This is the Ritual Page 3

  ‘I used to be a security guard as well. Out here.’ He gestured across the expanse. ‘In a warehouse for computer parts. It was like guardin a new race. That was the last job I had. Fifteen years ago, it was. They fired me because I was useless and weak.’

  I drank my can and we lingered in silence. I wondered what he had done in the fifteen years since losing his job. The light and warmth were seeping out of the day. Even in the quiet I could feel the intensity of the man’s sidelong focus on me, the restless calculations as to how he could render himself fascinating and enigmatic in my eyes. I felt even lonelier, more famished and dejected in his presence than I felt on my own.

  ‘This is where ye can be near to death,’ he said. ‘That’s why I come here, to get the feel of me own death, to be waitin for it.’

  I craved to vanish into the air. This was a man beyond salvage, doomed, but not in any romantic way; he was merely pathetic, shattered. I saw in him a vision of my own future.

  I said I had to go.

  ‘Sure I might see ye around here again,’ he said quickly. ‘I come out here a lot now.’

  I muttered that yeah, maybe I would see him. Then I made my way out of the darkening estate, utterly silent now that the workers had left for the day. I walked out to the Long Mile Road and took a bus back home.

  After that I didn’t go to Ballymount for several days. Instead I stayed in the house, lying in bed or playing the Xbox, or I walked into town along the canal. On a cold and sunny afternoon I went to see a film in the IFI. The cinema was nearly empty. It was a film about a middle-aged man in the American Midwest whose son is in a coma, having shot himself in the head in a failed suicide attempt. One morning, at breakfast, the man looks at his wife for a long time, silently, not seeming to hear her questions and pleas. He stands up. Then he walks out of the house, and keeps on walking. He reaches the highway and begins to hitch-hike north, crossing state lines, listening to the sad, broken or ecstatic people who pick him up, but saying little. He crosses the Canadian border. He slants across to the east. He walks to the ends of the roads, and keeps walking, out on to the bare and rocky coast, away from all human settlements. He reaches the Atlantic, cold and hissing, foaming over the rocks. He stops. He stands there and gazes out at the ocean, alone for miles around. Then he begins to laugh, a deep, resounding laugh, the first instance of joy he has shown in the film – but when we see his face, it is clear that there is no real joy, only the cold pretence of it. Then the camera slowly retreats, at an angle and into the sky, leaving us with a view of the man standing on the rocky outcropping. As the camera soars away he dwindles into pinprick insignificance, as if whatever meaning his story had is now dissolved in the infinite. The view of the coast and the ocean is hazed by wisping cloud. The screen is filled with white, the film ends.

  The day after I had been to the cinema, I went back to the Ballymount estate. It was a cold, dreary afternoon; winter was approaching. Though I walked for more than four hours that day, I didn’t see the man I had spoken with. When I came back again the next day, after wandering for an hour or so, I saw him sitting on the ground with a bag of cans by his side. He looked up as I approached. He didn’t seem surprised; I wondered if this was an affectation. He offered me a can and I sat by him. A lone bird swooped down nearby, squawking before flying off again. It was evening now, a reddish burning sunset hazed with pollution. I knew what was coming: he would tell me his story. I knew he had been thinking of me since we had first met; not in or for myself, but as an instrument of his own self-recognition.

  He drank deep from his can.

  He told me:

