Call Me the Breeze: A Novel Read online

  I’d fold my arms and vary the voice. Different emphases each time. Are you looking at me? You, are you looking at me?

  ‘Hi, Jacy. Joey here. So how you been then? Doin’ good?’

  I was beginning to feel really comfortable now saying stuff like that.

  I mean, the knowledge was something that had to grow privately within you. You couldn’t go around spouting philosophy all the time. Like The Seeker used to say, You are the you of you. And this was the me of me, the Joey Tallon that belonged in the real world that you could see and touch. The Joey Tallon that had taken himself in hand and set off once and for all on his journey. I repeated the lines: ‘My whole life pointed in one direction. I see that now. There has never been any choice for me.’

  Except that the difference between me and Travis Bickle was that he had always been lonely. He said: ‘Loneliness has followed me all my life. The life of loneliness pursues me wherever I go; in bars, cars, coffee shops, theatres, stores, sidewalks. There is no escape. I am God’s lonely man.’

  But that wasn’t how Joey Tallon felt. Maybe once upon a time he had. But not now. No fucking way now, I repeated to myself. No way.

  That night sleeping like the happiest bunch of motherfucking lambs.

  Primroses

  It was Carmel Braiden from Old Cross Terrace who won the Poem for Peace competition. Boyle Henry presented her with the prize, and a lot of the Peace People from Belfast and Dublin had turned up for the ceremony. Carmel was very nervous reading it but she managed to get through it all right. All I can remember is: ‘The world is a sad place/We see so much waste/Must we turn away, ignore/So that it happens for ever more?’

  That was strictly speaking the opening of the Peace Rally of Hope and Reconciliation. I was pleased to see it happening and hoped some good would come out of it, for everybody’s sake.

  Afterwards, I went out to the reservoir. It was a special place — always had been. It was where Bennett and the salesman and Mona had died. When you sat there listening, you could hear the rustling of the leaves, with the wind coming through them as though it were their voices trying to reach you in order to explain. What exactly it was that had happened and how they were feeling now. Are you up there, Bennett? I kept thinking, but not in a negative way. You could imagine other people there too. Other souls who had long since departed, who had once walked the streets of the town. Or stood there staring out across the water towards the thread of the distant horizon. ‘He used to sing it here,’ I heard Mona saying, ‘and whenever he did, you’d imagine yourself way out there on the ocean’s blue surface in this little boat, just lapping homeward. It always used to make me think of that whenever he’d sing “Harbour Lights”.’

  I didn’t expect Mangan to understand the complexities of the relationship I had with Mona. Or to know what she meant by ‘that precious harbour’. The place of dreams that her and my father never managed to reach. You’d hear mutterings in the town: ‘He bucked her crooked then fucked off both on her and the wife, without even bothering to look back once.’

  But that wasn’t how Mona saw it, and I knew that. She had told me all about it when I’d visit her after school every day. I’d just sit listening for hours.

  ‘I know he loved me, no matter what they say,’ she’d say. ‘And I’m sorry for the pain it caused your mother. But one day we’ll reach that Place of Wonders, the wondrous place, and none of this will matter any more. And all the things that have ever gone wrong, they’ll all have come right again. Because that’s what it’s like there, Joey. And he’s waiting there, your father Jamesy, for my boat to arrive. At night, perhaps, when those lovely golden lights are twinkling. And when it does —’

  She paused before turning to me and saying: “‘Mona,’ he’ll say. ‘Mona!”’

  Sometimes she’d whimper when she said it, or fiddle about with tissues.

  ‘Don’t think bad of me, son,’ she’d say. ‘I know what the rest of them are saying. Because of what I done to my baby.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Mona,’ I’d reply and want to climb inside her stomach so that I could become her baby.

  ‘It could be you,’ she said one day. ‘You could be born again! To me! Then everything might come right!’

  As I sat there I could have sworn I heard her. I listened again to the leaves softly stirring.

  ‘I’m hearing you, Mona,’ I said, then tossed some flowers into the air and smiled.

  I used always to make sure to bring her primroses, which grew in abundance out at the reservoir.

  Total Org.

