It's Not Yet Dark

by Simon Fitzmaurice

  {

  So much history. The days I’ve lived. The places that linger, the single moment that stays, like something from a book you once read. Glimpses that live within us. We are strange.

  We want to know. But we don’t. If we knew how the body worked, there would be no disease. If we knew the mind, no pain. But there is too much to talk about. More mystery than history.

  I write in bits and pieces. Live in bits and pieces. People live in my mind. People I’ve touched. A coffee and a cigarette at a small wooden table, with a girl sitting next to me. Knowing and not knowing. Love.

  Pathways. Taken. Followed. And we end up having lived.

  Leaning against a car, on a sloped German street. Waiting for someone. Cloud and sun. It’s cold when it goes in. I look up, the warmth on my face. I see an approaching cloud. How long before I’m in shadow? I follow its path towards the sun. I catch myself. Close my eyes. Feel the warmth on my face.

  {

  My extraordinary wife. I wouldn’t change ALS. Those two babies in my arms. Their warmth against me. Rising and falling with my breath. I wouldn’t risk that for anything.

  Eucharist means thanksgiving. That’s how I feel. Thank you, Caesar. Thank you, all who watched over Ruth and Sadie and Hunter. I send out a thank-you. A beacon. Something. From as deep as you can go. To as far as you can reach. I will hold this day inside me for the rest of my life.

  {

  Six months now. Sadie and Hunter are fat beautiful balls of life, with hands that reach to touch my face. ALS fought back these last few months, leaving me in terrified panic, drowning for air.

  Last week I bit the bullet and admitted myself into hospital for the first time since I left in March of last year.

  It was St Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin, and the week I spent there changed my mind about consultants. The warm, sincere individuals I encountered treated me with the dignity of being a person, not a disease.

  I don’t know how other people handle ALS but sometimes it lays me so low that I don’t know how I will go on. I feel like I’m being tortured, a thousand little jabs, which on their own I don’t notice but slowly over time they start to hurt, until suddenly I’m crying. They’re tiny things I barely notice, little hurts I’ve grown used to. Someone I love not understanding me. One of the boys telling me about something I will never do again with them. The hundreds of urges that I have to do simple human things but cannot do, like sit on a couch with Jack and read a book and hold him, put my arm around him, tickle him. I think I’m doing fine, then realise I’m holding myself together with I don’t know what. Something unbreakable that pain keeps trying to break.

  And then my boys pass the doorway on their scooters. Dot. Dot. Dash. Or wander into the room in their pyjamas, in the middle of some elaborate world of lizards and kings, the youngest watching his brothers with silent eyes of glass. Or one simply stands in the doorway, looks at me and says, Hi, Dadda. And I remember.

  And I write. Writing is my fighting.

  {

  Some days you can just see clearly. Our meaning, what we value, is the most private part of us. It may just define us. It shapes everything we do, everything we say, everything we feel, everything we dream. It’s hidden, from others, from ourselves. There is no mirror to show us what we value. So often it is only revealed to us after the fact, in the long movie reel of memory. And when we see it, our heart stops, aching with recognition. It is a beautiful thing to see yourself.

  {

  I’m still alive.

  On the way home from the hospital I see my reflection in my computer. I have a black strap across my head and a white one under my chin, a pipe coming out of my neck and going over my shoulder. I look like some crazy desert horseman racing along the dual carriageway.

  I’m still alive. I seem to thrive on things trying to kill me. I’m still alive, you bastard.

  When I die, don’t say, Simon loved films, say, Simon had as much love in him as blood. That’s all. I’m racing towards a bridge.

  {

  What is man?

  I had a different life. Before this one. Before death stood beside me. My death.

  There is nothing romantic about death. It is terror.

  A life. Now glimpsed in photographs and memory, of Simon as he was. Walking, talking, eating, drinking. Breathing. Simon.

