Hanging with the Elephant (17 page)

When I was nine months old, my mother decided that she had had enough. So a nurse was engaged. A teenager of exquisite beauty and tenderness who would steal me up a little bit of bread at night, to the back bedroom where my mother had abandoned me. I loved this nurse. I learned from her the music of the Cavan drumlins, the certainty of love, the pleasure of milk. But then at four years of age, the nurse vanished. She was let go. And there’s not much you can say to a four-year-old after that. They don’t understand how you can ‘let someone go’.

As a result, I grew up with an uneasy suspicion that the mundane world was never quite dependable, and that the people around me were not quite reliable. And my mother, who had her own problems, appeared as an enigma to my eyes, a colossus that stared down at the baby on the
floor wondering what she’d do with it, and me on the floor looking up at her, wondering who the fuck she was.

I comforted myself with vague memories of the beautiful woman I had lost, who used to feed me lumps of bread and who then vanished without explanation, and I always blamed her absence for the fact that by seven years of age, I couldn’t knot my tie, belt my trousers or tie my shoelaces.

Looking back, it could fairly be said that I ought to have worked harder in school. And it’s a pity I didn’t play more with other children, trust them or talk to them; maybe even play a little football now and again. That’s what children are supposed to do. Work as a team. And study. If I had even done a bit of homework every night, I might have got a good Leaving Certificate. Who knows, I might have become a doctor or an astronaut. But no, I was trouble from the word go – not to others, but to myself, a solitary child, a loner in the schoolyard, an infant abandoned by the queen of heaven. And then in adolescence, like all the other boys in my class, sperm flowed from my loins at night with the usual insistence of nature. But it terrified me. I feared that this was not a natural substance of my own making. This was the Godly essence of humankind. As if buckets of tiny unborn babies, lost souls, potential football teams were dying before they were born and every night I was bandaged more in wads of guilt and grief.

And to compensate for this concupiscence, as the priest in the confessional called it, I leaned a lot on Dominic
Savio, a watery saint who had died when he was about fifteen. I had a poster of him in my room. Other teenagers had Mao Tse-tung on the wall, a big fat smiling demon who was slaughtering all before him in China at the time and who was very fashionable among students in the Western world. The Mao poster was a way of saying to your mother that you were finished with her. The knot was broken. The umbilical cord had been severed in the teeth of Mao’s sleazy grin and in the deep red stain of the poster – like the ocean of blood in which Mao was drowning his nation.

But Mao and his lusty revolution were not for me. No. I was committed heart and soul, on my bare knees, to a watery saint that no mother would want her boy-child praying to. And yet this jaundiced little creature in love with death was, for me, a more subversive role model than the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, because his deep self-denial and his disengagement with the mundane world offered a sorrowful child like me an alternative reality. At night, Dominic induced in me dreams of death, and the life beyond death and the possibility of being enfolded once again in the arms of a beautiful woman who I lost so abruptly at the age of four. Religious fervour is what put me to sleep at night. That was, of course, after I had released into the cold universe another thousand unwanted souls spurting from the tip of my penis.

And then, instead of maturing in late adolescence by reading Camus and Sartre and realising that we all are alone
in the universe, I tried to hold my divine mother’s hand through life, trusting that she would always lead me home.

Except that, eventually, I let go. Because there is a kind of self-awareness in late middle age that rises up out of the loins, when the loins are old. It is a slow realisation that religious faith is just a therapy for depression, a way of masking one’s anxiety about impending death.

And then finally in my fifties, I was obliged to confront my real mother again. Mammy, my very earthly mother, was now an ageing and infirm old lady, beginning to wobble and shake and eat Panadol like jelly babies and complain irrationally about the neighbours.

Eventually she died. My dear mother, after doing her best and getting nothing but a lifetime of disappointment from me, at ninety-six years of age took her last few breaths with intense concentration and serenity and in the passing of a moment, she was gone. The room emptied. The bones in the bed maintained no further significance beyond all the other dust in the universe. Mammy would not be there to hold me ever again.

