Midfield Dynamo, page 5
‘I hope you keep well,’ I say, as she lifts her phone from her pocket, it lighting up and buzzing once more.
She leans forward and gives me a peck on the mouth; then she walks off, rolling her trolley towards the bustling health shop.
I place the Oregon grape tree between two benches and realize as I step back that it suits well these somewhat austere surrounds of echoing chrome and glass. I look again into the health shop, but Margaret is now typing something into her phone.
•
That evening, sitting on my settee – troubled by how Margaret described my sleep – I begin to wonder if I still behave in this way. I decide to devise an approach in the hope of learning more about it.
I think:
1. Buy a camera and record my sleeping.
2. Try to remember a dream.
Then I decide that if I carry out option 1, what I see might frighten me away from carrying out option 2 and this might leave me stranded with – or worse, between – myselves. So I decide that option 2 is a more thoroughgoing approach and that it will yield deeper meaning and may even some day lead me back to confidently exploring option 1.
When I wake each morning the following week, I try to remember the dreams I’ve just left, but all I get in that strange dozing period of the day is a return to the sunny uplands of things that are not dreams, but mere aches made visual.
Then, one morning, a few days later, when lying in bed I decide to wait until I’ve had my first coffee and cigarette of the day before trying to recall my dream from the night before. So I rise, shower, and while I brew a coffee in my kitchen I smoke my morning cigarette. It is a Thursday and the glow of the beckoning weekend, I reckon, will surely help my remembrances sink more easily into the night before. I sit at my table and close my eyes and breathe and try to think back into what it was I dreamt. I can see nothing, and it occurs to me that perhaps the night before was a peaceful one and that there are no dreams troubling me enough to remember. I open my eyes to the kitchen clock ticking towards nine. I close my eyes once again and decide instead to remember back into my dreams through whatever sources of physical pain I most often wake to in the morning.
‘Easy,’ I say, ‘my chest and my right fist.’
So I close my eyes and try to remember back into the place of my dreams through the dull throb that I feel each morning in my sternum and the heel of my right fist. It occurs to me that if my fist and my chest are painful in this dull way each morning, perhaps during the night I am striking my chest with my fist. So I visualize myself squatting like a gargoyle on my bed, in the dark and quiet, thudding away at my chest.
‘Poor Margaret,’ I utter.
I sit in my creaking kitchen chair for a while and think back through this image, but all it produces in me is an enlarging frame of malignancy, and as it gathers the quality of the malignancy becomes coarser and the frame falls away. I open my eyes before this gathering feeling becomes dense and sticky and I can feel my chest tighten and I realize I am merely sitting here in my own sunny kitchen now beating at my chest.
It is, all of a sudden, half-nine. I look around the kitchen to see if someone, while my eyes were closed, lifted the clock from the wall and wound the minute hand around by half an hour, or twelve-and-a-half hours, or twenty-four-and-a-half hours, or thirty-six …
I look to my fist in my lap, then I look at my still-steaming cup of black coffee. I look to the sunlight streaming in the small and mouldy kitchen windows and two things occur to me almost at once:
1. I don’t really want to see what I see in my dreams.
and
2. Perhaps this state of affairs is not so bad and perhaps someday I will meet someone untroubled by my dreamtime activities, or perhaps even this person who might grow to love me might grow also to enjoy these shadowy erratic theatres I produce each night on our bed, and instead of being put out by it, perhaps this curious person will merely sit up in our bed when, in the low part of the night, my jerking contortions begin, and this person, I hope, might simply choose to lie there in the dark looking on for a while, as I protect us from evil, and wonder, with mild amusement or perhaps even an aggregating boredom, as to wherefrom these small and ineffectual designs of my other self might come.
4. Midfield Dynamo
1.
My father was a one-woman-only kind of guy. It was as if, when he first met my mother, he had merely put his right hand out into a point in the universe, and she also happened to be there. The ease with which this union came about encouraged him to the point that he felt quite blessed. He then became quite blasé. And as I think about it now he was much more probably an unrepentant philanderer.
2.
My father, the year I was born, captained the local soccer club, a bunch of long-haired and moustachio’d outlaws. Their home games were played in a field just outside of town, a field that had been reclaimed from the bog some years previous. They had to finish all of their home fixtures that year by March because the owner of the field, a McCabe, wanted to have it ploughed by Easter.
That season the club played a cup quarter-final against a team from Dublin who arrived down one morning on a bus. All of the players got changed under the hedgerow that ran up the side of the pitch. Three members of my father’s team turned up just before kickoff, smelling of beer. For an hour and a half twenty-two young men marauded in beautiful patterns up and down the pitch, and in between the moments of skill, vision and finesse, they kicked lumps out of each other. Then they shook hands, my father’s team sympathizing with the team from Dublin. They all trudged from the field and my father’s team bade farewell to the visiting team as they clambered, filthy, onto their bus, which was parked alongside the canal that wound its way under a stone bridge and through the black-and-green fields beyond. Then my father’s team, every one of them, went home to their half-finished bungalows and had cold showers.
