A Goat's Song

by Dermot Healy

  Some part of him had stopped on the hour. A part of him was refusing to go forward till something terrible happened. He saw the gardener at the bar.

  “I met your lady friend as she was leaving town last Sunday,” sneered the gardener.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yes. She was asking if you were drinking.”

  “What did you say?”

  “What could I say?” replied the gardener.

  Everyone at the bar stopped talking. Just when everything seemed possible, the nightmare had started again.

  “Well I’m sober now,” declared Jack.

  “Is that so?” said the gardener, and he laughed.

  “I think I’ll go a bit further,” said Jack. At that moment his sobriety seemed a small price to pay for happiness. He always thought that the price would be more ephemeral, exotic, metaphysical. He felt humiliated and debased that her love demanded something as mundane as sobriety. A few weeks had passed and he’d been sober. She, too, wherever she was, was sober. Let us grow old and sober together. Yes, why not. She was coming to see him. But what did it all mean? Why did it feel so trivial? How do you build from within as your identity falters? He left the hotel.

  Something was wrong.

  Someone had been living through all of this on his behalf – a stranger. Now he had to create something from nothing. A man. He didn’t know what expression he should wear. What politics he had. Or the architecture that surrounded him. Yet once, out of habit, he walked in his shoes.

  For her he must remake himself. But she had all the materials which he needed to begin.

  As he sat waiting in the darkened sun lounge in the early evening, a bus disgorged a gaggle of youths and six priests onto Main Street. It had begun raining and they were drenched in the downpour. “That’s a shocking evening,” a priest said to Jack. The youngsters were sent into the eating house beyond the lounge for chips and sausages. Immediately they created an uproar. The sorry-looking priests, with brandies and gins, came into the lounge. A buxom woman brought them salmon sandwiches.

  “Where are you from?” Jack asked the priest nearest to him.

  “Castlebar,” he replied. “We are giving the altar boys of the diocese a day out.”

  “You didn’t, by any chance, pass a Lada on the road?”

  “I’m sure we passed plenty,” the priest laughed.

  Jack looked into his eyes. “A blue Lada. Maybe it was broken down. And a woman. She’d be wearing a black scarf.”

  “Not that I can remember,” said the priest.

  The priests hunched over their drinks in a single-minded way. Some wore old childish ganseys, others black, loosely knit vests. Here the back of a neck bulged, there it was graceful and white and reeked of a fleshly morbid sensuality. They chewed the white bread and lettuce with relish. One man, back from the missions, tanned and feral, talked of Chile, the Shining Path and Christopher Columbus while he sipped a Baileys Irish Cream. Then their conversation dropped to whispers. Jack gagged a little, and stabbed a finger into his thigh to control his stomach. His eyes watered.

  “Don’t look so sad, me buck,” the missioner called across, “it might never happen.”

  The nausea made Jack swoon. He gagged again and pressed his finger deep into his thigh till the nail punctured the skin. The smell of old drink seemed to erupt from the pores of his body.

  He was standing in the rain down on the Shore Road looking out at the violent sea which made no sound. Turning, he saw two dogs watching him, also silently, through a blue galvanize gate. One stood, his snout resting on his forepaws in the hole behind which the bolt is shot home. The other was stretched flat out on the cobbles so he could see under the corner of the gate. They were brown-and-white sheepdogs. Daisy lay in the middle of the road with his snout cushioned on a handful of grass and watched them. The three dogs and the man regarded each other silently.

  The hotel gardener, shaking his disconsolate head and fingers, as if he were feeding birds, foundered down the road.

  “How are you?” shouted Jack.

  The gardener did not answer, but stopped, looked and moved on with an ironic smile.

  “Don’t worry about it,” mumbled Jack.

  Dusk was falling. The surf rose silently. Outside a pub two tractors sat with their engines running. Local girls, high-cheeked, with jet-black Spanish hair, and dressed in virgin white, spilled out of a house speaking Irish. Dusk was falling quicker. The beach, when he reached it, was possessed of a low light. The sand was a quiet phosphorescent carpet. Suds lay the landward side of the wrack.

