Meatloaf in Manhattan

by Robert Power

  In April 1880 he was committed to the Royal Melbourne Hospital with delirium tremens. A few days later he absconded from the ward, returning to his common-law wife, Sarah Theresa Barbor, telling her they should die together and she could choose the means. She hired a local man to guard him, to keep them all from harm. On the first day of May, the guard went for his dinner. All the knives had been hidden away, but Tom found a pair of scissors in the kitchen and stabbed himself in the heart. His brother Egbert sent a letter to the family with a little sketch of Tom’s torso. Egbert drew three dots around the heart, adding that only a little blood was apparent on the shirt.

  Carlton, Victoria, Australia, 30 August 2010

  Running is spiritual. It becomes my mid-life salve, my balm, my retreat. Sri Chimnoy was a Buddhist who believed in its powers, encouraging runners to come together in the spirit of healing and reconciliation. Before the run in the early Sunday morning rain at Parkville, in the north of the city, we have a minute’s meditation, an entry point to the trance and flight of the race.

  As the race progresses the drizzling rain cools and calms. Drops of pure water fall from the uppermost branch of the ghost gum trees. One drop runs down the back of my neck. It holds the trace and shadow of my dream. The words of the gypsy come to my drifting mind. In the echoes and tread of my footsteps I sense the shroud of the I Zingari cap on my head and something to bind me to Tom Wills and John Landy. In the midst of the runners I see a flash of red, and yellow and black, like a tiger moving through the forest. Then I realise it is a young Aboriginal boy, his vest the colours of his nation’s flag: the sun, the land, the people.

  Later, when I get home, my wife is sitting at the computer.

  ‘Look at this,’ she says, clicking onto an old black and white newsreel on YouTube.

  ‘A race off between Landy and Bannister in Vancouver. To see who was the best.’

  I sit down next to her and squint at the screen.

  It is amazing to see the two men in their prime, one against the other. Landy strides out ahead, eating up the track, opening up a huge lead. His Aussie bronzed body in stark contrast to the lanky pale Brit with the floppy hair. Surely, with one bend to go, Landy will hold on to win. But Bannister closes, and steps up a gear to make his move. Inexplicably, Landy looks over his left shoulder, to the inside lane, where no one could run, as Bannister ghosts passed him in the outside lane. Bannister surges ahead, breaks the tape and then falls into the arms of his trainer.

  Vancouver, Canada, 7 August 1954

  The image of Landy looking over his shoulder, and Bannister passing him by, is captured in a larger-than-life bronze sculpture. It is the 1967 creation of Vancouver sculptor Jack Harman, from a photograph taken by Vancouver Sun photographer Charlie Warner. It has stood close to the site of the event ever since. Regarding this sculpture, Landy is reported to have said: ‘While Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of salt for looking back, I am probably the only one ever turned into bronze for looking back.’

  I look at my wife and she looks back at me. Neither of us turns to salt, but we are still and silent.

  It is late. The house is quiet. All are asleep. I sit at the computer, skipping between Landy and Wills, Google Maps of the Colva Cemetry in Goa and the writings of Sri Chimnoy. I type in ‘I Zingari Cap’ and there, on eBay, is a solitary item for sale, proudly worn by Captain Thomas Noble of Geelong from 1925 to his death in the North African desert of the Second World War. The bidding closes at midnight and I have my credit card details at the ready.

  Colva, Goa, India, 25 September 2010

  In the cemetery of Our Lady of Mercy in Colva the graves are only rented for three years. If a family member fails to return then the bones are dug up and left in the dust to mingle with the rest of the unloved. But I’ve done my duty and bought (for all time) a three foot by two foot niche in the wall. My father will rest in a spot where he’ll hear, from the church, the Mass sung in the local Konkani language, the choir as sweet as any.

  The grave digger cleans out the grave and hands me a plastic bag of my father’s remains: a skull, a leg bone, thighs and a couple of oddments. I carefully wash them under the tap in the corner of the cemetery, mindful not to step on any of the graves.

  I hold the skull in my hand. There’s a dent and hole just above an ear socket. I turn the skull to the right, not the left, as if looking over its invisible shoulder.

