How They Met Themselves

Niamh Campbell | Tolka, Issue Two, Dec 2021

I am, in this memory, five years old. I do tap-and-jazz class with my little girlfriends: Lindsey, Fiona, Karen (latterly, in Australia; a yoga teacher; last seen stealing boyfriends at the debs). We return from the hired lodge by the Protestant school – where we dance to ‘The Ugly Duckling’, ‘On the Good Ship Lollipop’; where the air is grainy with dust motes and fragrant of sweet, decaying orchard fruit – via the drained mill pond and contained land-water cataract known to the small town as the canal.

We do this every week and the route remains in my memory with strange vividness. On this day I skip ahead of the group and the mother-chaperone to cross a concrete bridge which, if you run through it, produces a tinny echo not unlike the tup-tup-tup of tap and jazz. Spinning out at the end I veer left into a green space, trees and grass, by the edge of the water and almost fall over an elderly man waking up under a tree. He wears a tweed suit and flat cap and looks up at me with a face that is concave – no teeth, I realise later – and causes fear and some additional, dimmer emotion to flute through me like lit gas. I run away and never say a word about it for some reason, never tell a single person, never mention it for years.

And then, at thirty-two, I put this experience in a story. The protagonist, a twenty-something, is confronted by her volatile ex-boyfriend about a crisis pregnancy: she knows she needs to have an abortion and, even though he will not support her either way, he attacks her for her decision. The episode at the canal is repurposed because I have, by now, come to comprehend that dimmer emotion – other than fright – it lit in me:

This feeling had the shaming force of one of her earliest memories: returning from tap-and-jazz class with a cloud of girls and one of the mothers, a context which placed her personally at five; they crossed the canal and part of this trip involved crossing a cement bridge. In the memory Nina ran ahead to reach the bridge and trup-trup through it, hearing her footsteps ring like the song, trup trup a chapaillín. When she emerged still singing from the bridge she turned sharply into the green space and almost tripped over an elderly man in town style – flat cap and tweed suit – lying under one of the trees.

He had no teeth. He raised his sunken face to her in fright.

The feeling in question, a rich flourish I remember well, was shame, but shame with no obvious application. Why would a five-year-old with no lived experience of addiction feel this at encountering a half-passed-out old man? How could a five-year-old understand that the man was drunk, and probably astray? There is something Buile Suibhne to it – the birdman falling out of his tree, the staved face of an apocryphal saint. The scene at five made zero sense, and it makes little sense to me now. This would have been by daylight, at about two o’clock, or perhaps earlier; this would have been 1993, not 1900.

With all I know about composite and symbolic memories, as an adult, now, I have to ask: did it happen at all?

*

The canal in question led, and leads, to a wide old nineteenth-century street lined with artisans’ two-up two-down houses built, originally, for employees of the hosiery factory. A friend of mine, pregnant and sick of renting, recently moved back to our hometown with her partner and bought a house on that very street. My sister and I browse photographs on Daft.ie, some showing a view of the sweeping but volcanically brambled slope to the weir and the wild wasteland that was always wild and covers what was part of the mill pond. The boxy bridge with its stripe of iron showing like a spine through combed concrete remains. The rest of the space is landscaped and serene.

At the top of the nineteenth-century street stands the thin, high old house of my paternal family. There were chickens and a privy once. It would have been inhabited by some or other of my relatives from the time of the factory, when they all worked as toppers and manual finishers of tights and stockings and stays, to 1998, when a distant cousin murdered his wife at the top of the narrow stairs. I knew the house well as a child because I found it entrancing. There was a front room, woodchipped and with one of those pizza-topping-floral carpets, a tiled fireplace built dollishly into the wall; there was the room with a brass-framed bed my great-grandfather slept in until he went into a nursing home; there was the damp peach-horror bathroom tacked to the back of it in the seventies. There was a long, straight garden full of roses my great-grandparents entered into competitions. In the nineties my dad dug out a Japanese maple engulfed by weeds and rehomed it in our garden, where I hope it still grows. This house – all the houses – have been sold.

