by Dermot Healy
Each day he walked over the fields or took the road from his isolated cottage in Aghadoon to the Adams’ house in the village of Corrloch and from there took the road back again to Belmullet town and the Erris Hotel. It was a bewildering triangle. Sometimes he was on the road for hours. And on the roads the people gave him that look that people give when they think they’re safe. He has it – he has the disease!
Hypocrites, he’d murmur. And yet he knew there can be no more pitiful sight than those who are defeated in love. He was an object of pity and therefore to be avoided. He had become the very thing he despised – a man obsessed with his own misfortune. And yet each afternoon he found himself on the bridge looking with a beating heart towards the mainland.
He dreamed he was about some business in the yard with a torch, moving bags of bottles through a tentative dusk-light, when she beckoned him from the kitchen door. He found that he was standing in his pyjamas. Jack dropped the spanner, checked the sky and went in.
She sat and looked at him. “Have you come back to me?” he asked. She nodded. “It’s very sensible here,” she said. She looked with admiration round his small house. He knelt beside her and she began to look quite practical, the way women do when they know there’s pleasure ahead. Her eyes had a bright, knowing light. Jack needed to rest his head in her lap. “I’m so glad to see you,” he said, and he leaned forward to rest his head. Then the blur, increasing its soft outlines, troubled him again. “Catherine, Catherine,” he said, but she kept silent, afraid maybe of argument, of saying the wrong things, of committing herself.
Then some part of his consciousness began, against his will, to stand aside.
He woke to find himself crying in a shocking free manner. Her visit had been so unbelievably real that for a long time he fought against returning to the waking world. The sheds were lit by a violet dawn light. Eagle Island sent out its three flashes. He tuned the radio to popular songs, and lay in the bed, his head upright, listening intently.
Someone shouted his name in the late afternoon, and hammered at the door. He heard the dog barking. Jack pulled on a pair of jeans. He opened the door. The dog raced into the room. The wind was screeching. He opened the door wider. There was no one there. He stepped round to the gable. There stood Hugh, the chef and barman from the Erris Hotel, and his wife Isobel.
“Yes?” said Jack.
“You asked me to call,” said Hugh.
“Oh that’s right,” he mumbled.
“You have the place looking well.”
“Inside is a mess.”
He shook Isobel’s hand. “I couldn’t invite you in with the house the way it is.”
“Let us give you a hand to clean it up,” said Isobel.
They walked by him into the kitchen. He stood there uncertain of what to do. They had come in the midst of one of his reveries of despair to which he wanted badly to return. Isobel washed cups. Hugh fed the dog while Jack sat by the empty grate.
“You don’t look well,” said Isobel.
“What’s wrong with me!”
She glanced at the red sore in the white of his eye that looked like a dash of Tabasco sauce, she took in the black matted hair, the dirty fingernails, the white cheeks. “Have you been eating?”
“I can’t bring myself to eat.” He indicated the bottles. “I was drinking with priests from Castlebar.”
“That will happen,” nodded Hugh. “I remember a few years ago I got off a boat in Killybegs and I ended up drinking with Russians.”
“Russians?”
“Russians are serious.”
“In the next few years we are going to have a lay church,” said Jack, unexpectedly. “Did the Russians tell you that?”
“No,” said Hugh.
“That’s what the priests told me.”
“That’s a good thing to know,” said Isobel uneasily.
They sat there in the cold watching the fire take.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“I’d like to know,” he explained, “why she didn’t come. I’d like to know what kept her away.”
“I’m sure she had her reasons,” said Isobel.
“Then why did she write to me, hah?” he said angrily.
As they were getting into the car he said: “Don’t go yet. Give me a few minutes and I’ll take a lift with you.”
They carried bags of bottles to the front wall. Then they took a bag of rubbish and burned it in a steel rain barrel at the end of the field. The smoke went flying across Gleann Thomáis. The fire was still burning as they hurried in the car through the failing light to Belmullet. “The truth is,” said Jack, “that I’ve been fooling myself. She was never coming.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Hugh.
A Christmas tree had been erected in a corner of the hotel. Bells jingled on the toilet door. Hugh appeared behind the bar. Thady, full as a tick from drink, sauntered in. Jack ordered a drink and paid for it with money he had secreted in his top-right shirt pocket.
“Wild day,” he said to the gardener.
A Derry couple, who had arrived to the Mullet Peninsula for Christmas, joined Jack. They sat down at his table after Thady left. Jack was glad they did because Northerners understood drunkenness. They seemed not to notice that Jack was very drunk. He found it hard to keep his eyes open. His throat was hot. The man began explaining to Jack how the Catholics of Derry had had enough of the Provisionals. If they ever get power, he was saying, he would be the first up the coast to kill him – the man at the top.
“Can we talk of something else?” asked Jack.
“There’s Catholics hate him,” he said. “We know who he is.”
“I don’t know that we should talk about it.”
“We know who he is,” the man continued. “We know the very house he stays in when he comes over to Donegal.”
“I took you to be a peaceful man,” said Jack.
“I never said I was against violence, did I, Sue?” he replied. “The Northerner is by nature a military man. We are reared to it. When you were playing with your dick I was learning how to use a –”
“That’s nice,” interrupted Sue. “That’s really nice”.
