The boy’s fat dog down there, I would claim that. It wouldn’t like me, naturally, and I couldn’t travel with it, but I’ve taken a fancy to the thing. Too old to bark, too heavy to run away, I get a sick feeling watching it and knowing the way it’ll end.
We will come down the slope tonight, where the stream is, fast and quiet and I will try to be careful, even though we know there are no men here, not to speak of. I’ve seen our people killed by women and grandfathers, children with unmanageable guns – you would think they might die a little more willingly, not having the proper strength or skills to resist us correctly, but that’s not the case. They despair very quickly and that makes them wicked. Dying to save each other, they’ll thrash about and kill you with something so unexpected and ridiculous it’ll make you tired to think of it.
I will drop down, bounce and bounce, the sound of me and what I have with me, always the same. The closer I get, the longer the distance – it will gape for the last few yards, shrink me right down and make me angry. Without the hill to stand on, I get small, just like them. I leave the clean, running air and break through the band of house smoke, house stink, right into the smell of them, their taste, and then I know that I am not like them, I am sure of that, because I am living and they will die. The air comes clear after that, smooth, almost on them, the real presence. I never see that too well, except in blinks and flashes. That doesn’t matter, what I miss, I’ll dream over again.
I think that perhaps in the dark the dog won’t get it. Black dog, it could have a chance.
WARMING MY HANDS AND TELLING LIES
‘BUT IT’S SUCH a wonderful idea.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘Yes. I mean, ten years ago – to have written that. The millionaire’s house invaded by all the animals his jungle road had killed. Wonderful.’
‘They weren’t real animals.’
‘Well, of course not, but you made that clear. The thing is, you made them have the effect that real animals would, I mean, we felt for them.’
‘Felt sorry for them.’
‘Of course. We were sorry. Those eyes always watching him; the constant sound of their feet. When that tiny armadillo drowns . . .’
‘It drowns in the millionaire’s toilet.’
‘I know.’
‘And you actually think that works.’
‘Yes, I’ve said, haven’t I? I think it’s a wonderful story.’
‘Mm hm. They’re still making roads through the jungle, they’re still killing animals, destroying indigenous tribes.’
‘Well, one story . . .’
‘Exactly. One story wouldn’t change that. You’re right.’
She was peering at him again, he didn’t like that. She peered the way she might at a cloudy fish bowl, checking to see if something was still alive. He wondered what she was checking for in him.
‘I know you didn’t mean to say it, but you’re right. There isn’t any point in writing, because it does no good. It does nothing at all.’
‘But that . . .’
‘Means that I’ve wasted my life. That’s right. Is that what you came to find out?’
‘No.’
‘Then why did you come?’
Well now, he was sure he’d told her why. He couldn’t have been so nervous he hadn’t said. He told her before he arrived, before he even came to Dublin. He wouldn’t have come all this way without telling her first: a brief, careful letter, her glorious reply and then the phone call. Hearing that voice, almost unable to answer when she spoke that name, her name. She knew why he was here. She was being confusing, making him argue, making him say things he hadn’t meant. It wasn’t how he remembered her at all.
But, to be honest, how did he remember her? Monagh Cairns. Novelist and critic, Monagh Cairns.
She had come to his school one Friday and read some stories. He could only recall a part of one.
Each night, the men and women of the city would go to sleep. Before they climbed into their beds, parents would kiss their children and weep and then they would walk, round shouldered, to lie under thin, cold blankets and wait. Sometimes wives and husbands would hold hands.
Each night, in one or two of the low, dark houses something very terrible would occur. Folk would point at darkened windows in the morning, they would stare at bolted doors. They would say, ‘The Industrialists came there.’
He had written it down, maybe twenty times, each time slightly different, but mostly the same and although he had searched through every source he knew, he had never found a story by Monagh Cairns with a passage like it. He had never found a story about night-time disfigurements, or invisible creatures called Industrialists. Perhaps he imagined it.
