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Green Glowing Skull
Gavin Corbett


A breathtakingly original, darkly comic, surprisingly contemporary and deeply surreal tale from the author of THIS IS THE WAY, Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year.After fleeing his dying parents and the drudgery of work in Dublin for the Manhattan of his imagination – a place of romance and opulence, dark old concert halls and mellow front parlours quieted by the hiss of the phonograph cylinder – Rickard Velily hopes to be reborn as an Irish tenor, and to one day be reunited with the love of his life.At the very peculiar Cha Bum Kun Club, a masonic-style refuge for immigrants who can’t quite cut it in New York City, he meets Denny Kennedy-Logan and Clive Sullis, and a plan is enacted: to revive the art songs and ballads of another time for a hip young city in thrall to technology and money.But that is without reckoning on meddlesome sprites, the phantoms of the past – and more malign forces who plot to subjugate the human race.Green Glowing Skull is a half-crazed brain-shunt of a trip around the spirit world, the cyber world and a woozily recognisable real world – a darkly comic tale of mythologies, machines and the metaphysical swirl.










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Copyright (#u2c9f8ffd-26e5-5b79-881e-f892e7753d9d)


Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thestate.co.uk (http://4thestate.co.uk)

Copyright © Gavin Corbett 2015

Cover images © Angelo Morelli/Millenium Images, UK (main image); Shutterstock.com (skull)

Cover design © Kate Gaughran

The right of Gavin Corbett to be identified as the author

of this work has been asserted by him in accordance

with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

A catalogue record for this book is

available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Source ISBN: 9780007594306

Ebook Edition © May 2015 ISBN: 9780007594337

Version: 2016-02-18




Dedication (#u2c9f8ffd-26e5-5b79-881e-f892e7753d9d)


For Lilian




Epigraph (#u2c9f8ffd-26e5-5b79-881e-f892e7753d9d)


A round unvarnished tale is that delivered to our representative by Mr. J.F. McCormack, the Irish tenor, who has just returned from St. Louis. Mr. McCormack’s narrative is a model of moderation, and contains ample internal evidence that he has exaggerated neither in one direction nor the other. From what came under his own observation it is plain that there were at least a couple of disgusting exhibitions of stage-Irishman antics … If the matter ended at what Mr. McCormack saw himself it would appear that there has been a good deal of high colouring in the charges levelled against the management of the theatre. The narratives of Mr. Digges, Mr. Ewing, and Miss Quinn, of the Irish Literary Theatre, have, however, yet to be obtained, and it may well be that they will supplement the facts related by Mr. McCormack.

From a report in The Dublin Evening Mail, July 21, 1904

A thought … will fly from us and only return again in the darkness crying in a thin, childish voice which we may not comprehend until, with aching minds, listening and divining, we at last fashion for it those symbols which are its protection and its banner.

JAMES STEPHENS, The Crock of Gold




Contents


Cover (#uf81c96f3-9054-5b37-9b3c-744e9e685bea)

Title Page (#ulink_98d00c6a-6f27-5836-aaec-f5b1195c5c33)

Copyright (#ulink_d86cc77c-85ea-5a3b-b2eb-eb50182f2b4e)

Dedication (#ulink_6194e25a-3ab7-57ba-97d3-7bc3a5ea3d78)

Epigraph (#ulink_bde29315-211e-572c-90d8-e6e197423d45)

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About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




1 (#u2c9f8ffd-26e5-5b79-881e-f892e7753d9d)


Rickard Velily’s first job in New York was as a reporter for a small local newspaper. He did not stay long in the job because it was apparent that the other people who worked in the newspaper were doing so as a sort of retirement project. He felt guilty spending time with them when, after all, he had fled his elderly parents in Ireland. The stories the newspaper wanted him to investigate seemed designed to frighten him off New York. In his first week he was asked to write about the city’s wild shih-tzu population. It was said that a person was never more than twenty feet away from a shih-tzu in New York. A small number of these shih-tzus were the creatures that looked like paper lanterns that were jogged around on the ends of leashes but most shih-tzus in New York were wild creatures with orange in their beards that lived in pipes under the street. Rickard could not find evidence to prove that any of this was true. The proprietor of the paper was a billionaire’s widow who involved herself in its newsroom affairs because she felt she owed something to society. She had come to New York as a child during the golden and only age of airship travel and she had an ambition to bring back this method of travel. Somebody put it to her that the gases that had been used in airships were dangerous. She said she would not use combustible gases in her airships but normal air filtered of the heavier pollen released by genetically modified crops and urban tree cultivars. Before she had a chance to rope Rickard in in some way on this folly or on some other aspect of her life he was gone.

Now he was idle and, thinking of things he could do to occupy himself, he settled on trying to realise a recent and half-baked ambition to become a singer. Lately he had discovered he had not only a certain unrefined talent for singing but a repertoire of songs within him that he had not known was there. All of this emerged on his last night in Dublin when his parents put on the traditional emigrant’s wake. This had been an unexpected move on their part because his father did not have much of an attachment to Irish traditions and his mother had a learning disability. To the last minute they misunderstood why he was leaving for America. They thought it might have been because he was angry over his sweetheart. He was angry over his sweetheart, it was true, but people do not move away from the sources of their anger unless they have been told to do so by a counsellor or a court. No, he left for America mainly because of his parents: he had been an only child and he did not want to have to care for them and he could not suffer to see them decline. About his absence from their lives, he hoped that they would remain healthy enough to care for one another to the end of their days, and that they would die more or less simultaneously. He comforted himself with the thought that they had good neighbours and many relatives, and that he was not, in any event, very entertaining company for them.

He did not like to think about his parents now because thinking about them, and how they had driven their son to the brink of suicide and ultimately America, made him feel like a tragic cabbage-scented character in an Irish rural drama. But happily there was another reason for leaving Ireland that he could dwell on, and this reason was wholly of the modern world.

In the end, leaving his parents in Dublin had proven not as difficult as leaving his job in Dublin. The company that Rickard had worked for in Dublin was called Verbiage. It specialised in ‘the mining and re-purposing of online text’. Only two people had worked for Verbiage – he had been the familiar of a man who looked after all the computer and technological aspects of the job. Quite suddenly Rickard had come to loathe the tasks being asked of him, and the feeling would not let go. There had been no possible way to move sideways within the company with just the two of them working there, and so to leave his position he had to leave the company, and the only good reason he could give for leaving the company was that he wanted to leave the country, ‘to explore new horizons’, etcetera. His boss was upset to hear this, and tried to convince Rickard to stay. He asked him wasn’t he a little old to be starting a new life abroad, alone, which only hardened Rickard’s resolve all the more, and not because he wanted to prove that he was young (which he proudly was not; he was forty-one), but because he felt that his boss (who was twenty-six) was being ageist, and he wanted to show that a forty-one-year-old was just as capable of starting again, abroad, alone, as a young person was. His boss, again and again, and finally (with his face in his hands), said that Rickard was irreplaceable, and that he would be admired and appreciated in time. ‘But this is just the problem,’ Rickard did not say. At the end of the exchange Rickard realised that he had committed himself to leaving the country, and that the unpleasant sensation he now had (with eyes closed) was one of floating in or falling through space, his insides pressing against him in all sorts of new ways, and that he was about to be reborn. He put his hands to his face just as his boss had done, cried with him, felt his face become hot and wet, opened his hands, and enjoyed the fanning of circulated air.

Alone, again, abroad, in his accommodation in New York, he understood that one of the reasons he had left his newspaper job in New York was that he was worried it might have taken a similar turn to his job in Dublin. The pattern would have gone something like this: he would recognise a sarcastic and assertive tone in his voice, and he would only have to find this tone once, as surely he would, because it was easy to be sarcastic and assertive in writing, and it was not so much that he would hit on this tone as slip down into it, and he would find it fun to express himself in this way for a while. And his editor, and the billionaire’s widow, would see something of value in it, and before long he would be asked to condemn seven or eight different people, cakes, films or pieces of street furniture a week. The seven or eight different subjects would be his to choose, but he would discover that it was hard to come up with things to have an opinion about every week: he was simply not opinionated about enough things. Once he had decided on what he would be opinionated about, however, the words of opinion would come easily. And then he would become nauseated by his false disgust or disapproval or cynicism, and every time his actual bile would rise at this false bile in print he would look at his byline photograph, which would capture nothing of the real contours of his head. He would hate this person, and this person would have hated him if he had existed. He believed these phenomena – graphics, with lives behind them – were sometimes known as ‘avatars’.

***

He had dreaded the prospect of the emigrant’s wake. He feared it would be awkward, a big ritual, all dry mouths and hesitant gestures. It was in fact a lively and easy occasion: eighteen of his mother’s surviving siblings turned up, and he had forgotten what good sport they could be when they were all together. Early on a guitar and an accordion were produced, and a cousin cleared the lid of the piano of boxes, and by the small hours the blue-painted wall in the living room, which was the inside of a cold gable wall that faced the sea, was damp with condensation. They were all in their turn called on by one of the more socially confident neighbours to sing a song. When it came around to Rickard he sang the music-hall standard ‘Come Off It, Eileen’. It was not an imaginative choice but it was said to him that night that no one in their life had heard a better version sung. He went on to sing, to everyone’s astonishment including his own, selections, some obscure, from the songbooks of Challoner, French, Ffrench, Balfe and Moore. He was told that he had great volume and vibrato, which he understood to mean that his voice wobbled to pleasing effect. These were certainly things he was aware of as he was singing, although he may have been helped on the night by the acoustic qualities of the corner into which he sang.

The next morning, feeling sorer of head than he would have wanted before a long flight to America, he was presented with a 1908 edition of Chauncey Challoner’s Airs of Erin of 1808. His father said he had been inspired to root it out after Rickard’s performance the night before. He described it as a sacred ‘codex’, which Rickard thought was a strange word, suggestive of future or futuristic technology, for this repository of songs gathered in long-gone romantic days of muzzle-loading firearms and symbolic bitterns. The cover was green and sticky and embossed with shamrocks, harps and gold lettering, and a reassuring beeswax-like smell rose up with the purr of the pages. Every few pages a colour plate or a title would cause him to pause and realise that he should not have been surprised to know such essentially Irish songs as ‘O Truncated Tower’, ‘The Clover and the Cockade’, ‘Wigs on the Green’, ‘Dempsey of Dunamase’ and ‘The Order of the Emerald’ (in school they used to deliberately mishear it as ‘The Ordure of the Emerald’). Other titles – ‘The Snow-flake on Art’s Greying Lip’, ‘My Grand-father’s Fighting Stick’ – were not known to him but were enough to evoke a world.

Afterwards his father attempted to impart some wisdom to him before his leaving. He began by mumbling unintelligibly in Irish as if scanning his stock of the language for a pithy phrase. This was another surprise, as although his father was a speaker of Irish he hated it because he had had it beaten into him by religious brothers who had also beaten ambidexterity into him.

Switching back to English his father said, ‘You must know at least one phrase of the Irish language. If you are on public transport and you see a black person and feel the need to talk about them to someone else for whatever reason, do not refer to them as a black person but as a dinna gurrum.’

