You mean in my uniform?
No, Pat. In your nude. With no clothes on.
No way, Coyne retorted immediately, turning around towards her. She could put that out of her head immediately. No way was he going to become part of this running archive in art. He wouldn’t be trapped on canvas. And certainly not in the nude. Whatever about living in reality, he was sure as hell not going to allow himself to be immortalised in fucking art.
And you better give up those ideas, Carmel. You’ve gone far enough. This art business has gone to your head, love.
The art teacher, Gordon Sitwell, said Carmel was very good. Week by week he watched her making great progress.
You’re coming on very nicely, Carmel. I think you’ve got real talent.
At the end of the class, when most of the other students had already drifted on home and Carmel was gathering up her materials, Sitwell leaned on a table and said he had been meaning to talk to her.
I’m impressed with your work.
Thanks, she said. But she wasn’t going to allow herself to be flattered too much. She was a married woman with three children, afraid of letting the whole art thing get out of perspective.
And you’re not getting quite so much paint on your nose any more, he joked. Carmel instinctively ran the back of her hand over her nose to check.
Only joking, Sitwell said. I seriously think you’ve got what it takes. Look at the skies you paint. They’re really quite… visceral.
I’ve never really done this kind of thing seriously before, she said. Only with the children at home. You know, crayons and stuff.
Sitwell was disappointed. Didn’t like her downgrading her own talent like that. Wanted his students to think big. To let go of all the emotional domestic traps that held her back from real self-expression.
You speak the language of colour, he said. I run a workshop from time to time. Only for the really talented, mind you. I think you would be good on portraits and human form.
A workshop, Carmel stammered.
Think it over. I think you could make a career of it.
Oh no, Mr Sitwell. It’s only for pleasure.
Maybe they were right. Coyne needed a break. Over the next few weeks he tried to take things easy. Tried to get closer to his family. He wanted to get back to basics with them. He got a call from one of his old drinking companions, Vinnie Foley, but he put the binge on the long finger. Most of Coyne’s friends had disappeared or moved out of reach somehow. He went for pints occasionally, but he was more inclined to devote his life to his work and his family. Vinnie Foley was an advertising executive now. Look where we’ve all ended up, Vinnie would say, before he went on his own public relations monologue. And you couldn’t talk to somebody who was constantly reviewing life like it was a comparative study.
Coyne had too much to do. He had to look after his mother, who lived on the outskirts of the city. Make sure she was safe. His sister was in England. His brother Jim lived down the country, so it was up to Coyne to protect her. He drove out there to erect wire grids on the downstairs windows at the back of the house. He had the sudden feeling that his mother was in great danger and prone to attack. She stayed indoors all the time now, just watching TV. He put a massive, ugly bolt on the back door and felt better after that. It eased his conscience as he walked away from his old home with the feeling that he had left his mother locked in safely behind him, like the Sean Bhean Bhocht – the old woman of Ireland besieged and incarcerated by wire grids of immobility.
Coyne felt he was on top of things. He achieved moments of deep intimacy with his family. One day, he just told everyone to get into the car. He was going to buy them all chips. Jennifer and Nuala giggling in the back of the Escort, touching tongues until Carmel told them it was disgusting. The local chipper was closed, so Coyne just drove on as though he was going to drive for ever.
Left or right, he said at each junction, and they all said different things until they eventually arrived far away in Bray, at the amusement arcade on the seafront. They bought chips and went on the dodgems. Carmel and Jennifer versus Coyne and Nuala. Jimmy in a car of his own. There was nobody else around and they had the whole place to themselves. Jimmy drove in a figure of eight, looking up at the sparks on the electric cage, colliding with everyone. Nuala’s bag of chips hopping up in the air out of her hand, making her cry. Flattened chips all over the dodgem track. Carmel laughing like she’d never laughed before, head jolting back, hair bouncing up around her head like she was in some shampoo ad.
