Songdogs

by Colum McCann

  Mam said: ‘Of course, I will look at the chickens.’

  Mam filled in for Mrs O’Leary, examined the undersides of the chicks. They would sit together on wooden stools at the back of the pub, feet swinging beneath them, chatting, laughing. Their cackle rose up and swung its way through the bar, where the men pounded their fists every half an hour to the chime of the headless cuckoo on the wall: ‘Another glass there, Alice, make it snappy.’ She sold the eggs to the men, who lay like dormant rags on the bar counter all day long, staring at the dusty mirrors, a musty smell pluming up from their jackets, handkerchiefs peeping from trouser pockets. But Mam and Mrs O’Leary ignored the men most of the time, sat out the back and whiled the time away, swapping bits and pieces of their lives, José with the Sewn Lip, Rolando, Miguel, fires in that far-off place, the peculiar Cici, the chicken opera that had developed in my grandmother’s yard in Mexico.

  After a while Mam and Mrs O’Leary began to invent their own opera, using the men in the bar as their actors.

  They were a curious bunch – men scared of living, even more scared of dying, afraid of ghosts that rose up and tiptoed through their kidneys. One sported a walrus moustache and wore shiny grey trousers, and he often slid off the end barstool, finishing his Guinness while sitting on the floor, a hedge of white cream above his lip. There was a misanthrope with a face like an oven-fresh roll, taking tenpenny pieces from behind his own ear. One man smelled of vinegar when he sweated. Another slumbered in the slop-house of his own giant Smithwick’s stains. All of them seemed to cough together in a choir, blowing their noses into the palms of their hands, bleary-eyed over newspapers, exhausted over whiskeys. ‘Who in the name of Jaysus stole the racing page?’ ‘Give us another jar there, Alice.’ ‘How about a lift home?’ ‘Well, there’s cars in the family but they’re all in America.’

  From what I can figure out, they treated Mam fairly well at first – the odd swoop of the hat when she walked in, the shadowy wink, the quiet suggestion of lechery with dentures moving up and down in their mouths, a hailing of her new dress, a compliment on the shade of lipstick. But there were whispers of curiosity as well, and soon rumours abounded like storms. Storms, too, brought in strange birds – hadn’t a peregrine falcon arrived all the way from Nova Scotia once? She was a former lover of Che Guevara. She was Jack Dempsey’s girl. She was an orphan from the slums of Central America. She had failed in Hollywood. She was a daughter of Franco. She was in flight from a revolution. She had once owned a hacienda in southern Mexico, lost it all in a game of bridge. Or maybe she was a model for the old man’s camera, perhaps even posed for him, nude. The latter rumour – the one they eventually embraced – may have caused a peculiar quickness in their dentures, the shaky lifting of a glass to the mouth.

  I came to the pub late afternoons, after school, swinging my satchel. Mam’s eyes were decked out, rocking back and forth in a curious sort of happiness that I didn’t recognise from home. Looking back, I can see that they could have been sisters, she and Alice O’Leary. They could have been in love with one another – sometimes sitting with a hand laid on the back of a hand, Mam’s mud-coloured fingers on Easter-lily white. Mrs O’Leary would run her fingers over my face. ‘He’s the spit of you, Juanita, feel the head of hair on him.’ Occasionally a gargantuan bottle of stout passed between them as the chickens pecked around in the garden. Mrs O’Leary would miss her lips with the drink, and a necklace of black would spill down the front of her apron, ‘Ah, Jaysus now, I couldn’t hit a barn door, used to be I could pee through a wedding ring, and now I couldn’t even hit a bucket!’

  The Angelus was always Mam’s cue to go home and make dinner for my father. When it sounded out in the pub smoke, a rat-faced comedian began a recitation: ‘Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us drunkards now and at the hour of eleven, amen.’ We walked home along the narrow roads together, Mam and I, seagulls over the bog, rainbows, winter stars rising early in the first darkness of the east. She was always wondering what to cook for him, and she’d stop by the wall, lodge in a few more rocks before she went to the kitchen, sometimes muttering quietly to herself.

