The Failing Heart E-Book

Eoghan Smith

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 223

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

The Failing Heart is a dark, surreal tale set in Dublin. Haunted by the death of his mother and the impending birth of his ex-lover's child, a student embarks on an obsessive quest for knowledge. Abandoning his home, running out of money and increasingly paranoid, the people he encounters and the places he inhabits become mysterious sources of terror and anxiety. Everywhere there are intimations of a world that demands to be known, and yet refuses to yield up its secrets.A contemporary fable of existential melancholia, The Failing Heart plunges the reader into the psyche of a tortured individual who is compelled to live a life beyond human comprehension.

Leseprobe

Dedalus Original Fiction in Paperback

Eoghan Smith is an Irish writer, critic and academic. He completed a PhD at Maynooth University, and has taught English literature at universities and colleges in Dublin, Maynooth and Carlow since the mid-2000s.

He is the author of a full-length study of the novels of John Banville, and the co-editor of a collection of essays on Irish suburban literary and visual cultures. He has contributed numerous essays, articles and reviews on literature and visual culture to a variety of academic and literary publications.

The Failing Heart is his first novel.

CONTENTS

Title

Dedalus Original Fiction in Paperback

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Copyright

ONE

He has been here again. I can smell him, taste him in the air. It is now almost eight weeks since I first came to this place – to my place. You might think that after eight weeks I would have become accustomed to these disturbances, but no, I am unsettled once again. This evening I had just put my mind to the question, my question, the question, when in he burst, into my flat, demanding his due, snarling about downpayments and contracts, waving his little black book at me in a manner that was less than courteous. I raised a hand to silence him. I told him Wait, wait, will you wait, I am working, but it was too late. The chilly, late March damp he brought in with him was poisoned by his noxious aftershave. I wrote haphazardly, in hope, in fear, trying to blacken the page before the words were lost to me. My concentration was sundered, shot through with his presence. I could hear only his body stirring the air behind me. I wrote quicker, trying to ignore him, convinced his breathing became heavier. The more I wrote, the heavier he breathed. I confused the words on the page. I misplaced a conjunction at the beginning of the sentence. I overindulged the subject, and somehow lost the object. In the end it was hopeless: I could no longer ignore the dead weight of his being there.

I let down my pen and rose from the table. Behind me, he had adopted a defiant posture. He squinted furiously and twitched his shoulders. I could see he was jumpy. We both were, as a matter of fact. For a moment I thought I might have to use my fists. I admit the prospect of violence did not make me unhappy, it even excited me a little, made me a little giddy. He rolled his eyes over my bookshelves and turned down the corners of his mouth. He poked his fingers into my last piece of bread. It was not fresh. He snorted cynically. Probing for some evidence of wealth no doubt, some trace of prosperity. Looking for the few miserable pence that I owe him. My due, he said, where is my due? I opened my empty palms. His fingers left hollows in the bread. A feeling of disgust came over me. He nodded slowly. Yes I see what’s going on here, he said.

I did not, could not, speak.

I am here for my due, he said.

But, I said, trying to recover my composure, today is not the due date.

He did not speak.

You will get your due, but not before time, I added with artificial defiance, trying not to look towards the press where I had stashed my money.

We held each other’s stare. The pressure to keep my eyes in place was immense, but eventually he blew out his cheeks and pointed at me again before turning on his heels.

My due, he warned over his shoulder, a half-smile appearing on his face. I will get my due. Well let him come, let him look, let him ask his insufferable questions – there are no answers here.

He backed out of the flat with painful deliberation, keeping his eye fixed on me through the narrowing gap between the door and the frame. I pressed my ear to the keyhole to hear the sound of his departure. My heart was thrashing wildly inside my chest. When I was sure he had gone, I rushed to the press in the kitchen to check the money was still there, for it might all have been a trick, the whole thing, he might have already stolen in some time when I was sleeping and taken the money, he might have watched me as I slept, he might have taken a pillow in his hand – but no. Stop. The money was still there.

I ran into the living room and packed up my writing things where I had left them scattered and clambered into bed, unable to close my eyes and incapable of keeping them open.

