Scrapyards
This is the way I would like to write - Aiden O'Reilly
There is a library, at the corner of Eglinton road and Shrove park: you may have passed it on the way to the credit union. It is a dull squat building, with skylights on the flat roof. On a dry day these are propped open, and in the winter evenings you can see the yellow glow they cast upon the mist as you approach. There are windows all the way around, and below these a band of brickwork with tall shrubbery growing against it. This brickwork is only decorative, but it lends the structure an innocuous look, as do the plants and flowers in the surrounding garden. You enter through an iron gate, the garden closed off by railings on each side, and mount five steps to a glass-panelled door with brass frames. Immediately facing you is the librarians' workspace, with one channel leading left and one to the right. Left is for entry: there is no sign, but such things are understood. Once inside, the far left wall holds the science books; 500 - 629 in the Dewey catalogue. This section extends halfway along the back wall too. Then the novels begin, from A to Z, but taking some time out, as it were, to hide in free-standing cases, and then the alphabetical order resumes and continues around the corner.
Close under the eye of the librarian is the children's section, in a little alcove of its own, with miniature tables and stools. Colourful books lie ready to look at on the tables. The Book of Why, The Book of How, The Book of When.
You can picture the library. It is a haven of reflection. Now picture this: a small boy, sitting on one of the foot stools which are used to reach the top shelves. He is rapt in concentration, oblivious to the old men seeking out their hobby books, the senior-school pupils who arrive in cliques to cog their homework. At times the boy is reading calculus, times it is fifties science fiction, or true-life ghost stories. But he does not choose indifferently: it is always a careful decision, guided by how the words speak out from the pages. Phrases like 'ground-breaking', 'revolutionary', 'universe' jump out from the covers and seize his attention, in much the same way the letters 's e x' may do to others of a different age. The unseen librarian looks down indulgently at his regular visitor. This is no horror story. This is no tale to make your skin prickle, no delineation of crushed souls where the human personality flounders and ebbs, like a cat run over by a car, crawling to the edge of the road, jaws working furiously while the body is a mangled mess. This is just a library. The windows are opened with a long pole when the air gets too stuffy. People shift their chairs politely to let someone pass. One cough more than two attracts an irritated glance.
Although he is not yet fourteen, he wanders freely through the building. Adult books, in this library and those times, means those without pictures. He chooses freely from science books, travel guides, histories. The boy understands the concepts in what he reads, but he is like someone who has heard music from the radio all his life but never seen a musical instrument. He does not know where these books have come from, why they were written, why they are kept there hoarded together. Between philosophy and science there are five paces, from these to the sports section another two.
What happens then, when he is not reading? You may be familiar with the round. There are alarm clocks, school, breakfasts going cold on the table, neighbours dropping by for a chat, strict teachers and easy teachers. There are lunches, rooms to tidy, radio pips, knocks at the door, football training, A to Z, things to bring in from the shed. The books modestly imply that they yield second place to all this, that they encompass only part of it, and only tentatively. There is far more to learn, they conclude, and w have only scratched the surface. We are at the beginning, and the story will continue as long as humans remain curious about the universe about them. That is what is written.
Outside the library is where reality begins, the source. The books speak as though a person's life was of more substance then a story, an old tree more interesting than its photograph in a book. This life is constituted of a continual sequence of events, he comes to realise, that all pass away into forgetfulness. This bothers him, though he knows it shouldn't. It is something everyone knows so it is never mentioned. He has no right to let it bother him; he is only a boy, a little boy who has never done anything of significance. He has no right to feel keenly the wasted unravelling of time. And yet it bothers him.
So he decides to account the events. They can be numbered. Over the past six months he can list them, meagre as they are, too thin to hook a life on to. They begin to seem vestigial, yes, it goes on and on, a disconnected sequence that doesn't know when it is time to stop.
1. In a class at school the teacher said it was not good to read too much.
2. He found a sick dog under the bushes in the park. Together with other kids, they covered it in an old wooly jumper and set a bowl of water alongside.
3. A different teacher said you would go mad if you think too much. A few weeks later he was sacked for drinking during lunch breaks.
