It's Not Yet Dark Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The brave

  Holding my breath

  Baggot Street Bridge

  Empire State Building

  I say his name

  North Cottage

  Sundance

  Pain

  Running

  He tells me

  The hopeful and the desperate

  Arden

  Sunshine in our lives

  Pizza

  Time to leave

  Fear

  My country

  A life

  Christmas

  This day

  What is man?

  The tree

  Four pieces of paper

  White bicycles

  Winter in Berlin

  Drama

  The biggest, thickest, heaviest dictionary

  Cold from the fridge

  Gecko

  I’m still man

  It’s not yet dark

  The darkness

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  First U.S. Edition

  Copyright © 2014 by Simon Fitzmaurice

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  First published in Ireland in 2014 by Hachette Books Ireland

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-1-328-91671-6

  Cover design by Martha Kennedy

  Author photograph by Simon Fitzmaurice

  eISBN 978-1-328-91858-1

  v1.0717

  For Ruth,

  Jack, Raife, Arden, Sadie and Hunter

  The brave

  I am a stranger. A different breed. I move among you but am so different that to pretend I am the same only causes me pain. And yet I am the same, in as many ways as I am different. I am a stranger.

  I observe your meaning on television, through song and writing. I was once like you. But I often feel distant from you.

  My meaning has faces, names. Totems. The words we utter. Every breath of us is meaning.

  {

  Everyone notices but no one sees.

  On the streets, in the crowds, no one sees.

  I was once invisible. I moved among you, invisible in my disguise. Now I am difference made manifest. I cannot hide. I move with a force field that makes you avert your eyes. Only children see me. You gather them together when I draw near but they do not look away. You cross the street from me but your children do not look away. They are still looking for the definition of man.

  I frighten you. I am a totem of fear. Sickness, madness, death. I am a touchstone to be avoided.

  But not by all. The brave approach. Women. Children. Some rare men. And I am shaken awake.

  Those I count as friends are the brave.

  {

  Holding my breath

  I’m driving through the English countryside. A narrow road rising up to a tall oak tree. It could be Ireland. The call comes just before I reach the tree. It’s my producer and she is excited. She has just received a call from the Sundance Film Festival, saying they would like to screen our film. I feel something shift inside me. She talks quickly, then gets off. I pass the tree. She calls back. Says she got another call and that they are really excited to screen our film. We exchange words of jubilation I can’t remember and say goodbye. I’m driving down the country road and I am changed.

  {

  I have been to many other festivals. I don’t know why this one means so much to me. Maybe it’s because I grew up within my father’s world of cinema, where Robert Redford was a legend. The Natural was one of our favourite films. I don’t know. But I’ve often wondered if that was the moment motor neurone disease, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), began in me. That I had been holding my breath for years. And suddenly let go. And that something gave in that moment. Something gave.

  {

  My foot drops the following month.

  I’m walking through Dublin. From Rialto to Stephen’s Green. I stayed in a friend’s house the night before. Slept on the floor. Now I hear a slapping sound. My foot on the pavement.

  It’s a strange thing, like my foot has gone to sleep and is limp. It passes. I immediately relate it to the shoes I’m wearing, brown and red funky things with no support whatsoever. I wonder if I damaged my foot on the mountain climb last year. So I go into the outdoors shop off Grafton Street, upstairs to the footwear department, and start trying on a pair of running shoes, determined to give my foot support.

  I ask the salesman for assistance. This is a mountaineering shop so I feel confident he will understand and I start to explain how I’d climbed a Himalayan mountain last year but I’d been wearing these awful shoes with no support and now my foot has started to flop in them and had he ever seen something like that before? He looks at me. My innocence meets his concern. No, I’ve never seen anything like that before, he says. The look in his eyes becomes a twinge in my stomach.

  My first diagnosis is by a shoe salesman.

