Getting it in the Head

by Mike McCormack

  About the change. Despite its surreal banality the incident itself is easily remembered. Six months ago we sat here in this kitchen eating. At this point I am tempted to speak of the weather, the time of day, the type of meal it was and so on in order to mark the incredible incident against a background of particular detail. But would that explain anything? I do not think so. It will suffice to say that the three of us were in the kitchen eating and Francis was carrying his mug from the table to the sink where my wife was preparing to wash up. As he approached the sink the cup slipped from his grasp – it will be the last time in this account that I will call him child with any certainty – fell to the floor and spun to a stop before the sink. My wife turned, on the verge of telling him to pick it up, but was struck silent by the intensity of the gaze with which Francis was looking at the mug. She would describe it later as a mixture of amazement and agony, the composite reaction of an old man who has seen many such troubled things in the past and the incomprehension of one to whom it was all totally new. My wife opened her mouth to speak but Francis took her forearm as one would a passing child and, in an unforgettably leaden voice, as if the memories and fatigue of a lifetime had come to rest upon him in that moment, he told her to ‘Bend down and pick that up like a good girl.’

  In that moment and with those astonishing words he changed the whole complex of relationships in our house.

  My wife, seconds before having been a mother on the verge of rebuking her child, was changed in an instant into a woman worried about the health of this old man. It is a measure of how complete and successful this reversal was for her because she picked up the mug in silent awe and handed it to him. After depositing it in the sink he returned to the table, and lowered himself gently into his chair, one hand on the table, groaning heavily, his bones apparently suffused with stiffness. A look of horror and astonishment passed between my wife and me. Despite ourselves we sensed some momentous change in our fortunes, some new beginning. Francis had resumed eating with a slow thoughtful relish far beyond his years. I decided to venture a question into the incredible silence which now reigned in the kitchen.

  ‘Are you feeling all right, Francis? You’re not sick or anything?’

  ‘A man of my age is always sick,’ he replied drily.

  Again it is indicative of how completely he had changed that I did not dare rebuke what I thought might be left of the child on this now old man – one does not reprimand someone for saying something that is in all probability true. I had not a clue how to handle the situation. In fact it took all my powers of concentration to recognize exactly what was happening. The child Francis in outward appearance was still recognizable before me but his deeper identity had been supplanted entirely by the character of an old, jaded man. For a dread instant I toyed with the notion that there were actually two people before me. My wife stood at the sink, her mouth slung open and her eyes staring wide. Francis, or more correctly whoever it was that was now within Francis, sat spooning up the last of his meal, apparently heedless to the great change which he had brought about in his house. I realized instantly that for him there had been no change – one moment had been perfectly continuous with the previous one, there had been no slip sideways into someone else. It would therefore be ridiculous to start asking him what had happened. In any case he put an end to my thinking at that point by speaking grimly.

  ‘You’re right, I am tired. I’ll lie down for an hour. Wake me up when it’s time for the news.’ He walked stiffly from the room.

  My wife broke immediately from her trance and began to sob hysterically. I went to her and held her in my arms.

  ‘What’s happened?’ she cried. ‘What has happened?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But he’s changed,’ she protested. ‘One minute he’s my son and the next I’m his daughter. What caused it? What do we do?’ Her voice was climbing higher, nearing a thin note of hysteria. Something frantic was moving within her like a current. I tightened my hold on her.

  ‘Let’s wait and see,’ I said. ‘Maybe when he wakes it will be all over.’ These words were solely for her benefit. I did not believe for an instant that something which had come upon us with such resoluteness and completion would not end in some disaster.

  He woke from his nap a few hours later and entered the kitchen, his eyes glued over with sleep. He asked for tea and when it was brought to him he supped fervently at the table. Previous to this Francis never drank anything but milk.

  ‘Is the news over?’ he asked presently.

  ‘Yes, it’s over,’ I replied. ‘There wasn’t much on it.’

  ‘What did it say on the weather?’ He was seated by the window, looking out at the sheets of rain that hopped in the tarmacked yard.

  ‘It said there would be no change. It would be like this till the end of the week.’

  ‘I suppose there’s no use going for a walk then. I was going to go to town for fags.’

  This was incredible. Could he really be so oblivious to the change that had taken place or to the silent turmoil which roiled about him? I could see my wife at the sink and the almost superhuman effort it was taking her to keep from breaking down was visibly marked on her face. Francis sat at the table, fair-haired and smooth-skinned, but with all the mannerisms and fatigue of an old man. He seemed to be the still centre of a small cyclone which was rampaging silently through the room. Now I was sure that he saw nothing different in himself. To him there had been no change: he was as he had always been. But to me he was my son turned in an instant into an old man. And there was the problem. I was already willing to admit that he was now an old man but who exactly was this old man? I decided to wheedle his identity from him gently, to proceed with caution. I feared that waking him suddenly to the change would plunge him also into a crisis. At that moment two crises in the one room was more than enough.

  ‘When did you take up smoking?’ I spoke very gently.

