Lark's Eggs Page 28

  He’d stay in Fenit for a few weeks and swim with the sidling blue light of the lighthouse in the evenings and the burning blanch light of the lighthouse in the early mornings.

  On one beach, just before dark, as if in answer to his swim, dolphins would approach the shore speaking in short barks an almost human language. They’d play a kind of Ring Around the Rosie, going around in a circle, surfacing and submerging in the combers. Then they’d head out to sea again. It was as if they’d been telling a story.

  Sometimes he could be seen pulling a small boy, whose freckled face looked like a wren’s egg, speckled white, over and over again by the feet, down a chute of sand alongside a beach, rainbows playing like cubs on the sea.

  There was a man near Ballinskelligs Beach who wore a trenchcoat, winter and summer, and farmed marijuana.

  On Inch Strand cobalt, violet and cerulean mountains were painted on the wet sands when the tide was out.

  In one town, where he’d found a dead calf whale on the beach, there was a pub, an advertisement for whiskey with the four provinces of Ireland on it in the window, whose proprietress had once had a play performed at the Abbey Theatre and there was a photograph of her on the wall on stage on her opening night in a trapeze-line cocktail dress with a silk flower under her bust, sling-back, high-heel sandals, drop earrings, her hair in a high curled fringe. People would meet here at night and tell stories. It was cited in this pub by a Pick-wickian-faced man how in Ancient Ireland it was the storyteller’s task to tell a story for each night from the beginning of November—Samhain—to the beginning of May.

  The exploits of the Emperor Tiberius were related here, who had little boys he called ‘minnows’ nibble at him when he was swimming.

  Sometimes people would repair from the pub to a ship in the harbour and one New Year’s Eve on a Russian ship he saw Russian soldiers writing wishes on scraps of paper, setting fire to their wishes with candle flame, mixing the ash with champagne and drinking it.

  A garda sergeant, in a jersey with a jacquard chequerboard design, who’d been interned in the Curragh during the Second World War for his Bolshevik sympathies, where the World’s Classics were passed between prisoners, remarked that the French writer Stendhal was not only one of the few survivors of the Napoleonic invasion of Russia, but was always impeccably groomed on the way back to France. Outside there were flecks of snow in the sea air.

  The proprietress of the pub stood on the deck in the snow in a chintzy boa.

  He always called on a boy with a face nimbused by acne, a face that had known Killarney mental hospital, who lived in a fuschine house on one of the peninsulas, with a palm tree that had suffered in shape outside it, and who managed a garage that had an advertisement for Coca-Cola that had faded to salmon beside it. This boy had been brought up in an orphanage in a big town in Kerry by the Brothers, a picture of a Penal Days mass on the wall, and his penis had always been beaten when he’d wet the bed.

  He spent the summer days now, when he wasn’t working, driving up and down the west coast, hoping to have his body franked by swimmers—Bundoran, Strandhill, the changing huts on Glin Pier in West Limerick.

  He’d stand beside lifeguards’ perches.

  He’d never been to the East of Ireland and he never wished to go. That was the way he’d spend his life; endlessly wandering the West of Ireland.

  Only on the west coast would touching have any meaning for him.

  When frost came he’d urinate on the gas cylinder in the mornings to get the gas flowing.

  He’d kick a football in the evenings with the boys in a Blackburn Rovers jersey, barnacle geese with their white faces, black caps and black markings running from bill through the eye, scampering in play or after a foe along the beach.

  In the town in Tipperary he coached soccer and frequently on Sundays he travelled with the boys in a coach to Armagh when the Troubles were just breaking out, where a boy with shorn hair holding the hand of a little girl in a long tartan dress with an Eton collar and button-up patent boots might look towards the bus. In the Middle Ages it was Malachy the anchorite, who, as Bishop of Armagh, brought repute again to the city that had the blood of Peter and Paul, Stephen and Laurence.

  On Kilkee Strand, he’d tell the boys in Kerry, the Connaught Rangers used to doff their scarlet trousers piped in green and play naked football.

  Inside the caravan he would often obsessively mention a film to the boys he’d seen once in Tipperary. ‘It’s about these fellas who race cars on cliffs. And one of them goes over the cliff. And the fellow he was racing is blamed for telling the police about the lot of them.’