  How much is left of him? How much spans the divide between Before and After? What is Man? How much can be taken away and what is left?

  I had a different life.

  {

  The tree

  I’m lying on my back on the floor. The carpet in my room is blue. I’m in love.

  She is a blonde-haired girl whom everyone loves, though probably not as much as me. Her face does something to me. Her body.

  The carpet is threadbare but I like the feel of it beneath my fingers. This is my room. I’m fourteen.

  {

  I started writing poetry a year ago. Somewhere to put my pain. The things I can’t talk about. I have a friend to whom I show the poems. He reads poetry. He understands. I love him too. Look up to him. Want to be him. I tell him all my secrets. Like about this girl I love. He has the confidence to talk to her all the time, at school, when we’re down in the park. She touches him when he makes her laugh. But he does not love her. I don’t know who he loves. She does not know my name.

  I’m going to see her today. I know it. I put on the shirt I like best. There is an open day at her school and everyone is going. It’s the middle of summer.

  I cross the landing. My sister Kate is in her room, listening to music. She is an angel. She is ten. I look in as I pass. She has an altar on her mantelpiece to Mary. Statues of all shapes and sizes. I see her on her knees sometimes. She is afraid of infinity, of the idea that things go on for ever, of Heaven. She wakes up crying.

  I pass the door that leads up to the two attic rooms on the third floor. One is my older sister Ruth’s bedroom. I don’t go up there. She smokes out of her bedroom window. She is eighteen. The other day she came down her stairs and wordlessly handed me a book. The Pawn of Prophecy by David Eddings. I read it in a day.

  A few weeks ago Dad handed me a copy of The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck and said, You have to read this. A week later he gave me Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.

  I hear the radio from the kitchen. Mum is in there. She and I are friends. Mum is the centre of the family, a nucleus around which we orbit.

  In the hall I see the television is on in the family room. It’s Saturday. Dad is watching a film.

  Film is a religion in our house. You don’t speak during a film. You watch a movie from beginning to end.

  My father taught me to love film. As his father had loved it before him. Dad grew up in the golden age of cinema before television. He lived in the array of individual cinemas in Dublin. The first film I saw in the cinema was when we were living in Cork. The Cat from Outer Space. I was spellbound.

  When I was six I watched The Godfather with Dad. He talked me through all of the relationships. How Sonny shouldn’t have spoken outside the family. He cried when Marlon Brando says, ‘Look how they massacred my boy.’ My love of cinema began.

  {

  My dad’s brother, my uncle Bobby, is another cinephile. He is a polymath and the only adult I know with the patience to sit for hours and discuss anything at all. He is a part of our family and a massive influence on my life.

  {

  I’ve had a wonderful, happy childhood. But I can’t stay in the house for ever. I go out.

  {

  I walk across the road to the tree where the group of boys I hang around with congregate. They are not my friends. They are a group of boys who delight in the humiliation of others. Bullying is another word for humiliation. I don’t know why I hang around the tree with them. My desire to have friends outweighs the cost.

  I pass under the shadow of the tree. Straight away the slagging starts. They have noticed that I’ve made an effort with my clothes. They notice every
thing. Anything different. Difference is the currency of humiliation. I am different. A little chubby. A boy with two sisters, taught to love. An easy target.

  I don’t know how they notice my shirt. They start to say her name, that of the girl I love. My friend must have told them. He sits in the branches of the tree saying nothing.

  Last week we were all up in a building site, muddy after hours of rain. Someone throws a mudball at me. Within seconds the group is in a circle around me, pelting me with mud. I hold my hands up to my face. They are all laughing. My friend is just standing there. I think I see him throwing something. I’m not sure. When they stop I run home. I climb up the front of my house to my bedroom. As I’m stepping in through the window, my mother walks into my room. Seeing me, my face, my clothes, covered with drying mud, she makes noises and says words I cannot hear. I’m drenched in shame.

