Call Me the Breeze: A Novel Read online

  Patrick McCabe

  CALL ME THE BREEZE

  A Novel

  What we call the beginning is often the end And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.

  T. S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’

  Table of Contents

  The End …

  Jailbirds

  The Acceptance of Doughboy a.k.a. Blobby McStink

  The Community College Ledger (Film Production Notes — dateless)

  Further Reflections on Dr C. and ‘The Confrontation!’ (from the actual ‘Community College Ledger’ itself, some weeks later) (After lunch — free class until 2.15 p.m.)

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  PRAISE FOR Call Me the Breeze

  by the same author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  The End …

  … is the beginning —that’s what the ancients say. Well, we’ll see. But first of all I want to get the rest of this stuff out of the way and leave it exactly as I found it for Bonehead.

  ‘You can’t be a famous writer and go throwing your papers around you like that,’ he says.

  And he’s right, I guess. But he might as well be talking to the wall. I’ve always been that way. As soon as I was finished writing anything, I’d just shove it into a bag.

  A Leatherette Holdall …

  … to be precise. That’s where he found nearly all of the material. ‘Give me that!’ he says. ‘Till I put some order on it once and for all!’

  So I did. ‘There you are!’ I says. ‘It’s all yours, Bone! You can do what you like with it, for all the difference it makes to me!’

  He spent about a month on it, beavering away in his room. When he was finished, he presented it to me: ‘The magnificent Joey Tallon Archibe!’ he says.

  But there could be no doubt about it — he really had done a terrific job. In place of the leatherette holdall, a neat little stack of marbled box files containing all my notebooks and ledgers.

  I’ve had a really good time going through it. And if I was any kind of writer at all, I’d have made something worthwhile out of it, instead of just sitting here rambling half the night, filling up pages with discursive nonsense. I mean, it’s not as if enough didn’t happen!

  Particularly during the seventies, when the old leatherette holdall found itself very much favoured — particularly by anonymous men who had a predilection for leaving it behind them in crowded public houses.

  Campbell Morris

  Although somehow you always felt that in a small border town like Scotsfield nothing serious would ever really happen. That most of what you heard was talk and would never amount to anything much.

  But that was before the ‘Campbell Morris Incident’. Campbell was a salesman who happened to drop by for the Lady of the Lake festival but ended up getting himself killed. It’s impossible to say who started the rumours about him.

  Either way it ended with him being pulled out of the reservoir and the cops going apeshit, raiding pubs.

  It wasn’t my business. I was too busy getting on with my life, pulling pints and thinking about Jacy. She was all I ever thought about in those days.

  ‘He was a fucking spy! And that’s it!’ you’d hear them shouting late at night, full of guilt over what they had done. There had been six or seven of them involved, I think.

  ‘How about we go out to The Ritzy?’ they’d said, as the salesman drunkenly grinned. ‘You’ll see things out there that you’d never come across in Dublin or London.’

  It was a ruse, to get him on his own. They used to show all these blue movies in a barn way out the country. They had dubbed it ‘The Ritzy’ and for a tenner you could watch the films and drink all you wanted. There was talk of Boyle Henry and the Provos being involved in its operation, but you’d never say that openly. ‘I couldn’t tell you anything about The Ritzy’ was what you said if you were asked. ‘I know nothing at all about any of that’ — that’s what you were expected to say.

  And did, if you had any sense.

  The ‘blues’, as they called them, were very popular. Bennett had always liked them. ‘The best of crack,’ he used to say. ‘I always make sure to go out every Saturday.’ But not any more.

  After the salesman’s funeral, Bennett had driven out to the reservoir and sat there for a couple of hours thinking about it all, and his part in it, I guess. He was discovered there a few hours later, slumped over the dash and poisoned with carbon monoxide.

  Whenever I heard things like that back in those days, my reaction would always be the same: finish up my work, head straight home to fall into Mona’s arms.

  I used to tell her everything. The only other person I had ever talked to in that kind of way was Eamon Byrne, The Seeker. We had been at school together but he’d gone off to travel the world. I used to love seeing him coming into Austie’s with the big long beard and the hair flying around his shoulders. Especially when you knew the reaction he was going to get. He always wore this hooded brown robe, the djellaba, and knew that it drove them crazy. He’d sit at the bar and roll himself a joint, without, it seemed, a care in the world. Then the two of us would just sit there, rapping for ages, about Dylan and Carlos Castaneda (The Teachings of Don Juan) and Santana, the band. He was a big fan of their album Abraxas and had brought me home a tape of it. I used to put on ‘Oye Como Va’ and ‘Singing Winds/Crying Beasts’ in the pub just to drive Austie wild. ‘Fucking jungle music!’ he called it, flicking his dishcloth and kicking crates.

  The Seeker (he took his name from a song by The Who) was living in a squat in Peckham and working on an adventure playground. Just listening to him there, you’d be kind of hypnotized.

  ‘Did you ever read T. S. Eliot?’ he said to me one day, and I had to admit that I hadn’t. To be perfectly honest, up to that point I hadn’t read much of anything. I’d read sweet fuck all, to tell you the God’s honest truth. Not since Just William, Biggles and shit.

