In the name of God what is the matter with this child? For ten minutes the eldest of Hannah’s three sons, eight years old back at the start of summer, has been sitting and staring at clouds. It is the autumn of 1977, a Sunday afternoon, and at Gabriel’s coaxing they have bundled the boys onto a 16A bus, got off near Parnell Square and then into the Hugh Lane Gallery with them to see these clouds and all the rest of it. Rosc ’77, Gabriel says. Do you not remember Rosc ’67, when we met at the museum and saw the Tara Brooch and the Ardagh Chalice, and then out to the RDS to look at the other half – there was the painting of a man in a big black armchair, that you said had the look of my da. She did, she did: the dark smeary look of a man with a second ball of malt inside him and a whole load of disapproval he wants you to hear about. (Corner boys from the housing scheme who insulted him on the road. Another letter from the Brits refusing him his rightful pension.) Was that ten years ago? A week before Christmas, when for the last time she left the office early and took the train down to Tralee to spend the couple of days at home. The wedding planned for next July, the house already found at the Kimmage end of Harold’s Cross, spitting distance from Gabriel’s parents and his sister – what was he thinking, a man of nearly forty? Ideas of his own, though, nursed above in that narrow bedroom for years, hard at his studies while the rest of them were downstairs griping away about something. Ideas he had above and beyond: how they ended up spending their final afternoon together before Christmas haring around the RDS, no horsey gear or ideal homes on show this time of year, no hairy blankets or pot-bellied brown tea sets from Kilkenny Design, like articles you’d find in a bog. No, they were here on the lookout, said Gabriel, for one painting by Francis Bacon, which when they found it he denied looked anything like his da. Universal, he said. Suffering, he said. And a Happy Christmas to you too, Gabriel. Before they left the exhibition he bought the catalogue that went with it, and long after they were married she would sometimes spot the book in one of the piles he made in the bedroom or beside his chair in the evening, and she would open it at that page, Study for a Portrait on a Revolving Chair, and remember Gabriel’s long strides through the gallery to find it.

Are there not enough clouds in the sky itself, pet? Her eldest is still there – what’s the word? Transfixed, stupefied, spellbound, rapt. The head stuck out sheepdog style. (Sometimes at home you would look down to the sea from the front gate as the fog came in, and in the bottom field you couldn’t tell what was sheep and what was low cloud, stalking.) Peculiar sort of picture for the boy to get so beguiled by – nothing in it but clouds, edge to edge a creamy grey mass and the whole thing a couple of yards tall, even wider. Like watching a film. What is he thinking? Very like a whale. Says he dreams a lot of nights about flying: is that it? Is her little one aloft in his mind right now, Superboy speeding into the pale shroud? Only last week he says I wish I was never born. Thought that was a good one, and so did Mrs. Quaile in the shop later in the day. Hannah is not sure she should have said that, with the pitiful look on him after, but she was hoping to shake him out of it. What are you looking for, boy of mine, in there among the clouds, twenty-four square feet of painted limbo? Leave him to his daydream for the moment; she moves off into the next room with the five-year-old’s hand in hers.

Half an hour since they came into the gallery, and all that time a noise, nearly musical, has been disquieting her and drawing her on. Rust and granite, sound like an old gate hitting a stone wall. Clangorous – is that a word? Clang isn’t right though, is it? Clang-ang-ang-thud-thrump-thing. No, not that either. Tzkzcskzziiiiinnnnggggzzzzrrrrmmmmmppppiiiiiiiitztztz. Good game for the boys: spell out what this sound sounds like to you. Onomatopoeia, how are you! What is this infernal racket, as Gabriel might say? Funny how a phrase you meant as only a cod, pretend pompous, gets itself stuck in the mind and mouth, and you start to sound actually intolerant and old and full of yourself. She is sure that she has her own, blurting them out now when the boys torment her. You’d break the heart in a stone.