Irregular behaviour, you may think, but you would be wrong. Just two weeks ago, as I was halfway to sleep, I heard the rapping of a ringed finger against the window and threats being shouted through the letterbox. I was already in a state of unease. My deceased mother had been lately infiltrating my dreams; at times I could not be sure whether I was awake or asleep, or for that matter, if she was alive or dead. Sometimes I dreamed that she was dead and sometimes I dreamed that she was alive. Sometimes she was neither dead nor alive but in some unfixed, zombified state in between. On that night I was dreaming of my mother’s birth. I was holding my grandmother’s hand and urging her to push. Through a frosted glass window, I could see the opaque form of my father in a waiting room, slowly pacing the floor. I had the impression of a troubled look on his face; he kept stroking a moustache that he had acquired from some unknown realm of my unconscious. His fingers were stained a little yellow. There was something distasteful about his mouth, something indecent that revolted me. He was treading back and forth across the threshold of the delivery room; later I would remember how his bad leg was in working order. Several times he was about to come in, but as soon as he put a foot inside he turned abruptly on his heel and strode away, clasping and unclasping his hands behind the long black cloak he was wearing. I could see him better now. A large lotus flower that was hemmed into the breast pocket of his coat was beginning to droop. I appreciate how improbable he was; even as a figure in my dreams he was unlikely. But let’s not worry about implausibilities, I have so little faith myself. A dark, red, half-globe was my mother’s head struggling out of the womb. I smoothed my grandmother’s hair and told her to make one last effort. The midwife shook her head gravely and produced forceps. From somewhere came a high and squealing noise, much like the mew of a hungry kitten. My grandmother scrunched her eyes and began to moan, pulling my head closer to her mouth. It is said that the dead are barred from communicating with the living but this was not true in my dream, not true in any dream. She was whispering something that I couldn’t hear. What is it grandma, I said, what do you want to say? She clutched me by the collar and raised herself up at the same time as she pulled me down. The old crone was stronger than I had thought. Or perhaps I was weaker. Oh for Christ’s sake, perhaps it’s all the same, it doesn’t matter, these details. What is it grandma, I repeated. She was shuffling her fingers beneath the bed-sheets in a manner that made me uncomfortable. She was so close now that her tooth decay began to overwhelm my senses. Didn’t the old hag ever learn to floss, I found myself asking, look at that repulsive calculus. She produced a hand to reveal a yellow-green lump smeared with red, like a giant snotty nosebleed, or a melted marble. The mucus plug, the midwife started shouting, it’s the bloody show! She clapped her hands in excitement and just then my mother’s flat, shut-eyed head started to bulge out of my grandmother. It was all happening much too quickly. The baby’s mouth and eyes were smeared with blackish-green meconium. I had an urge to clean its face but was afraid I would smother the child. The midwife gave a small but forceful tug, and the rest of my mother slurped out, blood-blotched purple, wriggling and scrawny. That’s not true. She was jaundiced, plump and completely still. My grandmother pulled me closer still, close enough to kiss me. She gasped for air. Her half-breath on my cheek was an aborted sentence. What is it grandma, I urged, what is it? I hope, she managed to say, vagitus uterinus… vagitus… but the rest was lost and never to be regained and at that point the cold sound of the metal ring on the glass put an end to my matrilineal phantoms. I sat bolt upright, my ears pricked. I assumed it was a burglar, skulking about outside the window. I heard the dull sound of a terracotta crash. I recognised it as the pot of sapling geraniums that I had been cultivating clumsily being crushed underfoot. So, not so stealthy, I thought, but potentially dangerous nonetheless. There was nothing for it but to keep the bastard out. I wedged a key between my fingers to poke the burglar’s eye and began creeping towards the door.

A new fear suddenly took hold of me: there was no time to dress and the buttons on my pyjama bottoms had long since fallen off, forcing me to hold them up with one hand. Ordinarily, living alone, there were no issues of personal modesty; often I allowed them to slip to the ground when I had to use the toilet, even enjoyed the freedom of it a little. But now I was convinced that my flat was going to be broken into and I was about to be assaulted. I imagined the worst. Should there be a scuffle and were I to be knocked unconscious – being unable to defend myself properly – would they find me humiliated, beaten and robbed, with my pyjamas flying half-mast at my knees. Or worse, around my ankles? Who might find me in this shameful state of undress? In my agitation, I cursed my witlessness in leaving myself so exposed and promised myself I would leave at first light. Yes, I would get the hell out of there, had I not been saying it since the first moment I came to this place? Escape: get the hell out. For Christ’s sake, get the hell out. The serrated edges of the key dug into my fingers. I tightened my grip on the pyjama bottoms. He rapped again. I adopted a strong working class accent and barked an obscenity to frighten him off. He rapped louder. I bellowed something defamatory about his family. That must have been a mistake. I had forgotten he had a key. He had begun to let himself in the door when he heard the insult, and stopping, mid-push, fixed me with a glassy eye, and said in a cultured voice, I hope I have not made an error of judgment with you.

