by Colum McCann
The Liffey guides a winter wind along its broad-backed banks. Fergus puts the brake on the wheelchair and lets a gob of phlegm volley out over the river, where it catches and spirals. He wonders what sort of arc the bicycle wheel will make in the air.
The fridge, all those years ago, tumbled head over heels into the water. His father, a leather-faced man with pockets always full of bottles, had taken it down to the river all on his own. He hadn’t been able to keep up the payments and wasn’t ready to hand it back to the collector. “That gouger can go for a swim if he wants his Frigidaire.” He nailed a few planks from the coal shed together, screwed some rollerskate wheels on the bottom, loaded up the fridge, and grunted down toward the quays. Fergus and his brothers tagged behind. Some of the drunks who were belching out of the pubs offered help, but Fergus’s father flung his arms in the air. “Every single one of ya is a horse of a man,” he roared, then stopped and pulled on his cigarette, “but yez can’t shit walking, so I’ll do it meself.”
Bottles clinking, he stumbled down to the river, laughing as the huge white fridge cartwheeled into the water, creating a gigantic splash.
The things that fridge must have joined, thinks Fergus. Broken toilets. Flagons of cider. Shirt buttons. High-heeled shoes. A very old pair of crutches. He shivers for a moment in the cold and runs his fingers around through his short curly hair. Or perhaps even a rotating bed, flanked with special syringes, piss bags, rubber gloves, buckets of pills, bottles of Lucozade, a dozen therapy tables, a nurse’s pencil with the ends chewed off. Holding onto the axle and the freewheel, Fergus spins the spokes around, peers through them, and listens to the rhythmic click as the river and the quays tumble into slices, then lets another volley from his throat out over the water.
* * *
Mangled by a bread truck on the Lansdowne Road, near where the Dodder negotiates low rocks. Bucketfuls of winter sun coming down as he rode back from a delivery, over the bridge by the football stadium, inventing Que Seras and Molly Malones and Ronnie Whelan hitting an eighteen-yard volley from the edge of the box. But there was only a song of tires and the poor bastard behind the wheel of the bread truck had a heart attack and was found with eclair cream on the front of his white open-neck shirt, brown loaves littered around him on the floor, slumped frontward on the truck horn, so that it sounded like the cry of a curlew, only constant, with blood in a pattern of feathers on the front windshield.
Fergus was tossed in the air like a stale crust and woke up in Our Lady of Lourdes Rehabilitation Center with the doctors in a halo around him. Collarbone broken, thirty forehead stitches, ribs cracked, and the third lumbar on the lower vertebrae smashed to hell. He was put in a ward full of rugby players and motorcycle victims. When his bed was spun he could see out the window to a ripple of trees that curtsied down to the road. Weeks rivered like months. A Cavanman in the bed beside him had a pair of scars that ran like railroad tracks when he held his wrists together. A persistent howl thudded down from the end of the ward. A carrot-haired boy from Sligo tattooed a tricolor on the top of his leg, slamming the needle down hard into a muscle that didn’t feel a thing. The months eddied carelessly into one another.
“How d’ya think I feel, I’m marvelous, just fuckin’ marvelous,” Fergus roared at the nurse one afternoon when the knowledge was settling in—no more slipstreaming the 45 bus down Pearse Street in the rain or sprinting along by the brewery, slapping at dogs with the bicycle pump, dicing the taxis, swerving the wrong way up the street, no more jokes about women sitting on things other than the crossbar—that’s not my crossbar, love, I’m only happy to see ya—or slagging matches along the quays with the truck drivers, or simply just trundling down Thomas Street for a pint of milk.
The bike was at home in the coal shed, a trophy of misery, collected by his father on the day of the accident. He had bought it for Fergus five years before, convinced that his son was good enough to race. Every payday he had rolled up his spare pound notes and stuffed them inside a Pernod bottle. He brought the bike home one Saturday night, carefully wheeling it from the shop on George’s Street. It was a red Italian model, all Camagnolo parts. Boys in the neighborhood whistled when they saw it. Once, on O’Connell Bridge, four youngsters in bomber jackets tried to knock him off and steal it, but he smacked one in the jaw with the kryptonite lock. In the messenger company he was known for the way he salmoned, leaping through the traffic the wrong way up a one-way road. In his first race, in the Wicklow Hills, two months before the accident, he had come in second place. The leather on the saddle had begun to conform to his body. He had learned how to flick it quite easily through the traffic jams up by Christchurch.
