‘/ in rain /’ by Danny Denton
Is the constant moment /
primal rhythms / like sleep / falls in sheets / in curtains / the world a depthless curtain / a curtain perpetually passed through / rain / passing through / the air transformed by cascading droplets / myriad / depthless / infinite to the eye / oceanic pitter-patter / atomic rhythms / droplet percussion / consciousness of drops / matrix of tears / a downpour / sweeps of it / showers / flurry of / fallflurry / drizzlemist / cascade all round / all / roundcas / cade / innumerable echoes / of a single watery instant / the pane-tapping of it / both micro- and macro- / the mystery held / beyond and above nature’s curtain / ever impenetrable / ever foggy / ever forgetful / ... See, I cannot do it justice. Nothing captures that constant moment, that feeling, that listening to it ...
O
Two ladies ahead of me in the queue at Spar. Outside, rain flings itself down on the car park tarmacadam. Is repelled. The opening of the automatic doors is filled with the hissing of it, and the hammering of it.
‘Shocking day, ladies,’ the manager says.
‘Oh! Awful weather altogether!’ one lady answers.
‘’Tis!’ says the other. ‘I’m telling you: that Enda Kenny has an awful lot to answer for.’
O
On the set of Blade Runner, at 1am on the night before they shot that final scene, Rutger Hauer / tall / tufts of soft peroxide blonde hair / unfurled / alien / asked to see his director, Ridley Scott. Scott, believing he was going to be fired by the producers that same night, said to himself, ‘Ah fuck it’, and went out through the rain to Hauer’s trailer.
Inside, Hauer told him about some lines he hoped to change for that night’s scene and wanted to try out.
I imagine Scott in the trailer, cigar tucked in the corner of his grin, or grimace, thinking first I’m too busy for this rubbish, but agreeing to hear them anyway because Hauer is enigmatic, charismatic, fun / grin of malice / wildness in the white eyes /. Because he is huge and Dutch and strange-looking.
So Scott said go, and Hauer delivered the speech.
‘You stole that,’ Scott said when it was over, looking up at Hauer and his proud, twisted pout, leaning there against the trailer wall like a school child.
‘No, no,’ Hauer said. ‘I just wrote it.’
‘Well,’ Scott replied. ‘That’s what we’re gonna do then.’
I imagine Scott as the type of person not to reveal that he has been moved.
O
I’m only thirty-six, but few memories of childhood remain. I don’t know; perhaps I am too distracted by the present tense; or perhaps I am enfolding within memory’s corners some repressed trauma. Memory is the juncture at which the past and present meet, and perhaps the glitches in memory are parts we don’t want to carry forward / bad for the process /. Inversely, do we choose what to remember, or what to forget? / forgetting as a sacred act? / But, anyway, here is a memory: of two boys running through the last meadow in Blackrock, Cork. Or perhaps it is an overgrown estate green, or wasteland / were my childhood meadows wasteland? / Each boy is wearing Bermuda shorts and a t-shirt. It is probably 1990. They have been, up to the moment the rain began, climbing parked rubbish lorries and huge refuse containers in the Barry’s Blue Bin yard. But now they are fleeing home in a torrential downpour / or a thunderstorm / the memory reacts, morphs as I write / it’s turning itself into / so that I can see all of it / or is it showing me various, conflicting possibilities? / They are laughing all the way, the two boys in bermudas. Shrieking. One of the boys is me; I don’t remember who the other one was / not Michael O’Donovan / smell of biscuits /.
I was probably seven years old, and I got pneumonia. The / medicine was banana-flavoured / rain got in my bones, the doctor said, or my mother told me / or some voice inserted in the memory /. In my lungs. The rain got right to the core of me / have I been carrying it within me ever since? / I remember that I actually didn’t feel that bad. I think I was off school for a week, lying on the couch, thinking that if the rain got to the core of me maybe I could become some kind of rain superhero / RAINMAN /. The house had no central heating and was freezing that week, so it must have been winter. But if it was winter, why were we wearing shorts? / cannot trust the memory /. Is this one memory, or various memories, whose rivulet pathways have run into each other on a windowpane / pane of my memory / increasing momentum / downward flow / but what rain actually does / is it redistributes energy / heat / energy / causes water to evaporate from fields / lakes / rivers / the vapour travels up through us / through the structures of our towns and cities / into air / altered by the temperatures on high / it condenses / this vapour / around a speck of dust / to form a droplet again / it is in the way of becoming water again / the unified field is transformed / again / energy is re-distributed / rain falls / why does rain fall, Miss? / because, Danny / why, Miss? / because there is water on the earth /.
