Icarus 63.3 (April 2013)

ICARUS

LXIII.III

Icarus LXIII.III

contents 14. Lemon Meringue Karl Peters

3. Editorial 4. The Painted Bell Liam Wrigley

17. Madness Takes Over Anna D’Alton

5. Snowdrop (for a.b.)

Arthur Broomfield

18. Death at the Post Office Martin Dyar

6. Beyond the Pain Barrier Arthur Broomfield

20. the interview: Joseph O’Neill

7. Fruit William Brady

30. Archangel Eoin McNamee

8. (from) ‘As Innocently As He Had Seen It First’ Philip Coleman

38. Beach Vanessa Lee

10. Time Capsules Dean McHugh

39. A Decline David Lynch

11. Don’t Get Her Started Dean McHugh

48. Arcadia 2012 John Scattergood

12. November Seventeenth Nineteen Fifty-Three Dean McHugh

49. The Crossing Jim Clarke 50. Contributors

13. The Shell Lisa Gannon

52. Acknowledgements

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Editorial Editing Icarus is always demanding, but also often a pleasure. It certainly has been an interesting learning experience. When studying English literature, there is an easy – and thus, not surprisingly, dangerous – tendency to rely on critical consensus. There are no such luxuries when assessing student submissions. Like walking a tightrope without a net beneath you, it’s the real thing. Every editor’s nightmare is to leave out something great. If we haven’t selected your work, prove us wrong.

Our own experience has been that sometimes a moment comes clearly into form on the page in a way that commands a sudden attentiveness on the part of the editor or reader. Strangely, this is most often the case when one’s own reaction cannot be put into words, but can only gesture to the page itself as summary. We like to think of Icarus as a continuing gesture of this kind, even as we recognise the limitations required to make that motion possible. Despite the loss that comes with selectivity, our hope is that the magazine has continued to offer a spur to creative endeavour in the college, a current connecting writers and readers to the page before them both.

In this issue, Nick Bland interviews novelist Joseph O’Neill, and we are excited to feature commissioned pieces by Writer Fellow Eoin McNamee and Martin Dyar alongside work chosen from the magazine’s ever widening pool of submissions.

One of Trinity’s unique appeals is the vibrancy of its creative life. As outgoing Icarus editors, we are fortunate to have had a nearness to that vitality over the course of the year. Much of the gladness we associate with our tenure in the magazine has its source in the willingness of people – many strangers and some friends – to open their work to editorial response. In addition, then, to those included in the ‘Contents’ and ‘Acknowledgements’ sections of the magazine, we are grateful to the multitude not mentioned by name who gave their time and attention to Icarus this year. We hope that they continue to do so in the future.

Editors: Nick Bland and Ciarán O’ Rourke Deputy Editor: Eoin Tierney Illustrator: Linnéa Haviland icarus magazine

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The Painted Bell Liam Wrigley A flicker of rain And then some wandering snow And the old man with slanted eyes Told me to come inside Inside was a cathedral bell Which they were painting red With golden tracery It wouldn’t enhance the sound, he said, But when it moved It would change the music

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Snowdrop (for a.b.)

Arthur Broomfield And then, after the last descent into alcohol I’ll go to your door, I’ll shuffle down the step stones, your design, through the beds where in summer Arum Lilies and Gladioli disguise the dun earth and for the bleak days leave on your doorstep Snowdrops, gathered that morning, and moist with dew.

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Beyond the Pain Barrier Arthur Broomfield ‘Never expose a thing of guilt and holy dread so great it appals the earth’ - Sophocles

A thought – to write an epic of paint peeling from a country pump, of dusty roads and potholes chorused in the tongue of the culture – falls to the well of its language.

I want to begin at Omega when all is done and said, when the last leaves of November have deformed the barren earth, when May mornings, Bach at Emo Court, are no more than empty letters, all that’s left of names that meant so much though it’s Greek to even you

at that end of time, time, that’s not time, that spell – it is broken – dissolving in the purity of night, being the eye that sees nothing the ear immune to lyre and truth, to each iota of twisted opinion, drawing from that which I cannot draw yet wonder was it blue then, am I really well?

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Fruit William Brady Charlotte had bought the punnet at the Sundrive market. There, a husky-voiced woman had wrapped them like penny sweets in a white paper bag and told her they would go lovely with a scoop of ice cream and chocolate Flake. Standing in front of the sink, she saw the woman had been right. The raspberries smelt of summer. They demanded ice cream. She tumbled them into a ceramic bowl. A red puddle clung to the bubble wrapped underside of the container. She turned on the tap and let it run until the berries rose with the water.

Then she drained them and mopped them with kitchen roll. The ones at the top looked fat and full but some she saw further down were bruised. The maimed leered up at her, shining with the ruby glint of a split lip. She picked one up – one couldn’t hurt – and pinched. On the outside it was arid, a tight bunch of bobbles with brown pubic wisps sprouting in the crevices. Droplets of water had hidden away in the fruit’s hollow. She felt them evaporate on her tongue. Gently with her teeth, she crushed the skin. Bittersweet sparks ignited in her tastebuds, spreading across her cheeks. Seeds crunched into her molars; her tongue tip would be excavating for them the rest of the morning. She plucked another from the bowl and tasted it. Then two at a time, the blaze increasing each time her teeth squashed the plump flesh and attacked the beads within. She journeyed to the bottom of the bowl. The berries became less firm, the skins saggier, until all that remained was a little red pool and a fuzzy fungal survivor.

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from ‘As Innocently as He had Seen It First’ Philip Coleman

To the Memory of Dennis O’Driscoll (‘King of the Quotations’)

I A woe that no mortal can cure Till everything that happened has unhappened and I don’t know a soul who doesn’t feel small I dare not withstand the cold touch that I dread.

I always felt like crying. It wasn’t fair as shadows bloom across the draw; making peace with the earth then taking leave of it.

The thoughts that arise in me.

One must be so careful these days.

The headland glitters with beached faces, lunar stares, I turn away and shut the door, and on the stair the other’s empty, intricate embrace.

On my shoulder squats a bird, hunched like a crumpled flower, the one whom I thought that cardboard hellfire held beneath my gallows, the cry of a child who’s lost his greatest treasure.

Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie un-rediscovered, un-renamable.

I attended school and I liked the place– bound up to perform that particular function.

The moon has nothing to be sad about, and in small sections wanders through the mind as the sun beats down upon the oval plots like pools to a solitudinem of mournful communes, lustrous, with their hinterlands of thunder.

A course that was laid long before the keel of oak made the quality of mercy seem scrupulous and calm.

What made the place a landscape of despair, the lament of a hungry fox at 2 a.m.?

Let Time be a wide, tight spiral– Let the Gods speak softly of us

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II quieter than shadows across an urn.

Sunlight gathers in the leaves, dripping branches obscuring the white parts of bathers lovely for seconds only –: lightblood gives being to everything that lives, diamonds and islands of light sliding over as does remnant of self.

Beauty, who has described beauty? Once upon a time from my unsteady, sea-view plinth and without the ties to a livelihood that require so many to stay indoors and make no signals I was a phantom for a day. My friends carried me around with them.

I gather words to gird my nothingness.

As I drove from the sepulchre of Lazarus, I thought I was healing, for all I know I might have stayed forever in the grim

room where I was camped in breathing the sulphur & no one there where wings come clattering and terror in the cells fleeing before shape can coax it whole.

You come to us out of the woods, out of history’s long corridor, You sit by the computer, covered with light snow – covered with your own

porcelain beauty.

Sometimes I feel I have to express myself when the winds pick up and the cool air is just behind it all & the deck of my uncle’s ship is only a mist of moving bulks, something which is nothing you make to become who you are.

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Time Capsules Dean McHugh Today, in Macomb County, Michigan there are 112 humans, frozen in flasks.

There are 91 pets.

No one knows if there are gardens in there.

Some have said:

staring with your ears to a glacier;

or rooting out coincidence;

or being there for a hatching and you can hear our bodies squirming and have visions of our races in frozen lakes

testing for darkness but cylinders have never spoken before not of how

we can alight from

this electric winter

where no questions lie casked how

by swimming from pufferfish, will

we warm the waters in which we speak.

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Don’t Get Her Started Dean McHugh isn’t the sand just rocks after a domestic a few batterings from the sea that’re casting the cynics off who don’t know their place in the snug all so they’ll like being Irish? but I’m one, speaking this to myself and on the 25a pretending my feet only touch certain places you’d swear I’m in Tír na nÓg.

