Donncha de Búrca isn’t a man who chooses a quiet life. He’s living on an idyllic island off the west coast of Ireland, but his life is far from perfect. He’s in hiding from the gangsters who killed his brother, he’s having problems with Quinn, his brother’s daughter he’s now responsible for, he blames himself for his wife’s breakdown and he’s having problems with some of the locals. No wonder he likes a drink.
But, clearly needing more problems, he decides to help Jonah, an albino youth from Dublin, whose Tanzanian family are proposing to sell him to a witch-doctor. Jonah’s arrival demonstrates it’s not only Tanzanians who are superstitious about Albinism. The youth’s presence upsets the locals, and not only those who already have a problem with Donnacha.
The world on the island is clearly not as Donnacha sees it, and at the start I wanted to shake him shouting, Wake up! Like many drunks, he takes to the booze at the worst of times, making himself vulnerable to his enemies. This is a complex novel with many strands. The characters, especially Donnacha, are well drawn.
The claustrophobia of the closed community on the island is well realised and builds. When Jonah disappears, Donnacha has to make a tough decision. Fearing he has failed yet another person, he risks everything and sets off on an expedition to recover the youth.
The danger and threats build to a satisfying climax.
DARRAN BRENNAN
WRITER I SONGWRITER I MUSIC PRODUCER
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 ones 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.
Excerpt from novel, As DEAD
As ALIVE…
BEYOND THE FORKED TRACKS the tunnel loomed. Slowly the freight train entered the darkness, the sound of rumbling heavy metal deafening against the cold damp walls. Tim put his back to the big wheel of industrial wire and slid down as Nelly rested her chin on the barrier of the flatbed. They kept their eyes on a small chink of light for a mile and a half until the invigorating sting of the Mediterranean sun kissed their skins again. They were greeted by miles of neat crop fields on one side, jagged dunes of wild grass on the coast side, and in the distance, straight lines of a forested nature reserve. Hums filled the air as crops exploded with puffs and the sound of a million fluttering wings. A black swarm of starlings lifted off like a shapeshifting jumbo jet, sending a dust cloud towards the pale blue horizon. Two more giant flocks of starlings lifted off.
“They move like the Rorschach test,” she said.
“What?”
“One of the tests Walter did on me when I was about nine. You know the thing psychiatrists do when they show you random blots, to crack your head open?”
“What was that like?
“I hated the whole process.”
“Did it help?” he said, scrawling into the flatbed’s filthy floorboards with a pen knife.
“I think it helped Walter understand me back then, when I was nine or ten. Nothing really worked on me. He said I was resistant to therapy.”
“Why did you keep going for so many years?”
“I found it interesting…” She looked back towards where the train had come from. “It took my mind off everything.”
“Like what?”
“Imagining being followed everywhere.” Looking at the uninspiring view of several small industrial towns, she muttered, “I feel strangely safe on here, like nobody will find me. I’m glad you forced me to do this now.” She glanced at him. “You look healthier.”
“I wish I felt it.”
“YOU WILL SOON. You’ll be the blonde haired, blue eyed poet who longs to row solo across the Pacific again.”
Laughter rose from deep in him. “I don’t think exertion is in my future. Maybe I’ll catch a cruise with all the other oldies with heart problems.”
“Forty one isn’t old.”
“It feels it,” he said, laughing.
“When you’re well again, you’ll do all you ever dreamed of.” She watched the three swarms form into one enormous blot over the land.
“I have that song in my head, ‘Me And Bobby McGee’,” he said. When she shrugged, he continued, “by Janis Joplin,” and sang tunelessly, “Busted flat in Baton Rouge, waitin’ for a train… Freedom is just another word for nothin’ left to lose.”
“It’s mad that we’re doing this, hopping freight trains to God knows where,” she said.. “You’re sure you’re up to it?”
“I feel great for once. It must be all the sun.”
“Good.” A distance in her neared again.
The coast shimmered with flickering stars. Low above the sea, a thin white mist stretched its long arms all the way back to the Bay of Biscay. To Tim, everything seemed to be in a romantic embrace with the sea and land and everything born of them.
