Songdogs

by Colum McCann

  ‘Goodnight, m’ijo.’

  I said nothing.

  Mrs O’Leary leaned across me: ‘You can sleep in my bed.’

  ‘I don’t want to sleep in your bed.’

  ‘Go on, now, give your Mam some rest.’

  Her room was curiously bright and colourful, some paintings on the wall, Saint Lucia glaring down from a wooden frame, beside it a wallhanging with peacocks in strut. Mrs O’Leary knelt down and said some prayers by my bed – ‘There are four corners to my bed, there are four angels there lie spread, one at my head, two at my feet, one at my heart my soul to keep’ – and all at once I felt vacuumed and angry and repeated them after her, a litany of uselessness – even then, at twelve years old, I thought how useless it was, that praying. The exposed hands of a clock moved and I pretended to be asleep as she pulled the sheets around me, folded them back. ‘Be a good lad, now.’ She leaned down and kissed the top of my head, tiptoed from the room. I didn’t want to be tucked in. I ripped the sheets out from under the mattress, made a puddle of them down at my feet. Later I could hear her downstairs in the pub saying: ‘Right now, gentlemen, I think it’s time, don’t you, I’ve said it’s time a million times, they need their rest, have yez no homes to go to at all?’

  I got up and looked out the window – cars were leaving the pub, a horn going like the cry of a sick curlew, the fire-engine lights not twirling anymore – and suddenly voices came from down the landing, and I jumped back into bed.

  ‘Are you okay, Juanita?’

  ‘I am fine.’

  ‘Shall I stay here with you?’

  ‘I am okay, Alice, I am okay.’

  ‘I’ll stay with the boy.’

  ‘Thank you, Alice.’

  ‘Are ya sure?’

  ‘I am sure, gracias.’

  And then the shuffle along the landing, and the knob turning and Mrs O’Leary coming to bend over me, moving to a chair that she had by the window, kicking off her shoes, breathing out a sigh in the cold, bringing a coat out of her wardrobe, slowly closing the buttons, a twist of a bottle and a small slurp, settling down into the flesh of herself, sighing deeply again before I fell asleep. When I woke up in the morning, Mam was gone and there was a make-up kit sitting on the bed where she had been, everything silent outside, a small mirror catching the light.

  * * *

  The bathroom lock clicked open and he stuck his head around the door, said: ‘Come on in, for fucksake, before I freeze me jewels off.’

  He still had his shirt on, but his shoes and socks and trousers were off. He had put on his swimming togs, the old red ones that he used to swim and prance around in on the beach. Pulled the string tight until the material valley-rippled around his waist, but even then they were miles too big. I was almost afraid to think of him rubbing the sponge against himself. See him turn to dust. Maybe crumple in his own fingers. His hands were shaking when he fumbled with the bottom buttons on the shirt. Strange how embarrassed he was by the nakedness, even with the togs on, using the one good hand to cover himself.

  I went to put my arm under his shoulder but he brushed me away, slowly steered himself towards the bath, tested the water with his toes. ‘The water’s too fucken hot,’ he said. ‘I can’t even remember how to make a bath!’ But I tested it with my fingers before he got in and it was simply lukewarm. I was sure he had lost some sense of feeling. The way his whole body gently shook. He went clawing for the soap after it fell in under his left leg. I was going to reach in and get it but he just shook his head. ‘Go on, now, I’m not a fucken invalid, I told ya a million times.’ Left the soap disintegrating away beneath his leg.

  ‘Right,’ he said, dangling his arm out the side of the tub, like it didn’t belong, a pantomime prop. ‘So tell me about all this travelling,’ he said. ‘Ya almost gave me a fucking heart attack yesterday.’

  ‘I just wanted to know some things.’

  ‘Like what things?’

  ‘About the past.’

  ‘Christ, couldn’t I have told ya that, Conor? Didn’t I tell ya everything? And you wouldn’t even look me in the eye. Isn’t that right? Didn’t I tell ya everything?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Well, I did.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘No maybes about it.’

