I do. Oh God I do. Would you fuck off outta my way.
Instead, out the window I cheerfully spit
Carry on with your lives now lads, otherwise I might be glad of a spell in prison and a bit of rest from the lot of ye.
And every time I hang out the washing, there’s seven of them looking at me and three of them leaping to help and I tell them straight: At my age, I know how to hang out washing. I’ve hung out washing twice as long as you’ve been alive!
I’ve warned them if I keep finding them under my armpit I’ll personally check myself + the lot of them into prison for trespass and we can be stuck together in a cell and there will be no commute required. They put up the palms in retreat and back off and for a few days I am left to myself unimpeded until, like the cheeky cat next door coming to snifflelickspit on food that’s not his, in they sidle all over again to give me reports. Reports! We think you should know…we’re ready to defend you should anything go down. Go down! Would there be any chance a passing dose of plague might come down and remove the lot of them and could it do me this useful favour in the next 30 minutes, right after this cup of tea.
I told them
Already.
No fuss, I told them,
I can have no fuss here.
Because fuss could bring Eddie back.
We don’t want Eddie back.
I’d take prison over Eddie.
They want to know. Who’s Eddie?
They’ll sort him.
They’ll protect me.
We’ll get Eddie.
We’ll get him.
He’s ours!
We’re yours!
Suffering Jesus, I tell them I can’t even hear that man’s name, would you keep your voice down. I don’t want protecting, I don’t want Eddie, I just want to be left in peace. But never are they convinced or convincible, only keep saying I mustn’t feel I am taking advantage of them, because they want to be here and they’ll stand up to this government and these gangster crooks, like the ESB or ECB and the TSB. Every time they seem to change the letters on me. I like the TSB and I told them this. I like them at Easter, I said. I went in there once and a man gave me a doughnut. No, that wasn’t the TSB, they say. The TSB is digging up Nigeria, they say. The TSB is doing all kinds of bad things to mammals and kerbs and they’re eating tires and beating clouds and imprisoning pandas. And that wasn’t a doughnut they gave you. What? It was a doughnut. It had jam in it! Bitumen they shout. Tar! Oil! Gas! What? I think I am going to pass out, I say. Get her a chair, says that lanky lang. Don’t touch me. Stop talking so loud. All of you shut up fighting in my ear. They apologize and whisper and say they didn’t mean to upset me. Go on, you’re alright, I relent. Then I usually have them carry up a bucket of turf. Because they need something else to think about other than bitumen.
There’s a new fella out there, the lanky looper I call him, with a thin face and a long beard that might have food gone relic inside it. He has it twisted down to a point and a red elastic band put on it with a bead or three, and he looks surgically demented. I don’t care what you put on yourself. I wouldn’t care if you tattooed a droopy spider on your bald-head like a lampshade, but a grown man with three pink beads hanging from his chin is disturbing. There’s just nothing right about it. And it’s not a nice thought, but when he is bitumening on, I have considered grabbing the dangle and yanking it off him very hard, one strong pull and handing it blithely back with the whispered words, sorry, there was something stuck on your chin and it was distracting me.
That’s a very dark thought.
No wonder I am being locked up.
I don’t remember—had I such dark thoughts when I’d a man living here within my gaze, who if the forces that be had flattened him dead, I would have cheered? That’s not a dark thought, that’s a truthful thought and I don’t care who you tell it to. I would warn you never to disclose your dark thoughts but to constantly disclose your truthful thoughts, because it’s only the dark ones that follow when the truthful ones are hid.
It’s very hard to do anything with these young Crusties spying on me. Every time I go into the loo, I see the shadow of a head or shade of a herd of heads passing up and down the path outside. I can’t even burp loudly because they’ll hear me and write it down and send it to Vincent Browne or one of these men on the TV and the radio who never shut up all day and are scruffy looking. If I were on the TV, and as rude as he can be, I’d at least take a bath and I’d at least do up my shirt and I’d think about the poor people who’ve to listen and look at me. People like me, stuck with Eddie. All over this country, there are people waking up day by day beside people they are disappointed to discover aren’t dead. I don’t care. I’m going to say it. You can think what you will. It’s factual talk. And this government deciding they’ve to carry on living with them. And they wonder why the murder rate is so high. And them’s the ones they are catching. I don’t want to imagine the number they are not.
The Crusties have gone mad, patrolling. They take turns to plod up and down, like border guards. They record it in books. They film each other walking up and down my path. Even the hens are confused. It’s worse than North Korea in my garden. The path is thin. One twisted his ankle. At first they held walkie-talkies! Imagine what a thing! Turn them off, I told them. You’re wasting your batteries. There’s nothing happening here. You never know, they said. I do know, I said, I know all too well because the one thing happening here has already happened. It was 10 years of Eddie and I wanted him gone and the only use for this patrolling is to alert me should he ever come back, so I can immediately run out this door and jump straight into the lake.
See amn’t I smart now.
I never offered one among them a cup of tea.
I never offered a towel nor the use of my toilet.
