McCormack This Plague of Souls

1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-915290-12-0
Verlag: Tramp Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 268 Seiten

Someone out there believes Nealon has a plan, a global blueprint for nothing less than a whole new beginning. But Nealon has other things on his mind. Returning home after the collapse of his trial he finds himself alone in a cold empty house. No heat or light, no sign of his wife or child anywhere. It seems the world has forgotten that he even existed. Barely in the door, Nealon's phone rings. The caller claims to know what's happened to Nealon's family. The man will tell him all that he needs to know in return for a conversation - that's all the caller wants, an exchange of views. It's an offer Nealon can't refuse. This Plague of Souls is at once a charged thriller of crime and absolution and a metaphysical enquiry into fractured society, fatherhood and the lengths a man might go to in order to save what he loves.

Mike McCormack is an award-winning novelist and short-story writer whose work includes Getting it in the Head, Crowe's Requiem, Notes from a Coma, and Forensic Songs. In 1996 he was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. His last novel, Solar Bones (Tramp Press, 2016), won the Goldsmiths Prize, the Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards for Best Novel and for Best Book, and the Dublin International Literary Award (previously known as the IMPAC). He was nominated for a slew of other awards, including the Booker Prize.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mccormack, Mike

Leseproben

Boredom gets the better of him, the house with its empty rooms and the phone lying silent on the table. He decides to walk across the fields. He might run into Shevlin, his neighbour.

Shevlin has rented the land off Nealon since his father’s death and the lease will be up in a couple of months. It would be no harm to show the face and let Shevlin know he’s around. That said, it’s the need to stop listening to the churn of his own thoughts that compels Nealon now more than the prospect of haggling with Shevlin over the terms of the lease. Besides, Shevlin is going nowhere. His tongue is hanging out for the forty acres that make up this holding if it ever comes to market. With no sign of any income anywhere on the horizon, Nealon has a vague notion that he might raise the possibility with Shevlin. Just dangle the idea in front of him. Coming out of the blue with it might flummox him and that, Nealon felt, would be worth seeing in itself.

There’s a pair of wellingtons in the shed, standing inside the door with their twin bores gaping up at him. A rivulet of sand drains away in a thin feather when he turns them upside down. The cold feel of them rises into his spine so it takes a moment standing there in the damp smell of the shed before they warm up and he moves off.

The sheds around him stand empty with the desolate air of structures that have lost their true purpose of men and animals moving through them. Light falls like dust in the narrow space between the barn and the dairy. The door of the calf shed is shut, the right-an-gled hasp on the jamb browned and smooth against the lead paint. It opens with that burred groan of metal and wood coming apart. The sound is a beacon from an age when things were simpler, when locks and doors were fitted with maximal regard for what they were about and nothing else. He lowers his head to duck inside. The interior is gloomy, the barred window blocked up with a sheet of galvanise held in place with a length of four-by-two wedged diagonally into the narrow recess. A plastic dosing bottle stands on the sill, yellowed and speckled like a small effigy in its own commemorative grotto. Overhead, there’s a hay fork wedged between the rafters and the corrugated roof.

The smell of the place – dried cow shit, hay and timber – fills him with his whole childhood. The years fall away and he is now a child moving through these outbuildings. The old smells, the old light. Any moment now he will hear his father call his name, see him come around the corner, walking towards him.

He steps back out into the yard and walks through the hayshed, the curved space over his head holding the still air within. Old hay is banked against the far wall – grey and mouldy now. A wad of black silage cover lies deflated in the middle of the floor. The whole assemblage looks like a carefully staged memorial – a site-specific installation – to a way of life gone completely, a way of life which would never evolve beyond these parts.

How many times has he stood in this hayshed with his father to shelter from a passing shower? Standing together and listening in silence to the rain falling on the galvanised roof, hearing the whole structure hum in a single continuous note. Such moments always seemed to hang outside of time, suspended intervals within their lives together on their small farm. And as the rain fell, the young Nealon sometimes wondered if this same rain might have fallen through the same angle and light across his life from the day of his birth. And if so, was it a sorrow or a consolation? And he remembers also how this mood moved him once as a child to an embarrassing tautology. Watching the rain rolling towards them across the fields in thick swathes he was startled to hear himself say out loud

‘That’s wet rain.’

