Hanging with the Elephant (12 page)

That attitude clearly suited me. I relaxed. I started to become gentle with myself. I stopped pushing myself out of bed in the mornings or pushing myself up the hill for exercise or pushing myself into the kitchen to tidy up.
Just leave things as they are
, I thought. ‘Let the universe
unfold, man,’ as my artistic friends say when they’re rolling a doobie. ‘Give the poor fucken elephant a break.’

Yes, my libido had gradually been declining since I began wearing tartan pyjamas but now even my need for other people was fading. My interest in the postman or the radio was dying. I was drifting into a soft, unfocused coma.

My only stimulation came from the wilderness. The majestic Lough Allen and Sliabh an Iarainn, the Scots pines with their long hanging branches over the door, the storms at night and the magpie that struggled to grip the moving branch and save himself from the sleet and snow. He was marching about on the water tank one morning for so long that I felt he had things to tell me. I think the beloved used to feed him bits of bread, so he was probably missing her. And he had the courage to hop towards me across the water tank until he was quite close; one eye staring at me like my friend the General in bad humour. I could actually imagine him speaking as I covered the ash bucket with a plastic bag.

‘Where’s that woman gone?’ I imagined him saying.

‘None of your business.’

‘She was nice.’

‘It’s none of your business,’ I repeated out loud.

‘It will be,’ he said, ‘if you’re running the show much longer. Jesus, look at this place.’

He stared at me and then at the ash buckets.

True enough, we had four buckets for ashes but they were all full and the wind was blowing ash everywhere.

‘This place is in shit,’ the magpie declared.

‘Fuck off,’ I said. ‘Go find your own breakfast.’

I was trying to get the ashes from the bucket into the plastic bag and he was so aggressive that I got distracted.

It’s a tricky operation. You have to cover the entire bucket with the bag, then turn the bucket upside down so that the ashes fall cleanly into the bag and then you make sure not to take the bucket out too soon in case the ash dust blows all over the yard.

I executed everything very well, except for one part – you’re not supposed to do it with last night’s ashes in case they’re still hot.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ I screamed as the black plastic melted and the ashes fell in a formless lump like loose snow.

‘Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh,’ the magpie cackled, so I took a stone and flung it at him. But I missed. Although I did hit the postman, who was coming around the gable of the house. I laughed it off and accepted the mail; a brochure from Sky and
The Path to Freedom
, a dissertation on an ancient Tibetan text by the Dalai Lama which I had ordered from Amazon in a flush of optimism when my beloved first announced she was going to Poland.

‘Them magpies are whores,’ I declared to the postman, affecting the tone of tribes indigenous to the Cavan region. ‘If I had a fucken gun I’d scatter the lot of them,’ I added, which I suppose just shows how much I needed to read something by the Dalai Lama.

Clearly meditation wasn’t doing me any good.

I considered the situation when the postman had clipped the door of his van closed, smiled at me through the window and driven off up the hill. It was too late in the day to be trying to communicate with gods or gurus, I thought, and I decided to dismantle my shrine and put away the statue of the Buddha. To coin a phrase – you can’t teach an old elephant new tricks.

I suppose that was a fundamental act of despair. The truth is that the future always offers limitless possibilities. We can never predict what will happen next. For example, the beloved might never return from Poland. Who was to say? Maybe she would find someone else out there on the side of the road and fall in love over a few vodkas, or succumb to the power of prayer and turn herself in at the door of a monastery in some remote and snowy mountain from where she would never emerge and I would never find her. I might be traipsing across the Tatra Mountains for the remaining years of my life calling her name. There was no point in being anxious about the future, because the future is unknown. All I could do was try to survive for a while without her.

I know that sitting still for half an hour a day, and avoiding television and Facebook and looking into the lake, can have a great calming effect on lots of other people. I’ve seen them chilled out sometimes at Buddhist retreats, like they’ve been stiffened by the faintest lair of shellac sprayed on their skin as they sit immobile in the lotus position for hours. But my fists were clenched, I was frightening the magpies, the postman may have suspected I was having a nervous breakdown, and the house was a kip.