  As the ‘plan proper’ got into gear, in the days that followed I couldn’t wait to get home, working harder than ever before — carting barrels, polishing mirrors, cleaning taps, all with the same purpose in my mind: Total Org. I had a little garden now beside the caravan and I tended it every day. There wasn’t much in it, just a few cabbages, parsnips and carrots. And a row or two of peas. I thought of it as being a shrine of sorts, in honour of what Charles Manson might have been. The problem with Charlie was that he had made the wrong choices. He could have been Jesus but instead became the devil. He could have been the Buddha but chose to become Hitler. There were two gardens on earth, and I knew that now. In one there were flowers both tender and perfumed, and in the other there was nothing but evil. I stood up and stretched as I shook my trowel. Then I looked at the sky as wisps of cloud drifted across in the blue. The sun glinted off the trowel’s polished metal. ‘You made the wrong choice, Charlie,’ I said.

  Just then Mangan appeared in the doorway of his caravan.

  ‘Who are you talking to, Tallon?’ he growled suspiciously.

  I shaded my eyes and smiled at him. Even things between the two of us had greatly improved of late. I’d started bringing him the odd cabbage or bowl of peas.

  ‘The Only One,’ I said. ‘She alone has shown us this path. The others are but minions. Messengers. Signposts, really, on the road to love.’

  ‘Who?’ he asked. ‘What others?’

  I’d meant Tagore. St John of the Cross. Manson even.

  ‘You cannot arrive until you surrender. And only with her can such a thing be possible,’ I said.

  He stood staring at me for a long time, then went back inside, muttering: ‘Dead people don’t fucking well talk! You’re lucky they don’t come and take you away!’

  He slammed the door and I could see him peeping out through the curtain. But it didn’t bother me now. I had never heard the birds sing so sweetly, knowing as I did that when the ‘precious moment’ came, we’d — all of us — be together.

  ‘In the place where Love lies, Mangan!’ I felt like calling out. ‘In that resting place we like to call our home!’

  But I didn’t. I simply sat there in my garden, cross-legged, and shrugged. Just grateful that the knowledge I’d gathered had become like a kind of armour that protected me. ‘Yeah!’ I heard myself say. ‘He loved Mona too, my father. He loved her and my mother both, if you wanna know the truth! You hearing me? Now they’re all together, up there behind them clouds! Listen!’ I said, and cupped my hand over my ear. It seemed so melodramatic that I almost burst out laughing. But I was glad I’d said it all the same. ‘Naughty daddy!’ I chuckled. ‘Riding two girls at once!’

  It was strange, uttering those words aloud like that, for I’d never have dared to before. It was like now that the ‘moment’ was close at hand — when we’d be together, Jacy and me — that I was practising ‘surrender’. For there was nothing I wasn’t going to tell her. Every skin and layer there was to be shed, I’d shed it. For that was what it was all about, Love. Mona knew that too. That was why I’d wanted to grow inside her. So that that second time I would know all about it, right from the very beginning. But, even better still, believe in it.

  ‘He never meant to hurt your mother, you know,’ she’d say to me. ‘You’ll really have to believe that, Joseph.’

  That night in the caravan, lying with Mona, running my fingers through her long black hair
, I whispered to her what my mother used to say whenever ‘the nerves’ came on. ‘That fucking whore, that slattern bitch! That skivvy Galligan, the husband-stealer! But he left her too, didn’t he? Where did he go? To the Far East? Did he go off on a slow boat to China? Is that where he went, Galligan? Miss him do you? Miss my husband?’

  I didn’t say anything for a while after that. Then I said: ‘Other times she’d cry: “Don’t leave me, Jamesy!”’

  As the dawn came up I listened to some Joni, trying out some more chords. I pretty much had ‘California’ off by heart now. I sang some of it, although I have to admit it was a little off-key.

  I could hear the surf crashing, rising up in slo-mo, washing on to the sand and retreating then without a sound. Sometimes it made you weep, the thought of the ‘precious moment’ being so close.

  It seems extraordinary now, that depth of feeling, but it’s evident here in every scrap of paper. No matter how illegible — and, believe you me, there are plenty of examples of that.

  With quite a number of one’s observations heavily underscored in pencil — a caution against wavering, sceptical tendencies, no doubt!

