Then his head was crushed by a ferocious blow to the skull.
“I have no idea where this will lead us, but I have a definite feeling it will be a place both wonderful and strange.”
(Dale Cooper, in Twin Peaks)
I got back to Galway — not a month later but nigh on two. Booze costs you time as well as just about everything else. Last lingering days in London, what I most spent my time at, apart from attempting to beat hangovers and fret about dwindling money, was, get this,
Watching YouTube.
One clip.
Titled “Wet Dog.”
Featured a Brussels griffon pup who was as weird and wretched as I felt. He was having what seemed to be a very human nervous breakdown and was flat-out funny and touching. Of course it reminded me of my pup, Storm, and how he was. I’m not claiming I returned because of him but it was in the mix. The only consolation was I missed Christmas and New Year shabby resolutions. If you want the very rock bottom of festivities, in all its naked misery and squalor, try a bedsit in Camden Town.
During my final London weeks, I’d watched Wolf Hall and marveled at the absolute stillness of Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell. In an era of all things Kardashian, it was quite astonishing to see such major talent and with such little movement. In some ways, I’d have killed for stillness and perhaps only being killed would still me.
Still.
“Come late the murder... come.
Flee the black.” (The White Buffalo)
Before I left London, I had some odd, not to mention almost mystical, encounters. Perhaps it was simply the befuddlement of drink or too much postponed grief but I had headed to Leicester Square to do an old-fashioned act. Some inverted homage to the generations of Irish who took the cattle boats to the UK. Never to return, swallowed up in Kilburn, on damp building sites, in Kentish Town and dead pubs and Cricklewood and death sentence boardinghouses, six to a shitty room.
To book passage home on the ferry.
No online booking, just the physical action of getting a ticket over the counter, one way only. The music of De Danann and the Leicester Square Odeon; it was showing Fifty Shades of Grey.
Nostalgia through utter nonsense.
A homeless man looked at me beseechingly, utterly silent.
I put a tenner in the guy’s cap and he went,
“Hey?”
I turned back and looked at him. He had the shadowed face of the wretched but a beatific smile, said,
“Landau dumping, a strange phenomenon that occurs as a consequence of the energy exchange between electro-magnetic waves and gases in a state of plasma.”
With Google, later, I would find this was part of Birth of a Theorem by Cédric Villani, the punk rock mathematician.
No, me neither.
I said,
“You what?”
He smiled, said,
“Or, as O’Casey put it, the whole world is in a state of chassis.”
The night before I took the boat, I watched a horror movie.
Mad, eh?
In my heightened state, you would think it was the last thing I’d want to see. A debut by an Australian woman titled
The Babadook.
A scary simple masterpiece. Oh, yeah, a dog got killed in it. Of course. Left me even jumpier than I was. Next day, I packed my meager belongings: a leather coat I got on Camden Lock; books, of course; a silver flask with Jay and Guinness; and no hope in my heart. In my mind was Ed Sheeran with
“Make It Rain.”
As I boarded the ferry at Holyhead after an arduous train ride from Euston, ahead of me in the line were a father and son. The boy was maybe eight or so and woebegone. The man, slight, with that fading weak blond hair, stooped gait, and air of furtiveness. The boy caught my eye and smiled. I didn’t.
I was all out of cordiality.
As we pulled out of the dock, I went up on deck and stared at the retreating English coastline. I threw a bent penny over the side and wished
For...
Nothing.
I was sitting in the ship’s lounge, which was packed. Seemed people still liked to travel this way and of course it was convenient for traveling with children. I was rereading David Gates’s Jernigan. Class act. Alongside the novel Stoner, it reaffirmed the power of narrative and especially the art of desperation. It sang to me the dark melodies of
Loss
The broken
The wounded
Indeed.
Like holding a mirror up to my battered life.
Heard
“Mind if we take this seat?”
The man and boy.
I said,
“Sure.”
I noticed the boy sat absolutely still, like a tiny Thomas Cromwell. The father, by contrast, was a study in fidgeting. He checked his pockets, pushed his fingers through his thinning hair, checked his phone, then looked around like a bird of prey or a trapped one. Finally he leaned toward me, asked,
“I’m terribly sorry to bother you but would you mind watching Daniel while I grab a pint?”
I gave him a cold look, said,
“Make it snappy.”
I swear the boy nearly smiled. The man took it like the lash it was but rallied, said,
“Aye aye, skipper.”
And fucked off.
I tried to get back to the book but was aware the boy was staring intently at me, I went,
“Was there something?”
He had those huge saucer eyes, blue and grave. He asked,
“Do you think, I’m, like, weird?”
Duh.
I don’t know how to talk to kids. I mean, I can talk to people — well, some, anyway, and give me a few pints, I’d talk to the pope. I can talk to dogs and that’s no hardship, they are busy loving you regardless, even if you talk shite. Kids though,
Phew-oh.
I answered,
“Why would you think that?”
He thought about that, then,
“I don’t have any friends.”
Me neither. I said,
“Well, you’re young and lots of time.”
Fucking wisdom of the ages from me. He asked,
“Are you very, like, old?”
Fuck.
Then before I could lie my way around that, he said,
“My dad is sick.”
Okay.
I asked,
“From what?”
“Drink.”
I racked my remaining brain cells and got this gem:
“How about Xbox, you play those?”
“No.”
I looked around desperately for his father, realized I had a slight sheen of sweat on my brow, said,
“I’m sure you have a wonderful life ahead of you.”
He stared at me in utter derision, then said,
“Fuck me.”
Okay....
He began to recite in his very proper English accent,
... Give up Paris
You will never create anything
By reading Racine
He pronounced Racine like Rancid.
Continued,
... and Arthur Symons will always
Be
A better critic of French Literature.
He took a deep childlike breath, then,
... Go to the Aran Islands,
Live there as if you were one of the people themselves
Express a life that has never found expression.
He took a swig of a large bottle of Dr Pepper, asked,
“Do you know who wrote that?”
“I don’t.”
“Yeats.”
I had nothing to add to this and he said,
“Me and him are going to live on the Aran Islands.”