He hadn’t imagined her. Lovely. He never could have imagined anyone so lovely.
Thanks to his later researches, he knew that she must have been forty or thirty-nine when he saw her first. Her second and final husband had left her that spring and she still had no children. She never would. Next spring, her third collection would be published. Good reviews. For another six years, she would stay in Scotland, then she would go to Ireland and fade out of sight.
He had been seventeen and when she arrived on that Friday, he was already waiting and watching and listening hard. He was there to make up for the others. Front row desk. He would show them he was good at this. They wouldn’t understand her the way he did. He read things, literature.
She surely must have noticed him when she stood so close to his desk. And maybe she had felt something too. He’d wanted her to feel how ready he was to know exactly what she meant, prepared to be outstanding for her, because she was outstanding, too. Mr Harrison had already told them she was a writer – she did that and nothing else. He couldn’t imagine what that must be like.
By the end of the afternoon, she had read them three stories, one of them very short and all about love. They were still in the silence after that story, having heard a woman talking, with their accent, about fears and excitements that didn’t seem even likely in someone so old. She really knew about love. One of the girls made noises as if she might cry, showing off.
Miss Cairns; Monagh – you were allowed to call her Monagh – had asked them all a question.
‘Are any of you interested in writing?’
He didn’t put up his hand. Nobody did, but he wanted to, he wanted to very much. He had always prayed for a moment that would alter the whole of his life and now it had come. That question. Her question had made it come. Something hot seemed to fill him and he knew this was it, for sure. He imagined the change must be howling out of his ears and down his nose. His hair must be starting to lift and he didn’t dare open his mouth, for fear of something luminous bursting out.
Monagh kept on speaking and he tried to catch her eye so that she would see him and know, by the way he was sitting, that really he wanted to write. As he remembered it now, she did look his way.
‘Why did you come, David? I can call you David?’
She didn’t seem very different, even today. Her hair was still a blonde that could be grey, or vice versa. It was long but wound about itself and sat very neat on her head. Once he had seen her wear a French plait in a television interview and there were photographs of her with a page boy cut and a perm. Sitting now in her living-room it was odd to have only one possible image of her. She seemed, somehow, less convincing like this.
Of course, time had passed and that did make for changes. After the move to Dublin, there had been no more photographs and five years had left her face surprisingly old. Monagh’s mouth seemed smaller and the line of her chin had blurred. She peered.
‘I came to see you, Monagh. I came . . . I thought I’d explained. The article.’
‘No, I don’t understand, no one would want an article about me. Not now. Scarcely then. You’d better . . . I don’t know, it’s all very confusing for me. I’m not used to this any more. How long are you here?’
‘Two weeks.’
‘Could you
come back tomorrow . . . no, the day after. Come back then; on Saturday. I’ve been ill, you see, otherwise I wouldn’t be at home. I have to work. Would you mind coming back?’
‘No, that’s fine, I don’t want to put you out, Miss . . . Monagh. If I came after lunch?’
He’d met her first on the Tuesday, half past four, by one of the ponds in St Stephen’s Green. He was to wait in front of the sign that explained the ducks. There were many varieties of duck.
The plane brought him in from Glasgow just before lunch. It didn’t take an hour, not even one hour from his home to hers. He could have done it any time. If he’d had the money. Now he could afford the plane fare, just about, and one whole fortnight in a reasonable hotel.
David’s room was small, mainly pink and grey. It smelled of disinfectant and chemical freshening. He filled the kettle provided and lay back on the bed, trying to let himself know he had arrived. Turbulence on the flight had left him quite unsettled, but he began to feel better now. What he should do, he should have a little tea without milk, put on the radio for music and read a few pages from ‘Nobody There’ – his favourite Cairns. That would put him in the mood, on her wavelength, let him get the feel of her. So to speak.
