Bogmail

by Patrick McGinley

  He went downstairs to help Susan in the bar, noting with interest that Potter was missing. As he had decided to limit himself to six whiskies, the evening dragged; every twenty minutes had become an hour. He felt pleased when the last of the locals had gone and he and Susan could begin the washing up. He said good night to her at half-past twelve and slowly climbed the stairs to his room. Since it was too early to begin the night’s work, he lay over the bedclothes listening to Schumann’s piano quintet and reading the article on Alchemy in Britannica. Sadly, the transmutation he desired was such wishful thinking that he put down the volume and closed his eyes, suddenly alive to the spontaneous clarity of a young man’s music.

  He had first heard the quintet on his honeymoon in London and knew at once that it was the music of a young man in love. Years later he discovered that Schumann had written it in the first blissful weeks of his marriage to Clara Wieck; and though his own marriage had turned to bitter aloes, he felt grateful to Schumann for confirming his perception of a reality he himself had found all too fleeting. Also grateful for these few stolen moments of transparency in a world that had become so opaque, he reached for a tattered biography of the composer and opened a page at random near the end:

  Suddenly on the night of February 10 the final dissolution of personality began. Previously Schumann had been distressed by aural illusions. Now what had formerly been a noise became a persistent note. As sleepless night followed sleepless night, the sound grew into music, ‘a music more wonderful and played by more exquisite instruments than ever sounded on earth’. In the disordered mind whole compositions appeared to compose themselves.

  After Dietrich left the house Schumann quietly collected a few effects and asked Clara to send for Dr Böger in order that he might be taken into an asylum. He feared the night. ‘It will not be for long,’ he said. ‘I shall soon come back, cured.’

  Unlike the egomania of Nietzsche, the madness of Schumann flowed from an oversensitive nature that was capable of the most exquisite self-knowledge. There was mental instability in his family, and Schumann himself had experienced symptoms of mental disorder by the time he was twenty-three. After such knowledge he must have lived from one year to the next with the fear of insanity pressing darkly like a storm cloud on his head, until the hammer blows of experience finally put him down. Suffering, he had read somewhere, was the surest way to self-knowledge. Now he knew that suffering was not enough. One needed nerves of steel to survive long enough to profit from it, for what was the use of suffering that snuffed out the sufferer?

  Who suffered more, Beethoven or Schumann? The answer, if suffering could be measured in a unit like ergs, might conceivably be Beethoven, yet he had the will and stamina to survive to compose the Choral Symphony, the Missa Solemnis, the Diabelli Variations, and the last five string quartets, while poor old Schumann had already succumbed to the stress of living by the time he was forty-four. There was no doubt in Roarty’s mind which of the two he found the more congenial.

  He recalled a spring day when he was barely eight, a day of fleecy clouds that made him think of open fields and sheep grazing. Parked in the village was a big, white ambulance with mad Lanty Duggan sitting in the back clutching a spray of bluebells to his chest, shaking his big empty head while sparse ringlets of grey hair swept his shoulders. On the way home from school he and some other boys peered in through the open door to find Lanty crooning the word ‘Kruger’ over and over again. With dismay in his big, red eyes he gazed at them uncomprehendingly and flung the bluebells in their innocent faces. An old-timer called Dúlamán from the village came up behind Roarty and croaked:

  ‘Say goodbye to Lanty. You’ll never see him again.’

  Roarty looked at him as if he had a screw lose himself.

  ‘Go on, Tim. Lanty is your uncle, though you may not want to know.’

  Lanty Duggan’s ringlets swung like cowbells as he grabbed Roarty by the elbow.

  ‘Ask your good-for-nothing father if his fingers smell in the morning,’ he neighed.

  ‘Is Lanty Duggan my uncle?’ he asked his mother when he got home.

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Dúlamán.’

  ‘Dúlamán should be on his knees saying his prayers.’

  ‘Is Lanty Duggan your brother, Mammy?’

  ‘He was my brother when we were children.’

  ‘He told me to ask Daddy if his fingers smell in the morning.’

