report

I wrote this a good few years ago, it was my response to the Ryan Report. I never felt it was quite right and never shared it with anyone. But I’m going to post it here now as it came to mind recently and I reference it in my post hare’s corner.

Morning begins.

A woman reads the paper while her husband eats his toast. She feels something odd underfoot. It feels as if a floorboard has lifted slightly, a ripple it feels like, as if the earth has turned liquid, has pushed up from under the wood, like an ocean wave unsettling a boat. A little uneasy, she looks down, but there is nothing there.

A father looks out the window on to his garden and sees a trees green leaves fall from its branches – as if it had decided to just let go.

To the left of a dealer down a back lane as he pockets a wad of €50 notes, two bricks, crumbly with age, fall from the centre of the wall.

In a field by the side of the M50 a herd of cattle cling to the southwest corner, the ground in the centre of the clearing not feeling solid underfoot. A low humm spreads across the field.

In the centre of the city there is a squeaking, shrieking wave of sound coming from a building covered with ivy. The building seems to be moving, alive. There are hundreds and hundreds of birds whipping in and out of the foliage, in a panic, diving, scooping as if the walls themselves were built out of birds.

A lady cleans an open-plan office on the fifth floor of a building before the workers come in for the day. She is startled by a sound as she bends to plug in the vacuum cleaner. A fox stands alert, ears and tail perked, eyes bright, by the lift door. Earlier that morning she had found a wet snail path across the boardroom table.

A woman in her 50’s, dressed up in lipstick, powder and fur performs show tunes to a ghetto blaster on the central aisle of O’Connell Street. As she finishes Happy Talk the pavement cracks and the earth soars up under her like a hydraulic stage.

Hot water comes out of cold taps, a horse kicks and kicks and kicks at its stable door. Holes appear on beaches, sand draining in to them like ancient mechanisms to tell the time.

The nation listens, watches and reads. It hears of blood and ink and snot, of spittle and Vaseline, of scaldings, of floggings, of heads underwater, of screams in the night, of puffed red faces, of mens’ dicks in childrens’ asses, of starvation, malnourishment, rapes and blows. Of scabbed heads and naked bodies.

As they are told and re-told a wind gathers strong, sharp, and strangely without sound. Branches shake, snap off. The sky moves, clouds form solid leaden alliances. And all without a sound. As if someone had simply turned the volume off, thrown the remote away.

The day passes.

The dealer now at home with some cans and the TV, sees a tree fall silently outside his window. The father watches clouds gather solid and metallic. The farmer looks out to see heavy rain fall. Sharp slits of it lashing the earth. But the ground, he sees, is dry. Parched. Impervious. The woman still reads. And the man on the bus, the shopkeeper, the banker, the office worker, the teacher, the policeman, the politician, the carpenter, the builder. The doctor and the journalist, the accountant, the father, the priest. They all look out at this angry storm. They marvel at its power, at it’s unusual nature, at the sight that it is. And then they go to sleep. They put their heads on their pillows, say their prayers, kiss bedfellows goodnight. They close curtains, switch off bedside lights.

Outside the land has started to move.

There is a line between land and sky and just there something has begun to gather. It brews, pours from the soil, as if the dirt were breathing from its nostrils into the cold night air. It starts to travel across the country, low, sweeping. Passing through town centres, up steep hills, across church car parks. Through housing estates as people sleep on their pillows in their beds. Over fields, graveyards, through woods. And as it passes over the land, the earth responds – great eruptions of earth, rock, soil and everything the land is asked to hold. Like porridge cooking pufts of it push through grass, concrete, stone. Pavements crack, foundations crack, cars turn on their sides. The earth remembers.

