At times, it feels as though I am making the city up out of my head. Creating streets that never existed before, a narrow alley of redbrick houses, no cars. The washing lines are out, every door is open, children on the street, a dog barking at me. I must look out of place, the women ask me am I lost, love? At the corner, I pass the wreck of a burned-out car, orange in colour, the springs in the seats showing. There is a Madonna and Child painted on the gable end wall, she has rosy cheeks, the child’s face is larger and more adult looking, with penetrating eyes. At a corner pub, the men sitting at the bar turn to look at me when I go inside, it feels as though I have walked into somebody’s living room. The barman asks me if I am all right. I tell him that I am looking for the rail yard.
One of the men wants to know if I am a tourist.
I hear them laughing.
At the rail yard, I speak to the man in charge of rolling stock about the possibility of buying a section of disused track. I explain to him that I want around two metres of track and a buffer stop, also one of those signal towers with the flap coming down, could I acquire one of those? I ask. One of those worthless projects I’ve had in mind, building something that has no function. He wants to know what it’s for and I tell him it’s for my children. I am going to buy a house and I am planning to put in a piece of railway in the front garden, allow it to get overgrown a bit. He doesn’t say – you must be joking, railway tracks, in your garden? He can see that I’m serious, he takes my name and address, he will come back to me with a price.
My walk is getting me nowhere. The streets are unreliable. I am achieving nothing. Escaping nothing. Standing with my reflection in a pharmacy window at one point, I think – Dublin is like something going on behind your back.
I come across a house being renovated by the canal, the door is open, a cluster of names and bells, it must have been in flats. There is a yellow skip outside full of building rubble – bits of splintered wood, a door at an angle, window frames, radiator units, a bath filled up with used bricks. It amazes me how much can be put into one skip. A worker comes out carrying a section of plywood partially painted blue, the unpainted patch must have had something leaning against it. He throws the sheet onto the skip and goes to open the boot of a car. I see him take out a can of beer and drink from it, the angle up to his mouth tells me how much is left. He waves his arm, I think he has seen me, but it’s the truck coming to take the skip away.
I stay to watch the skip being removed. I hear the chains being attached. The front cab of the truck jumps a little as the weight of the skip is raised up on the loading arms, then it is slowly brought into position over the back of the truck and set down, sinking on the wheels. Green netting is thrown across the top and the truck drives away, leaving behind a new empty skip. There is something about the sight of disposal that appeals to me, I could stay watching all day, I draw a feeling of satisfaction from the idea of things being cleared out.
Disposal and clearing, I love that.
Crossing over the river again by the last bridge before the sea feels like a re-enactment. Every journey is going back over a previous one. The city is a repository of myself in past versions. A composite map of my route to school, to work, to the German library, to the National Gallery, the various interlinking pubs, would look like one of those long exposure photographs at night with a cluster of tail lights frozen in swaying red lines.
My route leads me up along Pembroke Street to the laneway with the small theatre. The theatre Helen belonged to. A small drama group with an improvisation school, no more than thirty seats in the auditorium. It’s the last building, a flat roof, you could hear the rain falling during Miss Julie. The applause was like more rain. All the people in the audience gathered around after the performance with cups of tea and glasses of wine. The foyer was so small they had to keep their elbows in. Helen smiled and talked to everyone on the way through. I stood waiting for her to come out, she was wearing a black velvet jacket with the line of fake fur.
I have reached the end of the city. It takes me no further. The buildings are unchanged. The sound of traffic is no different, the lights, the windows, the succession of doors, the nearest pub, the direction we took. Our lives sneaking off down the street arm in arm.
Too late.
By the time I woke up, Rosie was on the floor in the hallway. She was trying to crawl but not moving. I got her up onto her feet and brought her into the front room to Helen. I ran to get the sick bowl and couldn’t find it. Made a terrible clatter of pots and came back with a plastic container, but it was too late, she had already been sick in her bed. I wiped her face with a warm cloth. I gave her a sip of water to take away the bad taste in her mouth. Helen had her cuddled in her arms, saying everything was fine, telling her to think of something nice, the time she was a baby and we once stayed in a castle near Munich, she slept in a rocking basket from another century.
I went to change the sheets on Rosie’s bed, I opened the window, I propped her mattress up vertically to dry, the dog next door must have heard the noise, he was barking. New sheets, new pillows, I dragged Essie’s mattress into the front room, we could all sleep together, the stuffed toys came in as well. I went back to find where the sick bowl was, it was out in the garden, they had been using it to make perfume. There was a snail floating on top. I picked it out and transferred the perfume to the plastic container, then I brought the sick bowl into the front room, for the next emergency.
Why was she getting sick so often?
We took them to Glendalough the next day, but Rosie stopped speaking. She didn’t want to hear any stories. She didn’t like the mountains, didn’t like the round tower, didn’t want to see the lakes. Didn’t want me to be the catcher when they climbed on the low arm of a tree. She got sick again in the car on the way back and I stood holding her by the side of the road. I bought a roll of kitchen towels and some disinfectant in a petrol station, the car smelled like an ambulance, we stopped for something to eat but nobody was hungry.
