Gavin Corbett - Green Glowing Skull

And tears fall to black earth from your smoke-stung green eyes,

And the bite of the crow and cut of the chain

Draws out the Royal blood from your faint-beating veins,

It must be remembered

’Twas not always thus!

This eternal December,

This sepulchral dust!

In your gilded past glory

No burden you bore!

This once was your story

And will be once more!’

The medallion enlarged and changed shape. It made now a lozenge, and came low enough so that he could enter. He did so, and she backed away across the hillside as he did. She stood among the ashes of weeds. He kicked the ground beneath him and saw that it was as black. The edge of the plateau marked the drop to the sea lough but he could not see the lough over the lip. Nor could he see far in any direction — only darkness, and the waveforms of intertwining bands of mist. He was frightened at having entered the scene, but then this was his country too. But it was hard to imagine that it was ever a place of wealth, or of hope, and hard to imagine that she was not lonely here.

White-Headed Boy:

‘The light will shine on you again!’

But the moon was gone and it was so monstrously dark. Even the dark above was like the light shut out by the cap of a cistern.

White-Headed Boy:

‘There is a harp with strings of sunbeam;

To play it and to sing the name:

Ireland! Ireland!

Will summon light oh once again

And bring that name back to a gleam!’

She clutched at her left breast with both hands to form the shape of a heart. The fingers dug and clawed. Her fingers were withered to relics and the place of her heart was the reliquary she sought to reach. From that place leapt a rainbow. The rainbow was composed of different shades of grey and one shade of black. It leapt like a leaping fish — slow near the top of its arc. When it hit the ground it made the thud of a landed fish. He saw something writhe in the ash and went to it. He found a dead pike that was already half pus. The pike curled up its head and hissed through its dreadful lips and teeth, ‘The borders of countries of the place whence you came have no meaning here. Even the border of that country you mention which is so fixed by nature has no meaning here where nature has no meaning.’

White-Headed Boy:

‘Is not Erin that place of which you speak?

Is not Erin that place o’er which you weep?

Is not Erin —’

Some light appeared as a greenish grain in the air. Distantly amid this disturbance, across the abysmal territorium, he saw a city emerge. He peered hard at the city. The dead pike hissed up at him, ‘It is built to an order you have never known. Columns are thin and twisted and carved with a uniform pattern of gnarls. These end in gigantic capitals carved in the design of a bouquet of frayed nerves. The columns support gigantic rhomboid pediments one to each column and each set on a column on one of its acutest points. Across the opposite acute points of the pediments balances the entablature. The architrave of every entablature is carved in an arrangement of various inverted mammalian nipples. The frieze of every entablature is carved in an arrangement of various mammalian anuses. The cornice of every entablature is carved in an arrangement of shards of various mammalian bones broken the better that the entire body will pass again into the matrix of origin. The city also abounds in finials carved as stacks of hairballs as extracted from mammalian stomachs, rostrums carved as cairns of bungs of cholesterol as extracted from mammalian blood vessels, and corbels carved as carpets of opened-out and overextended mammalian alimentary canal, the villi of which are massed into various depictions of mammalian suffering, each unique villus being a copy of a cast formed by pouring molten lead into a mammalian fistula. Only one material is used in the construction of our cities and it is the blackest most brittle obsidian. Each component of the order must follow a model as set out in the masons’ codex. Every mason must speak in black oaths. A foul chinook blows through the city. Pity the mammals.’

White-Headed Boy:

‘At the Mass rock in the howling wild glen,

Father Moore did tell us that we

Would one day reside, all women and men,

In a country of peace. Said he:

“It is eighty miles wide, eighty miles in the sky,

Angel music does float on the air,

And the place it is bathed in the most soothing light

That flows from Our Lady’s white hair.”’

He peered so hard at the city that he went blind. His blindness was a stratum of humus that rammed through his head. A bitter run-off streamed across his tongue and into his eyes. He blinked to ease the interference. He blinked a dozen or so times and at last he felt relief, and he could see again. But there was a pressure lying all across his face as if a sheet of glass were against it. It was most severe at the bridge of his nose, which, he suspected, had been flattened altogether along with the rest of his facial topography. It was as if he had woken from an operation in which his face had been shattered with a mallet. Through the glass he observed a new scene. It was a more intimate and homely and familiar scene than before. A wall to his left was plastered in the floral wallpaper of the living room of the flat he and Aisling had shared in Rathmines, Dublin. On it hung that gaudy picture of a weeping owl-eyed Spanish peasant girl. The wall to his right was plastered in the same wallpaper. And there was their old Lambert range. The furniture was theirs too, along with its horrid antimacassars (a wedding gift from Aisling’s mother), but it was all moved to the sides to make space at the centre of the floor. On the floor was their reproduction antique Chinese rug, a tribute to the orientalist Lafcadio Hearn, whose family had long ago lived in that very house. The floor was otherwise wooden boards. The plan followed approximately the same rectangular layout of their living room. But there was no wall opposite. The room opened out to darkness. Above, on that side, stage lights were suspended. He realised now that he was viewing this space from the perspective of a framed picture of the young John McCormack, a print of a painting in which the tenor had a dreamlike saintlike appearance. He had often stood with his back to the picture and sung, and he knew this perspective. Around and around the Chinese rug trundled a Friesian cow. It was not an actual Friesian cow, but a pantomime Friesian cow. Its bagginess, and its wellington boots, made it look very preposterous. One of the black markings on its pied flanks was a crude map of Ireland. Aisling herself occupied the front of the cow. He could identify her because she did not wear a cow’s head. The effect of a cow’s face was generated with the use of black and white face paint, pink paint on the nose, long false golden eyelashes, and gold hooped earrings. The cow appeared to have been delivered bad news. The around-and-around motion suggested perplexity and distress, though the face did not give much away, because Aisling was a bad actor. Adding to its distress now was the fact that its back half had come off. Yes — the back of the cow now lay on the floor, moaning. With no surprise he could identify himself poking out of the open end. He wore a pair of woman’s tights on his head and the way these pressed up his eyelashes made him look womanly. But he looked punch drunk too, which partly restored his manliness. ‘Oh what will I do now my four beautiful stomachs are taken from me?’ said the front half of the cow, stiffly, looking down at the detached back half. She stood arms akimbo staring into the dark, grinding her pelvis around to test the unexpected adjustment to her mechanism. With a sudden spiritedness then she kicked off her wellington boots to reveal ballerina’s plimsolls. She turned round to the back half of the cow and, with one of those delicate plimsolls, planted a kick in its udder. ‘Well you can take the four stomachs and all of its faeces and tripe,’ she said, stiffly again, ‘and you can take the milk too. When you feel the need to sup on that milk, as you will, you will remember me.’ Mass cheering and whooping broke out from the dark. She faced it and said, ‘I will not allow a whole life to pass and be alone in my loneliness. I will have the comfort of another body next to mine.’ As if in response to the juddering shift from metaphor to statement, and in disgust at the performance’s sudden lurch to bawdy and the suggestion of female sexual empowerment containing an intimation of necrophilia, a shower of rotten fruit rained in from the dark. Meanwhile, the back of the cow continued to squirm about the stage floor, moaning.