A Stranger Rides Into Town, A Man Goes On A Journey

To be truly home is to be simply here, and most of us are never simply here.

Ian Sansom

One of those slow melt summer days where Galway slips around you like the swoon that pulls a wave into the sea. I’m fifteen when I leave the house to walk into town, Discman in hand, earphones in, daydreaming already. (Galway’s a cradle for dreaming.) Make it out of the estate unbruised, having avoided certain corners, and the horizon pours into the Atlantic below where Salthill’s a shimmering bowl and tiny people freckle the distant prom where I’m eleven and myself and Andrew White stand at the roundabout at Seapoint, each armed with a litre of Yazoo strawberry milk which we’ve decided to chug down in one. We make a fairly decent go of it till Andrew splutters and vomits a pillar of bright milkshake and Supermacs onto the pavement. It horrifies the power-walkers and we run giddy down the prom past the car park where I’m seventeen, sitting next to Ciara Jordan in her smoke-filled car at dusk with Sonia Sweeney and Paddy and Brendan, chatting about what we’re all gonna do when we leave Galway, when we’re eighteen, when we’re famous. I’m uphill from all that at thirteen, traipsing past posh houses with mad driveways on Taylor’s Hill. ‘Pure rich people live in them houses,’ Brendan mutters beneath trees that spatter light on the cigarette skins crackling in his coarse drummer fingers. I close my eyes and watch the sun riot beneath my eyelids and he catches me and calls me a pure hippy, away with the fairies. Galway turns beneath our feet, the pavement rolls with the sky, and it guides us wherever we need to be. We walk over the galloping shoulders of the Corrib into town and we know these days will last forever, and that we will too.

If reality is a ceaseless stream of impressions and affects, stories provide symbolic coordinates to help us navigate the storm. These stories range from learned truths we internalise as infants to narratives we consciously interrogate about the world. There’s no human way of living outside story. Escape from one story always comes in the form of another.

I was born in Dublin but we moved to Galway when I was three. That’s the story I tell to anyone willing to hear it. Tourists trying to have a pint in Barna. Lifeguards on Silver Strand. Women working the check-out in Roches Stores. Strangers looking at the Christmas display in the Eyre Square shopping centre. I’m four, and I’ve done this sort of thing from the moment I could talk. I stand, hands clasped at the base of my back, body tilted upwards, telling people stories about Kinderworld, my playschool. I’m in love with all the women who work there. They have names like Assumpta. Tracey. I want to marry all of them. I’ve memorised several Ladybird fairy tales from the cassettes that come with the books and I like to recite them word-for-word for Assumpta. Hansel and Gretel. The Billy Goats Gruff. Jack and the Beanstalk. I’m story-mad. When Mam takes me to the pictures for the first time–_Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves_at the Palace Cinema, down the Crescent–it’s an overwhelming experience. The worlds of story and real life are entirely meshed for me and I live through whatever book, movie or cartoon I’ve just devoured. My parents’ photo albums are stuffed with pictures of me dressed up. Me as Santa wearing a beard made out of a bag of cotton wool. Me as a Ghostbuster wearing Mam’s swimming goggles. Me as Robin Hood, Peter Pan, the Artful Dodger. When I want to be D’Artagnan, Mam draws a curly French moustache on my cheeks with her eyeliner. Dad folds pieces of kitchen roll into rectangles and staples them to the shoulders of my jumper to make epaulettes. I march up and down our unpaved road like that, waving a sword and talking to myself. Mam’s brown boots are way too big for me; they reach all the way up my legs and the toes curl back at me like elf shoes. I think I look brilliant.

John Gardner said there are only two kinds of story: A stranger rides into town, and A man goes on a journey. In the former, reality gets disrupted by

some outsider element (think westerns, detective stories, love stories, horror, etc.), while in the latter someone has to leave their established reality and become an outsider to discover another way of being (coming-of-age stories, adventures, sci-fi, fantasy, and so on).

Whether a story is about the stranger’s arrival, the hero’s departure, or some comingling of both, all stories hold this in common: the world cannot remain stable and reconciled to itself. Stories are predicated on some sort of disruption, an event or character that tears a wound in the world. Whether or not the wound can be closed within the telling of a particular story, it’s always the wound that allows for the existence of the story itself.

