‘New Tara?’
‘Tara Nua.’
‘It sounds all very wonderful. It does. But. I could never go back to Ireland.’
‘Of course you could.’
‘No, I could never go back to Ireland. It would be dangerous for me.’
‘How so?’
‘Because … Mister Quicklime, how much time have we got?’
‘Clive, we have as much time as it takes.’
There comes a time, Clive thought, had been thinking all the while. There comes a time. This was the way of healing. This was encouraged, and it was a good thing.
‘Just let it all out, Clive, open up.’
‘You’re a decent-seeming man, it’s turned out. You’ve proved your bona fides.’
‘I will listen to whatever you have to say, whatever it is you want to get off your chest.’
‘A decent-seeming or any other kind of man, but at least you’re a man. At least I’m assured now that you’re a man.’
‘One to another.’
‘Oh no, I’m not a man. At least … I don’t know. As I’ve told you, I was born a woman. I never intended to become a man.’
‘Is this your big disclosure, Clive?’
‘No. No. That’s not what I need to tell you. That’s not my disclosure. I need to tell you – tell someone – about … what led me, or pushed me, to become a man. And what I became before I became a man. Yes – what I became before I became a man. Yes, this exactly. This fact of who or what I am that I need the world to accept.’
‘Take your time, my friend.’
‘But how can I be sure you’re a man and not a fairy?’
‘Clive …’
Quicklime became distracted, his attention switching to some activity beyond Clive’s left shoulder.
‘Clive, I can’t talk to you right now. I’ve got to go, I’m sorry.’
‘But, sir –’
‘But please – come back to me. Tell me everything. I’m in town for a while. My number’s on the card I gave you.’
Two men had entered the pub somewhere through the back. They were taking stools at the far end of the bar, were broad-faced, platform-browed, and neither was doing a good job of hiding an interest in Quicklime. Clive turned back to his companion, but he had already gone, leaving his trilby, or his homburg, on the hook behind the bar.
5
Denny’s telephone was black and heavy, made of an obsolete compound, and its electrics were partly exposed. The mouthpiece smelt of birdseed and bird markets. He had acquired the phone some thirty years earlier and it was fifty years older again. Its dial wheel resisted his finger like a ship’s wheel resisted the maelstrom.
‘Clive – a letter arrived this morning.’
‘Oh?’
‘From a radio station in the Bronx. Called Bettina’s Bathtime. Care of. But with my name on it. Denny Kennedy-Logan.’
‘Go on.’
‘Ultimately from a lady. Named Delma Rosenberg. Do you know this lady?’
‘Delma. Fidelma. A good Catholic name … No, I don’t know this lady. What does she have to say?’
‘Are you sure you don’t know this lady? Do you have any explanation for this?’
‘For what?’
‘For what’s in the letter.’
‘What’s in the letter?’
‘Are you sitting comfortably?’
‘I am now.’
‘She begins’:
Dear wonderful Free ’n’ Easy Tones. I won’t waste too much time introducing myself. My name is at the end of this letter. Let it suffice for now to tell you that I am a music lover. That means that I am cold on modern music because in modern music the percussion is advanced to the detriment of the melody. I think the art of melody has been lost in recent times, don’t you think so too? Perhaps that’s because so much of the old music has not been heard by younger ears.
You know what I mean by old music of course you do. I mean the old art songs and the ballads of old. I was raised on these songs and I’m afraid that they have spoilt me because nothing else in music can compare with them. I had long given up that this kind of music was around today as a living form but that’s ‘O.K.’. I simply don’t expect to hear the old music of my youth performed today and its essence intact.
It was a stroke of good luck that I had my radio tuned to Bettina’s Bathtime on the evening that you were on. I was having some ‘bath time’ of my own. I rarely leave the radio on when I’m in the bath because if something offends my ears it’s hard to change it in a hurry and then there’s always the risk of electrocution. There was nothing offensive about this show on that night however. I stopped turning the dial when I heard ‘Clair de Lune’ by Claude Debussy and there I left it. Then came some Hoagy Carmichael I think and then the Moonlight Sonata. And then the presenter introduced this great new singing group. Well you know who!
