Olga
by John McGroarty
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: None.
Description: When you fall out of love in the world’s most romantic city, there’s only one lady in whom to seek solace.
Swearwords: None.
Description: When you fall out of love in the world’s most romantic city, there’s only one lady in whom to seek solace.
Now that I think of it, it all really began in the Père Lachaise Cemetery. Among France’s illustrious dead. Before lunch. In a light southerly drizzle. Nursing a slight hangover. The end of me and Anibel’s romance. She was a wee smasher too but we were incompatible. Like so many before. We were searching for Jim Morrison’s grave. Along with dozens of other starstruck day tripping necrophiles. I was joking how in the future people would be looking for Johnny Depp. Or Lady Gaga. Or some tacky French equivalents. The great Gallic crooner Alain Lebon or the soap star Angéline Clémentine. But Anibel was serious. Deadly, if you will allow. This was a pilgrimage for her. The Doors were more than a pop group. Morrison more than a singer. It was a whole philosophy of life. Otherworldly. Levitating. Through her perception canals out into the great ocean of the eternal cosmos. Walking with shamans. Through the dead Indians. Mystical shit. Yet, despite all this, nobody could find him. And my mind was definitely beginning to squirm like a toad. We started by studying attentively the guide at the entrance. Piece of cake, I thought. We wandered for half an hour after that. Then we had a mad twenty-minute conversation with a shouty French man in a purple coat and braces. His ringed fingers shot off in all directions and none. Proust là bas. Chopin là. Balzac here. Edith Piaf there. Jeem Moorisun tout droit. Onwards through the tombs we filed. Then we had to resort to technology and for forty minutes we were just a short dash to the necromantic finishing tape according to Google. We trotted round reverentially in circles. It always led us to Auguste Comte. Standing in front of his tomb we were supposed to be at the epicentre of the great come-on-baby-light-my-fire poet’s last resting place. I thought that maybe the engineer who designed the app was having a little private joke. The rain started to pour. We had no umbrella. Or plastic bags to put on Glasgow-style. Then I made the mistake. Forget it, Anibel, it’s not important, let’s go and have some lunch. I’m starving, I added. She looked at me as if I was some sort of traitor to the cause of freedom. An unserious person. Someone who bends at the first sign of resistance. Oh, man of clay feet. She was deathly silent for a minute. Then she said in a highly irony coated voice, I thought you were from Glasgow, that they taught you how to dodge the rain drops at school. She said it in an exaggerated Scottish accent. I looked at my feet. It was straight from my repertoire of people from Glasgow and Scotland jokes. It wasn’t funny. Maybe it was never funny. I apologised and we trudged on. I kept thinking about Jimmy Clotworthy. Ticky. From Machrie Road in Castlemilk. How he loved The Doors. His Popeye tattoo and hair lip. I tried not to laugh. Ride the snail, ride the snail, he used to bawl with gusto in his manky Machrie voice till somebody told him one night it was the snake. The rain fell in sheets. In buckets. In monsoons. In cats and dogs. In elephants. Where the hell was he? Finally my patience gave out. I don’t even like The Doors, I screamed into the slate grey sky in a frustrated catharsis. But nobody heard my incantation. Anibel ignored me and kept walking. I saw her disappear round a bend into the gale and the tombstones. I ran after her but she was lost. The cemetery seemed to have swallowed her up. Into its mossy masonry and mists. I shook my head. We were going to die of pneumonia looking for bloody Jim Morrison’s grave. Then I realised that Anibel had the keys to the hotel room. And this was just the first day. We had five more to go. OK, I reasoned, she’s not going to dump me just because I could not watch an hour with messiah Jim Morrison in the rain garden. In the torrential pouring rain garden. She will see reason. I decided to try to find the exit and go back and wait in the hotel reception. As I walked I could hear that mad mystical organ wail of Ray Mazarak, or Manzorak, or whatever the hell his name is, Bobby Krieger, Jefferson Airplane, don’t you want somebody, find somebody to love, ride the snail, father, yes son, I want to kill you, mother, yes son, I want to …... I shuddered. How did Anibel get into that shit? She was a chemist from a middle-class family in Sabadell. Her mother was a little daft, now that I thought about it. She asked me one time if I thought toenails grew more quickly in summer. I said I didn’t know. Nevertheless the rain kept falling and I kept walking head down unable to find my way out. I took umpteen wrong turnings. I was going round in uncelestial circles in purgatory. I was also I realised completely alone. Peepil ur strange, ba ba ba bum bum, when yer a strangur, bum bum bum, Ticky used to belt out on the bus into the town going to Sylvester’s, wimin seem wickit when yer no waantid. I was now just walking from inertia, directionless. This is the end. Mad organ music. I was starting to get desperate. Then the French guy in the purple suit appeared from nowhere with an umbrella. Votre femme vous cherche, he screamed in my ear through the rain. He took my arm and we took a few bends and turns and there in the distance I could see a little group of people in white light. It was the tomb and Anibel was there with an ecstatic grin of triumph on her face. She handed the French guy her little camera and asked him to take a photo of her and me. She quickly pulled me into the lens and hooked her arm through mine. We’ll forget before and start again, she said sotto voce, and smiled at the camera. She stood gawking mystically for a few minutes more and then turned and took my arm again and we headed for the way out. It was as if she had received a revelation and now miraculously knew where everything was. We visited another few famous sepulchres and went for lunch.
