‘Two people love one another,’ she began, ‘there’s nothing they should not share. The Hindus have a saying. “We must listen to the still small voice. The still small voice that’s within us all. We must listen to it.’”
She touched my hand. ‘It’s just that I don’t think you’re listening, Joey. I don’t think you’re listening to that small voice. And I don’t think you’re telling me everything. I want to know the you that we’ve been talking about. I want to know the real Joey Tallon. Tell me about him, Joey. That inner child. The inner child, Joseph!’
‘The inner child?’
I swallowed as I said it. Then I looked away. There was no mistaking the tenderness in her eyes. It reassured me so much.
‘Perhaps you’re not ready for it yet. But I’ll be patient. Then, when you’re ready, I know you’ll tell me. Slowly begin to shed those skins. You’ll do that, Joey, when you’re ready? Tell me then you’ll give me your trust.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘My trust.’
‘That’s all I want, baby,’ she said. ‘I want to know you and I want you to know me.’
She moved her hand to my shoulder and stroked the back of my neck.
‘Then we can go to Iowa,’ she said.
She paused for a moment.
‘You hearing me, Joey?’
I could still feel her touch when I woke up I don’t know how long after. I think I slept eighteen hours.
I spent the whole day reading, then drove up to Tynagh mountain to get the Karma Cave ready. Austie had lent me this beat-up old Bedford on account of what had happened to our wagon. The only thing I was afraid of was that I’d go and crash it on him, for I’d noticed since Banbridge I had become very nervous behind a wheel. But as soon as I entered our ‘private world’, particularly there in that little cabin stuck there on the side of the mountain which had once been a forest-worker’s hut, any cares like that soon drifted away. It seemed so right just being there sweeping up the floor that I almost felt like falling to my knees. It was damp inside, having been deserted for years, but still was far from uninhabitable. The only other human being for miles was an old geezer called McQuaid, who I knew was spying on me from his own cottage across the valley. I’d see him at the window every time I drove up. But that didn’t matter — he could do that if he wished. If that was his scene. Maybe one day he could even come and visit us, right there in that old Karma Cave. That would be just fine by me, Mr McQuaid, I thought. You just keep on peering out that window, baby.
As I strung up the wind chimes, I felt absolutely certain that my journey had been … I don’t know — ordained, I guess. I closed my eyes and breathed in the incense. I could see the lights twinkling out across the bay. They said: ‘You’re here. It’s been a long journey but at last now it’s ended.’
I spent the whole night in the cabin, fixing things up. For I wanted everything to be as right as could possibly be. All the surroundings to be as … congenial — is that the word? — as could humanly be made possible. I would see to it — I had to. It was my duty. It was part of the regime. Of the total reorganization that would set us on our path. That led to the core of the onion, with its primordial, lustrous light. It was essential that everything at the beginning be made as smooth as possible. Because the first layer, without a doubt, would have to be the most difficult. I knew that. Just as I knew that when that was done everything else would be easy. Once successfully dealt with, all the other layers would flake off like paper.
I stacked the paperbacks on the shelf and tacked up the wall hanging. Beside that, the Joni Mitchell songbook and guitar. I had finished a painting of Charlie Manson on a sheet of hardboard, which I nailed to the other wall. Underneath I printed: ‘The Gardener’.
I was a bit tired but I still had enough energy to draw a single eye — the eye that sees the truth — on the ceiling. The harder I worked, the more I thought of The Seeker as he sat at the bar flicking through Castaneda. ‘The Toltecs say,’ I heard him musing, as he massaged his beard into a point, ‘that if we save enough energy, a door will open to an unknown side of ourselves, the Nagaul, a side that it is not possible to think of or verbalize about.’ If you asked him how he saw himself — and people were always doing it — he’d think for a bit before saying: ‘I’m a psy-warrior!’ Then he’d grin and look at you: ‘An astronaut of inner space!’ he’d say.
You really had to admire him, Eamon. In his memory I painted a few logos right there on the wall: ‘Stay high, love the Buddha!’ and ‘You are the you of you!’
