The system is more suited to firms with a greater turnover. At the native basement, some of items in the catalogue sell only a couple of copies a year, some cannot even be given away, ever more precious for being so rare. The stock can be counted with good accuracy in a couple of hours, so there is no need for an early warning system. If a record shop in Saint Paul, Minnesota, for example, orders unusually high volumes of a native singer whose family and friends have gone to live in that part of the world, there is no problem rush-ordering copies. There might be a delay while the latest Madonna album takes precedence at the pressing plant, it can all be explained in a letter, the music on our list is timeless.
The card system is soon abandoned, mostly by myself. We go back to counting by fingers. Numerals are safe provided they are written down. Spoken in Irish, they can be tricky. They seem more scientifically accurate in English, everyone on the street can understand them. The same goes for phone numbers and appointments, less room for error.
I have entered the results of the count into a report sheet. I have the sales figures in one column. A separate column for wastage, returns, warped pressings, damaged or discoloured album sleeves. There is a further column for stock given away as official gifts. Complimentary albums are frequently rushed by courier to key personalities in the community – government ministers, priests, bishops, school principals, theatre managers, men and women in positions of influence.
Once I was finished, I compiled the various figures into an annual audit and sent it upstairs to the commander. He sent me back a note to let me know that he was impressed with the figures. The organisation had been ingeniously established by him as a charity, sustained by a giant lottery held each month in the shadow language. There was no need for the figures to balance out in any commercial sense, no requirement on any of the artists in our catalogue to make a profit. Decisions were based entirely on cultural reasoning, on keeping things alive that would otherwise die without trace. Our loss-making was repaid in a surplus of heritage. One of the latest recordings was made with a solo dulcimer player, his sales remained at zero, but the number of copies given away as promotional material was higher than average.
The commander spoke to me at length about expanding the catalogue, he wanted me to recruit new bands, younger singers, more women. We signed up a singer with red hair from the west of Ireland who had a fantastic voice, she was well known for singing in English, she carried the shadow language in her pronunciation.
Gradually, with the kind of work I do, recruiting the best of Irish talent, the urge to sing begins to disappear in myself. It doesn’t feel right. I still have the rage and the sadness in my repertoire, all the songs I used to sing in bars in Berlin, but I don’t believe I can be genuine without being fully native. Being an outsider makes me inauthentic, half Irish and half German, half man half horse, some say. I don’t get away with singing back home in my own country, only in Germany where people thought I was as genuine as butter.
The Irish for singing is the same as speaking.
One of the band members I toured with in Germany came back to Ireland with a similar problem, not being able to speak. He found it hard to adjust to being among his own people again. In a Galway bar one night, he sang a song about emigration they said he had no right to sing. No matter how good his voice was, no matter how long he had been away from home or how much he missed the landscape of Mayo where he grew up, they accused him of appropriating grief that was not his own.
He might have been a bit like me, a daily migrant, going out the door to a country he was not sure he belonged to any more, he had to check to see who was listening. People treating him like a non-national. He sang from the heart that night in Galway, but he was forced to stop when somebody roared across the bar at him – go back to where you came from.
He grew up in a big house near Westport, there was a triple stained-glass window above the stairs, a view from the windows onto a lake and rolling lands, only himself and his mother and all those empty rooms. He was the last descendant of the Fitzgerald line, directly related to the famous fighting Fitzgerald, a historical figure who was given a ring by Marie Antoinette in Paris before she was beheaded, then he ended his life in a similar way, hanged in Castlebar for imprisoning his father in a cage with a circus bear. The ring was kept in a tobacco tin, the gem was on a swivel with the stamp of the French court underneath. His people were kind during the Famine. The house was later given over to the state to be turned into a museum of country life.
He plays the guitar left-handed. He has blond hair, a blue freckle on one cheek. He sits sideways at the table with his legs crossed while eating. He barks when the music is good. I saw him once kicking over a chair with excitement while he was listening to a band playing the Céili at Claremorris. I saw him yelping and slapping his hands on the dashboard for Voodoo Chile as we drove into the Brenner Pass.
There is nothing I want to do more than sing, but the catalogue of speaking songs no longer works for me. I am no match for those great singers. I try new ways of calling out my frozen mind, I pick up the guitar, I learn some contemporary songs, but my voice is easily dismantled. I settle back into my long listening.
The veterinary practice was closed. We heard the news that morning. The boy was found lifeless on the floor of the surgery. A note on the door mentioned the word bereavement.
I knocked. It took a while before Mark, the vet, came out. He didn’t take me inside. We stood on the pavement. He didn’t want me to see exactly where it happened, the empty space on the floor where he picked the boy up and ran out the door into the street late in the afternoon, racing to the hospital, hoping he was still alive. I was not brought in to meet the boy’s mother in her grief.
I’m sorry. That’s all I could manage to say.
Ah listen, he said.
