8

Hare

From the sun room radio, an expert is telling me that there is poison in my water.

My pipes are made of lead, he says, and so, every day, I am drinking it. But how can I not have noticed that I’m being poisoned? Because it will take years and years, the expert says, before all this lead I drink actually begins to harm me. It is building in my blood, but only very slowly. And so, of course, I did know this after all: that I am, slowly, being killed.

 

From the sun room radio, the newscaster is telling me that a body has been found in a suitcase in the Grand Canal, but that the Gardai are unable to distinguish whether the person was a woman or a man, old or young, black or white or some colour in-between.

 

I am digging.

Crouched beside a sand heap on the outskirts of the dunes. Back to the sun. Shoulder caps reddening. Fine hairs at my temples yellowing. But as fast as I am able to dig, the sand caves in and refills my hole. I make a clearing, pushing back the dry top layer of grains which cover the beach. If I am to stand a chance, I must set a pace of emptying faster than it refills. I must begin wide and delve narrow. Why is my hole against me? Even my hole.

I drove to the beach this afternoon. A perfectly reasonable thing for a perfectly reasonable person to do on a fine day in summer. I parked the car and walked as far as I could walk from all the perfectly reasonable people on the beach.

The tide is out, and I’m not sure whether or not my way back will be cut off once it comes in again. My grandmother would be proud.

 

In the dark, coarse, cold, firm layer, the sand starts to hold itself up alone and I am able to make progress. My mother used to tell me that if I dug down deep enough, eventually I’d arrive in Australia. ‘It’s right down through the middle of the Earth,’ she’d say, ‘and directly out the other side.’ When I was a child, I believed in Santa and the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny until I was embarrassingly old. I believed that nougat was made out of old chewing gum, that teabags were filled with dried and minced cowpats, that telegraph poles were God’s discarded toothpicks. And so, I saw no reason to question this shortcut to Australia.

Now I am down as deep as the length of my digging arm and I’m not sure I can reach any further. Every time I plunge, my cheek rests a second against the surface of the beach, adding extra grains to my lopsided sand beard. Every time I raise my head, I check the tide hasn’t barred my way. I check my Fiesta is still waiting for me beyond the dunes. And I check the old man in the sea, the solitary old man.

 

No matter how far I try to travel from people, people always appear. Either they follow me, or they’re already there, and I followed them, unwittingly. His wrinkled and bronzed paunch is bared to the ocean and he is wading-swimming his way along the length of the strand and back again, seemingly unruffled by the freezing water, the burgundy balls of bladderwrack bumping beneath the surface, the plague of transparent jellyfish. The water is shallow. The old man’s knees must be grazing the seabed as he kicks his legs, and when he stands to wade again, his trunks drag precipitously low on his hips with the weight of their wetness. The curls on his chest are fiercely white against his tanned skin, and every now and again, I see the old man checking on me too.

 

I suppose I pictured that, in Australia, I’d pop out through a trapdoor in the sky, spot the crowns of koalas’ heads swaying in the topmost branches of the gum trees and hear the distant whingeing of didgeridoos. Then I’d drop down, landing squarely with the bush on one side and the beach on the other and Alf and Irene from Home and Away waiting to welcome me. My child imagination had it all nicely rationalised, until, one day, I stopped to study a diagram of a cross-section of the Earth in my geography book. The molten rock, the blazing magma, the fiery core.

Did it do me any good, early in life, to believe so many things which were not true? Or did it damage me? Pouring a foundation of disappointment, of uncertainty.

 

The sky grows overcast. Even though it’s still warm and dry, the crowd by the car park begins to dwindle. In this country where the sun shines so infrequently, I find it strange that most reasonable people remain so fussy. That they leave with the arrival of the first cloud, thinking they’ll return on a sunnier day which is unlikely to ever come. That they expect so much from life and will not compromise.

 

I am digging.

Until I can dig no further. Creeping forward only to be gently wrenched back. Until there is nothing but dark and rock.

I withdraw my arm and clamber into my hole and stand. I stand in my hole and pretend to be a dwarf. Now the wading-swimming man and I check one another at exactly the same moment. He registers my dwarf and looks away. I climb out and begin a new hole.

