Iceland. A terrible beauty.

I have just about recovered equilibrium after a very heated telephone call  with  my bank. My "Relationship Manager" to you.. There are  many such calls these days, featuring  mortgage, overdrafts, repayment plans, direct debits and that sort of thing.. I do not actually  let it drive me to drink, but do need  take myself to a darkened room to still  my soul after.. This is the new reality these post boom  days.  Financial arrangements have to be re negotiated, and the banks seemingly have to be managed, not to say  wrestled with,  every step of the way. The Bank comes to the table with  a refusal to commit to any arrangement, doublespeak that touches on psychosis and a mix of timidity and cunning to cloud every exchange. I have threatened Ombudsman, the Banks own customer complains syteyms,  the Airwaves (Joe Duffy!)  and I have prevailed but probably lost about six months from my allotted life span on  each bruising encounter. And then there is Iceland. They took this bull by the horns. They did it.. They decided, they acted, bankers/politicians jailed, debt wrote down, an end and a beginning.

I listen to a man describe his dealing with his Mortgage Providers on said  Joe Duffy show  during the week. He is forthright, memorable.  He  jumped through every hoop they placed for him. He submitted  the intimate minutiae of his daily spending on his family,  bowed to the minimum payment they demanded, paid and paid  and decided finally to stop.  He would not continue to deprive his young children, in order   to exist.  There was no end in sight to the deprivation required  before they were grown and he spent.. He would not live like that. He recited a litany of frustrations in attempting to  sell his house.  When he found a buyer, the Bank continued to prevaricate, would not consent to the sale, wanted cast iron proposals as to the remainder of the debt.  So he has taken himself to the UK and is filing for bankruptcy there. Lucky he to be in a position to do so, I suppose. Many people are not,  and must continue fighting a  rear guard action with Banks,  scattering these   mongrel  dogs as they circle.  I think longingly of Iceland.

Later on  the radio  programme, there is the cluster of voices wanting to stick him and people like him to the bargain he made, to the  bed he is to lie on. Hmm,  these people are always the lucky ones, the timid ones, who have not engaged with the boom economy, or did not have to, I think.  Moral hazard, strategic default  and such phrases  uttered unthinking  in denial of boom, bust, bank speculation and rescue. It is tedious, pointless  to hear and I may have to go to the darkened room again. And  think longingly of Iceland.

The boy comes slouching towards his junior cert, a terrible beauty. He has after school study, a determination not to strain himself and  last minute maths grinds to sustain him.. . He tells me that his maths teacher is still "doing  new stuff" on the course. He tells me that he "doesn't get most of the  stuff"  she teaches. She is quite as unenthusiastic about him. He tells me he " like actually  get's it" when the headmaster  in the school takes the maths class in in her absence. He is having late eureka moments with his grinds teacher.

 He is in fact  incapable of applying  himself unless regimented, nailed  to desk and books.  And then there is the Tech Graph teacher, who hauls the absent minded ones in for extra tuition on Fridays, and brought  the boy's mark up to an A because he WILL teach every boy his subject, no exceptions, and so he told me at the parent teacher meeting. I pay for after school study, I pay for grinds. If there is a problem I am told it lies with the child. He is not the only one such. I can think of  some very obvious solutions here. More tough decisions that will never be taken. The boy takes Sunday off,  needs "downtime"   " knows what he is doing" he  calls  over his shoulder as he speeds of on his bike.Hmm  Yeah, a rough beast  towards Bethlehem indeed. . (Apologies to Yeats)

The summer continues to tease us  with a glimpse of ankle, a flash of bra strap, before the cold curtain of winter falls again. My husband is our weather man. An optimistic one at that.. He taps his father's gleaming,  polished  Barometer in the hall, and pronounces the real summer to be  imminent,  starting on mmm  Saturday in fact.  He tells me I have no patience when I call him on it.  Just wait he says, this year it WILL come. It WILL.. I ask the oracle if he thinks they might let me in to Iceland. "Why not" he says "lucky to get you. Me too. Where you go I go. And there's the Midnight Sun you know, summer with a twist, night that's not. You'd fit right in"

