As they made ready to go, there ensued what may have been the oddest moments of the entire episode. In this relaxed mood, we found ourselves engaged in pleasant banter, which skipped through several topics – the weather, recent political events and last of all, and by way of winding things up, the football championship. All three of us were agreed that, so early in the year, it was difficult to call the championship – as things stood there were at least six teams in with a chance. I advanced a case for my own county and was listened to attentively – we had done well in the league and some promising newcomers had strengthened what was already a gifted panel; all in all I was hopeful and I thought my voice and argument sounded authoritative in the room.
My speech, however, had a curious effect on the younger man; in one moment he seemed to lapse from himself completely into a twitchy and fretful version of the smooth professional who had till now so easily commanded his role and space in the room. Bracing both hands on the back of the chair, he lowered his eyes and shook his head dubiously. While he conceded we had motored along well enough in the league – that was his phrase, motored along – and we were definitely as strong as any through the middle of the field, he doubted our ability to move up into a championship gear; he couldn’t see it happening. He dwelt critically on the fact that the first instinct of our playmaker was to take a step backward while sizing up the available options, and only then lay on thirty-yard cross-field passes onto the forward’s chest. This was well and good, the young man conceded, on heavy winter pitches, but would it translate to the quicker surfaces of summer? He wondered if the ball wouldn’t go in too slow to the forwards – a better option, he opined avidly, would be to drive the ball quickly into the open space behind the defence so that when the forward ran onto it he would be facing the goal. Furthermore, he did not think converted basketball players made good midfielders – it spoils for the other game, he said. However, he conceded, all things considered it might indeed be our year and if it was, it wouldn’t be before time, and there wouldn’t be a man or woman in the country who would begrudge us because …
He stopped as suddenly as he’d begun and seemed altogether sheepish, as if realizing this speech had been the most embarrassing sort of incontinence. Such was his sudden gloom that I thought he must surely have some investment in his argument above the merely theoretical. I saw that there was a muscular girth to him and that the span of his two hands covered the back of the chair completely; it was easy to imagine him being secure under a high ball and for more than one moment I was lost in speculation that he might be the answer to an ongoing weakness in our right corner … The effect of this outburst on his older partner was of a subtler, more drastic sort. Something like a grimace of despair crossed his face, an expression so rapidly erased I could only think that this was not the first time it had happened; evidently, the young man’s speech had disclosed something, which, while hardly fatal to their purpose, was definitely not to their credit. Once again the conviction that I beheld a single, unified being came to me, but the possibility of ever seeing one without the other now presented itself in the same degree of improbability as a square circle or a single-sided coin.
Their grace and assurance was completely gone. The young man’s speech hung in the room as a gross error. It had opened a mood of embarrassment that turned quickly to something bleaker, less forgivable. If our meeting had drawn us together into some delicate, nuanced complicity, a virtuoso construct in which each had ably played his part, now, because of the young man’s outburst, it all lay in ruins. Visibly anguished, the older man made haste to draw his younger colleague through the door; he followed awkwardly behind, knocking his briefcase against the chair and pulling the door too heavily behind him.
Alone in the room, I was surprised by the sour feeling of disappointment that took hold of me. It came as a real shock to realize that in spite of everything I had enjoyed my two visitors, most especially the arcane expertise they had brought with them. There was no denying that their silken performance had spoken to my vanity; whoever had sent them had seen fit to deploy two men who, for so long, had appeared to be at the top of their game. But the young man’s callowness had ruined that and this angered me. Moreover, it cast considerable doubt on my belief that they had come all the way from the New World; it seemed unlikely that the young man’s acute analysis, his fluent handling of a cultural idiom, had its origins anywhere other than some place close to home. Nevertheless, I felt sorry for him. Outside, out of earshot, I imagined he would be severely rebuked by his older colleague and possibly gain some sort of written reprimand; it seemed likely that whoever these people were they would surely do these things by the book.
When they had left, I sat looking at the card I held in my hand – a plain white thing, which carried nothing save a ten-digit mobile phone number. Would I ever call it? I had no immediate intention of doing so. After a while I went into the kitchen and spent several vexed minutes vainly trying to twist the tap tight enough to make it stop dripping. I crossed back into the sitting room and lay down on the sofa. After what seemed like only a short time I woke up and, after consulting my mobile phone, found I had in fact slept for five hours and that my back had twisted itself into a new and more exquisite variant of the pain I had suffered since getting out of bed.
I thought back over the morning. Of all the stored impressions I had of it, one detail in particular presented itself with vivid insistence – this alleged argument I was supposed to have had with the German woman. Nothing about it seemed improbable – if anything, it seemed all too like me; the drink, the late night, the heated debate, the tendency towards righteous homily – I have a long history of this kind of thing. And yet, for the life of me, I could not put a face to her. Who was she, what exactly had I said to her? I was anxious to get this straightened out because I had some notion that in doing so the wider events of the morning would come into clearer focus.
So I reached for the phone and called this friend of mine. Two, three times I called but his phone kept ringing out; I would have left a message but his voice mail was off. I’d call again later on. I sat for a long time on the sofa listening to the tap dripping in the kitchen and dismally resigned myself to the fact that it would have to stay that way for the time being because, having no tools or washers, there was nothing I could do about it.
