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Fianna Neely slid across the polished floor in white wool socks, took the creaking staircase two steps a time, and threw herself face-first on to the double-sprung bed. There she lay, cursing the man whose blood was in her and whose blood she wanted to spill, out of which of them she wasn’t so sure, she thought she would play it by ear.
Fianna Neely rolled on her back and practised her curses. Her personal favourite was the legs of glass that break, or maybe the devil would sodomise him for eighty-thousand years. The last was her own invention and she was particularly pleased with it. She smiled, sat up, and straightened her hair. She felt better. She was pleased she hadn’t cried. Tears were what girls did. Tears showed weakness. As she examined her face in her vanity mirror she imagined herself an unbroken expanse, seamless and still as an inland sea. She imagined herself like a glacier. She imagined that she was as dry as a bone in which the marrow had cooled.
I am perfect, she said.
She went downstairs again and fetched herself an apple from the fridge. Her mother always put them in the fruit bowl by the window and this drove Fianna batty. The slightly warm and slowly ripened taste made her natch, what she wanted was something hard, and crisp as an eight ball. What she wanted is something she could really bite.
Her mother was away. Her father was away. Fianna Neely was glad.
When she was a little girl, still frilly from her first communion, her father had had the idea that she would be a singer. It didn’t take. Fianna wasn’t interested in The Old Ways, songs about famine and crop failure sung by bearded men in fishing jumpers and stringy women with colourless complexions. Oh, she was sure it was all very worthy, but they looked like moles, these singers, they looked like a race of people who belonged underground, to whom the light was very painful. From an early age she had identified The Tradition as something dark and rather dirty, and the musicians as things that her father dug from the garden, still with a skin of soil on them, like his home grown new potatoes.
No, it didn’t take.
If anybody had asked Fianna what she liked, she’d have told them: Punk rock. Punk rock, electroclash and hard house. But nobody did ask her. She was left to her own devices.
Until her father had phoned and interrupted her beautiful symmetrical solitude, Fianna had been sat crossed legged on the bathroom floor towel drying her newly purple-black hair. Now she caught sight of herself again in the patio doors and she literally jumped for joy. It was the thrill of surprising a stranger where her own blonde self should be.
Now she thought she would go back to her homework. Something else she had learnt quite early on is that being clever was her best way out. It wasn’t out of Ireland so much as it was out of the family and their oppressive sense of what Ireland constituted. It was escape from the clutches of her parents and their persecuted, persecuting endless self-reference, endless definitions.
She looked once more at the purple-black haired stranger. Anna, she said, when I am in America I will be called Anna, cold and crisp like the apple.
She turned on her heel, dropping the core in to the waste-paper bin and with it her father and mother’s Fienian past.
…
It was half past six in the morning before the girl came out of the bathroom, red raw eyes in a root white face. Rosin started awake, vaulting from the couch and tripping over her own feet. The girl eyed her curiously for a moment. I’m afraid your sandwich went cold, said Rosin. The girl shrugged her thin shoulders. That’s okay, she said, and then with a devilish smile, you’ve been there all night? Where did you pee?
…
Morag liked it best in the red meat of morning. She liked to give herself about an hour by the window, before she got dressed and went to work. In theory it would take her a matter of minutes, but she wasn’t a person who liked to rush things. She was a person who liked to stand by the window. She saw no reason to change just because Arlan was there, snoring on his side like a tranquillised cat.
Morag pressed the plunger on the cafetiere and the warm water voided with a satisfying whoosh. She contemplated the backs of her hands, something lunar about them in the pale light of day. She felt holy and auspicious. She did after sex. Not immediately after, maybe, but in the reflective calm of a new day when the harrowing impact of physical intimacy was over. She felt like a person who had weathered a storm, and emerged the other side victorious. It was a nice feeling.
In the room next door Bernadette had eventually risen. Morag listened to the other woman stumble and curse, and took another cup from the draining rack. She was smiling to herself, thinking on Bernie’s tentative rhythms, groping and ginger, just a little hung over. She thought she would tease her, ask her where she had gone. She turned from the sink and leapt back with a start, surprised by a pale faced intruder wearing her friend’s candy-striped dressing gown.
…
Rosin walked with the girl along the spirit-levelled line of the beach. What I always wondered, said the girl, is it natural or man made? You know, said Rosin, I’ve no idea.
