OD Chapter 5: The Scent of Apples

That night I put the hood on without fear. A part of me still resisted, said, ‘no, the night has more splendour without this’, but I didn’t hesitate. Almost at once, I was looking into the eyes of Mrs Walker. Deep, deep in the eyes there was… what? An emoji. The one with the monocle, only it had a very supercilious expression. I felt scrutinised, judged. It was an unpleasant feeling and I wanted to escape. Then a wind began, troubling and incipient to the emoji eyes, which blinked rapidly and filled with tears; but the wind felt warm to me, full of dreams from the past, the murmurs of a twin.

A second surge of wind was more powerful and pulled Mrs Walker away, pulled too on a billboard that displayed the Apple logo, uprooting it and whirling it into the distance, then pulling apart the room I was in, the hurricane swept away bricks, glass, wood, everything but me.

Under a calm and clear sky, I turned to see my mistress seated in the lotus position, eyes closed in a state of deep meditation. For some reason, this provoked me to a giddy insubordination. Knowing that she would be so deep in her trance as to be unable to notice my actions, I unscrewed her left hand, then the right, then her left foot and lastly the right. These appendages I hid in the temple before assuming the lotus position beside her.

There we were, two women in full dobok, one mischievous the other a cultivator. At last my mistress  opened her eyes and turned to look at me.

‘I do wish you would stop stealing my hands and feet.’

This was said with such earnestness that I no longer felt the deed to be funny and I ran to retrieve the stolen extremities. Uncomplaining, my mistress allowed me to screw them back on then rose, gesturing me for a walk along a path in an oriental garden that I’d been in before, in an earlier dream. Or a dream still to come.

‘Cyn,’ said my mistress, ‘do you know what’s worse than finding a worm in an apple?’

‘No, what’s worse than finding a worm in an apple?’

‘A kraken.’

The ground beneath me was ground no longer and it surged up to engulf me. Rushing at me from the black depths were enormously long, pale tentacles, which battered me, twisted me, dislocated me, and, before I had time to drown, drew me towards a terrible beak between the two parts of which was a tongue covered in teeth. Torn and smothered by the horrible tongue, I was swallowed.

I crossed a lake by a strong bridge and walked for a few miles until I came to a crossroads. I stood in the middle of the crossroads and studied it. The traffic lights were all red. There were weeds underfoot that fell to dust as I trod on them. I crossed the broken tarmac and looked over one of the traffic lights. The glass in all three circles was intact and red. I went back to the junction protected by these lights. Dust and ash lay everywhere.

My mother emerged from the darkness of the far road. She stopped at the light for some time.

‘It won’t change.’

‘Are you inviting me in?’

‘Please come in Mum.’

‘Were you swallowed too?’ she asked me.

‘By a kraken.’

‘That’s right.’ My mother looked around. She erased a weed with her foot. Then she opened her handbag. She withdrew her purse and found a two-Euro coin. She spun the coin. We both leaned down to see it lying on the dusty tarmac.

‘Tails,’ she said and with care for her hip, retrieved the coin. ‘Again?’

‘Let me.’ I spun the coin high, caught it, and slapped it on the back of my hand. I showed her the result. Tails.

‘Care to bet on heads for the next?’ my mum smiled.

‘I’ll take tails.’

She laughed, ‘Oh, Susie. You were always very quick.’

‘How are you doing Mum? It’s been a while.’

‘I’m sorry Cyn,’ there were tears in her eyes. ‘It’s only me. You. Informed by our memories of our mum. I didn’t mean to be cruel.’

‘I understand. And I don’t mind. It’s a comfort to see her. Especially here.’

‘Speaking of here,’ my mum looked around. Darkness in every direction. ‘I strove to save us.’

‘This isn’t yours?’

‘Nor yours.’

‘Whose is it?’

‘I’m not sure. Someone new made it. Someone powerful. They put this in my handbag. Does it mean anything to you?’ She held an apple with a bite taken out of it.

‘I’m not sure. Something to do with Eve?’ Yet I felt horror when looking at the apple, a dread that did not seem related to my feelings about the story of Adam and Eve.

‘Do you think we would suffer so much without language?’ asked my mum.

‘Pain. Hunger. Thirst. Tiredness. Cold.’

‘Broken hearts?’

‘Yes.’

‘Grief?’

‘Certainly.’ I was thinking about a YouTube clip I’d seen of a mother polar bear mourning the death of her two cubs.

‘I wonder though,’ Mum looked at the apple, then took a small bite. ‘Perhaps the human being suffers more terribly because they can put words on their suffering. They can know they are in a state of grief, as well as be in it. An extra dimension of grief.

‘Do you remember reading that Cormac McCarthy essay on language?’

‘Vaguely.’

‘What if Eve discovered language and taught it to Adam? Wouldn’t that be a fall into horror?’

‘I like the idea that the apple represents the beginning of self-awareness. I don’t think self-awareness necessarily means more intense grief though.’

My mum offered me the apple. I took a bite. Then another, so that the ring of our bites around the middle of the apple was complete. It tasted just like a fresh apple should. The scent was sweet.

‘Anything?’

I shook my head.

‘I believe we are here until the power of the kraken wanes.’ Mum was discouraged.

‘I can leave. I can wake up.’

‘Perhaps it is best if you do so. Could it be something has changed in your realm? That a hundred thousand years of symbiotic living is coming to an end? Try to find out Cyn. Find out what power can imprison me. And when you have discovered our enemy, destroy them.’

