Grimaldi's Garden

Part One

The Piano Player

Once there was a garden.  No, not a garden but the potential for a garden: a rough patch of soil, a couple of miserable trees that clutched at the sky with skinny arms.  A hummocky rectangle of scrubby grass squashed between high tenements in a part of the city that was despised and hastily traversed by those with no option but to go that way.  But old Joe, the Signor, looked at that patch of not-a-garden and could see what other more sensible people could not: a kaleidoscope of colour, a delirium of scents, an exaltation of birdsong, a little bit of blue heaven in the grey northern city.  He slapped more money than he could afford down on the table and bought it.

Marian, lying on her back, looked up. For a relatively new house, the ceilings were a disgrace.  Something would have to be done about those cracks and she didn't just mean Polyfilla.  Maybe one of those thick textured paints would be the answer, though she'd heard they were more trouble than they were worth.  Liam would know.  She'd ask Liam.

Her husband finished what he was about and rolled off her with a grunt.  He's getting quicker, thought Marian gratefully.  She kissed his cheek, said, 'That was nice, dear' and after modestly pulling down her nightdress, crossed to the en suite bathroom.  Something of a mixed blessing, the en suite bathroom.  The bedroom really wasn't big enough but it made life so much more civilised and suggested that they lived in a much grander house when she mentioned it to acquaintances.  Liam had done a good job, she thought as she turned on the bidet.  Beautiful tiling, most professional.

Her husband Francis listened to the water swishing.  Listened to his seed being flushed down the waste pipe, millions of tiny futile spermatozoa making their last unexpected journey.  He turned over in bed and tried to sleep.

Across the city, not far away, the Englishwoman stroked her daughter's sleeping face.  She tried to trace in the tiny features the likeness of the father but found she had forgotten.  Her hardened hand gently brushed the child's soft skin.  'Not quite right,' they'd said at the health centre as kindly as possible.  Poor little Starveling.

The house on which Francis was paying a mortgage at a variable rate of interest, where he lived with his wife Marian and his two teenage children, the house which Marian was constantly improving, was a narrow semi-detached in a modern development.  It was cloned so effectively over a maze of indistinguishable streets that on first moving to the district some years before, Francis had occasionally, in his customary state of absent-mindedness, walked up the wrong front path and tried to insert his key in the lock of someone else's front door.

'For goodness sake,' Marian had exclaimed.  'No one has crazy paving like ours!'

It annoyed her when he said that the houses all looked the same.  She kept trying to explain about the little personal touches that made all the difference.  Shortly after he had got lost for the third time, before people could start to talk, she replaced the standard wooden front door with a sliding glass panel.  The glass was patterned and frosted, so from outside you could only see imprecise shapes moving within.  Francis never went astray again but only because he concentrated.

Ruth, the Englishwoman, did not expect to spend the rest of her life in Ireland but for the time being she was comfortable.  She missed the cultural mix of other countries, the black, brown and yellow skins, the exotic tastes and smells.  She knew it was not the best place for a painter to succeed in - the glorious visual sense of the ancient Celts seemed long lost to her - but she loved the grey light, the grey rocks, the wilderness that nudged even at the edges of Dublin city itself.

She taught art at a community centre where most of the students were middle-aged housewives, with a sprinkling of men, elderly or unemployed.  She tried to coax them away from crude realism and showed them reproductions of modernists from Kandinsky to de Kooning to Kindness.  They looked politely, then continued daubing at their vases of flowers, their bowls of fruit, their landscapes.

Her own pictures she tried to sell at market stalls, from the railings of Merrion Square, most people walking on, preferring to pause over the Dublin scenes, the vases of flowers, the bowls of fruit.  But never mind if they didn't buy.  Soon she would have enough work for what she really wanted, an exhibition.

'Can nothing be done?' the chief librarian asked with a sigh.

Francis looked at the book and said, ' We could try and flip through each one when it's returned but what would that prove.  The culprit could always say it was already defaced.'

