Carta Magazine of Literary Prose Issue Three
© Trinity Publications 2020
1
O God, I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams. Hamlet, II.ii
2
Editorial
We have to talk about the coronavirus. Despite its massive effects on our lives, there seems to be a growing taboo about discussing it on a personal level. In this environment, the fatigue and boredom of a world without community easily incites a desire to use the arts as a means of escapism. Literature, especially the time-consuming variant of longform prose, presents the perfect opportunity to follow Erasmus’ old command to turn away from the rather grim veil of this world and lose ourselves in another. Discussing the pandemic in an editorial like this may therefore seem unwelcome. Yet while we would all rather that this was not happening, we cannot pretend otherwise. Writing as young people with no known risk factors to the virus, our lives are now defined around the impossible task of living somewhat normally during a pandemic. We muddle through online seminars that struggle to simulate once lively classroom discussions. We reminisce over time spent with friends now distanced by cyclical lockdown and pass through days spent without reason or meaningful opportunity to leave our home. This experience does not 3iii
compare to the suffering and real isolation of those with high-risk exposure to COVID-19 and those who love them, nor the sacrifices forced upon healthcare workers. It does, nonetheless, add to an underlying feeling long governing many of our lives: disconnection. The enforced solitude of the pandemic confronts us with ourselves—something we may not have done in a very long time. The external and social ways by which we have defined ourselves are gone. Without this structure of meaning, the tendency is towards distraction, whether in the Sisyphean tasks of work, streaming binges, or occasional bouts of fear. We hope to wait this pandemic out—and with the recent news of a workable vaccine, we may feel close to ultimate victory. In the meantime, at least, these distractions do not make us any happier, and they only distract from the thing that makes us unhappy. Ultimately, they lead to a sense of inaction and powerlessness. What this pandemic forces us to confront is our own insignificance. Staying at home is our primary weapon against the virus, yet this inactivity hardly feels like activism. The effects of this encounter, and this isolation, may linger for the rest of our lives. We now reckon with a heightened awareness of our own unimportance in the world. Not only are we unable to visit the ones we love most, but our potential rescue is decided by mathematical formulae employed by NPHET. Progress towards the next stages of our lives is now ruled more by the stages of vaccine trials than our own ambition or discipline. To add insult to injury, our problems are small. Everyone is too worried for their own lot to bothiv4
er with these faux-teenage melodramas about lost time and endless uncertainty. What’s obvious to us now and perhaps the only takeaway from this crisis, is that the old systems that confidently narrated our lives are as fragile as we are. This fragility can make us feel a sort of powerlessness, but a recognisably different kind of powerlessness to that which we may feel in everyday life. Our furious, egotistical reactions to the pandemic ultimately descend from an unwelcome awareness of the universe’s indifference to us—we rebel against yet another “so it goes” of cosmic change. Yet while the world can afford not to care about us, we must care about the world. At the end of an arrogant chapter of human history, where we have compressed time and space, knitted our globe together and built the capacity to beam our ideas instantaneously around the world, we have met a humbling conclusion: that we have not designed the world, but that the world designed us. This realisation, perhaps, belies the strange feeling of connection we now feel, knowing we are only human beings briefly bound together in a world not made for us. There may be a power in appreciating the resilience of that connection. Even in writing this editorial, it is obvious how different it will be to release an issue in these circumstances. There will be no pub conversation with the writers found herein, nor any running into old friends at launch night. Our abiding memories around this issue will not be stacking copies together at the Trinity Publications stalls around a busy campus, but of scheduling a series of social media posts and sending this file into the online netherworld. However, it 5v
is still a living magazine. We feel that the work hereafter are excellent pieces of prose literature. In reading them, we felt a common thread in their portrayal of isolation—perhaps for you, they can offer a pleasant distraction. Trying to communicate through that feeling is the central task facing all of us now. These stories might suggest some idea on where to begin.
Harry Downes and Sam Murphy 6th November 2020
vi 6
Contents
8 19 24
My Suicide Note The Grown-Ups Sparks of Flint
Christian Cowper A. P. Allen SinĂŠad Barry
vii 7
My Suicide Note Christian Cowper
CW: mental illness, suicidal ideation
The library is cold today. The library is dark today. I sit
at my desk, still, as a figure walks past in a perfect straight line. She goes forward, her feet pattering on the ground until she comes to a corner. She turns left. I study here a lot. You can watch people. It’s almost full down in the atrium. People take shelter from the October wind, even as it blusters through the building and forces them to keep their coats on. I like to peer over and evaluate their outfits; usually, the most stylish people look the coldest. It’s raining outside and it beats rhythmically on the library’s roof. The walls have a nice echo to them, so when people walk up from behind, I hear them coming from a while off. I pretend that I’m not interested in them by hunching over my laptop intently. Then, when they have passed me, I look up at their backs. They keep walking. I keep watching. They don’t see me. Everything around me is fine geometric structures. Straight lines and straight shapes that are supposed to keep 8
