New Storynew story
THIS SHORT STORY IS PUBLISHED IN EILIS NI DHUIBHNE: PERSPECTIVES. EDITED REBECCA PELAN. GALWAY, ARLEN HOUSE, 2009.
The Man Who Had No Story
Finn O’Keefe is driving along the M50. He’s on his way to the country. Sunday afternoon. It’s raining, as usual this summer. Hardly stopped bucketing down since May and today is the thirteenth of July. On top of which, the motorway is like an obstacle course. For most of it you have to drive at sixty kilometers an hour, steering on a narrow track between rows of yellow cones, a good few knocked over and rolling around: an extra little challenge for the weary driver. You’d be quicker going through town in all probability. But you never know, and at least it’s all moving along now, at this in-between time. Four o’clock. Sunday. Not many leave people town this late, and the great return from the country has not yet started. Grainne, Finn’s wife, is in the summer house they’ve rented for July and half of August, at a high enough price, down there in the west. They ‘moved down’ – he liked saying that, even to himself - three weeks ago. The plan was that they would relax, go for walks in the green hills and swims in the bracing ocean, eat good little things bought in the in the local town – from the organic butcher, the health food store, the bakery where they do the great rye bread. The farmers’ market. He was going to write. He’s a teacher -so is she - he writes in the summer, is the theory, and Grainne chills. But it hasn’t worked. Not after the first few days, when he wound down by reading a travel books about Tuscany called Bella Tuscany, which was so good that he started writing a similar sort of thing except about the west of Ireland. Bella Kerry – a working title obviously. He got right into it and when you thought about it this place had plenty in common with Tuscany. The sweet smell of the clover, the wild flowers all over the place. Cute little shops and restaurants in the town, curious local characters. The organic butcher. It hadn’t rained the first few days so that encouraged the comparison. They’d been able to go for long, long walks in the hills – stunning with gorse and heather, the same colours as the Wexford football jersey. They’d strolled on the beach by the turbulent ocean, let the breezes do their work, of cleaning out their cobwebbed heads. Their sticky hearts. Then the troubles started. First, the rain. Then Grainne’s back gave out. After all the housework before they left home – she had to do it, nobody lifted a finger apart from her, all that - and the long drive. A whole day in the Medical Centre – a country medical centre, ok, he wrote about it in his Bella Kerry book – you could include some bad things in that sort of book, as long as you kept them to a minimum. Next thing – next day in fact, as soon as he came down to put on the kettle, at the luxuriously late hour of nine o’clock - their son, Mattie, who is minding the house in Dublin, which to him means putting out food for the cat when the thought strikes him –it could be every two days - phoned. The cat’s sick. Doesn’t eat anything, doesn’t move. Quelle surprise! But Grainne worried. So back to town they went, the two of them. Three days running to the vet with the sick cat – Pangur Bán she is called, the most common cat name in Ireland thanks to some quirky monk who wrote about his cat in Old Irish high on a mountain in Austria in the eighth century or something.. Everyone’s favourite poem. Pangur Ban chasing mice and the monk chasing words, is the gist of it ( All of it actually; it didn’t take much to achieve immortality in the Middle Ages, as a poet. All you really had to do was writing something – the more banal the better - that wasn’t a straight transcription from the Bible. As long as your manuscript survived your fame and immortality were assured. You wrote a few lines about a cat! You genius, you!). Pangur, apparently –the real Pangur, their cat, born in the 20th century but living still in this one, a two century cat - may have Aids, or cancer, or both. She definitely has a heart condition and there’s something wrong with her kidneys. And she’s dehydrated. Hard to explain that, said the vet, giving Finn a suspicious look. It was Finn’s guess that Pangur hadn’t been given a drink of water or milk or anything in approximately ten days. But he didn’t reveal this to the vet, who disapproved of him. As if it was his fault the cat is sick. Which of course it was, in a way. Maybe the owners of ageing cats should not go off to the country to chase words. Or go anywhere, to do anything. The vet ran tests, cleaned out Pangur’s system with a twenty-four hour drip, administered a few injections, which Pangur hated. Then he prescribed antibiotics and heart pills, and advised, in that solemn slow voice of his, that they would have to consider things and make a decision. Meaning, Finn supposed, it was soon to be curtains for Pangur. A thousand Euros later and now they should consider putting her down. Shouldn’t the vet have mentioned that before? Anyway, after all the medication, Pangur looked ok. Relatively. So Grainne decided they should bring her back with them to the country. ‘Mattie loves Pangur, she’s his cat.’ Yes. Indeed. He had brought her home one day when he was ten and she was four weeks old, a little cute white kitten with bright blue eyes –he had fair hair then too, falling like flax into his eyes, also blue, sparkling like the sea in sunshine - thirteen years ago. Finn and Grainne had never wanted a cat. Or any pet. ‘But I don’t think he looks after her properly. It’s not fair to expect that of him. She needs a lot of attention and he’s got his own life.’ Mattie is busy, reading Nietsche, playing the guitar, and watching television, not necessarily in that order, from eleven when he gets up until one am when he hits the sack after his long strenuous days sitting on the sofa. Pangur isn’t keen on long journeys – or short journeys. She howls her head off on the five minute drive to the vet. But she came to Kerry, in her cage, on the back seat of the car. After four hours she stopped howling and dozed off – you couldn’t say she slept, as such. They made lots of stops to encourage her to take a drink of water, nibble some ‘treats’ ( she refused every time, but Grainne kept on trying). Pangur survived the trip and recovered somewhat – in fact the change of scene seemed to do her good, made her more alert. The change worked for her the way a holiday is supposed to work for a human. It was interesting, and cheered them both up no end. For once they had done the right thing, by the cat.. Instead of killing her, as suggested by the vet, they had taken her down the country for a holiday. Then, no sooner was Pangur settled in, eating a mouthful of Treats and a tiny can of gourmet catfood a day – oh you good little cat you! - than Mattie was on the phone again. He never phoned when things were ok so Finn smelt a rat as soon as he overheard Grainne talking to him. Mattie always talked to her first; even if Finn answered the phone he’d ask for his mother. A mouse. Mattie had seen one, in the conservatory, eating from the cat dish. A dish of catfood that had been left out even though there wasn’t a cat in the house. It didn’t bear thinking about. And – troubles don’t come singly - the fridge had stopped working. So back Finn had to go, to Dublin, to deal with the mouse and the fridge. Grainne couldn’t accompany him. Somebody had to stay and mind Pangur. Finn spent a whole week in Dublin, and now he’s on the road south again. Maybe now his break can start. The last week in July. Before you know it it will be September. Can he write Bella Kerry in four weeks? The woman who wrote Bella Tuscany, Frances something – he likes her, from the style, he must Google her sometime, see what she looks like. He envisages her as laughing, with shining fair hair. Tall and slender. She mentions her long rabbit feet on page fifty – she’s bathing them in Lake Trasimene - this is the only clue to her appearance, that and that she has married twice which usually means good looks, he believes, although he knows hardly anyone who has married twice, it’s still a newish thing, here. Frances. A soft lovely name. Friend of birds, flowers, sunshine. Wine, which she buys by the demijohn. He has tried to emulate that by buying a few of those wine boxes in Lidl. Who needs all those bottles? All those trips to the bottle bank, which are boring, and slightly embarrassing – the bottles accumulate, you feel decadent, or like an alcoholic, flinging them into the green container and hearing the glass shatter angrily, as if remonstrating with you. In Tuscany it’s not decadent to drink wine (it would be a sin not to, it’s so cheap). But in Kerry, it feels different. More guilt inducing. Which does not stop most people doing it to judge by the crowds flinging empties into the bottle bank, morning, noon and night. He successfully navigates the Red Cow roundabout, at the moment in transition from being a roundabout to being a cloverleaf junction, and essentially a complete nightmare – he has gone off on the wrong lane a few times recently, found himself at the toll bridge having to pay to cross over, do a u turn, then pay to get back, losing forty minutes and four Euro as punishment for his mistake. But it’s a bit easier than last time; they’ve put up a few signposts. In no time he’s out on the N7. From then on, it should be plain sailing down across Ireland to the south west. Apart from some thunderstorms – Laois has descended into a Dantean pit of despair, it’s a sombre rain lashed abyss in the middle of Ireland – this turns out to be right. Bella Kerry. It’s easy to do. But he has to write something else. Not a rip off of Bella Tuscany, which, he