  He had been fostered by a widow, a very strict Catholic. He had never known his parents, or why they had put him up for adoption. He had always been the weirdo, the victim, the figure of ridicule at school. He remembered having his head shoved into a toilet full of shit. He had no memory of ever being happy. As a child he hated summer, the outdoors, and the passing of time, which was famished and blank. He went to art college, hoping to be recognised, to shine and be loved. But at a student house party he took two tabs of acid and he saw in a shock of total insight that here, too, he had always been the figure of ridicule, the one they lampooned and despised and jeered at behind his back; he recalled a thousand things they’d said to him, and only now did he see, in awful hindsight, the suppressed sneers and the mockery in their faces, all of them deceiving him, then howling with laughter when he turned away. From that night on, he was broken. The horror of realising, in one blinding instant, the immense gulf between his grandiose perception of himself and how the others really saw him, shattered what was left of his self into fragments. His misery became so convoluted, dense and total as to be incommunicable. He lost his voice; he literally couldn’t speak, because having a voice meant having a self, or a sense of self, some fundamental core of positive self-regard, and he didn’t have that. He became totally impotent, unable even to masturbate. Incapable of functioning, he dropped out of college and retreated from the world, fled further and further into the fogged maze of himself until it had become impossible to find his way back out. For years he thought constantly of killing himself, and now believed that it was only the religious terrors instilled in him by his foster mother that had held him back. He lived on the dole and tried to convince himself that he was a great artist, that this was his season in hell, the terrible suffering that would give birth to the works that would redeem him, and eventually all the world would see what he had always been, and he would forgive them and he would be loved. He met an old schoolmate of his, an electronic-music producer who rented a dilapidated house in a secluded clearing off the Naas Road. He moved in with his old schoolmate and they lived together for several years. Then, one weekend while his friend was away, he burned the house to the ground. He could not say whether he had done this accidentally or on purpose. He stood outside, watching the house go up in flames, terrified and elated. He heard sirens in the distance and he fled. For several weeks he slept rough around Dublin, in parks, in alleys, by the canals, in corners of building sites and waste-grounds. At a school in Drimnagh he slept for a week in the playground, under the slide. One morning he was woken by the rough hands of two policemen under his arms, hauling him to his feet. They took him in and a day later he was admitted to St Patrick’s mental hospital. He was prescribed medication and assigned a counsellor. After several months he was moved to an outpatients’ home and allowed to come and go as he pleased. That was four years ago. He was still living there, receiving a steady welfare income, enough to buy cigarettes, cans and, occasionally, magic mushrooms. He never saw his friend who had taken him in and encouraged his painting. He never saw anyone. He just came to Ballymount to be alone with his thinking. He was thirty-nine years old, he said, and his destiny was to become a saint. My Lord is fire, and the Lord is coming.

  His story drew to a close and now he watched me. When I left, he would be nothing but a swirl of visions, pain and memories. For now, I was a mirror in which he could almost convince himself that he was whole.

  He rolled a cigarette and puffed hungrily on it. He drained a can and crumpled it in his bony hand. The night was coming on. What if the days keep on getting shorter, I thought, until there is only night?

  ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I can tell you’re an intelligent fella. There are some other things, different things I want to tell ye. Ye look like you’re able to handle big ideas. Will ye meet me here tomorrow? I’ll show ye some of the weirder places.’

  I nodded, wanting only to get away. Then I left him there, smoking and drinking in the wasteland as the night swarmed in to swallow him up. There is no therapy. There is no father. That night I dreamed, and in the dream I was back out there, on the estate. In the dream it went on for ever, the estate was the world and beyond it there was nothing. It was a dull afternoon. I saw him on the horizon, silhouetted and still. I walked towards him. Neither of us looked at the other, our eyes to the ground. ‘Look at my burn marks,’ he called out. �
��And look at the slits. The Gestapo did this. CIA. Mujahedin. God is great. No one leaves the zone.’ I looked up and we looked into each other’s eyes. ‘Beyond the horizon, a row of severed heads on sticks. Wooden chimes clicking in the wind.’ And then there were no longer two of us, but one, we were together, he had come into me and now my fingernails were yellow and caked with dirt, and my clothes as I walked away, towards a lost road, were greyed and faded, my hair was thin and streaked, lifeless. I woke up sobbing, drenching the pillow with tears that streamed out of me like never before or since, pierced with a desolation I knew to be incurable, a condition I would carry with me for ever. I rose from the bed, feeling my way through the dark. I found my way to my mother’s bedroom and turned the handle on the door. I heard her gasp in the dark. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘Go back to sleep. I’m sorry. Just let me lie beside your bed. I’m sorry. It’s OK, I just need to lie here on the floor, just like this.’ I could hear her hesitating, wanting to get up and fix this, but it couldn’t be fixed and she lay back down. I knew she was staring upwards into the dark, her face gaunt with worry. After a while she got up and draped some covers over me, then got back into bed. I closed my eyes and tried to hear her breathing.