Dad pretends to be a horse and crawls around the house with me on his back. Every night before bedtime, he heats me up a saucer of milk with sugar. He calls it ‘hero milk’. I’m convinced that I’m a hero. Mam takes photos of me ruddy-faced and unconscious in bed, with an illustrated book of _Tyrone the Horrible_or _Fred Under the Bed_still clutched in my hand. From these stories I’ve learned that I’m on an adventure. Life is a sort of heroic quest. I approach my first day in primary school like this. Most of the kids are in hysterics, clinging to their mothers’ legs. Mam is worried that I will get upset too. But I seem to be floating somewhere over the entire experience. Mam tells this story often, even now. ‘You walked into the classroom in Taylor’s Hill,’ she says, ‘and you sat down with a big smile on you, like you’d been there all your life.’ Mam burst into tears for me, that day, but I was so wrapped up in my own heroic adventure I didn’t notice her being upset.

School is where I learn how to put letters together. The first story I ever write, a mad scrawl veering diagonally across the page, is about Santa being kidnapped by an evil reindeer named Hornhead Brown. Only Rudolph, the lonely outsider, can rescue him.

Outsiders make for good storytellers. Ishmael can narrate Moby Dick because he is not Ahab. Lena can narrate Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels because she is not Lila. It’s far easier to describe the world’s contours if you’re hovering somewhere slightly outside it.

Every friend I make when I start primary school–Philip O’Connell, Brian Halpin, Sheena Murphy, Cian O’Donohue–has to move away within a year or two because of their parents’ work. (Galway’s a place that people leave.) At the same time, there are several deaths in the family, in quick succession. Each time someone leaves I want to cry, but I’ve learned from stories that this is something boys don’t do so I chew on my cheeks till they bleed in my mouth. I’m still the cheerful hero, chatty, eager to impress. But the constant vanishing of people, the faces that disappear from one year to the next, have convinced me that my Real Life, the one where I’m a hero triumphing over all adversity, must be happening somewhere else. I realise that this Galway existence is all preparation; one day I will be elsewhere, elevated. I spend more and more time inhaling the exotic plots of movies, TV and books. If I’m too young to watch a film, I read everything there is to know about it in my _Encyclopaedia of Cinema_and write a version of the film for myself. I memorise dialogue from movies I’ve never seen, words spoken by voices I’ve never heard. I know I will see them one day, because I know I’ll do everything one day, because one day I will be out in the world, living my Real Life, like a character in a story. For now, stories are my trapdoors out of flat Galway Tuesdays in the rain. (Galway’s full of dreamers floating outside life, biding their time.) I sit on my bed, reading and writing adventures, preparing for existence.

A recurrent theme in writers’ interviews is the admission of being a control freak, the sort of person who withdraws from the relentlessness of the outside world to sit alone in a room for hours on end, incrementally reworking isolated moments into narrative, orchestrating reality while holding themselves outside its flow. Such sovereignty is always confined to the page, of course. Beyond the desk, life roars on.

I read almost no fiction during my teenage years; Galway has suddenly opened itself to me with a wink and I’m at large in the city with Brendan, Paddy and the gang. It’s the rush of being in town with them in summer. It’s making hot chocolates last for hours in the nocturnal vibe of Java’s. It’s having my first shift at the Bish disco, bushing Buckfast and Dutch Gold down the Spanish Arch, Brendan smoking his first ever cigarette in Café de Paris to

try and look cool for the sexy eyebrow waitress. It’s flicking through the CDs and posters in Zhivago’s, walking next to Brendan and Paddy through Eyre Square shopping centre, hands dug in our pockets. It’s thumbing at the book boxes outside Charlie Byrne’s, getting spat at, kicked and headbutted weekly by shams for being a mosher faggot. It’s the belly purr feeling of did you hear who fancies you?, falling in love for the first time, losing my virginity under the stars at Galway Bay, getting my heart broken, getting drunk, getting lost. It’s coming up against the limits of myself and realising I’ve internalised loads of hateful shit about what it is to be a boy, a man, narratives I’ve passively absorbed in playgrounds and boys-only schoolyards, at churches and cinemas, from sitcoms and music videos. It’s realising I need to dig the prejudice out of myself, only to discover there are actually multiple selves jostling inside me and none of them particularly like one another. It’s developing a sort of self-loathing that translates into an urge to escape every irreconcilable thing in my mind.

By my twenties I’m frantically looking for some sort of overarching narrative that will fix the world, hold its contradictions in place. I travel a lot. I live and work abroad a lot. Everywhere I go, I’m reading mystics, religious texts, comparative mythology, history, philosophy, psychology, schematic novels of ideas. I go on silent retreats. I spend time in a Sivananda ashram in the mountains. I fast. I drink very heavily. I practise the shaking meditations of the Bhagwan. I comb my way through the narcotic throb of hot limbs on the Áras na nGael dancefloor. I get into several near-death situations in different countries, out of the thirst for any form of liminal experience. I am hoping that, if I push far enough, something epiphanic will reveal itself and I will finally arrive in my own story. I move from place to place, job to job, belief system to belief system. From the outside, to my parents, this looks like adventure, even freedom. But in truth, my flitting around is more about escape than exploration. I am trying to dodge all irreconcilabilities. I am trying to find a trapdoor in reality. I am trying to outrun time.

