by Dermot Healy
If other members of the cast came with her, then he would have to endure long periods of silence as the rest talked with feminist bravado and cynically told each other the real version of what was happening – in politics and in theatre. As he listened to them talking, the distinction between both forms of human activity were constantly blurred. Everything could be told in terms of performance.
Always they referred to the “Hidden Agenda”. There was “A Hidden Agenda” in the politics of the theatre, in the politics of the BBC, in the politics of Northern Ireland. It was the secret stimulus that kept the conspirators busy. The “Hidden Agenda” was base camp.
One of the women said she’d seen one of his plays in London. “It didn’t seem funny to me,” she said.
“Jack is a realist,” interrupted Catherine.
“I thought the characters were playing at being peasants.”
“They were,” agreed Jack.
She hiccupped. “It was way too romantic, and intellectual.” She hiccupped again. “All those primates talking philosophy. I didn’t understand it.”
“Don’t worry,” said Jack, “the children’s version will be out next year.”
“How would you know –” and she waited for the hiccup that did not come “– what happens here?”
“Would you like me to slap your back?” asked Jack.
“I asked you how would you know what happens here?” With a particularly gracious yet hostile look she lifted her glass of lager and considered him.
“Who do you work for?” he asked.
“RTE,” she snapped. “I’ve told you that before.”
“Oh yes, that’s right,” he said.
“In fact,” she continued, “what are you doing here?” She gave a polite yawn. “Don’t tell me you’re here because of your art.”
“I came to study you,” said Jack, “as you have studied those out there, after your fashion.”
“He’s with me,” said Catherine.
“Oh, I forgot,” the woman answered and she smiled triumphantly.
“I think it’s time,” said Catherine, “we went.”
They’d taxi home and light a fire. As she changed her clothes she’d have stories to tell of directors and fellow actors and scripts that went awry. He would recount some of his day, leaving out any stupid things he might have done. Their sense of privacy would return. Since the moment they had decided to live together they had to lean heavily on imagination to see them through. The deliciousness would turn to obsession. Each looked forward with increasing anxiety to these few short hours together, and then, when they would meet, demons would take their place. The hours together seemed too short for them to establish each other’s identity again.
She lived in fear that something would happen to him. In total silence they would watch the evening news. At certain items she would snort in derision. Then, having established her fear, and his vulnerability, they went down to the off-licence, skirting the lads who always stood in the doorway drinking cider. They bought gin and wine.
“What do you see out there?” she asked him.
“People stare straight into your eyes here,” he said. “Women especially. As if to see which side you’re on.”
“I do it myself.”
“And so do the soldiers. A soldier winked at me the other day. On the Lower Falls.”
“And what were you doing up there?”
“Walking about.”
“Yes, indiscriminately.”
“And then I always go through the barriers a few times.”
“Why?”
“I love being searched.”
“So that’s how you get your thrills.” She tapped her cigarette onto the windowsill. “I’m sure your Sinn Fein friends would not be enamoured to hear about your perverse nature. All you Civil Rights marchers are just old hippies, aren’t you?”
“That’s right,” said Jack.
“Did you ever take LSD?” she asked him.
“Oh, once upon a time, for breakfast.”
“I thought so,” she said, “I couldn’t. I don’t want to know what is going on inside me,” and she shivered and bit her tongue.
Sometimes at work she’d imagine herself arriving back at the house unannounced. She’d come in through the bedroom door and find him in bed with some woman who would be sitting astride him, riding him with passion. She’d grow weak at the thought. She’d ring. “Jack,” she’d say, “is that you?”
“I just rang to see if you were OK,” she’d bluster.
“I’m fine. How are you?”
“What are you doing right now?” she’d ask.
“Oh, wait till I see . . . What would you like me to be doing?”
“I’d rather not say.”
Jealousy was driving her astray.
One evening she came home with a set of new locks. Into the front door they screwed three extra bolts. “I’m afraid for you,” she said. “I think you’re trying to keep me in,” he said. But Jack knew that that was not the way they would come. The kitchen door which led into the yard was made of glass. Steps led up to it from the garden. The garden itself was entered from a lane via a rotten door. That, he thought to himself, is the way they’d come if they ever wanted to.
One morning after she was gone he woke to find himself on the floor. It seemed the wrench of a dream had thrown him out of bed. He climbed back in. And slept till the phone rang.
“Are you all right?” asked Catherine.
“I’m fine,” he said.
“Is the house all right?”
“Yes, the house is fine, too.”
“Well, you seem to be taking it quite calmly.”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Don’t you know?”
“Know what?”
“A car bomb’s gone off just down the road from you.”
He replaced the phone and looked out the window. The street was cordoned off and policemen and soldiers were strolling to and fro. A UDR man looked up and caught his eye. For what seemed like an eternity they looked at each other.
That night he opened the window in the bathroom and it slammed down on his index finger. Simultaneously he bit his tongue. She held his fingers in her mouth while he spat out blood. He had broken a tooth. The jagged edge continued to open the cut in his tongue. He got a nailfile and began to file the tooth.
“What next?” he asked Catherine.
