by Edna O'Brien
We were in a two-roomed cottage, everything ramshackle, the fencing reinforced with bits of galvanise and old wardrobe doors. We kept pullets and a dog. The estate itself was owned by a health farm. I worked there. It was funny tending to all the fat people, hearing them talk about food as they got slapped and slathered around, talking about the coffee with the cream on it, in Vienna. Nyumyum, Nyumyum. When I got home there would be the notes. Sometimes he had the dog on the table with a headscarf or a bowler hat on her. Laughing they used to be. The dog was called Rosie, a mongrel. Outside the window there was a commune of birds, about a hundred, and they used to grub in the fields, wander in and out between the cows’ legs and then all of a sudden they’d fly, and because of their underwings being white and their actual bodies silver, they were like a whole lot of razor blades, darting up into the sky, cleaving the skin of the air. I got cream for free from the health farm and we used to have it with the porridge, or the pancakes, or, in season, with fresh raspberries or fresh loganberries from their walled garden. Some people don’t know when they’re flying it, I knew it then. Everything had a rhythm to it, my cycling in the morning to the crèche with him, then coming back to find him already there, having been brought home in the school bus. He had only to walk up a lane. “Me a latchkey kid,” he used to say. He was very quick at slang. There was one note of his that I didn’t care for though. It wasn’t addressed to me personally, it wasn’t addressed to me at all. I found it the day after he went to boarding school. That was much later and we were in a city by then. I had a job in Hull as a cosmetic manager. It said:
Sometimes I feel sad for me.
Sometimes I feel sad for you.
Sometimes I feel just sad.
I crinkled it, bunched it up, not wanting to admit that he was prone to such thoughts, that he too had the pall, a bit of the Coose moroseness. He’d gone a long way from the dozy dazy times when he looked up at leaves and buses and played with beads and yodelled from the safety of his cot. All the joyrides he used to have. And laughs, nearly always followed by splutters. Made theatres out of match-boxes. He used to get in under the big brown table to fiddle with the castors. As the evenings got colder he used to reach up and pull down the green baize cloth, and cowl it round himself and wear it like a kind of igloo. Of course it wasn’t roses all the way. He had a bowel problem. His father, Dr Flaggler, recommended a cereal, a special brand of corn buds. Dr Flaggler was very imperious, always faggoting his notions upon us. He said if the cereal did not work it would have to be clysters. We were in mortal fear of these clysters whatever they were. The lad had a rebellious streak too, probably brought on by his adstrictions. He scratched the paint off a newly painted lavatory seat and left the shards – they were a shade of duck-egg blue – strewn all over the green rubber mat. He got his come-uppance. Dr Flaggler produced the water bag, and after insertion and later the movement, the lad was dispatched to his bedroom and locked in without benefit of bread or water. He says it is then he wished he had mastered the Chinese language, because it would have given him something to think about, as his mind was clamouring for new thoughts, theorems, puzzles. No doubt he knew all there was to know about the boxed house, the drab garden, Dr Flaggler and I. So many little memories of him loom up, his constipation, hence his shadows, his cheeks like discs, the striations on his forehead, the pre-lines, mere tracings, presaging where the real lines would later be. They have begun now. He must have always bathed in cold climes because I have a memory of drying him brusquely with old towels and his skin mauve and his little teeth chattering together. He had a dream once of being one of the three Wise Men, on a moped and calling at a gate lodge to look for the infant child. That must have origined while we were in the cottage, since there were various other little lodges scattered around. At the same time I dreamt that he was on his tricycle in Times Square, getting squashed in by convertibles and trucks. He kept busy. I used to bend over him, brush against him, while he was drawing horses and chariots. There was always a bit of jam lodged somewhere on his lips so that the kisses had a fruitiness and brought to mind the orchards of Coose where he hailed from, but scarcely knew. He had a little chain around his neck and a St Christopher medal that he bit. Blackened his front teeth. When he crammed pebbles up his nose Dr Flaggler had a brainwave. He poked at the nostrils, first with an orange stick and then with a wire. The wire happened to be a clothes hanger that he snapped in two. It bored me most painfully that usurping wire. No go. The pebbles refused to budge. Dr Flaggler let out a yippee and moved to the garden where the peony roses were in full rampant bloom; the lad loved these flowers, their colour, their