4. Bubbles were rising from the bed of the river where it rounds the sweet factory.
5. He wanted to kill someone, and then wondered if he really did want to. How would he know if he really wanted to.
6. He had seen McCabe walk up to Foyle in the school yard and threaten to break his arm. Then he knew that anyone can dare to say whatever they want. It is only the consequences they have to bear.
Having listed this sequence he feels at ease. Something has been accomplished. The nuggets in the dregs of time have been nailed down. They will not flow away to forgetfulness, as though they had never been. It is enough, for the moment, to list them.
He wonders if other people have the thinking-self inside themselves.
My garden then, was peopled by my minor gods, nymphs and wood-sprites, taking the forms of floppy dolls and shapes of leaves; places of atmosphere that held my moods, mossy places cool, like a cellar, where my thoughts were stored. My head was too small for them. A tangle of shrub and twig does not force the eye along its lines, there is nothing to decipher or understand. When you look at it for too long you begin to notice only motion, a waving leaf, a startled spider. To me, a six-year-old girl, it was possible to get lost among the undergrowth, be side-tracked down a corridor of green, behind another tree, and another, across the rotted remains of the fence without noticing it, and away beyond earshot, out in the wild country. Follow me, quickly, a pebble dash of birdsong, quick now, the spider's web will not deceive, the slug's trail is not there to make you slip, the thorns are not vindictive, follow, there are places where your moods have been captured, they hang in clusters like bitter hops, here, under the low branch, the smell of mushrooms that can kill and out to green-glow again, the shuddering fronds, the clinging stickle-balls, the brambles copper-stained and crinkly dry, to the edge of the thorn wall, here, at the decayed toy windmill, here.
It was a boy. A boy? There in my kingdom of goblins and voices. I had no experience in dealing with humankind, and consequently no embarrassment about staring at the wax candles of his arms, the white lamp of his throat. His face was composed of eyebrows. I liked him and he said, "I lost a ball and came to look for it," and with the infinite wisdom of a six-year-old I knew that he was drifting into the world of humans, paying his respects to them by saying what he would be expected to say. He had shiny black hair and a face with cheeks. A face is not like a spider's web or whorl of leaves. They draw you in or draw you out. But I just continued to stare, and he chose to understand, or not to understand, and said goodbye when I liked him. My uncle said he had climbed in to pick the raspberries.
This then is the geometry of his existence: its vertices are the library, the school, the allotments, his home, and occasional other places. Its substance are the events that happen there. His personality is being created from these scattered pieces. His space under the bed, a kitchen, the constellation Orion, and back to the library.
There are many stories captured within those walls. They wait there for minds to free them and give them life. Some will wait for ever. Inside each book, pasted onto the first leaf, is a white slip of paper divided into three columns. Here the librarian stamps the due-back date. Some have only a couple of dates, Feb 19 1973, Oct 26 1978. Some have only one.
There are some with no date at all. They are there, on the shelves, and no-one has ever read them. These are the lost souls. He reads a few lines to taste the rare flavour: such uniqueness is special. The condemned command a certain respect. It would be dishonest of him to borrow them. In the whole library, these are the true individuals.
He had assumed at first that the librarian was an adept, familiar with every book under his command. Even after he realised there were too many books for one person to ever read, he still retained a certain respect for him as the gatekeeper, even if he were not the master. The librarian had some inkling of this, and sometimes stuck his head over the boy's shoulder, snatched up the book, flicked through the publisher details and foreword, and pronounced judgement. The boy would not be deceived by the mock hard-man accent the librarian put on (the same accent as the boys he threw out for messing), but take each statement with the highest seriousness.
He would study the book until the gnats rose in a cloud from the clotted river and drifted towards the porch light, and the pain in his stomach clawed for attention. He would stand up abruptly from the low table and pace up and down, his limbs humming with life again, taking a book half out and replacing it, stretching himself in puzzlement. Then he would look at the high row of black windows reflecting the fluorescent lights and think: this is what it feels like to be hungry. Home again, home again jiggily jig, through the air taut with coal smoke to a reheated dinner. This is the taste of carrot and potatoes; this is how it feels.
