by Dermot Healy
And when they close their eyes they cross this familiar pasture. They feel purged as Jack did the first time he thought he would go into the asylum. They are asleep within seconds. And next morning they know they can leave once more without the burden of ties.
Each night they return to a different bed. Or sometimes to the same bed after a day of intense walking. And now as they lie down, their minds, too, return to rest. They tell the body where they have been. They exhaust themselves with stories of the world. And they forget the moment they knew it was only an illusion, and put it by. Then, when all the patients are asleep, the nurse who last year had his own trouble turns into a nomad. He starts his patrol on the outer reaches of consciousness. Under the cloak of responsibility, he starts his walk. And the sleepers have made room for his step in their dreams. The hospital becomes a great walking space for those who are active and those who are still.
In their boots the Mayo men walk to the end of the corridor, turn and tramp back; neighbouring men, fags burning next the little finger, butterflies in their stomachs, dogs at their heels and animals looking over hedges at them. When you’ve found someone to walk with you’re happy, even when that someone is yourself.
They need this enclosed space to remember in. They do not walk with purpose at the beginning. But soon they see new prospects away in the distance, and sometimes a person who may be a stranger or a friend.
Jack often saw a man trundling along who he was sure he knew.
At breakfast time he caught his eye. The brows were broad and black as if pencilled on. He saw him disappear into a room at the end of a corridor. He saw him leap up out of a chair in the TV room just as Jack entered. The face, where had he seen that face before? He carried the face in his head until one day it materialized before him as the man approached him in the small lobby that led to the phone. Neither could escape the other.
“Excuse me,” said Jack, “Don’t I know you?”
“I’m afraid not,” the man replied with a pathetic frown, and headed off at a sharp gait. For a moment Jack stood bewildered, then ran after him and fell into step with him. The two marched quickly by the reception area, down the corridor, then, reaching the room where he would often disappear from view the man turned, looked into Jack’s eye and said: “I must leave you here.” The door closed behind him.
He knocked on the man’s door and opened it.
“I have to speak to you,” said Jack. “You wouldn’t have a relation that’s a gardener out in Mullet?”
The man turned and as he did so a phial of pills fell from his hands and burst asunder on the tiled floor. He went to his knees and began gathering them. Embarrassed, Jack withdrew. The following morning he saw the old man climb into a blue Mini and drive away furtively, like someone who had left midway through a wedding celebration.
6
Christmas Morning
“Mr Ferris is a writer,” the hairdresser informed the nurse in the maternity ward. “At present he is writing my story.”
“Oh?” said the nurse.
“Certainly.” She smiled at Jack. “And I have some interesting things to tell.”
She took her child out of the cot and held her on her knee as if she was holding a stranger. “Isn’t she sweet, Mr Ferris?” she said.
“Yes,” agreed Jack.
After an hour the two of them returned from the hospital to the asylum. Arrangements were made for them to return the following day at the same hour.
“If that’s all right with you,” said the nurse ironically.
“Of course,” said Jack.
The hairdresser was pleased. Back in the asylum again, she asked Jack to begin her story that very day. The male nurse gave them a room, and a notebook for Jack to write in.
Later, after she was gone, he looked through some of his copybooks into which, when he woke at night, he had been writing notes. It was nearly impossible to read them. Now in the office with the desk and the swivel chair he started to write again, but his hand refused to move. He could write down the hairdresser’s words but not his own. The struggle was enormous to pen one word. And one word seemed to contain such a myriad of meanings that it was impossible to complete even a sentence.
He sat immobile in front of the desk. His mind was trying to make a leap into the dark but his hands would not comply. His thumb and forefinger were numb. If he tried to write they froze. And inside his head language no longer arrived grammatically, but surfaced as a series of bizarre signs. He walked out into the lounge. A nurse was standing by the window. He told her what had happened.
“I’ll write it down for you,” she said.
He was overwhelmed with gratitude.
And so his day began with a visit to the maternity ward, followed by a session with the hairdresser when she would tell him her story, and then for an hour he would dictate his confession to the nurse. At first all that emerged was a mix of blame, distress and hurt. The nurse quietly wrote down what he had to say. Sometimes the door opened and one of the patients would look in, glance around slowly at the two of them and then go away.
She’d ask him to spell certain words, she’d wait, he’d keep his eyes away from her, he’d turn and start again.
The hour with the nurse became for Jack a spiritual reprieve. As he spoke to her he fell in love with her. And he knew that this was an old medical cliché, but he didn’t care. He let his love for the nurse wash over him. The nurse told him that she trusted him. Why she said this to him he could not remember. That was when he fell in love with her. And when she was gone, the hairdresser would step in again. Then Jack would begin on her story. Word for word. From her birth in Ballyhooley on Clare Island until the moment she was apprenticed to a hairdresser in Sligo town. That was when the trouble began. Then would come the dark gaps, the single words, the silences. Silences to questions you ask yourself. He would sit pen in hand as the nurse had sat before him. And the hairdresser, brimful of love, would look away from him. And after the hairdresser left, Bohola would walk in, direct him to a clean sheet and recall his days in Finsbury Park in London, “It being somewhere near autumn and me having emerged from a locked ward in the north of England. Have you got that?” he’d ask Jack. “Me and London town. The Paddy in London in February of ’62. Me down at Beachy Head in Eastbourne. Have you got that? I like to hear it ring along like Shakespeare,” said Bohola.
