A Goat's Song

by Dermot Healy

  “If you want to go, why don’t you go on?”

  He did not reply.

  “Look, if it’s going to be a problem I’ll go now.”

  “Suit yourself,” he shouted.

  “Hi, pal! There’s no call for that.”

  “Look,” decided Catherine, stepping down gracefully off the stool, “I’d better go with him. I have an early start tomorrow anyway.”

  “Enjoy your holiday, Catherine,” the director said.

  “Thank you,” she said, giggling nervously.

  “Jonathan,” a woman cried, “don’t be running.”

  “Some day,” Jack said, “I’ll see the funny side of this.”

  The minute they were outside the hotel Catherine suddenly ran away from him. He ran after her. Then he stopped. He went back to the bar of the hotel. The men deliberately tried to avoid him when he appeared. They looked behind him at the swinging door, waiting for Catherine’s return. Then, astonished and uncomfortable, they threw him wary glances as they tried to turn back to their conversation. He stood unconcerned, silently drinking beside them, as if they were not there.

  Looking away they talked knowingly of the film world. They joked disparagingly about famous actors. Just then, Catherine returned. She was so shocked to see Jack still there that she stood uncertain for a moment with the door ajar. He smiled across at her. “Catherine,” called one of the men but, abashed, she closed the door. Jack ordered another pint. He began a loud conversation about the nature of the salmon’s radar system with the barman.

  Then, from out of nowhere, Hugh appeared.

  “Is that you, Jack?” he said.

  “Can I have a lift home with you?”

  “Sure thing. Can I get you something to drink?”

  “I’ll have a brandy.”

  Hugh came back with a brandy and crème-de-menthe for Jack and an orange for himself. He waited a few moments and said: “How are things?”

  “So-so.”

  “Well, just remember you are not alone.”

  “I’ll remember that.”

  They drove back through the black night. He fell asleep in the front of the car and swayed gently in the safety belt. At Corrloch Hugh woke him.

  He got out and rapped the top of the car.

  “Here,” said Hugh, and he handed him Catherine’s shopping bags. “Will you be all right?”

  “Yes, I will. Thanks.”

  He sat by the light of a fire he lit in the kitchen. Sometime later two cars pulled up outside. “There’s no one here, thankfully,” he heard Catherine say as she entered the house. Then she saw the fire. She stood a moment on the threshold in the dark. She switched on the light.

  “I thought as much,” she said.

  Two of the men were with her. They put their takeaways on the table.

  “I’ve brought some friends home,” she said.

  “I can see that.”

  “If you are going to start an argument I’d be grateful if you’d leave us alone.”

  “Why certainly,” said Jack, imitating Stan Laurel. And he stood and tickled the scalp of his head with a bunch of fingers.

  “Do you want a can?” asked one of the men contritely.

  “No, thank you,” said Jack.

  He climbed to the study. In a little while he heard Van Morrison singing. The next time he woke there were voices laughing.

  “Fuck off!” he screamed down the stairs.

  The voices stopped, and then there were whispers.

  “Will you fuck off!” shouted Jack.

  “You better go,” Catherine said to them downstairs. “I thought this might happen.”

  “Will you be all right?” they asked.

  “Yes.”

  They withdrew reluctantly. He heard her apologizing to them outside. He switched the light off again and climbed into bed. He heard her moving through the house. Eventually she came into the study and switched the light on.

  “Turn the light off,” he said, keeping his back to her.

  “Let me in beside you,” she demanded.

  “No.”

  “Jack, can I go to bed now?”

  “No!” he said savagely.

  “I’m going to bed now,” she said. He could feel her coming closer. “I must sleep,” she pleaded.

  “I’m not stopping you,” he said coldly.

  “I just felt I owed them an explanation.”

  “I don’t want to know,” he said.

  “It’s my career, Jack. They just wanted to be friendly.”

  She reached an arm round his neck.

  “No!” he screamed.

  “Please Jack, let’s not fight. We are going away together tomorrow.”