It’s funny now, how the fake things look more real than the real things. The girl looked sad. The real things all seem washed out and second rate, or they look like they tried but they just couldn’t cut it. It’s probably our fault really, we’ve come to expect too much. She kicked at a tin can with her bare foot.
Careful, you’ll cut yourself.
It doesn’t matter.
Of course it matters… Anyway, who expects too much?
People.
And she wondered distractedly down to the shore. Rosin followed, not really sure if she should. The girl stood wriggling her toes in the surf. It’s alright now, she said, I don’t need you anymore.
Where will you go?
It’s easy. You find somebody.
Who? What do you mean?
You just find somebody, like I found your husband. It’s easy.
Rosin was horrified. You can’t live like that, she said. The girl laughed. Of course you can, she said, how else is there?
…
Bernadette struck an apologetic pose and patted her pockets, seemingly for the word she wanted. It isn’t like we did anything, went her defensive inner monologue. I only went for a drink to give you some privacy, and he’s married actually, so there, you see…
But Morag never said a word about it, took it all in her elegant stride. She made the dishevelled looking boy a cup of coffee and snorted with the funniness of him in Bernie’s kimono. In the dark, said the boy, I mistook it for my shirt. He grinned back at Morag, impishly. Actually, he said, I think it rather suits me. What d’you think, Bernadette?
Their refusal to be embarrassed by each other infuriated her. Morag laughed at his jokes, and he ate her hard, blackened toast. Their gestures, their nodding and reaching for coffee, became synchronised after a while. A horrible physical simpatico existed between them. The pair of them both at ease and at one.
Bernie marvelled and envied in silence. As anyone would.
A body is a thing that should justify your existence, she thought, a clear statement of intent, a declaration of independence. But her body, it seemed to her, was always in the act of apologising or dissembling, of making excuses for the flesh and blood fact of her. Her body, she felt, would always be found bowing out backwards from crowded rooms, stubbing its toe and mumbling something nobody could catch. She would never smile, easy and slow at a perfect stranger, or gesture with a triangle of burnt rye bread. She would never fully inhabit the rooms she arrived in. She would never feel comfortable inside her own skin.
Morag always said that was her convent training. Bernie hated her for slights like that.
And now Morag’s man was awake. He came in to the room bleary-eyed but fully dressed, his hands in his pockets. Morag went to throw her arms around him in a gesture of solidarity, it seemed, rather than passion. The young man rose when he entered, as if to attention. My God, he said.
My God, yourself.
Sorry, but nobody told me.
He looked accusingly at Bernadette. Told you what? She hissed, inaudibly. The boy was up across the room in two crane-like steps and vigorously pumping the bewildered man’s hand. Morag put the dishes in the sink, laughing and shaking her head a happy coincidence. You do know who this is, don’t you? Bernadette frowned and her stirred sugar in to her mug.
This is Arlan O Suilleabhain, you daft wan. This man is a legend.
Quite a while elapsed before the boy would relinquish the elder man from his grip. My grandfather took me to hear you sing, when I was just a babby. It stayed with me, sir, I can’t tell you what this means… Bernadette tuned out. Leave it to a boy from the counties to over-sentimentalise everything. That, in her opinion, is where Ireland’s troubles started to begin with.
Morag was lacing her up her pretty black pumps, smiling at her well put together ankles. I have to go to work now, she said, and in that way of hers, she added, you all figure something between you today. It’ll be fun.
…
Concepta Neely ground out her cigarette, bit her bottom lip and did some cursing of her own. Oh, you and me Mister Mac Mathuna, you and me are gonna have a serious talk.
But that would have to wait. Everything would have to wait. The world would have to wait. Call would have to wait. Why, in God’s name, had she got that thing installed? Hang on would you, Joe? I’ve got Brendan on the other line.
She cut off her belligerent client and connected to her foul-tongued, foul-tempered, and in all probability, foul-smelling husband. What? She barked, I’m busy.
I’ve been calling home, goes Brendan. I can’t get a response, goes Brendan. Has she spoken to Fianna? Goes Brendan. Sure, says Concepta, I spoke to her on Tuesday. Then she awaits the inevitable incredulous eruption.
Tuesday?!?!
Connie sighed. Motherhood had frankly never really appealed to her. She’d only had a child out of a sense of duty. She felt she was somehow doing her bit, like people who grew their own vegetables or made-do-and-mended for the war effort. Really, she had wanted a boy.
