Jude in London E-Book

Julian Gough

• Herausgeber: Old Street Publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

A COMIC EPIC FOR ANYONE WHO LOVES RODDY DOYLE, P.G. WODEHOUSE, BECKETT AND KAFKA, BUT WISHES THEIR BOOKS HAD MORE EXPLOSIONS... 'The Death of the Author is on your conscience!' It was. 'Sorry,' I said. Jude is a penniless Irish orphan, fighting blizzards, bankers and the laws of physics as he walks the length of England. He has not one, but two Quests: to find his True Love -- last glimpsed in the hairy clutches of a monkey -- and to uncover the Secret of his Origins. Within hours of arriving in London, Jude has floored the monkey, won the Turner Prize, battled The Thing, and killed the Poet Laureate. Before the day is out he will be seduced, shot at, kidnapped, and forced to discuss literature with a crowd of Guinness-guzzling authors. But can he fulfill his destiny in the labyrinth of the city, with its ten million temptations? 'What a day! And I never got my cup of tea.' 'Sheer comic brilliance' The Times 'Julian Gough is a wonderful writer' Sebastian Barry 'Julian Gough gives a new shine to an antique mode, the Quixotic picaresque, as he relates the antic adventures of a Tipperary orphan. It's clever, it's nuts, and there are moments of comic greatness' Kevin Barry, Irish Times, Books of the Year, 2007 'Clever and laugh-out-loud hilarious' Mail on Sunday 'This is funny. It is also, possibly, quite serious. Certainly, it endears' Irish Times 'Gough's novel is like the picaresque bastard love-child of Flann O Brien and Matt Groening, and yet is all Julian Gough. Possibly the finest comic novel to come out of Ireland since At Swim Two Birds, it recounts the story of Jude, an orphan, as he wanders through Ireland in a quest to find his true love and uncover the secret behind his parentage . . . Gough makes it look easy, with an instinctive sense of timing, and a razor sharp and subversive intellect' Sunday Tribune, Books of the Year, 2007

Leseprobe

PRAISE FOR JUDE

“Julian Gough gives a new shine to an antique mode, the Quixotic picaresque, as he relates the antic adventures of a Tipperary orphan. It’s clever, it’s nuts, and there are moments of comic greatness” Kevin Barry (author of City of Bohane), Irish Times Books of the Year, 2007

“Clever and laugh-out-loud hilarious” Mail on Sunday

“This is funny. It is also, possibly, quite serious. Certainly, it endears”Irish Times

“Sheer comic brilliance… The ultimate Irish joke”The Times

“Gough’s novel is like the picaresque bastard love-child of Flann O’Brien and Matt Groening, and yet is all Julian Gough. Possibly the finest comic novel to come out of Ireland since At Swim Two Birds, it recounts the story of Jude, an orphan, as he wanders through Ireland in a quest to find his true love and uncover the secret behind his parentage… Gough makes it look easy, with an instinctive sense of timing, and a razor sharp and subversive intellect”Sunday Tribune Books of the Year, 2007.

“Twenty-first century Irish satire has well and truly arrived thanks to ‘Toasted Heretic’ frontman, Julian Gough”Metro, Fiction of the Week.

“Jude makes most other contemporary Irish novels look like a pile of puke” Olaf Tyaransen, Evening Herald

“Like Flann O’Brien before him, Gough has written a highly effective satire of contemporary Ireland by combining an eye for bizarre detail with a relentlessly anarchic prose style and structure… Judein Ireland is an extremely original and surprising book which goes some way to making up for the dearth of literary responses to the changes brought by the Celtic Tiger. Jude in Ireland succeeds where few have tried in making us laugh at the grotesqueness of 21st-century Ireland.”Sunday Independent

“Outrageously comic and satirical… a madcap romp which mercilessly sends up some of the sacred cows of modern Ireland, and even uses child abuse in an orphanage as a source of fun. It’s a brilliant story (a sort of Celtic Tiger Myles na gCopaleen) guaranteed to put the painful into laughter.”Irish Independent

“Gough’s preoccupation with the Greeks at the time of Aristophanes comes across in his writing, echoing the belief that comedy is superior to tragedy, being the Gods’ view. That is not to say that Jude is not a serious novel; it is deeply humorous, but Gough is deadly serious in his writing… With his inventive approach to publishing and disregard for literary conventions, Gough has written an epic novel for the 21st century, which, truly, no one else could have written.”Aesthetica Magazine

“Julian Gough’s Judein Ireland manages an opening line that is bound to become a part of literary history… I defy any Indian reader to read the account of a Fianna Fáil political rally at the beginning of the book and not find it both familiar and hilarious… Judein Ireland is a ridiculous, brilliant piece of writing.”Sunday Guardian, India

