A Line Made by Walking Read online

  I find only living creatures; the birds and rabbits at their busiest. I bring my camera, strapped to the back carrier. I am waiting for a photograph. Hoping, without thinking, for something to die.

  There came a point at which I understood about my hair: if it wasn’t so long and I didn’t like it so much then nor would I care whether it was falling out or not; no more would I harbour irrational fears for its safety.

  The Navajo Indians believe hair is memory. When a member of the tribe dies, the mourning family cut off their hair and move away to a different settlement. Deserting their ghosts.

  So I took my mother’s tailor’s shears: the largest and sharpest pair of scissors in the house. I stole them from her needlework box. I sat cross-legged on my bedroom carpet with the mirror propped against a cushion on the armchair. And I sawed my hair, lock by lock, from waist up to earlobes.

  Then I gathered the sawn hair and carried it downstairs. Stretched out in my arms, at last it looked properly like a mink. Lying limp, cudgelled.

  It was early afternoon and my mother was standing at the kitchen countertop preparing my father’s lunch.

  ‘Look,’ I said, holding out my arms to show her. ‘I’m free now.’

  Mum was angry that I’d taken her shears without asking.

  ‘It knackers them if you use them on anything that isn’t fabric,’ she said.

  Then she asked me if I wanted to go to a professional to have it tidied up, and offered to pay.

  ‘But I’m not supposed to care what it looks like,’ I said: ‘that’s the point.’

  I grew up in a house without beauty products. No lipstick, no lady razors, no aftershave, not even any conditioner. All my life my mother’s fingernails have remained un-varnished, her skin un-powdered, her eyelashes un-painted. No varnish or powder or mascara crossed the threshold of the famine hospital until my sister carried it in. But our beatific mother never objected. Instead, countless times over the years, she’s helped to bleach, or wrapped a tiny plait in coloured thread, or teased a bead onto a dreadlock. Over the years, my mother has come to think of me as a person who, unlike her, cares about appearances. And this is the only reason she mentioned the professional, and then mentioned it again and again in the following days.

  But it was just as I’d hoped. I stopped looking in all the mirrors. I didn’t care any more whether my hair fell out. And so every time she offered, I refused.

  And my father, of course, he did not even notice.

  A wet day. The potholes brimming. The clouds too thick to search the sky for planes, too low to see the fields on either side as I cycle. I hear a lamb cry through the thick white and a second later a fox drops from the hedge onto the road. I squeeze my brakes and the fox takes fright at the shrieking sound they make. He releases the thing he’s holding in his jaws and nosedives into the opposite hedge.

  Not a lamb: a rat. Already crunched so hard its tongue has been disconnected and pushed forward, out. Teeth hanging from bloody gums, raindrops collecting in its whiskers as I fumble for my camera. A drowned rat, I think. A phrase I’ve used a thousand flippant times and now here it is in the fur and flesh. I set the camera down on the tarmac in front of the rat’s face and push the button. Click. And with the click, at the other end of its body, the rat tail lashes the road, a single, gentle lash. Its head is mangled, how can it possibly still be alive? The rat body’s reaction to the rat soul’s desertion? No, just a nerve ending, surely.

  I turn my bike around, the morning’s mission accomplished. Before reaching the next corner, I check to see if the fox has doubled back. But there is only a rook on the telegraph wire.

  Watching the rat. Watching me. Watching for the fox.

  In the newspaper: an article about a charity that is soliciting donations of real hair to make into wigs for people suffering from cancer.

  I go to the drawer where my grandmother used to keep her stationery. I pull out a padded envelope, and in black felt-tip, I write the address provided at the end of the article. Now I fetch my severed locks, because I brought them with me to my grandmother’s house, wrapped in kitchen roll. I prise open the sticky strip; it has already been sealed by damp. I slide the hair inside, seal it again.

  How badly I want to post it.

  Lying in my child-bed in the famine hospital at night, I started to hear the high-pitched screaming of hungry rodents; I started to believe my neglected pets were all in there amongst the junk of my cupboard. Risen from the dead, nibbling the bars of their cages, rolling around in their exercise balls. The uncanny red of their rodent eyes piercing the dark.

