Songdogs

THURSDAY, a deep need for miracles

Brutally romantic, of course, but he has kept every single one of Mam’s dresses. They hang in a riot of colours amongst a dozen mothball bags. The cupboard was open in his room this morning when I looked in before going downstairs. Hems spilled on the floor, edges that were unsewn over the years, continually dropped another inch, always lengthening, until even her skirts covered her calves. The sleeve of an old adelita dress stuck out. Some blouses. A dressing gown hung with one shoulder on a hanger. Her sarapes neatly folded on the shelf beside some coiled belts. I stared at the old man asleep in the bed, the marmalade cat on the pillow beside him. His hat was perched on the bedside table, beside a full bottle of Bushmills. There was a bit of a smell in the room — he has bad gas these days. Finds it hard to control. Let one go at the kitchen table last night.

‘Oops!’ he said. ‘Barking spider around here somewhere!’

But I could tell he was embarrassed by the smell — even got a bit of a flush in his cheeks as he walked upstairs to his bed. But at least he sleeps. When Mam was here there were nights she would get out of bed — she was sleeping in the room at the end of the landing at that stage — and sometimes she would go down to work on her stone walls, those black bags collecting under her eyes.

* * *

It was the first time Mam had seen the northwestern part of Mexico, and the Model A negotiated narrow roads that often ended in dry floodbeds. They drove over cracked platelets of mud, past weedgrown churches, through long sweeps of prairie where whitewashed haciendas rose up and flared out against the grasses. In the mornings the towns were alive under spectacular red reefs of cloud, migrating flocks moving through them, and once a single white crane seemed to follow them for miles, noisily flapping in the air, until the bird veered off and joined a mate. Mam looked backwards over the car-seat — she wanted to feel the rhythms of her land before they went to El Norte.

It was a quiet trip, except for the crunch of three jackrabbits under the wheels of the car along a dirt road in Sonora. Mam wanted to chop off the paws of the rabbits at the side of the road — some tribute to her mother — but the old man drove biliously on, disturbed by the rattling gearwhine of the car. Besides, Mam already had a jar full of rabbit’s feet with her, and as they moved westward she affixed a half-dozen of them around the rim of his hat. It looked ridiculous — the way they pattered around his head — but my father bent to Mam’s superstition, put the hat on while he drove. In the vast expanses they haggled with gaunt garage owners over petrol prices. Children in ragged shirts stared as the car threw out smoke. Riders pulled their horses over into ditches. The horsemen sometimes carried rifles, and my father slowed as he went past, guffaws rising at the sight of his hat. He drove with fingers drumming heavily on the wheel, impatient with places, little traces of sweat beginning in the furrows of his brow.

Years later, in our Vauxhall Viva, which we drove around Mayo, an old Mexican paw and a St Christopher medal hung from the stem of the mirror. At times the paw would swing, animated, bashing itself against the windscreen, and Mam watched it as if it might break its way through the glass for her, bring her back to those moments in her country. When we were left alone in the car together, Mam and I, she would hug herself into heavy sweaters, tell me bits and pieces about that trip to America in 1956, how they abandoned the car and never saw it again.

They made it all the way to a coastline dock near Tijuana when steam suddenly flocked up from the engine. They must have looked a sight, the old man waving his hat over the open bonnet, my mother blowing her breath from her lip up to the fringe of her hair, trying to figure out what weather might be blowing in, what colours she might create. As the dockside darkened, my father wanted to tape the hosepipe together, but they had no tape. He crawled in underneath the engine, pounding the underside of the Model A with his fist. Mam began tearing a strip from the bottom of her dress to see if that might work. It was a white hem, she later told me, a single inch of cotton. She recalled it so vividly that it must have haunted her — it was one of the last things she remembered doing in Mexico, her foot propped on the bumper, knee bent, ripping her dress to try to fix the car that was taking her from her homeland.

As she was tearing the dress, a stranger with raven-coloured hair wandered up — the captain of a cruise ship that had docked nearby for emergency repairs. The captain offered them free passage to San Francisco. Some of his crew had disappeared into drunkenness in the tight alleyways of Tijuana, swallowed down into bottles of mescal. In return, he said, my father could bartend and my mother could waitress. The old man crawled out from underneath the car, shook the captain’s hand, flung the car keys away along the dock.