In the new room, a wall of blank (are they blank?) canvases: how many ways can you dream of putting a frame around nothing at all? Light blaring in from the square outside, and the wall opposite the big sash windows looks bright and bare. But here’s where the noise is coming from: a rectangle of white, just like the paintings (are they paintings?), from the upper part of which is suspended by wire a long piece of metal like a giant needle, and this swinging back and forth erratically, towards and away from the surface, to meet another wire, horizontal this time, that runs parallel to the bottom edge. And each time they collide, a noise like a child is trailing an empty bucket down a boreen, or some great machine is sparking and humming into electric life. There is a label on the wall, where Hannah reads that this – what would you call it, this thing – was made by Takis, a Greek artist it says, and it is called Electro-Magnetic Music. Made of wood, paint, magnet, electromagnet, spark plugs, amplifier, metal wire and needle. Amplifier above so, a circle of holes in the surface. There it goes again. The five-year-old laughs, the way he might laugh at a barking dog: the not human world with its sudden sounds and movements. Each time a thin buzzing as the first attack declines, a wasp behind the lace curtains fading out to midges at dusk as you walk home through heather. Magnets, wire, wood and an amplifier: has this Takis fellow made himself an electric guitar with just the one string – an electric guitar that plays itself? Imagine, this contraption starts blasting out some racket by the Rolling Stones or one of these punk groups or something she would dance to before Gabriel – ‘That’ll Be the Day’, ‘Be-Bop-a-Lula’, ‘Summertime Blues’. Where is Gabriel at this minute, back in the other room with the middle one, the artist of the family, looking for drawings among all this other – foolishness? No, not so sure about that, something more to it.

For two years she has been having guitar lessons. Once a week at first, then every month, except those times she was in Kerry or in hospital. Wednesday afternoon, she drops the boys up the road to their grandfather and Gabriel’s sister, then walks in the direction of Mount Argus to catch a 54A down to Leonard’s Corner, up the stairs to a South Circular bedsit where the guitar teacher lives – a girl of what, twenty-five? The caved-out look of these places, always, like you’re dug into the walls or rafters, glad she lived with the girls in a proper flat at that age. This young one seems already too old for her surroundings – trying to eke things out, Hannah supposes, it can’t be what you’d call a good position, no position at all, just whoever comes up these stairs, word of mouth and advertisements around the place. Imagine the nights though, some pub or club, letting loose with half a dozen other musicians, everything flowing. The teacher still has that hippie look, red hair wild around her plump face. Hannah would miss her as much as the music. Tea on the skinny coffee table between them, the electric fire switched on so that Hannah’s fingers will warm up nicely on the guitar strings. The girl is from Cork and they have plenty to compare – getting on in Dublin, getting home – before Hannah’s guitar comes out of its soft black vinyl case.

Her body rests easily now around the instrument, the way a mist settles around the big stones in the field at Clogher. (Was it gold under there, or the body of some giant?) But those first weeks she could not for the life of her hold the thing right; the guitar was a dead animal in her arms, stiff as a board and all hollowed out. May as well have asked her to pull a drawer from that old dressing table and make music with it. No idea her own limbs could feel so awkward, unattached – bit of a shock to a dancer like her. What did she imagine playing music might be like? That it would come flying from the ends of your fingers, as natural as dancing a jig or reel or doing the twist (not that she ever, only as a laugh)? That it would flow from her the way songs did, still do sometimes? Not a note in the head of any one of her boys, how did that happen? No doubt at all that a girl of hers would have been a beautiful singer. The first task is to learn how to hold a guitar, and when at last it comes to her it’s like leading in a waltz the top half of a department-store dummy – she laughs at how light and in charge she feels. What she did not predict: the guitar held close and precious to her body so that every sound she makes, accidental knocks as well as notes and chords, moves through her, she feels it in her chest, in her belly. Vibrations, like they say the deaf can feel, a sort of hearing without hearing. Was there a sound, Hannah wonders, when they put the electrodes to her head and switched on the current? Flesh and bone humming away in the key of – E, let’s try an E major chord, Hannah, to get us started. Not electric, what is the other thing, acoustic. She looks at the teacher’s left hand and tries to curl three fingers into the same shape, at the first and second frets. Now strum. Hannah rakes the fingernails of her right hand across the strings, one or two of which ring out cleanly, the others buzzing or thumping flatly, no note to speak of. The girl stands up, comes round behind her and shifts Hannah’s fingers closer to the metal frets, pressing them down. More force, less tension. Isn’t that always the way. Try again. The strings all sounding this time. By the way, we’ll come back to it, but take the index finger off there and you’ve got an E minor. Two chords already, imagine, major and minor. How strange the change, and all of that.

