KILLOYLE WINE & CHEESE A Novel

By Roger Boylan

As that hypocritical old Russian Christian-Socialist millionaire-peasant ascetic-boozer-groper-and-father-of-bastards-beyond-the-counting-of-‘em (don’t laugh, your great-granda could’ve been one) Leo N. Tolstoy, serf-Count and author of W&P and Anna K., never said to the missus over crackly plump sausages, black bread of the holy steppes, thick cream from the sleek cows of Yasnaya Polyana, foamy sweet Caucasian kvass, and/or vodka (certainly not in English, anyway):
Oy! All happy marriages are alike, but each unhappy marriage is unhappy in its own way. (Springs onto table, dances the kazachok.) Hey! Hey!
But he might have. And he’d have been right.
Just take the peculiar case at hand, that of Ferdia and Shirley Quain, inhabitants of the faux-Edwardian pebbledash bungalow at No. 15, Cretino Crescent, Killoyle City, in the lush, verdant, nonexistent southeasternmost of Ireland’s 32+ counties. The Quains’ marriage had a tendency to hit the rocks with the regularity of smokers’ bronchitis in an Irish winter , usually as the result of no obvious cause beyond tempers on the simmer for a day or so beforehand, Ferdia’s layabout indolence (now that he was officially retired as Chief Archivist of the Provisional IRA, Northern Command) and Shirley’s time of the month. But once they went off the rails dramatically, even for them, and it took a trip to America, and Interpol, and a sensational court trial to bring them back together again—sort of. Wait till I tell you.
It came to a head for the first time one night in front of the telly (Bao Dai Days on Channel 4, with special guest stars Lee Bum Suk and Nicolette Tedman). All the aforementioned elements necessary for a grand old bust-up were swarming about in the ether when Shirley, who’d been sneaking sneaky little sidelong glances at Ferdia’s great-dinosaur profile, came to the epiphanic realization that her man was a) “a bloody ex-terrorist” b) “a moron” and c) “bone bloody idle.”
Glaring boldly at him now, she summarized her emotions in a terse exhortation.
“Bugger off, you ‘orrible Fenian sod.”
His own indignant retort to this, once he’d jolted himself awake, was:
“Wha…?”
And when she’d repeated herself,
“Jesus. You’re as bad as a Unionist,” he spluttered.
“Well, I am a Unionist, as it happens. Funny you never asked. Ex-IRA indeed. Silly bastard. Go on, ‘op it.”
Well, that did for it and all, as John Braine, or even one not Braine, or brainy, might have said. But this was the way of it in the marriage of Irish Ferdia Quain (of the Quain clan, long since reduced by circumstances) and English Shirley Soup (of fine old Yorkshire stock).
Ferdia moved out to his cousin Finn’s place, swearing never to return, at least for a good few days.
Or several hours, at least.
“I’ll teach her, so I will.”
In earnest of his seriousness he took his books (23, not counting magazines) with him in his old Rah duffelbag, the one with the Easter lilies on one side, “Poblacht na h-Eireann” on the other; but a week later he moved back in again when Shirl was in less of a wax.
“Sorry, ducks,” she murmured on the phone. “It was my time, you know.”
“Ah sure the hell,” he said, open to anything, even the old game of forgive and forget.
But from the depths of the following month’s monthlies she struck at him again, this time ostensibly on the subject of his hypochondriacal consumption of vitamin tablets and her discovery of a secret cache of four vitamin bottles—containing gelcaps of C, D, E, and a hitherto unknown vitamin named T+, said to be excellent for the gall bladder and the cartilage of the foot area—hidden in the heel of his seldom- (indeed, never-) used Runbucko running shoes, a Christmas gift from his mother-in-law, who’d no use for them, or him.
Shirley held the vitamin bottles high, triumphantly, her eyes glittering.
“What’s this, then?”
“Ah.”
“Go on, what the bloody ‘ell is it?”
Ferdia sat up. He’d been dozing: colourful dreams of, for no apparent reason, China, or Japan. Tatami mats, chopsticks, pagoda roofs. (Or possibly Korea, Land of Morning Calm.)
“Oh them. Vitamins, you know, darlin,’ to offset the effects of the fags and the drink and that. Otherwise I’d have to do God knows what.”
It was a red flag to a very angry bovine.
“Oh, you mean like actually get off your arse,” screamed Shirley, “for a start? And take a walk from time to time? Instead of turning into some whinging gaseous old bedridden pill-popping impotent hypochondriac wanker? God, I can’t believe it, I’m the one who has the real job and all you can talk about is that styew-pid wine and cheese shop of yours that’s no nearer reality now than it was six months ago, meanwhile all you do is stagger from sofa to bed and back if you’re not down the pub with your awful IRA chums, God you are a cretin, aren’t you? Cretin cretin cretin. God you look like a gargoyle, did you know that? I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you.”
Etc.
Ferdia knew it was her time of month again, but even so he reckoned this was a bit over the top.
“Now you listenna me,” he spluttered.
“Go on, ‘op it.”
Later that night he found himself once again, vitamin- and book-heavy duffel bag in hand, at his cousin Finn McCool’s door on the second floor of Lord Thomas Maher Towers, the luxury housing estate on Oxtail Place.
“This time it’s permanent,” he said, glumly.
“Ya never,” said Finn. “Women. Sure they’re a bunch of gacks, so they are. You wait. She’ll come round.”
They entered. Ferd flung himself at the wine rack, stocked by him during his previous sojourn for just such a contingency.
“She’ll come round?” he echoed. “Yes, but will I?” rhetorically inquired he, as the double-jointed fingers of his left hand closed around the neck of a bottle of Chateau-Jaffrey ’98 while with his right he sought the corkscrew.
“Ah yer arse,” commented eloquent Finn.
“Fup,” declared the emergent cork.

* * * *

“No, no buses here. Try a bus company. Goodbye, and don’t call again, or I’ll be really cheesed off—no, really, know what I mean?”
Donal Duddy replaced the handset, his face mottled with angst and high blood pressure as, impatiently, he explored his hollow torso in search of the tell-tale bulge somewhere in his shirt pockets of a packet of Turf Accountant Imperial Ultra-Lite Dual Hyper-Filters . . . Eureka! He found one, but only one, and a poor specimen at that, wrinkled and slightly curved downward, like a limp dick, he thought; or the trajectory of his life. (It never occurred to him, Donal being Duddy and vice versa, to turn the fag around to produce instead an upward-yearning symbol of hope, as in a bland United Nations brochure of eternally mindless optimism and beaming black faces with Crest- (or air-) brushed teeth.)
“Buggersods,” he muttered. “Shiteballs.”
Chewing the air with an obscure and nameless fury, Donal stuck the cigarette in his gob, lit it, inhaled, exhaled, inhaled, exhaled, inhaled, and proceeded in like manner repetitively for some two to three additional nerve-racking minutes, expertly alternating inhalations, intermittent expectorations, and deep-voiced exhalations (“RRRRRRnnnnnnnahhhh”) between mouth and nose whilst all the while contemplating (for approximately—no, precisely—the 25th time that day) the not-so-great outdoors, Duddy’s corner of which embraced not sun-dappled uplands nor sweeping vistas of the sea nor mighty herds of eland on the veldt; rather, a grey stone wall across the way adorned with moss, the streaked remnants of an old pop concert poster or two and (the main attraction) ineptly-painted renderings of Northern hunger strikers Sean Pease, Petey Partridge and Oinsias “Socks” MacPayne. The wall was a magnet for tourists of a republican persuasion and a subject of total indifference to Duddy, who was of no particular persuasion except neo-alcoholic. Immediately to hand, in the forefront of his vision, was a sight of greater significance to him: a carpark littered with cars, all for sale, or if not, for hire. The place had a sad, even poignant gestalt for Killoyle-born Donal Duddy. Laid off temporarily as an assistant lecturer in “Anglo-Irish and -Saxon Literature Studies or Whatever 101” at Downstairs State College in New Ur of the Chaldees, Ohiowa, he had come home again upon the death of his aged (81) father, known as “Dad,” ex-president of the Southern Counties Bank long-ill-esteemed by all; and, what with the subsequent windfall (the family house plus £70 large, give or take), Donal had soon made numerous evanescent investments in a bad marriage with Jen, a woman with the thighs and buttocks of an Aphrodite Callipygos but (in Donal’s words, screamed by him that final night in the doorway of Mad Molloy’s Poteen and Wine Bar, the new hot spot down on the Strand) “the mind and morals of Himmler—yes that Himmler, do you know any others? In Torremolinos, eh? Well, it’s Heinrich I’m talking about, not Nico”; adulterated drugs, impelled by the hope of seeing phantasms of the eye drawn out by the fierce chemistry of dreams into insufferable splendour (no go, just heart palpitations, a touch of eczema, and a bad case of the jigs); striped fur coats afflicted with moth-mange; fast but unreliable cars, all of British manufacture; sagging real estate in and around Big Sinkhole, Fla.; and finally a Manx divorce from Jen and a long sojourn in the confines of a Co. Meath detox clinic (Dr. Matthew Mole’s, The Larches, near Navan ).
Oh it was the bit of an old slump lifewise, you might say, but:
“Right, then,” had been Donal Duddy’s can-do response, as soon as he found himself outside Dr. Mole’s gates, watching the ceaseless traffic of the Dublin-bound down the Navan road. “Cars are the men, me butty.” As a result, after tugging the odd Dad-inherited connection, he was soon assistant under-manager of a used-car business owned by a mostly absentee chap named Byrne up in Dublin. The business was named Heartland Autos, which name Donal took to be a good omen; for did it not seem at first blush to be a fortuitous homage to his former (and future, he hoped) home in America’s heartland, the great Midwest? The woods, the barns, the luminous prairie…and aah the purling waters of the mighty Wabash? Whereas in mundane fact it paid homage to nothing of greater consequence than the previous owner’s favourite pop group, Basil, Heartland and Snicks, whose 1999 hit single “I’m in Sync With Your Hips” had topped the charts for nineteen weeks running and had swept the Gobbovision awards the following year .
In any case, the place was conveniently located for potential customers, being just off the Uphill Street extension in the northern district of Killoyle.
“WAAAAWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW yummm,” yawned Donal, hippopotamianly. Desperate in the midst of his enforced idleness he picked up his well-thumbed copy of Bookhead, the lit-crit mag, and turned to the agony column.
“Dear Bookhead,”wrote T. T. in Athlone, Pennsylvania, “I had a crush on Vincent Altomonti, the deconstructionist. I e-mailed him verses from a. a. lemmings and Thom Bunn and Sylvie Plank and even tried to call him up on the phone, all to no avail. He hung up on me, with a very rude noise that sounded like steam escaping from a radiator—you know, the kind you get in old tenement buildings in like New York City? Anyway, I felt really spurned, as if I were an HIV carrier, or a Republican. Then, on his birthday (the 22nd: he’s a Virgo, just like me) I sent him flowers, c/o the English Dept. at Jeffersonia University. One day—one terrible day—I went to the front door and a police officer was standing there, and before I knew it there I was, spreadeagled face down . . .”
The possibility of further perusal of this fascinating tripe was negated by the phone, which rang, or rather, hooted, again, binding Donal tightly in the agony of having to a) answer it and b) communicate with strangers. He was, after all, the only potential phone-answerer on the premises, what with the total number of staff at Heartland Autos PLC having temporarily shrunk to one—himself—after Declan and Nasir, his two colleagues (assistant manager and head of sales respectively), had got themselves arrested for cocaine and heroin trafficking, the silly sods, and been sent off to serve one to three-and-a-half without the option in Shelton Abbey. It had been a tense few days. Donal himself had been subjected to questioning and, as a former drug addict, over the course of a week or so he’d been a bit roughed up round the edges, not to say manhandled verbally, by a nasty specimen named Sherlock Neame (the bastard), Inspector or something of the local Gardai Siochana (the nasty fuckers).
“Drugs, eh?” Neame had growled, making a fist. “Drugs, eh, you narky Yank?” Donal shivered at the memory.
The phone continued to importune in its mindless way—HOOOOOT [pause] HOOOOOOT [pause]— and seemed capable of emitting identical double-hoots until the Day of Judgment unless picked up—HOOOOOT [pause]—HOOOOOOT . . .
“HELLO THANK YOU FOR CALLING HEARTLAND AUTOS WE ADVANCE CREDIT DONAL DUDDY SPEAKING HOW MAY I HELP YOU?”
Actually, this time, once he’d got started, Donal responded with surprising fluency, even courtesy.
(It was a female voice, you see.)
“Yes, madam, each vehicle is thoroughly tested and valeted before being sold,” he awoke to hear himself saying by the tail end of the conversation, the beginning of which he had missed entirely, or already forgotten. Such on-the-spot blackouts were common among former drug addicts, he’d been told, although personally he put it down half the time to plain old mind-blowing boredom with whatever was being discussed . . .Vans? Saloons? Two-door dropheads? For the life of him he couldn’t remember, but whatever it was, she wanted it now.
“I’m going away on holiday with my fiance,” she explained. “Do you have a Web page?”
“Ah. Working on it. Up soon.”
“Well, are you open today?”
“Of course I’m bloo . . .” Donal reined in his traditional Irish ire, not to say irascibility. “Yes, madam, yes indeed, open as can be, open to one and all. Until nine of the p.m, or twenty-one hundred hours. First left after you turn off Uphill Street. Thank you, madam. Do drop in.” (The bleary bloodshot image of a bar named the Dew Drop Inn on the south side of New Ur of the Chaldees, Ohiowa, wobbled in front of his red-rimmed mind’s eye.) It sounded promising, right enough, and there was the faintest hint of a purr in the gal’s voice that sent shivers of a different sort elsewhere than the spine... too, Duddy reminded himself sternly, a deal would be good for business. He might end the day by actually selling a car.
. . but then, as an ex-drug addict and all-round failure in every walk of life inclusive, what did he know about anything at all, at all?
“Sweet Fanny Adams,” he muttered to himself, “is the truth of it.”
Brooding, he witnessed with abating pleasure the fading light of the gloomy gloaming leeching away the colour from the Hunger Strikers’ faces, which slowly faded but for incongruously toothy smiles that lingered briefly in the shadows like those of three Cheshire Cats. Twilight drew in its cobalt cloak (metallic-grey actually, just like the
colour of that almost-new Spratt-Mondale GLX with twin turbochargers he’d been trying to move for a fortnight already) and got Donal to thinking wistfully of places and things he remembered, like the covered bridges of western Ohiowa and the fat sluggish galleons of Midwestern thunderclouds bellying across the Ruysdael skies and the towering stalks of maize marching to the horizon in the slanting Raphael sunlight (or was that corn? Never could tell one from the other, or t’other as they said quaintly in the alluvial plain of the Wabash River and environs)…and yet Ireland, home of the meandering boreen and the clay pipe and the Little People, and an absolutely sickening surfeit of twinkling-eyed flute-tootling stout-quaffing anti-nuclear free-loving long-legged red-haired folklorists (and by the way, just to set the record straight, Donal Duddy was not then, nor had he ever been, prejudiced in any way, shape or form against the redheaded—but then he’d never known a single gingernut in all his born days, had he, especially not in Ireland, so there)—Ireland, as we were saying, was a much more modern country than the States, for all her Neolithic passage graves and even more ancient shite!
“True for ya, bugger,” mumbled Donal. He masticated nullity, negatively. His thoughts had swerved well away from the great unsold mass of automotive metal on his lot—not to mention the insufficiently-updated e-account books and so on (he could barely figure out how to turn the bloody computer off, let alone on)—and were even now plunging inward to his own soul—spirit—ka—harmony—yin/yan—mental rubbish tip, etc.
So yes, Ireland, Marbella-visiting, Mateus-bibbing, satellite-TV-watching software haven, was undoubtedly way ahead of the States, and the longer the inhabitants of that great isolated landmass stayed isolated and clued-in to bugger-all bar not eating (or scarfing down) red meat, saving (or shooting) the road runner, shaping (or letting go) their abs and pecs, driving a car with zero (or 100) m.p.g., building defenses against the Federalist-Zionist conspirators (or the Arabs), etc., the more nineteenth-century they were likely to remain in the extremes of their quasi-religious preoccupations, whereas Ireland, as a full-fledged European nation and duly paid-up charter member of the Treaty of Rome, was becoming far more secular, fashionably skeptical, relativistic, sex-obsessed (while pretending not to be), nouvelle-cuisine-eating, in a word: Eurochic.
Not that that was all good, mind you.
“Not that that’s all good, mind you,” Donal repeated, this time aloud, preparing to resume his interactive discourse with Bookhead but inadvertently addressing:
The gal, whose arrival had been as silent as that of the first snow (an infrequent visitor to rainy Killoyle).
“Hello,” she said. “I’m Terpsichore. I called earlier? About a roadster?”
From the male perspective—and that would be Donal’s, entirely—she was a knockout: red haired (at last!), clear-skinned, green eyed and appropriately willowy and well-shaped for one who’d blathered on the phone about instant purchases and debit cards and Mediterranean night clubs (he remembered now, he’d recommended one in Ibiza called Paco’s, God knew why, he’d never been near the place, he’d only read about it in some silly glossy mag called Gloss or Glam or something while he’d been sitting in the Garda anteroom, sphincter puckering with ill-ease, waiting to be summoned by Neame (the bastard)) and holidays with fiances and the tan she sported on the exposed parts of her arms and legs was decidedly unIrish in hue. Her teeth, too, gleamed overmuch for a Celt. And look at the hoop on her. Big enough to get a grip on but without the hint of a sag in either hemisphere, as firm and contoured as a pair of conjoined canteloupes, straining against the imprisoning denim of her Lewis jeans. Surely to God she was wearing falsies fore and aft.
Because if she wasn’t, Donal was a goner.
Well, she wasn’t, so it’ll come as no surprise to either of us that Donal was, in fact, a goner, in love instanter he was, the gawm, starting with her arse and spreading up and out, like.
Anyway, to business: It was indeed a roadster she was after, no surprise there either, the afore-mentioned red Tortuga being pretty much her line of country. Donal feigned delight.
“Five speeds, oh aye. Short throws, brakes like hammerlocks (four-wheel disks fore and aft with antilock on all four wheels you’ll not be surprised to learn), a real pleasure in the twisties,” brayed he outside on the lot, with mawkish and utterly false good humour fighting the rising morass of self-disgust and misery in his soul as desperately as a drowning man fights the sea. “Just a few old quid down God bless ya and you’re away. Oh God,” he muttered, turning aside from his own unbearable mock-cheeriness, mine hearty host with the shadows of despair etched under his eyes. The hunger strikers twinkled at him from the deepening darkness. It was the time of day that was always hardest to take. In the twilight he’d usually get a touch of the shivers, even a quick reel or two of the “movies,” as the ex-drug fraternity called the hallucinations, coincident with a sudden fierce longing for extinction that had to be fended off with, say, a visit to a pub.
“Twisties?”
Donal pledged a grin, shakily.
“Ah. Yes, yes. Narrow highways that effect sudden or abrupt curvature left or right frequently with deleterious effect on mental concentration and/or physical well- being, as in Co. Kerry, say, or the Alps. Highly prized by the boy racers among us as ideal venues to put an automobile’s performance capacities to the test, madam.”
“Well, as a girl racer meself I suppose I’ll have to take ‘er for a spin, yeah?”
“Of course. Mind you, we’ve a nice Spratt-Mondale GLX over there, always garaged, driven round the block infrequently by two nonsmoking old ladies, or were they gentlemen, a right pair of old dears anyhow.”
“Nah. The roadster’s the one.”
Donal bowed, hands poised for clasping, like those of an overly unctuous chamberlain at the court of the Dowager Empress of China (Ming Dynasty); then, suddenly aware of his obsequious demeanor, he put his hands in his pockets and scowled. He’d never quite sussed out the right balance of servility and amour propre you needed in a job that depended completely, after all, on the goodwill and willingness to splurge of total strangers who, being people, were apt to be flattered by handwringing attentiveness and equally likely to take umbrage at its absence, as well as at foolish things like the tilt of your eyeglasses or the cut of your anorak or the lingering afterpong of the fags you smoked—or the fact that you never took your hands out of your pockets, or never put them in, or wore eau de cologne instead of aftershave.
“Of course, madam.”
“Don’t you ‘madam’ me. The name’s Terpsichore. Terpsichore O’Hanlon.”
“Ah. Terpsichore.”
“Nah. Terpsichore.”
“Aha. Terpsi.”
“Right.”
“From Killoyle, are ya?’
“Yeah.”
“Muse of the ah? Dance, is it?”
“Yeah.” She gazed at him intently. “You aren’t Italian, are you?”
“Italian? Good God no. Irish as. Well.”
“Colcannon and boxty with a pint of stout on the side and a fag after.”
“Right. Right.”
Glad that was settled, yet somehow deeply unsettled, Donal handed over the keys.
“I’m Donal,” he ventured boldly, heart fluttering like a caged sparrow. She gave him a tight smile by way of acknowledgment, as if to say “Watch your step you pathetic sex-starved galoot I know what you’re after.” Or words to that effect, such effect being that of a swift kick in the family jewels followed by a slap across the gob. Reminding himself that this was not, after all, the movies, where her character—likely portrayed by some beauteous and excessively-famous lamebrain like Marge Bryan or Lettie Hobsbawm (or Nicolette Tedman, whom she slightly resembled)—would have broadcast hints of absurd future writhings ‘neath tangled bedsheets with a lash-batting comehither and chirpy “Hi, Donal,” Donal stood back, aside, and down, attempting thereby to efface his existence completely from the radar screen of her perception; but Terpsichore O’Hanlon, seemingly (although not, in fact) oblivious, got into the car and proceeded to display her considerable girl-racer capabilities. She shifted and handled the car adeptly, looking all the while like an advert for the blooming Syndicat d’Initiative of St. Tropez or some other Cote d’Azur hot spot (Duddy’s idea of earthly paradise was situated somewhere more or less equidistant between Marseille and Nice: he’d been once, as a laddeen, and always longed to return), right down to the long auburn hair flowing in the brisk breezes of March as the car hugged the corner and she was away at an accelerative rate equal to that of, say, Michael Schumacher at the wheel of a Ferrari on the Westphal straight at the Nürburgring . . . away?
So there she went, the girl in the red Tortuga—hang on a sec (said Donal to himself) “The Girl in The Red Tortuga” sounds like a shimmying sexy Brazilian beach-song of the Ipanema variety, doesn’t it?

