The Turning Tide

It was mid - July of 2020 when I realised the pandemic was not going to be over any time soon. 
All through the summer my work was filled with queries about death, the registration of deaths, the requirements of timely notification in the case of a death from a notifiable disease, all the grim practicalities of legally, permanently separating what was legally, yet transiently joined. My organisation and many others like us were working flat out, trying to be consistent in this new, wildly inconsistent world. 
 
At night it's so quiet, few cars, fewer people. The previously common low rumble of planes coming into land at Dublin Airport is so rare now that my wife and I stop talking and look at each other. "Is that thunder?" we ask, simultaneously.
 
In early August I was redeployed from taking calls to managing and distributing queries to the regional offices. I was relieved, as I was beginning to feel the emotional strain as well as the beginnings of exhaustion. I did wonder if this work would be tedious, but unexpectedly, I loved it. It put me in touch with regional colleagues I didn't know well, or at all. I noticed the level of queries marked 'distressed client' was increasing and the number of queries marked as 'challenging behaviour' also increased. The already black humour deepened to Vantablack and some immortal in-jokes were born. 
I had 2 weeks off in August and returned feeling almost perky. 
 
While on leave, I looked back at my diary entries and realised I had noted in early March how much the fear of the incipient pandemic reminded me of the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. The uncertainty of the method of transmission, the fear of unknowingly infecting someone or becoming infected, of touch, of hugging, of kissing, of crying and the logical conclusion that sexual contact almost certainly posed a significant risk.
 
Several times on the way to work on windy days I stop to look at the sea, voluptuous at full tide, a vast marbled maelstrom of dark grey, white and deep aquamarine, passionately hurling herself over the sea wall and clouding the air with salty spray. Her vitality is infectious.
 
By October my dreams start to feature a few men I knew who died during those first awful, bewildering years of the AIDS epidemic. We all came out at roughly the same time, just as that storm was making landfall on this side of the world. I didn't know those men well, we just orbited around each other at gigs and at Bartley Dunnes, which was the sole pub which housed the burgeoning gay-friendly goth scene in Dublin, the fringes of which I wholeheartedly embraced. We also spent one blissfully hot summer in each other’s company at various garden and park gatherings. 
One of these men had very unexpectedly kissed me passionately at a music festival at St Anne's Park in Raheny, then apologised, retracted the apology, made an inelegant speech about the vagaries of desire, somehow threw Guy de Maupassant into the mix, eventually realised he actually meant the Marquis de Sade, then threw himself under the bus with a wildly off-colour suggestion, apologised again, and, because he thought I was laughing at him (I wasn’t, I found the whole thing strangely endearing) finally stamped off in an enormous huff, frock coat billowing dramatically. It wasn't a wholly impressive exit however, as I could see he was limping from breaking in his new 16 hole Doc Martens and I could hear them squeaking as he stalked up the road. He came back later and for the rest of the evening we kept catching sight of each other sneaking confused glances at each other. I never saw him again, but heard many years later that he had died of AIDS, aged 23, in New York. 
 
Whatever the weather, I open the back door for a while to listen to the sea, a comforting, constant presence a couple of minutes from the house. She has different songs in different weathers: on calm nights it’s a lilting lullaby, distant yet intimate, like a whisper; I can almost feel warm breath close to my ear.
 
In my dreams, one of these men always has his immaculately tailored back to me as he sits motionless at a table. This is unsettling in a David Lynch kind of way, but if it's the man I think it is, he's probably reading Baudelaire. His tatty copy of Les Fleurs Du Mal went everywhere with him (he was fluent because his mother was French - he wasn't quite that pretentious) and he used the book and his French speaking as a chat up device. I'd seen him do it. "Oh, this?" he'd say, casually, "I love the Decadent poets, but I don't think Baudelaire translates well into English." This tactic seemed to work quite well, or at least with those men who also loved the Decadent poets.
A man called Chris also drifts in and out of some of these dreams.  When I was 16, he accidentally knocked me over in a mosh pit, and in restoring me to an upright position had bellowed a strangely courtly apology over the din. He noticed I had lost an earring and crawled back under the heaving throng to retrieve it. He waved it at me triumphantly while legs and arms flailed around him. Obviously, we became fast friends. Then, abruptly, he disappeared without a word to anyone. I heard - again, years later - that he went to Berlin and died there, shockingly soon after he had left Dublin. 
 
