Midfield Dynamo, page 2
‘There’s nothing sudden,’ he says, ‘I need the money is all. I’m six years from retirement, and I’ve nothing to get me there.’
‘Where will you live?’ I ask.
‘I have a sister.’
‘Where does she live?’ I ask.
‘Inland from here,’ he replies.
The following weekend, the weather is bright and breezy and the smell of seaweed drifts almost visibly around the shoreline. I call up to Leonard. He meets me at the door – his wavy white hair standing on end, like a static charge has entered him. He is stone drunk and falling around the place, as if he has not stopped drinking since I left. I imagine the sadness; it opens before me like a Burren fissure, full of wild and rare flowers. The house is turned upside down, the kitchen has been destroyed and the windows in the sitting room smashed. He slumps at the kitchen table and offers me a can of cheap beer. I put the cert down, and tell him it’s good to send to his solicitor. I understand, as he looks at me, that he has forgotten about the cert and that he has forgotten he wants to sell his house.
‘Have you a cigarette?’ he slurs. ‘I couldn’t find any fucking cigarettes.’
‘Can we get some cigarettes?’ he continues.
He can barely keep his head upright.
‘I’ll get them,’ I say. ‘You stay there.’
‘Let me come,’ he says, ‘I need some air.’
I look at him and measure the difficulty in carrying him to the village. He peers at me through a hundred yards of mist.
‘C’mon,’ I say, and I get him to his feet.
On our way down to the village, after stumbling countless times, he falls on his face. His nose cracks. As I lift him blood pours from his mouth. His septum has shifted across a nostril. We sway on the side of the road about two hundred metres from the village harbour. It is windy, the sea froths behind us, and I picture how this could look. He begins to moan. His eyelids open, so I drag him back to his house and put him to bed.
Next morning I call up. He is sitting at his kitchen table with an open bottle of perfume in front of him. He’s been sipping from it for I don’t know how long. He begins to mumble something. It may be a psalm.
‘I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world,’ and he looks up, waves and says, with whatever finality he can muster, ‘John, sixteen thirty-three …’
He takes a sip from the bottle.
‘I dreamt last night that I was bit by a dog,’ he says, ‘ferocious dream, must have been near the morning. The bite was so deep I woke up rubbing my arm. I jolted right off the bed, and fell. Then I felt my face, and wondered where it happened. So I searched the house for bloodstains, but found none. My face is in a terrible state.’
He rubs his chest, ‘You wouldn’t have a cigarette?’
I lift the perfume from the table and take a swig. I almost throw up. I put it back on the table and leave.
Next day, when I go to his house, Leonard is lying on his back on the floor of the kitchen. In the parting between his jumper and his corduroys I see his hip bones. They are coursed with blue veins throbbing like a snake that has eaten a large animal, one far too large for its own mouth, and the animal is curled up perishing among the snake’s long organs. I leave, and when I get back to the house I call my office and tell them it might be a few days before I make it in.
Next day, the landscape feels empty, like the houses have returned to the rocks. I go to Leonard’s. He is still lying on the floor, but has rolled his body into the recovery position. I survey the kitchen for any other signs of life.
Next day I call up to Leonard’s once more. Some presses have been opened and a few condiments and a bag of sugar have been pulled to the ground. A broken drinking glass is by the patio doors. He is lying, barely breathing, on the floor. There is sugar across his sunken lips and mounded in one of his claws. I kick his legs and throw water on his face. I sit him up and try to get some sugared water down his throat. After a few distant clicks, he gulps, then gulps again, then retches. I carry him back down to his bedroom and lie him in his bed. I ring an ambulance and when they arrive I tell them that I call up to visit him every now and then, and that I found him this morning in a terrible state on the kitchen floor.
5. Two Towers in a Forest
The walls of the terraced house in which I live are constructed with red brick. The house has a pitched slated roof, timber floors and two upstairs bedrooms. The front bedroom, where I sleep, faces out onto a square. Some nights this square can become quite noisy: dogs barking, distant helicopters, horses pounding stable doors, sirens, speeding cars, shouting … and on these occasions I push two old wax earplugs into my ears to drown out the sound. Then, lying there in bed, I begin to hear the blood pumping behind my ears, and I think of my grandfather, whom I never met, who died of a heart attack over seventy years ago while playing cards one afternoon with his young wife and his sisters at the kitchen table of his farmhouse, now derelict, that overlooks fields and a lake in the middle of the country. Then I think of the inherited weakness I must have in my heart and of the possibility that my heart will suddenly, violently stop, which causes me to think, what if my heart gives in as I sleep? and what is this pulsing object within me? and how can it truly be an object when it is part of me? And all of this confusion rehearses itself in my mind, over and over, until eventually it ebbs away in cascading throbs until I fall asleep and wake the next morning, exhausted, wondering what all the fuss was about.
