The Gamal (50 page)
That was the day before yesterday I wrote that. But yesterday something kind of weird happened to me. A three year-old-girl made me cry. Emily. My sister and her two children are staying here this weekend cos my sister’s husband is away for the weekend with work. Anyhow they were giving Emily a bath. The bathroom is next to my room and I heard her singing with her own mother and my mother and she splashing around in the bath.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
Once I caught a fish alive.
Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten.
Then I let him go again.
Why did you let him go?
Because he bit my finger so.
Which finger did he bite?
The little one upon the right.
I didn’t get the shakes or go numb or nearly vomit like the other times I hear music. I just cried and cried and cried. And I didn’t want to block my ears or stop the music. I wanted her to keep singing. And she did cos it was the only song she knew. And I cried and cried and cried, just lying on my bed listening to her beautiful little voice singing the song all clueless and happy and the random sounds of her splashes and my sister and mother saying kind happy things to her and her laughing and them laughing and then she singing away again and they joining in for bits when she’d forget the words. I went out then and I walked to Newport and back again. Eighteen miles altogether. And last night I slept. Without tablets. For the first time in a long time I slept at night and when the morning came I got up.
I bought matches again. Does a song stop being a song if it’s never sung again? If anyone who ever heard it or played it or sang it or hummed it is dead? Does the tune of it go some place? Anyhow it wouldn’t be right for people to have Sinéad and James’ tunes cos it’s the selfsame people killed them. We don’t deserve them isn’t it? The tapes melted and the pages burned away. If I make money with my book I might go away to America. I might find someone else with the music in them only this time I’ll mind them better isn’t it? I keep it in my bedroom. The map I got off Sinéad long ago. That she sent me in the post. I have it in my hand now. I just put it back in the drawer where it’s been all the time.
My bedroom is my world now a long time. I know sometimes and I up in my room what people are thinking. I see them walking up the road and look in at the house for a minute and wonder which room is mine and they just look on up the hill then and keep walking. But I know. I know they still wonder was it me. They don’t look in at the house and wonder when they’re on their way down to the village at all. Only when they’re coming back up from it cos they’ve their business done in the village and have nothing else to be thinking about only me and if I did it. Struggling up the hill with their tired legs and their heavy thoughts. Sad puzzled brains on them. You’d like to make them happy but there is no way. Only another hill after that one. And another puzzle to keep them sad isn’t it? But Sinéad could have made them happy. Of all the distractions I ever seen, Sinéad was the best. She said one time that music was like the way life was supposed to be. Like when you knew the song. You knew what was coming always and you were never disappointed. But in life you had to do whatever you figured was best and then just hope.
And this is where we are now isn’t it?
Cos long long long long long long ago some place on Earth small fires started to appear speckled around the land in the evening time. If there was a God maybe he’d have thought he seen somewhere on the dark side of this one planet, a light shining in the dark. A glow. Where there should have been no light at all, only darkness and he goes,
—What the fuck?
And he goes for a closer look and seen that there is life and he seen these strange two-legged animals all sitting around this fire and noises coming from their mouths at each other and they passing bits of burned animal around and eating it.
Then he seen them say.
He seen them say words. And the words were all different and they were for all the different things around this animal. And they all came to know the different words for all the different things.
Then he seen them using these words for imaginings and for no reason except to pass the night away and they sitting around this fire.
He seen them laugh and gasp and look at each other and shake their heads in awe and wonder.
He seen them cry.
He seen them draw on the walls of rocks and caves. Images of each other and images of other creatures and images of strange designs of their own conjuring.
He seen them then and they making sounds. And the sounds were soundings into the space they had and the time they had. Exploring the world unseen isn’t it? Inside themselves and outside themselves. Together and alone.
He seen them listen.
He seen them dance.
He seen them looking into the night’s sky and wonder.
He seen them maybe and he felt lonely maybe not being with them and maybe he seen himself and how he was like them and he wondered then maybe was he only an imagining of theirs. And maybe he thought if he really was a god of theirs he would die for them so awesome and beautiful were they and all the things he seen them do.
I can hear the baby crying down stairs now and it made me remember something Sinéad said about the way Bob Dylan played guitar on his song ‘I Was Young When I Left Home’. Said it was soothing cos it was like a baby crying. I won’t leave space for the words of it. You’ll just have to listen to the song cos that’s what I’m going doing now.
When I’d the song on that time I looked out my bedroom window and they were leaving and Emily had on a little red coat and I cried for a small bit.
My father just shouted up at me now was I going to the match. I said,
—I’ll be down now.
—Hurry up, he said.
Anyhow I’ve 114,124 words done so that’s the end of my book.
Thank you to my wonderful, supportive and encouraging wife, Sandra, who was first to read
The Gamal
in its becoming. Thank you to my amazing, darling daughter, Róisín, who enriches our lives immeasurably. To my outstanding and selfless parents, Seán and Mary, to my brothers and sisters, relatives, colleagues and friends, thank you all for your support and friendship.
