Falling out of Heaven

The Firebird

I watched as he patrolled the house, his eyes flicking periodically in my direction, sizing me up, daring me to shatter the silence he had spent the best part of the morning setting in place. It began with the way he responded to my mother’s request that he run her into town. He stared at her as if she had just insulted him and then walked the length of the kitchen and looked back at her, disdain in his eyes. She knew better than to say anything, that she had to let him posture and sulk his way through this latest mood otherwise there would be war.

From her he moved on to me. I remember I was drawing at the table, it was the picture of a bird in flight, a red bird with bright orange flames for wings. I had spent most of the morning on it, enjoying the feel of the crayons between my fingers. I could feel the heat of his presence as he stood over me; I could smell tobacco and diesel and hear the sharp running of his breath.

I recall sitting there, my hands frozen in the middle of their task, my brain desperately trying to read the situation. Should I look up at him and smile, careful not to make it too sure or confident, or should I continue drawing? I knew from experience that the best thing was to do nothing. After what seemed an age he moved off and sat by the door of the kitchen and lit a cigarette. I watched my mother, her eyes keeping track of him; aware at all times where he was, and most crucially who he was looking at.

I felt sorry for her that morning. I loved her; I wanted to kill for her, to smash down the grey walls of her life and to free her. Anger clutched at me as I looked at the man she had married as he sat there, the smoke from his cigarette climbing lazily, his legs crossed.

He saw it in me as I looked from her to him, my eyes meeting his, in that second he had me. He knew it; I had revealed myself to him. I remember him smiling as if to say go on, let’s see how long you can hold it, let’s see how big you are.

‘Seen enough?’ he asked.

I nodded carefully and took my eyes from him, wondering if he would pursue it, but he didn’t. I was easy prey. I was a pushover.

My sister broke the silence that morning. She rushed in from playing outside, her hair strewn across her face, her doll Lola pressed to her breast. She threw open the door and yelled.

‘Mammy.’

The wind rushed in, blowing apart the game my father had been playing. It ran through the kitchen like a storm of freshness, banishing the silence, busting it into a thousand little pieces.

‘Sssh,’ my mother had said. ‘Your father’s thinking.’

‘What? What did you say?’

‘Nothing. I meant…’

‘Don’t take the piss.’

‘I’m not. Please, I’m not.’

‘Yes, you were.’

‘No, I wasn’t. It just came out. I didn’t mean it that way. Ciara, come here, do this dress up, what have you been doing to yourself?’

‘Don’t fuck around with me,’ my father said as my mother fussed over my sister, running her hand across her face, gathering the snot from her nose between her fingers and shaking it into the sink, then running the tap.

‘Don’t speak like that.’

‘I’ll speak any fucking way I please.’

‘Alright. Alright.’

‘Is that clear?’

‘Yes.’

‘What?’

‘I said yes.’

‘Good.’

As he left he slammed the door behind him. I remember sitting there looking at my hands, they were shaking. Ciara began to cry, dropping her doll as she put her hands to her face. My mother bent down to her and pulled her close as we heard the sound of my father’s car pulling out of the garage in the yard and roar away from the house. I could imagine him sitting there, his hand ripping through the gears, his eyes blazing with anger, his world small and cold.

The Fall

I believed that I was falling. It was as real to me as my next breath. As I lay there in that hospital bed night after night all I could see was the tumble of my body through space. I could feel the moisture of the clouds bathe my face and the wind tugging at my clothes. I could see my life spread out before me like a half-assembled jigsaw. Sometimes I was glad and enjoyed the sensation, happy to be leaving everything behind. Other times fear held my hand as I fell and I would shake and moan as I saw the ground below hurtling towards me. I remember grabbing at the air, trying to find something to hold on to. I had left love behind and my only hope was these men and women who tended to me, whose job it was to bring people like me back from the brink.

I fell into my past. I walked the hard ground of my childhood again. I saw our marriage. I saw our love begin and end. I became a ghost walking the corridors of the living. They told me later that it wasn’t uncommon for a man in my condition to believe strange things, to think that he is in peril. Some never return from the strange land that they find themselves in. Hell is alive and well in the minds of men such as me, one of the nurses said with a strange grin on his face.

