|
Aïda
– How did you like Aïda? asked the judge, opening the back of his jeep. He likes having something to do when he talks.
– Aïda? It wouldn’t be my favourite opera. Was it on?
– Last Saturday, in the Opera House. He goes over towards the shed where the straw is stacked, and I follow him.
– What, live?
– Direct transmission from the Met. High definition. It’s a fundraiser, he said, they sell it all over the world. His enthusiasm overrode my bewilderment.
– I didn’t go out at all last Saturday, let alone to Aïda.
– Are you sure? asked the judge, stopping a moment, venturing a look at me before pulling over a bale of straw, a little damp at one end. It’ll dry out, he said, shoving a bale into the back of the jeep. Then he gave me another look, frowning. I saw you, and your partner, you were over on the other side of the Opera House. I was going to come over and say hallo and then you were gone. You must have a double.
He looked at me intently. He’s a shy man, I realised, after a few encounters down at the stable, where I stopped off in the Spring to see if I could organise some straw manure, as opposed to the wood shavings horse folk all use these days. At first I thought his busy avoidance of my eye as he shovelled shit, barrowed shavings and bedded down the horse, was to do with being a judge and having to avoid opinions outside the courtroom, or any situation that might give rise to opinions, so that gradually he preferred horses and avoided people altogether, unless he knew them well. This occasion of Aïda made him question his judgement in a way he hadn’t pinholed before. As he looked me up and down he saw me once more, over the other side of the stalls. He could have sworn. And then I was gone.
– These bales are bigger than I thought, he said, puffing slightly.
– I do have a double, I said, in fact I have more than one. It’s good to have doubles, they can cover more ground. I can be at things I wasn’t at, and know why I wasn’t there, and why I was.
Must have been K, I thought. Wouldn’t have been S. She wouldn’t go out of her way to opera. And she doesn’t wear glasses, whereas K does, and she would go to opera for her partner, who loves it, if not for herself. I thought the last time I saw K that I would like glasses like hers, even if this led to a deepening confusion. Ever since I’ve lived here I’ve been mistaken for these two friends, as well intermittent others, half an alphabet, even through cool or prickly stretches. However remote our relationships became, these women were planted in my life. We were interchangeable, as sisters are in the popular conception. So many people out there and yet so few who register, and for such tiny, subtle reasons. Women in shops have said to me throughout the last thirty years, I saw your sister the other day, or, How’s your sister? without pausing to confirm which sister was which or the nature of our family. That, they took for granted. We’re not talking fortuitous resemblance here, same features or hair colour, height or car or any other attributes the modern woman has. It’s a level of difference we share, a concertedness, a way of looking out at the world that we may not share with an actual sister, a kind of vibrant unease.
The judge can see this. I like to think it’s part of his judgehood. He has read the books and now he’s reading the situation. He can take an individual standing before him and know the exact angle of attitude. Not aggressive, not defiant, attentive in a way you don’t have to be if you feel at home in the world. Across the Cork Opera House a judge could scan a pair of glasses, a head of hair and a certain intentness, discern the way she’s involved, or not, in Aïda or the afterwards. Across the stalls, after the performance, through the serried ranks of matrons and knights, he knew he’d glimpsed an alien.
– I’ve only seen Aïda once, I said, it was in Paris in 1967. I was up in the gods, behind a pillar. Every time the star singer came on people applauded loudly. I noticed the cherubs and bunches of grapes painted on the ceiling more than the music. Triumphal, I thought, thought that may have been the ceiling speaking, or the audience, or the pillar. Do you like opera?
– Yes, said the judge.
I have a special feeling towards people who like opera, since a liking for it and for classical music in general has always seemed to be one of the unequivocal traits of my difference from other people. At school they called me Tchaikovsky, which both hurt me and led me into new, elevated terrain: if Tchaikovsky was the best they could come up with, I was safe with Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert and Difference.
