ICARUS
by Lorna Ginnety 1
Editorial “Anyone can run to excesses, It is easy to shoot past the mark, It is hard to stand firm in the middle.” – Ezra Pound, Canto XIII
T
he editors who strive for objectivity strive in the wrong direction; dispassion warps in the heat of the selection process, and in the end, “balance” shows itself as nothing more useful than the equilibrium of Sisyphus’ rock. This is good. A literary journal should primarily be the expression of an aesthetic urge. And while we feel that a golden mean can be found, a happy organization and presentation of the work through planned interrelations of texture, it can be all too easy to forget a basic premise: the necessity to avoid displacing the very urge which made these pieces stand out. Drawing back at the right moment, the editors find themselves as strange intermediaries between absolute creators and sorting-office bureaucrats. In the best of scenarios, they are everywhere and nowhere. That said, we give the stage over to the many daring, disquieting, original and eloquent voices in this issue, while for us, the rest is silence. The Icarus staff acknowledges Trinity Publication and the School of English, as well as Brunswick Press, for making this issue possible. Icarus is a fully participating member of the Press Council of Ireland. Serious complaints should be made to: The Editors, Icarus, Trinity Publications, House 6, Trinity College, Dublin 2. Appeals may be directed to the Press Council of Ireland.
Editorial Team
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Chief Editors: David Lynch & Claudio Sansone Deputy Editor: Niall McCabe Layout Editor: Thady Senior
Illustrator: Lorna Ginnety Featured Author: Kevin Barry 2
Contents Featured Illustration: 1 by Lorna Ginnety Editorial Rhagoletis Pomonella by Dean McHugh [Untitled] by James Gregory Who Eats the Living by Dean McHugh In A Library by Sophie Meehan Photograph: Fanlight by David Gunning Photograph: Galway by David Gunning Fishamble Street by Jim Clarke A Simple Wish by Zoë Boland The Future by Sophie Meehan Online: Oeuf by Katie Black still life: vase with carnations by Ronan Murphy Ajax by Susanna Galbraith A Brief History of the Anaphora by Fionnán O’Connor Fables of the Abbot by Fionnán O’Connor Mean Ends (a tongue knotted in thirst) by Michael Kemp
1 Featured Illustration: Inside 24 by Lorna Ginnety 2 Featured Illustration: Outside 25 4 by Lorna Ginnety Featured Author: Kevin Barry 26 5 Roma Kid by Kevin Barry 6 Nemesis Has Tagged You in One Photo 36 by Michael Lanigan 41 7 Photograph: The Tannery by David Gunning 42 8 Lampton House by Liam Wrigley 49 9 Photograph: Cinema Nova by Joseph Bodkin 50 10 Online: Waiting for the Man I Love byVawn Corrigan Online Photograph: [Untitled] 53 12 by Joseph Bodkin 14 Photograph: Cinema America, Before Occupation 54 15 by Claudio Sansone Contributors 56 58 16 Featured Illustration: 2 by Lorna Ginnety 17 18 20 23
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Rhagoletis Pomonella
by Dean McHugh
That sun, dragging trenches of light, Brought fat red apples To the back end of our garden, Childishly drawing its red untended moat. Heat multiplied our hunger When with a flash of autumn All those buckets I had known as baths Brimmed higher than crisped plain fog Rolling off toward the lust of wasps, The outlying apples dissolving As if by the corrosion of time To fill the season wholly. Out from the roots of that tree far afield Came crumbles and juice, gifts at the foot Of neighbourhood porches. The mimicking insects took the rest, flesh by flesh, To their warm undisturbed foundry And melted the cores to a sweet black mass For distribution among the old corpses, Tracing from world to world in the journey.
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[Untitled]
by James Gregory
Lately, in looking over some papers I meant to burn figures writhing in a box turtle’s eye beckoned, their invitation, ether; it’s like breathing in a lime kiln You were there, leaning livid upon a cane a carapace at your feet seething with worms stomped to the curb by youngsters for a penny you glued to it as a child I was in spirits on the Lord’s Day, ushered to the barber’s chair temples throbbing between mirrors a spark of darkness sweetening a razor singing you behold me: therefore I am here, Under the chin: through the eye; echolalia amid the hissing eels of August lightnings lilting, tell me, dear where will guilt get you?
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Who Eats the Living
Farmhand, MadonnaVineyard, Domaine de Gressac Prisons are warm and huddled and near, the vines are being straightened in rows astray in dawn’s black heat. White spidernests whirl towards the hearth merry, splashing our feet and pointing to the graves they have hidden. “You! Speak nothing to the branches, snap up the bonding wire, ‘this is not how people live.’ ” Us, savour the taste of the dead, flapping as an august shutter, too sore, burying and digging our bonds again.
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by Dean McHugh
In A Library
by Sophie Meehan
Reading war poetry makes me very protective of the boys I know It’s good that none of them have to be soldiers Except in the every day soldiering on It feels good to be here doing something Harry Clifton said back then that people would Only go to the library when they wanted to do work There was none of our built in and ready made distractions But they must have drawn little pictures For their girls and written notes In the inside covers of Dante All those old books are out in stacks now All those forgotten love letters And as for him I wish he didn’t work so hard I wish he was an English student with no morals If I sit beside him now I’m just going to be disappointed That he doesn’t want to play with me I’ll play the game of who cares less about their work and Who cares less about the other And I’ll make sure I’m not looking at him when he looks up But thinking deeply on Charles Donnelly And his sacrifice in the hills of Jarama
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Photograph: Fanlight
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by David Gunning
Photograph: Galway
by David Gunning
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Fishamble Street
by Jim Clarke
“Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.” - Doctor Faustus, Christopher Marlowe. I Awaken! Come Tower stands tall Skald shall tell tales Sing with your sword
to wintersettle. and in it, treasure. of bloody battle. to Loki’s daughter.
River runs fast Blood eagle flies Build salr strong Lest they return
around the longphort. in the Westmen town. with hewn oak athwart. to Thorgest drown.
II May Christ church climb unto heaven, and let not stone from stone be riven. John de St Paul giveth English gold so Jesus name may ever be told where Henry his mortal sin was shriven. The prior his pandemaine doth leaven with sweat we starving men have given e’en though we toil in rain and cold. May Christ church climb.
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Where stood twelve men are now but seven, all killed by gargoyle or the wyvern. Peasants and churls gorge, it is told, on rat and childflesh, bought and sold. The prayers from streets below now deafen. May Christ church climb. III Quoth the quinquagenarian, the old courts stood in Cathedral yard, a place named Hell, where uisgebaugh and wanton jezebel tempted all rapscallions to their sports; Philpott and Bully Egan would talk torts at table by a lout with kites to sell. Doxies with rouge to cover up their warts would promise barristers a tryst most fell. Students were barred by the Provost of Trinity who feared ‘neath Devil’s Arch they’d find affinity. IV Concrete and glass frame a foyer four storeys high. Taxpayers take a ticket and slump amid civic dreaming foretold in area plans, dusty models of the future city. It leads off to a dozen sterile waiting rooms where civil servants scowl behind closed hatches, suspended between boredom and revulsion. Out back, where staff go skiving for a smoke, drink-tanned, swathed in street stink and trackies stained with tiredness, the damned find quick release. A lank arm flourishes to the casual trading permits girl who’s startled, thinks to call security, when a needle drops onto hell’s parking lot. 11
A Simple Wish
by Zoë Boland
Intended as a simple wish for you You, who have once more circumnavigated the boiling sun No sailor’s soul have you, but I tell you As one wiser than me said, there is poetry in sailing as old as the world. Shipwrecked momentarily on the strand between carelessly folded yesterdays and the edge of tomorrow, unfurling its violent fingers Reflect, if you will on the tempests to thrash your stalwart little ship: You may locate yourself, precisely or imprecisely, catching the tendrils of someone else’s self as you lean out your window, suffocated, unsatisfied, smoking with the vibrancy ever turned to existing; on the banks of a foreign river, flowing to strange sewers or into the distant winking moon an exile, assailed on one side by the warm pink Western hands cajoled by acquaintances who don’t know your middle name; Screaming, even, for your heart to fall in the sludge Root, wet, and flourish to tie you to the terrain; Worst of all, Death’s stunning sister may twist your hair to tangles as you rest Gesturing to reflections in your cold coffee or leaking bathtub, the Done and the Undone, Coaxing you to labours not your own Her enemy stars whirling and singing ‘sleep’. All hands on deck, a new current spins us East Such a wave as I never saw is rising, upon its crests the dregs of the unused foam manifold and technicolour in the maddening dawn. An early breeze too fickle, map drifts from the idle boatswain’s hand Look beneath the deck, another woman singing a language still unscripted, what riddles must she weave! Awake, roughly awake now, soused with spray No one was there but you. 12
Seize the wheel and steer to barbarian ports What spices stain the air, what must they see in your nomad’s eyes! You are the reincarnation of childhood, of incandescent spring Yet do not stop awhile Wander below some galaxy supernatural Do not tell me how many comets you count Capture instead the kick inside as they mingle with the sea, scarlet now Make for them with all your might Now is the beginning, leave the endless doorway of youth and write me now and again.
