One night, he started talking, other patients in rooms off the same corridor could hear him speaking in a raised voice to one of the nurses, she was holding his hand. He had been commanded to a place on the outskirts of a small town. It was on the edge of a forest. Soldiers in his regiment had been given the job of clearing the town, separating women from their children. The women were rounded up into a small group of about thirty or forty. They kept looking back at the children from whom they had been separated, but the soldiers continued to push them towards a ravine. One of the children broke free and ran after the group of mothers but was held back. The child fell.
There was a soldier filming all of this with a moving camera, the man said.
The story went around the ward in a shocked whisper. The man was given an injection to calm him down. He continued speaking a while longer, then he was quiet. He was said to be delusional. Before the night was out, he was gone, his bed was vacant. The nurse said he had been discharged. There was no more talking, no more whispering, the story disappeared. My mother brought it to Ireland with her.
The dental practice is across the street from the former veterinary surgery. The waiting room is still in use as a dining room, a table and chairs for eight people, magazines like place mats. In the corner, there is a cabinet full of crockery, a porcelain teapot. Above the fireplace, a large picture of a turf boat with dark brown sails.
The surgery is in the living room, to the front, facing onto the main street. The dentist speaks to me at first in the native language, then he switches back to English. He’s from the North, from Derry. He smiles and flicks his head to one side as he speaks. He whispers to himself while he examines the X-ray, my ghost mouth.
He wants to know what is causing the trouble. I tell him I have no idea. The slightest thing can set it off, the air, the ground, the street, the sound of my own feet in my mouth. He asks me if I have been clenching my teeth, grinding in my sleep. He gives me a gum shield. I sleep like a boxer for a couple of weeks, but it makes no difference. Back in the chair again. He begins to single out one of the upper molars on the left. He undertakes the required root-canal treatment. It involves many repeat visits, lots of drilling, I take several days off work, I go back some weeks later and he puts in the crown.
The buses stop right outside the surgery. Passengers upstairs get a good look at me lying back with my mouth wide open and the light shining across my face. The sight must fill them with horror. The dentist reaching into my mouth with his fingers. My hands gripping the armrests.
I hear the dental assistant speaking to him softly in the background, handing over instruments I don’t want to see. Everything feels so enlarged. His rubber gloves make a squeaking sound against my teeth. He asks me questions he can only answer himself, all I can do is consent with a crow sound at the back of my throat.
When he’s finished, he removes the rubber gloves and says I should have no more trouble. He flicks his head to the side and apologises for not fixing the problem sooner. He refuses to take any money. I try to pay him, but he tells me to go. He smiles and says the tooth is dead, it’s beyond pain – come back to me if you feel anything.
2
Their school is on a street leading to the harbour. A terraced white building where the mariners used to gather for prayers with their families before they set sail. I wait outside in the car an hour early, falling asleep. In a dream, I trip over a tower of books and wake up with a snarl, not refreshed but confused, mothers and fathers standing by the gate talking in quiet voices, arranging play dates.
They came running out, handing me their drawings. Rosie had done a man inside a space capsule. Big dish ears. He was wearing a red shirt, the sky around him was full of onion rings. That was the song they wanted to hear again and again, about the man who gets lost in space and continues travelling far above the world in a tin can. As soon as we got home it was engines on, lift-off, we had chairs called Venus and Jupiter. I tried explaining infinity to them. The man in the spacecraft keeps going away for ever and ever.
Essie said – but he will come back.
Everyone was talking about the solar system, the Voyager space mission heading into the unknown, the drug allegories, there was a plaque erected on a wall nearby for somebody who died in a road accident – gone with Nash to the dark side of the moon.
While Helen was teaching her class, I sat in the back room playing the astronaut, they had me sitting in the armchair with the sick bowl across my chest, making swirling sounds. The launch buttons were carefully arranged along my knees. The aerial on the portable radio fully extended. They held a pink hand mirror up to show me how crooked my nose was. A battery-operated toy kept repeating the same phrase over and over in a voice that I found disturbing, I vowed to make it disappear overnight. A malevolent gift, given to them by one of Helen’s aunts, the aunt with the bunch of keys.
Here I was, floating above the world, two children and a talking toy.
As soon as the yoga classes were finished, I disappeared into the empty front room with a small foldable school desk Helen got for next to nothing from the furniture auctioneer next door. The room was heavy with perfume. I had a portable typewriter that belonged to my father. Essie left me a plastic zebra for company. There I sat for two hours alone, doing nothing, staring at all the things I could not describe.
Every sentence tied me down. Words often came to me first in my mother’s language. I was faced with a choice of three versions of the same object, like a street trick where the correct word was hidden under one of three matchbox hats, lifting the wrong one, the meaning had already moved. I formed a sentence in German, then I veered down into the native basement and came up at street level with the verb in English, a rough stone with no value. My descriptions kept alluding to something larger which was not contained in the words. If I mentioned a crowd, I was equating it with a crowded train station during the war, if I mentioned a space left vacant in a bar, it was a place where you could settle down for the rest of your life and never move again. Everything was loaded with distress and joy, full of misunderstanding.
