My Soul is a horse

This story was submitted for the RTÉ Francis Mcmanus Award 2005, and was broadcast on RTÉ Radio One. Pádraig Standún is a priest and novelist who has had novels published in English and Irish,as well as writing for theatre, television and magazines.

My soul is a horse. A wild stallion in a mountain valley, never tamed, never trained, never shod, never broken. My soul runs free. I catch glimpses of it as it gallops, turns, paws earth, slows down, eats grass contentedly. Its lively head swings to attention at the slightest sound of the unusual. That glimpse done I let it be. I know that all is well. My soul is free.

I am a mouse. I live in a house. I own the deeds. I am comfortable. Three up, (one en-suite) two down, a walled garden. I am prisoner, warder and governor all in one. I hide. I am scared of life. Life is a prowling cat. It terrorizes me, catches me, plays with me, tosses me up in the air. I wait for the comfort of the kill but it doesn't come. Life prefers to play, to bide its time. The kill will come.

I am not always afraid at night. I sometimes slip out for a walk. I like the dark separating ahead of my torch in the shadowy places between the lampposts. I feel the air, sometimes the rain on my face. I smell the smells, honeyed hedges, suburban compost, raw rubbish, dog droppings, smoky chimneys, beery breaths. Nobody sees my hooded face. I am a mouse but I see my stallion-soul gallop in the valley.

My beloved has a square face. My partner is a computer. It sits on my desk and carries out my wishes. It protects me from people. It earns my living such as it is. I translate. Instruction manuals. Books nobody reads. I know because that is how I have fun. I change the instructions. Not in a serious way. I don't want to have anyone's blood on my screen. Little things. Screw left rather than right. I screw things up as best I can. The mouse roars but nobody notices.

My partner does the shopping online. Deliveries are left at the door. The 21st century is the recluse's dream. There is no need to meet anyone. The web is the world. The nightmare scenario is the technical breakdown. It means planning. The key in the door. The danger of theft. Unlikely however, as the technician would be the prime suspect. So far so good.

I am not a suburban hermit. That would imply a belief, a reason, a God. Not on my agenda. Doesn't enter the equation. Don't know, don't care either way. Unless it is the stallion pawing in the green valley between the blue mountains, occasionally glimpsed and gone. Beautiful. Unreachable. Mine.

My house is my mother's womb, safe and warm. It is my womb too, dry and arid. How it feels depends on the day, the humour, the hormones maybe. Things beyond our control. The way we wake up, the previous night's dream, the story on the news, the words that are beyond translation. The hand life deals each day.

There is a sense in which I have chosen my life. I have dealt my own hand. My choice has nothing to do with childhood trauma. I have not been abused, physically, mentally, sexually. I have just run away and kept running. I don't really have any explanation except that I am a mouse. I need to hide.

I was called "mouse" at school. Because of my hair I think, wispy and lank, mousy. I was quiet, kept to myself, never raised my voice. I was bullied I suppose, but did not think of it like that then. I had intended to get my revenge. I would pay them all back when I grew up and became a rat. I thought a rat was a big mouse, and I knew that rats were nasty.

Mick Joyce was our neighbour. He was old and ugly. He had been a ratcatcher in Liverpool when he was young. He told stories of working at the docks where the flour was stored. He caught rats by hand. Caught them, shook them, broke their necks with a flick of the wrist. He would show us his hand: "That wrist is better than a terrier. One shake, dead rat."

Then the rats got him, got their revenge. Mick was at the potato pit when he saw the rat looking him in the eye. His wrist was old and didn't flick any more. The rat got to the artery in his wrist before he got to the rat. He bled to death, crumbled in a heap across his potatoes. Golden wonders they were, red wonders when he was found. I can't say I'm sure about the rat looking him in the eye. That is just the way I have worked things out, the way I saw it in my mind's eye.

We were in the field another day cutting barley. My father and uncle had scythes. My cousin and I tied the sheaves. Then we saw the rat. My cousin tried to jump on it, crush it with his heel. He landed on the rat's tail and before you could blink the rat had wriggled free and ran up inside the leg of his trousers. He caught it on his thigh and my father and uncle managed to squeeze it to death before it got any further and started to bite. I laughed until I felt sick. I was hysterical. Then my cousin fainted and I stopped laughing.

I thought of Mick Joyce in a crumpled heap on his potato pit and I thought the rat had finished Patrick. He woke up then, but he was pale and he tied no more sheaves that day. He sat on the headland with his head hanging down to his knees. When my mother brought fried egg sandwiches and bottles of tea in big stockings Patrick got sick. None of us could eat, even though no meal matches what you eat outdoors.