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The Future
by Sophie Meehan
When I live in Sandycove And have a dog When I spew out loads of kids and write and Make jam all day I’ll take them to the Joyce tower on Saturdays To run around and spit at things They’ll know the difference between Real ice cream and what is really just frozen milk The swimmers at the Forty Foot Will know my lurcher (Pooka) But lose count of the kids And I will be somewhere between Flann O’Brien in a wool coat And a cheerful woman who never thinks about the future.
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Online: Oeuf
by Katie Black
I found an egg yesterday right This tiny yoke Peppered with freckles And you know what it reminded me of? It reminded me of your face in June When it starts getting warm And I used to call you Pepper Remember that? (But after I stood on the egg and Watched the yellow flow And felt the shell crack like bones).
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still life: vase with carnations
lildip lamblionan grips on splenches rowj in jushel jowd the frowple plass an plembled inchenups erupts the planches plimial and plumial amass the morning mampliata thrushes thrembling umbly in the underble in dhrujel inding affrind oumbling up resembling ind and bind and blind and fragile as the frassis on prissis on crossis on blids and burst the blanching lids and lashes ushundoffranous un breppis boon in doon in frip and first the freshes millimp lirstes lippronous in primpis pure the rosht resounding dound and frishes full within the roumbling round
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by Ronan Murphy
Ajax
by Susanna Galbraith (after Exekias’ The Suicide of Ajax) Pitted already in the blood orange earth, a cold and blundered blackness fitted deep into your form flames a longing to sleep. And you weep. Make water undo your birth when you reach the shore. Now, your span is hot and dry. Thirst mingles with colour that burns your eye clear of light. To night below, you turn to void your frame. Just a game and your lot was all this. Oiled bronze flaked down to sand under your tremor. Heels give way – the weight of a stone sky and the palm left erect here. Dissolve, here, and regret to understand.
Ezekias, Suicide of Ajax, Athenian Vase, ca. 450 B.C.E.
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A Brief History of the Anaphora
by Fionnán O’Connor
For Travis Having already before come home to Home since the history in question, he still came back to its survived sites: Those Venice Canals, my dear lagoon, a night-walk all the way down San Vicente like the first, for clearer reasons Douglas Park, Charlie Lucas after he’d quit painting before he left for New York, 638 Marine St, Abbott Kinney, a little gentrified and that bookstore, gone, and the length and depth of Ocean Park— shards, pale, of the memory, told. After the fact, he still found himself at “Thank you for driving me here, Travis.” “Finn— when you tell me you need to go somewhere in that tone of yours, you know my schedule’s completely free.” “I’m finishing it tonight, you know— I needed to come back here to be here again.” Petrified remagnetic remains. “After you know what, I thought I’d never come back to all” the way up there, his eyes took hold— the view belexcavating that primary voice— distracted, he turned. 18
“Finn. I have to ask. Does it ever feel— you know. Contrived?” “I’d like to think if I didn’t really believe anymore, I’d stop writing now.” But it crept the ground, unheeded by voice, unstuck his eyes, realigned beneath. “Usually you can see the whole city from here. I’ve never seen it get so foggy.” “I know another place— Finn. In Culver City. I know it’s not Top of the World but you can still see all of L. A. Would that ruin it for you?” “No.You can’t see a thing here; let’s go” to 6300 Heltzer Rd. In a slow fog, fogging itself into a little more than that, they have driven (so far) through fog that was fog. (But even now, on the other side, there were thirteen places where the memory breathes.) That ritual lure, beguiling back. My original ground. A fetish of a thought that was only a thought. (Closer, closer to the) relic themselves. Hand in the fire; touch the surface. Feel a pulse— the bone. Retrieved. Now envision him standing— on heights, unnamed. Still the same city. Nothing changed— only those eyes, staring down, (always so stuck to those two to four miles, November fifth or was it sixth, and those people you know) that looked— less worn, less vacant, less still-possessed, A little less lonely among the less deceived. 19
Fables of the Abbot “You got to do something they never got ‘em in the world” –S.R.
by Fionnán O’Connor
In a better known story, he thought of Kinneloa twice a year the rest his days. But let’s backtrack a while. Before becoming a boulevard, Abbot Kinney made big money in wild tobacco. 6 foot 2 at the boisterous age of 16 & up, the Abbot came from lots of cash and played the game for high stakes every time. Speaking 6 languages well, he toured the globe in search of the globe: Venezia, Zürich, (overgrown, nettley, thistled in the brain, Kinneloa, Kinneloa, wont leave him alone— eucalyptus clean, spry like a) a walking tour in the exotic east, places of stature— he came back home the larger man. As we áll know by now, he never made it back to the place of his birth when (home became brambly, an ocean breeze. He) he missed his train from San Francisco by the luck of the draw in 1880, a year after the birth of Saturday Rodia in south Italia, who went by Sam because no one could pronounce him and Simon Sam’s a quiet little man. Always handy for an alternate plan, Finny went south for a summer vacation— No reservations. What a guy! No reservations. On a billiard board in a SoCal hotel, 20
he spent the night and woke in the morning with his asthma cured. Impressed as áll hell with the California air, the Abbot bought hundreds of acres of shoreline park— “Kinneloa Resort,” a forest in his name. Because— Chairman of the Board of California’s woods, founder of the Rustic Canyon Forestry Station— first in the nation, a true friend to John Muir, the Abbot has always loved (Kinneloa, Kinneloa, wont leave me alone. Published a book— “Eucalyptus) Eucalyptus groves near South Santa Monica gave him the name for The Ocean Park Property Company and the name caught on like a great big fire and, in 1895, South Santa Monica was Ocean Park, a year after Simon arrived in the States at the wiry age of 15 & under. It áll makes sense from a backward look; the past is so quiet and the project began. They bought the town, rights and áll. When the company split, with the flip of a coin, the Abbot took the marshy south. He furrowed the Park in Venetian canals. Restructured the place like a renaissance man. The roll of the dice was áll bogus that day. Overall, the Abbot lost 16,000 in Italian piazzas, first rate lecturers, painters, musicians! Grand old Europe with a California breeze! Visit theVenice of Ocean Park— A center for physical and intellectual renewal! 21
Nobody cared and nobody came. No reservations. What a guy. Always ready with a back-up plan, he built the past-a-Disneyland: carnivals, freak shows, amusement piers, and, as before, “With real Italian gondoliers!” (Kinneloa, Kinneloa, won’t leave you alone. You) Everyone loved it. Everyone came. In 1911, Ocean Park became The City of Venice, a year before Simon arrived in LA. Divorce and the Oakland all behind him, Sam got work as a setter of tiles from bits of scrap. But we áll know the story of Simon’s Kirk. Porcelain, glass, the Bubble Up, cut. Garbage, sharded, stuck to a… lonely the only a tower of tile.