Later that night my father sat at his desk, lit the Superser gas heater, clicked on his desk lamp, cranked the head of it toward him, and neatly recounted all of the details of the game in his ledger, taking note of the result, exemplary performers and routes for improvement for the team both on and off the field.
3.
When I was seven or so my father built me a small timber goal. It was painted white, with a sewn-together patchwork of orange and yellow onion sacks as the net. I spent entire days kicking my ball into the goal, or saving balls kicked by my sisters and brother; and some nights I would sleep on my back underneath it, with my black-and-white leather football resting on my belly, slowly bobbing up and down with each breath. If the night turned chilly my father, I believe, would come out and drape a light blanket over me and the ball.
One roaring hot day a second or third cousin came to visit. He was an oaf of a lad. His first shot flew past my left ear and I could hear a seam between the onion bags rip open. I looked around and spied, through the hole in the netting, the ball lodged in one of the luminous leylandii bushes flanking the front drive. As my enormous jug-eared cousin crowed and celebrated around the lawn in front of me I thought two things:
1. I must get rid of this guy, or he will be the end of me.
2. My father shouldn’t have stapled the bottom of the net to the base of the goal frame, he should have let the bottom of the net hang loose, so that there would be less strain on the netting seams under impact.
And to this day I am convinced that if it were not for this design fault, the goal would have had a longer life and would not have been discarded and so quickly left to rot, eventually to become a mere mound of white-paint-speckled pine-mulch and mesh at the bottom of our lawn.
4.
Most nights my father would go to the pub in town for a pint or two. Concerned for his safety, I’d lie awake until he returned. Then, as his car lights turned in from the road, around the bend in the driveway, and raked across my bedroom wall, I would allow myself to nod off. This was the case, unless my mother was angry, and on his return began shouting at him, to which he would mutter something apologetic and she would simply become angrier – then, I would sit up in my bed and listen keenly, hoping that everything would eventually settle.
One night, after the car lights were switched off and I heard the front door of the house close, my mother began shouting. She shouted for a long time, getting angrier and fiercer until I heard a bang and a tinny crumple, then silence. I ran down to the kitchen and my mother was sitting on the ground among the dozens of millionaire squares, baked earlier in the day, that had flown from the biscuit tin she had just hurled against the wall. I asked where my father was, and she looked up at me from the ground and said that he was long in bed asleep. Then she began to pick up the millionaire squares and eat them and I sat down beside her and ate too; then my brother and all of my sisters quietly appeared in the kitchen and we all sat on the ground and made small piles with the millionaire squares and ate the piles and then all of us kids passed out, not only because it was very late, but also because of the waves of sugar surging through our small bodies.
Next morning my father got up to find us bedraggled across the kitchen lino. He boiled the kettle, necked a glass of barely dissolved Disprin, looked out the window across the back drain and beyond at the cows mooching around the expanses of green fields, and he began grilling white sliced pan toast for us all, loaves of it, lathered in margarine, and flung four at a time, spinning down the length of the kitchen table to where we were all slowly beginning to gather.
5.
My father once told me about the night he turned up half-cut at a dance. He was fourteen or so, and the dance was taking place in the library hall at the top end of town.
He caught the eye of a girl that was new to the scene. She was a few years older than him but they started to chat. Then they took a walk out of the library hall and back down the town, in behind a garage, where they climbed into the two front seats of a smashed-up car and began to kiss and cuddle, until my father, enlivened, dropped his hand, only to find that the girl had a leg that was made of wood.
She became embarrassed at his surprise.
They sat apart for a while and it began to rain outside. He told me they could hear the drops bounce on the roof of the car, on the badly creased bonnet, on the boot, the folded rusting side panels of the car doors, the cracked side windows and the front and back windscreens. He told me he couldn’t think why those details had stuck. They promised to meet in the car every night for the rest of her holidays. And for the next four nights my father and this girl met up in this wreck and kissed and fondled with fervour and love.
6.
My father’s parents owned a dance hall in the middle of the town. It was the only one of its kind in this part of the county. When my father was very young he used to watch the loving crowds jive and spin from between the shapely balusters on the upstairs landing. By the time he was six he began offering jiving classes to those he deemed in need of them. His instructions were clear, earnest, roomy, inexpensive and fell on attentive ears.
By the time he was seven, my father had tired of the commitment to these ever-growing weekly classes, so he passed the responsibility for them on to a student who had excelled over the course of the year – he a retired dairy farmer from north Longford whose life suddenly brimmed with purpose.
7.
When the dance hall that my father’s parents owned closed down, they opened a cinema in town. And when everyone in the town and the immediate hinterland had seen the current release, my father was sent out in the family car with the projector and reels to other outlying village and parochial halls.
In these small darkened halls, clusters of families from the surrounding townlands would convene. Afterward, driving home through the dark and winding roads, my father would look on at the illuminated ribbon of hedge-lined tarmac appearing continuously before him only for it to disappear almost immediately again beneath and out behind him to rejoin the darkness from which it had come.
