Green Glowing Skull

‘I don’t mean to be so plain but it’s quite …’

‘Monotonous,’ they said together.

‘Yes,’ said Clive, looking at his feet. ‘It is sadly limited.’

‘So what happened to that voice in the meantime?’

Clive leaned back against the glass of the bus shelter, then stood forward again.

‘I don’t know. But I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he had accidentally or purposely disturbed in some way a fairy mound. Bad consequences are known to result from such an action.’

***

Within a few weeks of rehearsals Denny, Clive and Rickard had a core of fifteen songs for their set and a repertoire that extended to three dozen more. They were satisfied at last that their voices achieved harmony: Denny steadfastly held the middle; Rickard cleaved to and weaved around him; Clive skirted the top. They had a name for their trio too: the Free ’n’ Easy Tones. It was of course Denny’s name. It was not a traditional-sounding name, he conceded, but it had a spunk and a jizz about it that might catch the eye of modern audiences.

Rickard was excited about the idea of performing and making money out of it, but he couldn’t help wondering if Denny’s expectations of how their music would be received in the modern city were unrealistic. Did this residual affection that Denny insisted New Yorkers had for Irish tenor singing carry to the young people? It was hard to imagine, and New York was a young city. The young people seemed always busy and sometimes angry and interested only in young music and fashions. The boys were feminised yet somehow thrusting, like wicked regime-favoured women of mercy-free places of the East. The girls were not people Rickard could imagine in the nursing profession (apart from the girls he saw on the streets in medical scrubs, and there were many of these girls). All the young people were in thrall to the great technology cult, Puffball Computers. In every coffee shop they were bent behind the orbs of the hoods of their Puffball machines; if they were to lift their heads at all it was only for an incoming young acquaintance who they would acknowledge by dislodging then quickly reinstating a single white earplug. He recalled Denny’s enquiry weeks earlier about whether he was the sort who would ‘twist an implement inside an elderly man and rob his things’. He wondered about how easily these words had come from the old man and whether this was so because he had been violated in a natural or surgeon-made opening of his body by angry young people. Many muscles contracted in him at the thought of several gruesome scenarios and he felt these contractions as empathy. He pondered the cruelness of this city with its dry-eyed young people who would cull their living forebears. It was a city, he would later see confirmed, where even the young and the avant-garde spoke very well the language of money; a city that called on you to keep a hard ferocious focus. But he appreciated too that the young people were angry because they were afraid, for he understood that America was dying. Another old man, an Indian-Ugandan in a coffee shop, said that India was taking over and that perhaps Uganda would too if its ‘this’ levelled out to ‘this’ and ‘this’, and he appreciated that the new generation of young people must have felt great pressure to earn money in order to continue to enjoy the luxuries they were used to.

Their efforts in the early weeks to secure concert bookings were frustrated. Denny rang some likely venues – supper clubs and cabaret rooms – but all responded by requesting a sample of music on an internet website. This was something none of the men were either capable of providing or inclined to provide. Besides, as Denny asserted, an Irish tenor concert was about more than just the sound of voices; it was the experience of the live performance: seeing the joy and melancholy of song in the faces of three men; borne in their deportment, the plight of an injured linnet as a symbol of the plight of a nation.

Denny also contacted an Italian entertainment agent he had known many years before but had not been in touch with for a long time. The agent, Denny said, had promised to enlist a theatrical-set designer of his acquaintance who could create cycloramic backdrops for them. There was talk too of elaborate three-dimensional stage props, round towers and passage tombs and such, from which one or all of them might emerge as part of their act. The agent said that he knew opera-house managers in Campania and Sicily, including that of the San Carlo in Naples, and that if all went well the Free ’n’ Easy Tones would soon be touring the south of Italy and that they would be millionaires. It all sounded too wonderful to be true, and of course it was. Some days later, after another phone call to the agent, Denny was told that the trio would have to audition for a place on his roster.

The old man fumed.

‘I have offered him a private concert in these rooms yet still he demands we line up outside his decrepit offices with the sword swallowers and the cowgirl troupes. Well schist and frack to that! He can stick his auditions in his cameo locket and stuff it in his cannoli! And curse his dead mama! We’re better than this, boys!’

