1

 

I probably need to start with the shit, unfortunately.

In the third or fourth year of my drinking, while I was still an undergraduate, I began to lose control of my bowels. This would announce itself with a sudden lava heat and a prickling of dread across my nape, as my guts liquefied and I had to scarper to the nearest toilet. That melting sensation could hit just about any time: at a house-party, on a first date, in class, at a book fair, in a farmers’ market. If I was lucky, I’d feel the melt in time and make it to the jacks with only my jocks ruined. It was horrible shit – a long greenish-black scarf. It was like the shit of a cormorant. It was like kerbside muck. When I was not lucky, the first I’d know of it would be the heat and the sudden cooling on my ass-cheeks, and off I’d have to go, no matter where I was.

A lot of the time I was on my own. When I wasn’t, I got very good at keeping a poker face, receiving a fake text, and fleeing. I have no idea how effective these performances were.

One Sunday, some friends of my flatmate’s were over visiting. I came in drunk and high from the night before and got everyone a drink. Then I shat myself, sprang to my feet, and jokingly said I was off to pass out. I got into the shower fully clothed. I could hear everyone laughing. I told myself it was because they were saying how fun and crazy I was, and how high my marks were in class, too: how did I do it? I put the shower on full blast and scoured the green stain out of the seat of my pants, the pressure up so high it fizzed against the fabric, the suds foaming up white. I had gotten away with one. I’d left a good taste in everyone’s mouth – and a bad smell in the air, probably, but the windows had been open, everyone had been smoking, it was probably fine – and now I was saving money on laundry by washing my jeans in the shower with me.

I began to calculate my movements in terms of the likelihood that I would shit myself on a given outing. I’d take bigger risks when it was something important, like buying wine. I can remember these sorties only from the outside, as though watching myself on CCTV: my hair everywhere, my body narrow as a number one, a hunch to my shoulders, a face on me like a sad cartoon cat with glasses on. I’d listen to the gargle of my stomach and press a hand to it, checking if it was hunger or the telltale downward chundering sensation. House parties were OK. Pubs were difficult, but manageable. Classes were almost impossible. Still, though, I went, even if it meant filling my reusable coffee cup with crap wine in order to get through them without my body shaking me out of the chair.

It had to be wine: the easiest thing to drink on an empty stomach. And drinking on an empty stomach was important, because when I woke up I needed a big slug or I would go straight into a panic attack. Wine was economical, getting you pissed at a slow but steady pace. I would put away three bottles a day. The first took me through to afternoon, at which point I required a bit of soakage to prevent that acid-reflux heart-attack feeling. The second would smooth into the buzz of the first, a kind of golden cruise that allowed me to get work done, topped up now and then with vodka-spiked coffees until the jitters became untenable and I had to tip in bottle three. This shut me down for the night. It was a bit like pouring water onto a laptop because the fan’s humming too loud, but I was doing fine in college, so what did it matter?

 

2

 

If you’d asked me what was wrong with my life at the time, I’d have told you the same thing that I feel is wrong with my life now: problems with my writing.

Since I’d been in second year of secondary school, I’d been working on a novel. It felt like a long time. I’d often felt suicidal since I was around twelve or so, but I’d never acted on it. I had talked about these feelings with friends in my first year of secondary school, thinking that there was nothing shocking in what I was saying, that everybody found the school as violent, unsafe and frightening as I did. But my reaction was seen as extreme, and a concerned friend had told the principal how I was getting on. I’ll never forget the look on my father’s face when we were summoned to discuss the matter. He looked terrified, as though I’d died already. The teacher looked scared, too, but her face was more defensive, guarded. The shame I felt at observing these things was like a gust of steam rolling over me. I thought my skin would lift off. I knew then that getting feelings out of my body was dangerous. It scared people, it hurt them.

I think this realization was what made me start writing. I took every bad or even merely tedious thing that happened to me and put it into the frame of the story of a motor-tax clerk who meets the Devil. I had worked as a motor-tax clerk for a summer. It had been an unremarkable experience, so I converted my memories into a kind of Gothic Kafka, even though I hadn’t read enough Gothic literature or even enough Kafka to pull this off. An overheated language, stitched together from borrowed voices, was the way to conceal how skinny and small all of this pain really was. As long as I had a form into which I could feed the dross of my life and see it come out the other end in what was at least a draft towards art, then I wouldn’t feel as though it had all been pointless.

I hated the actual process, of course: it was like digging with my fingernails against the floor of a jail cell. To keep myself going, I told myself I’d tot up the junk of all that had happened to me and then pawn it to publishers. My headphones on and my earplugs in against the noise of my flatmates, the music loud, working late into the silent hours of the night, when it was only me and the herons trying to stab the koi in the pond, I’d batter myself into exhaustion with typing, and, in the idle moments between sentences, read through the Wikipedia biographies of old and contemporary writers for the signs of greatness in their beginnings. I checked the dates of first publication for writers I admired and decided that I was not precocious, and therefore not a genius, and therefore nothing. Still, I imagined selling a novel and making money.

My life had become deformed by the novel and my sense of its requirements. If the moment or the environment or the experience felt inadequate, then I needed to reject it, fast, before the poison of its inadequacy seeped in and destroyed my talent. On the other hand, too much intelligence was a problem, too. You had to be the right kind of stupid to break yourself to the harnesses of plot, character, description, dialogue, desire. The wrong kind of stupid was to be born into the wrong place, the wrong body, the wrong time, living the wrong kind of life. Somehow I was convinced that I was at once the wrong kind of stupid and the wrong kind of clever. These facts felt like walls. I was scrabbling against them, and the noise of the keyboard under my fingers was the noise of that scratching. That’s how I did it, though: eighteen-hour shifts behind the computer or at the notebook, worrying my nails until they bled, all of it intended to propel me towards an elsewhere that I’d made up out of car ads and video games and travel supplements, the ones that showed shots of Southeast Asian getaways and cars cruising smoothly through evocative European nowheres – deep pine forests, sandstone city centres with loggias and cafés with dim amber bulbs and maple floors and steaming espresso machines.