“Julian Gough is a wonderful writer” Sebastian Barry

“Julian Gough’s notion that shouting the word ‘feck’ and being grossly scatological will make him seem echt Irish only harms his argument” John Banville

“A tour de farce, a comic chronicle of the history of the Irish psyche which takes the reader from the middle of the 20th century to the post-Celtic Tiger ennui of today, at breakneck speed.”Galway Advertiser

For Anne Marie Fives

Contents

PraiseTitle PageDedicationWelcome.Jude Saves the Universe123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627The Snowy Walk282930313233343536Goats and Monkeys37383940414243444546Alice in Ordnung474849505152535455565758596061626364656667686970717273Gents Anal Cruise74757677787980King of the Artists81828384858687888990919293The Journey in Oil949596979899100Extract from Jude in IrelandABOUT THE AUTHORAlso by Julian GoughCopyright

Welcome.

You don’t need to have read Jude in Ireland to enjoy Jude in London. Like many before him, Jude starts a new life in exile. But, should you be curious, here is a brief account of his earlier adventures.

Jude is raised in an orphanage in Tipperary. On his 18th birthday, a letter arrives which may contain the secret of his origins, but it is confiscated. Jude is sent to the official opening of the sacred boghole in which Ireland’s legendary liberator, Éamon de Valera, had his vision of Irish maidens dancing barefoot at the crossroads. Jude urinates, in error, into Dev’s Hole, and onto Dev’s descendant – the Minister for Beef, Culture, and the Islands. An angry mob pursues Jude, and burns down the orphanage. Jude saves a corner of the letter from the flames before escaping across the fields. An enigmatic stranger, Pat Sheeran, rescues him, and takes him to the Sodom of the West, Galway City. Pat also gives Jude a prototype of his invention – the Salmon of Knowledge – which can distil, from all the information in the world, a single drop of wisdom. Jude discovers it was Pat Sheeran who delivered the mysterious letter. Pat has not recognized Jude. But Jude is afraid to reveal who he is, and ask Pat’s help, because Jude, by urinating on the Minister, has destroyed Pat’s chances of selling the Salmon of Knowledge to the Irish government. Pat abandons Jude in Galway, where Jude falls in love with the first woman he sees, Angela. He makes his home in a church. Angela sets him a quest: she would look more favourably on his love if he looked like Leonardo DiCaprio, and made a million. Then she vanishes. Jude seeks his million from billionaire industrialist Barney O’Reilly Fitzpatrick McGee, who gives Jude a job (while Barney’s daughter Babette gives Jude a smile). But Jude blows up the factory and himself. He persuades the doctors to reconstruct his damaged face in the image of Leonardo DiCaprio. However, the doctors’ experimental skin grafts, using penile tissue, leave him with an uncontrollably erectile nose. He leaves hospital, to discover that property developer Jimmy “‘Bungle” O’Bliss has demolished his home. Jude pursues Jimmy O’Bliss to the private island of Ireland’s former leader, Charlie Haughey. Jude does battle with both, and sends Charlie Haughey floating into exile on an iceberg. Jude returns to the factory, liberates the workers, makes love to Babette, defeats Barney O’Reilly Fitzpatrick McGee, and sets up a socialist paradise in an abandoned gated luxury estate. Jimmy O’Bliss meanwhile seduces and corrupts Angela. When Jude discovers Jimmy has committed Angela to a Dublin lunatic asylum, Jude reluctantly leaves his Galway paradise to free her. Before he walks to Dublin, Babette gives him a ring with unusual powers. In the inferno of Dublin, he liberates Angela from the lunatic asylum, defeats her lover Jimmy O’Bliss in battle, and follows her into exile on the largest car ferry in the world, the Ulysses. It hits Charlie Haughey’s iceberg, and sinks. Jude awakes on the iceberg, makes his peace with Charlie Haughey, and decides to swim towards England, and Angela…

Jude Saves the Universe

I began at the beginning, like an old ballocks, can you imagine that?

~ Samuel Beckett, Molloy

1

I left the iceberg behind me and swam towards England. Yes, somewhere in that dark and uncivilized land I would find her. Angela! The thought warmed my naked limbs, and drove me faster through the water.

On my head the black bag that contained all my worldly possessions began to feel heavy, and to force me under. I adjusted my stroke to one that held my head higher. Then, as I breasted a wave crest, I saw something in the water ahead of me.

Huge.

Very pale in the dim light before dawn.

As I sank into a trough it disappeared, and reappeared as I rose again. Another iceberg? No, there was something not right about it… I blinked the water out of my eyes and looked harder.

