Hanging with the Elephant: A Story of Love, Loss and Meditation

  PRAISE FOR STARING AT LAKES, WINNER OF THREE BGE IRISH BOOK AWARDS

  Bord Gáis Energy Book of the Year 2013

  John Murray Listeners’ Choice

  Non-Fiction Book of the Year

  ‘A repository of modern man’s deepest fears, Harding emerges as something of an embattled hero for our times

  … It’s rare for a memoir to demand such intense emotional involvement, and rarer still for it to be so fully rewarded’ Sunday Times

  ‘Hilarious, and tender, and mad, and harrowing, and wistful, and always beautifully written. A wonderful book’ Kevin Barry

  ‘I read this book in one sitting … Beautifully written … Staring at Lakes gives us permission to be lost, sick, sad, creative, happy and compassionate – in short, to be human’ Mary McEvoy, Irish Independent

  ‘This memoir grabs you from the outset and holds you right to the end. His language sings’ Deirdre Purcell

  ‘Written in lyrical prose, it provides a compelling insight into the turbulent emotions that rage behind so many of the bland faces we meet in everyday life’ Sunday Business Post

  ‘This frank and unflinching memoir offers a fascinating insight into the mind of the author of two of the finest Irish novels of the eighties’ Pat McCabe

  ‘Difficult to put down’ Irish Times

  Michael Harding is an author and playwright. His creative chronicle of ordinary life in the Irish midlands is published as a weekly column in The Irish Times. He has written numerous plays for the Abbey Theatre, including Una Pooka, Misogynist and Sour Grapes, and has published three novels, Priest, The Trouble with Sarah Gullion and Bird in the Snow as well as a bestselling memoir, Staring at Lakes.

  Copyright

  First published in 2014 by Hachette Books Ireland

  Copyright © Michael Harding 2014

  The right of Michael Harding to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Some of the names and details in this book have been changed to protect the identity of individuals.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 9781444783124

  Hachette Books Ireland

  8 Castlecourt Centre, Castleknock, Dublin 15, Ireland

  A division of Hachette UK Ltd

  338 Euston Road, London NW1 3BH

  www.hachette.ie

  Contents

  Praise for Staring at Lakes, Winner of three BGE Irish Book Awards

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Hanging with the Elephant

  Acknowledgements

  For Brendan

  I GOT ITCHY feet one time and left the beloved. I headed for Paris, but ended up in Mullingar. It was all because I knew too much – or thought I did. I knew who I was and I knew where I was going, in terms of my life journey, and I had decided it was time to leave Leitrim. Simple as that. It is important to see the world, I told myself. Going to seed in rural Ireland was not an option. So I presumed I was finished with the little cottage in the hills above Lough Allen, the home my beloved and I had set up thirteen years earlier. But of course I was wrong.

  Five years later I returned. Knocking on the door, I said, ‘I’m sorry I ran away. Will you please let me in?’

  ‘But why,’ she asked, ‘did you go away?’

  I don’t know,’ I confessed. ‘OK, so maybe I was worried that I hadn’t seen enough of the world and thought I might begin another life in Paris or elsewhere, despite the fact that I was over fifty.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And where did that get you?’

  ‘To Mullingar,’ I confessed.

  ‘So you didn’t get very far at all, did you?’

  ‘No.’

  After five years in Mullingar, I was on the flat of my back with a gigantic prostate, colitis, mental burnout and tears filling my eyes. ‘Hold me,’ I begged her. ‘I’m a ruined man.’

  And she did. And every day I sat up in bed, sipping a little soup and writing a few pages on the computer until I had a book finished, which was published and did very well and won a few national prizes, and then suddenly I was out of the bed again, going around the country, talking to audiences about how little I knew about anything. It’s amazing how consoling the general public finds it to meet someone who knows nothing.

  And I suppose what I now accept is that I most definitely know nothing. If I had used that insight as my guide on the road of life, like a route on the sat-nav, I wouldn’t have gone down so many cul-de-sacs. Knowing things can be a big problem. It can lead a man astray. It’s a delusion to think you know it all. In fact, it may be a delusion to think you know anything. Although it’s not easy to sustain a life based on knowing nothing. Or to admit you know nothing, especially when, like me, you’re trying to write another book.

  I went to a psychotherapist about all this. She told me I needed meaning in my life.

  ‘But I’ve tried Christianity,’ I said. ‘And I’ve tried Buddhism. Neither of them seems to work for me.’

  ‘And why did you leave your wife?’

  ‘I found marriage a bit boring,’ I replied. ‘And besides, she had a different view of how to fill a dishwasher.’

  ‘And why did you go back?’

  ‘Because I was wrong – about the dishwasher. And now I think maybe marriage does work.’

  She didn’t say anything else. I suppose that’s because she’s a psychotherapist.

  And what I find most difficult of all is that being a man is wildly more complicated than it was in my father’s time. Nowadays, it’s essential to be liked. And men want to be understood. They want to be held. They want to go to therapists and they want to cry on television. Men are expected to be tender and human and loving, and to know when to hold their partner and when not to.