 

Works about Digging, I test myself: in 2007, Urs Fischer had the floor of Gavin Brown’s gallery in New York’s West Village dug up and out. Drilled, torn, removed. Leaving only dry dirt and rubble, a sign by the entrance warning that the installation was dangerous to the point of risk of death. The title of the piece is baffling: You. But who was this ‘you’? Somebody who, the artist felt, imperilled his solid grounding, even his life? And now I wonder did he get his secret message across; now I wonder if each artwork is in fact utterly inaccessible to everybody but the person to whom it is secretly addressed?

 

Five holes later, each an exact arm’s length deep, I realise there’s someone standing over me. A woman in sunglasses and a baseball cap. I’ve no idea how long she’s been there because there is no sun to cast a shadow. ‘Excuse me,’ she pipes up, ‘what are you doing?’

I brush my yellowed hair from my eyes, scratch my sand beard. ‘What does it look like I’m doing? I’m digging holes.’

‘I just don’t think it’s appropriate,’ she says. ‘What if my children were to come running down here to play? And trip into one of your holes? And break an ankle?’

‘A knee.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Well, unless your children are unnaturally tall, I expect a knee is what they’d break.’

Her expression is astonishment, and then, disgust. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ she says.

‘Wrong?’ I get up from my knees and climb out. ‘Just because I don’t give a shit about your children doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with me.’

The woman begins to back off. I watch her watching her footing as she goes, picking between my ankle-breaking holes, back along the beach to her windbreak and her picnic rug and her precious, breakable children. I stand up and shout into the wind: ‘WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONGNESS ANYWAY?!’

 

Works about Wrongness, I test myself: Henrik Plenge Jakobsen, 1996. A tall-as-man circular wall painting cut through its core with the sentence: EVERYTHING IS WRONG.

 

A gull the size of an albatross soars overhead, screeches. A bee emerges uncertainly from the dunes and commits suicide in the slosh of my inaugural hole. My mother says there are twenty different species of bee in Ireland, but that the average person divides them into only two: bumble and honey.

I gaze out at the blue and vast. My mother says that every seventh wave is supposed to be large. In the same way as a succession of shallow breaths necessitates a deep one. As if the sea is breathing as well as counting.

But today, there’s something the matter with it. The tide goes out and out and out, when surely it ought to have turned around again by now.

Maybe it isn’t going to come back this time.

A world without sea.

I think about how this wide openness is the view I love best, and yet, if I was out there, how quickly it would kill me.

 

Drive again, home again. I can feel the grains in my socks and sleeves and pants sandpapering my sunburn. I stand in front of the bathroom mirror and lift my T-shirt and twist about. I see how my shoulder caps and a patch of skin at the top of my back and back of my neck is shocking pink. Fluorescent.

I remember a thing I used to do as a child after a day at the seaside. I’d drop my chin, stick out my tongue to lick my chest and taste the salt on my skin. I used to wait until I was home again in the bathroom or my bedroom and alone, as if there were something indecent about it, in the way that children are able to sense indecency, without fully understanding.

I stand on my grandmother’s carpet. Alone in her bathroom, alone in her house, alone on the summit of turbine hill. I drop chin to chest, stick out my tongue and taste the flavour of sea on skin, relish it. I close my eyes and wish I’d stayed there on the shore’s edge in front of the wide openness. And dug all my holes into one, and given myself a pirate’s burial.

 

I go to my grandmother’s room and lie down in the place where the bed borrowed from the hospice had been before a man came to reclaim it. I lower my cheek to the floor. My eyes fill as my head falls.

People are most likely to die in bed; I suppose I heard somewhere. But what bed? At home in their own, or in a hospice? Or maybe, like my grandmother, at home in a hospice bed?

Now I wonder how many more people have died in that borrowed bed since my grandmother.

 

On this carpet, again I remember the old one. Its cider-shade and the tin soldier who lived beneath and how he used to drum on his furniture. He was quite brilliant at it. With only his hands and domestic surfaces, he drummed up an endless variety of rhythms, and it wasn’t even annoying; it was curiously lovely. What bothered me was that he was the one who was supposed to have purpose; purpose enough for both of us. What bothered me was all of the time he wasted by drumming, and all the time I wasted by listening to him drum, by taking pleasure in it, for pleasure is almost always a waste of time.

