Hanging with the Elephant

by Harding, Michael

  ‘No,’ she said, cringing at the question, ‘I’m not your mother.’

  ‘Well, that’s all clear,’ I said.

  It was that time of the night. And half the whiskey was gone; too late for her to leave and too late to continue trying to make serious conversation. So I insisted. It was the only safe thing to do.

  ‘We must eat,’ I declared.

  ‘Are you thick?’ she said. ‘Ghosts don’t eat.’

  ‘You’re not a ghost,’ I replied.

  ‘I’m your fantasy.’

  ‘No. You’re a messenger; that’s what you are,’ I said.

  Nevertheless, we went to the kitchen. I found beers in the fridge. She sat on a high stool and I clattered around the worktop with various pots and pans.

  ‘Do you know,’ I said, ‘that there is a difference between solitude and silence? Silence is OK, it exists as a deep space in the human heart. You can share silence with another person; it’s the emptiness in an atom, it’s like the benign core of everything. It’s the space between the notes that makes the notes beautiful. But solitude on the other hand is a prison of one’s own making. Solitude is having no one. And I have been falling into solitude. I have been locked in that solitude since my wife left. Not silence. No. I am here in solitude and have become so cold and treacherous that I needed someone to turn up. And so here you are. But now I’m worried that even you being here won’t break the bond of my solitude. You’re just part of me, and both of us are here together in some terribly lonely embrace.’

  I was staring at her beautiful young body and she looked a bit uneasy.

  ‘Forgive me,’ I said. ‘I get over-excited. Did you ever hear the mind described as an unruly elephant? Well, mine is an unruly horse. I have a treacherous horse. I mean a treacherous heart. It clings to people and places, and sometimes I mistake these attachments for happiness.’

  She started looking at the clock on the wall.

  ‘When I was depressed, I used to play the flute. That sustained me for years. And, more recently, I have been cooking. Which is why we are here in the kitchen. Because I’m going to do pancakes.’

  ‘For God’s sake don’t do pancakes,’ she said suddenly. ‘Make an apple tart.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Apple tart is safer. If you do pancakes, you’ll set the place on fire – and probably poison yourself.’

  ‘OK.’

  And so I made an apple tart for the beautiful young woman.

  ‘For me, cooking is a way of mending the broken world,’ I said. ‘An alchemy that makes a little bit of the universe OK.’

  ‘You are very drunk,’ she said, after I had slapped a quick pastry together and wrapped it around a few chopped apples and flung it in the oven on a baking tray where the tart oozed apple juice while I leaned over the worktop and polished off every beer in the fridge.

  ‘I am brooding on my mother’s death, Simone,’ I confessed. ‘I am lamenting. That’s why I am so sour.’ And she seemed to understand.

  My mother went sour. ‘I’ll be carried out of here in a box,’ she used to say defiantly about her house, as if being human meant remaining there to the bitter end. But she wasn’t carried out in a box. She was wheeled out to a nursing home. And yet, in another sense, she never left. I might as well have tried to dig her out from under the floorboards, because her spirit was so embedded in the foundations, the walls and the ceilings that she couldn’t be moved. And her shadow fell on every door handle and on the backs of the chairs and on every little ornament. And the sound of her hand was in the creaking doors, and the tick and tock of the switches from the hot press to the central heating.

  And she said that she didn’t know what would happen to the place when she was gone. As if it existed for her and was so entwined in her psychic presence that it might turn to dust or air when she passed away. As if it might crumble. As if her consciousness was holding the slates intact on the roof. She had scrubbed the floors so often. Washed and painted the bathroom walls so often, and changed the crockery in the dining room china cabinet so very, very often. And she had made new covers for the sofas, and wove eiderdowns, and hung pictures, and sewed lining into the velvet curtains. And in December every year she scoured the kitchen cupboards. There were sheepskin rugs on every floor that she had stretched on frames in the back yard and cleaned the guts and gristle off herself, with porous stone reddening her knuckles.

