Donal Ryan - A Slanting of the Sun

I did a computer course in the library and I learnt how to look things up and about search terms and Googles and all of that. I searched there, and searched, and found nothing. The young lad who was the instructor helped me to send away online for a laptop computer of my own and he showed me how to get broadband for the house on a little square thing that only had to be plugged in and turned on and connected remotely.

When my laptop came I unpacked it and plugged it in and turned it on and connected it to the broadband step by step the way I’d learnt and I clicked on the Google symbol and the empty rectangular window came up with the cursor inside in it and I looked at it as it blinked and winked back at me and my heart palpitated in time with it and I got scared all of a sudden of what was in behind that window, and the lack of a watching instructor or librarian behind me, and the unfettered access to everything I now had, a world of knowledge and nonsense, and none of it any real use to me, and I unplugged the laptop and the broadband and put them in the back of the hall closet and they’re in there still. And the money goes out of my account every month still without fail for the broadband.

The sky is enough for me, I decided, and the wonder of all the things in it, besides concerning myself with the webs and ways of imaginary people. What knowledge is there, really? What can be known?

That silence can open between people that can become a gap, a distance, a gulf, and widen and deepen, and be for a finish fathomless and untraversable.

That the crows will leave one morning for their last day’s work and I’ll look one night at the sky above me for the last time and feel the cooling of the cores of distant galaxies.

That all things tend towards chaos, and chaos itself tends in its turn towards stillness and peace.

That all the parts of all the atoms and protons and quarks and leptons of the stars and of me and of the haughty crows and of my parents and of Lourda and of my Billy and all the things that are or ever were will arrange themselves for a finish equidistant from each other in all directions and stop still there in the darkness and the cold.

I PUT ON MY running gear this morning early and went downstairs and out the door and started to run. The landlord was smoking a fag outside his shop, facing away from me. I crossed the road to avoid talking to him. Murty is sound but I knew he was waiting there for news, for the story. I couldn’t face it. His shop-girls would have told him there was something up. They’d have seen the leaving through the window yesterday, the comedy of boxes and baling twine.

I went slowly at first. Under the birdsong, through the fumeless breeze, past the Lidl that was once the Davin Arms where we’d meet and pretend to be strangers; past the deathly whitewashed front of Ivan’s where we used to go to buy posh bread and wine; past the tyre place and the garage and the Limerick Inn hotel where I used to work weekends washing dishes when we were in college and she’d always ring me when the kitchen hummed the most and all the chefs would roll their bleary eyes and chop and clang harder in temper; past the roundabouts and traffic lights and onto the shoulder of the motorway, into the clean and still and misty countryside, into the morning, the rising day.

Jenny told me the night before last that I was disconnected. We gave until the sunrise to exchanging sentences starting with I’m the one and You’re the one . I begged her but she told me all my chances were used up. Her father came to collect her yesterday morning. She left the flat bare behind her save for a hillock of tat, summited by the ornamental Ganesh that I bought for her in New Delhi. There’s an echo now that was never there before; all the soft, downy things are gone, there’s nothing to swallow the sounds of me. I sat on the edge of a kitchen chair in the middle of my plucked flat and blew smoke in Ganesh’s elephant face and said, Well, Ganesh, what the fuck will we do now? And he said nothing back, only sat four-armed and cross-legged and stared at me through his alabaster eyes.

I don’t like being alone in the flat. I saw a ghost one time, walking across the kitchen floor from right to left. She was wearing jeans and a long, loose shirt; her hair was long and brown, her face was pale. She lived there once, and was killed in a car crash. She was coming home, she didn’t know she was dead. I never told Jenny; it happened on a weekend night. She hardly ever stayed in the flat on weekends, she stayed in the habits of college: going home Friday evenings to her family and childhood friends, bussing it back late Sunday or early Monday. Murty’s wife called a priest she knew and he came one day when we were at work and anointed the walls and floors and whispered gently to the dead girl to walk into the light. I think she did; I haven’t seen her since. I’m still afraid she’ll come back, though, and frighten the piss out of me again.

Anyway, I am alone, and there doesn’t seem much I can do about it. I texted Jenny a few times but she hasn’t replied. Or I don’t think she has: the keys on my phone are frozen. She’s gone from me. I’m not sure exactly why, but it’s got something to do with coldness, with absence, with non-engagement. Things like that. I didn’t see this coming, though, her sudden burst of temper and tears, this exodus.

This is it, so, she said, and smiled with her lips downturned so her chin dimpled sweetly. I felt, I felt. Something new. A concentrated kind of love for her, winding me. A knowing that she wasn’t coming back. Will you be okay? Ya, ya, I’ll be grand, I said, in a whisper. She said, Hug? I just stood there so she walked over to me and put her arms around me and I stood stiff and unmoving though I hadn’t planned on being sulky and she drew away saying Oh for fuck’s sake in a weary voice and she was gone down the stairs before I looked up from the naked floor.

Her father crammed his ancient Jetta with her stuff and his big hand swallowed mine and he pumped it up and down just once and leaned in close to me and his forested nostrils flared and he jerked his head sideways towards his idling car and tear-streaked daughter and said, There’s plenty more fish in the sea, son. She’s as contrary as they come, anyway, that one. And he looked over at her, a gleam of adoration in his eyes, and he tied the lock of his boot to his tow-bar with a length of baling twine, and they were gone.

I ASKED MY mother the same questions over and over when I was small. Why have I no granny and granddad? Why do we never go on our holidays? She’d answer, a different answer every time it seemed to me, and her words would make no sense to me. I’d know from a shimmer of change in the set of her face and a coldness that would enter her eyes when to stop. I knew her so completely, so deeply. I felt the changes in the air about her, I sensed her quickening temper, her softening, the tides of her. I was besotted, obsessed; I mooned about her, I constantly wanted to touch her, to press myself into her softness. Jesus Christ, will you get out from under my feet, she’d say, and I’d crawl behind the couch and cry, and she’d lift me out and say, Sorry, little darling, sorry, my little man. And we’d sleep on the couch, curled into each other, in the long and empty afternoons.

Once, when I was four or maybe five, I made a batch of mud-men, in a wheelbarrow at the side of our house. I’d been crying over something and had lost myself in the making of them, limbless figures ranked in three files with hair of grass and features of tiny stones, and my mother said she loved them, my tiny army, they were gorgeous so they were, and so was I. She brushed my fringe back from my forehead and kissed the back of my head and my salt-stiff cheek, and I smelt fags off her, and perfume, and felt in that moment as though all the universe only existed so I could be there, beneath the sun, being kissed by her.