Chameleon On a Kaleidoscope (The Oxygen Thief Diaries) (5 page)

She was really pissed off
that her husband was dead. She couldn’t see that she was in fact
very lucky to have someone, anyone, at home with her, even if it
was only Brian. The house had gotten worse since dad died. There
were pockets of unwiped goo everywhere. It was all too familiar and
yet it was like some sort of dream. Brian without his wife and my
mother without her husband. They’d become a sort of sexless
bickering couple and I was the umpire. In the mornings I’d hear
them stiffly descending the creaking stairs. The undead.

I gave my mother a signed
copy of The Potter And The Rose and joked that it would be would be
worth a fortune some day because it was a hardback and the author
was quite reclusive. She was happy about this until she noticed my
inscription wishing her a Happy Christmas. I had obviously devalued
it. I looked past her annoyance, like I had done so many times
before out the kitchen window at the black defeated trees and I
felt fortunate I could leave. When she got sad about me leaving I
was reminded of all the times I’d left home for Art College in
Limerick or London or St LaCroix or New York. My tears became
easier and easier to hide until there were none.

My constant state of
sleeplessness was like some sort of torture technique where my eyes
were sewn open and I was forced to watch something I didn’t want to
see.

My mother’s decline and my
brother’s misery.

I got up early the next
morning after another sleepless night. I crept quietly around the
kitchen so as not to wake them. The less conversation the better.
There were only two more days before I flew to Las Vegas but I
desperately tried to think of excuses to leave earlier. I was in
exactly the same place I’d sat when I first told my mother about
Father Eddie thirty years earlier. I remember waiting as she
drained yellowish green water from a saucepan of boiled cabbage. I
was about to inform on the coolest priest at my school. At nine
years of age I couldn’t even be sure that what I was about to tell
my mother was controversial. Mostly I was looking for a reaction.
Shock. Disbelief. Laughter. For all I knew I might have been
leading the priest astray. After all, why would a man dedicated to
God want to play with the thing I peed with? The only satisfactory
explanation was that I was evil. Some weeks after I had established
the habit of going to school with my trusty safety pin in place I
experienced what I would later realise was a sexual stirring. As
Father Eddie approached preceded by the smell of his hair cream and
aftershave I actually wanted him to come and sit beside me, to
touch me, down there. I even removed the safety pin, just in case.
This means that my very first sexual yearning was not only co-opted
by the Catholic Church, it was rejected. But the cabbage was more
important.

“
Oh” she said
“he’s just being friendly.”

She dissolved momentarily
as the steam enveloped her. I was her fifth Caesarian in a row. She
barely had time to heal between births. It must have been difficult
for the surgeon to find fresh skin for his blade. Each of us
literally left a huge scar on her. Mid-century Ireland was a
moral-middle ages where Priests, Nuns, Brothers and Bishops were
feared like Gestapo and contraception was the stuff of science
fiction. The way things were back then she was lucky she didn’t
have four more children. So were they.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Open on
a rainy farmyard somewhere in Ireland.
A potato grader juts
out of a barn as underage workers try to keep pace with the
conveyor belts. Cut inside the barn where a young boy pitchforks
potatoes into the funnel of a grader as other boys positioned on
either side of the machine busy themselves separating rotten
specimens from the healthy. They all wear hooded anoraks against
the rain and black potato sacks around their waists like makeshift
aprons. In a close-up we see the uncovered cog and chain mechanism
that powers the conveyor belt and we realise now as we pull back
that the boy with the pitchfork is leaning dangerously close to it
as he works. Another small figure scurries along in the rain edging
past the others as he makes his way towards the boy on the end. One
boy has a shock of ginger hair protruding from his hood and we
realise he’s the same boy from the safety-pin commercial, notices
something strange about the newcomer. His hood is larger and darker
than the others and oddly he carries a scaled-down scythe which
appears custom-made for his size. Suddenly the conveyer belt
lurches and shudders. Something is jammed in the mechanism. The
ginger-haired boy looks in the direction of the upset just in time
to see two little legs in swing impossibly into the air and fall
away again. The grader continues to lurch and grind until the
ginger-haired boy finds the switch. There is no sign of the strange
little hooded boy with the scythe. We hear the voiceover say;
“Tragedy comes in all sizes so keep protective guards on all moving
parts. Issued by the Irish Government for Safety in
Agriculture.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

My mother’s technique for
coping with the grief of losing her husband of forty three years
was to refuse food in the hope that she might join him. On her way
up to bed that night as she carefully closed the living room door
so as not to disturb my television viewing, I had the strangest
sense that I was seeing her alive for the last time. In stark
contrast a memory of her whooping with laughter flashed into my
mind.What the fuck did I care about the television? I was only
sitting there trying to postpone another sleepless night in my
freezing damp bed. An urge to save her suddenly rose within me. I’d
bring my energy intelligence, and wit to bear on the situation. I
won’t let you die ma. Don’t worry I’m here. I‘ll save you. But then
I realised I was powerless. I couldn’t make her want to live. It
was her decision. The living room door was like a coffin-lid
closing over her.

“
You don’t
have a vocation, you should start a family.”

Being sent home from a
seminary before you’d taken your final vows was the kind of thing
that was whispered about in fifties Ireland where, having a priest
in the family was better than a relative in government.

But for my dad it was not
to be.

The Bishop himself had
just ordered my father to go forth and multiply. This was no mere
whim it was an ecclesiastical directive. Had he been around today
he probably would have signed up for online dating. The speed with
which he found the one he wanted seemed to suggest that he might
have had his eye on her for some time. Brenda Sullivan was pretty
and well-off and promised to another. And it didn’t help that her
family were aiming higher than a failed priest. So when he received
an invitation to her wedding his faith quaked. Not good enough for
the priesthood and certainly not good enough for the
Sullivans.