Then, pretty exhausted but at the same time ecstatic, I tidied up the albums again — with Joni placed where she couldn’t be missed — and headed back into town, thinking: The shadows of evening fall thick and deep, and the darkness of love envelops the body and mind. I was so engrossed in my thoughts that I almost drove into a sheep — I just saw it at the very last minute, stumbling wildly as it got caught in the headlights, terrified. I knew I would have to be that bit more careful from now on. There was no room even for the tiniest lapse in concentration.
The Dancehall
I was writing in my new diary — an accounts ledger (I had found a whole bunch of them, completely unused, dumped behind the bank) — when I heard this furious hammering. ‘Will you give me a chance to get my fucking trousers on?’ I says. ‘Can you let a guy do that at least?’ Turns out to be Chico, one of the boys in the band, all on for the dance. ‘Let’s rock,’ he says. ‘I’m fed up moping and brooding about Banbridge.’
So off we went to Oldcastle. We had a couple of spliffs in the car park and a few pints in a pub on the way, then fell into the dancehall, and who does Chico run into? Only this mad fan who never missed a Mohawk gig. Goes white she does. ‘I can’t believe it’s you, the drummer out of my favourite band. I just cannot believe my eyes.’
‘Well, believe them, baby,’ says Chico, and gives me the wink and that was the last I saw of him. Off he sweeps into the crowd as I went backstage to have a word with the guitarist, asking him to play our song. ‘No problem!’ he says, so, man, was I happy camper then. All I had to do was sit there and wait for those first few opening bars: ‘I’m not in love, so don’t forget it, it’s just a silly phase I’m going through,’ that floaty feeling coursing through you the very same as when you’d find yourself dreaming about being inside Mona’s stomach all those years before, a tiny little baby sucking its thumb, in the original Karma Cave.
Against the odds, it had turned out to be a beautiful night, with all the windows thrown open and the warm air coming drifting right into the hall, the hippie chicks from Dublin hanging out in front of the stage, the Oldcastle headbangers pogoing up and down the maple floor. And as I waited for the song I don’t suppose I was in that dancehall in Oldcastle, Co. Meath, or anywhere fucking near it, tell you the God’s honest truth. For already I was halfway there, in the Karma Cave, where the only sound you can hear is the plinking of wind-chimes as cross-legged you sit, Siddhartha-style, three fingers touching your thumbs as you chant your mantra. The purple smoke of the incense writhing as yet another layer is dispensed with, bringing you ever closer towards that final goal, the unmasking of ‘the illusion of personality’, which, according to Hermann Hesse, had cost India thousands of years of effort …
I couldn’t believe it when I looked up and saw Boyle Henry. He was standing right in front of me, grinning. There was a half-drunk woman hanging on his arm. I had never seen her before. Just then the first mellow chords of the song started up and my heart began to pound. Between that and him arriving — just out of nowhere — I became alarmed and wanted a spliff. No! A pie! I thought. And then: No! No pies!
‘It’s stupid,’ I said to myself.
Fuck him! I thought. Fuck him and her!
‘Well, well, well! Would you look who it is! How are they hanging, Joey?’ he began as the guitarist adjusted the mike and announced: ‘This one’s specially for Joey from Scotsfield! Roadie with The Mohawks! Hope Boo Boo’s making a full recovery! Don’t
let the bastards grind you down, lads, you hear?’
The woman’s eyes kept swivelling in her head, looking up at him every so often as if about to say: ‘I’ve managed to get off with Boyle Henry? It can’t be, no, it couldn’t be!’
He pulled a hip flask from his inside pocket and handed it to me.
‘Always good to see a fellow Scotsfield man,’ he said.
‘What’s that, Boyle?’ I said, and put the flask to my lips. Then the word ‘pies’ came into my head again. That was always the way it worked. Just when it seemed OK I’d get afraid it would start up again, and sure enough it did. I spilt some of the whiskey and it went dribbling down my front.
‘There’s some gone down your jacket,’ he pointed out, and laughed. I could see the guitarist trying to catch my eye.
‘What?’ I said. Boyle winked.
