What Even Is Harmony

As I walked through the city I realised I’d never find ditch pints. I’d never find a meeting between the foul I wanted to embrace, vile as I was, and a bar that knew there was a market for disordered taste. Instead I sat in a pub I hadn’t been to since I was a teenager.

A steady snare of 80s thrash metal beat from speakers hung so often the presence of their effect made for a closeted space. The dark lighting hid the bar’s emptiness in shadows, architectural and of people. Smoking indoors had long since been banned and it seemed to suit this pub as it allowed for a clarity to—a sharpness in—this darkness. Everything was precise in a way that made sense, a way of reality realer than itself.

I watched two men talk as I drank. One had a spike—like a viking horn—through his ear and his leather jacket looked to have accumulated the wear of battle-hardened armour. The other wore a white shirt tucked into dark pleated pants; the remnants of a uniform. Both sat as though made of stone and their poses said their shells were internal, projected through poise and precision.

As they lifted a drink to a mouth, elbows bent at right angles, they turned to rocky concrete; viscous liquid and slow. Then they returned to marbled stone.1 My gaze searched for reason beyond them, to posters hung on the wall featuring images of riotous crowds and icons of chest baring guitarists. I imagined temporary release, to live as they should, was what made my unknowing friends so rigid. Their ability, every-so-often, to embody spirit allowed them to remain impassive to each other, impassive to themselves but just-as-much fully aware.

I tasted my drink then tipped a little more of my gin into my glass of white wine. It was an alchemical experience. l knew I would eventually find the right mix of sharp sweetness. Something almost wrong in flavour but that wrongness demanding respect as a sour-tinged mantra.

Drinking my concoction I felt the harsh alcohol evaporate on my throat and knew I was becoming gaseous, half-transformed, steady between two states. I was neither of one but nothing in combination. Watching the two men sit opposite me I wanted someone to be watching me, so I could ask who they saw, when a woman in an orange summer dress stood between me and my stone-faced companions.

“Happy skulls,” I said to her, seeing the toothless, open to the world heads picked out on the fabric of her dress.

“They’re really happy,” she said, her eyes wide with delight. My happy skull comment shouldn’t have caused such an uplifting turn.

I decided to give into the result, to play along with the pull of her theatrical joy. This was what I had escaped to, leaving the miasma of the ordinary for something outside second homes, like the bar I’d just left, second loves, the people in the bar, all seconded to the routine you never thought of escaping. “Their minds are open and there’s no meaty grey matter left to hold them back.”

“Giving them anxiety.”

“Occupying them with thoughts.”

“Thoughts are the worst,” she said. I agreed. She sat. Thoughts were spitting against my skull, falling over my body to layer me in a mucosal saliva.2

“Vodka and white wine?” she asked, setting her beer on the table next to the shot of I gin I had.

“Gin and white wine. And I’ve poured a little gin in the wine.”

“Nice,” she said. “I’m always doing that. Mixing things that shouldn’t be mixed.” It was a plain admission that these drinks shouldn’t be mixed but seemingly knowing in the value of shouldn’ts.

I lifted the glass, held it out to her. “Try it,” I said.

She took a sip, sucked in on her lips, pursed them, then shot air through her teeth. She’d discovered the kick I was searching for.

Asking permission to take another taste but equally toasting both me and her she raised the glass again before her mouth and said, “Do you mind?” as though no moment had passed between us.3

I joined her in the toast by picking up her beer and tipping it against my glass that she held. “It’s all for you,” I said, and I knew if I could share that drink, the sweet-snapping bite in the night with just one other person I would end my day content: a day of trawling through.

She drank, more than just a taste, more than just a mouthful. She looked at what little remained with determination. “Sorry. It has a punch.” She coughed. “I guess which is what I need! I didn’t realise.”

I hoped that my smile, unrestrained, and my eyes gleaming would say it was my joy to have that effect. “Finish it,” I said.

She did. I felt filled. “Fire. Cold blue fire!” she said.

“It helps me.”

I had no cares and could happily leave but instead she said to me, “Hang on here. We’ll take all the help we can get.”4 She stood, went to the bar and spoke with the barman who shrugged, reached beneath the counter and took out a bottle of gin, two bottles of white wine and a small stack of plastic glasses.

Sitting down again she set the glasses in a row, the gin in front of me and the two bottles of wine before herself. “We need to find the best mix.”