Anibel was calm all through lunch and said on the coffee: I know you were just angry because of the rain when you said that about The Doors, you really recognize the genius of their music I’m sure. Of course, I quickly assented. I told her about Ticky, though held back on his famous slept in a bin routine. You had to be from the west coast of Scotland to get that one. Tombs, eh? I finished up. Cast a cold eye on life, on death, horseman ride by, I quoted. Anabel eyed me sarcastically. Pass by, she said in a southern Irish accent. From this I knew she hadn’t forgiven me and was just putting a face on it. But I wouldn’t let it go. Ride by, I insisted, it’s logical, he’s on a horse, Anibel. She pulled out her mobile, patiently scanned for the poem, and handed me the screen. I was in Ireland three summers as a teenager to learn English. One of our teachers in the advanced group had us read all the Irish poets every day for two months. Under bare Ben Bulben’s head, in Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid, she said, and got up and went to the bar to pay. Aye, an ancestor was rector there, I muttered violently to myself. She was now flirting with the waiter and laughing like a drain. I walked outside and stood in the rain watching her through the windows. I shook my head. I had really liked her too. Thought she might be the one. I would be forty-seven next month. The chances were running out and my hair running thin. It’s strange how it all changes. My mind turned to Mark Dunn. My one friend in Barcelona. How he had got married two years ago and they had a baby. It filled me with rancour to the brim. Ach, good luck to them, I hope they’re happy. I really do. Then I thought again about Ticky. The day he got married to Flora, or Agnes, or Fiona, some name like that. He was only nineteen. How they set up home in Castlemilk Drive. How long did it last, I wondered. And the others. Williamson, Eddie Cool, Ernie Rose, McGeady. Some names I couldn’t remember. Just the faces. What a list. Like a cenotaph of the fallen. Casualties in the eternal struggle between life and the responsibility of peopling the planet. That was indeed the end, my friends! Who needed women and children and a family? I had my bohemian life and my books and my stories in Buckshee and Bolted online magazine. I laughed to myself. The night Ticky had told me that “Fiona” was pregnant and I told him to go home and pack his rucksack and come with me as tomorrow morning we were going to hitchhike down to the south of France and then into Spain and get a job on the boats and even sail round the world and see Singapore and Taiwan and Japan and California and never come back to this shithole of a place full of negativity and dourness and dead dreams and sectarianism and stupidity and his face was a picture. I told him about a man called Martin Eden and another called Henry Miller and about Kerouac and said that I would give him the books to read and that he would understand and want to escape like they had and forget everything like it was all a bad dream and live and breathe free though he had nothing in his pockets and nothing in his belly but life and the pursuit of his own happiness and that he could do his comedy routines and that we would ride the snail and take it easy for years and live our lives on beaches and in cool forests and that when we left this rapacious rock we would be able to say that we at least had lived our lives to the full. I told him that it mattered not one monkey’s fuck to “Fiona” if he ran off and that within six months she would have kicked him out anyway and all that she wanted was a big stupid white wedding and that he was the mug she had chosen and that then she would tie him up with cheap lawyers and that he would be slaving away to pay for the wean for the rest of his one and only precious holy unique sacred young life and that we would never come back and that it would even be an inspiration for the baby when it grew up and met its own existential crisis and wished it had never been born or that its dad had taken it down to see the world or at least left a legend of having had the balls to save himself. Something to be proud of, I screamed. He just laughed awkwardly and said something about not being able to leave his job or his family and that he “loved Fiona”. Anibel came out of the restaurant. The blue bus is calling us, I said dead pan, and pointed to the Metro. We went back to the hotel for an hour to freshen up and that evening went to the Picasso Museum. And that proved to be the final rose in the funeral bouquet of our relationship.