chromes, their creaminess, the smell, their softness perhaps. In fact he had the bad habit of breaking them off their stems and tossing them around as if they were toy boats or one of his paper kites. Naturally he got whacked for such usurpations. Consider his surprise then at being handed one with glee, a full-blown peony rose of the pink variety as it happened. “Nice nice flower,” Dr Flaggler said, as a tease. The lad laughed. He brought it to his nostrils because he was told to and just as flesh touched flower the realisation occurred. He sneezed like an old grandfather. The pebbles came cascading down. His father had put snuff in the rose. A snuff and pepper mixture. Ingenuity. He says his prime memory is not that, but of a cow’s tail and his hand in someone’s, an old man’s, or an old woman’s, a relation perhaps, a forebear. Anyhow it was a white hand with brown nicotine stains. It was after that he drew the chariot. Then he got out of bed one night and descended the steep stairs by means of his bottom, hopping and flopping from one step to the next. He avoided the last step altogether and darted cumbersomely across the hallway into a dark room. He was afraid of being found. Still, he must have mewled or puked or let out some little exclamation because Dr Flaggler found him there and surprisingly enough offered him poached egg. We tried for other children. I was pregnant on two occasions but lost them due to fucking. I believe our covetousness drives our future children out of us.
The day he was going to boarding school, we had to metal ourselves. We went by train. It was autumn. We came upon a little pile of sticks, then water with green scum on it and belts of young trees, young poplars, shivering, then more woods and tail-ends of woods, and jumping posts and horses and a bonfire and a solitary clump of Michaelmas daisies on a grass bank near a signal-box. I can see them still – insignificant and purple, a mournful purple at that. It is a strange thing that they did not remind me of field daisies at all, it must be the colour, it must be the difference between what white does to our sensibilities and what purple does. It would be nice to understand a colour, or get flooded by it, by the lineaments. Then came a different kind of wood, where the trees were very low, scutty, as if they had sunk into the ground, into mire maybe. Sunken trees, their tops bushy, like hammocks on which one could lie, a nesting wood as opposed to a forest where knights could fight a battle. It would have been perfect except for the situation, but come to think of it, it might not have hit us, the view might not have impinged were we on an ordinary day’s outing. He said little. He would look at his belongings from time to time or he would touch them or he would put his fingers through the holes of his tennis racquet, wedge them through. The low farmhouses were so right, so friendly, so safe and even then I said to myself what am I missing, and why do stone walls and white gates and sheepdogs and blond roofs speak so, along with little bushes and the clotheslines and the garments going swirl swirl and all the other inconspicuous things and the white birds, the gulls, and the black birds, the crows, and the black-and-the-white birds, the magpies. We waited till we saw four magpies and recited together as of yore, “One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a wedding, and four to die.” It wasn’t the jolliest thing to say as the train carted us along. I almost said a daft thing, one of those heady things that gets said on state occasions. I almost said that I wanted to shield him against all awful things, against the reeks of darkness and the perfidy of people. It is the grace of God that I did not. We took a
hire car and the driver had the funniest accent, an accent new to us, as if a pot of syrup had been spilt in his mouth. He said, “There be gold in our hills, there be gold in Wales, there be gold in Hampshire.” Hills, dun, their harvest just stripped from them, the edifices of souring silage a decent distance away from each farmhouse. Anyhow as I drove off, instead of waving as he might have done, the lad did a side hop in the opposite direction, as if he were playing with ball or skittle. Maybe he was. Two other boys, no doubt newcomers, mohawks, were coming towards him and maybe they kicked a ball in his direction. Anyhow it was not the farewell that we feared, it was inconsequential, him running away like that, his hair spilling over one side of his face, and the object whatever it was, maybe a piece of newspaper, the butt of his attention. The first letter said, “I eat the bit of cake with the cherry in it and think of Mamma.” He must have had the corners knocked off him soon after, because his vernacular changed. The letters got very perky and there were the nicknames, Tin Breasts, Huge Penis, Farnham Pervert, Gravy, and so forth. The food was called Muck and the girls, drips. The letters were very succinct.
“My aeroplane was broken so now I keep it locked in the modelling room.”
“I am making a yacht, circa 1900.”
