From where Sonia is sitting, his back looks like the hull of a sailboat. Two convex swells of muscle and bone, separated by a deep gully of spine. His legs, tensed and crouching, are immense tree trunks ending in huge trainers. His forearms swoop like lengths of turned wood, the muscles flexing as his wide hands squeeze paint out of tubes.
Despite his bulk, there’s very little fat on the Bear. A tower of strength, thinks Sonia. A pillar of the community. Not the community at large, by any stretch of the imagination, but here, inside, he’s a pillar, a tower, a myth of his own making.
He is sweating again. Probably the drugs. Maybe illness. Or it could be a problem with the heating. It’s an unspoken mantra in here, in these classes anyway: keep an open mind. Though with everyone saying how innocent they are, one’s mind can be easily unopened. It never takes long for the Bear’s tee-shirt to soak, the drops to glisten on his hedgehog hair. He wipes them away, over and over, but it’s no use. It starts again and soon he’s drenched. Drips bead his eyelashes, trickle into the corner of his mouth. He is sweating so much Sonia can taste it.
They usually start with tea, scalding hot, served in melting white corrugated plastic beakers. They sit on hard grey chairs and balance the beakers on whatever surface they can find: chair-arms, windowsills, shelves. Sonia’s chair is uncomfortable, grating against her bum. His is barely able to hold his weight.
He always brings sweets, mints or chocolates. ‘Bear’s a demon for the sweets,’ says his mate. The Bear agrees with a smile, showing in all their glory his black and missing teeth.
Once tea is served, they talk.
He spent most of the first visit quizzing Sonia. He had to check her out, be sure it was okay to spend an hour of his precious time with her. She has realised that in here, time is still precious, even though there’s lots of it, ticking away like a deathwatch beetle. He asked where she lived. She told him. ‘Alright,’ he said with a nod. ‘I grew up around there meself.’ The tension in the room lifted. Things were okay. Sonia was on the right side, for now, for as long as he wanted.
Approved.
They swapped stories. Sonia told him how the neighbourhood was changing, just like the rest of the city. Pretty paving stones, a facelift for the park, and of course, new buildings – apartments and an extension to the Centra. ‘Centra?’ said the Bear. ‘Yeah, beside the chemist.’ He shook his head. Sonia told him they were talking about pulling down the flats where he’d grown up. ‘They’ve been talking about that for years,’ he said, and laughed. Sonia joined in, hesitant, not sure if it was okay to share the joke.
He asked for more news and she told him people were getting obnoxious, in shops, on the bus, especially in banks, putting their hands out for your money before you’d even said what you wanted. And everywhere there were cars, new cars, metallic colours like rainbows fashioned from silver, copper, gold and verdigris, speeding through the city like there was no speed limit and certainly no tomorrow.
He liked that. ‘That’ll be me when I’m outta here. Speedin through the city.’
When the Bear speaks, his voice rumbles out of the depths of him. Wheezing. Almost breathless. The words seem to come from the top of his throat. A nasal drone that slides over itself, teasing the listener to make sense of it. He doesn’t pick words out one by one to make sure he’s understood, but lets them slip into each other as if they’re not that important. One evening before a visit, Sonia saw a programme about an English girl who was learning an accent, trying to fit in with the pimps in L.A. The next day she realised everyone inside speaks the same way. Making it her job to understand.
When the Bear gets excited, his drone speeds up, sending his sentences tumbling over each other. But if he senses her drifting, he jacks up the emotional intent behind what he’s saying, marks it with a staccato ‘Know-what-I-mean?’
He uses her name a lot, every second sentence, easily manufacturing intimacy. Sonia. Sonia. Sonia. The ball is always in his court. Around him, she feels like straw, insubstantial, easy to break.
At first he didn’t believe he’d be up to it; just watched, refusing to put brush to paper. On the third week he slathered black and yellow paint on a large page, creating a malevolent likeness of his cellmate, which he tore up in a rage because it was useless, didn’t look like anything. Then something snapped, a thread, a connection, and he couldn’t stop himself. Worked morning noon and night, putting off the demands of the addiction as much as he could, just to get it all out.