During a quick visit to Ireland, I get into a discussion with a guru who’s crashing at a friend’s flat on Merchant’s Road. We talk about the idea of the bodhisattva–the person who knows immortality but chooses, out of compassion, to participate in the suffering of time. The guru offers to read my astrological birth chart. Throughout the discussion, he repeatedly points

to a pattern of lines on my birth chart and asks: ‘Have you ever felt like you belonged anywhere?’ Later, as we step out of Neachtain’s into an unexpected Macnas parade (Galway is a place where this sort of thing actually happens), he asks me the question again. As the parade blares past, he shouts ‘You know, your chart reminds me of that quote from Groucho Marx, about belonging to a club. D’you know it?’ I actually do know the quote. I first read it in my Film Encyclopaedia when I was a child. I could never be part of any club that would accept me as a member. When I shout the line to the guru over the chaos of the parade, he turns. The lights flare across his eyes, like I have given him something. He points at me, and smiles.

Around this time, whenever people ask where I’m from, I still say, ‘I was born in Dublin but we moved to Galway when I was three.’ Fifteen addresses later and my adult life could be condensed into a smash-cut video edit of me saying ‘I was born in Dublin but we moved to Galway when I was three’ as various backgrounds blitz behind me, a storm of languages, faces, climates and countries with my spiel remaining insistent at the centre of the frame, a symbolic compass point. A story I’m telling myself.

During one of my visits back to Galway, I make a passing remark about this quirk to my mam. She laughs. ‘Well, you were so lost when we moved from Dublin. I don’t know if you ever fully settled. When you were a toddler it was the same. You were always going on about Galway not being your real home.’ Mam tells me that for the first year of living in Galway, I screamed whenever we entered our estate. ‘I’d pick you up from Kinderworld and as soon as you realised we weren’t going back to the house in Dublin, you’d start struggling against the straps of your baby seat. I don’t like this road! I don’t like this road!‘ Hearing this is disorienting. This isn’t the story I’ve told myself about the chatty toddler talking to strangers in pubs, the kid completely at ease in the classroom, the cheerful hero who recited fairy tales at Kinderworld all day. Mam frowns and shakes her head. ‘Half the time I’d come to collect you from Kinderworld and Assumpta would tell me you’d spent the whole day alone in the corner of the playroom, staring at the floor. They couldn’t bring you out of yourself. Unless you were reciting one of your Ladybird stories.’ I ask her what was wrong with me. ‘Ara… you didn’t like being uprooted, I suppose. I think you couldn’t get used to being where you were. You always wanted to be somewhere else.’

In 2008, the day before I took my final unthinking steps off a Shannon Airport runway into the future, Bertie Ahern appeared on TV to make the surprise announcement of his resignation. Within weeks the floor had fallen out of the economy, the country and Galway city. It took almost everyone I knew in Galway with it. They went to Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Melbourne, Perth, Dublin, London, Norwich, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Valencia, Barcelona, Castellón, Buenos Aires, Chicago, Orlando, Berlin. None of them have come back. When I see friends now, old friends, people like Brendan with whom I navigated almost every possible emotional extremity growing up, we don’t know how to talk to one another. Time howls like a gale between us, blocking out our voices. We can occasionally meet eyes and there’s an acknowledgement of an intimacy that distance cannot quite erase. But our conversations stutter and cul de sac, and nothing we say is adequate.

Last Christmas, I met some old college friends for dinner in a new restaurant near the Blue Note. I had to keep leaving the restaurant and ducking down a laneway because it felt like someone was laying bricks on my chest. I thought I was having a heart attack. I stood baffled on Dominic Street, and later on Shop Street, stupefied at how the particularity of these places–the way they are today, with their new shops, different moods–did not match up with the cinematic versions of them that I still carry in my chest. I could not let their reality in.

I usually don’t tell people when I visit. I stay at my parents’ house, and I don’t go into town. I visit the woods, Spiddal, and Connemara, because being in nature allows me to pretend that there are things about Galway that remain unchanged. This is cowardice. I am afraid to see old friends, afraid to see the city, because I am afraid of time. Despite myself, I’ve made an Eden out of my Galway life. This place, which I once saw as a mere prologue to the story of my real life, has now become an ideal to which I can never return. My Galway does not exist anywhere but inside myself, and the notion that I alone am the measure of all that experience is a knot in my chest. I never feel more homesick for Galway than when I’m there. I arrive at the bus station and immediately long to get away so I can miss the place again from the safety of some distance.

