Green Glowing Skull

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thestate.co.uk

Copyright © Gavin Corbett 2015

Cover images © Angelo Morelli/Millenium Images, UK (main image); Shutterstock.com (skull)

Cover design © Kate Gaughran

The right of Gavin Corbett to be identified as the author

of this work has been asserted by him in accordance

with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

A catalogue record for this book is

available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007594306

Ebook Edition © May 2015 ISBN: 9780007594337

Version: 2016-02-18

Dedication

For Lilian

Epigraph

A round unvarnished tale is that delivered to our representative by Mr. J.F. McCormack, the Irish tenor, who has just returned from St. Louis. Mr. McCormack’s narrative is a model of moderation, and contains ample internal evidence that he has exaggerated neither in one direction nor the other. From what came under his own observation it is plain that there were at least a couple of disgusting exhibitions of stage-Irishman antics … If the matter ended at what Mr. McCormack saw himself it would appear that there has been a good deal of high colouring in the charges levelled against the management of the theatre. The narratives of Mr. Digges, Mr. Ewing, and Miss Quinn, of the Irish Literary Theatre, have, however, yet to be obtained, and it may well be that they will supplement the facts related by Mr. McCormack.

From a report in The Dublin Evening Mail, July 21, 1904

A thought … will fly from us and only return again in the darkness crying in a thin, childish voice which we may not comprehend until, with aching minds, listening and divining, we at last fashion for it those symbols which are its protection and its banner.

JAMES STEPHENS, The Crock of Gold

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

About the Publisher

1

Rickard Velily’s first job in New York was as a reporter for a small local newspaper. He did not stay long in the job because it was apparent that the other people who worked in the newspaper were doing so as a sort of retirement project. He felt guilty spending time with them when, after all, he had fled his elderly parents in Ireland. The stories the newspaper wanted him to investigate seemed designed to frighten him off New York. In his first week he was asked to write about the city’s wild shih-tzu population. It was said that a person was never more than twenty feet away from a shih-tzu in New York. A small number of these shih-tzus were the creatures that looked like paper lanterns that were jogged around on the ends of leashes but most shih-tzus in New York were wild creatures with orange in their beards that lived in pipes under the street. Rickard could not find evidence to prove that any of this was true. The proprietor of the paper was a billionaire’s widow who involved herself in its newsroom affairs because she felt she owed something to society. She had come to New York as a child during the golden and only age of airship travel and she had an ambition to bring back this method of travel. Somebody put it to her that the gases that had been used in airships were dangerous. She said she would not use combustible gases in her airships but normal air filtered of the heavier pollen released by genetically modified crops and urban tree cultivars. Before she had a chance to rope Rickard in in some way on this folly or on some other aspect of her life he was gone.

Now he was idle and, thinking of things he could do to occupy himself, he settled on trying to realise a recent and half-baked ambition to become a singer. Lately he had discovered he had not only a certain unrefined talent for singing but a repertoire of songs within him that he had not known was there. All of this emerged on his last night in Dublin when his parents put on the traditional emigrant’s wake. This had been an unexpected move on their part because his father did not have much of an attachment to Irish traditions and his mother had a learning disability. To the last minute they misunderstood why he was leaving for America. They thought it might have been because he was angry over his sweetheart. He was angry over his sweetheart, it was true, but people do not move away from the sources of their anger unless they have been told to do so by a counsellor or a court. No, he left for America mainly because of his parents: he had been an only child and he did not want to have to care for them and he could not suffer to see them decline. About his absence from their lives, he hoped that they would remain healthy enough to care for one another to the end of their days, and that they would die more or less simultaneously. He comforted himself with the thought that they had good neighbours and many relatives, and that he was not, in any event, very entertaining company for them.

He did not like to think about his parents now because thinking about them, and how they had driven their son to the brink of suicide and ultimately America, made him feel like a tragic cabbage-scented character in an Irish rural drama. But happily there was another reason for leaving Ireland that he could dwell on, and this reason was wholly of the modern world.

