0.00
(0 votes)
You must login to vote
|
|
|
Morag was a collection of parts correctly assembled. This is how she saw herself, in a remote, mechanical way. She had a left leg to keep her right leg company. Same with arms. If she had two eyes instead of one or three, then that was only because two was the optimum number of eyes to have, and that was fine with her.
It wasn’t within her remit to decide about such things.
It seemed to Morag, and her correctly assembled parts, that God was somebody terribly capable and efficient; handy, in a masculine sort of way, like fathers are supposed to be, nothing flashy.
Design was not, as far as she was concerned, so much intelligent as it was sound. In human beings, in Morag herself, he had achieved a practical animal. More or less reliable, more or less useful. Like a Hoover or a steam iron or a Volvo or a suspension bridge.
God had always reminded her a little of Izambard Kingdom Brunel
It wasn’t that she lacked imagination, it was just that her imagination was not directed upwards or outwards. Morag’s inner life, the one not concerned with the actual factual mechanics of being alive, was rich and luxuriantly purposeless.
On her lunch break she would wander along in front of the expensive department stores, furnishing her dream house from the artfully arranged clutter. That she could afford neither the clutter or the house to put it all in was a moot point. That isn’t why people dream.
As she meandered from one window display to the next she composed little snatches of song in her head: A blue and white dish, a knife for fish, a spoon for soup, a dish for soap, all lived in the house that Jack built.
She imagined what this Jack would look like too. He would have red hair and a toolbox like a well-stocked larder. She never pictured herself married to Jack, only that he was sort of there, putting up shelves and fixing leaking faucets. He had raw plugs and counter-sunk molly clamps. He knew about the pilot holes and undercoating. He would insulate her loft.
That vase in black, a steel hat-rack, some roller blinds of different kinds, a red lampshade, a trowel, a spade, a wrought iron-
She stopped in the street and looked over her shoulder. A funny looking man in the wine bar across the street was staring at her avidly.
She knew she’d felt something a miss.
…
The minute she felt he’d been gone long enough not to change his mind and double back, Rosin began making enquiries. The best place to start, she assumed, was the place where he’d picked the girl up in the first place. And this narrowed her search a great deal. To a loose collection of very cheap bars.
Rosin didn’t relish the thought of picking her way through Arlan’s old haunts. But she supposed that needs must, in this case at least. She laced up a pair of black desert boots, more suitable for mountaineering. They had steel-toe caps. She wasn’t taking any chances.
…
It’s like this, Brendan Neely explained as his right eye twitched at the corner, you’re lucky to get him out here at all. To put him on so early in the day is an insult. It’s an insult to me, it’s an insult to my client, it’s an insult to the proud tradition he represents, d’you understand me?
The events coordinator pressed her lips together pertly and considered Brendan Neely. Every year they had this same argument, and every year his precious client went on at the time he’d been allotted in mid January. Why on earth he bothered with this charade was quite beyond her powers of comprehension.
But then, if somebody was going to take something too seriously and too far then it was bound to be an Irishman.
…
The funny looking man wore outdated tweeds and had a kind of Boris Karlof forehead. He was no Jack, but for all of that, there was no hint of menace in his look. He seemed to her to cut a shabby, lonely seeming figure. She made a mental note that he must be in town for the folk festival, although he wasn’t a long-haired bohemian type. He was something else, and in the silent, subliminal way like has of recognising like, she pegged him for an exile, for a wanderer like her, a starer in of windows.
She stepped across the street, her hand already extended. You were looking at me, she said. I couldn’t help it, he said. She winced slightly. She got that a lot.
I’m Morag.
Arlan.
You’re in town for the festival?
Something like that.
You don’t sound very enthusiastic.
It’s a living.
You’re a musician?
Singer.
He wanted to scream and pull out his hair as much as she did. The small talk agonised them, when all they wanted to say was I am like you, when all they wanted to do was take comfort in each other’s sameness.
Morag had always felt this way, meeting other Irish in America. She had always felt this way but inevitably been disappointed. The American-Irish were carnival-esque, they wore their nationhood in the manner of a costume. It was like a part they were playing. This had been baffling to Morag, who still felt she’d been ripped out of Ireland a Macduff in Macbeth is ripped untimely from his mother’s womb. She had been embarrassed by the raw wound of her heritage and disorientated by the speed of assimilation. At such meetings she lapsed in to silence.
Funny, but she only felt foreign amongst other foreigners.
But this was different. She pulled up a chair and sat down. She could see he carried his Irishness laboriously, she could see him literally, physically bent under the weight and strain of it. She asked him what part of the country he came from and she asked him when she could see him sing. He gave a self-depreciating sight.
The same time as all the other nobodies, at ten in the sainted morning.
