Beatlebone (15 page)

James and Jane Lennon left County Down in 1848 and emigrated to Liverpool. Among their children was John or Jack Lennon, variously described as a freight clerk or a book-keeper, and also known to be something of a bar-room crooner. Jack married first a Liverpudlian, Margaret Crowley, who died during the birth of their second child. He then married Mary “Polly” Maguire, from Dublin, and they had fifteen children, seven of whom survived. Among these was Alfred, or Freddie, who was John Lennon's father.

Following the death of her husband—the liver—Polly could no longer afford to look after all the children, and Freddie was deposited in the Bluecoat orphanage in 1921. Later, he is variously described as a ship's steward or a merchant seaman, and he was also known to be something of a bar-room crooner.

John became obsessed for a while with these Irish roots. He wrote anti-English songs. He named his second child Sean. He consulted the usual books of heraldry and sources of lineage—slow winter nights at the Dakota—including MacLysaght's
Irish Families: Their Names, Arms and Origins
, in which he learned that the O'Lennons were most typically from the Counties Down, Sligo or Galway, and were not known to have distinguished themselves in military affairs. Late in his life, he spoke of renewing the planning permission for Dorinish Island and building a magical house out there.

Cornelius?

Yes, John?

There's a lot of fucking water.

It's Clew Bay, John.

I mean in the fucking boat.

Oh?

It's up to me ankles.

Okay.

What does this mean, Cornelius?

It means there's a hole in the boat, John.

Alright then.

I wouldn't worry about it. Do you see behind you? There's a basin.

You mean I'm fucking
bailing
now?

It could be a notion.

Cornelius?

John?

I want you to look at my fucking ankles.

Yeah…They're soaking alright.

Is fucking right they are!

Do you want me to stop the fucken sea?

Just fucking answer me…Are we going to make it to the island?

Touch and go, I'd say. Different question for you.

Yes?

Does it matter, at the end of the day, which island I let you down on?

How'd you mean?

There are hundreds of the fucken things. They are all small, wet, miserable holes of places. They're only fit for hares and rats and filthy birds. Why should one of them be any better or worse than the next?

Listen to me, Cornelius, please. If I was to say to you the words
ritual excursion
…

Ho ho.

Ho ho fucking what?

You mean like an aboriginal buck?

In fact that's pretty much exactly what I mean.

The aboriginal is an odd buck.

Are there…Are there rats on the islands?

Crawling with them. Night and day. Chorus of them. A squealing fucken choir. But your aboriginal, if I'm not wrong, is the buck who'd be listening?

Exactly so.

What's it he'd be listening for again?

A kind of a song but it's beneath the skin of the earth.

I've heard it.

You've heard which?

The what-you-call-it. The song.

When was this?

I was coming home from a disco in Castlebar.

Okay.

I took a wrong turn.

This was late on?

Thirty-five o'clock in the morning. I found myself moving across a small difficult field. Oh-oh, I says. Where this field was exactly you could nail me to the cross and crucify me and I'd still not be able to tell you. But I found that an awful shiver had come into me. It was as if the blood had turned to ice in my veins. The feeling was not of this world but of another.

Cornelius?

Stay with me. I turned around. I was sure there was someone behind me. There was nothing and there was nobody. I thought there'd be eyes in the dark. There were no eyes, John. But the dark seemed to close in around me. As if it was trying to take hold of me. I was moved slowly around on my innocent feet. It was like I was being turned on my feet by a dancing partner.

Was it the devil?

Ah go easy, John, would you? I felt like I was being lifted above the ground.

Was it a floating sensation?

Well. I was…aloft. Is the only way I could say it for you.

Okay.

Aloft!

And what happened next?

All the air got sucked out of the world. There was utter quiet. And I could see everything. Do you know that kind of way? I could see the smallest things and the biggest. I could see across the sea and I could see over the shoulders of the mountains and I could see down a maggot's ears.

There were maggots?

Next thing there was…Jesus Christ…I don't know…I could only call it a rip in the sky.

Okay.

I'm not joking you. A rip! And I looked into it. And what did I see?

This I want to hear.

I saw the bottom of the fucken sea. And it was deserted except for all the little floaty plants and the rocks and the one…small…wise-lookin'…crab.

A crab?

Is right.

And wise?

And tuneful, John. Because it fucken sang to me.

Cornelius?

Don't ask me the words. Stretch me out on the Spanish rack and I could not repeat for you the words. But I could tell you the feeling it gave me handy enough.

