Sudden Times Read online

  fights with knives

  When I woke up next morning she’d been and come back again from early Mass on the bicycle.

  We had tea in the back garden in gleaming white sunshine.

  That town is a dread at night, she said. I see it in the Champion.

  It’s noisy.

  It’s brash.

  It is.

  Fights, she snorted, with knives.

  That’s right.

  And Lord knows what drugs.

  Everything under the sun.

  Such a carry on. You watch yourself now.

  I will.

  You know what happened before.

  I do.

  With a sigh she got up to inspect a pink rose. A lone bee hovered and the cat caught him in her mouth. Twooo! spat the mother. We walked to the well under the firs and cleared it of leaves and needles. I caught the reflection of our two heads in the water. We were ethereal. We walked the Long Square at the back of the house. The cattle in the next field were buck-lepping. The sea rose in a plume beyond the alt.

  4

  the body politic

  I took the Ma’s bike and cycled to Day’s shop to buy whatever came to mind, oh porridge fig rolls bootlaces candles rashers. Things. Just things.

  When I came in the shop was dark and my head struck a wreath that was hanging overhead. Do I need signs? That brought me back. There was a crowd of our neighbours there in after late Mass. Christian names were called. Whole families lay over the counter. Some sat outside in their cars reading the sports pages in the Sunday newspapers. Lads in baseball hats were propped up against the wall watching the next arrivals. They give impish waves to tractors steaming by.

  An emergency lorry from the ESB rose a ladder to a pole looking to see where the fault lay. This was watched by the young Gallagher girls who sat like boxers on the window sill of the shop in the sun. They wore jeans, trainers and puffed-out waterproof jackets. A woman who had left her husband whispered into the phone in the telephone box.

  A fine smell of dung wafted in from the lower meadows. In the football field a few cars were drawn in along the goals to watch a game of soccer.

  How are things, Ollie? asked Mr Day as he struggled to make up bills with a pen because the till was still off the air.

  Things are grand, I said.

  He was wearing a red flashy tie and a bright sports jacket. Through the partially open door behind him I saw a newly timbered coffin on struts.

  I’m glad to hear it.

  And how are things with you?

  Spot on. Except I’ve forgotten how to count. Unconcerned, he laboured on with his pen as a queue formed. Mrs Young stared a long time at her watch, sighed and spun the winder. Mr Day straightened up and looked me in the eye.

  Whisper, he said.

  Yes?

  The one thing that gets me is those words the body politic.

  The body politic, I repeated.

  It’s on the radio till I’m sick of it.

  Is that so?

  Yes, he said going back to his notes, the body politic. Who they are when they’re at home I’d like to know.

  The people, proffered Michael-Joseph.

  That’s another thing I can’t grasp, said Mr Day scornfully, the people. Who are they?

  Ah cripes, said Mickey-Joe.

  dancing

  The queue was chattering away as Mr Day totted. Then said Mrs Young to no one in particular:

  Dancing! she spat.

  Oh I know.

  Till all hours.

  Yes.

  Of all things – dancing!

  Then Day’s daughter arrived with a calculator. She had an urchin’s face and nearly too-intelligent eyes. Her father handed the calculations over to her and the queue moved on.

  Mrs Young took her provisions and shook her head at whatever the dancing had done to her.

  Cunla

  I tipped my cap to the wee priest in his old Volkswagen. Then the travellers trotted up in a horse and cart, followed by a posse of mangy curs who immediately knocked over the dustbin and swallowed ice-cream wrappers whole. I called out a timid greeting to a girl in blue who used busk with a ukelele in town. The blind man rounded the corner in a Russian hat and oversized light-blue jeans. The mother’s bike flew.

  I thought my own shadow ahead of me on the road was someone coming, but there was no one, not this time anyway. Only myself, said Cunla.

  O Cunla, dear, don’t come any closer

  O Cunla, dear, don’t come any closer

  Only myself, same as usual.

  I passed old damp sitting rooms where visiting babies slept in high prams. An elderly couple were on their hunkers planting flowers in the graveyard. I stopped the bike and walked through the graves to see that all was well with the lads. I peeled off a few tufts of grass and stood there a while studying the sea-stones.

  Not so bad, says Marty, though I had not asked him how he was. Not so bad, Ollie, Marty said, as if I had asked him how he was, which I hadn’t.

  Then on past the Long Squares. The Pound. The alt. A Mr Pheasant with a sharp red comb was nipping the bottom of Mrs Pheasant on the shore road. Every time she bent to eat he prodded her on. Go on out of that! A young hare shot across the beach, stopping with erect ears every few yards to contemplate what lay ahead, and then he sat on a rock alongside a questioning heron to view the sea.

  Cormorants.

  Spiders, righting the damage the storms had done, were spinning on every available tree. The hawk shivered in the sea breeze on a gate at Gypsy Green. Under the low bushes the plucked brighter grass. I got off to walk the hill. Into the house.

  the quarter finals

  There was a door into the back kitchen had come off its hinge and I fixed that. There was a window slipping in her room and I fixed that. The rain chased across the fields and the blackness lifted. A spot of weeding. At three all the lights in the house came back on and we watched the quarter finals match between Kildare and Dublin where the Kildare midfielder got clocked.