  The old man was freelancing for some agricultural magazines. His life had whittled down to fields of barley, gleaming red combine harvesters, cows with splatterings of shit on their tails, formal committee meetings, product launches, brand-new packages of bacon, shots of serious men in grey suits shaking hands at conventions. Banality at its finest, it meant little or nothing to him, it had no art, but it held him here. He took the sort of shots that appeared in the unread sections of newspapers. Or the type of images so indistinct that a byline underneath them embarrassed him. The world had come down to this – he was a father growing middle-aged and bored in a grey Mayo farmyard, patient as a draft-horse for a new season of grass. His wife built walls and spent afternoons in a strange pub. She talked and dreamt constantly of her homeland. He would slump his way through the front door in the evenings, smelling of old milk and cigarettes, sigh, kiss her brusquely on the cheek, ask her how much stout she had drunk in O’Leary’s. He’d wander around the table, put a hand to the back of my head, rub my hair: ‘How’s my young fella today?’ I’d tell him that I’d scored a hat-trick in a schoolyard football match. He’d put his hands into the pocket of his waistcoat and say: ‘Good on ya, lad, good on ya,’ and then lean his head down to his plate of food, every now and then looking up and winking at me, saying, ‘Hat-trick, huh?’ Moments like that, I loved him hugely, admired his bigness, but Mam sat at the end of the table and said nothing, all the time knowing that I hadn’t played football after school at all.

  He kept a notebook with him, wrote the accounts in it. Sometimes he read the financial situation aloud at the dinner table, promised that soon there would be enough for us to make our great trip to the Chihuahuan desert. ‘Yes,’ he’d say, ‘just a few more months and another big job, we’ll be on the pig’s back.’ Mam’s lips would give a small twitch as if Mexico was sitting there, at the edge of her mouth, as if she might just be able to taste it.

  But instead he built his own darkroom. He wanted to use the old cow shed, but it let in too much light, so he created it from scratch. Hired a JCB and dug out the foundations, sat me in the plastic swivel seat, pretended to let me steer the huge yellow digger. He drained the foundation holes with an industrial hose-pump and put in pipes, dropped the cement in by himself, let me draw my initials in it. He contracted a couple of men to help him on odd days. They called him ‘Boss,’ in an almost derisory way, and they went into exaggerated raptures when Mam brought out tea and slices of fruitcake. ‘Missus Lyons, ya make the best cup of tea in the county.’ ‘Jaysus, Missus Lyons, I’d put some of this on me head and beat me brains with me tongue trying to get at it.’

  Once, when the old man was gone to town for sand, I heard a wolf-whistle as Mam bent down to work at her stone wall. She stood up and smiled, waved at them, and the men hung their heads and went back to work.

  Out there with his shirt off in the cool drizzling summer, my father strutted around. His chest had begun to sag just a little so that he would sometimes pinch at his nipple to make it look hard. I remember now that he sucked in his belly and put his hands over the side of his love handles to seem slim. There was still a drama to him. Up on the roof the hammer was raised high, an arm cocked histrionically to show a muscle. Flamboyant with the electric drill, his finger wagged when he showed me how it worked. He had begun to comb his hair across, to cover up the large bald spot, but it was still impossible to control. It was long enough that it sometimes blew out and fell to his shoulder. He licked his fingers and pasted it back.

  The building was modular and neat, made of cinder blocks, with two rooms separated by wood panelling, no windows, a flat roof, carefully insulated, mindfully monitored so that no light leaked in under the doors. He drilled bolts into the wall for file cabinets and shelves, ran in electricity and water, jerryrigged a phone line. He called it ‘The Gulag,’ a nickname that could have been a
premonition. He had a string on the knob of the second door, which he kept locked, so that, when he pulled it, it would flip the lock and open the door. I would go out at dinnertime to call him in. Some shuffling around before he opened the door, a sound of papers moving, drawers closing, lids going down on boxes. Then he’d pull the string to expose the small banalities of his world. Rows of photos hung under a string of red bulbs, a contact sheet of Friesians or an advertisement for cheese. He’d wipe his hands on a piece of red towelling and ask me: ‘Is it chips she’s cooking again, tonight?’

  It was a familiar phrase.

