The city is full of lovers. In the park, on the grass, two of them have a small radio playing. They are singing along to the radio. Loud and exaggerated. Miming the images in the song like synchronised swimmers. They make the vaulting shape of a bridge. Their hands flutter over troubled waters. They lay their heads down to rest on folded elbows. She gives a dirty laugh and kisses the side of his face. He raises his fist in the air with a hoarse growl.
It’s summer. I have my lunch in the park with the lovers – two slices of brown bread, a piece of Cheddar, a pat of butter from the corner shop. I lie back on the grass and listen to the soft voices around me. The sound of traffic has an interior quality, a large room with lawns and trees, enclosed by a square of terraced buildings.
I work in one of those buildings, in the basement. My day is spent underground. From my desk, I see the feet of pedestrians passing by through a small window above my head. The neon lights are left on all day, even when the sun is shining outside in the street. I am a young man with a full beard and curls in my hair, open expression, quick to smile. I am content in the basement, only that I have contracted some strange, unidentified condition. A virus, a fungus, some parasite must have entered my veins. My face is drawn. My skin is translucent. My teeth feel like glass. I am overwhelmed by fatigue and sleep at my desk. I wake up with underground eyes.
The organisation I work for has been set up to preserve a minority language. Normally referred to as the native language. Some people call it the dead language. It is not spoken on the street, only written in the shadow script above the street names. My work is carried out entirely in this ghost language – Gaelic, Irish.
I run the vinyl record department.
We have a unique collection of native singers. It is my job to collect them from the train station. I bring them for something to eat in a hotel where people from the country gather and recognise each other, a drink before going to the recording studios. They are self-conscious when the red light comes on, the shallow acoustics, the mute face of the recording engineer behind glass staring as if they come from another continent. They get startled by the sound of their own voices played back around the sound-panelled walls. One of them tried out the headphones and said it turned him into a different man, his voice was never the same again.
Some of them go missing. I had to search the entire city for a man who disappeared with a nurse not even half his age, when I found him she was putting on her blue trainee uniform and he stood naked in front of me only for his tweed cap and his fists up. Some of them need to be held by the hand while they sing. Some are equally good at American country music, they will start with a nasal hum at the back of the throat and deviate into the Wichita Lineman. Some of them refuse to travel, we go to record them in their own kitchens. I once had to deliver payment to a singer who would not accept a cheque and insisted on being paid in person. In a village in Connemara where the ghost language is still widely spoken, I met him in a bar with cash. He wouldn’t touch the money, his hands were enormous, a pint of Guinness was no more than a thimble in his fingers, it took three days until he was fully paid.
Our most popular album was recorded live in a Dublin theatre where the audience can be heard yelping with excitement in the background. There is a sense that our moment has come, our music is raw, straight from the earth. It gives me the feeling of being carried back in time. We belong to a country with less roads, less lawnmowers, a place with more wild bees nesting in the grass banks.
One day I arrived at work to find everyone standing in the hallway crying. The commander of the organisation lay at the foot of the stairs, his face gone cold. His naked head was resting on the first step. His right arm was laid out as though he had been giving a speech when he fell. His shoes were off, his socks were yellow, a diagonal design along the side, as though he played golf. Which he never did, nothing further from his mind. The socks merely brought home how normal and integrated we could be while being so devoted to the restoration of a great treasure from the past.
We spoke in low voices, praising his wisdom, his vision, his words had the power to infuse us with emotion. When the ambulance arrived, he opened his eyes. He waved the paramedics away and tried to stand up, resuming his speech where he left off. Entirely in character with the language we worked so hard at reviving, the commander was brought back to life by the sound of a teacup and carried up the stairs to his office. The floor was strewn with newspaper cuttings, some empty bottles, the desk lamp was still on, covered with a garment that was beginning to burn. His secretary appeared and helped to lay him out, she rolled her cardigan up into a cushion. We arranged his tie over his eyes to shield him from daylight.
It’s a happy place to work. Being part of this marginal community in the heart of the city gives me a sense of place. Something glorious about a culture under threat. Hearing the endangered language around me brings back a recurring memory of going out to the islands. Leaning against the rusted white frame of the ferry boat with the engine throbbing in my shoulder. Quiet places with sunlight coming through stone walls, patches of green and blue, gannets diving, waves bashing into the cliffs. Everything in my work is devoted to a silence in the landscape, to what is receding, what is being kept alive.
When it’s time to go home, I tidy my desk and switch off the lights. The remaining daylight seeps in through the high window across the ghost faces along the walls. The basement returns to its forgotten peace. On the way out, the receptionist smiles. She is the niece of an author who wrote a novel in the native language about dead people arguing in a graveyard. I can no longer hide the fact that I am partly dead myself. Half alive. Perhaps undead. As dead as a dead language refusing to die.
I make my way across to the German library. It is situated on the other side of the square in a building that is identical in every way to the one where I work in the basement, same façade, same ratio of windows overlooking the park of lovers, same door, only painted red.
As soon as I step inside I have the illusion of being at home, seeing German newspapers and magazines displayed on tables in the front room. Going up the stairs to the library