Back she would come week after week then, up the stairs to that room with the two granny-looking armchairs, a single bed and a whole kitchen crammed into a cupboard. Passed a lad on the landing once: rangy, Aran jumper, big boots, gave her a wink and he was lucky not to go sailing over the banister. Lesson by lesson there were more chords, strumming patterns, exercises for finding her way around and knowing what note is where. And songs, the teacher’s suggestions – seafaring obsession she seemed to have: ‘Sailing’, ‘Longer Boats’, ‘Michael, Row the Boat Ashore’. Who was that one? The Highwaymen: loads of them strumming away in their suits and ties. Chills the body but not the soul. Plenty of progress the first winter; Gabriel bought her the music stand for Christmas, and more songbooks, though he wouldn’t himself have any draw towards such things. Gabriel, my love, sometimes I think you might even be frightened of music. The next summer, with the two older boys on holiday from the national school around the corner, she would bring the guitar into the back garden and sing to all three of them, and when the two of her sisters living in Dublin came round they would try maybe ‘Amazing Grace’, each finding her home among the harmonies, Hannah’s guitar holding all together. On into autumn and winter went the lessons, colder and colder it got that year until at times she would pull off her gloves above in the bedsit and her hands had turned blue, no chance of playing a thing till they thawed out. And then, the sudden shift she thought from freezing bus ride to warming them at the electric fire, they hurt so much she would make a hames of it. A pair of ragged claws. Christ, just like her father, tears in his eyes when he’d come in from the fields. The family curse.

There is a low bench in the middle of the room, from which she could carry on looking at and listening to Electro-Magnetic Music – the things in here that keep your attention – and she hauls the five-year-old over, but as she sits down he frees his hand and makes a run for this – sculpture, she supposes now. Jesus, boy, don’t. By the time she’s on her feet he’s already there, and with one look back at her, face full of mischief, he takes hold of the big needle and draws it back as far as his short arms will allow. Don’t you dare. Eyes wide, he lets go and turns away as needle and wire come clattering down and whatever circuitry is involved there goes into action and my god the most unholy noise comes out, like powering up a chainsaw and throwing it in an oil drum. The boy jams his fingers in his ears and makes a face, and then laughs and laughs and he’s about to have his second go when she grabs hold of him and drags him back to the bench. A holy show for sure, but now she is laughing too and thinking of all the children and teenagers and their parents and women in berets and serious artistic men in polo necks and blazers who have wanted to do that since Rosc ’77 opened at the end of the summer. Before long Electro-Magnetic Music has returned to its usual rhythms and resonance, but the pair of them are still giggling on the bench when a security guard, is he, or some sort of attendant, comes marching into the room, little fellow with hairy-molly eyebrows and a low forehead, and starts demanding – demanding, mind you – to know what happened and who was responsible. This is an art gallery, not a playground. Very original, very droll, just thought of that one, did you? God help you. String you up there with that wire, see what sort of a musical noise we get out of you. She pulls her blue leather gloves a little tighter and puts a hand on her son’s shoulder. This is nothing to do with us, nothing at all. Would you ever leave us alone. They go off looking for Gabriel and the others.

With music, she has always felt it move through her, whether she’s singing or dancing, listening to a céilí band, the hymns at mass – Gabriel roaring away beside her – her records at home or something on the television: classical, country, that fellow with the lute, was it, the other night, songs from the 1600s, galliards, madrigals, fantasias and the like. In darkness let me dwell. All of it seems to pass through her as if for the time of the dance or the song she is a ghost, all see-through and walk-through, or maybe it’s the world that turns transparent and she moves about with uncommon freedom, the only solid thing in a world of waves. When she sings, when she dances, when she listens, everything is mobile, everything flows. Why it was a shock to pick up the guitar: she loved the sound of it, golden and fine she thought, and then this clumsy thing in her arms, and she suddenly all incapable and embarrassed – imagine, embarrassed! Not a feeling she succumbs to often, as poor Gabriel knows well. Unlike her dear husband, who worries about his dignity. Dance, Gabriel, dance! But then he did, and took to it, and she would let go and be led. All come to life and grace and ease: how can he be such a lovely dancer and not love music? Still, one of those things he hasn’t lost: half his hair and a handful left of his own teeth, but a fine sense of rhythm when the mood takes him. And the boys, she’s tried to get them dancing, afternoons at home in the sitting room with her LPs out and the Pye Playboy going in the corner: Planxty, the Furey Brothers, the Wolfe Tones of course. The older two nearly getting into it before some self-conscious feeling took hold of them, after she came out of hospital – what did they sense about her, exactly? Some of the songs must have got in their bones though. Talk about embarrassment, some people would have died of it that time next door. The English neighbours, a lovely family, had a birthday party for their son, and all the children were meant to do a party piece. What was his name, Seán? He sang Oh my grandfather’s clock was too tall for the shelf so it stood ninety years on the floor. And then our eldest, all full of himself for once, starts off: Armoured cars and tanks and guns came to take away our sons / But every man must stand behind the men behind the wire. All he remembered I suppose, but that was plenty. No one said a word of course – who knows what they were thinking. When she told Gabriel later his main thing was: had she apologized? I’ll wait for the Brits to say sorry. Sounding like her mother then.