  I’m told that in the olden days, men spent their time in the fields making hay and had no feelings, and women were inside stirring pots of stew that later everyone ate, at the bare board table on the flagstone floor, in a kind of monastic silence, as they all inhabited the bliss of being a family.

  That must have been really peaceful. Everything was simple. A man knew where he stood. In daylight, he wasn’t unlike a horse, a thing that lived outside, only coming indoors late in the evening. He grunted over his soup, dozed by the fire or smoked a pipe as his children grew up around him, and sometimes in the night he surprised his wife in silent love-making with the tenderness of a child.

  When I returned home, I was sixty and I hoped I might just have enough wit to be a competent lover by then; because more than anything else in the world, a man dreams of being in love.

  I certainly wouldn’t like to imply that I’m a great romantic, but there was one phrase I kept coming back to when I was recovering from depression.

  ‘Hold me.’

  That’s all I could say to my beloved. It was sad and pathetic, and I was embarrassed, but I said it over and over again, and she did it over and over again. She held me.

  If I were a romantic, I might have used other phrases. I might have used the kind of phrases James Bond uses, and I’d throw them at he
r because she’s a beautiful person. I’d scatter them before her feet. But I didn’t. Not when I was recovering. I was speechless most of the time when we were alone and, I discovered, a man is not very attractive in striped pyjamas.

  In public or on stage, it’s different. I’m fine. I have no bother talking to three hundred people, and sharing my feelings. But when I’m alone in a room on a one-to-one basis, I get lost. Dumbfounded. I can never find the right word. Except for that phrase – hold me.

  And then of course there was the case of my poor mother, who lived so long and who for so many years had nobody to hold her at all.

  THAT’S WHAT I was thinking on a bright May morning in 2014, two years after my mother had died. On that particular morning, my beloved was returning from Poland where she had been for six weeks. I woke early. The room was still dark but through the window I could see the sun’s rays edging over the mountain. The sky was clear. The rain clouds had not yet gathered in from the ocean to cover Leitrim with that oppressive grey which makes humans in this part of the world feel so desolate and melancholic.

  A glass of water sat beside my iPhone on the headboard above my head. The curtain was half open and my clothes were on the floor. I reached up to turn the phone on and listen to the morning news on BBC Radio 4. Then I got out of bed, using the phone as a lamp, and went to the bathroom. I had slept soundly through the night, and I relieved myself in a single and marvellous flow from my bladder and felt an enormous sense of well-being.

  The reason for this sense of well-being was because in my early fifties, I’d been going to the bathroom every forty minutes, resulting from an enlarged prostate, and I was constantly walking around with the unpleasant sensation that my bladder was never empty. Then at sixty, after a successful operation to reduce the size of my prostate, I became a new man. I became like one of those Cavan men I have always admired; the ones who can down six pints without leaving the high stool and then go outside under the arch and piss with the ferocity of an officer’s horse.

  I shaved, observing myself in the mirror, lathering my face, neck and cheeks with a green slimy gel and then pulled the razor blade closely down each side, line by line, like a window cleaner, ensuring not to touch the small goatee that gave my chin some respectability. For years, I’d never bothered shaving. So I wasn’t good at it. And I only started wearing a goatee when I began visiting the therapist. I thought I might look more awake, or at least less mad, and more inclined to take the world seriously with a sharp little bush on my chin.

  The therapist raised her eyebrow.

  ‘And of course there’s always something erotic about shaving,’ I said, because I always tried to dredge up something for the therapist.

  She raised the other eyebrow so I didn’t pursue the topic. I was wearing some round-rimmed glasses I had bought in a chemist earlier that day for €5. I thought they might enhance the goatee. I wanted to look like a psychiatrist; it was a kind of defence mechanism, I suppose.

  The sun had not yet risen fully over the ridge of the mountain, but the faint grey light in the sky was intensifying above Sliabh an Iarainn, and the trees in the garden were almost visible. I put on fresh underwear, clean socks and a tight-fitting shirt, with brown cord trousers, and had a look at myself in the mirror.

  The smell of chicken and onion wafted from a pot on the cooker in the kitchen.

  That will make the place feel homely when she arrives, I’d thought.

  I’d bought the chicken in Scollan’s of Drumshanbo, a bright Gala shop that combines a family supermarket with a butcher’s counter and also provides hot dinners in a small restaurant at the front. For me and many others in Leitrim, it is a lifeline, a trading post, a kind of community centre. I’d brought the chicken home and put it in a pot with carrots, potatoes, onions, parsley and soup mix, and let it boil slowly on the cooker the previous evening.

  In the bathroom, I splashed my neck with Boss because I needed to smell good too. Who knows how ravenous we might be for each other by the time we got through a bottle of wine. I know men aren’t very reliable in matters of sexual performance when they pass the age of fifty, but it’s amazing what a period of abstinence can achieve.

  I sucked in my stomach, powdered the underwear and squirted more Boss on all sides.

