Falling animals, p.10
Falling Animals, page 10
I will paint it for you, Rhea decides suddenly. You’ll sit with me and describe the colour of the sky, the pile of dog-daisies, the snorting pony; the exact colour of your daughter’s hair, how she hunched her shoulders, how her fingers moved. She hesitates, self-conscious once more of her own pompous notions, of putting herself forward like this, intruding on the other woman’s grief. Would you like that?
Lila nods once, a downward jerk. She does not reach out across the low stone table, but her right wrist twitches as if she would like to.
Rhea smiles. She sees the other woman clearly now. I will paint your daughter, and the daisies, and there, at the centre of it all, I will put you.
The tortoiseshell cat wends its way between the two women’s legs, making the shape of infinity, and its gentle purring brings something like equilibrium.
the barman
It was just called Murphy’s when he took it over, the same as a hundred thousand other places in this strange little country that is obsessed with dead men. The estate agent hadn’t known who Murphy was, or if the man had ever even existed. The woman seemed surprised that Matías had asked, rifling through her files, trying to find an answer that wasn’t there. The place closed during the recession, she said, reading from her notes, and had been empty ever since. Securely maintained, of course, with regular upkeep, she added hastily, as nothing had yet been signed.
Matías didn’t believe this in the slightest. Perched on a corner at the end of the village, Murphy’s bar was three rooms and an overgrown garden, with a small bungalow attached to it. The building was painted a greenish colour, with a faded sign and a large, splintered front window that faced west. But the view of the sea was partly blocked by a housing estate, and the café next door filled the air with a thin film of grease. It was a far cry from the blue-sky promotional photos, the rooms stretched by a fish-angle lens. From what he could see, regular upkeep amounted to a pre-viewing lick with a vacuum and a polish of the tables. And outside was no better – grey skies, grey rain, grey pavements. A miserable husk of a building on a miserable rock in a miserable country.
It’ll do, Matías said, and signed the pieces of paper that made him the owner of a bar on the north-west coast of Ireland.
He never expected to follow in the footsteps of his grandfather, as crooked and winding as they had been. The old man’s bar wasn’t even really a bar, just an open area of the finca with a corrugated roof, a few extra fridges and a clay-board for tejo. Some days, men came in from the hot, grassy plains in overloaded jeeps, wearing uniforms with the yellow-red-blue stripes of the Colombian flag on their shoulders. His grandfather had handed out loose cigarettes and beer bottles with a lightness of touch, and let these men play tejo for free.
When the jeeps came to the farm, Matías and his younger sister Yesica were always sent to do some chore, or straight to bed, even if the sun was still shining. The men wore guns over their shoulders like handbags, black and shiny as beetles. When they got drunk, the children could smell the gunpowder snap of the tejo as it thunked into the clay, and hear arguments from their bedroom window.
When he was ten, their family had moved up the mountains closer to Bogotá, away from his grandfather’s farm. And when he was sixteen, his father told him it would be better if he fucked off, just disappeared, stopped breaking his poor mother’s heart. Whether he was to die in a back alley or just disappear somewhere out of sight didn’t seem to matter to his father. So Matías found a man on a prehistoric message board who was willing to pay for a sixteen-year-old Colombian boy to come to America. He took the free tickets, kissed Yesica goodbye and was on the plane before his father knew he had left. When he arrived in LAX airport, he had walked straight past the sign with his name on it – being held by a man who was much fatter and greyer than he’d looked in his photographs – and out into the Los Angeles sunshine.
For the first few days, Matías felt guilty, but he was too happy to care. A friend of a friend got him a job clearing tables in a bar, and a narrow bed above a Mexican-themed restaurant. He had to wear a sombrero that made his forehead itch, but he smiled under his painted-on moustache every evening. Five years later, he had worked his way up to junior manager when that same friend reported from home that his sister was pregnant. He had laughed and laughed and laughed. Little Yesica, always clinging to their mother’s skirt, now a mother herself at the tender age of fifteen? He was sure their father would kick her out the door so fast her ass would catch fire. But his parents had mellowed, it seemed, in the years since he left. Or, more likely, a teenage pregnancy was a much more acceptably Catholic scandal than a homosexual son.