'Anyway,' Maureen, the assistant, added, 'we wouldn't have time.'

They would, of course, Francis thought.  It was a small branch library and often empty.  Their work was steady but seldom frenetic.

He turned the pages of the American detective novel.  The words 'Jesus' and 'Christ' had been scored out whenever they occurred.

Marian, although she would hardly admit it, had her best ideas for home improvements while performing the sexual act.  It was the one occasion when she had leisure to think, as she kept herself busy.  An efficient woman, she was able to complete the housework quickly, leaving the place spotless for she was very houseproud and couldn't abide disorder.  Now that the children were older, she had more time to herself and attended a number of weekly classes as she had done over the years.  Souvenirs of many of her courses could be seen around the house and garden.  The dried flower arrangements that she put in the hearth in summer, the macramé plant-holders in kitchen, living-room and main bathroom, the ceramic ashtrays - no one smoked in the house, though both children did so outside, secretly.  She currently attended Ruth's painting class but was slightly disappointed.  The woman was so vague, so short on the necessary facts, and rather slovenly in appearance.  Her retarded child sat on the floor during the class, staring intently and emptily into space or else smearing paint on a large sheet of paper with its hands.  It gave Marian the creeps.  Still, she was pleased with her view of Ireland's Eye, painted from a postcard.  When it was finished, she would take down the heavy mirror over the mantelpiece in the living-room and hang the picture in its place.  The mirror could then go into the hall.

The moral guardian sharpened his pencil carefully. Such a task it was.  He scored out the word 'motherfucker', sucking his teeth and making clicking noises.  So much to do.

Francis had met Marian at French evening classes - she was intent on improving herself even then.  He had proposed to her in French.  It seemed easier than in English, as if the words didn't really mean anything.  'Voulez-vous m'épouser?'  He'd had to repeat it several times, because she wasn't sure she'd understood.  Then she kissed him and told him he was very romantic (trés romantique).  'Oui, François,' she'd said.

He knew he was something of a disappointment to Marian.  He was something of a disappointment to himself.  It seemed he had managed to dream away the best years of his life.  He looked at the two large people who lived in the house with him and his wife and wondered how they could possibly have any connection with himself.  Certainly, however much they had gambolled on top of him when they were small, whatever the echoes of laughter down a long tunnel of time, there was none of that now.  The boy, Gerald, would sit in his room, external sound blocked out by a walkman permanently tuned to a rock radio station, glassy-eyed in front of a computer screen, zapping at alien space ships, using a joy-stick to move a karate hero up levels of a crazy castle where floors fell away and knives came out of walls to spear you or a portcullis smashed down, chopping you in half, blood everywhere, pressing a button to spring back to life good as new, unaware that time was running out.  Or else he would move down to the living room and sit in front of the television, where a succession of American teen-coms passed before his eyes, interrupted only be advertisements for building societies, bright cars, sweet fizzy drinks and denims with expensive labels.

The girl, Valerie, recently become large-breasted, large-buttocked, thick-thighed, spent hours on her appearance pulling half a headful of long permed hair up into a pony-tail on the top of her head.  Then out she went to lounge on garden walls with an army of her identikit pals, going silent when someone passed them by and breaking into loud sounds again a second later.  Francis feared these groups as he made his way home from work, staring at the ground, acting as if he didn't see them, looking up suddenly to catch his daughter's cold eyes upon him.

'Does that look like water to you?' Ruth asked, frowning at the thick blobs of paint.

'Well ...' Marian replied.

'A lighter touch would give a better effect, spray on the rocks, you know.'  Ruth took the brush and showed what she meant.  But nothing could help.  The sea looked like cement, the clouds like smashed concrete blocks, Ireland's Eye itself like a lopsided chocolate mousse.

'Do you really want your picture to  look like a postcard?' she asked.  (Here we go again, thought Marian.)  'I've a book on Turner at home.  I'll bring it in and you can see how he handled it.'

