by Ian McDonald
The picture her parents had painted prepared me for some kind of monster, foul-mouthed and vituperative, a compulsive liar and braggart. Imagine my surprise to find in my waiting room (oblivious to Miss Fanshawe’s darkest glower) not some Dublin fishwife all chapped cheeks and puffed lips, but a girl of almost angelic beauty and demeanour (apart from a distinctly unangelic pout to the lips and shine to the eye) who spoke with a delightful soft South Dublin slur.
Every psychologist must, to some extent, be a master of subtle dissimulation and gentle deceit; ours would be a stimulating locking of horns—her innate talent against my professional training. I had no doubts that I would emerge the victor.
She succeeded in unnerving me at the very first test. I was administering a standard set of Rorschach inkblots. Jessica studied the first card from every conceivable angle before announcing, “A pair of kittens.” The second card, after a fraction of the effort, produced the same response: “a pair of kittens.” The third: “a pair of kittens.” The fourth, the fifth, the sixth, the same reply. I reminded her to say the very first thing that came into her head.
“That is the first thing that comes into my head.”
“Each one reminds you of a pair of kittens?”
“Yes. Anything wrong with that?”
“Well, is there anything else they might remind you of?”
“Like what?”
“Well, this one, reminds me of, well, it looks sexual to me.”
“It doesn’t look sexual to me. It looks like a pair of kittens. How does it look sexual to you?”
“Well, it reminds me of a woman’s vagina.”
“You dirty old bugger. If my mother knew she’d sent me here to look at dirty pictures…”
We proceeded to the word association test. It was even more farcical than the Rorschach inkblot test. Jessica clearly had the measure of me and manipulated the roles of questioner and questionee with such consummate skill that I became the one making lewd and suggestive replies and she the one pursing her lips and tutting, “Oh, Mr. Rooke!”
But maybe the old dog still has a turn or two.
“Well, Jessica, it’s clear to me we aren’t going to get anywhere with the regular psychological tests, so what we’ll do is, if you’re agreeable, I’ll put you in a light hypnotic trance and we’ll go back to events and incidents in your childhood, something you may have long forgotten, or buried in your subconscious, that might explain why you seem to need to engage in this kind of antisocial behaviour.”
“I don’t know about this,” she said. “How do I know what you mightn’t get up to when I’m under your power and totally helpless? For all I know, you could have five girls a day in here, obeying your every wish and whim.”
I bridled with outrage, then saw the devilment in her eyes.
She settled back in her chair, legs spread wide, fingers locked behind her neck. “Quite frankly, mister, I don’t mind what you do. You just have to look at me with those mad, mad eyes of yours…”
In fact, she did not have to look anywhere near those mad, mad eyes of mine. I used my trusted and true Maltese Cross and lamp arrangement. She proved a most amenable subject to hypnotism. In a very short time Jessica had reached a deep and comfortable state of trance. Hypnosis casts an entirely different light upon incidents and objects to memory alone. In the course of the regression I encountered several events, trivial in themselves, that took on an altered significance in trance: creeping from her bed on Christmas Eve to find the house filled with strangers standing around the Christmas tree; the thing that had stroked her hair in the ghost train at the amusements at Bray; a pair of hairbrushes, one backed with red for Grattan, the other green for Parnell; a porcelain doll in a basement window; a horse that had collapsed and died on the North Circular Road being winched into a knacker’s van; a dread of clowns; a long-remembered nightmare about the elevators in Switzer’s. We worked backwards through the years, reeling them out behind us like twine in a labyrinth—age seven, age six, her fifth birthday, then, shockingly unexpected: “I can’t go any farther.”
“What do you mean, you can’t go any farther?”
“I can’t go any farther. It’s like there’s a wall right across my life, and I can’t get past it. I’m stuck. I can’t go any farther.”
“What age are you?” I asked, making hasty notes on a foolscap legal pad.
“About four and a half, I think.”
