Extract from Seven Steeples

THE MOUNTAIN WAS full of miniature eyes. There were the yellow discs of long-eared owls, the purblind blots of pygmy shrews, the immobile domes of bluebottles, the glinting black gems of brown rats.

The mountain was full of miniature eyes, of pheasants, foxes, lizards, larks, rabbits, warblers, weevils, mink, mice, lice. And each eye was focused solely on its surrounding patch of ground or gorse or rock or air. Each perceived the pattern, shade and proportion of its patch differently. Each shifted and assimilated at the pace of one patch at a time. The mountain alone looked up, down and around,

seeing everything at once, keeping watch.

The mountain was a colossal, cyclopean eye that never shut, even when it was sleeping.

It kept watch on the sky, sea and land, and every orna- ment and obstruction – the moon and clouds; the trawlers, yachts and gannetries; the rooftops, roads and chimney pots; the turbines, telegraph poles and steeples.

The mountain alone could see through bracken, brick, wood, cement and steel – through to the trampolines and septic tanks; the IKEA coffee tables and home cinema systems; the family-size casks of laundry gel and multi- packs of buttered popcorn. The mountain alone moni- tored every jostle, flap and fall; every trembling clothes peg and traversing jeep; every stray cat and cowpat.

It witnessed the arrival of Bell and Sigh, on a clear noon in January – two bright specks against the green and green-brown and brown and brown-green and grey.

It saw them park in the driveway of a lichen-encrusted house on a lower rise beneath. It saw that they drove a red van filled with dogs and boxes. It saw that they were made of wool

and boots

and hair.

Once the dogs had been set loose and the van emptied, Bell and Sigh paused to appraise the view.

Although it surpassed the full spread of its surrounds, the high, rocky land was not strictly the right shape to be called a mountain. From sea level it appeared moun- tain-like, but the house itself had been built on a sharp hill above the scabrous shoreline. From the perspective of the driveway where they stood, the facing outcrop appeared to be more of a ridge or bluff – blunt but tall, inhospitable.

Gently and unspectacularly it ascended from the Atlantic, as if it had accumulated its stature over centuries. As if, over centuries, it had steadily flattened itself upwards.

It was the shape of a prehistoric bank,
a drove of smoke, an obliterating wave, a mud and rock and foliage barrier,

impeding, protecting.

In the overstuffed glove compartment of the van, there was a ragged dictionary. It had been gagged by masking tape then strangled with a gigantic elastic band. It was missing a wad of pages from the close of N to the opening of P. A pair of compact binoculars kept it company, along with a half-roll of toilet paper, three plastic spoons, six CDs that had become estranged from their cases, and a poorly-folded road map.

The ragged dictionary was not helpful.

Hill, noun, 1. A natural elevation of the earth’s surface, smaller than a mountain.

Mountain, noun, 1. A natural elevation of the earth’s surface, greater than a hill.

Bell and Sigh had first met at the foot of a low, pointy mountain forty miles of motorway beyond Dublin city’s outer limits. It was summer and they were among friends they had known separately for years, and friends of friends they had each known for only just a day – the day they all together climbed the low, pointy mountain.

Sigh had chain-smoked his way to the summit, and never once lost his puff, and Bell had been impressed by this.

Bell had talked her way to the summit, and never once lost her puff, and Sigh had been impressed by this.

They had both lived in the city then, divided by scores of streets and hundreds of sterile cherry trees; by a foul river and a declining population of house sparrows. He worked in the packaging section of a television factory, spraying the screens with anti-static before they were wrapped. He wore an elasticised face mask that cut into the cartilage of his ears and a pair of foam earplugs that failed to fully muffle the heavy puffing of hydraulics and the communal radio at full blast, its mewl of feel- good songs. She waited tables in a restaurant where the customers regularly asked for things that didn’t appear on the menu and never fully finished the food on their plates. When she lay awake at night, she could still hear the sound of china being scraped and picture lettuce leaves fluttering down the waste chute, the track marks of tomato sauce and coleslaw dressing.

