Praise for Mia Gallagher
HellFire
‘Takes screwed-up and scuzzy into hitherto uncharted territory… Gallagher depicts a culture in despair and a society in irreversible meltdown with tremendous compassion and energy… Remarkably done; as is the unexpectedly weighted power and beauty of the imagery… The vernacular rhythm is perfect… An extraordinary ambition; a grand achievement, too.’
– The Guardian
‘Mia Gallagher’s coruscating debut novel is not simply an Irish Trainspotting, though there are echoes of early Irvine Welsh in the energetic joy of her language. Instead HellFire is a powerful revenge tragedy, a glorious depiction of Dublin in all her dirty glory, and an unusual love story… There have been few better debuts in the last year.’
– The Observer
‘A work with a strong social conscience, forcing the reader to face up to the blindspots of Celtic Tiger Ireland… Gritty realism interjected with poetic surrealism is not an easy stylistic feat. However this is something that HellFire does effortlessly… unique and innovative… takes the reader on an exhilarating narrative and stylistic journey.’
– The Irish Times
‘I am reminded of Laurence Sterne’s Tristam Shandy… a magnificent achievement, bursting with energy, full of wonderful creations and telling a compelling, if unorthodox, love story. It is a novel of Dublin to rank with James Plunkett’s Strumpet City.’
– Irish Examiner
‘Magic, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll… the darker, grungier, flipside to Harry Potter, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, and all the other witches and wizards currently casting spells over willing readers.’
– The Independent (UK)
‘Brilliant… easily compared to Irvine Welsh with its energy and raw, compelling narrative. You find yourself hearing Lucy in your head, telling you her shocking story and you find yourself staying up all night to be with her.’
– Sunday Independent
‘Perfectly describes modern Ireland… a striking talent for storytelling and a subtly enchanting narrator… HellFire has the kind of episodic character that gives endless classics their power, the element of stories within stories… Mia Gallagher [is] worth getting excited about; something special, something different, something completely new, readable, talented and relevant.’
– Sunday Tribune
‘Vividly and descriptively honest… striking, inventive but also raw-edged and authentic… a power-buster of a novel, rich in character and language.’
– The Edmonton Journal
‘A novel as topographically significant as Ulysses… Because of the author’s sheer ability with words and an abundance of characters that would have been the envy of Dickens, one reads on – perhaps white-knuckled!’
– Verbal Arts Magazine, Belfast Telegraph
‘Powerfully told.’ … ‘Brilliant narrative skill and lightness of touch.’
– Financial Times
‘A powerful and brilliant book.’
– RTE Guide
‘Gallagher has a fine gift for storytelling, backed up by rolling, rollicking dialogue worthy of Angela Carter… an engrossing read.’ … ‘Unmissable’
– Image Magazine
‘Thrillingly unputdownable… myriad vivid images… Mia is the real deal, one history will remember.’
– The Irish Times (2015)
Beautiful Pictures of the Lost Homeland
‘I adored this thrillingly ambitious novel, which is intriguing, strange, yet seductive, too, in such clever and nuanced ways. A sheer pleasure to read.’
– Joseph O’Connor
‘A pitch-perfect rendering of Dublin today and yesterday, a devastating portrait of a family in grief, and a haunting account of the past’s pull on the present. As thrilling and inventive, as it is moving and profound. A major achievement.’
– Paul Murray
‘There is so much to say about this novel. It is sprawling, but not sloppy; messy, but not a mess. There will be as many readings of it as there are readers. Beautiful Pictures of the Lost Homeland is challenging, it is brave, it is original, it is flawed, it is moving, it is fascinating. It is art.’
– The Guardian
‘Rich in colour and broad in scope, and its many unruly pieces are similarly held in place by the strong voice of a central character… Gallagher’s writing is brilliant…Though somewhat baffling on the surface, Beautiful Pictures… is strangely coherent up close, like a magic-eye picture… a writer who doesn’t miss, or forget, a trick.’
– Sara Baume, The Irish Times
‘The whole sticky mess of humanity and inhumanity is here… a massively ambitious novel… it’s hard to better.’ … ‘Nothing came near Mia Gallagher’s Beautiful Pictures of the Lost Homeland for bravery and ambition this year. A skilful and fearless exploration of place, time and identity – it grapples the big themes to its heart. This is the Irish novel whose reputation will grow in the coming years. A new generation of Irish writers may well take their lead from it.’
– Sunday Independent
‘It would have been easy for Gallagher to turn Geo’s story into a blockbuster bestseller about transgendered identity. However, Beautiful Pictures is more interested in the binaries and doubleness of personal identity; the many lives we all live that produce the fleeting present moment… Comparisons with Joyce are inevitable… a gripping page-turner.’
– Sara Keating, Sunday Business Post
‘Mia Gallagher’s remarkable Beautiful Pictures of the Lost Homeland offers a flavour of past and potential lives. The story, which ostensibly centres on a transgendered film editor, takes the form of a montage, splicing together narratives from different periods to create a complex story about the binaries and doubleness of identity.’
