The Trick of the Ga Bolga, page 26
“But do you know her?”
“I know her as I know you.”
“As you knew the Proker and Salmo and Consolata. You’re an unlucky man to know, Coote. I don’t give a fiddler’s fart for Salmo and the Proker. Consolata is different, she was a rare and precious girl. She was too good to be the daughter of that pompous oul’ skittery-ass Timideen O’Gara.”
“I miss her. She used to look in nearly every day.”
“Look in? Red Biddy tells me she was in love with you.”
“Did she also tell you that I’m a war hero?”
“No, she tells me Consolata was struck on you. She said, ‘Why, I wonder, should a healthy young woman in love suddenly take her own life for no rhyme or reason?’ She must have discovered something terrible, some dark and evil secret, too big for her brain. Do you know my wife?”
“I see her from time to time at the well.”
“She isn’t the woman she was. Something is preying on her mind.”
“Your private life is your own and possibly your wife’s affair.”
“Affair? What do you mean?”
“I mean that it’s no affair of mine.”
“That’s where we differ, you and me. You may not be interested in my private life but I’m interested in yours.”
“I’m afraid I have no intention of satisfying your curiosity.”
“Red Biddy tells me that Imelda came over here the evening Consolata did away with herself. Is that true?”
“She came over to ask me to fill in a form for her.”
“Wasn’t the professor himself at home?”
“Like you, she isn’t over-fond of Timideen.”
“But she’s fond of you?”
“She wanted me to fill in a form and draft a letter to a man from Kilcar. His name, I think, was Mícheál Óg.”
“I believe you, Coote, though I’ve met compatriots of yours who wouldn’t.”
McMackin started whittling again and he didn’t stop till the end of his stick was as sharp as a pencil. Then he held it over the fire long enough for the smoke to blacken it.
“I often think that if the Proker had sharpened the end of his stick, he’d be alive today. Feel the point of that with your finger. It would go through a man’s chest like a javelin.”
“Are you trying to threaten me?”
“I’m not saying anything. It’s no good talking, because talk takes the edge off action. The word becomes a substitute for the deed.”
“Since you’ve got nothing more to say, I’d be obliged if you left me to my reading.”
“I’ll say one more thing before I go. Leave my wife and daughter alone. I don’t want you talking to either of them. You can talk to my son, though. He’s like me. Words don’t impress him.”
“You must introduce us sometime.”
“There’s no time like the present. I am my own son. Me and my son are the same man. Can’t you see it?” McMackin shouted as he went out the door.
That evening Coote told Timideen about his visit. Timideen held up his glass to the light and said: “Madness is alien and mysterious. It’s the stranger within us released for all to see.”
Coote lay awake most of the night pondering Timideen’s words. He did not know what to make of McMackin. Was he really mad—mad in a clinical sense? Or was he sane because he breathed an atmosphere which was the perfect complement of his madness? Did he know something, or was he just fishing inexpertly for information? In the morning Coote did not hesitate; he set off for the barracks to see Sergeant Blowick.
On the far side of the footbridge an old man herding a lean cow under the lee of a rock raised a peeled sally rod in salute. He was wearing a woollen semmit, moleskin trousers, broken clogs and a grey mackintosh.
“Heavy on the dorneen!” the man called.
A dorneen, as the blacksmith had told him, was one of the handles of a scythe. He got a little thrill from the thought that his scything had found its way into local folklore.
In Frank Nora’s garden the trees were bare. It was now too late to take the bag of apples he’d promised Salmo. He could buy a stone of apples in Jamie Byrne’s, but that was not what Salmo had in mind. On one of the branches overhanging the road was a single leaf, the only one left on the tree. All that remained was a reticulum of veins laid bare, a kind of ghost, yet greater than a ghost. It was an indestructible skeleton that had survived insects, weather and disease. Or it could have been a piece of parchment that once bore a message from another world that had been painstakingly and mischievously erased. He plucked it and placed it in his wallet beside the letter that the girl called Angie wrote to John White, the drowned rating.
