EATING ONIONS
Sheila and Erwan were eating lunch. They were looking at each other, thinking about thinking. Or at least, that’s what Erwan was thinking. He asked her what she was thinking. She was thinking about her supervisors at the M— hospital.
‘The bastards don’t think about me at all,’ she said, getting angry.
Erwan nodded.
She continued to eat her lunch in silence, staring out the window. It was a dull day, blowy, and with a grey-brushed feel to it. Erwan drew her back to the topic at hand.
He found out that she was quite frustrated with her supervisors, that she worked hard and did all the menial tasks she was asked to do, but she was becoming suspicious. She suspected that they weren’t going to help her complete this MSc.
‘Why not?’
‘Because they aren’t interested in it. Erwan, they never ask me the slightest help with it. I was talking to Dr. A— when Dr. C— came in and started talking right over the top of me! They completely forgot that I was there!’
Erwan thought about this.
‘They are bastards,’ he said.
‘That’s what I told you,’ said Sheila, as if annoyed at his slowness.
Erwan was mesmerised by this person. Her diminutive size – five foot zero – contained a surprising capacity for anger, anger at injustice, at slights, and at herself also.
He was seeing her frequently. Erwan had settled into a new way of being: a way of not settling into being; taking things any way they came; seeing what happened. This way of being had brought good things to him so far. He liked what was happening at the moment. It was fine by him if it continued.
Erwan was going out with Sheila. He had been since a while back. He was enjoying it. He had found out many things about her: not only had she no middle name, but she came from south Armagh. She would always say this, when asked, with fierce pride. Another truth was that he had met some of her cousins – Eoin, for instance, and Feargal and Cormac and Colm and Ciaran, and also some others. Many others. A select group of them had attended a Counting Crows concert in Dublin.
He’d suffered a severe reaction to alcohol for the first time. They’d been travelling up in the bus all day. It was a bus specially laid on for the concert. They’d caught it in Dundalk a few hours before that, a Saturday afternoon. He’d done his Propositional Calculus paper the day before. With Sheila he’d caught the train to Newry to stay at with her folks just north of Forkhill on Slieve Gullion.
At the venue, on the Saturday, they decided to have a drink in a pub next door, he and Sheila and her brother James. Her uncle, Hamish, was also there. While Erwan drank that pint at the bar beside the concert venue, his stomach slowly began to growl and twist and make unpleasant feelings for him. It felt like an octopus was opening his stomach lining with a pan-saw. At first he ignored it. He drank more of the Guinness in his pint. The agony became too much. He handed his pint to James, Sheila’s brother, saying:
‘Here man, you want this? My stomach can’t take it. Don’t know what’s up.’
James looked bemused. ‘Ok,’ he said, and accepted it.
Sheila returned from the toilet.
‘What’s up?’ she asked.
Before Erwan answered, he thought about the day before. The day before, Erwan had gone with Sheila to Dundalk. There was a pub called The Spirit Store, down by the docks, where a febrile mix of good-music lovers and sailors mingled, drunk, to talk shit of several sorts. Erwan was amongst them. He accepted several pints and in turn bought several more. In fact he wasn’t used to this level of drinking. He spoke for a while to Sheila’s cousin Fergal about Roy Keane.
‘He shouldn’t have done that, I don’t think,’ said Erwan.
‘Wha? He was right to have done it. Sure the team were probably as lazy as he said. He was fucked off for them not taking it seriously.’
‘Yeah, I guess so. But then maybe he could have just worked inside it and then come out afterwards and made his complaint? Still played for them. You know.’
Roy Keane had come home prematurely from the world cup the previous summer, having had enough of the lackadaisical training regime and surfeit of rigour or professionalism. Keane had done, perhaps, what any enterprising and ambitious young man would have done and applied strict standards to his play and that of his team-mates. He left when those standards couldn’t be met. Erwan didn’t really know any of this; he’d heard what anyone would hear about it, but he’d never given the issue any thought before. Somehow the conversation had come up and so Erwan pursued it with great vigour. It was never Erwan’s instinct to make a blandly acquiescent response to any statement.
‘No, I still think he was right to do it. If they couldn’t fix it up, then he was right to go. I think so.’
They debated long and furiously about the demerits of Roy Keane’s case.
