Bend for Home, The Page 6

  But now he was a complete mystery to me. It was like he was an adult’s toy. He stood resolute and stiff-bearded, staring straight ahead over the lid with silent eyes. I lifted him out and stood him on the floor. He was over two feet tall, wore a red velvet coat and little prim black boots. His eyebrows were dusty. I found a key stuck in his back. I studied the key very carefully and turned it once.

  Immediately, Santa nodded. I backed away. He nodded once, twice, three times, then, as if he were on the verge of a sneeze, his chin began to move very slowly, the revolutions diminished, and he stuttered to a stop. I started him again on the instant. He nodded away and I nodded back in return. We were at that a while until he came to a stop as before. So that was it. I put him back in his box of straw for again, and replaced him on the ledge where I’d found him, gazing at the hands of a clock that had suddenly stopped.

  Next I found a French medical book there that contained all manner of abnormalities. A huge foot like the trunk of a tree, an ear that opened out like a fruit, six-fingered hands, abnormal swellings on the calf, diagrams of the heart. Then the book fell open at a picture of a mother suckling a child. The fine lace shawl had fallen from the woman’s slender shoulder. She was fitting the nipple into the mouth of the child. The full dipping breast was exposed. It was shockingly real. The halo of the black nipple was peppered with small nodes. I could feel the soft dimensions of the flesh.

  Someone came into the old bakery below. My heart pounded. I hid the book. Went for a walk and came back again. And there it was breathing with life among the musty pages. I traced its contours. I studied the dark aureole. My mouth dried. My stomach raced. Trembling I hid it again.

  I went through tall green histories of Ireland with pencil drawings of the Tuatha De Dannan and Brian Boru. Then leafed through cookery books. I came across a French-English dictionary with the flyleaf signed in Great Aunt Jane’s hand – Paris 1912. Jane McGloughlin. There was a signed picture of the dancer Isadora Duncan. Then there was a dull photo of a huge mansion in which the murder must have occurred. News clippings from the New York Times: Scandal Strikes Prominent French Family. Seemingly the dead woman had been an actress from Hollywood. The man was arrested as he tried to step on a boat at Marseille.

  *

  I read on for hours till I heard my father calling my name.

  Where were you? he asked.

  Reading, I said.

  By God.

  I was solving a murder.

  That’s more, said he, then I ever done. Straighten your back! They’ve been searching for you high and low. Your dinner’s within.

  I went back straight to the attic when I’d finished. The windows had leaded lights, and flushes of red and blue sunlight crossed the wooden floor. I looked into old copper pots that were filled with blue mould. I found a cardboard box of maps. An old weighing scales. A marble soda fountain. There were elaborate lamps on the shelves. In some there was still a residue of paraffin. When I touched the wicks they crumbled. I found tall receipt books from the 1920s, with each item entered in copperplate writing. The symbol for the pound note was drawn in like a ballet dancer. I found old photographs of Cavan. Photographs of women I didn’t know by a lake I didn’t recognize.

  I sat on the floor with piles of books each side of me.

  Dust travelled through the sunlight. I couldn’t wait any longer. I took the medical book out of its hiding place and went back to the breast and gazed at it with a dizzy fondness. From the old bakery below the smell of fresh flour rose. The smell made me delirious. Since then I cannot smell flour without thinking of sex. Freshly baked bread makes me swoon. But the bag of flour is the most sensual object of them all.

  On many of our bed sheets in letters of light faded blue you could make out the name RANK’S FLOUR MILLS DONEGAL. The flour men came up the entry bent double. They had a covering over their back and scalps to protect them. They carried the bags of flour by the ears. The girls made the Rank’s men tea, and white-faced like clowns, they sat in the kitchen scattering down.

  My mother took the empty bags and made sheets from them. She sewed them under the window. So, even as I fell asleep, there was this distant smell of flour. And the first time I caught sight of a real breast flour motes fell.

  *

  It was that attic that made me want to write. The first real essay I wrote was about rain. I remember reading it out in the De La Salle Brothers school. I stole the lines from a book by Charles Lamb that I found in the attic. Imagination, says Brodsky the Russian poet in his book Less Than One, begins with our first lie.

  It is hard for me to remember my first lie, since I’ve told so many. And now I’m at it again. Can I lie here and sidestep some memory I’d rather not entertain, and then let fiction take care of it elsewhere, because that is sometimes what fiction does? It becomes the receptacle for those truths we would rather not allow into our tales of the self.

  The made-up characters feel their way by virtue of thoughts that novelists deny having. So I’d like to describe my first stab at fame, even though it shames me. It was a combination of lies and a fondness for words that started me. I can still remember the liquid feel of those words for rain. How the beads were blown against a windowpane, and glistened there, and ran. The words for rain were better than the rain itself. I wanted to type up words.

  I went to UCD for a disastrous few terms. Instead of attending university, I spent the year selling second-hand beds and wiring houses with my cousin Vincent O’Neill, who introduced me to clients as a science student. Or, with his father, Pop O’Neill, I’d sit supping bottles of stout at the kitchen table on his pension day. We’d be waiting for Vincent to come home with the dinner. Nothing good ever came out of County Clare, sniffed Pop. That was because Vincent was born there. Like my father, Pop had been a policeman, and before that was a member of the Connaught Rangers who’d mutinied in India over England’s treatment of the Irish in the Troubles.

