Collected Stories

by Bernard Maclaverty

  ‘A queer fish but a good hearted lad.’

  By this time I was in my first year at University, studying English Literature and before he left we had some good talks about Joyce. The Portrait of the Artist was one of the books I was studying. It transpired that he knew a tremendous amount about Joyce, had read every word that he had written and almost every word that had been written about him. At the time one problem that seemed to occupy him more than any other was Joyce’s daughter who was now in a mad house somewhere in England. He claimed Joyce had made a sacrificial victim of her for the cause of Art. He had dragged her around the Continent from Paris to Trieste to Zurich, giving her no security, no home, no life until eventually she went mad. Joyce blamed himself for her state for ever afterwards.

  ‘But then, d’ye think,’ said Hugo, ‘would it have been better if Joyce had settled in Rathgar and never written a word? His wee girl might have been normal. Would the world be a richer or a poorer place? Would you rather have Joyce with a normal daughter or Ulysses?’

  ‘I know what answer you would get,’ I said, ‘if you asked Joyce’s daughter that question.’

  ‘A good point,’ he laughed, then became serious. ‘There is no doubt in my mind which I would choose.’

  He helped me considerably with The Portrait, giving me insights into the book which, I think, my tutors and lecturers would have been incapable of.

  ‘May I come and see you sometime in your house?’ I asked.

  ‘We could meet in a pub some night, if you like. D’ye drink yet?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said, although two pints was about my limit. ‘But don’t tell my mother.’

  I didn’t see him again until the night of Paul’s celebration on passing his finals but did not get talking seriously to him because the room was crowded and noisy and everybody was tipsy.

  Some months later I had volunteered to do a seminar on ‘A Painful Case’, one of Joyce’s stories from Dubliners and I thought I would get Hugo’s views on the subject. I got his address, which he had left with my mother for forwarding his mail, and went round one evening after tea.

  It was a smallish house in a terrace. Paper blinds were pulled on all the windows like a dead house. I rang the bell and an oldish woman answered. Her grey hair stood out from her head like she’d had an electric shock. She smiled broadly.

  ‘Is Hugo there?’ I asked. She closed the door over, leaving me standing on the step, and went away. Hugo came to the door nervously pulling at the waist of his Fairisle jumper.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ he said. He seemed confused and embarrassed. He stopped in the hallway and leaned against the wall. ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘I just thought we could have that drink. Something else about Joyce has come up. I’d like your opinion on it.’

  ‘I’ll have to shave,’ he said rubbing his chin. ‘Come in and wait.’ Then he turned conspiratorially and whispered, ‘In here.’

  At that moment the woman with the electric hair opened the door of the other room and said, ‘Who’s your little friend, Hugo? Am I not going to meet him?’

  Hugo introduced me to his mother and going out said he would be as quick as he could. It was the end of a summer day and a chill was in the air. Hugo’s mother was kneeling trying to light the fire. On the side-board and pinned to the wall I could just see in the gloom unframed paintings. Childish abstracts and several crude attempts to paint what I took to be Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

  ‘So your mother looked after my Hugo for three years?’ she said.

  ‘That’s r . . . r . . . r . . . right.’

  ‘Very well she did it too. He was never happier. He’s losing weight now. I can’t look after him.’ She said all these quick sentences over her shoulder.

  ‘Are you any good at fires? No, I suppose not.’ The fire had gone out at the first attempt. Now she was spoonfulling sugar from a bowl over the top of the coals. She bundled papers and put them on top of the coal and lit them.

  ‘I think it is easier to light if the coal is warm,’ she said. The flames from the papers roared up the chimney and went out. The sugar melted and bubbled a bit, then went brown. Quixote’s white horse was stick-like and flat. Sancho’s mule was even more badly drawn, if that was possible, and its colour had gone all muddy.

  ‘Firelighters are great,’ said the old woman. ‘But we haven’t got any. I think they stink the house.’