The bloated corpse of a white whale?

Its shape was too regular, its lines too straight…

Was it large and far, or small and near?

I heard a scream.

I flicked my gaze along the smooth waves, pausing for an instant at each piece of debris, looking for a human face. I saw nobody.

Another scream.

I looked up, to see a dozen, two dozen seagulls, flying inland.

What were they fleeing? I twisted my neck, to look back over my shoulder.

Dark grey clouds. Black. A storm.

My right calf spasmed in the cold water. The muscles relaxed, then cramped again.

Unable to kick, I gasped with pain, inhaled a little seawater, coughed it up and out. The weight of all I possessed again pushed my head under the water. Gagging, spluttering, I reached up into my black bag, and pulled out the first thing I touched, to lighten it. The jacket of my stained and tattered suit fell to the water.

Not enough.

I pulled out the trousers.

The waistcoat.

The suit floated, grew saturated, and sank, heavy and slow, into the depths of the Irish Sea.

I reached up into my dark bag, again, and touched the cool, curved, metal sides of Pat Sheeran’s gift to me.

The Salmon of Knowledge.

No. That, I would keep.

I dug deeper. A small tube. The stub of her lipstick. All I had of her now. No. I dropped it back in the bag.

I pulled in a hard breath, as the cramp began to pass.

But the shore was very far away.

Too far.

I swam, as fast as I was able, towards the white… Whatever it was.

Oh, I did not wish to die in the gap between Ireland and England.

I let a roar out of me, in a language that was considerably older than English, or Irish.

In instant response, high on the mysterious white object, Angela climbed to her feet. Naked but for scraps of lingerie, her golden hair blazing in the dawn light, she and the sun rose together above England.

I was blinded by the nuclear light. When I had blinked the dancing suns out of my eyes, she was gone, vanished in the dazzle. Gone, the curve of her hip. The V of her thong.

Had Angela then drifted with me on the same currents from Ireland? So close, all along? I swam harder, towards the long shadow of her white island.

As my chilled body made its way through the water, the unnaturally warm low winter sun baked my forehead.

Thus I began to suffer simultaneously from both heatstroke and hypothermia. I had not experienced that particular duo of discomforts since the hot, thundery summer of my eleventh year, in the Orphanage, in Tipperary. The Orphanage! My happy home, before catastrophe and exile! The memory, enhanced into vividness by the heatstroke, came rushing back, obliterating my view of the sea, the waves, the white object…

I was eleven. Breakfast was about to be served. A rumour swept the length of the Dining Hall: Brother Quirke, in his rush to be off to the races at Limerick Junction, had left the Banned Books Section of the Orphanage Library unlocked.

By the time the food arrived, I’d summonsed my courage. Quietly, I left my fellows and my prunes.

I exited the Hall, unheeded.

Now, the Orphanage’s Universal Christian Library itself, full of improving fiction by God-fearing authors, containing indeed the literary fruit of two thousand years of Christian culture, was always unlocked, and I had read each of its books a dozen times. But today I walked past the open biscuit tin containing all seven slim volumes, pressing on instead to the Banned Books section.

The rumour was correct. Though the padlock was looped through the chain, it had not been clicked shut: and so I gently loosed the chain, pulled back the bolt, swung open the mighty double doors, and stepped into the vast, dim, echoing space.

The immense room was divided into the three major categories, in order of Bannedness.

I walked past Obscenity.

I walked past Godlessness.

I headed straight for English Literature, picked up Beowulf, and began to read.

Brother Quirke’s return from the race meeting was delayed somewhat, after he was struck by lightning in the Paddock. And so, by the time he had returned from Limerick Junction, I had made my way as far as the Seventeenth Century, and my head was full. Another summer thunderstorm was brewing, and outside the soft ions gathered trembling on the tips of every leaf and branch and blade of grass.

Inside, in the dense, cool air of the Banned Books Section, deep in Thomas Shelton’s original English translation of Miguel De Cervantes’ Don Quixote de la Mancha, I feared for my life.

Or rather, I feared for the life of Don Quixote. But the two had become profoundly confused: I was both observing and being him. I had, too, mentally translated Shelton’s translation of Cervantes’ place-names into names more familiar to me; and so my Don Quixote was not of la Mancha but of the featureless lowlands of Offaly, and loved a Dulcinea not of Toboso but of Ballylusky. Thus I walked my own fields as Quixote.

I winced as he was struck, and my legs twitched as he ran.

My hand moved to protect my teeth as he was struck again.

2

Thus it was that Brother Quirke entered the Banned Books Section entirely unobserved. He walked the long aisles of Obscenity and Godlessness, looking for intruders; I read on, oblivious.

