Bend for Home, The (5 page)

My father was sitting on the edge of the bed. He must have been there some time. He asked me was I all right. I am, I said. He looked at the po on the floor.

Are you sure?

Yes.

I’ll go then.

I could not wait on him to leave, and he wanted to stay. At last reluctantly he rose. The bed rose. The bile rose in my throat. He passed by the mirror, held the door open and turned.

Is there anything I can get you?

No, I said quietly, and closed my eyes, pretending sleep.

He accepted this regretfully, the door closed behind him with a quiet click. I waited till I heard his feet descending the stairs then I leaned out of the bed and vomited profusely. The door flew open. He ran in. He was short of breath and anxious. He took my forehead in his hand. I was grateful for the pressure.

Go on, son, he said.

I pressed down, I pressed real hard down on the palm of his hand as the spasms went through me. When I was finished I lay back and he wiped my cheeks and lips with a wet face cloth.

Why did you let me go, he asked, if you knew you were going to be sick?

I don’t know.

Are you all right now?

Yes.

I lay back on the pillow. He sat with his back to me and his hands on his knees. We could hear across the roofs the sound of the orphan girls screaming in the Poor Clare Convent as they played during their dinner break. Frank Lee in wide wellingtons came up the entry with the milk for the café in a can. The girls in the bakery were banging dough. Someone emptied a teapot into the drain in the yard.

Would you like some lemonade?

No.

I can’t understand why you didn’t want me to stay.

It was because I wanted to be alone when it happened. But I didn’t say that to my father. Since I’d got the jaundice I’d got used to doing it by myself. I would hear the disturbance away in the distance, see how my wrists shone and the patterns on the wallpaper wavered. Soon one of my legs would grow indistinct. The body blur. Every smell and sound would leer violently. Then your head disappeared for an instant. That was the moment and you had to concentrate to get it right. To get it over with. I didn’t want anyone else there.

I’ll take this away, he said, and I’ll be back in a minute. He crossed the floor holding the vessel. I lay there, as the other world came rushing back, feeling like I’d just come out of confession.

Daddy, I said.

What’s that?

I feel better now.

Good, he said, good.

It might have been then, or soon after this, there was some other sickness I can’t name. Maybe it wasn’t a sickness at all but some nightmare that visits a body during waking hours. It meant the closing walls again and the body ridding itself of its physical presence.

There would have been a radio on downstairs in the living room. There was always a radio on in the Milseanacht Breifne. The wireless itself sat in the sitting room above Main Street and a wire from it ran downstairs to the sweet shop, along the wall of the café behind, and eventually into a speaker in the small living room that separated the restaurant from the kitchen. The radio played all day non-stop from the moment Aunt Maisie switched it on at noon when she rose from her bed till the National Anthem blared out onto Main Street bringing another day to an end.

That night the voice of the announcer came out the window through the green bars, travelled up the entry and reached me in the room above, where I lay weightless and transparent.

What the voice was speaking of I can’t say. It was adult, male, nostalgic; it could have been James Mason; it might have been Perry
Mason; maybe a member of a religious order speaking of acts of charity or a voice about to announce a waltz; whatever it was, it troubled me.

At first, as always, there was the benign sense of sleep falling while I listened to life going on downstairs. I heard the ladies going away to the pictures and knew my father was down there alone.

I had this fear that he might tie his bad tooth to the door handle, and push the door. He’d done this once before and when we walked into the dining room he had a bloody handkerchief to his mouth, and the long fang, yellow and topped with black, sat in a saucer. But tonight all was quiet except for the voice on the radio.

I was walking up Finea then the wrong thing happened, and I screamed. I screamed again. I heard his hurrying steps coming up the stairs and along the landing. By the time he threw open the door and turned on the light he was breathless and pale.

Where is he, son? he shouted.

Blessed God, son, he said hoarsely, what’s wrong?

I couldn’t say. He held the bottom rails of the bed and looked round wildly. His gasps for breath left two pinches of blue on his upper cheeks.

What is it? he said, where is he?

But there was no one.

I was afraid, I said.

Afraid of what?

I couldn’t answer.

I thought, he said, you were being murdered.

I must have lain down then, and turned my head sideways.

There’s no one, he said.

Yes, Daddy.

I’ll turn the light off now, he said.

He turned it off but I could feel him standing there in the dark for a long time, watching me, ready for the next scream when it came.

And another time he caught me walking in my sleep across the landing. He’d been to a whist drive in the side rooms of the Town Hall, and then on to see Frankie Brady in the Ulster Arms for a few
bottles of Guinness, and then he’d let himself into the dark hall and caught sight of me standing in my pyjamas by the altar at the top of the stairs.