First there are the nameless fears. Without reason, without origin, they appear. They are always there at the edges of the light. At any absence they manifest themselves. Any evil is possible, lurking there beyond the close circle of warmth and light. Then you realise that there is no edge to the reasonable world. There are no gaps. It is reasonable all the way through. The most primitive layer of fear is almost forgotten when you attain the age of reason. Wild beasts and monsters are banished. The circle of reasonable things spreads. The stuff of the dark unknown is the same nature as the stuff in a daylit sittingroom. There is nothing essentially evil in the world. Nothing that will annihilate you and wipe away your eyes. They would teach you about it if there was. All told, the world is a fairly safe place, provided you don't step off the kerb into traffic or stick your hand into an electric socket. It's a jolly old place to live. There are no cracks in the pavement which lead straight down to hell.
But safety is no pleasure unless you can feel keenly its opposite. The garden then was my frontier, the last bit of unknown within my footsteps. I wanted to believe them when they said not to get lost. I wanted to believe it was big and dangerous. I was happy to hold on to a hand and let myself be lead, there in that place where I had spent so much time on my own. Through the tunnels of the damp green light, this will not last long. I found the place where the wild raspberries were growing and ate them, enjoying the idea that they could, after all, be poisonous. When he was standing there again I made the decision that he was safe, but only in the same sense as the raspberries. I held up a fist of dirt and dead leaves with beetles dropping from it. They scrambled away and hid themselves. He came down on his hunkers to examine it.
The mother at the sink looking through the window to heaven. The bird song of children at play. The creamy softness of the detergent, the joy of gleaming ceramic slipping out from the dark congested water. There are a thousand things to do to nail this day into place.
The sister skips in, coming through the front door no less, mammy mammy, and trailing after her a horde of kids all giggly and gaggly and bold as brass. The girl stops and giggles and is strangely silent, standing on the kitchen step, swaying in her skirt. Like a chorus the horde of three take up the giddiness and then also stop. The girl looks sideways: she is thinking hard. She thinks a second too long and the others collapse in laughter again.
"Guess what we saw," she says. The mother shakes the water off her hands briskly. Mothers have their roles and positions, their curls and creams.
"What is it?" she asks curtly.
"Weee sawww," she twirls from side to side until her sneakers squeak on the lino and her skirt flares. The mother concedes her modicum of patience. A gust of outdoors air breathes through the house. The front door slams in the distance. One child tugs another, pulling him back towards the hall door. Patience is probed to the limit.
"What have you to say?" At the moment of saying, the hesitation.
"We saw Nick kissing Sharon," and she laughs. The mother listens with a keen confusion, accepting the bare words. She has a strain of that adult wiseness which yes even adults yes have their own ways and wiseness.
"What Sharon?"
"Little Sharon, over at the allotments."
"What nonsense are you telling me," she frowns, dismissing it, and in the same breath, "what do you mean by kissing?"
"He was kissing her, everybody saw it," the child insisted, though this had not been the question. The children leave, the incident exorcised from memory, taking no place in the scheme of things.
What to think? What event has happened? Has anything happened at all? She goes up the hallway, dropping the dishcloth on the letter-table, and opens the front door. Children at play on the tarred street clump and scatter like hard glass beads. She observes them closely, young Kieran hooting "there'll be trouble" - an echo of his parents' voices. She reads their bravery and shyness, their squabbles and confidences, and can tell which have been brought up with manners and which are running wild. She stands against the gate, unnoticed by the children. She stands and looks also at her boy Nick, long-legged, knotty. He had gotten his school report a couple of weeks before, took it home and left it in his drawer. Several days later he brought it to her after dinner. Here, school rules say I have to show you this. Straight A's across the main subjects except French. He had put it on the table and left, refusing her praise.
The gaggle of children part and form again as he passes through. They recognise that he is not a part of their childish games. And she recognises it now, the mother, this woman. He's thirteen. He has sense. And now she allows herself to think the thought: this thirteen-year-old has grabbed and kissed a six-year-old girl. Something is not right. And there is no boundary, no limit to how badly wrong things can be. There is no safety net to prevent a slippage down to hell.
"That's going too far missus Guin. He's only a small boy. Sure he's not fourteen yet. It's not worth mentioning hardly."
"I don't know what kind of messing he's at. He should be out playing more with kids his own age. I don't know what kind of ideas he gets into his head. He's not a very sporty fellow. Out a bit more he should be. Though there's kids on this street that I wouldn't like to see him hanging around with."
