Dublin Palms

New ways of protesting. New ways of challenging the past. In Berlin, I had been to a play where the actors did nothing but offend the audience. Everyone was being shaken awake. There was respect for madness.

The bar where I used to sing in Berlin was full of people with new ideas. One night, a man came in carrying a sports bag with him. He didn’t order a drink. He slapped the bag down on the ground and fell on his knees. He opened the bag and took out a large raw bone. The meat had been stripped from it, straight from a butcher shop, a dog would love it. There were some red bits of flesh attached, the knuckle of a joint, like a gleaming white door handle.

Right in the middle of one of my songs, the man held the butcher’s bone up in the air like a warning. The bar had a cobbled floor and a green wrought-iron fence around the stage, the ceiling was a backlit panel of stained glass. It was located right under the railway bridge, near the main station. Trains could be heard rumbling overhead.

Everybody stood back.

I stopped singing. The man with the bone was in his thirties, long hair down to his shoulders. He wore clothes that attracted no attention, a pair of worn jeans, the collar of his shirt had rounded ends. His boots had the laces undone.

Kneeling on the cobbled floor, he held the raw bone in his hand and let out a roar. Without saying a word, he began gnawing at it, ripping off bits of pink flesh, snarling as he ran his teeth up and down along the white bone. His jaw was unshaven, there was a rage in his eyes, staring ahead into a distant place. The bar was silent, no drinks were being served, even the trains seemed to have stopped running.

Nobody knew what to say. We were given no clear signal whether it might be reality or invention. Hard to know if the man was performing or whether he was truly hungry and couldn’t wait to eat. Was he angry, was he out of his mind, was he doing it to scare the customers, growling like an animal as he licked and tore at the remaining meat? No indication that he cared if people were watching, he seemed unaware of his audience looking on with astonishment, amusement, pity, mistrust, afraid to laugh. The space around him was clear. He might as well have been kneeling in the middle of a steppe alone, a man in war, a man holding on to his life, a man who had come across this treasured section of bone, glancing anxiously over his shoulders to make sure nobody was going to take it off him.

Each country has its own way of breaking the silence. An artist arrived in Dublin one day carrying a huge wooden crucifix. On Good Friday, he was seen walking down the main shopping street with the cross on his shoulder. People might have mistaken it for a re-enactment of Calvary, but it was more of an art installation, a happening, he was questioning the power of the church. He leaned the man-size crucifix up against the wall of Kehoe’s pub and went inside for a drink. His art had no fear. He sat at the bar staring at his pint as though he was looking at the Atlantic.

All that revolution unleashes a provocative force inside me. I don’t need much encouragement. I am still trying to escape the grip of my father’s rule. I am full of rebellion. I believe in nothing. I have no collective instinct. I find it hard to belong to any group, I follow no team, I even have trouble shaking my head at rock concerts.

I stage my own private happenings. I get into a senseless confrontation in court one day over a parking fine. The fine had been issued on a quiet road with no parking signs. It was my right to park there. I had a perfectly good argument for saying the law was unjust. But it never even came to the point where I could present my case because I refused to swear an oath on the Bible. I told the court I did not believe in God, the judge roared at me – who made Dublin Bay?

It was too much of a crusade.

What is the point in trying to make a point? The first thing I need to change is myself, my silence, my inability to articulate or even work out what I want to say. My vocabulary is inadequate. Fighting the system, going against the establishment, breaking the hold of authority, none of those terms work for me. I speak in crowded sentences. A rush of misplaced words that don’t belong to me. I express confused emotions in public that are more suitable for letters. What I say is never memorable, just clumsy and exposed.

I have no gift for concealment. I do my best to speak with guile, but it sounds contrived, like borrowing a scarf without permission.

Better to keep listening.

I am struck by a book I borrowed from the Germany library in which the main character decides to create something that will never be recognised. It describes the furious love of a man who devotes his entire life and fortune to the task of building a monument for his sister in the middle of a forest. His decision to place the structure out of sight is central to his achievement. He builds his cone-shaped construction in a silent place where it will never be seen by anyone, not even by his sister, the person for whom it has been created. It becomes a monument to what is unsaid and unseen.

What a wonderful idea, I thought. A man compelled to squander his living energy on something that makes no sense, erecting an utterly useless edifice in a remote place, for what? For the sake of nothing? For love?

Do something useless today.

Helen has been encouraging me to write. All those silences can be put together into a book, she says. Things I have been collecting since I was a child. The absurd language wars, the mismatching countries, I have a needless need to put things in writing.

I brought the rusted shears found in my mother’s garden with me when we were leaving. At home, I propped them up on the mantelpiece in the empty front room and stepped back to admire the shape. Something about the fact that they could no longer be used as garden shears appealed to me. I began writing down what they looked like. Metal antlers. The skull of an impala. The eyes are missing. The skin has been torn off. What remain are the bones of a face. The rest of the carcass has been severed, possibly dragged up into a tree by a leopard.

