Reading Ulysses

I walked around the garden in the evening sun. The fields are full of rabbits again. I think they enjoy taunting the dog. They run around the open fields and they look like easy prey, but they always make it back to the ditches before he gets to them. He knows they’re taunting him.

My cousin Gary got a copy of Ulysses from his aunt for his birthday. His sister Chloe thought it was hilarious because he never read books, but he pretended to be very happy with the present, and he said he looked forward to reading it. He was reading the newspaper at the kitchen table a few weeks later when Chloe asked him if he’d enjoyed Ulysses. He had made an attempt to read the book, but he was stuck on the first word. He couldn’t admit this to his sister, so he told her it was one of the best books he’d ever read, and she asked him what it was about. The newspaper was open at the sports pages. He had been reading a preview of an upcoming Gaelic football match in which all the players were profiled, so he took a quick glance at that and said, “It’s about a man called Billy Green, who’s the sales manager in a car dealership. He’s twenty-eight years old and he’s six foot two. His interests include rowing and golf. And then there’s another man called Eddie ‘The Hatchet’ Moriarty. He owns a bar and he’s thirty-one years old. He’s five foot eleven. He says he doesn’t have many interests outside football, but he loves shooting.” The dog came into the kitchen and did a little dance. Then he walked on again. “But anyway,” Gary said, “there’s another man called Shane Duignan. He’s twenty-two and he’s a builder. He’s five foot ten. He can play on the half-back line or at full forward. I mean, he can ‘build’ on the half-back line or as a full-forward.” Gary went through a few more of the player profiles and he said they were all trying to find a valuable diamond after it had been stolen from a bank, and he found it hilarious that Chloe believed him. On the following day he bought a copy of War and Peace and he told her he was reading that. It looked as if there were a lot of characters in it, more than fifteen anyway, so he looked at the player profiles in his guide to English football for the 2001-2002 season. He told his sister that War and Peace was about Juan Sebastian Veron, Szilard Nemeth, Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink and Alan Shearer, amongst many others. But all of the characters were professional sportsmen. And they were all men too. If it was just called ‘War’, Gary thought, all of the characters could easily be men, but there’s the peace section too. Chloe looked slightly suspicious by the time he got to the end of his synopsis. When Gary looked through the book later he saw a lot of Russian names in it, and he wondered how likely it was that a professional sportsman in Newcastle called Lomana Tresor Lua Lua would appear in a 19th century Russian novel about war and peace. The next book he bought was The Great Gatsby, and when Chloe asked him what that was about he said, “It’s about a man called Roger Federer, and…” He noticed that she looked very suspicious then, so he said, “But I’ve only just started reading it and I don’t know much more than that.” Gary decided that the best way out of this was to actually read a bit of the book, and at least it was much shorter than War and Peace or Ulysses. He had a feeling it would be more entertaining too. Chloe’s boyfriend, Bill, arrived at the house one Saturday evening. He looked very dazed and dishevelled. He gave a red rose to Chloe and said, “I won it in a game of rugby.” Chloe said, “But you don’t play rugby.” “And I don’t even play rugby,” Bill said, and Chloe looked very suspicious. Bill had a habit of getting into tricky situations, usually with the aid of alcohol. Gary saw a way of helping him out and making a fool of his sister at the same time (he was really more interested in the latter) if he just explained Bill’s situation by telling the story from The Great Gatsby. He said, “I actually know what happened here. I’ve been following this story. Bill has acquired a fairly substantial amount of money. I’m not entirely sure how. But anyway, he fell in love with a woman who’s married to an American footballer. Or maybe he’s a rugby player. Yeah, that’s make more sense. I don’t know what his height is. There were lots of parties and drinking and all that. He had an affair with this woman, but her husband looked down on Bill for being a bit too common - you know what rugby players are like. And then…” Gary hadn’t got to the end of the book yet, and he was about to make up something about stealing a diamond, but then he noticed that Chloe looked very angry, so he said no more. Bill was still too dazed to know what was going on. The dog was lying on the ground, and Gary said to him, “Now would be an appropriate time to do your dance.” But the dog didn’t move.

The moose’s head over the fireplace is already wearing his Liverpool scarf for tonight’s Champions League final. He’s staring at the painting on the opposite wall, almost as if he’s daring the hen to support AC Milan. The hen still looks surprised, and we’re all a little bit surprised to find Liverpool in the Champions League final.