your thinking straight. But I haven’t read anything today and I’m not thinking straight. I started this morning with the sunniest intentions. I was going to envelop myself in The Melodramatic Imagination, note two chapters, then get a nice start on my essay plan after a €10 lunch salad. Now my neck hurts from looking at my phone for hours and there’s a gnawing pain in my stomach because it’s 17:32 and I haven’t eaten and I don’t deserve to either. Sometimes stories pop up on my Instagram which show my friends laughing in the rain on Westmoreland Street or chatting on the Arts Block couches. These stories are like fresh snow on Christmas morning. There’s a promise beneath them, if I can get to it. I swipe up feverishly and it’s—nothing. Again. Nothing. Again. New post from Ciara Keogan. Ciara’s a girl I knew at school; she was cooler than me and stupider too. She’s out with the gals, presumably last weekend. But then she could be out any day of the week, knowing her. I tap the heart on the screen twice. Like. Hold on. I can hear footsteps coming towards me. I put my phone down and look at my laptop. It displays a word document: notes I made yesterday, covering my tracks to the people walking past. Time for some anonymous typing. Footsteps. Loud. Masculine footsteps. He’s passed now. A beautiful boy. Tall. Beige polo jacket. Doc Martens. I see him a lot here. Once every few days the same girl comes up to his desk and they complain about their tutors. I heard him outside a lecture hall once talking with another boy about how he treats women. Well, he says. They want to be 9
looked after, he says. That’s all they want, he says. I was on the sofa opposite him; he didn’t see me. It’s been a while for me. Since sex, I mean. It’s been too long since I tried to get kissed, even. You have to try. Penises don’t just pop up like adverts—not since I deleted Tinder. And even if they did you wouldn’t want it like that. It’s not whack-a-mole. It’s been four months since the last time. Yeah yeah. You remember. Ciaran, the country boy with the Limerick accent. He pushed in the queue in Doyle’s for me and then he bought me a drink and after that I felt like I owed him something. After we finished, he was looking at me, really romantic like, but I called him a culchie as a joke and he looked away, down to his feet. He tried to deflect it, act like he wasn’t offended, but he was. Upset. I felt like an idiot. What I should’ve said is: “It’s alright, I’m a culchie too now. We had to move to Wicklow in my last year of school because my Dad lost his business.” But that’s too bloody South Dublin. I should’ve said: “I’m a posh Dublin girl, hating boggers is part of my cultural heritage.” To show him I could be ironic about it. That I knew what I was like and that it was okay. But how could I think to say the right thing at the right time? He didn’t say anything nice to me either. And he didn’t message. Culchie. Christ, you think you can’t do any worse than a rugby boy until you meet a GAA boy. And all the others here at Trinity are English and more Nigel Farage 10
than Mick Jagger. Remember the one I went to No Name Bar with. He was alright till I took the piss out of Brexit. Thought that was a winner. Nope. Next one will be another guy making me watch bloody Leinster Rugby matches, just like Dad. If there is another one. Don’t get left on the shelf, Mum once told me. I hear the wind beating into the ceiling window. I peer into the atrium for a second and everyone down there is stooped over their laptops. Tipper tapper on their keyboards together. I sit back down in my chair. Goosebumps on my arms. It’s chilly in here today. I shouldn’t put my jumper on, though: it doesn’t look right. I check Facebook Messenger. No notifications. Swipe up. No notifications. Open Gmail. No new emails on murphyele9@tcd.ie. Nothing on ellzbellz1998@gmail.com either. They wouldn’t miss me here if I died: I haven’t got involved in enough societies. You’d get that email from the staff that always goes around when there’s a death.
Subject: Death of a Student
Dear Students and Staff,
We sadly inform you of the death of a student. Ellie Murphy, a third-year student in English Studies, passed away last week. Ellie was a promising Junior Sophister who planned to become a Journalist after college.
11
They’d be nice about me for sure. Because they wouldn’t know that I won’t ever make it as a journalist. They’d give me the benefit of the doubt. Don’t speak ill of the dead, granny said, when they announced that the paedo priest died. If I topped myself they’d be lovely. They’d say: If you are experiencing mental health issues, please contact… And so on. They follow a formula, right? The emails for when staff and students die, I mean. There must be guidelines. They never say suicide, for sure. They wouldn’t say that. Suicide. Killed, by her own hand. Took the easy way out. Topped herself. There’s no nice word for it. But then it’s not a nice thing, so why would there be a nice way to say it? Almost two years since Jack killed himself. I remember the apartment in halls when I found out. I was sitting at the kitchen table. Saw it on Facebook and I literally couldn’t believe he was gone. Sounds like a cliché, that—‘literally couldn’t believe it’. It was so bloody horrible, and I can’t even think of an interesting way to express it. But it’s true: I couldn’t believe it. I stared at my screen for a minute flat. Didn’t think. Stared so long I could see each pixel on the page. I said ‘WHAT?’ out loud and I meant it. I’d no idea what was going on. There was no food in the apartment. I had to wipe off my tears and go over to Jessie’s to ask if I could have some beans on toast. I hadn’t even spoken to Jack properly since fifth-year, barely knew him anymore. 12
Last time I saw him, a few months before college, he was walking with his parents on Killiney Hill. I was out with Dad because it was sunny, and I saw a figure in a Hollister tracksuit-top at the crest of the hill. I thought: that’s Jack. He didn’t see me. If I walked past him on the path, I would’ve said hi. I wouldn’t have told him I always thought that he was kind, because I wouldn’t have needed to. Maybe my Dad would’ve said something to his Dad—some South Dublin Dad chat. It would’ve been a bit awkward and then we would’ve been away. And that would have been nice. Because everyone knows someone, don’t they? There was a girl in my sister’s year, at the Protestant school. Eve something? Or was it a different school? She seemed so lovely. All of that stuff whirring around her head, and all she seemed was lovely. Ciaran said something about one of his friends. Walking back to his, the night we slept together, he said: “This is the pub my Da took my friend and myself to after Limerick were in the All-Ireland.” And I said: “Is your friend in college?” He said: “No. He’s not around any more. He—.” Then he looked away. He had the same look on his face when I called him a culchie: frowning, but turning his face away so I couldn’t see it. Like he didn’t want me to see him feeling. I wish I hadn’t bloody said it. But he changed the subject right away. He was kind of like that during sex—unhappy, without showing me why. Or maybe I’m imagining 13
