Hanging with the Elephant (3 page)

The beloved and me are used to each other, so we don’t need to make much idle talk when we’re in a restaurant. I look at her sometimes and I don’t know what goes on in her head. The closer we get, and the longer we are together, the more mysterious she becomes. And the more transfixed we are by a shared silence. Of course she is used to my appetite for other people’s conversations. I’m nosey. Not that I was eavesdropping on the journalist, though he did take up
his phone once when it buzzed, and I stopped chewing in order to listen, but it was only a text and he didn’t reply. The beloved was lifting her full spoon from the won ton soup at that moment – when his phone buzzed – and she too stopped. Her soup spoon frozen in midair, because she knows me and my insatiable curiosity.

So that’s where we were, eating our noodles with the masters of the universe, or at least one correspondent for a national newspaper, whom we recognised from his appearances on television. But the universe was empty apart from one further group of men at a table in the distance, whispering in London accents. And it was such a good meal that the bottle of wine we drank during the main course only kicked in three hours later at about midnight, when we were sitting in the lounge of the hotel with a nightcap. There too business was slow. An old country and western singer, a great bear of a man with dyed black hair, was trying to impress a thin woman in a grey dress with anecdotes about travelling around Ireland in a van years earlier when he had his own showband. She was recording it all, though when she went to the toilet her high heels clip-clopped with irritation on the parquet floor and her face looked as drained as an empty paper bag. We had Hennessy brandies and the wine kicked in so well that I suggested another bottle for the bedroom. After all, she was going away for six weeks. I would miss her. There would be no fun without her. And she was going to meet Polish friends, other artists,
new people. She would be going to exhibitions and operas, and eating lots of Polish and Russian dumplings. So it was a big night for both of us. And since we had splashed out on a good hotel, and were safely situated in a deluxe room and there was a bus from just outside the hotel to the airport in the morning, we deserved another drink. That was my contention. And that’s when the trouble started.

Up we went to the eighth floor. I was carrying two brandies, two wine glasses, one bottle of Bordeaux and the key of the room, all on a round tray. I’m always spilling things but we managed to get in, get the lights on and put down the drinks without losing anything.

Pussy Riot had been interviewed on an Irish chat show a few days earlier, which we watched on YouTube, and we couldn’t take our eyes off the little laptop screen. We got so excited about how disastrous the interview turned out, that I suggested another bottle of wine. Which cost another €28.

‘We have spent more money on drink than we did on the meal,’ she observed.

‘Ah, yes,’ I replied, ‘but it’s a special occasion. We are separating.’

‘It’s only for a few weeks,’ she said.

‘True,’ I replied. ‘But that could be a long time with a mind as fragile as mine.’

She was leaving me. That was the fact.

‘Beloved,’ I said to her in the hotel room, as we came
to the end of the Bordeaux, ‘I have rarely been alone these past three years. And now this is our last night together before your flight. So it is a very special occasion.’

She agreed, not certain what I had in mind. I had drink in mind. More drink. Lots of drink. An endless flow of drink.

So a youth from Latvia arrived with further wine. I gave him €30 and told him to keep the change, and on we went, drinking and watching various other YouTube videos. Pussy Riot. Panti Bliss. Johnny Rotten and Judge Judy. Tommy Tiernan. And live webcams in Warsaw to see if it was snowing. I drank most of the second bottle, laughing at the videos, until she brushed her teeth and got into bed and I assured her that I had set my alarm for 6.30 a.m.

She was asleep in minutes and already I felt alone. I was embracing the dark. I was beginning a great adventure into the interior of my own psyche. I would be still, silent and alone, eating like a monk, my eyes glued to the flickering candle as I meditated my way into the dark interior of the unconscious. I would find what was in there.
Who was in there.
What had made me unwell? In what way is depression just a door into a deeper sense of self? What are the possibilities of compassion both for ourselves and others that awaken when we allow all the pain inside us to surface?

There was no point in setting the bar too low. I might even find out what possessed me to shave my cock. I would
come to realise everything. Alone for forty-odd days, a cosy calm abiding, I would see beyond the self in which I was isolated, to the miracle of Being, in which we are all one and where there is no coming or going, and no death or birth.