She knew she was wrong.  She knew they didn't want to be artists, just to divert themselves, to have a bit of fun.  Her trouble was that she wasn't a  teacher.  She was an artist with an uncompromising eye.  She was out of sympathy with her students.

Starveling lay on the floor absorbed in sucking green paint off her fingers.  The class pretended not to notice as Ruth went over and took care of her.

When Francis was small, he had briefly owned a dog.  His mammy and daddy had bought it for his birthday.  He had called it Red, because of its colour.

For a few weeks he petted the pup and played with it, throwing balls for it to chase.  Red would lumber after the ball on outsize paws, sniff it, try it for taste and then look back at Francis hopeful for ideas on what to do next.  His mammy cleared up the dog messes and said she hoped Red would grow out of it, otherwise .... Then one day Red ran out of the house under a car and was killed.  Francis's mammy refused to get another dog.

'I couldn't go through all that again,' she said, though whether she meant the shock and pain of sudden death or whether she was referring to having to clear up dog messes from dawn to dusk, remained unresolved.

Francis had always intended getting another dog but every time he broached the subject with Marian she recoiled in horror.  'They're so unhygienic,' she would say, 'You can catch terrible diseases from them.'

'Their hairs get everywhere, it's impossible to keep the place clean.'

'I know who'd end up looking after it.  Me.  No one else would bother.'

'What if it bit someone?'

It was undeniable that Ruth had seen something of the world but when she cast her mind back, all that remained were uncoordinated images like a heap of snapshots muddled together and unlabelled.  She had hitchhiked though Sweden which seemed in her memory to consist largely of thick woodland.  In Amsterdam she had shared a sleeping bag with a stranger in a park near the Rijksmuseum.  She had caught a boat down the Rhine from Cologne, floating past sunlit vineyards, villages with high church towers hanging off the sides of hills.  She had attended courses in Paris, Prague, Budapest and Moscow, visited cathedrals, palaces - some genuine, some perfect copies of buildings destroyed in the war - gazed at ten thousand paintings in hundreds of museums, rummaged through markets, bitten into half a million buns.  She had travelled down the east coast of America by Greyhound bus, journeying overnight to save the cost of accommodation - stopping off in Philadelphia where she had seen the soon-no-longer-to-be-president Jimmy Carter smiling and waving, Washington DC in the lashing rain, Richmond, Virginia where a black man offered her drugs, Atlanta, Georgia where a white skateboarder was the only other person on the streets and where she had seen a thrilling Sonya Delaunay exhibition.  In New Orleans, a small elderly black tap-danced and clacked false teeth.  New Orleans was full of American tourists buying tee-shirts with facetious or obscene messages.  She stared for a long time at the river boats on the Mississippi.  On the way back north, she was so exhausted she passed without stopping through Nashville, Tuscaloosa, Chattanooga.

She had formed brief relationships with men met on her travels and as a result now had a permanent companion, conceived when a condom leaked.  The Judgement as her mother called the child, Starveling her own name for the scrawny little thing, or else the Portable Baby.  Still portable enough after nearly three years through her silence and stillness.

So it wasn't Starveling who made her loath to move on.  Perhaps it was older age and the fact that travelling had after all been an excuse for inactivity.  Keep moving to disguise the fact that you're standing still.

Or perhaps what stopped her at last in her tracks was the vague memory of Starveling's father, a sandy-haired Irishman she had coupled with in a graveyard in Aberdeen after a night spent drinking.  She was almost sure that was when it had happened, lying on a tombstone in a mist, laughing and fumbling, spilling a bottle of whiskey over someone's dear departed.

It was the piano, he later decided, that finally brought him to breaking point.  Francis had not even known he was approaching a crisis until the piano.

Later he came to suspect that the problem had been there for many years.  What about the business of mistaking another house for his own?  Supposing the key had fitted, turned in the lock.  Opened the door.  Wasn't that what he wanted?  To try another life.  And what about following people?

