My father revisited Moby a lot.
Maybe it’s because there’s no other novel in the whole world that better captures the Impossible Standard.
The end of that summer in Ashcroft he was reading Moby, and then, one evening maybe because he was bored, maybe because he was in one of those mad chapters that detail the physiognomy of whales, he went and took down one of Abraham’s unused Salmon Journals, and shortly after, amidst the Havishammy dust and cobwebs of Ashcroft’s non-dining Dining Room, he began a novel. It was set on a ship in the sea.
Now it takes a certain twist of mind to be able to write anything. And another twist to be able to write every day in a house that’s falling down around you with a mother who’s working her way through the wine cellar and a moist Bank Manager who’s expecting At the very least, Mrs Kittering-Swain, a gesture.
My father had both twists. As Matty Nolan said about Father Foley, Poor Man, when he came back with the brown feet after thirty years in Africa, he was Far Gone. Virgil had that power of concentration that he passed on to me. He filled one Salmon Journal and started on the next. He went a bit Marcus Aurelius who (Book 746, Meditations, Penguin Classics, London) said men were born with various mania. Young Marcus’s was, he said, to make a plaything of imaginary events. Virgil Swain meet Marcus. Imaginary events, imaginary people, imaginary places, whatever you’re having yourself. Gold-medal Mania.
I suppose it was just pole-vaulting really, only with a smaller pole.
Point is, he was very Far Gone.
And that’s where he was when they came to take the furniture. Mr Houlihan didn’t come in person. He stayed out at the gates in his car, dabbing and moistening and peering in, blinking the rapid blinks of the obscurely guilty and finding he had chewed his lips into looking like burst sausages in an over-hot pan. Gaffney & Boucher it was that were sent. They parked the lorry in the Front Circle beside the fallen chimney and came in like long-necked birds calling various polite but unanswered hellooos through the house, both of them with the low-slung shoulders and downcast eyes of the deeply apologetic. Grandmother did not appear. They arrived in the foyer and began taking the gold mirrors off the wall. One screw wouldn’t loosen. It would only turn and turn, and Gaffney gave it elbow grease and Meath meatiness and broke a piece of the nineteenth-century artisan moulding getting it free. Boucher shouldered the front door and Ashcroft opened to the daylight for the first time in years. They took the long sideboard (leaving the twin China dogs on guard on the floor), the standing Newgate clock, the embroidered Louis chairs, the studded Chesterfield, four armchairs of stuffing various, huffing and puffing as they moved the long oak dining table that bashed against the door jamb and wouldn’t fit – sideways or backways or anyways, Phil; You’re right there, Michael – and at last had to be left just inside the dining-room door.
At teatime Virgil landed back in this world. He didn’t realise anything had changed until he came downstairs and crossed the front foyer and felt something under his foot. He bent down to pick up the piece of gold moulding. That’s when he saw the mirrors were gone. That’s when he saw the front doors were wide open. He called his mother. She failed to answer. He called her again, this time climbing the stairs, thinking we’ve been robbed and that this had happened when he was whaling just off the coast of Nantucket.
He knocked on Grandmother’s door. He called to her. When he opened the door he saw her slanted across the bed, one arm hanging over the side as if she’d been caught and pulled askew and then had either shaken free or been thrown back. Her face was lopsided, her lip pulled low on one side where the fish-hook had been.
A stroke is not the word for it, the philosopher Donie Downes says. It’s more a Wallop. It’s a flaming wallop somewhere in the inside back of your head. Bang! like that. And you’re switched off same as the Mains is down and you lie there in the Big Quiet silently cursing the closure of Emergency in Ennis General Hospital and hoping Dear God Timmy and Packy are coming. In Dan’s case everything returned to normal, TG, he says (Thank God), except for the compulsion to tell every passing soul in Ryan’s or Nolan’s, Hanway’s, the post office, going in or out of Mass, about the exact nature and dimension of his Wallop.
