Hare

Tim MacGabhann | Tolka, Issue Three, May 2023

As I get older I find myself better able to let things live under their own aspect: isolated, apart – like a single dart of seed blown from a dandelion or the colours in Cézanne which become their own blocks of solidity – as though beyond form. It’s a young person’s illness to look backwards so much. When I knew Sam I was coming into the last of those years when I might have been able to think of myself as young: that is to say, in those years when I already felt as though I were no longer young. When you get past those years, you start to feel young again. You don’t want them back, either. The low burnish of things as they are is enough: that gleam on the rim of a cup, early in the morning, a weathervane without cease against low banks of smoky purple clouds, a lizard skittering up a bough; to feel all of these so new that it’s as if they were the first things you ever saw occur, and yet also to feel as though to see them once was enough: that’s how you know you’re no longer young.

But I digress, which is something else I’m meant to have stopped now that I’m older. My sessions with patients have shortened to reflect this. You get to know the chase and you cut to it. I was Sam’s psychoanalyst. I hadn’t been analysed myself yet, and I wasn’t up to the job. I’m glad I failed. I thought that all he was suffering from was an overdose of university and a dead father. It was easy for me to underestimate. If I’d broken him to harness he might have found a way to write a kind of sombre minor poetry: Leopardi meets Housman, perhaps, but with an Irish accent. That would have been dreadful.

So, I invited him out for dinner one night, at l’Étoile, to see if we couldn’t hash it out. He kept me waiting by the Tube nearest the restaurant. I was standing there with my hands sunk way past the wrists into the pockets of my trench coat, but I could still feel the evening’s raw cold in them. My knuckles felt swollen and the tendons of my fingers had a hot pain in them, making them shake like they were about to snap.

‘Ah, Jesus, Doc. I’m sorry, now,’ Sam tutted, shaking his head. The way his body was stooped made his shoulders look a little like wings closing in towards his chest. ‘It’s these plebs of office workers, isn’t it. Filling up the place. Bastards.’

I took my hands out of my pockets and rubbed them and held back a groan.

‘Lateness for appointments’, I said, ‘is a form of aggression. But you knew that, didn’t you?’

He gave a laugh that sounded more like a cough and I saw the twitch of a smile at the corner of his mouth, vanishing almost as soon as it had appeared. He put his hand out and we shook hands and I felt the warmth of his pulse at the centre of his palm, which was slick with sweat.

‘That was the most Irish you’ve ever sounded,’ I said. ‘When you spoke, coming out of the station.’

‘Yes, well,’ said Sam. He stiffened his back, crossed one lapel of his coat across the other and rubbed away the line of sweat and hair oil with a finger. ‘If anywhere’s going to bring out the Irish in a body.’ Now his accent was in place again, too, that glassy almost-Anglo shine back on top.

‘It’ll be London,’ I said.

‘Tired of London, tired of life,’ said Sam in a dead sort of a voice. ‘And I am beyond both of both.’

‘Let’s see if we can’t fortify you out of that.’ The fake brightness in my own voice made me feel like I was a teacher chivvying kids along on a school tour that they hated. I gave a jerk of the head back over my shoulder, towards the lit-up white restaurant where I’d made the reservation.

Sam frowned at the windows. ‘Here?’ he said.

‘Yes, here,’ I said, and didn’t add ‘for Christ’s sake’. Whitejacketed waiters were moving around inside the placid amber glow of the dining room. Cutlery winked. A white-gloved hand lowered a needle to a record. It all looked so warm. I wanted to say, ‘Please, Sam.’

Sam shrugged, said, ‘Any storm in a port’, and strode off towards the door. As I followed I saw how the heels of Sam’s boots, all scalloped with wear, saw the ratted tangle of their laces, saw their leather so scuffed they’d gone from black to grey and, for a moment, I saw again a young man whom I’d treated at a hospital once – about Sam’s age, with a domineering mother, who one day brought him a pristine pair of boots, the leather gleaming terracotta in the morning light. But that patient had only been able to clasp his face between his hands, like two sad parentheses, his elbows propped on his knees, peering forwards dolefully past the boots and out of the room and into the high blue air beyond the window, while his mother said, ‘Come on now, love, take a step for Mummy, won’t you. Take a step for Mummy.’ The bird-down look of the young man’s hair had given me a stab right below the ribs, thinking how he was a thing not fully born. They were the most beautiful boots I’d ever seen. They’d stood there idle by the iron bed until the young man had been transferred: where to, I never heard.