The Sound of the Wind

Work on the garden is starting to take up more time, but we have the extra daylight to do it. Although it feels like a waste of time when you spend half the evening looking for something the dog hid in a bucket.

My cousin Rachel was modelling a new dress at her sister’s house one evening. June, Rachel’s sister, has a pet duck called Sleepy, and he was in the kitchen too, but he shook his head when he saw the dress. Rachel was very disappointed with this reaction, but June said, “Don’t take any notice of what Sleepy thinks. He’s just a duck. And he’s asleep anyway.” Sleepy walked across the kitchen and flew onto a chair. “He’s sleepwalking,” June said. “And sleep-flying.” But Rachel didn’t believe her. June said, “The opinion of a duck doesn’t really matter when it comes to dresses. He just likes bright coloured clothes. Or bright coloured anything. If you were wearing a bright red cardboard box he’d prefer it to the dress.” At the same time, my cousin Ronan was sitting at a bare wooden table with some friends of his. The only sound was from a clock ticking on the wall. There was no carpet on the floor. Ronan looked towards the window. The wind howled outside. When a woman coughed they all looked towards her, and she looked down at her hands. Ronan was the first to break the silence. He said, “I know people have accused us of being too self-critical in the past, but this must be the worst performance of Grease ever.” The audience woke up and said, “Is it over yet?” “You can go home now,” Ronan said. The other members of the Amateur Dramatics Society hadn’t spoken in the past half-hour, and it was another ten minutes before a woman sitting at the table said, “Why don’t we do ‘My Fair Lady’ instead.” They all agreed to that because they were sick of Grease. The next time Rachel visited her sister, she wore a brighter dress. Sleepy didn’t shake his head this time, but he didn’t nod either. “He still doesn’t approve of it,” Rachel said. Sleepy has always admired Alec Guinness, and June keeps a photo of him on top of the fridge, just in case she ever needs to distract the duck. So she picked up the photo and held it over Rachel’s shoulder. Sleepy started nodding his head, and June said, “See. He does like the dress.” Rachel nodded too. Ronan was on the stage, pacing from one end of the set to the other. He stopped at the window and looked out at the painted landscape, a bleak winter scene. There was a tear in the eye of one of the women sitting at the table. “This is even worse than Grease,” Ronan said. “At least it’s just a rehearsal.” The woman at the table broke down in tears and Ronan said, “We might as well go home now.” As he walked home he thought about giving up on My Fair Lady, but when he stepped into the kitchen, the first thing he saw was a teapot with ‘I’m a little teapot’ written on it (his mother had just bought it) and he realised where they were going wrong with the musicals. The set on the stage was just a room with bare floorboards and a bare wooden table. It looked too depressing, and they needed something much lighter for Grease or My Fair Lady. So the next day he took the teapot to the theatre and put it on the table. It lightened the atmosphere, and he kept adding in little things, like flowers or bright curtains. Rachel was doing her best to impress the duck. Every time she visited she wore a very colourful dress, and she even started wearing flowers in her hair. June kept holding up the photo of Alec Guinness, and Rachel was always happy when Sleepy nodded. When Ronan saw Rachel wearing a very bright dress with a flower in her hair, he asked her if she’d take a part in My Fair Lady. She could sing too, and Ronan realised the other thing that had been missing from their attempted musicals - music. On the day of the first performance, Ronan thought of one other thing he could add to the set to lighten the mood. A sleeping duck on the stage was just the thing he needed. June agreed to allow Sleepy make his musical debut, but she suggested hanging a photo of Alec Guinness on the wall if Rachel was to be in it too. Rachel didn’t mind sharing a stage with Sleepy because she got to wear a bright dress and a hat with flowers in it. When June saw the set with the photo on the wall, she was reminded of the film version of Great Expectations with Alec Guinness. That was one of Sleepy’s favourite films. The duck was asleep on the stage when the curtain rose, but he woke when Rachel started singing. He looked around him and started shaking his head. He turned around and walked away, shaking his head as he looked down. June got the impression that he was thinking, “This must be the worst performance of Great Expectations ever.” He sat down at the edge of the stage and went to sleep. Rachel had been watching him out of the corner of her eye. She stopped singing when she saw him shaking his head. There was a coat hanging from a hook on the door. When Sleepy went to sleep, Rachel put the coat on, put the hat on the ground and sat down at the table in silence. The only sound was from the ticking of the clock and the howling wind outside.

