by Donal Ryan
I wasn’t practised at being in love. I tried to make her leave her job; I hated thinking of her serving anyone but me, of other men giving her glad eyes, pressing their sweaty gratuities into her hand, groping her, inhaling her, pitching their low-voiced proposals, of the chefs or the waiters or the greasy manager ogling her, of people looking at her on the street. I wanted her on my couch in my flat, in front of the fire, dressed only in the glow of it, waiting for me. I tried to tell her how it was for me, how I was under tremendous pressure, to be successful, to make money, to be certain things; I told her I could keep her for as long as she wanted me to. Keep me? she said. What does that mean? Own me? And I said, No, no, just do things for you to make your life easier, arrange a flat for you in a nice part of town, I could give you money for yourself, a regular amount, for spending, you’d have no rent to pay, buy you nice things. You could live here with me in this flat. I could be here most nights. Jesus, she said, I didn’t really believe men like you existed. I thought men like you were made up. And I wasn’t sure if she meant this in a good or a bad way.
I started to sit in my car down the quay from the house she lived in, a Georgian red-brick broken into bedsits, to see if she left for work alone and came home alone, to see if I could catch her in a lie. And after a week or so of this I saw her holding hands with a gangly tanned youth wearing skin-tight black jeans and white trainers and a white T-shirt, and he was roped with muscle and he was cocksure of himself, and I gripped the steering wheel so tight my fingernails dug into the leather of it and left little dents there, and I heard a sound escaping me, a whiny breathless sound, and I felt the sting of tears in my eyes for the first time since I could remember, since my dear brother’s funeral, I’d say, and I a middle-aged man with an accountancy practice and a consultancy firm and a cash fortune and a property portfolio and a new Jaguar and a solid wife and solider daughters, and I found myself opening the door of my Jaguar and stepping out onto the footpath and standing with my hand on the top of the stone wall of the quay, listening to the whispering river, and the sound it made was you fool, you fool, you fool.
And I found myself at her door, and I found myself banging on it, and it was opened by the foreign-looking youth, and he was scratching himself, staring at me. Who the fuck are you? I said. Who the fuck am I? he said, in a Spanish accent, or Portuguese. Is more like who the fuck are you? And she was behind him suddenly, and she looked angry, and she was wearing a long T-shirt with Bon Jovi written on it and a picture on it of a man with long hair and she was saying, It’s okay, Javier, it’s my boyfriend, and she widened her eyes at him as if to say, say nothing, and Javier turned his face to me and he curled his lip into a sneer, and he looked me up and down and said, He is a boy? And he was laughing as he rearranged his private parts behind his blue Y-fronts, and suddenly I was through the door and swinging and Javier was moving backwards and he was grinning still and he had a good reach and a lightning swing and he caught me hard on the temple and in the stomach, and I was winded and I was on the back foot suddenly and I was falling and she was shouting, Jesus Christ, Javier, stop, just fucking stop, John, just leave me the fuck alone, and she pushed me out the door and slammed it in my face. And I stood there crying like a child awhile, and I drove home to my flat and my warm embers and I wondered at the things I hadn’t known, the parts of myself I hadn’t charted, my reckless, recondite nature. And that was all my dealings with adultery done.
Thou shalt not kill, it says in the Bible, the tendentious translation authorized by a man who let his own mother be killed so that he could be king. A man who thought himself divinely appointed. Kill is far too wide a word. Lo tirzah, God said at Sinai. Thou shalt not murder. I knew a man with LOVE on the knuckles of one hand and HATE on the knuckles of the other, and a series of dots along his wrists enumerating his convictions. I knew a man who knew this man, and I met the second man one evening on the street outside the cobbler’s shop and the shop was locked and shuttered up and the narrow street door to my apartment was open and I had a stack of briquettes and a bag of coal and a bag or two of blocks arranged in the tiny foyer at the foot of the stairs because I was always cold that winter: I couldn’t seem to warm myself or my empty flat, I couldn’t seem to get back to myself at all. I gave the man who knew the man with the tattooed knuckles an envelope full of notes, a consideration for a favour I was asking of his friend, to pay a visit to a young Iberian and knock some small portion of the wind from his sails.
And I had a dream that night that I remember to this day, as though it were a thing that really happened, and happened only yesterday. In the dream I was walking past Youghalarra graveyard and down the hill towards the quay. In contrast with the glinting lake, there’s a kind of darkness from the land down there, no matter how sunny the day. The sky may be clear and bright, yet a gloom will rise from the thick ditches and the dank brown reeds of the foreshore. Hulking evergreens line the road down to the quay and ring the sunless fields. It’s as though the land absorbs and suffocates the light, while the water gives it life.