that. He was kind really, but he didn’t like me. He didn’t like my humour, obviously. There’s a crash in the atrium. I jerk up and peer down towards it. A girl with pigtails and a raincoat leans over frantically at the far end of the room. Bends her back to pick up what crashed: a laptop. Around the atrium, eyes are fixed upon her. She turns around with the laptop in her hand and says nothing—she knows she’s being looked at. All the eyes dart back to their work as one. Like a shoal of fish when you swim after them. She’s almost performing, putting the laptop back into the charger, showing everyone it’s okay. Nothing to see here. I sit down before she can see me. A week ago, some lad spilt a bottle of Lucozade up here. He didn’t get the cleaners—too embarrassed probably—just got some paper towels. The floor was sticky and sweet-smelling until the next morning. It made him look worse, clearing it up by himself. Nobody helping him out or making a joke about it. I felt sorry for him, because you know people would talk. They wouldn’t say anything, but they’d talk. Straight onto the group chats. ‘Jesus, did you see the lad who split his Lucozade everywhere?’ That’s what this library is: a place where people always talk but never speak. Instagram. Three new posts. One is Bill Withers. One is a girl from college on holiday in America last summer. Caption: an American flag and ‘Sunshine’. One is from Oxfam Ireland, about modern slavery in Libya. She looks gorgeous. The girl from college, I mean. Hair back, sunglasses resting 14
on her hair, pretty pearly smile. I like it. I look up. It’s so dark outside now; the library’s lit even worse. In this light, the concrete doesn’t so much turn a darker shade of grey as a dimmer one. It fails to reflect the lamps and you almost have to squint to see there’s pillars and walls there, not just holograms. The wind and the rain are doing their worst out there. I catch my face in the mirror made by my laptop screen. Haggard. A mirror tells me I look old and haggard in the face. I’m frowning without meaning to. I look like someone to avoid, that’s how I look, to be honest. But then, I’m badly lit. If I was well-lit, I could be happy. If I was gone, they’d have some dynamite stuff to say about me. Probably they’d do an exclusive family funeral and my friends would do remembrance drinks for more of a laugh. Somewhere in Killiney, not Wicklow. Couldn’t drag people down there for that—it’s depressing enough already. I’d have to write a note. I wouldn’t want them to feel bad about it, but I’d want to leave something to the world. It would have to be well-constructed. I’m sorry to burden you but No. I’m sorry to put this burden on you but Better. I don’t feel like I can go on living like this No. That’s such a cliché. I’d have to create something that would fit with it all. The eulogy: A Life Cut Short. The dim light falling on my desk, and the envelope resting there: To My Parents. The spectacle of it. 15
But there’s no such thing as a good suicide note. Even Kurt Cobain, even Virginia Woolf: they’re barely coherent. They’re just lost—nothing else. What Jack did to his family. What he did to all of us. If he’d just... He was never that expressive, though. He never plucked up the courage, at that party, even though we were both plastered. To kiss me, I mean. We left the house and we were out in the garden for ages, listening to the music humming far away. Talking for so long I started to sober up and come back to earth. He kept trying to talk deep, but he couldn’t do it, he couldn’t express himself. We got down to the end of the garden, behind the hedge, and he said: “There won’t be a night like this again,” looking wistfully at the hedge. And I laughed—not because he was wrong; he was right— but because I felt so giddy just to be there. He looked like the lead in a high-school movie, casting his gaze romantically like that. And I took the piss out of him a bit, and then we talked more. It was funny. But he came back to it eventually. “It’s a beautiful night,”he said. And so it was. It was one of those bright midsummer nights when it never gets dark until it’s too late to care. One of those nights that only come around when you’re sixteen. I was only wearing a crop top and a skirt, but I didn’t feel a chill at all. It was the drink sure, but there was more to it than that. We were warm together even though we were the only two outside. “Yeah, it is,” I said. He must have been telling himself to say that and then 16
make the move, because he was painfully silent for a few seconds and then he said it again: “It’s a really pretty night.” He looked me square in the face. I was stunned still, no idea what to say. I thought he was going to kiss me then as we locked eyes, but he waited, and waited, and waited, and then—nothing. Maybe if I’d stopped thinking and just kissed him. But I didn’t have that kind of confidence. It’s so hard to do what you want to do. We waited, and we looked at each other, and we did nothing—and then he broke eye contact. It was him, not me. I’m sure we would’ve kissed if he’d just looked at me another two seconds. One of us would’ve got the message. But it couldn’t have happened like that, because it didn’t happen like that. I heard he shifted another girl a couple of weeks later, and I shifted another boy the next time we were at a party together. And that was that. I never expected anything to come of it, and it didn’t. Nothing came of it. Nothing could’ve been different. Laughter. Two boys are messing around at the top of the stairs. It’s the beautiful boy in the beige polo jacket again. He’s with a friend, whose back is turned to me. His friend feints a punch at him and he flinches, then they both burst out laughing, louder than they should in the library. He floats his shoulders left and right in a boxer’s stance as he grins and says: “Right, sound, see ya this weekend then.” He hears the same from his friend and then he’s away, pitter patter down the stairs and out of view. His friend 17
walks towards my desk and catches my eye, smiling, as he passes. I smile back and watch him walk away from me. Then he’s just pitter patter as well. Everyone’s filtering out of the library now. I close my eyes for a second, hearing but not seeing footsteps as they tap away down the stairs. The echo here sounds like water flowing down a stream. I take a moment to appreciate what’s around me. Unsteady silence, broken constantly by footsteps, the tapping of keyboards, and the wind breaking against the building. And the rain, too, coming down hard, giving us all it can. The library is full of these little noises. It’s alive—all of it. All of us—we’re alive. I exit my word document and pack my laptop away, then zip my coat up. I skip past everyone who’s studying late and then down the stairs. A can cracks open: the smell of Red Bull seeps into the air. I get to the exit and leave the carpeted floor for the concrete porch. I’m there a moment alone in the square as the wind shakes the trees down to its roots and the raindrops fall like bombs on the campus concrete. That’s it: it rains, it rains every bloody day. On Jack, on me, on everybody. Looking up into the low clouds, I smile. Then I step out, letting the raindrops bounce off my shoulders. Let it throw everything it can at me. Let it do its bloody worst.