Tall and tan and young and lovely
The Girl in the Red Tortuga
Comes Driving
And when she passes she goes “a-a-a-ah!”
When she drives she’s like a samba that
Swings so cool and sways so gentle
That when she passes each one she passes goes “a-a-a-ah!”

Or some such blatherskite, with gentle congas and marracas burbling in the background against the soft soughing of breezes in the bowing palms. Certainly not a ballad, you’d say, for Erin’s boreal shores.
And yet!
An hour later Donal was still reassuring himself that it was only a test drive, that the girl was young and vivacious and therefore quite a good match for a red Tortuga (and did he but dare the thought (he did), more than one for him, Donal Duddy, as well), especially with the top down; and that she gave off no vibes of malfeasance, none whatsoever—unless they were disguised by the stronger emanations of unadulterated sex that flowed from her like radio waves from a transmitter—and that she’d be back at any minute, or at any rate pretty soon . . .
Hush yer jabber isn’t that her now?
HOOOOT [pause] HOOOOT [pause] HOOOOT [pause] HOOOOT [pause] HOOOT
“HELLO THANK YOU FOR CALLING HEARTLAND AUTOS WE ADVANCE CREDIT DONAL DUDDY SPEAKING HOW MAY I HELP YOU?”
“Ah never mind that shite, Duddy, ‘tis Byrne here.” The boss. Byrne of Dublin, not in Dublin. “I’m in Killoyle. Staying at the Spudorgan Palace. Meet me in the Balsa Bar at nine. And bring the accounts.”
Donal rang off with a murmured acknowledgment and returned to Bookhead, but he was distracted by his own uneasiness, as expressed in nail-biting, fruitless hunts for more fags, sudden belching, and sideways glances.
Ultimately, his several frenzies spawned a brief but intense hallucination depicting a huge rubbish tip momentarily illuminated in a shaft of blinding light with, in the background, the accompanying aural hallucination of a monstrous breath wheezingly inhaled and shudderingly exhaled like the sobbing of a nearby demigod.
Where was she?

* * * * *

Terpsichore O’Hanlon and Stan MacKnee lived together on a barge, the Rumpelstiltskin, under an enshading willow on the Mangan Canal, just down from the Slumbeg Bridge, a hop skip and jump across the lock from Moylan’s Canal Bar and Grocery, the ensemble (plus St. Thor’s R.C. church, Mr. Iqbal’s sweet shop, the Driscoe Cash ‘N’ Carry, and a Vroom filling station) clustered together like a flock of cowering sheep on the broad upland of The Belfers, a fertile tableland across which ran the chessboard pattern of symmetrical stone walls erected by Homo Erectus or his descendants in the immediate pre-Neolithic period, halfway between Killoyle and the former asbestos-mining town-turned-health-resort West Crumsford North.
Stan, 40 or so, a would-be writer or something, was a bargee more by happenstance than by inclination. A mate, Terry Whelan (1st in line to inherit fuck-all from Mack Whelan, bankrupt bus conductor and burden on the public rolls), had absconded to Australia with the funds of various local church socials and bingo parlours and had left Stan the title and ownership of the barge. So there was always a place for Stan to put his feet up and lay his head down, sometimes both simultaneously and at the same time, like. This was fortunate indeed, as he’d lost his last job, that of under-assistant sub-foreman at Hildo’s Baals (Eire) NV, the local branch of the Dutch ball-bearing conglomerate, by dint of simple non-attendance spiked with insolence.
“It’s a fockin shite-for-brains wankerama for a lark and nothing to me achall bar the twice-monthly paycheque, which I declare here and now they can stuff right up their arse,” he’d said to Terpsichore early one morning over a fag and a cuppa as the cockerels crew on the nearby farms and the mallards gobbled on the canal outside and the prospect of eight hours hunched over a bin full of steel balls barely illuminated by a flickering fluorescent tube, under the hooded gaze of Ruud the Dutch shop steward, seemed about as inviting as (say) a weekend nailed to the side of a house, or dinner and dancing with Hitler.
“I’ll just not go in, full stop. It’s too boring. What do you think of that? Bleedin’ deadly, eh?”
“What is it you do again, exactly?” Terpsichore leaned over to turn down the radio on which she’d been quietly listening to a rebroadcast of one of her favorite scenes from Mrs Browne’s Schoolboys, the one where Mrs. B. takes a shoebrush to the young wan. Terpsichore mildly resented the interruption.
“Sure and haven’t I told you a dozen times gersha.” Stan had a lean look of permanent puzzlement, as though he’d been up to no good but had forgotten exactly how, or what. Sometimes, as now, the look of puzzlement spilled into more general expressions of agitation. His head nodded rapidly, his shaggy hair swayed back and forth, his hands played with the air, all traits indicative of a propensity to pantomime, or a gift for the dramatic arts, or rock music (not an art). “Well here goes again, but it’s the last time, OK? I stick piles of fuckin metal balls into one fuckin machine and take more stacks of fuckin metal balls out of another fuckin machine. At the end of the day I put all me balls into a fuckin great box and turn both the fuckin machines off. Then I fuck off to the boozer.”
“Sounds like a bore, all right.”
(There were times, never more than now, when a tiny flat voice in the recesses of Terpsichore’s mind whispered, This flake’s not for you, woman. But such was her all-too-human desire for comfort, stability, and the same thing over and over again, that she ignored the tiny voice—for the moment. )
“And I do it eight hours a day.”
(And there were times when another inner voice responded from the other end of her cerebellum: I know. Yer too bleedin’ right.)
“Poor dear.”
“And me a literary genius, the actual dog’s ballocks, gal. But you know what?” Stan sat up, his face elastic with inspiration. “I’ve had it with them and their silly old balls. Wait till I tell you now. I’ll just not go in.”
“Not go in?”
“Right. I’ll see how long it takes ‘em before they give me the heave. I’ll just stay away, by way of an experiment, like. It’ll be like the times I mitched me finals at school. Or stayed home sick.”
“Suit yourself,” said Terpsichore, an easy girl in some ways.
“Then I can go on the Sosh and draw the dole,” said Stan, as a means of making his proposal irresistible. “And concentrate on me writin,’ like.”
Stan’s plan was gas. The phone was silent for the first day and a half, then heavily Dutch-accented calls started coming in. Initial enquiries spuriously couched as expressions of concern for his health metamorphosed rapidly into stern reprimands that contained within them the seeds of menace, the blossoming of which was expedited by Stan’s habit of interjecting into his phone conversations with Ruud mock-stream-of-consciousness monologues (Stan had taken Mod. Ir. Lit. at Benedict Kiely College in Strabane and like so many of his nationality fancied himself quite the pocket James A. Joyce, Esq.—sans the hangups of course, thank you very much, like your man’s propensity for scatophilia, or fear of dogs and electric storms), quasi-literary ravings free of any precise association—doggerel, in short, that would be the front-page pride of many a student rag.
“One you not attend any day at all last wekk,” stated stolid Ruud, soberly. “This very hood dam bad, hood dam bad. Two you not call by phone anybody, or me. Bad, boy. Wery hood dam bad.”
“Ruud oh me rude boy me crude boy me wild and preening lewd boy me headstrong netherlandish low-country boyo boy, you’ve some neck me bonnie lad ah me bonnie bonnie lad me Dutch lad wild and free, me headstrong Friesian guy o headstruck, headstrong with hemlock in me rucksack Oy set out for the merry oh.”
“You not listening. I said very hood dam bad, meneer Stan.”

“Oh bad me lad ah cripes bad’s sad but God bless you and all but it’s a lovely day and all and today down on the old riverbank down on the Suir on the stilly greeny sure bedad did you know the river runs past Eve and Adam’s from swerve of Suir to the briny coastland of Killoyle Castle and environs oh doe the merry dee doe ray me oh tell me when you’re done me brawny lad and I’ll heave ye over me shoulder for the long trek down Ballybrann-na-Craic where the road rises up and the mountains plunge down like a colleen’s cleavage oh aye the merry oh.”
“OK shit to you, hood dam stupid guy. No phonecall to boss manager or me instead. I can tell you your future career’s not good looking. It’s no wonder you’re fucked, by Johnny God verdamm it.”
“And a trot and a trek and a cross-country trip, o so gallops the jaunting car o so merrily marriedly Mariolatrily-o and all ajaunt the young roan bay oh so gay with the canter of a king’s charger hey ho the golden-o o the gilded golden blaze of light blares yellowly over the plain of Tara’s golden haze tarah tee boom dee ay oh two oh tea for two and two for tea and you for me and me for you.”
“OK so you come in tomorrow for meeting at eight punctually in the a.m. or by Gaad you out of here for good you son of a butch.”
“Bite the back of me ballocks, old son,” had been insouciant Stan’s final response to rude Ruud. “With mustard sauce.”
Not surprisingly, a certified letter, manifesting the unerring punctuality of bad news, arrived the next day and informed one Stanley MacKnee of his termination as a wage earner at Hildo’s Baals (Eire) NV, with various reasons adduced, out of a checklist of ten:
1) daily near-tardiness;
2) implied insubordination;
3) suspected inefficiency;
4) potential non-productivity;
5) rampant individualism;
6) overt opinionatedness;
7) a reluctance to avert his gaze in the presence of superiors;
etc.

