They pulled into 23rd Street, one station from home. He would make his exit here. He waited until all who were standing had disembarked and then he sprang from his seat with as much suddenness as he could muster. The doors snapped behind him, nearly catching his coat. But he was safely on the platform, out and away. But – there was the man ahead, stepping out from the other end of the carriage without a glance behind, going now with the main flow of people, but proceeding slowly, with deliberation. The back of his neck glared. The skin looked painted on, like the skin on his face – resin on an invisible surface. Once, when Clive was a tall young girl, his brother had attacked the neck of a football hero with a rod because he had disgusted him, he said. The thought came to him now. He could attack the man’s neck, cut off whatever was feeding the brain. He could ram it with his elbow, then hand himself over to the law. They might be lenient, if he came clean, told them everything, every detail, right from the start.
Some people were moving against the main current, walking in the direction opposite to the way Clive was facing. They were heading for another exit, behind him. He went with this movement, flipped around, and hurried up the stairs. On the concourse above he was presented with a choice – a choice and a man playing ‘Rest, My Woolly Wolfhound’ on a saxophone. As he hurried up the steps for 22nd and Park he found himself transported. He thought of the pale cone of Errigal and the honeyed scent of gorse. And he thought that if souls and bodies with them could be transported they would have him where they wanted him, and they would surface with bronze hurls from the prickles, but they would not get their milk because he did not have diddies and they would be even angrier.
***
When he first emerged into New York he was still a young woman. Her name was awkward bony Jean Dotsy and her introduction to city life had been a Dublin of livestock sales and Swastika Laundry vans. In New York she had woken into a dream and for a while she experienced a golden time because the city was a place where she could lose herself and at the same time she knew it would tell her everything about herself that she wanted to know. She had for a long time known that she was a woman who loved other women but now she said it to herself and it felt like both the making of her and a declaration. Back in Dublin she was known as an independent girl but in New York she had another word – variant. She was a variant. She got the word from a kind of manifesto in a magazine that another woman who was also a variant had given her. Perhaps she had been magnetically attracted to this woman sitting on a bench in Washington Square Park or perhaps she was simply tired on that day, her first in New York, and had wanted just to observe the assembly of variants who were all gathered to march in support of basic rights for black people. The woman on the bench scribbled down the address of a restaurant where later the variants on the march were meeting. But Jean did not want to promise anything and she was naturally suspicious of being part of groups she did not know much about. And the wet creamy gravel of Washington Square Park patted under her feet in a paste like peanut butter and she had so many things she wanted to experience so soon: peanut butter and Times Square and jelly and jazz and Chew-butter Cracknells and the fish market and the Jews and the diamond sellers.
Of course she was so tired by that evening that she needed somewhere to sit down or where she could put up her feet. She was not prepared to go back to the hostel just yet, for the previous hours had given her a feeling for and a faith in the community of people. Everywhere was the sense of people exaggerating simple actions for spectacle. The city felt like a film – she recognised the fire escapes from the films, and the way the women walked with a waddle while pulling fabric taut over one shoulder – and as long as the days resolved themselves calmly she could leave aside the fear that had brought her here and could, indeed, be encouraged by the initiative she had shown in coming. They were golden days, those first in New York, when so much was happening in society and music and such and such and such. More recent decades had been drab, which was why everyone was secretly thankful for terrible news events so that they could feel there was excitement and meaning to their days and they could say later: I lived through those times.
But hers were golden times.
He codded himself in telling himself this. Hers were times that were given to her by her pursuers and they would want them back. They had given her back her life and she had wriggled her way out of a bargain.
***
There was a trick, there was a trick, to giving him the slip. The important thing was not to be forced by the pattern of the streets. He circled a block and doubled back. He made to cross an avenue, stopped in the middle, and doubled back. He said to himself that he must make his own trails and defy this logic superimposed on ancient lines. In New York people moved in the channels or lay spent in the shadows. He hobbled through gloomy arcades in already gloomy streets: scaffolding had sprouted everywhere. On 19th Street he felt the leer of stone carvings, hideous caricatures of mercantile men. He spun around a stanchion, checking through all degrees. At Gramercy Park he knocked a cup of froth from gloved hands. He brushed it, she crushed it. An upshoot of gloop. She screamed, ‘You’ll pay for that, asshole.’ There was no time for recompense. He would die running. They would kill him. He would die under these stone eyries.
He would need a weapon. He knew of a butcher’s shop nearby that would have hooks and cleavers and long knives. Perhaps he could persuade the butcher to sell him a hook. Or he might be able to buy a bone, a cow’s shin bone, or a buffalo’s. In the butcher’s shop he found himself behind a line of people. He considered leaving, but then the butcher’s assistant asked him what he wanted. He was aware that the other people in the line were annoyed that he had been asked before they had, but he had a base frenzy about him and they would not make a fuss. He scanned across the platter under glass and saw a mound of purple-brown tongues, outsized tongues that were still furred and glistened with pinpricks of light. A tongue was a weapon his pursuer would understand. He could slap him across the face with it and it would have mystical, symbolic significance. He got his tongue for one dollar on account of how late in the day it was.