A steady rattle of hail against the windows disguised his approach.

Yet as he raised his iron-tipped stick above me, the brief storm ended; the sun came out; the shadow of his stick was flung across my page. I ripped my eyes free of Shelton’s translation of Cervantes’ account of Quixote’s life, just as a stick was descending on Quixote, to see the stick descending on me.

My mind and body being already fully engaged in battle, the transition was effortless, and I used the heavy book as my shield to fend off the buffet.

“Zounds!” I said. “Sirrah! Would you besmirch the honour of your name with a Sneeking Attack? Face me, in combat fair and courteous!”

Something was terribly wrong. I put my free hand to my mouth. “Why, my voice sounds quite English!” I said, astonished. My native Tipperary tones had vanished, and with them certain words, certain ways of building a sentence so it would stay up.

I reached for my sword, and realised I did not have one.

I tried to say “Shite and onions,” but it came out as “Soup and fish.”

Brother Quirke, unused to such insubordination, took a step back and scowled. His scorched electric hair stood frightful and erect as he raised high again his smouldering stick.

“Well, this is a most pretty pickle I find myself in, I must say!” I said. Shocked, I said: “I say! Must I say, ‘I must say’?”

I appeared to have suffered some form of Mental Catastrophe, and lost all my sweet and beloved Irishness. When I reached for words, all I could find were those I had just read, a great pile of language going back to the Anglo-Saxon, built up and unprocessed in my head.

Trapped, under attack, without a sword or a language of my own to defend me, I turned to Sancho Panza to request his aid.

He was not there.

How lonely a feeling, to lose so good a friend so thoroughly that he never was at all. The closing of a book is a massacre.

I ran.

Wishing to have my friend back again, I opened the book, and as I ran I read. And back he came, smiling, frowning, living, and all was well.

Brother Quirke pursued me, roaring, through the Orphanage, across a number of nearby fields, and back around through the vegetable garden to the Orphanage again.

The trick of being pursued across rough ground while lost in a good book is to tilt it down slightly, and use the upper peripheral vision to ensure the route ahead is clear.

In this manner we passed a happy hour.

At length it began to rain, then hail again. I did not wish the book to get wet or damaged, and so, still reading, I took shelter in the South Tower. The only way was up: I took the stairs two at a time.

As we passed, some of the Orphans shouted words of encouragement.

“Leather the head off him, Brother!”

Their noble Tipperary speech reminded me of my Mental Catastrophe. I ventured an experiment with my deformity: I spoke a Catholic thought, and it came out Church of England. I tried another: I praised a fine All-Ireland semi-final performance by the Tipperary Under-21 hurlers against Kilkenny, and from my mouth came alien speech of an FA Cup semi-final replay at Villa Park.

Sweet Mother of Jesus, I thought, astonished.

“Queen of Heaven!” I said.

Christ on a bicycle, I thought.

“Good Lord!”

Holy fuck.

“Blessed Union!”

I gave up the attempt to accurately express myself, and returned to my book.

3

I reached the top of the South Tower, and made my way up and out through a skylight, onto the tower’s sloping pyramidal roof, as Brother Quirke came round the end of the stairs.

Scrambling down the wet slates to the roof’s edge, I lay down, unobserved, in the deep stone channel of the rain gutter, holding the book above the water as I read. My head, above the water, baked in the high summer sun. My body, below the water, chilled in the icy runoff as the melting hailstones flowed down the roof as slush into the gutter.

And so, when he finally found me, the hot blood in my head raced, full of images and language; but my languid limbs lay cool and still, numb and asleep in the chill water. As his red face loomed above me, I realised I would be able to answer his blows only with language.

The air around us was electric.

“I don’t know what’s got into you today, Jude,” said Brother Quirke. He shook his head. “Your refusal to cooperate is a most ferocious breach of etiquette.”

“By Our Lord’s Wounds,” I said sadly, “it is.”

The justice of the coming beating was indisputable, yet I felt a reluctance to cooperate. It would interfere with my reading of my book. Art made its call to me, and Life made its call to me, and I must decide. I felt the very air crackle with the potential of this moment, to create me or destroy me.

To whom would I discharge my duty? Brother Quirke, or Don Quixote?

For some reason an old physics lesson of Brother Brophy’s came back to me now. Ah, Brother Brophy’s fine advice is always useful in a crisis.

Art, or Life?

“Assume the position,” said Brother Quirke.

I sighed. And decided.

“Brother Quirke,” I said, “I am currently unable to move my frozen limbs. You would get a better run at me from the top of the roof.”

“True,” said Brother Quirke. “It is hard to get momentum into such a low stroke from a standing start.”

