From Ghost Voltage, a work in progress
My father’s name was Peadar Murphy, and he was the 1955 junior heavyweight Leinster amateur boxing champion. He fought tournaments until his mid-thirties, when he met my mother, Betty. She was a Gannon, a switchboard operator, and a part-time model too. She didn’t like to see him fight. Eight years between them, beast and beauty, she didn’t exactly tame him but she might have civilised him–to a point. One day we were in the car, I was maybe fifteen or sixteen, he was giving me a lift to town, and he paused a moment, irritated–they would sometimes bicker, him and Mum–before getting around to twisting the key in the ignition.
‘Pete.’
Only family call me Pete. ‘Yeah.’
‘Ever been to the circus?’
I didn’t know where he was going with this so I played along–Dad could be gnomic when it suited him, which was most of the time.
‘Sure.’
‘You know the fine-looking bird in the skimpy costume with the whip who makes the lion do tricks and stand on his head and so on?’
‘Sure.’
‘If a woman can do that to a lion, think what she can do to a man.’
If I think of Peadar, colossal in my child’s mind, a wall of muscle, I think of an outdoorsman who spent his working life chafing inside the starched shirt of a civil servant. He should have been a merchant seaman or a roustabout, one of those romantic 1950s jobs you read about. As a young bull he worked the cots that ferried freight downriver to Wexford harbour, loved it, out in the elements from dawn ’til dusk, shirtless for half the year–even into his
70s he was permanently tanned–except _his_father, our grandfather, directed him to get a more reliable job, one with a pension, and you didn’t argue with your father back then, so Peadar followed orders and forfeited the river for the desk.
In those days a job was not a religion, it ended at the door. Peadar rarely spoke of his work once he got home. My impression was he gritted his teeth through the week in barely restrained disdain for some of the gasbags he had to deal with. I picture him, a Sweet Afton burning between his fingers, squinting over his glasses through the haze at some balance book or customs form. He didn’t start smoking until he was into his thirties. The other clerks were trying to give up cigarettes for Lent and out of devilment he bought a pack and sparked one up in order to aggravate their nerves, but damn, the habit took. By the time he hit retirement, the coughing and hawking up would shake the house in the mornings, Peadar bent double, leaning on the mantlepiece or on the roof of the car, gasping for breath, payoff for the thousands of unfiltereds he’d smoked, the killing joke.
My brother Dave and I differ somewhat on this point, but my take is that when Peadar retired he faded from himself somewhat, disillusioned that he never got around to doing a lot of the things he’d always intended to do because there were still so many other things that needed doing first–as Al Swearengen said in Deadwood, sometimes that’s all life is, one vile fucking task after another. He was also a bit of a hoarder, and that drove my mother spare. He wouldn’t throw anything away if he foresaw some possible use for it in the future. Maybe it was the legacy of wartime rationing, years of lean. He’d wear a pair of my mother’s tights for a bandanna, kept a ferret named Wanda in a barrel, hung rabbit skins on the washing line to cure: visitors or delivery people would pull up short, appalled at the sight.
I wonder if, throughout those years as a clerk, it wasn’t anger that kept his fire lit. The word ‘vitriol’ comes to mind, the way it sounds like a kind of fuel. What was he angry about? I don’t want to put words in the man’s mouth, but maybe there was resentment over some of the compromises he’d had to make, things he’d given up for the job, for domestic routines and obligations, the stuff you put up with under sufferance even as you sense your years on earth ebbing into single digits. When you’re young that kind of anger will kick the ignition in, it’ll get you fired up, but in the long run it’s a non-biodegradable fuel, it burns out the tank. Peadar was a smart man, a heavy thinker, a comic and a philosopher, playful with language, maybe even some kind of unrealised genius, but perhaps, like Ali, he took too many hits.