  Early one morning I heard the old man thunder down the stairs. I followed him. A fire in the kitchen, the chip-pan ablaze. Mam stood in the middle of the floor, staring at it, eyes effulgent above her gorse-coloured dressing gown. She didn’t even look at him, kept staring at the fire as it leaped. ‘I only wanted to cook something,’ she said, ‘I couldn’t sleep, you see that I cannot sleep lately.’ The old man wrapped the flap of his string vest around the handle of the pan. He moved through the kitchen, muttering some surreptitious obscenity, stormed outside to the yard, where he threw the pan into long grass for the night dew to seal it. The last few sparks were spectral in the grass. He came back inside, a burn on the inside of his palm, licked at it, chopped an orange in half to soothe the wound.

  ‘Are ya off your fucken rocker, woman, who wants chips at this hour of night?’

  She was by the stove, still motionless beside the tea kettle, not unlike a tea kettle herself, one hand bent out spout-like, her face silver, slowly beginning to move on the balls of her feet, but lucid, a whistle in the voice – ‘It was just a little mistake, Michael, we all make mistakes’. He looked at me, his eye-whites slashed through with twigs of redcurrant, fingered at a bit of sleep in one of the corners, then scratched at the cavern of his belly button, looked like he was trying hard to remember something that wasn’t important anyway. He moved the tongue around his lips: ‘And you, young fella, isn’t it time for all good children to be in bed?’

  He guided me to the hallway, kissed me on the forehead. I hugged him, ascended the stairs in a confusion of love and hatred. Don’t worry about it, son,’ he said, ‘your Mam’s just a little tired.’

  That night I heard them arguing downstairs, and after that, when I called him in from the darkroom for dinner, he’d say: ‘Is it chips she’s cooking again, tonight?’

  On television there were programmes where men came up behind women at stoves, wrapped their arms around their waists, even helped them stir whatever was in a pot – and I wondered why the old man didn’t do that with Mam. Slumbering in their own solitude, they didn’t even saunter to mass together, as other parents did. On Saint Valentine’s Day I gave them identical holy crosses made from reeds, left over from Saint Brigid’s Day. They came up to my bed at separate times and thanked me, my father with a pound note, my mother with a cup of hot chocolate. They were in different worlds, impossible to bridge. I imagined them swaying through the house, the open jacket of my father’s pyjamas not even touching against the jumpers that Mam wore over her nightdress, the two crosses placed in different windows at opposite ends of the house.

  Weeds grew around the bottom of his darkroom. I tried to break in, but he had locked it tight and there were no windows to get through. Once, when he was travelling for a week, I tried to dig a tunnel for myself at the back. I imagined myself as some gaunt-faced prisoner breaking into his gulag, war ribbons dangling from the holy medal at my chest, using a trowel to scrabble away at the mucky mess, him high above me in a watchtower with a rifle. All I hit was foundation stone. When he came back he asked me about the hole. I told him I’d seen a dog back there, digging. ‘You chase him off with a big stick next time you see him, right, son?’ I gave up after that, though there were still times I rifled through the pockets of his trousers, unsuccessfully looking for the key.

  The old man made friends with a big-shot who owned a meat-processing company in Swinford. O’Shaughnessy was the sort of man who had bottles jangling in the pockets of granite-grey suits. He had a bulbous nose and a huge belly, drove expensive cars that rolled down our lane late at night and beeped very loud for the old man to come out drinking. Mam hated O’Shaughnessy, avoided him when he came to the house – he was always trying to touch the sleeves of her blouses, planting Continental-style kisses on her cheeks. Sometimes, when he visted, she went out and did a few bits and pieces of work on her wall, even at night, in the dark. The old man and O’Shaughnessy would come home when the pubs closed and they would sit in the living room together, loud guffaws rising up through the house.

  Once or twice Mam came into my room and sat by the window while they were downstairs. She said nothing, just looked out the window, watched the pattern of weather outside. The thing that got her most was the cold, the more or less constant lack of sun, the way it would seep downward into her marrow. She often wore two or three jumpers over one another. In the morning, while she got the fire ready in the living room, she kept the tea kettle beside her, warming her hands over the steam, even wearing gloves while she cooked breakfast, teeth chattering. Still amazed by snow, in winter she would watch my snowmen dribble down to a carrot and eye-pebbles, hugging herself into a coat, stamping her feet on the ground, watching the clouds made from our breath. The whips of winds shook her to the core – she was a watcher of storms. Huge billows lashed in from the Atlantic, carrying spindrift, causing the river trees to kowtow to the ground, litter to animate itself. One storm was a peculiar blessing for her – a sandstorm from the Sahara, carrying dust, red dust, all the way from North Africa, depositing it on the land so that tiny particles covered the windshields of cars, the roofs of houses, gates, walls, boots, the leaves of flowers by the front door. She didn’t wash the windows for weeks, enthralled by the revisit of red dust to her life. She ran her finger along the window ledge and held it up for me to see, ‘Isn’t it nice, m’ijo? A red wind.’

