A Goat's Song

by Dermot Healy

  “Yes.”

  “It’s a nice card,” he said.

  It was a long delirious day. He let the hours pass. High on Librium and Mogadon, he lay peacefully that night among the sleeping men. With love he watched the Madonna on the wall. The next morning he again imagined making the journey to the east. Hugh rang. A journalist was on the phone from Dublin looking for his telephone number. “I’m not here,” said Jack. It was a true statement. It was a long day, tantalizing, full of the fantasy of journeying, of arriving, moving through the theatregoers. Seeing her above on the lighted stage.

  A few times he strolled as far as the road, then turned back and paced the corridor. He stood and studied the hospital clock. Sat in the empty dining room and watched the cooks make the dinner. He listened to the clash of cutlery, and smoked. Other patients came and sat at the empty tables and watched those working in the kitchen with a quiet, transfixed curiosity. He returned to watch them make the evening meal. It did not seem possible that he could last out the day. That it would pass like others did. But it did. And he was still there in that place when it was too late to have gone. As the hour came for the curtain to go up he fought the desire to lift the phone and ring the theatre. As the minutes dwindled he grew euphoric. He imagined the crowd sitting in the dark and he not among them, and was filled with wonder. The minute passed. Relief flooded through him. I’ve stayed away.

  I didn’t go.

  It has started.

  He stood in the corridor outside the room of the man who had buried his bottles of gin in a Greek garden. Out came the Cole Porter song “Every Time We Say Goodbye”. Jack grew to love those words. Especially the refrain – the change from major to minor.

  He wished Catherine well.

  Then he began pacing the corridors like a popular song.

  Corrloch. Belmullet. Aghadoon.

  7

  The Love Object

  “So, you’ve lost your love object,” said the psychiatrist.

  To hear Catherine reduced to such a crude nonentity was a comic blow to Jack’s pride. He stared at the man defensively.

  “I’m thinking of letting you go,” the psychiatrist continued. “Stay off the drink for a while, and then, if you want, begin again. Start with a couple of pints. You are the only one will know if you are an alcoholic.”

  Jack, in a panic, asked: “When do I have to go?”

  “In a few days. It’s up to you. The main thing is there’s nothing chemically wrong with you.”

  Jack walked the hospital pondering the words love object. Then he pondered the words letting you go. And after that chemically wrong. But, as yet, he did not begin to ponder the word alcoholic. From it grew all the strands of unreason and fanaticism and hopelessness that terrified him.

  He sat among the friendly alcoholics on a Sunday morning in a small wooden room in the basement of the asylum. They shook his hand and he sat down and waited. A ray of cold sunlight came though the single window onto clouds of cigarette smoke.

  “I can see you’ve suffered,” said the man beside him.

  The door opened slightly and a head appeared. “Have you a cigarette, mister?” came the faraway familiar voice of a small farmer. The alcoholics handed over cigarettes to the chemically mad. Then, as if they were under the power of some medium, the drinkers, like austere feminists, began to bare their souls.

  Jack was welcomed to the meeting.

  “My name is Jack,” he said when his turn to speak came round. He could not bring himself to say he was an alcoholic. Instead he said: “I hope in time to have the courage to say I am an alcoholic.” The little group shook their heads knowingly. He reminded them of themselves. They all knew that defence, that dependence on self which was an even stronger addiction than drink. The self, which was governed by the will, would not negate its own existence.

  “It’s a life sentence,” said the final speaker. “You don’t cease to be an alcoholic. Never. It’s in the genes. The same flawed cell will burn brightly again the next time you take a drink, if there ever is a next time.”

  They stood with heads bowed for the serenity prayer. Someone opened a window. Fag smoke blew outwards like incense from a ritual.

  The nurses moved lightly in their own sure personalities between people lost in spasms of loneliness.

  An identity was affirmed. The nurse moved on. The patient, feeling pure because of the sympathy, looked after the disappearing nurse, or irked by the return of some reality, didn’t.

