The Sky is blue, but in the heart is rain and darkness

It comes in sudden downpours of anxiety that no amount of Macs could weather. Even the man who installed the Sky can’t help the rain

THE RAIN IS still getting me down. But that’s not unusual. It’s always raining inside me. The external world is only a projection of how I feel. The dampness soaks into my psyche, and rots the imagination. Inside me, it rains like it rains in the films of Béla Tarr.

Rain batters me emotionally. It comes in sudden downpours of anxiety. I don’t have a single dry field in my heart where a bright emotion might grow. The sun has abandoned my bones and rain obliterates my hopes. And I am underneath it like a lizard in the cold swamp of a limited life. And yet I think of lizards as fish with big imaginations; they escaped from beneath the sea.

So I decided to get Sky. A young man came to put a dish on the roof and a box under the television. He’s from Poland but he lives in Longford. When he was finished, we sat on the patio and talked of iPhones, and Steve Jobs. “Jobs was an artist,” he said. “Someone who invented beautiful things.” So I showed him the laptop I bought in Chicago in 1994, a Macintosh Powerbook 160, and we plugged it in to see if it was still working.

It was raining in Leitrim in 1994, and the dry skies of mid-America attracted me. It was hot at O’Hare Airport, in Chicago, but the taxi man, a moustached gent from Mumbai, said it would get cooler later in the evening. It didn’t.

I stayed in an apartment by the lake that belonged to a friend who was tired of the heat and had gone to the mountains of Colorado to imagine something different. She posted me keys and details about how to open doors, how to work the lights on the landing, and what not to do with the fridge. “Don’t lift the kettle off the ring without a towel,” she wrote.

And she gave me a number for Natasha, a friend of hers, if I needed help. I did.

I got into the apartment but I couldn’t work the air conditioning and in the morning the sheets on the bed were dripping wet. I showered and phoned Natasha. We met in a restaurant at one. She was in her 30s, a bundled woolly creature from Russia, with enormous amber eyes, and a chaotic mop of black hair streaked with grey.

She was beautiful in a compassionate and anarchic sort of way.

I counted three layers of cardigan around her body as she ordered omelettes and rashers and lectured the waitress as to how she wanted her bacon.

“Give it to me raw,” she said, “I can’t understand why Americans burn their rashers.” We ate in silence.

“Do you believe in God?” she wondered. “Why does everyone ask me that question?” I replied. Other men get asked about sport or sex but all anyone ever asks me is what do I think about the nature of the universe. We were on the sidewalk later when she said, “I suffer depression.” In those years I didn’t realise that I had the same problem, but I said, “Depression is okay,” because I thought such affinity might lead to a few cool beers in some nearby bar, as the heat melted the traffic lights.

“I have music lesson,” she said. “I teach violin. What are you going to do?” “I’m going to shop for a computer,” I said. Which I did, without success, but that night she phoned and said, “I have a friend will sell you computer.” And they came over with the Macintosh and I bought it.

They didn’t stay for coffee but I walked them down the stairwell and stood at the door as they fumbled on to the footpath, the wind blowing layers of cardigan around Natasha.

THAT WAS ALMOST 20 years ago. Now I have an iMac and a MacBook, and the man who installed the Sky took a photograph of the old laptop and said that if I held on to it for another short while it might be worth money. I said the money wouldn’t interest me. But to me it’s very precious.

When he was gone I turned on the television and flicked through 500 channels until I finally found an old film with blue skies, and I sat by the fire and watched it all evening, while the rain outside continued to enfold Leitrim in its wet embrace.

But I didn’t care. Blue was oozing from the Skybox and that gave me hope.