DARRAN BRENNAN

MUSIC PRODUCER / WRITER / PHOTOGRAPHER

Patrick Kavanagh (21 October 1904 – 30 November 1967), Irish poet and novelist.

Of the many writers Ireland has produced, I identify with Patrick Kavanagh the most for his authenticity. In 1939 Kavanagh concluded that Dublin’s literary world was not the stimulating environment he had imagined but petty and ignorant. He saw through the literary masks many Dublin writers wore to affect an air of artistic sophistication.

THE WINKING BLADE

I was too young and naive to realize, your can’t love me as I love you. You are not capable of love. Love to you is a discussion after work over a glass of wine, a pithy stance in the bathroom, a brisk walk along the pier. There is no customisation to ones human mercies, the weakness it brings before its abundance, no end of a day but for a rest of a poison arrow. And if there is a relent from shooting down homebirds, it’s promissory stay; that tomorrow will be back to being the same. 

There is a moment in all of it; a sense of retreat that mimics the unyielding strength of love, yet it never pays its debt to the pain endured. It is not love the world sees but that which you sell of the world.

I have taken the vow. This winking blade. This deathly promise to cut out the cancer. Should I ever strive for more than to answer a single mundane question from your cancerous mouth again, kill me first.

Understanding Storms

I had cycled to Clontarf to be near the sea. Weeks before, I had read that large bodies of water contain negatively charged ions, which stabilise mood chemicals and boost energy. There was a storm moving in quick; light rain but dense. On my ride through town, people had dragged on me to the point my optimistic mood was eclipsed by a moon of insubstantial substance; the ebb of too much stimulation and not enough flow. To darken the afternoon further, there was a new crack in my phone screen, and a swarm of infinitesimal raindrops did, of course, catch a breeze and nip in under my hood. It seemed futile in my affected tumultuousness to swipe them away, and I relented to let in the rain. Eventually, I let those tiny, almost invisible raindrops guide me gently out of the fermenting storm.

A lime green concrete shelter beckoned me to sit on its cold, grey, dappled lap. There I thought of sitting on warm-boned young women from my past as I gazed out over the inanimate, brown coloured Irish Sea. The shelter’s walls were colder as if they’d long been jealous of warm arses in windbreakers and sent them away, and the wind and rain had driven off even the hardiest of lichens. All life was absent but for me and my phone that insisted upon living. I put it in my pocket.

After a while, like a stranger with intrusive thoughts begging for a friendly face to unburden them on, something from the recent past pushed into the shelter. A few days before. A warning not to, and I had. That thought lingered in a woman’s cautious way, saying, only a fool runs into storms.

I must be a fool so, I thought.

She, whoever she was, and I deeply fear she thinks I know more than she might like, echoed my thoughts then. Vestiges of a shelter’s loneliness and something in me that understands the symbiosis of negatively charged ions, which we might leave behind us.

Quite literal, she said dismissively, then went onto swiftly pressing matters: only a fool tries to fight his nature.

Voiceless, she was, yet present in whole boiled-down chapters.

Perhaps only because I’m sheltering, alone and bored of my pensiveness and this college course I have undertaken at fifty, I thought.

Only a fool thinks he is bigger than the storm in him.

I looked up at nothing much and thought, this is true in fairness.

He can win over it and beat it back….

Okay, Jaysus.

And nature, she insisted, is what it is, and…

I rushed into the storm to escape… just for a moment, but it was the distinct lack of  her impending doom that drove me further,  with the promise that I could wander through life’s chasms and vaults without piqued by the infinitesimal drops I’d prefer not to indulge. 

There is only adventure. Reckless bloody adventure.

I was right. Completely calm in the wind and rain, I stumbled into another shelter. A much longer one with seven or eight windows and no glass. A good fifteen feet back, there were two fighters sparring MMA moves, carried out in slow practice. After my little chin nod to the middle-aged one of Indian descent, the trainer I assumed, I sat with my back to them and peeled an orange, the third of the afternoon. There I listened to the grunts behind and assumed much in transience of my earlier brush with mother nature.

Glancing back, the much younger lad with paving-slab Irish freckled skin, slick white yet weathered, was teaching the older Indian man. He stopped and stared at me until I looked away, which pleased him, I assumed given the unfriendliness. Their grunting slow sparring thing continued to be an interest to me, something more in the younger man and his anger, which went ahead of all he seemed to know about the art of pugilism. Was he really the master in their equation? Or was he getting something from simply posing as a teacher?