I can honestly say that I have not had an experience like it since I was perhaps fifteen years of age. I felt more than that – no! – I was transported further! I felt like one of those rose-cheeked girls in a Pears Soap advertisement from the nineteen hundreds, reclined there in my bath tub under imaginary velvet and green jungle plants! ‘Who were these men with these magical voices?’ I wondered. Magic! It’s the only word to describe it. A cracked and haunted quality that I have not heard from living men. I mean to say ‘live’ but ‘from living men’ is as good a phrase for it.
I mean, I’ve gone to concerts by the Galway Tenors and the Shamrock Singers but these acts are terrible – don’t you think? perhaps you wisely don’t attend their concerts? or do you know them personally? oh God! if you do – because they seem to me like parodies of great artists like McCormack and they don’t treat the music they sing seriously at all, they are like circus acts, although technically they can be quite good, not that I know fully because I am technically illiterate, but there is no life in their music somehow and they are not for me I’m afraid.
Those Irish ballads when sung must hold a certain spirit, a mysterious spirit which the phonograph companies of the early years of the last century captured on those cylinders and later those great heavy discs. This is the spirit that rubbed up against and warmed my own when I first sensed it through the records my mother owned. I was raised surrounded by Irish families close to the water in Steinway. This must have been where my mother developed her interest in authentic Irish music. She acquired her collection over many years. Possibly some of her discs were ‘hand me downs’ from her own mother who was also a lover of Irish song. I grew up with a great attachment to all things Irish. I sometimes feel that I’m ‘more Irish than the Irish themselves’! I had an obsession with the Kennedys at the height of the days of Camelot and do you know I felt a spiritual attachment to Black Jack who was the riderless and well-behaved horse that took part in Jack Kennedy’s funeral procession?
Anyway what I mean to say to you is that the music on my mother’s records was the sound of my youth and that it nourished my spirit in those and my later years. Since hearing your singing my soul has not for a long time felt so well fed! The Free ’n’ Easy Tones – what an apt and evocative name! But I must say I almost caught pneumonia waiting until the last note was sung – the bathwater went cold and cloudy around me!
Now let me get to the nub of why I am writing to you. I am the patron of a charity for nervous illnesses. On March sixth we are holding a benefit concert at the Amsterdam Avenue Armory. We already have a girl who does show tunes and a soprano who will sing some arias but if you were to accept my invitation I would love to add you to the bill. Indeed on the basis of what I heard on the radio you will receive star billing! Please do accept! We have a little under a fortnight until then but could you take not more than two days to confirm your availability? Perhaps that is enough time for you to fret and say no! Please don’t!
Yours admiringly, Delma Rosenberg.
PS I noted on the radio that you sang a cappella. If you like you could use an accompanist of my recomme
ndation or you may choose to use your own.
Denny took a moment.
‘And there you have it,’ he said. ‘Clive?’
‘I’m still here.’
‘What do you make of it?’
‘I’m as mystified as you are. Except, perhaps … When we rang the record company that time, and sang down the phone –’
‘What?! We were singing into space, man! There was no one on the end of the line. The line was dead. You heard it yourself.’
Both went quiet.
Then Clive said, ‘Still, we’re being offered a concert. You know? Denny?’
‘So it seems.’
‘And –’
‘But …’
‘Hello?’
‘This is not the answer.’
‘The lady is offering us a concert, Denny. Top of the bill, she says!’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What is there to know?’
‘This, exactly.’
‘Maybe we should just –’
‘I have a hazy … pre-Christian sentiment about it.’
‘I know she says it’s not a paid concert, but –’
‘Give me some time to think this through.’
‘But she says we only have –’
‘Just give me some time, man!’
‘Yes, Denny. Of course.’