When the wind strengthens a little, the sea sings a restless, erratically paced song, like free jazz.
 
Another man, whose name I can't remember now, flits in and out of my dreams. He had a profile so classically perfect I once spent an entire evening almost unable to look at anything else. I watched the sinking sun deepen the shadows under his cheekbones and set into the hollow of his collar bones. It turned out he was already sick, but didn't know it yet. Or maybe he did and just kept it hidden. We never knew who was sick and we were all permanently terrified, though it didn't stop us taking risks ourselves. Most of us weren't quite 17 and, this being 1986, we weren't even sure what was risky and what wasn't. But bit by bit we found out who was sick. Bit by bit, and yet with terrifying rapidity, all of these men just seemed to exit stage left and, like a badly plotted play, never reappeared. So many men disappeared that we learned to draw our own silent, sorrowful conclusions. 
 
Then there are the stormy nights when the sea is part of a quartet, performing modernist nocturnes for sea, stones, wind and wires. I love this most of all: the crash of chords as she rhythmically explodes against the stones, a flurry of notes as the stones and sand are drawn to each other like iron filings to a magnet, a glissando as they rush closer, and then further away from the shore, in perfect time with her; the wind through the wires, a steady didgeridoo drone under the melody.
 
I dream too, of Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield, standing in my sunlit kitchen bickering over cutlery. Katherine Mansfield is throwing major shade over the state of Woolf's tea towels, which she has inexplicably brought with her. I also have a recurring dream that I am playing table tennis with Emily Dickinson. She is in her classic white dress, but is wearing very spiffy trainers. She has a devastatingly accurate forehand drive and smiles enigmatically when deploying it. I wake from these dreams dry - mouthed and sweaty, and wonder what the hell is going on in my subconscious.
 
 
In late October my dreams began to feature regular walk - on parts comprised entirely of those I loved who are now dead: my mother, my father, my brother, my first girlfriend of whose death I had been unaware until I saw her 10th anniversary notice in the newspaper in the dentist's waiting room. I was shocked, not just by her untimely death, but also because her last bruised, bruising and wryly funny letter to me had fallen out of a book only a couple of days before I saw the notice. 
 
By November my waking hours are beginning to feel dreamlike, too. Several times I drive almost all the way towards my usual office before I remember I'm working in the local office in the opposite direction.  On November 22nd, with all the abruptness of an expected death, my aunt died. She was the last but one of my mother's siblings. Not long before her death I had written an essay about the house in which she lived for most of her life. Despite being agnostic and not prone to sentimentality, I notice that she died on St. Cecilia's day, a day I always notice, if not observe. My aunt had an encyclopedic knowledge of music and was in a choir her whole life. She used to jokingly sing Panis Angelicus in her beautiful bell - like voice every time she pulled one of her wondrous creations out of the oven. 
Her funeral is online and it is beautiful but harrowing. I suddenly realise, with a feeling approaching panic that it won't be possible for a choir to be present. But there is a male soloist and the priest says when she was still well enough she had chosen her own hymns. My cousin, her godchild, delivers the eulogy and she evokes my aunt so clearly I start to cry. At the Offertory, the soloist sings Panis Angelicus and I lose it completely. I am so distraught that my wife is holding me tight and I can't see or take a full breath. I am sad my aunt has died, sad at the loss of her unique spirit and her uproarious laugh and of the weakening links with my mother's family, but I also realise I am crying for every loss I've had, and for all the losses of the people I've listened to for almost a year. For all that we have lost. 
 
Sometimes, when the wind is very high, the song of the sea and stones is reduced to a percussive accompaniment while the wind and wires duet: at times a hoarse keening, more often an unearthly scraping sound, as though the wind has solidified and is bowing the wires.
 
After this, something changes in me, as if the tide is turning. I know that we aren't out of the woods, not nearly. But I also know it will end, even if we don't know when that will be. Sometimes I am frustrated and disillusioned with people, but understand that people are also naturally frustrated and disillusioned. Like the sea, we respond with a strange combination of gravity and inertia. These forces - though they act in opposition in terms of the sea - have to co-exist: without them, the tide would never turn.