Hanging with the Elephant

by Harding, Michael

  Not that I was entirely delighted when my beloved told me she was going off to Poland, because I had become dependent on her. Even though she would only be gone for six weeks, I would now be forced to stand alone – something I had done rarely since June 2011 when I had suffered a physical and nervous breakdown. Apart from a few weekends here and there, or the fortnight she spent in London, I had rarely been so completely abandoned.

  Every so often, men get the urge to create sheds and special no-go areas, like rooms to meditate in or rooms to work in, but all that insulation never solved anything for me. I have a little studio in the back garden but I might only be there for five minutes, with an image of the Buddha or a book about theatre or a low whistle in the key of D, when suddenly I would be overwhelmed by the terror of being alone and my desperate need for company even if it was just to have a cup of tea with her.

  And then her presence would relieve me from all my morose introspection. I wouldn’t have to worry about the meaning of life or the bleak prospect of death or any of the other great philosophical issues that prohibit me from washing dishes or making the bed, as long as I could worry about what she might want. When I told this to the therapist, she looked at me for a long time before saying that I wasn’t unusual.

  ‘Many men tend to orbit their loved ones like dysfunctional satellites,’ she said. ‘They obsess about the woman in order to avoid examining their own lives. The minutiae of the partner’s life becomes their agenda. When does she want dinner? How does she like her tea? What she prefers to watch on the television. All those things become a narrative that absorbs men beyond the scope of their own nostalgia. It’s the only reason why some men remain married. They find it soothing.’

  And it occurred to me that perhaps this was precisely why the beloved needed to go to Poland. She needed a break. She needed to get away from me. I may have been driving her mad.

  As a wise woman said to me one time: men spend the first half of their lives running away from women and the second half running after them. One way or another, I encouraged her to go, and I was glad when she bought her plane ticket. Because, beneath everything else, I had a real sense of purpose about being alone for a long period.

  Not that long ago, depression had manifested in my life like my own private Dracula. I had spent months with him in the same room when I was ill and now, two years later, he rarely looked in the window. Although, I suspected that he was still lurking somewhere at the end of the garden, and I was always afraid that if I was alone for a long period of time, he might just knock on the door again. And that fear made me dependent on other people for company.

  Although there is something in me that never stops craving solitude. So for six weeks in the spring of 2014, when she planned to be in Poland, I planned a journey to the interior. I was going on retreat. I would confront the unruly elephant of my own mind and I would use the ropes of meditation, discipline and single-pointed concentration to make that elephant sit still.

  At least that’s what the various gurus on YouTube were suggesting. ‘Depression is a lack of control,’ they said. You become filled with disturbing emotions, with anxiety, fear or melancholy, and that drags you down. But if you can control the mind – the great elephant of consciousness – you can observe all those emotions coming and going, rising and falling; and you can watch them, hold them, and allow them to be. You can wait for them to evaporate like soft clouds evaporate into the sky or let them rinse your body like clouds turning into rain. One way or another you can bear them and quieten them, until eventually your mind can become as calm as an elephant at ease with itself, or as clear as a blue sky.

  I wanted to stop going about the world like a blue-arsed fly, from one pile of dung to the next utterly consumed with anxiety and occasionally possessed by Dracula. I wanted to be still and chilled and full of compassion for the universe. I wanted to be a blue sky. I wanted to be a calm elephant. I wanted to be what the wise ones in robes on YouTube said I could be. Surely that wasn’t too much to ask?

  And if Dracula or any other personification of my anxieties knocked on the door, I would let them in and sit them down and gently accept them. I had read all the books on how to be compassionate with myself, and how to find a mindful path out of depression, and how to survive in the swamplands of the soul.

  And when she came home, I would make a great splash. I would give her a great welcome. It would be like she was meeting a new man. And we would have a banquet. I would feed her one of Mister Scollan’s finest chickens in a soup of fresh vegetables.

