Furious Horses

>What makes us pile into a room with fresh shining faces, scrubbed up like so many shoes, gleaming like fresh blades, like the flat top of a new bar of soap, untouched by fresh things, unsullied by new words, thoughts, experiences? What makes us so goddamn cold-steel scared of what’s just around the corner of that wall? It’s the not knowing, we say to ourselves in the safe quiet vacuum of our own heads, our own spaces; it’s the not knowing that’s the worst. What if it’s actually okay? What if it’s not as bad as we’d thought? But what if it is.

>She was driving to the town because of the weapons, the shiny new ones that rolled off the line in happy little dollops of steel and brushed aluminium. Her fathers warnings were forever in her ears, and she had to explain to him, silently, inside her own head, that she didn’t want to use them, just look at them. Her father had his own rich and oft-rewarded history of killing people on wide open beaches and the thick canopies of jungles, and despite this, or perhaps because of it, he always kept any violence at a long arm’s length from his children. She just liked the heavy rich feeling. Holding chaos in her four fingers. And she almost felt it now, driving the wide roads with the fir trees towering at each side of her, funnelling her quickly through the white-grey day.

>Which is not to say he was totally alone. The young barmaids at the pub knew him well enough, in that way of people of the town: a weary nod of the head, an imperceptible grunt. And while this particular movement was not native to the town, or indeed, the country, the people here had seemed to work it to a fine art, so much so that just walking down the main street at midday confronted you with—if you weren’t familiar with it—a seeming infectious plague of facial tics. On a rare night, he tried striking up a conversation with the least offensive-looked barmaid (for some reason, there was a common misconception among teenagers here that a thick redbrick tan and a joke-binocular mascara was considered the height of beauty), who, it turned out, had friends living in Australia. Although the conversation was pleasant enough, the barmaid kept looking over his shoulder and gaping her mouth, in a most—he thought—rude way. He soon realised that conversation, to this girl, was just a reflex action designed to pass the time until her hair-gelled tracksuit-wearing boyfriend came to pick her up.

And there were the old men huddled at the pub’s entrance, smoking in proud, Easter Island colonies, in shirts with open collars, laughing in the piercing chill wind. They would beckon him over, offer him a cigarette, which he’d take, light, and let burn down to the tips of his frozen fingers. And when he was desperate, when his thoughts got just too much to ignore, he’d go up and sit near to a tarted-up middle-aged woman at the bar and let her lean into him, squeeze his leg, dangle her much-bejewelled neck to his, and tell him hoarse, gory details of her sexual prowess. He never let her into his room, preferring instead the candid warmth of a fuck against an outside wall, or a squeezing of limbs into a tiny, slogan-stickered hatchback. And when they had finished, when they were tidying their clothes, rubbing their hands together for warmth, he would be struck by the true age of the woman, always pushing fifty, sometimes over, and wonder at her own sad story; what surly children had worn her down, what mean alcoholic bastard forced her to leave behind happiness and hide forever instead behind a mask of gaudy false brass.

In the mornings, after sleeping in late with the lingering darkness and a requisite headache, he would rise to make tea from a mournful brown-and-orange kettle that sat on a little ledge above the bathroom sink. While the water boiled, he would turn on the light above the mirror and finger his newly bearded face. He had not shaved since his long stopover in Shanghai—a superfluous but necessary visit in which he stocked up vigorously on non-prescription painkillers—and was almost fond now of the flecked black shadow taking form on his cheeks. And he would look into his eyes scattered with random twigs of blood and as the kettle screamed like a baby he would wonder how much more of this he could possibly take.

>He was not old, just 33, and still retained, somehow, the countenance of a younger man. During that other life, the one before, he had always dressed in the unspoken camouflage of middle-class suburbia, hanging his frame with pressed polo shirts and mute slacks, sleeveless polar fleece dog-walking jackets, leather slides, deck shoes, endless metres of blue and white chambre. Here, in this town, he could safely hide in layers of fabric, be nothing but a pair of eyes poked from between a scarf and a beanie. He could almost be local. Except when he ventured to the local store for his morning paper and cigarettes, and was forced to let out his coarse native tongue, scratching at the air like lost, angry animal. How he longed for the keys to that golden gate of the Gaelic tongue. The oldest language, his wife (ex-wife) had told him once. He would hang back in the shop, turning biscuit packets around aimlessly to catch just a shard of a traditional greeting. He waited often minutes for a local to approach the counter, and to make conversation with the shopkeeper. Oh, those burbling, velvet sounds, the softened hints of Germanic throats.

When he’d return to his room, he’d swallow a Valium and retreat to the endless heat of a generous, epic afternoon bath. In his mind, underwater, that old language lapped. He saw a procession of gentle, glass-faced Irish girls, with that cliché he was so pleased to have since confirmed: the softest of auburn hair. They traced his brow and stretched their milkmaid legs to the edge of the bath, one pink-painted toenail nestling neatly in the downturn of the hot water faucet. But soon, and always, a set of familiar worries returned, dulled by the drugs but still painfully acute. He would let his head slip beneath the water, looking up at the bare bulb above, squiggled into some sort of meaning by the vague currents set off by his own breathing.