They sailed the rest of the way to America. Umbrella drinks were served by waiters in white shirts. Jazz notes copulated madly in the air, bits of Al Jolson songs mashing against Billie Holiday numbers. The yawning head of a pig was laid out for supper the first night, a red apple in its mouth. My father stood behind the bar in a black bowtie, hair slicked back, revealing the beginning of two small indentations of baldness on his crown. He invented cocktails, shook them with drama. Mam was unable to work, sick the whole time, retching over the side of the boat. She stayed in her cabin while dinner was served. A grey wind blew off the sea for her, the boat combing its way over the waves for a day and a half. Occasionally there was sunshine, but most of the time dolorous clouds drifted with them. When they got near the port in San Francisco, Mam brushed her hair with an old comb and decked herself out in a strawberry dress and a wide-brimmed hat. As she leaned against the railing, the ship jolted against the pier, rocked her sideways, and she lost her stomach again.

My father lumbered heavy suitcases down the gangway. ‘Great day for a wander,’ he told Mam, people flowing past them, ‘great day for a wander.’

That afternoon they went to an old tumbledown building near the Mission, to the offices of the magazine company which had written to my father. The old man had a meeting, and Mam disappeared to the bathroom. Combing her hair in a broken mirror, she must have been amazed at what the cracks did to her face, fracturing her eyes down to her nose, sending cheekbones into a landslide, displacing one ear upwards so that it almost floated above her head. Maybe she ran her brown fingers over the broken sections, reached to take the ear, watched it float away again, her body not belonging to her anymore, the rhythms of the boat journey still moving within it. Maybe she could smell her eyebrows giving off salt and her teeth full of gulls flickering away into flight from a pink deck. I can picture her mouth moving into a small black O, falling out again into lips drained of colour, the heaves of the imaginary waves carrying her face into further fractures as if it were a kaleidoscope, or a million people lending her a piece of their faces, meshing and unmeshing until it wasn’t her there at all, staring at herself. Perhaps one green eye, one brown, one azure, one red. Water splashed up and formed beads within the cracks, beads that held the same broken images, mirrors within mirrors. Reaching for the sink — propping herself up against it, the strawberry dress against the porcelain, her chest heaving — she felt a pair of arms wrap around her.

‘You okay?’

Mam’s face flicked up in the mirror again, meshed with the face of the woman behind her, so that it was all at once brown and white, smooth and pockmarked, full and emaciated.

Cici Henckle had a cigarette dangling from her lips, which the shattered mirror razored into five different parts. She bent my mother over the sink, a liquid sickness splattering her fingers. ‘You go ahead and get it all on up,’ said Cici, smoke billowing from her mouth. She was dressed completely in black, a turtleneck, an obsidian necklace, long skirt with tassels. Her hair was dark, too, lopsided and limp around her shoulders. Long hands held Mam up over the sink for half an hour. ‘You’re whiter’n a sheet,’ said Cici as she washed her hands and rubbed some rouge into Mam’s cheeks.

Mam said nothing. She was propped against the sink, accepting the rouge, watching the mirror settle itself down. Calcium marks ran like musical notes on Cici’s fingernails, moving around Mam’s cheeks. ‘Who’re you with?’ said Cici. Mam flicked her head towards the door of the bathroom.

Outside, my father was slumped in a chair, hat on. The magazine had told him that there’d been a mistake, they needed him in New York, they’d written to him in Mexico, the letter mustn’t have arrived. They gave him cash for the shots of the copper mines, told him to get on a bus across country.

‘Your girl here’s sick as a dog,’ said Cici, when they came out of the bathroom.

‘Come on, love,’ the old man said, ignoring Cici. ‘We have to go.’

Cici, nonplussed, guided Mam to the chair. She kept one arm wrapped around my mother’s waist, and with the other took out another cigarette, lit it, kicked my father’s outstretched feet as if it were all just one natural motion. ‘Say, lover boy, I said your girlfriend here is throwing up God knows how many years of food. And you’re sitting here doing sweet nothing. What sort of goddamn man are you anyway?’