Sam held the door open for me on the tips of his fingers, then let it slide towards my grip. The sudden bloom of heat inside steamed up my glasses, and then came the rich sting of relief, flooding through my fingertips, almost too painful for a moment. When the lenses cleared I became aware of a walrus effigy standing on a plinth by the door, in the pose of a human, wearing a red dressing gown of padded silk, the sleeves and lapels bordered with deep teal. Sam was peering at it with great interest as he cleaned his glasses on his sleeve.

‘Right,’ I said. The effigy had a fez on, and a monocle.

‘Was this . . . expected?’ Sam said.

I shook my head.

Sam frowned at the effigy.

‘Late art,’ he said. ‘Very late. The latest, in fact.’

Not many of the tables were busy. While Sam circled the effigy I rubbed my hands and waited by a reception desk of dark wood for someone to show us to our table. Over in the corner, sitting in a booth, a couple in their fifties, a man and a woman, were sitting across the table from one another, postures stiff like they weren’t used to wearing the clothes they had on, or to sitting in restaurants. Their cutlery moved with little shy jerks. She was using the wrong knife on her fish. Little white flakes had caught in the serrations. The man had a red leash around his wrist. I let my gaze drop along it towards the loop, expecting to see a dog. But what I saw was a hare – large, still, with a deep, placid look, which made me think of a horse’s eyes. The blade of the woman’s knife winked. She looked over at me, saw me looking at the hare and gave a gentle nod and smile. Her husband saw her doing this and did the same. Sam had bent to inspect the plinth that the walrus was standing on; now he stood up, looked at me, looked over where I was looking, and said, ‘Is that—’

‘Yes, it’s definitely there,’ I said.

‘A hare,’ he said, and clasped his hands at the small of his back. ‘The creature of melancholy.’

‘Welcome, sirs,’ said a waiter with a thin pompadour who bowed towards us from behind the bar. ‘The interior is fur-lined,’ he said, seeing Sam stroke the nap of the dressing gown.

‘Very good,’ said Sam gravely, beginning to slide out of his coat. There was a crosshatch of fraying all around the cuffs of his white shirt and little burn holes pocked the sleeves. The fabric of it was washed out to the same worn grey as his boots. He was going to three sessions a week, and his mother was paying for it.

‘Shall we?’ the waiter said, with a gesture towards an empty round table. We would be side-on with the couple and their hare. There was nothing I could do. We followed the waiter, were seated, were handed our menus.

‘An apéritif, sirs?’ said the waiter.

‘No, thank you,’ I said. ‘A coffee, perhaps.’

The ends of Sam’s mouth turned downwards as he contemplated the list.

‘Port,’ he said, then folded the menu shut, interlocked his fingers with a crack, let his gaze swing around the room, up over the chandeliers, the tables, the deep plush of the carpet. Except for the occasional twitch of his ears the hare hadn’t budged.

The waiter returned with a jug and poured my coffee.

‘Won’t you ruin your fish?’ Sam said. ‘Drinking that?’

‘Needs must,’ I said. I turned the back of my hand towards Sam.

‘Alcohol won’t do the job. You get numb. But it comes back worse.’ I flexed my fingers. ‘Sometimes they burn. Sometimes they tingle. Sometimes they’re so cold that they burn.’

‘But they’re never quiet,’ Sam said.

‘No.’ I relaxed my hand, then gripped the cup. ‘But, well. That was the worst of it.’

‘The worst of what?’

I saw my own calm face looking back at me in the surface of the coffee. That calm on my face never seemed to fit.

‘The war,’ I said. I rested my knuckles against the side of my cup, to warm them. It wasn’t quite working.

‘You’re very brave,’ Sam said.

I tried to find sarcasm in what I’d heard, couldn’t find any, then said, ‘There’s no such thing as brave, really. It’s just a question of going one direction or the other.’

‘Directions?’

‘Back,’ I said, ‘or on.’

‘That is brave, yes,’ Sam said. He leaned back in his chair. He swirled his glass. Little eel-shaped dribbles flowed down the inner side. ‘But I meant another kind of brave. How brave to keep quiet.’