  It was Saturday night, and all the Catholics were headed for evening Mass. The old sabbath was being rejuvenated. The roads on the peninsula were lit by a convoy of trundling cars. The town was deserted, except for the hotel where the priests sat drinking, and the eating house, where the altar boys were shooting pool. An old gambling machine blinked on and off. In the distance, on the mainland, limestone glittered as if the sun were shining.

  He walked a street of ruined houses, then took a short cut across the lawns of the small industrial estate. The names were floodlit – Warners (Éire) Teo, Ionad Cloch lorrais, Ruibéar Chomhlacht Atlantach Teo, Fás. He went along a road where old shopfronts stared back with blank faces. The light from Eagle Island lighthouse swept across the sky three times. Count eight. Three times again. He stood on the new bridge. A light came on in the golf club. Nurses stepped into cars at the hospital. Standing there he listened to the alarming silence. The black sky blinked again.

  “Isn’t it getting late terribly early,” Mrs Moloney, the receptionist, said to him when he re-entered the hotel.

  “Were there any calls for me?”

  “No,” she said. “There was none since you last asked.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, Jack.”

  “Fair enough.”

  He stood by the desk wondering what to do.

  He went into the bar.

  “Hugh.”

  “Jack.”

  “Aye.”

  “No sign yet?” asked Hugh.

  “No,” answered Jack, “that’s about it.”

  The wind thrashed against the glass windows in the roof.

  “I think I’ll have a brandy.”

  “Why wouldn’t you?”

  “A brandy and crème de menthe I think.”

  Hugh filled a double measure.

  “Good luck,” Hugh said.

  It was only as he entered the sun lounge that Jack became aware of the glass in his hand. He stopped on the threshold and looked at the glass and thought, how did that happen? It was as if he had been transformed into someone else, someone he had once been. Someone he disliked entirely. In his sleep on the boat he’d often dream of drinking and wake with immense relief to find that it had not happened. The glass of whiskey he’d been swallowing in some unlit room of his consciousness he’d find did not exist. Now it did. It sat whole in his hand. After his two weeks of sobriety he’d ordered a drink without thinking. If she comes now what will I do? I’ll not drink it! He found the carpet under his feet. I have not drunk it yet! Holding the drink away from him he made his way to a deserted corner of the room and put the glass down at a safe distance from himself.

  “There’s the buck back,” said one of the priests. “Call me Peter,” he added. “We hear you do a bit of writing.”

  “I’m afraid you have the wrong man,” said Jack.

  If she’d been coming today, she’d have been down by now.

  “Sit down with us,” said Father Peter, “and give us some of your crack.”

  He sat down with the priests. They all sat round waiting for Catherine.

  2

  Walking the Triangle

  While he slept his body had ballooned out. A calf-hide receptacle of warm blood, he lay on his side. The panic that was his first reaction, could not be smoothed away. Everything was charged with static.

  He got up and dressed. His clothes stank of damp heat. Fungus
had bloomed overnight on the walls. As he entered the middle room Gay Byrne’s voice suddenly boomed forth speaking to a woman of some distant sexual problem. “Jesus Christ,” said Jack, and switched the radio off. He threw half a mackerel from a Donegal Catch packet to the wild cat who was screaming at the door. When Daisy ran under his feet, full of earnest early-morning enthusiasm, Jack roared at him. The dog, his tail curled up under his rump, backed away into a corner of the room. “And stay there!” shouted jack. He saw the misshapen image of his own face in the dog’s black eye as the animal circled the table.

  “Stop looking at me,” he said to the dog. Daisy immediately turned away.

  Jack spat out a globule of sick. The white fluid turned dry as if he had spat on a hot pan.

  Something had happened to his mind. His consciousness had always been protected by a sieve, but while he’d slept the holes had grown larger. Now the holes were as big as cherrystones. And they were growing bigger by the minute.

  He put one hand on the mantelpiece and stayed that way a few minutes. Where did Sunday go? I must have slept through it all. Then, sitting by the radio, he saw a bottle of sherry standing, the cork still half in. And tenderly he thought with a smile: I saved that for myself.

  The priests left that.

