'Darcy and O'Mara' is a novel by Arthur Cronin.
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Wednesday, July 27, 2005

The Lemon Tree

I tried to avoid the glasshouse during our little heat wave, but I went in there again the other evening and it was very nice inside. I told the dog to bite the hose outside, and that kept both of us entertained for half an hour. If you tell him to do something or not to do something he normally ends up biting things, so you might as well just tell him to bite something.

My cousin June has a habit of buying stupid things. One day she bought a statue of a man throwing a newspaper at a dolphin. She was showing it to her mother, my aunt Bridget, that evening, and Bridget pointed out that it was really just a statue of a man holding a newspaper. June said, “No, y’ see…” That’s as far as she got in her explanation. She had to admit that this was another item on the long list of stupid things she bought, so she said she’d take it back to the shop on the following day. The next time Bridget called around, the statue of the man holding the newspaper was still there, but it was next to a statue of a smiling dolphin. June said, “The man in the shop told me that these two statues are a set. He just forgot to give me the one of the dolphin the other day. So it is a statue of a man throwing a newspaper at a dolphin.” Bridget looked at them and said, “If that’s supposed to be a man throwing a newspaper at a dolphin, why is the dolphin so happy?” “Because…” That’s as far as June got in her explanation. Bridget said, “You’re going to have to stop buying stupid things. Don’t buy anything unless you think about it first.” “It’s not stupid. Dolphins are always happy, even when you throw things at them. Especially newspapers - they’re very intelligent.” Bridget shook her head and clicked her tongue. June changed the subject before her mother could make use of that ‘intelligence’ line. She started talking about the kids rehearsing for their school play. Daisy and Graham were playing daisies in it, and June got them to stare at daisies for inspiration. It kept them quiet for hours, and even Bridget had to admit that this was clever. Bridget and Uncle Harry went along to see the performance, and about half-way through, a boy called Martin walked across the back of the stage. He was holding up a placard that said ‘Lemon tree for sale’, and there was a phone number underneath it. He walked slowly so people would have a chance to read the number. Bridget was intrigued by this, and she couldn’t resist calling the number after the play. She was surprised to find that there really was a lemon tree for sale, and she was even more surprised when she put the phone down and wondered why she had agreed to buy it. She wasn’t all that surprised when she saw the tree and it looked nothing like a lemon tree. It looked nothing like a tree, more like a small bush. She planted it in an out-of-the-way spot in the garden, and hoped that no one would notice it, especially not June. But June did notice it the next time she called around with the kids. Bridget said, “A friend of mine gave me a present of that. I don’t know what it is. I’ll just have to wait and see after it grows.” June thought her mother was acting suspiciously, and then Graham said to his grandmother, “Martin has a black hat stand, if you want to buy it. He said he found it in a phone booth.” “Me? Buy a black hat stand,” Bridget said, and then she laughed. June figured out what was going on. She said, “You bought the lemon tree, didn’t you?” Bridget admitted what she had done, and June said, “Now you can never accuse me of buying anything stupid again.” “Yes I can. Because you will. And I won’t.” “We’ll see about that.” There had been a slight accident after the school play, when a cardboard tree that was part of the set caught fire. To pay for the repairs, the school organised a charity auction. People donated things to be sold. Bridget and June went along to this, and neither of them put in a bid for the first few items because they were so eager to avoid buying anything stupid. But then an antique teapot came up for sale, and they both wanted to buy that because it obviously wasn’t stupid. Martin brought it onto the stage and the bidding started. A few other people were trying to buy it is well, but then Martin held up a sign that said ‘For a similar teapot in better condition, call this number’. The other people dropped out of the bidding and got out their phones, but June and Bridget kept outbidding each other. Then Martin held up a sign that said ‘This one here was dug up by a dog’. They still kept putting in bids, but they were slightly more tentative now. June finally backed down. When the teapot was sold to Bridget, June smiled and said, “You bought a teapot dug up by a dog.” Bridget said, “It doesn’t matter who or what it was dug up by. It’s still a perfectly good teapot.” “That’s much more stupid than a statue of a man throwing a newspaper at a dolphin. Or even the lemon tree.” This argument went on for days, and neither of them bought anything in this time. Daisy was holding an apple in the back garden one day. She looked at it and said to Graham, “That cloud looks just like an apple.” Graham said, “You were looking at the apple when you said that.” “I’d just seen the cloud.” “That apple looks just like an apple - that’s what you should have said.” Daisy said, “Yeah well this apple looks just like that cloud.” Graham was confused at this stage. He didn’t know what to say then. Daisy said, “And the watering can looks like that cloud.” Graham looked up. Daisy said, “And that cloud looks like the shed.” Graham looked at a flowerpot, more confused than ever then. Bridget had been shopping that morning, and she was tempted to buy a brass statue of a dog with his head stuck in a flowerpot, but that was obviously stupid. When she called around to June’s place, Graham was staring at a cardboard box in the back garden. She asked him what he was looking at and he said, “An eighteenth century writing desk.” She asked if his mother bought it and he said yes. Bridget smiled. She went away again and came back half an hour later with the brass statue she’d seen that morning. She showed it to June and said, “I bought a brass statue of a dog with his head stuck in a flowerpot, and I know it’s stupid, but you can’t say anything about it because you bought an eighteenth century writing desk.” “What, this?” June said as she pointed at an eighteenth century writing desk in the front room. Bridget didn’t know what to say, but June did. She said, “You bought a brass statue of a dog with his head stuck in a flowerpot. You can never ever accuse me of buying anything stupid again. Nothing could possibly be as stupid as that.” Bridget looked down at the statue for a while, then she looked up and said, “Do you want to buy it?” June thought about it for a while and said, “Yeah, okay.”