‘We have to be somewhere,’ he said.

‘Where?’

‘New York.’ He said the words breathlessly, as if there were all sorts of camera bulbs erupting from his throat.

‘She’s about as fit for New York as that goddamn hat of yours. She needs to see herself a doctor or something. Get some rest.’

My father nodded, lit a cigarette. ‘She’s just a little seasick.’

‘Seasick my ass — this floor isn’t rolling, is it?’ Cici sat down, leaned towards Mam. ‘You can come to my place if you like. Nothing special, but I got an extra bed. Lover boy here’s welcome, too. Long as he doesn’t make you carry the suitcases.’

Cici’s apartment was in an old house on Dolores Street, not far from the Mission. Sickly white azaleas ranged along the wrought-iron railings, and scraps of graffiti welcomed them along the stairwell. The apartment was filthy. Suitcases were stuffed with clothes, and around them lay papers, ashtrays, bottles, half-eaten biscuits, lamps shorn of their shades. A newspaper photo of James Dean, a voluminous quiff of hair on his head, was propped against a wall, three candles beside it. Cici threw the picture a kiss. Mam’s head still spun as they laid her down in bed.

Cici didn’t have any clean towels available so she dipped a white sock in the sink and mopped Mam’s brow. Cici stayed there for almost two days, sitting by the bed in her black turtleneck, cigarettes tight between her teeth as if she was afraid that they might jump from her mouth and leave her. She was thin as a rib, older than Mam, about thirty. She talked to stay awake, wandered around the room, parted the curtain, pointed out trees, named cloud formations, chatted to Mam as evening stole shapes. A poet, Cici had gone to the magazine offices that afternoon to try to sell some work. She had written one book, which had sold one hundred copies, a small beige edition, the spine of which crackled and tore when opened. It was about a summer spent in a fire lookout in Wyoming. She had typed it on a ream of butcher’s paper while ensconced in the tower, waiting for fires. The paper had rolled incessantly through her typewriter, collecting in giant curls on the floor while a radio bucked behind her. When the book was printed she stayed in Wyoming for two years, trying to sell it, but only a ranger named Delhart paid attention, touting copies around under the seat of his green pick-up truck, amongst empty coffee cups. She had fallen for Delhart, lived with him in a cabin near the edge of the forest, but left him to come to San Francisco with a suitcase full of the beige books. She read the poems in jazz clubs. Men were strung out on Zen and amphetamines, small dharma dolls hanging from the buttons of their lumber shirts. They clapped their hands together at the feet of trumpeters whose bog-black skin glistened with sweat. Shrines of cigarette smoke rose around the bar. Cici’s only payment was a slurp from a jug of red wine, so she had taken a job as a singing waitress in a burlesque club for Asian men. Delhart wrote to her. His letters were full of bottlecaps which she kept in a row under the James Dean picture. Delhart also sent a blade of grass and told her to use it for a ring, quoting Whitman, ‘I believe a blade of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.’

Mam looked down, through her fever, saw the blade of grass on Cici’s finger, encased with tape now, the journey work towards humus.

‘You know,’ Cici told her, ‘you two should come with me back to Wyoming. Not much of a detour.’

She wandered out to the living room where my father was sprawled on the couch. He had a tendency to smack his lips together while he slept. ‘Looks like he’s eating his dreams,’ Cici laughed when she came back in, hovering over Mam: ‘So, how about it? Wyoming?’

‘I would like,’ said Mam.

But later the old man shook his head, looked out the window of the apartment, said they were in a vicious hurry.

‘Why you don’t wait, Michael?’ Mam asked. ‘Why don’t you wait for a day and we will go then? I need some time to get feeling better.’

I can imagine him nodding, pulling his overcoat around him, going out to find a phone, calling the magazine in New York and telling them he was unavoidably delayed. For the next two days he stayed out of the apartment during afternoons, while Mam and Cici talked. Walked down by the water and threw smoke rings out over the bay, the collar of his coat turned up even though it was the beginning of summer. Foghorns keened in. Hell-divers swooped down from loaded clouds above the Golden Gate. He swung off the edges of cable cars, camera poised. When he got back to the apartment the two women were there, in yellow rubber gloves, laughing, the apartment clean, the suitcases packed, and a stack of forgotten books in the corner.

