Lark's Eggs Page 25
There was a deluge of rats and mice—no one seemed quite sure which—in the tobacco-coloured fields that autumn and an influx of soldiers, young rat-faced soldiers borne along, standing, on front of jeeps. Rat eyes imperceptibly took in Honor. They had caught up with her. A little girl in a blue dress crossed the fields, tejacote apples upheld in the bottom of her dress. A little boy ran to Honor. They were close at hand. At night when her fears were most intense, sweat amassing on her face, she thought of Chris Gormley, a girl at a school in the Midwest with whom she’d shared a respite in her life, and if she said unkindnesses to her she could say sorry now but that out of frustration comes the tree of one’s life. Honor’s tree blossomed that autumn. Sometimes rain poured. Sometimes the sky cheerily brightened. Pieces moved on a chess table in a bar, almost of their own accord. In her mind Honor heard a young soldier sing a song from an American musical: ‘Out of My Dreams and Into Your Arms.’
The night of the concert squashes gleamed like moons in the fields around the hall. In tight jeans, red check shirt, her curls almost peroxide, Honor tightly sang a song into the microphone. Buddy Holly. ‘You go your way and I’ll go mine, now and forever till the end of time.’ A soldier at the back shouted an obscenity at her. A little boy in front, in a grey T-shirt from Chicago, smiled his pleasure. In her mind was her father, his grey suit, the peace promised once when they were photographed together on a broad pavement of a city in the Midwest, that peace overturned now because it inevitably referred back to the turbulence that gave it, Irish–America, birth. And she saw the girl who in a way had brought her here. There was no panic in her, just an Elysium of broad, grey pavements and a liner trekking to Cobh, in County Cork. ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and staff they comfort me.’ In the morning they found her body with that of other nuns among ribbons of blood in a rubbish dump by a meeting of four roads. No one knew why they killed her because after the concert a young, almost Chinese-skinned soldier had danced with her under a yellow lantern that threw out scarlet patterns.
Afterwards Chris would wonder why her parents had not contacted her; perhaps the party with its barrage of phone calls had put up a barrier. But here, now, on the pavement, as the hearses passed, loaded with chrysanthemums and dahlias and carnations, she, this blonde, long-haired protégée of Sister Honor, could only be engulfed by the light of pumpkins which lit like candles in suburban gardens with dusk, by the lights of windows in high-rise blocks, apertures in catacombs in ancient Rome, by the flames which were emitted from factory chimneys and by the knowledge that a woman, once often harsh and forbidding, had been raised to the status of martyr and saint by a church that had continued since ancient Rome. An elderly lady in a blue mackintosh knelt on the pavement and pawed at a rosary. A negro lady beside Chris wept. But generally the crowd was silent, knowing that it had been their empire which had put these women to death and that now this city was receiving the bodies back among the flames of pumpkins, of windows, of rhythmically issuing factory fires, which scorched at the heart, turning it into a wilderness in horror and in awe.
The Airedale
The door of their house and the side gate to the archway leading to their yard, their proliferation of sheds and subsequently to their garden were painted fresh bright green. Green was the colour of the door and the side gate of the last house on the street, the house just before the convent. The nuns were always eager to get hold of the house and they did eventually. If you pay a visit to the town now it is merely an eventual part of the convent premises.
The stone of the house was dark grey and if you peeped through the bony windows you’d see shining wooden floors and above them paintings of the maroon and purple mountains of the West. We lived in the Western Midlands. East Galway. Mrs Bannerton was from Poland. She had blonde sleeked hair. She had taken a bus from the War and arrived in Ireland. In Dublin she’d married a surgeon. They lived now in our town. Denny was the son. Their one child. He was my friend.
I came from a family of five brothers. There were certain obscenities within my family. I can now see that friendship was one of them. Denny should have been from a suitable class background for closeness with me but my mother detected something she did not approve of there. Looking out the window at Denny trailing along on the other side of the street, beside rugged curtains she spat, ‘You’re not to play with him. He’s wild.’
