by Robert Power
Later, apples and plums toppled into a bowl; the pineapple to the fridge.
FIRST NIGHT IN THE CELLS
We were arrested together: father and teenage son. You’d picked the fight with the biggest, meanest-looking man in the pub. The barman, well-versed in such goings-on, had called the police within seconds of the first punch. I heard the sirens and soon we were both cuffed and bundled into the police van.
We were locked in the cell together: father and teenage son. I lay down on the cold concrete slab that was too small to call a bed, and pulled the thin, rough blanket up to my chin. In your madness you banged on the door and they ignored you: your yells, your curses. Then you crashed your head on the wall, time after time, until the skin split and the blood flowed. We were held together in the night: father and teenage son.
LOST
I sit on my bed and cry. The day before, or so I said to my friend Edmond, was the happiest day of my life. I can hardly believe, I had said, that my dream would come true. Finally. How it can all change. All crumble to dust. In the garden the cold ashes from last night’s fire are caught and spiralled away by the wind that has been building up since noon. I will speak to no one, not move from this room. It is all lost, all dashed. Everything I have strived for, night and day, for nigh on a decade. I had burnt my fingers, sifting through the embers. Desperately searching through for the single sheet of paper that meant so much. The fruits of all my labours, the very essence of my spirit. It is lost. Never to be rekindled. A symphony. A poem. A theorem. I will lie here on this bed and do no more. I will neither eat nor drink. I will wait for my body to turn against me. To extinguish. To join the ashes of the fire on the wind. To disappear without trace or word or sound.
STORM
Hold tight, young sailor boy. This is but the first storm of the voyage, of this your first venture to the high seas. And today the cold front hits the warmth from the south and the clouds, trapped between freezing winds and a seething heat, must churn and thrash. There will be no peace this day, no respite in sight. I feel your fear, but can offer you little by way of solace, for I am here on land as the prow of your ship ploughs into the maelstrom. I can recall my own journeys; snippets I have shared with you. I can tell you the storm will abate, calm will come and the seas will flatten. Easy said for sure from the safety of my solid brick manse high up on the cliffs. I look through the window that faces the bay. The rain coursing down the glass. I can see your ship rise and fall and disappear and reappear once more. I want to reach out across the torrent, to let you know that I am here, watching, waiting for the calm to arrive, for the still and the peace. But for now; but for now.
UNCLE TONY FROM UP NORTH: TREACLE NOT TREAT
Pouring malt treacle into the large glass jars. Eating his cornedbeef and pickle sandwiches as he sits between the gleaming steel vats. His flask of tea, steaming, but not as hot and bubbly as the dark brown mixture being stirred by the mechanical ladle. No production line yet, though technology of the highest order.
‘The fourth-largest malt treacle distributors in the Midlands’, as Mr Spencer (buyer: mainly stationery and furniture for the ‘office workers’) had told him at his interview.
But that had been many years ago now, though things had not much changed.
After lunch, thermos top tightly screwed back on, more thick mucousy treacle spooned into jars. Each night mothers around the country untwist the metal cap of the jar and wrap a dollop of treacle around a tablespoon. Twisting up the last threads that cling obstinately to the mass they spoonfeed a waiting offspring. One by one, some holding noses against the brewery smell, the children take their medicine.
Day after day he watches the vats bubble, and night after night children throughout the land line up for their dose of something good, their tablespoon of malt. Sometimes, in his bed, the lamplight from the street throwing shadows of passing cars across the ceiling, he dreams his treacle dream. His hands sticky with the stuff; his fingers webbed with it. And he sobbing as he runs his treacly fingers through his thinning hair.
WOUNDED BOY
The wounded boy (even though he didn’t know he was wounded back then, and even when years later his wounds would be exposed by the talkers, he came to believe that they were, in fact, his armour, his amulets) found the world of books to be his solace. His private refuge, his treasure trove. Then, as he grew to be the wounded teenager, he discovered William Faulkner and his mysteriously concocted landscape. The timbre, the taste, the menace and fracture. The spectre of Popeye in a land of snakes and swamps. Works of vivid, intense imagination, like (later) Joyce Carol Oates’s Mudwoman which plunged the depths behind and beyond mere acts of violence and the frayed edges of what humans do to each other.
And the wounded boy and the wounded teenager knew that he would have to write, as Nietzsche said (though he knew nothing of what Nietzsche said), to fly from the animal to the superman, to make a mind of it. Like Faulkner in The Wild Palms, between the flood with the alligators in the Everglades and the couple in the bedroom in the motel; like his family, vying for space with the humans fleeing and searching in all directions. Like the couple fighting and loving and lying and hoping in a cheap motel room, somewhere on the edge of somewhere else.