  In the morning when I awoke, my mother was downstairs, cooking breakfast. I could smell coffee and frying bacon. A bird was chirping outside the window and beams of filtered sunlight warmed the room. I got up from the floor and went downstairs. My mother was sipping tea. She handed me a small, round cup, the one with a delicate Japanese sketch of a bird on the side. I could tell by her eyes that she had been crying and had slept badly, if at all, but she made an effort to smile. I smiled back. I put a hand on her shoulder. ‘I’m goin to talk to them at the college,’ I said. ‘I’m goin to see if they’ll take me back after Christmas. Ye never know, it might be worth a try.’

  Peering at me with widened eyes over the curve of her teacup, my mother nodded faintly. She hesitated, fearful of crushed hopes. Then she said, ‘I knew ye would. I never stopped prayin for ye.’ Tears welled up, her voice was cracking. ‘I never will stop prayin for ye. I mean it. I never will.’

  Exiled in the Infinite – Killian Turner, Ireland’s Vanished Literary Outlaw

  It is impossible today to read either the work or the life of the novelist, essayist, epigrammatist and pornographer Killian Turner, without seeking in it clues to the mystery of his disappearance, or attempting to locate the genesis of the strange obsessions that would eventually consume him.

  There is little beyond what Turner called ‘the crash-landing site of my birthplace’ by which he could meaningfully be called an ‘Irish writer’. In fact, his body of work, taken as a whole, might be seen as Turner’s lifelong project of effacing all marks of nationhood from his authorial voice and literary being. It is clear from comments made by Turner in his letters to other writers and artists (the majority of them obscure), and certain remarks in his essays,1 that, like such pointedly un-Irish compatriot-predecessors as Beckett and Joyce, Turner wished to be considered first and foremost a European author.2

  Born into an upper-middle-class family in Dalkey, County Dublin, in 1948, Turner only began writing with any seriousness in his early twenties.3 It may be that Turner was prevented from writing as a younger man by the unhappiness of his home life. Maureen Turner, Killian’s mother, died after complications resulting from the birth of her only child. Killian’s father, Henry, was a history teacher in a private secondary school in Dalkey, and a man of trenchantly melancholy disposition. In the smog-choked winter evenings of Killian’s boyhood and adolescence, Henry would call his son into his study. There, as Killian stood silently by his side, the father would issue sweeping utterances about the destruction inherent in the very cells of civilisation, the transience of mankind, and the utter folly of all our humanistic dreams of progress, peace and salvation. The cold gaze of scientific comprehension, declared father to son, betrays the appalling truth of our place in the universe as an accidental and fear-crazed species, rubbing its bleary eyes to find itself perched aboard a rock that hurtles through black infinities, whose only destiny is to be swallowed up once more in the great darkness. Religion, morality, truth, human solidarity – these are nothing, proclaimed the father, but the consoling fictions bred by our proximity to the abyss and the panic it engenders.

  It can only be imagined what impression these dark lessons had on the sensitive young Killian. What we can be sure of, however, is that the great, seismic event of Turner’s youth was the suicide by poisoning of Henry Turner at the age of fifty-three, when Killian was eighteen. This event, reappearing in various guises, is the black hole, the vortex of destructive fury around which Turner’s writing orbits, drawing ever closer, inviting – and this is what gives the experience of reading Turner what has been called its ‘vertiginous’, ‘abyssal’ quality – a kind of cosmic-orgasmic catastrophe in the psyche of both reader and writer.

  Until the death of his father, Turner seems to have been a rather normal child and young man. He enjoyed hurling, soccer and Gaelic football. His schoolmates and friends remembered him as being quiet, but devastatingly witty when called upon to use his wit as a weapon, and gently hilarious when among friendlier company. He was something of a loner by disposition, yet not unpopular. Beginning in early childhood, Turner read voraciously. In his teens he had a colossal appetite for science fiction and so-called ‘weird’ fiction (his fascination with the work of H. P. Lovecraft bordered on the religious: the young Turner would spend whole weekends in his room, drawing wildly imaginative pictures of the Old Ones of Lovecraftian mythology. Not infrequently, his father and any visitors to the household would be startled by sudden, bellowed recitals, issuing from Killian’s bedroom, of the incantations of savage tribes to their hellish gods familiar to readers of Lovecraft’s stories: Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!).

