The last time John had a drink he had been on Achill Island in his father’s house. He came round propped against the wall in the kitchen, with blood-stained hands, wearing his father’s favourite suit.
As he got to his feet, his head exploding and in search of water, he had the distinct sensation that his skin was holding everything together, that he was strapped in by a thin membrane, pulled loosely over his jumble of fat, and blood and bone, and instead of panic, he was overcome with gratitude for that packet of flesh around him and he smiled.
In front of him there was an axe stuck in the table and holes smashed into the middle of all the cupboards. A small cabinet had been beaten from above, its legs splayed and broken and three wooden rails, ripped from the wall, were on the floor.
As he pulled himself over to the sink, his father’s suit trousers open, his gut wedging itself through the slightly open flies, he looked at the axe. It was thick and shining. Dust swirled around it, hanging the air like his father’s cigarette smoke. The likeness sent a creeping darkness down the back of his neck and through his stomach.
'Jesus fucking Christ,' he said, as he looked out at the sun burning an edge across the hills beyond the water.
He had come to the thick walled cottage drunk again, along the 45km winding road from Westport. When is father died three months before, gasping into the summer afternoon, and everything outside was so full and dense with life, John had felt something beautiful and strange as the terrible sound of breathing stopped. For the last ten weeks or so, he had, by his own admission, lost the plot.
He had been drinking since the day his father died, scrabbling around in conversations with men he knew from the bar, and the Thursday night fishing club, and even with the cousins from Donegal who he hadn’t seen for 20 years who came down for the funeral. He had been trying to locate that sense of release he had felt so surely in the moments after his father stopped breathing.
It had rippled through him like a perfect song, as if the vibrations of every note were in him unheard until then. The excitement and sadness in those seconds had hung in the beat of his heart. Since that day the closest he had got to understanding the feeling was a sense that something can be forever and gone at the very same time. When he was sober he had begun to wonder if that moment had been his at all.
The afternoon John’s father died he didn’t tell the neighbours, but instead locked the doors and went to Nevin's for a pint, off the island, where the bar staff changed in the summer and no one knew who he was. And he called Goose, his best friend.
'Goose, he’s dead.'
'Dead, Johnny? When did he go?'
'Now, he went an hour ago, will you come to Nevin's?'
'Where is he Johnny?'
'He’s in the bed, where the hell do you think he is? Will you come Goose?'
There was a slight pause.
'I’m in the field, Sarah’s in the tractor, I’ll get her to her mam’s and come.'
'Are you still at that craic with Sarah? Someone’s going to get hurt.'
'I am, and she’s a mighty woman. See you now Johnny.'
Goose couldn't read and he had been one of Ireland’s top body builders in the eighties. They had nicknamed him Goose on the island because while he was training he had lived on bread and water. He had been proud of that. Now Goose lived with his sister and her family on their farm and had taken it upon himself to teach his six and eight-year-old-nieces, Mary and Sarah, to use the machinery. The farm was down the road from John’s father’s house, and John and Goose had grown up together.
Goose walked into the bar wearing a fresh white t-shirt and the jeans he had been wearing on the tractor. The air was hot, and the white skin under the barman’s wispy moustache was beaded with sweat.
'Well, are you happy now John?' he said as he sat down, one arm around John’s shoulder as he offered his condolences.
'I am, I’m delighted. I’m to sell it all and keep the axe, that’s what the old man said. Keep the axe, like it was mammy’s ring, or something.'
'He loved it, didn’t he John. The big aul’ red handle on it.' Goose rested both arms on the bar and put his hands around the cool pint in front of him.
'I want to throw his body into the sea and never talk about the man again, after today,' John said.
'Agh, get down out of there,' Goose shook his head, and turned towards John, raising his eyebrows. John moved his shoulders, his back rising, so that Goose was unsure if he had begun to cry.
Goose had said a phrase accidentally, strangely even. The last time they had noticed it fall between them, John was in the woods not far from his house and they were both 26 years old.
John was winding a rope around a trunk as Goose appeared, and continued to tie the half hitches as he stood underneath.
“Agh, get down out of there,” Goose had said, his big hands laced behind his head, his muscles bulging as he looked upwards, the wind howling through the scots pine and ash and silver birch.
'Your dad came to get me, saying you were acting the bollocks John, you’re acting the bollocks, what’ll we do without you?'
John was high in the tree, drunk on his father’s whisky. He didn’t flinch when Goose arrived. He kept moving as if he was still alone.
