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Authors: Eílís Ní Dhuibhne

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Fifteen years.

Since his first application.

Fifty.

His twelfth.

His twelfth time trying to get a bursary to write full-time.

It would be the makings of him. It would mean he could give up serving alcohol to fools for a whole year. He would write a new novel, the novel that would win the prizes and show the begrudgers. Impress Eileen Battersby. Impress Emer O'Kelly. Impress, maybe, Fintan Fucking O'Toole. And the boost to his morale would be so fantastic … but once again that Alan King, who had been running literary Ireland since he made his Confirmation probably, would shaft him. He knew.

Pam phoned him from the loo on her mobile. She had tried her best but there was no way. They had really loved his work, she said. There was just not enough money to go round. She was so sorry, so sorry …

Yeah right.

Alan was the one who made the decisions. Pam had told him so herself. ‘They do exactly what he says,' she said. ‘It's amazing. I never knew how power worked. Nobody ever disagrees with him.'

Nobody who gets to sit on the same committees and eats the same lunches, anyway. As long as he was chair, Francie would not get a bursary. He would not get a travel grant. He would not get a production grant. He would not get a trip to China or Paris or even the University of Eastern Connecticut. He would not get a free trip to Drumshambo in the County Leitrim for the Arsehole of Ireland Literature and Donkey Racing Weekend.

Alan King ruled the world.

The pen is stronger than the sword, Francie had learned in school. Was it Patrick Pearse who said that or some classical guy? Cicero or somebody. That's how old Francie was, they were still doing Patrick Pearse when he was in primary. He was pre-revisionism and he still hadn't got a bursary in literature, let alone got onto Aosdána, which gave some lousy writers like Pam a meal ticket for life. The pen is stronger. Good old Paddy Ó Piarsaigh. But he changed his mind, apparently. Francie looked at the Four Courts through the corner window of the Breadbasket. Who had been in that in 1916? He couldn't remember. Had anyone? Eamonn Ceannt or Seán Mac Diarmada or somebody nobody could remember. Burnt down the place in the end, all the history of Ireland in it.
ira
of their day. That was later, the Civil War. He had written about that, too. He had written about everything. Even about Alan. He had written a whole novel about him, and six short stories, but they were hardly going to find their mark if they never got published, and they were not going to get published if he did not get a bursary and some recognition from the establishment, and he was not going to get any recognition while Alan was running every literary and cultural organisation on the island …

At last. The evening was falling in when the board members tripped and staggered out of Gabriel's, into the light and shade, the sparkle and darkness, that was Usher's Quay. Jane and Mary had of course left much earlier, anxious to get to the supermarkets before they closed.

But Pam, to the extreme annoyance of everyone, had lingered on, drinking the Bordeaux with the best of them. They had been irritated at first but had then passed into another stage. The sexual one. Inevitable as Australian Chardonnay at a book launch. They had stopped blathering on about wine and had begun to reminisce about encounters with ladies of the night in exotic locations. Paul claimed, in a high voice that had Alan looking around the restaurant in alarm, to have been seduced by a whore in a hotel in Moscow, who had bought him a vodka and insisted on accompanying him to his room, clad only in a coat of real wolfskin. Fantasy land. That eejit Pam was so shot herself she didn't seem to care what they said. Her mascara was slipping down her face and her blond hair was manky, as if she had sweated too much. It was high time she got a taxi. He'd shove her into one as soon as he got them out. He couldn't leave them here, they'd drink the board dry, and if they were unlucky, some journalist would happen upon them. He stopped for a second. Publicity was something they were always seeking and hardly ever got. But no, this would do them no good at all. There is such a thing as bad press, in spite of what he said at meetings.

He paid the bill. There were long faces, of course. You'd think he was crucifying them, instead of having treated them to a lunch that had cost, including the large gratuity he was expected to fork out, one thousand two hundred euro of Lottery money. Oh well, better than racehorses, he always said, looking at the Last Supper. Was it Leonardo or Michelangelo had painted the original? He was so exhausted he couldn't remember. He took no nonsense from the boyos, though, and asked the waiter to put them into their coats no matter how they protested.