  Finally I asked Mum if there was any chance I could go and stay in Grannie’s bungalow, just for a little while. It was early evening and she was standing at the kitchen countertop where she mostly stands, preparing my father’s dinner.

  ‘I could look after it,’ I said, ‘caretake it, if you will, stop it from falling into disrepair.’

  My mother laid down the tiny garlic clove she was peeling. My mother grows enough tiny garlic bulbs in summer to keep her peeling their tiny cloves all year round. She listened as she peeled and then loaded several cloves into the crusher all at once and said:

  ‘I’ll have to ask the sisters, I suppose, but I don’t see why they’d mind.’

  ‘I think it will do me good,’ I said. ‘I think it will make me feel better.’

  My mother squeezed the crusher’s handle and garlic exploded into the pot. She thought for a moment. She said:

  ‘I might have to set a condition.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, cautiously. ‘What?’

  She picked up a small knife. A perfectly stab-shaped one. ‘I want you to go and see Dr Clancy,’ she said. ‘I want you to tell her what you tell me. About the way you are feeling, about how often you have to try not to cry.’

  And then she scraped the crusher with the knife. A sound like tooth pain. Clearing the vestiges away.

  A week since the missing aeroplane went missing. I don’t hear about it on the radio any more. Instead I hear that, in England, supermarkets are no longer allowed to display daffodils in the fruit and vegetable section, because there are immigrants who mistake them for something edible. Who chop and cook and eat the stalks, and make themselves terrifically sick.

  I try to picture a country where daffodils don’t exist. A raked landscape of cement and grout and stone. A place where no food crop but some kind of green stalks with closed buds grow.

  I think up a pretext for calling down to Jink’s cottage; I want to take my own measure of the man by means of the things he owns, the ways in which he chooses to arrange them.

  Though I am naturally curious about people, I’m also naturally uneasy when they are right in front of me; when I am right in front of them. Especially with strangers I would like to impress, but even with those I know really well, who are already aware that I am not remotely impressive. I struggle to say aloud the sentences which form inside my head, either clamming up or feverishly rambling. Jess used to try and reassure me that I came across just fine in company: chatty and bright.

  But I have never wanted to be perceived as chatty and bright. I have always wanted to be solemn and mysterious.

  Walking up the crazy-paved garden path, I notice how the old half-door has been replaced by an alu-clad one-piece, the thatch by polycarbonate. I stop and behold: all the new surfaces pieced together into the old-fashioned shape of a cottage. I ring the electric bell and when Jink answers, I tell him how well his home looks. I rattle off false compliments, and though he feigns modesty, I can see how proud he is.

  How strange, that he is old and admires modern, synthetic things. Whereas I am young and admire that which is antiquated, tumbledown, fusty.

  Jink invites me in and I’m pleased to find that, beyond the door, it’s desperately shabby. There’s mould mottling the walls, dust balls on the carpet. There’s a vase of plastic carnations on a hall table, a plastic holy water font attached to a crucifix nailed into the plaster. There’s
a smell of dog even though the dog is dead; or perhaps the smell of dog is Jink.

  Now he says how well I’m looking, as though I am a cottage too. I tell him how my looking well must be because of all the bicycling and we laugh, spuriously. He tells me ‘Come down to the living room’ and, once we arrive, to ‘have a sit down there for yourself now’. He clears a pile of magazines off a chair. It’s high and hard and straight-backed as though it belongs to the kitchen table. It’s impossible to sit comfortably on a straight-backed kitchen chair, feet together, shoulders pulled back and Jink looming over me, pleased but confused.

  ‘I won’t keep you,’ I say. ‘I only wanted to borrow something. I was wondering if you might have a hammer you could lend me, something hefty, like a lump hammer . . .’

  The old man listens very closely, as though what I am saying is vastly important. I am about to explain the reason why I covet a small demolition tool, but Jink interrupts.

  ‘I do, I do,’ he says, rubbing his palms together. ‘I’ll just go out to the shed and fetch it now, you’ll be alright for a minute?’