He looked at his watch and then at the sky. “We’re going north?
“Are we?” she said, tucking her green floral dress under her bum to stop it blowing.
He mirrored the distance in her.
Other than mutters to check if the other was okay, they lounged statuesque as the slow wagons clopped through small rural towns, miles of dry, hedge lined farmland and bigger towns with ugly industrial centres and empty car parks. Then a city that had life but was strangely lifeless. She leaned back on her hands, let her brown hair drape over her drenched chest, wiped dirt and sweat across her sunburned cheeks, lost again in unreachable thoughts.
He looked at her with wonder as life seemed to enter her eyes with each stolen mile. The buoyancy in her was unrecognisable from their first meeting in person. She had arrived at the busy restaurant to meet Tim that day after weeks of online DMs. Skittish was the word he remembered thinking; tattered hair blowing across her haunted face, like a ghost ship in a bay for pleasure boats. His small talk went unanswered as she folded a napkin on the table as if it was a flag on a coffin. To anyone not watching so closely, she was a typical, twenty eight year old millennial-Gen Z crossover; bored attractiveness and vulnerability; brow piercing in an oval hole; small faded tattoo of a black rose between her thumb and index finger and two elongated, indistinct tattoos poking up from her sweater on each side of her neck. He remembered thinking that her blue green eyes were imposters on her pretty face; too swollen, uneasy and knowing for one so young.
The train continued without stopping, trundled on through built up urban areas until it returned to the countryside. She said she was worried the train might not stop in time to rehydrate. Her lips had cracked, skin was flaked a little, enough to complain regularly. He complained in support. When it passed a mountain range, overheated, tired bodies quietened their gripes.
“I think that’s the Pyrenees,” she said.
“That means we’re going into Spain.” He gazed at the low sun behind him. “We’re headed more south east, maybe towards the south coast of France, I’d say at a guess.”
The sun had reddened her arms and shins raw. “I really need to drink something now.”
“It’ll stop soon.”
“Are you okay?” His breathing was laboured.
“Grand. Thanks for asking,” he said, wincing. “I’m used to it.”
“You’re strong, Tim. Stronger than I could ever hope to be.”
“Just a good actor.”
She kept him within the corners of her gaze. It was several more hours before the train began to slow. It entered a quiet town, inhabited but desolate. They were filthy now; nearly black faces and arms. Their clothes had snagged on splinters and were torn. She looked down at a big rip along the hem of her dress and a small cut on her thigh, which she had smeared into a mucky mess above her knee.
“Jesus, we look like a couple of hobos after only 4 hours on this thing.” He hadn’t paid much attention to his own tardiness and pointed out a sign, “Toulouse.”
“Maybe we should go back to Biarritz and then head back to Paris” she said. “It’s a shame to waste a free week in a plush hotel.”
“Thought there were too many ghosts in Biarritz?”
“Yeah, I’m just sore on these floorboards.”
“It’ll be good once we’re used to it.”
Once the train crossed the Garonne river into Toulouse, they lay back until it entered an industrial yard and stopped beneath a giant vice like contraption.
“A rail mounted gantry crane,” he said, as it moved away from their rear carriage towards the front. “They’ll unload the containers now I’d say.”
“I’m dying of thirst.”
“Me too.”
The crane lowered the vice that clamped onto a container and picked it up and put them on the back end of a line of trucks. A second crane moved behind on tracks, putting new rusted red and blue containers in place.
“How come they don’t see us?” she said, looking up at the cab high above.
“He doesn’t care or isn’t bothered.” He rolled his head to check on her. “Do you know what we need?”
“What?”
“Some tabards.”
He crawled along the flatbed to the far end, hidden from the busy workers by the barrier and watched them. “There’s an office over there,” he whispered. “They’re busy with cargo.” He took his opportunity to climb down and crept back past her. “Keep your head down, I’ll be back.”
“What if it leaves?” she said.
“It won’t for a good while. Wait here.”
He ducked through carriages on an adjacent track and disappeared between the containers. When he returned moments later he was wearing a bright yellow tabard, and he threw one over to her and climbed back on.
