He lived in a little room in Shepherd’s Bush. There was a bed for himself and above a little compartment for visitors. One climbed by ladder to this area. A curtain separated it from the rest of the room. It was this area he’d reserved for Moira.
Around the walls were accumulated Italian masterpieces, pieces of Titian, pieces of Tintoretto, arms by Caravaggio, golden and brusque. Dominating all was a Medici face by Botticelli. Above the fireplace a young man, stern, glassy eyes, his lips satisfied, his stare resigned to the darkness of the room, a darkness penetrated by the light of one window.
Jackie worked on a building site. He’d worked on one since he’d come over in February. Previously he’d been a chef in a café in Killarney, riding to and from work on a motorbike. But something made him go, family problems, spring, lust.
The room had been conveniently vacated by two Provisional Sinn Féin members from Kerry. He’d scraped Patrick Pearse from the wall. They were gone to another flat.
He’d risen early on mornings when Shepherd’s Bush had been suffocated in cold white fog, a boy from Ireland hugging himself into a donkey jacket. He’d been picked up in a lorry, driven to diverse sites. Now the mornings were warm. Blue crept along the corners of high-rise flats, lingering bits of dawn. Jackie was enclosed in a routine, last night’s litter outside country and western pubs. Guinness bottles, condoms, the refuse of Ireland in exile. The work was hard but then there was Moira to think of. At odd moments when life was harsh or reality pressing her image veered towards him; as he sat in the lorry, tightening his fists in the pockets of his donkey jacket, as he sat over a mug of tea in the site office. Moira Finnerty was his sister, at present in a mental hospital in Limerick but shortly to be released. She was coming to London to stay with him.
Jackie and Moira had grown up on a lowly farm in the Kerry mountains. Their parents had been quiet, gruff, physically in love with one another until their sixties. A grandfather lived with them, always telling indecent stories. There’d been many geese, cows, a mare always looking in the direction of the ocean, a blizzard of gulls always blowing over the fields. Life had been hard. Jackie had gone to school in Killarney. Moira had attended a convent in Cahirciveen.
Jackie had peddled dope at fifteen in the jukebox cafés of Killarney. His first affair had been at sixteen with the daughter of a rich American businessman, sent to the convent in Killarney by way of a quirk. After all Killarney was prettier than Lucerne or Locarno and it was possessed of its own international community. Sarah was from Michigan, randy, blonde, fulsome. She’d always had money, a plethora of nuns chasing her. However, she’d avoided the nuns, sat in jeans, which always looked as though they were about to explode, in cafés, smoking French cigarettes, smattering the air with French fumes.
Sex for Jackie until now was associated with the sea; recalling Sarah he thought more of an intimacy with the sea, with beaches near Ballinskelligs, inlets with the spire of Skellig Michael in the distance, an odd mound in the sea where monks once sang ‘Deus Meus’, the chants of Gaelic Ireland before Elizabethan soldiers sailed westwards on currachs.
Sarah had gone. There’d been many girls, Killarney was full of girls. He did his Leaving Certificate twice which led to nights lounging in cafés in Killarney, Valentine cards circulating from year to year, and one ice-cream parlour in Killarney where a picture of a Spanish poet stood alongside pictures of Powerscourt House, County Wicklow, and Ladies’View, Killarney, one tear dropping out of his eye, rolling up in a little quizzical ball and a bullet wound in his head. It was an odd cartoon to show in a café but then the owners were Portuguese so one accepted the odd divergence more easily.
Jackie had gone to Dublin, worked on building sites, peddled dope; lived like a prince in Rathmines. However, the arm of the law fell upon him. He was imprisoned for six months, returned to Kerry. A good cook, he got a job in a café in a world of provincial Irish cafés, always the jukebox pounding out the bleeding heart of provincial Ireland, songs about long-distance lorry drivers and tragic deaths in Kentucky.