Go on then.

Utter peace, John. Cornelius O'Grady wasn't made of bones and flesh and woes no more. All I was made of was a pure fucken smile and glee.

You were floating still?

Across the night and sky and not a bother on me. Well, I says to myself, this is a good one.

How'd it wind up, Cornelius? For a finish?

I came to, John.

I'd imagine so.

On the flat of my back in the middle of the same field and it pissing out of the heavens on me.

Morning?

And as bleak as you'd meet one. You know you've a night of it put down when you wake up in a small wet field.

There seems to be an amount of that around here.

Why would you think that is?

I don't know.

Because the fields are possessed, John.

You say this matter-of-factly, Cornelius.

Well.

Cornelius cuts the motor—the boat coasts by the sea road. There are voices in the night. There is a car on the stones of a small beach. There are men talking in a pod of smoke and carlight. They are very close but the boat moves unseen and silently by stealth through the water.

Pressmen, Cornelius says.

A voice comes clearly for a moment as they pass—

If she goes on me again it'll be the last time she goes. Thirty pound that exhaust.

Steepish, Cornelius says.

The world's about, John says.

Home bites at him for a bit. But he will not go back there. The days of England are done for now. What the fuck is England good for? Sausages and beer and pale gawpy faces. He sits in the boat and he fucking well bails. On white porcelain cups in railway cafés the lipstick traces. The boat moves on its slow-boom beat and it dips and scoops and cuts through the water. His gut is all over the shop. His heart aches for old England. The dark sky growls; in the near low mountains there are rumbles.

Mother of fuck, Cornelius says.

I've made a misery of your father's suit, John says, bailing.

It's not much good to him where he is now.

Do you ever think about where that might be?

I do, actually.

I thought you might.

I would see it as a falling field that runs down to the sea, John. It is not a bad old day there at all. Maybe it's much the same as now, the Maytime. From the field you can look across the sea or at least across a wide clean pacified bay. It's calm as glass. You walk in this field but of course by your nature you make no shade. The sun is through the white clouds in the sky but there is not much heat in it. By the edge of the field, by the shadow of the ditch, it feels very cold. You walk but your step doesn't land. You are at an elevation in the air just a fraction above the thistles and the heads of the flowers. You are no more than a few inches in the air but it puts a lovely ease into the motion. You are stepping through the air. Your eyes are speckled in the way that a young fox's are, greenishly. There is a particular type of saltiness on the air and it's of the sex. Your whole body from head to toe is weightless and trembles with delight. The breeze off the bay is a light one but plenty all the same to move you around the place. You travel the field hither and back again. Everything is very funny. The way a sheep looks up at the sky. The way the wren darts from a hole in the stone wall on its happy bouncing rear. The fucken hilarity of it all. The world has no sorrows. The world is nothing but a long comfortable sighing. The field runs down to the sea. The blood still pulses as in the best days of rude fucken youth. Certainly, John, it is in the west of Ireland.

They move out across the bay. The weather turns. With each moment the bay becomes rougher. There are sentimental forces at work. Also there is deathhauntedness—it is written across the sky. Cornelius steers with a blithe hand to the tiller. His eyes are vague and cheerful. The sky is moving above us now and ever so darkly. John is losing track of himself again. Which may be the purpose. Trouble is a cloak that I choose to wear. The boat moves; the past is about. Old England has him again, as it always will—he's a Second War kid. He screamed to life in the tinpot metropolis and a thousand nazi bombs came down to mark the occasion. There was sexy Adolf in his dancing boots. There were death planes on the English skies. Now the gulls wheel in sudden calm above Clew Bay and the bay pacifies but just for a beat and there is a sharp, hard slap of water and everything giddies and turns again and he thinks: what's the worst that can happen us out here? Plenty the fucking worst.

Cornelius?

Yes, John?

What I'm thinking now is fuck it, you know, the first island we come to?

I'm thinking the same way.

With these words it sails into view. It is not his island but another. The boat tilts deftly for it. The boat scalps froth from the water. The small island sits waiting in the wind and wild rain; it sits infinitely in grey patience. This island has at once a maudlin or a mawkish air. He has not put his foot to its stones and he's come over solemn and searching again—

After a while, Cornelius, do you get to wondering?

About, John?

What's it we're here for?

You mean in the middle of Clew Bay on as miserable a fucken Sunday as you'd meet?

Or more generally.