It was forty-four wooden spoons long, my bedsit. Even though I kept a steel ruler in the desk-tidy on my tabletop, I insisted on measuring the length of my bedsit in wooden spoons, and spoon by spoon, from the old fireplace across the tacked-down lino, as I measured, I saw how filthy my floor was, and I found a toy car with the figure of a tiny man inside, a thing that didn’t belong to me and that I’d never seen before.

I suppose that must have been shortly before I momentously phoned my mother, but I can’t remember for sure. I can’t remember what happened to the toy car and toy driver either. Did they get left behind, again?

 

When I first arrived here, it was morning, and my grandmother’s bungalow shimmered with healing potential. It wasn’t until after the sun set on my first night that I noticed the signs of decrepitude, as if, in daylight, weathered objects are inexplicably repaired: fissures resealed, colours reconstituted. All afternoon I’d been distracted by the process and possibility of the move. It wasn’t until my belongings had been put away that I’d looked—really looked—and registered: the mould on the weighing scales scoop, the chopping board, the table legs. The webs in the window frames so thick you could have called them hammocks and cradled kittens there. The stench of abandonment.

 

On the radio, gardai and pathologists are piecing together a little bit more of the suitcase body every day. Now they say it is a man, white and young. They are appealing for information.

Check your wardrobe for suitcases. Your life for the space a young white man used to take up.

 

At the beginning, I refused to acknowledge the decrepitude. Because this phase of my life was supposed to be new; I was supposed to be rejuvenated. But as the weeks pass, even the things which initially seemed intact have revealed themselves to be faulty. The knobs dropped off the cooker; now I’m down to the last one. I have to cook either all in the same pot or in rotation, or sometimes I use a pair of pliers to force the metal spike beneath the broken knob. Then there’s the beautiful old armchair where I sit in the evening to read. It was part of a suite, every other part of which is missing, and I couldn’t understand, at first, why it had been overlooked, until one night I lifted the throw-blanket draped across and found the place where Joe used to scratch his back: an ineradicable black stain from the grease of his coat.

 

The first night I spent here, I sat up until dawn in the dog-stained armchair. As surely as the sun had set and the decay shown itself, at the moment I stopped shifting about, the house started to shift instead, to creak and clunk and squeak and twitch. Even though I don’t believe in ghosts, I believe utterly in robbers and rapists and murderers, in those who make the scrutiny of defenceless people their specialist subject. So I sat up in the armchair until dawn. Then I moved to the floor of my grandmother’s bedroom and lay down there, as I am lying here now.

I need you at this moment, more than I ever did when you were alive, I implore my gone grandmother. If you come now I promise I won’t ever ask again.

And I remember that this is something I used to say to God, back when I thought there might still be a chance he existed.

And my grandmother doesn’t come, just like God didn’t.

 

Works about Ghosts, I test myself: James Lee Byars, 1969. An empty room, except for the audience, a bewildered audience. The title of the artwork: This is a Call from the Ghost of James Lee Byars.

‘I write the world’s simplest poems,’ the artist said, and I transcribed it in black ink and capital letters to the back of my left hand, and watched as it washed away, letter by letter.

 

The summer days continue to arrive in spite of my indifference to them. If I was my sun, I doubt I’d bother to rise and fall so incessantly with such scant acknowledgement. But then nature acknowledges it, of course. Everything leafing, blooming, bushing, teeming. The redcurrant bushes fruit and the fruit falls and gets scoffed by the rats and bugs. The baby birds learn to fly and fledge and fuck off. Only the air is dead and so only the turbine is on my side. Its somnolent blades barely managing to turn.

I lie on my back in my wilderness, watching the grass blades erupting into feathers above me. I remember how, when I lived in the city, I used to hear strangers sneezing in the distance. Now there are only the farmer’s recently weaned calves in the field which wraps around my grandmother’s property. They bawl and bawl, which is infinitely worse than sneezing. Sometimes, when I am not gazing at the grass stalks, I gaze at the dip in the garden step and contemplate all the footfalls it took to wear, and I find my grandmother in that dip. Or I gaze at the same spot in the sky; I wait for something to pass through it.

 

Today, a lone goose, gently honking. A honk for each flap, like a lorry reversing. Mindful of others, issuing a gentle warning. I watch the patch the lone goose intersected until the sun reaches it. Reducing the blue and cloud to stars and flashes, forcing me to close my eyes.