We stood in silence. His eyes were flooded, nothing more he could say either. Two fathers trading encouragement, full of words we could not say, looking at the ground. The eucalyptus trees on the corner across the road smelled like a hospital. The shopkeeper in the adjoining premises was looking out the window at us. We had no conversation. For the sake of talking, it occurred to me to mention a book of short stories he had recommended the last time we met, but I kept it to myself. There was a story in it about a couple renting a house in a remote place where they love each other with great intensity until the owner suddenly wants the place back for himself, their love comes to an end.
I stared away towards pub on the corner. He stood kicking the wall with the tip of his boot.
Jesus Christ, he said.
We heard the breeze rattle the eucalyptus trees across the street. The leaves were sickle shaped, green leather knives. The smell of sap was suffocating, a toxic preparation for parvovirus in dogs. Hardly any cars went by, no buses, I would have noticed. It was hard for him to face going back inside. As though he wanted to stay out there on the street with me, that might be the best way of remembering when things were safe, I was a person who brought him back to a time before the tragedy.
I stood there without saying anything more. Like a child trying to hide something, refusing to say there was a bottle of blue liquid I thought was a drink of lemonade.
He put his hand on my shoulder.
Look after those girls, he said. Then he slapped me on the back of the head and went inside.
The white coffin went to the church, people were standing in the street, I didn’t hear what they were saying, I didn’t talk to anyone. He stood with his sister’s arm around his shoulder at the graveside, a small group of mourners, his wife held his hand for the last prayers. The loss of their son took the streets from under their feet. He gave up the veterinary practice, she went back to live in France, he worked for a while in the North, in Coleraine. I ran into him from time to time when he was back, at the fish shop, at the fruit and vegetable shop, sometimes down at the harbour, we always stood for a while and he told m
e the news, we never talked about the dead boy or his family breaking up. His shoulders were hunched, he moved with delay, there was a cut made in his voice. Maybe it was a form of surrender in his eyes, half turning away and coming back to face you once more, it was good to hear him laugh again. You met him in the pub on the corner full of rugby fans and pictures of James Joyce. You saw his bike outside with a basket full of books.
I have a friend who went to Australia.
He has a gift for talking. His memory has legal accuracy, he studied law. He is tall, he speaks in a stride, it was hard to keep up. He was run off his feet revealing things he had heard about people, things about ourselves that we had forgotten, you felt good because your life mattered to him. He could remember Helen and myself in Berlin, the time I sang my sad songs in the street for passing pedestrians until a woman from the offices above came down and paid me to go away. He could remember Helen on the U-Bahn, a man staring at her love belly, the three of us walking arm in arm across Hermannplatz, she was carried along, not touching the street.
He got talking to people easily, people who normally avoided each other were glad to be in the same place together when he was around. He gave me the feeling of being in motion, being alive, being lucky, it was our responsibility to celebrate. His information had no false avenues. His grasp of human emotions was generous, you could trust him with your thoughts. I allowed him to put words in my mouth. I spoke so little. He did most of the talking for me.
If I could write the way he speaks, I thought, I would be at home anywhere in the world.
We stood at the bar in Kehoe’s pub. I was happy listening to the scattered voices. The twirl of a coin on the counter, a beer mat flipping upwards and being snapped between thumb and finger. Everything was worth remembering, the worn rung on the bar stool, the spill of beer, the discontented faces of barmen on the wrong side of life. Things you overheard – No, fuck off, I owe you a pint. Snatches of nonsensical conversation that didn’t join up – the permafrost, my twist, Galileo, you’re due a refund. I loved that disjointed prose of the city, the abstract way in which something serious could be said in one part of the pub and people burst out laughing in another corner.
In a flood of enthusiasm, I told my friend I was trying to write. The manner of the announcement made it look as though I had no other choice, each one of us was trapped inside a book, the only way out was to write it down. At one point, thinking that I had the speed of his voice in mine, I pulled out a couple of pages from my bag for him to look at.
It was a section in which I described my silence. Waking up at night, wandering around the house where I grew up while everyone else was asleep. I became an intruder in my own home. Avoiding the creaks on the stairs. Not switching on the light. Looking around at the objects belonging to my family, the photographs on the mantelpiece, the town where my mother came from. In darkness, it felt as though I had walked into a strange house where I didn’t belong, the people who lived there had nothing to do with me. When the light started coming up at dawn, I caught sight of myself in a mirror. A strange figure I could not recognise, standing alone among the furniture and family possessions I knew so well. The reflection was not mine, it belonged to someone else, from nowhere.
He read it quickly. He said it was a bit raw, a bit honest. I saw no difference between his honesty and my honesty, only that everything he revealed had time to evaporate overnight. His stories were full of travel. The names of cities and rivers in faraway places.
He told me that he was leaving. We met and got drunk together. I missed him. His departure left me short. It removed the map. I no longer had any connection to the talking grid. He carried crucial information away to Australia with him in his shirt pocket. Doesn’t every emigrant do that? I thought to myself. Each person leaving takes away some essential knowledge that cannot be replaced by those left behind.
