Charlie and Skippy. I liked them before I met them; they had such likeable names. We were staying at the same artists’ retreat in County Monaghan that autumn of 2004. Before we were introduced, I imagined a suntanned Californian travelling through Europe with his young son, or maybe a tomboyish girl. A man and his child on some sort of adventure.
I had been given a writer’s residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, or Annaghmakerrig, as everyone calls it, before I, or anyone else, could possibly describe me as a writer. It had been my big brother’s idea – he thought it might help to get me started. I’d bored everyone about my ambition since the age of fourteen, but I was still only talking about it at thirty-five. And I needed to do anything other than remain where I was, watching the sad, ugly days of a dying relationship and beyond bored in a meaningless job. It was October, my favourite month – always a time for new beginnings; the real new year for me, with its bright cold days and firelit evenings, so much more meaningful than grey and dreary January.
At Busáras in Dublin city centre, I heaved four large holdalls onto the Monaghan bus – far too much luggage for someone without a car (after several failed attempts I had yet to learn how to drive) and for only a two-week stay, and a sign in itself that my focus was more on escape and on the prospect of raucous evenings with poets, artists, dancers or musicians than on solitary writing at my desk. I would try to write, of course, in the time I’d been granted, but I would also be free – and who knew what might happen. Despite the earnest and ambitious tone of my application, this was how I was thinking on the two-hour journey.
I sat in the back of a taxi from Monaghan bus station, not talking. I was woozy from the stuffy bus and giddy with apprehension. What was I thinking, deciding to spend two weeks in the company of actual accomplished artists? I had written almost nothing and had only the vaguest idea of what I was going to work on while I was there. What would I do all day while everyone else was being properly creative? I was a phoney, a fraud, a salesman with an empty suitcase.
I had been underachieving all my life. I’d dropped out of university in my second year, right after my father died. College had been his idea; German the subject he’d chosen for me to study, and the only university to accept me was one he had described as the worst in Europe.
He used to roar that I’d put ten years on his life, and I’d roar back at him, slam my bedroom door, get under the covers and cry and rock from side to side to Now That’s What I Call Music 7, forcing my voice hoarse so that boys would find its huskiness sexy.
On the night he collapsed with a massive heart attack on the kitchen floor, I’d been finishing my waitressing shift at Pizzas and Tarts café, hoovering carelessly under tables, sucking up sugar sachets and pineapple chunks. ‘Where there’s life, there’s hope,’ was my mother’s mantra till they turned off his life-support machine ten days later. I was twenty-one; he was fifty-nine.
*
Just beyond the small village of Newbliss, we took a right and drove down a long, well-tended laneway to the white entrance gates of Annaghmakerrig. A putty-coloured Gothic mansion girdled by renovated stables, it looked eerie in darkness, with the lake in front of us vast, covered in a low mist and surrounded by thick forests of willows and birch.
As we crunched back and forth over the gravel with my bags, the taxi driver told me that the ‘Big House’ had its own ghost, a Miss Worby. What was troubling Miss Worby, he explained, was that her ashes had been scattered in the rose garden at Annaghmakerrig when she had wanted them scattered in England. Now she resided in a narrow and permanently cold room on the first landing.
‘Ach, don’t be worrying,’ he said, leaning his head out of the window as he reversed, ‘she’s only interested in men.’ I didn’t believe in ghosts, but I wasn’t thrilled at the idea of sharing a house with one either, particularly as I was already scared of other things.
*
The two women in the office were laughing about something I didn’t understand. One of them was sitting in an easy chair, occasionally lowering her chin to sip from the mug she was holding; the other one couldn’t stay still. She checked me in as she moved about the room, distracted, looking for this and that. Their talk was rapid, their accents strong and, though I couldn’t follow what they were saying, I was smiling too, from shyness and their infectious cackles.
The busy one led me through a grand, high-ceilinged hall, where sparse Persian rugs covered stone floors and an assortment of framed portraits of long-dead dignitaries eyed us glumly. The house was very quiet and calm – it was hard to imagine that it was full. She told me all eleven bedrooms were occupied, as were the six self-catering farmyard cottages outside, as we approached the first landing.