  ‘Let’s not fight.’

  ‘I’m not fighting. Am I fighting? Do I look like I’m fighting?’

  He raised his hands from the bath and turned his palms in the air. I turned away and picked his trousers up from the floor, placed them on the radiator to get them nice and warm. She used to do that for me when I was very young, five or six, clacking her way through a hum or a rhyme, neatly folding them first in the crook of her brown arm, weaving out a hand underneath them, smoothing them out, placing them on the radiator, always very precise, afterwards reaching in the cupboard for special soaps, leaning over.

  ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘it’s all so long ago now.’

  ‘It’s not really.’

  ‘We make our mistakes.’

  ‘We all do,’ I said.

  ‘Then we move along.’

  ‘We do.’

  ‘You learn finally that some things aren’t meant to heal.’

  He said it without sentimentality. His voice was as slow as syrup. He let his head loll against the back of the bath and clacked his teeth together, sighed. Outside, through the hazy bathroom window I thought I could see the movement of some birds. I turned back to the bath. I must have looked at him too long and hard, because he turned his head away and then looked back at me again.

  ‘Conor,’ he said after a moment, raising one hand to scratch at his forehead, ‘d’ya think there’s any way you could put some of that shampoo on me hair?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘My arm is sore here. Can’t reach up properly. Gives me a bit of a stab here.’ He rubbed his shoulder. ‘Maybe just help me wash it, you know.’

  I stood.

  ‘What’s wrong with ya?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing, nothing.’

  ‘Ah, it doesn’t fucken matter,’ he said, putting his hands back down into the bathwater.

  ‘Sure,’ I said, ‘sure I will.’

  ‘Good man.’

  I reached into the cupboard, fumbled around, and got out the shampoo, my hands shaking. He laid his head underneath the water, a boat of bones sinking, got his hair wet, resurfaced, reached his fingers up and ran them through it, still greasy and tangled. ‘Phhhhfffff,’ he said, shaking his head.

  ‘Are ya right?’

  ‘Right so. Go easy on it, there’s not much of it left, for fucksake.’

  I put a small dollop of shampoo on my hand, told him to wet his hair again, rubbed my hands together. ‘Ya look like a bloody executioner there,’ he said as he rose slowly out of the water. I sat on the edge of the bath and leaned over. ‘Out with the electricity, son.’ He hunched himself up, held on to the handrail, the veins stark and blue. The hairs on his back ran all the way down to the red togs.

  The soap piled up at the back of his neck and he gave out a little contented hum as I massaged my fingers into his scalp.

  ‘She wasn’t in Mexico.’

  ‘No,’ he said. It wasn’t a question, the way he said it.

  ‘I thought she’d be there.’

  ‘Well, now, you can never be sure of anything.’

  ‘And she wasn’t with Cici.’

  ‘Why would she be?’

  ‘Why not?’

  I kept massaging the soap into his scalp, around the age spots.

  ‘I miss her,’ he said.

  ‘I know ya do.’

  ‘No, no, you don’t understand, I really miss her. I honestly miss her.’

  ‘I know, I can tell.’

  ‘Ya can’t change the past. You know, you try to change the past, but you can’t.’

  He let out a long whistle and closed his eyes, and my fingers worked themselves into the soft spots on his head and he almost pushed his h
ead back into my hands and I thought how easy it would be to hurt him, just by mashing my fingers into his head.

  ‘And Cici, what’s she doing with herself?’ he said after a while.

  ‘This and that. Nothing really.’

  ‘Like the rest of us. Still writing poems?’

  ‘Says it’s not worth a damn.’

  ‘She’s dead right.’

  ‘Why did ya give up the photos, Dad?’

  ‘Jaysus, now, that’s a stupid question. Don’t be rubbing my hair away, now! For fucksake!’

  ‘Take a dip.’

  He took a long time to position himself so that he could go down into the water again.