After the accident the machine was a ribbon of metal. But, when his father came into the hospital, he would tower over the bed: “Before y’know it, Fergus, you’ll be on her again, and fuck all the begrudgers.” Fergus lay there, nodding.
His mother stayed upstairs in her bedroom, kneeling by red votive lamps and holy pictures. Letters were sent off to Knock and Lourdes. His younger brothers drew pictures of favorite places, Burdocks Chipper, the alleyway down by the Coombe, the front of the Stag’s Head, the new graffiti on the schoolyard wall. Fergus’s friends from the messenger service sat by the hospital bed and sometimes they’d race off together, radios crackling, come on ya tosser would ya hurry up for fuck sake. Old girlfriends wrote short poems that they found in magazines, and occasionally the nurses brought him down to Baker’s Corner for a sweet and furtive pint. But when the bed was spun the same trees curtsied down to the road. The boy with the tricolor went berserk with the pins, covering himself in small blue dots and stabbing at his eye with a needle. The Cavanman stroked his wrists. A biker from Waterford shouted that someone had left a pubic hair in the French magazine that had circulated around the ward. Oranges gathered mold on Fergus’s bedside table. The therapy room was full of bright colors and smiling nurses, but at night, back in the ward, the distant low moan wouldn’t subside—it became part of the scenery, swallowed up, a hum, a drone, a noise you couldn’t sleep without. The months flowed on.
Home from the hospital, his father wheeled him out to the coal shed. It was a Friday and fish was being cooked in the house. The smell drifted. A light drizzle was falling and pigeons were scrapping for food on the rooftops of neighboring houses. His father opened the lock of the shed slowly. Half a dozen brown boxes waited for Fergus, beside the bicycle. They’d been postmarked in England, sent by mail order. Fergus opened them slowly. “The doctors don’t know their arses from their elbows, son, go on ahead there now and get cracking.” Fergus stared at the boxes for a long time. “And they cost a lot fucking more than a miracle,” said his father, chuckling, heading out the door toward the pub, his shoulders ripping at the side of his overcoat. Fergus sat there, the smell of cooking food all around him, fingering a derailleur.
* * *
Hitching the scarf up around his neck, he looks at his watch—already three o’clock in the morning—and then lays his head back against the edge of the wheelchair for a moment to look up to the sky. Certain stars are recognizable even through the clouds and the smog. Ten years ago, when he was seven years old, he’d been caught trying to steal a Mini Clubman from outside St. Patrick’s, and his father, after walloping him, took him for a walk down the same river, pointing up at the sky. “See those stars,” he said, “let me tell ya something.” The story was that the stars were their own peculiar hell, that all the murderers went to one star where there was nobody left to murder but themselves, all the corrupt politicians went where there was no government, all the child molestors went where there were no children to molest, all the car thieves went where there were no cars, and if that wasn’t good enough deterrent for him, he’d get another wallop. Fergus rubs his hand over his chest and wonders if there’s a star full of bicycle paraphernalia.
The new parts had cost his father the best part of two wage packets. He had even gotten an extra job as a night watchman for a security firm in Ta
llaght. When he came home at night there wasn’t so much as a clink inside his pockets anymore—it was more a persistent clatter of dismissive humphs, an emphatic hope, a nagging insistence that Fergus would get on the bike again.
And out in the coal shed, for two months, in the wheelchair, Fergus sweated over the bicycle. He tightened the nipples of the spokes on the right hand side of the wheel to bring it to the left, took the cotter pin and tapped it until the fat leap came out of the pedals, used the third hand to hold the brakes in place, dropped in the new set of front forks, plied the thin little Phillips-head screwdriver to adjust the gears. He overlapped the tape on the handlebars, twisted the ends of the cables where they frayed, bought new decals. His brothers watched and helped. Each night his father would come out to the coal shed, slap the saddle: “Just a few weeks now, son.”
He offered the bike to his brothers, but they knew better. It was a fossil, and Fergus knew it, and the only thing it could be ridden with was a perfect cadence of the imagination.
* * *
First to go were the handlebars and they went down with a small splash. The following night the pedals, the cranks, the front chainwheel, and the ball bearings were tossed. It was a Saturday when he wandered down to jettison the brakes, the cables, the saddle, the seatpost, and the derailleur. A crowd of drunks were huffing glue down on the quays, so he sat in the gateway of the Corporation building and waited until they drifted off.