We walked from our hotel next to Notre Dame to the Bastille and then down to the Picasso Museum. I knew this part from many years ago bumming around. The whole way Anibel was going on about The Doors. I think she was trying to test me or something. Put our love and my patience on the rack of monomaniacal conversation. Finally we arrived and spent a couple of hours wandering through the museum. Even though I had been to the one in Barcelona dozens of times I really knew nothing about the life of the greatest son of Malaga. And I knew nothing about Olga. The wife and mother. The first few rooms were full of standard paintings of her and her melancholy and then we progressed through the psyche of Pablo, from normal paintings to abstracts to Cubism and pigeons and back again. What struck me most were the minotaurs. Sex and death and guilt and Celestine’s face in his head. How he deformed everything in his head into monsters of guilt. God, this guy must have really hated himself. Even more than I do. I watched Anibel from a distance. I felt sad. My six month law was proving itself to be true. I thought this time it could have lasted longer. We had even talked one night about having a child and I had spent a couple of days in ecstasy thinking, dreaming about how my life would change and I would get the security I had been looking for the last few years. For in my heart I was sick unto death of the bachelor’s life and lot. The constant weekends and travelling . I couldn’t even become a writer. What a joke. Jesus, everyone’s a writer nowadays. Half a dozen mediocre stories and an abandoned novel about my youth in Glasgow. And I was beginning to think, my worst fear, that I had missed out on something. What if they were all right and I was wrong? When you completely give up the ghost things only fall into place for a short time, and then what? The only dead certainty is the chaos. You’re left with doubt and alienation and no people and no country and no nothing and a life that is like a dream and nothing is real and you belong in no place and the sands run faster every year. In truth it was starting to go wrong before we got to Paris. We’d had a tiff the night before about my drinking. And on the plane when I ordered a second beer. She’s only thirty-four. She has a lot of living still to do. I think she was already bored with me before anyway. I don’t think I stretched her enough. All my jokes and Glasgow patter were long spent and fell on barren ears. Back at the hotel she was mad though it wasn’t my fault when I asked if she had seen the portrait of Dora Maar and she had looked surprised and then disappointed. She looked at me harshly. She was taking on a cubist Dora face right in front of me. A face from the ancient gallery, I thought to myself. I was starting to fully understand the artist. She looked really angry. And increasingly abstract. Her nose and forehead triangles. Her hair a bunch of grapes. Her neck conical. Her ears twisted eights. Then I said, trying to find common ground: he must have really suffered, Picasso. Anibel exploded. What about Olga? And his son? Little Paul? I was just saying, I floundered. I’m sure he was a good father. Qué?? He was a womanizer. He suffered. Olga shook her head in disbelief at my words. But still I steamed on. Olga was a neurotic. A melancholic. She must have made his life hell, that’s what I meant. I mean, you only have one life, Anibel. She didn’t speak more. My stupid voice hung in the air. There was a silence now. One of those that can’t be filled. Two lemon drop tears fell from her asymmetric eyes. I could see there really were tears running down her face. Then it hit me. Her father. The absent one. The alcoholic. The man who had abandoned her and her brother when they were just little kids. When they had needed him the most. Had gone off and had another family. Had accused her mother of being crazy. Father, yes, daughter, I want to kill you. She wrote to him every day, you know? I wasn’t sure if she was talking about her mother or Olga Picasso. Then she got to her feet and went into the bathroom. She locked the door. I knew what I had to do. I hadn’t unpacked so it was easy. For even my obtuse brain had registered the fact. It wasn’t about me. It wasn’t my imagined charisma or humour or me “being a writer”. She really wanted me to be her father. What a cosmic imbecility that one was! Me? She had chosen me! I got my little wheeled case from under the bed and I walked on down the hall and out the door. I knew Paris. I knew there was a hostel next to the Louvre. That’s where I would go. Give her a couple of days and phone her. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s better like this. A good clean break. Aye, that’s always the best way.