‘You’re a writer, is that right?’ she asked as we stopped outside Lady Guthrie’s room (not Miss Worby’s, thank the Lord, though hers was the next one along).
‘Yes,’ I replied, lied.
She held the door open, encouraging me in, presenting the room with pride. It was beautiful: large, lamplit, cream-carpeted, with a big bay window overlooking the gravelled entrance, the gardens and the lake beyond. There were a dark mahogany desk and a leather chair in front of the window, where I would work. The bed was king-sized and piled high with cushions and throws. In the centre of the room was an incongruous wrought-iron spiral staircase.
‘Righty-oh, I’ll leave you to it, so. Dinner’s at seven, but sure, take your time. Lovely wee group we’ve got here at the minute.’
The first thing I did was unpack my laptop, fire it up and sit in front of it. Nothing came, of course, and I was up again in seconds and wandering around the room. I climbed the creaky winding stairs. They gave the impression of leading to something important – an attic, a gallery, a pulpit perhaps – but what was at the top was a toilet with a sloped ceiling, a tiny four-panelled window and a mirror with one of those plastic strip lights with a string pull above it. Its base was thick with dead flies, and when you pulled the string nothing happened.
Back down again, I sat on my bed and heard the door across the landing shut. Then footfalls on the stairs. I got changed and waited a few moments, not wanting to meet anyone; then I opened the door and went down myself – it was ten past seven, the perfect time to make my appearance.
I turned the door handle to see an empty sitting room and a dying fire. I retreated, stood still and listened, trying again to work out where the voices I could hear were coming from. I followed them through the hall, pushed open swing doors with nautical windows and strode down the ramp to the kitchen as loudly as I could to disguise my profound fear.
The table was candlelit and fully occupied. I registered bottles of wine, large casserole dishes, great roars of laughter. And there they all were: the dancer, the journalist, the poet who spoke only when he was drunk, the grumpy American with his pipe and flat cap, the handsome but dangerous-looking writer from Dublin, the gay comedian, and the nervy painter with her black pudding-bowl haircut and red turtleneck sweater.
I knew none of them that first night, of course; they were all still nameless and intimidating. I sat, awkward and overdressed, at the end of the table. There was no one to my left; the director of the retreat sat opposite me and an older female artist from New Mexico was on my right. Once I’d rid myself of the feeling that the director had joined us solely to check out my credentials, I settled down a little, but I talked too much and ate too fast and drank far too much red wine.
There was a brief lull when the main course was over, conversation disrupted by people standing to clear the table. I didn’t know whether to stay sitting or get up to help, and I found myself with no one to talk to. I was glad of the distraction when Charlie and Skippy arrived moments later. All eyes turned to them.
They stood at the end of the table, luminescent under lamplight, the group gathering around them in stark relief, like a Renaissance painting of a biblical scene with the contrast of light and shade – chiaroscuro, Charlie would later teach me. Charlie was not Californian, he was not sun-kissed and not young. He was a tall and thin man from the north of Ireland, in his fifties, I guessed, entirely bald, with sunken black hollows beneath his eyes. His clothes were dark and baggy, and tucked under his arm was Skippy: not a cute boy or a tomboyish girl, but a six-foot-long iguana, looking startled and ready to attack. When he sat down to join us for dessert she crawled up his shirt, curled herself around the back of his neck and began bobbing her head. ‘That means who the hell are you?’ he said softly and smiled at me. He reached his hand up to stroke under the iguana’s chin until her eyes began to close.
*
For the first week we were all very diligent – writing, painting, dancing, composing in the quiet of our own studios and rooms. I took a lot of early-morning walks, for exercise but also on a vague search for inspiration. Walking is a great way to get ideas, I’d read somewhere. It was often misty when I set off, the lake invisible, cobwebs spread decoratively across bushes, the air wet and thick with the delicious stench of fresh manure.
