I’ll miss Gav – he’s a great kid. Looks more like his mother than his father, thank God, but he worships the ground I walk on. I’ll miss putting him to bed, and reading to Chloe, my one and only. Deirdre will go ballistic when she finds out what I’m up to – or when I tell her; I don’t have a plan. She’ll use Gav and Chloe to get back at me and squeeze me dry. I’m under no illusions about that and I can’t say I won’t deserve it. I hope I can still bring him out on the boat, Gav loves that, and I’ll surely get some custody rights. But I know the way the courts treat fathers, too.
So, why am I even doing this? I’m not quite sure. It’s not as if Emma’s drop-dead gorgeous or anything. Or even that sexy, although I have been fantasising about those lips and that tongue.
She asked me a few more questions in the café, before leaving. Mainly about sociological issues to do with fame, reputation, group behaviour and leadership; I didn’t even attempt to answer them – what do I know about that stuff? I told her she should talk to Dinny. Part of me wanted to drag out the conversation and keep her there, part of me wanted to process it, to take five and think about what was happening; so I let her go.
She never asked me about Sully leaving and I did wonder if she knew more than she was letting on. Dinny wouldn’t have told her, but his daughter might have. I’ve met that girl, I can’t remember her name – I guess she’s not a girl any more, she’s a woman too – and she’s a bright spark.
After Emma left the café, I rang Niamh and told her to cancel my next client, that I didn’t feel great. I ordered another coffee and tried to make sense of what had just happened. I rang Niamh again and told her I was taking the rest of the day off, and I headed up Barrack Street. As I was walking around The Lough fifteen or so minutes later, I had an idea. I stopped and just stared into the water. It was one of those light-bulb moments.
Maybe in the same way that I was glad of Sully’s cast-offs, Emma would be too. Maybe I’m as close to Sully as she can get – in a way I’m another cast-off, we all are. Maybe that’s really what she wants, so I could be in with a chance.
Yes, I had a lot more to tell her, but I held it all back. Even before she left the café, I already knew why. I wanted to meet her again, I wanted to look at those eyes, I wanted to hear her story, and I needed an excuse. Or maybe I didn’t need an excuse – this is all a bit new to me.
And that’s why I’m sitting here now in front of this laptop, looking at this email. Trying to click SEND. She gave me her email address – two addresses, in fact: one for UCC and one gmail. The gmail address is [email protected] – I’m not sure what the ‘14’ stands for. It doesn’t matter; nothing does, really, except meeting her again, getting out of this drifting current and moving in the direction I want.
So.
Here we go:
Hi Emma,
Nice to meet you the other day and to hear about your very interesting thesis. Brought me right back, I can tell you. Actually I have a few other things about Sully you might like to hear about, if you’re interested. Especially the whole destiny thing – I’ve been thinking about that. I forgot to tell you where he is now, and what he’s up to.
I’m busy during the day this week and next – how about we meet in Tom Barry’s some evening, after 6? Let me know what day suits. All are good for me except Thursday. You can get me on my mobile, which I already gave you, or you can message me on Facebook.
All the best,
Paul O’Neill
It’ll have to do. I want to reel her in and I hope she’ll take the bait to get as close as she can to Sully boy. But I don’t want to sound desperate, either. She probably has a boyfriend, though it doesn’t say so on Facebook. She accepted the friend request straight away. And she gave me those email addresses. I wonder, too, if I’m the one doing the fishing or if it’s her. Only one way to find out, I guess.
Click the SEND button, you coward. Click it. Do it.
Why am I hesitating? Like I said, I’m frightened. Well, nervous, maybe. I’m giving up a lot. I know, I just know, that by moving the cursor over the button and by clicking that mouse, I’ll be setting in motion a series of events over which I won’t have much control. A lazy, drifting current can turn into a raging torrent pretty damn quick.
Fuck it.
Click.