As a very small child, smaller than five, I had a dream I can remember with the same degree of queasy precocity attached to tap and jazz. In this, I found a severed ear lying on the stairs of the tall old house. I was probably passing through a phase of being fascinated by death, if unable to comprehend it, or else this appendage is a Freudian emblem of some sort. I knew that people who’d lived in the house were dead, I had a sense of generations and cemeteries, I went to primary school on the primary funeral route. We had a routine for pulling the blinds when a cortege passed, chanting the ‘Our Father’ together, moving on. So many things never leave you from this time of life: the smell of disinfectant in school corridors, the bulky radiators painted so many times thick spots had crusted into glands and scabs.

For a short time, I would have known my great-grandfather, William, as one of the old-world presences in the town – tweed suit, flat cap – before he went into the nursing home. I sense that, early on, I associated the man beneath the tree with him, or recognised the man beneath the tree as a type corresponding to William. I suppose one must remember how grotesque the very old can look to the very young; how generically uncanny.

After my great-grandfather had died, many years after in fact, my mother told me that he’d been a pioneer, a teetotaller, but not always. As a young man, drunk one night, he went astray on his way across the canal (it may even have been a mill pond then) and fell into the water. It was waist-deep, so he waded to the opposite end, abruptly, one presumes, sober. He washed up at home to recrimination and was, in the morning, deeply ashamed. He went straight to the church and took the pledge. When I heard this story of wading, repentance, shame, I wondered if my encounter at five was some kind of a time stutter, if I’d met his younger incarnation somehow, if during that experience of inebriation William himself had seen a weirdly daylit, flickering five-year-old regarding him from a cosmic height, if the chain of affect between us is nucleic.

There are issues with the timeline in this anecdote, of course. And, in all likelihood, the man under the tree was some town eccentric and not an apparition, problematically aged, from the past. It is all coincidence, and yet a great deal of poetic potential hinges on the sensation of self-consciousness at the centre of it. It was this sensation, encased in the resinous effects of emotional deep time, that made it worthy of plucking and repurposing in a short story almost thirty years after the fact.

*

People say there are two things: guilt and shame. Guilt for what you have done, but shame at what you are.

In a book I came across as a student, the queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick tries to explain shame itself – epiphenomenonally, as experience – by recalling herself walking in New York shortly after 9/11 and looking up to notice, jaggedly or disassociatively, that the twin towers were not there. Seeing, that is, or sensing the raw vacuum where death had happened and feeling, inexplicably, shame. I remember finding this account compelling because it is so weird: Sedgwick has done nothing to bring about the destruction of the twin towers and has nothing, rationally, to feel bad about. Nor is it the case of something so glib as feeling ashamed for humanity, ashamed of human nature, ashamed of one’s complicity in foreign policy or any kind of political violence. Rather, the theorist feels stupid, naïve, or cowed for forgetting in this instant that the violence happened, for being taken by surprise at the harrowing absence in the sky. She feels, perhaps, mortal.

She also explains it – as I remember, or as I have decanted the details from a dense academic work I have no intention of tracking down again, for my own purposes – as a form of misidentification, of failed mirroring, whereby the person she thinks she is can be undone or dumbfounded simply by looking up and finding the environment that would otherwise facilitate this personhood vandalised.

This makes intuitive sense to me. With the man beneath the tree, when I was five, my shame and fright did not really occur in response to the narrative logic of the scenario – an old man passed out, coming to, under a tree – but to the fact that, just before this, I was in my own world, singing and running and separate from the group, a state I entered into all the time as a kid, because I was intensely sensitive and couldn’t trust other people, especially groups of people, not to overwhelm me or absorb me or shout coarsely over me. In my own world I sustained a proud little privacy made of fantasises and ambient avenues – my own voice, my own footsteps, my own mental projections – in which I was left alone. And I must have understood the vain precarity of this enterprise to be so humiliated, so soundly shamed, at its interruption by someone I feel, in the thick space of this enduring and textured memory, occultly responsible for.

