Margaret O’Driscoll and Peggy McCarthy, currently students on the MA in Creative Writing, write about the family in crisis and the ties that bind. 

The Day Daddy Cried

 I only saw my father cry, once –

bolting past us in the kitchen

to the coal room out back,

his sobbing a runnel around our house

after getting the message from Dunne’s

shop to phone his brother.

I coiled against my mother,

what’s wrong with Daddy I whispered,

she blamed it on the onion he had been chopping earlier.

She swore it, so I rummaged for that onion

in the bucket kept for our hens, found one

under peelings and withering cabbage leaves,

I needed to keep stomping it

flatter than my sandcastles.

When my father emerged, shrunk into himself,

red-faced, his two eyes like trapped birds,

I took a few steps towards him

squeezing the onion tightly in my fist

in case I burst, then backed away.

Margaret O’ Driscoll  

 

REAR-VIEW MIRROR

It was the view in the mirror that scuppered her as she drove away.

No more false starts and idle planning. Months and years caught in the bind of wanting to go and needing to stay. She was still young enough, it wasn’t too late, not nowadays. She knew she could find a new life somewhere else.

It had always been just the two of them. The years had piled in slowly and maybe he walked with a little less vim these days, but he was still solid and strong, stronger than most men his age. Since he’d retired, he’d become quite a good cook, obsessively watching every cookery programme on television from the mundane to the exotic.

‘I’m a man who knows his way around the kitchen,’ he’d boast.

He could drive, sometimes ferrying neighbours to and from hospital appointments. When he was caught for speeding last November, he strongly resented having a licence that wasn’t ‘clean’.

He protested to the garda, ‘I was driving lorries up and down the country before some of you bucks were born!’

So today was the day. She was finally set to go.

Just before she rounded the bend and home leaked out of sight, she caught a glimpse of his waving left hand drop slowly across his eyes as he sank down on the low white-washed wall like a balloon deflating. Jerry, she had always called him, not Dad. She tightened her grip on the steering wheel and shifted gear.

Peggy McCarthy

TOMORROW: “STOLEN” by Mary O’Donnell

John Banville is the Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at UCC. He is the author of over 20 works of fiction, including the Booker Prize-winning The Sea.  Under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, he has written seven crime novels, the latest of which, The Secret Guests, was published in January.  His reading with Catherine Kirwan on March 24 had to be cancelled due to the COVID-19 virus.  Here he writes about another period of self-isolation and the first glimpses of a different kind of virus. 

UNDERNEATH

As this time of isolation goes on, I am reminded of the couple of months I spent at the University of Chicago in the autumn of 2016. I was there to conduct a seminar on the novels of Henry James, at the splendidly named John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought—alumni include T.S Eliot, Saul Bellow and Leszek Kołakowski.

My accommodation was a spacious upper room in a fine old townhouse on campus, in the bosky neighbourhood of Hyde Park. There was one pub within my range, a melancholy dive that I shunned, while the only restaurant deserving of the description was a forty-minute walk away—it was all right going there, but the return tended to be a little wobbly.

The first American campus I knew was Berkeley in 1968. Times have changed. Hyde Park in 2016 was as quiet as a Sunday evening in Belfast. My days, then, were uniform, tranquil and uneventful. I lost track of the days of the week. I woke, I wrote, I ate a sandwich, I wrote, I ate a bowl of spaghetti, I read, I had a drink, I went to bed. One morning my eyelids snapped open and I said aloud to the ceiling, ‘I know what this is—this is Groundhog Day!’

A virus was rampant in that time, too. I had seen the early signs of it throughout October. People shouting racial slurs at each other in the streets. Hate-filled insults were hurled back and forth in political debates. Shameless lies were broadcast as television news, by journalists, or ‘journalists’, who should have known better. The world according to Fox News as against the world according to CNN. One afternoon, sitting in a taxi stopped in traffic, I saw a white man, purple with rage, leap from his car and stride back past a line of no fewer than six vehicles to deliver a kick to the door of a pick-up truck driven by a black man.