  I don’t know why, for it certainly seems stupid now. A writer who doesn’t read — sounds really impressive, all right. I think what had happened was I’d developed a kind of a block. ‘I don’t give a shit about that intellectual stuff!’ I used to say, but, almost at once, would feel kind of ashamed.

  That would be around the time that I got put out of the house for having the parties. The council had given me three chances, and this was the last one. There had been all sorts of complaints about black masses and shit, but that was just the old-timers freaking. We’d always have a great laugh, myself and The Seeker whenever we’d get round to rapping about those parties. It was all to do with me playing Black Sabbath albums, and The Seeker going around in his djellaba blessing people and making out he was Charlie Manson. One night he jumped out in front of this old lady and roars ‘Yow!’ right into her face — but with this luminous skeleton mask on. It scared the living shit out of her and got the pair of us done for disturbing the peace. To be fair to the council, though, they weren’t that bad — after that they could easily have got away scot-free with giving me sweet fuck all. Which a few of them would have been damn glad to do. But the fact that my mother had had a hard life (she was in Cavan General Hospital for a while before being institutionalized totally — they wheeled her off gibbering about ‘Chinamen’) kind of helped my situation, and when she passed away they offered me this rundown mobile home on the edge of a tinker camp just a mile outside Scotsfield town.

  I tried the factory for a while after flunking out of school — I drank a bottle of whiskey before Latin class and when the president asked me how ashamed I was (they found me asleep in a pool of vomit) I replied, ‘No, baby, I ain’t ashamed because when you ain’t got no
thin’ you got nothin’ to lose.’

  Which of course is a characteristically acerbic quote from Mr Robert Zimmerman, the defiant Jewish minstrel — not something that the president of the college was aware of, as I was to find out very shortly.

  So that was it then, down the road and don’t come back, you and your Bobby Zimmerman, and then a spell in the foundry ladling layers of molten iron on top of limestone and silicone to make stupid sickles and scythes and then a month or two in that fucking meat factory boning hall before Austie the publican saved my life.

  He’d heard that I’d been given my cards at the foundry — on account of me being ‘a dreamer’ — and that things weren’t so good in the meat factory either, what with me drinking and missing all these days and shit.

  One day I met him on the bridge and, after we got talking, he said: ‘Out of respect for your mother, she was a lovely woman, I’ll give you a try-out in the bar, Joe Boy. But you’d have to be on the ball. Not like I hear you were above in the foundry. Or the meat factory either, the way I’ve been told. You get what I’m saying here, Joey?’

  ‘Yup!’ I said, and I started on the Monday.

  The Seeker would just puff on a joint and out of nowhere then say: ‘Now Rabindranath Tagore. There’s a man worth reading.’

  I still have his books. There’s one of them right here actually, well-thumbed and battered. The Poems of St John of the Cross. ‘To Joey The Man,’ it reads, ‘from his old pal The Seeker — Eamon Byrne, Feb. ’75.’

  That was inscribed just the week before he died — he OD’d in his flat in Clapham, South London. Another time, I remember, he had sent me over The Wisdom of Hinduism. And when I opened it what was there inside? Only this lovely faded primrose (he must have remembered I used to bring a little bunch to Mona), squashed flat but with every one of its petals still intact. And, inscribed beneath: ‘We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time — T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, ’75. Keep believing, Joey! Your old pal — The Seeker!’

  Only for him, I might never have written anything. Whenever I’d get his letters, I’d want to read them again and again. He was always including little quotes like that. It made you want to try and express your own … feelings, thoughts, whatever —

  They’re all to be found here, in amongst these pages so diligently catalogued by Bonehead. Some of them are calm and, I suppose, somewhat measured, while others are more passionate and, at times, even frenzied.

  Although none of them, it has to be said, are quite as legible as they ought to be …

  19 June 1976, 1.05 a.m.

  A bit wrecked. Just in from Austie’s. Wild night. Fucking disco jammed to the doors. Was run off my feet. Feel like …

  3.10 a.m.

  Must have dozed off there. Feel like … I don’t know. Life is funny. Sometimes I think I love Mona and other times I think it’s because I’m afraid of her. I mean she’s older — a lot older, man, you know? So strictly speaking it shouldn’t … well, it shouldn’t be, I guess.

  There are times I weep when I get to thinking about Jacy. A catch comes in my throat and I can’t stop thinking of that long blonde flowing hair. When I do, it’s like a film with my face and her hair melting in and out of each other.

  They found Bennett today. Someone was out walking his dog and he came upon the van. The cab was still full of smoke. Poor Bennett — no more blue movies for him. I have a fair idea who the ringleaders were. Hoss might have been in on it — Sandy McGloin, for sure.

  But that’ll never come out. Everyone’d be far too scared to name names.

  None of it’s of interest to me. All that interests me now is love. Love, like The Seeker used to say, and truth and understanding. Poor Eamon, R.I.P.

  I dreamed about him again last night. He’s just sitting there, smoking his jay — then suddenly he starts to cry out: ‘He’s coming for me, Joey! The Big Fellow! He’s going to … he’s going …!’

