It was a strange experience because it was only in the writing out of the story that I realised what the important things had actually been. That might sound incredible to you but believe me, it is true. In those years I was too close to the everyday to be able to see anything with objectivity. I wrote for a whole week, usually quite late at night or very early in the morning when my bewildered fellow patients were at mass down in the hospital chapel. I wrote until I had a hard red blister on my writing finger, then I went back and showed the psychiatrist what I had done. He looked through the two full foolscap notebooks for a while. He seemed disappointed and even a little disconcerted. This was all fine, he told me, but there was no feeling in it.
I had no feeling. That part of me had maybe died, he said. It was all facts. I will always remember the strange expression on his face when he told me this. Your life, Mr Sweeney, is all f-f-facts and no f-f-feelings.
It was just my luck to get the only psychiatrist with a stammer in the whole place.
You should try to remember your feelings was what he reckoned, more specifically, your f-f-feelings about your choices. That was what made you f-f-fundamentally human, the nature of the choices that you had made. Every person is the sum of their choices, he said, each one of us is a story, a mix of desires, experiences, f-f-fantasties: I needed to write my story if I wanted to f-f-fully recover.
I was tempted to tell him to go f-f-f-f, but I suppose I felt a bit sorry for him. I went back to the ward and wrote for a while, then I gave it up. But in the long silent hours I spent listless and tranquillized, in a cocoon of artificial warmth punctuated by occasional oddly obsessive, random neural firings, I would find myself thinking incessantly about that word. Recover. An interesting word. To recover is to be healed of an illness, of course, but it is also to reclaim. When a ship sinks at sea the bodies of the drowned are recovered. Stolen goods are recovered by the police. And there is another meaning too, of course, to cover up again. You see, pet, for some reason, lately I have been thinking about what the psychiatrist said to me all those years ago.
I suppose I have been wanting to recover. Hence these words.
There is another, more important reason for doing this now. Last month your doctor and I had a conversation that has stayed with me. He told me that no change could be expected in what he called your condition, at least in the short term. You would not wake from the coma that Donal Quinn and his three brave friends put you into. But you would not die prematurely either. You might awaken in a year, or five years, or thirty years. It was possible and actually quite likely that if you did wake your memory would have gone in parts, or even completely, and that when you tried to recall the important events of your own life nothing would be there. Just a hollowness. A computer, he said, with the hard disc taken out and thrown away.
It was also possible that there would be long-term motor-neuron damage or muscular atrophy. You might never walk normally again. You might well be at least partially blind or deaf. Perhaps you would have lost the power of speech. I found this especially a terrible thought, you who were always so full of endless brave talk, like your mother. These things were notoriously difficult to predict, but you would not die prematurely, he was certain of it. You were in a hospital, after all, it was the safest place you could be.
He took off his glasses and peered at me, an impatient scowl on his suntanned, handsome face. ‘Lookat, Mr Sweeney, your daughter could live a deal longer than yourself,’ he said, and he poked me a few times in the stomach, ‘’specially if you don’t lose a bit of that spare tyre and give up the fags. You’re a heart attack waiting to happen.’ You know how amazingly arrogant these doctors can be. ‘Now,’ he went, ‘if you’ll excuse me, I’ve work to see to here.’
In the days afterwards, the doctor’s remark began to preoccupy me. It was just a throwaway comment, I was aware of that. But a good salesman knows that a throwaway comment can be more powerful than any other. No force in the world can pierce the armour of the heart like a well-timed throwaway remark. In the car, out on the doorstep, at the warehouse, back at the office, I found myself thinking about what the doctor had said. I began to try and imagine what would happen if I were to die before you. My intention was not to be morbid, but the truth is that you cannot treat your body the way I had treated mine for years and then expect to live to a hundred. I know that. I am not holding my breath for a telegram from the President. So I decided to write these events down, just some things that I thought you should know – and one or two things that I am not at all sure you should know, but I am going to tell you anyway – about me and your mother, some things that you and I never had the chance to discuss and most probably never will now, and some things that happened when I decided to take the law into my own hands and murder Donal Quinn.