“Well, that’s that then,” had been Stan’s airy response. The letter, once read, served as a paper airplane swishing in leisurely semicircles through the stagnant air before crash landing in the dustbin and being in due course whisked from thence to the municipal tip, along with three empty Biryani containers; yesterday’s and the day before’s Daily Calrion (sic); an unread collection of poems by Milo Rogers, autographed hopefully by the author; an empty fag packet that had once contained twenty Turf Accountants DeLuxe Dual Filters; several bottles, clinking merrily, that had as recently as the night previous been brimful of Murray’s porter; and other objets best unnamed, being stringy and sticky and altogether gray.
A while passed, and Stan reckoned he was living the life of Reilly, with the old Rumpelstiltskin and all, better off anyhow than he’d been when he had a job. He was writing the odd bit here and there, too, or at least pretending to. He was immersed, anyway, in Cá bhfuil fiacla Mhamó? a good old thigh-slapping read by Firbolg O Leeson, the poor scholar. It kept him going, brainwise, within limits. And in the canal outside there were fish for the taking (trout mostly, with the odd pilcher in spring), and the pub across the way pulled a fine pint, and–best of all—he’d sold a piece, albeit a mincing, anodyne, housewifely one copied word for word from the Australian fashion mag OzGlam (“Canal Living: Pardon My Barging In”), to Belfers’ Belfry, the local journal of record. But they’d paid, or more accurately had promised to pay, 25 euros for it; and wonder of wonders—provided he showed evidence of looking about a bit for a job, of all things, nothing more demanding than a classified advert from the Clarion, say—every fortnight Stan drove his old Nitsun Micro with the dented left rear wing over to the Employment Exchange in Killoyle City and received from the fond plump hands of the Irish State in the person of Mrs. Dalrymple, resident representative of Poblacht na hEireann, two hundred and eighty–six euros and sundry cents, enough for a fortnight’s worth of fags and groceries and the odd pint (or two) nightly (unless he was lucky enough to get bought a round), like.
So life could be worse, so it could (and had been, and would be again—cf. intra).
“Did you know, it’s dead easy to get money out of the government in this country, darlin,’” he explained to Terpsichore. “All you have to do is get sacked.”
“Easy enough to be a government artist, you mean. Doesn’t hurt if your motte has a job, but, does it,” was the young lady’s short, shrewd response.
“Right. Eh—what is it you do, exactly, darlin?”
She muttered an irritable reply that left him none the wiser. In fact, she was a waitress at Fairy Farmer’s, the wine bar on Downhill Place, and it wasn’t much of a job at all. She detested the false humility, the kowtowing to morons, the ogling, the murmuring behind her back and the ordering about, not to mention the skimpy pay and odd hours; but the sad, not so uncommon truth was that she’d started out fine in life but had squandered a fair amount along the way. Whereas Stan was the scion of the Ballymun MacKnees, two parents and eight kids as working-class as you could get without actually transmogrifying into Arthur Scargill to the power of ten, Terpsichore’s O’Hanlon ancestry was the lineage of barristers and librarians and law professors and the sweet East End of fair Killoyle’s swank King Idris Avenue where children were raised up to the academic heights of Belvedere and UCD, or UCC at the very least; but in her case nostalgie de la boue had taken care of all that, and although she’d started off with some panache at UCD’s newish campus in Belfield, Dublin 4—first in her first-year Honours classes in Post-War Italian Cinema and Micronesian Anthropology (a most promising debut for one who had never been to Micronesia—or should that be Macro?—nor shown any interest in anthropology; although she had seen Italian films, mostly late at night on RTE9’s Director’s Chair) she’d not graduated, having instead married and divorced a Harley biker from New Ross named John Fitzgerald Kennedy who was now serving a short sentence down Kerry way for having a go at his da.
What was more, Terpsichore hadn’t spoken to her family (Mum, Dad, brother Pegasus) these two years and counting.
Then one night, in the midst of an entourage of poets and wastrels, Stan MacKnee entered Fairy Farmer’s and her life simultaneously. Stan, she thought, held out the promise of freedom from routine, as well as the chance to be a lifelong berk on your own terms, like. (Not to mention live rent-free on that old barge.) It was a two-edged deal, she soon realized as soon as she also became aware of what a total naghead and loser the fella was.
“No rent, darlin’,” he’d said, over a glass of chilled Yquem-Salade he could hardly afford. “It’s a barge, d’you see. All mod cons, but. I’ve even a satellite dish, if you can credit it. Me pal’s in Australia and not likely to come back as long as there’s Gardai about, if you follow me drift. Ah it’s a grand old barge so ‘tis. License paid up till the end of next year. Docking guaranteed as long as I’m on board every night.”
Plus, there was something about the fella’s guileless face, when he shut his eyes to laugh.
“Snork-asnork-asnork-asnork,” he’d chortle, eyes tight shut, tearlets forming.
So there they were. Only he was twice the slacker she’d reckoned at first, she was beginning to see that. Whether he was an actual writer or not, he certainly sat about doing enough “research” to fill a library. Still, he never actually wrote a word, except when copying stuff out of magazines, which he then sent off to other magazines under his own name. It didn’t seem entirely right, somehow, but she didn’t really care. But it was about the time he lost his job that Terpsichore, faced with the bleak prospect of further belt-tightening and an endless, if leisurely, downward spiral into permanent unemployment and poverty, started seriously to contemplate the prospect of a more stimulating life lived on the margins of legality and beyond, viz., adultery, the demimonde, mild use of recreational drugs, emigration to America, etc., like some steamy bosomy broad in Vittorio de Whatsit’s Biker Boys or Gay Thief or whatever it was called (Il Gran Vitello Milanese?) or Nicolette Tedman in Up Up and At ‘Em...
“Oy. Ever stolen anything?” she asked Stan one evening after they’d managed a complex yet languid bout of sexual fondling involving much moaning and bared midriffs and thighs that had culminated in quick, spasmodic shudders and joint reaching for the fags.
“Sorry. You go first.”
“They’re yours anyway.”
“Who cares. Common property, eh?’
“Not on my barge, darlin.”
“Well, you go ahead then.”
“Oh all right.”
“Got a light?”
“Oh, right. Here ya go.”
Inhalations vied with exhalations, then:
“So did you ever steal anything?”
“Bar the odd quid from the collection plate, not much.”
“How about a car?”
“Nah. I have a car.”
“But it’s a piece of shite.”
“It is not. It’s a ninety-four. Anyhow, so long as it gets me down the Sosh and back, I’m happy. I don’t need it for the bloody Paris-Dakar, for fuck sake.”
“Well, I don’t have a car. And I’m dead narked at taking the bus every day.”
Hence the red Tortuga GT that suddenly showed up that wild March eve parked in Moylan’s carpark across the canal.
“Fuck me, darlin,’ you never nicked her, didya?”
“Well, let’s say I’m taking it on an extended test drive, like.”
“Shite on a pole,” said Stan, bemused, caught between admiration at the outright brass of the girl, like, and the distinct possibility that someone, somewhere, was dead cheesed at her, and was very likely at this very moment reaching for the phone to summon the guards (oh she’s the one lives with that gurrier on th’owld barge down the canal, he could just hear it now) . . .