As Rita the nurse listened to his confession, he had a great urge to put his arms round her. She said: “It must be a struggle for you to say these things.”
“Because you are here it makes it easier,” he told her.
“Is there self-pity in it?” he asked. She said not. He knew there was, but didn’t care. He thought Rita looked very beautiful. For a while they’d sit together saying nothing. Across from him she smelt very human. They’d start again.
“You have to live with evil. It will not go away. It will steal your energy. It must be faced. It’s serious,” the hairdresser said. “It’s a serious business. Let no one tell you otherwise.”
A man says: “It’s a wonderful Christmas day.” It is. The sun is shining. “It has shone for the past seven Christmas Days,” says Jack. It is wonderful. It is wonderful to him who says it. Wonderful to him who hears it. Any words that surface now are the real thing. In the other world they were meaningless. Now they are vital and amazing. The soul seated across from Jack who said the day was wonderful exudes wonder himself – that life should have accompanied him this far, given him mild weather, pills that balance him for a moment; he hears no children crying but knows they do, he knows people are dying on the upper floors of Castlebar General Hospital which sits across the grass verge; he may not like his own selfishness, his rancour, his innocence, but here in the clinic that runs along a lawn, much like an American chalet, he has got the far side of the moment when his consciousness seized up.
“It’s a wonderful day, Jack,” he says. “Anything might happen.”
That is why the man has declined to wal
k outside. He is alive by that window. He is the first man to say it: It’s a wonderful day. It is wonderful weather. Yes, and it was wonderful to have the words to say it, it was wonderful that the effort was made. A new planet is named. And the greatest wonder of that day was that the soul of the man beside you agreed and saw it as you did.
Then you knew it was no addiction. No high. Nor a search for a high that prompted this wonder. It was a blessing. It was enough. In Jack, the moment passed. But you could tell that for the man commanding the window what he’d seen would remain with him for some time. Some day, unbeknownst to him, it would return. In Bellagarvaun, the land flooded, fingers burnt from hot tobacco, a child sitting abstracted, a woman askew, a light would strike a cushion and the man would be visited by that wonder. On that day he might conceal it thoroughly as a sane man would, but for a second it would be there. Till the day be robbed of its wonder, the cliché regain the senses, language fail him, the respite go.
Jack sat there, considering the window and all the alternatives, and sadness stirred in him like an aphrodisiac. Not far off was desperation, the climax. He savoured the panic, the mild otherworld of absence, the beached self, the love blunted by nostalgia, and his sadness was increased by the self-conscious cheerfulness of Christmas Day visitors as they alighted from their cars.
“Does the west wind,” asked Jack, “blow to the west or from the west?”
“To its grief,” the Bellagarvaun man answered like a sage, “the west wind is known by where it comes from.”
It is night. It has never happened. He tries to plug the gaps through which the nightmare enters. Mostly those gaps open onto nothingness. Then an argument begins in a flash. You’re so sorry for yourself, he’d hear her say. I think you are despicable. This is sanity returning like a type of revenge. I’ll show those fuckers outside! Is there anyone will come part of the road with me? The man from Bohola will. So will the man from Bellagarvaun. And the man from Buleenaun. The man from Balla. His friend from Manulla. The girl from Dereen. And the woman out of Pontoon who wears football socks.
Then we’ll begin to wear each other down.
Each man has a fellow who gives him counsel.
If they take away the drugs they fear the loss of their soul. They need their souls. The soul does not fear isolation. It has no time for bitterness. It has unhinged bitterness. The nurse talks to him, taking down his words in her own hand. He can’t write. They sit in the Male Admissions office trying to spell certain words. When he hears his first name on her lips he feels weak.
He would like to sit in a room with nurse Rita forever dictating his confession. What he says to Rita is believed by her. Rita is sloe-black and tender. She takes up her pen. He recommences. Each man’s story must be written down. He writes theirs. She writes his. As he hesitates, she looks away desiring something back there, something else. She looks bruised; remembering passes the thing on.
“God stands beside me like a bedside lamp,” said the hairdresser, and she formed an O with her lips.
Jack dreamt that Catherine’s clitoris came away in his hands though it still remained part of her. He did not realize immediately what it was. She observed him closely as he moved around with her pleasure-centre in his hand. To him for a while it looked like a goanna, but presently it became a frog. When the goanna became a frog the room smelled of mushrooms and wet grass.
With that, he realized with a shock what he was carrying. He asked her if he took it behind the wall and rubbed it would she still feel pleasure? But Catherine said: No, you must be where I can see you. Then she closed her eyes. The fact that she closed her eyes could be interpreted as meaning that she trusted him completely, or that she had complete power over him as she lay there passively. Or, indeed, that she was entering a fantasy in which he had no part, all because of her propensity, as she would call it, for the stranger.