  Look at that, said the mother, and he done nothing.

  I started laughing.

  For dinner I picked a pot of Maugherow Roosters in the garden and peeled the spuds into the sink, uprooted a cabbage head that sprouted out of a bed of seaweed, and the fire brigade called round at eight. The mother came to Gerties for the waltzing. The cockneys settled in the middle room, my neighbours gathered in the shop and the one-man-band from above Skreen played a keyboard in the back room all down through the piece. There was a mark on the ceiling that his head used hop off. For the ceiling in Gerties is low too. The divers had been down off the rocks at dawn, sixty foot or so, all eight of them since early morning among the lobsters and the crabs, the lights on their heads bouncing off the stones.

  A different world, they said. Pure. Purest water in the world.

  You can see better down there than you can here, said Al.

  I can imagine it, I said.

  Some elderly couples, who danced with each other every Sunday night, took very large strides across the timbered floor. My mother danced with Dom Feeney to a song of Kris Kristofferson with her head down watching her toes, then she took her seat again among the widows. The crowd stood with their backs to the bar to watch the floor. I joined the mother for a jive.

  the meaning of sin

  I copped a low-slung man swing out of the toilet whistling an introduction to some idea that was going through his head. He stopped up to consider what he wanted to say, his forehead creased, then he bit the nails of his right hand. I’m glad you asked me that, he said to himself, yes. Then he went back to the shop.

  I followed him for no good reason.

  And that’s how I found the German psychiatrist sitting by the stove. We often talked mental problems together when he’d come to his summer home on holidays. Ollay! he said. A pint beside him as he tapped tobacco into a cigarette paper, then he dabbed it with his lips, lit her, and kissed my cheek.

  And before you start as
king me, he said, I don’t feel guilty.

  I wasn’t going to mention it.

  You always do.

  No I don’t.

  Yah, you do.

  It’s always you that starts it.

  No, he said.

  It’s my shout, I said. I bought us two gins. He wiped his face with a handkerchief soaked in perfume.

  Well, I have no problem feeling guilty, I said.

  Ah the Irish.

  What do you mean – Ah the Irish?

  Because you have little to feel to feel guilty about.

  I have, I said, a certain sufficiency.

  Please?

  I have enough guilt to be getting by, I said.

  Of course.

  Of course is the wrong word.

  Please?

  You should have said – I understand.

  Of course, he said nodding.

  That’s right, I said. Keep her going.

  Please?

  Nothing.

  What do you mean – nothing?

  It was a joke.

  A joke?

  Yes.

  I have something for you, he said, something special.

  Yes?

  Do you know, he asked, the meaning of the word sin?

  I have an idea.

  You are thinking of religion.

  I suppose I am.

  I mean the meaning of the word.

  OK, I said, fire ahead.

  It means, in most languages, he said, to be. To exist.

  Go ’long.

  It is true, and he nodded emphatically. Yah. I found it in a dictionary in Berlin and thought of you.

  That threw me.

  To be, I said.

  Yah.

  I’ll have to look it up.

  One of my neighbours interrupted us and the psychiatrist disappeared. The mother went ahead home with the Feeneys and I joined the divers and the surfers.

  bad versions

  This often happens. The divers and the surfers had begun to sing bad versions of Irish songs and were telling stories in Irish accents. I had heard this shit before. It got too crazy for me after a while, too much going on for me to keep abreast of. I was losing my place. I grew distracted. Something like cowardice.

  The want to be away.

  As if I was losing at the horses and couldn’t recoup, no matter how hard I tried. Now the last race was over so I said good night, slipped the latch and stepped out into the dark. Lasses were chatting in the arched porch. Mammy, a child called to her mother, come back here. The storm from the northwest was hurrying in from the Atlantic, and as it came thundering across the sea, it drove before it a barrage of bright sparkling lights.

  I stood behind the battery wall.

  To be, I thought.

  5

  Joe Green

  What happened was I stood into the ditch to let a car go by, then the driver threw open the passenger door. It was him – Joe Green. I sat in.

  the problem

  Are you listening?

  I am.

  Right. The problem is I make enough money and yet I have nothing. Do you understand?

  I do.

  Well, it beats me. And what use is the TV? Feck all. The thing you like they take off. I miss the fucking wrestling on a Saturday. I loved the wrestling. Do you understand?

  Yes, Joe.

  What are you saying!

  I’m saying I understand.

  How could you understand?

  What?

  What are you saying?

  Nothing.

  I’m sorry for you, he said.

  Is that so.

  You know why?

  Why?

  Because you can’t face it.

  bad things

  You never miss the shelter of the bush till it’s cut, said Joe quietly. Isn’t that true. And I knew he was referring to Redmond and Marty.

  It is.

  But you have to have the true nature. You have to have the true nature – that’s the key. Will you believe this! I had a quiet calf and she wouldn’t go to the hay. Pass out there! Pass out there! I said to the calf and she paid me no heed. And she died.

