Midfield Dynamo, page 3
There was one hot afternoon when we were taking a break on the ridge of the roof, the angular planes below us almost fully patterned out in waves of brown and dark-brown tiles, and as he rolled up a cigarette and smoked it, he asked me if I had ever considered leaving. I told him, as the breeze frisked his short blond hair, that I had not. I probably said something like, ‘Sure what more would you want?’ We had played soccer together for years, so we were more or less shunned by the Gaelic footballers in the town – ‘the devout savages’, as Carl called them. That hazy afternoon sitting on the ridge of the roof we could see that the two large chimney stacks of the new factory, being carefully constructed on the outskirts of the town, were almost complete; and the tower cranes either side were beginning to descend, in folds. Carl finished his cigarette, flicked the stub toward a rusted barrelful of water in what would eventually become a flower bed and surveyed my plank-strewn site. I feel sure I saw in his face then the faintest flicker of boredom, but at the time I thought nothing of it, and merely suggested we finish out the roof.
I get up, shower and walk through the house to the kitchen, light the range and the living-room fire and drive to the filling station to buy some sausages and a newspaper. When I get home I fish my black phonebook out of a bottom drawer in the living-room dresser. Old colour photographs of Eleanor and me on a package holiday in Spain spill out – shiny waves of dated yellows, reds and blues. I flick through the phonebook and find a number for Carl’s sister. I dial the number but it does not ring so I try a friend of a friend, Patrick, who, last I heard, had left the construction trade to buy a large pub in Ballsbridge. I call the pub, get his mobile number and call him, and for almost a minute he has no idea who I am. I tell him I am looking for our old friend Carl Jones, and he falls silent, apologizes and tells me that Carl moved home from Boston eight years ago, set up a demolition business, but passed away a few years later. He tells me it was a stroke, but there is something uncomfortable in the way he says it. I ask if Carl had married, and Patrick gives me a number for his wife, Nance, an American lady whom he believes still lives in their home somewhere in County Westmeath.
I call Nance and Carl’s number. The phone rings many many times. I eventually talk with a woman I assume to be Nance and tell her who I am. She enquires as to how I knew Carl, so I tell her we went to school together and that he helped to build my house. When I ask if I may call over, she says, ‘Of course.’
Next day is showery and bright and I’m driving through the rolling farmland of Westmeath. The directions Nance gave me were vague, but she seemed quite certain I would find the place: ‘It is a fine big old house,’ she said.
The land opens. The tall hedges either side of the road splay, thin out and are replaced by cut-stone walls drawing adamant lines on the countryside. It has stopped raining and the sunlight has reached back around the dissipating clouds; the shadow of the wall aligns with the curves of the road as I go. The land rises around me and I see their house – an old misshapen three-storey thing that sits with what seems like an unearned regality about a quarter-mile in from the road. It is surrounded by small trees and undulating pastures. As I drive up the bumpy and threadbare entranceway I notice a row of dilapidated stables to the rear. At the front there’s a new conservatory extension, populated with two large sofas, some wicker chairs, lamps, patterned throws and tall well-cared-for plants. A newspaper collapses and a woman’s head appears over the back of the couch. I get out of my car as Nance comes to the conservatory door. She opens it and stands there: ‘You must be Liam.’
‘I am,’ I say.
Nance is a small person, with short dyed dark hair. As we enter the bright conservatory and sit down, it becomes clear that Carl never spoke to her of me, or that she has forgotten whatever he might have said, and so I give her an account of our friendship. Nance then describes to me how she and Carl met in Boston, how handsome and energetic he was. She tells me about where they lived, her career as a pharmacologist, their three children and how Carl’s business grew through the eighties and nineties until he received an enormous contract as part of the ‘Big Dig’, to knock and excavate a quarter-mile of Boston’s downtown. ‘That contract paid for this house,’ she says in her soft New England accent. She is intelligent and effusive, and as she speaks I try to imagine her and Carl together, but I cannot.
Then I look at her, and I ask how it was Carl died.