The moose’s head over the fireplace looked very suspicious when we put a small statue of a fox in the room. I can understand why the hen in the painting looked surprised, but I wouldn’t have thought that the moose would worry about a fox. And this particular fox does look very friendly.

Wednesday, July 20, 2005

Enigmatic

One of our neighbours was in the garden the other day and he asked about the origins of the four stone steps. I’m glad someone finally asked about them. My grandfather built them rather than go to his cousin’s wedding. It was a very funny story.

My cousin Jane was in a small art gallery one day and she saw a version of the Mona Lisa that looked slightly different to the original. The title was ‘Mona Lisa with a toothache’. The owner of the gallery saw her looking at it and he came over to her. He said, “As you can see by the expression on her face, this is Mona Lisa with a toothache.” Jane said, “Oh,” but she didn’t sound convinced. The gallery owner said, “It’s enigmatic,” and he moved his hand around as he said it. Jane smiled and said, “Ohhhh. Yeah.” She nodded at the painting. She took her friend, Claudia, to see it a few days later. She told her about the toothache, but Claudia wasn’t convinced at all, so Jane said, “It’s enigmatic,” and moved her hand about. Claudia was even sceptical after this. She said, “What’s enigmatic about it?” Jane tried her best to explain it, but she wasn’t entirely sure of what she was explaining, and it didn’t work on Claudia. Later that day they were walking in the fields behind Uncle Harry and Aunt Bridget’s house and they came across a fence post with a pencil hanging from the top on a piece of string. They looked at it for a while and then Claudia said, “What’s that for?” Jane clicked her tongue, shook her head and said, “Well obviously it’s there to write things.” Jane picked up the pencil and wrote the word ‘sheep’ on the fence post. Claudia asked her why she’d written that. Jane looked around, but there were no sheep in the fields. She said, “Because there are sheep here.” Claudia looked around too, and she said she couldn’t see any. Jane said, “Well there should be… It’s enigmatic.” “What’s enigmatic about it?” “I wrote the word ‘sheep’ on a fence post and there aren’t any sheep at all.” “‘Stupid’ is the word for that, not 'enigmatic'.” Jane was going to suggest that Claudia didn’t know what ‘enigmatic’ means, but she wasn’t entirely sure of the meaning herself, so she said nothing. They continued their walk around the fields, and when they got back to the house they met Uncle Harry. My cousin Ronan was there too. He had taken up painting, and a few days before this he painted the back garden at Uncle Ben and Aunt Greta’s house. When they saw it they were very impressed, but Greta said, “Why did you add in a clothesline?” Ronan said, “I didn’t add in a clothesline. It was already there.” Greta said that they never had a clothesline in that spot. Ronan found this difficult to believe, so they went out in the back garden, and there definitely wasn’t a clothesline in the place Ronan thought there was. He couldn’t understand how he came to believe that there was a clothesline there. He had made a sketch of the garden, and he was sure he saw the line then. He even added in some clothes. He had been thinking about this for days, but he couldn’t figure it out, and this made him very nervous. Uncle Harry said to Jane and Claudia, “I was just walking in the fields there, and someone has written the word ‘sheep’ on a fence post.” Claudia smiled, said, “It’s enigmatic,” and winked a few times. Ronan stared at her, wondering what she meant by that, and then Harry said, “It’s funny that the word ‘sheep’ was on the fence post, because I was talking to Billy earlier - he owns those fields - and he was telling me that one of his sheep has gone missing. His son once called this sheep ‘Dorothy’ and he’s been acting strangely ever since. That’s the sheep who’s been acting strangely, not his son. His son must have been acting strangely before that if he calls sheep ‘Dorothy’.” Claudia wanted to say that it was enigmatic, but she wasn’t sure if this was the appropriate word. Ronan was still staring at her. My cousin Hector called around to see Harry and Bridget, and he brought his twin daughters, Alice and Grace. That morning, they had been watching a TV show about the life of a lamb, and the lamb was played by an ostrich. Grace said, “You’d probably need a giraffe or something to play a fully grown sheep.” Alice said that was ridiculous - that a cow would do. They were still arguing about this at Harry and Bridget’s house. They were in the back garden with Ronan in the evening, as he was sitting on a deck chair, trying to paint the rockery. He found it difficult to focus on the painting when Jane and Claudia joined them, because he was convinced that Claudia was up to something. He tried to ignore them, and after a few minutes he was able to focus on the rockery again. His face was very close to the canvas as he painted the moss. A sheep walked across the garden and stood on top of the rockery. Alice pointed at it and said, “That’s probably just a horse.” Ronan looked up and saw the sheep, then he pushed over the easel and ran away screaming. “Now that’s enigmatic,” Claudia said.