‘I said, it’s always good to see a fellow Scotsfield man!’ he said again, and gave the woman’s buttock a squeeze. I was bathed in sweat. You could fill a glass with it, I thought. Then, for no reason at all, I found myself thinking: I would like to be somewhere else right now. In Austie’s even. Washing glasses. Pulling pumps. You could fill a glass with my sweat. ‘Two gins and a nip of sweat, sir. Yes, there you are!’
‘For God’s sake, Joey, will you watch that whiskey!’ said Boyle. ‘You’ll go and spill it again if you’re not careful.’
‘Ha ha,’ I laughed.
He winked again and squeezed my elbow. ‘Not a bad little piece, eh? Whaddya think?’ he said.
I agreed — over-enthusiastically, I realized almost as soon as I’d opened my mouth.
‘Yeah, sure! Fantastic!’
I handed his whiskey back.
‘OK then, kid?’ he said, reaching out to accept it.
‘Sure thing, Boyle,’ I said and gave him the thumbs up. My face was aflame.
‘Well! Be seeing you then!’
He grinned from ear to ear as he sparked a Hamlet, looking dapper in the cream-white suit, as he said: ‘Let’s get dancing then, sweetheart!’ Her eyeballs swam as she fell into his arms and he dragged her like a sack of potatoes across the floor.
The minute he’d gone I went back to where I’d been. In the land before pies! I thought. Then giggled a little … idiotically. I got to thinking of myself on Tynagh mountain. Sitting inside with both my legs crossed. In the lotus position. That was what you called it. I thought of the mountain and I thought of the sky. Then I closed my eyes. I must have looked pretty stupid sitting there in the dancehall with everyone sweeping past me on the floor. But I didn’t care, because the calm was returning. You could feel it. ‘Knowledge can be as a vast tree which yields more and more fruit,’ I repeated softly to myself. And, as to this knowledge, we must attend to that little voice. The one within which tells us: “You are on the right track, move neither to your left nor right, but keep to the straight and narrow way.”
The band finished the song and announced the end of the set. ‘Your next dance will be coming right up,’ they said. Then, out of nowhere, I heard: ‘Hey, Tallon! What the fuck are you at over there? Are you falling asleep or what?’
It was Chico, pulling on his coat, with the chick beside him. ‘OK, man, I’m outa here!’ he said. ‘I can’t stand this country-and-western bollocks any longer! We’re going up to this baby’s place! You staying or going?’
I said I’d hitch a lift. Which I did. I headed off shortly afterwards.
I must have been on the side of the road a good two hours before I looked up and saw the yellow Datsun approaching.
‘Hello there,’ said Boyle, pulling in as the door swung open. I climbed inside.
The woman was still all over him, her mascara streaking her cheeks. She slipped her hand inside his shirt and grinned blearily, stroking his chest. Boyle thought it was a great laugh. ‘Sure as long as we’re enjoying ourselves, that’s the main thing! Would you say I’m right there?’
He grinned. ‘Well, would you, Josie?’ he asked me. They called me that too sometimes — Josie. I didn’t mind it. The way I was feeling now they could call me whatever they wished. For the first time I felt that my little ‘zen’ session in the dancehall was really beginning to kick in and I was overjoyed. Now he had started telling me all about his plans. He was thinking of running for office, he said. ‘Do you think someone like me might make a good representative, Joey boy? Boyle Henry as your local TD? Your man above in Dublin, whaddya say?’
If he didn’t cut it as a Dáil Deputy, he might make the senate, he reckoned. ‘I’ve a lot of good friends up there in the smoke, Joey. As well as around our own town. You think they like me, Joey? You figure they like Mr Henry in Scotsfield? I think they do! She does anyway, don’t you, baby?’
He made a grab for her bare thigh and she dropped her cigarette in a shower of sparks.
‘Baby! You’ll burn us out!’
‘Boyle!’ she chuckled as she bent down to retrieve the cigarette.
He started going on about Fr Connolly then and his great schemes. ‘He’s a terrific idealist. You have to hand it to him. I admire a man like that!’ he said, then adding: ‘But this Peace Rally — now what do you think of that? Would you say now that’s such a good idea?’