* * * *

Next morning at eleven o’clock, consequent to not one but three bottles of the Chateau-Jaffrey, with digestive single-malt accompaniment (Glen Gland, 16 years old), Ferdia was still asleep on the sofa in the living room.
“Snore,” he declared, nasally.
The wild March winds shook the electric lines outside the window and produced a low, irregular, thrumming sound like distant drums being expertly tuned up by warmongering primitives; but Ferdia, as if responding to hidden dream-stimuli of a more gustatory nature, resorted to smacking his lips obnoxiously once—twice—thrice.
“Slurp. Slop slap.”
This was too much for Finn, who promptly flung at him the book he was reading: One Toe At a Time, by Clay Schouëst.
“Wake up, you old pisser,” he screeched.
Waking was not achieved instantly, for hadn’t the pair of them hit the scratcher well after one a.m., and wasn’t Ferdia indeed older, in comparison to 32-year-old Finn: 47, but not for long. His 48th birthday, in three days, would put him in contention age-wise with, among others, trim, tennis-playing “still-young” politicians, heavily face-lifted and tanned former starlets off whom the bloom has begun to fade, and retired, balding, overweight jockeys.
Anyhow.
“Arrrrrgggh,” semi-articulated Ferdia, mouth open and emitting, like a spitting cobra, considerable random discharge of fine saliva. His limbs twitched ataxically; his heart stopped, his eyes opened, closed, and opened again, his heart resumed beating with an extra roll of the timpani for good measure, his eyelids fluttered like wary pigeons at the sight of diminutive but glowering and muscle-bound Finn, known to his girlfriends—well, to Anthea down at Mad Molloy’s, at least—as “Work-Out” McCool.
“Arrh.”
“Wakey wakey,” said Finn, snappishly. He watched Ferdia disentangle himself from sleep’s embrace. He was still undecided whether his cousin’s appearance might better be described as “the small version of a large dinosaur” or “the family-size model version of a small dinosaur,” say an oversized velociraptor rather than a miniature T-Rex (or Allosaurus) . . .
It would be a fella with the hell of an overbite, anyhow.
“Wassa time?” inquired Ferd, smacking his lips.
“It’s half eleven,” said Finn. His forefinger tapped his watch with heavy significance. “And today’s the day.”
“’Tis that, boy,” concurred Ferdia. He sat up, his eyes a pale blue blur behind eyelids that went up and down like venetian blinds in a gale. “Tis. I know. What do you take me for, a fuckin eejit? But not till the p.m., like.”
“True. But you’ve the bunting, the cutlery, the caterers. And it’s on the other side of town.”
Yes, but the town in question, Killoyle, was, and is, a mere three miles and a half from stem to stern, so not much of a travail to traverse, bar the odd bottleneck round the Shops, especially with “Wet” Wesson’s new government having abolished all shopping taxes and the French coming over in droves on weekends with German or even Dutch lovers in tow, all as anti-nuclear, oversexed and long-legged as all get out —and yet! Finn, for all he was the merest broth of a boy, had spent a year or so of his earlier life knocking around North and South America with his big brother Fergus (now the proud owner of the Dew Drop Inn in New Ur of the Chaldees, Ohiowa, USA, of all places) and, as a consequence of having seen bits of the world here and there, he sometimes hit the nail on the head, if you please, with the iron whack! of common sense, that oh-so-uncommon sense the lack of which Ferdia, for one, had spent much of his life displaying—I mean to say, just look at the record (as follows):
Ferdia Aloysius Quain, middle-class boyo from the Connemara Road and all (with God- and Inland Revenue-fearing neighbours into the bargain), after an utterly mundane progression through Loreto Convent school and Collins Comprehensive, with a degree in librarianship tossed his way by the Senatus of Upper Killoyle College on condition that he leave the premises AND NEVER COME BACK, had joined the IRA at the age of 22 at Bodenstown, over a teary lunch. This entailed much chanting and mystical tattoo-bearing and recitation of emeraldine blather from the likes of Douglas Hyde and Padraig Pearse, which rigmarole had as its goal the forging of a fine fanatic, whereas Ferdia’s sole ambition was to become a librarian or archivist. It was a vision inspired by over-heated mental pictures of great librarians and/or archivists of the past, say white-robed Hero of Alexandria poring over semi-unrolled papyrus manuscripts on marble tabletops half the size of the Irish Midlands, with of course small steam engines of his, Hero’s, own devising put-putting about like mechanical mice, and through the cross-paned glassless windows the lofty Pharos towering against the ever-cerulean sky of Antiquity (strong appeal, that, for a gray-sky-schooled Irish lad)—young Ferd had seen Lord Grade’s Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, Part III three times, after all—then, closer to home timewise, there was scarlet-robed Cardinal Richelieu, chief archivist to Louis XIII, sweeping in incarnadined majesty, with many a barely audible smug snigger, through the musty book-lined halls of the Bibliothèque du Roy to the piercing golden accompaniment of a clandestine trumpet fanfare from behind the canon-law stacks. . .
Well, however colorful its genesis, Ferdia’s plan soon took a nosedive with the folks, you’d not be surprised to hear. Almost as bad as his marriage to that Englishwoman.
“Bugger off, you ghastly prat,” hoarsely expostulated the Da by way of disinheritance, and continued to expostulate in like manner every time Ferdia stuck his sniffer in the door of the parental place on the Connemara Road (no. 115A, just across from Arbuckles’ Danceteria and within staring distance of the solemnly blinking monolithic mass of the Garrett FitzGerald Radio Tower ).
“But I’m an archivist, Dad,” Ferdia protested. “I don’t do the actual rat-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-tat, tat-ta-ta-ta tat-ta-ta tat-ta tat-ta-ta-ta-ta tat-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-tat aaaaahhhhhhhhhhh.” Even his vivid machine-gun mimesis failed to persuade. His father, Bren, a Derryman, regarded Ferdia and his chosen profession with (as he confided to his wife, Ferdia’s mother, Jean, or Joan, a Dubliner or Corkwoman, depending on her mood) “distaste combined with waves of nausea, the way you’d think I’d taken a bad load on, like maybe six pints of Harp the night of a Rangers—Cliftonville match.” What was more (or less), the family—or at least Bren’s side of it—were, and long had been, staunch Fine Gaelers. Bren attributed the past, present and no doubt future Troubles exclusively to the connivance of the Provos, the Church, and Eamon de Valera and his descendants. A great-uncle of Ferdia’s (Tim O’Boone) had been shot during the Civil War on the Treaty side by Dev personally, to hear Bren tell the story; and a great-aunt, Imelda McCaffrey, had mysteriously disappeared in Spain with General O’Duffy, eliciting rumours of illicit passion and elopement with a tall, taciturn Spanish peasant—except to Bren, who saw everywhere the Hand of Dev (“only for the fact that the awld bastard was blind as a newt they’d have laid the deed at his doorstep personally, you mark my words ah shaddup ya little git”). Pictures of the sainted dead rubbed shoulders in the hallway with aging chromos of Michael Collins, Kevin O’Higgins, General O’Duffy and Tam “’Anker” Mac Heron, the half-blind balladeer.
“There’s room for one more hero here,” Bren was wont to muse out loud, while contemplating the little portrait gallery in the entrance hall, his little pipe a-puff and a-gurgle, “but it won’t be you, lad, nor any of your Provo friends, you can be sure of that, ya bleedin’ nit. Bunch of bleedin’ Fianna Failers. Ye’ve the bad drop in ya. I knew it from the first.”
“If I’ve the bad drop where could it have come from?” inquired Ferdia, reasonably, to his father’s retreating back.
On the other hand, Joan or Jean, the mam, regarded her first-and-only-born with equanimity, even affection, at times.
“Ach yer de quare shoneen sure yar arencha ach sure yar,” she’d say in a piercing Galway accent while prising apart diminutive Ferdia’s cheeks with a firm pinch on either side and thereby eliciting angry shrieks to which her unmaternal response, when pissed, was usually (in pure Liffeyside) “Aw sharrap yer gob.” (Jean or Joan, known primarily as “Mam,” was also widely known as an aficionada of bottled liquors, more’s the pity.) The paternal response followed the lines of the exhortation quoted above or, with Shavian conciseness, the likes of (say) “Sod off, you.” Otherwise, what with excess contraception (it being, back then, the heady ‘60s, well into the ‘70s), sheer laziness (the welfare state, as we all know, turning honest citizens into pampered layabouts), and advancing age (oh, and Joan-Jean’s extreme debilitation following a bout of bulimia rendering her something of an Auschwitz survivor in appearance and firmly quelling any lingering desire old Bren might have been feeling but wasn’t), no more children joined Ferdia in the privileged category of Offspring of the Quains. He was an only child, poor boy.
In fact, it was fine by him.
“Fine by me,” he said in another temporal/spatial context, that of his flat, the present year, and a response to Finn’s proposal of:
1) a quick bite downstairs at Fairy Farmer’s, Killoyle’s newest and trendiest eatery featuring oh-so-healthy items such as baby green snapdragons in onion gravy, St. John’s-wort pâté, muesli cakes stuffed with muesli, Celebean lizard rolls, and charcoal-braised endives à la Katangaise;
2) a hearty workout at Jim’s Gym on The Parade (Ferdia shook his head furiously at this suggestion but said nothing, preferring to cite his objections in due course in the methodical order in which they presented themselves—1) too bloody boring; 2) too bloody exhausting; 3) too much horrible pop music; 4) the TV, forever tuned to some Moron Special; 5) too many sweaty hairy blokes);
3) a brisk stroll along the Strand, past The Shops, to The Shop, whose inauguration day it was.
They set off. Ferdia, no slob at heart, was dressed in a quite, indeed excessively, elegant Gianfranco Mafioso double-breasted blue-and-white twill pinstripe suit with a loosely knotted Principessa Benita Fanculo silk tie depicting rampant Dalmatians, set off nicely by a touch of gold round the sock area and a yellowish-hued hankie that peeped out coyly from the breast pocket like a lone daffodil in a drainage ditch. In stark contrast, Finn wore only maroon cycling shorts, greying tennis shoes, and an off-white Ironman singlet, the better to expose his biceps for puposes of visual wooing of the opposite, and far fairer, sex.
It was cold, but.
“Brrr, it’s cold,” he muttered, as they strode along—or rather, Finn strode, while Ferdia progressed in his precise, stealthy way, like a giant sloth speedy in comparison to others of his species.
“Shouldn’t have worn that stupid bloody singlet, should you then, me owld sweat?”
“Aw shut it, big man.”
Fairy Farmers was closed, for some unfathomable reason.
“That’s all it says: Closed.”
“Bugger it.”
“Luck of the Irish, eh.”
And so it was that our heroes paused at McShiney’s Super Shiny Sausages for a quick greasy bite: three orders of Super Sized Shiny sausage and Super Limp Chips, two Big Daddy portions for Ferdia, the Kiddie portion for Finn, doubled, with half again on the side, equaling three Big Daddy portions.
Following ingestion, they set off again, albeit with a mite more gastric activity, not to say queasiness. “Now for the gym,” announced Finn, smugly, shadowboxing the bobbing and weaving wind.
“Yer granny. With huge sweaty blokes everywhere? And that bloody pop music?”
“Pop music, is it? What do you expect, Vaughan feckin Williams? Well, all right, maybe later.”
“Count me out of that, boy, now and permanently. Sure won’t I be getting all the exercise I need just lifting crates at the shop when the stuff’s delivered.”
The cousins, mismatched in years as they were, and temperamentally polar opposites, nonetheless got on quite well, considering—considering notably, that is, Finn’s limited range of intellectual interests (he was a former software engineering student at Lower Southeast Polytechnic, after all) and Ferdia’s grudging indebtedness to his young cousin after so many bailouts and shakedowns in the four years that he’d been married to Shirley. So here they were, roommates again with Ferdia all on his lonesome . . . oh this one would take a while, he knew that. If it could be fixed at all. He’d called her at her office (she was a senior property surveyor for the King Maher Land Corporation, “all winks and no money” as she described it with insanity-inducing regularity) (but had he ever said anything?) and she’d rung off instanter with a brief plosive sound of contempt and a muttered, semi-audible “cretin.”
So there he was, spurned by his wife, just another ex-IRA serviceman on his uppers trying to start a business, having been cashiered in the wake of the Derry Accords and the Porridgetown Codicils by the organization whose proud and sinister motto had once been “Once In, Never Out”! But Ferdia Quain was no dunce, despite appearances. He’d been ensconced in the IRA archives, after all, for a fair while altogether—twenty years, give or take--and he’d not forgotten where the bodies were buried, as it (and they) were; and this, in turn, enabled him for financing purposes to invoke the names of some ex-contacts, once he’d thought up, over a few Pisherogue Specials down at Mad Molloy’s, the little venture that was coming to full fruition today, to wit:
Killoyle Wine & Cheese, F. Quain, Prop.!
“Oh I know, there’s pubs galore, and a couple decent wine shops down by The Shops, and Driscoes have a halfway acceptable cheese counter (in their serviette department for some reason) but as far as I know, and correct me if I’m wrong.”
“Ah yer right yer right ah yer right right enough arrh.”
“It’s not much cop as a delicatessen.”
“Sure God bless ya yer right so yar.”
“Furthermore there’s not a single bloomin actual wine AND cheese shop in the place.”
“There’s Fairy Farmer’s. That’s wine and cheese.”
“Yes but that’s a bar, ya twat. I’m talking about a shop, you know, a place where you can pop in at your leisure and pick out say a nice crisp Riesling or Chardonnay for later and then pop over and choose say a nice Vale of Avoca Blue to go with it and then pop off home and wash down your Avoca Blue with your crisp Chablis or Pinto Gris till the bloody welkin rings. All the foregoing transported mind you in very elegant carrier bags, sure aren’t those fellas half the battle in any respectable emporium.”
“Do you say so, now.”
“Eh—that’s Pinot, surely?”
“Carrier bags are the men, are they?”
“Right enough, just think of Harrier’s in London, sure many’s the gal who’s been lured into that particular bazaar on the strength of getting hold of one of them British Racing Green carrier bags with the snob appeal and never been seen again. Mind you, when Crankshaft O’Deane planted that thirty-pounder in the Food Hall, the one that didn’t go off quite in time—wonder how Crankshaft’s doing, I heard he just set up down here, in semi-retirement, I’ll have to give him a buzz…nah, you just wouldn’t believe the numbers of allegedly missing persons who suddenly emerged from the woodwork.”
“And now that Killoyle’s getting like a half million tourists a year over from Europe.”
“We’re part of Europe now. Have been since ’73, or was it ‘74. No looking back, anyway.”
“No surrender!” guffawed a party peripheral to the conversation, earning himself stony glares galore.
“Exactly. Europeans we are and Europeans we’ll stay. And wine and cheese are part of what makes Europeans European, if yez follow my drift. Not that I’m a connoisseur, or in any way a specialist, no no I’m the first the admit it.”
“And I’m the second. Sorry, just joking. Carry on.”
“Anyhow. It’s time for a spot of oenophiliac whatsit, like. Wine culture. Here in old Killoyle town.”
“Whatever.”
“I mean please don’t forget that for a while back in the nineties I was seconded by Sheets McGinty, the Bogside Beria, as an observer of archives to Harry Batasuna, the Galician Goebbels, ah ha ha ha, over in Bilbao, Spain, the Lusitanian Limerick, ah ha ha just joking. A fine city it is. Home as you all know of the famous Guggisberg Museum. And plenty of fine wines there, believe you me. Your Rioja, for a start. And the old Ixarra fortified brandy, brrr. Grand stuff altogether.”
“Sheets, was it.”
“Ah, dear old Sheets, now there was a fella. Wasn’t he in the papers again recently, carrying out a series of friendly executions somewhere in the Cork area, or Youghal, or—God bless us—Killoyle itself?”
“Arrah. You may have something there, Ferd me owld flower. The Soldiers of Brian O’Nolan caper, as I recall, went down very poorly with yer man. ”
“Right y’are, Finn.”
“But it’s not all Spanish plonk you’re counting on flogging at your winery, is it Ferd?”
“Not at all. Sure weren’t there the Strasbourg years after that.”
“Years? I thought you were there for like a fortnight or less.”
“Well all right so I was. But I could have been there for years, if they’d accepted me at the translators’ school.”
“Ah the translators’ school. Hogs’ heaven for translators, yeah?”
“Pigs’ paradise for drunks is more like it. While they were poring over my application forms, I was pouring the vino.”
“Good old froggie plonk, was it.”
“No plonk, boy. The best Alsatians, and I don’t mean bow-wows. Traminers, Rieslings, you name it, grand stuff, ambrosia so it was, so anyway I knocked it back full tilt so I did and thereby acquired quite an educated palate, believe it or not. Granted, I blew all my nicker and had to come home, but they’d turned me down anyway at the translators’ school, as I don’t speak French worth a tinker’s fart. Sorry, traveler’s. But overall the experience gave me quite a taste for wine.”
“Sure it’s well-known that yer an awful owld wino, Ferdia Quain. And that’s a fact.”
Unexpectedly, for a former member (albeit a mere archivist) of what was, after all, a notorious terrorist organization, Ferdia was the very soul of restraint, quick to anger but rarely given to violence. It was thanks to this forbearance that the speaker of the last-quoted words wasn’t given a good schmaaaaaaaaaaaaaack on the muzzle, as one of his companions (Finn) pointed out:
“Jayz, I’d give ya a good schmaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack on the muzzle for that.”
“Just you try it, clever dick.”
So anyway, it was in the wake of all this, and despite a decided paucity of your actual financing, that Ferdia felt episodic surges of apprehension alternating with exultation below the breastbone, like a severe attack of intestinal gas, or the on-and-off confluence of two live wires in the wind, as he and Finn approached their destination that blustery March afternoon: the actual opening for business of Killoyle Wine & Cheese (very important to have that ampersand in there with its connotations of bespoke Victoriana and general gilded upscaleness and that, as Ferdia had shrewdly and repeatedly pointed out to the signpainter, one B. Ehan, Esq., of Sandycove), the city’s first emporium vinitorium, an establishment “for the discerning cheese-lover and oenophile, a relaxed dual boutique with piped violin music and separate entrances doubling as exits, in which the shopper may sample and browse in boutiques adjoining, etc.” (He’d thought up the PR shite himself).
And there it was. Hung with bunting, with a large sign in the window.
“Grand opening 1800 HRS March 17th: Killoyle Wines & Cheeses, F. Quin Prop.”
“Who’s the gobshite wrote that out?” inquired Ferdia, peevishly. “Cheeses? And looka that fer Jaysus’ sake. Quin? Me arse. Can’t even get the name right.”
“Oh God,” gasped Finn, as if punched in the solar plexus.
“I know. Well, I’ll leave it for now. The owner’s name won’t matter that much to the customers, anyway.”
“Not the name. It’s the date.”
“The date? Sure there’s nothing wrong with the date. The seventeenth . . . that’s today, isn’t it?” Nevertheless, a serpent of nameless worry coiled itself round Ferdia’s bowels.
“Jayz, man, wake up! It’s March seventeenth! It’s blooming St. Pat’s Day!”
“Whaaa?” quavered Ferdia, thrown decisively off balance, and with the first deliveries due to start in ten or fifteen minutes . . . or not, on the national holiday.