It was interesting to watch them with sideways glances, particularly the Indian man’s fading will to master something he did not innately possess; a wildness and power he could never match in the younger man, as if he should have to live centuries more to find such a storm in him. I thought, how was it that this older man, at least fifteen years ahead in many obvious ways, had gone through life without seemingly ever once having to find some anger? I imagined him normally weak shouldered, skulking into backgrounds, watching the creations of a world not for him. I peeled my fourth orange. It was bloody nice.

I listened to them for a while and watched the storm on the horizon as the clouds grew darker and more menacing. Determined grunts accompanied light punches. I picked up on the young master’s entitled barks at his older pupil, “move yourself,” “pick it up,” “straight jab.”

Furnace black clouds and cannon blasts of wind called an end to proceedings, signalled by the sound of ripping open the Velcro straps of gloves. Peeling my sixth orange, I began to think that the young man had too much to prove and had developed in him too much self-belief. I felt a tinge of hate… hate is too strong a word, I felt disgust that he had so much pride in himself at his tender age. I might have intervened to preach about him thinking he was bigger than any storm but it was the Indian man who had removed the straps at the first growls of thunder, and shouts interrupted those intrusive thoughts.

As a Velcro strap was forced closed for another round, I heard her speak to me again: no man’s talent will ever be bigger than his recklessness.

To my amusement, the older man clocked his master square on the chin. The crack was sweet. I imagined it would linger with the Indian long, and in the concrete’s fissures and cracks too. I glanced back and saw clearly the lessons behind his unmasked countenance that said, “You can’t cheat life, or even out-storm it. The smart way is to lie down and wait for it to pass.”

There was some agreement amongst us two, who found ourselves facing inner storms, and why we are drawn to chase them.

To beat them.

There, the truth, anchored in nature, which people forget or ignore until it’s there before us, settled on us. And all while the wind blew and rain spiralled around the concrete shelter, we grew calmer.

And if you are really smart, you wait until it is at your back before you get up again.

Bloody good advice, I thought condescendingly, as if in full-blooded conversation with her—before my arse made me a promise the if I ate another orange it’d send a second storm.

As I left the two sparring (gentler) men to their interests, I found myself driven from behind by a gust of thought, thought that the young man was more of an expert than people gave him credit for (which explained his frustration); I could relate too. It had been lost on him and now he saw something of it. Self awareness and perhaps even self love. That face said he had faced storms his whole life and had mastered them if not quite pugilism (given he’d been clocked by a rank amateur). It was a clear and present feeling that I had seen instantly in his boyishly sharp eyes on meeting him but did not know what I had seen. Those eyes said, why would I bow down to the likes of you?

Why indeed. I dunno.

I doubted he ever saw that look in his own eyes, mirrors are rarely so reflective; the clarity of his outward identity seemed ephemeral and grasped at clumsily. Too late perhaps, unless someone older and wiser tells in some clear eyed or cracking way.

As I passed, I fist bumped the Indian and gave the Irish a solid look, each an imprint, which perhaps went barely noticed, would be needed during some passage of time. I left my feeling of how I had once a face so wilfully and neglectfully misunderstood by the world until I started listening to her while I ran.

I looked back at the Indian, he had clearly lived a life of ease and acceptance and thus became nothing in storms, wilfully. His face spoke of a deeper connection to storms, how they will always find you and his admittance that he could not lie down every time. That was why he was there after all.

Further alone the coast, something lingered between us: an understanding in the moment, we would, in a strange absent way, stay with each other until the end of time. Perhaps in those timeless voices that quietly live inside us and seem to come out of the cracks of old shelters. They paint colours that spell: there comes a time when you have to read the weather, see past the face of storms and gauge whether they are as mean as they look. Sometimes her nature is coloured so you run into them, just stand in the eye to know they’re just like you.