If you ever do wake up, these words and pages will be here for you. I intend to see to that. I do not have high hopes, they are after all only marks on a page, black stains and justifications, and no substitute at all for what you deserved from me. But they might help you to understand something small of where you came from, the bright mad love we felt for you, the evanescent love we had for each other. I confess that I do hope for that little, or that much.
A salesman has to have his hopes. It is not a way of life for a pessimist.
Let me apologise to you now if I tell some things the wrong way around, or incompletely. A forty-nine-year-old man should still have a good memory, but my drinking years I mostly remember as a blur, or more precisely, a set of vague stories and unconnected incidents involving somebody else, a man on the run from love who has nothing at all to do with me. It is not that I have forgotten those times exactly, I just remember them distantly, out of shape, out of their chronology, in the wrong colours.
In fact sometimes, I have discovered, I clearly remember things that never happened, or events at which I was not even present. I could swear to you, for example, that I attended Seánie’s investiture as a priest. If somebody asked me now to describe that scene, I could, I know it, down to the details, the chubby bishop, the smell of incense, the shimmering blue of Seánie’s robe. In my mind I can see him walking slowly up the aisle with that smile on his handsome face, then lying face down in front of the altar with his hands outstretched. I can see that he is wearing new shoes and has not thought to take the price tags off the soles, and as a result the people around me in the chapel are trying not to laugh. But I know that I was not there that day. It is a simple fact, I was not there. I have seen photographs and I suppose down through the years I must have talked to him and others about it. But I was not there. I could swear I was, but it would not be true.
A good salesman will swear to things he knows not to be true.
Chapter Two
Early enough the other morning I was gunning it down to Portlaoise with the car full of satellite dishes and decoder boxes to be distributed among the indigenous peoples of that region when I heard on the Pat Kenny Radio Show that the Beatles were about to re-form. A middle-aged man came on from the Irish Beatles’ Fan Club, then Pat Kenny interviewed Pete Best – you may or may not know that he was the one who left the band – about the old days and the Cavern Club and meeting John Lennon and all the rest of it. Pete Best is now working in an unemployment counselling centre in Liverpool, apparently.
Fuck me, I thought to myself, imagine taking career advice from Pete Best.
When the interview was over Pat Kenny played that old song, ‘Love Me Do’. I hadn’t heard it in so long. It sounded absolutely wonderful, that lazy feel, the nonchalantly sullen delivery, the nasal twang of the lyrics, the hollow thunk of the drums, the doleful honk of the harmonica. When I was your age, Elvis was hot. Little Richard was red hot. But in those days, whenever I heard ‘Love Me Do’ I thought of smoky industrial Merseyside, ice cool in the morning mist. That morning I turned up the radio and sang along loud. Anyone passing me by on the Naas dual carriageway must have thought that I was some kind of a basket case. But it brought ba
ck memories, I can tell you.
One important thing for you to know about Seánie was that he was always a fixer. He was simply one of those people who knew how to get his hands on things that others found difficult or impossible to find. I’m thinking about spare parts for cars, real leather footballs, bottles of poitín for some of the old Ringsend ladies, rare cigarette cards needed to complete a collection. Seánie was the youngfella to see. He knew people everywhere, he had contacts the way the other kids in Raytown had acne. That little gurrier would’ve got on great during the war, my mother always used to say about him, and I knew what she meant. He would definitely have been one of those spivs in a hound’s-tooth jacket, the pockets all stuffed with plump lemons, stolen watches, sheer silk stockings. So when it was announced that the Beatles were going to play a concert in Dublin – this would have been early in 1964 – it did not really surprise me that Seánie had got his hands on four tickets despite the fact that the show had completely sold out in ten minutes.