* * * * *

Byrne was sitting by the window in the elegant Balsa Room at the Spudorgan Palace Hotel, nursing a half of Earwickers Mild.
“Ah there you are Duddy sit down well well look at this it’s nine on the nose very good I only just got here well I’m staying upstairs booked into the Padraig Pearse Suite for some reason full bar telly the size of well the size of well the size of oh I don’t know that horrible Hunger Wall and God knows how many channels not that I watch much television most of it’s utter rubbish if you ask me anyway I’m only on the third floor so I didn’t have very far to go just wandered down about twenty minutes well maybe half an hour ago be dad they’ve tarted this old place up haven’t they I remember when it used to be the plain old Spudorgan Hotel or was it Spudorgan Hall well anyway Hole would be more like it I’m telling you a right old rat-infested pile it was as a matter of fact I think they even called it the Rat Palace for awhile not officially of course ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
but then that American group you know the one Vacation Inns the ones with the glass lifts and fountains and all that ballyhoo well they came in invited by the creditors from what I heard you know the story of Carfax the jockey and his amazing disappearing bank accounts don’t you well Carfax won a few big races back in the sixties Leopardstown and Fairyhouse and even the Grand National if memory serves or was it the Derby one or the other as well as a couple on the Continent at Concierge-les-Bains or someplace so anyway with his winnings he bought up this place and tried turning it into a right old holiday spot which he did after a fashion of course the upturn in the economy didn’t hurt and the building of the new ferry terminal and airport and all those shops what are they called now The Shops that’s right ANYHOW the odd thing was no one ever saw a penny in profit and why was that you ask well old son very simple the old story alas wasn’t it yes that’s right wasn’t your man Carfax salting it all away in offshore bank accounts God knows where Isle of Man and Luxembourg and what have you you know those offshore accounts they say he hid the dough in accounts under the names of the racehorses he used to ride Mr. Vestibule was one and Lord Hatrack another and wasn’t Chairman of the Board a third anyway the authorities finally sussed him out and he’s now serving a few years in the clink over in Florida I believe or is it California always got those two places mixed up you know well you know oranges and beaches and palm trees and suntans and all that carry on bikinis ahhahahahaha ANYWAY so the Vacation Inn crowd came in and took over like they’re doing all over the place they’ve even taken over the Silverspoone Hotel in Dublin be the love of Jaysus sit down sit down sit down you’re right on the nose now I hardly need to tell you that’s a pleasant change in this country where we seem to be chronically incapable of being on time for anything except pub opening time but truth to tell I had the feeling you’d be on time don’t know why maybe because you’re American and we all know how punctual Americans tend to be compared to us Irish a bloody shower of wasters we are if ever there was one so we are and by Jinny for all this Celtic Tiger blether we could still learn a thing or two from our American cousins I mean that’s the place to be if you want to make a packet always was and still is and I should know as you know or maybe not well wait till I tell you I spent a year in the States oh five six or was it seven eighty-eight eighty-nine yes that was it year of Tienanmen all those years ago and by the by I didn't end up in someplace like Ell Ay or Manhattan or Chicago no sir there I was all on me lonesome in a little place outside Houston called El Brando Texas nothing but HallMarts and McSprogginses as far as the naked eye could see I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of the place no I didn’t think so why should you have it’s the middle of bloody nowhere and after all weren’t you up in the Middle West Illinoise was it or somewhere Nebraska wasn’t it or Alaska or Ohiowa was it well right neck of the woods anyway not that I was ever any great shakes at geography in fact let me tell you I had a geography teacher back at Father Cormorant Academy in Buncastle Buncastle Co. Wicklow you know near Powerscourt Estate Missus Ryan her name was Missus Irma Ryan that was it not a bad old stick really I suppose but I’ll never forget the way she sat there with her mouth hanging open do you know let me tell you there she was one summer morning staring out the window with her gob hanging wide open and what should come flying in but a horsefly I kid you not it buzzed through the window straight into her cakehole which went snap and she swallowed it just like a frog oh we all rolled about laughing at that I can tell you oh there were sore hands and other parts that day let me tell you ANYWAY she once told me if I ever got the hang of the map of Europe she’d bake me a gooseberry pie well I never did I mean the capital of Slovenia or Slovakia or whatever the blazes your guess is as good as mine and that’s how it should be I mean who bloody cares right so Missus Ryan never did bake me a gooseberry pie but truly I’m not that bad at geography I can tell you where all the main car manufacturers are at least go on ask me go on Volkswagen Wolfsburg go ahead what about Fiat Turin see I knew that go on Ferrari Modena Ford Dagenham Renault Boulogne Debbler-Bertz Stuttgart you see well all right maybe later now where was I oh yes El Brando Texas and why was I there you ask of all places well the answer to that one’s simple enough I was doing an internship sponsored by Paddy Taggart at Taggart Motors of Terenure he had an arrangement with Clark-Iago Motors Inc. of El Brando the biggest pre-owned Clewhart car dealership in the southwestern United States all Clewhart products which of course as you know these days means basically German quality as you know what with the Germans moving in and taking over everywhere Debbler-Bertz in this case so they’re now officially DebblerClewhart all based over in Germany whatever the Detroit papers say Mannheim is it or Magdeburg one of those places whoops there I go with the owld geography again ah ah ahaha hahaha hahaha hahaha hahaha hahaha hahaha hahaha hahaha hahaha hahaha hahaha hahaha hahaha hahaha hahaha hahaha hahaha hahaha hahaha anyway the partnership hasn’t done Clewhart’s quality ratings any harm I can assure you I mean the Yanks are top rung in terms of horsepower and torque and your small-block vee eights and what have you but chances are the bits and pieces will start falling off around you while you’re driving pity because some of their products would be world-class well anyway with the Germans looking over their shoulders things may change in fact Clewhart’s quality ratings were way up in the latest issue of Consumer’s Armchair the March issue or was it April do you subscribe you should I reckon it’s a must for anyone even remotely connected to the automotive industry but anyway where was I oh yes El Brando Texas by janey let me tell you boy oh no you go ahead I’m all right well all right I’ll have another half of Earwickers the mild mind not the stout can’t abide the stuff anyway let me remind you parenthetically this was in Texas not the middle of bleeding Manhattan for the love of Jay so I really had to hustle and me with me owld sod accent ah top o’ the morning to ya and all and there in the middle of Texas where they never heard of fucking Ireland and the temperature gets up to oh I don’t know forty degrees in midsummer let me tell you boy it was bloody hot one hundred and something Fahrenheit bloody stupid of us to have gone the Centigrade route don’t you think when we were quite well off with dear old Fahrenheit I mean when you say Listen here my man it’s a hundred degrees outside well now that sounds bloody hot but oh I say did you know it’s just hit forty well what’s the big deal none at all or no biggie as they say in the States don’t they anyway as I was saying there we were and I don’t know how hot it was bloody hot is all I can tell you and we had to go out and stand about in the heat half the day and the sweat sticking to your shirt and no bloody shirking thank you very much ah thanks very much cheers the mild is it good man yourself here’s how is that stout or porter you’re drinking stout of course good old Arthur’s eh can’t go wrong although just between you and me I can’t take the stuff no after a pint I feel all poxy and itchy like and once my lips suddenly swelled up like balloons and I passed out right in the middle of a sale and when I woke up I was lying face down in a puddle at the bus station impeding the progress of the thirty eight to Enniskerry anyway what was I saying oh right enough cheers to you too slaunchy go bra so there I was in the middle of Texas at a hundred and ten bloody degrees standing about a huge bloody car lot now I’m talking humongous boy as they say over there in the States isn’t that right humongous they say that all the time meaning of course very very big and believe you me this was as big a blooming car lot as I’ve ever seen you could hardly see the bloody horizon of it and the blinding sunshine glinting off the roofs of a thousand cars and us salesmen standing about with shades on and white shirts with ties like bloody Mormons anyway there I was standing about in the hundred and fifteen or twenty degree heat with a fella named Gonzales no Garcia Garcia that was it, nice guy Mexican so his English wasn’t too good no hablo mucho sinnyor olay patatas fritas caramba or whatever ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha oh haha but man I can tell you he was the man to watch oh he was that after no more than three months he was well on his way nominated to the president’s circle already do you know what that means no well you should or don’t you work for me at all well it’s the honour to beat all honours for DebblerClewhart sales reps over in the States and it means by the way that your man had turned in a performance of over thirty units monthly did you hear that I said he moved out thirty units in one month without breaking a sweat or even speaking English properly now what do you think of that eh do you know what the average car salesperson sells in one monthe eh no well hold onto your hat it’s fifteen units that’s right fifteen units per month and by the way how many did you move this month just for purposes of comparison like ?”
“Two.”
“Two good God Duddy what kind of career do you expect to have in this business if you only sell two bloody cars in one month I mean I know you’re new at it and all but maybe coming to Ireland was the wrong idea for you maybe you should go back Stateside and do an internship at Clark-Iago Motors of El Brando Texas like I did sure I could drop a line to Garcia he’s the sales manager old and used I mean pre-owned now last I heard I’m sure he’d be happy to do me a favour we never had a falling out no hang on there was once but that was over the relative displacement of the aluminium Clewhart hemi you know the one with the miniature blown vee-six it was only a gentleman’s wager and it was probably a problem with his English but in the end everything was hunky dorey even though the bugger was outselling me two to one but I don’t regret the experience no sir not one day have I regretted my decision to go over there oh it was a bit of a risk financially especially at the time with Brenda expecting young Colm he’s four now young Colm yes that’s the one here have a look got a minute of course you do what would you be doing here if you didn’t have a minute for me anyway amn’t I the boss so if I say Have a gander at me snaps of the wee laddeen what choice do you have aha hahahahahahahahahahahahaha here he is no that’s the dog Purvis is his name he’s a setter as you can see I think that was taken shortly before feeding time which would explain the tense expression on his face hang on a sec ah here we are there he is there’s Colm or Daddy Junior as he says look at him if that isn’t the gleam of the salesman in his eyes I tell you I’m a Hindoo oh yes oh yes regular chip off the owld block isn’t he oh that’s the three of us in Marbella last year well anyway back then there we were the two of us well three I suppose you could say living in rented digs down on the Circle with a right owld harridan of a landlady Mrs. Treadmill did I ever tell you no well remind me to some day she was the one with the pet anteater God that animal was an unwelcome sight first thing of a morning with its tongue darting in and out as it inspected the tenants for ants oh I can tell you are you sure I never well all right anyhow there we were and I was getting nowhere fast a bit like yourself lad if you don’t mind me saying so no no get out of that boy you know I’ve your best interests at heart so anyway I said to meself I said Byrne me lad I said stay here and you’ll maybe sell twenty five in a single month this is your chance pal that’s what I said to myself so I did and do you know it woke me up I can tell you I mean I didn’t think I was doing too badly what with oh let me see seventeen the first month twenty-one the second twenty-two the third then by gum it occurred to me the one thing we needed was publicity even though we were the biggest bleeding car lot in El Brando Texas which by the by as far as the locals are concerned means on the south side of the universe itself I mean talk about ignorance of geography half of them couldn’t find New York on a map of the bloody world if you gave ‘em a torch and bloody magnifying glass ANYWAY my analysis was they weren’t buying enough cars because we didn’t have the right publicity and by coincidence be dad wasn’t it coming up to dear old St. Paddy’s Day itself and it only about ninety two degrees in the shade so I decked the halls with all that green shite and did a jingle on the radio something like El Brando El Brando Come On Down to Danny Boy’s Rancho with yours truly singing Four Green Fields and Mother Machree and Sweet Mavourneen and Kate O’Brien’s Nipples and of course Danny Boy and hey presto bloody hell you smoke a lot don’t you is that your fifth or sixth since you sat down well at least they’ve filters on the ends did I ever tell you my old man was a fierce smoker but Capstans Full Strengths would only do God bless you and perish the sight of anyone who offered him a filter no it was the Capstans for him and it was the bloody Capstans did for him in the end needless to say what with sixty of them inhaled every day for as many years until one day he just let out a tremendous cough and a puff of smoke and went face down on us at the breakfast table with a fag still burning in each corner of his mouth mind you he was eighty-four if he was a day or was it eighty-five no spring chicken anyhow ahahahahahahahahahahahaha well as I was saying I reckon it was the Mother Machree number that pulled ‘em in and I always had a reasonable singing voice back in college I used to entertain the troops as ‘twere ahahahahahahahahaha with a rendition or two of The Owld Triangle and Whiskey In The Jar so where was I oh yes so there I was and it was St. Pat’s Day ninety three degrees in the shade or ninety five ninety six somewhere in there and by the way no shade at all anywhere in sight ANYHOW by the sacred vespers do you know what I’m going to tell you Duddy yes you guessed it blow your fucking smoke somewhere else won’t you Christ I’ll end up with lung cancer as well anyway yes there we were and I was wearing the standard gear you know the green plastic bowler hat and white braces with the green shamrocks holding up the white shorts with a bloody great shamrock right on the arse well that had ‘em coming in until well after midnight grand total thirty four units shifted by the wee spalpeen from the County Killoyle and even Gomez I mean Garcia no hang on a sec it was Gomez that was his name Ernie Gomez that was it aye and it was Gomez who was the first to extend a hand in congratulations mewy byen amigo ahahahaha and boys o boys I can tell you I wasted no time perusing as it were perusing is that the right word the establishments of El Brando for a wee celebration just and let me tell you something they made the likes of Killoyle look like bleeding Paris but there was one halfway decent class of a joint where you could actually get Harp in bottles no draught of course but there it was and there it was I went with my butties Gomez and Garcia that’s right it’s all come back to me now there were two of ‘em one was called Gomez and the other Garcia and Garcia was the fella who sold all the cars thirty or more a month would you believe it no Gomez was a kind of glorified valet with a wife and kids back in Old Mehico you know the sort honest and hard working and destined to be pronged up the arse by life without fail no it’s the smooth operators like Garcia who make it in life or was his name Gomez one or the other anyway and I’m not criticizing them mind you the likes of you could learn a fair amount from the likes of him or them and by the way he was most impressive about three weeks after that when two or three units went missing from the lot and the fickle finger of suspicion hovered about for a while before aiming itself directly at yes you guessed it yours truly the likely lad from Erin’s green shores because as malicious tongues had it how could the bugger go from a mediocre score of ten to fifteen units sold in one month and zoom all the way up to thirty odd unless he had outside help oh aye ee wideboys crooks hustlers the local mob or what have you but by janey I’m here to tell you that Gomez or Garcia or whatever his name was stood up for me and suggested posting additional security guards preferably under the age of seventy five and not blind which we did and lo and behold we nabbed the thieves the very first night a pair of local high school students on a lark with a string of car thefts to their credit and speaking of credit let me take this opportunity to remind you that theft is the number one risk we run in this business I don’t suppose any units have gone missing have they good good that’s lucky for you me boy you know I need an accounting of all the cars you’ve shifted and if any have disappeared without being paid for and it’s not unknown in our line of work as you know I’m sure you remember that four by four Jocelyn GTX that mysteriously vanished last year when the hard lads were holding their annual convention over at Bodenstown well that took a touch of diplomacy I can tell you anyway if it happens get onto the horn and call the guards immediately if not sooner otherwise we’ll have the hell of a time persuading insurance to pay up and that’s coming out of your paycheque sonny which paycheque need I add would be your last if you follow my drift you do good good another one eh all right I’ll have one more then I really must be off to the land of Nod busy day tomorrow and all that well cheers and here’s hoping you can pull it out ah here we are cheers slaunchy go var and all that.”
“Bye,” said Donal, and went home.

* * * * *

“From the dismay occasioned by King of Milton Keynes’s accident at Newmarket in ‘02,” bayed the racing bloke with the agitated pompadour, “we hark back to the glory of his triumph in the Arc de Triomphe ’01, the high point of the doughty little horse’s wonderful career. King of Milton Keynes, of course, never ran against Panters Down after that first spreadeagling defeat in the ‘03 Guineas. But at stud Paolo Transistorio’s champion was so much more successful than Panters that it’s tempting to forget the one defeat. Twice leading stallion in Europe, King of Milton Keynes sired the winners of many Pattern races, including the Derby, and many other Group 1 prizes all over the world, sob hic,” the silly bloke concluded, deeply affected as usual by the nags, the bookies, the crowds, the snapping banners, steady infusions of whiskey-and-soda, and all that caper.
“Stupid berk,” snarled Judge Jeremiah “Jay” Larkin. “Idiot.” From his corner seat in the snug at Mad Molloys Judge Jay was watching, as was his wont on racing days, the All-Racing RTE Channel 17b. Molloy’s management, distant relatives of his ex-inlaws, kept a television permanently tuned to All Racing when the Southeastern Circuit was sitting in the Court across the street from Molloys. Currently the trial was in recess. When it resumed it would tackle the issue of an ex-husband, Bill Cutlet, berating his ex-wife Vera for claiming custody of their wolfhound Yul. The outcome was of little interest to Judge Jay. He’d already decided he’d take the dog, and anyway he had a fiver on Panters Down at Fairyhouse and cared little for the rest of life, bar a) the reggae rhythms of the Isles; b) Rosie O’Connell, his mistress in Garlick-on-Shannon; and c) a steady flow of Red Reamer and short ones.
As for the courtroom and all its doings, Judge Larkin wished devoutly that he was done with it and away fishing for good on Lough Cobb, where the salmon do be a-leppin.’
Commercials elbowed their way past the pompadoured chap’s emotional harangue. Judge Jay rose to his feet in disdain, hugged his robes to his sides, and began to quietly dance with himself.
“Wo, wo,” he chanted, Africanly,”aye aye aye,” he sang, Caribbeanly, “a-leppin,’ a-leppin,’ so dey are. O Bend down low, let me tell you what I know now; Bend down low, let me tell you what I know. Oh! Fisherman row to reap what you sow now; Oh, tell you all I know (Oo-oh!), you've got to let me go (Oo-oh!), And all you've got to do: (Bend down low) Oh yeah! Let me tell you what I know; Bend down low, let me tell you what I know. Oh yeah! Oh de salmon, oh de trout; oh de trout, oh de salmon, aye aye aye,” Judge Larkin emoted, like the great Marley, or his favourite West Indian steel drummer, Big Bucko MacBryde from Antigua (next year’s Gobbovision favourite, hands down), limbo- swaying in the hip area (then, abashed, His Honour glanced quickly round for any observers: None, except for the barmaid, Anthea, who was used to it), like the Caribbean surf sounds he loved so much. Oh de rhythm, mon. Nothing like a fine grilled swordfish, of a soft evening, out there under the golden thunderheads. Pity he’d never been, but by God one day, when he was done with this judging shite: himself and Rosie, atop a greeny hilly Jamaican bay…. To Garlick, then, raced the judge’s imagination. He sat down again and belted back his Reamer. Grilled salmon, yes, with a slice of lemon and a sprig of parsley. And boiled spuds swimming in butter. And one of them chilled white wines. But such was not the sole attraction of Lough Cobb and environs, oh no. Too, there was the ale, rich and nutty, if strongly English-influenced in brewing technique (Tetleys of Leeds, mostly). There were sausages and the grunting porkers from which they were made. There was the weather, milder than most places in Ireland, with the slightest spit of rain. And of course there was Rosie, proprietress of the Grand Hotel Pumps in Garlick-on-Shannon, in whose hostelry Judge Larkin maintained a semi-permanent upstairs suite and in whose lace knickers (many of them purchased at the Petite-Grande boutique on the Strand) he’d been spelunking these five years and more, ever since Mr. O’Connell slumped to one side in front of the telly one evening and moved no more and Mrs. Larkin hitched her fading star to the creaky wagon of “Spuds” McGillivray, retired centre-forward for the Antrim Eagles and assistant manager at Ulster Oils, Ltd. . . .but Rosie cared not a fig for all that, nor for judges nor barristers nor their ilk at all, at all. But she liked to talk, so she did. It was a bit much, sometimes, the endless gab-gab. Still, she’d scared up some nice business for him, with her no-holds-barred gossip about who was doing what to whom and what they were smuggling in by dead of night (perfumes, cigars, gold-plated urns, necklaces, underage Kazakh girls, the odd well-used M19, small fuel-efficient German-made cars); yes, while Garlick slept she stayed awake over her Cliff Richard videos from the ‘70s (golden age of kitschy crooning), peering through her roller blinds and, with a prewar Leica inherited from her da (a great shutterbug), snapping shots of smugglers’ lorries rumbling through the darkened streets …
“By jiggy he’s done it,” shouted the TV. “Panters Down by a nose.”
“Fucking great,” said the Judge. “Pour me another pair, Anthea, then I’ve got to get back to the bloody courthouse. Put ‘em on tick.”
“Not much longer, Judge. You’ve a slate half a mile long.”
“Ah I’ll settle up when I win at Newmarket. I’ve a gilt-edged tip for that one. Fillet of Plaice, ten to one. Fancy a flutter yourself? I’ll put a fiver on for you.”
“Ah no thanks, Judge,” said Anthea, a sensible girl—far too much so for the berk she was going to marry (Finn). “But good luck yourself.”
“Case dismissed,” roared the judge, anon, back on the bench. “Both of yez, ya pair of stupid gawms. I’ll take the doggie with me. Nice brute. Now pay your costs and clear out.” Amid the usual hum of consternation with which his off-the-cuff court pronouncements were greeted, he doffed his robes and rushed into the loo, from where an earnest if cracked rendition of Big Bucko MacBryde’s latest hit “Oh de big fisherman say,” could be heard with varying degrees of clarity throughout the courthouse and its immediate environs.
“Oh de big fisherman he say
It be a good fishin day today
It be good for de marlin,
Good for de swordfish
Oh he say
Oh it be good for Jesus too
Oh all de livelong day
Day-o.”
Later that day, at Fairyhouse, Panters Down sprawled across a hedge and hobbled off like a lame Clydesdale, lucky to not be put down.