Pam had excused herself at the last minute, taking him aback.

‘Don't wait for me,' she had said. She could still speak coherently. ‘I'll be grand, I'll get a taxi. I'll put it on the account.'

She gave him a peck on the cheek – that's how drunk she was – and ran out the door, pulling her mobile out of her bag as she did so.

Not such a twit as all that. ‘I'll put it on the account.' He almost admired her for a second.

With the help of the waiter, he got the other pair of beauties bundled out to the pavement.

Their taxi had not yet arrived.

He deposited Simon and Paul on a bench placed outside for the benefit of smokers and moved to the curb, the better to see.

Traffic moved freely along the quay. It was not as busy as usual. A quiet evening. The river was a blending delight of black and silver and mermaid green. Alan was not entirely without aesthetic sensibility. The sweet smell of hops floated along the water from the brewery. He'd always loved that, the heavy, cloying smell of it, like something you'd give a two-year-old to drink. Like hot jam tarts. In the distance he could just see the black trees of the Phoenix Park. Sunset. Peaches and molten gold, Dublin stretched against it. The north side could be lovely at times like this. When it was getting dark. The Wellington monument rose, a black silhouette, into the heavens, a lasting tribute to the power and glory of great men.

It was the last thing Alan saw.

He didn't even hear the shot explode like a backfiring lorry in the hum of the evening city.

Francie's aim was perfect. It was amazing that a writer who could not change a plug or bore a hole in a wall with a Black & Decker drill at point-blank range could shoot so straight across the expanse of the river. Well, he had trained. Practice makes perfect, they said, at the creative writing workshops. Be persistent, never lose your focus. He had not written a hundred short stories for nothing and a short story is an arrow in flight towards its target. They were always saying that.
Aim, write, fire
. And if there's a gun on the table in act one, it has to go off in act three, that's another thing they said.

But, laughed Francie, as he wrapped his pistol in a Tesco Bag for Life, in real life what eejit would put a gun on the table in act one? In real life a gun is kept well out of sight and it goes off in any act it likes. In real life there is no foreshadowing.

That's the difference, he thought, as he let the bag slide over the river wall. That's the difference between life and art. He watched the bag sink into the black lovely depths of Anna Livia Plurabelle. Patrick Pearse gave up on the
peann
in the end. When push came to shove, he took to the
lámh láidir
.

He walked down towards O'Connell Bridge, taking out his mobile. Good old Pam. He owed her. ‘For each man kills the thing he loves,' he texted her, pleased to have remembered the line. ‘By each let this be heard. Some do it with a bitter look, some with a flattering word. The coward does it with a kiss; the brave man with a gun.' That wasn't right.
Word
didn't rhyme with
gun
. ‘Some do it with a bitter look, some with a flattering pun.' Didn't really make sense. What rhymes with
gun
? Lots of words.
Fun
,
nun
.
Bun
. ‘Some do it with a bitter pint, some with a sticky bun,' he texted in. ‘Cheers! I'll buy you a bagel sometime.' He sent the message and tucked his phone into his pocket. Anger sharpened the wit, he had noticed that before. His best stories had always been inspired by the lust for revenge. He could feel a good one coming on … maybe he shouldn't have bothered killing Alan.

He was getting into a bad mood again. He stared disconsolately at the dancing river. The water was far from transparent, but presumably the Murder Investigation Squad could find things in it. They knew it had layers and layers of meaning, just like the prose he wrote. Readers were too lazy to deconstruct properly but policeman were probably pretty assiduous when it came to interpreting and analysing the murky layers of the Liffey. Would that Bag for Life protect his fingerprints,
dna
evidence? He didn't know. The modern writer has to do plenty of research. God is in the details. He did his best but he had a tendency to leave some books unread, some websites unvisited. Writing a story, or murdering a man, was such a complex task. You were bound to slip up somewhere.

Perfectionism is fatal, they said. Give yourself permission to err. Don't listen to the inner censor.

He had reached O'Connell Street and, hey, there was the 46A waiting for him. A good sign. They'd probably let him have a laptop in prison, he thought optimistically, as he hopped on the bus. They'd probably make him writer-in-residence. That's if they ever found the gun.