By the time he gathered the courage to get in touch with his sister, Yesica was a qualified solicitor in Bogotá, a grown woman as fierce as the sun, and her own son was a baby no longer. It turned out it had been Yesica herself who put her foot down and refused to leave; she always had a stubborn streak as wide as a river. She told her brother how she had insisted on taking her high-school exams, and was offered a full scholarship to a law programme. She got the bus up and down the winding, mountainous roads to the university each day, and worked in their parents’ shop at weekends. Matías felt positively lazy when she described it to him. The previous decade of his life had involved hard drugs in Berlin, a breakdown in Thailand, a year-long romance in St Petersburg, of all places, and a mercifully short stint at a desk job in Lisbon.
They would be visiting him in California soon, Yesica announced; she hoped he hadn’t let his hair grow too long. Then she hung up. To his amazement, he became Tío Matí almost overnight. A sister and a nephew – a family – regained with a suddenness that left him reeling.
When Yesica called with the news that their abuelo had died, she had been firm and sure of her words. Yes, he had gone peacefully in the end; yes, their mother was upset but relieved; no, he shouldn’t come home – he hadn’t really been considering it; it had been a knee-jerk response.
The first surprise was the inheritance. Where the money could have come from, they had no idea, until Yesica remembered the men with their beetle-black guns who came in from the plains in jeeps. The old dog, they agreed.
The second surprise was the size of his share. When he hung up the phone, he sat for a time and tried to summon up his grandfather’s face. He hadn’t even known the man particularly well. Matías was only one among a flood of grandchildren, and when they moved closer to Bogotá, they only returned to the farm at Easter and Christmas. The man was almost a stranger – why had he picked his grandson out for such largesse?
Then, when he closed his eyes in bed that night, a memory came to him, with such searing vividness and clarity he couldn’t believe he had ever forgotten it. It was his grandmother’s birthday. They had killed a bird to make sancocho, and it had been simmering with plantain and yucca in a metal pot on top of a fire pit. Matías was eight and had gone off all meat, which made his father furious, for no reason he could decipher at the time. His grandfather spotted him slyly feeding lumps of chicken from his plate to the dog, and had chuckled.
His father had come out of the farmhouse then, calling for a leg or a wing, claiming his pussy son would eat the whole bird if it killed him. His grandfather had shushed his son-in-law, whose mouth turned into a hard line before he stalked away with his hands in the air. Then, the old man pulled the chicken’s carcass from the pot and twisted it around so its back legs were facing upwards. He dipped his machete in the flames and let it heat there for a moment, then slid it into the belly, angling it to slice away a lump of meat. The ovaries had cooked in the heat of the stew, and the unlaid eggs descended in size from golf balls to peas, surrounded by a thin film of flesh. He popped one out from under its covering and offered it to the boy.
Here, he said, try the eggs instead.
In Matías’s mind, the old man is huge, his face crease-lined, squinting in the sun despite his wide-brimmed hat. His hands are as wide as shovels, and the egg steams in the humid air as he drops it into the child’s palm. His mouth waters, remembering the savoury, crumbling bite of the orange yolk, and he hears again the whisk-whisk of the machete as his grandfather wandered off through the long grass.
Now, in his memory, he is shocked by the heat that comes streaming out of the old man’s silhouette as he walks away, as if he is a dark wound in the world made especially for love to come through. The offering of the eggs – an outstretched hand, an opening, another way – and his eyes cocked a little to the side; as if he was seeing his grandson for the very first time, looking at him and him alone, not simply as a branching of his mother and father and sister and a score of other blood connections.
That is the last clear memory he has of him. But obviously, something in the old man had sustained itself for thirty years, some itch had gone unscratched, and the result was enough pesos to retire on, waiting in a bank account with his name on it.