I started writing fiction while living in Belgium in 2016. I had spent years trying to dissolve the contradictions of life by burying them within various metaphysical architectures. Fiction is a space that actively invokes the irreconcilable, welcomes it in, and after years of running from one totalising Big Idea to another, it felt like writing might be the one way in which I could actually meet the plurality of life.

But making a fetish of writing is just me erecting another Eden towards which the flow of my actual life is subordinated. The act of writing already threatens to become a trapdoor allowing me to escape a world from which I feel increasingly disconnected, a daydream that gives me a simulacrum of communication with others but actually preserves me in my solitude.

There’s always the threat that the identity of ‘being a writer’ will trump the real work of just being a person. I see myself wobbling on that ledge all the time now. I worry that I’m failing as a man, friend, son, boyfriend, brother, colleague, cousin, nephew, neighbour, citizen, person, and that I’m looking to writing (writing!) as some sort of redemptive act that will justify how locked outside of life I actually am. The fact is, I’m deeply lonely much of the time. Often I just want to lie on the floor and not get up. I don’t allow myself to do that, because I still believe that writing may somehow deliver me into life. This is one of the symbolic fictions that structures my existence. Nowhere is this clearer to me than in my relationship to Galway.

My humiliating hope is that somehow writing this essay will earn me a place in the collective dreamscape of the city where I grew up and tether me to the flesh and clay of the world instead of the isolated sphere of my imagination, where I spend most of my time.

I’m not a complete eejit, though. I know this hope is absurd. But there’s knowing on the level of the intellect, and there’s knowing of the guts. And my guts remember the first time I got from one end of Shop Street to another without seeing a single familiar face.

The constitutive wound in stories is that which knocks the world off balance and enables the narrative to happen. The constitutive wound in life, though, is time itself: it both feeds and eats away at everything, enabling life while

sundering it slowly. I write in order to manage the time-wound in some way, and I can talk a big game about how my experience of the act of writing is one of being truly ‘home’, about how writing now creates a space for me where life’s irreconcilabilities do not need to be neutered, where contradiction can be explored as a fertile– blah, blah, blah. This is all just brittle intellectualism when confronted with the visceral panic I feel whenever I’m in Galway, the closest thing to an actual home I’ll ever have. Galway forces me to look into the wound and I always blink.

When I was younger, I arrogantly assumed that my story was ‘A man goes on a journey’. There is a brutal irony to realising that it’s always been ‘A stranger rides into town’.

I don’t have a way out of this. This essay cannot resolve things with a neat ending. It’s not fiction.

The day after my panicked episode at the restaurant with my college friends, I met Brendan and Paddy for lunch. We hadn’t seen each other in years. We went to Java’s, which is no longer nocturnal and seductive. Now it’s painted in bright, inviting colours. I was still shook from the night before but I grinned my way through the conversation, heart thudding. We warmed to the moment awkwardly, the way my Dublin cousins and I used to feel out the air between us before clicking into our familiar groove. There’s still a deep familiarity between Paddy and Brendan, despite the fact that Paddy now lives in Cork. They communicate in slags, like family. As we left Java’s I felt my belly drop, because I’d held myself back from the experience, afraid to just relax and be there with them. We walked up to the crossway at Lynch’s Castle to say goodbye, when Brendan said, ‘Here, will we take a look at what’s happening in the shopping centre?’

One of the things the guru said to me the day he read my birth chart was: ‘You have an eye for things, I think. And you can put words on the things that you see. This is a gift, but gifts are something to use very carefully. A person like you would find it very easy to… try and freeze things. To stop them from moving as they want to. Does any of this resonate with you?’

I actually laughed.

We walked through Eyre Square shopping centre, scraps of noise and laughter moving all around us. The shop that used to be the Zhivago’s where Paddy worked. The spot where Mam used to bring me to see Santa. Brendan raised his eyebrows at giddy children clutching toys they’d gotten for Christmas, kids whose parents may not have even met one another the last time I lived in Galway. (Galway is like every place; it is always young, always new.) We wandered in the Christmas music, making chit-chat. I don’t know what was happening in that moment, even now. But I felt a sudden, wild love at how Paddy still walks with his hands dug so deep into his pockets, at Brendan’s silhouette in the corner of my eye, striding against the glare of milky light. The feeling flooded across the tiled floor of the shopping centre and along the knuckled remains of the medieval city walls where a group of toddlers stood, pointing open-mouthed at the Christmas display. I looked over at Brendan and he winked at me, and it felt like a fissure was opening in the world, and I was being invited into something, and I knew I would remember how, in the surge of that moment, I was so happy.