Call Me the Breeze: A Novel

by Patrick McCabe

  A development which I don’t expect you’ll be displeased about, Bone, considering some of the outpourings that you’ve been subjected to of late, although I don’t for a second mean to blame all of it on booze and narcotics.

  You ought to have hit me when I came in the other night. ‘You want a drink?’ you should have said. ‘Then have yourself a fucking drink! Here then, you fucker, have this one, why don’t you?’ and struck me with the bottle right there and then. But you didn’t, did you, you decorous old bollocks, for that’s what you are at the back of it all, too fucking decent by half! What did I say to you? I suppose you won’t even tell me that!

  All I can remember is turning the CD player up — what time was it? Long past three, I know that much — slobbering like a half animal as you did your best to placate me. That was when I turned on you, wasn’t it? Like I’d been doing all day in the pubs to anyone who was dumb enough to come near me. Or encourage me in my work — even dumber still. Like you did, Bone, and you see the thanks you got. A Joey Tallon special ‘speech from the dock’, which I’ve no problem regurgitating now I’ve delivered the fucking thing so often.

  ‘What would you know, Stokes? What would you know about anything, you half-tinker simpleton? You think you know about writing, do you? You think that’s how it happens then, huh? A few well-chosen words and — bingo! Out springs the follow-up novel! Well, I’m sorry, Bone, but you got it wrong! You got the wrong guy this time, I’m afraid! Maybe that’s the way it happens for someone else, but not Joey Tallon, the small-town innocent who happened to get lucky, waking up one morning to find himself famous! Me, a writer? Now there’s a fucking joke! Another illusion, just like Jacy! Surprised to hear that, are you, Bone? You thought I didn’t know she’d never lived in California? Sure I did. All along. I just happened to think that if you believed — enough! — that somehow that would make it happen! How about that for a fucking illusion? That good enough for you? Huh? Well, Bone? You lost your fucking tongue or something?’

  You tried to say something but didn’t get a chance, and all I can remember then is you capitulating resignedly and the dawn coming up as I read through the letter I must have spent two hours composing —there were pages and pages and pages of it — out of pure unconscionable spite not addressing it to you but McQuaid, the old geezer who lives up on Tynagh Mountain.

  He never got it anyway. I changed my mind and tore it up.

  Which is just as well for it was the most objectionable litany of incoherent nonsense, with the predictable sprinkling of sententious pronouncements and any number of half-finished simpering parables regarding this ‘illogical, irrational world, devoid of apparent meaning’ and the ‘yearning for communion’ that, I seemed assured, exists within us all. With particular attention — and three whole pages — being paid to Jacy and what I’d christened ‘Our American Journey’, regarding how we might now make it ‘real’, forever in our ‘minds’, with our two precious souls vanishing out amongst the stars, there to be eternally entwined ‘in the wondrous place that beckons, far beyond the Cave of Dreams’. Which all along had been the womb, apparently, a prognostication bombastically inscribed in elaborate, emphasized calligraphy.

  Whatever anyone was supposed to make of that, especially a poor old inoffensive old bollocks like McQuaid, who you can be pretty sure is going to be the one to find me, all right, and that it’s not going to be very fucking pleasant. I just wish it could be some other way, for distress around here has more than exceeded its quota. And ‘then some’, as the Yankees say.

  But at least, if nothing else, he’ll have been spared my stupid original ‘letter of explanation’. That over-emotional assault upon the intellect with its grossly inflated metaphors and unremitting, self-pitying prose now happily replaced by this much leaner, infinitely more direct elucidation: I’m going, Bone, I’m finishing it, and I’m sorry I didn’t tell you! I hope you forgive me and that this makes sense. My final penned masterpiece which I hope you’ll file, prophetically entitled:

  ‘THE CRASH!’