*

When I began writing my first novel I was bored, and I don’t mean idly – I mean violently. Giving vent to this violent boredom helped. At the start I imagined I might have a coy kind of epigraph opening everything breathily: ‘I am half-sick of shadows,’ said / The Lady of Shalott. This lady leaves boredom and the consolations of simulacrum to choose life (Lancelot) and, ultimately, death. On a basic level she would rather be dead than left behind to imagine the parties going on elsewhere. In the painting of the same name by John William Waterhouse, the lady lifts her arms in a pose of frustration and stretches her back, her face angled wryly upwards as she side-eyes her own reflection. I liked the epigraph idea because it was slightly over the top and I intended the novel, the enterprise itself, to be slightly over the top.

Which is partly why the original title was How They Met Themselves – in some lurking nether-reaches of American Amazon, it is still purchasable as How They Met Themselves – after the Dante Gabriel Rossetti painting from 1864. In this painting a honeymoon couple, the artist and his wife, Elizabeth Siddal, wear mediaeval clothes like good Pre-Raphaelites and meet their own doppelgängers walking in a gloomy forest. Siddal faints away with arms extended in a pose loosely suggestive of Victorian melodrama, perhaps because meeting one’s double is a sign of impending death, and the work itself was finished in the aftermath of the real Siddal’s death by laudanum overdose in 1862. Siddal’s own illustration of the Lady of Shalott, a pencil sketch, shows a plainer, thinner lady glancing preoccupied from her loom as if distracted rather wearily by, say, an unwanted knock; before the window to Camelot is a crucifix.

My first encounter with the Tennyson poem was indirect, through the Pixies’ ‘Nimrod’s Son’ and, specifically, its riff on the curse of the cracked mirror: the joke is come upon me. But even without this watermark emerging through later encounters in adulthood the inference is pretty punk. I’ve always been drawn to doubles. Or, rather, to the idea of self as a representative template, an automaton, which is detached from the lived experience of being alive – in the novel (which wound up being titled This Happy) this concern began life as an interest in parallel lives or possible lives and junctions in life which mark the difference between one kind of life and another, but also of being badly seen, misunderstood, perhaps even instrumentalised by another person because they think you are kind of are, in a way, an automaton: a symbol, a thing.

As a young woman I experienced this from men who took certain details about my life – my writing, for instance, or my bookishness or my physical smallness or my youth or the ersatz bohemianism with which I appeared to live vis-à-vis the nine-to-five life – and extrapolated from these with speed to decide I represented something – freedom, creative energy, self-possession – they themselves, in fact, desired. Because I was young I could not see this abrupt and flattering response to my sitting there or standing there or whatever as illusory and, for the man concerned, simulacral: I can say kindly now they saw something in me as effigy and responded to it with psychodrama. Certainly women behave the same way and I don’t mean to suggest this is only misogynist (though it can have that flavour, at times). However, it is terribly painful to be made feel you have failed for being human by a person who decided, on sight, that you were a symbol instead. This person will also find it easier to leave or to be cruel because they are talking to a doll.

I began the novel in the aftermath of a brief and bruising relationship that was not a relationship but two people awkwardly interacting in a strange sentimental submarine, one very young and one far too old, and this distance unmendable, incomprehensible, like little kids who can’t speak yet handing one another toys as tokens of tensely hopeful affection. It was not his fault but afterwards I looked at the drab matter of my life, then nine-to-five, and decided that madness in my submarine, death-drive, was preferable to weaving simulacra, sitting outside life with my hands dabbing listlessly at a shining machine, and these are – always have been – the same bonily elongated and uncanny hands that made my precursors so successful at topping and manually finishing hose that even I heard about this, like, one hundred years afterwards.

My sister’s iterations are better: hands like hands of a tanned skeleton, which she keeps in high style with shellac.

If you’re a complicated woman you have to go mad once, and preferably only once, after which you see everything clearly. To recover, and right before I took to the book, I decided to learn to meditate by signing up for a donation-based ten-day residential course in Vipassanā (no talking, no gadgets, no writing, no reading, no input from the world), hosted by kindly vegan votives in an off-season boarding school. Rule one of Vipassanā instruction is that, for the duration, one cannot kill a living thing, and this extends to the moths and bluebottles wilting or zipping through a dormitory I remember now as gauzy behind drawn curtains and smelling gently of medicine.

