Room Little Darker

by June Caldwell

  The Man Who Lived In A Tree

  Rashi waited for his tormentors by the pissy park gates. Balloon faces from years on the gear; bodies so thin they could thread through gaps in garden gates all across the lit grid of suburbia. They mauled their way around in the limp hours hassling the likes of him trying to live a cloistered life. Most were just passing through the bend at Broadstone, heading on south towards the quays to score some scag. Or back down the crack in the road to the high rises. He wondered how they’d managed to spot him in the first place. For two months, four days and a couple of lean hours, he’d peeled off the city pathways entirely, heading up an old willow tree beside Brannigans pub and the Odlums flour factory that looked like a Sealink ferry flopped on its side.

  ‘Story, bud!?’ they’d shout up at him, in unison. ‘Story?’

  ‘The bleeding head on ye, did ye get that in a charity shop mate, did ye?’

  ‘Here, Isaac Newton, throw us down a few light bulbs.’

  ‘Any gorgeous birds up there?’

  His home was planted on a small patch of avocado grass on the bend where the houses tattletaled behind a hairy park. To the front some redbrick council flats (mostly boarded up). At the side the bulk of bus station with its parked army poking out above a beanstalk wall now being smashed up to accommodate the Luas line extension. In the squiggle of high branches he laid out a single-plank bed using pilfered clothing full of cotton wool to keep him snug. On lower branches he flung clothes, photographs, a leather satchel his father used when he was a revenue collector, a tablecloth stolen from the Maldron Hotel, letters from his mother, EuroShop toolkits, grilled crisp bags, a lifelong collection of medals. Lying crabways he’d watch the locals paint their lungs russet outside the pub, crowing about monies owed and goods stowed. On his back staring up between the crown and the treetop: 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 overcooked stars that seemed to have a lot in common with him. When he closed his eyes he was able to muster up Lorna in their bedsit in Camden. Pirouetting across the floor to the swampy arias of Kate Bush. Goading him about reconstituted spuds they were about to have for dinner again. ‘One, two or ten?’ she’d ask, cocking her leg behind her in a kind of chef-jest. ‘They taste of nothing but water! What say you snuggle head, are you a hungry boy?’

  For an entire summer they’d lived on tinned potatoes, kidney beans at 19p a tin and Fray Bentos pies. She was taking a course in Contemporary Dance for Performance at a small amateur getup in North London and liked to prance about in the evenings in her sky-blue knickers and guipure lace bra, cooking up the same leaden fare on the one-ring hob over and over. He adored her milky boobs and olive eyes, her animal cackle and the fact she could only fuck with her clothes partially on because she was so ‘County Wexford shy’. On those smoky summer nights in 1988, he sprinted all the way from the building site in Chalk Farm in the still sweltering glare of evening to pin her to the bed for as many hours as he could. She found it impossible to look at him straight on. He’d stretch her elfin hands behind to the bed bars. Jammed like a butterfly, she’d give in, rooted in pleasure, squealing to the ceiling plaster and scarlet sky out above. ‘Give it to me again,’ she’d say. ‘Push inside deep as you can.’ He’d kiss and lick the sweat off her for ages. He would’ve sucked her up whole through a straw if he could. Afterwards they’d watch arthouse films, before flopping into repose in the single bed, wrapped like burritos. His work of lugging bricks and metal poles starting up again as early as 5 a.m. The foremen were all Irish, which planted the first kernel for visiting Ireland one day. Lorna talked about it a lot. She always stuck a small bunch of black grapes in his jacket pocket so he’d have something healthy to eat on the move. They took care of each other.

  It was a good few weeks before the tree spoke to him. Speckles of information at first: age (169 years); classification: Grey Willow; planting date (as yet unknown, same too for exactly how he got in the ground); how he loved the rain and sodden soil beneath him; the oval-shaped leaves that tickled all year round; his greyish green fleece-like belly; sawflies, aphids, caterpillars and leaf beetles that populated his arms and legs since the primary days; things he’d seen and witnessed: famine, Republican marches, car crashes, building booms, child rape, dog snatches, stabbings, carnivals, Christmas celebrations, guided tours, industrial strikes, Luftwaffe raids, surreptitious deals beneath his bough when the chickpea moon was at full-flourish.

  ‘My ancestors are the Salicaceae from China. Scientific name: Salix cinerea subsp. Oleifolia. Often known to botanic know-it-alls as “common sallow”. We’re better settled next to lakes or ponds but the tempestuous weather here does me fine my friend. How long do you hope to hang around? I’d like to tell you that you’re the first though I did have a malodorous old bag lady grow into my branches back in 1938, a year before the War broke out. Her husband a right panhandler all been told. Had her beaten to a pulp most nights until she ran away.’

  Rashi completely ignored him at first. After a few days he’d spew back a ‘piss off’ or ‘fuck up’, shaking Willow’s rusty veins until some of his own oddities fell onto the soggy ground. ‘Is me being here dragging you down?’ he asked Willow one Saturday afternoon when he felt he could no longer resist the voice. The fine old gentleman tree assured him all was grand and peachy as long as he didn’t spill chemicals on him or cut into branches with sharp objects.