What are you doing up there? he asked.

I didn’t reply.

Dermot? he said.

I put a hand out and touched the walls and began to feel my way down the steps. He approached me warily.

Are you asleep? he said, and his voice reached me from another dimension.

I struggled best as I could to stop going wherever I was going. I really wanted to go on very much to that first place and there was a sense of loss in not reaching it. Now I was losing it very fast.

What’s wrong? my mother said from somewhere below.

I caught him, said my father, just in time.

Dermot? she said.

Don’t wake him, he advised. They say you shouldn’t wake them suddenly.

I could feel the world taking shape around me, the bloody head of Christ on the altar, the pink cups of plastic flowers, the white curtains on the windows that opened onto the flat roof, and then I saw my mother in a blue housecoat, her glasses luminous, her face shining from Nivea cream, and my father standing ghost-like below me, with one hand flat on my chest.

Where were you going? she asked.

I was going nowhere, I replied.

You’re at home now, she said.

That’s right, agreed my father.

He led me back to bed.

You were sleepwalking, he explained, as he pulled the sheets to my chin. He sat on the bed with his hands on his knee. His shadow was comfortable and benign. He lit a cigarette and tapped the ash into the grate of the small black fireplace.

You’re a great walker, he said.

A few years later it was him I would meet on the stairs, a thin gaunt figure in a pyjama top open onto his chest, and pyjama bottoms that
reached to just below his knees. He was, he thought, on his way to the barracks. I led him back to bed as he had once led me.

Where I was for the night he found me I can’t say. But most nights we set off for Finea. That was how we always met, somewhere on the landing or on the stairs, thinking it was the bridge or the barracks, always at one remove from consciousness, in a twilight world where certain journeys had to be completed out of an obscure sense of duty and longing.

My father met people through Miriam, through whist drives, poker schools, the Ulster Arms and the Farnham Hotel.

His closest friend in the long run was Frank Brady, one of the Brady Family who ran the Ulster Arms. Frank then was in his late twenties, my father in his early fifties. Frankie had a pale laughing face, a brilliantined quiff and long painterly fingers. He always had a
Daily Express
in his sports-jacket pocket. He had trained as a pastry chef in Glasgow but now spent his days working behind the bar in his family’s hotel.

They played cards over the bar and drew bottles of stout. They chatted about horses and jockeys – Joe Sime, Des Cullen, Lester Piggott. Mid-conversation Frankie would fall asleep, his chin would drop onto his chest and the night would continue for a while without him, then he’d suddenly re-enter the conversation as if he’d never left it.

My father won a pair of Clark’s black shoes at a whist drive in the Town Hall, and he brought them up to the Ulster Arms to show Frankie.

Well, Jack, said Frankie, they’re a neat pair.

They are.

After closing time he came home with the box neatly wrapped under his arm. He entered the kitchen. My mother was ironing sheets.

Take a dekko at that, he said.

Maisie undid the wrapping.

I won these at whist, he explained.

She opened the box. Inside were a pair of brown mud-spattered shoes, without tongue or soles.

The curse of the crows on Frankie Brady, said my father.

The business premises had large canopies over the shop windows and above the gate that opened into the entry. Over the years I painted them all kinds of colours.

The shop sold the produce of the bakery. Inside the shop was a small room where all the cakeboxes were stacked. There were a few small tables where people sat having ice-cream soda with spoonfuls of ice cream in tall glasses. To the left you went out to the toilet, past the room under the stairs where Croney slept. Straight on through was a door with a glass porthole that opened into the public tearoom. Beyond that was the private dining room that was never private, for beyond it was the kitchen and the scullery and the waitresses were always on the go.

A door in the kitchen opened onto the yard. An entry ran the length of the house. Opposite the kitchen was the old bakery in which eggs in barrels of brine, boxes of margarine and bags of flour were stacked. Further up the yard was the new bakery. One corner of it contained a vast coke oven that could take four trays at a time. Above the old bakery was a long slatted attic – once a storeroom – with a galvanized roof. It was filled with antiques and books from my Great Aunt Jane’s time in France at the turn of the century, when she was au pair to two girls whose family suffered a grave scandal. The father murdered the mother. And later the sisters broke up over a man. Then a Hollywood film was made about the affair.

Great Aunt Jane, who taught domestic economy in the Technical School, never married, and started the Breifne with a small loan from John Brady, draper, grandfather of Frank Brady. It was one of the few large businesses (maybe the only one) opened by a woman in the newly formed Free State. And it thrived. She in turn left it to her nieces – Maisie and Winnie – so it passed on through the female line, and perhaps in time would have continued on to my sister Una or Miriam, if circumstances had not changed. But anyway.