The moose’s head over the fireplace seems to be enjoying the extra daylight too. It’s nice to be able to stand at the window in the evening and look out at colours other than black. I’d have thought that the moose’s head would find the extra daylight sad because of the memories it would bring of summer days in the hills and valleys when he had a body, but he seems quite happy on the wall, as if he’s in retirement now. You could understand why the hen in the painting would be surprised to see a moose’s head in a retirement home on a wall over a fireplace.

The Goat

All the insects are out and about again. There are a good few flies and bees and wasps around the place, plus a flat green thing I haven’t seen before, and a lot of very nasty-looking black things.

My aunt Bridget and uncle Harry invited a lot of the relatives to their house for a day during the Christmas holidays. It had been snowing for the previous few days. My cousin Hugh was there with his fiancée, Annabel, and they went out sledding. They walked about a mile to the top of a hill and stood before the steepest slope. Hugh went first. Annabel gave him a push, but there was really no need. He got more than enough speed from the slope, and then he gradually slowed down as the land flattened out. He came to a rest on a frozen lake, and he got off the sled very carefully in case the ice broke, but just as he was standing up he heard a very ominous sound. When he looked around he saw a goat hammering at the ice with his hoof. “Stop that,” Hugh said. “Stop hitting the ice. You’ll break it.” The goat looked up briefly, and then went back to hitting the ice. Hugh kept telling him to stop, but the goat ignored him, so Hugh took off his scarf and threw it at the goat. It landed in the goat’s left horn and he stopped hitting the ice. He looked up and tried to remove the scarf from his horn, but the scarf moved every time he moved. He ended up running in circles, chasing the scarf above him, and he completely ignored Hugh when he said, “Stop it! Stop running. You’ll break the ice.” Annabel had attached Hugh’s gloves to the sleeves of his coat with a piece of thread. She did it as a joke, but he found it very useful because he was always losing his gloves, so he left the thread there. He pulled off one of the gloves, and swung it from side to side with the piece of thread. “Look at the glove,” Hugh said to the goat. “Keep your eyes on the glove at all times.” The goat stopped running in circles and looked at the swinging glove. “You are getting very sleepy. You are not on a frozen lake in winter. There is not a scarf on your head. Take a deep breath and relax. You’re in a field in the middle of summer. There’s a blue sky above. Birds are singing. Little lambs are jumping through the long grass. Just relax.” The goat looked very relaxed as he stared at the glove. Hugh very slowly walked off the ice, swinging the glove all the time, and the goat kept staring at it. Annabel had reached the bottom of the hill at that stage. Hugh told her what had happened, and then they headed back towards the house, but the goat followed them. Hugh put the glove in his pocket, and he said to the goat, “Go home. Go home.” He said it very slowly, but the goat didn’t seem to understand what he was talking about. The goat followed them all the way to the back garden. Annabel went over to get the scarf, and she said to Hugh, “The poor thing is shivering. He must be frozen.” “Well I think I might have hypnotised him into thinking that this is a day in the middle of summer with lambs jumping in the grass and that sort of thing.” “You poor thing,” Annabel said to the goat, and she put the scarf around his neck. The kids were playing hide-and-seek in the house. Scott was doing the hiding, and Daisy, Graham, Alice and Grace were trying to find him. It’s a huge house, and after an hour of looking they still hadn’t found him. They’d looked behind all the curtains, and then they concentrated their efforts on the cupboards, but still no luck. Alice said, “I know of one more cupboard in the house. He must be in there. It’s in a room upstairs.” So they went to the room, opened the door as quietly as they could and tiptoed towards the cupboard, then they opened the doors very suddenly and said, “Aha!” But Scott wasn’t there. “Wait a minute,” Alice said, “there’s another cupboard downstairs that we haven’t checked yet. He must be in there.” They went back down again, tiptoed towards the cupboard, opened the door suddenly, but still no Scott. Alice remembered another cupboard, so then more tiptoeing and suddenly opening doors of an empty cupboard. They were all getting sick of the game at this stage. As they were walking past the back door they heard a noise. Alice whispered, “That must be Scott. He’s hiding in