They took a bus across a huge slice of America, where interstates weren’t even built yet. The roads were long and black and shimmery, sometimes interrupted by wandering cows, or herds of antelope kicking across the tarmac, bounding fences. On the journey Mam was sick again. The bus was stopped every fifty miles, and Cici held my mother as she vomited behind the wheel well. She put her coat around my mother’s shoulders, took dry bread out of her rucksack, fed it to her, mopped her brow when Mam began to suffer from another fever. The bus travelled slowly. California stretched itself into a dry desolation; Nevada reared up with sagebrush and juniper; a few wild horses moved in unison through the high desert. Before they got to the Idaho border, the bus almost hit a boy with a dirty white bandage on his thumb. The boy had fallen asleep at the side of the road while hitch-hiking.

‘Goddamn it, son,’ said the bus driver, who stopped and woke him.

The boy had short yellow hair up in wheatfield rows on his head. It turned out that he was on his way to San Francisco, and Cici gave him a crisp new five-dollar bill and two addresses that he wrote in ink on the side of his burlap sack. Some years later, in the sixties — or so Cici told me — she met the boy again at a party, when they were both strung out on LSD. The yellow hair was longer by then, and the boy gave her back the five-dollar bill — he had soaked it in lysergic acid. They ate the bill together over the course of the next three days. Two months later his body was found washed up on the southern end of Half Moon Bay Beach in California. Cici saw it as a peculiarity of her life that faces and moments kept coming back to haunt her — when I met her she told me that she was amazed at how much that bus journey still moved within her, all the people she met, the things she saw, she could recall it all, the bandages on the boy’s thumb, the rattle of the bus engine, the white cloth in her fingers, rubbing its way delicately over Mam’s brow.

The old man sat in the seat behind them, amazed by America moving past. He kept his face glued to the window, fingered his cameras.

By the time they hit Boise, my mother was so dehydrated that not even Cici’s rouge could help her. They booked into a hotel room, stayed for thirty-six hours while Mam recovered. Cici hovered by the bed and talked about Delhart. He was a brown-bearded brute of a man with pellucid eyes. In particular she remembered his hands — huge boats with dirt under his fingernails. She had thought of those hands often after she went west to see the Pacific — they sometimes caressed her at night in her imagination. She had met him after a fire; he had come up to her lookout one evening and ended up spending the night, loving her, afterwards coughing up reams of smoky phlegm into the pillow.

From Boise they hitched a lift on the back of a pick-up truck and my mother began to feel better, the open air rushing over her, the fevers cooling down, a world settling itself in her stomach. Cici, sitting beside her, feet over the tailgate, stared out at the passing of Idaho: ‘Why don’t you guys come stay with me for a day or two? I’m not up in my tower until next week.’ During the night the pick-up sidled its way to the edge of the Tetons, up narrow switchbacked roads, through forests of fir trees, over huge passes where red-tailed hawks were gliding. They huddled together in the freezing cold, under blankets. Cici lit up a cigarette, twisted at the blade of grass on her finger.

Delhart met them in the morning outside a café in Jackson Hole. The ranger had a scar on his face the shape of a horse’s hoof. He kicked at imaginary pebbles. ‘I’ve something to tell you, Cici.’ He waved my parents off, took Cici’s hand and guided her towards a café with elk antlers on the wall, ordered coffee. Delhart told her that he’d met a Ute Indian woman, he’d been afraid to tell her in any letters. The woman was pregnant. He said they could adopt the child, raise it themselves. Cici leaned back in her chair, watched the sweat that came from Delhart’s brow, slowly, in drips down to his chin. ‘What is she? A goddamn postman or something? Pony goddamn Express?’ ‘What d’ya mean?’ said Delhart. The coffee landed very neatly on his green shirt. ‘You’re an asshole,’ Cici said, ‘don’t come near me.’ She stirred her coffee as Delhart left, looked at her hands as if they didn’t belong to her anymore.

