Thirteen
Down there in the country the winter grabbed you in its relentless grip as soon as the clocks went back in October. From then on, the darkness never let go. Before you got used to them, the grey mists of day were swallowed by the cloudy nights. In the blanket of darkness the little houses tried to hold their own; they glowed with a plucky desperation, like space ships lost in a black infinity. But the atmosphere that surrounded them was earthy, solid: it was noisy with the howling wind, which reached levels of absurd fury almost every night, battering against the roofs and the windows like herds of some crazed animal, buffalo or elk or – it could be – elephants. And the rain accompanied the wind. The great clouds raced in from the Atlantic as fast as they could and they broke and lashed against the first place they saw: the valley.
Leo always felt snowed in at this time of the year, although there was never any snow. This year he felt more snowed in than usual. How could he leave the house? Only a fool would step out into that weather more often than was strictly necessary.
He wished, more than usually, that he had a car. He had to step out into gale force winds, driving rain, sweating in his waterproof suit and hardly able to walk in his squelching wellingtons, to catch the bus to go to the town for food. While almost everyone else stepped into their jeep, heated it up, and moved around the countryside with ease and comfort. He doubted if he could learn to drive now. He was so clumsy. But he promised himself that he would try; he would take lessons in the spring. This is what he promised himself every winter.
Not having a car meant he was lonely. In the summer he walked down to the pub at night and chatted to whoever was there. But now it was often too cold and wet to walk down, so he spent a great deal of time alone in the house, getting in on himself, as people in the valley would put it. Getting in on himself, while nobody got in on him. He hadn’t formed good enough relations with most his neighbours to have a circle of friends who felt free to visit unannounced. In his less self-pitying moments he decided that people in Ireland did not drop in casually as much as they had when he was a child, even here in the country. They telephoned in advance. Or they telephoned for a chat and then did not bother calling in at all. And there were, around here, several people like him, artists and writers and such people, who were holed up in their houses for the winter, isolated, them as well as the old people, the widows and bachelors who had been left bereaved and lived alone. Not a soul dropped in on Leo, apart from one neighbour, an American woman, Stacey, who lived a few yards away and owned very good rain gear.
Why do I live here? was a question he asked, also more often than usual, at this time of the year. Sometimes he promised himself that he would sell up and move once the spring came.
Move where? Dublin was the obvious place. And the obvious problem would be property prices. That was why, after all, he was here in the first place, and it was why he would stay here, because the money he would get for this house would never be sufficient to buy a place in Dublin. Although he might get a mortgage … for someone like me, Leo felt, a freelancer, that is the last thing I want hanging around my neck.
Life would have been so perfect if Kate would have considered … marrying him. Or even if she had liked him enough to visit him, to come down for weekends on a regular basis, even if she did not want to go as far as moving down or getting married. But she had wanted nothing, not even to make one visit, to see what the place was like. He wanted her to love him and she didn’t even like him. She probably laughed at him behind his back. Quite possibly the look of him made her feel physically sick. He didn’t like it much himself, why should she? He was getting old.
All his life – or all his life since his parents’ death, since he had moved to the country – he had devoted himself to the well-being of society, of the country, of the planet. He had had big ambitions for the world, and no ambitions for himself. He had focused on global happiness, and paid little attention to his own. Now it seemed that he was just as selfish and self-centred as anyone else.
His true wish was for love and happiness, for himself.
He did not think of passion, transcendence, sexual bliss. All he wanted was a girl he loved, marriage … a child. Or two. Ordinary stuff. Just what most people wanted.
But time was running out.
He was thirty-five.
He was a survivor. He did not give up. Instead he flung himself into his work, since the alternative, as he knew from experience, was to sink more deeply into misery. He had two books, one of which he hoped to get out in time for Christmas, one by a Dublin woman who wrote strange, surreal poems about child abuse in orphanages in the 1950s, and one ordinary collection by an ordinary poet. The poems about the orphanages could be a hit, if properly marketed. There was, of course, a slight chance that people were weary of the theme – they wearied so easily and so quickly, no matter how shocking the story, and the story of the orphanages had now been told several times in fiction and journalism, but – it was to this fact that his hopes were pinned – not so often in poetry and especially not in Irish language poetry.
That would have to be his unique selling point. An old shocking story in an old beautiful language (Irish) and a new beautiful medium (the poetry of this woman, which he would insist was beautiful). She was beautiful herself, which helped. And black. The first black Irish language woman poet, he was almost certain, in the world. She had a lot going for her. If he couldn’t sell her work, he was worse than useless.
He beavered away, editing, talking to the authors, sending thousands of emails, commissioning covers. He could work for ten hours a day, easily, and still have plenty of time on his hands in these dark days, which hardly seemed like days at all when the clouds came down and swamped everything in grey fog so that you could see nothing, and his house on the hill seemed more like a submarine than a cottage with a view of the sea.
