the bedroom, a woman with long sandy hair, wearing a sleeveless dress of rainbow colours down to her ankles. I couldn’t resist staring at her long, elegant toes as they peeped out from under the dress and flapped about in brown leather sandals. He asked me if I wanted another cup of tea.

She had been doing yoga in the bedroom, she said, and now she was going out for air. She looked at his smoking cigarette with sadness. I kissed her on the cheek, as a sort of hello and goodbye, and wished her well. He got up and hugged her too. ‘Love ya, baby,’ he muttered, and held the door for her as she went out into the world like a goddess to bless the cosmos or water the plants. When she was gone, we both sat in silence staring at the door. The room felt completely empty. He asked me again if I wanted another cup of tea, but I refused.

I continued on towards Carrick-on-Shannon and then to Drumshanbo where I stopped at the Gala shop to get some shopping, and finally out the Drumkeerin road, and up the narrow lane we call the mountain road, beyond the dirty sheep, the hungry horses and the abandoned thatched studio that two Hungarian artists once lived in before they fled to lower ground on the other side of the lake where they set up a ceramic studio. I could see the wind turbines
up ahead near Spion Kop. Each year, there are more blades. More pillars of white reaching into the sky, confusing the hen harriers. They sneak them up on great transporter vehicles at night when people are asleep.

When I arrived at the cottage, I parked the jeep and I said hello to the cat, who was flinging insults at me for abandoning her overnight, and I went inside and shovelled out the ashes and put a flaming firelighter under six briquettes. I was lucky. There were only three matches left in the box.

I checked Facebook a few times to see if she was online. There were a few new additions; pictures of Warsaw taken from inside a train and one of her friends smiling at an art exhibition. So, I concluded that she had access to wifi. I tried messaging her, but the icon beside her name on Facebook said she was offline.

Well, OK. That was fine. By now, the fire was blazing and I sat back on the sofa with the cat to watch the two last episodes of
Breaking Bad
although I kept one eye on my Facebook page in case any signal came in from Warsaw.

Eventually I couldn’t resist a text.

I’m back in the house. The cat is happy. All seems fine.

I sent it twice. But it didn’t deliver. She had turned off her phone.

When I woke the following morning, I had forgotten her. It was 8 a.m. and the sun had just then risen above the slope of the mountain and was like an orange ball of fire in the chilly grey sky.

My first emotion was one of surprise that the sun was orange, and that it was shining through the cream curtains. I felt like a child long ago who had been allowed to stay home from school. I could lie there all day just watching the clouds being pushed across the sky and be happy in myself thinking of how far I had come in life. When I was a child, I used to see Warsaw on the dial of the old radio and when I twirled the knob so that the needle pointed to it I could hear the sound of a man talking in a strange language behind the crackling static, though I didn’t know what the word ‘Warsaw’ meant. And now I had ended up married to a wonderful artist who was at that very moment walking the streets of that extraordinary city. I thought about the BBC too, and the splendid gift it is to live in a world where I can press the app on my iPhone and hear the soft fluttering violas of unnamed musicians in a London studio being broadcast on
Breakfast
on Radio 3. It would have all been perfect if she had been beside me.

But there were obstacles too. When I got up and went to the kitchen, I realised that I had forgotten to get milk in the shop. In fact, I had forgotten to get bread, coffee, marmalade and even tablets for the dishwasher. She
had actually said it in the hotel – ‘Don’t forget milk on your way home.’ It’s one of the great gifts women have. They can anticipate what you might need in a domestic situation. And men hate that. They don’t like being told things that make them feel incompetent. Of course they
are
incompetent. It’s just they don’t like to admit it. And it’s staggering how irritated a man can get when a woman says those simple words: ‘Don’t forget the milk.’

Of course I won’t forget the milk
, he thinks.
Does she suppose I’m stupid? Does she think I’m incapable of keeping the kitchen organised?

‘I’m a modern man,’ he insists. ‘Some of my best friends are feminists.’ And he stares around the kitchen convinced that if he ever bothered doing the housework, he would of course do it far better than her. But I’m not that bloated with hubris. It’s just that we live five miles from a shop and so it’s not funny to forget. And I was going around from one press to another muttering, ‘Where did she leave the sugar?’

No.

‘Where did she hide the sugar?’

No.

‘For fuck’s sake, where is the fucking sugar?’

The bottom line was that there didn’t seem to be any sugar. I had no choice but to drink a bitter black coffee, and skip the refinements of porridge, toast or marmalade. It wasn’t a great start. But it reminded me that there were
other issues. Like which bin was due to go out on Friday. I couldn’t remember if it was the blue one or the black one that had gone out last time.