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Mean Ends (a tongue knotted in thirst)
by Michael Kemp
PersonaVivienWelch, theWaifish Self-Vivisector,As Previously Summoned My ends trail off fraying & colliding in bunches a net in wet sand, dragging up bundles all caked up This will cause me to scalp myself I am double-backed & broke Look at those free dancers Fools passing off hollow things plaster-wrapped in onion skins THINK: That’s what they call “An Image” Where’s my tongue? The duodenum’s been breached, My clockwork house just lost its plumbing Its rib wall will blanket and crouch With this gall flooding
Being mute; make it Philomel’s blessing “Jug Jug Jug” is aqua drinking ----------(green fields)(death)(water): beginning
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by Lorna Ginnety 24
by Lorna Ginnety 25
Featured Author: Kevin Barry Kevin Barry is an Irish author, has published two short story collections and a novel (City of Bohane) and has won many national and international prizes.
Roma Kid
S
© 2013 Kevin Barry
he watched her brothers sleeping but not for long and left them in the grey dim haze of a February morning that was not yet half to life; she did not speak the language but understood plainly the tone of the officials and their knotted gestures and their faces. Her mother had told her nothing but the girl knew that soon the family would be sent home again and she would not go back there. She was nine years old and chose for her leaving the red pattern dress and zipped her anorak over it. She went quietly among the chalets of the asylum park. She held the zipper of the anorak between her lips and its cold metal stuck fast to her lips – it was a ritual of her safe passage to hold it there until she was clear of the park. She did not look back at all and no voices rose to call her back. She walked out to the foreignness of the morning. She climbed the embankment. She had none of the words that appeared on the advertising boards by the motorway as she walked in her squeaking trainers along its verges. She did not have the words on the side of the bus that passed by and was lit against the morning and she had none of the pitying words that formed on the mouths of the passengers who stared out at the thin child in a dress of red paisley, ragged, and an anorak – Poor knacker child. Poor pavee kid. Poor latchiko. She walked for an hour or more. She was hungry. She knew where to cross for the train station by the image of a train on the road sign and by the arrow’s direction. There were people at the station waiting in a yellow heated room. She did not ask them for money because if she did not speak there was a good chance she would not be spoken to. Her stomach groaned and hissed and the morning sent up its first cuts of lonesomeness and fear. She would not see her brothers again. 26
She was slight as a ghost and went about the station as its haunting. She knew by the one journey the family had taken that the trains aiming left must be headed back to the city of Dublin again and its trouble and those that were aimed contrary must go to the countryside that was out there, and beyond. There was no ticket checker at the station – it was a man on the train that checked the tickets and on the outward journey he had been a kind man and on the fact of this kindness she had built her plan and laid her fate. She crossed the rails by the metal bridge and a light rain had begun to fall and spoke more than anything else of the place through which she moved; there were just a couple of passengers waiting on the far platform. Her trust also was that the countryside would be kinder. She sat on a bench and again she felt for the zipper of her anorak with her lips and got it between her teeth and bit down hard on it. She would not see her brothers again. When she had played with them the evening before, it was for the last time, and they had fallen one by one to sleep then, like dominoes dropping, and she counted off in her mind once again and as she would for many years the four black buttons of their tiny, bopping heads: Andrzej, Luca, Tobar, Bo, and the way almost that there was a tune to it. The minutes passed, and the platform became busier – she sat so quietly as to be almost unseen. Tired men and women took their morning places on the platform and let down their slow ropes of words. She did not understand the words and listened to them intently for the tone that might signal danger but the people were too tired to notice her, or at least they did not notice her for long: she was among them but as an image only of her type, and she registered for just half a second’s pity or distrust and was erased again – Poor Roma kid. The train’s noise came up – the train was heard before it was seen – and it came as a great rumble of promise. The word on the bulb of the train’s nose was ‘Sligo’. The morning came alive around her as the train pulled in and she watched herself as though from above as she climbed on board. She stayed in the space between two carriages. The train took off again and she rocked on her heels as she crouched there. She hadn’t the word for west but knew the pull of its directional drag. The train was not busy and there were many empty seats but she would not enter a carriage to take one. As she crouched and rocked on her heels, she began to sound a low groaning beneath her breath, and she let it sustain, and it slowed the beating of her heart, and it made her feel stronger. She blinked her eyes also, rapidly, and in a rhythm counter to the low, held groaning – she made in this way a shield of 27
hummed noise and flickered movement against the world and its grey morning. The train pulled back the morning and the countryside and she was alert to the grey fields passing, to the sheds and outbuildings, the sidings and high, the distant towns, and as she went she checked the land for and was reassured by its many hides and lairs. She was very hungry. Drawn by her hunger a cart came trundling along the passage and was laden with sandwiches and cakes and crisps and cans of soft drinks beaded with freeze. The cart was pushed by a young woman and the girl knew at a glance she was not from this country either. The woman searched her out quickly with a look, and said – Okay? The girl was frightened by the day’s first contact but smiled and something in the smile was read by the woman. Are you alone? she said.You speak English? She knew the word ‘English’ and shook her head against it. The woman spoke in another language then and it was closer but not known and again the girl shook her head and with her large eyes she pleaded. Don’t be frightened, the woman said. She passed the girl a muffin and moved on again and as the girl held in her hand the muffin she held her breath also. She waited, and then she took off the plastic wrapper, and the doughy smell came up like heat and there was the smeared blue of the berries, and she broke off precisely a quarter piece, and wrapped the rest again, carefully, and placed it in the pocket of her anorak. Even as she savoured the first bite she was already patting her pocket to be sure the rest of the muffin was in place. The tiny creatures in her stomach were soothed and quietened as she chewed. She kept watch along the carriages for the ticket collector. The train had a sombre feeling as it rolled through the dull morning and after a couple of stops it was almost empty. The wind that moved in slow waves across the fields the grey colours of the fields; the iron beat of movement along the line. She was lulled, and she closed her eyes for a half minute, and then more – she tried not to go deep – but she drifted, and soon she felt the soft pads of fingertips on the back of her hand. She opened her eyes to the ticket collector – Now, he said. 28
By the word she could tell that he too was kind as if the softness of his fingertips had not told it already. She shook her head, and pleaded. Uh-oh, he said. She knew what that meant. Are you not with somebody? he said. No mother? he said. No father? She bit down hard on her bottom lip. Okay, he said. She knew that every second and flayed inch of her nine years’ existence was written on the fibres of her skin. She could be plainly read – all the alleys and doorways and pleading years were there to be read, and the longing for the four tiny brothers who had been her comfort and, guiltily, her burden – their black buttony heads, bopping – and the cold tile floors of railway stations, and the detention chalets, and the home place that would never be seen again, and the cherry brandy of her mother’s sour breath, and the softness of her father’s hand. Do you know where you are even? Silently, she pleaded. We’re past Longford town now, he said. Have you people waiting on you? I’m not even going to ask about a ticket. He made the gesture of scratching his head and she smiled as he played at being puzzled. What’ll we do with you at all? Hah? The food cart at that moment came by again and she was the subject now of a consultation. The ticket man conferred with the woman who pushed the cart. It was hopeless and, after a moment, both of their heads moved sadly from side to side. A sighing was made and a phone call was made. The train pulled into a country station. The doors opened and the treetops outside were eerie with the voices of birds.There was everywhere but for the birds quiet. She hummed a low groaning and flicked rapidly her eyelids. Go handy now, the ticket man said. She was made to leave the train and was placed in a station master’s care. He brought her to a room of the station house that was made up as a home. What in Jesus’ name are we going to do with you? he said, as the colour rose 29