– So do I, I said. I grew up with it.
– You saw it live I expect, said the judge, placing my experience politely beyond his for the time being, though he seemed pleased I’d gone there, back to my past, without any effort on his part.
– No, we listened to a programme on the radio, every Sunday lunchtime. Bel canto. Interspersed with Dutch, or Flemish. I can’t listen to certain arias without tasting apple pie. Was it good, Aïda from the Met?
– Yes, he said, terse but confidential. Realising how they shifted scenes, moved things around. The craft of it was extraordinary.
– Strange though, the Met in high definition in Cork. People gathering in the Opera House to watch a – transmission. When I was six, and hardly anyone had TV, we all went on the bus to Marconi’s where my father worked, eight miles away, to watch the Queen’s coronation on a large screen. Followed by tea and a souvenir teaspoon. I’m sorry the straw got a bit wet. The rain we’ve had.
– N did his first point-to-point you know. He stopped after two miles. Felt the horse wasn’t ready.
A judge relaxing with matters relating to his son and his son’s horse is not a zone I’ve practised in for long. I’m interested in the straw, in the manure that will result a year or two hence, and the good effect that will have on my vegetable garden and my paradisiacal dreams of willing fragrance coming out of the earth. I don’t know what you say to a judge whose son gave up his first point-to-point after two miles, and I can’t determine in the judge’s tone whether he thought his son was right to stop, or felt disappointed in the horse they bought together, at Goff’s, an event in itself in the life of a judge and more especially of his son, sole among the judge’s children not to incline towards academe, to say nothing of the law.
The horse spent a few weeks in our field this summer. They were worried about his condition then; you could see his ribs showing through. I liked watching him dance about the field in his highbred way, all his lightness focussed somewhere around the shoulders, even through a few weeks grazing and gallivanting after a wet summer soon had the field poached. I learned that word from the judge. I wonder how he learned it, being, as I suspect, a recent convert to fields in all their conditions as well as the therapy of replacing divots. The horse’s hooves made pools here and there, more and more, till the water was in danger of outbidding the grass.
The life of a judge was not something I thought I’d ever know about, but in the time I’ve been living here I’ve known four. Part of the strangeness of living in a small island country must consist of knowing unusual quantities of an unusually wide range of people. Of the four judges I’ve met, the horse judge is the only one I’ve met repeatedly knowing he was a judge. We’d heard a judge had the bought the new stable down the hill, and enjoyed the prospect of some educated manure. The second judge had a wooden boat that lived for a while in one of our sheds. He was the sailing judge, a bon viveur in the mid to late stage of pleasure in the judicial life. The third one was my solicitor for a while, before becoming a judge. He was elated when he was chosen. When I said I wasn’t surprised, he wanted to know why. You’re good with people I said, you say the right thing and mean it. The fourth judge I only met once, at a party. He had seven children, Septimus the last-named. He had a tribe now, and a good, casual, pale suit that fitted him the way a suit might fit a patriarch and sealer of fates. The current judge, the horse one, isn’t good with people. He’s good with horses. He’s found the right tone to reassure a point-to-pointer who could do with putting on weight.
He closes the back door of the jeep goes round to the front. He’d like to get in but I slow him down.
– Do you like Handel operas? I asked. Alcina is on at the Everyman next week. We’re going, and at least one of my doubles may well be there too.
– I hope I choose the right one!
– It’s a good thing you’re a judge, I said, not a detective.
He smiled.
– I’ll spread this straw out, he said, it’ll dry.
Modern travel
For dropoff in Cork that’s a very good price you know. (If you do any better than that I’ll slice the living daylights out of you. Understood?) Sign here, here, here and here, says the car rental girl, handing Jack the biro and slapping a set of car keys on the counter. The car, where’s the car? we ask. Bay 285, she says, pointing to the number on the key. Where’s that? Out the door, straight ahead and on your left, she says, as if we’re stupid. We’ve just come off an aeroplane and we’re still 160 miles from home. Of course we’re stupid. How do we get to the Cork road? Take the M50 then the M7 turnoff, she says without looking up. (There’s only one road out there. Now leave me alone.)