IN THE WEEDS

Another shot missed, rewinding through a fog
We sit down to talk and I seem to lose the plot
Breeding pride says humility is just a begging dog
Clarity feels like sickness to a self-destructing God

In the weeds again, heart bleeds innocence
Forgot how to be a friend, hold you down ’til then

Off the point, smile, not holding on.
Went deep because it’s been a shallow slog
Head’s not sorted through, from opening locked doors
Competition broke each moment that got involved

In the weeds again, heart bleeds innocence
Forgot how to be a friend, holding down ’til then

Coffee drinker, thinking thinking clearer
Getting somewhere nearer, think I feel the dreamer
Claw painted at my feet, draw blood to know I’m real
Watch it slowly seem, token shards on our beach

In the weeds again, heart bleeds innocence
Forgot how to be a friend, hold a crown ’til then

I wash you down a stone, bathing you a child
Emerging as a one, together we have died
Ghosts upon our shore, above our fractured ground
Heavy spirits taking shots of people falling down

In the weeds again, heart bleeds innocence
Forgot how to be a friend, sold down a pound ’til then

Breaking you won’t help, yet no Marvel saves the day
Ugly heart screams out, dressed up to find a way
Physical attraction renders, each one who sees as slaves
Love isn’t blind to us, when every nothing pays

In the weeds again, heart bleeds innocence
Forgot how to be a friend, told many a tale ’til then

It might be old as time but has the energy
And passion matters more than almost anything
Each generations best, in tatters, bells keep ringing
Feel only of the mire, depart that road to wisdom

In the weeds again, heart bleeds innocence
Forgot how to be a friend, sold you out ’til then

Then the final comes a chance, a wry sideways glance
Balling up of our hands, won’t go through all that again
Morning light lasts ‘til ten, through A.M. ‘til P.M.
The clearest thoughts came when, you glanced quick through a fence

In the weeds again, heart bleeds innocence
Forgot how to be a friend, held it down ’til then

From the trees it came, the nature of us all
Forgot what mattered child, that soared before the fall
When heard it’s whispering, did not answer its call
The right tone moves the world, a major chord for all.

In the weeds again, heart bleeds innocence
Forgot how to be a friend, own it all and be proud, the end.

BUS ROUTES

There comes a time when a person thinks he can learn nothing more of value to him other than the lessons found in everyone around him. 

September 2024 was the coldest in recent memory. I find myself back in that deeply contemplative place where the gravity of starting a new phase in life makes waves in my stomach. Turning fifty and feeling twenty seven hit me hard. Strangely not painful but with a sense of undeniable reality. As a working class artist of thirty years, with minor success and long spells of perfecting my myriad of hobbies into talents, I feel a sense of ultimate control over my wares. 

After my writing class, I exit through the college doors with a young man, Aaron, thirty years my junior in tow. He’s a boy really but quietly self-assured; a strange mix of anxiety, curiosity and arrogance. He begins to quietly walk the oak-lined winding road behind me towards the white front gates. In class his bespeckled bluish eyes often flash to me from beneath his brown curls. Open and empty eyes. His constant reliance on my approval and not Dave’s, lounging as he teaches, tells me he respects a certain type of man. One more like me, I presume. In comparison, Dave has womanly ways; sensitive, floaty, always willing and malleable and seemingly often confused, yet remains to me a man. A man who is overwhelmed because he believes, in typical male fashion, that he can handle everything he invites onto him. This has made him full of hubris and self reflection; an assured unwellness. It’s a sick feeling in the head that’s begun to transfer onto the class through his intense eye contact. However, everyone is hunting a witch hidden amongst the students, and me being someone that is comfortably numbed to life’s trivial pricks, they think I’m a prick in hiding.

“How did you find that?” I ask Aaron, slowing to let him catch up.

His words are always short and curt. “Yeah good.”

“It’s a big adjustment for all of us, including Dave. How are you finding him?”

“He’s alright.”

“Grand. How are you getting on with the change?” I ask, kicking a stone up the driveway.

“Whaddya mean?” he asks curtly, as if the reason for his bluntness is not down to anxiety and a lack of understanding of the big bad world.

A little smile fights its way into the corners of my mouth. “Ah, ye know.” I decide to change the subject to me. “I started a course there last year and struggled with the adjustment.”

“It’s grand for me so far,” he says.

I laugh to myself and realize that during these intense glances across the room, I’ve picked up more about him than he realizes. “You’re fine are ye? Ok grand,” I say, in a way that puts him in the closed off and toxic box.

“I mean… I dunno, it’s eh… yeah.”

“You’re Dad is quite prevalent in your life, isn’t he?”

He looks up at me, the first time on our saunter, says nothing for a few steps and then, “How’d you know that?”

“Ah, I know things.”

Rather than being curious to see what more I might know about him, he says,. “How?”

“People are the same the world over. Our minds work in much the same ways; like bus routes.”

“Whaddya mean?” He stares at his dirty white Vans as we walk.

