by Tim Buckley
“On three,” he said, crouching, “one, two, three.” He heaved on that last and lifted his end. I heaved at my end, raised it an inch and dropped it to the floor with a thud that echoed through the empty gallery.
“Jesus Christ,” I said, my face reddening with the effort. “It weighs a ton.”
Oran just grinned. “Will we try that again, miss?”
“I wasn’t ready,” I protested. “Is it on three, or three and then heave?”
“On three, yeh gobshite. Now come on – one, two, three.”
We lifted the huge piece of oak and scraped, bumped and dragged it out of the Gallery and into the adjacent store-room. My eyes widened when Oran turned on the light in the store. It was a veritable treasure trove. The room was a new addition, and my father’s old easels and palettes and brushes and unfinished canvases were piled, stacked and filed neatly on shelves and hooks and racks. Some I recognised. An unfinished oil of a young football fan holding his father’s hand among the crowds making their way out of Croke Park caught my eye. He had been working on it when I was born, when my mother died. He could never finish it, but equally he could never throw it away.
“I could find everything I need in here,” I said. “I was going to go down to the supplies shop tomorrow, but sure it’s all here. Or most of it anyway.”
Oran looked around. “Probably. Just be careful. He knows every single thing that’s in here,” he said. “If he comes looking for something and you’ve moved it, there’ll be war. You might want to ask him before you take any of it.” He pointed a warning finger at me. “Do not piss the old man off – he’s going to get fuckin’ stressed enough about this show as it is without you drivin’ him mental.”
He spoke with a warmth that surprised me, a warmth that the flippant afterthought sought to disguise. It was not only unlike Oran, it was unlike my father to stoke such affection in others.
We carried the other desk back into the studio and placed it in the middle of the room.
“Where do you want it?” Oran asked.
“In the corner. I’ll put the easel and the model’s chair by the windows. It’s the best light.”
We pushed it flush against the wall and stepped back to review our handiwork.
“Thanks, Oran, I appreciate it.” I said, and I meant it. “I’d better let you get on, you must have a ton of work to do.” I was reluctant to let him go.
“My mammy said I should always help old people if I see them struggling,” he said. I was born two days before him, and just as I had used my age as a badge of seniority when we were kids, he never let me forget who the old man was as we grew older. “Listen, I’d murder another coffee. Let’s get one in and then I can get cracking.”
We went into the kitchen and Oran put on the coffee machine.
“So, how long are you going to be staying for?” he asked.
I paused. “I don’t know, to be honest.”
As long as it takes to find out where Aoife is – but that wasn’t a conversation I was ready to have. I had never shared with him the trials of my college days, and how they had ultimately driven me away. A selfish part of me had always wanted to tell him – confidence in a friend would surely make it all easier. But first it was too soon, then too raw, then we moved away, and the opportunity never presented itself.
“And it’s not like I have anywhere to go or anything demanding my presence.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“I’ve packed in the job,” I responded to his silent question.
“So what’ll you do when you go home?”
“To London? I don’t know.” I shook my head, then paused for a moment. “It doesn’t feel much like home at the minute.”
The words hung in the air in front of me, demanding to be acknowledged. I was so struck by the revelation, I said it again. “It doesn’t really feel like home.”
“But your life is there, your mates, your… life.”
But a certain kind of friend is attached to a certain kind of life. They come with it, like a free cushion on a sofa. And they suit the sofa, make it comfortable. They complement a passage of our lives, and we complement theirs – a perfect symbiosis. And it’s not that we lie or exploit or mislead – we make that passage of each other’s lives better. Nicer. Richer. But we grow up and move on and change the furniture. And the cushion just doesn’t work anymore.
And if not by reference to our friends, then how do we position our life, how do we fix its location? What defines its geography? Career? Family? A sense of empathy for a place and its people?
Another conversation for which I was unprepared, and so I deflected it with a shrug. “Yeah I know. I just need to sort myself out I suppose.”
The coffee machine pinged and saved me further introspection.