Denny put the phone down and went immediately to his kitchen, took some mince from the refrigerator and tipped it into Bit’s bowl. The dog had been fed less than an hour before but did not complain; it ate the mince with gusto. Then Denny went to the living room, and his piano stool. He sat in the heat, dripping, elbows on knees, and later also in the dark. He did not turn on a light. Always in the colder months the apartment was hot like a botanical glasshouse. Below the building Jeremiah and his goblin brothers made sure the boiler was full and firing through the day.
At some point in the evening the smell of Bit’s faeces drifted into the room. He heard the dog warble.
‘Good boy,’ he said, seeing the sparkle of Bit’s eyes in the doorway.
He held its gaze for some moments.
‘Come here now.’
Bit did not respond. Its eyes disappeared in the dark. Denny resumed his slumped posture. Later he turned to face his piano square. His right hand idled over the higher notes. He felt the faint and satisfying shup of keys, then held down a chord. The words of one of Arthur Sullivan’s songs came to mind:
‘I know not what I was playing,
Or what I was dreaming then,
But I struck one chord of music,
Like the sound of a great Amen.’
He allowed the notes to decay as a melody swirled in his head, building and collecting. Clamor. Clamor.
Before the notes had faded to silence he had it. In the dark night all noise is quieted: Otello and Desdemona’s renewal of their vows of love. ‘Già nella notte densa s’estingue ogni clamor’: the peerless tenor Francesco Merli, his favourite performer as Otello.
He tried singing the Moor’s lines himself but nothing would come; his throat – tightening, stoppered – ached with the effort. Now his fingers did the leading, searching for the melodic accompaniment to Otello and Desdemona’s great love duet. It was a kind of automatic playing: harp and horns and bassoons filled the auditorium of his skull while in the dark outside he pushed for a way through. But his playing was heavy, his joints stiff. Clamour, clamour, it went. With the quiver of violins that brought the first act to a close his fingers weakened on the keys until the soft beat of wires on felt came to him again.
He wept, leaned forward to the shiny black box. His cheek pressed the panel in front, his hand the panel at the side. Wood and metal rumbled inside with the disturbed air. He was no longer hearing Merli soaring now. He was hearing Paolo Silveri. In Dublin, 1959, dying.
Dying.
(He told anyone who asked that she had died. And dead she probably was now. They had been the same age and he was all of eighty-three and half of Western humanity did not make it as far as eighty-three.)
Aisling.
She had come off her bicycle. It was a terrible tragedy.
The next day he decided to get rid of his piano. He put an ad in the newspaper:
UPRIGHT PIANO. BLACK, GOLD LEAF AND BRASS. GERMAN. MID-CENTURY.
HAS STAYED TRULY IN TUNE FOR 45 YEARS.
$750 o.n.o.
Two days later three men came to carry it away. A woman in mustard angora, the mother of the new owner, stood back, directing their movements, little Bit jigging like a jumping bean among these strangers’ ankles.
‘You must show these beasts who’s boss,’ he said to the woman, stooping to smack the dog’s bottom.
‘Yes, they are making it awkward for themselves,’ the woman said, ‘though I can see why you thought it was too big for the room.’
The men carried the piano out the door, down the corridor, down in the service elevator. In the lobby, doorman Emmet helped them the rest of the way.
‘Mind it,’ Denny couldn’t help calling out, though it was no longer his to care about. ‘Good riddance,’ he said, ‘and bye to that.’
Emmet came back into the lobby shaking his arms from the shoulders down.
‘Ee-yaye, yaye, yaye,’ he said.
‘Heavy?’ said Denny.
‘Painful,’ said Emmet.
‘Emmet,’ said Denny, ‘I want to talk to Jeremiah about his electric piano. I’ll need a replacement for my own now.’
‘Excellent for tight spaces, Mister Kennedy-Logan.’
‘Is he down below?’
‘Just follow the noise.’