  He’d spend the evening telling them football stories; of the Old Handsel Monday Football Match played in Scotland in the Middle Ages; of how football took over from bull-baiting and badger-baiting in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century; of how pupils of Rugby School where rugby began and pupils of Eton where soccer began used hurl abuse at one another; of how the first soccer star, Lord Kinnaird, who had a fiery beard to his waist, used to play in a quartered cap and long white trousers and would be pulled in his coach by fans to the players’ entrance; of how Doncaster FC was formed as a team to play Yorkshire Institute for the Deaf; of how Arsenal got its name from a munitions factory in Woolwich; of how Moscow Dynamos was founded by Lancashire textile-men in pre-revolutionary Russia; of the confusion in the Irish soccer team, who were featured on a set of cigarette cards, when Partition took place; of Dixie Dean who captained Everton at the age of eighteen; of the Manchester United Team killed in the Munich air crash on a freezing February day.

  ‘In Liverpool there’s a lot of touching, but no homosexuality,’ a boy said to him in England, whom he slept alongside one night, peach pubic hair, a small amount of it, a ruche of a backside, pressing his body as a child in Ireland would press a missal with giltedged leaves and a cover of pearl with a picture of St Patrick with a grandee-beard inset in it.

  But here no one was touched and no one touched.

  In Fenit a marine worker from Achill had once told him how the prophecy that the last train from Scotland to Achill would bring the body of a dead young man had come true.

  Other prophecies come true too: ‘And the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail.’

  The boys would go home, walking with the aid of a flashlight.

  The last beach he’d visit, before returning to Tipperary when the peacock-green fields were brimming with black lambs and the barnacle geese were about to return to Greenland, was Beal, where the sea cabled in towards Limerick and the river came out, the ribs of a wrecked trawler here and there, a landscape like a cowled monk.

  The garda sergeant in the pub with the playwright proprietress had told him, as the North of Ireland Troubles had intensified, how the Book of Kells, the Book of Ardagh, were written in centuries of early Christian peace in Ireland. But then the Vikings came and monasteries began to war with one another—there were abbot and monk soldiers—and the art form was stone crosses with embossments.

  Before leaving, in his caravan, in a Mao jacket, he’d sing a song for the boys who were visiting him.

  I never will marry, I’ll be no man’s wife

  I intend to stay single, for the rest of my life.

  When asked what happened to him someone might shake their head and say, like the barnacle geese that fly so high no one can see them, ‘He vanished off the face of the firmament.’

  Chintz

  I met him my first time in Leningrad, New Year’s 1989, in the Metropole Restaurant. I was dining with two friends who were part of my tour party, slices of sturgeon, a dessert of clementines. The orchestra played ‘Let’s Go to the Hop’, ‘I Celebrate My Love for You’, ‘Wild, Wild Party’. A man in a pinstripe blue suit and a girl with coronets on her high heels danced on the floor.

  There was the chintz of the chandeliers, the chintz of the snow outside, the chintz of Alush’s eyes when he came to the table, eyes o
f scabious blue. His hair was flaxen, an Arctic purity about it. He wore a shabby duffle coat. He was with a friend.

  He’d come with bottles of champagne for my friends, five pounds a bottle. They’d met him on Nevsky Prospect, outside the Aurora Cinema. He sold T-shirts at Piskaryovskoye Cemetery where the dead of the Siege were buried. If caught he’d be sent to a detention centre in the country.

  ‘Irish,’ he said to me. Sometimes the Irish tourists on Nevsky Prospect showed him Irish money. They were easier with money than the British tourists.

  A few days before he’d met an Irish boxer who lived in California who said that when you’re a boxer you come to realize your body has peaks and lows. So you learn to time your boxing with your peak times.

  He’s played a Victorian boxer in a movie, wearing knee-length boxing pants and duck gaiters. He snorkled and swam through the winter with his seven-year-old son. ‘He’s better than me,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t you feel the cold?’ Alush asked him. ‘No. You just jump in there,’ he’d replied.