and then faded in his face again. He gave her a banana and some biscuits. He went to the office adjoining his home room to make a phone call – she knew it would be the police next. She heard him speak and understood the note of his nerves and confusion. She pocketed the banana and the biscuits and as quietly as dust moves she climbed out a window. She landed in a flower pot. She put her feet to the ground and quickly she was gone, across the car park, and over a fence, and into the sidings, and into the fields. February. The fields were cold and grey as she crossed them and open to the skies and the wetness underfoot came through her trainers and a sharp wind came across the fields and cut through the fabric of the dress to her bones and the anorak was all but useless against the wind. She kept to the edges of the fields and moved in quick darts and she kept down when cars went past. She beat away the briars of the ditches that swayed with the wind and the branches were bare still but with swollen buds that told soon a cold spring would come. Birds now were everywhere garrulous. She was at home again in the country – the rough lanes were home, and ditches were home, and now she could walk and for miles and her heart lightened. The country rose into hills. She knew that she was strong. She went for an hour, and then longer, and ate the banana – she ate it under a tree of early blossom by a rough stone wall and as she sat there motionless in the wind but for her chewing a sweet black mouse crawled from beneath a crack in the rocks of the wall and lowered itself to the ground on a high strand of yellow grass that groaned and bent with its weight and always in the future she would think of this place as the place of the mouse blossom tree. The mouse disappeared into the tunnels and routes of the grass. She rose and went on again. She decided to follow the direction of the mouse. And did so. After a while she saw a small town rise to the north and she knew to keep clear of it. She walked along a country lane by its old stone walls. She saw nobody. She crossed the fields and walked the lanes and crossed the ditches. Sometimes a dog’s bark came from far off and was hoarse and plaintive and as though it was always the same dog. She saw another town announce itself, and she kept clear of it, and then there was a great swathe of woodland ahead and rising, and she knew at once that she would climb to this wood – she was drawn by it. The tiredness of the day was deep in her bones now. She climbed a lane made dark by trembling old hedges on either side and the chill in this laneway was intense and made of more than the air, it was made of the feeling that was present in the place – which was malevolent, a badness – and it hurried her step, and soon she was in the late-winter of the woods, at the quick fade of the February day, and it was 30
strange but familiar, the path that led through and became rougher, and there was the sour, olden scent of the needles of the pines that she trampled – February – and the wind was distant as she became lost in the woods, it was such as the wind at the edges of a dream, and now she believed that there was a presence among the trees. She hurried to get through the woods but it was everywhere around her, as gripping as a cold sea, and a terror built and did not relent – it did not relent – and she named beneath her breath her gods but to no relief. She knew now that she was being watched. The watch that was on her had the warmth of a breath at the back of her neck. She hummed against fear and flicked her eyelids rapidly but she was in disarray now as she felt the watchful presence and she began to run and the root of a tree took her ankle – she went down. She reeled inside and vaulted on a high white screech of pain – she was wretchedly in pain. She lay there crying and in great pain and his shadow moved across her. The broken hatched light of the woods was impoverished as the day ended and his face was made of shadow. Hush, he said. He leaned down close to her and her heart popped clear of its box and vaulted clear of the trees and she clenched her teeth and prayed hard that she might wake from the bad dream – she did not wake. Ah look it, he said. No-one’s dead. He lightly placed a hand on the broken ankle and she reeled again in pain. No-one’s dead, he said. As we always say at times of abject fucken disaster. He was old and did not have the look of human life and circulation but the look of the woods – he was a ferny, mossy, twisted old thing and all of his roots and fibres spoke of years long and deep in the shadows and out of the light and he was a small bony creature but limbre and he lifted her from the ground and she felt his odd energies and strength and now she was not afraid at all. Best thing to do with pain, he said, is ignore the ignorant fucker. As he carried her through the woods the effort of the carrying caused his breath to labour but only slightly even though she was almost as big as he was. They came to a sudden clearing in the woods – a trailer was kept neatly there on blocks. Do you have the English? he said. No, she said. Well, no is a start, he said. And a fucken good one. He set her down on the plastic crate that worked as a step to the trailer. He 31
pointed at her ankle. The tops of the trees were wind-swayed, and sang. Is the pain bad, missy? He winced to explain the pain he meant. Yes, she said. We are making progress, he said, in great leaps and bounds, and a smile then showed the perfect white of her teeth. He laughed at the smile. He displayed with a sweep of the hand and a low bow the bleakness of the woods surrounding. Well, it’s a fine spot you picked, he said. There being no place known to man nor beast of grimmer fucken aspect. He opened the trailer door with a poke of the foot and reached for her and carried her inside. The Ox mountains you decided to land in? he said. Christ on a fucken bike. The pain came again in a nauseous swooping and he saw it in her and whispered to it – she did not know the words as they went to their work. She saw about her a solitaire’s cabin made of a hatched and brambled light and stacks upon stacks of old books, there must have been thousands of them that lined the walls and made of the trailer a cave of books. Did you come through the town? he said. He set her down on a low armchair and stoked a fire of sticks in the pot belly stove. Town? he said, and he made steeples of his knuckles for rooftops. The fire took again and its glow filled the small trailer’s room. No, she said. You’re as well not to have, he said. That place has gone fucken maniacal. He fetched down some bandaging from a high shelf and wrapped tightly her ankle. The vulgarity of people, he said. He placed a pot of water to boil on the hot plate of the stove. Not that I’d be passing moral judgement, he said. But the auld glamour pusses down in that town? he said. Auld biddies on sun 32
beds? And gettin’ fucken blood changes? There are women of sixty down in that place now, he said, with lickable legs. And faith that wasn’t always the case around here. He snorted a manic laugh and tears came to his eyes that she saw were made of this mad mirth and she chuckled, too. The trailer held also a low table and a hard-backed chair and there was a pallet bed on the floor. The trailer was lit by the flames only and the shadows of the woods surrounding were everywhere in the room and she thought of her brothers, far away, and she knew that by now they would be crying for her, their tiny worlds cracked open to fear and confusion, and she echoed their cry – Kizzy! Is that your name? he said. She nodded – she had the word. Kizzy, he said, you are most certainly not vulgar. He made her tea with leaves and settled to drink a cup with her. What we have here, he said, is a difficult situation to communicate except by what we can feel. She nodded – the tone was agreeable even as the words were alien. I would say that we have serious fucken trouble on our hands, Kizzy. But what’s trouble today can seem like nothing at all tomorrow. Are you with me or agin me? She smiled. Good, he said. Then we’ll make a job of this fucken calamity yet. He rose and went to a press and took down a loaf of bread and a pot of jam and he cut a thick slice and spread it with butter and the jam and it was the finest thing she had eaten ever. Would you believe that jam is made by my own fair hand? he said. If I’m nothing else I’m fucken knacky. She found the belief that her brothers would know she was alright, that she was strong, and that she was guided in the world. She did not care what her mother thought or believed. We’ll figure this out between us, Kizzy, he said. That first night she slept hardly at all – it was not out of fear but out of a strange 33
