Songdogs

TUESDAY, the law of the river

I sat on my backpack, behind the hedge, where the old man couldn’t see me, and watched the slowness of the river and him.

Not even the river itself knew it was a river anymore. Wide and brown, with a few plastic bags sitting in the reeds, it no longer made a noise at its curves. A piece of Styrofoam was wrapped around one of the footbridge poles. Some oil boated lazily on the surface, throwing colours in the afternoon sun.

Yet still the old man was fishing away. The line rolled out, catching the light, and the fly landed softly. He flicked it around with his wrist for a minute, slumped his head when he finished each cast, reeled in the slack and rubbed at his forearm. After a while he went and sat in a red and white striped lawn chair under the branches of the old poplar tree. He turned his head in the direction of the hedge, didn’t see me. Leaning backwards in the chair, he started fiddling with the fly on the end of the line, put the hook and feathers in his mouth, blew on them, trying to fluff out the dressing. His overcoat hung in an anarchy around him, and his trousers rode up past the ankles of his green wellingtons. When he stood up to take the coat off I was shocked to see the lineament of his body — as thin as the reeds I used to make holy crosses with during February winters.

The afternoon wore on and he left the cork handle propped in lazily at his crotch, leaned down and spat on the ground, wiped some dribble off the bottom of his chin. Every now and then he tipped his hat upwards to the swifts that scissored in the sky, then stared at the line lying in the water, amongst the rubbish.

A long time ago, back in the seventies — before the meat factory came — he would bring me down in the morning and make me swim in the fast water, against the flow. He was a good swimmer, a strong body on him, powerful shoulders, the neck of a bull. Even in winter he’d climb into the water in his red togs, plough away, his arms making windmill motions. Wisps of wet hair stuck to his balding scalp. The current was strong enough to keep him stationary. Sometimes he could stay in one spot for an hour or two, just swimming. He’d let out big shouts while my mother stood on the riverbank and watched. She was dark-skinned, almost bog-coloured, like the land. Blue work gloves that migrated to her elbows. Bags under her eyes. She would stand and watch, sometimes waving, every now and then fumbling with the colourful flag of elastics that kept her silver hair together.

I stayed in the river by hanging on to the roots of the poplars. Seven years old, I could feel the tug in my armpits, the water skimming over my face, my body sweeping away. The old man kept moving his arms against the current. When he’d had enough he let himself be swept a little stretch downstream, to the riverbank curve. I’d let go of the root and be carried along after him. He’d reach down, catch me, drag me out by the waistband of my togs. We’d dress, shiver together on the muddy bank, my mother calling us up for breakfast. The old man would give a nod to the river. It was the law of water, he told me. It was bound to move things on.

But, watching him this afternoon, I thought that if he tried swimming nowadays he’d just float around like all that shit and rubbish in the reeds.

When evening fell the eastern sky was the colour of nicotine, merging into red in the west. A few thin clouds slashed along through it. He took out his cigarettes, tapping the bottom end of the box with his palm, opening the lid, flipping it upwards with his thumb, a studied patience in the movement. Reaching into his overcoat pocket he got some long kitchen matches. Even from a distance I could see that his hands were trembling, and he lit two matches before the cigarette took.

He blew the smoke up to the swifts, lifted the rod again. Ran his hands lovingly along the glass pole, flicked it back for one last cast. A pile-up of line hit the water noisily. The river skipped. It was an instant of concurrency. The sunlight caught the droplets and coloured them as they rose, and it struck me then that the old man and the water are together in all of this — they have lived out their lives disguised as one another, the river and him, once wild with movement, churning new ways, violently ripping along, now moving slowly down towards some final, unalterable sea.

* * *

A russet-haired woman who only wore one sleeve on her dress gave birth to my father on a clifftop overlooking the Atlantic, in the summer of 1918. She was known in town as a madwoman — she kept one arm inside the dress, tucked down by her waist — and nobody was surprised by the circumstances of the birth. Spindrift blew up on to the cliff, and purple wildflowers were exploding in shapes that might have made her think of bombs erupting in far-off Flanders. She had just received a letter saying that her lover had been fed to the guns of the Great War — he was a local man who had furrowed inside her seven months beforehand, then stepped his way out from Mayo into a British army uniform. Perhaps she flapped a crazy dance of grief after slicing the umbilical cord, unsurprised by the shock of black hair on her baby’s head, the rude red lips, the very white skin, the squash of his ears.

