the summer holidays.
He heads out the Dunmore road. He does not want to go home. He remembers the can of gloss paint waiting in the basement. He turns left onto the bridge, leaves down his bags and leans on the wall. Below him, the glimmer of water, the play of sunlight and wind and trees and sky on the surface, the currents and underwater motion almost invisible. Reeds, green and nervy, rise from the shallows. He turns his head. Half a mile downriver, the concrete bunker of the abandoned chicken factory is just visible beyond the trees. Decades’ worth of chicks hatched out at one end. Birth to death in a hundred yards. Other dark goings-on there too for years. Poor boys from the terraces desperate for summer jobs and Vinnie Molloy, supervisor, pervert, brute, had the giving of the jobs. For certain favours rendered. Conor Mahon. Sean Byron. Kevin Kelly. Trying not to cry out with the pain. Always the poor who get raped.
He leans over the top of the bridge and searches for his reflection in the water. The shadow of a drowned man is supposed to be waiting for him in the water. Conor Mahon’s shadow waiting for him here when he was twenty-one. Luke sat beside Conor in first year in secondary school, the two of them full of devilment. That day the priest came in to give a sex education lesson. Take these little bookeens home with ye, lads, he said. He returned the next day. Well, Conor, did you read the book? Oh I did, Father, I did … and ’twas the dirtiest book I ever read. Conor used to play the banjo. Started a band with three young ones when he was sixteen – Three Birds and a Badger, he called it. Luke cornered Molloy one night after Conor’s death, threatened to cut off his fingers and toes if he ever touched another lad in the town. You’ll be fucken walking on your heels, you scumbag, you’ll have to be fed through a tube. Molloy hanged himself the week before his trial.
Luke straightens up. There has always been a pall over the town, he thinks, something dark and blighting, the cause of which he cannot put his finger on. Even during the economic boom, the air of depression and neglect never lifted. Old usurper’s shadow still hanging over the valley. Imperialist thieves. Sir Richard, like his Blake forefathers, still collecting ground rent from businesses in the town but never giving back a penny to plant a tree or put a lick of paint on the terraces or a bench in the square. Take, take, take. A wave of anger flares in him.
He draws his gaze back to the flow of water rounding the bend in the river. He remembers the day in third class when Miss Fahy ran her wooden pointer along the line of a river on the physical map of Ireland. When the river suddenly changed direction Luke made the connection and transposed in his mind the river on the map to the river at the end of the town, and suddenly the penny dropped and it dawned on him that this was their river, and their bend and their land – O’Brien land – and it was up there on the map of Ireland for the whole class and the whole world to see. It was the first surge of familial pride that was woken in him. Here, at the little peninsula they call the Inch at the very edge of his land, the Sullane swings suddenly to the south, a ninety-degree rotation executed millions of years ago. Before it was named, before this place was touched by humans, the river captured the drainage system of another lower, lesser river and met a strange new tide coming up from the sea. A pirate then, the Sullane, Luke thinks now, a bully and a thief, usurping the route and riverbed of another. He had never thought of it like that before.
A plastic Coke bottle comes floating under the bridge. A sudden flash of anger at litterlouts, at the wanton thoughtlessness of someone just tossing their rubbish over their shoulder. Wanton thoughtlessness everywhere in evidence. Human stupidity too. Road rage, fish kills, farm effluent, phone masts, mindless government policies, or lack thereof. He keeps his eyes on the plastic bottle, tracking it for twenty or thirty yards. It flows out and around the tip of the Inch, appearing smaller and smaller as it floats off downriver, the sun still glinting on the plastic. Tossing on the waves all the way to Errish where the river enters the sea, where fresh water meets salt and swirls in little eddies, the salt nosing underneath, the fresh floating on top, no mixing or melding, no fusion of molecules.
He walks along the road and turns in the avenue. He can always feel when the afternoon changes and evening falls. Something in his circadian clock, he thinks, the way hibernating animals sense when the light fades.