Jack flaunted himself for her amusement. Wearing his fishing boots he danced a jig in the nude. Catherine could not have enough of his play-acting. Then she touched his maleness. How it mutated. Grew a head all of its own, then drooped, hanging. The flower that hangs its head. The phalarope, she called it. Then starting up into that ambiguous hardening in her hand. She studied him, a man laid out in a vest, smoking. Her mouth was ajar like a child’s. She held his penis against her cheek. There was white under her eyes from want of sleep. Because of the cold she was wearing long black socks that came over her knees. She watched him. I have not slept since I met this man, she thought. Her knees were spread unceremoniously beneath her father’s dressing gown.
She drew his hand to her.
“Feel,” she said happily, “how wet I am.”
“In time,” she said, “I will be as much a part of this as you.”
He regretted she had said that.
“And you tell me,” she said, as she fondled his head, “that you were never with Sara.”
“No.”
“I wish I had met you at the very beginning.”
“And I wish I had met you then, too.”
“The things I used to imagine about you,” she said.
“I had a few of my own,” answered Jack, “going as well.”
“Tell me.”
“Now let me see.”
It seemed hard to credit that she would ever return from the world of the senses. She held him in a furrow made in her hand. He breathed into her armpit. In the furthest mirror two people were lying wrapped round eac
h other. The sign his penis made. The fozy nest between her thighs. He stopled her. Her hair bedewed. After imagining themselves with all those other selves, they were with each other again. She opened herself to him. It passed all understanding. They slept. And woke to find each other in the cold room. Outside, the silent clock of another Belfast snowstorm.
Jack on one of his solitary walks discovered an old record shop in a side street near where they lived. Here he bought a fairly good 45 of Roy Orbison singing “Pretty Woman”. The next time he went he bought an old LP of Cat Stevens.
Each day he walked over there and searched through the cardboard boxes of records.
The man who owned the shop sat in a straw chair in a back room in front of a gas Superser. Through a curtain of lace beads he watched his display of paperback books and records and old Northern lace with the watchful eye of a man minding a pornography kiosk. On the gas fire he always had a can of Fosters lager standing. In his mouth a hand-rolled cigarette. He accepted money for items without a word, so on the day that he first spoke to Jack neither of the two had heard the other’s voice before.
“Do you remember Del Shannon?” he asked, without moving.
“Sure,” said Jack.
“I have his collected works at home.”
“I remember ‘Kelly’.”
“I got ‘Kelly’, too.”
“Tell us this,” said Jack, “do you ever come across an old copy of Graham Greene.”
“You won’t come across a second-hand Graham Greene in this town,” said the man. “The Catholics have him read from cover to cover.”
“Are you cockney?”
“Yeah. And you’re from Éire.”
“That’s right.”
“Yeah.” He ambled over to the light switch. “Do you fancy a pint?”
They walked together across the road to the pub. The shop-owner moved with a slow Londoner’s gait, as if he were crossing a desert that might possibly be mined. The interior of the bar was low and dark. Pool balls clashed. Soccer stars were pinned next to the ceiling. A huge Orange flag was tacked to the wall. “How’s about you, Chris?” said the barman. Christopher Nolan took on a custodial air. They bought a dozen cans of Fosters, then retired to Nolan’s room which was lined with volumes of history on the First and Second World Wars. He had books on the Conquistadors and on the Mexican Revolution. The single room was impeccably tidy. The bed was made like a seaman’s. They settled down in the small library of war to listen to Gene Pitney, early Elvis, Buddy Holly, Little Richard and the Crystals, and they drank Australian lager and smoked Golden Virginia.
Finally, Christopher Nolan played Del Shannon as loud as the speakers would take.
He fell asleep, suddenly woke up and saw Jack, and said: “The IRA it was started shooting first in Londonderry.”
“Did they?” asked Jack.
“I was there on Bloody Sunday,” said Christopher Nolan. “I heard those shots.”
He stared at Jack a moment as if trying to remember who he was, then fell off to sleep again. Jack listened to the needle spin. Then he put on Crosby, Stills and Nash. “The Marrakesh Express” played as he leafed through a volume on Ivan the Terrible. He finished his beer and slipped out quietly and made it back through the dusky streets to the house before Catherine came home. “What did you do today?” she asked. “Not much,” he said.
The next day he bought an old, withered copy of Somerset Maugham’s stories from the shop. A few days later, a book of birds. Each afternoon, he went over to Christopher’s shop. When he closed, they’d amble to the pub and then back to the flat. They spoke little, and when Christopher did, the words came out in a disjointed, clipped rush.
“I’m glad you’re living here, Jackie,” he said. “What are we but a couple of strangers in this town?”
“Either way.”
“Yeah.” He shuffled to the stereo to change the record. “Were you ever married?” Jack shook his head. “I was,” said Chris, “but she took off with some other geezer.” His belly swung to and fro. He picked a ball of dust off the needle. Then he filled up two small glasses with the Russian vodka that Jack had brought. “Yeah,” he said. “Fuck it,” said Jack. “Yeah,” Christopher Nolan said and palmed the large stomach under his T-shirt.