The barman left his thumbprint in the sandwich.
Helen made everything better when we got home, she set up a theatre for them in the hallway, by the public phone, props dragged out from the kitchen. Rosie was back to herself again. It was a big production, the play about a wedding in the lighthouse. The front door was open, the audience passing by the gate, the people upstairs crossed the stage on their way out.
Helen allowed them to use her clothes, her little black jacket with the fake fur. All those untouchable things from before she was a mother, things we kept out of sight, from ourselves. The bells, the broken snake, the stolen spoon, the weeping stick of salt from a Canadian mine, the detached plait of her hair made up when she went to boarding school, still intact, not a day older, like an amputated limb. All her Carnaby jewellery. They were dripping in necklaces. They put on wide summer hats that Helen wore in the Ontario heat but never found a reason to wear in Ireland, the wind would take them way.
The crêpe-de-Chine powder-blue skirt.
A full costume rehearsal of plundered memory. They wore everything with artistic innocence, defacing all previous meaning, they were borrowing her life, her backstory, stepping into her shoes.
I took a photograph of them by the door.
Children dressed as grown women. Rosie was the image of her grandmother in Canada, full of drama, one shoulder pressed forward, hands pointed flat out on either side like a dancer. Essie was looking straight and open, hands clasped, more like my mother, ready to ask what you were thinking. Rosie born in a hurry the night after visiting the Berlin Wall. Essie born with a birthmark on her forehead in Dublin. They both sang in Irish voices on the cassette tape, we sent it to Canada for St Patrick’s day – do you love an apple?
My true character caught up with me each time I was back at my desk in the basement, transparent and found out. The footsteps of people overhead on the street. My restless legs, my broken-bottle mouth, the pre
ssure in my jaw reaching into each eye socket, like somebody hanging on to my cheekbones by the fingers.
You need to get out of that basement, Helen said.
I sat across the desk from the commander, telling him that I needed time off to write. He understood my request and asked me what I was writing, I had no idea, maybe something about glass.
He wanted to know what language I was writing.
English, I said.
The language of the street, he said.
It was the only way I could find a place to settle down, I explained, my feet were not my feet. In English, I might be accepted on the street, the language that made people welcome around the world.
The word for good luck in Irish means carrying a trophy. To wish somebody well is to put them on a rising road. He spoke about letting a trapped animal go free, what you said in the shadow language to a person in great thirst, what a couple in love might say to each other.
Write like a man on a bike with no brakes, he said.
He was surrounded by newspaper cuttings, a heavy fall of leaves. He kept me late. He opened a bottle of wine. We drank together from plastic cups. The desk lamp flickered, he tried to fix it, but the brass fitting scalded his fingers, he called it a right buffalo. His stories went on long after the traffic slowed down outside. The park of lovers was gone dark. He asked me for a song and I sang like the living dead.
After that, I began to write down everything that was happening in order of life moving on.
The excitement in the house when Helen’s uncle arrived from London. Uncle Jerome. I wrote down how I went to collect him from the boat. He had travelled through the night. It was cold, he was dressed in a good suit, no coat, his shoulders hunched. He carried a small sports bag under his arm. Helen had breakfast ready for him, rashers and sausages and black pudding, toast and strong tea. He wasn’t all that hungry after the crossing, he handed her a bottle of whiskey and she poured him a glass. She closed the door to keep the smoke from drifting up the hallway into the yoga room. I could see how happy she was, he talked without stopping, he sat in the armchair with Rosie and Essie clasped on either side, how great it was to be home, he said.
When she was eight in Birmingham, Helen once sneaked into his room to steal a bit of his aftershave, so she could remember him when he was gone.
He wore sideburns, I wrote. His hair was receding, pinned back over his ears, sitting on the collar of his shirt at the back. He wore a blue tie, he carried a manicure set in his top pocket, he perfected the London accent, he could live under cover and only be Irish when he needed to. He had a long nose and his teeth came forward a bit, he spoke like Rick in Casablanca, full of altruism, something that was gone out of fashion. It was the mark of his time to do the right thing, let the girl go, leave all that happiness and luck to someone else, better off with nothing to lose.
He had been in love with a teacher from Achill Island, she was mad about him, they said she was a painting on two feet. They were the most perfect couple, engaged to be married. He was on the way to becoming a bank manager in Mullingar, then he found himself in a hotel in Donegal where his cousins came from, late one night he bet money he didn’t own at a poker game. The cards were against him. The daughter of the hotel owner recognised his distress and stepped in to pay his debts, then he did the decent thing, he married her instead of the person he loved. He disappeared off the face of the earth and left his belongings, his books, his country, his aftershave, a note to the woman from Achill he loved more than anyone in the world. He took up a caretaker position in London and lived in a basement flat in Knightsbridge with the woman who bailed him out, in return for her kindness.
His fiancé from Achill moved on, she got married to somebody else in Dublin. Like all people who emigrate, he was the one left behind.
Only the song left over full of recurring pain.