At Liffey Valley™ now and my cranberry tea is drinkable only if you’re looking to taste nothing for a week and maybe eat less lard because of it.

I’m not going to pretend I know how to talk to a homeless person and if that means I’ve got nothing to say or because your-one might just come on her bulldozer to demolish my blood from this red earth or because I can say nothing without a fight then that’s evolution and that’s why we’re alive and that’s the only way I’ll have it, please.

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November Seventeenth Nineteen Fifty-Three (Dingle Peninsula) Dean McHugh Through the notorious sea mist we volley long looks because we’ve dug up our intersections and divide them between family can’t you feel yesterday’s mutton is knawing at this elsewhere our cycle of legends knotting A bus delivers boxes

flinging

a net is absurd

We pause and anticipate from this sharp thaw will surge a foreign outward gaze to pick out a distant, mass becoming of connection

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The Shell Lisa Gannon The shell was buried alive, The ocean within silenced.

Only the wet sand heard the Muffled sounds it made– The world was oblivious.

It’s hard but delicate Case cracked.

Small fragments surfaced, But no sound broke the cracks.

The world remained oblivious.

Someone dug deeper than the world Ever could.

Youth pressed the broken shell Against his ear And it whispered softly through the Sharp cracks.

Youth will grow old.

The world will hear that voice, My voice.

The world will know that I was here Long after I have cracked

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Lemon Meringue Karl Peters Lemon Meringue was an orchard broker from Paris, dealing mainly in citrus. He arrived home with a neat physician’s case after ten years away, walked straight off the plane and out of the airport.

The taxi brought him directly to a launderette, where he stripped to his underwear. Lemon watched his yellow three-piece swirl to the top of its arc and then collapse once more. For an hour he followed the subsiding circuit without emotion.

When the cycle was finished he re-dressed and asked an old lady pretending to mind her own business for the loan of a coin.

She obliged, allowing her to drop the pretence. With his yellow suit dripping a puddle beside the drier, he inserted the coin and climbed in.

Only the old woman noticed because the launderette was empty. It had been vacated by the owner who was last seen struggling out back with a screaming infant. Lemon knocked on the window like a submarine pilot, motioning the old lady to push the red button. She gasped with shock and looked around to see if anyone was there to notice. Still empty. The gasp fizzled out of her face. The launderette rested in the blank balance of perfect symmetry disturbed slightly by an open box of powder three machines down, a bin by the door and her old sagging self.

No one could tell that within one of these gleaming boxes was a man, all the other machines directed their blank stares straight ahead. She clicked the door into place with her knees and felt the button tense against her flesh as she drove it backwards to carry its orders inwards.Â

She sat on a slatted wooden bench that ran two feet from the opposite machines. Lemon’s bag sat beside her closed in a neat triangle at the top while he spun with all choice now suspended.

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At stages his reddened cheeks or white shoelaces would flash by but the overall impression was that of a tumbling yellow puzzle falling to pieces. It was mesmerising together with the heavy thump of filled sleeves and legs. Forty minutes left.

Was it possible to survive, she thought? She really didn’t know. Or was he being dried to death like a raisin? The owner returned with a scowl on his face, distracted by a personal life that could not be contained behind doors.

The old woman touched Lemon’s bag and ran her finger down its rough leather exterior. It felt like an elephant she once touched in Thailand on a journey through the tropics. She closed her eyes and touched the elephant again.

Twenty minutes to go. She thought he gave her a thumbs up but it could have been anything really inside the tumults of that drying machine. Someone came in and sat beside the old woman.

By the time she became aware of the intruder he was gone, five minutes were left and Lemon’s bag was gone.

She looked up and down the wet street while holding open the launderette door, careful not to cross the threshold. The warm air rushed out, escaping. Neither end of the street betrayed signs of human life. A parked car and a twisted umbrella were clues but nothing definitive. Whoever that someone was, they were somewhere with that bag.

She felt an aching duty to this man in the dryer. To his bag left alone on the bench. To making sure he came out dry without creases with all his possessions as they’d been left. The street knew what happened but couldn’t reveal its secrets so she returned inside . . .

. . . with a fright, her dryer door was open, the owner standing over it. ‘It’s done Ms Peel. I must turn off these machines, ok?’

Wendy, it’s Wendy. She could never tell this man, all he was interested in was emptying machines and filling them up again.

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But what of Lemon Meringue, was he done? The owner slid over his shining vinyl floors like a child in socks. Wendy approached the only open dryer, why hadn’t he come out – come out mystery man, come out.

A solitary sock hung out the rounded threshold. Inside the crumpled yellow cloth settled at the bottom of the drum. It reminded her of a cheese grater. Maybe he shrank. She took out the clothes, warm as a nest, and checked the pockets in ludicrous agitation. Shaking the clothes, Wendy realised that no shrunken man would fall from its fabric.

‘Lemon Meringue.’ She read aloud from the inside pocket. He couldn’t be . . . what kind of name is that? Written in sweeping joined letters the name was sewn with a calligrapher’s needle, and the smell.

The heated fabric fumed lemon peel in hot whiskey. So she closed her eyes and saw Lemon Meringue once more holding his warmth close to hers.

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Madness Takes Over Anna D’Alton Clatter and smash to take its tiny life that filthy stinging insect moulded to the wall I fumble the weapon splash water as its weight drops on a body quickly soap a wet knot of tissue to scour the soiled the splayed stain of minute innards licked fast to the paint one leg lingers on the blunt book like a tortured eyelash

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Death at the Post Office Martin Dyar The job they’re given is fairly simple.

Find the place, go in for half an hour and discuss the settlement.

Consider, if it’s appropriate, the few antiques: the safe, the signs, the switchboard.

Glance at the books, the electrics.

Perhaps fill out some forms.

But these aul’ ones, these Cathleens, these Annies, they can be fierce long-winded.

For some of our lads their ways are just too compelling.

Some accept a drink, some’ll have lunch.

We’d a Polish guy who took a ninety-two-year-old out in the van.

She showed him a ball alley.

Fair enough: dozens of ghosts and no graffiti. But if you’re not direct about the job? You understand, we’ve had to weed out the dreamers.

Immunity to stories, I find, is the primary quality.

You don’t want to be sitting at an old table, under a clock that strikes you as fabulously loud.

Or find yourself cradled by the past, thinking a man need venture no further west than the brink he meets in a mouthful of milky tea.

If the archive-harbouring frailty of the postmistress soothes you; if her wit grants you the lost farm and maternity of the world; icarus magazine

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if her isolated, dwindling village, a place without a pub or a shop, whose nearest decent sized town is itself desperately quiet – if these things move you . . .

What I mean is, if you can’t meet a forgotten countryside head on, and calmly dismantle her, fold her up, carry her out, and ship her back to Head Office, however ambiguous, however heavy-handed or fateful, however bloody poignant the whole affair might seem to you; if you can’t stand your ground when a steep moment of hospitable chat and reminiscence might tempt you to put your mobile phone on silent, or worse, blinded by plates of fruit cake, to switch it off completely; if you cannot accompany an inevitable change, knowing you did not cause these people, these ways, to vanish, and if you will not sign off on expired things for us, then, I’m sorry, but you are not our man.

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The Interview Joseph O’Neill, author of Netherland and Blood-Dark Track, in conversation with Nick Bland.

NB: What are you writing at the moment? Do you generally avoid discussing your work with people before it’s finished?

JON: I’m trying to finish a book this year: a novel based in Dubai.

Maybe one or two people will have read it by the time I’ve finished it. My basic approach is that if I’m not sure of something then it’s probably not working yet, so why show it? I know writers who have several readers they show their work to, and they find that useful and that’s obviously valid. Younger writers – particularly those who are used to presenting their work at workshops and in the university situation – are particularly comfortable about showing their work to multiple others. But I don’t know – it doesn’t help me very much.

NB: Fitzgerald once said, ‘When you talk about plans, you take something away from them.’ Linking that to creative writing workshops, do you feel able to teach students?

JON: Creative writing in the context of an undergraduate degree is fine. At Bard College, it’s compulsory for students to have credits in something creative, so the students I get are not necessarily doing the workshop with any profound literary ambitions at stake. I do think it is educationally valuable to try to write fiction, or to think about fiction, particularly if it isn’t something you would normally do. The question might be slightly more vexed at the graduate level, when people do MFAs, because in theory there arises the danger of the institutionalisation of a person’s sensibility. But I know that good MFA teachers are extremely alert to this problem of formatting people’s sensibilities, and they simply don’t do it. Good writers will survive creative writing classes, I would imagine.