It was a wonderful attic. First I found an elderly silver-bearded Santa standing in a scattering of yellow straw in a tall cardboard box. Later I’d learn that he went into the shop window at Xmas to nod at passers-by, and with a quick bow, dispense innumerable favours. In London, later still, I’d meet men from Cavan who’d turn sentimental at the days they spent in front of the Breifne asking Santa for things. He stopped there for a couple of weeks saying yes to everyone, then on the dot of twelve midnight on Christmas Eve Aunty Maisie would take him in and up he went to the attic to hibernate for another year.

But now he was a complete mystery to me. It was like he was an
adult’s toy. He stood resolute and stiff-bearded, staring straight ahead over the lid with silent eyes. I lifted him out and stood him on the floor. He was over two feet tall, wore a red velvet coat and little prim black boots. His eyebrows were dusty. I found a key stuck in his back. I studied the key very carefully and turned it once.

Immediately, Santa nodded. I backed away. He nodded once, twice, three times, then, as if he were on the verge of a sneeze, his chin began to move very slowly, the revolutions diminished, and he stuttered to a stop. I started him again on the instant. He nodded away and I nodded back in return. We were at that a while until he came to a stop as before. So that was it. I put him back in his box of straw for again, and replaced him on the ledge where I’d found him, gazing at the hands of a clock that had suddenly stopped.

Next I found a French medical book there that contained all manner of abnormalities. A huge foot like the trunk of a tree, an ear that opened out like a fruit, six-fingered hands, abnormal swellings on the calf, diagrams of the heart. Then the book fell open at a picture of a mother suckling a child. The fine lace shawl had fallen from the woman’s slender shoulder. She was fitting the nipple into the mouth of the child. The full dipping breast was exposed. It was shockingly real. The halo of the black nipple was peppered with small nodes. I could feel the soft dimensions of the flesh.

Someone came into the old bakery below. My heart pounded. I hid the book. Went for a walk and came back again. And there it was breathing with life among the musty pages. I traced its contours. I studied the dark aureole. My mouth dried. My stomach raced. Trembling I hid it again.

I went through tall green histories of Ireland with pencil drawings of the Tuatha De Dannan and Brian Boru. Then leafed through cookery books. I came across a French-English dictionary with the flyleaf signed in Great Aunt Jane’s hand –
Paris
1912.
Jane McGloughlin.
There was a signed picture of the dancer Isadora Duncan. Then there was a dull photo of a huge mansion in which the murder must have occurred. News clippings from the
New York Times:
Scandal Strikes Prominent French Family. Seemingly the dead woman had been an actress from Hollywood. The man was arrested as he tried to step on a boat at Marseille.

I read on for hours till I heard my father calling my name.

Where were you? he asked.

Reading, I said.

By God.

I was solving a murder.

That’s more, said he, then I ever done. Straighten your back! They’ve been searching for you high and low. Your dinner’s within.

I went back straight to the attic when I’d finished. The windows had leaded lights, and flushes of red and blue sunlight crossed the wooden floor. I looked into old copper pots that were filled with blue mould. I found a cardboard box of maps. An old weighing scales. A marble soda fountain. There were elaborate lamps on the shelves. In some there was still a residue of paraffin. When I touched the wicks they crumbled. I found tall receipt books from the 1920s, with each item entered in copperplate writing. The symbol for the pound note was drawn in like a ballet dancer. I found old photographs of Cavan. Photographs of women I didn’t know by a lake I didn’t recognize.

I sat on the floor with piles of books each side of me.

Dust travelled through the sunlight. I couldn’t wait any longer. I took the medical book out of its hiding place and went back to the breast and gazed at it with a dizzy fondness. From the old bakery below the smell of fresh flour rose. The smell made me delirious. Since then I cannot smell flour without thinking of sex. Freshly baked bread makes me swoon. But the bag of flour is the most sensual object of them all.

On many of our bed sheets in letters of light faded blue you could make out the name
RANK’S FLOUR MILLS DONEGAL
. The flour men came up the entry bent double. They had a covering over their back and scalps to protect them. They carried the bags of flour by the ears. The girls made the Rank’s men tea, and white-faced like clowns, they sat in the kitchen scattering down.

My mother took the empty bags and made sheets from them. She sewed them under the window. So, even as I fell asleep, there was this distant smell of flour. And the first time I caught sight of a real breast flour motes fell.

