Beneath the Earth Read online

  ‘And then what? If this war doesn’t end soon and with fairness on all sides, you can mark my words that there will be another along before too long and you’ll be too old to fight in it and I’ll be too old to fight in it but our sons won’t! Your Donal will be of an age. And my Émile. So think on before you say we should just ignore what’s going on.’

  There was an almighty debate and Émile couldn’t hear any of the arguments any more as voices were raised so high, and finally Father Macallie had to take to the altar and call the meeting to an end, for it was clear that there was never going to be agreement between the sides and if it didn’t stop there’d be a fistfight in the church.

  Émile sat at the back and tried to reason it through in his mind. He could see both sides of this. But brave young soldiers who were fighting on the Continent to make sure that everyone got to live as they wanted to live – it seemed to him that this was the side worth fighting for.

  When he thought about it for too long, however, it made his head hurt, that was the truth of it.

  But the posters went up, and Stephen’s part in it – that couldn’t be denied. And a few nights later, the brick came flying through the front window, waking up the house and causing Émile to reach out so quickly that his grandfather’s watch smashed on the floor.

  Six weeks later, when Émile found out that Stephen had signed up to fight for the British Expeditionary Force, he felt frightened and proud at the same time. But he knew that the whole town was in a quandary over it because everyone liked Stephen. He’d grown up among them, after all. He’d married a woman they all respected, had a son who was a fine fellow altogether and had never done a moment’s harm to anyone in all his life. Yes, the English were the enemy, but at least they all knew who the English were. If the Germans won, then it was anyone’s guess what might happen to Ireland next.

  Émile ended up in another fight with Donal Higgins, whose father said that Stephen was a turncoat and a blaggard for falling in with a bunch of Sassenach ne’er-do-wells and if he was any sort of Irishman then he’d never fight for a country that had done all they could to keep the Irish in servitude for eight hundred years.

  ‘Your dad’s a traitor,’ said Donal Higgins, keeping his left arm close to his waist and his fist clenched as his right jabbed out and made contact with Émile’s chin.

  ‘And your dad’s a coward,’ said Émile, punching low to Donal’s waist with his right hand while his left gave him an almighty clatter around the head.

  ‘You’ll take that back,’ said Donal, kicking out.

  ‘I’ll do no such thing,’ said Émile, launching himself forward and throwing himself on top of Donal, his whole body lashing out in the hope that he’d hit something important and the fight would come to an end as quickly as possible.

  It took two teachers to separate them and they were both put in the bad books for fighting.

  They all came out to see him off the morning that he left for the war and those who were old enough remembered the day, over twenty years before, when they’d done the same thing for his father. The arguments about the Irish taking part hadn’t changed during that time but no one wanted to see any harm come to one of the town’s favourite sons.

  He woke early, just after five o’clock, ready to join a small group of young men who were taking a bus together to Rosslare and then a boat across to Plymouth and a train to the centre of England where they were to be taken to a camp to begin basic training. Lying in bed, his eyes on the ceiling, he wondered whether he would survive whatever was to follow and whether he would ever see West Cork again. Whether he would ever hold his wife in his arms or take a hurley out to the fields with his son as he’d done every Saturday morning for the last few years. And finally, the minutes passed and what choice did he have but to get out of bed, have a wash, dress in the uniform they’d given him and get himself ready to say his goodbyes.

  They gathered on the street, his wife crying for fear of what might happen to him, his nine-year-old son standing in the corner of the doorway, trying his best to be a brave man even though every part of him knew that he might never see his father again.

  ‘I’ll write when I get there,’ said Émile.

  ‘Make sure you do,’ she said.

  ‘You’re the man of the house now,’ he said, turning to the boy. ‘You look after your mother while I’m gone, do you hear me, Stephen?’

  ‘I will, Dad,’ said Stephen, standing up tall, determined not to cry while the whole street was watching him.