“That was a head rush… everything is with a dying heart, to be honest,” he said, laughing. He handed her a small bottle of water and cracked the lid of another.
She rolled onto an elbow, opened it and devoured every drop. “You stole them.”
He grinned and looked up at the sky. “The Universe provides.” He laughed and pulled another from his back pocket and gave it to her. “Hang onto it, it’s all we’ve got.”
Darkness fell quickly. It was cold as the train carriages clinked and shunted off back down the track. “Is it going back to Biarritz?” she said.
“Dunno.”
When it began to head in a different direction from where it came, she held him for warmth.
“I haven’t an ounce of fat. I’ll hardly keep you warm.”
“I make up for what you’re missing then.”
They lay shivering until deep into the night, sleeping intermittently and jolting awake often. When eventually the train slowed again and stopped under another rail mounted gantry crane, he checked the time.
“5 A.M., the unloading will take as long as the last time. That’ll give us time to get off, buy food and water and return.”
“I’m not sure I like this. I’m really worried about you.”
“Don’t sweat it, I’m fine.”
“We should go back.”
“We both need this.” He climbed down in his tabard and stood scratching his head as if he was a worker bothered by something on the carriage. “If anyone says anything, act like you belong. Come on.” He held out his hand, and she took it.
She followed him towards bright floodlights near a gate, where a line of trucks, their silhouettes gilded by the fluorescence, hid their escape. In their tabards, the workers and drivers who spotted them paid them little attention. They passed through the main gate, waving at a security guard who craned out of his box and said in French to show their passes at the smaller pedestrian gate when returning.
They found themselves next to a motorway slip road crammed with trucks leaving the yard. Tim saw the coast to the south, signs for Beziers pointing west and Marseille to the east. “I reckon we’re in Montpellier,” he said. “I reported on a few European matches here.”
“I’m freezing,” she said, rubbing goosebumps from the back of her arms.
He put his arm around her, and they walked until the bright lights of a motorway rest stop came into view. Something about the man behind the counter kept her from entering. Tim went in alone and returned with two plastic bags full of water, fruit and nuts.
“It’s the only healthy stuff they had,” he said, holding them up and giving her a smile.
She peeled a banana and stuffed it into her mouth. “Mmm.”
“It’s probably locally grown. Food tastes so much better when you’re starving.”
They walked back towards the lights of the depot and stopped short of risking passing through the small gate to get back in.
“We’ll be asked for ID,” he said, watching the silhouette of an articulated truck at the gate. “Follow me and keep low.”
He crouched next to the truck’s back wheel as the driver spoke to the guard on the main gate. As it rolled forwards, they scurried alongside until it passed, and then they casually walked back to their carriage.
The train got going as the sun came up. The cold of the night kept them awake until the morning’s warmth allowed a few hours of corpse like sleep. She woke and watched him with one eye. When the loud caws of a crow overhead woke him too, he crawled to the barrier. She wearily sat up to see the hazy pale Mediterranean Sea and an island in the distance.
“What a view,” he said, stretched and yawning. “My back is in bits sleeping on that floor.”
They peered down over the land that bowed towards the sea and lots of little fishing villages with their terracotta tiled roofs dotted along the coastline. She took out her phone and stared at it. “I should call Walter but I’ve no battery left. Have you?”
He took his from his back pocket. “Dead too.” He grinned.
“No it’s not.”
“Dead as a dodo,” he said, repeatedly pressing the power button.
She frowned and stared past him. “He’ll be worried. I usually call him in the mornings to let him know I haven’t… you know, done myself in.”
“Everything alright this morning?”
She gave a cynical sort of cackle. “If you could hear what’s going on in my head you’d be put off the view.”
“What is it?”
“You really don’t want to know.”
He sat beside her. “You’re giving me your heart in a few weeks time. I want to know everything about you.”
“You might not want it after I tell you.”
“I don’t have much choice now. Tell me.”
“Ah, just a lot of negative things. Intrusive voices; things people have said or wanted to say. They’re bad in the mornings.” She took a tablet and pulled her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. “Let’s just look at the view,” she said, as the train entered a section containing the backs of houses and graffiti covered walls topped with fencing or barbed wire.