A year before they first met, they had each been passengers on double-decker buses travelling in opposite directions that bumped wing mirrors on a lane in the city centre. She was upstairs in an aisle seat on the right. He was downstairs standing by the luggage rack. As the buses passed and the mirrors cracked, Bell and Sigh were obliv- ious. They had no reason to suspect that in the future they would know each other.

They had no reason to suspect that theirs would be

a single future.

On the day they moved in together, it was the winter that followed the summer they met. As they stood on the driveway to look at the view, the idea occurred to them in unison that they might one day – a day of clement weather – climb the outcrop they looked over and that overlooked them, which was definitely

greater than a hill,

but smaller

than a mountain.

They moved in a single van load.
They started by dismantling the dog cage and together laying it down across the floor of the boot. Then Sigh took charge of the logistics of slotting the even-shaped boxes into the crooks of irreducible furniture. He plugged the gaps created by the gnarled, bowed and serpentine jumble with pliant black sacks, unbagged duvets, cushions and towels, leaving the bare minimum of negative space.

The van body rode low on the van tyres. As it climbed the last and steepest hill, the negative space was squeezed and shifted. The load pressed hard against the back doors, threatening to burst the lock and make an avalanche of their belongings.

Their new home was a whole house, whereas the homes they moved from had each been only a room.

Their whole house was unfurnished, and so the fur- nishings they owned that had once been too many, sud- denly, together, became too few.

The house was not new to the mountain.
It had sat up on its subjacent elevation for seven decades – a drab, roofed box girdled by countryside.

From the west-facing front, it was stoutly rectangular, with five windows, a dark-wood door and a garden path, a garden gate, a concrete garden wall. Outside the wall there were two raised beds barricaded by rotted railway sleepers. Inside there was a prodigious tree. It reached out for the chimney pots. Its fat roots forced the ground up. They broke through the unkempt lawn. Bell and Sigh decided to believe the tree was alive, even though – because it was winter, because it was bald – they had no way to be sure.

Opposite the tree there was a telegraph pole. It was also bald, but certainly dead. Its surface was blank but for the thumbprints of old knots. It held up a cable between their roof and the next nearest telegraph pole across the field, down by the road.

Onto the east-facing back of the house a kitchen exten- sion had been added in the 1980s, ruining its charming symmetry. Across the purple gravel from the kitchen door, there was a shed of weathered timber planks with its windows boarded up. On the edge of the field – umbil- ically connected to the kitchen by buried pipes – there was a tin-roofed cow barn that sheltered the oil tank.

For seven decades, the mountain had watched as new tenants moved in and out again, leaving behind the props and shrapnel of their passing. There was a laundry pole, a breeze block, a tyre swing, a partially rotted timber pallet. There was the orphaned fixture of an old satellite dish, and a marginally newer satellite dish.

The house had always remained unpainted – raw plaster grey except for the sea-facing gable, which was smattered with mustard-coloured lichen – an abstract mural painted by

fungal hyphae, airborne nitrates,

and time.

They had chosen to move in the earliest week of January, to set themselves in step with the new year.

On their journey south from Dublin, in the shop of a motorway service station, Bell had bought a bunch of unopened daffodils. In the new kitchen, she filled an old soy-sauce bottle with water and slotted the shiny stalks through its glass mouth and placed it at the pinnacle of the appliances.

On the top of the free-standing fridge, a beacon of talismanic buds.

By then they had known each other only against the backdrop of other people – friends at first, but later, mostly strangers. In pubs, parks and buses, Georgian houses rented room by room, other people had always been a few stools, benches or seats away – above a ceiling, below an expanse of floorboards, through a wall, behind a curtain, a pane, a door.

It had been in public spaces,
against the backdrop of strangers that they had first started to talk about the possibility of living in a place

where other people didn’t.

