| Rockin’ the Bronx
By Larry Kirwan
(This is a small extract from Rockin' The Bronx, a novel in progress.
It's set one morning in the early ‘80s, in a bar at Shannon Airport.)
...At a table over by the window, full to the brim of overflowing pints,
a number of people were calling for quiet. They made little dint in the
proceedings, until a tall, hawk-faced man with wild head of flaming red
curls stood up and shouted out "ciunas, a chairde Ghaeil." At the
authoritative sound of the nasally, spiky Irish, a number of backs stiffened
and the room began to hush.
A pale young country girl hesitantly rose to her feet. Her coarse black
hair was swept back off her forehead and held somewhat in place by a mother-of-pearl
headband. Though obviously post Leaving Cert age, she was dressed like
a convent girl in pleated gray skirt, white blouse and a dun cardigan.
She even wore stockings up to her knees but they were thin and tight fitting
unlike the standard nuns' issue. Her eyes were lowered, but when she raised
them Sean could see that they were of the deepest blue and, though her
manner was demure, those eyes sparkled like the water off the Saltee Islands
on the sunniest of days.
As though she were an alabaster statue, the hawk-faced man with the
red curls lifted her from the ground and she allowed herself to be placed
on the banquette without disapproval, but with even a hint that this particular
elevation had been long due to her. Her family and friends devoured her
every movement; they waited expectantly in a deep silence that spread like
eiderdown over the room. She closed her eyes and began to sing to herself,
at first quietly and then with increasing confidence as the song came into
its own. Her voice seemed too rich for one so young. It caressed the words
like the soft wind that eases down from the mountains in search of the
sea. It would curl around a particular word wrapping it in tendrils of
vibrato, then cast it aside and dance over the syllables of two or three
others, sometimes going beyond a line in an unorthodox manner, but always
laying bare a feeling and meaning that Sean had never before gleaned from
this old song
You may travel far far from your own native home
Far away o'er the mountains, far away o'er the foam
But of all the fine places that I've ever seen
There's none to compare with the Cliffs of Dooneen
Take a view o'er the mountains, fine sights you'll see there
You'll see the high rocky mountains on the west coast of Clare
The towns of Kilkee and Kilrush can be seen
From the high Rocky slopes of the Cliffs of Dooneen
A pale silence seemed to sift through the room. The offhanded veneer
of hardness and devil-may-care flippancy that had enveloped the emigrants
began to crack, and the gray tide of sadness swept in once more. The girl's
face was luminous now and Sean could see the cliffs as if in a mirror.
He saw other things too that he had recently banished: his Mother, well
clear of Limerick in the old Vauxhall, listening to Gay's comforting banter
from cloth covered speakers, heading home to her widowhood and a house
full of ghosts.
He even saw Mary peering out from the girl's cobalt eyes and he remembered
all at once exactly why he was going away and how it was immeasurably too
late to turn back. A number of people were humming the song under their
breath. It reminded Sean of a summer's day he had once spent in the bog
up near the mountain. Off in the distance he had heard the rumble of thunder
and, on a high harmony, the drone of a hive of bees sensing the approaching
storm. At first, the combination had been comforting but, as the storm
gathered, it grew ominous; he had felt odd and ill at ease, and now it
occurred to him that he had been unknowingly listening to the sound of
his boyhood departing.
For, the week before, he had first noticed Mary outside the chipper
and everything had changed. There was something about her: although very
much of the crowd, she stood even more apart from it. The paleness of her
face was accentuated by the delicacy with which she applied her makeup.
Unlike the other girls, she didn't slather it on like tar on a pebbled
road. No, there was thought behind her every stroke. If no one else knew
what they were doing, Mary had a quiet deliberation to all her actions.
Her lips weren't smeared with blood red or punky mauve lipstick either;
no her choice, if she made one at all, served only to highlight the natural
pale pinkness of her lips.
Although she hung around with the cooler element - punks, skinners and
the like - she did so only because she had absolutely nothing in common
with the other various shades of post-pubescent small townieism that congregated
on the Main Street. Her hair was the darkest of brown and cascaded over
her black leather jacket. Though often hammered straight, it would usually
revert to its natural waviness which he preferred, but which she abhorred.
Her skirt was always some inches above her knees, but not at an impractical
height for a girl who lived out on the mountain and had to cycle in more
days than not. She wore fashionable ripped, seamed black nylons that clung
to her well shaped legs and slid down into gleaming Doc Maarten boots.