  But you never get to hear what it is the Big Fellow’s going to do. All you can feel is his presence right there. As an icy wind blows by. And the next thing you know The Seeker is there — but with flattening beads of brackish blood pushing out of his mouth. I shudder when I think of it and I don’t want to see it again. There was a needle too. A hypodermic syringe, just lying on the bare floorboards. I get headaches when I think of that and it makes me just want to stay in. Not to go out at all, or go back into work or -

  But then I think of Jacy and it’s like the sun is rising in your head. Just that way she smiles when she turns around, like she knows instinctively you’re there. Blue eyes. Blue eyes and blonde hair. It’s fantastic. I have taken up the guitar and am learning a couple of Joni Mitchell songs. I think she’ll really like them. One is actually called ‘California Sunshine’ — isn’t that amazing? The other is … I forget …

  (Some of the scrappier bits of foolscap have no dates at all. This one I’m not sure of, but it looks like it comes from early June 1976.)

  What Jacy Means …

  The worst thing about Mona is her moods. One minute she’ll be perfectly OK — smiling away there, grand and happy, with not a bother on her. Then the next thing you know she’ll be glaring at you, making demands or cutting you dead. Looking at you like you’re the worst piece of filth she’s ever had the misfortune to lay her eyes upon.

  Then other times she’ll be taking you in her arms and covering you all over in kisses, saying: ‘So, how are you today then? How is my best little boy? How is Joseph today?’

  It’s not a nice feeling, not knowing which it’s going to be. It’s the worst feeling in the world, to tell you the truth, and I’ve had it all my life — right from the earliest days when my father would come in, all smiles one night and full of simmering violence the next — and only for Jacy would probably have never known anything else. I often ask myself: ‘Just what does Jacy mean?’ She makes me feel secure and believe in love, that’s what my Jacy means. She helps me and makes me want to — like The Seeker said — believe. Because that, more than anything, is so much of the essence, so important, more than all other things …

  When she came to the town first, she was so beautiful that some of them couldn’t wait to get started. Calling her this and calling her that. They called her a stuck-up bitch, but all I did was smile. And to tell you the truth, it wasn’t so long after that that any time they spoke her name, a part of me would just shut down, and it was like they weren’t in the bar at all.

  All you’d see were these lips moving and over in the corner, the prettiest woman you’d ever laid eyes on, really. The kind of chick you never thought would stop for a second in your town. But she had, and they were so unprepared for it, it was all they could think of doing. Like the worst kind of backward hillbillies. Pathetic fucking bullshit, nothing more or less.

  I knew what was going through their minds, of course, things such as: ‘Why the fuck should we look at her? She wouldn’t pass us the time of day!’ and ‘Flicking her hair like she’s in the movies, fucking Californian whore!’

  Maybe the reason I knew was that, before The Seeker, before I got reading, I might have thought along those lines myself. But not now.

  Not now.

  Not since that first time.

  The First Time

  I don’t need any diaries to help me remember that. She was standing at the far end of the counter, and when she turned my heart skipped a beat. It was like a camera had caught the floating wisps of her hair in slo-mo. She was wearing a zippered blue denim jacket. There was a cluster of flowers on the scalloped collar. She was the spit of Joni.

  Sinking her hands into the pocket of her Levis and fingering that lovely bead necklace, one exactly like you’d expect Joni to wear. You could tell straight away that she played the guitar. I could just imagine her, in a log cabin somewhere with the firelight flickering on her face as she looked into my eyes and strummed. I just stood there watching as
she talked to her friend about Iowa, which is a state in America, of course, but apart from that I knew nothing about it. Maybe they were going on holiday there or something because you could see a travel guide with this coloured cover sticking out of her bag with a great big blue sky and waving golden corn and just that one word — Iowa. I even loved the way it formed on her lips. I would call her ‘My Lady’.

  ‘A pint of Guinness,’ she said, and it was like I was kind of swaying in space.

  Afterwards, when I went home, I thought of her all night. The One, was all I could think, for that was how she seemed: The One who is The Only One.

  30 June 1976

  In Dublin today to score some acid but Boo Boo didn’t have any. Said he’d be getting some at the weekend, that one of the guys he busks with is definitely scoring — windowpane, I think. So we just had a spliff and rapped about her and things in general. ‘She sounds like a cool fucking chick,’ he said and started what was probably the only argument I ever had with Boo.

  ‘I don’t like you saying “fucking”, Boo Boo,’ I said. ‘Not when you’re talking about her.’

  There was a bomb scare in the Film Centre during Taxi Driver but it turned out to be a hoax, not that it would have made any difference for we were too out of it to know what was going on. After that we went to Zhivago’s to get more wine. Boo Boo met some doll he knew and she asked us back to her place for more booze and who knew what else. What else, as it turned out, being mostly Boo Boo blathering on about his band and what they were going to do, world domination starts fucking here. ‘You’ve heard The Sonics,’ he says.

  ‘You’ve heard The Voidoids, The Mojos.’ He cupped his hands and blew the jay: ‘But, baby, you’ve heard nothing.’ The last thing I heard was him saying: ‘And that man there — Big Joey — he’s gonna be our roadie!’