I said nothing for a moment. I smoothed the nap of the white tablecloth flat, even though there wasn’t a single ridge or bump in the surface, not one that I could see, anyway.

‘Well,’ I said. ‘That ought to be something we talk about. The silences.’

Sam’s shoulders sagged a little. ‘Ah,’ he said.

‘Even the talking,’ I said. ‘Even that’s a form of silence. You’re about six miles ahead of whatever I might say to you. And right when I think I’ve got you’ll pull out a quote from Freud or Jones or Descartes or Guerlincz or whoever and that’ll be me skewered.’

‘Geulincx,’ said Sam. He was levelling up his napkin so that the line of it was flush with the line of the tablecloth, white cancelling into white. He looked up at me with a teenager’s smile of wan dumb sarcasm.

‘As I said,’ I said.

‘You said Guerlincz,’ said Sam.

‘No, as in, as I said, you can quote anybody you want to defend yourself, and correct people who point out quotation as a defence.’ There was no heat in my hands but there was some in my voice.

That little smile flicked up and down at the corner of Sam’s mouth, making him look proud for a moment. ‘Sorry,’ he said, at last.

The waiter laid down the port glass and let an ink-coloured dribble fall from the bottle. Sam watched the level rise, then sighed. He rubbed his breastbone, then swirled his glass and then toted it and said, ‘To the Everlasting’, and then necked the port in one and nodded at the waiter for another.

‘And that’s a whole other story,’ I said.

Sam’s eyes looked beady, almost piggy, behind the lenses of his glasses. ‘The Everlasting?’ he said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘The drinking.’

‘That’s everlasting, too,’ he said. Then he leaned back in his chair. ‘You’re letting your national prejudices blind you.’

I tapped my fingers on the table, looked back towards the hare. There was something about it that set off a flutter of recognition in the centre of my body. It wasn’t a bad feeling. I wanted to get closer to it or for it to become stronger. There was an image underneath the sensation. It was waiting to appear. I felt sure of it.

Sam was rubbing his sternum again, the knuckles making a sound as they went up and down the bone like a cloth being worked against a washboard. ‘I just never know where to begin,’ he said, in a quiet, beaten sort of a voice. ‘Nothing is simultaneous. Everything is a fog. Or a soup, perhaps. I feel all these unseen shapes and pressures moving through me and around me. And they make speech feel like a consoling noise that you make just to not feel that sloshing compression going in and out against me. Like I’m in a lung. Like we’re all in a lung, an immense lung. Or all of us in their own separate lung. I can’t be sure.’ A lock of hair had drooped onto his forehead. He pasted it back up. I saw the shine of where he hadn’t been able to get all of the hair oil off his skin. Then he went on. ‘I walk,’ he said. ‘A lot. And fast. On, always on. I don’t know what I am running from but it feels like I’m running. I am more charging than running, really. As though there were something ahead, more so. I feel a churn in my stomach. It’s a noise moving over and over. It feels like it’s almost about to go solid, but then it turns into something else. The sky in Ireland is like a stone, or a bone ceiling, the inside of a skull. And I feel all bowed when I’m walking, like I’m carrying that sky on my back, up and over the rolling hills that are nothing other than the old seabed for a long-gone ocean. I feel so old and so tired. The oldness and the tiredness climb up my legs. And I sort of want this. I want to feel tired enough to lie down. But equally I can’t stop, because if I stop the land keeps moving even if I’m still, and kills me all by itself, like I wouldn’t have to do anything, and I’m so much of a coward that this scares me.’ His thumb and index finger rose to his forehead. He touched the line of hair oil, stroked it, then rubbed his fingers together, absently, as it seemed to me. ‘The land I see all feels like one thing turning into another all the time. Paths walked into the earth turning into currents turning into tree roots turning into a wild, unweeded garden, big stems on them, all pale, but shaped like muscles there in the undergrowth.’ He paused, frowned, rapped the table with his knuckles. ‘I see a red-brick wall. I see my cousin in the hospital sitting by the metal tables on the lawn and unable to do anything but jog her knee up and down trying to tire herself into calmness.’

‘You should write all that down,’ I said.