Then his father got on to what he really wanted to say:

‘New York is a tough city and it would be easy for a man to fall on hard times. Don’t let this happen to you, son. Fortunately for you, there is an institution in that place where you will always be welcome.’

His father of course was referring to the Cha Bum Kun Club, of which he was a long-standing member. It had clubhouses in all the major cities of the world, plus Thule, Greenland; Puerto Williams, Chile; Leverkusen, Germany; and Ceduna, South Australia; and several clubhouses in remote locations through the Korean peninsula and islands.

His father gave him a shining leather tie box.

‘I went to Rostrevor Terrace yesterday and finally got this off the President. These are not handed out at random. Only one scion per cell every six years is allowed to possess a tie. They had been considering my application for weeks. I am so relieved to present this to you. You will never go hungry or homeless with one of these. If you wear it to the New York clubhouse you will be given a room and a stipend until you are capable of supporting yourself. But you must wear it in the special way.’

The tie’s design was of left-to-right-slanting blue, orange and cream stripes. Overlying the field of stripes, at the thickest part of the tie, was the black, white, blue and red Cha Bum Kun roundel, and below the roundel a white box inside which were stitched, in blue, the characters ‘< V.V.’: V.V. being Rickard’s father’s initials and < signifying ‘less than’.

His father showed him how to tie the knot in the special extremely tight manner, so that the knot looked less like a knot than a hard seamless node.

‘The trick is to pull and pull until your hands burn,’ he said. ‘Put your back against a wall if it helps.’

***

Rickard’s favourite film of all time, The Severe Dalliance, opened with an establishing shot of the Chrysler Building. The first thing he did once he had arrived in New York and dropped his luggage at his temporary accommodation was go to the south-west corner of Lexington Avenue and 42nd Street from where the shot was made. The Chrysler Building looked terribly magnificent from this spot in reality as it did in the film and he was overcome at the sight. The sun shone in a direct line up Lexington Avenue and the building’s pale stone looked brilliant, its armour sparkled and reflected only blues and whites, and eagles or some sort of birds of prey circled high in the air at about the level of the fiftieth floor. All kinds of associations came to mind: the opening of The Severe Dalliance, of course, but also a sense of American power, and his head swelled by turns with Harold Campbelltown’s ‘Dalliance Theme’ and some show tune he did not know the name of or the lyrics to. Then suddenly he felt very sad because he thought of his sweetheart Toni. They had watched The Severe Dalliance for the first time together and later had bought the DVD and watched it many more times. New York was a dream place for them, full of clean sparkling metal and white clouds. They had said that their souls would be at home there. Beneath his anger he hoped that Toni would come to New York herself, looking for their dream, and that they might bump into each other on these streets.

Those first weeks he experienced all of the newly arrived immigrant’s pangs and few of the excitements. His cheap guesthouse in the northern Bronx was in a mainly Irish neighbourhood that prided itself on being a tightly knit community. The shops sold Irish teabags and Irish chocolate and Irish black pudding and damp-tasting Scots-English biscuits. Everywhere there were murals that depicted sporting and paramilitary activities and featured Celtic script and men with basic eyes and very pink faces. Many of the buildings were in the faux Irish-village style just like many of the buildings in Ireland. The land of his birth had never seemed so far away. People moved as if they had all the time in the world, following cracked cambers with their hands behind their backs; or idled as if they had all the time in the world, slumped against chamfered corners below dowdy eaves laughing pile-driving laughs. They seemed so at home, and he felt so locked out. He spent every spare hour he could in Manhattan where even the men in suits spun about as dazzled by the place as he was, though it was not ideal boulevarding territory owing to the regular stops put in the flâneur’s way by the town planner. One day in one of the less frenetic streets of Midtown a photographer told him he had ‘crossed’ his ‘line’ and ruined his photograph. After this Rickard told himself to be understanding of US ideas of social involvement and he became careful not to disturb people’s ‘personal space’. He took ‘personal space’ to mean the space between people and the objects of their concentration, or that aura-like area around people through which the energy by-product of their concentration was diffused. For example, in subway cars he would try not to look people in the eye or would be wary, as he was taking a seat, of sitting on a stray bag strap or body part. And in book shops he would not walk between people and the books they were looking at on the shelves and thus he took tortuous courses and was left face to face with books he had not in the first place been looking for.

He did not like the idea that anyone wished him ill but he felt that the billionaire’s widow at the newspaper wanted only evil to be visited on him because she could not have him. She had tried to kiss him with her doughy, immobile and always-damp lips as he was leaving the offices for the last time. He recoiled from her, backing into a filing cabinet, which fell backwards into another filing cabinet, which broke a window. The glass, original to the building and warped with age, crumbled to grains. The rest of the office staff rose as one.

‘See what you bring to the party,’ the billionaire’s widow bellowed. ‘Only blue funking dudgeon, to use a local expression.’

With no job, no daily routine, he found himself careering, and for long listless weeks; he ate only sweet things and slept odd hours and never felt bothered about seeking work. His behaviour became erratic, sometimes risky. He engaged madmen – people happy to violate his own ‘personal space’: street preachers, or rap singers on the make who handed out leaflets with website addresses on them. He went to the famous Waldorf Astoria one night and tried ‘the green fairy’ – absinthe; and he told the barman from County Mayo to fill her up again. Rush hour one evening he climbed down to the subway track to salvage what in any case only turned out to be a potato.

Once, worn out, and feeling sentimental for home, and knowing that the pubs of his neighbourhood were anything other than public houses, he went to Mass. The priest had a whispery voice like chalk on a blackboard, but coughed often, spoiling the effect. Rickard woke on a cough to hear the priest deliver a homily on the dangers of leaving Mass early. He said that leaving Mass early was like finishing a course of antibiotics early, and that if one didn’t finish one’s course the germs of sin would grow stronger and become resistant to the medicine of the liturgy. Rickard, aware that he was in danger of falling asleep again, and that he was a snorer, decided all the same that it was best to leave before the end.

Near Christmas he went, in indifferent mood, to a late-night rhumba party on a pier in the Hudson River to see if he could meet a US girl. He never told his landlady where he was going or at what time to expect him back. Nothing happened at this rhumba party, which was exactly as he had wanted, and he walked all the way home to the Bronx shaking his head violently in self-punishment and blowing into the gently descending snow. If only he could have a vision in a snow-globe now to say you have done this and now you will do that he said as his brain chattered against his skull.

A couple of days later he travelled to a factory in a bunker, conceivably a former nuclear silo, in Flushing, Queens. He went there to have a doll made up for Toni and in the likeness of Toni. He was shown sliding drawer after sliding drawer of eyes, locks of hair, swatches of skin and featureless heads indicating face shapes. The heat in the factory was oppressive and the render on the walls appeared to bubble, and after a while it was hard to tell the difference between one pair of eyes and another. He waited six hours for his doll. She had brown eyes, blonde hair, and flatteringly even cream skin. For some reason he had chosen to dress her in an orange-and-gold Irish-dancing outfit. On the train back to the Bronx the eyelids distressed him: they rocked up and down, falling into and out of synchronisation, making a faintly audible click. The doll looked nothing like his former sweetheart, not even a three-year-old version of her. He had paid $130, albeit tax free, for this hoodoo rubbish.

He moved into longer-term and cheaper accommodation in a part of Queens that was not quite Long Island City; set back from it, to the east. The area was uninteresting, but he was tired even of Manhattan now, where every footstep seemed to land on hot soft sand. His new apartment building shook with tremors generated by shallow-lying tunnelling machinery and it also had a cockroach problem. A significant factor in his decision to leave Ireland had been his fear of the European house spider, but he soon grew to hate and fear the American cockroach with equal passion and dread. Daily they seemed to increase their dominion; taking the words of Charles Stewart Parnell out of context he would lift his hand and say to them, ‘Thus far shalt thou go and no further.’ One evening he was putting on a moccasin when he noticed one of the maroon scurrying pests inside it. He opened the window of the apartment to shake the creature out. ‘Shoo, shoo!’ he said, and ended up letting the moccasin slip from his hand. It dropped eight floors and beyond retrieval. His other moccasin, water-stained and curled from drying out, sat at his feet looking like an artefact from a museum of agriculture. This, after a day in which he had suffered the hauteur of people in shops and the service industry. He wept for forty-five minutes and thought of moving back to Dublin. He thought about this – moving back to Dublin – paralysed slightly in movement, and partly in thought itself, for the rest of the day. Late in the night he tried to sing. He willed his diaphragm to flatten like a weakling pushing a plunger, and he intoned. His plans to be a singer now seemed altogether pathetic. He knew no way of going about being a singer – and how juvenile and risible of him to have even dreamt of it. He took Lyons tea and felt that perhaps it would be nice to return to Dublin and embrace the kind of love that was sympathy. But it was painfully easy too to imagine the great stigma of being delivered, pitied, in a squeaking cage like some kind of King Puck, brass crown askew, with divergent eyes. No; no. It was true; he could not return to Dublin so soon.

There was of course another option, another way that an observer of his situation might have told him would improve that situation; but it was one that Rickard had never been, nor was now, prepared to entertain. He had felt, from the moment his father had introduced the idea, that to go to the Cha Bum Kun clubhouse would be to walk into a trap. His father knew that Rickard would only have approached the lodge in the most miserable condition. Down at heel, pining for home, and sitting across a room from old men, he would be squarely in front of the cause of his flight from his parents.

No, no, he decided. He would attack his problems with great conviction. Encouragement came from an unsought source. One of the books in a book shop that he was left face to face with that he was not in the first place looking for was Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Lessons emanated. He would strain at his balls and sockets from the down-suck and make money. This was America, this was New York, the beating and – importantly – not geographical and not rutted heart of America. Men here had made art deco facades to provide footholds and handholds to the clouds. Later in the 1980s men had made the same things in polished granite that was the colour of both the inside and outside of salmon. Now new walkways were emerging on elevated platforms, and gleaming silver tubes on skyscraper roofs pumped beautiful pure clouds into clear blue skies. Young people, no longer afraid to revel in youth and money, were running with the spirit. Many wore ironic pilot goggles in a nod to the spirit of early aviation. A new dawn, or a new young spirit, was rising, or abroad.

In the meantime, in a time, some time, in the middle of that, on a day when no ATM in the city would accept his PIN, a woman in the bank persuaded him that – yes – he should get a job because his funds were rapidly depleting, and assured him that the problem with his card would be resolved by the next morning.

‘But if you don’t mind me saying,’ this banking woman with beautiful Greek almond eyes decorated with platinum eye shadow said, ‘it’s all fine declaring that you’re a professional singer, but when you’ve got no income from it, it isn’t worth the name that you give it. New York is an expensive place at the best of times.’

This was true, Rickard knew, but he had said ‘professional singer’ without any belief that that’s what he actually was and only to make it seem that he was not a layabout.

‘But then I realise the kind of person you are,’ continued the woman with the Greek eyes, ‘and it’s the kind who will be satisfied only with following some “art and craft” pursuit.’

‘Yes, I’m afraid so,’ said Rickard, taking in the woman’s stern high-waisted navy skirt and then looking at his hands on his knees.