One wet and very windy night when he eventually got back to the shadows of his parents’ house, he walked in on his father at the end of the downstairs hallway sitting on the hall seat and smoking – the tip of his cigarette glowing like a distant carbide-battery lamp being carried through the lowland fogs away from a steaming hedgerow car wreck.
8.
When my father drove us – all of my sisters, my brother and I – into town for our Saturday-night bag of chips, he would often draw our attention to the distant streetlights of the town and point out how, if you joined the dots, it resembled a large amber arrow pointing diagonally downward from the sky to the earth. He reasoned that the point of the arrow was directed toward the part of the town where his parents’ house would have stood, it being on the bend of the street. As we drove closer to town, the arrow slowly dissolved around us until we became part of its electric umber, sitting outside the chip shop in the back of his car waiting for our warm packets of vinegar-sodden chips.
On the way home we were too busy eating to bother looking out the rear window of the car to see the arrow re-forming in the sky behind us.
There is the town before my father, and then there is my father’s town – the one he built for ten years. My father’s town was built into and around the old one. It was made up of new houses, apartments, industrial units, garages, shops; and such was the way these developments sprawled outward and embalmed the old town that, if you were now to drive in to the town, the arrow that once hovered in the sky above it has transformed into an amorphous cluster of amber, yellow, red and orange pixels.
9.
For a few years my father’s father worked as the clerk of works in the Midlands division of the Rural Electrification Scheme. One bright evening in late summer he and my father took a trip out to an elderly lady in a small village fifteen miles from town. She had written to say that she wanted to see my grandfather.
She greeted them at the door and smiled at my father – a curious sort – who was peering up at the white electrical wires running across the underside of the eaves of her thatched cottage, taking note of how the cable was fastened to the soffit at regular intervals with white plastic hoops. My grandfather apologized for not getting out sooner, and this elderly lady said it was fine, and that they should come in for a cup of tea.
They sat in front of the fire and the woman pottered around in the half-darkness of her two-roomed house and eventually produced three white and sky-blue-rimmed cups of tea. She sat and talked at length to my grandfather about her husband, who had passed away in early spring. She spoke quietly about how lonely she felt and how she missed him, and eventually my father nodded to sleep, the drained teacup slumping incrementally from his lap until it finally slipped and dangled by its handle from his curled index finger. He slept through her story and was roused only when his father nudged him that they were to leave. When they emerged from the low front door of the house it was as if the evening had somehow become brighter and the air had become lighter too, so light that my father felt that if he had wanted he could have taken flight up over the house, trees and fields, beyond the moon and stars and out into the universe, beyond the systems, beyond the dark, beyond everything, until he disappeared forever. My grandfather turned to say goodbye to the woman, but she asked them to wait a moment because she had something for him. When she returned she placed a large one-hundred-watt glass bulb into my father’s hands. She said that she had never wanted the electricity in the first place and now never uses it, and as she grasped her pink crocheted cardigan about her slim chest and waist, she said, this bulb has been putting my fire out and making my house feel small at night, and I am afraid that the thatch will take flame from it too.
My grandfather, who had heard these poorly reasoned arguments a thousand times before and knew every line and official response to counter them, took the bulb out of my father’s hands and said to this woman standing at her low door: thank you for the tea, and it was lovely to see you in any case, and perhaps I will see you again the next time we are doing work in this part of the county, and if you ever change your mind, there is no problem at all getting this bulb back, because I will keep it safe for you.
10.
My father’s father opened a bookie’s in a long-disused butcher shop in the middle of town, the weekend before an FA Cup Final. Going against his son’s calculations, my grandfather misjudged the odds on the races in Leopardstown that Sunday too, and by the following Wednesday he had to close down because he was unable to pay the next week’s rent.
My father refused to help him take down the signage or empty the ashtrays that were overflowing and spilling from the counters onto the many crumpled chits and betting slips on the floor. So my grandfather swept the entire property down himself, cleaned the windows, pulled the blinds and left through the front door, where he stood for a moment and looked up and down the broad main street of the town to see that it was empty of people and completely still.
8. Prosinečki
I can hear the crowd above me erupt again, but this time with far more heat than the roar that greeted the second-half whistle not minutes ago. Shudders pass down through the walls of the changing room as the mass of people overhead leap once more to their feet. The shudders dispel. My teammates told me, with the rain that fell in the first half, that the pitch will take a stud. The changing room is empty now. It smells of oranges, sweat and muscle rub. I pull on my studs and begin to lace them up.
Our stadium is an old thing in the middle of northern England, surrounded by long-stilled steel and iron works and a network of congealing canals. I often think the fans come here just to be among the decaying trusses that shelter our deep single-tiered stands. Old men and women with their grandchildren usually people the seats, along with pockets of harmless, drunk and overweight men on cheap season-tickets who obsess over transfers to and from the club. Tonight, like at every home game, these men gather in a sprawling sky-blue-and-white horde across the South Stand. This club was never great – but it seems to exist now only out of the ghost of some habit.