I never met anyone on these mornings, but sometimes I would catch the sound of a musical instrument being tuned, a complaining crow, distant farm machinery. Everything was in soft focus around me: beiges, browns, light greens, the dirty cream of sheep grazing on the drumlins. Ear-tagged cows stopped chewing the cud and stared at me as I passed, seeming to sense that I wasn’t local and that I was wary of them. I stuck to the same route each day, walking anticlockwise around the near edge of the lake until I could go no further. I was nervous of taking a wrong turn, getting lost or encountering a hostile dog.
I ate in my room at lunchtimes, going up and down with sandwiches and cups of tea on trays several times a day, always with the unshakable feeling that I was being watched, that Sir Tyrone Guthrie was keeping a close eye on me. He had provided me with all that I could possibly require: space, silence, food, drink, a comfortable place to work – and I needed to at least look like I was using my time creatively.
But as the week wore on, our communal discipline weakened. More bottles of wine were ordered at night. We got to know each other, got giddy, started staying up late. We began to seek each other out, took tours of each other’s rooms, scared ourselves with news of nocturnal visits from Miss Worby – the beautiful dancer swore the ghost had sat on her legs as she slept; the dangerous writer from Dublin said she’d curled up behind him in bed.
We saw the Northern Lights one night. Charlie still remembers them; I only remember staying up late, being outdoors and freezing, and looking up at the sky but noticing nothing except everyone else’s enthusiasm.
One evening we took a boat across the lake after dinner. Charlie tried to teach me the rhythm of rowing, then stood and made the boat rock and list as he clambered over to my side and sat behind me. He held on to the oars, his arms pressed against mine, forcing them to follow his actions. I was embarrassed by this clichéd attempt to get close – Charlie was playful and a flirt – but I liked it too. I’ve always liked to be taught things (I developed crushes on tennis instructors and teachers in my teens), and Charlie was becoming increasingly intriguing and attractive to me. I couldn’t get the hang of the rowing – I was too self-conscious to concentrate – so he took over, and I lay back and listened to him talk. I loved the way he spoke: his soft accent, his old-fashioned (to my ear) turn of phrase.
Rowing came naturally to him. He’d grown up on the seafront in Bangor, County Down, with uninterrupted views over Belfast Lough to Whitehead on the Antrim coast. He told me stories of childhood adventures he had taken with his dog Wendy, the two of them in a little rowing boat far out in Bangor Bay, and how his mother would flash a torch across the water to let him know when he was to come home for his tea.
At the end of the first week, things changed. On Friday night we all went to McGinn’s, a tiny pub in Newbliss. Annie, the landlady, was in her eighties and so small herself that all you could see was the crown of her grey head as she pottered back and forth behind the counter, her hand reaching up every so often to deliver a drink to a customer. On the wall above the bar there was a photograph of Annie when she was younger, though not much, on a motorbike in full leathers. The bar was also her home, and up in the pink-carpeted bathroom that she opened to the public were her clothes basket and nylon bath cap.
That night Charlie bought me drinks, played with my gloves, laughed at my silly observations and gave me the front seat when he drove us all home at closing time, Leonard Cohen’s ‘The Future’ thumping on the stereo, at least six in the back – some sitting forward, some up on laps – as we careered down dark and unfamiliar country lanes. I loved that he was so wild; but also that he was the one in control. There was an impromptu party back at Charlie’s cottage. I remember the dangerous writer doing a sort of pole dance around a supporting beam, some vile-tasting liqueur and then Charlie kicking everyone out except me.
We lay under a skylight and talked through the night, Skippy in the corner keeping a watchful eye on me, resentful of being usurped from her place on the pillow beside her master. Her knobbly dewlap splayed whenever I so much as moved. I had never been keen on reptiles, but I accepted and liked her immediately and I think maybe she came to feel the same. She was part of the package, part of Charlie.
There was a moment in the early morning when we were both quiet, dazed with tiredness and drink. I turned to Charlie and saw that he was staring at a shadow the rising sun was making on the ceiling. I followed his gaze and began to stare at it too. ‘Hey, that’s my thing to be looking at,’ he said in mock annoyance. ‘You find your own thing.’
