Everywhere
by John McGroarty
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: None.
Description: A tale of lost love and lost souls on the rain-soaked streets of Castlemilk.
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Malcolm told me that he had seen her. Had seen Andrea down in the shopping centre. He was sure it was her, and Malcolm was not a man to lie or to make things up. Not that I knew. Nor was he a fool. Because Malcolm knew about me and Andrea. All about me and Andrea. What it meant to me. A subtle one, Malcolm. He told me as if he were making a confession. Softly, his voice gently lilting her name into my ear. It wafted in like perfume to soften my calloused soul. Lighten. Stir. She was beautiful, her face as dark as a night walk home from Carmunnock. Her eyes the stars. Her body the still blanket of the fields. Home across the fields. Andrea singing “there’s my baby, lost that’s all”, her long ebony bones enwrapped in mine. Her telling me how she would be mine for a thousand years, how all the possible worlds were hers when she looked into my crazy Castlemilk eyes. How she saw me from her throne, how she would take off her veil only for me, how the beams of our house would be cedars, our rafters firs, how she would never abandon me, for I had loved her, and for that I would someday find, through, and for her, the kingdom. The universe in me. Greatness, strength, modesty, victory, awe. Malchut at the root of time.
Where I was then was the anus of time. I had never amounted to anything in this world or any of the other possible ones. That was true. Had never been anything before Andrea came, had never become anything since she went. But, for that summer I was somebody, really was somebody, a full, conscious, believing, living, loving, being. The attack came on me suddenly one day in April, and indeed it was cruel. It was as if I had been cast out of somewhere, taken and wrenched like a small mote of flesh from the carcass of my former life and thrown into the howling wind of an infinite slaughter. My chest was caught in a vice, my hands and feet were like ice. I could not sleep. I could hear screams from other spheres at night. Could hear the littlest insects gnaw and spit out their webs and breathe their glassy breath. I wanted to join them, to burrow into the dark places, to fill my mouth with straw. To be as they. But no comfort did I find among the rats and the scarabs. The ground beneath my feet and the sky above my head were scalding me, making my interior the only cold place. My brain ice, my eyes Baltic blue, my body hollow. I was impelled to walk, to run, to try to escape, to find something to shelter me. I walked all over the scheme. Up and down Castlemilk Drive incessantly for three whole days and three whole nights. Down through Spittal to Rutherglen, through the south Glasgow parks to the very limits of the known world. Along Ardencraig Road up across the fields to Carmunnock and into the Braes. Into the trees, climbing them to the very top. Screaming at the rain. And then back down and round, and round, and round. And back down Carmunnock Road, back down Ardencraig Road. And so on for weeks without end. And then, one day, Andrea was there.
I am almost completely alone now. I only have Patrick. And my job. I never speak to any of the people at work. Not even when I’m spoken to. I am a naughty little boy. But I do my job well. Better than most, so they let me stay. I know what to do, exactly what to do, so I never make a mistake. No one has to tell me anything, no one has to communicate any information. That’s the way I like it. I speak to Patrick, true, but he never speaks to me, so there’s the balance. He will be a hundred next month. I think he will never die. He is worse than me because he will never die. I think that’s why he hardly ever speaks. He knows he is worse than me, worse than anyone. The last time he spoke was at the doctor’s surgery last year. A man tried to speak to him. He was a stubborn one, that man. He kept trying to get Patrick to speak. Kept asking him daft banal questions. And then, when he asked him his age, Patrick struck. Ninety-eight he said, emotionless icy voice. The man didn’t believe him. It’s true, I nodded. He’s thirty years older than me he said to his wife, look at him, ach, he let out a long sigh and sat back violently in his seat. After a few minutes he looked at Patrick and shook his head. Then he was called off in to see the doctor and Patrick said nothing more. He was in the wars, Patrick, the Spanish one and the one nobody really talks about. His eyes are grey, once they were blue, Maria told me before she went into hospital and never came back out. His hair was long and his balls were of steel. I was only a wee boy then. Patrick didn’t let me go, wouldn’t let me go. I never cried about Maria. I was too wee. I never cried about my parents either. And I don’t believe I shall cry for Patrick, for he will never die. Steel never rusts. I was a strange little child. Like a small animal. Maria was gone, Patrick was mute. I remember one day I came home from school and I heard some noises from upstairs. I thought Patrick would be at work. I climbed the stairs and Patrick was lying on the bed he used to share with Maria. He was crying softly. Patrick was crying. What’s wrong, Patrick, I screamed at him, what’s wrong? What’s wrong? But he wouldn’t tell me. He sat up and wiped his eyes and went downstairs and made the dinner. He never cried again. At least not in front of me. I do believe that Patrick thinks he will never die too. I can see it in his grey eyes sometimes when I look at him. What did you do, Patrick, to make yourself so bad? I sometimes ask him, was it betrayal? Was it resignation? Being broken? Giving up? What was it, Patrick? I was a little devil with Patrick, always playing mad games with his silence and his iron will and his immortality. For in truth he was not bad, he was a good man. His milk was good, it was just that there was no honey. We lived in the land of milk, of good milk, but no honey. Aye, in the land of milk. But no honey.