Later Erwan and a cousin of Sheila’s and some sailors from Poland shared a potent joint outside. ‘This shit is from Poland,’ they said, passing it around. Erwan invented some story about robots to keep everyone entertained. He was rather drunk and more than a little stoned. The rest of the evening was a sloppy mess.
When Erwan got back to Sheila’s folks house, at about half-two in the morning, he felt like the gears of death were turning in his digestive system. The cannabis and alcohol had combined to produce a vision of hideous loathsomeness as if he was staring into a dank cellar and being told that he had to live there with no-one in silence forever. Sheila assured him that he’d feel better later. He accepted this intervention with some relief and went up to sleep on the spare bed.
Erwan reflected on this. ‘My stomach just turned on that Guinness.’
‘We’ll buy whiskey for you. Sure that’ll be better.’
James and Sheila told him of their own stomach pains. It turned out that everyone in the world was doing battle with stomach ulcers, bad ones, and it was very likely because of drinking. Erwan asked if this had actually stopped anyone from drinking. They said no; they got used to it after a while. It just made their insides out the next day – or next week. Erwan didn’t like this. He didn’t want to drink over a bad stomach and see his own blood.
He and James chatted about different types of music they liked and also about smoking. They finished their drinks and went into the venue, a large stadium-style place. They got some more drinks at the bar there, beer for most, a whiskey or two for Erwan. Hamish, Sheila’s uncle, regaled them with stories about drugs and mafias. Cormac, Sheila’s cousin (double first cousin) joined them. They had a few drinks.
They rushed into the big stadium as soon as the first familiar notes of the Crows opening number began. Sheila grabbed Erwan’s hands. She pulled him rapidly in the direction of the left-hand side of the hall. It was dark but the mass of people were surging forward, thousands packed together in the shadows. Up on stage the band pounced through their first song with great energy. Erwan watched the mass of people, the audience, the distant musicians, the singer with his dreadlocks, the bassist with a colourful jacket, and the other members, six or more. It seemed like a panoply of polyphony, or world conference for all the people interested in sound. Erwan took part in it as well as his ability would allow.
‘So what do you think you can do?’ asked Erwan in the café.
‘Don’t know,’ said Sheila. ‘Murder them.’
There was another guy called M— at the M— hospital. Sheila very much disliked M—. He was a busybody, an obsessive-compulsive, and like many such personalities he was in charge of H&S in the lab.
H&S was a species of anti-litigation machinery developed across the western world in response to decades of overzealous prosecution by busybodies who sued for any life-threatening injury or stubbed toe. In another view, possibly the more correct view, H&S was designed to provide a safe work environment for all employees. Workers, after all, have a right not to be injured through negligence.
In any case H&S was universally despised by all who came into contact with it. T
hose who were assigned officers were in deadly battle with those who had to be chained daily in its strictures. It was wrong, for instance, to leave a pipette tip lying on the ground in case somebody stood on it. Then it would go flying into somebody else’s eye. That is almost certainly a fabricated example. But there are other examples that probably have happened and the reader can think of these for herself. In any case, H&S was something somebody had thought about, and written down, and encoded into rule. The tabloids were full of stories of ridiculous instances of H&S gone haywire. The story of the man who couldn’t tie his own shoelaces at work, for instance, because it meant bending over so he might get a slipped disc. Again, this example has been fabricated. Please insert your own.
Sheila did not despise M— because he was the H&S officer. Sheila had no tabloid-derived hatred of H&S. No; she despised M— because he used the H&S platform to apply his own private program of tyranny and rule-setting. M—’s mind appeared to be organised around the basis of an ego-setting tripswitch. Every time someone bungled or made a minor protocol error in the lab, M— would pop out of his office with a disapproving frown. Then he would advance with trepidation towards you. He would become more and more anxious the closer he got. He would stare at your experiment as if it contained the most virulent bacterium known to humanity, ready leap at his throat and strangle the life out of him if he ventured too close. He’d tut and hiss and tap his foot as if he didn’t want to say what he had to say. Then he’d open his ill-shaped frowning mouth. Rhyme on and on about these protocols, these procedures, the safety blah blah blah and you’d be half-asleep on one side of your body and enervated out of all reasonable tolerance on the other. M— would finally turn away and squeak his shoes down the brightly polished lino. You would claw your eyes out in desperation, making silent screams and faces of grotesque incredulity. It would hurt you to return to work; but return you would. You always returned to work, you were incapable of starting the revolution by stabbing both of M—’s eyes out with a splintered pipette. You despised yourself for not having the guts to skewer him with lab equipment.
