But, whenever I think of him, the memories still so alive, his presence still so powerful, it’s impossible to believe that he’s no longer in this world. And I think of him often. I know that I’ll think of him the next time I’m sitting in my office at the University, the rain beating against the window.
[IRELAND: ENGLISH]
MIKE MCCORMACK
Of One Mind
Sometimes I feel young and sometimes I feel old and sometimes I feel both at the same time. This trick of being in two minds, of weighing things on the one hand and then again on the other, has never been a problem for me. But, while I can hold two warring ideas in my head at the same time, and even retain a clear idea of what it is I am thinking about, I am sometimes less sure of who or what it is that is doing the thinking. This weightlessness takes hold of me, this sense that somehow I am lacking essential ballast. I suspect it’s one of the gifts of my generation, a generation becalmed in adolescence, a generation with nothing in its head or its heart and with too much time on its hands.
Lately however I’m experiencing something new and it has taken me a while to recognise it. Obscured behind amazement and something like awe it has taken me weeks to see it clearly as the thing it really is. When I finally did get it straight in my mind I could hardly believe it. To the best of my knowledge I have never experienced anything like it before, nor, living the type of life I’ve done, is there any reason why I should have.
Take this example, an incident with my eight-year-old son only last week…
It was, on the face of it, a simple enough disappointment involving a school trip to an open farm outside the city. Giddy with anticipation, Jamie had talked about nothing else in the days leading up to it and, when I had met his questions with memories of my own upbringing on a small farm in west Mayo, his expectations had soared; the chance to see something of his Dad’s childhood promised to be a rare treat. But now the trip lay in ruins. Traffic congestion and a radio alarm clock flummoxed in the small hours by a power cut conspired to have us arrive at the school fifteen minutes after the bus had left. Now we stood in the stillness of his classroom, gazing at the neat rows of tables and seats and I thought to myself that surely there was no place in all the world so full of absence as an empty classroom.
And Jamie’s disappointment was huge. I had no need to look down at him to know it—I could feel it rolling off him, deep noxious waves of it. Just to have me in no doubt he told me so himself.
“I’m disappointed,” he said solemnly. “I can feel it here, right here.” He placed his hand low on his chest and rubbed it up and down as if trying to relieve some digestive ache.
“Next week Jamie,” I assured him. “We can all go next week, the three of us. I promise.”
“I’m in pain,” he persisted. “Severe pain.”
“You’ll get over it,” I replied shortly. “Next week I said. Let’s go.”
I took him by the hand and led him out to the car. January light hung low in the sky, oppressive and tightening the muscles across my chest. I hated these winter months, the gloom that rose in my heart; summer seemed an infinity away.
“This isn’t the first disappointment like this,” Jamie said, as I held open the door for him. “They’re beginning to mount up. I can feel the pressure.”
“That bad?”
He nodded and sat in it. “Yes, that bad. I’m only telling you for your own good.”
“Be a man,” I blurted. My own disappointment at letting him down now made me brusque. “Put on your seatbelt.”
There is of course no such thing as a simple disappointment, a small disappointment to an eight-year-old child. I’ve seen enough of fatherhood to know that feelings like these only come man-sized, brutally disproportionate to the job in hand, never calibrated to the dimensions of a child’s world. They come with crushing intent, fully capable of annihilating their fragile universe. The wonder is that any child can survive even the slightest of them.
We drove back towards the city centre, the traffic loosened up now after the early rush hour. Jamie sat silently in the back seat. A glance in the rear-view mirror showed him gazing out the side window, his moon pale face pinched with the effort to hold back the tears.
He happened into my life over eight years ago, waking a dream of fatherhood which took me completely by surprise when it presented itself out of the blue some time before my thirtieth birthday. Before that all my visions of children came with a completeness about them which Jamie’s arrival had totally confounded. Nothing in my idea of fatherhood had warned me against the fact that children do not drop fully formed out of the sky, nor of the ad hoc nature of fatherhood, which is its day-to-day idiom; basically, nothing had warned me against screw-ups like this.
“Someday,” he called suddenly from the back seat, leaving the word hanging in the air.
We had pulled into the first of the two roundabouts on the western edge of the city. Rain was now falling, that resolute early morning drizzle which tells you there will be no let up for the day.
“Someday,” he repeated, eying me in the rear-view mirror. “Someday what Jamie? Speak up, don’t be mumbling back there to yourself.”
“Someday,” he said, “when you’re sitting in the visitors gallery of the criminal court listening to the jury returning a guilty verdict on all charges and hearing the judge hand down the maximum sentence with no recommendation for bail you will probably be asking yourself where did it all go wrong. Well, just to set your mind at rest, you need look no further than this morning.”
“That bad?”
“I’m only telling you for your own peace of mind.”
“Thank you, that’s very kind of you. I’ll remember that when I’m organising your appeal.”
Eight years ago I blundered out of my twenties, a feckless decade of drink and dope smoking, a decade of late nights and videos lived out against a soundtrack of white boy guitar bands, a decade funded by various under the counter jobs and the most gullible welfare system in the whole country. The setting up of the nation’s second-language TV station rescued me, drew me out, pallid and blinking, into the light. Being fluent in Irish scored me a contract subtitling the German and Scandinavian cartoons which bulked out the station’s Irish-language quota in its early days. A month-by-month contract had opened out to a yearly one and all told I had now turned in seven of them. Each year I resolved to find something permanent and each year the relevant deadlines passed me by. This last year the cartoons had given way to captioning the station’s twice-weekly soap opera which now, in its fifth year, was responsible for a big percentage of the station’s advertising revenue. A job which took me all of thirty hours a week left me with more than enough time with which to split the child-minding duties with Martha, Jamie’s mother.
Back then the advent of a new TV station on the outskirts of this city had drawn a new type of female into the light. Upmarket and eager, all short skirts and high boots, they had a radiance about them which gave them allure in a city which till then had seen heavy boots and woolly sweaters as the uniform of bohemian aspirations and left-wing politics. That the majority of these new sirens were merely continuity announcers, weather girls, and bit-part players in soaps did not diminish their glamour one bit; the city was grateful for their new colour and the open optimism they shed about them. This was Martha’s milieu. She too had the looks and the standoffish poise of a young woman with plenty of choices. Therefore, when I met her, it was somewhat gratifying to find that in fact her status was almost as lowly as my own. She too worked temporary contracts, honing scripts for continuity announcers and weather girls, all the time dreaming of an alternate world where she wrote code for video games, specifically tactical world-building games. At the time she was working out the end of her current contract and thinking of moving to London where she hoped to find work in one of the design studios that had sprung up after the launch of the PS2.