Then one Sunday evening Denny told Clive and Rickard that he had had a dream during a nap that afternoon. He described it with the solemnness and detachment of a religious mystic, looking away and into himself in recollection of the vision.

‘I saw loudspeakers attached to telegraph poles in a bocage-like landscape playing the music of liberation.’

‘Were they playing our music?’ said Clive.

‘They were playing Al Jolson. They were playing Al Jolson. Listen now – we must find a mosque. I believe hundreds have sprung up around the city in recent times. We’ll get a willing muezzin – bribe him if necessary – to play our music over his loudspeakers and have it echo down the avenues.’

‘We’ll need to make a record first, to play it on his stereo,’ said Rickard.

‘We’ll look in the Yellow Pages!’ said Clive.

‘Yes!’

Denny bounded humpbacked from his chair like an excited monkey. They were all excited – at the way they seemed to harmonise and relay on this gathering idea. They ripped leaves and sheaves from the directory – the hand of one beating away the hand of another – until they reached the R listings. They found a number – one of several under ‘RECORD COMPANIES’. Aabacus Records. Denny straightened his back and went to his phone. Rickard took a deep breath, went to the window, tore back the Turkish curtains. To the south, a huge glowing nebula that changed through phases of intensity and colour hung between the great entertainments of Midtown and the proscenium of cloud above. All seemed poised and possible.

‘Fellows!’ called Denny in a loud rasp with his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone. He beckoned the others near. ‘“The Caul That Jack Was Born With”, all right? When I slide my hand away. On three …’

Some twenty-five minutes and ten songs (‘The Caul That Jack …’ / ‘Cogitations of My Fancy’ / ‘’Tis Very Cold For June’ / ‘The Malefactors’ Register’ / ‘Empress of the Americas’ / ‘Evidence of the Glimmie Glide’ / ‘The “Celebrated” Windy Song’ / ‘Letters from France’ / ‘A Pike in the Eye’ / ‘What I Shall Have Been For What I Am in the Process of Becoming’) later they took a pause, took a step back, and Denny signalled that that was enough. They had given the best possible account of themselves. They would change the world.

With the return of the wail of far-off sirens, and as the light in the room seemed to pulse and pitch as on a boat adrift, Rickard realised that it was ten past eight on a weekend evening and that no record company would be open for business. Also, he noticed that the year on the front of the directory was ‘1961’.

There came then the sound of laughter – cackling laughter, as troubled as it was troublesome – from up the hallway and out in the landing. Denny swung open his front door. A big man, broad as a sandwich board, was creased over on himself.

‘Jeremiah! What are you doing?!’

The man stretched to full height, rising to six and a quarter feet. He had flaccid dangling arms like downed electric cables, and his shoulders were held confidently apart. He had short black coarse hair, pale pimply skin on a babyish face, and unclear milk-blue aboriginal Irish eyes.

‘Jeremiah! Were you laughing?’

‘No, sir. I was crying. I was weeping at the sound.’

4

The thought came suddenly to Clive Sullis that the creatures who had returned him to his body had at last caught up. He began to run – crab-ways, turning, instep patting into instep. In so far as he was in any state to be observing anything he observed all of the colours at once and only grey. A weather condition rose above the trees of the park. Any and all of the trees, they all looked the same. So did the grassy areas. There was no telling where he was, or in which direction he was going. The sky was the sky; towers towered beyond like the fairy follies. Pathways of chewed chewing gum. Choo choo along, he said. Just keep on, keep choo choo-ing. He spun around and the man in the chewing-gum trench coat was gone. The world continued to spin. He was in a cartoon. More like it he’d had a stroke and all this had been assembled using a computer. He wondered when he’d had his stroke. Because it seemed likely that recently he had had a stroke. He was bothered lately. He took more time with decisions. He sometimes did things and was not sure when or why he had done them. The delicate man he was outwardly had started to seep inwards. Fears he had not had since the nineteen pissstained seventies were coming back more wretched, more fawsach, than ever. Irish words had been creeping into his speech. Rude words had been creeping into his speech.

He plunged his hands deep in the pockets of his long black overcoat, narrowing his already thin frame, and hurried along a path towards a bright open area. Ah, but he knew this place. The Conservatory Water, according to all the maps and guides; the toy-boat pond, as he thought of it. He would stop by here sometimes, on the way back from the Boathouse, on his way out of the park. He had just come from the Boathouse, in a roundabout fashion.