 

I do almost nothing, just barely enough to keep myself from turning to stone. I perform only the most necessary tasks at the basest level of involvement. Shower without soaping, eat without cooking, read without concentrating. I still go out and cycle, but only just. I push the pedals down and down and down. They push themselves back up again. I don’t take my camera. I don’t look for dead things and when I find them anyway I cycle past and leave them there.

I miss rats and rabbits; I miss a hare.

 

I go to my bags and boxes in the spare room, the ones I have not unpacked yet. I turn them out onto the carpet. In the last—always the last—I find it.

The toy car which doesn’t belong to me, but which I didn’t leave behind.

 

I tell myself that so long as I eat and sleep and wash and cycle and talk on the phone every other evening in an emotionally stable tone of voice, on emotionally stable subject matter, then she will not notice how nearly killed I am.

But of course she does; she is my mother.

 

Mum in summer, when I was a child. Because the famine hospital is at a crossroads, it marked a logical meeting point for the neighbouring children. On sunny days there would always be several of us frolicking in the rockery, clambering the straggled pines, sploshing in the paddling pool. It was during summer that Jane and I realised our mother was less motherly than the others’ mothers, and this was a great blessing. She’d ignore our amateur acrobatics on the swing-set, our tendency to turn the guinea pigs loose and chase them. She’d drive us to the beach and carry all the seaside paraphernalia herself, the cool box and windbreak and picnic basket. Rubber rings, bodyboards, rug. She’d even buy us all ice lollies on the drive home.

The swing-set acrobatics, as precarious as I imagine they appeared, had been carefully devised. They began the summer of the Barcelona Olympics, after Jane and I became obsessed with watching the gymnastics. The Americans who always cried and the Russians who always won and the Chinese who never had any boobs. The rules of our contest were more concerned with landing than swinging or leaping. The object was to hit the ground with arms out straight and feet planted evenly apart. We often twisted ankles or got kicked in the head, but were not discouraged. Because it was quite challenging to accomplish a perfect land, we remained interested; we continued to play.

Like all the best games, it was pointless and difficult.

Like all the best games, it was about pretending to fly.

 

What does my mother do in summer now? She goes to work. But what about the other days? I’ve no idea. I never ask.

 

‘HOW ARE YOU?’ I shout down the phone this evening when she calls. ‘What did you do today? What’s that noise?’ She’s on her mobile at a classic car rally in a seaside town with my father and his vintage Jensen. In the background, I can hear bandstand music.

‘Jimmy died last night,’ my mother says, ‘so we’ve got to do the removal on the way home from here.’

‘Who’s Jimmy?’ I say.

She tells me where in the parish he lived. Alongside the parochial house, with red hot pokers in a bed by the front wall. But I neither recognise nor absorb the information. Another faceless old man, perhaps the one who used to ride on a Honda 50, perhaps the one who used to loiter around the crossroads on hot days trying to catch a glimpse of my sister and me and our little friends messing about in the paddling pool.

I don’t keep track of them any more: the old men who die.

Now Mum starts to talk about a new book she is reading. It’s about famous hypochondriacs. Marcel Proust, Andy Warhol, even Florence Nightingale. My mother says: ‘People who suffer from anxiety are usually those with the most vivid imaginations.’ A gentle accusation disguised as consolation, as compliment; this is how I know she knows that I am struggling.

‘How would you feel if I phoned Beth?’ she says.

My aunt Beth is a Buddhist. ‘Buddhist Beth’ my father calls her, sometimes even to her face. She is the member of our family who is mobilised whenever any of the rest of us run into emotional turmoil.

 

I remember that the hare was Joseph Beuys’s spirit animal. I go back with my camera. It’s still there, just a little bit more battered.

A hare is a rabbit crossed with a horse. All limb and no fluff, an air of prudence. One of the cars has somehow managed to split the bowel and draw out a strand of shocking pink intestine, the colour of sunburn. And to flick a piece of its own shit into its frozen open eye.

This is how it will be for all of us, I think. Even the ones who do no harm.

 

Back again. To the famine hospital. We sit opposite each other on the floor of the room which used to be the playroom, my aunt Beth and I, cross-legged. We are having a go at meditation.

