Songdogs Read Free

been left to rot in the corner. He took it outside, burned the bones, slopped the barn out, nailed the boards down, festooned the walls with photographs, and waited for customers, leaning against the doorway, bored, smoking. Sometimes Manley arrived, touting his shotgun, wearing unfashionable ties and suits of outstanding vulgarity – clothes my father had lent him money to buy. Manley hung out at the barn, talking of new books he had read. He was championing anarchy at the time – said it was democracy brought to its fullest form – and pounded his fist in the cause of the late Sacco and Vanzetti, who had been executed in the States over a decade before. Manley dreamed of making his way to Spain, perhaps to join the International Brigade. My father nodded to the tune of Manley’s rants, all the time looking down the road for customers.
    News travelled late to Mayo. Papers arrived late. Ideas arrived late. Even flocks of birds sometimes arrived late. There was something about the heaviness of the soil and the weather that inspired torpidity. He knew that the locals would come to his barn if he did something unusual, so he soon announced that the portraits would be free of charge. After that a small trail of people came in and out – guiltily and secretly, down along the high brambled lane, into the building, where he hung a white curtain from a wooden beam. Ripples of light came through the slats of the walls, falling in peculiar shapes on their faces – gaunt farmers uneasy in their old Sunday suits, grandmothers with fingers over rotten teeth, policemen in hats, a boxer in billowy shorts, thumping his glove against his chest, the local butcher with a flower in his lapel, girls with safety pins in the undersides of their dresses. There were even some young women slouching in bony but salacious poses.
    My father had rescued an old chaise with three legs. When the women reclined on it, their hair swooped towards the floor. Manley, giving politics a rest, let a licentious tongue hang out as he peeped in through the barn slats. They weren’t lurid, the photos. They had a stodginess to them, as if the old man forced his hand too hard – unlike the ones he took of Mam years afterwards, fluid and sensual. Most of the women never saw their photos. But decades later, when he was somewhat notorious, he had them printed at a press in France. The book caused a minor uproar in town, giving one of the local councillors a mild heart attack when he saw a portrait of his aunt with her left nipple visible under a thin linen blouse.
    *   *   *
    The swifts moved with a disregard for space, some of them darting up for insects on the air, others swerving down towards the sea, or simply moving back and forth, whipping the evening sky. He looked up at them, as if envious, as if he might burst his way upwards himself, join them in a mockery of flight. They were bellyfull with insects as he rose stiffly out of the lawn chair, grabbed his fishing rod, put the flyhook in the lowest eye, and walked away from the river, through the muddy soil up towards our house.
    He used the bottom end of the rod as a stick as he lurched, his dark overcoat open and hanging, cigarette smoke churning from his mouth, a blue bucket in his right hand. At the doorstep he leaned his rod against the wisteria, and slowly kicked off one of his boots. A stockinged foot trembled with cold on the concrete. He coughed into his fist and let some spit out into the hole at the bottom end of the drainpipe, bent down, stubbed his cigarette in a puddle, swiped at some midges in the air.
    I lifted my backpack, stepped out from behind the hedge, and walked across the yard. Cocking his head sideways like a curious animal, he closed his right eye, fumbled in his coat for his glasses.
    ‘Jesus Christ,’ he muttered, ‘if it isn’t yourself.’
    I held out my hand and he leaned his shoulder against me, smelling of earth and tobacco and bait. He moved to place his foot against