‘Only the deep sense of some deathless shame.’
John Webster, The White Devil
I was shortlisted once for the Kerry Ingredients Listowel Writers’ Week Prize for Irish Fiction. It was all a bit long for putting in a short biog, but still, I thought, this is nice: I have a few Kerry Ingredients myself; a grandfather who left Ballylongford, just up the road from Listowel, in the 1920s.
The letter said that the winner would be announced during the actual Writers’ Week and they were hoping that I would make it down, but I had various deadlines and a small baby so I let the invitation slide. Then one of the organizers rang to follow the invitation up. She was really most persuasive. Although, of course, she could not, would not tell me who had won the Kerry Ingredients Listowel Writers’ Week Prize for Irish Fiction, she did say how much they would be really, really pleased to see me there. It seemed churlish to refuse. What the hell. Even if I hadn’t won, I would have a good time. And besides … she sounded very keen.
It is only a six-hour drive to Kerry, but I had to pack the baby up first and bring her across town to stay at my mother’s, so that added another two or three and suddenly we were looking at eight, maybe nine hours and I was late already by two o’clock. I didn’t stop for lunch. On the other side of Limerick I was hurtling on such a trajectory that I had forgotten where Kerry was and how you got to it, and was too busy driving to reach for the map. I wrenched myself off the road, finally, outside a shop in Adare, where I bought six cotton pillowcases and two beaded things you put over milk jugs to keep out the flies, and I asked my way to Listowel. They pointed down the road.
Actually, I don’t have a milk jug. It is one of my ambitions to get beyond the litre box on the kitchen table, but I saw the perfect milk jug once and didn’t buy it, so now I keep waiting until I come across it again. Also beaded bits and bobs aren’t really my thing, but I think I was a little mad by now. I was late. I was starving. I was missing the baby. I wound down the windows and turned the music up high.
North Kerry is very beautiful and, as the roads got narrower, I wondered why our grandfather left this place, and what kind of man he might have been. He married a schoolteacher’s daughter in County Clare and farmed the land that came with the deal. I thought of her life; the piano that ended up in the hen house, the way she called her father ‘Papa’, the remnants of French, the front parlour gentility and, in the middle of it all, this Kerry man who got the farm. I am not sure they got along. I passed through a village and saw ‘Enright’s’ written over a pub facade. There would be pictures in The Kerryman of Listowel Writers’ Week; they would lean over the bar counter and say, ‘Is she one of ours?’
My ironed dress hung from its hanger, and flapped a little from the breeze in the back of the car. When The Third Policeman got turned down by every publisher in London, Flann O’Brien told the old lags in the Palace Bar that he had left the manuscript on the back seat of the car, and it had blown out the window on a trip from Donegal, page by page.
How different everything was, now. I was getting quite emotional. All these various thoughts – of success and failure and greed and homecoming – were by way of avoiding making acceptance speeches in my head. Because, of course, I did not know if I had won the Kerry Ingredients Listowel Writers’ Week Prize for Irish Fiction or not. Even so, it was quite a tease. There were no obvious big hitters on the list. Besides, I had done some other prizes with this book, and they didn’t expect the shortlist to turn up. The Whitbread waves a few names around and then invites the winner (not me). The Encore Prize just rings you up and says ‘You’ve won!’ – fantastic. Whereas … the Kerry Ingredients Listowel Writers’ Week Prize for Irish Fiction says, ‘Please come. No really, please.’
So, as I bowled along, I tried not to draft a few modest remarks about the Kerry grandfather who came from just up the road – in which I certainly didn’t mention the junked piano, or the nuptial acquisition of land. I strenuously avoided the phrase ‘coming home’. I did not say that, by a strange coincidence, one of the two judges had been, for some years, my English teacher at school. Nor did I quip that she had only ever given me a C. Actually, that last bit I really kept scrubbing out of the acceptance speech that I was not writing on the roads of North Kerry. No matter how I phrased it, it seemed a little small. Also the bit about how she had given me a B once ‘up to the last paragraph’, but then a C overall because the ending was too sentimental. Nor that this essay was about summers on my grandmother’s farm. Nor that this childhood essay was the foundation, in many ways, for a section of the book that had just been awarded (or not awarded) the Kerry Ingredients Listowel Writers’ Week Prize for Irish Fiction. None of this made it into the speech that I wasn’t writing in my head – there was always that niggling thing that said ‘She didn’t like it so much in 1976…’ and then a niggling hope, ‘It will all be set to rights, now.’
They don’t give you directions to Writers’ Week, because it is so easy to find. At the end of a long straight road you drive into Listowel, and you keep going until you hit a bend that turns into the town square. In the crook of that bend is the Listowel Arms Hotel. The end of the road.