More lessons, on into the second year, and for a while her hands were fine, the fingers fleet and nimble even when they got on to picking instead of strumming. ‘Freight Train’, the teacher said, was written by Elizabeth Cotten when she was just a child, but nobody knew it outside of her family and friends until Peggy Seeger heard her singing in the 1950s. Elizabeth returned to the guitar then, playing it upside down, left-handed with the thin, high strings at the top – Cotten picking, how would you manage that? Half the summer of ’76 Hannah picked away right-handed at ‘Freight Train’, getting it right, almost, starting to mumble and hum along the words as she played. When I die, oh bury me deep. Eleven years old when she came up with this song – peculiar thought isn’t it, to be singing the words and the music of a girl like that. Makes her seem like a little ghost somehow, lilting and plucking still, whatever it was happened to Elizabeth Cotten later. Still going, the guitar teacher thought. A break in lessons for the holidays and back in early September, and maybe it was then her hands started up again: it made no sense, still warm outside but cold in that room at the top of the stairs, so that her supple fingers would stiffen and sting. Her playing getting worse as she went along, now that was worth being embarrassed about. At times that autumn she could not even get her hands warm in the bed. Funny at first – Feel this! – but now she was frightened, heard herself pleading with Gabriel. Is this normal?

Oh, but it wasn’t, was it? Not in the least bit normal, it turned out. The old family curse, she learned at the hospital where the doctor sent her eventually, was a problem of the circulation, and it seemed she had an especially cruel case of it, more severe as she got older. There could be complications, they said, like infections and tissue death and gangrene, but she was nowhere near that yet and might never be. Gangrene, Gabriel, fucking gangrene. That was late in the winter, by the time they got an answer, and now here she is, autumn again, her gloves on, for all the good they will do, from the end of August, and the hands turning blue and then white on her for no reason other than pulling a wash out of the machine or sitting in the bath too long, never mind standing at a bus stop or taking the boys to the park or digging out her flower beds again. Since they got back from Kerry she hasn’t had a guitar lesson, cannot imagine going there again to make a fool of herself. A pair of ragged claws is right. Might as well have no fingers whatever when it’s bad, like trying to play with hands that are not your own – the pianist in that old film, horrible thought now – or with a couple of hooks lashed to your stumps, pirate style. When her hands don’t hurt they are practically numb, what good will that be when it comes to putting on your clothes or cooking a meal or writing a letter or touching your husband. At the hospital they said there are special gloves she can buy, heated, with a battery pack you wear at the waist. Stylish. And will these doctors not be content till they have electrified every inch of her? Till she rises from the hospital bed with sparks flying from her extremities? Till she is deadly to the touch? Fire me up Gabriel, but stand clear, it’ll be quite a show.

No more lessons – she can’t stand to pick up the guitar. Revels now are ended. Still it goes on in her head, like the thing might play itself, or is it as if, yes, she is the instrument now, the music sounding inside her skull. When she wakes up in the night she stares into the dark and sees and hears and feels the fingers of her left hand on the fretboard, finding the chords she has not played for weeks, and discovering new shapes: here is the root, the third, the fifth, the octave. Flatten, sharpen. Augment, diminish. Is that it, so? Making music only in imagination, ghost hand strumming and a feeling in her chest like but not like the vibrations of wood and wire? Never able to get the notes out of her head and into the air – she can sing, of course, but not the same. Chords and melodies caught in there (in here!) like moths in a glass lampshade, heat and dust and desperation. And if she went back to St. Patrick’s and begged, would they hook her up again to their machinery and draw the music out of her with the current – electrodes, cables, ECT machine wired to a tape recorder, big reels turning slowly and fellows in white coats watching needles twitch on dials. Could be famous then, a middle-aged prodigy. Headlines in the papers. Mental Machine Music! My Wife is Wired for Sound! Interviewed on the radio. Well, myself I call it ‘electro-magnetic music’.

She finds Gabriel and the other two looking at a couple of large panels on the wall. On the left, a map of the city centre with St. Stephen’s Green circled in red, and four black-and-white photos of footpaths in the park, a handful of small figures in the distance. On the right, a bigger photograph of a path by the pond, but covered over in something pale. He wants to wrap the paths in golden nylon, Gabriel says, but the Office of Public Works won’t let him. Lovely idea, brighten the place in winter, would give a fine glow to the complexion too, while you follow the yellow brick road. God almighty, here’s the little man again from the gallery, thought she’d got rid of him but he advances now on the lot of them, no time to let Gabriel know what happened in the other room. The youngest holds onto her coat, purses his mouth off to one side as if he could hide his face without turning away. What more can this gobshite want, hasn’t the noise subsided into the usual, as per presumably Mr Takis’s instructions, and isn’t the child at this very moment trying to hide between her legs like a nervous puppy, well shielded from nearby works of art, electro-magnetic and otherwise? But no, the fellow insists on lurking foolishly close to them – foolish because if he’s not careful she will let fly with some colourful words and let him know where to direct his beetley gaze. What would Gabriel do if she whispered to him now that this man keeps staring at her? Would draw himself up no doubt – Disgraceful. But she says nothing, gathers the family about her and clicks her boot heels for them to be off.