By the time I’ve been describing, the time of the shit, the novel had been rejected a few times. I’d been given copious and helpful notes on it, but I couldn’t find the energy to act on them, and I was so lacking in psychological insulation against what were pretty fair critiques of a pretty terrible book that I had begun to crumble. The stopper had gone out of me: all the pain was flowing out, and taking me with it. I had no idea what I was doing, I had no idea what I would do, and only the drink stopped me from feeling what I was really doing to myself.

I thought of the martyrs I’d read about and seen pictures of in the art history books and encyclopedias at home, damaged into pure knowledge: John of Patmos having the oil ladled on, Lawrence asking the soldiers to flip him over on the griddle, Lucia holding her own eyes on a plate, Bartholomew in Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel fresco, frowning in glum contemplation of the shreds of his earthly pelt, still not fully over it. Drink took pain away, or at least some of it, and, where it met a limitation that it couldn’t dissolve, I’d take a tube of toothpaste and, using the sharp corners at the bottom of the tube, draw long red exclamation marks from my wrists to the soft inner fold of my elbow. These faded quickly but hurt like fuck, and the blinding white incandescence of it stilled the noise for long enough that I could breathe.

More than a source of relief, though, drinking felt like a drive that was bigger than me. It was trying to achieve something via my body. While I drank during the afternoon, if I had enough money I’d be on Absolut, looking back and forth between book or screen and the winking bell-shaped litre-and-a-half bottles of what I thought of as liquid clarity. I wanted my head to feel like that. More heat than light, a lecturer had said of one of my essays, or perhaps all of them. Well, vodka made my head feel all light and no heat, pure white, a tundra nowhere, scalded into a clarity so painful that any thought conceived outside of this state was a retreat, a cowering away from the hard fact of being. Nobody else I knew was living this way, and I felt sure that I had found a level of pain and despair so powerful that the writing I produced from this place would demand to be published. Truth was a mixture of serenity and disgust: only the destroyed headspace of a vodka hangover got me to that place. The trouble was that, once there, it was too painful to write, and impossible to stop thinking, like the thrumming silence you can feel around the words to Canto 21 of Dante’s Paradiso, the silent, cloaked mystics lost in their apophasis, flying by an incommunicable power of thought.

I just wanted to still the desperation, go about getting published in a calm way, but it seemed impossible. Since reading Tobias Wolff’s Old School in Fifth Year, I’d been haunted by the protagonist’s craving for a laying-on of hands from a senior writer. This craving has never left me, and it has led me down some horrible paths. When Michael Longley was poet in residence at my university, I brought him some weak, handwritten stuff that he couldn’t read. He narrowed his gaze at me over the rim of the teapot in the upstairs café of a bookshop and said, I know you want me to tell you this is genius, but I’m very old, and I’m very hard to impress. He shuffled through the papers I’d brought. I don’t know why I brought him handwritten stuff. I think I hadn’t been able to face the humid fug of the printer room. His hand settled on a cod-Miltonic sonnet I’d written to parody both his style and that of Seamus Heaney, showing, I thought, how Longley’s marmoreal calm and Heaney’s hectic textures owed themselves to different phases of Milton’s sentimental bombast. The sonnet was about a walrus. This, he said, now this I like. He sounded relieved, probably because he’d left me with no grounds to despise him. He pumped my hand up and down, put down a fiver for the teas and got out of there. I looked down at the pages he’d liked and disliked. I was not sure if this was a true laying-on of hands.

Sometimes I went to readings with the pages of my novel in my sweaty grip. When I was still in secondary school, I mustered the guts to foist the manuscript on Eoin Colfer at the Kilkenny Arts Festival, but his publicity people ushered me out the door before he could even have seen me. I did not learn my lesson. On my first day of Freshers’ Week I approached the Literary Society stand, ready to foist my manuscript on the guy sitting there. But the look on his face – evidently perceiving a suicide risk, a level of vulnerability that exceeded his training – stopped me. He was only two years older than me, but with his cord jacket and scarf and easy manner he looked like a real writer, the kind you see on book jackets. He and I became friends, but I don’t know if a pure friendship ever really exists between writers, especially not in their twenties. It’s half arms race, half a blind mammal nuzzle after warmth, all teeth and snuffling.

By the time I finished my undergraduate degree and embarked on a doctorate, I was holding on by my fingertips. The scholarship I’d won in my second undergraduate year meant that I didn’t have to pay rent on my apartment. I had an internship at a mental health charity that occasionally involved payment. I’d won a small academic prize. I had four hours a week doing data-entry at a self-publishing house. That would have to be enough until year two of the doctorate, when I might have the chance to teach. My writing was going terribly, even though people were trying to help. That college friend forwarded my manuscript to an editor at a small but prestigious publishing house. The editor did not like the novel. He tattooed the margins of the document with snide remarks of the kind that we all write, I suppose, when a piece of work really is just that bad. But he offered, in his email, to meet me – I suspect as a favour to my friend, who was in turn doing me a favour – though he added I am sure you would prefer to throw acid on me.

This wasn’t true: I was too crushed to feel angry, or, at least, I didn’t feel angry until the meeting, in the upstairs café in the branch of Tower Records that used to be on Wicklow Street. I had no clean clothes other than a white shirt, so I ended up accidentally overdressed for the occasion, with the black overcoat I owned over the top, because I didn’t have any jumpers left whose sleeves weren’t holed by fallen bits of lit cigarettes or joints. It was the first time I’d met an editor. He was nice, shy, diffident, but in my arrogance I found this dweebish, almost pitiable. It should be noted here that I had been drinking most of the morning. He told me that the important thing to remember about writing is that I was insignificant not just in the grand but also in any scheme of things, and that this understanding ought to be some kind of starting-point for my future work. He told me not to rush into publication, because a lot of people he knew who took writing seriously weren’t getting books out until they were around his age. I asked him what I should be doing at this age, in that case, and he told me to go away and find something to write about, then see, because what I’d written was the kind of novel people write when they think they have a worse substance-abuse problem than they in fact do.