What kind of existence is this? Am I not, after all, a private citizen? I might have been towelling myself in the living room in front of the large mirror. I might have been painting a nude study of myself. I might, even, have been making love. But no, let’s not. Enough of that. Be aware, he said, this property belongs to me. Your living here is temporary. Then off he went on his loathsome little routine, lifting his eyebrows at me, rubbing his chin, nosing the air. Was he wearing white gloves? Did he run a gloved finger over the windowsill to check for traces of dust? There was something inauspicious about his tone.

Now I will not warn you again that failure to make another subsequent payment may result in the activation of the legal consequences which are outlined in the terms of your lease. And what, may I ask you, will you do then? Would you have me put you out in the street? Would you have me responsible for your homelessness? No no no no no. Would you return to the bosom of your mother? You would not. Would you return to the shelter of your father? You would not. Are not both your parents deceased?

Yes, that is half-true, but I did not correct him.

And what is your occupation may I ask you? Did you not mention something about a school?

Yes, I lied, that’s correct, and they owe me my money.

Now look here, he said, I do not believe any more that you are awaiting payment from this school. And what are these pages I see you writing on? he sneered. Some type of story teller, are you? Some class of a thinker, are you? I will need, as initially agreed with you, a letter of reference stating your good character and reliability from your place of work. And I am afraid that if this can’t be provided I shall have to ask you to leave this flat.

He raised a triumphant eyebrow. And from where did he get such a preposterous voice?

Growing a moustache are we? he said, referring to an irrepressible smudge of downy hair on my lip.

There’s your due, I said, for once having it to hand. It’s all there.

He didn’t bother to disguise his disappointment, nor I my contempt for him.

But let him disturb me, let him disgust me. What do I care about him? What is he but a momentary distraction? If this question is to come, I must have solitude. Yes. I must have stillness. Yes. I must have resolve. Yes. I will persevere until I have found my question, the question that lies even at the dead heart of knowledge. All this I know. All this I accept. And only when I have found the question will it be all over: I will abandon everything and begin again.

I am eyeing the date, you see, for the slow, final trudge down to Schorman, that fellow in the university who is my appointed judge. To arbitrate my work, the sum of my exertions, for the final time, yes, for the final time. His advice has been clear: Simplify, isolate, you must simplify and isolate.

Yes. Simplify and isolate until the final time.

And so I did. One night, I left my home in the outer suburbs between the ring road and the foothills of the Dublin mountains, filled as it was with wild and profligate mourning for my mother, who surprised everyone by dying when we were least expecting it. There had been assurances she would live for months, maybe years. She was the first emissary of the dead, the one whose death was the annunciation of all the others. I telephoned Schorman, after the funeral. Simplify and isolate, he urged impatiently. Do I need to tell you again? And so I came here, to this flat, to shed the ballast of emotion, to unmoor the weight of moods. Here, secreted away from the excesses of my family and friends to find solitude and simplicity. With an envelope of money that I stole from my father, I have hidden myself away to work on the question, my question, the question, for which I have as yet no answer.

My mother died a quick death, give or take an hour of dying, of that much I am certain. Certain too that it was on a gleaming Spring morning when the birds were in full throat atop my father’s beloved Silver Queens. She was diseased, yes, but it was something, I suspect, to do with her heart. She had not appeared at the customary time to make the breakfast, leaving the remnants of her family waiting at the table. My father had been telling my sister and I that my mother had woken in the night terrified by the dream she had had once again, in which she felt guilty for a killing, but exactly who was killed and by whom was a mystery. The dead person had no face, was neither child nor adult, male nor female, but was only killed. Nobody knew who it was, and the not-knowing made it worse, and in an intense flush of conscience, my father surmised, though he had no proof for the claim, she had wakened, sat bolt upright, and scrabbled desperately in the sheets for his hand. Hush, he calmed her, hush. And back off to sleep she went, as if it had never happened, just like that, he told us. After the story we sat silently for a while until he began a conversation about the light in early springtime, and about how surprising it was in this weather to witness the fullness of hydrangea bloom, such vivid blues and reds and purples, such lush greens, such thirst. It had the makings of a lively discussion, but the talk soon petered out. After another half an hour had passed, my father began to scratch his head and look accusingly at the ceiling. Puzzled, he got up on a stool and tapped the clock that hung over the sink, trying to start up its stalled hands. Hydrangeas, remarked my father, would make a desert of the earth. My sister sat hungrily with her hands folded across her bosom, frowning at the sink and probing the inside of her cheek with an exploratory tongue. My belly rumbled. What’s happening? asked my father. Perhaps she’s gone, my sister said. Gone where? I asked. Nobody ventured an answer. Away? I offered. Could she have gone without our noticing?