‘Should I close my eyes?’ I ask.

‘However you feel comfortable,’ she says.

With them open, I feel deeply uncomfortable, so I close them. But it’s just as bad.

I feel Beth’s hand on my right leg. It is jiggling my leg, or rather, my leg is jiggling her hand; this is my habitual right-leg jiggle. I force it to be still, which makes me even more uncomfortable.

Already I know I won’t be able to do this.

 

Right here on this same floor, when Jane and I were small, Beth would lie on her back and raise her legs up into the air and we’d take it in turns to have her balance us on the soles of her feet. It was a wonderful game. Of course. It was about pretending to fly.

 

So I open my eyes again and trail them around the room which has now been repurposed as my mother’s study. In my unemptied mind, I peel back the changes my parents have made since I left home: the computer desk and built-in bookshelves, the brilliant-white wall and its tasteful abstract paintings, the sofa bed and its multi-patterned cushions. In my mind, I put it all back the way it was when it was still meant for play.

The most horrible wallpaper of all used to hang here in this room. A stripy pattern the colour of peach yoghurt, and every second stripe was of a spongy material which was curiously satisfying to sink my fingernails into. But Mum used to find the tiny half-moon prints and tell me off, and so I had to be sneaky about it. I’d shunt the furniture forward to poke the wall behind; I’d shunt it back again once I was finished.

 

I close my eyes and see the peeled room. The toy houses lining its perimeter, toy cars parked in toy driveways, toy grocery shops and toy cafés. Jane’s roller-skater doll lived in a moulded plastic mansion and my Monchichi family lived in a moulded plastic campervan and all of the others lived in renovated cardboard boxes. We had designated the open expanse of carpet in the middle a lagoon, though sometimes we’d forget, or run out of space elsewhere and locate our games in the invisible lagoon anyway, ignoring the fact that the toys ought to be drowning. Jane would always give her dolls the names of nobody we knew or had ever known in real life; American names inspired by the characters on Baywatch. And I copied her; I always copied her. My cuddly cats and bears and monkeys were called Ricky and Shauny and Erica. And we gave them ages. Our toys were sixteen or seventeen; only the very eldest were in their early twenties, because, apparently, I didn’t envision anything of particular interest in life beyond twenty-five. And now I am a greater age than any of the toys were allowed to reach, older than I even cared to imagine as a child.

 

I peek at Beth. Her eyes are closed and so I close mine again too. But I cannot make the doll town go away. Ricky and Shauny and Erica are rising out of the carpet-lagoon and dancing inflexibly around my meditating aunt. Kicking their stumpy legs up, shaking their rigid elbows and fluffy bellies about.

‘It’s important,’ she says, ‘to pay attention to the nothings and appreciate them.’

 

Alone in the car again. Passing the about-to-be-harvested fields, stuck behind a harvester. I think about what Beth said. ‘Don’t feel guilty,’ she said. ‘Nothing good comes of guilt.’ She said it after I admitted how frightened I am that all this stupid sadness is chewing at my intellect.

‘It’s time to let this go,’ she said.

She meant: it’s time to postpone—if not entirely abandon—my burden of unrealistic ambition. To start churning the intellect I have left into simply feeling better; to make this my highest goal. It’s time to accept that I am average, and to stop making this acceptance of my averageness into a bereavement.

‘Do you remember the story of when you were born?’ my aunt said.

 

I was born blue and breached. Half-strangled by my own umbilical cord. The very thing which kept me alive for nine months tried to kill me as soon as I started leaving it behind. The same name had been written twice on a blackboard in the delivery room. It was spelled once for a boy and once for a girl—Francis and Frances—and for a moment my mother must have thought I’d never get a chance to be either. But then the midwife diligently un-strangled me and a nurse arrived wheeling an incubator.

‘You were resilient,’ my aunt said, ‘right from the off.’

I was, at least, above average at resilience.

 

Works about Misguided Resilience, I test myself: Robert Morris, Untitled (Passageway), 1961. A floating entrance inside the exhibition space. Leads to a passage. The passage leads on and on, narrows and narrows. The passage becomes so narrow it’s impossible for the person trying to walk down to keep going, but still, the person persists in pushing and pushing. Determined they are heading somewhere; determined to refuse to accept that the passage is the point.