  ‘A chap of wine hair persuasion once considered it somewhat a witty thing to splosh superglue on some of my lower branches. I made sure to remember. Did him a disfavour next time he stuck his bony posterior at my trunk.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Well if you recall, Shakespeare’s Ophelia drowned close to a willow, didn’t she?’ He refused to elaborate but kept grinning. A bit imbecilic, Rashi thought. Beneath his foliage being eaten by caterpillars, moths and a very regal purple emperor butterfly, he smiled like a monkey with a new banana. Willow greased him with prudent tips from the silver felt of his under-leaves on the art of being indistinguishable, the best time of day to head off scavenging for food or other sundries he might need. All manner of kind advice he never expected from anyone anymore under any circumstances.

  ‘You need to take care around here, keep one eye brewing at all times,’ Willow cautioned. ‘The escalation of drugs around and about is nothing short of heart-stopping. Marauding gangs hawking their trade in the all-encompassing daylight, brash as you like.’

  Rashi had seen it with his own inky eyeballs. Knackbags dropping off stacks of cash and sports bags stuffed with what could be handguns. Nippers from the flats flailing in the grip of chemico-crash. One of them, a scaldy maggot of just fifteen, was venerated for biting off a security guard’s ear outside McGowans where horny nurses went sniffing for prison officer husbands on Wednesdays. It was all drink, drugs, litter, loss, random violence and mayhem, according to Willow.

  ‘Residents have a right pain in their you-know-what,’ he explained. ‘Complaining 24/7 there’s nowhere safe for their uncouth youths to kick a ball.’

  By early evening he gathered his bob-bits from under the scrag of bushes to put back up the tree. Across the way Lower Dominick Street was beetling alive. Plywood apartments with artificial fireplaces and thermofoil kitchens emptying residents out through electronic gates in search of something to do. He’d lived up that stink of road before. Prostituted himself when his mother flew over from Loharu Tehsil to compost him for good. It wasn’t just about the money – he needed cash when the boom work dried up – it was principally about punishment. He could do nothing but guzzle himself into more torpor after Lorna’s death; hating himself for being unable to stop it. ‘You can’t stick fast in this horrible country destroying yourself bachcha, bringing shame down on us, not caring a damn,’ his mother whined. ‘You’re disgracing the family, disrespecting yourself, bruising me.’ He understood. She’d witnessed his father do it for a bucket of years.

  His d
rinking got way out of hand even when himself and Lorna were still in the vice-grip of idolatry. ‘It can’t be helped, petal,’ he told her. ‘You’re obliged to go for drinks if you want to pipe work for the following week … they give priority to the men who stay on after hours.’ He had come home to catch her in tears. Snotting inconsolably in her Victorian drawers and tap pants he bought in a vintage shop in Islington for a crazy £40, equivalent to one week’s rent. It wasn’t even her birthday but he loved her so perfectly he couldn’t resist witnessing that lick of bliss on her face. ‘You’re losing yourself mohabbat,’ she replied. Her pet name for him in Hindi, love. ‘I’m starting to think I don’t know the real you anymore.’ It made him heavy with misery when she spouted such awful melancholia. He couldn’t bear the idea of ever being without her. Life would be a half life minus her whirling around giddy inside it. ‘It’s only a few pints of Guinness, it’s not like you don’t enjoy a drink yourself.’ It was a different thing to sup together all happy out, she felt, than to come home drooling and dripping, smelling terrible. Too late to do fun stuff like they used to when they were buddy-buddy in the cramped bedsit they felt so lucky to get. A lot of landlords didn’t tolerate cohabiting couples and especially mixed-race cohabiting couples. He didn’t stop drinking after work because he wasn’t able to. Towards the end of her first year, Lorna started hanging out more with her dance troupe of posh gits and retro quacks after practice sessions. Smoking joints at music gigs in the Engine Room or the Lock Tavern. When he’d arrive late drunk as a skunk song with a carryout of Carlsberg Special Brew under his drizzly armpit, her friends sneered, gazing into the hinterland of makeshift stage. Britpop band Blur hung out in these drink dens before they became properly famous. The drummer had a grá for Lorna which made Rashi more than mad. ‘If you want to go there, then go there,’ he said. The sinkhole look on her face.

  ‘You missed the busybodies when you were off gallivanting earlier,’ Willow informed him. ‘Talking about serving an eviction notice on me for you. They are a canker my friend.’

  ‘There’s nothing illegal about me being here. Nada. Not a thing they can do.’

  He’d looked it up in the National Library, the new-fangled anti-loitering laws. There was only mention of being firmly on the ground, outside ATMs. Beggars holding out cupped hands to collect coins. Roma on roundabouts. Wizened women holding newborns up like placenta-covered puppies. Laws so bygone that statute books still insisted you carry a bale of hay with you to feed your method of transportation. Statute books in Ireland still insisted you carry a bale of hay with you to feed your method of transportation. No one could tell him he was doing anything wrong. Dublin City Council itself was not aware of any deeds for the tree.

