Notes from a Coma. Mike McCormack

passed off smoothly after that. Frank and Maureen forswore Satan with all his works and empty promises and JJ was held out so that the holy water could be poured over his head. He lashed out with his hand and nearly drowned us and everyone got a great laugh out of it.

      When all the fuss was over the five of us went for a meal in the hotel—Owen was with us as well. A lovely evening it was too, sitting round and having a quiet drink and the craic and people coming up shaking my hand and wishing us well. And when Maureen took the two boys home myself and Frank moved into the front bar and I bought a round of drinks for the house. It must have been near eleven when Frank gave us the first song. He could hardly stand by that time but no matter how drunk he is he’s still a fine singer. “The Streets of Laredo,” that’s his song. He got the hush and he just stood there with his eyes closed and one elbow on the counter and it was no hardship to listen to him. The odd shout of Good man, Frank, and Shhh and Give him a chance and then at the end a big round of applause and someone said Folla that and I was called to sing. And that was it for the rest of the night. We sang it out, one after another along the bar, some of us singing twice and the night ended where it began with Frank singing “The Parting Glass.” We were the last to leave—Johnny was wiping down the tables. When we stood out on the street the town was quiet, no one around except Sergeant Nevin standing on Morrison’s Corner with a flashlight in his hand. Goodnight, men, he said as we passed and we went on our way down to the bridge where the car was parked.

      It was around that time I applied for this council house. John Ryan was the welfare officer at the time; he was calling round fixing up JJ’s medical card and children’s allowance and so on. It was him that mentioned it.

      There was only two bedrooms in the old house: JJ’s behind the fireplace and mine at the other end of the house. It was big enough for both of us but you didn’t need to do much looking at it to know it was no place to raise a child in. There was a small bathroom off the back and a flat-roofed kitchen extension put on in the seventies that was never right. It needed rewiring and the roof needed to be redone. I talked about renovating the whole thing.

      “That’s only throwing good money after bad,” John said. “The sooner you get in an application for a council house the sooner you’ll be out of this place. Take it from me this house will be down around your ears in a few years. It’s no use reroofing or rewiring, a house this old will always be an old house, dampness and everything. Do the job right or forget about it. A child in your care and site on your own land—the whole thing’ll be ready in a few months.”

      So I took his advice, wired off a half-acre of land—this half-acre we’re on here—and filed for planning permission. Pete Mangan was peace commissioner at the time and he signed for it and the whole thing was in progress about two months later. It went out to tender that August and the foundation was dug and poured in the middle of September. John Finn put up the blocks and Ted Naughton—this was one of his first jobs—did all the plumbing and wiring. The promise was that we’d be in it by Christmas but between one thing and another it wasn’t till the first week in February we turned the key in it.

      JJ was nearly three years old by then. He’d grown strong and hardy and he was running around and up to all sorts of devilment; it was a full-time job keeping an eye on him. Up on tables and ladders and you couldn’t keep him down off the old Ferguson for love or money. And one day, when my back was turned, he went missing. Owen came over looking for him and my heart came up in my mouth; I thought he was with him. Out we went looking for him, the whole lot of us; Maureen and myself going through the sheds and barns and Frank, grey in the face, standing on the wall of the slurry pit with a length of four-by-two in his hand. Then Maureen comes round the house with JJ asleep in her arms. Up on top of the bales she’d found him. How a three-year-old gasúr managed to climb up there with no ladder was beyond me but climb up he did. Up after the cat he’d gone and whether it was the heat of the hay or that he couldn’t get down Maureen had found him asleep with the cat curled up on his belly.

      That’s when I put him into the crèche. I couldn’t keep an eye on him twenty-four hours a day, not with the few cattle I had and doing jobs and everything. Maureen mentioned the crèche but I was in two minds about it. The way I saw it I hadn’t taken him out of one institution to land him in another.⁵ Maureen laughed at me.

      “It’s not like that, Anthony. It’ll only be for a few hours a day, and besides, all those other kids there, it’ll only be good for him.”

      I knew what she was saying but I still wasn’t convinced. She must have read my mind because she told me then that she was thinking of sending Owen off for a few hours in the morning and afternoon just to get him out from under her feet.

      That settled it. JJ and Owen were packed off to the crèche till two in the afternoon when Maureen and I took turns picking them up and bringing them home. It worked out well enough. We’d get our day sorted out before they came home in the afternoon and put everything up in a heap and, as Maureen said, it was only for a few months, before they were packed off to school proper in September.

      JJ and Owen were solid buddies by then. They went to school together in the morning and came home together in the evening and sometimes it was as much as I could do to keep JJ here of an evening and spend a few hours with him. But he needed so little. As long as he was fed and foddered and had Owen, his right-hand man beside him, he didn’t want for another thing. Often, just so that I could spend some more time with him, I’d have Owen over for the dinner in the evening and the two of them would sit there at the table, laughing and talking and planning away together like two old men. Sometimes, looking back, I think it was Owen who reared JJ, not me. There was a brightness about him whenever he was with him, a glow, as if the happiness in his soul was coming out in his skin. Now with all that’s happened since I sometimes find it hard to find that happy JJ. All I seem to remember are the arguments and the heartbreak and the confusion we had later on. But for those few years he was happy and whatever part I had in it, if I never do another thing with my life, I will always be proud of that.

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      ¹ A child’s geography book will tell you that the Killary is the only proper fjord on the Irish coastline. Running six kilometres west–east through Ordovician sandstone and Silurian quartzite it forms part of the Mayo–Galway border. At one time its steep sides and sheltered waters called out for mineral prospecting, cheap holiday accommodation, mussel farming and marine leisure activities. Now hemmed in by protective legislation, it is the focal feature of an extensive national park and is marked down in tourist guides for sightseers travelling in this part of the world.

      What no tourist bumf will tell you is that this inlet is suffused with an atmosphere of ineffable sadness. Partly a trick of the light and climatic factors, partly also the lingering residue of an historical tragedy which still resonates through rock and water down seven generations of fretful commemorative attempts and dissonant historical hermeneutics. Now think of grey shading towards gunmetal across an achromatic spectrum; think also of turbid cumulus clouds pouring down five centimetres of rainfall above the national average and you have some idea of the light reflected within the walls of this inlet. This is the type of light which lends itself to vitamin D deficiency, baseline serotonin levels, spluttering neurotransmitters and mild but by no means notional depression. It is the type of light wherein ghosts go their rounds at all hours of the day.

      ² In December of the previous year the Conducator stood on the balcony of the Central Committee building in Palace Square and addressed the crowd below. His voice, carrying in the sub-zero temperature to the back of the square, assured the crowd that the great collective experiment of the last three decades was in no way compromised by recent political developments in neighbouring countries.

      As always on such occasions his wife stood shoulder to shoulder with him. Through four decades this has been her place—it has indeed been a great love affair. They have drawn strength from each other and they have needed every bit of it; together they have destroyed an entire country. Bearing in mind that the country was one of God’s masterpieces to begin with this is no small feat . . .

      Eight minutes into the rally the crowd gets restless, a definite low-level hum begins to undercut the autarch’s speech. At first nothing