I pictured my lecturer, a thick-set balding man with an American accent, moving in super slow-motion, his arms and hands blending into gestures made towards a blackboard, he informing us in a profound and sonorous voice of the problems that emerge when the frequency of the sea wind and waves and the natural frequency of an oil rig, sitting in among them, became resonant with each other. He’d walk over and back in front of this blackboard, covered in chalk scribbles, arrows, geometrics and glyphs, stating that this resonance was a sign of considerable danger, because if the frequency of any wave at any time or any gust of wind matched the natural frequency of any part of the oil rig – a beam, a column, a derrick – then this element would fall into a dangerous oscillatory vibration that required special welds and bolts to control. He said, if you missed one of these instances, the entire structure and everyone on it would be in great danger, and if anything drastic happened, it would be your fault and you would be charged in court, he would say slowly, with manslaughter.

  When he lectured in this calmly macabre way, I’d dream later those nights of a young man sleeping in his bunk on an oil rig. This young man would start awake in the middle of the night to the sound of something whining, breaking, followed by a shunt, and his stomach flipping with panic. And in my recurring dream he’d lurch from his bunk and chase to the green exit light above the bunk-room door, but before he’d get there he’d be taken to the ground by one of his roommates, a senior rigger, who’d pin him to the cold metal floor and sit on him, and the young man would gyrate wildly underneath the older man, trying to flee, and the larger older man would smack the younger man in the face and whisper to him, ‘You are dreaming again, please wake up, son, before you wake the others too. You know there’s still a tonne of welding to do on the north leg, so go back to bed and quit this fucking around, son, and sleep, and don’t worry; this thing is going nowhere. Now, are you okay? Are you tranquil? Are you going to go back to sleep?’ And the younger man would nod, tears streaming down his face, and the older man would say into the crying man’s ear, ‘Good lad, don’t worry – you’ll be back again on the mainland in a few days.’

  Then, the older man would lead the younger man, shivering, back to his bunk and tuck him in.

  He’d return then to his own bed where sleep would eventually come to him too, but only in those deep and dark places plumbed most deeply and darkly in the moments just before he woke again in the morning.

  MIDFIELD

  7. Oregon Grape Tree

  Every morning I take a tram into town. The carriages are always full of ghosts, their morbid lovers and lawyers. I find it a hurtling distressing journey.

  This morning, finding it too much, I disembarked three stops early and walked the rest of the way into town. I visited the pound shop for a fan to blow air onto an Oregon grape tree I’d purchased a few days before. I want to look at how the tree – it’s prickly and about three feet tall – will respond if I fasten all its leaves to these dozen or so lab stands I’ve positioned around it. One leaf will remain unrestrained. The response of the tree to these conditions will appear through the bobbing of the free leaf; and it is these movements I am curious to see.

  I ambled over to an ancient flower seller on the corner and asked for a clay pot of begonias.

  ‘Okay, love,’ she croaked, and as she turned I grabbed a rose and ran and ran until I got home. I put the rose into a pint glass of water, and put the pint glass of water onto the middle of my kitchen table, and, while sitting there in the shafts of late-morning light – considering the crimson petals slowly coiling out towards me – I thought two things:

  1. This is beauty. Yes?

  2. Eat the flower.

  So I ate the flower till my mouth bled.

  Then I drank the water and went to bed and dreamt of my great and unforgettable love, Margaret, who had black hair, green eyes and a long and graceful neck.

  •

  When I rouse it is dark. I wander into the next room and turn on my lamps. I fine-tune the arrangement of my tree, my lab stands and my many clasps. I hook the tree up and turn the fan on. The tree just shivers, except for the free leaf, which oscillates happily in the air. I shine a lamp onto the leaf, pin a sheet of graph paper to the wall behind it and track the shadow of the leaf tip with my pencil. The line I draw is patternless but quite beautiful. I place the sheet into a folder, produce another sheet and place it behind the leaf, turn on the fan and trace another line, then another, then another, then another. Again, all patternless but quite beautiful.

  I get the tram into town the next morning. It is full and smashes into some cars and a bus. People spill out onto the footpaths and road, some shaking, some holding their heads. I continue on foot to the call centre where I work. I sneak into my cubicle, take out the Golden Pages and begin to dial.

  That evening, while sitting at home on my tiny settee, smoking a cigarette and watching the evening news, my phone rings.

  ‘John,’ I say, ‘how’re you, mucker?’

  ‘Good good,’ he replies. ‘Thinking of making a trip down the country on Saturday, if ye fancy …?’

  I ask him where.

  ‘The centre of Ireland,’ he declares.

  ‘There is a centre?’ I say, through a plume of smoke.

  ‘I’ve wanted to go for years,’ he says.

  It is the following Saturday and John and I are driving around warrens of country roads trying to find the tower of stones that, he tells me, marks the centre of Ireland.

  He takes a corner and accelerates up a hill. The land undulates alongside us as the sun flickers through the hedges.

