‘Ah. Don’t worry about that. I was out with the boys.’
‘Come here to me.’
He sloped over to the bed and sat down.
‘Come here!’
He threw his feet up. She rummaged about his hair with her fingers.
‘We were only acting the maggot. Ouch!’
He tittered.
He said, ‘You’re lucky you didn’t know me in my rugby-playing days.’
‘You and your boys,’ she said, her voice now full of relief and tenderness, and her fingers too, full of tenderness and affection.
‘What’s the book?’ he said. He could see what the book was: it was a motoring guide to Ireland.
‘I’m planning some weekends and day trips.’
‘And who’ll drive us?’
‘It’ll have to be me, won’t it?’
‘It might yet be me.’
‘That’ll be the day.’
She began humming a rock-and-roll tune.
He rested his head fully back on the mattress. His coat and shoes were still on him.
‘What did you do tonight?’ he said.
‘I was over at Jim and Sheila’s. We played cards. And then Jim went off to his parents and then me and Sheila talked about nonsense.’
Her nightdress was made of linen, gathered at the top, with a kind of primitivist motif embroidered down its front. It was like a cross between an old farmer’s smock and a kimono – Aisling delighted in the Lafcadio Hearn connection as much as he did. She looked very virginal and very pagan in it.
‘I wish you’d come to the concert,’ he said.
‘You need your time with the boys.’
‘But I was at the concert on my own. I wish you’d come.’
‘I couldn’t go to a concert. It’d make me feel down.’
‘How do you think it should make me feel?’
Gently she said, ‘It doesn’t seem to bother you. Why would it bother you? You bought the ticket so it mustn’t bother you. And it shouldn’t bother you. But seeing these people … It bothers me.’
She picked her book back up.
‘It shouldn’t bother you. Deep down you should know that.’
‘Deep down where?’
‘Where your voice is hiding.’
She went ‘tssk’ as if to say he was silly.
‘It doesn’t bother me because I don’t see myself as an operatic tenor any more,’ he said. And then, after a pause: ‘If it’s any consolation, Silveri was abominable. He can’t sing tenor. Would it bother you now if I sang?’
‘It’s not the singing that bothers me, or Silveri. It’s the people that come to these things, all the not-so-grandees. And all the people on the make. They make me feel … Ah, look. Let’s not.’
‘“Not-so-grandees”. I like it,’ he said, and proceeded to sing ‘Niun mi Tema’ from Otello. His body was so at ease, so forgotten, that he thought he had never sung so well. He opened his eyes to the cornicing. The ceiling was the colour of peaches, and throbbed softly, and he felt secure, but remembered his sadness.
‘Did you meet him?’
‘Who?’
‘Paolo Silveri?’
‘Why would he want anything to do with a scut like me?’
‘You still sing opera beautifully.’
He turned to face her, making a pillow with his elbow. She looked down at him from her book, her chin resting on her shoulder. There was virtually no gap between her top lip and her nose, and she looked like a cornflour rabbit.
‘My boy,’ she said.
‘Do you know what is great about you? I can tell you things that I don’t tell myself.’
‘Like that you love me?’
‘Like that I’m a scut. But sure I know I love you.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Don’t I say it?’
‘To who?’
‘To you.’
‘You do.’
‘I’ve proven it.’
‘How?’
‘“How?”’
‘I’m codding.’
‘I know it. I’ll say it now: I love you. You’re my wife. And that’s to me I’m saying it.’
She laughed and went back to her book. ‘What do you think of “Paolo” for a name?’
‘I don’t like it.’
‘I think it would go well with Logan, though. If we ever have a boy I think Paolo Logan would be a fine name, because if he got too big and manly for his boots, he’d always have “lolo” in the middle of his name to make him feel like a girl.’
‘So what sort of nonsense were you talking about with Sheila?’