He was found by two Protestant ladies who lived together in a giant house near the edge of the sea. The ladies were out on a Sunday stroll when they saw the bundle of skin amongst some trampled flowers. One of them took off her petticoat and carried him home, wrapped in it. The madwoman, my grandmother, was nowhere to be seen, although a trail of her clothes, including the one-sleeved dress, led inland towards the mountains.

The Protestant ladies raised him in a house of fine china teacups, radio broadcasts, scones privileged with spoonfuls of clotted cream. They sat him by a grand piano, licked their fingers and combed his hair back, an unruly cowlick growing long at his forehead. His clothes were ordered all the way from Dublin, beautiful white shirts that he destroyed running through the bogs, tweed trousers that were ripped on sea rocks, gorgeous blue cravats in which he wrapped stones to fling upwards at curlews. They baptised him in the Protestant church with the name Gordon Peters, and years later — beaten up in school for the name — he repaid them by urinating on their toothbrushes.

Still he loved them in a strange way, these old ladies with scintillating bottle-green eyes. He came back from his long walks with bundles of flowers that he’d plucked from the sides of dark pools, purple flowers that nodded to one another in expensive vases on the dining-room table. He called each of them ‘Mammy,’ bounding home with stones from the beach, telling stories of dolphins that had leaped alongside him, the length of the strand. A friend of his, Manley, emitted a high-pitched squeal that he claimed attracted dolphins, and they spent days together on the beach, shouting, eyes seaward. The ladies brought packed lunches down to them, spreading their long dresses on the rocks, watching their adopted son.

He must have been a curious sight in his belted blue coat, my father, eyes very dark, a history of mischief and sadness already written in them.

At the age of eleven, when he was told the story of his mother, he renamed himself Michael Lyons, a name that was common among many of the locals, a name that could have belonged to his own father. He stood on the edge of the cliff in his short trousers and spat out over the ocean to soak Britain with phlegm for the pointlessness of his father’s death. At the time he didn’t realise that his spit was aimed westward — at Mexico, at San Francisco, at Wyoming, at New York — where in later years it would truly land.

The ladies came along the seaboard and each took one of his hands, swinging him home between them — a chairoplane of freckles, kicking small brown shoes up into the air.

In the spring of 1934 the old Protestant ladies decided to take a boat out to bring some food to islanders across the bay. My father wasn’t with them — he was out slingshotting curlews in the bogs, his body awkward now with adolescence. The sun was pouring down turmeric over the perfectly calm water. The ladies stepped off the dock into a currach, white parasols above their heads. They began to row, the oars creating concentric ripples on the sea, the dock receding from them. Nobody knew what happened next — one of the ladies, Loyola, had been a skilled boatwoman by all accounts — but maybe she leaned over to look at a porpoise, or a floating shoe, or a starfish, or a discarded bottle, then tumbled in. Maybe her friend went after her in a fit of pure love, the parasol taking flight, a grey-haired woman in a white lace dress, with her arms outstretched, breaking the surface of the blueness with a dive. In the water they might have suddenly looked at one another and remembered the essential fact that neither of them could swim. The parasol drifted on the water’s surface and I imagine the two ladies going down together to the ocean floor, holding hands, regretting that the boy couldn’t join them in the seaweed.

Their bodies were found washed up on the strand, with seals barking loudly by some nearby rocks.

The Protestant ladies were buried in a quiet graveyard near where the river tumbled into the sea. In their will they left my father everything they owned — the house, the land, the china, the sad toothbrushes staring him down from a porcelain cup. He was sixteen years old and he sat at a giant mahogany table in the living room, contemplating the thud of empty house around him. Gardeners and housekeepers came by to do their work, rapping at the brass knocker on the door. They whisked their caps off and nodded gravely to him when he opened up. He gave them their wages, but asked them not to come back, said he would do the chores himself, that he’d continue to pay them every week from the inheritance. They moved down the gravel driveway, casting suspicious glances backwards. Grass began to grow long over croquet hoops on the lawn. Mallets were lost under leaves. Curtains were left open to shafts of sunlight, discolouring the furniture. My father’s shirts and vests carpeted the corridors. He started sleeping outside, on the verandah, too many spectral voices in the upstairs rooms. The house seemed alien to him, but by day he wandered around it, opening drawers, tapping walls, scrawling ‘Michael’ in the dirt on the windowpanes.

