by Edna O'Brien
Night
Edna O’Brien
For the Lads
She is far from the land
Where her young hero sleeps
(Song)
The original Hooligans were a
spirited Irish family whose proceedings enlivened the drab monotony of life in Southwark towards the end of the nineteenth century.
E. Weekley
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraphs
One fine day in the middle of the night…
I say seven and think it means something.
There was a time when I made jam…
Christmas is not long gone…
To see a door close and know that the very last person has gone out…
Her funeral was a comic event…
I see the animal starting up in people…
A feather.
Paramours are not battering on any door…
Nick was of the red-haired fraternity…
I am reaching for the pushbell.
Coose, that old Alma Mater.
I don’t know anyone who hasn’t grown up in a madhouse…
Among the foe.
Of course other people do come here…
I expect someone died in this room.
Little does my mistress know.
Two nights later I was sitting starkers…
Birdshit on the window.
The next landing post after Coose was Liverpool.
More mortification.
I wouldn’t mind a visit from the Holy Ghost.
The lad sleeps out in fields…
Dr Flaggler, one of the original princes of darkness.
Soon it will be St Valentine’s day.
I have had a game of snowball.
My next Romeo after Dr Flaggler was a Finn.
I picked up that slang in New York…
Still, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
I had quails’ eggs yesterday.
Still, little by little the circle dwindles.
Another letter from the lad.
The dawn like doves to come…
Oh mine own land, a lifetime away…
There is no magic, no homecoming…
I am up now, limbering…
I went down in all harmlessness…
The good is oft interred…
‘Begone, begone…’
About the Author
Also by Edna O’Brien
Copyright
One fine day in the middle of the night, two dead men got up to fight, two blind men looking on, two cripples running for a priest and two dummies shouting Hurry on. That’s how it is. Topsy-turvy. Lit with blood, cloth wick and old membrane. Milestones, tombstones, whetstones and mirrors. Mirrors are not for seeing by, mirrors are for wondering at, and wondering into. There was a piece of glass by which we tried to catch and contain the sun’s fire. It must have been called a sunglass. There is so little and so fucking much. Half a lifetime. Felt, seen, heard, not fully felt, most meagrely seen, scarcely heard at all, and still in me, rattling, like a receding footfall, or Count Dracula’s swagger.
I am in a bed, a fourposter no less, satinised headboard, casters. Paws come out from underneath the well of the bed, all vying for a handshake, some gloved, some ungloved. The more I wrestle with sleep the more it ducks me, I am beckoning to it, beseeching. There are moments when it seems imminent, but then it vanishes, like a cloud formation or someone on rollerskates. I’ve had better times of course – the halcyon days, rings, ringlets, ashes of roses, shit, chantilly, high teas, drop scones, serge suits, binding attachments, all that. I used to have such a penchant for feelings, now, I feel as much for the woman in the train who had the flushes, as for the woman Lil who bore me.
Outside it is blustery. In the occasional lull I think I hear an owl. Of course I always hear the cars, their drone in the distance, cars going too fast at night. There could be an owl since we are on the outskirts of a city and there are trees to roost in. They too are creaking and groaning. I am counting sheep but they are tumbling into one another and I see nothing but rumps of greying fleece, ruddled at that, and as for the ploy of counting apples, it is too playful, too strenuous. Still, one has to pass the time, the leisure hours, the resting hours, knit up the ravelled sleeve of care. Jesus. Buckets of time, you put your hand into it, deep down as far as the elbow, and it is like putting your hand into the abyss. So slowly does time pass, that is if it passes at all. Still, the Christmases rip around quick enough, the giving and taking, the Yuletide grog, the guzzle beneath the parasitic mistletoe. Only the minutes are rugged.
I knew a man once that saw time as loaves of bread, feasted on it, gorged, got overbloated, lost his desire, became a toper instead. I knew another that squashed eggs in his hand, existed for that sound, that crunching sound when he squelched them in his fist, made snowballs of them and threw them shell and all at whoever he happened to sight. A cretin. I’ve met them all, the cretins, the pilgrims, the scholars, and the scaly-eyed bards prating and intoning for their bit of cunt. More of them anon.