18
The Grown-Ups A. P. Allen CW: family trauma, childhood trauma
The sun was dwindling as we got into the car; we stopped
by the nearest shop and Daddy bought me a bottle of coke for the last time. Daddy drove me and Mammy through Dublin city, past the Northside and further out, into the countryside. They left the radio off; when I asked a question about visiting my uncle they didn’t reply. I watched the sun touching the horizon across the fields, waiting for night to come. As darkness drew in the road began to narrow. Houses became fewer and farther between. Soon the headlights were the only thing between us and the pitch black. I closed my eyes for a few full seconds at a time, imagining that the car’s lights had died, and we were just riding blind into the night, or that we’d have to pull over and wait while my father went to find help. We said nothing between my unanswered question and when the tyres crunched the gravel outside my uncle’s house. A light on upstairs; a silhouette arose behind thin curtains. The last time I had been at this house was shortly after my seventh birthday, a few years previous. Mammy 19
stayed in the car as Daddy pulled me along by the hand. There was a frosted glass bit beside the black front door where I could see the half-light in the hallway. When Daddy pressed the doorbell, it took a long time for my uncle to arrive, bumping heavy and slow down the stairs. Without saying hello, he nodded at Daddy, who pressed his hand against my back to lead me through the porch. I asked Daddy if he was coming in, and he turned away. My uncle held his hand on my shoulder as Daddy walked straight back to his car; he told me to wave to my parents as they drove off. I watched the headlights as they winded back down the road, then disappear as they turned around a corner. My uncle walked me down the long corridor to the kitchen, where my auntie had put some food out on the table - ham and potatoes with Brussels sprouts. I hated sprouts, but made myself eat them. They had electric lights in the house, but there were just a couple of candles lit on the table. I looked out the window at the darkness outside the kitchen. Beyond the whistle of the wind, there was a silence deeper than anything you would hear at my parents’ house in Ranelagh. My uncle and aunt talked about grown-up things for a bit, laughing and joking. Then my uncle asked me if I knew why I was there. I said I’d some idea but not really. He explained that my parents weren’t able to look after me, and that I would be staying with him and his wife. Maybe my parents would come and take me back in a few weeks, maybe a few months, maybe a year or two. Things were going to be different in this house. I wouldn’t want for anything, 20
but I was going to have to start doing some jobs around the house. There were going to be more rules, and there would be real trouble if I broke them. I started to sob, and my auntie said that if I didn’t stop mewling she was going to smack the head off me until I stopped crying. I blubbered something about wanting to be excused, got up from the table and began to walk away, not sure where I was going, but my uncle grabbed me and pulled me by the jumper back to the table. He told me to finish my dinner and that we would talk about things after we finished eating. I ate, too nervous to cry now. My auntie finished her dinner last, and gazed at me, licking her fork. No words were spoken for a moment. I picked up my plate and put it in the sink, then did the same for my uncle and aunt’s things. My uncle started smoking a cigarette. He faced me and said that I had been nothing but a burden to my parents, and it was little wonder they had sent me here. He was pretty sure they were never going to come back. If I didn’t want to end up somewhere worse, I had better do just as they said. As a matter of fact, he had a little job for me just now to see if I wasn’t totally useless after all. He brought in a mop and bucket from the next room. He set them by the table, then stood in the middle of the kitchen, took his willy out and started peeing on the kitchen floor. My aunt was laughing hard at this. He handed me the mop and I started to mop it up into the bucket. He made me throw the pee down a drain out the back and then go over the kitchen floor with water and some cleaning fluid. In bed it was completely dark. I heard my uncle and aunt 21
talking and laughing in the next room, then it was totally silent. It was still summer holidays – what would the next month be like? I wondered if my parents would stay in their house for long or if they would leave and move somewhere else. Yet somehow, I sensed that everything from before was gone, like a toy that had just fallen in the fire. For a long time, I lay awake in the darkness. Eventually I started to feel tired enough to sleep. As I drifted between waking and sleeping, I opened my eyes a little. There was something to my left; the outline of a man standing over me. I tried to move but I was gripped by sleep paralysis, a hand reaching up from the mattress through my chest, hooking its fingers between my ribs and skin to drag me down. I opened my eyes wide. The room was empty; there hadn’t really been anyone there. Still I stared towards the bedroom door, waiting for someone to walk in. I stayed hidden beneath the covers. In my imagination I slipped out of bed. I tiptoed to the kitchen, and looked through the different drawers. I took out the biggest knife I could find, crept upstairs, and hesitated in front of the door of the other bedroom. I could make out my uncle’s and aunt’s sleeping heads peeking over their duvet. I stood over my uncle like the shadow phantom I had seen over me sleeping. I stabbed him in the neck. He only made a gurgle as he bled. Then I stabbed my aunt. Hiding in the bed, it felt like I’d really wanted to do it, but then I thought of the sun rising the next day, and being alone in the strange house with enough food for a few days. Maybe it was still summer, but it felt so cold in that room. 22
*** Dear Reader, there are three things you should know about this story. The first is that it is not true. The second thing is that I am telling it to my husband as if it were true. The third thing is that I am not making a specific false accusation against a particular uncle; I am simply telling my husband this story in order to exert control over him. My name is David. I am a Professor of Psychology at an Irish university. I am in the process of conducting a case study of psychological abuse within the context of a marital relationship; my own. It is a project that gives me gratification at an emotional and professional level. Although I am the narrator, my husband Vincente is the hero; he is a schoolteacher, originally from Chile, who puts the interests of his pupils first. I hope you enjoy my story.