Denny was wild; he had wild chestnut hair, wild confluences of freckles, wild and expansive short trousers. He kept a milling household of pets, lily-white, quivering-nosed rabbits, garden-trekking tortoises, cats of many colours, at one stage a dying jackdaw, but monarch among the pets was Sir Lesley the Airedale. Denny tended his menagerie carefully, kneeling to comb the fur of cats and rabbits with a horn comb he assured me had been part of his grandmother’s heirloom in Lublin. Later discovering that Lublin had been the site of a concentration camp struck home memories of a childhood where imaginary storks cascaded over a town which often looked, in its loop of the river, that it had been constructed as a concentration camp. Denny in white sleeveless jersey and white trousers combed a cat’s fur and muttered a prayer he insisted was Polish. It was in fact gibberish. Denny did not know a word of Polish because his mother refused even to speak a consonant of it. Some languages are best forgotten. The town had its language. My family had its language. But the Bannertons spoke a different language and I owe them something; I owe them what I am now, for better or for worse. Denny’s gibberish addressed to one of his cats is a language I still hear. We move from one country to another; we move from one language to another. But certain remembrances bind us with sanity. Denny’s addresses to his cats is one of them for me. Another is the red in Denny’s hair. Denny’s red. My own hair was dull brown and I always vied for red hair so when I first came to live in this city I had a craze and dumped a bottle of henna into my crew cut, stared into my eyes in a mirror then and saw myself as an inmate in a concentration camp.
Denny and I sat together at school and we heard the words of William Allingham together:
Adieu to Ballyshannon! where I was born and bred
Wherever I go, I’ll think of you, as sure as night and morn.
That we were elevated at an early age by the romance of words was also a saving grace of this town. The speaker of these words, a grey-haired headmaster with a worn and lathery black leather strap, is now lying in his grave. After doing his purgatory for the mutilation of poor boys’ hands—boys from the ‘Terrace’, the slum area of town—he will surely be transported to heaven on a stanza of Thomas Moore. That was the duality we lived with. But Denny’s home in the afternoons dominated at school. Toys on the wooden floor were trains winding through Central Europe. Snow toppling on the trains—litter from Denny’s hands. We saw a midget woman alight from a carriage on the floor, look around her and wander through the bustling streets of an anonymous Central European city.
Mr Bannerton had a large penis. From Denny I first heard mention of the word ‘penis’. He kept me in touch with his father’s and mother’s attributes. I presumed Mr Bannerton’s large penis was to do with his medical profession.
Denny taught me history; the entire history of the world; he knew this from books; Denny read Dickens and Louisa M. Alcott. These authors owed their life in the town to Denny. He frequented their worlds. He borrowed their books from the library. Denny was a parent. At eleven he had a wide and middle-aged freckled face.
Everything was lovely about Denny, his father, his mother, his hair, his clothes, everything except his face. He had an ugly face. When I met him in later life he had kept that face like a chalking-up area for pain.
In Denny’s home I first heard Mozart; I first spoke to a jackdaw; I first was kissed by a blonde woman; I first acquainted myself with the names of herbs. In Denny’s home I first hated my mother and my father. I despised my brothers. There were no cats or dogs in our home. No Airedales. I swapped passports in their
home and took out citizenship of a country situated between bare wooden walls.
I was ten when Denny left. God threw snow out of a spiteful heaven. He was borne away in the furniture van. On the main street I cried. They were going to a city in the very South. I was wearing a short blue coat. Tears stung in my eyes and if I stay awake long enough at night I can still feel them.
All their property had gone, everything, except the Airedale. He’d been too big to carry away and whether they donated him to a neighbour or not he strode majestically around town for weeks. In the mornings on my way to school I nodded to him though he did not acknowledge me. Then one day I passed his carcass beside a dustbin. They left his carcass there for weeks, below the dustbin, until fleas got into it. I supposed it was to demonstrate to everyone the folly of being lofty and having once been the pet of a gifted family. The Bannertons went on to be part of a big city. There was an opera house in this city and a river which divided into two. There were many hills in this city and many churches. Now that I had been left my brothers turned upon me, beat me up, locked me into rooms on grey afternoons. It was a grey February afternoon for a long time now. One grey February afternoon I left to be a priest in Maynooth.
