Lord Mcdonald (2)

'Who's that at this hour of the night?'

'Michael Coleman, tell Seamus Michael Coleman is here to play a tune, to play "Lord McDonald", Michael Coleman has landed from Killavil!'

'Wait there,' she said, and walked away back into the house. I knew that if I didn't get into the light something awful was going to happen. There was a lot of noise inside. It seemed a long while before she came back.

'Seamus Anderson isn't home tonight, he's out of town.'

He had been out of town the last five times I'd been to the house. Still, he was a busy man. A businessman. I still felt bad, so I leaned against the door and hoped the black waves in front of my eyes would disappear. I could hear a man's voice inside the house.

'Is Coleman gone? That man is nothing but trouble when he has drink in him.'

The voice could have been Seamus Anderson's but I was not certain. I banged on the door and shouted for them to let me in. There was another voice. A harder one, with an unpleasant laugh.

'Get out of here, go on, get out of here!' And then to someone else, 'Ye only have to lift him and he'll fall.'

In a narrow back street. Me lying on a pile of rubbish. And a good number of rats. You'll always know rats because they sit up and look you straight in the eye to let you know that's how carefully they're watching you. I thought these were real rats, not the rats I see when I've had a couple of drinks. 'Lord McDonald' was playing in my head.

There was a cop walking towards me. I realized my nose had been bleeding for a while and the front of my jacket was covered in blood. The cop was cautiously tapping his stick against the inside of his left hand, as he walked slowly towards me.

I stood up and stepped out from the wall. Into the light.

'Officer, I was only taking a rest.'

They take drunks down to the police station and beat them unconscious. With sticks. Sometimes they kill them for the fun of it.

'Christ, it's Michael Coleman, Michael Coleman, the great fiddle player. We've got a whole pile of your 78s at home. What are ye doing here?'

'If I knew that, I wouldn't have to drink.'

He smiled and put a hand under my elbow to stop me falling.

'Good luck, Mr Coleman. It's good to meet ye. Ye're a great fiddler when ye're playing.'

And he walked off. A good Irishman. The rats were still there, so they were real rats. Not my rats. The night was lovely and warm and there was nothing to be afraid of.

The drink is like music. How can you explain it to someone who has not fallen in love with it? How it floods your head and pushes the blood three times faster through your body. The wonderful moment of the first one the morning after, when it starts to clear away the fear and anxiety it put there the night before. Drink makes the world a place of certainty. In every way.

I remember the day I played 'Lord McDonald'. I sat in a small recording studio in the South Bronx at midday. Played another tune for a couple of minutes and then it started. I played the whole of 'Lord McDonald' just once and I could feel something running through me. Every second was like an hour and the music was coming from a place so far back in myself that it was tearing me apart. I followed the music, chased the music, with colours going through my mind and Killavil and my dead brother and the man who taught me to play and the end of all this and the twist in myself and green and brown. It was bringing me somewhere and I finally got there.

I walked away out from the studio when I finished, and two men from the record company came out into the street after me. One of them pulled a huge roll of dollars from a deep trouser pocket.

'Here you are, Michael, a couple of hundred dollars for a special performance. No one ever heard anything like that before.'

The sun was shining the way it does in New York in the summer. The rest of the musicians were sitting in the usual bar, talking about work and spending money. They didn't know then they'd never have that sort of money again.

I tried to explain what had happened. My hand was shaking and the beer was spilling onto the floor. Sunshine was coming through the dark glass of the front window. Blue-coloured light with dust flying round in it. I had got there. I looked at my fingers and said there would be so many more tunes that I would play like this.

But it never came again. Not that way. There was just that one day before it all finished for me. 'Lord McDonald' was the tune. My name is Michael Coleman and they say I am the finest fiddler that ever lived.

- THE END -