  John is married and has two young children. He is a good few years older than me, but we get on very well. I used to deliver phonebooks with him. I think he asked me to help because he was once friends with my older brother who has long left to work on the oil rigs off the west coast of Australia. I expect John enjoyed our untaxing chatter; it must have eased the boredom, and kept him somehow near to my brother.

  A couple of times a week, I’d receive a text from him telling me to be at such-and-such a corner at such-and-such a time, and he’d roll up in his white Transit van and we’d drive on to some quiet suburb on the edge of Dublin. He’d hand me a high-vis vest, then slide back the door revealing a wall of phonebooks. We’d gather up ten at a time and run around like thieves dropping them, with slaps and claps, at doors and creaking gates. One evening – it had been raining hard – I wandered up to a red-brick house on the corner of a street in Rathfarnham: one of those Edwardian things that had been carved up into dark-windowed bedsits.

  The front door was ajar. I heard a growl, then a bark, then the scrambling of paws on lino. I ran, and a black-and-white dog, whose breed I could not make out, lurched after me, chasing me down the driveway and out the front gate, me hurling books at it and it barking me further down the street, on and on, before it slowed, turned and trotted back up to the house.

  I, hands on knees, heaved for breath until I noticed across the road a dozen schoolgoers, only a few years younger than me. They were staring. I tore off my high-vis vest and walked back to John’s van, got in and told him nothing of the incident.

  It was around then that Margaret and I finished. She left one day without a word. I came back to our apartment after work and I could tell in the stillness of the place that something was amiss. I chased to the bedroom, calling for her. I stood at the bedroom door unable to make out what was different until I realized that the only objects left in the room were mine. I pictured her picking our belongings apart, stalking around our room, separating and bagging her things, over and over until, with my eyes watering up, I took a mule-kick to the chest that launched me at great speed back out the door, crashing through the wall behind, through the neighbour’s walls and through their neighbour’s walls, on and on, crashing through walls, until I landed on my back out on the street, covered in dust, about half a block away. I haven’t heard from her since. I feel like it’s up to her to contact me, but she never has.

  For months afterwards I collapsed into self-pity – drinking and smoking myself into a maudlin hoop each night – and I’d turn up surly and often late for John. He tried to lift my spirits, but we ended up getting less and less work done and he contacted me less often until he stopped texting altogether. Then, after almost a year, I eased off the drinking and smoking, returned to these small experiments of mine, got a job in this telesales centre and after a while I reconnected with John.

  •

  I count twenty-six petrol stations along this stretch of country road. As we drive I can see the hedges either side rustle in a breeze that seems to carry in it, gusts. After agreeing on how lost we are, John relents, pulls onto a station forecourt and steps into the shop. Moments later, a skinny aged man in navy overalls emerges with John and points across the road to the fields in the distance. On our way down I wanted to tell John about my latest experiment with the Oregon grape tree, but the way he looks at me of late, when I do update him on my extra-curricular projects, tells me that he ascribes to the uselessness of these experiments a certain childishness.

  I lean forward and look out the front windscreen. The sky is massive down here. I have an urge to draw an infinitely large frame around it, then move everything one metre to my left.

  John jumps in.

  ‘Over there,’ he says, pointing at the buckling horizon.

  Ten minutes later we are a few miles off the main road. It’s funny; in just ten minutes there is no one around and the land has emptied out – no cars, nothing – like we have travelled back in time to an Ireland from a hundred years ago. We approach a rusting steel gate leading into a field. Straggled herds of both brown and black-and-white cows mooch harmlessly before us. John produces two plastic bags from his pocket, bends over and ties them around his shoes. He runs a hand through his thick dark hair and looks to me, his broad and handsome face gormless with anticipation. I imagine he’d have been excitable company as a youngster.

  ‘It looks smaller from here,’ he says, leaping the gate, and we walk up the luscious hill to the stone tower at the summit. The cows, in their calm confusion, can’t decide between dispersing or gathering around us.

  The view from the hill is lovely: endless green fields edged out with dense rectilinear hedgerows. The breeze picks up and tosses our hair as we stand there gawping at the land. John fills and empties his lungs vigorously beside me, for almost a minute, to the point that I fear he might trigger an attack. He stops, pauses to say something significant, but – and this is why I love him – he doesn’t. He just circumnavigates the tower that those British surveyors put up to orient us, all those years ago. John then slaps its surface, leans into it, as if he, the Samson of Smithfield, will topple it. I step to one side, pick up a stone and chuck it down the hill. It arcs, burrows, then disappears into the long grass like a terrified bird that has suddenly forgotten how to fly.

  A farmer appears at the gate below and waves amiably up at us. He whistles the gate open and drives his old red roofless tractor in. The cows drift expectantly towards him. One piebald to the left of the herd breaks off and it walks with a strange determination through the fields leading west, on and on, until I lose sight of it.

  The strange calmness of this place rests on me, and I take it easily. I picture John and myself as aimless black outlines on the summit. This place seems to invite at once purpose and total aimlessness, and I imagine, if I stayed here long enough, that once the feeling of purpose disappeared, all that would be left to do would be to leave, or sink to new depths of aimlessness, into a Good Friday of aimlessness.