If I was a strange little beast, then Andrea was a unicorn. A black unicorn. A face burnt black by floating too near the Sun, she used to say. I had never seen a black person before, except on TV, in the movies. She was exquisite, Andrea Costello. Her long sable mane, her almond toast eyes, a black unicorn. She stepped out in front of me in Castlemilk Drive and looked into my eyes. She wouldn’t let me past, no matter how my demons whipped me on.
“I’ve been watching you,” she said mysteriously, “and I know what you are looking for.”
I threw up my arms in a sort of surrender. For in truth I was ready.
“You are looking for me, all your life, looking for me; I am wine mixed with myrrh, I am honey.”
Then she reached out and touched me. Touched me on the face. Her fingers were warm and soothing.
“You are cold,” she said, “like ice, like a frozen waterfall.”
I wiped some sweat off my face, contradicted, “No, I am hot, I am burning inside.”
“I’m not talking about that,” she said, leant forward, and kissed me.
Nobody had ever kissed me before. I was a virgin to the touch. Never been touched, never been kissed.
“Did you try to fill yourself with straw? Try to live with the rats? Be an insect? Try to get behind the skirting board? And thus, to escape?”
She took me up to her room and we did things to each other that I cannot tell. Secret things. Her naked body was like a shadow on the moon. Like the equinox of some lost world. Verdant as music. For a moment I thought she was going to laugh at me. A voice in my skull said it. But she didn’t. She smiled right into my soul. Shattered, fragmented the ice. Let the water fall. She set me free. We slept for a while and then Andrea got out of bed and went over to the cupboard. I looked around the room. It was like a library, full of shelves of books and piles of records. Thousands and thousands, and it seemed to be much bigger than was possible for a council house in Castlemilk. It was labyrinthine, and I had the mad feeling that I was weightless, that I was floating in space. I got up to look out of the window but didn’t make it as she reappeared from the cupboard with a camera in her hands. It was an automatic Polaroid.
“I want you to take my photograph,” she said. She turned on all the lights.
I pulled on my jeans and took the camera. She posed with her right hand up behind her head and her left hand on her hip. I clicked the camera and the photo shot out of the front slot. Click, whirr, rip.
“Let me see,” she said, and held it up to the light.
“Isn’t she beautiful?”
The photo was of a Japanese woman with ruddy red lips. Pot belly and raven black diadem.
“Quick, take another. Don’t think!”
I took hundreds of photos of Andrea and each time a different form appeared in the print. At first there were only beautiful women from different countries, but slowly this form faded and others took its place. All the races and faces and ages of all the peoples of the world. Old women so fat they looked like tired mountains, old men with sad disappointments in their eyes. Young childish hope. Mad teenage fear. Middle age angst. Aged terror. Twisted faces, smooth faces. Happiness. Hatred. Peace. Guilt. Greatness, strength, modesty, victory, awe.
“Stop,” said Andrea, “that’s enough, give me the camera. And take your jeans off.”
She took a photograph of me and put it in the middle of the pile.
“Now you can’t turn back,” she said.
She walked over to a bookshelf and pulled down an old green-backed book. She opened it and, looking at me, began to read:
“I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved? were we not wean’d till then?
But suck’d on country pleasures, childishly?
Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers’ den?
‘Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be.
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, ‘twas but a dream of thee.
And now good-morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love, all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room, an everywhere.”
Since Malcolm told me about Andrea’s return I have been here in the street looking up at her room. I have been watching for that light to go on in her old room. To go on everywhere. It hasn’t stopped raining for over a week. It’s not summer now. There are no summers now. Only long rainy days. Perhaps I will have to wait here for years. Wait for a thousand years. Perhaps the rain will never stop. Perhaps the light will never go on. Perhaps everywhere is nowhere. How will I live then? How will we all live then, if everywhere is nowhere?