Here’s a story I heard told, circulated like a hipflask at my father’s funeral: It’s close of business at the counter, six o’clock, Peadar’s trying to get columns to balance but they won’t match, there’s a rogue entry in there, and the postmaster or whomever is in his ear–come on Peadar, what’s the delay, come on Peadar, what’s keeping you man, Peadar, will you hurry it up for feck’s sake–but my father ignores him until he’s located the problem, and the numbers come out right, he shuts the ledger and walks up to his overseer and slaps him open-handed across the face and barks, ‘_Now_what are you saying?’ Peadar was never that way with me, although I think the older brothers might have taken a clip around the ear if they were acting up. Sometimes, if you were grating on him with your prate, he would release a stream of air out of his nose. He didn’t need to say a word to voice his displeasure, just that exhalation through the nostrils was enough to make you put a cork in it. As a young man he’d served as a bouncer in the Castle Ballroom in Enniscorthy, a man from Monageer told me how one night some canat pulled a knife and my father put him on the floor, knocked him clean out, they had to call an ambulance. Peadar was a powerful man, nearly a stone weight at birth, had that post-war physique, Burt Lancaster or Robert Mitchum, formidable but not ripped–nourished on steak and milk, as one of my bandmates put it– but his disposition was mostly thoughtful, I would say. When my brothers teased me for being overweight, he’d quote from Julius Caesar. ‘Let me have men about me who are fat. Sleek-headed men such as sleep at nights. Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look. Such men are dangerous.‘ But I didn’t want to be sleepy or sleek-headed. I wanted to be someone dangerous, someone to be reckoned with. I followed my brothers into the boxing club, trying to prove something. That club, St Anthony’s, was really just a garage, a concrete floor, home- forged dumb-bells, punch-bag, overhead ball. We trained three or four nights a week and sometimes travelled for sparring matches. The first time I got hit in the nose the word that came to mind was ignorant. That’s what it felt like. Not heroic, not cinematic, not Rocky III, just uncouth. That famous Tyson quote: everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. We were amateur class, wore those big 14-ounce gloves, pillows we called them, but a dig to the gut with the pivot-force of a boy’s bodyweight behind it made you spit your
gumshield out.
My brothers were boxers because my father was a boxer, and I wanted to earn their approval, or at least, avoid their disapproval. Their approbation was important. My father regarded me differently when I trained, seemed
less irritated by my presence, less exasperated by my prattle. Training was a way of earning his attention without wearing on his nerves. I’d come in from a run and gulp a glass of water and pull off my runners and socks and lean against the table, foot raised behind me like a horse about to be shod, while he pierced the blisters and wiped away the weep and sprinkled the red-raw skin with salt so that it would heal more quickly, and it made your eyes water but you could run on it again the following night.
I wasn’t much good of a fighter compared to my brothers or the other lads in the club. I was awkward and uncoordinated and I didn’t have that pit- bull instinct. I was angry in the way that thirteen-year-old boys are angry– hormonal-angry, bored-angry, just-because angry–but that anger was always internally directed. My brothers were the attack dogs, they had no problem asserting themselves, they butted and shoved and shouldered their way to dominance. I was tentative and uncertain. I overthought everything, I was anxious and socially inhibited, but I had an agile imagination and I loved language and comics and books and music, and I think my father recognised that as a part of himself, so he went easy on me, the youngest.
Travellers would sometimes ask for my father at work. If they were unlettered he would take their papers home and attend to their affairs at the kitchen table so that they wouldn’t feel embarrassed waiting at the post office hatch while a queue formed behind. During the long postal strike of 1979, eighteen weeks, I’d go with him to the sorting office to collect emergency wages. There were armed soldiers guarding the mail sacks, young men with rifles slung over their shoulders, berets and combat boots. That was the year my mother had her operation and the bed was moved downstairs where she sat propped up like an ailing queen. It was a hard year on everyone. The hostage crisis, fuel shortages, queues for petrol stations, everything down to the gristle. It was around that summer that sacks of potatoes and vegetables started appearing at our back door. We’d wake in the morning, there they were. Peadar couldn’t figure out who was responsible, so one night he stayed up keeping vigil until he saw them, stealing to and from our threshold like thieves in reverse, the Travellers.
One night in 2009 I was on the train home from Dublin to Wexford, it was the Sunday of the horse fair at Smithfield, there had been a stabbing: guards stopped the service at Dun Laoghaire to question passengers, we were held up for an hour. On the way back from the drinks trolley I passed a table around
which were seated four Traveller men. One of them, huge and imposing, the don, caught sight of me, asked to know where I was from. I told him, Enniscorthy.
‘Whereabouts?’ ‘The Milehouse.’
‘What’s your name?’ ‘Murphy.’
‘Peadar’s son.’
He indicated the man sitting across the table. ‘He lives in your house now.’
My mother had in fact sold the home place to a Traveller family. The don placed me in three clicks. Facial recognition technology. Travellers would have known my father, or known of my father, through the coursing or the horses. Peadar was a greyhound whisperer, took in nervous dogs and kept them for a while, and when their owners reclaimed them, their nerves were cured. I wish I’d questioned him about his methods. Maybe they found his presence calming. But the track was our social life: the rush for the tote, the whirr of the electric hare, the baying of the dogs, men in sheepskin coats sinking pints and brandies at the bar. A subculture of bookies and betting men, hounds with names like Cushy Lightning or Brindle Lady. I went back there one night some years ago. The stands were almost empty and the queue for the tote took only moments. It felt like a desertion.