I recall the first time I heard the term ‘alternative facts’ spoken by a political adviser—on CNN, in fact, not Fox. It was a stroke of genius, I thought—worthy of Joseph Goebbels or one of Lenin’s useful fools.

The populist epidemic reached its crisis point in the United States on November 9^th, 2016. Never in recent times had a presidential election so sorely infected the nation. And like all viruses, this one spread rapidly, not only within America but across the world. Populism is not a pandemic—see the Irish leader Leo Varadker’s television address to the nation on St Patrick’s Day, a model of dignity and restraint—but the infection lurks within the body politic everywhere, biding its time.

Blaise Pascal contended that all of humankind’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone. Everywhere today there are people in rooms who have no intention of keeping quiet. As Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man observed of his kind, ‘Though we may sit forty years underground without speaking, when we do come out into the light of day and break out we talk and talk and talk.’

John Banville 

TOMORROW:  “The Day Daddy Cried” by Margaret O’Driscoll and “Rear-View Mirror” by Peggy McCarthy     

Catherine Kirwan is a crime writer.  Her debut novel Darkest Truth, drawing its inspiration from her day job as a solicitor, was published to acclaim last year and was chosen as Cork’s One City One Book. Catherine was due to read on March 24 with John Banville as part of the Department of English annual reading series, one of many events that had to be cancelled due to the virus. 

LIFE GIVES YOU LEMONS

For a while after, I used to walk to the Eurospar away up along, so as I wouldn’t have to go past. And then, says I, sure I’m not the one who should be ashamed. So I started going down the hill instead. I make sure to stare in at her when I’m passing, though, and when I see anyone I knew coming out or going in, I stop and tell them that I’ve taken my custom elsewhere, and that the bread is fresher in the place down below. I’m getting fit from all the walking, my waistband getting looser. When life gives you lemons, make lemonade, says I.

              Until one night, a few weeks later, a knock came to the door. Late for anyone to be calling, says I, and I peeked sideways out through the net curtain on the landing window. When I saw who it was, I had the door open in five seconds flat.

              He’s Dan to everyone else, Danny Boy to me. He calls in regularly and he has a terrible weakness for a Kit-Kat normally, but he refused one that evening so I should have guessed there was something wrong. We had the usual banter back and forth till he drew down about the incident, wondering how I was feeling.

                ‘I’m not letting it get to me,’ says I.

                ‘You’re dead right,’ says he.

                ‘But you remember me that day,’ says I. ‘In an awful state so I was.’

                ‘You were,’ says he. ‘Tis a thing to put behind you.’

                 ‘That’s what I’m doing,’ says I.

                 ‘I’d say the Adult Caution is the way to go, so.’

                 ‘What’s that?’ says I.

                 ‘It’s a system for people to avoid having to go through a prosecution when there’s no need. It’s just admitting that wrong was done, and then it all goes away, nice and quiet, like.’

                  ‘Tell me a bit more,’ says I.

                   ‘Not much more to tell,’ says he. ‘It’s a slap on the wrist, not even that…’

                   ‘But she’d have to admit she was wrong,’ says I.

                Not a word out of him then for a good while, though he started looking hot in himself, loosening the collar on his shirt. The blue of the uniform suits him so well, I was thinking, with the dark hair and the rosy cheeks on him, and if I was only a bit younger, and all that.

                     ‘Em, Eleanor,’ says he. ‘You might have, maybe, taken me up wrong.’

                     I laughed, thinking he was joking. He wasn’t. He said that it was nothing to do with him, that it was the fecking Superintendent, that he, my Danny, was only the messenger boy. I wouldn’t hear of him running himself down like that.

                      ‘You’ll be a sergeant in no time,’ says I. ‘Amn’t I always saying it?’

                      ‘You are,’ says he.

                       ‘And you know how fond I am of you,’ says I.

                    ‘Well,’ says he. ‘We’ve had our moments. That time there was a complaint against you about the slashed tyres on the cars parked on your grass verge.’