  ‘He doesn’t know the meaning of what he says. But don’t mention it to your father; he might not like it.’

  Roarty knew little of Lanty Duggan except what he had gleaned from overheard gossip and in later years from his mother, who told him that Lanty had been a black sheep from the beginning. At seventeen he tried to rape her, after which he took a religious turn that manifested itself in an extreme distaste for women. Since no woman would look twice at him, he was determined to make life impossible for lovers. He would lie in wait for courting couples and belabour them with his ashplant. On one occasion, having put the man to flight, he tore off the girl’s knickers before letting her off with a warning. In fairness it must be said that he was no common or garden fetishist; instead of storing his trophies to help while away a winter night, he would climb up a telegraph pole and nail them to the crossbar as a reminder to passersby that Lanty Duggan had been there.

  His father was so horrified by his exploits that he paid his passage to Glasgow and promised to send him three pounds a week on condition that he stayed there. The life of a remittance man was not for Lanty, however. After four months he arrived back in the glen with a new-found knowledge of Scottish poetry and a crooked staff which, he claimed, had once belonged to the Ettrick Shepherd. It would seem that the Scots had cured him of his misogyny, for now he began leading the life of a quiet vagrant who knows every cranny and nook of his hinterland. In summer he lived in a tent which he carried everywhere on his back and pitched in a roadside field wherever night overtook him; and in winter he would take up residence in an empty barn or hayloft and emerge during the hours of light to warm himself over a fire of turf and brushwood in the shelter of a rock or hedge.

  He saw himself as the last of the ancient Fianna, leading the life of Oisín after all the comrades of his imagination had departed. It was a romantic image that was not borne out by the reality. He would spend the day begging for milk, eggs, fish, potatoes, turnips and cabbage as well as turf to make a fire on which to cook them. In his way he was something of a gourmet. He would never eat baker’s bread from the shop. He insisted on having soda bread and homemade butter, and not every housewife in the glen could make those very special commodities to his liking. It was little wonder then that he was made welcome in those houses where the housewife took his begging as a compliment and accolade. On such occasions he was in the habit of saying that there were two things not every woman could make—soda bread and butter—and that half the secret was to know how much soda to put in the former and how much salt in the latter.

  Though regarded by some as a halfwit, he was generally seen as a prince of beggars because he never accepted money. Drunken farmers in pubs on fair days would thrust pound notes under his nose just to tempt him. Though he would accept as much whiskey and stout as he could hold, he was never known to sully his hands with cash. Not surprisingly, many of the glen folk saw him as a saint, albeit a saint who neither washed nor shaved and who allowed his hair to grow in greasy ringlets down to his shoulders. His sainthood might have received formal recognition from the Church if the grand climacteric had not unbalanced him. In his sixty-third year all sense of shame, as the locals put it, deserted him. He would sit by the roadside with his flies undone, sunning his cock and scrotum while reminding passersby that his was the only suntanned cock in Christendom. Worse was to come. He began taking an interest in little girls. He would wait for them as they came home from school and offer them butterscotch in return for what the schoolmaster called ‘intimate personal services’. Predictably, that ended
the exploits of Oisín. The parish priest had a word with the sergeant who had a word with the doctor, and before Lanty Duggan could say ‘Christendom’ the ambulance had whisked him off to the asylum.

  Dúlamán was right. Lanty Duggan never came back. He died in a straitjacket a year later, shouting his head off for beautiful women. Roarty had a vision of a smelly old man in the back of an ambulance clutching a bunch of bluebells, and suddenly he feared for himself. It seemed to him that far from being too short, life was longer than he cared to contemplate. Day upon day reached into the distance, a dusty plain that the traveller must traverse unaided and alone. Each day was a lifetime in itself, full of pitfalls, encounters, and unwanted conversations that smothered the yearning spirit and exhausted the body’s vim. If only he had not been blessed with such a vivid memory! Though it afforded him the pleasure of learning by heart whole articles in Britannica, it was a curse in that it preserved old hurts and sores best forgotten.