He is twenty-six but looks older; thirty-two, thirty-three even. He’s always looked older, he tells her. He was over six foot by the time he was eleven. Sonia imagines him at that age, huge and awkward but still growing, stooping to look smaller, terrifying other kids with his intensity. Being jeered, as you always are when you’re a kid and you’re different. That’s where his nickname came from. Imagine looking like a bear at eleven.
He got the scar when he was eight, knocked down by a bus. ‘I was a mess, Frankenstein, disgustin.’ He reckons since then he hasn’t been right in the head.
Sonia pictures him at eight, a boy lying on a trolley with his face smashed to pieces. The doctor, green-clad, bending over him. This isn’t going to hurt at all. The green mask fades into blackness. In the morning the two sides of his face are sewn together with black thread.
Not right in the head.
Later she hears a contradictory account. The scar is part of – unclear how? response to, symptom of? – a deeper underlying congenital condition, something that’s been with him since he was born.
Three weeks after their first meeting, he brings in a jar of Roses. Sonia chooses a caramel. It glues her teeth together, making it impossible to speak. The Bear, driven by the silence, begins to tell stories.
He has two sisters. One is fair, the other dark. Snow White and Rose Red. He tells Sonia that Snow White has fallen under again. Sick is the word he uses. ‘She goes in waves,’ he says and Sonia nods uselessly, still chewing.
Fighting it, giving way, fighting it, drowning.
‘She was doin good,’ he says. Snow White’s clever, apparently. A reader, a dreamer. Not like him, who never had the patience for school. She knows there’s a different way but the habit makes it hard to stay straight. Last year she got into trouble and received a warning. After that she stayed clean for months. And did well. ‘They held her up as a, yeah, example.’ He stops speaking and his dark uneven eyes go absent, inwards, thinking.
Silence bristles round him. Shame crouches on his back and shoulders, breathing heat into his ear. The air is so loaded that even if Sonia could speak, she wouldn’t.
He exhales and, as if the smoke leaving his lungs was a signal, looks up. A blue S weaves up between his face and Sonia’s. ‘She met a fella none of us liked,’ he says. As if that was enough.
Sonia wonders what happened between Snow White and her fella. Abandonment, abortion, pimping, worse? A rival gang, turf war? Money? Whatever it was, it made her go under again. And the Bear is angry at his sister for falling. When he gets up to go that day, he leaves his anger behind him in the cell like his animal namesake, big, black and savage.
He is fascinated by technique, with the very act of painting. It’s magic, shamanic, how he conjures light and dark, heaven and hell, African witchdoctor and Herne the Hunter from the cheap acrylic shit they buy for the men. He daubs the paint on with shouts of the brush, using the force of his whole body. He is obsessed with pattern – dots, slashes, faces, faces – but every recurring element is different, every painting a new take. His feelings seep out from the edges like water from a sore. Hurt, anger, love, sex, death, addiction, sickness, hate, fire, silence.
He sweats so much it makes Sonia want to lean over and wipe his face.
She looks at the column of neck leading into his scarred, mysterious skull and wonders how much the paintings on paper match up to the ones he sees in his head.
He lunges in, paints a series of white dots. Bambambambambam! Suddenly on the muddy col
our he has fashioned an aboriginal songpainting, a portrait of an Arab, face half in sunlight, half in dark, a red turban on his head, a fat cruel mouth, slanted cheekbones. The face reminds Sonia of something she saw once, or something she read. A man with a knife on a beach. A Clash song.
He doesn’t look up at her when he’s working, like a kid would, like she expected him to, needing assurance. He knows what he’s doing.
The week after the Roses, he shows Sonia pictures of his family. He puts them up on the windowsill, propped up by sizzling beakers of tea, so she can compare and contrast. Snow White is lovely. A blonde fairytale princess with a winning smile, long plaits and slender arms the colour of freckled milk. She bears no resemblance to the Bear. Aware of this, he laughs his breathless laugh, showing the gaps in his crooked mouth. ‘Beauty and the Beast, hah?’
Ah, Beauty, poisoned by the witch’s needle.