NB: Producing work for someone other than a friend is helpful. If one respects the teacher, they can collapse some of the illusions people have. Prescriptive ideas of writing seem to contradict one another. icarus magazine

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JON: When I’m teaching creative writing I steer clear of aphorisms and try and focus on text. I’m trying to understand what utterance involves and what a series of utterances involve; how you might structure them and what’s at stake. The whole business of, ‘Writing is X’ and ‘Teaching is this, that and the other’ – it might be fun coming up with pithy insights but I’m not sure how useful they are.

The business of writing is extremely complicated, and a text, or the reading of a text, can have all sorts of objectives. So it seems very difficult to come up with any key remarks – except the most unexceptionable – about writing.

NB: Do you find working in an institution healthy? Is that something that you personally need as a writer?

JON: The only institution I’m currently associated with, very happily, is Bard College. It’s a new experience for me – teaching. I’m not just teaching creative writing, I’m also teaching English literature, and so I find it extremely interesting. It’s a very enlarging experience, because I’m doing it in my 40s and not doing it in my 20s, say, or my 30s.

I was also a lawyer for a number of years, and so I was institutionalized by the English Bar. I wasn’t faking it, I was working at it properly, and for over ten years. It helped me as a writer in two ways.

First of all, the study of legal reasoning, and the peculiar importance placed by lawyers on language and accuracy, gave me sense of what exactness of thought and expression might involve. And of course working as a barrister was also a source of income, so I didn’t fall into what I think is a hazard, particularly in English-speaking Europe, of trying to make a middle-class living from writing literary novels. That’s a pretty much impossible hope for the great majority of novelists, and so you’re forced to look elsewhere – journalism, almost inevitably, and the journalism of opinion, most likely. I think it’s hazardous to cultivate a professional facility for opinion – whether it’s about your domestic life or about society or culture, or, like this opinion, about the hazards of opinionated journalism. In the end, you run a risk, if you involve yourself in that discourse, of diluting your relationship with language; and also with the idea of truth, frankly. There are obviously risks involved with becoming a lawyer, but I felt those risks were more manageable for me. icarus magazine

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NB: When you became a lawyer, did you always know that you were going to write?

JON: I always wanted to write. I took a year off before I became a practising lawyer, which is a very risky thing to do, and when I’d finished writing This is the Life, I went back and renewed my application for a barrister’s tenancy. I was very lucky – I was taken on; but that’s fairly unheard of. I think if I’d continued to try and do both, I would have ended up being not particularly good at either of them.

I chose to focus on writing full-time. And that’s a very risky thing, too, because although I’d published three books, I was by no stretch of the imagination a writer with any sort of readership. Then again, there are risks associated with not doing what you really want to do.

NB: As for teaching English, is that something that you, envisaging a career as a novelist, thought of doing? Are there particular novelists or poets that you’re enjoying teaching?

JON: Just picking up on that term ‘career’ – I just didn’t have a very careerist idea of writing. Nowadays you can have a careerist’s idea: graduating, going into an MFA, and then maybe teaching an MFA, there’s a whole kind of paraliterary career you can have, which, in theory, is conducive to writing novels. A lot of American writers, especially, have that kind of trajectory and it seems to have worked very well for them. I had a fairly old-fashioned idea of writing, which is to say, I tried to make separate arrangements for my bread-winning needs.

And what am I teaching now? A course called ‘Hobbyism and Professionalism’, funnily enough. It looks at hobbyistic conscientiousness in writing, and also professional conscientiousness. We’re looking mainly at non-fiction characterized by accuracy and carefulness.

NB: I emailed the Head of English here about this interview, and she wondered if you thought ‘the big landscape contemporary novel – like Netherland, or Franzen’s novels – functions as a kind of state of the nation novel in the same way that Victorian novels did in the UK?

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JON: Obviously they function differently because novels function differently in the culture. Corrections or Freedom, which are Franzen’s two most sweeping novels, are very different to Netherland – in their scope and in what ideas of writing they’re privileging, particularly with regard to narratorial viewpoint. I do think there’s timeless scope for a lengthy panoramic fictional portrayal of a particular country.

On the other hand, the question of formal validity is more complex now than it was a hundred years ago. With the panoramic novel of society, one could equate artistic borders with national or societal borders. Ulysses, for example, is basically a panorama of Irish society. But what makes it so compelling isn’t necessarily how searching or sweeping it is about issues of Irish culture, but its technique.

It would of course still be valuable to write a big novel of society that was technically interesting. Now it’s hard to be technically innovative or surprising in that sense. Pynchon tried it, and Foster Wallace, I think, is the great recent exponent of this idea – writing this enormous novel of our times. Foster Wallace is the guy who knows how to combine a certain measure of innovation with a certain comprehensiveness, and shows that it is doable, in spite of all the competition that the novel now faces. Much of the information novels have about life is now widely available outside the pages of novels. The Victorian novel was culturally situated in a comparative vacuum, in which the only competition came in the form of newspapers with fairly restrictive reaches. Newspapers did not penetrate, to any great degree, domestic life, private life, emotional life – so the novel and theatrical drama were pretty much the only ways that people had access to information about these vital things.

NB: While Netherland might not necessarily have a state of the nation element to it, I think it’s a wonderful assessment of New York.

Ulysses is an interesting novel, because technically it’s too difficult to be a state of the nation novel; I’ve not read Infinite Jest or Pynchon but I imagine that, technically, those novels are too experimental.

JON: I just think it’s different. I mean these writers – and Don DeLillo’s another one – they’re interested in having novels embody a certain sort of informational and stimulational overload. I’m interested

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in the overload, too, but I’m investigating something slightly different.

Incidentally, very few writers relish being described as ‘experimental,’ for the good reason that the word secretly refers to failure.

I suspect Pynchon, etc., would much rather be called ‘innovative.’

NB: Going back to This is the Life, am I correct in thinking you wrote that at 27?

JON: It wasn’t published till I was 26 or 27. I delivered it a year and a half before it was published. It was a novel I wrote when I was about 24, 25 – actually in the year between Bar School and becoming a full-time lawyer.

NB: I read in an interview you gave that you don’t have any particular yearning for your first two books to be republished. Why? JON: They have been republished, so obviously I don’t feel that strongly about it. I looked at The Breezes, my second novel about two months ago, out of archaeological curiosity, and I did look at the various strategies which I used to get in and out of scenes – to make the whole thing move along – and I had a certain affection for them.

I feel that I’m so far removed from the person who wrote those books in some ways; in other ways I’m pretty close to that person still. I just feel that it would be a misrepresentation to have those books sort of prominently out there as an image of what sort of writer I am now.

If I’m lucky, at some point, they may become of interest again to me, and maybe to other people; but right now I feel caught up in what I’ve been doing with Netherland, what I did in Blood-Dark Track, and what I’m doing now. I think I’m a much more mature writer now, a more advanced writer in some ways. I’m not Philip Roth: if I had written Goodbye, Columbus first I might be still very interested in having that book out there.

NB: Presumably you started writing when you were very young.

That generally seems to be the case with most successful writers.

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JON: I wrote poetry. I thought I was going to be a writer of poetry, and that was my great passion from the age of about sixteen onwards, throughout my undergraduate years. The year after that, I found that I couldn’t produce poetry. I actually have a piece coming out in the Dublin Review, which has its 50th edition coming up very soon. They asked a number of writers to write about what they can’t do, and I touched on this issue of not being able to write poetry. It’s just very difficult. But that’s how I started out reading – certainly reading contemporary poets, Irish poetry especially.

I grew up in Holland and went to an International School, which was basically an English international school – it was called the British School of the Netherlands. My legal nationality was always Irish, but my cultural nationality was very complicated. I didn’t have one; but I did feel that my literary nationality at a young age was Irish. I remember very vividly being in a sort of stupor from the age of sixteen when I read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: I began to understand the power of language. There was a little bookstore in The Hague – the American Bookstore – which had contemporary poetry in English. So it was the Irish writing and American writing I was reading as an eighteen-year-old which really got my juices going. I read Patrick Kavanagh and Derek Mahon and Paul Muldoon. All these writers were significant writers, and Seamus Heaney was very significant – North and Field Work and Station Island.