  {

  It’s my birthday. The doorbell rings. My parents are out and it’s just me and my gran in the house. I’m upstairs and I hear Gran opening the door. Voices. Laughter. I feel it in my stomach. I come into the hall. They are taking the piss out of my gran and I can see she’s getting flustered. She has Alzheimer’s. They know it. I take my gran gently by the arm, tell her it’s ok. She looks at me with frightened eyes and goes back into the house. I step out into the group of boys on the doorstep, closing the door over behind me. One of them laughs. I slap him in the face. He punches me in the stomach. I go down. They are all bigger than me. They get me up, make peace, cajole me, ask me am I coming out on my birthday. There is nothing in their voices. I close the door and walk out of the house, up the road.

  We walk for a bit, take a turn onto a smaller road. They form a circle around me and pound me with eggs. This was their plan. When they’ve finished, I push one of them, the leader, and say, I hate you. I mean it in my bones. He laughs in my face. I understand then that I mean nothing to him. My love or hate, nothing. And something changes in me. I walk home covered with egg and shell. It’s my birthday.

  {

  Standing under the tree in the shirt I like, I see them all from a distance. My friend is not my friend. He is cowardly. And the others are not just cruel to me but to each other. They snipe and chide and belittle. It’s their only means of expression. It’s pathetic.

  {

  We go down to the school. Me and this group of boys. I know she will be there. We wander through the school. The corridors are packed with adults and children. We enter a classroom. It has another door at the other end. There is artwork covering one wall and we start to walk past it as she enters through the other door, moving towards us, among a group of girls. Straight away the slagging starts, all around my ears. I feel my face grow red. I see her. She is beautiful. Unearthly beauty. Coming towards me. Burning inside and out, the words of the boys around me become a dull throb. I don’t care about them. I care about this girl.

  {

  Four pieces of paper

  My poetry is no longer about sadness, it is about joy. Love. The world around me. I have woken up.

  If, in the earlier stage of boyhood, physical prowess was the defining characteristic, it is not in this stage.

  I am no longer chubby. Coming from a house of love and women, I know how to speak to girls. In the place of brute force I have developed a sense of humour. I leave them in the dust.

  {

  Girls. The reason for living. The place for all my love. Difference. Beauty. Girls.

  The back of their neck. The way they stand with their feet together. Their bare feet. The way they move when they don’t know they’re being watched. A tilted hip. Grace. Their shape. The softness of their skin, their arm, their face.

  Girls. Girls. Girls.

  Girls with big teeth. Girls with small teeth. Girls with big boobs. Girls with small boobs. Long hair. Short hair. Bad skin. Good skin. Thin lips. Full lips. Tall girls. Fat girls. Short girls. Thin girls. I fell in love with them all.

  {

  We’re in someone’s house and the parents are out. Four guys, four girls. The girls go off to four different rooms in the house. Four pieces of paper sit on the coffee-table in front of us. I take one. It says ‘Toilet’.

  Great.

  I stand in the hall outside the door of the toilet as the other boys move off to other rooms. I don’t know who’s in there. I open the door. It’s a tiny room with literally just a toilet. Sitting on the lid is a girl with ivory skin and black hair, a fairy of a girl. I close the door behind me. We look at each other, her eyes wide and dark. I’ve never done this before, I say. Me neither, she says. I lean down and we kiss. Our mouths touch and our tongues in the gentlest flutter of movement. My body is alive to her touch. I stand and we look at each other but don’t speak. I leave the room dizzy with it. My first kiss.

  {

  Miles from home, in another town. The middle of the night. Full moon. I lie on a hillside in the embrace of a poem, writing furiously. I’m in love with the world and question everything from the beginning. What is the moon? I write how it feels to me, a burning drop on the cusp of the veil of knowing, and I must swallow it whole. I lie back in the dew-dark grass and drink it in.