His sister emerged from convent school about this time, got a job in a hospital in Limerick. It was supposed to be temporary but she stayed there. Moira, when she hadn’t been at school, had spent her adolescence wandering the hills about their home. There’d been few trees so one could always pick her out. She’d rarely gone to dances and when she had she’d always left early before the other girls, thumbing home.
They rarely spoke, but there was always something there, a mirror-like silence. Jackie saw himself in Moira, saw the inarticulate disparate things, a moment of high on an acid trip in Rathmines, a moment of love in a café in Killarney, a moment of reverie by the sea in Ballinskelligs. The West of Ireland for all its confusion was full of these things and it was these people Jackie veered towards, people who spoke a secret language like the Tinkers’ Shelta.
You discerned sensitivity in people or you didn’t. Jackie was an emotional snob. He was a snob in clothes, in cigarettes, in brands of dope even. But one thing he never minded was working and wending his way among the semi-literate.
Moira had spent two years in Limerick when she had an affair with an older married man. The usual. He made love to her, took every advantage of her shy, chubby body. Then returned to the suburbs. It was more than that which made Moira crack up. Her parents seemed content to leave her, not to expect anything remarkable of her. By solicitude they condemned her to a life of non-achievement.
Jackie had gone by the time Moira was put in the mental hospital in Limerick. Her face pressed on him. At first he thought to go back and rescue her. But he relied on time and patience. Moira was to be let out in June. He wrote and asked her to come and stay with him. For a while.
Early June in Shepherd’s Bush, the young of London walked along the street. Bottles flew. Bruce Lee continually played in the cinema. Irish country and western singers roared out with increasing desperation and one sensed behind the songs about Kerry and Cavan, mothers and luxuriant shamrock, the foetus of an unborn child urging its way from the womb of a girl over for a quick abortion.
Sometimes Jackie allowed himself to be picked up. He’d long lost interest sexually in women. The last girl he’d actually wanted to make love to had been in Dublin, a blonde who ran away to a group in California, mystical and foreign to the Irish experience. Walking in Shepherd’s Bush was like walking among the refuse of other people’s lives, many bins in the vicinity. He read many paperbacks. On colder days he lit fires in his room and sat over them like a Tinker. Above the door was a St Brigid’s cross, which traditionally kept away evil. He’d bought it at the Irish tourist office in Bond Street. There was a desk in his room on which he wrote letters home. He thought of his mother with her giant chamber pot that had emerald patterns of foliage on it. She’d bought it in an antique shop in Listowel. He thought of his father, a randy look always in his eye. As children they’d hear their parents making love like people in far-off cities in a far-off time were supposed to. He could still distinguish his mother’s orgasms, a cry in the air, a siren which was sublimated into the sound of a gull, the sound of a train veering towards Tralee.
They’d only had one another, he and Moira. They’d made the most of it.
Now he wrote to her.
Dear Moira,
Expecting you soon. The weather is changeable here. The job’s hard. I think I may go to Copenhagen in autumn. See you soon.
Love,
Jackie
She arrived unexpectedly one morning. The doorbell exploded. He jumped up. Oddly enough he was on the upper tier. He’d gone up there for a change. He climbed down the ladder, went to the door. He’d overslept. She was there, with two cases, scarf on her head, something more moderate about her face, less of the mysticism.
They kissed. Her breath smelt of Irish mints.
As there was no coffee he made her tea which they had on the floor. He was late for work but he decided to go anyway as he was on a nearby site. She’d sleep. He’d be back later. He bid her goodbye. She lay asleep in the upper bed. Before closing the door he looked around this den of loneliness. Moira’s slip lay over a chair.
She had the room tidy when he returned and she herself looked refreshed, having bathed in the grotty bath with its reverential gas flame bursting into life. Her scent had changed. There were perfumes of two kinds of soap in it.
This time she made tea and they sat down. He didn’t want to ask her about the mental hospital so instead he queried her about home. Moira didn’t want to talk about home so instead she imparted gossip about DJS on Irish radio.