He kicked up some late-winter mulch and tore at a salt sachet in one pocket. He rested his foot on the kerb that ran around the edge of the pond and tried to rally his nerves. In the water his reflection was in pieces. The man by the wheelbarrow in the chewing-gum trench coat – had he been the same man inside the Boathouse, he wondered; the man in the mould-blue sweater sitting on his own by the bar, tipping at something in a little pot? It was hard to tell. The man by the wheelbarrow had not only been wearing a chewing-gum trench coat but a trilby, or a homburg. He had also been wearing sunglasses.

Clive Sullis thought to himself: Why? But why now? Why were they coming, after all this time?

Why, because he’d been given, lately, to saying too much. He’d given himself away. He’d let the mask slip. He’d told perhaps rather too many people that he had once been a woman. He realised that now.

This was possibly a condition of his stroke. Or it was a function of his mind. His mind knew what his body did not know by this stroke. His body, at the last, when it came to it, taken by surprise and feeling betrayed, would put up a struggle, pulling in gulps of air and throwing out gobbets of phlegm. It was all it knew to do. And his mind, in its pathos, knowing what was coming, was trying, in its way, to put his affairs in order.

And so he had gone around telling anyone who would listen. And they’d laughed in his face. ‘But sure we knew!’ they’d all said, in words of that order, or in the way they’d looked back at him. And he’d looked at his reflection and seen that it was true: funny; though he’d been a manly girl, he was never quite the manly man. Perhaps it was in the outline of the eyes. And perhaps it was in the nose – and the surgeon had even offered to take a bone from his backside and bolt it to his nose, give him the pugilist’s nose. But he’d worried, stupid girl, that he’d have toppled over while seated.

And it was a pity he’d told so many people because it had been a good disguise until then, he said now to nobody (pulling out the elasticated waistband of his trousers and pouring salt on the sore around where his outlet pipe met his skin – the salt being medicinal). I mean, although I’d never made much of a man, it was still a pretty good disguise – I looked nothing like I did before. I looked nothing like her, that person, me: Jean Dotsy.

And by God Almighty, he’d made a good fist of it. Out of necessity, the very need to survive, he’d given it all he’d got. So that before a year was even out he’d wanted to be the best man there was. She grew into himself, in whole.

But it was a disguise. Still it was. He’d forgotten that. In wanting to grow into it, and in giving it away finally, he’d forgotten that. Why did he give it away? Because he needed everyone to know. Not to know that he’d once been a woman, no. But that it was a disguise.

And he’d go back now, if he could, if he could give his pursuers the slip, he’d go back to the Colombian who sold him his cantaloupe melons, the man, one of them, he’d told he was a woman, and he’d say, ‘No – no. There’s something else.’ And he’d go back to his neighbour, Mia, who he’d told too, and he’d say, ‘No – no. I knew you knew that. But have you since wondered why? If I tell you now that it was all just a disguise, a way to go into hiding, would you like to know why it was so?’

And he’d go to Denny, he would. He would go to Denny, who had thought he knew all that there was to know. And he’d say, ‘You think you know me. You think you knew who I was, and what I became. But. Listen.’

If only he could be given the chance now. If only he hadn’t opened his big bog mouth.

He looked out over the pond for a few minutes. Children and their minders raced yachts and clippers and tourists were spread about. If he stayed here, no harm would come. This was the idea of safety in numbers, this was the feeling of safety that came from being in somebody else’s scene, a windless Dutch scene. This was the play of the light. He could wait here for the man. Where was the man? There he was. His form stretched above and below the line of the kerb. He was as still as the bare branches.

Clive watched him and waited for him to move but he did not.

The enemy: safe to think of him as that now. The envoy. He thought back to the wheelbarrow; the way, after he’d spun around, the man had disappeared, gone, into thin air, in a whip and a swirl of leaves. He knew exactly the enemy he was dealing with here. He looked about him, at women his own age and at little children in paper-boat hats. Common birds of the north-eastern United States that did not have a care. The world was spinning. Litter, little weightless scraps, ash, followed a spiral descent. No amount of witnesses, no number of nobodies, would protect him. He knew exactly what he was dealing with. The spy costume no doubt was deliberate. A taunt. This is what we are doing, yes.

