This is the Ritual Read online

  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.

  I started to take the bus out to Ballymount almost every day, in the late morning or early afternoon. My mother was tentatively hopeful that the increased vitality evidenced by my leaving the house was a sign of recovery. I never told her where I was going; I thought it more prudent to say I was heading into the city centre, where (I suggested) it would do me good to merge with the crowds, or sit in cafés, or browse in bookshops. On some days I took my Discman out to the estate, listening as I wandered to formless ambient soundscapes that deepened my sense of being in a place that was beyond the world, and which now outlived it, a timeless zone of litter and intermittent wind. Other days I would borrow pop CDs dating from my younger sister’s teenage years. It gave me a peculiar feeling to stand alone in the windswept emptiness of Ballymount and experience, with Michael Jackson or Destiny’s Child pulsing in my ears, the gulf between the exuberant commotion of civilisation and the vast ruination that had swept over it – for there in Ballymount industrial estate, it took little imagination to believe that the catastrophe had already happened.

  I spent three, four, five hours there each day, and for weeks I avoided all human contact; I kept to the blank stretches between zones of activity, the overgrown margins that were silent but for the odd car streaking across the unseen distance. Whenever I saw far-off figures mutely conducting business outside warehouses or unloading trucks, I turned away, straying deeper into the emptiness of the estate.

  One dull midweek afternoon, walking while lost as ever in convoluted and intractable worry, I looked up and saw an unexpected form in the distance. It was a man, standing alone on the dull-brown, stony wasteland far ahead of me, out beyond a cluster of run-down buildings. I had been walking randomly, as usual, following no trail but that dictated by my whims. Now I stopped and peered across the empty stretch. The man was facing away from me, gazing at the horizon. As I walked a little closer, I saw that his hair was wildly unkempt, thinning and scraggly, blown by the wind in wayward streaks across his protuberant forehead and bone-angled face. It is difficult to say whether the following is a genuine memory, or if my subsequent encounters with the man retroactively tainted my recollections, but when I think of it now, I feel strongly that my first sight of him provoked in me a deep chill – a sense of total abjection and an urge to flee. Whatever I really did feel, I diverted my walk, that first day, to keep me well away from the solitary figure on the Ballymount estate.

  Two days later, he wa
s there again. I was wandering in a different area of the estate, deeper into it, where it becomes harder to tell where you are. The man was walking on his own. He had his hands in his pockets and I could see that he was muttering to himself. When I was about twenty metres away he looked up and saw me. After I had passed him by I heard a call, muffled by a wind that had just then started up. I turned back and he was watching me. His gaze seemed hungry, desperate, as if he craved to take something from me. The man gestured for me to approach him and I did. He was a lot older than me, perhaps in his late thirties. His clothes were faded, as if they’d been worn for so long that all the colours had bled into the same indefinite non-colour as the man who wore them. He took out a pouch of tobacco and started to roll a smoke. ‘Do ye want one?’ he said. His voice seemed hollow, as if there was no one behind it. I wanted to walk away, but I nodded and muttered, ‘Yeah, please,’ even though I’d stopped smoking. He gave me the cigarette, then rolled another for himself. It took him only a couple of seconds to roll them. His fingertips were stained a thick yellow and his nails were caked with dirt. He lit my smoke, then his own. He sat down on his hunkers, facing across the wasteland towards the murk where the sun was sinking, heavy and lifeless, jaded with the world.

  ‘What’s your name?’ said the man. The question sounded unnatural, as though the speaker were trying to replicate the conversational patterns of a species among whom he was exiled, and whose experience was inscrutable to him.

  I told him my name. He asked me why I was walking around Ballymount. I shrugged and mumbled that I just took walks, I needed to clear my head.

  ‘I know what ye mean,’ he said. ‘It’s the same way for me.’

  He opened the tattered schoolbag he had on his back and took out a can of Dutch Gold. He handed it to me and opened another for himself. I stood there with the can, sipping from it, looking at the ground. ‘I come out here and listen to the place,’ he said. ‘The humming of it. And the spirits from the old Ireland underneath. Ye can still hear them, just about.’ He looked sideways at me, gauging my reaction. Though I had just met him, I felt that I could either crush or elate him by whatever I did next.

  I nodded my head.

  He smoked hard on his roll-up, turning away from me towards a cluster of deserted-looking buildings. He finished his can and opened a new one (I was still on my first couple of sips).

  ‘What do ye know about Nietzsche?’ he said.

  I didn’t know what to answer. I mumbled that I knew a bit, not much, God is dead.

  ‘Nietzsche didn’t see this coming,’ he said, ignoring my response. ‘Or he did, but he didn’t know how bad it would get. He thought this was a transition, he still held out the hope for some kind of breakthrough. The laughter that would ring out across the planet. As if we could find a home again. But we can’t. There’s nothing to hope for now. That’s why this place around here is a real and honest place. Do ye get me?’

  I nodded.

  ‘There’s no plan any more. This is unprecedented. There is no father. There is no appeal. And hell, hell assumes its true fuckin significance. We’re already there. I saw all this so fuckin clearly, durin a mushroom trip out here, one of the first times I came to this place. The mushrooms are like a technology, they let ye see what’s happened to the world. Death is in everything now. I sat there cryin and screamin for hours. The entire sky was crushin me, all of outer space was pressin down on me, I was buried and I’ve never come back. I’m still buried. There is no surface, nowhere to claw back to. You’re buried too, and ye know it, I can see it in ye. There is no father. There is no therapy. Do ye know how that feels?’

  He watched me again, studying the effect of his words. He desperately wanted me to be awed. Despising myself, I pursed my lips and nodded, as if to say it was a profound insight he had just shared. I didn’t know what else to do.

  Maybe I had failed to mask my insincerity. ‘What’s your story?’ he asked, guardedly, the portentous tone gone from his voice. Again I had the sense that the question was only a mimicking of curiosity. I said I was a college student but I’d dropped out, I was living at home now, I used to work as a security guard. I didn’t mention the other stuff, the counsellors and psychiatrists.