Chapter 4: All The Things We Don't Discuss
I was up, cotton-wool-minded from a dream of my brother. Too many dreams. Sometimes I couldn't tell if I was dreaming, or awake. Everywhere I existed was a grey area.
I could be sitting on the side of the street eating an apple or something of that nature when suddenly I would think I saw Ranulph striding across the road towards me, decked out in military splendour.
His face was different every time. I began to watch my tapes of the missing person reports more often. I watched my mother's delicate mouth shape I.R.A.1
I could never believe that tale of theirs with my brother entangled with the masked men with guns. Ranulph made that gaggle of drug-dealing bomb-makers too real for my imaginings.
Sometimes I would even dream while I was still awake, I swear it. Ranulph prowled the rooms of St. Catherine's. The rhythm of his footsteps flooded up to the high ceilings, sound lathered on sound until I couldn't breathe. I mustered the wherewithal to peep up through the interior window to see that Ranulph was being followed by a trail of fecund decay.
Weeds sprang up in his wake, dandelions and buttercups wending their way through cracks in the concrete, accompanied by rats, by toads, by whatever these pink things mean.
There were the roses, of course.
Everywhere
everywhere
there were roses
I fixed him with my eyes, my breath reverberating around his footsteps. He turned to me. He turned to me with a look I had never seen before on his face, a blank blurring that frightened me because I knew that he was transforming - evolving, becoming, shifting into some other place, some other time, and we were joined in our dining.
Our dining.
By the sky.The building clouded with birds, a toiling of black and red, sounding the gloom and the coalescing colours with their stark cries. Crows, ravens, jackdaws, swans - every conceivable cliché that my dreaming state could fling at the walls of this place.
I was dying. I knew I was dying.
I was falling to pieces around my eyes until they were the only things left to watch as the flakes of my body transmuted into beetles, scrabbling things that moved in circles around the room, circles moving, creeping around the edges of the room, obscuring the view of my brother who had his faced pressed up against the glass, linking it, tonguing it, until all I could see were swarming beetles and all I could hear was the rasp of Ranulph's tongue amidst that unending avian dissonance.
I woke up to sweatslime and a sharp inhalation, my feet curled in the crevice where my hammock strung up to the wall.
They shared the space with some spiders, their mummified victims all nestled in close together. I could still feel the beetles on me, crawling inside my body, my small intestine, Bowman's Capsule, tiny sneaking things.172
I sat up, the hammock rocking, afraid to put my feet on the floor. There seemed to be snakes. It took a long time for my brain to relocate into my body. I floated in midair, barely resting on the hammock, feet swinging, being nothing but air until I felt I could do it. Until I was sure. The journey to the kitchen area was slow. The dream amplified my feelings of awe at that cavernous space.
Switched the kettle on. All I ever did, really, was drink tea. How we pile things up between our mind and the mess that we really are.
Tea and dreams.
That was in the second 'missing person' plea. Irish. Republican Army. Terrorists. Freedom fighters. Dublin units. Unidentified remains.
I peeped up through the interior window but there was no Ranulph, no weeds, no birds.