'Agh, Johnny, get down out of there,' Goose repeated, as he watched John sit back on the branch, and rest against the trunk of the tree. Thick fast-moving clouds moved above them both.
Goose climbed the tree and sat between John and the rope.
They sat there for the night. John didn’t speak. Goose watched his friend, and when John closed his eyes in exhaustion he unwrapped the rope. The pair climbed down as dawn broke and went back to John’s house. His father was sitting alone, smoking by the stove, which had gone out.
'You’re alive,' he said. 'We’ll start at 10 today, go to bed. Thank you Goose, see you soon.'
Soon after that, one night, John packed his things and thumbed a lift to Westport, and never went back.
A month before his father died, Goose called John to say his father was sick, and two weeks later he called again to say he had pneumonia and he was dying.
John didn’t want to go back to his father. In the 20 years since leaving, he had felt no different.
In the bar, he turned to Goose, 'Everything that’s beautiful, is ugly somehow, because of him. He was scared of being alone, and he was scared of being scared. Life was work. He never spoke about how his carpentry was. And as I grew, I sent all my questions, all my fucking love Goose, I sent them to a place where they would never accidentally slip out. Even to let a thing in, even a woman, Goose, I can’t, I haven’t done it. Do you know what I mean?'
'No, not really John, I think you should let it go,' Goose said.
'It’s like he turned me inside out when I was a chap and I keep being stunned by the stranger I am. I play at being John. When he died and the breeze swept through the purple heather outside and the sun tumbled down on it all Goose. It was the first time I felt right inside and out. But it passed like a bird.'
'He’s dead now,' Goose said.
'I went outside to pick flowers, I must have been four or five years old, Goose. I brought the handful into him, he was leaning against the fireplace, smoking in a suit, it must have been Sunday, and he just took them from my hand, without lifting them to his face to smell them or see them properly, and threw them straight into the fire. I don’t know if he said it, but I hear him saying 'no'. And the flowers, like the swirl of cigarette smoke in the sunshine, or the smell of Sunday roast, or the curves on one of his tables - I hate them Goose, I hate the memory of them or the thing they are now, repeated in anyway, because I think I could have loved them and I never did.'
'Sure, you never wanted to be a carpenter, and that was it, John,' Goose said.
'No, I didn’t.'
'Your Dad never let that go,' Goose said.
John was silent. Then he lifted his eyes and looked at the crown of his head reflected in the bottom of the mirror behind the bar.
'It’s the loneliness out here. It wasn’t about he tables or the chairs, he wanted me to become a thing that was his, that he could keep. He wanted me to sit in a room and imitate him all day.'
Goose was silent for a moment, and finally he said, 'He had talent though, didn’t he John.'
John swallowed and looked at his pint.
'Those things he made, his Sunday suits, the way he would stand outside the church in the summer with his coat open, and chat to people, they were rotted out of him, and he was never passing them on anyway. See now Goose, see now who I am, and I'm scared.'
Three months later, John stood in the kitchen staring at the smashed up furniture as the sun took its path above the hills and into the enormous sky above the Atlantic.
He stepped outside to feel the air folding around him, and smell the breeze, and try for a second to feel the beats he had felt his father died. But the air felt loose, and he could hold onto nothing.
The air pulsed with a life he lived, it vibrated with all the half-starts he had made since he left his childhood home. In the spaces between the white shine of the sun on the wet morning grass he saw all the fragments of himself, surrounded by those shimmering blades.
One of them held his body stiff with anger, holding out his thumb on the bridge of the island - his arm fully outstretched, his whole body begging to be driven away, there was the kind face of Michael who had given him a job in Walsh’s Bar, the woman who had come in every night for nearly four years, who drank Jameson and Ginger Ale and only ever spoke when she ordered. There was the American who he had loved, the little lad who came in on a Thursday with his father and who he had taken fishing on the Bunowen, there was each long night and wild evening of music, and he saw them all now between the grass.
He watched himself walking slowly from his bed to the bathroom, one shadow between the grasses was his changing face in the mirror, the other held the echo of calls to Goose, and there were his feet on a table, Nina Simone blaring from his stereo, and the winter sucking the autumn evenings into all its certain coldness.
And the morning sun sank into the moist grasses, the air felt cool and fresh, gushing in from the wide blue Atlantic, and across the fields a thousand versions of John pressed between the shimmering grasses, holding the space between each blade, filling the earth. And they could not be piled one on top of the other, the moments that he saw were nothing but empty spaces, if they were taken apart and put together again, they wouldn’t exist. They were spaces in the shaking sunlit morning grass, that was all.