by Dermot Healy
A link had snapped between him and the past. There was no use looking for it. He stopped mourning his forthcoming death. The drunk, Jack realized, is the chief mourner at his own funeral. The drinker would like it all to happen in the one day: his birth, his lovemaking, his death. So he speeds up the process.
Scarves, he thought joyfully, she had an inordinate number of scarves. Some that were large as the capes west of Ireland women wore; scarves that were black, made of crepe, black satin, green woollen scarves, red cotton scarves. The memory of the scarves filled him with tenderness. As he used to be filled with sentiment at the sight of her washing hanging up in the back yard of their house in Belfast, or in the sea-fog in the back garden of the dwellings in Corrloch – the line of black skirts, jumpers, blouses.
Scarves, he thought.
When the bad days came he’d grow frantic and nervous. His heart would beat like an oncoming train. He’d wait. His body would shudder. I’m being punished. Let it pass. His daily life became a battle between resignation and the will to change. He began to find comfort in his bed, in the Tilley lamp beside it, the candles burning, in Hugh who had visited him. The male nurse who gave him the extra pills. The Leitrim man. Nurse Rita. The hairdresser. The woman from Pontoon. The dining room where he’d waited all that long day and listened to the raucous chatter of the kitchen staff.
At last he walked the peninsula, but the insults he expected never came. Life was going on without him. Then one day, with an overpowering sense of guilt as if he had recommenced secretly drinking, he began again walking like a disturbed soul past the Adams’ house. The next evening he was back and the gardener, whistling softly, slipped by him into the dusk.
At last, he completed the triangle and ventured as far as the Erris Hotel for coffee. Mrs Moloney stepped out from behind the counter.
She leaned forward and took his hand.
“You’re welcome home, Jack Ferris,” she said. “We could all do with a break.”
“Thank you,” said Jack.
“Do you know what’s wrong with us?” she confided. “We’re far too passive. There should be a band out on the street to welcome you back.”
“Do you think so?” he asked incredulously.
“I do. We never look after our own. My daughter saw your play and thought it was wonderful.”
“I’m glad.”
“You must have had a great time up above on opening night.”
“Yes,” he answered smiling, “we did.”
“It was my dream,” she said, “that something like that might happen to me.”
“It might yet.”
“Never,” she declared.
He sauntered the streets. And then again walked the road to Corrloch. With dread he entered the door of Lavell’s shop.
“You’ve been away, Jack,” Mrs Lavell said.
“I have,” he said.
“Can you hear the cockatiel?”
Jack was startled.
“What?”
“Since you’ve been away I have a cockatiel. Her boyfriend bought my daughter Marie one in Dublin. The bird was driving the aunt mad. Marie was out at work all day and then out with the boyfriend at night and the bird was jabbering away. So, her aunt – my sister – said the bird must go.”
“I’ll have half a dozen eggs.”
“So my daughter asked me to take him in.”
“And half a pound of sausages.”
“Now he has me awake at the crack of dawn.”
“He’ll be a companion,” said Jack.
“It’s a long winter,” nodded Mrs Lavell.
Next morning he crossed the fields and went up to the shop to buy bread. The old fisherman, Bernie Burke, was seated on a sack of spuds getting his breath.
“Morning,” said Jack.
“It’s good to see you,” said Bernie. “I saw your name in the papers, I did. And I saw Catherine’s.”
‘Has the bird talked yet?” asked Jack.
“All he says is in another language,” replied Mrs Lavell.
“You should leave him listening to the radio,” said Bernie. “That’s how they learn.”
“The radio,” said Mrs Lavell, “would only sicken him.”
Jack laughed.
“Isn’t that right, Jack?”
All three laughed together. Jack took a newspaper, and laid the change on the counter. He stepped out. He was home. It was blowing hail. He read that night an Irish Independent dated 1933 from cover to cover. Next morning Daisy fell in behind him and prepared for the walk to the Adams’ house. “Not today,” said Jack.
And so it was. If he loved her in the body once, let his imagination seek her out as best it could. He arranged himself at the kitchen table. He waited. As he had waited in the hospital. But as long as he loved her he could not begin writing again.
The minute he put a word on the page he would stop loving her. Once it became a story it was over. Some other person would materialize.
Still his imagination would not comply. He was not ready yet to consign the real living Catherine to the world of imagination. He wanted to stay in life, to continue with the adventure.
There was one more trial of nerves that had to be gone through. He would not be free till he had spoken to her. He visualized the street he would meet her on. What coat she might be wearing. What she would say. What he would say. And how he’d keep his distance and his dignity. He would not hang on to her. This was how he would behave – with respect. He would not persist. He would be regretful and not argue.
He caught a bus to Ballina. He had been sober some time but he took his phial of Librium with him. He hurried through the wet streets that were rampant with hallucinations. He caught the afternoon train. He went round Dublin terrified of walking into her, and yet craving to see her. He turned into the street where the theatre was.