In the evenings he lit a great turf fire on the stone hearth to cheer himself up, and after his vegetarian dinner, he liked to sit there reading detective novels or watching television. Then he turned off all the lights and enjoyed the flickering of the firelight on the walls.
In short, he was reduced to watching his own shadow for amusement.
Or animal shadows.
Sometimes he made shadow puppets, something someone – his mother – had taught him to do as a child. He could do a fox, a rabbit, and an animal with horns, which he variously decided was a goat, a cow, or a sheep.
Some people would think this is pathetic, Leo said to himself, aloud, watching quite a well-shaped goat nod his head on the wall. But he liked doing this. He liked creating shadows on the wall.
Well, it was better for you than snorting cocaine, on your own, in a flat so small that there was no wall to make shadow animals on, and a city so bright that there were no shadows anywhere.
Country life.
Stacey called in. A red letter day. A visitor!
‘Hi!’ she called out, as she opened the door and let herself in. He didn’t lock the door during the day.
Leo left what he was doing and came out to the kitchen.
‘Hi Stacey,’ he said. They spoke English together. As usual, she accepted a cup of herbal tea.
‘I’m going to town to see the reflexologist,’ she said. ‘I wondered if you wanted anything. A lift maybe?’
‘I’m ok,’ he said, boiling the kettle. He hadn’t lit the fire and although the kitchen felt warm enough, it looked cold. Outside the big windows dark grey cotton-wool fog swathed everything in misery, as usual.
The raspberry tea cheered him up, with its deep red colour and fruity taste.
‘I’m trying African reflexology for my arthritis. Everything else has failed, so might as well give it a go,’ she said, stretching out her legs, which were very short. Stacey was a tiny woman.
‘It can’t do any harm,’ Leo said.
There were clinics in the town offering acupuncture, a Chinese herbal doctor, Indian head massage, African reflexology, and Reiki. And other such things. Also two gps and a dentist. Leo had gone to one of the clinics to get a head massage once, out of curiosity more than anything, although he had been suffering from blocked sinuses. There were scented candles in the waiting room, and a statue of Buddha, an orchid. The masseuse cleared his sinuses, for about a day; then they got blocked again.
‘Mainey told me her grandmother – you know, old Lane – had a great cure for arthritis but alas it’s gone to the grave with her. She had a great cure for everything, according to Mainey, but what use is that to us if nobody learned what the heck the cures were from her before she kicked the bucket?’
‘Probably spurious anyway,’ said Leo. ‘Mainey says more than her prayers.’ Mainey was one of the oldest women in the valley, a sort of mother figure to the entire parish, who sat in state at her fireside every night in her charmingly cluttered old kitchen and entertained callers with anecdotes about the old times. She was one of the few people you could drop in on unannounced. Leo reminded himself that it was time for him to pay her a visit.
‘I know what you mean but this time she’s right. I’ve heard it from other people too. Old Lane knew a lot about herbs. She had some funny ideas, such as eating a ferret’s leavings for whooping cough and untying all the knots in the house when a woman was in labour, but she knew her stuff,’ said Stacey. ‘Where to find the selfheal and the eyebright.’
‘Sure you know that yourself.’
Stacey could identify all the wild flowers in the locality, having helped some professor from the Botanic Gardens in Dublin to collect them one summer ages ago. She it was who had taught Leo the names of most of them. Before he had got to know her, he had known buttercups and primroses, cowslips, but now he could name almost every flower that grew in his own field, and on his wall, that endless, reliable, relentless cycle of plants, starting with the primroses and violets in March and ending with the montbretia in October. In between, thirty different flowers came and went in the patch of grass in front of his house, as they had grown and withered and seeded, grown and withered and seeded, for thousands and thousands of years in that very place – although there were newcomers. The fuchsia, which had come from South America, and the montbretia from South Africa, and the terrible Japanese knot, which threatened to oust everything else, including the houses, if the worst predictions were to be believed.
‘I do, but I lack the magic touch. Somehow I know that if I make some concoction with eyebright, it won’t do any good … and my cataracts prove it!’
Stacey had trouble with her eyes as well as with her limbs. She was always very cheerful when talking about her complaints, referring to them in an ironic, wry tone, the kind of tone other people used to talk complainingly but proudly about the antics of their clever children. Her attitude was very different from that of other sick people he had known – his father, before his death, for instance, had suffered incessantly from headaches and stomachaches and mysterious pains, and talked about them as if they were unassailable enemies. He had always frightened Leo into believing he was going to die. And then he did die, but not of any of his ailments.
‘You’re never sick, Leo?’ Stacey had mentioned this before.
‘I’m lucky,’ he said. ‘Or else it’s the easy life.’