So I abandoned everything. I abandoned the Buddha and the prayer shawls and the candles and the incense and all the books and leaflets and pictures of dakinis. I put them all in a drawer and I sat by the stove in the empty room for a while, saying, ‘Just take it easy and be gentle with yourself.’ Over and over again I said it. ‘Let the old elephant go where he wants.’

I was watching the rhythm of the flames behind the glass door. If there was an elephant in the room, then he was standing completely still, and tranquil, like he was made of gossamer and filled with light and he was about to fly off over the lake.

‘Maybe I’m already enlightened,’ I whispered, with not another soul present, unless you consider the millions of other Buddha beings, bodhisattvas and the communion of Catholic saints, Doctor Who and Jesus and Mary, and really so many more that I can’t go through them all. I
believe in them all. I couldn’t see them but I felt they were surrounding me, like a swarm of bees, and I decided to address them formally in this crucial moment.

‘I apologise for being angry with the magpie and the pyjama bottoms,’ I said. ‘After all, what harm have they done me? And I’m sorry I was fretting about cleaning the house. I realise none of it matters.’

And in that single instant, I felt enlightened in the way that ordinary folk are enlightened. Just like the widow woman in west Cavan who used to say the rosary in the church on quiet afternoons, and then slap herself with holy water and walk on down to the shop to make lewd jokes with the other women about the young curate. Just like the old philosopher in Clare Island who made his own whiskey and had a handlebar moustache and philosophised by his own fireside for eighty winters. And all the women with headscarves who used to sit in the shelter shed in Lough Derg through the night talking about the quality of soda bread in the midlands. And the shepherd in Lizzy Buggy’s Bar in Dowra, whose dog was always under the legs of his high stool and who used to sit with one glass of stout all afternoon, listening to the clock, and looking out the window at the children coming from school and seeing in them the same beautiful innocence that he regarded every spring in newborn lambs.

Maybe enlightenment is nothing more than a highly developed emotional intelligence, or what used to be
described as common sense; a word that long ago faded from the lexicon of mental health.

And then the good feeling vanished, like the vicarious sunlight in Leitrim that often withers behind a sudden cloud. I no longer felt enlightened and the only thing I wanted was to go into Tesco. I had an intense craving for everything. Every lust and appetite that had been sleeping in me woke up at the same moment. I was so consumed by my general appetites that I was almost afraid to get into the jeep in case I’d crash. But Jesus, Mary and Saint Joseph, I fucking needed Tesco. I wanted Tesco. I wasn’t going to cling to the dry solitude of meditation if I didn’t feel like it. I wasn’t going to clench my fist all day in some act of resistance and say, ‘I must not submit to my appetites, because I’m on a journey of spiritual inquiry.’ Fuck that. Let it go. Stop clinging to spiritual inquiries. I was off to Tesco.

And it was glorious. So many people with shopping trollies, so much colour and light and the decadent excess of glossy products on the shelves. And I was dizzy at the sight of women again. Buying too much and bringing it all home. The lady on the till asked me if I had a clubcard.

‘A what?’

‘Do you have a clubcard?’

‘Ah, listen,’ I said. ‘Do I look like I have a clubcard?’

‘No,’ she said, looking at me and laughing, ‘you don’t.’

And her good humour encouraged me to continue, not quite knowing what I was talking about.

‘Sure, in the long run none of us have clubcards,’ I said.

‘You’re dead right,’ she said.

‘If we only had the clubcards,’ I said, ‘we’d be singing.’

She laughed again.

Not that I understood what she was laughing at either, or what a clubcard was, but I had just had so much fun meandering up and down the aisles after being two weeks on my own that I was enormously over-excited.

And I got so much stuff I didn’t need, and then came home and cooked a curry and ate it with rice as I sat at the television watching
Girls
.