  ‘Ahha, got you, you thief, you would-be murderer,’ says the skull.

  The skull takes another look over the right shoulder

  ‘Speed up or he’ll pass me on the outside lane,’ pants John Landy.

  I take the I Zingari cap from my head and place it on the crown of the skull.

  ‘Clean bowled, it’s a long walk to the pavilion, WC,’ scoffs Tom Wills.

  Then I hold him close and stroke his wounds. The skull of my father.

  As tenderly as I know how, I place my father’s remains in the niche with a note and a flower and a prayer for peaceful repose.

  Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 10 October 2010

  The I Zingari cap feels right on my head, as I line up at the start of the Saint George’s marathon: thousands of us ready for the off, eager to slay our very own dragons.

  I hear my breath, I feel my heart, as the miles disappear beneath my feet. I run along the bay, the river, around the Botanical Gardens: all the places known to John Landy and Tom Wills.

  I turn into the stadium. The October sun is high, the breeze is keen; the spectators pack one side of the stadium. My body screams out for release from the pain, but my mind is free, two-thousand-five-hundred years since the first runner dropped dead at the feet of his king. The cheering crowd is a blur as I run for the finish line. A shout from the crowd: a voice I recognise.

  I see him in front of me, on the final bend. There, leaning on the railings, is my young son. He cups his hand like a trumpeter.

  ‘Dad! Dad! We spotted your cap,’ he shouts, ‘like you said we would. The colours. The red and black and gold.’

  I breathe deep the fresh spring air and whoop and howl and sprint like a cheetah to the finishing line, the cheer of my son edging me onwards.

  And there awaiting me, waving the I Zingari cap, is the gypsy of my dreams.

  His voice is clear and loud above the swell of the crowd.

  ‘No need to look over your shoulder, boy, just keep coming, right to the end. Out of darkness, through fire, into light.’

  SYNGE’S CHAIR

  I’ll sit here, in Synge’s chair, until my hair grows long down my back. I’ll wait for Joseph to come back or else just stay here with the wisp of him. Strange as it might be, just now, at this particular moment, it hardly seems to matter which it is. I sit here, in Synge’s chair, high above the sea, looking out over the Atlantic, grey and heaving. Jo’ll come back or he won’t.

  It was a year ago today that we arrived on Inishmaan. We’d taken the train from Dublin to the west coast. There was something about us being together without a woman, a wife, a mother, that seemed to interest people. In Galway, the old lady in the bed and breakfast asked where was Mrs Hennesy; the man in the post office looked at me curiously when I paid for the postcards and stamps.

  ‘Me and my son Jo want the folks back home to see what a grand time we’re having’, I’d said, just to make the point, just in case the postmaster and the people in the queue had other ideas. The Aran Islands hadn’t been on our itinerary. We’d had in our mind that we’d just get to Galway then head up north to the Giant’s Causeway. Maybe hire a car, maybe even hitch. Then on the first evening in Galway we saw a poster for the three islands (the big one and the small two small ones) and we decided it’d be fun. If nothing else, then just for the thrill of the boat trip.

  ‘We can pretend to be smugglers, pirates’, I said to Jo over a burger dinner. He looked up at me, stirring a chip in the pond of tomato ketchup he’d made on his plate. He smiled, as if he was the adult humouring the child, but said nothing. I’d no
ticed how quiet he’d become over these last months, ever since his mum had gone away and left us two together. This was my big idea. A trip together. Father and son.

  Everyone else got off at the big island. Jo and I were the only ones left on the boat. Except for the crew: an old man at the helm and an even older man in charge of the cargo. Jo sat on the crates of provisions from the mainland. It was three days after his tenth birthday and he was eating the last of the chocolates.

  ‘Got relatives?’ asked the older man. ‘On the island?’

  ‘No,’ I replied.

  ‘So you’ll be staying with the South American. At the bed and breakfast.’

  ‘We’ve booked,’ I said. ‘From Galway.’

  ‘That’ll be it then,’ he said and spat into the wind.