For once, Coyne heard nothing but the sound around him of the dodgems and the video machines and the camel race. No inner voices telling him to carry out some impossible goal. He smiled at the woman in a cardigan inside the glass office with the towers of tenpenny coins. The sound of a pop song was hanging over everything like a soft duvet, eliminating the past as well as the future, pinpointing just one feeling of warmth, love and utter joy. Can’t live, if livin’ is without you – Can’t live, can’t live any more. Coyne had lost consciousness. He was entertaining his emotions, afflicted by a great longing to be swallowed up in this comic bubble of happiness for ever.
Then they moved on to play the Tin Can Alley, where the whole family threw coloured balls into a red dustbin from which a woolly cat peeked out every few seconds. Coyne with all the remaining chips stuffed in his jacket pocket, lifting up handfulls of balls to bring the score up so that they would win a free game and be able to stay there for ever, game after game. Jimmy like his dad, serious and determined. Jennifer and Nuala throwing one ball every minute between them. And Carmel just leaning on the rail in weakness, unable to breathe with the pain of laughter.
Do you want to go away? he said to her that evening when they got home again. He had eventually built up the courage to ask her, and she looked up to see what he was getting at. What possessed him?
Away to the west. A break. Just the two of us.
Like lovers? She laughed.
An autumn break, like. I just thought we should try and get away together more often.
Out to the west. Brilliant, she said.
Carmel had already begun to imagine the trip as a great art excursion, giving her a chance to do some outdoor work. Mountains, coastline, bogs; provided it wasn’t raining. He let her make all the plans. She phoned up the tourist board looking for a cheap hotel. Bought an easel so she could stand and paint the sun going down over Galway Bay.
And so they were off. Late one Friday morning, Mrs Gogarty waved goodbye from the door as Carmel and Pat drove away. The children had been bribed with sweets and promises of new toys. The last beep of the horn seemed so final.
They drove through Ireland with the blues on the car stereo. It was the first time in ages that Coyne and Carmel had actually listened to music together. My God, why hadn’t they thought of doing this before? How green everything was. They had been out of touch with nature. Carmel thought she was looking at cardboard cut-out cows. All the familiar landmarks from the hitch-hiking days – Newland’s Cross, Newbridge, Kinnegad. They were heading west, into the sun. Subliminal blue flashes of the Atlantic already appearing in their minds like holograms of past journeys. They stopped for lunch in Athlone and on the last part of the journey Carmel changed into a teenager. Sang along with the songs on the car radio, giggling. It was as though the glass of wine at lunch had gone to her head and she tried to dance in the front seat, moving her shoulders; embarrassingly happy; happy beyond any of her wildest dreams.
At the hotel in Galway, the receptionist apologised for the renovations. There was dust all over the place and dirty footprints of workmen on the carpets where the plastic sheeting had shifted. Walls had been broken through in some places. In others, new plasterboard walls had gone up. But the bar was still in business as usual. The dining-room had a massive sheet of plyboard over the window holding out the wind.
They were led through a maze of
corridors and little steps going up, down, then back up again into an extension which was not finished. In some places, the roof had not even gone up yet. Smell of paint and bitumen everywhere. Men hammering and whistling all around. A sign in the hallway apologised for the inconvenience on behalf of the management. Right beside it, an attempt to restore the sense of hospitality with a gilded print of a child playing with a kitten. All covered in dust. At the end of the corridor, they were shown into a room overlooking the Corrib river. The smell of fresh paint was intoxicating and a new picture of horses galloping through canyons at night hung on the wall. The bathroom was all in pink. And Coyne’s Garda obsession with time noticed that the ever-present digital clock stood at 4:44. Enjoy your stay.
It’s a shagging building site, Carmel.
It doesn’t matter, Pat. We got twenty-five per cent off.
