Getting it in the Head

by Mike McCormack

  In the morning she wakes ravenous. In a gluttonous frenzy she hunches over a bowl of cereal and sloughs it back greedily. She thinks of animals and eats four bowls in succession with bread and an apple and a bar of chocolate. For the first time in three days she holds the food down. It is warm and weighs like ballast in her stomach and she walks to work with a solid step. Her fellow workers comment that she is looking much better; there is a bloom on her cheeks and she smiles shyly in return.

  ‘I haven’t been feeling well these last few days,’ she says. ‘Some kind of bug.’

  In the bathroom she checks to see if she is bleeding but there are no traces. Outside the sun is shining and for the first time in ages she feels a kind of happiness. At lunchtime she returns to the bench in the hope of seeing the old man but he isn’t there. She eats with comfort and knows now that her obsession is at an end. She feels also that there has been a shift in the disposition of the world towards her. Several of her colleagues have come to her during the day and engaged her in jokes and silly games. She has laughed a lot, clasping her hand over her mouth like some shy schoolgirl caught in mischief. Even the sun has lost its oppression. It lies upon her now like a comforter, warming her, making her glow.

  The days which follow are the happiest of her life. She begins to enjoy her work and it seems that a genuine friendship blossoms between herself and her workmates. She goes for drinks after work with them to a little pub where she is shy at first but where the barman gradually comes to recognize her when it is her round. She goes to the cinema and one night at a club one of her colleagues kisses her, and tells her that now, when he has finally got to know her, he thinks she is great.

  The next morning she wakes in her flat and rushes to the toilet, throwing up. On her knees she grips the toilet bowl trying to hold down the panic that is threatening to make her scream. Please, oh please, she cries. It is midday before she can hold down any food. And it is the same the following day and the day after that and the day after that again; sick and frail in the morning with her hand clasped over her stomach until the light midday meal that carries her over till the evening. And it is in these morning hours also that she is stricken with the crazed urge to eat things. In her flat she has to remove the detergents, the soaps and even her bathroom sponge from out of her sight. At work she has her desk cleared of ink, correction fluid and her eraser. And one morning in her nausea and weakness she realizes that her period, normally like clockwork, is three weeks overdue. She thinks of the days without food and the days of nausea and the glass, and wonders has all of this thrown her biology out of alignment. She waits another week, then two more, and at the end of four weeks she visits her doctor.

  Her doctor is a kindly, middle-aged man who listens with his head inclined to his left side, a man hearing signals from a distant planet. He hears her list of symptoms and finally asks her does she herself have any idea what it could be. She skirts around the obvious shaking her head, not wanting to face the incredible. He asks her about her love life and she tells him shamefaced that she has no partner, she is still a virgin. He shakes his head in mystification and tells her he will do a pregnancy test, otherwise he has no clue what it could be. Five minutes later she finds out that she is pregnant.

  She remonstrates. ‘How can that be, I’m still a virgin?’

  ‘It’s very strange,’ he tells her. ‘I never thought in all my days of practice I would come upon such a case. It is a condition that is very rare, one in a million if I can remember the statistics correctly. There is no medical explanation which covers the case entirely. It’s a form of parthenogenesis. What happens is that …’

  He seems awed by her presence and he moves about the room giddily as he talks, keeping his distance and erecting a barrier of technical language between them.

  ‘I find it unbelievable,’ he concludes, ‘totally unbelievable.’

  ‘Well,’ she counters, ‘it’s happening, whether you believe it or not.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ he says. ‘I’ve seen that. It’s just that you’re one in a million, one in ten million.’ He looks at her suddenly. ‘You are going to keep the child?’ It sounds like an accusation, not the question it is meant to be.

  She spreads her hands. ‘I don’t know. This is such a surprise, such a shock. I hadn’t thought about it.’

  He sits on his desk, making an effort to bring the situation under control. Despite the lack of frenzy and raised voices there is no doubt that the room has been visited by some disaster. He clasps his hands before his face in the manner of a penitent and seeks inspiration in the ceiling.

  ‘All right,’ he says. He has finally come to some decision. ‘There really is nothing I can do for you at the moment. I could give you something for the nausea and vomiting but that is not the issue. What I suggest is that you go home, think about it for a while and come back to me with your decision. Think it over. There are other options, things to be done and so on.’

  He is becoming flustered, his sentences are beginning to ramble. She unsettles him with her thin face and her eyes continually focused in her hands. He repeats himself again, almost pleadingly.

  ‘There really is nothing I can do for you now. Call back in a few weeks when you have a decision.’

  She is glad to leave the room. She has difficulty in breathing there, the air seems filled with smoke. Outside in the sunlight she braces herself and it works its way into her, warming her chilled bones. She is marooned now, at a loss where to go. It strikes her that this world is stranger than she can ever imagine. She wonders is it always going to be like this, will there always be this cruelty at the heart of things. Will the world keep offering up jagged pieces of itself, not as a means to enlightenment but as a reminder that it will always have the upper hand? One moment it will seem solved, comprehensible and full of sense, the next it will have heaved beneath her feet throwing up shapes and configurations without precedent, filled with terrors. She walks carefully through the streets now, unsure of her footing. People look strange, their skins have a funny pallor: she can see their veins. She fears that at every corner someone with a clown’s grin will draw her aside and show her some new atrocity. She finds herself walking towards the canal and has to suppress an urge to stretch her arms ahead of her like a blind person. She feels like prey.