* * * *

Built in 1706, at the apogee of the reign of good (or at least not too bad) Queen Anne, Roofwalls, the Duddy homestead, overlooked Killoyle Harbour from down the Crumstown Road. The house was an elegant redbrick box with double-hung windows, a sloping slate roof, a false portico, and towering twin chimneypots like the erect ears of a startled donkey, or hare. In the 1780s the house had been the residence of the notorious British Sub-Viceroy Sir Buckley “Boomer” Sykes-Buckingham, a philanderer and rake whose ghost was said to stalk the halls, especially on windy March nights, not that Donal had never seen anything, although once or twice, during those deepest night hours when a man’s bladder impels him across icy floors, he had heard loud throat-clearing in the middle distance of the upstairs landing. . .“Ahhh-HEMMM. AHHHHH-hemm. A-HEM.,” like a timorous schoolmaster trying to maintain order in an unruly classroom. “AAAAAAAAAAH-hem. Ahem hem.”
“Who’s that?” was Donal’s standard riposte, to no avail. The throat-clearing just faded slowly away, like the Doppler effect of a passing coal lorry down an alley . . . however, going back a bit, Donal’s Mam (God bless and keep her memory and may the posies on her grave never wilt) had once awakened to the unexpected but not-unpleasant experience of strong, albeit invisible, hands kneading her ample bosom, and a hoarse male voice crooning Come To The Bower into her left ear, but no matter how hard she looked no one was there, except “Dad,” sound asleep as usual, with his back turned, the better to broadcast his snores into the nocturnal Beyond . . .
Yes, Roofwalls was a house unto itself, from roof to walls. The plumbing was a holy terror, and indeed so audacious in its sound effects that Donal had long been inclined to attribute any “hauntings” thereto, rather than to M. R. Jamesian manifestations. Too, Roofwalls was also a most capacious residence for one lonely wanker, as most of the whores whom Donal had brought home with regularity in the bad old drug-hazed days sooner or later remarked, although not necessarily in those precise words.
“Well, it belonged to my parents,” he was wont to say, by way of explanation. “And I don’t have anywhere else to go. And anyway,” peevishly, “I like it, OK?” at which juncture, depending on the number and quality of drugs ingested, he might (in the old days) wave his arms about, frightening no one; or, au contraire, he might sink to his knees and warble chivalric love to some poor prossie more accustomed to swaggers and kicks. (Hence his popularity among the red-light crowd, among whom he was affectionately known as The Dud.) But now, when Donal dined in, he dined alone. Tonight conformed to that rule. He snuggled his pajama’ed knees under the chipped Formica yellow of the kitchen table while the wind wheezed under the old doors and through the chinks in the windowjambs.
“Eewwwwwww,” it keened. “EEEE-yeeeeeewwwwwwwww.”
(Or was that the sneering of a long-dead Regency buck!?)
The kitchen at Roofwalls, once the venue of hearty Hogarthian antics and the slow dripping of roast hog on the spit and the general loose morals of the ascendancy of the Ascendancy, now housed only the slow-ticking, ancient Dutch grandfather stool-clock by Willem Den Stoelklok of Utrecht (1754), whose value at auction would probably spell an end to Donal’s financial worries for the rest of his natural, did he but know it; and a disused oven in which mice slumbered comfortably, undisturbed by cats, to which Donal was, and is, allergic. On the kitchen table, across from tonight’s just-barely-thawed TV dinner of maggot-white noodles stained with blood-red sauce, squatted a small microwave oven cooling down after its recent two-minute exertions, a hiatus during which Donal had managed desperately to inhale the foam and all the liquefied hops and barley out of two bottles of Earwickers. He smacked his lips, theatrically.
“Now for din-dins.”
Next to the microwave (Hatichi, ’98) was a TV, displaying on its screen sequential scenes from the classic Frank de la Teja film It’s a Ludicrous Life, a paean to small-town America that always reminded Duddy forcibly of his own ludicrous sojourn in that happy heartland.
“Ah God,” he mumbled tearily through a mouthful of macaroni while viewing the scene in which Jeb Stuart, the actor depicting the hero, vapid Jerry Bewley, realizes that his placid hometown has been altered by intervention of God Himself to resemble a Biblical Sodom, complete with cynicism, cigarettes and leering louts. Jeb staggers blindly through once-familiar streets in a blizzard of soap flakes, screeching in his irritating way the names of friends and relatives. Poor Jeb or Jerry gets no response, bar a tear trembling on the viewer’s eyelid. Interference from passing light aircraft blurred the screen in wiggly serpentines, as if the TV were inwardly shivering in the unseasonable cold.
“Ah Christ,” screamed Duddy, “get the picture back will ya ya fucker ah that’s better and that’s a great scene so ‘tis ah God.” And didn’t that street look just like Judith Q. Fowler Boulevard back in downtown New Ur of the Chaldees, Ohiowa? Sure we all knew it was just a Hollywood sound stage but somehow de la Teja (now there was a director of genius for you, never mind your Ciobattas and Dinards ) captured the cozy intimacy of those small towns way way out there in the vast lonely trainwailing heartland…and thus did Duddy’s ethereal semi-self unmoor itself from his dreary macaroni-chomping present physical other half and drift dreamily into the past, down Fowler Boulevard in unvenerable New Ur of the Chaldees, Ohiowa, to the late-summer days of yore when a barely shaven, barely sentient and barely sober Irish lad masquerading as a visiting lecturer in Anglo-Irish and –Saxon Literature Studies or Whatever delivered himself onto the quaking asphalt of Bus Station Square in downtown New Ur of the Chaldees, Ohiowa, and politely inquired of Trev Romanov, a nearby wino and hardened veteran of the ’83 Grenada campaign and the bottle wars ever since:
"Pardon me, but is this the place?”
Trev’s reply was prompt, if somewhat personal in tone.
“Goddam fuckin’ fag go fuck yourself.”
“Beg pardon?”
“You one of ‘em Goddam fuckin’ fag students whyncha get a job Goddam fuckin’ rich fag kids whyncha give me somma yer daddy's dough instead of buyin' your fuckin' fag ski lodges and fag bee em double u's fuck you anyway Goddam fuckin Ay-rab fags whyncha go back to fuckin’ Eye-ran Goddam fuckin’ French fags whyncha go back to fuckin’ Paris Goddam fuckin’ fags whyncha fuck yerselves and drop dead Goddam fuckin’ fag bellydancers whyncha go back to fuckin' Egypt or what the hell fuck you anyway Goddam fuckin’ fag students whyncha go drive a cab get a real job for a change ah fuck you anyway Goddam fuckin’ fag cabdrivers whyncha get a real job 'stead of drivin' yer fuckin’ cabs around in circles all day Goddam fuckin’ fag Jews whyncha go back to fuckin’ Israel Goddam fuckin’ fag liberals whyncha go back to Vietnam fuck you anyway Goddam fuckin’ Jesus freak fags whyncha go fuck yourselves Goddam fuckin’ fag micks whyncha go back to fuckin’ Ireland. . .”
“Go back to Ireland?” said Donal. “not on your life, sunshine. That’s where I’ve just come from.”
Old Trev later became a firm and dependable enemy, always at his post, always raving when he wasn't sleeping one off, always semaphoring wildly, as to invisible incoming aircraft, always uncannily able to spot Donal approaching half a block away despite the perpetual rheuminess of his piggy old eyes and the flocks of flying mice frolicking thereupon. But Donal had come of age in the distant Ireland of pre-Celtic Tiger days when corner boys and louts and alkies and general seediness (ah 'tis no fit place for a man with any ambitions at all at all as everyone repeated ad infinitum) were the norm, so he’d had his share of those one-sided encounters in which the passerby is subjected to scabrous bellowing from one or more mud-smeared whiskey connoisseurs with empty bottles sticking out of the pockets of their ripped and torn nylon and / or corduroy dress jackets bespeaking quondam bespoke tailoring…oh he’d seen alkies before, right enough. But to be an immigrant, now, however briefly, that was new. The big blue sky that boomed over New Ur of the Chaldees, Ohiowa, that day was no smothering, lowering Irish sky but an American one of infinite possibility and broad-shouldered individualism and Louis l'Amourous cattle drives and Route 66 road trips at the wheel of your Chevrolet, therefore symbolic of freedom, at least for awhile. And Donal Duddy was still young (well, youngish), fancy-free, and well out of the financial, emotional and mess he’d left behind in Killoyle. And 'twas full of great expectations he was, and determined to set straight the wavering compass of his life. In his heart leaped hope; in his eyes blazed the courage of a man among men; in his wallet lay squished banknotes of Irish and U.S. denomination totaling $750 or Ir£ 436.54 (per then-applicable pre-euro exchange rates), thanks to a sudden spurt of generosity from Dad upon hearing of Donal's intention to depart the dear emerald shores for far Amerikay. "Not bloody far enough" were the old man's first and last words—understandable, given the tensions that had crackled in the familial air ever since the Pink Pussycat Motel affair, the Silvery Strand coke-snorting scandal, and the demise of Donal's poor mam "Mam" (she that was supposedly struck down in her prime by the mysterious and lethal narco-disease called PIGS, or Puffin-Influenza Gas Syndrome, a megavirus supposedly mutated through the islanders’ habit of dining off puffins, a local delicacy, and then lying down “for a wee kip, like,” and never getting up). . . so all in all 'twas soon enough, 'twere best to pack one's bags and head off down the ribbony runway into the bluish beyond. Donal had planned on the Riviera at first, or Spain, but he’d ruled out Morocco: too many pooves, poetic as some of them undoubtedly were, per the latest cover story in Bookhead, “Daisy Chains in Tangier”...in fact, the whole American caper had come about as the direct result of an advert in the Bookhead personals pleading for a "strong Celtic-bard-like dominator with a firm open hand, a hard-drinking personality and carnal / artistic instincts" for a 40-ish SWF in New Ur of the Chaldees, Ohiowa, USA. Hum, Duddy had said, picturing himself as just that very firm-handed Celtic bard. Swarming with sexual anticipation, he’d replied without further delay.
"Dear 40-ish SWF," etc.
Suffice it to say, however, that this avenue of joy was soon closed off by a combination of prurience and prudence on the lady's part, engendered by the intestinal upsurge of apprehension she felt upon receiving a stained envelope postmarked in Gaelic containing a letter whose hoary whorish salutations were expressed in the slimiest paddywhackery ("lovingest greetings to ya me own sweet darlin' God I want to get at yer fair white thighs God ye just try to keep me away gwan ye just try ya tease ya GRRRR know what I mean GRRRRRR") infused with a scrap of verse from the Victorian booze-poet James Clarence Mangan:
"I saw her once, one little while, and then no more,
'Twas Eden's light on Earth awhile, and then no more."
The domination-craving lady, one Ms. Erlich, received thereby a sharp metaphorical goose up the arse in the form of a jolt of (un)common sense. . . On the other hand, as will happen from time to time in this life, Chance took a hand. As a result of this ridiculous correspondence other opportunities slowly opened up, like giant clams in the warm currents of the Caribbean, one of them being a lecturer's job in Anglo-Irish and -Saxon Literature Studies or Whatever at Downstairs State in New Ur of the Chaldees, Ohiowa, a position recently vacated by Ms. Erlich in the interests of self-fulfillment. [Postscriptum: Resolving to "revisit her priorities," the miserable wretch checked into Sri Mickey Munga's Self-Esteem Institute in Canyon Loco, California, for a proper course in self-love, complete with manuals, how-to videos, board-certified gigolos, and bedside accessories. After an intensive three weeks, it was apparent that none of this claptrap had had the slightest redemptive or indeed any effect at all, so poor Ms. E. took charge of her own destiny by fleeing to Amsterdam, in which lowlying metropolis she hoped to find, as she put it, uncertainly, “a man?” Instead, a man—Chief Inspector Barry Van der Valk of the Amsterdam Homicide Squad—found her, cold and stiff in her attic room in the Hotel Wim-Kok on Ruudlubbersgracht near the central railway station, having done for herself by means of polythyrene Ikea shopping bag, clothesline and lukewarm bathwater. . .]
So came Donal Duddy to New Ur of the Chaldees, Ohiowa. But, like everything else, it all fizzled out soon enough. "Donald who?" was the general response to his name being mentioned, which it seldom was, those drear and unfelicitous first weeks in New Ur of the Chaldees. Aggravating the situation was the fact that Donal knew nothing about the subjects he’d been hired to teach, viz., Anglo-Irish and -Saxon Literature Studies or Whatever. Well, the “whatever” part was a breeze, because he'd read a spot of this and that, as well as dear old Yeats, Synge and Goldsmith, all right, and you can bet he’d wallowed along with J. A. Joyce, Esq., and he’d nibbled at O’Nolan, sure; but as for the Anglo-Irish and Saxon bit, well, he’d shared a chuckle with the Stephens and Lady Gregory crowd and leafed through the Neo-Neolithic poets Stone, Fodder, Awl & Co., and one day at the pub whilst awaiting a likely touch he'd tackled the Tain in Kinsella's translation (whew; five pints weren’t enough to take care of that one); and of course there'd been the odd Shakespeare and Chaucer and so on and once at Upper Killoyle College for want of anything better to do (actually it was probably during one of his cocaine binges when it was practically impossible to come up with a suggestion that didn't sound thrilling) he'd sat through a recital by Sean Henry, the Nobelist, of some endless Anglo-Saxon rubbish—The Sea-Wolf, or Wolf's Bane, or Be a Wolf, or something—with an audience of all-black T-shirts and couples gazing into each other's eyes and minds a-wandering across one another's scrota and up sundry bungholes (and bored shiteless, but wouldn't it sound great the next day to say to one's friends "We went to hear Henry reading Wolfgang (or whatever the blazes it was called) last night". . .no, "to A Henry Reading," that was more like it, "A Henry Reading from Were Wolf," yes that had the right phony ring to it) and behind the lot the divorced, graying, pony-tailed academics and their acolytes, usually nubile, usually opposingly-sexed; and on the human soundtrack, viz., Henry, the emission of droning noises and loud throat-clearings (Oy, you lot, I'm a fucking Nobelist, so if you don't like it you can clear out) followed by, or interspersed with, abrupt glottal stops; and all the rest of the ambient pretentiousness—sudden sideways glances and wine-bar underlighting and the occasional “OOOOO” or manly titter, in sham exultation and/or amusement—and furthermore Donal cared not a jot, then or now.
Indeed, caring not a jot was Donal’s creed, and the creed of his age.
It was Xiao-Lian ("Lotus Flower") Lee’s creed, too. She was a Chinese hipstress from Shenzhen via Singapore and Bangkok taken on by Downstairs State as an adjunct professor of Asian Gender Studies because they needed an Asian on the faculty and she came highly recommended, one of their tenured professors having spent a "rich and rewarding" night in her company above the "Smoke My Ass" night club in Upper Phuket, Thailand. No one could understand what she said, let alone get their tongues around "Xiao-Lian." Yet such was the imminence of the Damoclean sword of instant dismissal in the event that one of lemony-ice or cocoa hue might feel him- or her-self to be marginalized, that none confessed as much, and she was hired on the spot . . . anyway, she ostensibly taught Chinese and Japanese history, and although none of her students could understand what the frig she was on about, the guys appreciated her tight white sleeveless turtlenecks and black thigh-hugging vintage Madame Chiang Shanghai-Bund skirts split up the side. She treated those heavy-breathers with disdain, but; then one day she saw a hunched, unshaven figure illegally emitting smoke in the far end of the faculty lounge and it was love, or something.
“Owww wuuu awww fwwaa Awww Rand?” were her first words to Donal, who, with cigarette smoke spilling out of his nostrils and the sides of his mouth, nodded eagerly, having understood nothing, but moved by the skirt she was wearing at the time and by the sheer unlikelihood of his ever hitting, not to mention having, it off with a mature Chinawoman who was also, and not incidentally, a knockout deluxe.
“Awwwww hah,” she hissed.
“Wha’?”
"Jazz too mutttss faw a giwwww famm Singapaw."
"Ah, Singapore, is it, yes, always wanted to, eh."
"Arrrrwazzz a want a miting Awwwwissss Maaan."
"Um, sorry, whaaaa...?"
“Ahn Awwwwwissss Maaaan.’
“Aha.”
Never mind, she was a great gal, with a booming laugh and thighs to match. Soon enough the mood-music of life took over and the two of them, sweat-slick and silhouetted against aggressively postmodern paper blinds of a decidedly Asiatic cast, were moaning and flaring their nostrils (God, did Donal ever feel like a chump at first, but it didn’t last), and biting their lips and grinding their hips together as in some louche TV drama about passionate big-city lawyers, or ever-promiscuous starlets, but unlike those sexy on-screen shysters Donal and his Lotus Flower conducted their non-reproductive sport in near-total wordlesslessness, bar the usual "ohs" and "ahs" and "grrrrs," and this was just as well from Donal's point of view, for not even when Xiao-Lian was deported by the Immigration and Naturalization Service for
a) not having a visa of any kind whatever, even Tourist;
b) following instructions downloaded off a Mohammad Rules OK Web page from Muslim Sinkiang to construct a crude nuclear device in the basement apartment of her landlady’s, boarding house at No. 12, Elm Street; and
c) extinguishing her cigarette in the outstretched palm of Officer Tom Tankersley, who had pulled her over on Highway 5 for going 95 in a 45,
did anyone, least of all Donal, understand a single bloody syllable the woman said.
Well, maybe two: Bye-bye!
A month after her departure a postcard arrived postmarked Taipei (where the nightclub scene was great, according to clued-in youngsters in black T-shirts), denouncing Donal as the probable agent of her deportation.
"I hate you great big Iris Man who say Love and Fuck and then Go to Cops to say Go back China Girl Fuck Yu Love Me."
In lieu of a signature there was a sketch of a nasty face with stuck-out tongue, very wobbly, as if penned in transit from A to B, or while otherwise occupied, say in . . . oh, never mind. Just chalk another one up, eh.
So that took care of sex, etc.
The rest of the year—now muddled together, as in the dream of an opium smoker (or eater), a comic-strip of a dream composed of the primary colours of memory's high summertime, aching blue heaven arching over little New Ur of the Chaldees, Ohiowa, and its puny yet eternal concerns, to do with bills, debts, sex, finances, health, etc., the pertinent one of which as far as we are concerned (or not) at the end of the third semester was whether Visiting Lecturer D. "Daddy" Duddy, BA (Hons—just barely), would be asked to stay on for another year, and the answer came before the corn was knee-high to a grasshopper's eye:
YES!
But.
Well, they needed suckers, didn't they, as what self-respecting institution doesn't? Not to mention a boyo so desperate to stay in the land of opportunity that he rejected all other opportunities and buckled under to the ruthless greed of college administrators and their waiver of all interest in medical coverage, paid vacations, and the like: "I mean good God," stridently declared the Dean, “Chuck” McCantinflas, "the sorry little fuck—what's his name again? The Scottish guy, or is he Irish?— is costing the college less than Ray's little Ay-rab!" . . .
But Donal was more concerned with avoiding his creditors in Ireland (including Declan and Nasir, those two oft-busted knee-busting drug-dealers) than with his own self-respect as an immigrant to America, so he mollybloomed Yes yes yes I will yes to everything the bastards demanded. And so things drifted for a while, like the great cloud-galleons over Ohiowa's rich ochre farmland. Books arrived, sat about, stayed unread. The TV blared hollowly through the night. Bottles were purchased full and disposed of empty, noisily, down the dark back steps into cat and raccoon territory. But it was officially a Recession Year, and layoffs were "in the air.” All Donal's self-humbling humbug availed him nought once the iron pincers of the budget-crunchers calmly set to work and unemotionally plucked Anglo-Irish and -Saxon Studies and Whatever from the next semester’s curriculum, along with French and Latin and Greek and Music and even Quantum Juggling (for which the outgoing professor, Ms. Wire, had won the 1999 Pressburger-Montoya Award for Diversity in Educator Excellence and Stamina) .
"Sorry, Daddy-o. You're out, for now," said Dean McCantinflas. A smile lurked somewhere. As a former All-Big-Tencenter and All-American honorable mention at Purdue, “Chuck” McCantinflas viewed intellectuals and their kind with disdain, especially foreign ones, Irish or not (or whatever). "But try again next year. I’ll do what I can. Meanwhile. Get going, Daddy-o. Sorry. Duddy-o. Get going, Duddy-o."
"But I."
“Yeah I know. And one of your students actually got into Yule or Hartford or someplace like that. Good break for you if you re-apply. Be sure to mention it. I’ll see what I can do. Promise.”
So the coda was bitter, in a minor key. Donal drank deep at the Dew Drop Inn, abetted by Fergus, the shamrocky landlord.
“Ah shure God bless ya and ye’re the lucky one altogether so y’are because aren’t you the one gets to go back to dear Oarland green?”
“Don’t want to,” muttered Donal. “Keep pouring.”
“Well, you’ve a job here, lad, if you need one. I could use a real Irish barman.”
“Thanks, Fergus. Fill ‘er up.” Tears welled, handshakes exchanged, a fool and his money parted from each other. Soon, scratchy voices broke into balladry on the topic of four green fields and the flowers of the forest. Later, at home, Donal bawled thickly from his bedroom window into the dark, torpid back yard. "Yez stupid bastards. Smug bloody sods." The back yards listened, quivering, alert. “Shite.”
The next day he went home.
“Fuck you you fuckin’ upperclass Limey fag,” loudly declared Trev Romanov as Donal headed glumly toward the bus. “Go back to.”
“Ah shut yer gob, ya old alkie,” said Donal. “I am going back. And here’s the rest of my Yank change.”
When he tossed a few singles in Trev’s direction, the resulting stunned silence could be heard halfway to the middle of Terre Haute and environs.
So Donal was off back to Ireland. “Dad," his da, died of a massive herniac embolism on hearing the news, and bequeathed his all to his sons Dermid and Donal, but Dermid, a prominent West End transvestite, promptly died of AIDS, leaving only a “companion” who slunk away back to Never-never-land and a spot of rumbling with the lads. As we have seen, Donal blew all his inheritance on a spending rampage, and before you could say "Conor Cruise O'Brien" or “Thus Just In: Brontosaurus Brain Preserved in Formaldehyde,” there he was, selling used cars and, worse, giving jobs to Declan and Nasir, who'd threatened to break his knees, elbows, and coccyx if he didn’t. So the whole year had all been a waste after all. A flamin' diddle-yer-willie year and a half right down the chute. Not to mention the rest of his life. Well, if none was the better for his having lived, at least none was any the worse. So bugger it, anyway. And there was always next year, again.

