Farewell to Prague Page 5

  A woman once a beauty queen in Kerry, ‘the year Canvey Island flooded’, killed herself in that encampment in May and was buried with a wreath of shiny red roses in the shape of a vardo and horses. When she’d been laid out, near a rhino in a sailor suit, there was a candle at her head.

  I didn’t go back to the encampment after that.

  Modern caravans, men hanging around as they hang around streets in Nationalist Belfast, one supreme vardo soon to be gone on the roads.

  I blamed many things for this breakdown, but I could more or less directly trace it back to a night in Dublin, in the middle of an affair, a very vulnerable affair, a girl, erstwhile friend, screaming at me: ‘You’re incapable. Incapable of full physical relations with women.’ She’d heard on the Dublin grapevine of some sexual failure. If I’d have stayed in Dublin I’d have committed suicide.

  After loss, when the crying stops inside, something else starts, an alternative world. It is peopled by a tinker woman, a mad aunt, an English poet. There are squats in Battersea, squats in Maida Vale where you live. You find a body upstairs in one, and ceilings fall in on bathrooms and bedrooms. But you keep going. For a while, in a very peaceful time, there’s a flat beside the heath in Hampstead. You spend a while in the United States, autumn 1981.

  A Chinese lady who’d been locked for eight years in a chicken hut, where she could only write on toilet paper, was also there. Her hair was swabbed over her head and she wore jerkins and pants. She’d straddle with her fifty-five-year-old Chinese boyfriend past young Americans in shorts and T-shirts. Once she gave a reading. There was a Norwegian writer with a gipsy scarf on her head and in a décolleté dress on one side of her and a Philippine writer in an even more décolleté dress on the other side of her. The large hall was scattered by American feminists, some in crocheted hats, who ran vegetarian cafés and macrobiotic cafés which also sold turkey sandwiches. The little old Chinese lady raised her arms in the air and asked why the American army wasn’t there.

  There was a Polish woman with steely hair in a ponytail. When she had travelled around the United States on Greyhound buses she’d keep loading tins of food on to the buses. She had studied medicine in Leningrad during the last years of Stalin. When he died they were asked to cry and they cried. A few days later they were asked to laugh and they laughed.

  Your hostess was a Chinese lady who liked wearing shawls of lacquer red and pink. She’d hidden among the skeleton firs in the mountains near Peking during the Chinese revolution and then escaped to Taiwan.

  We had parties on lawns at night. There was usually a fat lady in black – black dress, black shoes, black stockings – sitting on those lawns, holding a flotilla of black balloons. She was in love with a middle-aged Egyptian doctor, with black and ash hair which fell on to his shoulders, who later married a young Polish waitress. Later, she went to New York, where she’d stand around Rubens exhibits in galleries, because she reckoned that men who liked the flushed, flaccid bodies of Rubens would like her.

  You had an affair there, with a boy you met at a discotheque mainly frequented by South American girls who’d been tortured, and by gays. It was on the edge of cornfields which Amish people rode through on buggies, the women in poke bonnets.

  One morning, after having made love to him in the bath the previous night, you walked past a Catholic church with him in which a wedding was taking place. It was just about the third anniversary of Eleanor’s wedding.

  Although it was only November, an imbecilic Santa was swinging himself on a swing in a shop window and a Virgin Mary with outspread auburn hair, who looked like an Italian starlet of the fifties, looked aghast at the Christ child in another shop window.

  You made friends there with the Norwegian writer and the Israeli writer, an Arab Catholic. Afterwards, you visited the Norwegian writer in Norway. When you arrived at Oslo Central Station youths and girls in pale blue jeans and high boots were sweeping up the garbage with brooms. Two days later, Sunday, women in fur coats had come out of Karl Johans Cathedral which had chandeliers in it. The same day you took a train to the town in the country where your friend lived. Norwegian trains are very slow. Taciturn boys with tight pouches of pubic hair on pale skin sat endlessly in saunas. You went with the writer’s son to her summer house by a fjord and sailed in a boat with him out on to the lake, under the mountains. Snow came to the hilly town when you were there, falling on the houses which were set apart from one another.