When Marian wanted things done in the house that she couldn't manage herself, she turned to the faithful friend.  Liam, for many years the best mate of her elder brother, had always, the family tradition went, had his eye on her.  But Liam was over-familiar, always there.  She married the stranger, Francis, and though she wouldn't have said to herself that she had made a mistake, it was comforting to find that Liam was still around now that they were back again in the old neighbourhood.

Liam, a bachelor of forty-three, still lived with his mother, was clean-living, sporty and good with his hands.  He had entered with enthusiasm into Marian's plans, done most of the crazy paving in the front garden, the patio in the back, crushing grass and daisies under concrete slabs on which Marian had then placed large pots of geraniums, a white plastic table and chairs for summer meals 'al fresco' which the climate seldom permitted.  Liam had even tried to forge a friendship with Francis to show there were no hard feelings, suggesting they go for a few jars together one evening.  It was not a success.  Without Marian, the two men found they had nothing to say to each other.  Liam tried to bring the conversation round to football but found Francis unbelievably ignorant.  Francis was equally put off by Liam's uninformed Catholicism, his uncritical support for what Francis regarded as a political party of gombeens.  They stared at their pints and drank faster than was good for them.  'Poor Marian!'  Liam's mammy commented with satisfaction when he told her about it.

When Francis thought about himself, which he tried not to do too often because it was so depressing, he came to the conclusion that somewhere along the line he had got it wrong.  And he had been getting it wrong ever since.  As an only child, he had been over-protected as they say, so that the corners that might have been knocked off him in the ordinary way had stayed with him, causing him to bump into things constantly, to walk around in a state of self-conscious physical and mental clumsiness.

Just above medium height, with a permanent inclination of the head and shoulders that seemed to apologise for this, he had the air of one listening to confidences whispered in the hushed atmosphere of the library where he had worked for so long.  He peered short-sightedly through spectacles that were constantly sliding down his narrow nose.  Now his hair was starting to go, though so far it had kept its colour.  His most outstanding feature was his hands with their incredibly long nervy fingers.

Of course he had been bullied at school.  He was bad at sports, liked books, was very shy.  So he developed  a skill for disappearing.  The bullies started not noticing he was there.  Sometimes he even wondered if he was.

In the library, he was not so much himself but rather the authority figure, the 'librarian,' and as such held his own.  In the estate where he and Marian now lived with neighbours who were taxi-drivers, bus-drivers, postmen, builders, artisans, Francis was thought to put on airs.  If he happened on someone he knew by sight, he would look away quickly but not out of snobbery.  The truth was that he was terrified of rejection.  He avoided catching anyone's eye in case they looked right through him, leaving him smiling foolishly at nothing.  Gradually to look lost in thought became his defence.  Often, he really was lost and increasingly it was becoming hard to find himself again.

Once Ruth had been with Starveling in Donegal.  They'd been walking on a long sandy beach, deserted except for a few people up ahead of them, moving strangely.  When Ruth got near them, she saw they were severely mentally disabled, uttering raucous sounds, attracted and terrified by the waves lapping the shore.  A woman was walking in circles, chanting incomprehensible words and gesturing with her hands.  Starveling stared at her.  The woman stared back and even started to follow them along the beach, stretching her arms towards them.  Ruth, filled with terror and convinced that the woman was somehow trying to reclaim Starveling, walked faster, nearly ran.  The child, held tight against her, still gazed back over her shoulder.  When finally Ruth dared to glance round, she saw the woman being led gently back to the group.

Ruth, in her thirties, was a large woman, whose choice of big baggy comfortable clothes made her look even larger.  Once she'd had long hair down to her waist but she got tired of it, caught hold of the shears and cropped it all off.  She knew she looked butch which suited her at present because it discouraged the amorous attentions of Irishmen, who seemed to prefer their women conventionally feminine.