O
You’d be drownded.
Soft day!
Weather for ducks!
She’s not the day you’d ask for.
She’d be a grand country if you could put a roof on her! Miserable day.
’Tis horizontal.
It’s washing away.
Shocking day!
O
Hauer’s / Batty’s / peroxide blond hair is drenched in the rain that fills the / neon / steam / L.A. night. The rain comes straight down, in curtains, washing the blood down his face. He holds a dove in his left hand, his elbows resting on his knees where he sits cross-legged. His chest / chalk ghost pale / Greek statuesque / slimy with precipitation / is erect against the night. It is a campfire pose, penitent only when he finally lets his head drop. It is no longer clear whether he is talking to Deckard or to the night or to the world or to some maker. He does not say:
I have known adventures, seen places you people will never see. I’ve been off-world and back ... frontiers! I’ve stood on the back of a blinker bound for the Plutition camps with sweat in my eyes, watching the star’s flight on the shoulder of Orion. I’ve felt wind in my hair, riding test boats off the black galaxies and seen an attack fleet burn like a match and disappear. I’ve seen it ... felt it!
He / now both Hauer and Batty / simultaneously / multitudes forever / does not say that, because he has re-written the words for that scene.
O
Testimony of Stranger #1: ‘I hate it. Nothing ruins my day like rain. Come ‘ere – I won’t even get out of bed on a rainy day! If I can help it. Fucking rain, God! We used get soaked walking up the hill from school. Then when we got home drenched we’d have to put our school books and copy books on the rad to dry out, and our clothes after that. I remember – most of the year – all the words in my copies being blurred and leaky, as if they weren’t real. Leaky, basically. Impossible to read. And the dried pages of the book then were like poppadoms or something. Don’t get me started on rain! Ruins me fucking life!’
O
2015. A torrential downpour in Girona. When it rained here, in this medieval town in the crumpled duvet of the Catalan landscape, it really hammered down. Strong, steady, long / potent / stair rods of rain that collapsed and exploded on the cobblestone and concrete. We lived in the old town, in an old apartment block, on the second floor, and when it rained like this / occasional / regular / I went straight to the balcony and rolled out the sun-awning so that I could watch it rain, feel it rain.
2015. / a weekend afternoon / vegetable basket full / radio on / another language / The sky darkened to a smudge. The rain began suddenly / turned on / as it would continue: hard and fast and loud. Filling the world with its sphere of sound / it amplifies itself / what does it sound like to a raindrop? / Our balcony looked out onto the apartment blocks’ courtyard / empty / concrete / a stunted, branchless tree like a pin on a concrete map / and the back of one of the town’s many / many / churches.
Within moments, rivulets formed in the furrows between the tile-ridges of the church’s roof / fold-out seat / elbows on the railing /. Rainwater cascaded through the furrows / rivulets / and onto a lower roof, from which waterfalls formed / fell / the moment perpetual / and landed in the / unreal / raindappled / concrete yard. The fall of the yard was towards the cobbled steps, so that / coming home / suddenly battling upstream / soaked to the shins / shallow rapids formed and fell to the cobbled street below, and that street was soon a shallow river / runnel / surging down past the old derelict cinema, the church, the medical centre into town.
There were voices.
Two girls / ten / eleven maybe / sat at angles in their two windows – one on the second floor in the first block, one on the fourth floor of the adjacent second block – calling across to each other. Their voices were a line of conversation, thread through the heavy rain / wet noise /. Usually these girls played in the yard together, making up dance routines by the tree stump, into the dusk, until their mothers’ voices drew them up back into their apartments. Their parents spoke to them in Catalan, but they called to each other now in Castellano / language of the playground / and I listened to their casual chat through / across / the rain, understanding only the odd word. I listened to the rain too, understanding nothing.
