Gavin Corbett: Green Glowing Skull

There was just a single free chair in the room. It was so positioned that Rickard could not help but face two men. One of these men was bald on top, perfectly round-headed, and had an underbite. A pad of spittle had collected at a corner of his mouth. The other man had a full head of greasy white hair, long and pinned back behind the ears, and a face that tapered to the nose and lips like the blade of a Stone Age hatchet. They were snoozing, and easy to imagine dead.

Recently Rickard had been given to imagining that any elderly person he saw looked dead. Perhaps this was because the elderly were the easiest of all people to imagine dead: their corpses, in the main, would not look so different to the living versions of themselves. Something of the fear of death would disappear with this visualisation, although when he thought of his parents at home he saw them face down on the floor beside each other and hollowed out and grey like hot-counter chickens. But this bald old man would not be quickly corruptible. He would remain apple-cheeked and full in the mouth — no collapse in support behind the lips. Rickard imagined him too in a giant glass tube, in a bubbling rose-coloured liquid.

The other man — the flint-hatchet one, rigid in his chair, one hand loosely holding the other — would find the transition to corpsehood traumatic. His face was whittled, Rickard decided; had an eaten quality, been blasted, from having seen too much. He had uncanny foresight. Or, rather, uncanny experience: he knew, somehow, the advancing horrors. In the first moments of death the microbes would swiftly — and not for the first time — get to work; the tissue in the face would subside ply on ply and the hard edges above would harden further.

But even haunted by death there was something elevating about this man. He would be long and limber and heroic and become one with the relief carving in his likeness on the lid of his tomb. The tomb would be made of alabaster and in the dark it would glow. And in death the other man too — there would be something grand and glorious. This man as a crusader at rest, and that man at peace in his bubbling tube: and now the tableau behind glistened and quivered. Rickard saw in its details other creation stories; he thought of Romulus and Remus, Europa, and of the Milesians. He saw in it too evolution: the squirming tissue oozing more of itself, regulated by an electronic pulsar; but in the embers something seasoning — a glimpse of another world, arcane and outlasting, beyond bosses or bailiffs.

The heat of the fire had lulled him to sleep — a thump of the heart brought him back to life. He saw the bald man taking him in with querulous rousing eyes. The other man fully awake. The fire roaring again with fresh fuel.

‘New blood?’ said the bald man, with a discernibly Irish accent.

Rickard was afraid to open his mouth. It would give him away and then they would be off on that predictable old track talking about the same old bull.

The other man looked him gently up and down, and said, also with an Irish accent, but Americanised, and slightly lispy and high, ‘Sure leave him be, Denny. He’s only settling in. You’re very welcome anyhow. I’m Clive Sullis. Your friend here is Denny Kennedy-Logan.’

‘He’s not normally so forward and confident,’ said the first man, Denny, leaning now with ladsy familiarity towards Rickard. ‘The club makes him feel very secure. In the street he’s a lamb.’

Well, he would have to be out with it. He told the men his name — established that Denny was from Dublin, Clive from south Donegal (‘though I went off to Dublin as soon as I could escape’). Both had been in New York a long time.

‘And so they’ve given you that attic room, aye?’ said Denny. ‘They gave me that room when I first came here. But they boot you out once you find your way again. I wonder if they’ll ever give it back to me. What do you think you’ll do with yourself here in this city?’

‘I’m not sure,’ said Rickard. ‘Perhaps I’ll stay with the newspapers.’

‘You look like a print-room boy, all right. Do you know about the hierarchy of aprons? You won’t get anywhere in that game unless you have the right length of apron.’

‘But,’ Rickard cut back in, ‘I’ve a bit of an old hankering to become a singer, that’s what I’ve set my sights on.’

‘Nothing in that game either. I knew a “rock and roller” in Dublin called Pádraigín O’Clock. You’ve never heard of him because he never amounted to anything.’

‘I don’t want to be a rock-and-roll singer, sir. I want to be a tenor.’

‘A tenor!’ Denny guffawed, clapping his hands together as a log exploded in the grate and hissed in its half-life. ‘Clive, would you listen to this! And how is your voice?’

‘Untested. Untrained,’ said Rickard. ‘But it’s all there, I think.’

‘You must try and coax it out so. Have you thought about getting lessons?’

‘Yes, this eventually would have been the plan.’

Denny sat back into his seat and turned to his companion. ‘Well, Clive, what do you think?’

Clive, to Rickard, said, ‘Denny here is a tenor of note.’

‘And better known than Pádraigín O’Clock I was in my day, too!’

‘He was,’ nodded Clive, ‘I can vouch. Sure Pádraigín never made it to acetate, and you made it to America.’

‘True enough! True enough! Did you know that Pádraigín’s real name was Pádraigín Cruise? They always give themselves these jazzy names, these “rock and rollers”.’ When Denny had finished laughing, he said to Rickard, ‘If it’s lessons you want, come to me, and we’ll see what you’re about.’

He took a notepad — personalised with his initials — from the pocket of his cardigan, and scribbled his home address.

‘We’ll say this time tomorrow, at my apartment. What do you think?’

Before Rickard had time to answer, Denny, to Clive, said, ‘New blood, what did I tell you?’

The corners of the piece of notepaper were decorated with feathers and swirls; taking a cue — Rickard fancied, as he made his way from the subway station — from the built character of Manhattan’s Morningside Heights. Leafy friezes and arabesques on building facades spoke of high ambitions, but the impression of the area now was of neglect and decay. Bread husks dissolved to pap and fish heads putrefied in neon-pink pools; discarded plumbing technology cluttered pavements and front lots; in the air distant sirens mingled with a nearer synthesised racket; on the avenue cars hurtled south to brighter lights. Rickard hurried down a side street, found the door he was looking for, and pushed its heavy iron grille.

Upstairs he followed a corridor that turned three corners to Denny Kennedy-Logan’s door. Immediately it opened the guilt crashed over him again: Denny Kennedy-Logan was very old; Rickard’s very old parents remained abandoned in Ireland. Denny was wearing a bulky dressing gown, tightly tied, which suggested to Rickard age-related illness, and he became a little angry, thinking of how he’d been manipulated. The old man would have him, before he knew it, wiping his bottom.

But he had a surprising bounce, Denny, to his walk; a combative bustle and energy, as he led the way into his apartment. He was forward-angled rather than forward-leaning or forward-stooped. Rickard could picture him in leathers, in a garage, at three in the morning, failing to kick-start a Triumph motorcycle; on his way to a confrontation or to playing a mean prank on someone; unwittingly and unknowingly kneeing a child in the skull in the course of a purposeful stroll.

A darkened passageway brought them to an inner room, softly lit and warm in colour. A brass or bronze arm projected from a wall and held a barely luminous globe. Rickard perched on the edge of the seat he was offered, under the arm. An upright piano created an obstruction in the middle of the room. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves flanked a chimney breast and the space on the shelves in front of the books was cluttered with trinkets and ornaments, as was a mantelpiece, a wake table, a whatnot and a small chest of drawers. Larger ornaments — slim glazed pots and a couple of wooden figures such as might have been prised off the front of a medieval guildhall or from the alcoves of a reredos — sat on the floor against the wall behind him. The place smelt either of dog or popcorn, Rickard could not decide which. As if in answer, a ginger-and-white dog with a squidgy pink-and-black face came skittering into the room and rolled on its back by its owner’s feet. The old man pulled up a chair so that he could sit down and tickle the dog’s belly. After a minute he turned the animal over and toggled the flesh on its head until its eyes watered. ‘My little poopy frootkin, my little poopy frootkin,’ he said, and continued to jerk the dog’s head.