He walked up the hill past the rectory gate, thinking of the two messages in his wallet, until he came within sight of the Protestant church. He climbed the stone steps into the cemetery and stood over the grave of Lieutenant-Commander Enright, who had so generously and so unwittingly contributed to the New Garaross Bridge Fund. Now he was truly dead, and it did not matter whether his name was White or Enright. He tried to understand how the ghosts of these two men had pursued him night and day, until they seemed to threaten the very integrity of his personality. He had escaped for good from that self-enclosing world. Now he knew that the ghosts were as much pursued as pursuing.
As he made for the barracks, he kept his eye on a single cloud in the east, a great, grey boulder so solid and massive that it threatened to fall, not like rain but road metal from the sky. To his surprise, Blowick wasn’t casting with his greenheart fishing rod in the garden. He was alone in the kitchen surveying a table on which stood a prewar orange box. He had bored six holes in the side of the box and in each hole he had placed an old bicycle pump standing upright like a test-tube in its rack.
“Doing a little experiment?” Coote enquired.
Blowick was in shirtsleeves. He was wearing the cap and trousers of his uniform, and when he turned to Coote, there was more than half a glint of officialdom in his eye.
“I’ve already done the experiment. I’m now repeating it.”
“To find out if you can repeat the results?”
“I know I can, I’ve made candles before.”
“So you’re a chandler as well as an angler?”
“I was doing a bit of coast-watching yesterday morning and I found this big box of candle grease washed ashore. I didn’t have to look twice to imagine what to do with it. I use these old bicycle pumps as moulds. I get a piece of string for the wick and thread it down the centre of the pumpcase. Then I melt the wax and pour it round the wick. When it’s set, I push it out of the pump and I’ve got the loveliest candle you’ve ever seen.”
“Very ingenious.”
“And it saves paraffin oil. Now what can I do for you so early in the morning?”
Coote sat down at the table so that the orange box and the pumps were between himself and the sergeant.
“I had a visit from Denis McMackin yesterday. The man’s a lunatic, he should be put away.”
“Why?”
“He sharpened the point of his stick with a knife and then threatened me with it.”
“The knife or the stick?”
“The stick,” Coote said impatiently.
“What did he say?”
“It wasn’t what he said, it was what he meant. He told me that he believes in action, not talk. So what are you going to do about him?”
“Has he broken the law?”
“It’s against the law to threaten a man with a stick.”
“McMackin’s no gowk. Even drunk, he knows how much he can get away with.”
“It’s up to you to teach him a lesson, Sergeant.”
“I know he’s a nuisance, I’m playing a waiting game. The law, at least in Glen, is not an ass.”
“There’s no problem. You arrest him and I’ll provide the evidence. You’ll be doing every good citizen a good turn.”
“The man’s been fighting a war. The violence got on top of him, and now he’s working it out of his system. Mark my words, he’ll settle down in a couple of months. We mustn’t make ourselves look ridiculous, Mr. Coote. Some judges, as many a policeman knows, have sharp tongues in court. Anyhow, if I charge him with threatening behaviour and he’s found guilty, he’ll only be fined ten shillings and bound over for a year. I’ll achieve a reputation for officiousness and you’ll get a bad name for being a bad neighbour.”
“So what?”
“Just leave everything to me. I’m biding my time. Last week he pulled another man’s tie so tight that it had to be cut to keep the man from choking. I put him in the black hole for the night and then let him go without charging him. Gradually, he’ll become overconfident. He’ll say Blowick’s a softie. He’ll overstep the mark, and there will be me, waiting with the handcuffs.”
“I hope I live to see it.”
“He’s not a bad sort, really. In his way, he’s a bit of a philosopher. I asked him why he’s so fond of the bottle and he said, ‘I get drunk to make decisions, and then reconsider them sober.’”
“I’ll leave you, Sergeant. And may your candles and your shadow never grow less.”
“Forget about McMackin, there’s bound to be more candle grease coming ashore, it always comes in batches. I’d get some if I were you. Paraffin’s going to be as scarce as hens’ teeth this winter.”