This is midnight in the land of last thoughts. It was cold when we went away and now it’s cold when we come back. Is that hail? Small pieces of snow on the move? We peer nervously at the ground and hurry on to bay 285. The car is metallic blue, brand new, a zealous little bug whose headlights have the look of a fly’s compound eyes, whose doors close too knowingly for comfort. There’s an accident pack in the glove box. Penalty for misuse – €30. Forget bandages and antiseptic, through the cellophane I can see a disposable camera and a whistle. ‘Use only after accident’, is printed in large letters on the bag. ‘Before accident’ is a new and interesting concept, now I think of it.
We settle into the faint, cloying readiness of a new car, and Jack starts the engine. Where are the lights, the horn, the seat adjustment? Where’s reverse gear? The rigmarole is endless in the dark, in the quiet. As we move off, a voice from the car tells us the driver’s seat belt is not fastened. Two days after Christmas, no one is loitering. Everyone’s with the family tonight. That’s what they said to us in Granada last Christmas, when we were wandering the streets looking for an open restaurant. We should be with the family. We wandered on, blinder than ever.
This year we went to Morocco, and slept the honest sleep of the traveller, light yet full, poised on a different spot every few nights, in the valley, in the mountains, plotless as a pair of beetles in a dry river bed. Dust is a great leveller. Silence. No wind. Up in the anti-Atlas, during anti-Christmas, we come to a complete halt among pink granite boulders. Millions of years of rest and catastrophe have made this spot what it is now, with its few palm trees in a modest arena, a cactus garden with rocks like hooded monks looking out west, like a mastiff jaw or a tall, leaning Henry Moore. Before we leave we place a one dirham coin behind a rock, for next time. Hard to say what is so pleasing about time immemorial.
Midnight comes black to the M50; there’s a faint gleam in the frosty air. Already we know this road as we know the Pyramids and Macchu Picchu. We’ve seen it on TV, whenever a new stretch opened, or traffic jams reached crisis point and began to get interesting. The car rental girl was right: there is only one road, and it will take us to its turnoffs, one by one, until it is used up or we are. Roads are designed for people going all the way, and tonight, we are such people; we’re tired, we submit to the course we’re taking, Dublin to Cork, and try not to think too much. But we do, we think all the time. As my friend André said, I’m sixty years old and I’ve spent the last forty years lost in thought.
Either side of the road, hotels advertise Rooms from €90, Season’s Greetings, 20% Off; hyperstores bide their silence, their tenancy. If you’re looking for Slovakia or Berlin, this could be your turnoff. Travellers for Derry, or Wexford, where the new opera house is waiting for someone like you, please turn off here. We observe the swoop of the turnoffs, glimpse now and then a sprawl of houses, a phone mast, a multi-storey carpark. In L.A. they discuss highway turnoffs as they discuss wines, noting the smoothness, the curve, the kinetic fragrance. Here in post-boom Ireland we are over these childish pleasures. We are only looking at where we’re going. There’s a frozen ribbon caught on a couple of traffic cones, from the day the minister of transport opened the road. ‘It is with great pleasure...’ he began. The roar of a passing plane drowned the rest of the speech.
Buñuel, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. In his only appearance in the film, Michel Piccoli is standing not far from one of those floor-length Parisian windows, talking on the phone. He has the sinister sateen rabbit look of an actor between a business deal and a sexual encounter left over from another film. Under the roar of the passing plane he springs out of prison his charming friends (played by Delphine Seyrig, Michel Lonsdale, Stéphane Audran, Bulle Ogier) who spend their lives sitting down to dinners they never eat, in dreams and nightmares from which they never wake. The curtain goes up on their dinner table; a plastic chicken bounces off the platter; the audience titters.
