I Could Read the Sky Page 8

  The Animal walks into the church hall, a man to either side of him in case anyone would have a go at him. One was from Newcastle, I remember, and the other from Louth. They sit down under a picture from the African missions. There’s a nun opening bottles behind the bar and another handing out plates of sandwiches. We all take a sandwich when she comes to us and when there’s just one on the plate the King leans over to me and says, “Hold on to that one for me until I get back.” He goes right out the door and when he comes back again he calls out to the Animal, “Here you are, John,” he says. “Don’t go hungry,” and the Animal takes the last sandwich. “You’ll see something now,” says the King to me. The Animal takes a gouge the size of a fist from the sandwich, the jaws working under the red nose. He stops then, bread falling from his open mouth, the little black eyes as wide as they’ll go. “Christ Jesus,” he says to the man from Louth, “I thought the priest bought his meat from Corrigan’s,” and he spits what’s left in his mouth onto the floor.

  “What did you give him?” I say to the King.

  “A rare thing to find in a church hall,” he says.

  “What would that be?”

  He leans over close then so the women won’t hear. “A condom filled with raw sewage.”

  “Holy Mary,” says Francie. “He’d break a man’s back for less.”

  “Do you know what’s almost as bad as a man from Louth?” asks the King. “A man would take a job in a factory or on trains.”

  The Animal comes over to wash the taste of sewage from his mouth with a glass of the King’s whiskey. “God save all here,” he says with a kind of smirk. “Do you know what that bollocks of a works inspector from the council got me out on a Sunday evening for?” he says. He swallows down the glass of whiskey. “One fucking inch. ‘That trench,’ he says, ‘is an inch further out into the road than is shown on the plans. You’ll have to fill it in and dig again.’ Can you credit it? A fucking inch. I’ll fill him in before I’ll fill in the hole.”

  You can only see how truly ugly the Animal is from up close, the head narrowing up nearly to a point from the shoulders. The lips look like they’re filled with water, the huge nose like something half eaten by a dog. He’d talk like that in front of your grandmother. “What’s a fucking inch?” he demands of the table.

  Maggie with a serious look like she’s working through a mathematical problem raises her finger in the air and says, “An inch is a lot on a nose.”

  The Animal becomes suddenly still and numb like a stunned bullock in an abattoir. The King’s shoulders are shaking as he pours himself another glass of whiskey. Martin looks like he’ll explode, Francie like he’s found a five-pound note on the road.

  Maggie’s not moving, but I think there’s a smile forming within her. She saw an opening and she moved in, her mind a blade. From that day I could never turn away from her.

  30

  IN THE PICTURE a young girl in a red and white dress is planting flowers in a window-box outside her room. Every day that hot summer week while we dig up the pavement beneath her window in Ladbroke Grove we can look up and see her. By the Friday she knows each of our names. There’s Myles Walsh, Pat Kennedy and the Iroquois from Glasgow. John Conneely from Connemara is sitting against the wall eating an apple when the girl from the window comes down and gives him a wooden chair. John was sixty-three that time and anyone could see the knees were bad. Francie has his foot up on a low wall and is drinking milk from a pint bottle. He is bothered for a moment by a bee and when he puts the bottle back up to his mouth a black man with a straw hat and a blue and white striped suit walks past, gold rings shining on his fingers and a cigarette in its holder gripped between his teeth. He is wearing the finest white shirt I ever saw.

  We’re talking about the Animal.

  “He’s no gentleman,” says John. “He put a lit cigarette up into the arse of a cat. A gentleman would never do a thing like that.”

  “You’re right there,” says Myles.

  Francie leaves the milk bottle down and lifts the jack-hammer.

