The Ikon Maker

by Desmond Hogan

  Nothing would pass between herself and her son. They’d say goodnight, sleep maybe, as thunder passed over, or sleet, and in the morning, cabbages frozen, Diarmaid would trek off to the station at Woodlawn, to attend school in Ballinasloe.

  Sometimes she worried lest he tired of this procedure. He wasn’t very good at school; his marks were just about average. He was good maybe at biology and sometimes he scored high marks in art. But that was all. She wanted to do better for him, seek a better position for him.

  She wished she had enough money to place him as a boarder at school. Then – almost by God’s volition – she won the Sweep. That’s what people said though it was only five hundred pounds she got.

  But enough at the end of a dark and endless summer to send Diarmaid to school, a boarder.

  A local man drove him there. Saint Ignatius’ statue looked forbidding, a jackdaw stood on his shoulders.

  Ladies left their children there; all talking. Nobody spoke to her, Mrs O’Hallrahan. Nobody knew her.

  Diarmaid took a last look at her before he disappeared and somehow she knew she’d betrayed him.

  Her business did well that autumn; it flourished. More people were wearing neater, happier clothes.

  She was busy. Yet she was lonely and in the evenings went for a drink. A thing she’d never done before. She’d sit and listen to people talk about neighbours’ wives.

  Apparently there were fewer virgins in the district, more adulteries. And television too, it had its effect.

  People said nothing while Ironside, a programme about an American cripple, was on. Talk only began during the news. They spoke of Mrs Broderick who was seeing a young dental student in Ballinasloe, or Mrs Kelly who was seen at night with Mr Chapman, an English gentleman come to live in a big house where he played a piano in summer on the front lawn.

  And when the late news would start up – and images emerge of war, war in Vietnam, the Middle East, North of Ireland – she could only feel shame.

  Somehow she knew she’d left Diarmaid to perish; a loner by nature, he could only become more alone in the nights at school.

  But over the year as she visited him she saw him moving towards another boy, Derek. A little fellow from Leitrim, older than Diarmaid, moon-faced. Freckles lay on his forehead like fish. He was Diarmaid’s friend, a companion at art class. Together they knocked about. Hands in their pockets, journeys before them through the woods – they made off from teasing boys.

  Susan usually found Diarmaid beside a stuffed pheasant; bread hung in the air, Holy Communion wafers, stale loaves of lunchtime.

  Diarmaid was shy of her. His face held a skeleton of displeasure – he was totally enamoured of Derek.

  Twice, she’d watch them shy away from her, the two of them off before she left, her bag empty, having brought Cadbury’s chocolates and glucose for her baby.

  The morning, February the second, she marched past the mirror preparing for Ballinasloe, the train there.

  Her bust was large and healthy.

  It reminded her of bucketfuls of something. Chaotic patterns on her dress, urinal shapes.

  White on black. Her hair was loud and black; a tiny bit of grey fluff there, earrings. Silver.

  Her husband’s presents. They’d been on her for years. Ever since she’d seen a bomb drop on Leicester Square, 1942. She’d been walking alone away from a coffee shop where she’d been watching a Cockney who looked like Adolf Hitler. The bomb dropped, flesh screamed, a tree burned like a frantic dancer. People ran, screamed, but she froze. As though into a gesture which accomplished her life. She felt no fear. Her stance was quiet, unchaotic.

  Stolid, she watched a woman run with a child’s foot in a tiny strapless shoe. It was an image she wouldn’t forget. Silently she watched. Blood marked the top of the foot and she thought of Shirley Temple singing ‘The Good Ship Lollipop’.

  Paddy McCarthy called at eleven o’clock. He was going to drive her to Ballinasloe.

  ‘Hello.’

  Sunlight caught the windshield, penetrated it. Blue.

  ‘Nice day.’

  ‘It is.’

  They made off. Past a tinker encampment. A woman wandered with a child and to Susan she looked like an Apache in a film.

  A dog barked morosely at them – bitten.

  A horse sauntered.

  Susan waved at the tinker woman and Paddy McCarthy looked at her as though she were mad.