My shelves were full of books on self-improvement, paths to enlightenment, loving kindness and how to escape depression. But the time for reading was over. The time for doing had arrived. The day was upon me and I would not be afraid. I would not cry out for anyone to hold me. Because sometimes a man must travel into the darkness – alone.

I closed the laptop, brushed my teeth in the bathroom, turned off the lights and slipped in beside her.

It seemed like I was asleep for five minutes when the sound of a trumpet on my iPhone indicated that another day was already waiting.

‘Beloved,’ I whispered, touching the nape of her neck on the pillow beside me. ‘Beloved. ’Tis time to rise.’

But I had got the call-time arseways.

‘You said 6.30 a.m,’ I protested.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I need to check in for 6.30.’ And she sprang up so suddenly in the bed that I thought she might bounce off the ceiling.

‘Fuck it,’ I muttered to myself. I never saw anyone move so fast through their morning ablutions in my life. She showered, dressed, zipped her bags closed and was out
the door in less than fifteen minutes. In that time, I had contacted Reception, a taxi had arrived and when we got down to the lobby along a corridor smelling of paint, I could see the taxi’s roof sign through the glass door. She got in and I mouthed the words ‘I love you’ through the window before the taxi slipped out the gate and into the grey drizzle of a Dublin morning.

And I went back to bed. I dozed a bit until she texted from the boarding gate, and when she did, I phoned her back instantly and wished her a safe journey and apologised for getting so drunk and told her I’d miss her terribly. In the two years since my illness, I hadn’t known what it was to live without her. I had been with her all the time. Day and night. And there was something final about the phone line going dead that morning. As if I might never hear her again. I stared at the screen.

‘Well, that’s it,’ I said. ‘She’s gone. She’s on the plane. May God help me now.’

God or Buddha or Simone Weil. Anyone would do. It didn’t matter. I would lean on any god who helped me stand alone, because I believed it imperative that, as a couple, we should not be tied to each other. We should not be gazing at each other all the time but, together, gazing outwards into the universe. We should be like Sartre and de Beauvoir, I thought, and not the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of an Irish marriage.

‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ asks Tweedledum.

‘I don’t know,’ Tweedledee replies. ‘Would you?’

‘Will we have our dinner now?’ asks Tweedledum.

‘Whatever you think,’ Tweedledee replies.

‘And what are you thinking, in your own little head?’ Tweedledum might wonder eventually, but never ask for fear it would flummox Tweedledee entirely.

You see them sometimes in the supermarkets, tethered to the same trolley. He’s in a daze. He might see corn flakes on the shelf. He likes his corn flakes. He reaches for the packet. She takes it from him and switches it for the muesli. And when his fingers touch the honey jar, she points to the organic one, and his fingers obey. ‘That’s better for you,’ she says. And he doesn’t disagree.

On the other hand, when he’s puffed up at a dinner table and she knows he’s going to start a conversation about bankers that will swiftly turn into a monologue to make everyone cringe, she just drops her head and listens graciously because she understands him. She is one with him. They are a single being. And as he gets into his stride, she rises from the table and says, ‘I’m off to bed.’ The wind goes out of his sails. He lasts another few minutes before following her. Because she is his ‘other’. She is the listener. She is the monitor and mentor. It is pointless speaking when she is absent. It’s even pointless living when she has left and gone for ever. And I have seen them too, the widows, bewildered in their slippers, struggling with the tax forms and the car insurance for a few years after he is
dead and then she too fades, glad to close her eyes for ever and be planted with him because there is no individuality or separateness left in her. And they become one again in the clay.

Maybe that’s why I ended up in Mullingar. I was like a dog chasing its own tail. When I was with her, I wanted to be alone; when I was alone, I longed to be with her.

It’s a common affliction of the male psyche, summed up by my mother when I threw my toys out of the pram. ‘You’re never satisfied,’ she’d said.

‘But you’ll be fine on your own,’ the beloved assured me in a text from the boarding gate. ‘I really need to go.’ And I suspected some lightness in her footfall as she walked the tarmac and up the stairway of the Ryanair flight and took her seat just inside the cabin door.