  Suddenly the door opened and with relief I looked round expecting to see Hugo, but it was someone else – a boy of about my own age, wearing the exact same Fairisle jumper as Hugo had on two minutes ago. The boy looked subnormal, blunted features, eyes vacant and twitching. He spoke in a thick, unrecognizable speech. ‘Oo da.’

  The mother introduced me to Hugo’s brother and I shook hands with him. He laughed, spittle shining on his chin, and seemed delighted to see me. Hugo seemed to take hours shaving. I was damp with sweat and the minute he came into the room I stood up, ready to go. Hugo’s brother reached out his arms and said something which I couldn’t begin to interpret. Hugo went over to him and ruffled his hair and hugged him kindly with one arm.

  ‘Sure, Bobby, sure,’ he said. When we left, the fire was still unlit. Outside the evening was fresh and clear.

  ‘What did your brother want?’ I asked.

  ‘I’d promised him we’d paint.’

  ‘Did he do the Quixotes on the wall?’

  ‘No, they’re mine,’ said Hugo. I felt very embarrassed but he did not seem to mind at all that I should have ascribed his paintings to his subnormal brother.

  ‘You’re a primitive,’ I said, trying to get out of the situation gracefully.

  ‘If you say so. Bobby likes to paint. It’s a kind of therapy for him as well. When I paint I encourage him to paint with me. He’s improving.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’ll have to forgive my mother. She’s a bit odd. She’s had a lot to put up with in her life, what with Bobby and things.’

  One of the things, I later found out from Paul, was that Hugo’s father had committed suicide by putting his head in the gas oven.

  In the pub we sat down to pints.

  ‘How’s the job?’ I asked.

  ‘Which one?’

  Taggart had given him the sack. He had got a job in another chemist’s shop but had left it. Now he was just doing locums.

  ‘There’s more money in it,’ he said. ‘I’ve realised I just hate the public. They come into the shop snivelling and coughing with their eyes on the ground. Nothing is important for them. They’re so stupid. I hate when you make a joke – you know, intentionally – and you are serving a fool who thinks you haven’t been aware of what you’ve said. Then he tries to underline it with some remark and claims the joke for his own. Do you know what I mean? It’s like a fully grown man being proud of finding the six sweeties hidden in the picture. I can’t think of an example off-hand, yet it happens a hundred times a day. They have no intelligence themselves so they don’t expect to find it in others.’

  ‘A job’s a job,’ I said.

  ‘I can’t be smooth and charming like Paul. People think I am dour. Taggart just thought I was insolent, the bastard. I’ve applied for a job in a hospital pharmacy. You don’t have to meet people there.’

  As we drank he became more and more talkative. He told me things about himself which I never knew. He had gone away for a time to study for the priesthood. He had been a journalist for a year on a small provincial paper. Then he confessed to having written a novel. I was very excited by this news.

  ‘You must let me read it.’

  ‘I might someday. It’s about 250,000 words but I’m not sure if it’s finished yet.’

  ‘Wow, that’s some size. What is it about?’

  ‘I don’t like to talk about it. But if I do let you read it you’ll have to be honest.’ I nodded that I would be. ‘I don’t want just to be good. I want my book to be great. It has to be.’ He laughed and said, ‘That’s the drink talking now.�
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  ‘Will you not tell me what it is about?’ I asked again.

  ‘No. But I might give you a clue.’

  I bought a drink for him but none for myself. I was becoming groggy and wanted to listen to what he had to say.

  ‘It’s all a matter of juxtapositions. Intersections might be a better word. Two things happen together and we get more than double the result.’

  ‘Like Joyce’s Epiphanies?’

  ‘Yes, a bit like that, but not the same. One recent one was – I was in the grounds of a monastery at this open air mass and there was a pop group playing the hymns very badly and just in front of me was a rose bush. It hadn’t flowered but the buds were green and covered with greenfly. The leaves were riddled with holes and there were rust spots all over them. That’s the kind of thing I mean. Both flawed but something different arising out of the joining of the experiences.’