  The island appeared out of the heave and drop of the waves. It looked like a wedge of cheese, with the sandy beach and jetty backed by the incline and the huge cliffs beyond. Although I didn’t know it then, as the crewmen tied the ropes to the moorings, Synge’s chair would be awaiting me on the far, high side of the island. The old men nodded a goodbye to us as they busied themselves with unloading the cargo. No one else was around, so we took the only road leading away from the jetty. Jo grinned.

  ‘This is fun,’ he said.

  ‘Sure is,’ said I as we walked up the hill.

  The narrow laneway was corralled by shoulder-high stone walls. Peering over the top, I could see the land in the distance was parcelled up into small fields each divided by a maze of walls made from stones piled one on the other. Through an open gate we saw a calf with a fresh cowpat steaming off its back.

  ‘What’s that for, Dad?’ asked Jo.

  ‘No idea,’ said I.

  Later that night, around a roaring fire, we’d be told that it was the mother’s way of keeping the calf warm. Just like we’d learn that there was no grass on the island and that the ‘fields’ were created by centuries of seaweed being spread on the bare Burren limestone rock.

  The first person we saw was a small woman who waved at us from the top of the hill. I waved back. As we got closer I could see she had coffee-coloured skin and shiny jet-black hair. This must be the South American. I’ve always been the sort of person that has to ask the obvious questions. So, after we’d put our bags in the back bedroom and been called into the parlour for a cup of tea I turned to Christina (for that was the name of the ‘South American’).

  ‘I hope you don’t mind my asking, but I’m really curious to know how you ended up on Inishmaan.’

  She smiled. She was a kindly lady, as I would come to appreciate over the following days. She offered us a plate of freshly baked scones and poured tea from a large china pot. Jo’s ears pricked up. Like me, he always enjoyed a story.

  ‘A lot of the men leave here. It’s the great shame. My husband left for San Francisco when he was little more than a boy. He worked on the railways. All over the country. One night he met a couple of Irish guys from Waterford in a bar somewhere. I think he said it was in Chicago, but that may have been another time.’ She looked to one side as if she was filtering all her experiences and memories to locate the bar. Her accent had a soft Spanish lilt peppered with the occasional Gaelic beat. ‘Anyway, wherever it was, these two young men were up for trying their luck in the tin mines in Peru. My Paul followed them to Puno, where I was brought up. I’d never seen a chalky-skinned man with wiry ginger hair and he’d never seen anyone like me. And that’s how it happened.’

  ‘And back here?’

  ‘Ah, Paul always planned to come home. To work the land, such as it is. So he saved his money and came back and bought a tractor. He’s the one who hauls the seaweed up from the beach. All the others pay him to bring it to the fields. He’s doing some business on the mainland just now. Should be back in a week or so. So you might meet, if you’re still here, that is. Anyhow, I keep myself busy by taking in visitors,’ she said with a welcoming smile and the offer of another scone.

  At that moment there was the sound of a door opening at the back of the house and the bark of a dog.

  ‘That’ll be Ann-Maree,’ said Christina.

  Jo, who had been sitting quietly all the time we adults were talking, sat up in anticipation. ‘This is young Jo,’ said Christina, as Ann-Maree entered the room with a large Dalmation dog following close behind. The two children looked at each other, sizing each other up. The girl, tall and lithe, thick wavy chestnut hair, about twelve years old. The boy eager for a friend, all the better to be one with a dog. The dog sniffed the air, perhaps already aware that the two children would soon become inseparable.

  Thinking back, as I so often do now that Jo’s gone, there were two incidents that stand out, incidents that unsettled me. The first was on our second day on the island. It was before Ann-Maree had adopted Jo and taken him along with her Dalmation dog to explore the island. Jo and I were walking to Dún Chonchúir, an ancient oval stone fort up on the hill. Two young men were in the lane below, leaning on a wall. Jo was running along the remains of the ramparts when I happened to catch the eye of one of the men. He raised his hands as if holding an imaginary rifle, took aim and pretended to shoot at both Jo and I. Then he laughed, by no means a friendly laugh, and then went on talking to his friend. Jo didn’t see, which was good, but it suddenly made the whole place feel a bit strange, a bit sinister. The second incident was a few days later. Jo had been off with Ann-Maree and the dog all day long. I asked Christina if they were okay to be on their own and roaming. She said it was just fine. That everyone knew there was a man and his boy over from the mainland and all the islanders looked out for each other.

