by Dermot Healy
At five in the morning the radio was a cache of memories.
There came a time when he thought she had slipped away. He could not know what she was doing at all.
Some thin psychic line between them had snapped.
Now came the sound of a quarrel from the past. He saw Catherine’s face switch from hurt to sadness. He heard the static of raised voices. The torch of hatred from an eye. But mostly the awful sound of his voice pleading his case. The malignant cries of blame, and then nothing, absolutely nothing, except a radio tuned to popular songs until the dawn brought short newsflashes that became extended news bulletins, then there was talk of traffic congestion; advertisements shrieked through his brain, the radio studio became smaller and smaller, he felt the wary consciousness of the early-morning announcers as they slipped a new day on to the turntable, and began, at short intervals, reading out the time.
When he turned the radio off for a second there would be a thunderous echo through the room. Then, after a while, a timid silence. It was like he and the radio had travelled out on a boat. They had made a night-crossing together. They had survived. Despite the moments he had suddenly switched the radio off because he thought someone was at the door, when he had lowered the sound because of someone at the window, or because he had heard someone in the other room, they had landed.
He bought a gas oven and had it delivered, but had not as yet taken a gas canister home. He cooked on the open fire with a frying pan, but mostly lived off toast. Toast and gin and bread buttered with black layers of Marmite. Then he’d walk the fields down to Corrloch and stand guard on the dunes waiting on the lights that would signal her return.
He knew she wasn’t coming, and it didn’t matter that she wasn’t coming. This, too, had to be gone through. He woke up in the chair beside the dead fire in the kitchen of the cottage and saw the bottle of vodka on the table. Where it came from he could not answer. He saw a leaf pinned neatly to the window like a musical note. From somewhere inland it had been blown against the pane during a storm, and stuck there.
He filled a glass and sat. A blast of cold damp air hit the back of his upper arms. The leaf stayed pinned to the window, marking the highest note the storm had reached. At the thought of the loneliness ahead he’d grow dizzy and euphoric. There’d be lumbering and dissolving. The closed door. The damp carpet. Sootfall.
Walls running with condensation. Then, for a moment, the memory of corncrakes. Then one day no corncrakes.
34
Happiness
He painted the gables of the house with lime and cement, and scraped the weeping walls in the bedroom down to the original stone. Early October light came crashing across the silent sea towards the door. His cottage seemed from a distance to be riding the waves. The air was like champagne in the north wind. He installed a bucket for a toilet in one of the abandoned sheds in the back garden.
He came down one morning and discovered a rat sitting in the embers of the fire. The rat flew up the chimney. In the warm ashes he found two potatoes, well chewed, that the rat had carried over from the vegetable box.
When he opened the door, a wild cat was lying on her back, dusting herself.
“That’s right,” he said to the cat.
He travelled back to Leitrim for a weekend. Dr Ferris and Ma Ferris and himself ate Sunday dinner in a hotel in Bundoran. From across the street came the sound of a bingo announcer calling out numbers, while at the other end of the dining room a bunch of Ireland soccer fans were singing.
“You’re not drinking,” said his mother.
“No.”
“That’s good. It will do you good.”
“How is that girl Catherine?”
“She’s fine.”
With his father hunched over the wheel and his mother perched precariously in the passenger seat, they drove him back dangerously and slowly to Belmullet in the roaring Volkswagen. Cassettes slid along the floor. An accordion in the boot wheezed as they took long corners. The moment they arrived, Daisy leapt out of the car and sat at the gable end of the cottage. The cat came over and perched beside him.
“I’ll keep the dog,” Jack said.
His mother peered into the house.
“They have terrible lives in Mayo, glory be to God,” she said sadly. “No light and no electricity. It makes a body think Leitrim is not so bad. And how is poor Thady?”
“Fine mother.”
“Aye,” she said, “the poor soul.”
Without going beyond the front door, she sat back into the car, disdainful and perplexed.
“I don’t know what took you out here,” she said.
“When the weather gets good we’ll come and see you,” the doctor said. His mother gave her son a polite nod as the Volkswagen, with a blast of its exhaust, pulled away into the cloudy evening.
It was raining. Daisy, who was now slightly arthritic, had grown a wizened grey beard. He perched and tried to scratch himself. He lifted a back paw awkwardly to a downcast ear, shook uncontrollably and fell on his rump. He howled lonesomely.
With Daisy by his side, Jack walked up to the forts on the cliffs above Aghadoon.
The sea had risen wide and high. The moon came and went behind clouds that dotted the blue sky like bruises. He missed the landscape even as he walked through it, as much as he had missed her while she was with him. All the weight of the responsibility had somehow shifted to him.
The spiritual numbness was entire. He had handed his entire being over to the care of another. He should not have done it. The centre had shifted. The islands were leaving.
Each morning he woke early, tried to stifle his panic, then walked out the back for a while, set the fire, fed the dog, breakfasted, washed in a bucket of warm water, and read in front of the fire.
