woman, who is quite frail, is almost throttled in an embrace by the black-haired woman. There is a wood of lime trees around the dance area. I had a black-haired aunt who wouldn’t behave herself when I was a child, dancing at the crossroads, especially with young men. Dances which were periodically interrupted by a ferocious display of Irish dancing by girls in dark emerald dresses and cloaks, in black tights. A few funfair swings near the crossroads.
She married a radio expert from Sligo. They opened a pub, but she drove him off. When my grandmother died my aunt wanted to look after my grandfather, in his little town house with the gipsy vardo in the front window, but my mother took him. My aunt became unruly and she died, in one of her reprieves from mental hospital, in her pub.
My first summer in London I stayed a few days with her husband. Walked down the Uxbridge Road on a Saturday afternoon, past a black people’s wedding, hair in cornrows, white roses in lapels, to a flat where there were beds in the kitchen. There was a mass card for my aunt, a camellia in her hair, beside a picture of St Bonaventure.
‘We put towels over the mirrors the day she died,’ a young man who had his shirt off told me.
The old lady in the ginger wig sat at the table across from me tonight, in sailor trousers, sailor top, sailor cap with gold braid around the peak, platform high heels, and kept nodding to me. The orchestra played ‘Hong Kong Blues’, ‘Jeepers Creepers’, ‘Two Sleepy People’, ‘You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby’, ‘La Mer’, ‘We’ll Meet Again’. Someone had told me that the old lady had owned a hotel on Wenceslas Square which was confiscated in the early fifties, when high-ranking officials were being thrown downstairs to their deaths in Czechoslovakia, when there had been mass rallies in Wenceslas Square, with people like tornado clouds, when trams ran up and down the square, when there was a rendezvous with Stalin’s profile around every corner, alongside posters of faded, aquatic-coloured cherries, for even then the Czechs had a fondness for communicating in pictures on the walls.
There was puce-violet kohlrabi in the little shop windows in Prague that summer, and peppers that looked like snoods. Some of the shop windows were mainly yellow, like a Dutch painting, with a few items in them. There were window displays of red hats with ladybird spots on them, and mauve trilbies. Men with satchels full of vodka beside them throwing bread at swans; old men huddling past alabaster-faced Marys with alabaster-coloured lilies, sequined in gold, in front of them. There was a poster for ‘The Mikado’ everywhere, a poster for Dvorak’s ‘Requiem’, a girl with one eye on it. There was a poster for a Goya exhibition with a man with a letter in one hand which he seemed to be giving you, the word ‘Expulsis’ on it, his other hand missing. Tram number seventeen brought you to Podolí, where naked men waited in the lemon light of a sauna as if for a ceremony, and where a jubilant body-building life-guard congratulated me on being Irish against the dazzle of a pool.
It was part of a journey East, a journey which had begun in Berlin the previous summer.
From the eighth floor of a high-rise, gauze curtains ruffling, it was a look back. It was a city which grew out of little tales I’d written, not knowing where they’d come from, whence a hotel, a crossroads.
It was a city which grew out of the punitive damp of a little flat in Catford. But in coming out of those things it also showed an alternative truth – that life is humbler than art and more loving.
Sometimes, early in the mornings especially, I spoke to her: Amsterdam, you woke crying. I did not know why you were crying.
She was looking at a painting of a huddle of women with hats like geese on them in the Van Gogh Museum and suddenly she turned to me and smiled.
Later that autumn I journeyed to Italy alone, to Florence. Walked along a street where there were salmon-coloured hearts with lace borders under a statue of Mary. I got accommodation in a dormitory in a monastery. There was a broom hanging on the wall at the end of the row of beds on the opposite side to the door.
She started having an affair in Dublin with a boy who came from the countryside near our town, a house with lily of the valley wallpaper in the sitting-room, a house always visited by the tinkers at the same time in spring. He had rooster-orange hair and the same colour was rumoured to be elsewhere on his body.
The following summer she left for the United States.
I heard Rodrigo’s ‘Concerto d’Arjuanez’ today as I was painting walls and it was a miracle. Afterwards I went to the Pacific at Cissy Field. It was very, very deep blue. There was an old Chinese woman there in red socks and I threw a pebble in for you.
Two years later I found her. She had joined a religious group. We stayed in Carmel, with an old Czech man who wore a black beret with a tongue on it. He gave us pancakes with strawberries. He’d left Prague when he was twenty-six.
Then we stayed with an Indian family near Arcadia, and used to watch the elk come down to the ocean, in the fog.
But when she came back to Dublin the following summer a girl, a supposed comrade, attacked me at a party. ‘You’re incapable of having full physical relations with women except with Eleanor.’ She raised a closed fist to indicate an erect penis.
I couldn’t make love to Eleanor any more. She went back to California and I left Ireland, carrying impotence, making stories, doing odd jobs.
Sometimes our cities connected up, and we were in the same place, or near one another. But she was always just that girl in the café now, behind a window.
9 August 1987. I sit in a café near the Vltava. Sunset on the edges of women’s hair as if on waves of the sea. Boys in asterisk-splattered bermudas skating across Maje Bridge.
‘Do you know Seamus Heaney?’ a worried-looking boy from a nearby table, who’s heard that I’m Irish, comes up and asks me. There are four boys with shaven heads at the next table. A man with a little bullion of a goatee looks as I answer the boy. A man in a beret with a tongue has his head bowed over an empty plate as if in prayer.
There is a boll of light to the left side of Prague Castle.
The orchestra plays ‘La Paloma’, ‘Melancholy Baby’, ‘As Time Goes By’.
Pictures of robins, clumps of pansies at their feet, ripple, in my mind, into advertisements for Kincora Plug.
There were dead aunts outside the windows of cafés at sunset, and against the Vltava visions of drownings in my town when I was a child, a chain of swimmers across the river searching for a body.
A woman opened a wallet beside me, and instead of the young Slavonic face inside I saw the face of a drowned Teddy boy.
‘I’ll be watching to see if you go to the altar tomorrow,’ his mother admonished him on the Saturday he was drowned, urging him to go to confession. He was laid out in a brown habit. At his funeral a phalanx of liquorice-haired girl-cousins had carried wreaths of purple-carmine roses.
Years later, his father, a widower, put a memorial in the Connaught Tribune, where the photograph looked tragically fashionable and the handsomeness savagely unrequited. ‘That we might meet merrily in Heaven.’
At night there were the cafés, the one with the lady in the ginger wig, the one by the river, the same repertoire of songs over and over again.
I was troubled by these songs. I could hear my mother’s voice through these songs. ‘At Night When I Listen to Late Date I’m in Dreamland.’
She and her boyfriends would go to Dublin and dance to Billy Cotton, Ambrose, Jack Hylton, Oscar Rabin.
Then she got tuberculosis, had her lung punctured, refilled. She broke off an engagement because of it but didn’t tell her boyfriend, and so left him broken-hearted and bewildered.
Her doctor was in Mullingar: Dr Keenan, Church View. It was while she was attending him that she met my father. He recoiled when he heard about the tuberculosis, but after a few months proposed to her and they became engaged. He told her about the funeral of his mother in 1926, how it was one of the biggest for many years in East Galway, the blinds drawn on every private house