The Pen Friend Read Free

It’s a very bright painting, you know? you said. I know, I said, it’s called The Yellow Bungalow , it’s by Gerard Dillon. My father knew Gerard Dillon. It’s a melodeon, by the way. Not a concertina. So what’s the difference? you said. I said I’d written a catalogue text once for a show of Dillon’s paintings, and it was important to name things by their proper names.
    The Yellow Bungalow was and is a favourite painting of mine. I can see it in my mind’s eye as I write. It’s small, and almost square, some thirty by thirty-two inches, and shows the interior of the bungalow, whose walls are painted a bright yellow, its perspective tilted a little, as if in a fish-eye lens. A boy holding a melodeon and a piece of paper sits to our left, looking out at us; in the far corner a woman – she might be his mother, or a sister – sits with her arms folded, watching the boy. A cat lies curled in a yellow cane chair: it is either sleeping, or eyeing the three fishes arranged on a white plate on a yellow, patterned tablecloth. There is a black stove against the wall, with a pale blue kettle and teapot on it, and a hurricane lamp with a pale blue shade hangs from the ceiling. Through the window we see a fragment of a landscape: a path, some houses, a green field, a blue strip of sea and mountains of a darker blue beyond. I am reminded of the West of Ireland which I first saw at the age of five. I imagine my father and me opening an unseen door in the yellow bungalow and stepping out into the windswept landscape, where we would wander before returning to the animated murmur of stories being told around the fire at nights: stories of ancient Irish heroes which my father subsequently retold me over the years of my growing up. I remember, too, their opening scenario, where it is always nightfall, the hero has lost his way, and a few lights glimmer on a lonely mountainside. One of these represents a house which the hero will enter. Gorgeous food is arrayed on a table, and there are lit candles everywhere, yet the house seems empty. One can tell that mysterious actions are about to unfold.
    I think The Yellow Bungalow is the first painting I ever really saw, I said. My father would bring me to the Gallery as a child. The Mummy in Antiquities was the big draw that had everyone peering over her glass case to see her blackened features and her flaxen hair. I can remember standing on tiptoe to look at her, and thinking she looked nothing like the picture on her coffin. Sarcophagus, my father would say, and proceed to tell me how the ancient embalmers drew the brain out through the nostrils with a hook, and would then discard it, believing it unnecessary to the reanimation of the body in the next life. The heart, the centre of intelligence, was left in place. After seeing the Mummy we would go to view The Yellow Bungalow , and I still remember the glow with which it hit me first. Though of course we don’t know how many layers of remembering have been built on to that, I said to you. My father would point out how the three fishes were a reference to the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes. The woman was a type of Madonna. As for the boy, who did I think the boy would be? Oh, the boy with the concertina, I said, as if there were another boy. Melodeon, said my father, it’s a melodeon. And I should have known better than to call it a concertina, for my father played the melodeon himself, and I realised I had been trying to be clever.
    So my father would lecture me on the importance of names, and when we emerged into the Botanic Gardens, he would point to the broad lawn surrounded by chestnut trees in blossom and ask me how many blades of grass I thought there might be on the lawn, and I said, I don’t know, hundred of thousands, maybe, millions? We can be sure that it is a great many, said my father, but every one is different from its neighbour, because nothing in the world is the same as anything else. Because if any one thing was