the back porch.” So they tiptoed towards the back door, opened it suddenly, and saw a goat lying on the ground in the porch. He was wearing a scarf and a hat. He just looked back up at them. Alice said, “Hands up who agrees that this is Scott.” They all put up their hands straightaway and went to watch TV. Hugh and Annabel had been discussing what to do with the goat. Annabel’s suggestion was to try to snap him out of his trance, but Hugh thought it was a stupid idea. She pointed out that it was he who put the goat into the trance by telling him about summer days and lambs jumping in long grass. That sounded fairly stupid then too, so he agreed to try her idea. Scott’s father, my cousin Mike, had been with Uncle Harry and the other cousins sampling some of Harry’s drinks cabinet. He took a break for a few minutes to stretch his legs, and he found the kids watching TV. When he asked where Scott was, Alice said, “We were playing hide-and-seek, and we found him in the back porch.” “Where is he now?” “He’s probably still in the back porch. He seemed quite happy there.” The other kids nodded. Mike went to the back porch and when he saw the goat with the hat and the scarf, the first thing he thought of was a bottle with no label that Harry took from the very back of the drinks cabinet. He said it was very strong, and there was a funny taste off it. It seemed to offer the most likely explanation for the fact that he was seeing a goat in a hat and a scarf. He went back inside, and as he was walking past a cupboard in the study, he heard a noise from it. He opened the doors and saw Scott inside. Scott said, “Ssh. They still haven’t found me,” and he closed the doors. Mike walked on towards the kitchen. Hugh and Annabel took the goat out to the back garden. Hugh stood in front of him and said, “When I snap my fingers, you’ll be back in the real world. It’ll be winter.” Hugh snapped his fingers. “Now go home… Go home…” Louise came into the kitchen and asked Mike where Scott was. Mike looked out the window and saw Hugh running in circles, closely followed by the goat. Then he remembered seeing Scott in the cupboard. He tried to make up his mind, and eventually he said, “He’s playing with Hugh in the back garden.” When Mike looked out again, Hugh was on the roof of the shed, with the goat looking up at him, and Hugh was swinging a glove attached to a piece of thread. “I need to sit down,” Mike said. Scott got sick of waiting and left the cupboard. He found the others watching TV. “Ye’re supposed to be looking for me,” he said, and Alice said, “We thought we had found you.” “No, I was in the cupboard in the study.” “I knew there was one more cupboard. We thought we found you in the back porch, wearing a hat and a scarf.” “No, I was in the cupboard in the study.” “Now that I think about it, that might have been a goat.” Daisy, Graham and Grace all said, “Ahhh.” When Hugh was on the shed, Annabel told him to tell the goat that it’s summer and the lambs are running in the long grass. Hugh said, “That’s a stupid idea. I only said it earlier because I was about to fall into a frozen lake. If he can’t understand the words ‘go home’, how is he going to understand something about lambs in long grass.” Annabel said, “Mr. Goat. That man on the shed wants to kick you.” “He doesn’t know what you’re talking about. He’s just looking at the glove.” Hugh got down from the shed very slowly, swinging the glove all the time, and the goat seemed completely relaxed then. The kids went outside to see the goat, and Scott said, “How could ye think the goat was me?” Alice said, “He was wearing a hat and a scarf earlier.” The others nodded. Annabel told Hugh to put the hat and the scarf back on the goat so the kids could see it, and then she said to the goat, “Remember, Mr. Goat, he wants to kick you.” Hugh tiptoed towards the goat and the kids followed him, tiptoeing just behind him, moving slower and slower as they got closer to the goat. About two feet away, Alice shouted, “Now!” Hugh got a shock, and the goat got a bit of a shock from the shocked looking Hugh, and Hugh got a very big shock from a slightly shocked goat. Hugh ran around the front of the house. All the relatives in the front room saw him and went to the kitchen to see what was going on. Annabel had put a hat on the goat. She and the kids were standing back, just looking at it. Aunt Bridget said, “I wonder where that goat came from.” “What goat?” Mike said. Uncle Harry laughed and said, “I think I can explain this. That drink I gave you earlier, the man who sold it to me said it once made his horse fall off a car.” Then Mike saw Scott outside and said, “Which one’s Scott?” Harry said, “I’m very sorry about this. I’ll throw that drink away.” But he was really wondering where he could get more of it.