It wasn’t she didn’t love Fianna, she just wasn’t sure what to do with her. A boy she could have made use of, she thought, a boy could’ve been something. She was always intrigued by the Muslim mothers training their dandled infants for Islamic Jihad. Perhaps she’d had a similar thing in mind.
Beneath the purple pencilled eyebrows and the lacquered gothic dome of her formerly blonde hair, Concepta Neely was feeling old. Why is it, she wondered to herself, that I spend all my day dealing with sexually frustrated infants? And she included her husband in that.
All her life she’d worked with music people. Her daddy had been a producer, her mammy a singer, her innumerable sisters went that way too, and then she had married Brendan, with the notion that together they could “do” something. Something worthy, something in a similar vein.
She had been idealistic then, during the sixties. Almost proscribed idealism, that. Almost mandatory. But she’d been idealistic then. She had felt that in working to make the music of the Old Tradition flourish she was doing good and necessary work. She felt it was a noble aim. She had felt brave and defiant. She had felt privileged. Which was fine. Concepta always had and always would love the music. But there was one thing she had not counted on. The musicians. If there was some way of separating the two, she thought, life would be a breeze.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t.
And she’d never liked Brendan overmuch, although she respected him and his way with their often difficult clientele. He’d never liked her overmuch either, but they managed most times a bland compatibility, and, when things were going well, as parents or as professionals, they thrashed out some conspiratorial self-congratulatory sex. And that was fine, she supposed. When things went well.
Things were not going well.
It was Arlan O Suilleabhain for a kick off, she swore the man got worse every day. He seemed to think that they owed him a living, and the more that he drank the more entrenched and all-encompassing this conviction became. He’s got a mania for the getting, she reflected, sadly. Whatever was on offer, he wanted more of it than was good for him. It was the broad, excessive nature of many musicians. It stemmed, she supposed, from a certain retardation, from a certain arrested development. Singers were children at heart, they had to be to keep it up. They were selfish, jaded, weather-beaten children.
Brendan prattled on in her left ear. Alright, she said, I will go and see our daughter. As if she didn’t have enough to do.
…
The girl took off in the small hours and fetched up again the next morning, like a tin can caught in an ebb-tide.
When the phone call came a rattled Rosin was pulling her cushions straight, acclimatising herself to her own company again. The girl’s voice sounded jagged and strangled. She said for Rosin to bring bail. She was brisk, impatient and huffy, as if the whole episode was Rosin’s fault.
…
Without the force of her personality to hold it together Morag’s injunction fell promptly apart. The boy left insisting he give Bernadette some money, and once more pumping his elder statesman’s hand. Bernadette kicked the coffee table out of sheer frustration. I wish he hadn’t done that, she said, not to Arlan, but to the room at large, it makes me feel like a prostitute.
Realising, with panic, that the older man was still there, she added, not that we… I didn’t… um… And went to get dressed.
…
The thing you fail to appreciate, Fianna, is that I am still your mother.
Act like it, then.
Oh, grow up.
I did, thank you very much, and without any help from you.
The exchange took place almost laconically. They batted the wounding words around like Connie’s ginger tomcat batted the curtain cord with his paw. They argued in this desultory, perfunctory sort of manner until both were happy a sense of propriety had been satisfied. Then they went their separate ways and Fianna did what she wanted anyway.
You are still too young, Fianna.
How old were you, when you first went?
That’s not the point.
Exactly.
Fianna folded a black smock dress in to her holdall. The sombre efficiency with which she did it reminded Concepta of the way the ancient Egyptians prepared their dead, stowing their organs neatly in knopic jars.
The world is different now, Fianna.
Yeah, they invented the wheel.
Very funny. I mean, it’s a dangerous world.
Yeah, and it’s dangerous however old I am or wherever I go, so what difference does it make?
Concepta sat down on the bed, stumped. Do you fancy a cigarette? She asked. Her daughter placed her iPod on top of the smock dress and smiled. Yes please, she said, quite formally.
…
Look, said the girl, I’ll pay you back, okay? I wouldn’t have called you at all but you’re the only person I know here. I kept telling these pigs that my money got stole but they won’t even take me seriously. I had nearly eighty dollars and now it’s gone and all they can say is I shouldn’t been drunk on the sainted beach. I told ‘em. I said, you’d want a drink if you just had the day I did. She trailed off, looking out the window, watching the scudding clouds and the crawling traffic, and the bare-legged women miraging along through the heat haze.
You hit that officer, said Rosin. Sure, went the girl, but he’s a big man, you’d think he’d be able to take it.
