by Ian McDonald
Upon closer inspection you see that the top of the GLASS TOWER is constructed in the fashion of a sundial. Upon the dial is a garden: fountains, mazes, pergolas, gazebos, Italian gardens, living statues, nymphs, fauns, satyrs, bambini, orreries, roses, wine, etc. In the centre of a small lawn stand two trees. One bears buds, blossom, ripe fruit, and leaves both green and brown. The other is divided root to crown, one half green with leaves, one aflame.
The First Tree:
All seasons in one
And one in all seasons,
The green leaf, the brown,
The blossom, the bud,
The ripe golden fruit
The bare winter branches
The seasons of life
All in one season
All the days of one life
Life in a day.
This to the accompaniment of massed choirs of nymphs, fauns, satyrs, living statues, bambini, water organs, Aeolian harps, songs of birds, grunts of pigs, mechanical orreries performing the music of the spheres.
The Second Tree: Fire! Fire! Dingalingalingalingaling! 999! 999! Hello, what service do you require—Fire, Police, or Ambulance? Fire! Fire! Fire! Call for Moses! Call for the burning babe the burning bush the bush in the bulrushes the babe in the bush the burning bulrushes the burning baby help help help!
Enter FAERIE QUEENE dressed head to toe in ermine £3 3s 6d per mile from Arnott’s sale second floor Haberdashery. Her crown is an oversized Carting Black Label bottle cap, inverted.
Faerie Queene: Jessica! Jessica! Jessica!
Music tinkles, like ice clinking in whiskey glasses.
John Jameson, Old Bushmills, Paddy, Powers and Companie:
Oi’ve been a wild rover,
Fer manys a yearrrrr …
And oi’ve spent all me money,
On whiskey and beerrrrr …
The FAERIE QUEENE smiles, revealing Dracula teeth …
(The Dublin Dentists:
Twice a day, twice a day.
Up and down, up and down,
Till they’re clean and sparkling.
… glistening with blood. She wipes her slavering mouth on her hand, notices the blood. Embarrassed, she wipes her hand on her ermine cloak (£3 3s 6d per mile, etc) which has by now grown to hang off the edge of the sundial garden and down the side of the GLASS TOWER.
The Arnott’s Ermine: Those drops of blood, oh those drops of blood,
Those drops of blood, upon the midnight snow …
Faerie Queene: Jessica, Jessica, please, Jessica, I love you, Jessica, I love you …
JESSICA awakens, head pounding, heart racing, soaked in sweat.
Voice of the Alarm: Ting a ling a ling! Ting a ling a ling! Half past eight on a bright and sunny Saturday, half past eight, time to be gay, be light, be shiny and bright, half past eight in the morning, oh!
Light streams through the window, a lattice of shadow on the counterpane. Without, the sounds of the streets—picking, clicking heels; the jingle of horse harnesses; the grumble of trams; the slam of letterboxes. From within, the thunderous gurgle of the plumbing and the joyful incense of bacon frying.
Jessica: Jaysus, what a dream I’ve had!
The definition of a Super Saturday (that is, of Superness as opposed to Saturdayness) was that it was one of those rare calendrical occurrences when the timetables of the Wesley Hospital, Dudgeon and Gowes, Ltd., Chartered Surveyors, and Mangan’s Family Restaurant all meshed to give the three girls the same day off. Super Saturdays were events anticipated and grimly enjoyed with the determined enthusiasm of a family holiday: rain, hail, civic unrest, they would wring every last second of their Super Saturday dry.
One does not so much travel on a Dublin tram as voyage. All that brass and wood, that heady top deck exposure to the elements, that seaside ozone spritz from the overhead wires, you are reminded irresistibly of piers and steam packets; you expect bunting on every telegraph pole and lamp standard. In the backseats on the top deck, the conversation turned toward boys. Jessica was telling Em and Rozzie about the man she’d seen on the tram.
“So, what I told you at Rozzie’s was a lie, but he wasn’t; this is true.”
“Like that time you swore on the Bible you saw Clark Gable getting out of a big car outside the Shelbourne Hotel?”
Jessica’s father held the belief that to swear on the Bible was a vain thing, demeaning to the Holy Scriptures, which gave his daughter all the license she needed to abuse the Testaments for her own ends.