I stopped along the road at the gate of a house, a long bungalow, and there were people in the garden, drinking and eating; there was music being played but I couldn’t see the musicians. A woman turned to me and she had sorrow in her eyes, and she said, A child is after going missing, a little boy, a child of this house. I looked away from her and saw that all of the guests from the party were darting about the roadway and the quay, shouting his name, peering into the water, searching the reeds and the undergrowth around the willows and the diving board, running over the rocks and along the sides of the crumbling boathouse. I walked up the lane that borders the foreshore, away from the road and the quay and the frantic crowd, along the forbidden route we always took as children. I came in sight of the little pebble beach known only to a daring few that lies at the end of a gently sloping bank, almost fully hidden from view by a copse of ash trees. A sandbar forms a soft track, ankle-deep in the water of that bay within a bay, that’s warm and pleasant on the soles and can lead the unwary outwards from the shallows towards open water. Only a short way from the shore the going becomes treacherous: the lakebed drops suddenly in places and the sands shift with sly currents and unseen eddies. Forests of reeds invite young explorers. Weeds like nests of vipers lie in wait in hidden hollows. And there I saw the child. He’d paddled out about twenty yards and must have slipped from the sandbar into deeper water and become tangled. His head was barely breaking the surface, bobbing desperately as he tried to free himself from the weeds’ grip. I could just make out his eyes, wide with terror, as small waves lapped against his face. I could hear him splutter and choke; he was starting to inhale water. He hadn’t breath enough to call out, though he must have heard his mother and father and all the others shouting his name just around the bend of the lakeshore. He was using one hand to keep himself up as best he could with a wild, flailing, outward stroke. He must have been reaching downwards with his other hand to the vicious tangle around his legs. I judged that he had a bare minute left of life, if even that. His arm would soon cede to exhaustion; those deadly little waves, mostly of his own making, would soon find ingress and swamp his lungs.
I stood tight in my dream to the cool trunk of an ancient ash tree, unseen in the dappling shadows of the muddy bank. I watched a mayfly light on a leaf to rest for a few seconds of his one eternal day. I wondered at the mayfly’s sudden stillness, while the sounds of sobs and splashes faded from my mind. When it flew away, back towards the canopy of the looming trees, I stood squinting from the shade against the dancing shards of light on the water’s surface, and, seeing that I could no longer see any part of him, ran from my hiding place, splashing wildly through the shallows, falling, rising, roaring, and the voices still were shouting out his name, and some of them were shouting Edward, and some of them were shouting Javier, and some of them were shouting John. I grabbed the glass-eyed boy, tearing the weeds from his legs as I lifted, and held him to my chest. His head flopped bac
k, his limbs hung limp. His lips were blue, his face white; a thin river of lake water ran from the side of his open mouth. A bare crescent of pupil broke the whiteness of his eyes. I laid him on a soft bed of dead reeds on the foreshore and put my mouth over his; three breaths, thirty compressions of his chest, over and over, counting and crying, trying to force the foul water from him and make his heart beat again, to force the life back into him, to take back what I’d done. But time has only one direction, and I’d filled those blank moments after I first found him with nothing but the watching of the stillness of a mayfly. He wasn’t moving, and would never move again, and whatever unsullied bit had been left on my soul was gone to black and the gates of Hell were flung open to me now in welcome. And I woke drenched and gasping, face-down on my double bed, and I knew before I heard the news the terrible thing that I had done.
I had to go to Brussels a few weeks later. We flew into violent air. Something in the plane’s mechanical or electrical parts stopped working. The cabin lost pressure; oxygen masks popped out and hung in front of people’s faces like yellow gibbets. The plane lurched up and down, and then started to descend at a lunatic angle. People were clutching each other and crying. Some were praying out loud. A baby screamed, squeezed too tightly by its white-faced mother. The pilot’s crackling instructions were ignored, drowned by panic and a rising whine from the stressed turboprops. I sat still, watching the mask dancing before my eyes. I think I was smiling. There was a man across the aisle, the one age with me, the same kind of a go as me, you might say. We’d nodded at one another on boarding. I looked across at him as the rushing air outside shrieked over the plane’s canted wings and the overhead compartments gaped open in unison and vomited coats, bags, bottles and boxes of fags all over passengers and the empty aisle. He was smiling too. And he said, in a soft, clear voice that I could easily hear in spite of the hysteria all around us: There’ll be no pain, you know. If we go down, we’ll just evaporate. Evaporate. He looked away from me again and put his right arm out to soothe a person I couldn’t see in the window seat beside him.