I loved Patrick. He was my cousin but there was a song then about "kissin cousins", and I hoped that he would kiss me. I used to love to sit beside him at the dinner table when the day's work was done. Our hands nearly touched once as we reached for the beetroot. I tingled. I longed for his touch. It might have been then that I saw the horses running free through the valley, shoulder to shoulder, side by side. I knew a way could be found even for cousins to marry. A dispensation. We were told about it at school. We would be happy ever after. I had no doubt about that.

He never did kiss me. When he made my cousin pregnant that summer I was sorry the rat in his trousers leg had not reached its destination. She was even mousier than I was, small and fat. I had been shaping into a woman and had seen the way he looked at me. Looked and looked away but admired what he saw. She must have thrown herself at him.

It was all covered up of course. She was sent to "finishing school" up the country and was home by Easter as thin as a whippet. Well, as thin as a woman built for childbearing can be. We never talked about it. We never talked much about anything. She married at 18. A man of 35. No doubt they have a houseful of children. A rabbit in mouse clothing.

Idanced with Patrick at her wedding. It was the last time I saw him, the last time I saw any of them. It was a long time ago. I wondered what I had seen in him. A teenage crush, I suppose. I was the one crushed. The others got on with life. The mouse retreated, disappeared, hid, died to the world, lived only in the wild horse tossing its mane in the green valley between the blue mountains. There was only one horse in the picture now.

I doubt if any of them know that I am back in Ireland. In a house with a sea view overlooking Dublin Bay. A house of my own. A cage. A prison. A palace. The womb of my world. An existence eked, a small fortune made from what was a cheap house in London 25 years ago. I am what is known as middle aged, and even though I am probably at the upper end of that scale, I could go on for a long time yet. I might just be halfway through with half a century to go.

I was always healthy. I did not abuse my body with any of the substances or pastimes that pass for pleasure. Now that the tiresome monthly mess has ended I see a long comfortable home straight stretch ahead of me. I intend to become more daring in my translations. Add a touch of spice, send a few DIY merchants off on a bit of a tangent. Enjoy myself.

I have offered my services in the translation of government documents. Business strictly by e-mail and internet. Irish was my best school subject and although I am rusty now I have dictionaries and know the grammar by heart. The Irish version is sacrosanct in the wording of Bills. Constitutional issues hang on the dot of an "i" or the placing of a síneadh fada. The mouse will have real power in the country even though it never did grow up to be a rat.

I remember the day my father shot the rat from the kitchen window. It was eating with the chickens, its bright eyes on the watchout for the cat. Double-barrelled danger was closer at hand. The shots from five feet buried all but its tail in the ground and left one chicken without a toe. "Ah, the poor mouse," I said, seeing in it a bigger version of myself.

It was explained to me then that a mouse would never become a rat. I was disappointed, but then disappointment is a staple of life. It reminded me of the ugly duckling story. What was so great about being a swan anyway? If I was a duck the last thing I would want was to look like a big goose. I no longer wanted to grow up to be a rat. Being a mouse was fine as long as I had my horse, running wild and free.

I went away to see the world but saw little more than London, and little enough of that apart from Kentish Town. I learned a few skills, what was known then as a commercial course, shorthand, typing, book keeping. Upgraded later to include the computer which would eventually set me free me from human contact, human need, from people.

I see people's images on the television screen. That is the way I like them. Images. Souls without bodies. I follow the soap stories, laugh at the lives, the lies, the superficiality. I look at the news and wonder which is real, the soap story or the spun political tale. They blend together so that it does not matter. I will not be voting for any of them, but I intend to have a hand in framing of the law of the land. This mouse will leave its mark, a few small droppings in the cupboard of history.

My soul has a body, the lean athletic body of a wild stallion. I see it cool off among the tall green ferns on the hillside in summer. It warms its blood by galloping on the frost-hard soil of winter. It faces each new day with dignity and pride, its head high, its neigh at once a welcome and a warning. The winged horse soars high above the valley. It carries all the hopes and dreams of the mouse that hides in the undergrowth.

Pádraig Standún is a priest and novelist who has had novels published in English and Irish, as well as writing for theatre, television and magazines. He is currently working on a memoir of his 30 years as a priest and writer in the islands and Gaeltacht areas of the West of Ireland. This story was for the RTÉ Francis McManus Award 2005, and was broadcast on RTÉ Radio One