I have the curtains drawn, the old clausilium shut, tight, so it ought to be safe enough, it ought. I take a tablet, break it down its central line and swallow one half, with some of the waters of the Malvern hills. I’ve always had a taste for spring waters, sparkling waters and sturgeons’ eggs. I lie with my God, I lie without my God. Into the folds of sleep. Oh Connemara, oh sweet mauve hills, where will I go, where will I not go, now?
Fucking nowhere.
I say seven and think it means something. The figure slides across the page or the blackboard or the sweet sky or the sawdust floor and though it tells me something, like the cost of the joyride, or what filly to back, or how long more the journey, the immediate journey that is, it does not tell me what I need to know. Not that I know what I need to know. Not that I do. I am a woman, at least I am led to believe so. I bleed et cetera. And those noises, and those sighs, and those murmurs, and those innuendoes, and those emanations, and those come-hithers, and those coo-coos, issue from me faithfully like buntings. Not to mention the more bucolic sounds, the ones in sly reserve, the choice slushings of the womb which have ogled many another by means of gurgle, nuance, melody, ditty and crass babbling supplication. A dab hand at it I was. As aforesaid I have met bards and knackers. Along the wayside. They told me many a tale, spun me many a yarn, swindled me as often as not. I bathed their feet, had ointments, mused, groped in the dark, looked up to the constellations, identified the Plough and the Milky Way, said most lachrymose things.
There are so many waysides that one mistakes them sometimes for the real route.
I have had unions, tête-à-têtes, ripping times, gay collisions. All sickeningly predictable like a doh ray me fa. Simply did they start up the perturberations, the springtime spawn, the yea-nay, the boogie-woogie. Result, more blasted birth or more blasted arrested birth. And hark, a population problem. Solution. Nota bene. A hard ebony cock secure within the lassies and the myriad others, that is to say the poor male human rejects, displayed upon a clothesline, white, bloodless, jovial, obedient; twittering, hanging, maybe even fluttering, like sparrows perhaps, or socks, or sloths or clothespegs proper. Hosannah.
We had a clothesline in Coose, in fact we had two. One adjacent to the back kitchen, ideal for small things such as teacloths, dribblers and bibs, then one farther away, on a hill, open to the prevailing winds, that served for sheets, blankets, quilts, eiderdowns, pillowcases, bolster cases, and the Boss’s lugubrious long johns. Quite a formidable place on account of the force of the trade winds, and the clothes that flap-flapped and the sight of Lil frequently rushing out to retrieve things at the first onslaught of the rain and the hails that were wizard both for their fr
equency and their velocity. A bit like the sea although it was green and had thickets and the different field flowers in the different field months. So lying here I think of there. God blast it. As if there was nothing else, as if there was no one else. One’s kith, one’s kin – Boss, Lil, Tutsie, and the inimitable Dr Flaggler. No forgetfulness within, or without. The heart in its little swoon, in accord, sometimes in discord, and a note of solemn music, a refrain, for ever being struck up within one, saying thy mother, thy father, thy spouse, thy son, thyself. Others too, though never the mob, never enough of the mob. I have written some nauseating letters – “you touched my heart, you touched my cunt, I touched yours” and so on and so forth. Devouring, cloying, calumnious. All of those missives I have kept in reserve because to act as nonsensical as that, without presently dying would be the most clownish of my many clownish actions. I have even made a written request to be buried on an island in the vicinage of Coose, a woeful place surrounded by choppy waters and presided over by a pair of unpropagating swans. An affirmative involves the goodwill of the hierarchy and also of the lady butcher who has leased the grazing rights, ad infinitum. Its features consist of tombs, tumuli, vaults, boulders, a round tower, turds, toadstools, and bullocks all scratching and munching and chewing their cuds. No doubt, on frosty mornings it is regaling to witness their vapours, the numerous vapours rising up, the flowers congealed in the ice, splendid plumes of grass, the peckled shimmer on the headstones and the thistles lording it like starched cockades. But mere postulation, to want to lie there when I am incapable of living anywhere within its precincts. Is it that I imagine death to be the apotheosis of