The moose’s head over the fireplace finds it very difficult to stay awake in the heat. I don’t know if he has trouble sleeping at night. I’m not sure if he sleeps at all. I came down in the middle of the night once and he was wide awake, but he seemed quite happy. The wife has already given him sunglasses, and the other day she suggested putting sun cream on him. She said she was joking, and that it was me who suffered the lapse in mental faculties because I thought she was being serious, but I don’t believe her.

Wednesday, July 13, 2005

Scrabble

Summer has certainly arrived now. Of course, it’d be nice if it was a little bit cooler, and it probably will be soon enough. You can’t do much in this weather.

My cousin June got her husband, Dan, to paint their shed one summer day. It turned out to be one of the hottest days of the year, and Dan would have been much happier in the shade with a cold drink. Then the dog attacked the shed door just after it was painted. Dan had to hold him back for a while, and then he spent the next half-hour chasing the dog, following the trail of blue paint. That evening, they went to visit June’s parents, my Aunt Bridget and Uncle Harry. They played Scrabble, and June noticed that most of the words Dan formed were related to the shed, like ‘blue’ or ‘paint’. So ever since then she’s used Scrabble to determine what’s on his mind. She was organising a party one Saturday and she noticed that Dan was acting strangely early in the day, so when Aunt Bridget and Uncle Harry arrived, she suggested a game of Scrabble to see what he was up to. But he came up with words like ‘gold’ and ‘Mini’, and she couldn’t read anything into them. She tried to figure out what they meant, but she forgot about that when she met her kids, Daisy and Graham, in the kitchen. Graham had his hand in an empty jam jar, and there was a piece of rope and a pea on the kitchen table. She asked them what they were up to and Daisy said, “I found a piece of rope and a pea, but I couldn’t find the measuring tape.” June asked them if they’d seen her necklace while they were looking for the measuring tape, but they hadn’t, and then she asked why they were looking for the measuring tape. Daisy said, “We thought it was in the jam jar, but it wasn’t.” Then Graham held up his hand with the jam jar and said, “I checked.” June thought about this and said, “Well why would the measuring tape be in the jam jar?” Daisy said, “The dog ran off with the measuring, and to get that back off him we gave him the bell, and then we put the measuring tape into the jam jar so the dog couldn’t get it.” June heard the dog running by outside with the bell, and she remembered the last time he got hold of it. It took days to get it back off him, and he spent those days running around with the bell in his mouth, often shaking his head from side to side. That was a nightmare. Daisy said, “And then we remembered the last time he got the bell. When it took days to get it back. And he kept ringing it over and over and over again. That was a nightmare. So we decided he’d be better off with the measuring tape, but when we went to get that from the jam jar it was gone.” Graham held up his hand again. June was desperate to get the bell back from the dog, so she looked around the house for the measuring tape. Daisy helped her while Graham tried to get the jam jar off his hand. They looked in every room for it, but they couldn’t find it anywhere. And then when they got back to the kitchen they looked in a cupboard and the measuring tape was there in another jam jar. Daisy said, “It was in another jam jar. We never thought of that.” So they went into the back garden where the dog was ringing the bell, and June held the measuring tape up in front of him. He looked at it for a few seconds, but then he started ringing the bell again. June went inside and got a wooden spoon. She left the wooden spoon and the measuring tape on the grass in front of the dog, and this seemed to swing the deal. He dropped the bell and took the wooden spoon. He left that a few yards away and went back for the measuring tape. He took the tape over to the spoon and lay down on the grass, guarding them. June looked up and saw Dan at the end of the garden. He was following their pet duck, Sleepy. June’s gold necklace was around Sleepy. Every time Dan moved forward, the duck would move forward too. Graham, Uncle Harry, Aunt Bridget, some more of the relatives and Dan’s friends were a few feet behind Dan. He took a step forward, and so did Sleepy. Dan lay down on the grass very slowly, reaching forward towards Sleepy. His fingers were just a few inches away from the duck, but then Sleepy took a small step away from Dan, and Dan stopped moving. “Hang on a minute lads. I’ve got a great idea,” he said.