Remarkable, this state of consciousness we call hypnosis, as if our lives are some kind of picture gallery through which we tour in full adult consciousness. A wall. How very, very interesting. I decided that we had seen enough of the exhibits in this particular mental gallery, and counted Jessica back up to full consciousness. In those few moments, as she emerged from the trance into full cognizance, she seemed as pure and open as a Church Bible. Then, as she recalled where she was, what she was doing, guardedness and guile crossed her face like bad weather.
“Well, Mr., Rooke, did you get anything? Did you have your evil way with me?”
“It was very instructive. Do you remember anything?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure. Something about a wall? Does that make sense? I don’t really know—it all seems so hazy. I hadn’t thought it would be like this. I thought I’d remember everything. You could have had your evil way, and I wouldn’t know a thing.”
“I assure you, Miss Caldwell, your virtue is entirely intact.”
“More’s the pity.”
“Tell me, what is your earliest memory? Think carefully.”
“Let me see: I can remember being on a swing boat at the fun fair in Bray. I remember Daddy swinging the boat higher and higher and higher and Mummy telling him that was high enough, it was frightening me, although it was her that was frightened. I quite enjoyed it, I think.”
“Anything before that?”
Concentration creased her brow momentarily.
“No. Should there be?”
“What age were you when you were on the swing boat in Bray?”
“Oh, about five: Yes, just five. It was my fifth birthday, I think. Yes, it was, definitely, my fifth birthday.”
“And you can’t remember anything before your fifth birthday?”
“No. Should I? Is that odd?”
I did not answer her question. Rather, I said, “Well, that, I think, will suffice for today. If you see Miss Fanshawe, she will make you an appointment for next week. Thank you, Jessica, it’s been most stimulating.”
The study door closed, followed a few moments later by the glassy rattle of the office door. I could detect Miss Fanshawe huffing and puffing and grumbling, grumpily, and needlessly rearranging papers.
Little frigger, indeed!
4
TRIBULATION AND PERSECUTION. MORNING light saw the vicar striding Protestantly across his glebe meadows with dogs, gumboots, and his demand that the two unequivocally undesirable tramps remove themselves forthwith, tout de suite, chop-chop from his property. Failure to comply would result in the summoning, without one second’s further delay, of an officer of the constabulary. Seemingly a conclave of fresh-faced young evangelicals would be descending upon his vicarage that very afternoon for a weekend of good, sound, factual Scripture teaching and happy-clappy chorus singing about the Pearls of Great Price to be found between the leather-bound covers of the B.I.—B.I.—B.I.—B.L.E. and he had no intention of their apple-cheeked washed-in-the-blood zeal being diminished by close proximity to two gentlemen of the road, read tinkers, read vagabonds, read tramps.
“‘Religious persecution may shield itself under the guise of a mistaken and overzealous piety,’” declared Gonzaga as they picked their way over dew-wet hedgerows to the main road. The shift from Nagmara to In Quotationem generally presaged the heightening of sensitivity before a bout of gyrus building.
Where the main road crossed the river by a picture-postcard, ivy-covered stone bridge, Gonzaga paused to lounge against the wall of the Irish National Foresters Club while Tir
esias surveyed the mythlines.
“‘Where the Mountains of Mourne sweep down to the sea,’” sang Gonzaga, disconsolately, then, galvanized into unexpected action like a pointer coming onto a scent, he plunged into a public litter bin on a lamppost and emerged with an empty Morton’s Red Heart Guinness bottle.
Camp was established on a long sloping strip of land overlooking the lough known in the locality, so Tiresias informed his partner, drawing on the information stored in the mythlines, as Fiddler’s Green.
“Legend has it the great Turlough O’Carolan himself, doyen of the blind harpers of Ireland, attended a fleadh in the village for which he composed a specially slip-jig, named ‘Fiddler’s Green.’” He hummed a few bars. Gonzaga lay back among the seed-laden grasses and looked out across the blue water to the Carlingford Mountains.
Gonzaga made flame with his firebox and brewed tea in his black iron pot suspended from a stick. The two tramps had long ago stopped being surprised by the fact they could survive, and even thrive, on the scraps and orts human society discarded. Both, however, shared a partiality to connoisseurs’ teas they could not quite explain. Tiresias sipped the brew from a jam jar and contemplated the clouds.