On another second floor window, a grey cat with a white collar sat against a closed window, it too watching the deluge, with the usual feline disinterest / nothing but / rain / drumming / tapping on stone / wood / glass / concrete / like a computer thinking / like a wave / never breaking / a bucket poured / never emptied / like a complaint / a tarpaulin dragged / forever / exhaling forever /. You would think, when you’re part of it, that you’re going to have to endure it forever. That the conversation between children, across windows, will go on forever. Then it turns off like a tap.
O
Why is my father / are all fathers? / so intrigued by the weather forecast? Nobody – including him – is naive enough to trust it, and yet each evening there he is standing over the couch, / tea towel slung over his shoulder / feet planted / yawning / watching the shifting graphics beyond the sweep of a weather presenter’s arm. The symbols over the map / shift and / morph: Irish forecast, English, European, Egyptian, it doesn’t matter. He jaws. He watches. The kettle boils, and steam rises / precipitation /.
O
Each rain droplet holds itself around a speck of dust / its own piece of planet /. Each one is a sovereign state. A world. A life. Each one is a metaphor / an extended metaphor /.
/ bla /
/ bla /
/ bla /
The café window, its pane beautiful with raindroplets / mind forms a haughty phrase / myriad tributaries /. Myriad tributaries of raindroplets track down the windowpane, making a complex / watery / map on its surface, one droplet’s journey joining another in its meandering.
/ but watch /
Sometimes there are sudden twists or turns in the droplets’ going. Bursts of speed for no clear reason / each one going south / each in their own way / chance often putting them in the same pathway / condensation /.
/ wonderful notion /
The really beautiful thing is that this is what happens in an actual cloud in the sky. These myriad tributaries on the windowpane occur kilometres above us in the / sacred space of / cloud form. Droplets slip down through the cloud, each with their own speck of dust like a borrowed heart inside them, falling south, joining up with other droplets / get back to earth / release energy / re-settle / change / the unified field /. When they are heavy enough: rainfall / comes in shifts / in patterns / rain-shafts / shaped also by the nature of the dust they carry / patterns of rain / rain fallen from cloud /.
O
A brief / shallow / survey of the rain gods indicates that they had lots in common with each other. They were all a bit strange, and mostly up for mischief: Indra, drunken hedonist; Tó Neinilii, the masked clown who made it rain when least convenient. At least half of them (those surveyed that is) lived alone on sacred mountains, a fierce lonely existence, and maybe that is why rain appeals to the want of solitude in you, or the / dread / fear of loneliness in you, or the sense of enduring the present / endless / moment.
Chaac had a lightning axe, as did a few others, and the Mayans would chant like frogs to get him to throw a few of his rain-snakes out of the sky for them. Chaac was both one and manifold – and that makes sense to me.
Like Chaac, the Wandjina, Indra, Tlaloc and Lono (and a good few others) were stone mad for fertility too. It was all about life and death with them. Lono actually existed before the world – that’ll deepen the mystery straight away – and so there is the idea that rain was here before there was a world for it to rain on / was consciousness here before there was a world to think about? / do god and rain and objects and everything else / do they predate thought? / In fact, the Wandjina – the aboriginal rain gods – are said to have created the landscape themselves. And actually, I remember being in the back of family cars as a child, on regular ill-fated outings / six of us crammed into the Peugeot 206 / the Fiesta / some rusty Renault / and often it would be raining. And looking through the steambeaded window / to grey / to mist /, rubbing my hand in circles against it, I would wonder was there a world out there at all.
O
Testimony compiled from various WhatsApp feedback:
‘[In 2016] it rained from Hallowe’en until about the first or second week in February. It nearly drove me fucking insane. I’m talking about 2015 actually, not 2016. Imagine that. Three whole months of fucking rain.’
‘When it rains some say, “ah ‘tis a day for the high stool”.’
‘Rain reminds me of Kerry. Home. Standing under a shelter, looking out, watching rain piss down for hours on end, wondering when it’s gonna stop. Pure perseverance. Standing in under a shelter and still getting wet, with the rain hitting you in the face. Torture! What else? I remember walking around golf courses getting hit by rain, having to put on ten extra layers of clothes before going out into rain. Cycling my bike in and out of school, having to put on oil pants. But still getting wet, until you are wet as can possibly be, so that you don’t care anymore how wet you are, so that you’re having the craic when you’re cycling home drenched. Only to be given out to when you get home because you’ve only got one set of clothes for school. Runners drenched. Stuffed with paper. Up against the range. What else? I don’t like rain because you can’t do fuck all when it’s raining. I suppose it’s not too bad when you’re not in the rain. Like when you’re sat in a car looking out and it’s pissing rain, hitting off the windscreen. That’s grand. If you’re in bed watching a movie and the rain is hitting the window, that’s grand. If you’re sat in the pub and fellas are rushing in off the street after getting drenched, that’s always a bit of craic. So I suppose rain isn’t too bad. I suppose it’s just where you are when the rain is happening.’