I work as a draughtsman in a large bright engineering office. We design houses, bridges, churches and libraries. The engineers give me their hand-drawn sketches and I work them up into large formal drawings for issue to site. I sit beside another draughtsman. His name is Allen; a tall man, with blue eyes and a dark full beard. We both began working here on the same day, ten years ago – a clear Monday morning in August 1978. Allen and I consider the engineers in this office as artless types. We work our handsome tracing-paper drawings up in pencil, and neatly ink in these lines, then, if the engineer spots a mistake in the design, we have to take our razor blades out and scratch away the dried-up lines of ink and redraw the correct plan area, the crosssectional detail, the note, the specification – and the drawing is ruined. I often become quite angry and lose interest in the project at hand.
I am an only child. Once a month I go home to visit my mother, who lives in a council cottage at the end of an old cul-de-sac in the Midlands. My mother is beautiful. She has long dark hair even though she is quite elderly, and eyes so black it is a wonder she can see out of them. She feels alone these days and cries whenever I mention anything from the past. She misses my father, who died forty years ago, two years after I was born, while he was working as a welder on a Dutch vessel exploring for oil in the middle of the North Sea. It is my wish to make her happy again, to help her forget about the past for a moment, and with this task in mind I have begun work on a large project. It is to be built in the belly of a patch of forest that was once bequeathed to her. The forest is full of upright and fallen trees, and it smells almost of decay. I think it will die very soon – it will in a sense strangle itself to death. Before this happens I want to build two towers in the forest. Then I will bring my mother to see these towers, at night, when they are both lit up by dozens and dozens of high-strength lamps.
The day I moved into my terraced house I dismantled the two single beds in the spare bedroom upstairs, turning it into a studio for this project. Every moment I am not working in the engineers’ draughting office, I spend in the spare bedroom working on one of the towers – a ziggurat, more precisely. I will build it in balsa wood, in 360 interlocking parts, then I will transport the tower, piece by piece, to my mother’s patch of forest. It is a plot of 4.2 acres, and in the centre of it is a large concrete pad once used for storing silage. Upon that eight-hundred-square-metre pad I intend to assemble, to its thirty-metre height, the ziggurat.
The dimensions have been carefully considered so that the internal and external surface areas of my ziggurat will approach one one-millionth of the surface area of my mother’s patch of forest in mid-summer. By surface area I mean the area of each side of each leaf, each branch, each bole, each piece of grass, plus that of the ground these groaning things emerge from. On a number of visits to the forest last June, Allen and I – with measuring tapes, metre-square sheets of tracing paper, ladders, pulleys, rope, climbing gear, cameras, notebooks – carried out a survey of the place. The plot has on average one deciduous tree in every two square metres; the average height of a tree is 8.2 metres; the average trunk diameter is 311 millimetres. My calculations factor in the unevenness of the bark of the tree trunks and the smoothness of the branches. The average length of the secondary branches is 3.5 metres, the average number of secondary branches is forty-five per tree, the average number of leaves on each branch is fifty-six. The average leaf area on 22 of June last year, from a test sample of two hundred leaves, was 83.2 square millimetres. Grass: at the edges of the forest the blade count was 413 per square metre, the average area of one side of each blade was 12.5 square centimetres. In the inner parts of the forest the average blade count per square metre was 126, the average area of one side of each blade was 8.3 square centimetres. Moss: the area of moss was assumed to sit within the tree area and the forest-floor area. Flowers and miscellaneous weeds: add .05% of the area of grass.
From this Allen and I produced colour-coded maps relating to each of these layers of the forest so we could iterate its entire surface area in summer and, from this, discern – taking away the leaves and a percentage of the grasses – the area in winter.
Which leads me to the second tower: I intend to purchase a giant roll of electric-blue stage light film, the surface area of which will tend towards one one-millionth of the area of this same forest plot, mid-winter. Allen and I will go to a clearing in another part of my mother’s plot, unfurl this roll of film across the ground and, using a number of simple geometric propositions – each corner curled to the midpoint of the opposite edge – bend the material over and upon itself over and over, repeating these rules until the sheet, through its sheer stiffness, stands upright. At night I will install and shine huge stage lights through this unsure object, and disclose, through a build-up of electric-blue tone, the curved structure.
In the end I will have two huge sculptures sitting in different places in my mother’s forest, with surface areas that are relative to the difference in the forest between summer and winter, and expressed using my two preferred types of geometry: the grid-like units of the Cartesian, and the continuous surface curves and bends of the Topological.
Allen at first did not believe in this project, but the more I talked with him about it during our lunch breaks at work, and showed him my drawings and my corrugated cardboard models, and impressed upon him just how important I felt the project was and who it was for, the more he took to it, to the point that he became enthusiastically involved. He began calling over to my apartment more often to see how the models and designs were progressing and offering often to double-check my calculations. In short, this project has brought us from being mere workmates to ‘brothers-in-arms’, as he often says. One evening in the early stages of construction, we were driving to the hardware suppliers in the middle of the small Midlands town not far from my mother’s house. I needed to purchase some lengths of pine as supports for my sheets of balsa. As we went, and the distant street lights began to wink on the horizon, he turned to me and said, as if he had been considering this detail of the project for some time, but had been afraid to ask, ‘… And why balsa?’
To which I replied, ‘Workability and fragrance.’