‘There are plenty of creative opportunities in this city if you look around you. New York is full of reminders that you may not be wasting your time if that’s the life you feel you must live. There are signs in the smallest gesture on the street and in the grandest building on the block.’

Perhaps this woman was not Greek after all: Rickard had only thought so because his thinking had become contaminated when he noticed the Greek-style columns in the hall. And then there was the question of him taking advice from a person who was obviously under the spell of these trashy fashionable novels that dealt in symbology and conspiracies: a copy of The Gordion Quorum by Cole Tyler lay on her desk.

‘New York,’ said the woman, ‘is a city built by cults who begat cults who know very expertly the art of making cults. And this is my suggestion to you: that you find a cult of your own. There is a very large one in the city right now that you would do well to be a part of. Lots of people young and old are part of it and it worries those of us who are not! I’m talking of course about Puffball Computers. You won’t have failed to notice its adherents. They carry Puffball products with them wherever they go, and they look in ways unconventional, yet every element of their appearance is discrete from the other elements around it. They are so clean and ready for this world that they’ve shaped for themselves. We in the bank are always happy to help a person who looks like this.’

***

Breaking point came one evening when he fought a hopeless battle against a translucent close relative of the cockroach, the water bug. Long after the creature had scuttled to safety he was still rattling his tongue scraper back and forth through the crack behind his water cabinet.

‘Die! Die! Die!’ multiplied ten thousand times he screamed.

Afterwards he went to his bedroom, sat at the end of the bed, and began to do the one thing he’d been doing a lot of recently to comfort himself. Most often he would select a song to lift his mood, but occasionally he let the mood dictate the selection of song. That evening the most morbid ballad in the Challoner canon, a song about expulsion to the penal colonies, poured from him:

‘Diemen, smother my face

And have what you will,

For the bread I have taken

Is making me ill.’

As he sang, he looked from his window to the night sky and the full moon above. He saw it as a spot at the end of a beam of light moving across clouds that were not, on this coldly clear night, there. A call for help, or to arms, in other words. Then he looked at his Challoner book on his bedside stand and considered again his home, his father, his mother’s porous brain, his genetics, Toni, and his funds. He saw from the corner of his eye a movement on the wall – a plain cockroach. He leapt to his wardrobe where his Cha Bum Kun tie hung on a hook on the inside of the door, made a loop with it, and went to crack it against the bug. But he pulled back at the last moment; and then began the complex and arduous process of putting on the tie.

New York City’s Cha Bum Kun clubhouse was a townhouse-height Venetian box of white and smoky-blue stone, in Murray Hill, Manhattan. Tall windows tapered to sharp points and the impression of verticality continued through many twisting chimneys and flues. Inside, the air smelt of brass polish and coconut hair. A flying-buttress-style walkway vaulted the width of the grand stair hall. The walls to second-floor level were crusted with dozens of skulls of mystery beasts.

‘Rabbits, hares and cows,’ said a receptionist, a Pole, or Russian. ‘All killed by Kunians, or their Pak Doo Ik forerunners, in the New York area when it was mainly forest and silica.’

He beckoned Rickard to bend his head towards him. Pulling Rickard’s tie across the desk between finger and thumb, he worked slowly towards the knot, appearing to examine the threading. When he got to the knot, he pinched into it with his nails, then produced a thumb tack and tried and failed to puncture it – testing it presumably for hardness and layering.

‘What is your name?’

‘Rickard Velily.’

Now he looked into a diary, scanning down through a series of paragraphs in tiny squarish handwriting. He turned over two pages until he found the entry he was looking for.

‘Rickard Velily. Yes, yes. Velily. Yes. Okay, just give me a moment. Yes. Velily. Your father rang ahead some weeks ago and told us, uh … to expect you?’

‘He did?’

‘Yes, he did. Can you wait here for a little while until the President arrives?’

Clicking feet descended the stone grand stairway, and a ‘Hello’ sounded from two flights up. The President embraced Rickard with overbearing warmth. He looked every centimetre the reluctantly retired company executive with his figure-hugging silver suit, his Latin tan, and his side-parted grey hair held in place by a perfumed product.

He introduced himself as Paulus.

‘Rickard, the first thing to say to you is that we’ll ask no questions. You’re among friends here. We’ll ask nothing other than that you don’t play loud music in your room, that you smoke only tobacco, and that you eat only in your room and not in the dining hall, and only off your plate and not off your lap or bed sheets. Of course if you choose to become a member and pay your subscriptions you can eat with us in the dining hall.’

Rickard was taken to the other side of the building, and an elevator. The elevator was of a corporate 1980s design – Nefertiti’s breast cups blinkered bulbs in its corners. It took them to an attic floor where Rickard’s bedroom was. The bedroom was plain – bare dark floorboards; yellow walls on which was hung a framed picture of ‘the 18th at Valhalla Golf Club’ – and partly dirty. The bed, a double sleigh, at least looked comfortable. A bedside locker, a desk, a tall walnut wardrobe and some chipboard bookshelves completed the furnishings. The shelves were scattered with books on business: ‘how-to’s and biographies and annual reports. A porthole in the slanted ceiling was filled with distorting glass.

President Paulus leaned against the door jamb with crossed arms, looking as if he had not seen the room in a long time. Embarrassment, disdain and contrition expressed themselves in a cluster of dimples on his chin.

‘Home for however long you require. But with any luck you’ll be self-sufficient again soon. Until then you’ll receive our stipend. You’ll need to leave your bank details with Jon our treasurer. And while you’re under our roof, please enjoy our amenities. We have a library, a billiards and card room, and a racquet court which I’m afraid these days is used only for storage. We also have a small pro golf shop.’

Rickard settled for now on the drawing room. The room was hot as he entered, and he felt his face flush. A fire blazed in the grate. Set as it was into a gigantic tableau carved from green-grey soapstone, the fireplace resembled the centrepiece of a tall satanic grotto. At first glance the tableau seemed to be an oppressive mass of ribs, roots and boils, as if made of continually melting and solidifying wax. As Rickard’s eyes adjusted he picked out the details: foliage, weaponry, fauns, sheep-people, Korean farmhands, men from Europe. It was an attempt to represent the legend of Cha Bum Kun. Here were the gryphons and dragons of his childhood; there was the Moon Baby that brought him dairy produce from the West. It was a random and confused scene, and therefore a good representation of the story. Nobody was sure of the details of the story of Cha Bum Kun or in which order the details came. Nobody knew, either, what Cha Bum Kun’s message was, or even if he had had a message, or what lessons could be drawn from his life, or even if he had ever lived. In truth, Cha Bum Kun was not a figure that was taken very seriously. It meant that the Cha Bum Kun Club had no rituals – the tie business aside, and despite the vocabulary around its workings – and no ethos. It was, and always had been, just a club where men from all over the world could meet each other in its lodges, make useful connections, relax and play games. Usually these men were of such a disposition – meek, or odd – that they found it hard to get on in the world despite significant financial means. (And, usually, they were of significant financial means.)

There was just a single free chair in the room. It was so positioned that Rickard could not help but face two men. One of these men was bald on top, perfectly round-headed, and had an underbite. A pad of spittle had collected at a corner of his mouth. The other man had a full head of greasy white hair, long and pinned back behind the ears, and a face that tapered to the nose and lips like the blade of a Stone Age hatchet. They were snoozing, and easy to imagine dead.

Recently Rickard had been given to imagining that any elderly person he saw looked dead. Perhaps this was because the elderly were the easiest of all people to imagine dead: their corpses, in the main, would not look so different to the living versions of themselves. Something of the fear of death would disappear with this visualisation, although when he thought of his parents at home he saw them face down on the floor beside each other and hollowed out and grey like hot-counter chickens. But this bald old man would not be quickly corruptible. He would remain apple-cheeked and full in the mouth – no collapse in support behind the lips. Rickard imagined him too in a giant glass tube, in a bubbling rose-coloured liquid.

The other man – the flint-hatchet one, rigid in his chair, one hand loosely holding the other – would find the transition to corpsehood traumatic. His face was whittled, Rickard decided; had an eaten quality, been blasted, from having seen too much. He had uncanny foresight. Or, rather, uncanny experience: he knew, somehow, the advancing horrors. In the first moments of death the microbes would swiftly – and not for the first time – get to work; the tissue in the face would subside ply on ply and the hard edges above would harden further.

But even haunted by death there was something elevating about this man. He would be long and limber and heroic and become one with the relief carving in his likeness on the lid of his tomb. The tomb would be made of alabaster and in the dark it would glow. And in death the other man too – there would be something grand and glorious. This man as a crusader at rest, and that man at peace in his bubbling tube: and now the tableau behind glistened and quivered. Rickard saw in its details other creation stories; he thought of Romulus and Remus, Europa, and of the Milesians. He saw in it too evolution: the squirming tissue oozing more of itself, regulated by an electronic pulsar; but in the embers something seasoning – a glimpse of another world, arcane and outlasting, beyond bosses or bailiffs.

The heat of the fire had lulled him to sleep – a thump of the heart brought him back to life. He saw the bald man taking him in with querulous rousing eyes. The other man fully awake. The fire roaring again with fresh fuel.

‘New blood?’ said the bald man, with a discernibly Irish accent.

Rickard was afraid to open his mouth. It would give him away and then they would be off on that predictable old track talking about the same old bull.

The other man looked him gently up and down, and said, also with an Irish accent, but Americanised, and slightly lispy and high, ‘Sure leave him be, Denny. He’s only settling in. You’re very welcome anyhow. I’m Clive Sullis. Your friend here is Denny Kennedy-Logan.’

‘He’s not normally so forward and confident,’ said the first man, Denny, leaning now with ladsy familiarity towards Rickard. ‘The club makes him feel very secure. In the street he’s a lamb.’

Well, he would have to be out with it. He told the men his name – established that Denny was from Dublin, Clive from south Donegal (‘though I went off to Dublin as soon as I could escape’). Both had been in New York a long time.

‘And so they’ve given you that attic room, aye?’ said Denny. ‘They gave me that room when I first came here. But they boot you out once you find your way again. I wonder if they’ll ever give it back to me. What do you think you’ll do with yourself here in this city?’

‘I’m not sure,’ said Rickard. ‘Perhaps I’ll stay with the newspapers.’

‘You look like a print-room boy, all right. Do you know about the hierarchy of aprons? You won’t get anywhere in that game unless you have the right length of apron.’

‘But,’ Rickard cut back in, ‘I’ve a bit of an old hankering to become a singer, that’s what I’ve set my sights on.’

‘Nothing in that game either. I knew a “rock and roller” in Dublin called Pádraigín O’Clock. You’ve never heard of him because he never amounted to anything.’

‘I don’t want to be a rock-and-roll singer, sir. I want to be a tenor.’

‘A tenor!’ Denny guffawed, clapping his hands together as a log exploded in the grate and hissed in its half-life. ‘Clive, would you listen to this! And how is your voice?’

‘Untested. Untrained,’ said Rickard. ‘But it’s all there, I think.’

‘You must try and coax it out so. Have you thought about getting lessons?’

‘Yes, this eventually would have been the plan.’