                       ‘Not a scrap of evidence,’ says I.

                       ‘No. No. But there was that letter from the school that time you …’

                       ‘Freedom of speech, Danny,’ says I.

                       ‘And there was the keying,’ says he. ‘The alleged keying.’

                       ‘Danny,’ says I. ‘I’d love to help you with the Superintendent but this is one favour I can’t do for you. Right is right.’

*                                        

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get a small bit of a hop when they came to serve me, not Danny, another guard. Two. One stayed in the car, and the other, a big brute with a Kerry accent, nearly took the door down with the hammering he gave it.

                ‘Summons for you, Mrs Kelly,’ says he.

               ‘It’s Miss,’ says I, and I slammed the door in his face and crumpled the paper into a ball and threw it into the recycling. I went up to bed for a while, but I was twisting and turning, and then the children out on the green started their usual roaring, so I got up and made myself a cup of tea and I went out to the back garden and sat on Mammy’s bench, under the apple tree.

                   What would Mammy do, says I to myself. Well she wouldn’t run away from a fight anyway, says I, and I got up on my hind legs and went back into the house and I dug the summons out of the recycling bin and I flattened it, and read: ‘Assault causing harm contrary to section 3 of the Non-Fatal Offences Against the Person Act 1997’.

*

The next time Danny called, I said it straight out. 

                   ‘Your Kit-Kat days are over in this house.’

                   ‘I suppose because of the summons,’ says he.

                   ‘You suppose right,’ says I.

                   ‘Ah, now, sure,’ says he. ‘The black eye would have been hard to ignore.’

                   ‘It’s not what you know, Danny,’ says I. ‘It’s who. Mammy always said it.’

                 ‘Eleanor,’ says Danny. ‘In my training for the community guard role we were taught about the Two Cs. Contrition and compensation. I could nearly guarantee that, even at this late stage, the complaint would be dropped if you would pay a token amount to show …’

                     ‘Get out,’ says I.            

*

I’m wearing the suit I had for Mammy’s funeral and I’ve a taxi ordered for afterwards.

                      It isn’t every day of the week that justice is done. 

Catherine Kirwan

TOMORROW: “Underneath” by John Banville 

Beau Williams is an American performance poet and the author of two collections of poetry.  He is the creator of  Virtual Poetry Marketplace where members of the public can commission a personalised poem.  Both he and Breda Joyce, whose first collection, Cadence, came out in 2017, graduated from the MA in Creative Writing this year. 

 

Call The Locksmith

Outside, a siren rounds and ebbs through Dublin 6.

Nobody knows what this means.

In the midwest (Oklahoma, Dolly Parton, meth),

that same sound rattles through livestock

and the locals move to cover,

watch pregnant clouds spin-on

as they genuflect and tongue psalms.

 

The siren climbs our spines,

nestles in our ears,

itches.

 

All the bars have spit us out and

apartments swallowed us whole.

 

A slender black house cat struts

every sidewalk on the planet.

Links its way through fence posts

and slips through window cracks.

 

Rubs its neck on every

door knob and neighbour.

Makes us lay one rigor mortis body

between us and every other body.

 

6 feet is a brother

is a science teacher

is a movie star

is a casket.

 

This cat has chewed up all our toilet paper,

has buried our soap

and raked our bones.

Has hollered from the street corner

and from every balcony in Venice.

Has drowned businesses.

Has gutted towns.

Has burned chests.

Has washed sounds.

 

This slender beast has reset the clock.

Has snapped the key in every lock.

 

Beau Williams

 

No Covid Blues

 

No one told the daffodils about social distancing,

that they should no longer bunch together;

their brazen yellow heads just nod as I stroll by.

 

No one told the cherry blossoms not to cluster

in groups of more than two and in the plantation

bluebells defy the ban on congregation.

 

And no one thought the air would ever feel

this clean, that a teeming choir of birdsong

would welcome in the day. I catch the scent

 

of hyacinth, wild garlic on warm afternoons.