14
Well, said Jeremiah Mac An Fincashel to a thirsty buck – as water finds its level so the wanderer finds his too, and usually where there is water. It was all very still. He turned around to the sound of the crunch of stones. The Hudson River heaved by quietly beneath the glide of its surface but nonetheless washed unexpectedly and in unpredictable patterns against the shore. Thorny seed casings and old rope and rusted rail-plates were scattered among the stones, and the stones were sharp as if freshly broken. These surfaces and textures he enjoyed against his thin shoe soles. He followed the wooded valley until the smell of the air changed from rusty to flower-like. He found that he had drops of salt water collected on the fine hairs around his mouth, as if his mouth itself were a flower. He turned left, and walked on narrow country roads alongside wooden fences that buckled inwards and then went towards righting themselves outwards so that what he appeared to be following now were long helixes that stretched away out of sight before a full revolution was made. He forgot to look out for the completion of these revolutions before the wooden fences gave way to recognisably picket fences and the picket fences became chain-link fences.
Having assumed that the commanders of all trucks across the American continent were male, Jeremiah was shaken to discover that the commander of the vehicle that pulled over for him near the Indiana state line was a female.
He would have run away across the field only he had already flung the sports bag containing his belongings into the vehicle’s cabin. It had landed with a sludgy rubbly crunch.
‘It’s funny,’ said the woman on seeing him in the seat beside her. She wore glasses with bright red frames and lenses so large they almost covered her cheeks and in those cheeks he was certain he was identifying the lost bloom of maidenhood. ‘You look tiny on the road, tiny in the movies, but normal-sized in real life. Is that all trick photography or something?’
‘I feel you must be mistaking me for somebody else,’ he said. He grappled about him because he had the sense that if he touched things, these things would disappear. His arm went through the hollow centre of a triangular tubular calendar with a nude woman on it that sat on the dashboard. The inside of the cabin was covered with postcards with nude women on them.
‘You’re British?’ she said.
‘No I’m not,’ he said in his best General American accent.
‘On the run?’ she said.
‘Where are we now?’ he said after a couple of hours.
‘We’re still in what used to be called the Old West and is now commonly known as the Midwest, heading west.’
‘Can I get out now?’ he said.
‘Have we established where you’re going?’
‘Not yet.’
‘So what’s in the bag?’
He croaked like a mechanical crocodile.
‘Do you know what eternity is?’ she said. And then: ‘It’s the condition of being an electronic seabird.’
Later he said:
‘Do you know any of these people?’ He pulled each postcard slightly on the dab of chewing gum that held it. For each one he touched she replied:
‘No.’
The cabin filled with the smell of mint disturbed from the chewing gum.
‘Do you know what elasticity is?’ she said. ‘It’s the condition of living as a seabird electronically.’
Presently she said:
> ‘Would you like to go to a casino? There’ll be women at it. And private rooms.’
‘Where would I put my bag?’
‘Will you stop worrying about your bag? There’ll be a changing room. You’re right to be making plans for tomorrow, that’s what my ol’ momma used to say. My mother was stupid. Jesus Christ lived only for the moment, and he hated the stupid. You know who said that? Oscar Wilde. And you know what Jesus Christ said? Have faith in me alone, not in laws or morals written down. And the only way to know Christ is in yourself. It’s all there in the Bible.’
‘Would I be invited?’
‘I’m inviting you. Nobody else will see you. It starts off dark and only then the lights slowly come on.’
Some time later, observing black bushes sweeping by across an endless plain in a dim blue light, he said:
‘Maybe between here and there will be the Crack of Doom, and I won’t need to worry about my bag. I intend to throw my bag in the Crack of Doom.’
‘What the hell is in your bag that you need to be throwing into some crack of doom?’
‘Do you know the Crack of Doom?’
‘Never heard of it. Is it like Brig o’ doom?’
‘My brothers tell me about it. They’ll regret it. If it’s possible that there’ll be a future in which they exist to regret it. They said to me, “Off you go now so, off you go to the Crack of Doom.” They don’t realise that I’ll carry through with my threat.’