  ‘I think I see,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t sound convinced.’ He laughed into his beer. ‘The one unforgettable one – and this one is in the novel – happened to me on a train once in England. I was in a seat opposite what looked like two soldiers, short haircuts sandpapered up the back, tattoos on their arms. It was a long journey and I was reading this book, a thing called Good Morning Midnight. Have you read it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘All the time I was trying to concentrate, not to listen to the soldiers’ conversation. They were drinking beer and the table was crowded with bottles and they were getting louder all the time. I reached this part in the book – ahh, she’s a beautiful writer – there’s this point in the book where the woman loses her baby at birth. This totally lonely person, without one belonging to her in the world, loses her baby, the only thing that gave her any hope – and I just choked up reading it. You know the way tears well up but don’t spill and then you can’t read?’

  Although I have a real love of literature I have never experienced what he talked about and, even though a bit suspicious of that kind of reaction, I nodded in agreement.

  ‘To stop the tears I just put my head back and one soldier said to the other, “What’s a five letter word for gristle?”’ Hugo paused to watch me. ‘It’s all there in the juxtaposition,’ he said.

  There was nothing I could say.

  ‘Of course that’s not what the novel is about. It’s the kind of thing I hope is happening all through it.’ He was still nodding his head as if in disbelief that such a perfect thing could have happened and he was the partaker and witness of it. After this and some more drink either he became incoherent or I ceased to take in what he was saying.

  On the way home, dizzy with drink and Hugo’s novel under my arm I was annoyed at myself for trying to think of a five letter word for ‘gristle’.

  That night I did not dare read the book because I knew I was in no fit state to make a judgement. I did, however, look at it. It was a huge fat cash accounts ledger ruled in red and blue covered in Hugo’s tiny copperplate handwriting. The colour of the ink varied from page to page, some black, some blue, some red. Occasionally there were words crossed out and corrections inserted above but I did not permit myself to read these. I left the book at my bedside and went to sleep.

  I was tempted to quote some passages of the novel here but after deep consideration I have decided against it. It was all too embarrassingly bad. He had not even grasped the first principles of good writing. I would be doing him a further disservice to parade them before the public to laugh at. Some of his ideas were good enough but the way he expressed them was lamentable. One could not even say that it was avant-garde and that I was too stodgy a critic to see it. I know enough about literature not to make a mistake like that.

  My problem, over the next weeks, grew into an obsession of what to say to Hugo. I had promised him to be honest yet had not the heart to be cruel. Neither could I be dishonest. This, to me, would have been a far greater cruelty. So I compromised.

  After I told him, as kindly as I could, what I thought of his novel, suggesting possible ways to improve it, he seemed to shun my company. Every time I called he was not in. Once or twice I spotted him at a distance in the centre of town but he would slip away like a ghost before I could catch him.

  A year must have passed before I talked to him again. I was on my usual Saturday afternoon browse through the bookshops. I was in Green’s second-hand department, feeling my usual annoyance at the lack of classification of their books. My eyes skimmed from one shelf to another, ton upon ton of print, none of it – not a single name familiar to me. Then suddenly through the shelves I saw Hugo and our eyes met for a fraction of a second. When I went round the other side he was just on the point of leaving. I called him and he stopped. He seemed affable enough but somehow detached from all that was going on around him. He told me that he had left his job in the hospital. They were always picking on him and did not give him his rightful status so he told them what they could do with their job. I asked him to go for a drink but he refused, saying that he no longer indulged. I myself think it was because he had no money.

  I had been lecturing for several years when I saw him for the last time. Again he could not avoid me. I saw his familiar gaberdine ahead of me in a crowd of shoppers. His shape had slumped and he walked as if looking for something on the pavement. He walked slower than the crowd so that they flowed past him on either side. I came up behind him – I felt I should – and greeted him. He looked up startled that someone from the crowd should address him. Then, recognizing me, he smiled.

  ‘How’s things?’ I asked.

  ‘Not so bad, struggling on.’