It was that attic that made me want to write. The first real essay I wrote was about rain. I remember reading it out in the De La Salle Brothers school. I stole the lines from a book by Charles Lamb that I found in the attic. Imagination, says Brodsky the Russian poet in his book
Less Than One,
begins with our first lie.

It is hard for me to remember my first lie, since I’ve told so many. And now I’m at it again. Can I lie here and sidestep some memory I’d rather not entertain, and then let fiction take care of it elsewhere, because that is sometimes what fiction does? It becomes the receptacle for those truths we would rather not allow into our tales of the self.

The made-up characters feel their way by virtue of thoughts that novelists deny having. So I’d like to describe my first stab at fame, even though it shames me. It was a combination of lies and a fondness for words that started me. I can still remember the liquid feel of those words for rain. How the beads were blown against a windowpane, and glistened there, and ran. The words for rain were better than the rain itself. I wanted to type up words.

I went to UCD for a disastrous few terms. Instead of attending university, I spent the year selling second-hand beds and wiring houses with my cousin Vincent O’Neill, who introduced me to clients as a science student. Or, with his father, Pop O’Neill, I’d sit supping bottles of stout at the kitchen table on his pension day. We’d be waiting for Vincent to come home with the dinner. Nothing good ever came out of County Clare, sniffed Pop. That was because Vincent was born there. Like my father, Pop had been a policeman, and before that was a member of the Connaught Rangers who’d mutinied in India over England’s treatment of the Irish in the Troubles.

For five days he stood in the burning sun, and sometimes the memory would come back, and he’d rage and stare at me –
A student,
my arse!
he’d shout.
Useless! Useless! Useless!
Other times, I’d sit with Kitty, Vincent’s wife, who was heavily pregnant, both of us looking into the fire for hours on end. I was filled with guilt at spending my mother’s money, and taking a place at university that Una would have relished.

Then one day I upped and left for London, did not return to university, and found a job with Securicor. In my underpants I sat on half a million pound notes in the back of a van in Ealing during
a heatwave in 1968. I lodged with a family called Healy whose youngest son was called Dermot. In that house Dave Allen was all the rage. I passed a window in the High Street and saw a manual typewriter in a window. I bought it with my first week’s wages.

That typewriter was a great liar. It wrote out refurbished poems by Dylan Thomas, snatches of pop poetry by the Liverpool poets that had been published in the Penguin Modern Poets series, and many disjointed lines by virtue of e. e. cummings and William Carlos Williams. It lied beautifully at times. As a night watchman I walked factories near Smithfield Market that were filled with the rank corpses of cattle. Hides hung from the walls. There was one corner that was stacked with horns and hooves. I read Camus. Beyond the fence at the end of the yard trains flew by scattering the rats.

I disappeared from Ireland and my family. I sat by the back window of Healy’s and read
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog.
Then I moved on to Dylan’s poems. The words shimmered on the paper and released themselves from the prison of the sentences they were in. They became things in themselves. A single word collected a myriad of meanings. Verbs bounced in open spaces. A noun was like a bowl of cream. It contained vast worlds. An adjective made an image infinite.

But it was the responsibility for the everyday kept me calm. The groan of an oven in the foundry. The stiff hides. The rats racing over the railway lines. Lorries, after a drive from Scotland, blowing their horn at the gate some time near dawn. Heathrow, where two of us loaded gold onto a plane at nine in the morning, and unloaded the same gold that evening at five. In between the gold had been to France and back again. It was something to do with keeping the foreign exchange rate correct. Those gold bars fascinated me. How easy it would be to rob them. Later the same gold bullion
was
stolen.

Then I became a guard in Heathrow dealing with aliens from Pakistan. I had my own office off two cells where prisoners were put. The prisoners were young Pakistanis who had been sent to England, with, in many cases, their home village putting up the fare. They arrived without proper authorization and I led them across the tarmac. They followed in my wake according to custom. I made phone
calls on their behalf to various embassies, relations and immigrant services, then locked them away and lifted out Dostoevsky.

A citizen of London I returned home to a wedding in Cavan via the Holyhead boat. I hitched to Cavan. That afternoon I found myself at the reception seated by the editor of the
Anglo-Celt,
the local newspaper where I had published my first short story.

How is the writing going on? he asked.

Oh fine, I said.

He filled me out another glass of wine.

I’m glad to hear it, he said.

Thank you.

So will we be seeing a book out soon?

Not yet. (
Pause
.) But I have a play finished.

And is it going on?

Yes.

Where? In the Abbey?

Oh no. I searched round frantically. On TV.

TV, he said.

ITV actually.

Well that’s wonderful.

I got a thousand pound.

You’re made up. He raised his glass. What’s it called?