The day we lifted into place the peak of the ziggurat, Allen stood and looked out over the top of the forest. The tips of the trees bobbed around us in a slow asynchronous way, and the ziggurat creaked gently below. It was a warm and sunny afternoon and all of the different scents of timber coursed up through the air. Allen placed his left foot onto the top step of the ziggurat and stood astride it for a while, like a mountaineer, gazing out over the land. He held this posture, closed his eyes and breathed deeply in through his nose, then out through his mouth, a number of times, until it became obvious that standing like this was tiring him out and his thighs, knees and calves were beginning to strain. The birds chirped nearby and the flies cut spiralling curves down into the sparkling forest below. Allen opened his eyes, took out his pouch of tobacco, rolled a cigarette, smoked it and sent a string of ragged grey-white hoops out into the heavens – they wobbled then expanded into obliteration. I took a seat on the top step of the ziggurat, and looked out over the tips of the trees, the farmland beyond, the lake, the distant hill.
Then, Allen uttered: ‘I think we have done something very fine here.’
I did not respond.
He asked me when I hoped to light up the forest and show these two giant constructions to my mother, and I said that I would do it as soon as I got some more lights and more generators to power them. I told him that he should not worry because I would certainly take him back here some day, before it all rots, or is blown asunder.
•
And this is where I am now, in the middle of a very dark night, in my van, hurtling with my mother to this godforsaken plot of forest. We have gin, blankets and food. We roll up to the forest entrance and I insist on blindfolding her. She is nervous and hesitant as I lead her through the damp darkness and halfway up the side of the ziggurat. As she and I falter up the steps she asks me what on earth it is I am doing. I sit her down, and tell her not to move and that she must leave the blindfold on until she hears me call for her. I excuse myself, chase down into the trees to start the generators, to power the stage lights that will illuminate my vast curling electric-blue film sculpture. The generators click, groan, hammer, whirr. Then the lights slowly come up, and the whole forest begins to glow and oh … it is glorious – the forest is blue-ness: blue lines, gleaming blue curves and shapes that break in senseless arcs across the trees, the branches, the leaves, the glowing sap. The blue light quakes up through the dark undergrowth, the branches, the leaves until it blasts outward, obliterating the sky, way, way up, where it rolls and radiates and sings, and I start to shudder and run through all the blinding gunk, strand and shadow, and call from the top of my irregular heart:
‘Mother! Mother! Come see what I have done!’
6. Trusses
I am lying on my back, staring up at the galaxies of damp spiralling across my bedroom ceiling. It is Wednesday. My wife, Eleanor, died thirteen months ago and I am still struggling for habit and will. My youngest child, Samantha, a purposeful woman, visits me twice a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays, on her way to veterinary college, and during those calls the bottom half of the house fills with warmth. Elizabeth, my eldest, whom I visit irregularly, lives in a fine semi-detached house in a pleasant part of Dublin city with an attentive husband and two vibrant children. My eldest son, Allen, lives in the next county over, but I have seen him only twice since Eleanor’s funeral. He says that he can’t bear the house without her sounds in it. I can’t bear my bed without her small feet in it. Then there is Foster, my youngest son, who works as an engineer in Abu Dhabi and has not been home in three years. Recently, he has written a series of terse letters to me, talking about his work and his accommodation. There are only glimpses of heat in his notes, but these are enough to tell me that he has developed an unhealthy hatred of this country and is becoming unwell. He never asks after me or Allen or the girls, or mentions his mother. I received another letter yesterday, telling me he wants to become a writer, not as a career, but so as to ‘invent routes out of my subconscious,’ he says. He was the last to move out, and I often wonder what effect this had on him – living in this bungalow watching his siblings leave him to it.
Every morning, these days, I wake to the same memory. Eleanor and I – when we first had Elizabeth – would often meet on workday afternoons for tea in a small bright café in the middle of town. Elizabeth, who was a beautiful and quiet child, would lie there, then sit, then stand and talk and point at things. I had begun studying at the nearby technical college for a diploma in management, and my hours at the plant – where I spent all my working life – had to be shared with my study time and it sometimes left me less organized. One afternoon, I forgot about our usual arrangement to meet in the café. When I got home that night, Eleanor, who was pregnant then with Allen, told me that Elizabeth had missed me, that she’d stood on the sofa by the window of the café for a whole half hour, looking out the window and speechlessly wondering where I was. Next day I was coordinating a delivery of four two-tonne spools of copper wire to Dublin. After I’d waved off the loads I went inside, sat at my small desk in my cramped cold office and was overcome, for a moment, with a feeling of wretchedness for having somehow conspired to place such a delicate point of awareness into the vast expanse of my daughter’s mind.
My hands are cold. I should get out of bed and light a fire or else I’ll smother myself in these maudlin thoughts. The damp patch in the ceiling is so bad I can see right through to the underside of the timber truss. This whole ceiling will need to be repaired. Perhaps the roof felt is rotten too.
I should call Carl for some help. It’s been forty years since we built this house, and fifty since we sat in the same classroom. The last time I saw him was on the street in town a few weeks after Eleanor, Elizabeth and I had moved in, and he told me he was emigrating to Boston. I remember being surprised and a little hurt that he had not even mentioned the possibility of making such a move during our time building the house together.