“I know him,” he continued. “I know where the car turns, what gear the driver will be in on the hill. I know my Donegal. I may not know Mayo, but I know Donegal. At the end of the day someone has to take him.” He drank. “The Donegals are soft. Fuck. And they make him welcome. They do not know the real man. I know him,” he said. “I know what he stands for.”
“So do I,” said Jack. “I taught him Irish for a while.”
The wife gave a scream of laughter.
“Oh, you’re a laugh,” she said.
“You think you know him,” the man continued undeterred, “but you don’t know us. When we drive over the border into the South something sacred happens. Something holy. We are safe for a while. But if he gets to power, we are not safe. If I have to go up to Belfast, I’ll kill him,” he said in a quiet obsessive voice, and both of them looked at his wife who had gone to the bar.
He lifted his gin and tonic. He was thirty, fresh-faced, and had lived a couple of lifetimes. His wife, small and dark and pertly over-dressed, came back from the bar smiling. She put a drink in front of Jack. He thanked her.
“The Provos have used our house twice to kill. So we’ve moved twice. Both houses were used, can you believe that? Now we’re in a new place on the border with Derry. We are starting a new life. But I know a gun. The insides of a gun. And if I have to, I will. I won’t walk around in fear. The Donegals think he’s a great fellow. I know different. They just want to help us Northerners and they think he stands for justice. They’re wrong. I’ll take him the day he comes to power. Believe me, Mister. And I don’t intend to wing him, no. The Catholics, never mind the Protestants, have had enough.”
For a while the three of them sat facing forward, saying nothing as the bar filled up.
“I love this place,” said Sue, tur
ning to Jack.
“They say you grow used to it,” replied Jack.
“Never!” she exclaimed and she shook her head. He found her eyes on his. “What do you do?” she asked.
“Years ago I went on to be a doctor.”
She laughed in disbelief.
“Now I’m a fisherman,” he admitted.
“That’s more like it,” she said and then the three of them resumed their watch.
“Of course, the Republic is soft like that,” ruminated the husband. “They feel guilty. Who wouldn’t.”
“I have to go to the toilet,” said Jack.
And when he returned he explained: “I’m having trouble, myself, with a woman.”
“Is she a feminist?” asked Sue. “Because if she is I don’t want to hear about her. Don’t talk to me of women’s rights. They’d have you believe a woman can’t be violent. I’ve heard enough of that till I’m sick.” She drank. “There’s something greater wrong and no one will own up to it. Am I right?”
“You’re right,” said her husband.
“The Provos tied us up in the kitchen,” she continued. “We were there for hours. There was only one gun –”
“The first time it was a Lee Enfield .303 mark 1 with sights,” the husband interrupted. “The second time it was a Lee Enfield .303 mark 2 with sights and a light intensifier. Things had improved in the meantime. It had a calibrated barrel, I’d swear, and a stock made to measure.” He thought back, “About sixteen inches.”
“It was a Lee Enfield with sights and they’d settled for our bedroom. I could hear their every move above my head. The window must have given them a clear view. Hours went by. There wasn’t a sound. We just waited.”
“Same as them,” said her husband.
“Then, when it came, it didn’t sound like a shot.”
“They never do.”
“It was like someone had dropped an egg. I thought I’d only imagined it. Then the three lads went by us. They untied us. They even apologized. ‘You can give us two hours,’ they said. But within a half an hour came the policemen. A soldier had been killed in Rake’s Avenue.”
“Corporal Wilson,” said the husband. “He took it in the head.”
“Considering what had happened in our house,” she continued, “they were not bad to us, the police.”
“I saw his name in the papers. He was Manchester, wasn’t he, Sue?”
“He was Manchester all right. Derek Wilson I think it was.” She drank. She caught Jack’s eye, then looked away. “I couldn’t bear to sleep in our room after that,” she added.
The bar was filling up with men in brightly coloured clothes and local women in white skirts and trousers and white shirts, and belts slipped at the waist so that they hung towards the groin. The gardener was drinking alone though surrounded by people. Once the gardener had turned and said to Jack: “You don’t fool me!” Now he was pinned in by all the newcomers yet he took no notice of them. He was a constant man, round-shouldered, soft, and his legs were wrapped round the stool like a young boy’s.
“Are you high?” she asked
“I am,” Jack replied.
“He’s high,” Sue told her husband.
He nodded, went to the bar and called a round. He returned without the drinks. Jack went up to get them, and ordered another round. He searched in his pockets but found he had no money left.
“You wouldn’t have the lend of a tenner?” he asked the gardener.
“You must be joking,” he said.
“I didn’t think so. Will you put it down to me, Hugh?”
“Your friend owes for one as well.”
“It’s getting confusing,” said Jack. Then he found the money in the pocket of his shirt. He paid Hugh and returned to the couple. “This is your round, I think,” he said, “and this is mine.”
“Aren’t they the same either way?” said the husband.
“Except that one is paid for and one is not.”
“Which one is not paid for?”
“Yours.”
“Right. I’ll look after that. Then tomorrow we’ll drive down round Blacksod Bay.”