Everything seemed just "so" about her.
She had noticed Sean studying her and held his stare, not insolently
but with a quite inquisitiveness, before he looked away in confusion, aware
that he'd betrayed much of himself. It was a small town -- he must have
seen her before, but couldn't remember when. Had she done a stint in London
or Dublin and come back, remade and ready to lord it over the locals --
a laconic queen bee to their fruitless drones? But, no, she seemed oddly
displaced, never quite fitting in and yet accepted by all in the deferential
way that pretty girls usually are.
Though she had her acolytes and was aware of her position in the run
of things, still, these small town trappings of social success seemed to
matter little to her. Elvis McCarthy knew exactly who Sean was talking
about when he finally had the nerve to broach the subject. "Oh yeah, the
quare wan from out the mountain. Grand lookin', isn't she - pale and interestin'
like. Somethin' to while away the nights when the rain is hammerin' the
window panes and the wife is in her curlers snorin' blue blazes next to
you." Sean blushed at this obvious intrusion into his own dream, but had
to conclude that McCarthy had her well-pegged.
And when Sean finally had the guts to risk a timid hello, it was as
if he'd always known her. She understood everything he spoke about. She'd
been there and done that but never in a know-it-all-way; and if by chance
she hadn't, then she was quite content to listen to him with that vaguely
mocking smile, but all-understanding eyes that invited the deepest of confidences.
Within weeks, he had changed his hairstyle, his clothes, his attitude,
his ambitions, the very way he thought about himself.
Through her grief at the passing of her husband, his Mother barely noticed,
until it was far too late. His marks in school went down as his obsession
with Mary deepened. Swept away were her safe arid hopes of a life in law
or accountancy for her only son, to be replaced by his mania for music
and coolness. Just when his Mother needed familiarity and reassurance most,
Sean changed into a moody, nihilistic, punky antichrist wrestling with
the inevitable demons and demands of first love. He shook his head and
took a furtive slug from his pint; Mary and all her allure faded back into
the singer's eyes. The girl had taken a long deep breath -- the only one
to do so in the room. She cast her head to one side and her hair shifted
off her face. She placed the fingers of one hand to her ear for tuning
or concentration, closed her eyes and revealed the bare truth of the penultimate
verse that everyone in the room dreaded:
Fare thee well to Dooneen, fare thee well for a while
And to all the fine people I'm leaving behind
To the streams and the meadows where late I have been
And the high rocky slopes of the Cliffs of Dooneen
The mood darkened across the room. The song had exposed, and then cut
deep into the raw nerve of emigration. The dread pain of separation was
flitting once again across the faces, etched in webs of worry lines, draped
in frowns and remembrances of words and deeds and promises and consequences
that had been temporarily banished by the magic of the song and its delivery.
The warm glow of the drink dulled once more into the anxiety of cumulative
hangovers, while the surreal feeling of what-the-hell camaraderie was swept
away by a nauseous clawing down somewhere around the pit of the stomach.
The full white ceiling lights that had only recently given glow and allure
to the stacked bottles of booze, now seemed too bright for the twisted
sadness of the morning that was in it.
But still they listened spellbound as the song circled back inexorably
to its final haunted beginning.
You may travel far far from your own native home Far away o'er the mountains,
far away o'er the foam But of all the fine places that I've ever seen There's
none to compare with the Cliffs of Dooneen.
The girl held the last long note in a breathy vibrato. It seemed to
drift off into the waves that beat against the cliffs and evaporate in
foam and spray, before heading once more back out across the Atlantic to
be washed up like the emigrants on the sandy uncaring shores of Jersey,
Cape Cod or Long Island. As her voice faded away, there was a long silence
while each one was lost to their own thoughts, catching a furtive glimpse
of their own destinies as they made an uneasy peace with their partings.
Then the moment was gone. The room erupted in applause and each one
turned to friend or stranger and complimented the girl, and wasn't that
the finest version of the song they'd ever heard? Some compared it with
past performance of Christy's in Brooklyn or Brookline or even Doolin itself,
and the talk turned to other song s and other nights, but the party was
over, something once there had fled and could not be recaptured; and so
they turned to their drinks and ordered last rounds and grimaced as the
whiskey hit the soft sad sickness that lodged in the core of their hearts.
 
|
|