The Glory of That Day
Art is a strange desire. It was conceived inside me when I was eight years old, when I took part in a thing of splendour and immortality. It was an early conception and it has been a patient gestation. But now it longs to be out, to be freed. It is sweet but sharp. It is pitiless. It is hot and pulsing, piercing, prising, growing so that it can cut me open, ribbon my flesh, cast aside my blood. I can see my metal flowing out of me, placental, as in a messy birth. Streaming like hundreds of baby spiders out of an egg, into a webbed and dusty unknowing world. Into life. Into art.
Saoirse Keane knew she was seeing everything in London with new eyes. With ravenous eyes, gorging herself with as much as she could take in. Now that she was leaving in two weeks, maybe for good.
She glanced around the carriage at a typical Sunday morning Central Line scene: the usual array of multi-ethnic faces, everyone engrossed in maps or books or screens except for two chatting Sikhs, immaculate and proud.
She pulled at and smoothed down her jersey, the Banner saffron and blue. Her number, 15, proudly displayed on her chest and her back, the camogie crest on the right, the Clare crest on the left and the B.G.D. logo on the blue band below them.
It all sprang from that wonderful, terrible final, of course – fifteen years ago now – when Cillian McMahon flopped and she met him after the match, and he had been no less than a beautiful wounded Rubens’ Saint Sebastian. Her poor mam had to console her all the way home in the car, and shush Shane because whenever she cried he did too. But she had been hooked.
After years of camogie with her beloved Sixmilebridge, she’d put on the saffron and blue of Clare herself on a sunny May day, in a minor match against Galway. The pride she’d felt when she ran onto the Cusack Park pitch with her band of sisters, all helmeted up for battle and glory.
The highlight, when she was eighteen, was being picked at corner-forward against Wexford in the Senior All-Ireland semi-final in Thurles, even if they were hammered out the gate. It was the last time, too. London was calling. Art was calling. But she still had the jersey and wore it on match days. She straightened her back, breathed deeply and tugged the material down.
The train pulled in to Marble Arch. She noticed a poster for The National Gallery: Michelangelo and Sebastiano. She’ll go next week, though the installations at the Tate Modern are more her thing. Someday her work will stand in that great cavernous hall, too, and people will wonder. Someday. Maybe this MoMA prize will go on tour. Imagine, lil’ ol’ Saoirse Keane, the pride of The Bridge, commissioned by The Museum of Modern Art, New York city.
She still glowed with the memory of that Observer review of her first exhibition, after graduation. She knew it by heart: Keane’s gigantic pairs of figures, enmeshed and immersed in one another, as though locked in an eternal Olympian agon, rusted weapons and heads flowing out of Herculean torsos, like inverted Bourgeois spiders’ legs – a triumph of scale and ambition.
She would have her own Maman too, and those stuck-up New Yorkers knew it and wanted in on the show.
Her fingers tingled in her lap with the thought of it: the soft power of the pencil, sketching ideas, forms, pulling them out into the world. The immensity of the metal, its permanence, the fervid heat of the welder, that ‘puff’ sound it makes when, god-like, she ignites it. That white flame, the pieces coming together, freed into form. The elation when it begins to breathe itself into life, into the timelessness of the Burghers and the Grandes Femmes.
She tapped the screen of her iX3. Nothing. Carlos was still sulking about her not inviting him to Shane and Max’s to watch the match. Well, not to watch the match, but to get a free lunch and lots of good claret – she shou
ld have kept her mouth shut about that. He wasn’t the one either, but he’d do for now; with those hands and those big brown eyes and that fine strapping Catalan cock. But the moods! And the neediness. What’s that Grandad Seamus used to say? ‘God, give me strength.’
Why were they always so needy? Maybe the Americans would be different.
But it was great to see Shane so happy again, with loveable old Max to mammy him. Just what he’d needed after Colin did the dirt. Now they were living it up in their little Shoreditch pad, all prim and neat. She was just glad she didn’t have to mammy him herself any more, the way she’d been doing since she was four and Shane was six and she’d flattened Tommy Ward, Traveller or not, for picking on him. But look, there it was. He was happy again, that was all that mattered, and he had Sky Sports on his TV, and Clare were back in the All-Ireland final.