See how I heed the warnings now
See how finally I paid heed to my own warnings.
Which is the only good use for them
Other than writing them here.
For you to ignore
At your peril.
I did a bold thing.
I am going to whisper it.
It wasn’t a particularly nice thing to do
But I did it anyway.
I’m not advising you to do it.
I’m not publicly advertising this.
I am merely recording it here
Between us
As done.
OK.
I admit it.
I phoned the radio.
Told them I was a prisoner inside my own home.
I’ve a vanful of Crusties out there.
Camping, I said.
The researcher said it was strange
Aggressive, I said.
They’ve swarmed me.
Do you know them?
I do not.
And didn’t they come down and interview them.
And didn’t they splice all their voices together.
And didn’t a pile of people come the whole next day from the vicinity
To get a look at them.
And didn’t the Crusties become very excited
And think it was time for a pitched battle.
Wrapped their faces in dirty tee-shirts
Like they were fighting for Chechnya.
And didn’t I go out there and tell that young fella waving a lump of wood that if he didn’t put it down I’d put it up him.
And didn’t the whole thing end up in the newspaper.
And there was I only aiming for the radio.
Finally TG4 turned up because, of course, they would have to have an Irish speaker out there like the Buddha of the encampment. Earnest in two languages.
He is the awful one who plays the bongo drums and can’t sing in tune.
I swear I’d like to murder him.
They knocked at the front door
With the television camera
And that Big Number 4
Under the lack of a chin.
Have you any statement, Chinless said.
He was small
With a Donegal accent.
Idir dhá teanga.
Yes, I said.
I kept it short.
I’d like to murder them, I said
And shut the door.
And by Christ, even though they dubbed me as Gaeilge on the Nuacht, it set them phoning. There was no one who didn’t phone. The only call I answered was the Solicitor. Stop it, he said. Stop saying you want to murder people. You’re going to scupper us all if you keep this up. There is no us, I thought. There’s just me. Last I checked there are no double berths for the convicted and their solicitors in any prison in this country.
There’s only one man I want to murder and he’s in Vancouver, I said. That’s the only thing I have to say on this matter.
I put down the phone.
And that was the point. The point was or is, in the very matter itself. I forget the point. I forget the was or is. What is the point? Merciful hour, how this keeps happening to me. A name, a word, a meaning, a person, it’s all unthreading and blowing out the backdoor of my mind. I’m fading to remember why I do the things I do and who is at war with whom. The only memory I unfortunately cannot seem to unthread is Eddie’s forty-gutted face. Ah that’s it, there’s the point: Where were all these people when and while I was boxed in here for lengthy years with Eddie?
Where were you and you and you?
Where was him and her and she and he?
Where was this hillock full of bearded bandits tripping up and over my hens?
Why didn’t they descend on me then?
Then was when I needed them.
Then was when
They’d have been useful.
And, in trying to relieve myself of that image of boots clipping my hen’s wing, when I think further on it, who was it had knocked at my door? Why only the Tall Man. Only he came useful, bearing sufficient distraction to occupy me and enable me to escape Eddie. I had him and I’d Phil. Only when the Tall Man was sat here at this table did I have a moment’s peace from Eddie. Only then did Eddie evict himself, even temporarily. Only Dr Death, as the papers have labelled him since, could silence the dodo, who’s so slippery not even the papers, despite trying, can catch up with him. For it wasn’t that long after the Tall Man made my acquaintance that Eddie set up the yard, which at first appeared a change for the better.
What looks to be a change for the better initially, can, if carefully and sceptically observed, be an unambiguous deep slide into the dire.
Keep your eye sharp.
Make no decision about what anything might be or become until the very worst of it is upon you.
Don’t. Invite. Change.
Don’t imagine things change for the better.
They don’t.
If he’s awful like Eddie assume he’ll remain that way.
Unless unconscious.
Eddie was pleasant enough up in the ICU in Castlebar hospital.*6
He was bearable with his eyes closed and in a coma.
Carry on with burdensome people only if you enjoy having something to moan about.
Otherwise hammer your expectation towards the tin can of inevitable failure.
Tin is tin.
Tin’s din.
Let din in and he’ll only give you more tin.
I agreed I’d stop. I’ll stop, I said, if you can get these slugs out of my back garden and keep me out of prison.
Go out.
Go out?
Go out, she said, and say you’d respectfully appreciate it if
they’d all leave. That you appreciate their enthusiasm, but they are disrupting your life.
Very good, I said
I’ll do that.
I put down the phone and I worried. I worried about going out. She was right. She was wrong. She was half right. She was not a bit right. She was a full turn and a half wrong. Say I went out and one was to sneak in here, it’d be Eddie all over again. I know squatters. 40 minutes on a rug and it’s theirs. No court can shift them. 2 hours in your bed and they possess your life. I looked at a man down in a ditch and 10 years of my life was ruined. And it would probably be the worst among them who’d slip in. It would be that bacon-faced bongo drummer, that recently converted gaeilgeoir, and he’d never stop addle-prattling about my pronunciation and that would be in English, never mind Irish, and we’d have Eddie all over again, but in two languages all day long. The more I thought of going out, the more I shrunk back in. No No No. No way. No how. No, would you? No, appreciate. No, respectfully. Never respectfully appreciate. No, nothing of the sort. Only shift your furry arses before I insert something into them and hop you all off to Mars. But no, see now I didn’t do that either. I put the electric blanket on and into the bed I went, even though the hallway clock said it was only half four.