Sam looked at me. He had a wide sort of a hopeful look on his face for a moment. He said, ‘What? Like in a novel?’

‘Well, yes. That’s what you do, isn’t it? Or, at least, that’s what you want to do.’

He shook his head. ‘I can’t. The pain won’t fit. I put the pain in a form and either the form breaks or the pain breaks.’

‘But that’s what we want. No? For the pain to break. Isn’t that why we have our sessions?’ The waiter was moving to collect the plates of the couple in the booth. I stole a look at the hare. He was so still he could have been a model of a hare, but his nose was moving a little, and his whiskers were a shine of motion under the light.

Sam bridled. ‘It’s what you want,’ he said, his voice still quiet, but hard now, almost a hiss. ‘It’s not what I want. I want to see the pain. I want to watch it leak away.’

‘And the difference between that and breaking?’

‘Can’t you hear one?’

‘No.’

‘The thing holding the pain is what breaks.’ Sam’s hands rose and described a fast outward arc, then dropped to the table again, miming something I couldn’t see. ‘The pain stays. The form breaks. And then just the seepage.’

I flicked the handle of my coffee cup and said, ‘Is that working for you?’

‘I’m working for it,’ Sam said.

I pinched the bridge of my nose.

‘You’re asking questions,’ Sam said. ‘I’m answering them.’

‘You’re riddling.’

He gave that cough of a laugh again and said, ‘I am certainly riddled, that’s for sure.’

I could feel anger like a white-hot steam rising in my sinuses. I thought his head might lift off. I tried to observe the anger as though it were happening to somebody else. It didn’t work.

‘Sam, I took you here because I think we need to break off the analysis.’ The words came out in a long fast string and the look on Sam’s face made me feel like I’d whipped him across the cheek.

The waiter approached the table. ‘Sirs?’ he said.

‘Oh, dear,’ said Sam. His manner smoothed over instantly, like a lake surface sealing itself over again. ‘We haven’t even looked.’ He opened the menu, snapped it shut. The woman in the booth looked up at the sound. The hare’s ears didn’t even quiver. ‘Your recommendation. For both.’ He handed the waiter the menus.

‘Very good, sirs,’ the waiter said, with a bow that took him backwards away from us. Sam leaned his elbow on the table and ground at the centre of his forehead with the heel of his hand.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I can’t do it. I’m making you worse.’

‘But that’s the point,’ Sam said.

‘Not for me,’ I said. ‘I got into this because I wanted to make people well. That was stupid. It feels quite stupid when you’re there. And then that makes me feel so useless when I’m with other patients, because then I feel like I’m just flattering myself that I’m helping.’ I rubbed my eyebrows with the thumb and forefinger of one hand. ‘But I cut across you. Why do you want to make it worse, Sam? Can you tell me that at least?’

Sam looked down at the table and seemed to notice a wrinkle. He smoothed it, said, ‘Act One of Hamlet. There’s a pun. Do you remember it?’

I shook my head.

‘“Adieu, adieu, remember me” and “resolve itself into a dew”. That’s what I want. To feel my whole body saying goodbye to the whole shitball world one second at a time, and in perfect peace.’

‘And how,’ I said, ‘are three sessions a week going to help you with this?’

He shrugged in a way that made him look like he’d had an electric shock, and said, ‘It’s not so crazy. It’s an ache that runs all the way through Shakespeare.’ He counted on his long fingers. ‘Richard II, O that I were a mockery king of snow, to melt myself away in water-drops. Antony’s pre-suicide speech: I cannot hold this visible shape. The utterance as rehearsal for death. And now back to Hamlet, to Ophelia this time. A sigh so piteous and profound, as it did seem to shatter all his bulk, and end his being. You see?’

I gave it a second. My fist bunched up the napkin on my knee and then let it go. I heard the ting of the kitchen bell. That had to be our food. I hoped it would make me more able to deal with all of this. ‘It’s all very clever,’ I said.

‘And?’

‘And that’s all. It’s all very clever.’

The waiter approached carrying a steaming plate balanced on either hand. He told us what we were about to eat – loup de mer, beurre noisette, shellfish and peas – then swept off with another of his bows. Sam picked up his fork and frowned at his plate.

‘Clever won’t get me out of here,’ he said.

‘No.’

‘It just kills the time.’

‘Yes.’