And I felt calm and looked forward to being atomized, released into vapour. The pilot pulled the sick bird up and landed it for a finish, with a terrific whump into the tarmac. Whatever had been knocked off by the turbulence had restarted just in time. There were some eardrums burst from the sudden drop, ribs broken from the hard landing, a few lacerations from flying duty-free, and a scattering of meely-mawlies in need of handholding and bottled oxygen from the shock of it all. Paramedics picked their way along the strewn aisle, checking and tending, before anyone was allowed to stir from their sodden seats. Fire trucks and ambulances were massed, circling slowly below us in frustrated redundancy, each like a pugilist at a cancelled bout, shadow-boxing in an empty ring. That man didn’t speak to me again, but he looked at me with an expression I couldn’t read just before we were evacuated. He had the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen.
The captain stood by the bulkhead near the top of the exit steps, dutiful and awkward. He looked too young to be in command of anything, let alone a planeload of lives. Women were hugging him before they disembarked, crying with joy, high and sick with relief. Pale men took his hand in both of theirs while he stood straight, flanked by two tousled beauties, smiling, apologetic, embarrassed. I looked back but I couldn’t see the man who’d spoken to me. I wondered had I imagined him. I wonder that still. I walked out past the pilot without acknowledging him. People felt they’d cheated death that day. It was the other way round for me.
O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins, because I dread the loss of Heaven, and the pains of Hell, but most of all because they offend Thee, my God, Who are all good and deserving of all my love.
Lake Islands
FROM ASHDOWN VILLAS to the foot of Stoney’s Hill is a short walk, along the drive he lives on to the corner, then a sharp turn down along the backs of the houses and through the rough gap behind Ad Foyle’s house. Dixie does it most days, bar it’s raining hard. A soft mist is grand but anything heavier and he stays indoors or goes out to his shed. He always slows at the corner to squint down the walkway at the backs of the houses to see if Ad Foyle is hanging out over his back gate, gawking at the hill and the passers-by. He torments people there daily, and they out for a peaceful constitutional, making them feel they have to salute the cunt and talk to him about the weather. Soft day, soft day, ya grand, go on away. They weren’t on the best of terms since Dixie’d been a bit too enthusiastic in greeting him below in Ciss Brien’s one night. Ha-hah thee faith, look who tis, he’d said, as Ad had opened the door and stuck his long neck in. Here’s me face me arse is coming. Ad Foyle, Ad Foyle, Ad Foyle the Paedophile. And straight away he’d known he’d gone too far. It had only come to him in the same second he’d thought of it. He was on the second Ad Foyle, and his brain was flying through options for a rhyme, and it lit on that, and it was a sorry thing some days to have a brain that was lightning fast and a mouth that matched it. Anyway. It was said then and Ad pulled up to a standstill halfway across the floor to the bar and his face was white and his eyes were bulging and it was one of those nights when the place was full but it was quiet, there was no match on or anything being argued about, and every fucker was only waiting for him to say something, as usual, or dredge up a yarn from somewhere, and poor Ad had stepped right into the spotlight and the whole place was skitting behind their hands and letting on to be not laughing at all and Mickey Briars didn’t give a fuck, he was roaring laughing, knowing there was a flame after being lit that he could stoke and stoke, and Ad was taking it badly. There was shapes thrown. Dixie had had to hold his hands up and then hold his hand out, and explain how it was only something that had occurred to him there on the spur of the moment, and Ad had given the night sulking and telling Dixie and everyone else that that was how stories got out, that was how names got blackened, fuckers saying things like that, on the spur of the moment, and he was saying on the spur of the moment in a by-the-way imitation of Dixie’s voice, like a right funny man, and for a finish Dixie had said, Ad, you’re either letting it go or you’re not, and he’d set his voice at just the right pitch, low and even, to let Ad know to drop it there. Or he could get a fucking smack. He’d left four bags of blocks at Ad’s door the next day, just by way of pacifying him. Ad had thanked him graciously enough in Ciss’s that night. They’d drunk a small one together. A bit of something had lingered, though, for all the making-up they’d done. A certain coldness, a quickness to argue, a slowness to laugh. It was the fucker’s own fault anyway for never having married, nor even done a line for all anyone knew, and for living on his own and giving his days to looking out his window at children kicking football on the green. He wasn’t there, anyway, and so Dixie hurried on. You’d never know when he’d pop out, like a long grisly Jack-in-the-box.
