From out of the City

by John Kelly

  I was very close that night, sipping Guinness in a jammed bar in Baggot Street, named for Robert, Lord Bagot with g and one t and where I once saw David Bowie and Tin Machine. I got the news within minutes but I didn’t linger. There were no taxis that night and so I walked the whole way back to Dún Laoghaire along the old Rock Road, staring up at the sky and thinking about how the world had somehow turned and how this new Millennium Baby would need special minding and care. They brought him home a few days later and Mrs S never once blinked. I could hear everything through the wall. Mr S singing lullabies, Mrs S creaking in the bed and little Baby Schroeder crying like a lion cub all night long.

  And yet, the strangest thing of all is this: for the next forty years, myself and Schroeder would only speak once. There were of course the odd muttered greetings over the garden wall but there was only ever one actual conversation and that was when I brought those shirt-boxes to his door. Not much of a conversation, I know. An offer of coffee and a request for milk. But I treasure it all the same. And the more I think about it now the more shocking it is to me that he invited me in at all. As a younger man, he had always been much smarter than that. And as boy he had been a certifiable brainbox. Cautious, rigorous and, school report after school report, always top of the class. Gold star student, his teachers wrote, a pleasure to teach.

  At one time it seemed that there was nothing Schroeder didn’t know. Capital cities, soccer grounds, makes of car, dates, actors and actresses, historical figures, which river ran where etc., etc. The naming of names was like breath to him – birds, fish, dinosaurs, trees, flags, dogs, herbs and garden plants – all had to be identified and logged. It was the sort of knowledge which kept a boy in control of his world and gave him the steadying sense of being on top of things. I was the same myself. A fact collector.

  But then, at some point, everything seemed to change. Borders changed, flags changed, capital cities changed and, in the far north, entire land masses changed as country-sized lumps of ice slipped into the sea. The plastic globe in Schroeder’s room quickly became just another curious, spinning thing and his old school atlas might as well have been the work of Ptolemy or Mercator. And then as more and more species became extinct and more and more soccer clubs abandoned their turf, he somehow yielded, let go and wrote everything off as he would later write off his book. Almost overnight he turned into one of nature’s rejectors and became a man for cuttings off. Whatever he couldn’t master, he spurned.

  That said, I knew it still hurt him when he found himself struggling with some television quiz. Questions to which he once knew the answer or, worse again, questions where a once correct answer was no longer so. There was a period when he could beat any television contestant with ease – even in the chosen subject round where you really needed to know your onions. In fact I recall a contestant whose chosen subject really was onions and, even then, Schroeder got six of them right. It was something about onions in the eye sockets of the Pharaoh (I’d need to check my notes) and a line from Shakespeare. Then C. T. Onions. Charles Talbut. Mine eyes smell onions; I shall weep anon.

  But by the time King was shot in Dublin Castle, Schroeder no longer farmed such knowledge with any real diligence and had, with actual grief, relegated himself to the second tier. He had allowed himself to slip and to settle, conscious that all his highest hopes (and there were many because of the circumstances) had quietly died alone. Sad to say but Schroeder knew more when he was twelve than he did in his thirties – before all that potential, and that meaningless Millennium buzz, had passed into nothingness.

  The job at Trinity had not been good for him either. He specialised in the largely forgotten works of late 20th-century fiction and here again was another trigger for that constant fizz of frustration which one might best read by passing a Geiger Counter across the white knuckles of his writing hand. The book was about eight years ago. Lucky’s Tirade. The story of a man who dreams the secrets of others and uses this knowledge to make himself as rich as Croesus. But for all its potential (a movie, surely?) and for all the quality of the writing, it had no impact whatsoever. The editor was a cokehead and the publicist was a drunk but that probably made no real difference in the end. Lucky’s Tirade was verbose, digressive, unconvincing and flawed, and those who read it rarely showed any enthusiasm or, to use a word from the novel, enthusmiasm.