And Beckett was huge for me; I felt very connected to Irishness in that sense.

NB: I was interested to see that you’re anthologised in Irish collections. If I tried to identify Irish characteristics in the two novels I was speaking of, I would point first to a lyrical quality, which seems audially more similar to Irish literature than American or British literature.

JON: I remember myself thinking that Ireland, unlike the colonists, achieved its cultural diversity not through immigration, but through emigration. There is a very significant tradition of Irish writing without some Irish horizon. I wasn’t an émigré Irishman, just one who was removed from the country as an infant; and after that I was away, visits aside. Irish literary culture is, icarus magazine

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on the one hand, very insular and self-interested, but it does partake – in a way that English doesn’t – of a certain continental tradition.

Beckett is a highly continental writer, and Joyce is to a very large degree. That may be why I was able to connect to Irish writing; that, and the usual personal need to identify with somewhere.

NB: Out of curiosity, do you think Ulysses is a better book than A Portrait, or would you rather read the latter?

JON: Well I think they’re just different projects. There are certain scenes in A Portrait which are simply not available in Ulysses . . .

There’s the wonderful scene which always gets to me in A Portrait, where Dedalus is a kid, and the grown-ups are arguing about Parnell: that’s an extremely moving and brilliantly managed scene of domesticity and politics, which isn’t really available in Ulysses. I think Ulysses is probably a more intelligent novel, in that it’s less prone to the slight tendentiousness of the second part of A Portrait. And I think there’s a very powerful counterpoint between Dedalus and Bloom – to that extent, it offers things that A Portrait doesn’t really offer. You could say it’s a crash course in languages, too. He’s a very lyrical writer, Joyce – although people see him as a severe sort of writer, which in some ways he is. He’s also extremely lyrical… I mean, his poetry is frankly terrible! You know, he has this slightly maudlin, ‘man singing in the pub’ streak to his sensibility, which he only barely keeps in check from time to time.

NB: You’ve said that the first inspiration for cricket in Netherland was from the ‘pic, pac, poc’ in A Portrait. That’s an interesting connection, especially tapping into this theme of colonialism. Did you want to make that manifest in the book?

JON: That scene of the ‘pic, pac, poc’ is essentially where literature and cricket merged for me, which produced my personal aesthetic awakening. The whole book is, in a way, an homage to that moment.

The ‘pic, pac, poc’ of the cricketers on the sports field in A Portrait is reprised in Ulysses, where Stephen is now teaching, and the boys’ play on the sports field intrudes upon the reflections of Dedalus – only they’re playing football.

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NB: On the counterpoint existing in Ulysses, you definitely have these counterpoints in Netherland and This is the Life: Donovan and Jim Jones, and obviously Chuck and Hans. Even in the memoir I noticed how you chase after your grandfathers’ identities. Is that a key device of yours, this counterpoint?

JON: You do discover when you write, there is a natural tilt to your sensibility, and in my case, I seem to always repeat the structure of a slightly passive, slightly disabled narrator – someone purporting to tell the story of someone else – I have the same thing in the novel I’m writing now.

NB: It’s like a footballer’s star trick, like that thing Cristiano Ronaldo does when chops the ball – when you have a move like that you probably use it.

[JON laughs] NB: Do you feel that you would have been able to write a family memoir if you’d had the family experience of, say, one of your friends?

JON: It might not have been as easy to make something of interest out of it, but I think that whatever background you have is interesting: it just depends how deep you’re willing to dig. I had a rather soporific relationship with my own family history. I was thoroughly indoctrinated and familiarised with it, and it took a certain distance from it to be able to start defamiliarising myself from it. Let me put it this way, there were lots of people in my family before I came along, and not many of them felt there was a family memoir to be written about their experiences. But I think every family – no matter how apparently banal or insignificant – is a portal into history. I think you can take any background and there’s something extremely valuable and interesting there, something exemplary going on which other people can connect to – as long as you take the time to think critically about it.

One writer I felt alerted me to this, was Janet Malcolm in her book The Silent Woman, about Sylvia Plath. What she does is focus on icarus magazine

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the biographers who’ve written about Plath and Hughes. She takes a very interesting story, and almost makes it more boring than it should be – and then of course writes something much more interesting than if she’d just written another book about Sylvia Plath.

NB: That’s a fascinating example. I remember that on the BBC show Who Do You Think You Are, Michael Parkinson was rejected because his family history was apparently too boring.

JON: His family history was too boring?! I suppose it is true that some situations are more dramatic than others. I don’t give that much advice, but one piece of advice I give people trying to write something is – do yourself a favour and come up with an interesting situation.

Of course, in principle you could write a good novel with a terrible dramatic premise – a novel about a man who’s doing an interview, for example, a novel about this conversation. I think it’s doable. A lovely novelistic challenge these days is to resist velocity of opinion and information, which is obviously the most profitable and prevalent form of writing: journalism and blogging and stuff. I would hope that people look to good writers to slow things down, and that’s what I try to do. I’m always interested in the difficulty of that.

NB: It’s a trope of literary criticism that that is the mark of a good writer – someone who can entertain multiple different viewpoints and do so with equal – or near equal – force.

JON: You were talking about Cristiano Ronaldo: great writers - and I’m not suggesting for a second that I’m one of them, but I see it among them – seem to have a lot of time on the ball. They’re not dashing around, hoofing it everywhere. They seem to play the simple pass and the game seems a lot simpler. Look at some of these Russian writers of the nineteenth century. They seem to be able to dwell on little things, and suddenly big things start turning on these things. I’d like to be able to do that. As it is, I still sometimes feel hurried on the ball. I got into real trouble in the second half of writing Netherland, because I was trying to write towards plot – I was trying to make it happen; I realised that was just counter-productive. The novel which taught me that was Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson – the Franz Beckenbauer of contemporary fiction. icarus magazine

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I think that plot is essentially surprise, and the surprise can come either because of a turn of events, or because of a sentence going a way you didn’t expect. I’m in danger of getting bored of a book when things start happening, and people stride here and there and do things and have adventures. I don’t find eventfulness very eventful, funnily enough. At the level or the wavelength at which I find things interesting, it’s about sentences and words – and that element of surprise has got to be there as well. My idea of plot is something more microscopic, or micrologic.

NB: When you talk about that problem with Netherland, are you saying that you’d plotted it much too carefully towards the end?

JON: I thought I had to have a plot. I also had false ambitions for the book. I wanted to write a novel about business. It’s an idea that feels valid and interesting when you’re starting off, but at a certain point your starting ideas are superseded by what you have actually written, and you have to look at what you’ve written to understand what the novel is about. I was allowing myself to have the writing driven by a conceptual framework, which was inadequate and boring. I had to go back and slow down, and see what was there and what was interesting and feel the logic of the text, and set schemas to one side.

NB: There’s an interesting note by Paul Muldoon I came across, where he says that every good work of art is an act of discovery for the author of it.

JON: It’s true. I know the quote you’re talking about; you have to feel you’re exploring something, and that’s when you feel right, when it feels valuable to the writer. That’s when you feel, ‘I’ve just written something I didn’t really anticipate and I didn’t think I could write and I’ve discovered something.’ The excitement of that – all being well – will translate into a corresponding excitement for the reader.

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Archangel Eoin McNamee The boathouse stood a little way from the sea, almost buried in the sand dunes. Its cracked salt planks had turned silver-grey. The bitumen roof was covered by marram grass. The wooden door was held shut by sand under the jamb.

Jolene found the boathouse on her second week in K. Jolene walked on the strand after school, waiting for Knoxy’s shift to start at the Silver herring so that she could go home. Several times she had come back from school to find Knoxy and her mother in the bedroom.

The noises coming from the room suggested that Jolene’s mother was uncovering melancholy facts about herself. Jolene thought she should already have learned enough sad things not to want any more.

No matter how far Jolene and her mother travelled there was always a Knoxy in their lives. They were storemen, barmen, migrant workers given to pilferage and absenteeism. Weak-willed princelings of vice.

Jolene kicked the sand away from the door jamb and went in.

There were no boats at the dried-up dock. There was a pair of Dunlop tennis shoes without laces on the floor. A beach bag and a worn Alice band hung from a nail. Daylight came through the planks. Everything was sun-faded and lost.

