Hanging with the Elephant (26 page)

I lay on my side telling her I was sorry. I hadn’t meant to hurt her. Her eye watched me. She didn’t know what had happened. She didn’t know how she had been hurt, or who had done it – though she probably suspected me. In the darkness, I could see just her eye between the tins and the washing machine. But she kept looking at me. And I stayed there. I kept looking at her until, eventually, she came out and let me hold her. I held her for a long time, petting her, and both of us were terribly upset. After a while I knew she felt grateful to be comforted. I knew she liked being held. I knew that the pain had woken in her an intensity of awareness about the savagery of sentient life and in that pain she felt strangely better because she was being held.

After that, we were great friends. Her paw healed and she loved nothing better than to jump up on my lap when I came from school and be held by me. And I loved holding her. And my mother never blamed me for taking her out of the box. And I never blamed my mother for leaving the cooker on.

B
Y THE TIME the beloved arrived home from Poland, the season had changed. The winter was over. Spring was well developed and because of the warm weather it felt like summer. It’s not as if she had been away for years. It was only six weeks. But I was up at 7 a.m. and I went mad fussing around the house, cleaning dishes and floors and worktops and emptying the cat’s tray that had been unchanged for over two weeks.

She had travelled across Europe and trudged in the snow along foreign streets and met new friends and learned
all sorts of new stuff about Fresco Art and Expressionist painting, and she would have new ideas now about the meaning of life, because that’s what happens when you leave your comfort zone and go to another world for a few weeks. But I was at home with the elephant; the enormous conundrum of the human mind. And it settled. Just occasionally it settled, and was still and present to the rustling leaf and the buzz of life around me.

Every day, I had sat on the floor, with my back straight, in front of a small candle as the cat sat on the opposite armchair watching me with one eye, a paw covering the other eye and half her head.

At 8.30 a.m. on a beautiful spring morning, I finished my meditation and, without the slightest compassion, I threw the cat out. She wasn’t impressed. ‘The beloved is coming,’ I explained. ‘She might even now be in the air over Germany heading for Dublin airport. We mustn’t be sleeping all day today.’

I imagined throwing my arms around her saying, ‘So tell me everything.’

‘Where do I begin?’ she would reply. ‘I have had so many adventures!’

That’s the way it used to be in the old days in good hotels, when we had been separated for a while and were suddenly back together again. We would run the hot water and plant the condoms under the pillow and arrange the bed before getting into the bath. Those were afternoons
I loved. And afternoons were the best moments for love, or so I read in a poem by Ovid when I was a teenager. ‘Afternoons were the best,’ Ovid had said. And I stuck to that proposition and I found it to be true.

Before heading to Dublin to meet her I filled a tiny suitcase with some fresh clothes and a toilet bag. I put the laptop in my briefcase, with the flexes, adapter and a phone charger. And I took walking boots and my rain gear too, flung them all into the back of the jeep as if I was heading off trekking in the mountains.

Then I was nearly off. The engine was running. Except that I decided to go back and double-check the electricity and the central heating and make sure that the kettle was plugged out. And, of course, the cat had slipped back in a window. So I got her by the underbelly and left her outside again.

I reversed slowly out the gate. The cat had now hunched into a tight bundle of misery at the gable wall. It was almost 10 a.m. I drove down the slopes of Mount Allen, the lake on my left spread for eleven miles and the mountain behind it. I went through Drumshanbo and on towards Ballinamore. I was almost in Cavan when I got a text. I saw her name and pulled over to read it.

Apparently she was still in Warsaw. She was stuck in Warsaw. She had mistaken the month when she was booking her return flight. She had clicked ‘April’ when she ought to have clicked ‘May’ and when she got to the check-
in at Modlin airport the lady said that there was nothing she could do to help. So she had to book another flight, and then another night in her hotel and then go back all the way on the bus to Warsaw with all her luggage. I don’t think she would have been too happy about that but she was actually apologising to me and hoping that it didn’t inconvenience my plans.

‘No problem,’ I texted back. In fact, I was delighted. I would have an extra evening in the city.

I arrived at the hotel in Ballsbridge around 3 p.m., checked in and immediately booked a ticket online for the Project Arts Centre later in the evening. I’m a creature of habit.

Driving back along the same canal, and checking into the same hotel and even going to a show in the same theatre as I had done on the day she had left were all a kind of ritual of repetition that made me feel secure.

The show was called
Visitation
. It was a collaborative work between a Butoh dancer, a musician and a sculptor. I took my seat in the racked auditorium of old-fashioned seats and I could see the Butoh dancer, standing on the edge of the stage, pallid and undefined among the shadows. When the show began, he moved slowly across the stage for an hour like a ghost or a moon; a human without a narrative, broken like a victim of war and silent like an imbecile.