Somebody suggested we search for her. We set off. My sister headed for the pantry; my father made for the only fertile patch of the back garden where my mother had latterly taken to growing her own rhubarb. Her spade, still covered in thick, black muck, lay on the ground. But it was I who discovered her, still in the hymeneal bed where she had been reading a battered copy of The Double, sitting up with her head thrown back over the pillows and her fissured mouth wide open. A woollen shawl still covered her white-blue shoulders. A glass of water sat untouched on the dresser. The faint musky scent that she had inherited from my grandfather was stagnant in the air. Her lower lip was curled in under her teeth, her eyes staring contemplatively at the light shade. The stillness made me restless. I called my family together and we stood around the bed. We took turns to aimlessly pat her hand. Her hand was so cold the feeling was unpleasant, but it seemed like the thing to do in the circumstances, even though I didn’t want to do it. My sister combed her hair and smeared colour on her cheeks, asserting that She always liked to put a bit of rouge on her cheeks. My father was shocked by the claim, and he immediately contested it. I suggested that perhaps she had always used blusher. Don’t you know the difference between simple things? my sister hissed at me. My father said, No, she always had a natural rosy glow, always had since she was a bloody girl, and who would know best? My sister insisted otherwise, laying the colour on thicker until my mother obtained the cheeks of a circus clown. My father pointed his finger at my sister wordlessly. But we all soon grew weary of the dispute and the truth of the matter remained unknown.

My mother’s face, contorting minute by minute, began to acquire the careless look of someone in the middle of telling a joke. Someone suggested closing her mouth and her eyes – those dead, green eyes still fixed on the ceiling – but the jaw kept flopping open and the eyelids kept popping up. Defeated in the effort, we left her there agog and agape, her final punchline unspoken. I tried to make a pithy observation about her resilience in death, I mean especially in death – or do I mean even in death? – but my father misinterpreted it as a slight on his own character, and made a jerky, threatening gesture towards his belt, just enough to shut my trap. After that, nobody knew where to look. My father kept peeling back the side of the curtains and spying out on to the street as if he was expecting someone. I could tell he was suppressing the urge to whistle a tune. Even the dog, a primped-up, panicky little Bichon Frise bitch with apparently little or no intelligence, seemed embarrassed. My mother had bought the pup to keep her company in her dotage; now the creature seemed at a loss as to what to do. She wandered about the house, getting under my father’s feet until he roared at her to get out of his way. She gawked up paralysed by terror of him. He towered over her, raising his fist and shouting short staccato curses until she ran to a corner of the living room, where she promptly deposited little piles of greenish-brown shit. To teach her to do otherwise, my sister rubbed her nose in a turd and smacked her rump hard. But it was no use. She shat a greater, fouller-smelling turd, lowering her head at her shameful lack of self-control. A sense of generalised ignorance began quickly to spread through my family. We waited for something significant to happen. My quiet little fish, my loyal and golden Virginia, swam quiet circles in her clear plastic bowl. She lifted her mouth to the top of the water and made little desperate gobs as if she were trying to breathe the air before sinking to the bottom. She sucked in delicate slivers of faeces hidden between the blue stones and spat them out again at the side of the bowl. Out of one solitary eye she gazed judiciously at the dog.