Illumination

I was spending the summer at an artists' retreat in the hills on the west coast of America. The house where I lived was a brown wooden building, sheltered by a grove of pine trees, where bobcats had their den. My room was large and plain and comfortable, with a wooden ceiling, a desk, an easy chair, and a wide bed, covered by a blue patchwork quilt. A small balcony faced east to the rising sun, and in the mornings I sat there. Hummingbirds, like large insects, stood in the air near my head, making their sound, which is more like a whirr than a hum. Rabbits, looking like pictures cut from a children's pop-up book, nibbled at the grass in the garden below, where agapanthus, Shasta daisies and orange nasturtiums bloomed. And climbing up the wooden wall to the balcony railing was a rambling rose bearing small pink blossoms that had no smell. All around me were layer upon layer of undulating hills, smooth and rounded, their long grasses the colour of pottery left too long in the kiln. Here and there among the dry hills were dark green stains, cool and inviting as oases. That was the forest. Redwoods, exotic pines, oak and arbutus, which here is called the madrone.

At night the coyotes barked, and the bobcats screamed, and it was said that a mountain lion roamed in the hills and sometimes came down to the house where the artists lived and worked. But no one had seen it for a long time. During the day, one saw only rabbits, and hummingbirds, and flowers. In the forest, hiding among the trunks of the redwoods, furrowed deeply like sticks of chocolate flake, small deer would run, startled by the walker, and bound along the woodland trails as if on springs.

In the mornings I wrote, sitting by the window, and I spent an hour sitting outside on the balcony, beside the pink and scentless roses, catching the sun before it moved around to the south and the west sides of the house. I wrote a novel, doggedly, without hope or despair, trusting that sometime the work would find itself, although my experience told me that with novels this does not always happen. In the afternoons I walked in the hills or in the woods, and in the evenings I read.

There was a good library in the house, warmly coloured, with dark wooden shelves, and a few thousand books, many left there by previous residents. The collection of biographies was particularly good and after a while I understood that the original owner of the house had been married to a biographer – her own works formed part of the collection, but there were many other lives there, captured between two covers. The lives of Isak Dinesen, of George Eliot, of Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Franz Kafka. I read some swiftly. (Anne Sexton, whose life was not edifying; Sylvia Plath, whose story we all know too well already.) The other great writers had led longer and more varied lives, though all in their different ways were very strange. In the end, Isak Dinesen, or Karen Blixen, the lion huntress of Copenhagen, with her hooked aristocratic nose and intolerable snobberies, her incurable syphilis, tragic love affairs and ridiculous fantasies, seemed the most balanced and normal. Such biographies make me wonder if an ordinary, sane person, lacking any stunning eccentricity, could be a writer at all.

I was not alone in this wooden house. There were, during my stay, two others in it. A Chinese man of a very sweet disposition, a painter of abstract pictures. Li had a studio in another building at some remove from the house, and went there in the mornings to make his paintings, which consisted of beautiful, kaleidoscopic images built of thousands of minute coloured segments. They suggested fairgrounds, roller coasters, childhood, golden memories broken down into a million fragments. When he spoke about them, it was in a stream of associations – he might mention macaroni, Taormina, the sea, Paris, Plato, Frida Kahlo, Ingmar Bergman, rice pudding, Shakespeare, Woody Allen, Avedon, strawberry ice cream, all in one long, intricate sentence. At first I tried to keep up with his train of thought but soon I abandoned it, realising that I could not go into that mysterious labyrinth and follow the thread to its meaning.

Also, there was a woman from Germany, Frederike, a composer who spoke very little. She spent the whole day and most of the evening in her studio, playing the piano, creating music, which, I think, represented alienation and disconnection, the absence of harmony characterising our world. Its randomness. There were many long pauses in her music and Li told me that one of her compositions consisted only of fifteen minutes of silence, fenced between two single notes.