Denny sat back into his seat and turned to his companion. ‘Well, Clive, what do you think?’

Clive, to Rickard, said, ‘Denny here is a tenor of note.’

‘And better known than Pádraigín O’Clock I was in my day, too!’

‘He was,’ nodded Clive, ‘I can vouch. Sure Pádraigín never made it to acetate, and you made it to America.’

‘True enough! True enough! Did you know that Pádraigín’s real name was Pádraigín Cruise? They always give themselves these jazzy names, these “rock and rollers”.’ When Denny had finished laughing, he said to Rickard, ‘If it’s lessons you want, come to me, and we’ll see what you’re about.’

He took a notepad – personalised with his initials – from the pocket of his cardigan, and scribbled his home address.

‘We’ll say this time tomorrow, at my apartment. What do you think?’

Before Rickard had time to answer, Denny, to Clive, said, ‘New blood, what did I tell you?’




2 (#u2c9f8ffd-26e5-5b79-881e-f892e7753d9d)


The corners of the piece of notepaper were decorated with feathers and swirls; taking a cue – Rickard fancied, as he made his way from the subway station – from the built character of Manhattan’s Morningside Heights. Leafy friezes and arabesques on building facades spoke of high ambitions, but the impression of the area now was of neglect and decay. Bread husks dissolved to pap and fish heads putrefied in neon-pink pools; discarded plumbing technology cluttered pavements and front lots; in the air distant sirens mingled with a nearer synthesised racket; on the avenue cars hurtled south to brighter lights. Rickard hurried down a side street, found the door he was looking for, and pushed its heavy iron grille.

Upstairs he followed a corridor that turned three corners to Denny Kennedy-Logan’s door. Immediately it opened the guilt crashed over him again: Denny Kennedy-Logan was very old; Rickard’s very old parents remained abandoned in Ireland. Denny was wearing a bulky dressing gown, tightly tied, which suggested to Rickard age-related illness, and he became a little angry, thinking of how he’d been manipulated. The old man would have him, before he knew it, wiping his bottom.

But he had a surprising bounce, Denny, to his walk; a combative bustle and energy, as he led the way into his apartment. He was forward-angled rather than forward-leaning or forward-stooped. Rickard could picture him in leathers, in a garage, at three in the morning, failing to kick-start a Triumph motorcycle; on his way to a confrontation or to playing a mean prank on someone; unwittingly and unknowingly kneeing a child in the skull in the course of a purposeful stroll.

A darkened passageway brought them to an inner room, softly lit and warm in colour. A brass or bronze arm projected from a wall and held a barely luminous globe. Rickard perched on the edge of the seat he was offered, under the arm. An upright piano created an obstruction in the middle of the room. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves flanked a chimney breast and the space on the shelves in front of the books was cluttered with trinkets and ornaments, as was a mantelpiece, a wake table, a whatnot and a small chest of drawers. Larger ornaments – slim glazed pots and a couple of wooden figures such as might have been prised off the front of a medieval guildhall or from the alcoves of a reredos – sat on the floor against the wall behind him. The place smelt either of dog or popcorn, Rickard could not decide which. As if in answer, a ginger-and-white dog with a squidgy pink-and-black face came skittering into the room and rolled on its back by its owner’s feet. The old man pulled up a chair so that he could sit down and tickle the dog’s belly. After a minute he turned the animal over and toggled the flesh on its head until its eyes watered. ‘My little poopy frootkin, my little poopy frootkin,’ he said, and continued to jerk the dog’s head.

‘You found me all right,’ he said, still looking at the dog.

It took Rickard a moment to realise that the old man was talking to him. ‘Your directions were very good,’ he said.

He sat back into the seat, warily, expecting broken springs and plumes of dust, but discovered a plump and yielding easy chair that smelt most definitely of dog; for split seconds he remembered the two dogs of his childhood, Jumpy and Kenneth. This was a comfortable, lived-in sort of place, he admitted to himself. Something about the randomness of the clutter and the softness of the light reminded him of the living room of a wealthy Irish country home or townhouse. It would be nice to live in this way in this city, he soon found himself imagining; in a dim few rooms near the service core of an old apartment building surrounded by the stuff of a lifetime. He spotted high on the bookshelves a cherrywood radio set like the one in his father’s clubhouse in Dublin. He remembered seeing it on Spring Open Day. A man called Wally had said, ‘That is just like the one in my grandfather’s country kitchen. My grandfather was a great man for the ideas and one day he had the idea that there was a little man inside that radio and he smashed it up with a hammer.’ He chuckled gently at the memory, forgetting himself.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Denny, ‘would you like some shaved ice?’

‘No, thank you,’ said Rickard. ‘I haven’t long finished my dinner.’

‘I have a machine inside for it.’

‘I’m fine, really.’

‘I don’t drink alcohol any more, so I’ve nothing to offer you in the way of that. We said nine o’clock?’

‘Nine o’clock was the time I thought we agreed in the club last night.’

‘I must have meant four o’clock. I’m usually thinking about bed by nine. But all right so – nine o’clock.’

The old man made playful faces and noises at his dog, then spun it around and sent it racing away with a loud smack on the backside.

‘Here for the night we are, then. Oh well, I’ll enjoy the challenge.’

He stood up and, with his shins, shuffled an ottoman towards Rickard.

‘At least have the footrest,’ he insisted, manoeuvring the item under Rickard’s feet. ‘You should come and see the outside of my building in the daytime. It’s been said that it looks like the Treasury in Petra, so grand and serious does it look in this street, and so suddenly does it come upon you.’

‘It’s not an area lacking in grandeur.’

‘No it is not.’

The old man sat down again, on top of his yelping dog, which had already skittered back into the room and settled itself up on the chair.

‘But the pity then it has all gone to rot. The cross-streets are not so bad but they funnel you, with no by and by about it, to the main drags. If I take a stroll anywhere these days it’s on West End Avenue.’

‘I have been on West End Avenue,’ said Rickard, indulging him. ‘It’s a very beautiful thoroughfare.’

‘What do you like about it?’

He thought about it seriously and could not come up with anything better than, ‘I like that it doesn’t have any shops.’

The old man sat perfectly still for a moment, then added, ‘It brings to mind, for me, the old world, or at least old New York, with its old associations. And something of the world of the tango, and of depressed beef barons. But mostly, yes, it recalls a great European boulevard. In its scale, in its idiom and, when I think about it now, its shape. Not so much because it curves, which it doesn’t, but because it undulates. Like keys rippling. Under a virtuoso’s hand. Spelgelman used to live there, as did Rosburanoff.’

These revelations delighted Rickard, although he had no clue who the old man was talking about.

‘Tell me now, Rickard Velily’ – he said his name mockingly, Rickard sensed, throwing in an extra ‘-il-’ syllable, and became distracted with the taste of it on his tongue – ‘Velily, Velily, Velily. Is it an Irish name?’

‘It is. It’s also a village in White Russia.’

‘They are Bialy this and Bialy that in New York. Many people originate from places that were once part of Antique Poland or Lithuania, or Greater Austria or Russia. Velily is one of those names that is Irish but might not be. Like Costello, which could be Italian, or Egan, which could be Turkish, or Maher, which could be Berber.’

‘Or Walsh,’ offered Rickard, ‘which could be German.’

The old man looked at him testily.

‘You mustn’t make any jokes around these parts about the war, you’ll learn that smartly enough.’

Rickard protested, ‘I –’

‘You’re a recent immigrant, we’ve established that?’

‘I’ve been here just a few months.’

‘Ah, you’ll fit in well enough. We always do. There are American people today called Penhaligon and Thrispterton and the like who say that they’re Irish. And they probably are. Anyhow, she’s doing well, I believe, Ireland?’

‘She has been doing well, it’s true,’ Rickard confirmed, hoping that the matter would be left at that as he did not want to be drawn into a discussion on economics, of which he knew nothing.

‘I hear that now we’re a force on the world stage, that everyone seeks to imitate us. I have read that there are companies that will kit out your pub in Moscow or Peking in the Irish style, with advertisements for Whitehaven coal for the wall and Nottingham-made bicycles to hang from the beams.’

Rickard’s eyes wandered about the room, to the left and right of Denny, through the ornaments and vases, and settled on a small mottled wall mirror.

‘Perhaps,’ said the old man, evidently noting the pattern of Rickard’s scope, ‘if someone from one of these companies, someone less forgiving than myself, stood on the threshold there and said, “How much for the job lot?” I might agree a price. We have trouble moving these days for the bric-a-brac, isn’t that right, Aisling?’

Rickard glanced back at Denny and saw with some alarm that he was not addressing his dog but the ceiling or a point beyond. He guessed that this ‘Aisling’ was a dead wife, and he had no wish to hear about her, or about the old man’s being made a widower, or to be involved in his affairs by this knowledge and have it implied to him that he should care.

‘It’s not, though, as if I bought it all in one go. Although I have had to move a quarter of it twice, and half of it once, and arrange it in new ways, in different places. Though the last time it was a different place only to the one before it, and not the place it is now.’

Rickard was tiring already of these spiralling formulations. ‘Do you mean this present apartment?’

‘Yes. A fitting home for my belongings, I think it is. Did you notice the tracery in the hall?’

‘I did,’ said Rickard, lying.

‘It reminds me of Stapleton’s work, and the work of those great Italian stuccodores that came to Dublin in the eighteenth century.’

‘How long have you lived here?’

‘Oh. Twenty-one years. Twenty-one from last September.’

The old man tapped the dog’s head, nestled in his groin, evenly and gently now.

‘I have done more living in this building, in these rooms, than in any other building since I came to New York; many moons ago now. If living is taken to mean man-hours, and in this building, in these rooms, is taken to mean just that.’

Rickard detected self-pity creeping in. ‘It’s not such a bad space to spend time. A fitting venue, as you say, for a man of refined tastes.’

‘It is that. But, well … refined tastes. I must tell you, all this’ – the old man gestured magisterially with his hand – ‘this, ornamentation, all these pretty-looking things, you probably wonder if I’m a bit of a funny sort. Well I am not this way inclined, I would like you to know.’

‘I would never make judgements of that nature about a person.’

‘But these pretty things … What you see about you are monetary investments.’

He leaned forward in a manner that suggested he was about to say something very important, though the lower part of his face wrestled with a smile.

‘You’re not a – hoo hoo hoo – thief, are you? You’re not one of these drag-racing hooligan bucks who would twist an implement inside an elderly man and rob his things?’

‘No, Mister Kennedy-Logan. I have come here to be taught how to sing.’

‘Shall I tell you what is the most valuable of all the items in this room? It’s those curtains.’

He pointed to dark red drapes, drawn across, on the end wall.

‘You wouldn’t think to look at them, would you? They’re from Turkey, from the early nineteenth century. They look better tied back in the wings, I feel about it, where the gilt threading picks up the light, but they add an element of drama to the nightly act of blocking out the evening.’

He remained leaning forward, with a slump, as his dog trilled enquiringly and tried to catch his eye.

‘But I do not sleep in this room, so it’s an act best described as a ritual, then.’

