It's Not Yet Dark Read online

  Ruth is delirious with the pain, drenched in sweat, mumbling my name as we fly across the city, sirens blaring.

  I stand outside the room as Ruth is being scanned. The ambulance staff wait with me. They are not afraid of looking me in the eye. In the worst moments of my life.

  Ruth is declared ok and they drive us back in silence across the city. The doctors give Ruth something and she is instantly asleep. I go up and Jack is ok. He is so big he barely fits into the incubator. He is back down beside Ruth the following day. They are ok.

  {

  Ruth quits Today FM to be with Jack.

  {

  I go running on the cliff walk just down from our house.

  When Jack is a little older I walk him down and hold him up to see the trains. He is a wonder.

  {

  I’m full time in the advertising position while working on my films every spare minute. I’m travelling to film festivals with Full Circle and working on my new film, The Sound of People. It’s a film about a moment in the life of an eighteen-year-old boy in which he confronts his mortality, and the mental and emotional journey it takes him on in a matter of seconds. It’s intense. It started when I wrote on a piece of paper, ‘The day after I die there will be internet.’ The story grew out of that line. I wanted to make something different from the standard narrative structure. I wanted stream-of-consciousness on film.

  {

  Raife is born.

  No epidural. No headache.

  I wheel him down the corridor in his cot to be weighed, while Ruth sleeps. I watch him sleeping, breathing. I say his name like an incantation. Raife. Soft, gentle soul.

  {

  I finish The Sound of People. Ruth and I decide to leave Greystones to focus fully on our passions of film and writing. We sell our house. We make a plan.

  {

  The Sound of People is selected for the Sundance Film Festival.

  After spending the night at a friend’s house in Rialto, I’m walking into Dublin city centre. I hear a strange slapping sound. It’s my foot on the pavement.

  {

  North Cottage

  He meets us at the gate, holds it open, beckons us in. We drive across the frozen white gravel, crunching to a halt. The estate agent takes us inside. It’s as if the owners have just stepped out. There is a roaring fire in the sitting room, a picture-perfect Christmas tree in the corner. It’s a two-hundred-year-old cottage, lovingly restored in every aspect. Ruth and I walk from room to room in the utter silence that can mean only one thing. This is it.

  {

  I spend my days painting. We’re living with Ruth’s parents while we get the place ready. So I’m here by myself while Ruth minds our children at her mum’s.

  There is no way better to get to know a house than to paint it. Down on your hands and knees in every corner of every room, a house reveals itself to you.

  This house, this house we bought, is on the border of Louth and Monaghan. There are no neighbours either side, just fields in every direction, stretching to the horizon. We have almost an acre. Eight little apple trees standing in two rows. Strawberries from an overgrown herb garden. And a separate building, a garage, with a loft. There are two entrances. New wooden gates with a gravel driveway and, at the far side of the cottage, the original stone gateposts, lichened and mottled with time.

  The trees that shadow the cottage sough in the breeze, and behind the hedgerow, the soft muffled hoof-falls of dray horses.

  {

  I’m standing in the cool interior of the garage. This is what drew me here, to be honest, this space. It is two-thirds the size of our previous house. A blank canvas of bare concrete walls. A window looking out into the garden. Perfect place for a desk. I have a vision. Home office. Home cinema. Turn the loft into a bedroom for visitors. Put a bathroom down here. Turn this concrete shell into a studio.

  {

  I’m painting the bathroom in the cottage. The ceiling. My arms feel funny. Like it’s hard to hold them up there. It passes. I stand in the bedroom, the double doors open to the garden. I’ve finished painting the house. There is no sound but the movement of the wind, and the fields stretch out to an open sky. We move in and call it North Cottage.

  Sundance

  It never snows here, not ever. He said he’d lived in Atlanta for thirty years. I mean, I’ve seen sleet and hail, he said, staring out of the airport window, but not this fluffy floating stuff. Panic in Atlanta: snow.

  Travelling and doing the numbers. Eight hours transatlantic. And then? Five more to Salt Lake City. Which time zone? How many hours ahead, behind? Start pretending you’re on local time.

  Descending into Atlanta I get excited for the first time about Sundance. Only another flight away. Out of the oval window, light snow is falling, like the beginning of something. And yet. Snow in Atlanta?

  We get on the connecting flight and everyone is talking about the weather. Unlocking the bathroom door, the light dims and it feels like Christmas. A group of young men wearing similar suits and ties sit together like a team. They wear badges with the words Jesu Christos beneath their names: Elder Jepson; Elder Koons. None of them out of their early twenties. Some younger. They’re a lively bunch, laughing and joking. Going home.

  We taxi out from the terminal and come to a stop. It’s still snowing. The captain tells us each plane has to be de-iced and describes the procedure. It’s complicated and involves the wings and wheels. We’re not used to this here in Atlanta, he tells us, so it may take a little while. Panic in the air: snow. After an hour of sitting on the tarmac, the captain explains we are in a queue for the de-icer and it’s a line of ten planes. We’re number ten.