  ‘Now take this,’ said Émile, reaching into his pocket and handing across his grandfather’s watch, whose glass had been broken and mended half a dozen times over the years but still told the time without fail. ‘It’s a family heirloom. And you look after it for me until I get home, all right? Because I’m coming back here for that watch and for you.’

  They drove across to Rosslare in silence for the most part. Donal Higgins told a few jokes and the others tried to join in but the truth was they were too afraid of what was to come to join in the laughter. Émile sat, staring out the window, thinking of his father and all that he’d suffered during the last war, the one they called the Great War. He’d put up those posters, he’d tried to recruit people to fight for what was right and the people of the town had turned on him, but he had fought on regardless and finally taken four of the lads from the town with him to the trenches where all but one of them had fallen, all but one of them had given their lives for peace, all but one of them were buried in a cemetery where their families could only visit once or twice in their lives, for wasn’t the price of the boat across to the Continent only shocking?

  Stephen hadn’t been the one to come home. He’d died just short of a year after arriving in France. He’d written home every week while he was there and he’d kept his spirits up and stayed good-hearted and he’d been sure that whatever the differences were between England and Ireland, this war was something bigger than all of that and every good man needed to play his part for peace.

  And now it was his son’s turn.

  Émile met his sergeant, he trained, he collapsed in exhaustion and then got up again. He felt his body grow thick with muscle, he thought he could give nothing more, he had no more to give, and then he gave some more. He collapsed under the pain of it, he fought out the other side of it. He realized that he was made of strong stuff, that he was his father’s son. He reached the end, he passed out, he was applauded, he took another train to Southampton where he boarded a boat for France and the uncertainty that lay ahead.

  He lay in his bunk the night before the first battle began and thought of that night when he was just a boy and a brick had come through the parlour window and life as he knew it began to change.

  ‘What’s your name?’ asked the boy in the bed next to his.

  ‘Émile,’ said Émile.

  ‘You’re French?’

  ‘My mother is. My father was English. He died in the Great War.’

  ‘And you?’

  Émile hesitated. It still came down to this end, didn’t it? Who you were, where you came from, how you defined yourself. The country you called home.

  ‘I’m Irish,’ he said, before rolling over and trying to find some sleep.

  The Schleinermetzenmann

  I never had a chance to observe Arthur in his public role until a few days before my mother’s funeral. We grew up next door to each other, the closest of friends throughout our younger years, but drifted apart in adulthood for all the usual reasons. Almost a decade earlier, with my nascent and much-longed-for career already smothered in its cradle like a mewling infant, I decided to spend a summer travelling and somehow lost track of time, building a new life far away from anyone who knew me. Arthur, in fact, came to the airport to see me off and just as I was about to make my way through the security gates he asked whether I would mind if he called Becky, a girl I had briefly been dating earlier that year, and invited her out for a drink. ‘She has amazing tits,’ he told me, which
was true, although I had got no closer to seeing them in their exposed state than he had for she subscribed to some outdated and frankly nonsensical ideas regarding maintaining her virginity until her wedding night.

  ‘Do whatever you like,’ I told him, thinking this was a disappointing way for him to say goodbye to his oldest friend. ‘I don’t care.’

  We seemed to lose track of each other after that and when I eventually dug out his email address and wrote to tell him that my mother had died, he wrote back almost immediately, offering condolences while inviting me to a reading he was giving at a city-centre bookshop the following day, to be followed, he said, by an evening of alcohol-fuelled reminiscing.

  I had no great desire to see him in front of an audience but nevertheless I went along and was surprised to see that he’d become a little bit famous, or as famous as a novelist can get anyway, for a sizeable crowd had gathered to hear him tell us all how wonderful he was.