  WE HAD BOTH ended up in a panic the morning she was heading off. I had booked the same hotel as we had stayed in on the night my memoir had received the Irish Book of the Year Award at the end of 2013. On that occasion, I had squeezed myself into a dress suit and clipped a dickie-bow round my neck with inflated pride, as if writing a book and winning an award were of some significance or that they might protect me from death. But when we returned to the same deluxe room of that Ballsbridge hotel four months later, it was being refurbished, and the painters’ ladders lay in the corridor and the dizzy prize-winning ceremony seemed like it had all happened years earlier.

  The award had been a transient moment. The book was nothing more than the tracks of an animal or footprints on a beach long since rearranged by the tide. The morning after the award ceremony, the blue glass trophy was sitting in the bath, for some reason I can’t remember. We shared breakfast in bed, and then I did a radio interview and then we drove home.

  But now I was lying on the bed with a terrible hangover, and the heating had been on all night, drying my tongue to the texture of sandpaper.

  She was gone. She was on the plane. ‘Thank Christ,’ I said with relief, speaking to my own image in the mirror across from the bed. ‘The panic is over.’

  Those were the very words I used. I was still in the hotel an hour after she had rushed from the room. I was looking at the message she had texted from the boarding gate:

  Just about got here in time.

  We had decided to go to Dublin the day before the flight and stay over, rather than drive from Leitrim in the middle of the night. We’d had a Chinese meal in a very swanky restaurant near the hotel, early in the evening. The dumplings we had for starters were hand-made. They would have made a meal on their own. The soy sauce just sprinkled on the rice was fit for emperors.

  I suppose the restaurant would have been full during the boom. I could imagine government ministers on their way home dropping in, or bankers with grey hair and gold cufflinks entertaining their mistresses, or journalists swapping jokes with the oily-skinned bosses of corporate Ireland. It had the air of a film set where great things had been enacted. Where historical events had been dreamed up. But the good times were over. The pile on the carpet was still thick and soft, and the lighting was just as delicate and the white tablecloths just as starched, but there was nobody there. They even had an early bird menu so that ordinary folks like us could afford to eat between five and eight, but even with a special offer of won ton soup, noodles and a choice of three main courses for €23, the place was empty. A famous journalist with grey hair and a cream linen suit sat at a table across from us reading a book. I kept trying to see the title, but I couldn’t.

  The beloved and me are used to each other, so we don’t need to make much idle talk when we’re in a restaurant. I look at her sometimes and I don’t know what goes on in her head. The closer we get, and the longer we are together, the more mysterious she becomes. And the more transfixed we are by a shared silence. Of course she is used to my appetite for other people’s conversations. I’m nosey. Not that I was eavesdropping on the journalist, though he did take up his phone once when it buzzed, and I stopped chewing in order to listen, but it was only a text and he didn’t reply. The beloved was lifting her full spoon from the won ton soup at that moment – when his phone buzzed – and she too stopped. Her soup spoon frozen in midair, because she knows me and my insatiable curiosity.

 
So that’s where we were, eating our noodles with the masters of the universe, or at least one correspondent for a national newspaper, whom we recognised from his appearances on television. But the universe was empty apart from one further group of men at a table in the distance, whispering in London accents. And it was such a good meal that the bottle of wine we drank during the main course only kicked in three hours later at about midnight, when we were sitting in the lounge of the hotel with a nightcap. There too business was slow. An old country and western singer, a great bear of a man with dyed black hair, was trying to impress a thin woman in a grey dress with anecdotes about travelling around Ireland in a van years earlier when he had his own showband. She was recording it all, though when she went to the toilet her high heels clip-clopped with irritation on the parquet floor and her face looked as drained as an empty paper bag. We had Hennessy brandies and the wine kicked in so well that I suggested another bottle for the bedroom. After all, she was going away for six weeks. I would miss her. There would be no fun without her. And she was going to meet Polish friends, other artists, new people. She would be going to exhibitions and operas, and eating lots of Polish and Russian dumplings. So it was a big night for both of us. And since we had splashed out on a good hotel, and were safely situated in a deluxe room and there was a bus from just outside the hotel to the airport in the morning, we deserved another drink. That was my contention. And that’s when the trouble started.