We’re unnaturally intent, what with the cold and the new road running past these places we half-know, called Tallaght or Ballymun; we’re sucking highway, ducking bridges like the proverbial, our minds a pointless ferment, prey to idle thoughts, we’re grateful for the least distraction. 7.1L/100 flashes on the dashboard, between a little digital car and a petrol pump, a black on yellow dotted line. Nothing is moving along the dotted line. I will be perplexed about this for as long as it takes.
Yesterday, which is also today, in a Moroccan rental car, we stopped at a garage near Inezgane bus station (there’s a movie to be made there) to fill up before we got to the airport. In front of the petrol pumps, a man was pouring buckets of water into the boot of a car. Another man looked on, as in Morocco there is always at least one person looking on when things are being done to a car. It was old and battered, more rust than paint. We watched little pools and streams of water pick up dust on the ground as they rolled between the stones. We think blood, we think dead sheep, we think obliteration. We think Harvey Keitel. He organised the cleaning of the car in the Tarantino film, while John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson, wide-eyed and poker-daft as adolescents faced with an incomprehensible mess, played the operatives who don’t know a bucket from a mop. What was it called? We name all the actors and recount several scenes. Is it one word or two? If it’s one word, does it end in i-o-n, or is it more resolute, like Intolerance, or Greed?
One night in the Anti-Atlas mountains, the coldest of the winter, they said, we stayed in a hotel in a small town where tourists didn’t usually stop, not after sunset. In the café downstairs all the doors were open to the night, there was no fire, no heating; the food was lukewarm beans on a saucer and three or four pieces of meat on a small plate; all the chairs faced the vast plasma TV screen as if this were a classroom and we were schoolchildren learning about the world courtesy of an Al Jazeera studio discussion cut with triumphal ads for gas and petroleum. Our room, to which we repaired to bed at about nine, to get warm, was pale blues and greens, with two beds we pulled together, a chair, a table, and a large window onto the street. Nice proportions, said Jack. We took snaps of ourselves fully dressed in bed, including hats and scarves, slightly hysterical, as if that, along with loud shivers and three pairs of socks, would warm us, then slept a cold half-sleep interrupted by strangled sounds from across the street – birds or animals or the desert cracking, I couldn’t tell. Jack is good at sleeping anywhere, but I agonized over the sickly ancient smell of the blankets, wrapping my pillow in my clothes, a shirt sleeve round my nose so I could smell something familiar. The cold dropped through the holes in my knitted hat.
In the morning, early, the café is filled with people eating bread and soup and omelettes and drinking tea. The air is filled with breath although few people are talking. Both doors are open. It’s 7.30 and the town zigzags with people. We eat a bowl of soup hunched over the table like everyone else and wait for the sun to come up.
Scene Two: Grilled fish on the street. Jack can’t resist. I stand nearby, watching the man with the chicken shop take in a pan of feed from a new bag just delivered. He smiles and I smile back, as if to say, we have hens where we live; which we do. The chickens were what we heard, in the night. So that’s OK. The sun is coming up.
Scene Three: The man in the jewellery shop. We ask him about water in the town. We’d walked up the hill to the barrage behind the town the night before, at last light. There was barely any water, but there were tilled patches along the stream that fed it, each about the size of an average European hallway, with green sprouts of grain a few inches tall.
In month seven and eight there is no water for the houses, says the jewellery man.
But the town exists, you’re here.
He laughs. We exist, yes, he says, we’re here.
Kill Bill, Part 1 and Part 2. Uma Thurman. Bang bang, he shot me down, bang bang. Nancy Sinatra. Such a soft voice. You could fall asleep to this, like a child with a comic slipping off the pillow. People told me I wouldn’t like Tarantino, too violent, they said. The violence is bright red and black modern dance. There’s as much story as you want, and then all you have is happiness, irony and the promise of a new story coming soon. At the end, in the diner, Samuel L. Jackson is in the bathroom while the hold-up is taking place, John Travolta gets shot earlier in the movie, but he isn’t dead. At the end they go off down the street in their beach shirts at the start of a whole new adventure.