The council promise perennially to widen the gap and pave the foot-worn walkway through the field of scrub and briars to the commonage of the hill where every man is free to roam. Free. He spits each time he breaches the gap. They’re all in league: the bigshots in the offices in town; the remnants of the Proddie crowd that used own half the land and the mountain with it; the posh knobs on the far side of the hill that wanted no riff-raff traipsing over hills and down valleys and through their delicate country. Like children dragging muck in along a carpet. Herbie Grogan took a look one time when there was an election on. Oh, yes, he said, oh, yes, I can see what you’re saying. What a lovely amenity. A footpath would certainly add to it, allow it to be fully utilized. Isn’t it well to have it, though, so close to your houses and everything? Wasn’t it great planning all the same? The prick was nearly making out the hill was put there by the likes of him, dreamed up and proposed and voted on and dragged stone by stone from the earth and set pretty as a view for wasters, something for them to admire out the windows of their little houses. We gave you a house and we gave you a mountain, he was saying. Now is there any fear you’d shut your
fucking mouth and put your mark beside my name on Friday week? You’ve a grand face for fancy paths.
The puffy clouds had given way to blue and the bit of snow that fell was hardening to a thin crust and there was a good couple of hours or so of daylight left. More on the far side of the hill, of course, where the big houses were, where the western horizon was lower and farther away. The quality, of course, as usual, allowing themselves every ease and privilege. The path that zigzagged up the hill was dry; what water fell there was soaked into the peaty ground or ran in culverts to a stream that ran in its turn to the Dead River that ran through the marshy callows to the lake. He liked to look at the string of lake islands from the cairn on the hilltop, leaning on the ancient pile of stones left there to commemorate some fucker or other, or to mark his grave, or just to lay a claim to the hill. He wasn’t sure and nor did he care. Plenty wafflers hereabouts would surely know the ins and outs of that pile of stones and would love a chance to tell him all about them, but he couldn’t let himself be assaulted like that. They were put together well, though, the flat stones of the cairn, he had to concede that. Whatever ancient mason done it he was tasty. God knows how many hundred years had passed and still they stood, with no mortar to hold them fast, nothing between them and Heaven but the wind and rain.
He was smarting still from breakfast time. The way the boy had roared at him and banged his hands against the tabletop. The eating he was after getting from his daughter over it. Like it was his fault the boy was forever like a dog over something or other these days. If it wasn’t one thing it was another thing, and none of the things could be helped or fixed. And he’d tried, God knows. What kind of pussyfooting had he to do not to be drawing the boy’s ire? Was he to ask to know in advance what way his winds were blowing so he could adjust himself accordingly? Was he to conduct himself in his own house and home in ways unnatural to accommodate the humours of his grandchild, who by rights should be thanking him daily for all that was done for him, and all that was given him, and he never once having been asked for one thing in return, not even a show of respect? It was hard lines, hard lines. And the boy was gone then and the door splintered behind him from the slam he gave it going out. And the stories he had from last night were still untold, except to his daughter, but she didn’t appreciate them, only lit always on the funniest bits and gave out about them, and damped the punchline always down to nothing, and ruined the stories, and he only told her them to practise the telling of them, because in fairness to the boy he appreciated a good story, he got a great kick out of some of the yarns he brought home from Ciss Brien’s or the Half Barrel inside in town or the Frolics below in Carney. And he felt foolish now at his own excitement, his childish joy since the minute he woke this morning at his triumph over Hughie Fitz last night in Ciss Brien’s, and everyone telling Hughie he was gorgeous in the new coat Bridget bought him for his birthday, and every cunt telling him how they couldn’t believe he was sixty, and making out they wouldn’t have given him a day over fifty, and the pure delight on Hughie’s face when Dixie’d seemingly joined in and compared him to your man George Clooney, and the tide of purple that had risen up along Hughie’s neck when he’d taken it back and said he meant Mickey Rooney, and the way Podge had laughed so much behind the bar he’d had to stop what he was doing to draw his breath back and collect himself for a full minute at least, and the hard chaws from the Island Field that were out doing the steel fixing for the new railway bridge over in Lackanavea had bursted their arses laughing, and he’d timed it perfect, so he had, spot on to the millisecond, and it wasn’t every man could time a slag so well. He’d try the boy again when he was in better humour.