  O’Shaughnessy and my father began to take trips abroad, mostly Belgium and France, something to do with EEC beef deals. Pictures were taken of O’Shaughnessy at conventions, wearing his fat gaudy ties. They’d be gone for a fortnight at a time, and Mam would fall asleep in a wicker chair by my bedroom window, three blankets pulled around her.

  And then one evening the old man arrived home from France with two cardboard boxes. It had been a particularly cold day, frost on the ground, all the windows of the house locked tight, robins frantic over bits of bread in the yard. O’Shaughnessy dropped my father off at the front of the house, blew my mother a kiss as she stood at the window in her jumpers. She turned away. The old man lumbered the boxes and his suitcase out on to the porch, shuffling his feet precisely over the ice. He sat there for a while, the boxes at his feet. Mam asked me to call him in for dinner – this time he said nothing about chips. He breezed his way into the house, threw off his coat, just a white shirt underneath, combed his hair across his pate, pasted it down with spittle, and put his suitcase down against the kitchen table. Mam was bent over some eggs with salsa sauce, rubbing her gloved hands together.

  ‘Two shakes of a lamb’s tail,’ my father said, and he stroked her tenderly on the side of the face.

  She looked up, surprised. He went back outside and lifted the cardboard boxes from the porch. Despite the chill, two large ovals of sweat formed on his underarms. He laid the two boxes on the kitchen table and nodded up and down, turned and told me it was time for me to take my swim. ‘He will be frozen,’ said Mum. My father winked: ‘Nah, he’ll be fine, he’s a big man now.’ There was a strange look in the old man’s eye. I went upstairs and got the two sets of togs. At the front door I waited for him to come with me. I held the togs up, but he motioned me away with his hand, told me to go on my own. He took out a knife and began cutting the string from the cardboard boxes. I waited at the window.

  ‘This is a present for your Mam,’ he said, ‘you go on down and I’ll join ya later, take your coat, wrap up well when y
a get out.’

  We had often swum in the cold before, but always in the morning, the initial shock of climbing in disappearing, a feeling that another skin had developed over my body. I had become better at going against the current, didn’t have to hang on to the poplar roots any more. I swam for maybe ten minutes, let the water push me backwards, went to the pool at the side of the river and pulled a hollow reed, went underwater, breathed through it. It was a strange green world down there, immense and fascinating and slimy, until I was so far down in it that water poured through the reed and I let it go, and my breath left me at the same time, bubbles rising up, and I sank, felt like I was swimming blind, the pressure thumping my chest, pushing arms outwards. I sat on some riverbottom stones until the pain became almost peaceful, a barrage of it in my lungs, and I shunted myself up, resurfaced.

  The meat factory had only just been set up and none of the offal floated in the water yet, although I had begun to notice a little bit of a smell. I paddled around the river for a while, saluted a duck, got out and pulled my anorak around me – the zip was broken – put a towel around my neck. When I came back up from the riverbank Mam was at her wall in her big coat and three sweaters, and the old man was nowhere to be seen. I walked up and stood beside her, my hair dripping wet, a chatter in my teeth, wanting to tell her about my swim, but she told me to go into the house and towel myself off. She was looking down at a place where her wall had given through, one of the teeth fallen from the grey gum of it. She looked at it long and hard, knelt down, picked up a field rock, tried to wedge it back in, tried very hard but couldn’t, broke a fingernail, said something in Spanish I didn’t understand. It sounded as if there was custard in her mouth. I thought she was just cold. Her body began to tremble, quietly at first. ‘I thought it would support,’ she said to herself, ‘it’s so easy thing to do.’ She tried to wedge another rock in, but it jutted out and her fingers shook. She pushed her knee against the rock, but it still didn’t budge. She stood up, shivering.