“Generally we’ve the same basic needs, and everything else is like bus routes to and from that point.”

“Oh right, makes sense,” he says, lifted.

“There are a millions of routes and a few major stops at intersections.”

“Like getting a job, house, wife and kids.”

“We can get stuck at stops.”

“Whaddya mean?”

“Like your Dad being a major influence in your life: I can tell that your Mam is influential but he’s dominant. Hence, you’ll respect men more than women.” I look down to see his eyes glaze over and widen. “It’s why men don’t really like Dave and that’s why he wants to get me out of his class. He wants easy, malleable people.”

“Yeah, he’s a bit of a weirdo.”

“He’s a bit overwhelmed. That’s another stop on a different route: someone who overestimates their capabilities usually ends up in divorce and dependencies on sex and substances to deal with the extraneous pressures they bring into their lives.”

“Oh, I get ye now.” He looks at me and smiles as if I have assured him that his instincts about me were right.

“So you, for instance, will struggle with women.”

“So I’m stuck on that route?”

“Not if you take the wheel of the bus and change lanes. That means you have to put all that stuff from your upbringing in the back of the bus.”

“Or kick it all off.”

“I tried that, you’d need a lobotomy.”

He laughs before his face darkens. 

“You can’t hit the accelerator and speed away from life, Aaron. You’ll only speed into people’s gardens and pick their flowers. You really do not want to go in there without permission,” I say, aggressively insistent he not mess mine and quietly stare at him until he looks away.

He nods and fixes his eyes on the gate. 

“I’m a bit like everyone myself. I kicked off the people who caused me problems, family and friends, but they’re still there. I have problems with women because my parents argued all the time and my mother claimed me, my dad claimed my brother. Dave probably had a similar situation with his mother. That can be very confusing for people to understand. So you know, best to not go digging into their inner workings, or you’ll inherit the pain and sickness they struggle with and incur their wrath for digging.”

His mood quickly becomes a simmering sort of aggressiveness. Towards himself, I assume and quickly kick the stone up the road. I sense that I’ve changed his entire world, which is again not to his liking and explains to me his curtness.

I slow. “Cool so,” I say. “What time are we in tomorrow?”

He goes back to being that open and empty eyed boy. “Ten.”

“Sound, see you then.” I stop to check my phone. 

As he goes, I watch him; the route from self-assured and determined to someone who watches his step carefully but with a greater sense of himself.

Fear of Honesty

It’s September 20th 2024, the beginning of my fifty-first year on planet Earth. I am walking from my new photography class into a cluttered college corridor. Weaving around me are cleaners, mature students looking for rooms and troops of young women searching for something that catches their fancy. 

These cracked linoleum floors, in their black-speckled institutional cream, are far from the mahogany grandeur I had imagined. Years spent on my couch left me sinking deeper into the cushions, my widening arse marking my only imprint on Earth. Belatedly, I had to roll off it. If I didn’t, I’d never escape that comfortable pit of despair. 

The vocational college’s walls, constructed of a flimsy material and misaligned with the sagging, falling ceiling tiles, are lined with pretentiously avant garde clothing designs. Attempts at high fashion. I can’t help staring at the gaudy constructions. They’re made with bright coloured paper, glitter and hot glue; hodgepodge schoolkids’ attempts with lavish dollops of sharp angles and chiffon, all cut out by shaky hands. 

It’s an honest start,  I think.

So much pure amateur work compounds a feeling I’ve had inside me since first speaking in my new class. Not my own innerstanding but something of my classmates’, most of them over thirty, who are able to engage in eye contact and smiles. Yet there is a self conscious feeling of not knowing anything again and trying to crack out of a hardened shell; dragon eggs. It’s a raw, cold and frustrating sense of transition that I, an eternal optimist in a soft shell when off the couch, don’t generally suffer with. 

I had hoped my photography classmates, who enter into the busy corridor behind me, will make more effort to speak to me. My sense is that my intense interest in the subject of photography and regular interactions with the tutor was a bit overbearing and frustrating for them. 

The unsettling wall-vomit somehow influences me to blurt out, to nobody in particular, “You get up or get down.”

“That’s serious,” says one of my classmates, a Nigerian man walking behind me, who seemed the most alpha (or angrily stressed) on our induction day when I made the effort to speak to him. However, he was far from confident when speaking and in class, which suggests poor efforts at stress management. 

