Icarus 63.2 (February 2013)

ICARUS

LXIII.II

Icarus MMXIII

LXIII.II

CONTENTS 14. Haiku Liam Wrigley

3. Editorial 4. Liberation Linnéa Haviland

15. Poor Old Winter Liam Wrigley

5. Chronology of Lost Things Madeleine Barnes

16. After the Rain Anna Clifford

6. What Looking Does to the Light Madeleine Barnes

17. Tej Jim Clarke

7. Fra Angelico’s Crucifixion Arabella Currie

18. Sheep!

Hilde L. Losnegård

8. History Arabella Currie

19. Haican’t P. Hunter

9. The Liberation of Bergen Belsen Arabella Currie

20. the interview: Paul Murray 29. Birthday Blooze Niamh Donnelly

10. Bluebell James Bennett 11. sit down on this bench now and i tell you a story James Bennett 12. Nachtmusick Galen Mac Cába

37. Missing Sophie Meehan 37. A Bridge Niall McCabe 39. Youth Niall McCabe

13. put me in a white bed Shannon Azzato Stephens

40-41. Sheep!

Hilde L. Losnegård

14. Wings of Change Vanessa Lee

42-44. Acknowledgements

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Editorial Icarus is a testament to creative writing at Trinity, but also a means of encouraging it. The easiest job for an editor is reading a submission of standout quality. To assess a submission of more variable quality is a much more difficult task, and the importance of having a clear idea in one’s head of why something works or why, perhaps, it fails to – remains paramount. Does a writer’s descriptive flair, for example, get the better of him/her? Does the plot of a story or the structure of a poem cohere sufficiently? Most importantly, is the writer’s voice compelling? These are the kind of questions we end up asking ourselves. The criteria are not particularly rigid, or clearly laid out.

And why should they be? Afterall, good writing is something unique.

As editors, our predominant hope is that Icarus encourages aspiring writers to cultivate their creative interests, regardless of whether or not they ultimately feature as contributors in the magazine.

This issue of Icarus features an interview with Trinity alumnus, Paul Murray. Amongst other things, his conversation with Eoin Tierney touches on the importance of workshops to his early development as a novelist. This is something which student writers might take particular note of, with Writer Fellow Eoin McNamee taking up residence at Trinity later this month. We are also delighted to publish illustrations from Linnéa Haviland, Vanessa Lee and Hilde Losnegård.

Editors: Nick Bland & Ciarán O’ Rourke Deputy Editor: Eoin Tierney icarus magazine

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Liberation LinnĂŠa Haviland

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What Looking Does to the Light Madeleine Barnes The story is long, even to me it starts with twin cards in a tarot deck it starts with a horoscope read too late, one predictive scar in a closed palm, a life-line split two ways.

I can’t speak the words, but I know you—once before we folded into halves, napping in shared blood.

I don’t call you anything because they didn’t name you, but when the time comes I will look up constantly your apprentice of yet-to-become attached to your first breath I won’t fail to meet you and you will see me standing with your curls in my hands, their fortunate identical shimmering, air-colored. Anywhere I’d know you and think you must have lived at least seven new colors famous to me now, burning best at night, little names without fortunes and had we been exempt from a world that keeps doing what it does, I would want my loneliness for everyone at midnight to appear lung-shaped in your fist. icarus magazine

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Chronology of Lost Things Madeleine Barnes They don’t know this but I have found your grave and come every three months to leave coins and sketches, photographs of rooftops and avocado peels.

I have an extra rib that floats against my muscle as if something in me shook loose when you died.

I rip passages from books whose quiet spines say nothing of your first life. They know how far apart spoken words become when we bury someone small.

The synonyms for mother always make me tremble: guardian, as if my cells contain armor, origin, source, as if I were your center.

I could not understand when they said you were sick and much less the coffin waiting to be closed in the floodlit corridor.

When they touched my stomach and told me to breathe your weight held its place inside me like feathers. icarus magazine

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Fra Angelico’s Crucifixion, San Marco, Florence Arabella Currie The saint at the far left edge has turned his back – the heat crusting blood, the butcher’s smell the mother falling, her arms stretched to balance her son’s arms.

And he has closed his eyes.

With hands lifted to his face he stops the sight from coming in.

But if there were enough hands he would stop his ears or, better still, would snap the painter’s brush into two lines clean at the cut, bone-thin.

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History Arabella Currie His house was full of them – oak leaves spilling out of drawers ash and horse chestnut and willow leaves like reeds.

His filing cabinet had run its course.

He’d had it purpose built – rough wood to make them feel at home labels on each drawer to tell him year and species and shade.

It kept him warm through winter then in spring it turned – his dry collection seemed suddenly dead and suddenly very old.

He shut the windows.

He drew the blinds and tried not to think of the next year’s autumn – the piles of leaves that waited for his footstep’s crunch his white page, his ruler and his meticulous records of each tree’s pattern and each leaf ’s fall.

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The Liberation of Bergen Belsen Arabella Currie I don’t like to talk about it although we had to do it.

We broke the walls down and opened the doors and lit the few hungry living.

That part was what was photogenic, us letting the light in, their wide eyes, shoulders given for them to lean on, our cigarettes shared.

But the rest, too, had to be got through cleaned out. Machines are better, faster, so it didn’t take as long as you’d think.

And the pits were dug before we came.