  {

  White bicycles

  I work in a local video shop. Thousands of films for me to watch for free. I have a soft brown chair in my bedroom and a tiny TV, which I have hooked up to four massive speakers mounted in the four corners of the ceiling. Perfect. I watch a film every night after work.

  This is a literary culture and the question has always been, what book changed your life? But it is a film that changes mine. I feel embarrassed it’s not a book. But you don’t choose what changes you.

  It’s Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society. It speaks directly to me. It speaks to me in every way possible. I pledge to dedicate myself to writing.

  {

  I go out with girls. Long brown hair. Long black hair. Girls who make small sounds when we kiss.

  {

  I fall in love with a girl who doesn’t love me back. I’m going out with her friend. It’s making me miserable. We go down the coast camping. A group of us. That night there is a storm that blows down all the tents with sheets of rain. We run down a cliff path to the beach, to a cave, for shelter. We are soaked. When the rain stops I go down the beach and sit by the sea. The girl I love follows me and sits beside me. We don’t speak. The moon throws a glittering path across the sea.

  We sleep in the cave. All of us, in a pile. I wake up in the dead of night, frozen to the bone, teeth chattering. I touch my sleeping bag. Everything is soaked through. The sea is close to the cave now.

  In the morning we eat burgers from a van.

  I ring home. My dad shouts down the phone. What the hell are you playing at? He tells me my mother had woken him in the middle of the night very upset saying, Where is Simon? He said, Don’t worry, and touched her arm, and her skin was icy cold. Her teeth were chattering. Dad wouldn’t stop shouting until I told him about the storm and that I was all right.

  A few days later, over the counter of the video shop, I decide to stop being miserable. I decide to stop being in love with the girl.

  {

  I make a real group of friends at school. People who care about each other. People who want to share their experience with each other. Friends.

  We are all in the same English class. The teacher is a doctor of English, and is bored to the marrow of his bones teaching the same curriculum for decades. He is even bored speaking and gives out in slow-motion, drawing out the syllables of each word: Miiii-chael, he says, you look like soooome-thing a motorcycle threw up, to a student wearing a leather jacket in class. The result is a unique English learning experience. Because there is only one thing that he does like. Stories. Our stories. He likes us to write them, to read them out in class, to discuss them. It is more like a creative-writing class than anything else. It is my favourite class.

  {

  I discover Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. It immediately becomes my favour
ite film. I have an attraction to its world that I cannot explain. I watch it over and over in my room.

  {

  I go to University College Dublin to study English and philosophy. I’m in my first longterm relationship. I’m having sex for the first time. I fail the second year. I’m in Cape Cod, east-coast America, working as a chef for the summer, living with my girlfriend in a little cottage, when I get the results. I get a fright, quit my job and go to the local library every day to study. I fly home and pass my repeat exams in the summer. I graduate third year with honours.

  I leave the country with my friends, for Nuremberg, Germany.

  {

  I work the night shift in the largest printing factory in Europe. It is a small city. The staff are given bicycles to get around. White bicycles. I try not to count the cars of the freight trains that pass endlessly outside. It puts you to sleep. It’s conveyor-belt work. Watch-the-clock work. I make up poems in my head. On my break I stand outside and eat German bread and cheese. I look across the industrial night landscape. White smoke and lights for a thousand miles. Men at work for a thousand years.

  {

  Winter in Berlin

  From this hilltop the blue of the sea is in every direction. The blue of a cloudless sky. I want to live here. In the utter silence of the heat. Santorini. Mykonos. Ios. We burn all day, drink all night. It’s been a long dark summer in Germany.

  {

  I return home to graduate but Germany draws me back. I’m at the bus stop in Greystones, listening to music, waiting for the airport bus. The music is stirring and I’m excited. It feels like the beginning of something. Berlin. A face steps in front of mine. The blonde girl I loved when I was fourteen. I’d heard she’d been living in Australia. She says my name, kisses me on the cheek and is gone before I can take off my headphones. I swear my feet leave the ground.