Stepford wives/ Sucides/ Mary Gauthier sublime/

"Turn it off. Turn it off. Turn it offff." My husband raises an eyebrow as he flips the radio off switch,  mid sentence, slicing into the words " suicidal ideation".  Relentless, depressing, predictable.  I knew it was coming of course, the abortion Bill is in the drafting stage. We have the barest most pared down provisions  at last, three tiny cowardly faltering steps for womankind. One obstetrician's say so where a woman's life is in the balance, two obstetricians' say so when it is merely at risk,  one obstetrician  and two psychiatrists where there is a risk/threat  of suicide.

Nowhere in there will you find mention or requirement for choice or  contribution  from the woman requiring the abortion. The discussion is largely on the part of  minority catholic crazies,  politicians peddling the party line, the traditional  line, the line to re election, and  the occasional real life actual  woman  struggling to be heard.  Possibly one of the eleven women per day going to or back from the UK for an abortion. But not so much. These women don't count. They are not the ones we legislate for.  It's for the others. All the pregnant Stepford wives. You know them?

And then there are the suicides. The meagre provisions on offer hang in the balance, on account of all the suicidal pregnant  women, particularly those many many who  might be pretending.  And besides and in fact and indeed abortion you know is not a remedy for the suicidally  ideated, an assertion trotted out  witlessly,  ad nauseum.  Is  Suicide now  defined as  a symptom of mental illness? Are we unable to acknowledge the possibility of suicide as existential choice? The victim in the X case was not mentally ill, she was raped and asserted  to be suicidal if forced to carry her rapist's child. This was a fundamental existential crisis, leading to a choice of suicide, and so it was recognized to be by the Supreme court and by every rational  civilized  person in this country.,

Rape, the prospect of carrying a non viable fetus, a disastrously unplanned pregnancy, any of these might well lead a woman to such an existential crisis.  We carry a child for nine months deliberately intelligently, a herculean labour in fact. We do not do it lightly. We do not do it forcibly. People choose suicide in intolerable situations That is a fact. No one  can dictate  what is existentially possible for another. The  current  debate is a fudge and  an insult to women who must make real choices.

Later on, when I think its safe to come out, Bishop someone or other is faithfully quoted on the news .... abortion can never ....not a  treatment for suicide ideation .... must never be allowed....... put at risk   innocent life of the unborn.....!!!! I ask my husband to take the radio down stairs and put in in the garden. Why oh why would anyone quote the catholic clergy now? What place have they here? They  don't really  care for children do they? We know they have two modes when it comes to innocence and vulnerability, no exceptions,; they prey, or they cover for up their pervert priests. We  know they would be doing it still, if they had  not been exposed, dehorned, dragged kicking and  screaming, into the light.  So hey, not concern for children, for morality then,  A power play, stoopid.

"It's' ok honey, s'ok,  they're  gone" my husband turns the radio up up up  for  Mary Gauthier. Devine existentialist  Mary Gauthier  come among us to the land of Stepford  for a week,  and now she's on the radio.  He pulls me down beside him  on the back door step, and we listen under the tentative barely warming sun.

                          Now that same frown's in my mirror/ I got my daddy's blood inside my veins.
                 Fish swim/  birds fly/ Daddies yell/ Mamas cry/ old men sit and think /I drink.

The Russians are coming.

.                                                 Crazy
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             "Oh you know, I mean  I don't think I'm actually getting through here",  My husband hands me a restorative glass of wine.  "Yeah,  not. I mean he resists, he argues, he contradicts, he presents counter arguments as  energetic as they are, dear God, just plain daft.  "You were supposed to study for one hour"  I say. "And I did. What do you mean supposed. I did"  he says. "Didn't"  I say.  "Timed you from the moment you collapsed on your bed with the school book and your earphones in  to the time  you collapsed on the sofa, with the TV  remote and your ear phones in.  Twenty  minutes. Tops ".  "No"  he says "No. I think you'll  find it was actually thirty five  minutes in fact. Cos it was English, And I'm good at English. So thirty five minutes is as good as an hour when it's English".  "Now just back up there" I manage. "Just hold on there a second". He doesn't.  "And YOU don't seem to realise, I mean has it ever occurred to you that your life would be so much easier if you'd stop with the crazy rules..just trust me, I mean  my friends parents never.. eh... bother them like this ..and now I am just not doing any more study  ever at all, thanks to your picking on  me, no more EVER.  AND you have only yourself to blame"   he finishes,  romping home.