Shovel, scoop and toss.

Your photograph shows me in the worst light.

I didn’t know you’d take it.

I couldn’t see you, and I only smoked that cigarette to keep the stink out.

I really don’t like to talk about it and I still see it enough times without all this and your photograph is blurred, and from a distance, and there is no telling that the man is really me, after all this.

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Bluebell James Bennett Up point and puckered at the sky Crisp sponge petals clasp and curl and the mouth Full of sticky dew Light blue purples with sun and feeding And the clasp is loosened and with time comes weight And a knowing nod Darker again now and blooming The stem once crisp and brittle gives and bends And goes like this Dip Dip Dip down slowly Rest

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sit down on this bench now and i tell you a story James Bennett sit down on this bench now and i tell you a story did you ever hear tell of a fellow by the name of Leary well he lives in the house around the corner there the one with the blue door you do know it you do it’s the one with the christmas tree in the window all year round see i told you you knew it anyway he was always a queer fellow never mixed even gets the shopping delivered every week he works in the glass factory always did since he was sixteen or seventeen you know he got that house when the mother died and that was a fair few years ago he leaves every morning at twenty to nine i see him because i’m always sitting here and he comes back at a quarter past five he goes in on a friday evening and doesn’t come out til monday morning he goes away for the last two weeks in june every year i see the car driving off and he doesn’t come back til the first of july nobody knows where he goes but here wait til you hear this now i was walking along the quay there late one night last december and there he was sitting on the edge with his feet dangling over the water and he had this bit of paper in his hands and he was ripping it up into halves and then quarters and again and again ripping it up smaller and smaller and smaller did you ever hear tell of the likes of that now did you?

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Nachtmusik (for Katy) Galen Mac Cába Little flurries of light Mark well the path tonight.

Is it just whimsy, just fancy to think That other spirits traipse these streets?

Look at the soggy leaves Gaily decaying on paved slabs, Losing their lustre as they cheer up the dark.

See the eaves of ancient houses Swaying by whiskers to gentle waltzes, Swinging around the axis of this Quotidian ländler, Roman avenues and Viennese Straßen But two types of dance On this our ballroom, Earth.

Oh City City, I can sometimes hear A strain of secret music Gasped between the roars of the motorcycle, Seeping ’twixt cycles of sound, Catching the middle ear off guard A flicker of humour In the phalanx ranks of stone.

Teach me your tune, Oh tired town – Wrap me up tight In your bodice of light.

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put me in a white bed Shannon Azzato Stephens you say, remind me to always put you in a white bed. you call my skin dark, marvel at its bronze, though i know if i were home my shoulders would be twice the mahogany. i reach to hide a stray stand of hair i lost overnight: black on white, usually straight but now curling, long and slow, from the tip of a pillow to the mattress, a lone comma on white paper. you stay my hand, trace the line of hair where it ends on your wrist, rise to make tea, leave me full in the empty, warm place you left in the kitchen you press your thumbs into our tea bags, squeeze out the last ochre drops, cloud the mugs with milk, feed the cat, and if i were down there i would measure my cheek against the space between your shoulder blades and tuck my finger against your gentle hip bone, sweat pants slipping so low desire is a plant that trembles. you are the only one who can slip into me like this, having always been the same, stretched out, waiting for someone to take your love, to drink your tea

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Haiku Liam Wrigley you chose to sit under the brightest barest boughs

that engine shudders winter into spring my cherry blossoms swallowed by the flattering lake spoke the swans stare not deeply the bus drives sadly a girl with clear brandy eyes the day turns yellow a different moth I marvelled coldly, listening, the spindle moon spinning

your face a leaf amber in the sun

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Poor Old Winter Liam Wrigley Give Winter a kiss on her long shadowed hair, Her wobbly lighting is so unkind, It’s simply not fair, Her mascara’s a rainfall mess, She’s wept herself blind.

And now Spring, that grinning bitch, Walks in with a strangely Purple leafy dress.

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After the Rain Anna Clifford You couldn’t call it blue – Prussian, Cobalt, Ultramarine weren’t on the scene that evening.

Baby had faded, and Cyan too. It was getting late.

No it wasn’t electric, but it had a dull iridescence – of a blank sheet of paper, of words on a screen.

It was more obscene than tepid.

I was facing uphill and east, I suppose, because the sun sets west – (I say this in case you go searching) – It held me and I watched it bruise.

I held on too.

And they never came – deep sky, midnight, teal, azure – only the beat of blood behind that stare.

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Tej Jim Clarke The dancers shrug off the world. Everything that moves here moves from the shoulders down. We drink tej and compare with Fanta Orange. Then dance with the dancers, clumsy, white with brown.

A thousand years past, faith slammed into the rock and kept slamming. Mountains bore churches. More people came and keep coming, flecking the hills with fires, life seeking purchase.

We drink tej in the smokefilled hall and clap to drums, our sore legs throbbing. Round the fire, dancers shrug off the world.

We drink more tej. They beckon to us, brown shoulders bobbing.

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Expect the Unexpected Hilde L. Losneg책rd

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Haican’t P. Hunter

I can’t write a haiku. It’s hard to do. But I want to try any-

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The Interview Paul Murray, author of An Evening of Long Goodbyes and Skippy Dies, in conversation with Eoin Tierney.

ET: Your dad Christopher Murray is a well-known literary academic. Was it daunting having a father of his stature, especially for you, writing fiction?

