Hanging with the Elephant

by Harding, Michael

  ‘So why are you looking so miserable?’ I asked. But the image in the mirror didn’t reply. Apart from asking me the same question. I looked old, hung over and as sad as a wet field that even the cattle have abandoned.

  I got up and stood sideways, just to get a better view. It was the same mirror in which I had examined myself, dressed in a tuxedo on the night of the book awards. It’s not just that I was overweight, but my stomach had expanded out of proportion to the rest of my body. I felt like a whale but I looked like a duck. I walked naked, watching myself in all eight mirrors in the room and making critical comments.

  I don’t know why men begin to resemble ducks as they grow older. The rump expands at the rear and the belly expands forward. The spine begins to make an S shape in order to carry everything as the muscles collapse and the bloated gut flags and falls towards earth. It’s a shape that has been bred into men over generations of affluence. It should make me ashamed, when I see what I’ve done to my body over a lifetime, considering that most human beings are merely skin and bone and barely get enough food to sustain themselves. But men don’t feel shame too often. That’s bred out of us as well. Sometimes I see friends crossing the floor of a hotel foyer like turkey cocks, proud of every ounce. As if a lifetime of success behind an office desk was made manifest in their soft white flesh. If there is one thing that proves that a man’s perception of the world is entirely deluded, it is his ability to hold an image of himself as heroic while his body deteriorates.

  I find this kind of fascination with mirrors strangely pleasing. It’s as if my teachers from secondary school are still inside my unconscious mind flailing away. I give them voice and then I can’t stop them, because this kind of psychological self-abuse is only the beginning; was only the beginning. I was alone and naked before the mirror, and on the edge of a great journey of self-discovery.

  I was going to grasp my manhood again. I was going to pull my masculinity up from the floor, suck in my pot-belly and bend my head towards the great solitude wherein a man liberates his true self and becomes forever enlightened.

  And besides all that, I was now my own master. I could do whatever I wanted. A man alone can please himself. He need pay no attention to manners, decorum or the various courtesies of living with another. I didn’t have to talk to anyone in the jeep now. I could drive back to Leitrim listening to the radio. At night, I could move around the bed like a lazy bull, or a walrus, depending on how I felt. I could toss, turn and fart or scratch myself any way I wanted. In the evenings, I could put as much coal on the fire as pleased me. I could put far too much coal on the fire and no one would know as long as the chimney didn’t burst into flames. And that hadn’t happened yet. I could stack up the coal, the Polish doubles, so high in the grate that I would need to take off my clothes because of the heat. And I could do that too – take off my clothes. I could sit, strip, sweat, lean over the fire, drink wine, belch, watch EastEnders, Doctor Who or Judge Judy. Whatever I wanted. I could be obscene, vulgar or unconscious, without offending anyone. And in the mornings, I could put butter on my porridge and toss the bowl in the sink with the other dirty dishes; the pot and the wok and the cups and the plates from the previous night. I could go to my room, my writer’s room, every day and close the door and not talk to another human being. I could reconnect with the wild man inside me; that brutish animal could sing in me without disturbance or without a sense of obligation to others.

  But what if I couldn’t? That thought had occurred to me. What if I was unable to endure being alone? The answer was simple. In fact, my security lay in the certitude that she would return. She wasn’t going away for ever. I could safely play the Lone Ranger or the Buddha of Leitrim all day long with the knowledge that, even if I went completely daft, she would be home in just over a month and all would become normal again.

  I wasn’t jealous of her. Why would I be jealous? It’s the last thing I would think of. She was an independent woman, an artist, and she was of course entitled to her own life. And what she did in Poland was her own business. She had been there a few times over the years. I knew she had friends in the Art School. I knew she always enjoyed Warsaw, studying and working and talking about art and going to restaurants and museums.

  So I let her off. Because I would do what a man does when he tears himself away from society and seeks out an isolated place like a bear seeks a solitary cave. I would do what the wild animal does when mother bear has moved down river, or when the beautiful woman bear has been swept up into the clouds by Ryanair. I would do nothing.