  “Martin was digging in a hole under the Marylebone Road on Monday when he hit something hard with the spade. ‘What’s that?’ he says to himself and cleans away the clay. The thing is big and dark and it has writing on it. It’s made of lead. ‘What do you make of that?’ he says to Jack O’Rourke, who’s beside him in the hole. Jack puts the glasses on and takes a look. He’s a great reader of books as you know. He looks all around it like it’s something he might buy. Finally he gives the verdict. ‘A Roman coffin,’ he says, putting the glasses back into his pocket. Martin crawls out of the hole and phones Muldoon over in the yard. But he can only get the Crow. ‘The Animal is taking his lunch over in the Princess Louise,’ says the Crow. So Martin phones over to the bar and gets the Animal on the line and explains to him all about the Roman coffin. There’s a pause then while he thinks about it. Then he says, ‘Break the fucking thing up and bury it.’ He didn’t want anyone from a museum holding up the job. That’s the Animal, the friend of art and science.”

  He puts the tip of the hammer to the pavement then and begins to dig. I see the little girl in the window reading a book with the sun shining onto her face. I see the black man with the rings fixing a rose to the lapel of his jacket. I see Francie smiling. Then there’s a fierce hiss and a blaze and the air around Francie is shimmering in the heat. Flames pour out of his boots and his trousers and his shirt. His hair too is on fire. There is fire in his mouth. There is fire on his hands. His skin flames and then blackens. The jackhammer falls to the pavement and Francie along with it. Myles and John and Pat and the Iroquois and myself and the girl and the black man all look at him lying dead on the pavement beside the hole and the mains cable he cut through with the hammer, the insulation boiling and smoking and the coloured wires inside like the stems of cut flowers.

  31

  I LOOK UP and watch the ash form at the end of the cigarette balanced on the headboard. I watch the ash move and break up and fall onto the pillow beside me. Then I watch the fire in the cigarette burn into the wood. All along the headboard there are lines of cigarette burns like the black keys on a piano.

  In Maggie’s room way up at the top of the house in Elgin Avenue the headboard on her single bed had beading and vines and flowers engraved into it. The headboard was deep brown, the colour of stout. There was a small table covered with lace by the side of the bed and sometimes when we went into the bed together she would take the candle by the picture of the Sacred Heart and she would place it on this table so that we would have light. There was a way she looked in this light that gave me the sweetest peace. From the bed when she was sleeping I could look at the way she arranged the room. There was a shelf she had for books and a shelf for records and in between was a map of Ireland. The map not only told you where the cities and towns and rivers were but it also had little marks on it that told you about things that had happened. There was a mark that meant ambush, a mark that meant battle, a mark that meant slaughter and a mark that meant the wasting of a town. The walls were white and the carpet was the colour of the grass that grows in sand. There was a picture of her cousin Eddie Furlong who was a champion fiddler from Monaghan town. There was a picture of her father down on one knee picking flowers for a child. There was a picture of me at Brighton Pier in the Tailor’s suit that had worn so well with my hands in my pockets and with more hair than I have now. In this picture I am wearing Maggie’s sunglasses. I loved the feeling of her breathing lightly on my neck when she was sleeping. If she woke she did not fix her hair so that it would fall over the left eye. I could see the table with the mirror where she kept her bottles and scissors and combs that always had a different arrangement each time I was there. I could see the wardrobe which was sometimes open and when it was I could see the dress the colour of sand and all the other dresses and her hats and her blouses and her coats. I liked to see something out of place, like maybe the red leather shoe with the high heel tipped over onto its side. Th
ings like this made me think of her doing things. The room was up at the top of the house just beneath the roof and the ceiling sloped down to either side of the bed and you felt enclosed and private like you were in a tent.