PM: No it wasn’t. What it meant was that we grew up in a house full of books. When we were little children we’d be pulling books down from the shelves, looking at the covers and wondering what these mysterious things were. The big family outing every week was going to the library. We just read all the time.

ET: What do you make of the statement, ‘Those who can’t do, teach’?

Might your dad have pushed you towards writing instead of teaching?

PM: Well, I don’t believe that’s true. To be able to actually impart wisdom to someone is a genuine gift; if you’ve ever had a really good teacher, you’ll know that. My dad didn’t push me towards anything. My brother’s an academic now, so he’s inherited that particular passion from my dad. But for whatever reason, I didn’t have any desire to stay in academia. School for me, as you gather from Skippy Dies, was quite a restricted place. That doesn’t mean I haven’t taught: I taught in Trinity last year in the Writers’ Workshop, and that was great, I really enjoyed it.

ET: Teaching Creative Writing has become a great resource for writers to supplement their income with.

PM: Writing is a tough racket: it’s a very precarious way of living. And that’s fine when you’re young and unattached. I remember someone writing about Pynchon that the reason he was able to write the books he wrote is because he deferred what they called the ‘Bourgeois Contract’ – he didn’t get married or have children until 70. You can indulge non-participatory fantasies when you don’t have anyone depending on you. Once you do, you’ve got to put food on the table, so the icarus magazine

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game changes. If you’re making 70 cent from every book you sell, you start to realise the maths are going to be pretty tight.

I remember Jonathan Franzen was giving out about universities having become these gated communities for writers: writers spending their lives in fancy East Coast colleges, and the only people you meet are the children of phenomenally wealthy people. I think that’s very valid.

ET: I want to ask about your slow writing process. It took seven years to write over 1,000 pages for Skippy Dies. It was eventually brought down to 660 pages. What had to be removed?

PM: There are a lot of characters, and until the very last drafts everyone’s story ran right through to the end. That’s why it took so long – me trying to find some way to square the circle and fit these things in. If you read Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace basically leaves everything in, and I thought initially that I could get away with that – all these digressions – and it could just sprawl.

Then quite late on I realised it wasn’t working. I had various fixed ideas, and one of those ideas was that I didn’t want to compromise the book for commercial reasons. The editors were going, ‘If you release this 1,000 page book, no one’s going to read it.’

It was very late in the day I realised the editors were trying to help.

Skippy was constantly getting bogged down in these digressions, these scenes and set-pieces. The thing was just stopping and starting, and the essential story, Skippy’s story, was completely getting lost in that.

Eventually I had to go through it and just cut it; I cut about 250 pages out in the last edit, and it was like being a psychopath, emotionlessly chopping up your family because at that stage I’d worked on it very hard for about six and a half years. Everything was really tight, and now here I was ruthlessly deleting whole chapters that in a very real way were a part of my life. It was the right thing to do, and an important lesson to learn, but also quite a painful one.

ET: You can definitely detect the influence of writers like Pynchon and Foster Wallace in your books, not just in size, but in the tone and vocabulary as well.

PM: I like linguistic exuberance. I think if that’s what you’re drawn to, then that’s how you write. I like maximalist books that have a lot icarus magazine

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of energy. Roland Barthes has this concept called ‘the flourish of thought’, where the thought just comes alive. That’s really exciting to me. I think that’s how those American authors operate. It’s ambitious, it’s exciting to read. Pynchon, Foster Wallace, William Gaddis: they can be overbearing because there’s such a welter of ideas, but it’s thrilling in a way that pared-back, monosyllabic, realist books aren’t. I don’t get those other kinds of novels, they seem like they’re not trying.

But that kind of ambition isn’t exclusively American. Someone like John Banville would be of that school. Or even Kevin Barry, you know, he’s much more rural Tom Waits-y. His stuff, there’s this kind of dark electricity to it.

ET: But is the popular Irish style now not very pared back? What Julian Gough called ‘sub-McGahern’.

PM: He said that, and then admitted he hadn’t read any new Irish fiction in years. I think that for some reason we have this unshakeable belief that the ‘sub-McGahern’ novel is the dominant mode in Irish fiction. But in reality, very few writers are working in that mode. The big names: Joe O’Connor, Anne Enright, Banville, McCabe and so on, these are all writers who experiment quite a bit with form and style. The younger generation likewise: Claire Kilroy, Kevin Barry, Mia Gallagher, many others – none of them are writing the kind of ponderous, retro stuff that Gough’s complaining about.

Even if they were, I find these kinds of critiques, ‘The novel should be this or that’, ‘The novel is dead’, tedious. In any art form, most of the material is mediocre, then there’s a small percentage of good or great stuff: Sturgeon’s Law. As an artist, you should be trying to do new things, trying to break through the restrictions and conventions in your own work, instead of complaining about your peers.

ET: You were an English and Philosophy TSM. Were you in David O’ Doherty’s class?

PM: Yeah, I was. He was a friend of mine. He’s a great guy and very funny. A cool and thoughtful guy, quite analytical. He’s someone who’s always looking under the surface and saying, ‘What’s really icarus magazine

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going on here?’ He set up the Jazz Society with Ben Jackson. They started bringing over these great acts to play, first in the Buttery and then further afield: Brad Mehldau, Ray Brown. Then Ben started a music promotion company called Note, which is still running, though he’s not involved any more.

