Angelo.’
A tapestry has been hung from the balcony of one of the flats, showing night in El Salvador: bodies rising from graves, men in cowboy hats being tortured in police stations, devils pulling naked women out of houses, nuns in outlandish wimples kneeling outside confessionals, Indians praying by open coffins in their sitting-rooms, houses, under huge coconut trees, going up in fire.
In one flat I pass a group of young people, some in baseball caps, are huddled on the floor. A boy is playing an accordion. Its borders are tallow and green-coloured and its body is gold. There are bottles of red wine on the floor around. Cervano Vino.
In Paris in 1968 I went to a concert given by a guitar-playing priest in the basement hall of the high-rise in which I was staying and drank wine for the first time, red wine, coughing it up.
Eleanor was in Paris the same summer. She lost her virginity to the father of the children she was minding. She liked sitting in the cigarette smoke of tables on the Boulevard St Michel. When the first chestnuts came to the Luxembourg Gardens we were both preparing to leave. But she was returning to the three-tier trays of cakes in Bewleys and the prospective boy-lovers from Rathmines and Rathgar and Monkstown.
‘Remember you told me how that blond solicitor leaned towards you in the toilet in Toners. That French boy looks like him.’
She wore a white blouse the night before I left Prague, silver caterpillar brooch on it, a little black hat, spears of black lace standing up on it, black leaves imprinted on the lace. Her face was nearly that of a skeleton, powdered and pearled. She sat beside me, singing along with ‘La Paloma’ as usual, head bowed.
There were two lovers seated on a bench on Wenceslas Square, the girl wearing white bobby socks and a skirt of cedar-green with pink roses and ruby crab-apples and pale green leaves on it, her head inclined towards the boy’s thighs. Around them the humble blue and red and yellow of Traktoro Export, Machino Export Bulharska Telecom Sofia Bulgaria, Lucerna Bar, Licensintory Moscow USSR, Vinimpex Sofia, Licence Know How Engineering, Hotel Druzhba.
Next morning there were marigolds being sold all over Wenceslas Square before I got the Metro to Leninova.
Tinker boys in white shirts and kipper ties outside St Saviour’s Church of John the Evangelist and St John the Baptist in Lewisham as Sunday mass proceeds inside, looking like boys outside churches on Sunday in Ireland.
A plea for the Peru missions near the railings and a sign saying ‘Do you want to know more about the Catholic faith?’
One of the women has taken home a collection of pamphlets with saints’ faces on them – Blessed Margaret Clitheroe, Blessed Cuthbert, St John Fisher, St Thomas More – I notice on my next visit to them and when I feel uneasy and an intruder, as I often do on these visits, I browse through them.
On the windowsill is a girl dancing with sunflowers at her feet, a scarlet bow on each of her feet; two matchstick caravans; two toby jugs; a lampshade held up by an elephant who has foxgloves at his feet. To the right of the window a photograph of Vincent, the dead boy, beside a picture of Marie Goretti.
‘It’s all going back to the 1300’s,’ the youthful and even-voiced father says, and we discuss a recent court case in London where a girl was prosecuted for killing a rat. Now that winter is moving in there’ll be no more journeys this year for them. But I’ll be leaving Lewisham for a while before the end of the year. I am planning to go to the United States.
All this was a year ago. Now it’s summer. I am separated from every country in the world. I hold Robin’s card and grasp for seconds the last night on Wenceslas Square, the powdered salvia, the lights. But after having been nearly swept out to sea, and having toyed with the idea of suicide, there’s a decision, despite the emptiness I had to fight, to keep trying for a path.
I keep hearing the voices of ancestors which started up in Prague.
‘He’d never have become a priest but for your vigilance.’
I see a clutter of young, newly ordained priests cycling into a town, bunting strung up and confetti being thrown at them, a middle-aged priest walking behind them, throwing bonbons from a biretta to children.
My mother, deep down, had hoped I’d become a priest.
After her marriage, as she walked out the Galway Road wheeling me, her boyfriend passed, the one she forsook because she had tuberculosis, on his way to the Galway races. He stopped his car, admired me and said: ‘He’ll have to do great things, this child.’ When I was three I got a gift of a river boat for Christmas. Ultramarine and white, with yellow wheels on it. A fat little fellow, I was standing at one end of the long dining-room, holding the river boat, my mother standing on the other side, crying.
Last Christmas I went to the land of river boats, the Deep South. I’ll go back to Alabama I think, get a job hewing wood. Always, always, there is something keeping you apart in England. The ancient war. Always, always, there is something reducing you as an Irish person to thief, to criminal. They just want you to sweep the roads, to be squalid for them.
‘Take care, soldier,’ one boy said to another as they parted near the tombstone of Thomas Dermody in Lewisham.
Thomas Dermody was a poet from County Clare who lived in Catford. He met a recruiting party in a pub in Great George’s Street on 17 September 1794. Went to England with the 108th Regiment of the Earl of Granard. Fought in the first Napoleonic wars. Journeyed through France, Holland, Germany as second lieutenant in the waggon corps. Saw the graves of Abelard and Heloise in Lombardy and was injured, his face disfigured and his left hand rendered useless. Returned to England. Published verse and drank. His clothes were found by the Ravensbourne river one night and the people of Catford went searching for the body, with candles. But he’d thrown them out of Catford manor, having been given new clothes within. His final friend was an Irish cobbler at Westminster. There were still cattle fields in Westminster at the time of their friendship. He drank himself to death at the age of twenty-seven.
‘Degraded genius! o’er the untimely grave / In which the tumults of thy breast were stilled,’ Lady Byron wrote. This poem she sent to Lord Byron and it initiated their courtship.
In a pub in Lewisham in July a young singer from Belfast in a red shirt, his hair the colour of sun on chestnuts, a pendant around his neck and a few fake poppies hanging by his thigh, sang:
As he was marching the streets of Derry
I hope he marched up right manfully
Being much more like a commanding officer
Than a man to die upon the gallows tree.
A kind of rallying spirit, an unwillingness to lie down, an invocation of Ireland – a madonna with blue veil and saffron belt, country women with coil on top of their heads coming in for mass on Sundays – the ability, as if from a wayside Goddess, to immure yourself and look back, picking up the sequence of the last year.
There was a strong morning light behind the bus in New Orleans and a black woman was standing beside it, engulfed in a striped blanket, as if she was in Africa.
A card had come from Dublin a few weeks before, Jan de Cock, The Flight into Egypt; demons doing parabolas on mountain tops; Mary in a turquoise gold-fringed cloak; the donkey’s head bowed in meekness at his task; St Joseph’s flowing, rich red cloak forming a rosette under the donkey’s mouth.
In Alabama a black man at the back of the bus