  So here I am in Jink’s living room, left in peace to snoop just like I’d hoped. I look first at the frames on the walls: they are holy pictures without exception. Here’s Jesus carrying a lamb across his shoulders, Jesus extending a hand to a fallen woman, Jesus anointing a leper’s feet. The ones that aren’t holy pictures are quotes from the Bible, printed large. BELIEVE IN THE LORD JESUS AND YOU WILL BE SAVED says the closest. I have to get up in order to read the others.

  YOUR INIQUITIES HAVE SEPARATED YOU FROM YOUR GOD; YOUR SINS HAVE HIDDEN HIS FACE FROM YOU, SO THAT HE WILL NOT HEAR. As though God listens with his face, like an owl.

  When I was a child, I seemed to know rather a lot of old people; I seemed to have reasons to interact with them. Now I remember how most had a wooden crucifix or a water font or a picture of Christ with an electric bulb for a sacred heart stuck to a wall somewhere inside their house, and this was perfectly humdrum. But there’s something different about the stuff inside Jink’s cottage, something more intense. I reach down to the pile of magazines he moved onto the sofa. I lift the top copy and look. The banner-head is filled by a single word, followed by an exclamation mark: SAVED! I lift another and another. They are all the same.

  Oh shit, I think. He’s been born again.

  It’s taking Jink a long time to fetch his lump hammer. I’d forgotten how slow he is, how he limps. I should have asked for directions to its place in the shed and offered to fetch it myself. I consider leaving before he comes back. I get up, move towards the door, raise my hand to touch its knob. But suddenly I hear him. Step-drag, step-drag, step-drag, stop. Probably around about the kitchen, followed by silence as he attends to something there. Now the final few step-drags before reaching the living room.

  Jink smiles when he sees I’m still on the straight-backed chair where he left me. His lump hammer has a pea-green handle. We talk about hammers for a couple of minutes. Lumps are designed to shatter, I learn, and scatter the shattered debris like a miniature explosion. They have no claw, like smaller hammers. They don’t do precision, only force.

  At the first lull, I get up and thank Jink and begin to leave.

  ‘I was just wanting to tell you . . .’ He leaps up after me; his tone is urgent. ‘I was just hoping it would be alright . . . to tell you about my accident . . . ?’

  I stop and nod but don’t sit down. I loiter between the dust balls and the mould-mottled walls as he tells me barely anything about the actual accident, only that he experienced an industrial one and spent a long time in hospital afterwards. What he really wants to tell me is that while he was recuperating he found Jesus, or rather, Jesus found him. What he really wants to tell me is that Jesus loves me and is there for me too.

  ‘Have you ever thought about initiating a relationship with Jesus?’ Jink says. His voice lowered to a husky whisper, as though the son of God is my secret admirer at the disco and this old man is one of his buddies who has been sent over to ascertain whether or not I reciprocate, to see if I’ll agree to a slow dance.

  That isn’t his word: ‘initiating’. That word belongs to some higher-ranking Born Again from whom Jink learned his spiel; one of the ones who must have gone to the hospital to prey upon those lost and bored and injured. Now he asks if it would be okay to give me a leaflet and I see he’s been holding it in his hand all along. Small and yellow, stomach-bile yellow. Tightly folded.

  Lump hammer in one hand, leaflet in the other, before I open the door I see something fixed to the wall above my head, almost as high as the ceiling. It’s a cage with a budgie inside. Its feathers are terrifically pale; whiter than I believed a budgie could be. How odd that I haven’t noticed it until now. Its talons are wrapped around a bar. It glowers into a tiny mirror. But as I pull the living room door open, the breeze upsets the budgie and he starts to hop. From ornament to ornament, to bar, to ornament again.

  There is a bird market. On Peter Street. Every Sunday morning.

  I visited it only once, in the earliest days of my years in Dublin. Before I grew accustomed to living in the city and stopped trying to do and find new things. The bird market was set up against the graffitied walls of a dingy alley between a warehouse and an office block in the city centre. It was a would-be artist’s dream, but I didn’t meet any of my fellow students there. Every stall belonged to a retired bloke from the Liberties and all of the people dawdling and browsing on Peter Street that morning were retired blokes from the Liberties too.