knows quite well, he will never finish and will go nowhere. Basically writing that is an excuse for not writing something else. This happens more and more, he finds. Something else is what he’s always writing, never whatever it is he is supposed to be doing. Which is, at the minute, a short story. A short story that will make his name. Again. Or even a short story that he knows in his heart is a good short story, no matter what anyone else thinks. He used to write them when he was younger. He even published a collection once, ages ago. Retrospectively it seems to him he wrote those stories effortlessly, some autobiographical, about things that happened to him (mainly women ditching him, him ditching women – this was before he was married, of course), invented ones about people he saw on the bus or the train (mainly about women ditching them, or them ditching women – these imagined lives bore a close resemblance to his own). He always said they were entirely fictional. But he can’t think of anything to write about. He never thought much of his talent – nor did anyone else – but looking back he admires his younger self, the self who had the wit, the imagination, the energy, to write any kind of story, even a bad one. How on earth did he do it? He hasn’t the foggiest idea. He hasn’t the foggiest idea, although he is teacher of creative writing. He tells other people how to do it and encourages them. It always surprises him that they can write anything, and he is even more surprised that plenty of it is good. And how they can write, all those kids! (And mature students.) He just tosses them an idea, a topic, an opening line (a trigger, he calls it, he’s getting tired of that word but hasn’t come up with a satisfactory alternative) and off they go. Writing for all they’re worth. Trouble is, he can’t give himself a trigger. Well, that’s not true, of course he can – he knows hundreds, literally, enough to get him through a ten-year course with the same class, although no course actually lasts longer than ten weeks. But none of those triggers fire anything, shoot anything,- whatever triggers do. None of them hits the target. Because his imagination is dead. Dead as a fox on the motorway (he’s passed three of them, squashed like eggs in the frying pan, their glorious russet fur black with blood) He used to have loads of imagination. It was his hallmark. But it’s gone, like the colour in his hair, and the other things he had when he was younger. Such as? Joie de vivre. Passion. Bright dreams. Maybe he should be taking a creative writing course himself, instead of giving one? However the time comes when you can’t do that. Wouldn’t be fair on the teacher for one thing. And, for another, potentially humiliating for yourself. Say, just say, he did take one – in another country, it would have to be, where nobody knew him. Tuscany perhaps. Say, just say, Frances, that delightful woman with the rabbit feet and sense of humour and beauty – she has the spark of life, he knows it from the flow of her prose - were giving a course in some hill town in Italy, and he went and turned out to be a dunce – which, it is his guess, could easily happen – how would he feel then? And if word got out? Which it would. Is his guess too. Even in Italy. He’d have to go further afield. Alaska. Outer Siberia. No doubt there are creative writing courses in those places. They have them everywhere. There’s a story he heard. On the radio – there used to be storytellers in the place they are staying, that deep green valley on the edge of the ocean, but not any more, that he knows of. It was a recording of a storyteller who used to live down the road from his rented cottage, in the same townland, which is Baile na hAbha, the town by the river, or place by the river because surely nobody would ever have called this place a town? Baile. Also means just home. Home and Town mean the same thing in Irish – which is odd, since everyone who speaks Irish lives in the country, never in a town. No Irish speaker has lived in a town ever, not the real McCoy anyway – the Vikings brought town to Ireland, and then the Anglo Normans and then the real English. So the original Irish must have had quite a different concept of town. A few houses pitched at intervals along a straggling lane must have been their idea. Or a couple of fields with a cow in them. Not shops and pubs and a railway station. A school, a library. Streets, for heaven’s sake. Was there ever a street worth the name in the Gaeltacht? But it’s full of places called Baile This and Baile That. Full of towns. In name only. Anyway. This was the story he heard. The Man Who Had No Story. It was about just that. And apparently he – let’s say his name was Dermot, from Baile na hAbha - was looked down upon by the people. Everyone was expected to have at least one story they could entertain their neighbours with (the