In the end, leaving his parents in Dublin had proven not as difficult as leaving his job in Dublin. The company that Rickard had worked for in Dublin was called Verbiage. It specialised in ‘the mining and re-purposing of online text’. Only two people had worked for Verbiage – he had been the familiar of a man who looked after all the computer and technological aspects of the job. Quite suddenly Rickard had come to loathe the tasks being asked of him, and the feeling would not let go. There had been no possible way to move sideways within the company with just the two of them working there, and so to leave his position he had to leave the company, and the only good reason he could give for leaving the company was that he wanted to leave the country, ‘to explore new horizons’, etcetera. His boss was upset to hear this, and tried to convince Rickard to stay. He asked him wasn’t he a little old to be starting a new life abroad, alone, which only hardened Rickard’s resolve all the more, and not because he wanted to prove that he was young (which he proudly was not; he was forty-one), but because he felt that his boss (who was twenty-six) was being ageist, and he wanted to show that a forty-one-year-old was just as capable of starting again, abroad, alone, as a young person was. His boss, again and again, and finally (with his face in his hands), said that Rickard was irreplaceable, and that he would be admired and appreciated in time. ‘But this is just the problem,’ Rickard did not say. At the end of the exchange Rickard realised that he had committed himself to leaving the country, and that the unpleasant sensation he now had (with eyes closed) was one of floating in or falling through space, his insides pressing against him in all sorts of new ways, and that he was about to be reborn. He put his hands to his face just as his boss had done, cried with him, felt his face become hot and wet, opened his hands, and enjoyed the fanning of circulated air.

Alone, again, abroad, in his accommodation in New York, he understood that one of the reasons he had left his newspaper job in New York was that he was worried it might have taken a similar turn to his job in Dublin. The pattern would have gone something like this: he would recognise a sarcastic and assertive tone in his voice, and he would only have to find this tone once, as surely he would, because it was easy to be sarcastic and assertive in writing, and it was not so much that he would hit on this tone as slip down into it, and he would find it fun to express himself in this way for a while. And his editor, and the billionaire’s widow, would see something of value in it, and before long he would be asked to condemn seven or eight different people, cakes, films or pieces of street furniture a week. The seven or eight different subjects would be his to choose, but he would discover that it was hard to come up with things to have an opinion about every week: he was simply not opinionated about enough things. Once he had decided on what he would be opinionated about, however, the words of opinion would come easily. And then he would become nauseated by his false disgust or disapproval or cynicism, and every time his actual bile would rise at this false bile in print he would look at his byline photograph, which would capture nothing of the real contours of his head. He would hate this person, and this person would have hated him if he had existed. He believed these phenomena – graphics, with lives behind them – were sometimes known as ‘avatars’.

***

He had dreaded the prospect of the emigrant’s wake. He feared it would be awkward, a big ritual, all dry mouths and hesitant gestures. It was in fact a lively and easy occasion: eighteen of his mother’s surviving siblings turned up, and he had forgotten what good sport they could be when they were all together. Early on a guitar and an accordion were produced, and a cousin cleared the lid of the piano of boxes, and by the small hours the blue-painted wall in the living room, which was the inside of a cold gable wall that faced the sea, was damp with condensation. They were all in their turn called on by one of the more socially confident neighbours to sing a song. When it came around to Rickard he sang the music-hall standard ‘Come Off It, Eileen’. It was not an imaginative choice but it was said to him that night that no one in their life had heard a better version sung. He went on to sing, to everyone’s astonishment including his own, selections, some obscure, from the songbooks of Challoner, French, Ffrench, Balfe and Moore. He was told that he had great volume and vibrato, which he understood to mean that his voice wobbled to pleasing effect. These were certainly things he was aware of as he was singing, although he may have been helped on the night by the acoustic qualities of the corner into which he sang.

The next morning, feeling sorer of head than he would have wanted before a long flight to America, he was presented with a 1908 edition of Chauncey Challoner’s Airs of Erin of 1808. His father said he had been inspired to root it out after Rickard’s performance the night before. He described it as a sacred ‘codex’, which Rickard thought was a strange word, suggestive of future or futuristic technology, for this repository of songs gathered in long-gone romantic days of muzzle-loading firearms and symbolic bitterns. The cover was green and sticky and embossed with shamrocks, harps and gold lettering, and a reassuring beeswax-like smell rose up with the purr of the pages. Every few pages a colour plate or a title would cause him to pause and realise that he should not have been surprised to know such essentially Irish songs as ‘O Truncated Tower’, ‘The Clover and the Cockade’, ‘Wigs on the Green’, ‘Dempsey of Dunamase’ and ‘The Order of the Emerald’ (in school they used to deliberately mishear it as ‘The Ordure of the Emerald’). Other titles – ‘The Snow-flake on Art’s Greying Lip’, ‘My Grand-father’s Fighting Stick’ – were not known to him but were enough to evoke a world.

Afterwards his father attempted to impart some wisdom to him before his leaving. He began by mumbling unintelligibly in Irish as if scanning his stock of the language for a pithy phrase. This was another surprise, as although his father was a speaker of Irish he hated it because he had had it beaten into him by religious brothers who had also beaten ambidexterity into him.