At the sound of the post van coming up through the valley he was on his feet. He had already written to Catherine. He had written a very businesslike letter saying he would light a fire once a week in her house. He told her where he had left her key. He described the cottage he’d bought. He wished her well in the forthcoming play. I’ll not intrude, he wrote to reassure her.
And I’m sober, he wrote. Let’s grow old and sober together.
But no post from her came. The van would swing away well before it reached the road that led to his house.
A dead seagull fell at the back window. A crate containing two rotten dogfish was left at the back door. What were these signs? Each night he masturbated, and thought of her masturbating; he imagined her fingers flicking her groin at a giddy tempo till he came with a low moan that made the old dog on the mat before the fire start to howl.
“Aisy, Daisy,” he shouted from the bedroom.
Meanwhile he waited for word. But nothing came. Once under a stone at the pier of the gate he found a subscription request from a missionary group in Africa addressed to the previous owner of the cottage. That was all.
In the afternoon he walked the three miles to Corrloch to O’Malley’s bar and drank coffee that disorientated him. He sat there one afternoon before a gas fire and listened. He ordered a Smithwicks beer. It had no head. No bubbles. The froth was flat and yellow-covered. He drank more coffee.
He began to piss every few minutes. He walked past the Adams house to see was there any sign of life. But the house was cold and dark. He stood by the window and peered in. He was startled to see the wild reflection of his face. He stepped back frightened.
He walked the white road through the night. Unable to sleep, he’d go out for a piss and watch the lights of the few cottages that lay beyond him in Aghadoon.
“Eddie,” he said.
“Ha-ho.”
“Eddie,” he said again. “Have you cast the play?”
“I have.”
“Is she in it?”
“She is.”
“Well I don’t fucking want her in it.”
“It was you asked me to arrange it, for Christ’s sake.”
“Well, I’ve changed my mind.”
<
br /> “Are you drunk or what?”
“What’s that to do with it?”
“Well it’s too late now. She’s in it and that’s that.”
“Fuck you, Eddie,” he said. “You can’t have the play. Do you hear me?”
“I hear you and I think you’re fucking crazy.”
“I don’t want her in it, do you hear?” he shouted, and slapped down the phone. He stood in the hallway of the hotel and glared at the gardener. The moment he most dreaded had come. “What the fuck are you looking at?” he shouted at the gardener in the Erris Hotel. Then he called for more whiskey.
He woke at one o’clock.
He walked to the kitchen opening all the windows of the cottage as he went. He boiled the kettle. Then the hangover struck. Suddenly he felt a burning pain in his lower back. “Good Jesus,” he said. The first bottle he found he drank from. Each move he made re-echoed in his mind. He drank the last of the poitín. He made toast. He went down the garden to the toilet. All the grass and the small shed stank of piss. He vomited once, two, three times. In the kitchen he rinsed his mouth. He found an old glass of whiskey and drank it. Then he rinsed his mouth again.
I’ve fucked everything up, haven’t I, he thought, as he set off for Belmullet. Every few yards he stopped to puke. It took him hours to walk to town in the driving wind. Immediately he entered the bar he ordered a double gin.
“Will you have one?” he asked the gardener.
The gardener stood up and left.
“What’s wrong with him?” he asked Hugh.
The emptiness struck again. It seemed, as he stood in the cold back room of the bar, all the props that had been used to preserve the illusion had been withdrawn. The emptiness seemed perpetual. Yet he felt something would give, something would break the cycle and allow them to be their natural selves again. Even if that self was diminished.
He wanted to beg forgiveness but did not know how. He must wait for her letter to arrive. He sat down. He got up and phoned Eddie. “Look,” he said, “forget all about what I said.”
“I will.”
“You didn’t tell her?”
“No.”
“Sorry about that, Eddie.”
He thought some form of death was approaching, one that he would survive, and after that he would know his limitations. Whatever he expressed now would be visited on him later in some recess of his mind. He stood and looked at his hands. They were pulsating again. He smelled the damp from his clothes. The corridor was forming.
The next day he woke to a land with no horizon. He found that the whole house and landscape was reduced to a mere dot in time. He did not think he could survive one minute. Then he survived the minute only to find that the clock had begun another. And then he knew, with a sense of furious sadness, that this would be followed by another minute, and another, and throughout each one he would be like he was now, only worse, for each second would – though the same in the mathematical sense – have increased in psychical length.
He was trapped within ever-increasing particles of time that were the same in shape and distance and size, and yet their interior was endless. His despair became greater than ever his passion had been. His mind was making each second into an eternity.
He was gripped by single hallucinations.
A dog, his dog, vomited a wad of fat on the doorstep of the house. It lay there steaming.
He wrote to Catherine. Please come back to me. I want you. I am sober, he wrote.
He dropped the letter off in Corrloch and went into O’Malley’s bar and bought a bottle of vodka. He walked across the fields with the dog and lay down on the old bed.