  The bottle was half full. He watched the bottle. If I start on that I’ll never telephone. I must do it while I’m sober. It’s eleven-fifteen. The first train is into Ballina. The first train has left Castlebar. She has not come. That’s the position. Maybe she’s been and gone. Maybe she has driven straight to the Adams’ house in Corrloch and is still there. I should walk up and see. Three and a half mile to Corrloch. Six miles to Belmullet. Is she in Dublin still? What did the fucking gardener tell her? Maybe she never left. Did she have an accident? Maybe I should go there. I can’t make Dublin now unless I hitch. Sometimes if you get up and go and don’t think about it, you can do it. If I have to hitch, I mustn’t drink.

  The room was cold. The wind fierce.

  He lifted her letter out of his pocket and read it.

  He stood reading it, then drank from the bottle.

  He filled a glass and drank and thought: She was never coming, I’ve been fooling myself. Then, while the alcohol sang in his head, he remembered her love pledge. He read the letter again, then walked the few miles to Corrloch across the fields, saw that her car wasn’t there but knocked on the door all the same; he entered the empty house and sat in the kitchen and saw it coming, whatever it was. I should ring. And yet he didn’t want to ring because he didn’t want to know. He walked the five and a half miles to Belmullet town. The dog appeared from nowhere by his side. “I’m sorry about this morning, Daisy,” he explained to the animal.

  In the Erris Hotel he asked Mrs Moloney to put a call through to the theatre in Dublin while he ordered a gin and tonic at the bar. Immediately he had put the call through he regretted it. He went out and cancelled it. He ordered another drink. The TV was on. He read the value of the punt in sterling. He watched the flickering digits of the day’s stock market prices. The TV grew abnormally large. He must have been standing there for more than an hour staring at the screen before Hugh switched it off. Then Jack sat down. His limbs stirred of themselves. His feet felt stone cold.

  He put the call through again. Mrs Moloney handed him the phone.

  “I’m sorry, Mr Ferris, Miss Adams is in rehearsal right now,” came the voice.

  “Could I speak to Eddie?”

  “Mr Brady?” she said correcting him.

  “Mr Brady, yes,” he agreed.

  “I’ll see.”

  Jack, as he waited, smiled at Mrs Moloney.

  “Jack?” said Eddie.

  “Is Catherine there?”

  Pause. “Yes, she is.”

  “Can I speak to her?”

  “Look, Jack, I don’t know what’s happening between you two, but she has refused to come to the phone.”

  “I was expecting her down here at the weekend.”

  “I know nothing about that. It’s best to leave her alone, I’d think, at present. It’ll sort itself out.”

  “She wrote to say she was coming, but she never came.”

  “I would know nothing about that.”

  “Tell her I’m still waiting.”

  “I will.”

  “Tell her I’m sober.” Then he added, “Tell her I’m sorry.”

  “I will.”

  “Eddie,” he said, hating the whinge in his voice. “Will you please ask her to speak to me?”

  “Look, Jack, you are putting me in a terrible position. I don’t want to interfere.”

  “Will you ask her?”

  “I’ll try. Will you hold?”

  Jack pulled his stomach muscles taut to smother a wave of nausea. A long time passed.

  “She’s refused to come to the phone.”

  “Did she say why?”

  “I shouldn’t expect her to tell me.”

  “Tell her I need to talk to her.”

  “Look, Jack, we are in rehearsal.”

  There was silence for a few seconds.

  “Jack, leave it for a few days. We’ve just begun. Wait till we’ve settled in a bit, OK?”

  “I’m coming up.”

  Pause. “I can’t stop you.”

  “Ask her to speak to me,” came out of his mouth like a screech.

  “I’m sorry, Jack.”

  The line went dead.

  He put the receiver down. Mrs Moloney, who was wiping down tables in the foyer, looked at him. Embarrassed he paid her for the call. “I have no luck with phones,” he explained cheerfully.

  The minute he entered the bar a cold light came on in his head. Is this what it is like? Will it happen now?

  The air was filled with dark threads of hair. He refocused his eyes.

  Some local men, the gardener among them, came in and chatted jovially. They did not look in his direction. He wanted to speak to them but didn’t. He could feel the hostility. He ordered a double sherry.

