In the morning, the younger sister goes to the registry office, calling up documents which have nothing to do with her but with the student lawyer she loves and cannot have. She sits in the office, reading the dates, his entry into life, his mother, his father, his family going back in time. From the documents, the people of the town appear to be scattering, the arrow of time in reverse, uncoupling, unmarrying, dead people coming back to life, children disappearing, families thinning out to the point of arrival, when they first merged into the town.
Tears enter the records. A jealous smudge of vandalism. The letter J is found attached to the family name. The wedding never goes ahead, the names are never joined. The law student disappears. Two sisters left broken hearted, the windmill never moved.
The garden at home had become terribly overgrown since my father died. My mother asked me to do something about it, make a start, at least. She loved the sound of the soil being turned. I brought out a chair, she sat sheltered from the breeze, by the greenhouse.
What I liked about digging was that it had no meaning. I was happy doing something with no great purpose. It was like reverting to childhood, taking over what my father used to do. It was good to have Rosie and Essie there with me. They had their own patch of ground each to work on. They gave me the feeling that I could pass everything on to them, no need for me to achieve anything more.
My life is limited to the vision of a father. My ideas are all designed around them. I love placing things into their minds and watching them bounce back in their crooked words. My success comes through them, I am at their disposal, I love hearing them laugh, my despair returns every time they fight. When Rosie is angry she shouts the word – anything. When Essie is angry she shouts the word – blood.
It was not long before the spade clacked against a solid object. The sound of metal travelled up through the wood into my hands like a tuning fork. It took a while to dig up. It turned out to be an old pair of shears. They were rusted solid. The blades were fused together and could not be prised apart. The wooden handles had completely rotted off, leaving only two core metal prongs. The prongs had been moulded with a twist in the metal, presumably to prevent the handles from slipping. A flat metal cap had been welded on to the top of each prong.
The girls came over to see what I found. With the wooden handles gone, it looked like a set of antlers. My mother laughed. Antlers, she agreed. She called me a poacher. What I’d recovered was a piece of gardening equipment belonging to my father. The fact that the handles had completely rotted away seemed to date them back to when he first bought the house. The garden was a wilderness when my mother arrived from Germany. My father was too embarrassed to take it on. He felt the eyes of the neighbours looking at him through the windows. She didn’t care who was watching and went out to dig the garden herself, while he looked on from the window along with the other neighbours. It was only when he saw her digging the weeds unbothered by the audience that he changed his mind. She freed him from the fear of being judged. He no longer cared about being seen and took over the work himself, growing vegetables in neat rows, a section for flowers, new fruit trees, a patch of lawn and a place to sit in the sun.
His garden fire is what I remember most, the smoke drifting over the boundary walls, sending a message across the world, the neighbours could hardly see a thing, they had to close their windows, it drifted through the house, it was in all the rooms, in our clothes, in our beds, it went out onto the street, the big cigar cloud of his gathered weeds smoking through the afternoon, into the night, still smouldering in the morning.
Helen arrived as soon as her yoga class was finished. My sisters ran to open the front door and let her in. She was like a visitor from another world. They examined every inch, the black beret, her long dark copper hair, the black corduroy jeans, her light green jumper finished off square across the front. Her freckled shoulder came leaping out as she leaned forward to put down her bag on the floor in the hallway. In the kitchen, she spoke in German, remembering words she had learned in Berlin, testing them out on my mother with a contorted twist in her voice. My mother laughed and treated her like a child, slapping her on the thigh – you are a mouse.
It’s a time of revolution. Every act contains some degree of rebellion and disobedience. There is a feeling that things are changing, civil rights, women’s rights. The art scene is full of naked bodies. Things have become less sacred, less respected. Irrelevant things are being brought centre stage, a strange truth is discovered inside objects which have previously been merely functional.
We hear about a German artist who is using butter and felt in his work. He makes a legend of his own life story, he wears a hat to cover up the head injuries he suffered when he was shot down as a pilot in the war. He puts on spontaneous happenings, in New York he sat in a room with a coyote, in Berlin he took up a brush and began to sweep the street with an audience around him – sweeping out, he called it.
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