The barman left his spot behind the bar and walked to the front door, closing it out and bolting the lock. I knew my day should end with the bar closing up. It wasn’t quite half a day in pubs, at least not in hours. I started that morning with the pillar of my new life—doctors and nurses—and that was all true and real, then I talked and found purpose—the man on the building site—then I sought real purpose.

The woman unscrewed one of the bottle’s caps and waited, ready to pour.

With the door locked it felt like I didn’t have a choice in the matter but sitting in a lock-in was the choice I would have made anyway. “Which comes first,” I asked, happy without choice. “Gin or wine?”

“Gin,” she said. “Just a little, to start. However much you think best.”

I picked up the gin bottle left in front of me and poured just about half a shot into one glass, hesitated with the bottle’s mouth hanging and then poured more gin into the next. The barman pulled down the blinds on the windows looking onto the empty path outside.

“Pour another,” she said, as she topped up the first two glasses with some of the warm Chardonnay.

“Gerry!” she yelled. The barman walked up to the table, took the glass she raised to him and walked back behind the bar. There he turned off the music, then began to print out the till takings.

No-one in the bar moved. Nothing had changed. Everyone still sat, still drank, still conversed. It was all normality but I had to know why she’d come to me. Why I was sitting mixing drinks in a closed bar where no-one had ever seen me before. I did ask.

“I like you,” she answered. “I want you here.”5

I didn’t know I wanted to be wanted. “That’s a good feeling,” I said, taking a drink.

“Being liked or being here?” she said. “The feeling?”

“They’re the same thing, aren’t they?” I said, not knowing if we were talking about ourselves, each other, or embracing the long prospect of three bottles of booze.

“Yes, I guess. I don’t know.” She laughed. Her statement was tripartite but there was an equality to it, a singular admittance to knowledge.

Looking over her she didn’t seem crazy. I didn’t see myself in her. I saw peace. I tried to take it into me, to liquefy the salt of not knowing if she was pitying me, celebrating me, mocking me, or confiding in me. “But not knowing is good, isn’t it? Not having to know,” she said. She swirled our creation around the glass.

As I watched the draining liquid cling to the side of the plastic I felt that I needed some control. “I know I’ll have given you a hangover,” I said. I had intended to laugh but what I said was cold and overbearing, my intent embarrassing. I gave into an ease I didn’t know I was searching for and so found the worst of myself.6

“I know I have no-one to blame for hangovers but myself,” she said.

I re-engaged. I pushed forward. “Some people blame circumstance. The world,” I said.

“That’s why I don’t want to know anything. Because I accept I’m at fault for everything.”

The lights came up in the bar. Not fully, just enough to show it was shabby and in need of painting, with a thin fuzz of grime on the walls’ surface. The layers of previous coatings, drips and layers of thick purple, were obviously visible.

Eyes passing back from the wall I paused to consider how I had always been so wrapped up in myself, never considering others could be caught on themselves. Before that moment took full hold, resigning me again to my failure I spoke up. “Catholic guilt,” I said.

“Original sin,” she said.

I laughed, not at her but at the understanding of the multi-layered trap we all had made for ourselves.

“I used to walk out of confession and think, ‘I’m clean. I’m free of sin. Go me!’ And in that instant I’d know I was being prideful. Then I was unclean again.”

She opened up, as though about to sing, and though her words were levelled and measured they were lilted with conspiratorial excitement. “The feelings that make you, you, are sin so you’re fallen as yourself,” she said. “But it’s more, it’s a mentality.”

“Eventually I was doing it as a taunt,” I said. “I’d go to confession, then curse myself as soon as I could. A big fuck you to the inescapable.” She looked at her glass. I spoke feeling myself anew. “You’re unclean. Existence dirties you. It’s not ‘just living’ it’s living wrong, as though you’ve made a choice.”

She pulled her leather jacket over her shoulder but she didn’t look as though the temperature affected her. “It all changes the way you think, about the world, but mostly about yourself,” she said. I looked around, wondering how many others in here blamed themselves. My stone-friends seemed far from blame. To become statues you need to be free.

“Your mind betrays you. And it’d be nice to blame the church, to blame someone else but you can’t. It’s who you are.” I thought what I felt was rising anger, instead it was a release of anger. A joy in anger.

“You internalise it,” she said. “And it’s not just the church. There’s always someone thinking you’re wrong, reminding you you’ve made your own bed, you start to become your own guilt. But it’s more than guilt. It’s people saying your very existence is wrong. What did anyone do wrong?”

“I didn’t give you a hangover,” I said.

“I have no-one to blame but myself.”

“It’d be nice to blame someone else.”

