Getting it in the Head Read online

  Back then I had a succession of menial jobs which meant I kept unsociable hours. That was good because those same hours gave me time to write. One job had me working as a cleaner in a city-centre shopping complex. My shift started at ten PM and I’d finish at three in the morning. That was when I would begin my writing day – a steady chain of cigarettes and the head down till the morning traffic ran outside my window and the pub downstairs opened; then I would go down and have coffee with the barman before his first customers arrived.

  My bedsit was a single room which measured about four foot by eight. I lived in it for four years and to the best of my knowledge I was happy enough there. But I’ve often wondered since if the theme of penal incarceration which recurs in my work was not born there.

  The small desk inside the window looked out on the Salthill road and it was there that I sat down to become a writer.

  And what sort of stories did I have in mind at the time? Well, all I knew was that they were going to be dynamic and dramatic; things were going to happen in them and any reader who came upon them would be in no doubt but that they were indeed stories. I had resolved that there would be as little as possible of that pallid soul-searching which slowed things up and too often tried to pass itself as storytelling.

  Sharp, sudden and happening – that’s what I wanted.

  It must have been a Thursday night when he called, the one night in the middle of the week I had off. We’ll go for a pint he said, down to the docks.

  There was indeed a pub on the docks. It was well known as a place where dope-dealers and seamen and other hard-chaws hung out. My crowd would sometimes go there whenever we fancied ourselves as sharp, existential vagrants, tripping on the edge. We were hardly seated two minutes at a low table when the door into the lounge burst open and two men sprawled across the floor. They got to their feet, regained their balance, and then tore into each other.

  I’d seen fights before and I knew they mostly involved men throwing more shapes and fucks than serious punches. But this was different. For a start, both of these men were armed – one had a pool cue and the other held a knife. And both men were driven by a real and spewing hatred of one another.

  A big fisherman in a donkey jacket moved to get between them.

  ‘Let them be, Sean,’ the barmaid called, ‘they’ve been at this all day.’

  The man with the knife swung out and scored a gash along the other fella’s temple. Ten or twelve people rose from their seats and backed away to the wall. I was the only one who remained seated – I was that scared I did not trust my legs to carry me.

  Now the two men closed with each other and grappled against the pool table. They tumbled along its length and when they broke the man with the knife stood back with blood pouring from some dangerous place under his chin – a terrible stain was quickly spreading down his shirt. He stood there in shock while the other man, in no hurry now, brought the pool cue down on his head and dropped him to his knees.

  I was terrified I was going to see someone killed in front of my eyes that night.

  He threw the pool cue onto the table. The man on his knees swayed back on his heels and two lads came forward and caught him up just as he was about to tip sideways down on the floor. They hauled him to the door and out into the night.

  The barmaid came out with a bucket and began mopping the floor and the people along the wall resumed their seats.

  There wasn’t another word said about it

  No book of short stories is reducible in its origins to a single incident and that is especially true of a debut collection where sixteen short stories jostle for attention. However, I can never recall this book without that particular incident drifting above it.

  The next time I went back to that pub I saw two men go to fight over a stool.

  And the time after that I saw a man start a fight in his sleep.

  I swear to God.

  I’ve always had a great regard for obsessives. For whatever reason I’ve always thought there was something heroic about that deep, relentless gaze which always returns to its established focus. The old questions, the old gravity asserting its draw.

  And I have always loved writers who’ve written the same books over and again – Ballard, Kafka, Beckett and so on – these visionaries circling the same lodestone but somehow making something new of the return journey.

  It was pointed out to me recently that there are books of short stories and there are collections of short stories. The difference, I’m told, is that one is a loose aggregate of dramatic considerations with no necessary connection between them; the other is a suite of stories bound together by structural conceit or thematic spine.

  My memory of writing this book was that I set out with the intention of simply writing stories with no wish of ever having them chime or link together; as a young writer I would take whatever offered itself to me and be grateful for it. However, somewhere into the third or fourth story the whole thing developed a gravity which drew on my pen. Blows to the head were mounting up and a lot of young men were going around with that wall-eyed stare which is the mark of the true obsessive.

  The finished collection shows that from then on the book held to that specific gravity; these were some of the ways we get it in the head.

  Acknowledgments

  Some stories in this collection have appeared in the following magazines and anthologies: ‘The Stained Glass Violations’ in Passages, ‘A is for Axe’ in Brought to Book (Harper Collins), ‘Thomas Crumlesh’ in the Sunday Tribune and An Anthology of Irish Comic Writing (Michael Joseph), ‘Machine: Part 11’ in the Connacht Tribune and ‘The Occupation’ in Ambit and Best Short Stories 1995 (Heinemann).

  The author is grateful for permission to reprint lines from ‘Caffeine’, composed by Bordin, Bottum, Gould, Martin and Patton © 1992 Rondor Music.

  Published 2013 by

  THE LILLIPUT PRESS

  62–63 Sitric Road, Arbour Hill,

  Dublin 7, Ireland

  www.lilliputpress.ie

  Copyright © Mike McCormack, 1996, 2013

  First published in the United Kingdom in 1996 by Jonathan Cape

  ISBN 978 1 84351 397 1

  EBOOK ISBN 978 1 84351 414 5

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the publisher. A CIP record for this title is available from The British Library.