There were times as I lay in that hospital room when I felt my fear subside, it was as fleeting as a bad man’s smile. For a moment, I was embraced by a sense of peace, and my body’s fever abated. It was in moments like these that I tried to ask God to forgive me, but I was still too angry with him and the words never made it past my lips. I still blamed him for all that my father had done to me. He died a long time ago but he still had a hold on the guts of my being. His hands are always there twisting and pulling. Sometimes when I was falling I could hear him whispering, taunting me.

I thought of my life, of how I had believed that I was a fortress, standing alone on the horizon of other people’s lives. I saw how much of a lie that was. I had learned the hard way. Here I was, alone, dependent on the kindness of these doctors. I thought of all the pain I had caused, the misery I had brought to my door and the doors of others. At night sometimes when I woke I would call for someone to come and sit with me. If no-one came I would lie there shivering in the dark hoping that my fall was almost at an end.

The Pier

I see you as I first saw you, your eyes shining, your face offered to me as I bent to kiss it. We were in a bar in County Clare, behind us people were celebrating New Year’s Eve, and we had slipped away and left them to put the old year to bed. We stood on the small wooden pier that fronted the pub and watched the night sky turn in glitter and ice high above us.

How long ago that New Year’s Eve seems and yet sometimes in a moment when my weary spirit is caught off-guard, I taste your sweetness once more as if it was all about to happen again. I’ll be ready this time and meet you on the long pier, which divided the sea and held us and our dreams that night long ago.

‘I love you.’

‘I know,’ you said.

‘Do you?’

‘Do I what? Know that you love me?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Oh you mean…?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do I love you? What do you think?’

‘I think yes.’

‘Then you think right,’ you said.

Just after, you smiled and quickly closed your lips over your teeth, and a slight embarrassment flickered across your eyes. It was because one of your incisors was crooked, I’d seen you do it many times, most especially in company. It gave you a vulnerability that made me want you more. I remember I put my fingers to your lips and ran my thumb across them, holding your eyes.

‘But…’

‘Love isn’t just saying. It’s doing too,’ you said.

‘I love your mouth.’

‘Gabriel, I’m serious.’

‘The wow of your mouth.’

‘Gabriel?’

‘Yes?’

‘Are you listening?

‘Yes.’

‘Then show me, Gabriel. Show me.’

‘Your lips…so beautiful.’

‘Gabriel.’

‘Yes?’

‘Words are easy. I don’t want that, do you hear, I don’t want that.’

Eating God

I see her holding my young body down, her hand on the nape of my neck, forcing me to spit out the prayer. I remember her body shaking as she implored heaven for release.

‘Holy Jesus, we implore you…Holy Christ, fruit of the vine…’

‘Holy Jesus,’ I said, echoing her.

‘Holy Jesus…The one true Lamb…The one true God…Enter me, Lord…Fill me with the sweet Glory of your Love…Come to me, Jesus, in Love, in Sorrow.’

‘Mammy,’ I would say. ‘Mammy.’

Her eyes would glaze over, the look I used to see in the eyes of fish I caught, as they lay on the riverbank and death passed over them. Her head would move from side to side and a film of foam would cover her lips. I would hold her hand and squeeze it until my knuckles whitened. I felt as if I was holding on to her as she dangled above a steep drop and that I was her last hope.

Then I would feel her leave me, it passed through her body and into mine, the feeling of absence, of flight. She was no longer mine; she was beyond me. She had passed into trance. Then the noise would pour from her. Words half known, bastardised and tangled, child words, woman sounds, all fell from her lips, and God, always God, the word that kept coming, kept shining through like a flame on a dark hillside. It would last for minutes sometimes, her mouth working, sweat forming in the small well between our clasped palms.

I knew better than to say anything, I just kept my head bowed and waited for the storm of words and emotion to pass. Then she would fall silent, her body flopping forward as if she was a puppet whose strings had just been cut. The first time she did it, I panicked, thinking her dead. I had grabbed her, pulled at her white face and tugged at her hands.

‘Mammy, Mammy, I’m frightened.’

Then she would sigh and open her eyes and regard me. I would see myself reflected there, I looked so small and scared.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘The Lord is with us…All these things, son…All this pain…It’s sent to try us…’

‘Yes, Mammy.’