storyteller knew about two hundred, the person who was commenting on the story, a professor of folklore, said). But Dermot hadn’t even one story. He was like someone at a party who refuses to sing a song (very wise people, in Finn’s considered opinion – sometimes he has been persuaded, even though he can’t hold a tune. This happens at about two in the morning when he’s drunk two bottles of wine). It wouldn’t do. The professor says this story indicates how important storytelling was in the Irish community. It was considered an essential skill. Some were better at it than others, but not having anything to say for yourself, not having even one story, was considered anti-social, almost criminal and very very bad manners. The man was thrown out of the party, in disgrace. ‘Go to the well and fetch a bucket of water,’ the woman of the house said, crankily. ‘You’d better do something for your keep.’ And at the well poor old crest fallen Dermot came across some fairies. As you would. And the fairies lifted him up in a blast of wind and swept him through the sky. East and west and north and south the carried him. And he landed in front of a big house. And in the house a wake was going on. As soon as he stepped inside the door a very nice-looking girl with curly black hair asked Dermot to sit beside her. Which he did. Gladly. And the man of the house said: ‘We need a bit of music. Somebody go and find the fiddler’. The beautiful girl said: ‘No need. The best fiddler in Ireland is sitting here beside me. Dermot O’Keefe from Baile na hAbha.’ Dermot was gobsmacked. :Who, me? Sure I’ve never played a tune in my life. He said. But lo and behold there was a fiddle in one of his hands and a bow in the other, and the next thing he was playing the most beautiful music anyone ever heard. And then, later, the man said: ‘Somebody go and get the priest to say Mass, because we want to get the corpse out of the house before daybreak.’ No need, said the curly haired girl. Isn’t the best priest in Ireland right here beside me? Dermot. Up he stood and said Mass, and all the prayers afterwards, as if he’d been doing it every day of his life. Then four men took the coffin in their shoulders to carry it to the graveyard. There were three very short men and one very tall man. And the coffin was wobbling all over the place. ‘Somebody call the doctor!’ said the man of the house. ‘So he can shorten the legs of this long fellow, and make the coffin even.’ ‘Isn’t the best doctor in Ireland here at hand!” said the lovely girl. ‘Dermot O’Keefe from Baile na hAbha.’And – to his own surprise - Dermot performed the amputation like someone starring in ER. And off they all went to the graveyard. But just before they reached it, a big blast of wind came and swept Dermot off his feet. And he was blown east and blown west and north and south. And when he was finished being blown all over the place, down he fell at the well where he had gone to fetch the water. The bucket was full to the brim with sparkling clean water. He picked it up and brought it into the house. ‘Well, now, Dermot,’ said the woman of the house. ‘Can you tell us a story?’ ‘I can,’ said Dermot, pleased with himself. ‘Indeed. I am the man who has a story to tell. You’ll never believe what’s after happening to me...’ This tale seems to tell us that if you just let things happen to you, you can make a story out of them,’ said the professor. God, these guys! thinks Finn. So patronizing. As if that isn’t obvious to anyone. Basically the story is saying, get a life, then tell your story. Yes, says the interviewer. And get confidence in yourself, so you can make things up? Play the fiddle even if you never learnt. It’s saying that too, agrees the learned one, thoughtfully. Because how can you play the fiddle if you haven’t learnt, is probably what he’s thinking. It’s impossible. But the professor says, “ Dermot hasn’t ever played the fiddle, and yet, he can now, when requested.’ ‘Or he hasn’t amputated somebody’s leg,’ says the interviewer. ‘That’s a bit weird, isn’t it? How did your man feel, minus a chunk of his legs?’ The interviewer chuckles and so does the professor, but uneasily. ‘Of course, the fairies have given him the gift,’ says the Professor. ‘That’s it I suppose,’ says the interviewer. “ The bottom line. The fairies. And now we’ll go to a commercial break.’ Get a life. It is the sort of thing Finn tells his own students. In fact he could give them this story, as a sort of insight into the history of story in Ireland – they’d like that. As for him, well, he’s had as much life, interesting life, as is his due, and he doesn’t believe in the fairies, unfortunately. In the old days, the storytelling days, they were always there. To frighten ordinary decent people. And to give the gift of music, or story, or song, to the extraordinary folk, to the artists in the community. The mouse was, as Finn had suspected, a rat. And they usually aren’t alone, my friend, said the rat man. (He kept addressing Finn as My Friend, which was nice – the kind of thing he might mention in Bella Kerry, although the rat and the ratcatcher were in a suburb of Dublin – the pest control company was, in fact, just around the corner from Finn’s house, a thing he had never known before, and which he did not find reassuring, even if it was convenient. He could shift them south, though, for the purposes of the story). The rat man put plastic bags of poison down various holes. The skirting boards were full of little holes, which Finn had never noticed before. The rat man promised to come back in a week and do another round of poison. We’ll get them, my friend, he said. He was a small intelligent looking wiry man, with dark grey hair, and an ironic, cheerful manner. They’re everywhere. You’re never more than six metres from a rat. Finn had heard this, in many different versions. Six metres. A hundred yards. Ten feet. In his case, he guessed he was about six inches from a rat. Rats rather. They were probably scuttling around just beneath his feet as he talked to the exterminator. ‘See you later, my friend,’ said the man. Three hundred Euro for the basic job. About an hour’s work. But who’d want do it? Catch rats. He was a hero, the rat man, when you thought about it. These people were the real heroes. Finn could be a hero too. Especially since he wanted to escape from town and get back to the country and to his writing. He went to Woodies and bought a few traps. Rat traps: big versions of mouse traps. Like the holes in the skirting, he’d never seen them before but there they were, down in the garden section, on the same shelf as the weed-killers. Before going to bed, he set two of them near the fridge, where the rat came out, he was pretty sure. Ten minutes later Mattie came up. ‘The mouse is in the trap’ he said, in a thick voice. His blue eyes had darkened since childhood. The colour had not changed, but the light had. They didn’t sparkle any more. It was not a thing Finn had noticed before, but he saw it now, and wondered, as he went downstairs, when that had happened. When had the sparkle left Mattie’s big blue eyes? Death had been instantaneous, Finn guessed – though he didn’t care one way or another. Broken neck. Long brown body. Surprised expression in the eyes. He picked up the rat, in its trap, with a plastic bag wrapped around his hand, and dumped the whole thing in the wheelie bin. To his surprise, he felt suddenly queasy, as if he might vomit. But he gritted his teeth and set another trap before going back to bed. He was going to get them. Three rats in two days. And he could hear them eating the rat man’s poison. By the third rat, he still felt sick after disposing of them. But by then he was feeling sorry for them too. Their little pointy faces looked so shocked, in the trap – a vicious machine. They just came up from their home under the floorboards for a bite to eat. And snap. Guillotined. He was beginning to know the rats now - their habits, their points of ingress. They’d been under his house for quite a while, was his guess, and they’d eaten lots of things. Mostly catfood but other stuff too. They loved plastic. He cleaned out the cupboard under the sink, one of those cupboards that gets left, uncleaned, for years and years, and found heaps of shredded plastic bags in at the back behind the old tins of shoe polish and dried up window cleaner. They were also very fond of electric wires – that’s what had happened to the fridge. The cable to the dish washer was well gnawed too but was holding out for the minute – apparently they preferred the poison to electric cables. Poor things. Had some of them been electrocuted? Finn stayed in Dublin for a week. A whole week out of his precious month in the country. The rat man had made a return visit and pronounced himself well pleased. He’d come back in another fortnight. Finn arranged with Mattie, who was sickened at the thought of dead rats (Mattie was a vegetarian, and a sort of Zen Buddhist,or something), to let the rat man in, and only to call him, Finn, back to town if it were absolutely essential. He’d tried to start a conversation with Mattie a few times in the course of the week; he’d seldom been alone in the house with him before. But nothing doing. Mattie got that stony look in his eye and left the room whenever his father tried to talk to him. Six hours later and he’s home in the cottage.Grainne is sitting in front of the fire in one chair, Pangur in the other. Woman and cat.She doesn’t stand up. Instead she just turns when he comes in. Pangur miaows, which is more than Grainne does. Pangur looks skeletal. Now that he’s been away for a week he sees her with clear eyes. He sees that she’s not really getting any better, even here, in the country. Also he sees that there’s no dinner on the table. He’d been imagining. A nice bit of marinated lamb. Mint sauce. A bottle of Chianti. Candles. Grainne had had no car of course. She could have got the bus, though – there’s one on Fridays, bringing the old folk into town to collect their pensions. But anyone can use it.