                                                     Russians

"You see" says my husband as he pours me another " You're just not talking his language".  "Huh?.  "Sure. You gotta tell him it's a war, it's a  war and  we need  an Accord.  Second World War tell him.  He is Russia, the boss she is Greece carefully weighing up the merits of all sides,  the beautiful girl is Belgium, just wants peace, just wants quiet, just wants  to get on with her own more important stuff, but us, we are the Allies. He can't actually win without us. He might be the Russians, baby,  but we have the inside track. He needs us, he knows it, so tell him to shut up and do it.. United we just can't be beat.

                                                   Because we are are the Allies.

 Right. Well.  That helped.  I mean yeah,  Greece, Belgium and all the Russians are plotting, stropping,
marauding through our house, but that's basically Ok . We have the inside track, we're all over it ,  we have strong liquor. We are the Allies.

Screwing with the Hippocratic oath. Choices.

"I didn't mean to be hurtful" the mid wife at the Halappanavar inquest offers, "I didn't mean to be hurtful,  when I told her  that this is a catholic country",  she having  being sternly reminded at the same inquest that it is the legal and not the religious rule that prevails in Irish hospitals.  Right.  Does it  though?  Does it really?  Well yes.  And no.  And yes. And no not really.   We flounder  in  a legal quagmire because of the catholic business,  in fact .  And yes we are sorry,  and so we told Mr Halappanavar.  We are sorry, we are embarrassed, we are exposed.  We are the catholics.

The midwife tells the inquest that her remarks were made in the context of a friendly chat with Mrs Halappanavar.  She meant no harm. She meant no harm  as she in effect told Mrs Halappanavar that she, the patient,  did not have the right to choose. Though Mrs Halappanavar's choice was clear.  Inevitable miscarriage,  non viable pregnancy,  rape.  Across the world a woman has the right to choose in these circumstances at least.  And if a woman cannot choose in such circumstances she is a chattel,  little more.

You carry a child  in your body conciously, intelligently, deliberately.  There could be no good outcome if you did not. The collorary of this is that YOU choose. Only women choose. The choice is the business of  the one who bears the burden.  But  we,  the irish,   we say not. We say it's a catholic thing, a  legal thing,  it's anything but a woman thing.  And now we are exposed, blinking up  into the  harsh light of day, wishing only that the murky boulder be replaced.

And then there IS the legal thng, the position we claim. What is that exactly? Oh yeah, the DOCTOR has the right to choose. The doctor  brings the woman down to the wire, up against it,  to the very brink,  her life in the balance, and chooses.  A fine calculation that.  We know that some medics will go in and terminate if there is ANY risk to life,  and some will obey the law's letter,  having interpreted it. Cautiously. The law's an ass so watch your ass. We are the Doctors.

And oh you think if you were in Mrs Haloppanavar's  position you might well regret not having stayed at home in your own bed, where at least you would  have been spared the weasel words while the  deathly sepsis gained purchase in your life's blood. And afterwards your husband spared the torment of an inquest where the  midwife,  the nurse,   describe your chattering teeth,  your shivering fever,  the  clear evidence of your septic abortion, all charted, never acted upon.  Because.  Oh listen as the doctors say they did not hear, they never read, they did not know, they were not told.  Oh no.  A systems  failure then.  And marvel as the doctors duck and dive behind the dangerous law they do not seek to change.

"All you are permitted to do is wait"  Doctor Peter Boylan said, "for sepsis. Then you can. Act." That is entirely a matter of interpretation, I say, and  if it were true ,  it would be  an iniquitous thing accepted in a passive and shameful fashion by doctors,  who DO choose.  If Mrs Halappanavar was given the procedure that she asked for, when she asked for it, she  would be alive today planning her next pregnancy having laid her daughter to rest. That was her choice. What happened in the event is ours. We are the people.