Jackie made a meal, one he’d been preparing in his mind for a long time, lamb curry. Afterwards they had banana crumble and custard, eating on the floor. Moira said it would be necessary for her to get a job. Jackie didn’t disagree. Moira read the little pieces of print stuck about. A line from Yeats. An admonition from Socrates. Soon a point came whereby there seemed nothing else to talk about so both were silent.
They went for a drink before going to bed. Jackie apologized for the grottiness of the pub. Moira said she didn’t mind, her eyes drifting about to young Irish men holding their sacred pints of Guinness.
Afterwards they returned through the dustbins and slept in their individual beds.
It being summer Moira got a job in a nearby ice-cream parlour, dressing in white, doling out runny ice cream to West Indian children. In a generally bad summer the weather suddenly brightened and Jackie was conscious of himself, a young Adonis on a building site. His body had hardened, muscle upon muscle defining themselves. His hair was short. His face more than anything was defined, those bright eyes that shot out, often angry without a reason as though some subconscious hurt was disturbing him.
What he resented was the young Irish students who were arriving on the building site. They brought with them a gossipy closeness to Ireland and a lack of seriousness in their separation from that country. However, he and Moira were getting on exceedingly well. There was less talk of trauma than he’d anticipated. They had drinks, meals, outings together. On Sundays there was Holland Park and Kensington Gardens. They had picnics there. Sometimes they swam in the Serpentine. Moira’s head dipped a lot, into magazines, into flowers, into the grass. The vestiges of wardship were leaving. Jackie often felt like knocking back a lock of Moira’s hair. Something about her invited these gestures, her total preoccupation with a Sunday newspaper cartoon, her gaze that sometimes went from you and turned inwards, to that area they both held in common.
Moira cooked sometimes. She was a plain cook but a good one. She made brown bread much like his mother’s. Jackie’s cooking was more prodigious, curries that always scared Moira, lest there be drugs in them, chicken paprika, beef goulash, moussaka, and then the plates of Ireland, Limerick ham glazed in honey, Dublin coddle, Irish stew.
The divisions in the room were neatly made, borders between her area and his. Both were exceptionally neat.
For the first time she mentioned the mental hospital. It slipped out. There had been a woman there who’d had nine children, whose husband had left her, who scrubbed floors in a café and who’d eventually cracked up. In a final gesture of humiliation she’d wept while mopping the floor one day so that the proprietor reckoned she should see a psychiatrist. ‘Jesus, I’m crying. I’m just crying,’ she’d shouted. ‘I’m just crying because they told me life would be better, men helpful. I’m just crying and I’m not ashamed. I can manage. I can manage myself.’They’d told her she couldn’t and quietly stole her children, placing them in homes. It was then she’d cracked up, looking like all the other mad visionary women of Ireland, women who claimed to have seen Maria Goretti in far-flung cottages.
‘They force you to crack up,’ Moira said, ‘so that they can be satisfied with their own lot. After all the idea of pain, real pain, is too big to cope with. Pain can be so beautiful. The pain of recognizing how hopeless things are yet accepting and somehow building from it.’
His sister had grown. More than that she’d become beautiful, her Peruvian eyes calm and often a scarlet ribbon in her hair. Playing a game they’d played as children both of them dressed up at nights and went to showband concerts. Whatever her other sophistications Moira had not relinquished the showband world so they traipsed off to pubs, Moira in a summer dress, Jackie in a suit, a green silk Chinese tie on him, girls from Offaly moaning into microphones. You were scrutinized at the doors lest you were not Irish. Often there was some doubt about Jackie until he opened his mouth. Inside people jostled, a majority of women edged for a man. Lights changed from scarlet to blue and somehow Moira in her dreamy, virginal way seemed at home here, lost in a reverie of rural Ireland.
Shyness had gone, a kind of frankness prevailed. Often Jackie sat around his room in just trousers. Moira washed in her slip, sometimes it falling over her hips.