It was a camera that woke him. He found it in a large red box under one of the beds, forgotten. It had belonged to Loyola, but she had never mentioned it to him. Opening the silver snaps, a pandora of dust arose around him, and he lifted the parts out on to the bed. It was an old model with a dickybird hood, glass plates in perfect order, wooden legs sturdy, lens unscratched. A hand-scrawled note left instructions. He spent hours putting it together and carried it downstairs, stepping along the corridor of scattered clothes, out to the front lawn. He hailed the sky with his new discovery, roaming around the grounds, practising, looking at the long grass through a box-view, opening and closing the shutter, wiping every fleck of dust from the body, reinforcing the tripod legs with wedges of wood. He called the camera ‘Loyola’ and at night he carried it to the verandah, stared at it through his insomnia. He didn’t know it then, but the camera would burst him out on to the world, give him something to cling to, fulminate a belief in him in the power of light, the necessity of image, the possibility of freezing time.

He ordered more glass plates and developing equipment from Dublin, built a makeshift darkroom at the end of the lawn, took the camera apart once a week, cleaned it with the flap ends of white shirts, put it back together again meticulously, polished it with a soft rag dipped in diluted vinegar, careful to rub the cloth in one direction, to avoid staining. In the cold winter months he stuffed clothes and old towels in the box to keep the equipment from freezing. During summer he put it in the shadows and draped it with a large white tablecloth.

I can imagine my father back in the thirties, roaming around, darting his head in and out, like a swallow, from the black hood of the camera. He carried it along dark roads built eighty years before, by famished men from the poorhouses. They were narrow roads, bits of sea-blown spray landing on them, winding drunkenly away from the cliffs towards the mountains. And drunken men walked along them, sometimes rows of men, like weeds in motion through the decade of the Great Depression. Rain soaked the soil, battered the land, flung rainbows over the bay. Storms squalled across the water, sometimes so strong that they carried slates and beams and occasionally the whole roofs of houses through the air.

His friend, Manley, had a motorbike that my father used to borrow. Leaning the Triumph around tight corners, along piers and through village greens, a scarf flying out at the back of his neck, my old man became famous locally.

Along the backroads of Mayo he caught black and white images of old women head-bent on the way to mass; flowers reaching up above black puddles; sheep huddled in the ruined shells of old cottages; packets of cornflakes fading in the windows of shops; fishermen down by the docksides warming their hands over oil drums; a middle-aged tinker resting outside an old caravan, spreadeagled, plucking at the crotch of his pants. It was a world that had seldom seen a lens of any sort, and my father moved around it, taller now, his body filling out, sleeves rolled up, drama in the exhibition of himself. The quiff of hair bounced around on his forehead. Veins rose, eskers on the back of his hand, blue and well defined. He could cock his arm and dance an easy muscle. Girls outside the dancehall watched him and wondered.

The owner of the dancehall — a man with a face like a hagfish — wouldn’t allow any cameras inside. Still, my father was quite content to hang around, smoking, waiting for Manley to emerge, looking for opportunities to use Loyola. Eighteen years old, and the world back then was a fabulous place to him. He could have bitten off pieces of the universe and spat them on a big glass photographic plate. Outside the dancehall he sometimes took pictures of young women smoking for the first time, new hats cocked sideways, daring lipstick smudged upwards to thicken their lips. Sometimes the girls would try to get him to come in and dance, but it didn’t interest him, dancing, unless he could take a picture of it.

Once he got caught trying to take photographs of the church housekeeper in the outhouse behind the priest’s place. The door was left open, revealing the housekeeper with her skirt hitched high around her hips and her knees ajar. My father had hidden in a clump of bushes but didn’t have time to take a single picture. The priest, a former hurley player, discovered him and knocked him to the ground with a single roundhouse, opened the back of the camera, held the glass plates to the light as if reading the holy scrolls. He gave a thunderous sermon the next week, passages from the Old Testament about graven images, feverish words flying around the pews. My old man slouched at the back of the church with his hat on. He tipped his hat a little when worshippers went up for the Eucharist. From then on, there was a dark, but almost heroic shadow following him in town. A swagger out the door of the church, a bit of spit aimed at the sky with missionary zeal, a bravura in the sway of his shoulders as he walked.

With his inheritance he set up a small studio in a disused cow barn at the end of a country lane. An ancient barn, it was strewn with animal shit and pieces of lumber. The carcass of a calf had been left to rot in the corner. He took it outside, burned the bones, slopped the barn out, nailed the boards down, festooned the walls with photographs, and waited for customers, leaning against the doorway, bored, smoking. Sometimes Manley arrived, touting his shotgun, wearing unfashionable ties and suits of outstanding vulgarity — clothes my father had lent him money to buy. Manley hung out at the barn, talking of new books he had read. He was championing anarchy at the time — said it was democracy brought to its fullest form — and pounded his fist in the cause of the late Sacco and Vanzetti, who had been executed in the States over a decade before. Manley dreamed of making his way to Spain, perhaps to join the International Brigade. My father nodded to the tune of Manley’s rants, all the time looking down the road for customers.