We’ve been away for two weeks at the pit of the year; life as we knew it must have turned around; large portions of the brain have already fallen away. The house might have burned down. I can see it: we drive up the boreen to find only a steaming ruin at the end. Do we spend the hours till daylight staring at the dereliction, in the moonlight, in the cold? Or turn away and leave immediately? No family nearby, of course. Friends? I start to scroll through disasters that could have me knocking on a friend’s door at three or four in the morning.
In Morocco, if a road came to an end that was OK. We stopped, and there was a village among low hills, rough and stony, a Pasolini landscape, more harshness than plot, more contrast than character. Women washed clothes by the well. They offered us a drink of water, and we smiled at each other for a few minutes. A bright red jeep was parked outside the post office. Up on the main road we’d seen a sign for a women’s cactus cooperative; hard to say which of these few buildings it might be. From the municipality, three officers appeared, nothing to administer but we’re wearing the trousers and almost the tie: any information you want, we can supply it. The cooperative, yes, it’s over there; no, there’s no sign. It’s closed, but you can look.
In the commune rural of Sbouya, in the cercle of Sidi Ifni, in the province of Tiznit, nothing stirred.
The ninth, tenth and eleventh month, we work, said the woman who showed us round. We gather the fruit and dry it, we make oil from the seeds and jam from the flesh. After that we look at cactus and wait.
We bought three small jars of cactus jam. Then we were going to give a man a lift to the main road, but he disappeared.
Whatever we saw or felt or breathed or forgot while we were away, during that time Ireland became a country in which we once lived, in a house that may have burned down. Now we have to start over. We can’t see the towns we bypass. They may not exist any more. This is all very new, very empty. All very late, very early. We really should stop, if we ever go through a town. We’ll stop at the next place that’s open. But these are boom roads, box-fresh, with clean new signs; there are no cafés, no service stations. Everything is at the front of my head, like goggles on the cerebellum. 7.1/100 says the sign on the dashboard in front of me. The little digital car has not budged any nearer to or farther from the petrol pump. We aren’t going anywhere and we’re getting there unexpectedly fast.
In Mesti, on the way to the Western Sahara, we saw fifty women sitting around the walls of a long room, on cushions, each with a large stone in front of her, and a small stone in her hand, cracking the shells of argane nuts and talking. They collect the fruit and feed it to the goats, then collect the nuts from their dung, then crack them open. Thirty kilos of nuts make a litre of oil. Fifteen hours of work. A young one was learning, a trial stone in her lap and in her hand, getting used to being among women. She didn’t yet have anything to say.
The men outside sit as they sat yesterday, at the café table with tea so strong it would wipe the grin off a wrecking ball. They mix the tea with the sugar by pouring it out into glasses then tipping it back into the pot, then back into the glasses from on high, to cool it, or because they like the bubbles. Sometimes there are two glasses for one person, as if his friend might appear. Often he does.
An old man eats bread and fish, throws bits to a lucky cat. A boy comes by, and kicks stones at the cat. The old man continues eating, wipes his plate, then throws the bread to the cat. The boy comes by again, kicks more stones at the cat. Bread, fish, old man, cat, boy. Shadows on clay walls. Clay walls in rocky landscape. The extra visibility of empty places. The harshness of beauty or the other way around.
Suddenly we’re off the M road and back on the old N road that goes through the middle of towns, renders night unto buildings and chips unto revellers. It’s one a.m. on Saturday night, two nights after Christmas; only the takeaways are open in Durrow and Abbeyleix. Reeling with drunks in shirtsleeves. No coffee. No tea. Plenty of chips, sweet and mild, in a bag, with ketchup. Extra salt. Malt vinegar. Pickled onions. Onion rings. Acid and grease, like a general repairs shop at the back of a town wall in Morocco. Except here you eat it.
