Being Alexander

by Diarmuid Ó Conghaile

  Alexander takes the opportunity of George having turned his back to slip in the subject of the alleged sexual harassment.

  ‘Neville has accused me of making lewd propositions,’ he says, recognising immediately from how George’s back stiffens that he has made an error in mentioning this and in the way he has done so.

  George turns around and examines him accusingly with narrowed eyes.

  ‘Needless to say, there is no foundation in what he is saying,’ Alexander continues, but George’s expression does not change. His jaw seems more square than usual, with the muscle at the corner of each jawbone pulsing visibly, from the man’s heart beat, or from a rhythmic clenching and unclenching of his teeth.

  ‘I didn’t proposition him,’ Alexander further asserts, but senses that the situation is getting worse with every word he utters.

  George turns away abruptly to face the controls again.

  Alexander falters in his comprehension of reality. The steel panels of the lift chamber alter their proportions and close in on him. It seems for an instant that George and he are suspended horizontally, free from gravity, hurtling in this box through the dark outer regions of the universe. Alexander cannot breathe. His hand goes to his neck and he tugs at his shirt collar to create some space. His other hand reaches for the side wall to steady himself. He feels as though his equilibrium is gone, but he doesn’t fall.

  Bing-bing. They have reached G. The doors open onto the spacious foyer. George is on the move without a backward glance.

  Alexander is due to meet Helena in L’Ecrivain. He arrives early and opts to wait downstairs, seating himself on the sumptuous sofa. The hostess offers him a drink, as though it were free. His first thought is to get a sparkling water, but he decides instead for a single-malt whiskey with one cube of ice.

  ‘Hiya, kiddo,’ says Helena, flopping down beside him on the sofa. ‘It’s a bit early for hard liquor, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m having a difficult day. Or, rather, I was having a difficult day. At this very moment I am deciding to bunk off for the afternoon and get plastered, so things are looking up.’

  ‘It’s a pity I can’t join you. I have a meeting with clients about a litigation.’

  ‘Well, if you have to be there, you have to be there,’ he says with mock sympathy, ‘but do allow yourself a moderately boozy lunch. It’ll ease your passage through the afternoon.’

  ‘I’ll have a glass of white wine, and maybe a dessert wine at the end. . . . Listen, while I think of it: I was talking to Siobhán at the weekend—’

  ‘How could you have been talking to Siobhán at the weekend?’

  Siobhán is their riding instructor.

  ‘I bumped into her in Tesco’s. They’re going to have a show-jumping competition in January. I put our names down.’

  Upstairs, in the bright airy space of the restaurant proper, they are shown to a table that is closer to the busy traffic from the kitchen doors than Alexander would like. It is not so much the traffic as the lack of regard that bothers him. In fairness, he forgot to book until this morning, and didn’t specify any table preferences, but there are plenty of unoccupied tables in better locations.

  The key in these situations is to be gracefully assertive, to have natural authority, to require a better table simply because you require a better table, without giving the thing any thought. On his better days, he can sometimes hit such heights. But today the waiter is super­ior to him. Alexander could allow the whiskey to bring out his brash, argumentative aspect, but that is not the tone he wants to set. So he sits where he is told.

  ‘It’s not the world’s greatest table,’ Helena says, after the waiter has helped her into the seat and left them to consider the menus.

  ‘I think it’s fine,’ Alexander says, a little abruptly, not wanting the embarrassment of her insisting on their being moved.

  ‘Do you remember when we were kids and we talked about our souls?’ he asks, once they are well engaged with their starters.

  ‘No,’ says Helena, as she picks a mussel out of its yawning shell.

  ‘I would say that you were eight or nine and I was six-seven. We were talking about the shape of our souls, what we imagined them to look like.’

  ‘How do you remember this shit?’

  ‘You must recall that they used to teach us in school that everyone has a soul, which is immortal.’

  ‘Almost. Being Catholic is so far in the past now.’