He sang his heart out at nine in the morning, the precious days of September dwindling fast. He fell asleep in the armchair and we left him alone, we got his shoes off, I took the glass out of his hand. When he woke up, we brought him for a walk by the sea, he stopped off at the pub on the corner, we had a hard time getting him out. Helen took him by the arm as though he was being arrested.
We had no room to put him up, so we brought him to my mother, he stopped to buy a bunch of flowers. She welcomed him like a visitor from home. My little brother Emil stood in the doorway with his bike, my sister Lotte carried his sports bag upstairs. Greta made dinner, he didn’t eat much, only the soup. He got the hiccups, Rosie and Essie counted on their fingers, fifteen in all, he leaned forward and drank water back to front, then it stopped. After dinner, they performed their ballet for him, he even tried some ballet himself, shuffling on silent feet, like somebody hurrying across the road.
He got my mother to drink whiskey, I wrote.
They sat in the front room and maybe it reminded her of her father. It was the smoke, the sound of whiskey being poured, the link she made as a child between happiness and the smell of alcohol, the talk and the laughter it brought out, the stories keeping people up late. Before the crash, before the stationery shop was closed, before the family went bankrupt and people stopped coming to visit and they no longer got free tickets for the cinema.
Uncle Jerome told stories about London, the apartment block where he was the caretaker. He took in their complaints, their opinions, their cats, their flowers, their husbands locked out, notes from lovers, he was a psychiatrist and a friend, he helped them with the crossword, told them what was on TV, gave them his teabags, got a bottle of whiskey from them at Christmas. He knew their history, the Kurdish freedom fighter, the Iraqi former diplomat, the old Jewish woman who had escaped Nazi Germany. A Bulgarian man came down late one night in an agitated state with the fog around him at the door, entrusting him with a sealed envelope, a dead letter, the police found his passport, money, clothes, a gun, photographs of his wife and children back in Sofia.
My mother asked me to put on some music.
I unlocked the gramophone and put on one of her favourite pieces, a short piano introduction followed by a deep male voice – a stranger I came, a stranger I will go.
Uncle Jerome got up and asked her to dance, she smiled and shook her head.
It’s not for dancing, she said.
Of course, it is.
He held out his hand. He didn’t know what was being said in the song, but he heard the words coming from the singer’s heart and insisted on pulling her out of the chair. She had to laugh because it was a bit foolish being swung in a gentle circle around the room to words that were more for listening, about love and wandering, remembering journeys in winter, the road you must go, the road no one returns.
She turned into a girl, she was out of breath and had to sit down, laughing. Uncle Jerome bowed with a sweep of his arm and said the word in German for thank you. He told us he was an Irish count. We believed him. He placed his hand on the mantelpiece for support and laughed with his head back.
I never saw my father dancing.
Dancing produced nothing, it had no destination. My father never made those sweeping gestures, he didn’t drink, he didn’t throw his head back, he made speeches and spoke with great fervour about how things could be improved. When he listened to music, he stared at the floor with a frown.
To demonstrate the depth of his feelings, my father built a gramophone. It was enormous, it took him over a year to finish. Four separate compartments, components imported from Germany, the finest quality needle ordered in from Sweden, arriving like a piece of jewellery in a small box with velvet cushion interiors. He built a single speaker in one corner, the size of a wardrobe, a triangular shape with cavity walls full of oven-dried sand for solid sound, chequered speaker gauze throbbing. People on our street understood the magnitude of his project. The volume of music he played to keep my mother in Ireland could be heard six doors down, we had the
Vienna Philharmonic orchestra in the front room, dancers in costume bowing and taking the arm. The walls were swaying, the furniture moved, vases, ornaments, table lamps, photographs of our dead relatives, pictures of my mother’s town, the stationery shop, the paper factory, floating up to the ceiling. The sound was so pure, my mother said, you could hear the sheet music being turned.
This gigantic record player was my father’s sweeping gesture, I wrote. That was his exaggeration, his overstatement, his love so close to his fury.
We left my mother and Uncle Jerome sitting in the front room with the side lamp on. Greta said it was after midnight by the time they got to bed. Uncle Jerome sang a train song on the way up the stairs, he went down on one knee on the landing, his arms out, my mother held on to the bannisters, laughing. Lotte showed him to his room, they had the bed made up for him. It was my room, the window leading out onto the flat roof where the beehives used to be. It was my bed he slept in, with the heating pipe in the corner and the Chagall poster on the wall and the books of Russian poets. He took my place. He took the fear out of the walls.
He coughed a bit, Greta said. His light was on for a while. They heard him laughing and talking in his sleep as if the room was full of people.
There was sweeping exaggeration in everything I did after that. I began phoning estate agents. We went to see run-down properties that few other people seemed interested in. Rosie and Essie ran around the empty rooms, hearing their own echo on the stairs. Helen remarked on the lives of previous occupants, the faded curtains, the bits of broken furniture, stains and smells left behind by people who came to the end of their lives, soon to be replaced by a new family.
I bought a house. My solicitor did his best to hold me back, but I panicked and agreed with the asking price, the building society accepted the inflated figure I gave them for my salary. It was a time of exuberance and risk.
Dublin Palms Page 11