  “You’re going on your own,” he said. “I’ll not be going with you.”

  The light went off. She ran downstairs cursing him.

  In the morning he woke to find her standing startlingly nude by his bed in the study. Her sunny bush sat high and transparent on her long legs, her small breasts were white and cold. There were red weals across her stomach and shoulders from where she’d lain in sleep awkwardly across some unmade bed. He turned his back on her nakedness.

  She laid a hand on his shoulder.

  “Jack,” she said, “I’m freezing. Let me in beside you.”

  “No,” he said.

  She cursed him and went back to her room. Sometime later she was back.

  “Jack,” she said, “I’m really sorry, I really am. Please talk to me.”

  “No,” he said, “I can’t take any more.”

  “You disgraced me last night, do you know that?”

  “Just fuck off, Catherine, and don’t come back.”

  She went away again. The next time she came to his room she was partly dressed and smelt of male bodyspray. She laid a hand on his forehead. “Please, Jack, forgive me. Please let me lie beside you.”

  “No.”

  “What am I to do with the other ticket?”

  “Bring Helen, bring anyone you want.”

  “Jack. Jack. I can’t go away without your blessing,” she said.

  He remained quiet. She moved round the bedrooms as she packed her bag. Then she sat on the bed again.

  “Jack, please.” She was crying.

  But he would not look at her. She stood at the door of the study.

  “You’ll be sorry,” she said.

  He turned and looked at her.

  “I know I’ll be sorry,” he said.

  33

  Popular Songs

  Now Jack, on certain nights, would find the sexual scent of Catherine on the breeze. But he could not reach her. She was off on another island, and he was trapped on his. The more she stayed away from him, the stronger she would get. A note arrived a few weeks later telling him to send her mail to Dublin. Then another note came to say she was coming to collect her belongings. He stayed out of the house for four days so that she could do that without him being there.

  On the fourth day she arrived with her mother. She stepped out of the Lada. She looked brown and beautiful and not his. Though she was still in her fifties, Maisie’s hair had gone totally grey. Little worry lines had etched themselves in folds beneath her eyes. She looked at Catherine in consternation when Jack appeared.

  “I thought you might like a hand to move your stuff,” he said.

  “No, thank you,” said Catherine. “We can manage fine.”

  “Hallo, Mrs Adams,” he said.

  “Hallo,” she replied and stepped inside.

  “Catherine,” said Jack.

  “I’d be grateful if you’d leave this house as soon as you can,” she said. “I am sure you are aware that none of my family can stay here while you remain.”

  She put her head down like a goose and sped by.

  In her absence, life became one grey hallucination. He was waiting for his body and his brain to return to normal. He phoned the theatre and spoke to Eddie. “Things are going well,” Eddie said. “We have found the money, we sh
ould go into rehearsal in a few months.”

  “Will you be using Catherine?”

  “I think we will, Jack.”

  A few sober days passed. Some self-respect would return. They asked him to return to the boat, but he said, “I can’t, I’m working.” He made plans to leave, and yet there seemed no place to go. And her smell was on the breeze, the fresh smell a body brings in from the outside world. A ripe, perfumed presence would slip through the room. A teasing whiff of her frustration. Then he could actually feel her bed down at night beside him.

  As he lay in bed her body-presence would float past. Warm. Protestant. Seductive. He kissed the place where her face would have been. Now at last apart, whatever the hurt, at least they were themselves.

  Now that she was gone, he did not move as one person through the day. Walking the street of Belmullet he would hear a laugh he’d think was hers. Then would start the search. He’d go from pub to pub – shifty, transparent, bad company, nervous – searching for her. His jaunty conversation would become deadly earnest. Have you seen her? Oh yeah, she had been in town. Collecting her things. Oh, she was happy, they said.

  She said she was happy?

  She did.

  If he turned a corner he expected to see Catherine. Some days he’d stay out of the house and stop with Thady. He imagined that if he stayed away she might return. While the boat went to sea without him, panic-stricken, he watched the house from the dunes. The rain would blow. He’d get drenched. She’d not come. Then one day she did.

