I say, ‘I was in the neighbours. They turned on the television set. The Herbs was on the television set. We watched The Herbs!
‘What age were you?’
‘Five? Six?’
‘Grace,’ he says, ‘the neighbours only had RTE. It was 1971 before even suburban Dublin, that centre and flower of modern civilisation, went multi-channel.’
‘Fuck off.’
‘I hate to break it to you Grace, but The Herbs was BBC. You saw The Herbs for the first time in your trendy little adolescence, on the BBC.’
‘The Herbs was RTE.’
‘Murphy agaus a Cháirde was RTE, Dathaí Lacha was RTE. Of course you’re too posh for Wanderly Wagon. You have to invent some fucking Protestant childhood with Bill and Ben the fucking Flowerpot Men!
‘They had an aerial.’
‘That’s not what I’m saying.’
‘There’s nothing intrinsically Protestant about Bill and Ben,’ I say. ‘You don’t start making chutney and knitting hot-water bottle covers just because the gardener is on his way. You don’t get more channels just by singing Nearer My God to Thee!
‘So what’s your excuse?’
Oh but Marcus knows what everyone’s game is. Marcus will be revenged on the whole pack of us — because Marcus did not escape from his family like anyone else, he escaped from history. He understands his country intimately and is hurt by the fact that it does not love him back.
I say ‘You just think that “urban” means “privileged” and “inauthentic”, because where you come from, everyone went to Mass and lived in a cow’s arse and fucked their uncle on a Saturday night, while we sat around forgetting who we really were and trying to speak proper.’
‘Yes,’ says Marcus, ‘that’s exactly what I think.’
Still, he dresses like a successful man. I imagine his body underneath it all, soft and underused. I want to sympathise with him, for all that intellectual effort. I want to sympathise with the fact that revenge will never be enough and success is a lie. I like the way he hates me, even if it is for the wrong reasons. When he says the word ‘suburban’ I feel arrogant and masochistic and a little bit horny. I want to open his wallet and smell it, but I am afraid it smells of shit.
Don’t ever ask Marcus about his childhood, because he will tell you, because he will be right. You ask him about any day in the past, you say ‘What happened to you on the 19th July 1969?’ and he will say ‘That was the day that someone laughed at me.’ As for me, I don’t even have that much — not even a lie like that to call my own.
I rang my mother and she said we were at the seaside in the summer of 1969 and weren’t anywhere near a television, so when it came to the moon-landing we listened to it on the radio and looked out the window at the moon. Thanks Ma.
As for Brenda de Banzie, she thought she might be the old one with the crinkly smile and the breathing problems on Dallas. ‘That’s Barbara Bel Geddes,’ I said. So how was she expected to remember, when they were all of them the same and half of them dead?
‘And how’s your young man?’ she said.
‘He’s fine.’
‘I hope you’re being good to him.’
‘He has painted the kitchen,’ I said.
‘Well there you go.’
‘He has painted it white.’
‘White! That’s a terrible colour for a kitchen.’
‘Well there you go.’
‘How did you let him paint it white?’
’He has a virginity complex,’ I said.
‘Grainne,’ she said, ‘he came to the wrong house.’ My mother knows how to swing a paradox. Grainne is my childhood name, if you can call children virgins. And I changed it to Grace because at school they called me Groin.
‘Grace,’ I said. ‘Just call me Grace.’
‘A nose by any other name’, she said, ‘would smell.’
I went into the white kitchen and cut my hand on a can of chopped tomatoes, for which my mother is to blame. There may have been a lot of blood, there was certainly a lot of tomato. Half of it hit the white wall, like someone was shot and tried to get to the light switch in the dark. I shagged the rest of it into the bolognese, blood and all.
It did not agree with Stephen. He ended up calling God on the big white telephone. ‘Gawhhd!’ he said. I slept well.
Stephen has never seen God. This was part of the swiz of dying. Stephen is still working his way up — as far as he is concerned I am just one more rung on Jacob’s ladder. He doesn’t even know what is at the top. Dread, I suspect.
I tell him he has a long way to go, choices to make. Will he be a Throne, a Power or a Prince? Will he shine red-gold or violet? The places of the seven who stand before God are already taken, so he won’t be blowing a trumpet on Judgement Day, but others have fallen and more may yet fall. In the meantime he should stop getting excited by the numbers on Sesame Street and take care of his diet, because the puke of angels smells like pestilence and despair.
He blames the food. In the kitchen onions sprout through their net bags. He turns potatoes green just by looking at them. The water tastes sweeter and there are lilies in the sink. He has a way, I think, with light. There is the sound of bursting glass as herbs outgrow their jars and dough rises like an alien in the airing press. Nevertheless, his shit smells like shit and then some.
He is getting thicker. The edges are flattening out of his face and the marks on his neck have faded to a porcelain blue. In a year’s time, he says, I will be naked and chubby and carrying garlands for you. I do not want a child, I tell him, let alone a cherub.
He talks to the telly all the time now, just like the rest of us. He says ‘Go on, do it!’ he says ‘Well that’s a lie for a start!’ And he cries and he switches channels — I suspect without using the remote control. When I come in from work one evening the screen is blank and there is music coming out of the speakers. It looks like DeValera and Kennedy have died again and both on the same day, or the bomb has dropped silently somewhere and they are rootin’ and tootlin’ for the end of the world. Then a clatter of ads breaks through and I realise it is just the picture that’s gone.
Sitting in the centre of the screen is a dot, like the old-fashioned nub of light that used to stick when you turned a set off. So I go over to the box to give it a good belt. Bang. The television gives a round of applause. Stephen laughs his laugh of celestial gaiety. He has painted the glass a strange and luminous black and in the centre is a small and remarkably detailed picture of the moon.
Behind the black the pictures are jumping around, agitated and blind — contained, like a couple making love in their in-laws’ house or a hoe-down in a funeral parlour.
But the moon is beautiful. Even on the television the moon looks beautiful. I wonder what is so sad about it. The Sea of Serenity, The Marsh of Sleep, The Sea of Plenty like plaster coming off a wall. My father’s voice telling them quietly, if my mother is right, under the huge sky and the black noise of the waves, The Alps of the Moon, The Lake of Dreams. And there they are, settled in Tranquillity, two men in a tin pot. You can see them if you look hard.
‘What a lark!’ I said. ‘What a jape! Now scrape that off before you come up to bed.’ So that I can feel like I am winning, though probably at the wrong game. The pictures are banging against the screen, the pictures are bursting out all over as Stephen turns to smile at me. His eyes still pull at some vital desire, making my innards and lights feel clotted and strung out. Even now the moist and newborn look is fading from his face. I pull the