Cherry Smyth Intro

 

 

In August 2004 Adrian Fox organised a Summer School 

for Writers at the Millennium Court Arts centre and invited myself 

and American poet Patricia Clark to come and lead workshops and

read from our work. Adrian is good at the job of getting others to write, 

to dig down into themselves and bring up treasure. He's a born teacher, 

an enthusiast for truth and passionate discovery (and recovery) through poetry. 

He's not interested in fancy techniques or shallow prettiness. Patricia and I soon 

realized that his regular students had been primed to expect the  toughest teaching 

there is where the teacher has to be direct, totally open and full of faith. 



 

One afternoon, in his office during the break, Adrian pointed something out to me, 

across the back lane behind the arts centre in Portadown. There was a boarded-up, 

disused building. One of the casement windows had been boarded up inside but 

a small windowpane lay open at the top. Pigeons had flown in and become trapped 

behind the glass. They had died in struggle and were collecting in a soft grey pile 

at the bottom of the window. We watched this horrible vitrine

 

for a few minutes. Then Adrian told me how he'd been over to the building 

and had thrown stones at the glass to try and smash it and release the birds. 



When Adrian suffered a huge almighty stroke in April 2005, he was unable

 to move or speak or swallow at first. I was haunted by that image of the trapped birds. 

Adrian demanded that visitors read him poetry and show him paintings and he began 

to write and paint. He used art to break the glass of his vastly different world.

 

 

A man sat in corridor in a wheelchair by a hospital stroke ward watching nature out there in the trees.

All the other brain injured patients were watching daytime T.V.  He was put out there because he

laughed too much at the other patients who sometimes thought they were mickey mouse or on other

days they were the president of the united states.  He was there at the window because that’s where

He wanted to be, trying to find memory that was taken from him during stroke.

His long-term memory was shot away, he couldn’t remember eighteen years of marriage or three sons  

being born he woke from the stroke like a new born being formed with only the word positive in his

brain.  He had what’s medically called locked in syndrome:  where a person has no form of

communication, he could only blink his eyes, one for yes two for no, paralyzed down the right side.

The consultant asked, ‘can you move your arms, can you speak’, he seen the word come from his

Mind, it was right there on the tip of his tongue, but it could not form to say hello.

He knew who his brother and sisters and his ex-wife even his girlfriend when they came in but

He couldn’t remember his own childhood.  All his limbs were intact, but he felt like he had, an accident

But couldn’t explain why he was paralyzed without speech unable to walk, it was surreal.

 

He thought that he would drift out in a wooden box, the people all around him were dropping dead.

The girl from speech and language and the occupational therapist kept him out of the dark telling him

what was happening because he hadn’t got a clue.  He stayed there for a year recovering speech, O.T.

and physio everyday learning how to brush his teeth and wipe his own ass.

At first, he thought the nurses were out to kill him because he had nothing in his mind, he couldn’t

comprehend emotion after a time he began to trust but at the beginning he couldn’t form any emotion

It was as if his hard drive was wiped clean.  Friends and family called and gave him back some sort of life

But he still couldn’t remember what he was about.  Before he took the stroke, he was a father and a

teacher but all he could remember was waking during some sort of hallucination, a man stood behind

the hospital bad cutting up bodies with a chainsaw and tossing the body parts in a skip.

They say he died in intensive care and woke just seconds later from a stroke/coma, he never put his life

spurt back to any divine intervention or miraculous awakening, he never seen no light that he was

drawn to, he reckons that his love and his love for his children was so strong and without hatred in his

heart that took him back into existence.

THE FOLLOWING WAS WRIT BEFORE MY STROKE, DOESN’T COME FROM MEMORY.

SO, I DON’T KNOW IF ITS TRUE OR FALSE.

 

I never felt the beat of my heart until 

I was six years old, if I felt it before then 

it was only a faint murmur so, I take it that my 

first years were spent in peaceful innocence.  

Mum said I was a laid-back child if my high chair 

was piled with food, dad said he was lazy needed, 

too much attention suppose I was somewhere 

between both.