  ‘We talked about it. You imagined that your soul was round, “like an egg”, you actually said. And I thought that was all wrong. Mine was like a spear or an arrow, which ran through my body. Isn’t that amazing?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Don’t you see what it means? We were kids. Consciously we knew nothing about sex, but we were thinking in archetypal symbols of sexual identity.’

  ‘Mmm,’ says Helena, dipping her fingers in the bowl of water and lemon slices, drying them on her napkin. ‘Have you seen Julia at all? Have you rung her? You were supposed to ring her. We’re all worried about you, living in that grotty flat by yourself, going mad.’

  ‘I saw her at the weekend. I met her in Holles Street by coincidence, visiting Aoife and the new baby. We didn’t really get a chance to talk, but I’ll see her again at the weekend, at the christening. I’ll try to talk to her then.’

  ‘And what are you going to say?’

  ‘What do you want me to say?’ he snaps, not liking the space into which they have moved, Helena being all big-sisterly and condescending. ‘I don’t know what to say. If I knew what to say, we’d be married now, living in Inner Mongolia, with two overindulged brats in the local Gaelscoil.’

  Helena sits back and raises her eyebrows. I apologise for caring, her expression says. He sees this as just another aspect of her condescension, but allows himself to be manipulated.

  ‘Sorry,’ he lies. ‘I appreciate your concern. And you know I’m crazy about the kids. I wasn’t implying anything. Let’s talk about something else.’

  ‘Oh my God, yes, how could I have forgotten?’ she blurts out warmly, relenting immediately, sitting forward in her chair to recreate their intimacy.

  ‘What? What is it?’

  They were very close in their teenage years, when they were both in Malahide Community School. Back then, Helena used to love to talk about her precocious sexual adventures. (Later, in college, something happened to her – he doesn’t know what – and she turned prim, relatively, almost overnight.) He could have told her back then about his recent epiphany, his insight into the shapes of souls, how he was walking down Grafton Street and saw all these pricks and cunts. Not that they had pricks and cunts, but that they were pricks and cunts, that this was the beginning and end of their identity. How he now understood, retrospectively, the Picasso nudes which had previously puzzled him, the painter’s focus on the cunt, his putting it at the centre of the picture, the centre of the anatomy.

  ‘It’s about Maisie,’ Helena begins. ‘She’s back in hospital again, this time for an irregular heart beat. Mum says she’s in great form, giving out goodo.’

  ‘Is Mum down there?’

  ‘She went down on Friday. She says that Maisie has been asking after you, that she wants to change her will and leave the farm to you. How about that?’

  Helena is beaming. Alexander experiences no more than a light internal change of tone, like the effect of a drop of colour in a Petri dish of water. He is not excited by the prospect because he doesn’t believe that such a thing can come to pass.

  ‘When did this happen? Why didn’t Mum tell me herself?’

  Helena shrugs, indicating that she considers this an unimportant detail, given the significance of the news itself.

  ‘I was talking to her on the phone on Saturday. I said I was meeting you for lunch today and that I’d tell you.’

  ‘Ther
e’d be blue murder. Tommy Óg Grady would have my guts for garters.’

  ‘Don’t worry about Tommy Óg Grady,’ says Helena impatiently. ‘I thought you would be delighted. It must be worth a fortune . . . like a few million maybe.’

  ‘It’s not going to happen,’ he tells her heatedly. ‘Nothing good like that ever happens to me.’

  ‘That’s because you never go for anything.’

  ‘How do you go for something like this? What do you want me to do? Do you want me to go down and sweet-talk the old dear? Do you want me to threaten her with a kitchen knife? Anyhow, she’s probably not in her right mind. Who is going to let a 95-year-old dying woman write a new will?’

  ‘Those are exactly the kind of people who do write new wills. The rest of us think we’re never going to die.’

  Alexander takes a swig of his wine.

  ‘I wish I were a Buddhist monk,’ he says.

  ‘Well you could be,’ Helena points out agreeably. ‘You could be a fat cat Buddhist monk sitting on forty acres of prime rezoning land in County Galway.’

