Excerpt: Welcome to the jungle

It was a dark day when it all started. It must have been because when I think of it now all I see is clouds, and gloomy Sunday evenings. Every day seemed to have the feel of a depressing Sunday evening. The morning that I was born, at the witching hour, is score and ten years ago now. When I was a child I remember hearing my mother sing the eulogy to the lost fishermen of the North- East of England. " Three, score and ten, boys and men were lost from Grimsby town, from Yarmouth down to Scarborough many hundreds more were found." My mother sang this song in her British accent, which seemed somehow to increase the poignancy of the lyrics. I always felt like crying when I heard it. I wanted to cry for those lost fishermen. I wanted to cry for myself.
Feeling sorry for myself from the first moment of my existence, I entered this world with anger deep inside. A crazy, burning sensation consumed my soul and my mind. A hatred of everything, it was just not right. A wriggling, crawling sensation always overcame me.
It was all wrong. Of course I had no idea why it was this way and I felt like I was going to burst with anger, fear, shame, guilt and pain. I was a "complex one." Nothing was ever simple. All was overwhelming and dramatic. All the bad stuff led me to a happy road and don’t you worry I’ll come back to the bad stuff later. The good thing about feeling bad is that it makes you think about what is important in life. Now, I'm not saying that I am something special or anything but my imagination was really all I had. You see reality was never really good enough for me so I wished to leave myself and go. Away, leave it all and go away. From an early age I dreamed of other lands. Late at night I would dream of exotic places like India. I would imagine the difference, the magic, the wonder and the colour. Some day I said to myself when I was a still a young boy,some day I will go. It will be the making of me. I will find the magic I need elsewhere, not here in a rural Irish village. In this magic I will feel at home.
Each morning the sound of my mother calling me for school sent a shock through my nervous system. Each day felt like the beginning or the end of the world. Memorable and overwhelming. Sounds seemed to be too clearly heard, visions were seen from an obscured view. A song on the radio seemed to call out to me and only me. I hated the heat inside my head, the burning shame on my face, the emotional pain. As you might of guessed the problem with such an all-consuming feeling each day is that one could quite easily become, well, completely self-obsessed. Realising this; realising that I was in grave danger of spending my life in my own crazy world of self- obsession and perhaps self-delusion I studied the lives of others. I studied others with a tenacity and perseverance that could not, I would bet, be matched by anyone of my generation.

So as a young boy and man I looked around. I looked at my mother struggle to keep going after my dad died. I looked at my Aunt Angelica and her evil ways. I saw things for what they really were in a way that a happy child could never do. I saw the truth.

The truth was that my Aunt Angelica also felt that it was all wrong. She lived a life that was without any love. Her only true love was money. Angelica was driven by a burning ambition to succeed. She was going to make money and lots of it. And that was that. Her soul was willing to take a back seat in the pursuit of this goal. She was driven by her stomach. When she was a child the food that her mother had fed her had always settled uneasily in her gut. She pictured her grandmother struggling in a hovel during the famine. An old woman, bent over a black iron cauldron, mixing her gruel. Boiling the spuds. Like her grandmother Angelica always seemed to have raised eye-brows, like she was constantly surprised by something that you had said. I knew that her eye-brows told so much more, she was suspicious not surprised. Seeing the world and its ways through only the prism of her own, troubled mind. Fussing and worry, ailments and grief. It would never be enough. She could never get enough. Leafing through the property section of the newspaper Angelica licked her finger and narrowed her eyes with each turn of the page. Another house to buy, more land for sale.
I used to sit in Angelica’s kitchen and take it all in. The terrible smells. A gone off chicken brought to the boil, the dull musty feeling of a complete lack of love. She, like her grandmother would stand over the pot and seem to be oblivious to any odour. Her grandmother would have heard the whistling of the cold westerly winds through the trees outside her hovel. Not here, there was no whistling to be heard here in Angelica’s kitchen. She hummed a distracted tune, devoid of warmth or grace. The double glazing windows revealed a silent picture of the trees outside bending their necks in the stiff breeze. She had made herself safe, shut off, protected by wealth and modernity.
Had she ever known love? That is a good question. Sex, there definitely had been this on a few occasions. She had three children, each with a different father. Each man entering her life then leaving with an unsettling feeling, or a powerful survival instinct telling him that it was just not right. The relationships began with nightly visits. The men, like a Garda entering a house that is reported to have a dead body were carrying out a duty. The sex was clinical. Starting tentatively the moments of passion would reach a climax when and only when Angelica whooped a loud cry into the air. A shrill, conquering cry that declared her womanhood. The men, for their part were always consumed with an overpowering stench of T.C.P.
She lived alone now. In the sitting room of Angelica’s house a piano stood purely for show. Framed photographs of her three children looked back, with smiles that contained no warmth. Each looked different from the others. I watched T.V often in that room and never felt at ease. It was not a place to relax.