Rose Red is different again. Both she and his mam look like Galway matriarchs with their wide strong faces, dancing dark eyes, tough black hair, bundles of children. Echoes of their features stir in the Bear’s ruined face.
Rose works in the local community centre on a scheme for addicts. ‘She’s good,’ he assures Sonia. Sonia nods. From the photos, Rose looks as if she’d be good.
‘She knows them all from the old days,’ he says, meaning the addicts. ‘She doesn’t treat them like they’re different. But she’s no fool either.’
Sonia imagines the old days, Rose and them all, the nameless addicts: dancing at discos, smoking on street corners, drinking, flirting, mitching off school. Further back, playing childhood games on the worn grass beside the canal, the concrete courtyard at the mouth of the flats.
Sonia notices something missing when the Bear talks about Rose Red. He admires her sure, but there’s still something missing. A light not in his eyes.
His little brother is gorgeous, a small boy version of Snow White. Neat gleaming hair, shining eyes, Ireland football jersey. A live wire, says the Bear. He visits as regularly as he can. He worships you, thinks Sonia. And why not? After all, the Bear is a legend, a demon or an avenging angel, depending on your perspective and the papers you read. The Bear seems to think his brother will be alright. He’s quick at school, very brainy. His mam makes sure he does his homework. He wants to be a scientist. They look at the photo. Sonia hopes to god he gets what he wants.
Every time Sonia visits the Bear she comes home with his voice in her head. Cathexis. A Greek word. It usually happens to lovers, but a student can get it with a good teacher. You absorb the other person into you, like a language. Only time gets rid of the trace.
When she got home that evening, the day he’d shown her his family album, she lay along the banjaxed comfort of her landlord’s sofa and watched traffic headlights chase shadows across the ceiling. She wondered why the Bear felt the way he did about Rose Red. Why there was something missing. Maybe he was afraid of her. She was older than him, and that made Sonia think of her own brother, her sisterly self. Older sisters can play awful games with their younger brothers. Petting, then tormenting them. Bullying, then making up. Racing with them, then stopping at that age when he’s started to outgrow her, when it looks like they’ll lose, saying the race was just a joke, leaving the boy outraged, at the finishing line, screaming for justice.
Old sisters tell tales. They manipulate and, usurping the place of parents, use approval as currency, handing out praise and blame like sweets. Sonia gave her brother poison once. Drink this, she said. It’s lemonade. He raised the bottle. Mum, mum, screamed Sonia. Declan’s drinking turpentine. And lunged for the bottle, grabbing it just in time to be seen. Watch me, how marvellous I am.
Maybe, she thought now, the Bear felt Rose Red was ashamed of him, the way he was ashamed of Snow White. Maybe she’d said things to him, disowned him, set her children against him. Maybe one of her boyfriends knew someone in the guards.
Maybe it’s just that Snow White gives the Bear someone to look after, for a change, and that’s what puts the light in his eyes.
It’s not just his size that makes him look older. Apart from everything – the crazy innocence that clings to him despite what he’s done, the infectious enthusiasm, the childlike eagerness to say it all, now, before someone stops him – there is something ancient in him that goes beyond his size. Sonia read somewhere that humans have an alligator brain in the back of their heads. She wonders if that’s where he gets it.
Tinny music. Yellow walls.
He is working on a red painting. Afterwards, when Sonia has left the place, she will realise it’s her favourite.
There’s a figure at its centre. God-devil-demon, call it what you will. Snakes writhe upwards from the shoulders. At the crotch is a huge phallus, pointing downwards. The Bear calls this his warhead. It looks like it’s strapped on. The testicles are large and red, with black spikes coming out of them. Landmines. All down the god’s arms are heads. He is like an Inca headhunter showing off his victims, his samples, tourists who wandered into the wrong place at the wrong time. According to the Bear, some of the heads are good, others aren’t.
Does he have as many heads in his own head, she wonders. Does he have as many voices in there as heads on the arms of his terrible god?
He tried to lift Sonia up one of the last days she came to visit, an apology for an insult he didn’t mean to make, and in his arms she was a gnat.