When he was not talking about his work, Li talked about food, in which he was very interested. He was an excellent cook and made delectable meals for the three of us every evening – not just Chinese, but Indian, French, American. He would go into the kitchen at six o'clock and by seven thirty an array of dishes would be laid out on the counter, ready to be eaten. Salads of chicory and baby tomatoes and feta cheese, home-made breads, spicy curries, grilled fish or meat. Sauces of indescribable deliciousness, tart and sweet. We shared a bottle of white wine every evening, but he drank just a small glass.

When our meal was over, Frederike would go back to her studio and I would retire to the library and read the stories of Karen Blixen, Anton Chekhov, William Trevor: the old masters. I knew I should pay attention to more gritty contemporary writers but once I had started on the clear sentences and meandering thoughts of Chekhov, the flowing fantasies of Blixen, once I had been transported on one night to the idyllic summer woodlands of a Russian dacha, painted in Chekhov's watercolour, and on the next to the cool slopes of the Ngong Hills, embroidered like regal tapestries, fabulous fantasies that sometimes succeeded in shaking the heart, I could not revert to the urban jangle of irony, menace and gruesome murder, which is the stock in trade of contemporary fiction. It would have been like moving from Beethoven's Fifth Symphony to one of Frederike's pieces, with its jabs of sound, its long silences, its love of dissonance.

The truth was, my life was not dissonant, but whole and fulfilling while I was here in the golden, sun-washed hills, with the Pacific Ocean beating on a distant shore, with the merry hummingbirds and the sombre redwood trees, the dark library and the bright meals. But it lacked what I had thought I would find here. Brilliant insights into life and literature. Answers. I had none to offer myself but I had hoped to sit at the feet of philosophers, listen to discussions that Plato might have organised, symposia where the dialogue itself led to the solution of the problem, or to some great discovery. All my life I had been waiting for some answer to come to me, from the conversation of others, or from a book, or from the clouds themselves, or the sunlight on the ocean. And as yet this had not happened.

My housemates did not like to walk in the woods, or in the hills, or anywhere. Frederike preferred to do gymnastics, and Li was afraid of mountain lions. The chances of being attacked by a lion are one thousand times less than of being struck by lightning. Li knew this – it was written out in our guidebook – but he still did not want to take the risk. It would be such a painful and messy way to die – although possibly, I said, possibly not as painful or messy as being killed in a car crash. But so terrifying, he said. We could both easily imagine the moment when the victim sees the face of the lion, those ferocious tawny eyes, the huge teeth bared within inches of one's flesh. We could hear the deep growl, the deadly scream, and feel the bottomless fear they would arouse, which would be much worse than the pain, than death itself. The long, golden grass that grew abundantly on the slopes surrounding us, the scrubby green bushes and the dense redwood thickets, provided miles of hiding places for the canny lion. Li could imagine them, everywhere.

‘To him I am a mouse,' he said. ‘Have you seen a cat take a mouse? I do not want to be treated in that way.'

I thought it would be worse. More violent and bloody, and noisier. But maybe compared to the terror the mouse feels it would be the same. That is one of the many things I should know, as a writer, but cannot: how it feels to be a mouse, at the gate of the cat's mouth.

But anyway, I did not believe so much in the lion, and I walked on my own, in the afternoons, between three and five o'clock. Then the sun was still warm, which I liked, but my day's work was done. I had two favourite walks – one up the golden hills to the top, from where I could gaze down over the hills that rippled out to the coastline – in its habitual shroud of mist, there was always, from the high vantage point, a strip of white foam visible, like a trimming of white fur on a winter hood, on the far-off beach. My other walk led into the depth of the woods, through colonnades of the ridged redwood trunks, ferny groves, a babbling creek. I would see snakes, occasionally hear the menacing jingle of the diamond-patterned terror. Deer. Red-tailed hawks and the beautiful, harsh-voiced blue jay. But never the mountain lion.

About a week into my stay at the lodge I followed a new trail. In a clearing in the wood – known as the picnic grounds, although nobody ever picnicked there – I noticed a gate that I had not before observed. This was not surprising, because the gate was constructed of logs, old and clothed with that pale green moss that hangs on the oak trees, a strange, dry, lacy green that looked like something that would grow on an ancient coffin, or like the cobweb veil of a skeleton.