I think I have never really stopped feeling what I felt in that moment – as though a small, pointed depth charge had exploded against the middle of my chest. I’ll show you, I thought. I’ll show you how bad it is. This is a dangerous feeling still to hold in my body. Anger feels to me the way cocaine used to: something happens to infuriate me, I feel the sharp bitter dart going up my sinus, and then eight seconds of a lapse before a rippling wave of heat crosses diagonally from my left shoulder to the bottom-most rib on the right side of my chest. My eye kicks thinking of the remembered anger. Under the heat there comes an upward rush of a dark, cold, and extremely self-serious fury, from the pit of my stomach to the top of my throat. I think it’s the most nihilistic sensation I have in my body still, even seven years away from all the drugs and alcohol. You don’t know a thing, the sensation says, but I’ll show you, you posh cunt.

I don’t know what I’m still angry about. I don’t know where the anger comes from. It was there before I knew what class was. It was there before the frustration of my writing being rejected took on such towering proportions inside me. I think it must have been there when I was a baby, or at least a small child, and that I must have rediscovered the feeling through the burning sensation of alcohol. I can’t seem to get any further back than the following memory, though, which is of myself, aged about four, one Saturday evening of whipping wind, hard rain, and black sky beyond the sitting-room windows. A fire is roaring in the grate. It’s the exact same shape as the Disney castle at the start of all the films. I’m thinking about this and only this, because I have a fever, and I’m sweating, and my throat is so tight with heat that I can’t call for anybody. My stomach has been hurting all day. I keep wanting to vomit but anytime I’ve been to the toilet all that comes out is a hot watery spatter of shit. All I’ve been able to do is lie there face down on the carpet with my picture book about the kings and queens of England, reading about how they died. That story about Henry I and the poisoned eels is there, and my insides feel like eels, too, at once cooked and hot and still alive and writhing around under my skin. I want them to swim out of me and leave me empty. This does not happen. I’m stuck inside the shrinking form of my own body, which is tightening and sweating. If this goes on too much longer, something is going to snap or die, I’m sure of it. I look down into the carpet. The red of it is pocked all over with white diamonds that have little black dots at their centres, like pupils. I become convinced that the entire world is nothing more than strings like these, made up of varying gradations of hard and soft. This is all the world is now: textures moving in the dark. At the bottom there isn’t even nothing, like the well Gaston falls into at the end of the film of Beauty and the Beast. There is only the falling, and eventually I’ll stop being aware of it, and that’ll be it, no more me. Suddenly I feel warm arms swooping me up. They’re my father’s. He’s carrying me up the stairs. My sister is also ill and I’m being carried towards her. She’s sitting up in my mother and father’s bed, a big snowy drift of duvet high around her, a chip on her fork. My mother is a still presence in the background and the air feels like she is smiling. I should feel peace. But all I feel is a sensation like the words Where were you when I needed you? being screamed from the very depths of my throat. It is the feeling of not having been listened to – a fact bitterly resented, even though I hadn’t, in fact, been able to make any sound at all. There had only been the roaring of the fire in the grate, and the whistling noise of the wind in the chimney, and the whipping rain.

 

3

 

One Sunday, still staggering from the previous night’s pills, I went out of the campus onto Nassau Street, crossed the road to Spar, and saw a strangely familiar figure bent over, his hands crossed at the small of his back, squinting at a rotating display of postcards – pub doors of Ireland, Great Irish Writers, pints of Guinness. I thought the familar-looking man was Paul Muldoon, and I wanted to stop, but I wasn’t sure it was him, and I also wasn’t sure how long my guts were going to be steady. I quickly gathered up the three bottles and paid with my Laser card. I didn’t know if there was enough money in my account. Monday would be a long and hungry day, but someone had left a few cans in my fridge, and I could always just have sleep for dinner. Paul Muldoon was wearing a big spotted tie and a black shirt. It was definitely him. The ellipsis on the terminal blipped and erased itself, blipped and erased itself, and I kept my fingers crossed behind my back until the receipt chugged out and I could go. I’m not sure how seriously I had thought of asking Paul Muldoon to spot me money should the card be declined, but there was no need for that now. The relief expanded in my chest. I went up to him.

—Are you Paul Muldoon? I said.

—Oh! He stood up with a start, his hand out, his face blank and cheerful. —Yes. Paul Muldoon. Nice to meet you.

I shook his hand and told him I’d liked his Baudelaire translation in Maggot.

—Oh! he said again. He gave a little quirk of the head and smiled with one side of his mouth. I thought this was gracious of him. I’d seen myself on my way here, smelled myself, too, breathed in that greenish tang like late vegetable rot rising out of my pores. Fair play to him, I thought to myself.

—What has you back? I said.

—I’m doing a reading over there. He pointed, squinting. Conference Centre.

—The one that looks like a can. Yes.

—Yes. His squint deepened behind his glasses. I watched the lenses darken in response to a shift of the clouds that released a sudden strike of brassy light. —We’re commemorating 9/11.

—Right. A sudden kick of pain went off in the upper corner of my head. —That’s cool.

—Yes. They’ve all been very nice.

—Well, have fun, anyway, I said. Now my eyes were narrowed. There were headrush stars teeming everywhere. —I’ll chat to you.

He put his hand out again and said, —Well, it’s been a pleasure.