“Some do. They see what’s wrong and know they didn’t cause it. They want to change it. But some people don’t know there’s anything wrong,” she said.

“Imagine being that person,” I said, and I did imagine it.7 I looked at my hands resting against the edge of the table and hoped she was also imagining herself as that free person. Then I looked up, and smiled, and she was looking at me, seemingly always, and she smiled too.

Her smile dropped. For the first time she didn’t look confident. “I wanted to be someone else, growing up.”

Her words caught on the hooks hanging around us. The quiet of the bar now apparent and ready to look at the two women with three full bottles at their ready. I didn’t care about the rest of the bar. “I didn’t know who I was growing up,” I said. “I still don’t but I know other people do know who I am.”

“They think they do,” she said. Her index finger pressed into the table to make her point. I wanted to reach out and stop her stabbing, driving against the hard black wood. It gave me confidence and I didn’t know what to do with such confidence. “You fill it in for them, yourself. You fit into their mould of you.”

“There’s no escape,” I said.

“Which I learned all the while I didn’t get to be who I wanted to be,” she said.

The frenzy I imagined around us had calmed. The chat’s hush in noise, awareness for the near other, and not our pronouncements, had returned, and I wanted to know who she was. I had to know if that person wasn’t her and if we could all be who we weren’t. “Do you still want to be someone else?” I asked.

“I am someone else,” she said. “I made myself. So I was sort of wrong. I did get to be adjacent to who I wanted to be, the almost eventuality of who I decided to be.”

“What are you two talking about?” Gerry asked, leaning over the gate at end of the bar as though it was his barman’s role to mediate the lost.

“He doesn’t care who he is,” she said.

“Who do you want to be?” I asked Gerry.

He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.”

“See what I mean?” she said.

“It’s a privileged position. To just be.”

“Right now I want to be someone at home, with you, and these drinks, tonight,” the woman said. “With no Gerry calmly breezing through and mocking our every struggle with his simple plain ignorance.” She looked at him as though she was a schoolgirl praying her sins to a god. He ignored her.8 She stood. “Come with me. We don’t have to go far, I promise.”

“Everyone out. Now! We’re closed,” Gerry shouted.

“Will you come with me?” she asked.

“Where?” I said.

“Somewhere very close.”9

She began to stack up the plastic glasses as I, straight with new purpose, carried the bottle of gin towards the front door Gerry was unlocking. “Hang on,” she called out to me. “This way.”

I rocked on my heels. She walked towards a back room as everyone else was walking through the now opened exit—reaching up to touch hanging flags and banners on the ceiling in celebration of potential—chatting and laughing with Gerry who smiled and joked but I could feel his impatience. Or at least I imagined it. He could have been simply tired or maybe tiredness was catching up with me. Maybe it was apprehension.10

I followed her into the keg room where metal barrels were stacked three high, some with hoses running from them.

She opened back a dusty door I hadn’t noticed when I walked in. A stairs ran upwards, then crossed over behind the building to come to a door leading to a landing. She stood in front of a sturdier door, more modern and plain, fiddling with keys while trying not to drop the white wine.

Past that door I arrived into a room with worn carpet, roughly cut and placed in the middle of the room but not secured to the edges, tall cream and orange wallpapered walls, and a mishmash of cheap apartment furnishing. There was a ratty but plush green couch and its armchair companion, pushed into the middle of the floor was a coffee table littered with spilling tobacco pouches, loose tobacco, and rolling papers. Whiskey bottles, all empty, lined a windowsill—window looking out onto an orange sodium streetlight—above a sink next to an old electric cooker. A black metal bookshelf, sturdier than the surrounding flimsy furniture, stuffed with books stacked and layered two deep reached almost to the ceiling.

“Not far at all,” she said as she dropped the wine on the couch. She turned to me, “Sit where you want.” She fell back, following the wine to the chair.

“This is a great place to live. Great location,” I said. I sat in the armchair off to the side.

“I used to work down there,” she said, stamping her foot to indicate the general below.

"Why?” I asked, meaning circumstance.

“I drank there, it paid, it came with an apartment. Gerry looked after me.”

“No. Why this?” I waved the gin bottle loosely to indicate what we’d found of the night, of me being with her in her home.

“You’re too far away,” she said. She unfurled from the couch and reached out towards me. “Come over here.” I wanted to be close to something, but I still held the bottle of gin and a small core of temptation in me was to place it in her hand. The larger temptation was to take her hand.

