A Goat's Song

by Dermot Healy

  “But you’ll go for it?” he asked delighted.

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  “I’ll ring him.” He leapt up from the table. “That’s great. I’ll ring him and tell him.”

  On the road to Belmullet he met a goat. A black-and-white goat with a long gentlemanly snout started to follow him when he reached the Church of the Holy Family. When he’d stop, the goat would stop. When he went on, the goat would go on. He stopped, the goat looked at him like a shepherd dog. He started forward again, and the goat followed him. “Go long,” he shouted, but the goat just moved his yellow shining eyes and stood watching him from the far side of the road. Jack lit a cigarette and dropped his matches. When he went to pick them up, the goat ran off, afraid that the man was about to hurl a stone at him.

  “So someone has been ill-treating you, have they?” he said to the goat.

  He leaned down again. The goat moved further away and watched him. He reached down one more time and the goat jumped backward.

  “Go home!” shouted Jack.

  And then as he walked off and the goat stopped where he was, Jack was sorry to lose him. He reached Belmullet town and went into the Erris Hotel and rang Eddie. There were two lassies dressed identically lying alongside a piano, face down, counting dice. Mrs Moloney shouted: “Nessie come here,” but the girls didn’t move.

  “Hallo,” they said.

  “Hallo, Nessie,” called Jack. “Hallo, Trish.”

  “We saw you with Bridie from Glenroe,” said Trish, hanging upside down.

  “Did you now?”

  “Why isn’t she with you today?”

  “She’s gone home.”

  A man who worked as a gardener at various places on the mainland and on the peninsula was sitting alone drinking pints of Guinness. Hugh was preparing that evening’s dinner in a room off the bar. Jack could see him piping meringues onto tinfoil on a tray. The two men were talking to each other about race horses and severed limbs and The Late Late Show.

  “Give us a brandy, Hugh,” called Jack.

  “Jazus, Jack,” Hugh shouted. “How is life on the mainland? Wait till you hear this job that I’ve got here.” And he brought out from the kitchen a two-wave radio, shot the aerial into the air, pressed a button and spoke to the Blue Cormorant. “Ye poor bastard,” said Hugh. “Over.”

  “Did you ever feel the whole thing was a waste of time?” Jack asked in an attempt to ingratiate himself with the gardener.

  “If I ever felt like that, I’d change my drink,” the man laughed, and inside the other room Hugh laughed.

  “I’ll have a brandy,” said Jack, “and give this man whatever he’s having.”

  “No, thank you,” said the gardener, “I’ll stop by myself.”

  “I’ve just had some good news,” announced Jack.

  “Is that a fact?” replied the gardener, laughing ironically again. “You wouldn’t think it to look at you.”

  “If that’s the case,” replied Jack, “it must have been a long time since you heard anything worthwhile.”

  He brought the corrected pages of the text into a building society office in Belmullet where the woman was editing the disc that contained the play. He gave her the corrected manuscript, let himself out onto the street and walked round the town. I’m raving, he thought. He tried to keep from entering a pub so that his head might be clear if there was any further work to be done. He could not wait to see the text. Each time he called back she was still working on the various corrections. He looked over her head at the computer and saw with relief whole pages being erased. Nights and days of work were disappearing. Characters, lines and moments went off the screen like magic. This gave him a crazy sense of satisfaction.

  He would like to have leaned in and pressed the erase button so that the entire play would be wiped from the memory. That would have been the business! Leave nothing, nothing at all!

  He watched enthralled as the voices of people he had invented sped by like trains into the night. One press of the button and another whinge disappeared into the void.

  32

  A Time of Big Seas

  The first time it happened Jack was sitting in the council offices that acted as a court house and library. He had been in there sorting through old mariners’ maps and local history books. Then he sat back to smoke a cigarette. The window looked out onto a yard with a street beyond. He looked up and let his mind idle. He was thinking of something utterly banal, something nonsensical.

  A man walked up and down the street, then another. Their forms passed the window. And though Jack could not make them out he knew they were familiars, they were human beings, he could taste the life-breath of them.

  It was early afternoon and over the top of the curtain he could make out a hard blue sky. He was thinking in another language. The eerie language of the half-formed and the unsayable. He looked round the bare wainscotted walls, feeling with his eyes how the light fell. Then the room seemed to jerk forward in time. All peripheral vision was suddenly obliterated, what he could see was fixed remotely at the end of a long high corridor. He was afraid to look back towards the window lest he might find there evidence of this sudden passage towards evening. That night had mysteriously fallen. But as he looked at the shadowy perpendicular frames of the distant wood-panelling his panic grew. He felt his mouth fall. He was being swept along an indeterminable passage and could not stop himself.

  “Oh, God,” he said. He gripped the chair so that he might ease the nausea in his throat. Then, slowly, he tried to loosen his grip on the armrests. He could hear each of his breaths distinctly, and as the interval between each seemed to grow, he listened intently in the pauses for the sound of his heart turning round.

  He looked up to find the same blue over the curtains, to find that nothing had changed. The same blue was over the curtains, some persons – ordinary, particular – passed again, and his breathing returned to normal.