‘Stealth rain has always been a personal favourite of mine – you look out and you think it’s not that bad, so you only stick on a hat. But then by the time you get to the shop you’re drenched. Stealth rain that is.’
‘I remember when I was a kid. I stayed in countryside. I really loved raining. Because I can smell the earth. I can smell flowers more than every time. After rain, it smells so good, the earth, flowers. It’s a lovely smell. A fresh smell.’
‘It rained the whole way through the senior hurling final of 1999 between Cork and Kilkenny.’
O
Roy Batty / Hauer / is a replicant, an android created by humans to serve a manual purpose. And he can be described as an asset, a possession, a worker, but he is not human. To help them learn emotional responses, replicants are pre-programmed with fake memories; however, somewhere along the way Batty and his companions began to accumulate new / other / real / memories, on top of the pre-programmed memories. Meaning can only be implied in hindsight, through memory / memory as a kind of processing function / between past and future /, so are these new memories and Batty’s processing of them the beginning of his ‘consciousness’? / are all these moments lost / memories lost / the end of my consciousness? /
After consciousness, or self-awareness, comes his desire to survive. Throughout the film he searches desperately for a way to extend his lifespan (and the lifespan of his dear companions), but at the last, it is his memories that he sees as his essence. His assertion of / adoption of / humanity, or soul. What he says, in the end, is:
I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All these ... moments ... will be lost ... in time ... like ... tears ... in rain. Time to die.
Tears seem to represent memories that have provoked an emotional response, but what about the rain? What if each raindrop was a memory / pockets of present tense visions from the past / and what if what we did was move our bodies around in this rainy sphere, flooded by experience / present become past / perpetually /? What if this constant immersion in memory reinforced our existence, our / sense of self / consciousness / are metaphors real? / blank, dull forms we are / once lifeless / wandering through a neverending downpour of metaphors that gave meaning to our colourlessness / to our blind / dumb / endless searching / the metaphor exhausted / failed / memory as the site of illumination? /
O
Testimony of Stranger #4: ‘I don’t mind it though really, once you get a hot shower at the other end of it though. Funny how people would call it a bitter night, as if those millions of raindrops flying into your face and stinging you were spiteful towards you. The way you angle yourself against it – lean into it – is pure endurance. Pure battle. Woman versus nature. But I don’t know as it’s that. I do always feel though like it’s some spirit though, some mystery trying to solve itself. Or trying to open itself up to me. Only we can’t understand the language of the rain. It’s all a bit daft really, what I’m saying.’
Testimony of Stranger #5: ‘Outside of summer, it rained more in London than anywhere else I lived. But for year-round rain, Galway’s your man. I remember the flooding in 03, 05 and 09, fellas canoeing up and down Pana to bring the Dunnes Stores staff home. Pure pandemonium in town. But nobody got it as bad as Galway in 09. Nobody. I watched it on RTÉ. That was humanitarian that was. Livestock drowning. People literally stranded on these ... islands that weren’t islands. The papers were full of politicians in wellies – standing next to boats, or with sandbags in their arms. Fucking bastards. And footage of people indoors too, in dark, half-submerged front rooms. People in water up to their elbows. That was all rain that. Relentless that year. One lady on my street said it was God punishing us for MTV. Relentless rain that year.’
O
Unlike many, I loved playing Gaelic football games in the rain. Playing in the rain felt somehow more primal. To be out there in the elements. In the weather / italics don’t do it justice /. But the world / precipitation / was happening all around you: the ground was changing into something less discreet; the ball was suddenly like a bar of soap; everything was odd / unpredictable / and slippery and up for grabs; motion slowed; you had to drag your boots through the grass; you scrambled; you had to shout louder to be heard; teammates and opponents alike appeared out of the mist of it, and back into the mist of it ... It took effort and bravery just to look up and see.