  One day when I was a child, Granny had come to the house to watch the Vatican Council on the television. Granny had her knitting with her, and I took up the needles and was trying to pass a stitch from one needle to the other, and Granny said, ‘Stop that!’ There was thunder and lightning outside and she feared that the stainless steel needles might conduct electricity from the sky down into my fingers. At least that’s what she told me. I knew that if lightning struck it was more likely to strike the television aerial and blow up the Vatican Council on the screen, but I said nothing. And I suspect the needles were plastic and that Granny was making it up. But she certainly ruined my chances to develop an interest in knitting. And maybe that too is what she was up to, because boys didn’t knit many jumpers back then.

  I remember in the nursing home one day, I noticed an old lady knitting, the way Granny used to, and she was keeping a close eye on Mother, so that I imagined she was a guardian angel, knitting a scarf to pass the time.

  Then the old woman put down her needles and said to me that she had been up half the night. ‘If I’m depressed or can’t sleep,’ she explained, ‘I knit. It takes my mind off other things.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Mother said, staring out the window.

  There was another woman in the nursing home who had a child’s doll. And she hugged it day and night. And a stout and cheerful woman, who spent all her waking hours in a wheelchair, sang ‘The Old Bog Road’ at Mother’s ninety-fifth birthday party. We had afternoon tea, and a cake, and a man played the accordion. And then all together we sang ‘The Old Bog Road’.

  I too am getting old now. Drifting into an uncertain future where I’ll soon be lighting the fire with difficulty, like all those old men in my youth who used to sit in the corner of their kitchens, grunting every time they moved. Back then, old people wore black and passed the time rolling up newspapers into firelighters or dangling string in front of cats or minding grandchildren from falling into the fire. But then the Celtic Tiger arrived, and everyone got jobs, and money emptied all the houses. People became oppressed by mortgages and they couldn’t stay at home and so the old folks went off to nursing homes where they could sit in the day room and dream, knit or hug their little dolls.

  So eventually my mother died. At ninety-six. At long last. And I’d go to her house in Cavan during those months after the funeral and look out at the wilderness in the back garden; the white lilac tree growing sideways so that it was impossible to get to the clothesline, the ivy breaking through the galvanised roof as it squeezed the garage to death. The evergreen trees had grown high and scrawny and up through the electricity wires. The phone line was broken and straggled through the grass from the post to the wall of the house. I asked myself, is that the way she would want it?

  Like this?

  No. She would never have tolerated a garden so wild. And yet she herself was wild. In my psyche, she had become a devouring wolf and her teeth still ripped the meat from my bones every night when I lay down to dream in the huge double bed where she first imagined me.

  ‘You’re crying,’ Simone Weil said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘because she banished me in some way that I can’t quite understand. And I miss her.’

  ‘Go easy on the whiskey,’ she said. I had almost finished the bottle.

  ‘She hunted me away from the fireplace, she flung me into the dark. And I crave to be held by her, or to be held by my eternal mother, by Christ’s mother, or by some angel or demon mother. To be held by my beautiful perfect mother who used to come betimes in unexpected visitations, but who comes now no more.’ />
  ‘You are, how you say, off the wall,’ Simone exclaimed. ‘You need to chill.’

  She was boiling a kettle.

  ‘What’s that for?’ I wondered.

  ‘Coffee,’ she said.

  ‘Listen to me,’ I said. ‘Listen to me.’

  And I think that’s where everything went black. I lost track of things. Simone Weil went away and I went to bed.

  But I didn’t sleep. In the middle of the night, I woke with a pain in my stomach and I went roaming the house to see what damage I had done. One cut-glass beaker was broken. Tea was spilled everywhere. The empty whiskey bottle was on the floor in the kitchen. The cat was finishing the last of the apple tart and I pushed her away, because I think it was the uncooked pastry that had ruined me. My belly felt tight and rock hard. My stomach was distended and my skin was on fire.