‘God sees it all…Remember that…There is nothing He doesn’t see.’

‘Yes, Mammy.’

I wanted to tell her that I understood even though I didn’t. As I knelt over her like a doctor tending a patient I remember wondering why I couldn’t see what she saw, feel what she felt. Why was I different, why had God excluded me?

‘Don’t tell your father,’ she said. She always said it.

‘I won’t.’

‘Promise?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good boy.’

‘What’s it like?’

‘What, son?’

‘That. The…praying.’

‘It’s like…’

‘Does it hurt?’

‘No, son…It’s beautiful.’

‘Do you see angels?’

‘Well, not really…I see light…I see the light…’

‘What light?’

‘It’s hard to explain.’

‘Try.’

‘Well…I see…I feel the power of God’s love…It’s like the summer sun on my face, only it’s forever, not just one season, or one day…And deep down in my heart I know that everything happens for a reason…That all the good things and all the bad things they all enter our hearts for a purpose. I suppose I feel safe…Like I’m on a big white cloud.’

‘Is Daddy there with you?’

‘Sometimes…’

‘Why only sometimes? Does God not like him?’

‘Don’t talk like that, son…God loves all his creatures, bad, good or otherwise.’

‘Does he like him even when he…’

‘When he what?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What are you trying to say?’

‘When he does really bad things?’

‘Son, that’s when God loves him most of all.’

Code, that’s the way we live, tapping out cloaked messages to the ones we love. We never say it, the thing of something; we never tear the secret from its cave and lay it at the feet of the ones nearest to us. All those years ago as I sat with her she told me that God was by us, that He knelt with me. I felt the rage rise in me, and I wanted to tear down her belief, smash the altar of her faith. I wanted to stand and tell her that God didn’t exist and that if He did He was more like the devil than anything else. How could He be all love? How could He love the pig man who ruled our house as if he was an agent of the damned?

What You Don’t See

‘You can either do it yourself or I will have to do it for you. It’s your choice.’

I say nothing but hold her with my eyes. I am in a bathroom of some kind but it is more industrial than personal, all chrome bars and wide porcelain sinks. I am sitting on a small folding steel chair. I am still wearing my white gown and I can see the goosepimples on my exposed arms and legs.

‘Hygiene is very important,’ she says.

I don’t feel as alone as I did, maybe it’s the long sleep or the fact that I am getting used to these people who surround me every waking hour telling me that they only have my best interests at heart. She is pretty this young girl in front of me and her face is open and rounded. She has a small plastic basin full of soapy water.

‘My name is Naomi.’

I know she’s trying to get me to speak, but it’s so long since I have that I’m not sure if I can.

‘I know that this is difficult…That you feel alone…But you are in good hands…This is a good place, you must trust that…’

She gently takes my feet and puts them in the basin. I feel the warmth spreading up my legs. She begins to move the sponge along the line of my calves.

‘You’ll feel better for this, you’ll see.’

Her hands are small like a child’s and I watch as they slide up and down my shins.

‘You’re from the North, aren’t you?’

Still I don’t reply but look at the suds forming in soapy rings on the hairs of my legs.

‘It’s great what’s happening up there now. Let’s hope it holds. It must have been tough for you all those years, all that violence…I’m from Waterford. I think sometimes that we had it very easy down here. You know, what you don’t see won’t hurt you…Now I’m going to put this mat on the floor and I need you to stand on it so I can give the rest of you a good scrub. That’s it…Who’s a good boy?’

May

Often I would meet her at night on the road as I walked home. She would appear out of the darkness, her shape moving towards me with that jaunty, disconnected gait that I would come to know so well. She lived alone in a crumbling farmhouse about a mile from us, fronted by a line of ancient trees. The only company that meant anything to her were the cats and dogs that she gathered to her like a princess collects suitors. They would follow as she moved about her garden, waiting for titbits or an affectionate ruffle of their coats. They were like her, rejects from their own kind. They huddled together in the face of a violent world, depending on each other for protection and warmth.

When I met her late at night she would always ask me if I had seen one of her animals, that it had gone missing and that she was worried about it, fearful of foxes or even larger predators that she believed lurked high in the mountain’s undergrowth. She never washed and her face was a large smudge of dirt and wrinkles. Her hair hung together in tangled clumps and her eyes looked at you as if they were regarding you from another world, one that only she had access to. I was attracted to her in spite of her strangeness, because of her strangeness.