My heart beat like never-before, it felt like my

 body was vibrating with fear, reluctantly 

I stumbled up the mobile staircase, mother’s 

strength tugging my arm as I stopped taking 

in the sight of the massive steel bird, aeroplane,

holding the rail, white knuckled like the branch of a tree when falling, a life saver.  On reaching the platform my mother turned to me and reassured him that everything would be alright.  Seeing the fright written on his grimaced face and the buildup of tears, she took him in her arms, he clung to her like a leech so close their heart’s entwined. 

 

This was his first time on an airplane, flying to Belfast of all places with his head stuck in a second sick bag, as if Ihe had been given a premonition of what the future had in store, as if I knew that this heart beat would be the norm for thirty years, the year was nineteen sixty-seven.

 

THE LIFE OF REILLY

 

by Adrian Fox

 

Mickey Reilly sat on his single bed looking out onto the busy road. The dark nights were slowly creeping in as the lights of the traffic flickered through the rain splattered window. His computer dimly lit up the tiny bed-sit behind him, his library of music was shuffling through the 722 songs he had downloaded and stored there. The raw bass of Damaged Goods by Gang of Four played imperceptibly at the back of his mind.

 

He was re-enacting a scene. He was walking through St Anne's park smoking a cigarette as he passed the band stand where the local acts played a free summer festival. He fixed the length of blue nylon rope—burnt at both ends to stop it fraying—around his neck and tucked the ends into his bomber jacket. He zipped it up to his neck.

 

It was a crisp winter’s night and the stars glowed clearly above him. As he walked through the arches of the rose gardens, he saw a puff of smoke rising from a figure seated at the bench. The man turned to look up, and Mickey noticed the white strip around his neck shining like a star.

 

"What about ya, father?” he said. “Lovely night.”

 

“Yeah it is, son. Been sitting here watching the stars and listening to the sea out there beyond the darkness. Come and sit down here son and listen,” he said, patting the seat beside him.

 

Mickey took a drag off his fag, looking at the old man for a second, then settled in beside him. He rested his arm across the back of the bench and shifted his right foot over his left knee, inching closer to the dark figure.

 

"Can I have one of your smokes, Father?” he asked.

 

“Have you no more smokes son?” asked the priest.

 

“No Father, I've got fifty pence to my name.” Mickey took the piece out his pocket and flicked into the air. It dropped dully in his palm.

 

"I could tell you a story about a fifty pence piece just like this one, Father.”

 

"I'm sure you could, son', said the priest handing him a cigarette. He dug a lighter out of his coat pocked and reached over to light Mick's cigarette. The flame illuminated the darkness between them. Looking deep into the priest’s eyes, Mickey pulled back on his right arm and let it collide like a hammer with the side of the priest’s head. He opened his jacket and pulled out the rope, found its centre and dragged it through the priest’s teeth from behind like a bit in a horse’s mouth. He crossed the end of the rope and laced it across his back to bind the priest’s hands and place him back on the bench. The priest began to come to he sat on the bench beside him, his arms wrapped tightly around him.

 

“Now Father, I want you to shut the fuck up so I can tell you a story about a fifty pence piece just like this one,” he said, flicking it through the air to land in his palm.

 

He took the blank "Black n' Red" A4 notebook from the shelf above his bed between a small selection of books and CDs. A thin volume of Baudelaire's poems fell on the bed. As he lifted it to put it back on the shelf, his eye caught something on the page and he began to read it out loud. “To the Reader: stupidity, delusion, selfishness and lust torment our bodies and possess our minds.”

 

He discarded the book and opened the Black n’ Red notebook. He flicked it open to the first blank page, signed his name and the date. He looked at the page littered with lines until the lines began to merge into an image. He blinked his eyes like someone waking from a dream, not believing what they have seen and trying to capture it again. He lifted the pen and began to write.

 

The rain beat off the window outside like the rhythm of the pen, the ink catching a tiny glimmer of light moving across the page before it dried into reality. He was twelve in 1972. It was a Sunday. One of the gang said lets rob the egg factory. He couldn't remember if it was Hardbap or Haggis who suggested it but they sprang into action and got together a couple of giders and old prams and headed off to rob the place. They broke in through a back window, but had no way out through the smashed window with the boxes of eggs. With all the eggs they couldn't take they had a riot in the massive factory space.

 

Mickey unleashed the fork lift from its power point where it was charging and crashed it into ev