This Is Happiness Read online

  I wanted to tell Christy what had happened to me. But the dimensions of it seemed large and amorphous. I was in the grip of a compulsion to do something I had not yet done in this life, that is, to say the name Sophie out loud. Overwhelmingly, I wanted to sound it, I wanted it to be in my mouth and then in the air. I wanted to hear what it was like to hear her in my voice, to have that connection, not just because it was a name outside of the realm of girls’ names I had grown up with, in Sophie was sophistication, and an air foreign, intelligent and compassionate, the music of it was beautiful, but also because to say Sophie Troy out loud was to summon her into my space.

  I opened my mouth to say it, but, silent as a fish, closed it again.

  To escape feeling that I might float belly-up, I said at last, ‘Thank you for going to the chemist.’

  ‘No need for thanks.’

  I looked at the sky, he looked at the estuary tide going west. ‘You saw her?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And…’ He drew on the cigarette. He pulled the smoke inside him, making the puckered sound and squinting one eye, shooting or shot, before leaking it slowly then pushing away from him in a backhand gesture cigarette, smoke, and the scene. ‘She filled the prescription.’

  ‘She knew it was you?’

  ‘She did.’

  ‘And what did she say?’

  He studied the tidal river that was all but invisible now. ‘She said, “Wait here.”’

  ‘That’s all?’

  He nodded towards where the river we knew was there was not there now. ‘That’s all.’

  It was like something had fallen from the sky. It plummeted down and landed thump on the ground in front of us, feathers, bones in a twist, neck awry and blood from the beak. I tried to swallow.

  ‘She saw you. She knew it was you. And all she said was “Wait here”?’

  He nodded once and, after a time, I realised he was reliving the scene when he added: ‘“Here,” she said, when she came back with the things.’

  ‘And didn’t you say anything to her?’

  ‘She opened the door. “Goodbye now,” she said.’

  I can’t say he looked sad or hurt but I felt he was. I had ruined the reunion. This was not how it was meant to go, this was not what you waited fifty years for. I had that sickening feeling in what they say is your stomach but is in fact your soul. Annie Mooney had been neither pleased nor angry to see him, worse, she hadn’t cared. It had meant nothing to her.

  Night fell on us. The river was gone. In the dark, only the red tip of Christy’s cigarette.

  ‘We’ll hold off our quest to hear Junior play until you’re able,’ he said at last, by way of closing the evening.

  Those who sleep in snatches say they get none, so I may or may not have slept that night. It’s a fact that the heat of the day was trapped under the thatch and the midges whose day had been destroyed by a foreign sunlight found their way up the Captain’s Ladder. Christy’s snores serenaded them. Lying awake in a sleeping house is sometimes peaceful, sometimes not. I couldn’t list all the things that were agitating inside me. I lay there, both bound hands flat out on the blanket and sort of singing with under-pain, reminding me I had a body not just a mind. Reminding me too that I was an idiot.

  After a time, I held up my left wrist, and, with the fingers of my right, from inside the bindings drew out the taper that had been Sophie Troy’s bookmark. I can’t do justice to what it felt like to hold it. I can’t do justice to the notion that that thin wand that had been in her hand was the thing that held me on to the world.

  Now, I had abandoned the practice of praying at that time. But I don’t mind admitting here that, under the influence of an encounter with extraordinary beauty, and dejected by the failure of Christy with Annie Mooney, I held that taper a little aloft and to the dark offered a silent prayer: Good things coming for Noe and Christy.

  In the days that followed, Christy went to work, and I stayed in and around the house, lost to the dream-blank of the bereft and the mute mope of a heart given away. Because I was incapable of inventing a unique behaviour, or the world had used up all its originality, with a sugared irresistibility, all the clichés of lovelorn behaviour stuck to me. I didn’t mind. There’s honour in the ghost-company of the unrequited.