At this moment Rickard felt that he could have risen from his chair and walked out of the room and apartment undetected, such was the completeness of the trance that the old man appeared to be in. Instead, in a life-changing intervention, he said, ‘Mister Kennedy-Logan, I am booked in for a singing lesson tonight, yes?’

‘Booked …’

The old man grasped, peevishly, thin air, as if he might have found an appointment book there.

‘Singing lesson … Yes. Do you have a song that you could sing so that I can gauge the quality of your voice as it is?’

‘I do,’ said Rickard. ‘I usually like to warm up with “Come Off It, Eileen”.’

‘Good choice. Not too challenging. Away you go.’

‘Now?’

‘Yes.’

‘Unaccompanied?’

‘Yes.’

‘All right. Here you have it, so. Ahem.’

Rickard stood up, cracked back his shoulders, and began:

‘With a nerve to match her rosy cheeks

And a cheek to pique my nerves,

My brazen Eileen, mo cushla …’

‘Stop there, stop there.’

The old man lifted a hand, his forefinger extended; and he was chewing, seeming to be assessing Rickard’s efforts with more than one sense.

‘You have very good vibrato.’

‘Thank you,’ said Rickard, still frozen mid-pose, his arms stretched around an invisible keg at his chest.

‘And more. And more.’

Rickard laughed, in astonished gratitude.

‘Yes. You have quite a range of gifts.’

‘I’ve been told that I have excellent control in the middle to upper register, if only you would give me the chance to show you.’

‘Oh yes … control … middle to upper register … I can tell that, I can tell. No, you’re ready.’

‘When you say “ready” …?’

‘I could do with a young man like yourself, and a voice like yours, pure and not so fraught with the years.’

‘I’m not as young as you think,’ said Rickard, with a suddenness and even a venom that surprised him, his arms dropping by his side. For some reason the use of the word ‘young’ felt like an attack on his very sense of himself. His reaction seemed to jolt the old man.

‘Do you not consider yourself young?’

‘I have not considered myself young for many years, even when I was young. Even the pop vocalists I admired when I was young were people who sounded old, like Kaarst Karst of Kaarst Karst and the Iron-filers.’

‘When did you technically cease to be young?’

‘I could last credibly claim to be young five years ago when I was in the middle of my thirties.’

‘You’re young in my book. It’s unusual for someone of your age to be interested in the old-style tenor singing. Your soul may creak but, I tell you, it’s exciting for my ears to hear a virgin voice like yours. You should revel in the light voice that you have, your spry and tinkling tone; do not be after some character that you do not possess. You would be ideal for a project I have in mind. I and the man you met in the club last night, Clive, wish to form an Irish tenor trio and we are on the lookout for a third person. We will play the front parlours and concert venues of this city, whose people’s appetite for Irish ballads and art songs and the singing styles of John McCormack and Joseph “The Silver Tenor” White I believe is dormant but has not disappeared.’

Rickard was still brooding over the ‘young’ comment.

‘Mind you,’ the old man went on, looking Rickard up and down, ‘young though you are, it’s not as if you’ll be attracting the attention of the ladies. Your thighs are swollen like upturned bowling skittles and you have hips like a hula hoop and your face looks like it’s been split with a hatchet and has gradually fused back together after many setbacks in a humid region of the world.’

It was an easy decision to make in the end. If Denny Kennedy-Logan could continue to offend him, Rickard would not feel so bad about spending time with the old man and not his parents. The next evening, finding him in the drawing room at the clubhouse again, Rickard said he would join his trio.




3 (#u2c9f8ffd-26e5-5b79-881e-f892e7753d9d)


They began practising every night in the drawing room, in front of the fire and often in the company of others. In a typical session they talked about programmes for future concerts and considered the suitability of certain songs for future audiences. In Denny’s experience the Anglo audiences did not respond well to ‘Come Out Ye Black and Tans’, and neither did the black audiences; the Jewish audiences did not like the songs that laboured the point about Jesus. Early on Denny suggested that they include in their repertoire arias, bel canto, lieder, zarzuela excerpts and late-eighteenth-century pleasure-garden songs, but this idea was dropped owing to Rickard and Clive’s lack of training in and ignorance of these styles. A good deal of the evenings was spent in reminiscing. Denny and Clive were capable and guilty of great nostalgia. Clive remembered the village and hinterland of his youth, and the Dublin he later escaped to; Denny talked about Dublin – which he called ‘Dovelin’, with three syllables – as it could have been: a Hanseatic outpost, with terraces of tall Billy-gabled houses. But the real Dublin was not so bad, he said; it was where he had learnt to sing, and learnt all the songs that meant the most to him, and it was the city of his father and mother, and the city that gave birth to them: the floral Victorian city; and of the generations preceding them: the stout Georgian city; and of a less-easy-to-define lineage. (Twice in three weeks Rickard listened to Denny tell the story of when, as a young man of seventeen, he was invited to ‘Glena’ by the marsh, the home of John McCormack, to view the body of the tenor-count in repose, and how grand he looked in that cucumber- and lily-scented room in his dark blue papal uniform and his lilac sash, with a medal pinned to his breast and a ceremonial sword by his side, and that surely in such resplendence he had graduated to the ranks of the most exalted heralds.) They spoke of the entertainment that was had in the Theatre Royal on Hawkins Street. Clive bemoaned the day that establishment was razed (which he remembered well, because he’d been there the day that it happened, and he remembered not just the wrecking ball and the clouds of dust but the lament of many voices that came to his mind: Jimmy O’Dea and Maureen Potter and Noel Purcell crying for Dublin in the rare aul’ days and the big American variety stars who had graced the Royal stage down the years and under it all Tommy Dando’s organ playing a dirge). Denny dismissed that version of the Royal as ‘a seedy penny gaff’, and Clive as ‘an old blow-in’, and preferred to talk of the previous Royal on the site, the building that burnt down in 1880, where his great-grandfather had seen Pauline Viardot in Don Giovanni.

They spoke, both of them, about Ireland with such ardour and colour that it was as if Ireland were the only country that mattered to them and all their years in America amounted to nothing. But the Ireland that they spoke about was not one that Rickard recognised wholly from reality. It was an Ireland, perhaps, with ‘Dovelin’ as its capital; one that he knew only from the romantic Irish songs they practised. It was the Ireland of Airs of Erin. It was Hibernia herself. It was the Ireland that glowed brightly in the minds of a certain class of dreamer in about the 1840s – Thomas Davis and Gavan Duffy and the Young Irelanders.

It was a dream Ireland, yes, they both admitted, finally and without any provocation; but it was an Ireland that they once had been prepared to fight and die for to make real, just like those Young Irelanders.

‘Well, maybe not you, Clive!’ said Denny. ‘You were only in the movement because the Davy Langans was the only club in New York that would have you!’

‘Who were the Davy Langans?’ said Rickard. ‘Militant Irish republicans?’

‘Militant Irish patriots,’ said Denny, and stressed again: ‘Militant Irish patriots. It wasn’t from Marx or Thomas Paine that we drew our credo. It was from “Bright Fields of Angelica”. We were after a dream country, oh to be sure, unbound and unburdened by any social realities, or any of the other realities.’

‘It was there in the constitution all right, all of that,’ said Clive, with a drop of the head. ‘But by the end of it were we anything other than a drinking and gaming club like any of the rest of them? I don’t know.’

Denny glowered at his companion, causing Clive’s head to drop further and turn away. ‘There you have it! There you have it! As I said: Clive was only in the Langans for want of a roof over his head! There were some of us still in that movement idealists and activists! Some of us to the last meant to take the dream home and rescue Ireland. If only more of you understood what the Davy Langans was for and it might still have been a force today. But it’s all gone now, and a pity. The last branch of it died out in the Cape Colony some ten years ago, I believe. We once had been a very active branch here in New York.’

‘Ach,’ said Clive, ‘long ago, long, long ago, before any of us –’

‘We died on his watch!’ said Denny, wagging a finger in Clive’s direction. ‘He was both secretary and treasurer when we went under. All North American funding for the movement came through New York. A sudden disappearance of money killed us off! There are questions still unanswered! We died on his watch and he has to live with that!’

‘The writing had been on the wall for a long time,’ said Clive, laughing it off. ‘We folded anyhow, and we merged with the Cha Bum Kuns up the street, and the few of us left in the branch were taken in here, at a reduced subscription for a while.’

‘“Merged” is a good word for it!’ Denny adjusted himself in his seat. ‘Eaten up! Utterly subsumed! By golly, if they’d known there were some of us would have borne arms for a cause would they have taken us in so fast?!’

***

It was difficult to sing through all the many interruptions. There was one pesky club member, a man from an old Dutch family, who took enjoyment from bursting into the room. Usually this man had been enjoying wine somewhere else on site.

‘Here they are again!’ he boomed in one evening. ‘Oh, they’ll love you, the hussies! You’ll have them lining up outside the stage door at the Carnegie Hall.’

‘Go away now!’ said Denny. ‘I won’t have this, or any excuses that my friends make for you.’

This particular interruption on this night moved Denny to make a vow:

‘From tomorrow we take our rehearsals to my apartment. What do you say, men? The environment here is not conducive. I think it is time to strike out on our own.’

He pointed to the ceiling. It was a chequerboard, of orange and blue panels.

‘East Prussian orange amber and Dominican blue amber. The soapstone beside us was shipped from Persia. They’ve plundered the mineral and cultural wealth of the world. From us they’ll take our spirit, put it up there in mahogany in mawkish motifs of fiddles and harps. I’ve always felt a certain condescension within these clubhouse walls towards the Irish, haven’t you, Clive?’

Clive looked uncertain, rearranging the flaps of his jacket at his groin, and dithered over a response.

Denny jumped back in: ‘There’s a latent racialist sentiment in this city. The reason these pug-dogs are so popular in New York today is that blackface entertainment has been outlawed. There’s a latent irrepressible fondness in the people for little white clowns with painted black faces. They will seek to characterise you. I think it would benefit us to take ourselves away from this clubhouse. We must work to extract the essential in what we do and concentrate on it, never lose sight of it. Keep it and concentrate ourselves in it. We will not get that here.’

‘Hey, you guys! Are you still fighting off the hoes or what?’

‘We will not get it with that nincombocker around.’

Denny turned his gaze on the Dutchman until the Dutchman had shrunk behind the door again. His eyes lingered on the closed door for some moments; furious, then pensive.

‘I will say though that he has brought to my mind an important issue. If we are to be committed in what we do we must commit fully and no compromises. Both of you would do well to take on board, before the start of your singing careers, a bit of advice. I heard it first from Maestro Tosi, my singing teacher in Milan. I did not pay much attention to it at the time; I remembered his words only too late, and how forcibly they struck. I remembered them on the very day of my wedding. They seemed like the most fearful admonition at that moment. He had said, “Do not go rushing into marriage before your career has begun!” Now let me be fearful with you both – let me be fearful with both of you! But then the time for marriage has long passed for you, Clive! And you, young man – Rickard – no woman would have a man that looked like you!’