  His consciousness was largely the product of his experience, and the force of his experience flowed from his unusual memory. If only he could control it as a rider controls a horse, suppressing what he wished to forget and remembering only those things that came with a warm glow. His active imagination, which in normal times enriched his life, now led him into a search for endless meanings where none might have been intended. His life had become a book that clamoured for close textual analysis. Now he could not hear even one of Potter’s mellifluous sentences without repeating it to himself, changing the inflexions and recasting it in the hope that by some arcane linguistic alchemy the Englishman’s dread secret might be exposed. Likewise, he could no longer pass the time of day with McGing without dwelling on the dedicated single-mindedness of a hunter who was half in love with his quarry simply because it was his quarry and no one else’s. If only he could anaesthetise himself against the sting of these encounters; if only he could enjoy one day of self-forgetfulness without having to pour a bottle of whiskey down his neck to achieve oblivion by the evening.

  He put Schumann’s piano concerto on the gramophone and imagined that he detected a foreshadowing of madness in the evanescent darkness of the first movement. It was only a moment’s intimation, shattered by flashes of heavenly light, and try as he might he could not discern the lack of mental robustness he so eagerly sought.

  At half-past two, when the moon had set, he crept downstairs, took a hold-all from the kitchen, and stuffed into it a pair of thick woollen socks, a pair of gloves, a torch, a cold chisel, a club hammer, and a box of cigarettes, cigarette ash and charred matches from the waste paper basket in the bar, what Potter referred to as the WPB. Finally, he took a small bag of blue till or boulder clay from his hiding place under the sink and let himself out by the back door, taking the side-road behind the Ard Rua where he was less likely to meet a car or pedestrian.

  He lurked briefly under the trees by the parochial house gate, alert for any unusual sound but all he heard was the fluttering of a roosting bird he had disturbed and a groan from a spancelled donkey in the next field. He looked at the stars through a threadbare roof of branches overhead, noting that the wind was due west and that clouds were coming in over the sea. With a tremor of anticipation, he opened the hold-all, pulled on the woollen socks over his shoes, and put on the gloves. Keeping to the shadows under the trees, he sidled up to the house and nimbly crossed the lawn to the back.

  With a tap of the hammer he broke a pane in the kitchen window and, retreating quickly to the garden, he stood listening. He waited ten minutes, ready for the slightest stir on the road or in the house, but all was silence. Again he stole forward, and in a matter of minutes he had opened the window and climbed through. As a prominent member of the parish council who had business with the Canon from time to time, he knew the house so well that he went straight to the little door beneath the stairs, where the Canon kept his vintage claret and the guns he was in the habit of showing to visitors of social consequence.

  He took out the Canon’s two shotguns and put them standing against the wall in the hallway where Nora Hession would see them in the morning, and he put two bottles of claret in his hold-all for his own enjoyment and Susan’s. He and Susan always had a late Sunday lunch together, and after a bottle each it was anyone’s guess what might be achieved. Rummaging in the Canon’s glory hole, he found a leather leg-of-mutton bag which he knew contained a .22 Remington rifle belonging to Dr Loftus, the Canon’s brother, who came to Glenkeel to shoot from time to time.

  He opened the bag, balancing the rifle on his hands in the dark. A fine weapon, a pleasure to handle, and he knew it to be in beautiful condition. He gripped the small of the butt with his right hand and felt for the trigger with his trigger finger. Having pushed the safety catch over, he took aim at the centre of the fanlight above the front door. He pulled the trigger, listening appreciatively to the decisive click of the striker pin. Very satisfying, provided the right man was at the far end of the barrel. It would have to be a heart shot because he did not believe in causing a fellow sufferer unnecessary pain. A professional job, cold and impersonal, sharp and sure as the death of the seal on Carraig a’ Dúlamáin.