The basement was in fact quiet when Denny entered, except for the hum of a tumble dryer or two coming from a side passage. Past the passage, on the left, was a door to a vestibule, then two of the three goblin brothers’ living quarters. Past Jeremiah and Breffny’s living quarters was, somewhere, a set of workshops.
‘Come in,’ said Jeremiah.
On one side of the vestibule plastic trays filled with oiled nuts, dirty rags and various cranking and turning tools were stacked to the ceiling. On the opposite side, sitting on a stool, was the middle though largest and yet youngest looking of the goblin brothers. He was eating a sandwich, and wearing shorts and an upside-down US Mail bag with holes for head and arms. To the left of him was his electric piano on a serifed-X-shaped stand. To the right was a wooden lectern desk.
Jeremiah was a quiet and private lad, but the residents often remarked on his talent. He played in the day or in the evening when he was not on door duty, which was most of the time. Whenever Denny came down to wash or collect laundry it seemed that a vamp or fugue or riverine tinkle was coming from Jeremiah’s cubbyhole.
(The lectern desk, Jeremiah had explained to Denny before, was for the business of producing manuscripts. All the goblin people and varieties of that kind in the world worked flat out to make history and artefacts to give a delusion of past beyond human beings’ living memory.)
‘What can I do for you, Denny?’
‘I have always liked the sound of your electric piano. Are they expensive?’
‘Are you in the market?’
‘Can you demonstrate for me please what your machine can do? I believe the keys on these things are not satisfactorily weighted.’
Jeremiah slowly savoured the last bites of his sandwich, then dragged his stool to the piano. He quickly ran through a scale.
‘They’re fine. Your fingers get used to it.’ Lifting his head and crossing his arms now he said, ‘The brother tells me you were wanting to get rid of your old lovely upright.’
‘Just been rid of it,’ said Denny, loudly exhaling through his nose.
‘And why would you have done something like that? The tone off of that instrument was easily the finest in the building.’
‘A woman, of course.’
‘Sit down there now,’ said Jeremiah, offering his stool. He went into his room and fetched a fold-up chair for himself. ‘Same
woman?’ he said, settling down again.
‘The same one.’
They listened to a fit of croup from the boiler for some moments. (The goblin brothers had illegally redirected steam from public services into the building’s heating system.)
Finally Jeremiah said, ‘I wouldn’t be in any position to give advice on that.’
Denny considered this point. ‘It’s true that I have never seen a goblin woman, or even assumed that such a variant existed. How do the goblin people generate themselves?’
Jeremiah angrily slapped his hands on his knees. ‘Why do you persist in calling us “goblins”? We are fairies or shee. Is that such a hard idea to grasp? Do you not believe I’m a shee?’
Denny was sorry he had said anything to hurt Jeremiah, having thought the words ‘goblin’ and ‘fairy’ and ‘shee’ were interchangeable (though the words ‘fairy’ and ‘shee’ clearly now were, and this was noted).
‘I have no difficulty at all believing that you are a shee,’ he said.
The Mac An Fincashel brothers belonged to a clan of lowland fairies, isolated by bogs and cuts, who were famed for their jam-making but equally for spoiling jam. After a blackcurrant blight they came to the new world as stowaways in the hull of a steamship, or at least a ship that was powered a great length of the way by steam and partly by electrics. It was in the clanging compact chambers of this vessel that they had learnt all that they knew about plumbing and electrics. In America where there are no blackcurrants they turned to blueberries, and because of the tremendous nutritional value of blueberries the brothers grew to an abnormally large size. Denny had no difficulty believing that the Mac An Fincashels were shee because two of them (Emmet and Breffny) had tenacious beard shadow despite shaving every day, and one of them (Breffny, the youngest) had dark wrinkled skin like a defecated husk. Also, he had no difficulty believing that they were shee because he, Denny, belonged to the city of Dublin, the most magical city in Ireland, which sat in a saddle between the Hill of Howth, where the queen Aideen was buried, and the Hill of Kilmashogue, which was a known haunt of the god Aonghus Óg.
Green Glowing Skull Page 7