ON THE ROAD TO CAIRO
I knew that if I didn’t take her then no one would. All those nights we had spent together in her bedroom, she telling me stories of ancient Egypt, of the pharaohs and gods and the temples buried for aeons by the desert storms. She would look into my eyes and tell me her deepest secrets and then outline hieroglyphics on the palm of my hand with her fingertips. By the time we arranged the trip she was getting old. She had never been outside the country, but nothing was about to stop her: not the conscripts that had rioted three weeks earlier and burnt down hotels and clubs; not the night-time curfew, nor the warning from the embassy. She was going and I was to accompany her. The queen and her architect once again. Hatshepsut and Senenmut, as we had always been, would always be.
You are radiant here, Mother. You radiate life. You drink in every single moment of this, your Egypt. The sand, the sun, the trees, the engravings from the past. You have such knowledge of this place, not just through books. We cross the Nile in a felucca and you trail your hand in the water, stroking the surface of this ancient river. It rises to your touch, as if to kiss your palms, welcoming you back to the ebb and flow of this promised land.
You had talked about it all morning. There we sat, drinking tea on our balcony in the Hotel Giza, feeling the warmth of the early morning sunshine on our faces, watching the young boys working in the fields in the near distance, the majestic pyramids dominating the horizon.
You had woken up in the bed next to me and said, ‘Today we are going to the pyramids.’
The pyramids at Giza being the first of the twin peaks of your spiritual journey. Hatshepsut’s temple at Deir el- Bahri being the other.
And this I remember of what you taught me.
The world began from watery chaos (Nun). Atum, the sun god, emerged from all this chaos as a primal mound. His first act was to spit forth into the void the twin deities of air (Shu) and moisture (Tefnut). From this original pair came earth (Geb) and sky (Nut), who in turn engendered Isis, Osiris, Seth and Nephthys.
One inscription at Hatshepsut’s Mortuary Temple records the words of the Ruler of Punt and his wife on the occasion of the pharaoh’s journey to their land:
How have you arrived at this land unknown to the men of Egypt? Have you come down from the roads of the Heavens? Or have you navigated the sea of Ta-nuter? You must have followed the path of the sun. As for the King of Egypt, there is no road which is inaccessible to His Majesty; we live by the breath he grants to us.
I had no inkling then, but before the year was out I would perform my last duty, Mother of Mothers, and spread your own ashes among the sands that blow on the winds and whip up against the colonnades of the Temple at Deir el-Bahri.
JOURNEY ON THE LONDON UNDERGROUND
He looked at the mangled mess of his hands then slumped down onto one of the seats. What was becoming of this night? Where would it end?
ORANGE
There is an orange on the table. The air around the room closes in; the light through the kitchen window darkens from the garden. There is a moving away from the day, a scattering of what was held to be truth. The orange unpeels and portions itself into segments of the moon. Settling on the horizon and the rooftops, the juice runs down the windowpane, freezing in minutes, reflecting the snowflakes that fill and flush the frame. The cathedral bells muffle through the storm, calling to prayer any who care to listen. All the whys and the wherefores hold their counsel. The dog barks, the fence rattles. In the distance, the wind reminds of the cold polar caps.
MY GREAT-GREAT-GRANDFATHER
He conjured poisons and perfumes for kings and queens, courtiers and handmaidens. He would expend as much loving care, way into the night if need be, in producing a beguiling scent as he would a throttling potion. A fine line between sweet smells and sweat that could, under the spell of arsenic, turn to blood. One winter’s evening, the queen had taken him aside in the corridor and whispered treachery and evil against her own daughter, who consorted with the Protestants. An heir apparent who threatened the line and creed. Who would take no order, holy or otherwise.
‘Here,’ he would say to the young princess on the morn that followed. ‘A very special potion for you.’
Handing her the small glass phial.
THE RING
He said he needed me to come to form the Ring. It’s what they did back in Dublin, I knew that. He’d talked about it before. It was what happened when two men fought in the street. The Ring was formed around them by their friends, their family, their supporters. So that no one interfered, so that all could look on, leaving the two men to slug it out. Bare knuckles, no weapons, no kicking.
I had long hair, grown especially for my new hippie girlfriend. I had washed it and gone to bed with it wet. I’d not long fallen asleep, with thoughts of tomorrow’s maths test on my mind, when the phone rang. I knew it would be him.
He was slurring, breathing, demanding.
‘Now … The Fountain Pub … The Ring.’
And, loyal to his master’s voice, hair still damp, I went out into the empty night-time streets. Running.
FAITH
‘Can you be an agnostic with faith?’ he asked his mother, who had once considered taking up the life of a nun. ‘I mean, we are not that highly evolved, so we have to make stuff up to make sense of ourselves.’
His mother sipped her coffee and smiled.
‘And agnosticism really means not knowing, which we can’t,’ he said. ‘But the trees and the air and all the billion galaxies make me think there must be some kind of higher energy, a force. Something our little human minds are unable to fathom.’
How she loved this son of hers. This thoughtful, kind boy who was growing into a young man with a mind of his own. The instant he was born (her eldest child) she fell in awe of life: its energy, its power. For days (for years, if the truth were told) she stared into his baby eyes as if she had discovered some deep secret, some revelation.
‘Darling,’ she said, ‘you be an agnostic with faith and I’ll be the Holy Mother.’