He slumped into Duffy’s Tavern on 23rd Street and sat on a stool at the bar in front of the taps knowing he would be challenged soon. The barman would not care for raw meat on his premises. He gripped the tongue between his knees with his nails. He kneaded his head, his hair, and the knots and mounts beneath. He pleased the barman by allowing him to show that he could fix an old-fashioned but now the tongue had slipped from his fingers and hit the floor with a splat. He kneaded his hair with his other hand, the one he had been holding the tongue with, and his fingers were through his hair before he realised. Oh my God, he thought, his hand shaking. He was a delicate man. He feared people – he feared his good friend Denny, this delicate man. That’s what Denny thought, that’s how they all thought of him. A delicate man. He didn’t want that side, the side that was on the outside, to infect him. He was not this delicate man. She had not made this man to be a delicate man. For the love of Christ, if she was to be a man could she not just be a man? She had howled and wailed at this delicate man. She had tried to command him and watched as he failed her, put on airs, apologised for everything. Her words would go unheard, lost somewhere. The voice was tiny. Tinny. Always she was aware of the great breezy gaps in this largely empty vessel – always she was aware she was the occupant of a vessel. One had never, never nearly, fitted into the other. Now the occupant was shrinking from disaster. Jean, he called to herself, from outside to in. Wake up you feisty thing, you big lumbering bitch.
‘Mind if I sit here?’
His pursuer.
Chewing-gum trench coat. Enemy/envoy. Trilby or homburg. The voice was, like his own, an Ulster one. It made some kind of sense to him that this should be so.
He did not look in the creature’s eyes and he was uncertain as to whether he should take the hand that was offered. He fastened his eyes on the floor where his tongue was laid out in black blood like a slug.
/>
‘Oh, Saint Sybil. What’s that? Your dinner?’
He found the Ulster accent placating, like the sudden rush of some mild narcotic.
‘Hey. Allow me to introduce myself. Please.’
He looked at the creature’s knees.
‘My name is Aidan Brown. My friends call me Quicklime.’
The barman dawdled at the taps, waiting for an order. Aidan Brown climbed on to his stool, his trench coat and hat still on him. Clive opened his mouth.
‘Yes?’ said Aidan Brown.
‘Are you a fairy, Aidan Brown?’
‘Quicklime, please … No, I’m not a fairy. My friends call me Quicklime because I’m a sailor and I know the best way to treat scurvy.’
‘Is that true?’
Aidan Brown shook with laughter.
‘No. My friends call me Quicklime because I have pitted thick skin and I’m fast on my feet.’
‘Are you a fairy?’
‘No, most definitely not.’
‘Have you been sent on behalf of the fairies?’
‘No. I represent only myself and the organisation I represent.’
‘Reveal yourself please and do whatever it is you have pursued me to do.’
‘May I ask, first of all, your name?’
‘Do you not already know?’
‘It’s evaded me, that one, I admit.’
Aidan Brown ordered a pot of coffee. Eventually he took off his hat and got the barman to hang it up for him. He rolled his trench coat in a bundle and sat on it. In the piercing spotlights Clive was able to observe that he indeed had pitted skin. His face was not frozen and palsied now but puffed out and twitchy with tics like that of any regular middle-aged man after taking vigorous exercise. The humanitarian in Clive was glad he had not attacked Aidan Brown in the neck. At the same time he was aware that a game of wiles might have been in play.
‘Am I to call you Quicklime?’
‘If you like.’
Quicklime looked across the arrangement behind the bar. A grid of pigeonholes was decorated with bunting and each flag on the bunting was a county flag of Ireland. Amid the reserves of whiskey, perry and absinthe was a lead bomb labelled ‘Replica of Saint Patrick’s Bell’.
‘You could feel at home in a place like this,’ said Quicklime. ‘You’re from Donegal?’
‘Yes. Close by Ballyshannon. I left it when I was eighteen to go up to Dublin.’
‘You haven’t lost the burr. It’s softened a bit, mind. But that’s burrs for you. Burrs burr, brogues rattle. I’m from your neck of the woods. The village of Garrison. Caught the wrong side of the border.’
Clive tried quickly to ascertain the layout of Duffy’s Tavern. It was a narrow and deep and typically light-starved single room. He looked for escape routes. But he was somehow assuaged by this mention of a real place, Garrison, and the implication that the listener would understand the nuance in the words ‘caught the wrong side of the border’.
He traced the rim of his glass with his finger.
‘You’re a Catholic rather than a Protestant?’
Quicklime laughed again.
‘You’ve been out of Ireland a long time, my friend. Nobody asks questions like that. I’m a Protestant, as it happens. But a nationalist. My parents named me after the great British way station of Aden. Later I gaelicised the spelling.’
Some moments of silence passed as Quicklime mopped up coffee from the bar with a handkerchief.
‘Look at the two of us here in this pub,’ he said.
‘And you’re not a sailor?’
‘I’m not a sailor, no. Nor do I know the best way to treat scurvy. But I do spend most of the year travelling great distances. This is what I do.’