  Sometimes, maybe in a boutique, in a sports shop in Southern California he heard the voices of Irish people or what he imagined were Irish accents. But then he remembered swimming in swimming pools in Belfast, where he was the only swimmer, with an armed British soldier outside and he didn’t approach, he hid in the Southern California sun splash, exile outlined in his body. ‘I’m a guest of the Pacific,’ he said.

  Alush and his friend invited us back to a flat in Ploshchad Vosstaniya for a small party where we could drink the champagne he’d sold my friends and smoke hash.

  We got the metro. The flat, almost at the top of the building, was being rented to a couple for some hours so they could make love. The girl, in a long black coat and astrakhan hat, was thrown out into the snow while her boyfriend stayed. Under a poster of a naked-buttocked, helmeted Mercury guiding a girl in a transparent peplum through the sky, they played Frankie Ifield, ‘Sweet Lorraine’. There was a bath in the kitchen as there’d been a bath in the kitchen of the flat of a friend of mine who died as a child.

  I looked into Alush’s eyes. I’d really, really despaired the previous year, thought I’d end up sweeping the streets.

  I met Alush by arrangement the following day in a café, a fish lit up on a plate, over a bedding of pimentos on the wall. On the street outside an old lady in black carried a plastic bag with a girl in a flamingo bikini under spider palm trees on it.

  When I told him my two friends were lovers he said, ‘Homosexuals!’, that he should have charged them more for the bottles of Georgian attar he’d sold them. He and his family who were devout Russian Orthodox celebrated the feasts and he named a few for me, that of St Nadezhda, of Sergius of Radonez, of the Glorification of the Mountain of Tabor, of the Protecting Veil of the Mother of God, of Our Lady of the Snowstorm.

  We walked in Kuznechny indoor market where women threaded dill and parsley and where eggs on pedestals had illuminations under them.

  A few days later in Yelokovsky Cathedral the Patriarch of Moscow blessed the throng of which I was part for the Russian Christmas Eve.

  Earlier I’d swum in Kropotkanskaya near Tolstoy’s house, changing in a bleak room, then swimming through a tunnel out into an open-air heated pool. Snow was falling on ladies in bathing caps with baubles on them or daisies or little roses or summer anemones.

  Alush haunted me over the next few months. I got a commission to write a travel piece about Leningrad from a woman whose cook-book I had used to cook a turkey my first Christmas in London and which gave me lasting recipes for a sponge cake and Irish soda bread.

  I met him again, after a phone call to his family home, at evening in the Seagull Bar on the Griboyedova Canal. He was with, as if chaperoned by, a big, muscular friend, with a Tony Curtis quiff, who wore a T-shirt with a narrative about a rabbit and a tortoise on it.

  He’d been in Gatchina mental hospital in the meantime. On February the third, the Feast of St Anna, he’d slashed his wrists in order to avoid the army. It was ‘a cigarette for a fuck there’, he said.

  I knew in Stalinist times many people had gone technically mad in Russia. I had gone somewhat mad in Britain. The voices of Irish tramps, of Irish desolation, were omnipresent in London.

  ‘Do you remember Bridget the Midget?’

  ‘Are you a squaddie? Watch it or they’ll beat you up.’

  ‘Stay close to me. Just to be warm. I don’t like what I’m going through.’

  I met him again the following evening by the Stalin Gothic Palace of Youth where steps led down to the Neva. He flagged down a van. There was a blue circus tent with auric stars on it by the Neva and a boy in half-boots, cutaway jacket, shirt of glamorous salmon, stood outside it and looked at us. We went to an off-licence that was a man sitting on a bench in a park with bottles of wine under it. Walking along the Neva I put my hand on Alush’s backside. There was the taint of love in my life again.

  We took a boat down the Neva. A sixteen-year-old boy, in a beige shirt with pandas and turquoise palm trees on it, who had the blond to cotton hair of a Polish woman who’d lived in my town and would give children’s parties with servings in Dresden cups, was snogging with a girl from Silver City, New Mexico, who had a scarf of Killarney green in Native American style around her head.