“How about you? What are you up to these days?” It was sad, I thought, how little we knew of each other’s lives.
He poured the coffee, looked at me for a moment and seemed to reach a conclusion.
“That, now, is a bit of a scéal,” he said, “but everyone knows it around here, so you might as well hear it from me.” And so he began slowly to tell me the story.
It’s all too easy, in the midst of our own personal crises and dramas, to assume that the lives of others are serenely unaffected by misfortune and mishap. It’s only natural. Like the duck in the park pond, most of our struggles go unseen. I was, I suppose in hindsight, sublimely oblivious to the tribulations of others, even those closest to me. Often the misplaced assumption that others have never suffered serves only to deepen our own despair. The revelation that others know or have known our sadness would be a comfort surely, and yet we perversely choose to make the patently ridiculous assumption that everybody else’s life is a bed of rose petals.
Oran’s was not. I knew he had worked in the restaurant in Dublin after leaving school, a little family-run Italian. I didn’t know that he had discovered there a talent for, and a love of, the culinary arts. He had worked his way up the kitchen hierarchy from general dogsbody to sous-chef to head chef. Oran’s family background had not been altogether harmonious. His parents were always either recently split up or just back together. His two older brothers had left to work in England as soon as they could afford the plane fare, and Oran was left essentially to his own devices. Not that he minded. He was just as happy looking after himself and never, as far as I could see, longed for parental intervention. But the lack of a support structure became, for perhaps the first time, an unhappy state when he began to consider his future beyond the little Italian restaurant in which he had learned his trade.
And that was when he had called on my father for advice. Oran and my father had never been especially close, never given to overt affection nor to particular comradeship. But I suppose my father had always displayed an interest in his well-being that I had dismissed as passive politeness. And yet it was to my father that Oran had turned when considering his bold plan – to open a restaurant of his own.
And so, with Lochlann’s counsel and guidance, Oran opened The Ketch, a sea-food restaurant in Portmarnock.
“It was brutal,” he shook his head, his eyes betraying painful memories. “I just wasn’t ready for it. I knew how to cook, and I wasn’t bad. I loved that part of it. Designing the dishes, preparing the menus. Loved it. But the rest…”
He looked out the window and, for a brief moment, I had never seen him look so beaten.
“I just couldn’t do it, Aengus. What did I know about VAT returns, wages for the staff, cash flow? I hadn’t a fucking clue. And so I got deeper and deeper in trouble. Everything started to go wrong. I couldn’t afford to source decent stuff, to pay decent staff. It was a shambles. And then…”
He went over to the counter and poured another coffee.
“And then I really screwed up. There’s a food critic in town called Alan Joyce. He’s a bastard
. Bastard. I knew of him from La Bella Cucina, my old boss there had a run in with him a few years ago. Anyway, he came to the Ketch, and he claimed he had a bad meal. Claimed the waiter messed up his order and that the food was a disgrace. The place was nearly full, and he made sure they all knew, called me out of the kitchen and made a huge scene. And then he wrote a review for the Independent that made sure the whole fucking world knew. I was a laughing stock. Bookings just dried up. Some of my suppliers were even afraid to be associated with me, stopped taking my phone calls. I couldn’t keep it afloat. I had to close it down.”
“Jesus, Oran, I’m really sorry. I had no idea.” I couldn’t quite believe that my friend had been through this whole trauma and I had known none of it. “When was all this?”
“We closed in the Spring. With Valentines night and Patrick’s Day and Easter – I thought things would pick up. But it just got worse and worse. I owed suppliers, staff, the revenue. But just when it couldn’t get any worse, I made it a whole lot worse. I was in McGrath’s one night, having a few pints on my own, when Joyce walked in with a few of his sponger friends, looking for a free dinner. He saw me, and said something to his pals and they all had a good laugh.” His lips thinned at the memory, his eyes narrowed. “Something inside me snapped. I went over to him, grabbed him by the front of his jacket, and dragged him out the front door. I shoved him against the wall, and I bashed him.”