Barefooted Hero. Seductive sweet.

"But. No. ..you paid money for this stuff.  Why should we leave it here"  my husband flings shampoo, various lotions, my new green tea perfume into his bag as he speaks.  "Yes, but, darling, I will feel like a quasi criminal at security. No liquids, you know".  "Huh. It's SHAMPOO. And I'm putting your perfume in my spare shoes"??? ".Um right,  if you think so, "  I offer into his mutterings about waste, idiotic rules having spawned an industry to apply, causing massive irritation and inconvenience, and  being besides,   useless, pointless, AND  ineffective as a preventative measure, etcetera etcetera etcetera. I wonder if the divine sun's heat  has gone to his dear head.

 Later I balance on one leg replacing shoes, belt, dignity even, and wonder where he is. I notice that my socks are mismatched just as  he bounces over flushed, triumphant.  "Yea,  yea, stopped, my bag lit up like a  starry night,  interviewed by the head man, so yeah, shampoo gone, sorry, BUT perfume salvaged".  "How?" " Just did. There was an exchange mano a mano, him and me, said it was the wife's, said other stuff, he got it" . Hmmm. I look back at a young girl, pink faced  as she is barked at to remove her pretty boots, the back up of edgy sweating travellers behind her. I think of how hard it is to hold your ground on the planet  without your shoes.  I grab my hero tight to myself and we make for the plane.

The same sun shines the whole way home in the airport bus, brilliant,  clear,  fifteen degrees colder. It will be gone, our week, in a flash, he told me seven days before, as the bus  rumbled the other way at dawn. "Shut up ",  I say "not the point, but to have it, suck it dry, eat it whole.

And now we are fat with it. Bursting. The citrus infused,  seductive sweet smell of the orange blossoms; the warmth seeping into our chilly northern  bones; the soundtrack of  birdsong piercing, poignant; the  kindness of  swaying  sheltering trees.; the  food eaten out of doors,  post prandial  sherries in an  impossibly exotic old world wine bar; my weeping helpless, surrendered by the walls of the Alcazar after a falling out as to  its whereabouts, his white pained  face as appalled as mine;  lying in the hotel room listening to the rain slapping on the tiled court yard, mindless, entangled; the smell of the orange blossoms the smell of the orange blossoms the smell of the orange blossoms.

Stoned.

"I WAS going to call you but...but then.....a man in a car stopped to ask if I was Ok.... and my friends gave me tissues, and...and..  the bleeding stopped, and they bought me an ice-cream and I knew...I knew  like  if I called you I'd have to like come home."  The boss has returned from town, her sister in anxious attendance, with a bruised and lacerated lip, some little beast from a gang of  beasts having stoned herself and her two little girl friends in the Park. Why?  No particular reason. They were just  there. The police  assure me that there would be little  point in making a complaint  the beasts being  juveniles etc etc. I don't agree. The boss is reluctant to make a complaint,  name names. I tell her she is not a punch bag for anyone's low-grade craziness. And that her days of roaming free in town with her  girls pals are over. She must content herself with the village till she is much much older.(At least twenty five) The boss is dauntless, and will get about, but she is still a child. Mine.


Afterwards I think of three young  girls,  the spinning stone,  finding only her.   She has a history. She it was who might have lost an eye last year in a bizarre swimming pool incident, a wave maker incompetently managed, and she collected shivering and shocked from school before that,  mugged by a flying fire extinguisher. And so and so forth  back to  when she was pinned underneath the car wheel,  two years old,  in a driveway car reversal nightmare.We were lucky then, a broken leg the outcome. And back back yet  when she was five weeks old, a foot slip as I began to ascend the stairs, and  flying  from my  flailing arms she bounced on every step down.down  before  my  agonized gaze. "Yeah I think we got away with it just about, this time", the doc told me later  in Outpatients,

The thing is, some folks are always in the frame, first up in the firing line. . One of my brothers, a bright and open hearted child, was such. He it was who caught the flying yard fork carelessly tossed,  in his face, the falling bricks from the outhouse on his sweet  head,  and he who waited  in  the path of the car wheel when the brake slipped, and later still  his fingers smashed by  the threshing bullock. No one else. Him, her,. such folk..