She saw a piece of cloth in the sand. She pulled on it and uncovered an old-fashioned one-piece swimsuit with a piece of lace like a skirt around the waist. She took it out of the sand and hung it on the wall beside the beach bag.

When she turned around there was a man standing in the doorway. He was wearing a black overcoat. He was unshaven and his eyes were deeply sunk. He was like a bent figure of retribution from an old tale. People would be warned about the error of their ways.

They would be told about the sundering to come.

She waited for him to speak. If he meant harm, she wanted his pronouncements to be unornamented. If something terrible was about to happen, there was to be no beating about the bush.

‘My two girls were drowned out there,’ he said. ‘I told them not to swim when the wind was blowing in from the mouth of the bay, but they didn’t heed. They’ll tell you I was never right after it. Who icarus magazine

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would be right?’ ~ That evening she asked Knoxy about the man and his daughters.

‘They were drowned off the strand. Everyone told them not to go swimming in a north-wester. They decided they knew better. By the time he called the Coast Guard it was too late. The bodies were washed up at the beacon.’

The beacon was a navigational aid at the mouth of the bay. It looked as though pagan hands had placed it there.

‘You can’t trust that bay,’ Knoxy said. ‘You can’t trust the rip tide.’

I can’t trust your watery eyes or your one gold earring or your hands that have a way of staying too long where they are not wanted, Jolene thought. I can’t trust you or a thousand people like you.

Jolene told her mother that she had met Stirling on the beach.

Her mother was pleased. It was proof that Jolene was integrating.

Jolene said that a meeting with the father of drowned girls was not integration.

‘If Jolene was mine, she’d know all about it, talking to her mother like that. She’d know the toe of my boot,’ Knoxy said.

The two girls were spoken of often in the town, Jolene’s mother said when Knoxy had gone home. She had heard about them in the whole food shop and at Reiki class. The drownings were the town’s gravity. It was proof that the place had undercurrents. It was entitled to its own imaginings. ~ There was a storm that night. Autumn lows coming down from Greenland. Knoxy drove them out to the viewpoint overlooking the strand. There was a ship just offshore, a freighter driven before the storm. It looked too big for the bay. It looked as if a city had somehow gone adrift and been stranded, ablaze with harsh industrial light, rundown, salt-corroded. Beyond the ship Jolene could see the white tops of the swell against the darkness, surging in the deep channels.

Jolene got out of the car and walked to the collapsed railing. icarus magazine

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Stirling was there. He looked as if he had summoned the storm. The night was full of wrath and he was its master.

‘There’s a deep-water anchorage just out there,’ Stirling said.

‘It’s not on any of the maps. You got to know about it.’

She could see the name of the ship on the stern. Kristina, Archangel.

‘She’s a Russian freighter. Down out of the Arctic Circle.’ She thought of icebound northern ports, winter beyond measure.

‘She must have run before the weather,’ Stirling said.

‘What did Stirling say to you?’ Knoxy asked when she went back to the car.

‘He said the ship must have run before the weather.’

‘That’s me,’ Jolene’s mother said, ‘I’m running before the weather of existence.’ It was important to her to find a phrase that encompassed each part of her life and she liked this one. She had described their last move as a step up on the ladder of her life. This time she wanted to see herself as helpless, storm-driven.

They had rented a house on the seafront. It was one of a line of wooden chalets. There were cars on blocks, desolate gardens. Troubled lives were to the fore. Her mother had stood in the centre of the house holding a crystal to assess the energies of the place. Jolene studied the damp-stained wallpaper.

‘You don’t need a crystal to see where this is going,’ Jolene said.

‘I might need one,’ her mother said. ‘I might need one to set up lines of communication with my daughter.’ That was the trouble with Jolene’s mother. There were moments of perilous self-knowledge.

They had moved to K from the city. Running before the weather. It was a time of renewal, her mother said. Jolene was classified as troubled. She missed school. There were assessments. She was seen walking on the streets late at night. Her teachers were wary of her.

Her classmates regarded her with respect. They saw an emissary from the land of errant girls.

Late in October Knoxy came into her bedroom. She could smell vodka. He sat on the edge of her bed.

‘I want to tell you a story,’ he said, ‘about a girl who didn’t do what she was told. A naughty girl.’

‘I don’t want to hear about your naughty girl,’ Jolene said. She remembered the swimsuit on the wall in the dark boathouse. She thought of it hanging in the dark. Holding the memory of the girl icarus magazine

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who had worn it, holding her phantom shape, the beloved form.

After that, Knoxy came to her room every night when her mother was at yoga or reflexology.

‘Me and my therapies,’ she would say when she came home.

‘You and your therapies,’ Knoxy said. ~ The Kristina was still there at the end of October. A tender carried the crew to the seamen’s mission in the harbour. The crew were blue-eyed men, wearing pea jackets and seaboots. They smoked Russian cigarettes and played pool. They looked like mariners from a long time ago. Knoxy said that they came from former republics with collapsed governments.

‘Their countries are fucked,’ Knoxy said.

‘What did Mr Stirling do when the girls were lost?’ Jolene asked Knoxy.

‘Searched for them up and down,’ Knoxy said. ‘He was out in that rotten ketch of his from dawn till dusk. It’s a wonder he didn’t sink her as well. When the helicopter found them, he sets about finding out what happened. He’s at it to this day.’

‘It’s so sad,’ Jolene said.

‘Sad my eye,’ Knoxy said. ‘Them girls were wild. They had him tortured. They say he wished them dead and got his wish.’

‘Divination could have told him how to find them,’ Jolene’s mother said. ‘There are techniques that would have alerted him to the presence of loved ones. He could have sought their aura. Knoxy has a beautiful aura.’

‘Fuck Knoxy’s aura and the horse it rode in on,’ Jolene said.

‘You have no inner life,’ her mother said. She was wrong. All Jolene had was inner life. ~ The Stirling house behind the sand dunes was dark and silent. The yard was full of derelict marine machinery. It was said that Stirling attended service at a hall in the mountains, a wintry kirk where they were required to attest to whether they were saved or whether they were damned. icarus magazine

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Two weeks after the Kristina had been driven into the bay, Jolene saw Stirling standing in the dry channel which led from the boathouse to the sea. He knelt and ran the sand through his fingers.

‘The pattern of the currents has changed,’ the man said. ‘The sand bar at the mouth of the bay has shifted. It dried the channel to the boathouse.’ He looked up at the Russian ship and shaded his eyes with his hand. He looked as if he navigated by distant constellations.

‘I’m going out to have a look at that ship. You can sit in the bow.’

Jolene clambered into his paint-streaked boat. It wasn’t a question of trust. The truth about people was something you sidled up to. You had to catch it off-balance.

They rowed out to the Kristina. Up close you saw its dented plates were streaked with rust. There were broken stanchions and cabling hung over her side. There was tangled gear on her docks. The ship made Jolene feel as if some catastrophe had taken place. That the ship had fled south carrying the remnants of a civilisation.

Stirling spoke to a crewman on deck in Russian.

‘Her rudder was damaged during the storm. She has to stay at anchorage.’

‘How come you talk Russian?’

‘I was there in the sixties. I studied hydrology.’

‘Hydrology?’

‘I was a student of water.’ He told her about his studies. There was a whole vocabulary that she had not thought to consider. Models and schematics. Temperatures and flow charts. It was starting to get dark as they rowed back. He told her to trail her hand in the water. When it phosphoresced she gazed into it. The water seemed more to her like deep space. The currents were like eerie breezes. Astral winds that blew unheard in distant galaxies.

Stirling looked strong. She imagined being on a boat with him on a great eastern river. The Danube, the Volga. He would sing as he rowed.

She walked back along the beach with him. He told her about camping on the taiga. He went there with Young Pioneers who were as guests of the People’s Republic. They had sung Party songs around the campfire at night. She could imagine their ardent faces in the sun. He said they were beautiful and alive in a time of undaunted hearts. He had married one but she had died after his girls had been born.

Jolene told her mother she wanted to be a hydrographer. icarus magazine

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‘You’re not the scientific type,’ her mother said. ‘You’re of an artistic bent. You get that from me.’

Jolene’s mother said that she was worried about her daughter asso ciating with Stirling.

‘A man with grief issues, if not more,’ she said. ‘Besides, it isn’t age-appropriate.’

‘If there’s any problem I’ll sort him out,’ Knoxy said. ‘Those girls weren’t born wild. Something made them that way.’