  He saw the light go on in the house. He ran back.

  She was walking down the path to the Lada carrying some clothes she’d left behind. As they approached each other his heart and her heart beat furiously.

  They recognized each other, not with a start but with a fatalistic shudder, for that meeting was not by chance. The meeting had occurred in the mind over and over. It had happened long before it had taken place. And as they walked by each other they were already preparing for the next encounter.

  She did not speak. He called her name.

  He put his hand on her arm. She shook it off.

  “Catherine, please.”

  “No,” she said. She pulled away.

  For her, it was necessary to show no affection. If he was suffering, then that was good. She wanted him to suffer. His suffering lightened hers. He sat in the house dreaming of making a new beginning while, estranged and angry, she drove back to Dublin. He waited on the phone to ring. She stood remote at the furthest point of his consciousness, at the end of a long tall corridor which had no sides.

  For days he searched the peninsula looking for a house to rent. He stood under thatched roofs, galvanize roofs, and despaired at the thought of starting a new home. It seemed an impossibility.

  “Move back in here, can’t you?” said Thady.

  “No, I must have my own place.”

  “And you should come back out with us.”

  “When I get myself sorted out.”

  He stood in the house of the postmistresses waiting on the sergeant to arrive with the dole. The homely unemployed sat round céilidhing before a roaring fire. He’d take down directions to cottages and the names of owners who were selling. Then one night Bernie Burke, the old fisherman, took him up to the last cottage at Aghadoon. It sat on a green hump of land above a steep fall into the sea. They walked through the three rooms by candlelight.

  “I’ll take it,” said Jack. “How much is the rent?”

  “I don’t want to rent it. I want to sell it.”

  “Well I’ll buy it.”

  “Have you the cash?”

  “In a few days.”

  “Four thousand and it’s yours.”

  “Done.”

  “You’ll see your time out here,” Bernie Burke said, as he closed the door and handed Jack the key.

  Then he returned to the Adams’ house and began the nightmare of constructing their next meeting. He packed his things. Bought blankets and sheets and a tilley-lamp in Belmullet. Phoned Eddie and asked for the advance to be sent on. He moved down to the cottage in a gale and set a row of oleria cuttings round the garden.

  He lay on a thin mattress on the rusted iron bed of the previous owner. Under it were yellow piles of Irish Independents from the fifties sitting on the damp cobbled floor. With candles burning on an upturned tea chest, he read the old newspapers. Vigils to Knock, Mr De Valera, Lyon’s Tea. There was a drawer with letters from Scotland and the States. In the dark the storm pressed home. Unclean wings slapped on the galvanize roof. The furies took their seat upon the midnight pillow. He was afflicted. He let his beard grow. He felt the peninsula was going through a spell of speaking evil of him. Everything felt evil to his senses. What was once candescent burnt not at all.

  He was the deer with the beard, the tragelaph, whining each night for the return of his beloved who he himself had sent away. On certain nights the breeze would carry the heat-smell of the lady he loved to his bed. The house smelt of goat piss. He lolloped about, only waiting for the day to end. Then, at night, Catherine slipped under the sheets. A goatsucker, she milked him. The sound of the tilley went up into a whine. The time spirits sent dreams to confuse him. He’d wake to find that red whorls, itching like mad, had appeared on his thighs.

  A new day began. Stationary above the green sea, a wisp of cloud hung below the level of the house. Boats stirred beyond. He walked down the white road that was fenced and wired on each side. Sheep sheltered in a dyke from the wind. The road turned yellow and creamy. Suds flew up over the cliffs from the Seagull’s Rock. Rain fell, beating a left-right dance rhythm on the surface. The cloud dispersed into thin air.

  Seaweed glided past.