Good Friday. No work.  My husbands comes to me having  left the fearsome three to the train station..  A special day.  The holy  space,  the break from the world.  I keep  my childhood memories of church, much and many  mass, the sonorous chanting  procession around the stations of the cross, the arrest before each dark and bloody  picture.  I light a metaphorical candle to the break out in my dizzy twenties, the frantic  house parties devoted to drinking, the pubs being closed. For the whole day.

I think of the gnostic principle; as within,  so it is without.  Took me years to get that.  Now I  get it fleetingly.  What happens to you in the world being  neither random or  punishment,  but reflecting an inner  interpretation,  unconscious, implacable. An old  role tacitly given and accepted, playing out. . I think of the boss, the brother, the Catholic notion  of Christ crucified on the cross  for the sins of the world. Another mystery in enigma wrapped as we see through a glass darkly having sucked up those Lethe waters good. Stoned.

if you go away ashes. Kilkea.

KILKEA                                                                                                                                            Look , everything's  changing,   new green,  palest pink appleblossom ,"  my husband nudges me "see the  lightening ",  so I do, and he is right. We are walking in beautiful Kilkee Castle,  clutching on to  each other more or less, after a rough raw week.  I  am worrying at  some impenetrably knotty  parenting quandaries, he is pale and recovering from a shattering flu.We tread a well worn path,  past the shadowy old graveyard, the last best tended grave with its heavy burden of  children, through the arched  Castle Gate and out under ancient oaks, copper beeches, sycamores  until our jerky striding slips into an easeful tandem. The war has not gone away, but my vision  expands from a pin point of baffled fury till I find my place in  the vast  greening universe

OPPRESSION
The evening before I am told by an indignant hissing  Boy that:  I am too strict,  will only allow one hour's internet use daily; true.  Will not allow TV sets in the bedrooms; true. All his friends have TV sets  in their bedrooms; unlikely! Harrass him with daily doses of fish oils; true.  As though he needed to be medicated; maybe.  Force him to rise at 7.30am for the school bus when it is my job to drive him; guilty.  Insist he study for an unconscionable three hours nightly; what can I say.  And impose strict deadlines on visits to his mates, reacting in rabid unreasonable fashion every times he is late; True true true. But then he is always visiting and always late. Oh AND  ALSO his sister is equally aggrieved with my hardline hardcore parenting.... and...and  none of  his friends' parents etc etc etc; hmmm, may or not be true. Basically he and she have had enough and they are not taking it  any more; ???. Right.

THE HEART WILL HAVE ITS SOUNDTRACK
Anyway, it all led to a painful falling  out between myself and my husband. He, poor man, midst his hacking and shivering  made the fundamental mistake of explaining to  me WHERE I WAS GOING WRONG. As, on the contrary, in fact,  I was too amenable,  a tad inconsistent,  over indulgent  even.  But...but...but ..NOT!.  And at that we were simply derailed.   I,  overwrought and unforgiving, unable to  locate the reason why I married him in the first place, left him huddled deathly pale on the sofa and took to the bed where I fingered and brooded on my sufferings. And the damnest thing, David Bowie's song Ashes to Ashes  played on a loop in my head, that  whole time. We were listening to his new CD earlier  you see. Don't you?

PROMISES
But not for  long because hey we are married and you can't get out of that one without a tsunami, and also  I need him like air.  So I rose from my bed, grabbed my coat and his hand and made for Kilkea, where we wander like refugees both in a mighty cathedral under the  open sky. We walk and we talk and we promise each other honesty, kindness, to  sidestep the fear and loathing when you cannot  let love in,  and distance is the cruelest thing. We promise. And we go home

HEART WANTS WHAT HEART WANTS
Much later on he finds and plays Scott Walker's version of "If you Go Away" on his magical I Pod for me, because it was haunting my head all evening