Why was I grasping at these comparisons? Going for the refuge of a story? What things look like instead of what they were, the suggestions they flung out rather than the material facts? Was I protecting myself from the real world? Was I describing myself? Does everything turn into a self-portrait?

I went back to the object in front of me. Rusted garden shears. Beyond use. Nothing more than a piece of unearthed metal with no significance attached. I mistrusted even that bare description. The words were full of opinion, imposing a function on the object, it was being looked at, being conquered, given value. I tore up the few sentences I had rolled together and went back to the physical artefact itself. I stopped trying to explain where they came from or who they might have belonged to. I saw them only as the senseless shape they had become. I tied a thin piece of invisible wire to the metal prongs. I drove a nail into the wall and hung them up.

The morning is spent in the basement conducting a stock inventory. Many of the album stacks in the storeroom have been untouched since the last count. I have introduced a stock control system adopted from a publishing house where I worked for a while in Berlin. Each item in the catalogue has a card attached to the stack with the number of copies left in stock. A person filling an order, often myself, will cross out the number and enter the new figure with the amount of sales deducted. If stocks run below a critical figure, the card is brought to the attention of the person in charge, myself in this case, so the item can be re-ordered in time to meet demand. The idea is to avoid the awkward situation of running short of either one of the components, the disk or the album sleeve, one without the other is worthless.

The system is more suited to firms with a greater turnover. At the native basement, some of items in the catalogue sell only a couple of copies a year, some cannot even be given away, ever more precious for being so rare. The stock can be counted with good accuracy in a couple of hours, so there is no need for an early warning system. If a record shop in Saint Paul, Minnesota, for example, orders unusually high volumes of a native singer whose family and friends have gone to live in that part of the world, there is no problem rush-ordering copies. There might be a delay while the latest Madonna album takes precedence at the pressing plant, it can all be explained in a letter, the music on our list is timeless.

The card system is soon abandoned, mostly by myself. We go back to counting by fingers. Numerals are safe provided they are written down. Spoken in Irish, they can be tricky. They seem more scientifically accurate in English, everyone on the street can understand them. The same goes for phone numbers and appointments, less room for error.

I have entered the results of the count into a report sheet. I have the sales figures in one column. A separate column for wastage, returns, warped pressings, damaged or discoloured album sleeves. There is a further column for stock given away as official gifts. Complimentary albums are frequently rushed by courier to key personalities in the community – government ministers, priests, bishops, school principals, theatre managers, men and women in positions of influence.

Once I was finished, I compiled the various figures into an annual audit and sent it upstairs to the commander. He sent me back a note to let me know that he was impressed with the figures. The organisation had been ingeniously established by him as a charity, sustained by a giant lottery held each month in the shadow language. There was no need for the figures to balance out in any commercial sense, no requirement on any of the artists in our catalogue to make a profit. Decisions were based entirely on cultural reasoning, on keeping things alive that would otherwise die without trace. Our loss-making was repaid in a surplus of heritage. One of the latest recordings was made with a solo dulcimer player, his sales remained at zero, but the number of copies given away as promotional material was higher than average.

The commander spoke to me at length about expanding the catalogue, he wanted me to recruit new bands, younger singers, more women. We signed up a singer with red hair from the west of Ireland who had a fantastic voice, she was well known for singing in English, she carried the shadow language in her pronunciation.

Gradually, with the kind of work I do, recruiting the best of Irish talent, the urge to sing begins to disappear in myself. It doesn’t feel right. I still have the rage and the sadness in my repertoire, all the songs I used to sing in bars in Berlin, but I don’t believe I can be genuine without being fully native. Being an outsider makes me inauthentic, half Irish and half German, half man half horse, some say. I don’t get away with singing back home in my own country, only in Germany where people thought I was as genuine as butter.

The Irish for singing is the same as speaking.

One of the band members I toured with in Germany came back to Ireland with a similar problem, not being able to speak. He found it hard to adjust to being among his own people again. In a Galway bar one night, he sang a song about emigration they said he had no right to sing. No matter how good his voice was, no matter how long he had been away from home or how much he missed the landscape of Mayo where he grew up, they accused him of appropriating grief that was not his own.

He might have been a bit like me, a daily migrant, going out the door to a country he was not sure he belonged to any more, he had to check to see who was listening. People treating him like a non-national. He sang from the heart that night in Galway, but he was forced to stop when somebody roared across the bar at him – go back to where you came from.