It was interesting being in college and meeting those guys who were very confident, but also quite independently minded. Me and my friends came out of secondary school thinking there is no way anyone can achieve anything in Ireland; all you can do is get a job in a bank or else leave. Coming to Trinity, meeting people like David, who were not only smart and analytical but also did things, after a while you start to think, ‘Well maybe I can write a play and put it on in Players? Or send a story into Icarus . . .’ That level of confidence was something that I hadn’t acquired yet. Obviously David’s gone on to great success.

ET: What was it like starting out getting published, and first seeing your stuff in print?

PM: I think the first thing you see is all the problems you didn’t notice on your own computer. But getting published is great, obviously. You want people to read the words you write – no matter how cerebral or high-end, it exists to be read. That said, once you are published, a whole new set of concerns presents itself. Getting published does not equal being read. I used to work in a bookshop, so I didn’t have too many illusions on that front, but some writers imagine that as soon as their book comes out they’ll be catapulted into some higher realm where they’re drinking champagne with F. Scott Fitzgerald.

ET: Can you talk about the Creative Writing workshop you did in your SS year with Deirdre Madden?

PM: That was one of the best things I did in college. I think the leap you have to make as an aspiring writer is to believe in yourself as a writer. Because there’s so much self-doubt involved, it’s very easy to lose faith in yourself. In Trinity, even though I was writing I didn’t really think of myself as a writer. It was just something I did. But I icarus magazine

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had two good experiences that changed that: one was I wrote a play in second year that I put on in Players, which was great fun; and fourth year was this workshop with Deirdre Madden.

It was the only time I showed my stories to anyone apart from one or two friends, and it was fantastic. Fantastic to get in, for a start, because I had been rejected from all the previous years’ workshops.

And people liked what I was submitting, which was very encouraging. Deirdre said some very incisive things. She’s very smart, and she doesn’t pull her punches. She would say that while the writing flowed, some of it was derivative of certain American writers – which was true. At that point I was still trying to imagine myself 5,000 miles out of Ireland.

ET: Charles Hythloday, the narrator of your first book An Evening of Long Goodbyes: were there people like him in Trinity?

PM: Well, I don’t know what Trinity is like now, but there does exist in Irish society the vestiges of the Anglo-Irish ascendency. There are a couple of people I know who are tangentially attached to that scene. In Trinity there were a few massively posh people, who divided their time between a castle and an island in Greece or whatever. They were terrifying: incredibly confident, usually very tall and good-looking, had loads of money. Dublin town was their playground. For me, coming from the suburbs, the city was intimidating.

Charles in the book wouldn’t be quite of that bent though, I mean an international jetsetter. I think the beauty of being massively wealthy is that you can afford to be completely divorced from reality.

People affect this sort of fuddled, tweedy nature. The lords, they don’t need to put on airs, because they’re the lords, they don’t care if you think that they’re cool or not. Like what Charles is talking about in the book, the concept of the sprezzatura, the grace that comes with just not really caring what people think.

ET: As far back as 2003, the year An Evening of Long Goodbyes came out, you were very sceptical of the Celtic Tiger.

PM: Yeah, the hangover didn’t come until 2008 at the earliest. icarus magazine

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Without blowing my own trumpet, that book is fairly accurate about what was coming down the track. There’s a line where someone says, ‘This whole thing will come crashing down and all anyone will have done is have eaten a lot of expensive cheese.’ Broadly the truth.

People were coming out of Sheridans with armfuls of expensive cheese. The conspicuous consumption was through the roof.

People were so anxious, trying to find their role in this new society.

To be a writer was even worse: as a writer you’re marginal at the best of times. Now you’re marginal, you’re broke, and you’re in the middle of this horrifying orgy, like the whole country’s turned into the bar at the Four Seasons. It was pretty alienating, and it was hard to have a positive spin on it. Although I was sceptical about the Celtic Tiger, I had no idea just how corrupt the underlying system was, and just how crazily people spent. Claire Kilroy’s new book The Devil I Know covers that very well.

ET: And with Skippy Dies you anticipated the clerical abuses.

PM: I didn’t anticipate anything there because the clerical abuse stories had been coming out since the early 1990s. It was something I approached cautiously. For one thing, it’s very real, and very sensitive: these are things that happened to vulnerable people. Also I think there’s a real danger of child abuse becoming hackneyed. I didn’t want my book to use real, genuine trauma to leverage the plot.

I wanted it to be an instance of a bigger system of oppression that’s happening in the book, whereby the most powerful people in society are relentlessly exploiting the most vulnerable, and refusing to take any responsibility.

People were complicit in these things. We all like to demonise, and to blame, and blaming and demonising makes us feel better. If you watch an episode of mass hysteria like the property boom, you realise how people can be led quite easily into doing very unwise things, things which in clearer moments they themselves would feel to be wrong. The clerical abuse scandal is a symptom of something much bigger in Irish society, where marginalised people were abandoned, in the same way they’re still being abandoned.

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Most child abuse is carried out by family members, 2% is carried out by priests. Priests weren’t solely to blame. Allowing children to grow up in poverty is a form of abuse which many, many Irish people colluded in. When this country was rich, we still allowed that to happen. Poverty a lot of the time is what creates the environment where sexual abuse takes place. The more interesting question is why are we pinning this all on the priests? The game’s changed, there’s a new regime in charge. The priests had already lost a lot of their power when all these stories started coming out. It becomes this convenient story: everything bad that happened is because of those other guys.