“Shi-it.” The slowly dawning realisation of what he had done caused me to draw out the word. “Christ. What happened?”
He shrugged.
“I just went home. But of course the cops were called and they came round half an hour later. Arrested me, banged me up for the night. Your father bailed me out. I’m up in court in a few weeks.”
I didn’t know what to say. Oran was robust, quick to argue, slow to back down. But he had never been violent, I had never seen him hit anyone, never seen him fight. But he had been through the mill, and his reaction had been extreme.
“Your father’s been a saint, Aengus. Bailed me out, came to court with me, gave me a job. I’d have folded without him.”
I nodded. I knew my father was a decent man, I knew he had done good things. Not that he had ever made even the slightest reference to them. Instead, I had learned of them in overheard, hushed conversations in the pub or at the back of the church at mass-time, or from oblique, off-hand remarks from a shopkeeper or a Garda or the local priest. “Tell your father I was asking for him,” they might say. Or “Tell your father thanks,” with a knowing wink. Or “You’re a lucky boy, he’s a good man your father.” These compliments drifted over my young head, I was oblivious to his generosity.
Oran snorted a wry laugh. “Funny isn’t it? After all these years, after all the plans we made and the dreams we had, we never thought the two of us would be here at forty and still sponging off your old man!”
We both laughed, relieved that the tension had been broken.
“So what now?” I said, stupidly.
“Don’t know, Aengus. Just wait for the trial, that’s all I can do.”
“You have a decent solicitor?”
“He’s not really interested to be honest, just going through the motions. We both know I’m going down. The only question is how long for.”
“They won’t send you to jail surely, not for a first offence?”
“You should have heard Joyce’s brief in court. You’d think I’d nutted Mother Teresa. ‘A decent man assaulted for simply going about his business and doing his job’. My arse. Assaulted for being a prick.”
I was struck mostly by the manner in which he handled himself. Dashed dreams, a sense of injustice, likely incarceration – one of those would be enough to destroy a normal person. And yet he continued to display his own brand of abrasive dignity and loyalty, compassion even.
Once, when we were children playing in Lochlann’s orchard, I fell out of an old apple tree and hurt my arm. I started to cry but Oran gruffly silenced my sobs, dismissing my pain and mocking my weakness. I got up and the game went on. It was only that night, when my sobbing woke the childminder, that the doctor was called. I had broken a bone – only a little bone, but it was broken nonetheless. I was taken to the Accident and Emergency Department and proudly wore my cast for three or four weeks. Oran now displayed the same phlegmatic disdain for his own predicament as he had demanded from me in mine.
I was struck also, inevitably, by my own father’s reaction. No doubt the Master was party to the whole affair, and little wonder that he held Lochlann in such high regard. But why, then, had Lochlann chosen to take so detached a role when I needed him? Was my crime less noble, less deserving? Did I need him less? I was torn between being proud of him, and being bitter that I had enjoyed none of the succour he had given Oran. I felt guilty for bearing a twenty year-old grudge, but there it was.
“Come on,” he got up from the table. “That’s enough whining for one day.”
We walked back to the Gallery. The workmen had arrived and were busy enjoying a cigarette by the Gallery door.
“Fuck sake, lads,” Oran protested to them, “were you boys thinking of doing any work today? Or do youse just want to fuck off home and I’ll do it myself?”
I went into the studio and sat down at my new desk. The sound of his rant followed me through the door.
CHAPTER 12
That’s your day.
She was from Canada, my second year tutor with the steel blue eyes and a stare as cold as the plains of the frozen Yukon. And an unquenchable passion for the naked, raw beauty of art. Fire and ice. I went to see her as usual on a Monday afternoon. I was angry. Angry and frustrated. I had spent all of the previous day and night trying to finish an assignment that would not be finished, could not. A simple assignment, an urban landscape in pencil.