This piece is an extract from a novel. 23
Sparks of Flint: Snapshots of Ireland Sinéad Barry
“You are neither here nor there, A hurry through which known and strange things pass As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.”
Séamus Heaney, Postscript
-
This is a collection of snapshots of contemporary Ireland.
It is not a representative account. There is no consistent way that people live or have lived on this island. It is a nation in flux by necessity. We are like sparks of flint flying without direction in the night. We are like running water, whole only by changing. January, Limerick The rain drizzled lightly around Henry Street, spitting lightly on my face as I walked home. I had wrapped my scarf around my head to keep it dry. It had gone two in the morning but there were still people on the streets. They were all young and moving in small groups, looking forward, talking quietly. No one was wearing a coat. The men 24
uniformly held their hands flat in the front pockets of their jeans with white arms posed stiffly downwards. I could almost see legions of fair hairs standing perpendicular to their arms in the cold. At the corner by Shannon Street, a girl with bright blonde hair was jumping up and down in a puddle beside the footpath. She looked like the cup of a pale daffodil, her dress tight and ending in frills just below her arse. Her shoes were in her right hand, her left pumping in a jerky dance. Dark streaks ran down her face, and there were splatterings of mud on her bare legs. She turned around to see if her friends were watching. “SOOOOPHIE,” three girls dressed similarly shouted and ran clumsily down the street towards her, wobbling in their own high shoes. The girl in the white dress, must have ran on ahead. She laughed and waved at her friends from the puddle. No one else was left on the street. Sophie started dancing again, coughing between laughing shrieks. The group soon reached her and began scolding her loudly. She skipped onto the next puddle, shrieking now. I pulled my scarf tighter over my head, smiling at the scene. I wasn’t close enough to see the group’s faces but felt that I could see their expressions clearly. Sophie was smiling with her eyes closed, jumping around. Her friends’ mouths were turned down in drunk frustration. Sophie’s smile soon fell too into a frown. She kept jumping in the puddle, her feet now laced with muddy scratches—whimpering in rebellion on a rainy night. 25
April, Dublin “Hey man do you’ve the coke there?” someone I didn’t recognise asked Oscar. “I think I gave it back to you.” They both patted their jeans pockets hurriedly. “Fuck, no you definitely didn’t. Are you serious?” About 40 people were wedged into the kitchen, most of them lined against the peeling green cupboards and huddled around the fridge, chatting loudly to each other. The room had no kitchen table. Tension swelled the cramped space as the two men rifled through their wallets. They looked through their things with one eye, the other focused on each other. The air started to heave and spark. Myself and my friend Fiona said we were going to go the bathroom. We passed a heated debate between a young man sitting on the counter-top and a woman. I think it was about the point in time in which bread becomes toast. He was gesturing earnestly, pushing his shoulder-length blonde hair behind his ears every now and again. Her slim arms were folded over the strip of skin between her jeans and crop top. She was leaning back on her right foot. Every time he adjusted his position, she slightly adjusted hers. We knocked on the bathroom door which was just off the kitchen. Three lads came out together, one of them holding his wallet. Leaving the toilet, Fiona got trapped in a conversation 26
with a man talking loudly about the Lord of the Rings. One of the people he was speaking to was looking down at her phone and scratching her arm. Another body was beside her, eyeing someone’s abandoned can of cheap beer on the table behind the speaker. Fiona was listening to him, making eye contact and smiling when appropriate. She even looked sincere in her interest. I think the people like this might be the kindest in the world. I pushed past to escape, making my way towards the fridge where I had left my wine. In front of it, Oscar was licking cocaine out of his house key. He stuffed the key into the pocket of his tight jeans and turned to the people nearest him. “You know, I’ve been listening to a lot of rap music lately,” he said. I looked to the door, which was blocked by about 20 people. I looked back to the fridge and sighed. “And yeah like I’ve just come to realise that without a doubt Kanye is the best artist of our generation,” he stopped. “Yeah, yeah completely, completely,” said a deep voice belonging to someone in my course I hadn’t met yet. He was nodding vigorously and chewing gum. Tiny flakes of white powder hid between the hairs on his Cupid’s bow. I recognised him as the guy who twirled the ends of his anemic moustache during lectures. I asked Oscar to move so I could get my wine. “Up Kanye 2020,” someone on the other side of the room shouted. “I’d go so far as to say that every major album that has been released in the past ten years is if not a direct response to Kanye’s art at the very least a derivative of it,” said Oscar. 27
I took a long gulp from the bottle. “What do you think?” He directed his question to Fiona, who had escaped from the Lord of the Rings conversation. “Umm to be honest I wouldn’t be the best person to ask, I don’t mind rap but I’m not like super into it,” she said. He nodded. “Yeah, yeah I get it. Man, I’d really recommend it like it’s just the only genre out there that’s like actually creatively generative you know?” He placed a finger to his nostril and inhaled. “And Kanye like ugh he’s a genius. Although now don’t take this the wrong way but maybe you have to be a lad to really get it you know? Like the whole rap bravado juxtaposed with all his insecurities. Like, he just grasped the entire male experience in one album you know?” Oscar smiled expectantly. “That sounds really interesting, I might give it a go,” she said. “Sorry, I hope I didn’t come off as misogynistic or anything, I really don’t mean to.” Fiona laughed. “Don’t worry, you’re grand I don’t think you’re sexist at all. I wonder where everyone has gone?” she looked around the stuffed room. Everyone we arrived with was missing. “What the fuck man? Where have you been? None of us have had anything all night.” Oscar’s friend reappeared looking angry. He reached over me and put his arm on Oscar’s shoulder. They locked eyes, neither smiling. I wondered if they were going to fight. 28