They dusted leaves from each other’s backs as they walked to the car. She pulled little twigs and fragments from the sleeves of his cardigan and swiftly brushed her fingers over his hair. Before they parted to open respective doors, she paused and allowed him a chance to kiss her. He continued to walk and fumble through his keys.
He dozed for almost an hour, dreaming of parkland and hares with grey blonde fur. Monagh’s forehead caught by the classroom sunlight, somewhere he saw that.
It was raining quite sharply by the time he set out for the green. He had decided to travel without an umbrella, but wearing a hat, because he felt more confident that way. Umbrellas made him uneasy, they seemed to demand the use of both his hands and he would find himself struck clumsy in the street. The hat and the long dark overcoat were much better.
He did want to look his best. For Monagh.
Striding out along the pavement, he knew he was at home with the city; dressed to fit a Joyce short story, or a fragment of Beckett prose; resonant, stylishly simple and a little out of time.
The way he had chosen took him through Merrion Square and he wanted to stop there and look at a few of the plaques. There was one to mark the house where Yeats had lived, one for Wilde and another for Le Fanu. At school and constantly reading, he had always assumed these people were Englishmen. As with Barrie and Buchan or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, success had made them automatically English.
He noticed the plaque for Daniel O’Connell – not a writer – but by this time he was running for the gallery steps. Over the road and through the high gate and up the path to shelter. His hat was beginning to droop and the bottoms of his trousers were clinging round his socks. He mopped his face with a handkerchief and blew his nose, his forehead stinging with cold.
He squeaked across the varnished floors, pausing in front of a high, glowering canvas which took its theme from the Book of Revelation. If David stared at it and partly closed his eyes, the overall effect was strangely warming. He remembered Monagh Cairns took ‘Revelation’ as a title once. Later, he passed a bust of Sheridan, looking young and tastefully dishevelled. Dead and famous and another Honorary Englishman. Beyond the final room, he found the cafe and a very large pot of tea.
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘English writers. Like Naomi Mitchison, Alistair MacLean – they’re Scottish writers, but they’re never described that way. They are assumed to be English; good equals English.’
‘Well, most folk have always known that and you could argue some cases either way. It’s a bit of a red herring, really, not the central issue, and what does it have to do with my work? I was never well-known enough to be Scots.’
‘I wondered what you thought. I wondered if you’d ever thought of going South.’
‘Instead of going West?’
He couldn’t mistake it, she was laughing at him. He’d seen an odd light in her eyes before, but now she was almost giggling. In a way, it was nice to see, but now he couldn’t tell if she honestly meant what she said.
‘Look, David, I could have moved to England, to France, to America, the fact is, it wouldn’t have worked. Nobody liked my work when I was in Scotland – don’t look like that, I’m not feeling sorry for myself. I mean nobody liked it enough for me to live. I could not make a living. I always had to do other work in order to finance my writing when the other work meant that I barely had time to sleep. I wrote or worked and existed, that was all, and it wasn’t worth it. I had to give up too much.
‘And I couldn’t move because I’m a Scottish writer. I don’t mean that it’s a betrayal to write elsewhere. I think it might have been, in my case, but that’s not what I’m saying. The fact is that, disconnected from Scotland, I find I don’t have much to write about. Scotland was my way in.
‘And I get homesick.’
‘But if you knew you would be homesick here and you knew you wouldn’t be able to write . . . Why?’
‘Because I don’t care any more.’
It wasn’t a good conversation to have as their first.
The rain had become a chill dust in the breeze as he found the right pond on the Green and stood in front of the sign with its painted ducks. His pause in the gallery seemed to have driven the damp against his skin. He was shivering.
Almost at once, he heard a call.
‘Mr Reid, David Reid? Hello, there. Come over this side, we’ll go to Bewley’s, have some tea. I should have thought it would rain.’
