vi
It is almost evening. She has not come. The old woman has lit the wax candle and has placed it in the window. It gives off a thin line of smoke which lifts up and snakes above us. The old man reaches out for his wife's hand and she looks directly at him and then at me, says something quietly and tries to laugh. But she is upset, I can see this now.
Something is happening. Something in the air moves around me, in the grainy darkness. A sensation on the back of my neck, as if someone has entered the room. The candle becomes a beacon, and the smoke becomes a fog, a fog that has enveloped the world, enshrouding all those close to us, and the reflection of the candle in the window draws me in, a slight dizziness at the bridge of my nose, the smoke, the empty street in the window, a single candle... The flame climbs up, illuminating our stillness, our stark expressions. I feel myself falling, my head spinning... The old woman is not looking. She is quietly weeping. I know now, without any doubt, it wasn't my loneliness at the door. This day was not meant for me. The invitation was not meant for me at all, but for her. I have slipped forward, my elbows on my knees and my head in my hands. I have come with nothing. I am a messenger with no message. Did they think she was with me all the time? Did they think I would bring her to them? They have no idea - about me, about her, about what happened... They have no idea where their only daughter is, even on this her name day.
I lift up my head to look at them. I have killed no ghosts, if anything I've only stirred up new ones, deep inside me, inside the chambers I have chosen to disregard, my very real past. Only now do I recognise the similarity, these two old souls, the pre-occupied expressions, more - the hope in the faces of this gentle couple. They are here in the darkness, staring back at me, waiting for me. They have old faces but do not come near. They are calling me by my name and I want to run to them. These ghosts are my own parents.
I can't stand the morbid atmosphere of this room any longer, I must leave now, must get some air... I stand, make to pick up my things and she rises, startled, I can't be going? But nothing could stop me now. I make for the door. But even before I am out of the room Anna's mother has embraced me. In her arms I can feel a lifetime of waiting, a burden which fills me with despair, compounding my impulse to flee, to break away from all this. But I don't. I stay in the clinch. Her fleshy arms are strong. I'm sorry, I say, I didn't realise, but they don't understand me. As I turn to go Anna's mother is wiping her eyes, Anna's father walks up slowly behind me and puts his hand on my shoulder - as if he is comforting me. How can this be?
Breathing hard, exhausted, I sit down by a tree, light up a much needed cigarette and look out over the skeletal figures towards the Great Plain. This Great nothing, where everything lies buried. Something like a running film is going on in my head - it is not Anna, it is a bar-room, smoke rising about the stout, Christie Moore rousing the rebels from the back, someone I recognise looking in from the window, the half-fire in the corner where old Soap sits, crackling, throwing out its sparks... It wasn't even as if we were sure, Mary and me. She said it could have been stress, or her diet. We didn't know, but she went and told him anyway. Family! She said she didn't drop any names, just one of the dead. And not old Soap either. So on my eighteenth birthday I was on that boat heading for the 'Pool and a BA in Musicology with some Philosophy thrown in. Never to return to find out... Maybe now she's got a bonny fifteen-year-old baby sitting next to her on another barstool in another town? Maybe the Queen of Spades was given over to phantoms, being the Black Castle and all? I took a liking to the movements of the ferry just the same. I took a liking to riding the waves, the slap of a more robust wind in my face, and after graduating took a bigger boat still from the other side, from the south, thinking, there's no way I'm ever going back. No more Black Castles. No more Black Knights. No more Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary's...
I am thinking of the home that would have been, the crack of the early evenings, the meetings in the TV lounge at the Golf Links, the sitting round the telly waiting for I Don't Like Mondays with Joe and cousin Jimmy showing their teeth and dropping their heads like Geldof, ahhing the way he does at the end, pushing each other aside. I am thinking of the way only Wicklow girls look at you, those dark eyes with their mocking 'nothing's getting past these' effrontery, the Sunday lunchtime drink, everyone looking out of joint, slow and reflective, and outside, that endless net of drizzle... The folk of Coynes Cross who came to town, they were my family. What must they be thinking now, I wonder, of that hot-headed egit who's kept them guessing all these years? And Uncle Mick, Soap, the gang from the Bridge Tavern, Fish, Mary? What did she ever do, that dark-eyed Mary? What was it we did?
I push my cigarette into the root. I know what it is I'm hearing - the blast of someone shouting back at me. It is my own voice. Didn't I run away just like her - just like Anna? Didn't I disappear too? Only no-one ever chased after me. No-one ever drove half-way across the world to tell me they missed me - that they missed me. And what of going back? What of that, I ask? Wouldn't I be cursed to the last drop? Wouldn't they call me for everything, clip my ear, my wings? Shake their heads in my face for abandoning the lot of them?