Coote went home harbouring pent-up anger. He wanted to think objectively about McMackin. He tried and tried, and found himself thinking about the Proker.
“The Proker led Salmo a dog’s life and came to grief, entirely by accident. If I were unprincipled, I’d say, ‘What I need is another Salmo.’ I’m not unprincipled, and in going to Blowick, I’ve already cast myself in the role of Salmo. Who, then, is going to play Coote? Who is going to provide the accident? The trouble is that I try to think, when I should do better to dream. Reason and logic are spindrift before the winds of necessity and chance. So what is a serious man to do?”
That evening Timideen turned again to McMackin.
“He’s our local Hitler,” he said. “And we are the men of Munich who are letting him get away with it. Now, if Salmo were around …”
“You think he’d stand up to him?”
“He finally stood up to the Proker. I have a sneaking admiration for Salmo. The Proker only got what was coming to him, and if Salmo’s topped for it in this world, he’s sure to get a halo in the next. McMackin’s worse than the Proker. The Proker was only a menace to Salmo, but McMackin is a threat to the whole parish. If you found him lying on the Straid road dead drunk on a snowy night, would you carry him home, give him a warm drink and put him to bed, or would you leave him to die of exposure? Tell the truth.”
“I’d leave him by the roadside and say to myself that he was too full of whiskey to feel the cold.”
“You should be a Catholic. Your casuistry is wasted on mere agnosticism.”
“What would you do?”
“I’d pick him up and carry him as far as the bridge. Then I’d dump him in the Deán and hope that the tide was high enough to drown him. If a man is going to sin at all, he should sin mortally. It makes the accounting simpler for the Recording Angel.”
“What we need is another Salmo,” said Coote.
“There’s only one Salmo, and from what you say, he’s lost his sting.”
A fortnight passed and he saw no more of McMackin. The weather was rough, he spent the days reading Spragg by the kitchen fire. He placed a rolled-up sack against the bottom of the door to keep the wind out, piled the turf high and enjoyed the warmth and now and again a sense of creature comfort. His cow was in calf again. She had gone dry, he didn’t have milk for his tea or for making bread. He knew that sooner or later Ned Curran or one of the other neighbours would realise his plight and give him some. In the meantime, he could not bring himself to ask. Bread made with brown wartime flour and water was heavy and unappetising. He ate less of it, and he did not eat more potatoes to compensate.
One evening at the end of November he was coming back from Cashel with half a pound of rashers which the shopkeeper claimed he was lucky to get because they had been earmarked for the lightkeepers’ monthly hamper. He was walking briskly, his mouth watering at the thought of the aroma they’d give off on the frying pan, when he stopped to watch a mountainous wave making for the Big Strand. Because of the contour of the land, he could see only a small stretch of the bay and three waves at a time. They were tearing in with the wind against them, green horses rearing with white manes flowing, and because you could see just three and no more, it was oddly exciting, like watching a horserace through a keyhole. As he walked on, his eye caught a movement by the abutment of the unfinished bridge. Though he couldn’t be sure what it was, he was certain that something had vanished round the corner. He went straight to the abutment and looked about him. There was no living thing to be seen.
At home, he told himself that it might have been the white of the waves that was still in his mind’s eye. He kept thinking about it throughout the evening and went to bed with a distinct sense of unease. In the morning he went to Cashel again, where Dr. McNelis was holding his weekly clinic. Dr. McNelis, Father McNullis’s brother, was a small, thin man whose grip on life wasn’t strong. He took the next world more seriously than this world. He took it so seriously that he used to pay his brother to say Mass for the repose of the souls of patients he had failed to cure. He sat behind a little table and listened to Coote with eyes closed and bloodless hands joined in front of his pinched nose.
“You say you see movements with the tail of your eye. Surely there’s nothing strange in that?”
“When I look again, there’s nothing there that could have moved.”
“Then you think you’ve seen a movement, that’s all.”
“That’s just it. I don’t want to see movements that don’t exist. If there’s a rational explanation, I should like to know.”