  And so, in despair and indignation, Schroeder slithered into a burrow of self-loathing and paid a substantial sum of money to have the book removed from the site, hoping that it would simply explode back into nothingness like some unviable planet, blasted into a million smithereens of resentment and defeat. As far as he was concerned, the book was gone. He never referred to it again and he retained not a single copy of his own. As I say, one of nature’s rejectors.

  But that said, Schroeder never stopped writing and just about everything he pondered and plotted he still hammered out in note form and emailed to himself for safekeeping. Hokum mostly but moved by mood, alcohol, pills and the occasional cigarette, he scribbled ideas and slivers of notions which rarely survived a few hours’ sleep. But even so, I intercepted everything and filed it away with especial care, along with the nuked novel which I had printed and hardbound in linen with blind-embossed title in a Pergamenta wraparound. A dozen copies at very great expense. Lucky’s Tirade. A title which drew negative critical attention from the get-go. Using words like “retromingent” and “Brobdingnagian” brought nothing but further abuse. And, in truth, he really did bring it all on himself.

  Lucky raises a buttock and exhales from the depths, producing something rancid and astonishing with all the sonic quality of a knackered bus in deep pneumatic collapse, that sudden relax on its axles over in Dolphin’s Barn – the heart-stopping gush of bad air. Hydrogen, methane, oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide coming together in a profound multiphonic honk. It might have been the sad expiration of a beached whale on the rocks of Mayo. It might have been the boat leaving Kingstown in the full fog of Empire. Or even the folk-memory of a Cyclopic New Orleans sousaphone humping up the old streets of Tremé on a Mardi Gras Day.

  And all that for a fart. No wonder his readers were pandiculating by the end of Chapter Two.

  He’s a strange boy, Schroeder. Unmotivated now. And even on this fresh new day of drizzle and possibility, he will be sleeping still, astray no doubt in a vivid dream of Paula Viola – the nation’s vampon-the-spot, recently voted Ireland’s Best Dressed Woman thanks in part to his voting many times over. Schroeder has never actually met Ms Viola, but her nightly appearances on the news and in newsflashes in particular sometimes have him on his knees before the screen in lust and adoration. Even when he makes love to Francesca, she is always somewhere in the room – watching, reporting, the black mic in a death-grip like some high-end dominatrix from Prague. In a PVC catsuit perhaps. Or a transparent raincoat of rosetinted plastic. Right now she’s in a long string of pearls. Eight inch stilettos. Cigarette holder. A black fedora at a dark suggestive tilt.

  This is Paula Viola for Channel NB1 News. Dublin City Centre. I like to be watched.

  THREE

  THE SCREEN turns itself on (I’m always ahead of my alarms) and the predictable headline is the early morning rain. Then news of unrest in Venezuela, Indonesia, the Sudan and Sweden. Then local titbits – a drive-by, a hospital closure, arrests at Shannon, three fatal stabbings, loose horses on the Tolka Valley Road, Gorczynski out of the Ireland squad and finally more on the rain. I don’t dwell on any of it except to witness yet another clip of self-immolation in a Chinese shopping mall. Depressing stuff. Raising my hand, I wave it goodbye and the sudden silence is welcome.

  Of course, none of this was ever to have been the future. By this stage of the century the world should surely have overtaken the punts of my old paperbacks and Dublin should, by now, be some Irish Tokyo filled with flying machines, artificial intelligence and a telepathic citizenry. But no. None of it ever happened and our run-down wreck of a capital is now little more tha
n a mix of Camden Market and old Philadelphia, and its citizens can think neither crooked nor straight. In fact, apart from the military, the murders and the feral dogs in the Green, named for a leper hospital, named for the first Martyr, things haven’t changed all that much since the year of Mise Éire and JFK. And for Ireland to end up as a place neither utopian nor dystopian seems to me to be the worst outcome of all. Neither one thing nor the other and all we have is some kind of stasis. Slow death. And waste.