Because there is an entire (respectful, informative) genre of writing about white people discovering Vipassanā, I will not rhapsodise: suffice to say I was in an agony of imagined inflammation during each two-hour stint of entirely inert meditation, but this pain evaporated as soon as I stood up; suffice to say a pollarded monkey-puzzle tree of muttering rooks seemed to address me personally each day as I sat on a window ledge imbibing the only stimulant I could get hold of, which was fucking Barleycup; suffice to say for three days I could not get Josh Ritter album filler out of my head until suddenly, unbidden, ‘Salisbury Hill’ replaced it summarily, just like that, as I washed my hands in the communal bathroom. A lot of the paperwork ahead of entry seemed to suggest certain people were predisposed to psychotic break when undergoing the silence and focus and loneliness required for Vipassanā, but everyone there seemed placidly elegant, ducking between buildings with insular gazes and walking slowly, at break times, around a playing field lined with green ditches and hawthorn trees.

And at the end, on the final day, we broke our silence and our semi-fast to talk to one another animatedly at last. The warmth between twenty women who’ve been sleeping side by side and holding doors open for one another for two weeks without meeting eyes, without speaking – twenty women watching one another’s gestures and gaits and habits and haircuts in silent calculation – was remarkable. We told one another about our assumptions. We said, I think you do X for a living and come from X and I think you have children/do not have children; I think you teach X or like X and you remind of me Y.

More than one told me something about myself, my life, which is not true but which I have always, always wanted to be true. They said to me: I bet you are a dancer, aren’t you? I’m not and I have never been able to dance. Tap and jazz was a one-year thing; after that, it was being asked to stand at the back of the room during ceili and a photograph, from 1997, showing me skinnily screwed up, fist-clenched, midway through a choreographed Spice Girls routine. The photograph is testament to my profound self-consciousness and shyness as a child; it hurts me to look at it, since I look miserable at nine. To have seen a dancer as I moved about for ten days, brushing my teeth and folding my mat and lurking with Barleycup under some rooks, was to see some longing aspiration made incarnate in a set of gestures, affectations, disconnected from reality.

I think of this on those mornings when you wake at dawn and for a minute, less than that, feel painfully baffled by your own first name, your age, your own vertiginous history – those glittering interims of possibility and panic when every single thing about you seems so shamefully arbitrary.

*

At Halloween: Finglas is ablaze. You can see it from the train, like Mount Olympus, like Slievenamon on fire in the fairy tale. I sit in the wrecked kitchen of a houseshare that has, really, been going on too long – extended into the late thirties of the men involved, all of whom are musicians, none of whom mind the weird pergola rotting under plant debris in the back garden nor the smell of mildew nor the darkness of the hall, where there is no bulb anymore. The housemates tell me their visiting friend has an alcohol problem and will certainly encourage everyone to continue partying into the next day. Actually, we sing ‘Wuthering Heights’ and then begin telling ghost stories.

Here is one: a teenage girl sleeping by the disused chimney breast of a Victorian house in Dublin 3 is woken repeatedly by solid, persistent, deliberate human knocking from within the coffined confine of the chimney breast.

Here is one: bandmates on a tour in Eastern Europe descend the stairs of an industrial building after midnight on their way backstage and meet a middle-aged man, bushy-moustached, in mid-century military regalia; whipped by fright, they turn in unison and belt back up the stairs without discussing it.

Here is one: a group of youth hostelers meet the wandering spirit of the country-and-western icon John Denver walking around the bend of a boreen; he retreats from them, clasping prayer hands and bowing, without turning around to look at Eurydice. On his back is a guitar case.

Here is one: I saw, I say, quite possibly the spirit of my great-grandfather pressed through time and deeply confused, young and old at once, spreading over my vision like a stain. And this, you see, is how stories get made.

‘How They Met Themselves’ was first published in Issue Two of Tolka (Dec 2021). Issue Two is available to purchase here.

Niamh Campbell’s second novel, We Were Young, was published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in February 2022. Her

debut novel, This Happy, was published in 2020. She was the 2021 winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.