I recently found a photograph of me dressed as a poinsettia for the primary school Christmas concert. I was ten years old. I didn’t want to be a poinsettia; I wanted to be the Virgin Mary, but the nuns chose big-breasted Dolores to be the Mother of God.
My outfit was a green pullover, green tights, and an enormous red petal hat that my teacher had made. I had a wand, too, made from two ice-pop sticks glued together. I was meant to be a magic poinsettia.
I sat on a stepladder, waiting for my turn to go on stage. A line of girls opened the concert with a wilting rendition of O Mother we weep for joy. Sr Ignatius swayed like a great fir tree as she conducted their squealing melody. Next was the thunderous sound of rocks falling down a quarry – the Irish dancers were on stage. Consumpta Joyce took centre place. Her row of medals joyfully slapped her chest as she leapt and heeled and toed. Poetry followed: The Cleary twins recited Inisfree with their elbows stuck out and their hands knotted into rosettes upon their chests.
Continue reading ‘A wand worth a curse’
An old metal sign stands near a beach in Sandycove. Hand-painted upon it without punctuation is the following: “Forty foot men only bathing place.”
If you pass this sign and follow the stone steps downwards, then duck beyond a small wall – suddenly you’re almost in the sea. You’re standing on the flat-bottomed inside of a large bowl of rock; an amphitheatre for bathers. Here they undress; they test the waters, they jump in. Here, half-naked, we are all connected like family, and like family, we speak.
“Come on in Conor, the water’s quite warm really.”
“Did ye see that film – In Bruges – deadly, wasn’t it?”
“Hey lads, where’s me fookin’ shoe?”
Today is a good day. Today it’s not raining and the sea is not ferocious. On the surface of the water which slops about the rocks, the heads of swimmers bob and talk to one another about holidays. A father steps into the water and turns to his little boy: “Come on in, Conor. The water’s nice.”
Continue reading ‘The Forty Foot’
As an experiment, at the age of forty-one, I drew the letter C on the back of my left hand in thick permanent marker, and every time I looked at it, I asked myself, “Am I conscious?”
On the third night it entered my dreams. I crossed into a state of waking sleep. It felt dangerous.
I looked for my grandfather, who died in 1979. I asked, “Where is granddad?” and from deep within my consciousness he walked towards me in the heat haze of a hot summer day. I lengthened my stride along Charlton Lane towards him; I was unburdened. I was ten again.
Granddad was wearing a short-sleeved burnt orange shirt, light trousers, and brown shoes. As we approached each other, his spectacles came into focus, and I could see his gold watch with its black strap on his left wrist. We met right at the border of the two villages. I could make out his features, younger than I remembered. This was the past, but this could not have been the past: on my hand was the letter C. He smiled, and we hugged. He let go of me as though we did this every day. I tried to hold on. He didn’t speak, and neither could I.
We walked together back to his house – my home until he died. But no sooner were we in the door when he disappeared and left me alone.
Continue reading ‘Carbolic’
Brone wakes with her boxing-gloved hands at her face. She opens her eyes to red cracked leather. The gloves have not come off for weeks. She looks at her sideways room. She’s mattress height from the floor, under a window without blinds. There is a great deal of sunlight. The corner opposite has a square wooden table with black steel legs. Three pellets of chewed gum are stuck underneath. There’s a purple metal chair with yellow foam erupting from its black seat. Brone’s gold satin robe is spread flat-perfect on the grey lino in the centre of the room. A legless, headless, gold-dust angel. She sits up, then slides her feet into navy flip-flops. Her silk red boxing vest and gold shorts uncrumple creased and cool.
She walks around the spread robe to the bathroom. She steps into the copper-and-green streaked bath, and twists the taps with curled toes. Her toes flick the rough lime-scaled lever and the shower head bursts. She steps backwards into the spray, holding her hands up and out – in the beginning water had wet into the gloves, and it had numbed and smelled for days. The spray quickly seals the red and gold silk to her skin. Today she would run her clothes dry in the park.
Continue reading ‘Seamless silver mercury’
I am in Dresden. A string quartet playing Bach in an archway gets me in the mood to go to the Semperoper, the Opera House. I buy a ticket to “Stomp.” I have no idea what it is. The concert hall is huge, white wood with gold decorations, beautifully curved ceiling above a sparkling chandelier, four stories of balconies lit by illuminated clusters of grapes. It’s big, warm, beautiful.
I see a boy in front of the stage, no older than fifteen, paralyzed from the neck down, in a mobile bed. He is looked after by his mother and father. They arrange his head so that he can watch the performance. They hold the programme up to him, so that he can read, and turn the pages when he motions them to do so. They don’t seem a bit self-conscious. I think of DH Lawrence: Never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop dead frozen from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself. The concert starts. It’s not what I expect! Stomp are contemporary dancers and musicians. They take on music and rhythm radically; they use everyday objects for their dances: trash cans, brooms, tins. There is no music; they create with what they get their hands on. They look like punks; they don’t fit in. I look at the boy in the bed. He’s swallowing the dancers whole with his eyes. I try to imagine what it’s like, being unable to move, watching this explosion. I’m suddenly aware of my own flesh. The warm evening, the strange town, the beautiful opera house, the boy, the dancers, the music. I feel alive, excited, full of sorrow.
