The Holy City

by Patrick McCabe

  But the highlight of that visit, I’m afraid, proved to be none of these particular phantasmagoric delights, or the long hours spent on the dodgems and fairground rides. But that dreadful night when I found myself falling out into the night, after I’d quit the Beachcomber Bar, where Dolly had been working her way through her repertoire, enthralling the audience as per usual. It was an appalling business, the Beachcomber Affair, not, as I liked to joke to myself about it later, like some amusingly light-hearted episode from the television series The Man from Uncle but an occurrence which succeeded in debilitating me to a truly distressing degree and for which, even yet, I find it difficult to find the words. No, the Beachcomber Affair was anything but amusing, or light-hearted either. In that the affair which took place that night in Butlin’s of Mosney — it was just about as real as it could get.

  The Beachcomber Bar, with its clam-shell stage and papier mâché models of Easter Island stone faces, its palm fronds and fish nets, rattan ceiling, Polynesian carvings and wicker chairs, was packed to the door with enthusiastic dancers — practically every night of the week.

  The Vince Broy Band were performing on this occasion — hilariously, from the audience’s point of view, attired in grass skirts and garlands of flowers. Playing, as their programme had promised, ‘all the summer’s fantabulous hits’.

  Ever since my ‘Catholic’ emotional outburst, I had become insecure — quite edgy now, in Dolly’s company. And, as I sat there nursing my coloured ‘Rainbow Bird’ cocktail, staring, preoccupied, at the cornucopia of thick coloured glass bottles suspended from the ceiling, I could not prevent myself from perspiring heavily. And rerunning all of her stories in my mind. All of the ‘little encounters’ she’d told me about, regarding Marcus. The News of the World. Hospitals’ Requests. Dear Frankie. Marcus Minor, I’d think, and, simultaneously: The holy place: love’s ancient city.

  I was at my wits’ end, frankly. Thinking of him laughing as he reached out to touch her hand, saying:

  — Ariadne, my precious. I, Marcus Otoyo, upon this orphan earth, am and shall remain your sole appointed envoy.

  Quite cleverly, even cruelly, it began to appear to me now, as I sat there trying to prevent the drink from quivering in my hand, dressed up as nothing of any greater importance than whimsy:

  — Dear Frankie, my boyfriend is a very puritanical man. He will not permit me to wear tights or jewellery.

  Each tale delivered as if it were of no import: frivolous, disposable gossip — nothing more, nothing less. But the more I turned them all over in my mind — she had only just started up ‘Mr Wonderful’ now — the more I became convinced of exactly what it meant.

  Why, Dolly, I inwardly pleaded, why Marcus?

  Why indeed. As I looked down to see that two of my fingers were, in fact, bleeding and that the stem of the glass had broken off in my hand.

  * * *

  To this day I cannot determine for sure exactly what length of time had elapsed after I had removed myself from the bar that night, quite intoxicated, I regret to say. I waited for quite some time but now there were only a few minutes remaining before a shocking and truly traumatic sight was to meet my eyes. An encounter which, quite irrevocably, was on the verge of changing everything in my life. But which, in a way, I had been half expecting.

  I heard the murmur of voices first: muffled, furtive — not that that was any surprise. But then, quite startlingly — a sudden peal of girlish laughter. As I approached chalet number II, the rickety clapboard cabin where Marcus was supposed to have been residing alone. That was the arrangement. The one condition that of course — laughably, in retrospect — had been ‘laid down’ by his mother.

  After hearing a ripple of the laughter again, I mustered what pitiful reserves of courage remained to me, galvanising myself to peer through the grubby panes of the chalet window, a tautness gathering in my chest that grew close to unbearable. But not even my worst imaginings could have prepared me for what was about to transpire.

  Marcus Otoyo was standing in semi-darkness now, bathed in the light of the moon, splendidly attired in a neatly pressed suit. As Dolores ran her fingers along his thin tie, he might have been an absurdly youthful and quite urbane city gentleman. The black suit was neatly cut with narrow, sharp lapels.