And I’m not blaming her for anything. I couldn’t. She was a great lady. A character. She was a small bird of a woman, agile in her mid-nineties and quick-witted. She could laugh and joke in company. She had a powerful turn of phrase. She played golf. She was an extraordinary cook. She relished having visitors to the house when we were young because she could relive again the days when she was
a young woman walking the corridors of the Metropole Hotel in Cork, greeting guests, and ensuring that their linen was impeccable and that everything else in the room was to their satisfaction. She could hold her memories and live them again in brief affected exchanges with the occasional visitors who called to her in old age.

She loved Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and she danced with a coy feminine delicacy, but on the other hand, she was abrasively truthful. She could cut the socks off anyone who disagreed with her and, as she grew older, she engaged with doctors, bureaucrats and civil servants as if they were the enemy. Even as a widow, a bereaved queen in muted grey, her eyes could reach across a crowded dining room and connect with someone in the far corner, just to share her grief.

I remember nights when she was exuberant. When she was funny and happy and drank whiskey, and told great stories and danced with strangers. Nights when she came for Christmas and couldn’t be put to bed until the singing ended. And earlier, when she was younger, I would accompany her to the weddings and dance with her, and she’d say, ‘Where did you learn to dance so well?’

I sensed that my father danced like a donkey and, as he got older, he withered fast. But as she got older, something deeper darkened her face. Something never discussed.

I didn’t really understand her until she died. I never got the full picture. It was only when I went into her house after
the funeral and looked into the cupboards and drawers that I found something – like the tracks of the animal or like the markings on a cave wall – that suggested someone had been there and tried to scrawl in private and unconsciously a little of what it was like for them to be human.

It was all there in her house, the photographs and scraps of paper, the notes and diaries and shopping lists from the past. From them, I could patch a person together. By touching things, and smelling things, and reading little one-line notes about what she had paid for face cream or bales of turf briquettes I became closer to her than I had ever been when she was alive. And I became more ashamed of the ways that I had let her down.

T
HE ROOF OF our cottage had been leaking for years. We noticed it each winter. The same brown stains would appear on the ceiling during November. But they never seemed urgent. The stains were tiny. Like freckles. We would look at them sometimes as we ate our toast and marmalade in the mornings with a sadness that writers and artists acquire as they get older and poorer and can only watch the deterioration of their homes with stoic humour. It’s part of the package for an artist that success is
merely the postponement of failure and eventually an old age of anonymity and frugal living awaits us all.

I remember the beloved going off to London for a week in October after my mother had died, and I sat in Arigna looking up at the ceiling and feeling sad but not alarmed at the spreading brown stains above. I wasn’t alarmed because that winter I had other things to worry about.

Like the fact that my mother’s house was still locked up, untouched and unloved since the day she had died. And if the roof came off that house during a storm, I wouldn’t even know about it. That’s where the leaks could destroy a building that was already decaying because fires had not been lit regularly, and the windows were never opened to ventilate the rooms. We were heading into another winter, and it didn’t seem right to leave it like a mausoleum, with dust gathering on her clothes, and fungi creeping in behind the wallpaper, and the radiators turning the bedrooms into incubators for creepy crawly things as the snow fell outside on the abandoned garden. It was all just a waste of electricity. In fact, I was so worried the house would deteriorate further that I pleaded with the solicitor to do something with it. But he just turned it back on me.

‘Perhaps you could get a team of cleaners to go in and scoop out all the rubbish,’ he suggested one day on the phone as I was driving through Carrick-on-Shannon. ‘It’s simple. Just put everything in one big skip.’

I said, ‘I can’t just put all her private things in a skip and send it to the dump. I’d prefer to burn everything. How could I throw her bed into a skip?’

Mother hadn’t even wanted to get that bed. She’d said it was squandering money. But the nurse insisted that we get a new one and so off I went to the furniture store. It just about squeezed into the jeep, though it scuffed the upholstery on the roof and possibly dinged the back door. But it had to be done. Because a good bed is essential. Years ago beds were revered; old people would say that ‘so-and-so had taken to the bed’, as if that was a final stage of enlightenment. There wasn’t much talk of heaven as a hectic zone; rustic theology didn’t entertain any hyperactive angels flapping around in choirs; afterlife to the Cavan man was a big sleep, a great snooze, a long doze till Christ returned on tiptoe, at the dawn of a new tomorrow. The grave was just another bed, and eternity was a silence undisturbed.

