chipper in Clonmel. He’d had a mother a demon drunk, and a brother by the name of Denis. He was half blind, and something told him there had been an accident, and he had got money from it, which was now down to less than six hundred euro. He knew his way around the inside of a deep-fat fryer and home, for now, was a small unkempt room with a couch and a sink.
When he got there, he unscrewed the bottle of Cork gin and got good and familiar with it. He had the broad strokes of things and he knew that he had been drunk many thousands of times, mostly on account of the heebie jeebies. It was through no fault of his own but he was simply not the sort of man who was comfortable in the night-time. He was familiar with the motions of alcohol. The elevations of mood were no news to him, nor the sudden dips. He knew what it was like to drink big in small towns—it was hard work sometimes, you had to have the same good time over and over again.
He picked up a golf magazine, then another, then noticed a magazine near the bottom of the pile that did not seem to be in any way, shape or form about golf. It was in fact a pornographic title and as he flicked through it, sipping at the gin, he discovered its theme. It was about women who dressed up by wearing animal tails. There was mail order, even, where you could send off for a horse’s tail attached to a belt. Now maybe he was an innocent man for fifty, but this was news to him and there in the grim room, at two in the morning, it became an intense agitation. He got up off the couch and began to pace.
‘Is this what it’s all about now?’ he shouted. ‘Is that what’s supposed to be going on around the place? Somebody’s mother or somebody’s daughter? Hah? Going around a kitchen in a horse’s tail? Stood over a pan of sausages? Hah?’
He caught sight of the old quarehawk reflected in the window, pacing and ranting, and that shut him up lively. He turned off the light and lay down on the couch. He drew the malodorous anorak over his head. An unquiet sleep came. There were images full of dark portent, images of mountains and still water. It was an enormous relief when he woke to grey light in the window. He went immediately downstairs—though it was just gone five in the morning—and he got busy sorting out the grease traps. He looked out onto the street and it was familiar but odd, as if streets were running into the wrong streets, as if the hills were wrong, and the sky at a crooked slant, it was the amalgam place of a dream out there. A tremor arrived with the rise of the morning.
This student has been coming around Wednesdays for three or four weeks now. He is doing a project about low-income families. Richie think it’s a disgrace, this fella is just a snoop, but his mother and father put up with it because they’re bored, is what it is, because they’re on the wagon, and they’ll talk to just about anybody to escape the monotony. The student has all these daft bloody questions. Tonight it’s about God and Mass and all that.
‘Do you go to Mass yourself, Mrs Tobin?’
‘Sometimes,’ she says. ‘Not that I believe that much in Jesus and stuff but it’s just lovely sometimes, you know, if there’s a choir and the way things are said.’
‘The ritual, you mean,’ he says. ‘It’s the ritual of the thing you admire?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And what about yourself, Mr Tobin?’ he says. ‘Do you have beliefs?’
‘I don’t know, really. I mean if you’re asking me do I believe in miracles and walking on water and bread and fishes, I couldn’t look you in the face and say oh I do, yeah. But if you’re asking me when we’re dead do we just lie around and rot in the ground like cabbage, well, I don’t know that I believe that either.’
‘And what about you, Richard?’
‘Oh don’t be asking him,’ says the Da. ‘Richie’s a fucking pagan.’
He put a mop to the floor of the chipper. There was some relief in laying the suds down, squeezing the mop out in the wringer of the bucket, taking the suds up again. The day had arrived into Clonmel like a morbid neighbour, dour and overcast, the sky was low and dense, it was close in. As he swung the mop back and forth across the linoleum, things started to come apart altogether. He would begin to get a clear image, then somebody would drop a rock into the middle of the pool. Tremors queued up.
‘Ah stop it for fuck sake,’ he said.
But it’s the Ummera Wood, he’s fifteen years old and pustular, a hank of hair and hormones, and Denis is a year or two older. They’re bush drinking—naggins of vodka. They sneak up on her quiet and she freaks out and screams, then laughs with relief ’cause she knows them—Denis and Richie. The three of them sit around drinking, and she’s slagging them off because they’re younger than she is. They drink the vodka. Denis gets quiet and moon-faced for a while, then he strikes up, he says Linda would you snog Richie, would yuh? Fuck off, she says, he’s only a baby! Snog me so, he says. Nah, she says, you’re too fucking ugly! And he has her by the hair then and she’s down on the ground. What are yuh crying for, he says, we’re only having a mess? And he’s on top trying to screw her and Richie kneels down and puts his in her face and he says b-bite me and I’ll fucking b-b-bate yuh.
He peeled spuds. He made batter for the burgers. He rolled out the potato cakes. He filleted the fish. He wondered where Denis had got to, and then he saw him: he was on his back underneath a Subaru Legacy at a garage outside a small town on a trunk road to Cork. He was covered in oil and diesel, there was junk everywhere, tarpaulin piles, dead Fiestas, tyres and wrenches, scrap iron, and Denis found that life was very hard sometimes because you cannot take a spanner to it.
(And love is very hard to do.)
Richie locked up the chipper for a while and he walked through the town to clear his head of all the crap that was building. He would stay in Clonmel for a time at least, nobody seemed to know him here—they say God looks after drunks and children. He walked to the town’s far edge and there in the small garden of a house on a new-build estate, he saw a boy and a girl holding hands and crying and he went to them. He said, what’s the matter? The dog is dead, she told him, and he asked the dog’s name and she said the dog was called Honey, we had to bury Honey. He said I know a song about Honey and he sang the old Bobby Goldsboro number. A mother appeared at the front door, arms folded, thin smile, and he made a move back towards the centre of the town.
It was coming to life just then. Trim old ladies busied along towards the shops. Men were going into the ESB to talk about bills and easi-payment plans. He hummed to it all as he walked and then he thought that maybe if you tried hard enough you could transmit the thing itself out into the world and each time he passed somebody new he said lightly under his breath just the single word ‘love’, he said it to the postman and he said it to the guard, he said it to the old ladies and to the cats on the walls. The sun was making a good effort to come through the low banks of cloud; traffic streamed down for the new roundabout. Five sad slow notes played on a recorder. It was turning into June.
Animal Needs
Meadowsweet Farm is perhaps not the place you have prepared for. There is no waft of harvest to perfume the air. There is no contented lowing from the fields. These are not happy acres. Meadowsweet Farm is put together out of breeze blocks, barbed wire and galvanised tin. The land is flat and featureless. There are sawn-off barrels filled with rancid rainwater. A snapped cable cracks like a whip and lifts sparks from a dismal concrete yard—the electrics are haywire. The septic tank is backed up. The poultry shed is the secret torture facility of a Third World regime, long rumoured by shivering peasants in the mountain night. Desperation reigns, and we hear it as a croaky bayou howl. There is a general sensation of slurry.
John Martin stalks the ground, with a five-litre tub of white paint spattering a trail behind him. He pulls up short and considers a gate and decides to give it a quick undercoat, and does so. He nods to himself, acknowledgement of a job at least begun. There was an offer on the five-litre tubs, and hasty streaks of white are showing up all over Meadowsweet Farm this morning. He is painting gates and fences and breeze-block walls, barrels, sheds, pallets—if it stands still, he paints it. This is a brilliant white that will glow eerily after dark. It’s as though he’s preparing for an airlift evacuation.