When sunsets ribbon the evening sky,

a strange light catches me off guard and I dance

around my kitchen. I’ve banished the covid blues!

 

Breda Joyce

 

TOMORROW: Life Gives you Lemons by Catherine Kirwan.

Dr Graham Allen is a poet and Professor of Modern English in the Department of English, UCC. “A Question” is from his forthcoming book with Salmon Press, No Rainbows Here. “It’s obviously about Palestine,” Graham says, “but it seems horribly relevant today.”

A Question

Imagine there was no place for you,

nowhere to rest on this fertile earth.

Tell me my friend, what would you do?

Dig a hole in the dust and disappear?

Grind your teeth and wail at the moon?

Curse God and teach your children to throw stones?

March together in hopeless defiance,

fists raised high against tanks and tear gas?

Or would you stay still and silent and die,

crammed into the one small box they allow you?

the men with dark glasses and heavy machine guns,

whose faces stayed blank when they murdered your boy.

Imagine there was no place for you,

nowhere to rest on this fertile earth.

Tell me my friend, what would you do?

 

Graham Allen

 

TOMORROW: “Call the Locksmith” by Beau Williams and “No Covid Blues” by Breda Joyce

Claire Zwaartman considers the supermarket, a site of last resort in our viral times. Claire is a graduate of the MA in Creative Writing.  Her story “Ashes” won the 2018 RTE/Francis McManus Short Story Award.

FEARS, DREAMS AND TROLLEYS  

I’ve always found supermarkets fascinating.  For me they are intimate spaces where I can get a glimpse of what goes on behind closed doors, which is, of course, where the real interest lies. I like to spy at the contents of people’s trolleys and imagine what their homes are like, what they’re going to have for dinner later. What they might watch on television after their sweet-and-sour chicken with ready-cooked rice. In this act of imagining, all my prejudices and assumptions are at work, based mostly on food choices.

Put that back, we’re having dinner soon a woman hisses to her son who’s trying to slip a jewel-coloured bag of sweets into a trolley filled with fresh fruit and vegetables. Poor kid, I think to myself. At the checkout I wait behind a thin woman hefting three boxes of wine and several large bottles of tonic water onto the conveyor belt. She also has a loaf of bread and a litre of milk, and in my imagination, I see her back at her empty house pouring a large glass of something in relief.

My husband likes to quote the statistic that we are only ever three days away from empty supermarket shelves. He picked up this alarming piece of trivia during a recent storm and has taken to intoning it ominously at the first sign of threat to the supply chain. He suggested we start a vegetable garden to prepare for disaster. Being too lazy and fatalistic, I dismissed the idea saying we would have new problems should we find ourselves in a post-supermarket world – protecting our patch from marauding neighbours.

If the apocalypse is coming some stunted kale isn’t going to save us. Crisis, like the contents of our baskets and trolleys, reveals our true natures; his with an innate aptitude for self-preservation, mine a laissez-faire approach fueled by absurdism.

Last week, I rang my aunt to see how she was coping with the new restrictions and general panic. Discussing possible food shortages she said, “Well, I think we could be in trouble. Sure, don’t all the pizzas come from Italy?” There was such a richness of confused thinking on display here that, for a moment, I was speechless. Yet, when we hung up I was left thinking. . . all these years and that’s what she’s been surviving on?

Supermarkets are where we betray our deepest fears, but then I think, didn’t they always? Food, that most urgent and primal of needs, must be got and in quantities. Cans of chickpeas and squat packages of conch-shaped pasta are the order of the day for pragmatic shoppers, yet there are still dreamers among us buying houseplants and dog beds and ingredients for elaborate cakes we will never make.

Someone passed me in the car park with a boxed lava lamp under his arm and I nearly cheered. Meanwhile, in the frozen section you’ll find my aunt loading up on Hawaiian pizza, and my husband in the centre aisle examining the garden tools.