***

In the privacy of Denny’s apartment, away from the taunts of other club members, physical exercises could be performed. The purpose of these exercises was to improve the musculature of the chest walls, diaphragm, lungs, throat, tongue and mouth, and to bring legs, spine, shoulder-girdle, neck and head into the correct relationship.

The first exercise of any evening involved adjustment of the pelvis in a standing position by means of rolling movements so that it was relaxed and the intestines lay relaxed also, as in a basket. The idea was to inculcate good posture. Legs were held in such a way as to cause the balance of the body to shift backwards. To this end, splints and yokes carrying buckets of water were imagined. The singer, said Denny, was no different in a certain respect from the butler or the docker: his was work performed on the feet.

Broad vowels unknown in speech were held to keep the pharynx open. Denny said that eventually he would introduce eggs into the men’s throats and that when each man could keep an egg in his throat without breaking it he would know that his pharynx was elastic enough to achieve all the necessary shades of dynamics and timbre. Scales and a system of forced coughs would sharpen the ventricular mechanism. Correct unhinging of the mandible was practised, with particular regard to coordination with lip shapes. Awareness, on singing of the brighter ‘ee’ and the duller ‘ah’, of the muscles that closed the entrance to the smelling bulb in the upper nose would burn a nerve pathway to allow the voluntary control of these muscles. These muscles could then be brought into play for tonal manufacture, along with the muscles of the throat.

‘The face is a mask for the purposes of singing,’ said Denny. ‘It is one of our key resonators. The mask has to grow so that it reaches behind the ears. Then it will have the maximum opening.’

To improve suppleness of the ribs, the men vigorously beat imaginary timpani with their fists while singing in the middle voice for thirty seconds at walking tempo.

‘Let’s be wary at all times, men, of the Bs, Ds and hard Gs, and I am not here talking about musical notes. I am talking about consonants. Firm closure of the glottis could kill stone dead the vibrations of the vocal cords.’

Strength was built in the omohyoideus muscle by saying the word ‘omohyoideus’ one hundred times at an increasing pace. A strong omohyoideus was needed to keep the larynx lashed to the backbone during singing of the A-range of vowels.

All exercises were ultimately assumed to give native vowel sounds the best possible chance.

‘The special character of our songs is held in the vowels. You see, men, in music there is a unique set of Irish vowels. They are rounded like the English vowels but their articulation must never result in the sacrifice of the R sound. The R must, at the very least, be trilled. Our Irish vowels will be found by knowing and practising the Italian, English, French, American and German vowels. They lie somewhere among all of those.’

During exercises a set of charts was tacked to the wall depicting the anatomy of the structures under improvement. These charts were huge powdery things, variegated with minute creases, which had to be unfurled with great care. Denny had taken them from Italy with him. They had originated at the medical school in Bologna. The larynx looked an immensely complex piece of machinery in the charts. The ribcage was simple, stark and frightening. Awareness of these structures would lead, the thinking went, to more nerve pathways.

A formula for sublimation was written on a sheet of paper and also stuck to the wall. It was never mentioned. It read:

100 JOULES OF ONANISTIC FERVOUR = 100 JOULES OF RELIGIOUS ZEAL = JUST AS EASILY 100 JOULES OF ARTISTIC PASSION

***

‘Tell me more about Denny’s time in Milan with Maestro Tosi,’ Rickard said to Clive one Thursday evening ahead of rehearsals. They had met outside the clubhouse and were now – having been delivered by the uptown subway – waiting for a crosstown bus to Morningside Heights and Denny’s apartment. A smell of caramelisation on the air – a uniquely New York feature of the colder months – tortured them both.

Clive said, ‘It was a period so brief and embarrassing in Denny’s life and career that it rarely comes up, and I’m surprised that it ever does.’

Rickard said, ‘I’m ashamed to say that I hadn’t heard of Denny before.’

‘I’m not surprised that you hadn’t. This was a star that burnt brightly and went out quickly. But a source of historic light.’

‘I see it,’ said Rickard. ‘I see it. It beams through the universe.’

Clive stood stolid, beaky in profile, looking up the avenue at the crest of the hill against the fading pearl of the sky and at the approaching cells of headlights. Rickard was suddenly embarrassed at his own open enthusiasm. An icy cold wind blew through the cross-street. He pinched at his dripping nose.

‘Nineteen … when was it?’ said Clive. ‘Early fifties. I was a young lady in Heet. (Heet is the name of a townland.) My parents left me one night with my brother on our own to go to a concert in Bundoran. I believe it was for the opening of a ballroom. Denny Logan was giving the concert. I did not know this at the time. Only later, after I’d met Denny, and I wrote to my mother, did I know this, did I know anything about Denny. I’m afraid that Denny’s time in the limelight had passed me by entirely. He was one of a crop of young Irish tenors in his day, one of the best, so it was said of him. There was no shortage of tenor singers or concerts in those days. For a very brief time. Before the girls’ attention moved elsewhere, on to the rock and roll and what have you. Then the tenor voices were forgotten, and with them Denny Logan. You young people would find it hard to believe that tenors were ever a popular success. I found it hard to believe. But the girls went crazy for the tenor voices, they came with flowers to the concerts. The singers used to hand out photographs of themselves in the carte style, and they looked all blushered up in them, bruised below the eyebrows, and flushed in the cheeks. My mother brought home Denny’s that night, and posted it, later, to me here in New York. I could not understand the magnetism, but I understand it now I do. You bring me out you do.’

Clive took a long pause.

‘You do, you do. You bring me out in Donegal you do. I have not spoken like that in a long time. Must be that you’re Irish. I do not like it.’

‘I see it too,’ said Rickard. ‘That magnetism, despite certain masking features. But I don’t hear …’

He checked himself.

‘The voice?’ said Clive.

‘I don’t mean to be so plain but it’s quite …’

‘Monotonous,’ they said together.

‘Yes,’ said Clive, looking at his feet. ‘It is sadly limited.’

‘So what happened to that voice in the meantime?’

Clive leaned back against the glass of the bus shelter, then stood forward again.

‘I don’t know. But I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he had accidentally or purposely disturbed in some way a fairy mound. Bad consequences are known to result from such an action.’

***

Within a few weeks of rehearsals Denny, Clive and Rickard had a core of fifteen songs for their set and a repertoire that extended to three dozen more. They were satisfied at last that their voices achieved harmony: Denny steadfastly held the middle; Rickard cleaved to and weaved around him; Clive skirted the top. They had a name for their trio too: the Free ’n’ Easy Tones. It was of course Denny’s name. It was not a traditional-sounding name, he conceded, but it had a spunk and a jizz about it that might catch the eye of modern audiences.

Rickard was excited about the idea of performing and making money out of it, but he couldn’t help wondering if Denny’s expectations of how their music would be received in the modern city were unrealistic. Did this residual affection that Denny insisted New Yorkers had for Irish tenor singing carry to the young people? It was hard to imagine, and New York was a young city. The young people seemed always busy and sometimes angry and interested only in young music and fashions. The boys were feminised yet somehow thrusting, like wicked regime-favoured women of mercy-free places of the East. The girls were not people Rickard could imagine in the nursing profession (apart from the girls he saw on the streets in medical scrubs, and there were many of these girls). All the young people were in thrall to the great technology cult, Puffball Computers. In every coffee shop they were bent behind the orbs of the hoods of their Puffball machines; if they were to lift their heads at all it was only for an incoming young acquaintance who they would acknowledge by dislodging then quickly reinstating a single white earplug. He recalled Denny’s enquiry weeks earlier about whether he was the sort who would ‘twist an implement inside an elderly man and rob his things’. He wondered about how easily these words had come from the old man and whether this was so because he had been violated in a natural or surgeon-made opening of his body by angry young people. Many muscles contracted in him at the thought of several gruesome scenarios and he felt these contractions as empathy. He pondered the cruelness of this city with its dry-eyed young people who would cull their living forebears. It was a city, he would later see confirmed, where even the young and the avant-garde spoke very well the language of money; a city that called on you to keep a hard ferocious focus. But he appreciated too that the young people were angry because they were afraid, for he understood that America was dying. Another old man, an Indian-Ugandan in a coffee shop, said that India was taking over and that perhaps Uganda would too if its ‘this’ levelled out to ‘this’ and ‘this’, and he appreciated that the new generation of young people must have felt great pressure to earn money in order to continue to enjoy the luxuries they were used to.

Their efforts in the early weeks to secure concert bookings were frustrated. Denny rang some likely venues – supper clubs and cabaret rooms – but all responded by requesting a sample of music on an internet website. This was something none of the men were either capable of providing or inclined to provide. Besides, as Denny asserted, an Irish tenor concert was about more than just the sound of voices; it was the experience of the live performance: seeing the joy and melancholy of song in the faces of three men; borne in their deportment, the plight of an injured linnet as a symbol of the plight of a nation.

Denny also contacted an Italian entertainment agent he had known many years before but had not been in touch with for a long time. The agent, Denny said, had promised to enlist a theatrical-set designer of his acquaintance who could create cycloramic backdrops for them. There was talk too of elaborate three-dimensional stage props, round towers and passage tombs and such, from which one or all of them might emerge as part of their act. The agent said that he knew opera-house managers in Campania and Sicily, including that of the San Carlo in Naples, and that if all went well the Free ’n’ Easy Tones would soon be touring the south of Italy and that they would be millionaires. It all sounded too wonderful to be true, and of course it was. Some days later, after another phone call to the agent, Denny was told that the trio would have to audition for a place on his roster.

The old man fumed.

‘I have offered him a private concert in these rooms yet still he demands we line up outside his decrepit offices with the sword swallowers and the cowgirl troupes. Well schist and frack to that! He can stick his auditions in his cameo locket and stuff it in his cannoli! And curse his dead mama! We’re better than this, boys!’

Then one Sunday evening Denny told Clive and Rickard that he had had a dream during a nap that afternoon. He described it with the solemnness and detachment of a religious mystic, looking away and into himself in recollection of the vision.

‘I saw loudspeakers attached to telegraph poles in a bocage-like landscape playing the music of liberation.’

‘Were they playing our music?’ said Clive.

‘They were playing Al Jolson. They were playing Al Jolson. Listen now – we must find a mosque. I believe hundreds have sprung up around the city in recent times. We’ll get a willing muezzin – bribe him if necessary – to play our music over his loudspeakers and have it echo down the avenues.’

‘We’ll need to make a record first, to play it on his stereo,’ said Rickard.

‘We’ll look in the Yellow Pages!’ said Clive.

‘Yes!’

Denny bounded humpbacked from his chair like an excited monkey. They were all excited – at the way they seemed to harmonise and relay on this gathering idea. They ripped leaves and sheaves from the directory – the hand of one beating away the hand of another – until they reached the R listings. They found a number – one of several under ‘RECORD COMPANIES’. Aabacus Records. Denny straightened his back and went to his phone. Rickard took a deep breath, went to the window, tore back the Turkish curtains. To the south, a huge glowing nebula that changed through phases of intensity and colour hung between the great entertainments of Midtown and the proscenium of cloud above. All seemed poised and possible.