“I don’t know how to waltz.”
“I belong to the thirty per cent of the human race that has a bent spine.”
“I am making a table. Make no mistake, one table is not like another. Instead of quite thick legs, it has got thin legs and hidden dovetailing.”
“Did you know that when a branch comes out of a tree you get a knot. If same, i.e. branch, falls out, you get a hole. You can heal it with pitch.”
His handshakes grew more tepid the manlier he became, he knew the inference of such things, he knows the havoc of binds.
He writes now about the latrine service and the fruits that they eat and the mangoes that they stole, how perfumed and juicy they were. He has discovered all the uses for the mango tree, as a dye, and for pectoral complaints and as a laxative and to clean teeth. He is determined to get back to nature cures. He will be a healer yet. He did not use the word orchard so I get the impression that the fruits there are growing in the fields, just like the noble spud and the not-so-noble mangold in Coose. There are four of them, they gave blood in Morocco because blood is pricey there. He describes the tracks, the adobe huts, the interiors, the cooking utensils used in the different parts. He seems very interested in what is underneath the earth, not for death’s sake but for antiquity. Always off at a tangent – “I have been to extraordinary places and walked over desert, and explored caves that monks lived in during the fifth century, caves carved out of cliffs, that are sheer, dizzying, in their drop to the sea. Sun, glaring sun. And I have been to the tombs of Abraham and Isaac. The landscape was fantastic, a movement of giant swellings, eruptions, corrosions of land where the earth has been stripped away, leaving rock vertebrae that look like monsters. The rituals at the Wailing Wall are too much, you should witness these. What a contrast of explosive nature between what occurs on the surface of this land and what the archaeologists find right under it. More, much more, but not now.”
It was he who sent the casket, silver with little mauve studs on it.
Going, going, gone. Like the walls and the crows and the ruins and the flat stones and the mere stones and the stubble and the voices and the kines of Coose. The perennial divide. First chiselling, then scraping, then the terrifying emptying of all but a sob. I don’t mind too much. I mind awfully. I claw, at nothing, at naught.
*
Dr Flaggler, one of the original princes of darkness. Had a peculiar humour. He put a notice in the lavatory, having mounted and framed it, requesting that faeces only to be put in the bowl. It was a very old bowl, cracked, and veiny, like one of Lil’s plum pudding bowls that eventually had to be relegated to the dogs. Once upon a time there seemed to have been a design upon it, maybe a spray or a cherub. The sign must have been meant for me as he didn’t open his house or his gardens to any others, to the riff-raff as he would say. He was a curator by profession. It was an old house not far from the moors. I am surprised that I did not get broken veins, always out on the moors, we were, back and forth, walking and stalking; the wind impeding us, the wind battering us. We used to bring scones and a flask of tea. He was very pernickety about his afternoon tea. We used to sit, or rather flop on to some piece of heather, to eat and drink. The view was unvarying, endless vistas of heather, flat, the sky itself reflecting whatever colour the heather happened to be, light mauve, or dark, or a springing green; sometimes a smearing black after it had got charred from accidental fires. In its green phase it stirred and was a bit like a sea, or sea spinach. I used to wait for the waves that never came. He fetched a rug one day, announcing that we would make love but I think too much preparatory work went into it, it was a sad ballocks. Out there you wouldn’t hear a bird at all, only the grounders, the pheasants and tame partridges and moorhens. We used to try to catch them with our hands, very often we almost did. They let out a kind of cackle that was in no way like that of hens. More lunatic by far. The ferns used to stay from one year to the next, so that the young fronds used to rise out of the old, rusted, swordy stumps.
The sign in his lavatory was accompanied by a snowscape, which is why I refer to his humour, astounding if you will. Ours was not a blessed union. Full of foreboding even at its best. For one who loved the moors and the misted fells he had an unexpected liking for babies, used to say he would rather kiss babies’ skins than the skins of women.
It more or less ended in a little café on a bank holiday morning. The lad was three or four by then, and at home in the charge of a skivvy. The café I remember distinctly, what with its bright blue plastic chairs, all stacked up, its washed plastic tables, and such a wretchedly small clientele, and still the hoping and still the fluttering, like being in a banqueting place. We were on a bus holiday, a single-decker bus with amber-tinted windows. Five countries we toured and for a ridiculously low sum. I said to myself, “It will be all right, this Erebus will pass, Dr Flaggler will mellow again.”