  Most of the cages were mounted on the wall and each had bars at the front and a plyboard backdrop painted bright blue, cerulean, a small rectangle of surrogate sky. I can tell a finch from a tit from a sparrow, but that day, I couldn’t identify a single bird, even though each was faintly familiar.

  Of all the pets we had as children, my mother never allowed us to keep a bird. ‘A caged gerbil can still run and jump and dig,’ she explained, ‘but a caged bird can’t still fly.’

  In the market I couldn’t take my eyes off one cage in particular. It contained what looked like a cross between a blue tit and a canary. I pointed and asked the old man who owned the stall what species it was.

  ‘That’s a cross between a blue tit and a canary,’ he said.

  Then I realised what it was that made the birds seem familiar. Each one was a cross-breed, a mutant. I couldn’t name what species they were because they were no species at all.

  I can still hear it: the rhythm drummed by the mutant birds’ delirious movement. From bar to bar, to floor to bar, to floor to bar to floor.

  Works about Birds, I test myself: Jan Dibbets, Robin Redbreast’s Territory Sculpture, 1969. I should have thought of this one first, after my guardian robin was struck down by a windscreen or wheel or whatever it was. Dibbets’s piece wasn’t a sculpture in any traditional sense but a series of studies which followed the movements of a robin around a park and were eventually collated, alongside other research, into a book. So where was the art? Dibbets manipulated the bird’s movements by means of a number of wooden poles upon which it perched. A free bird, which could have flown anywhere it wished, perched upon anything it chose, and yet, it preferred to establish territory, to remain in that particular area of that particular park, hopping between man-made points.

  The art was the manipulation.

  In the sun room, I unfold the tightly folded leaflet. Smooth its stomach-bile yellow across the Formica. It’s been in the pocket of my jeans since I visited Jink. And the lump hammer is still leaning against the kitchen wall on the floor beside the shoehorn. I was too annoyed, at first, to read his leaflet or employ his hardware. When my mother phoned in the evening, I didn’t mention the old man or what happened between us. I ignored the bulge in my pocket, the dint in my frying pan, for the frying pan is the reason I needed the lump hammer in the first place, to belt its bottom flat. There is only one and it has come to bother me. The way half my vegetables are always charred, the other half raw
. It just isn’t the way a frying pan is supposed to work.

  The first panel shows a cartoon man in a white robe standing outside a locked gate surrounded by clouds. IF YOU WERE STANDING AT THE GATE OF HEAVEN AND GOD WERE TO ASK YOU WHY SHOULD HE LET YOU IN, it says, WHAT WOULD YOU TELL HIM? Across the following panels, the cartoon man has a conversation with a speech bubble emanating from between the gate’s bars, and in the end, sees the error of his seemingly typical but apparently sinful ways, wakes up to find it was all a dream and rushes off to join the Church of Jesus in God. At the very bottom, in red biro, Jink has written the address and phone number of the Church’s closest branch. This must have been what he stopped to do in the kitchen.

  I take the pan outside and lay it against the concrete. I fetch the lump hammer and strike it as hard as I can. As if it were a horizontal gong. Over and over, until it is flat again.

  Now I feel a little better.

  Still I wait until after sunset to go back to Jink’s cottage. I lean the lump hammer against the front step. I leave without ringing the bell.

  Works about Birds, again, I test myself: Wheatfield with Crows, 1890. Popularly believed to be the last painting Vincent van Gogh completed. An angry, churning sky, tall yellow stalks, a grass-green and mud-brown path cutting through the stalks, tapering into the distance; a line made by walking. And a murder of crows between the stalks and sky as though they are departing or arriving or have just been disturbed.

  I know Van Gogh killed himself, but I can’t remember how. He spent his last summer, Wikipedia says, staying in a single room in a hostel in Auvers-sur-Oise, a commune in the countryside beyond Paris. Near the end of July, he shot himself in a wheat field, Wikipedia says, but he angled the barrel incorrectly, and didn’t die at once but struggled, wounded, back to the village. There he was attended by a doctor, and appeared quite well. It took twenty-nine hours for the infected bullet wound to kill Van Gogh, and I cannot help but wonder whether, during that time, he changed his mind.