  There was a window came out through the slope of the roof and I remember a tall glass there filled with irises. They were very still and blue in the first light of the Sunday morning after I’d played all night in a session for the landlord’s wife’s birthday in the Weaver’s Arms. It was the month of May, the morning light a very pale blue. We had such hunger for each other all the way back home through the streets and up the stairs and into the bed where finally I could feel all the warmth and draw and power of her body. We drank brandy then in the bed, the sheets and the blankets rippled the way sand is under water, the pale blue light moving past the irises into the room. The air of the room seemed loaded with her as I breathed it in and I knew I had never felt so filled with the wonder of another person when she placed her lips up close to my ear and asked me to play for her. I see me now sitting up in the bed in my vest only, the bare white legs crossed, the hair on my head almost all gone too, moving a little from side to side with my accordion and with Maggie beside me with her hand resting on my knee and her red hair falling down on her white shoulders as I play for her very slow and sweet “My Lagan Love”.

  32

  “DO YOU REMEMBER the way my hair was then? It was that long I had to move it to sit down. Do you remember the way Da begged me not to cut it?”

  There are sixteen people in the upstairs room of the Eagle’s Nest the day I marry Maggie and I did not think that Eileen would be among them. Mary that time was in a convent in Wales. Bernadette with her husband the publican in Belfast. They sent a telegram. Vincent last heard of was working with racehorses in Australia. I never found Joe, though I look still. Eileen I’d lost long ago too but Brid hadn’t, even though she was away in Philadelphia with her six children and her husband who’s a millionaire from building houses. Brid sent Eileen the message about the wedding. I would like to see Brid now. I remember the day a man from Galway Da knew from music competitions left a tin whistle down on a chair and Brid picked it up and could play even though she was only eight that time and never played before. She played “The Soldier’s Song”.

  Eileen is laughing. When she laughs it sounds like someone is pressing on her throat. I cannot see the steps she took from Labasheeda to this room in Cricklewood on the day I was married. On her face there are many lines like the lines on maps which show rivers breaking up before they empty into the sea. Her hair is grey and there’s a kind of orange in it like what would colour ice-cream. She is thin and when you look at her you think of the hardness of her bones. Her dress has white in it but is mostly orange the same colour as her hair. Her voice is thick now and the sound of Yorkshire where she lives moves through it the way the smell of leaves burning far away would flavour a breeze. She smokes cigarettes one after the other.

  She speaks of her husband.

  “I met him one day in a black fog going around a corner in the Holloway Road. The fog was so thick you could take a spoon to it. It was the first time I ever saw them use lanterns. It was like the frozen fogs they get in Russia where if you walk through them you leave the print of your body. I met him in a black fog and I never came out of it until the day he died. He was useless. He was worse than useless. Do you know I can upholster a settee? I can tell you the value of old clocks. I know about dress hats for women and the buying and selling of motor cars. I ran a hotel. I did these things because he didn’t do a tap of work all his life and whatever I brought home he drank. I should have known better and stayed in out of the fog.”

  The laugh that sounds like there’s a heavy liquid down in her lungs. I think looking at her that maybe she’s not bitter but she’s tough. Out on the floor they’re doing a set. Eileen looks over and with the breeze of the dancers moving over her face and through her hair I can see as I look from the side at the arrangement of brow and nose and eyes something of what she was when she was a girl and nothing had disappointed her. The more she watches the dancers the more of what the years have put in her eyes lifts from her and goes.

  “I was nursing when I first came over. I was in the Hackney Hospital. One time a man came in with terrible burns and the clothes were all stuck to his skin and they gave me the job of getting them off him and I collapsed right onto the floor before I even touched him. I knew I couldn’t manage it then but before I quit it was St Patrick’s Day and a crowd of us went in a coach to the Seymour Hall for a dance. We went to tea dances that time too at the Astoria. It cost sixpence. Everyone was beautifully turned out.” She has her eyes still on the dancers.