  ‘Once more,’ I said. ‘One more shampoo.’

  ‘Christ, it isn’t that dirty!’

  ‘Hold still there, now.’

  ‘And yourself, I mean, are ya making a living?’

  ‘A few bob.’

  He closed his eyes: ‘Ah, this’ll do me for years. I’ll have the cleanest hair west of Waterloo.’

  I had put too much shampoo on, and some of the soap fell down from his hair and on to his neck. I reached to scoop it up, left my fingers there, began to wash his neck. His head went forward at first, a little shocked, then laid back into my hands. I felt curious knots in his neck. It was like rubbing cheese. It had that peculiar texture, not hard, not soft. He didn’t budge while I massaged, and maybe his body was relaxing, maybe he was calling things back, because I could feel some sort of melting-away, washing along his neck tanline. The soap bubbled over on to his shoulders and I rubbed it down and over the top of his back, along his shoulders, until I was using both my hands, my fingers converging on his spine – thinking that if I pushed too hard I could crack his whole nervous system – and time seemed to be effortlessly drifting from us, rolling along, until he pulled away and bobbed down into the bath.

  ‘Soap was getting in me eyes,’ he said.

  But I knew what it was and he turned his face away from me, said: ‘I’m grand, so. Leave a man in peace so he can take off his fucken togs.’

  I pursed my lips together and nodded: ‘I’ll be outside if ya need me.’

  He pulled at the string of his togs as I closed the door and moved as if he was going to take them off.

  ‘Conor,’ he said.

  I peeped back through the crack in the door. ‘What?’

  He still had his hand on the string of his togs.

  ‘I really have no idea.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘About your Mam.’

  ‘That’s all right.’

  ‘For all I know she could be in Timbuktu.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ll be going there.’

  He made an attempt at a little laugh.

  ‘Just walked out from there,’ he said. ‘Didn’t even know she’d left until Mrs O’Leary came around and told me. I was knocking the rest of the darkroom down with the big hammer. Turning it to mush. Played it over and over in my head ever since. Thought she’d be back. Swore it to myself. Didn’t give it much thought until a few hours later. Then a day. Then two days. Three. Sometimes I even think she could have walked her way down to the river beyond. She was awful depressed, you know.’

  ‘The river?’

  ‘I don’t know. Anything’s possible, isn’t it?’

  ‘You mean she walked her way into the river?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Maybe that night.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Ah, you can’t be sure of anything, can ya? You can be sure of nothing. That’s the only thing you can be sure of. Nothing. But I miss her. I miss her more than anyone thinks.’

  He picked up the washcloth from the shelf and dunked it in the bath, lifted his armpit in the air and began to scrub as vigorously as he could. The water must have been getting a little cold because he shivered a little when he did it. Droplets were dripping from his hair on to his shoulder. The rims of his eyes were red.

  ‘I’ll get the hairdryer,’ I said.

  ‘You won’t catch me using that fucken thing,’ he muttered, ‘no bloody way.’

  I closed the door to let him take off his togs and scrub himself down. I sat down on the top of the stairs. ‘The river, Dad?’ I said from outside, but he mustn’t have heard me, the bathwater gurgling down the drain.

  * * *

  Water is what we are made of. It has its own solitude. A storm blew in and the search was called off for a few hours. The rain filled the ditches with flow, hammered down on the roof, made small lakes in the roads, the lane impassable. The old man stayed outside and watched as it rifled down. Doubt sunk itself into the searchers, and the rumours were again rife. She had gone to Chile, where she had fallen in love with a military dictator. She had been seen in Dublin with nasturtiums behind her ears. She had taken a boat out into the storm. She was in the mental hospital in Castlebar, behind the big yawning gates. But for me she was home where she belonged – and a letter would come for me one morning.

  One of the searchers, a young girl, handed me a gold earring, told me it was for luck and I believed her, went home with it shoved into a jacket pocket.

