he’s forty, like Dadda. Nothing between me and Heaven, Dadda used to say. Hirsute arms and legs, a bit of grey in his temples. He lathers on shaving foam and begins to shave. The short strokes of the Bic razor rasp against his skin. He once slept with a girl from Rathgar who had white pubic hair, and she only twenty-five. Fernfoils of maidenhair. Was that Stephen or Bloom? More like Bloom, he thinks. Josie went bald down there, but he thinks that was from the chemo. In her final months he used to take her to the toilet, bathe her. His strange, simple-minded aunt. She had more baths and showers in the last six months of her life than she had in the sixty-six years that went before.
The kitchen sink is piled with dirty dishes, pots and pans, cutlery. He begins to sort them, scraping grease and mould from the saucepans into the bin. Then, frustrated, he gives up. He takes the tea towel from the little rubber suction hook, sniffs it, then tosses it away. He read somewhere that dishcloths are two hundred thousand times dirtier than toilet seats. That couldn’t be right, could it? His eyes are drawn to spots of mould on the grout between the tiles where the tea towel hung. Microbes, colonies of bacteria dividing and multiplying there in the dark under his nose for years. Generations of them. All over the house, miscellaneous colonies of bacteria. Spiders and flies, too, and moths and fleas all going about their business – all the minute, parallel lives this house accommodates.
He makes coffee, sits at the kitchen table and lights a cigarette. There are books and magazines strewn all over the table. A fly buzzes past his head, around the kitchen, then angles back to the dresser. Lily jumps on his lap, settles down and begins to purr. Her purrs vibrate in his thighs. He strokes her back, thinks of her little organs and entrails, the gestating foetuses. Her eyes grow drowsy. Sunlight streaming in the tall windows makes him drowsy too. His head is tender this morning; he shouldn’t mix grape and grain. Lately he has started to visualise liver damage. The edges get frilly, tattered, discoloured, then the function slows. He is constantly looking for signs in himself – liver eyes, liver skin, pale stools. White specks on the fingernails, a nurse once told him, are the tell-tale signs doctors look for.
Lynch’s dairy herd are fanned out on the front field beyond the lawn, empty udders swinging loosely. Bulls at the back of the house, cows at the front – he is besieged by Lynch’s beasts. Big Friesian cows, heads down grazing, filling up with milk again. Every morning they move in an eastwardly direction, then curve towards the south, like a great ship turning. Such a meek nature they have. He watches them intently. Not as melancholy as the cows of his childhood. Modern cows might be prone to interference from satellite signals or phone masts or the electronic bleeps and the spectral wavelengths of light-emitting diodes in the milking parlour, all this turbulence entering their consciousness and changing them, corrupting their nature, dulling their sensibilities. Poor, post-industrial cows. He watches them for a long time. The way they lift their tails and simultaneously defecate and urinate and masticate without as much as a how-do-you-do.
What to do today. He could cut away the furze and briars in the quarry, clear out the junk in the stables, rehang the doors. There’s no shortage of work. Getting started is the problem. This solitary life is breeding in him a great immobility. Some days, sitting in the same position, he thinks he has been there for a few minutes when, in fact, hours have passed and suddenly it is noon or afternoon or four o’clock and the day outside has entirely changed.
He could go back to his teaching job in Belvedere. His happiest years, waking up in the little flat in Harold’s Cross with Maeve beside him. Her warm breath and body. Sleepy sex before dawn, the smell and taste of her in his mouth, on his fingers. Standing under the hot shower, dazed, cleansed, then out into the cool morning air. His feet snug inside soft nubuck boots, bought in Clark’s on Grafton Street. One hour it took to cross the city, south to north, down the Harold’s Cross Road, into the little park just as it was opening at 8 a.m., out the other end, past the Hospice for the Dying. Thinking of the poor devils inside, gone to nothing, bones protruding under sheets, morphine pumps ticking away the pain. Unmerciful, he thinks now, not to allow mercy killing. He’d have done it himself to Josie if he could. Walking along, thinking of Maeve in the flat rising sleepily from the bed, showering, dressing, and then he’d be caught off guard by a crosswind coming up the canal on Harold’s Cross Bridge. Below the bridge, Gordon’s fuel yard, the coal and oil trucks lined up, ready for the day. On Clanbrassil Street a plaque on a wall for Leopold Bloom: citizen, husband, father, wanderer. In the imagination was born …
He puts two eggs on to boil. Husband, father, wanderer. Epithets all. Citizen. Who composes these inscriptions? Some arts officer in Dublin City Council who never as much as opened Ulysses. Confusing Bloom with the citizen! Husband, father, wanderer. What else? Dreamer. Schemer. Sinner. Humanist, feminist, pacifist.