  Alexander drinks again. His wine is getting low. It tastes watery to him now, with a cardboard flavour, where before he thought it was debonair. He looks around for a waiter so he can order more.

  ‘We should have got a bottle,’ he says.

  Most years, before the kids reached their teens, the Vespucci family would drive to Galway for a fortnight’s holiday in the summer. To them it was an epic journey. They made a day of it, stopping late in the morning in Kinnegad for sandwiches, ‘minerals’ and tea, and again in the mid-afternoon in Ballinasloe. Jim Vespucci never drove above forty miles an hour, and if the kids moved around in the back seat, or complained too much, he threatened to turn back, which shut them up immediately.

  Crossing the Shannon at Athlone was the fulcrum in the journey.

  ‘We’re in the West now,’ Brigid would say, as though the West were a completely different country – by understood implication, a rough windswept land where life was more real and more attractive than the suburban Dublin monotony to which the Vespuccis were accustomed.

  Not long after the Shannon, the dry-stone walls appeared, lining the roadside, dividing the grassy fields into sequences of irregular rectangles. These pretty walls – their infinite idiosyncrasies, the lichen stains, the beaten weathered look, the kiss of the rocks off each other, the patchwork of fresh air between them – became for Alexander synonymous with the West and evocative of freedom and happiness.

  They stayed in a caravan park in Salthill, which was excitement enough in itself. Alexander, Helena and their mother spent the day on the Salthill promenade, swimming in the sea at Blackrock, racing down the slide in Leisureland, pushing pennies and tuppences into the casino slot machines.

  Jim Vespucci was not much of a man for outdoor activities, or indeed for indoor activities. He would disappear shortly after breakfast, and they would meet up in a bar or hotel in the late afternoon, where he would be drinking a pint, smoking his pipe, reading his book, all at a stately pace.

  In the evenings, they had dinner in the caravan and played cards, laughing a lot. On the best days, they were so fatigued by the time they lay down to sleep that they did not notice the musty smell of the pillows or complain about the tough spongy cushions with the asthma-inducing upholstery. For a brief few minutes, before disintegrating into a deep sleep, Alexander would be conscious of the dried crystals of sea salt on his back, his sunburnt skin emitting in pulse rhythm some of the heat it had absorbed during the day, and the pepper of sand that felt like grit between his body and the bed sheet.

  Two or three times during their holiday they would visit Maisie, and these were the days they loved most.

  At the time, Ballyryan was deep in the countryside, though only twenty miles from the centre of Galway city. Maisie had no phone, so initially she wouldn’t even know that the Vespuccis were in Galway unless Brigid had dropped her a note in the post.

  The farmhouse was a stone construction, built in the second half of the nineteenth century, with a big blonde thatched roof. Adjacent to it was a bigger two-storey barn, also made of stone. The walls of the house were thickly plastered, whitewashed, giving it a skin that had an organic quality, curving slightly on its lines, bulging in places. The house and barn were on about three-quarters of an acre, fenced off from the surrounding fields; with gates in two places, a narrow one that led to the front door, and a broad one behind the house for workloads. In previous years, the fence had shielded a busy herb and vegetable garden from grazing animals. By the time the Vespucci children were old enough to pay any real attention, the garden was riotously overgrown, made interesting by the things one could discover in this growth, picking one’s way through hazards of nettles and long thorny limbs of gooseberry bushes gone wild: bits of an old tractor, including a seat on which one could pretend to be driving; a rusty scythe; galvanised-iron buckets full of muck, with the grass growing out of them; a configuration of large flat rocks that might have been a man-made something from early history, collapsed now. And when their nerves wearied of such explorations, they could return to the relative order of the yard behind the barn, where – in season – they could climb and slide down the beehive-shaped haystacks, held together with rope and rocks. Panting in the August heat, the kids would pause then to drink and splash cold water from the outside tap – the only source on the farm.