He grew up in a big house near Westport, there was a triple stained-glass window above the stairs, a view from the windows onto a lake and rolling lands, only himself and his mother and all those empty rooms. He was the last descendant of the Fitzgerald line, directly related to the famous fighting Fitzgerald, a historical figure who was given a ring by Marie Antoinette in Paris before she was beheaded, then he ended his life in a similar way, hanged in Castlebar for imprisoning his father in a cage with a circus bear. The ring was kept in a tobacco tin, the gem was on a swivel with the stamp of the French court underneath. His people were kind during the Famine. The house was later given over to the state to be turned into a museum of country life.

He plays the guitar left-handed. He has blond hair, a blue freckle on one cheek. He sits sideways at the table with his legs crossed while eating. He barks when the music is good. I saw him once kicking over a chair with excitement while he was listening to a band playing the Céili at Claremorris. I saw him yelping and slapping his hands on the dashboard for Voodoo Chile as we drove into the Brenner Pass.

There is nothing I want to do more than sing, but the catalogue of speaking songs no longer works for me. I am no match for those great singers. I try new ways of calling out my frozen mind, I pick up the guitar, I learn some contemporary songs, but my voice is easily dismantled. I settle back into my long listening.

The veterinary practice was closed. We heard the news that morning. The boy was found lifeless on the floor of the surgery. A note on the door mentioned the word bereavement.

I knocked. It took a while before Mark, the vet, came out. He didn’t take me inside. We stood on the pavement. He didn’t want me to see exactly where it happened, the empty space on the floor where he picked the boy up and ran out the door into the street late in the afternoon, racing to the hospital, hoping he was still alive. I was not brought in to meet the boy’s mother in her grief.

I’m sorry. That’s all I could manage to say.

Ah listen, he said.

We stood in silence. His eyes were flooded, nothing more he could say either. Two fathers trading encouragement, full of words we could not say, looking at the ground. The eucalyptus trees on the corner across the road smelled like a hospital. The shopkeeper in the adjoining premises was looking out the window at us. We had no conversation. For the sake of talking, it occurred to me to mention a book of short stories he had recommended the last time we met, but I kept it to myself. There was a story in it about a couple renting a house in a remote place where they love each other with great intensity until the owner suddenly wants the place back for himself, their love comes to an end.

I stared away towards pub on the corner. He stood kicking the wall with the tip of his boot.

Jesus Christ, he said.

We heard the breeze rattle the eucalyptus trees across the street. The leaves were sickle shaped, green leather knives. The smell of sap was suffocating, a toxic preparation for parvovirus in dogs. Hardly any cars went by, no buses, I would have noticed. It was hard for him to face going back inside. As though he wanted to stay out there on the street with me, that might be the best way of remembering when things were safe, I was a person who brought him back to a time before the tragedy.

I stood there without saying anything more. Like a child trying to hide something, refusing to say there was a bottle of blue liquid I thought was a drink of lemonade.

He put his hand on my shoulder.

Look after those girls, he said. Then he slapped me on the back of the head and went inside.

The white coffin went to the church, people were standing in the street, I didn’t hear what they were saying, I didn’t talk to anyone. He stood with his sister’s arm around his shoulder at the graveside, a small group of mourners, his wife held his hand for the last prayers. The loss of their son took the streets from under their feet. He gave up the veterinary practice, she went back to live in France, he worked for a while in the North, in Coleraine. I ran into him from time to time when he was back, at the fish shop, at the fruit and vegetable shop, sometimes down at the harbour, we always stood for a while and he told me the news, we never talked about the dead boy or his family breaking up. His shoulders were hunched, he moved with delay, there was a cut made in his voice. Maybe it was a form of surrender in his eyes, half turning away and coming back to face you once more, it was good to hear him laugh again. You met him in the pub on the corner full of rugby fans and pictures of James Joyce. You saw his bike outside with a basket full of books.

I have a friend who went to Australia.

He has a gift for talking. His memory has legal accuracy, he studied law. He is tall, he speaks in a stride, it was hard to keep up. He was run off his feet revealing things he had heard about people, things about ourselves that we had forgotten, you felt good because your life mattered to him. He could remember Helen and myself in Berlin, the time I sang my sad songs in the street for passing pedestrians until a woman from the offices above came down and paid me to go away. He could remember Helen on the U-Bahn, a man staring at her love belly, the three of us walking arm in arm across Hermannplatz, she was carried along, not touching the street.

He got talking to people easily, people who normally avoided each other were glad to be in the same place together when he was around. He gave me the feeling of being in motion, being alive, being lucky, it was our responsibility to celebrate. His information had no false avenues. His grasp of human emotions was generous, you could trust him with your thoughts. I allowed him to put words in my mouth. I spoke so little. He did most of the talking for me.

If I could write the way he speaks, I thought, I would be at home anywhere in the world.