Grandmother did not recover. Maybe she wouldn’t have wanted to anyway. Maybe once she was transported out the front doors of Ashcroft and was loaded bumpily up across the fumy exhaust of the ambulance, rolled into the grim metal interior and strapped in place, her one imperious eye still good for glaring, maybe she realised she wouldn’t be getting any further in the wine cellar. She had the second stroke. In Faha the word that’s fatally attached to stroke is massive. This one was Massive. To her eternal mortification it was not in some private room with stacked goosedown pillows, elegant bedclothes, and attendants with proper accents. It was in the ambulance, stopped on a narrow bend somewhere near Navan, waiting for skittish young cattle to cross. Her son was sitting alongside her.
Three weeks after Grandmother died, Virgil too left Ashcroft. There was no natural place left for him to fit into the world.
He took Moby Dick and went by bus to Dublin. Two days later he stepped on to a Merchant Navy ship docked on the River Liffey.
Then he went to sea.
TWO
Mythologies
Chapter 1
Back in the time when we were all seaweed, Tommy Devlin says, and adjusts himself on his seat for the long story.
Tommy Devlin is Nan’s cousin. He’s a strictly brown-trouser man. He’s an Irish Independent man. He’s a fist socked-into-his-hand man in Cusack Park when the boys from Broadford are putting points on the board. Now for you. Tommy’s History of the World is not written down but firmly fixed in his mind in the same way that Chocolate Goldgrains are the only biscuit, Flahavan’s the only porridge, and Fianna Fáil the One True Rulers (like all mythological heroes presently enduring a temporary period of exile).
Back in the time when we were all seaweed, he says, there was some seaweed already had the MacCarroll microbes or genomes or whatever and after that it was only a matter of time and creation.
Back then Ireland was down at the South Pole. So I’m thinking it would have been frozen seaweed of the sort Paddy Connolly started selling above in Quilty thinking in the Boom it would catch on like frozen yoghurt but hadn’t calculated on the power of the salt making your lips swell up like slugs in a wet June while you stood there sucking Quilty seaweed. But then the Bust came and the Japanese had the earthquake and the mini-meltdown and couldn’t eat their own and started sending delegations worldwide in search of good seaweed. A Mr Oonishi arrived in the County Clare, had a taste of frozen carrageen and went odorokuhodo yoi, which was boys o boys in Japanese, and the Connollys were back in business.
Sorry, drifting. It’s a river narrative. Once, we were all frozen seaweed.
Then, Tommy says, America split off of Africa, said See you boys later, and did the American thing, it went West.
Ireland of course did its own thing and went north. All of us were seaborne. Whatever microbes were paddling Ireland they were fierce stubborn and didn’t bother stopping at any of the sunnier climes, didn’t say Lads, what about the Canaries for a location? Didn’t say Madeira looks nice. No, they kept on, getting away from everyone, and would have kept going, Tommy says, except that Iceland had broken off above and was already in situ. The microbes were like the McInerneys who head off to Donegal each year, any number of children sardined into the back of the old Peugeot, three per seatbelt, and somewhere north of Claregalway dement their mother and father with Are we there yet. Enniscrone, County Sligo, is as far as they’ve ever made it. Tommy’s basic point: the microbes were getting restless by then. The sun had livened them up. Then the rain got them in a right stew. Suddenly we were bestirring ourselves.
Ireland came to a stop. And the seaweed-people started moving about on the land.
And some of them were MacCarrolls.
Because we were once seaweed we all long to get back there. That’
s the premise. The sea is the Mother Ship. That’s the explanation for Kilkee Lahinch Fanore Ballyvaughan and all the bungalows built up and down the Atlantic coast. That’s the reason the planners couldn’t say it’ll look a bit mad and make the whole country look like we’re some kind of perverted sea-voyeurs.
So the seaweed people started moving around in the rain. Some of them, who resented their mothers, and figured out right away that the west was the rainiest part, went into the Midlands to vent their feelings and invent hurling. The MacCarrolls stayed where they were. They’d just about dried out when The Flood came, Tommy says.
‘And they all drowned?’ I asked.
‘Some of them survived,’ he said, ‘by becoming birds.’
‘That was clever.’
‘Others were swimmers.’