To which I replied that I didn’t know and had no opinion on it at all. The only peace I cared about was to be found up on Tynagh mountain, although of course I didn’t utter those words.
To my surprise, I started really enjoying his company then — and to feel bad about the way I’d been thinking. About him. And everybody else, in fact. I began to feel regretful about it all. But promised myself I’d make up for it. I smiled as Boyle pulled off the road and drove up to her house, promising me he wouldn’t be long and giving me the wink as he assisted her out. She was completely incapable now.
He must have been about twenty minutes or so, and was still grinning as he climbed back into the car, shoving two fingers under my nose as he said: ‘So smell that, Joey Tallon! Sweet as fucking roses, man!’
Chuckling to himself all the way along the Scotsfield Road. ‘The yelps of her, Joe,’ he says, practically jumping up and down in the seat. It was almost coming naturally to me now — and I can’t tell you how good I was feeling about it — moving into that relaxing space. Where anyone could say absolutely anything and it wouldn’t bother you at all. ‘Sure,’ I said, and ‘That’s right, Boyle.’
I must have dozed off for a bit, for the next thing I remember the car is turning off the road somewhere around Lackey Cross and Boyle is saying: ‘Now listen, Josie, I might be another wee while up here, so the best thing you can do is stretch out here for a bit. Here, take another drop of Jemmy. But don’t stir till I get back. And then we’ll have you safe and sound at home in the campsite. You’ll be OK then, Josie? Catch forty winks!’
I nodded and did just that as I watched him dodge the sudden shower as he made his way on up the lane, and it was like a warm and toasty hand had come to soothe my soul. I might as well have grown wings and been gliding over cool clear water, skimming it every so often just for the sheer fucking fun. Triumph was a word that came to mind just then — I had reached some special plain. And this was just the beginning. What would it be like in the Karma Cave? With her in the Karma Cave? I reckoned I was getting close to … I don’t know. ‘Delirious’ was a word that I wouldn’t have been afraid of using right then.
What time it was when the birds woke me up I couldn’t say for definite. It was bright outside and it looked like it was going to be a really lovely day, but as yet I was too tired and hungover to appreciate it. I searched around for the flask. It was dry as a bone. All of a sudden — it was like the ‘old me’, I thought — I found myself becoming unnecessarily alarmed and thinking: Oh no! He’s gone and forgotten me altogether! Which was stupid, of course, as I realized almost immediately — I mean, he was hardly going to leave the Datsun lying there at the side of the road.
So I just got out and went off up the lane towards the bungalow at the top of the hi
ll, nearly breaking my neck over an old pushbike someone had left lying in the middle of the drive. ‘Will you for fuck’s sake wake up, Joey!’ I said. ‘Wake up here now, Joey Tallon! Just because things are getting a little easier now doesn’t mean you can afford to start getting sloppy!’ I grinned unconsciously, thrilled at the idea of this new confidence that appeared to be growing apace inside of me. The ‘old Joey’ might have been lying like a shed skin by the side of the road. ‘Oh, Joey,’ I heard her saying, ‘I never dreamed it would be this good. You’re so …’
She’d be lost for words. I’d toss her a smile.
There was nobody around when I got as far as the bungalow. Nobody I could see through the first window anyway. But when I looked through the second, who’s in there? Boyle. As fresh as a daisy, it seemed, walking around chatting away to — guess who? — Detective Tuite, with the pair of them getting on like a house on fire. All you could hear was Boyle saying: ‘I’ll make sure it’s worth your while coming out here tonight, Mr Tuite. I know you’re taking a big risk, but you know you can trust me. Which is more than can be said for a lot of the fuckers around Scotsfield. And believe me, I should know, for I’ve been doing business in it long enough. Fucking felons, wouldn’t believe a word comes out of their mouths. But listen here. This information. We’ve got the lowdown on a couple of very important people. Who’ve made the big mistake of stepping out of line with some other very important people, if you get my drift. Not that it matters to me what they fucking do. Just don’t ask us where we got it. All you need to know is that they shouldn’t have crossed Sandy, know what I’m saying? And, if you play your cards right, Detective, what I have to tell you should see them put away for a very long time. But before we get to that—’