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Heinrich Böll’s
Maybe they’re afraid that if they show they care about it someone will take it away, you blurt. Maybe this is a country where for centuries if you cared about anything someone would come and take it away.
Her gaze on yours, nothing between you, she is here, you are here, and beneath your gaze her hereness resolves, deepens, like a veil has lifted delivering her up to you, and though she doesn’t move she seems at the same time to unfurl, to fluoresce, and her liquid lips part and her liquid mouth is ajar and seems to call yours down upon it, stroke stroke goes her thumb on your cheek, stroke stroke goes your thumb by her liquid incarnadine mouth, and her head is on your lap and within your lap is a sea, a sea that is balanced on a point, and if that point should shift if it took a single touch
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The old haunts are just as they were Unchanged As if they have been waiting for you to return
And then following you along winding byways you haven’t been down in years not knowing exactly where you are going Feeling like you are sewing the thread of yourself into the green hills Your heart racing your mind turning turning
Till you come out in a valley or on the crest of a hill in a blinding chorus of sun The gods of love Flashing up at you Hello
he’s at sea it’s plain as can be
on the pig’s back
You find yourself trying so hard to be nice to him that one day you give yourself a nosebleed
Time the country gazes back at you like a mirror with nothing in it
On and on, up and down, the exhausting flux of emotions locked tight inside you, like a rollercoaster in a prison.
Funny how soon you get used to it how quickly you come to rely on it A few kind words A single letter even Take them away and you feel like you’re falling apart
lugubrious.
sure as eggs,
The morning of the party you’re woken by the sound of the hoover. It’s Elaine, cleaning the living room for the first time since you moved in. She’s already mopped the floor of the kitchen, and she’s strewn fairy lights over the broken washing machine, the broken dishwasher, the broken microwave, so it looks like a kind of magical garbage dump.
I have heard there is an Irish saying, that even though a candle is not very bright, it is better to light one than if you do not light any candle at all, and then you are complaining because it is too dark.
Well, she says, I must be going. You can’t help laughing. I must be going, is that something they teach you in school in Germany? you say. Because it’s not something people actually say. She smiles at you, and you watch her make her way past the Hub and the 1937 and then into the square and out of sight.
It’s funny, she seems like a loser, but she acts like she doesn’t know or care she’s a loser, which makes you wonder whether she is, in fact, a loser. And for a moment a part of you wishes you could go with her.
I mean, I wonder if we’re holding each other back. If this relationship belongs to an earlier part of our lives.
the Luas
Don’t touch me, you say. She starts. The boy with the videos looks confused. You are confused too. The words just came out, you don’t know where from. But suddenly you’re overcome by revulsion, like you’re looking in a mirror and your reflection is rotting. You okay, babe? Elaine asks. You don’t know what to say back. Except you do. I hate you, you say. I fucking hate you, you say. By you of course you mean yourself, in the mirror, but there’s no time to explain that. Your hand is still in hers, you tug it free, then you turn and you run.
Hello? you say. Somewhere in the background there’s the sound of voices – Hello? Dad? – then they are gone again and it’s back to the hissing not-quite-silence, the sound of black trees, pine-needle soil, the dark unknowable universe swirling like sharks around you. You hang up, feeling worse now than if he hadn’t called at all. You wish you hadn’t lied to Mam! You wish someone in the world knew where you were! Then it hits you. Someone does know.
It’s warm on the bus and your seat is right over the engine and you keep wanting to doze off, but every time your eyes close you instantly jerk awake again, seized by a terror that he has gone, and you have to stop yourself reaching out and grabbing him to be sure he’s really there.
What would he do, where would he go? That’s when you saw the game shop – appearing to you like a gift, a shimmering holy grail, right across the street.
oatmeal cardigans,
You’re going to let him have it Both barrels
Sometimes he feels like a house that no one has ever lived in. Shiny and enticing but not quite finished.
The rest of your life stacked in a pyramid and tied with ribbons
The walls shake, the wind is like a great hand, pounding its palm on the roof – no, wait. There really is a pounding. You run out to the hall, see a shape in the glass.