My accelerator leg was shaking from nine hours pressing the pedal as I slung my dress over my arm and checked in to the hotel. The woman behind the festival desk didn’t, in fact, seem really, really pleased to see me. She didn’t seem to recognize my name, but she checked a list and told me there would be photos in fifteen minutes’ time. Up in my room, I showered cold and slapped my face a bit. I put my dress on and did a big Aaah, Eeeeh, Oooh, stretching my mouth in the mirror. I looked at myself very seriously, eyeball to eyeball, then twinkled, as though sharing a secret joke with my reflection. Then I lifted my chin, and left the room.
I went down to the foyer and found my old English teacher. We shook hands and laughed at our changed circumstances and she told me that I had not, in fact, won the Kerry Ingredients Listowel Writers’ Week Prize for Irish Fiction. She tried to soften the blow. She said that, in a way, I was the wrong kind of writer for the award, and probably shouldn’t have been on the list at all.
The organizer came along and was delighted to see me and said that the photos were happening any minute, outside.
‘Right,’ I said, and I walked out into the square. Then I kept walking and sat in my car. Then I got out of my car and went into a country hardware shop and bought two plain plastic window boxes, that were really cheap and just the right size. Then I went into a toy shop and bought the baby a toy phone. I hadn’t been in a shop for months. I used the change from the toy phone to ring my mother from a real phone in the square. She told me the baby was just fine. I told her I hadn’t won.
‘Be nice,’ she said, a little frantically, as the pips started to go. ‘Try. Do try to be nice to everyone, will you?’
Back in the hotel foyer the organizer, who seemed to know what was wrong, said, ‘Have a drink, there’s a buffet inside.’ I hadn’t eaten in ten hours. There was a huge crowd around the buffet, but she found me a glass of wine. I drank it and left. Two women followed me and caught me at the door of the hotel and brought me back inside to the organizer. She said, ‘Please sit here. Look, here’s your chair.’
I realized as I sat down that I was placed in a convenient position for going on stage. The question was, when? The evening never seemed to start. Then it did. There was a choir. Then there was a keynote speech from an intellectual with ferociously witty eyebrows. Then more choir. Then a corporate, sofa-shaped man from Kerry Ingredients, which seemed not to be, as I had thought, a company that made cake-mix, but something far more important. Then a few more speeches. Then finally, mercifully, the award ceremony began. First, the winner of the Bryan MacMahon Short Story Award was called up and handed a cheque. There were smiles and photos. Then the winner of the Eamonn Keane Full Length Play Competition bounded up. After this came the winner of the Poetry Competition; followed in quick succession by the Short Story, Humorous Essay, and Short Poem category winners in the Listowel Writers’ Week Originals Competition. The winner of the An Post/Stena Line New Writing Competition, which was open only to those living outside Ireland, had come all the way from London. The winner of The Islands Short Story or Poem Competition, which was open only to those who were islanders by birth, held the cheque up high for the photographer, who seemed to be taking his time. After this came the glowing winner of the Kerry County Council Creative Writing Competition for Youth ‘under 9s’ category, who recited a brilliant poem., followed by the winner of the under 12s who read another. This was followed by the under 14s, then the under 16s, then the under 18s category winners and their poems, which were all a joy. Everyone cheered them, including me, but as the evening ground on, I began to realize that I was the only person in the hall who had not won something, or was not related to someone who had won something. Even the other writer who was shortlisted for, but had not won, the K.I.L.W.W.P.F.I.F, had been given a prize in some other category – I can’t quite recall which – I think it was for an Irish debut.
By the time it came, finally, to the climax of the evening I knew what I had to do. I had to go on stage and not get a prize. I didn’t know what the not-prize would be until the man who didn’t make cake-mix announced a ‘Cross Pen’. This is a ball-point pen in a box. It is retractable. He put the box on the lectern and asked my old English teacher to say a few words about the shortlist. She cleared her throat and gathered her notes. I thought she would take this opportunity to say that I was very, deeply special but just, lamentably, not suitable for the prize this year. She didn’t really. And then she called me up on stage to collect the ball-point pen. After which I turned to the audience and gave a little bow. Then we all stood there and got our picture taken.
‘Left a bit,’ said photographer. ‘No, left a bit.’
After it was over, I went to the cash machine outside and came back in and hit the bar. I didn’t know anybody. Besides there was a sort of smell off me of the woman who didn’t get the award – people didn’t quite know what I was for. I didn’t know what I was for. A guy accosted me. He said I had a sadness in my life, he could see it. He said I drank too much, he should know, he used to be an alcoholic. Then he ordered three vodkas in a half-pint glass with some water on the side – no ice. I escaped over to a man I half knew, or knew of, a much-remaindered journalist in a bow tie who had been watching me across the room with a small smile. I told him an amusing story. I said how he knew my sister a little, then I griped a bit about the long drive, the no lunch, the fucking Cross Pen.
‘Sorry?’ he said, as though uncomprehending. Then he chortled (actually, really, chortled). ‘Oh I see,’ he said. ‘You thought you had won.’
To which there was no answer really. In the morning, I went home.