  “That time at the Seymour Hall I went out for a Paul Jones. We went around in our circles and when we stopped there was this man opposite me and of course we danced. He was in a black tie. He was absolutely immaculate. After the dance we sat down together. He told me he was a tea planter home from Assam. I can still see him. He was tall and dark, with horn-rimmed glasses. Very good looking. If he was to pass me on the street now I’d know him. We had two or three more dances together and then he asked me could he see me home. When I said this to the other girls they said it was too dangerous and I was to go back with them in the coach. But I went back with him anyway. He had a lovely car and I sat up beside him thinking of the life I might have on the tea plantation in Assam. He drove me right to the gate of the hospital, he shook hands with me and he said, ‘Thank you for the lovely evening.’ I’ve never forgotten him. He was a perfect gentleman. He had a lovely black coat with fur on the collar.”

  She stands up then and holds out her hand. I take it and we go out onto the floor. Martin is there with a big smile on him and the sweat pouring off his forehead. John Conneely is standing ready with his wife, tapping his foot. Maggie finishes tying a bow in the hair of her niece and then turns to me. The look on her is like that of a valley just cleared of mist. The faces are red from the dance just ended, the skin shining, the chests rising and falling as they wait for the music to begin. They hold themselves like long-distance runners just before the start of a race. The meaning of a thing that brings you pleasure can come slowly but I got the fullness of this picture just when I saw it. Jack Dwyer puts his bow to the strings of his fiddle. Artie Sweeney’s shoulders fly up as he squeezes his accordion. The man at the piano leans over and drops as he hits the note like a swimmer diving from a rock. The tune begins. Eileen is very light. Her bones could be made from the lightest wood. The music is like an electrical current driving us all around the floor. Eileen knows the steps without looking or thinking. The steps are inside her. She throws her head back and laughs and it’s as though something in her face breaks and falls away, a mask made of dried clay. The way she spun me around at home the day of the Stations. Her feet now are like gulls as they dip and glide on the air. We pass the dancers, flashes of white and red from their clothes, breezes blowing. John Conneely charges through a gap with his wife, his bad knees springing him forward. The pulse of the music and the pulse of the dancers. We are all of us in the dance. The sound I heard from the kitchen at home as I waited by the door after I painted it green. Da lifting the accordion from its box and holding it out to Joe, his eyes shining. The way he could blow into his flute and put the notes of “Anach Cuain” through you like stitches in a cloth. Joe Connor showing us the white stones of Donegal when he sang the day we killed the pig. Matt needing a tune like he would need a drop of spring water on a hot day. The accordion growing from my hands. The notes ringing in the iron hold of the boat to Liverpool. The way I found “She Moves Through the Fair” in the room with Francie in Kilburn. “My Lagan Love” for Maggie when she asked for it. Music happens inside you. It moves the things that are there from place to place. It can make them fly. It can bring you the past. It can bring you things that you do not know. It can bring you into the moment that is happening. It can bring you a cure.

  33

  THE WAY MAG
GIE was.

  She could place a hat on her head at the perfect angle. She knew the names of trees. She could follow a tune or a notion or a story and see sense where others couldn’t. She could weave. She could drink and never falter. She could mend wounds. She could speak so that it sounded like her voice was inside you. She could make a dress. She had knowledge of cities in Spain. She could win at any card game involving memory. She could fill an emptiness even when silent. She could swim great distances.

  I remember the way she placed a handkerchief to her lips. I remember the way she held vegetables when cutting them, the way her hands moved, the fine bones and long fingers, everything light and slow and sure. She had a way when something amused her of moving her lips one way and her eye another. She was quick with sums. She took me to the museum to see the coloured birds of the Pacific. The sun could be hard on her, but only on her face. It made her look bothered and embarrassed. She couldn’t stop her feet when she heard a tune. When sick she did not complain. When I asked her about the way she pushed up the two sides of her long red hair and let it fall so that it covered her left eye she held my hand very lightly and told me that the eye that was hidden was made of glass.

  What was she like? She was not like an animal or a colour. She was not like the sky, or weather, or a kind of food or stone. She was like a forest. Things unknown to her lived and changed inside. The light never stopped moving. The age of the forest and its new growth. She could enclose you. Her silence. The wind could not touch you.