***

A night weeks before. Clive Sullis woke from a nightmare that was gone in an instant and he was worried about blood clots to the brain. He woke up screaming, screaming. The screams out of him. That was it. Just: ‘Pissstains!’ ‘Jisolm!’ Like that, bursting through darkness. Like the original language. The first words after the bang. As if something had broken down and something else was made in its place. False and crude. This was the story of his life. Why couldn’t they see him for who he was?

He sat up and patted the bedclothes around him, letting them cool, and his breathing settle.

He had an obscure memory of getting up in the night with a headache and pulling apart the presses for paracetamol. He remembered having a dry throat and that he was nauseated too and that he was convinced a plastic fork was stuck in the root of his tongue and that his head was a head of lettuce and that he was halfway through a prayer when he realised he was praying to Peter Stuyvesant, the last governor of New Amsterdam. This was an obsession now: Holland. This was the trouble after the bang. Memories from now on might only be vague, or split, or not memories at all. Of the moments before he woke, before the outburst, he could recall, he thought – what? Material, chippings. Lines and circles. Ones and zeroes. These things had been falling through his mind against a black background. But of the day before – of the waking day before, he could recall almost everything, he thought. He remembered he had read that because the beaver ate only tree bark its diet was considered vegetarian. Now hold on a minute, he said.

He made himself a cup of coffee and brushed his teeth and swept his jacks across the table with his arm and tried to keep active in his apartment at 1202, The Birches, Stuyvesant Town. He knew who he was, in name: Clive Sullis, self branded. He knew his age: seventy-four. These were the present identifying stamps. But what of his long-term memory? Could he write his whole life story, if given the time, in broad strokes at least? Yes, he felt that he could.

He poured himself another cup of coffee, tipped out the rest of the container of sweetener on the saucer, and dropped in three of the pills. And he had also read of pills that could help with the despair of getting older. And that they worked by giving you a good view of yourself in the world and making you realise that you are unremarkable and that any of the oddities that you worry the rest of the world might notice are not noticeable at all. He thought that he would have to nullify this knowledge if these pills were to work on him, but he did not need to think so deeply now. He did not need to be fretting and thinking or fretting about not thinking. He needed to relax was what he needed to do. He should not be fearing the worst and he should stop being so hard on himself. He should allow for the fuzzy memories, for the confusion, for the bad language, for the worries, given his age and given every change he’d been through.

Later that day he was not so coherent. Parting a way through a scrub of cane chairs under the umbrellas of the terrace he greeted his good friend Denny by saying that some day he would say something, that there were some things that needed to be said, that in all their years of friendship there was one thing, that really there was one thing, that –

‘All right, Clive, all right. Sit yourself down and stop making a holy show, will you? The cold is getting to all of us.’

***

He made it as far as the subway station. He was under no illusions about any of this. He waited by the steps, in front of the MTA booth, where it was said that you should wait for safety’s sake, where behind a pane of glass smeared with scratches a beautiful young woman was absorbed in a magazine. The station was not busy with people. A teenaged boy was spinning a girl around by her haversack and the girl was screaming because she was coming close to the edge of the platform. Three youths watched with awe and amusement something on the track. Beside him a woman and her ward pulled at cords of liquorice from a paper bag. The announcer said a downtown local train was two stations away. The commuters gathered themselves. He moved off the steps and to the white line and stared into the ribbed gullet of the tunnel. Choo choo, he said.

One station along, at 59th Street, a large crowd squeezed its way on to the train. His carriage filled up with huge shopping bags stuffed with duvets. There was a collective release of breath, and here and there laughter broke out. He looked along all the people on the side opposite him, then he leaned forward to look at the people on his own side. There was no reason to believe that the man in the trench coat had got on at 59th Street. Why not just have done with it further up, out in the open, on the street? He could have caught up with him if he’d wanted to, on 72nd Street, or on Lexington. That said, somewhere between Madison and Lexington he had seemed to lose the man. He most definitely had followed him out of the park, he was sure, but then somewhere on the street he had gone, perhaps ducking into an apartment-block lobby, or crouching in the flower beds in the middle of Park Avenue.