  “And put it in a lemonade glass.”

  “Right,” said Hugh. “Do you want to speak to anyone at sea?” he asked in a conspiratorial voice. As he twisted the knob on the illegal two-wave radio a jumble of German and Russian voices came in from the Atlantic. “There’s none of us out there in this weather, anyway.”

  After a while he drank a brandy. A gin. Which one is it will bring us over the whatever-it-is? The what-do-you-call-it. Keep moving! By then a red wedding carpet had been thrown along the garden path and in through the front door. It led to a table where sherry glasses stood brimful, awaiting the bride and groom. On his way to the toilet Jack asked the lad for one.

  “I’m a guest,” Jack said.

  “Is that so?”

  “That’s right. Just pour it in there,” and Jack proffered the lemonade glass. But the lad gave him none through some misunderstanding that was beyond Jack. In the toilet he placed the lemonade glass on the pink-tiled window ledge and retched violently. I’m not getting any better, he thought.

  The gardener came in and combed his hair.

  “Vanity is lost on you, squire,” said Jack, recovering himself.

  “You don’t look so good yourself, boss.” The gardener skimmed a grey lock across his weatherbeaten skull, shook his member generously and spat into the urinal.

  “Why,” Jack asked, “are thoroughbreds put into horseboxes on their own?”

  “I don’t know,” the man said, without looking at him.

  “It’s for the same reason,” replied Jack, laughing hysterically, “that cardinals wear tall hats.”

  The gardener considered Jack and said: “I’d have a long rest if I was you.”

  A lot of people have sat like me, thought Jack, throughout the world, their hearts stopped on the half-hour, and soot falling.

  He was overflying the place he was in. He filled a glass with vodka, and put it under his chair. He wrote into his notebook. Then he searched round for his glass. When he
drank he was surprised to find it was vodka in the glass. He could’ve sworn it would be sherry. Then he was equally surprised to find he was back in the Adams’ house. I should not be here, he thought. This is not home.

  I’m in the wrong fucking house, for the wrong fucking reason. How the fuck did I get here? Where did Sunday go? He looked round him in alarm and the recollection of other days spent in those rooms flooded through him. Sitting there, well removed from her, he again felt her mind entering his. He jumped to his feet. I have to get out of here! As he walked up the street in Corrloch he found he still had a mouthful of vodka kept in a ball on his tongue. He stopped outside the prefab primary school with its red chairs, painted flowers and multicoloured maps of the world. Watched by the children inside, he stood hitching, but when the first vehicle that came did not stop he started walking.

  Again he was on the road to Belmullet in an east wind. He passed the turning for Aghadoon and thought of going home. He passed the Church of the Holy Family – a ball-alley of red girders – and stood a moment thinking. He continued on. The wind howled through the shuttering on the new mushroom-shaped water towers. A plane from Knock airport flew over the town towards America as he entered the hotel. Guiltily he stood in the foyer and watched the gardener ascend a ladder to change a light bulb. Very uncertain of himself he searched through his pockets for change. He had none. He rang the theatre, reversing the charges. The call was refused.

  “Try again,” he told the operator. “My name is F-E-R-R-l-S, Jack,” he said angrily spelling his name out.

  “I can try.”

  Then he overheard the girl in the theatre say that she was not to allow any calls through to the rehearsal room.

  “I’m sorry,” said the operator.

  “Tell her,” said Jack, “that I’m the author of the bloody play.”

  Another few seconds silence.

  “I think,” said the operator, “that she is aware of that.”

  “Jesus Christ,” he said.

  “Excuse me,” said the operator, and she rang off. Jack smiled across at Mrs Moloney and carried on talking into the void. “Catherine,” he said, “it’s good to hear from you. How are things?” He listened with a false laugh to imagined replies. “Great! Great!” he said and chuckled cheerfully into the receiver. He spoke of spring, politics, and wished everyone well. And hoped – he was smiling up at the gardener – to see them all soon. “See you on opening night,” he said expansively. “There you are now,” he said to Mrs Moloney, as he replaced the phone. “It was as easy as that.”