Rain was also a very effective leveller, slowing everything and everybody down as we scampered slipshod across boggy grass / some form of horizontal gravity unkinked /. We all fell as we turned. We reached out as we spilled the ball, or ourselves, as we flung ourselves at the moment, and by and large missed.
One rainy Sunday, in an underage game / under 15s / 16s /, our cheap nylon jerseys chafed our / cold-hardened / teenage nipples in a soaking gale. When we were getting changed after the game we all laughed, because with the white-green muddy jerseys off, we realized that every nipple in the room was bleeding. We laughed, but the pain was acute.
O
/ behold a veil of drizzle in the landscape / making ghosts out of ditches / and trees / making memories of them / notions to be renewed / as you drift through the veil / as the sun cleans the image / windscreen wipers / wipe / the screen clear /
O
/ ‘Questions, Sebastian’ /
What does a person think, who has experienced nothing? Can you think without having experienced? Or, to experience nothingness – is that in itself an experience to provoke thought? Surely then consciousness is awareness?
Roy Batty – replicant, android / skinjob / – was pre-programmed with certain physical attributes and a set of memories. He added real memories to his pre-programmed memories. The memories / real / fake / junctures between the constant moment and past / were evidence of his consciousness, his life. In HBO’s new version of Westworld (2016), it is worth noting that the robots’/androids’/hosts’ journeys into self-awareness also began, or were triggered by, the conflict of experienced memories layered over pre-programmed memories. Once the host / the replicant / began to reflect on these memories, the crisis of self-awareness beckoned.
And yes, my own memory is so poor. I wish I could remember more. I can recall specific, mundane episodes / moments / with great clarity. I remember in a supermarket in Girona, photographing the two types of cream and sending the pictures to Rachel because I didn’t know which to buy. I remember a McDonald’s cup rolling in a half circle on the footbridge over the Thames that goes from Embankment to Waterloo (of course, I can’t remember the bridge’s name). I remember the exact point on the Old Kent Road – just after the Windsor pub, when you came out of the shadow of the overpass – at which I used to shift on the bicycle, from the inside to the outside of the lane, in preparation for a right turn. I remember throwing the ball against the opposite curb in Bloomingdale, on the short hill outside our house. I remember pausing for cars.
But, bar a few token dramatic moments, I struggle to recall large tracts of childhood. I remember so little about school, about the styles or habits of particular teachers, about books, poems, essays, formulae and so on. When I become nostalgic for earlier life, it is for still visions, boring things like the road layout at the top of Church Hill, or the cul-de-sac – empty – up in the Meadows on a hot day. Or the way board games were stacked on a bedroom shelf. Or everybody fighting and slapping and already feeling carsick as we piled into the Fiesta or the Peugeot or the Civic. Or the pedestrian traffic light outside my bedroom window the summer of 2005 / 2004 / that never stopped beeping all through the night. In a narrative sense, I don’t remember much of childhood, or of the Junior Cert, or going to my Debs, or my summer in Delaware, or the second year of college. There is the worry sometimes that some trauma has been hidden. That there’s a reason I’m forgetting. Or perhaps the teenage years are such a traumatic experience that they obliterate earlier memories. I suppose too that the vast quantities of alcohol imbibed over years doesn’t help either. But if I could only access everything perhaps I could begin to understand myself better. Or see myself as a whole, clear entity, and not just a blurry, expansive downpour of thought, memory, reaction / rain /.
And but what if memories could be kept? What if they could be uploaded, stored, transferred like photographs to a hard drive? If we could share them with friends on social networks and thus commodify them? In doing so, would we be going the opposite direction to Roy Batty? All these moments would be ... kept. In the cloud. What would this change about us? How much of our personality / consciousness / would be left over when the memories were stored elsewhere? Unclogged by the terabytes of sensory data, would our processing power be magnified to superhuman proportions? Would self-awareness strengthen or erode? Is it possible we’d become templates again, factory resets ready for customization?
This, of course, presumes that memories are whole, capturable entities. But perhaps they are more like stains – residue of something that marks you somehow – or echoes, or scars, or raindrops / falling and gathered up / falling and gathered up /. And either way, the truth is that if it came to it, if it really came to it, could we give them up? Because we hold onto the memories / retrace them /; we pull them close to form and re-form ourselves. We shore them against ourselves, because the end of life is forgetting, and being forgotten.