‘Sounds like a complete bastard,’ Erwan said sympathetically.
‘A complete bastard?’ Sheila raged. ‘That doesn’t describe the half of him.’
‘So …’ said Erwan carefully. ‘He’s two complete bastards.’
‘He’s three or four.’
They both laughed.
The question of what makes someone complete is an arduous and difficult one. It would be best for us to avoid that question – it would be best for us to be distracted, take away on the wings of birds to a new land, where we could raise flowers and build our houses out of lightness and air. But this cannot be done. We must bang our heads against the wall, for the fifth, sixth, and seventieth time. Take, for instance, this extract from the journal of Erwan Atcheson, aged 19, just a few days before his conversation with Sheila in the café:
Am I happy with my life? I am. I think it is a good life; I think I am lucky to be in my situation. Am I happy with my situation? Yes I am. Am I happy with future prospects? The world is my oyster, it really is. I have a girlfriend with whom I am happy; with whom I am more than happy. I am very pleased to have her. Friends, yes, I have all I need, if I need them. Therefore, I am happy about everything; I would not change anything in this life so far led; I have no real problems; and the future is mine to live as I will – I am as free as any person could be. There is nothing making me unhappy. So why am I not happy? How can there be no object that when I look at it I can think, ‘this is worth feeling unhappy about’? It is just a thing of the mind, somehow; some glumness which hides from your immediate gaze and lies where you are not focusing. You lift your attentions for one moment and it invades the spot you left. It is a drag, it is a real drag, and I know it is a drag; so what do I do?
I don’t feel so bad now that I’ve thought these thoughts; I feel pretty good (I think so anyway; other people might not feel that feeling as I do; I don’t know, I can’t see into their minds to see what kind of feelings they have that I might not have). But it is the nature of this beast that it will return again, and powerfully too, I have no doubt. I think it may be getting more powerful with each appearance. And with each appearance it becomes more difficult to answer, ‘what is the focus of these feelings?’ for it changes – nay, it deepens – every time. As my personal depth increases, everything I can experience increases – the depth of all aspects of my mental life become deeper and more profound.
Maybe it is a question of focusing on the source; or thinking to see if there are any grounds for actually feeling like this. If there are, well and good. Hopefully they are removable grounds. And if not? Well, then why worry? (But; and I suspect this; some things are difficult to just dismiss; not without considerable and painful mental processes and possibly reorganisation. Drag, again …).
And if there aren’t any grounds? Then … I still couldn’t feel … it (hmf) if I was made aware, on general enumeration and revue of my life, that I was displeased with no thing? I suspect, in fact, that I could – That my brain could still send me suspicions of problems that beyond my immediate vision always hid. I guess, though, that if you can’t explicitly see the problem, then assume it to be a pseudo-one.
What Erwan Atcheson realised was that there were no pseudo-problems; all the problems of the world were entirely real. Most of the problems of the world lay beyond the slender circle of his ken.
‘I think Neil’s reading your copy of Brave New World now,’ said Erwan.
‘Oh right. That’s grand,’ said Sheila.
Sheila and Neil knew each other better than Erwan did. By ‘did’ we mean that Sheila and Neil had first met a long time ago, in 1999, during a university fieldtrip to a small fishing village. They had trampled on the grey early-morning worms, wriggling in the sand, a long line of undergraduates all marching hungover and crying to themselves. It was in honour of 210EVB104 Environmental Biology.
Sheila sneaked onto the course surreptitiously. As a Molecular Biologist she had no right to attend the module. By the time her supervisors found out it was too late – she had already bought the textbooks and gone on the fieldtrip. It was fortune that she did. She met, through that fieldtrip, several fast and firm friends. Neil, Barry, Tanya and Sarah amongst them.
‘Do you know he read the last line of the book before starting it?’ asked Erwan.
Sheila scowled. ‘That’s no way to read a book!’
That was the way Neil Steed read a book. The best – indeed only – way to tell if a book was worth the effort was to read the final line. He was sufficiently impressed by the ending of Brave New World to read it from the start. Or perhaps we should say, sufficiently disturbed.
It could be argued that if time is linear, humans are not.
The students would have liked to have escaped the wriggling of the worms.
Sheila met Tanya, Neil and Barry there. They drank, they had good times.