The Dead’s whispers are heard more clearly at night, she would say to me, as we stood on the road, the moon bathing us in its ghostly light. She would stand close to me and indicate with her head that I should listen. I remember the wheeze of her breath and the smell of dog and cat that had overpowered her own human smell.

‘Be careful what you say. Be careful what you think because they are always listening,’ she would say, her head upturned, her mouth slightly parted. When I was a child, she told me stories of old Ireland, the one that grew strong on the meat of poetry and the spoken word, the one that gave the world its dreamers and magicians. She looked as if she had been moulded from the woodland that surrounded her, carved into being with bark as her spine and moss for flesh and a bird’s nest for a heart. At night as I lay in bed I could hear her as she moved across the fields searching for a lost cat, using a high-pitched feeding call to try and attract it.

My sister and I accepted her as only children can, whole-heartedly and without prejudice. My parents were not so accommodating, believing she was mad, or worse just plain evil.

I would often sneak off, running the distance to her house, my heart longing to see her.

‘Who is it?’ she would demand as I stood at her front door.

‘Me,’ I would say.

‘Which me? There are a lot of mes in this world.’

‘Gabriel me.’

‘Ah…’

Her door had an old cross on it, with a peeling Jesus nailed to it. He looked so forgotten and so tired. Every time she opened it either to let herself out or to usher someone in she would touch him gently on the wounds of his feet and pause for a second, her eyes closed, saying something I couldn’t quite hear.

‘Why do you do that?’ I asked her one day.

‘Because it only takes a moment,’ she said. ‘And besides, he’s in trouble.’

It was dark in her house; the windows were so grimy and dirty that they only let in a pale wash of daylight. Her sitting room was a muddle of broken chairs and discarded clothes. The floor was covered with old newspaper and magazines, and everywhere there was movement, small shapes lurked in the corners, their eyes flashing in the darkness. The place smelled of stale piss and warm bodies. Ashes from the fire were strewn in front of her fireplace like a grey beard. I remember the first time I went a small tawny cat sidled up to me and ran its tail across the tops of my knees. It only had one eye, and its good one ran with yellowy pus.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ she said to me. ‘He’s only new here. I found him on the mountain a few days ago, he has a cold in his eye, but it will be alright. All he needs is a bit of love like the rest of us.’

I was mesmerised by her, by this child-woman who lived in the cracks of life that the rest of us avoided. I could see what had once been a beautiful young woman beneath the coat of filth she seemed to wear like a suit of armour.

I felt comfortable with her and her troop of sick and wounded animals. I would watch as she spoke to each of them in a language made up of coos and tuts. Sometimes she would break into a strange banshee wail, beginning softly, her head thrown back, her tongue disappearing in and out of her grimy mouth then building to a screech which filled the whole house. Her animals would stand pert with attention and as the noise built would move to her, quietly circling her, rubbing her with their bodies, their heads upturned and their eyes glowing.

She talked to me as if I was a grown-up, as if I had something to say. I would listen to her as she spoke of the magic that lived in the hills around us, how each breath of wind had its own message. She told me that on every hand we were being watched, that God had filled the air with spirits that noted how we were doing, and that animals could see what we couldn’t see, that they held a key in their souls that we had lost a long time ago.

I would walk the countryside with her, watching as she stopped now and then to sniff the air, her hand raised, her head stock still.

‘There’s a wee one in trouble,’ she would say.

I would stand beside her and look around me, desperate to see what she saw, scouring the hedgerows and the ditches. Sometimes she would say: ‘He doesn’t want to be found. It’s his time and he wants to go on his own and in peace.’

Now and then on the way back from school we would see her, as we sat in the back of Dad’s Hillman Imp. He would shake his head as we passed her and mutter something like no good lunatic under his breath. We would watch as she raised her hand to us in greeting as if she was conducting some unseen choir.

It was only later in life that I discovered that she had lost her brother when she was in her early twenties. He had been taken out and shot nearly thirty years before; local men had arrived in the dead of night wielding a rusty gun and iron bars. She had answered the door. They pushed their way past her and dragged him from his bed out into the front garden where they beat him senseless and then shot him twice in the head. His blood seeped into the grass and onto her nightshirt as she held his broken body. He was an informer, or so a man told me, running titbits of information to the local police in return for a few shillings, for blood money, was the way the man put it.