  In the cathedral car-park there is a crowd. Busy mothers and fathers fuss over children, straightening ties and fixing veils over angelic faces. Today is Confirmation day and these kids have come here to sign up as soldiers of Christ, new recruits in His massive conscript army serving under assumed names. Standing on the edge of the crowd she notices that the Christ Child in the window has not been replaced. Part of the window has been blocked up with plywood from within. Earlier in the week she read in the local newspaper how the police are mystified by the breakage and how they have no clue whatsoever. She remembers the lines – At this time we have neither suspect nor motive and we are led to believe that it was an act of wanton vandalism. We are looking for anyone with information, no matter how small, to please come forward.

  She stands in the car-park long into the evening and long after the crowd has gone, her hands clasped over her stomach. She has the same wish for herself; would someone with some information please, please come forward.

  I would like to think that from the beginning I put up a fight. Not some token gesture of disaffection with my terrible predicament but a full-blooded resistance. I picture myself rising to my knees in the after birth, eyes open and sharp – there is nothing of the doe-eyed lamb about me this time – my nose sniffing the air. And do I imagine it or is my slimy hand already reaching out to grasp some weapon? I see myself dark and primitive, grasping it by the hilt and marking a slow watchful retreat. I am not so much a child as a beleaguered rat. But my mother’s legs are closed now and I am cut off, left stranded. Alone again. Just for that I wish my entrance had been marked by some carnage. I would give much to be able to say that on entering the world I killed my mother.
But I cannot. Therefore did I hang my head and weep in despair. I did not. I filled the room with curses, dark occult sounds that shrieked out at the wretchedness and misery of it all.

  Of course it was nothing like that. Instead, I lay stranded on my back choking in the amniotic fluid, my hands rising to my eyes to fend off the light. A nurse upended me with a quick slap across the arse and I drew some foreign but dimly remembered element into my chest, something upon which my young lungs scrabbled for foothold and having found it I rose quickly into myself with a wail. I was immediately aware of the hostile atmosphere, the uniforms, the searing lights, the physical abuse. Oh yes, there is not much difference between birth and interrogation – both are issues of truth and identity.

  I am young, very young, but I have the memory of eons. I can remember clearly the last time and all I can say is that father’s work or no father’s work I am not going to let it happen like that again. This time it will be different. The world will be given an even chance this time and no more.

  I am young and I am willing to admit that I am not in full possession of the facts. Maybe there are mitigating details that I cannot remember but I doubt it. Therefore my plan is simple. Bide my time quietly and keep my ear close to the ground, my eyes open and my mouth shut. I will hoard up knowledge. I have got a good thirty years before I make my entrance proper so I will be circumspect. But I do know a few things; I am and I have memory and this time it is going to be different.

  A is for Axe

  Six pounds of forged iron hafted to a length of hickory with steel wedges driven into the end. During the autopsy the coroner dug from my father’s skull a small, triangular chip which was entered as prosecuting evidence by the State. It was passed among the jurors in a sealed plastic bag like the relic of a venerated saint.

  More than any detail of my crime it is this axe which has elevated me to a kind of cult status in this green and pleasant land of ours. I am not alone in sensing a general awe that at last, small-town Ireland has thrown up an axe murderer of its very own. It bespeaks a kind of burgeoning cosmopolitanism. At last our isolated province has birthed a genuine, late-twentieth-century hero, a B-movie schlock-horror character who is now the darling of down-market newsprint.

  As I was led to trial several of my peers had gathered on the steps of the court-house. Long-haired, goateed wasters to a man, they sported T-shirts emblazoned with my portrait and short lines of script: Gerard Quirke for President they read, or Gerard Quirke – A Cut Above the Rest. My favourite is Gerard Quirke: A Chip off the Old Block.

  B is for Birthday

  I have picked through the co-ordinates of my birth and I find nothing in them which points to the present calamity. I was born on the twentieth of October 1973, under the sign of Libra, the scales. It was the year when the sixth Fianna Fáil administration governed the land, added two pence to the price of a loaf and three on the pint. In human terms it was a year of no real distinction – if there was no special degree of bloodshed in the world of international affairs neither was there any universal meeting of minds, no new dawn bloomed on the horizon.

  I have these details from a computer printout which I got from James, a present on my eighteenth birthday. He bought it in one of those New Age shops specializing in tarot readings and incense that are now all the rage in the bohemian quarters of cities.

  I was named after St Gerard Majella whom my mother successfully petitioned during her troubled and only pregnancy.

  C is for Chance

  Chance is at the root of all. 20, 10, 3, 12, 27, 8. My date of birth, my father’s date and my mother’s also. These are the numbers my father chose on the solitary occasion he entered for that seven-million-pound jackpot, the biggest in the five-year history of our National Lottery. And for the first and only time in his life the God of providence smiled upon him.