The doctor got him to roll his eyes and peered into them, as if they were keyholes to another world. Coote held his breath, because the doctor’s jacket smelt of ferrets.
“You’ve got a floater in your left eye.” The doctor sat down with an air of physical exhaustion.
Coote laughed uncertainly.
“I thought a floater was a dead body in water.”
“Floaters are opaque specks in the field of vision, they simply float across the eye.”
“You’re not making fun of me?”
“Of course not. They even have a Latin name, muscae volitantes, which has nothing to do with corpses.”
Coote felt a surge of relief and at the same time nostalgia for another kind of life.
“Would they account for the things I’ve been seeing?”
“They might, and then again they might not.”
“What do you mean, they might not?”
“I can’t be sure.”
“So I’m back on square one.”
“Not quite. You now know you’ve got a floater.”
“The only way I’ll find out, then, is to get rid of it and see if the things I’ve been seeing go away.”
“I’d forget about them if I were you. They’re not important. They’ll never be the death of you, I can assure you.”
He shook the doctor’s hand, about to go. The doctor told him that floaters were not his problem, that he looked a bit peaky, that he would like to examine him. Again Coote held his breath because of the smell of ferrets. He was almost relieved when the doctor concluded that he was suffering from mild malnutrition.
“Like your floater, it isn’t a killer. Nevertheless, I think you should try to eat. Meat is scarce, but there’s plenty of fish, eggs and potatoes. If you want to try a tonic, buy yourself a bottle of cod-liver oil and take two spoonfuls night and morning. I’ll guarantee you won’t know yourself in a fortnight.”
“I can’t stomach the stuff.” Coote grimaced. “Have you ever felt, doctor, that all food is only medicine?”
“Buy yourself a ferret,” the doctor commanded. “The Warren is alive with rabbits. They’re easy to catch and they make lovely stew.”
Coote thanked him for his advice, though he had no intention of taking it. He felt weak on the way home. He stopped for a drink in McShane’s and spent ten minutes resting on the Minister’s Bridge. That afternoon, as he sat by the fire, he felt utterly alone. The world was empty, a fishless pond in which only the self-deluded fished. He gazed out at Screig Beefan, a mountain that was only a mountain. At one time its grey and green slopes, and how they changed in appearance depending on where you were, held him in a kind of mesmerised infatuation. He would look at it from the Tower and from Ballard, from Doonalt and the top of Braide, and he would ask himself which was the real Screig Beefan, because it was never the same. He was a man in love who looked at his loved one’s face and saw new beauties a hundred times a day.
He got up and took the road to Skelpoona. There were no birds on the Carraig Mhór, because the sea was leapfrogging over it. In the center of the inlet was a yellow island of churned foam, and, next to it, a floating spar with a chewed end which he gazed at without avarice. It was almost high water. Leic na Mágach, his favourite rock, was awash. A fierce gale was blowing round the nose of Glen Head. It was only the end of November, but here it was already mid-winter.
He could not imagine how he used to sit above the War Cave in the summer, looking across at the stony shoulder of the bluff, thinking he was observing through a magnifying glass, every rock-edge and cranny so clear. He glanced down at the place where the sailor’s body floated in the moonlight, and where Consolata’s body floated in his dream. Now the dream had become someone else’s, Philip Woodwind’s, Timideen’s or Salmo’s.
Night was falling when he got back. He lit the lamp and opened a book to see if he could read. The kitchen was snug and tidy, the walls white, the flagged floor smooth. By the dresser hung a wire griddle, a hank of fishing line, an iron spike used to search for bog oak—odds and ends belonging to Cormac, who was here before him. It was another man’s kitchen, all that belonged to him were the books.
He felt in his bones that he could not face the winter. There was nothing he wanted to do, because every act was now a travesty of acts that had gone before. Nothing else would ever happen to him here. He had exhausted the life, or the life had exhausted him. He felt like a man who had believed in God and one day saw Him vanish round the corner of an abutment out of his life forever.
