Six months ago, in January, I was lying in bed with the flu when I looked out the window and saw cows on a roof. There were two, black-and-white, painted on the side of a water tank of a Georgian building across the canal and a few houses up. They were facing each other. One’s head was lowered to the other. How funny! I thought. Who’d bother painting cows on their roof? You can’t even see them from street-level. I smiled. Crazy neighbours, I thought. I sneezed. I picked up the novel I was reading. My spirits were uplifted by the thought of eccentric people living in close proximity. I got on with recovery.
This sunny June morning, I’ve noticed them again. I woke up with a stomach ache and decided to stay in bed. I’ve had plenty of opportunity to contemplate the cows since January, but the fact that the trees have come into full leaf obscures them from easy sight. Plus, I rush to get ready in the mornings. In the evenings I don’t spend time in my bedroom until sundown.
Peter’s come up from his office downstairs and is about to head off on a mid-week break. It’s ten a.m. He’s at the hall closet wrestling a suitcase out from behind our vacuum cleaner. I call him in.
“What is it?” he says, a little impatiently. (He’s running late.)
I gesture to the rooftop across the canal, “Look.”
“What?”
He kneels on the bed and draws his head over to mine. I coordinate the line of my finger with his sight. “That,” I say, “The two cows.” He smiles and walks over to the window. “Weird neighbours, huh?”
He doesn’t answer.
I get out of bed and go to where he’s standing. “What is it?” I ask. He’s squinting now. I press my nose against the window and squint myself. Suddenly I see one of the cow’s black spots is fluttering in the breeze. “Hey!” I shout (he wouldn’t say anything – he’s too polite). “Those aren’t cows!”
As it turns out, there’s a black covering on the tank, torn in places, exposing a white surface underneath. From a distance, the pattern looks remarkably like cows. Peter even says so: “It really does look like cows.”
“I can’t believe it,” I tell him, “My eyesight must be terrible.”
“It’s not your eyesight,” he says, putting on his shoes. “It’s your brain. It wants to see cows.”
My brain wants to see cows!
Peter drove off two hours ago and I can’t stop thinking about what he said. I’m now sitting at a desk, in front of a window overlooking the canal, with an even better view of the cows, contemplating my need to believe in them. I’m disappointed they’re not real – that nobody bothered to paint cows on their roof. I’m thinking we should paint some on our own.
As a teenager I experimented a lot, did silly things. As an adult, I don’t; I’m sensible. Not because I want to be, but because intuitively I understand my credibility depends on it.
It’s not infrequent that I have a hankering to dye my hair blue like I once did, but that’s what people do when they’re young. If I paint my fingernails green, I won’t give off that impression of stability we all, children and adults, crave in adults. I know myself now. My hair must stay brown. But since I don’t get to do weird things, I need them done for me.
Sometimes when I’m in the library I look around and try to will something to happen – a fart, an outburst, something obscene. I want someone to scream out something completely nonsensical. I half dream of doing it myself.
A few years ago, when riots broke out following an Orange parade march in Dublin, I was in the reading room in Trinity. I got a panicky text message from my then boyfriend telling me to stay in college, to be careful. I grabbed my books and ran out of the front gate. There was a car ablaze in the street. The crazies were out. Suddenly I liked where I was standing.
It’s any event out of the ordinary that stimulates and excites me, though events that aren’t violent are better, because I don’t have to feel guilty about getting a thrill from them. And I’m not the only one. My mother, who’s tired and stressed a lot of the time, gave me a call from New York a few summers ago. I was in Washington visiting her, and she’d gone up to New York for a couple of days for a business trip. There was a black-out. The whole city lost power (the whole northeast, in fact – even parts of Canada). Everyone was stranded. I don’t ever remember hearing her so upbeat. Her cell phone had died, so she borrowed one from some friends she made in a stairwell. “Mom, are you okay?” I asked, watching the news footage from a sofa in our basement.