  It all began, if not with the arrival of Richard de Clare, 2nd Earl of Pembroke, aka Strongbow, then with the economic rot which blossomed like an algal mat in the early days of Schroeder’s childhood, when the jet stream split for the very first time and there were simultaneous heatwaves in Russia and floods in Pakistan. The IMF, the EMF and Standard and Poor’s of 55 Water Street, NYC. It makes me shudder now to recall those years and how they tasted of nothing so much as lead. That overwhelming sense of breakage that was in the air – that stink of falsity and failure. Failed powers and failed priests. Broken systems and broken people. False prophets and false witnesses. False hearts and black arts. Deadbeats and dead ducks. Surfers started seeing the Devil in the skies above Strandhill, the General Post Office went up in flames again, turtles swam in the Liffey at the Strawberry Beds and unholy balls of snakes were found for the first time in the wasted brambles of Glendalough. And these were the days in which I watched Schroeder enter his adolescence and somehow survive without recourse to Australia or the massed regiments of Europe. Depression-era Ireland. Villainy. Treachery. A murder picture which is running still.

  I break the fast with naturally cloudy, pressed apple juice, Mocha Sidamo roast ground coffee, two slices of German bread toasted and lightly spread with organic butter, a glass of Marlbank mineral water (still) with one 500mg effervescent lozenge of Vitamin C. Assorted pills, powders and capsules follow, then one potassium loaded banana, another glass of water with a random splashing of Echinaforce resistance drops and finally another camomile with honey. Synthetic but even so. Sweetness is essential. If only the bastards would approve lugduname I’d put it on my pancakes. Then I clear up, do a few stretches, go upstairs and start work.

  Each morning, the first thing I do is check everyone’s mail. Today it’s all official circulars mostly – threat assessments, global security alerts, updates on tropical diseases and then rivers of spam pushing drugs, sex and weapons. No personal stuff for Schroeder yet except for one brief dispatch from Walton.

  – Did you see himself this morning? Taking a slash in the fucking garden? Yuk.

  Walton. Another name we all know. And mid-morning, sore shoulders and down for a tea break, I hear the bored railroad noises of his wheelchair coming from the flat below. Louis Patrick Walton, another one in the orbit of my surveillance and the only one who (sometimes) pays me rent. A complicated character certainly, but as he never goes out the door, he hardly seems like the most thrilling arrival, for our purposes here. Action-wise I mean. But even so, he lives downstairs and so I have my eye on him. Always.

  I tap the radiator three times with a spoon – amateur Morse for good morning you little shit and the greeting travels downwards. The response comes quickly by way of a sweeping brush poking the floor directly beneath my feet. Fuck off you old bastard. And this is about all the direct contact we ever have, other than to deal with matters of rent or small to-be-ignored repairs. The relationship is strictly landlord / tenant and there are never any state visits below. No tea and bickies. No Christmas drinks. In fact, at this point, I haven’t seen him in the flesh for six months, three weeks and two days. As I say, he never goes out.

  Ever since the accident he prefers to crouch in front of his glowing unit, not so much surfing the net as drifting through it on a rotting, salty raft while permanently (night and day) logged on to the worm-infested website of a ferocious-looking Ukrainian blonde, by professional reputation a black belt in fellatio and a screamer to boot. Her name is Jakki Jack. She’s a multi-award winner and Walton worships her. In fact Walton has seen so much pornography that he knows the names of just about every performer in history and can recognise any of them from any angle. He doesn’t even need to see their faces to know who is doing what, and to whom. For a party piece he can recite the CV of everyone from the early 1980s onward – what movies she has been in and what her specialties are. Actresses, he gently calls them, and their names all begin with J. To tell you the truth it all makes me a little nauseous. Sometimes it sounds like gangs of drunks are sawing each other in half. Or worse. And his stamina is breathtaking.