  {

  Baggot Street Bridge

  I’m sitting on an uncomfortable stool in the dingy basement apartment of a friend from college when a girl walks into the room. She is tall, slender and quite easily the most beautiful girl I have ever seen. She is crossing the back of the room with a friend of mine. My first thought is simply, How the hell did he get her? She is a girl from Ardee, County Louth. She is out of my league. Her name is Ruth.

  {

  I spent my whole life looking for Ruth.

  Years after first seeing her, I’m walking down O’Connell Street with my parents, after coming out of the Savoy cinema, and I pass Ruth at a bus stop outside Clery’s department store. I stop my parents and run back to her. We talk but behind our words, in our eyes meeting, something is there. I ask for her number and she opens her bag. Her hair is short and she looks stunning in a simple navy winter coat. I’m cheeky. I see her pay slip in her bag and reach in, pretending to have a look. Ruth gives me her number, we say goodbye and I catch up with my parents. It’s Thursday.

  I don’t call. It’s too important.

  The following Monday, I’m walking up from Lansdowne station into work. Coming back from working in Ukraine, I had got a job no one else wanted. It was an accountancy practice with one accountant. That was the staff. Me and him. My job was to sit in a little back office and answer the phone. It never rang. Ever. I read all day. It was so quiet that the recruitment agency said no one had lasted more than a week in the place before me. I was getting through a book every three days. Paid to read. I had been there for months.

  I’m standing at Baggot Street Bridge, waiting to cross in a crowd of commuters. It’s pre-coffee early and I’m half asleep. The girl in front of me is wearing headphones. Her coat is navy. I realise and slowly reach out to touch her shoulder. Ruth turns around. She is half asleep and it takes her a moment to recognise me. She goes red. I go red. She fumbles off her headphones and the crowd crosses the bridge without us.

  It takes a few moments of conversation to figure out that she works just down the road from me and has done for months. That we both walk the same way to work, at the same time, and have done for months. But that we hadn’t met until four days after we bumped into each other for the first time in years. Wonderfully weird.

  Embarrassed beyond reason, we hurry off.

  {

  We meet for lunch in Searson’s pub on Bag
got Street. Two large bowls of pasta sit between us. But my stomach is constricted. So is Ruth’s. We cannot eat. It is embarrassing. It is love.

  {

  At the weekend we go to the cinema with some friends. I sit beside Ruth. The air is magnetically charged with my desire to touch her.

  {

  We kiss for the first time a week after, in a basement nightclub off Wicklow Street, in the shadow of a doorway.

  {

  Empire State Building

  This is it. My life is changed for ever.

  My family is used to me talking all about love and the new person in my life. This time I tell them nothing. I let them meet Ruth for themselves. They are all nervous because of it. Ruth arrives and I watch her talk, move, blush and sit among them. I’ve never felt prouder in my life.

  {

  Ruth. My whole body is on fire. I’ve been in love before but never like this. It is not one thing or a list of things. It is everything. I’m in a different place than I’ve ever been. This is beyond any happiness I’ve felt. It’s not what we do or say, it’s about being together. It’s wordless. We are animals, humans without words. I spend three days in her room. We only come out to eat. Sit in the back of taxis and travel wordlessly into Dublin to eat. We are creating a bond for life. It’s obvious. We are consuming each other.

  I have never felt more alive with anyone or been with anyone more alive. This is it.

  {

  I saved every penny, enough to put a deposit on a tiny three-bedroom mid-terrace railway cottage in the old part of Inchicore in Dublin. I buy it, rent out two bedrooms to friends to help pay the mortgage, and move in.

  After a few months, Ruth moves in. She has just started working at Today FM, a national radio station, and is loving it. Broadcasting is her passion.

  I do a web-design course for the sole reason that they have a digital video module. I direct three short films. No budget, shot on digital. With Ruth I feel like I can do anything. I decide to do one last year of university to pursue my dream. I start a master’s degree in film theory and production at the Dublin Institute of Technology. I get a job as a waiter in a pizza restaurant on the quays of the river Liffey.