  ‘Terrible goings-on in Belfast.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Susan sighed. ‘It’s a troubled country.’

  ‘What’ll happen next?’

  ‘Murder,’ Susan said distantly. ‘Murder.’ And the word sounded like a Dashiell Hammett story. She said it with the reluctance of a star in a 1940s film.

  ‘That Paisley is a cagey divil,’ Paddy said. ‘We don’t hear much of him these days. He’s up to something.’

  ‘No,’ Susan said, ‘he’s not. His day is over. There’ll be others now.’

  And just as she said it she remembered that the previous evening on television Paisley’s image had floated.

  A gull careered down. ‘Paddy, this country is mad. Murder upon murder. Thirteen dead in Derry, the British Embassy burned down and bombings and that Faulkner fellow. They’re selling out. Rats,’ she said simply. ‘Rats.’

  Later. ‘I don’t hold a man’s politics against him, but when I see the young die that’s the end. There can be a million Paisleys and a million Faulkners but can they not realize there’s death in store for those that’s fallen. The young die. Like hound-dogs. So many die.

  They could fill busloads with them. Busloads.’

  And in her mind – frantically – a dream returned. All the dead of Derry and Belfast piled into a bus, skeletons with ties and hats on them. ‘I wish they’d all shut up.’

  ‘That Devlin one’s a whore,’ Paddy McCarthy said.

  ‘A whore.’

  ‘Having a baby.’

  ‘I wouldn’t hold that against her.’

  And realizing the conversation was getting nowhere she changed the subject – but not before she caught sight of bombing news from the North. A news-sheet outside a shop in Aughrim. It looked old, the news-sheet.

  Signs of rain on it. But it bore something of Ireland’s tragedy.

  Suppressed. All over the land now was an eating sense of grief since the calamity in Derry earlier in the year.

  And because gulls hovered over the bodies that day – it had been shown – gulls brought back the television images to Susan. The Blitz.

  A nun passed them outside Ballinasloe.

  She knew nothing of unrest. This was obvious.

  Yet Susan felt Ireland’s turmoil so strongly now.

  All the messages. Ulster Protestants rising, gangs beginning.

  They careered down a hill in Ballinasloe.

  Past a hospital.

  And the North was forgotten. Susan remembered she was about to see her son.

  Guns and internment camps were far away.

  The fair green slouched past.

  This was middle-class Ireland after all.

  Diarmaid. Her son’s name excited her.

  She welcomed the idea of him in his anorak.

  And was involuntarily reminded of Bernadette Devlin as she looked, a young girl civil-rights worker before she became famous.

  5

  The platform was bare, neglected figures stood there.

  Again a nun, her eyes behind spectacles. Beady. Beautiful. She had the qualities of her race.

  A poster benignly advertised France. Brittany. Mont Saint-Michel; shore-line slithering towards a castle.

  Susan waited. Fear showed on her face. She didn’t know what she was frightened of. Her eyes stared out.

  Like someone waiting for news of something.

  The train came. No one emerged at first. Then an old lady. That was all.

  Then a young man with glasses.

  And a very preoccupied face. Diarmaid did not turn up. Susan turned away. Fea
r built up. She wasn’t crying. Trembling took over.

  She looked back at the station. Silently she cursed the disappearing end of the train.

  And then realized Paddy McCarthy was watching.

  ‘He must have missed the train.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Paddy. She entered the car. Quietly a woman passed, head down. She saw the sunlight glare on the tracks.

  ‘I’ll come back tomorrow,’ she vowed. ‘He’ll be on tomorrow’s train.’

  That night she drank Guinness, watched television. Brian Faulkner was being interviewed. Mrs Conlon was knitting a blue jumper for a niece in Australia. Mrs O’Hallrahan got up, walked away. She felt bad had come upon her today because she’d maligned Brian Faulkner. They’d been ill-chosen words.

  Cold smote the air; her head reeled, blind spot of red in it as though the aftermath of bomb explosions in Belfast. No, Brian Faulkner wasn’t at fault. We’re all at fault, she decided. She shouldn’t have spoken ill of him. It had brought her no good.