‘You look tired,’ is what she says, in an accusing voice.That means, you don’t look attractive. You look old.Of course I’m fucking tired, he thinks. I’ve spent a week catching rats. I’ve driven two hundred and forty miles across Ireland in the rain. He says nothing. ‘Rats,’ she says, with a sigh.And then it blows up.A full scale row.His selfishness. The rats. The house in Dublin that she hates (it’s true, she’d gone on about wanting to move, it was a thing that got her from time to time but usually it passed). His fathering. he is bad at it, that’s why Mattie is the way he is, which is, too closed in, too involved with his own hobbies, like his father. His stupid writing. His selfishness and self centredness. His diary. She’d snooped, she’d read it when he was away. Fantasies about Frances in Tuscany. When he never had sex with her. (not that she wanted it, but of course she conveniently left out bits of the story in this version, the rowing version.) It’s over. She wants out.And on and on.The rows.They have them periodically. Every few weeks. Then months might go by. They were rows, they finished, they struggled on. He believes marriage is like that for a lot of people. But of course how would he know? And does that make it right? Frances and her second husband in Bella Tuscany never seem to have a row. They have dinners, walks, holidays. Outings with friends. He wonders what it was like with her first husband? How could a marriage to someone as lovely and charming and pleasant as Frances come to an end? I want some peace and happiness while there is still time. That’s Grainne. He’s heard the words a hundred times before. He’s even said them himself, once or twice, and thought them very very often. Some peace and happiness. How wonderful it would be, how wonderful. But would there be peace and happiness, without her? He can’t imagine life without Grainne. He could hardly say he loves her, not in the old sense, the erotic sense. Eros and Agape. Maybe a bit agape, hardly any eros. He missed her, when he was in Dublin, catching the rats. Trying to talk to his silent son. Is fearr an troid ná an t-uaigneas, he heard on the radio, another day. The fighting is better than the loneliness. They’d a proverb for every situation, the old folks. And you could hear most of them on the local radio station down here if you bothered to tune in, which he does occasionally, though mostly he listens to Lyric FM. Classical music soothes and helps him to be creative. He hopes. He thinks he should kiss Grainne, now, here in the dark kitchen. That would, he is ninety percent sure, calm her down, put a stop to the row. But he’s afraid to. She’s so angry. So instead he says, I am very tired, which is perfectly true. I’m going to get some sleep. And off he trundles, up to bed. He lies down in the not completely dark room. The sheets are cool, the room fresh and uncluttered. Through the skylight he sees the dark blue sky, studded with silver stars. It’s a nice bungalow, this place they’ve rented for their month in the country. But when he closes his eyes the rat appears, in the big trap, near the fridge, in the messy Dublin kitchen. Its eyes surprised. Its long rat body, long tail, sticking out behind. Mattie is standing by the kitchen door, silently looking at the rat, his eyes as sad as sad can be. Nausea grips Finn, even as he lies flat on his back between the fresh cool sheets. Nausea. And terror. He makes a supreme effort. He succeeds in pushing the picture of the rat out of his head. Near Exit Thirteen, which is where the Dundrum shopping centre is, on one side, and the Dublin Mountains, on the other, he saw from the corner of his eye this thing: a bank of wildflowers. Long golden grass. Buttercups splattered through them, brilliant yellow, most painterly of flowers. And a profusion of poppies. So scarlet, so scarlet. At that very moment the sun broke through the massed grey clouds and drenched he wild flowers of July in its warm summer light. The rock of the mountains appeared on his left then – the very inside of the mountain, which they must have blasted away to make the road. He passed the bank of flowers – you weren’t allowed to stop – but tucked the picture away, stored it, to take out when he wanted to. Next up was the sign that was all the way along the motorway, that always lifted his spirits slightly: In Case of Breakdown, Await Rescue. And then – because the motorway was going through the mountains - a yellow sign with a picture of a deer on it. A black deer, springing into the air. A deer rampant. Young and lovely, full of energy. Full of joy.