In those last weeks the elastic that had snapped earlier, allowing him to paint, snapped right back again. Perhaps it was inevitable, the pressure of the outside world. Appeals and cases, rights and visits, a whole load of other things Sonia never fully understood. He stopped working at night, didn’t turn up for class, made excuse after excuse. Sickness, flu, exhaustion, no ideas. Sonia missed his company, his humour, his seething rage, his vivacity. She even missed the tea. Then summer came and it was time for her to leave. She never returned. The institution had got into her soul, like Charles Lamb’s wooden desk. She’s always thought it’s better to leave things before they die on you.
She would think about the Bear from time to time and wonder if he’d kept at it. She heard he was working for a while with a girl from Germany who was a bit more adventurous, into political art. Some years ago she’d got children in Bosnia to fly white balloons over Sarajevo. Sarajevo is in a bowl of mountains, so the balloons hovered there for weeks, cloaking the beleaguered city with a thousand statements of intent, supplications for peace and hope. There was an odd match, but right somehow, between all those balloons and the Bear’s white dots.
Time passed. Sonia missed the feeling of his voice inside her.
One evening, she strayed off her path and went into the flatlands down from the canal, passing the blocks where the Bear grew up. Kids were playing, shouting like they always do, so loud their voices were bouncing off the concrete walls. Sonia saw a flash of green, and wondered if that was the Bear’s little brother, radiant in his Ireland jersey. Then she went to sit by the canal, looking at the dirty white swans. The kids’ voices rose behind her. She imagined the Bear, a big handsome boy in the days before he grew monstrous, playing football with his pals. Rose Red, her black hair in ringlets, bossing everyone. Snow White seated on the edge of the grey grass, her long legs crossed at the ankles, reading a comic, dreaming of the future.
Nice images, she will think later. Romantic, almost. Redemptive. Sympathetic. Palatable, even.
From images like that you could curate your own show. And near the exit door, have a film sequence. A loop, endlessly recursive, showing an empty yard in front of a block of flats, the echo of children’s voices banging off its walls. You could have your audience walk out of the show with the echo still playing, following them into their coffee shops, cars, bedrooms. In your artistic statement, you might talk about your intention: how, each time the audience thinks about flats like that, you hope to implant them with the sound of children’s voices. In this way they – the flats and the voices – become woven into your audience, an ex
tension of the Bear’s cathexis; an incorporation of his world and his history into a collective psyche. It’s a portrait of yourself, of course: the artist, still thinking about those voices. Hearing them every time you pass that site, long after you move to a different part of the city, or country, or world, long after the flats are pulled down – as will happen, of course, in spite of the disbelieving laugh the Bear shared with you on your first visit. They’ll be there, resonating in the cold cheap corners of the new builds, enduring, like the apocryphal blood and bones buried under concrete foundations in South American cities, pouring into the space where the Bear and his like used to live.
And that’s a decent enough ending for a show, in some ways. But it’s not correct.
So, how about this:
Three years after leaving, Sonia is on her way to an opening in Cork with a friend of hers, a colleague a few years older. The new motorway bypass hasn’t been built yet, so their drive takes them past the institution, whose barbed wire towers they can see clearly from the dual carriageway.
Hiya lads, says Sonia, nodding in the direction of the towers.
Oh? says the colleague, and Sonia starts telling her stories of inside. She names the Bear.
No, the colleague says. I don’t believe it. And then she tells a story that leaves Sonia’s in the ha’penny place, about the time she, this colleague, was mugged by the Bear, and got her skull cracked, and how, in a weird, perverse way, she’s always felt grateful to him, because that experience changed her life. Forced her to make personal and creative choices, become an artist, do things the pre-mugged version of her never could.
This also is a decentish ending, and it would be nice to leave it there. But again: not correct.
Ten years pass. Sonia is working in a different institution, where people are no longer using and trying their damnedest to keep it that way. Over tea-break, that sweet, scalding tea, those sugary treats, those cigarettes, someone asks her where she’s living. She tells them. The Bear’s name comes up – he’s a legend of his own making, after all – and she mentions having worked with him. The usual sighs, head shakings, stories.
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