“The wind feels nice against my skin,” he said. “I love this air. The Med is such an amazing place.
“Beats Ireland.” She gazed longingly into the distance.
He took a fresh bottle of sparkling water from the plastic bag, cracked it and gave it to her.
“Thanks.”
As she drank, he sighed with pleasure.
“Umm,” she said.
“Drink as much as you need. I’ll get you more.” He smiled as she enjoyed it. “Nice is it?”
“Yeah,” she said, and drank until full.
“How are those bubbles on your tongue?”
“Yeah grand.”
“Smell that morning air.”
“Nice yeah,” she said, screwing the top on. “Honestly?” She sat the bottle between her legs. “This is nothing like how I imagined it. I thought it’d feel much… freer, but I’m so anxious.”
“If we’re caught, we can just hop off and jump another freight.”
“It’s how I am, Tim, nothing shakes it.”
“You have moments. I sense it.”
She laughed ironically, looked down at the violence rolling over the tracks, recalled those four lost years after Biarritz and finally getting so drunk on two bottles of vodka that she walked naked into traffic outside her flat. Blots of forgotten memories of that first attempt appeared through the sleepers: looking down at her breasts a moment before she felt the stomach churning slam sideways as the white van ploughed into her. It had been a relief to be sent like a ragdoll on her back, skidding across the tarmac and crashing into a traffic bollard. Unfortunately one of those soft rubber ones. A man stood over her, trembling with his phone, a confused look in his eyes about why a naked woman had stepped in front of his van. She remembered closing her eyes in anger at being alive and the blue lights arriving to extend it all for however many tomorrows until she tried again. All the grey Irish days alone, fogged windows, lonely rooms filled with the ghosts of those few happy years in Biarritz fighting with the ghosts of her parents.
forever…
2 SOUTHERN FRANCE
You bring it all with you
As if you’ll need it
Their freight laden carriage took them back the way they came, slow enough to step off at a crossing. Tim insisted they continue east and stuck out his thumb. Before Nelly could drag him back to the reality of their situation awaiting them in Geneva; before she could formulate the words to remind him that their relationship was based on her euthanizing herself so he could have her heart, an orange Toyota truck pulled up. A teenage boy with blonde floppy hair stared at them. An English woman’s voice spoke from the driver’s seat. “Where are you headed?”
“Anywhere,” said Tim.
“Told you,” she said, to the boy. “We had a bet you’d be English too. Irish is close.”
“I thought you were German,” he said, and turned up the radio playing a Daft Punk song.
“Hop in the back. Just move the mountain bike and bags of animal feed. Jack was racing, so it’ll be mucky.”
“We’re filthy as it is,” he said, following Nelly towards the back. “If you are going anywhere near train tracks, drop us off.”
“I’ll drop you at the station in Port-Saint-Louis-du-Rhône it’s on the way.”
“Thanks.”
The boy looked back as they climbed in and moved the bags of feed. “Mum wants to take the scenic route.”
“Cool,” said Tim.
Bags of compost made for a comfortable trip along the coast. Tim wrote in his journal, which piqued Nelly’s interest. Before she enquired what he was writing about, he looked up, “What exactly happened in Biarritz?”
“Writing about me?”
“No, just curious.”
She tied her hair back to stop it blowing and gazed at the tarmac speeding by. “Childhood sweetheart broke my heart. Well, his father, Gabriel, did. He tried it on with me a few times and insisted it didn’t happen. Gaslit me, made me really sick, you know? Until I went mad and Leon got sick of me.”
“Did he know about your problems?”
“Gabriel? Yeah, he knew I was ‘crazy’, that’s why he thought he could get away with it. He was worried I’d learn about his criminal dealings. He said I was wrong for his son, and I’d mess him up.” She sighed. “I’d rather not relive all that again, if you don’t mind. I spent years thinking of nothing else.”
“No worries.”
She smiled.