  … the entire mountain shuddering as the Pontiac came screaming past the old man’s window, making straight for the dilapidated wooden cabin. It glanced off a telegraph pole and almost hit the ditch, the tyres screeching as its speed increased. The old man at the window knew there was nothing he could do. He looked on in horror, the colour draining from his face as it went ploughing right into the deserted shack, the noise of the impact horrendous. He fled from the cottage, but knew it was pointless. No one could possibly have survived such a collision.

  By the time he reached the appalling scene the American-style car was a complete write-off, with the windscreen shattered and the pink hood smeared with blood. ‘Joey Tallon,’ he gasped as the dying man smiled from where he lay prone on the earthen floor with his skull split open.

  It was a strange smile, the old man reflected, and he couldn’t quite determine where it was coming from. But then, of course, he couldn’t see the Big Fellow …

  … Who stepped from the shadows and said, quite softly: ‘Well, Joey Tallon. You took your time.’

  Then he stood in the doorway, not making a sound. Staring out across the verdant valley, with its light, drifting mists and eerie evanescent stillness, powerfully evocative of both ‘The End’ and …

  The Beginning …

  … where Joey opened his eyes to see that yet another fine day had dawned in the Place of Wonders, the wondrous place. What freshness in the air! What excited twitterings of birds in the orchards! Joy and exaltation in everything! The entire countryside resounding with song, as though at a wedding feast!

  Everyone had got up early and they had all been for a walk in the spring rain so as to give Mona and Mrs Tallon time to get everything ready for the ‘Picnic of Dreams’, a daily occurrence which took place at 12.00 p.m. sharp. They had prepared the most beautiful array of treats that you could ever imagine: wooden bowls of peeled boiled eggs, fresh salads, fruit, nuts, pastries and mouth-watering confections of all sorts, plus a bewildering assortment of coloured fruit drinks neatly laid out on the gingham cloth which they had spread beneath the ‘Tree of Everlasting Apples’. The sky was streaked with stripes of pink and the sun was the most gorgeous-looking crimson ball. Mona was nibbling on a watercress sandwich and waiting for Jamesy. You could hear him singing ‘Harbour Lights’ the way he used to long ago. It was beautiful and Mona felt sure that this was the day when everything would come right. ‘I just feel it in my bones,’ she said to Mrs Tallon, who wrapped a clean fresh cotton towel around a plate of cooked ham and said that she did too. ‘I think you just feel it, don’t you, Mona? Some days you just know and that’s all you really need.’

  They half expected Joey to appear out of the trees at that very moment, specially attired for the occasion in his lovely white starched shirt and red tie. ‘Jamesy!’ called Mona. ‘Come along now, Jamesy, we’re expecting you-know-who any minute!’

  Everyone apart from Joseph was present. The Seeker had been sitting there on the stile all morning, serenely turning the pages of T. S. Eliot’s Collected Poems and dressed after the manner of St Francis of Assisi in his hooded brown djellaba. Bennett was close by, not bothering to speak, listening attentively as The Seeker cleared his throat and, somewhat ponderously, read aloud: ‘We shall not seek from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.’

  As they looked up, Mona and Mrs Tallon could see the English salesman Campbell Morris approaching with a copy of Dead Souls under his arm. ‘Yoo hoo, Campbell!’ called Mona, waving. He waved back. They really had become quite friendly with Campbell. ‘He’s such a lovely man,’ you would often hear Mona saying.

  They waited for almost three hours but there was still no sign of Joey. In the end they just gave up and went home, Mrs Tallon folding the picnic rug and sighing, a little tearfully: ‘We’ll try again tomorrow! Who knows, he might come then!’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed her h
usband as he put his arm around her, ‘I’m really sure that he will.’

  But in their hearts they knew he never would. For ever since their earliest days in the wondrous place Joseph had increasingly grown into a stranger, and somewhere deep down they had come to accept it. Back then Mrs Tallon had tried so hard to get through to him, gone down regularly to the harbour each night where she’d find him staring out to sea.