“Galleasses, triremes, and feluccas asail upon the stream of consciousness,” he whispered. Gonzaga had already slipped into his dream place; Tiresias’s musings were for his own edification. “Two bastard nations,” he said, sprawling on the sun-warmed hillside of one country, looking across the water at the hills of another. “And I fear the inevitable price of compromise will eventually be paid by every man, woman, and child of the pair of them. The tragedy of founding two nations upon nothing more solid than mythology. Myths, my dear Gogo. You cannot build a nation on myths, you cannot feed its children with myths, you cannot grind them out of its mills and factories. They will not shelter you from the rain; you cannot burn them to drive the cold winter away. They will not comfort you when you are old, when you are lonely, when you are afraid or in need. Yet they feed their children with them from their mother’s breasts—Good King Billy on his white charger, remember. 1690, the Battle of the Boyne, No Surrender!; A Nation Once Again, the Harp that Once through Tara’s Halls, Cuchulain chained to the standing stone, his enemies all around him, the martyrs of 1916, the Soldier Boy to the Wars has Gone…”
“‘Hypocrisy is the homage paid by vice to virtue,’” Gonzaga murmured.
“Ah, Monsieur Le Due de la Rochefoucault had it right, Gogo.”
When the night had advanced onto the mountains and into the forest, they left their camp and climbed the sheep path to the stone. This close to the nexus, Gonzaga’s more intimate senses came into their element. His nose led them up the hillside through grasses and twilight butterflies and Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry conifers. On the flat summit of the hill stood a massive perched boulder, a glacial erratic, Tiresias postulated, deposited on this mountaintop when the ice sheets retreated across Ireland.
“An Clacban Mor.” Tiresias picked the name from the mythlines. “The Great Stone, Anglicised to Cloughmore.” Gonzaga scurried around the stone, touching, smelling, lifting pebbles, dirt, and leaves to taste them. Two late-evening walkers, plus a Sealyham terrier, paused at the stile on the tree line and, seeing the tramps, reconsidered their twilight constitutional.
Gonzaga emptied his haversack on the ground and picked through the malassortment of odds and sods—a brass button with an anchor crest; a chatter of gulls’ feathers bound together with twine; pine cones; sea-smoothed stones; a packet of Navy Cut cigarettes (“it is a less commonly known fact than it should be that the sailor in the front is actually Charles Stewart Parnell.”); snail shells; a piece of old car tyre; a lenseless pair of spectacles; seemingly far too many things for one small knapsack to hold. He weighed each item in his hand and either returned it to the sack or laid it carefully on the grass. The assemblage complete, he pressed an ear against the stone and worked his way around, tapping it with a silver thimble on the end of his right forefinger. Tiresias polished his glasses in the light of the rising rebel moon and listened to the voice of the wind in the wood. He could feel the phaguses close, gathering, present, massing on the borderlands between Mygmus and Earth.
Using a ball of string as a triangulation tool, Gonzaga began to mark a series of locations in relation to the stone. Some were underneath the overhanging bulk, some well below the tree line. Clouds rose from over the water to race across the face of the moon. Tiresias slipped on his newly cleaned glasses and the hilltop came alive with mythlines, the paths and patterns ten thousand years of legend had impressed upon the landscape. The mythlines flowed and eddied around the stone, numinous silver rivers filled with drowned faces, the phaguses, the differing manifestations of the basal archetypes of local story and song. Gonzaga moved through the river of faces, planting items from his collection at the junctions of the marker strings—four carefully piled pine cones among the trees, the Morton’s Red Heart Guinness bottle by the stile at the entrance to the forest walk, a small dolmen of sea-polished slingstones here, a fossil belemnite here, a spiral of snail shells and cigarette ends there, here a feather, there a feather, everywhere a gull feather. Midnight approached, passed; dawn became an insistence on the edge of the warm early summer night. A pattern was emerging. Gonzaga was wrapping the balancing boulder in a complex of cycloids and endocycloids, a gyre of spirals and curves. Through the spectacles Tiresias observed how the mythlines were being frustrated, turned in on themselves, directed into fruitless whirlpools and eddies and woven into a cocoon of lights and faces.