  Peggy Lee was playing very softly in the background as Dolores McCausland continued staring into his eyes, pressing her lips to his ear as she whispered:

  — Tell me, Mr Wonderful. Do you love me?

  Then she began, quite methodically, tenderly and patiently, to remove each item of his clothing — it was abundantly clear that this was not the first time that had happened — placing tiny pecks, soft kisses on his chest.

  I thrust my knuckles against my clenched teeth and cried out:

  — Vile betrayer! Treacherous Judas! Love’s holy city, it falls now into sand!

  That’s all I can remember for the remainder of that night. Apart from the door of my chalet opening — some two hours later — and Dolly, with a fur coat draped over her frosted-pink Dreamland nightdress, whispering:

  — Are you awake, Mr Wonderful? I hope you were expecting me to pay you a visit, were you?

  I subsequently began studiously avoiding Wattles Lane. His mother would often stop me in the Five Star or on the street to enquire as to whether there was a problem of some kind. I said why of course not, of course there isn’t a problem. As she said but our eggs and you’ve not delivered any buttermilk, not for at least three weeks now past. No, I said, I’m up to my eyes. The supermarkets can’t get enough these days, what with the way business is going in the town.

  But I could tell the excuse wasn’t very convincing.

  — You look pale, she said. If you like I can send Marcus out to get it. Out to the farm, I mean.

  My response was foolish, falsetto, practically:

  — No! Do you hear me!

  I routinely wept now — uncontrollably, to be honest, entirely unmanned by wounded pride and baffled desire.

  Whenever I turned on the radio it was never Herman’s Hermits or the Animals now. It always seemed to be Stevie Wonder — unabashedly proclaiming his love for his Cherie Amour, lovely as a summers day… distant as the Milky Way. I grew to loathe it more than anything. More than anything I grew to despise that song.

  And would find myself saying, my eyes smarting with anger and confusion and bitterness as I did so:

  — Don’t ever trust any of them. Niggers, they’re notorious.

  Why, I might have been Dr Henry Thornton, I laughed. Before weeping and chafing my knuckles again.

  I tended not to sleep very much now. I didn’t care much for the dances either. Slowly but surely the effect it all had on me was that I began to hate the times that I lived in, to loathe the decade I lived in called ‘the sixties’. And loathe it with a passion, despise it with all my heart. To hate who I was and what I had become.

  How I wished I’d come of age in the twenties or the thirties. Even the threadbare fifties would have been better. Infinitely so. But much much better than any of them, I now found myself considering on a regular basis — would never to have been conceived at all. As a half-Protestant bastard, in a barn or anywhere else.

  18 Saints You May Not Know

  Once when I happened to arrive home unexpectedly to the apartment, to my astonishment what did I discover, only Vesna doing a little private dance in the flat and playing a CD with a Lulu track on it — ‘To Sir With Love’, as a matter of fact. I flew across the room and straight away tore the music-system plug right out of its socket. Then I wrenched the CD case from her hand. I gave her what for after that, I can tell you — I mean I had to, actually at one point pushing her down on to the sofa and lifting my meerschaum cane, on the verge of giving her a proper thrashing. But, as might have been expected, she hadn’t the faintest clue what I was talking about, poor thing. How could she? She didn’t even know who Sidney Poitier was, for heaven’s sake. Much less be aware that he had co-starred in a feat
ure film with Lulu, and which, in fact, had been a big hit back in the year 1969.

  — I’m sorry, I said later. I didn’t mean it.

  I was still trembling violently. As Vesna gave me the puppy-eye look — Lord but she was good at that — nervously fingering the necklace I had given her as a present, some weeks before.

  — I no understand iss just song, no?

  I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t speak. The skeleton of the melody was still lingering in my ears.

  — Lulu, I kept thinking, with uneasy tingles spreading all over my back, Lulu.

  As I scratched my head and obsessively paced the room. Repeating:

  — Luh-luh-Lulu. Luh-luh-Lulu.

  With her twirly red hair and lovely baby dimples.

  — Luh-luh-Lulu, I kept on saying, as Vesna sobbed, begging forgiveness all over again.

  I held up my walking cane and considered for a moment — then I simply put it away.