A photograph sent from Fremantle shows him wearing a bright blue shirt with floating vintage cars and palm trees. By the angle of his shoulders, he must be standing in the kitchen, opening a bottle of wine. Everything I attempt to say from that point on is directed like a shout across the world to a distant reader, waiting for the echo to come back.
Another episode with my teeth. Brought on this time by an attempt to write in German. My mother’s tongue gave me no protection. It was like pointing at myself. I became the accused. I took on the banality of somebody waiting to be caught and brought back to face trial. Normal words like bread and butter were extremely childish and at the same time loaded with pre-existing meaning. Milk was no longer milk. I could not use the word ground, nothing to do with land, territory, domain, home, belonging.
Writing is no place to hide.
It may have been the mashed potato, it scalded my front teeth. I knew what was coming and didn’t want my children to see me flinching. I got up from the table and left the house. Helen asked me where I was going but I had no idea. I walked as far as the lighthouse, it felt as though I was biting granite, my teeth scraping at the pier wall. Then I walked in a great hurry back to my mother, asking her if she had ever seen Hitler.
Once, she said.
Where?
Düsseldorf, she said.
She was in a department store looking at fabrics, feeling for quality, when everybody suddenly rushed out the door onto the street. He’s here, somebody shouted. The wind sucked them out, shop assistants included, leaving the till behind unguarded. She was the only person left inside. The crowd was lined up along the street, people on their toes, straining to see over shoulders, leaning in the direction where the cavalcade was expected to appear. The buildings were decorated with swastikas, everybody waving flags.
My mother used the expression – torn along.
It was her way of describing that moment on the street, what her uncle the Lord Mayor had warned her about, how everyone was being swept along by a euphoric feeling, by a longing inside each breast for a strong leader after so much disaster. She said the people had an appetite for lies and false facts. It helped them to hide what they didn’t want to know about themselves. They stood waving with great happiness in their hearts, they had been promised holidays in the mountains, family trips on a cruise liner, their country was winning again, they were expecting heaven on earth.
Inside the abandoned department store, my mother said she felt unsafe. She was afraid they would accuse her of stealing. She went outside and saw a small woman who had just left the shop with a broad new hat. The cavalcade passed by with Hitler in the back of an open-topped car. A small man with a modern moustache. It was known that he had a warm smile and his eyes had the ability to look inside each person.
The moment was brief, my mother said. She stood at the back of the crowd. She hardly knew it was Hitler, only that the woman in front, wearing the wide-rimmed hat, not paid for, the label was still attached, turned around with great excitement in her voice and said – did you see him?
After the cavalcade passed by, everyone went about their business. The woman with the new hat walked away down the street. Another woman crossed the street wearing a new tweed coat, the gifts of Hitler. My mother was working in Düsseldorf by then, in an employment office, she had some money, she went back into the department store to buy gifts for her sisters, the two eldest ones were already married, things they needed. She said it was a time of high fashion. A time you could not easily trust men. Most of them were in the Nazi party. Her boss was a senior Nazi member, he was married, always asking her to go for a drink.
A lot of the women in Düsseldorf looked elegant and provocative, she said. The style was to show how perfectly rounded your backside could be. They wore tight dresses that turned the bottom into a walking globe, spherical cushions in bright colours and stripes. She laughed and sang the line of a pop song from the time, about a woman walking down the street with her round bottom swinging and all the monkey men turning around to look at her.
Walki
ng back home, the granite bite in my mouth slowly began to let go. Nothing, to my mind, can be as intoxicating as the grip of denial being released. The enormous energy that goes into refusing the past comes flooding back in a wave of peace once I face up to it. It is not possible to choose my history. I cannot favour one part over another.
They were all asleep when I got back. I made sure the children were covered. Helen woke up, there was a sleep cloud of warm air around her neck. I whispered to let her know I was going to stay up and listen to some music. I had borrowed a set of headphones from work. I put on one of the albums from the basement catalogue. The accordion player from Galway with a cigarette in his mouth gone to America, a jig called the Rambling Pitchfork. Three, four times in a row I played it.
The Rambling Pitchfork.
The country is full of black flags. We see them hanging from the windows, attached to lamp posts, on the goalposts in sporting fields. Black flags tied to the gates of a car park, on the back of a delivery truck, on bridges over the dual carriageway. Some of the flags are tattered, made of material that doesn’t last. Some of them no more than black refuse bags, stuck to the branch of a tree in the wind.
The black flags make it impossible to ignore what is going on in the north of Ireland. They are there to remind everyone of people on hunger strike. Hunger has a deep meaning in our country. In some places, the flags are accompanied by the faces and the names of the men on their fast along with the name of the camp in which they have been imprisoned. They look thin and gaunt, their hair long, their eyes sunken, one of them had been elected to parliament in London while in prison, his face bore a smile from an earlier time.
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