  Hours pass. The captain keeps a tally of our position in the queue. Seventh place. Children start to run in the aisles. Sixth. A man opposite shouts at an airhostess. Fourth. Two men break out a dominoes board and play across the aisle. Second. A woman is crying, saying something about her daughter. A sleeping boy’s feet stick out into the aisle. We’ve been in the plane for seven hours. First place: people cheer. We start to move. The captain comes over the intercom. I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news, folks, he says. Silence. Our duty shift has run out and I’m afraid we have to go back to the terminal. Silence. People are too stunned to even complain. It’s inconceivable. The plane turns back.

  Parents carry sleeping children from the plane. It’s two in the morning. The terminal is like a refugee camp. Hundreds of people stranded. The largest queue I’ve ever seen snakes back and forth towards an airline desk. Two girls sit behind it. I ask around. Nobody knows what the queue is for, whether for re-booking flights or hotels or just information. I walk to the top and ask one of the women the purpose of the queue. She refuses to answer, saying I have to get in line. But if you’ll just tell me what the line is for, I say. I’m sorry, sir, you’ll have to get in line.

  I persist. She calls the police. On her walkie-talkie. You can see them coming a mile off. Four of them. Badges, guns. I melt back into the crowd.

  The airline makes an announcement: all hotels in the Atlanta area are booked out. We lie all night on the tile floor of the airport. Children sleep with their heads on their parents’ laps. Elderly couples sit staring, unable to sleep. Hundreds of people fill the corridors, curled up with their bags for pillows. The tiles are cold.

  In the morning I walk back to the main atrium and people are asleep in piles on the floor, the remnant of the massive queue, afraid to lose their place. The airline makes another announcement, stating that transatlantic passengers have been automatically reassigned places on the next available flights. We leave Atlanta.

  Main Street, Park City, Utah. Night in Sundance. The crowd is heaving. Cameras point across the street. Every angle filled with fellow cameramen pointing back. The will to capture: the moment. Celebrities. Free merchandising. Main Street, Sundance, is a baptism of fire. Like a bus ride through downtown Delhi at night or—as a passer-by put it—a nuclear winter in Mardi Gras. It’s snowing—the
fluffy stuff—and the altitude shortens your frosting breath. The streets are humpbacked with snow, and between the buildings—in the darkness beyond Main Street—are mountains of impossible beauty.

  The crowds are alive with anticipation. Hunger. An almost tangible will to consume the fame they know is hiding in expensive restaurants all around them.

  Adoration has always been a troubling concept for me. Screaming crowds at rock concerts. The suspicion that fame is the will to defer responsibility to another. The king is dead, long live the king. That kind of thing. Sundance forces you to reflect on fame and art.

  At the top of Main Street, at the peak of the madness, I pass a basement place called The Music Café and go down. It is packed and a woman is singing. All the lights are out but for the stage and we sit there in the dark, listening. She puts me in my place. Shuts me up and makes me sit there, listening as hard as I can. I realise it’s not adoration when you find yourself listening to someone that way. It’s inspiration. It’s why we sit in the dark in cinemas or scream at concerts. It’s exultation.

  Robert Redford said he set up Sundance in the mountain town of Park City so it would be ‘a little bit difficult to get to and a bit weird’. The snow in Atlanta ensured the former and, as for the latter, as a summit retreat for weirdness, it’s alive and well.

  Its mountaintop location doesn’t hold off the marketing mania but Sundance is about people who love films. Whether you’re a believer or not is down to your opinion. Just like an opinion on a particular film. The films I saw knocked me down and picked me up. So I’m a believer.

  I had no expectations coming over here. All I knew was an idea of Sundance, like everybody else. I’ve seen dramas and documentaries here that have moved and pushed me, and because I’m here with a film, I’m forced to question whether my short film would move anyone that way. Scary.

  {

  In the morning I’m invited up to Robert Redford’s house in the mountains.

  No media, no producers, only directors. We travel up by coach, every director in the festival. The house is the soft colour of wood, with towering windows that let in the vast whiteness outside. There is a buffet laid on and it is sumptuous. After we’ve eaten, Robert comes out to greet us. He talks to us about the festival, what it means to him, the importance of film and directing to him. I’m listening and not listening, drinking in the brightness of the room. Afterwards I meet him and we talk about Dublin, people all around us. I meet Quentin Tarantino and he talks staccato. I give him a copy of my film and he puts it on top of a large pile on the table beside him.

  {

  I climb the street humped high with snow. I’m wearing boots and the snow is falling heavy and thick. I’ve just come from a screening of my film at the Egyptian Theater on Main Street. And I’m electrified. I decide to walk, out of the town, into the snow. There are other shops out here and I want to buy some presents for home. I walk along the edge of a larger road, the blizzard really picking up now. I love it here. I feel like a filmmaker for the first time in all my years dreaming about film. I reach the shops at the end of town. I step under a walkway and call my parents’ house. My mother answers and I listen to her voice as I watch the cars pass slowly on the road through the blizzard. I tell her my foot is hurting, that there’s something wrong with my foot. But we talk about it normally, neither of us is worried. Afterwards I head back towards town.