  The farmer clatters off to a distant field where he parades up and down spreading his gunk. The cows still follow. The engine throws revolutions up into the sky, thirstily, hoarsely over and over, breaking, louder, then receding, like waves on the shore of an inland lake on a quiet day.

  John appears. ‘The country air,’ he says. ‘There’s something to it.’

  We look out for some moments, then he shifts his weight in a way that might be called awkward.

  ‘So I bumped into your Margaret there recently,’ he says, finally. He coughs.

  I turn to him. He coughs once more, but won’t meet my gaze.

  ‘She ask for me?’ I say.

  ‘No,’ he says, ‘I mean … No, she didn’t. It’s probably a few years for her now …’

  We look at the land. I try to picture the centre point of the tower behind me.

  ‘It seems she’s pregnant anyway,’ he says.

  ‘Oh,’ I say.

  ‘With some lad from Cork,’ he continues.

  The bags at John’s feet rustle as he shifts his weight once more. I look over my shoulder as the sun comes through; it draws a thick line on the ground, out from the base of the tower. Then the tower disappears leaving only its shadow. I turn back.

  ‘Did you bring me all the way down here to tell me this?’

  ‘I wasn’t going to mention it,’ he says. ‘Then, in the van I thought I should, in case you ever saw her.’

  I look at John and I can’t think of anything to say and nor it seems can he, so we wander back down to his van and leave.

  As I peer out at the evening light passing, my stomach aches at the thought of her. Then, I turn to John. He’s focussing on the road.

  ‘She’s a bit young to be having kids though, no?’ I say.

  ‘Ah, not so young anymore, I wouldn’t say,’ he replies.

  •

  A few weeks later and I’m on the tram into town. It is early on a Saturday and the tram is peaceful and peopled only with a few shoppers and their quietly excited young children. I have brought the Oregon grape tree with me. I decided once I brought my experiment to a close that I ought to bring the plant back to the shop and see if they might take it and sell it to someone else, and perhaps even return to me a small percentage of what I spent.

  I disembark and cross the tramlines and a few of the streets leading to the shopping centre, but I realize when I arrive that the plant shop opens later than usual on a Saturday. Beside it the health food store is opening up, admitting the first few customers – young men with long hair and tattoos down their forearms. I don’t want to lumber this tree around with me all day so I decide instead to wait the half-hour or so before opening. I buy a take-away coffee from the newsagents a few doors down and return to the bench. I flick through old text messages on my phone while listening to the thrum of the shopping centre coming to life.

  Then, feeling a strange pull, I lift my head and I can see Margaret approaching the health food store. She is pushing a trolley along, looking at her phone. Her hair is still dark and long but she looks very large and she seems to have aged in her beautiful face. My chest tightens.

  Something old then lifts into my throat. ‘Margaret,’ I croak.

  ‘Margaret.’

  She looks up from her phone, but her face alters in a way that saddens me. She looks away.

  ‘Margaret,’ I say once more, and I stand, pick up my Oregon grape tree and approach her.

  Her green eyes soften, and I can’t tell if it is because seeing me has made her sad, or if she has simply been reminded of someone she forgot about a long time ago.

  ‘Why did you go?’

  It just comes out. She looks back to her phone. It is buzzing – she silences it. She looks to the tree. Then, she looks to me.

  ‘Your dreams, Lee, your dreams; they scared me,’ she says, pushing strands of her hair from her earnest face, ‘and I didn’t want to tell you, because you always seemed so unworried when you woke, but when you slept, you scared me, Lee; you’d leap up, stand on the bed, crouch at its end, swinging your fist around at something that seemed terrible, and I thought you might eventually settle, but you never did, and I decided that if I wanted a baby, and I always wanted a baby, that I could never have a baby with a man that dreams like you.’

  I can see in her face that she is serious.

  ‘Why didn’t you wake me?’

  Her phone buzzes once again and she silences it once more. A family passes behind her. I can hear the checkout in the bright health shop ding.

  ‘I didn’t want,’ she says, putting her phone away, ‘whatever was in your dreams to come into your life. I thought if I just left, that it was the kindest thing I could do.’

  I lean forward and place the Oregon grape tree into her trolley and tell her that I’d like her to have this small plant.

  ‘It does well in the light,’ I say.

  ‘Oh,’ she replies.

  She looks at the tree, then she looks to me, then back to the tree once more, and I can tell that she will take it out of politeness but that it will almost certainly never see the inside of her home.

  I remove it.

  ‘It’s hideous,’ I say, ‘isn’t it? I only realized that when I saw it there in your trolley.’

  ‘It is,’ she smiles, and for a painful moment I can feel something of the easy humour that we once shared return; and when the pain passes something softens between us too.

  ‘Can I touch it?’ I ask, nodding towards her enormous belly.

  And after a pause, she looks to me, and says, ‘Of course.’

  I put my hand onto her belly and I can feel a lovely warmth, but it is not a warmth that has anything to do with me, so I remove my hand.

 

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