  ‘She’s just disappeared for a few days,’ my father said. He slept on the floor outside my room that night, and for the next eighteen months, stories coming from him each evening, like hallucinogenic prayers, magnificent dreamscapes, while I – brutally young – waited for a knock on the door, twirling a gold ring in my hand. It was a couple of years later that I came home from school wearing the earring. He had begun his fishing then, every day he would go down to the river. ‘Take that piece of shite from your ear,’ he said to me on the riverbank, ‘or I’ll give ya what-for and no doubt about it.’

  ‘Ask my bollocks,’ I said. From then on, that was one of the few things I ever said to him.

  * * *

  After he towel-dried his hair he pulled on two jumpers, the warmed trousers and the overcoat. Even got some clean wool socks. He stretched himself out and gave a sniff at the air. ‘Jaysus, haven’t smelled this good in years.’

  He told me that the morning midges and other insects are attracted to sweet fragrances, that if he went outside he’d be besieged after the amount of shampoo I had put in his hair. But we went out anyway into the dawn and I didn’t notice any more insects than usual. They made their normal congregations around the bushes, and a few of them hovered around us, grey smudges. A drizzle broke, stopped, fell again.

  ‘See, I told ya,’ he said as he attempted to clap his hands on a few of the midges in the air.

  We shifted our way around the farmyard and he made a crack about the wheelbarrow and pushing him around in it. Even gave a little kick at its wheel, a swipe that missed. I noticed the flap of one of his wellingtons was coming undone and told him about the old man in Mexico whom I had seen dance, in his collarless shirt and his holey shoes. ‘Nothing better than an old man for dancing,’ he said as he shuffled over the courtyard towards the pathway. We went out beyond the yard. Clouds were out, swifts following them. A breeze blew over our heads. It was too early for the factory smell. He negotiated his way over the stile and through the gap in the bushes down towards the water. The river was as dead as ever.

  I tucked my jacket in under me and took a place at the edge of the riverbank. He took to a fit of coughing in the lawn chair, then stood up and started collecting a few cigarette butts that we had missed yesterday. I started helping him, put two butt ends in my jacket pocket. I was standing close to him when his arms flew out.

  ‘Look at that!’ he shouted, ‘Look!’

  I looked around and there was nothing, absolutely nothing, not even a ripple.

  But I know what he saw. Caught in mid-twist in the air, the flash of belly shining, contorted and unchoreographed in its spin, reaching out over the surface so the skips were alight in the air around it, fins tucked in, tail in a whisk throwing off droplets, making a massive zigzag of itself, three feet over the surface, mouth open to
gulp air, eyes huge and bulbous, a fringe of water around it – place and motion caught together, as in one of the old photos – reaching up, the whole surface of the water in a frenzy beneath it, so that the flow jiggled and freed itself from its home within the reeds, went down towards the sea, the grass itself bending to the movement, until his salmon hit a zenith and it retreated headfirst into the water with a magical sound, a chorus of plops, erupting like weather, and the water knew something about itself and became all at once quiet and there was joy there, I felt it, marvellous, unyielding, and he leaned his shoulder against me and said: ‘Fucken hell, amazing, wasn’t it?’

  He slapped me on the back and asked me to go to the house and get his fishing rod and the flies, which I did. I opened the wooden box and brought him the colourful one he had made the other day. As I came back down, he was nodding away on the riverbank, clapping his hands together and laughing and shouting at the magnificence of his fish. I walked up to him with the rod and said to myself, and to the swifts that flew around, and to the midges that they fed on, and to the clouds that were sauntering along, I said: Let this joy last itself into the night.

  He tied the fly on. He was whispering, ‘Did ya see it, son?’

  I looked over and said to him: ‘Yeah, I saw it.’

  He gave a grin, fixed the fly, adjusted the reel, stood away from me, just a few feet, spun out some line, caressed the length of the rod, all the time whistling through his teeth as he whipped the rod back and forth above his head, fluidity to it, the swish and swerve, casting away as if there was no tomorrow, none at all, just casting away with all his might.