That afternoon Cici, deciding that she wanted to visit her tower in the mountains, borrowed a truck and some keys from another ranger. While my father slept in a hotel at the outskirts of town, Cici and Mam drove down long, winding dirt roads together. Mam sat in beside her, leaning over, comforting her. ‘I’m all right,’ said Cici. ‘It don’t bother me none.’ The wind rushed through open windows, already threatening fire with its dryness.

Cici carried a jug of wine as they hiked up the five miles to the lookout tower, said nothing as she climbed, a long green stare from her. My mother trudged behind in a pale yellow dress, up the mountain, around frost-veined boulders, along dirt trails making narrow canyons in the light-shafting trees. They moved up towards the treeline, passed a few remaining snowbanks, stopped together to catch their breath as Cici burst into laughter. ‘I don’t give a shit about him, he’s an asshole.’ Cici was whistling to scare any bears that they might stumble upon. She stopped whistling when they hit the edge of some scree, no longer threatened, and slowly negotiated the boulders towards the summit.

It was an astounding place for Mam to see — snow on the northern faces of the mountains, the sweep of green underneath, eagles on the thermals, no dust for miles.

The tower, a small grey building, was perched on the top of the mountain like a bird ready to explode into flight. A lightning rod stuck up, an obscenity in the air. The rotten carcass of a baby deer lay not too far from a rusting water trough. The door of the tower creaked when they entered, and the air was heavy with must. They sat together, lotus-legged on the floor, wrapped in old mangy blankets, wine passing between them. No clouds in the sky to hold the heat in, they shivered in the cold. ‘I don’t give a shit,’ said Cici again. ‘I don’t give a shit about him, sometimes people just ain’t what they seem, you dream them up for yourself, then — shit, I don’t care.’

She was plucking at the long strands of hair that fell down over her face, rocking back and forth, her knees to her chest. Her eyes fixed on a spider web, insects caught within it. It moved slightly in the cold breeze that came through the open door. Cici rose and closed it, flicked at the web with her fingers. ‘I never gave a shit about him.’ The wine went down and later on, while Mam was sleeping, Cici’s body was a rhyme, a singular rhyme that slipped its way out of the tower, walked across some scattered rocks, down to the water trough, tripped her way to the edge, drunk, stumbling against the metal sides. She stared down into the water and, reeling with alcohol, chuckled.

She swept insect larvae from the surface of the water, kicked her shoes off, placed her socks neatly in them, laid her hands on either side of the trough, swung her body across and climbed in, felt the coldness through her legs, her spine, her hands, the water sloshing around the edges, some drops jumping out to the ground. She moved in the water, watched the creation of ripples, and then propped her feet and elbows on the edge, lay there, chuckled again — ‘I don’t give a shit’ — watched the night, the stars rioting away, the moon a heap in the west moving towards morning, felt the water weigh her clothes down, the larvae fondling her hair, some fireflies flicking luminescence from their bellies around her, and she laughed as she sat in the tub of rainwater, waiting to freeze to death.

Dawn had left some freckles in the sky and it could have been the most peaceful morning in the world when Mam woke up, indolent birds on the thermals and the insects busy at the ends of long grass stalks and the sun moving itself into yellowness beyond the edge of the lookout. She came out of the tower to yawn off a hangover and saw Cici’s body, arms and legs draped over the water trough, blue. ‘¡Carajo!’ Cici’s face looked like it might have been prepared for a mass card. Her lips were set into something approximating a smile. The black hair flared out from the whiteness of the skin. The insect larvae had settled now and they clung to her legs, to her thighs. Mam reached in. The water was oily as it lapped up against the trough.