‘What do you do?’
He reached into his trouser pocket, winked at Clive, and took out a slim silver case from which he produced a card. It said:
BRING OUR BOYS BACK HOME
‘We’re a charity, but as I say to the people we help: don’t look on us as a charity. Look on us as a service, a free service. We’re in the business of repatriation. We help the most valued members of Ireland’s diaspora. The elderly and the wise. Which description are you most comfortable with? Elderly, or old, or aged?’
‘I would say I’m comfortable with any of them.’
‘We help men who left Ireland as hopeful younger men for places like New York and London and are still in New York and London but with the old form of hope long extinguished. If they have any hope left it’s the hope that one day they might return to Ireland.’
He was not looking at Clive as he spoke, becoming absorbed in his spiel, rapping the counter with his knuckle.
‘But that hope is laid to waste by worry about where the next bag of fuel pellets is coming from, or whether the cheque will last them the week. They’ve nothing to be doing only breaking into racecourses and walking the track in the middle of the night. Or mooching in Irish clubs in Cricklewood, say, nursing a pint of sickly English bitter, eyeing that battered box of Cluedo up on the shelf. And they’ll be eyeing it all evening, that box of Cluedo, because they’ll have nothing else to be doing. And they’ll be thinking of all the people they’re not playing Cluedo with and of all the people they once played Cluedo with. Does this sound familiar to you?’
‘I don’t know what Cluedo is. I’m … This is …’
‘Or take the man I helped the week before last. Poor lad, went out years ago, in his thirties, to the Niger Delta in Africa to follow the fossil-fuel craze. He had degrees coming out his ears, in oil engineering this and oil engineering that. Thought he might meet a wife out there. But he didn’t. The Nigerian women wouldn’t have him. And he didn’t thrive in the job either. Turns out the oil business down there is run by a cabal of Brits. Treated him like muck. I found him in a bar in Port Harcourt supping bad Nigerian Guinness. Have you ever had Nigerian Guinness?’
Clive remained silent.
‘It’s not the same. Nothing like the same. It’s brewed up there in Lagos.’
‘Mister Quicklime …’
‘Just Quicklime, please.’
‘Have you come to rescue me?’
He took a moment.
‘Well. That’s up to you. I know little about you, if I’m being honest. All I’m here to do is tell you about Bring Our Boys Back Home. And to tell you that Ireland values her sons even if no one else does. I want you to know that there’s help here if needed.’
‘But … you must have identified me as someone in need of help.’
‘I identified you as a fellow tribesman of a certain vintage, alone in a vast and impersonal city.’
‘But really – you know nothing.’
‘Which is true. I haven’t even got your name yet.’
‘I don’t have a name.’
‘Now come on.’
‘I call myself Clive. I’ve learnt to live with this name, Clive Sullis. It means “sword of light” in Irish. Men with theatrically priapic names such as this you have to wonder about, don’t you think? More recently I’m inclined to respond to the name I was born with, Jean Dotsy, though no one ever calls me that.’
‘Look. Clive. As I say – a vast, impersonal city. And full of fairies, you’re right about that.’
Quicklime began brushing the bar, the patch where he had spilt his coffee, with the sleeve of his mould-blue sweater.
‘Ah yes, that’ll bring up the grain all right,’ he said.
Clive stared quietly at the wood for some moments. Then he said, ‘No, I’m staying here. I’ve been here too long, and this is my home.’
‘“Too long” I think is the revealing phrase.’
‘Things are moving along now. I have a purpose here. I have a friend, Denny, and … we’ve started a tenor trio. We’ve formed a little singing group. We’ll sing Irish ballads, play engagements.’
Quicklime examined his sleeve for damp.
‘What sort of ballads?’
‘Oh … the old ones. Like McCormack used to sing
.’
‘This is one of the signs, you see. I’ve seen this many times before, in men like you. The pain of yearning is too much and so they lose themselves in sentimental old songs. It’s a dangerous game. These are sad old songs and in their singing the yearning and sadness is perpetuated. And the Ireland depicted in these songs is a fantasy. All harps and rainbows and Glocca Morra.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with that, no? What’s wrong with a little make-believe?’
‘Fantasy is the path to madness. And wouldn’t you rather come home and see how things are for real? How long is it since you’ve been in the old country?’
Clive thought about it.
‘Fifty years.’
‘Ah now, Clive.’
Quicklime flicked the gleaming gold pipe of a tap, making it ping.
‘I can show you an Ireland more glittering and more wonderful than any Ireland you’ll ever sing about. Ireland today truly is the land of fantasy. You would be amazed. A new age of statuary … Huge triumphal arches in green Connemara marble … Gold mines.’
‘Gold?’
‘In south County Wicklow. They’ve reopened the mines after two hundred years … We have ways of thinking about politics that are a cause of wonder to the world. Restitutionalism. Bifurcal assemblies … They’re draining the bogs and clearing the fields on the Roscommon–Mayo border to create a new capital city. New Tara.’
Green Glowing Skull Page 6