Square on that first day: lime trees in bloom on a downsloping pavement; flanks of ice-cream awash with viridian syrup in plastic tubs in a window; fat creamy cakes called Budapest with wide-brimmed chocolate papal hats on them; a young man in shorts and white workcoat darting between buffets in a sudden downpour; amber make nude statues over a magazine shop; a man in a buffet cleaning up, a disabled hand outheld, like an unpeeled prawn; a dreamy-eyed woman in the same buffet, her white workcoat stained lemon, like butcher’s blobs. There was a young tinker in Lewisham called Foncie who had a pen-pal in Prague and one recent summer, according to legend, he journeyed to Berlin to meet her in Friedrichstrasse.
High-rise buildings, bluish, like another city, on the horizon, the yellow and green fields slightly carmined with poppies. I got off another red bus. There was a gypsy family at the bus stop, a gradation of them, father, mother, two sisters, a brother, tattoos on some of their wrists. It had rained torrentially and suddenly the sun came out, the grey sky with a rust tint like an orange galvanized roof on a shed which was part of the panorama behind our house in County Galway. A boy sat on a stool in the meadow, a plastic bag of orange in his arms. A woman with fungus-like veins on her legs stood by the bus stop, a little away from the gypsy family. And for some reason there were flowers in a glass jar, isolated, in the meadow.
I had to get away from London. I had a brother who’d been a monk in County Waterford. He left and came to London, followed me, surveyed me. You were compounded in clan. When he entered the café I frequented one day, looking around, an old lady tramp seated near him over tea, I dashed into the lavatory and locked myself in.
Some people said living in London was an escape from Ireland, but there were more people from County Galway in London than there were in County Galway. While I lived in Dublin I met middle-class people. In London I had to deal with family again.
Every day I saw the images: Irishmen with red faces, chipped noses, tottering along Camberwell Road; a tramp wearing a silver Bridget’s cross on a pendant playing at a UN squadron pinball machine in a café in Kilburn, a girl companion alongside her with a blue ribbon in her hair, her cheeks the red of the Virgin Mary’s cheeks on roadsides in Ireland.
Afterwards, when I had the breakdown, I dreamt of it over and over again, this place where I came alive after the not so much death-existence but fretful, shadowy one in London; sweet-peas, sunflowers, geraniums, hollyhocks in the gardens at the foot of high-rises; rabbits in pens; old people talking to one another from deck chairs; tarmacadam tarnished with spillages of coal; groundsel, elder, warts of poppies in the grass; young Africans wandering around in happy huddles; a woman in a T-shirt showing a fighter-jet wheeling a child; a song blasting out from a high-rise, ‘I Love Your Daughter, I Love Your Son’; washing decorating every balcony, pink the favourite colour; dead lakes in the distance. I lived on the eighth floor, in a bare room which had plywood walls. One day I looked out and saw what I had not noticed before – a field spanned by blue chicory.
I made love in this room to a long-haired boy called Radvj whom I met on a path in the fields. He was from Bratislava. He was wearing gooseberry-green bermudas and told me he was looking for somewhere to stay. He stood proudly in front of the bed before getting in, showing off his genitals. There was a tattoo on his left shoulder which depicted a cairn.
‘The quiet sculpture of your body,’ I thought.
‘You’ve got a beautiful body.’
‘Not as beautiful as yours.’
He told me of his favourite sexual memory, being fucked by an older boy in a field at night, season of the gathering of the hay, while he looked into the boy’s eyes.
I wanted to smell his buttocks. I wanted to smell the pink T-shirt thrown in a heap on the floor. I wanted to return to life.
I thought of Foncie, the tinker boy, my nearest connection to life in London. His twin brother, Vincent, had been killed by a car near the encampment when they were six. An uncle was supposed to be minding him. Later, that uncle went to Brighton and drowned himself.
Porridge every morning of his life; at seventeen a job with a cousin’s painting business; first sex with a Chinese prostitute on Lee Road; the pubs of the West End marauded in large, flashy groups.
With every wedding there was an essential video. Though born in England they often journeyed to Ireland – the occasion of the erection of a grandmother’s headstone, of a wedding. London tinker young mixed with the young of Ireland on hills in Cork city on Sunday nights.
There was a car dump near the encampment. A famous actress had gone there on a supposed errand to buy ginger ale, taken alcohol and pills and been found dead by a tinker dog.
Foncie too had felt the life being dragged out of him by London and, with a crest ‘Wild Ireland’ on the elbow of his jacket, he’d gone to Berlin and met a Czech girl on Friedrich-strasse. They never corresponded again. She’d been carrying white chrysanthemums. They’d strolled to the temple-like building nearby where two helmeted soldiers stood guard by the flame to the unknown soldier, the lime trees lit up, in the late afternoon August sunshine, in biblical incandescence.
With Radvj I dreamt of tinkers on a cart passing a shield of oak trees just outside our town in County Galway and shouting after them a customary tinker farewell, ‘See you in Clare-morris.’ My eyes consumed then in a colour like the pink T-shirt of my guest, who left abruptly early in the morning.
The Prodigal leaving his father’s house, corn being loaded distantly, a glimpse, just as it was in a photograph, of an ancestor in a cloche hat bending over the grave of my mother’s youngest sister.
Rest in peace, O dearest Una
Thou art happy
Thou art blest
Earthly cares and sorrows ended.
The headstones are splattered with lichen and meadow barley grows in profusion in the graveyard.
Women bearing baskets of redcurrants across fields that were lime-coloured, poppies on stalks that had seized up in the field, men raking lime hay, an azure tooth of a small mountain above them.
A pudgy, slightly obese Christ child in a see-through gauze dress, the edges of the dress gilded.
Lambeth Palace, the foreign painter having endowed a pearly light to Westminster Bridge, a tiny figure in a red swallow coat supporting himself against a privet hedge, back turned. The main character in the little film I made was dressed like that. An Irish poet in London at the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth. His favourite song had been ‘Lillibullero’ and he’d drunk himself to death in Catford. On his tombstone in Lewisham you can read ‘Let fall a holy tear.’
An uncle of mine, my mother’s half-brother, had worked in a jeweller’s shop near Lambeth Palace in the mid-nineteen-forties. When he was a teenager he’d joined the army in Mullingar; the Twenty-seventh Infantry Battalion. Then he’d moved to England. Wrote a card home, ‘Rotten lonely here.’ A grey embankment scene with painted wallflowers on it. Fought in Egypt, wore a hat like a funny-shaped brioche and desert shorts. Returning to England he worked in the jeweller’s shop in Lambeth and became engaged to an English girl with lavish ginger-blonde hair. One night, when they were dancing in Forest Hill, just after the compère announced, ‘Please take your partners for the last waltz’, and the band started up with, ‘Who’s the lucky man who’s going home your way?’, the hall was hit by a doodlebug and the place confounded. He’d wandered through all the nearby hospitals looking for her, and eventually heard her screaming in one of them. But it was because she had toothache. He died a few years after the war. No one really knew why.
His sister, my mother’s half-sister, the woman who wrote to my mother on my birth, also died young. She died of tuberculosis two weeks after my birth.
An open-air dance in Prague. Two old ladies dancing together, one with white hair, the other black. The black-haired one is the taller, she wears dark glasses and her mouth grins like that of an American tough guy. There are men in suits, and men in white shirts and casual trousers. A gipsy woman, in white bobby socks, black high heels, black dress