Colum McCann - Songdogs

Mam climbed off the chairoplane, smoothing the back of her skirt, hitching up some pantyhose at the knees, her voice a loom, interweaving with carnival notes, spinning out once again. ‘Come, Conor,’ she said to me. I pretended that I didn’t hear and tucked the toffee apple under my jacket so the lads on the wheel couldn’t spit down into it. The moths flared away under carnival lights beneath a massive burlesque of stars.

I saw the old man walking towards the strongarm machine, a giant loping stride as if he’d just stepped out of an advertisement for very strong cigarettes, like he always walked — even when I hated him I loved him for the gigantic way he walked — shoulders swinging, everything in a loop around him. Mam went the other way, moving through the tents and the broken brown bottles. I stood there between them, by the toffee-apple stall, listening to a man play a concertina. I walked towards her as she moved through the sea of shirts and gypsy-fed eyes and faces lacquered with alcohol and — even before I was beside her — the hand, brown and slender, reached out backwards to take mine, a well used reflex. I took her fingers. The spindrift of carnival seeped outwards to further-strung lights of the town. Behind my back the old man was standing by the machine with the giant hammer in the air, against the backdrop of a red and white tent. The carnival clamour wilted as Mam and I moved towards the edge of the car park, and I was wondering if my father was the one sounding out the trilly muscleman bell as we tramped down weeds at the side of a field, Mam and I, circling around, waiting for him to drive us home. From the tents I could still see the boys peeping.

She was famous by then.

The books were censored in Ireland, of course — at first they couldn’t be found anywhere except in his darkroom, although O’Shaughnessy probably had some, too. Maybe it was O’Shaughnessy who showed them to people. Or perhaps they were found by emigrants in obscure European bookstores, sent back home in envelopes with fabulous stamps, young men stumbling across them in the corner of a Parisian stall, tentatively peeling back a cover, feeling the heart thump, looking over a thin shoulder, lifting the page higher. Maybe there were drunken miscreants in the backstreets of Liège who recognised his name on the shabby front cover — men with holes in overcoat pockets so they could reach all the way down to their articulate penises. Or curly-haired artists crazed against the sunsets of a plaza in Rome, denizens of vivacious dreams who loved the photos for what they were, sent them home, wrapped in brown paper to beat the censors.

I had seen a copy. The door of the darkroom had been left open, the old man was gone for the day, and twenty or so were stacked in a corner. At first I didn’t understand that it was her. I just kept flicking the pages. A huge feeling of sickness rose up in me. I scoured quickly through it again, hands shaking. I remember feeling as if a big vacuum was sucking the air from me, dry-retching, a world churning in me, slamming the door, afraid to go home. I had a dream that night. The book was on the coffee table and my schoolteachers were in the house. They picked up the book and smiled, comparing different shots, bits of chalk circling around the pages, one teacher constantly circling her breasts. I kept grabbing the book and tucking it behind the pail of peat near the fireplace so that they wouldn’t see a leg leap from the glass of the coffee table, or a nipple emerge from under a plate of biscuits, or a belly button give an eye from beneath a teacup. But the teachers kept tut-tutting at me, taking it back, some of them holding it up in the air. A giant bamboo cane was raised by the headmaster and I woke, tremulous, walked out into the landing and hunched down, inventing ways of killing my father: make him swallow his chemicals, thump him to a black and white pulp.

Copies got through to people in town, or the rumour of the book did, so that the whole place swivelled and the postman was famous and the telephone operator was abuzz. Father Herlihy flapped in his vestments and made a veiled threat, saying, ‘Blessed be those who know the reasons for things, we must fling all filth out! Fling it out, I say!’ Men in peatbogs who had heard about the photos hailed the heroic eye of my father, caps raised up over centuried soil. Workers from the abattoir, blood-splattered, shit-splattered, passed by our house, looking up at the bedroom windows for a glance which would never come. And the women in their coffee mornings surely set about whispering, lipstick on their teeth, slapping their tongues against the news.

‘Listen up now, I heard they took photos in the bath.’

‘Go away out of that.’

‘Swear to God.’

‘You’re having me on.’

‘I’m not.’

‘Well, the water bill must be something fierce.’

There wasn’t a whole lot of money in our house anymore — the old man had obviously paid to get the book published, and he never read from his notebook anymore. The silence at our dinner table doubled and redoubled itself. The idea of our trip to Mexico had vanished.

Mrs O’Leary still supported Mam. She still went to the pub as often as she could — slinking through the bar quickly with her head down as barstools shifted and swivelled, out to the back garden where the chickens were. There were probably jokes made — ‘There she goes, Mrs Public Hair,’ the rat-faced comedian might have said, ‘would ya look at the swish of her!’ I figure that much, because Mrs O’Leary banned him from the pub. Over the bar counter she declared with a flourish of a fleshy hand: ‘Leave her bloody well alone! I’d do it myself, go bloody starkers, only they’d laugh at me best and whistle for more.’

I continued to meet Mam at the pub after school, until one afternoon when birds were beating blackwinged against the sky and hay was on the wind and rain was dolloping through chestnut trees. I pulled the heavy door open, was met with curls of smoke. The man with the walrus moustache was sliding off his barstool, drunk. He looked at me as if surprised by my existence, curved his index finger towards me, ‘Come here a second, you,’ he said, ‘come here,’ leaning into me with a wink. His breath was stale with Woodbine, his eyes like apples just bitten into and discoloured, his moustache hairy over his teeth. He shifted himself on the barstool, looked around, reached forward, and out of his lunchbox on the counter, suddenly, like a rabbit pulled from a hat, came a picture of Mam which he held in the air and examined for a moment. He licked the hedge of Guinness off his moustache, rotated the photo between his fingers. He sighed, smiled at me, saying, ‘Look at this, look at this, would you have a look at this,’ and I looked, and she was there, staring out with sepia eyes from a bed overhung by a white mosquito net, beside an old lantern, beside a painting of flowers, beside a crack in the wall — Mexico — and the walrus man was twirling her in his fingers, incanting a low whistle over his lunchbox, and I stared at Mam, her breasts all soggy from lettuce and tomato sandwiches.

Mrs O’Leary broke out from the bar counter, a greyhound from a trap, slapped the man with the walrus moustache, slapped him twice, so hard that his head moved, a wooden doll, side to side, the sound of it around the bar, ‘Get the fucken bejesus outa here!’ she shouted, then blessed herself for the blasphemy. ‘Sorry, Father,’ she said to the ceiling. She gathered me to her immense chest, held me there, turned to Mam, who had come in from the yard, and said: ‘I suppose you’d be best off leaving the young fella at home.’

Mrs O’Leary wiped the topaz sleeves of her billowy dress across my face. She reached for a bottle of Guinness at the same time, took a slurp that dribbled down the front of her dress. Mam was fumbling at my anorak — trying to hold the steel teeth of the zip together to close it, hands shaking. Mam looked up and said sadly: ‘Yes, Alice, I suppose I should leave the child at home, should’t I?’