—Yeah, same. I shook. The grip was cool and soft. I tried to remember this. I’d wanted a laying-on of hands from greatness, and now it had finally come, early on a Sunday morning, in circumstances that could not be turned into anything, at a time when the only thing I was capable of was falling through the door of my apartment and drinking on the bed until the Spire in the distance turned to a glycerine-orange spike of caught morning light.

—Good luck with it all anyway, I said, and he gave me a little salute and turned back to the postcards, stooping, squinting. I crossed the road. I went home. I got drunk. I went to sleep. In the years that followed, I kept waiting for those postcards to turn up in one of Paul Muldoon’s poems.

 

4

 

I am having trouble writing this. The problem is that I have few specific memories of drinking, so what moments remain must stand in for the blank weeks and the grainy months. The surviving footage is scratchy and yellowish. This causes real-life problems, too. When I’m home visiting, people will stop me in the street and say ‘Tim! It’s been years!’, and I will blank on their faces, their names. But this is where long experience of pissed social bluffing comes in handy. I can just bob my head and laugh along, while the vertigo climbs my legs. In my better moments, I try to think of forgetting as a kind of geological scarring and twisting, creating rich, strange shapes braided with the candy colours of bared minerals. But most of the time I don’t feel that way, because the kind of forgetting I am experiencing cannot be reversed by a small clue that sets off a chain of associations. There is no there there. This isn’t forgetfulness: this is oblivion. Even now, seven years sober, when I think about the past the ground beneath me loses its solidity and becomes a thick, black pool with an oily shine to it, sucking me down by the ankles.

I have been trying to bag all this stuff up for years and shape it into something worth reading. Writing it down now, it all feels pretty small, and I sort of wonder what I was so upset about. At the same time I don’t really care: I just want it out of me. When I go back over all of this, it feels like replaying a single endless day, trudging between hungover waking and bad sleep, under a black sky broken here and there by abrupt orange explosions of dirty sunlight. I move from humiliation to humiliation. The camera moves unblinkingly with me. I cannot get the tape in my head to stop.

I’d love to tell all of this in a voice of chilly, sculptural calm, as a marker of how far I’ve come from those years, but these images are so hot to talk about, it’s like bouncing coals around on the palms of my hands. Or else, I’d love to find all of this funny. Then I’d really be over it, wouldn’t I? If I could find it funny, I might be able to let all the molasses-thick pain leak out of me, leaving a clean empty shell of stone exhaling its grave-smell to the air. I see my body lying on bare rock that cuts through a slope of clay at the bottom of a valley which is grown all over with birch, alder, and oak. The rock is limestone and it is pocked all over with whitish fossils, their shapes like ‘O’s and ‘C’s and ‘S’s. There is a tunnel-feel to the deep greens of the valley. The sky overhead is the empty blue of old Kodachrome photographs, the sunlight a Super 8 blear. When I finally get up from this stone heap, I feel sure I’ll have the calm mastery that’s required to write something properly achieved about what I’ve gone through. But that never happens. Even now, writing this, I feel a sag of disappointment in my chest and stomach. Instead of bagging up a failure and trying to reconvert it into wisdom, or just work, I would prefer to have just succeeded instead. I still dwell on the failure of the stuff I wrote then, taking out the novel and seeing what can be quarried out of its ruins. It can’t all have been in vain, I tell myself, chiselling the failed paragraphs into verses of a poem, or taking the shape of the plot and flattening it out into an essay that will tell me why it all seemed so urgent, or changing the names of the characters and using them to populate two novels that have done OK but haven’t transformed me as I used to imagine publishing a book would. Lately I lie on my bed a lot, scrolling through old documents and smoking these kinked cigars called culebras, and wondering what a book might look like if it were shaped like those cigars, or even like the bluish festoons of smoke that taper up breaking from my lips – pretty, transitory, more of a vibe than a substance, all told, and the pain behind it all arising and passing away, released into the air in time with my breath. It’s possible that I never wanted to be here at all, and that underneath it all I realize that all that I’ve been doing since birth is marking time. It’s possible that the desire for success in writing is nothing more than a desire for desire itself – something to keep the clock inside me ticking over.

I didn’t learn much from suffering beyond ‘I don’t like suffering’. And from my recovery group, I’ve learned that painful stories, far from being a marker of uniqueness and a source of profound material, are what make us the same as one another. In the meetings I go to three times a week, we’re sort of post-narrative, tired when we talk; but we need to keep the jaws moving, in case there’s something there for someone else. One day at a time, meeting by meeting, hour by hour, it’s not about the epiphany, it’s all about the grind. Whatever jokes come out are an accident of total bleakness, and the response is more a cough of shock than a laugh per se. There are people who’ll come into the room and I’ll say to myself, —Oh, fantastic, she’s always good value, then kick back with my coffee and wait for it, a mix of stand-up and Thomas Bernhard, this long, stressed monologue looping around the day’s events, a rapid jabber of barely controlled anxiety and terror, the register toggling between a seriousness that doesn’t realize it’s funny and moments of plainspoken blinding insight that slide between my ribs like a letter-opener or a quote from the King James Bible. In the meetings, I tune in to the voices, let them wash around me, see what they set off, and get out. It’s probably affecting how I write, making it more digressive, more sentimental, more positive, less plotted, but I’m either too tired or too serene to know which, and I can’t tell the difference between those feelings anymore anyway.

 

5

 

The summer before I started my doctorate, I went to the cinema with a friend who had taken a sabbatical year to run a student society. En route, he told me that he’d been accepted into Stanford’s Ancient Philosophy programme pending his fourth-year results.

I didn’t have many friends in college. The thought of losing this friend as I began to prepare myself for a doctoral programme in Trinity – covered by the terms of the scholarship this friend and I had both received – made the evening suddenly blur and shimmer. The orange light over the red bricks and glass turned to hot glycerine. I looked at the Coca-Cola I’d gotten at a takeaway and saw the fluming browns and candy-striped straws begin to morph and move. I wanted to be lost in that space. I wanted to tip a naggin into the litre cup.