Catherine was opening in a play downtown at eight and Jack left to get there at three. He started walking, then he jumped on a bus and got off at some place that attracted him. Then he recognized the name of a pub in an area that Catherine had warned him about. He studied the pub’s wooden façade, the old plate glass and its silver designs, and the gas lamps that hung outside. A man in electric-blue carpet slippers and a ravaged face crossed the street and opened the door. On a blind impulse Jack followed him into the forbidden bar.
He ordered a double gin and looked preoccupied.
Beside him the man ordered a Carlsberg Special and a Black Bush.
He looked at Jack. “How would you like a thirteen-year-old?”
“I’m all right,” said Jack.
“She has a beautiful arse,” said the man. “I can get you any wee young thing you want now. Just give me the nod.”
“Sure.”
“Take a look at these here now,” the man said, and he handed Jack a pile of photos in an envelope.
Each was of a young nude girl aged about thirteen or fourteen.
“See the pussies on them?” he said. “They’re yours now, boy, whenever you want them.”
“Here,” said the barman, “put those away.”
“It’s all right,” explained the man with a wink. “I know this lad.”
The barman looked Jack in the eye.
“Well that’s all right, then,” he said, but was not convinced.
“Where are you from?” asked the man when Jack returned the photos.
“I’m from Leitrim.”
“Leitrim – it’s only natural,” he replied. “My mother came up here from the town of Arva in the Free State, if you ever heard of it.”
“I know the place,” said Jack, and on an impulse he added, “it means ‘the place of slaughter’.”
“There you are now.” He tossed back the Bush. “I would have thought Arva a quiet place, compared to here.” He laughed ironically. “My ma was a nurse.” Then he brought his face close to Jack’s. “You’ll be safe coming in here,” he whispered. “This place is safe enough, you understand.”
“I understand,” said Jack.
“Arva – I remember to go down there when I was only a bairn.” His voice returned to normal. “I didn’t even know it was still standing.”
“Oh, it’s there,” replied Jack.
The man drew close to him. “If you have any trouble here, just give me the nod. My name is Henry Fair.” He drew back. “I’ll look after you.”
“Thanks,” said Jack.
“Just ask for me, OK, fellow?” He paddled off in his blue slippers across the tiled floor before Jack had a chance to follow him.
“What time is it?”
“It’s six,” the barman replied. Then he left down a double gin in front of Jack. “Henry left this for you. All right?”
He had lost his chance to steal away. He was incapable of bringing himself to go – the subterfuge had to continue. He stood alone by the bar drinking very quickly. Someone switched on the TV. A woman in some sunny valley in Antrim was demonstrating the making of wattle baskets. They changed stations. Up came the Conservative Party Conference where Margaret Thatcher was closing her eyes to emphasize the seriousness of her words. They changed again. A black-and-white romantic comedy from the thirties appeared. For a few seconds the barman studied the silent screen so that the figures played across his face.
“Aye,” he said as if he were answering some question posed deep within the recesses of his mind.
Jack watched the film. It seemed appropriate that he should be where he was – scared out of his wits and yet turning maudlin and drunk, watching an old melodrama. It seemed somehow appropriate.
Words tumbled out of his mouth. He called for a gin.
He wanted to feel the sensation of getting drunk, but somehow he had passed the moment of drunkenness without noticing it. He only knew how bad he was when he realized he was uncertain whether he would be able to lift the glass of gin from the bar.
“What time is it?” he asked loudly.
The barman flicked a button on the cuff of his leather jacket.
“Seven-thirty.”
Some upright part of his mind carried his body to the door. He hailed a taxi. “It’s a bloody great city,” he told the driver. “You think so?” answered the driver without conviction. “Well, sometimes,” said Jack. “Try living here,” the driver replied. Jack entered the small theatre, and ordered a glass of wine. He ordered another because he couldn’t taste the first. Suddenly out of the corner of his eye he saw Maisie Adams enter, dolled up in fur. Jesus, he heard himself say. He sat at the back. Later, at a great distance from him, Catherine stepped onto the stage. The lines she’d been practising with him night after night took on a new life of their own.
Onto the record player he put Billie Holiday. Then Van Morrison. He sat on the sofa and looked round, wondering where he had left his cigarettes. Laboriously he searched each room in the house.
At last he found a cigarette. Blatant images and crazy thoughts went through his head. The room was stone cold. When Catherine came home, she found him in the study on the spare bed.
In the typewriter was a sheet of paper filled with gibberish.
She tried waking him.
“You were great, Catherine,” he mumbled.
“Why did you not join us?” she asked. “Don’t you know my mother was there. We went for a meal. We waited and waited for you.”
“I came home.”
“Where were you before the show?” she demanded.
At last he answered. “I was drinking in a pub off Our Lady’s Road,” he said.
“It’s not Our Lady’s Road,” she shouted. “It’s My Lady’s Road. It’s My Lady’s Road, Jack. My Lady’s Road, do you hear?”
“My Lady’s Road,” he repeated.
“What were you doing down there?”
