‘I took a man and I put him in a castle’ by Muireann Crowley
It was a castle of storm and wind where cats ate shadows and practised conflict negotiation with their mice brethren. The walls sang with carpet moss and bristled with knights’ battle cries. It was homely in the winter and perfectly cool and pleasant in summer.
It was perfect for a modern man.
*
The problem was this: there were no longer any gerbils in the castle. There had been at one time, but I was forced to make a change due to their tendency to run up outrageous bills by making long-distance phone calls to libertarian gurus in the Appalachians. Nor were they at all reasonable when I pointed out I had installed broadband for their convenience and would happily guide them through the process of setting up Skype accounts. Gerbils, like all survivalists, are deeply suspicious of the internet, and so it was no surprise when they refused to mend their ways. From there it was a short distance to enlisting the anacondas’ assistance, and that is why the castle was gerbil-less on the day I put the man in the castle, and why, indeed, it remains so to this day.
*
The castle has always hosted friends of the family.
*
It was autumn when I put the man there. I left him a satsuma (to minimise risk of scurvy) and a bottle of Dettol (to disinfect any wounds). This amounted to the most meaningful kindness ever rendered onto the man. Or so I am reliably informed. However, an unfortunate sequence of events meant the castle afforded him fewer opportunities than usual to practise dinner conversation and thus, in the conventional way of things, develop a mastery of social niceties he had hitherto lacked. Therefore, the castle, while perfect for a modern man under normal circumstances, fell short in this one instance.
*
The castle had been in my family for many generations and was indeed a cornerstone of our ancient genealogical identity. I had inherited it from my mother who inherited it from her father who inherited from his father who inherited it from someone whose throat was throttled on a brightly lit pier in Brighton.
*
Why this man and not another? No one could possibly accuse him of stealing beauty’s laurel from the other young bucks who crossed my path that day. In fact, my choice had consumed many hours of deeply draining introspection. While the anacondas had proved helpful in the matter of the gerbils, there was no getting around the fact they were remarkably self-involved, forever fixated on detoxification and enemas and other such emollients for their digestive tracts, and rarely ever expressed an interest in the wellbeing of others. The ascendancy of Mars had also propelled my usual intimates from terms of easy conversation, and I found myself alone, adrift without a sounding board.
Perhaps that was it all it was; it was necessary for me to have in my possession a board, which I could sound at a moment of my choosing.
*
It took three months to find the right ketchup.
*
In any event, I provided the man with audiobook cassettes of The Chronicles of Narnia in lieu of conversation partners. These were among the few items of memorabilia I retained from my childhood. Unfortunately, there was not a single cassette player or analogue device in the castle – having wholly embraced the digital after the gerbils’ departure – so I confess I may not have considered the situation fully. That being said, having recourse to some mental resources, the man did endeavour to devise another method for playing the cassettes. It was this method I found him demonstrating one afternoon when I arrived an hour early for my monthly pubic wax.
*
The BBC weather forecast correctly predicted light drizzle in my locality for the twenty-second consecutive day. Meanwhile, my ancestral land boasted an absolutely insufferable orb of gladness that was entirely antithetical to its ideal form, as had been successfully captured only once in the history of literature by that rude bard Myles na gCopaleen in his singular An Béal Bocht. In any event, this disjuncture between my homeland and my country of residence perturbed me greatly, and so some days had passed before I could quite muster the energy to visit the castle, given the dreich mists and piranha-infested lochs I needed to traverse to reach it. In fact, I think it no small indication of my commitment to the man that I visited him as frequently as I did.
*
The man did cry at first.
That was regrettable.
*
There has always been a boy.
I received a postcard from the boy and the feelings it provoked within me were, while not unfamiliar, unsettling in their proximity to the impassioned state I experienced when held on the cusp of a destination after a protracted period of stagnated time in congested traffic. This impassioned state has a very particular timbre (similar to the resonant bonging bass-drop familiar from that soundtrack you have heard a thousand times thanks to a certain Mr C. Nolan) and an unsettling colour (the yellow-green of infection congealing beneath the surface of white skin). I confess I was a little too affected by the postcard. It unsettled otherwise quite settled objects lying within my duodenum, and the disturbance resulted in some rather abrupt and bilious behaviour towards my work colleagues that day. I later apologised without reservation.
It was indeed fortunate, for all concerned, that I had a man in the castle at that time.
*
Have you ever seen a collision between a heavy goods vehicle carrying glamorous yurts and a moped carrying an elderly political commentator of the centre-centre persuasion with a basketful of his balanced views? I have. It happened on a motorway off-ramp some three miles from the castle. The ensuing chaos was visible from the castle battlements. Lord, how I chortled at the scene of carnage before me. The man laughed too once he was assured the commentator was merely in shock and not deceased among the tumble of colourful silks. He had the most curiously sentimental preoccupation with the integrity of human bodies – his own, a stranger’s, anyone’s really – and any suggestion of an infringement on that integrity threatened to compromise his good humour for several days. Thus assured of his fellow man’s relative wellbeing, he peered through his toy telescope and narrated the scene in the manner of a sports commentator. He was quite the wit when he applied himself to the task.
It was a jolly time until he spied a skeleton lying among the rushes on the far side of the moat. Not for the first time, I cursed the rats’ ongoing industrial action. And then the doldrums descended.
*
The man’s flesh had the golden textured quality of a succulent rotisserie chicken: pimpled, as if by cloves of garlic slipped between dermis and epidermis, and delicate as crepe paper.