The cat was looking at me and whining as I ate. It was a devastating moment. I had not thought about her in Tesco. I had thought only of myself. And here she was like the reincarnation of some great teacher in a former lifetime, chastising me. She and I may have been together for endless lifetimes. She may have been my mother in a former life or I hers. She, I believe, was certainly my precious guru at some stage and now it was my responsibility to mind her. So I told her that, in the morning, I would go to the vet and get her a bag of Science Plan, her favourite dish. I apologised and said that, for now, I could only offer her some curry. I put a little curry and rice on her saucer. She turned her nose up once or twice, but eventually she dug in with such enthusiasm for the hot spices that I felt it was almost a confirmation that she was indeed my precious teacher in a former life
in the wilds of Tamil Nadu, teaching dance perhaps to young classical singers dressed in saffron robes, their ankles adorned with jingling bells.
Anything is possible
, I thought. And I sat with her, the two of us, as happy as laughing Buddhas on the sofa watching FashionTV on the fifty-inch screen.

T
HE DAY MY mother was buried, I touched her photographs and her little diary as if I was holding her hand. I held a picture of her as a schoolchild on Bridge Street in Cavan. In it, she is holding a cat, just outside Johnny Donoghue’s house. Further up the street, there’s an upright Ford, the only car in the town, outside Flood’s shop. I held pictures of her walking along Patrick Street in Cork, a stylish woollen coat wrapped around her, flanked by other young women in their twenties. I could see she was having the time of her life back then, a manageress
at the Metropole Hotel. In every picture, she laughs openly, her smile so loving and joyful that I am forced to ask if this is the same face that I saw on the pillow the night she died.

I held a letter in my hand that was written in India by a nun, who had heard the news of her engagement in June 1950. Maureen, a childhood friend, had joined the Loreto convent and was sent to Calcutta from where she wrote to Mother wishing her ‘every joy and happiness in your new life’.

The letter goes on:

The nun was teaching in a school, beginning her classes at 7 a.m., and sleeping on the roof of the building with the other sisters at night because of the heat. And now she was writing in blue ink, and underlining words for emphasis. I held the letter in my hands, wishing my mother had shown it to me at some stage, even in old age, and said, ‘Look at this!’, and we could have laughed and cried at the brevity of a human life. Instead, she had folded it neatly away and placed it with three photographs of the nun at the back of a drawer in her dressing table, where it rested for over fifty years until I held it in my hands on the day of her burial.

I noticed an electric razor in the bathroom that my father
had used when he was old. It was on a shelf under the sink. Something intimate about him still remained on the teeth of the little Ronson machine, and it occurred to me that he might have been the cause of her sorrow. Perhaps, in private, he had been a monster to her. He might not have enjoyed sex. The union might have been arranged. Her expectations might have been based on too many romantic films seen with her friends in Cork. Or perhaps, at thirty-four, she had discovered too late that a forty-eight-year-old man could be a cold authoritarian fish in the starchy world of the Irish middle classes in 1950.

I was desperate to know what had wounded this beautiful woman. I was speculating wildly until I found other pictures of the young couple together that proved me wrong. It was as if the house was talking back to me, telling me that there was a different story for me to uncover. I found heaps more photographs in her purses, in drawers, in wardrobes and under her bed and in a shoe box and out in the coal shed in a Jacob’s biscuit tin. I found albums of her wedding and maps of County Kerry from her honeymoon, and postcards I had sent to her from Italy in 1985, and postcards she had sent from Donegal on that same honeymoon in 1950, and pictures of her children in the 1960s, and letters from friends on the birth of her boys and pictures of her with himself in different parts of Ireland and pictures of her as an old woman in Belgium and Finland and Saudi Arabia when she went off with groups of other old people on
adventures that I had long forgotten about. I found her laughing with my brother in Newfoundland and on her own at the end of a pier in Sweden. I found pictures of myself and of her one single grandchild everywhere. And I found cookbooks and recipes and stacks of magazines with knitting patterns. And letters.

The house was singing to me. It was giving up its secrets. It was happy. It was saying, ‘Look here and there and here again, you’ll find evidence of her love that you had forgotten about.’ I found a letter I had written to her when I was ten. It fell out of a high-heeled shoe under the stairs. It was from Donegal saying how much I missed home and how I hoped she was feeding the cat.