ET: In Skippy Dies you address this, because it isn’t Father Green who abuses Skippy, as much as he might want to.

PM: It’s a suggestion. It’s up to you to interpret how you want. The priests did appalling things, there’s no question about that. But you need to recognise this society as a whole has failed really comprehensively. During the Celtic Tiger, when much of the materialistic project was directed at obliterating the church, the government failed society just as greatly, by doing things like closing Combat Poverty, or removing teaching assistants and education psychologists, or the problems of residential care, that could have been addressed but weren’t. This generation sold kids down the river. We use these stories about clerical abuse partly to cover up the sins of the present.

I’m really interested in that, the stories we tell ourselves and the way that we take very complex situations and turn them into good and bad stories. The concept of responsibility, what it means to be a grown up. Maybe being a grown up is being aware that your actions have consequences, that you have an effect on people around you . . .

ET: Is this something the character Howard learns: responsibility?

PM: I hope so – without wanting to be dogmatic about it. Howard might do something; I don’t know, will he stay in the school? It’s not clear. Obviously it’s a story with a narrative, and I worked quite hard to make it something that would have you turn the pages, with a icarus magazine

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beginning, middle and end. But I didn’t want there to be an ending that validates one particular perspective, like Howard learns his lesson and now he’s going to go out and affect goodness. Because the world is a complicated place, and even if you decide to be a good person, you’ve got to pay the rent.

Maybe with Howard he could do the most good by staying in school, and actually taking his teaching seriously, and trying to get through to the kids at least. In response to ‘Those who can’t do, teach’, I think teaching is crucial. If you get a good teacher, they can really change your life, whereas Howard is the opposite, he’s not really paying attention; maybe he’ll start paying attention.

ET: What was it like seeing David Cameron holidaying with Skippy Dies? You potentially received more attention from that than if you’d had won the Booker prize.

PM: I don’t know about that. Someone told me once that if you win the Booker you’ll sell a million copies, and Skippy didn’t sell anything close to that. But it’s a good comparison nonetheless because of all those things, like celebrities reading the book, being nominated for prizes, published abroad, and picked up by a famous director [Neil Jordan]. But I can’t stress how extraneous all of that feels to me. I didn’t write the book for that. I wasn’t expecting any kind of success for Skippy at all. It’s a very long book about fourteen-year-old boys and I didn’t know who, if anyone, the audience might be.

When it did find an audience and these various exciting things happened, that was very strange to me. That’s the strange thing about writing. By the time the book comes out, the fight is over for you, and if you do get praise or attention – and it’s great to get it, don’t misunderstand me – in a way it’s too late, because you’re already onto the next thing, and worrying about that. When you’re three years into a project, running out of money, and you’re stuck on chapter seventeen feeling like everything you write is lifeless or false or empty – that’s when you want someone to give you a prize. That’s when you would like someone, after a bad day when you close your laptop, to come up, hug you and say, ‘Incredible! The best thing I ever read.’ icarus magazine

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ET: Were you worried about negative associations with Cameron’s politics?

PM: Look, a writer wants everyone to read his book. The book only exists when people read it, and one of the great things about publishing Skippy has been meeting all of these people of every age and from every background who’ve read it and got something from it. It makes me happy that people are still reading at all, and I’m appreciative of anyone who’ll take the time to try to connect with my book.

I’m not sure how Cameron came to be reading it, but I suspect that as an Old Etonian it was the boarding school aspect of the book that appealed to him. I’d been quite tickled by Johnny Marr and Bobby Gillespie coming out and fulminating when Cameron said he liked their music. That seemed like a silly reaction on their parts. I couldn’t help thinking that here were two ageing millionaires having a public hissy fit because they were worried he might de-cool them.

It was all quite funny, like a bizarro version of what happened with Tony Blair, when he so cravenly got Noel Gallagher and Damon Albarn to hang out with him, and they so cravenly agreed.

Writing is different. Writers are all megalomaniacs on some level, so I think every writer fantasises about someone as powerful [as Cameron] reading his book – then ringing him up, and asking him over to Number 10, and standing at the window rubbing his jaw, then saying, ‘Paul – what should I do?’ And you lean back in your armchair and take a deep breath, and say, ‘Well, Dave . . .’ Wasn’t that what happened to Don DeLillo after September 11? He was invited to speak to the FBI about terrorism. Most writers’ fantasies are actually about being more like Don DeLillo.

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Birthday Blooze Niamh Donnelly Happy birthday. Even at nineteen you’re still the same: still shy-ish, still socially inept, still a fluttering mess when trying to string a sentence together. Yes. The winter sun soaks the kitchen where you sit, the sticky bits on the table all twinkling as you doodle on the newspaper trying to tease out the clues of a crossword puzzle. Lion in The Wizard of Oz, 6 letters, begins with C. Nana and Granddad have eaten. They sit plump and content on the matching blue chairs by the window.

Mum is dancing about, wiping surfaces, drying dishes. You should be able to slip away soon, take the car, go home and start getting ready.

Happy birthday. There is a rattle and slam of the front door and in comes Francis, your godmother. She holds you by the shoulders and kisses your cheek.