—Huh, I said, and then, —Congratulations.

Every rung in my social ladder appeared to be giving way beneath me. I don’t remember what film we saw. I was too busy imagining the walls juddering apart. I’d hated being in Trinity. It had felt like Plan B. When I’d been seventeen, the career guidance counsellor had suggested I consider applying to Oxford or Cambridge. I’d gone for the latter, probably because I’d liked the blues and silvers of the university website more than the reds and golds of the Oxford one. I’d gotten called for an interview. This terrified my family. The thought of me being so far away and surrounded by people whom they perceived as aggressively rich made them fear that I’d go off the rails and kill myself. They were unable or unwilling to think that my reasons for wanting to kill myself before had had more to do with who I was than with where I was. They told me to cancel the interview.

I remember feeling then as I’d felt the first time I came off my bike as a child: the empty-goldfish-bowl clarity of my head, and the words This is going to be painful appearing in my head, printed in black on white, as though on the thought-bubble of a cartoon; then the divot of clay dug up by my helmet gouging forwards through the grass, and everything suddenly hurting, all at once. I walked around with that empty-goldfish-bowl feeling in my chest all the time, watching the rain surge back and forth over the cobblestones, walking around the carpeted maze of the Arts Block, smoking crap hash in the sterile comfort of an on-campus efficiency flat paid for by the scholarship. I’d begun to suppose that my parents had perhaps been right about wealthy people being a danger to me. One by one I was watching my privately educated friends trampoline beyond the walls and on to what one of my lecturers had called ‘the royal road’: Cambridge, Harvard, Princeton. I assumed that their families were all helping them pay for it, rather than that they’d been able to keep the head better than I had. There had been one Tuesday house party at which many of them had wound up dancing on the table to ‘Break on through to the Other Side’. I’d been too buckled to move, and lain on the couch, smoking, my shirt open for some reason, laughing at it. The image turned over and over sharply in my head as I sat in the cinema beside my friend, at whose apartment that party had taken place. If there really was some other side to all of this, they’d burst right through to it, while I butted my head against the wall. One lecturer had mentioned the École Normale Supérieure in Paris to me, but I’d felt a jag of fear at the thought, thinking that maybe I really would end up doing something fatally stupid. The weight in my body had been too immense to allow me to contemplate even filling in the forms.

All I could get myself to do was cobble together a tentative doctoral proposal. The dissertation was to be about theories of lovesickness and their connection to medieval dream visions. Part of my thesis was supposed to talk about how the accidia or sloth afflicting Chaucer’s speaker at the start of his early dream vision, The Book of the Duchess, was something like a hallucinatory depression, akin to what happens to Dante at the beginning of Inferno, and to Stephen Dedalus’s twitchy throes at the beginning of Ulysses. Their specific grief was a mirror on the self, but also a window out of the self, relinquishing a desired object and realizing that all desired objects weren’t worth much, leading to a ghost life, the living of a death, despair as a form of knowledge. I wanted to get to that point. Nothing could hurt me if I found nothing worthwhile. The all-night reading room and the cool purple glow of the vending machines, the shadows and silence of the library, corridor after corridor, unfolding like a hotel of the dead in some kind of dream, the long dives into despair felt like a truer, purer success, uninsulated, the real thing. My apartment was nice – a kitchenette, a large room with a desk and a bed that reminded me of a ship’s cabin, huge windows that looked down onto the methadone clinic on Pearse Street. If I ever resented any of the conditions of my being in that place, then the sight of the people queueing up, sleeves and pants-legs ballooning like wind-socks, faces lost to cottony blooms of cigarette smoke, made me admonish myself back into working even harder.

I’d found where the campus maintenance lads kept the key to the roof, and that night, after the cinema, decided to drink my last bottle of the day while perched on the ledge, looking down on the din and the mess. I’d gotten good at finding ways to these roofs. One of my favourites to sit on at night was the Geology building. Heights didn’t scare me when I was drunk: just the rest of the time. I’d always been terrified of heights, even if I wasn’t up in a high place myself. As a child, during trips to Dublin, I would cower in the back seat or become dizzy while walking the streets, for fear of the buildings toppling over us.

I have always been subject to these terrors, these visions. When I was perhaps six or seven, I saw the banshee from Darby O’Gill and the Little People looming out from the dark of my sister’s room across the hall. I became so hysterical at this that my sister also began to see the fucking thing looming out at her. Other nightmares would leave me roaring on the upstairs landing, my hands clutched to my face, unwilling to tell my parents what I had seen in my head, for fear of frightening them. I dreamed of a world where people had been relocated to tall apartment blocks with riveted doors and portholes for windows, where the only privacy came from the curtains that hung over the bunk beds that whole families had to share. Outside, the dark crashed like a sea, with storms that never ended. Another dream featured red-faced priests banging gongs by the side of the road, me asking the driver to tell me where we were, and the Devil turning slowly in the front seat to say, ‘We’re in Hell’.

Now, the dreams felt retrospectively prophetic, a sign of the world I’d die in. My head was busy with horrible images of the end, and the news made me feel as though nothing good was ever going to happen again. Opening a styrofoam takeaway tray, I’d see white pellets choking the fish. When I washed my hair I could smell the oceans turning to acid. Looking up at a clean winter’s sky, one single jet contrail was enough to make me think of the pollutants turning the ice in the clouds into slush. I’d read somewhere that people’s diets contain so much mercury that the last thing to disappear of our civilization would be the little silver lakelets where public toilets once had been, before the churn of geology worked everything under again. Even reading provided no escape. I could no longer tolerate bookshops, and especially not those with a big second-hand collection. The packed shelves felt to me like the back streets where I did my lone drinking, stinking of disinfectant and of whatever the disinfectant was meant to hide. The sour tang of their pages made me feel rain on my skin, and the lines of print began to seem like streets in some sad, mid-European city, with old games machines that weren’t vintage, just old, and nights that felt like a black mac slick with rain, a city of literature that morphed periodically into a Borgesian landscape where the sheer quantity of words and pages and thoughts seemed to argue that every possible permutation of human pain had already been written out and published and forgotten, with nothing new to add, with all of me accounted for in advance.