He walked back up the wet slate roof, to the peak. I sighed a second time at what was about to happen.

“Remember to take a good high swing,” I urged.

Brother Quirke swung the iron tip of his copper-clad stick high into the electric air.

Every ion on the Orphanage, and indeed the surrounding fields, rushed up to this new highest point, and Brother Quirke’s hair leapt momentarily erect as the electrical potential of half of Tipperary expressed itself through him.

For the second time that day, he was struck by lightning.

Blazing, he rolled past me and over the edge of the tower roof and, still blazing, down into the vegetable garden.

I sighed with satisfaction for a third time. Physics had always been hard chewing for me, and it was most gratifying to find a practical use for it.

I returned to my book.

My eyes adjusted to the cross-fading light, as the moon rose and the sun set, and I brought the living book closer to my eyes so that it replaced the world entirely.

When I had finished reading it, and closed it, and the hot tears had finally dried on my cold cheek, I looked up from the gutter and found that I was looking at the stars.

4

Oh happy memories!

As my head, above the water, baked, my body, below the water, chilled, it all came rushing back. And I thought, Mighty Stuff! And I said, “How wonderful!”

And I entered the shadow of the iceberg, or whatever it was.

I touched its sheer sides. Brilliant white.

A curiously regular shape. More like an ice cube than an iceberg. No, not a cube either, I realised, as it rotated slightly, caught by a cross-current as it came nearer the shore.

It was neither cold nor hot. Neither hard nor yielding. It was definitely there, but it was barely there at all.

I trembled. Where was she? Had I, like a man in a desert glimpsing a shimmer of sweet water, only seen what I most desperately wished to see?

“Angela!” I cried, and back came the high cry of a gull.

There was no other reply. I swam around the enigma. Smooth. Featureless. No steps, no ladder.

Even my eye could find no purchase on it.

A fresh spasm of cramp. I inhaled water.

This blank thing stood between me and life. And love.

I spat the water at it. Punched it. My fist bounced, but left a dent. Sinking, gasping, I poked it, with a single finger. The finger crackled half an inch into it. Yes…

I drove the rigid fingers of my strong right hand into it, hard. They crunched in as far as the second knuckle.

Lifting myself halfway out of the water, I drove the rigid fingers of my other hand through the surface, pulled myself higher. Crunched another hole, got my toes into the first handhold, and I was up and over the lip…

As I lay there, face down, gasping, shaking the cramp out of my leg, I saw words stamped into the blank white surface, too close to focus. I raised my head and read “Styrofoam Packaging”, accompanied by some mysterious symbols.

I rose to my feet and stood, unsteady, on the flat top. No sign of Angela. It had been a hallucination, then. I sighed.

The rising wind whipped the heat from my wet naked body and I shivered. My manhood had shrunken till it was as small and tight-wrinkled as a barnacle. My erectile nose, too, had tightened to a hard nubbin.

I looked back, across the Irish Sea. The dark shadow of the black clouds snuffed out the sparkling light from one wave crest after another, as the storm blew towards me.

In the far, far distance, I saw Charles J. Haughey, the last Tribal Leader of Old Ireland, floating on his vast white ice mountain into the past. Melting, melting.

I strained my eyes, but the land of my youth was gone. Ireland lay beyond the horizon now.

The last white horse turned grey, and the storm’s shadow fell on me. I turned to survey my little artificial island. My only refuge from the coming storm.

5

The iceberg was made of immense white styrofoam blocks, all held snug with plastic ties. These blocks surrounded and supported a single tremendous object, set down about a foot inside its thick walls of styrofoam. The styrofoam roof which had guarded the top of the object was long since lost, in shipwreck or gale. All that protected the upper surface now was a cloth of fine black wool, ripped and unravelled on the side nearest me. I pulled it back.

The object was a vast, black, concert grand piano.

I knelt, and lifted up the keyboard’s curved wooden cover, longer than a man, to reveal the keys. The number of octaves seemed excessive. I knew of no music which required so many. Reaching down, I struck a black key.

From inside the piano, in a voice like nectar flowing down the throats of a thousand hummingbirds, came a muffled “Owch”.

The enormous lid of the great piano began slowly to rise, and Angela emerged from its dark interior into the fading light. Her golden hair blew about her in the gathering storm. In her right hand she held a large number of the thongs, knickers, and string-like things that she had acquired for her new life in London. In her left hand, she held a selection of bras, bra-like objects, and cloth scraps of uncertain function. She herself was naked. I myself was naked.

Nothing stood between us but a grand piano.