But it was his father. Watching his father, he had decided he would never complain about being sick. And so far he had never had to.
‘Micheál is dying,’ Stacey added cheerfully.
‘Is he?’ Micheál was a farmer down the road, one of the old men of the parish. Somebody was always dying here, especially in the winter. It was as if they looked out at the rain and the fog and the dark and gave up.
‘They took him to Dingle the day before yesterday. He won’t come home, they say. Stroke.’
‘Poor man.’ Leo had known him to nod to as he passed up and down on his tractor, his dog in the trailer.
‘He was a nice man. Didn’t have a lot to say but there was no harm in him.’ Stacey got up slowly. ‘Well I’d best be off,’ she said. ‘You’re quite sure you don’t need anything?’
‘I am,’ said Leo. ‘And drive carefully, you. Look at that fog!’
‘Sure amn’t I used to it by now?’ said Stacey. She moved towards the door. ‘You know what you should get? You should get yourself a nice girlfriend,’ she said, looking back over her shoulder. ‘But unfortunately I can’t buy one for you in the supermarket.’
Even Stacey, who lived alone, who was a model of happy independence, could see that Leo was sinking and needed a helpmeet, to get him through – through life in the valley, through life in general. Everyone saw it. Lots of people had begun to hint that it was time Leo got himself a partner, or a girlfriend, or a boyfriend – some people thought he was gay, since he lived alone and published poetry. It was as if his single status had begun to upset the community, or as if they, like him, had realised the danger he was now in, the danger of a life of lonely bachelordom. Down here in the country, life was easier if you had company in the house, especially in the winter.
As if to make an effort, although there would be nobody down there, male or female, who would fit the bill, Leo went to a meeting in the community centre. That was one of the pastimes winter offered: you could go on a committee or two – as if he was not on enough already – and attend meetings and talk about problems.
Down he went, in the wind and the rain, togged out in a bulky, grey, waterproof suit and wellingtons, to a meeting of the local heritage committee, which they had put him on because he had attended the agm and anyone who attended it got invited to sit on the committee. A group of ten, seven men and three women. They sat in the front row of the theatre in the heritage centre, along the tip-up plush seats, and talked about planning permission, and who would get the franchise on the ferry to the island, which had been the main topic of conversation in the valley for about three years.
Leo didn’t have any view on the ferry franchise and he was sick of the issue. He could see that it would never be sorted out unless a ruling came from some Minister or other – democracy wasn’t going to provide a solution. Even a ruling from a Minister would probably not be obeyed. It was one of those problems that would run on and on forever.
The planning permissions he always had a stance on. He battled on the side of the environment, ranting on – as his opponents put it – about polluted ground water, destruction of habitats, unsustainable development. Most people on the committee, like most people around here, were all in favour of unsustainable development. They said they wanted planning permission for their children. Everyone said this, even people who were eighty years old, even people who had no children. But they also wanted to sell sites for high prices to anyone who would buy them.
Leo spoke out bravely against self-interest and defended Mother Earth against her residents. They saw him as an idealistic blow in, with his city perspective on the country – one of the urban know-alls who came to the country to tell the natives what was wrong with them. They tolerated him because it was their custom to tolerate everything and everyone, including their worst enemies. Like the bogs that surrounded it, the community absorbed whatever was tossed into it, sucking it down into its secret depths and thus rendering it harmless.
Leo by now was one of their beloved cranks. The committee, the valley, needed him to voice the alternative point of view and would have been disappointed had he failed to turn up with his predictable arguments at all their meetings. They listened, they argued a bit with him, they shook their heads at his persistence, and then adjourned to the pub, where they drank convivially together for hours, those who had opposed each other strenuously at the meeting buying one another pints now.
This is the great thing about here, Leo thought. People do not fall out, not for long. The place was too small to allow long-term animosity. You would meet your enemy, if you had one, every time you went to the shop, the church or the pub. Falling out openly was not a real option. So a sort of friendly duplicity prevailed.
News had broken about the torture of American prisoners in east European prisons. Extraordinary rendition. The ten o’clock news, in the corner of the bar, showed the little spaniel face of Condoleezza Rice, looking sad and serious. ‘Mistakes happen,’ she said. Or errors. That is the word Condoleezza used, not ‘mistakes’. ‘Error’ sounded better, less serious. Mistakes could be blamed on someone but errors simply happened. Had this something to do with the very sound of the word, all those soft and gentle rs, as opposed to the hard consonantal clusters in ‘mistakes’? The Anglo-Saxon directness of it. ‘The United States government does not condone the torture or inhumane treatment of prisoners.’ Torturer Condoleezza, thought Leo, getting angry after a few pints. Torturer Bush. Torturer Taoiseach for allowing the planes to land at Shannon. Planes with prisoners, on their way to Poland or Romania, to be interrogated there, off the campus, had landed at Shannon for refuelling. Condoleezza said they hadn’t and the Minister for Foreign Affairs had believed her, had asked no more questions. He was satisfied to know as little as possible. He was not going to interrogate Condoleezza, or interrogate the crews, or search the planes, in case he found what he did not want to find, because money was being made out of those planes at Shannon. The newscaster added, without comment but with a faint sinking of tone, that the landings were worth twenty thousand euro a day to the Irish economy, or was it a week, or a month or a year? She didn’t actually specify or he had missed that. That was the price of sending men to the torture chambers of Poland, Ireland’s Catholic neighbour in the north of Europe, thought Leo.