  Once, trying to reach him, she had touched him on the shoulder, whispering his name only to find him facing her, glowering like an Antichrist. ‘Who are you?’ he bellowed. ‘Don’t you dare touch me! Don’t lay a finger on me! You hear? You fucking hear me?’

  And since then she never had, to all intents and purposes leaving him to himself and his musings, his self-styled ‘meditations’ which were little more than vainglorious gibberings, endless repetitions, including: ‘I’m in the wrong place!’, ‘I can’t stay here, don’t you understand?’ and ‘I have to go to America, you see!’

  Sometimes you’d hear him going on about Iowa, waylaying people and insisting that they listen as he rambled incoherently about ‘magic’. ‘The most beautiful magical journey,’ he called it, ‘and I’m supposed to be on it! I’m in the wrong place, can’t you see that? Why? Why can’t you see it?’

  Occasionally he would become hysterical and inevitably people began to lose patience, tossing him aside as they went off about their business. ‘It was sad,’ they would often reflect later, having come upon him by the side of the road, perhaps, with his hair all matted and clearly the worse for drink, muttering to himself along the same old lines. Then rumours began to circulate about his having become ‘deranged’, a perception chiefly prompted by the peculiar smile they had noticed on his lips of late. Which was indeed sad, because the truth was that Joey Tallon wasn’t deranged. He was, in fact, as he insisted, simply in the wrong place. And which was why it was logical for him to continue going on his nocturnal visits to watch the harbour lights twinkling, repeating: ‘She’ll be definitely coming tonight.’

  And to plan for the moment they’d be setting off on their ‘journey’. To the United States of America, where the surf of Big Sur would crash on Californian sand, the blue sky of Iowa rise over patchwork fields and white wooden chapels. And the woman he loved more than anything in the world put on her shades and shake her blonde hair free, standing by the side of the Pontiac, smiling, as she said: ‘It’s the end, you know that, Joey, don’t you? The end of the beginning and the beginning of the end. It’s beautiful, Breeze.’

  ‘I know that, Jacy,’ he’d reply, consumed almost totally by a sweeping wave of happiness, her hand in his as she rested her head on his shoulder, contemplating the tranquillity of the flat Midwestern plains. He could see it all clearly, like some secret mini-movie in lush and sumptuous Technicolor.

  ‘It’s like … total belonging, Breeze. You know what I mean?’ she whispered. ‘It’s like home or something.’

  ‘I know,’ he replied. ‘I know what you mean. I’ve been searching for it all my life,’ her hair in that huge but inconceivably easeful silence blowing as though before some ancient wind, the golden corn all about them swaying, as it might in a child’s golden Paradise vision.

  The author would like to express his thanks to Jon Riley and Jeff Kellogg, editors, for their invaluable assistance while working on the manuscript.

  * Some editors found this amusing! ‘A metaphor for the character’s intrinsic self-loathing and congenital malignant shame?’ they said. ‘Really, that never would have occurred to me!’

  Bibliography

  Carey, Tim, Mountjoy: The Story of a Prison. The Collins Press, Ireland.

  Kerekes, David and Slater, David, Killing for Culture: An Illustrated History of Death Film from Mondo to Snuff. Creation Books, London.

  Thanks to Paddy Goodwin, Solicitor, Drogheda, Ireland, for legal advice.

  About the Author

  PATRICK MCCABE was born in Clones, County Monaghan, Ireland, in 1955. He is the author of seven novels, including Music on Clinton Street, Carn, The Butcher Boy—which was a finalist for the Booker and was made into a highly acclaimed film directed by Neil Jordan—Breakfast on Pluto, also a finalist for the Booker, and Emerald Germs of Ireland. He lives in Sligo, Ireland, with his wife and two daughters.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  PRAISE FOR

  Call Me the Breeze

  “Like a noisy night out with all the people who made you—the geeks, the girlfriends, the bullies, the rock stars, your gauche selves. … Pat McCabe is back with a dizzy drunk book that leaves you the next day with a sore head and heart from the laughter and smoke of ideas too big for ‘Joey Tallon’s’ pants until suddenly they’re not and we see into an Ireland where everything seems possible, we watch Joey being born, he delivers himself.”