Now, half-pissed, a little stoned, I looked blearily down at the place where the skin of the road had been peeled back, baring a black soup of mud and dirt and gravel and pale straggling tree roots, none of it holding any bones, or ruins: just a swirl of sand and gypsum and tarmac gone black in the leakage underground, an eddy in a dark pool. They were at that messy stage of the project where the idea of a smooth, new road looks further away than if they hadn’t even bothered to start work, so it felt to me like I was looking down on an anticipatory ruin, looking down on the way things would look when they had been worn away completely. It was the same with the abandoned apartment project further up the road, rebar jutting up into the glare of the security lights, big tarps flapping, wind howling in the empty units where apartments were meant to be, newness and a sense of future collapse blurring together into the one vision.

In the first few years of my degree, when it felt as though things were going somewhere, I’d loved the library, the gold of the reading lamps against the tea-coloured perma-dimness, just me and the cursor of my laptop screen moving around a kind of colossal city of writing. The noise of the roadworks made me feel like I’d been ejected from that library, pinged out to a place where no thought was possible. Tonight, I watched a long, rusted pipe rotating at the end of a crane. An odour of wrecked drains rose from the hole. The builders were standing around. One waved for the drills and the generator to be cut off, and in the ringing silence I could hear suction. I leaned over the edge of the roof, peering in from a height. A floodlight was being shone into the gouge, the white glare seeming to spiral into the gargling blackness, and my gaze was sucked in until all I could hear was the sound of my own breathing. Then the door clicked open behind me, and I heard a man draw in a breath and speak in a voice that was tight with tension.

—Howiye.

—Ah, fuck, I said, and jumped back, slipped, steadied myself against a chimney breast.

—You’re alright, you’re alright, the man said.

I knew him: he was one of the security guards, one of the sound ones. I’ll call him Barry. He had a way of sighing and shaking his head when he turned up at house parties that made him seem like he hated what he was doing as much as we did. Once me and my then-girlfriend and my flatmate had chucked pots of water down on top of some noisy student-union types who were smoking and talking bollocks outside of our window. Barry had come up afterwards, grinning, inviting us to play dumb, saying, ‘You wouldn’t know anything about a bunch of lads getting soaked under this window, would you?’ But he wasn’t grinning this evening. He looked worried.

—What’s the craic, I said, and dropped the joint down the neck of my wine bottle. I heard the sizzle. I saw his eyes move to the bottle and back to my face.

—It’s just a smoke, I said. —Standard issue.

He shook his head.

—I can recognize the smell.

—Yeah?

—You’ll remember this is a university, Tim.

—Oh. Yeah. Fair.

Barry squinted around the rooftop, breathing out, saying, —Look, you know you’re not meant to be up here, but you weren’t about to do anything stupid, were you?

—Like what?

—I don’t know, he said. Like throw yourself off or something?

—Jesus.

—I’m not hearing ‘No’, he said, then looked back down the way he’d come. He jerked his head, said, —Look, come on down from up here, will you? And we can have a chat about it, alright? There’s nothing’s going to happen. It’s OK.

I was too embarrassed to protest, and so I just followed him down the stairs. He walked me across Front Square to the security booth under the arch.

—What happened you, anyway?

—Breakup, I said. It was a reflex, not a lie: my girlfriend had gotten an offer for Cambridge, and then broken up with me. It had made sense at the time. I couldn’t afford to study in England, and I’d a year to go before I graduated, anyway. The trouble was that, a year later, I hadn’t gotten over it. She’d spoken of the end of our last summer together as an agony, but it was an idyll as far as I’d been concerned, wrapped up in the rug I’d bought her, in the cushioned dormer window of her family’s big house in Greystones, reading thick Victorian novels and watching the rain-fog creep back and forth over the treeline, while she waited to hear back on a job at the Irish Times, an editorial internship, or that Master’s in Cambridge, while I spent the days we didn’t see each other passing out on the couch at my parents’ house, drunk on screwdrivers and despondent from torrents of Ingmar Bergman films. She was rich. She’d be all right. Rich people always were. She’d broken up with me over the phone, but she’d been sobbing. That made it hard to parse, as she’d have said. I’d write her long emails once a week. She’d reply to some of them. That was hard to parse, too. My father had said of my relationship with her that I had a tiger by the tail. He’d turned out to be right. Something more useful to her than our relationship had come along and off she’d gone. You couldn’t hold on to something that was stronger than you.

—Shite. Barry sucked his teeth, then pushed open the glass door to the booth that was under Front Arch. The smell inside was of instant coffee and Johnny Blue. He lifted the partition in the desk and said, —On you go. Grab yourself a chair there.

I did as he’d said while he unlocked and pulled out a drawer, which clinked with all the bottles inside – Jameson, Huzzar, Green Spot, the whole lot.

—You can guess where we pick these up from.

—Yeah.

He waved his fingers above the collection, slid out the Green Spot, and said, —There should be at least one clean cup in the back kitchen there.

—You don’t want one?

—Working, aren’t I, he said. He plonked a packet of cigarettes down on the table in front of me. —You OK here for a bit?

—I’m fine, I said, sliding one from the packet and putting it behind my ear. —I could honestly go back home.

Barry scratched his ear. —See, here’s the thing. If we think someone’s going to hurt themselves or someone else, well, it’s either we call the guards or we just sort of … I don’t know. Wait for the doctor to come on call or wait for them to look a bit better.

