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Attraction as physical catastrophe was not exactly news to Seamus Ferris. He had been besotted before. Always it was with slightly humourless-looking women who appeared to be in a condition of vague disbelief about the world.
No doubt it was national stereotyping to think so but she seemed to know her way around a head of cabbage.
This, about a woman from Poland, nearly ended me.
On a clear night in mid-July, he went outside very late—stepped softly so as not to wake her—to see the starlight fall on the mountain as she slept, and he made a ritual vow to remain true if not exactly to the reality of the small woman sleeping in his bed in the cottage then to the perfected version of her he had worked out in his scenarios, for he believed that this version could incorporate and sustain—that we must each of us dream our lovers into their existence.
Her lips moved, she made words on the air as she walked, saying lowly, and determinedly, “I will make…of this riverbank…a fuckery.”
A hall of fame line.
The fright betrayed a weight of feeling that was a surprise to her. She had carried it without knowing. Though she knew well enough that it was the idea of him rather than the fact—the idea of a long, thin, sombre man, in a soak of noble depression, smelling of lentils, in a damp pebbledash bungalow, amid a scrabble of the whitethorn trees, a man ragged in the province of Connacht and alone at all seasons, perhaps already betrothed to a glamorous early death, and under some especially mischievous arrayment of the stars he was all that a girl could ask for.
I began to get the sense that life is not much more than an inch or two deep, really—how you display the surface of things can dictate all else.
At my age—I had long since cleared the vault of fifty—it was not unreasonable to assume that this might have been my last great love. But still my pain had that shimmer of bliss at its edges—I had gone to the end of passion with someone, once more, and I knew that the achievement was, as it always is, a quiet miracle.
In tone it was truly a one-off. The verses were charged with a kind of erotic mania that resonated all too sharply with my own contemporary funk. Its characters were deformed by desire, and thus the song blew familiar notes through the slutty arcades of my middle-aged brain. It was about lust, betrayal, sexual jealousy—it was meat and drink to me. It informed me that there had been others before as deranged by matters of the heart and loins as I was now. This was a tremendous relief and consolation.
Love, we are reminded, yet again, is not about staring into each other’s eyes; love is about staring out together in the same direction, even if the gaze has menace or badness underlain.
“Marry the shop girl,” she said. “Marry the factory line. Marry the barmaid. MARRY THE WHORE! But never, never marry the actress, Tony.”
“I can’t help it,” he said. “I find it very…impressive.” “Impressive?” “That there’s no gainsaying it. That no one has the answer to it. That we all have to face into the room with it at the end of the day and there’s not one of us can make the report after.”
Re: death
Ah look it, he said. No one’s dead. He placed lightly a hand on the broken ankle and she lurched again in pain. No one’s dead, he said. As we always say at times of abject fucken disaster.
Barry's use of the phonetic "fucken" = one of my favorite small things about his dialogue.
The day was up and about itself. The fields trembled. Catastrophe was a low-slung animal creeping darkly over the ditches, across the hills.
*chef's kiss*
—Is this a reasonable kind of establishment, Doctor? Is this a reasonable kind of town? —Tell me what you mean. —Might a man go for his walk in the evenings, take the evening air? —There’s one pub I’ll allow you to go to, Ted. Our nurses drink there and they’ll look after you.
#Ireland
When you say you’re going into work, as a writer, what you mean is you’re about to crawl into your fucking nerves.
He has made some beautiful work, he believes—who the fuck is better than me? He has given himself a fucking shot at it, he believes. Because brokenheartedness is the note that sustains always and this he can play at will.