  A GIRL FROM Latvia shouted ‘room service’, and knocked at the door three times between 11 a.m. and noon, eager to freshen the room for the next guest. So I phoned Reception and booked another night. That would give me twenty-four hours to recover from the drink, before driving into the Dublin traffic and negotiating the dual carriageway towards Blackrock and the bottlenecks running into the M50.

  I phoned the Project Arts Centre and booked myself a ticket for A Tender Thing. The Project is one of my favourite theatres in Dublin. The Gate Theatre at the far end of O’Connell Street – once nicknamed Sodom because it was run by Micheál MacLiammóir and Hilton Edwards, Ireland’s iconic gay men of the 1950s – is an elegant building, and I always love its frocked dramas. And then there is the Abbey Theatre, astutely nicknamed Begorrah because in every generation it rediscovers the argot of the Irish peasantry and stretches it to hyperbolic absurdity in the way that Irish audiences love – and which pleases the tourists, who come in summer and eat bars of chocolate as they watch the classics by O’Casey, Synge and J.B. Keane. But the Project Arts Centre always surprises me. It caters for young middle-classes, graduates of Trinity College and other sophisticates from the leafy suburbs who like a kind of erotic polish on their entertainment. Not for them the affected accents of nineteenth-century English heroines or the squalling agony of unrequited love among the peasantry. They present some dance theatre, and plays by lots of international writers and new interpretations of classics and there is no proscenium arch and I feel the players are reaching out to me with a wonderful intimacy.

  So that’s where I went. The play in question starred Olwen Fouéré and Owen Roe, two actors of superb abilities whom I knew at a slightly personal level from my own work in theatre.

  A Tender Thing is about the enduring love of an elderly couple. The conceit is based on Romeo and Juliet’s tragedy and, though the words are all Shakespeare, it presents its tale of love in a world of grim middle-aged reality. I was certain that it was my kind of play.

  For the rest of the day, I lounged in the room, took a bath, went for a walk and messed about on Facebook. Just after 6 p.m., I headed for town. The weather forecast was for a dry night, though storms were expected at the weekend. But, being from Leitrim, I never trust weather forecasts so I faced the night in full battle dress – black plastic leggings, a yellow fisherman’s raincoat and a weatherproof hat with a wide rim. I was hoping to have noodles in a cheap restaurant in Temple Bar just across the road from where the beloved once had a sculpture studio and where we used to dine long ago when we had no money. In those days, Temple Bar was a rundown labyrinth off Dame Street and the cobbled streets were usually empty. The buildings were derelict, apart from artists who rented big nineteenth-century rooms with holes in the floor. There was a pub where busmen used to drink as they came off duty. And only one café. And then a noodle bar. But that of course was before the boom, when the buildings were refurbished and shop fronts were cheered up and new restaurants opened and Temple Bar became the clichéd Artistic Quarter in every Dublin tourist brochure. And there were fewer artists because they couldn’t afford the rents. Like me and the beloved, most of them fled to the west of Ireland long before the stag groups from the north of England began to arrive every weekend to drink themselves into a stupor.

  The noodle shop had closed down, while the beloved’s workshop had been transformed into a flashy gallery, with a young man with a guitar stood in the doo
rway singing. Foregoing the noodles, I went into a fancy coffee house farther down the street with two long tables where young couples were chatting over lattes and green teas. I decided to sit by the window on a high stool, and kept my eye on the street. It was still early enough; the waves of women wearing fancy hen costumes and furry pink tiaras would sweep the street later in the evening. But, at 7 p.m., restaurants were still offering early bird menus to the few young backpackers who wandered the cobbled streets like lost chickens.