Within forty-five minutes I had completely forgotten everything. Free again, I thought to myself. I installed myself in the hostel and went down to have a look at Notre Dame by night. Then I went for dinner and walked around Saint Antoine looking for my old haunts. It had been twenty-five years but nothing seemed to have changed though I saw no ghosts. The next day I went down to Shakespeare and Company and bought a copy of Tropic of Cancer. It was then in the light of day that I noticed it. The complete change of everything. There had always been tourists but this was something different. There were no people on edge or desperate ones or skeletal madmen with hungry eyes in the book shop. Just middle class couples taking photos and buying all the wrong books. When I paid for my book the girl asked in a New York accent if I wanted the stamp. Yeah, sure, I said, that’s why I’m buying it. I thought there was a slight tone of mockery in her young voice and a look half pity half disdain in her face. Shakespeare and Company Kilometer Zero Paris, it said. With a black and white Shakespeare in the middle. I walked across the bridge and waited in front of Notre Dame. When my turn came I stood in the middle of kilometer zero and closed my eyes. I tried to concentrate on where I was going next. Miller was right about me. I had given up the ghost and taken up with some other phantoms years ago and now I would have to live with it. It was only two o’clock and I went back to the hostel and lay on my bunk. There were twelve other beds in the room but at this time they were all out seeing the sights. Sailing down the Seine, climbing up into the bowels of the Eiffel Tower, soaking up the sun in the Luxembourg gardens. I felt that I had been washed up on some strange but yet eerily familiar shore. I read a few chapters of my book. Then I closed my eyes and thought about Anibel exploring this great city alone. I felt bad. But life goes on. I thought about all my old friends in Glasgow. About Mark, my last pal ever. I felt sorry for myself. God fuckin’ damn it! Maldita puta sea! I thought about the island of Arran. I was on the boat then. It was a sunny day. The sky was blue and the clouds were high and the spray from the sea was chill. I was sailing with Maggie. We were holding hands. Then we were on the little beach listening to the sea lapping its tongues up on the shore. We were walking through the trees climbing up the forested hill. Up to Goat Fell. Then we were looking out to the West of Scotland. From where we had come. From where I wanted to run. From where the sun came. Out to the western lands. To the cold of the north. And the endless ice. To the paradise of the south. Then we were in the bar, sitting at the window. Maggie said softly that she had a secret. A secret that was just for my ears. If I didn’t hear the words, then no one else would. That nobody would hear what she had to say. That it would be a secret for all eternity. Only me, her, and God on high would know. She was going to have a baby, she said. My baby. My child. And I said nothing. Heard no words from her mouth. No secret. It’s nearly thirty years now. It’s like a dream. That whole world. I don’t know if she had the child. What age it would be now. I had to think about myself. Now I would give everything to go back on that boat over the blue Scottish sea to Arran again. To live that moment again. To buy a little house. To take Anibel. To have a child with her young body. To be the decent father she never had. God damn! To live again. To have true life courage. To rid myself of all this aimless dissatisfaction. To give real life to somebody somewhere. I got up and left the hostel and went for a walk. I went down to the Louvre galleries and waited in the queue. There was something I wanted to see. When I got inside, I headed straight for the room with the Mona Lisa like a man possessed. I shoved my way through the crowds of photo takers and stood directly in front of her. Like as if she was a judge or something. The final judge of all I had ever done and had not done. She smiled at me with that smile she keeps in her frame for every human being who comes to her for guidance. The secret of the world and all human existence is in that smile. Me and Anibel are in that smile. And me and Maggie too. And Mark and his little baby. And Ticky and “Fiona”. And Olga and Picasso. It is the world given to us all. To travel down the road to the sea. To cross the bridge. To take your moment and to live it. To live it. Each part of it. Each moment of your life. Just as it comes. In an eternal enigmatic smile. In an acceptance of yourself and your times. And in a reconciliation with the past. And in a life loving welcome to the future. I could feel it inside me now. The second chance. My second wind to blow me back over the sea. I had the strength. I just knew that I still had it. That strength and undying flame and fire for life still burning deep inside of me.
