Static panning in and out: applause.
‘And so we’ve come to our final performance tonight, our last act. I feel I’ve known these men – these wonderful Irish tenors, the Whiteboys – all my life. I’ve never met them before. I’ve never set foot in Ireland either, but when I listen to these men sing I feel like I’ve been transported on a rainbow to a great pine forest and that I’ve drunk from the cleanest Irish spring. And when you hear them too, I think you’ll say to me, “Aye, lass, ’tis true.” Harh, harh, me hearties, are you ready, boys? I think that they are. Curtain, please!’
A rattle and a whoosh and a wind on his face. And then … And then …
He stood, squinting.
Lights and darkness. The one and the other.
Mostly lights. Hot, burning lights.
Below the lights, the darkness.
He twitched his head inquisitively.
A movement: glasses, glinting.
Drawn back to the lights: white and yellow. The heat seared into his eyes. He closed his eyes. Pulsing red. He looked to the darkness again. A blob of white flashed and faded – to blue, to nothing. Leaving a blacker arid nothing.
And there he stood, squinting.
The void was hot. Now he remembered. He had forgotten how it felt, that it could be felt, that it was hot – it excited him in a way he hadn’t felt in years. For this he used to live and on this he used to thrive.
To project, Maestro Tosi had said, was to propel goodness into the dragon’s mouth. If you do not believe in monsters, let it be nothing and the thing to fill it with is your soul. But for me, I am a Crusader of Palermo and what I have to give is Christian goodness.
So let it be nothing. This was how he derived his energy. From being on the edge of nothing. This was his element. Nothing. This was his challenge. To give something to nothing. Ringed by lights, inside the ring: nothing. He leaned into nothing.
To his surprise, nothing answered. From the middle of nothing a small light shone. Whiter than the white lights above, but cold, fixed in the dark like a star, but not like a star, stable in the light it threw out. He could sense its coldness from a distance, but not a great distance, no. All that he felt in his body told him he was looking down at the light, not across. The dark gave him no mooring, no reference, nothing to tell him that he was not looking down. But his chin was held high and his ribs were well spaced; how could he be looking down and not across? And what was this now? A rope, dangling from the stage, wrapped around his ankle, dropping off, out – down through the dark. It was made of a very long piece of grey woollen fabric and had a thousand knots in it. It waved, arced greatly in the dark, seeming to summon him, like a beckoning finger. Was this how he was to feed the void? To give himself, all of himself? It was time.
He had no say in the matter. Gravity ploughed him forward, the rope tightened around his ankle, and he was yanked upside down. The jerk and the snap broke the tension in his body, whipping his spine, but instilled a kind of suppleness. He fought against his harness, thrashing spasmically, spinning zanily, and making the rope bounce and the bind stab at his ankle. He knew by the pain that his show of defiance was futile, and he stopped, but a vestigial electricity fought on. Stop now, he urged his muscles. His body relaxed, and the physical laws took over. He rocked through a gentle torque. The rhythm of it was calming, slowing all the time. His arms hung limp, and he felt an odd sort of bliss. He was both constricted and free – his arms were like strings of blood sausages, or the necks of pheasants in a poulterer’s, or the ends of mammy’s mink scarf, or daddy’s shirt on mammy’s line – and he could have stayed like this for a long time. But then, having the urge to invigorate his fibres, he took the rope in his hands and twisted with a new stripling strength, and his ankle was liberated from the rope’s bind, and he flipped the right way up, and he slipped an inch, and then he carefully descended, taking knot by knot with his hands and feet. Only when he got to the end of the rope, dangling by his hands from the last knot, and his feet kicking in the dark, did he permit himself a look down.
He saw there Aisling, bright as a pearl, fathoms from him. He said, I want to reach you, lovey, but I am afraid of letting myself go in the dark. He pulled at the rope in his frustration and the last knot disappeared – he felt a thump as he dropped the three inches. He looked above him, at the rope tapering into the darkness, at the many knots he had let through his hands, at the many bound inches, and he started back up, snapping at every knot along the way, lengthening the rope by many more inches. When he had got half the way up the rope he thought that he might have added enough length to it to enable him to reach Aisling. But descending to the bottom again he saw that she was still a good distance from him. And so he went at it once more, shinnying past halfway, snapping out the rest of the knots as he met them. It was tiring work, and he felt the child in him disappear, and the stripling too, and he felt again like the old man that aeons ago he knew that he was. He twisted some of the rope around his wrist and his ankle and he rested. The rope smelt like rotten mutton, and it was clammy.