  For five days he stood in the burning sun, and sometimes the memory would come back, and he’d rage and stare at me – A student, my arse! he’d shout. Useless! Useless! Useless! Other times, I’d sit with Kitty, Vincent’s wife, who was heavily pregnant, both of us looking into the fire for hours on end. I was filled with guilt at spending my mother’s money, and taking a place at university that Una would have relished.

  Then one day I upped and left for London, did not return to university, and found a job with Securicor. In my underpants I sat on half a million pound notes in the back of a van in Ealing during a heatwave in 1968. I lodged with a family called Healy whose youngest son was called Dermot. In that house Dave Allen was all the rage. I passed a window in the High Street and saw a manual typewriter in a window. I bought it with my first week’s wages.

  That typewriter was a great liar. It wrote out refurbished poems by Dylan Thomas, snatches of pop poetry by the Liverpool poets that had been published in the Penguin Modern Poets series, and many disjointed lines by virtue of e. e. cummings and William Carlos Williams. It lied beautifully at times. As a night watchman I walked factories near Smithfield Market that were filled with the rank corpses of cattle. Hides hung from the walls. There was one corner that was stacked with horns and hooves. I read Camus. Beyond the fence at the end of the yard trains flew by scattering the rats.

  I disappeared from Ireland and my family. I sat by the back window of Healy’s and read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. Then I moved on to Dylan’s poems. The words shimmered on the paper and released themselves from the prison of the sentences they were in. They became things in themselves. A single word collected a myriad of meanings. Verbs bounced in open spaces. A noun was like a bowl of cream. It contained vast worlds. An adjective made an image infinite.

  But it was the responsibility for the everyday kept me calm. The groan of an oven in the foundry. The stiff hides. The rats racing over the railway lines. Lorries, after a drive from Scotland, blowing their horn at the gate some time near dawn. Heathrow, where two of us lo
aded gold onto a plane at nine in the morning, and unloaded the same gold that evening at five. In between the gold had been to France and back again. It was something to do with keeping the foreign exchange rate correct. Those gold bars fascinated me. How easy it would be to rob them. Later the same gold bullion was stolen.

  *

  Then I became a guard in Heathrow dealing with aliens from Pakistan. I had my own office off two cells where prisoners were put. The prisoners were young Pakistanis who had been sent to England, with, in many cases, their home village putting up the fare. They arrived without proper authorization and I led them across the tarmac. They followed in my wake according to custom. I made phone calls on their behalf to various embassies, relations and immigrant services, then locked them away and lifted out Dostoevsky.

  A citizen of London I returned home to a wedding in Cavan via the Holyhead boat. I hitched to Cavan. That afternoon I found myself at the reception seated by the editor of the Anglo-Celt, the local newspaper where I had published my first short story.

  How is the writing going on? he asked.

  Oh fine, I said.

  He filled me out another glass of wine.

  I’m glad to hear it, he said.

  Thank you.

  So will we be seeing a book out soon?

  Not yet. (Pause.) But I have a play finished.

  And is it going on?

  Yes.

  Where? In the Abbey?

  Oh no. I searched round frantically. On TV.

  TV, he said.

  ITV actually.

  Well that’s wonderful.

  I got a thousand pound.

  You’re made up. He raised his glass. What’s it called?

  Night-crossing, I said.

  To Night-crossing, he said.

  We touched glasses.

  It starts with two lads leaving Ireland on the Holyhead boat.

  Sounds good.

  The dancing began and I forgot all about the play I’d never written. A week later I was sitting in Ward’s Irish house when Dermot Burke, my next-door neighbour in Cavan, and now by another coincidence my next-door neighbour in Piccadilly, came in with a smile on his face and a copy of the Anglo-Celt. He clamped it down on the bar.

  Look, says he.

  And there I was on the front page with a cigarette in my mouth over a small headline that read: CAVAN AUTHOR FINDS FAME. Oh Burke brought that copy of the Anglo-Celt everywhere, into every company I found myself in; he produced it out of his pocket as we sat with friends, he had it photostated and posted it around.

  He’d set me questions about the plot, and the more he asked the more I had to invent.

  In time I invented a producer from ITV, a Mr Evans, if you don’t mind, who lived in Hammersmith. Apparently I saw him from time to time. He went over the shots and camera angles with me. I even eventually set a date when it would be broadcast to the nation – November 10th, let’s say. In fact I began to believe in it myself. I believed the script existed. The more of the story I invented, the more real it became.

  Then I’d suddenly wake out of a dream terror-stricken by my duplicity. Slowly I tried to extricate myself from the lie. There were problems with production monies, I said. There were production difficulties. Something had gone wrong down the line. The date for the broadcast came and went. No one mentioned it.

  But in fact I had set myself a duty. Everything I write now is an attempt to make up for that terrible lie. Had I not lied I might never have tried my hand at fiction. The truth is the lie you once told returning to haunt you.