What happened in the meantime had been a kind of breakdown. My parents, fearful of consequences, confiscated stamp albums, books. Stamps were slightly suspicious, books were dangerous for me. They knew no better, my parents. They were peasant people, their parents having graduated to businesses in towns. The only book my mother had ever read was the penny catechism, and my father, a more jovial sort, had his joviality truncated by my mother. My brothers were all going to be accountants. At fifteen I borrowed my father’s razor blade and slashed my wrists. Blood ran from the wound of a white hamster. They did not bring me to the main hospital but to the mental hospital. On the way there, like Denny, I began muttering gibberish. Gibberish saved my life.
Maynooth was rusted pipes alongside the grey walls of premises which were alleged to be haunted by catatonic ghosts; Maynooth was young clerics in black soutanes, hands digging deep into their soutanes, staring collectively at gutters; Maynooth was razor blades the colour of congealed blood, deftly taken from private lockers. There were sonorous prayers and professors of medieval philosophy who went around spraying snippets of Simon and Garfunkel. But eventually a prayer became too nasal for me; a part of my brain leapt into self-awareness again; before being ordained, a hitherto placid clerical student boarded a plane from Dublin to London, first having attended a film in his favourite cinema on Eden Quay. The city I arrived in was experiencing its first buffeting of punk hairdos; skies were bleached, dustbins overladen. Hands were generally shrouded in pockets. From a room in Plumstead I looked for work, got a job on a building site and a year later started attending a film school. Boats pushed past on the Thames outside my door. Plumstead marshes nearby conjured skeletal boats on the Thames. There was a ghost running through and through me as I sat, meditating, in my room in Plumstead. I could make little communication with fellow students. Something in me was impotent and my favourite occupation was sitting on a stool, meditating on my multiple impotences and creating a route out of them. One day I knew I’d walk out of inability. Charitable notes drifted through from Maynooth. There were short films made. There were eventually relationships made. Sex stirred like a ship on the Thames. But I touched one or two people. I made gestures to one or two people. I was released from the school with accolades. I made my first film outside school. A short film. On that ticket I returned to Ireland.
Adieu to Ballyshannon! where I was born and bred
Wherever I go, I’ll think of you, as sure as night and morn.
A plane veered across lamb-like clouds. Below me was a southern Irish city. My film was being shown in the annual film festival. I was sitting next to the window. I’d never been to this country before. I was an outsider now. I’d prepared myself and preened myself for that role. But a wind on the airport tarmac ruffled my demeanour and cowed me back again to Good Fridays and Pentecost Sundays on a grey small-town Irish street.
Cocktails were barraged towards the glitter of the light. Young women in scanty dresses and with silken bodies flashed venomous eyes at me. I was invited to bed chambers that always seemed by implication to be above the bars of cinemas. I declined these invitations. The night my film was shown, afterwards, I met Denny Bannerton. Dr Denny Bannerton. We said hello, made polite comments to one another, and arranged to meet the next night. There was no award for my film. Silence. Unmuttered blame. It had been a trip to Ireland though and I was glad of it. In a gents’ toilet full of mirrors I congratulated myself on my black, polka-dotted tie, a narrow stripe of a tie purchased on Portobello Road and subsequently endearingly laundered and ironed. It was as if someone was affectionately pulling my tie in the direction of London. But first I had an appointment. A camera went off and took a photograph of me, dark glasses on and a smile winter days living by London cemeteries had given me.
A blank, broad freckled face with black glasses. A grey suit—a collar and tie. Unusual accoutrement for a film reception. Denny’s face was still the same in a way. We met in a pub the night after. The night was young, Denny explained when we met; there were many bars in this city to travel through. I sat on a high stool and gazed into a purple spotlight falling on a many-ringed male finger. We had ventured into the gay scene of this city. We were about to step further.