The gate opened easily and I found myself on another track through the woods. I decided I would walk on it for ten minutes to see if it led anywhere of interest, then turn back – I did not want to get lost. Mobile phones did not work here, and my companions would never find me if I failed to return to the house. Perhaps in a day or two Li would phone for help, but the woods, I knew without experiencing them, would be another world once darkness fell, a world where the coyote and the bobcats ruled, and the mountain lion. As I lay in my bed I heard the noises of the night – barks and howls and hoots and screams. It was comforting to lie tucked up under the patchwork quilt, watching the moon gleam coldly over the branch of the fir tree outside my window, and listen to the nocturnal symphony. But I did not want to be a member of the orchestra that produced it, or to hear it at closer range.

The trail went slightly downhill through the forest for about half a kilometre, through an avenue of tall redwoods, sentries to the gravel drive. I glanced at my watch. Eleven minutes had passed; something rustled in the leaves, and there was a quick scurrying sound in the undergrowth. I considered turning back, but I went on.

In front of me was a wide clearing. Nestling in the back, stretched out like a sleeping dog, was a white house, low and long. Behind it and around it, a sheltering half-moon of tall, dark trees. A colonnaded porch ran all along the front of the house, and a stretch of lawn, where Shasta daisies and agapanthus grew, just as around our house. But this lawn was much bigger and so green and soft it looked like emerald silk, not grass. At one side was a swimming pool, open to the sun. Someone was swimming and on the side of the pool were two women, one reclining on a lounger and one sitting at a poolside table.

I went over to them, realising that I seemed like an intruder. As I came closer they both stared at me. The woman at the table was middle aged, dressed in a white blouse and beige skirt, and the other was young, wearing a spotted bikini, brown and yellow. They did not look frightened.

‘I strayed off the trail,' I said. ‘I'm sorry.'

I introduced myself, and told them I was staying at the artists' lodge, that I was a writer of fiction, and walked every day in the woods and hills for exercise and inspiration. The latter was not true, because the woods never inspired me, although I liked them well enough.

‘Sit down. Have some lemonade, you must be thirsty.'

The older woman's voice was kindness itself. Her face was heart-shaped, like the chocolates you get in boxes made for lovers on Valentine's Day, and the irises of her slightly slanted eyes were of an unusual hazel colour, bright and penetrating. She wore gold-framed spectacles, and her tawny hair was swept off her face and caught in a big tail at the back of her neck. She had exceptionally neat ears, which I noticed because they were studded with minute black earrings. Her name was Ramalina.

The younger woman's name was Isabel, and I assumed her to be Ramalina's daughter. The person swimming in the pool, who had not stopped swimming, was her son, she told me: Marcus.

Isabel wrapped herself in a yellow silk robe, and sat at the table while I drank my lemonade. She was beautiful, with long, black hair, eyes of a similar colour to her mother's, but rounder and with more penetrating pupils. Her skin was smooth and honey-coloured, and her lips thick and rather pale.

They lived here, the three of them, all year round, although this was an area mostly inhabited only during the summer.

‘We have an apartment in the city,' Ramalina said, ‘but we only go there for the Christmas shopping. We just seem to like it better here.'

‘What about you?' I asked Isabel.

‘Oh, I stay here, too.'

‘You don't go to college?'

‘No.' She did not offer a further explanation.

I felt clumsy, as if I had been rude to ask such questions, although they had asked me a few themselves, and in most company such enquiries would have been no more than polite, meaningless words.

The swimmer climbed out of the pool and, dripping, came up and shook my hand.

‘Marcus,' he said. ‘How are you?' As if I were an invited guest.

He was older than Isabel – brown and very slim, he looked at least thirty to me, or even older. He had reddish hair, like his mother, but of a darker shade. It was cut very short, in a sporty style, and this made his ears look exceptionally large, by contrast with hers. His feet, I noticed, were small and small-toed, for such a tall man.

‘Got to go up to the house,' he said. ‘But call by again. Come to dinner.'

‘Oh yes, please do, my dear,' said Ramalina.

I muttered something about not wanting to intrude but she pressed me, and her invitation seemed to me so heartfelt, so warm, so motherly, that I accepted it. I would come to dinner the next night.

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