“I like it here,” Sue told Jack. “I really do.”
Jack asked him what trade he was in.
“Fireplaces,” he replied.
“Fireplaces?” asked Jack.
“Have you heard of Grampian rock?”
“Jack would not understand you,” his wife said.
“It looks good,” explained the man.
“I can’t believe it when I wake in the mornings and see the sand dunes from my bed,” she continued. “Then I hear the sea. I can actually feel the waves. It’s beautiful. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Sure,” agreed her husband.
“You’d want for nothing,” she smiled as she imitated the Southern accent. “I know,” she continued, “what it is like to feel disorientated. Most of the time I feel out of this world.”
Jack passed the night being led cheerfully through all that had happened to her: who had died, what she’d seen; while her husband, on cue, filled in the facts, the concrete details. If Catherine was here, he thought, she’d despise him. A sense of how Catherine would hate him sitting here drinking and enjoying the random world swept through him. She’d have left long ago. Her negativity returned to him and it stirred in his consciousness like a malignant spirit. As the woman spoke, he thought of Catherine. His empathy for the couple felt sacrilegious, and his genial drunkenness profane.
“You can’t sit on the stile,” said Jack.
“What’s he talking about?”
“Never mind him,” she told her husband, “he’s high.”
Next morning he went outside to shout for the dog. Through the breeze came the stink of piss. He stood against the gable of the small cottage and tried to remember anything that might save him. A low mist was swirling along Gleann Thomáis. On the other side the white sea was floundering on Seagull’s Rock. Salt fell in the garden. And his great wonder was – would Catherine, wherever she now was, think of him? Would she be able to look back without pointing the finger of blame?
He was standing at the gable, and someone brushed by him and entered the cottage. She was sitting there in judgment on his mind. As he might at this moment be sitting in hers. He walked directly to Belmullet and from the post office phoned the theatre.
“Could I speak to Catherine Adams?” he asked, businesslike.
There was silence a while, then a muffled conversation. He whistled tunelessly, then like a man making an obscene phone call he started whispering into the receiver.
3
A Taxi Through New York at Midnight
Jack took the bus to Ballina, from where he intended to catch the train to Dublin. His intention was to go to the theatre, stand outside it for a while and hope to catch sight of her. There would be no argument. No. If she spoke to him, then he’d reply. If she didn’t, he’d return to Mayo. It would be as simple as that. It would be enough for her to see him standing there.
Yet the minute he stepped on the Ballina bus his scheme foundered. He could not envisage himself ever reaching Dublin. He thought he was living through a nightmare that would soon end, like all the others did. But it didn’t. With each day he was being pushed deeper under until he’d make a decision to change everything. What was the point? He was no longer able to control the darkness. But darkness was too broad a word for what was overwhelming him, as was overwhelming the wrong word, as all words were the wrong words when they had not been lived in. Everything, in fact, was happening in lurid technicolor. The wall that separated him from everyone was growing higher and more impenetrable. Reality had been a small window at the end of a dark corridor. Now a wall had gone up in front of the window. It was a skin-coloured wall.
He had lived in his body and now it was the wrong body. His body, errant and sickly, was what controlled his mind, and ultimately the language that mind expressed itself in.
For the first time, afte
r all the sleepless nights, he considered the word illness, which led to the word disease, which led to the phrase failure of the imagination. For the first time in his life he had a slight insight into what the word imagination might mean. To live on in a different world, to transcend, to enter a new story. As they passed through Crossmolina he realized that it was not going to happen.
I am diseased, he thought.
And he felt – my God – how vulnerable people are, how short their stay in consciousness really is, and how the self they think they know they take for granted. He was maddened by the other passengers, how their identities remained comfortable and intact while his careered around him. Everything he did seemed a betrayal of the truth, while they surveyed the world, uninhibited, sure of themselves, without a hint of the fact that consciousness was something visited on people.
This was going to be a bad day. He could feel it. He could end up anywhere. He should have stopped at home.
Suddenly, Jack was swept into the panic of non-being. He looked round at the vigilant passengers. He clamped his feet on the floor and made his hands into fists. The interior of the bus was a chute along which he would be swept if he did not hold on.
Passing a church, a few passengers in front crossed themselves. And though Jack did not, still he did, secretly, in a psychic mime where a finger touched the forehead, the two shoulders, the heart. He might even have raised a rosary to his lips.
I exist, mumbled Jack. I can pray.
We can’t say we don’t exist, for we do. Each stronger in the other’s mind than in our own. But that was the mind on a good day. The distant cure, the harmony we seek as lost souls. But on the bad days? It was getting difficult for him to stay long in his body. To carry it around normally. To reach out for things. To know his body belonged to him. That when habit said sit, his body would sit. That if he looked to his left it would be for a reason. And when he’d look he must know the reason why. Yet there was always some perverse self-ronsciousness that made the simple command unreasonable. Every move he made he questioned. He was fighting against a lifetime’s habits. Every thought he had was suspect. He felt all his actions were false, masks behind which he imitated and observed normality. That meant he was false, playing to an audience. But the chief member of the audience was missing – Catherine.