Swans, very clean swans; little neon-emblazoned retreats; hills; wave-like lanes. A spiralling journey. Conversation. I was the film-maker. Denny Bannerton was an auspicious and regular part of the newspapers and behaved as such. I was treated to propaganda. I listened to the water, the breeze and the swans. The tricolour flew for some reason over a Roman pillared church. As Denny’s conversation battled with the breeze, as young men in white shirts behind counters, glasses being cleaned in their hands, enthusiastically saluted him among purple light, I made a mental film of his life.
The most important discovery in Denny Bannerton’s life had been that of his homosexuality. He discovered it at thirteen. With a white rabbit. In the back garden of a red suburban house. The tenderness of his impediment connected him with inmates in a concentration camp near Lublin. He was still in short trousers at the time. Broad, blank-faced, at fifteen he had an actual beauty. He had a brief affair with a corporeal monk who was directing a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. Afterwards, having been rejected by the monk, Denny’s face resigned itself to ugliness. At university he took girls out. But such relationships quickly collapsed. As a young doctor he toured the world, had posts in Iran, in Venezuela, in Bristol. He returned to Ireland. Returning to his city in the south he announced his homosexuality. Affairs with Moslem, short-socked boys in the oil deserts. An affair with a piano-playing prodigy in Caracas. Nights of promiscuity in Bristol. Back home he politicized his loneliness. A doctor, he travelled the city with an expansive rose on his lapel. He was in the newspapers. He wrote irate letters to editors. He was a mirage on television discussion programmes. He’d peculiarly found his way home.
The questions asked of me were for the most part very factual; I knew what he was driving at. What were my sexual proclivities? I refused to answer. I just allowed myself to be led and occasionally I indulged in reminiscence. But it seemed reminiscence brought me back further than a garden. It brought me to a concentration camp in the suburbs of a Polish city.
Some of the nights in the desert had been like a concentration camp for Denny; the hot air, the arid flesh. Petrol had burned like pillars of flame. They had returned him to a geography before birth. Shirts were purple and pink in the dimly lit bars we slipped through. I was introduced to many people. A blond, furry-haired boy revolved his hand in mine in the pretence of shaking it. There had been the question of where Mrs Bannerton had really been from but now I knew. She’d been a mutual mother. Denny yapped on in a flaxen brogue, regardless of the images in my mind, furnaces lighting the night on the perimeter of a concentration camp i
n Poland.
Whether in reality or in dream she had traversed that camp. The skeletons had piled up in the dark. She’d heard the screams from those freshly dying. But in the middle of the skeletons and the screams she’d had an intuition of a limestone street, of an oak tree over a simple and pastoral pea garden, of an Airedale.
‘So you’re the film-maker. Heard your film was lousy. What are you doing beyond there in England? Pandering to Britannia. You should be home and drawing the turf of our native art.’ An academic’s lips seared with effeminacy. A gold chain sheathed the brushing of black hairs on display in the V of his pastel-blue shirt, the chain sinking into a tan picked up in Mexico. ‘You’re one of the quislings who won’t admit they’re queer.’ He was asking me to concede my ratio of queerness. I said nothing, looked to the photograph of a scarlet-sailed yacht in Kinsale. Denny muttered something about camera work. The one word reserved for special treatment by the academic was Britannia; I saw a spring shower dripping off a stone, slouching lion.
Back in the night Denny ran down the list of his endeavours to bring gay liberation to Ireland: planting flags on the top of low, buttercup-covered mountains, leading straddling tiny marches through the city, chaining himself to the pillars of the Town Hall. He’d been wearing a brown T-shirt the day he’d chained himself to the Town Hall. Not a grey suit as now. A breeze from the sea suddenly slapped me with a drop or two of rain on the face.
The edges of her hair had burned against the lights of the concentration camp; again and again she strode across my vision. She wanted to exorcise it. She’d come a long way. Suddenly she’d been in Ireland and she’d lain down.