  The rain was still postponed, and, by a grace in time and memory, was already passing into a fonder reality where the rain had never been that bad, There’d been a drop now and then, yes, but what harm? and people forgot the floods, leaks, puddles, drips and drop-downs. From the front of their minds they let slip the constant drumming of a falling sky, living damp to the underpants, the watery squelch in their boots, and the green fungus that grew to the height of a small child inside the walls of some houses strongly denying they were stone submarines. Because of a kink in human nature, where the new becomes old, people were already asking when this terrible hot weather would pass. For the first time in Fahaean history the ridges of potatoes would need watering, and all times now you’d see women and children bearing buckets and cans along the roads back and forth from wells, with sun-blistered foreheads and freckled arms.

  In Faha pure was an adjective of negativity. In circulation now, from the weather: I’m pure burned.

  At my grandparents’, a number of the burnished came to make calls on the telephone, and enquired after me, and repeated versions of what they heard had happened, adding details and leaving out others in a living demonstration of how reality was made up. It was a true thing that all incidents in the parish then had an afterlife and were tirelessly reanimated with an interpretative emphasis or edit. It was one of the threads that tied community and whether or not you had heard the story already didn’t matter, you listened to this version and nodded and said, ‘I know,’ and let that knowledge be a comfort between you for a time.

  One afternoon the stools and chairs were brought in from the garden and set around the kitchen because a summit of the neighbours had been called. Moylan, a salesman from the electricity company, was doing the rounds. A victim to the cult of his own personality, to maximise the effectiveness of his pitch and to showcase the skill of his performance, Moylan wanted the largest audience. Because it had the telephone and the air of unofficial post office, because it was already deemed connected, and as I’ve noted was a kind of locus in the townland, my grandparents’ house was chosen for the demonstration of what the future was bringing.

  Ahead of the event, my grandmother’s nominal housekeeper, Mrs Moore, arrived in green gaberdine and orange headscarf. Like her, her costume was immune to season. From her large bag she took out Flo the duster, placed her on standby on the dresser, an act she made seem part of her working, as though the dust was now on retreat and the house already that bit cleaner. Then, signalling the notability of the upcoming occasion, she took off her boots, a labour of angles, her body inflexible as an old oak, and, since yesterday, her laces much further than her fingers. Then she pressed her feet inside what appeared to be balls of rags, a genus of slippers of her own construction, whose purpose was twofold, first she would be dusting as she went, and second, she’d leave no boot prints on the wet flags. ‘So,’ she told my grandmother, ‘it will be like I was never here.’

  Before she went wax-papering the stove, to catch her breath, she would have just the one Wild Woodbine. Doady would have just the one too, the two of them soon puffing away in a wood-bound wilderness found savoury and companionable. While Mrs Moore smoked, she looked out at me in the garden. I had been to where all of her family and most of her acquaintance had gone, but I alone had come back, and resurrection, as I was soon to find out, has its own allure.

  Because of an unwritten rule in country living, ahead of the summit, there were hills of rough sandwiches to be built from home-made bread, and a cake to be boiled. In these Mrs Moore was no help, but she offered an imaginary version, standing alongside Doady, the fifth of her just-the-one Woodbines held out and doing its tower-tilt above the
makings while she relayed who else was now ashes. (She herself had been unwell all her life, she’d say out loud, she could die at any moment; it was a gambit that worked until she was a hundred and four and God caught on.)

  The meeting had been called for three in the afternoon. Moylan was a nine-to-five man, three was when he was at his peak, and country people had no work that couldn’t be left aside for something as essential as electricity, was his position. A Limerick baritone with a magnificent sweep of black hair, he arrived in the yard in a van. ‘Sonny, help me carry these in,’ was his greeting. I could carry nothing and his entrance was stymied by having to be his own prop man. When he saw the smallness of the kitchen – the slope of the floor doubling the cramped illusion – he had to overcome the familiar fall of his heart that this was a lesser stage for his talents, and not let it impact upon his performance.

  ‘Where is everybody?’ he asked Doady.

  ‘Everybody is coming,’ she said.