  23 October 1976, 9-ish

  Just back from the reservoir, sitting there thinking about us and the ordained life ahead. The open road and all its excitements — from Denver to Lincoln to Omaha and then across to you-know-where. Because that’s the heart of her onion! It sounds funny when you put it like that!

  Note to self: Is the world real? Is it an illusion? With form? Without form?

  With The Jace, the answer is yes, it is real. Realer, in fact, than anything you could dream.

  When I had finished writing, I closed my eyes and I could hear her saying she was glad that I prepared everything so carefully, gone out of my way to put so much effort into it.

  I heard her saying: ‘He’s a very dangerous man. And that’s why I appreciate you doing this, for that’s what true courage is: knowing your fear and facing it.’

  I thought: Because it is true. Whenever I think of him, I shudder. Who wouldn’t when you think of what he did that night?

  But love is stronger than any of that. Love and patience and discipline. Love and discipline will see us through. Upon discipline depends the heaven that men desire and upon it rests this world too.

  1 November 1976

  I got the plastic bags, and the sand I’ll be getting tomorrow from a place not far from the camp where they’re putting up a new estate. Went up the mountain and swept the place from top to bottom — again! If this keeps up it’ll be the cleanest home in history! ‘Home’ — even saying the word makes me feel at rest. For that’s now how it seems, anything it might have been before no longer having any meaning. Cave of Dreams most precious. Where you belong, where I belong. Where we belong. I know … I am perfectly aware that the first two or three days will be hard. Until slowly the layers begin to strip and our two souls bond, entwine. The self, hidden in all things, does not reveal itself to everyone. It is seen by those of subtle and concentrated mind. What we must do is concentrate on the onion, take each layer one at a time. This is essential.

  Remember: Time of its own power cooks all beings within itself. No one, however, knows that in which Time itself is being cooked.

  A Good Laugh

  On the way back from getting the sand I remember meeting a couple of the boys from Austie’s. ‘Hey! Travis Bickle? You lookin’ at me?’ they shouted. ‘Because if you’re not lookin’ at me, who are you lookin’ at?’ Then they bawled: ‘I just hope we don’t get the weather you’re expecting, Tallon!’ laughing away at my US army jacket, which I’d buttoned all the way up to my neck to hide the sand. I did three or four runs so as not to look too conspicuous. Then I practised in front of the mirror with a couple of the bags strapped to my waist. I drew with my gunfinger, then wheeled sharply. ‘You doin’ good then, Jace? You are? You feelin’ OK? Your hair — it looks real good. Huh? Huh? Yeah!’

  One thing I was afraid of was that they might slip, but they held pretty steady thanks to the duct tape I’d bought in Provider’s. I did some exercises while still wearing them. They made it much more difficult, of course. But also much more beneficial. I did fifty press-ups. All the time it kept going through my head: Thank God for this chance, this precious moment. I’m working long hours now some six days a week. It’s a long hustle but it keeps me real busy.

  She is not like the others.

  I sealed all the bags then tried to get to sleep as best I could. But it was hard. What I wanted more than anything was for it all to be over. That it all would end so it could begin once again — with each new day being born in the way it ought to have been the first time.

  (All the stuff from Mountjoy Bonehead has pasted into a number of ‘Jail Journals’, essentially thick, bound notebooks with various items of correspondence clipped or stapled into them. The writings themselves are far from chronological — quite erratic, with some of them typed, others handwritten. Quite a few a mixture. There were long periods when I didn’t write anything at all inside, being overcome by blackness, melancholy … I don’t know — maybe just not seeing the point. Months could go by without me writing so much as a word. Even years.)

  Jail Journal (subtitled: ‘Diary of a Kip’)

  It has been hell in here for so long ever since I came through that fucking gate that I don’t even like to talk about it, much less write down my feelings in a notebook like this or anywhere else. After the hacksaw business the screws never left me alone, in particular one of the kicking squad — kind of like Tuite’s ‘Heavy Gang’ — who’d got it into his head that me and Bone were definitely queers. ‘You needn’t think you’ll get out of it that handy!’ he said to me one day when he came up behind me in the yard. ‘Topping yourself with a hacksaw blade. It’s not good enough for you terrorizing women but now you’ve turned queer-boy as well. Well, don’t worry, my friend, I’ll see you finish your term. You try that again and I’ll bust your balls! I’ll sort you out good and fucking proper, Mr Taxi Driver! You see if I don’t!’