Once again, I have ended up in a room full of people who seem to be brooding introverts in comparison to me, FFS. Thankfully, I don’t blurt that in the corridor. Or maybe I should…

I respond to the Nigerian man’s comment with nothing but a head tilt that hopefully says, yeah, it is serious. Life is serious. You get up or get the fuck down. 

That’s my mantra: no passengers just riders.

As I cycle out of the car-park, I pass him and ask where he’s heading. He responds with a calm and firmly fixed look like there’s a lot more to him beneath the stress. Now this I prefer because I don’t like having to put strength into people; it’s a lot of work and often for little reward; those people foster poor attitudes and self-pity. 

He proves to me that there is also something deeper in most people that comes out of them when they get out of their own way; a thing that isn’t afraid to be forward, obtuse or even violent. 

It’s better for you if your environment is a product of you rather than you a product of its poor stress management.

It’s strangely reassuring to become the villan.

Craning, I slow the bike, with a look back to enquire where he is based. 

“Eh…”

Ah, you’re catching a bus, I think, don’t be embarrassed. And I nod and smile.

“Santry, just catching, eh, the bus,” he says.
I didn’t ask what mode of transport but I appreciate that your read on me is honesty-based, I think.

His more open and less hostile expression as we say goodbye gives me flashbacks of the depressed air that seemed to be festering in the class. 

I had a solid plan to keep my head down in class so as to avoid the false sense of my overbearingness; an optimist can make people of a comfortable-discomfortable imposition feel uncomfortable; negative self-consciousness and insecure assessment of situations. I’m seen as cocky. I have enough festering introverted enemies in Ireland to be getting on with.

The class was interesting; I couldn’t stay quiet. Our brand new tutor, Michael, was explaining how the first ever photographs came about by accident. My plan was to sit and listen like all the others but I had to know all about why light reflects off an object and appears on the page upside down. And all about the first camera, which we learned started as a tool used by painters to trace the real world onto a page by bouncing light (and thus shadow) of an object onto it. I brought up Carravaggio, who painted in a hyper realistic style, and asked whether that had been his trick to painting with such precision. This seemed to impress Michael because he had, on his foundational level course face, a similar curious mind. 

During the class we discussed compressed files and how digital formats had to be agreed upon by those that wanted to exchange them, jpegs (Joint Photographic Experts Group), so as to be shared worldwide. We discussed RAW format digital photographs, the uncompressed, undiluted format. Afterwards, I had a passing thought, which I gave no heed to but is worth mentioning how an optimistic and affected mind functions around stress: humans in raw form versus the compressed form. I am the type of person who needs the detailed, true, uncomfortable form if I am to give you any respect, however, I prioritize that much lower these days.

Long story short, my voice was as dominant as Michael’s and had inadvertently set a bar for the Nigerian man, and others, who grew more reluctant to open their mouths as the day went on. This unduly became higher in my priorities; usually it’s the opposite as people get more comfortable. Perhaps they had a plan to keep the head down and are people who can stick to plans. I suppose I looked like a fool to them. Given a few trembled whenever prompted to speak, I wasn’t so sure if the plan was as sound as mine. Afterall, interacting with a tutor isn’t exactly revealing myself, unless I am in a room whose main priority is to understand everyone in the room. 

Kind of shady. Villains a plenty. 

As I leave the Nigerian man to his humballing bus journey, I have old emotions swirling around me. Mostly about honesty, deflection and the confusion born out of playing games when you don’t know what you’re doing. 

I had allowed my passion and curiosity about the subject to supersede my planned ways to avoid negative attention and poor attitudes. 

Why did I throw out those plans? Why couldn’t I shut up? 

I was a pensive kid who had questions that nobody could answer. So I said to myself at some point,  maybe I would have to answer them myself. I’d probably need to stand up and tell everyone what I’d found, or put it in words, or photos, music or even clothes. 

Wherever you go, or end up, truth always follows. 

I saw raw truth and honesty in those crude fashion designs on the walls. Yes, they were ejaculatory, unrestrained and over-the-top, yet there was life there; the questioning dreamer; the giving of something to the world; the expected smoothening of those shaky starts and future arc into linear truths. 

There is honesty or there is fear. There should be no fear of honesty. 

What if we don’t risk ridicule? What if we stick to our plan when it might be best to risk looking outlandish in the eyes of true villans? What if those budding designers had fashioned some Dunne’s Stores denims and stuck those on the wall instead? Would I have been less ill at ease and not blurted the truth of the situation? Would there have been a point to life then? Or if they copied final designs of someone who had worked tirelessly their whole life, has planned and readjusted to life, and finally got to stick pins into the hips of long legged waifs for Haute Couture? Would I be humbled by that copycat style on the walls? 