  Into the kitchen on a handcart Moylan hefted a selection of machines whose existence to that point had been notional. Many were white and of such a gleaming newness it seemed nothing in the parish was as white as had previously been thought. All had a black wire coming out the back with a three-pin plug that looked both imperative and nakedly masculine, as though in urgent need of finding a three-holed female. Moylan laboured to get the washing machine in and around the turning of the front door whose jamb was predicated on human dimensions. Doady said it was a shame Ganga wasn’t there to help. The turf needed turning, he’d announced abruptly that morning, and headed with Joe to the bog.

  In clusters of shyness, the neighbours began arriving.

  Moylan had already given a performance in the village, and the reviews were good. ‘Nice little house you have,’ he said to Doady, the sweat shining off him standing in front of the twelve-foot hearth where small sods were sighing a complacent smoke unaware that their time was running out. He was a desperate plámáser, a pure flatterer, Doady’d tell Mrs Moore later, and rebuff his recalled compliments with one back-toss of her head, but right then it looked like she ate and drank them. ‘It’s very, I don’t know, home-like,’ he said.

  The centre of the room was taken with the machines and the neighbours came in around them muted and respectful the way they did when there was a body laid out. They settled into the chairs, on to the stools and benches, and let their eyes do the talking for a while. Mostly it was women. Those who were not eyeing the electrical equipment were taken by Moylan’s shoes, which were two-toned, extra-terrestrial, and with an air of Hucklebuck. Maybe the Shimmy Shake too.

  While the practical business of bringing the electricity to the parish was almost exclusively the domain of men, inside the houses the jurisdiction over electrical equipment, kettles, cookers, hairdryers and washing machines, was conceded to women. Only two men came to the summit. First, because it was taking place in a kitchen in daytime, and second, because men refused to be summoned, it outraged their dignity, and nothing in the known world had yet required that absolute submission except Christ, and even with Him there was leeway. The two men were Bat from back the road who came in, God bless all, with cap low and eyes down, and Mossie O Keefe who was the Job of Faha, a man so hexed, not only dogged but whaled by bad fortune, that eventually, by a Fahaean genius for latitude in language, his initials became the thing people thought when things were not OK. You hit your thumb with the hammer, you went over on your ankle, you thought of O Keefe and said, ‘OK!’ (I remembered this years later in a coffee shop on 14th Street when a senior waitress spilled coffee and her curse was ‘Oh Finkelstein!’ and I said ‘OK!’ I couldn’t translate and her look said she didn’t much appreciate it.) O Keefe’s mother died when the cart turned over on her, his father went into the bottle, he himself married the woman in love with his brother, one of his sons went in a threshing machine, the other drowned in a ditch. A Stan Laurel, with abbreviated eyebrows like a pair of French accents, both pointing haplessly in and upward, Mossie took it all without complaint. His good luck was going to someone else, he’d say, and the eyebrows would go up a little and you’d feel that whoosh inside you that comes in the company of something larger than yourself. From his job keeping the grass down on the graves, Mossie’s head had been savaged by the sun. As shield against the sores he now wore a four-knotted handkerchief that had a look of poultice.

  Bat sat alongside him and grasped firmly the balls of his knees. His suit was a brown that had turned a glazed plum. It bagged at the knees and flagpoled his shins, lending him a look ceremonial and derelict. Bat was a man who tried in vain to make himself believable. He often looked like he was in mid-sum and realising he had forgotten to carry the one. Keeping his eyes on the floor, he shook his head slowly and said, ‘If only Napoleon had invaded.’ It was a starter for which there was no finisher, but for the occasional muffled artillery of his gas. Next to Bat, Mary Mulvey performed a little pulling in of herself. She’d had two bits of bad news and was waiting for the third. Mary Bruff, who never went anywhere without her cough, let it off now, and all of Moylan withdrew an inch, as though he were behind a curtain peeping out at the horror of the public. The impossibly pale and thin figure of Jo Ryan slipped in and stood just inside the door. She had a beaten air, a small sensitive mouth and the timidity and shame of those who feel the scars on their soul visible. At the age of thirty, Jo had succumbed to the false coinage that a bad man is better than no man, and married Pat, a cur, who is roasting somewhere now.