  ‘What do you mean, when did I take up smoking?’ he repeated testily. ‘You know very well that I’ve smoked since I was twelve, smoked all my life except for twice at Lent when I couldn’t go the distance and was back on them inside two weeks. Thirty Woodbine a day and nothing less.’ Looking out the window he changed tack slightly. ‘I can’t go anywhere in this rain.’

  As I listened to these words a dim germ of horror and recognition began to flower within me. ‘Here,’ I said. ‘Have one of mine.’ I proffered a red box with one fag extended towards him.

  ‘John,’ my wife hissed, ‘you can’t go giving the child cigarettes.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said, ‘I know what I’m doing.’

  This was brave talk indeed for in truth I hardly dared recognize what I was seeing come ever clearer into focus before me. Francis took the fag with gentle ease and raised it to his mouth. With one movement he bit off the filter and spat it into the fire. He took a light from me and angled his face backwards for the first drag, tipping the lighted end into the air. With his eyes closed he drew fearlessly on it as if he’d been doing it all his life.

  ‘That’ll do,’ he said, picking a scrap of tobacco from the tip of his tongue. ‘A bit weak but it’ll do.’ He sat and smoked the rest of the cigarette, sunk in such silent contentment that my wife rushed from the room choking back sobs.

  ‘So the weather’s going to stay like this. It’s just as well then we decided against planting spuds. They’d be washed out of the ground with this rain.’

  He talked on like this into the evening, taking an avid interest in the news and most particularly a current affairs programme which dealt with the BSE scare which had affected so many cattle in the west.

  ‘The price of cattle will go to hell,’ he declared solemnly, twitching his nose. ‘We won’t get a pound a kilo by year’s end if this keeps up.’ Despite his youthful looks he spoke with the certainty of one who was laying down the law and anticipated no dissent. ‘It will be the end of the small farmer,’ he pronounced. ‘Only the big ones will be able to af
ford quarantine and the small ones like ourselves will have to sell off at below cost price. Isn’t it always the same?’

  I could take no more, I staggered from the room in a daze.

  The following morning we had our next big shock. He appeared in the doorway of the kitchen done out in a perfectly fitting black suit and a black hat that scooped down over his child’s face. Across his waistcoat was slung a watch chain. He stood in the doorway, framed like a portrait, consulting his watch with eyes that were surely failing.

  ‘Not that a man of my age has much business knowing the time,’ he concluded grimly before turning to me. ‘Has the post come yet?’

  ‘There’s no post on a Saturday,’ I said.

  ‘That’s right,’ he conceded, ‘I completely forgot, the memory is going on top of everything else.’

  As on the previous day he lowered himself gently into the chair beside the table. I was glad my wife, who had not yet risen, was not there to see him. Despite the almost comic contrast between the clothes and his face he seemed even older in essence than the day before.

  After breakfast our neighbour came in on an errand. I was glad to see her because with her by the hand was her daughter Anne, one of Francis’ classmates. My immediate hope was that he would recognize some kinship in her that would snap him out of this terrible persona. But his first words crushed any such hope. He put his hand out to ruffle her curls.

  ‘You’re getting bigger every day, Anne. What class are you in now?’ An immense weakness came over me as I heard him speak.

  ‘I’m in second class,’ she simpered, pleased to be the centre of this old man’s attention. Her mother picked her up into her arms.

  ‘You’re looking well yourself, Francis, getting younger every day. This damp weather must suit you.’

  It was now his turn to simper. ‘It’s a good job it agrees with someone,’ he said. ‘This country will be washed out from under our feet if this rain keeps up.’

  ‘When it hasn’t been washed away in all these years it’s not likely to happen now. Say goodbye to Francis, Anne.’ She turned to me. ‘We’ll be on our way, John, it will soon be time for the dinner.’ And they left.

  And so I knew the incredible truth. The change in Francis had taken place only before our own eyes: for the rest of the world nothing at all had happened. Worse than that, my neighbour had spoken to him as someone she had known all her life. By now my own recognition of him was beginning to take fuller shape and that night I decided to test it to the full. As the nine o’clock news ended I suggested we go into town for a drink. My wife’s mouth fell open in disbelief but I frowned aside her silent protest. We travelled in my car and he sat beside me in his black suit, his young features heedlessly radiant under his black hat. If at this point I could have overcome my horror at the dawning recognition which was now nearing a certainty I would have been able to see the Chaplinesque comedy in our situation; I was definitely able to see the horror.

  I entered the pub behind him and immediately my recognition was confirmed. The three or four men leaning over pints at the counter turned around and saluted Francis as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

  ‘Evening, Francis. It’s a wet one.’

  ‘It’s always a wet one in these parts,’ he replied drily.

  ‘What will it be, Francis?’ asked the barman, throwing aside the damp cloth.

  ‘The usual, two pints of Guinness,’ he replied with a certainty that was fast becoming the mark of his character. He was even sure of what I drank.