Carmel threw herself across the bed. There were men passing by the window, clanking down the steel emergency staircase outside in their boots. Coyne closed the curtains and threw the room into a tropical yellow and green forest interior. The duvet had apple blossoms and red apples at the same time. Above them, the men were hammering, shifting pieces of felt and plyboard, whistling and laughing. Soon they would be knocking off for pints, which increased the urgency in their work.
Come on, Cowboy, Carmel said.
Coyne pointed at the ceiling. Indicating the audience above. But she pulled him down on the bed beside her. Unzipped his trousers in such a hurry that he thought she was looking for money or something. Pulled up her dress to show him that she was wearing no underwear, and had come all the way from Dublin like that, arriving in Galway with the Atlantic breeze whistling around her thighs. What if a gust of wind had blown her dress up? At the hotel as she got out of the car? Was she going to walk around like that all weekend? Until she met an almighty squall up on Eyre Square and ended up looking like an inverted umbrella, exposed to the entire western world. But there was no sense in trying to talk because somebody had started using a drill outside and plunged the whole place into a sound-shadow. She began to kiss him. With the noise of the hammering and sawing and shouting, they made love. She drew him on top of herself, on the apple duvet. Smothered him with her tongue and pinned his buttocks down with her hands. In front of all those workmen, you could say. All that violence and passion on a Friday afternoon. The noise around them urging on the fury of love. His breathing like that of a labourer. Her shouts merging with the shouts of men outside, beating the last Friday afternoon nails into the timber planks above.
They fell asleep with all that clamour in their ears. A deep afternoon sleep from which they would never wake up. They might as well have been dead. No amount of noise could raise them out of the torpor of this love-drugged sleep. It was only after the men had gone away that Coyne eventually roused himself out of the coma in a great panic, sweating, as though he’d been left behind in utter emptiness. He had never experienced such absolute silence before.
When Carmel woke up, she found Coyne naked at the foot of the bed, his hair all wet, rubbing his back with a towel. He had just come out of the shower and she reached up to slap his buttocks.
There was a naked man in my room, your honour, she laughed and ran away into the bathroom before he could lash back with his towel.
Pat Coyne was the most complicated man in Ireland. He bore that slightly troubled expression of a man with an indeterminate mission. He was no messer. He was waiting for a crisis, some apocalyptic occasion when he could really come into his own. 1916 might have been a good year for him, but he was born half a century too late, looking ahead to the next major event and resenting the complacency around him, as though all that humour and laughter in the country was denying the presence of real disaster underneath. Right from the beginning, Carmel could see that he was devoted to sorting out the world.
Stubborn as hell too, he was. And full of contradictions. Always coming out with his own notions on the way things should be done, even down to the small details like whether to go for wooden or plastic clothes pegs. The kind of man who would remind you of what gear you were in, and give you firm instructions on the most direct way from A to B. The kind of man who could fix the washing machine as if he was dealing with a broken heart, and interfere with the buttons of your blouse with the detachment of a gynaecologist. Stopping to admire the design features of the bra strap.
He was no pain in the arse, though. And there was a soft side to him as well. A gentleman, who occasionally allowed people to talk him into things. Her man, protective and courteous, drawing on chivalry from a bygone age.
He was afraid of affection, however. As though affection was always something progressive, leading up to a goal. Making love was one thing, but affection was really scary. Ireland was not a very tactile country. It was a place where people touched each other with words. Songs. Jokes. The kind of verbal intimacy of islanders. And Coyne was not a groper, or a poser, or some kind of bedroom hero. His advances came in the shape of ideas. Thoughts. Observations. Pronouncements on the environment. Projections about the future. He touched her with words and silent spaces between words.
In a way, you didn’t marry one person, Carmel always said. You married a place, an era, a set of pop songs and world events that all merged into a general drift towards one person. You were in love with a gang. In love with the pubs you drank in, the cafés, the arch at Stephen’s Green, the taxi driver who once let you off with half the fare. It was group consciousness. She recalled the clothes, the way she wore her hair, the clumpy high heels, the expressions everyone used at the time. The jokes, the repetition, and Vinnie Foley’s stories in which they all appeared like characters in a soap opera. Billy Burke’s enigmatic laugh. Deirdre Claffey’s father’s car. All the other friends who had now emigrated. And Pat.