The man also told me that when she was younger she would have broken your heart with her beauty. She had many suitors, him included; they would follow her like the strays that she subsequently collected. When her brother was shot the young men looking for her hand fell away, melted back into their own lives. The world shut her out, banished her to the wild scrub and the fluttering heather of the mountain behind her house.

She stopped washing maybe out of protest, maybe out of shame, maybe rage. She shoved herself into the face of an indifferent world, the stains on her face put there by the good people of the parish. She buried her brother and stood in the wind alone as he was put in the earth, and an anger must have begun in her, it must have moved within her with the force of a detonating bomb shattering every dream, every hope, every prayer. Maybe as she stood there watching the coffin being lowered she thought about leaving, setting out for England or America. Instead she looked to the night; she moved to peer through the cracks that border this world, the place where fury lived and where the lonely spin in eternity, friendless and without love.

She began collecting strays, broken beings who knew the taste of disappointment just as she did. She held them to her as the world lay sleeping and told them that she was one of them, that she had left her own kind behind. She would shield me too when I was with her, her grimy features following every move I made. She made me listen to the whisperings of nature at work, from the heavy hum of bees seeking pollen to the flick of a trout leaving the water to take a fly.

Sometimes we would just sit there on a hill, the clouds hovering above us, and hold the silence between us, believing that we were close to unearthing some secret that lay hidden just beneath the wings of the breeze.

I would look at her in profile and see the fine beauty she once had, the ghost of it still lying across her bones and in the corner of her green eyes and in the gentle plunge of her long neck.

‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ she asked me one day as we sat there.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Maybe you could be my gardener.’

Then she laughed, throwing her head back.

‘Would you like that?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Then you could listen every day to the worms and beetles moving in the ground, happy and free in the wet muck, eh?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Or you could be a wizard or a warlock. Do you know what a wizard is?’

‘Yes.’

‘What about a warlock?’

‘Not sure.’

‘A warlock is a male witch. He has powers that can frighten a man and bring him weeping to his knees. What about that for a notion?’

‘What?’

‘You…A warlock. That’d be something.’

‘I don’t know…’

‘What are you a man or a mouse?’

‘I’m frightened,’ I remember saying.

‘Of what?’ she asked. But before I had a chance to answer, she said, ‘They’ve put that there.’

She waved her long arm at the middle distance as if an army rose on the crest of the hill in front of us, poised to take us apart.

‘The world and its wife.’

I remember nodding, unsure what she meant.

‘No-one listens anymore. They only plot and fiddle with other people’s happiness. They take and take. Everyone says they’re owed…Don’t you think?’

She plucked up a long stem of grass and put it between her teeth and sucked at its end.

‘There’s goodness in these. Try one.’

She handed me one, and I put it in my mouth.

‘The thing to remember, wee one,’ she said. ‘It’s they who are frightened, not us.’

As the sun set that day, throwing up long threads of fire as it disappeared, I remember looking at her and her lioness profile, part animal part woman, and my heart was calm and full of love for her.

Locals from the town, young boys fed on a diet of Republicanism and sheer fuck-you hardness, used to circle her house in the dead of night like wolves scenting the weakness of a fallen prey. They would call to her and taunt her, throwing rocks at her doors and windows. Inside, her animals would howl and beat the deadness of the night with their cries. Sometimes one of the boys would force a window latch and try to climb in screaming abuse at her, but none of them ever made it in, the largest and strongest of her dogs would always be there, fangs at the ready, his eyes blazing with fierce loyalty to his owner.

Stories began to circulate that one of the youths had caught a glimpse of her lying naked in front of her fire, a fine ridge of animal hair running down the length of her back, her eyes glowing with wildness, her teeth bared, as she was mounted from behind by one of her dogs, an old grizzled Alsatian called Ahab after the sadistic captain in Moby Dick.