The clock began playing radio. A familiar song; the song Beyoncé had sung every morning for several weeks. Erwan groaded and muggled. In the tiny bed he and Sheila shared there was little room for more expansive gestures. Except – well. He went to lectures thinking himself superior to others. There was a seminar in particular that he attended on Wednesdays. It started at ten. It was Kant. It was far too difficult.
He spent hours staring at his computer screen in his room, trying to stay focused on each impossible sentence. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: it was like a ball of string wrapped in leather salted and left to dry in the sun for eighteen weeks.
Erwan listened to the music playing, rubbed his eyes, while Sheila got out of bed. Erwan lay there, dazed, almost comatose. Sheila prepared for her day. It was ridiculously early. They always got up early; they always went to bed late, talking.
When Erwan slept in the Big Pink house he was similarly befuddled, except there he slept in late at least. Indeed he found it impossible to rise under his own volition and
stared instead at the pitted marks on the ceiling. He made patterns out of them.
Another tune played on the radio. Erwan grented subvocal sounds.
Erwan persuaded himself to rise with the promise of a particularly invigorating coffee.
He made it using Levin MacHill’s percolator. This percolator was fast becoming the most treasured item of technology in the Pink House.
Erwan caught the Nutribar that Sheila threw to him. He ate it and then went downstairs to make some tea. Mark was also in the kitchen. He shared a few non-comittal phrases with the chap. He noted the small scar beneath his right eye. Mark was attending a management course with Eoin. Erwan knew little about him, and was not entirely aware that he always noted the scar below Mark’s right eye when he looked at him.
Erwan made the coffee, adding more grounds than he thought he ought. He trembled with cold, shivered at the ruin of mouldy plates and unspeakable filth on the floor and worktops. It was a sunny day outside, but the sun did not penetrate into this bomb-site of cutlery.
Erwan took the two cups of tea upstairs. Sheila was finishing off her makeup. She lived on the top floor with a view down onto the street. Erwan stationed himself at this window and stared down at the people walking to work. Soon he and Sheila would be joining them.
Erwan scrambled upstairs and pushed his computer ‘on’ switch. The computer ran its rusty gears round and round. It sounded like a tractor dragging a herd of goats up a 90° slope. He breathed on his coffee, hands wrapped around it, and felt glum and incapable of facing any work. When the desktop was loaded he opened a new document in Appleworks and typed:
Does the seed planted always determine the tree that grows? Or, can the future development of a person be predicted from his or her original physical state? Since that is an obviously clumsy expression of the question, I will instead ask: what of our future development can be predicted from our past?
Say we predict this future. Would we have the power, if we became aware of the predictions, to oppose them? Knowledge is freedom. Freedom to do what? Freedom is having more options. That is why freedom is also knowledge: because knowledge makes us aware of the way things are, and if we know what way things are, we can judge that state of affairs, and (to whatever extent is within our power) change that state of affairs.
He moaned and opened up Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.
Erwan and Sheila left the house. They chatted about what the day might hold. For Sheila it held dread at the thought of more soul-destroying work. Erwan was thinking about what he’d do after his lecture. He intended to do work, but he had a sneaky feeling that his will wasn’t all that strong today. No, he’d probably do work.
He and Sheila parted at the bus station outside Methody primary school, promising to meet again soon.
Erwan stared at the same cryptic line he’d started with 35 minutes ago.
Erwan rubbed his eyes, which felt like salt, and forced himself to admit the line was a lost cause. He moved onto the next one. It was evidently a follow-up from the first.
Erwan went to his lecture and felt tired. He answered a question put out to the class and listened to the lecturer with at least 50% attention. He chatted a bit to Ricky after, whose girlfriend wanted him to shave off his beard.
‘You want to shave off your beard?’ asked Erwan.
‘Sure, why not,’ said Ricky.
They parted ways. Erwan walked to the Big Pink house.
Meantime Emmett was living with Claire in a house on Malone Avenue. They took ecstasy regularly and both worked in the Tesco on the Lisburn Road. Emmett had discontinued his studies for a while, suspecting his marks were not as good as they could be. He was faced with repeating a year but did not much like the prospect. His ambitions had in fact plunged him into an abyss of nightmarish soup-like consistency. He did not know what he was going to do the next day let alone in the next seventy years. He had developed into a state of desire for all or nothing. Since he was evidently not going to achieve all, he had driven himself with a stick to the latter.
Erwan turned off his computer. It was becoming troublesome to continue.