The Unquiet Land

excerpt

Respectfully, of course. I think we can call on the infinite power and all-knowingness of God. And God is good, Caitlin. He knows what is best for each and every one of us. Yes, if you ask my honest opinion, the Carney boy was beyond saving by medical means. I believe, and believe fervently, that God intervened to spare his life.”
Those words had had more of an impact on Caitlin and on her future than Dr Starkey could have realised. He had looked at Caitlin with his wise, compassionate eyes and knew what was going on in her head. But he could hardly have guessed the full consequence of his words. Like the stone-man’s wedges they opened a crack in the monolithic relationship between Caitlin and her father.
“Why don’t you talk to Father Padraig?” Dr Starkey had suggested. “He is better versed in these matters than I am.”
Caitlin had deferred talking to Padraig. Looking ahead like a traveller on a long road, she could see the priest at a parting of the ways, waiting for her, watching her approach. The sun was low behind him, and his thin body cast a monstrous shadow across her path. She could not see what lay along either of the roads at whose branching the priest stood, but she knew she would have to choose the one or the other.
҂
A month after Joe-Joe Carney’s miraculous recovery Caitlin met Padraig in the village. She had not seen him for several days, not since he had come to the house for a meal. He had had his hair cut short and he looked different. He seemed taller, and his thin face even more emaciated. In his black priestly garb he appeared even paler than usual.
“Hello, Caitlin,” he said. “How are you?”
“I’m fine, Padraig.”
“No,” Padraig said right away. “Something is troubling you. What is it?”
“What makes you think that something is troubling me?”
“I can see it in your eyes. They look disturbed. And I think you have been avoiding me of late.”
“Padraig, that’s not true. You had dinner at our house not so long ago.”
“Yes, but I invited myself, Caitlin.” Padraig looked into her eyes for a moment; they were more disturbed now. “I feel like a stranger in Finn MacLir’s house. Even an unwelcome stranger.”
“No, Padraig. Never unwelcome. And never a stranger.”
“Are you talking for yourself, Caitlin, or for both of you?”

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Swamped

excerpt

…the flies circling around them, like the gusts of the wind that sometimes
turn even more violent and abrupt. Sudden and abrupt like the
attacks of one team against the other until the end of the match is
whistled and Spitha, the local team, has beaten the team from Argyroupolis
two to one.
In that summer of 1958, when they move from Peristeri to Hagios
Fanourios, another Athens suburb, their father one day brings
home a heavy book called Erotokritos. He hands it to Eteocles, who
is now eleven years old and suggests that he read that big book. Eteocles
knows Erotokritos as a song people sing at christenings and weddings
and some other celebrations, but he has never known that it is
also this long, long poem.
After opening and reading a page, Eteocles knows that he will
enjoy it very much and also that he would like to have a copy of that
book for himself, though he doubts he ever will since they are so
poor, and getting the money to buy a copy, if not impossible, will certainly
be very difficult.
Then a thought comes into his eleven year old mind: why not
copy the book page by page and line by line, all 378 pages of it? He
doesn’t say anything to anyone, but he goes to the peripteron, the local
kiosk, and buys a red and a blue Bic pen and begins transcribing the
book that he imagines one day will be his own.
He uses the red pen to write the first letter of the first word of
every line and regular blue for the rest of each line. He even designs
headers for each chapter, exactly like the printed book, though the
designs of course are those of an eleven year old boy, a boy who has
never taken art lessons in any school, a boy who lets only his imagination
guide his pens, both the blue and the red.
When Nicolas finds out what Eteocles is doing, he only smiles
and says “good.” Nicolas has now finished all six grades of elementary
school and has started his apprenticeship at a small, family-run furniture
factory. Since he no longer has much time for playing their
usual football games, he doesn’t mind his brother getting involved in
such a time-consuming project and he leaves his little brother to transcribe
the Erotokritos and just rests when he comes back from work
every day. He is usually very tired anyway.

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The Qliphoth

excerpt

It was a period ambience even then but it drew the global punter and I didn’t
want to tinker with the formula. The curios and the industrial relics were
doing well, a famous designer had just bought the shell of a Wurlitzer jukebox,
while over in the clothes section, some sunny blonde creatures in cheesecloth
and tight jeans were rummaging daintily through the old lace. Pauline the Sex
Police Person would accuse me of self-indulgence there—yes, she was firing
accusations even then—but this is a spiritual exercise, to recreate through sensuous
evocation the exact details of that crucial afternoon.
I was half-listening to the ritual shamblings of a local freak who claimed to
be a secret roadie for Hawkwind. Every week he expounded his scheme for a
Silver Machine to transport himself and the group to a deep space colony; then
he’d pester me for obscure sword’n’sorcery items. “Thrustmasters of the
Gormlands . . . Come on, man. It must be in here somewhere.”
I never replied, because Larry was strolling through the doorway. As I got
up, his long stone face, like an ethnic sculpture of Jean Paul Belmondo,
cracked into a smile. Lawrence Alexander Zachoides-Dunbar, my general
dealer with multi-way connections: a Greek father, a Scots mother, and an
assumed Balham accent. His multiple pasts included Cambridge, half a doctorate
in mediaeval literature, the curious end of the antique trade, and a
cameo role in a celebrated dope bust.
“You’re going to love this, Nick,” I can recall the exact cadence of his
catarrhal chuckle, his leer, as he wedged open the bronze door of his old Jaguar
3.4. (I have to get his status details right. Before the Puritan Paramilitaries
erase his memory from the surface of the earth.)
I helped him inside with a tea-chest. Then we struggled with the battered
black trunk on the roof-rack.
“This little business is for the upper room,” he murmured. I told my assistant
Willy to mind the shop; and hoped that his preoccupation with Krishna
Consciousness wouldn’t leave him at the mercy of the more mercenary customers.
We humped everything upstairs, cursing rusty protruding nails, and
dumped it all beside the sagging sofa bed in my office, pushing aside the rumpled
scrolls of day-glo posters,the heaped comix and sex mags. My fibre-optic
desk ornament had been left switched on, like a luminous jelly-fish slowly
expiring in the gloom. For the blinds of the upper room were never raised.
This was my sanctuary, where I could get stuck into my tacky stuff. PP called
it, with decreasing levity, the Chamber of Horrors.
I fumbled at the sink with dirty cups and coffee powder. Larry pulled out
Rizlas, and his tiny brass bird-shaped casket. He began skinning up.