She had come away with Pat. She had married a Garda. A good man. Could have been more ambitious and ended up in a right mess with Vinnie Foley. It was only later on that you realised your luck. Even though she remained loyal as ever to that collective feeling, to whatever song was in her head at that time, to the Lakes of Ponchartrain, to the Rolling Stones, or even the Bee Gees, she had now become an individual. Somebody with biography. Only years later, with three children and a unique memory, had she thought of doing something for herself. And she would not allow that moment of individuality to be consumed by her family. She was determined to become an artist.
That night they sat over dinner in a Galway restaurant as though they had gone right back to the beginning, the first moment alone together. A dangerous moment. With the silence left behind by workmen still ringing in their ears.
She had the Chicken Butler Yeats, with its golden, crisp breadcrumbs. Coyne almost exploded when he saw the T-bone Bernard Shaw on the menu; wanted to rant at the factual sloppiness of the management until she told him to calm down. They were on holidays. And who cared if Shaw was a vegeterian.
Later, Carmel was shifting the last crumbs of chocolate gateau around on her plate, listening to Pat talking about consumerism. He hit her with a wave of statistics. Did she know how much Coke they drank per capita in Iceland. Did she know that they drank more Coke in Northern Ireland than they did in the south. He was about to come to his conclusion, his vision of the future. It all culminated in cataclysm, in pollution – the end of the world. But he was so enthusiastic about it, so committed to that vision of miasmal disaster, that it came across the table to Carmel like words of love. If the universe came to an end that moment, Pat Coyne would say: what did I tell you, Carmel?
Do you realise what they pump into the lakes, he went on, with light radiating from his eyes. And the sea. Look at the Irish Sea, full of nuclear crap.
Pat, don’t start getting worked up on the ecology again, she said.
Coyne poured more wine.
Look at the Black Sea, he said. A cauldron of filth and gunge, like a thick soup with all these big lumps. Dead horses and t
hat kind of thing. Islands of floating ordure.
Come on, Pat. We’re eating.
The world is shagged, Carmel. I’m telling you.
Carmel looked wonderful. She was wearing a pearl necklace borrowed from her mother. Her hair was clamped up at the back with a spangle the children were afraid of, because she called it jaws and chased them around the bedroom with it, like teeth going up and down. In the light of the candle, her face was illuminated by a kind of Mediterranean warmth.
But Coyne talked as if he had a big cardboard box around his head. Massive boulders of ice had come loose in the Arctic, he cautioned. Something was happening. The depth of the permafrost was shrinking each year. And did she want to know what was going to become of the melting ice caps? Rain. More clouds and more shagging rain. It was all going to be dumped on Ireland, that’s what. I’m telling you, Carmel, he said, holding her under a spell of doom with the power of his forecast, there’s going to be another flood soon. Wait till the water starts coming up to our front door.
In a feckless, end-of-the-world decision Coyne ordered two brandies. A sign of abandoned hope.
Come a day very soon though, he continued without a hitch in his delivery, when water will mean everything. Everywhere else will be suffering the biggest drought in history. The world will have its tongue hanging out and water will become as expensive as oil. Then we’ll have the last laugh. Us here in Ireland and all the rain.
With a triumphant look in his eyes, he sat back, sniffing the exotic liquid in his glass as though he could measure it for toxic waste. He was thinking wooden barrels collecting rainwater at the gable end of each house. Rain-money. Water-sheiks. Selling bottled clouds from Croagh Patrick to the tourists. He was drunk on a distant notion of future prosperity. Carmel looking across the table at him in solid agreement. Waiting for a moment where she could speak.
Pat, she whispered. I’ve never been so happy.
Yes, he said, as though she concurred with his predictions of chaos.
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