He joined in her quiet as the pickup took them through dunes of long grass on each side. A family of wild white horses bolted from a wood and crossed the road, bound for the sea. Their long manes festooned in rhythm with their canter. Pulverizing hoofs deeply scarred the sand as they moved in unison, each one smashing waves into hazy rainbows with joy, kicking up hind legs and shaking their heads. Scattered armies of flamingos circled in loops of the vast strip of wild beach as the horses seemed missioned to their destination beyond the dunes, where they got lost. The truck drove at a crawl, considered in the balance of things.
“I know where we are,” he said. “We haven’t reached Marseille yet. This is the Camargue Plains.”
She hardly moved her gaze until they were dropped off at the station. After the Toyota left, Nelly walked through the main door. She shivered and scanned the packed concourse. He took her arm and led her to a ticket desk. As he spoke with the ticket clerk he felt her wet hand slip from his.
“Nelly relax,” he said, grabbing the tickets and leaving his change. “Sorry bud.”
She barged an old woman aside, sending them both face first onto the floor. The shrillness in her voice as she scrambled back up echoed in the ceiling with shouts of “move”. He followed her through the crowd to find her at the end of a corridor, rattling the bar of a security door. “There was one there,” she said, repeatedly kicking the bottom of the door.
“What? Who?”
“In the suit next to the photo booth. He was pretending not to watch me.”
“The place is full of suits. This is normal for you?”
“Fucking thing.” She slammed the bar. “How do I get this open?”
He looked back at the empty corridor. “I don’t think anyone is following us.”
“Help me, Tim.”
“Look, Nelly, there’s no one.”
She tensed her shoulders and turned. “They’re probably…” She leaned back against the security door and growled.
He held her hand and brushed her hair out of her eyes. “Don’t let it get on top of you. We’re miles from anywhere.”
After a while, she settled and muttered, “I don’t want to catch a commercial train.”
“Ok let’s go.”
He took her arm and led her towards the tracks. They followed it back to a crossing and sat, where they ate fruit and hydrated below a scorching sun marauding across the sky. Nelly counted pills and swallowed them robotically.
“I saw a freight stop at this crossing on the way,” he said.
She had been ghostlike since the station. “Alright.”
“Is all that medication really necessary?”
“Yes.”
“Even out here?”
“Yes.”
“Why do you take the pills?”
“I always have.”
“For what?”
“Depression, psychosis, and I have delusions.”
“Delusions about what?”
“Men following me!” Her face knotted and she lowered her head in shame. “After I was kidnapped at aged nine, I suffered from a lot of trauma. I also have developed a thing recently called frontal lobe seizures. Everything in my head feels backwards. It’s strange though, since we came to France, I’m beginning to feel different.”
“Different how?”
“I don’t know, like when I was young, before my abduction, before my parents died, before therapy, before being in love with Leon in Biarritz. Just me, you know?”
He stared towards the sea. “I actually do. I’ve been feeling the same. I should have done something like this five years ago when I got the diagnosis.”
She sighed. “Well, you’re doing it now.”
They waited for a half hour when a slow freight train stopped. The second last flatbed had a giant air conditioner strapped down, and with more than enough room for them to ride. She was more present from the moment the freight train shunted off.
Miles of vineyards, then steps of olive groves. Stately homes and driveways lined with conical cypress trees. And roads joining their side with tunnels of beach trees. Rolling hills; reservoirs teeming with red eyed, Black-Necked Grebes, diving and soaring back up with frogs and crayfish in their bills. Storks waded in their solemn searches along the shores of miles of miniature lakes, and further towards the towns happily nesting on rooftops and in chimney folds. There were slow climbs into vanishing beyonds, through clay canyons and rocky hillsides, the slowly trundling freight shifted around rusted bends. Heavy rumbles vibrated a body pleasingly, soothing sore hips and shoulders from the naps they took in the empty parts of the land.
With each mile, he saw glimmers of the exquisiteness captured in microcosm in her, revealed in the corners of her mouth and the sheen in her eyes.
“We’re nearing the Côte d’Azur,” he said, smiling. “The old French Riviera. Not for the likes of me, though.”
“Nor me,” she said, casually leaning over the barrier and glancing back at him.