News travelled late to Mayo. Papers arrived late. Ideas arrived late. Even flocks of birds sometimes arrived late. There was something about the heaviness of the soil and the weather that inspired torpidity. He knew that the locals would come to his barn if he did something unusual, so he soon announced that the portraits would be free of charge. After that a small trail of people came in and out — guiltily and secretly, down along the high brambled lane, into the building, where he hung a white curtain from a wooden beam. Ripples of light came through the slats of the walls, falling in peculiar shapes on their faces — gaunt farmers uneasy in their old Sunday suits, grandmothers with fingers over rotten teeth, policemen in hats, a boxer in billowy shorts, thumping his glove against his chest, the local butcher with a flower in his lapel, girls with safety pins in the undersides of their dresses. There were even some young women slouching in bony but salacious poses.

My father had rescued an old chaise with three legs. When the women reclined on it, their hair swooped towards the floor. Manley, giving politics a rest, let a licentious tongue hang out as he peeped in through the barn slats. They weren’t lurid, the photos. They had a stodginess to them, as if the old man forced his hand too hard — unlike the ones he took of Mam years afterwards, fluid and sensual. Most of the women never saw their photos. But decades later, when he was somewhat notorious, he had them printed at a press in France. The book caused a minor uproar in town, giving one of the local councillors a mild heart attack when he saw a portrait of his aunt with her left nipple visible under a thin linen blouse.

* * *

The swifts moved with a disregard for space, some of them darting up for insects on the air, others swerving down towards the sea, or simply moving back and forth, whipping the evening sky. He looked up at them, as if envious, as if he might burst his way upwards himself, join them in a mockery of flight. They were bellyfull with insects as he rose stiffly out of the lawn chair, grabbed his fishing rod, put the flyhook in the lowest eye, and walked away from the river, through the muddy soil up towards our house.

He used the bottom end of the rod as a stick as he lurched, his dark overcoat open and hanging, cigarette smoke churning from his mouth, a blue bucket in his right hand. At the doorstep he leaned his rod against the wisteria, and slowly kicked off one of his boots. A stockinged foot trembled with cold on the concrete. He coughed into his fist and let some spit out into the hole at the bottom end of the drainpipe, bent down, stubbed his cigarette in a puddle, swiped at some midges in the air.

I lifted my backpack, stepped out from behind the hedge, and walked across the yard. Cocking his head sideways like a curious animal, he closed his right eye, fumbled in his coat for his glasses.

‘Jesus Christ,’ he muttered, ‘if it isn’t yourself.’

I held out my hand and he leaned his shoulder against me, smelling of earth and tobacco and bait. He moved to place his foot against the bottom of the door and shoved it open, coughed, threw his coat on the rack.

‘Christ, that’s some fucken monster you’ve got there,’ he said.

I placed the backpack against the kitchen table as he walked towards the fireplace.

‘Well, well, well,’ he said, his back to me, fumbling in the fire pail, ‘would ya look at the cut of ya.’

‘You’re looking well yourself.’

‘Cut your hair.’

‘I did.’

‘Lost the earring as well,’ he said.

‘Ah yeah, got rid of that a long time ago.’

‘You’re home for a while?’

‘I am.’ I picked up a spoon from the table, twirled it in my fingers. ‘For a week. Is that all right?’

‘If ya can tolerate an old man.’

‘If you can tolerate me.’

‘On holidays?’ he asked.

‘Sort of, yeah. Back to pick up the green card. Have to go up to the embassy in Dublin one of these days.’

‘Thought you were in London?’ he said.

‘Well, I was, yeah. I’m in the States now.’

‘I see. What ya doin’ there?’

‘Bits and pieces. Nothing much.’

He scratched at his head and let out a bit of a belch: ‘Nothing much happening here these days, either.’

‘Looks the same, except for the river.’

The fluorescent kitchen light fizzled. ‘I’m fishing every day.’

‘Every day?’

‘On the quest for a giant pink salmon down beyond the bend. I’d swear the fucken thing’s taunting me. Up it rears every now and then and looks like it’s waving.’ He stretched out his arms. ‘This bloody big.’

‘A salmon?’

‘That’s right.’

‘In the river?’

‘Why not?’

‘What happened to it?’

‘What?’

‘The water.’