  When he returned to himself it was like it had never happened. What had occurred was something without form or shape. Any words he could conjure up were inadequate to deal with this sudden loss of time and perspective.

  It seemed to him, just then, that every person knew this, this loss of self, but it could not be told. It was an opening onto a non-world. He left down the book that was in his hand with extreme care. That, because of the unreality, was necessary. If he did anything too quickly he feared the reverberations that might follow. Yet it was important that he escape. He got into the Lada and sat a moment with the steering wheel in his hands. He was not sure whether he could any longer drive a car. Then he switched the engine on. He drove very slowly to a beach, fearing that any moment his sense of what lay to his left and right would suddenly be removed. He stopped the car on a bed of gravel, and with relief headed towards the breaking surf. There was another walker abroad. Jack fell into step with him. He was wearing a duffle coat and a shirt open to his waist and carried a black refuse sack. He had a genial raving eye, with smiling ducts and generous looks about him that ended in private and imbecilic tittering.

  “Are you all right?” asked Jack.

  The man stopped to consider the question.

  “I suppose I am. I’m getting older”

  Now the man was, as many before him were, a stooped creature with a broken wing. Balanced on a stick he dodged through the sands. A young girl in an oilskin coat approached them. Jack saw a seal. He shouted to the young girl who was standing looking out at the Atlantic.

  “Look,” he shouted, “at the seal.”

  The girl followed his outstretched arm.

  “The seal! The seal!” shouted Jack.

  She looked out, but by then the seal had gone. She looked back at Jack and ran away.

  “I fear,” said the old fellow, “that she thought you were shouting: ‘Look at the sea! Look at the sea!’”

  “Oh,” said Jack.

  The two men walked on.

  “It’ll break before it gets any better.”


  “Are you expecting a storm?” asked Jack in a neighbourly way.

  The man stopped and swung his arm in a curve. “I carted this beach most of my youth. Do you see the stones? There were no stones.” He moved on. “There were no stones then. Only sand. We took away layers of sand for building purposes. That’s how the stones got there. That’s stopped now. The authorities put a stop to that.”

  He halted. His black shoes sank into the sand.

  “Only for I was pensioned off I wouldn’t be here. They don’t want you here. It’s the Famine mentality. If you are feeling bad they’d make you feel worse. In these parts the cuckoo mocks the corncrake.” He spat. “Once you start thinking for yourself there’s something wrong with you.”

  “Where were you?”

  “Down Clydebank for twenty-five years. I’d prefer to be there now. I should be in Scotland. Scotland has the best health service in the world. If you fall sick you’d get the same treatment as Prince Charlie. I know no one here now. But they know me.” He spat to the left. The wind blew across his bare red chest. “Neighbours of the presumptuous propensities!” He spat again to the left. “But I don’t know them.”

  The old fellow laughed. Some specks of wet sand had blown about his trouser legs. He studied them with the tip of his stick. He laughed again and slung the bag on his back.

  They took leave of each other in a slow fashion: waving and looking back and going on again.

  A few minutes later, as Jack was crossing the field behind the beach, it happened a second time. Just when he had forgotten, the same mental gap opened again. But this time the wrench was longer and more frightening, for now all natural things – grass, birdsong and sea air – were becoming objects of horror. He went back to the beach and lay down on his back. His heart was beating furiously. It began to drizzle. Then followed a series of highs and lows – he would feel exhilarated to be a part of the world, then would come the low pitiful sound of his own breathing.

  The walk to the car which was only a few hundred yards away seemed like miles. His wrists became itchy. He rubbed them fiercely. A knuckle on his spine started to throb. He started the car. Every mile or so it cut out. The people he saw on the road home he imagined nude, squatting over a bowl to shit. This is normal, he said, there is nothing wrong in seeing that. It happens. He saw them again and again, people sitting upright with innocent looks while under them their waste accumulated. He drove fiercely by them in the Russian car.

  “I’m losing my senses,” said Jack.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Lie beside me,” he whispered, “I don’t feel well.”

  But even as she lay beside him, he could not bring himself to touch her.

  She had broken their love-vow. With terrible regret he felt the love-feeling leave his body and return deadened. If a hair of her head touched his ear, it felt like electricity. He tied back his hair with a ribbon of Catherine’s and listened to her aggrieved, disturbing breathing.

  “Do you mind if I ask you something?” she said.

  He did not reply.

  “Will you be there when rehearsals start? If you are there, I’ll be too self-conscious.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You see, it’s painful for me reading these lines.”

  “Catherine, I just don’t want to talk about it right now. Just leave it for now, all right?”

  She pulled away. Don’t move, he thought. Just stay perfectly still. Don’t move, Catherine.

  She caught him on the hill. She flung her arms around him.

  “I’m sorry about everything,” she said. “Please forgive me.”

  In the spitting rain they turned back to the house. She would not let him go. He was in a cold sweat. He sat on the step of the house and looked at the mountains on Achill Island and wondered: Where does it reside – the will to go on? They walked towards Scotchport. The sun pooled on a cluster of whins. Seagulls changed to ravenous crows. A seal, with a porter face, surfaced for a look around the bay. Fish jumped in ecstasy. The seawater glimmered like saved hay. And he was sorry that he had made Catherine’s simple needs into fantastic demands.