  He put the rifle back in its case and went into the sitting-room, scattering blue till and trampling it into the Canon’s new carpet. He filled an ashtray with cigarette butts, cigarette ash and seven burnt matches, not forgetting to spill some of the ash on the Canon’s mahogany table. Finally, he went to the sideboard and shone his torch on the bottles. His eye passed over the Bushmills and Jameson and rested on an unopened bottle of Glenlivet. He poured out half a glass of the whisky and, without tasting it, poured half of what was left down the kitchen sink, praying God to forgive the unforgivable waste. Then he placed the bottle beside the glass on the table and placed a chair and the Canon’s leather footstool alongside. As an afterthought he poured a little blue till on the footstool, which gave him a dart of pleasure far in excess of the action.

  For a moment he stood by the door and shone the torch on the table. It would make a perplexing sight for McGing when called out to investigate in the morning. He would take it as a personal affront that anyone should have the cheek to break into a house within half a mile of the barracks, steal a rifle, smoke eight or nine cigarettes, muddy the carpet, and drink half a bottle of the Canon’s best Scotch before leaving. It was not the kind of thing that happened in the best policed parishes. He could not keep himself from laughing as he climbed out through the window with the hold-all and rifle. For the first time since receiving Potter’s bogmail letter, he felt in full possession of his life again.

  He made his way down the fields to the river, crossed the Minister’s Bridge, and found a secluded culvert he remembered from boyhood. Pushing back the rushes at the entrance, he crawled inside and hid the rifle in the uppermost and driest part. Backing out, he pulled the woollen socks off his shoes, filled them with stones, and flung them into the deepest part of the river.

  He felt quite elated. His head had cleared and the black anxiety that had been gnawing at his gizzard for weeks had vanished. He had missed his vocation. Essentially, he was a man of action who had been born into the wrong age. Instead of enjoying the camaraderie of the officers’ mess or the explorer’s campfire, he was living the life of an idle publican, condemned to mete and dole unappreciated pints unto a savage race.

  Reaching home at four, he scraped the labels off the two claret bottles with his penknife and slept soundly until morning. He got up at ten to find Susan in the kitchen serving a breakfast of rashers and black pudding to a ravenous Allegro.

  ‘That McGing has no cat sense,’ she said seriously. ‘He should have known better than to give Allegro cheap Whiskas from a tin.’

  ‘He’s neither a cat-man nor a dog-man,’ Roarty said, putting an appreciative arm round her waist. ‘Never trust a man no animal will trust.’

  14

  Potter was reading a book about bogs, sent to him by Margaret. It was, he felt, typical of her childish s
ense of humour to find the idea of bogs amusing. ‘Think of it,’ she wrote. ‘The announcement “I’m going to the bog” will have a new and refreshing meaning for you. What a pity I am unable to share in the experience.’ Though she might be surprised to hear it, he was reading the book with interest and in the knowledge that he was adding to his fund of arcane and, to him, completely useless information.

  He now knew that the bogs on the west coast of Ireland, unlike those on the central plain, were classified as blanket bogs. He had a good mind to write her a boring letter explaining at great length the difference between bogs of the ombrogenous and soligenous varieties, not to mention Hochmoore, Niedermoore, and Übergangsmoore. If nothing else, it would teach her not to send him presents tongue in cheek. If only she’d leave him alone to forget the past and allow him to live with a clean slate. Not content with walking out on him, she was bent on reminding him at least one a week of how much she was enjoying herself. ‘We share past versions of ourselves, you and I,’ she’d written. ‘They may be versions we’ve outlived but they’re precious. We must never forget them. We must always remain friends.’ Margaret was a mystery. He would never understand her, nor could he begin to imagine what she was up to. Compared with her, Nora Hession, though enigmatic in her Irish way, was an open book. Women, he thought, were a total mystery, and that of course was half their fascination.

  He went to the kitchen window. It was the last week of October and most of the garden trees were bare. Day after day over the past month he had watched them change colour, seemingly at random, to olive green here and light yellow or brown there; and he had watched them falling in twos and threes, floating soundlessly to the earth through still air. He would get up in the morning expecting to find that a wind in the night had blown them all away but the nights remained untypically calm and most of the leaves remained on the trees. Then at the weekend the weather turned cold, bringing a still, dry chill that pierced the stone walls of the cottage, and he woke on Sunday morning to find that most of the leaves had fallen, as if the cold of the night had nipped their attenuated stems.