  ‘Before writing this novel,’ he said, putting both hands to his face and dragging them slowly across the skin, as if his fingers might offer an early-evening exfoliant, ‘I had a serious case of what our German friends call …’ He paused for a moment and looked around the room. ‘Are there any Germans here?’ he asked, and if there were, no one spoke up. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘I had a serious case of what our German friends call kästellfrügenschänge, which literally means the sensation a man feels when he is standing on a precipice, usually but not necessarily naked, preparing to jump to his death but being held back by a feeling that he might yet be of some use to the world.’ He smiled gently and shook his head as if he could not quite believe that he had ever doubted his own genius. ‘But when the words came?’ He wagged his finger at us as if we were unruly children. ‘No more kästellfrügenschänge.’

  The audience, morons all, lapped it up. I could see two university-aged girls, pretty if you like that sort of thing, doing everything they could to make eye contact with him. And I’m sure the boy next to me emitted a faintly erotic sigh at my old friend’s supposed bilingualism. For my part, I found it hard not to laugh out loud, for I had spent most of the last few years living in a town called Tittmoning on the German-Austrian border and had become fluent in the language. (I work on a large dairy farm where, in fact, I have my own brand of local celebrity as the kuhliebhabermann – which literally means a man who has a suspiciously close emotional relationship to cattle – a nickname I acquired for no other reason than the fact that I try to treat all my cows, especially the good-looking ones, with atypical kindness before sending them off to the slaughterhouse in Burghausen to be stunned by electrical currents and have their throats slit.) And I can promise you that kästellfrügenschänge is not a real word. It’s just a jumble of sounds placed next to each other that have a faintly Germanic ring to them.

  My sighing neighbour, trembling before greatness, raised his hand.

  ‘A question,’ said Arthur, pointing towards the boy, whose face immediately turned fire-engine red.

  ‘Please, sir,’ he whispered, like an older, ganglier, gayer version of Oliver Twist. ‘Please, sir, what advice would you give to young writers?’

  Arthur tapped his upper lip with his index finger as he considered this. I rolled my eyes; this could hardly be the first time he’d been asked such an obvious question. Surely he had a stock answer tucked away somewhere.

  ‘Have you ever visited the southern of the two Brelitzen Islands?’ he said finally, after much thought.

  ‘No,’ said the boy, shaking his head.

  ‘The northern one perhaps?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What about the Cassandra Strait, that spiteful stimulant of cerulean that separates the two?’

  ‘I’ve never been anywhere,’ said the boy, becoming noticeably aroused now by such close attention. ‘Except to EuroDisney once with my uncle Mark when I was twelve.’

  ‘The Brelitzen Islands,’ said Arthur, smiling. ‘Go to the Brelitzen Islands. You’ll know why when you get there.’

  I felt myself beginning to grow angry. I’m not an expert on world geography by any means but I had never heard of the Brelitzen Islands and doubted their existence. Still, I said nothing. God forbid that I should piss all over the magic.

  ‘Creating art,’ declared Arthur a moment later, apropos of nothing, while holding his wretched novel in the air, ‘reminds me of why I look forward to death so much. At the heart of our mortality lies what the Shīn-du monks on Mount Hejiji call shrān-kao.’ He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m pronouncing that wrong, amn’t I? It’s shrān-kaoj, I think. With a silent “j” at the end?’

  He looked around but no one said anything. They were staring at him like he was the love child of the Dalai Lama and Oprah Winfrey. An old lady, close to tears at such life-changing wisdom, blew her nose loudly, sounding like a steam engine about to depart a platform in The Railway Children.

  ‘Yes, I think that’s it. Shrān-kaoj. Forgive me, Gampopo!’

  Both pronunciations had sounded exactly the same to me and they were, I’m sure, equally meaningless. I also doubted the existence of Shīn-du monks or of Mount Hejiji itself, which, for what it’s worth, he pronounced He-ki-ki.

  ‘But life,’ he added, banging his index finger sharply against the dust jacket, which showed a young boy walking with his back to the reader along a road towards a moonlit horizon. ‘Life is art and art is pain and pain is what makes us know that we are alive.’ He held the book aloft now and waved it at us with all the zeal of John Knox brandishing the Book of Common Prayer in the face of Mary, Queen of Scots. ‘And I am alive,’ he roared then, a blue vein beginning to assert its presence on his forehead. ‘I’m alive!’