  ‘A woolly social worker with them, dressed in pink, blathering on about the Mental Health Act,’ Willow said. Rashi thought he could hear him snickering but he couldn’t be certain.

  ‘Who you talking to?’ one of the local scuzzers roared over. A pallet of new eighteen-year-olds had just qualified for drinking in Brannigans, spilling out every night to abuse him on their short hop home.

  ‘Spanner brain, I’m talking to you, who you yacking at?’

  ‘Give them whatsfor,’ Willow advised. ‘Or there’ll be no let up. I wouldn’t put it past them to take a blowtorch to my tired old legs. Have you seen the new burl on my back there? It’s really unsightly …’

  Rashi would never answer them back. What was the point?

  ‘Hey! Charlie Chapati, do us up an aul filthy kebab!’

  Chucking blobs of wet toilet roll. Hurling them in the dark. Not letting up until scores of soaking splotches stuck to Willow and him like cockleburrs.

  ‘Grab hold of that there,’ one of them instructed his muscle mate in a torn combat jacket. Pissing their cacks laughing. Eight or nine of them yanking a garden hose from around the side of the pub over onto the lonesome patch where Willow stood majestic as the great High King Lóegaire mac Néill, fierce and pagan. They pulled and hauled and slapped it into position, before turning on the outdoor tap full blast. Some of them were so drunk they began to wiggle and weave under the weight. ‘Stall the ball!’ they shouted. ‘Gerra proper grip on it.’

  ‘Why are they doing this to me?’ Rashi asked, eyes yellow as a frog’s belly. ‘What have I ever done on them, on anyone?’

  ‘Leave the poor fucker alone,’ the barman told them. ‘Stop the fucking messing or you won’t get served, deyezhearme?’

  ‘Cool the beans, we’re just giving him a power shower for his little gaff up there.’

  ‘You must admit, they are rather buoyant with rolling punches,’ Willow chuckled.

  ‘Yamadev and Shanidev will punish the likes of them for their wickedness,’ he told Willow.

  ‘Hmmm, indeed, but we don’t do those exotic gods here. Just that wearisome fellow with the beard and pretty dress who guzzles wine and sports a tremendously sexy foot fetish.’

  He was beginning to think he’d picked the wrong temple to rest up in and that Willow was a bit of a smart alec who liked to mess him around. Thinking about it properly he’d need a camouflaged platform a hundred feet off the ground, possibly a Douglas fir in the Botanic Gardens, to stay out of harm’s way. Parnell Street was rough when he was holed up there for a few months outside Cineworld, but this was steadily getting worse. Back then the congeries of German men on ‘culture holidays’ looking for a group jiggle outside the sports bar left him alone. As did the brawny truckers with a furtive hunger they preferred their A-line wives not know about. Businessmen who needed to be sucked off before bi-monthly stock flotations. Whores on high heels hunting horny punters. Libertine hipsters and their flowery frock girlfriends. None of those types paid him any heed. There was so much sex on the streets after hours. Quick fumbling hasty half fucks. Legs plastered against pebbled walls. Devil-may-care moans. It didn’t bother him much. Not like the spiteful violence others helped themselves to before hopping into late-night taxis. He’d often get a quick kick or a wallop after 2 a.m. Cans of half-supped lager lobbed at his head. Needle jammed in the back of his thigh he never got checked out because he didn’t have a medical card. Two winters in he’d been roughed up too many times and found himself back out on concrete, living at the back of a restaurant beside a humming fan. There was always food in the laneways, a vortex of throwaway. Some of the foreign workers left out dregs for him after the clean-up of nightshift spillage. Bits of sloppy taco, jerk chicken, wild wilted spinach and other khaki leaves plucked from the roadsides of Wicklow and Meath for wannabe Michelin stars.

  ‘Take it out here and be good to it,’ the only friend he ever met before Willow, Dhudha, would say, passing out cardboard plates through the ventilation hole. He had come all the way from Uttar Pradesh where hunter-gatherers first lived in wood huts along sluggish rivers of the Bhabhar. Rashi had visited there himself for a family wedding as a small boy. Mesmerised by the buzz of two hundred million voices and monsoons emptying from its skies. Dhudha’s English was hilariously bad and nothing he emitted made sense. ‘My boss says you are the baggabond! He kill me if he knew I food you!’

  Sometime in 2012, the Somali dealers moved in around the laneways of Parnell Street, pegging their powders to the nostril-famished. Restaurants closed down because of racketeering. He never saw Dhudha again but dreamt he was back in India in a jam-packed town selling clunky wooden toys to foreign children on the side of a hill. Spending afternoons pointing his donkey-skin feet into the marmalade sunshine. Three people were done with blades in these laneways. Two men pretty much like him hospitalised from beatings that left them with sixteen broken bones between them. It was a catwalk of mêlée – not a ruddy-faced Garda in sight – so once again he moved to the porch of a banana warehouse at the back of the Four Courts. Later, he dragged himself and his belongings up towards Broadstone to a bandstand in Temple Gardens where he sang out loud on bitterly cold days.