I’d like to thank my agent Jamie Coleman of Toby Eady Associates, for seeing what I was trying to achieve from day one and for seeing me through the first few drafts. Thank you to my excellent editor at Bloomsbury, Helen Garnons-Williams. Thank you very much Erica Jarnes, Ellen Williams, Audrey Cotterell, Anna Simpson and Oliver Holder-Rea and all at Bloomsbury who had an input. Thank you to Nancy Miller and Lea Beresford at Bloomsbury USA for helping to bring the book across the water and to Birgit Schmitz for bringing
The Gamal
to German readers. I’m also very grateful to jacket designer Greg Heinimann for creating such an attractive-looking cover.
I appreciate the helpfulness of the information desk staff at the Central Criminal Court, Dublin. I found Michael Sheridan’s book on crime scene investigation in Ireland,
Bloody Evidence – CSI: Tracking the Killers
(Mentor, 2006), extremely useful. Another invaluable book I picked up was
Psychiatry in Medical Practice –Third Edition
by David Goldberg, Linda Gask and Richard Morriss (Routledge, 2008).
Ciarán Collins was born in County Cork in 1977. He teaches English and Irish in a school in West Cork.
The Gamal
is his first novel.
These discussion questions are designed to enhance your group’s conversation about
The Gamal
.
About the book
Charlie has always been, as his father says, a man apart. The only people who ever really accepted him were his friends Sinéad and James, who saw a life for him beyond the restrictive judgments of their home, Ballyronan. When Sinéad and James die, Charlie is left utterly alone and unable to function in day-to-day life. He can’t sleep, he suffers from severe headaches, and he rarely leaves his house. His psychiatrist, Dr. Quinn, suggests he write his story down, as a means of processing his grief, and it is through this exercise that
The Gamal
comes to life.
The Gamal
is set in an Ireland de
fi
ned by its national pride, a place where
fi
tting in and maintaining the status quo is akin to patriotism. The story that Charlie shares in these pages is about three people who break the mold: Sinéad, James, and Charlie himself. Each in their own way, they challenge the world around them, suggesting that it is inadequate. It is through that inadvertent de
fi
ance that they strike fear and distrust in their peers and elders, eventually bringing great tragedy to them all. But as Charlie shares their story, we see them as more than their horri
fi
c and untimely deaths: we see the joy and beauty they brought to those who opened their hearts to them, the power they wielded by daring to devote their lives to their love for each other.
For discussion
1 Charlie tells his readers early on that they won’t like him. Do you like Charlie? Why do you think that he’s so sure that you won’t?
2 Charlie hates descriptive writing, and when he tries to write his own descriptions, he becomes very self-critical. Why do you think that kind of writing is so troublesome to him? Why is he so biased toward unadorned, fact-based writing?
3 How do James and Sinéad take care of Charlie? How does he take care of them? How would you characterize his relationship with them?
4 On page 222, Charlie writes, “Sound was freedom. Sound was everything.” Did music free Sinéad and James? Did it free Charlie? How was music a catalyst for the tragedies of the novel?
5 Fitting in with the group is a central theme in
The Gamal
. How does that play out on the different societal levels portrayed here? Compare the sense of national pride with the sense of familial—or clan—pride. How do they differ? Does belonging to any of these groups make people happy?
6 Charlie is
fi
xated on the idea of madness. Throughout the book he has several different theories on what madness is, and why we, as a society, label certain people as mad. What do you think of his ideas? Do any of them resonate with you?
7 How would this novel be different if it had an omniscient narrator or if it shifted narration between characters? What does Charlie’s perspective add to your understanding of the story? Does it detract from your understanding at all?
8 The idea of the outsider is a common theme in some of our greatest literature. Why do you think this is so?
9 In his play
The Glass Menagerie
, Tennessee Williams writes, “The play is memory. Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic. In memory everything seems to happen to music.” How does this relate to
The Gamal
? How does the aspect of memory affect the story, especially taking into account Charlie’s almost supernatural auditory memory? How do music and memory connect in the book?
10 Religion plays a big role in Irish society. Where do you see religious imagery in
The Gamal
? How do you feel about the portrayal of the martyr in the novel?
11 Sinéad was a light in the darkness for Charlie. How does he carry that light with him at the end of the book?
12 Based on what you’ve seen in
The Gamal
, how do the Irish honor their history? What aspects of contemporary society seem to stem from historical con
fl
icts with the English?
13 How are women portrayed in this novel? Based on what you see in this book, what roles do women play in Irish society?
14 At the end of the novel, the state’s lawyer suggests that Dinky is a sociopath. Do you agree with his assessment? Why or why not? If not, what motivated his actions?
15 Snoozie’s character—and to some extent, Charlie’s, as well— both deal with guilt due to complacency. Do you think this is justi
fi
ed? If so, do they atone for their inaction?
16 What message are you left with at the end of this book? Is it a hopeful ending? Why or why not? Was, as the state’s lawyer so badly wanted, justice achieved?
Suggested reading
Mark Haddon,
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
; Jonathan Safran Foer,
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
; Dermot Healy,
Sudden Times
; Patrick McCabe,
The Butcher Boy
; J. D. Salinger,
The Catcher in the Rye
; Sabina Berman,
Me, Who Dove into the Heart of the World
; Carson McCullers,
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
; Patrick McCabe,
Breakfast on Pluto
; John Banville,
The Sea
; Seamus Deane,
Reading in the Dark
; Robert Kee,
The Green Flag
; Roddy Doyle,
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
; Sean O’ Faolain,
The Finest Stories of Sean O’Faolain
; Flann O’Brien,
The Third Policeman
