Tales from the Tower, Volume 2 by Isobelle Carmody Read Free Book Online Page B

returns, but she doesn’t get very far. As rapidly as it arrived, her anger evaporates, and she slumps onto one of the ladderback chairs and rests her head against its top rung.
    No, she is not disrobed, she is disempowered. The com- parison with Samson is too obvious. Or is it? He didn’t look at her as if she were Samson. He looked at her as if she were Methuselah.
    {4}
    He suddenly realises where his feet are taking him and stops, appalled. Quite unconsciously he has been following the sweet, hop-and-barley scent-trail laid by Dionysus. It is alluring, but he is wise to it as well. He knows the other stinks it masks: the vinegary sweat, the stale bedclothes. His body remembers, too, and he gets a bilious flashback taste in his throat.
    All the same, he hesitates for an instant. He doesn’t believe that he is an alcoholic but he does believe what the doctor told him a few years ago about the state of his liver and his heart. A unit or two here and there would do him no harm, he was told, but he doesn’t take even that. He can’t, because if he empties a glass he empties a bottle. If he enters a pub he is always the last to leave, unless someone succeeds in dragging him away. He knows that oblivion is only a short-term answer to the horror that has entered his life, but he still longs for it.
    He won’t yield. It isn’t the fall he fears so much as the long, arduous climb back out again.
    The gods are everywhere around him these days. Not just Dionysus, but Eros and Hermes and Zeus and Ares. And the Irish gods, too, and characters from his schoolbooks that he has scarcely thought of since. Fionn and the Fianna, who roamed the ancient forests of Ireland, hunting and hobnobbing with the fairy folk. Bran, the dog with a human mother. The Children of Lír, who were turned into swans for four hundred years, and Oisín, who fell off the horse and turned to dust. Some nights they all crowd round him so intensely that he feels suffocated by them. They enter his dreams and try to elbow their way into his poetry, but he won’t allow it. He doesn’t write that kind of poetry. He despises that kind of poetry.
    He threw off that backward-leaning yearning for the old myths along with his Catholic religion when he was a student. He replaced them with radical politics and a hatred of empire. His early poetry blazed with anarchic rage and idealism. His middle era pulled no punches either; was full of meat and bone and machetes. It writhed and sweated on the page. It prophesied the deadly effects of the capitalist system and free-market enterprise. His best-known collection, the one he was launching when he met her, was written from the viewpoint of an Aboriginal woman who watches the eradication of her people for the sake of sheep and gold, and whose voice he studied during a two-month visit to Australia, funded by the Arts Council.
    And his recent work? It unnerves him to see his attention trying to veer away from the subject. He rebukes it. It is true that he has only published two collections since he moved into the house in Islington with her, but so what? They are fine. They are good. He is happy with them.
    He just wishes he didn’t have to keep reminding himself of the fact.
    {5}
    How did she expect him to react? She must have thought it through, because she has spent hours mentally composing emails and deciding not to send them. Except for the one that had the hint. She would never expect him to meet her at the airport, any more than she would meet him if he had been away for a few weeks. It’s a long time since they have been at that stage of their romance. But she sent the email anyway, just to flag the fact that he should expect a change. So if not this, what had he expected? She hasn’t been away all that long. She is hardly likely to have put on four stone, and she couldn’t have lost it because she doesn’t have it to lose.
    The kettle boils but she doesn’t get up