Claire Zwaartman

TOMORROW: “A Question” – a poem by Graham Allen

Kathy D’Arcy is a published poet, performer and activist.  She is a qualified medical doctor as well as holding a PhD in Creative Writing from UCC.  This poem comes from Encounter (Lapwing 2010), her first poetry collection. The collection is available to browse in virtual form at her website –  http://www.kathydarcy.com/encounter.html#

 

Measles

His watch sits on the table

rash-itchy.

My pillowcase and sheets are inside out,

the sour-milk smell of our union

folded away.

 

I will wrap myself in them

as if I had the measles

and school off tomorrow.

 

Kathy D’Arcy

TOMORROW: “Fears, Dreams and Trolleys” – by Claire Zwaartman

On Day 4 of “Creative Corona”, Betty O’Mahony and Darren Hall, both current students on the MA in Creative Writing, travel into the dark night of the writer’s soul, where strange things can happen when everyone else is asleep. Although there is no direct connection with COVID-19 in these stories, there are subliminal echoes in the presence of bats and sleeplessness.

INSOMNIA

I was lying in bed. I had just turned off the lights. It was pitch black. I heard a fluttering suddenly close to me and I sat up and turned on the light. There was a bat coming straight for me, vampire wings fully extended.

I bolted out of the bed and out the door.

Then I realised I had left my cigarettes and matches on the bed. When I needed them most. I eventually opened the door a fraction and I could see them on the bed, but the bat was wrapped around the lamp immediately overhead.

Courage!

I wrapped a scarf around my head and shot in, reached for the ciggies and matches and raced out the door again.

How would the bat get out of the room? I had to open the windows for him.

I only had five cigarettes left. I lit up and inhaled feverishly. Then I wrapped the scarf around my head again, shot into the bedroom and opened the three windows. On the way back out I spotted one of the limbs of the vampire bat unfolding from behind a picture.  It had an elbow!

Exit!

The following morning, I searched through the bedroom, thoroughly, still wearing the scarf, but my night visitor had gone.

For Sale!

Detached house, genuine reason for selling!

Betty O’Mahony 

 

INTO THE ABYSS

I know don’t know how I got here. Or where I was. The memories glimmer then fade. Like wisps of vapour from a steaming cup, they dissipate before they’re formed. And like my memories, my perception of time itself has become vague. Intangible. A dizzying ebb and flow of noise and colour sporadically colliding with my consciousness.

What started as a fleeting momentary distraction has become an all-encompassing, all-consuming freefall.

To dip a toe is to drown. To become immersed.

The sense of self that was so solid, so concrete mere hours, or days or minutes ago has dissolved, like the spoons of sugar I put into that fifth or sixth cup of coffee I probably shouldn’t have drunk.

My consciousness is becoming unshackled, assimilated into something larger. Something immense. But not in a “that time I was tripping balls and felt connected to everyone” sort of way.  This is more like I’m one screaming face amidst innumerable screaming faces all writhing and screaming and melting into an incognisant, incohesive fleshy mess.  Like that weird fucking monstrosity in that horror movie clip I think I watched at some point of the night or morning or day or night or…

Morning…

I’m surrounded by morning light…

Fuck, I should probably get some sleep…

Cool video by the way. I love your cat. Wish mine was that smart.

Posted at 5:08am. 4 likes. 2 comments.

Darren Hall 

TOMORROW: “Measles” – a poem by Kathy D’Arcy.

Christina Hession, who graduated from the MA in Creating Writing this year, contemplates  life after the virus in this future-looking poem on the third day of “Creative Corona”. 

Cocoon

When I emerge

from this cocoon,

I will wave off kummerspeck

at the departure gate for Cologne.

 

I will paint tangerine sunsets

over The Long Walk,

in an acquamarine kimono

accompanied by Por una Cabeza.

 

I will learn how to say

‘you’re a big ride’ in Italian,

and practise it in Lisdoonvarna

on an unsuspecting hill farmer.

 

I will silence that niggling character

who wants his own short story,

I will scale my ‘to be read’ book towers,

like a griseous Rapunzel.