At intervals we – the thirty occupants – tumbled out into some city where there were bells and inns and a church spire. It may have been Bruges, or then again it may have been Brussels. Bells and stone façades do not differ that radically from one strange town to the next. We had to go through the side entrances of these cafés for our meals, and the foodstuffs put before us were unfamiliar. There was a man called Fred who was very chary about it all and kept dreading the prospect of octopuses. He suspected the dyes in them. He had been on a former bus holiday and was subjected to them three times a week. Dr Flaggler pointed out that that would have been in the south, whereupon Fred said everything being frozen, octopuses were as likely as not being sent all over the continent to physic people. He also testified that the Danube was not blue. He had seen it with his own bespectacled eyes. His eyes were small as nibs. His sister Ethel, for whose holiday he was paying, fell sick along the floor of the bus, and a glut of these foreign nutriments dropped out as she ran from the back seat, her appointed seat, to get to the front door, ran in vain. The rilings and the scoldings that he gave her! Reiterating that she should not have had those crème de menthe frappes and that she should have stayed away from Vienna schnitzel, since it was cooked in oil. His grey complexion was replaced by another colour altogether, a scalding red. It was anything but becoming. I thought his poor nose would explode so vehement did it become. Everyone heard him except her, afflicted as she was with industrial deafness. She had confided that to me although it was apparent. The passengers did their noticeable best not to whiff or burp but what with the heat and the enclosure, it was not easy. Heads sought the window, Fred went on with his rhetoric and then somewhere along the way the courier stopped and broke off some palm branches which he strewed along the floor. It was then we smiled, he and I. A young courier, very smarmy. I helped him in so far as I trod on the palms that were near
to me, to make better their carpeting. Looking down at the floor of the bus and seeing it green and seeing it rustle was like being plunged into a forest for a moment, and knowing that decay lurked underneath, that there was something rotting and decomposing, as there always is, even with Mother Nature. Dr Flaggler and I did not confer. He was the only male who commanded the window seat. Not that I objected. We sat, he and I, like two solid substances waiting to burn one another up, we never talked, we never nudged, we were very nearly numb, yet we perspired, we stared, we let out involuntary sounds that could be called abortive coughs or abortive cries. In the fields women worked. The courier would point to them as being a sight to see. Sometimes a woman would lift her head and a face would become visible under the straw hat, but the features were not to be seen so that it was like looking at rows of clocks that were unable to tell the time. They all wore kerchiefs under their hats and their skirts were dirndl and a petrol blue. We drove all day and hence we sweltered. The windscreen used to be smeared with dead insects. By the time we got to our destinations so fatigued were we that we plodded out of the bus. In one of our inns I heard the rats scrabble behind the wainscotting. I heard them all night and so assiduous were they that I expected them to succeed and press through. I expected a great congeal of them. I was envisaging my escape, the ledge that I would have to jump on to, the repercussions from them. I had heard tell of one that had adhered to a hand by reason of its teeth. It was presented to a youngster by his guide dog. It being dusk and his guide dog must have taken it to be an odd glove or some matted leaves. The youngster could not shake it off. It just clung, dug itself in, and every time the dog went fopping its tail stiffened, likewise its backbone and likewise its clench. The boy was afraid to shout in case he frightened his aggressor. Probably the rat was frightened too, not knowing what it had got itself attached to. There seemed to be no solution when of all things a gentleman farmer went by on horseback, jumped down, searched for a big stick and severed them by taking a swipe at the rat, causing it to dismember as it fell away. There had to be a second blow in the lumbar region to extinguish its life altogether. It became one of the marvels of Coose. He excelled himself by describing the clench as being like that of a burr. It appeared in the local newspaper, and the schoolmaster gave him a jar of Virol as a reward for his command of the language. The rats of Belgium did not press through, and in the morning, after the continental breakfast, eaten out on the little landing, there was the usual queueing for the lavatory and the usual dissertations about the beds and the bolsters. While we were queueing, the sheets and the bolster cases were whipped from our beds as the two strapping maids prepared rooms for the next bus party.