  Really, considering that we were only meeting again because I was preparing to bury my mother, I thought the whole performance was a little over the top.

  Later, in the pub, Arthur told me that he didn’t want to know anything about what had happened to me during my years abroad. He asked me not to speak about the friends I had made, the experiences that had changed me or any love affairs that I might have enjoyed. He didn’t even want to hear about my cows and I have many interesting stories to tell about them if people are only prepared to listen.

  ‘As an artist,’ he explained, ‘as a creative person, I prefer to rely on my imagination. I have memories of the boy you once were, Mulligan, and ideas about the man you might have become. Let’s not spoil the narrative by drizzling reality over it.’

  ‘Why do you keep calling me by my surname?’ I asked. ‘Why don’t you call me Pierce?’

  ‘I’ve always hated that name,’ said Arthur. ‘Even when we were children, foraging for adventure like truffling pigs in the woods, comparing penis sizes in darkened glades—’

  ‘That never happened,’ I said.

  ‘Even then I didn’t like the name Pierce,’ he continued, ignoring me. ‘There’s something so unbearably common about it. No, I think Mulligan is a far better name. You don’t meet many Mulligans any more.’

  ‘Well, I don’t want you calling me that,’ I said.

  ‘Fine, then I shall call you Darling.’

  ‘No, that won’t work either.’

  ‘It’s either Mulligan or Darling, darling. You decide. Now would you mind if I swapped seats with you? I prefer to keep my back to the room.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked, standing up and moving around to his side of the table.

  ‘The punters, darling,’ he said. ‘Everyone is trying not to look at me but in doing so they’re making me feel very self-conscious. If I have my back to them, perhaps they’ll stop not-staring.’

  ‘I really don’t think anyone recognizes you,’ I said, looking around at the bar, which was defined by its overwhelming indifference to our presence. Three young men, likely strangers to literature, were watching a football match on the television, their tabletop littered with glasses and empty crisp packets. A few old men were seated silently at the bar, contemplating the ruins of their lives. A woman
was typing on a MacBook Air while drinking gin after gin after gin.

  ‘You have no idea what it’s like to be watched all the time, darling,’ said Arthur. ‘It’s a wonder I’m not a recluse in some luxury hotel suite.’

  ‘Can you stop calling me darling, please?’

  ‘Of course, Mulligan. You see, one doesn’t write for fame or glory but sometimes that’s what happens. Consider a packhorse wandering into an untilled field and …’ He stopped and reconsidered the beginnings of his analogy before shaking his head. ‘No, forget that,’ he said. ‘It won’t work. By the way, did you read what Robertson wrote about Clive?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. (Naturally, I hadn’t; nor did I have any idea who either Robertson or Clive were. Nor did I care.) ‘Let’s not talk about it. Look, the reason I came to your reading—’

  ‘Did you enjoy it?’

  ‘It was fine.’

  ‘Just fine?’

  ‘It was very good.’

  ‘What was wrong with it?’

  ‘Nothing was wrong with it. The audience seemed to enjoy it.’

  ‘You were part of the audience.’

  ‘Well yes,’ I admitted. ‘In a manner of speaking.’

  ‘You were sitting among them.’

  ‘But you invited me.’

  ‘And you came.’

  ‘Because I needed to see you.’

  ‘The woman behind me. With the MacBook Air,’ he said, leaning forward. ‘If she comes over, tell her that we’re old friends who haven’t seen each other in a long time and—’

  ‘Well, that’s actually true,’ I pointed out.

  ‘She’s probably writing a book,’ he said. ‘She’ll ask me to read it. There’s no way that I will but I don’t want to disappoint her.’

  ‘I don’t think she’s even aware of us,’ I said.

  ‘Perhaps she’s shy.’ He turned and looked at her, flashing a set of very white teeth. ‘I don’t bite,’ he shouted, causing every head in the place to turn in his direction. ‘My prose does, yes. But I do not.’