O
The day I made my confirmation we got a puncture. 1995. It hoored down rain from the moment we left the church. Your confirmation is apparently when you receive the holy spirit unto you / the ghost / most mysterious of the trinity /, an act that completes your religious maturity / makes you whole / you can ask it for anything to make you whole / not to be afraid of the dark anymore / and now not afraid /. We didn’t have our first car / second car / long at that stage, a silver Ford Fiesta, manufactured in 1983 I think / same age /. We were going to the LEISUREPLEX as a family / the present of money / from everybody / a few hundred pounds in all / bowling / pool / the arcade / Quasar /, my parents in the front seats and myself, my brother and my two sisters in the back. We tore up the Rochestown Road, bursting through heavy sheets of rain / evil river hidden on our right / hidden by drenched wind-stunted trees /. I remember the windscreen wipers distinctly, squeaking away in that frantic rhythm, that clean pendulum wipe / squeak / so many moments of return / memory / wiped / hopping into the car with Mam / Dad / various stations / various ages / collected from school / from training / from town / from the airport / compilations of daily conversations / ritualistic complaints on loop / sampled / old snippets repeated / repeated / enhanced / wore out / wiped cleaned / returned / I spend my whole evening going round turning out lights after ye / them / it is the usual rubbish / I don’t even respond to it anymore / they will be doing that job ‘til the end of time /. And suddenly, halfway up the Rochestown Road, there was this dramatic rumbling underneath our seats, as if we’d run a boat aground.
Dad wouldn’t let anyone else get out of the car. It was a rare moment in which he and Mam didn’t argue about an incident. He searched the boot for something called a jack, but did not find one. There were no other houses on that stretch of road / but what about that B&B? / so Dad disappeared into the rain for five, ten, twenty minutes.
The hazards ticking like a clock, I remember, and vague, almost unseen cars, breaking past us / like shore waves /. Sometimes their horns called out of the mist. If this were to happen in any of my friends’ cars, there’d have been a jack. Or they’d have called the AA. We might not even have had insurance then – I don’t know.
Some time later, as I watched the rearview mirror, assuming my day ruined / feeling sorry for myself / this navy blue wraith / formed / strode out of the rain / grew through the beads of the back window /.
Dad. With a large metal yoke hanging out of his right hand.
I don’t think we even got out for him to elevate the damaged side of the car and change the wheel. He just raised us all up using that metal yoke, swapped the wheels while we dangled, and let us all down again.
O
From the radio, testimony of flooding on the outskirts of a town: ‘What happened was the people who’d been living in their car had been tying the two dogs to the lamppost by night. Father, mother, two kids: living out of the car, by the playground, by the river – short-term apparently, hard times, they were on a list; this is the kind of thing that’s happening now, PJ ... And they’d two dogs who they were always playing with then shouting at. I saw them myself, two collie mongrel type things. Happy dogs, hyper dogs.
‘The banks of the river burst then the second day and they obviously had to move the car. Maybe they couldn’t get back, maybe they forgot, but the two dogs drownded, tied to the lamppost while the river burst through the car park and was up to the five-foot mark within hours. People out of their homes. Floating clothes. Shops on Main Street washed out completely. Their own leashes probably dragged them under. Probably barking all that time until they couldn’t swim or bark no more.
‘Probably everyone heard them but no-one noticed them because everyone was too busy saving their own stuff. PJ, there’s a lot of sad, bad stuff going on out there, but those two dogs are after breaking my heart. I heard them barking, PJ, and I didn’t think a thing of it.’
O
/ rain like tension /
A drop of drizzle is usually smaller than .02 inches. A full-sized raindrop can be .05 to 0.1 inches. Raindrops are not like tears, but usually spherical in shape.
/ rain like tension / released /
Sometimes they fall and evaporate in mid-air; the effect of this happening en masse is a dark hanging fringe around a
cloud, called a virga.
