There’s a palm tree in the back garden of my parents’ house in Dublin. About 10 or 12 feet high, it has leaves like swords, fierce and young and straight at the top, bristling vertical, needle-sharp. Circling outwards, the more mature leaves broaden and sag to horizontal. Underneath them all, the oldest leaves hang down, brown and brittle, like the raffia skirt of a cartoon cannibal. Some of them have dropped off and stabbed the undergrowth, plunged like wooden daggers into the lavender bushes beneath.
It’s raining steadily, but the air is still, and I’m watching how the middle-aged leaves bob up and down every few minutes in an elegant dance, a natural clockwork movement. As the raindrops gradually gather on its surface, each leaf is slowly burdened, until a critical mass is reached: the frond swoops down, dumping its load like a seagull’s dropping, and then it bounces right up again for more.
I’m back home for a bit, to take care of some business. Home? What is home? The folks’ garden is a suburban jungle now, unrecognisable from the trapezoid wedge of grass, two trees and a bush that we moved into back in 1969. It’s in a city that has changed completely in the 12 years I’ve been away. Trams? A Polish-language Irish TV channel? Nothing is familiar. The homecoming myths of ancient Ireland haunt me – the hero returns to Erin after his jolly japes in foreign lands, to find that for every day he’s been away it’s been a century back home, and everything he once knew is dead and gone. He takes one step ashore and pfft! – he’s a pile of ashes. There’s nothing sentimental about old Ireland.
My flat, back in London, is decanted of dependents, of life. I am as free as a bird. The cats moved out weeks ago, to another single guy living on his own. He has emailed me, with pictures and glowing reports. The tropical fish went to the local aquarium shop yesterday, run by a friendly family of Chinese Christians, who agreed to look after them and sell them on for me. Oddly, I felt more of a twinge letting go of my Medusa catfish than the more sentient mammals. There was something ineffably charming about that algae-eating, swampy, nocturnal, gnarled, ugly little critter, whom I called Mildred. She never disappointed me.
This home thing. It’s a mystery, and it runs in the family – my dear sister, also England-based, did her doctorate on the meaning of home. It’s different for everyone, of course, but there is a particular bittersweet flavour to the Irish experience of it, the split between Mother Ireland and her offspring in diaspora. It’s a bit like an ache: an ache you wouldn’t want to be without, focussed somewhere around your belly-button.
I knew, as soon as the cats went, that my flat was no longer the “home” it was – as much as I got sick of the cat hairs in every nook and cranny, on every jumper and jacket, as much as I got tired of their constant moaning for food every time I opened the front door, the flat seems to echo more without them. But, also, my books are off the shelves now, stacked away in crates. They, too, contribute to my sense of home. My determination to eliminate all unnecessary baggage, purge myself of dross and ephemera, to emerge from this mid-life crisis lighter and leaner and fleeter of foot, comes a cropper when it comes to books. I can’t let them go. Some of them have made it to the pile for friends or the local second-hand bookshop or eBay, but not many. It’s not for the look of them – only a few are of the formal hardback kind, most are less-than-pristine paperback. It’s the character of them, the touchstone of them. The wisdom of them. They stay with me.
But the rest can go: the trinkets, the gee-gaws, the little ceramic dust-catchers that go on shelves or hang on walls. The magazines, piles and piles of them. And the old shoes – they can go. Apart from the special fetishy DMs. College notes – all out. Years and years of them. Floppy disks – bin them. The boxes and boxes of wires and plugs and aerials and connectors and the “oh that will come in useful someday” stuff: gone.
But the records – the vinyl, the dusty shabby vinyl in record sleeves pockmarked with cat-claws – oh, now they were difficult to part with. The singles: Agnes Bernelle and The Radiators singing ‘Kitty Ricketts’ – ABBA’s ‘I Wonder’ – Bowie’s ‘Can You Hear Me?’ – Bronski Beat’s ‘Smalltown Boy’ – Tom Robinson’s ‘Glad To Be Gay’ EP – It’s Immaterial’s ‘Driving Away From Home’ and (don’t laugh) David Soul and friend singing ‘Black Bean Soup’ – they define me. So I get out the old record deck from the kitchen cupboard. When I last used it, years ago, it took an hour or so to get it up to speed. This week, I had to leave it running overnight to get it up to 45rpm, and I spent an emotional day recording all my singles to my hard drive. They are impossibly crackly, and undoubtedly offensive to anyone raised on CDs. But like the tattiest paperback lovingly held together with yellowing sellotape, it’s not the look or the sound of a thing, it’s the personality, the story that matters.