When Jack awoke he was disturbed by all these contradictions, but more so because now he found that not only his own loins, but her loins, floated free in his dreams. Always in the dream of the severed penis, which had afflicted him for years, was the fear that overcame him as he tried hurriedly to fit his cut cock back into place only to find it coming away again in his hands. No matter what he did, his prick would not take. He interpreted this as his desire to be a woman, and the man in him bemoaning the fact. The cry of the buck wailing always brought him awake, and with a sense of relief he’d find himself intact, though the sense of loss still remained.
Now the clitoris had freed itself from her dressed groin and the quest in the dream was how to tickle it that it might jump in ecstasy, but this, even though she had her eyes closed, could not be done outside of Catherine’s perspective. Yet despite his delicate nudging of the frog’s wet rump, it sat in the palm of his hand eyeing him and remained unmoved by all his coaxing. Nor could he bring it elsewhere because it still remained part of her.
He was sad that he had no control over her pleasure even though he carried its source around in his hand. And if he took his eye away – even for an instant – from the eye of the frog, it was gone. Then began the search to find it again, sometimes here, sometimes there, sometimes gone altogether. Then back again giving him that long, infinite gaze from the cup of his hand.
He realized that he had no control over the mystery.
Then, with a tightening of the knuckle of the spine, he considered the prospect of having a mind in which, while it slept, parts of the body disengaged themselves and floated free, and then he considered why the penis and the clitoris of his dreaming self and his dream-figure Catherine should so wander. And he wondered why, in the case of the male member, its painless severance brought not so much terror as the overwhelming urge that it be replaced immediately. “Some men,” Catherine once said, “are afraid to put it in lest they might never get it back again.” “Did you ever meet anyone like that?” he had enquired nonchalantly. “Only once,” she answered. They were walking at the time through a wood, and she laughed. He considered this implication now and knew it did not apply in his case, instead he became intensely aware of the fact that when the intimacy of two people ends, the secrets of their experience are handed on as tensions to the new lover.
Now he felt for the plight of this other man who feared entry into a woman, and that it was not a laughing matter. Then he went on to consider why, in the case of the clitoris, its position in the cup of his hand had brought both wonder and responsibility for its well-being. He was glad that the frog had remained moist and oiled, for that was a good sign. Yet he felt guilty that the sexual parts should have been chosen by his subconscious mind to be severed from their fellows, but there was relief in the fact (after all those repeated dreams in which the penis had come away in his hand) that now in some sort of sympathy the clitoris had followed his sad appendage into the unknown to keep it company.
He was happy about this, even though he knew that the companionship was emanating from his mind only, and not from Catherine’s. And even though no dream was occupied by the two free-floating loins at the same time (although that too might come in time, he thought) he was glad of the dream, for its sense of fellowship and exotica. Intoxicated, he remembered fondly eyeing the frog as it sat crouched in his hand, moist, ready to spring.
He knew it – the sexual parts were trying to break through the prejudice of the mind.
But in the world of the real and normal the place beside him in the bed was empty. He struggled up from sleep still carrying the clitoris in his hand, like a diver striking to the surface of the sea with a pearl.
He looked around bewildered. The ward was filled with the smell of may-blossom. The stench of lust. What was happening? Then the dream returned to him from another dream. He’d been dreaming about her again. And he felt a deep nostalgia for Catherine, for that sick feeling of wondering: Would Catherine be there, would she turn up, would she be beside him? It was a mystery. He felt there was some awful truth about himself he had to tell before she would return to him, but w
hat it was he could not say.
For hours Jack walked the corridor, perplexed and delighted by the scandalous dream. The other patients, knowing the by-laws of another’s obsession, kept out of his way. He relived the dream to find its meaning.
All he could think was that a false author dwelt within him. In his dreams the true author existed, unhampered by reality. He re-entered his office and immediately thought of Catherine learning to play the trumpet.
She is aged nine. Sunday school is just over. There is something strikingly true, he finds, in this portrait of her. She holds the trumpet between her tiny hands on a Sunday afternoon in the Protestant North. She is wearing the uniform of the Salvation Army band. She is in her own room and in that room she weaves no fantasies, but concentrates totally on blowing a recognizable air.
The image brings him great satisfaction. His spirit returns.
He finds his spirit safe at his side and is content. His spirit has a laughing, gangling form. “You’ve been away some time,” Jack says to his spirit. But the mind-spirit, like some stranger, just nods. The nod could be benign, the nod could be dangerous.
“I grieved over your absence,” says Jack.
“Maybe you should stay quiet for a while,” says Leitrim, who is sitting across from him.
Hugh arrived. He brought with him an invitation to the first night of the play. It was opening the following night.
“Did you get one?”
“No,” said Jack.
“Why send one to me?” asked Hugh.
“It’s a way of telling me not to come,” replied Jack. He studied the invitation.
“You take it,” said Hugh. “You should go.”
Jack thought of the train journey from Castlebar to Dublin. The curtain going up. The shouts of Author! Author! Liar! Liar! When Hugh was gone he showed the invitation to the Leitrim man.
“Is that you?” he asked, pointing at Jack’s name.