Then a lifeline came down for him: a white cable with a metal clamp on the end. It required no gymnastic effort to get across to the cable; it hung side by side with the rope. He threw his legs over the clamp and sat on it like a jack on a swing, intending to rest some more and build up his energy. His head was slumped forward and the cable was at his shoulder and he drifted into a semi-sleep, but he became alert again when torpidly he noticed the remaining knots in the rope trickle by, trickle by – the cable was being drawn up! It reeled him all the way back to the stage, dematerialising above him, and finally dematerialised in his hands, leaving him suspended for a moment in the air before he thudded to the boards. Immediately he was on the stage floor he scrambled around like some crippled vagrant thrown in a gaol cell. And he no longer sensed, as he looked into the dark, that he was looking down; when he looked up he felt that he was facing up, that up was up and down was down and across was across again.
Aisling hovered above him, almost within reach. She was wrapped in the grey wool of the rope. No pietà Madonna could have looked so sad. The cloth was wrapped around her head as a mourning shawl and wound about her body. The weave was caulked with thick body liquids. She chewed and sucked one loose end.
He sprang up. He sang:
‘If I die in this prison you will know before long,
But they give me no word of you.’
She began to unfasten the cloth. It unwound and broke down to a dust. The dust built up below her feet, making a picture. The picture built up around her until she was the figure in a medallion. The scene in the medallion was of a land barely green and the grey and black clouds that roofed it. The underclothes that she wore were the same colour as these clouds and the land that took on the colour of the clouds. They melted into and came of these clouds, even as her feet touched her little piece of earth, which seemed so cold and lonely.
White-Headed Boy:
‘Do not lose heart my Emerald Maiden –
For your friends are many in number!
Call to the lands where they bow to the ring,
They will raise in arms Peter’s great crozier!’
The clouds came down, enveloping entirely the scene in the medallion. She floated among them. The clouds parted but the undergarments of cloud remained. She stood aside in her medallion to a platform of grey rock and swept her arm to indicate a new scene. The sky was black and starless but held a faint faraway moon. Far below the grey rocky platform was a sea lough. There was no water in the sea lough except for a sluggish trickle. Did this water once meet the sea as an equal? Did the sea keep its distance because the moon was feeble? Was the sea as black as the dark, blacker still, devouring the moon in its stolid tarry waters? On both sides of the river’s weakly black course lay great flats of grey estuarine silt. No French longboat would reach this far, nor the row-barges of a relieving Spanish fleet. Her face carried the sad expression of the feeble moon, saying, I am falle
n to an unconquerable conqueror, I am condemned to my destiny.
White-Headed Boy:
‘Though the clouds they have gathered to darken your skies
And tears fall to black earth from your smoke-stung green eyes,
And the bite of the crow and cut of the chain
Draws out the Royal blood from your faint-beating veins,
It must be remembered
’Twas not always thus!
This eternal December,
This sepulchral dust!
In your gilded past glory
No burden you bore!
This once was your story
And will be once more!’
The medallion enlarged and changed shape. It made now a lozenge, and came low enough so that he could enter. He did so, and she backed away across the hillside as he did. She stood among the ashes of weeds. He kicked the ground beneath him and saw that it was as black. The edge of the plateau marked the drop to the sea lough but he could not see the lough over the lip. Nor could he see far in any direction – only darkness, and the waveforms of intertwining bands of mist. He was frightened at having entered the scene, but then this was his country too. But it was hard to imagine that it was ever a place of wealth, or of hope, and hard to imagine that she was not lonely here.
White-Headed Boy:
‘The light will shine on you again!’
But the moon was gone and it was so monstrously dark. Even the dark above was like the light shut out by the cap of a cistern.