  {

  That night I go to a party in a mountain lodge. When it’s late I go outside onto the balcony for a cigarette (don’t tell my wife). There is a full moon and the mountains are cast in a blue light that makes the snow iridescent. It is something I have never seen.

  {

  Pain

  Ruth has a miscarriage. It devastates us both.

  It is a strange time for me. My foot is constantly on my mind. I’m seeing a neurologist for tests.

  The day after the miscarriage I’m driving from North Cottage to Dublin for a nerve test called an EMG (electromyogram). We are already under a lot of pressure, worry, stress.

  I’m on the M1 in the car by myself and I’m angry at the pain I saw the miscarriage causing Ruth.

  I don’t think I’ve ever felt so angry.

  And yet I feel detached from it, feel nothing, and that doubles my anger and shame at myself for such feelings.

  And I say something.

  I say, I hope this hurts.

  I hope this procedure I’m about to undergo hurts me.

  Because I want to be hurt. For Ruth, for me, for this loss that we’ve suffered.

  I say it out into the world, throw it through my teeth at the clouds.

  It was a mistake.

  The procedure turned out to be the most pain I have ever experienced.

  Someone heard me.

  It has been said that it’s impossible to remember pain.

  I will never not remember this.

  He sticks long needles directly into my nerves. Like that moment a dentist accidentally touches a nerve. Except this is deliberate, and he doesn’t just touch it, he drives a needle deep inside it. There is no way of preventing the pain of the procedure because it is the essence of pain itself. Needles in the legs and arms. And once inside the nerve, inside the white blindness of feeling, he asks me to move the limb attached to that nerve. And then it’s the kind of pain that makes my body wish for blackout.

  I get up from the table and my clothes cling to me with sweat.

  {

  Running

  My younger sister Kate gets married in March. It’s the most beautiful wedding I’ve ever attended. I wear a brace under my sock to keep my foot upright. On the second day of festivities I get a text to say my film, The Sound of People, has won the Belfast Film Festival.

  I dance for the last time.

  {

  Bergerac. We go on holidays with my parents and my older sister’s family.

  No one is talking about my foot but we all know something is coming. It’s like a deliberate holiday into innocence.

  Ruth is under a lot of pressure. It’s the not knowing: it’s a weight, a silence between us. And yet we don’t want to know.

  We play games as best we can.

  We’re sitting on the grass and I get a call to say my film has won the grand jury prize in the Festival Opalciné in Paris and that on the jury is the iconic French actor Dominique Pinon. I lie back in the grass.

  {

  One day it rains and I carry Jack between the two houses. I pick him up and run through the rain. He clings to my body as the rain patters loudly through the trees. The fragile boundary between strength and weakness, between holding Jack and letting him fall: I feel it. The last time. And time slows down. I’m running in my sandals across soft earth and leaves, focusing all my energy on not letting go of Jack. There is no one else around. He trusts me completely. We run beneath the trees. We make it to the house.

  {

  He tells me

  We cross the glacier at midnight. A row of bobbing head-torches in a sea of darkness. Ice-axe, crampons and a pipe over my shoulder for water. And more stars than I thought possible. This is outer space. We climb through the night.

  The sun is up and I see where I am. I’m twenty thousand feet up a Himalayan mountain, lying on a four-foot-wide bridge of snow and ice that leads to the summit. We are an hour from the peak and I have never felt more tired in my life. I try to move. There is a sheer drop on both sides. I freeze. What am I doing here? And then I feel it. Immediate and sickening in my stomach. The shocking starkness of it inside me. If I fall here, I fall to my death. There is no one here to help me. I am alone. With it comes a feeling I have never felt before. I’ve thought about it many times but never felt it. Death. My death. It is as close to me as the drop on either side. It is all around my ears. I have to move. I start to climb.

  {

  I’m in his office and he tells me. Light leaves the room. And air. And sound. And time. I sit on the chair opposite but I am far away. Deep inside. Looki
ng up through a tunnel of myself, as he speaks on past those words. ‘Three to four years to live.’ I don’t hear him. Is this my life? Is he talking about me? I leave the room, the tunnel all around me, and stand before my wife in the waiting room. The colour leaves her face. Her father is beside her. They come into the room and he tells them the same thing. I don’t hear him. Ruth starts to cry. Within ten minutes we are out on the street. Not knowing what to do, we do what we had planned to do before. We go to lunch. Ruth’s dad will meet us after. We walk through the streets like the survivors of some vast impact. Pale, powdered ghosts. We reach the restaurant. Dunne and Crescenzi on South Frederick Street. Our favourite. I stand into a doorway outside and call my parents. It is the worst phone call of my life. I tell them everything, fast, hearing the panic in my voice. Later, I’ll thank them for coming when they arrive at our house, and they’ll look at me as if I’m insane and I’ll become aware, for the first time, that nothing is the same. We enter the restaurant. Sit down like everyone else. We sit there, not knowing what to do, what to say. The waiter comes over and starts to speak to me. Ruth starts to cry. The place is under water and I can’t hear what he’s saying. Ruth is pregnant with our third child.