The house has settled around him, restive now. He opens a bottle of Rioja, admires the ruby glow of the wine streaming into the glass. He sips it, lets it linger on his palate for a moment, then down his gullet it goes. Outside, a bird is singing in short sweet trills. Maeve had wanted to get a parrot for the flat in Harold’s Cross but he never liked the idea of caged birds. Joyce kept two little parakeets for a while in Paris, Pierre and Pipi. One of them flew in the window one day and stayed and, not wanting it to be alone, he acquired the other. Probably saw it as a sign. Wonder if he clipped their wings. Or taught them to speak. Or sang to them. Probably spent hours peering at them with his poor eyesight, delighting in their plumage, in their little nipping and kissing and beak tapping. Leaning in closer, imitating their whistles and chirrups, picking up their secret little tones in his inner ear … slipping deeper and deeper into communion with them until he emitted his own little trills and twitterings in reply to theirs. Luke remembers buying a book about birdsong; it’s somewhere in the house. Every morning at dawn the author entered an aviary in a zoo – in Philadelphia or Pittsburg – and played his flute to the birds. As time passed the birds started to imitate his notes and sing back to him.
He boils potatoes, fries the steak in a little butter and garlic, then lifts it onto a warm plate and lets the brownish meat juice trickle over it. Lily will soon appear, drawn by the aroma. At the table he draws the Borges book and a book of Derek Mahon’s poems close to him. Certain nights are right for poems and he has a knack of opening a page at random, hitting on exactly the right one. He pours more wine. When he cuts into the steak, blood-brown juices run out, and he salivates. The meat is delicious. He thinks of Bloom’s pork kidney and wonders why he ate pork. He wonders if it really is possible to taste urine off a cooked kidney. He remembers his alarm the first time he got a strong sulphurous whiff off his own urine after eating asparagus.
He eats another forkful of steak, then some potato sopping in juice. The potato melts in his mouth. Another forkful of steak. The eyes of this cow will pursue me through all eternity. Poor Bloom. The weight of feeling he carried on his shoulders. Such humanity. Joyce too, a gentle soul. His whole life marred by illness and poverty and Lucia’s madness. Only fifty-eight when he died. Perforated ulcer. Luke was shocked when he came upon the post-mortem report as a footnote in Ellmann’s biography. Reading it felt like rummaging through the body itself. Paralytic ileus. Extensive bleeding. Enormously dilated loops of small bowel as large as a thigh, coloured purple. Head section not permitted. His stomach must have been cut to ribbons from all the white wine. If only he’d listened to Nora and gone to a doctor, instead of paying heed to the Jolases and the other intellectuals telling him for years that the stomach pains were psychosomatic. All that genius … gone for ever. Feel him close still. Always. Have to keep the Ellmann book close to hand. He had a blood transfusion the day before he died and received the blood of two Swiss soldiers from Neuchâtel. A good omen, he thought, because he liked Neuchâtel wine. His last hours. Slipping into a coma. Waking in the night, asking for Nora. His coffin carried up the hill through the snow to the Fluntern cemetery. Eternally with me.
He must not exhaust himself thinking. Random inchoate thoughts following on more random inchoate thoughts. Thought is the thought of thought. The pressure of thoughts sometimes, ideas turning cartwheels in his mind. Coming in surges, fast-flowing, flooding. All is in all. His speech too, at times. His father always at him. ‘Easy, Luke, easy, slow down.’ In class in Belvedere he’d stray off-topic, once extolling the beauty and harmony and symmetry in nature’s fabric that is everywhere discernible – in the nucleus of a nut or an atom – and the boys saying, ‘Slow down, sir, you’re going too fast.’ Maeve too. ‘Stop! What are you talking about? Luke, you’re making no sense!’ He couldn’t understand why she couldn’t keep up. Moments like that, he had felt alienated. One night, she stopped him mid-stream. ‘I bet you’re bipolar,’ she said quietly, nodding slowly. ‘You’re just like my uncle Mattie.’
He