…
Bernadette hated being amongst crowds. She felt herself foreshorten like a shadow, shrink from the visible spectrum. In this heat she could be a sauce, she thought, that someone was reducing. Alone at last, when the relief ran out, she was self-consciously committing the sin of having uncharacteristic thoughts.
There’s been a mistake, said some inner thing, somewhere, my life is being lived without me and I do not know it.
The lotions and potions in the plate-glass display windows made out that womanhood was a sophisticated science. It belittled her, was beyond her. Morag was right, she thought, in a way, I was apprenticed to sexlessness.
She located Morag in the up-market style food court. What’s a Bombay potato, d’ you think? Said Morag. Bernadette conceded she hadn’t a notion.
It’s with lentils in a vinaigrette at any rate. Where’d your feller go?
Bernadette was annoyed. He isn’t my anything, she said, and he left. Morag looked her friend over, a funny look crossing her face. Bernadette was struck with a certain soviet inscrutability. Morag’s Joseph Stalin face.
What’s that look for?
You.
What about me?
You always look so guilty, Bernie. One would suspect you of serial arson.
Bernadette picked up a tray and a selected a box of leafy green something, boredly. She would like to have had proper food. She would like to eat something- what was the word- less ambitious. That isn’t funny, she said, curtly. Morag just smiled. He seemed nice, she said.
Did he?
You ought to know, Bernie.
I didn’t sleep with him.
I wouldn’t care if you did.
But I didn’t.
It doesn’t matter to me. It’s your life.
You’re missing the point. I didn’t. I don’t care what you think, but I didn’t, alright?
Calm down, said Morag, and then, with an insouciant look, added, d’ you want to share a pot? Bernadette felt foolish. She could not make Morag understand. It mattered to her enormously, not that people’s opinion of her was good, but that it was accurate. Somewhere along the line her education had muddled honesty and correctness and it had stuck to Bernie’s conscience like flypaper.
Did Arlan get off alright, said Morag, interrupting her laboriously chain-ganged thoughts.
He left at the same time I did, but he was going the other way.
He’s nice, isn’t he?
I don’t know, Mog. You’d have a better idea than I would.
Yes, but I want your opinion.
He seems okay.
Wow. Stop presses.
Don’t.
You’re so out of sorts today. Look, I know what’ll cheer you up.
And she took a glossy magazine out of her big straw bag and flopped it on to the table where it glistened like an over-oily fish. Oh yes, said Bernadette flatly, how well you know me.
…
He always forgot to ask what it took to be contented. He would’ve liked to have questioned the dark-haired girl, but that is not what people did.
It was funny about Arlan O Suilleabhain. He knew he should have been happy. Maybe that was the secret to contentment, the ability to enjoy coincidences.
Or an inability to recognise omens.
He shrugged, stopping to inspect his reflection in the window of a parked car. He looked alright in the convexing glass, broader, more substantial. There was a time when his appearance had attracted attention, but he’d got in to the habit of hiding, somewhere just inside or just behind his body. He had gotten in to the habit of wearing himself like a second hand suit, like a suit of armour, of making himself deflective, invisible from certain angles and in certain light. It wasn’t that people didn’t notice anymore, they just couldn’t quite put their finger on why. People’s memories were short anyway, people were easily distracted.
That’s probably the secret to contentment, he thought, the unremembering knack. He sighed. He wondered if there ever was a happy Irishman. Maybe, but it seemed unlikely. Problem is from day one, at home and school, we’re drilled to remember. Remember everything, learn nothing. Catechism, that is. Cateclysm. Ha-de-shagging-ha-ha.
Still, Arlan O Suilleabhain. He had wanted to talk to him more, but he was conscious of monopolising the conversation, of making the two of them the centre of attention. And he didn’t want that. Besides, the man was embarrassed, and he wouldn’t discomfort that man for anything in the world. What he would liked to have done is to play for him, without any encumbering word-smithery. He hated, he thought, the inarticulate middle ground between silence and music, where poetry lived, where words got in the way. And he was good at words. But what was that? That was nothing. That was excelling at necessity, and any fool could do that when pushed. He bit his lip. He had walked past the street that he wanted. He thought. He wasn’t sure. What in God’s name was it with this sign system? He’d have asked somebody for directions but they glanced off each other through dint of mutual repulsion. He stood on the street-corner, baffled. He felt phased, parochial, un-American.
And maybe the police wouldn’t help him anyway.