  ‘I’ll bring it over,’ the man behind the counter said, and when he did it was warm but not hot, like I think a latte ought to be. I didn’t have the courage to challenge him. And it’s funny the way anxiety can build from that single thread into a great tapestry of negative emotion. I felt like any countryman feels on the sophisticated streets of a city; like an elderly gobshite. Public affection, kissing on the street, wandering aimlessly, sucking ice creams, sitting on steps or rolling loose cigarettes are all activities we associate with young people. It’s just never something older people do. It’s as if the high streets and shopping centres and culture quarter of modern cities are the playgrounds of late-developing adolescents. And it’s no place for old men. And I felt I should not have brought my leggings and rain gear. I looked like a fisherman from the windy end of Killybegs. And when I tried to take the gear off, I felt everyone was staring as if I was undressing. So I sipped the cold latte and already felt a kind of defeat spreading across my skin.

  Not that anyone was looking at me. They were far too interested in each other. In fact older people are invisible to the young. I was just experiencing the straightjacket of self-obsession that people get trapped in when depression is overwhelming them. When it becomes acute, some people can’t go out the door. They don’t want to be seen. They can’t walk down a street. They think everyone is looking at them.

  I even debated with myself about whether or not I was in the right mood for theatre. I might run into people I didn’t want to speak with or people I knew who would look at me and see how I have deteriorated. So perhaps I shouldn’t go. Perhaps I should flee back to the hotel.

  When I looked out the window, I saw young Italian students with soft skin and dark olive eyes in furry anoraks holding each other. I saw a circle of tall Spanish girls, chattering like wild flamingos, their long noses like beaks, and enormous Picasso eyes darting here and there, and I saw a few drunk boys sheltering under the canopy of an Italian restaurant, gawking with the confused lust of meerkats. Not one of those people could care that I existed. And if I had been still suffering from depression, all this would have triggered an irrational panic, a fear that if I was to step onto that street every eye would turn to judge me in some negative way. But not any longer. I was a man who had been healed. A man who was on a spiritual journey.

  So I went to the play despite my inhibitions, and it was beautiful. I cried all through it and when it was over, I wanted to go up and hug the actors. But that’s where I drew the line. After all, I didn’t know them very well.

  And the one I might have hugged wasn’t there; she was in a far country drinking vodka or sleeping soundly in her little cot in some tiny but warm room in the middle of Warsaw, while outside her window it was probably snowing. And I was alone in a strange crowd wrapped in the unpleasant delusion that the entire world might be out to get me. I slipped out of the theatre and stood on the street trying to get into my rain gear, and the texture of the raincoat made me feel like an insect in its shell.

  I walked for forty minutes down Baggot Street, into Ballsbridge and towards the security of my hotel bedroom where I watched Tonight With Vincent Browne on the television. He was talking about the economy with a panel of academic and political experts. Two university professors with baggy cream jackets, PhDs in Economics and flamboyant neckties were pouring scorn on the stupidity of Irish politicians. And two politicians, a woman with alarmingly red lips and a boyish TD with red hair, big ears and a suit that was far too small for him were both grinning. They stuck out their chins and smiled as if they were enduring bad wind.

  The politics didn’t interest me and I began to regret leaving the theatre so soon. Perhaps I should have gone for a drink with some of the cast. Perhaps I might have met some amazing young actress. She might have said, ‘Do I know you?’

  And I would have feigned false modesty and said, ‘Oh, I don’t think so. I don’t live in Dublin anymore.’

  And she would have said, ‘Are you a writer?’

  I would have maintained my façade of humility hoping that if I hung around long enough she might drink too much and then throw herself at me. On the other hand, I might have met some beautiful woman who seemed interested in me until she addressed me by another name and it would dawn on me that she thought I was someone else. I hate it when someone says, ‘I love your work,’ and then after two or three drinks you realise they have mistaken you for another writer. So maybe I was right to leave the theatre, I told myself. Maybe I am always right to shun the public world, because it never works out. I am condemned to a life of solitary confinement with a television set.