Spoken as if there was a chance there could be any other kind. And his voice hung in the soft light, invoking some in-finite foolishness until his father, apparently seeing nothing redundant in what he had said doubled on it with ‘That is wet rain,’ and then added for good measure, ‘and never an end to it.’

And, for whatever reason, this is one of the moments in their lives together that Nealon holds dear and that comes back to him most often. A moment with a weight of understanding which reaches across the years.

Now he is overtaken by a feeling of shame at the depth of stillness and silence throughout these buildings. In his early teens he had become aware that he would be heir to all this – this homestead with all its land and cattle – and that realisation had filled him with dread. The prospect of a life amongst these sheds and everything they entailed frightened the shit out of him. This could not be his whole world, he raged, these sheds and barns, these fields and livestock. And the death of his father a couple of years later compounded that fear – now he was stuck with the place and there was no way out.

But whatever fears he had about life as a small farmer had been offset by the fact that he was at bottom his father’s son and he could not rightly see this place fall to someone else’s name. The problem was solved for him when, shortly after his father’s month’s mind Mass, Shevlin knocked on his door and proposed renting the land off him, adding solemnly that he would give him as good a price as the next man. In those stunned days after his father’s death and with the house still ringing from his absence Shevlin was the last man young Nealon expected any favours from. So startled was he by the proposal he could hardly gather his thoughts to think properly, but when Shevlin named his price Nealon calculated right there on the doorstep that his offer would provide a small income for the next few years while he studied and worked through what shape he might put on his life.

Nealon had a lease drawn up and Shevlin came over the following week to sign it on the kitchen table. Shevlin in his great coat and wellingtons filled the kitchen with the smell of cow shit. He was canny enough to gloss over the mood of embarrassed opportunism with a slew of thin words about a young man having to live his own life and not get tied down to something if his heart wasn’t in it. When it was done, Shevlin folded the forms into his coat pocket, shook his hand and walked from the room. Nealon watched his broad back filling the doorway, like a cowboy moving off to some ready destiny. But whatever scorn Nealon might have felt towards him was offset by the contempt he now reserved for himself. How quickly he had taken the soft option and enabled Shevlin to move on this opportunity.

‘Two months dead already,’ Shevlin said suddenly, turning in the doorway with a fine sense of dramatic timing. ‘You never feel the time passing. And such a shame for a man who had been given a taste of life.’

And then he walked from the kitchen, having scored some obscure point on the young Nealon, leaving him with something to think about.

Nealon’s memory of Shevlin goes back to childhood. He was one of those men who were always reliably present at those frequent bawling crises that mark out the rhythm of livestock and farm life. Calving and sculling and castrating, wherever there were bawling animals with bloodied mucus and liquid shit, that’s where you’d find Shevlin with his castrating tongs or hacksaw or stick of caustic, directing operations from a boss’s distance while Nealon’s father and neighbours wrestled with the animal until he was tied and secured. Shevlin would step forward then and go down on one knee, gripping the massive testicles between his hands before leaning into the beast to clamp shut the tongs and there would follow that awful strangled roar as the animal buckled down on its back legs with shit pouring from him.

And he was a man of one joke which he never tired of repeating. Holding up the stick of caustic to the child Nealon he would say

‘You wouldn’t want to get a rub of this on your lad.’

And then he’d back off with a sour grin.

Nealon’s accommodation with him was that he knew such men were necessary to rural life, men who went about their work without disabling sentiment. Later, in his student years, he would come to a different respect for Shevlin when he found himself surrounded by watery vegetarians and animal lovers of every stripe. Nealon found their oversensitive regard a sickly denial of all the shit, blood and pain in which life itself is sourced. There was a pallid squeamishness about them, and he found himself quickly distancing from it in distaste. Farm life was not some pastoral idyll populated by saintly shepherds and warm animals, strewn with homely implements smoothed by venerable use. Farming was a glutinous realm, throbbing with pain across cycles of death and renewal that were tinted with green shit and blood-veined mucus.

It was around this time Nealon found himself filling his canvases with rich aortal and cloacal colours that took their hue from life’s under-realm where blood and shit had their proper communion.

Beyond the hayshed, in what used to be the haggard, Nealon stands over the axle of the old horse cart. It is set aside in one corner of the enclosure, separated from the body years ago and now...