Menhir man
Praise to god left tangled in the trees above me by the whisper of a breeze choking in the maples. It deposits in the branches the distant hymns of a pentecostal choir at practice. With the light failing I watch the bats hunt, whipping through the air in crabby whirls. The brown-bellied squeakers stay close to the capped towers of the Chateau and as I follow them with my eyes I trudge the banks of the Boyne to the rhythm of its weirs.
I have just been to Cheap Shop. Another taste of home on the high street, which lives up to it’s big block print name; peeling black on yellow plywood. A woman with a sagging face and a warm smile sold me rubber binoculars to watch the buzzards with. There are a lot of buzzards here. They are large and conditions are good for them with plenty of woodland bordering tillage and pasture. Sometimes I sit on the wall of a small graveyard in the foothills from where I can see them circling on the thermals.
Once I saw one on the Menhir. The sun was rising over the Alps as I rounded a bend between Fiez and Grandson. Slowing the car to look at Mont Blanc I saw a large buzzard perched on the big standing stone. We watched each other as the sun spread itself like warm yellow butter on the lake, then he spread his wings and flew. The Menhir stands alone against a magnificent backdrop. Across the lake at Cledy dozens of standing stones were unearthed in the 1970’s and reinstated in their original positions. Their sizes vary and some are formed to cast human silouhettes, which as the day lengthens sees the gods stretch and contort. Neolithic man lived all through this valley and in the shoreline woods, and through the reed beds, there are still boar, deer and ghosts at dusk.
Menhirs, it appears, are still a going concern in the canton and a few weeks ago I was told the Menhir man was coming. In the garden a Menhir erected by a lesbian couple to channel vibes or some such needed recharging and the Menhir man - who also does fridges - was called on. The young man sat with his hands on the Menhir murmuring to it like a man calming a horse. But for all my sceptiscism the dark-featured fellow succeeded in fixing the standing stone just in time for dinner, to which he was invited; afterwards collecting his fee and leaving.
The people were feeling good and credited the Menhir’s restoration, I, the wine. And I was thinking too about those dark evasive eyes above a latin nose which had put me in mind of McCarthy. The chairbreaker. And oh, what a chair. Plucked from a skip on Fleet Street and wheeled for want of a taxi fare the mile and a half to Blackhorse Avenue it had been installed as my pride and joy. A little rip had been enough to have it consigned to the skip, but it was quiet something else to wheel it past the laughing ushers of the Four Courts, through gob-dawed traffic, down the Luas tracks and up Manor Street to the jibes of yellow-hacked men hunched in pub doorways.
My colleague had done a Peter when he saw Judge Alan Mahon coming up Fleet Street. He had abandoned me and the chair, crossed the street and affected an air of ignorance. Reckoning Judge Alan Mahon a man of more depth than my colleague I continued alone, wrestling the chair from the skip: A man walking his chair. That green-fabricked freebie lasted until Christmas drinks when, with one gyration too many of McCarthy’s huge arse, the chair lost a wheel, and as anyone who’s worked in an office knows, that’s the difference between a good chair and a bad chair.
The day after the Menhir man’s visit I stopped on a bridge over the black waters of the Thiele and watched the Grebes gorging themselves on perch fry. The sun was stretched out for bed in a watery way and as I cast around for things to draw breath on I noticed I had dog shit on my left boot. Sighing I moved off and as I neared the apartment leaned against the bins to poke at the shite with some card from my pocket.
Beside the bins was a black leather office chair.
It is one of the more civilised aspects of Switzerland that there is a designated day once a month for the disposal of furniture, and if you want something, you just wait. I was exilharated, and later, topless in the kitchen cleaning the shit from my boots, I gestured triumphantly at the chair when my companion came home.
”Look! I found a new chair!”
“Oh god,” she groaned, “I saw that thing this morning on my way to work and I knew it would end up in my apartment!”
I am sitting in it now. And the Menhir man’s alright by me.
McCarthy… not so much.
admin @ October 20, 2008