‘Fellows!’ called Denny in a loud rasp with his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone. He beckoned the others near. ‘“The Caul That Jack Was Born With”, all right? When I slide my hand away. On three …’

Some twenty-five minutes and ten songs (‘The Caul That Jack …’ / ‘Cogitations of My Fancy’ / ‘’Tis Very Cold For June’ / ‘The Malefactors’ Register’ / ‘Empress of the Americas’ / ‘Evidence of the Glimmie Glide’ / ‘The “Celebrated” Windy Song’ / ‘Letters from France’ / ‘A Pike in the Eye’ / ‘What I Shall Have Been For What I Am in the Process of Becoming’) later they took a pause, took a step back, and Denny signalled that that was enough. They had given the best possible account of themselves. They would change the world.

With the return of the wail of far-off sirens, and as the light in the room seemed to pulse and pitch as on a boat adrift, Rickard realised that it was ten past eight on a weekend evening and that no record company would be open for business. Also, he noticed that the year on the front of the directory was ‘1961’.

There came then the sound of laughter – cackling laughter, as troubled as it was troublesome – from up the hallway and out in the landing. Denny swung open his front door. A big man, broad as a sandwich board, was creased over on himself.

‘Jeremiah! What are you doing?!’

The man stretched to full height, rising to six and a quarter feet. He had flaccid dangling arms like downed electric cables, and his shoulders were held confidently apart. He had short black coarse hair, pale pimply skin on a babyish face, and unclear milk-blue aboriginal Irish eyes.

‘Jeremiah! Were you laughing?’

‘No, sir. I was crying. I was weeping at the sound.’




4 (#u2c9f8ffd-26e5-5b79-881e-f892e7753d9d)


The thought came suddenly to Clive Sullis that the creatures who had returned him to his body had at last caught up. He began to run – crab-ways, turning, instep patting into instep. In so far as he was in any state to be observing anything he observed all of the colours at once and only grey. A weather condition rose above the trees of the park. Any and all of the trees, they all looked the same. So did the grassy areas. There was no telling where he was, or in which direction he was going. The sky was the sky; towers towered beyond like the fairy follies. Pathways of chewed chewing gum. Choo choo along, he said. Just keep on, keep choo choo-ing. He spun around and the man in the chewing-gum trench coat was gone. The world continued to spin. He was in a cartoon. More like it he’d had a stroke and all this had been assembled using a computer. He wondered when he’d had his stroke. Because it seemed likely that recently he had had a stroke. He was bothered lately. He took more time with decisions. He sometimes did things and was not sure when or why he had done them. The delicate man he was outwardly had started to seep inwards. Fears he had not had since the nineteen pissstained seventies were coming back more wretched, more fawsach, than ever. Irish words had been creeping into his speech. Rude words had been creeping into his speech.

He plunged his hands deep in the pockets of his long black overcoat, narrowing his already thin frame, and hurried along a path towards a bright open area. Ah, but he knew this place. The Conservatory Water, according to all the maps and guides; the toy-boat pond, as he thought of it. He would stop by here sometimes, on the way back from the Boathouse, on his way out of the park. He had just come from the Boathouse, in a roundabout fashion.

He kicked up some late-winter mulch and tore at a salt sachet in one pocket. He rested his foot on the kerb that ran around the edge of the pond and tried to rally his nerves. In the water his reflection was in pieces. The man by the wheelbarrow in the chewing-gum trench coat – had he been the same man inside the Boathouse, he wondered; the man in the mould-blue sweater sitting on his own by the bar, tipping at something in a little pot? It was hard to tell. The man by the wheelbarrow had not only been wearing a chewing-gum trench coat but a trilby, or a homburg. He had also been wearing sunglasses.

Clive Sullis thought to himself: Why? But why now? Why were they coming, after all this time?

Why, because he’d been given, lately, to saying too much. He’d given himself away. He’d let the mask slip. He’d told perhaps rather too many people that he had once been a woman. He realised that now.

This was possibly a condition of his stroke. Or it was a function of his mind. His mind knew what his body did not know by this stroke. His body, at the last, when it came to it, taken by surprise and feeling betrayed, would put up a struggle, pulling in gulps of air and throwing out gobbets of phlegm. It was all it knew to do. And his mind, in its pathos, knowing what was coming, was trying, in its way, to put his affairs in order.

And so he had gone around telling anyone who would listen. And they’d laughed in his face. ‘But sure we knew!’ they’d all said, in words of that order, or in the way they’d looked back at him. And he’d looked at his reflection and seen that it was true: funny; though he’d been a manly girl, he was never quite the manly man. Perhaps it was in the outline of the eyes. And perhaps it was in the nose – and the surgeon had even offered to take a bone from his backside and bolt it to his nose, give him the pugilist’s nose. But he’d worried, stupid girl, that he’d have toppled over while seated.

And it was a pity he’d told so many people because it had been a good disguise until then, he said now to nobody (pulling out the elasticated waistband of his trousers and pouring salt on the sore around where his outlet pipe met his skin – the salt being medicinal). I mean, although I’d never made much of a man, it was still a pretty good disguise – I looked nothing like I did before. I looked nothing like her, that person, me: Jean Dotsy.

And by God Almighty, he’d made a good fist of it. Out of necessity, the very need to survive, he’d given it all he’d got. So that before a year was even out he’d wanted to be the best man there was. She grew into himself, in whole.

But it was a disguise. Still it was. He’d forgotten that. In wanting to grow into it, and in giving it away finally, he’d forgotten that. Why did he give it away? Because he needed everyone to know. Not to know that he’d once been a woman, no. But that it was a disguise.

And he’d go back now, if he could, if he could give his pursuers the slip, he’d go back to the Colombian who sold him his cantaloupe melons, the man, one of them, he’d told he was a woman, and he’d say, ‘No – no. There’s something else.’ And he’d go back to his neighbour, Mia, who he’d told too, and he’d say, ‘No – no. I knew you knew that. But have you since wondered why? If I tell you now that it was all just a disguise, a way to go into hiding, would you like to know why it was so?’

And he’d go to Denny, he would. He would go to Denny, who had thought he knew all that there was to know. And he’d say, ‘You think you know me. You think you knew who I was, and what I became. But. Listen.’

If only he could be given the chance now. If only he hadn’t opened his big bog mouth.

He looked out over the pond for a few minutes. Children and their minders raced yachts and clippers and tourists were spread about. If he stayed here, no harm would come. This was the idea of safety in numbers, this was the feeling of safety that came from being in somebody else’s scene, a windless Dutch scene. This was the play of the light. He could wait here for the man. Where was the man? There he was. His form stretched above and below the line of the kerb. He was as still as the bare branches.

Clive watched him and waited for him to move but he did not.

The enemy: safe to think of him as that now. The envoy. He thought back to the wheelbarrow; the way, after he’d spun around, the man had disappeared, gone, into thin air, in a whip and a swirl of leaves. He knew exactly the enemy he was dealing with here. He looked about him, at women his own age and at little children in paper-boat hats. Common birds of the north-eastern United States that did not have a care. The world was spinning. Litter, little weightless scraps, ash, followed a spiral descent. No amount of witnesses, no number of nobodies, would protect him. He knew exactly what he was dealing with. The spy costume no doubt was deliberate. A taunt. This is what we are doing, yes.

***

A night weeks before. Clive Sullis woke from a nightmare that was gone in an instant and he was worried about blood clots to the brain. He woke up screaming, screaming. The screams out of him. That was it. Just: ‘Pissstains!’ ‘Jisolm!’ Like that, bursting through darkness. Like the original language. The first words after the bang. As if something had broken down and something else was made in its place. False and crude. This was the story of his life. Why couldn’t they see him for who he was?

He sat up and patted the bedclothes around him, letting them cool, and his breathing settle.

He had an obscure memory of getting up in the night with a headache and pulling apart the presses for paracetamol. He remembered having a dry throat and that he was nauseated too and that he was convinced a plastic fork was stuck in the root of his tongue and that his head was a head of lettuce and that he was halfway through a prayer when he realised he was praying to Peter Stuyvesant, the last governor of New Amsterdam. This was an obsession now: Holland. This was the trouble after the bang. Memories from now on might only be vague, or split, or not memories at all. Of the moments before he woke, before the outburst, he could recall, he thought – what? Material, chippings. Lines and circles. Ones and zeroes. These things had been falling through his mind against a black background. But of the day before – of the waking day before, he could recall almost everything, he thought. He remembered he had read that because the beaver ate only tree bark its diet was considered vegetarian. Now hold on a minute, he said.

He made himself a cup of coffee and brushed his teeth and swept his jacks across the table with his arm and tried to keep active in his apartment at 1202, The Birches, Stuyvesant Town. He knew who he was, in name: Clive Sullis, self branded. He knew his age: seventy-four. These were the present identifying stamps. But what of his long-term memory? Could he write his whole life story, if given the time, in broad strokes at least? Yes, he felt that he could.

He poured himself another cup of coffee, tipped out the rest of the container of sweetener on the saucer, and dropped in three of the pills. And he had also read of pills that could help with the despair of getting older. And that they worked by giving you a good view of yourself in the world and making you realise that you are unremarkable and that any of the oddities that you worry the rest of the world might notice are not noticeable at all. He thought that he would have to nullify this knowledge if these pills were to work on him, but he did not need to think so deeply now. He did not need to be fretting and thinking or fretting about not thinking. He needed to relax was what he needed to do. He should not be fearing the worst and he should stop being so hard on himself. He should allow for the fuzzy memories, for the confusion, for the bad language, for the worries, given his age and given every change he’d been through.

Later that day he was not so coherent. Parting a way through a scrub of cane chairs under the umbrellas of the terrace he greeted his good friend Denny by saying that some day he would say something, that there were some things that needed to be said, that in all their years of friendship there was one thing, that really there was one thing, that –

‘All right, Clive, all right. Sit yourself down and stop making a holy show, will you? The cold is getting to all of us.’

***

He made it as far as the subway station. He was under no illusions about any of this. He waited by the steps, in front of the MTA booth, where it was said that you should wait for safety’s sake, where behind a pane of glass smeared with scratches a beautiful young woman was absorbed in a magazine. The station was not busy with people. A teenaged boy was spinning a girl around by her haversack and the girl was screaming because she was coming close to the edge of the platform. Three youths watched with awe and amusement something on the track. Beside him a woman and her ward pulled at cords of liquorice from a paper bag. The announcer said a downtown local train was two stations away. The commuters gathered themselves. He moved off the steps and to the white line and stared into the ribbed gullet of the tunnel. Choo choo, he said.

One station along, at 59th Street, a large crowd squeezed its way on to the train. His carriage filled up with huge shopping bags stuffed with duvets. There was a collective release of breath, and here and there laughter broke out. He looked along all the people on the side opposite him, then he leaned forward to look at the people on his own side. There was no reason to believe that the man in the trench coat had got on at 59th Street. Why not just have done with it further up, out in the open, on the street? He could have caught up with him if he’d wanted to, on 72nd Street, or on Lexington. That said, somewhere between Madison and Lexington he had seemed to lose the man. He most definitely had followed him out of the park, he was sure, but then somewhere on the street he had gone, perhaps ducking into an apartment-block lobby, or crouching in the flower beds in the middle of Park Avenue.