  She made Fry’s cocoa for herself. The milk danced. She went to the window and looked out. Peaceably she watched the fields. She prayed Diarmaid would come and inadvertently she saw a tree.

  The tree dangled. Yes, it reminded her of a tree in the year Diarmaid spent as a boarder at school. A tree on which his friend Derek had hanged himself. The boy apparently had become preoccupied with the teasings of other boys, one day he walked out to a bare tree in lonesome land and hanged himself. The image stark and amazing, women talking about it. And the boy’s figure dancing in everybody’s mind. Bred into an east Galway sky on a famine tree. Famine because it was eaten up, the tree, as bodies had been in Ireland once.

  Shock, terror had followed. Apparently Diarmaid had never really been teased. He was too quiet for it. He’d just lounge, watching goldfish in the pond. His friend had made an effort of supremacy and therefore suffered.

  Suffered terribly. He died on a day the boys ate fish at the school.

  Diarmaid hadn’t seemed so much shocked as silent after it; he quietened. Again.

  Remained inside himself. But it was as though Susan often thought there was a revolver in the drawer of his mind. Something about to emerge. Diarmaid was unsatisfied with authority now.

  He was disturbed.

  The following year he again attended school as a day-boy. Going from Woodlawn station on March mornings. But now he made additional trips to Ballinasloe. On Saturday afternoons he went and bought records in Salmon’s in Ballinasloe. He became part of what Susan had heard so much about. The younger generation. He played loud music.

  The Rolling Stones. They were the only names she recalled because they struck her as downright peculiar.

  And she worried a little, Susan did, when she saw Diarmaid’s face become just a little like one of the young men’s faces on the cover of a Rolling Stones album. It seemed like idolatry going the wrong way. Diarmaid’s face sometimes had an almost-girl’s look. A cosmetic appearance.

  It frightened her. It repelled her. The sounds took up his time – they seemed to estrange him from her – these strangely dressed young men. She almost swore vengeance on them. But there was little she could do. Her attraction was minimal. The attraction of these pop groups was gross. And when an ape-like face stared from over his bed she felt like tearing it down. The young man in the pop pin-up had over-large lips. Like jelly.

  ‘Pansy,’ she felt like saying to him when Diarmaid was at school.

  But she realized that was uncharitable. These young people had their ways. And she loved whatever they chose.

  Because ultimately they had to be.

  There was no reaching them.

  They were in a world of their own.

  And when Diarmaid left in autumn he took but one album with him. A Rolling Stones album. The oldest-looking of them all. And from that day on she felt a queer affiliation with The Rolling Stones.

  They were almost like brothers. Their mouse-like faces; their quivering hamster-nostrils. She felt love for them. They were part of her son’s design.

  He’d gone to the trouble of buying their albums in Ballinasloe on foggy afternoons.

  Her love went with him now and often – alone – she’d probe the leftover Rolling Stones albums as though love itself was about to fall out of them.

  But all that came was dust.

  The tree tonight now emerged, receded, its horror gone.

  ‘Poor mite,’ she thought, remembering past The Rolling Stones to Derek.

  ‘Poor child. Sure as people said of him he was probably not all there.

  Too much by himself. It’s bad for you.’ Inadvertently she realized her own solitude.

  She went to bed, crossed herself with water.

  Images of the North returned, blood, gore, bodies; she took fright. Her body sweated; she felt her sweat merge with the sheets.

  ‘Jesus. Jesus.’ She slept. Soundly. And all the green afternoons returned, Galway long ago with her husband, George. Cabbages buoyed up like circus clowns. Performers. Life was an arena then.

  She dreamt she was having her toe removed in a quiet surgery in Galway in 1939.

  Then she woke. Far away a goods-wagon let out a drone. And she felt for Diarmaid’s youth and solitude.

  The world was tight with problems now.

  She’d ring a taxi, go to the station in Ballinasloe. No Paddy McCarthy today. Her night of agony was over.

  But it was only five o’clock. She slept on.

  And in a dream she saw Diarmaid behold a ladybird.

  Blood-red. A blob on his nail.

  His face gleamed. She woke. It was still early.