He woke to find a mirror-image of himself seated in a chair at the other end of the room. The other fellow did not look wise. Jack rose disheartened, only to find that he kept meeting after-images of himself in the small rooms of the cottage. When he suddenly turned he got a sense of himself where he had stood before. When he raised a hand to his face the action continued long after it had finished. He could feel the back of a chair pressed tight against his spine minutes beyond the moment he had risen from it. Though he stood, he could still feel the chair beneath him. He saw himself seated in the chair. Then from the chair he looked across at his own standing figure. He could see himself sitting there, scared, heavy-limbed, weighed down white-faced, shivering, because that person, too, was recalling where he had been a moment before.
Was this death, he wondered, when the time came that he did not know in which of the images his consciousness rested? Which was him he did not know.
Scattered round the room were representations of himself, and each viewed the other with trepidation. To go anywhere was to assemble a train of disparate images and fragmentary moments that moved along with him. First he’d wait on the image to catch up with him. In triplicate he moved from the chair to the middle of the floor, to the door. Each self looked at the other to see who was at the fore. Habitual movements, that were once natural, now appeared strange and distorted. Any movement increased his anxiety, and yet to remain still was even more terrifying for then the waiting made the horror in each image climax in his mind. The one mind was shattered into pieces. The pieces were stored in these ghosts that hovered round.
He waited, they waited behind him, the door closed twice, his feet came down the steps many times. Breathing furiously, he walked. Then, he waited on the others to catch up with him. This series of deep-breathing ghosts moved down the white road.
Objects took on other presences. For a certain amount of time the objects remained what they were-chairs, stones, shadows, a holy picture, a bend in the bed, a bottle – then there would be a slight alien encroachment, a vague déjà-vu, but before they could entirely become something else, the hint of change receded.
There was a tilt, a moment of horror. Then the irrefutable presence of the object took over again. A chair soon had a gagging, stifling presence like a clamp.
Then it began to change, to merge with its background. For a minute he thought he had moved forward, but the next reflection in his mind’s eye showed he had stayed still. The same image remained. He had felt the urge to go, but he had not moved. And though he looked the same, he was not the same. The chair was in a different space. He was in a different space. This was the difference. Then he realized that space was provided by thought. So he tried to fill that space with comforting things. But sometimes the exact same retinue of resentment and nothingness would present itself. Then came a grand spasm of panic.
What was worse, he had no pity for himself. Some cold part of Jack Ferris viewed his disorientation and his collapse without compassion. As he sat in his shirt by the fire in late autumn, with cold knees and thighs, and a mind obliged to consider itself, some cold ghost turned aside.
It was this ghost that took him outside. A whiff of turf smoke told him that there were others about. When he saw a trail of turf smoke going up from a neighbour’s house he knew that at the foot of it was another soul warming itself by the hearth, in britches or frock, easeful.
As he stood out on the moist grass watching his cottage, his head grew enormous, and the parts of his body under his shirt became moist and wavery, then they too became enormous. The sky went back and forth. He dragged the bags of bottles along the front wall. Then he dragged them across the garden and put them round the back. He looked up. There was no smoke coming from his cottage. That meant there was no soul in his house. All of a sudden he realized that the consciousness he inhabited was of a mean, limited kind.
The skipper met him on the road as he was setting off for Corrloch.
“Jack,” he said, “have you finished with the writing?”
“I think so.”
“Good. I need you out on the Blue.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow. We could get in a couple of weeks before the storms. The forecast is good.”
He would have refused but could not. De Largey came for him in a car. They drove down the valley in silence. Th
ey went to sea for two weeks after the flatfish – plaice, turbot, white sole. It was a sober, spiritual time. He was standing one morning by the skipper in the wheelhouse looking towards the Skegs. On the radio various voices of other fishermen were cajoling, complaining, cursing, talking of the forthcoming storms. Their voices were always in the background, and sometimes the sound of the radio would drown the sound of the sea. Then suddenly, as he and Thady were cutting slices of white bread, Jack heard Catherine’s voice.
“Calling the Blue Cormorant.”
The strange feeling of her personality at the other end of the radio unnerved him. Each nuance was hers, and yet not hers. She was present in the small engine room in a disembodied way, full of tact, irony and sounding genteel.
“That’s for you, I’d warrant,” said the skipper.
“That’s Catherine,” said Jack, disbelievingly.
“The Adams girl?”
“Aye.”
“You have to cherish the ladies,” said the skipper, and he cut the engine.
Theo De Largey and the other fishermen looked in to see what was wrong. The skipper held his finger to his lips. They all moved out of the wheelhouse.
“Jack,” she said, “are you there?”
“Jack Ferris here. Over.”
“When will you be coming in?”
“Friday at eight. Over.”
“Oh. That’s a pity. Did you get my letters?”
Jack looked round and whispered into the mike: “No. Over.”
“That’s strange. You should have had them by now.”
“They haven’t arrived, Catherine. Over.”
“You don’t sound like yourself.”
“Neither do you. Over.”
“Have you been drinking?”
“No,” he lied. “Over.”
“Well, that’s wonderful. You sound very businesslike. Over.”
“Under the circumstances, so would you. Over.”