  That’s a pity.

  The first of January that calf died. I was supposed to keep him for a year and a day. And a day.

  He shook his head.

  That’s a strange thing – a year and a day, he said, isn’t it?

  It is.

  A year and a day, he said with wonder. Then the calf died.

  He slowed the car down till we were nearly at a standstill. I love animals, I do, he said looking at me.

  I know that, I repeated.

  The trouble with Joe Green is that he just won’t just let go of his beasts. His cattle are pets and he goes with the moon.

  tendencies

  And he has them too. He told me once that he had such a huge member that when he got an erection the blood would drain from his face. So that’s Joe. The Golf comes to a stop a hundred yards from my house.

  Come back, he says, to the mobile for a drink.

  I can’t, I say.

  He turns on the overhead light.

  It gets awful lonely, he said.

  We sit there without moving. He gives off a wide dank angry smell. He looks at the rain and seems for a few moments to be unaware of my presence. Then he turns, sees me sitting there and we coast to my door. He looks ahead as I get out.

  Good night, Joe, I call.

  Never mind, he says.

  He heads off into the dark, the right-hand indicator blinking furiously as he motors down the sea road and it is still going all the way out to the alt, ticking along the ridge like a distress signal at sea, until first the headlights are doused, then at last the indicator. Joe Green is home.

  Sean McGuilty

  I stood at our gable out of the wind and had a smoke. A figure passed in the rain.

  Who’s that? I shouted.

  Sean McGuilty, said the German psychiatrist.

  Tell me this, I asked him, did your father ever surrender?

  No. And you tell me this, Ollie. Vot is it like to speak in the language of the conqueror?

  I had no answer to that.

  I heard Wagner from the German’s cottage. Then jazz. A tractor taking the new road. To be is to sin. Only one dream that night. It was spacious and there were certain familiars there, people long gone out of my life, the figures in the high cupola at the airport, a figure in the back of a lorry. Then Redmond appeared behind the bar of Gerties. He held a glass up to the light. Very high. I was delighted to see him and started to explain in a hurry all that had happened.

  Never mind that, he says.

  I just came up to see you for a minute, I said joyfully.

  Work away, he says.

  I’m sorry, I said, that I could not get here earlier.

  Never mind.

  It’s great to see you.

  Sure.

  I tried to explain that I’d been planning to get to see him. Never mind that, he said. Then he stepped away. I would have gone with him, but my father was in the way. This emptiness. They were there, but the following morning I couldn’t piece it together, it was all a haze, and again came that sense of something missing.

  I have taken more risks in my dreams then I have in reality. A hundred times more.

  I’d dropped something.

  I’d forgotten the thing that tells me who I am.

  6

  the General

  I was on the road next morning in teeming rain seeing things that weren’t there. Along the new road I was followed by a cat who was simple. Scat cat, I said. Not now, boss. He watched me through clouded pupils narrowing to slits, and reluctantly he moved off with one long querulous meow.

  Smoke reared from the General’s chimney and his door was open. I saw him at his kitchen table in his shirt sleeves.

  My my.

  The thought of him within preparing for the day ahead struck me like a revelation. The first cup of scalded tea,
his aired trousers, the fire lit from the embers of the night before. My my.

  I walked through that parish of bachelors with a light step. I’ve always been in my element walking abroad at first light. Especially of a Monday because I start at nine and that leaves me the whole early morning to myself. No pressure, just take her nice and cushy. Nice and cushy. That’s the one.

  I greeted the Italian who was standing out of the rain under a tree in his back garden. Saw Elvis counting his beasts on the crest of a hill. We waved.

  good morning hare

  I stand in the transport box of a neighbour who stopped on the new road for me and we take off over bumps birdlife scatters thunder past the cemetery John Pete lifts his cap and blesses himself with the peak I salute a hare darts across the road Good morning hare.

  He drops me at the creamery.

  tell them we’re still here

  A few other tractors were already there, their engines turning over, so we took our turn and waited for the creamery to open. Soon Eddie Flynn came down the road in bright dungarees. He flings the galvanize doors wide and the trailers back in. We stand in the high-ceilinged shed listening to the birds flitting from beam to beam on the tin roof. They sang, chewed seeds and shed white droppings with a small splash onto cement bags then swooped out over the heads of the farmers who were gathered over milk churns in the forecourt. Bales of wire coal fencing posts fertilizer bags coarse grain animal feed were stacked against the bare walls.

  Eddie Flynn stood at his high counter ticking off purchases into a tall blue-backed ledger.

  I’ll give you a hand, I said to John Pete.

  He made a clocking noise. His eyes were a runny blue and he had large hands. We lifted bags of calf nuts and fertilizer, some briquettes and a bag of Polish coal onto the transport box. I sat up behind him, we lit fags and watched cats drink from a spill in the pump that was sucking milk from a churn. Then Marty’s father, Mr Kilgallon, pulled into the yard on his tractor. He saw me.