“Up your bums, repeatedly, with a sharp implement.”
The tram deposited them outside the Bank of Ireland before crossing the Liffey into the cold and ill-spoken districts of North Dublin, where, according to Charlie Caldwell, they called the things you wear on the end of your feet Bewits, thus proving, if proof were needed, the superiority in every consideration of South Dublin over North Dublin. The girls lunched at a restaurant slightly more expensive than they could justify; being called Madam after a week of calling other women Madam was a gratifying luxury to Jessica. Then up Grafton Street, past the pricey glitz of Switzer’s and Brown-Thomas’s, to Gaiety Green.
Gaiety Green, me dearios, me cheerios, me fine and ducky queerios: to call it a flea market is to insult the fine and noble flea of which each and every one of the troglodytic stallholders is in copious possession. Call it a glass-roofed labyrinth, call it an Argosy with B.O. where the treasures of fabled King Solomon lie heaped and shimmering beneath blazing coloured light bulbs (for some reason, the blue ones are never working), where the air smells of hot fat and the urinous reek of shiny-trousered drunkards and the warm, oily stench of menopausal women, where cockatoos recite obscene limericks and within a dozen steps you can hear a dozen different musics, from the newest hep-hot waxings of Django Reinhardt and Louis Armstrong to the primal moanings of white-stubbled balladeers, eyes gas-blinded at Ypres but forever focused on the face of Fair Caitlin from Garykennedy, where pickpockets have their pockets picked and a policeman is as rare as an Orangeman in St. Peter’s, and the voice of the stallholders and vendors do cry bargain bargain how do we do it how do we do it, five for a shilling, five for a shilling, unrepeatable offer, one hundred percent bona fide genuine bargain, money refunded if not totally satisfied, the large print giveth and the small print taketh away.
Gaiety Green: where else in God’s Green Universe can you buy a dozen gravy rings, the skull of Brian Boru when he was a boy, a three-pound note, a first edition of the Grimoire Verum, a portrait of the Sacred Heart with electric eyes, a secondhand frock from last year’s Castle Season, an old Orange bowler, a brace of pigs’ feet, a pair of magic blue knickers sixpence a pair (never heard of magic blue knickers? Part with sixpence and see if your dearest wish doesn’t come true), a holy medal of Pope Pius XII, a bottle of holy Lourdes water, a sepia postcard of a woman engaged in an act of oral outrage with a Tamworth pig, your present, past, and future read by Madam Mysotis, Queen of Little Egypt, with the aid of an inky palm print on an old copy of the Athlone Gazette and a little cup of Cork Dry Gin (to liberate the spirits, you understand); a spinning top, a Claddagh ring, a tray of yellow-man pulled toffee that would give a mule lockjaw, with a hammer to break pieces off, a pair of boots that have walked to Tashkent and back, a brass spaniel, a bag of bananas, a hand-coloured postcard of Queen Victoria not engaged in an act of oral outrage with anything, a pound of Davy Byrne’s prize-winning sausages for your Dublin coddle, a gallon of porter, a chest of Assam tea, a jeroboam of champagne, a hogshead of sack, and still have change from a shilling?
Jessica adored the place’s vulgarity. Things found in dark corners, under cobwebs and dust, were endlessly fascinating to her. So rapt was she that she did not notice that somewhere in the little hell of sweating lights and the blue haze of deep-frying fat and grating brick-edged Dublin accents, she had lost Em and Rozzie. On a secondhand bookstall that had not seen the light of day in twenty years, she found a copy of The Scarlet Woman and The Many-headed Beast: The True Teaching of Revelation, by Dr.
Edmund Zwingli Crowley, published by The Firebrand Press, 1898, price three pence, for her father. Calvinist theology was a hobby of Charlie Caldwell’s that had never, thankfully, spilled over into an obsession. Having proved from diverse authorities that St. Patrick had been the first Protestant, he was currently engaged in a massive reinterpretation of the Book of Revelation in the light of recent Ex-Cathedra utterances from the Throne of St. Peter’s and events in Stalinist Russia. She was about to part with her three pennies when a voice picked her out of the general din.