Sunday was the most difficult job of all—it had taken three hours to try and negotiate the frame, and he was about to just leave it alongside the church when a taxi driver, with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, pulled alongside him and asked what the hell he was doing. “Bringing the bike for a swim,” said Fergus, and the driver just nodded, then offered to put it in the boot and drive it down to the river for him. He balanced the frame on the riverwall. “Just as well this isn’t the bleedin’ Ganges,” said the driver, and drove off. Fergus, unsure of what the taxi man meant, toppled the frame over the wall and headed home, not even waiting for the ripples to spread out over the water.
And last night, when he went to get rid of the front wheel, he woke his brother Padraic as the door of the coal shed swung too far. Padraic came downstairs in his Arsenal jersey: “Wha’ ya doin’, Ferg?” “Mind your own business.” “Where’s the rest of the bike?” Fergus said nothing. “Da’ll cream ya,” said his brother. Later, as Fergus maneuvred down the street, he saw Padraic pull back the curtains and stare. When he got home Padraic was waiting for him on the steps of the house. “Ya’ve no fucking right to do that,” Padraic said. “Da spent all his money on it.”
Fergus pushed past his brother into the house: “He’ll find out soon enough.”
Down along the quays things are still quiet. The exhaust fumes from a couple of trucks make curious shapes in the air, sometimes caught in midflight with a streak of neon from a shop or a sign. A couple of pedestrians stroll along on the opposite side of the river, huddled under anorak hoods.
He bends forward in the chair, grabs one of the spokes, and hauls the rear wheel up to his chest. He sees a smidgin of oil and dirt on the third cog of the freewheel and runs his finger along it. He daubs the oil on the inside of his jeans, staring at the small smudge the oil makes against the blue.
The water is calmer now, with bits of litter settling on its surface. He wonders if all the pieces that he has flung in over the last few days have settled in the same area of river bottom.
Perhaps one day a storm might blow the whole bike back together again, a freak of nature, the pedals locking on to the cranks, the wheel axle slipping into the frame, the handlebars dropping gently into the housing, the whole damn thing back in one piece. Maybe then he can take a dive to the bottom of the slime and ride it again, slip his feet in the toeclips, curl his fingers around the bars, lean down to touch the gears forward, then pedal all around the river bottom, amongst the ruin of things.
He heaves the wheel out over the Liffey.
It flares out over the river, then almost seems to stop. The wheel appears suspended there in the air, caught by a fabulous lightness, the colors from along the quays whirling in its spin, collecting energy from the push of the sky, reeling outward, simultaneously serene and violent, a bird ready to burst into flight. For a moment, he thinks of marathons and jerseys, sprints and headbands, tracks and starting guns. Out there trundling through the traffic of Dublin in a wheelchair, racing along with others, maybe even delivering a package or two, parcels and letters that he can fit in his lap, a small paycheck, his father bending down to look at the money, bottles clanking. His younger brothers at some finishing line in colorful shirts, his mother fingering a string of red beads.
In an instant, the wheel turns sideways and falls. The walls of the Liffey curl up to gather it down to its belly as it slices the air with the economy of a stone. Fergus pins his upper body across the chair, leaning against the wall, but loses sight of the wheel about five feet above the water. He listens for the splash, but it is drowned out by the rumble of a truck coming along the road from the James’ Gate Brewery. Down below, on the surface, concentric circles fling themselves outward, reaching for the riverwalls in huge gestures, as if looking for something, galloping outward, the river itself shifting its circles for another moment, moving its whippled water along, all the time gathering the wheel downward to the river floor, slowly, deliberately, to where it will rest. Fergus tries to remember if the door of the fridge had been flung open as it cartwheeled down into the river all those years ago.
He places his hands on the wheels of the chair, grits his teeth, pushes forward along the riverwall, and rams down the quays, his overcoat flapping in the breeze.
CATHAL’S LAKE
It’s a sad Sunday when a man has to dig another swan from the soil. The radio crackles and brings Cathal news of the death as he lies in bed and pulls deep on a cigarette, then sighs.