This is it, Leo got more and more angry, watching the doll face of Anne Doyle tell this terrible story, not a hair out of place as she described the train to Auschwitz, as it might be. He had often wondered what the next European holocaust would be and here it was. Iraq. Afghanistan. The knock on the door in the early morning, in Milan or Copenhagen or Paris. Come with us. Take nothing. We will fly you to the torture chamber as long as your captors pay the toll.
It is happening at this minute before my nose, thought Leo, and I’m drinking a pint of Guinness. While I know, or half know, just as people half knew about the concentration camps long, long before the war ended, and just like them, I am saying maybe it is not true, we don’t have the evidence, and anyway what can I do about it?
He got up and left the noisy cosy pub, just as Daniel O’Shea was striking up on the accordion. The news was over, the television volume lowered. (They never turned it off, even when singers were performing, just lowered the volume. It was as if the television were a customer in the pub, and, like the regulars clustered around the bar, had a right to be there no matter who else came in.)
Outside it was cold and dark but for the first time in weeks the rain had stopped. The dark blue sky was full of white stars – like moths, Yeats got it right, or almost right, the way the stars flickered was like the twitching, mysterious movement of hardly visible insects, although they would have to be luminescent, glow-in-the-dark insects to make the metaphor exact. There were so many stars to be seen that the sky was crowded; you could always see more of them here than elsewhere; the Milky Way looked really milky, a smudge of white like a stain on a black coat across the sky; the Plough he could easily pick out, the Pleiades, and others.
Ranged over him and the absurdity of all his efforts to change the world, they had looked down for millions of years. Even here in this very spot human beings had been gazing up at these stars several thousand years ago. From the minuscule perspective enormous changes had taken place in the ant hill of human evolution, but sub specie aeternitatis, what did that matter? The valley had looked the same from the perspective of the stars for aeons. And vice versa.
For thirteen whole years of his tiny span on earth he, Leo Kavanagh, had been living here in the almost eternal valley, fighting for an eclectic mixture of good causes. The Irish language and vegetarianism. Road safety. The environment. The future of the globe – as if it mattered in the really broad scheme of things. The burdens of the world, big and little, global and national and parochial, had found a resting place on his broad and weary shoulders. Although he had tried to limit himself, the number of causes he was involved with was always growing. At least half his time was taken up with some society work or other. And had anything changed as a result of his efforts?
The answer the stars gave was: not really.
No, said the Plough, and No, said Sirius, and No, said Venus, and No No No No No, said all the splash of mothlike planets in the Milky Way.
No more people spoke Irish, or read Irish, in spite of his best efforts. The environment, even in the immediate locality, the parochial environment, continued to be destroyed. Every week, it seemed, new houses sprang up in the fields, new septic tanks were dug to pollute still further the ground water, new suvs appeared to churn up the surface of the boreens. Every month some young man or woman, or some old-age pensioner, was mowed down on the roads.
Before you even talk about animal rights, and vegetarianism.
He had tried, for thirteen years. He had tried to make a difference. What else could anyone serious do? Your allotted time was short enough; if you didn’t use it to make some contribution, how would you feel when your time was up? Guilty, he supposed. But he felt guilty anyway. And stupid. He was just deluding himself that he could change something, or make a contribution. History rolled on inexorably in spite of what he, or anyone else, did to change its course. Killing Roads had not stopped a single car killing a single victim and it probably never would. His efforts to keep the Irish language alive were energetic and solid but the Irish language would continue to fade away in spite of all of them. That he ate vegetables did not prevent the butchery of innocent animals continuing and expanding. That he used public transport made no difference to the appalling record of Ireland as a car-dependent nation.
He could not stop the killing roads, he could not stop a rich man evading the planning laws, he could not stop the Taoiseach allowing Bush to land his prisoners at Shannon. Just as he could not stop Kate from running away with that Vincy fellow.
His life was passing him by and he was failing, at every single thing he did.
The stars twinkled and laughed their heads off at him, as he trudged sadly up the hill to his house. The world you are so busy saving is a moth, they laughed. We are moths to you and from our point of view you are also a mothlike star, flickering out, out, out.