Switching back to English his father said, ‘You must know at least one phrase of the Irish language. If you are on public transport and you see a black person and feel the need to talk about them to someone else for whatever reason, do not refer to them as a black person but as a dinna gurrum.’

Then his father got on to what he really wanted to say:

‘New York is a tough city and it would be easy for a man to fall on hard times. Don’t let this happen to you, son. Fortunately for you, there is an institution in that place where you will always be welcome.’

His father of course was referring to the Cha Bum Kun Club, of which he was a long-standing member. It had clubhouses in all the major cities of the world, plus Thule, Greenland; Puerto Williams, Chile; Leverkusen, Germany; and Ceduna, South Australia; and several clubhouses in remote locations through the Korean peninsula and islands.

His father gave him a shining leather tie box.

‘I went to Rostrevor Terrace yesterday and finally got this off the President. These are not handed out at random. Only one scion per cell every six years is allowed to possess a tie. They had been considering my application for weeks. I am so relieved to present this to you. You will never go hungry or homeless with one of these. If you wear it to the New York clubhouse you will be given a room and a stipend until you are capable of supporting yourself. But you must wear it in the special way.’

The tie’s design was of left-to-right-slanting blue, orange and cream stripes. Overlying the field of stripes, at the thickest part of the tie, was the black, white, blue and red Cha Bum Kun roundel, and below the roundel a white box inside which were stitched, in blue, the characters ‘< V.V.’: V.V. being Rickard’s father’s initials and < signifying ‘less than’.

His father showed him how to tie the knot in the special extremely tight manner, so that the knot looked less like a knot than a hard seamless node.

‘The trick is to pull and pull until your hands burn,’ he said. ‘Put your back against a wall if it helps.’

***

Rickard’s favourite film of all time, The Severe Dalliance, opened with an establishing shot of the Chrysler Building. The first thing he did once he had arrived in New York and dropped his luggage at his temporary accommodation was go to the south-west corner of Lexington Avenue and 42nd Street from where the shot was made. The Chrysler Building looked terribly magnificent from this spot in reality as it did in the film and he was overcome at the sight. The sun shone in a direct line up Lexington Avenue and the building’s pale stone looked brilliant, its armour sparkled and reflected only blues and whites, and eagles or some sort of birds of prey circled high in the air at about the level of the fiftieth floor. All kinds of associations came to mind: the opening of The Severe Dalliance, of course, but also a sense of American power, and his head swelled by turns with Harold Campbelltown’s ‘Dalliance Theme’ and some show tune he did not know the name of or the lyrics to. Then suddenly he felt very sad because he thought of his sweetheart Toni. They had watched The Severe Dalliance for the first time together and later had bought the DVD and watched it many more times. New York was a dream place for them, full of clean sparkling metal and white clouds. They had said that their souls would be at home there. Beneath his anger he hoped that Toni would come to New York herself, looking for their dream, and that they might bump into each other on these streets.

Those first weeks he experienced all of the newly arrived immigrant’s pangs and few of the excitements. His cheap guesthouse in the northern Bronx was in a mainly Irish neighbourhood that prided itself on being a tightly knit community. The shops sold Irish teabags and Irish chocolate and Irish black pudding and damp-tasting Scots-English biscuits. Everywhere there were murals that depicted sporting and paramilitary activities and featured Celtic script and men with basic eyes and very pink faces. Many of the buildings were in the faux Irish-village style just like many of the buildings in Ireland. The land of his birth had never seemed so far away. People moved as if they had all the time in the world, following cracked cambers with their hands behind their backs; or idled as if they had all the time in the world, slumped against chamfered corners below dowdy eaves laughing pile-driving laughs. They seemed so at home, and he felt so locked out. He spent every spare hour he could in Manhattan where even the men in suits spun about as dazzled by the place as he was, though it was not ideal boulevarding territory owing to the regular stops put in the flâneur’s way by the town planner. One day in one of the less frenetic streets of Midtown a photographer told him he had ‘crossed’ his ‘line’ and ruined his photograph. After this Rickard told himself to be understanding of US ideas of social involvement and he became careful not to disturb people’s ‘personal space’. He took ‘personal space’ to mean the space between people and the objects of their concentration, or that aura-like area around people through which the energy by-product of their concentration was diffused. For example, in subway cars he would try not to look people in the eye or would be wary, as he was taking a seat, of sitting on a stray bag strap or body part. And in book shops he would not walk between people and the books they were looking at on the shelves and thus he took tortuous courses and was left face to face with books he had not in the first place been looking for.