‘Nineteen, my goodness.’ Gives you €20 without a card or envelope. Mum makes the tea. That spoon’s dirty, Mum, don’t use that.

The mug makes a perfect ring on the newspaper where she places it in front of you. It is blue and it used to have a picture of Tom & Jerry on it.

‘So do you feel much older now?’ says Francis. Do you? There are pictures of you everywhere in this kitchen: a collage of you and your cousins at different ages – two, eight, twelve; playing in the garden or on the beach, wearing shorts or woolly jackets from summers and winters that seem to slide into one another over and over again.

Nana says, ‘Do you know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen that girl here before.’

Mum sighs. ‘Who’s that, Mammy?’ pointing crossly towards you.

‘Ah, d’you know I know, but it must be years and years since I’ve seen her.’

‘Come on, Mammy, what is she to me?’

Mum comes over and puts her face beside yours. Nana scans the two faces and beams:

‘Your daughter.’

‘Yes. So who is she?’

‘Aoife.’

‘No, other daughter.’

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‘Yes. You see, you do know.’

‘Ah I do, but you’re very hard on me. You’re always trying to catch me out.’

‘They’re easy questions really, Mammy.’

‘Ah . . .’

Francis tells her it’s your birthday.

‘BIRTH-DAY! Can you hear what I’m saying?’

Granddad is the one that keeps the money. He is sitting there blowing his nose. He examines the linen handkerchief carefully when he finishes. Nana signals to him to give you a few bob. No, snotty hands, snotty hands. €5. He pulls it out of a brown leather wallet that he keeps on him at all times. That’s twenty-five quid. You will spend it on cigarettes and vodka for later.

Nineteen. You still get spots just under your lip and your hair gets greasy just as soon as it’s been washed. You sip the brown tea, making ripples. Thoughts are floating through your mind, haphazard and strange: birthdays you had when you were a child; jelly and ice-cream and caterpillar cakes; that time you fell off the chair and Dad caught it on camera (tears and all); the time when you were twelve and dyed your hair pink and Mum wouldn’t let you leave the house until you washed out every last streak; that girl Raina from swimming who was your friend when no one else used to talk to you; that boy from when you were sixteen who kissed you twice and you thought he liked you but he didn’t. Your heart keeps on breaking over and over again. You have been held and you have been kissed.

You think you know a thing or two by now. You think that maybe tonight you might kiss Charlie Madden who, you have been told, has a thing for you. The brown wooden clock on the wall says it’s almost half past five. By the time you get home in the traffic and put on false tan, make-up, wash your hair it’ll be . . . what?

Francis picks at her nails and complains about the week.

Granddad is curious about the crossword and keeps gesturing to you to pass him the paper. In a minute, it’s nearly finished. C_W_ _ _.

Hmmm. Mum’s voice is a background hum as she tries, yet again, to explain to Francis about the situation with the prescriptions for Nana and Granddad. Francis says she can’t think about all that right now. She can’t concentrate, she says, she hasn’t the capacity for it, her brain is fried. Menopause. She was out sick from work on Thursday and Friday. It has been a disaster, a disaster of a week. Her icarus magazine

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fingers run through her hair but her fringe keeps falling back in her eyes each time. She says she can’t do it any more, she can’t go on, can’t, can’t, can’t. You smile coyly, looking up from your crossword to where she sits animated on the edge of a broken wooden rocking chair. You tell her that line from Beckett: ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on.’ Oh boy, do you like when you remember things like that – a little tickle of delight, something up there jigsaws into place. Mum rolls her eyes.

‘Don’t take all that stuff you read too seriously,’ she says.

You frown, shaking your head slightly without noticing. ‘What do you mean?’

Francis laughs and makes childish scrunches of her face:

‘I can’t go on. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.’

Her fists are little balls and she is hammering them up and down. You laugh. Mum laughs. Francis laughs. Nana laughs even though she can’t hear what is being said. You all laugh, sitting there, in the kitchen, with the sun pouring in.

The long curvilinear hands on the clock are edging towards six and you don’t know what you are going to wear yet. Mum pretends not to see how you keep looking at the clock and then at her. The pendulum swings from side to side. You clear the tea cups, wash them, dry them and hang them on the little hooks over the cooker. Francis follows you pensively with her eyes. You wonder does she think you’re doing it wrong. Have you put the cups in the wrong places? Did you use a hand towel instead of a tea towel? No. She would have laughed.

Francis sighs in earnest, gazing through you at the geometry of tiles on the wall above the cooker.

‘It really isn’t fair for some people, though,’ she says, ‘the awful things they put up with. I mean, why should they? People whose whole worlds have fallen down, how do they go on?’

Nana remarks on the tiles.

‘They’re new, you know, Jimmy put them in for us. A lovely job he did, a lovely job.’

Mum smiles with her lips closed.

‘I don’t know,’ she says, ‘you always think about these things more deeply than I do. You’re like Roisín. You two are the philosophical ones. I just . . .’

Just what? Totter on the surface, dip your toes? Tickle at it and then forget?

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Don’t? Dive thickly into the deep deepness of it?

‘You’re optimistic,’ says Francis. ‘You’re the optimistic one.

And you’ve always had faith. That’s what sets you apart.’

‘I don’t know,’ says Mum.

Soon silence fills the room, soft and melancholic.

‘I think I might head on,’ you say.

Francis perks up.

‘Ooh where are you off to?’