White-Headed Boy:
‘There is a harp with strings of sunbeam;
To play it and to sing the name:
Ireland! Ireland!
Will summon light oh once again
And bring that name back to a gleam!’
She clutched at her left breast with both hands to form the shape of a heart. The fingers dug and clawed. Her fingers were withered to relics and the place of her heart was the reliquary she sought to reach. From that place leapt a rainbow. The rainbow was composed of different shades of grey and one shade of black. It leapt like a leaping fish – slow near the top of its arc. When it hit the ground it made the thud of a landed fish. He saw something writhe in the ash and went to it. He found a dead pike that was already half pus. The pike curled up its head and hissed through its dreadful lips and teeth, ‘The borders of countries of the place whence you came have no meaning here. Even the border of that country you mention which is so fixed by nature has no meaning here where nature has no meaning.’
White-Headed Boy:
‘Is not Erin that place of which you speak?
Is not Erin that place o’er which you weep?
Is not Erin –’
Some light appeared as a greenish grain in the air. Distantly amid this disturbance, across the abysmal territorium, he saw a city emerge. He peered hard at the city. The dead pike hissed up at him, ‘It is built to an order you have never known. Columns are thin and twisted and carved with a uniform pattern of gnarls. These end in gigantic capitals carved in the design of a bouquet of frayed nerves. The columns support gigantic rhomboid pediments one to each column and each set on a column on one of its acutest points. Across the opposite acute points of the pediments balances the entablature. The architrave of every entablature is carved in an arrangement of various inverted mammalian nipples. The frieze of every entablature is carved in an arrangement of various mammalian anuses. The cornice of every entablature is carved in an arrangement of shards of various mammalian bones broken the better that the entire body will pass again into the matrix of origin. The city also abounds in finials carved as stacks of hairballs as extracted from mammalian stomachs, rostrums carved as cairns of bungs of cholesterol as extracted from mammalian blood vessels, and corbels carved as carpets of opened-out and overextended mammalian alimentary canal, the villi of which are massed into various depictions of mammalian suffering, each unique villus being a copy of a cast formed by pouring molten lead into a mammalian fistula. Only one material is used in the construction of our cities and it is the blackest most brittle obsidian. Each component of the order must follow a model as set out in the masons’ codex. Every mason must speak in black oaths. A foul chinook blows through the city. Pity the mammals.’
White-Headed Boy:
‘At the Mass rock in the howling wild glen,
Father Moore did tell us that we
Would one day reside, all women and men,
In a country of peace. Said he:
“It is eighty miles wide, eighty miles in the sky,
Angel music does float on the air,
And the place it is bathed in the most soothing light
That flows from Our Lady’s white hair.”’
He peered so hard at the city that he went blind. His blindness was a stratum of humus that rammed through his head. A bitter run-off streamed across his tongue and into his eyes. He blinked to ease the interference. He blinked a dozen or so times and at last he felt relief, and he could see again. But there was a pressure lying all across his face as if a sheet of glass were against it. It was most severe at the bridge of his nose, which, he suspected, had been flattened altogether along with the rest of his facial topography. It was as if he had woken from an operation in which his face had been shattered with a mallet. Through the glass he observed a new scene. It was a more intimate and homely and familiar scene than before. A wall to his left was plastered in the floral wallpaper of the living room of the flat he and Aisling had shared in Rathmines, Dublin. On it hung that gaudy picture of a weeping owl-eyed Spanish peasant girl. The wall to his right was plastered in the same wallpaper. And there was their old Lambert range. The furniture was theirs too, along with its horrid antimacassars (a wedding gift from Aisling’s mother), but it was all moved to the sides to make space at the centre of the floor. On the floor was their reproduction antique Chinese rug, a tribute to the orientalist Lafcadio Hearn, whose family had long ago lived in that very house. The floor was otherwise wooden boards. The plan followed approximately the same rectangular layout of their living room. But there was no wall opposite. The room opened out to darkness. Above, on that side, stage lights were suspended. He realised now that he was viewing this space from the perspective of a framed