 

What else did Beth say? I try to focus on the nothings. The air—all of this air I fought so hard to take in as a newborn and have spent every moment since completely ignoring. Now I notice the scuffing of the inside of my clothes against the outside of my skin. How can it be that I have worn clothes every day of my life and never noticed this sensation? It feels as if the labels at my hip and collar are scratting flesh away to bone, as if the elastic band of my pants is sawing a slit towards my organs. And now I notice the trembling. Not just my right leg, but everywhere. Very slight but irrepressible. Have I always trembled? I can’t remember. Was I born breached and blue, and trembling?

 

Gorse blurs past. Trees, cows, houses. At the bottom of turbine hill, I notice all the stray balls and plastic plant pots in the hedge at the bottom. I see how every rolling thing that ever rolled down turbine hill has lodged here. There seems to be an awful lot for so few houses. How strange I haven’t noticed until now. I drop to second gear and feel the change which occurs in the engine, a mechanical sigh of relief. I reach my grandmother’s bungalow, park in the driveway and walk back to close the gate, to tie the dog string. I notice how frayed it has become. With the force of a few more tugs it will snap and I’ll have to choose between replacing it with an utterly needless new length of twine and accepting that the dog is gone.

I go in the back door to the kitchen. Open a cupboard, click. Take out a tin of tuna chunks and close the cupboard, thunk. Pull the ring on the can, click, again; a smaller, sharper click. Open the cutlery drawer, jangle, and select a fork, clink. Pick an ant off my sleeve and flick it down the sink. I breathe. I breathe. I breathe.

And all of this time, I am trembling.

 

I eat my tuna chunks with red wine at the sun room table, dripping brine into the keyboard of my laptop. I drag a duvet off a bed and onto the sofa, trick myself into sleeping by trying not to sleep.

I dream about pneumatic drills and Himalayan earthquakes. I wake up thinking about the Tibetan Delek Hospital and why I ended up there. It wasn’t because of the stomach thing, not initially. Jane, initially, called an ambulance because I thought I could not breathe; because I was so scared of the thin air and the vomiting that I forgot my body knows to inhale and exhale on its own and does not require my brain to initiate every breath; I panicked. And as soon as the fuss had been made and we were both in hospital I felt like such a fucking eejit. The doctor who X-rayed my chest gave me the photograph to keep, the one which showed my lungs were perfectly fine. I rolled it up and carried it home over land and sea, through sky, and nailed it to my bedroom wall as a reminder of what a fucking eejit I’d been.

When people ask what India was like, still I always say: ‘breathtaking’.

 

In the morning, they are all still here; the under-appreciated nothings. Pulsing, bleating, blaring, swirling. Once in a doctor’s waiting room I overheard two old women talking about the irritation of how, when they have their hearing aids switched up to full volume, it results in an unsettling din of white noise. Water hissing through pipes, mice twitching in their sleep, the whirr of light fixtures. Now I recognise what the old women were talking about, the deafening silence.

This morning, I see the lead in my glass tumbler. A slim, bright glint, a silverfish. I feel it collecting in my blood, papercutting the lining of my veins.

 

There’s a queen wasp in the sun room, beating her fragile head against the glass, crushing her antennae down. ‘Why can’t I go on,’ she is thinking, ‘when there’s nothing here to stop me?’ I watch, and wait unnecessarily long before I open the window.

When I do, I see the flies which have built up in the frame and on the floor. Houseflies and horseflies and bluebottles, dead and dry and crispy. What do so many mean? They are time, of course. All the time I’ve been here, neglecting to open the windows, to clean up like my mother told me.

I will leave the flies where they have fallen, as a unit of measurement.

 

What is it about crying? As if my body believes that squeezing all its salt out might somehow quell the sadness. As if sadness is a parasite which suckles on sodium chloride.

 

After a few days of dry heat, a huge shower. The thrust of descending rain so strong it guns my unpegged socks down from the line to the sodden grass.

 

Rising from the earth and through the open sun room door: the scent of a chemical reaction between the heated ground and the cold cloud’s water; of summer thunderstorms.

I hit the radio switch and assume foetal position on the mouldy sofa. On the radio, lone joggers are being devoured by wolves, because the way the wolves see it, running away is a sign of vulnerability, an open invitation to give chase.