excitement. She lay on the pallet bed as he lay on the floor and listened to his breathing as he slept and tried to decide if it was an old man or a type of elf that lay there – it could not be an elf for this was not a dream – and the sound of the high wood by night in the wind was all about them and it was as real as the slow pumping inside that was the motion of her settled heart. Kizzy? She had slept at last for a while but she woke to the word again, and there was more tea to be had, and it rained hard on the roof of the trailer. A day for the books, girl, he said. He was busily all the morning about his books. He hunted through great ancient volumes. He made tsssking sounds and gasps of affirmation. Right so, he said, reading. Kizzy, he said, is the Romani form of the Hebrew Qetsiyah, which is a bark similiar to cinnamon. A flavoursome young lady, he said, and named for the fucken trees. He was no elf but simply a tiny old man. He was not as others for he was cannier than others. His contact with the towns and villages beyond the woodland was minimal. Sometimes, he sold wooden ornaments for Christmas, and he sold net sacks of kindling at the car boot sales, and once a week he walked the miles to a 24-hour supermarket at one of the bigger towns but he did so in the middle of the night when he knew the aisles there would be empty as desolation. When it rained they stayed in with the books. Her ankle soon mended. When the bright spring days came they were about the woods and the mountain fields of the peripheries of the woods, as the wild garlic came, and the blossom that formed on the bushes and hedges was an itch on the air and caused giddiness in them both. The understanding that grew between them was first of tone and gesture, and then of words, as she took them one by one and in compounds from him, by the phrase and by the sentence, and she took the colours of his dialect, and her own talk by and by took on the precise timbre of his, just as her own young malleable life took on the form of his, and they settled to a type of collusion with each other. The pretence that they must puzzle out their dilemma was soon dropped. It became clear that this was where she wanted to be. There were no questions to be answered here. None except for the simple questions of when to eat and when to sleep and when to work, and slowly, the dilemma was allowed to 34
disappear and was replaced by the quiet efficiencies of love, and both knew that she had come to the end of her path, and she would go no further. He gave her his life. He gave her the routines and tiny errands of it.The basic skills that were needed for the making of Christmas ornaments, and the ways of the wheedling at the car boot sales, and he taught her that always a distance should be maintained, that there need be no others. He taught her the rituals of the year in this damp and temperate place. She grew to young womanhood in the hatchlight of the woods and its sudden clearances. After her first menstrual cycle, a second trailer was bought and placed beside his. He kept her by his canniness from the prying of officialdom. As time passed they would go for days and weeks often without speaking to each other – there wasn’t the need for it. She lived long and calmly here, and calm even was the moment of his eclipsing, when she became and replaced him, and lay her fingertips on his eyelids to close them, and she took on the forces of the place, as he had granted them to her, and she could vanish at will then into the dark cool recesses of the woods. There were times of great change beyond the woods, but it did not matter, and the noises of the towns sometimes grew frantic – it did not matter; she read her books – and there were times of mobbed voices and great migrations – it did not matter – and there was the time of the fires on the moon – it did not matter – and the gaseous blue of their after-glare, but that too faded and passed, and did not matter. Still the woodland each year stretches out and grows, like the shadow of a disease spreading, and soon now the century will turn again, and her trailer’s flue will for just a while longer twist its penlines of ash smoke through the hatching of the trees, and when she speaks to herself, on these final days, it is in the accent of the Ox. If there is a sadness it is that her brothers have long since disappeared – first their faces went, and then their voices – and she can recall them now only as an aggregrate – the four black buttony heads, bopping, as playful as a sack of pups, and as vulnerable – but in truth she does not think of them that often. THE END
35
Nemesis Has Tagged You in One Photo
I
by Michael Lanigan
t had been two days since the Dixon brothers’ chain gang tied the sheriff’s daughter to the tracks. As a result, the LUAS line was still down until further notice. From the brothers’ perspective, this was a disaster. Her death had failed to lure Django Keefe out of hiding so the eight ne’er do wells, with even larger bounties on their heads, fled the city that night according to reports. Meanwhile, the shock incurred by Dublin collectively meant there were a few cancellations on the guest list for Emmet’s going-away party. Further adding to this chaos was the fact that the tracks remained cordoned off, causing delays of at least an hour for several of his other friends. Emmet tried to keep calm. However, with every passing minute, he became more agitated. By the time Jennifer had begun fishing wires and plugs out of the pond, he was pretty much on the verge of another nervous breakdown. Now mid-afternoon, Jen had been lying on her side by the water for a considerable length of time, while the rest of us nattered on and on about nothing in particular over at the garden table. Our moods were relatively upbeat as we tried to keep distracted from discussing the images of the damsel’s remains, which had circulated the office earlier that day. I dare not describe them here, because if I did it would certainly put you off Bolognese for life. Anyway, we started drinking at lunchtime after a slap up meal of spaghetti Bolognese, pacing ourselves slightly as to avoid total inebriation, in the event of the latecomers arriving stone cold sober. There were several pouches of tobacco decorating the table, overshadowed by nine crushed cans and six half-finished bottles of the cheapest wine with the highest alcohol percentage. Accompanied by a stench of weed so potent that it was enough to lure every single twentysomething year old named Dan with an agenda behind his new vaporiser in an eight mile radius, we really didn’t take much notice of Jen’s game as we became satisfyingly lubricated. She had been wearing that dress again, the white one that Emily Dickinson probably wore in her grave. It was getting muddied as she lay in the damp moss and bird shit, but she couldn’t care less as she reached into the water, rummaging around for some severed cables worth sticking in that black plastic bucket of hers. 36
While today’s haul was nothing worth faxing home about, she appeared unfazed considering that last week she dragged out eight plugs and a phone charger. The latter she hammered above the shed door to ward off bad vibes, and the plugs she used to stimulate herself with when Nar went out to Pygmalion with the guys. ‘His prick is usually limp when he gets in. Do you have any better suggestions?’ I didn’t really. Still, that never stopped me from asking her, if even only to rile her up a bit. Click. Julien was shifting about with his camera. Following a few amusing snaps of the girlos, he decided to focus on Nar, who was sitting aside from the rest of us. Not paying any attention to the camera, he sat, fixated on Jennifer’s search through their filthy pond. Batting a dead coy away, which was floating around her arm, she managed to fish out an extension lead before placing it beside the bucket. Ignoring this impressive discovery for the time being, she reached back in yanking up two tangled USB cords from the murky waters. Wrapped in a thick layer of algae and frogspawn it was enough to churn my stomach. At the table Cissy began to wretch at this sight, shrieking aloud, ‘Urgh, Jen. Come on. You can’t honestly expect to be able to use that? It’s fucking ick.’ Jen took no notice and tore some of the weeds off the grey wires. Dan gave a husky laugh, before saying, ‘Man, that’s rank.’ ‘Yeah. Here, Dan’, said Dan, ‘pass me my grinder.’ ‘Man’, said Dan, ‘y’need a vaporiser, yeah.’ ‘Nice,’ mumbled Dan to nobody in particular. Emmet poked his head out the back door, ‘Here Dan, where’d you put the bottle opener?’ Eight heads turned around and shouted simultaneously, ‘Dunno. D’y’want a toke, man? Got this new vaporiser, real nice smooth drag.’ Back over by the pond, Jen was taking a couple of minutes to unravel this newfound puzzle. At last, she had managed to separate the mess, sticking the cables in the bucket, followed by the extension. That was it for the day. Sniffing her hand and then picking up the bucket, she sauntered over to Nar and whispered something in his ear, before kissing him on the lips. He did not make eye contact, 37
but complied with her neediness, being the ‘half-decent lover’, an epithet he wore with pride as we spotted him in flagrante delicto with every Jane Doe and Julia Louis Dreyfus in Dublin. The party never really took off and we each made our exits in and around seven, bidding Emmet our fond farewells, knowing full well that we probably wouldn’t see him for a long, long time, or care are much either. In fact, I’m not sure why nobody thought to ask him why he was leaving, or where he was going. I guess it wasn’t so much a going-away, rather a go-away party. Nobody particularly liked Emmet. His dress sense gave us reason enough to hate him. That was about a year before the journo from VICE came to interview Nar, with whom I lost all contact the day after the party. Prior to the article’s publication, the only news that I had heard regarding Nar was that he had yet to move from his desk in all that time. Jennifer was still living with him, but not once since Cissy tagged him in that photograph on Facebook, had he acknowledged her existence. While I maintained a degree of indifference to his behaviour, still it could not keep me from reading the piece when it landed on my desk after lunch. Glossing over the preamble, which rabbled on and on about internet addiction, the first line that caught my eye was a description of his current physical state. Always a man to indulge in protein shakes, excessive pruning and cotton picking down south, were it not for the photograph, which pictured a vaguely familiar withered and hairy aged man, wearing only a filthy pair of boxer shorts, I might have thought this a story about another pectoral popinjay entirely. The only parts of his face recognisable were those small, but striking blue eyes.You could spot the virile homunculus seated at the controls behind those windows a mile off. It was reassuring at least to see that little fella going about his duties. He gave the camera no attention whatsoever, looking straight at the screen, with a smile poking out from behind his new rough and patchy beard. His fingers had shrivelled into ten chips plucked from a Happy Meal and his arms could have been Madonna transplants, but these emaciations were seemingly of little concern to him. ‘“I just don’t get why everyone is so upset,’ he said. ‘They don’t get love when they see it. This is real, not like a choice or anything. I’ve found my purpose like.” ’ According to the account, one of the photos that Julien had snapped of him at Emmet’s party turned out to be the love of his life. 38