  There were others, the room filled and the sunlight blocked at the window, but Moylan couldn’t wait forever. Emboldened by the air of event, and with the fattened authority of farmyard matrons, three hens came inside the open front door, nestling down in a bath of sunshine to watch. Neither in nor out, I was perched on the back step.

  To give Moylan his due, he had his routine down pat, Now I want you first to look at this, a combination of science and circus in an actor’s boom, This, this machine, will do all the work. It will wash your clothes for you. He lifted the lid and drew out a white towel, as though the washing and drying had happened in the time it took him to say the sentence and here was the proof. He had devised this touch himself and was proud of it. It was the only proof possible without electricity and had the added boon of making it seem as if he himself was the current or at least its conductor. Further to this, ten seconds into his pitch a film of sweat was glistening on him, lending him a shine which he didn’t dab away, believing it translated as electric excitement and disguised the actual truth, that he was being cooked by the fire.

  Moylan had all the tools of rhetoric. If you stayed in school past the age of twelve you learned them then. Things like Johnson’s Letter to Chesterfield or various bits of Swift were taught, you knew your clauses and subclauses and had homework parsing sentences. You knew everything from alliteration, allusion, amplification, analogy and anaphora (‘If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh?’ I could recite every speech of Shylock’s once. God bless the day) to metonyms and metaphors, oxymorons and similes. After Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres, the next thing you learned in Latin was non solo sed etiam. What I’m saying is, it was foundational, and admired, the bit of flourish.

  On Moylan went, letting fly with antanagoge (‘This heater is not as beautiful as your fire, but it puts out more kilowatts’), enumeratio (‘The motor, the pump and the drum, all the very latest’) and epizeuxis (‘Power, power, power’).

  His audience was rapt by the important and foreign sounds of spec and kilowatt in that 200-year-old house, and by touch and look Moylan kept relaying the words to the magic of the machines that sat mute but powerful like idols.

  From time to time, because I was from Dublin where they had been using such things for twenty years, the neighbours kept looking at me to confirm wonders, and Moylan, sensitive to his audience’s every breath, caught on at once and with a looping gesture roped me in. Tell them, sonny.

  Knowing th
e mystic power of jargon, he wasn’t shy about employing the Germanic language of electrical engineering, letting it do the business of marshalling his audience, making them a little afraid and abashed, as though everything they had known, they were just now realising, was not so known.

  Moylan said the first law of engineering was to make the world a better place. (He didn’t state the second law, that without exception everything that was engineered would one day break down, that sometime, and usually one day after each machine had become indispensable to living, that machine would abnegate all responsibility and not turn on, you’d press its red button and it would just sit there looking at you, and you’d press the button a second time as though excusing it that one time it had forgotten its job and forgotten that its whole purpose was to serve this one simple function, and you’d press the red button or throw the switch and an absolute nothing would happen, a less-than-nothing, a minus action because it would seem you were in a worse-off place than nothing happening because now not only had you forgotten how you lived before but you had to find a service man, and while some part of you always realised that you were living in the forgotten edge of nowhere you didn’t have the hard proof until you tried to find a service man to come to Faha. Where? Oh there might be one coming next week, definitely the week after that, or the one following, and, as it slowly dawned on you that to make his journey worthwhile the same individual was waiting for more machines to break down, you kept pressing the red button because maybe today after the bit of a rest you never know it might turn on, and when it didn’t, when you’d tried the pressing combined with a small shove, with a more serious shove, with a shake, descending through the whole sorry declension until you’d arrived at a kick, when the stubbornness of the stupid machine seemed so defiant as to not only lower the flag on the flagpole of manhood but take the flagpole too, sundering marriages by the blank white stare of an unwashing washing machine, any number of men, and some women, would choose to have a go at it, going with the crude iron tools of an earlier time and a zero knowledge, the guts of the machine spilled on the floor and the red button somewhere over there by the time the service man came in the door with his sponsored smile. Is she giving you a bit of trouble? taking a good gander at the home-made devastation before nodding slowly and telling you the third law: Afraid this is going to cost you a fair bit. The fourth soon after: I haven’t the part with me.)