  {

  Ruth and I are inseparable. She is unlike anyone else. We drive around in my little white car—her father calls it the Molecule. I meet Ruth’s family. She has four brothers and a sister. Four. I’m nervous as hell. Ruth laughs as I stop the car at a crossroads before her house and change my shoes. A pair of black shiny ones I never wear. Her family is like my own. Close. Crazy. Boisterous in talk around the table. Full of love and humour, good food and wine. My kind of people.

  Ruth and I eat in restaurants all around Dublin. We quickly find our favourites. We adore good food together. I don’t know what we talk about. It’s not important. We laugh at the same things. We devour narrative, books and films. We talk about that, I expect. I’m too busy looking at Ruth to remember.

  We are happy and alive in the light from our bedroom window.

  {

  The film school has film cameras. Film-editing tables. Lights. Sound equipment. And a teaching staff committed to and passionate about film. I’m in heaven.

  I write and direct a five-minute film. Shot on film, not digital, with a properly organised crew. Standing on set, walking among the cables and the beautiful chaos of people, all working towards a single creative purpose, I just feel right. This is what I want to do with my working life. I’m hooked.

  Ruth is promoted at work. She is now producer of the afternoon show.

  I write a simple love story about a girl who works in a chip shop and a guy who is a security guard at the bank across the road. They watch each other from a distance, neither of them knowing. It’s my graduation film, fifteen minutes long, and I work on it night and day for a year. I graduate with first-class honours and a finished film, Full Circle, in my pocket.

  The course is over and the students go their separate ways. I start sending my film out to festivals, three submissions a week. I get a job through my brother-in-law, Chris, at an asset-management company. It’s data entry, monkey work, but it pays better than waiting tables. It’s three days a week and a woman there takes pleasure in giving me the most menial jobs.

  My film gets selected for the Cork Film Festival. It’s screening on a Thursday and everyone involved is working so I ask my mum and we travel down by train, the two of us. Spending time with Mum is effortless. It’s my first film festival and we sit in the dark and watch my film among the audience. It’s magical.

  Afterwards we get the train back to Dublin.

  The call comes on Sunday morning. Ruth and I are asleep and the phone wakes me. It’s someone telling me my film has won the Cork Film Festival. You’re taking the piss, I say. Laughter on the phone. No, the voice says.

  Ruth and I just make the train, sprinting down the platform. A few hours later, I’m standing back stage at the festival about to go on. A guy whispers in my ear. You see the awards? he says. I see a table of them on stage. I nod. That’s your one, he says, the big one at the back.

  I see it. They call my name.

  {

  I get a director’s job in Chicago, a corporate project for a giant pharmaceutical company, bizarre in-house mumbo-jumbo. I don’t care. I’m directing camera, crew and actors, in the smell of Chicago. I get up every day and go running before dawn in the city streets.

  {

  At my data-entry job I suggest to one of the directors that their website could do with a revamp and show him my ideas. Do it, he says. Within a year, I’m working full time, in charge of all the company’s advertising, print, radio, online and TV. I give an advertising update at the weekly company meeting. I catch the eye of the woman who enjoyed giving me the shit detail. We don’t have much contact any more.

  {

  I drive up to Ardee, County Louth. I’m going to ask Ruth’s parents for their permission to ask Ruth to marry me. I’m very specific about it. I’m not asking for their permission to marry Ruth. I’m asking for their permission to ask Ruth. It’s my modern version of the old tradition. It’s the way I was brought up, to respect parents.

  I turn off the motorway, drive down the country road and come to the crossroads. I stop. Left is the road to Ruth’s parents. Right is a road I’ve never taken before.

  I’m going to ask Ruth’s parents whether I can ask their daughter if she will marry me. Forever. For the rest of my life. I’m terrified. I take the road to the right.