  “Take a taste of this,” he said, picking some wild leaves. They both walked on chewing.

  “My God,” shouted Catherine, “is this stuff poisonous?”

  Suddenly he realized that his mouth was red hot. They stopped and started spitting furiously.

  “I thought,” he said, “they would taste of lemon.”

  “Sometimes, you know,” she said, “I despair of you.”

  It was a time of big seas.

  At night they spoke of Scotland in the bar.

  He did not, on wakening, put out a hand to touch her.

  Through his mind raced all the bad things. The light of the morning reached into the room full of a wicked shining truth. They were bodies in a pure stupor. If she touched him, he would freeze. For he felt his body to be shamelessly packed with sweat, urine and excrement. Catherine sat up, gripped her knees and looked towards the window. Then she looked at him a second. He wanted to disappear and come back in another shape to please her. But she misunderstood this fear and self-loathing. She leaned over, nevertheless, and kissed him. But then turned tetchy at his lack of response.

  She got out of bed, went to the toilet, then sat looking out of her window. Eventually she went about her business of half-dressing.

  She began to test him, seeing how far she could go saying wild things, then wilder things, things that once used to unsettle him, make him dizzy. In her melancholia she looked dated and a little odd. She talked indecently of all his friends, and her lovers, and the village folk. He, not to be outdone, continued the same comical, slanderous talk. His hands joined between his knees like an embarrassed schoolboy, he told her that he often took her erotic asides as somehow a slight on himself.

  “Can we go somewhere together for a holiday – somewhere foreign?” she asked.

  “Like where?”

  “Anywhere. Majorca. Cyprus – places where normal people go on holidays.”

  “You really want to go?”

  “It will be good for us. Cheap wine, swimming, sunshine and no wind.”

  “OK,” he said.

  “But where?” she asked.

  “Some place” said Jack, “with a bar.”

  “Can we afford it?”

  “I’ll have a few bob from the fishing. And there’ll be an advance.”

  The next day she booked them into Majorca through a travel agency that was based in a draper’s shop on the Moy.

  The night before they were to leave they walked up the town of Castlebar. While she went shopping he sat in the car. She stepped out of a boutique holding a new dress before her for his opinion. He nodded. She leaned out of a shop with a scarf round her head.

  As she walked happily up the street towards him holding her new clothes he was overcome with sentiment. She kissed his eyes. In a bar in Crossmolina they had their first drink in a few days. She put her arm over his shoulders.

  “I’d love it,” she said, “if we were always as happy as we are now.”

  “We will be,” he said.

  She stood. “I’ll go and get some groceries. It’ll only take a few minutes.”

  “Meet me here”, he said, ordering another pint.

  “Stay sober for me,” she said and kissed him. “I can’t wait to get home.”

  “Please be here,” she said.

  Half an hour passed, then an hour. He stood at the door and looked up and down the street, but she could not be seen. He walked the town, returned and sat there in the empty bar. The panic attack came again. She had deserted him. He was overcome with nausea. He tried to see himself reaching the bar but felt it was an impossible task. Though he was going forwards some irreversible backward pull was gaining on him. His body felt like a worm, bloated below the neck. He heard the hard snip of an insect buzzing round his ear. He tried to detect the insect but just as he thought he had trapped the sound it
began somewhere else. He scratched his wrists. He followed the hopper for ages because its sound felt like a stitch in the heart.

  He sat on drinking by himself waiting for her to appear. The waiting seemed to go forever. His thoughts seemed loud as screams. Then he went to the other end of the town and found her sitting drinking in the small hotel with men he didn’t know.

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” he hissed.

  “Oh God,” she said, “I forgot all about the time.”

  “I’ve been waiting for hours.”

  “I got held up here.”

  “You got held up drinking. Why didn’t you just lift the phone and ring?” he persisted angrily.

  “I didn’t think of it.”

  “Who is this?” asked one of the men.

  “This,” said Catherine biting her lip, “is my friend.”

  “Oh.” He looked at Jack and smiled sarcastically. “So this is him.”

  “Who is this bollacks?” asked Jack.

  “Could you leave her alone?” said the man.

  “Jack, this is the director of that film. Peter. I was just explaining to him what happened to me.”

  “C’mon, let’s go,” muttered Jack.

  “In a minute,” said Catherine with charm, “this is the man who wrote the play I told you about.”

  “Congratulations,” Peter said.

  She introduced him to the others. Which one of them is the fucker? he thought.

  “Can we go?” he asked her again.

  “Jack, please!”

  “This is the exact moment,” he said, “when we should be elsewhere.”

  “In a few minutes, all right?”

  “I’ll have a brandy,” he demanded, and sat apart from them.

  He watched her, talking, laughing, being coy, enjoying herself. He tried to catch her eye but she deliberately avoided him. She came back with a third brandy and set it on the table in front of him, and was about to move away when he grabbed her hand.

  “Let’s get away from here,” he pleaded with her.

  “I’d rather stay for a while,” she said. “Just give me a little longer.”

  “Suit yourself,” he said.