  And words of Christ came back to her. But instead of ‘The poor you will always have with you’ in her mind now they were ‘The young you will always have with you’.

  6

  Next morning a taxi came from Loughrea. It called at her door. Lazily she answered. As though drugged. It didn’t matter now. He’d come. She knew that.

  Again sun shone. And a tinker encampment was all colours.

  Faces danced out – the old, frozen, suffering faces of Ireland.

  Each seemed to have a special design. Like an old lady who was trembling over a child. Her face lit up, all its contours.

  Not much conversation passed between them, talk of the weather.

  The taxi-man stared ahead.

  He praised the local bishop who’d declared talking about nightdresses on television was wrong some years before.

  Susan smiled.

  She despised the local bishop, hearing that the woman censured by the bishop for speaking about nightdresses on television later had a nervous breakdown.

  ‘He’s a very good man,’ the taxi-driver said.

  Mrs O’Hallrahan said nothing.

  Ballinasloe curved inwards, a different route from yesterday. Trees, glinting branches strong as limbs, reaching out, sparkling.

  The railway station lurked ahead, red, white. Susan wondered at the sadness of stations. An advertisement for Woodbines dominated her view; she considered partings, stations, the humdrum meaninglessness of them. All building up into death. Just death. A final desperation.

  Her thoughts were dark. She was depressed. She could see nothing before her but death and failure. She found herself afraid. Fearful of her own death. The paralysis motions which led up to it.

  She wanted to cry out. Her scream – mental – searched the sky. A gull wheeled.

  ‘Diarmaid.’

  That was it. Would he arrive? Her whole life seemed to depend on that fact. Everything. She remembered underground stations in London during the war. Faces.

  A Mongolian face she once saw. Strange. Like something from the silent films which still showed in Galway city.

  All memory lugged inside her. Fearful. A French woman she once met in London during the war. A girl, 23, who’d fled the Nazis. She’d had a child. Her husband she’d left in Paris. On a back street. They’d got a lift out before the invading Germans.

&
nbsp; Her husband had escaped from the lorry. He, 25, awfully handsome, wanted to stay and fight. Susan knew he was handsome from the French woman’s description. She also knew he wore a red check shirt.

  Marguerite, the French girl, held these details like prizes.

  They were her gains from life. Despite the fact her husband probably lay dead or castrated somewhere.

  She emerged from the car, Susan did. Her hat probed the air, a feather on it.

  She walked quietly, hesitantly towards the platform. The Dublin train came in.

  Merging, devouring the station.

  All was bustle for a moment.

  Then in an anorak Diarmaid emerged. Silently she perceived him. Like seeing Veronica Lake walk out a door. She ran. His eyes were grimmer, his lashes blonder. Hair sheathed the smoothness of his cheekbones. They embraced.

  There are a few immutable moments in life. One for Susan was welcoming her husband back from Germany after the war. In Victoria Station. He was lovely then. Now Diarmaid, without badges, was in her arms. ‘Love.’

  He vaguely struggled free.

  ‘Hello.’ They walked past the taxi, got in. The taxi-man helped them slide in Diarmaid’s case. That was the supreme sadness for Susan. It looked like a coffin. She watched her son again, the care of sunlight on his cheekbones. He’d changed. Really changed. His eyes had points of sapphire in them. He was so fair. So young and lovely and fair. And as she watched she realized he’d become more and more like a pop star. He was not alone any more, Diarmaid wasn’t.

  He was part of a whole generation of young people, alive to the possibilities of the moment.

  Diarmaid was one such young person.

  For a moment he was like a stranger. She wanted to catch something, hold it. Like his eyes. They’d changed, too. Yesterday’s almond-coloured brown had deceived her. They were at once more solid. Greyer. Grimmer.

  He stalked into the car.

  People flashed by. An old lady held a suitcase. Susan felt a depth of inarticulation in her never felt before.

  A sweet shop floated by – in it a swan on an advertisement.

  The road breached in sunlight.

  Traffic was high today. The taxi-cab wandered on, stopped outside Mrs O’Hallrahan’s dressmaking shop. There a pink dress was shot through with light.