At the close of that summer, Andrea told me a secret. It was not something I had expected but on later rationalization it made perfect sense. She wanted to be a star. To be famous. She wanted her name to be known. For Andrea had honey, but no milk. She lived with her mother on benefits and dreams and clouds of melancholy. She was like a negative photograph of me. She was a singer in a band. She wrote some songs and they played different bars and clubs in the south side. They usually played popular hit-of-the-moment stuff and Sinatraesque ballads to finish up, but sometimes they would slip in one of her metaphysical John Donne inspired dirges that nobody could make head nor tail of. The last time that I saw Andrea has a house of its own in my memory. A place apart. It is burnt into my brain like the pain of the first lost love that it was. She invited me to hear one of her performances. It was in one of those grotesque lounge bars that sprung up like fungi in the eighties. Gaudy blues and pulsating reds. Neon and bottled beer and liebfraumilch for yer bird. The pub was busy. It was Saturday night and all the madmen were scrubbed and had the missus in tow. Stuffed into cheap suits and designer shirts and caked makeup and I-mean-business twin-suits. Cheap Champagne Charlies and Charliesses in showers of peroxide and chib marks. There were a couple of teams of afternoon shift drunks. Middle-aged men feart to go home and young tickets with no home to go to. Andrea’s band was stuffed into a corner down a flight of stairs next to the toilet. We had already had Come on Eileen and Abracadabra (Ah waant tae reach oot an’ grab ye) and Eye of the Tiger and Up Where We Belong (twice) when it happened. Nobody heard it at first. Nobody was listening. It had to break in through the banality and the gruesome glitz of false joy. But then the chatter stopped, the bottles and tumblers were put down, and everywhere descended like the Holy Ghost.
……. Don’t you know, you’re life itself………..
Like the leaflings to the tree
Oh my darling cling to me
For we’re like creatures of the wind
And wild is the wind
……. Wild is the wind ……..
When she finished her voice seemed to hang there among the cleaning product vapour and the fag smoke for a few minutes and then was overpowered. She was shaking, like as if she were possessed or trying to control something, trying to stay on the ground. For a moment I had the absurd feeling that she was going to fly. Going to levitate, up, over, and right out of that dive. But she snapped together and came up the stairs. Nobody was paying any attention again. The spell was back in the jar. As she moved up the stairs, a fight broke out right next to where she had been playing. It was me who wanted to levitate. I moved to greet her, to take her in my arms, my love of the ages, but she pushed past me and went up to a group of men at the bar. I watched at a distance for a moment and then approached. The circle was closed. Come on, Andrea, let’s walk home, I need to see the stars, to go and catch one, to get with child a mandrake root. She turned and looked at me. Looked but no longer saw. I was struck by the idea that she had lost her eyes. That she was blind. She was angry with me. I’m going to a club with Charlie, he has a contact in a record company. I looked at Charlie. He had a frizzy perm and a two day shadow on his boney face. When he spoke he sounded like an American. Why don’t you come along, he said. Andrea was looking around searching for something with her blind eyes. She looked right through me, right through everything, right through everywhere. I saw her black unicorn levitate up and out of her. It hovered round the pub for a while dazed like a lost child’s balloon. Then it started to panic. To bolt. To try to get out. It started battering itself off the ceiling. It was now terrified. Its horn broke off and fell down into the filthy carpet of the pub among the spilled booze and the fag ends. It was covered in blood and screaming wildly. It dropped and then battered itself against the ceiling over and over again. I couldn’t watch anymore. Couldn’t listen to the dull thumps and the screaming. I left the pub and started to walk up the road. I didn’t march madly as I had before. My step was heavy, slow, but steady. I was slowed down by the honey, by the mandrakes, and the wine mixed with myrrh. The stars were there but they no longer shone like they had done in Andrea’s eyes over the fields home from Carmunnock on that first dark night when the world had just begun.