  D is for Defence

  I had no defence. To the dismay of my lawyer, a young gun hoping to make a reputation, I took full responsibility and pleaded guilty. I was determined not to waste anyone’s time. I told him that I would have nothing to do with claims of diminished responsibility, self-defence or extreme provocation. Neither would I have anything to do with psychiatric evaluation. I declared that my mind was a disease-free zone and that I was the sanest man on the entire planet. As a result the trial was a short(ened) affair. After the evidence was presented and the judge had summed up, the jury needed only two hours to reach a unanimous verdict. I was complimented for not wasting the court’s time.

  E is for Election

  As a child, nothing marked me out from the ordinary, except for the fact that I had been hit by lightning. I had been left in the yard one summer’s day, sleeping in my high, springed pram when the sky darkened quickly to rain and then thunder. All of a sudden a fork of lightning rent the sky and demolished my carriage. When my parents rushed into the yard they found me lying on the ground between the twin halves of my carriage, charred and blackened like a spoiled fruit. When they picked me up they found that the side of my head had been scored by such a perfect burn, so perfect in fact that, were it not for the ear it had carried with it, you could have admired the neatness and tidiness of it. While my mother carried me indoors my father stayed in the downpour, shaking his fist and bawling at the heavens, cursing God and his attendant angels.

  In the coverage of my trial much has been made of this incident and the fact of my missing ear. Several column inches have been filled by popular psychologists who have repeatedly drawn parallels between the lightning strike and the axe. All have sought to deliver themselves of fanciful, apocalyptic axioms. It surprises me that at no time has a theologian been asked to proffer his opinion. I feel sure he would have found in it some evidence of a hand reaching out of the sky, a kind of infernal election.

  F is for Future

  My life sentence stretches ahead of me now, each day an identical fragment of clockwork routine piled one upon the other into middle age. I do not care to think about it.

  Ten months ago, however, after my father came into his fortune, I dreamt of a real future. Hour after hour I spent in my room working out the scope and extent of it, embellishing it with detail. I polished it to a gleaming prospect of travel in foreign climes, sexual adventure and idle indulgence. mapped it out as a Dionysian odyssey, a continual annihilation of the present moment with no care for the morrow. It would take me in glorious circumnavigation of the earth all the way to my grave, ending in a fabulous blow-out where I would announce my departure to the assembled, adoring masses – an elegant, wasted rake. I was careful enough to leave blank spaces in the fantasy, filling them out during moments of conscience with vague designs of good works and philanthropy. I confess that these were difficult assignments: my mind more often than not drew a blank. My belief is that I had not the heart for these imaginative forays. My cold and cruel adolescent mind was seized mainly by the sensual possibilities and I hungered cravenly for them.

  G is for God

  My father stayed in the downpour to decry the heavens and my mother pointed out in later years that it was at this moment God set his face against us and withdrew all favour. Whatever about God, it was at this moment that my father turned his back on all religious observance, an apostasy of no small bravery in our devout village and probably the only trait in his personality I inherited when I entered my own godless teens. A steady line of self-appointed evangelists beat a path to our door to try and rescue him out of the cocoon of hunkered bitterness into which he had retired. But my father’s mind was set. The God of mercy and forgiveness was nothing to him any more and the community of believers were only so many fools. He could be violently eloquent on the subject. In black anger he would wrest me from the cradle and brandish me in their faces.

  ‘There is no God of mercy and forgiveness,’ he would roar. ‘There is only the God of plague and affliction and justice and we are all well and truly fucked because of it. This child is the proof of that. More than any of you I believe in Him: I only ha
ve to look at this child to know. The only difference is I have no faith in Him.’

  These rages would reduce my mother to a sobbing shambles. She would recover, however, and then redouble her observance on his behalf, attending the sacraments twice daily to atone for his pride. Icons flourished in our house and the shelves and sideboards seemed to sprout effigies overnight. My father ground his teeth and reined in his temper.

  H is for History

  I admitted my interest in killers at the pre-trial hearings. However, even now, I maintain that it is nothing more than the average male teen infatuation with all things bloody and destructive. Like most young men of my generation I can reel off a list of twentieth-century killers quicker than I can the names of the twelve apostles. At school I listened critically to the tales of the great ideological killers – Hitler, Stalin et al. I became convinced that the century was nothing more than a massive fiction, an elaborate snuff-movie hugely budgeted and badly edited, ending with an interminable list of credits. I came to believe that beneath this vast panorama of warring nations and heaving atrocities the true identity and history of my time was being written by solitary minds untouched by ideology or political gain – solitary night stalkers prowling alleyways and quiet, suburban homes, carrying their knives and axes and guns and garrottes. And I believed also it was only in this underworld that concepts of guilt and evil and justice had any meaning, this world where they were not ridiculed and overwhelmed by sheer weight of numbers. Bundy, Dahmer, Hindley, Chikatilo, Nielsen, the list goes on, an infernal Pantheon within which I will now discreetly take my humble place.