  You visited the Israeli writer in Jerusalem, just after the Sabra and Chatila massacres. He had a menorah in his room, five brown candles in it and two white ones with gold sequins on them.

  Rabbis prayed, heads close to the temple wall.

  ‘We sit in solitude and mourn for the temple that is destroyed. We sit in solitude and mourn.’

  I travelled around Israel. There had been soldiers on foot milling on the roads near the Lebanese border, an unceasing, onward march. In olive-yellow hills black goats had bits of white like wigs on their heads. Tanks had overtaken camels in the desert behind a deserted white-brick refugee town near Jericho. An old man had played an accordion by a field of melons.

  Back in Jerusalem, in the Mea Shearim district, men with peoths, in fur-edged streimel hats, had walked by in the September light.

  I took a bus from the Jaffa Gate to Bethlehem. The protruding-nosed bus was old and dusty and had no colour. Geese and goats had fled from its path and some of the passengers were geese.

  There was a little blue and white flag on a mast in the middle of Manger Square in Bethlehem. Sweets had been laid out on tables on the little alleys that led away from the square: pistachios, hazelnuts, almonds in the yoghurt whites, saffron reds, pistachio greens. There was a framed photograph of Tracey Ullman on a wall above a bench on which men smoked honey-soaked tobacco.

  I thought of Eleanor.

  I thought of my new friend, Marek, whom I’d met in a school in the West of Ireland. His mother was a German actress and his father, from whom she’d long been separated, was a Palestinian surgeon.

  I walked to the Mount of Olives one night, through the West Bank, and looked down on the Garden of Gethsemane, the Kidron river.

  In Acca, by the Mediterranean, I had wanted to masturbate but didn’t.

  After walking to the Mount of Olives I met my Arab friend in La Belle Bar. There was a picture of a grey-haired Paul Kent on the wall and the jukebox played ‘We had joy. We had fun. We had seasons in the sun.’ That was the song that was playing in my mind June 1974 when I walked into Easons in Dublin, picked up the Irish Press, a little news item at the bottom left-hand side of the front page about the death of a sister of a friend of mine. She’d been killed near Lyon, hitch-hiking from Geneva to Paris. Shortly after that Eleanor went to see her brother, who was stranded in San Francisco without a valid visa.

  One evening in Norway we had earthberries and cream just as Mr Haythornthwaite, the Englishman who visited our town when I was a child, would have had in Norway in the nine-teen-twenties.

  As I walked up the hill after arriving at the station my friend was waiting outside her door. ‘Thought you’d never make it.’

  An actress friend of mine died in Dublin that day.

  ‘Once hit by it you are haunted forever,’ a voice had said in a dream shortly after the girl had abused me and Eleanor had gone.

  It was in Cairo, early in the summer, the muezzin’s call to prayer at dawn, gurkies on front of cars on October 6 Bridge, sag pipes played by the Nile as brides in glacial white were photographed with sudden flashes by Coca-Cola stalls like munition heaps.

  In London you start recovering again. You start being well again.

  An old man, a neighbour, face red as a lady tulip, stands outside his door. A trough of sanguine horsechestnuts beside the door, the last green of the year lit up. Sometimes he talks about Mabel Stevenson, a girlfriend he had before the war who used to live in the oatmeal and faded mulberry-coloured houses visible just above the hill; about meetings in Lyons
Corner Houses all over London, an idyll on the Cornish Riviera. She joined the Wings and was killed. A last photograph. She’s standing in very high high heels, very straight, to the right of an army big band who are arraigned with their instruments in front of an aerodrome. In memory of her he observes a wartime diet in the evenings: Spam, Cheddar cheese, a slice of half-moon cake.

  As a youth he worked in the Black Cat cigarette company in Camden Town. He did an evening course in photography and got a job in Whitehall during the war, working for the War Ministry. His task just after the war was blowing up photographs of quislings.

  I sit on a deck chair with him on warm afternoons, beside the pineapple broom. He describes how the patch of road near us was once haunted by men taking bets. Now there’s an estate agent’s which is open on Sundays, painted viridian outside with viridian fluorescent lights in the window.

  That autumn, at the opening of an exhibition by a Russian painter, I saw an old friend of mine – the boy who used to take turf home with a donkey and cart before it got wet.