*
When I think of the boy now I see him as he was at twenty: very beautiful and very gauche with a luminous insensibility of his historical materiality. He entered each space with a slate blank of expectations, much like a silverskin onion encountering a Gibson for the very first time. Do you know what I mean? Take a moment to summon the Gibson to your mouth, your nose – think of the chill mouthfeel, the tilt-shift view. Experience dimly, but escape perceiving, the suffusion of bitters (celery, of course) binding it all together.
*
I do beg your pardon. The Narnia story – I completely lost the thread of it. I found him undulating amongst reels of unspooled magnetic tape, his limbs entangled in oily ribbons, his tongue attempting the role of tape-head by assiduously licking forth the sound of Mr Tumnus crunching through a perpetual winter. This was a more appropriate commentary on our contemporary moment than anything C.S. Lewis might have anticipated, as I am sure you will agree, and I was pleased by the inadvertent consequence of the gerbils’ disaffection. Of course, it was an exercise in futility, but I did so admire his ingenuity on this occasion.
*
I dislike attaching numerical values to a man’s worth as much as the next true lover of masculinity. That being said, I confess falling back on crude taxonomic systems to organise the men in my recollection. Despite all the idiosyncrasies and superficial variations between them, I am ever convinced of a certain universal masculine spirit that elides these mean differences. Hence my little data collection project. There is no doubt they would otherwise have blurred into a single tripod form.
From the time of my third guest, I carefully collected the following basic data in a Microsoft Excel document:
Age
Height
Eye colour
Shoulder to waist ratio
Torso to leg ratio
Number of limbs
Butt curvature conformity to golden ratio (y/n) Distinguishing features (scars, moles, birthmarks, tattoos, etc.)
Means of departing castle
Favourite ice cream flavour
*
For exercise, I encouraged the man to dig holes in the castle grounds. He was at first somewhat truculent, preferring to get his cardio workout via running up and down the stairs at a terrific speed while I followed him at a sedate but consistent pace. One day I followed him for ninety-seven hours, and the workout concluded only because he lost consciousness. When he awoke, he accepted the more holistic benefits of a digging-centred regime, which could integrate elements of high-intensity interval training (HIIT) for maximum gains. After all, things were always needing to be buried, and they did tend to pile up in the most daunting fashion unless dealt with promptly.
He became partial to a jug of Long Island Iced Tea after each dig.
*
Thursday is the best day for exsanguinating Tories, Fine Gaelers and Fianna Fáilers, and indeed all those of a centre-right persuasion on the islands.
*
There was blood the first time I bedded the boy. Perfectly natural, of course, but it did take me by surprise – the warmth, the drip, the greedy seep across the pristine white sheets. We stripped the bed and remade it with fresh linens he had collected from his mother’s tumble dryer that very morning. Street lights illuminated the room in his dingy student bedsit, and I blatantly admired the lustre of his skin, its poreless sheen, in the blue light. I mouthed promises of lilies and first-born sacrifices and Twin Peaks marathons into his clavicle. In return, he spoke haltingly of his hopes, and his unfurling, softening form became the object of the purest expression of adoration I have ever experienced. I was certain beyond all certainty that my adoration would shear off my limits, and his dissolving inhibitions would collapse his, and thus we would consume the liminal between us.
*
Later, I did manage to secure a cassette player, and worked night and day with a team of salamanders to re-spool the tapes. The restored objects continued to render a reasonable facsimile of C.S. Lewis’s classic tale, but they now offered some additional auditory experiences. After some discussion with the salamanders, I concluded that these were (i) the final moments of Pope Chad Bartholomew IX before he was assassinated by his astrologer-landscaper at the behest of a rogue masonic lodge run by disaffected ex-Pret A Manger staff; (ii) the fall of a thousand wheels of Camembert from the sky; (iii) Jonathan Franzen’s sobs when he reads #FuckFranzen on Twitter; and (iv) the moist, hairy squelch and scratch of the man’s most intimate and delicate regions.
*
Peanut butter on a teaspoon. Golden koi in a pond on the ground floor reception of a multinational asset management company. The trimmed hairs on the nape of the boy’s neck. Refuse collection schedules. Finger smears on a car’s wing mirror. Bear scat. Found poetry composed of craft brewers’ social media posts. Pages torn from The Parallax View and folded into paper airplanes.
Rodgers and Hammerstein know exactly what I am talking about and always have done. I will have my day in court.
*
That reminds me of the time one of the cats accidentally ate a mouse instead of darkness. When the mouse re-emerged, scamper-dragging itself up the cat’s gullet, it brought with it a bolus of shade that twitched and vibrated and grew into a shadow mouse-brother of humongous proportions. The ensuing battle between cats and shadow painted the corridors in fractured light. I made popcorn and watched long into the night.
Jealous? Yes. Yes, of course I was jealous.
*
When the man was gone and all trace of him removed from the castle it was safe to reintroduce the spider plants I had been keeping in abeyance.
*
On Valentine’s Day, we wallpapered the third bathroom with a collage of Sears catalogues from the early nineties. The stonewashed denim, bowl-cut hair, and languid looks tickled the man’s fancy, and he laughed until the tears flowed in twin babbling brooks down his angular cheeks and splattered onto the newspaper-lined floor. I offered onions for tissues and a hair shirt for solace.
The glue we used had a sickly sweet odour, which engendered a lingering headache that impressed a band of pressure across my eyes and forehead. I remember how the headache, the fashion, and other auditory sensations of that Valentine’s Day contributed to a delightful stickiness between my thighs, making them grip each other, as I admired how the man lay prone and trembling against those glossy pages, his eyes limpid and dark.
How he waited to see what I would do next.
From issue #6: spring/summer 2018
About the Author
Muireann Crowley was born in Cork, and now lives in Edinburgh.