The moose’s head over the fireplace has started wearing sunglasses. The wife puts them on when the sun shines in. He looks very laid back, as if nothing would bother him, and I think he likes looking like that in front of the hen, because the hen still looks surprised. It looks as if nothing in the world could surprise the moose’s head. Even when I fell over a stuffed swan with a pipe he took no notice.

Wednesday, July 06, 2005

Polo

I went to the very back of the garden and looked out over the fields. I once saw someone on horseback chasing a man on a hang glider, but the fields are rarely as exciting as that.

My cousin June’s kids, Daisy and Graham, learnt how to play the piano, and most people thought Graham had a gift for it, even though he normally just played the same note over and over again. Daisy didn’t like the idea of her brother being better than her, so she took up the violin, and she was very good at that. Graham didn’t like his sister to do better than him either, but not enough to learn how to play the violin. He started ringing a bell instead. When visitors came to the house, Daisy would play the violin for them and Graham would ring a bell. My cousin Mike called around one day with his wife, Louise, and their son, Scott. Daisy played her violin and Graham rang the bell. Scott was starting to feel left out, so he held up an apple. The kids went out into the back garden, and there were some cows in the field just beyond the fence. As Daisy played the violin for the cows, Graham rang the bell and Scott held up an apple. The cows just stared back at them. Daisy said, “That means they like it,” and Graham said, “When is silence a sign that someone likes something?” Daisy said, “Well if they objected to anything, it would have been the way ye were ringing that bell and holding the apple.” Graham suggested that she ring the bell and he play the violin, so they tried that, with Scott still holding the apple, and this time one of the cows mooed. Graham said, “Now that’s a sign that they like it.” Daisy said, “It all sounds the same to them. When she mooed she was saying, ‘Why is he holding the violin like an idiot?’” Graham suggested that if they blindfolded the cow, she’d moo again when he plays the violin, and she’d be trying to say ‘more’. So Daisy put a blindfold on the cow, but before they even had a chance to play, the cow walked away. The other cows looked at Scott when he held up the apple, and he smiled at them. My uncle Ben has been playing polo for a few years. He started the team with some friends of his, but they only have one other team to play against. Neither team are very good at the sport. When they first started playing, they sometimes went whole matches without hitting the ball, but then one day a dog ran onto the field and started pushing the ball around for them. This was much easier than actually trying to hit it. The dog was the only one capable of scoring goals too, and they let him score as much as he wanted, but they pretended they were doing it themselves. The outcome of the game was a matter of chance, and this situation seemed much better than accepting that they couldn’t play polo. Some weeks Ben’s team would lose, and they’d congratulate their opponents at the end and tell them they played a great game. Some weeks they’d win and their opponents would congratulate them. The dog got better as the years went by, and they pretended that they were getting better. But then the family who owned the dog moved away, and the polo teams had to find a replacement. This proved to be extremely difficult. Some dogs they tried were frightened of the horses, others frightened the horses, some just sat there and did nothing, some were too quick and would score goals at one end while all the players were at the other end of the field, and a good few just ran away. They were considering giving up polo because of the difficulty in finding a replacement dog. On one July day, my cousin Hugh went for a picnic in the country with his fiancée, Annabel. They sat on a rug in the shade of a tree and listened to the radio. They heard the voice of a man describing his surroundings as he walked in the hills. He said, “That’s a funny looking dog,” and this was followed shortly afterwards by the sound of him screaming and running away. This made Hugh slightly nervous. He looked all around him, and he kept looking around as they walked back towards the car. He stopped when he thought he heard a noise. He stood still and listened, but he couldn’t hear anything. Then he turned around and saw a very funny looking dog. He ran away as fast as he could, but after a while he realised that it wasn’t a funny looking dog at all - it was a very ordinary looking sheep. He stopped and turned around. The sheep was standing next to Annabel, and he went back to them. It was then that he thought of how to replace the dog in Uncle Ben’s polo games. They could use the sheep instead of the ball, and