AUNTIE KATIE AND COUSIN JEAN
She called it the spare room, these last four years. She would, on occasion, open its door and push in a piece of furniture or a box full of old books. But she would never linger, never pause. Passing by on the landing, on her way to the bathroom, she would always avert her eyes and hurry past the closed door. But something in her dreams had got to her. Not always very precise, not always something she could wake with and hold through the day. But it was certainly a sense of something to cling to, and that something was of her daughter. Of a time before that leap into the void and the deadening years of pain that followed. So on this morning she called it, not the spare room, but her daughter’s room. And she entered into it as an unknown space and began the process of recognition, sifting and healing.
MOONLIGHT FLIT
I’d heard them talking earlier in the day, so I knew what was coming. There they were, at the back of the garden, burning all the papers in the old tin bath. Everything that might possibly tie us to this house: bills, rental agreement, letters from the bank.
‘Hurry, hurry!’ said Mother, panic in her voice, frantically feeding the fire. ‘They could be here anytime.’
Through the kitchen window I watched the sparks fly and the blackened paper take wing on the wind, dispelling into the night air.
‘These people are not to be messed with. They break legs for far less,’ she cried, the tears mingling with the smoke to smudge and streak her cheeks.
‘They won’t come till the pubs turn out. That’s their style,’ said Father, lighting another cigarette from a smoldering ember.
Across the table sat my younger brother. He stared ahead, trying to understand what was happening around us. That we wouldn’t be going back to school on Monday. That we were to leave this house, now, tonight. That our mother had packed some suitcases of clothes and that was all we could take. Just what we could fit into the back of the Zephyr. On his lap he caressed the small fishbowl that housed Goldie, his pet goldfish.
‘If I have to leave all my football magazines behind, then you can’t take Goldie,’ I said.
He looked at me, in shock, in sadness. He was three years younger than I was and hadn’t yet become hardened to the ways of our family. But I did feel as if I was being unkind to him, even a touch cruel.
‘It’ll be okay,’ I said. ‘It’ll work out somehow.’
Later, in the middle of the night, somewhere between London and the bonfire and Anglesey and the ferry, my brother and I were lying horizontal on the back seat of the Zephyr on top of piled up blankets and suitcases. It was raining heavily. An empty whiskey bottle clattered and rolled with the motion of the car between my parents in the front seats. My brother was keeping as still as possible, balancing the goldfish-bowl on his chest as the water sloshed from side to side. Goldie was spinning around, as mixed up as the rest of us, tossing and turning in his own private whirlpool.
BRAYHEAD
I couldn’t afford to lose the job. The family was not in good shape. Dad was drinking all day, Mum was helping him, and my little brother was in no fit state for anything. We’d become marooned in this tired seaside resort south of Dublin and my job at the hotel was a godsend.
‘I’ll do anything. I can do anything,’ I had said to Mrs Reagan, the owner.
She’d looked me up and down and said she’d give me a start in the kitchen.
‘Ten pounds a week, nine hours a day, seven days a week. Take it or leave it.’
I took it, slave labour that it was.
So this day, a month later, I’m loading bacon, lamb chops, sausages and black pudding into a fruit box, the huge fridge wide open, readying myself to scurry out the back pan
try door, over the breakwall and along the beach to our tiny flat on the esplanade. A thief by any other name, hunger or no hunger (and the Garda would be called, no questions asked). It’s then, rack of lamb in hand, that I hear Johnny the assistant manager come into the kitchen. Without turning around, pretending I haven’t heard him enter, I pick up the box and start putting the meat back into the fridge.
‘What …?’ says he.
‘You can’t trust anyone these days,’ says I, busy about my task. ‘Someone’s gone and left the fridge door open and all this fresh meat about to go off.’
You think quick when you’re hungry.
LIKES
He likes colour and walking and water. He likes walking in the hills before dawn, on the beach when the sand is wet, and in the dead of night along the streets of his city when the least, the last, and lost are around. He likes swimming in cold open water. Like a pond or a lake, a river or a dam. Once, on Hampstead Heath in London he swam all year round, through the ice and the snow and the fog. On Christmas Day he dove from the springboard. Just as his fingertips touched the water’s surface his body screamed at him to get out. But he sucked up the icy day and let the pond wrap itself around him. He likes the colour blue. For the sweep of the sky, For the curve of a wave. For tablecloths and crockery; painted walls and woollen jumpers. And for the lapis lazuli stone of his wedding ring.
VOICES
‘Hang yourself.’
I’m in the shower. Is it the cold water that brings the voice on? Or sugar? Or the time of day?
‘Hang yourself,’ it says again.
‘You are not me,’ I scream, face pushed against the torrent of cold water cascading from above.
‘I am me,’ I shout, the water filling my mouth, drowning my one voice.
Turn tight the tap. Off. Listen. Drip, drip. A bird squawks in the garden beyond. A car passes by. The sound of tyres on the wet road. A kind of silence. Wrap the towel around. A blanket against the cold. Listen more.