Rob Doyle - This is the Ritual

He drank deep from his can.

He told me:

He had been fostered by a widow, a very strict Catholic. He had never known his parents, or why they had put him up for adoption. He had always been the weirdo, the victim, the figure of ridicule at school. He remembered having his head shoved into a toilet full of shit. He had no memory of ever being happy. As a child he hated summer, the outdoors, and the passing of time, which was famished and blank. He went to art college, hoping to be recognised, to shine and be loved. But at a student house party he took two tabs of acid and he saw in a shock of total insight that here, too, he had always been the figure of ridicule, the one they lampooned and despised and jeered at behind his back; he recalled a thousand things they’d said to him, and only now did he see, in awful hindsight, the suppressed sneers and the mockery in their faces, all of them deceiving him, then howling with laughter when he turned away. From that night on, he was broken. The horror of realising, in one blinding instant, the immense gulf between his grandiose perception of himself and how the others really saw him, shattered what was left of his self into fragments. His misery became so convoluted, dense and total as to be incommunicable. He lost his voice; he literally couldn’t speak, because having a voice meant having a self, or a sense of self, some fundamental core of positive self-regard, and he didn’t have that. He became totally impotent, unable even to masturbate. Incapable of functioning, he dropped out of college and retreated from the world, fled further and further into the fogged maze of himself until it had become impossible to find his way back out. For years he thought constantly of killing himself, and now believed that it was only the religious terrors instilled in him by his foster mother that had held him back. He lived on the dole and tried to convince himself that he was a great artist, that this was his season in hell, the terrible suffering that would give birth to the works that would redeem him, and eventually all the world would see what he had always been, and he would forgive them and he would be loved. He met an old schoolmate of his, an electronic-music producer who rented a dilapidated house in a secluded clearing off the Naas Road. He moved in with his old schoolmate and they lived together for several years. Then, one weekend while his friend was away, he burned the house to the ground. He could not say whether he had done this accidentally or on purpose. He stood outside, watching the house go up in flames, terrified and elated. He heard sirens in the distance and he fled. For several weeks he slept rough around Dublin, in parks, in alleys, by the canals, in corners of building sites and waste-grounds. At a school in Drimnagh he slept for a week in the playground, under the slide. One morning he was woken by the rough hands of two policemen under his arms, hauling him to his feet. They took him in and a day later he was admitted to St Patrick’s mental hospital. He was prescribed medication and assigned a counsellor. After several months he was moved to an outpatients’ home and allowed to come and go as he pleased. That was four years ago. He was still living there, receiving a steady welfare income, enough to buy cigarettes, cans and, occasionally, magic mushrooms. He never saw his friend who had taken him in and encouraged his painting. He never saw anyone. He just came to Ballymount to be alone with his thinking. He was thirty-nine years old, he said, and his destiny was to become a saint. My Lord is fire, and the Lord is coming.

His story drew to a close and now he watched me. When I left, he would be nothing but a swirl of visions, pain and memories. For now, I was a mirror in which he could almost convince himself that he was whole.

He rolled a cigarette and puffed hungrily on it. He drained a can and crumpled it in his bony hand. The night was coming on. What if the days keep on getting shorter, I thought, until there is only night?

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I can tell you’re an intelligent fella. There are some other things, different things I want to tell ye. Ye look like you’re able to handle big ideas. Will ye meet me here tomorrow? I’ll show ye some of the weirder places.’

I nodded, wanting only to get away. Then I left him there, smoking and drinking in the wasteland as the night swarmed in to swallow him up. There is no therapy. There is no father. That night I dreamed, and in the dream I was back out there, on the estate. In the dream it went on for ever, the estate was the world and beyond it there was nothing. It was a dull afternoon. I saw him on the horizon, silhouetted and still. I walked towards him. Neither of us looked at the other, our eyes to the ground. ‘Look at my burn marks,’ he called out. ‘And look at the slits. The Gestapo did this. CIA. Mujahedin. God is great. No one leaves the zone.’ I looked up and we looked into each other’s eyes. ‘Beyond the horizon, a row of severed heads on sticks. Wooden chimes clicking in the wind.’ And then there were no longer two of us, but one, we were together, he had come into me and now my fingernails were yellow and caked with dirt, and my clothes as I walked away, towards a lost road, were greyed and faded, my hair was thin and streaked, lifeless. I woke up sobbing, drenching the pillow with tears that streamed out of me like never before or since, pierced with a desolation I knew to be incurable, a condition I would carry with me for ever. I rose from the bed, feeling my way through the dark. I found my way to my mother’s bedroom and turned the handle on the door. I heard her gasp in the dark. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘Go back to sleep. I’m sorry. Just let me lie beside your bed. I’m sorry. It’s OK, I just need to lie here on the floor, just like this.’ I could hear her hesitating, wanting to get up and fix this, but it couldn’t be fixed and she lay back down. I knew she was staring upwards into the dark, her face gaunt with worry. After a while she got up and draped some covers over me, then got back into bed. I closed my eyes and tried to hear her breathing.

In the morning when I awoke, my mother was downstairs, cooking breakfast. I could smell coffee and frying bacon. A bird was chirping outside the window and beams of filtered sunlight warmed the room. I got up from the floor and went downstairs. My mother was sipping tea. She handed me a small, round cup, the one with a delicate Japanese sketch of a bird on the side. I could tell by her eyes that she had been crying and had slept badly, if at all, but she made an effort to smile. I smiled back. I put a hand on her shoulder. ‘I’m goin to talk to them at the college,’ I said. ‘I’m goin to see if they’ll take me back after Christmas. Ye never know, it might be worth a try.’

Peering at me with widened eyes over the curve of her teacup, my mother nodded faintly. She hesitated, fearful of crushed hopes. Then she said, ‘I knew ye would. I never stopped prayin for ye.’ Tears welled up, her voice was cracking. ‘I never will stop prayin for ye. I mean it. I never will.’

It is impossible today to read either the work or the life of the novelist, essayist, epigrammatist and pornographer Killian Turner, without seeking in it clues to the mystery of his disappearance, or attempting to locate the genesis of the strange obsessions that would eventually consume him.

There is little beyond what Turner called ‘the crash-landing site of my birthplace’ by which he could meaningfully be called an ‘Irish writer’. In fact, his body of work, taken as a whole, might be seen as Turner’s lifelong project of effacing all marks of nationhood from his authorial voice and literary being. It is clear from comments made by Turner in his letters to other writers and artists (the majority of them obscure), and certain remarks in his essays, 1that, like such pointedly un-Irish compatriot-predecessors as Beckett and Joyce, Turner wished to be considered first and foremost a European author. 2