Mum frowns.

‘You’re not going yet, your Dad will be over after work, and Aoife. I have cake for you.’

‘What? I can’t stay that long. I have plans.’

She purses her lips. ‘What plans? You can stay a bit longer.’

‘I can’t, by the time Dad gets home, and cake . . . You never told me.’

I knew you’d do this.’

‘Do what?’

‘Go on. It doesn’t matter now anyway.’

‘What does that mean? You never told me you wanted me to stay.’

‘Go on. You never stay for more than ten minutes anyway. I don’t know why I thought you might want to . . . Oh just, go on.’

‘This isn’t fair.’

‘What’s not fair? I’ve told you you can go, haven’t I?’

‘Argh, you know what I mean, what’s the point in even . . .’

You’re already storming down the hallway, teeth still gritted.

It isn’t you that slams the door but it slams shut anyway. The cold outside pierces your skin – you’ve forgotten your jacket – but soon you are in the car, turning on the radio, trying to shake off another stupid argument, trying not to feel guilty, trying to feel excited. It’s your birthday. It’s your birthday. *** You meet for drinks at eight. The pub, if you can call it that, is one of those new-age places with jam-jars for cups. There is a grid of fairy-lights spread across one wall. You don’t recognise the music but your head nods along anyway. The table where you sit in a darkened corner is painted childishly with flowers icarus magazine

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and swirls. The chairs are mismatched and there are too many of you. Yours is at an odd angle and you find yourself sort of exterior, unable to magnetise the conversation your way. He is not there yet.

One of the girls, Jenny, has managed to swivel the conversation her way with her easy charisma. She has a sort of lightness you have never felt your way into. You focus on the movement of her mouth and smile at intervals though you can’t hear what she is saying. You wonder is your lipstick as nice as hers. Or is it silly. Can you really pull off red lipstick? You contemplate going to the bathroom to take it off but you are glued to your chair. You keep feeling yourself craning around to look for him, expecting him to come back from the bathroom, perhaps. You wonder does anyone notice.

The drinks are overpriced but you find yourself drinking quickly, more for something to do than out of any clear necessity. When Sarah stands to go to the bar you hand her a note and she brings you back two drinks, for convenience’s sake. Eventually the effect of the alcohol shakes off the gloom inside you. You feel as though you have stepped into a different version of reality, new and optimistic. Where is he? You’re definitely going to kiss him tonight.

An hour or so later you have moved to another venue: louder, fuller, livelier. You dance in a series of swooshes and whoooos and you hug people and people kiss your cheek and head and forehead, happy birthday, shots, shots, shots.

Then out of nowhere it comes over you and you are thinking: where is he, where is he? Your eyes scan for brown hair all around you.

Every set of blue eyes seems, for a moment, to be him and then a moment later it’s not. You are not seeing things right. People are two-dimensional or four-dimensional or something, not real, colourful, transparent; they are part of the patchwork of lights and music and inebriation; they are part of the world inside your drunken imagination. Yes. Out of nowhere, it’s that feeling again, grabbing you by the jaws and pulling you under, pulling you inside that head of yours. Body goes limp and stops dancing, him nowhere to be seen. Where have the last few hours gone? Why are you even here? Why didn’t you stay for cake with Mum on your birthday? Thoughts are filling you up as Sarah grabs you by the wrists and tries to liven your body: jump start it back into action, back to the carefree, light-headed, dancing person you were a moment ago. Where did that person go? No, you are brimming with a world inside yourself: thinking about that time you sat in an Irish oral and didn’t say a word, not one word; thinking about that boy icarus magazine

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when you were sixteen who kissed you twice and you thought he liked you but he didn’t – this feeling again – everything blurry and heightened, oh and happy birthday, happy goddamn birthday, nineteen and still clueless.

When the tears come – when did the tears come? When did they start? You don’t know. You can’t remember. All you know is you’re being bundled into a taxi and nobody seems to know what’s wrong, everyone’s asking each other, holding onto you, clasping your head as it shakes, tearful and snotty. There is a ringing in your ears that tickles right down to the back of your throat. What is wrong, Roisín, what’s wrong? What happened? The night seems to be watching you. You feel eyes from all around – the taxi-driver, groups of less obliterated bystanders, reflections in puddles, refractions of light in windows – all watching with unsubtle eyes as your tattered suede heel collapses to one side and you wobble feebly. But all of that, the world, reality, is receding outside of you and you are stuck on the inside, inside this head of yours, rattling about, jittering, hammering, swirling. Then, all of a sudden you stop crying, lift your head and say:

‘I saw Charlie kissing someone else.’

You almost laugh when you say it. It is so blatantly untrue.

Charlie was not even there tonight. You know that. Everyone knows that, surely. There is a moment of silence, of confusion. The grey of the world floats past outside: buildings, windows, cars, a ribboning curb, flashing streetlights. The taxi driver coughs, gruff and beardy.

But then the moment subsides and there is a chorus of ‘it’s okay’ and ‘he’s not worth it’ and ‘there are plenty more fish in the sea’. You wipe your bleary eyes, still sniffling, and sit in the warmth of your lie.

You like it. Your story fits.

When you get home you sit in the kitchen for a long, long time.

You put toast in the toaster but forget about it. You gaze into the blackness of the garden and up through the glass conservatory at the thickness of the sky. Mum and Dad and Aoife are upstairs sleeping.