Hearing that, I felt a cold, skin-rippling rush of fear. My flatmate’s father had killed himself at Christmas. In the silence around the news I asked my flatmate how the holidays had been. He laughed and said, ‘Other than that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?’ When my face fell and I started to gabble out apologies, he was the one who ended up consoling me with a pat on the shoulder and saying not to worry, that making fun of it was the best way through. After he’d moved home, the news hung around his room like the smell when the drain of our kitchen sink got blocked, a treacle-dark rot stink tacking to everything. It felt like the news might kill me all by itself, that I’d die whether I wanted it or not. When I couldn’t get out of bed in the mornings, I’d put the radio on, feel the mellow burble of horrible things happening elsewhere build until the guilt forced me out of the place.

—I’m alright, I managed to say to Barry. —Honestly.

Barry’s mouth was a concerned line.

—No offence or anything, but, well. You wouldn’t be looking a hundred per cent to me. He handed me the cup. —I do paintballing. Lads go into shock and all. And you gave yourself a fright there tottering on the roof I think. So a dram is usually the fastest thing, to be honest.

I swirled the cup and drank it like it was juice.

—Are mental health services really that bad? I said. —That you’re giving whiskey to people you think might be a suicide risk?

He spread his hands and said, —Twelve on the campus this year. I’ll fucking try anything at this point. His voice was glib. His eyes were not.

—Twelve?

He counted, starting with the little finger of his left hand. —Three overdoses, two hangings from belts around door-handles, and the rest did the wrist thing with a bucket of warm water – you’ll have noticed youse have no baths in your gaffs. This is why. But sure fuckit. Nature finds a fucking way, doesn’t it.

—You must get used to it, no?

—Not at all.

I put the cup on the table. My hand didn’t shake. The rest of me did.

He took the other chair and looked at the squares of CCTV footage. An extra screen flickered beside the one rigged up to all the cameras. It appeared to show a video game that had been paused. The frozen image on the screen reminded me of light streaming through the birches my father and I had planted years before, back home. I remembered everything about planting them, the soft grunt of the earth giving way under the shovel, the coppery taper of their roots as delicate as the inside of fuses, the foggy light through them when we’d finished. They’d been burned ages ago. My father had gotten sick of sweeping up the yellow seed-pods that flurried over the tarmac. I felt better instantly – numb, tingly, giddy with relief, as though the world were solid, but soft, made of clouds, or the pillowy whiteness in that Softmints ad from the ’90s: a warm cloudiness that could support my weight, but wouldn’t hurt if I fell down. It was always so easy to get to that place. This should, logically, have meant that it would be enough for me to drink moderate quantities, but I had it in my head that if I kept upping the amounts I milled into myself then that softness would turn into a more intense version of the same thing. It never quite happened that way: I’d flail, get messy, realize that, while the world around me may have softened, it just made the heltering anxious voice inside me sound all the louder, and I’d need to keep going until I spun out into unconsciousness.

 

6

 

I was actually quite old – seventeen – before I’d first sensed the possibility of that pillowy softness. We’d been reading about alcoholism in religion class. One testimony from a recovering alcoholic was printed against a blue sky. The point of the thing was to put us off drink, but all that happened was I felt enticed – and, you know, I mean, personal responsibility and everything like that, but how could I not, in one way, reading the words The first time I drank, I felt safe printed against pale blue air and Super Mario clouds, through which God himself might reach down and hand a sticky bottle of something to me?

Alcohol had never seemed like anything but hell to me before. I’d grown up knowing that three of my uncles had what was referred to as a ‘drink problem’. Two appeared to have gotten over it (one after a liver transplant), but the third was still in and out of recovery. He was the one I looked most like, acted most like, talked most like, moved my hands the most like, laughed the most like, got giddy the most like. I’d been reading a book once as a small child and asked him what the word ‘jubilant’ meant. He’d told me the answer in a deep voice tarry with cigarettes. It sounded warm to me, jubilant, jubilant, inseparable from the sound of his voice, the cosy party smell of his clothes. I’d been told stories of unsuccessful family interventions with this uncle. I’d smelled his body, that warmish fug of cigarettes and sour beer, and the smile that was always about to wobble off his face. It didn’t seem like the worst way to be, on the face of it, but my mother used to clutch her temples and say, ‘Oh, Lord, Tommy,’ whenever a reminder of him came up in conversation.

Around the age of fifteen, I’d begun punishing my body with laxatives and emetic quantities of salted water. I don’t know where the impulse came from. It had to do with not feeling worthy of the food I was given by my parents, I think, or else some more complex rejection, based on the sense I’ve always had that the love I’d received was somehow conditional on good behaviour. I can’t tell where I’ve picked up this sense of unlovability, or when or how the belief that I had to earn the love of others became a need to punish myself for not deserving it, but that sense is everywhere, even now, a buzz of uncertainty and fear that runs around the outline of every interaction I have, however innocuous, however brief, deepening the shadow of that outline into a dread of punishment. Nobody seemed to notice. There was one chest-tightening moment when my mother and father returned from a dinner party at their friends’ house and queried the scrim of dried Andrews Liver Salts and water on the draining-board. I hadn’t been able to say anything much, and they were too tired to press any further, I suppose. There were other new practices: twisting my own pubes until the skin lifted, red, around the base of each hair, then holding this for as long as I could; stabbing the backs of my hands with darts; going at the soles of my feet with razors. To this day I can’t even buy a safety razor without being afraid of what I’ll do with it.

From the classroom where I read of that man who felt ‘safe’ when he first drank alcohol, I could see the cathedral where I’d been baptized, St Mary’s, the spire looking somehow cleansed by the harsh cool of the autumn sun. Inside was a wax statue of a saint lying in her death throes, with a tin chalice of her ostensible blood held between her hands. An image of that chalice hovered in my head, and the chalice contained alcohol. That was what peace looked like.