  Up we went to the eighth floor. I was carrying two brandies, two wine glasses, one bottle of Bordeaux and the key of the room, all on a round tray. I’m always spilling things but we managed to get in, get the lights on and put down the drinks without losing anything.

  Pussy Riot had been interviewed on an Irish chat show a few days earlier, which we watched on YouTube, and we couldn’t take our eyes off the little laptop screen. We got so excited about how disastrous the interview turned out, that I suggested another bottle of wine. Which cost another €28.

  ‘We have spent more money on drink than we did on the meal,’ she observed.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ I replied, ‘but it’s a special occasion. We are separating.’

  ‘It’s only for a few weeks,’ she said.

  ‘True,’ I replied. ‘But that could be a long time with a mind as fragile as mine.’

  She was leaving me. That was the fact.

  ‘Beloved,’ I said to her in the hotel room, as we came to the end of the Bordeaux, ‘I have rarely been alone these past three years. And now this is our last night together before your flight. So it is a very special occasion.’

  She agreed, not certain what I had in mind. I had drink in mind. More drink. Lots of drink. An endless flow of drink.

  So a youth from Latvia arrived with further wine. I gave him €30 and told him to keep the change, and on we went, drinking and watching various other YouTube videos. Pussy Riot. Panti Bliss. Johnny Rotten and Judge Judy. Tommy Tiernan. And live webcams in Warsaw to see if it was snowing. I drank most of the second bottle, laughing at the videos, until she brushed her teeth and got into bed and I assured her that I had set my alarm for 6.30 a.m.

  She was asleep in minutes and already I felt alone. I was embracing the dark. I was beginning a great adventure into the interior of my own psyche. I would be still, silent and alone, eating like a monk, my eyes glued to the flickering candle as I meditated my way into the dark interior of the unconscious. I would find what was in there. Who was in there. What had made me unwell? In what way is depression just a door into a deeper sense of self? What are the possibilities of compassion both for ourselves and others that awaken when we allow all the pain inside us to surface?

  There was no point in setting the bar too low. I might even find out what possessed me to shave my cock. I would come to realise everything. Alone for forty-odd days, a cosy calm abiding, I would see beyond the self in which I was isolated, to the miracle of Being, in which we are all one and where there is no coming or going, and no death or birth.

  My shelves were full of books on self-improvement, paths to enlightenment, loving kindness and how to escape depression. But the time for reading was over. The time for doing had arrived. The day was upon me and I would not be afraid. I would not cry out for anyone to hold me. Because sometimes a man must travel into the darkness – alone.

  I closed the laptop, brushed my teeth in the bathroom, turned off the lights and slipped in beside her.

  It seemed like I was asleep for five minutes when the sound of a trumpet on my iPhone indicated that another day was already waiting.

  ‘Beloved,’ I whispered, touching the nape of her neck on the pillow beside me. ‘Beloved. ’Tis time to rise.’

  But I had got the call-time arseways.

  ‘You said 6.30 a.m,’ I protested.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I need to check in for 6.30.’ And she sprang up so suddenly in the bed that I thought she might bounce off the ceiling.

  ‘Fuck it,’ I muttered to myself. I never saw anyone move so fast through their morning ablutions in my life. She showered, dressed, zipped her bags closed and was out the door in less than fifteen minutes. In that time, I had contacted Reception, a taxi had arrived and when we got down to the lobby along a corridor smelling of paint, I could see the taxi’s roof sign through the glass door. She got in and I mouthed the words ‘I love you’ through the window before the taxi slipped out the gate and into the grey drizzle of a Dublin morning.