‘Oh, they put in a few more gates by the meat factory.’

‘Why?’

‘Don’t know. For cleaning the carcasses or something.’

‘It looks slow.’

‘But chock-full with that big one.’

‘Yeah.’

‘I’m telling ya, this bloody big.’

He stretched out his arms again, a three-foot expanse between liver spots. But I was sure that the only thing more than three feet long in that river was the rod that he threw in, in a fit of anger, one time long ago. I had come home from secondary school wearing a gold hoop in my ear, and he flung the rod by the cork handle all the way to the footbridge and told me that if I didn’t take the piece of shite out of my ear he’d give me what-for and no doubt about it. Which he never did, and never would.

‘No kidding,’ he said to me, ‘ya should see it.’

‘Where?’

‘By the bend, I told ya.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah. Running around like a fart in a bottle.’

I laughed as he bent down, rubbing his knee.

‘An absolute bloody giant,’ he said.

But giant salmon or not, it looked to me that he shouldn’t be going down to the river too much anymore. Might catch himself a bad cold. Or tumble in. Get blown away in the breeze. With his shirt open to the third button he turned around from the fireplace. His chest was a xylophone of bones sticking out against his skin. His face and arms still held some tan, but the vale at his throat was lost to whiteness and the remaining chest hairs curled, acolytes of grey. His neck was a sack of sag and his trousers were huge on him. Not too healthy for him to be out in the cold, although it would be lovely if I could see him cast in the way he used to — even when I detested him there were times I was astounded just to watch him cast. Back when the river was alive, those flicks of the wrist like so many fireflies on the bank, the hooks glinting in the lapel of his overcoat, that huge sadness of his disappearing as the rod whipped away, him counting under his breath, one-two-three-here-we-go, lassoing it to the wind, brisk upward motion of the tip of the glass rod, sometimes drying off the flies by false casting, finally watching them curl out over the water and plonk, reeling the surface into soft circles, stamping his feet on the bank, spitting out over the water, all sorts of hidden violence in the motion.

He coughed again, fumbled in his pocket for a handkerchief, pulled it out, and some coins fell to the floor. I stooped down to get them. I stood there looking at the new tenpenny coins.

‘When did they change the coins?’ I said.

‘Oh, a year or so ago.’

‘I see.’ I looked at the harp. It was finely etched.

‘It’s nice to have ya back, Conor,’ he said finally.

His lip quivered as he moved towards the fireplace with the poker, knelt down, prodded softly. A few large chunks fell out on to the cement slab and he mashed them down with his thumb, licked at it to soothe the burn, spat a few pieces of ash from the end of his tongue. He struggled to get up from his knees and I put my arm under his right shoulder.

‘Right,’ he said with a sudden whiparound. ‘I’m not a bloody invalid, ya know.’

‘I know.’

‘So I can get up on my own.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘Without a lick of help.’

‘Okay, okay.’

He placed his hand on the concrete and raised himself, using the mantelpiece as a fulcrum. One of Mam’s pictures — she is standing by a fencepost in Mexico — was still leaning against the mantel. He didn’t look at it. Just stood up, wheezing, straightened himself in the air and yawned, made a helicopter of his arms as if to expand the universe of himself.

‘Ya see?’ he said. ‘Fit as a bloody fiddle.’

He ambled his way into the kitchen and came out with a bottle of whiskey and two glasses, one of which chipped when his trembling hand cracked the bottle against the rim. Poured himself a big glass, handed me the bottle. ‘Take it from the neck,’ he said to me, ‘all the other glasses are dirty.’ I think it’s the first time in my life that the old man has seen me drinking — although when I was younger and Mam was gone, he would tell me his stories, and afterwards I would steal pound notes from his pockets. I would go downtown to buy flagons of hard cider, then return along the riverbank to clear the names of the two Protestant ladies underneath their explosion of cerise wildflowers.

* * *

He was almost twenty-one when he stood in a Fascist camp and watched great white loaves of bread showering down on Madrid, the strangest rain the city had ever seen. The bread zipped through the winter air, over the clifftops of the Manzanares River, parachutes of it moving like snow, bombarding the city. It fell on the streets, a miracle of propaganda, beautifully arced from hidden airplanes by pilots who played at being a 1939 Jesus in the clouds.

Reports came back to the Fascist front that the bread had descended from such a height that windows had been broken in the Royal Palace. Craters had been made in the snow. Birds and starving men were in an uproar upon it. Slates had been knocked off the roofs of houses. Books, used as sandbags, had been shaken from windowsills. Little boys in the city had stopped collecting shrapnel and were being won over by the bread. A Communist had been squashed to death by a flying bale. A priest on the Fascist front was heartened by the news of this angelic death — if only they could shower Madrid with holy wine they could have a mass for all the godless dying. Bread, said the priest, was even better than bombs.