And yet! There'd been moments in New Ur of the Chaldees, Ohiowa, that like the music of Aaron Copland had answered a lifetime's longing for America, like the Saturday Night Waltz from Billy the Kid one drowsy afternoon beside bug-loud Lake Sandman, or the long drive he once took into the rolling wheaty countryside one fine June day to a winery recommended by Shan, one of his less abrasively student-like students (i.e. neither baseball-capped nor black-clad), there to sample a silken Chardonnay from America's breastland and gaze out upon that vast horizon beneath stately plump Buck Mulligans of clouds crossing a burning ochre sky, or the bracing brightness of the fine spring days. . . And the drip drip drip of autumn rains from the eaves at No. 120, Barracuda Court, with the TV reassuringly booming in the background, and a "cold one" at, or in, hand, and a poem or two (not by Henry) somewhere about . . .
And the swat and thock of baseball in the long summer nights, under moth-buzzed spotlights reflected in the quiet gleam of a 1959-vintage student-buffed convertible in the gloaming . . .
And the sweet sight and scent of girls girls girls, every single one a Callipygean Aphrodite with swinging ponytail and tanned legs and pant gasp pants . . .
And the aboriginal immensity of the night past the city limits where the roads ran their course into The Mile-Deep Wood in the depths of which stirred night creatures of dimensions unknown in Ireland, and farther on there burbled the aborning Wabash . . . And the lumbering power of endless freight trains wailing their mournful way northward to South Bend and westward to Chicago and southward to Kansas City and eastward to Baltimore and beyond . . .
And beyond . . . AND.