On her way home from school she stopped at the library. She asked where she could find the newspapers. She said she wanted to read about the drownings. The librarian was wary. The town had an inner life as well and it wasn’t just for anybody. Jolene persisted. There was a photograph of the two girls. They were standing on the seafront, smiling at the camera. They were fourteen and sixteen. They were wearing wide flares and cheesecloth shirts. They looked like seafarers themselves, lost matelots looking for wreckage to cling to.

The inquest outlined how the two girls had died by accident.

They had gone swimming when the sea piled surf up onto the strand, and the undercurrent had carried them far out to sea.

Jolene said she liked the name Archangel. It sounded like a ghost city, surrounded by the taiga, the deep boreal hush.

‘It’s about time them Russians moved on,’ Knoxy said. ‘They’re no addition to the town. They haven’t spent a red cent since they got here.’

‘They’ve as much right to be here as you have,’ Jolene said.

‘No they haven’t,’ Knoxy said. ‘I was born here. I come from this town in ways you can’t even dream of.’

‘I think they’re romantic,’ Jolene’s mother said.

‘Romantic my hole,’ Knoxy said. ‘It’s only a matter of time before somebody gets stabbed. The knife is the weapon of choice for them boys.’

‘I wonder what it would be like to be a missing girl,’ Jolene said. She would be good at it. She would treat it as a calling. Once she was gone there would be no being found.

~

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Stirling finally understood what had happened to his daughters and that it was nothing to do with currents. It was a case of teenagers and their reckless throwing away of things. They didn’t run away when they saw death coming. They tried to reason. They made pacts with it.

He could see what Knoxy was up to. Loss had given him insight.

Jolene’s mother was sad and insubstantial. Here was no real harm to be done there. Jolene was different. She was capable of absorbing as much pain as Knoxy could hand out. There were oceans within her.

Jolene had found one of his daughters’ swimsuits and hung it on the wall of the boathouse. He understood that all consolation was partial and fleeting but he was grateful to her for it.

Jolene didn’t come home on Tuesday night. Her mother did not miss her until Wednesday. She sent Knoxy out to look for her and prepared herself for the role of the mother of a lost girl. She would do national press. She would mention the word ‘home’, enfold Jolene’s name in it. Once Knoxy had left, she phoned the Coast Guard.

Knoxy went down to the boathouse. The stones on the beach were sand-scoured. The beach covered with shifting wracks. The Kristina straining on hawsers. It was the year-end and things were changing. Deep-sea migrations. Whole species on the move. Knoxy went into the boathouse.

‘Where are you Stirling, you pervy old get,’ Knoxy said. ‘That girl’s young enough to be your granddaughter.’

Stirling stepped out of the shadows. He had an oar in the hand.

He carried it like a token of office from the testament of his youth.

There were lost girlhoods to be avenged.

‘Leave the girl alone,’ Knoxy said. ‘You’ve done harm enough.’

Stirling stepped forward and raised the oar. Knoxy looked into Stirling’s eyes. He wanted Knoxy to understand that you ran before the storm but sometimes the storm was faster than you were. Stirling would sing as he rowed but it would be a song of hurt.

Stirling brought Knoxy’s body out to sea. Jolene sat in the bow.

When they got to the beacon they dropped Knoxy overboard. The current would carry him into the Gulf Stream.

She thought about the drowned girls floating in the depths.

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Drifting in the deep currents with marine ghost life all around. As they returned to the strand, Jolene could see that the Kristina was raising her anchor. Her plates shuddered. Scant diesel fumes came from her funnel. Seamen stood at the rail. They were going back to their soon-to-be-lost worlds, to Archangel. The clouds gathered in the north like smoke rising from destroyed cities.

They saw the Coast Guard helicopter. It flew around them in a circle and Jolene waved to it. The pilot waved back. The helicopter hovered over the boathouse until they made land. Jolene saw the roof of the boathouse shake under the rotor wash. She wondered if the swimsuit still hung on the wall, trembling, lace-girdled. The shadow of the helicopter darkened the salt timbers as though a giant hand was poised above the boathouse for a moment, then the helicopter moved on, and the shadow was gone.

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Beach Vanessa Lee

Platform of non-entity, wet, timeless, The sand is not the sand it was before The last tide, feet dig into what is made Nothingness by a callous wave, no trace, No prints, the perfect crime scene.

All over the world the beach is the same On which men and women disembarked, or That arrogant young artist or politician strolled, Painters traced, sketched, coloured onto canvasses That last longer than sand.

All over the world beaches are born die are born again.

The child from a fishing village in Capo Verde would like To believe that the sand over which he drags his nets is the Same the intoxicated bikinied waitress in Copacabana cleans Out of her high heels.

The fickle writer whose quill-waves write and erase the pages Of the oldest book in the world; the Sea embraces Land loving Her in out in out inhale exhale again again, spraying foam on her Grainy chest and returns twelve hours later to ravish her some more, Inhale exhale again again.

Children making grey sandcastles on Sandymount beach dream of white Beaches where Gallician surfers slide off the waves, of the currents of Earth’s Panthalassa that link these rainbows of sand, brown white black grey specks of cholesterol Coursing in her dark blue vein.

Platform of non-entity, wet, timeless, the sand is not the sand it was before the last tide, Feet dig into what is made nothingness by a callous wave, no trace, no prints, the perfect Crime scene.

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A Decline David Lynch – You remember Dad. – Dad. – How it went with him.

– No. I was a child.

– You were old enough.

– I was six, seven. Six. I had almost turned seven.

– So you remember.

– Obviously I know the date.

– You do, you remember.

He saw the parched white pin-boned stockfish of the hand move onto him. Then it was at his shoulder. It was trying to clutch.

After the news and before the Wednesday night film came on one of them – it was probably John, who could still recite the catalogue of their parents’ liquor, and knew that little of it would have changed over William’s sole occupancy – John said, Bring out the Midleton, and without waiting rose slowly from his chair, his thin legs bending under him like the tines of a cheap fork, and half-fell across the sofa on his way to the cabinet. William lifted him back into the chair, John, breathing, or guttering, asking again for the Midleton, but William wasn’t sure, William who was never sure, and John looking so pale so suddenly, and maybe it was a bad idea anyway drinking on his medication. Mammy . . . approve . . . watching over us . . . , John said. His lungs working beneath his baggy shirt reminded William of the heart-flutter in a sparrow’s breast. His fist was pushing into William’s thigh. Go on, he said. So William brought out the oblong box and they drank. To dearest Mammy, to dearest Daddy, John said, raising his glass at the ceiling.

William sat for two hours in the hospital carpark.

On the way home John leaned his forehead against the window and watched the passing streets, the passing shop-fronts, calling a name when he recognised one.

– O’Neill’s. McDonagh’s. Quirke’s Centra. The Capitol. All still there, Jesus. icarus magazine

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– That’s not strange for a small place.

– And I wouldn’t have bet on seeing Mrs Devlin alive again. Isn’t that her with the umbrella?

William, glancing left, squinting, then back to the glossy road as a dump truck shuddered by, apprehended in the same instant his brother’s profile against the rain-blued glass and, through the glass, moving on the footpath, Mrs Devlin behind a tortured umbrella, affixed briefly by John’s eyes from the darkness of their hollows before she slipped behind, her old woman’s form somehow reiterated in the shape of his face, flesh, glass, woman and the street beyond all coloured for a moment as one, ruined grey, then gone.

– Isn’t it? John repeated.

William’s knuckles were pale.

– Yeah.

– How is she?

– Old. I don’t know. Since Mam went I don’t think I’ve spoken to her.

– I suppose she’d hardly recognise me now. At least not looking like this.

Two more trucks passed, both humped with loose tarpaulin over rain-bruised sand.

– Looks like the gravel pits still represent the area’s prime economic interest. Dad would be proud.

– Please stop, William said.

– What?

– This reminiscence bollocks. The return of the conquering fucking hero. No one cares.

– Conquering fucking hero? Have you seen the state of me?

He oared his meatless arms woodenly under William’s nose, then said, Here, let me show you, pulling William’s hand from the wheel.

William didn’t try to resist. He felt his hand run beneath his brother’s shirt and over the denuded collar, the lumpen chest, a scaffolding of rubber and bone.

– How’s that? John said. Then the hand was on his face, in the concavities of his cheeks, and registering the skull’s contours through the smooth, cool scalp.

