Gavin Corbett: Green Glowing Skull

‘You found me all right,’ he said, still looking at the dog.

It took Rickard a moment to realise that the old man was talking to him. ‘Your directions were very good,’ he said.

He sat back into the seat, warily, expecting broken springs and plumes of dust, but discovered a plump and yielding easy chair that smelt most definitely of dog; for split seconds he remembered the two dogs of his childhood, Jumpy and Kenneth. This was a comfortable, lived-in sort of place, he admitted to himself. Something about the randomness of the clutter and the softness of the light reminded him of the living room of a wealthy Irish country home or townhouse. It would be nice to live in this way in this city, he soon found himself imagining; in a dim few rooms near the service core of an old apartment building surrounded by the stuff of a lifetime. He spotted high on the bookshelves a cherrywood radio set like the one in his father’s clubhouse in Dublin. He remembered seeing it on Spring Open Day. A man called Wally had said, ‘That is just like the one in my grandfather’s country kitchen. My grandfather was a great man for the ideas and one day he had the idea that there was a little man inside that radio and he smashed it up with a hammer.’ He chuckled gently at the memory, forgetting himself.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Denny, ‘would you like some shaved ice?’

‘No, thank you,’ said Rickard. ‘I haven’t long finished my dinner.’

‘I have a machine inside for it.’

‘I’m fine, really.’

‘I don’t drink alcohol any more, so I’ve nothing to offer you in the way of that. We said nine o’clock?’

‘Nine o’clock was the time I thought we agreed in the club last night.’

‘I must have meant four o’clock. I’m usually thinking about bed by nine. But all right so — nine o’clock.’

The old man made playful faces and noises at his dog, then spun it around and sent it racing away with a loud smack on the backside.

‘Here for the night we are, then. Oh well, I’ll enjoy the challenge.’

He stood up and, with his shins, shuffled an ottoman towards Rickard.

‘At least have the footrest,’ he insisted, manoeuvring the item under Rickard’s feet. ‘You should come and see the outside of my building in the daytime. It’s been said that it looks like the Treasury in Petra, so grand and serious does it look in this street, and so suddenly does it come upon you.’

‘It’s not an area lacking in grandeur.’

‘No it is not.’

The old man sat down again, on top of his yelping dog, which had already skittered back into the room and settled itself up on the chair.

‘But the pity then it has all gone to rot. The cross-streets are not so bad but they funnel you, with no by and by about it, to the main drags. If I take a stroll anywhere these days it’s on West End Avenue.’

‘I have been on West End Avenue,’ said Rickard, indulging him. ‘It’s a very beautiful thoroughfare.’

‘What do you like about it?’

He thought about it seriously and could not come up with anything better than, ‘I like that it doesn’t have any shops.’

The old man sat perfectly still for a moment, then added, ‘It brings to mind, for me, the old world, or at least old New York, with its old associations. And something of the world of the tango, and of depressed beef barons. But mostly, yes, it recalls a great European boulevard. In its scale, in its idiom and, when I think about it now, its shape. Not so much because it curves, which it doesn’t, but because it undulates. Like keys rippling. Under a virtuoso’s hand. Spelgelman used to live there, as did Rosburanoff.’

These revelations delighted Rickard, although he had no clue who the old man was talking about.

‘Tell me now, Rickard Velily’ — he said his name mockingly, Rickard sensed, throwing in an extra ‘-il-’ syllable, and became distracted with the taste of it on his tongue — ‘Velily, Velily, Velily. Is it an Irish name?’

‘It is. It’s also a village in White Russia.’

‘They are Bialy this and Bialy that in New York. Many people originate from places that were once part of Antique Poland or Lithuania, or Greater Austria or Russia. Velily is one of those names that is Irish but might not be. Like Costello, which could be Italian, or Egan, which could be Turkish, or Maher, which could be Berber.’

‘Or Walsh,’ offered Rickard, ‘which could be German.’

The old man looked at him testily.

‘You mustn’t make any jokes around these parts about the war, you’ll learn that smartly enough.’

Rickard protested, ‘I —’

‘You’re a recent immigrant, we’ve established that?’

‘I’ve been here just a few months.’

‘Ah, you’ll fit in well enough. We always do. There are American people today called Penhaligon and Thrispterton and the like who say that they’re Irish. And they probably are. Anyhow, she’s doing well, I believe, Ireland?’

‘She has been doing well, it’s true,’ Rickard confirmed, hoping that the matter would be left at that as he did not want to be drawn into a discussion on economics, of which he knew nothing.

‘I hear that now we’re a force on the world stage, that everyone seeks to imitate us. I have read that there are companies that will kit out your pub in Moscow or Peking in the Irish style, with advertisements for Whitehaven coal for the wall and Nottingham-made bicycles to hang from the beams.’

Rickard’s eyes wandered about the room, to the left and right of Denny, through the ornaments and vases, and settled on a small mottled wall mirror.

‘Perhaps,’ said the old man, evidently noting the pattern of Rickard’s scope, ‘if someone from one of these companies, someone less forgiving than myself, stood on the threshold there and said, “How much for the job lot?” I might agree a price. We have trouble moving these days for the bric-a-brac, isn’t that right, Aisling?’

Rickard glanced back at Denny and saw with some alarm that he was not addressing his dog but the ceiling or a point beyond. He guessed that this ‘Aisling’ was a dead wife, and he had no wish to hear about her, or about the old man’s being made a widower, or to be involved in his affairs by this knowledge and have it implied to him that he should care.

‘It’s not, though, as if I bought it all in one go. Although I have had to move a quarter of it twice, and half of it once, and arrange it in new ways, in different places. Though the last time it was a different place only to the one before it, and not the place it is now.’

Rickard was tiring already of these spiralling formulations. ‘Do you mean this present apartment?’

‘Yes. A fitting home for my belongings, I think it is. Did you notice the tracery in the hall?’

‘I did,’ said Rickard, lying.

‘It reminds me of Stapleton’s work, and the work of those great Italian stuccodores that came to Dublin in the eighteenth century.’

‘How long have you lived here?’

‘Oh. Twenty-one years. Twenty-one from last September.’

The old man tapped the dog’s head, nestled in his groin, evenly and gently now.

‘I have done more living in this building, in these rooms, than in any other building since I came to New York; many moons ago now. If living is taken to mean man-hours, and in this building, in these rooms, is taken to mean just that.’

Rickard detected self-pity creeping in. ‘It’s not such a bad space to spend time. A fitting venue, as you say, for a man of refined tastes.’

‘It is that. But, well … refined tastes. I must tell you, all this’ — the old man gestured magisterially with his hand — ‘this, ornamentation, all these pretty-looking things, you probably wonder if I’m a bit of a funny sort. Well I am not this way inclined, I would like you to know.’