I pushed myself out of the chair and walked over to sit next to her. My question felt foolish us having come together but still she answered. “I didn’t want to be alone,” she said. “And you’re someone who offered me a drink, and that’s more than I could wish for.” I seemed more happenstance than reason.

Gerry walked in.

“I forgot to bring ice,” the woman called out over her shoulder, without fully turning to him.

“You’re an amateur,” Gerry said, putting a bulging plastic bag on the table.

“What’s your name,” I asked.

"Gerry,” he said.

“No, yours,” I said to the woman.

“I’m going to bed,” Gerry said. “Enjoy your ice.” He walked through the open kitchen and I followed his path as he left the room through a door. When I turned back to my room I saw she had been looking at me all that time.

“Do you like him?” she asked.

“He gave us the drinks,” I said.

“I’m Niamh,” she said.

“Natalie,” I said. She picked up a remote control and started the hifi in the corner. It was all connected through an old silver amplifier, with valves exposed and a needle in front of a panel indicating volume or warmth, or maybe nothing at all.

A twisting drone slipped into the room, that, after a few seconds, took on a sound warm like a reed instrument, then looping and swirling, then distorted and percussive. Then all at once.

“Do you have a story, Natalie?”

“I’m not sure I could tell it,” I said.

“Everyone needs to share their story.”

“I more mean I’m not sure I know it. I have one. I don’t know the details.”

“Give me a word or two,” she said. I became aware I hadn’t told my story in my regular bar earlier. That place was sedimented strata of meaning without focus or narrative: telling in layers rather than apparent or shown. I didn’t know if I needed to begin my story but it didn’t feel wrong in that moment.

I was just about to speak, to brave my tale when the song I realised had started mid-way ended. I stopped myself. No music returned.

There’s a craziness in telling people you’re crazy. They either know, from being with you, or they don’t need to know, because they’ll judge you. You tell them when you need an excuse, when you need to explain.

With the silence expanding in the room, I spoke up, not to excuse the silence, not to fill the silence but, for once, to be heard. She listened. “I’m mad,” I said.

I thought I wanted her to take it in her stride. I was used to people simply moving past such an uncanny statement. She looked surprised.

The lack of coiling saxophone pushed me into it, between all that I was in the room. The emptiness took over. It halted me and I fought it, in that room, sombre and stark, I worked to restrain it.

“Shit,” she said, eventually. “Proper mad?” she asked. I nodded. She took my hand in hers. I noticed the silence from the hifi wasn’t a true silence but the slow rise of another song, or the same song gently building its brutal comfort. “Have you told people before?”

“They act like it’s not a thing, that I’m just another person and it doesn’t affect me, or I’m being dramatic, so it doesn’t affect them.”

“I believe you,” she said. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.

I opened my eyes. “Thank you,” I said. I asked about her. “What’s your story?”

“You’ve just started yours, is there a need to move on?”

The no-longer-need-to-cry I felt—not even aware of my need in the first place—I realised had emptied me. I moved onto her because it was what was right. The focus on me from others should only last until I acknowledged it, it should never be explored, that would be selfish but I also knew, I understood from her question the constant transferring back and forth, the world’s tacit acceptance that everyone is equal and equally deserving creates an infinite bouncing—return and return—where nothing ever stops to be held. I wanted to hear about her, about who she was and what drove her but she wanted to hear about me. “I want to show what madness is,” I said.

She sat back into the chair, leaving the grip of my hand. She looked at me with a severe absence, the blank wash of need.11 There was no hesitation on her face, no sign that she braced against what was to come. It was a look that asked for my forgiveness for what the world had wrought. “It’s no-one’s fault,” I said. “Not yours, not mine. Madness simply exists within me.”

“Are you madness?” she asked.

“Sometimes,” I said. “But not now.”12

“When?”

“In hindsight,” I said. “I can see it looking back, when I can’t understand.” I didn’t know if I was madness in that moment. I just knew that moment existed with my slow taking-hold.

“Do you see it in your future?” she asked.

“I can’t predict it,” I said. “If I could I would avoid it.”

“You can’t avoid yourself.”

I felt like I was talking to myself, or another part of myself, patient, steady-and-knowing, such was the care of attention she was giving. I wanted to prove myself to her, with her. I wanted my hold to be as universal as the two of us together, claiming each other as she claimed my profession that couldn’t explain the true depths of what I’d been through. “That’s why I want to show it to people. I want to show its value. I don’t think I can even think on what it really is, what it’s really like.”

“What do you value from it? That’s more important. If anything.” Her hand didn’t hold mine, it simply rested on it. I hadn’t noticed it when she left it go but her hand had stayed, always in contact.