I’d have been innately cynical!!

Gaudy is honest. Raw is honest. Honesty is a humbaling arc; The only route to an arc. 

Nobody says life is going to be all planned moves to catwalks and bouquets, perfect answers and smooth transitions. Sometimes, the best parts are the ugly confusing parts; in getting your head around why light reflects off things and appears upside down; or why most plans go by the wayside.  

There must be allowances and above all, honesty. Life must become in its honest, RAW and ugly form or be forever doomed to a comfortable pit of despair.


A SHORT STORY ABOUT LEARNING TO BE BRAVE:
SINK OR SWIM

(This isn excerpt from a novel I’m writing called ‘Pint Glass Men’).

My Granda Mick believed that fear was a sign of weakness. He regularly reminded himself of his prowess as a man by swimming in the Irish sea in winter. He took long walks alone to contemplate people’s weaknesses. He didn’t drink, despite working for Guinness Brewery his whole life, and his only vice was smoking a pipe. One day, he decided to find out if my life would be one of fear—assumed by my dad—when he took me to Guinness Athletic Swimming Club. 

Now I often wonder if in doing what Granda Mick did, if there’s something about the Irish identity that’s equal to ancient Sparta. You know, when they flung babies from Mount Taygetus that were suspected of being unworthy of life? In our case, decidedly less death inducing; if I survived, I would save myself from a life of being considered worthless.

I was seven and he and my mam were at loggerheads for some reason. Mam was a hyper vigilant mother—I once saw an old home video of my christening where she had me in her arms leaving the church and couldn’t take her eyes off me to the point of constant tripping. 

So that day, Granda Mick must have ripped me from her arms. He took me on the bus filled with a sense of pride about what he was planning to do. He regularly smoked a pipe, held his chin out, chest barrelled, showing the world he didn’t have their petty fears. I still associate the smell of pipe smoke with his self assurance. The sun was belting down, filling the bus with a healthy waft of sweat and suntan lotion. Mick talked to everyone, always willing to invite a stranger along on one of his walks and promising to put in a good word at the brewery. As always, the brewing process made Dublin stink something foul, and his pipe smoke was a welcome relief. He chatted proudly about his job, which is how I first learned all about the benefits he availed of for working for the brewery in the 1980s, that included access to healthcare, pension plans, sick pay, paid holidays, life insurance and subsidized housing. He mentioned the free and discounted beer, which garnered many potential new friends. However, he never mentioned the free access to certain sports and social clubs, which I would later learn of. This included the Olympic sized swimming pool in the Liberties, which he was planning on surprising me with this day.

Once I had gawped myself through the big lobby and into the wet area, that fear I was absolutely not supposed to feel, began to make me anxious. Fear of the unknown. Fear of the plan I saw in his eyes. Fear of my as yet unrevealed inabilities.

We got changed alone, me in the big bad world awkwardly pulling on my stretchy blue togs while he, in the next cubicle, talked about Dad’s impressive diving accomplishments—Dad was on the Irish Olympic diving team but never quite reached the Olympics. Then we slip slopped across the dressing room tiles towards the echoing shouts of kids leaping from the diving boards, their big cannonball claps filling me with excitement. Timidly curious, I entered the space where the Olympic sized pool loomed monstrously. Copying Granda, I washed my feet—for whatever reason, I remember thinking as I shook. It’s clear now that he took this excitement for fear.

Walking towards the shallow end, I gazed into the friendly pale blue waters.

He marched on and called, “Over here.” Stopping halfway along the poolside, he peered down into a scary looking deep blue. “You’re going to swim in there,” he said, hands on hips, head up, embarrassed by my sheepishness.

He had a friendly, trustworthy smile, so I optimistically decided he was simply giving me something to aim for, that one day I’d take to that deep water like an otter. “I know that I have to kick my legs and move my arms at the same time, but…” I said, walking back towards the shallow end.  Suddenly I felt hands around my hips, and then I was moving upwards, sideways and out over the deep blue, curling my legs into my body as if I could climb inside myself to escape certain death. In the midst of catching my breath to make my plea, he threw me out a good ten feet. Before I splashed down I heard him say, “You better swim.”