  It was late March now, 1969, and it would soon be time for the play in the cathedral. There were posters for The Soul’s Ascent pasted up everywhere.

  But all that did now was fill me with bitterness. I no longer wanted to think about him or his part in a stupid and inconsequential amateur school play, which, at the end of the day, was all it was. More than anything, I disdained talk of the soul, and in particular the possibility of its ‘ascent’.

  I wished I had never laid eyes on Joyce’s Portrait. But one sentence, in particular, kept returning with a fierce aggression to my mind: amid the tumult of wounded pride and fallen hope and baffled desire, a film of sorrow veiled his eyes.

  — You stupid little tabernacle of Christ, I moaned. What you have done to me.

  If I heard Stevie Wonder on the radio, I’d fly into an inexplicable rage. Even the sight of A Portrait now had the effect of making me feel queasy.

  I had tried telling Dolly I wouldn’t be seeing her any more.

  She was aghast, she told me — quite astonished.

  — No, Mr Wonderful, tell me anything but please don’t tell me that, she implored.

  — My name isn’t Mr Wonderful, I said, without feeling.

  — You don’t realise what you’re saying. Please say it’s a joke: is it, Mr Wonderful?

  I found myself growing cold all over. Yet again, becoming so cold — only this time without realising it — I might have been Henry Thornton.

  — I told you my name is not Mr Wonderful, I said.

  She looked at me then — drawing back a little — quite afraid now, it seemed.

  — It was you who took the envelope, wasn’t it? You stole that letter out of my handbag.

  I didn’t say anything.

  As her lower lip began to tremble.

  — Now I see, she said, haltingly, reluctantly. It’s not me you care about at all, is it? Oh my God.

  — There’s nothing further to say, I told her.

  She dropped some things out of her handbag as she turned to go.

  — Dolly! I called after her.

  — Get away from me. Stay away — do you hear?

  Yes, C.J. Pops, ‘real gone’ grooving sixties freak. Just how would you describe what really was ‘his bag’?

  By this point now, the performance in the cathedral had begun to draw near. Everywhere you went there were conversations about it, with printed additions to the posters confidently predicting it would be the ‘event of the year’.

  The Soul’s Ascent: Saints You May Not Know, starring Marcus Otoyo as Blessed Martin de Porres. There was a photo of him with a white halo set in place just behind his head: as he smiled faintly with folded hands and uplifted eyes, in his habit of brown and girdle of beads. Like an angel on the verge of ascending to heaven. To announce the establishment of the long-awaited ‘new Jerusalem’.

  — The holy city, I repeated, grinding my teeth. The holy city of love gone wrong.

  19 A Walk in the Black Forest

  It’s funny when you look back on things sometimes but if I had thought that the episode with ‘Dr Mukti the Midget’ had been amusing, it was nothing to what took place only a few nights after the Beachcomber Affair. I had been away all day getting the ‘E-Type’ serviced in Dublin and was exhausted by the time I got back to the Nook. So just about the last thing I was expecting to hear when I came in the door was music.

  Especially music by Herb Alpert and his band. But there they were, delivering ‘Tijuana Taxi’, in full flight. The sound appeared to be coming from the kitchen. I tiptoed tensely along the hallway. And sure enough, there they were. Not paying the slightest attention to me, I have to say, in their neatly tailored blazers and ribbed white-nylon polo necks.

  Perched, almost treacherously, on the rim of a drinking glass. Surprising as it was, what could you possibly do but laugh? I hadn’t even had anything to drink.

  Bemused, I shook my head somewhat wearily before retiring to bed, with the next tune they’d just started already playing on my lips: ? Walk in the Black Forest’, a perky upbeat jazz number, once again delivered in Herb’s trademark mariachi style.

  20 City of Sapphire

  Probably the finest band I have ever seen playing in a pub — anywhere, I would have to say — is the group of youngsters, not one of them, I would say, over twenty, who deputise occasionally for Mike and the Chordettes in the Mood Indigo club and who style themselves (this ‘retro’ thing remains ever-popular) after a famous combo from the sixties — Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich. Who were a very well-known outfit indeed, throughout the course of their career chalking up a considerable batch of hits. Numbers which included ‘Hold Tight’, ‘The Legend of Xanadu’ and, of course, ‘Zabadak’.