Bell and Sigh had both been born in the middle of large families in the middle of a decade in which large fami- lies were going out of fashion. The overcrowded houses they were raised in had always been sandwiched between other people ’s identical houses; the open spaces available to them had always been periodically mowed, the trees in rows. Neither had experienced any unusual unhappiness in early life, any notable trauma. Instead they had each in their separate large families been persistently, though not unkindly, overlooked, and this had planted in Bell and in Sigh the amorphous idea that the only appropriate trajec- tory of a life was to leave as little trace as possible and incrementally disappear.

This idea was the second thing they found they had in common, as well as the above-average lung capacity.

Gradually they had lost touch with the friends of friends they’d met on the day they climbed the low, pointy moun- tain, as well as the ones they’d had for years – the ones who would have advised, had advice been sought, that Bell and Sigh should not move in together – because they were each too solitary, with a spike of misanthropy.

But Bell and Sigh were curious to see what would hap- pen when two solitary misanthropes tried to live together.

A refuge, a cult, a church of two; this was their experiment.

They carried from the van into the house, sometimes alone and sometimes between them: a chest of drawers with every handle missing, two frail timber whatnots, three wheelie office chairs and four mug-scarred tables. A tiny TV set, a handheld blender, two radios, six lamps, nine fruit bowls, thirteen densely embellished rugs.

Every one of the household goods they owned had been donated by family members Bell and Sigh intended to lose touch with. Somehow they had ended up with two juicers but no toaster, three dustpans but no brush, two steam irons but no ironing board, ten towels but not a single set of curtains.

As if in consonance with these coincidences, tenants past had relinquished to the officially unfurnished house: four mattresses but no bed, a block but only a single kitchen knife, a stainless-steel sink strainer, a lopsided fridge, a toilet brush, a dining table and a three-seater sofa with curlicue Latin calligraphy incorporated into the blemished upholstery.

Ubi amor ... the sofa read, ibi dolor.
Because Latin, Bell said, is the language of sofas.

Then she draped the best blanket across it, silencing the twisted script with turquoise arabesques.

They had made the decision to lose touch with the families given to them by chance, and to inaugurate a new one of their own – spare but select, without regress to obligations of gift gifting, attendance at group events,

or love.

For the whole afternoon and evening of the day they arrived, and late into the night, Bell and Sigh studiously commingled their separate belongings. Eventually they chose a bedroom: the worst of the upstairs ones.

Upstairs, because altitude is essential to good sleep.

The worst, because they would mostly be unconscious while they were in it.

Then they appointed the best of the second-hand mattresses, pressing their knuckles into the springs, kneading the dimpled foam and debating what might be lost along with the bed frame; whether springs, slats, legs or small, swivelling wheels made some quietly significant difference to the quality of sleep.

Probably bed frames, Sigh said, are just something bed-makers want you to think you need.

On their first morning, the sky over the mountain was a lather of pink. The pinkened puddles pulsated; the briars dripped. There was a streamer of black sack that had escaped the previous day’s unpacking, somersaulted down the driveway and tangled itself around the spiky branches of a scruffy spruce tree. On their first morning, it fluttered madly in the wind, as if a black flag had been raised for them.

Inside the house, tenants past had left behind their stains, wounds and signatures.

In the worst room where Bell and Sigh had chosen to sleep, there was a wide bronzed penumbra at the meeting point of the ceiling and the gable wall. There was a fat smudge on the back of the beige door, the combined palm- marks of several years’ worth of slamming. There were old cotton buds, safety pins, paper clips and colouring pencils in the splits between floorboards. There was hair of all colours –

white, gold and copper;

dog, cat and human;

brown, brown and brown.

During the earliest days, Bell and Sigh were solicitous to one another and, at the same time, shy of their keenness, their solicitudes.