That summer, by my troth, we fell in love with the world. We walked all over that wonderful dear green place. And green it was. We walked in places that nobody knew except us, down backstreets, through arbours and city lanes, down into stony crypts among tombstones, and back up into the world of the living light and the silly old sun. We sat in empty cafes and bars. We heard the silence and the click of the clocks and the tick of time. We made love in long lethargic afternoons. We learned how to be human beings. We learned how to love. We read the spirit of the world. Read books in Babel. We were the hollow men, we measured out our days with coffee spoons, we sang the songs of innocence and experience, bathed in the song of songs, swam in the holy sonnets and waited with Josef K at the gates of forever. We ran feverishly through the streets of Moscow and Petersburg with Raskolnikov and Prince Myshkin. She Nastasya Filipovna and I the idiot. We sailed the wine red sea and hunted the white whale with Ahab. We searched for light with Beatrice in the netherworlds. And for a few short hours, at least, we found it. Paradise. In Andrea’s room and on the streets of a Glasgow housing scheme. From the inferno to purgatory to paradise. All we had to do was will it. We swore eternal allegiance in the dark, lit candles to the dead gods, slept in cemeteries, cried for the departed and for those still to come. We drank cheap wine, got drunk, pissed ourselves, smoked hash, dropped acid. We laughed unafraid. We were gods. We smelt the world anew with each day. We knew then that we would never die. That this world would never die. This world of light and love and honey would never die. That it would be, forever. This is what we did, by my troth, after we loved.
The weeks have become months. It is February now. An old year has gone and a new one has come. Still the light in Andrea’s room has not gone on. Still Patrick has not died. Still the rain falls. Still the waterfall is ice. I have finally come to a decision. I am going to go up. Going to go right up and chap on her door. I cross the road and push at the close door. It is open. The intercom is all mangled. I climb the stairs to the top. There’s her door. A little nameplate with some letters faded. Costello. I rap on the door. There is no bell. Nothing. I bang. Nothing. I turn to go and I hear the door opening. A twisted lame old woman squinting at me. Wit dae ye waant? Mrs Costello? Aye. I’m a friend of Andrea’s. Silence. Who’s Andrea? Can I come in? Aye, why no. She walks into the living room. Andrea, don’t you know Andrea? Naw. Is she no yer daughter? Ma daughter? I waanted tae huv a daughter once. I dreamt aboot it a loat. But… No, she was here. No a dream. I was here, every day, in that room. I point to the room. Point to everywhere. When wiz this? Wit did she look like, this Andrea? I don’t know, nearly thirty years now. She was, she was black, really beautiful. Black? Aye. Naw, son, no here. I turn to go, saying sorry. Wait, black? There wiz a lassie came tae ma door a long time ago, she left a packet fur somebody, but I cannae remember the name. Wit’s yer name, son? I think for a minute. Malcolm, I say. She looks at me weird like then. Aye, that’s it, fur Malcolm. She claps her hands together and smiles a toothless smile. In here. She opens the door. The door to Andrea’s room. She goes into the cupboard. I step into the room and look around. It is completely stripped and smells musty. There is no bookshelf, no piles of LPs, there isn’t even a carpet on the floor. Just a light bulb hanging in the middle of the room. The walls are grimy and the skirting board broken in places. Here, says the old woman, handing me the packet. I turn it over in my hands. There is no writing or any other mark on it. I rip the brown paper off. Inside is a book. The collected poems and songs of John Donne. And a photo-album. I open the album. There are all the pictures I had taken that day so long ago. The day I lost my fear of life. The day I first loved. In the centre of the album there I am, as young and naked and stupid looking as the day I was born. Someone has written below the photograph, “you’re in the middle now, there’s still no turning back”. Aye, says the woman, there wiz a letter tae. She disappears back into the cupboard. Andrea, aye, that woman who brought the parcel was black, aye, I’m sure, though I cannae really remember that well. I open the letter. Wit diz it say, son, I cannae see waeoot ma glasses. I look at her. It says, “all the photos are the kingdom. And you are too”. Wit? Wit’s the kingdom? “Greatness, strength, modesty, victory, awe. Malchut at the root of time.” Ach, I cannae hear ye very well, it disnae matter. She starts to move out of the room, I huv tae take some tablets, son. She stops. Malcolm? Aye. Malcolm wit? McGuire. She looks at me closely. Patrick McGuire’s grandson? Aye. She studies me for a minute in silence. Tell him I’ll be seeing him sometime, sometime soon. I nod, aye, I will, Mrs Costello. What’s your name, your first name I mean? She smiles. Maria, she says. Tell him that, that Maria Costello will be waiting for him someday soon. She shuffles off to take her tablets. I sit down in the middle of the room and look at the photos. At the kingdom. Aye, how shall I live now in this land of milk and honey? How shall I live now that everywhere is nowhere? How shall we all live in this land of milk and honey now that everywhere is nowhere? How shall we all live? How shall we live?
Swearwords: None.
Description: A tale of lost love and lost souls on the rain-soaked streets of Castlemilk.