‘And so?’

I looked around the room: white plaster and gold scrollwork – oak leaves, laurel, some other leaf I didn’t recognise. Sam reached down and rubbed his ankle through his boots.

All that works’, he said, ‘is walking. I just try to tire myself out enough that I might feel dead. I do it until I get these flaking blisters on my toes.’

For a moment in my head I saw a flash of my bunched, filthy toes soaking in too-cold water back in the lodgings after hours juddering around in the tanks. Then the blisters on my toes turned into the scorched lips of a man called Owen who hadn’t gotten his mask on fast enough. I saw a finch flying, chirruping away with a blue thread of Owen’s uniform in its beak. Then I saw Shearsman the night before, toasting me with a wink, then Shearsman peering into the smoking crater in the side of our tank, his mouth wide, his eyes big and wobbly, like two poached eggs. I’d shoved him down before he could get the top of his head taken off. Then Sam’s knife caught the light, bounced the gleam into his eyes, surprised him back into the dining room. I smoothed the line of my moustache with the blade of my thumb.

‘The exhaustion’, I said, taking up my fork, ‘may be the point.’

Sam stopped sawing at his food. His body sagged and his cutlery moved outwards.

‘What?’ I said.

‘Break, my tongue, for I must hold my heart,’ he muttered, and kept eating. His frown as he hunched over his plate, the shine of the hair oil on his forehead: the two details made me dizzy. He looked at once far too old and far too young to be acting this way. He’d lived longer than so many people who I’d seen stretched out face down in the mud, mown down as close to all at once as made no difference, their uniforms spattered with mud. I wanted to tell him that he didn’t have a clue.

In the corner the man and woman with the pet hare had moved on to their desserts: slices of Battenberg cake with cream. The hare hadn’t shifted once. A muscle thrummed in his thigh. I felt a shaking in my chest, right in the place where earlier I’d felt an image or a memory trying to get loose. Then it happened: the image rose, the memory returned, and I was running down a stony road, that bright morning in the forest a mile from the front, a day after we’d all nearly died, running for the sheer free feeling of it all, and to feel myself alive the way so many weren’t, the jolt of each step jarring my spine and my ribs, shaking me back out of my thoughts, making me all nerve, all motion, nothing more than the breath cutting hot in and out of my lungs, closing slowly in on that level of speed where it feels like you are being pushed from behind rather than propelled under your own speed. Before me was a stream flowing over rocks, the orange light a shiver on the water. A river smell rose from the grass and hogweed leaves bobbing in the verge between the trees, and then I heard a rustle, saw a long, sleek hare come chasing out of the shadows, matching my stride for a moment, before rocketing ahead, his long feet throwing up arcs of lit water as he crossed the stream.

I turned back to our table. The memory had me feeling loosened somehow, like I had a higher voltage of electricity running in circuits around my body

Sam put down his cutlery. His eyes were shut. He interlaced his fingers and brought them to his mouth. ‘I need this,’ he said. ‘I do. I need it.’

‘Need what?’

‘This.’ Sam flapped his hand back and forth between us. ‘Conflict. A solid object to smack myself against until I’m too tired to keep smacking myself against it.’

‘A blank,’ I said. ‘Like a page.’

Sam sat back looking like he was really thinking about it. He scratched under his chin. I heard the rasp of the parts where he had shaved imperfectly. The sound gave me a tender stab under the ribs, and I saw again the young man in the hospital with the downy hair and the heavy mother and the brand-new unwearable pair of boots.

Sam was tapping at the table with his fingers, tapping at the tablecloth. He frowned at his own fingers. The stricken numbness of his face made me see the mother of someone who’d died in the war at the unveiling of a monument to the Tank Corps. This was some years after the war, and she had still looked as though all the time in the world wouldn’t be enough for the scald of the grief in her to diminish even one degree. He had no idea. I felt that sensation of electricity grow sharper in me and for a moment it was as though my ribs were about to clarify, become nothing but light. I saw the hare running through the water, throwing up drops that flecked my skin. I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled a napkin across to myself, then unlidded my pen and sank the tip of it into the soft white fabric and began to flay it, dragging so hard that I heard and felt tiny rips and thought that the nib would bend. The ink came out in fat blots and thin scrapings of blue. Then I started to scribble in circles on the ripped surface, until little rags of material started to swirl in the thickening ink. The noise of it was a long steady rumbling against the table. In my head I was running again but I was also stripping away the bandages of the dead and the wounded, tearing through each starched white layer with the pen’s nib, laying bare every stiff limb, every blinded face, every unlidded head – except now in my mind every wound was gone, sealed shut, leaving a circular red opacity as shiny as a coin. I stopped. I heard the breath go in and out of my nose, once, twice, as hot as steam. I looked at the hole I’d worn in the napkin, at the long blue scorings I’d scratched into the nap of the fabric. Then I put the lid back on the pen, and pushed the destroyed cloth napkin across to Sam.

