A plastic Coke bottle comes floating under the bridge. A sudden flash of anger at litterlouts, at the wanton thoughtlessness of someone just tossing their rubbish over their shoulder. Wanton thoughtlessness everywhere in evidence. Human stupidity too. Road rage, fish kills, farm effluent, phone masts, mindless government policies, or lack thereof. He keeps his eyes on the plastic bottle, tracking it for twenty or thirty yards. It flows out and around the tip of the Inch, appearing smaller and smaller as it floats off downriver, the sun still glinting on the plastic. Tossing on the waves all the way to Errish where the river enters the sea, where fresh water meets salt and swirls in little eddies, the salt nosing underneath, the fresh floating on top, no mixing or melding, no fusion of molecules.
He walks along the road and turns in the avenue. He can always feel when the afternoon changes and evening falls. Something in his circadian clock, he thinks, the way hibernating animals sense when the light fades.
The house has settled around him, restive now. He opens a bottle of Rioja, admires the ruby glow of the wine streaming into the glass. He sips it, lets it linger on his palate for a moment, then down his gullet it goes. Outside, a bird is singing in short sweet trills. Maeve had wanted to get a parrot for the flat in Harold’s Cross but he never liked the idea of caged birds. Joyce kept two little parakeets for a while in Paris, Pierre and Pipi. One of them flew in the window one day and stayed and, not wanting it to be alone, he acquired the other. Probably saw it as a sign. Wonder if he clipped their wings. Or taught them to speak. Or sang to them. Probably spent hours peering at them with his poor eyesight, delighting in their plumage, in their little nipping and kissing and beak tapping. Leaning in closer, imitating their whistles and chirrups, picking up their secret little tones in his inner ear … slipping deeper and deeper into communion with them until he emitted his own little trills and twitterings in reply to theirs. Luke remembers buying a book about birdsong; it’s somewhere in the house. Every morning at dawn the author entered an aviary in a zoo – in Philadelphia or Pittsburg – and played his flute to the birds. As time passed the birds started to imitate his notes and sing back to him.
He boils potatoes, fries the steak in a little butter and garlic, then lifts it onto a warm plate and lets the brownish meat juice trickle over it. Lily will soon appear, drawn by the aroma. At the table he draws the Borges book and a book of Derek Mahon’s poems close to him. Certain nights are right for poems and he has a knack of opening a page at random, hitting on exactly the right one. He pours more wine. When he cuts into the steak, blood-brown juices run out, and he salivates. The meat is delicious. He thinks of Bloom’s pork kidney and wonders why he ate pork. He wonders if it really is possible to taste urine off a cooked kidney. He remembers his alarm the first time he got a strong sulphurous whiff off his own urine after eating asparagus.
He eats another forkful of steak, then some potato sopping in juice. The potato melts in his mouth. Another forkful of steak. The eyes of this cow will pursue me through all eternity. Poor Bloom. The weight of feeling he carried on his shoulders. Such humanity. Joyce too, a gentle soul. His whole life marred by illness and poverty and Lucia’s madness. Only fifty-eight when he died. Perforated ulcer. Luke was shocked when he came upon the post-mortem report as a footnote in Ellmann’s biography. Reading it felt like rummaging through the body itself. Paralytic ileus. Extensive bleeding. Enormously dilated loops of small bowel as large as a thigh, coloured purple. Head section not permitted. His stomach must have been cut to ribbons from all the white wine. If only he’d listened to Nora and gone to a doctor, instead of paying heed to the Jolases and the other intellectuals telling him for years that the stomach pains were psychosomatic. All that genius … gone for ever. Feel him close still. Always. Have to keep the Ellmann book close to hand. He had a blood transfusion the day before he died and received the blood of two Swiss soldiers from Neuchâtel. A good omen, he thought, because he liked Neuchâtel wine. His last hours. Slipping into a coma. Waking in the night, asking for Nora. His coffin carried up the hill through the snow to the Fluntern cemetery. Eternally with me.
He must not exhaust himself thinking. Random inchoate thoughts following on more random inchoate thoughts. Thought is the thought of thought. The pressure of thoughts sometimes, ideas turning cartwheels in his mind. Coming in surges, fast-flowing, flooding. All is in all. His speech too, at times. His father always at him. ‘Easy, Luke, easy, slow down.’ In class in Belvedere he’d stray off-topic, once extolling the beauty and harmony and symmetry in nature’s fabric that is everywhere discernible – in the nucleus of a nut or an atom – and the boys saying, ‘Slow down, sir, you’re going too fast.’ Maeve too. ‘Stop! What are you talking about? Luke, you’re making no sense!’ He couldn’t understand why she couldn’t keep up. Moments like that, he had felt alienated. One night, she stopped him mid-stream. ‘I bet you’re bipolar,’ she said quietly, nodding slowly. ‘You’re just like my uncle Mattie.’
He sips more wine. Bipolar. A touch, maybe. Occasional highs, definite lows. Restlessness. Some hubris. Nothing delusional – his own mind does not mislead him. Certainly nothing that warrants intervention. They dope you to the gills. Like a veil thrown over everything. All you’d miss.
Lulled and sated, he picks up the Mahon book, opens page 81. Let them not forget us, the weak souls among the asphodels. Asphodel meadows, where the souls of those who did neither good nor bad reside. He looked up the asphodel flower once and when he clicked on the images and recognised the yellow flowers – which he had always assumed were a variety of iris – as identical to the flowers that appear every summer at the edge of the Inch, he was momentarily floored. Mythical flowers from Hades growing here on his land, right under his nose. What were the chances!
Irises were Maeve’s favourite flowers. He brought her home a bunch of blue ones to celebrate the good tidings of great joy. Two weeks later it was all over and when they came home from the hospital she lay on the bed facing the wall. He lay beside her, then stood at the window. Nothing to say. Above, the night sky, the stars, the indifferent earth. A mistake of nature. Unplanned anyway. Better to happen now than at age four or fourteen, he told her later. They got hammered the following weekend and fell in the door at 3 a.m., and onto the bed, laughing. To think it was all over. A heavy period, that’s all it amounted to, blood clots flushed down the toilet. A life, a life not … No soul yet. Or was there? Forty days before ensoulment occurs, the Greeks believed. Islam says one hundred and twenty. The yogis say it happens at the moment of conception when the ovum meets the sperm. A flash of astral light, then the soul rushes in. Wonder if a couple’s spiritual goodness and wholesomeness matters, if their devotion to each other helps serve as a divine magnet to draw a good soul towards them. Wonder where the soul resides. Not in the body or blood, it being metaphysical, not physical … All those years in the grave, the blood of those two soldiers mixed with Joyce’s and settled in his body. Traces still there maybe. One body, three bloods. A trinity of blood, he’d have liked that! Wonder what the soldiers were doing in the hospital that day.
He reads the poem. A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole. He leaves his head in his hands. Tired. Foresees the road ahead, the years ahead … Sleepy … Shouldn’t sleep here … He can do whatever he wants. He lifts his head and smiles. If you behave, Borges said to his six-year-old nephew, I will give you permission to think of a bear. I will give you permission to think … A thousand souls crowding to a door, waiting to be born … crying Me, Me … Go back, go back, it’s not your turn yet.
FROM THE KITCHEN window he watches a red van snaking up the avenue. As it passes the window the driver turns his head and meets Luke’s eyes before continuing on into the yard. Casing the joint. It happens about once a week – they see the big house from the road and take a chance.
He stands at the front door and puts out his hand when the van approaches from the yard. The passenger lowers his window and Luke leans in.
‘Morning, lads,’ he says, throwing his eyes over the driver and