…
It’s not my fault, said Concepta Neely, she knows her own mind, I couldn’t stop her.
But Brendan let out a howl of pain, not so much enraged as inconsolable. Concepta knew for why, of course. It’s alright, Brendan, she said, I don’t think she’s under any illusions about the way that you live. Besides, I doubt she really wants to see you anyway.
But that wasn’t so much doubt as hope. It was funny, how you’d think of them as opposites but the two conditions made you feel about the same. It was like morning sickness, like being pregnant again. How apt, Connie reflected, in an ironic sort of way.
The dread that got her gut-wise was the idea that at some point her daughter would be standing in the same room as Brendan and Arlan together. That at some point a canny Fianna would realise which one of the two men she looked the more like, or- horror of unimaginable horrors- somebody else would, and a chance third party assumption would make the bad penny drop. Please to God, no.
It had taken Concepta Neely time and effort and years to cultivate and preserve that trinity of precious ignorance. To shatter it now would be more complicated than she had the honest energy for. The truth, she reflected, in an ironic sort of way, is very bloody tiring.
Yes, that was it. It wasn’t the lie itself that she feared, it was the dread of having to explain herself. Once would be bad enough, but three times? God! And people never want just your answer, you have to tailor it and tart it up to suit them. You can’t just state the obvious: Oh, human error. Oh, just because. You have to be tactful.
Tact was not Concepta Neely’s department.
…
Miles away now, the gypsy-looking boy tried stating his case. It would just have been simpler to lie. But that wasn’t exactly his style. He had always found untruths difficult, inelegant, like fiddling around the middle eighth. His were usually the sins of omission. He never could master the lie.
It wasn’t really fair. Hardly his fault if his truth struck them as strange. Maybe it was his face. Maybe it was his past. He always had a hard time convincing people he didn’t have any harm in him.
Look, he explained, marshalling his reasons along with his elastic-banded photographs. Look, I don’t even need to know where she is. I just need to know if she’s here, somewhere. I just need to know that she isn’t in trouble.
He didn’t want to do her down to strangers, but he needed to make them understand why she might be in trouble. Look, he explained, it isn’t her fault, but she gets herself in to things…
…
Arlan mulled the morning over and found it lacking. Fans, he thought, were a peculiar breed. They always seemed to be seeking your permission for something.
You got scared sometimes, thinking about them, you got feared about where the music went. It was a lack of control, he thought, like being drunk and your legs don’t work, or your lips don’t work, or your bladder cuts loose. Yes, you got scared, and control is the reason, a loss of control. Because music is a muscle after all, music is a limb. How frightening would it be to have an arm act independently, or a hand without consent?
He had one more day, he thought, and then he would move on. He would ask Morag to come, although she probably wouldn’t. But her refusal could sustain him as much as her acquiescence. There were many ways to sing goodbye, there were many ways to re-imagine parting.
He would go to the bar to find Brendan. He would get drunk and he’d sing her a song. He’d only vaguely remember the way she made love.
…
Fianna Neely hated the motiveless void of sitting still, so she quivered, cat-like, cross-legged, Trance-Mission going in her ears. She longed for the moment she could dispense with her passport and superfluous Fi. She was annoyed that she couldn’t arrive as she meant to go on, under an assumed identity.
…
The girl wouldn’t say what had happened or how she and her money got parted. She was a long time in the bathroom and when she came out Rosin had dozed off again. Tell you what, Grandma, said the girl, think you’ve got the right idea.
But she didn’t sleep. She went out on to the balcony and sat with her knees pressed against the railing. She began singing Branwen’s Lament. She saved her own language for under her breath. Nobody would know she had any Irish at all. Nobody had ever taught her any. She learned what she learned herself. There was such loneliness in this learning. Learning as opposed to being taught. There was such exhaustion in this learning, in the relentless circumscribing of keeping in and together.
In English, her words ran like this:
Stripped of my title, my dignity taken,
Cut off from my son and my ties ‘cross the sea.
They sent me to cook, and be beaten daily,
Revenge for my brother was given to me.
This bird now I send from my lonely exile,
A starling I’ve raised to carry my plea.
A message to take away to my brother,
My kinsmen bring rescue and justice to me.
So fly little bird, fly to my brother
Fly on the wind far over the sea
Fly little bird, fly swiftly and safely
Fly to my brother… and bring him to me.
------
The human race, the only race I know where everybody loses.
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practical insanity #4