‘You know we made a pact, didn’t we, when we were growing up?’ Jackie said one evening. ‘Mammy and Daddy never seemed to notice us.’
It was true. Against their parents’ carnality they’d chosen a kind of virginal complacency.
Once in Kerry, looking at the moon, Moira had stated that this country had always been a country of nuns. In ancient times nuns had built cottages by nearby beaches.
It was less that they were a nun and a monk, more that they had to resist. Resist their parents’ self-absorption, resist the geese, the skies, the dun of the mountains, the purple changing to green of the rocks.
Jackie had had his affairs. In fact Moira had hers. But it was as though they’d made a vow of celibacy when Jackie was thirteen and Moira eleven; they didn’t want to fall into the trap of closing themselves off. They wanted to be open, romantic, available. Looking into Moira’s eyes before going to bed Jackie saw that in fact they were closing themselves off in a different way.
They were outsiders, resigned to be outsiders, and were making a fetish of this role. Moira had picked up a little teddybear in Shepherd’s Bush market. In her bed she held it. She was sitting up in her slip. ‘Goodnight Jackie,’ she said.
The teddybear slept with her.
That night Jackie walked the environs of Shepherd’s Bush, sat in a café, spoke to a man from Ghana. He waited some hours. The first light came. He returned home, picked up his things for work, waited for a lorry on Shepherd’s Bush Green.
She wanted to dance now so she danced with him. They travelled to Kilburn and Camden. Saturday nights in ballrooms, the London Irish swung to visiting showbands. Despite this venture in a foreign city Moira had a lonesomeness for the decay of rural Ireland, for its fetishes. Jackie dancing with her, cheek to cheek, wondered if he could cure it.
It was a miserable summer weather-wise. Early in August there was a much-advertised march against troops in Northern Ireland. Jackie and Moira saw it by accident, young English people shouting about women in Northern Ireland jails.
Later that month the Queen’s cousin was blown up in County Sligo. Moira and Jackie didn’t listen to the radio much but they heard a jumbled commentary on the events. Jackie wondered about the provisional Sinn Féin people who’d lived in this room once, that was their domain, instant and shocking deaths in the cause of Ireland. He smiled. No one in the whole of London reprimanded Jackie or Moira but the papers were full of hatred, mistaking the source of the guilt.
The guilt was a shared one, Jackie thought, a handed-down one. Everyone’s hands were dipped in blood; blood of intolerance. He’d thought about it so much, knew the kind of prevalent and often justified anger of Irish republicans. In Kerry they were eccentrics. One IRA man he knew grew the best marijuana in Kerry and decorated it with Christmas decorations come Christmas. Often Northern republicans fled to his house, men with trapped eyes. Reaching to them was like reaching to dynamite. They hit back easily.
So Jackie and Moira assumed responsibility for the deaths of the Earl of Mountbatten, the Dowager Lady Brabourne and the two children killed with them. They walked about London with the air of criminals. The newspapers had ordained this guilt. Jackie and Moira accepted it, not as slaves but with a certain grandeur. They were Irish and as such bore a kind of mass guilt, guilt for the republican few, for the order of the gun, the enslaved and frightened eyes, the winsome thoughts of Patrick Pearse. It was all part of their heritage; to deny it would be like denying the wet weather. But in accepting a certain responsibility both knew, Jackie more than Moira, of a more real tradition which never met English eyes, the tradition of the great families of Kerry, the goblets of wine, the harp, the Gregorian chant.
They’d left Kerry with their wolfhounds, going to Europe, but something was always ready to be disturbed of this tradition, a hedge-schoolmaster behind a white hawthorn tree reading Cicero; O’Connell, another Kerryman, in Clontarf telling the Irish proletariat that the freedom of Ireland is not worth the shedding of one drop of blood; Michael Davitt in Clare leading a silent pacifist march against English landlords.