The moose’s head over the fireplace looks very serious when you put glasses over his eyes. He seems to enjoy looking serious, so we’ve left the glasses there for the past few days. The hen in the painting on the opposite wall looks more surprised than ever. Of course, it’s always possible that it’s just a painting of a surprised hen, but I don’t remember it looking that surprised until it saw a moose’s head over the fireplace. I don’t remember it looking particularly surprised at all.

The Storm

I noticed the leaves starting to come out on the trees yesterday. And then in the evening Liverpool beat Chelsea in the Champions League semi-final. I was talking about winter last week, but now it’s difficult to imagine anything but summer.

My uncle Harry and aunt Bridget went to visit their daughter, June, one Saturday afternoon. June’s kids, Daisy and Graham, looked out the kitchen window at things blowing by on the breeze - newspapers, a scarf, a rabbit asleep on a box. The rabbit and the box disappeared behind a hedge. “You’d think it’d wake up,” Graham said. They left the kitchen window and went to the front room where their grandfather was talking to their father about the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Uncle Harry thought that one of the four horsemen was a dead fox, and Daisy wondered how a dead fox could be a horseman. She remembered the rabbit on the box. If a sleeping rabbit could glide along the ground like that, then a dead fox as one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse didn’t seem all that unbelievable. But then she realised that the four horsemen of the apocalypse wouldn’t be a good sign. And a rabbit blowing by on the breeze wouldn’t be a good sign either. She looked out the window and said, “Oh my God! It’s a storm!” The rain came with the thunder and lightening, but after an hour the skies cleared and they went outside. Graham’s rabbit was asleep in the hutch, but Daisy couldn’t find hers. Graham drew a chalk outline of a rabbit on the ground, but he couldn’t resist adding in a speech bubble with the words ‘I’m dead’, and he gave the rabbit a curly tail, like a pig’s. He was often saying that the rabbit was dead - that was just one of his hobbies - and his sister never believed him. But when she saw the chalk outline, tears started to well in her eyes. Graham tried to take her mind off the rabbit. He had a James Bond Action Man figure and he said, “The one man we need in a situation like this is James Bond.” So he got Bond to help in the search, but he got bored after a few minutes (Graham, not Bond) and he glued the figure to a ladder. He couldn’t get it off the ladder then, so he started playing with the ladder instead. He got bored with that too, so he decided to kill James Bond as well. He drew a chalk outline of the ladder with a speech bubble that said ‘Tell Moneypenny I’m an idiot’, but Daisy didn’t believe he was really dead. Their father and grandfather were walking around the garden, putting things back in their rightful places after the storm. A towel that was on the clothesline had blown into a tree and Harry said, “You’ll need the ladder to get that down.” The kids’ father, Dan, was nervous after listening to Harry talk about the four horsemen of the apocalypse for an hour during a storm, and he didn’t feel like climbing the ladder when the wind was still strong. He said, “I think I gave a loan of the ladder to someone.” But Harry had remembered seeing Graham talking to the ladder earlier. He was saying, “I was talking to a flag pole about it, and then I thought, wait a second, I’m talking to a flag pole.” Harry said to Dan, “I’m sure it’s around here somewhere. Graham was talking to it earlier.” They went looking for it, and they found the chalk outline of the ladder first. This only made Dan more nervous. And then they found the ladder leaning against the shed. Dan couldn’t get out of it then, so he took the ladder to the tree and leaned it against the branches. He climbed up very slowly, and just as he was reaching out for the towel, a strong gust of wind blew the tree forward. Dan fell off the ladder and into the tree, and he was just about able to hold onto the branches when the tree swung back the other way. The ladder fell backwards and landed on the kennel. Daisy’s rabbit ran out of the kennel and James Bond came off the ladder, landing in a hanging basket, where he hung upside down, swaying from side to side. “I told you he wasn’t dead,” Daisy said as she pointed at James Bond.

The moose’s head over the fireplace has spent the past few days staring a new painting on the opposite wall (apart from a brief distraction when Luis Garcia scored against Chelsea to put Liverpool into the Champions League final - even the moose’s head thought it was over the line). It looks as if he’s taking in every detail, trying to appreciate this work of art, but it’s just a painting of a hen. We thought about unveiling it to surprise the moose and see his reaction, but it was easier to cover the moose’s head and ‘unveil’ him instead. I have a feeling that the hen in the painting looked more surprised to see a moose’s head than the moose’s head was to see a hen.