  —Bono, lyricist and lead singer of U2

  “[McCabe is a] master of creating broken, brutal, but charismatic characters.”

  —Boston Globe

  “[A] Faulkneresque ballad of the perverted holy ‘innocent,’ Call Me the Breeze is … compulsive, often haunting. … Full of bile and quiet fury but also pathos and almost skittish black humor.”

  —Time Out (London)

  “What begins as a fictional memoir of apparently successful Irish author Joey Tallon becomes a psycho-thriller when he recounts disastrous incidents of stalking and kidnapping. Just when the book threatens to get really dark, it turns into an all out comic romp as Joey, like the heroes of Taxi Driver and Being There, is mistaken for something other than the wack-job he is.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “A weepingly explosive take on that most distressful border between two unstoppable political realities. … The blistering unmediated rawness owes still more to earlier Southern (American) gothic precursors: Carson McCullers, William Faulkner and—most persistently—the Flannery O’Connor of Wise Blood.”

  —Guardian (London)

  “Patrick McCabe’s brilliant new tragicomic picaresque Call Me the Breeze … is often very funny and is rich in ironies. … Whether McCabe means [it] as an allegory about Ireland’s struggle with the twenty-first century or the paradoxical nature of creativity I am not sure. Nor does it matter; it is about both things and it is close—very close—to being a masterpiece.”

  —Salon.com

  “McCabe’s raw prose … and flawed but likable characters make for a hilarious novel.”

  —Maxim

  “A rollicking tragicomedy, brilliantly cast. Joey, with his physical girth, intellectual myopia, and injured indignation, could be the Irish cousin of Ignatius J. Reilly in John Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces (1980).”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “Turns the traditional epistolary novel on its head. … McCabe’s deliciously warped wit is as razor sharp as ever. … [His] trademark humor and crafty Irish colloquialisms … leaven even the darkest of scenes.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Call Me the Breeze is a full-blown original. … A painfully funny, beyond-dark odyssey through the soul of a man in conflict with himself and the demented universe he inhabits. That the soul plumbed is Irish is incidental—the music of anguished perversion and twisted joy is universal. From the depths of his own heart and history, Patrick McCabe has created the novelistic equivalent of a rock ‘n’ roll anthem—a tenderly nihilistic and brutally life-affirming scream that enriches, explains, and redeems the hells we are all trying to survive.”

  —Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight,

  Perv—a Love Story, and Plainclothes Naked

  by the same author

  fiction

  MUSIC ON CLINTON STREET

  CARN

  THE BUTCHER BOY

  THE DEAD SCHOOL

  BREAKFAST ON PLUTO

  MONDO DESPERADO

  EMERALD GERMS OF IRELAND

  plays

 
FRANK PIG SAYS HELLO

  (based on The Butcher Boy)

  THE DEAD SCHOOL

  LOCO COUNTY LONESOME

  children’s stories

  THE ADVENTURES OF SHAY MOUSE

  Copyright

  First published in Great Britain in 2003 by Faber and Faber Limited.

  The first U.S. edition of this book was published in 2003 by HarperCollins Publishers.

  CALL ME THE BREEZE. Copyright © 2003 by Patrick McCabe.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  EPub Edition © AUGUST 2010 ISBN: 978-0-062-03019-1

  First Perennial edition published 2004.

  The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:

  McCabe, Patrick.

  Call me the breeze: a novel / Patrick McCabe. — 1st American ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-06-052388-3

  1. Politicians—Fiction. 2. Ex-convicts—Fiction. 3. Northern Ireland—Fiction. I. Title.