– The Irish Times
‘Gallagher has left us with a fearless and defiant book. Generous, reckless, revealing and baffling, you come away from it with renewed faith in what the novel can achieve.’
– Mike McCormack, The Irish Times
‘Gallagher, I believe, with Beautiful Pictures of the Lost Homeland, has achieved some kind of formal evolution of the novel.’
– Oisín Fagan, The Irish Times
‘Beautiful Pictures is no conventional door-stopper – it’s more of a portal-stopper; it’s no airport novel, it’s more a rocket launch pad novel! Everything about this book is surprising… it’s exciting and epic.’
– Rosemary Jenkinson, The Irish Times
‘A voluminous book, sprawling and… absorbing, digressive and endlessly surprising… its rendering is incredibly vivid… her characters are isolated and enigmatic souls… shown with a delicate intimacy.’
– Dublin Review of Books
‘A tightly wound story, intricately imagined and expertly told.’
– Books Ireland
‘Every page… is stuffed with prose of simple elegance that also displays human insight with brave, verging on cruel, description. Every permutation of family relationships is covered… We are all but individuals who each bear a certain private self we shall never reveal, for truth exposes us to more hurt than we can bear.’
– Writing.ie
Shift
Shift
Mia Gallagher
SHIFT
First published in 2018 by
New Island Books
16 Priory Hall Office Park
Stillorgan
County Dublin
Republic of Ireland
www.newisland.ie
Copyright © Mia Gallagher, 2018
The moral right of Mia Gallagher to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright and Related Rights Act, 2000.
Print ISBN: 978-1-84840-669-8
Epub ISBN: 978-
1-84840-670-4
Mobi ISBN: 978-1-84840-671-1
All rights reserved. The material in this publication is protected by copyright law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be reproduced (including by storage in a retrieval system) or transmitted in any form or by any means; adapted; rented or lent without the written permission of the copyright owner.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
New Island received financial assistance from The Arts Council (An Chomhairle Ealaíon), 70 Merrion Square, Dublin 2, Ireland.
New Island Books is a member of Publishing Ireland.
For my mother
Miriam,
in memoriam
Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, hélas, I may no more.
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them that farthest cometh behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,
Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I may spend his time in vain.
And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written, her fair neck round about:
‘Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.’
Thomas Wyatt, from the Italian of Petrarch
Contents
More Often in Future
Polyfilla
Found Wanting
Christopher de la Rosa
Hello My Angel
Shift
Departure
You First
Lure
Headhunter
Pinning Tail on Donkey
All Bones
Trust in Me
The Lady, Vanishing
With Soldiers, in a Cup
More Often in Future
She’d always been haunted. A devil on her shoulder, an infant demon with invisibly black eyes and breath like a blown-out match. Hey, it said, and whispered cold things in her ears.
Her name was Beatrice, but, weirdly, she was called Trish, not Bea, for short. Noelle, like everyone else, never queried that, not until it didn’t matter anymore. She lived in a block of flats, in a part of town that as a kid Noelle only knew from sensational evening news stories and the number thirteen bus timetable. ANOTHER TRAGEDY JUMP. 65p, please. COT DEATH HORROR IN TOWER BLOCKS. You’re not going to the terminus then, love? MOTHER OF TWO FOUND IN KITCHEN. No, I’m not thanks.
Noelle lived at the other end of the bus route. Her terminus had its own nightmares, a church where monsters prowled under the palm trees every Sunday and shook wagging fingers from the pulpit.
Noelle had had a thing for Trish’s brother, once upon a time. She hadn’t realised he was Trish’s brother when she’d decided she had the thing for him. She knew Trish from school, though only vaguely, by sight and reputation. The closest they’d got to each other had been an audition for a school play, but they’d never spoken to each other. She’d got to know the brother through the other school, the Saturday morning drama workshop, with its colourful, clever, insecure members, quickfire slagging and no-holds-barred dancing at age-inappropriate nightclubs and end of show house parties.
In school, Trish was beautiful with her black hair and bright round blue eyes, her slim legs and shapely ass. Noelle, short, mousy and pear-shaped, envied her.
They were in different years, so Noelle had no idea how good Trish was, academically speaking. She knew she was bright. In those days, you could see her from yards away, radiant with her own knowledge. She went to university after school, with a grant. She was bright alright. And, thinking this, Noelle hears the lunch bell again. No sweet chimes; a long jarring scream.
Trish belonged to the elite. Dressed well, smoked, made fun of the teachers. She had it all. Christ, Noelle envied her.
She is washing her hair in cold water, gasping at the shock. What is she doing? you might wonder. Why cold water? Perhaps she’s trying to wash her brain, and only cold water will do the trick, blast it back into something like normal. Perhaps she’s trying to freeze it, too-fast brain, solid.
Stop. She can’t afford a back boiler. Simple.