‘“It’s just perfect, I mean like there is nothing wrong, no flaws, no blemishes. I could look at it forever, I mean… Wow, look at that hairline, it’s… The smile, I mean they run a perfect parallel… Sorry, what was the question?’ “‘I was asking about your sister? Do you not worry about her?’ “‘Shit, Jen still lives here?’ “‘Yeah, she let us in.’ “‘Huh, makes sense. How is she?” ‘“Not great, I think she was crying when we left her.” ‘“Yeah, that probably happens a bit.” ‘“Is it just her living here?” ‘“Maybe, couldn’t possibly say, I reckon Evelyn used to drop by too, but you’re asking the wrong person, ha.” ‘“Sorry, who?” ‘“Evelyn. Ev- Oh fuck, sorry, my girlfriend. We were together for years.”’ I laughed slightly at the thought of how Jen might take this mix up with his sister Evelyn. ‘The door opened and his sister, Jennifer entered to clean up a mess under his seat. Asking him how he was today, she received no response. Evidently, in distress, she left the room sobbing and slammed the door. ‘“What was that?” Nar inquired. ‘“Jennifer.” ‘“Serious? Is she still here? That’s nice, ha. She’s always been there for me.That’s family for you.”’ The article trailed off at this point, referencing similar cases in Tokyo, London and Hong Kong, but I gave up reading after my editor came down to hound me over the already twice extended deadline on my piece about the Dixon brothers. Still on the run, there had been no sign of them, or Django since the murder. Letting out a heavy sigh, I downed my banana and peanut butter smoothie, before bashing away at the keys in order to see how much more speculation could be churned out to prevent that Audi ad being made the whole cover story for a third consecutive day. ‘With the general elections looming and several potential candidates vowing to 39
bring these high plain drifters to justice, still there is no sign of the Dixon brothers, now a year since their murder of Cherrybell Clancy. We asked Callum McCarthy, an expert in bounty hunts to comment on the current state of affairs, just to fill space, because hey, no news is our news.’ Yeah, that should be a runner. It certainly beats last week’s online comment board issue. I should send this on to Ewan and see what he thinks. The next day I lost my job and they used the A2 ad for Audi as a cover story again.
40
Photograph: The Tannery
by David Gunning
41
Lampton House
T
by Liam Wrigley
he trouble with being a genius is that every once in a daylight moon some new stranger comes knocking at the door. I never know how they find me. I have had the very young hoping to be apprentices, to be rejected offhand of course, and sent to their fate to paint thousands of accurate moustaches on clammy cheeks, or many more thousands of Her Majesty’s ships, accurate to the last keel and sail and halyard, tossing on Atlantic waves under those formulaic dark grey clouds with the majestic light breaking through. Whatever they find the market for. It could also be that worst sort of beast, the arrant contemporary, who marches through my door, calling me by my first name, telling me I should be less selfish with my art, and I should direct my talents towards historical events, or the Great Ideas, or the dignified hardships of the peasant classes. The most common were these mercantile types, who thought just because they did business with Swiss brokers and a luxury textile firm in Heidelberg, that they somehow deserve personal commissions for their horrid families with my name attached. However, I am more courteous to these people than I might otherwise be out of respect to one of the most interesting callers I have ever had.The gentleman’s name was Mr Chester. He arrived at the reasonable time of noon, though I answered with my natural trepidation. “Good afternoon, Mr Beasley,” began the man with rich red-tinged whiskers, his left eye playful and his right full of scrutiny. He was about ten years my senior but still a man in his prime. “I do hope you remember meeting me.You were laying on a dockland wall making all sorts of accusations to the moon.” His face lit up ruddily as he continued the story. I recalled the incident: I often made friends under such circumstances, as I consider myself to be possessed of those robust good looks that make even older gentlemen desire my friendship and fall a little in love with me. “There I was, watching bemusedly, when you called out for a cigar. I came over and supplied one, and I also happened to possess a decanter of brandy which we shared.You tried to get me to sing a song, but then you forgot the words and let me off.You made me promise to come visit you, given a day to recover fully; I do hope that your state of mind was not too much altered for me to take advantage of this imposition?” I found the fellow so agreeable I let him in with an expressive, “Do come in, Mr Chester, you shall find yourself most rewarded for your goodwill!” Normally I’d be 42
anxious to recommence work, but that morning I had been painting one of the lady figures, and I realised she looked enough like one of my sisters that the painting was irreversibly ruined. I took him to the only neat room in the house and we dined well on cigars, brandy, easily reheated slices of quince, and fine conversation that was aided by his hearty laughter at my most paltry remarks. “My good friend, you have more than repaid me, so now I wish to offer you a rare opportunity. I am of close association with Lord Hillgarth of Lampton House, and he says he is searching for the finest artist possible for what he terms an ‘unusual and remarkable’ commission.” As I’ve said, usually these matters are of high inconvenience, but I was so inordinately fond of Mr Chester that I decided to go with him to hear this offer. Mr Chester stood up delighted, and told me our carriage was waiting immediately outside. The driver was a young man with an exquisitely pale face and the horses were a honey brown whose paintwork would require much dabbling when I remembered them. Mr Chester assured me that we were not going far, and though I hardly noticed the time passing, before I knew it we were deep in the countryside riding over dry tracks between wheat field and summer laden pasture, and hours must have passed. I did not draw attention to it. We arrived at the black gilt gates of the estate, after which the carriage passed through an overlong grove where the wassail leaves cast damp avenues of shadow, which then opened up into a fierce clearing of yellow-green grass, speckled by dandelions; atop the hill at the end of the winding white stone path sat Lampton House. Getting out of the carriage, I examined the not insubstantial house. It was of an earthy terracotta facade with plentiful glaring bands of mullioned windows. It seemed an old house, weathered but not shabby, quite Elizabethan, though there were Gothic touches like ornamental figures, perhaps saints or ancestors, who stared down from the gables. The air was quiet, I had not seen a single other person, and my footsteps crunched on the pebbles. Then Mr Chester turned to me and said, “I apologise, dear fellow, but this is where it starts to get unusual. Don’t worry, it’s all part of the fun. Do you see down the hill that leaning and crooked hawthorn tree? We must go there.” Mr Chester took me though the lawns of this English Garden delicately blooming, the light thrown so fine over the wide pond it seemed a brightening sheen of dust. 43