She stepped up, onto the far end of the keyboard. An immense chord boomed from the piano, blending with the booming chords of the sea, the wind, my heart. She walked towards me, along the keyboard, and at each step drove music to the sky. Heel-to-toe, each footfall a little run of ever-lighter notes, ever higher, soaring with my heart, until she arrived, smiling, naked, stopping in a flight of notes almost too high and delicate for human ears.

Would you believe it? I thought.

“Would you Adam ’n’ Eve it?” I said, astonished, my brain still damaged into random forms of Englishness.

Oh, Angela.

My head was spinning.

No, it was the great world that spun. The wind, stronger now, was bringing us towards the shore, and a small stray current had caught us.

Angela and I rotated towards the future on our vast white styrofoam block.

She dropped her thongs in a little heap and reached out to me.

I reached out to her.

She took my hand and pulled me gently towards her.

Were my sufferings over?

Was this the end of my lifelong quest for True Love?

With her beautiful, naked foot, Angela tapped my right ankle behind my left and tripped me, sideways, into the piano.

The wires rang and sang as I fell on them, and I felt the great throb as they yielded, then resisted my fall. I noted that several wires were missing.

I felt her heel pressing into the small of my back, sliding me over the gap in the wires.

I fell through it, and lay winded on the deep-set sound-board, looking up at the sky through a prison of wires.

6

At first I had trouble making out what I was seeing. The huge interior of the piano was almost entirely filled with unravelled threads from the piano’s black woollen cover. They hung tangled in the wires and hammers.

I had been briefly incarcerated like this – though obviously in a much smaller piano – in the Orphanage, years before. The memory made me nervous.

With a crash, the vast black lid descended. And now, in the middle of my life’s quest, I grew lost in the dark wood. Angela did not yet think me worthy of her love.

My eyes adjusted. A little light spilled through a crack.

I wriggled towards it. The lid had been held from closing by the little heap of thongs. I reached up through the gap in the wires and touched their bright materials, backlit by daylight, vivid in the dark. I looped my little finger through the string of a thong of gold and tugged it gently. It slipped free of its sibling thongs.

In the distance, a dozen hammers lunged up and struck a dozen tight wires, and a high cry, almost unbearable, almost too loud to hear, filled the tight chamber, and a blast of brighter light came through the narrow crack.

Angela had stepped back on the keys at the far end of the piano.

The dozen hammers dropped. Another dozen rose, and struck.

The hammers and the sound approached me, deepening to thunder, mingled with true thunder as the storm broke outside. The soundboard vibrated against my naked skin, like a gentle beating. I should not fear the hammers. They could not reach me. Soft hammers of dense felt. They could not hurt me. But I feared the hammers.

There was a pause.

Now she was no longer walking on the keyboard, but playing it. Or was it her playing? The music was strange and wild. Sunstruck and frozen, trapped in a dark space, I wondered was it music at all, or noise? It contained patterns, repetitions, areas of chaos and beauty. Above all this, Angela sang words that were neither Irish nor English.

And then the hammers came for me, in their rising thunder. The energy of the beaten air was almost overwhelming. By turns it caved and vexed my lungs with its power.

I rolled back as far as I could along the pulsing soundboard, under the wires, and was wrapped in a hundred, then a thousand threads, around my torso.

The hammers were almost upon me. I threw myself back the length of the piano.

All my threads pulled tight about me, and a dissident, right-angled thread, running in and out of all of mine, was pulled down through the lot of them like a comb through hair.

The hammers came for me again, descending now the scale.

I threw myself back the way I had come. The thong I held snagged for an instant, on what I could not see, and jerked me to a startled halt; I pulled free, and kept rolling, leaving the thong behind. Angela’s thong! Her colours, my talisman! I reached back and pulled it free, leaving a golden thread dangling.

The hammers pursued me. One snatched at the trailing thread, stretching it taut. Another slammed the thread and, with a high clean note, plucked it from my hand. Threads slid through each other and pulled tight. The unseen player hammered out a charged, charming, strange-flavoured music that spun up and down the keyboard, paused, then repeated.

And now the invisible pianist, by the correct choice of small, perfect movements, used the great machine of the piano to reorder the chaotic air into a sublime order. Air and water transmitted a code which led the fish in the darkness beneath us to swerve; halted the rabbits in the distant dunes; and caused the birds a mile above to shriek their appreciation and fear of the suddenly meaningful air.

The pattern of the music was rich, dense and repetitive. With each pass, as I threw myself through the threads that hung from the hammers, I grew more enmeshed. For the threads, in their passing and repassing, were weaving themselves back into their old relationship. And I, caught in their dance, imposed my naked shape upon their dark material, as it wove itself about me in a pattern rich, dense, and repetitive.

