THE IRISH LITERARY scene has long been a source of national pride, but it’s in particularly rude health at the moment. Yet with so many books to catch up on, it can be easy to lose track of what’s out there.

Enter The Irish Read, where we feature an extract from a piece of work by an Irish or Ireland-based author.

The taster from a novel or short story should spur you on to find out more about the writer and their work.

The writer

David Hayden John Spinks John Spinks

David Hayden was born in Ireland and lives in England. He is the author of three collections of short stories Darker With the Lights On (Carcanet/Transit), Unstories and Six Cities, and a novel titled All Our Love. He has also had writing published in A Public Space, Zoetrope All-Story, The Dublin Review, AGNI, New York Tyrant and The Georgia Review. 

The story

This essay is taken from the collection ‘well I just kind of like it’, edited by the fantastic short story writer Wendy Erskine. It’s an anthology of writing about art and the home, published by Paper Visual Art. The essays in the book – from authors like Keith Ridgway, Susannah Dickey, Erskine, Joanna Walsh and Nicole Flattery – look at art in the home and the home as art. Each piece is deeply personal and unique, taking in what we display in the home and what it means to us – and what it tells us about ourselves. While the word ‘art’ might be lofty, the book shows that art is in the eye of the homeowner. 

In Hayden’s essay, he takes us back to boyhood, and how a friendship highlighted the differences between himself and others. 

The extract, from Always Approaching by David Hayden

*
There was nothing in the beginning, and too much ever after. The walls of the house were empty, never quite white but grey, or perhaps, in the memory, faintly yellow. The sea was at the end of the road, and marine light, recalled in long tenebrous durations, punctuated by brief hot reaches of salt white, high blue light, lived all around and through. There were no paintings or posters or photographs or ornaments. No mirrors. No made form or image, no thing that could be dwelled upon, or within, or mistaken as coming from life.

No thing from which to take sense or make story, from which to depart into a world of feeling and connection. No diversion. No companion. No consolation. All that had been, had been broken, or sold, or lost; left behind in the other country.

On the coldest days of winter, a coal fire would be set, and as the black burned orange, it made the first picture that I knew, and from inside the calescent rocks, and out of the wavering flames, with the cold at my back, my eyes and mind would draw the comfort of warmth and of nameless shapes and wordless stories.

On fireless days, a child might stare at patterns in the carpet, or gather forms from the way the plain green curtains fell in tubes and folds and pillars in the sea light. In bed after dusk, there might be watchful spirits, trembling ghouls, or nameless animals in flight that would not take me with them on their journeys beyond the night. If I looked down there was a pitch-dark sea, separating one brother from another.

In the day, sitting quiet and motionless on the settee, causing and being no trouble, the child would look into one blank wall or another and see what small part of everything that he knew, knowing or feeling that it might go on forever and mean nothing all the while. Or that the blankness might signify unending fear, always approaching. The empty wall might have been a looking-glass, one that held the noise of the mind, silent behind a hard and spotted skin, one that would dwell inside and show the world its shadows, its nothingness, one that might look into itself and see howling.

But the walls were gelid and unmoving, damp and unmeaning, scanned over each day by starving eyes not knowing what they searched for, what this other hunger consisted of, what it yearned for.

Briefly, there were crayons and paper, and the waxy feel in my hand and the untutored motion that made marks that ran over marks and covered up the white blankness in an expanse of jagged colour that contained no animals or trees or people or buildings, but only what the walls spoke. These pages were not to be displayed but hidden away in a shoebox, with a found old coin and three marbles, that stayed in the dark, under the bed. And when I lay there at night, I could imagine underneath me the colours I had made.

**
There were no friends until the day in the secondary school playground when a boy, on whose lively group I was silently on the margins, approached me and asked if I wanted to come round to his house. Two evenings later, we walked towards the sea, away from the chemical factory where his father was a foreman and past the bakery where his mother worked.

In the hall I was asked to take off my shoes and I stood uncomprehending. I looked above me at a print in a plain brass frame on the wall at the foot of the stairs. The mother came out through the kitchen sunlight in an apron, rubbing her red hands on a blue tea towel.

‘You alright, love?’ she said, looking at my feet.

‘Alright, mum,’ the boy said, and kissed her cheek.

I bent and tugged loose my shoelaces.

‘Welcome,’ she said, and turned back from where she had come.

In the picture a boy in a blue silk suit, white lace collar, and silver-grey stockings, stood on a low stool, his hands behind his back, looking across a red-cloth-draped broad table, at three men, one leaning towards him questioningly. A fourth man took notes with a quill, a fifth stood tall in the shadows, a sixth was sprawled on a bench, staring exhaustedly at nothing. My sight flickered to a man in a breastplate and armour, carrying a spear, its long blade fringed with a red tassel, standing by a crying girl in a peach-coloured dress and cap, with his hand on her back. Two girls, or possibly women, in olive-green dresses stood anxiously in an open doorway, with more soldiers in the darkness behind them. Light, another person, hovered in the left and centre of the painting.

My new friend opened the door to the front room. I could see more framed pictures inside on the walls.

‘You coming?’ he said, and smiled.

***
I walk into a gallery room and, for the hundredth time, see a boy and a boyish girl, hand held in hand in promise, before a tree in lavish bloom. I open one of my books and see blind Orion searching for the rising sun.

I sit in my own front room. A picture on the wall, slightly crooked in its pale wooden frame, made by my son long ago of our first living room together, almost abstract with its strong black lines and wavering blocks of yellow, green, and red. I see a guitar. The picture is as present as I am. And behind the picture, the empty wall.

well I just kind of like it is available to buy in bookshops and from Paper Visual Art’s website.