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The Unquiet Land

excerpt

“Oh he loved her, Caitlin. He always loved her. He chased her for ten years or more before she accepted him. Longest wooing I ever heard of. Finn MacLir does do things for people because he feels sorry for them. That’s in his nature. He rescued poor Padraig from an unbearable life in Scotland and adopted him so as to give him a name. He took pity on me and brought me here to look after you and Nora and then he married me. He’s as soft as goose-down, Caitlin. With a heart of warm butter.”
“In spite of his outward show of swagger and bravado,” Caitlin said.
“Yes. Swagger and bravado. That’s your father. Roisin was just the opposite. She was one of those women who are left alone to take care of an aging father and, in her case, a brother as well. Poor Roisin. There are so many women who are caught like that. I always think of Maeve Muldoon. Remained a spinster till she was forty-three, caring for a sick old mother, and then she died of cancer while her mother lived to be eighty-three or -four. Your mother’s was a sad story too, Caitlin. She had her boyfriends, including Finn MacLir, but she didn’t marry. Her duty, as she saw it, was to keep her father’s home going. By the time her father died and Tom went to America, Roisin was already over thirty. Tom wanted her to go to America with him, but Finn wanted her to be his wife. That was an easy choice for Roisin to make. They were so happy here for a year or more. As much a pair of devoted lovebirds as Nora and Flynn.”
“Then Nora and I were born.”
“Yes. And it was too much for your mother, poor woman. Maybe if there had been only one of you, she might have survived. But a twin birth was too much for her. She died, and Finn was heartbroken. Dear God in heaven, I’ve never seen a man so … so … destroyed as Finn MacLir when your mother died. I know. I was here when you were born.”
“Poor Father,” Caitlin murmured. “He doesn’t deserve the blows he’s had to suffer.”
Now, seated on the rock by the shore, watching another wave break, Caitlin thought of Michael. Michael came to work for Finn MacLir after the Neelys left. Michael was Seamus Slattery’s nephew, and Finn had immediately taken a liking to the young man. He accepted Michael as the son he had not found in Padraig. At first glance there seemed to be no good reason why he should, for the two men were as different as sea and soil. Michael lacked Finn’s intellect; his wilful, blustering self-confidence; his extroversion; his exuberant enthusiasms. Michael was quiet, sensitive, introverted, and shy. But he shared Finn’s compassion and Finn’s love of man and earth …

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The Qliphoth

excerpt

(The producer has turned down faders and pulled out patch-leads at random.
He is under panic attack—what will Mr. Chamberlain say? A staff
announcer dashes to an adjacent studio. “. . . owing to technical difficulties, we
cannot bring you the conclusion of our interval talk by Colonel Arthur
Parker-Byrd . . .” The Colonel’s lips still move soundlessly behind the double
glazed partition, he continues his spiritual de-briefing and barely looks up as
the producer blusters in mouthing excuses . . .)
HOW DID I LOSE TRANSMISSION? BEDDOWES GOING TO
THE BOG IN THE MIDST OF DARKNESS TURNING ON ALL THE
LIGHTS I COULD SCREAM…
Afterwards I was never quite awake. Just the old rapid eye movements. Under
the woofly blanket. Under the flaky ceiling. Under the drip of the moon.
Waiting in vain for the next installment of my Teachings . . .
These memoirs confuse me. Why, why, do they insist on blocking my
neurotransmissions with chlorpromazine? Do they think my neurotransmitters
can beep out through my skull? As if I were the old Soviet transmitter
“Woodpecker”, bombarding the West on shortwave at forty million
watts?
It is closing time in the Gardens of the West, I know that for sure. Even
with my Rabbinical hat on, even in this sweltering noon, I feel a chill, a demon
of cold with long claws, and I feel that evil feeling crawling around my hatband.
My metal-framed glasses produce a curious stinging current behind the
bridge of my nose. The black jacket and the black books must protect me.
Jago was obviously exasperated when I first adopted this Hasidic style of
dress—domed hat, long beard and black suit. “I don’t see the point of it,” he
grumbled, “You’re not Jewish. According to our records, you’re not even circumcised.
Supposing we had some Jewish clients! What would they think of this
Hippy-Brigade intellectual in his fancy dress parade of stolen knowledges? I think
you are trying, are you not, to make fun of the Father of Psychoanalysis. Perhaps
in this way you hope to mock I, Jago, a surrogate father. Perhaps you act out your
metaphysical frustrations? Perhaps you read too many of the paper-bound books
on therapy, I don’t know. Better to take your lithium carbonate.”
But my brain ticks relentlessly. Every strand of each synapse is numbered.
Numbered are all the hairs of my beard. And mighty are the powers thereof.
It is overcast in the West, towards the sea. Perhaps it is already raining on
the holiday chalets, the weapon dumps, the garden tourist traps. I hear thunder,
distant megatons of it. All around the Western world…

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