The fly is back, zigzagging above Lucy’s Irish dancing medals, coated with old grease and grime, on their velvet display. His own gold medal is in a velvet box upstairs. First in maths in the Leaving Cert in 1996. Dadda, in his gentleman farmer’s tweed jacket and waistcoat, drove around the town on the tractor that evening, hooting the horn, a victory lap. First in the whole of Ireland. He was treated as special after that, marked out by destiny. Even before that, he had felt special. His father took him out of primary school on Friday afternoons, and they’d ride the tractor to the old folks’ home up on the hill and dole out oranges and chocolate to the residents. How’re you today, Teresa? Didn’t Pat-Joe play well on Sunday, Dinny? He is, he’s a great boy … My son. In whom I am well … On winter nights Luke and Lucy would lie on the drawing-room floor doing their homework, with Josie knitting by the fire and his mother below in the kitchen, smoking, alone with her thoughts, and his father would enter the room whistling, the smell of cold air off him, and he’d lean down and kiss each one of them on the head. He had come late to marriage and fatherhood. He must have pinched himself sometimes at his good fortune.
Poor Dadda. He never learned to drive the car. Less than a year after the victory lap, he suffered a sudden, fatal heart attack. No time for goodbye. Three days later Luke walked ahead of his funeral cortege up to the graveyard. He still remembers the sound of his footsteps on the road. Nothing else was audible – not the hum of the hearse’s engine or the breeze in the trees. It had felt like a dream. The light of that May morning, the clear blue sky, the shimmering river. The stillness of everything. And then he flew, like it was the most natural thing in the world. He felt himself rise and hover above the road. Below him, the hearse and the mourners on foot and the cars coming slowly behind them. He could see it all: the road, the bridge, the avenue leading up to their house with no one home and all the rooms with all the furniture and beds and rugs awaiting their return. And the shiny black roof of the hearse glinting in the sun and the coffin inside and his father’s body in a tweed suit and waistcoat supine on a bed of white satin, his beautiful face framed by a fringe of lace. He had never felt closer to him than at that moment. Where are you taking me? his father had asked. Up the road here for a rest, he replied. Are you going to plant me? I am. Will I sprout? You will, next spring. Will I bloom? You will, next summer. Luke felt the touch of his father’s hand on his head ruffling his hair and he heard the beat of his own footsteps on the road again, the sound in tandem with the gentle waves lapping against the riverbank and the whistle of the reeds. And then a flock of little birds swooped down from above and flew on ahead and he heard their song – the authentic music of Eden – and he thought this is what it must feel like to walk into eternity.
A shaft of sun falls diagonally across the wooden table. He lights another cigarette. He had not been afraid that morning. He had felt his father’s protection. The river, too, navigating him, something alive and benevolent – a little river sprite come to his aid in his hour of need, an imp of reason bringing order. The Imp of the Adverse. He peers at the grain of the wood in the table. The quantum properties of wood. Maybe he should have studied maths or science. A speck of cigarette ash drifts down in the air. He did not have the steam-power to be a mathematician, or a physicist. He frowns in concentration. What is it he is trying to recover? Something that the ray of sun and the grain of the wood and the specks of ash are drawing out. With his index finger he presses an ash speck into the wood, then rubs the remaining ash between finger