‘Something like that,’ I said. ‘Do something like that to the page.’

Sam poked at the ragged edges of the tear in the napkin. He got ink on his finger and rubbed at it with his thumb. ‘The silence,’ he said. ‘And that’s all you’ve got?’

‘If the tiredness is the point’, I said, ‘then this might tire the mind the way walking does the body. So yes. That’s all I’ve got.’

Our plates were clear enough to draw the waiter over. He came to the table, saw the napkin, touched his finger to it, then shook his head, looking at me.

‘We really didn’t think you’d be the kind’, he said, ‘when you came in here.’

‘You let a bloody’ – I dropped my voice – ‘you let a hare in.’

‘That hare is very quiet, sir, and has defaced fewer napkins than you.’

‘Add it to the bill,’ Sam said gravely, with a wave of his hand.

Sam had his wallet out and was throwing money down. He was smiling, and the rest of his expression hovered somewhere between bored and authoritative. He’d told me about days and nights out with his father: the big bills, the casualness with which he made them vanish, how much control and trust he’d felt at such moments. I let him have this one.

The waiter looked at the pile of cash and then back to me, then shook his head again and swept off, saying something like, ‘Bohemians.’

Sam threw on his coat. The draught of it had that high orange cut of all-day-indoors anxiety sweats, with an undertang of dark tobacco. He handed me my brown mac and said, ‘Shall we?’

I wanted to laugh. I wanted to use words like elation or exhilaration for what I was feeling. Maybe they were the right ones. I was looking at the still, tense hare by the booth. The man and woman had noticed the fuss but didn’t seem to have taken a side. They saw me looking at the hare.

I wanted to laugh. I wanted to use words like elation or exhilaration for what I was feeling. Maybe they were the right ones. I was looking at the still, tense hare by the booth. The man and woman had noticed the fuss but didn’t seem to have taken a side. They saw me looking at the hare.

‘Very tame,’ the woman said.

‘I can see that,’ I said.

‘How did you come by him?’ asked Sam, buttoning up his coat.

‘Her,’ said the man.

‘Raised almost from birth,’ said the woman.

‘Found lamed on a wire fence,’ said the man.

‘How wonderful,’ said Sam.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘have a pleasant evening.’

‘Bon appétit,’ said the man, and saluted us with his dessert spoon.

‘You should put that in one of your stories,’ I said, as we began to make for the door.

‘If it’d fit,’ Sam said gravely. We walked past the walrus. Sam slowed a little, gave it a beady look like he was trying to stare it down and then we were out through the door and into the night’s raw cold. Our breath smoked. The red and green neons of the Bisto sign were glowing through a thick mustard-coloured layer of fog.

‘See you next week, then,’ Sam said, putting up the collar of his coat.

I felt a stab of surprise. ‘Really?’ I said.

‘Well, yes, of course,’ he said. He made a crease of his mouth and gave me a curt nod, and said, ‘That was a lot more like it.’ Then he was off, walking down the steps of the Tube, his satchel knocking against his hip.

My hands were stinging again but I didn’t register it like I did before. There was a thrumming warmth at the centre of the pain. In my head the hare was still running through that stream of bright water, wet delicate feet kicking up drops like beads of new glass.

‘Hare’ was first published in Issue Three of Tolka (May 2022). Issue Three is available to purchase here. You can subscribe to Tolka for a year for €22.

Tim MacGabhann is is the author of two novels, Call Him Mine and How to Be Nowhere. His fiction, non-fiction and poetry also appear in the Stinging Fly, the Dublin Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Winter Papers and elsewhere. He lives in Mexico City.