loneliness, to do away with a lesser loneliness, the force, puniness and shackle of which has kept me captive in towns and cities, where I have forgotten the fact that earth and running water lie somewhere underneath the vast complex of concrete and sewerage and rubble and weed and fag-ends and grating and shit. In yon High Street the tyres play havoc with the shit, especially the double tyring of lorries and pantechnicons. I often say “Ah, to sink into it at last, to say yea instead of nay to the lambative stink and smear of it all.” Goodbye to daisies and plankton, goodbye to the mavis, the missel and the white-bodied thrush. It is the dunghill ethos, is it not. Another thing that might have influenced my decision about the island is the banishment of it. The truth is I do not wish to lie with my own kith and kin. Another blow for King James and for the green. I do not want to lie with anyone else’s kith and kin either. One for King Billy. I have no desire, not even in deathbed slobber, to be lumped in with other people and have them flustering around me and vice versa. Think of the tendernesses we would have to purport, the subsequent niceties, the clacking of tongues, handshakes, boneshakes, in order to live, middlingly peaceably, together for a long time, for ever maybe. Maybe. I want to be by myself at last and to be robbed of that stupid, suppurating malady they call hope. Not to be a member of the communion of saints or angels or gods or demi-gods or fathers or mothers or grandfathers or grandmothers or brothers or sisters or brethren of any kind, germaine to me through consanguinity, affinity, or any other kind of linear or genitive or collateral bond. To face the music at last. To be on one’s tod. Do I mean it? Apparently not. I am still snooping around, on the lookout for pals, pen pals, pub pals, cronies of any kind, provided they know their place, keep at distance, stay on the leash, leave me my soul’s crust, and my winding dirging effluvias.
*
There was a time when I made jam and met my son Tutsie, as he came through the school gates. A straggler, nearly always the last, always tarrying. Big lad now, has a quarter share in a jeep, and is touring the world. Said he wanted to reach places that others hadn’t percolated to. Taciturn, always was. He loved the animals, had a way of taming them. He stayed on a train once, crouched down, just to be near a dachshund, stroking it. When at first he was tonsured and I used to be putting a bonnet on him, the crown of his head spoke to me of former massacres, his little bones used to suggest holocausts. Then sprouts, like toothbrushes came standing on his head, and then it began to grow in ringlets, long flaxen curls. I have these locks, and his milk teeth in a little chain purse, stored for his children. I am eager for them. The purse is in the blanket along with the rest of my belongings. A mother’s love, like yeast, multiplying, the spores rising up over the lid of the world, too much. Grandiloquent pees he did in the municipal parks, to keep tow with the fountains. The janitors and keepers used to get us to scarper, crotchety people keepers and those in authority. I am in authority here but it’s negligible.
One day a week I bought a lollipop for him. That was a Thursday. The Thursdays have become all one, the Thursdays of his childhood are mine, and perhaps yours? Ring a ring o’ rosy, haisha haisha, we all fall down. The dye of the lollipop used to rubify the colour of his lips, dribble down on to his chin, drop on to the nap of his dufflecoat and then very deftly his little tongue came out to retrieve it. He even retrieved it from the coat or retrieved as much of it as hadn’t soaked into the pile. Our cate was sherbet. It caught in the throat. The grains lodged in the tastebuds and spread behind the nose and made all the inside of the mouth areas itch with pleasure. I suppose mouths experience it first, the resuscitation, the life thrill. Also there was a little wooden spatula with it, sturdy enough to press the tongue flat, much preferable to Dr Rath’s implement for when he got people to say Aaaah. It smelt of summer, that sherbet, at least it seems so now.
I try, I try so hard to recollect – not that recollection is of any use – but to remember the then, their countenances, what they wore, what I saw of myself, mis-saw, when I looked into one of the many long, sad, blotched mirrors that fronted the wardrobe doors in that dark rookery that was our house, our homestead. I remember nothing much except the sherbet, its airiness, crêpe dresses with the creeps on them, and a rubber ball mauled by a dog so that its insides were like a frayed old brain falling about. A ball, a dog, a brain?