There was a tree in a quiet corner of the campus, near the lake, surrounded by concrete and steel. Like an old man who refuses to move out of his old house when the developers move in, it stood defiant. Age had bent its back, gnarled its fingers, thinned its thatch. But still it stood, alone and incongruous, resisting the urban spread.
I went there in the morning. It was Sunday. The place was still sleeping off its hangover. It was quiet and peaceful. I sat on a bench and sketched. All day. And into the evening until I couldn’t see it anymore. But I could capture neither its spirit nor its dignity.
And so I knocked on her Monday afternoon door, empty sketch book in hand, only the tattered remnants of ripped out pages to show for my weekend’s efforts. Tired, angry and beaten. I vented my frustration and she sat, impassive, watching me and listening. On I went, bemoaning all the myriad obstacles that stifled my inspiration, obscured my vision. She listened and said nothing. I finished my rant and still she was silent. For – it must have been – five minutes, we sat staring at each other. Then she spoke.
“Every day, life changes the rules. Get over it. She’ll make a nonsense of the plans you made and the road you chose. That’s your day. You choose to be here, you choose to learn how to create the beautiful, the inspiring, the uplifting. You choose to do what others can only dream of doing. It’s not supposed to be easy. Things will go wrong. You will be challenged. You will be frustrated. But you will learn not to despair. You will learn how to overcome, because that is to excel. Whatever goes wrong, whatever is sent to block you, that’s your day. It’s up to you to find what it is in every day that inspires you. Then discard the rest. Learn from it, then discard it. We just never learn that when a day is over, it’s gone, dead. And in every day is something you will cherish and want to live over and over again. But you can’t. So make the most of it before it slips away.”
God, how you hated whinging! Your naturally short fuse was further frayed by the moaning you heard around you every day.
“I know life is frantic, and the pressure is relentless, and it’s sometimes grey and cold and damp,” you us
ed to say, a hand pressed against your exasperated forehead after another evening of gloomy doom-mongering. “I know all that. But we have money and friends and food and fun... does everybody really have to be so bloody miserable? Do they have to complain all the bloody time?”
If you don’t like it, you better change it before you’ve pissed your life away. That’s what you used to say.
You’d have been proud of Oran today. You never knew him as well as you should have. That was my fault. The two of you were uneasy with other, mistrusting almost. To you he was unfriendly, unwelcoming, resentful. In his eyes you were opinionated and pompous. I wish you could really have known him. I wish that he had known you, I could share you with him now that you’re gone.
He’s no longer a little boy, scratched and bloodied and bruised after a fall. He’s not a child who’s lost a toy or broken a treasured plaything. Now he’s a man, but he’s the same. Life has made a gratuitous and unprovoked nonsense of his plans. But he’s still the same. Still unbowed, defiant.
Like that old tree by the lake.
If you don’t like it, change it, you said. But what if I can’t change it? What if I don’t like it, but it’s all there is? What if all of the alternatives are just as bleak, just as hopeless? Because none of them have you. Do you shake your head when you see me give in, despair of me and my despair? What would you have me do then? How do I move on?
When you were with me, everything else was incidental. We kept all of the drama and all of the crises of modern life in a cupboard, a cupboard we carefully locked every night. Our problems and the turmoil they spawned were just one small part of our world, never the dominant force. We never allowed them to take over, to consume what we loved and cherished. And unnourished by our disinterest and neglect, they never had the strength to blow us off course.
We were strong and calm. That was our day.
CHAPTER 13
It was the first time in a very long time that my fitful sleep had been a result of a sort of latent excitement and not of tormenting thoughts that refused to be banished. And so I got up with the cloud-covered sun and ran on the Head. The early morning cold defied the season. So little distance separates London and Dublin, so why is it that Dublin always feels so much colder? Do we strip the west wind of its chill before it reaches the British shore? Climbing back towards the house again, I stopped at an old bench looking over the Baily and started to stretch out my stiff muscles. On a clear day, they say, you can see Mount Snowdon from Howth Head. The soaking mist that hung in the breathless air ensured it stayed hidden from view.