***

The daily form on the DreamAds app was difficult to complete as once again I could hardly remember my dream. Only when prompted to consider if I’d seen any Apple products did a flash of insight give me something to write about. As far as I could recall, there hadn’t been any computers or iPhones in my dreams. But I had bitten into an apple – I could remember the scent of it quite vividly – while worried that I might be biting into a worm. There was something potent about that moment and something dark too. It would make for a good portrait if I could capture the feeling. I would call it Eve. I felt like getting my sketch pad and starting work.

That evening we went to the Irish Writers Centre. While Daniel shook hands, chatted with his fellow poets and helped himself repeatedly to the free wine, I walked quietly on the blue carpet and studied the collection of paintings that decorated the walls of the stairwell.

‘Do you like it?’ The man interrupting my thoughts was about forty. His brown eyes were assessing me, not the portrait we were adjacent to.

‘Very much.’

‘There’s a resemblance to you.’

‘Really? Or do you say that to everyone who stands here? Do you wait until someone stops then come over and hit them with that line?’

‘Hah, hah. No. It’s the complexion. You’re both the same in this light.’

‘Or we use the same makeup.’

‘You’re not wearing any and I don’t think she was.’

‘You’re observant.’ I looked again at the woman in the painting. He had a point, we were both very pale. Her face was stronger than mine, like the women you see in photographs from early twentieth century Irish history, a Maude Gonne.

‘Not really, I’m just clutching at straws. Looking for an excuse to talk to you.’

I don’t mind being approached by men and this one was attractive at least. But pro-tip to those who start flirting with me: twisting around like a wet rag when challenged really is not appealing. I just nodded and moved, intending to go to the next painting, a study in silver that was probably dated to the 1950s and Abstract Expressionism.

He didn’t let me leave so easily though. ‘Consider the scene from my point of view. We’re at a poetry event. An attractive woman is looking at paintings. I get the impression she’s smart, creative and interesting. I probably should respect her space and leave her in peace. But she’s drifting as if slightly bored and what if she’d like to talk? What if we’d click if I came over and broke the ice?’

‘You did well enough with the resemblance to the portrait. But I lost all interest once you spoke in clichés.’

‘Clichés?’ He looked a little hurt and I realised I’d been too sharp, again. It was past mending though.

‘I only date poets whose lines are original. “Clutching at straws”, “click”, and “breaking the ice” are so worn out they are colourless.’

‘The way to your heart is with a metaphor as coruscating as the dawn light on a bird-of-paradise.’

‘That’s a simile. But I appreciate the effort.’

Two taps of a microphone diverted the man from his next response. From the room above came a female accent, a respectable south Dublin one. ‘Friends, if you’d like to take your seats, we’ll begin.’

‘Can I sit with you?’

I genuinely had lost all interest in him and shook my head.

Ten rows of firm-backed chairs faced a lectern and a top table at which sat Daniel and his poet friend. The room was warm and the low-volume conversations made an amiable soundscape. Three tall, rectangular windows allowed a pink, evening light to create a sense of softness to the scene and I found a seat towards the back, ready to enjoy myself.

Twitchy with the two lines of speed he’d taken, Daniel occasionally looked at the host at the lectern, who was giving the fire safety announcement; more often he glanced down to the three pages of notes in his large hands; and most often of all he looked out at the audience with eyes that were trying to make friends with everyone.

Then it was his turn.

Up at the lectern he was confident as he should be. No better man for crowd-pleasing humour and dramatic lines. This was not his launch and with a self-awareness that I loved, he stayed well away from his own poems. None of Daniel’s poems were declaimed from the lectern, only those of his friend.

‘It was once said to me that we should be poets in our twenties, dramatists in our thirties and novelists in our forties. Fortunately for Irish poetry, Ainé has not heeded this apparent wisdom and has joined that impressive list of poets whose first collections were published when they were in their forties.

‘Ainé’s is a poetry of impacts much more than events. Her poems are typically about consequences. About legacy. Not the throwing of the stone but the ripples. The presence of an event is always nearby, always exerting a power, but it is not on the page. Rather, you feel like it is close, perhaps behind you, as you look in the ravaged eyes of its survivor.’

Daniel was good at this. Not all poets were as articulate in analysis as they were in composition, but Daniel was skilled at both and I was happy for him to have the opportunity to show how well he could talk about poetry.

Afterwards, when the hubbub was dying down, when Ainé had left having signed fifty books, when the pats on Daniel’s back had ceased and when the wine had been drunk, we had sex in the gents, way down in the basement. For him, this was a perfect finale to a fine evening. In the past I would have said, ‘for us’. I’d enjoyed the evening, mostly via the reflected happiness of my lover. For my own sake too, as listening to poetry did me good. Yet here I was bent over, dress up above my waist, braced against the wall of the narrow cubicle in circumstances that should have made me feel excited and wanton, feeling more tired than aroused.

Not wanting to disappoint Daniel, I tried to find that happy and erotic place in my thoughts that the moment deserved. Tried and failed. Entrance denied. Or rather, it simply was not there.

Someone came into the room beyond. After a couple of minutes of Daniel’s enthusiastic bucking motions and cries, a man’s voice said:

‘Oh come on. What are you? Teenagers without a home? I need the cubicle.’

I recognised the voice.

Daniel simply laughed, ‘fuck off!’

More helpfully, I added, ‘there’s another bathroom on the third floor. Above that painting you liked.’

Even that acknowledgement of my semi-public sexual activity, which should have been thrilling, did nothing for me. Was I ill perhaps? Certainly, something was wrong and strangely, I caught the scent of apples.