  Jack was happy on Librium.

  Then came another responsibility. That all that happened in the hospital, even as it happened, had to be written down. Now his time there was running out Jack was visited by an obsession that he must become the chronicler of those who were his companions.

  It was a time that must be remembered. Because of this obsession, he sat in the unused office for Male Admissions those last few days feverishly writing. He answered the telephone, gave precise directions to those in the outside world, then resumed his task. From now on, everything was going to happen for a first time.

  It was present times he was addicted to. The notebook stayed with him throughout the day. It was there beside him while he slept, it was there first thing in the morning.

  He wrote down immediately what he saw. The villagers collecting. The nomads heading off. The icon, still and perfect. But sometimes, for what he saw or felt, there were no words. No words would come. The writing stopped. His hand could not form a word. And the word he might have written down disappeared into the void. He no longer had any language in which he might contemplate the world, but only stinging asides from his past with Catherine. His memory was impaired, and since memory depended on words, no words would come except those which had already been defiled. So he listened intently to the others, as he had once listened to popular songs. He’d write down a sentence spoken by the villagers as they unrolled their bedclothes and greeted each other, as they shuffled towards breakfast, as they fasted before their pills.

  It’s a dirty old morning, a voice sang out.

  You’re a trickster – like a weather pot, came the reply.

  What’s a weather pot?

  A weather-gauge. A class of thermometer. Like yourself, it’s got two readings.

  Oh.

  I’ll give you £2 for the woollen cap.

  How about £2. 50?

  Are you a bit of a farmer?

  Yes, and I worked in a factory in Killalla, God bless us. But it’s dear honey that’s licked off the whins. I’ve already lost two of these woollen hats. But they’re great, they are. You can roll them up and put them in your pocket.

  Like a sheep. You can roll them up and put them in your pocket.

  This will be all yours one day, my uncle told me. Oh, but if I had only got it in writing.

  If I could only see her again, said Jack.

  You’d be well, but sick again.

  Where there’s two in it, the guilt is halved, said a listener.

  People worry something wicked about themselves.

  It’s a pity about them.

  Each man has his savings, said an old trim voice.

  I broke the rule to find out the right way, explained Bohola. I’m told the right way, but when you are used to your own way you can’t correct it.

  God help us, Kiltimagh!

  What is the name for a lady’s frustration?

  Oh, sacred!

  There is an earth outside the Shangrila, and its purpose is misguided, spoke the hippy. Could you help Jack to put it back on the path to Heaven?

  We all have people somewhere, said Jack to the hairdresser.

  Yes, and we’re not with them, she replied.

  As time passed, he found one day was not long enough to contain all that happened in it. Each moment had at its centre a hint of eternity. Some day, he knew, he would lift these papers and hate them, yet it had to be done.

  The men and women came, tapped on the door of his office, and impatiently began to tell the
ir stories. He fought to sustain the inflexion, the pause, the backward look. He wrote, they spoke. And there was some sanity in this. As he wrote their stories down, it was as if his imagination had been granted time to see their lives in another light.

  For each detail of their lives, though it had already happened, had to be tortuously reinvented. He wrote down their lives because every time he thought of his own he thought of Catherine and their togetherness, and then began the turmoil. His spirit would vanish. The hospital was no longer home. Only when the patients spoke did he know peace.

  When I was fourteen I used an ass for pleasure.

  Was it any good? asked Jack.

  It was perfect, the man replied.

  The story went on. He was glad for the man that it had been perfect. When one speaker went, another sat in the chair. He turned the page, wrote the date, the time, the place, then they began telling him terrible things. When the stories stopped, he felt drained but satisfied. The hospital induced in him a warm satisfaction that he had not felt in years. The first minutes of the day and the last minutes of the night a holy breeze blew down the corridor.

