He leans over the top of the bridge and searches for his reflection in the water. The shadow of a drowned man is supposed to be waiting for him in the water. Conor Mahon’s shadow waiting for him here when he was twenty-one. Luke sat beside Conor in first year in secondary school, the two of them full of devilment. That day the priest came in to give a sex education lesson. Take these little bookeens home with ye, lads, he said. He returned the next day. Well, Conor, did you read the book? Oh I did, Father, I did … and ’twas the dirtiest book I ever read. Conor used to play the banjo. Started a band with three young ones when he was sixteen – Three Birds and a Badger, he called it. Luke cornered Molloy one night after Conor’s death, threatened to cut off his fingers and toes if he ever touched another lad in the town. You’ll be fucken walking on your heels, you scumbag, you’ll have to be fed through a tube. Molloy hanged himself the week before his trial.
Luke straightens up. There has always been a pall over the town, he thinks, something dark and blighting, the cause of which he cannot put his finger on. Even during the economic boom, the air of depression and neglect never lifted. Old usurper’s shadow still hanging over the valley. Imperialist thieves. Sir Richard, like his Blake forefathers, still collecting ground rent from businesses in the town but never giving back a penny to plant a tree or put a lick of paint on the terraces or a bench in the square. Take, take, take. A wave of anger flares in him.
He draws his gaze back to the flow of water rounding the bend in the river. He remembers the day in third class when Miss Fahy ran her wooden pointer along the line of a river on the physical map of Ireland. When the river suddenly changed direction Luke made the connection and transposed in his mind the river on the map to the river at the end of the town, and suddenly the penny dropped and it dawned on him that this was their river, and their bend and their land – O’Brien land – and it was up there on the map of Ireland for the whole class and the whole world to see. It was the first surge of familial pride that was woken in him. Here, at the little peninsula they call the Inch at the very edge of his land, the Sullane swings suddenly to the south, a ninety-degree rotation executed millions of years ago. Before it was named, before this place was touched by humans, the river captured the drainage system of another lower, lesser river and met a strange new tide coming up from the sea. A pirate then, the Sullane, Luke thinks now, a bully and a thief, usurping the route and riverbed of another. He had never thought of it like that before.
A plastic Coke bottle comes floating under the bridge. A sudden flash of anger at litterlouts, at the wanton thoughtlessness of someone just tossing their rubbish over their shoulder. Wanton thoughtlessness everywhere in evidence. Human stupidity too. Road rage, fish kills, farm effluent, phone masts, mindless government policies, or lack thereof. He keeps his eyes on the plastic bottle, tracking it for twenty or thirty yards. It flows out and around the tip of the Inch, appearing smaller and smaller as it floats off downriver, the sun still glinting on the plastic. Tossing on the waves all the way to Errish where the river enters the sea, where fresh water meets salt and swirls in little eddies, the salt nosing underneath, the fresh floating on top, no mixing or melding, no fusion of molecules.
He walks along the road and turns in the avenue. He can always feel when the afternoon changes and evening falls. Something in his circadian clock, he thinks, the way hibernating animals sense when the light fades.
The house has settled around him, restive now. He opens a bottle of Rioja, admires the ruby glow of the wine streaming into the glass. He sips it, lets it linger on his palate for a moment, then down his gullet it goes. Outside, a bird is singing in short sweet trills. Maeve had wanted to get a parrot for the flat in Harold’s Cross but he never liked the idea of caged birds. Joyce kept two little parakeets for a while in Paris, Pierre and Pipi. One of them flew in the window one day and stayed and, not wanting it to be alone, he acquired the other. Probably saw it as a sign. Wonder if he clipped their wings. Or taught them to speak. Or sang to them. Probably spent hours peering at them with his poor eyesight, delighting in their plumage, in their little nipping and kissing and beak tapping. Leaning in closer, imitating their whistles and chirrups, picking up their secret little tones in his inner ear … slipping deeper and deeper into communion with them until he emitted his own little trills and twitterings in reply to theirs. Luke remembers buying a book about birdsong; it’s somewhere in the house. Every morning at dawn the author entered an aviary in a zoo – in Philadelphia or Pittsburg – and played his flute to the birds. As time passed the birds started to imitate his notes and sing back to him.