She smiled, anticipating the lunch and the wine and the match, and her nerves, and screeching at the TV, and Shane and Max escaping with their dogs for a walk up and down Brick Lane to show each other off.
Two Kilkenny men boarded the train at Oxford Circus, sporting the black and amber. They saw her and grinned. One of them – tall and fair-haired with bright eyes – kissed the crest on his jersey ostentatiously. She smiled back. His hands were like something out of a Titian – enormous things, all bent and gnarled, a hurler’s for sure. She’d have loved a closer look, but they always got the wrong idea when she asked to look at their hands. Well, sometimes it was the right idea.
The Kilkenny men got out at Chancery Lane and the tall one smirked and beckoned her to follow. She smiled again and shook her head. We’ll see who’ll be smirking in a few hours, boy!
At St Paul’s she realised she’d cry whether Clare won or lost and when she’d see Cillian interviewed, as the manager; getting handsomer by the year, with his beard now greying at the edges. That first day when he came to give the training session to the camogie panel, she’d thought, child that she was, that he’d fall for her and leave his wife and they’d live happily ever after. The innocence. But she’d had other thoughts too, and she wondered if she could have made that happen. She told herself to forget about it. Half the girls in the county had a crush on him.
She’d known, even at sixteen, that she wanted out, that she had to get out. And that it had to be art. Only for all Miss Donnellan’s support with the portfolio and her scholarship to Goldsmiths, who knew if she’d ever have made it. But she would have too, somehow.
Rigour got her to London and rigour kept her high, and here she was now on the Central Line, for her last time in who knows how long. Soon she’d be taking trains from Brooklyn to the studio in Long Island. No stopping now. No fucking way.
She had thought she’d be a painter, but in her first year at Goldsmiths, when the sculptor Karen Foster saw her sketches of figures, she said: ‘Oh, my child, these are drawings for sculptures. They are so physical; I can feel them. They are hard, my dear. And so strong. Can you not feel them?’
So it was. Stainless steel at first, then cast iron and now her beloved bronze. When she walked among the Burghers of Calais on that class outing to Paris, the anguish of their hands ran through her like long knives. And when she stood under her first Maman at the Tate Modern, and then the one in Bilbao, she knew. Heart and soul, she knew.
She had been walking in a daze outside the Guggenheim in the rain by the river, in and around those spider’s legs, again and again, looking, longing, sketching, touching, marvelling, until that Basque family had to drag her away to have dinner with them. They thought she was high on drugs, but it was something else.
As the train pulled into Liverpool Street Station, she rose to leave. She could feel the mounting sense of elation on the escalator, as it climbed up towards the iridescent light, all the people drifting by unseen, unheard, unknowing. That match, her first time in Croke Park. The anticipation for days beforehand, the early start, the long drive, the walk to the stadium, her little flag, her sleeveless top, her long flowing skirt. Her plastic sandals, saffron and blue. The saffron and blue streaming magnificently all around Croke Park. The red and white. Brilliant. Dazzling. Climbing up the interminable concrete steps of the Upper Cusack and emerging out into a delirium of possibility. The pitch flaunting its grandeur below, the stadium arraying itself around her. The thunderous noise, its expectancy like a weight pressing on her, and she pressing back. The sound, that sound when Clare came on to the pitch, the frenzied roar of tens of thousands; Shane putting his hands over his ears to block it out, and she adding to it, shrieking ‘Up the Banner’ like a banshee, waving her flag, as if something primal had been freed within her, released. She, only eight years old, but rapt with an ecstatic, blissful radiance as the teams paraded around the pitch behind the band. Aflame, aglow, like new starlight.
Cillian the last man in the line, number 10, with his lovely lime-green boots and his tanned legs and fair hair, his blue helmet in his hand, his faceguard glinting in the sun.
In that heartbeat the metal had materialised inside her, founding itself. Her metal began a knowing wait for its time, to breach her and to will itself into form with the fertile heat of the white fire that she had become. She knew this now; she thought about it and wrote about it often enough.