  The nurses sent him patients who wanted to tell their tale. The doctor he had not become he now was, one that cured others that he might himself be preserved. It was a great time of not knowing, of being whoever the patients judged he was. Contrary waters met. They subsided. His notebooks filled with stories that had once made perfect sense.

  One clear day will come, he thought, when I will find what I am addicted to. He sat in his office, happy at his pad. The hospital was the free world. Never again would he be able to walk happily through the unnatural world outside. So, on the morning he was to leave he woke with a heavy heart. He was frightened and anxious. The nurse gave him extra pills to help him through the coming weeks.

  “I had so much more work to do here,” Jack said.

  “You were great,” said the night nurse, “but I’m worried about you returning to be alone. Is there no one you can ask to stop with you?”

  “I won’t be alone,” said Jack. “I will have you all with me.”

  He searched the wards to find Nurse Rita, only to discover it was her day off. He crossed the lawns carrying his bag and stepped through the gates of the General Hospital and was shocked to see a sculpture of the Virgin holding Christ on the far side of the road. The flesh-coloured plaster arms and leg made him stop in his tracks. He turned towards town.

  He felt a holiday sense of dread. He should be enjoying this moment, instead he felt disloyal. He had formed mental associations inside the hospital that would be considered improper in the outside world.

  No one outside the hospital where he now stood would admit to such an appalling lack of intimacy. Nor would they try to overcome it in that same genial way. I have been cured by the Mayo men. But the minute he stepped through the gates he was suddenly afflicted with his need of Catherine in a terrible new way. For he had gone through this alone. She had not been with him. It was his first independent act in years, and he had an overpowering wish to tell Catherine about all that had impressed him.

  Already, as he walked through Castlebar, he was preparing for his encounter with her. He felt strange on the streets. He had been happy with the hospital order of sleeping, waking, strolling, sitting, without the burden of guilt. Now, as he went down the road, another self stepped out and accompanied him. Then another. And another. The old crew, acrimonious, scolding, shouting, were back. By the time he reached the bus, they had all returned. He had a gathering of many selves, each wrapped up in their own condition and each demanding his attention by their gesticulations, their silence, their bitter talk, and their dreadful insecurity.

  Each of these would be with him on the bus to Ballina, on the bus to Belmullet. They would be about the house when he got there. They would arrive ahead of him wherever he went. They would be with him – these ghosts – for the rest of his life, until, by some act of faith, he could incorporate them into himself. He tried to put them by. And to keep self-pity at bay. But that was to induce a worse sentiment – nothingness – in its place.

  In a pub he sat down. He had entered it with habitual familiarity only to find that here his ghosts grew abusive and hurried. Each drinker there betrayed the same quiet mindless absorption that Jack knew of old, but now it had lost its centre. The smell of the alcohol threw him off-balance. Each face was brightly discoloured and dry. Jack nodded to them as he ordered his coffee. When someone ordered a whiskey his senses were filled with furious memories. He could feel the alcohol as it flowed down the tubes and pipes to the drinker’s stomach.

  He turned his back and swallowed a Librium. God, I’ve shamed myself. He asked the time. He ordered another cup of coffee. Turned, swallowed another Librium. By the time the Ballina bus arrived, he was beginning to feel that it was possible. That he would have the strength to hide away from everyone, even her.

  8

  The Cockatiel

  He reared up that night in the cold cottage and yelled at the thought of his loss and the stupidity of his thinking. He knew finally that the only intoxication he could live with would be himself and yet he wanted more than ever to meet Catherine. He needed to make peace. He needed forgiveness. It had happened in the past – he thought it might happen again.

  He took out what remained of her letters and began reading them. He found his heart raging. He swallowed a few Librium. Then read the letters over and over again. Soon the tone, the sound, the hesitations, the acrimony, the exaggerations, the humour, the sensuousness of her voice was pouring through his consciousness. In these letters were references to people he had long forgotten, to old arguments that seemed futile now. Places, words of love, encouragements, erotic endearments. Where was all that love now? Had it drifted into the upper air?