William returned his hand to the wheel and stared onward. John laughed himself into a spasm of coughing, bent over with his brow against the dash and his hands at his mouth until William, glancing icarus magazine

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again from the road, saw something trickle between his fingers.

William paused to consider.

– Oh, he said. That’s . . . blood.

– Hm? – That’s blood.

– Christ alive.

William parked and bought wet-wipes in the nearest filling station. John crumpled them, one after another, into pinkish twists.

He remained huddled while his breathing evened out, a noise of escaping fluid still coming, though fainter, from within him.

– Cunt of a lung, cunt of a lung, he whispered.

– That’s what Dad sounded like. That gravelly sound. Or maybe I suppose it was more like sand, wet sand.

– Appropriate.

They watched the arcs carved out by the wipers dissolve and reform.

John said, So you remember something.

William put on the radio. A voice gave out a syllable like a distant cry and was lost in static. He cycled through the frequencies but the hiss stayed constant, total.

– Damn, he said.

John sighed angrily but even before he was finished had turned suddenly, facing the road behind them.

– Shh. Turn off the radio.

– What? I didn’t hear – – I think we should drive back into town.

– But we’re five miles outside it by now.

– Still.

– Just do it, will you?

His hand on William’s arm, trying to clutch, felt serious. In ten minutes they’d reached Main Street. Two squad cars and an ambulance blocked the road. Something about the way the lights of the three vehicles were screaming redly, without sirens, at the rain, pristinely silent, made William feel uncomfortable. A dark, angular, broken-looking shape lay just beyond.

– I think it’s one of the trucks from the sand pits, he said, climbing out. Jesus, it must have overturned in the wet.

– OK, said John. William peered in at him.

– You’re staying here? icarus magazine

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John shrugged. His gaze, directed nowhere, had the same quality of fixity as in the moment he’d watched Mrs Devlin pass.

William shook his head and went down the street, toward a group of people being held back by a circle of guards. Paramedics were doing little but stand and mutter and point at something in the road.

The truck, on its side, seemed to loom higher than the two parked a few yards along, right ways up. Runnels of mud streamed from the wet sand spilt beside the trailer, coloured darkly, William thought, but for a vague taint like copper. He found a gap among the spectators. A face turned to him, round-eyed, working its mouth dumbly like a fish, then turned back as though to show him where to look. He looked.

He saw Mrs Devlin’s umbrella snapped in three fairly regular pieces in the gutter. He saw the coat he was sure she had been wearing face-up on the ground, arms splayed in cruciform, beside it, as well as what were probably her shoes, but no Mrs Devlin. He wondered where she’d gone. Then he realised that there were legs, female legs, connecting the shoes to the coat, and hands in ladies’ gloves coming out of the sleeves, and it occurred to him that what really humanised one’s physical being in the minds of others must be the head, or more properly the face, as it was the absence of Mrs Devlin’s head and face and the mass of raw red-brown fleshy mealy stuff spread across the road where they should have been that had confused him at first, prompting him to perceive Mrs Devlin’s body, stretched very still in the viscous sand, as nothing more an arrangement of empty clothes made to look like a person. Even knowing this, he continued to some degree to see her, as he stared, as nothing more, the way he’d see a headless mannequin in a shop window. He looked for another few moments, then turned his face away, as his neighbour had done. Then he looked again. He looked until a guard pushed him away. When he sat back into the car John only said, Mrs Devlin? and William thought of how he’d nailed her in place with his eyes, and his countenance had become her body, her body the street, the street his countenance, and the rainy glass.

By the time they got home John had weakened. William, also trembling, found himself unable to look at the colour of his brother’s skin, or the sweat fastened to it like pinheads. He only said, Wait here, I’ll open the front door and come back to help you in, and John nodded.

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The air still felt uneasily of rain but the showers had stopped. Clearer midday light was trying to come down. As William fumbled his key into the door he felt a cold hand grip his arm and he turned, obscurely angry at John for following him, but saw John in the car, at the end of the driveway, looking at the radio. Actual sunshine began to glimmer on the sodden drive. An old man whose name he forgot went by, waving.

The radio had it thus: Pedestrians in the midlands village of C–––– watched in horror this morning as an elderly woman was decapitated in a freak road incident.

The woman, whose name has not yet been released, was walking along the village’s Main Street when she apparently fell off the kerb and was caught beneath the wheels of a passing truck. Although the truck then skidded and overturned there were no other injuries. The victim, who is believed to be from the locality and in her mid-80s, was pronounced dead at the scene.

Residents have often criticised what they regard as the excessive traffic of heavy trucks from the nearby Midlands Gravel Pits, the area’s main employer.

Garda sources blamed the heavy rain and slippery conditions of the footpath for the victim’s fall and are describing the tragedy as ‘an unfortunate accident’.

(If parts of the report were drowned in ambient crackle then it was the fault of the radio, which was worn, and paint-spattered, and perhaps thick with oils drawn from the yellow kitchen atmosphere in which it sat. Certainly there was nothing else in the air to make it sibilate evilly like it did.)

William dreamed of bloody steaks. John, on the futon in their parents’ old room, screamed his brother’s name every hour until dawn, but William didn’t wake and John, afterwards, said nothing about it, or simply couldn’t remember.

– I can’t remember.

– Try. Tell me.

– John, I can’t. Or won’t. I was not yet seven and for three months my father was dying all around me, his dying was everywhere, in every room, in every meal I ate, in every word any of us said, beneath the covers with me when I tried to sleep. That’s what I remember.

The rest I have no choice but to refuse to.

(But as he spoke he remembered: grey paint curdled thickly on icarus magazine

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the awful steel mechanics of the bed, the sky like damp concrete in the window-frame, the smell of the bed, a cough fumbled out and lost in the sheets, the shape in the bed that was the shape of the smell of the bed that became in his small mind always the smell of the shape of any twisted hoarsely-calling thing under hard lights and linen.)

– Then make yourself not refuse. Or make something up. You owe it to me to tell me something.

– No. – No you won’t or no you don’t owe me?

– I just can’t. I can’t tell you how it was because you weren’t there. And I know, I know you couldn’t come home – – I couldn’t come home because someone had to earn the money to keep him in that room. Because the fucking hospice wasn’t enough.

Unless it was live-in nurses and morphine drips and that special bed up there like a metal coffin it wasn’t enough. So think of the eighteenyear-old hardly out of school plying a fucking shovel in London just to pay for that prick’s death before you – – I know – – Selling off his wife’s bed, our mother’s bed, selling it to the knackers so he could have that other thing to lie in – – For Christ’s sake, John, you could have come back for a weekend, a day, at least to see him before he went, to see how it was for the rest of us.

(More: a cracked blue eye adrift in its socket, watching from its pillow, pale blue, the colour of the little veins that showed when Mother’s tights got a hole in them.)

– You chose to stay away, and that’s fine, I probably would have done the same. But don’t blame me that I was there and you weren’t.

(The eye was after the Polo mints. Then his mother’s voice: You shouldn’t, you can’t manage them.

And, Who brought them? They shouldn’t have.

And, Look, you’ve already tried one and couldn’t do it.

On the bedside table, by the opened tube and scattered wrapping, a single mint, lathed smooth by tired tongue, crumbling whitely into drool.

He went to his room and read a comic.) icarus magazine

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– Alright, John said. Alright. But now I have what he had, and now I’m lying in that room too – – Yes, you are. You’re following his example perfectly. Think about that the next time you curse him for wanting to die in his own home.

John sat back and looked into his teacup.

– I’m not that bad, he said. I’m not there yet.

– I know. I’m sorry.

– At least I’m still on treatment.

William nodded. But didn’t know what else to say. The slightest curl of steam through which John looked made him seem spectral, inhuman. He was getting thinner.

Then he laughed.

– I’m jealous of that Mrs Devlin. She had the right idea going under that truck. Interesting, painless, if not clean. She was old enough too that she could hardly complain much about it. A quick death, God help us all.

– I’ve been meaning to ask. How did you . . . how did you know to go back into town? That something had happened?

– I didn’t. What do you take me for?

– You said we should go back into town, you seemed anxious about it.

John said nothing for a moment. Then he leaned forward, breaking through the steam. His face was gaunt enough for his grin to almost hinge it in two.

– Remember that cruel bitch Molly Lamb? The village beauty?

– That was probably before my time.

– I think she babysat you once.