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Malcolm told me that he had seen her. Had seen Andrea down in the shopping centre. He was sure it was her, and Malcolm was not a man to lie or to make things up. Not that I knew. Nor was he a fool. Because Malcolm knew about me and Andrea. All about me and Andrea. What it meant to me. A subtle one, Malcolm. He told me as if he were making a confession. Softly, his voice gently lilting her name into my ear. It wafted in like perfume to soften my calloused soul. Lighten. Stir. She was beautiful, her face as dark as a night walk home from Carmunnock. Her eyes the stars. Her body the still blanket of the fields. Home across the fields. Andrea singing “there’s my baby, lost that’s all”, her long ebony bones enwrapped in mine. Her telling me how she would be mine for a thousand years, how all the possible worlds were hers when she looked into my crazy Castlemilk eyes. How she saw me from her throne, how she would take off her veil only for me, how the beams of our house would be cedars, our rafters firs, how she would never abandon me, for I had loved her, and for that I would someday find, through, and for her, the kingdom. The universe in me. Greatness, strength, modesty, victory, awe. Malchut at the root of time.
Where I was then was the anus of time. I had never amounted to anything in this world or any of the other possible ones. That was true. Had never been anything before Andrea came, had never become anything since she went. But, for that summer I was somebody, really was somebody, a full, conscious, believing, living, loving, being. The attack came on me suddenly one day in April, and indeed it was cruel. It was as if I had been cast out of somewhere, taken and wrenched like a small mote of flesh from the carcass of my former life and thrown into the howling wind of an infinite slaughter. My chest was caught in a vice, my hands and feet were like ice. I could not sleep. I could hear screams from other spheres at night. Could hear the littlest insects gnaw and spit out their webs and breathe their glassy breath. I wanted to join them, to burrow into the dark places, to fill my mouth with straw. To be as they. But no comfort did I find among the rats and the scarabs. The ground beneath my feet and the sky above my head were scalding me, making my interior the only cold place. My brain ice, my eyes Baltic blue, my body hollow. I was impelled to walk, to run, to try to escape, to find something to shelter me. I walked all over the scheme. Up and down Castlemilk Drive incessantly for three whole days and three whole nights. Down through Spittal to Rutherglen, through the south Glasgow parks to the very limits of the known world. Along Ardencraig Road up across the fields to Carmunnock and into the Braes. Into the trees, climbing them to the very top. Screaming at the rain. And then back down and round, and round, and round. And back down Carmunnock Road, back down Ardencraig Road. And so on for weeks without end. And then, one day, Andrea was there.
I am almost completely alone now. I only have Patrick. And my job. I never speak to any of the people at work. Not even when I’m spoken to. I am a naughty little boy. But I do my job well. Better than most, so they let me stay. I know what to do, exactly what to do, so I never make a mistake. No one has to tell me anything, no one has to communicate any information. That’s the way I like it. I speak to Patrick, true, but he never speaks to me, so there’s the balance. He will be a hundred next month. I think he will never die. He is worse than me because he will never die. I think that’s why he hardly ever speaks. He knows he is worse than me, worse than anyone. The last time he spoke was at the doctor’s surgery last year. A man tried to speak to him. He was a stubborn one, that man. He kept trying to get Patrick to speak. Kept asking him daft banal questions. And then, when he asked him his age, Patrick struck. Ninety-eight he said, emotionless icy voice. The man didn’t believe him. It’s true, I nodded. He’s thirty years older than me he said to his wife, look at him, ach, he let out a long sigh and sat back violently in his seat. After a few minutes he looked at Patrick and shook his head. Then he was called off in to see the doctor and Patrick said nothing more. He was in the wars, Patrick, the Spanish one and the one nobody really talks about. His eyes are grey, once they were blue, Maria told me before she went into hospital and never came back out. His hair was long and his balls were of steel. I was only a wee boy then. Patrick didn’t let me go, wouldn’t let me go. I never cried about Maria. I was too wee. I never cried about my parents either. And I don’t believe I shall cry for Patrick, for he will never die. Steel never rusts. I was a strange little child. Like a small animal. Maria was gone, Patrick was mute. I remember one day I came home from school and I heard some noises from upstairs. I thought Patrick would be at work. I climbed the stairs and Patrick was lying on the bed he used to share with Maria. He was crying softly. Patrick was crying. What’s wrong, Patrick, I screamed at him, what’s wrong? What’s wrong? But he wouldn’t tell me. He sat up and wiped his eyes and went downstairs and made the dinner. He never cried again. At least not in front of me. I do believe that Patrick thinks he will never die too. I can see it in his grey eyes sometimes when I look at him. What did you do, Patrick, to make yourself so bad? I sometimes ask him, was it betrayal? Was it resignation? Being broken? Giving up? What was it, Patrick? I was a little devil with Patrick, always playing mad games with his silence and his iron will and his immortality. For in truth he was not bad, he was a good man. His milk was good, it was just that there was no honey. We lived in the land of milk, of good milk, but no honey. Aye, in the land of milk. But no honey.