It was a half-day at school. I went straight to the drinks cabinet. It wasn’t me opening the front door, going into the sitting room, kneeling at the cabinet, doing a quick assessment, and then leathering into it with the free Baileys glass that my mother had gotten in a two-for-one offer a couple of weeks before. That safety feeling hit almost immediately, a warm amniotic thrum. The outline of my body seemed to waver and resolve into golden undulations. My heartbeat was no longer an anxious kick in the chest, but slowed to fantails of candy-coloured fireworks that arced through a dark void. I felt great, in other words. There may have been an itch of anxiety under the soft heat of my second Southern Comfort sour, mixed from ingredients left over from Pancake Tuesday, according to instructions on the back of the label. But the only thing that really frightened me at all in that moment was how well the stuff worked. I was drunk. I felt safe. Whatever force it was that had impelled me all the way home with only this mission in mind, that force had been quieted now. I had a new master. All I had to do was obey.

When my father came home to find me groaning and hungover under the covers of my bed, a part of me wanted him to realize what he was seeing and smelling, wanted him to zero in on the Southern Comfort tang breathing from my pores. I wanted him to rip back the veil.

—I’ll leave you to it, so, he said, after listening to me groan for a while. He shut the door. I woke up later, showered, went downstairs, feeling clean and rinsed and scot-free. I think we watched Michael Clayton afterwards.

It wasn’t the last time he’d catch me, and then continue as though nothing had happened. Can I accuse him of irresponsibility? I don’t know. I can’t really remember how these encounters went. My memory holds only the record of my father’s face, of each gradation in his expression from concern to exhaustion with the person he had been concerned about.

A few months before my evening with the college security guy, when I was leaving my flat for the summer, my father drove me home in cold silence, until around as far as Goff’s on the N7. At last he said,

—Do you think you have a drink problem?

I will never forget the sensation: a mixture of extreme heat and extreme cold flaring up along my body, and my skin rippling in the updraught of a plane lifting off directly in front of me. I was neither dead nor alive.

—What? I said, trying to add a sceptical uplift to my voice.

My father tutted, sighed.

—It’s Jim saying it. He saw you at a party with the lads back home. Out one weekend. Said youse looked like old men, downing a pint and a shot every go. Going wild. But I don’t know. His sons have had enough struggles.

My innards were shaking, seeming to jounce up and down, but I could speak.

—He’d know, I said.

My father said nothing.

—His sons had troubles, didn’t they? I said.

My father kept his eyes on the road. The sky looked like a Superser heater coming on, pink light, hard silver clouds. When I’d been a teenager, when I’d fuck up – get less than a 90 on a test, come home with the smell of Marlboro Red on me, mix up the times for a debating trip or an after-school practice and leave myself without a lift – my parents would sit me down and excoriate me for hours, telling me everything that was bad about me, linking minor flaws to deep, inherited similarities between myself and their problematic siblings. Every time I tried to tell them that I was in immense pain I would be told that I was trying to get off the hook.

But now my father had hit on what was really going wrong inside me, and now I wanted him to finish the job of peeling all of my flaws into visibility. I wanted the tarp to be pulled off everything I’d gotten up to. I wanted the sputter of fat, the cleansing punishment of it.

My father flipped the indicator, tutted, and shifted lanes.

—But you know Jim, my father said. He might just be being spiteful, either. He is always trying to pull me down. Making it sound like his problems are the ones that I have.

I looked at my father. He kept looking at the road.

—Don’t mind him, my father said. —Forget about it.

I said nothing. Under the relief at getting away with it, there was disappointment: I’d have to carry this around longer now. We pulled into Castledermot. We got chips and ate them sitting on the bonnet of the car, same as the evening when I’d been eight or so and we’d had Creme Eggs while the town lights caught like yellow solder between the cobblestones.

As we ate, I remember each hot bite of the chips stinging to the cores of my teeth. I was glad of the carb weight in my belly. That morning I’d woken bloody-knuckled in the empty yard of a primary school and walked down to the rippling waters at Grand Canal Dock, trying to decide whether I should walk all the way to St Pat’s, check myself in. As part of my work with the mental health charity I had been part of a panel interviewing psychiatrists for a new teen unit; now I wondered if mentioning this credential at the door of the psychiatric hospital would get me into a ward. I just wanted to be hugged around the head with deep, white blankets and told that I was alright until the perma-clutch of my muscles relaxed. Eventually I had just gone into the Spar, gotten a wedge roll, a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a load of blackcurrant, then spent the morning drinking and swaying in front of the unread books I’d bought for my PhD.

My father ate quickly, with a hunted blankness in his eyes. I thought of the cholesterol silting up our veins. My father had had a big pay cut as part of the austerity measures the government had brought in. There were times I saw his forehead take on the shiny pallor of a rasher being fried, other times when a blue hashtag of pressurized veins appeared at his temple. He wouldn’t be able to carry me if I needed him. I had to carry him. I had to keep this back.

The cars were trailing past my father and me. The air was tart with woodsmoke. A cold wind raked my knuckles.

—We’ll go on home, will we? my father said, and I got back into the car with him.

 

7

 

I felt myself begin to slump down along the little pleather bench in the security booth, watching a cloud of moths and flittering cigarette ash turn in the square of light just by the door, above where Barry was smoking. The same grey shreds were turning above his head now, joining with the drizzle under the lights, making shapes like the funnels mackerel form up into when threatened. He watched them, looking peaceful, and then his radio yawked and he shook his head, flicked his cigarette, and turned to me.

—I won’t be ten minutes.

—Not a problem, I said, and toasted him with the cup, and then, when he was out of sight, I slugged off the rest, slipped out of the booth with the bottle of Green Spot inside my coat, and went out onto College Green, bending my steps around the corner, heading east, making for the sea.

To read the rest of Dublin Review 85, you may purchase the issue here.