After The Flood withdrew things were grand for a time. Then the Partholonians came. They were already bored with sunscreen and deckchairs down in the eastern Mediterranean and arrived into Donegal on a salty gale, had a bit of Killybegs Catch, and headed south, where they met the Fomorians. The Fomorians were the misshapen one-eyed one-legged offal-eating hoppers who were peopling Offaly at the time.
Having only the one leg, they weren’t that great at fighting. The Partholonians made mincemeat and pale spongy bodhráns out of them.
By the year 520 Tommy says there were 9,046 Partholonians in Ireland. Then in one week in May a horde of midges came, brought a plague and wiped them all out.
Except for one.
Tuan MacCarrill survived by becoming a salmon.
Fact. It’s in the History of Ireland.
It’s not all that strange when you consider that story is written in the Book of the Dun Cow, which is Book Number 1 in Irish Literature and was written on the hide of Saint Ciaran’s favourite cow in Clonmacnois.
Not kidding.
Tuan survived by becoming a salmon.
Now, before you go saying those Irish, or Come off it, I will point out that though Tuan was maybe the first to use this method he was not the last. In the fat yellow paperback of David Grossman’s See Under: Love (Book 2,001, Picador, London), one of the few books in which my father inscribed his name (blue biro), Bruno Schulz escapes the Nazis by becoming a salmon. Check it out.
Anyway, years later (according to the hide of Saint Ciaran’s favourite cow), the salmon that was once Uncle Tuan was caught by a woman who ate him. It’s true. She caught him, ate him, and then, in the kind of plot twist you get when you’re writing on the hide of a Dun Cow, she gave birth to him again. He was a fine lad with distinctive red hair and salmon-coloured freckles, who had inside him the history of Ireland.
Not kidding.
The MacCarrolls were always into the stories. But first the stories were inside them.
Tuan MacCarrill had seen the Nemedians, the Partholonians, the Fir Bolgs and the Tuatha de Danann. The Tuatha de Danann were the followers of the Goddess Danu. They’d come to Ireland in long wooden boats and, tough men, burned them the moment they landed so there would be no turning back. Some of the locals looked up, saw this great boat-shaped cloud from the boat-burning and believed these fellows had sailed down from the sky.
‘The stories of them lads would fill all the libraries of the known world,’ Tommy said. But Tuan knew them all. He was the only one who could tell of the great battle against Balor of the Evil Eye, which was the first All-Ireland, but took place on the Plain of Moytura. The referee was a crow called the Morrigu. She whistled for the Throw-in and watched from a tree. When the last of the Fomorians were dead, the plain slippery with black blood and the ground underfoot spongy as figrolls in tea, the Morrigu blew up for fulltime.
Tuan MacCarrill had seen it first-hand. He was the first Embedded, the original Eyewitness Reports, a one-man Salmon News Corporation, he’d been there and seen that, getting fish-eyed Exclusives of everything from the Fomorians to the Fianna.
And so, because he’d been here since seaweed, he told the early history of Ireland to Saint Finnian of Moville, who, being a monk, had a quill handy.
It’s the way Tommy tells it.
If Ireland’s first historian had been a girl instead of a salmon-boy it would have been a different story. If the man writing it down hadn’t been a saint there’d have been other parts for women besides Goddesses, witches and swans.
So, there were seaweed people and sky people.
In time the seaweed people and the sky people found attraction in each other, and intermarried and became the Irish. That’s the short version. That’s why some of us are always longing for sky and some are of us are longing for the sea, and some, like my father, were both.
We’re a race of elsewhere people. That’s what makes us the best saints and the best poets and the best musicians and the world’s worst bankers. That’s why wherever you go you’ll see some of us – and it makes no difference if the place is soft and warm and lovely and there’s not a thing anyone could find wrong with it, there’ll always be what Jimmy the Yank calls A Hankering. It’s in the eyes. The idea of the better home. Some of us have it worse than others. My father had it running in the rivers of him.
The MacCarrolls stayed near the river. Beside the river there are two things you never forget, that the moment you look at a river that moment has already passed, and that everything is on its way somewhere else. The MacCarrolls weren’t poets. They were too stubborn for metre and rhyme schemes. They were knuckle- and knee-scrapers and collarbone breakers, they were long-hair growers. They were fisher and boatmen. They had a wild streak in them about the same width and depth as the Shannon and they had no loyalty to anyone but themselves, which was as it should be Tommy says, because Ireland then was in a complete dingdong between kings and clans and Vikings and Normans and whatnot and a lot of it was to do with O’Neills from Up North, which in Tommy’s narrative means Enough Said.