I remember still the way he laughed out loud when I asked him where he had got these precious tickets. He did a gesture which he was fond of in those days, tapping the side of his nose and winking. I think that he had seen someone do this in a film. Seánie was always susceptible to films. I looked at the tickets and touched them and held them up to the light. I stared at the words ‘The Beatles’ printed on them, in exactly the same slim black typeface that Ringo had on the front of his bass drum. I thought they would disappear if I blinked too hard.
‘The Beatles,’ he laughed. ‘The fuckin’ Beatles, Billy. In Dublin. If that isn’t a ticket to ride I don’t know what is.’
I handed them back and asked him if I could buy one.
He clicked his tongue and peered at me. Oh, he didn’t know, he said, they were worth a rake of money. He’d been offered two quid each for them by a fella he knew in work. Seánie worked as a runner in a bookie’s shop at that time and so always seemed to know people with money. There was absolutely no way I could afford two pounds. My own job in the storeroom of Randall Electrics paid thirty shillings a week and of course I had to give half of that to my mother. I was broke all the time, or at least badly bent. But I stared at those tickets, love, and I thought about the Beatles and I suppose I just spoke out without really thinking.
‘I’ll take one off you anyway,’ I told him, ‘if you let me have it on the never-never.’
‘What?’ he went, pretending to splutter, ‘is it a dollar a week? Are you jokin’ me, man? Are you hoppin’ the ball or what?’ (A dollar was Seánie’s word for five shillings. For some strange reason, I think to do with music, Seánie used to talk in Americanisms back in those days.)
‘Let me buy one,’ I said, ‘and I’ll give you piano lessons for it.’
He burst out laughing. ‘Buy me arse,’ he said, ‘amn’t I givin’ you two of them. One for you and one for what’s her name. That posh Jewish mott above in Harrington Street.’
It was actually several years after I met her that Seánie finally stopped referring to your mother as that posh Jewish mott above in Harrington Street.
He put the two tickets into my breast pocket. I was absolutely speechless. I told him that I did not know how to thank him. Which was true, I really didn’t. This was above and beyond.
‘Well, shag off and don’t be annoying me, so,’ he said, then, which was Seánie’s way of telling you that thanks were not absolutely necessary.
Seánie knew that I had been completely smitten by your mother. The Saturday night after I had first met her he had come back up to the tennis club dance in Ranelagh with me but she had never showed. The next week was the Christmas dance and I was sure she would come to that, but again she didn’t. I wondered what to do about this. I had discussed with Seánie the idea of calling to her house to talk to her but he had advised against it. Seánie was full of advice.
‘Let’s face it, man, you’ve been blown out,’ he told me. ‘I don’t know what you’re bellyachin’ for, there’s plenty more motts about the place.’
There followed one of Seánie’s frequent lectures on how girls could sometimes be funny and you had to get used to their strange and unpredictable ways. That only annoyed me even more. Your mother was not a girl, after all. Your mother was Grace Lawrence.
The next afternoon I took a half day off work and waited for your mother outside her school. I did not feel too good skulking around the gateway like a peasant and she took so long coming out that I thought I must have missed her. When she finally emerged I barely recognised her. She was wearing her school uniform, fat clumpy shoes and carrying a satchel and a hockey stick. Her socks were down around her ankles. Her shins were grazed and bruised, I remember noticing. She was with two or three of her friends. When she saw me waiting across the road she did not seem taken aback in any way, and I suppose that surprised me. She just said something which must have been amusing to the gang of friends and they glanced over at me and laughed before walking on. Your mother came across the road with a warm smile on her face and said hello.
‘God,’ she said, ‘I’m embarrassed you seeing me in this awful get-up, look at the bloody state of me.’