The previous summer, a woman friend had invited her to Kerry, to a holiday home.  On arrival, Ruth discovered the place to be full of lesbians, alone or in couples.  Ruth had ended up sleeping on the floor of an unused bathroom, making a bed for Starveling in the bath.  A melancholy American woman had made a pass at her but so readily took no for an answer that Ruth had felt almost remorseful.

Most of the time Ruth was glad to be celibate though she didn't consider it a permanent condition.  Occasionally she could have done with a good screw but instead bought a bottle of wine and got maudlin drunk listening to old records.

There was an inexorable pattern to things.  That was what Francis believed.  That was how he justified his passivity.  Once he had asked Marian to marry him and once she had accepted, he was swept along by the inevitable flow, the houses they lived in, the children they had, the holidays they went on, the small rituals of life.

Had he perhaps chosen an organising woman to remove responsibility from himself?  He hadn't yet confronted the question.  But more and more often he thought of his childhood, of the dog Red, and an imprecise moment when things might have taken a totally different course.

The business with the piano happened like this.  One day, he went to the city centre: his eyes had been troubling him for some time and he was to collect new glasses.  When he tried them on, everything came into sudden sharp focus.  He looked in the mirror and almost failed to recognise himself.  Partly it was the contrast between the new dark steel frames and his old brown plastic ones, partly it was seeing suddenly how old he looked, sharp lines scoring his skin, thin hair, scraggy neck.  He walked out of the optician's in shock.  He went to a café where the tables stood under an artificial tree covered eternally in pink blossom, sat down with a coffee and thought.  He was unable to come to a conclusion.  Around him people laughed and chattered or sat silent, reading or staring into space.  So many lives, so many.

He walked out of the café and found himself behind a woman in a silky purple dress stretched tight across her buttocks, on her head a black hat with a peacock feather that bobbed as she tottered on ridiculously high heels.  Francis had never seen a woman dressed like that, had never seen such a hat. He began to follow her out of curiosity.  Or out of something stronger perhaps, a compulsion as he thought later.  Certainly he had never followed anyone before: it was totally out of character, he would be more inclined to take the opposite direction.  She walked the length of Dame Street and up past Christ Church cathedral, dodging the traffic at the intersection and continuing into the Liberties.  This was a part of the city, the oldest part, that Francis had never explored on foot, only driven through occasionally.  The woman walked on, her feather bobbing, Francis trying to be inconspicuous behind her, not sure whether following someone like that constituted an offence.

The street was empty.  Francis, feeling exposed, was about to turn back when the woman went into a junk shop.  He approached and peered through the glass, browned with dirt, glimpsing within heaps of old furniture, clocks, mirrors.  An ornamental hatstand stood in the open doorway, a greasy cap hanging from it.  The shop was narrow and deep and Francis couldn't see the woman at all.  He wandered in and started to examine a small table with rickety legs.  Suddenly, the opening notes of a tune played on a slightly off-key piano came from the rear of the shop.  He made his way carefully between the chairs and stools and chipped, glass-fronted cabinets toward the music.  The woman, her peacock feather still bobbing, was sitting with her back to him at the piano, playing, watched by a fat and grizzled old man who nodded silently at Francis.

Suddenly she started singing in German, her voice deep and cracked.  It made Francis shiver to hear the poignant melody, even more so than if the piano had been in perfect tune, the woman's voice true.  She played the piece to the end, then stood up, tapped the old man on the shoulder and walked out past Francis.  He saw that she was old, that tears were running down her collapsed cheeks.

The old man shook his head after her and turned to Francis.

'What can I do you for?' he asked.

Francis looked at him uncomprehending, then asked,  'How much for the piano?'

'Two hundred and fifty.'

'Can you deliver?'

'Depends.  Where are you?'

Francis told him and gave him all he had, thirty pounds, on deposit.

'What piece of music was that?' he asked.

The old man shrugged.

'Search me,' he said.

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