I stand. My legs seem unsure of themselves. The sun is almost down. I must go. Part of me would have stopped a moment longer, for the blaze over the farmsteads and wheat-fields is truly beautiful. But I am dizzy with voices. I seem to be both standing and not standing. There's a farm building down below, with dark, moth-like figures running about. Smoke from a chimney, drifting above the place as if it had nowhere to go. A foal is gingerly approaching its mother. My own mother must have grown up in such a place as this. Her six brothers and sisters, all of them together on that small piece of land, Coynes Cross. Six miles to school, seven coming back... And my mind flits to another scene, a philosophy lecture in Liverpool, the capital of Ireland, it is said, perhaps I am the very fly in Wittgenstein's fly-jar - the one which kills itself looking for the way out, trying to fly through the glass it cannot see or understand... doesn't it know that all it need do is turn around and fly out the way it came, to retrace its path? So clucks the professor as he adjusts his spectacles. It doesn't think! But you see, soft chuckles, it has no time to lose, it knows very well, does it not? that in a matter of hours it will be dead! What though, is the glass supposed to represent? was the question we were posed. What is the glass to us? I think now I might be able to answer that fresh-faced, white-haired prof. - perhaps nothing but the unseen, yet fully material reflection of man's misery at facing himself. Glass, transparent, liquid container of flies! And Wittgenstein himself? His life's work brought him to this: Philosophy leaves the world untouched! Your self-made riddles cannot be resolved, only dissolved! Turn back! Go out the way you came! And off he goes, Wittgenstein the comedian, to take his place in the front row, laughing loudly as the Indjuns swoop down across some other burning, make-believe prairie...
The edge of the world is alight. Long shadows stretch out across the gilded fields. I can't see the centre of the village, though I can sense well enough its empty rapture at another day passed. These people have families too, scattered everywhere, why do they live so remotely? I recall the words of the woman at the gate and of Anna's mother, Isten hozott - God has sent you. Jeez, just look where God has sent me! Well now the devil is sending me back again, to the alleys and bars that would tie me up, to where Fides' miseries are not hidden quite so meticulously - back to the city.
I set off towards the wagon, scanning across this huge expanse with all its hidden activity, all its hidden lives, and I see them again - Anna's parents - sitting quietly, sorrowfully in the light of a single candle, its wax - its very body - spilling over into the darkness, cooling, hardening. As I fumble for the keys I notice my fingers doing a little jig. I can't pick out the key. Here's the wagon. But my feet don't take me to the door... Cool metal against my face. I am mortally weary, but my eyes are busy, searching for traces of her, my one-time friend, inside of me. Is she there? I set her face against the sky, against the world, alas
her features will not be still, resisting my mind's possession of her. Even now. A long moment hangs between us, and it comes at last... the late evening sun, staring back towards me as it dips into the earth, causing my eyes to water...
I can't explain. I can never explain, because in that moment's release, I feel a hand on my shoulder, no more for you son, the touch of someone's lips on my forehead, wake up birthday boy, three-pint wonder you! I recognise the voice of my mother, soft Wicklow tones, hard humour. As I lean like some drunk against the side of this piece of scrap metal, liquid fire is spilling from my eyes...
vii
The sun has long since set, yet the fields seem still to be burning. White smoke rises casually over the homestead, its inhabitants, shadowy figures no larger than flies are all safely gathered inside. A man is standing, holding a wagon in his hands, a light breeze upsetting his hair; he is steeling himself for a drive he doesn't want to make. The end of the journey takes him back to the beginning. He knows there was never anything there. He opens his eyes (they had never closed), he awakens - the ghost in the machine is there to greet him, so too is the fly in the fly-jar, the past and the particle, fusing.
He makes to turn back.
It is entirely imaginary, his past. They are entirely hidden, his actions, his freedom. He is not searching the mountain slopes for a path that would lead him back, he is scanning the fields for a glimpse of those wild, crazy-wild black horses. He is not wiping the windscreen with the back of his hand (you have had no sleep, the glass whispers), he is reaching out across a sheet, patchwork-blue it appears, and darkening like the night. They are not reflected in the mirror before him, though he feels them well enough, too short a measure of kiskutya burning his gullet, golden strands of hair on his lips, his tongue...
***
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‘Kiskutya – A Musician’s Tale’ was originally entitled Black Horses and is taken from a larger collection of 28 stories by the same author entitled Krakow Stories. Please buy a copy of the book and help keep this impossibly optimistic writer – who is currently abiding under a bridge with his Hungarian dictionary – in good spirits!
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