He stood in an alleyway watching his name and hers emblazoned across the entrance. The role he had written for her had released her from him. Just like that the emphasis shifted. Catherine, he’d say, I just came up to wish you the best of luck.
Footage of their previous encounters passed swiftly through his mind while he imagined some final heroic encounter. Fearful of being seen he slipped along the outside walls of the theatre and looked at the strange black-and-white stills from the play. He looked at them and tried to place them within the context of the script but couldn’t. He fled across to a side-street. At first it seemed a colossal joke that he should be standing there opposite a theatre in which his play was being performed while he had not the authority to enter it. Then came the sense of déjà-vu. When was it he had stood here before? He could not remember, and yet he saw himself in his mind’s enlarged cyclopic eye standing there in that very place waiting for Catherine. Every aspect – sound, light, taste – was exactly as he expected, and yet the scene contained an extra dimension he had not previously encountered. And with a shock he realized that this was the street where for so long he had imagined he would meet her. This was the time. She suddenly came walking towards him and stepped into a telephone booth. He felt his heart pounding. His hands shook. He watched her talk, gesticulate, frown, smile. This familiar mute performance made his heart beat giddily.
When she stepped out he approached her from behind and said: “Catherine.”
She turned and froze. For a second, just as she heard his voice, she had been about to smile in greeting. Then despair descended over her face. She stood there fighting to control herself, then she walked off.
“Please,” he pleaded, following her, “can we remain friends?”
“No,” she said coldly, striding on. “You let me down.”
“I was sick,” he replied.
“You can say that again. What about the phone calls?” she said, turning on him.
“I’m sorry.”
“Do you understand half of the terror you caused?”
“I should have been let attend rehearsals of my own play.”
“They didn
’t want you. No one wants to see you again. No one! You’re a joke, do you know that? Do you realize what people think of you?”
“I can imagine,” he replied. And before he could stop himself he caught her arm: “I was in hospital.”
“You were only there,” she answered, looking angrily at his hand, “collecting notes for your next play.”
“Christ! How can you say that?”
She looked away from him. “Take your hand off my arm, please.”
“Let me go, please,” she said.
He stood back. She walked off towards the theatre, proud and convinced, as if she had won some final argument. Already he had lost control. Everything he had meant to say he had forgotten. He turned away, ashamed of himself. Yet when he looked back after her she glanced towards him with wild agitated eyes. He ran after her again. When he caught up with her, she raced ahead of him.
“I waited for you.”
“You told me lies,” she said. “You were drinking all the time.”
“I’m sober now.”
“It’s too late.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Go away,” she shrilly whispered.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked, as he trotted alongside her.
“I want you to go away.” She walked faster.
“OK,” he mumbled.
He stopped. Humiliation and defeat made the air in the street curve before his eyes.
He walked through Dublin, drinking coffee, in cafés and bars filled with the European tourists of early spring. The coffee drinking continued all that evening. He knew that he should leave, go home, be elsewhere, but he moved from pub to pub like a sick dog because there was always the chance he might run into friends who might speak on his behalf to her. Who these friends were he didn’t know. He didn’t drink. Not because he had chosen not to, not because of any great sense of discipline, but because he had forgotten about drink. He had forgotten that drink might ease the pain. And yet all those mad laps of the city had the hallmarks of a binge. The coffee was making him insane.
The trek from pub to pub, trying to talk to the odd person that congratulated him while his nervous consciousness chattered away; the foolish expectancy as he turned a corner, the comic inevitability, the talking to himself; the seeking out the eyes of sympathetic women, crying dry-eyed, saying his serenity prayer; all this had to be gone through even though the irreversible moment had passed.
He was opposite the theatre again as the crowds emerged when the play finished sometime after ten. They passed by him chatting, laughing, hailing taxis. He watched the doors, the lights go off, the poster boards taken indoors. A couple of men he took to be technicians strolled by him to the pub. An actress, still dabbing make-up from her face with a tissue, stood on the sidewalk and sneezed.
“Bless you,” said Jack.
“My God,” she said, “it’s you.”
“I was just wondering was Catherine about?”
“She’s gone.”
“Oh.”
She rushed away. Then the street went quiet. He began to search the nearby pubs.
That search ended as the pubs closed. Then he set off towards the last address that Catherine had given him. He did not want to go there as that seemed like a breach of trust. To meet her by chance was acceptable, to go to her home was wrong. Yet he could not stop himself. By now he had perfected the walk he had established in hospital. The intent gait that bore the impatience of a relentless search. The obsessive drive through psychological terrain. The disturbed soul was on the move again.
His fingers working themselves in his pockets. His socks sliding in his shoes. The manic breathing. The lights from cars and traffic lights blinding him.
When suddenly he came to a stop he found that he had long ago walked past the house. He stopped, bewildered by the fact that he had gone so far out of his way. He turned and went back again. When he eventually reached the red-brick two-storey house in a side street off the South Circular Road he stood for a moment unsure of himself. He knocked on the door. A curtain was drawn overhead and a face came to the window. Then the curtain quickly fell into place again. “Catherine,” he called out. He heard voices in the hallway. Steps, whispers. All the quiet insignificant sounds that paranoia feeds upon. “Catherine,” he called again. He listened for as long as he could bear then he walked off down Camden Street, feeling that he had at least discharged a psychic duty that was expected of him.