And as the minutes passed, I gave myself over completely to a blunt feeling of disgust at having wasted what promised in its first hours to be a perfectly good day.
If you ever go looking for this pub, here’s where to find it. Come off the Charles Bridge into Karlova, pass the torture museum and turn right into Liliova. It’s the first of three pubs on this short street, you’ll find it behind heavy wooden shutters under a yellow Gambrinus sign. During my stint there as a regular, it played home to a crowd of hard-drinking expats, mainly British IT workers and American real estate sharks who’d been lured to the city on foot of a property boom that was just going into decline when I got there.
One afternoon I gathered up my newspaper to make space at the table for a beautiful woman in her early twenties who had materialized above me. Her height and bone structure were an immediate giveaway. Cheekbones, a former girlfriend had assured me, Slavic women have these great cheekbones. Whatever about cheekbones, six weeks’ casual observation in pubs and on the streets had convinced me that, should the need ever arise, the world could draw on this city’s standing army of lingerie models and off-duty action-movie heroines. Pulling off her coat, this particular one motioned to my copy of The Guardian.
‘You are English?’
‘No, Irish.’
She smiled keenly. ‘Sorry.’
‘It’s OK, we can start again.’
Beneath her coat she wore a scoop-necked T-shirt over a grey skirt and black tights. My gaze snagged at the top of her left breast where there appeared the scaly sheen of what I took to be scar tissue; during the next few minutes I tried not to stare at it. She stirred her coffee, tur
ned towards me and we fell to an easy and relaxed conversation. I told her my reasons for being in the city and she told me about a waitressing job and English lessons across the river in the Berlitz School. Then, without warning, she paused in mid-sentence, dipped her head into both hands and yawned hugely.
‘I’m so tired,’ she said, surfacing abruptly and shaking her head. ‘I slept badly. The phone ringing all night, my flatmate is having trouble with her boyfriend.’ She yawned again and then added dozily, ‘But at least I didn’t faint like I used to.’
I was flummoxed – phone calls and fainting – I couldn’t see the connection. Before I could say anything she went on, speaking now in the distant tones of one who was recalling some absent version of herself with more than a trace of bemusement.
‘When I was a child I used to fall down in a faint whenever I got a fright: doorbells or sudden crashes or even someone coming up behind me and tickling me … down I’d go. But I wasn’t the only one – my mother and older sister did the same thing.’ She tapped her chest with a narrow index finger. ‘It’s a heart condition, a weakness which causes it to shut down whenever its rate rises suddenly … It closes down, shuts off the blood supply to my brain and I would fall to the ground in a faint.’ She shrugged. ‘It was just a part of my childhood, something I did, something we all did, as a matter of fact. One day the phone rang in our flat and myself and my sister stood there and saw each other’s eyes roll up into our heads before we passed out. My mother, in the next room, came in and pulled the fruit bowl off the kitchen table on her way to the floor. That evening my father came home and found the three women in his life lying in a heap. Two months later he took off to a clerical job in a lignite mine in Slovakia.’ She screwed her face into a querulous frown, ‘High maintenance, you use that phrase?’
‘Yes, we use that phrase.’
‘Well that’s what we were, three high-maintenance girls.’
‘Three women,’ I blurted, ‘three women falling down in a faint …’
‘Yes, three women, you can read all about us in medical journals, we’re well known in the cardiac community. And my mother is the one with the looks, by the way, my sister and I are only so-so.’
I didn’t remember arguing the point. By now she’d emptied her cup of coffee so I called her another and a second beer.
‘It is allowed,’ I stumbled, ‘all that caffeine …?’ I motioned vaguely with my hand.
‘Yes, it’s OK.’ She touched the scar tissue above her breast. ‘In the early nineties this new technology was developed and my mother and sister were among the first to be fitted with it. It’s an electrical device, it kicks in with two hundred and fifty volts whenever your heart rate falls below a certain threshold.’
‘Like a jumpstart,’ I said.
‘Yes, like a jumpstart. I was only sixteen at the time and they didn’t know whether it would be safe to fit one for me – no one so young had had it done before. But my fainting fits were becoming more frequent and the periods of unconsciousness were getting longer and longer. They were afraid I might fall down one day and not wake up. So, shortly before my seventeenth birthday, I had this thing fitted in my chest.’
She reached over and took my hand. Hers was cool and dry, as if it had just been dipped in talc.
‘You can feel it here.’
She pressed my hand to the top of her left breast, making it yield under the firm pressure. Pressing hard on my index finger, she ran it up and down beneath the seam of her T-shirt. Something wouldn’t yield; a narrow rib, thicker than an artery but with a synthetic hardness, ran vertically from beneath her collarbone, then seemed to sink behind the mass of her breast. Feeling that synthetic hardness beneath her warm flesh, my mind was crossed with a crazy and complete thought – this is how you turn into David Cronenberg, I said to myself, my head is going to explode any moment.
‘I’m proud of my scar,’ she said, releasing my hand. ‘Four or five teenagers have gone on to have this implant. But I was the first.’