I stood up to look out the window. There was salt on the glass. The houses on the far side were turned a dull yellow by the street lighting. My face was a yellow death mask in the window. A bus went by from left to right with a single passenger upstairs. An estate-agent sign was budging a little in the wind, sale agreed. The long straight leaves of the palm trees outside the guest house next door began rattling. The street lights gave them an orange sheen, like artificial leaves, strips of plastic cut in slices from a large sheet. The clacking made them seem lifeless, as if they understood no seasons, as if they felt nothing.
I had the need to keep moving. I walked out the door. My yellow face turned left past the palm trees. The beat of my feet gave me a feeling of urgency and purpose. Some instinct made me always turn down towards the sea, as if the truth could only be found by facing the water, something in the large space in front of me that opened a large space inside me. The silent bay at night brought an understanding of my own silence.
Somewhere around the derelict public baths, with the boarded-up windows and the roof caved in, the pool silted up with sand and rocks thrown in by the winter tides, there was a heron calmly standing in the water and it came to me that there is no single story. There is nothing but restless fragmentation. My skin inside is black and white, ragged and incoherent as the palm trees. It is in this disorder that I will discover everything.
Every morning, I buy the newspaper from the vendor outside the train station. I take the same train to work, I get off at the same station, I turn the same corner and walk along the square with the park of lovers at the centre. The continuity is inescapable. I am following in my father’s footsteps. To the onlooker, I must appear like an updated version of my father without the limp, the same forehead, the same smile, the anxiety in the eyes. The same unfinished life going on into infinity. I give myself t
he illusion that things are changing, my music is different, the grip of the Church might soon fade away, there is a freedom coming. I get my sandwich from the corner shop, I lie in the park at lunchtime dreaming, watching the clouds, the ground underneath me begins to slide. By the end of the day, I cannot help stepping back into my father’s shoes again, going to the German library, retracing the same route by the park back to the station, the same train home.
In the German library, they have a cataloguing system whereby you can see the names of previous readers marked on a sheet at the back of the book along with the return date. Many of the books on history I borrow have already been taken out by my father while he was alive. His name is there like a forerunner. His hands turn the pages for me. In one of the books I found his posthumous train ticket, punched five days a week. It gives me the confidence of a man whose mistakes have already been made in advance.
Does your memory ever grow up? Or will it always stand still at the age of happening?
Over and over, I go back to remembering my father with the bees. His death keeps turning up at the most unpredictable moments, forcing itself on me with a surge of fear. Even when I am surrounded by other people, standing in a bar, at a party with music playing, I become exposed without warning to the sight of my father fighting off bees. Swinging his arms around his head, his face mask dislodged, bees getting inside, the anger, the mutiny. Bees jumping up from the open hive like a black cat. They have turned on him, they are in his mouth, in his ears. The house is full of humming, the children have locked themselves into the bathroom. My father’s hands, my father’s face, flinching with each sting, his pain, his limp from birth, his childhood calling for help.
On the stairs, my mother’s voice calls up to the roof – God in heaven. In her language the bees have gone out of their minds, they are wild with rage. She is prevented from going near him by the bees all around the house, on the stairs, in every room. Bees buzzing up and down the windows. Bees lodged in the curtains, under the beds, crawling in dying circles on the wooden floor. My father falling backwards, holding his chest. She finally pulls him out into the street, the hall door is left open. She waves her arms, but nobody takes them in the car with the war of bees all around them.
Followed by the day of the funeral, my mother lost, far away from home in the wrong country. She is surrounded by people outside the church that she hardly knows, in the confusion of grief she has trouble remembering their names, even the butcher seems out of place. The shame of death. The ridicule of life. How alone you are in a foreign place when the coffin goes into the ground. How empty the words can be in the language of the street.
The silence left behind by my father is a choir of voices unheard.
After I have my sandwich in the park, I walk through the streets and come across a hardware shop where they are selling some second-hand carving tools. Chisels with curved blades in various diameters. I buy three of them. I get advice on how to maintain the tools with linseed oil. In addition, I buy a rounded wooden mallet, like a shiny ostrich egg with a handle. I also need some fine sandpaper, and French polish.
Why am I buying these items? I have no idea, only that I am copying my father, the need to do something useless. As they wrap up the tools for me, I think of my father when he was alive, he must have done the exact same thing at lunchtime. Perhaps he even came to the same hardware store, with the same expression of eagerness, the same questions, the same smile.
With these tools in my bag, I walk back to the basement. Along the way, I come to a joinery. There is no office, I walk right into the workshop. The saws are going, wood-turning machines spinning, they are producing legs for chairs and tables. There is a sweet smell of wood all around that reminds me of my father. It’s hard to see, cloudy light, everything is covered in a layer of sawdust. Cobwebs around the light fixtures, heavy and drooping like netting bags. I speak to one of the men, he takes his protective mask down and reveals a clean patch of his face, his lips are blood red, his eyelashes gone white. It’s hard to hear him with the noise of the machines. He points to a pile of cut-off wood, tells me to help myself, he doesn’t want any money. I pick out a couple of small pieces of mahogany, a section of walnut, and a piece of white basswood.