Anibel was calm all through lunch and said on the coffee: I know you were just angry because of the rain when you said that about The Doors, you really recognize the genius of their music I’m sure. Of course, I quickly assented. I told her about Ticky, though held back on his famous slept in a bin routine. You had to be from the west coast of Scotland to get that one. Tombs, eh? I finished up. Cast a cold eye on life, on death, horseman ride by, I quoted. Anabel eyed me sarcastically. Pass by, she said in a southern Irish accent. From this I knew she hadn’t forgiven me and was just putting a face on it. But I wouldn’t let it go. Ride by, I insisted, it’s logical, he’s on a horse, Anibel. She pulled out her mobile, patiently scanned for the poem, and handed me the screen. I was in Ireland three summers as a teenager to learn English. One of our teachers in the advanced group had us read all the Irish poets every day for two months. Under bare Ben Bulben’s head, in Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid, she said, and got up and went to the bar to pay. Aye, an ancestor was rector there, I muttered violently to myself. She was now flirting with the waiter and laughing like a drain. I walked outside and stood in the rain watching her through the windows. I shook my head. I had really liked her too. Thought she might be the one. I would be forty-seven next month. The chances were running out and my hair running thin. It’s strange how it all changes. My mind turned to Mark Dunn. My one friend in Barcelona. How he had got married two years ago and they had a baby. It filled me with rancour to the brim. Ach, good luck to them, I hope they’re happy. I really do. Then I thought again about Ticky. The day he got married to Flora, or Agnes, or Fiona, some name like that. He was only nineteen. How they set up home in Castlemilk Drive. How long did it last, I wondered. And the others. Williamson, Eddie Cool, Ernie Rose, McGeady. Some names I couldn’t remember. Just the faces. What a list. Like a cenotaph of the fallen. Casualties in the eternal struggle between life and the responsibility of peopling the planet. That was indeed the end, my friends! Who needed women and children and a family? I had my bohemian life and my books and my stories in Buckshee and Bolted online magazine. I laughed to myself. The night Ticky had told me that “Fiona” was pregnant and I told him to go home and pack his rucksack and come with me as tomorrow morning we were going to hitchhike down to the south of France and then into Spain and get a job on the boats and even sail round the world and see Singapore and Taiwan and Japan and California and never come back to this shithole of a place full of negativity and dourness and dead dreams and sectarianism and stupidity and his face was a picture. I told him about a man called Martin Eden and another called Henry Miller and about Kerouac and said that I would give him the books to read and that he would understand and want to escape like they had and forget everything like it was all a bad dream and live and breathe free though he had nothing in his pockets and nothing in his belly but life and the pursuit of his own happiness and that he could do his comedy routines and that we would ride the snail and take it easy for years and live our lives on beaches and in cool forests and that when we left this rapacious rock we would be able to say that we at least had lived our lives to the full. I told him that it mattered not one monkey’s fuck to “Fiona” if he ran off and that within six months she would have kicked him out anyway and all that she wanted was a big stupid white wedding and that he was the mug she had chosen and that then she would tie him up with cheap lawyers and that he would be slaving away to pay for the wean for the rest of his one and only precious holy unique sacred young life and that we would never come back and that it would even be an inspiration for the baby when it grew up and met its own existential crisis and wished it had never been born or that its dad had taken it down to see the world or at least left a legend of having had the balls to save himself. Something to be proud of, I screamed. He just laughed awkwardly and said something about not being able to leave his job or his family and that he “loved Fiona”. Anibel came out of the restaurant. The blue bus is calling us, I said dead pan, and pointed to the Metro. We went back to the hotel for an hour to freshen up and that evening went to the Picasso Museum. And that proved to be the final rose in the funeral bouquet of our relationship.
