“Being a football manager is like living on a volcano: any day may be your last” - Arsene Wenger
At night his heartbeat gets faster when he hears it, the drip drip; the wind getting up; the words from the forecast ringing in his ears; his mind a mixture of warnings yellow and orange of wind and rain. He twists but sleep doesn’t come because there is always a worry that it will happen again; like before. The forecast said rain...heavy rain...torrential rain...rain that will swell the river below.
A few times in the night, he slips back the bedclothes and goes down to the kitchen; in his bare feet, using his toes on the tiles to check for dampness. But there’s nothing, so he goes back again. He looks at the clock, four am, the death hour; the time when people are least surprised if you go. He wonders if that will be the time that he will go, brought on from the stress of all of this, because nobody ever mentions that when they come on the telly talking about moving out, about starting again, about getting a new house. When RTE come to town.
When national papers you never read come on like they’re your best friend...to get the good snap...the drama...When they talk about cost and benefit, and they jot down figures for a similar house or a similar farm, but what is the cost of these nightly treks down to check if the water has come in again? What price do you put on the years less he’ll have because of it? What price the stress of waiting for those nights when all that they have is ruined. He has known four or five times when it has happened, because he can replay them in his mind; the panic, the drama, the loss of every photograph they had; the rank rotten smell of it for months after...but it might as well happen every day, because every night when there is rain, he checks the kitchen, he looks down the field to see if the river has burst into that, and then the other and then over to his, and up his driveway until it creates a moat around the little garden. Except he doesn’t feel like a king in a castle. He feels broken again. She feels broken again, and they look at each other and wonder why.
It’s easy for them above in Dublin to say, leave it, move out, leave it behind, take compensation and build somewhere else, but where somewhere else? Where else can you go that has so much of what means so much to you? Here is where he ran behind his grandfather through the hedge to the back fields; here is where he searched for eggs in the straw; here is where he got his love and respect for animals because they would be his workmates for all the years ahead; here is where he left for his first dance, polishing his shoes at the hearth. Here is where he thinks he sees his father every day, coming around the sound of the shed, shuffling in the wellingtons. Making sounds and sights that never leave you.
Here is where he stood the morning after himself and his wife brought home their first born, when he wondered if there would be enough from the place to feed them all, or would they need to take on a job in the city, a shift work job to help get them all through school and college. To give them a chance to do something other than what he had done. Here is where he buried his first dog, a companion up the fields like all the rest.
Here is where he patted the back door of the hearse on the times when his parents left for the last time, after being waked through dusk and dawn to hear one last crow of the rooster, the crunch of the tyres on the gravel the only sound as their remains departed but their souls remained.
Here is where he hopes himself and herself will spend their dotage; scratching around in the yard like old chickens, watching the young ones try their hand at it, but he knows the price of what they produce has collapsed, that there is no value on what they make and what they do.
And that there is no cognisance of the life and the stress they go through.
That when they are making their plans up in Dublin, they sleep easy at four am because they don’t fear the drip drip drip or the whoosh the wind makes in the trees on the side of the house. Representing so so much. A sound that precedes the possibility of the end of everything.
So he looks to the skies again and sees the clouds, knowing that what they represent to him is so much more than for many of the rest of the country. He wonders if he could start again, would he have stayed for an existence as unsure as this? He shakes his head. He’s a custodian, and can never abandon a place that holds the ghosts of a lifetime of living.
