Gavin Corbett: Green Glowing Skull

***

He had dreaded the prospect of the emigrant’s wake. He feared it would be awkward, a big ritual, all dry mouths and hesitant gestures. It was in fact a lively and easy occasion: eighteen of his mother’s surviving siblings turned up, and he had forgotten what good sport they could be when they were all together. Early on a guitar and an accordion were produced, and a cousin cleared the lid of the piano of boxes, and by the small hours the blue-painted wall in the living room, which was the inside of a cold gable wall that faced the sea, was damp with condensation. They were all in their turn called on by one of the more socially confident neighbours to sing a song. When it came around to Rickard he sang the music-hall standard ‘Come Off It, Eileen’. It was not an imaginative choice but it was said to him that night that no one in their life had heard a better version sung. He went on to sing, to everyone’s astonishment including his own, selections, some obscure, from the songbooks of Challoner, French, Ffrench, Balfe and Moore. He was told that he had great volume and vibrato, which he understood to mean that his voice wobbled to pleasing effect. These were certainly things he was aware of as he was singing, although he may have been helped on the night by the acoustic qualities of the corner into which he sang.

The next morning, feeling sorer of head than he would have wanted before a long flight to America, he was presented with a 1908 edition of Chauncey Challoner’s Airs of Erin of 1808. His father said he had been inspired to root it out after Rickard’s performance the night before. He described it as a sacred ‘codex’, which Rickard thought was a strange word, suggestive of future or futuristic technology, for this repository of songs gathered in long-gone romantic days of muzzle-loading firearms and symbolic bitterns. The cover was green and sticky and embossed with shamrocks, harps and gold lettering, and a reassuring beeswax-like smell rose up with the purr of the pages. Every few pages a colour plate or a title would cause him to pause and realise that he should not have been surprised to know such essentially Irish songs as ‘O Truncated Tower’, ‘The Clover and the Cockade’, ‘Wigs on the Green’, ‘Dempsey of Dunamase’ and ‘The Order of the Emerald’ (in school they used deliberately to mishear it as ‘The Ordure of the Emerald’). Other titles — ‘The Snow-flake on Art’s Greying Lip’, ‘My Grand-father’s Fighting Stick’ — were not known to him but were enough to evoke a world.

Afterwards his father attempted to impart some wisdom to him before his leaving. He began by mumbling unintelligibly in Irish as if scanning his stock of the language for a pithy phrase. This was another surprise, as although his father was a speaker of Irish he hated it because he had had it beaten into him by religious brothers who had also beaten ambidexterity into him.

Switching back to English his father said, ‘You must know at least one phrase of the Irish language. If you are on public transport and you see a black person and feel the need to talk about them to someone else for whatever reason, do not refer to them as a black person but as a dinna gurrum .’

Then his father got on to what he really wanted to say:

‘New York is a tough city and it would be easy for a man to fall on hard times. Don’t let this happen to you, son. Fortunately for you, there is an institution in that place where you will always be welcome.’

His father of course was referring to the Cha Bum Kun Club, of which he was a long-standing member. It had clubhouses in all the major cities of the world, plus Thule, Greenland; Puerto Williams, Chile; Leverkusen, Germany; and Ceduna, South Australia; and several clubhouses in remote locations through the Korean peninsula and islands.

His father gave him a shining leather tie box.

‘I went to Rostrevor Terrace yesterday and finally got this off the President. These are not handed out at random. Only one scion per cell every six years is allowed to possess a tie. They had been considering my application for weeks. I am so relieved to present this to you. You will never go hungry or homeless with one of these. If you wear it to the New York clubhouse you will be given a room and a stipend until you are capable of supporting yourself. But you must wear it in the special way.’

The tie’s design was of left-to-right-slanting blue, orange and cream stripes. Overlying the field of stripes, at the thickest part of the tie, was the black, white, blue and red Cha Bum Kun roundel, and below the roundel a white box inside which were stitched, in blue, the characters ‘< V.V.’: V.V. being Rickard’s father’s initials and < signifying ‘less than’.

His father showed him how to tie the knot in the special extremely tight manner, so that the knot looked less like a knot than a hard seamless node.

‘The trick is to pull and pull until your hands burn,’ he said. ‘Put your back against a wall if it helps.’

***

Rickard’s favourite film of all time, The Severe Dalliance , opened with an establishing shot of the Chrysler Building. The first thing he did once he had arrived in New York and dropped his luggage at his temporary accommodation was go to the south-west corner of Lexington Avenue and 42nd Street from where the shot was made. The Chrysler Building looked terribly magnificent from this spot in reality as it did in the film and he was overcome at the sight. The sun shone in a direct line up Lexington Avenue and the building’s pale stone looked brilliant, its armour sparkled and reflected only blues and whites, and eagles or some sort of birds of prey circled high in the air at about the level of the fiftieth floor. All kinds of associations came to mind: the opening of The Severe Dalliance , of course, but also a sense of American power, and his head swelled by turns with Harold Campbelltown’s ‘Dalliance Theme’ and some show tune he did not know the name of or the lyrics to. Then suddenly he felt very sad because he thought of his sweetheart Toni. They had watched The Severe Dalliance for the first time together and later had bought the DVD and watched it many more times. New York was a dream place for them, full of clean sparkling metal and white clouds. They had said that their souls would be at home there. Beneath his anger he hoped that Toni would come to New York herself, looking for their dream, and that they might bump into each other on these streets.

Those first weeks he experienced all of the newly arrived immigrant’s pangs and few of the excitements. His cheap guesthouse in the northern Bronx was in a mainly Irish neighbourhood that prided itself on being a tightly knit community. The shops sold Irish teabags and Irish chocolate and Irish black pudding and damp-tasting Scots-English biscuits. Everywhere there were murals that depicted sporting and paramilitary activities and featured Celtic script and men with basic eyes and very pink faces. Many of the buildings were in the faux Irish-village style just like many of the buildings in Ireland. The land of his birth had never seemed so far away. People moved as if they had all the time in the world, following cracked cambers with their hands behind their backs; or idled as if they had all the time in the world, slumped against chamfered corners below dowdy eaves laughing pile-driving laughs. They seemed so at home, and he felt so locked out. He spent every spare hour he could in Manhattan where even the men in suits spun about as dazzled by the place as he was, though it was not ideal boulevarding territory owing to the regular stops put in the flâneur’s way by the town planner. One day in one of the less frenetic streets of Midtown a photographer told him he had ‘crossed’ his ‘line’ and ruined his photograph. After this Rickard told himself to be understanding of US ideas of social involvement and he became careful not to disturb people’s ‘personal space’. He took ‘personal space’ to mean the space between people and the objects of their concentration, or that aura-like area around people through which the energy by-product of their concentration was diffused. For example, in subway cars he would try not to look people in the eye or would be wary, as he was taking a seat, of sitting on a stray bag strap or body part. And in book shops he would not walk between people and the books they were looking at on the shelves and thus he took tortuous courses and was left face to face with books he had not in the first place been looking for.