When the band played ‘La Paloma’ she said, ‘My song,’ and sang with it.
Later that evening an accordionist played the same song at the top of Wenceslas Square, under the lime trees, and a couple danced and a man in a white workcoat let himself free from a sausage kiosk and put a lighted cigarette in the accordionist’s mouth.
The woman dancing was wearing a daisied navy dress and white bobby socks and I thought of Mrs Delaney who dressed this way when she was working for us. After her husband died she started getting electric shock treatment. She was very proud of it. Being strapped in, electrodes clamped on to her forehead. She used to walk in from the mental hospital, past the two-storey Victorian house beside an Elizabethan ruined castle.
Then one day her bones broke under the electric shock treatment and she died. That was the day her son played billiards.
The ninety-year-old lady who lived a few houses away from me was out sweeping the leaves the morning I left for Prague. ‘I was down in Margate yesterday, loafing around.’ She was eager to tell me. She wore a long adamantine necklace. Her husband was killed in the war and she still spoke about him as if he were alive. She frequently hummed ‘We’ll Be Lit Up When the Lights Go Out in London.’
Hedgehogs, owls, starlings lived in this grove.
She reached out her hand and touched my wrist. ‘Have a wonderful time wherever you go.’
On the train into London, in the middle of a conversation about work, a woman suddenly leaned towards a man and whispered, ‘You’ve got to suit the horse and the horse suit you.’ It was just as we were passing the tinker encampment, roses in pots that were swan-shaped outside modern caravans, and geraniums on ironwork above the doors of little huts.
In the latter part of 1968 there were two photographs in my room. One of Nguyen Thanh Nam, a prophet who lived up a coconut tree in Vietnam, and one of a woman, lamé stole around her neck, kneeling on the front of a tank in Prague, arms outstretched.
There were tanks at Prague airport the first time I arrived. Inside, people from sundry nations were having cocktails and beers. By the exit there were a row of stalls, one of which had matchstick angels with fluted dresses under glass. In a cavernous underground toilet there was a picture pinned to the wall showing a funfair by the azure waters of a Russian port.
I got the bus into the city. A broom stood at the back of the bus. An old couple walked by outside, holding hands, the woman holding a scarlet handbag in her other hand. Viburnum cut the avenue. A little man in a black beret and persimmon shirt kept consulting a little fat brown-covered dictionary he had with him. The high-rises on the way in were like the high-rises of the suburbs of Paris where I’d stayed in 1968.
Wenceslas Square on that first day: lime trees in bloom on a downsloping pavement; flanks of ice-cream awash with viridian syrup in plastic tubs in a window; fat creamy cakes called Budapest with wide-brimmed chocolate papal hats on them; a young man in shorts and white workcoat darting between buffets in a sudden downpour; amber make nude statues over a magazine shop; a man in a buffet cleaning up, a disabled hand outheld, like an unpeeled prawn; a dreamy-eyed woman in the same buffet, her white workcoat stained lemon, like butcher’s blobs. There was a young tinker in Lewisham called Foncie who had a pen-pal in Prague and one recent summer, according to legend, he journeyed to Berlin to meet her in Friedrichstrasse.
High-rise buildings, bluish, like another city, on the horizon, the yellow and green fields slightly carmined with poppies. I got off another red bus. There was a gypsy family at the bus stop, a gradation of them, father, mother, two sisters, a brother, tattoos on some of their wrists. It had rained torrentially and suddenly the sun came out, the grey sky with a rust tint like an orange galvanized roof on a shed which was part of the panorama behind our house in County Galway. A boy sat on a stool in the meadow, a plastic bag of orange in his arms. A woman with fungus-like veins on her legs stood by the bus stop, a little away from the gypsy family. And for some reason there were flowers in a glass jar, isolated, in the meadow.
I had to get away from London. I had a brother who’d been a monk in County Waterford. He left and came to London, followed me, surveyed me. You were compounded in clan. When he entered the café I frequented one day, looking around, an old lady tramp seated near him over tea, I dashed into the lavatory and locked myself in.
Some people said living in London was an escape from Ireland, but there were more people from County Galway in London than there were in County Galway. While I lived in Dublin I met middle-class people. In London I had to deal with family again.
Every day I saw the images: Irishmen with red faces, chipped noses, tottering along Camberwell Road; a tramp wearing a silver Bridget’s cross on a pendant playing at a UN squadron pinball machine in a café in Kilburn, a girl companion alongside her with a blue ribbon in her hair, her cheeks the red of the Virgin Mary’s cheeks on roadsides in Ireland.
Afterwards, when I had the breakdown, I dreamt of it over and over again, this place where I came alive after the not so much death-existence but fretful, shadowy one in London; sweet-peas, sunflowers, geraniums, hollyhocks in the gardens at the foot of high-rises; rabbits in pens; old people talking to one another from deck chairs; tarmacadam tarnished with spillages of coal; groundsel, elder, warts of poppies in the grass; young Africans wandering around in happy huddles; a woman in a T-shirt showing a fighter-jet wheeling a child; a song blasting out from a high-rise, ‘I Love Your Daughter, I Love Your Son’; washing decorating every balcony, pink the favourite colour; dead lakes in the distance. I lived on the eighth floor, in a bare room which had plywood walls. One day I looked out and saw what I had not noticed before – a field spanned by blue chicory.
I made love in this room to a long-haired boy called Radvj whom I met on a path in the fields. He was from Bratislava. He was wearing gooseberry-green bermudas and told me he was looking for somewhere to stay. He stood proudly in front of the bed before getting in, showing off his genitals. There was a tattoo on his left shoulder which depicted a cairn.
‘The quiet sculpture of your body,’ I thought.
‘You’ve got a beautiful body.’
‘Not as beautiful as yours.’
He told me of his favourite sexual memory, being fucked by an older boy in a field at night, season of the gathering of the hay, while he looked into the boy’s eyes.
I wanted to smell his buttocks. I wanted to smell the pink T-shirt thrown in a heap on the floor. I wanted to return to life.
I thought of Foncie, the tinker boy, my nearest connection to life in London. His twin brother, Vincent, had been killed by a car near the encampment when they were six. An uncle was supposed to be minding him. Later, that uncle went to Brighton and drowned himself.
Porridge every morning of his life; at seventeen a job with a cousin’s painting business; first sex with a Chinese prostitute on Lee Road; the pubs of the West End marauded in large, flashy groups.
With every wedding there was an essential video. Though born in England they often journeyed to Ireland – the occasion of the erection of a grandmother’s headstone, of a wedding. London tinker young mixed with the young of Ireland on hills in Cork city on Sunday nights.
There was a car dump near the encampment. A famous actress had gone there on a supposed errand to buy ginger ale, taken alcohol and pills and been found dead by a tinker dog.
Foncie too had felt the life being dragged out of him by London and, with a crest ‘Wild Ireland’ on the elbow of his jacket, he’d