  ‘We’ve never had a policeman here,’ she said, ‘never needed one.’ She pointed down the hill and there they were. A boy and girl and a polka-dot dog, running across the island. ‘Standing here,’ she said, ‘you can see everything.’

  And so you could. Looking around I could see from cliff to beach, north to south, east to west. That night Jo couldn’t sleep.

  ‘What’s the problem, matey?’ I asked, as we settled down in our bedroom. ‘Ann-Maree took me to a cave and told me the Green Lady had told her to bring me to her. I was scared. Who’s the Green Lady, Dad?’ I told him I was sure it was just a game. Make-believe. That there was no Green Lady.

  ‘But she might be like a leprechaun’, he said.

  ‘Ah, leprechauns are different’, I said, trying to reassure him, but not quite sure how my logic would hold up. So I changed the subject by telling him a story about a boy who could fly and be invisible at the same time.

  Soon the fresh air and all the exercise got the better of Jo and he began to doze. He turned on the pillow and just as I leant over to kiss him he asked, ‘When will Mum come home?’

  ‘When she’s finished writing her play’, I said. ‘Then we’ll all go together to the theatre and see it on the stage. The Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Now won’t that just be grand?’

  Siobhan had always wanted to be a great writer. I first met her at a poetry reading at the Clarence Hotel, down by the Liffey in Dublin. From day one she made it clear her writing was the most important thing to her. It was that single determination, that unbridled passion, that most attracted me to her. The fact she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever set eyes on was a bonus I couldn’t deny, what with her flame-red hair and Monroe body. If she wasn’t writing, she’d be talking about writing. If we were making love and an idea came to her she’d stop whatever we were up to, lean over the bed and scribble something in her small notebook with one of the pencils she kept all over the house. Her ‘now where were we?’ was our secret joke.

  While I was out at work trying to teach school truants basic literacy she’d stay at home writing poems and short stories. She was in training for the great Irish novel. Her aim was to mingle the gravitas and oddness of Joyce and Beckett with the wit and lightness of JP Donleavy and Edna O’Brien. When she fell pregnant with Jo she became deeply depressed. She wouldn’t countenance abortion (one
time she actually said ‘once a Catholic’), but couldn’t see how a child would be anything other than a barrier and encumbrance to her writing. So when he was born she’d express milk and I’d feed him. It was I who took him to the swing park, the kindergarten, the school open days. I went part-time at work and we moved to Bray, on the coast south of Dublin, to cut costs.

  Three years ago Siobhan came second in a short-story competition. The judges praised the dialogue. One said it had a rare theatrical quality. So Siobhan decided the great novel could wait and she would become a playwright. Every morning, long before I’d get Jo up for his breakfast and dressed for school, she’d be striding off to Bray Head, along the path by the railway line, past Sugar Loaf Mountain and then down to Greystones. Along the way she’d be talking to herself and scribbling snippets of dialogue in her notebook. The play came to obsess her. Sometimes I thought she’d go mad with the intensity of it. The hold it had over her (and our lives) was frightening. Then one day she told me she was going to New York, that our domestic life was stifling her and she needed to be some place where she could ‘really’ write. Siobhan had a journalist friend who’d offered to put her up. She said she’d wait tables to pay for her food. Anything it’d take.

  ‘Can’t you do that here?’ I pleaded. And ‘what about Jo, our son?’

  But she’d made up her mind. Her bag was already packed and the taxi ordered. She was gone before Jo came home from school and it was left to me to explain. He cried and asked if he could sleep in my bed. About three weeks later a card came addressed to Jo. The picture was of the Statue of Liberty and his mother said she was fine and happy in her new home. That’s all we got. He kept it under his pillow and fell asleep with it next to his cheek.