There’s a toad who is able to predict earthquakes, a cat who got locked in a freezer and lost his tail and ears to frostbite, a man who is able to hypnotise squirrels.

On the radio, at last, there is a head to fit the suitcase body.

The storm stops fast. The sky unclenches, a blanket lifted from a birdcage. I go outside to survey the damage. The rain has battered down the tall grass of my wilderness as well as my socks, erased my crop circle. I bend over and begin to stand the stalks back up again. But one by one, they resist me, refusing to be repaired.

 

The inaugural thunderstorm heralds more rain: a whole monsoon season in the space of a week. On behalf of the green world, I am glad. The grass had started to develop jaundice, the flower-heads to droop. The strawberry patch surrendered the last of its crop to the indomitable slugs; the leaves of each plant withered, whorled. I suppose I should have watered the garden, but I didn’t think of this until the clouds stepped in on my behalf.

And yet, the early mornings are always fine. The sun climbs into a clear sky and burns away the dew, as if the dawn is a perpetual optimist.

 

Every afternoon, clouded mood beneath clouded sky, in foetal position on the sun room sofa, I listen.

There’s the one-in-one-thousandth donkey that has given birth to twins, a man who was charged with public drunkenness because he was found administering the kiss of life to the corpse of an opossum, a woman on a waiting list for gastric band surgery followed by a spokesperson from the Size Acceptance Movement whose members prefer the term ‘fuller figured’. This makes me think about how there’s a counter argument for everything: every single thing I thought I knew—there’s someone out there who can discredit it.

I lie on the sofa and tremble, until the radio stories jumble into nonsense. The toad that lost his tail and the donkey twins that can predict earthquakes.

 

I stay up late and watch a foreign film on the Irish language channel. It is spoken in Hungarian, subtitled in Irish. I can’t understand either, but I still have all the little gestures and noises and faces people make in order to express themselves; I still understand the film, enough. How prosaic words are, I realise, how insufficient.

 

After the Hungarian film, the late-night news. A woman walking her dog has found thirteen pilot whales beached on a long strand of the north-west coast. The reporter is talking to an angry environmentalist who is doing an interview when he ought to be dragging sea mammals into the falling tide. The JCB can only take them so far; there are teams waiting in the shallows, towing them into deeper water, dressed up in wetsuits as if to better resemble the creatures they are trying to save. The angry environmentalist implicates fleets of Dutch and French trawlers which have indiscriminate access to our waters; the signals from their enormous boats interfere with the cetaceans’ sonar, he says, causing them ferocious, unknowable trauma from which they cannot recover—from which they see no means of escape but to throw themselves on the mercy of the treacherous dry land.

The camera lingers on a whale stretched out in the sinky sand of the shallows, the sort into which my sister and I used to plant our feet and pretend we’d had them amputated. Every now and again, he pushes a great gust of air through his blowhole, out and out and out, and never in again. The environmentalist says they are called pilot whales because they like to crest the wave created by a ship’s bow, as though they are piloting it. He says that, of all whales, pilots are the ones which most frequently strand. The ones with the most sensitive hearing, or perhaps, the closest listeners.

 

The ocean is a cacophony of noise. I’m guessing David Attenborough said this at some point and it stuck with me because it’s so hard to believe. I’ve held my nose, plunged my head beneath the surface on summer days at the beach, and heard nothing but the suctioning of water. But now I understand that this isn’t because the ocean is silent; it’s because I am ocean-deaf.

 

A final monsoon shower. The clouds recede into a watery rainbow. I watch it through the sun room roof, fading as fast as it coalesced. I go outside to stand in the centre of the garden, the openest part. This is my ocean lawn. The other parts of the garden—the wilderness and flower beds and compost heap—are only seas. The bungalow is only an island. The birds sing and the calves cry and the turbines’ blades thrum. And yet, it’s peaceful. Here is the peace I craved all the years I lived in the city, shushing my sneezing neighbours.

How could I have known that peace could become so boring?

In only my socks on the lawn ocean. Beneath the throbbing turbine and the fading rainbow. I shut my eyes, raise my hands up and my elbows and shoulders raise after them. Slowly, methodically, I sway. Like a hammock. A pendulum. The clapper of a church bell.