She falls silent and her light-blue eyes become tearful. Then, gesturing, she tells me that once they came back here and he began working again he unravelled: ‘And with all of the kids still in Boston getting on with their lives,’ she says, ‘he began to feel “rudderless”.’ To which she pauses and I can hear the ticking of a clock from somewhere in the adjoining hallway.
I peer around at the decorative Victorian style of the room and say to her that I would have gladly visited.
She looks at me, and puts one hand into the palm of the other. Then she brings me to a framed photograph on a piece of wall between two windows facing out onto the lush shining fields beyond. The photograph depicts a giant digger on a dusty street, framed out by a twinkling Boston skyline. On the flank of the digger are printed the words ‘Jones Works’ in dynamic green-and-black capitals.
While she looks to the photograph she tells me that once his work in Ireland dried up he had to let all of his employees go, ‘and this hurt him,’ she says. Then she tells me that to stem this hurt he took on himself any jobs that did come in ‘with the last of his machines’, and she looks down at her hands – she strikes me as a person who looks at her hands often – and then she says, her voice gently wavering, ‘I’d ask him to let someone else do those jobs … but he’d just round on me and tell me he’d not sit in a dead office all day.’
She turns from the photograph as if it hurts her to look at it for too long, and she describes to me that, near the end, Carl had begun fixating on ‘innocuous things’ around the house – ‘the trees, the shrubs, the ditches’ – and that he didn’t eat or sleep well … ‘I’d often hear him pacing up and down the stairs at night,’ she says.
Nance then asks me to follow her through the house, which is dark in the way of thick rubble-walled houses of this vintage. She leads me back to the kitchen window and points to a small hill on the brow of which is the lower third of a tree that was once a fine chestnut or sycamore or oak, something expansive, old and lung-like.
‘That’s where he had his stroke,’ she says, and she then explains to me how one afternoon when she was out, that Carl, with his wrecking ball, had tried first to demolish the stables before he had a go at this tree, and that he was eventually come upon by their neighbour, a farmer, ‘a nice man called Mr Holland,’ she says, ‘who was driving past when he found Carl slumped over the steering wheel, with the tree bent in two and the engine puttering out.’
I look at the tree trunk and imagine Carl up there swinging this enormous metal ball at it, trying to get purchase on the thing, and I begin to smile; then my smile broadens until I almost chuckle. I cough and try to look the other way before I give myself up and really laugh out loud, but I need not have been concerned, Nance is already laughing quietly beside me, she has the back of her hand to her mouth and her eyes are streaming, but she is certainly laughing, and this sets me off – I guffaw, I cackle, and Nance is shaking as if suppressing some prodigious mirth. I realize that she is very handsome laughing like this, but then her hand comes away from her mouth and her face contorts, and from her mouth comes a full broad howl and by now we are both not so much laughing as ululating, bent over double, like two wind-up toys bellowing out horrible demented shrieks that echo around the kitchen, to the point where I, for a moment, have forgotten what exactly I am laughing at, and I am afraid that one of us will die, or that I will accidentally urinate, or worse, that we will stay in this kitchen laughing in this convulsed fervour forever, gulping brutally for breath, so I take a hold of a chair that I can barely see, to try to steady myself, but also hoping that the inanimate object will somehow neutralize this surging elation. I grab the back of the chair with both hands, as hard as I can, until I see the ten whites of my knuckles before me and I dare not look away from them until I can feel our laughter falter and stop.
We pull ourselves together, and the world subsides once more, and Nance, who now looks strangely calm, as though she has been quietly watching me laugh alone all this time, hands me a glass of water, like a dental nurse would a patient, and I drink from it, and we look back out the window. I breathe deeply for a number of minutes, and after some time, just before I begin to feel very tired, I ask her might she ever return to Boston.
She chooses not to answer.
We stand in the quiet midday glimmer of the kitchen for a while looking out at the tree stump and the wet green hill and the birds whirling around and descending onto the electricity wires that draw drooping parallels over the base of the hill and beyond.
‘Do you have a photograph of him?’ I ask.