  Rain went by the window in waves. He cleaned each room to find his way to the front room again. A great fondness went through him for the dozen or so pictures – the Madonnas, the Rose of Mystica, the Child of Prague, Our Mother of Perpetual Succour, the Crucifixion – that lined the walls. A farmer dropped off twenty plastic bags of turf. Then, that weekend, Thady appeared with cement and sand on a tractor. Jack and Thady started to break up the damp, cracked floors with a sledge hammer. By the light of a tilley-lamp Jack stood in the evenings mixing concrete with a spade from sea sand and gravel. The line of mountains on the mainland hardened into a deep evening blue. The mountains went perfectly still. The air filled with last birds. Then, in his new home, her smell came on the breeze again.

  Thady rode off into the dark.

  He began to imagine that they would meet on a certain street in Dublin. He planned the encounter meticulously. He could see the street in his mind’s eye – the parked cars, the green canopies over the two Italian cafés, the windows of the various clothing manufacturers filled with curtains and fabrics for dresses, the mannequins wearing orange and blue, the antique shop below the level of the street, the iron railings, the newspaper seller under his canvas, the sandwich bar, the wet pavement. She would have just come out of the pub he was walking towards. They would be taken unawares. They would look at each other as they had the day he’d stepped off the train in Belfast.

  Then, as he began to imagine her smile, the vision faded.

  For he did not know what would happen then. His stomach was giddy as he saw her falter.

  One day he walked the road from Aghadoon, past the thatched cottages, the wreck of a car sitting snug in a small quarry, the Church of the Holy Family, the mobile homes behind brick walls, and slipped on to the Ballina bus. As they drove east his conviction grew that he would meet Catherine at the corner of South William Street in Dublin. As he sat in the train, snippets of their life together went through his mind. The most outrageous things and the most banal.

  When he alighted in Connolly Station he had no doubt that she would be there as he imagined her.

  But first he had a gin and tonic in the Plough bar alongside a group of Abbey technicians. Then a gin and tonic in Mulligan’s among the dockers and journalists. He coughed up the white phlegm
that now attended all his drinking, shoved a finger into his hip and drank a third in a pub he didn’t know. The afternoon news came on the TV. He recognized the area of Belfast that was being shown.

  “I used to live there,” he said to the drinker beside him.

  “You’d want your head examined,” the man replied.

  The last drink he took he could not swallow. He retched violently on the street. He crossed over at Trinity, sweating heavily. A pigeon swung out of Wicklow Street and, turning to the right, flew low up Grafton Street over the heads of the advancing, retreating pedestrians. He walked up Wicklow Street, then turned left. Everything was as he visualized it, except perhaps for the pedestrians about their business. He looked into each face as you’d look at the names of stations flying past from a train.

  The railings came to an end on his left. Now was the moment. He walked like a man with a fine sense of purpose. He was about some urgent business. He lit a cigarette and looked at the sky. He asked someone the time. I have an arrangement, he said. But she did not appear. Yet he had so convinced himself she would be there that he traversed the street countless times.

  He walked into a bar he knew she used.

  “Where’s Catherine?” the barman repeated his question. “I saw her here – when was it? – oh, yesterday.”

  Jack nodded. He understood. He was a day too late. This was how it would be from now on, he knew. They would arrive at a place where they thought they would meet. But they would arrive a day early, or a day too late. Soon it would be a year too early, or a year too late. But what length of time it was made no difference. He would imagine a place and go there to find she had just been, or hear, in the future, that she had just stepped through the door after he was gone.

  He sponged smooth the wet cement floors. Threw bucketfuls of sea gravel on the path. And took a dead crow down out of the chimney.

  And now came the turn of popular songs. In his cottage by the sea he would listen to the radio with great attention. He’d prop a transistor on the bedside table and search till he found music from the sixties and country-and-western songs. A rush of sentiment would go to his head. He’d feel a great benign sadness. If he turned the radio off, in came the sound of the September ocean growing towards the full. He knew that somewhere inland she’d have her record player going. Her songs would be intelligent and sophisticated, while his were belligerent and sentimental.