As the web wove tighter about my torso, I tried to push the threads away, but then the web wove itself about my outstretched arms too, until I was jacketed in the finest black wool, precisely suited to my contours.

I began then to worry that the invisible weaver would not halt, would continue to glove my hands and mask my face, as mummies with the mummy cloth are bound.

Mother of mercy, I thought to myself.

“Mummy! Mummy!” I cried, in anguished English.

And I was afraid then, and exerted all my strength, and broke the threads that bound me.

7

I crushed myself into a corner, warmer now in my perfect jacket, with its delicate pinstripe from the golden thread of Angela’s thong. But my legs still stuck out, into the area of music and danger. And soon – after a quiet passage drifting the length of the keyboard which merely reorganised the broken threads, catching them again on the hammers – there was a lunging, attacking piece of music which shook the ribs in my chest. The taut threads rippled in octaves, embracing one leg, then the other, as I tried to swing them free. Then the left hand and the right hand of the unseen player clad my legs in fine cloth, coming together at my crotch with a bravura display of staccato and legato that made me gasp, crescendoing magnificently as it hugged my hips, finally running out of thread at the stirring climax.

Well, you would get used to anything. Now that I had a most marvellous jacket and trousers, I felt the lack of a waistcoat. Something bright, I thought, to shine against the darkness of the suit. I slid back under the gap in the wires and, with trembling hands, freed several of Angela’s thongs from the grip of the piano lid and unwound their silk threads. Cautiously, I threaded the mighty machine.

I waited a moment and, sure enough, the unseen player soon started up a sprightly little tune, with elegant variations on each return, which sent a herringbone pattern through the coloured silks.

My waistcoat was soon finished, woven into an unorthodox yet pleasing relationship to jacket and trousers.

The music stopped. The silence was almost unbearable.

Now what? I thought.

Oh yes! My True Love.

Clad in pinstriped woollen suit and silk waistcoat, my brain crippled into Englishness, I felt ready for the ordeal ahead. Which was good, for it was about to begin.

I heard, far off, a splash. Could Angela have fallen? Jumped?

With an almighty scrunch, the high-floating plastic iceberg struck England’s shore, caught on an English rock, and tipped over on its side. The lid of the piano swung open, and crashed down onto the pebbles of the beach, forming a ramp.

I stared through the wires of my prison. The light was stunning, too much.

After a while my eyes adjusted, and I squirmed out from the warm dark through the gap in the wires, and looked up into a pale blue sky.

The storm had passed.

I walked down the ramp and onto England’s shore.

8

I had never before walked upon land that was not almost excessive in its Irishness. My bare feet touched the beach, each with a crunch. I looked down at the alien shore with great interest. So this was England! Or perhaps Wales.

I picked up a stone, and examined it for signs of Englishness, without result. No doubt a magnifying glass, or microscope, was required. I dropped the stone.

More than the weight of the stone seemed to leave me. I felt lighter. Light-headed, light-hearted.

I looked around me at the long curve of stony, sandy beach. At the dunes beyond.

Pulled in an enormous breath. Held it, savoured it. Sharp, salt air. I drove it out, pulled in another. Ah, the rich rot of the shore.

It seemed to me that to be a young man in a foreign land, journeying on a Quest to win his True Love, was a splendid thing, and I let out a yell of joy that rattled stones along the beach.

But where was she? I looked around me, at the piano and the sea. I scanned wave after wave. Further and further out. Nothing.

Debris.

Broken things.

No life.

Dread, in me.

But then, close to shore, her head, then shoulders rose up out of a trough. Her strong legs bore her up the steep approach; bore up out of the creamy, foaming water her breasts, torso, bellybutton, then the great curves of her hips. I was dazzled and dizzied by the sight of her tiny golden hairs, their captured water-drops glinting in the sun.

As she drew close to me, I drew everything I felt into its simplest sentence and said, “I love you.”

“Fuck off, for fuck’s sake,” she said, and she ran.

Her strong legs carried her up the beach in a long diagonal and into the dunes.

I nodded approvingly. It was a tactic I was familiar with, from the shop-lifted copies of women’s magazines the Lads read in the Orphanage, the better to understand Female Psychology.

She was Playing Hard to Get, in order to make me value her, appreciate her, and love her all the more.

The tactic was working. I began to run after her.

9

The stones were hard on the soles of my feet, softened by so long in saltwater. Angela began to widen the gap between us.

I saw two shoes further along the foreshore. I broke off my chase and ran down and got them.

Excellent English black leather shoes, of the highest quality.

Though on closer inspection no longer black, as the dye had been dissolved by the water and altered by the sun so that they were now a strong dark blue.