It was an exquisite experience. It didn’t offer any clear
narrative or storyline. Just a human being in motion, full of anxiety on the surface, and yet deep down in his movement, I felt a sense of longing, a connectedness with people in the audience, as if he was trying to assure us of his enduring love for us. I read it like a poem, a kind of love in a time of cholera. And I felt an intense connection with the dancer, as if we were a single being, feeling the same disturbance, and that he there on the stage was just expressing in his body what was buried in my heart.

I couldn’t wait to tell the beloved about it the following day.

I returned to the hotel and enjoyed a couple of brandies in the bar, chatting to a young waiter from Bulgaria. I was excited. Then I went upstairs and opened a bottle of wine, which was meant for the beloved, except that she was stuck in Warsaw so now it was just myself and Vincent Browne again, and Vincent couldn’t drink with me since he was on television and I could hardly push a glass through the screen.

I also had two brandy glasses, because I didn’t want to be seen carrying a single brandy to the bedroom. So I pretended I had company, as I was ordering my two final drinks. That way if I met someone in the lift they wouldn’t think I was a sad bastard drinking alone. And in a sense I wasn’t alone, because the Butoh dancer was still with me. I imagined him following me after I left the theatre, naked and white and taunting me, like a messenger from beyond the cliff, to let go and awaken.

He was so close behind me and so vivid in my imagination that when I opened the door of the room, I turned around and spoke to him.

‘Here,’ I said, ‘hold this,’ meaning the tray on which my two brandies rested. But as I spoke, a woman coming out of a door across the corridor saw me talking to myself, which caused me in turn to let one of the glasses slide off the tray and break. The other one I managed to save with my other hand.

‘Fuck it,’ I hissed, which undoubtedly the woman heard as she strode down the corridor, her high heels making not the slightest sound on the deep pile of cream carpet, although she did turn at the lift and gazed back down the corridor at me and smiled.

‘Now look what you made me do,’ I hissed at the Butoh dancer, when I got inside the room. ‘I lost a brandy over you.’

Outside I could hear ambulances in the traffic, rain hitting the windowpane and the wind stretching the branches of the trees inside the railings of the car park.
It’s funny how I’m always spilling drink
, I thought.

And in fact when the beloved came through the glass doors of the customs area in Dublin airport the following afternoon, I was holding a paper cup full of coffee which I waved to signal –
I’m here
– and the coffee spilled over my head. She was pulling a case on wheels, with two smaller bags hanging around her neck. We fumbled a hug and
she looked at the coffee dribbling down my cheek and smiled.

We got a taxi. The driver was from Cameroon. I asked him about racism. He said sometimes people flag him down, make him do a U-turn because they are so desperate for a taxi and when he pulls up and they realise he is black they wave him on or tell him to fuck off. ‘It is not nice,’ he said.

After that I whispered my questions.

‘How was the trip?’

‘What did you eat?’

‘Had you many perogis?’

‘Were you at the opera?’

In the hotel, the Bulgarian waiter smiled.

‘How are you this afternoon?’ he enquired.

‘I am well,’ I replied, and before I could say more he spoke again.

‘Shall I get you your usual, sir?’ Like I was James Bond.

So we took the drinks to the room, my Miss Moneypenny and I, and when we were inside the door she started rummaging in her cases, checking that everything was there, opening presents she had bought for various people and showing them to me and asking what I thought.

I filled the bath and she lay on the bed. She said the water was too hot so I got in first and soaked and then came out wearing a white bathrobe and a new pair of silk
pyjamas I bought at the airport while I was waiting. She was looking up at the ceiling.

‘So,’ she said, stretching on the bed, ‘any news?’

‘I made soup,’ I declared. ‘Chicken soup.’

‘Great.’

‘I have a big pot of it. Sitting at home on the cooker. We can have it tomorrow.’

‘And no other news?’

I looked in her eyes.

‘No,’ I said. ‘No news at all.’

I suppose I could have mentioned the television, but already the past had swallowed up all that had happened over six weeks. And, besides, I was holding her in my arms once again.

T
HANKS ESPECIALLY TO my brother Brendan, and to all Nellie’s family, relations, neighbours and friends in Cavan who supported her with love through the years. Special thanks to the home help, care workers, Health Service personnel and Active Age volunteers who sustained her when she lived at Glenasmole, and to the staff of Newbrook Nursing Home in Mullingar for their immeasurable kindness in her final journey. Thanks to my partner Cathy for her love and wisdom, and to Sophia for brightening up so many birthdays for her granny. Thanks also to Simon Carman, Philomena Brown, Kathleen and Ann McGrenra, and to so many more who constructed a fabric of love and kindness over the years around the person we all knew as ‘Nellie’.

It was a privilege to work again with Ciara Doorley, editor at Hachette Ireland, whose insight and skill guided me in the writing of this book, and I thank her for her faith and encouragement. And thanks to my agent Jonathan Williams for his vigilance as always with the text, and to Jenny in Scollans who made all the dinners.