We stood at the bar in Kehoe’s pub. I was happy listening to the scattered voices. The twirl of a coin on the counter, a beer mat flipping upwards and being snapped between thumb and finger. Everything was worth remembering, the worn rung on the bar stool, the spill of beer, the discontented faces of barmen on the wrong side of life. Things you overheard – No, fuck off, I owe you a pint. Snatches of nonsensical conversation that didn’t join up – the permafrost, my twist, Galileo, you’re due a refund. I loved that disjointed prose of the city, the abstract way in which something serious could be said in one part of the pub and people burst out laughing in another corner.

In a flood of enthusiasm, I told my friend I was trying to write. The manner of the announcement made it look as though I had no other choice, each one of us was trapped inside a book, the only way out was to write it down. At one point, thinking that I had the speed of his voice in mine, I pulled out a couple of pages from my bag for him to look at.

It was a section in which I described my silence. Waking up at night, wandering around the house where I grew up while everyone else was asleep. I became an intruder in my own home. Avoiding the creaks on the stairs. Not switching on the light. Looking around at the objects belonging to my family, the photographs on the mantelpiece, the town where my mother came from. In darkness, it felt as though I had walked into a strange house where I didn’t belong, the people who lived there had nothing to do with me. When the light started coming up at dawn, I caught sight of myself in a mirror. A strange figure I could not recognise, standing alone among the furniture and family possessions I knew so well. The reflection was not mine, it belonged to someone else, from nowhere.

He read it quickly. He said it was a bit raw, a bit honest. I saw no difference between his honesty and my honesty, only that everything he revealed had time to evaporate overnight. His stories were full of travel. The names of cities and rivers in faraway places.

He told me that he was leaving. We met and got drunk together. I missed him. His departure left me short. It removed the map. I no longer had any connection to the talking grid. He carried crucial information away to Australia with him in his shirt pocket. Doesn’t every emigrant do that? I thought to myself. Each person leaving takes away some essential knowledge that cannot be replaced by those left behind.

A photograph sent from Fremantle shows him wearing a bright blue shirt with floating vintage cars and palm trees. By the angle of his shoulders, he must be standing in the kitchen, opening a bottle of wine. Everything I attempt to say from that point on is directed like a shout across the world to a distant reader, waiting for the echo to come back.

Another episode with my teeth. Brought on this time by an attempt to write in German. My mother’s tongue gave me no protection. It was like pointing at myself. I became the accused. I took on the banality of somebody waiting to be caught and brought back to face trial. Normal words like bread and butter were extremely childish and at the same time loaded with pre-existing meaning. Milk was no longer milk. I could not use the word ground, nothing to do with land, territory, domain, home, belonging.

Writing is no place to hide.

It may have been the mashed potato, it scalded my front teeth. I knew what was coming and didn’t want my children to see me flinching. I got up from the table and left the house. Helen asked me where I was going but I had no idea. I walked as far as the lighthouse, it felt as though I was biting granite, my teeth scraping at the pier wall. Then I walked in a great hurry back to my mother, asking her if she had ever seen Hitler.

Once, she said.

Where?

Düsseldorf, she said.

She was in a department store looking at fabrics, feeling for quality, when everybody suddenly rushed out the door onto the street. He’s here, somebody shouted. The wind sucked them out, shop assistants included, leaving the till behind unguarded. She was the only person left inside. The crowd was lined up along the street, people on their toes, straining to see over shoulders, leaning in the direction where the cavalcade was expected to appear. The buildings were decorated with swastikas, everybody waving flags.

My mother used the expression – torn along.

It was her way of describing that moment on the street, what her uncle the Lord Mayor had warned her about, how everyone was being swept along by a euphoric feeling, by a longing inside each breast for a strong leader after so much disaster. She said the people had an appetite for lies and false facts. It helped them to hide what they didn’t want to know about themselves. They stood waving with great happiness in their hearts, they had been promised holidays in the mountains, family trips on a cruise liner, their country was winning again, they were expecting heaven on earth.

Inside the abandoned department store, my mother said she felt unsafe. She was afraid they would accuse her of stealing. She went outside and saw a small woman who had just left the shop with a broad new hat. The cavalcade passed by with Hitler in the back of an open-topped car. A small man with a modern moustache. It was known that he had a warm smile and his eyes had the ability to look inside each person.

The moment was brief, my mother said. She stood at the back of the crowd. She hardly knew it was Hitler, only that the woman in front, wearing the wide-rimmed hat, not paid for, the label was still attached, turned around with great excitement in her voice and said – did you see him?

After the cavalcade passed by, everyone went about their business. The woman with the new hat walked away down the street. Another woman crossed the street wearing a new tweed coat, the gifts of Hitler. My mother was working in Düsseldorf by then, in an employment office, she had some money, she went back into the department store to buy gifts for her sisters, the two eldest ones were already married, things they needed. She said it was a time of high fashion. A time you could not easily trust men. Most of them were in the Nazi party. Her boss was a senior Nazi member, he was married, always asking her to go for a drink.