I knew that with the dishwasher not functioning because we were out of tablets, the kitchen would soon back up with dirty plates and cups. And I wasn’t going to start hand-washing them all. And then I couldn’t find the mop to clean up the cold coffee that had spilled straight out on the floor when I opened the lid of the coffee pot because I didn’t think there was any coffee in it. How was I to know that the pot was still half full of cold coffee? Doesn’t someone usually clean it before they go to bed? Yes? Well, there you go. So I made a note of that for future reference.

But I was still looking for the mop. I tried the scullery, the shed, outside the back door, behind the fridge.
Where the fuck is the mop?
I wondered. I was getting exhausted and it was only 8.30 a.m.

Maybe I need to relax
, I thought. Go out to my room and chill. Leave everything as it is for the moment. Go to town at lunch and pick up stuff. I could make a list of ‘stuff’. That’s the trick. That’s what women do. They make a list. That’s what my mother used to do. She’d have a list every Friday for me. Even if her mind was dissolving when she was in her late eighties, she always had her list.

So I made another coffee and took it out to my studio. I crossed the back yard with the laptop in one hand and
the coffee and my keys in the other. It was raining and the rain splashed into the mug. I ran to the patio door, fiddled with the keys, almost dropped the computer, opened the door, and then spilled half the coffee as I went inside. And for fuck’s sake, what was sitting on the desk from two days earlier? The sugar bowl.

At least now I was getting into better form because I was in my refuge. My shed. My isolated study where no one bothers me. And there were two firelighters left in the packet. The lake stretched before me. I cleaned out the ashes from the stove, placed the firelighters between two turf briquettes and set them on fire. Then I settled into a swivel chair to contemplate the day.

It’s not just a phrase I picked up from some cheap self-help book about Buddhism. It’s what Pabongka Rinpoche said in his book
Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand
. And he’s the real deal. He’s the bee’s knees. You won’t find him on YouTube. He didn’t waste his time doing videos for the internet. Of course he’s long dead but the book is still out there.

The mind is like an elephant
, he said.

He would have heard the same phrase from his teachers when he was a young student in some remote Tibetan monastery. It’s an image commonly used for the unruly mind in lots of Tibetan texts on mind training. The elephant goes where it wants. And there’s no telling when an elephant will change its mood. There’s no guiding it or
tying it down, unless you use the ropes of meditation and mind training at which Pabongka Rinpoche was apparently such an adept.

My mind is like a particularly dysfunctional elephant. My mind is like an elephant that has escaped from traumas in a circus. My mind is like an elephant that might drag me off a cliff at any moment in a sudden fit of rage. Such is the state of my mental disequilibrium that I am a victim every morning to what rises up in my mind, and I have utterly no control over it; as my teacher once said to me when we were in Mongolia together, ‘Always something arising – but never what you expect.’

I couldn’t have expected what came into my mind that morning when I knelt down on the floor of my studio to meditate. It wasn’t the beloved. It wasn’t the episodes of
Breaking Bad
I had watched the night before. It wasn’t what food I planned to put on the list before going to town. It wasn’t even the cat, though she was at the window, screaming to be allowed in (and just by the way, I was out of cat food as well). But none of these things disturbed me.

It was my mother who came, like a ghost flitting in and out of my mind, like something in the distance, like a small moth in the corner of my eye at first, or in the back of my mind, as they say. She was in the back of my mind but I certainly noticed her there.

This is how it happens. Sometimes we live through
moments of intensity like a death, and it’s so overwhelming that we replay the moment over and over again. We can smell it and touch it repeatedly in our mind. And then one day, the event arises as usual, but it’s different. We see it in a new light. And there is no reason for this. It just happens.

When my mother died, I was with her. And her going away from the world was simple and eloquent. She panted her way as if she were taking giant steps, one at a time towards a summit. And when she reached the summit, she vanished.

I had replayed that moment over and over again in the two years since she died. I can still remember sitting on an armchair at the wall just inside the door of her room in the nursing home. Sometimes I would get up and stand at the foot of the bed. I remember a radio in the distance, out on the corridor, and what music was playing in the very moments when she stopped breathing. But what never occurred to me until that morning, sitting in a swivel chair in my studio, the cat outside the window, the beloved in Poland, two years after my mother had died, what had never occurred to me until that moment was that I had not held her. And it horrified me, like a letter that announces some terrible debt you owe and just falls through the letterbox and lands on the floor at your feet. I never held her. OK, there might have been a moment when I engaged her in a chilly embrace akin to what the pope might offer another fully vested bishop during the
sign of peace at mass; a fumbling formality without much passion. But that is not the way I held the beloved. Not the way I held the cat. Not the way I held my own child when first I took her from the cot in the hospital delivery room. Not that way. I never held my mother like that. And she was obliged to go, to leave, to head down along the long, dark tunnel of death without a human hug from me. My brother was there and he treated her beautifully. He hugged and held and blessed and kissed her. But I just watched. From me she went away empty-handed, empty-armed. And there is nothing so empty as the beginning of a journey when you have not been fortified by the assuring hug of someone you love.