Defeated.
Defeated again by clowns.
Factory-made ones.
Made in the boreens of Spiddal.
Budded in Buncrana.
Smelt very bad since leaving Salford.
Now come here to invade me.
I woke starved at midnight after very bad David Bowie dreams. His face was half penguin and half blue. He was fully penguin on the bottom. Yet he was wearing yellow tights and nothing on his top half, but he’d no wings. How could he be wearing yellow tights if he was penguin on the bottom? It’s why I do not like waking from bad dreams. I’ll have to scratch that out. Should I lose the yellow or the penguin? Which will perturb you less? No matter. I’ve no warning to share over David Bowie dreams.
If you have them, you’ll grow into them.
Fact.
But never in my life, and it was a sheltered enough life til I imported Eddie into it, have I had such visitations. I’ve sympathy for people caught unawares by visits from saints. I would never be right near a grotto again.
Oh plenty.
Sure I’d plenty, plenty dreams.
I’d had swallowing-chewing-gum dreams, falling-down-a-well-and-breaking-my-neck dreams, forgetting-where-I-live dreams, on-my-holidays-in-Rome dreams, catching-a-too-big-fish-that-pulled-me-into-the-sea dreams, I’d had them all. But never a pop star in transition to the aquatic wearing yellow tights. I opened the back door in an attempt to dissolve the images and was gasping as I shut it. The numb nail lords had lit a fire on top of where I’d buried four ducks six years ago. Eddie had a role in their deaths. He reversed a trailer over the poor creatures, who thought and assumed they were napping safely inside the enclosure I had them living in. Eddie blamed me and said I needed an outside light. I remember the exchange. I came out of the house with my angry arms aloft. He continued reversing. I screamed at him. He continued reversing. I attempted to place myself between the ducks and his reversing. He opened the door.
What are you doing?
You are on the ducks, I said. Get off the ducks.
What’s that, he said, I can’t hear you.
Get off the fucking ducks. You’ve killed them dead!
He tried to insist it was the only route and it took another 90 seconds of cursing at him before he drove forward and turned the monster off. He walked a few steps and stared. Fuck, he said. I told you to put in an outside light. Then I let out an anguished growl and called him a murderer. And that he was not to cross my mat until he had cleaned up the carnage he had created.
Later he did apologize. Not to me. He said he felt sorry for the ducks and that if he hadn’t squashed them so bad we could have put them in a pot like the Chinese do and eat them. I resolved to dispose of them myself for fear they could suffer further and he might try to sell them to a takeaway because that is how stupid he was. Sure enough I f
ound he’d put them in individual carrier bags and when I opened them he’d taken their heads off with the axe. Dismal. Dismal. Dismal. Dismal. I took care instead to give them a proper burial spot and I surrounded it with lumps of brick so no eejit could drive over it without first bursting his tires. And this circle of bricks is, I must suppose, why these Crusties designated it their fire pit.
I had to go up and confront them. They were going to torch the ducks’ bones. If I’d wanted them made ashes I’d have lit them on fire myself.
I will say one thing: as I stood outside dithering about going up, it was clear that I could no longer take assertive decisions the way I once could. Suspiciously, as soon as Eddie left I lost whatever small courage I had.
The realization I was lacking the basic courage to walk outside my door and confront a gang of misery-making, uninvited do-gooders propelled me and my poker back indoors to drop down into the chair beside my solid-fuel range. Nothing remarkable to say about it. (I can’t afford oil. Fierce expensive.) It leaks smoke and it’s nothing but a punishment to live beside. It was not a comfortable landing as there was a telephone directory and three damp towels left on the chair. The corner of the directory hit sharp an area of my body I will not be disclosing and caused me to rise as hurriedly as I’d sank. I helicoptered about, more useless foostering, until I made my way back to bed still hungry. Hungry and now more confused than David Bowie’s visit could ever make me. There’s nothing quite as confusing as yourself, I concluded. This is likely why so many of us succumb to absolute confusion, the dementia, in the end.
Another woman.
A woman not in a hurry.
The way I am in a hurry here.
Such a woman, she’d lay herself back in the bed at this point in the proceedings and disclose every thought that followed the laying back, down onto this paper. She’d lace up paragraphs that would absorb you and you’d believe her, because you’re easy this way.*7 I am not that woman. I’m not easy. I might dither about the dark, about the destruction of my ducks’ final resting spot, but I won’t dither here. I won’t fill up this page with false recollections of important thoughts I’ve never had. You’ll have to make those ones up. I’m busy here. Busy trying to report what’s actively being lived whether you like that or not.
Bina Page 3