  In his late teens and early twenties, Turner lived on the inheritance he had received upon his father’s death. He did not pursue third-level studies, though he did continue to read as much, and more widely than ever, nourishing keen interests in mythology, anthropology and avant-garde physics. It was during this period that Turner began to imagine he could become a writer. At the age of twenty-five, having published two short stories and several reviews in various Irish journals and newspapers, he set to work on his first novel. Edge of Voices took four years to complete, and a further two to find a publisher, finally seeing print when its author was thirty-one. Regarded from its first appearance as one of the true oddities of Irish literature (a literature hardly scarce of oddities), the novel is equal parts semi-autobiographical portrayal of an unremarkable Dublin adolescence, and fantastical, eerie missive from the furthermost extremes of human experience. The story, such as it is, tells of a boy, Michael Kavanagh, similar in most ways to Turner, who, on the day of his Catholic confirmation, begins to receive, or believe he is receiving, telepathic messages from a hyper-intelligent presence, perhaps extraterrestrial or inter-dimensional in origin, which may once have inhabited the earth in corporeal form, but now exists only as an imperceptible atmospheric layer. Michael is deeply troubled by the messages, often doubting his own sanity. Yet he continues to live his outward life more or less as usual, enduring the timeless trials of adolescence and winning local renown as a full-back on the under-17 Gaelic football team. Then, after Michael reaches his eighteenth birthday, loses his virginity (in what must rank as one of the most hilarious love scenes in Irish fiction) and applies to study European History at Trinity College, all in the same bittersweet week, the transmissions abruptly cease, never to resume. The final sixty pages of the book are given over to an exegesis, supposedly set down in the fourth millennium AD, of the messages received by Michael over a three-year period during his adolescence. The implication seems to be that Michael has become some sort of messiah, or the founder of a new religion or civilisation.

  Edge of Voices was first published not in Ireland but in France, and then in
New York, by small independent presses committed to the literary heterodox. Turner gave several readings in Paris, where he gained minor cult status. Then, when he was thirty-three, he received an Irish Arts Council bursary, which he used to fund a trip around Europe. He travelled for three months, filling several notebooks with reflections on post-war Europe that were to inform his work for years to come. Instead of returning to Ireland after his travels, Turner settled in West Berlin, where he was to remain for the final three years prior to his disappearance.

  Throughout the early eighties, from the anarchist and bohemian neighbourhood of Friedrichshain he had made his home, Turner continued to send stories, essays and other, increasingly uncategorisable writings almost exclusively to Irish journals, as if still engaged in a dialogue with a land he had otherwise repudiated. (By no means were all of these pieces accepted for publication.) Turner rented a small apartment in a block largely occupied by political radicals and artists, and seemed to thrive in this environment. The poet Sarah Flanagan, who also lived in Berlin around this time and befriended Turner, later remarked that his apartment had something of the monk’s cell to it. ‘There was a stove, a pot, a pan, a few cups and plates, a desk, and a bed. Apart from that, the only things he had were books,’ she said. Asked about Turner’s social and romantic life in this period, she replied: ‘I don’t know what to say about that. I mean, for sure he was handsome, and he had a certain charisma. But there was a . . . a kind of privacy to him that went beyond simple introspectiveness. Like he would only let you come so far, and then he’d step out into the grounds of the castle to meet with you. He was never unfriendly, never cold. But there was a boundary. I used to wonder about his love life. He never told me about it, and when I asked he was always wittily evasive. Later, of course, there were all the rumours, but I didn’t know him any more by that stage . . . I used to tell him he looked like Michel Foucault, with the bald head, the intense eyes, the glasses. He liked that. He rarely laughed, but he had a lively, faint kind of smile. I remember that.’