  Another much-requested act is the Engelbert Humperdinck lookalike who always gets the crowd going whenever he appears, complete with gold medallion and impossibly hirsute sideburns.

  Vesna liked him a lot too, and would flutter her thick black lashes at me as she cooed:

  — You like me dance, Christopher my dear? You think iss good idea, hmm?

  In the beginning she winced at the idea of me making suggestions — as to how she might dress, I mean. But whenever she got into it — I mean, on any given night in the club you’d find at least two Dusty Springfields — she began to rather enjoy the idea. ‘Peggy Lee’, I’d whisper, or ‘Ruby Murray’ — as I squeezed her hand and kissed her lacquered blonde hair. By the time I was finished with her all trace of the seventies songwriter was gone, with the flared blue jeans discarded for ever. The same with the trendy peasant-style scarf and halter-neck top, now in their place spray-on sheath dresses and panda eyes, and expensive high heels that I bought for her on eBay. Which she dandled on her pretty foot as she sat beside me holding my hand, moving her lips in time to the music.

  While I whispered:

  — Miss Wonderful, it’s you, and her body would vibrate with the loveliest little ripple of delight.

  Yes, we made quite a couple and, more than anyone, Vesna Krapotnik from Croatia knew it. It’s just a pity she had to go and spoil it, but there isn’t anything that can be done about that now. We looked good dancing together too. And, just as he had once done in the Mayflower of yesteryear, old Roger McCool-Moore, alias ‘the Saint’, would never pass up an opportunity to demonstrate his considerable ballroom-dancing skills — his cha-cha, his tango and his quickstep, Mr Twinkletoes the hoofer in his white Italian loafers, a Peter Stuyvesant, as ever, dangling louchely from his lips — the international passport to smoking pleasure!

  As he twirled his meerschaum cane with a smile.

  * * *

  Maybe the fact that I no longer bother going down to the club, now that I have more or less lost interest in going to Mood Indigo, is the ultimate indication that, at last, it has happened. That I have been cured, once and for all. And no longer feel the need to make an impression of any kind on anyone. Being capable of just being myself, content to live my life here with Vesna in the blissful tranquillity of the Happy Club. It helps, of course, that her aff
ections are no longer in any doubt, for no relationship can withstand unremitting uncertainty and suspicion. In a way I like to think of our new-found contentment as a kind of brand-new version of ‘the Nook’, on those nights when Ethel and my mother would arrive, under cover of darkness, bearing gifts. With one present, as always, standing out in my mind: that little golden treasury, A Child’s Garden of Verses, by Robert Louis Stevenson. From which I continue to derive unlimited pleasure, turning its pages each night in the Happy Club, here in our love-nest. Sucking my thumb as I stare at the sky, where my old friends the stars wink back in approval — Joyce’s blue fruit of heaven: Orion and Cassiopeia, and the infinite majesty of the Milky Way.

  A life which we have been living for well over the best part of a year now. And one which, at least once upon a time, I would have considered impossible — quite literally unattainable. How wrong I was.

  But back then, of course, things were immeasurably different. Yes, a year or so ago the relationship between Vesna and me, well, it had not been going so good at all. There was no such thing as the Happy Club then. Which is hardly surprising — after all, I had caught her in the act of stealing from me. Sometimes, even yet — I get the eeriest of feelings whenever I think about it. Especially whenever I’m crossing the Plaza, passing the café where we two first met. It’s a strange, hollowed-out, empty kind of sensation. And I must emphasise that I really don’t like it. I don’t like recalling catching my wife in the act, what husband would. I call Vesna ‘my wife’, although strictly speaking, of course, she’s not. It’s just another of our private little games. We got married, you see, in a ‘Happy Club’ ceremony, one night when we’d been drinking, and I played — quite convincingly, I have to say! — the role of the priest. Why, I was almost as convincing as Marcus Otoyo!