He boils potatoes, fries the steak in a little butter and garlic, then lifts it onto a warm plate and lets the brownish meat juice trickle over it. Lily will soon appear, drawn by the aroma. At the table he draws the Borges book and a book of Derek Mahon’s poems close to him. Certain nights are right for poems and he has a knack of opening a page at random, hitting on exactly the right one. He pours more wine. When he cuts into the steak, blood-brown juices run out, and he salivates. The meat is delicious. He thinks of Bloom’s pork kidney and wonders why he ate pork. He wonders if it really is possible to taste urine off a cooked kidney. He remembers his alarm the first time he got a strong sulphurous whiff off his own urine after eating asparagus.
He eats another forkful of steak, then some potato sopping in juice. The potato melts in his mouth. Another forkful of steak. The eyes of this cow will pursue me through all eternity. Poor Bloom. The weight of feeling he carried on his shoulders. Such humanity. Joyce too, a gentle soul. His whole life marred by illness and poverty and Lucia’s madness. Only fifty-eight when he died. Perforated ulcer. Luke was shocked when he came upon the post-mortem report as a footnote in Ellmann’s biography. Reading it felt like rummaging through the body itself. Paralytic ileus. Extensive bleeding. Enormously dilated loops of small bowel as large as a thigh, coloured purple. Head section not permitted. His stomach must have been cut to ribbons from all the white wine. If only he’d listened to Nora and gone to a doctor, instead of paying heed to the Jolases and the other intellectuals telling him for years that the stomach pains were psychosomatic. All that genius … gone for ever. Feel him close still. Always. Have to keep the Ellmann book close to hand. He had a blood transfusion the day before he died and received the blood of two Swiss soldiers from Neuchâtel. A good omen, he thought, because he liked Neuchâtel wine. His last hours. Slipping into a coma. Waking in the night, asking for Nora. His coffin carried up the hill through the snow to the Fluntern cemetery. Eternally with me.
He must not exhaust himself thinking. Random inchoate thoughts following on more random inchoate thoughts. Thought is the thought of thought. The pressure of thoughts sometimes, ideas turning cartwheels in his mind. Coming in surges, fast-flowing, flooding. All is in all. His speech too, at times. His father always at him. ‘Easy, Luke, easy, slow down.’ In class in Belvedere he’d stray off-topic, once extolling the beauty and harmony and symmetry in nature’s fabric that is everywhere discernible – in the nucleus of a nut or an atom – and the boys saying, ‘Slow down, sir, you’re going too fast.’ Maeve too. ‘Stop! What are you talking about? Luke, you’re making no sense!’ He couldn’t understand why she couldn’t keep up. Moments like that, he had felt alienated. One night, she stopped him mid-stream. ‘I bet you’re bipolar,’ she said quietly, nodding slowly. ‘You’re just like my uncle Mattie.’
He sips more wine. Bipolar. A touch, maybe. Occasional highs, definite lows. Restlessness. Some hubris. Nothing delusional – his own mind does not mislead him. Certainly nothing that warrants intervention. They dope you to the gills. Like a veil thrown over everything. All you’d miss.
Lulled and sated, he picks up the Mahon book, opens page 81. Let them not forget us, the weak souls among the asphodels. Asphodel meadows, where the souls of those who did neither good nor bad reside. He looked up the asphodel flower once and when he clicked on the images and recognised the yellow flowers – which he had al
ways assumed were a variety of iris – as identical to the flowers that appear every summer at the edge of the Inch, he was momentarily floored. Mythical flowers from Hades growing here on his land, right under his nose. What were the chances!