I was trying to park when the solicitor had phoned. There was a Traveller wedding on the steps of the church and the street was jammed with vans, and settled people were gawping at the bridesmaids in pink dresses. I couldn’t take my eyes off the belly buttons and talk to the solicitor and drive, all at the same time.

‘I’ll call you back,’ I said, and turned off the phone.

There’s a way nomads carry their bodies that mesmerises me. Settled people show their wealth by building houses, but the wealth of nomads is carried on their shoulders or
hangs from their ears or their wrists. And the enormous houses that settled people build and that pepper the Irish countryside seem crude and ostentatious compared to the grace of a woman walking down the steps of a church wearing her grandmother’s gold ear-rings, and carrying in her demeanour all the pride of seven generations who have lived on the side of the road, with nothing to call property but the elegant meringue of white satin in which her virginity is packaged.

When I had parked the jeep, I phoned the solicitor again and told him I was sick. He didn’t understand what I was talking about.

‘I have a cold that won’t go away,’ I explained.

‘And what can I do about that?’ he wanted to know.

‘I need to go to a chemist,’ I said. ‘Therefore I can’t think about the house today. I’ll call you tomorrow.’ And I hung up abruptly.

‘I’m congested at night,’ I said to the chemist. ‘I’m afraid it might be an infection.’

She said, ‘Is the mucus green?’

I didn’t know.

She said, ‘You’d better see your doctor.’

I coughed later on the street, and examined the result in a tissue. It had that light-green luminosity which the Virgin Mary statue used to display in my childhood bedroom when it glowed in the dark. There was a time when luminous Virgins were all over the place, but not any more – though
the pound shop had a lot of luminous fingernails in the same shade of green on sale for Halloween.

I stepped into the pound shop to buy a haircutting machine, because I was fed up with long hair. But the girl at the checkout made a joke. ‘Don’t make a mess of it,’ she said, and that worried me because I always make a mess of everything when I’m alone, so I resisted the haircutting machine.

‘I don’t want it,’ I said to the checkout girl, even though she had put it through the till.

‘OK,’ she said, smiling, like she was trying to be pleasant to a walrus. ‘No problem.’

The solicitor’s number was coming up on my phone. But I was back at the chemist’s for paracetamol and I noticed pink hairbands for sale on a rack inside the door. They were very pink, but that didn’t seem important until I tied up my hair and examined the result in the jeep’s rear-view mirror five minutes later. And then the solicitor’s number came up again so in a complete fit of frustration, I went to a barber and had my skull shaved down to a number two.

After that, I was standing in a queue in the post office, feeling like a prisoner with a shaved head and emptying tissues from my pockets into the wastebasket, when the solicitor phoned yet again. This time I answered it.

‘What?’

‘There’s a letter of intent that needs to be signed,’ he said. ‘We need your instructions on how to proceed. Are
you keeping the house? Or selling it?’ He sounded a bit shirty, I thought.

So I said, ‘Isn’t there something very elegant about the Travellers’ tradition of burning the trailer when someone dies?’

There was a pause.

‘They don’t just throw out the old beds,’ I added. ‘That would be disrespectful. So they burn everything in an elegant immolation of all memory.’

The pause got longer.

‘You want to burn the house?’

‘No,’ I replied, ‘I suppose I don’t.’

‘Well, what
will
you do?’ he asked.

‘That,’ I replied, ‘is a good question.’

But I just couldn’t articulate for him how difficult it would be for me to clean the house or even walk in the door, never mind try sorting out what its long-term destiny might be. Even when she was in the nursing home, I only went to Cavan in winter to check that the heating was on and the place wasn’t going to be ruined by leaking pipes. And that was never more than once a month. And I’d dash in and out in ten minutes.