“Oh, Jesus yeah I found it. Sorry, forgot to say,” Oscar pulled a post-card sized plastic bag from his back pocket and handed it over. The room deflated. The other man laughed with relief, loosening his grasp on Oscar’s shoulder then patting it. He turned and pushed past the crowd, waving to a friend at the other side. I wondered for a moment if men and women are very different after all. March, Galway The only light in the car came from a small rectangular radio screen in the middle of the dashboard. It was a flat, black colour with RTÉ R1 shining out in white font. I was listening to the announcement with my mother in the driveway. She was leaning back against the headrest with her eyes closed, her face turned towards me. She looked white, almost translucent under the light of the screen. Her hands were at her lap, fingers kneading each other. I saw rosary beads in her mind, moving quickly through her hands. Looking down, I noticed that my fingers were mimicking hers. “It’ll be okay,” I said, scared more by her expression than the solemn announcement. She said nothing, keeping her eyes closed for a few moments longer, looking for the first time like an old woman. February, Dublin For years, I thought the proverb ‘you can’t step into the same river twice’ was coined by the 1995 Disney film, Poca29
hontas. You can imagine how stupid I felt to discover it was about 2,500 years older than this, found in a fragment of a scroll written by the philosopher Heraclitus. Heraclitus is said to have written just one single text which he deposited at the temple of Artemis at Ephesus. Everything that is known about his philosophy comes from fragments of this papyrus scroll. Its contents are bizarre and contradictory, believed by some to be part of a single coherent argument and others to be a collection of standalone epigraphs. Of these hundred or so fragments, there are just three mentions of rivers. The most scrutinised says: Into the same rivers we step and do not step, we are and are not. What does this mean, if anything important? Scholars are divided. Some believe that his intention was because of change, we can never encounter the same thing twice. Others say he had a more subtle idea in mind, that some things are the same only because they change. I’m interested in the second part, ‘we are and we are not.’ Have we ourselves been changed just by entering a changing thing? Maybe all notions of consistency are comforting myths. What interpretative significance is there that the proverb was put together from over a hundred scattered fragments? That it was translated from Ancient Greek? If what it says is true, then we can’t encounter the fragment in the same way twice. But we only know this through its rediscovery. There is a poeticism to this, one ignored by philosophers as 30
if unimportant. Easter, Limerick On Easter Sunday last year I was working in a pub near my house. It was large, dimly lit and empty except for three people sitting by the corner of the bar by the door. They were all there alone. On the left was a woman, around mid-fifties, looking tired, her waterproof jacket still on. (No drink, just nuts.) The man in the centre had grey hair, around mid-forties. He was well-dressed, with vapid eyes. (Three jaeger-bombs, all at once.) A man in his mid-sixties or so was standing on the right. He had a long grey-ponytail that brushed the top of his protruding arse-crack. His name, he said, was Tony Rainbow. (Beamish) The man in the centre waved me over, “Do you know who this is playing?” he gestured vaguely to the speakers in the corner of the bar. There was a bench there, with an array of DJ equipment in front of it. Staff working Sunday nights were privy to DJ Tony Rainbow’s infamous set. The man answered his own question before I had a chance to. “It’s Prince, do you know Prince love?” “Yeah, didn’t he die two years ago toda-” I started. “I’ve loved Prince my whole life, my whole life since I was a kid” he said earnestly. “I remember buying my first album of his, sure he was already a star by then and I was only about sixteen I’d say. How old are you my love?” His voice was broad with a pseudo-American accent. I 31
guessed he had acquired the accent sometime in the past 10-15 years. He moved to America for work and raised his family there, bringing his children (two girls?) back to visit every two years. I thought they’d have matching charm bracelets with sterling silver shamrock charms and hate the rain. Maybe he was home for a few days by himself to visit his mother over Easter. Did she mind that he’s spending it at this depressing bar, arms cradling three full glasses of Jägermeister and red bull to his chest? I smiled apologetically at him, “I’m twenty-one.” “Aw you’re only a kid love, a baby,” he crooned, eyes glinting. “You wouldn’t know so.” “Do you remember Prince?” He asked the woman to his left. She nodded curtly, folding her empty peanuts’ wrapper twice over and smoothing out the creases. They returned to silence. Tony Rainbow never ordered his pints from me. When he was finished his stout, he got the attention of the barman, if he was around, and pointed to his glass with a nod. The DJ didn’t sit down when he was drinking, which he always was. I thought it might be because he was afraid people would think he was taking the piss if he sat down at the bar during his set. DJ Tony Rainbow was a hardworking man, he wanted people to think. He took a slurp of his pint that drew his head back and sauntered back over to his equipment to change the song. “New York, New York,” blared through the sound system, dislodging some dust from the speakers and I checked my 32