In Mexico she had once picked up the body of a dead bird, amazed at how light the bones were. She reached under Cici’s languid back. You are so light, she thought. Mam propped her hands under the shoulders and began to lift Cici out, the feet languishing behind in the trough, propped up on the edge. Mam tugged again. The feet fell, hard and lifeless, against the ground. She dragged Cici back to the tower. A small cut opened between the toes. Mam looked around the tower, frantic. No radio. She laid Cici down on the floor, took off the wet cothes, wrapped blankets around her cold cold body, put her fingers in under the blankets and rubbed her heart, where there was still a faint slow thumping. Her hands moved furiously, penitently. Mam took off her own clothes and covered Cici with them, put some socks on Cici’s feet. ‘Michael!’ The shout to my father echoed around the mountains. Nothing stirred. ‘¡Por Dios!’ The carcass of the deer rolled up in her mind. She took Cici’s hands and placed her fingers in her mouth. For a long time she sucked on the fingers, until she saw the first stir, the head moving sideways a little. Come on. She fitted as many fingers as possible in her mouth, let the warm saliva roll over them, the nails with the calcium marks — when she was a child she had been told that calcium marks, when they rose to the top of the nails, were a sign that she would get a gift. With Mam’s tongue down by the lifeline of the hand, Cici moved again.

Mam scoured her hand over Cici’s ribcage — my father had told her of the famine in Ireland where once a man and his wife had been found frozen to death by the hearth of an empty fire. The woman’s feet were frozen to the man’s breastbone where he had tucked them under his shirt to warm them. It was as if they had been nailed there. Mam, her mouth dry, rose up, took the blankets and rubbed them over Cici’s body. ‘Michael!’ Cici’s fingers were moving now, slowly against each other, as if counting money. Mam leaned up and whispered things in her ear. She suddenly noticed how grey and bare the tower was, but it was still too cold to drag Cici outside. The sun wasn’t high enough. ‘Come on!’ She took Cici’s head in her hands and the head lolled as if broken. There were acne marks on Cici’s chin and tiny hairs that stuck out like the needles of conifers. The mouth moved within the pockmarks and Mam went furious again with the blankets. Cici mumbled something and my mother leaned down and left a dry kiss on her forehead.

‘You will be all right.’

Keep her warm. Talk to her until the sun rears up further. Try to find some food. ‘Michael!’ Cici began to move a little more, to almost laugh, tiny exhausted gollops.

From somewhere very far away, down the mountain, came a faint shout. Mam clasped Cici’s stockinged feet, rubbed warmth into them. A curious thing occurred as Cici’s eyes opened wider — a swarm of giant brown butterflies flocked out from the trees below them, all of them in unison, one giant dun sheet that ran its way through the forest, thousands of them at once, barrelling out, into the trees and upwards again, their wings pounding their slender bodies. My mother attributed it to some sort of miracle — there was always a deep need for miracles, she thought. Cici later put it down to the simple vagaries of nature — the butterflies had obviously been flushed from their habitat by an animal in the trees, a threat of some sort, a natural phenomenon.

When my father came up the path with Delhart, half an hour later, he carried a jug of wine. He was amazed to see Mam naked, rocking back and forth in the sunlight, with Cici beside her, under the blankets, dressed in Mam’s clothes. A washing line was strung up between pine poles, and Cici’s garments flapped, animated in the breeze. ‘What happened?’ said Delhart to my mother. My mother gave him a vicious look, turned and stared at my father. ‘An accident happened, Michael.’ Her voice quivering.

Cici looked up from the bed of blankets. ‘Oh, it’s the lover boys.’

The old man sat down on the ground and took his hat off, left it beside Cici. Delhart went away, down the mountain, without a word, carrying the wine. Mam went over to the washing line and put on Cici’s dress.

‘I am staying,’ she said to my father. ‘I am staying here until she’s better. And don’t ask me for changing my mind.’

* * *

Old Father Herlihy didn’t recognise me in the Spar. He was in buying a packet of cigarettes, flirting with the girl behind the counter. ‘And how’s the studying coming along?’ he was saying, a glint in his eye. She looked like one of the O’Meara girls, dollops of freckles on her cheeks. Father Herlihy has put on a bit in the girth, it was propped out over his trousers, mashing against the buttons of his thin black shirt. He was shaking absentmindedly in his black jacket pocket for some matches. The counter-girl gave him a smile and took out a box from the side of the register: ‘Don’t worry about it, Father, they’re on the house.’ Out he walked, smiling, straight past me without a second glance. He left fifty pence on the counter and she was in a right tizzy for a moment. She shoved it in her pocket and started looking at her nails, bits of red polish on them. Turned up the radio and smiled at me: ‘I love this song,’ she said. I must admit it wasn’t too bad — felt like slamdancing through the washing powder myself. Filled up five bags of groceries, put three of them in the front basket, hung one on either side of the handlebars.