  And I went back to bed. I dozed a bit until she texted from the boarding gate, and when she did, I phoned her back instantly and wished her a safe journey and apologised for getting so drunk and told her I’d miss her terribly. In the two years since my illness, I hadn’t known what it was to live without her. I had been with her all the time. Day and night. And there was something final about the phone line going dead that morning. As if I might never hear her again. I stared at the screen.

  ‘Well, that’s it,’ I said. ‘She’s gone. She’s on the plane. May God help me now.’

  God or Buddha or Simone Weil. Anyone would do. It didn’t matter. I would lean on any god who helped me stand alone, because I believed it imperative that, as a couple, we should not be tied to each other. We should not be gazing at each other all the time but, together, gazing outwards into the universe. We should be like Sartre and de Beauvoir, I thought, and not the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of an Irish marriage.

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ asks Tweedledum.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Tweedledee replies. ‘Would you?’

  ‘Will we have our dinner now?’ asks Tweedledum.

  ‘Whatever you think,’ Tweedledee replies.

  ‘And what are you thinking, in your own little head?’ Tweedledum might wonder eventually, but never ask for fear it would flummox Tweedledee entirely.

  You see them sometimes in the supermarkets, tethered to the same trolley. He’s in a daze. He might see corn flakes on the shelf. He likes his corn flakes. He reaches for the packet. She takes it from him and switches it for the muesli. And when his fingers touch the honey jar, she points to the organic one, and his fingers obey. ‘That’s better for you,’ she says. And he doesn’t disagree.

  On the other hand, when he’s puffed up at a dinner table and she knows he’s going to start a conversation about bankers that will swiftly turn into a monologue to make everyone cringe, she just drops her head and listens graciously because she understands him. She is one with him. They are a single being. And as he gets into his stride, she rises from the table and says, ‘I’m off to bed.’ The wind goes out of his sails. He lasts another few minutes before following her. Because she is his ‘other’. She is the listener. She is the monitor and mentor. It is pointless speaking when she is absent. It’s even pointless living when she has left and gone for ever. And I have seen them too, the widows, bewildered in their slippers, struggling with the tax forms and the car insurance for a few years after he is dead and then she too fades, glad to close her eyes for ever and be planted with him bec
ause there is no individuality or separateness left in her. And they become one again in the clay.

  Maybe that’s why I ended up in Mullingar. I was like a dog chasing its own tail. When I was with her, I wanted to be alone; when I was alone, I longed to be with her.

  It’s a common affliction of the male psyche, summed up by my mother when I threw my toys out of the pram. ‘You’re never satisfied,’ she’d said.

  ‘But you’ll be fine on your own,’ the beloved assured me in a text from the boarding gate. ‘I really need to go.’ And I suspected some lightness in her footfall as she walked the tarmac and up the stairway of the Ryanair flight and took her seat just inside the cabin door.

  I FELL BACK asleep, my body still vibrating with the excess of alcohol in my system, though I slept soundly until after midday when I got a text from Eastern Europe.

  Arrived at Modlin. Great flight. Cold but no rain.

  I resisted phoning her. She wouldn’t like that. She’d say it was wasting money. So I texted.

  Great. You got there safely.

  Yes. Friends at the airport to meet as planned.

  That’s great.

  Long pause before next signal from her.

  R U OK?

  Yes I’m OK.

  New text from me.

  I mean I’m fine.

  From her.

  What will you do?

  From me.

  Go back to Leitrim this evening and be miserable.

  Ha ha.

  From her.

  That’s grand. Do that. Won’t call you. Wastes money. You can get me on Facebook. Use text in emergency.

  I watched the screen for a long while to see if she would say anything else. I couldn’t think of a new text either. So I presumed we were finished.

  Sitting up in the bed, I couldn’t resist my image staring out at me from the mirror on the wall; him that was going to be my constant and perhaps only companion for the next few weeks.