We stand among swaying figures for about fifteen seconds. A large woman behind the counter ladles chips into bags; the counter is slightly too high for her which gives her a managing manner in the face of drunkards and their insistence that they have found the right way to be.
The cold air is caffeine enough, we decide, and drive on. We start to feel lightheaded, as if we were outside the range of gravity. South-west is an illusion, at best an arbitrary decision. Is this one of those anxiety dreams in which the slope you’re climbing gradually approaches the vertical, and then you have to let go?
On Christmas day we ate at the Café des Nomades, where Mr Nomad was showing off a large pie. We have made a bastilla, he said, special Moroccan dish. You’re Irish, aren’t you?
Well, that’s a first. No, but we live in Ireland. Why did you think we were Irish?
You sound like my Irish friends, not like the English – ‘djwwahmean’ and ‘innit’. I can’t understand them; I can understand you. You’re nomads: no mad, no bad, no sad. You should come and live here. We need people like you. I don’t need to travel, the world comes to me, he said, I look round the restaurant: Ireland is here, and France, Switzerland, England, Spain, Brazil.
And we’re very pleased to meet you too, we said.
Pleased to meet you, Mr Jones, he replied, smiling, easeful in his black and white hospitality shirt. I like hippie music, he added. There were some good ideas then.
If the house had in fact burned down there would be very few options. Perhaps we could go to the pink palace, as we called it, the pub where we used to hold our extraordinary general meetings, before the smoking ban removed the gravitas and drink/driving laws the silliness from the occasion. The pink palace is now a seriously dim hotel, painted light-cream, the last place you want to be, full of TV screens and a powerful smell of mendacity, as Big Daddy would say, (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Burl Ives, Elia Kazan), but they would have a night person from eastern Europe who’d let you in at four in the morning if you said you had nowhere to go and a credit card. Explaining what had happened would be a high point in the nightmare, but only to us.
No, not Cahir, not Cashel, we bypass them. Cahir had antique shops. Cashel was pleased with itself at one time, what with the kings and the castle. The hotel garden has the oldest mulberry tree in Munster, if not Ireland, Europe or the World. Reading the road is easier the more tired you become; signs are all you can see in the cold middle of Ireland, plunging down into dark-blue minus temperatures. If there’s black ice anywhere we’ll be beyond taking photographs with the accident camera, unless it pops out automatically like an airbag and photographs our last terror like that Powell and Pressburger film, can’t remember the name. It looks dry but there could be black ice; it only takes a tiny patch. Jack does a few tentative tries on the brakes. A trio of supermarket trucks glides by in the opposite direction. I hate to think of food moving around at night, depot to depot, like contraband. No longer are we coasting towards Cork. We pass under bridges individually now. Everything that isn’t tarmac in the headlights is something of note.
Peeping Tom, that was the Powell and Pressburger film. The killer who filmed his victims as he brought down the knife.
In the hills beyond Taroudannt we saw a tortoise family on the move: big tortoise, smaller tortoise and small tortoise were proceeding in a line through the rocky scrub, racheting over obstacles, swaying on scree, smaller tortoise knocking on the shell of big tortoise every few inches. I’m here, darling, I’m here. Onward, don’t ask, onward. We are a trail of life. Knock. Knock, knock. We watch the family of tortoises move across the stony ground. Knock, knock. The french for tortoise escapes me for the moment. Knock.
Another takeaway in Mitchelstown. A garda car outside. A loose dog. Rare parked cars frosted and still. The town rises up its town square slope, ranks of houses stacked like toytown in the rickety dark. Traffic lights work best without traffic, they tint the cold night air and light up the white and yellow lines to no purpose.