  It came to a head and one day I lunged at him in the workshop. Which was a mistake for he had been waiting for it and I came off the worst. ‘I’ll put that other eye out for you, you half-blind fucker!’ he said when he had me down on the ground. They didn’t do that, but him and the rest of the kicking squad took me into the toilets and gave me a beating I will never forget. Bone said he’d get them but there was nothing we could do. I didn’t talk much to anyone after that and to tell you the truth I don’t think I ever would have if things hadn’t changed in the fifth year when the new governor Mervin Recks was brought in to take charge. This would be around the time when the first junkies had started to appear, all these porridge-faced Dubliners with dark eyes sunk in their heads, traipsing around the place like Dawn of the Dead. Me and Bone were sitting in the TV room watching U2 one day (I couldn’t take my eyes off Bono — he seemed so sure of what he was doing) when this fellow in a tracksuit sits down beside us and asks for a smoke. ‘What are you in for?’ says Bone, and when he says: ‘I got caught with seventy grand’s worth of gear!’, asks him maybe could he get us a telly, or a couple of Walkmans at least. ‘I’m bleedin’ talkin’ about gear!’ says your man. ‘Smack, you stupid bleeding tinker!’

  Well, when he said that, you can imagine the reaction of Bonehead — it took three of us to pull him off him!

  ‘How dare you say that to me!’ he yells. ‘I’m one of the Stokeses of Rathowen! I have me own house, you jackeen drug addict bastard!’

  Much of the diary for those four years is quite banal and tedious, with one day the same as the next. There’s this deadening rhythm going through it. And only for Mervin, to tell you the truth, I don’t know …

  Whether I’d have made it or not, I mean.

  A lot of them said that he took a shine to me and Bone and that because of it we got far more than we were ever entitled to. I don’t know about that but one thing I do know is that Mervin’s arrival chan
ged the fucking place for ever. I won’t say the years after he was appointed were heaven but it sure did make it more bearable, the opportunities he offered you enabling you to forget the sickening smells that clung to the place, the stench of pisspots, fags and underwear changed once a week mixed up with that of overcooked food, disinfectant and detergent. It was as if the minute he came those smells kind of turned around and died. Which they couldn’t have, of course, but you definitely didn’t notice them. Not so much.

  ‘I’ve seen you writing the odd time,’ he said to me one day, and of course I denied it. Because at first I didn’t trust him. As well as that, I was embarrassed. If I’d been full of shame about attempting such things before, well, as you can imagine — the kicking squad can work wonders for your confidence — I was twice as full of it now. ‘No,’ I said, ‘as a matter of fact, Governor, I can barely write my name.’

  If it had been anybody else, I suppose that would have been the end of it. But Mervin knew how to handle you and it sort of didn’t seem like you … were being used, I guess.

  So in the end, I confess, he got around me. We used to have these chats in his study and, during walkabout, he’d come into the cell and spend some time there. He couldn’t get over Bonehead. ‘Does he ever talk about anything else?’ he asked me. Meaning travellers.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He talks about football.’

  He was football mad, in fact. Which really did my head in, for when he got started all you’d hear would be: ‘Who scored the winning point in the All-Ireland Final in 1954? Go on then, Joey, who? Who?’

  I never had the faintest clue. But Mervin did. He was nearly as bad as Bone. It was after one of those chats that the two of them cooked up the idea of the football tournament. The Mountjoy Gaels A wing we were called and what a collection of fuckers as ever was let near a football pitch! We had the little junkie guy, who turned out to be like a streak of fucking lightning, scoring a hat-trick on his first outing alone. Bone was in goal and didn’t let one past. The only thing about it was he never shut up about it now. It was night, noon and morning football in the cell. ‘We’ll fucking take her, Joesup!’ you’d hear him saying, pacing up and down the floor at all hours of the night. ‘We’ll burt the fuckers!’