And no longer leather, for being scraped up and down the beach every few seconds by the tireless sea, for several weeks, had sanded them to a soft suede finish.

I hesitated. Blue suede shoes, with a black wool suit? I would do aesthetic violence to all I passed. But can we afford such scruples, in the pursuit of our true love? I pulled them on.

We pursued our flirtation for some time among the dunes.

Angela had set a brisk pace: the sheep and rabbits had to step lively to get out of our way.

The long day wore on.

At length my new shoes began to chafe my feet.

I resolved to manufacture miraculous socks for myself, in the manner of Saint Christopher as he fled persecution.

I stopped to gather handfuls of black wool from the brambles on the landward side of the dunes. I stuffed the rough wool into the big shoes, then wriggled each foot into its warm nest.

Off again, through the dunes, running hard in search of lost time.

10

The pounding rhythm of my feet massaged the fibres of the wool, back and forth, back and forth.

Soon the warmth and moistness of my feet opened the tiny scales covering each fibre of the wool, and the fibres aligned themselves into a new and more stable order, their scales meshing like the teeth of tiny gears. After a couple of miles of strenuous running, I had manufactured a fine sturdy pair of black felt socks.

Or perhaps, I pondered as I ran, pedifacture would be the more accurate term.

The judicious application of energy to a disordered system had created order. Though, of course, the overall entropy of the universe had gone up, as it always does, the entropy within the zones of my shoes had been greatly lowered.

Ah, pleasant it is, to pump order into a disordered system on a warm winter’s day.

However, it occurred to me that, should I ever need to wash my socks, I would have no spares. And so I stowed my new socks in my little bag, and stuffed my shoes with black wool, and made a spare pair of socks.

All went well for a while. I made better time in my comfortable socks, and was rewarded with frequent glimpses of Angela’s buttocks. Her brief stay in the Merciful Hour Lunatic Asylum on Dublin’s North Side had put meat on her, and I was impressed by her speed and stamina.

As we covered a dozen, or perhaps two dozen, miles of beach and dune, I absently plucked the fur of some class of local rabbit from the passing brambles, and at length I had an excess of it. I mused on this as I ran. There was always the option of the third pair of socks.

But no, with two pairs of socks you know where you are. One pair on, and one pair drying. What would a man do with three pairs of socks? It would lead to confusion and decadence.

I ran past a rock the size and shape of my head. Ah! Here was my way out of this crisis of overproduction.

Running briskly on the spot, I felted at a fierce rate. Then I quickly stretched and shaped the fresh felt around the rock. Removed it. Hmm… Perfect!

I adjusted my new bowler hat as I ran. Yes, now I would be able to hold my own among the heathen English.

But where was my True Love?

Far ahead, I glimpsed the curve of a familiar, a beloved, buttock, high on a dune’s crest against the pale blue sky. Like a crescent moon.

Then it was gone.

Angela was heading inland.

11

I reached the crest of the dune. No sign of her…

There! Angela’s thong! Or, more accurately, one of her many thongs. I picked up the squiggle of tangerine, and clutched it to my heart. I looked about me.

Her naked footprints on the sand.

I followed them inland through the labyrinth of dunes.

They stopped at the edge of a stream that cut through the sands, exposing a rocky bed. The footprints did not reappear on the far side. An old trick for evading one’s True Love, often practised in Tipperary. In which direction had she waded? Upstream? Downstream?

Ah. Dark splashes of water on smooth, pale rocks by a quiet pool.

Upstream.

I ran on…

12

I followed the stream towards its source.

Sand became grass.

Dunes became low hills.

I emerged into a valley of great beauty. Old oak groves grew in its shelter. The stream chuckled to itself. The air was warm and fragrant.

Across the stream, a red deer appeared, and bent to sip, unaware of my presence.

I stopped my breath. A pregnant doe.

The trees sighed as time passed, and water ran over stones. I could hear her drink.

Finally she swung her casual head, water dripping in a curve, to face my exhalation. She froze a moment to stare at me, then unfroze, and spun, and away with her through the dappled light of the oak forest. A breeze shuffled light and leaves so that the forest imitated the pattern of her skin in every dancing direction, and the deer in mid leap disappeared.

Somehow the warm valley seemed exempt from winter, and all the trees within it were in fruit. I walked on, upstream, and plucked wild plums from a tree as I passed, and ate them.

Further on, I paused in a glade, to listen to the music of the bees. Endlessly the same, yet never repeating.

At length I emerged from the trees into open grassland, punctuated with thorn bushes and young hazel groves, at the far end of the valley. Here, a group of men were improving the situation with shovels.

The native inhabitants of England! Or perhaps Wales.