He turned and saw her standing across the grey lake. Even at that distance, the blue of her eyes was obvious; striking, he thought. He waved, then paused for a moment before he could make for the path. Seeing her there, it had seemed quite possible he would step out on to the water and then run to meet her.
In the steamy warm of Bewley’s with his second pot of tea, he watched her eat a raisin muffin, slicing it carefully into four. Sometimes she would lick her lips for crumbs and he noticed her tongue was a very pale candy floss pink. Just to ease her into talking, he outlined his Theory of the Honorary English.
‘David, what do you expect from a colonised culture? The better Scottish writing gets, the less it will matter. The work will improve itself, it won’t be competing with anything other than the best it can produce. It will be international.’
‘You sound quite passionate.’
‘Maybe.’
‘But you don’t want to write.’
‘It isn’t a question of wanting. There’s no point.’
‘You can’t believe that.’
‘Watch me.’
David didn’t go back to his hotel, not straight away. He had to walk. Monagh bent towards him when they parted, but only shook his hand. No kiss. He didn’t know how he felt. Monagh. Bitch. She was a disappointing bitch. Attractive in a lonely kind of way and a disappointing bitch.
It was dark and the rain was finished. As the sky cleared, the wind grew colder and he noticed he could see the stars. Looking up from the centre of Glasgow that wouldn’t have been possible, but the comparison didn’t please him. Dublin seemed to be the only capital that was uglier in the dark. Away from O’Connell Street the place seemed to pinch in and he wanted the nicotine and whitewash Glasgow sky. If that meant he was being parochial, he didn’t really care.
What had happened to the woman? She only seemed to come alive when she was saying that her talent had no point. How could anyone enjoy just tearing their life up like that? She was almost gleeful.
If she thought her writing was pointless, then where on earth was he? Drip-feeding a literary mirage with shitey freelance journalism. He wasn’t even a journalist, hadn’t written a story in months. Bitch.
Tomorrow, he was invited to her house. That would have been wonderful. But now he didn’t want to go. She wouldn’t talk
properly about writing, she was famously secretive about her private life, he had no idea why she wanted to see him again. He was mystified. And he had a piece to write about her. Did she know how hard he’d pushed to even get the chance to do it – a piece he really cared about? At the moment it would start with ‘Where is she now?’ and finish with ‘Fucking Dublin’.
The name of the pub escaped him. Quite probably, he never knew it. He drank Guinness which he didn’t like and made him sick. No one sang or spoke Gaelic, nobody laughed a hearty, Irish laugh. The faces in the gantry glass confused him. They could have been in Glasgow, his breed; sharp and dispossessed. But this was their own, independent country now, they should be changed. They had their own, Celticly twee money, their own army and they should be changed. They should be able to tell him how to change.
Finally flat in his hotel bed, David couldn’t get warm. Between his head aching and the deep cold in his feet, he didn’t think he slept at all until the morning. He missed breakfast.
Monagh’s flat, at least, was a pleasant surprise. She had the second floor in a square Victorian house built of pale brick. The street could have been in any London suburb. He climbed a flight of concrete steps and rang at a door painted crimson to match the wooden shutters and window frames. Clearly, there were still some things Monagh managed to care about.
‘Bless you.’
He’d sneezed almost as soon as she opened the door.
‘I thought you were looking chilled yesterday. You should be careful.’
‘Thanks, it’s alright. I’m mainly tired.’
That sounded more bitter than he intended. Monagh seemed to glow, while he’d spent the night in mourning for her career. Perhaps she really didn’t care.
They had tea. More tea. Then:
‘I should show you round. That’s the kind of thing you want?’
‘If you don’t mind; that would be nice.’
She steered him along the hallway to the kitchen, a room he guessed would be sunny at the right time of the year. Her bedroom was almost empty. Single bed. The bathroom, too was remarkably bare, not even an old leaf dropped from the ivy plant. David was about to ask her why she didn’t seem to have any books when she opened a final door. Her Bluebeard room.
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