the players could move around the pitch after the sheep, herding it towards the goals. Hugh was glad to be able to help his uncle, but the real reason he came up with the idea was because he saw a way of making money from it. He could bet on the game, and the outcome could be guaranteed by using a sheepdog to herd the ‘ball’. When he told Annabel about using the sheep, she suspected what he was up to. They had an argument about it in the field. A blindfolded cow came along and stopped when he heard the voices. He looked back and forth between Annabel and Hugh as they argued, and then he walked on again. Ben and his fellow polo players agreed to use the sheep as a ball, and it was a very enjoyable game for the first few minutes, as they trotted around the pitch after the sheep. But then a sheepdog ran onto the pitch. The dog was owned by one of Hugh’s friends, and the owner was there with Hugh on the sidelines, telling the dog what to do. The dog herded the sheep into the goal, but none of the players noticed what was going on because they had spent years ignoring the dog that used to push the ball around for them. None of them suspected that their new ball was being herded by a sheepdog. Ben only started to think that something was wrong at the end, after his team had lost ten nil. Neither team had ever lost by more than three goals before. And then he saw someone paying Hugh money. He suggested to his nephew that he’d rigged the game, and Hugh pretended to be very upset by this. Ben saw through the pretence, but he still had no idea how the game was rigged. When he was on his holidays, he went to a small casino with his wife. He went to the roulette table, but the croupier and the other players were just standing there, doing nothing. Ben asked what they were waiting for and the croupier said, “A mouse ate the ball. We’ll just have to wait until he comes back.” Ben placed a bet on black and waited. Twenty minutes later, the mouse appeared on the table and walked around the wheel. It stopped for a while and then it turned back the other way before finally coming to rest, and the croupier said that the ball was on black because that’s where the mouse’s nose was pointing. Ben went for red the next time, but the mouse pointed at a black number again. So Ben stuck with black after that, and so did the mouse. Everyone there saw the pattern too, and the mouse made them a fortune because of his preference for black. That’s when Ben got the idea that Hugh must be controlling the sheep using colours. He had no idea how this would work, but he was convinced that it was all done using colours. And shortly afterwards he had a brilliant idea of his own. The opposing team wore red, so if he got a bull to replace the sheep, he’d frighten off all of the opposition. Hugh had bet a large amount of money on the next match, and he was going to make sure that Ben’s team won this one, but he changed his mind after Ben accused him of rigging the last game. About fifty spectators came to watch it because they’d all heard of what Hugh was up to, and they all bet on the team that Hugh was betting on. There was complete silence when the bull arrived on the field. Everyone just stared at him. The sheep was the first to run away, closely followed by the dog. Then all of the players wearing red slowly backed away. And then the bull ran away too. No one said anything for a while, as they tried to figure out what to do next. Then someone brought out an actual ball, and they tried to figure out what to do with that. Eventually they came to the conclusion that the best thing to do would be to play polo, or try anyway. None of them had hit a ball in years, and it looked as if it would take another few years the way they were swinging and missing. It was the biggest crowd they’d ever playing in front of too, and that was making them nervous. But twenty minutes into the game, one of Ben’s team mates finally hit the ball and it was heading straight for the goals, but it stopped just short. One of the players tried to hit it in, but missed completely. There was just a minute left till the break, and they all thought they hadn’t a hope of scoring in that time, but then a blindfolded cow walked onto the pitch, and went straight towards the goals. The ball was right in its path, and the crowd watched in horror as the cow hit the ball forward a few feet, into the goal. The cow kept on moving in the direction the bull went, and Ben’s team cheered. The rest of the match was a bit of an anti-climax after this. No one hit the ball again, let alone a blindfolded cow. The only one who made any money from it was Ben because he placed a bet with Hugh.

The moose’s head over the fireplace seems to be ignoring the dog ever since the dog got his head stuck in the back of a chair. I think the moose must have thought that the dog was mocking him, but it was an accident. At least I’m fairly sure it was an accident. You never know with that dog.