Gavin Corbett - Green Glowing Skull

Denny said, ‘If we are to be honest singers then we should be honest, as I have been trying so hard to tell you. Let us play a game among ourselves. It’s a game like dare, or omphalos gazing. Tell us again about your being a woman at one time, Clive. “What gives?” as they say. No, I want to know what Rickard has been up to. Anything you’d like to tell us, Mister Piltdown Man?’

Rickard, who was in the room again, said, ‘I once threw a roof tile at a cousin who kept putting “-tastic” at the ends of words, for example, “sandwich-tastic”, “gas-meter-tastic”, etcetera.’

Denny laughed loudly and harshly.

He said, ‘Do you know how my dear wife Aisling died? I’ll tell you — she walked out on me. There was a real game of dare. I said I was a modern man, a man of the modern world. There were others around me were doing far worse and I asked her to give me the freedoms that these men enjoyed at that time in history as artists. And when she would not stand for it, I took them anyway. And she said she would prove this was a time in the world for women too. And she went after her freedoms too.’

Clive said, ‘I am curious to know exactly how this machine brings out the noise in you, Denny. I want to be assured that there is firm science behind it.’

A grinding sounded in the corner: a light came up, the light from the brass arm — Jeremiah was back in the room.

‘Twenty-four-hour hardware,’ he said.

‘Of course there is firm science behind it,’ said Denny. ‘Biology and sound waves. It resonates with my mitochondria.’

‘I cannot help feel that a deal has been done.’

‘No cash changed hands.’

‘I can sense in its outgoings something above and beyond you and it and Jeremiah.’

‘There’ll be a certain amount of leakage that will have all of our mitochondria moving, that is only natural.’

‘There is a well-established link between music and the otherworld.’

‘But anyhow I held out for Aisling, and holding out requires a certain amount of holding in. I wonder if that did all the damage.’

***

One Saturday afternoon when Jean Dotsy was a young child an American aeroplane came from over the border and scudded into the bog where her older brother Patrick did casual work on weekends. The pilot, a brown-haired man with a face that suggested he would go on to achieve great things, climbed out of the plane uninjured. On landing, it had ploughed up a huge curl of turf which now, collapsed into divots, largely buried the nose. Patrick observed the pilot, wild still with panic, scoop further bundles of turf in his arms and try to pile a rick on the wreckage. Sensing that he was being watched, the pilot turned around to see Patrick observing him.

‘Help me with this, kid — quickly. Take your spade.’

Patrick was a big strong lad but the plane was a job to cover because, as well as being massive, it had a fin that stuck up in the air.

‘What about the wing?’ said Patrick — one of the wings had broken away and was lying on the ground fifty yards behind.

‘Goddamn,’ said the pilot, and the two ran to bury the wing as well.

The light was dim by the time the job was as good as could be done and the pilot asked Patrick if there was somewhere he could shelter the night. Patrick brought him the couple of miles to the family home. The pilot explained to Patrick and Jean’s mother and father that as an American and an ally he was no threat to them.

‘Technically, you are not an ally,’ said Mister Dotsy. ‘Make up scones and some of that serviceman coffee,’ he said to Missus Dotsy, and then to the pilot again he said, ‘Young man, have yourself a wash,’ before disappearing for half an hour.

Later, over stout with Mister Dotsy, the pilot, whose name was Joe, played between his knees with little Jean, who remembered his tanned face and sharp nose and not-disfiguring wrinkles, and his white teeth, and the way those teeth and his mouth were set in his face in a way that she would later have described as ‘goofy’.

‘I am fighting the war for people like your little girl,’ he said to Mister Dotsy.

He sat unembarrassed in long johns and in a yellow gansey of Patrick’s that was only a little too small for him. The two men faced the fire, drowsy from the stout. Behind them sat Patrick, in Joe’s pilot’s jacket and not much else.

After a while, Joe remarked: ‘I feel quite at home here. My ancestors are from the opposite corner of Ireland, I believe, but now I feel they are close by me.’

Over the radio came the voice of the great John McCormack, though he was great now only in reputation for he was well past his prime. The concert being broadcast was one of a series he was giving in Britain to raise funds for the war effort. Mister Dotsy said that he did not ‘have the ease of movement through the notes in the higher register that he once had, and why would he, for McCormack is not a young man and he’s exercised by this burdensome schedule’. Nonetheless the voice was sweet; lacking its vital and piercing sonority of old, but it had a richness it couldn’t have had before, and induced the memory of comfort such as one might have got in better years from Ovaltine or burnt brown marmalade, and it seemed to lull the airman further as it sang of harps ringing out through once-royal halls and pale maidens across the seas.

‘I think my radio set does him justice though,’ said Mister Dotsy.

He was fascinated by the workings of machines, and could not resist boasting of how he had built the radio himself from a kit. He was a member of a group of enthusiasts that met regularly in Omagh.

There came a mighty thump on the front door. Mister Dotsy turned out of his seat, stayed Patrick with his hand, and left the room with no great concern apparent on his face. He returned with two helmeted officers of the Local Security Force.

‘I am sorry, Joe,’ said Mister Dotsy, ‘but I was obliged to inform the authorities of your hereabouts.’

One of the officers, a man of less than five feet in stature, elaborated: ‘Neutral Éire will detain until the end of hostilities all combatant personnel found on its soil or within its waters.’

Joe, who looked as unruffled as his host, calmly rose from his seat, requested his jacket back from Patrick and the rest of his clothes from the laundry sack, and went off with the two men and a ‘So long, Mister Dotsy.’

About a fortnight later, Missus Dotsy opened the door to Joe again. This time he did not look contented or collected but in a state of distress.

‘I’ve cycled all the way from the Curragh Camp of Kildare, Missus Dotsy.’

A bicycle was dumped flat on the drive, and Missus Dotsy dared not imagine how it had been acquired.

Joe, still wearing his pilot’s outfit, was covered in the slime of the bog, just as he had been the first time he’d arrived at the Dotsys’ house. In spite of the filth, and in spite of his distress, he retained a great shining ineffable allure.

‘I’m not sure if I should be admitting a fugitive to my household, Joe,’ said Missus Dotsy, admitting him anyway.

A few minutes later she had him down to his skivvies and into Patrick’s gansey again. She noted that he shook with nerves, and how in the couple of weeks he’d somehow both gained and lost definition, like a bit of grey dried wood on a beach. Afterwards she got him a bottle from the outhouse. In it was a clear liquid.

‘This is my secret medicine, Joe. It’s made from potatoes, with some clove oil to numb the throat and honey to make it go down. It may help to steady you. But go easy on it.’

When Patrick came home from school she said to Joe, ‘I have to head out for a little while but Patrick and little Jean will look after you.’