An Clachan Mor stood in darkness unbroken at the centre of a shining wheel. Tiresias came to join Gonzaga at the heart of the gyrus. Gonzaga produced the Free State penny from his waistcoat pocket, held it up.
Tiresias removed his glasses, nodded.
Gonzaga inserted the penny into a crevice in the rock.
A sudden breeze stirred the trees, tugged greasy locks and clothing, rattled the barbs of the gull feathers. Flickers of nervous light, petty lightnings, ran fretfully along the curves and spirals of Gonzaga’s weaving, lost themselves in the predawn darkness. Mist gathered around the perimeter of the maze, knotted into a face, many faces in one, features melting and reforming—old man young man wise man fool.
“Struggling for quotidian expression,” muttered Tiresias. “Must be a more powerful local phagus, running through its incarnations in an attempt to find one relevant to the contemporary subconscious.” The changing faces yelled and screamed silently within the wall of mist. Gonzaga pressed his face to the stone, stroked the Mourne granite with his fingers, his lips. Under his touch as tender as a priest’s first experiment with love, the rock softened, melted. The Free State penny was absorbed into the substance of the stone. For one instant it glowed there, in the heart of the rock. By the light of a straggling, ragged dawn, the two men watched the signs and markers of the maze grow insubstantial and be absorbed into the soil; snail shell, gull feather, brass button, Guinness bottle.
“The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beams, all that wealth e’er gave,
Await alike the inevitable hour,
The path of glory leads beyond the grave,’”
Gonzaga dolefully consigned the sailor-suited Charles Stewart Parnell to the soil.
The bubble of mist and faces dissolved in the memory of a wail as the promise of dawn was fulfilled behind Slieve Martin. Tiresias sighed, expanded his birdlike chest, and breathed in the light.
“A grand and glorious day, my dear Gogo—a grand and glorious day altogether.”
“‘He that hath light within his own clear breast, May sit in the centre and enjoy bright day. But he that hides a dark soul, and foul thought…’” Gonzaga left the quote half finished. Tiresias was standing, head cocked, nostrils flared, as if scenting something on the wind.
“Strange… strange. It feels like… No. Nothing. Sorry to have troubled you, old friend. Felt for the briefes
t quantum of time like… but no, tiredness, dog tiredness. We are not as young as we used to be. Come Gogo, and let us partake of blessed tea, if we can squeeze another pot out of those leaves…”
5
SCENE: THE GLASS TOWER rises out of a silver sea, sheer-sided, smooth-shouldered, unscalable. The sea is dark and storm-tossed—waves crash and break about its base.
The Dublin Bay Wave No.7: Hey me boys, ho me boys, up and at ’em, up and at ’em, no resting no slacking no slouching no skiving no sick days holidays holy days fair days feast days, famine days, no Christmas Easter St. Paddy’s begorrah begob be-jaysus, it’s up and at ’em, up and at ’em, we’ve got to get all this ground down to sand before the turn of the millennium, me boys!
The Sandman: Excuse me, but I would just like you to know that I play no part in this dream sequence whatsoever, thank you.
Sea gulls with a lot of swan in them, or swans with a lot of sea gull, fly around the tower. They are chained together at the neck by collars and links of red gold.
Sea Swans/Swan Gulls: Squadron to tower, squadron to tower, bandits ten o’clock high, ten o’clock high— tally ho, chappies! NyyaaggHHRRRUuuummm…
The GLASS TOWER hums in the wind, exactly as if you had wet your finger in a wineglass and rubbed it aroundroundround the rim.
The Wineglass: Ooohhhmmmmm …
Fierce clouds crowd around the GLASS TOWER, like supporters at the All-Ireland Football Final at Croke Park.
The Football Fans: We’re the boys from Tipperary, Up the Pope and the Virgin Mary!
Though the storm is all around and all about and the black clouds hang low about its sides, the summit of the GLASS TOWER is lit by a single shaft of pure sunlight.
The Carol Singers:
While shepherds washed their socks by night,
All seated round the tub,
A bar of Sunlight Soap came down,
And they began to scrub.