Outside Mitchelstown, there’s a hotel on a roundabout, the door open despite the frost, and an almost visible melt all around, as big girls in red dresses slop in and out of the disco, their jaws aching from a night of hopping, yapping, gulping and laughter. In the bar, a young eastern European in waistcoat uniform leans under the tables and hoovers with zeal, as if it meant promotion or at least consoling pain. Coffee? Without a word he moves towards the machine and pours two coffees that look like the bottom of the Danube. He does not distinguish these two people in hats and scarves from the big girls in their red dresses or their loose suit boys grown breathless in the thick heat of – you’ve guessed – a boutique hotel set in its own grounds (beside the roundabout).
We turn off the Cork ring road to the 24 hour Tesco. What else would be open? There are two other customers besides ourselves; the aisles are filled with boxes that would house a tribe in the Western Sahara. Where’s the milk? we ask, and we’re led there by a pillar of sanity, a woman who takes it as it comes at any time of the day or night. She’s built her day around this, her twenty-four hours; this is her empire of aisles, shelves, boxes, her mute crew of helpers from all over the world. We invent her all the way to the milk department. There you go, she says, and vanishes.
This is food, the contraband we saw on the night road. This is what we stand up on, this is what moves us. Croissants. Brack. Milk. Barbecued chicken wings.
Use your club card – if you have one – at the self-checkout machines, most of which don’t work. One lad is standing there in a trance beside his as yet unchecked goods. There’s a pallor about him, held together by a scarf round his neck, like Rupert Bear gone to hell and back. He stands there looking three-quarters back into the shop, his focus some miles hence. The other customer has his machine working. He’s the one with the barbecued chicken wings. It’s a secret link, a deep sympathy he has. He
has a club card. We stand beside our nonfunctioning checkout machine, too tired to be exasperated. The pillar of sanity is on her break. A south-american with a patch on one ear like a fighting cat, takes on our case. No language passes between us, and no lucre. We have touched the night heart of commerce and I have to say we are strangely moved.
We stumble out with our milk, brack and loose croissants, into the dim enchanted carpark where our metallic blue bug from Bay 285, is waiting. Her camera intact. Her whistle unblown. It’s only a few miles home. We leave the N road for the R road and finally the boreen. The house didn’t burn down. It shows up pale in the non-moonlight, in the frost, the same pinkish, washed-out clay colour as the houses in Morocco. I was dreading that drive, says Jack. It was very smooth, though, even if I was worried about ice for a while.
The house is freezing, and has a profound, northern smell to it, of earth reclaiming her own. We eat a few pieces of brack with Moroccan honey, drink a cup of tea we hardly taste and go to bed. I don’t get any of that reassurance you’re supposed to feel in your own bed. It’s hard to sleep amid desert printed on damp, now upon yesterday, if yesterday ever ended. The front head bashes the back head; the pillow is cold through and through.
I turn again to Tarantino and start to run through -i-o-n words. Like Redemption. Dereliction. Fiction. All the towns of my acquaintance fall around in my head, with louche figures here and there like a fifties print. Punk Fiction, that’s it. No, not Punk, Pulp. Pulp Fiction. When a lost name comes back to roost, there’s an almost immediate relief, as well as a rise in temperature right down to your feet as the chink in your memory fills in.
You should have told me, says Jack, over a late breakfast of Tesco croissants and coffee.
I couldn’t, I said, you were asleep. Do you want to feed the hens or shall I?
Communication
The subject of my father’s emails is Communication. Mine are called Re-send. That is, the second one is called Re-send. The first one might be News, or Seasonal, or whatever. But he doesn’t get that. He only gets Re-send. It gives him a plateau for his eloquence when he replies. How extraordinary, that out of all the other emails sent and received, these should go astray in the ether. This is a readymade and manageable drama featuring search engines, servers and hobgoblins. Part of his uniqueness. If not mine. Perhaps I should try calling them Re-send in the first instance. Then would he get them?
Start here
|