As the train groaned down from a hillside towards the coast again, she quietly devoured fruit and the feast of a view. Rickety buildings peppered the hillsides above three and four stories of pink and yellow visages of orchards. Adorable homesteads were crammed into every available plateau and flattened part of the cottage cheese hillsides. Then the spires of churches and their chiming reminders, regular and gentler the further east they got. The smaller towns always overlooked a tiny cove or a stony strip of beach. When the train wound around a mountain, it returned to the coast at a height. Countless showy yachts that had clapped by for miles out of sight became scattered debris on the bluest sea.
Peeking over the barrier, he joined her in watching cars speed along snaking coastal roads below, disappearing into mountains and reappearing on the lips of precarious, scraggy cliffs. Weaving Fiats and Citroens and the white trails of speedboats remained the only movement for miles, until they got closer to sea level by the late afternoon and the beaches of Saint Tropez, that stretched out like golden ribbons.
The town’s port thrived with activity, with sleek yachts and fishing boats bobbing gently on the sparkling green waters. The air hummed with conversation and the clinking of glasses. Wandering through the narrow, cobbled streets, lazy tourists photograph the Citadel, standing proudly on a hill overlooking the town. In the town’s heart, markets burst with life; stalls overflowed with fresh food, fragrant flowers, and coffee wafted through the air.
The train slowed above an attractive sun spot swarming with radiant revellers. Beautiful bodies, pristine sand and an inviting casualness in the air. Theirs was the rough and ready kind of luxury, however; a free, outlaw extravagance.
Chin on the barrier, she cocked her head and smiled. “You good?”
“Great.” His breathing snagged again like thorns on wool.
She sighed.
“Each morning is a struggle,” he said. “But by the afternoon I almost feel human again.”
The sun had begun to fall slowly towards its watery bed and she sat beside him and put her head on his shoulder. “You’ve stopped writing.”
“I was just documenting everything, it’s cathartic to get lost in words.”
“That’s good,” she said, with a long exhale.
“I have a feeling this is going north from here,” he muttered, looking for a comfortable spot for his boney backside.
“Why?”
“The Alps are up ahead. It might keep to the coast into Italy. But I’ve a feeling for Germany..”
“Or…” He cleared his throat. “Or Switzerland. If we ended up in Geneva, that’d be all the proof I need that I’m doing the right thing.”
He tensed and looked at thick rain clouds forming in the north as he remembered her scrunched eyes fighting back tears when they first met in the restaurant in Dublin and how conflicted he was about her dismissal of his comment that mental problems are not a sufficient reasons for euthanasia. His doubts were firmly squashed after she told him about a few of her suicide attempts. “Let’s get off and visit Cannes,” he said.
“I need to call Walter anyway.”
“You’re enjoying yourself, why not skip it?”
“He doesn’t like it when I don’t.”
“Call him tomorrow. For now, let’s forget the world back there exists.”
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.
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.
IN THE WEEDS
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
Every shot taken 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
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.
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. He got me hooked on the thrill of endangering myself. On recklessness. On taking risks with my health by swilling poison to give myself a high; dancing into blackness.
This, Sir, is NOT the Sparta you promised when you taught me that lesson!
FOOLED
Fooled yourself again into feeling something that seemed real
Your reflection growing, one day you will seal a deal
Feeling is real, right? But real is not really feeling. And seeing is but believing
Who have you been deceiving?
Comfortably numb is how we are taught to belong
And when released, we feel how ill at ease that is
That is.
To say, it’s always been one way
Now not feeling, in that, preening a feeling not real
Obvious, awkward; to honest for me
Don’t see all of me, the diamond heel. Where have I been?
What do you need,
why do you hurt
to feel?
SLIPPING
My brain has found a way to stop me slipping. Being a son of Ireland, of the world at large, one’s pride in themselves is unbecoming, bordering on criminal. However, what might be diagnosed as schizophrenia is in fact the product of my many endeavors and my humility; my forgetting how often I find the right answer and never credit myself. I am like a surfer who rides the biggest waves, whose focus is catching the next thrill. The thrill is the same for us all, figuring life out. Pride is not a curse, listening to those who do not endeavor to catch waves at all, who remain in the shallows, they are the curse.
Consider it righteously broken.
Amen
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)