‘You guys had a fight or something?’
‘A terrible fight. A terrible, terrible fight. They said, “Here you go now. Here are the spark plugs from the server. Go off now and throw them in the Crack of Doom.” Do you think that was terrible of me to have pushed them like that? But they were laughing as I left.’
‘See – I knew you were a fugitive.’ She poked him playfully in the ribs.
She left him off in a strange landscape that was as arid and cold as the moon. He came in from the road in case she came back. He dropped to his knees behind a collapsed termite mound. Soon after dawn it became very hot. He walked through the day. His eyebrows would be almost blond now. He began to miss the woman. No, he said, he was missing the foam that she offered. He imagined with self-tormenting pleasure the pop in his mouth of bubbles, the most perfect things that there were. He looked in his bag for food, though he knew there was no food there. A giant moth had got in. He quickly zipped his bag closed. It was to be hoped that the heat would kill it, and then he could eat it later.
He had his moth that night and the effort of chewing made him even more desperately thirsty than he was. He needed now to dig for water. With a sweep of his foot he cleared some of the loose stones off a patch of desert. As a result of his thirst, and of the cold, he could not summon even a drop of urine to soften the ground. He got down on his belly and started to lick it instead. This worsened everything. The effort would kill him before he got to the water, but he was going to die anyway, he said. Ignorance kept him going. He had some idea not his own that he had come out here with his brothers before, and that they had dug up and then filled in again the soil beneath this very patch of ground. In his delirium he thought repeatedly of bubbles, the beauty of them, and that they were a whipped soul.
Lo, he had been at this spot before. At least that’s what the Indian told him. The Indian helped him out of the hole, and he hauled out the Indian. They flicked the clay and dust off themselves. The Indian wore only a leather loin covering, and his skin was as brown as the desert, which was to say (which Jeremiah didn’t), not very. With ceremonial emphasis Jeremiah slung his bag into the hole.
‘I made you,’ he said.
‘And all of my works,’ said the Indian. ‘Now come with me.’
Their little caravan travelled through the night. As the sun rose in the sky so the Indian’s skin became darker. He led Jeremiah to a land of greater variety. They followed a dry river bed, smooth and scaled, until it became filled with pebbles, and continued along its course into the higher ground. For water they drank from a fistful of clay that the Indian had taken at the last minute from the hole. They rested when they reached the top of the height. The Indian wrung the last drop of water into Jeremiah’s mouth and then moulded the clay with the palms of his hands into a perfect shiny ball. Standing up again he beckoned Jeremiah to the edge of a cliff. Hundreds of metres down on the floor of the plain was a vast sward of rich lime green. The Indian allowed Jeremiah to observe it for some minutes.
‘What am I looking at?’ said Jeremiah.
‘A multi-leaved clover,’ replied the Indian. ‘You must pluck the clover from the desert and hold it up to man and woman. What it means is outrageous and everlasting luck, and what it stands for is the Multinity. To God, the Son and the Holy Spirit, we must now add every man and woman.’
‘But how am I meant to hold something so large?’
‘In all beauty there is some strangeness of proportion.’
Jeremiah reached out his hand, holding the clover in the C of his finger and thumb, but felt only the breeze.
‘I said proportion, not perspective,’ said the Indian.
Jeremiah made his way down the cliff face through a vertical fault. Dead skunks littered the route along the horizontal. Ahead was a thin strip of green and, seeming to hover above it, an iridescent pall. Closer to the clover he heard the pulsing hissing chorus of a million snakes. A car whizzed by in front of him. He saw a sign that said:
WELCOME TO PALM SPRINGS!
A DIFFERENT GOLF COURSE FOR EVERY DAY OF THE YEAR
From the open top of a converted Routemaster double-decker bus he saw that the golf courses connected up into one enormous piece of landscaping. He mashed around his mouth the salty paste of disappointment, and imagined the sweet taste of water in the hissing, life-giving sprinklers.