 

Christina Hession

TOMORROW: “Insomnia” by Betty O’Mahony and “Into the Abyss” by Darren Hall

On the second day of “Creative Corona” – highlighting  the work of the virtual community of writers  associated with the MA in Creative Writing – Eileen O’Donoghue, MA alumna, explores what now seems like an old-fashioned definition of the word that is on all of our lips.  

VIRAL

On the evening of his 18th birthday, Brian Keane, shades on, was driving his polished silver Peugeot 208 with the driver’s window down, on his way to collect Kyle and Jack to go for a not-very-social-distancing spin, when his father rang to tell him to drive the new hearse out to the nursing home, that some poor old woman was dead up there and would he do that job for him.  He couldn’t go himself because he was on his way to the hospital where some other poor bastard was dead.  

            The hearse was in the yard with the coffin and the keys in it. All he had to do was take up the coffin and bring the hearse back down to the yard and since he had his licence now, and there was no school, he could make himself useful.

            Brian indicated and pulled in by a farm gate a few hundred yards up from Kyle’s house, as agreed, so they wouldn’t be spotted.

            ‘Happy birthday, funeral boy,’ said Kyle hopping into the passenger seat, landing two six packs of beer on the floor. ‘Tara and the girls are on. We’ll meet them at the top car park.’

            ‘I’ve to drive the hearse up to the nursing home first.’

            ‘Fuck off. With a dead person and shit?’

            ‘No, you spanner, just dropping of a coffin.’

*

The hearse was parked facing the gate of the funeral home, gleaming black, ready for business. The lads parked up transferring themselves and the drink into the front of the it, Kyle whistling and admiring the leather interior and the size of the dash.

            ‘You know what would be fuckin’ hilarious?’ said Kyle, twisting the top off a beer.

            ‘Don’t even think about it.’ said Brian.

            ‘Ah, just for Jack. Go on – like, we have to.  I’ll do it – you film it from here and I’ll get him close up on mine.’

            Brian rolled his eyes and that was enough for Kyle who crawled into the back and got into the coffin.

           ‘Put the top on,’ he said and Brian complied, leaving the top just a fraction off-line so it was not completely shut.

            While the hearse slowed to a noiseless stop up the road a bit from Jack’s house, Kyle was playing some song called Dead as Fuck on his phone at top volume and banging on the coffin lid for head banging.

           ‘He’s here, shut it!’ Brian shouted behind him.

           Jack got into the passenger seat, putting his rucksack on the floor. ‘I’ve got vodka and cider. We can get some Red Bull in the Centra.’

          While Jack was rooting around in the bag, Brian mounted his phone on the dash and pressed record. He pulled the hearse back onto the road. ‘Shit, this is weird,’ said Jack, ‘What’s the story with that?’ pointing his head at the coffin. 

‘        ‘I’ve to drop it up to the nursing home, then we’ll get Kyle and go down to the lake in my car, with the beers.’

        From behind them a sound like scratching became more insistent. Jack jumped ‘What the fuck is that? Brian!’ Hearing it again he said, ‘What is that?’

       ‘Shit, maybe I didn’t close the lid properly and it’s squeaking a bit. Happens sometimes.’ Brian slowed the hearse and indicated to pull into a lay-by on the roadside. ‘You’ll have to help me to get it on straight.’

       ‘No fucking way,’ said Jack.

       ‘We have to fix it. Otherwise the top might fall off.’

       Brian climbed into the back of the hearse, pointing to Jack to get in on the other side while examining the lid.

     ‘Looks okay here,’ said Brian. ‘Can you scootch in a bit, have a closer look on that side?’ Just as Jack leaned in over the wood, Brian yanked the top of the coffin over to his side and Kyle sat bolt upright in the coffin, his phone in his hand, filming Jack screaming his head off.

      ‘Brilliant, man,’ said Kyle, ‘This will go fuckin’ viral.’

Eileen O’Donoghue

TOMORROW:  “Cocoon”- a poem by Christina Hession