Irises were Maeve’s favourite flowers. He brought her home a bunch of blue ones to celebrate the good tidings of great joy. Two weeks later it was all over and when they came home from the hospital she lay on the bed facing the wall. He lay beside her, then stood at the window. Nothing to say. Above, the night sky, the stars, the indifferent earth. A mistake of nature. Unplanned anyway. Better to happen now than at age four or fourteen, he told her later. They got hammered the following weekend and fell in the door at 3 a.m., and onto the bed, laughing. To think it was all over. A heavy period, that’s all it amounted to, blood clots flushed down the toilet. A life, a life not … No soul yet. Or was there? Forty days before ensoulment occurs, the Greeks believed. Islam says one hundred and twenty. The yogis say it happens at the moment of conception when the ovum meets the sperm. A flash of astral light, then the soul rushes in. Wonder if a couple’s spiritual goodness and wholesomeness matters, if their devotion to each other helps serve as a divine magnet to draw a good soul towards them. Wonder where the soul resides. Not in the body or blood, it being metaphysical, not physical … All those years in the grave, the blood of those two soldiers mixed with Joyce’s and settled in his body. Traces still there maybe. One body, three bloods. A trinity of blood, he’d have liked that! Wonder what the soldiers were doing in the hospital that day.
He reads the poem. A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole. He leaves his head in his hands. Tired. Foresees the road ahead, the years ahead … Sleepy … Shouldn’t sleep here … He can do whatever he wants. He lifts his head and smiles. If you behave, Borges said to his six-year-old nephew, I will give you permission to think of a bear. I will give you permission to think … A thousand souls crowding to a door, waiting to be born … crying Me, Me … Go back, go back, it’s not your turn yet.
FROM THE KITCHEN window he watches a red van snaking up the avenue. As it passes the window the driver turns his head and meets Luke’s eyes before continuing on into the yard. Casing the joint. It happens about once a week – they see the big house from the road and take a chance.
He stands at the front door and puts out his hand when the van approaches from the yard. The passenger lowers his window and Luke leans in.
‘Morning, lads,’ he says, throwing his eyes over the driver and passenger. ‘Ye’re out early.’
‘How’s it going, boss?’ the driver replies. A big, burly, red-faced fellow with ash-blond hair. A slightly younger version of the same man sits in the passenger seat.
‘What can I do for ye?’
‘Would you have any auld scrap lying around? Any auld iron or copper?’
‘Devil the bit,’ Luke says. He keeps his eyes hard on the driver, then makes a big show of looking into the back of the van. Plastic bags, lengths of rusty iron, a marble fireplace. ‘Ye’re not local, are ye? I haven’t seen ye around here before.’
‘Ah, not far, boss – the far side of Mallow. What about new windows?’ He nods towards the house. ‘This man here can get the best of PVC windows for you.’
‘No, no, ye’re grand. I’m not interested.’ He slaps the roof of the van twice, takes a step back. ‘All right, so … Good luck, now.’ Off with ye and don’t come back, he wants to add.
He waits until the van is out of sight at the end of the avenue, then sits on the step. He needs to put up gates at the entrance and proper mortice locks on the front and back doors. He’ll come home some day to find the place cleaned out. One kick to the back door and they’re in. The Adam fireplace, the furniture, Dadda’s gold pocket-watch, Ellen’s trunks. A small fortune sitting in there.
The granite step is warm. It was on this step his mother was felled two years ago. A beautiful day in June. Sitting here talking away to him while he planted annuals in the flowerbed beside the front door. She had had him all to herself for several years. No more Josie, no more aggro. He had begun to enjoy her too – her fierce wit, her ferocious tongue.
‘Get me an ice cream,’ she ordered. He tipped a little plant out of its pot and set it in the soil, then turned to look at her. Her eyes were closed, her face tilted upwards towards the sun. He stood and looked out over the fields and down across the river to the town. A perfect day, he thought. He went inside and brought her out a choc-ice and bent again to the flowerbed, his back to her. A little puff of wind blew the ice cream wrapper past him, and he reached out his hand to try and catch it. It came to rest against a pot. Stay, he urged it. But another little gust blew it on; it stopped and started and worried along for a few more feet. He stood up and went after it.
‘You’re a rip!’ he said, waving the wrapper as he returned. ‘Why do you always have to make work for me?’ His role now was the exasperated parent to her naughty child. It was the way she loved too – with robust gesture and combat. He resumed the planting and waited for her mocking jibe.