  That morning the beloved planned to fly from Modlin airport in Warsaw at 9 a.m. and arrive in Dublin before noon. We intended to meet at the airport. Then we would drive home and I would lift the lid off the pot and she would see the amazing soup, with carrots and onions and potatoes and parsley floating on top and a plump chicken sitting in the middle.

  And yet, I was sorry that the six weeks had come to an end. My solitary retreat was closed. Our brief separation over. The soup was in the pot. The bird was well and truly cooked.

  I had everything prepared. I was trussed up as well as a pot-bellied old man of sixty can manage to truss himself, because I still harboured intense fantasies of an erotic nature and dreamed of fulfilling them with the lady wife when she returned and had washed down the chicken with a bottle of Bordeaux. I get excited when I’ve been alone for a while, and then suddenly the day of her return arrives and I get an urge to hold her. Even though I usually just stand there at the airport like a gobdaw when she wheels her trolley through the arrivals gate after some of her travels. I say things like, ‘Well, how did you get on?’ as if she had only been away for twenty minutes looking for a particular book in the library. I want to hug and hold her but sometimes I don’t because it seems too emotional a risk in public. I am embarrassed to lash out all that girly feeling at an airport in front of so many men in visor jackets and peaked caps.

  ‘What exactly do you think is girly about being emotional?’ my therapist wondered one day. I couldn’t answer her. And when I thought again about airports, I had to admit that the arrival lounges are usually stuffed with men happily flinging their emotions in all directions. Men with sun-burned faces, short trousers, sandals and silly hats going way over the top emotionally, shouting their lovers’ names, grabbing their wives by the buttocks and pushing their uncouth tongues into their lovers’ faces like they were in an adult movie.

  ‘So what’s so girly about showing emotions?’ the therapist repeated.

  ‘Nothing,’ I admitted. Although in my neck of the woods, people are masters of emotional restraint. The conventional salutation in Leitrim among neighbours is a minimal nod of the head, and there are no lovers, just husbands who after being parted from their wives for a very long time might just risk whispering in her ear something like, ‘So, there you are.’

  I can cook, but I rarely bother. In fact, I am ashamed of all the meals I have failed to cook for the beloved over the years, because I was too busy playing the flute or watching television or working on another book or renouncing the world in one of those self-absorbing private meditation sessions that used to isolate me in my studio for hours and sometimes years. I know there are men who serve their lovers steak in lean slices, blood raw, with fresh salads drenched in exotic oils, and other men who have a reputation for tossing a few things around in a wok for three minutes and dazzling their lovers with the aphrodisiac spontaneity of their noodles. But I never got beyond doing a chicken in a pot of soup the way my mother used to do it. The chicken bent over, like a dead monk at prayer in a jungle swamp.

  I think many men are glad when their wives or lovers go away for a while. It allows them time to play house on their own. To fantasise about what it would be like if they had remained unmarried. Being alone, they feel they have permission to surf the internet, check out porn sites and leave the bed unmade for weeks.

  And it’s a serious thing to leave a man alone at any time. There’s no telling what he’ll get up to. Men catch ideas like an open mouth attracts flies. They worry about things. They rearrange the furniture. They make big decisions. They opt out of marriage. They plan affairs. They change jobs. They resign from the club. They drink beer, smoke dope and watch football. They use their wives’ to
iletries in the bath and never clean up. In fact, it was when I was alone for a weekend that I once tried to shave my pubic hair in a fit of erotic passion after downing a bottle of wine while watching a programme on Sky about what young men do nowadays to enhance their sex lives. I lathered shaving cream all over the target area and then with a Wilkinson Sword triple blade scraped it all off, leaving myself tender and bald. It felt supersensitive. It reminded me of being a baby. But I anticipated vast increases of sensual pleasure during future orgasms. Or at least that is what the guy in the television programme had claimed would happen.

  And it wasn’t easy explaining the results to the beloved when she arrived home from a friend’s funeral – and to be honest it didn’t even make any difference except that I got an ingrown hair, which created a boil of puss under the skin and I had to go to the doctor a few months later.

  I remember one morning in the sauna gazing at a younger man whose chest was smooth but whose legs were as hairy as a gorilla and I suspected he may have shaved more than his chin. I was even tempted to enquire, there in the intimacy of the steam room, whether or not he had ever ventured between his legs with the razor and if so had he ever experienced any trouble with ingrown hairs, but discretion is the yardstick in the steam rooms of rural Ireland, so I decided to say nothing.

  I am one of those men who likes to think he can survive without women, even though experience keeps telling me the opposite. I find a liberation in my own smell, the masculinity of a full sink, the nonchalance of dirty underwear piled on an armchair in the sitting room, and the kind of personal chaos that makes women doubt their own sanity for loving such savages and makes women wonder if they were utterly mad the day they walked up the aisle of some church long ago in a big white meringue of silk and satin to pledge loyalty to a half-evolved Neanderthal with a fragrant penis. A solitary man in a house is an unfolding horror movie, like fungus in an unwashed cupboard or the blue mould that grows in coffee cups that have been abandoned under chairs or on the cistern in the toilet or hidden on the window sill behind unopened curtains and forgotten about until the morning of her return.