The black Raleigh was none too comfortable, the springs gone in the seat, and there was a big fat skip in the pedals, a hiccup. It wasn’t easy to balance with all the heavy bags, and I had to retrieve a packet of biscuits that skipped out when I grazed against a lamppost. Goldgrain, his favourite. I think they’ve changed the packet though, and I almost overlooked them in the shop. Got him a pack of Major too, but that’s the last one of those I’m going to buy, he’ll be hanging his lungs out on the clothesline to dry, like grandmother’s rabbits, fluttering away in the wind.

Down along main street, some of the old farmers, fresh from the pubs, were leaning across the doors of their cars. Fine Gael posters from the election strewn out around their wellington boots. One of the farmers was crunching his boot through a politician’s face. All the Fianna Fáil signs were still up on the lampposts, looking out over the town, but someone had ripped the others down. The town’s not much different, little has changed, a bit like the kitchen. A tawny labrador scrounged around the back of the video shop, nosing his way through the boxes. Inside, two young girls, swamped in bright colours, were staring upwards at the television screens, entranced. Onwards and away, I said to myself. The red tiles on the town lavatory walls hadn’t faded a bit. The smell hit me when I went past — a curious cocktail together with the distant sea.

A couple of drowsy gulls moved up from the sea and over the roofs of the houses.

I rode down along the river, chocolate wrappers floating on the surface, past the old house of the Protestant ladies — I’ve no idea who’s living there now, but it looked a bit tumbledown, a rotting hulk of a car in the gateway. A couple of schoolboys hung around in the entrance, throwing pebbles. They gathered together and started elbowing one another. One of them gave me the middle finger — a new gesture in these parts. Heard a truck rumble behind me, beeping madly, and suddenly the created draft sucked me outwards, almost smacking me into the truck.

But it felt nice to be out and rolling, that song from the shop jumping around in my throat, all the three miles home, the sea getting closer and closer, me never quite reaching it.

A bird had made a nest in the back of an old discarded fridge near the grotto where we used to scrawl our graffiti. Nothing written on the good Virgin these days, although years ago someone scrawled Man United Rules across her chest in vibrant red ink, and there were always great jokes going around about Norman Whiteside knocking in a header from Mary Magdalene, and Bryan Robson putting one over on poor Saint Joseph, and nutmegging the good Lord himself. We would sit with our backs against the gate and slurp our bottles, smoke cigarettes in the cups of our hands so the red glow couldn’t be seen from the road. Sometimes there’d be fights in the woods and we’d gather in circles, chant them on. But it seems quiet and litter-free these days, apart from the fridge. I stopped and peered in the big white carcass — thrush eggs sitting on one of the metal racks, down near the vegetable drawer. Twigs wrapped in near the back coil. Some birdshit on the electrical cord. I sat for a while, but a few people stared at me from their cars and I felt a bit strange, got on the bike again. Curious how different the sense of space is here. In Wyoming I can take off and go walking for miles on end without seeing a soul, only a few cattle scrubbing away on the lands, every now and then a horse breaking the hills. Land like that seeps its way into you, you grow to love it, it begins to thump in your blood. But it’s confined here, the land, the space. Doesn’t feel much like mine anymore — it’s like when I’m with the old man, floating around him, not really touching him.

I got used to the skip in the bicycle pedals — a bit like learning to dance with a limp — and I began counting the number of rotations my feet made. Still, it was an effort getting up the hill by O’Leary’s pub. Stopped in to see Mrs O’Leary, but there was only a young boy behind the counter, sipping a glass of red lemonade behind the brand-new mahogany bar, lots of plush red seats roaming around the room, not at all like it used to be when Mam came here in the afternoons and chatted with her about chickens and the like. The bartender told me that Mrs O’Leary had passed away three years before, went in her sleep. Felt my stomach sink, had a quick pint of watery Harp, toasted her vast memory, pedalled on.