  He looked terrible – dirty, unshaven. His shirt was filthy and the collar wings curled. His glasses were mended at the bridge of his nose with sticking plaster.

  ‘Are you working?’ I knew the answer but felt I had to ask the question.

  ‘No. Not just at the moment.’

  I walked along with him and asked him what he was doing now.

  ‘Making raspberry ruffles.’

  ‘What?’

  Something of his old intensity returned as he told me about his new hobby of sweet-making. Toffees, macaroons, yellowman and now he was looking for the ingredients to make raspberry ruffles. Did I know where he could buy loose coconut? No, I said, I didn’t. We stood facing each other in the street with nothing to say.

  ‘Doing any writing this weather?’ I asked him. He laughed, scoffed almost.

  ‘No – I’m finished with all that long ago.’ He made to move away from me.

  ‘But you shouldn’t,’ I said. ‘By all means keep it up. You shouldn’t throw a gift away. The last thing I wanted to do was to discourage you.’

  He looked at me straight, his eyes hard and needle-like. ‘If you say so,’ and he walked away into the crowd.

  It was about a year after this, as well as I can calculate, that I was sitting reading in my study. Distantly I heard the phone ring and my mother answer it. She came up the stairs and knocked lightly on the door.

  ‘Come in.’

  ‘I’ve just heard bad news,’ she said. She was on the verge of tears.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Poor Hugo is dead.’ I was silent for a long time looking at my book, the print jumping before my eyes.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘The poor thing took his own life. He was found hung in a barn – somewhere outside Dungannon.’

  ‘Jesus. When’s th . . . th . . . the funeral?’

  ‘All this happened a couple of months ago. He was dead a fortnight when they found him.’

  I closed the book and tried to comfort my mother who was very upset and was now crying openly.

  I still experience a sense of shock when I remember that day. Of not eating, of being unable to read. I couldn’t help feeling that I could have done something to avert the tragedy. I could have called on him, sought him out, perhaps even given him some hope. My only consolation was that during our talk on Paul’s wedding day, Paul said t
hat he felt exactly the same way, but he too had done nothing about it. When I asked him if he had ever seen the novel he said no – so far as he knew Hugo had never showed it to anyone. We drank our beer and talked, more like people at a funeral than a wedding, laughing but not loudly enough to betray ourselves to each other.

  A PORNOGRAPHER WOOS

  I AM SITTING on the warm sand with my back to a rock watching you, my love. You have just come from a swim and the water is still in beads all over you, immiscible with the suntan oil. There are specks of sand on the thickening folds of your waist. The fine hairs on your legs below the knee are black and slicked all the one way with the sea. Now your body is open to the sun, willing itself to a deeper brown. You tan well by the sea. Your head is turned away from the sun into the shade of your shoulder and occasionally you open one eye to check on the children. You are wearing a black bikini. Your mother says nothing but it is obvious that she doesn’t approve. Stretch-marks, pale lightning flashes, descend into your groin.

  Your mother sits rustic between us in a print dress. She wears heavy brogue shoes and those thick lisle stockings. When she crosses her legs I can see she is wearing pink bloomers. She has never had a holiday before and finds it difficult to know how to act. She is trying to read the paper but what little breeze there is keeps blowing and turning the pages. Eventually she folds the paper into a small square and reads it like that. She holds the square with one hand and shades her glasses with the other.

  Two of the children come running up the beach with that curious quickness they have when they run barefoot over ribbed sand. They are very brown and stark naked, something we know again is disapproved of, by reading their grandmother’s silence. They have come for their bucket and spade because they have found a brown ogee thing and they want to bring it and show it to me. The eldest girl, Maeve, runs away becoming incredibly small until she reaches the water’s edge. Anne, a year younger, stands beside me with her sticky-out tummy. She has forgotten the brown ogee and is examining something on the rock behind my head. She says ‘blood-suckers’ and I turn round. I see one, then look to the side and see another and another. They are all over the rock, minute, pin-point, scarlet spiders.