Don’t ask me, Matí, Yesica sighed on the phone. I think he was gone a bit caca in the end.
When the money finally came through, Matías had played with a few ridiculous ideas for almost a year, feeling that an unexpected windfall should be used for something just as unexpected. Then an article popped up online, a jokey one with lots of exclamation marks – Would You Like To Own This Pub In Ireland – and he had thought to himself, yes, I would like that.
He was nearing forty and had been sick of Los Angeles and the denseness of people, sick of hot places and of shielding his eyes in the sun. He found himself dreaming of the green, landlocked seas of his childhood, the grass-plains that undulated in the wind. Yesica argued that a cold, wet rock on the Atlantic Ocean was a poor substitute, but the idea already had its claws in him. So he quit his job, bought a bar, and moved to Ireland. Three Simple Steps To Change Your Life.
Horrified at himself, he got drunk on decades-old Irish whiskey the day after he got the keys to Murphy’s and fell asleep in the middle of the musty barroom: a nightmare of paisley wallpaper, red leather seats and mouldy carpets. He woke the next day to a crippling hangover and an equal amount of regret, which morphed into a resolution to throw money at the place until it went away. Then he could go back to mixing cocktails in the sun.
But somewhere along the way the regret had softened and turned into something lighter, something almost hopeful. He found himself singing as he stripped wallpaper and polished furniture. Sleeping better in the freezing bungalow behind the bar than he ever had in his life. Driving around the country to search through second-hand shops, collecting pieces of kitsch. After spending most of his life on the move, the idea of decorating his own place was intoxicating, and he regularly filled his battered van to the brim. Even when the bathrooms had to be replumbed, it felt like an annoying pinch rather than a slap.
The owner of the café next door, a burly middle-aged woman, had watched the renovations with suspicion. When he waved at her, she grimaced. Welcome to paradise, she said sarcastically, and went back inside. A few of the village elders had walked by while the place was under renovation, trying to reminisce about good old times spent in Murphy’s. None of them knew who Murphy was – or, at least, they all had a different origin story for the man, the myth, the legend. His favourite was that Murphy had been a sailor who took deathly ill while on shore leave, but the captain insisted the ship sail with the tide, so the crew buried him with a loaf of bread and a shovel – just in case he woke up.
When Matías told the passers-by he was thinking about changing the name, they had seemed put out: an expression of confusion paired with a tilted head and a grim smile. One woman even blessed herself as she walked away. At first, he couldn’t read these strange Irish people, the way their faces did something different to their words, the way their sentences were the wrong way around. Hah? they said, just hah? As if all the infinite possible questions in the universe were contained in those three letters. And then ah! with an upwards jerk of the head and an inhalation, which could describe anything from a stubbed toe to a tsunami to a lottery win. They thought he, the foreigner, was irredeemably stupid, of course, but they slapped him on the back all the same and went away shaking their heads.
Of course, there had been the obligatory faggot screamed across his front window in red paint one morning, but for a boy used to his father’s ire, this was barely a prickle. It had upset other people more than him, and when his freshly repaired front window was broken, he kept it quiet, deciding a quick clean-up was easier than another round of outrage. The local priest had condemned the incident from the pulpit, and he was plagued by people stopping by to shake his hand for a week. Bemused, he only figured it out when Oona – the old woman who had blessed herself – mentioned the priest’s sermon in passing. Matías was surprised by this, remembering his father’s fervent grip on his rosary, his devotion to La Virgen that didn’t seem to soften his fists.
Oona has a sort of spidery influence – knows everybody, everything, and manages to rarely pay for her own drinks. She has given him many a history lesson from the bar stool, as if it is her duty to educate him on the generations of people who have lived in the village: the intricate webs of marriages and variations in the spelling of surnames, children who have become lawyers or writers or butchers or statistics.