We sat on a bench under some fir trees. I smoked a cigarette. For the first few minutes things were easy enough between us. I asked how she was getting along, she told me fine. She was studying for her Leaving Cert at that time and had plans to go to university. A raindrop fell from a branch and hit her bright face. When I think of it now, love. If we had only known that afternoon what was going to happen to all your mother’s plans. But it was very hard work, she told me, especially the maths. You know the way your mother always was with maths. Trigonometry was the worst, she told me, it was enough to set a person stark staring mad.
Then I think I said to her that I had been wondering whether she was avoiding me. She seemed suddenly to get a little peeved. She said she had been studying hard and just had not felt like going to the dance for a few weeks. Also she had been invited to a Christmas party at a friend’s flat in Leeson Street on one of the Saturday nights. There were far more interesting people there than anyone you would meet at that stupid dance. There had been writers and painters, she told me, and different kinds of musicians; people with something to say for themselves. You’d meet some awful old bores up at that bloody dance, she said.
I suppose it hurt me to think that your mother felt people at the dance were boring, since that was where she had met me. But perhaps, I figured, she was just saying this to test me in some way.
‘So who did you go to this party with?’ I asked her.
She peered at me with a bold and sullen expression, the same one I would often see on your own face when somebody crossed you. ‘That’s for me to know and you to find out. And I’m old enough to do as I please, thank you.’
‘I didn’t say you weren’t,’ I told her.
‘No,’ she snapped, ‘well I didn’t shaggin’ well say you did, did I?’
This was not going quite as well as I had planned.
We sat there for maybe a minute or two without saying anything, her long fingers fiddling with the frayed ends of her hessian satchel. I noticed that she had chipped pink varnish on her fingernails, and also that the backs of her wrists were covered with hieroglyphics of thick black felt-tipped pen. After a while she nudged my arm.
‘Why anyway, young Sweeney?’ she smiled. ‘Would you be jealous if I’d went with a fella?’
‘No,’ I told her, ‘I’d be interested, that’s all. But you can do as you please I suppose.’
Wrong thing to say, as it turned out. Her eyes narrowed. ‘Oh, can I? Is that right? God Almighty, thanks for the bloody permission, Lord Muck.’
‘You’re welcome,’ I said, and I lit another cigarette. A group of middle-aged people whom I took to be teachers came out through the school gates. They stared at your mother for a moment but she did not look back at them. Then they stared at each other, like small confused woodland animals of some kind. They climbed
into a little Volkswagen and drove off. I remember being surprised by how many of them had fitted into the Volkswagen.
‘Well, I didn’t go with any fella actually,’ she said. ‘I went with some girls, for your information. And with my cousin Ronnie. He writes poetry and got himself invited. He’s in Trinity College like I’m going to be. If any of this is your business.’
There was silence between us for what seemed to me a long time. I must have thought about just getting up and going home, but for some reason I stayed. I told your mother that I had been thinking about her over Christmas, which was the truth. I had thought about little else. She did one of her dismissive sighs. She peered up into the sky, then down at her scuffed knees.
‘Well, I suppose I thought about you too,’ she said, in a very gentle voice and without looking at me. Then she just nodded and peered across the road as though something interesting was going on in the school’s front yard.
‘It made me feel warm inside to think of you opening your presents,’ she said. ‘did you get good ones?’
I told her about Christmas in our house, how my grandparents had come up to visit from Oughterard and spent the whole holiday moaning about the length of the journey and the dirt of Ringsend and the spectacular rudeness of Dubliners, how my granny smelled of turf and mist, how my grandad played the piano standing up, like Little Richard, or so Seánie had laughingly said, how everyone in the family had given me either a book or a book token, all except for my sister Nessa who’d gotten me a sub to the NME, how my father had sat down blind drunk to the dinner table and told everyone he hoped they truly enjoyed their meal this year because he could feel in his bones that this was definitely his last Christmas on God’s earth. Just like he’d been saying every year for as long as I could remember. That made her laugh. And I liked it when she laughed. It was exciting, and it made me laugh too. I felt closer to her then.
The Salesman Page 3