“It’s quite funny,” I began blithely, “but did you know that the conception of an English Garden was derived from the work of the French artist Claude Lorraine? He quite changed our country.” To this Mr Chester did not directly reply, and his countenance had changed. “Sit here by the hawthorn tree,” he said. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry but I have things to attend to at the house. Come up to the house in an hour or so, you’ll know when it’s the right time. For a man of your inclinations, considering the scene, it should not be an unpleasant wait.” He was right, it wasn’t, but it was a peculiar one. I did not know where we were, but considering I could just about perceive some heather-blown moorland to the east I suspected we could be as far as Derbyshire. My spot was most appropriate; the pitch dark fully-dressed tree provided a foreground for the intricate greens of the nearby woods. The evening was tilting down, and there was a thin blue haze over the distant hills. I listened out for birds, a squabbling lark or some curlew taking flight, but there was none. After an hour or so of waiting, the pollen thick and the falling sunlight still heavy, I began to feel drowsy. Perhaps unwisely, we had continued the brandy during the carriage ride. When my eyelids started drooping, the growing red and blue hues found vigour. Then I noticed under the fir trees, dressed in riding gear and white walking dresses, a group of young people. They were talking excitedly among themselves; there appeared some light-hearted confusion or disagreement, and one young lady disregarding this left the bounds of the trees and began to walk in my direction. At the same time, I noticed Lampton House was coming to life, gleaming yellow lights from the windows turning on, black carriages arriving up the path and into the front yard. “Sir, are you the artist that Lord Hillgarth has called for?” The young lady could not have been more than seventeen, though she spoke like someone six years older. Her hair was strawberry and fair, her stature small, her face slightly too intellectual, but pretty all the same. It was most likely the light, but I recalled that Goya trick of almost putting something dark and enveloping into his muses eyes. I told her who I was. “Oh good, I’ve heard of you. I used to take an active interest in the arts.” I thought she might be more complimentary, but alas no. “I have a question for you, Mr Beasley: can you draw a face from memory?” I daresay that it was one of my particular talents, but I needed a little time to 44
study the face. “Well, that’s fine,” she said, “I’ll sit here with you, and you get a good look at my face.” So there she sat, at first seeming impatient to move on, then warming to the quietude. I was trying to concentrate, but was growing increasingly distracted. More carriages were arriving at Lampton house, and as the dusk settled playfully and the vault of the Pleiades emerged and Orion and his dog looked ready to set traps, I noticed farmers and labourers emerging in large groups from different parts of the wood.They seemed in festive spirits, gaily dressed, the women carrying baskets of bread, meats and fruit, boys rolling barrels of wine, the men carrying torches and leading dreamy-eyed cattle, haughty goats and brooding horses. “Please, Mr Beasley. I insist you concentrate on my face.” Her friends were still waiting for her by the fir trees, increasingly restless. “What on earth is going on at Lampton House?” I asked. “Oh, this is a fancy of Lord Hillgarth’s; he liked that his tenants have a market fair and festival in his house once a week, then he invites all sorts of dignitaries and aristocrats passing through. Such peculiarities come with immense power, but he knows it’s for the best of the sanity of everyone involved. Have you nearly finished?” “Yes I suppose I have.” “Good. I must be on my way, my friends await. Do go up to the house, I enjoyed the ones I went to.” Then she sprang to her feet and was on her way. She smiled most kindly at me and waved as she left, greeted her friends again, and melted into the folds of the foliage. I’d been hoping she’d show me around, but no luck. Brushing off my trousers and my waistcoat, and putting back on my jacket, I began to walk towards the house. The huddled processions from the woods kept coming, and there was now a formidable number of men with wrinkled brows and women with flushed cheeks, children running about in-between, working away at the preparations, calling out greetings to friends whom they hadn’t seen for a week. The front doors to the house were wide open, as well as many lesser doors along the sides and out from the courtyards. People carried in and out wooden tables and dinner plates to lay on them, fresh food and broth to be heated, and more wine from the cellars. They all looked so natural that I felt out of place, but observed happily. A motley but greatly talented band grew together, and to much boisterous 45
acclaim, assembling deep-timbre fiddles and woodwind, began heavily beat-driven country dance songs that were thrilling and filled the night. They built bonfires out front, and they built bonfires in the courtyards, and they hopped up and down and danced around them linking arms, and young men jumped over the flames, all to the pulse of the music and shill laughter. Mr Chester stepped into me quite from the spinning crowds, laughing in his way, “Ah, my good man, marvellous isn’t it? I take it you want to meet Lord Hillgarth. Come with me.” “Why are all these cattle and horses brought here?” “Oh, Lord Hillgarth is an aesthete, in his way; he collects beautiful cattle and other animals, and they are brought here to be examined.” He grabbed some broth on his way leading me to the door, and then he expended effort cleaning his whiskers with a handkerchief. We went into the hallway, waiting and then squeezing through the clumps of people blocking the way, and turned directly right into the lounge. There was a fire in the large grating, and some very wealthy looking people sat down in chairs around it, drinking from crystal glasses, attempting to remember some opinions on the fine arts, and having decidedly a lot to say about the various messes in parliament. Mr Chester did not lead me to them, but rather to the great window looking out at the merriment, and in front of which was a winged armchair. Lord Hillgarth had a pearly mane of white hair and a scientist’s eyes. His suit was crisp, his neck-tie an extraordinary Prussian blue. His hands stayed gripped to the chair, and he was paying most detailed attention to the proceedings outside. “Mr Beasley, I take it the young lady found you?” “She did, but I hear you have an unusual and remarkable commission for me?” His voice was low, and he seemed to enjoy withholding his replies for ten seconds or so to leave one in the lurch and create a tone of dryness. “You have already completed this part of it. I do not believe you will regret it.” I’d vaguely suspected some nonsense like this, but I was having a tremendous time regardless. Outside I noticed a red-faced man in a top hat dancing with a farm girl in bare feet, his gentille wife busy admiring a spit-roast suckling pig above a fire. “So, Lord Hillgarth, can you explain to me why you host these wonderful fairs?” 46
“I simply provide essential services for those who need them. Mind you, Mr Beasley, you are allowed to explore Lampton House as my guest, but you must promise me never to tell anyone of it, or to use any of it in your art.” I made my promise, and Mr Chester found me a glass of wine, and I set about exploring the house. The deeper into the house I went, the more intense the shadows, making the light a dazzle as in a Rembrandt, and giving the faces that restrained passion. From room to room I went: women played cards, men lay alone, weird dancers moved in rooms filled with nothing but scattered objects of vivid textures. It made me think of painted art, and how it is a triumph of consciousness, and may it never die. The creak of the floorboard, the resounding halls, and the moving shafts of light, and the high voices and continuing music from outside; I shall never remember all I saw there, but everyday new details come back to me. I wish with all my heart that I had less access to alcohol, for I woke up with Mr Chester leaving me back at my house, patting down the creases in my jacket and wishing me all the best. Two months later I was at another party, bored – all parties seened a little drab these days – when I ended up in a corner with a Sir Barrington. I had aimed for this, because I had heard he was fabulously wealthy from his business in the Far East, and I was hoping that he was of a jovial and generous nature. This was not the case; he turned out to be a weepy sort of fellow, but sympathetic ears do get by. He did end up on a subject of gravity that excused his manners, speaking of the recent death of his daughter Kate two months before. “It was so sudden the way she fell ill, oh my poor Kate, you would have loved her, everyone did. She had the finest mind and the gentlest manners, I know she’d have gone down in history somehow. The most terrible thing is that she never had a portrait, all her life, all her beauty, to be wasted to the mists of time. All I have is my memory, and I try to tell the artist the description, but how can they get it right?” He tried to entice me to have a go (he even had paper and charcoal with him, having cornered me, it seemed) and he told me of her fair hair, as well as useless information like the way she moved her head. Then a sudden thought came to me – I drew the young lady from Lampton House. “Oh my word! OH MY HEAVENS!” The man managed to silence half the party with his towering joy. “How did you do it? You must have seen her before? Did you know her?” “No I never met her. Perhaps I glimpsed her face one time, around town or on 47
a train, and never forgot it, she was so memorable. Sometimes I do that.” “I love you my boy – you are the greatest artist in the world!” I painted him a full-sized portrait of her underneath the hawthorn tree, and the whole family were astonished by the exact likeness. Sir Barrington paid me the almost absurd amount of twenty thousand pounds that evening alone, and he promised me that I was a made man forever, and that he would do anything I ever needed of him. The news spread throughout the nation, and though I was the greatest artist anyway, it’s almost a shame how much of biography and myth seem to make the artist. Well, I didn’t complain. From there my career went from strength to strength; I naturally broke my promise and made many masterpieces out of the fantastic sights that I had seen around Lampton House. You can never trust an artist. The mystifying motifs sent even my most malodorous contemporaries into awed silence. Although I do wonder if there will be any repercussions if I ever end up once again at Lampton House.