If I was a strange little beast, then Andrea was a unicorn. A black unicorn. A face burnt black by floating too near the Sun, she used to say. I had never seen a black person before, except on TV, in the movies. She was exquisite, Andrea Costello. Her long sable mane, her almond toast eyes, a black unicorn. She stepped out in front of me in Castlemilk Drive and looked into my eyes. She wouldn’t let me past, no matter how my demons whipped me on.
“I’ve been watching you,” she said mysteriously, “and I know what you are looking for.”
I threw up my arms in a sort of surrender. For in truth I was ready.
“You are looking for me, all your life, looking for me; I am wine mixed with myrrh, I am honey.”
Then she reached out and touched me. Touched me on the face. Her fingers were warm and soothing.
“You are cold,” she said, “like ice, like a frozen waterfall.”
I wiped some sweat off my face, contradicted, “No, I am hot, I am burning inside.”
“I’m not talking about that,” she said, leant forward, and kissed me.
Nobody had ever kissed me before. I was a virgin to the touch. Never been touched, never been kissed.
“Did you try to fill yourself with straw? Try to live with the rats? Be an insect? Try to get behind the skirting board? And thus, to escape?”
She took me up to her room and we did things to each other that I cannot tell. Secret things. Her naked body was like a shadow on the moon. Like the equinox of some lost world. Verdant as music. For a moment I thought she was going to laugh at me. A voice in my skull said it. But she didn’t. She smiled right into my soul. Shattered, fragmented the ice. Let the water fall. She set me free. We slept for a while and then Andrea got out of bed and went over to the cupboard. I looked around the room. It was like a library, full of shelves of books and piles of records. Thousands and thousands, and it seemed to be much bigger than was possible for a council house in Castlemilk. It was labyrinthine, and I had the mad feeling that I was weightless, that I was floating in space. I got up to look out of the window but didn’t make it as she reappeared from the cupboard with a camera in her hands. It was an automatic Polaroid.
“I want you to take my photograph,” she said. She turned on all the lights.
I pulled on my jeans and took the camera. She posed with her right hand up behind her head and her left hand on her hip. I clicked the camera and the photo shot out of the front slot. Click, whirr, rip.
“Let me see,” she said, and held it up to the light.
“Isn’t she beautiful?”
The photo was of a Japanese woman with ruddy red lips. Pot belly and raven black diadem.
“Quick, take another. Don’t think!”
I took hundreds of photos of Andrea and each time a different form appeared in the print. At first there were only beautiful women from different countries, but slowly this form faded and others took its place. All the races and faces and ages of all the peoples of the world. Old women so fat they looked like tired mountains, old men with sad disappointments in their eyes. Young childish hope. Mad teenage fear. Middle age angst. Aged terror. Twisted faces, smooth faces. Happiness. Hatred. Peace. Guilt. Greatness, strength, modesty, victory, awe.
“Stop,” said Andrea, “that’s enough, give me the camera. And take your jeans off.”
She took a photograph of me and put it in the middle of the pile.
“Now you can’t turn back,” she said.
She walked over to a bookshelf and pulled down an old green-backed book. She opened it and, looking at me, began to read:
“I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved? were we not wean’d till then?
But suck’d on country pleasures, childishly?
Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers’ den?
‘Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be.
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, ‘twas but a dream of thee.
And now good-morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love, all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room, an everywhere.”
Since Malcolm told me about Andrea’s return I have been here in the street looking up at her room. I have been watching for that light to go on in her old room. To go on everywhere. It hasn’t stopped raining for over a week. It’s not summer now. There are no summers now. Only long rainy days. Perhaps I will have to wait here for years. Wait for a thousand years. Perhaps the rain will never stop. Perhaps the light will never go on. Perhaps everywhere is nowhere. How will I live then? How will we all live then, if everywhere is nowhere?