Time accordions, time folds over on itself. It’s a misty Saturday afternoon sometime in the early 1980s. I’m straddling one of the greyhounds’ backs, holding it clamped and muzzled while my father takes its bony paw in his hands and trims the nails with a sort of guillotine clippers. If he cuts too close to the quick the hound will squirm and yelp. These animals are not pets. You have to observe certain protocols. Never startle them. Never disturb them while they’re at their feed.
There’s a coursing meet at the weekend. The hounds need to be made ready, to be blooded. My father flips the car boot and they leap easily inside, then we drive towards the Bare Meadows on the far side of the Slaney. The windows are open and the hounds point their snouts towards the airstream, tongues lolling, dribbling on my anorak. We cross the bridge and turn right onto the Wexford Road, and after a few hundred yards we pull in at the entrance to the field. My father grabs a sack from the footwell and gets out of the car. I take
the hounds. He climbs over the gate and swings it open for us to follow. Along the perimeter of the field an electric fence hums, animated by the damp, the fine rain. Across the river, afternoon strollers walk the prom. The dogs are restless, excited.
My father strides the length of the field, shaking the sack and making hulla- hulla sounds. I hold onto the greyhounds’ collars as they buck and bark– they can smell the hare inside the sack. When Peadar reaches the end of the field he raises his arm, the sign to release the dogs. I let them off, and you can feel their paws thudding the damp ground as they gallop the length of the field. When they’re within distance my father shakes out the sack and lets loose the hare. If you’re sensitive, look away. One of the hounds will catch the animal up in its jaws and shake it and you’ll hear a squeal. But one time the hare manoeuvres a last-minute swerve and the hounds gallop over the edge of the bank and into the river and my father doubles over laughing so hard I fear he’ll have a stroke.
Later we’re walking back through the drizzle, skirting the edge of the field. My father grabs my arm with one hand, and the electric fence with the other, and he conducts the jolt through his body into mine. He laughs as I yelp, and after the shock has subsided I join in the laughter, my pulse racing, my heart beating hard.
Time contracts. Time loops itself. I’m about twelve years old the day Peadar comes home from work with a parcel containing several copies of Creem, the Detroit rock magazine, that had been left sitting in the dead letter office for years. _Creem_was well-known but it wasn’t mainstream, you had to order it especially from overseas; it featured writers like Lester Bangs and Dave Marsh, smart-arsed iconoclasts writing smart-arsed iconoclastic articles about Ted Nugent–the fuckin’ Nuuuge–about Foghat, Grand Funk Railroad, Johnny Winter, whomever. Everything about it had an air of informed insolence: the piss-take captions, the ads for Boy Howdy, the snotty editorial attitude seeping all the way down to the personal ads. This was the summons, the Princess Leia hologram, two or three copies of an American magazine telling stories of rock stars who seemed wild as sorrels to a timid country boy.
Draw a line from that afternoon to a day five years later when the Vocational School teachers lock me in a room with research materials and order me to draft an essay for a competition sponsored by the European Commission. My submission wins. The finalists get packed off to travel around Europe for two weeks on the EC’s tab. It was my first journalism junket. I’d never been
on a plane before. I’d never been further than Dublin Zoo. We saw Brussels, Luxembourg, Paris, Strasbourg. The call to adventure (messiah complex, I know), followed by the refusal of the call, or rather, a detour, into nine years of playing drums in going-nowhere bands. My father set me on this path, unknowingly; the shock of his intervention, those missives from Detroit, blasting me out of the orbit that trapped him, birth, school, work, retirement, death.
Jump-cut to the weeks after his funeral when I wake in the night, stricken with the awful realisation that time is finite, that we can all go at any moment, and is this what you want, to get old and die, having only written about other people’s work? I won’t be validated until I’ve published a book. I think of Hubert Selby Junior’s moment of epiphany, how he imagined lying on his death bed knowing he’d wasted his life, and wanting to live it over again. (I’m not comparing myself to Selby, Selby was a genius, but if a writer that good can be that humble, maybe there’s a glimmer of hope for the rest of us.) It had always existed, this need, but my father’s death was the ignition. It was around that time I began writing a book set in the landscape of my childhood, a book that returned me to my earliest memories, provided continuity amidst the chaos of death and grief. That novel became a shrine I visited every morning, a return to a dream-time place. I’d rise before dawn, before the phone started ringing and the emails started coming in, and I’d make coffee and smoke a cigarette and write. Some mornings I did little more than butt my forehead off the keyboard. The next morning I tried again. It’s been years since I read that book. It mightn’t be any good. I try not to burden it with a value judgment. It was somewhere to go in the morning, like lighting a candle in St Aidan’s Cathedral when there’s no one around.