When I was twenty-one, I went to a nightclub alone. I was drunk, and I was looking for sex. I stood with my back to the sweaty wall, and I tried to maintain a brooding appearance while I watched people dance. I held a bottle of Heineken Export and imagined myself as Jeffrey Beaumont from Blue Velvet but without the earring. A blonde girl approached and asked if I was interested in scoring her male friend. I turned her down.
I attempted to dance with a few women, but each turned her back to me. I returned to my brood against the wall. Half an hour passed. From behind the pillar in front of me, a woman in glasses with black hair appeared. I stared at her, and she stuck her tongue out at me. Then she disappeared behind the pillar. I walked around it and stuck my tongue out at her. She vanished in the thick crowd of the dance floor.
Continue reading ‘Self portrait at night and in daylight’
Every year, it’s the same. What shall I do for my birthday? The pressure to organise something special begins to mount as the day approaches, but instead I daydream about being someone else, someone who likes birthdays. Sometimes there is a flicker of optimism. I think, “Fuck it, I’ll throw a party!” Then I look for an excuse to snuff it out.
This year’s excuse is the backyard. It is crammed full with a wardrobe, ladders, three bicycles, a homemade table that collapsed and green recycling bags. One of the ladders now doubles as a shoe-rack, with running shoes, redundant football boots and my Converse All-Stars on permanent display.
I recently added a pair of silver sandals to the collection – an orange mold was growing inside them. I put them on the ladder, safely, so the mold wouldn’t blow away.
Continue reading ‘Things in my backyard’
When I was growing up, my mother explained, again and again, the importance of being closely engaged with what you did for a living. You had to get something out of it, something more than a paycheck and a gold watch after twenty-five years. She was an old-fashioned country woman who spent her life teaching young children, and of her many unbearable lectures (there were many), that one struck me. In my twenties, I knew what I didn’t want to do. I didn’t want to work in an office, or on a factory line, or anywhere you had to clock in and clock out. Fifteen years of heavy-handed Catholic education spent staring out a classroom window, combined with the fact that both my parents were schoolteachers, had produced an intense loathing in me for sitting down and using my head. I wanted to be outdoors, I wanted to be in a different place every day, and I wanted to be doing something dangerous.
Risk has a certain attraction for young men. We live in a culture with a very ambivalent attitude towards it. It’s good to join the army and risk dying for your country, but it is bad to drive a stolen car a hundred miles an hour the wrong way down a motorway. It’s easy to get confused. They both involve a quasi-suicidal pursuit of glory. As a young man, I believed that danger could somehow purge me of inadequacies. I thought I could temper myself in it, pound myself sharp and lean and deadly. When I heard about tree surgery, I felt it was the perfect opportunity. It’s a high-risk occupation, I had a good head for heights, and you can travel easily with it. The specialised nature of the work means it’s fairly straightforward to find employment. It’s hard to find people who are willing to climb up a hundred-foot oak with a chainsaw and then have the ability to get that twelve ton or so of timber safely on the ground without demolishing everything in sight.
Continue reading ‘From The king of Covil Avenue, Part 2′
Prisko was an awful reprobate, rejected by God and beyond all hope of salvation. I first met him on Alcatraz. We were both throwing up in the famous recreation yard. I had food poisoning and he had bulimia. We skipped the tour and sat on a bench looking out at the bay, united in bile. The wind blew steadily across the blue-and-white water, into my open mouth. Prisko was originally from some other part of America. Maybe Connecticut. He had a mouth like a torn sphincter.
I remember he said, “I came here to walk around, to look at the sea lions, you know – the usual stuff, but I smelled that smell, the smell of architects and gaybos and crazy people, and I felt right at home.” We met up regularly after that, for beer and long discussions mostly, but I had major doubts about the longevity of my relationship with that asshole.
Continue reading ‘Cameraman’
I had just finished a Boston Cream donut when Jimmy said, “There’s a deer sitting down on the road.”
I looked up. One hundred and fifty metres ahead a deer was seated in the middle of the left lane of the highway. He was causing a minor obstruction, but this was a country road and the traffic wasn’t heavy.
“He probably got hit by a car,” said Jimmy.
When we got closer I could see that he was right. The deer had his legs folded underneath his body, but he was making no effort to rise. You could tell he was young because the horn on the right side of his head wasn’t large. The other horn was missing, snapped off near the skull, leaving an ivory stub with a purple centre that was seeping blood. His head was erect and he stared straight ahead, not turning to watch the moving cars. Foam dripped from his mouth and chin.
Continue reading ‘One-man animal holocaust’
