The journey was nearing its end. John-Paul Finnegan was muttering away by my side, as if in tense dialogue with the waves, or the treacherous forms that squirmed inside his head. I sensed that the closer we got to Dublin, the less sure of himself he became. Very soon we would be at Dublin port. I could already make out the Poolbeg towers hazed on the horizon. I thought of all the time we had spent away, John-Paul Finnegan and I, and the hatred he bore within him, the hatred that is purer than any other, the hatred for where one comes from. And now John-Paul Finnegan turned to me, gripping the rail. I could feel his gaze on me. I turned to face him. What the fuck did they do to me? he said quietly, referring to what, I did not know. What the fuck did they do to me, Rob? The words had to them a tone of revelation. The coastline was expanding across the horizon, sinister and domineering. John-Paul Finnegan shook his head. What the fuck did they do to me? What the fuck was going on, Rob? What the fuck was going on?
I turned away, facing the coast. Neither of us spoke for a time. John-Paul Finnegan went to speak again but hesitated. I did not look at him. Finally he said, I hate what I’ve written. I hate every word of it. That moronic and sickening fucking book. That so-called novel which I hate more than anything. He seemed calmer now, even as the coast grew closer, firmer, filling our vision to the prow of the Ulysses. Paltry realism is nothing, means nothing, he said. I wrote what I wrote because I thought it would heal me, but there is no healing, you just learn to live with your wounds and your mutilations, and you stagger onwards, crippled and bedraggled, towards your death. One day your energy fails you and you keel over, and that’s that. You have not beeen healed. In a way you died from your wounds. Every hurt and every humiliation lasts for ever. There is no healing. Writing changes nothing, it’s an infliction. You inflict yourself on the page, and then on the reader, and on the world. Better to have no readers, better not to write at all. There was no worth to what I wrote, nor to anything I have ever done. Nothing in my life has had any worth. Writing has no worth. Nothing has any worth. Nothing. We were both silent as the ferry sailed into the mouth of the port, the twin red and white towers looming like sentries. Now John-Paul Finnegan seemed truly calm, self-possessed once more, neither raging nor afraid. I will not forgive, he said. Fuck it all. I have decided. I will not forgive them, not forgive any of them for what they have done, for what they have done to me. I will not forgive them, he said. I will not. No. Fuck it, he said.
No Man’s Land
At a certain point in my early twenties, a severe nervous affliction that I had been struggling against for many long months finally overwhelmed me. I was forced to drop out of university, quit my part-time job as a security guard at a stalled building development on the outskirts of the city, and move back in with my parents.
For two months I rarely left the house. I spent my days in bed, or shuffling between the rooms, hallway and landing in a medicated daze. My mother took temporary leave of her job as a secretary so she could stay at home to make me cups of tea and meals of soup, fruit and pasta, which I no more than poked at. On several occasions I walked in on her weeping in the kitchen, or in the cemented back garden that was hidden from the neighbours by high, grey-brick walls. Sometimes I heard her weeping in the bathroom. She always tried to hide her crying from me.
Reading, during this period, was impossible; the letters on the page were alive and crackling, mocking my inability to organise their scattered chaos into some semblance of meaning. I tried instead to watch television, or films on DVD, but everything that came through the screen was unbearably sinister — a spewing of cruelty, bewilderment and chaos that, I realised, other people consumed with utter nonchalance, day after day.
I passed the better part of my days playing games on the Xbox, an activity which somehow left me free of the anxieties aroused by books or television. After two and a half months, I began to feel up to taking walks. For the first few days my walks lasted only twenty or thirty minutes, taking me no further than the few blocks of dreary, featureless working-class suburb around my parents’ house and the shadowy park nearby. Walking in this area where I had grown up and to which I had always felt deeply alien, largely but not solely on account of the miseries of victimisation I’d had to endure there for years as an awkward, painfully sensitive and somewhat effeminate boy, served mainly to awaken buried traumas which exacerbated the agony I was already in.
Deciding I needed to go further afield, I began to conduct my walks on the Ballymount estate, which I had heard described as the largest industrial estate in western Europe. The estate begins at the limits of Bluebell and Clondalkin, two depressed suburbs on the south-western peripheries of Dublin. It stretches out for miles, strewn with warehouses, disused factories, and other low, anonymous buildings whose purpose was and remains unknown to me. Between the clusters of buildings, which are spaced far enough apart for realms of unearthly silence to predominate in the landscape, there are high metalrailings and fences, stretches of rubble and scrub, and shapeless swathes of long and withered grass.
When I was seventeen, I had worked part-time on the industrial estate, at a table in a windowless room in a long, rectangular building, separating money-off supermarket coupons into discrete piles. Before my evening shifts, I would always stand outside, at a secluded corner of the building, and gaze through a fog of hash-smoke at the void of the Ballymount landscape. It must have been these stoned observances that imbued the place with such haunting resonance for me during my two miserable years in university, when I longed for it with an intense nostalgia.