  The landscape of East Galway behind the cottage. Beds of pearl-like rock, riff-raff of cypresses, abandoned baths for cows to drink from, verdigris on thatch, sudden illuminations on the horizon.

  The Russian painter wore a crimson caftan and as if drawn by that a woman in a crimson coat approached him. ‘May I introduce myself?’ He totally ignored her.

  ‘You’ll probably never meet me again,’ a very tanned woman with honey-coloured hair in a pigtail, in a black leather skirt, said in a kind of despair. ‘I’m off to live in Wiltshire.’ She was talking to a man with skimpy, shoulder-length grey hair, in drainpipe trousers, dicky bow with white mice on it, who was staring with infatuation at the painter. A woman with an entire batik trailing from her handbag very purposefully blocked his view.

  I was at the party because I knew Vincent, the waiter with the canary-yellow quiff in otherwise dun hair, who was from Derry. He wore a tuxedo, a sleeper in his left ear. Then suddenly I saw Daniel. He had not changed. Walked out of school twenty years ago and had not changed. He wore a black suit, a shirt of blue and yellow and white. He still had that moulded face, brown eyes with flecks of gold.

  I’d met him once since he’d left. He’d returned to town for a visit two years after first going.

  ‘Reason I left Ireland was because I wanted to fuck. You couldn’t fuck in Ireland.’

  I didn’t approach him. Just looked.

  This melancholic city of exiles, all races, vendors of Colombian star fruit and golden passion fruit, but always, in the wetness, the incipient sense of tribe.

  Met Daniel in Salthill once and we went for a secret, naked swim. He had swabs of sores on his body and a soldier’s pectorals. His body smelt of Vaseline. The day was very grey and there was an alarming number of nuns on the prom.

  ‘I will always have Teampoilín in my mind,’ Daniel said as he swam. Teampoilüín was the ruined church by the river in our town where miscarried or aborted babies were buried, as well as illegitimate babies who died at birth.

  Barry McGuire sang ‘Eve of Destruction’ from an amusement arcade which was painted in twin colours outside – tobacco brown, frog green – and Padre Pio’s face was nailed to a billboard outside the church next door.

  On one of Mr Haythornthwaite’s final trips to our town, when he was sitting in the buffet at Westland Row Station, waiting for the train West, no other customers in the buffet, a woman in a sky-blue coat came in and sat at his table. There were many empty tables. ‘There are some very nice soldiers in Collins Barracks,’ she said eventually.

  I visited him shortly before he died. A room in a row of council houses. It was autumn and there was a carton of Chesterfields on the cupboard – white and red with black lettering – a souvenir from the time he gave up smoking cigarettes.

  In Dublin once, after you’d left Eleanor in Bewleys in Westmoreland Street, you saw a young male prostitute with blond hair, in pale blue denim, being fished out of the Liffey. You felt like giving that boy some speech, some memorial, in this city of Guinness-lubricated and Guinness-agitated speech.

  I got a lift to Ireland that autumn with Vincent and a friend of his, Chris. There were cumulus clouds over an Italian villa of a pub called the Ocean Queen and over raspberry haemorrhages of council houses. Chris spotted a headline in the window of a newsagents which looked like a Royal Legion hut.

  ‘I’m not having an affair,’ says vicar. ‘I’m a pouf.’

  Vincent had been a rent boy before he became a waiter. For a while he worked in a room full of out-of-order washing machines, where old men came to have tea and sherry and be whipped. His mother was a heroin addict who brought him over from Deny when he was very young. For a while he had a foster mother who was an East Kilbride Catholic in Appleby in Westmoreland. When he was seven or eight he confronted his foster mother in Louis XV heels with fancy bars: ‘You’ve lost a son and gained a daughter.’

  Chris had hazel hair, a scimitar of freckles across his face. He wore a watch with teddy bears instead of digits. He switched all the time from a tough Dublin working-class accent to a camp South-East London one. He came over from Dublin when he was thirteen and went to school at Sedgehill. His first sexual experience had been with a girl who’d bestow herself for Cadbury’s cream eggs. Her father was a piper who played on Saturday nights in the Pipers’ Club. He played his favourite tune, ‘Speed the Plough’, in the house as they made love in a shed.