There weren’t enough forks to go around on the days of the threshing, and some workmen, the apish ones, had to wait, malinger, while others hacked their food assiduously before passing on the ungainly utensils. Ah yes, it is trickling through. Men with caps upon the knee, cloth caps, peaked caps, nosegays in the form of sops of hay, the odd surname such as Dowling or Stack, a bit of a snortle, the numerous pisreogs, the clamorous Banshee, the Buggie man, the geese already ushered to the cornfields to get the leavings, to lunge their black webbed feet into the rails of stubble, to gorge themselves in order to be plump for Christmas. It would have been then autumn. Harvests are. That I do know.
That and the ears of corn, gushes, pouring out of a chute, and the men busy with the pitchforks and the chaff flying, while down in the kitchen cling-clang as the washed forks were put back in the musted drawer. Those showers of corn, in some way connected with a seventh heaven, as was the silver of a chalice and the dunner silver of the one christening mug that the male issue of the family had been presented with after birth. Silver and gold, gospel and gooseberries, the snagging of same, the benefits of carragheen moss, that cold substance that was liable to wobble when tipped out of its corrugated mould. A trepidation. There were also the hens, moving in and out between the ragwort, the latter gaunt, over-riding the grasses. Cock a doodle doo, monarch of all he surveyed. Afternoons merging into evenings, and such a momentum of tears and for what, and for whom? Evening light, sometimes phosphorescent, in threads, finely spun, melting, molten, like oil, like honey, ladles of light, linking the two worlds, the one where we carried cudgels, the other to which we aspired to go and for which the whole of our living life was a frigging pilgrimage.
Somebody – that tattler Dowling – announced that a tennis court was going to be erected, a hard court of tarmacadam, and that on their weekly half days the shopkeepers, the excise officer and the bank clerks would be able to while away the time in white tuxedos, causing a ball to pass to and fro while some nipper counted up the winning and the losing scores. Farmers were to be prohibited. When Boss hea
rd that he harangued. He hated to be shunned. His temper rose, causing him to down three of his indigestion tablets which he cracked vehemently with his molars. The precincts smelt of magnesium. Oh Boss, were you ever not on the edge of a cataclasmic ire, with your two brown suits and your white shins that were revealed to all at the ploughing match of Glenstall, the day you got a kick. Incurred a kick from a bay mare and since he was without benefit of leggings or gaimbeaux he was perforce to roll his trousers to look for injuries in case he had to resort to a reprisal such as fisticuffs or calling in the law. “Buggerotum to tennis,” Boss said, “a fop’s game, clerks’s stirabout.” To have known and not known, now that is a glim thing. Glim. Glaucous. To have met and not met, like cyclists, in a spinney at night, cyclists going in opposite directions and passing each other without a greeting, without a snatch of conversation, without a holler; recognisable to each other only by the strength or the weakness of their flashlights, or their tail-lights, or failing such properties, recognised by the sheen of the spokes or the mudguard or the handlebars in the thrall of the night. Not known. So many of our encounters are. Even the gut ones. Especially the gut ones. The seed of my father I reach out to you, as you once did to me, pitifully, passionately, idiotically, to small avail. What caused us to embark on such a maraud? Her buttocks, flaunched and ordinary, the slit, the slit of absurdity into which we chose to pass. The nearest we ever were. You and I? You or I? Only you, not yet I? Already I, no longer you? A trinity of yobs. In occidental damp and murk. What gave rise to your spasming? A full moon, a half moon, no moon at all, a touch of the madman’s wisp, duty, reconciliation, thirst? Anything? The crab delights in soft and unguent places. Bucking maybe and pronouncing fiendish words such as bollocks or jackass or Oirre, upon her. Grunting. I wouldn’t put it past you. You shaman you. Already I, with some cursed inkling, some predilection towards shame and calamity and stupor, already liturgicalised before entering that dark, damp, deep seasous place. No choice in the matter.