And the wind as it travels hurls things in its wake. Sticks, hurleys, broom handles, hand brushes, wooden spoons, pointers, batons, chair rungs, yard brushes, hoes, hay forks, pikes, pieces of wood with leather rungs attached. A bunch of keys embeds itself in a cow’s eye, a belt buckle gorges another’s side. Drain rods slash the bark of trees, a golf club spins through the air and catches a dog on the side of the head, a tyre rim slashes a sheep’s gut, a t-square plunges in to a stallion’s neck, a hammer head bloodies a sleeping swan. Fan belts, metal rulers, rifle butts, gun pellets, hay ropes catapult through the air. The hive of birds on the side of the building continue to swarm, even though it is now pitch night. A sparrow, caught in the wind, travels faster than it ever has before. Flung through the air it suddenly catches the wind under its wings, surfs it speeding like a bullet. It sees colours ahead and dives in to them, its beak crashing in to the glass, smashing its face, its body, its wings as all break apart and fall to the earth amongst a hail of the sharded glass of the church window.

And still most sleep.

All across the country the low sweep that had sprung from the land, from what it remembered, begins to spew. Out of the land pours haunted half-lives, murdered, smothered souls of the islands children. One after the other, one, two, five, ten, fifteen thousand, the soil exhumes their howling silence. From every inch of land they were betrayed on, these buried lives rise.

The earth remembers.

As they pass through the night and across the country they are once again mostly unheard. Those that do hear feel an almighty weight laying heavily on their chest bone, their ribs, on the cartilage holding the front of them together. For those that do hear, breathing feels like it must if you were a human on the bottom of the ocean.

But still many others sleep soundly, with earplugs and nighttime music, they turn their backs to their windows and the storm outside.

And so the children travel to the centre of every town on the map; to Galway, Gort, Caltra, Clonard, Wexford, Leixslip, Knock, Kells, Sallins, Sneem, Stillorgan, Sligo, Tralee, Inistioge, Letterfrack, Roscrea, Clonmel, Antrim, Ardagh, Artane, Cabra, Dalkey, Barleycove, Carigeen.

In Dublin the Liffey starts to brew. And then the water is sucked out of the bed of it, out towards the sea and is gone. O’Connell Bridge disintegrates as if it were made always of sand, like the dogs sculpted on Grafton Street for money. A great tear erupts down the belly of O’Connell Street, the intestines of the land bursting out of it’s skin, knocking statues, bursting pipes. The Spire falls in to this open wound, like a clock arm moving backwards from 12 to 6.

And then there they are. A generation of half lives standing on the open belly of the capital. As they stand on the main street of every town on the island. The streets are silent. The roads and pavements are crumpled like corrugated iron, or a carpet pushed up out of place. Foxes sniff and scratch at piles of earth exposed beneath skew-ways slabs of concrete. The wind stills itself.

They wait. They wait for the nation to draw their blood from the earth, collect their broken nails lost in the ground, gather up the clumps of their hair caught on hedges. They wait for their tears to be returned, and their broken bones to be mended. They wait for a humble apology. They wait on the bowels of the earth. They wait on land that has not forgotten.

They wait. Still the nation sleeps. The sky turns now from black to velvet to an inkpot blue. And they know that when the light fills overhead that they will be blown back in to the earth. Birds still set to their morning tasks, start to sing.

Dawn begins.

And they know they have been forsaken. They stand tall and proud as they are called back to the land. They stand face to the wind as it peels the flesh from their now brittle bones, sucks blood from their veins, tears shreds from their insides. Blood smatters, sinews strain, muscles snap and whip off and away. Spittle sprays from tongues, snot is caught on the wind. As they travel back across fields and airstrips, golf courses and farmyards teeth break out of mouths, tissue flaps and falls, blood seeps in to the land. Clumps of hair blow like dust balls, fingernails snag, tears pour and are drank by the earth. They are lost again.

It is morning.

Trucks beep, reversing with full loads of rubble. A crane lifts the Spire from his horizontal pose. Workmen re-tarmac the roads. A new Church window is ordered and radio chat shows rev up for talk of damage and responsibility. A woman in her fifties settles down to sleep in a doorway.

On a busy London street a man named Peter Tyrell douses himself in petrol. He lights a match and holds it under his chin.