Or hopping into a taxi. Most likely. Most evidently. This was exactly what he had done: at the other end of the carriage a door opened to a gush of hissing and grinding and slammed shut again. The man stood still for a moment, as if decompressing, or as if preparing to make an announcement. Ladies and gentlemen, a few words about safety. It was comical, almost. The enemy/the envoy. Chewing-gum trench coat and trilby, or homburg. Now he was moving again, all deference, tipping his hat to the woman whose bags were blocking his way.

He sat diagonally opposite Clive, twenty feet away, in clear sight. Nothing was in the section of aisle between them except duvets, folded in quarters. He opened the top buttons of his coat to show a sliver of mould-blue sweater, took off his hat and placed it on his lap. So this was the creature who had staked him out in the Boathouse, had pursued him using all means at his disposal. This physical – yes, physical, Clive was surprised to note – specimen. Thin on top; wispy strands of red backcombed hair clinging damply to the sides of his head. A colour to his skin. It was not quite a high colour and not quite a tan. He had the complexion of a hearing aid, and almost the glaze: something other than blood coursed through his veins. His head turned slowly in Clive’s direction as if on an oiled track, his face set in palsied neutrality. His eyes were watered-down green; they stared into Clive’s, looked through him, to say, ‘There – we are going to there.’ Behind him a poster read: SNUGGLE UP TO APPLEDORN’S HALF-PRICE DUVET SALE. Any second Clive expected the train to derail in a shower of white sparks and feathers.

They pulled into 23rd Street, one station from home. He would make his exit here. He waited until all who were standing had disembarked and then he sprang from his seat with as much suddenness as he could muster. The doors snapped behind him, nearly catching his coat. But he was safely on the platform, out and away. But – there was the man ahead, stepping out from the other end of the carriage without a glance behind, going now with the main flow of people, but proceeding slowly, with deliberation. The back of his neck glared. The skin looked painted on, like the skin on his face – resin on an invisible surface. Once, when Clive was a tall young girl, his brother had attacked the neck of a football hero with a rod because he had disgusted him, he said. The thought came to him now. He could attack the man’s neck, cut off whatever was feeding the brain. He could ram it with his elbow, then hand himself over to the law. They might be lenient, if he came clean, told them everything, every detail, right from the start.

Some people were moving against the main current, walking in the direction opposite to the way Clive was facing. They were heading for another exit, behind him. He went with this movement, flipped around, and hurried up the stairs. On the concourse above he was presented with a choice – a choice and a man playing ‘Rest, My Woolly Wolfhound’ on a saxophone. As he hurried up the steps for 22nd and Park he found himself transported. He thought of the pale cone of Errigal and the honeyed scent of gorse. And he thought that if souls and bodies with them could be transported they would have him where they wanted him, and they would surface with bronze hurls from the prickles, but they would not get their milk because he did not have diddies and they would be even angrier.

***

When he first emerged into New York he was still a young woman. Her name was awkward bony Jean Dotsy and her introduction to city life had been a Dublin of livestock sales and Swastika Laundry vans. In New York she had woken into a dream and for a while she experienced a golden time because the city was a place where she could lose herself and at the same time she knew it would tell her everything about herself that she wanted to know. She had for a long time known that she was a woman who loved other women but now she said it to herself and it felt like both the making of her and a declaration. Back in Dublin she was known as an independent girl but in New York she had another word – variant. She was a variant. She got the word from a kind of manifesto in a magazine that another woman who was also a variant had given her. Perhaps she had been magnetically attracted to this woman sitting on a bench in Washington Square Park or perhaps she was simply tired on that day, her first in New York, and had wanted just to observe the assembly of variants who were all gathered to march in support of basic rights for black people. The woman on the bench scribbled down the address of a restaurant where later the variants on the march were meeting. But Jean did not want to promise anything and she was naturally suspicious of being part of groups she did not know much about. And the wet creamy gravel of Washington Square Park patted under her feet in a paste like peanut butter and she had so many things she wanted to experience so soon: peanut butter and Times Square and jelly and jazz and Chew-butter Cracknells and the fish market and the Jews and the diamond sellers.