Fourteen years to heaven, and the boy probably not even old enough to shave. Maybe a head of hair on him like a wheat field. Or eyes as blue as thrush eggs. Young, awkward, and gangly, with perhaps a Liverpool scarf tied around his mouth and his tongue flickering into the wool with a vast obscenity carved from the bottom of his stomach. A bottle of petrol in his hands and a rag from his mother’s kitchen lit in the top. His arms in the beginnings of a windmill hurl. Then a plastic bullet slamming his chest, all six inches of it hurtling against his lung at one hundred miles an hour. The bottle somersaulting from the boy’s fingers. Smashing on the street beneath his back. Thrush eggs broken and rows of wheat going up in flames. The street suddenly quiet and gray as other boys, too late, roll him around in puddles to put out the fire. A bus burning. A pigeon flapping over the rooftops of Derry with a crust of white bread in its mouth. A dirge of smoke breaking into song over the sounds of dustbin lids and keening sirens. And, later, a dozen other bouquets flung relentlessly down the street in memorial milk bottles.
Cathal coughs up a tribute of phlegm to the vision. Ah, but it’s a sad Sunday when a man has to go digging again and the lake almost full this year.
He reaches across his bedside table and flips off the radio, lurches out of the bed, a big farmer with a thick chest. The cigarette dangles from his lips. As he walks, naked, toward the window he rubs his balding scalp and imagines the gray street with the rain drifting down on roofs of corrugated iron. A crowd gathering together, faces twitching, angry. The boy still alive in his house of burnt skin. Maybe his lung collapsed and a nurse bent over him. A young mother, her face hysterical with mascara stains, flailing at the air with soapy fists, remembering a page of unfinished homework left on the kitchen table beside a vase of wilting marigolds. Or nasturtiums. Or daisies. Upstairs in his bedroom, a sewing needle with ink on the very tip, where the boy had been tattooing a four-letter word on his knuckles. Love or hate or fuck or hope. The sirens ripping along through the rain. The wheels crunching through glass.
Cathal shivers, pulls aside the tattered curtains and wa
tches a drizzle of rain slant lazily through the morning air, onto the lake, where his swans drift. So many of them out there this year that if they lifted their wings in unison they would all collide together in the air, a barrage of white.
From the farmhouse window Cathal can usually see for miles—beyond the plowed black soil, the jade green fields, the rivulets of hills, the roll of forest, to the distant dun mountains. Today, because of the rain, he can just about make out the lake, which in itself is a miniature countryside—ringed with chestnut trees and brambles, banked ten feet high on the northern side, with another mound of dirt on the eastern side, where frogsong can often be heard. The lake is deep and clear, despite the seepage of manured water from the fields where his cattle graze. On the surface, the swans, with their heads looped low, negotiate the reeds and the waterlilies. The lake can’t be seen from the road, half a mile away, where traffic occasionally rumbles.
Cathal opens the window, sticks his head out, lets the cigarette drop, and watches it spiral and fizzle in the wet grass. He looks toward the lake once more.
“Good morning,” he shouts. “Have ye room for another?”
The swans drift on, like paper, while the shout comes back to him in a distant echo. He coughs again, spits out the window, closes it, walks to his rumpled bed, pulls on his underwear, a white open-necked shirt, a large pair of dirty overalls, and some wool socks. He trundles slowly along the landing, down the stairs to make his breakfast. All these young men and women dying, he thinks, as his socks slide on the wooden floor. Well, damn it all anyway.
* * *
And maybe the soldier who fired the riot gun was just a boy himself. Cathal’s bacon fizzles and pops and the kettle lets out a low whistle. Maybe all he wanted, as he saw the boy come forward with the Liverpool scarf wrapped around his mouth, was to be home. Then, as a firebomb whirled through the air, perhaps all the soldier thought of was a simple pint of Watney’s. Or a row of Tyneside tenements with a football to bang against the wall. Or to be fastened together with his girlfriend in some little Newcastle alleyway. Perhaps he was wishing that his hair could touch his shoulders, like it used to do. Or that, with the next month’s paycheck, he could buy some Afghan hash and sit in the barracks with his friends, blowing rings of Saturn smoke to the ceiling. Maybe his eyes were as deep and green as bottles in a cellar. Perhaps a Wilfred Owen book was tucked under his pillow to make meaning of the whistles on the barbed wire. But there he was, all quivery and trembling, in Londonderry, his shoulder throbbing with the kickback of the gun, looking up to the sky, watching a plume of smoke rise.