  In the front room, the fire had gone out. There was a north wind rattling the ivy against the windowpane and the sky had opened to the stars. The house felt like a fridge but of course I was only wearing pyjama bottoms. I went to the bathroom to piss and I could sense my toes going numb on the tiles. I tried to scratch the side of my leg while I was urinating and then dribbled piss on my pyjama leg.

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ I roared in a rage, and I vowed to give up alcohol for ever.

  I went back to the bedroom and lay awake, listening to the wind and waiting for the morning light.

  When it came, my stomach was still sore, I had a headache and my cheeks were hot. I spent a few disturbing moments in the toilet, but by lunchtime I was well enough to go to the Gala store in Drumshanbo. I got a take-out stew and returned to the house, where I ate it in the kitchen like a child, with a soup spoon, and threw the apple tart in the bin.

  Later that evening, Nellie Finlay arrived. Not an angel or a demon or a mystic philosopher in a black dress, and certainly not the misty-eyed mother of any Christ. Just Nellie, my mother, the visual memory of an ordinary woman. She rose up out of the floor with powerful intensity, a frail little lady, who had sat in that same kitchen years earlier, watching Christmas mass on the television, her lips moving silently as the Pope of Rome intoned his blessing to the world.

  I lit the fire in the front room. I got a blaze of coal roaring up the chimney and I turned on the television to watch another episode of Girls. But Girls was empty now. It was the chair across from me that gripped my attention. I stared at it, remembering her. A woman whose heart I had never quite reached. At least I could hold her there for a little longer, before every bit of her dissolved for ever.

  I KNOW THAT there are no ghosts in the modern world – I suppose it may have been electric light that finished them off – but maybe there are angels. Because I did get a fright when I went to Cavan to stay in my mother’s house not long after she had died.

  It was All Soul’s Eve. Maybe that’s why I imagined I saw something. At first, it was just a queasy feeling. I just hadn’t the stomach to go inside the house. It was late afternoon. The darkness was seeping out of the trees and the earth and enveloping the house, and the house looked bleak. I glanced at the upstairs windows and thought I saw someone standing there behind the curtain. Thought I saw the curtain move. I felt someone was looking at me. And then the curtain moved again and I was certain I saw a hand. I stood on the roadside looking at the dead windows, as inviting as empty eye sockets, and the grass growing on the roof, and the crows cawing from the chimney tops. It was the end of November. The evening was getting darker. Perhaps things will look better in the morning, I thought.

  So I booked into a hotel in town and, the following day, I was out early. I found a small Gala shop with a café, close to the bus terminal beside the bridge, that served breakfast rolls to the early birds, though there were no queues now; no men in yellow jackets or work boots covered with yesterday’s cement any more. The young woman behind the counter used to know them all by name, but she told me that they were probably all gone back to Poland since the economy collapsed.

  I got talking to a slim girl in an anorak with a rucksack, sipping coffee by the window and toying with her scarf. Her father had left her to the bus station. She was a student at the College of Art and had missed the bus because she was combing her hair in the station washroom. So she decided to eat before heading off to hitch a lift.

  ‘What bus did you miss?’ I enquired.

  ‘The Donegal–Dublin Express,’ she said. ‘It stops in Cavan.’

  She didn’t have to tell me that. When I was young I was familiar with all the buses in Cavan that went to Longford and Granard, and stopped in small towns like Crossdoney or Killeshandra, and at every laneway where some woman with a string shopping bag wanted to get off.

  But one day in the yard of our primary school, an academy on a hill just above the bus station, the rumour went around that Cavan was getting ‘an express’. I didn’t know what ‘an express’ was. I thought it might be a press, like the things in the kitchen where Mammy hid the fig rolls.

  ‘Oh, no,’ a senior boy explained in the schoolyard. ‘The express is a new type of bus. It’s like a train. It doesn’t stop anywhere and it will go all the way from Dublin to Donegal. In fact, the only place it will stop is Cavan, so that they can cool the engine and people can go to the toilet. It won’t even stop in Navan,’ he added gleefully. He was a real encyclopaedia.

