Gavin Corbett: Green Glowing Skull

He did not like the idea that anyone wished him ill but he felt that the billionaire’s widow at the newspaper wanted only evil to be visited on him because she could not have him. She had tried to kiss him with her doughy, immobile and always-damp lips as he was leaving the offices for the last time. He recoiled from her, backing into a filing cabinet, which fell backwards into another filing cabinet, which broke a window. The glass, original to the building and warped with age, crumbled to grains. The rest of the office staff rose as one.

‘See what you bring to the party,’ the billionaire’s widow bellowed. ‘Only blue funking dudgeon, to use a local expression.’

With no job, no daily routine, he found himself careering, and for long listless weeks; he ate only sweet things and slept odd hours and never felt bothered about seeking work. His behaviour became erratic, sometimes risky. He engaged madmen — people happy to violate his own ‘personal space’: street preachers, or rap singers on the make who handed out leaflets with website addresses on them. He went to the famous Waldorf Astoria one night and tried ‘the green fairy’ — absinthe; and he told the barman from County Mayo to fill her up again. Rush hour one evening he climbed down to the subway track to salvage what in any case only turned out to be a potato.

Once, worn out, and feeling sentimental for home, and knowing that the pubs of his neighbourhood were anything other than public houses, he went to Mass. The priest had a whispery voice like chalk on a blackboard, but coughed often, spoiling the effect. Rickard woke on a cough to hear the priest deliver a homily on the dangers of leaving Mass early. He said that leaving Mass early was like finishing a course of antibiotics early, and that if one didn’t finish one’s course the germs of sin would grow stronger and become resistant to the medicine of the liturgy. Rickard, aware that he was in danger of falling asleep again, and that he was a snorer, decided all the same that it was best to leave before the end.

Near Christmas he went, in indifferent mood, to a late-night rhumba party on a pier in the Hudson River to see if he could meet a US girl. He never told his landlady where he was going or at what time to expect him back. Nothing happened at this rhumba party, which was exactly as he had wanted, and he walked all the way home to the Bronx shaking his head violently in self-punishment and blowing into the gently descending snow. If only he could have a vision in a snow-globe now to say you have done this and now you will do that he said as his brain chattered against his skull.

A couple of days later he travelled to a factory in a bunker, conceivably a former nuclear silo, in Flushing, Queens. He went there to have a doll made up for Toni and in the likeness of Toni. He was shown sliding drawer after sliding drawer of eyes, locks of hair, swatches of skin and featureless heads indicating face shapes. The heat in the factory was oppressive and the render on the walls appeared to bubble, and after a while it was hard to tell the difference between one pair of eyes and another. He waited six hours for his doll. She had brown eyes, blonde hair, and flatteringly even cream skin. For some reason he had chosen to dress her in an orange-and-gold Irish-dancing outfit. On the train back to the Bronx the eyelids distressed him: they rocked up and down, falling into and out of synchronisation, making a faintly audible click. The doll looked nothing like his former sweetheart, not even a three-year-old version of her. He had paid $130, albeit tax free, for this hoodoo rubbish.

He moved into longer-term and cheaper accommodation in a part of Queens that was not quite Long Island City; set back from it, to the east. The area was uninteresting, but he was tired even of Manhattan now, where every footstep seemed to land on hot soft sand. His new apartment building shook with tremors generated by shallow-lying tunnelling machinery and it also had a cockroach problem. A significant factor in his decision to leave Ireland had been his fear of the European house spider, but he soon grew to hate and fear the American cockroach with equal passion and dread. Daily they seemed to increase their dominion; taking the words of Charles Stewart Parnell out of context he would lift his hand and say to them, ‘Thus far shalt thou go and no further.’ One evening he was putting on a moccasin when he noticed one of the maroon scurrying pests inside it. He opened the window of the apartment to shake the creature out. ‘Shoo, shoo!’ he said, and ended up letting the moccasin slip from his hand. It dropped eight floors and beyond retrieval. His other moccasin, water-stained and curled from drying out, sat at his feet looking like an artefact from a museum of agriculture. This, after a day in which he had suffered the hauteur of people in shops and the service industry. He wept for forty-five minutes and thought of moving back to Dublin. He thought about this — moving back to Dublin — paralysed slightly in movement, and partly in thought itself, for the rest of the day. Late in the night he tried to sing. He willed his diaphragm to flatten like a weakling pushing a plunger, and he intoned. His plans to be a singer now seemed altogether pathetic. He knew no way of going about being a singer — and how juvenile and risible of him to have even dreamt of it. He took Lyons tea and felt that perhaps it would be nice to return to Dublin and embrace the kind of love that was sympathy. But it was painfully easy too to imagine the great stigma of being delivered, pitied, in a squeaking cage like some kind of King Puck, brass crown askew, with divergent eyes. No; no. It was true; he could not return to Dublin so soon.

There was of course another option, another way that an observer of his situation might have told him would improve that situation; but it was one that Rickard had never been, nor was now, prepared to entertain. He had felt, from the moment his father had introduced the idea, that to go to the Cha Bum Kun clubhouse would be to walk into a trap. His father knew that Rickard would only have approached the lodge in the most miserable condition. Down at heel, pining for home, and sitting across a room from old men, he would be squarely in front of the cause of his flight from his parents.

No, no, he decided. He would attack his problems with great conviction. Encouragement came from an unsought source. One of the books in a book shop that he was left face to face with that he was not in the first place looking for was Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Lessons emanated. He would strain at his balls and sockets from the down-suck and make money. This was America, this was New York, the beating and — importantly — not geographical and not rutted heart of America. Men here had made art deco facades to provide footholds and handholds to the clouds. Later in the 1980s men had made the same things in polished granite that was the colour of both the inside and outside of salmon. Now new walkways were emerging on elevated platforms, and gleaming silver tubes on skyscraper roofs pumped beautiful pure clouds into clear blue skies. Young people, no longer afraid to revel in youth and money, were running with the spirit. Many wore ironic pilot goggles in a nod to the spirit of early aviation. A new dawn, or a new young spirit, was rising, or abroad.

In the meantime, in a time, some time, in the middle of that, on a day when no ATM in the city would accept his PIN, a woman in the bank persuaded him that — yes — he should get a job because his funds were rapidly depleting, and assured him that the problem with his card would be resolved by the next morning.

‘But if you don’t mind me saying,’ this banking woman with beautiful Greek almond eyes decorated with platinum eye shadow said, ‘it’s all fine declaring that you’re a professional singer, but when you’ve got no income from it, it isn’t worth the name that you give it. New York is an expensive place at the best of times.’