In his essay ‘Fathers, Sons, Blood’, Harry Crews writes about the first time the son beats his father in a race. It is a painful moment for both. I am twelve years older now than my father was when I was born, still trying to eclipse him, or rather honour his name, because you can never really beat your father. I picture Peadar, sat behind the wheel, Sweet Afton fuming between his fingers, silently raging over some dispute with Mum, just as I was raging over some fight I’d had with one of my brothers, and Peadar saying, ‘Humour them, son, just humour them.’
‘Dad, I can’t.’ ‘You have to.’
‘But why? _Why_do I have to?’
‘Because even if you win, they make you feel worse than if you’d lost.’
It battered down rain the day we put him in the ground. It felt like a mafia funeral, or that scene in _Watchmen_where they bury the Comedian. I wore a suit borrowed from my brother, who never wore a suit. We walked from St Aidan’s Cathedral to St Mary’s Cemetery. People huddled at the top of the town in the downpour, paying silent tribute. We gathered at the grave and six of us lowered the pinewood box, feeding the rope through our fingers. Coffins are heavy, it’s a job of work, you have to concentrate so that you don’t slip on the wet soil. When the load is settled, you retract the rope. A shovel of dirt spatters the coffin lid. The priest delivers the final words.
After the service we walked to Murphy Flood’s Hotel, the same hotel where my brothers were married, where I played my first gig. We drank tea and ate soup and sandwiches until the people, good people, shook hands and drifted away, until it was only a few stragglers left, lingering over drinks at the hotel bar, reluctant to return to the world. I stayed for as long as I could, then I hugged my sister and brothers and walked through the rain to the train station, and I was distraught because my father was gone but also because I wasn’t ready to return to Dublin, because I needed to be minded, or at least remain among my brothers and sister a while longer. I wasn’t able for returning to the role of husband or father yet. I boarded the carriage and looked out the window, beads of rain trickling down the glass, and in that moment I felt a terrible ache to stay with the ones I grew up among, to be comforted by their banter, the long-established sense of order, to know my place in things, because my home was not in the city, but here, where Peadar was buried.
My father’s final night on earth. He’d been ill all winter and now he was slipping. The call came through; this is it, you have to go, catch the train for Wexford, barrelling through the unreal night, all the way to O’Hanrahan Station. My brother John collected me and drove us to the hospital and we walked together into the white behemoth of the building, two astronauts disappearing into the mothership, joining our crew mates, preparing to load our father into a pod on the departure deck, the casket waiting in the hold, generational transmission near complete, the ghosts of electricity almost fled
the bones. Dad was asleep when I arrived. Then one of the other men on the ward took bad, and when the nurses wheeled the blanket-covered trolley out of the room Peadar came awake long enough to lift his head and squint at the three remaining survivors. ‘It’s a four-horse race,’ he said.
At the end of the Coen Brothers’ film adaptation of No Country for Old Men, at breakfast on the first day of his retirement, the Sheriff, played by Tommy Lee Jones, recounts a dream for his wife. It was in the olden times, he says. His father rode by on a horse, carrying fire in a horn. He called out to his father but his father passed on. This dream feels Yeatsian; it is the night before the morning after of The Road, the father and the son making their way through a dead world.
In Wendell Berry’s poem ‘Come Forth’, the poet is with his father among wild horses. His father was once a knower of those horses, but he is old now and uses a cane. At a climactic moment in the poem the father proclaims, ‘It’ll be all right‘ and leaps onto one of the horses’ backs, miraculously young and limber again.
A week after my father’s death, I had a dream that I was standing on a hillside, and beside me in the field there was a horse. We communicated using some form of telepathy. There was a feeling that somehow things would be set right in time.
There’s some pattern to this, a system behind these symbols–horses, fathers, dreams–but I don’t know exactly what it is or what they mean. A dream is a story the mind tells itself in order to make sense of the unfathomable. Sometimes those stories are just as unfathomable as reality. All I know is I bear my father’s shoulders, and nose, and an echo of his voice, and I can’t figure out how this happens but I’ve seen this process several times, it happened first when my father died and my brother John sort of _became_my father, and I think the same thing happened to me after John died, I _became_him, so by extension I became my father too, and maybe this is what happens when people die, they pass through the rain in the field of time, they grasp the live wire as they die, they grab your hand, your heart stutters, the shock of their death conducts transference, the jolt, the ghost of electricity, the electricity of a ghost, some essential residue of their energy travels from their being into yours, you carry the phantom power of who they were in your marrow, and through this process of metaphysical tribute we assume their shape, their sound, and in this fashion they live on.