I found myself watching the clock expectantly. Someone had forgotten to do the shopping so my sister made pots of tea with the same foul-tasting teabag that had been rescued from the kitchen bin. The tea tasted of onions but I felt under some obligation to drink it. We sipped to the sounds of the boy in the adjoining house batting a tennis ball against a wall over the hornet-fury sound of his father’s lawnmower. My father gazed out the kitchen window at my mother’s rhubarb. Big obnoxious looking plants, he said, big stupid looking leaves on them. You can’t do shag-all with the leaves either, poisonous bloody things. All that vegetation for nothing. A small cloud of bluebottles gathered at the pane of the patio door, softly thudding their heads against the glass. The sun shone in the cloudless sky. We briefly discussed cremating the corpse. My father telephoned his widowed friends for advice on the matter. Somebody suggested – no, Swore on their life – it was more dignified than burial. Another said burning the body would show conviction, It would leave no one in any doubt.

We sat around for a while, trying not to think of the vacancy my mother’s body was pouring into each moment. Something was stuck in my nose, blocking the airwaves, but I dared not pick at it. My father sat unnaturally upright with his hands in his lap, his eyes twitching at the clinking of my sister’s cup on her saucer. An hour or two later, four ashen-faced men in tight black suits appeared, treading slowly down the road to our house. A gleaming black hearse trailed them, taking an excruciating amount of time. Eventually, they arrived. A small man with a red face in a bowler hat got out, followed by the driver in dark glasses, and then a tall man, fiercer and more imposing than the rest. Mister Flanagan, said my father, shaking hands with the small man in the bowler hat. We’ll soon have her out of your way and get her all fixed up, chirped Flanagan. Where is she? intoned the tall man, addressing me and not my father. I pointed a finger towards the bedroom. We all traipsed upstairs, me, my father, my sister, Flanagan, the tall man, and the rest of the men in black. Someone pushed the door open and the whole lot of us trailed in and circled round the bed. My mother was still gawking at the ceiling. There was a smell of something that I couldn’t quite identify, like oranges or soap. Flanagan shook me firmly by the hand, gazing solemnly into my eyes. Don’t worry, he assured, we’ll give her a good massage, stretch her out, loosen up those limbs. See those whiskers she has on her face, he said, warming up, we’ll get them right off, aye, we’ll give her a good shave all over. Take twenty years off her. We’ll have her looking right as rain. My father watched on, his face cracking with resentment.

The tall man set about directing the others, issuing careful instructions about hoisting the corpse into a coffin they had brought with them. The men in black moved mechanically, lifting and sliding with practised sureness. With the body in the hearse they sped off down the road. I imagined my mother stretched in Flanagan’s morgue. A white space under blue lighting, Flanagan sewing up her mouth. I winced at the thought of the needle piercing the underneath of her tongue, just behind the lower teeth until an upside-down tent of flesh would appear on the soft underside of my mother’s chin, before it was pushed through in one deft movement, the skin elastically snapping back. The day passed into night. Nothing else happened in the quiet of the house. After a while, I grew into the silence. I felt at peace.

The next evening, with some neighbours loitering on the roadside, the sound of four sets of footsteps on the road began to grow from a feint tapping to an audible trudge. Louder and louder the footsteps grew, until I could not hear any other noise except the slow, measured march of leather on concrete. Behind them, Flanagan’s hearse shadowed their progress, the shining silver of the hubcaps revolving with an almost torturous slowness. I felt impatient and I had a need to urinate. Just as the men in black reached the house the hearse pulled up to a stop. Flanagan, the driver and the tall man got out, and with the other four men slid the coffin onto a metal trolley and wheeled my mother up the driveway. Flanagan strode with rehearsed solemnity at the head of the procession, the tall man following behind, staring sternly into the distance. The neighbours lowered their faces as they passed and clasped their hands loosely in front of their groins. Once inside, the men in black refused my sister’s offer of tea and rhubarb tart, and instead set about unscrewing the lid off the box. Here she is, said the tall one. Nothing happened. The tall one pointed at the corpse. Look, he said, pointing, look. I obeyed him, felt compelled to by his cold authority and his red eyes that were blazing into mine. I looked. My mother was unhumanly stiff in the coffin. Her hair had been styled in an unfamiliar page-boy cut. The scar above her eye she had picked up as a child had been filled in with skin-coloured putty. Every stray hair on her face had been removed. For some reason she now looked less of a woman. We stood awkwardly around the body for a few minutes and remarked politely on the quality of the mortician’s work.

Well, said Flanagan, who had appeared beside us.

She looks very well, my father said.

Thank you, said Flanagan, pleased. I do it all myself. Mammy always told me I had the hands of an artist