The warmth of her breast hummed on my fingertips; it took me a moment to gather my thoughts.
‘It must affect your life, there must be so many things you cannot do?’
She was now openly enjoying my astonishment; her smile broadened.
‘I have this little manual,’ she said, ‘all the things I cannot do. Cycling up hills, sprinting, swimming … it’s a long list but as yet I’ve never tripped it. My mother has, though. One day we were hurrying to catch the Metro in Malá Strana, walking quickly, not running. I was two paces ahead of her at the top of the stairs when she called out to me. When I turned around, she was sinking to her knees against the wall. Then it kicked in. Have you seen the movie Blade Runner?’
‘Yes.’
‘That scene where Harrison Ford …’
‘Deckard.’
‘Deckard, yes, that scene where Deckard hunts down the replicant and she lies dying in the rainy street, kicking her life out. That’s what it was like for my mother that day, really scary. She was thrown to the ground, kicking, trying to tear open her blouse. I stood over her trying to keep people away from her. You cannot touch her because she is …’
For the first time she faltered over a word. After a moment’s hopeless groping she gave up and held up her hands beseechingly.
‘Live?’ I said.
‘Yes, live, that’s the word, electric. She was very embarrassed but she recovered and that was the main thing.’ She fell silent for a moment and when she spoke again her voice had a different, giddier timbre to it. ‘But there is one way of tripping it that I would like to experience … if you make love very hard it trips the mechanism and all that electricity … the man is supposed to find it very pleasurable.’ She was looking me straight in the eye now and to my shame I found that I was less a man of the world than I had thought.
‘But,’ she said with a sharp giggle, ‘my boyfriend tries very hard.’
I lowered my head to let a complex wave of embarrassment and disappointment pass through me; when I looked up she was on her feet wrapping her scarf around her. I heard myself offering to pay for her coffee and I heard her thanking me. She wished me luck and, shouldering her bag, she moved off between the tables to the door.
Fifteen minutes later I stepped out into the leaden day, my head still swimming with what I’d just heard. I walked back through Liliova and turned right under the astronomical clock. Halfway across the old square I pulled up and looked around me, suddenly feeling very foolish … Of course! How could I have missed it? – this city of dolls and mechanicals, this city of robots and golems … what else would you meet but an electric woman?
As I stood there laughing I became aware of the cold and pulled my coat up around my ears. It was the middle of the afternoon, grey skies snagged in the steeples of the cathedral. The crowds drifted through the square. Three months from now this city would throng with German and Japanese tourists making its narrow streets unpassable; coming here in winter had been one of my better ideas. And turning a full three-sixty, watching all those women move smoothly over the cobbled paving in high heels and short skirts, fading into the grey light, I thought then what I now know – that if I lived to be a thousand I would never visit another city with such a company of tall, beautiful women.
Six weeks later, back home, I stood at the bottom of my garden feeding page by page a sizeable manuscript into a small fire. All curdled inspiration and nonsense, every page of it hopeless whimsy, the work of ten weeks. And as I stood there peeling off the pages and dropping them into the flames, I thought back to that young woman in the pub. And the thing that came back to me clearest of all wasn’t what she’d told me or the strangeness of what she’d told me. No, what came back to me clearest of all was the fact that one day in a strange city a beautiful woman stepped in out of the cold, in out of the blue, sat down beside me and told me a story. And when she had finished she picked up her coat and left. As simple and as graceful as that.
That’s what c
ame back to me clearest of all.
Sometimes I feel young and sometimes I feel old and sometimes I feel both at the same time. This trick of being in two minds, of weighing things on the one hand and then again on the other, has never been a problem for me. But, while I can hold two warring ideas in my head at any given moment, and even retain a clear idea of what it is I am thinking about, I am sometimes less sure of who or what it is that is doing the thinking. This weightlessness takes hold of me, this sense that somehow I am lacking essential ballast. I suspect it’s one of the gifts of my generation, a generation becalmed in adolescence, a generation with nothing in its head or its heart and with too much time on its hands.
Lately, however, I’m experiencing something new and it has taken me a while to recognize it. Obscured behind amazement and something like awe, it has taken me weeks to see it clearly as the thing it really is. When I finally did get it straight in my mind I could hardly believe it.
To the best of my knowledge I have never experienced anything like it before, nor, living the type of life I’ve done, is there any reason why I should have. Take this example, an incident with my eight-year-old son only last week …
It was, on the face of it, a simple enough disappointment involving a school trip to an open farm outside the city. Giddy with anticipation, Jamie had talked about nothing else in the days leading up to it and, when I had met his questions with memories of my own upbringing on a small farm in west Mayo, his expectations had soared; the chance to see something of his dad’s childhood promised to be a rare treat. But now the trip lay in ruins. Traffic congestion and a radio alarm clock flummoxed in the small hours by a power cut conspired to have us arrive at the school fifteen minutes after the bus had left. Now we stood in the stillness of his classroom, gazing at the neat rows of tables and seats, and I thought to myself that surely there was no place in all the world so full of absence as an empty classroom.
Forensic Songs Page 11