  In those days, there were still boys who wore dickie-bows and little grey suits at school to distinguish them from the lower classes. Nobody knew what an express looked like and we wondered why it would be called ‘an express’. Once again, it was one of the posh boys who enlightened us.

  ‘The express is not its name,’ he said, sneering at us. ‘In fact my daddy says it’s going to be called the Cú-Uladh. It’s named after Cú Chulainn’s dog, who was quite a fast dog.’ Smart boys were smart because they had parents who knew interesting things and they always started sentences with phrases like, ‘My daddy says …’

  I was very proud of this bus to Dublin. It assured me that Cavan was on the world map and that I lived in a place of significance.

  ‘It was called the Cú-Uladh,’ I said to the girl with the scarf.

  She had never heard it called that. But then she’s from another generation. And it is unlikely that we would have spoken to each other at any other time of the day. She would be trapped in her own little world and I would be trapped in mine. A young woman and a middle-aged man is a poisonous cocktail, according to the ancestors. Though in the darkness before dawn, we were only shadows, and the other tables were occupied so the possibility arose for each of us to escape our restricted worlds and have a little chat.

  ‘I’ve seen you before,’ she said. ‘Are you from Cavan?’

  ‘Yes, I grew up on Farnham Road,’ I explained.

  The dregs of her coffee remained in a plastic cup on the table between us.

  ‘I hate this time of year,’ she said, hugging the cup with both hands, and gazing sideways out the window at a taxi man having an argument with a suitcase.

  ‘And I hate waiting for buses,’ she added. ‘So I better head off and hitch.’

  ‘I’m always waiting,’ I said.

  ‘What? For the bus?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘For nothing in particular. I wait for letters a lot of the time. And I wait for the phone to ring. And I wait for good news that I always believe is just around the corner. In fact, one of the pleasures of being a writer,’ I said, ‘is that I get lots of time to wait.’

  ‘You’re up early,’ she said. ‘I thought writers lay in bed all day, with hangovers from the night before.’

  I said, ‘That’s a tourist’s idea of writers.’ She was fidgeting again with the scarf around her neck.

  ‘I better go,’ she said.

  But there was something sad about her. As if she was missing someone.

  ‘The mornings are getting very dark,’ she said, as she sighed and looked out the window. ‘I don’t like the dark.’

  You can’t tell now
adays if young people know anything about religion, so I didn’t bother telling her that such mornings remind me of the days when I was an altar boy, my nostrils alert to candle wax and my belly rolling with hunger in anticipation of a good breakfast after mass. Days when old men and women shuffled into their pews or muttered prayers to the Virgin Mary on the side altar so loudly that all their anxieties rattled around the painted ceilings. That might have been too much information for a young woman in these secular times. So I asked her if she would like me ‘to freshen her coffee’, a phrase I first learned from waitresses in American diners.

  If I had said, ‘Do you want another coffee?’, she might have said no. But the phrase made her smile. And then it dawned on me that she might not refuse a breakfast either.

  ‘Can I treat you to a full Irish?’ I wondered. ‘It might help you if you’re hitching.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘But really, I’m OK.’

  ‘It’s a very dark morning,’ I persisted. ‘Forecast says we might even have snow later.’

  ‘OK,’ she said, and smiled.

  And when I returned with two breakfasts on a tray, she had taken out a book with ‘Business Management’ written on the front cover. I reminded myself of advice I once heard from a Japanese actor in Paris.

  Only a young man should play the role of suitor. Older men ought to seek rewards by playing the wise uncle.

  So I ate my sausage and pudding and spoke as softly and wisely as I could, declaring that a happy life sometimes depends on embracing the dark.

  ‘Enjoy these short days!’ I said. ‘Enjoy the cold wind, and the flames in the fire, and the promise of snow!’

  ‘Are you mad?’ she asked, with the affection that only Cavan people can give that question.

  ‘I’m from out the road,’ I said, which explained everything.

  Her eyes lit up and she said that there was one thing she had loved about early mornings when she was a child.

  ‘My mother used to make pancakes,’ she said. ‘I used to love that.’