I had never met anyone like Charlie, anyone who saw things the way he did. In the following days he began to linger after dinner, before returning to his cottage, and he focused his attention on me. He teased me about my tweed trousers and threadbare, scruffy black coat. I teased him about his narrow and neat goatee beard, which he charmingly referred to as his ‘fanny tickler’. He said he had never met a girl with so many hang-ups; he told me often that I was a ‘buck eejit’ and that I needed to wise up.
He could be cruel, too. One night at a party in the living room, the reticent poet sang a Leonard Cohen song and I took up the harmony. There were a few seconds of silence after we’d finished, followed by some abrupt claps. Charlie told me later that he’d need to listen again to be sure, but that he didn’t think I could sing. And he was dismissive of the work of the funny one in the red turtleneck who had a studio next to his. Every time he passed her window, he would see her arm moving swift and furious across the canvas, giving it everything. ‘She’s just making marks,’ he said.
Charlie lied sometimes. On Monday he was fifty, by Friday he was fifty-five. And he’d snuck Skippy in when animals were forbidden, admitting only to a small lizard when confronted by the director, gradually widening his arms to take in her full six feet. She had been discovered one morning by the cleaner while hoovering, who mistook her for a crocheted toy – you could hear the screams in Carrickmacross. But Charlie’s was the tidiest of all the cottages, according to that same cleaner: ‘Aye, he keeps it spick and span,’ she said in his and Skippy’s defence.
We began to take walks together, neither of us able to focus on work. Charlie called himself ‘Brown Owl’ as he strode ahead of me across the fields. He would always bring a stick, years before he needed one, and twirl it like a baton in the air, or balance it on his index finger for impressive lengths of time. ‘It’s for getting small boys out of trees,’ he said when I complained. I didn’t want him to have a stick. I was already worried by how old he was, about the twenty years between us.
*
I was myopic, but Charlie saw everything. A lone donkey (or ‘dunkey’, as he called them) in a far-off field, the smallest bug on a leaf, a hovering, electric-blue dragonfly. As we walked, he would stop every few steps to point out the brilliance of a colour of a particular leaf, the tangled branches of an ancient tree. He gave focus to things that others ignored or trampled on or yanked from the ground. Sometimes he would come across a colour, a view, a shape he found so remarkable that he couldn’t handle it. ‘That’s wild,’ he would say. ‘Fuck, that’s too beautiful, it’s too much.’
He could run as fast as a boy across rocks at the lake’s edge, making split-second decisions on where to put his foot next. He could put a blade of grass between his thumbs and produce a sharp whistle that made dogs stop in their tracks, ears pricked; and I’d stop too and ask him to show me how to do it. He would detach brambles from my coat and my hair as we walked, free me from barbed-wire fences, tend to my splinters and cuts. I’d call him a sissy as he edged around puddles that I squelched right through, muddy water seeping into my socks. ‘It’s because you’re Catholic,’ he would say. ‘Because you weren’t brought up proper.’ But he liked to pee outdoors, especially at night, even when there was a conventional toilet inside, which didn’t seem proper to me.
‘Let’s use the word “literally” literally all day today,’ he suggested one morning, and that’s literally what we did. He put the word ‘but’ at the end of every sentence, a verbal tic he’d never noticed. Teasing him about it, I told him I’d heard of some children who’d been locked in a cellar for years until one managed to escape and get help. Psychologists said the single thing they had in common was that when they spoke, all their sentences ended with ‘but’.
Charlie ignored my insinuation and told me about the ‘Chicken Boy’ instead – a child who was found doubled over in a chicken coop near Downpatrick in County Down. He couldn’t stand, he clucked in hen language and flapped his arms about when excited. Charlie had caught a glimpse of him once from the window of his home on the Seacliff Road – the boy was being taken for a walk by a nurse and was scurrying about the pavement with a wild look in his eye. The image scared us both.
Some days he put ‘wee’ in front of everything, the way some Northerners do. It made me laugh and I’d join in. (My father would have hated his accent. ‘Ah, no!’ Dad would snort, unsettling himself from the armchair in which he had just got comfortable, his glass of whiskey on the coal barrel beside it, to watch the main evening news. ‘Not Pigs-in-space!’ he would roar, referring to a portly newsreader from the North, and he would recede, loudly pronouncing everything with a Northern accent until he had slammed his study door.)