It is 3 o’clock in the morning. Underneath the folds of teariness there is a niggling feeling that you have done something strange and wrong and embarrassing but none of that will surface until you wake up tomorrow on this couch in the kitchen, probably. Your birthday is gone. Nineteen. You are nineteen. And still the same, still the same.

No bigger, no braver. And drunk, drunk, drunk. icarus magazine

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Missing (for Jesse Jones and others) Sophie Meehan You died later on the beach head Climbed to the beauty spot where they plant daffodils for you now.

Drove the black of your brain to the silver blade points of the waves And no one saw the moon you saw.

They cradle the glimpses of you Sacred shreds the camera caught But no-one saw you tearing up the pieces You were ready to scatter in the sea Pieces they try now So desperately To gather.

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A Bridge Niall McCabe Sometimes I see myself walking across that bridge in Belfast when my hands and legs shook so badly I had to hold on to the railings.

I remember the force of it rattling out of my body, then evaporating like a lover, leaving me a shadow in the shivering absence of myself.

Sometimes that bridge shook so hard the cars rattled around like dinkies on the plastic surface, a flat replica of the world.

I can’t remember how many times. icarus magazine

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I shoved my mind off and watched it drop like a thick stone into the suck of water below.

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Cartoonist’s Nightmare Hilde L. Losnegürd

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On Thin Ice Hilde L. Losneg책rd

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Youth (for Ronan Murphy) Niall McCabe The word youth whistles out of your mouth an asteroid sent to wipe dinosaurs out.

A poet stands up opens trench coat wings made of pterodactyl skin and glides across the room stroking his chin.

The coffee he had suckered with his puckered wrinkled lips sits grows skin and blows me a kiss.

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Contributors

Shannon Azzato Stephens Shannon is a postgraduate student in the M.Phil in Creative Writing Program at the Oscar Wilde Centre. Her work has been included in a number of publications in the past, including The Sugar House Review, The Susquehanna Review, Anderbo, Emprise Review, and Brink Lit. Madeleine Barnes Madeleine Barnes is a writer and visual artist working toward a Masters of Philosophy in Creative Writing at Trinity College. Her work has appeared in places like Pleiades, Borders Open-Door Poetry, Oakland Review, Allegheny Review, The Loyalhanna Review, and The Rattling Wall. (madmads128@gmail.com) James Bennett James Bennett is a SF student of French and Spanish. (bennetja@tcd.ie) Anna Clifford Anna Clifford is a fourth year music student who would like to go to space. (annainrussia@googlemail.com).

Jim Clarke Jim Clarke is a former tabloid newspaper reporter, roulette croupier, playwright and whiskey barman. He is currently pursuing a doctorate in the School of English at TCD and keeping out of trouble. (clarkeji@tcd.ie).

Arabella Currie Arabella Currie is studying for an M.Phil in Theatre, having studied Classics as an undergraduate. She has written poems for a while, winning the Newdigate Prize at Oxford and the Foyles Young Poets award, and is attempting now to write plays also, especially translations of Greek tragedy. (curriea@tcd.ie).

Niamh Donnelly Niamh Donnelly is a SS student of English Literature and French. She is still waiting for Godot. (donnelni@tcd.ie).

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Linnéa Haviland Linnéa is 22 years old, and from Sweden. She was a student of Maths and Philosophy at TCD and is currently studying Illustration and Animation at Kingston University in London.

P. Hunter P. Hunter usually writes short texts that can be finished during a 45 minute-long class. After graduating they hope to have time for longer works. (penhunter@gmail.com).

Vanessa Lee Vanessa Lee is a Senior Sophister student of English and Drama who enjoys bringing new ideas and poetry to life through paint, ink, drama, and text. (leev@tcd.ie).

Hilde L. Losnegård Hilde is a PhD student in the School of English, and although she usually spends her time writing, sometimes she comes up with strange ideas like her Sheep! comics. They came about mostly because she can’t draw humans, and from her love of a good (or bad) pun... (losnegah@tcd.ie).

Galen MacCába Galen is an Irish composer studying Music at Trinity College Dublin. He has enjoyed writing poetry since his teens. (maccabag@tcd.ie).

Niall McCabe Niall McCabe is a Senior Freshman studying English and Drama and Theatre Studies. Niall has just broken up with Jacques Derrida after an intense year-long relationship and has moved in with Stephen Greenblatt. (mccabenp@tcd.ie).

Sophie Meehan Sophie Meehan is a SF student of English Literature and Spanish. As well as writing poems and stuff she makes theatre and really likes dogs. (meehansp@tcd.ie).

Liam Wrigley Liam Wrigley is a SF Nanoscience, Physics and Chemistry of Advanced Materials student. He is oddly fond of those sinister-looking seagulls that guard Trinity’s secrets. He dreams of one day writing a good, honest book. (liamwrigley@gmail.com).

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Acknowledgements ~ Icarus is funded by a grant from the DU Publications Committee and is supported by the School of English.

Icarus is a fully participating member of the Press Council of Ireland. Serious complaints should be made to: The Editors, Icarus, House 6, Trinity College, Dublin 2. Appeals may be directed to the Press Council of Ireland.

The editors wish to thank Paul Murray, Brunswick Press, LinnĂŠa Haviland, Leah Elsted, and the DU Publications Committee. ~

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