while he looked on from the window along with the other neighbours. It was only when he saw her digging the weeds unbothered by the audience that he changed his mind. She freed him from the fear of being judged. He no longer cared about being seen and took over the work himself, growing vegetables in neat rows, a section for flowers, new fruit trees, a patch of lawn and a place to sit in the sun.
His garden fire is what I remember most, the smoke drifting over the boundary walls, sending a message across the world, the neighbours could hardly see a thing, they had to close their windows, it drifted through the house, it was in all the rooms, in our clothes, in our beds, it went out onto the street, the big cigar cloud of his gathered weeds smoking through the afternoon, into the night, still smouldering in the morning.
Helen arrived as soon as her yoga class was finished. My sisters ran to open the front door and let her in. She was like a visitor from another world. They examined every inch, the black beret, her long dark copper hair, the black corduroy jeans, her light green jumper finished off square across the front. Her freckled shoulder came leaping out as she leaned forward to put down her bag on the floor in the hallway. In the kitchen, she spoke in German, remembering words she had learned in Berlin, testing them out on my mother with a contorted twist in her voice. My mother laughed and treated her like a child, slapping her on the thigh – you are a mouse.
It’s a time of revolution. Every act contains some degree of rebellion and disobedience. There is a feeling that things are changing, civil rights, women’s rights. The art scene is full of naked bodies. Things have become less sacred, less respected. Irrelevant things are being brought centre stage, a strange truth is discovered inside objects which have previously been merely functional.
We hear about a German artist who is using butter and felt in his work. He makes a legend of his own life story, he wears a hat to cover up the head injuries he suffered when he was shot down as a pilot in the war. He puts on spontaneous happenings, in New York he sat in a room with a coyote, in Berlin he took up a brush and began to sweep the street with an audience around him – sweeping out, he called it.
New ways of protesting. New ways of challenging the past. In Berlin, I had been to a play where the actors did nothing but offend the audience. Everyone was being shaken awake. There was respect for madness.
The bar where I used to sing in Berlin was full of people with new ideas. One night, a man came in carrying a sports bag with him. He didn’t order a drink. He slapped the bag down on the ground and fell on his knees. He opened the bag and took out a large raw bone. The meat had been stripped from it, straight from a butcher shop, a dog would love it. There were some red bits of flesh attached, the knuckle of a joint, like a gleaming white door handle.
Right in the middle of one of my songs, the man held the butcher’s bone up in the air like a warning. The bar had a cobbled floor and a green wrought-iron fence around the stage, the ceiling was a backlit panel of stained glass. It was located right under the railway bridge, near the main station. Trains could be heard rumbling overhead.
Everybody stood back.
I stopped singing. The man with the bone was in his thirties, long hair down to his shoulders. He wore clothes that attracted no attention, a pair of worn jeans, the collar of his shirt had rounded ends. His boots had the laces undone.
Kneeling on the cobbled floor, he held the raw bone in his hand and let out a roar. Without saying a word, he began gnawing at it, ripping off bits of pink flesh, snarling as he ran his teeth up and down along the white bone. His jaw was unshaven, there was a rage in his eyes, staring ahead into a distant place. The bar was silent, no drinks were being served, even the trains seemed to have stopped running.
Nobody knew what to say. We were given no clear signal whether it might be reality or invention. Hard to know if the man was performing or whether he was truly hungry and couldn’t wait to eat. Was he angry, was he out of his mind, was he doing it to scare the customers, growling like an animal as he licked and tore at the remaining meat? No indication that he cared if people were watching, he seemed unaware of his audience looking on with astonishment, amusement, pity, mistrust, afraid to laugh. The space around him was clear. He might as well have been kneeling in the middle of a steppe alone, a man in war, a man holding on to his life, a man who had come across this treasured section of bone, glancing anxiously over his shoulders to make sure nobody was going to take it off him.
Each country has its own way of breaking the silence. An artist arrived in Dublin one day carrying a huge wooden crucifix. On Good Friday, he was seen walking down the main shopping street with the cross on his shoulder. People might have mistaken it for a re-enactment of Calvary, but it was more of an art installation, a happening, he was questioning the power of the church. He leaned the man-size crucifix up against the wall of Kehoe’s pub and went inside for a drink. His art had no fear. He sat at the bar staring at his pint as though he was looking at the Atlantic.
All that revolution unleashes a provocative force inside me. I don’t need much encouragement. I am still trying to escape the grip of my father’s rule. I am full of rebellion. I believe in nothing. I have no collective instinct. I find it hard to belong to any group, I follow no team, I even have trouble shaking my head at rock concerts.
I stage my own private happenings. I get into a senseless confrontation in court one day over a parking fine. The fine had been issued on a quiet road with no parking signs. It was my right to park there. I had a perfectly good argument for saying the law was unjust. But it never even came to the point where I could present my case because I refused to swear an oath on the Bible. I told the court I did not believe in God, the judge roared at me – who made Dublin Bay?
It was too much of a crusade.
What is the point in trying to make a point? The first thing I need to change is myself, my silence, my inability to articulate or even work out what I want to say. My vocabulary is inadequate. Fighting the system, going against the establishment, breaking the hold of authority, none of those terms work for me. I speak in crowded sentences. A rush of misplaced words that don’t belong to me. I express confused emotions in public that are more suitable for letters. What I say is never memorable, just clumsy and exposed.
I have no gift for concealment. I do my best to speak with guile, but it sounds contrived, like borrowing a scarf without permission.
Better to keep listening.
I am struck by a book I borrowed from the Germany library in which the main character decides to create something that will never be recognised. It describes the furious love of a man who devotes his entire life and fortune to the task of building a monument for his sister in the middle of a forest. His decision to place the structure out of sight is central to his achievement. He builds his cone-shaped construction in a silent place where it will never be seen by anyone, not even by his sister, the person for whom it has been created. It becomes a monument to what is unsaid and unseen.
What a wonderful idea, I thought. A man compelled to squander his living energy on something that makes no sense, erecting an utterly useless edifice in a remote place, for what? For the sake of nothing? For love?
Do something useless today.
Helen has been encouraging me to write. All those silences can be put together into a book, she says. Things I have been collecting since I was a child. The absurd language wars, the mismatching countries, I have a needless need to put things in writing.
I brought the rusted shears found in my mother’s garden with me when we were leaving. At home, I propped them up on the mantelpiece in the empty front room and stepped back to admire the shape. Something about the fact that they could no longer be used as garden shears appealed to me. I began writing down what they looked like. Metal antlers. The skull of an impala. The eyes are missing. The skin has been torn off. What remain are the bones of a face. The rest of the carcass has been severed, possibly dragged up into a tree by a leopard.
Why was I grasping at these comparisons? Going for the refuge of a story? What things look like instead of what they were, the suggestions they flung out rather than the material facts? Was I protecting myself from the real world? Was I describing myself?