/ rain like a wave / never fully breaking / no matter / evaporated raindrops! / alas, poor Yorick! / ye who have
disappeared on your journey / ye who never have the chance to splash /
/ rain like a bucket poured and never emptied /
/ rain like a hissing animal /
/ rain like a complaint /
/ rain like a tarpaulin /
/ no matter / you’ll have your chance again / in the next formation / in some other rainshaft /
/ rain like a blanket /
O
2016, for sure. Earlier that morning I’d woken fitfully, as I’d slept fitfully. The laneway terrace hotel had been like something from a manga dream, all piled detritus, creaking stairs and broken tile bedrooms with dripping faucets. I was up and away out of it then, cycling up the cobbled laneway in the ramshackle mountain border town of Puigcerda, and onto the main square then, and out of the town and across the border from Spain into France, seen only by a few horses, a milestone and the odd overtaking car.
A kilometre before Porta, I turned up from the main road and the route began to cut back and forth, the tacking of a mountain road. I couldn’t tell Col du Puymorens from the three peaks filling my blue sky. That road I was on could have tacked at any point, in any direction. That road carried me up. I’d had the most boring epiphany the previous day, and transcribe it here from one of the few journey notes I ended up making: ‘The thing is that, here in the countryside, like this, on the bike, on a horse, on foot, you are part of the landscape. You are not apart from it; you are of it. You are the ecosystem, not some cold distant observer of it. Human is nature. What am I on about? I mean that when the land rises, I rise with it. My body changes to meet the rise. The rise is my rhythm. The rise fills my thoughts and my actions. These hills have formed over aeons. You will ascend again. And descend again. And the wind is always there, blowing up or down, and always part of you while you ascend and descend. Even in its absence, wind is part of you.’
I listed then the remarkable things I’d seen on the journey: ‘a family of wild boar skittering across my track; eight or nine parachutists landing in a field; a red kite chasing a smaller bird; mountain cows with bells around their necks, in the eternal act of chewing cud; I passed through a tiny town – a quarter mile of road and 240 people according to the sign – but it had a roller disco and a McDonalds; I saw ten people in white lab suits, following a tractor around a field ...’
Climbing Col du Puymorens on the bicycle, I felt the absence of animal or insect sounds. Saw high-altitude mountain flowers I could not name, and rock, sheer. The hairpins drew apart, and then narrowed again, as I closed out the ascent.
Approaching the summit, the sky was as grey as I’d ever seen it. I could no longer pick out the speck of road on which I’d entered the valley between mountain peaks. There, at the top, my face stretched with the effort, I huffed and puffed upon a car park, with several cars and mobile homes parked about, and a large drab house / a restaurant / closed for the season / closed down entirely /. 1920 metres into the sky. I leaned the bike against a barrier and ate my roll, my Snickers and my banana. Ragged groups of people took photos of the view on their phones. An old man strolled to the toilet hut. A large / raven-haired / woman stood out of a camper and tucked her jumper into her trousers. A freezing wind blew across the summit, though down in the valley it had been a beautiful day. I huddled beneath the barrier, out of the wind, while I ate. I took a photo of my bike against / depthless / grey sky. I walked a lap of the car park, kicking stones, reading French warning signs on some kind of electrical hut, stretching out my leg muscles and my back. I was cold and calm / giddy /. I’d cycled this high into the world, almost two kilometres. The counting was over for the day. Everything else was downhill.
And yet, back on the bike, coming down the other side of the mountain / perfect black tarmac road / new / beautifully lined / tacking back and forth /, everything was very quickly dark. I could not see the land below.
I could barely see fifteen feet in front of me, in fact, and in moments was drenched. It was raining but it wasn’t raining. No rain fell.
Cold pairs of headlamps grew suddenly / occasionally / out of the gloom, the gloom cold and wet and enveloping. I was freezing and drenched and yet still no rain fell.
And I realized then that I was in the cloud. I was part of the rain, in the process of descending to the earth, kilometres below. Me on my two wheels, gathering moisture enough to drop ...
... and soon / falling freely / tacking between hairpins, onto a mountain-nook town that was dominated by a huge electrical plant, and coming around the sweep of the road / the road’s curve I was / ...
... saw a burnt-out Renault in the grass verge ...