But within a few days the bombs started again. Fires raged in Madrid. The joke was that the Communists could make toast.

My father stood in the camp, a holy medal at his throat, and watched as the bread and bombs zipped in towards his friend Manley, who was in the city somewhere. He envisioned Manley tracing the pattern of the strange parcels with a Lewis gun held at his shoulder, blowing a bale of loaves to bits, crumbs of it floating down around him. Maybe Manley would hallucinate and think it was a flock of birds, with the trajectory of doves. Or maybe he would be given a loaf by a novia who loved him. Or maybe Manley was dead — it was the end of the war and there weren’t many Communists left.

The siege of Madrid wore its way through winter, and my father watched it through the eye of a camera, knocking frost off the soles of his boots, flecks of snow melting into the uniform of Franco.

Manley had left Ireland long before my old man. The vulgar suits were left hanging in a cupboard and, drunk on Marx, he had sauntered away, leaving my father alone in the town. There was a narcosis to Manley’s going, but it was two years before my father followed. He left on his twentieth birthday, no politics in the leaving, simply bored. He sold the house, paid the grave of the Protestant ladies a final visit, gave Loyola to a young boy in town. He pinned most of his inheritance into the rear waistband of his trousers. A few strange stares followed his going — the dickybird camera had become something of a fixture around the town, and perhaps people would miss it. He packed a rucksack and moved out, brutal with innocence. Two new Leica cameras strung across his breast. A huge skip in his stride. He didn’t stop to get blessed by the priest who hailed the virtues of Francisco Franco and General O’Duffy.

The old man hitch-hiked and walked his way through storms along the seaboard towards Cork. A wiry unshaven man in a brown hat, wandering through fields, splashes of blood-red poppies like a premonition in the ground, his last look at Ireland for almost three decades.

The only ship going out was full of Irish Fascists in blue shirts. Songs were summoned up about good ways to die in vineyards. Beards grew thick as the waves knocked the boat around off the coast of France. They landed in a blue and delicate Spanish bay, where a melancholy guitar was drowned out by the shouts of the men. They punched the air and grabbed at their crotches as girls at windowsills blew them kisses. But the songs were muted when one of the soldiers was kissed by a teenager, a Communist sympathiser, who bit his tongue out and spat it in his face. The girl was shot to death, running away through a field of hay, a silence descending on the regiment as they stared. By the roadside a priest incanted prayers and doled out holy water to the soldiers. They moved on, the stub of a tongue flickering uselessly in one man’s mouth. Suddenly there were olive trees, bloated bodies, lemon groves, butifarra sausage, stretchers, mangled faces. My father sent photos of severed limbs and discarded bullet shells to newspaper editors. They chucked most of them in the bin, but every now and then one was found tucked in the bottom corners of an English newspaper, beside the colourful reports of some daring young journalists. The photos were dark and brooding — a chaplain in a field, stepping over the dead, a woman picking shrapnel from her thigh as if bored by the enormity of her wound, an obese surgeon smoking over a stretcher, the sucked-in bones of a village after an aerial bombardment.

The old man bribed ambulance drivers to let him take his shots, bellowed in cafés, slept in the open under stunted trees, made his way towards Madrid where Manley and other Republicans were being besieged. He had no politics, my father, he was only a photographer, shooting visions, but he placed the holy medal at his neck for safety. On one of the Leicas he pasted a portrait of Franco. He didn’t care about the man — it was just a convenient blur to him, a safe passport, a foxhole. Nor did he care for Manley’s hero, Stalin. He might have looked vaguely comic out there, riding along on the backs of vans, handkerchief tied on his head, four-knot style, under the hat, men with guns in a circle around him. His rucksack, with two Foxford blankets tied on the bottom, was his only link to home.

He wore a pair of big black boots that he had taken off the feet of a dead Welsh Republican. The body was found, fragrant with death, in a clump of bushes. There was a letter in the inside pocket of the man’s uniform, telling his mother, back on the banks of the Teifi River, how much he missed her cooking. ‘Mum, that stuff would…’ and the letter finished there. The old man undid the laces, pulled the boots off — he needed new ones, his own had begun to flap. Some newspaper was stuffed into the toes, and he wrote a note to the family, saying that one day he’d return them. On the bottom of one sole was a carving of a sickle, so that every time his right foot landed it left an impression of the sickle in wet ground. He left sickles behind him for miles, until a soldier in the regiment, walking directly behind him, levelled a rifle and forced him to remove the boots — ‘Communist boots make a Communist man.’ He left them on the ground where the soldier riddled them with bullets. Bits of leather splayed around and the laces lay in some sort of mourning. Maybe there was a family on the banks of the Teifi who waited for years for a large brown package to arrive, waited for some totem of a dead son, waited for a story of some heroic death, waited and waited, among mounds of food and mouldy leftovers.