Her nails are bitten. Her fingers are longish. Her hands, like most of the rest of her, are thin and knobbly. The bitten nails dig into her scalp. Shampoo suds coat her forehead. The cold water makes the soap run instead of foam, so it drips into her eyes, stinging. She squeezes them shut and rubs off the suds, using the back of one thin, knobbly hand. Then opens her eyes again, careful, and eye by eye, picks the lather from the corners. The whites are bloodshot. She looks as if she’s been crying. She takes a breath, plunges her head under the tap and rinses.
Noelle didn’t see much of Trish during those long teenage years she was obsessed with the brother. Trish left the school just after Noelle joined the drama workshop, and they hadn’t known each other, so there was no reason to stay in touch. The brother did mention he had a sister who used go to Noelle’s school, but even though she knew their surnames, Noelle didn’t put them together. She’s always been a bit thick that way. So she never realised, those nights of sweating and dancing and hoping for a smile or even just a look from him, that this sister was Trish. Finding out felt huge. Like she’d discovered a new twig on her own family tree. Beatrice, he said, as they sat together without touching in the dark musky corner of a party, and the penny dropped, clunk.
Trish? Really? Isn’t the world a small place? And so on.
How exciting. To find a legitimate chance to approach him, pretend they had something real in common besides their horny teenage bodies and their shared religion.
At fourteen, after ditching God the Father, Jesus and The Ghost, Noelle had needed a new idol. The path led her to a lodestar from the world of music. Was He rock, was He pop, was He other, was He art? He was David, and He was Divine. She wore His many faces on badges pinned onto an old waistcoat. The brother, she discovered, loved Him too. They discussed His new singles, His old albums, His intriguingly unclear future. One New Year’s Eve they danced to the slow voice wilding as the wind, and snow fell outside, and it’s true, she would rarely feel as happy as that again. After the dance, the brother took another girl’s hand and Noelle drank and talked to others and fell asleep, and that was that New Year over.
He was thin, the brother, like Trish. Green eyes with a bit of a glint in them. He knew Noelle wanted him and he played her like she was a reliable but not very swanky guitar. He was popular in their world. Charming. And charmed, others scrambled into his circle. Eager puppies. He made enemies, or what they, with their naïve teenage hyperbole, thought were enemies. He would get restless, and play one friend against another, slipping through their cat’s cradle allegiances unharmed, like mercury. Later Noelle would think he was a bit sick, because people who aren’t sick don’t do things like that. She imagined his mind a filing cabinet, with folders on those he knew, red-stamp Xs or tick-marks identifying who should be cultivated and who pruned away.
Oh, she was like the rest of them. She grovelled.
He’s gone now. Somewhere worthy and interesting. Gone, with his guitar.
Occasionally, in the last year or so, he would flash across her mind, and she’d see him in a hot country, some place south of the equator. Trekking down a dusty road glaring orange in winter sunlight, hiking towards the horizon until he was lost against a backdrop of arsenic-green mountains. She would think, at those times, it would be nice to hear from him, even though they never knew each other that well. It would be fun, perhaps, to send him a postcard to make him think of her. Then she’d wrap her arms around her lover’s sweaty shoulders and moan as he came inside her. She would feel a little sad at those times.
The first devil appeared during a school play, the
one they’d auditioned for, a rural drama set in a famine cottage on a bog. She, Trish, got the lead. She was to be possessed. Back then, Noelle thought she wanted to be an actress. She yearned for Trish’s part. Instead she was cast as a nun. The nun only appeared in the last scene so Noelle wasn’t needed at rehearsals for ages. Word came back that Trish was good. Until the day she came into a rehearsal with scratches on her arms and neck. She claimed a spirit had done it. She’d gone to bed, usual time, nothing strange, and woke up covered in scratches. That was all, according to the people who’d been in the rehearsal room. She didn’t talk about voices or spectral commands that sounded like radio interference crackling in her ears or a devil straddling her on her bed. Her evidence was admirably tangible. Another older, equally pretty, girl got the part. Noelle still played the nun.
The year after that, Trish left school and by then Noelle had met the brother.
Noelle grew out of wanting to be an actress. She told herself it was because of the magazines, body image, fuckability factor, all that, and Christ, isn’t there enough pressure to be performing, all the time, in real life? She would be the first to say she wasn’t good enough.
She sits in front of her window, looking down at the strip of green separating the concrete stretches below. The lights in the supermarket are offering Christmas bargains at slashed prices. She wears a towel around her shoulders like a poncho. Her wet hair lies on the towel, soaking through. Cold. She notices, she forgets. She smiles and the smoke from her fag curls into question marks over her head. She narrows her eyes, and forgets.
The long stick of white ash drips onto the floor. The electric bulb flickers. It’s nearly dead. There are pots on the cooker. One is filled with some yellow muck that once lived in a soup tin. A pan of sliced batch waits in the cupboard. She could be hungry but she doesn’t care. The hair near her scalp is drying a little. She is going out tonight.
She is going out tonight; she’s no longer sure where. She forgets. She could be meeting a friend, or maybe someone closer. She won’t be meeting the brother. He’s gone. Her foot is blue-veined and purplish with the cold. Her toenails are a chipped orange. Her eyes are foggy. Remember, forget.
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