“Here, lovie, over here.” A small woman, wizened and wrinkled as the original apple in Eden, beckoned her from behind a mound of junk jewellery. Jessica looked around for someone else the woman could be referring to. “Yes, you, love. Come over here, I’ve something to show you.” The crowd parted, and Jessica was drawn into the vacuum. The tiny woman leaned across the trestle table and opened her hand. In her palm was a wrist torque, scratched and tarnished with age, but the unmistakable glint of gold could not be disguised.
“Pretty, ain’t it?” said the tiny woman. “Look, it’s engraved, see?” The torque twinkled under ten thousand light bulbs. Jessica could barely make out a Celtic knotwork pattern like those in her father’s book on which she practised her draughtsmanship. It seemed to be a cow or a bull; something bovine. “Would you like to have it?”
“I couldn’t afford that.”
“Who said anything about you being able to afford it? It’s for you.” With a sudden darting of fingers, the stallholder seized Jessica’s wrist. She shivered with sudden gooseflesh. “You keep it.”
“I can’t. I couldn’t possibly accept …”
“You’ve got to have it. You can’t not.” Her grip had tightened, a gin trap made of bone. Jessica swore, tried to tear herself free from the old woman’s grasp. The old woman wheezed and giggled and tried to force the torque over Jessica’s balled fingers. Then she saw him—a moment of clairvoyance, of the kind Madam Mysotis had spent her whole life seeking. That face, that brief glance over the shoulder of the dirty Army greatcoat, that flicker of recognition through the press and shove of Saturday afternoon people, that slight suggestion of a smile.
And somehow, the spell was broken. Jessica felt the old woman’s skeleton grip fall away like withered leaves. Like a heroine in a Hollywood dream sequence, she fought her way through the crowd, but the press and shove of bodies only seemed to mount before her the more she exerted herself. Certainly, no Hollywood heroine ever swore as enthusiastically as she saw him slip away, with an almost mocking smile, beyond her reach.
She retraced her path through the crowd to give the old woman on the junk jewellery stall the benefit of the sharp edge of her tongue, but the stall was gone. A blowsy woman peddling cotton sheets stood between the religious curio kiosk and the tea booth. She possessed the utter solidity of one who has stood all day and not sold a thing.
“What you gawping at, you little gurrier?”
“Never seen a backside could dress itself and talk at the same time.” Jessica noted some of the ensuing colourful oaths for future use.
Em and Rozzie were busily engaged in acts of oral outrage with ha’penny ice cream cones by the entrance.
“Where the hell were you?”
“This and that. My own business.” Pointless even to try to explain. She saw them glancing at their watches—so many minutes until Colm and Patrick came and their Super Saturdays really began. As hers was ending.
To spare them the discomfort of having to dismiss her from their company, she made an excuse about having to be home for tea, which they accepted though they knew as well as she that it was untrue. As they walked away, she noticed how their pace quickened as they caught sight of their men shouldering their way through the homeward bound shoppers around the top of Grafton Street. She was astonished to find herself on the edge of tears. To be seventeen, going on eighteen, in Dublin, with nowhere to go and no one to go with, into the heart of Saturday night.
With typical vengeance she wished them all miserable—wished the girls pregnant, the boys smitten by green and seeping venereal diseases.
“Excuse me, could you give me a light?”
It was him. Him. She gulped audibly.
“Sure. Here …” Her hands were shaking. She thought her heart was going to stop.
“Waiting for the tram?”
She looked up at the pole with the destination board on it as if she had just seen it for the first time—as if there were some other possible purpose for it being there. He grinned. She liked that.
“I’ve seen you about a lot,” he said. “Would you mind if I rode home with you, seeing as how we’re headed in the same direction?”
She smiled offhandedly. Her tongue was somehow wedged in her vocal cords. The tram sailed in to the halt. Bells rang, latecomers leaped for the doors.
“Fine evening altogether,” said the young man in the khaki greatcoat in the top-deck seat beside her. “You know, and I hope you’ll pardon me for being so forward, but I find it hard to believe that a young lady with all your obvious charms doesn’t have a boyfriend who would be taking her out on the town of a Saturday night. If you’ll excuse me saying, it seems a proper shame.”
The tram passed the front of the Shelbourne Hotel. A large and extremely shiny car drew up outside. Porters and bellhops fell over each other in their stumble down the steps to open doors, take luggage, tug forelocks, pocket tips. A tall, classically featured man with a pencil-line moustache stepped out.