At the close of that summer, Andrea told me a secret. It was not something I had expected but on later rationalization it made perfect sense. She wanted to be a star. To be famous. She wanted her name to be known. For Andrea had honey, but no milk. She lived with her mother on benefits and dreams and clouds of melancholy. She was like a negative photograph of me. She was a singer in a band. She wrote some songs and they played different bars and clubs in the south side. They usually played popular hit-of-the-moment stuff and Sinatraesque ballads to finish up, but sometimes they would slip in one of her metaphysical John Donne inspired dirges that nobody could make head nor tail of. The last time that I saw Andrea has a house of its own in my memory. A place apart. It is burnt into my brain like the pain of the first lost love that it was. She invited me to hear one of her performances. It was in one of those grotesque lounge bars that sprung up like fungi in the eighties. Gaudy blues and pulsating reds. Neon and bottled beer and liebfraumilch for yer bird. The pub was busy. It was Saturday night and all the madmen were scrubbed and had the missus in tow. Stuffed into cheap suits and designer shirts and caked makeup and I-mean-business twin-suits. Cheap Champagne Charlies and Charliesses in showers of peroxide and chib marks. There were a couple of teams of afternoon shift drunks. Middle-aged men feart to go home and young tickets with no home to go to. Andrea’s band was stuffed into a corner down a flight of stairs next to the toilet. We had already had Come on Eileen and Abracadabra (Ah waant tae reach oot an’ grab ye) and Eye of the Tiger and Up Where We Belong (twice) when it happened. Nobody heard it at first. Nobody was listening. It had to break in through the banality and the gruesome glitz of false joy. But then the chatter stopped, the bottles and tumblers were put down, and everywhere descended like the Holy Ghost.
……. Don’t you know, you’re life itself………..
Like the leaflings to the tree
Oh my darling cling to me
For we’re like creatures of the wind
And wild is the wind
……. Wild is the wind ……..
When she finished her voice seemed to hang there among the cleaning product vapour and the fag smoke for a few minutes and then was overpowered. She was shaking, like as if she were possessed or trying to control something, trying to stay on the ground. For a moment I had the absurd feeling that she was going to fly. Going to levitate, up, over, and right out of that dive. But she snapped together and came up the stairs. Nobody was paying any attention again. The spell was back in the jar. As she moved up the stairs, a fight broke out right next to where she had been playing. It was me who wanted to levitate. I moved to greet her, to take her in my arms, my love of the ages, but she pushed past me and went up to a group of men at the bar. I watched at a distance for a moment and then approached. The circle was closed. Come on, Andrea, let’s walk home, I need to see the stars, to go and catch one, to get with child a mandrake root. She turned and looked at me. Looked but no longer saw. I was struck by the idea that she had lost her eyes. That she was blind. She was angry with me. I’m going to a club with Charlie, he has a contact in a record company. I looked at Charlie. He had a frizzy perm and a two day shadow on his boney face. When he spoke he sounded like an American. Why don’t you come along, he said. Andrea was looking around searching for something with her blind eyes. She looked right through me, right through everything, right through everywhere. I saw her black unicorn levitate up and out of her. It hovered round the pub for a while dazed like a lost child’s balloon. Then it started to panic. To bolt. To try to get out. It started battering itself off the ceiling. It was now terrified. Its horn broke off and fell down into the filthy carpet of the pub among the spilled booze and the fag ends. It was covered in blood and screaming wildly. It dropped and then battered itself against the ceiling over and over again. I couldn’t watch anymore. Couldn’t listen to the dull thumps and the screaming. I left the pub and started to walk up the road. I didn’t march madly as I had before. My step was heavy, slow, but steady. I was slowed down by the honey, by the mandrakes, and the wine mixed with myrrh. The stars were there but they no longer shone like they had done in Andrea’s eyes over the fields home from Carmunnock on that first dark night when the world had just begun.