Back home, I start working on the basswood. It’s the softest of them all. The chisel makes it feel more like wax. I decide to carve a mouth. I go into the bathroom and look at myself in the mirror. With a pencil, I draw the outlines of an open mouth onto the wood. The mouth holds the silent pose of a word, a song suspended. I get to work, hammering and chiselling on the kitchen table with a sheet of newspaper underneath. A section from under the nose down to the chin. The lips are parted, the front teeth showing, the interior hollowed out. It takes me a couple of weeks to get it right.
My silent mouth goes on display. It sits on the mantelpiece speaking for me. Calling out the latest news. Everything in the newspapers, opinions heard on the radio, images on TV faithfully spoken back as though saying the worst will protect you from the worst. It has become a household witness to everything that is happening around the world. My wooden voice repeating new words for atrocity and shame and senseless loss of life in the North. It becomes hopelessly enraged, getting in on every dispute, every injustice, people imprisoned for crimes they did not commit. It speaks in prophecies, in warnings, in exultant waves of bad news. Helen says it’s hard to live with. The children don’t want to hear all this.
A wooden mouth, stalled in belated protest. Making up for student revolts I never took part in. Anti-Vietnam War demonstrations I was too late for, civil rights marches, sit-downs, house occupations I missed out on. A mouth full of wayward rebellion, all those door slamming wars with my father, followed by hours of unending silence.
Helen threw a party. Her family rule was not to dwell on misery. Her second family rule was not to be mean with drink. Make people sit down. Make them feel welcome. Ask a lot of questions. As a child in Birmingham, she could remember finding a man’s shoe half burned in the fire, the leftover crisps, the bitter taste of gin. She remembered the singing, the sound of her mother laughing on the stairs, the perfume and the soft touch of her face coming to tuck them in late.
She went around making sure everyone got introduced to each other. Some of them were utterly incompatible. She put the most demented stoner in conversation with a sailing fanatic. She had a native singer talking to a woman who despised everything to do with her own country. A friend back from California in tattered tennis shoes was trying to explain the meaning of a song to a woman who seemed too laid-back to care, he told her it was inspired by a German philosopher who said we were all thrown into this world – oh, that’s terrible news, she said. Most of them were leaning against the wall, one armchair shared between three, a few straight-backed chairs. Right in the middle, there was a couple sitting on the floor like a street protest.
I stood around like a guest in my own house, listening, overhearing things, saying as little as possible. I was unable to get drunk. I spent the evening memorising things, stealing what other people said, my mind was full of theft.
Somebody picked up the carved wooden mouth from the mantelpiece and started examining it, running a finger across the lips. It got passed around, they checked the back of the carving as though they were expecting to see the larynx. They held it up to their own mouths, they used it to tell each other to – fuck off. Somebody sang out the words of a song – the heat pipes just coughed. One of the women laughed and leaned forward with a retching sound as though it was going to puke. When she discovered it was hand-carved, she quickly gave it away like a piece of voodoo.
They managed to get the mouth talking.
I was unable to prevent the wood carving from revealing things about myself, speaking openly in a wave of personal facts. There was a mixture of surprise and fascination in their eyes as the talking mouth started telling them about a time in Germany when I was hitchhiking from Frankfurt
to Berlin. I stood on the autobahn and a car pulled up. I thought I was lucky. A man got out. Did he show me a badge? I could not remember, all I saw was the gun. The faces of terrorists were posted up in all the service stations. I must have looked like one of those wanted people. I had a wanted face. A wanted beard. Wanted clothes. He ordered me to open the mandolin case. He told me to take the mandolin out and place it on the ground. He told me to step over the crash barrier and walk through a small stand of trees with my hands up. He was right behind me. He motioned me forward, down a steep slope, into open ground, well out of sight of the passing traffic overhead. He told me to take my coat off. It lay pooled on the grass. He looked at my passport. He looked at me. He refused to believe I could be Irish and speak fluent German. Waving the gun, he told me to take off my shoes. My shirt. My trousers. It was cold. I didn’t know what he wanted from me. After some time, he turned and walked away. I watched him climb the slope to the motorway and disappear. I stood in the field in my underpants without moving. I waited for him to come back, but he didn’t.
My mouth was too honest. It spoke like somebody in the witness box. Answering questions without much tactical intuition. Under cross-examination, it revealed that I worked in the native basement, that my father was from Cork, that I had a German mother. Helen was afraid they would be able to extract all kinds of personal information that she wanted to keep private. She went over and politely asked for it back. She placed it on the bookcase where she could keep an eye on it. She didn’t want somebody walking away with my mouth.
Helen’s friend Martina was there, wearing a long colourful dress and cowboy boots. She lifted the arms of her brown suede jacket and let the tasselled fringes underneath rise like the wings of a bird of prey, swooping down to pick up her drink. Her wrist jangled with handmade jewellery. She allowed her long hair to fall across her face and shook her head like a rocker. Free dancing, she laughed, in her Kerry accent. She had once been to a famous concert in the Isle of Wight.
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