  Sleep eventually came amidst a letter of love and reconciliation he was dreaming up in his head to reply to hers.

  The skipper he fished with visited him the following day.

  “You’re welcome back, Jack,” the skipper said. “Hugh told me you’ve been having a bit of bother.”

  “It’s over now,” said Jack and he sought for the skipper’s name.

  One night, in his drunkenness, Jack had forgotten it. And now, without the excuse of drunkenness he found in a panic that he again could not remember the man’s name. The nameless figure sat before him stirring a cup of tea and eating a sweet biscuit with uncouth relish. Jack looked at this strange face – windswept, with a garish swollen nose and huge ravaged teeth – and tried to restore an identity to it that he had once known. But the man’s identity remained a mystery. He wondered was this the beginning of cynicism and distortion in himself. Would he begin to lose everyone he’d known?

  “I think you should stay,” the skipper continued. “You shouldn’t run.”

  “You’ll always have a berth with me,” he said, “out on the Blue.”

  He walked with him down the white path. The skipper got up on his Honda 50.

  “Be seeing you, Jack.”

  “Good luck,” said Jack, and he waved and watched him till he was gone from view, but still the name did not return.

  At noon Joe Love appeared in his green post van. While the van rocked in the wind and Daisy barked wildly, Joe handed Jack his mail. Jack looked at Joe Love’s face with its huge forehead, snow-white hair and full whorish lips as if he were seeing him for the first time.

  “How are you, Jack?” he asked.

  “I’m grand.”

  “I saw your picture in the paper,” said the postman. “You looked mighty.”

  He slit open the envelope. It was a bunch of reviews sent on by Eddie. Jack read them, but the only words that registered in his mind were those that referred to Catherine. “Catherine Adams delivers a stunning performance.” “Miss Adams is impeccable. She was born for the part.” “An actress new to the Dublin stage, Miss Catherine Adams, turns in a rare and moving performance.” He felt a painful twinge of bitterness, of jealousy
and sadness. The two of them should have been sharing this moment together. He would have liked to have been called onto the stage, and to take her hand and bow. It would not happen. It would never happen.

  He stuffed the newspaper cuttings in the pocket of his oilskins and sauntered fearfully round the peninsula. The sea roads were creamy yellow in the cold January sun. Each person he met tumbled by, full of their own life, at home in their own consciousness while he was trapped in an alien perspective from which there was no relief.

  He sat in the cottage for two days without stirring. Then Hugh the chef arrived with Daisy and the cat. He was glad that he remembered Hugh’s name but distraught to find that he had forgotten the dog. Daisy went frantic with joy at seeing him, then lay down in his accustomed place. This is how it will be, thought Jack. Who do we have to talk to when we are alone? He looked at the holy pictures that he had kept on the wall and wondered should he remove them. If he left them there what magnificent madness, he wondered, might home in on his deranged mind? He took down the Madonna, the Crucified Christ and yet could not bring himself to remove a small plaster cast of Joseph holding his son, for the shadow the statue threw on the wall of the mantle he found comforting.

  The banal and the ordinary things began to count. Through them he would re-enter the world, for he had not the strength to begin listening to God. He tried to imagine her in her new life. Would she be able to trade in ceaseless affection with some other again? Would the evil energy be dissipated now? They had lived together thinking they knew everything about each other, but they had forgotten the strange world that would be there after they parted.

  Who would take care of them now?

  For a long time their life had been full of forgiveness. How serene the world was after they’d argued! Then the forgiveness stopped. The moment that had actually happened he could not remember. It had passed him by.

  For hours he’d be filled with unrelenting hurt and resentment. He culled old notebooks written in Belfast and found there no record of their day-to-day life. He had always, out of a naïve sense of loyalty, wanted to live there and yet his time in Belfast had barely registered in his mind. What was I doing, he thought, during those years?