Farewell to Prague. Desmond Hogan

a guard directing traffic under Nelson’s Pillar.

      I walked home. A baby was crawling around the window of a pawnbroker’s in Camberwell. Lampposts were swathed with posters for wrestling, a Mardi Gras incoherence about the way they were pasted over one another, a bricolage of names like Kendo Nagazaki and Ravishing Robbie Hagan, of mammal-like breasts and Titan heads in balaclavas.

      ‘I’ve got more scars on my back than I can count,’ a stooped old man was telling another old man outside a bookie’s in Peckham.

      The Appleby Fair would be beginning just about now, black boxing gloves embossed with red satin roses hanging in the windows of vardos. I’d once known a boy from Derry who lived with an adoptive mother in Appleby for a while.

      In Catford, outside a shop which had fluorescent green pens in the window, pictures of reclining nymphs in Scandinavian forests, cups with ferny patterns, Limerick Benny was singing.

      He was wearing a black hat and, although it was summer, a black overcoat.

      ‘Tis not for Limerick that I sigh though I love her in my soul.’

      Perhaps it was because I’d just left Robin, but I heard the words of an English folk song and the English folk song in turn conjured a landscape in Ireland with an insistent narrative.

       Hurrah for the Scarlet and the Blue

       Bayonets flashing like lightening to the beat of the military drum

       No more will we go harvesting

       Together in the golden corn.

       I took the good king’s shilling

       And am off tomorrow morn.

      The landscape, like the words, was heraldic; the eighty English acres my father’s people had come from Tipperary to tend the time the railway station was being built, the coral-red station building against the bog.

      In my flat I picked up a tiny photograph of a woman in a crisply fluted black coat and white saucer hat by a porch adorned with traveller’s joy, her legs like the legs of malnutrition. On the mantelpiece beside her was a framed photograph of two Teddy boys in the middle of a street, a row of council houses running behind them, a man bending his head into the distance and a row of trees in a conflagration of bloom. Close by was a snapshot of me and my parents in Bray in the early fifties. Behind us, advertisements for Bradmola and Dundyl.

      I picked up a letter that was on the mantelpiece, partly for decoration, partly because it had never been resolved.

       Hearty congratulations to you both on the arrival of your little son. I was delighted to get the good news, and aren’t you the lucky one not to have been kept waiting too long. I just got the news before the pater arrived on the 3 p.m. bus from Trim.

       I am sending a wee frock for the baby. You know all the shopping one can do from a bed. I feel middling. The same routine still, from bed to school and back to bed.

      A red bus to a house which has a white sifted feel where traveller’s joy comes in summer, a runaway bit of white fence in a field behind. There was also another bus in my mind. Eleanor travelling south in California, through a landscape of mustard fields, green mountains, blue skies, red earth, a landscape which had crowd scenes of people from India who had come here because rice and soya beans were grown in the area. It was some months after she had arrived in the States. She’d been living in Sacramento in a hostel mainly for Hawaiian girls and some days she did not have the fare for work. In her mind she was writing to me, telling me of her new life, her new religion.

      Birds had gathered on the wires along the road.

      I’d passed through Sacramento in the small hours this last Christmas, a woman with pigtails, leading her six little boys, all of them with chinquapin eyes and chipmunk mouths, off the bus.

      I knew her to be in Berlin just now, with her second husband, out of reach. But at Summerleaze in Cornwall a few weeks before, where I’d gone with a group of Bangladeshi children, when I’d been pulled out to sea in an undertow, it was her image and the voice of a Bangladeshi child which brought me in.

      ‘Come on, Des. Come on.’

      A girl with sculpted face, sculpted olive-yellow hair. I saw her in a café when I was in the sea, a German café whereas once it had been an American café, a red bulb over the upholstery of rich crimson at the door, a little picture of a village with rose roofs by a lake in a mountain valley by her shoulder, a solvent handbag beside her.

      I was given a coffee after coming in from the sea, in a miserly-looking sand-dune café of white and teal-blue which had a big sign saying ‘Special offer on Tuesdays. Fish and chips £1.55.’

      And then we drove away from the sea and visited a church in which there was a picture of a worried king, a gold and black check jerkin on him. Outside, a man in wine socks, fawn trousers sat on a bench, and harkened when he heard my Irish accent. I sat on a bench near him. The names on the graves were Trythall, Stoat, Willis.

      After nearly drowning there were flowers I was grateful to see, tucked into the crevices of this town of big masculine buildings, like Clonmel in Ireland, where my father had once worked in the hosiery and shirt department of a shop.

      ‘We will give you a position at a salary of £3.10 per week. (Three pounds, ten shillings.) Please come soon as possible.’

      I’d lost my part-time job after my breakdown, and now had to start anew.

      By now, Robin would be arriving at the house he was staying in in Hastings, boats piled up under the castle nearby, gulls dropping mussels.

      On her wedding day my mother had worn a froth of white lace on her head, her eyes frightened.

      There was mental illness on both sides of our family. I had often imagined what it was like, but now that I was on the other side, that I’d lost what was most precious to me – flow – I was faced with what seemed an undifferentiated future.

      I looked around me, wanting to be held by someone, wanting to be in someone’s arms, but there was nobody there, only the ghost of a girl’s arms, hopeless conjugality, of Robin’s arms, of a young Englishman with a face full of indigo grooves, and I thought of my first embrace, with a teacher of French on a sofa in 1968. In her flat.

      There had been oak trees in bloom outside, and she had remarked on the abortion law which had just been passed in England.

      Last night, as we walked the streets of Soho, we met a tramp who said he’d been a music teacher until recently in a South London public school. A horde of destitute people passed us, heads bent, most of their rucksacks sooty but one of them bright orange. And before we got a tube from Charing Cross Station we passed a tramp who was sleeping just outside South Australia House, a picture of vineyards in the window above him and two white seals snogging.

      I met Carl Witherspoon in a café in Soho.

      He lived both in Berlin and London, his mother a rich German woman, his father English.

      He’d recently spent a few days in a town on the border of Portugal and Spain. Sunday morning in a café, a boy in holy communion costume, red rosette on his white shirt, water-colour blue eyes, a few men in dove-grey suits, an old man with a bottle of red wine in his satchel staring at him. A mosaic of the Immaculate Conception on the wall, a swish of royal blue sash over her white robe. St Martin de Porres among the vodka and port.

      Outside was flat land where white ignited cauliflower shapes bloomed.

      Carl had wondered what had brought him here, what he was doing here. He went all over the place, a tickertape of journeys, sometimes losing tickets, sometimes foregoing a journey to one place at the last moment in order to go somewhere else. His life felt wasted, hopeless. He wanted to die.

      A woman came into the café and asked in a religious tone, almost bowing her head, for a religieuse.

      I’d been to Carl’s flat in Berlin two years before. In the bathroom, on a cabinet, had been numerous bottles of milk of magnesia tablets from