‘I do,’ she says, ‘lots.’
‘Could I have one, do you think?’
‘Of course,’ she replies.
That evening, when I arrive home, I am reminded that it is Thursday: there is a note from Samantha on the table, a single blue question mark written on the back of an electricity bill. I light a fire then call her and tell her I was seeing some friends, and I take the silence on the other end of the phone to indicate that she is about to ask me ‘which friends’, but instead she tells me about her coursework and that she has a birthday card for Allen’s wife that I should sign. She says she’ll see me on Tuesday, and then she’s gone.
As I make a ham-and-cheese sandwich I think about Foster and how I struggle to imagine his predicament off out east in Abu Dhabi. So I sit and write a short letter to him. I tell him about Carl, how I knew him and how he died, and I enclose the small photograph of him in the envelope, in the hope that Foster might intuit something for himself from Carl’s demise, or at least, in my writing this letter he will know that I still care for him.
When I first saw this photograph, while standing with Nance in their shadowy hallway, I found myself expanding my memory of the shape of Carl’s young face into the form of the face in the photograph, a healthy middle-aged tanned and happy face, with thinning hair and the same blue eyes I think I remembered from the street in town. Time in that moment sullenly revealed itself as an invisible truss, spanning between moments; but I have now lost interest in what is propping it up. I seal the small envelope, address it and lean it against the sugar bowl in the middle of the table to remind myself to post it in the morning.
3. Two Silences: One from the front and one from the back of my head
1. A buried forest of ferns
Once, a shelter to protect soldiers from falling rocks was commissioned, designed and built for an army barracks in Gibraltar. It was an oversized concrete pergola for officers to walk under to take some air. The engineers charged with designing the shelter found it a strenuous undertaking. The most pressing questions at the outset were: at what height might the largest rock fall from? What weight might that rock be? And what then might be the force at impact? It proved impossible for the engineers to calculate to a satisfactory degree of rigour. They made site visits to the barracks, carrying out desk studies of the tectonic and recent geological history of the place. They made models; they developed 3D computer versions of the location too – clunking animated dodecahedrons bounced down dark dimensionless terrains – then, exasperated, the engineers invited a team of statisticians to examine the probability of great movement in the landscape, but nothing would allay their fears of under-design. They settled instead on the army’s codes of recommendation for bomb shelters and designed the structure for medium-range enemy ballistics.
For years, the rocks – great irregular igneous things – would fall and deflect off. Then the shelter outlived its design life and the sea air infiltrated the concrete and attacked the reinforcement within, rusting and expanding it, and causing the surface of the concrete to chip, break and spall.
The army decided to patch the shelter up, and the day the local contractor, a young man called Alvaro, began his repairs to the roof, a large rock came loose from the top of the hill behind. It tumbled down the ragged syncline and, missing him by inches, thudded horribly against the edge of the roof. The rock cracked open. One half keeled over and thumped dustily to the ground while the other yawned back onto the roof and wobbled there for many moments like a giant upturned turtle. Gathering himself, Alvaro spied in the centre of the rock a delicate index of a fossil of a fern, and in the midst of this ancient cyanotype was a white drawing of an insect’s skeleton caught mid-flight between the fronds of the fern.
What a pretty and serene scenario that must once have been, Alvaro thought, as he mopped his brow. He pushed his thinning dark hair away from his eyes and squinted skyward at some circling birds; then, feeling an unearthly rumble developing behind him, he turned to a deluge of black rocks galloping down the hill. He leapt from his ladder and dived under the shelter. As these small planets pummelled overhead, bouncing off the roof and pounding emphatically onto the soil beyond, Alvaro wondered if all of these rocks were carrying in their centres such beautiful stilled moments as the one he had just spied, and if so has a forest of ferns ever made such a racket, and, he wondered, if this might have been how it once rained on the earth – giant thundering drops hammering the undergrowth of his paleolithic psyche.