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Photograph: Cinema Nova
by Joseph Bodkin
Online: Waiting for the Man I Love
A
byVawn Corrigan
romantic imagination can develop, like a dangerous fungus, when one is deprived of day-to-day exchange between the opposite sexes. By the time my mother went to work in London in the fifties, as a young woman of twenty, she was already blighted. How could she not be? Firstly, she had the temperament, generously described as ‘artistic’, and secondly, she came from a family of five girls who were sent to ‘Nazareth House’; an all-female boarding school. The man she loved - half celluloid and half paperback novel - had already been formed. Now all she had to do was wait for him to appear. ‘Flash! Bam! Alakazam!’ My mother shared a tiny basement apartment with her older sister. After work they went to the movies or they danced in ‘The Tottenham Royal’. It was the great era of dance. ‘You have no idea,’ she would tell me in my teens, looking at me with pity as I returned from a night of self-conscious solitary bobbing about, ‘how we danced, we really danced.’ In the fifties one needed a partner to dance. Short with prematurely receding hair, Bill Wesley, a friend of my aunt’s fiancé, was more James Cagney than Rock Hudson. However, with his stocky body he swung her easily about, her legs flew like two slim wings as ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’ and other tight rhythmic pieces fuelled their mutual dance passion. The next day, seated behind her typewriter in ‘Wadeson’s Secretarial Services’, her legs ached. Looking at old photos of her classic hourglass figure and radiant smile it’s clear she was a ‘looker’. ‘Dancing is a horizontal expression of a vertical desire’ as Frost put it. And that year many expressed their desires for her. But Bill was told by my aunt to abandon his hopes for my mother; she was waiting for the man she loved, and the check-list was specific. One night when dancing she noticed a man slouching against the wall, tall and slim as a runner. A lock of black hair fell over his forehead and he scanned the room coolly. He didn’t dance. As Bill and she went through their moves she felt the stranger’s eyes upon her deliciously. Her romantic imagination was at its most hazardous; Hudson was watching her. With few words, for he was never much of a talker, my father persuaded her to let him walk her home. When she described
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this to me years later, I responded by mockingly recounting Hudson’s affairs to her. At their wedding shortly afterwards, a glass clock arrived from Bill. As she had moved to Ireland my mother didn’t see him again. My aunt reported that he had embarrassed them by turning up one night crying. Poor Bill had been biding his time certain that once she had grown up a little, she would realize that they were well-suited. My father enjoyed drinking and watching rugby. He preferred to do both in male company. When he returned vivified and ready for the comfort of the domestic sphere - what he had married for - he was astonished to find a sullen wife in an unkempt house. They settled upon cyclical storms of outspoken hostility, broken up with blizzards of icy silence. We children navigated our way through these inescapable forces of nature, buoyed up by our own innate fountains of youthful joy. I was to be my mother’s confidante as she presumed that our sharing the same sex meant we would see things similarly. Occasionally when she was very down, she would say to me in hushed tones, so that my brothers wouldn’t hear: ‘I suppose it all worked out for the best. I wouldn’t have had you if I had of married Bill Wesley.’ I would blink, trying to imagine an alternative universe in which my mother was married to a man who danced and I didn’t exist. Impossible! I knew then that I was the rational one between us. Bill Wesley remained in the background, the rough arc of his life traced through my aunt. His wife, I was told by my mother, stayed slim because they carried on dancing after their marriage. I pointed out that my mother liked food - very much - but she insisted that the loss of her twenty-one year old form was down to my father’s sedentary ways. I passed the age that she had married as free of notions as I could possibly be. I felt sometimes that I had never been as young as my mother, ever. At present my mother has been unapologetically enjoying several years of widowhood. So, last week I was surprized to call into her house and find her crying, really crying. ‘He’s dead’ she said ‘Bill Wesley, he had a heart attack. He contacted me last May, his wife had died, he heard that your dad was gone too and asked could he come to Ireland and visit me.’ ‘You never told me.’ I said, surprizing myself by being irritated that she kept a secret, when I had so seldom shared mine. She got up and paced around her living room, past the pictures of her 51
grandchildren, and past her wedding photo. In the photo my father’s expression, despite the smile, was uneasy. Perhaps he was longing for the day to be over so that their simple life could begin – except it never did. How could he have known that his wife had married a version of a man that was made up from the lyrics of songs? ‘It might be better that you never met Bill. You are inclined to romanticize things. Maybe he turned into a cranky old bore. Anyhow, you can’t recapture the past you know.’ ‘You really don’t have a romantic bone in your body do you?’ I shook my head proudly.
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Online Photograph: [Untitled]
by Joseph Bodkin
Photograph: Cinema America, Before Occupation Shot on 35mm
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by Claudio Sansone
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Contributors Claudio Sansone
Claudio Sansone has published creative writing, translation and critical essays in Ireland and abroad. This is his first published photograph. It was taken hoping that someday the cinema would re-open, and now he is happy to dedicate it to the young people running the Cinema America Occupato!
David Gunning
A Senior Sophister student of English Literature and History. He is a Big House enthusiast, regularly travelling around Ireland photographing the ruins of these buildings.
Dean McHugh
A second year English and philosophy student from Lucan. The poem included here was written after ‘Rilke: The Apple Orchard’ on August 30, 2013.
Fionnán O’Connor
Born in Los Angeles to Irish parents and lives in Dublin. He is a graduate of the U.C. Berkeley English undergraduate program and the TCD Literary Translation mphil. The two poems published here are both drawn from The Aphasian Codex, a longer unfinished project. He is currently taking this year to finish the codex as well as a book on the revival of Irish single pot still whiskey and a verse translation of the sonnets, madrigals and poetic fragments of Michelangelo.
James Gregory
A visiting actuarial student from Bermuda.
Jim Clarke
A doctoral candidate in the School of English atTCD, where he is completing research on the aesthetics of Anthony Burgess as a scholar of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. He is a former playwright, croupier, tabloid newspaper reporter and whiskey barman. He once had his passport stolen on Fishamble Street.
Joseph Bodkin
Currently a Senior Freshman in Single Honours English.
Katie Black
A Senior Freshman English and Classics student from Dublin.
Liam Wrigley
Half man, half walking cup of tea, Liam likes books, James Taylor’s more sexual music, and that magical turtle island from Aladdin 3. [wrigleyl@tcd.ie]
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Lorna Ginnety
A Senior Sophister French student, who is drawn to many forms of graphic art. She tends to own more paintbrushes than socks due to the greater freedom and lesser precision associated with wet, fluid media. None of which is evident here however, or has anything to do with cold feet.
Michael Kemp
From Cabinteely, Dublin and is a Senior Freshman studying English. He writes poetry, short fiction, and is developing different ideas for a novel.
Michael Lanigan
Born in Kilkenny, he is currently a Junior Sophister student of History and writes regularly for Trinity News, Tn2 and TFR. His hobbies include reading, obsessing over Nicolas Winding Refn and performing one-man versions of ‘Grease’.
Ronan Murphy
A Trinity graduate currently based in Italy. He is lead singer with the Sweet Naive.
Sophie Meehan
A Junior Sophister student of English and Spanish. She writes prose as well as poetry and has been published elsewhere in The SHOp and Bohemyth. She has also written and directed theatre and is working on illustrated stories for children all ages. [meehansp@tcd.ie]
Susanna Galbraith
A Senior Freshman in English Studies. She has been the Editorial Assistant at the poetry and art magazine Abridged for two years and coordinates the Beginners Creative Writing class with the TCD Literary Society. In addition to poetry she has a number of creative interests including visual art and dance.
Vawn Corrigan
Before becoming a mature student in English Studies atTCDVawn Corrigan had many incarnations, everything from professional Bellydancer instructor to Kilmainham Arts Festival Director and much between. She currently runs Kilmainham Arts Club, sings and wonders in her final year in TCD what on earth she’s going to do next.
Zoë Boland
A Junior Freshman Student, studying English Literature & Latin.
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by Lorna Ginnety 58
www.icarus-magazine.com Š Trinity Publications 2013