To give up music. No, to give up making music only. You think that dancing and singing, listening to records, trying to make your mind and body do this thing that you’ve heard all your life – fiddles and bodhráns and tin whistles in her case – you think that all of this is part of the same spirit moving and swelling inside you and round about you and that it has no end, why would it end, and then before you know it a part of this part of you is stolen away and all the music of the future, the songs you know and might have known, the notes you could even have improvised, imagine, songs of your own, pieces for your own entertainment, no that’s not the word, for your own ecstasy, flight, transfiguration, all of this lies silent and frozen under the sudden snowfall of a stupid fucking diagnosis. Better when it had no name, no prospects. Didn’t stop Daddy, did it? Still out there now with his sheep and Belle in all weathers, can’t wear gloves doing that sort of work, destroyed in one morning anyway, never mind lambing or any time you’d have to get hold of an animal, see what’s the matter with it and so on. Delicate work at times, not the brutal life Gabriel must imagine – fingers in the mouth of a newborn, feeling around hoping for a sound out of it, a single note to say all is well with this one. From what they’ve told her she’s worse off than Daddy, progressing was the word they used. To where, now, and how will she know she’s landed? Wasn’t progressing what she was doing with the guitar? Does she give it away or sell it to the red-haired girl so she can pass it on to some talented child or retired teacher with time on her hands? Or do you leave it there at home in case one of the boys wants to learn? Take it out now and it’d be miles out of tune. My music hellish jarring sounds to banish friendly sleep.

They are leaving the gallery but Hannah tunes back in to Electro-Magnetic Music, she can hear it still behind her, thrumming like a heartbeat but not exactly regular, like something is wrong but God knows it’s trying. She would like that sound to follow them out of the building, wires in the walls and waves in the air all alive and ardent, getting louder now so it startles visitors and begins to worry that annoying man, and we can all five of us feel the vibrations through this marble floor, feel ourselves purring with it, on out into Parnell Square, where the sound bounces and sings off the lampposts, singing in the rain, and burrows itself between paving stones and into the new cables Gabriel says they are laying all over, where the noise rumbles off round the Garden of Remembrance and past the Rotunda Hospital, to the top of O’Connell Street, where shoppers crossing over and teenagers on bicycles and drivers of silent, broken-down buses, but not motorists in their idle or inching-along cars, know dimly that something moves under them, the way every summer in Kerry now, you hear around midday the boom of Concorde going over and the boys look up but never see a thing, and onward the sound goes, across O’Connell Bridge, putting ripples on the ripples of the dirty river, speeding now through Westmoreland Street and over College Green, disconcerting well-heeled women with Brown Thomas bags on Grafton Street and then skittering out across St. Stephen’s Green where it trembles the grasses and the rose bushes by the paths the French artist would have covered in gold, making ducks leap up from the pond and moorhens dart for home in the weeds, and on south towards the canal where perhaps (Hannah herself now flying in her mind) it troubles a heron that has been standing on the bank like a vigilant old man in an overcoat, and now spreads its big silent wings and labours up the air making off, she supposes, for the Dodder river, while the sound, which spreads also in all directions across the city, starts to vex the redbrick outskirts of Ranelagh and Rathmines, the tall houses on Leinster Road and the shops and the church (ah, fuck that parish priest!) in Harold’s Cross, creeping through tidy gardens and cold bedrooms warmed only by a one-bar electric fire that a boy has just switched on and stuck a finger in before it heats up, giving himself a shock, onwards till it finds the house on Shanid Road where resting in a corner of the dining room is Hannah’s useless guitar, whose strings now begin to shiver in affinity with the sound of Electro-Magnetic Music, and though she knows the exhibition can only last so long, she thinks: what if this new sympathetic noise would just carry on forever, the guitar playing quietly in its case, and only she knowing where this music of a sort was coming from, which sometimes lulled her husband and her boys and all the neighbours and all the citizens of this city, and sometimes drove them wild with its tone and tremor – crazy in the knowledge of something they could not place and could never complete.