  I suppose everyone has bad nights like that, when we are overpowered by a voice harassing us from the mirror. ‘You stupid gobshite,’ the voice says as we look at ourselves in bleak wonderment. That’s what was happening. The black psychic dog within me was awake again. The cesspool of negative emotion that I personified as my own private Dracula and who sucked all energy out of my soul had returned. The negative voice, the talking fish, was coming my way, like a big pike through the muddy water with its teeth bared.

  Once upon a time, there was an old priest in Cork. He suffered from low self-esteem. He got stressed when he had to preside at First Holy Communions. But one year, his parish was chosen to lead the Corpus Christi procession through the city. Hundreds of thousands of devout onlookers lined the streets as the procession passed. There were bands in uniform, and women in white veils, and children with baskets of rose petals, and choirs singing hymns, and at the centre of it all was the golden canopy, held by four posts firmly in the hands of four members of An Garda Síochána, and, under the canopy, the little priest held the monstrance wherein the sacred presence of God is made manifest in the white wafer host. This tiny piece of bread is the dramatic focal point of the entire Corpus Christi procession, and the old priest was terrified that he might let the monstrance slip. He clutched it ferociously and stepped carefully forward to the beat of a drum. And then suddenly the curate came rushing to his side and whispered in his ear, ‘We forgot to put the host in the monstrance.’

  The old priest winced. ‘Fuck it,’ he hissed, ‘we always forget something.’

  At least I woke up sober. I showered at 8 a.m. and went for another walk into town. All my negativity of the previous night was forgotten. As if it had never happened. As if it had was someone else’s life. And I felt alive. Joyful. Exuberant. I could hardly contain myself as I cracked the shell of my boiled egg at breakfast in the dining room. I couldn’t resist a second egg, and then pancakes. I thanked the young Lithuanian girl who served me coffee as if I had just been married to her the day before and was overwhelmed to see her so radiant on the first fine morning of our honeymoon. It was going to be a wonderful day.

  At that moment, I felt especially delighted to know that the beloved was safely embedded in Warsaw and I had before me six weeks of solitude in which to drill into my deep unconscious, to examine the core of my psyche, to meditate myself into some great transcendent state of bliss in the hills above Lough Allen. But not before a walk into the city.

  So I walked as far as the Apple store near Grafton Street because I needed a new charger for my phone and then I went up to Stephen’s Green, where I sat on a seat watching a high-booted woman in a snug black coat having a video chat on her phone with someone in Spain. At least I think it was Spain because she was speaking Spanish. It might have been Mexico or Thailand for all I know. But I knew enough about Buddhism to realise that she and I were one. W
e were the one being. We shared a single core. Even the person in Mexico that was chatting to her in Spanish was just another part of the one we all were. The high-booted woman had raven-black hair, but nonetheless she could be a child of mine. She could be my mother. How wonderful that we were all so connected! As my therapist might have said, I was getting over-excited.

  I treated myself to a pastry on Baggot Street.

  ‘Would you like jam or cream with your scone?’ she asked me.

  ‘Could I have both?’ I wondered.

  ‘Of course,’ she said, and jotted something on the notepad that was slung from the belt around her waist.

  ‘Would you like it hot?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The scone.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Hot. I like it hot.’

  And it came hot, with cream, and the coffee was hot.

  Then a woman came in with a buggy. She had three children clinging to it and she struggled to negotiate her way around the tables. There was only one table free and it was beside me. She reached it and lifted an infant from the buggy. She put the three children around the empty table with the buggy and then she sat down at my table.

  ‘Do you mind if I sit here for a minute?’ she asked.

  She was about thirty-five, blue-eyed and had blonde hair as straight and clean as someone on Scandinavian television.

  She ordered three fresh fruit drinks and a coffee for herself. And I was beginning to fantasise. She might have a very busy day ahead. Walking the two big ones to their school. Walking the little one to a crèche. Walking around the streets for hours with a baby in the buggy, shopping just to pass the time before returning to the crèche.

  ‘Isn’t it a lovely morning!’ I declared, even though the strands of her blonde hair hanging over her nose were wet from the drizzle.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, looking at me for the first time, with a certain curiosity.