  And the night went on like that. On the one side, between him and his friends, a complete and unsurprised recognition of each other; within myself, a descent quickened by alcohol into a deepening pit of despair. Talking back and forth among his friends that night Francis left me to flounder in this pit. Only once during the night did he turn to me.

  ‘Cheer up, son,’ he said. ‘It could be worse.’

  I had not a clue what he meant.

  That night when he had gone to bed I stayed up alone sorting through all the documents which had made their way into our home. By the early hours I had two separate piles on the table. On the left, among others, there was a pension book, a will, a death certificate and a coroner’s report. All these testified to the existence and death of my father. On the right, in a much smaller pile, there was a birth certificate, a christening cert and a small collection of school reports. All of these spoke the existence of someone who at one time had been my son. Yet now I could neither be sure of my father’s death nor of my son’s existence. Now the only certain thing was that in some ghastly way they were both present in the one person at the same time, my father’s character in the body of my son whom the rest of the world seemed not to remember. I felt the room beginning to reel about me, becoming a vortex, pulling me down. What was I going to do? In my confusion and misery I had a wild notion of taking my shovel and driving into the night towards the graveyard and digging up that documented and three-year-old corpse. I could see myself already in the graveyard, the rain suitably pissing down as I dug furiously, a decent and honest man driven to hideous deeds by some presence in his life which he is neither responsible for nor capable of making any sense of, a character in a cautionary tale, a black and white movie illustrating how the dark shapes of the unspeakable rise up to shatter our lives. I dismissed the idea with a groan. This was no black and white movie and after all, what would it prove to dig up a skeleton which I would never be able to identify?

  My wife, red-eyed and sleep-dishevelled, entered the room. She sat down beside me at the table and I noticed with alarm that she too seemed to have aged. But would this disaster not age anyone? I put my arm around her, as much to comfort myself with her solidity as to steady her now that I had decided to tell her what I knew. I turned her face towards me.

  ‘He’s come back,’ I started. ‘I don’t know how or why but the Francis we have now is my father.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I know. I’ve known since the moment he started talking about smoking.’ She began to sob. ‘Where is our child, John, where did he go?’ I held her towards me and made some useless comforting noises. Presently she pulled away from me. There was a sickly gleam in her eyes.

  ‘John, what if we’re mad? What if the whole world is right and we’re wrong? What if our son never was?’

  ‘That can’t be,’ I retorted quickly. ‘How are all these documents explained, birth certs, christening certs, school reports? Where did they all come from?’ I drew to a halt suddenly, aghast at what I was saying. My hands clutched my head. ‘What the hell am I talking about? Forget these documents, forget these school reports. Remember the child, remember the things he did. Christ, we still even have his things.’

  This was true. His school bag stood in the hall by the hotpress piled high with his clothes; at the end of the hall was a room decorated with posters of football teams and motor bikes, a small boy’s room. Earlier that day I had noticed his bike in the garage. More correctly, I had woken from a reverie, aware that I had been standing and staring at his bike for a long time. But it was a spell in which I found no clue where my son was nor even where to start looking.

  These were the first days of the six month horror which dominated our lives like some waking nightmare. And as the nightmare continued it fleshed itself out, became more complete as the days went on. That following Monday, as he had expected, a new pension book arrived for him in the post. His friends began to call on him as if he had never been gone and one day a student came to interview him as part of the research he was doing on the history of the Rising. He spoke most often of the past, his military adventures, departed comrades and even, in glancing references, of his marriage. More and more of his speech became prefaced with remarks like, ‘I remember when’, or ‘In my day’, or ‘God be with the days when’. It was a unique horror to see this young face reaching down into an impossible reservoir of experience for these memories and then lay them there before us blithely like dead th
ings. But the worst of it was that, while in our eyes he retained his child-like looks, his manner became so jaded and crotchety that a time quickly came when it became difficult for us to summon up the image of our son Francis. One day, walking into the garage, I found my wife running her hands absentmindedly over his bicycle. She had been using it as a prop to try and prompt her imagination. I knew it because more than once I had come to my senses in his bedroom, staring in the same way at his pile of toys in the corner, trying desperately to visualize our child playing with them. Once Francis, or whoever he was, happened in on me as I sat there.

  ‘You don’t want to spend too long staring like that. Life passes you by quickly,’ he said. That day in the garage my wife looked at me with her eyes brimming. ‘I’m losing touch with him, John. I can’t see our child any more.’

  The child Francis was receding from our imagination like a story told to an infant, a small boat drifting away on an infinite sea of loss.

  What was our attitude towards Francis during those six months? Did our initial horror and confusion turn to outright hatred and bitterness? Did we treat him as we would some monster in our midst? Hand on my heart I can say that we did not. There was a continual hope in our heart that our son Francis would one day reassert himself from out of this composite being, one day emerge completely from beneath the character of my father, shiny and new like a small, eclipsed moon. Built upon this hope was a genuine attitude of concern that this Francis be nurtured. As long as he lived there was a real chance that our son would return.