…
It wasn’t a strip club exactly. Anything that blatant wasn’t Arlan’s style. But the girls wore next to nothing and high-kicked and bent over on stage.
Burlesque, was probably the word, although that seemed to be lending it a little too much dignity. The girls contorted themselves apathetically, routinised provocation, bored by being beautiful.
The girl was swinging her legs on the bar in a state of splayed tedium. Rosin watched her cover her mouth with her hand more than once. You could drink a shot of tequila from between her breasts. You could lick a line of salt from her belly.
Rosin wasn’t sure where you got your slice of lemon from. But the girl looked sour enough as it was.
She watched the long creature, while considering how to approach her. She could already hear herself saying in a slightly stiff, slightly forced manner, you don’t know me, but… and that would definitely not do. She needed tact, she needed to find the girl’s level. She needed what she did not have: empathy.
As it was, Rosin was saved the bother of having to formulate a more involved plan, because the girl, uncoiling herself from the bar, came to her. I know you, she said, leaning against the dented outer casing of the public telephone. I know you, she said, what do you want?
…
In the uninspired nook of his guest house, Arlan was deep in contemplation. The dark-haired girl with the disappointed face and the strong shoulder blades, she was working her magic through him. She too had come out of Connacht, sprung from rural stock.
She was something new, in the country she had been healthy and loved, in the country she had been sporty and brusque, happy and careless. And, unlike the others, it was from this very happiness that she was running; from the inherent disaster this happiness implied. She ran to escape an expected misfortune, because that was the Irish character, or rather, the Irish habit, the habit of waiting for the axe to fall, though never knowing when.
We are fatalists, deep down, he thought. History might have made us stoic, if we could have learnt to accept and endure. But we are too proud. Pride is a kind of cowardice, deep down, and cowardice is the strongest form of fatalism there is.
I am in love, he thought, in love once again with a beautiful coward.
…
Rosin watched as the girl put her clothes on. She averted her eyes with as much a sense of embarrassment as if she were taking them off. There was something about the way she put on clothes, how she seemed to unwear them, transform herself from something honest and open and natural in to something cunning, full of hidden meanings and openings. Rosin shuddered.
She began to explain to the girl why she had come. Arlan, she said, is not a good man. He has ruined me, and many other women besides. She thinks if she can get enough of those women together they could take him on in court.
The girl looks over her shoulder. She is pulling on a pair of black denim jeans, trying to slide her feet in to kitten-heel shoes with the same stalk-legged inelegant gesture. She is tottering. But why would I help you do that? She asks Rosin.
Wasn’t he unkind to you?
Sometimes.
Don’t you want to get justice?
Justice? That’s a bit melodramatic.
But he beat you.
Yes. Occasionally.
He was cruel.
I wouldn’t put it like that.
Rosin was infuriated. The girl sat down on the edge of the makeup counter upsetting a regiment of lotions and potions. Look, she said, you don’t know shit. It wasn’t like that. He wasn’t a bully or anything, not like how you say. He didn’t mean it. He just had a temper that’s all, he just got carried away. It’s the man’s temperament and he’s too old to change, so why bother dredging all this up?
Rosin rocked back on the balls of her heels in stark-staring amazement. The girl went to a locker and pulled out her rucksack. I don’t have to put with being hit, but that’s my look out, ain’t it? It can go if I want, and I did, didn’t I? He helped me, okay? Not many blokes would’ve.
Rosin wanted to slap her. He didn’t help you, she blurted, he just didn’t want to get lumbered with a kid. Oh, said the girl, matter-of-factly, that’s not it. He could’ve just put me out if he wanted to. It wasn’t even his.
…
Brendan Neely finished up his stout and looked around the bar. He wasn’t a social drinker so much as a voyeuristic one. Drinking lent him a sense of the fascinated. Only when drunk did he ever become remotely curious about his fellow man.
Right now he was watching a young Canadian girl arguing with her boyfriend. She was nicely rounded, that girl. She must’ve been about the same age as his daughter. That’s the trouble, thought Brendan Neely, with getting old, your need and desires don’t age with you. In our heads were still pink-skinned, incontinent and tubby, lying on on our backs, playing with dicks, waiting for mammy’s knockers to decend from on high.
…
Away in the manger of another time-zone a gypsy looking book with a fugitive look pulled himself from the crease of his fold-away bed and stepped outside his van to urinate.
The cold shrunk his genitals to a bad harvest’s husks. He felt dehydrated and slightly sore, but he was drunk on a single over-mastering purpose.
Today’s the day he left for Amerikay. It was time his wife came home.
…
Morag was picking out a dress. She chose a dark red velveteen to be worn over jeans. She wondered if the singer was good with his hands. She hadn’t had time to ask him his name.
------
The human race, the only race I know where everybody loses.
|
practical insanity #5