The dead soldier’s name was Wilfred Owen, an echo of the World War One poet. Years later my father’s life might invoke a line of the poet’s for me: ‘Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.’

He bartered his way into another pair of shoes — rope-soled alpargatas, and as the weather got colder, snow in countryside drifts, he bought new boots. The holy medal still shone at his throat and, by the time he reached Madrid, he was well able to sing the praises of nationalism.

He waited outside the city among the gum trees and watched the bread being loaded onto airplanes to swell the nostrils of a pilot. Thousands of loaves. Some of the dough still rising. He stood in the camps as the planes flew off and wondered what it was that had brought him here, took shots of the nationalists as they waited for the planes to return, drilling their way through time and howitzers and dark-haired whores. There were as many pictures of prostitutes as there were of bread. The prostitutes held a peculiar fascination for him, girls who rolled their skirts up on the rubble of their thighs. It was fashionable to be a little plump, so the girls sometimes wore four or five skirts over one another to give breadth to their hips. The men around them were articulate with their penises, a natural extension from the barrel of a rifle to the absurd freckle sitting on any man’s undershaft. One of the shots shows a line of men in a tent, Germans, Spaniards and Moroccans, impatient with sweat, waiting in queue for a thin pockmarked whore in baggy underwear, panties around one ankle. She is kneeling down in front of an equally thin soldier with her mouth at his crotch. At the back of the queue another soldier raises an air-punch in anticipation of the soldier’s climax. His fly is already open and his scrotum leaks out like an underwater polyp.

In makeshift hospital tents there was as much syphilis as shrapnel. Years later, when I went through boxes in our attic, there were shots of women naked in lamplight, women parading in front of his camera, women with sheets pulled coyly around them, women with their heads tilted sideways and an eye in half a wink. I was a teenager when I discovered them. I’d sit, perched on a slat of wood in the attic, thumping away at my body, in the beginning of its own articulation. I became the camera, became the cameraman, and all the time hated my father for being privy to these visions. I walked into the photos, parted the canvas doors of the tents, stood, bemused at first, talked to the women. The women smiled at my curious appearance, beckoned me backwards to the 1930s, asked me sly questions. I hung in behind the camera as outside the planes droned in the clouds with their bounty. The women would move around in the photographs for me, come behind the camera, take me by the hand and lead me somewhere no lens could watch, let me touch them, open my shirt buttons with a flick of their fingers, let me wander, sleep beside them. Sometimes I swore that I could hear the bread falling outside.

When Madrid surrendered, the graveyards of Spain were full of men the world could not do without — other wars would need them.

Manley was found in the charnel of the city, minus one leg in a bombed-out house, babbling, a row of stale loaves around him. The doors and windowframes had been torn off and used for firewood. Manley was strewn out on a mattress that smelled of urine. Unshaven. Huge boils on his neck. He spat in my father’s face when he saw the holy medal, but the old man wandered around the city that day and bought some forged papers for his friend. They were in the name of Gordon Peters. Manley became a man who crawled around on crutches and invented a new past for himself. He and a few other stray Republicans hid in the city with their new identities. My father still had his inheritance, pinned away in plastic at the back of his trousers. He and Manley made arrangements to leave the city together, but Manley disappeared one morning while out buying provisions. My father sat in the shell of the house and waited, days giving way to weeks, cameras gathering dust, the mattress beginning to fester. He searched for his friend, walked around in a stupefied ache, couldn’t find him.

One afternoon he found Manley’s crutch along the banks of the Manzanares — it had been carved with the initials G. P. — and he felt sure his friend was dead, although the body couldn’t be found.

The photos that they had taken years before in Mayo, with Manley in his outrageous suits, became my father’s most vibrant memory of his friend. When the old man talked of Manley he remembered him as a sixteen-year-old with a lustful glint in his eye, rather than a legless soldier who reeked of piss at night. It was something the old man often did — if a moment existed in a photograph, it was held in that particular stasis for ever. It was as if by taking a photo he could, at any moment, reinhabit an older life — one where a body didn’t droop, or hair didn’t fall out, or a future didn’t have to exist. Time was held in the centre of his fist. He either crumpled it or let it fly off. It was as if he believed that something that was has the power to be what is. It was his own particular ordering of the universe, a pattern that moved from past to present, with the ease of a sheet dropped into a chemical bath. Manley was sixteen once and, because of that, Manley was sixteen forever.