  When they arrived, Jim would park the car by the narrow front gate. If the folks were home, the front door would be open, to let in the light.

  Auburn-breasted hens would be wandering purposefully around the lane, clucking, pecking, slipping under the closed gate, strutting in and out of the house, calmly varying speed and direction, randomly, or as required by changing circumstances – for instance, the arrival of the Vespucci’s car. The droppings would be everywhere, in varying shades and states of disintegration; mistaken by Alexander for chocolate when he was very small, as Helena liked to recall.

  Maisie would emerge from the house when she heard the car pull up in the lane; but not immediately. There was a waiting period, no more than a minute or two perhaps, but seemingly long to the children, a period during which they were instructed to remain politely seated in the car. When she had done whatever it was she did in this mysterious lapse, Maisie would shuffle out into the yard, putting her hands to her cheeks in her surprise at seeing them; and though not smiling exactly, she would seem to be pleased at the visit. She was a medium-sized woman with curly grey hair, a fat red-skinned face, and deep-set intelligent eyes, overlaid with thick-rimmed glasses, the stand­ard issue from the health board. At home, she was always dressed in the same outfit: a big apron, long black skirt, manly boots. Even then, her ankles were flabby, spilling out over the tops of her boots despite her heavy beige stockings. Her clothes were so much a part of her identity as to be indistinguishable from her person in Alexander’s comprehension of her.

  Husband Johnny was a thin shy man who said very little. He wore a cap, and smoked a pipe with a perforated steel lid across the top to stop the tobacco from falling out when he was going about the farm. His trousers were held up with a piece of twine. The biggest thing about him was his boots, which had steel studs nailed into the soles to stop them from wearing out. When he moved across the flagstone kitchen floor, they made a great noise and gave out the odd spark, which the children loved. Johnny – their mother would tell them – had fought bravely in the War of Independence. But in another breath, without cross-reference, it would be given to understand that he was a mouse of a man, too nice by far for Maisie, that it was she who wore the trousers. By inheritance, it was Maisie’s house, Maisie’s farm.

  The culture of these visits was unlike anything that Helena and Alexander were used to. In a standard visit back home in Dublin, you would ring the bell, go in quickly, sit down. In a visit to Maisie’s, there would be what seemed like twenty minutes of conversatio
n at the car, half an hour in the yard, half an hour at the door, twenty minutes standing in the kitchen, two hours sitting at the kitchen table, twenty minutes sitting at the kitchen table with imminent departure signalled, half an hour standing in the kitchen, twenty minutes standing at the door, another long while in the yard, then at the car, then in the car but with the windows rolled down. And all the time Brigid and Maisie would be yapping, yapping, yapping, laughing, while Jim and Uncle Johnny would offer occasional comments to the general discussion or have their own sparse manly interchanges about the weather or sport or politics, never anything too contentious or even interesting, just enough to signal friendliness, affection. The children mostly ignored these conversations, wanting just to run off down the lanes, in search perhaps of neighbour Michael Phaddy, who might let them sit up on his old horse and go for a bit of a stroll, bareback. Sometimes they would wander off on arrival and wouldn’t cross Maisie’s threshold until a couple of hours into the visit, when they were getting tired and hungry. Or, if it was later in the afternoon when they called, near milking time, Uncle Johnny would take them down to the field to collect the cows.

  The two huge Friesians would be waiting at the gate, and Uncle Johnny would walk behind them up the path, carrying a stick he never used on them, saying: ‘Wooooe na beh-hee, wooooe na beh-hee,’ which Alexander guessed years later to be a remnant from the Irish language: na beithígh – the beasts, the beings.

  Up to the Famine, this area had been Irish-speaking. But following those years of great hurt, the people who had lived that life were almost all dead or departed. And what remained of the language was soon rooted out. When she went to school – barefoot, with a lump of turf in her hand for the fire – Maisie’s mother had to stick out her tongue so that the teacher could judge if she had been talking Irish at home. Speaking Irish put black spots on your tongue, and these were rewarded with the cane.