‘There’s nothing to see in Palm Springs,’ said the Mexican in the seat beside him. He wore small pink binoculars on a string around his neck. ‘But you might find something you like in this.’ He handed Jeremiah a leaflet. The front of it read:
THINGS TO SEE IN PALM SPRINGS
Jeremiah slid down the banister rail of the bus.
‘Can you take me to the Clover Bowl, please?’ he said to the driver.
The driver dropped him off three-quarters of a kilometre from the Clover Bowl and gave him good instructions on how to get there. On arrival he did indeed find a bowl, an upturned one, though it could also have been a shield resting on its concave side or an empty turtle shell. The bowl reminded him too of the monument at Newgrange and, while he was thinking of that cruel trick played on antiquarians, he thought also of an upturned coracle. Atop, supported by scaffolding, was an idealised shee, beside his crock of gold. By the front door a child was having a disco in a coin-operated Spanish galleon with flashing bulbs. He walked the perimeter of the bowl, through a car park and then a backlot strewn with litter, dead palm fronds and full-to-bursting dumpsters, to see if the rear of the building made a clover shape, but it was elliptical all the way around. He supposed that a multi-leaved clover would, in fact, be elliptical.
The inside of the Clover Bowl was blessedly cool, owing to an absence of natural light. The walls were made of rough-hewn granite held together with a tar-like pointing. Where the walls were not like this they were panelled, mirrored, plastered, or obscured by partition walls that sectioned off rooms. One of these rooms had a sign beside the door that said:
HAVE YOUR PARTY HERE
He peeped in the door and saw a room that was very well fenestrated and full of natural light. A man had come to his shoulder and he asked the man:
‘Do you ever have foam parties here?’
One half of the Clover Bowl was taken up with bowling lanes and a range of clattering traps. Above the clattering traps ran a facia that depicted a scene of green hills among which jigged and jiggled many more idealised shee.
‘A-ah,’ said the man at his shoulder. ‘You can’t go down there without the right shoes.’
; Jeremiah minced to his designated seat in the right shoes. They looked tiny and shiny on his feet, and felt tiny too. The sounds of the Clover Bowl resembled nothing so much as the drippings inside of sewer pipes greatly amplified with the use of software. Other than that, the William Tell Overture blared over the speakers. Beside him was a rack of bowling balls. They connected one with the next with a pleasing clonk. He tried all the balls for size and found that his thumb, which was as thick as a cucumber as a result of callousing from hard endless work, would only fit in the thumb-hole of one of them. This ball was brown and, funnily enough, but maybe not so, had a clover on it.
His thumb felt as tight in the hole as his feet did in the shoes. He flung the ball into the lane almost glad to be rid of it, and stumbling as he did. It thumped on to the greased wood, screwed immediately into the trough, and rolled slowly towards and then into the trap. The gang of undisturbed white skittles at the end of the lane seemed to laugh at him.
Back in his seat he realised that his thumb was gone. It didn’t pain him one bit, and hadn’t when it came off, otherwise he would have noticed that he’d lost it when he did. All he could do now was wait for his ball to reappear through the chute. Perhaps five minutes went by and still it had not returned. He did a test: he hefted all the other balls out of the rack and rolled them down the trough and watched them fall into the trap. One by one, and with a suck, they returned. But his brown ball never did.
‘What happens to the balls when they don’t come back?’ he asked a passing cleaning woman in pink and white overalls.
By now his blood was everywhere.
‘Shee-it,’ said the woman. She ran.
He looked up at the digital screen that showed his points tally and was sure he saw there his brothers. Breffny was holding the brown ball with Jeremiah’s thumb in it and he would lift the ball between his face and Emmet’s and they would kiss it through their laughter. In this vision the image was drained of colour, not quite monochrome, but almost, and of low contrast.
Green Glowing Skull Page 21