That summer, by my troth, we fell in love with the world. We walked all over that wonderful dear green place. And green it was. We walked in places that nobody knew except us, down backstreets, through arbours and city lanes, down into stony crypts among tombstones, and back up into the world of the living light and the silly old sun. We sat in empty cafes and bars. We heard the silence and the click of the clocks and the tick of time. We made love in long lethargic afternoons. We learned how to be human beings. We learned how to love. We read the spirit of the world. Read books in Babel. We were the hollow men, we measured out our days with coffee spoons, we sang the songs of innocence and experience, bathed in the song of songs, swam in the holy sonnets and waited with Josef K at the gates of forever. We ran feverishly through the streets of Moscow and Petersburg with Raskolnikov and Prince Myshkin. She Nastasya Filipovna and I the idiot. We sailed the wine red sea and hunted the white whale with Ahab. We searched for light with Beatrice in the netherworlds. And for a few short hours, at least, we found it. Paradise. In Andrea’s room and on the streets of a Glasgow housing scheme. From the inferno to purgatory to paradise. All we had to do was will it. We swore eternal allegiance in the dark, lit candles to the dead gods, slept in cemeteries, cried for the departed and for those still to come. We drank cheap wine, got drunk, pissed ourselves, smoked hash, dropped acid. We laughed unafraid. We were gods. We smelt the world anew with each day. We knew then that we would never die. That this world would never die. This world of light and love and honey would never die. That it would be, forever. This is what we did, by my troth, after we loved.
The weeks have become months. It is February now. An old year has gone and a new one has come. Still the light in Andrea’s room has not gone on. Still Patrick has not died. Still the rain falls. Still the waterfall is ice. I have finally come to a decision. I am going to go up. Going to go right up and chap on her door. I cross the road and push at the close door. It is open. The intercom is all mangled. I climb the stairs to the top. There’s her door. A little nameplate with some letters faded. Costello. I rap on the door. There is no bell. Nothing. I bang. Nothing. I turn to go and I hear the door opening. A twisted lame old woman squinting at me. Wit dae ye waant? Mrs Costello? Aye. I’m a friend of Andrea’s. Silence. Who’s Andrea? Can I come in? Aye, why no. She walks into the living room. Andrea, don’t you know Andrea? Naw. Is she no yer daughter? Ma daughter? I waanted tae huv a daughter once. I dreamt aboot it a loat. But… No, she was here. No a dream. I was here, every day, in that room. I point to the room. Point to everywhere. When wiz this? Wit did she look like, this Andrea? I don’t know, nearly thirty years now. She was, she was black, really beautiful. Black? Aye. Naw, son, no here. I turn to go, saying sorry. Wait, black? There wiz a lassie came tae ma door a long time ago, she left a packet fur somebody, but I cannae remember the name. Wit’s yer name, son? I think for a minute. Malcolm, I say. She looks at me weird like then. Aye, that’s it, fur Malcolm. She claps her hands together and smiles a toothless smile. In here. She opens the door. The door to Andrea’s room. She goes into the cupboard. I step into the room and look around. It is completely stripped and smells musty. There is no bookshelf, no piles of LPs, there isn’t even a carpet on the floor. Just a light bulb hanging in the middle of the room. The walls are grimy and the skirting board broken in places. Here, says the old woman, handing me the packet. I turn it over in my hands. There is no writing or any other mark on it. I rip the brown paper off. Inside is a book. The collected poems and songs of John Donne. And a photo-album. I open the album. There are all the pictures I had taken that day so long ago. The day I lost my fear of life. The day I first loved. In the centre of the album there I am, as young and naked and stupid looking as the day I was born. Someone has written below the photograph, “you’re in the middle now, there’s still no turning back”. Aye, says the woman, there wiz a letter tae. She disappears back into the cupboard. Andrea, aye, that woman who brought the parcel was black, aye, I’m sure, though I cannae really remember that well. I open the letter. Wit diz it say, son, I cannae see waeoot ma glasses. I look at her. It says, “all the photos are the kingdom. And you are too”. Wit? Wit’s the kingdom? “Greatness, strength, modesty, victory, awe. Malchut at the root of time.” Ach, I cannae hear ye very well, it disnae matter. She starts to move out of the room, I huv tae take some tablets, son. She stops. Malcolm? Aye. Malcolm wit? McGuire. She looks at me closely. Patrick McGuire’s grandson? Aye. She studies me for a minute in silence. Tell him I’ll be seeing him sometime, sometime soon. I nod, aye, I will, Mrs Costello. What’s your name, your first name I mean? She smiles. Maria, she says. Tell him that, that Maria Costello will be waiting for him someday soon. She shuffles off to take her tablets. I sit down in the middle of the room and look at the photos. At the kingdom. Aye, how shall I live now in this land of milk and honey? How shall I live now that everywhere is nowhere? How shall we all live in this land of milk and honey now that everywhere is nowhere? How shall we all live? How shall we live?
About the Author
John McGroarty was born in Glasgow and now lives in Barcelona, where he works as an English teacher. He has been writing short stories for many years. His acclaimed long short story Rainbow is a McStorytellers publication.