"That's true. It's a terrible thing to say about another person's child, but there's some on the street that'll go to the bad." The mother purses her lips, feeling dark intimations behind the words.
"Well there'll be no more wandering around the streets for Nicholas," she averred, her inconsistency going unremarked. "I don't want him running wild on the streets."
"No missus Guin, he needs to have his bit of play with the rest of them."
"He needs an eye kept on him. Honestly I don't know what's going through his head."
The other woman laughed good-naturedly. "Isn't it ridiculous what young boys can get up to?"
The mother tightened her mouth and was resolute. "Well I'll tell him not to be interfering with your little one any more."
"Missus Guin, not at all, he's only a child with no wit. Don't be saying anything of the sort to him. It'll only put ideas in his head. It's hardly worth mentioning only I heard the children talking about it."
"There's no knowing what kids that age can get up to. They're no angels, that's for sure."
"Your little lad comes as close as they get. He gives me a wave through the railings when he's on the way home from school. And to see him with his little books under his arm when he's on the way back from the library! Such a marvellous little fellow. I'd say he's good at school, is he?"
"I've no complaints there, it's true. He gets good reports, more than I can say for myself. I don't know who he takes after but it's not me." She felt a tinge of pride and reconciliation that things were being brought back into perspective, though she felt a little out-manoeuvred by the other woman, wife of an airport engineer and organiser of coffee mornings in aid of the old folks' home. Mrs Guin felt two steps behind, felt herself being evaluated by that perky scarved head. Even the woman's tolerant attitude towards Nick was presumptuous, as though she knew more about the boy than his own mother. Not for the first time she had presumed to pass judgement on how a child should be reared.
"It must be his father he takes after," she said. "He'll grow up his own way, there's nothing much we can do for them. My little Sharon, only a few months ago she got lost in the allotments and we were looking for her for hours. We took a look through the bushes but we were sure she'd be crying. We were calling her name and looking back inside the house and out on the road for her. All the way down the road to the park we went, sure that she'd strayed, you know she can walk any distance now. And then we found her hiding away at the back of the raspberry bushes. She'd been listening to us all calling and never opened her mouth. Would you credit it? What possessed her to sit there and never answer us I don't know. For half an hour or more. Away with the fairies. So that's the way I see the little incident with your little fellow."
Missus Guin was vaguely discomfited by this sudden resurgence of a matter which both had so enthusiastically dismissed as unworthy of mention only a few moments before. She felt the return of a dim horror that would not go away, and words were unseemly in the face of it.
The door opened slowly. The father stood there, looking for a reason to disturb such avid studying. So concentrated that the head never rose from the page.
"Nick?"
"Yes?"
"Your mother is making a good dinner. It'll be ready in about ten minutes." Then the event tries once more to break into words, where it had briefly, in the voices of the children, attained a distorted existence.
"You like the studying?"
"Some of it. Why?" He lets the book drop sideways.
"Well. Life isn't all studying. There are more important things than passing exams."
"Oh, you mean like helping Missus Ryan find her cats when she's half blind and can't see them?" He smiles easily. There's a standing family joke about Mrs Ryan and her spinsterly concern for animals.
"Yeah, things like," his father nods, "See you in five."
The door closes. The boy turns back to the pages exultantly. The event relapses back into its own place, among the debris left from the clear white atomic light. He is left alone with his invention, and his tenderness and innocence.
There are other gardens and other places of refuge. They grow smaller now, and no longer take the form of fronds of leaves and mossy grottoes. Now they are the slag heap of a mining station, the oily pool at the bottom of a lift-shaft, the sheds at the back of an abandoned fertiliser mill. In these places there is room enough to wander and to hide. The smell of decomposing bonemeal will envelop me. I can feel free to breathe. This is a good place, with burst sacks spilling their rotten contents across the floor and a bare bulb sufficient only to cut a tense puncture in the darkness. The dull grind of machinery is a distant sound, far out there through indeterminable layers of damp brick, through wooden doors hanging off their hinges, scrap heaps of tangled iron and stacks of slimy boards. Dark machine oil, blacker than thought, seeps across the floor. It is here I will meet my lover. We will sit on the sacks in this place that is hidden away from the world, and live moments that never connect back into the stream of time.