Even today I suppose he might still believe that there’s a loaf of bread in flight above Madrid, a single one, or a parachute-load of it, making its way gracefully through the air from the belly of a high-flying bomber, preparing itself to fall.

* * *

After the whiskey he fell asleep in the chair. He woke when I knocked over the kettle in the kitchen by mistake. Pulled the blanket from around himself, clacked his lips together, reached into his shirt pocket, took out a box of Major. After a few minutes he fell asleep again with a cigarette burning down in the ashtray. I stubbed it out, went upstairs and took a hot bath in the iron-coloured water. A bit of a waft from my clothes, though not as bad as him. He’s fairly pungent. The smell was hanging all around the house. A deep unwashed odour, the disappearance of himself, the sort that smells like old campfire. When Mam was around all those years ago, she would wash our clothes in the sink — exiled in a farmhouse kitchen, watching the vagaries of Irish weather, black crows defiling low over a brown bog, telling stories of the colour that once used to exist in her life. She would lift me up and sit me on the sink, gaze out at the columns of crows, talk of other birds — vultures, grackles, red-winged hawks — in other places. She had a couple of sarapes and sometimes they would animate themselves on the washing line, fluttering out over the land, reds and yellows and greens. Mexico existed on the washing line for her, hung out to dry, the woollen ponchos full of life beside the ordinary clothes of our days, my father’s vests, his trousers, his underwear, the banality of them held tight with wooden pegs.

These days, without Mam around, the old man has let the rings of dirt settle down around him — eleven years of it on his shirt collars.

In the bathroom, clumps of hair sat in the sinkhole, under the waterlines. A tiny sliver of soap in the dish. I got some shampoo out of my backpack, sank down into the bath. It was nice, that black silence outside the bathroom window, no mosquitoes or dune bugs battering against the air. Only a couple of harmless moths throwing themselves stupidly against the window. I lay in the bathtub until the water grew cold. At midnight I woke the old man to see if he wanted to go upstairs to his bed, but he grunted sleepily: ‘I’m grand here, it’s comfortable, I sleep here all the time.’

The edge of the chair made a red line on his face, which ran down to the sparse grey beard. His beard may have its own entropy, so that instead of growing outwards it is shrinking inwards to his skin. It looked like a stubble of only one or two weeks, but it has probably been there for months. Two large patches on his cheeks, where the hair doesn’t grow anymore, adding symmetry to his bald pate. I watched him as he woke. He rubbed the red line away from his cheek, coughed, reached for the stubbed butt in the ashtray, smelled it, flicked it towards the fireplace, lit a new one. ‘They taste bloody awful when they’ve been stubbed out,’ he said. He held the new smoke between his teeth, looked around the room. ‘Jesus, it’s chilly enough though, isn’t it?’

I went to the cupboard underneath the stairs to get the blue beach blanket. It smelled a little musty. Waited for him to finish smoking, handed it to him. He pulled it around himself, tucked it up to his chin, gave me a wink. He brushed my hand away, though, when I offered him a cushion to put behind his head.

‘Conor,’ he said, ‘I thought you were dead, for crissake.’

He’s the same crotchety old bastard that he was when I left five years ago. Bit stupid for me to come home and think that it might be any different, I suppose. But a week is a week and we can probably tolerate each other that long — besides, I’ll have to make arrangements to get up to Dublin for a few days, get everything sorted out for my visa. But I wonder what he’d say if I told him that these days I’m living in a cabin in Wyoming, working jobs that hardly pay the rent, just drifting along. Probably wouldn’t give a damn, though, wouldn’t faze him one bit. Living his days now with those slow castings.

I sat up in the bedroom tonight and looked out the window to the bible-dark of the Mayo night, the stars rioting away. In a strange way it’s nice to be back — it’s always nice to be back anywhere, anywhere at all, safe in the knowledge that you’re getting away again. The law of the river, like he used to say. Bound to move things on. When I left home I promised myself I’d never return — at the train station he shoved a ten-pound note in my hand and I threw it right back at him as the train pulled away. But enough of this. Enough whining. I am home now, and a million possibilities may still lie outside my window, curlews resurrected to the night if I want them to be.