We walked from our hotel next to Notre Dame to the Bastille and then down to the Picasso Museum. I knew this part from many years ago bumming around. The whole way Anibel was going on about The Doors. I think she was trying to test me or something. Put our love and my patience on the rack of monomaniacal conversation. Finally we arrived and spent a couple of hours wandering through the museum. Even though I had been to the one in Barcelona dozens of times I really knew nothing about the life of the greatest son of Malaga. And I knew nothing about Olga. The wife and mother. The first few rooms were full of standard paintings of her and her melancholy and then we progressed through the psyche of Pablo, from normal paintings to abstracts to Cubism and pigeons and back again. What struck me most were the minotaurs. Sex and death and guilt and Celestine’s face in his head. How he deformed everything in his head into monsters of guilt. God, this guy must have really hated himself. Even more than I do. I watched Anibel from a distance. I felt sad. My six month law was proving itself to be true. I thought this time it could have lasted longer. We had even talked one night about having a child and I had spent a couple of days in ecstasy thinking, dreaming about how my life would change and I would get the security I had been looking for the last few years. For in my heart I was sick unto death of the bachelor’s life and lot. The constant weekends and travelling . I couldn’t even become a writer. What a joke. Jesus, everyone’s a writer nowadays. Half a dozen mediocre stories and an abandoned novel about my youth in Glasgow. And I was beginning to think, my worst fear, that I had missed out on something. What if they were all right and I was wrong? When you completely give up the ghost things only fall into place for a short time, and then what? The only dead certainty is the chaos. You’re left with doubt and alienation and no people and no country and no nothing and a life that is like a dream and nothing is real and you belong in no place and the sands run faster every year. In truth it was starting to go wrong before we got to Paris. We’d had a tiff the night before about my drinking. And on the plane when I ordered a second beer. She’s only thirty-four. She has a lot of living still to do. I think she was already bored with me before anyway. I don’t think I stretched her enough. All my jokes and Glasgow patter were long spent and fell on barren ears. Back at the hotel she was mad though it wasn’t my fault when I asked if she had seen the portrait of Dora Maar and she had looked surprised and then disappointed. She looked at me harshly. She was taking on a cubist Dora face right in front of me. A face from the ancient gallery, I thought to myself. I was starting to fully understand the artist. She looked really angry. And increasingly abstract. Her nose and forehead triangles. Her hair a bunch of grapes. Her neck conical. Her ears twisted eights. Then I said, trying to find common ground: he must have really suffered, Picasso. Anibel exploded. What about Olga? And his son? Little Paul? I was just saying, I floundered. I’m sure he was a good father. Qué?? He was a womanizer. He suffered. Olga shook her head in disbelief at my words. But still I steamed on. Olga was a neurotic. A melancholic. She must have made his life hell, that’s what I meant. I mean, you only have one life, Anibel. She didn’t speak more. My stupid voice hung in the air. There was a silence now. One of those that can’t be filled. Two lemon drop tears fell from her asymmetric eyes. I could see there really were tears running down her face. Then it hit me. Her father. The absent one. The alcoholic. The man who had abandoned her and her brother when they were just little kids. When they had needed him the most. Had gone off and had another family. Had accused her mother of being crazy. Father, yes, daughter, I want to kill you. She wrote to him every day, you know? I wasn’t sure if she was talking about her mother or Olga Picasso. Then she got to her feet and went into the bathroom. She locked the door. I knew what I had to do. I hadn’t unpacked so it was easy. For even my obtuse brain had registered the fact. It wasn’t about me. It wasn’t my imagined charisma or humour or me “being a writer”. She really wanted me to be her father. What a cosmic imbecility that one was! Me? She had chosen me! I got my little wheeled case from under the bed and I walked on down the hall and out the door. I knew Paris. I knew there was a hostel next to the Louvre. That’s where I would go. Give her a couple of days and phone her. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s better like this. A good clean break. Aye, that’s always the best way.