“
God only
breaks your heart so he can get in.” he would tell me many years
later. The Bishop was God’s representative on earth and my father
would do his bidding. In wide-shouldered suits that hung vertically
from his thin frame and well-spoken after his six years in the
seminary he must surely have cut a dash in the countrified
dance-halls of downtown Kilkenny. My mother certainly thought so.
She was taken with his manners and poise and of course his looks.
The Foley brothers had strong intelligent angular foreheads with
brows that sheltered deep-set mostly blue eyes and even in their
later years they took turns throwing their heads back in loud
uncontrollable guffaws.

All dead now of course.
Except for Frank, the youngest at seventy-nine. My mother couldn’t
bear to let him into the house during those first few weeks
following the funeral looking as he did, so much like a skinnier
paler version of her dead husband.

He was like a ghost
knocking at the door.

Her nickname for Brian was
“Flash” precisely because he wasn’t. She complained constantly that
he couldn’t be arsed to find real work and that there fore he was a
depressing influence.
Divorce
seemed like such a glamorous
word to use in connection with him because nothing had happened to
Brian since well, nothing had ever happened to Brian. He was
receiving back-pay from fate. I once walked in on him in the toilet
and found him pissing not into the toilet but in the sink. He did
this so he could continue watching himself in the mirror. It wasn’t
vanity so much as self-surveillance. Directly after his divorce he
was so bereft of ideas about what to do he was like a life-size
doll between positions. Brian making a cup of tea. Brian sitting.
Brian standing. Brian walking. Brian sitting again. Talk about
teachable. If my mother hadn’t managed to fuck him up the first
time she was getting a second chance. They very quickly became an
eccentric modern couple. Her bringing over fifty years of marital
experience to the table and Brian bring nothing at all. He didn’t
pay rent. Her friends remarked on how closely he resembled my
father and how lucky my mother was in effect, to have him
back.

But she didn’t see it this
way. When he drove me to the station on a morning so moist it might
have been regurgitated, I was so elated at the prospect of leaving
that damp rotting ancient island I almost fell out of the car when
it stopped. He mock-saluted and drove away eyeing himself in the
re-angled mirrors.

But it wasn’t over
yet.

From the platform I could
see the farm where Timmy was killed. Much was made of the fact that
I broke into the farmhouse to call the ambulance. Like it was an
act of heroism. But I would have done anything to get away from the
image of my friend dangling by the throat with the hood of his
duffel coat woven obscenely into his pale skin. Breaking a window
was the cowardly thing to do. I should have stayed and helped him.
But as it turned out there was no escaping the horror of that day.
Turning around with the phone still in my hand I was met by an
equally disturbing sight. One of the other boys was busy robbing
the place.

As the train pushed the
damp empty buildings aside I realised my Christmas had consisted of
four freezing days and nights in a damp house with a bitter old
woman and a divorced unemployed barman. No wonder I was relieved to
get out. I left five hundred Euros on the mantle-piece to ease my
guilt. Brian joked that my sister and I should pay him since he was
basically running an old folk’s home for one. He can’t have known
that if he had insisted I would have been happy to set up a
standing order. I looked up and down the train to see if there were
others like me who couldn’t wait to leave this wet washed-out,
rained-on place. The train was full.

ERIN

Erin a pale red-haired
beauty looked out at me from the just opened jpg. She was young.
Twenty-nine is young when you’re almost forty. I had already fed
her email address into Facebook to see if she had a big ass in tow
and here she was not as clear-skinned in an un-photoshopped version
of the same photo she’d posted on datemedotcom but her body was
visible now so that didn’t seem to matter. I leered over profile
for a while before calling her. She had been married before she
said and now wanted kids. She had a little dog she’d bought from
Puppies on Lexington. She was going to a wedding that Saturday and
was doing her laundry on Sunday and hiring a car for the weekend.
She lived in Nassau and though she loved having sex she was
allergic to condoms and so could only do it with a specific condom
made from lambskin.

“
They’re
expensive and not easy to get” she said

“
How much is
expensive?”

“
Twenty-five
dollars.”

“
Each?”

“
Yep”

There was something
refreshing about her lack of finesse. She encouraged me to speak so
she could hear my accent. She wanted me. Pure and simple. No games.
She invited me to go to the wedding with her that Saturday. It
would be a two and half hour drive with and a six-month old puppy
on my lap and three hours being paraded around like a captured
American serviceman. I was thankful to be able to truthfully tell
her I had to be in Las Vegas for work. This impressed her. She was
not quite white trash but getting there. Off-White maybe. Eggshell.
She bemoaned the fact that she couldn’t drink at the wedding since
she was driving but she would make up for it the following night.
She’d recently had a few one-night stands with a Texan who bought
drinks for everyone in the bar wherever he went. She said this kind
of behaviour embarrassed her but she couldn’t refuse a man who
bought her drinks all night.

And yes, she had sex with
him.

“
Did you use
a custom-made lambskin condom?”

“
Well no, not
that night silly, we were, you know, drunk ”

“
I like the
idea of the lambskin condom because as an Irishman it satisfies my
desire to shag sheep and women at the same time”

“
I’ll pretend
I didn’t hear that.

“
I‘ll pretend
I didn’t say it.”

Hearing her laugh I
imagined her covering our child’s ears in her version of our
future. Isn’t daddy awful? I had a headache after forty minutes of
listening to her. I had only stayed that long in the hope that I
might step into the toilet for some phone sex. But she was
obviously thinking further ahead than I was. She wanted to get into
my genes. So when she asked if I had the Orish Curse I pretended
not to understand.