Every speck of land on every continent has as much history, he wants to tell her. He has been all over the world, stayed in bedsits and campsites and penthouse apartments, and every one of them has a backstory as rich. More, where people are wedged together like sheets of paper: in the cities, every neighbourhood is its own universe, every inch of space is layered with lives, with memories – arguments, spilled food, bird shit, blood, sweat and tears – so thick that they waft up like the steam off his grandfather’s pot of sancocho.
You have to find the eggs, he wants to tell this pot-bellied woman, who teeters on the bar stool like a bucket of paint. Those are the real treasures. But that’s not a discussion Oona would understand, or welcome, so instead he smiles and nods. And the old woman releases her words of wisdom like air bubbles from an underwater clam.
But all the same, this strange sort of welcome from the village’s most venerable one made him feel more at home than a hundred shamrock-headed leaflets from the bank. And as soon as he reopened, the regulars trickled back in – shaking their heads at the decor, poking at each item like curious kittens – but still, they came. So, as a compromise, he kept the pub’s name, but added to it – Matí Murphy’s.
Donal arrived into his life one day when his beloved van had refused to start. He was supposed to pick up Yesica and her son from the airport and had spent the week previous arranging and rearranging the furniture in the guest bedroom, suddenly terrified that he would disappoint his visitors, that they would sneer at how small and condensed his life had become.
Oona was passing by – she is permanently passing by; he is convinced she does loops of the village looking for something to poke her nose into – and recommended he call a particular mechanic. She named him as car magician and engine whisperer wrapped into one. From the description, he was expecting a middle-aged man, but Donal was in his early thirties, tall and lean, with silvery scars on his hands. He had a gentle manner about him that disguised a slight nervousness, and spoke mostly to the engine instead of Matías himself. But whatever magic Donal had in his ragged fingers wasn’t enough to save the old van. Instead, he offered to drive him to the airport in his own car. All the way there they spoke sparingly, but the silences were comfortable, full and easy, like the feeling after finishing a good meal.
When Yesica arrived, glamorously dishevelled after the flight, she assumed this to be her brother’s boyfriend, and kissed him on both cheeks. Donal went bright red at being accosted by this Colombian whirlwind, but recovered in time to shake her son’s hand. The car journey back was noisier, Yesica bombarding her brother with questions and advice in a flurry of Spanish, and Matías was surprised to find himself annoyed at her, missing the gentle silence of the journey up. When they got back, the visitors disappeared inside while he apologised for his sister’s expansive personality.
I get on with my own sister like a house on fire, Donal said. There’s lots of screaming and running away. It took a beat for his nervous joke to register, but then they both laughed, their eyes meeting properly for the first time. Matías asked to buy him a drink as a thank you.
After he left, Yesica leaned on the bar and examined her nails. I think you should keep him, Matí.
Two years on, Yesica’s son has two tios, and they share the bungalow behind the bar with an obnoxious tortoiseshell cat. The space is small, but Matías still scours the markets and second-hand shops every weekend. The bar itself is groaning with artefacts he has picked up – a diver’s helmet, a stuffed mongoose wearing a tie, a life-size cut-out of Dolly Parton, a farting toilet seat, two phrenology busts. Donal has instituted a one-in, one-out policy to prevent the walls from buckling under the weight of this tat.
So when he sees a leaflet outside the supermarket advertising a craft fair, he isn’t planning to buy anything new. He goes along to the community centre to show support; he is a pillar of said community now, even if Oona is the only one who thinks so. Most of the stalls don’t entice him – he has had his fill of handmade jewellery, personalised fridge magnets, seaweed soaps – and he is almost relieved to be leaving empty-handed. But on his way out, a large canvas catches his eye, a dreamlike mess of heavy paint and whorls. In it, he recognises the curve of the landscape, the westerly crag of the cliffs and, in the middle, a bright billow of steel-rimmed flames. The ship had burned long before he arrived in the village. Now, from the clifftop path, it is little more than a few rusting chunks of metal that appear at low tide. He would never have guessed it used to be a ship; he assumed the lumps to be another one of the markers that lined the old shipping channel until Oona told him what it was during one of her speculation sessions about the the body found on the beach last summer.