“I was fearful of men,” I said. “Ex-boyfriends who I thought were stalking me. Men I thought were getting me drunk just to have sex with me, then if I didn’t do that they’d just laugh at the woman downing shots, desperate.”

“That happens,” she said. “That’s not craziness."

“I saw it everywhere. I couldn’t act because of it. It consumed me.”

“So it was what you feared?”

“It was what I saw, believed was everywhere. That it was inevitable. But it’s not. It didn’t happen to me, it was the threat of it happening. The impression of thoughts—the thoughts pressing on people they don’t act on, but the darkness existed in people. The hate, never fully them but within them. They moved about the world, making me small, not an immediate threat but their effect on the way the world works. The ex-boyfriend who wants to rape you, for revenge, to put you in your place, but you know it won’t happen, it can’t happen, not to you but you fear it and you know it’s the same as the man who talks over you, dismisses you, doesn’t value anything you do, belittles you. The man who stands against, and in my case works against the value you do bring. It was everywhere.”

“What’s the value in thinking through all that?” Niamh asked.

I could see moisture coming to her eyes. Nothing I said should have been a shock. It was madness put into tolerable words: the basic narrative of what I’d been through but not the feeling. I would never be able to show the feeling in all it’s terrifying glory, for good, for bad, for danger.

She let me continue what I was saying, to let me give my truth: me seeking the urgent need of where the justification of my troubles lay. “That’s just a part of the madness, the acute delusion. The value is in the feeling when I denied it. Then there’s the feeling when I walked tall and proud, when I felt I could walk into any situation and knowing how they thought deny them their power. Work against it. Prove them wrong.”

Looking at her I felt her recoil, despite no movement. I felt myself tangle. I spoke as though untying myself. “The part that makes it mad was that I saw it in everything I did, ordering a coffee in a café where the barista with a waxed moustache was overly friendly and giving him a one cent tip meant I’d changed anything. I thought it did though. I thought he saw the significance. He obviously didn’t, at the most he saw a scattered woman make a fuss with his tip-jar. My second worry was he thought I was a thief, but the value comes from the feeling that you can make a change. Or the feeling of power that your actions matter. There’s a confidence to it. But it’s also the madness, feeling like everything you do changes the world.”13

“You’re making sense of it then,” she said.

“I can’t remember most of it.”

“I have trouble sleeping. I’ve had it for a long time. So when I lie in bed I dream before I fall asleep. I imagine all the things I want. I picture myself as I want, in the situation I want. Then, when I wake up the next morning if I’ve found anything new I write it down.”

“Have any of those things come true?” I asked.14 I wanted to know if anyone could become what they dreamed of but I knew she was tired. Neither of us had poured a drink, we didn’t look to continue the spirit of what we’d had beneath us, in the pub. We were separating.

“What I write in the mornings is very different to what I imagine at night,” she said. “The mornings are more real. More hurried. I feel like I can’t give into fantasy in them. What I write is just bullet points. I thought it was stupid at first. That I should write the lushness of what I wanted. Eventually, I realised the small notes were more true for me awake. What I want and how to continue onto what I can have. I dreamt a fantasy, I put into action a simplicity.”

“That dreaming sounds like something you want,” I said. “You should go to sleep.”

“I only have a single bed,” she said.

“You’re OK with me sleeping on your couch?” I asked. I wasn’t too far from home but the thought of walking through the night filled me with a coldness that would pale in comparison to what I’d feel if I abandoned that apartment.

She stood. “I’ll get you a duvet,” she said. She walked out slowly and I took out my phone to set an alarm. There were thirty-seven missed calls from my mother. Our agreement was that I would call every evening but I was so caught up in feeling an escape that night... I set the alarm in time for my walk to the hospital and told myself I’d call her after I met with the nurse.

Niamh walked back in carrying a duvet and some pillows. She set everything down next to me, picked up the bag of ice and set it in the sink, then walked towards the hallway leading from the kitchen. “Do you want the light off?” she asked. All I could do was nod. “If you’re cold during the night wake me,” she said.

As I turned over in my blackness, all the more dark from seeing it with the street-lights outside, I pulled the duvet into me. The thoughts of my mother’s anger over the unanswered calls would normally have bothered me, shook me, but the reason I felt as isolated as I’d ever been in my life was knowing Niamh was sleeping just a few doors away. And I couldn’t join her, couldn’t be with her, couldn’t be there for her as she had been for me. How I couldn’t be to myself what she seemed to be for all.15

Index - Moment 6