“Look? Isn’t that, isn’t he, Clark Gable?”
The tram rounded the green, and Hollywood and hotel were lost in the traffic.
“I’m certain it was Clark Gable.”
“This is Dublin, me darling—anything can happen here.”
They sat exhaling plumes of pale blue Woodbine smoke and engaging in the desperate chitchat of people who can hear the clock running down inexorably to the time when they know they must part, but are still incapable of making that first, tentative move to communicate. Belgrave Road lurched nearer, stop by stop. Jessica was gripped by a helpless paralysis of desire. The tram crackled into its halt and she rose to her feet, stepped off.
She watched it continue on its journey with the feeling of guilty helplessness you get when, through your own reluctance to act, you see an altogether different and more wonderful life sailing away from you. A hundred yards up the road, the tram jolted to an abrupt stop, as if someone had pulled the communication cord. Which was exactly what someone had done. A figure appeared in the entrance—the young man in the army greatcoat.
“My God, that’ll cost you five pounds!” Jessica shouted.
“Worth every penny,” he shouted in reply. “Tomorrow, in Herbert Park, by the pond, at ten o’clock?”
And she said, yes, I will, yes. Then the tram resumed its interrupted meander through Victorian suburbia and she was running down Belgrave Road with her copy of The Scarlet Woman and the Many-headed Beast: The True Teaching of Revelation in her hand.
6
WALLS. CLOUDS OF UNKNOWING. Amnesias.
There are ways over walls, through clouds, lights that will illumine the deepest amnesias, known to the skilled practitioner of the hypnotic arts. Not so much ways over or ways through, but ways rather of moving from one side to the other without having to traverse the intervening space.
I did not know what might lie beyond the wall of forgetting, so I carefully prepared Jessica with a string of post-hypnotic commands to pull her out of the trance and erase any memories of the session should the experience prove too intense.
Then together we abolished the distance between remembering and unknowing.
“There are vans parked against the river wall. The vans have canvas sides. Green canvas, I think. Men are jumping out of them. They have things like bandages wrapped around their shins. The bandages are green, like the canvas. We are watching from the window, but when we see the men Daddy makes us get down on the floor and hide under the table. Why
does he do that? Are the men bad men? They’re shouting, the men; they have funny accents. Then we hear the shots. One of them comes through the window. Funny, it’s not the sound of the shot that makes me jump, it’s the crash of all the glass falling in. It makes quite a hole in the ceiling, too. It travels upward, you see.
“We hear them running about in the street, and there is the smell of paraffin everywhere. Mummy says, ‘Oh, dear God, what’s to become of us?’ and starts to cry quietly. We hear the voices again. They sound ugly, pleased with themselves. I think they have voices like dogs. Then … whoomph! Fire! Fire! At either end of the quay, they’ve set fire to the houses! They’ve set fire to the houses! We all go downstairs to get out. We open the front door and there’s a man in a black and brown uniform standing there. He’s got a rifle. He says, ‘Oh, no, not you, Paddy. You’re not going anywhere, old son,’ and he raises his rifle. We slam the door, run back up the stairs. There’s the sound of shots. I can see the back of the door go into long, white splinters. Don’t you see what they’re doing? They’re shooting at anyone who tries to run for it. They want us all to burn.
“The fire’s racing along the roofs. There’s melting lead dripping down into the gutters. Number three’s already gone, number four’s alight, number five’s just caught, and numbers six and seven are smouldering. There are shots and cries and screams and the sound of people running. The room is filling with smoke. I can’t see; I can’t breathe! Can’t breathe! It’s getting so hot. Where’s the Fire Brigade? Why don’t they come? What’s keeping them? Tans or no Tans, we’ve got to get out. We try for the front door, but the fire’s got there first. The hall is full of smoke and flames. We can’t get out. We can’t get out—we’re trapped!
“We’re at the window. It’s the only way out. There are people down in the street—our own people, not the Tans. They are getting back into their canvas-covered vans. The people are shouting, ‘Don’t jump. Don’t jump, hold on, here comes the Fire Brigade.’ They’ve come! They’ll rescue us. The firemen have silver helmets. The helmets look gold in the light of the flames. They’re getting sheet things. What do you call them?”