The long drunkenness was nearly over. Now began the long insane journey into sobriety. For what, he wondered, had he survived?
He made it back to his house out on Mullet two days later. The papers were still set out on the table. The starving animals scraped the door. Daisy went beserk when Jack threw him some bones. The wild cat meowed round his feet, her tail stiff with hunger. He fed her milk gone off and porridge oats. The house felt unlived in. It smelled of old distemper and stale potatoes. He passed by the kitchen where his papers were and moved on into the bedroom. He lay down and lifted one of her letters onto his chest. The hopelessness was intense. The badness started. The veins on the back of his hands began to pulsate. He was back among the enemy. Future realities were being measured out in woeful doses. Jesus Christ! He got up and put her letters away. And he said the only way I can free myself is to imagine her, not as herself, but as someone else, someone different, for then I can think of her without resenting her.
And then he realized with a start what she had done; she had saved them from each other. He saw the smile that had partly formed on her lips as she heard his familiar voice behind her. For an instant it was there, her old longing. Then he cringed as he heard the sound of his loathsome plea. He saw her turn, with wild eyes, towards him on the street. Her sadness, her loveliness. For a moment it could have begun all over, but it didn’t. She had struggled against the disillusionment. She had seen what was coming.
Now he had to live on in a different world. To transcend. To enter a new story. She must be imagined. He opened a spiral-bound notebook and thought, Here it begins.
II
THE SALMON OF KNOWLEDGE
9
The Death of Matti Bonner
Catherine was thirteen the day that Matti hanged himself from a tree midway between the Catholic chapel and the Presbyterian church. She was first down the steps of the church to face his contorted visage.
At the beginning she did not realize what had happened.
He was like a climber reaching out for the next branch, or someone hiding up a tree, but then she saw that his two boots were resting on nothing. She had left the church because religious gatherings often made her sick. Now, filling her lungs with air, she saw Matti Bonner’s face. She came forward a bit. The right hand, that lacked a middle finger, seemed to stir imperceptibly. Behind her an organ played and a choir was singing a hymn.
“Daddy!” she screamed.
In convulsions she ran back to the church.
“Daddy! Daddy!” she screamed, and men, embarrassed, stood up to let Jonathan Adams through to his daughter.
Jonathan Adams ordered everyone to remain where they were. Then, knowing Matti Bonner to have been a parishioner of St Mary’s, he stepped quietly into the sour-cream smell of the Catholic chapel to tell those standing at the back what had happened. As the communicants were coming down the aisle a labourer cut the dead man down, Jonathan Adams received him and an on-duty RUC man laid him out on the ground.
By then the congregations of both churches had been released, though each Sunday, morning service began in one when Mass in the other was nearly over. The two were timed so that the congregations would not meet, either going or returning. But this morning the service had ended abruptly when Catherine ran in, and the Mass had faltered after communion. The parishioners gathered round the dead man, they studied the tree, the cut of the knot, and fended off certain political thoughts. The Presbyterians looked on remotely as the priest whispered into Matti’s ear.
The Catholics app
eared awed.
But for all there this death was uninspiring. It did not lead to awesome thoughts about the hereafter. It disputed grief. It seemed the work of a man intent on turning his face away from God.
It was the third suicide in two years. A young reservist had been washed up at Dernish Island on the Erne, a girl had cut her wrists in a shed. Both of these were Protestant deaths. The first brought on by manic depression, the second by domestic trouble. But this was the first time in recent history that a Catholic had taken his own life in that territory.
Matti Bonner’s death gave the Loyalist village an insight into how vulnerable the enemy was.
The Presbyterian elders who were standing under the birch tree felt both alienated and aggrieved. His death had somehow exposed them. Even though this suicide should have been a reproach to the Catholics, they felt it was directed at them. It involved them all. There was a curse in what he’d done. It was a sign. He wanted to remain forever in their minds.
And as for the Catholics, who moved round his death with an easy familiarity, they, at a further remove, felt let down. By his suicide he had gone over to the other side. He had smashed the idol of life itself. By his death he had turned informer. They were embarrassed by the obvious grief of Jonathan Adams, while they themselves were not so moved. Matti Bonner had even robbed them of their right to mourn. That he should have hanged himself facing the Catholic chapel meant he was pointing the finger at them.
He was saying: In the chapel there is no peace.
And there were some who privately understood Matti Bonner’s despair.
He had picked that spot and that time and those two churches, and said: I’ve had enough – one day you go out alone and marry death. Matti Bonner was not saying he died because of politics, or economics, or because of a broken heart. He was saying that God had failed him in his despair. And so he risked the concept of everlasting mercy. I am not staying around, said Matti Bonner from the tree, I’ve had enough.