When Charlie wanted to impress, he made me think of the mating dance of a bird of paradise – feathers out, all his best colours on show. He told me about the music video he had made for Bob Dylan that got him a Grammy nomination, and how he had worked with Bette Midler and Bruce Springsteen. He quoted from Shelley, Keats, Dylan Thomas, Rimbaud. He introduced me to country music, played John Prine, Lucinda Williams and Woody Guthrie on the stereo at his cottage. And he sat with great hardback books he had brought with him to the retreat and talked me through paintings by Botero and Don Bachardy, carefully turning the pages as we studied them together: Botero’s soft fat women, Bachardy’s perfect sketches of men.
He gave me a tour of his studio at the retreat, which made me nervous – I didn’t know one thing about art. I remember a painting of a single red brick with a red background. When he asked what I thought, I had pouted, inwardly searching for adjectives. ‘It looks angry,’ I said. He flicked his thumb at my bottom lip and said, ‘Ach, you’re a wee bat.’
But Charlie also loved Coronation Street and Viz and rhubarb-and-custard sweets. He told me about the pulley system he’d constructed in his bedroom when he was a boy, with a bucket at the window end, and how his mother would fill it with treats at night. After lights out he would lower it by pulling the strings and have midnight feasts on his own in the dark.
We talked about writing. He told me to write using all my senses, not just sight. What did the thing smell like? What did it feel like? When you touched it, what was its texture? What sounds did you hear? Back in my room I would try to think about what he’d taught me and would sit at my desk, laptop open, hands poised. The seven senses: sight, smell, taste, hearing, touch, vestibular (movement), proprioception (body awareness) – I had to look the last two up, but I would use them all in my work. This was what I would do, beginning tomorrow.
‘Go ahead, just make a mess,’ the artist from New Mexico suggested when I told her that I was stuck. This I could do, I’d been making a mess for years. I’d been rudderless for so long, losing jobs, going out with the wrong men, spending money I didn’t have on things I didn’t need, just generally mucking things up. I didn’t know it then but I was missing my dad, who had died before I’d had the chance to do anything to impress him, before I had told him that I loved him. Charlie was someone new but older, who could teach me things, someone who might become proud of me.
On Charlie’s last day at Annaghmakerrig, we tried to complete the crossword together at the kitchen table. He wasn’t concentrating on the words, he was doodling as he always did. Funny, sweating Viz-inspired men peeped out from behind the puzzle as if they were up to no good, or hid from the heavy-set, scowling, huge-breasted women in slippers he created in any free space. We both remember that our little fingers touched as he drew and I scribbled words.
*
‘Did you know that a swan could break your arm?’ I told him as we stood at the boathouse by the lake watching them, just before he left. It made him laugh. It still does, I’ve never understood why.
He wanted me to travel back to Dublin with him; I said I needed to stay. I had to see out the last three days of my residency. If I was going to be a writer, I would have to begin to take myself seriously. I also couldn’t yet imagine ‘us’ outside of Annaghmakerrig. Charlie and me together seemed wildly incongruous, and we both had relationships on the point of dissolution in Dublin. Here, real life was suspended; it was a magical time out of time. He told the funny one in the red turtleneck that he’d race her back instead. ‘That’s a brilliant idea!’ she said.
A few days before he left I’d shown him some of what I’d been working on, and he had given it back to me that evening with whole paragraphs crossed out, question marks in the margins and arrows telling me to please turn over. On the reverse were his own words. He had given up entirely a few pages in – the rest of it too bland to be read – and had gone back to his studio. He reappeared a little later with some of his own writing. ‘This is how to do it,’ he said.
After we said goodbye, I sat cross-legged by the fire he’d made for me in Lady Guthrie’s room and reread the writing that he’d edited. I missed him immediately; I wanted to be reminded of his voice. I began to scribble out my words till the pages were grubby and creased. I didn’t know then that this was not the answer, that this was not the way to find my own voice; but at least now I was thinking like a writer.
Unlikely mentor and misguided muse – this was how Charlie and I began.