Ah Jesus, John. Are you having feelings again?

I know.

These large sad warmish feelings, John? The best thing you can do is ignore the fucken things.

I wish that I could. I wish I could think of nothing but the happy things. The kid and love and home and all the rest of it. I wish I could think about the fucking money. But then I get thrown back in again. I'm into the past and the murky things. I am not in control, Cornelius, of the way my fucking brain turns. You know where I'm at sometimes? Just by way of hysterical fucking example? I'm in nineteen twenty fucking dot. I'm in the Bluecoat orphanage. How fucking cruel and how fucking lonely? To lie awake at night in the middle of the city. No brothers here, no sisters. A kid awake in the city and lonely. It's the winter and deep in. This gimpy fucking kid in the corner bed. This snotfaced raggedy limpy kid. The best part of you's dripped down your dad's leg, hasn't it, Freddie?

Ah, John.

And I will not wipe these tears away. My old man? He was like me without the spark plug in. I could have been a fucking disaster as easy. It's like aunt always said—I'm just the idiot that got lucky.

Can you not go easy on yourself the one time, John?

No I fucking cannot.

The island is as drab as its first glance suggested. They push through the misery of its weather across the stones of a shingle beach. The wind is that stiff it raises the eyebrows. Weather that outrages. The stones slide and click eerily beneath their feet as they go. The click and fall of the old Chinamen's dominoes, on Berry Street, in the Liverpool afternoons—it's the same note and bone sound precisely. Throwing the bones they called it in the Liverpool pubs.

Cornelius as he ploughs into the weather is happiness itself, is native to the murk, rain and shifting wind.

Above us, John, are you watching?

His words come cupped in a pocket of the wind. The remnants of a cottage sit on a rise above the shoreline. It is huddled sourly among the rocks there. They climb to it. The half-crumbled walls stand about like bewildered soldiers. He steps inside the roofless hollow; Cornelius steps in after. They lean back against the walls of the place. The walls and the men hold each other up. Throwing the bones—doesn't it mean also to read the future? They are out of the wind here at least. They consider each other coolly.

What was your plan, John?

Fuck off, Cornelius.

The way the sky is squared off by the half-fallen walls. Nothing between them and the heavens now. Snipes of wind get through the gaps with fast enquiries but they're away again as quick. The wind about the bay and the rain make arbitrary music. I wanted to be stood out in the world and here I fucking well am. Here I am on this commanded journey. The sky moves and it is dark and light at once. Size of the place? You'd hardly have kept a family here. Though people were smaller, a world of full-growns five foot two, the kids like elves. The stones that are blackened still must be the last of the fireplace. He lights a fag. So the fireplace was just there, and maybe the huddled sleepers there—a family—and were their limbs entwined, for warmth and love, against the wind and island night?

No, John. This place would have had no more than a poor farmer in it. And only for a few weeks at a time, for the sheep, in summer.

I see.

Hauling the maggot out of his stomach and drinking green envy and spitting into the fireplace.

You paint it beautifully.

My own father used these places, John. He would cross over in the springtime and the summer. We would not see him for weeks on end. Which was a relief to all fucken parties. He was not right in himself ever nor right in the world. There were times he was so bad he couldn't lift a cup of tea to his face. Do you want tea, my mother would say, or more likely she would ask me to say. The father would look back at me, with the eyes like stones inside his head, and he'd say, I no more want tea, Cor, and he would look away and settle down lowly to himself. Like a wounded animal settling to its lair. There was no easy relief for him. The way that he groans—I can hear it still, John, I can hear the same groans exactly rise up from myself some mornings. It's then I fucken worry. Did you know that the groans get passed down to us? My father would bring sheep out to the islands in the summer. I wonder if he was easier in himself when he was on his own. I'd doubt it. He was an intelligent man but it would lead him—the same mind—into dark and difficult places. He would travel inside himself. He would go utterly quiet. You'd know that he was gone deep and to someplace bad because all the colour would leave his face. As if someone turned the bar off on an electric fire—as quick as that. He would go very pale and I would say nothing and my mother would say nothing and I would go outside but I wouldn't even kick a ball against the gable. It might take an hour or two for it to pass, sometimes a week. He would move lightly through the yard then and you would know it had passed because he would say right so, Cor, and he might even rub my head. The colour would not yet be back in his face. Wherever it was that he had been. But he would move with a bit of a skip to him to reassure me and to make out he was the finest again.