Once the tip of the hill had all but slumped itself onto the shelter, the place fell quiet and Alvaro emerged, covered in dust and dirt and grit. As he clambered onto the roof of the shelter – to survey the new embankment of boulders below, all the while carefully patting himself down – a small rock, about the size of his shoulder blade, dislodged itself from the top of the hill. It skipped down frivolously, hopped, flew, then arrowed straight at the back of his head. One crescent of a second later with the army officers running out in file and horseshoeing around the shelter, Alvaro, with a clop, spun like an acrobat in a circus, flipped a three-quarter circle and landed on his back – his head two Janus-like crania, one of bloodied bone the other of gleaming calico. With a trickle of blood emerging from the corner of his mouth, he, before all of his thoughts disgorged into stillness, thought one final thought: ‘This heat, this work, this dreadful salt and dust … tonight I’ll drink that cool bottle of beer; it is somewhere in the back of the fridge beside the cherry tomatoes.’
Four junior army officers carried Alvaro’s body back into their mess. He was brought home, tidied up, then buried in a cemetery outside of town. The shelter was decommissioned and eventually the barracks closed. Much later again the army abandoned Gibraltar, and the lands, with little ceremony, were given back to Spain.
Centuries from then, and after many further rockfalls, the shelter was completely covered over, buried under many tonnes of rocks and soil, and the landscape around it was altered too. In the shelter’s new subterranean world it finally came apart completely, the last few columns disintegrated and the reinforcement within crumbled into mere piles of red filings, and with them, almost with a sigh, the last shreds of the engineers’ concerns disappeared from the face of the earth.
2. Twelve beaches way off the coast of Portugal
I once worked as a sound recordist on mid-budget independent films. While I was working on these projects I used to often disappear for a day or two, at the end of each shoot, and make my own set of field recordings. Then I developed tinnitus in my right ear and had to leave the industry. I retrained as an engineer.
One night last week I worked until almost five, overseeing a concrete pour on a site – a soon-to-be printing works – miles outside of town. I woke early the next morning, and unable to get back to sleep I took to the couch in the sitting room of my apartment in central Dublin, listened to the traffic and dozed. When I am tired like this the distant ringing sound of my tinnitus often reappears and causes me discomfort. I could tell on that morning that if I didn’t get some rest I would be revisited by this sickly feeling of noise. Then, while I was lying on my couch in my apartment I thought, for the first time in years, about a particular group of recordings I’d made over the course of a changeable day on a broad beach a few miles east of Carvoeiro, a town in southern Portugal not far from the Spanish border. I was in a low mood when I made them because my tinnitus had got so bad that I knew I couldn’t trust myself to work in the industry much longer.
I rose from my couch, went to my desk and searched my laptop for these recordings; then, having found them in an old folder, I hooked my laptop up to my amp and speakers and set up these twelve recordings so they played in a relaxing continuous loop. I reclined on my sofa and closed my eyes.
The rhythmic churning of the sea waves came up, filling my sitting room with sound. I opened my eyes, then closed them once more and with this I fell into somnolence as the pace and intensity of the waves grew and fell and at times hushed in long barely audible crashes. The twelve tracks began morphing into something complete but whose distinct parts I was still able to discern. As the gentle shifts in tone and duration of each track clarified, an irregular dodecagon-shaped island in the middle of a twinkling ocean gradually took form in my mind’s eye. The island was more an absence framed out by twelve edges of frothing white waves breaking around and over it. I watched this dark island pulsating there below me, the water bending into the black at its centre, as if these fabricated flows were themselves being swallowed forever by time.
In the fourth track – a five-minute recording made at midday when the sea at that beach near Carvoeiro must have been very still – I noticed the sound of a machine in the distance. I didn’t remember hearing a machine while recording it. I listened errantly, waiting for the track to loop around again, and each time this track came round, this sound became more prominent, to the point that I soon found myself focussed on it entirely, separating it, then amplifying it in my mind until it drew me mathematically away from this trembling twelve-sided absence in the sea and towards the screaming source of this whine, and with this my mind’s eye arrived at the oil-rig design classes I took many years ago while in university in Aberdeen.