Still to this day, I wonder where the lifeguard was or why nobody pulled him up on what would be considered child abuse today. His confident voice said, ‘this is how it’s done’—the proof was that Dad was a champion diver, who had a whole cabinet full of diving trophies and medals.

In one panicked breath, I went under and swallowed a bellyful of water. A swarm of tiny stinging bubbles attacked my nose and cheeks, and bigger ones pounded my ears. Everything sounded muffled, bringing a forgotten part of me back to where it all began in Mam’s belly. Yet, my heart’s addiction to air, a heart of silence normally, screamed that I was sinking into one of those giant crevasses at the bottom of the ocean that I had seen on TV. I concured that my air would run out before Granda Mick decided to save me from ten leagues below.  My little timid, self-conscious arms and legs transformed into the fast spinning blades of a bent propellor; one pulling sideways, the other upwards at a diagonal. Below me, stick legs, as opposed to bladed fins found on any living creature, did a blunt scissor kick motion. As my heartbeat increased to the speed of the pistons of a Formula 1 car in 1st gear, I managed to create enough force to barely negate gravity. Slowly, weakly, I moved towards the rippling, shimmering shapes warping above my head.

Coughing and inhaling my own splashes, fidelity returned to my hearing. When I breathed my larynx made a high pitched wheezing sound. I remember thinking about water wings and how they’d always kept me afloat because I was sinking again. I cried out, “Help,  help,” went under and came up, “… help Granda!”

He just stood there, not even a hand out to reach for. “Kick your legs,” he said. “Don’t be whinging. Swim, for Jaysus’ sakes.”

Through a crude scrap with the water and cannonball waves shoving me back out, I managed to stay on the surface and doggy paddle back. With my chin dipping below massive waves, as far as I could tell, I barely noticed that I had been thrown into acid; my eyes and nose stung something awful. This is Sparta! Once I clawed up the poolside, coughing acid from my lungs and wiping bee stings from my eyes and nose, I looked up at him in shock.

He smiled. “Good man, ye didn’t die.”

Seeing how proud such a big man was of me, my heart’s terror quietened itself for a second. “Can I swim now?”

“No, but that’s a bloody good start.”

If Dublin had been Sparta, I just secured my survival.

Afterwards, he was gentler and a little guilty as he took me in his arms and carried me to the shallow end. There he taught me to swim properly. He lay me face down in the water, hand under me for support, the other hand teaching me how to pull the water, showing me the coordination needed for a front crawl.

After an hour, I was back in the deep end of my own volition, desperate to
show him what a quick learner I was and how unafraid of life I had become. On
the way home, I reran the panic I felt and the initial betrayal. The feeling of
being shoved from the safety of solid earth to face my own mortality, without
warning festered in me. However, every other forgiving cell in my body was
changing; this was how it was done. One day I would find myself in the deep end of a situation, clueless about how to swim and I’d have to find a way. 

That lesson worked. Temporarily. Life is never so black and white as sink or swim. He had inadvertently given me my first drug, adrenalin. Got me hooked on the thrill of endangering myself; on recklessness. 


LISTEN TO 2 SHORT STORIES I WROTE, READ BY ME


My Debut Novel's Trailer: Treoir: Curse On The Island

Donnacha lives on the remote Irish island of Treoir.
Haunted by the memory of his institutionalised wife and failing at being
a surrogate father to his niece and nephew, he tries to find new
meaning by giving refuge to an African teen who has albinism.

In parts of Africa, people with albinism are considered magical and
witch doctors convince remote tribes they will be blessed with good luck
and wealth by drinking a broth made from the body parts of albinos.
This makes them a hunted people.

Dubliner, Jonah Odjinwahlia, has a world-changing scientific theory
and suffers from albinism. When his petty criminal of a father plans to
sell him to traffickers, he is given refuge on the island of Treoir. But
his arrival amongst the sheltered community sparks old superstitions.
Once Jonah goes missing, his benefactor, Donnacha, sets off on a
perilous trek across Tanzania to hunt for the witch doctor Jonah has
been sold to.

Set against a backdrop of conservatism and superstition, Treoir is
both a gripping plot and an exploration into cultural norms that span
the modern and third worlds, highlighting the arbitrary remedies we
create for our fragility and human nature—that can legitimise our
most abhorrent behaviours.


Review for My Debut Novel

David Beckler (Author)

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 12 October 2020

CLICK IMAGE ABOVE TO PURCHASE