phone for the time. 11:10. At least another two hours before I’d get home. For fuck’s sake. The music sounded padded. It bounced off a few edges of the bar before disappearing down the big empty seating area in the back. The pub, usually quiet, was ghostly empty on Sundays despite Rainbow’s attempts to confuse local drinkers into thinking they were living out their wildest party fantasies on an exotic island instead of guzzling stout in a Limerick pub. On Easter Sunday mind you. To achieve this ambitious feat of deception, Tony Rainbow shouted phrases including: “Sunday Night!”, “Are you ready?”, and particularly embarrassingly, “IBIZA!” during pauses in the remixed classic rock songs that comprised most of his set. I was surprised to hear that regulars were shouting along in the smoking area outside. Usually they disappeared into the outdoor area for a timely fag when DJ Rainbow started playing. Hearing that they were singing along to Sinatra their enthusiasm became clear. I stifled a laugh at their version. “Bangkok, Bangkok” was a take on the original “New York, New York” in reference to the six weeks Tony Rainbow spends partying in Thailand every year. I felt a pang of sympathy for Tony Rainbow, he must have known he was being mocked. The self-named choir was made up of a group of six or seven men, in their late 20s from what I could tell. Some of them had been in the pub since 3pm. The manager had been giving out to one of them earlier for coming in in the same clothes he had on in the pub last night. 33
“If you don’t go home tonight and change your clothes, I’m not letting you in tomorrow,” she had told him, only half-joking. Man-drinking-in-the-centre, Michael? A man I think I heard someone call Michael earlier gestured for me to come over. His lips sponged white dribble and were moving slowly, but no words were coming out. I thought I should stop serving him, but I was too nervous to refuse him. He gestured for me to come closer. I craned my head a little further over the bar. He muttered something incoherent. “Sorry?” He did it again. “Sorry I didn’t catch th-” “Take your clothes ofsfs...” I sighed and stepped back but reprimanded him with no more than a stern look. I thought about how often I recount the advances of drunk customers to my friends. I tell people that I wish I could scream and curse at these men. I’m glad that I can’t. Rather than appearing cowardly, or as if I secretly welcome the attention, I can say that I don’t want to risk getting fired for yelling at customers. The principles I transgress to avoid conflict. I looked around to see if any other staff were nearby. They weren’t. “Sorry no sees it’ssss like the song, the Prince song.” “Right,” I replied curtly, moving away from his side of the bar. “Alright I’ll take my clothesss off,” he decided. The woman with the peanuts stood up and left, her neatly folded peanuts wrapper immediately springing out of its pleats, the silver catching the light of an overhanging lamp. 34
“Sorry don’t worry I won’t sorry don’t worry now.” I took down fragments of the encounter in my notes, hearing my mother’s voice in my head telling me that all these experiences will make a bestselling novel one day. It didn’t seem so worth it. February, Clare It had been a year and a half since my last ocean swim. I was beginning to feel feverish. The prospect of the exhilarating catharsis that comes with swimming in Ireland’s freezing waters preoccupied me in the weeks leading up to my trip. I had been invited to spend a few days with friends in New Quay on our college reading week and was impatient. New Quay is a tiny, beautiful village in the north of Clare, near the Galway border. The few buildings in the town all face the same way—the sea. They spread out across the coastline forming a long line, extending their arms to the stony beaches together. On the train down, I was distracted from my reading by a pain in my lower calf. There was a deep cut on it from wearing ill-fitting boots to work a few days previously. The night before I had accidentally sliced the cut further with a razor when I was showering. It was shiny and raw, tinged yellow at the edges. We arrived in the early afternoon and I decided to go for a walk on the rocks to get some fresh air. The ocean spray followed me across the grey slates, moving quickly hissing up from the sea like cold steam. Beside the point where the road ended, two copper monuments were drilled into the rocks. One was L-shaped with the outline of a wave on its arm, marking 35
a point on the Wild Atlantic Way for tourists. The other was shorter and had a plaque with a Séamus Heaney poem etched into the stone. The poem, Postscript, was inspired by a drive through the area. I walked for half an hour or so before turning and coming back the same way. The tide had come in and lapped all the way up to a narrow walkway. Sitting on the stones, I rolled up my jeans and eased my calf into the salt-water, feeling the water’s stinging healing fizz on my cut. When I came back my friends were all lounging in the sitting room reading. I sat down to join them with a battered red library copy of Principia Ethica for my upcoming essay. The room was filled with large windows facing the ocean. Reading with the sound of a gentle curdling sea, I felt that any learning was possible in such an environment. At around half four in the afternoon we drove down to the beach for a swim, borrowed swimming togs pulling at the skin under our clothes. Pink streaks were running through the grey sky. The days were still short and the sky looked like it was being pulled at the sides, ready to close into night. “What do you think?” Aoife asked me as we stepped out of the car. The water was dark-grey, ruffling against itself under the wind. I grimaced in response, pulling the neck of my jumper up to my chin. Smooth rocks covered the beach, glistening on a bed of grey sludgy sand. The entire landscape was fatally grey, its features visible only by subtle falls and fades. Dark sand fell into black water, silhouettes of rocky cliffs loomed over the cloudy hori36