But none came, and he prodded again. ‘Here I am, morning, noon and night, serving you … Jesus, and you haven’t an ounce of gratitude or consideration for me – or for anyone! Do you know that?’
Again, no response. He turned to look at her. On her face, a wry crooked smile, a fixed grin.
‘What?’ he asked. The grin remained, lending her a look of stupidity. Mimicking Josie, he thought. I have a thundering bitch for a mother. ‘Stop that,’ he said and turned back to the work. Again he waited for the quip, the wisecrack reply. Again, none came. He turned around. The same frozen grin.
‘Stop messing, Mammy … For fuck’s sake … Stop it, it’s not funny.’
Her face was tilted, her left eye half closed. The choc-ice slipped from her fingers onto the step. Mammy, he said urgently, jumping up. From her twisted mouth came a guttural sound. Her head slumped to one side. He leaned towards her and touched her face, then lifted her left arm. It fell, slack. His stomach lurched. He took out his phone and dialled. He kept saying her name. ‘It’s okay, you’ll be all right.’
He lays his hand on the warm granite. On this stone a cataclysmic neurological event occurred in his mother’s brain. He rubs the granite. We know not the day nor the hour, nor the stone. He wonders if she had a premonition. After four weeks in hospital she recovered sufficiently to be moved to rehab. Then, in the ambulance en route there, she was struck by a greater and, this time, fatal cerebrovascular event.
Just after eleven, another vehicle – a small yellow car – comes up the avenue. Again he goes to the front door. The car stops and a girl steps out. Small, striking-looking with very pale skin and short, jet-black hair. She nods and half turns to close the car door. Then she stands before him and meets his gaze calmly. She is thirty, perhaps thirty-two. Not a girl, but a woman.
‘Hello,’ she says, smiling. She glances at Lily, standing in the doorway behind him.
‘Hello,’ he says.
Lynch’s Friesians are grazing in the field behind her. Just as she puts one foot in front of the other in a forward motion to offer her hand, a cow moves gracefully behind her head, from right ear to left, oblivious in her grazing to the beautiful simplicity in the motion of cow and girl.
She introduces herself, Ruth Mulvey, and he does likewise.
‘I’m sorry for barging in on you like this,’ she says. ‘They told me in SuperValu that you might want a dog. I was going to put up a notice and the woman at the till said you might be interested. Katie, her name was.’ Then, a little bashfully, ‘She said to say she sent me.’
She gestures towards the car. ‘It’s my uncle’s dog. He’s gone into a nursing home. I have to go back to Dublin and I can’t take him with me.’
Luke peers into the car. A small brown dog is curled on a blanket on the back seat. Without lifting its head, its eyes fix anxiously on Luke. Katie Cullen works part-time in SuperValu, and has the same bleeding heart for animals as he has. She co
mes up and feeds his cats whenever he goes away. The size of your place, she says, if I had it, I’d have fifty dogs.
The girl looks to Luke before opening the back door of the car.
‘Go on, sure take him out,’ he says, with a nod.
She lifts out the dog, its ears flattened, its body trembling in her arms.
‘This is Paddy,’ she says. She grips him tighter to mask the trembling.
‘Paddy,’ Luke repeats. ‘How are you, Paddy!’
She raises her face to his and when their eyes meet her mouth widens into a broad smile, and he smiles back, elated.
They are standing very close. She comes up only to his shoulders. He can see the top of her head, the line of scalp where her hair is parted. He had forgotten how good it feels to be this physically close to a woman.
‘Bring him into the house,’ he says and turns and leads the way.
She sets the dog down on the rug in the drawing room. Rigid, tense, wary, the dog doesn’t move and they stand staring at him.
‘The poor devil,’ Luke says softly, then turns to her. She has long dark eyelashes. Green eyes. Beautiful. Something a little funky about her – her hairstyle maybe. ‘Sit down,’ he tells her. ‘I’ll get him a bit of meat or something. Will you have something yourself – tea, coffee?’
‘No thanks, I’m grand. And don’t worry about Paddy – he’s probably too anxious to eat. He’s had a lot of change lately and I think he’s sensing there’s more to come.’
The River Capture Page 4