picture of the young John McCormack, a print of a painting in which the tenor had a dreamlike saintlike appearance. He had often stood with his back to the picture and sung, and he knew this perspective. Around and around the Chinese rug trundled a Friesian cow. It was not an actual Friesian cow, but a pantomime Friesian cow. Its bagginess, and its wellington boots, made it look very preposterous. One of the black markings on its pied flanks was a crude map of Ireland. Aisling herself occupied the front of the cow. He could identify her because she did not wear a cow’s head. The effect of a cow’s face was generated with the use of black and white face paint, pink paint on the nose, long false golden eyelashes, and gold hooped earrings. The cow appeared to have been delivered bad news. The around-and-around motion suggested perplexity and distress, though the face did not give much away, because Aisling was a bad actor. Adding to its distress now was the fact that its back half had come off. Yes – the back of the cow now lay on the floor, moaning. With no surprise he could identify himself poking out of the open end. He wore a pair of woman’s tights on his head and the way these pressed up his eyelashes made him look womanly. But he looked punch drunk too, which partly restored his manliness. ‘Oh what will I do now my four beautiful stomachs are taken from me?’ said the front half of the cow, stiffly, looking down at the detached back half. She stood arms akimbo staring into the dark, grinding her pelvis around to test the unexpected adjustment to her mechanism. With a sudden spiritedness then she kicked off her wellington boots to reveal ballerina’s plimsolls. She turned round to the back half of the cow and, with one of those delicate plimsolls, planted a kick in its udder. ‘Well you can take the four stomachs and all of its faeces and tripe,’ she said, stiffly again, ‘and you can take the milk too. When you feel the need
to sup on that milk, as you will, you will remember me.’ Mass cheering and whooping broke out from the dark. She faced it and said, ‘I will not allow a whole life to pass and be alone in my loneliness. I will have the comfort of another body next to mine.’ As if in response to the juddering shift from metaphor to statement, and in disgust at the performance’s sudden lurch to bawdy and the suggestion of female sexual empowerment containing an intimation of necrophilia, a shower of rotten fruit rained in from the dark. Meanwhile, the back of the cow continued to squirm about the stage floor, moaning.
White-Headed Boy:
‘I will outline for you in this letter from France
The plight that I see ourselves in.
You must live! my sweetheart, you must take every chance
Of love that your life now might bring.
For away from the trenches
I fell for a temptress!
And you know I cannot sheath my love!
So please do not wait for me,
Be blithe! Go with gaiety!
But hide these French letters you must!’
He waited for an age for the pressure on his face to ease. Finally something cracked. He stumbled forward on to the boards. The fourth wall was now in place, and light flooded in from Prince Albert Terrace through the window. ‘You look perfectly ridiculous,’ she said, albeit with tenderness. She added: ‘But at least not awfully ridiculous.’ He opened his mouth to bark something back, and felt a lump in his throat and his jaw unhinge, and heard a crackle right through his head like burning cellophane. The lump pushed up through his throat, widening it all the way. His head bloated to an enormous extent to accommodate the lump, opening along the fissures of his broken skull. The head only returned to something near its normal shape when at last the lump had fully extruded and revealed itself to be the half-pus pike, now slathered in mucus and bile too. The pike flipped about the floorboards, as surprised as anyone in the room, looking for a hiding place. Then it divided into a dozen eels, which searched for cover too. Each eel split into a thousand earthworms, which each became a thousand white parasites of the gut, which all crawled through the spaces between the floorboards. ‘Where is he?!’ barked Denny, pushing about the newspaper kindling in the range. ‘Where is he?!’ he barked, marching into the bedroom and opening the wardrobe, and looking under the bed. ‘Where is who?’ answered Aisling, as equably as she could pretend. ‘The pike! The pike! You know who! That rotten bastard roe!’ said Denny. ‘And who is this?’ he said, seeing a framed picture of a young handsome man on the mantelpiece, and whipping it into his hand. The face was worryingly familiar. ‘You know who that is,’ said Aisling. ‘That’s your great hero, aged sixteen, the man whose name you have taken as an important-sounding prefix for your own so that people will fall for you.’
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