In any case, the MacCarrolls stayed out of all that. Because of the salmon-time that was in their bloodstream they had a fair bit of knowledge and they hadn’t forgotten the important thing the river had taught them: things pass. The place under their feet changed name a dozen times, but they stayed put.
A share of them got in boats and headed for the horizon. Stands to reason, Tommy says. Wouldn’t there be a restlessness in any man who was once salmon and floating seaweed?
There’s no arguing with that.
I wouldn’t argue with Tommy anyway. Mrs Quinty says three months ago when they brought Tommy to the Regional the surgeon opened him up, and then just closed him up right away again, as if Tommy Devlin had become The Book of Tommy and on every page was written Cancer. Afterwards, Tommy took his book home again to Faha and carried on regardless. He has a kind of Lazarus glow now. There isn’t a person in the parish would deny him anything.
‘My point,’ he says, ‘restlessness a natural by-product of salmon-ness.’
That’s why there’s MacCarroll cousins in Queens and White Plains and Lake View Chicago and Michigan and San Francisco and why there’s a Randy MacCarroll who’s a horse-breeder in Kentucky, a Paddy MacCarroll a sheep-breeder in Christchurch New Zealand, and Caroll MacCarroll who breeds the turtles in Bali.
But a share of them stayed in what became Clare too.
‘The family has a certain contrariness in it,’ Tommy says. ‘D’you see? From time to time the family would burst up in rows, one gang taking a position, the other gang taking the contrary, even if only for the virtue of being contrary, which is a peculiar twist in the Irish mind that dates back to sky and sea people. Some of the MacCarrolls would take a huff and splinter off over the mountains into Kerry or even, God Help us, Cork.’
What you had in the chronicle of the country then was a few centuries of a game of Rebellion-Betrayal, Rebellion-Betrayal, Uprising Put-Down, and Hope Dashed.
The History of Ireland in two words: Ah well.
The Invasion by the Vikings: Ah well.
The Invasion by the Normans. The Flight of the Earls, Mr Oliver Cromwell. Danie
l O’Connell, Robert Emmett, The Famine, Charles Stewart Parnell, Easter Rising, Michael Collins, Éamon De Valera, Éamon De Valera again (Dear Germany, so sorry to learn of the death of your Mr Hitler), Éamon De Valera again, the Troubles, the Tribunals, the Fianna Fáil Party, The Church, the Banks, the eight hundred years of rain: Ah well.
In the Aeneid Virgil tells it as Sunt lacrimae rerum, which in Robert Fitzgerald’s translation means ‘They weep for how the world goes’, which is more eloquent than Ah well but means the same thing.
There were MacCarrolls on both sides each time. They were Pro and Anti in equal measure. The only thing you could be certain of with a MacCarroll, Tommy says, was that opinions were Strongly Held. It was a seaweed–salmon thing. Salmon aren’t reasonable. They’re the boys for going against the current.
‘Which holds a certain attraction for the Opposite Sex,’ Tommy says, using Capitals.
‘It does?’
‘Oh it does,’ he says.
That’s when he goes Old Testament and starts listing the Begetting. Cearbhall MacCarrill married Fionnuala Ni Something who begat Finn who married Fidelma Ni Something Else and begat Finan who married a Fiona and begat Fintan, and so on. When they emerge out of the seaweed-smelling mists of time they are still marrying and begetting, some of them have dropped the A, others the Mac and some have gotten above themselves and taken up the O, so there are MacCarrolls, McCarrolls, Carrolls and O’Carrolls, all of them with a seawide streak of stubbornness and a character composed of what Nan simply calls salt. Some of them have twelve in the family, one of the Ni’s wins Ovaries of the Year and gives the world eighteen MacCarrolls before sending the ovaries to the Clare Museum in Ennis and lying down on a bed of hay with a bucket of milk.
History of the Rain Page 14