One night they came armed with baseball bats and chains, one had an axe, a kid called Hardface. He was known for it; at dance halls up and down the country he would produce this small wooden axe to impress and frighten, to let the world know that he had come prepared. They were about twenty strong and this time they were determined to get beyond the threshold of her small house and her pack of loyal guard dogs. Four or five of them led the charge, rushing at her door, busting it down with a blow from their boots, swinging their baseball bats at anything that moved, catching dog and cat in equal measure, their barks and shrieks filling the house. Old tables, chairs and pots were thrown to the ground; kittens scurried between their feet like rats caught in a flood. The youths wore heavy combat jackets, thick motorcyclists’ gloves and balaclavas. One after another they poured into her house, thumping and kicking their way down her small hall. They heard her calling to her animals; she was in the room at the back where she lived most of the time by the guttering fire. Ahab was the last animal they met; he stood by her, growling at them as they burst into the living space. He looked like a lion of the savannah, proud and ferocious, daring any of them to make the next move.

Hardface, who up until now had been using a baseball bat like the rest of them, pulled out his small axe from inside his coat, it glinted like a devil’s eye in the gloomy candlelit room. Youth after youth squeezed into the tight dark space. One of them spat on the floor as he looked around. Their heavy violence filled the air and for a moment they just looked at her, as if she were some kind of soiled queen about to be deposed, being given one last moment of deference before her execution.

Ahab inched forward when he saw the axe, his coat bristling, his eyes filled with hatred.

‘Ssh, Ahab,’ she said. ‘Ssh.’

She stood slowly and faced them, her eyes shining with a quiet defiance. One by one she looked at them.

‘At least have the decency to show me your faces,’ she said. ‘Let me see who I have the pleasure of welcoming into my house at this late hour.’

As Ahab leapt I saw the axe move past my head in a downward swoop, its blade gleaming. It struck the dog across the muzzle, drawing a long line of blood across it and almost separating the nose from the snout. I let out a cry and May’s head snapped in my direction and her eyes burned into mine. The dog managed to get a hold on Hardface, biting into his wrist, causing him to drop the axe. He tried to shake his attacker from him, but Ahab just bit deeper. I grabbed the axe and swung it high above my head, bringing it crashing down across the dog’s back. I could hear the dull thud of steel on bone and fur. Its body buckled but still it held on, its teeth shining, its blood mingling with that of its attacker. In I struck, my breath coming in quick grunts.

‘Fuck,’ I said. ‘Fuck.’

I remember fumbling with the handle, how it slipped in my gloved hand. I felt May’s eyes on me, I knew that I had crossed a line, that I had committed a treason against the beauty she had laid at my feet, that I was taking an axe to the strong tree of poetry she had grown in my heart. I wanted to explain to her that the stain had always been there. Even when I first came to her, my small hand beating on her door to let me in, the mark lay across my heart like the shadow of an upturned cross.

He had put it there. He had placed it between my legs where all good things come from. He had put his hand there and in doing so he had taken any chance I had. He had told me it was alright, that the night was made for secrets and that this was just one more to add to the ocean of secrets that the world was made up of. The seed was already in me as I stood in her front room for the first time; I was lost to her even before she began to talk to me of the world of magic and wondering. I was a hard ball of hate and so immune to her. I was one of those she had spoken about, who felt that they were owed.

As I killed her dog that night, pounding it until its carcass was a mass of fur and blood, that’s what I was trying to tell her, that she shouldn’t have bothered with me, that all along I was a spy, sent to peer into the workings of her soul, and that like my father I was built for betrayal.

All of this and more rose in me that night as she watched me smash her last friend into the earth. I pounded his hand on my balls, his mouth on mine, and the seam of sweat he brought to my skin every time I thought of him.

The dog was dead and with it any hope I had of crossing back from the wasteland I now found myself in. I no longer cared. I remember removing my balaclava and looking at her and that was the moment I put my signature to the crime, not caring that the moon had dimmed and that the lights that guided me had begun to fade. She didn’t say anything and made no sound as we dragged her into the front garden and stripped her. Then we hunted her, giving her a head-start, listening as she crashed through the hedges and fields that surrounded her house, her dirty nakedness flashing through the moonlit night. We chased her, calling to her, taunting her, making animal noises. I remember revelling in the power of my hold over another human life. We spread out, calling to each other in owl hoots when we spied her, the cider we had downed only hours before giving us madness and a violent clarity.