  Outside the Hermitage later, with its Caravaggio’s Youth with a Lute—a boy, with a rose amid new greenery beside him the colour of his half-opened doll’s lips, playing a lute, in an oyster-white smock with a vent for his stork-white chest, a girl’s fluted veil hanging from the back of his English chestnut hair, a script with notes of music open in front of him beside a pear with a lascivious ferrule on butterscotch marble—as we listened to songs and to guitars a boy briefly touched my penis.

  Caravaggio fled Rome after killing a man, first to Naples, after being knighted in Malta escaped another fracas to Sicily, died on the coast of Italy after walking a hundred kilometres only to find the boat carrying his paintings—the boys with bull earrings; the palmreaders with fillets on their heads; patterns of clothes breaking through like the lines of a palm—had already left. He undoubtedly died of a broken heart.

  In a courtyard we stood in a queue and purchased the first bread of the morning.

  In the evening I went to dinner in a flat of a girlfriend of his who lived in a block of flats in Prospect Veteranov. I was wearing Scout Master shorts. Women sitting beside a bed of marigolds in the courtyard howled with laughter at me. A little boy played handball by himself.

  The next day was a red-letter day on the calender on the wall I saw as the girl served dessert in a strapless corselette—Anna Akhmatova’s centenary day. Alush and I resolved to go to Komorova where she was buried.

  On the way down a road through pine trees to the cemetery a woman, in a dress with tiny folded umbrellas on it like the umbrellas you got in a lucky bag when I was a child, ran towards us. ‘The Patriarch of Leningrad is there,’ she cried. We just missed him. Women who’d come in umber buses had left Anna Akhmatova’s grave and run amok around other graves, reciting poetry.

  It turned out they were reciting Akhmatova’s friend Marina Tsvetaeva’s poetry.

  In Paris in the 1930s Marina Tsvetaeva had to borrow a white dress for a reading because she had only one woollen dress she’d been wearing all winter.

  ‘Why didn’t she leave Russia?’ Alush asked me about Anna Akhmatova.

  ‘Some people can’t leave their country no matter what.’

  ‘Why commit suicide?’

  After visiting the cemetery we swam in the Lake of Pines and Alush, a muff daisy chain on now, slats of light running over his face, talked about escaping to the United States.

  When I returned to Leningrad solo and not as part of a tour, as I had to do previously, by train from Berlin in March 191, Leningrad under snow, I rang Alush’s home and was told he’d gone to Manhattan.

  I returned again by train in June 1991 from Berlin, met the friend who’d been snogging with the A
merican girl, in a Byron-shirt and hat like the young Walt Whitman, on Nevsky Prospect, and he told me that Alush and his friends gathered on a rooftop in Manhattan every Sunday morning, wearing tie-dye T-shirts, smoking hash and shelling sunflower seeds. They had parties in the evening in the hall of the religious group who’d sponsored many of them coming to the United States, where they drank Dr. Peppers and ate tea-cakes under an inscription from Dietrich Bonhoeffer: ‘Brother, till night be past pray for me.’

  In early April 1997 coming from Southern California to New York on my way back to Ireland, the sun cutting through the skyscrapers to the cherry and pear trees, which were a fleece of blossom against the brownstone buildings of Manhattan, I met him, by chance, in Chelsea bagel shop. He was wearing tie-dye shorts with red kisses on them as many young men in New York wore shorts on mild days in winter and early spring. Manhattan skyscrapers were powder blue in the afternoon sunshine. A man in elephant trousers, with a Pekinese on a red ribbon, paused and looked at us.

  He was married to a girl from Long Island now.

  A Russian friend had recently returned to St Petersburg on a visit and, despite the fact he spoke Russian, in a music club they asked ‘Who’s the foreigner?’ and tried to charge him exorbitantly as they would a foreigner.

  In New York on his arrival he spent a lot of time with American Romany Gypsies who’d sit under charts showing family trees in their kitchens. With his girlfriend he attended a Romany wedding in Pennsylvania. On the train journey there he’d seen Amish people riding in buggies.

  At the Romany wedding they gave out scarves to the women as they would at a Russian funeral and handkerchiefs to the men. A pig was roasted. The amounts of money people donated as presents were announced. Alush saw his reflection in house trailers that had laminated pictures of beaches, palm trees, curtseying blue waves on them.