Though she rarely ate white bread, still Bell would remember to crack two pieces off the sliced loaf in the freezer every morning and laid them out on the chopping board to defrost for Sigh’s lunch. Though he rarely wore necklaces, still Sigh would take up the snarled ball of Bell’s jewellery from the bowl in the bathroom and strew them out across the pitted timber surface of the kitchen table.

He would sit and pluck at the strings and beads and pendants.

He would tease out the knotted cord of her earphones.

Their skill sets, in the beginning, were dissimilar.
She was unable to work cigarette lighters or whistle. He was unable to change duvet covers or answer to recorded voices on the phone.

Their perceptions of certain colours differed too. They would often argue over purple, and the nebulous zone where yellow becomes green.

To their select family, they had each contributed a dog.

Pip, a lurcher, was hulking and dull-witted.

Voss, a terrier, was spry and devious.
Both had arrived as strays and originated from sepa- rate but comparably tragic pasts – the details of which would remain always mysterious to Bell and to Sigh. Before moving house, they had devoted lengthy discus- sions to the matter of how Pip and Voss might react to the change in circumstances. They were both fascinated by their dogs’ fidelity to routine – their apparent content- ment with the daily repetition of a sequence of mundane rituals – and by the idea that each dog lived in a state of doubt, constantly anticipating the worst.

Voss liked the new house. He liked its old smells. He liked to methodically lick patches of its surfaces where potent substances had been spilled in eras past. He liked how the upstairs windowsills began at floor level, as if they had been designed especially for him. The view was of the fields and road, the animals, tractors and jeeps that went by. It extended across three rooms and could be chased from sill

to sill

to sill.

Where Voss habitually met the world with enthu- siasm and aggression, Pip was diffident and evasive. If the living-room door had been left ajar, she would linger in the hallway, her cavernous eyes peering through the gap to the unreachable room, whereas Voss would shove every door with his black snout, whether it was ajar or not.

Pip also found the timber-imitation lino that floored the lower storey of the new house terrifyingly slippery. She would repeatedly hurry back to the sanctuary of the carpet on the stairs, the only graspable strip of ground throughout the whole house. She was coarse-coated and lean, with a scooping chest and long, snaky legs. The precariousness of her anatomy was much of the reason for her insecurity. Downstairs, whenever she stopped to think, whenever she glanced at the floor, she would promptly lose her footing and fall over.

We need to put down rugs, Sigh said.
She ’ll adjust, Bell said.
Finally, they compromised by designing a stepping- stone arrangement of carpeting, and Pip adjusted by hopping

from rug-island to rug-island
without ever touching down on the lino.

Voss would think with his right paw, raising it a few inches from the ground to dangle mid-air, trembling,

as if pressing down, lightly, upon the rising thought.

There were belongings Bell and Sigh had chosen not to bring and, during the earliest days, regretted having aban- doned. They regretted a portable barbeque grill that had been corroded beyond recognition, a camera stand that had lost a vital screw, a temperamental bathroom scale. Former housemates claimed them; unscrupulous land- lords pitched them into nearby skips.

They did not sleep well, on the mattress on the floor.

Their sleeping positions had already evolved in rela- tion to springs and slats and swivelling wheels. They heaped two of the surplus mattresses onto the original, but it made no difference. Sigh was six foot; his back often ached. Bell was shorter but had poor circulation. The chill of the floorboards seeped into her sluggish blood. Then there was the dearth of altitude. A hill and a single storey were not enough, as it turned out. An extra few feet of frame was necessary for comfort, a rectangle of negative space between boards and vertebrae.

He would stretch and curl, crane and buckle his over- long limbs. She would monitor the cold of the night – manipulating the knob on the radiator, tilting the top part of the window at various angles of openness. She would fill a hot-water bottle and slide it around between the different districts of the bed –

the level of her belly, his belly, her feet, his feet, and ultimately, with a splosh, to the floor.

Reprinted with permission from Tramp Press....and from the opening section of Seven Steeples.