>He had come to the sea to think. To watch the water from the long, safe distance of his window, warmed by whisky and often little pills. His room was one of four positioned above a bar in town on a slanted street on Ireland’s east coast. He had never learned the name of the town. He had stayed there before, in the years before his impossible young marriage developed its unavoidable greenstick fracture. That relationship, full of rookie mistakes, as his then-wife liked to put it.

During the day, the far-off water was his companion, and by night—or what passed for night as the sun died off at 5pm—his company existed in the pub below: endless fiddle melodies, leather-patched elbows, and that indecipherable, lyrical language. He would sit, nursing one heavy stout or two, in the very corner, letting the slow rich atmosphere settle about him. He would pass the hours spinning a coaster, coaxing nods from the old heads at the bar. He watched the population of the small place grow, filling to capacity at eight, with musicians now mixed with drinkers, children balanced on arms holding hot steaming port, the whole place tapping one foot, over and over. And as the merry shining faces grinned their small-town grins, and as an inevitable shoulder rammed into his and as he was caught in the whole wondrous rhythm of it all, it made him irrepressibly, impossibly sad. And yet, every night, there he was, three plane rides and countless hours from home, voluntarily crushed beneath the deep gorgeous history—eight thousand years at least—of the only place in the world in deeper denial than he.

>There was such a thing as an amnesty, apparently. Although when she thought of the word, Andrea saw refugees’ hands poking through prison bars, a bloodied bear’s snout, barbed wire fences. She did not equate the phrase with her current love. The hardback love. The sweet sour smell of well-flipped paper. The thick clear bodybags of dustproof plastic, squeaking, rumpling. Perhaps it was like human rights. Perhaps it was a pile of hostages she had secreted in her room, mouths and memories sealed up tight. Perhaps there were protests, somewhere, placards with paint, effigies of her body burning. She saw religious leaders clearly, praying for her salvation. She picked up the nearest book, pleased at its already speckled spine. She’d held this one, now, for nearly fifteen years. Should she really feel so bad about giving it back?

>My neighbour M. had four wives. All of them were installed in different towns around the state and none of the wives knew of any of the other wives’ existence. When he explained this to me for some reason I pictured missile silos, those big dull grey concrete slab doors sliding open in the earth. We were at a fete, at a primary school just across the street from where we lived, though neither of us had any children. This fact made me slightly uncomfortable. I was fairly new to the area and M. and his wife had dragged me along. They said they went every year. To be honest M. distressed me. He was forty, quite athletic and usually dressed like he was about to play tennis. Sometimes he let a cardigan hang off his back like a cape, the arms tied in a casual knot around his neck. Later in the afternoon, when they announced that M. was the runner-up winner of the raffle – his prize was a meat platter supplied by a local butcher – his excitement at his victory verged on the aggressive. His face was red, his hands were fists that he let swing around his body like out of control satellites, and as he shouted spit flew out of his mouth. He looked around himself, at us, the group of losers. His wife, in a red dress, looked on and smiled and clapped and seemed happy enough to start crying.

>“Hello?” said a voice, so unfamiliar that Simon could see it. His heart stopped, and all he saw was the voice, one word with spiky letters jumping through the night, erratic like a striking snake.
“Hello?” said the voice again. “Is everything alright?” It had an accent, high-strung and velvety.

Simon stood as still as he could. Everything now was perilous. These people were not his parents. Reality snapped back like a rubber band against his skin. This was danger. Two strangers in the dead of night in a place nowhere and anywhere. Simon tried to run, but he couldn’t move. Run then hide. Hide then run. The torchlight hit his face. Boot noise on the gravel. He already knew he was dead.

>Then there was a light. Just a trick at first—a blotch like when Simon sometimes rubbed his eyes too hard—but then it was real, a swinging, jittering yellow light. All that mattered was that Simon knew it was someone, and hit his hand quickly against the horn, hurting his cold fingers. He let the horn ring out, and the light started to swivel faster. Simon tried desperately to remember if his parents had taken a torch with them. Why would they, though, when it was still daylight when they left? Perhaps they had come back, he thought. Perhaps they had returned for a torch, and gone off again. But why wouldn’t they have woken him up? Maybe they were angry with him. Simon hit the horn again. The light was close now, and Simon tried to work out how many people there were.

He got out of the car and began walking towards the light. He wanted to shout out, but he couldn’t. It was his parents, he knew it now—they’d taken a torch and they were coming back. They were all going to get in the car and go to a nice hotel and stay there for the night and when they got up there would be a breakfast and Simon would ask for sausages because he liked them and his parents would probably let him have them even thought they didn’t usually …

>The sound of the horn had been a night-swallowing noise, bellowing out like an animal in pain. This was the only life the car had left, the final scream Simon had forced from its body, both hands pressing down. He had railed the horn for five awful minutes, beating out long aching cries that filled his ears like wate, hammering it in short angry bursts that shook his entire body. Each one was a battle against the silence, a denial of his isolation.

Now he sat back in the driver’s seat, stillness pressing in around him. He tried not to think of the fact he was truly alone, but no other thought would replace it. This was acceptance—something he had read about, when fallen mountain climbers gave up, when the body failed, when the mind let go. The cold began to take Simon over. He saw himself the next morning, frozen like a caveman in the car, frosted face staring, twisted, from the driver’s window. He tried to see his reflection in the windshield, but there was just the blackness, the stars spread too thinly across the sky.