Getting it in the Head. Mike McCormack

the Christ Child this terrible obsession will be at an end. That is why, in the darkness and humidity of this summer’s night, she is up on the western nave of the cathedral, next to the canal, working on the window with her pliers. This is her second time here this night. On her first visit her nerve failed her and she was afraid to touch the Christ Child. She took instead a few of the pieces that surrounded Joseph and Mary, featureless squares that were tight up to the stonework. They were background pieces without detail and when she returned home with them, she knew that they would be useless; there would be no fulfilment in them. So now she has returned again and this time she knows that she will have to prise the infant from Joseph’s arms.

      Already she is nearly done. The seven white and amber pieces that make up the image of the Child have been worked from the lead strips and she has now only to crawl along the ledge, climb down and walk home. Her thin body is vibrating from within with the energy of neurosis and starvation. On the ground, in the shadow of the buttress, she hunkers down like an animal to collect herself. Despite the narrowness of her obsession she has been careful. She has worn dark clothes and has kept to the shadows. She has made sure to wear something with pockets; she can hear the broken image rattle around in it now. She has been careful in her choice of pliers: it has long jaws like a surgical instrument, its inner surfaces have been milled for grip. Some of this knowledge she has researched – the pliers for instance and the structure of stained glass windows. But other details – the dark clothes, the pockets and, oddest of all, the ability to climb the down-pipe on the cathedral wall – have been pure inspiration. She knows now that this is the knowledge of the violated – one part received wisdom and two parts black inspiration. She gathers herself now to walk homewards through the still city, hands deep in her pockets. She takes one last look up at the window and she sees that Joseph is left clutching a dark hole in his abdomen where once was the Child. Dimly, she remembers a biblical text: whoso-ever eats of the flesh of the lamb will have eternal life. In the darkness she is not too sure why she should remember it and less sure what it means.

      Walking through the silent city she remembers how this horror began one week earlier. At lunch hour that day she had walked into the city square already looking like a maimed thing. She had crossed the grass towards the one vacant bench that faced directly into the sun. She moved cautiously but with speed, threading her way among the coiled lovers who lay on the warm grass.

      Already she was beginning to regret having come here. The whole place, the sun, the grass and especially the lovers made her feel alone. She reached the bench and sank into it with a feeling of relief. This too was a mistake. The sun, so bright, seemed to have singled out this one bench for special attention, falling upon it like a white blade. She would have liked to move but there was no other bench free.

      All dowdy looks and no confidence, she had neither the nerve nor the style to sit and eat on the grass. And she knew it too. She was now on the verge of tears and she felt bad enough without blighting the air, filling up the beautiful day with the grey substance of her loneliness. My God, she thought, why does it always have to be like this? Once, just once couldn’t it be different?

      She started. A thin man had loomed up before her. She hadn’t seen him arrive.

      ‘Greetings, favoured one,’ he said.

      Greetings. What a strange word, she thought. He placed his thin frame on the bench beside her and she appraised him. He was a startling old man, thin beyond belief and even on this hot day he carried a beige mac draped over his shoulders. But what was really amazing was that although he was undeniably there beside her with his legs stretched out before him, he projected not the clear lineaments of an identity but the mobile and blurred contours of a confusion; he looked like someone whose true identity had one day been smudged. She thought she could dimly make out a clean-shaven hawk-like face with pointed features but she could not be sure. She felt that maybe deep within him there was some truer and stronger identity with sharper delineation biding its time until it saw the moment to come forth. He was a man who gave the impression of looking unlike himself, not out of some perverse desire to deceive but simply because this projected confusion was itself his true and inscrutable identity. Despite all this and the added fact that his presence beside her was a negative one, an absence, like a vacuum scooped out of the air, she was not afraid. She suspected he was one of the many vagrants about the city, one who at any moment was going to tell her that he was down on his luck, going through a rough patch, and had she a pound to spare to get him a cup of tea.

      ‘Today is a beautiful day,’ he continued. ‘The sort of day which justifies the world.’

      She persevered with the smile.

      ‘I suppose you’re on lunch-break,’ he said.

      ‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘I’m a librarian. I have to return at two.’

      ‘Nice work I’d say, clean work. I haven’t worked myself in twenty years.’ He was grinning now, well pleased with himself ‘Imagine that, twenty years and I haven’t done a stroke.’

      She liked him now and was well glad that he had sat down beside her. She flourished one of her sandwiches but he waved it aside.

      ‘No thanks. A man of my age need only eat a couple of times a week. You’re a growing girl, eat up.’

      She liked him now and she relaxed. ‘What did you work at?’ she asked.

      ‘I worked in a circus,’ he said proudly. ‘Was born into it and worked in it for the best part of thirty years.’

      She remembered the circuses of her childhood and her interest quickened.

      ‘What did you work at? I’ll bet it was the trapeze; you’re very thin.’

      ‘No, not the trapeze, I had no head for heights. Guess again.’

      ‘Clown?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘Ringmaster?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘Knife thrower or animal tamer. They were my favourites.’

      ‘No, none of those.’

      He was smiling at her now, having teased her along like a favourite child. In all this there was something benign, something protective about him.

      ‘I give up,’ she said. She had enjoyed the little game.

      ‘Well,’ he began, ‘it was very strange. I was the only act of my kind in the whole of Ireland. England too if I’m not mistaken. I used to eat things.’

      ‘Eat things,’ she repeated. ‘What things?’

      ‘Everything,’ he grinned, springing his surprise. ‘Bars of soap, small toys, metal, glass, timber, anything.’

      ‘Anything?’

      ‘Yes, anything. Oh, it’s not unheard of. People eat swords, frogs and so on. I’m even told that in England there is a man who over the space of a lifetime ate a small aircraft. Still, though, the range of my consumption was something else. There was nothing I could not digest. Can you believe that towards the end of my career I was working on a way to eat a house?’

      It may have been all a joke but she doubted it. He was too earnest, too obviously proud of his amazing craft.

      ‘How did you start?’

      He threw up his hands in a gesture of unknowing.

      ‘I don’t know. How does anyone start anything? One day you’re here and the next you find yourself in the middle of something else. I remember thinking as a child that it was strange and funny that people should limit their intake to simple foodstuffs. I knew that the world was full of things waiting to be eaten. So I asked myself what would happen if I tried some of those other things. One day I sat down to a piece of timber, a piece of softwood. I wanted this first piece to be something organic, something that would not be too much of a shock to the system. I remember it well. I can see myself to this day under the caravan, tearing strips out of that piece of timber with my teeth like it was a piece of meat. Three days it took me to finish it. But I kept it down and I knew