... and suddenly I am
running through the meadow / wasteland / in bermudas. I am watching out the / clouded / car window, blue figure crouching beyond. I am sitting on a bike / drenched / at a Catalan traffic light, staring beyond it to my own bank, and I am unable to break the red light, even in the downpour. I am flaking along a hard shoulder / face keen to it /. I am ducking out of the flight of umbrellas. We are drunk / high / at a festival and dancing through it. We are taking off. I am playing Final Fantasy VII in my bedroom as it taps the windowpane. We are called in from the yard and everybody groans. We are trying to get home along the beach while the thunder rumbles out at sea. My nipples are chafing – will the ref ever blow the fucking whistle. We are playing cards in a tent. We are lost. We are running for the shelter of a bus stop. I am wading down the flooded Western Road with a pregnant stranger. I am hauling my schoolbag up the back road. We are crammed in the back of the car and Ben is pinching me because I have punched him and Rosie is crying because she feels sick and Emily is crying because she wants something she can’t have. I am sitting on a balcony in a Chinese university. On a balcony in Girona. On a porch in Delaware. I am swimming. I am crying. I am listening. I am telling lies. I am running for a bus. I am complaining. I am out for a jog on the promenade, my face stung, my knees creaking. We are asking each other for loans, endlessly paying each other back. We are pulling clothes from the line / squealing / and pegs are flying. We are running for the shelter of a / city / doorway. I am trying to stuff the rolled / unread / newspaper up my jacket sleeve. I am nearly slipping on my ass. I wish I could remember more, because if I cannot remember then I cannot grasp all that I am / the mind not large enough to contain the self / begins to forget / ...
O
Maxi – a stone mason for whom I worked on the summer holidays between school years / summer days, praying for rain so that we might get to go home early / – greets me with a big grin and a hardy handshake. It could be any year after 2016.
‘The prodigal son!’
He shouts because he is partially deaf.
At one time he’d about ten guys working for him. But that’s a hard act to keep up, he’d tell you. Things fall away from you, day by day, month by month.
‘How long are you back?’ he asks.
‘Yarra since October. How’s the work?’
‘Grand! Tipping away all the time.’
‘Anyone out with you, Maxi?’
‘Just meself now ...’
‘...’
‘‘Tis way handier. Less pressure, no wages to pay only my own. If it starts pissing rain I can just fuck off out of it. No pressure anymore, like.’ ‘Perfect. Only yourself to look after.’
‘...’
‘...’
We are standing by the side of the training field. I’m togged. I’m back playing football. He’s got a bunch of cones in his hand. Others – my teammates, his squad members – are drifting out, shivering into the floodlit field.
‘Where are you living?’ he calls from my right shoulder.
‘Town. Just by the North Mall there.’
‘Oh yeah.’
‘What about yourself? The Meadows still?’
‘No! We sold that place. Siobhán is down in Timoleague with the kids. I’m down with the mother, on the hill.’
‘Down in Marina View? Lovely!’ ‘Yeah.’
‘How is the mother?’
‘Alzheimer’s and dementia. She has good days and bad.’
‘Jesus, sorry. I didn’t know.’
‘’Tisn’t your fault!’
‘... Double whammy.’
‘Hah?’
‘DOUBLE WHAMMY.’
‘Ah, yeah. She’s eighty-five. She had a good life. And the sister isn’t far away.’
‘...’
‘...’
‘The rain is holding off for now at least.’
‘’Tis, thank fuck!’
The weather has always been a handy change of subject, and pulling ourselves back from the brink of his mother’s forgetting disease and our various failures, we talk about the patterns of the weather and its effect on the usually marshy training pitch, and other weather-related things, until a whistle somewhere blows. I often wonder how long I could talk about weather to avoid saying the things I really want to say. I don’t know. But I do think about Maxi since. Not minding his mother, or roaring at the footballers going through the hard drills, but packing his tools into the van in the pissing rain, just himself now, clocking off on his own clock, wandering back to the jeep, the windscreen wipers going. Drinking tea from a take-away cup, idling by the pavement, reading the Examiner in the driver’s seat. I know the sound of the rain on the windowpane, accumulating, searching, the roads empty of traffic until the schools finish.
From issue #9: autumn/winter 2019
About the Author
Danny Denton is a writer from Cork, and lectures on writing at UCC. His first novel, The Earlie King & The Kid In Yellow, was published by Granta Books in 2018. His second novel, All Along The Echo, was published by Atlantic Books in 2022. He is a contributing editor with The Stinging Fly.