– OK. John laughed again: full, wind-bellied laughter without coughing, as though from someone else’s lungs.

– I realised – ha ha – I realised I’d seen her on Main Street, a fucking slag-heap of flesh, the size of – the size of a fucking elephant – two bobble-headed babas hanging off her tits, and I had to – I just had to see – Laughing giddily, doubled up in his chair, he lost the power of speech. Teeth showing grey, bony arms striking at himself, he was almost simian. William got up.

– You stupid bastard, he said.

He went to the kitchen and put his cup in the sink. He could hear icarus magazine

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John still giggling, a regular knock-knock sounding on the wall as he rocked. He ran the tap and leaned into the sink, breathing steadily, waiting for the hot water to come through. After a minute the flow was as cold as from a pipe in winter, though he knew that the immersion had been on all night.

The wall said: knock-knock-knock.

He swore at the tap, and the words clouded before him. The radiator was warm to the touch yet the temperature of the room had suddenly dropped far enough to raise gooseflesh.

The laughter stopped. The thudding continued, now of a different register and not, he realised, coming from the sitting-room wall. It was overhead, moving from one end of the ceiling to the other like someone pacing, but too irregular and heavy to be footsteps. Passing over the light fixture it made the bulb shake. It quickened and seemed to multiply, becoming three or four separate thuds jumbled together, then five, then six. William eyed its progress until it paused, directly above him. Air strained in his chest.

The silence held.

He went into the hall. John stood crookedly in the sitting-room threshold, watching him.

– What the fuck is doing that? said William.

– What?

– That sound upstairs.

– Didn’t notice it.

– It’s like – I don’t know. And didn’t the house get cold just now?

John said nothing.

William sighed and mounted the stairs. Trying to picture where the noise had come from it occurred to him that in order to cross the space of the kitchen fully it would have had to pass through the wall between his bedroom and his parents’ – or, he supposed, John’s. He wondered if he felt afraid. The light in the upstairs corridor was on but the bulb here, too, was moving very slightly. He was about to open the door to his parents’ room when: William.

It was not that he heard someone speak his name. There had been no voice, and the corridor was quiet. But he had become suddenly conscious of the name itself as a presence, or an occurrence, either in his mind or body or the zone around him. Things had shifted by a tiny but significant degree. It came again: William. icarus magazine

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He opened the door. John’s futon lay on the floor, pathetically, William remembering again as he looked at it the skeletal hospital bed that had stood in its place, and feeling its absence as a tear in fabric. That’s where my father died, he told himself. That mirror opposite is the one in which he saw his own death. He remembered coming in once and seeing two fingers wave at him frailly from under the sheets like bent prongs, and a voice saying, Cigarettes, get Mammy up here with my cigarettes. And when he was even younger he would hear Mam giving out about the big boot-shaped sandy footprints that appeared in the carpet when Dad got home.

He said, My daddy works at the gravel pits. Dad tucked him into bed and whispered, in his gravelly-sandy cigarettey voice, Here comes the Sandman, Bill, to put you to sleep. But there was something in the mirror. It pulsed like smoke-wreathed heart, a vague, dense shape as in a photo taken with a finger half-covering the lens.

William watched it, feeling cold, then turned and left, shutting the door behind him.

– What was it? John said.

– Nothing. Pipes, I suppose.

(He dreamed of blood and wet sand. The round walls of the pit loomed above him. He thought that there was white gravel amid the sand but found, when he sifted it, that it was bone, crushed terribly and scattered, and warm red jelly that turned the sand to glue. John was with him, distantly, watching from the top of the pit, sitting down – but not sitting, slumped rather in a wheelchair, and not watching, but lifeless, sand-blasted. John, he said. John fell into dust. William picked up handfuls of the gory sand. It dripped through his fingers. He was eating it. It coated his tongue and stuck in the back of his throat so that he could only think to swallow more handfuls to force it down. He took great scoopfuls up in both palms and buried his face in it, gulping hugely. The blood from his own lacerated gums mixed with it and made swallowing easier. He looked down and saw his stomach bulging like – like – well, like a sandbag. And that made him laugh. And that drew the sludge into his lungs too, and as he coughed John’s, and then his father’s, voices rose from him, and he fell back laughing and waving two bony broken fingers at the sky calling, Son, come here, I need you, son, son.)

By morning John was dead. icarus magazine

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Arcadia 2012 John Scattergood Without so much as having to be told, The local dogs know how to deal With their government’s disarray And the country’s indebtedness: They lie down in the middle of the road.

Stranger, if you should ever feel A pressing need to pass this way, Go round them. This is their place.

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The Crossing Jim Clarke There is no compromise between the river and the bank, only slippery, treacherous rocks. It takes a clutching hand to make a bridge across it, and in the beating heart, trust.

The crow can fly it alone, like the soft electric that pulses through the air, cheesewiring the sky, slicing the rain, taking crackling words across oceans. But I can’t fly and speaking is not being. Words won’t walk and no speech can stride this torrent. Whatever’s said, we’ll all leave a different river than that we entered.

If you step into the shallows, I will wade to you. If I have to swim, then I will swim.

And if I must drown, I’ll drown crossing

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Contributors

William Brady William Brady is currently on an Erasmus year at the University of St Andrews, Fife.

Arthur Broomfield Dr Arthur Broomfield is a poet and Beckett scholar from County Laois. His chapbook The Poetry Reading at Semple Stadium was published in 2011 (Lapwing). Arthur is the editor of Outburst online poetry journal.

Jim Clarke Jim Clarke is a former tabloid newspaper reporter, roulette croupier, playwright and whiskey barman. He is currently pursuing a doctorate in the School of English at TCD and keeping out of trouble.

Philip Coleman Philip Coleman is a lecturer in the School of English, TCD. “As Innocently as He Had Seen It First” is a poem in cento form, and is being composed throughout 2013 in honour of Dennis O’Driscoll, who died in December 2012. The sections published in this issue were written in January and February 2013. The work will be completed on the 31st of December 2013.

Anna D’Alton Anna is a Junior Freshman student of English.

Martin Dyar Martin Dyar’s debut collection, Maiden Names, was recently published by Arlen House. His work has received a number of honours, including the Patrick Kavanagh Award in 2009. He lectures in the School of Medicine at Trinity College Dublin.

Lisa Gannon Lisa Gannon is a JF psychology student. She has a passion for writing and a penchant for poetry.

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Linnéa Haviland Linnéa is 22 years old, and from Sweden. She was a student of Maths and Philosophy at TCD and is currently studying Illustration and Animation at Kingston University in London.

Vanessa Lee Vanessa Lee is a Senior Sophister student of English and Drama who enjoys bringing new ideas and poetry to life through paint, ink, drama, and text.

David Lynch David Lynch is a Junior Sophister studying English.

Dean McHugh Dean McHugh is a JF student of English Literature and Philosophy from Lucan. He was a winner in the 2012 Trócaire/Poetry Ireland Competition.

Eoin McNamee Eoin McNamee is the 2013 Arts Council Writer Fellow. His 2001 novel Blue Tango was nominated for the Man Booker Prize. He has written screenplays, including one for the film adaptation of his 1994 novel Resurrection Man. Orchid Blue is his latest novel.

Karl Peters Karl Peters is most comfortable in the third person. When he is himself he makes far less sense.

John Scattergood John Scattergood retired from the Professorship of Medieval and Renaissance English in 2006. He is now one of the Pro-Chancellors of the University of Dublin.

Liam Wrigley Liam Wrigley is a SF Nanoscience, Physics and Chemistry of Advanced Materials student. He is oddly fond of those sinister-looking seagulls that guard Trinity’s secrets. He dreams of one day writing a good, honest book.

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Acknowledgements ~ Icarus is funded by a grant from the DU Publications Committee and is supported by the School of English.

Icarus is a fully participating member of the Press Council of Ireland. Serious complaints should be made to: The Editors, Icarus, House 6, Trinity College, Dublin 2. Appeals may be directed to the Press Council of Ireland.

The editors wish to thank Joseph O’Neill, Eoin McNamee, and Martin Dyar; Brunswick Press, Eve Patten, Vanessa Lee, and the DU Publications Committee members; June Murphy and Catherine O’ Callaghan, for their continued good humour and support; Linnéa Haviland, for her willingness to create such beautiful illustrations for us from overseas; and finally, Eoin Tierney, without whom this year would have been far less enjoyable and the magazine a much inferior publication. ~

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