  That accident I refer to was a bad one. Walton’s red Toyota was walloped by a lorry on a roundabout somewhere in the old industrial estate in Sandyford. He wasn’t even supposed to be there but he simply took a wrong exit off the Inner Ring and he’s still finding it hard to believe his bad luck. From the moment he regained consciousness, it seemed as if everything inhabiting his head was evicted and replaced by an ant colony of relentless questions. Why had it happened? Why had it happened to him? Why not the car behind him? Or in front? What sort of fluke of timing and circumstance had brought about such a catastrophe? He considered all these questions, drunk and sober, for an entire year and came up with nothing. Of course, of the three of us on Hibernia Road – Messrs Schroeder, Walton and Monk – I was the only one old enough to know that such fear of the random is not only deep but incurable. Nothing for that one even in my cabinet.

  Walton’s spin was a good one though. The direct cause of the crash had been, according to him, some kind of high-risk devotion to beauty. The car had been moving so well, so gracefully, that to have given way would have been a crude affront to what he called the “fluid aesthetic of the roundabout.” Schroeder saluted him for that theory but he knew that his old friend would never be truly happy again, and had condemned himself to remain henceforth unseen in his curtained, flickering room, insisting that he could live his entire life online, like a pig in shit. Walton thought many such things and he meant none of them. Schroeder worried about him. I worried about him too. But not so much.

  In the years before the accident Louis Patrick had been a television presenter on a Dublin-only channel and, despite being thoroughly uncommitted, this made him both a minor local celebrity and a malcontent. His programme Dinosaur Grooves (not his title) was basically a string of vintage music clips broadcast to a very small late-night audience, with no other real purpose than to fill dead airtime. Eventually the sheer emptiness of the situation got the better of him and one sub-tropical day in springtime he drove into work, passed through the security gates, went around the block and then drove straight back out again in the general direction of the Wicklow Mountains, where he spent much of the afternoon asleep in a field. When he got back to the flat, his head still full of the sound of rooks, there, stuffed in his letterbox, was a legal document which officially marked the end of his television career.

  For a time he enjoyed being unemployed and, at least as far as television was concerned, unemployable. But once he remembered he would need money in order to eat, he began accepting offers to write for all manner of publications. It was all tolerable enough and at least he was no longer defined by a job he had always found more than a little ridiculous. His professional suicide had, it seemed, the potential to be a very good career move. But then came the smash and nothing was ever the same again.

  Schroeder helped out at first by getting him what he needed, setting up the basement with the trappings of a changed life, while Francesca visited far too often for her own good. As for me, I did what I could by not pushing for the rent, knowing that Walton just about got by, living as a cipher for his former self, recycling old articles and sending them to editors desperate for content. I monitored all of it but there was never anything of note. Nothing he hadn’t said before and said much better. He stayed well clear of current events and apart from one occasion when he battered out a drunken rant about the USS Barry, he never really attracted any serious attention. The
Embassy checked him out but took it no further.

  Schroeder, distressed by the fact that Walton refused to go out, did his best to encourage him but in the end gave up and, for the most part, tried to ignore Walton’s damaged presence. The idea of his old friend all hunched in a wheelchair manky with gaffer tape was too much for a man of Schroeder’s sensibilities. Yes, Walton could be as pornisophical as he wanted but for Schroeder this was all too dark to even consider. Walton could protest all he liked, but the reality was that there was no drink, no drug, no art, no belief, no politician, no love, no chemical weapon and no masturbatory technique known to humankind that could do a damn thing about what had happened to him.

  At times Schroeder feared (a fear not shared by me) that Walton would inevitably mutate into some new strain of computer übergeek – like some nerd in a movie secretly hacking into security systems and planning some murderous attack. Sometimes he pictured Walton looped in chains, wearing an orange jumpsuit, being led into the arse-end of a transport plane at Shannon and flown off to be tried and fried on Fox Morning Justice. An Irish national who, from his darkened (musty) room in County Dublin, had managed to breach Pentagon systems and launch several missiles and a smart but dirty bomb which took the panhandle off Texas, the nose off North Carolina and the knob off Nantucket. He would show no remorse. He would regret none of it. Just as long as the Valley survived.