  We stopped at a church in which one of the stained-glass windows depicted a crucifix made of lilies. There was a note beside a candle. ‘For my son Ben who is 21 today.’ The names of the First World War dead were ingrained in the wall outside. ‘Of your charity pray …’

  We passed through a mountainous landscape of boarded-up houses, scattered rocks, dried-up rivers. Suddenly there was a Congregationalist church and beside it a Chinese restaurant, Po Lun.

  Vincent had been born near the statue of Our Lady Queen of Peace in the Creggan. She had blue, upcast, lunatic eyes.

  The boys in tartan kilts used come to Deny on Saturdays in buses to march.

  ‘Are you Irish?’ a soldier boy asked me at a disco the other night. ‘Why?’ says I. ‘Do you want some Irish?’

  Posters for the Wolfe Tones and the Pogues hugged electric poles in Dublin. The trees were yellow.

  ‘Nice day in the shelter,’ a woman sarcastically said.

  Some men were working on the pavement outside Trinity College. ‘Sure, they’ll be pulling it up next week.’ There was another driven bit of sarcasm from a passing woman.

  Two women on a bus talked.

  ‘And I said to him it’s about time he’d be going to the altar.’

  ‘She boils a good egg.’

  ‘Mind you, it goes soft now and then.’

  By the Grand Canal two prostitutes were fighting. ‘She fuckan cut her wrists and you don’t care.’ One was wearing a short crimson dress and carrying a handbag. The other was wearing a fake leopardskin coat.

  On Percy Place Bridge nearby was scrawled: ‘Boo is a prick, but a cool one.’

  There was a new motorway outside Galway city with the ruin of a castle on a circle of exhibition verdure in the middle of a roundabout.

  You go back to the town you’re from. An ancient sign for Kincora Plug, on the gable of a town house where the town houses ascend in size, is a mirage of colour, mainly navy.

  The legend is that while a local Moslem lady customary veil on her head, was preparing dinner recently a billygoat who’d run away from some English convoy people had intruded upon her in the kitchen.

  ‘Elizabeth Maloney Don’t know her. But I know her aunt.’

  Now that I’m here, people who ran away are called up, an inventory. A woman who ran away with a circus artiste. The woman across the road who followed her example shortly afterwards: she’d always emulated her neighbour. If her neighbour bought a lampshade, she bought one. If her neighbour bought a carpet, she bought one. The second woman ran
away on a country fair day. It could have been with any of four men.

  ‘Hope you get the weather you’re expecting,’ one of three men leaning against the bank corner tells me.

  Once there was a virtually unbudging, save for a rota in the pub, row of First World War veterans here. ‘Rue di Doo Boys’ they were called, after Rue de Deux Bois.

  A gargantuan one-legged man whose wife, a dress-maker, festooned him in right-fitting clothes.

  One of them had deserted in the Judean Hills. They thought he’d been killed and sent home a body they believed to be him and he’d stood at this bank corner, saffron-brick then as it is now, watching his own funeral.

  The smallest of them would shave his legs each year for about ten years after the First World War and box in the Con-naught Under 16.

  Another little fellow became an idiot, would wander about town after his mental collapse, in a cap and coat to his feet, singing rebel songs and ranting about opposing sides in the Civil War, joined the circus, was killed in a car accident.

  A fellow with pitch-black hair, face always charcoaled in stubble, called Joseph O’Meara after an illustrious Limerick opera singer, would sing arias – Puccini on verdant spring days – in his malodorous black coat on the side-line at GAA matches, arms outstretched.

  The gargantuan fellow, despite his one leg, had gone back to war, in October 1936, to fight on Franco’s side in the Spanish Civil War. He’d never got, for some reason, very far beyond the coast of Galicia. In his last years he was the town crier. Would clang a bell on the anniversaries of Ypres and Givenchy, shouting, ‘Hear ye. Hear ye.’

  Teddy bears having a tea-party in the window of a guesthouse; the news that a tinker who lived by himself in a caravan by the Ash Tree has died; a blonde-haired girl leaning against a wall asks me, ‘Are you Australian?’; a visit to the bog.