zon. Coldness emanated from every pore of the landscape, feeling like a space between worlds. It was everything that a beach should be. Mila, Emma, Aoife’s mother Anne and I pulled our layers and hobbled down onto the beach in bare feet. I remember how white our feet looked, clenched to the pale stones as we made our way to the water. Anne was versed in February swims and made it to the tide first, without drama, rubbing cold water on her arms and legs herself after getting ankle deep. Mila and Emma were behind me, hugging each other for warmth. After the first shallow wave hit their feet they screamed, running back towards the stones with wide eyes and flapping arms. The three others, dressed in coats and scarves, laughed, taking pictures. I laughed too and stepped in, swallowing my gasps, in equal parts headstrong and performatively courageous. The water was unbearably cold. An image floated to mind of a pack of dogs pulling the skin off the lower half of my body. Anne had already started to swim, stretching her arms long in the water, her white hair raised from the dark bath, glowing slightly. I took a breath and dove in after her, emerging with my hair plastered to my head, utterly exhilarated. “You can tell who’s Irish,” Christian laughed from the beach, shivering in the wind. “It’s lovely once you’re in!” I called back, lying. We got out of the water quickly. My friends took pictures of me, shaking violently blue in front of the pink skyline. Back at the house in the shower I remember the first douse of hot water burning my skin, flattening the blonde hair on my arms that 37
had stood like a legion of soldiers just moments ago. That evening, we went down to the only pub in the village, Linnane’s. The place was empty. We arrived except for two men. One was reading a newspaper at the bar and the other chatting to the barman in a cement-thick Clare accent. Sitting down at a table with five pints of Guinness, Aoife gestured quietly to the man who had caught my attention. “You see him?” We all looked over. He had grey hair that fell around his head and a woollen moth-riddled jumper. He was talking earnestly at the barman who responded with polite affirmations every now and again, his gaze elsewhere. “His name is Paddy ‘the Thatch’.” “Sorry, did you say, ‘the Thatch’?” “Yeah, that’s his last name,” she said, and we all laughed. “Yeah so apparently, thirty years ago he came to do a thatching job for someone who lives here,” Aoife started explaining the story. “Wait hang on, Paddy the Thatch isn’t from New Quay?” “Yeah believe it or not that man is a blow in.” We all looked over at him again, he could have been part of the landscape outside, all grey and earnest and wild. “Anyway, he came to thatch Mrs. O’Connor’s roof and said he’d do it for free if he could live in the shed thing in the back of her garden.” “No way,” said Emma. “I know and he just moved in and never left.” We were baffled. We spent the next while chatting and laughing, playing 38
cards that I had brought with me. After half an hour or so, Paddy wobbled over to our table, caught my eye and said something indistinguishable. “Sorry?” He repeated the question, gesturing with his hands and spilling a bit of his pint. His movements diverted my gaze to his right, where I noticed there was a framed photo of himself on the wall dated from the nineties. We looked at each other, all confused. I noticed that he was wearing the same jumper as in the photo. “Do you know how to cut hay?” We laughed as a group. “No, I don’t,” I replied. He kept talking, his words coated in a wet layer of drink, smiling, and waving at me. The barman watched from behind the bar, amused at the scene. “Cooking so what about cooking?” I realised this is what he was saying after a while. “Not particularly.” He looked shocked. “Jaysus what do you know?” I shook my head to signify obviously very little. “You’ll do the cooking and I’ll do the thatching…” We laughed, shocked. He repeated the proposal a few more times in various ways. We realised he was asking me to come live with him. Christian and Emma made a glance at me to make sure I wasn’t too uncomfortable. After a few minutes of this Paddy started to sing, exposing a dark, toothless mouth producing a rough, but decidedly lyrical tune. 39
“Come to bed with me come to bed with me,” he raised his hand offering a dance and performing a little jig in front of our table. “Is that a real song?” I replied in a weak voice. We went back to the house around midnight and slept in until late the next day. I thought about our ridiculous exchange for weeks afterwards. It furrowed itself into my mind as an invitation to another world. The world must only exist in memory—no, memory is too sensible. His reality is only possible through a shared imagination. One that has almost disappeared. I didn’t and don’t mourn its loss. On the drive to the train station a white flurry of snow flew past the windshield, beginning to settle on the beach. I wondered if Paddy the Thatch had central heating. He probably had an open fire. I imagined it looked like a cottage from the 19th century that you can visit in folk parks, small, dark, and smelling of turf. I chastised myself for the vision of antiquity that sprung up from the recesses of my imagination when prompted with rurality. My heart ached slightly for this Ireland, knowing my nostalgia was misplaced and this world fictional. It still hurt. The speed of the car made it seem like the snow was blowing against us, melting on impact. I remember thinking: does any real place exist where the wind catches hearts off guard, blowing it wide open? Maybe space needs to be injected with powdery doses of fiction to create any sense of magic. What harm.
40
The Contributing Writers
A. P. ALLEN is a member of Research Staff. CHRISTIAN COWPER is a recent graduate of History. SINÉAD BARRY is a recent graduate of English and Philosophy.
41
The Editorial Team
CHRISTIAN MOORE is the Founding Editor HARRY DOWNES is the Co-Editor SAM MURPHY is the Contributing Editor AOIFE DONNELLAN is the Design & Layout Editor MAYA BUSHELL is the Cover Designer
The Carta staff acknowledges Trinity Publications for making this issue possible. Email carta.magazine@gmail.com with any queries, prose related or otherwise.
42