“Oh yes, Amy, we’re having a ball. Everybody’s had to leave the offices and I’ve made some pals and we’re out here on the sidewalk cooking hotdogs!”
“So when will you be back?”
“As soon as I can, I don’t know.”
“Be in touch.
“I will.”
“Have fun.”
“I am!”
She hung up. I felt jealous.
In adulthood I’ve lost control. Sometimes I think I’ve gained it, but I haven’t. It’s illusory. Some people cope by having pets. They give them idiotic names: Sprouts, Buttercup, Yoda… I have a couple of friends who got cats and dogs recently just so they could name them.
Me, I can’t stand the idea of housing animals. I figure they’ve got fur for a reason. Given this position, I must rely on other means for alleviating the boredom of day-to-day life. For instance, I like to get exercised about things: complain, be difficult, protest, rant. I have this friend who’s always got a smile on her face, and whenever anyone says anything negative about our society, institution, whatever, she shrugs and says, “Things aren’t so bad.”
“No,” I tell her, “They really are. You just have to look: there’s so much to be angry about.”
“But you have to look on the bright side.”
“No,” I say, “That’s what they want you to do!”
In fact, that is what they want you to do: our governments, employers, the Aviation Transport Authority.
In 2004, I ruined my passport swimming with it in Thailand. Within hours the cover had begun to peel away from the photo page; and a week later I found myself in Heathrow airport, confronted with the insinuation that I may have tampered with it.
“If I wanted to tamper with it, wouldn’t I be less obvious about doing so?” I asked politely. “You know, glue the pages back together?” My question was met with a hostile stare.
A couple weeks and $150 later (my travel plans required the more expensive “expedited” processing), I received my new passport, stiff and blank, in the mail. I opened it to look at my picture, noting on the page just above, a declaration and a line with a note below which read, “Signature of Bearer (document invalid until signed)”. I left it unsigned; I travelled for three-and-a-half more years, on at least eight or nine more overseas trips, until one day I found myself back in Heathrow airport in front of a new, yet remarkably similar-looking customs official, who, having flipped through the pages to observe all my stamps, flipped back to the first page, narrowed her eyes at me, stuck a pen in my face, and said: “This document is not valid until signed.”
“Wow.” I smiled, “It’s really good you caught that.”
How juvenile! And yet how gratifying! It was a silly point to make, not signing, and yet it wasn’t a point at all. Or was it?
It infuriates me that inanimate things have more freedom to travel than humans do. Your job may circumnavigate the globe, but you, who have legs, must stay put when your passport isn’t valid.
I wasn’t trying to get a reaction, but I was making a point. In neglecting to validate a document I see no fair use for – a document which controls and restricts me, and reduces my identity to a few details, none of which I’ve chosen.
My father bought a camcorder. It must have been shortly after my birth, and one of my favourite home videos is of my sisters, cousins, the children of family friends and me at my grandmother’s house one Easter day after we’d changed out of our nice dresses and suits. There’d been a deluge of rain which had transformed Grandma’s back yard into the most fantastic mud pit any of us had ever seen.
My father swings the camera around, as we criss-cross like flies against a green backdrop. We squeal, we shriek; ten or twelve of us aged five to fifteen run around in circles flinging mud at each another. Dad moves around, zooming in and out; he attempts to record individual contributions to the mayhem. The son of a family friend squats behind a bush with two handfuls of ammunition. My sister takes a break from combat and kneels by a creek, lining up frogs on her forearm. Everyone else continues flinging mud, and all of a sudden, my eldest sister screams, “Oh my God, Amy, this is cashmere!” And then there’s me, in grainy view. I’m standing in the middle of a clearing. I’m by myself. I’m five years old. I’m patting my belly with a muddy hand. And I’m wearing a t-shirt that’s far too small for me. I’m giggling so hard I don’t notice my trousers have begun inching down my snow-white ass. Before long they’ll be at my ankles. But I don’t care. I notice nothing. I’m too busy laughing. It is the happiest image of myself I have ever seen.
Amelia Mahon lives in Dublin