Jackie knew, as all sensitive and knowledgeable Irish people knew, that the prevalent philosophy of Irish history was pacifism and he could therefore accept the rebukes of the English newspapers with glee, with a certain amount of wonder, knowing them to be founded and spread in ignorance.
But Moira wasn’t so sure. He’d noticed her fluctuating somewhat. Although outwardly calm there was a new intensity in her dancing. She was going back, quicker than he could cope with, to the ballroom floors in Kerry, the point at which all is surrendered, the days of drudgery, the nights of squalid sex in the backs of cars. She was trying to be peaceful with a violent heritage.
In a dancehall one night there was a fight. Someone hit someone else on the head with a chair. A woman started singing ‘God save Ireland said the Heroes’ and in moments Jackie’s dreams of pacifism were gone. A young man made a speech about H-Blocks on the counter and somewhere an auburn-haired woman described her lust for a Clare farmer.
Jackie took Moira home. She began crying, sitting on a chair. In moments it was gone, a summer of harmony. The tears came, scarlet, outraged blue. Afterwards it was the silence which was compelling. She was steadily recalling the corners of a mental hospital, the outreaches of pain. Her heart in a moment had turned to stone.
It was a curious stone too which her heart had become, exquisite and frail in its own way. She began going to dances by herself and one night she did not return. Jackie sat up, waiting until the small hours. When there was no sign of her he went out for a while, hugging himself into a donkey jacket. Autumn was coming.
People are like doctors. We live with one another for a while. We cure one another. Jackie saw himself as physician but too late. Moira no longer needed his physician’s touch. She was sleeping around, compulsively giving herself, engineering all kinds of romances. And when she stopped talking to him much he too searched the night for strangers. At first unsuccessfully. But then they came, one by one, Argentinians, West Indians.
She perceived the domain of his life, said nothing.
‘Pope visits war-torn country,’ the papers warned. It was true, John Paul was coming, giving an ultimate benediction to the dance-halls, the showbands, the neon lights, the jukeboxes that shook jauntily with their burden of song.
He saw the look on Moira’s face and knew she was destined to return. Nothing could hold her back. Dancing to an Irish showband singer’s version of ‘One Day at a Time’ he realized her need for the hurt, the intimacy, the pain of ballroom Ireland. She wanted to be immolated by these things.
There was nothing he could say against it. It was his life against hers and she saw his life as a shambles. He couldn’t tell her about the boys with diamond eyes, no more than she could tell him about the lads from Cork who jumped on her as though she was an old and unusable mattress. In mid-September she announced her decision.
A bunch of marigolds sat on the mantelpiece, a little throne of tranquillity.
‘Will you come too?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he said and half-naked he looked at her. He wanted to ask her why it was necessary always to return to the point where you were rejected, but such questions were useless. The Pope was coming, the music of ballroom Ireland was strong in her ears.
He took her to Euston and she asked him if he had any messages for their parents.
‘Tell them I won’t be home for Christmas,’ he said.
She looked at him. Her eyes looked as though they were going to pop out and grapple him and take their mutual pain but they did no such thing.
Later that night Jackie wandered in Shepherd’s Bush. He knew he’d deceived himself, going from body to body, holding out hope he’d meet someone who’d fulfil some childhood dream of purity.
All his life he’d been trying to reconstruct her, not so much Moira, as that virgin of Ireland, Our Lady of Knock, Our Lady of the Sorrows, that complacent maiden who edged into jukebox cafés, into small towns where apparitions had taken place in the last century and now neon strove into the rain.
He wouldn’t go to Copenhagen. He’d go south. He’d pack up his things and leave, knowing there was a certain compulsion about the sun, the Mediterranean, the shine of the sun on southern beaches.
Before leaving London there was one thing he wanted to do, dress up like any other Irish boy, comb his hair, put on his green Chinese tie and dance until all was forgotten, the lights of Killarney, the whine of the jukebox, the look on Moira’s face as she stared over a stone wall in Kerry, into a world which would consume their knowledge of the sea, their knowledge of stone, their reverence of one another.