Green Glowing Skull. Gavin Corbett
a room and a stipend until you are capable of supporting yourself. But you must wear it in the special way.’
The tie’s design was of left-to-right-slanting blue, orange and cream stripes. Overlying the field of stripes, at the thickest part of the tie, was the black, white, blue and red Cha Bum Kun roundel, and below the roundel a white box inside which were stitched, in blue, the characters ‘< V.V.’: V.V. being Rickard’s father’s initials and < signifying ‘less than’.
His father showed him how to tie the knot in the special extremely tight manner, so that the knot looked less like a knot than a hard seamless node.
‘The trick is to pull and pull until your hands burn,’ he said. ‘Put your back against a wall if it helps.’
***
Rickard’s favourite film of all time, The Severe Dalliance, opened with an establishing shot of the Chrysler Building. The first thing he did once he had arrived in New York and dropped his luggage at his temporary accommodation was go to the south-west corner of Lexington Avenue and 42nd Street from where the shot was made. The Chrysler Building looked terribly magnificent from this spot in reality as it did in the film and he was overcome at the sight. The sun shone in a direct line up Lexington Avenue and the building’s pale stone looked brilliant, its armour sparkled and reflected only blues and whites, and eagles or some sort of birds of prey circled high in the air at about the level of the fiftieth floor. All kinds of associations came to mind: the opening of The Severe Dalliance, of course, but also a sense of American power, and his head swelled by turns with Harold Campbelltown’s ‘Dalliance Theme’ and some show tune he did not know the name of or the lyrics to. Then suddenly he felt very sad because he thought of his sweetheart Toni. They had watched The Severe Dalliance for the first time together and later had bought the DVD and watched it many more times. New York was a dream place for them, full of clean sparkling metal and white clouds. They had said that their souls would be at home there. Beneath his anger he hoped that Toni would come to New York herself, looking for their dream, and that they might bump into each other on these streets.
Those first weeks he experienced all of the newly arrived immigrant’s pangs and few of the excitements. His cheap guesthouse in the northern Bronx was in a mainly Irish neighbourhood that prided itself on being a tightly knit community. The shops sold Irish teabags and Irish chocolate and Irish black pudding and damp-tasting Scots-English biscuits. Everywhere there were murals that depicted sporting and paramilitary activities and featured Celtic script and men with basic eyes and very pink faces. Many of the buildings were in the faux Irish-village style just like many of the buildings in Ireland. The land of his birth had never seemed so far away. People moved as if they had all the time in the world, following cracked cambers with their hands behind their backs; or idled as if they had all the time in the world, slumped against chamfered corners below dowdy eaves laughing pile-driving laughs. They seemed so at home, and he felt so locked out. He spent every spare hour he could in Manhattan where even the men in suits spun about as dazzled by the place as he was, though it was not ideal boulevarding territory owing to the regular stops put in the flâneur’s way by the town planner. One day in one of the less frenetic streets of Midtown a photographer told him he had ‘crossed’ his ‘line’ and ruined his photograph. After this Rickard told himself to be understanding of US ideas of social involvement and he became careful not to disturb people’s ‘personal space’. He took ‘personal space’ to mean the space between people and the objects of their concentration, or that aura-like area around people through which the energy by-product of their concentration was diffused. For example, in subway cars he would try not to look people in the eye or would be wary, as he was taking a seat, of sitting on a stray bag strap or body part. And in book shops he would not walk between people and the books they were looking at on the shelves and thus he took tortuous courses and was left face to face with books he had not in the first place been looking for.
He did not like the idea that anyone wished him ill but he felt that the billionaire’s widow at the newspaper wanted only evil to be visited on him because she could not have him. She had tried to kiss him with her doughy, immobile and always-damp lips as he was leaving the offices for the last time. He recoiled from her, backing into a filing cabinet, which fell backwards into another filing cabinet, which broke a window. The glass, original to the building and warped with age, crumbled to grains. The rest of the office staff rose as one.
‘See what you bring to the party,’ the billionaire’s widow bellowed. ‘Only blue funking dudgeon, to use a local expression.’
With no job, no daily routine, he found himself careering, and for long listless weeks; he ate only sweet things and slept odd hours and never felt bothered about seeking work. His behaviour became erratic, sometimes risky. He engaged madmen – people happy to violate his own ‘personal space’: street preachers, or rap singers on the make who handed out leaflets with website addresses on them. He went to the famous Waldorf Astoria one night and tried ‘the green fairy’ – absinthe; and he told the barman from County Mayo to fill her up again. Rush hour one evening he climbed down to the subway track to salvage what in any case only turned out to be a potato.
Once, worn out, and feeling sentimental for home, and knowing that the pubs of his neighbourhood were anything other than public houses, he went to Mass. The priest had a whispery voice like chalk on a blackboard, but coughed often, spoiling the effect. Rickard woke on a cough to hear the priest deliver a homily on the dangers of leaving Mass early. He said that leaving Mass early was like finishing a course of antibiotics early, and that if one didn’t finish one’s course the germs of sin would grow stronger and become resistant to the medicine of the liturgy. Rickard, aware that he was in danger of falling asleep again, and that he was a snorer, decided all the same that it was best to leave before the end.
Near Christmas he went, in indifferent mood, to a late-night rhumba party on a pier in the Hudson River to see if he could meet a US girl. He never told his landlady where he was going or at what time to expect him back. Nothing happened at this rhumba party, which was exactly as he had wanted, and he walked all the way home to the Bronx shaking his head violently in self-punishment and blowing into the gently descending snow. If only he could have a vision in a snow-globe now to say you have done this and now you will do that he said as his brain chattered against his skull.
A couple of days later he travelled to a factory in a bunker, conceivably a former nuclear silo, in Flushing, Queens. He went there to have a doll made up for Toni and in the likeness of Toni. He was shown sliding drawer after sliding drawer of eyes, locks of hair, swatches of skin and featureless heads indicating face shapes. The heat in the factory was oppressive and the render on the walls appeared to bubble, and after a while it was hard to tell the difference between one pair of eyes and another. He waited six hours for his doll. She had brown eyes, blonde hair, and flatteringly even cream skin. For some reason he had chosen to dress her in an orange-and-gold Irish-dancing outfit. On the train back to the Bronx the eyelids distressed him: they rocked up and down, falling into and out of synchronisation, making a faintly audible click. The doll looked nothing like his former sweetheart, not even a three-year-old version of her. He had paid $130, albeit tax free, for this hoodoo rubbish.
He moved into longer-term and cheaper accommodation in a part of Queens that was not quite Long Island City; set back from it, to the east. The area was uninteresting, but he was tired even of Manhattan now, where every footstep seemed to land on hot soft sand. His new apartment building shook with tremors generated by shallow-lying tunnelling machinery and it also had a cockroach problem. A significant factor in his decision to leave Ireland had been his fear of the European house spider, but he soon grew to hate and fear the American cockroach with equal passion and dread. Daily they seemed to increase their dominion; taking the words of Charles Stewart Parnell out of context he would lift his hand and say to them, ‘Thus far shalt thou go and no further.’ One evening he was putting on a moccasin when he noticed one of the maroon scurrying pests inside it. He opened the window of the apartment to shake the creature out. ‘Shoo, shoo!’ he said, and ended up letting the moccasin slip from his hand. It dropped eight floors and beyond retrieval. His other moccasin, water-stained and curled from drying out, sat at his feet looking like an artefact from a museum of agriculture. This, after a day in which he had suffered the hauteur