I
FELL BACK asleep, my body still vibrating with the excess of alcohol in my system, though I slept soundly until after midday when I got a text from Eastern Europe.

Arrived at Modlin. Great flight. Cold but no rain.

I resisted phoning her. She wouldn’t like that. She’d say it was wasting money. So I texted.

Great. You got there safely.

Yes. Friends at the airport to meet as planned.

That’s great.

Long pause before next signal from her.

R U OK?

Yes I’m OK.

New text from me.

I mean I’m fine.

From her.

What will you do?

From me.

Go back to Leitrim this evening and be miserable.
Ha ha.

From her.

That’s grand. Do that. Won’t call you. Wastes money. You can get me on Facebook. Use text in emergency.

I watched the screen for a long while to see if she would say anything else. I couldn’t think of a new text either. So I presumed we were finished.

Sitting up in the bed, I couldn’t resist my image staring out at me from the mirror on the wall; him that was going to be my constant and perhaps only companion for the next few weeks.

‘So why are you looking so miserable?’ I asked. But the image in the mirror didn’t reply. Apart from asking me the same question. I looked old, hung over and as sad as a wet field that even the cattle have abandoned.

I got up and stood sideways, just to get a better view. It was the same mirror in which I had examined myself, dressed in a tuxedo on the night of the book awards. It’s not just that I was overweight, but my stomach had expanded out of proportion to the rest of my body. I felt like a whale but I looked like a duck. I walked naked, watching myself in all eight mirrors in the room and making critical comments.

I don’t know why men begin to resemble ducks as they grow older. The rump expands at the rear and the belly expands forward. The spine begins to make an S shape in order to carry everything as the muscles collapse and the bloated gut flags and falls towards earth. It’s a shape that has been bred into men over generations of affluence. It should make me ashamed, when I see what I’ve done to my body over a lifetime, considering that most human beings are merely skin and bone and barely get enough food to sustain themselves. But men don’t feel shame too often. That’s bred out of us as well. Sometimes I see friends crossing the floor of a hotel foyer like turkey cocks, proud of every ounce. As if a lifetime of success behind an office desk was made manifest in their soft white flesh. If there is one thing that proves that a man’s perception of the world is
entirely deluded, it is his ability to hold an image of himself as heroic while his body deteriorates.

I find this kind of fascination with mirrors strangely pleasing. It’s as if my teachers from secondary school are still inside my unconscious mind flailing away. I give them voice and then I can’t stop them, because this kind of psychological self-abuse is only the beginning;
was
only the beginning. I was alone and naked before the mirror, and on the edge of a great journey of self-discovery.

I was going to grasp my manhood again. I was going to pull my masculinity up from the floor, suck in my pot-belly and bend my head towards the great solitude wherein a man liberates his true self and becomes forever enlightened.

And besides all that, I was now my own master. I could do whatever I wanted. A man alone can please himself. He need pay no attention to manners, decorum or the various courtesies of living with another. I didn’t have to talk to anyone in the jeep now. I could drive back to Leitrim listening to the radio. At night, I could move around the bed like a lazy bull, or a walrus, depending on how I felt. I could toss, turn and fart or scratch myself any way I wanted. In the evenings, I could put as much coal on the fire as pleased me. I could put far too much coal on the fire and no one would know as long as the chimney didn’t burst into flames. And that hadn’t happened yet. I could stack up the coal, the Polish doubles, so high in the grate that I would need
to take off my clothes because of the heat. And I could do that too – take off my clothes. I could sit, strip, sweat, lean over the fire, drink wine, belch, watch
EastEnders
,
Doctor Who
or
Judge Judy
. Whatever I wanted. I could be obscene, vulgar or unconscious, without offending anyone. And in the mornings, I could put butter on my porridge and toss the bowl in the sink with the other dirty dishes; the pot and the wok and the cups and the plates from the previous night. I could go to my room, my writer’s room, every day and close the door and not talk to another human being. I could reconnect with the wild man inside me; that brutish animal could sing in me without disturbance or without a sense of obligation to others.