  Chapter 11

  I came into the outpatients alone. I handed in the card from the doctor to the nurse. Names were called, we moved on a seat, one by one, all sorry folk – ladies from the county with shopping bags, sombre pallid townsfolk, startled children on the laps of their mothers, pregnant women.

  What are you in for? my neighbour asked. But before I could reply my name was called.

  The young intern placed me in a bed behind a screen. Outside I heard them speaking of how serious things looked. I was terrified. He returned.

  Are you not undressed yet? he asked me.

  Then he went off again. I took off my shirt and trousers, then my underpants. A nurse looked in. I got into the bed and pulled the sheet to my chin. An Indian doctor stood at the bottom of the bed with my card in his hand. He read it and looked at me and handed it to the intern. He in turn read it. The doctor disappeared.

  The intern lifted the sheet and tapped my stomach.

  Any pain? he asked.

  No.

  He tapped again and pressed.

  Now?

  No.

  Then where is it?

  Down there, I said, pointing.

  Here?

  He sank his fingers into the flesh above my groin.

  Is it the bladder as well? he asked.

  I don’t know.

  We’ll have an X-ray taken, he said, as soon as possible.

  He looked into my eyes and shone a light into the whites. The doctor returned with a chart.

  He’s a remarkable good colour, the intern said. Take a look here, Dr Rao.

  The doctor entered the cubicle and smiled at me. He looked into my eyes. He read the chart. He pulled back an eyelid and shone his beam.

  He has complained of his bladder, said the intern, but I can find nothing wrong with his liver.

  The two of them looked at me.

  You have been very sick, said Dr Rao.

  My heart took a turn.

  Is your mother with you?

  No, I said.

  Goodness. You came here alone? he asked astonished.

  I did.

  You are a very brave man, said the Doctor. Isn’t he?

  Yes, said the intern.

  But someone should have come with you, the doctor continued, and he looked at the intern with dismay and shook his head as if my mother and father were totally irresponsible.

  Tch, he said. Tch, tsh. Have you brought your pyjamas?

  I have.

  Tell me now where is the pain?

  I pointed at my penis.

  In your willy? he asked aghast.

  Yes, I said.

  Goodness, he said.

  They consulted the chart again, then viewed me with disbelief.

  I don’t understand, he said. It is Brendan Heaney?

  My name is Dermot Healy, I said quickly.

  They retired. I lay there wondering what would happen next. Dr Rao returned smiling.

  So you’re for circumcision?

  I am.

  We thought you were someone else, he explained. Get into your pyjamas and I’ll take you upstairs.

  As I crossed the room in my pyjamas I saw Brendan Heaney enter with his father and mother. They were helping him. His skin was bright yellow and he was in carpet slippers. With my clothes under my arm I took the lift to the second floor. Forty years later I was mistaken for another Heaney, when a man stopped me up in Sligo town and took my hand and said, You’re made. You can laugh at them now. Then he congratulated me on winning the Nobel Prize.

  *

  Father A. B. McGrath walked down the ward. Then he saw me in the bed.

  What has you here? he asked.

  They took a bit of my mickey off, I said.

  Not before time, he replied. This is a choirboy of mine, he explained to the nurse. He sat on the bed. So why did they do that to you?

  It started to itch.

  Did it?

  My foreskin was too long.

  I see.

  So they cut it off.

  The same, he said, happened to Jesus.

  *

  Una and two of her girlfriends came to call. They sat around the bed, whispering and joking and enthralled by what had happened me. The thought that I might have lost such an extraordinary organ made me an object of great interest.

  Are you in pain? the Keogan girl asked.

  A little.

  Can we see it? said Doreen Sm
ith.

  No.

  Can you go to the toilet?

  Yes.

  How do you go to the toilet?

  Carefully, I said.

  This made them laugh. A few days later I was let go and ordered to return in a week to have the stitches out. Each day I painfully urinated and grew terrified of having the doctors near me again. By the time a week had gone by I did not have the courage to return to the outpatients.

  On the appointed day I walked out to Swellan lake, returned and said it was done.

  Now that I’d told the lie I didn’t know what to do. The next morning when I woke the stitches were still there, a purple hem round my flittered foreskin. The next morning they were there again. I began to fear that the stitches might be there for all time.

  I stopped outside the hospital but could not bring myself to go in. The window of the operating room on the second floor was ajar. I could see Surgeon Moloney in a blue plastic hat washing his hands. A nurse with a tray of implements passed by. Steam pumped out of the down-pipe.

  I ran home.

  That night in the bedroom I took a scissors and patiently snipped each stitch, then gently drew them out. I could feel the pain in the soles of my feet. I thought when I had finished that the head might fall off. But it didn’t. It was a delicate intimate affair, and when it was over, it brought me immense relief. But with each hint of an erection I held my breath and tried to think of other things.

  Slowly it came back to itself. Dirty thoughts no longer made me flinch. When I went jiving at the record hops Una’s friends would laugh, but I’d keep my head aloft, as if I didn’t see them.