I came back to the house, a vision of Mrs O’Leary rolling in my head. I had once seen her dance across her bar-room floor with a chair clutched lovingly to her breast, feet sliding in beerstains and her hair thrown back in red ribbons — she was one of the few people around who made Mam laugh.

All of them going, I thought, all of that wild and leaping world on its way out.

The old man still had that Victrola of Mam’s in the living room, but it must have conked out years ago. I tried to crank it up and play some mariachi music of hers in honour of Mrs O’Leary, but he just laid his head back in the armchair and shook his head, no. He rose up and went to the kitchen, all lopsided with the pain again. He didn’t notice the bags of groceries at the front door. He was going to make himself a cup of instant soup, but, when he lifted the pan off the stove, the boiling water slipped a little. The pan fell down into the sink, toppled over. I heard it gurgling down the drain. He looked at the pan for the longest time, spat down on to it, turned around, saw me.

‘I’ll put on some soup,’ I said.

He ran a hand across his mouth: ‘I can put on the fucken water myself, all right?’ But he didn’t. He brushed past me, back to his armchair. He smelled terrible. This body of his is an effigy, he carts it around on the stick of himself.

I put on the pan — had to wash the spit from the bottom — and made the soup, along with a slice of bread and some butter. He nodded his head, slurped, coughed: ‘I could have done it myself, you know.’ He finished off his soup, left the mug on the floor, and went to wipe his lips with his hanky — it was caked in snot, with a little bit of blood speckled in it. He tucked the hanky away in his trousers pocket and washed his dish.

I took out the packet of Major and threw it on his lap.

‘That’s the last of those,’ I said.

‘Ah, you’re a star, Conor, thanks a million.’

‘I heard Mrs O’Leary’s not around anymore.’

‘Oh, she kicked the bucket a long time ago. Chock-full of whiskey, of course.’

‘Of course.’

‘A grand way to go, I suppose,’ he said.

‘I suppose.’

‘Took four bottles down with her.’

‘Took what?’

‘Took four bottles down into the ground with her.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘Bushmills.’ He smacked his lips together. ‘Someone went along to the graveyard one night and dug up the fucken coffin.’

‘You’re not serious.’

‘Some thirsty bastard,’ he said.

He ran his fist across his mouth. ‘Talking of — is that tea ready yet?’

He sat back and slowly, ritually, banged the bottom end of the packet against his palm, took the plastic wrapper off, turned one of the cigarettes upside-down. ‘For good luck,’ he said. I went upstairs and took a shower, got dressed. Came down and asked him if he was interested in going for a pint in O’Leary’s, but he just sort of laughed at me.

‘What would ya want to hang out with an old fella for?’

I wasn’t about to start arguing. Enough of his self-pity. Before I left I went over to the fire, put on some peat, and ruffled it with the poker. He had some of his fishing flies placed on the stonework, to dry them out. He sat up and said that fishing flies were like good women — they should never be stored away while moist — and laughed away as if it was the funniest thing in the world.

I left him sitting in the chair and went back out on the bike again into the boneblack night.

When I came back from O’Leary’s, he’d collapsed in the chair. His fly was open like a wound and his hands were down by his crotch. His handkerchief was tucked into the nape of his neck. It was as if he’d been about to serve himself, then forgot. In the kitchen I could tell that he’d been pissing in the sink — he hadn’t rinsed it out and there were still two saucers there, one of them with little splotches of yellow on the side. Disgusting. The least he could have done was take out the saucers.

Watched him as he dozed. He raised a hand to wipe something from his eye, maybe some sort of vision, a dream, an absurdity. But I can’t imagine him having dreams anymore. What would he summon up? Maybe something slow and soporific, moving itself into blackness, a slow waltz towards oblivion. Or might it be some secret of technicolour? Who knows? Perhaps life goes out as it once came in — down to the secular brilliance of a single hydrogen atom, imploding back on to itself, the emergence of a songdog on the rim of nothing. A fatuous idea really. Too many pints of Harp in me. Didn’t recognise anyone in O’Leary’s pub, not a single soul, maybe everyone has emigrated. Sat in the corner and flipped a few bar coasters up and down on the table. Plenty of old men in there though, moving their dentures up and down in their mouths, the oval dawns of yellow nicotine stains on their hands.