Or hopping into a taxi. Most likely. Most evidently. This was exactly what he had done: at the other end of the carriage a door opened to a gush of hissing and grinding and slammed shut again. The man stood still for a moment, as if decompressing, or as if preparing to make an announcement. Ladies and gentlemen, a few words about safety. It was comical, almost. The enemy/the envoy. Chewing-gum trench coat and trilby, or homburg. Now he was moving again, all deference, tipping his hat to the woman whose bags were blocking his way.

He sat diagonally opposite Clive, twenty feet away, in clear sight. Nothing was in the section of aisle between them except duvets, folded in quarters. He opened the top buttons of his coat to show a sliver of mould-blue sweater, took off his hat and placed it on his lap. So this was the creature who had staked him out in the Boathouse, had pursued him using all means at his disposal. This physical – yes, physical, Clive was surprised to note – specimen. Thin on top; wispy strands of red backcombed hair clinging damply to the sides of his head. A colour to his skin. It was not quite a high colour and not quite a tan. He had the complexion of a hearing aid, and almost the glaze: something other than blood coursed through his veins. His head turned slowly in Clive’s direction as if on an oiled track, his face set in palsied neutrality. His eyes were watered-down green; they stared into Clive’s, looked through him, to say, ‘There – we are going to there.’ Behind him a poster read: SNUGGLE UP TO APPLEDORN’S HALF-PRICE DUVET SALE. Any second Clive expected the train to derail in a shower of white sparks and feathers.

They pulled into 23rd Street, one station from home. He would make his exit here. He waited until all who were standing had disembarked and then he sprang from his seat with as much suddenness as he could muster. The doors snapped behind him, nearly catching his coat. But he was safely on the platform, out and away. But – there was the man ahead, stepping out from the other end of the carriage without a glance behind, going now with the main flow of people, but proceeding slowly, with deliberation. The back of his neck glared. The skin looked painted on, like the skin on his face – resin on an invisible surface. Once, when Clive was a tall young girl, his brother had attacked the neck of a football hero with a rod because he had disgusted him, he said. The thought came to him now. He could attack the man’s neck, cut off whatever was feeding the brain. He could ram it with his elbow, then hand himself over to the law. They might be lenient, if he came clean, told them everything, every detail, right from the start.

Some people were moving against the main current, walking in the direction opposite to the way Clive was facing. They were heading for another exit, behind him. He went with this movement, flipped around, and hurried up the stairs. On the concourse above he was presented with a choice – a choice and a man playing ‘Rest, My Woolly Wolfhound’ on a saxophone. As he hurried up the steps for 22nd and Park he found himself transported. He thought of the pale cone of Errigal and the honeyed scent of gorse. And he thought that if souls and bodies with them could be transported they would have him where they wanted him, and they would surface with bronze hurls from the prickles, but they would not get their milk because he did not have diddies and they would be even angrier.

***

When he first emerged into New York he was still a young woman. Her name was awkward bony Jean Dotsy and her introduction to city life had been a Dublin of livestock sales and Swastika Laundry vans. In New York she had woken into a dream and for a while she experienced a golden time because the city was a place where she could lose herself and at the same time she knew it would tell her everything about herself that she wanted to know. She had for a long time known that she was a woman who loved other women but now she said it to herself and it felt like both the making of her and a declaration. Back in Dublin she was known as an independent girl but in New York she had another word – variant. She was a variant. She got the word from a kind of manifesto in a magazine that another woman who was also a variant had given her. Perhaps she had been magnetically attracted to this woman sitting on a bench in Washington Square Park or perhaps she was simply tired on that day, her first in New York, and had wanted just to observe the assembly of variants who were all gathered to march in support of basic rights for black people. The woman on the bench scribbled down the address of a restaurant where later the variants on the march were meeting. But Jean did not want to promise anything and she was naturally suspicious of being part of groups she did not know much about. And the wet creamy gravel of Washington Square Park patted under her feet in a paste like peanut butter and she had so many things she wanted to experience so soon: peanut butter and Times Square and jelly and jazz and Chew-butter Cracknells and the fish market and the Jews and the diamond sellers.

Of course she was so tired by that evening that she needed somewhere to sit down or where she could put up her feet. She was not prepared to go back to the hostel just yet, for the previous hours had given her a feeling for and a faith in the community of people. Everywhere was the sense of people exaggerating simple actions for spectacle. The city felt like a film – she recognised the fire escapes from the films, and the way the women walked with a waddle while pulling fabric taut over one shoulder – and as long as the days resolved themselves calmly she could leave aside the fear that had brought her here and could, indeed, be encouraged by the initiative she had shown in coming. They were golden days, those first in New York, when so much was happening in society and music and such and such and such. More recent decades had been drab, which was why everyone was secretly thankful for terrible news events so that they could feel there was excitement and meaning to their days and they could say later: I lived through those times.

But hers were golden times.

He codded himself in telling himself this. Hers were times that were given to her by her pursuers and they would want them back. They had given her back her life and she had wriggled her way out of a bargain.

***

There was a trick, there was a trick, to giving him the slip. The important thing was not to be forced by the pattern of the streets. He circled a block and doubled back. He made to cross an avenue, stopped in the middle, and doubled back. He said to himself that he must make his own trails and defy this logic superimposed on ancient lines. In New York people moved in the channels or lay spent in the shadows. He hobbled through gloomy arcades in already gloomy streets: scaffolding had sprouted everywhere. On 19th Street he felt the leer of stone carvings, hideous caricatures of mercantile men. He spun around a stanchion, checking through all degrees. At Gramercy Park he knocked a cup of froth from gloved hands. He brushed it, she crushed it. An upshoot of gloop. She screamed, ‘You’ll pay for that, asshole.’ There was no time for recompense. He would die running. They would kill him. He would die under these stone eyries.

He would need a weapon. He knew of a butcher’s shop nearby that would have hooks and cleavers and long knives. Perhaps he could persuade the butcher to sell him a hook. Or he might be able to buy a bone, a cow’s shin bone, or a buffalo’s. In the butcher’s shop he found himself behind a line of people. He considered leaving, but then the butcher’s assistant asked him what he wanted. He was aware that the other people in the line were annoyed that he had been asked before they had, but he had a base frenzy about him and they would not make a fuss. He scanned across the platter under glass and saw a mound of purple-brown tongues, outsized tongues that were still furred and glistened with pinpricks of light. A tongue was a weapon his pursuer would understand. He could slap him across the face with it and it would have mystical, symbolic significance. He got his tongue for one dollar on account of how late in the day it was.

He slumped into Duffy’s Tavern on 23rd Street and sat on a stool at the bar in front of the taps knowing he would be challenged soon. The barman would not care for raw meat on his premises. He gripped the tongue between his knees with his nails. He kneaded his head, his hair, and the knots and mounts beneath. He pleased the barman by allowing him to show that he could fix an old-fashioned but now the tongue had slipped from his fingers and hit the floor with a splat. He kneaded his hair with his other hand, the one he had been holding the tongue with, and his fingers were through his hair before he realised. Oh my God, he thought, his hand shaking. He was a delicate man. He feared people – he feared his good friend Denny, this delicate man. That’s what Denny thought, that’s how they all thought of him. A delicate man. He didn’t want that side, the side that was on the outside, to infect him. He was not this delicate man. She had not made this man to be a delicate man. For the love of Christ, if she was to be a man could she not just be a man? She had howled and wailed at this delicate man. She had tried to command him and watched as he failed her, put on airs, apologised for everything. Her words would go unheard, lost somewhere. The voice was tiny. Tinny. Always she was aware of the great breezy gaps in this largely empty vessel – always she was aware she was the occupant of a vessel. One had never, never nearly, fitted into the other. Now the occupant was shrinking from disaster. Jean, he called to herself, from outside to in. Wake up you feisty thing, you big lumbering bitch.

‘Mind if I sit here?’

His pursuer.

Chewing-gum trench coat. Enemy/envoy. Trilby or homburg. The voice was, like his own, an Ulster one. It made some kind of sense to him that this should be so.

He did not look in the creature’s eyes and he was uncertain as to whether he should take the hand that was offered. He fastened his eyes on the floor where his tongue was laid out in black blood like a slug.

‘Oh, Saint Sybil. What’s that? Your dinner?’

He found the Ulster accent placating, like the sudden rush of some mild narcotic.

‘Hey. Allow me to introduce myself. Please.’

He looked at the creature’s knees.

‘My name is Aidan Brown. My friends call me Quicklime.’

The barman dawdled at the taps, waiting for an order. Aidan Brown climbed on to his stool, his trench coat and hat still on him. Clive opened his mouth.

‘Yes?’ said Aidan Brown.

‘Are you a fairy, Aidan Brown?’

‘Quicklime, please … No, I’m not a fairy. My friends call me Quicklime because I’m a sailor and I know the best way to treat scurvy.’

‘Is that true?’

Aidan Brown shook with laughter.

‘No. My friends call me Quicklime because I have pitted thick skin and I’m fast on my feet.’

‘Are you a fairy?’

‘No, most definitely not.’

‘Have you been sent on behalf of the fairies?’

‘No. I represent only myself and the organisation I represent.’

‘Reveal yourself please and do whatever it is you have pursued me to do.’

‘May I ask, first of all, your name?’

‘Do you not already know?’

‘It’s evaded me, that one, I admit.’

Aidan Brown ordered a pot of coffee. Eventually he took off his hat and got the barman to hang it up for him. He rolled his trench coat in a bundle and sat on it. In the piercing spotlights Clive was able to observe that he indeed had pitted skin. His face was not frozen and palsied now but puffed out and twitchy with tics like that of any regular middle-aged man after taking vigorous exercise. The humanitarian in Clive was glad he had not attacked Aidan Brown in the neck. At the same time he was aware that a game of wiles might have been in play.

‘Am I to call you Quicklime?’

‘If you like.’

Quicklime looked across the arrangement behind the bar. A grid of pigeonholes was decorated with bunting and each flag on the bunting was a county flag of Ireland. Amid the reserves of whiskey, perry and absinthe was a lead bomb labelled ‘Replica of Saint Patrick’s Bell’.

‘You could feel at home in a place like this,’ said Quicklime. ‘You’re from Donegal?’

‘Yes. Close by Ballyshannon. I left it when I was eighteen to go up to Dublin.’

‘You haven’t lost the burr. It’s softened a bit, mind. But that’s burrs for you. Burrs burr, brogues rattle. I’m from your neck of the woods. The village of Garrison. Caught the wrong side of the border.’

Clive tried quickly to ascertain the layout of Duffy’s Tavern. It was a narrow and deep and typically light-starved single room. He looked for escape routes. But he was somehow assuaged by this mention of a real place, Garrison, and the implication that the listener would understand the nuance in the words ‘caught the wrong side of the border’.

He traced the rim of his glass with his finger.

‘You’re a Catholic rather than a Protestant?’

Quicklime laughed again.

‘You’ve been out of Ireland a long time, my friend. Nobody asks questions like that. I’m a Protestant, as it happens. But a nationalist. My parents named me after the great British way station of Aden. Later I gaelicised the spelling.’




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