The straining of the hurlers that day, their exquisite power. Their timeless grace. Their muscle, bone, sinew, blood, skin. The ruthlessness of them, the brutality, their cold will. Their hands clutching, opening, reaching.
And they calling to her, demanding her to reform them within her metal. All the hurlers of the past, the present, the future, calling.
Those thirty men – and she inside there with them all. At one with it all. The grass, the sky, her plastic seat, the high roof above them, the noise, her flag, her skirt, her top, her sandals, the light, the heat, the sound, that sound, her mother and father, her brother, the Clare fans, the Cork fans, the hurleys, the sliotar, the hurlers – oh, the hurlers, their hands, immortal.
The marvellous truth of it all.
The game drifting like a shadow into pain. The heartless, pitiless reality of it – that Clare could lose and Cillian fail.
Ah, but the glory of that day. The glory of it all.
The glory, soaring.
Acknowledgements
They say it takes a village to raise a child and a book isn’t much different. My thanks to the From The Well Anthology 2017 (Smoke in the Rain and Other Short Stories) and The Honest Ulsterman for previously publishing versions of ‘Angels’ and ‘Fandom in The Context of Darren O’Sullivan, Cork Hurler’ respectively.
Several people have read some or all of the book and I want to thank them. First of all, Mary Morrissy gave me invaluable guidance and support when I first put it together. Madeleine D’Arcy supervised my MA in Creative Writing dissertation in UCC – whence this book emerged – and she was a wonderful supervisor and mentor.
My writers’ group have been great friends, advisors and supporters and they are an ongoing godsend. They are Anna Foley, Mark Kelleher and Eileen O’Donoghue.
Thomas McCarthy read an early draft and his inspiration and advice was invaluable.
Thank you so much to my other readers and advisors, including Ciara Coakley, David O’Callaghan, Declan Evans, Norma Coakley, Dermot Coakley, Colm Coakley, Úna Ní Cheallaigh, Mary Harrington, Billy O’Callaghan, Holly Cooney, Anna O’Herlihy, Mary O’Herlihy, Donna O’Leary, Adrian Connolly, Walter Wynne, Margaret von Mensenkampff, Armorel Manasseh, Niamh Kindlon, Mary Minnock, Martin O’Donovan and Triona Ryan. Apologies if I’ve forgotten anyone.
Heartfelt thanks to all at Mercier Press: Sharon O’Donovan, Deirdre Roberts, Wendy Logue and Alice Coleman, but especially Mary Feehan, Patrick O’Donoghue and Noel O’Regan for their faith that hurling and literature could be a good match. Noel’s sterling advice, encouragement and acute editing have been hugely beneficial to the work. Wendy’s keen eye and attention to detail have also been a great help.
I want also to thank my lectu
rers in The School of English, UCC, during my MA in Creative Writing: Dr Eibhear Walshe, Professor Jools Gilson and especially Mary Morrissy, who taught me three fiction-related modules.
Thanks too to all my classmates and fellow-writers in UCC, for their critiquing, collegiality and friendship during the year: Beth Buchanan, Ed Cashman, Jenni DeBie, Robert Feeney, Anna Foley, Colm Furlong, Kathleen Hickson, Nicole Johnson, Alison Kavanagh, Mark Kelleher, Sam Lai, Rosi Lalor, Megs McHenry, Mira Mason-Reader, Julian Munoz, Una Ní Cheallaigh, Eileen O’Donoghue, Aoife O’Leary, Conor Roswell, Dominik Shultz, Nora Shychuk and Kelly Warburton.
Above all, love and gratitude to Ciara and my family, who have given me so much support down through the years.
About the Author
Tadhg Coakley graduated with first-class honours from the MA in Creative Writing in University College Cork in 2017. His stories have appeared in publications such as Quarryman, The Honest Ulsterman, and Silver Apples, as well as in the From the Well anthology. First Sunday in September is his debut novel.
About the Publisher
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