Within forty-five minutes I had completely forgotten everything. Free again, I thought to myself. I installed myself in the hostel and went down to have a look at Notre Dame by night. Then I went for dinner and walked around Saint Antoine looking for my old haunts. It had been twenty-five years but nothing seemed to have changed though I saw no ghosts. The next day I went down to Shakespeare and Company and bought a copy of Tropic of Cancer. It was then in the light of day that I noticed it. The complete change of everything. There had always been tourists but this was something different. There were no people on edge or desperate ones or skeletal madmen with hungry eyes in the book shop. Just middle class couples taking photos and buying all the wrong books. When I paid for my book the girl asked in a New York accent if I wanted the stamp. Yeah, sure, I said, that’s why I’m buying it. I thought there was a slight tone of mockery in her young voice and a look half pity half disdain in her face. Shakespeare and Company Kilometer Zero Paris, it said. With a black and white Shakespeare in the middle. I walked across the bridge and waited in front of Notre Dame. When my turn came I stood in the middle of kilometer zero and closed my eyes. I tried to concentrate on where I was going next. Miller was right about me. I had given up the ghost and taken up with some other phantoms years ago and now I would have to live with it. It was only two o’clock and I went back to the hostel and lay on my bunk. There were twelve other beds in the room but at this time they were all out seeing the sights. Sailing down the Seine, climbing up into the bowels of the Eiffel Tower, soaking up the sun in the Luxembourg gardens. I felt that I had been washed up on some strange but yet eerily familiar shore. I read a few chapters of my book. Then I closed my eyes and thought about Anibel exploring this great city alone. I felt bad. But life goes on. I thought about all my old friends in Glasgow. About Mark, my last pal ever. I felt sorry for myself. God fuckin’ damn it! Maldita puta sea! I thought about the island of Arran. I was on the boat then. It was a sunny day. The sky was blue and the clouds were high and the spray from the sea was chill. I was sailing with Maggie. We were holding hands. Then we were on the little beach listening to the sea lapping its tongues up on the shore. We were walking through the trees climbing up the forested hill. Up to Goat Fell. Then we were looking out to the West of Scotland. From where we had come. From where I wanted to run. From where the sun came. Out to the western lands. To the cold of the north. And the endless ice. To the paradise of the south. Then we were in the bar, sitting at the window. Maggie said softly that she had a secret. A secret that was just for my ears. If I didn’t hear the words, then no one else would. That nobody would hear what she had to say. That it would be a secret for all eternity. Only me, her, and God on high would know. She was going to have a baby, she said. My baby. My child. And I said nothing. Heard no words from her mouth. No secret. It’s nearly thirty years now. It’s like a dream. That whole world. I don’t know if she had the child. What age it would be now. I had to think about myself. Now I would give everything to go back on that boat over the blue Scottish sea to Arran again. To live that moment again. To buy a little house. To take Anibel. To have a child with her young body. To be the decent father she never had. God damn! To live again. To have true life courage. To rid myself of all this aimless dissatisfaction. To give real life to somebody somewhere. I got up and left the hostel and went for a walk. I went down to the Louvre galleries and waited in the queue. There was something I wanted to see. When I got inside, I headed straight for the room with the Mona Lisa like a man possessed. I shoved my way through the crowds of photo takers and stood directly in front of her. Like as if she was a judge or something. The final judge of all I had ever done and had not done. She smiled at me with that smile she keeps in her frame for every human being who comes to her for guidance. The secret of the world and all human existence is in that smile. Me and Anibel are in that smile. And me and Maggie too. And Mark and his little baby. And Ticky and “Fiona”. And Olga and Picasso. It is the world given to us all. To travel down the road to the sea. To cross the bridge. To take your moment and to live it. To live it. Each part of it. Each moment of your life. Just as it comes. In an eternal enigmatic smile. In an acceptance of yourself and your times. And in a reconciliation with the past. And in a life loving welcome to the future. I could feel it inside me now. The second chance. My second wind to blow me back over the sea. I had the strength. I just knew that I still had it. That strength and undying flame and fire for life still burning deep inside of me.
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 long short story, Rainbow, his novel, The Tower, and his two short fiction collections, Everywhere and Homo Sacer, are all McStorytellers publications.
You can read John's full profile at McVoices.
You can read John's full profile at McVoices.