  Without purpose, without reason, I drive down the wrong road. I’m driving away from decision, from commitment. The road turns and reveals a row of poplar trees on the left-hand side. I’ve never seen poplar trees in Ireland. A wall of green, shivering in the wind. I drive down the length of them, fast. What am I doing? I reach the end and turn around, racing back down the row of swaying trees. Back to the crossroads.

  I stop, open the door and sit my feet into the road. There is no one around. Not a soul.

  A dog appears. A little terrier. He trots up the road and stops in front of me. Our eyes meet. Neither of us looks away. My mind is made up. I close the door and drive down the other road.

  {

  Full Circle is invited to screen at the legendary NYU Film School, so Ruth and I go to New York. The city steals our hearts. It’s everything. The smell of the city. The deli next door to the hotel, open all night, with the most delicious salad bar we’ve ever encountered. We often just fill the plastic boxes and bring the food up to our hotel room for dinner, the window open to the sound of taxi horns as the lights brighten in the darkness.

  {

  I have never been more nervous. It’s on my mind all the time and Ruth doesn’t have a clue.

  We’re doing all this film stuff, meet-and-greets and screenings. We’re visiting the Statue of Liberty and all the time I’m thinking, How will I do this? When? When?

  I decide.

  I phone the number my American cousin gave me, of friends of his livi
ng in New York City. I tell them my plan and ask for a recommendation for a restaurant after I ask Ruth. I book it.

  {

  At the end of the NYU screening of films, a man stands up and says that the overriding theme of the films was the uncomfortableness of being alive, and Ruth and I look at each other. We, and my little film about love, don’t fit in there.

  {

  The next day, we visit the Empire State Building. This is where I’m going to do it. It’s hot, really hot, yet I’m wearing my big jacket to hide the snipe of champagne and two I love New York shot glasses. I was nearly caught buying both but got away with it. Inside there is a queue for the elevators to the top. I’m sweating. Why don’t you take off your coat? Ruth says. I’m ok, I say. I feel sick.

  We turn a corner in the queue. People are lining up before a metal detector, putting their bags through an X-ray machine. Oh, shit. If they make me take off my coat the bottle will clink or show up on the screen and Ruth will know for sure. If she doesn’t know already from my odd behaviour. God, I’m so hot. Sweat is running down my face. We approach the machine and the guards. I feel like a terrorist. Ruth puts her bag on the belt and goes through. They are going to stop me and ruin everything. They don’t. We are in the lift. I smile at Ruth, sweat down the back of my neck. She must think I’m crazy.

  At the top of the Empire State Building, as green as Kermit the frog, and with a similar voice, I get down on one knee and ask Ruth to marry me and she says yes.

  {

  I say his name

  Ruth said yes. We are married. I sell Inchicore and we buy a little house in Greystones, the coastal town in County Wicklow where I grew up. We make it our own. My uncle Tony builds us simple bookshelves for all our books. Our first home.

  {

  Nine months later Jack is born. Our first born.

  Back in the ward, Ruth and I look at our sleeping son. Ruth says she has a headache. It quickly escalates. She starts getting sick. Doctors come. Two of them stand at the end of the bed as Ruth is moaning in pain. They are discussing whether Ruth should have a cup of tea or maybe some paracetamol. I’m incredulous. Ruth starts screaming. Nurses come running. Ruth grips my hand and is saying my name over and over. Simon, make it stop. Simon, make it stop. I shout at them to give Ruth something for the pain. Ruth is crying. The doctor says they can’t mask the pain, it is most likely a reaction to the epidural but they have to rule out a blood clot with an MRI. The ambulance is here, a nurse says. What? I say. Another nurse steps up to me, speaks quietly in my ear. There is a problem with your baby’s breathing, we have to take him up to intensive care, she says. What? I say. Everything is spinning. I see Mum in the doorway, flowers in her hand, smiling. Jesus, Mum, you go with Jack, stay with him, I say, as I go out the door with Ruth to the ambulance.