juke-box.
Perhaps it was beginning then, in a room in San Francisco, what had been overtaking me for years, a breakdown.
On the day after Christmas I walked the hills and looked into the face of an old Chinese lady.
When it came it put me with the ostracized of our town, the Mickos, the woman with the prematurely white hair and the apricot lipstick who used to shout out ‘Glorio, Glorio to the bold Fenian men’ on the street, and walk off with young men.
Mental hospital patients used to visit her and feel her breasts. Sometimes the price was tobacco. She lived in a house with a doll outside in a jersey of the Galway colours, maroon and white, and in the kitchen a portrait of Michael Collins. Sweet currant bloomed around it in May, and in the meadows at the back there was a refuse of broken bottles. Next door to her lived a one-legged man who was a veteran of the First World War. He sat in a cap and coat beside a pile of Hotspurs, Beanos and Dandys. Her business was stopped by the guards and then she sold holy pictures in the cattle mart before going to England. In a mental hospital in South London, in my mind, she was walking away on a street with a porpoise of a National teacher.
Other images of the fifties in Ireland came back in the mental hospital: boys marching to confession one side of the street, girls on the other; women queuing with Vincent de Paul coupons in a classroom on Fridays; turf mould disfiguring poor boys’ nails; emerald school buses, an armament of bicycles by their sides; Children of Mary stalking the town in blue and white carrying Virgin Marys with screw-in arms which they temporarily exhibited in the homes of prostitutes or the dying; barley being loaded on to barges on a canal; campanula in front of the convent statue of Mary, the stations of the cross in Indian-ink black on the white blocks of her rosary.
And an emasculate voice whispered: ‘Do you need confession?’
Years later I saw the prostitute on the tube in London. She was wearing high boots, transparent black stockings with black dabs on them, a crimson dress and a pearl necklace. She’d married a butcher and had two daughters. In a street which mixed nationalities and brands of exile the shop, which also sold Irish marshmallows, bore her husband’s name and the words ‘and daughters’.
Beyond the station from which the prostitute and Guy ‘Micko’ Delaney departed there was the bog with its cormorants, its bogbean flowers, its bog pimpernels, its St John’s wort, its near-violet stacks of turf, its manic plastic covers, its pervasive rainbows. Daniel, a friend at school, who had brown eyes and a sturdily moulded face, used to cut turf there in June and turn it in July to allow it to crust. He put it out in stooks and brought it home in a horse and cart before the dew of August came.
Another friend, an old Englishman, used to come every spring and fish in the bog river. He grew up in the Midlands of England and the bog reminded him of his childhood. He’d gone to university in Birmingham and afterwards taught in Chester. In his twenties he’d go to Norway every summer but then he found Ireland.
‘When I stand alone in this bog I can hear “Crimond” again.’
In my childhood you’d see Teddy boys in red jackets on the station platform against the bog. One Teddy boy was drowned. It was a man who used to steal suits in town and then parade in them on the prom in Galway, past the Grand Hotel, Commercial House, Donnellan’s pub, who recovered the body.
An Irish doctor pursued me in the hospital.
‘You’re clinically depressed.’
He’d follow me past young male patients with shaven heads who looked like Mayakovski.
‘Do you remember Olive White?’ Olive White was Miss Ireland when we were very young. She used to turn the wheel of fortune on the Bunny Carr Show, and afterwards she married English nobility.
‘Be careful you don’t end up chasing chickens into boxes,’ he said nastily one day when I wouldn’t listen to him.
He liked to summon up Brendan Behan’s last days, his companionship with a Dublin prostitute.
‘He always said moving from the tenements to a council house ruined his sex life.’
The young doctor was sitting under a view of the Isle of Ischia.
It was the dark side of the brain; walking through it was walking through Hell. It was the genetically mad side of me, the part that clawed at me. And the landscape I was walking through looked like the landscape around the high-rises in Prague. Or it may have been the landscape around high-rises on the suburbs of Paris. When I slept at night I saw people who were half-dead. They sat on benches, drooping. They looked like Czechs, women in floral dresses and bobby socks, men with eagle or turkey badges on their lapels. Sometimes the black woman from Columbus, Georgia, with the red scarf on her head, sat among them, nodding. There were marigolds at the feet of these people. Marigolds were one of the flowers of Prague. And sometimes, instead of the near-dead, there was a young soldier in sap-green uniform, with straw hair, at a café table, a girl on the other side of the table, the soldier looking out at the amber trams.
A mental hospital with walkways between the top floors of buildings; gargoyles coming out of corners; a coat of arms with antelopes on it; disentangled tapes blowing on paths; groundsel and wild garlic in the grass.
A woman in a scarlet flamenco dress, carrying Tesco bags in both hands, walked endlessly through the grounds, as did Rastafarians with floods of hair and girls with ecclesiastical purple hair.
‘Lesbian wants sperm. No commitments,’ a bit of paper said on a notice board at the entrance.
There was Hyacinth Ward, Bluebell Ward, Narcissus Ward.
‘Are you one of us?’ a man said, doubtfully, to the sound of ‘Hotel California’.
‘Don’t mind where I’m buried as long as I get to Heaven,’ a salmon-faced Irishman said to me. He also told me about holidays with relatives in Rhyl, about the hereditary thatched cottage which had gone to ruin at home.
‘PG Tips always tastes better with you,’ a Polish lady informed me. She had many stories: how she’d hidden under the covers on the back of a truck and got to Berlin just after the war; how she’d stayed in a house in Berlin with some of the rooms missing; how she’d moved to a camp where the Germans, even in defeat, would only drink freshly ground coffee.
‘All I wanted was fish and chips,’ one silvery-haired old man in a suit smiled as he told me.
There was a boy who, in his dreams at night, always walked in Catford, a lighted sign for the Catford Gold Cup in the background. I walked through a landscape after war. It was a bog.
You feel sick inside. You feel very sick, but there is something there even if it’s all over. They did everything in their power to stop you.
Just outside the mental hospital there is a drapery store with white lace roses on the suits.
I went to Brighton that spring to throw myself in the sea, like the tinker man.
First I had a coffee in a café in Soho. ‘Oh, I knew Madame Valerie,’ a woman was saying, almost hysterically. ‘I first met her in 1924.’
‘Welcome to Brighton’, a sign said by the railway tracks, under purple lilac.
Last time I’d come here was the January the Athina B was washed up on the beach. I was with a student from the Royal College of Art I was having an affair with. When I lost interest in him he wrote letters to friends of mine, asking if they were coming to his funeral.
Schoolboys in moss-green jackets had gathered in a bus marked Hove outside the station. A girl with cat’s-eyes glasses and a sixties bouffant hair-style led a shepherd dog with a Lippizaner haircut past a brandy-and-wine shippers.
There was a huge rubber reptile with green spots on him on the opposite side of the street to the beach. The sign said ‘Children under 14 only’.
An Arab girl with henna hair was making a video of her family with a huge camera by the sea, a woman’s and some girls’ faces hidden behind Moslem