He did not like the idea that anyone wished him ill but he felt that the billionaire’s widow at the newspaper wanted only evil to be visited on him because she could not have him. She had tried to kiss him with her doughy, immobile and always-damp lips as he was leaving the offices for the last time. He recoiled from her, backing into a filing cabinet, which fell backwards into another filing cabinet, which broke a window. The glass, original to the building and warped with age, crumbled to grains. The rest of the office staff rose as one.

‘See what you bring to the party,’ the billionaire’s widow bellowed. ‘Only blue funking dudgeon, to use a local expression.’

With no job, no daily routine, he found himself careering, and for long listless weeks; he ate only sweet things and slept odd hours and never felt bothered about seeking work. His behaviour became erratic, sometimes risky. He engaged madmen – people happy to violate his own ‘personal space’: street preachers, or rap singers on the make who handed out leaflets with website addresses on them. He went to the famous Waldorf Astoria one night and tried ‘the green fairy’ – absinthe; and he told the barman from County Mayo to fill her up again. Rush hour one evening he climbed down to the subway track to salvage what in any case only turned out to be a potato.

Once, worn out, and feeling sentimental for home, and knowing that the pubs of his neighbourhood were anything other than public houses, he went to Mass. The priest had a whispery voice like chalk on a blackboard, but coughed often, spoiling the effect. Rickard woke on a cough to hear the priest deliver a homily on the dangers of leaving Mass early. He said that leaving Mass early was like finishing a course of antibiotics early, and that if one didn’t finish one’s course the germs of sin would grow stronger and become resistant to the medicine of the liturgy. Rickard, aware that he was in danger of falling asleep again, and that he was a snorer, decided all the same that it was best to leave before the end.

Near Christmas he went, in indifferent mood, to a late-night rhumba party on a pier in the Hudson River to see if he could meet a US girl. He never told his landlady where he was going or at what time to expect him back. Nothing happened at this rhumba party, which was exactly as he had wanted, and he walked all the way home to the Bronx shaking his head violently in self-punishment and blowing into the gently descending snow. If only he could have a vision in a snow-globe now to say you have done this and now you will do that he said as his brain chattered against his skull.

A couple of days later he travelled to a factory in a bunker, conceivably a former nuclear silo, in Flushing, Queens. He went there to have a doll made up for Toni and in the likeness of Toni. He was shown sliding drawer after sliding drawer of eyes, locks of hair, swatches of skin and featureless heads indicating face shapes. The heat in the factory was oppressive and the render on the walls appeared to bubble, and after a while it was hard to tell the difference between one pair of eyes and another. He waited six hours for his doll. She had brown eyes, blonde hair, and flatteringly even cream skin. For some reason he had chosen to dress her in an orange-and-gold Irish-dancing outfit. On the train back to the Bronx the eyelids distressed him: they rocked up and down, falling into and out of synchronisation, making a faintly audible click. The doll looked nothing like his former sweetheart, not even a three-year-old version of her. He had paid $130, albeit tax free, for this hoodoo rubbish.

He moved into longer-term and cheaper accommodation in a part of Queens that was not quite Long Island City; set back from it, to the east. The area was uninteresting, but he was tired even of Manhattan now, where every footstep seemed to land on hot soft sand. His new apartment building shook with tremors generated by shallow-lying tunnelling machinery and it also had a cockroach problem. A significant factor in his decision to leave Ireland had been his fear of the European house spider, but he soon grew to hate and fear the American cockroach with equal passion and dread. Daily they seemed to increase their dominion; taking the words of Charles Stewart Parnell out of context he would lift his hand and say to them, ‘Thus far shalt thou go and no further.’ One evening he was putting on a moccasin when he noticed one of the maroon scurrying pests inside it. He opened the window of the apartment to shake the creature out. ‘Shoo, shoo!’ he said, and ended up letting the moccasin slip from his hand. It dropped eight floors and beyond retrieval. His other moccasin, water-stained and curled from drying out, sat at his feet looking like an artefact from a museum of agriculture. This, after a day in which he had suffered the hauteur of people in shops and the service industry. He wept for forty-five minutes and thought of moving back to Dublin. He thought about this – moving back to Dublin – paralysed slightly in movement, and partly in thought itself, for the rest of the day. Late in the night he tried to sing. He willed his diaphragm to flatten like a weakling pushing a plunger, and he intoned. His plans to be a singer now seemed altogether pathetic. He knew no way of going about being a singer – and how juvenile and risible of him to have even dreamt of it. He took Lyons tea and felt that perhaps it would be nice to return to Dublin and embrace the kind of love that was sympathy. But it was painfully easy too to imagine the great stigma of being delivered, pitied, in a squeaking cage like some kind of King Puck, brass crown askew, with divergent eyes. No; no. It was true; he could not return to Dublin so soon.