* * * * *

Then it was morning again, coming as usual after too long a night. Through the lingering veils of nocturnal mist the sun’s rays fingered the trees, meadows, construction zones, taxi ranks, and small shopping precincts of the southeastern reaches of Killoyle City, where the already-musty smell of bricks and mortar off the building sites hung about like a pisser’s pong in a barroom jakes. At No. 15, Cretino Crescent in the extreme southeastern corner of those southeastern reaches, a hoarse contralto ripped through the startled air as Shirley Quain, née Soup, sole current inhabitant of No. 15, tested her vocal range whilst having a “tosh,” as they called it back in West Yorks, splashing in the tub like a giant otter in the tide pools of Scapa Flow. In one hand she held a copy of the po-mo pop-fab mag GLAM; in the other, a gold-filtered Combs & Duncan. The woman’s screeching bounced off the teal-tiled walls and echoed hollowly inside the fastness of the ca. 1920 claw-foot iron bathtub she’d inherited from Uncle William “Billy” Ponsonby, the Harrogate groundsman, known as “Bill.” “Bill” had left behind precious little else, bar a 1949 Austin Seven (now in the Old Frayed Car Museum, Hutton-le-Hole), a cat named Pru (pensioned off to cat-loving cousins in Huddersfield) and a few packets of dried noodles named Ramen (donated to a Bradford down-and-out named Amrit, who took one look and said, “Pukey”), but ‘twas the old toshtub Shirl loved the most. After all, she’d taken some of the most memorable baths of her life in it during the summer hols that she’d always spent as a lass at “Bill’”s and Auntie Flo’s rundown bungalow on the southern edge of semi-treeless, windswept Priestleydale; so during last year’s midsummer break, in honour of the poor old dead things (Flo first, then “Bill,” only about an hour apart, one in the garden, the other in front of the telly (Nindbad the Nailor reruns on Northeast Yorkshire and Merseyside Channel 45 with Scouse subtitles), Shirley intercepted the bathtub on its way to the scrapper’s yard and had it shipped, over the Irish Sea and Ferdia’s protests, to Killoyle, just so there’d be a touch of old Yorkshire in the mostly-sterile (tellies, a treadmill, microwaves, etc.) Quain-Soup family demesne on the newly fashionable southeast end of our fair but unfashionable city in our so-suddenly trendily transformed country.
“Trilalalali,” trilled Shirl, approximately. “Trilalalalalalalalalali.” She inhaled her fag, took a deep breath, then, triumphantly, through the smoke: “TRILL LALALALALALALALI,” thus producing for a brief moment an approximate aural facsimile, in the tediously optimistic key of C major, of Fabia Fanni singing the Gobbovision-winning pop hit “Your Hair, My Knees,” a tune itself (all unbeknownst to Shirley) based on the aria “Coconut Romance” from the opera Il Babuino by the Italian composer Pierpaolo Cazzini (1871-1936?).
Encore:
“TRIIIIIIIIIIIII lalalalalalalalalalala LIIIII.”
Bis:
“TrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIlala.”
Etc.
Pretty rusty. Still, she was in pretty good voice for a gal who smoked and drank like a subaltern and ate like a Skeldale hog, if she did say so herself:
“TRIIIIIIIIIIIIIII-AHHHHH….”
Suddenly she choked, gagged, hacked briefly, and dropped the fag and the magazine into the drink: the first with a wispy hiss, the second with a pulpy plop.
“Oh bugger.”
Shirley’s damp mock-Afro do rocked gently from side to side in the wake of her coughs like a giant sea-sponge caressed by the warm currents of the Caribbean. Her breasts, too, swayed like gentle D-cup bells, then were still.
“Aha aha aha aha AHACK.”
Oh well. The earth wouldn’t be worse off with one less sodding magazine.
“GLAM, indeed.”
She fished out the fag and the rag, glanced one last time at the sinuous imbecile on the cover (“Joop den Hunckk: Filmdom’s Butchest Batch?”) and, con gusto, chucked the mag into the bin. Must cancel my subscription while I’m at it, she thought. Bloody waste.
“Triiila….hm. Hack.”
Must cut down on the filthy nicotine too, she told herself. Then I’ll sing like Callas, or Dame Jeanette Ross-Cromarty herself. Only, truth be told, Shirley, who’d been a smoker since sixteen (twenty long, or short, years ago), enjoyed puffing away on the old fatal weed far too much to quit quite yet.
“Heck,” she exclaimed, then “Hack,” she hawked, clearing the pipes, risking a coughing after-tremor that never came. The fag end, duly damped, followed GLAM into the bin, finger-flicked in the manner of James Dean, a gesture implying more style than was immediately obvious in a cursory glance at Shirl’s half-pretty face and somewhat peat-springy bod that was yet quite admirable in its firmly-rounded altogetherness (especially in the altogether), as it were, given her indulgences … as for the singing, well. Truth to tell, it wasn’t much good. It wasn’t that much fun, either, without that gangling halfwitted Neanderthal paddy galoot to take the piss out of, that she had to admit—not that she was ready to call him on the phone, oh no, no, not yet.
She repeated her mental monologue aloud.
“No, no, no, no, no.”
No. Let him stew in his own juice for a few days more. Or weeks. Honestly, who needed it? It wasn’t as if he was a Joop den Hunckk between the sheets, not exactly, and apart from that he brought in piss-all income these days. All he ever did was lie about and whinge about his bloody wine shop and his health (vitamins indeed!), I mean one day it was his throat, the next a pain in his side, then his heart stopping and starting over and over again, then God knew what, but none of it ever got him to see a doctor, or stop dreaming and complaining about his dreams like the emerald-hued paddy he was. So he was. And herself? Why, a true-blue Englishwoman, daughter of the Dales (Wensley, Priestley, Skel, Marrow—the lot). So why, and how, did the whole thing start in the first place? (Ah, the bath was a fine place for reminiscences.) There she was, a Soup from W. Yorks ending up in the bog, as it were, with him, a bogtrotting Quain from East Killoyle—well, that was bad enough, and it wouldn’t have happened at all without those five fortified Babychams he’d pretty much forced down her throat that first night (very uncharacteristic behaviour, that, for such a mewling meek-and-mild milquetoast, ex-IRA or not) at the Fifth Annual Leisure Craft Shareholders’ Dance at the Spudorgan Inn, back in ’00, three or four or a hundred years ago. She’d gone there by invitation from Mr. Akmar, some oily wog (sorry, but you know) she’d met in her capacity as assistant admin demo assistant at Gutta-Percha Sport Craft Ltd., world HQ in Scarborough, then she’d been transferred over to Ireland when Gutta-Percha opened a branch and testing centre at Killoyle, whose placid Gaelic-Norman harbour waters were more welcoming to Gutta-Percha’s fragile vessels than the choppy waves whipped up by the Viking ill-temper of the North Sea. Anyway, at the time, as she’d had to explain to heavy-breathing (clove- and tobacco-scented) gropey-feely Mr. Akmar (“I know! Why not take your knickers down, just for one little minute, eh? Just to make me happy, OK? Eh? Whatsa matter, you are prejudiced?”), she was on the rebound from Joël Bourgeois, the cigarette-boat racing champion (Riviera Water Derby, ’99; Auckland Mondiales, ‘01; Killoyle Harbour Circuit, ‘02)…and had he ever led her on, the bastard, with his toothy laugh and muscular tits and neck tanned to an oaken hue like the furniture in Uncle “Bill”’s front parlour. Oh aye, and wasn’t it all lute music and honeyed words, not to mention the odd Ricard above the table and the odd squeeze below, downright exotic for a naïve lass from the Dales, what with him giving out the impression of swinging bachelorhood and all, well it was great stuff and all till that dreadful day she decided to call on him—the thirtieth of May, as if she’d ever forget: Off she went, found the address on the map, took the bus out nine stops, found the place in the flesh, as it were, then waltzed merrily up (or down) his garden path, expecting Romance to step quietly out from behind the rhododendrons, instead of which she was set upon from that quarter by a roaring Dalmatian, two pimply adolescents with squirt guns and a Frenchwoman brandishing a rolling pin, the ensemble like something out of the old Beano comics. Emitting the sounds of high emotion appropriate to their respective genders and species—shouts, shrieks, barks —the motley crew pursued her up and down the path, round the house, into the street, and back again, until finally, battered and bruised, with a puffy lip and tears welling in her eyes, poor Shirl fired missiles of visual rage at the froggie wanker when he finally came out to lounge about on the front step with his hands in his pockets and his tits strapped in behind that pair of tricoloured braces he always affected at the office on French holidays. Then, would you credit it, of all the brass! He actually said, gazing at her blankly, as if she were something, or someone, the postman had just dropped off by mistake: “Did you bring the Swenson report, Miss ah Miss ah Potage—I mean Soup? Ah I see you’ve met my family, ‘ave you.”
Well, that did for him and all. What could she do, with the dog taking nips out of her calves and those two teenagers emptying their water-guns all over her while chanting something like “Chilly billy bum Aha, ha, ha” (or “A La, A La”), and the madwoman French wifey aiming for Shirl’s noodle with her marble rolling pin, snarling imprecations Gallically sotto voce, the whole thing like an inferior, far-too-ludicrous episode of Nash Rambler, P.I., or the Keystone Kops…? Shirley just shook her head, speechless in fury and rejection and a thousand Nos. Bourgeois still had a chance to set things right, but as you might expect he sank to the occasion, all right, with feigned irritation, flexing his pectorals and barking (barely audibly, above the competing dog), “Well, Miss Soap, Hi’m going to ‘ave to hask you to go back to the office and get hit for me.”
“”Appen I won’t,” she shouted, moved to native dialectical patterns of speech. “Tha’s a right sod and all. Tha can fuck off.” She turned to go, harried mercilessly by the dog, which was uncertain by then whether it wanted to attack or play (or both, in its Dalmatian way); the lads pressed their charge, squirting with vigour, but Madame of the rolling pin desisted, at last, victim of a wheezing attack followed by rich, rolling chest-coughs that gave poor Shirl momentary hope and an opportunity to slip away. (Indeed, news came six months later that Mme. Bourgeois had succumbed to a lung infection contracted in the shallow wading pools of Tahiti while she was waiting for her Joel to return from refereeing the Papeete-Pago Pago Ladies’ Catamaran Race. Shirley was mostly unmoved by the news.)
Well, it didn’t take her long, after that. She grew up, matured, hardened, lost her illusions. No more tenderfoot she, oh no. The New Shirley took no prisoners. No sir. And by the by she didn’t get to be assistant director of the office of the assistant vice-assistant to the vice-chairman by being a pushover for man or woman or in-between…well, with the exception of a certain ludicrous draught of cold water named Ferdia Quain, that never-to-be-forgotten (no matter how hard she tried) day at the Leisure Craft party a week later when she was still very much atingle and asmart over the Bourgeois fiasco and given to deep sighs of tragic import…
“Need a drink, doncha?”
Had more romantic, or at least more apposite, words ever been spoken at the outset of a woman’s erotic and emotional dream come true? Then his face swam into view like a Moray eel emerging from its lair, but the shock was mitigated by the dim light. The whole place had been configured as if in a Cornish diorama of the buccaneer 1780s, complete with oil lamps, recorded sea shanties, pseudo-pirates, ship’s rigging and free-ranging, suspicious-eyed parrots, so Ferdia’s pointy nose and goggling stare didn’t look as if they’d been thrown together willy-nilly (as they did to her now, especially in the morning) by some ghastly bloke like Picasso—who for no apparent reason decided people would look better if they were depicted falling to bits—but by someone more normal entirely, say one of those quiet landscape blokes she’d seen at the Scunthorpe Art Gallery exhibit last year, Lowry or Gourmet or Carrot or one of your more everyday frog painters with pictures of ox-carts and ponds and sunrise and praying peasants like that good old true-blue English painter Sergeant Constable with his hay-wains and muddy farmyards and granges against great cloudbanks of bluish mash… In short, a fella with a way with words.
“Need a drink, doncha?”
“Babycham?”
“Why Babycham?”
“Why not?”
“Good answer. You’re on.”
Plus, he talked about HER. Not himself. Not naff comments like “I’ve a flash motor,” or “I’m in charge of the Spewdoggle account, over at Metcalfes,” or “I played for Ireland (or England) back in ’79, till I got the knee,” or “I’ve a really cool motor, want to see it?” or “You’re my kind of woman, ya know,” but “Where are you from in England?” and “Do you like it here?” and “Ever tried colcannon?” All right, not friggin’ Brains Trust stuff, he was no Magnus Magnusson, that was a dead cert; but he was nice, and she needed niceness from a man. Like Lord Rutland de James in Dame Barbara Yelland-Spencer’s Cavalier’s Moon, Ferdia was “curious, not inquisitive; solicitous, not obsequious; firm, not demanding.” He was the bloke Shirley was looking for but didn’t even know it.
“You in the IRA?” she’d enquired, as a joke, after about four drinks, having pretty much run out of small talk, yet awash in the hotel’s pseudo-marine life (a Long John Silver winked at her out of his good eye, across the room) and creeping Irishness. By half nine the recorded sea-shanties had yielded to the Little McCrackens, tootling and banging away on the jukebox, and of course, this being Ireland, Irish accents sprang up everywhere, even under the fake buccaneer’s hats; and the whole atmosphere changed from Treasure Island kitsch to about as bloody Irish as a St. Patrick’s Day in a South Shields boozer, complete with shillelaghs and shamrocks and hurried dashes to the loo, hand over gob… in short, a natural atmosphere in which to mention the IRA, hence her question.
His reply took her aback, and set them both on their curious course through life together.
“Not any more,” he said in all seriousness, above the rim of his pint (stout, of course, but no more than his third). Meaning, of course, he actually had been one of Them. Blimey. Well, whatever she’d expected him to say, that wasn’t it. IRA? How horrible! She thought she ought to leave. But somehow—in the unknowable way of love—his being an ex-IRA man was the secret formula for infatuation, right then and there.
“Crikey,” she said.
As he rose steadily to his feet to acquire a fourth pint and fifth Babycham from the shoulder-girted bar, then a fifth and sixth respectively, she fell for him with all the need and despair in her nature, like responding to like on some hidden level as if he were Don Quicksoat and she his Dulcie Neary. In her moment of misfortune, a warrior-hero had come to comfort her with gentle romance. And comfort her he did, that very night, with his spine curved and his eyes closed and his teeth, between which lolled his tongue, bared to the sky.
“Oh no,” sobbed Shirl, wrapped in a bathtowel, seeking out her reflection in the fogged-up mirror. “Wot ‘ave I done. “E’s not ‘alf so friggin’ bad, ‘e isn’t, with his vitamins and all.”
Nah, she assured the all-too-familiar, yeasty-round-the-edges-but-still-pretty-in-a-puppyish-way face (hers) that gradually manifested itself in the expanding patches of clarity amid the mirror-mist like a clurichaun in the deep tarns of the Wicklow Hills: she’d call him later.
“Call him later,” Shirley exhorted the face, which exhorted silently back. “Don’t forget, now.”
Time now to harness up for the day’s doings in the tense torpor of the south-facing office cubicle (nice view of the Strand, the sea, and sometimes Wales) at her place of employment, Maher Global Worldwide International Estate Agents PLC, World HQ. The building was Killoyle’s only stab thus far at a skyscraper, and with the sky generally so low in those parts in March, its twelve storeys very nearly scraped it, on good days. Greek Tower, it was called, in honour of its originator, Tom “The Greek” Maher, real-estate tycoon, man of action, and stage-Irishman par excellence. When reproached mildly by the Killoyle Preservation Committee for chucking a bloody great skyscraper up in a neighbourhood of Georgio-Victorian row houses, The Greek’s reply was eloquent at first of the little people and little brown jugs and dances with shillelaghs at the crossroads by moonlight; but soon his temper soured and he invoked the spirit of imprecation, thus: “Sod off yez feckin’ hoors if yez don’t watch it Oy’ll be tearin’ down yer feckin’ pseudo-Tudy shacks with me own two feckin’ hands so Oy will.” So his folly went up, funded by stolen donations and pittances bullied out of the bulliable and the proceeds of a great swatch of built-over land in Southern Italy, the notorious “Vesuvio” complex near Naples, built right on the edge of Vesuvius’ crater (“smashing views”). Completed inside eight months with nary a thought for zoning restrictions, Greek Tower could be just peeked from as far away as The Belfers, especially by night, aglitter with electricity a-squandering.
Still, Shirley liked her job, as jobs went—or rather, she liked what she’d done with it, having started as a humble freelancer surveyor and having risen over the past two years to become Assistant Demo Manager and Demo Manager (Ireland) and finally Assistant Executive in charge of Accounts Domestic and Foreign (Assistant Vice-President’s Office). Mind you, it was a real office number, so she was expected to get in at 8 and hang on daily till 5 or 6 and wear business attire and go to cocktail parties and flirt with visiting estate agents from abroad and generally be as blandly brisk and gung-ho as any number of office-trained drones the world over from Boston to Bangalore and beyond, those hapless souls imprisoned by the needs of their daily survival (or, God help us, ambition) in the soul-collectivism of corporate life that owes more to Hitler, Stalin and Genghiz Khan than to any form of democracy . Shirley, for one, found severe limitations placed on any form of expression of her personality, even in as small and ludicrous a universe as Maher Global International Worldwide, PLC, which consisted of The Greek, his wife, their cousins, their cousins’ children, the Mahers themselves being childless (rumor had it manly Tom was impotent as the inside of a hop-toad’s foreleg), Mrs. Maher’s young brother Seamus and his boy Liam, along with a dozen or so outsiders, including Shirl and a somewhat slimy but also somewhat intriguing (to her) Yank import called Lance; yet, even at Mahers, the One Truth was the company’s Bottom Line, and any hints of Shirley’s native warm-hearted and humorous Yorkshire common sense that seeped through the armour of corporate life were promptly squashed, like fungus-beetles under the rampaging Wellingtons of an over-zealous gardener.

* * * * *
The day after St. Patrick’s Day was known throughout Killoyle City and environs as “The Day after St. Patrick’s Day.” Once widely accepted as Hangover Day back in the long-gone green-and-golden Golden Age before nationwide prosperity extended longevity and improved health and, consequently, elevated hypochondria to the status of national pastime,
it had long been considered almost as good an excuse to slack off as St. Pat’s itself, or at least to say “Nah God bless yez we’ll get round to that tomorrow.”
And indeed, islets of the old ways survived here and there in the ocean of Ireland’s new self-denial.
“Nah God bless ya we’ll get round to that tomorrow,” said O’Reilly of O’Reilly’s Wiring and Electrical Supplies.
“Yeah?” growled Ferdia. “When?”
“Tomorrow,” said O’Reilly, a wisp of a man with circumflex-pointed eyebrows that gave him the expression of a doubting saint, although he was quite the opposite. Aptly, his name was Thomas.
“Ya ballocks man. Give us a ballpark anyhow.”
“Ten. No, twelve. Or one. Or maybe two. Tell ya what: Three-ish at the outside.”
That was close enough for an Irishman of the old school.
“Right. You’re on.”
Ferdia left, whistling, oblivious to the fiery glare directed at his shoulderblades by seemingly harmless O’Reilly (“go on, ya shite,” muttered the latter), relieved in his poet’s soul to be free of the dreary place with its fluttering fluorescent lighting and creaky floors and grime-and-dust-on-filing-cabinet smell and aging adverts for boring things like transformers or alternators and its groaning old ill-fitting drawers overflowing with electrical flexes and light bulbs and butterfly spanners and bolts and an infinity of wires and plugs and small dull metallic fixtures and nuts and bolts and that. Truly, ‘twas a depressing place, where a sensitive man might contemplate the attractions of suicide. But for all its dinginess O’Reilly’s shop did well, so it did. And O’Reilly’d always give Ferdia a two percent discount on any work for old times’ sake, where others might give ten.
“Opening a wine shop, are you?” he’d exclaimed when the idea was yet being bruited about in the alehouses and groggeries of Killoyle by a certain recently-demobbed ex-IRA archivist. “Think about your track lighting, Ferdia old son. Nothing like it to give a joint some class, and knowing you your joint will need it more than most.”
“Arrah,” replied Ferd, like one of the old overfed lions in Dublin Zoo. “Arrrh.” Sure, he thought it was a grand idea, and the wine-and-cheese shop of his dreams was thenceforth suffused in the soft aura of track lighting against the lullaby soundtrack of cornets and harps and his own voice modulated to a silken murmur uttering the words “May I help you, madame?” over and over again, a pleasant fantasy poisoned by the eternal voice of The Great Money Nag screeching But You’ve Got No Money Son, Money Money Money like some ghastly tarted-up Grand Canal whore somewhere offstage left . . .
Well, yes, he did need more money, that was certain. Small contributions from fans of the Republic One and Indivisible had paid for a few things: some boxes, the windows, a door lock or two, but there was a whole shop to build, including vents, gutters, handicapped access ramps, phone jacks, shoplifter-spotting ladders and cameras, and steel doorframes; and much more moolah to be raised, and Ferdia knew not how, never having been much good with moolah, or the raising and cultivating thereof, as Shirley, among others, would readily attest…so he hoped, in his foolish, IRA-poet’s way, that the arrangement with O’Reilly was on, money or not—which, of course, it was not, and would never be, for what was O’Reilly if not the bit of a sharper in his business dealings, and Ferdia’s sworn enemy since both were six, and how had he withstood Japanese competition?
But Ferdia dreamt on. Once your standard common-or-garden overhead lights were installed, he mused, O’Reilly would, conjuror-like, endow the whole place with the golden glow of track lighting to bring out the inner (young) Liz Taylor in the raddled features of every old crone, the innate (youthful) Gary Cooper in the collapsed faces of our old wans.
And au fond the honeyed purr, “May I help you, madam (or ‘madame’)?”
But the installation would not take place on the 17th, nor on its direct descendant, the 18th, nor down any of the succeeding days. And God Himself was sole possessor of the knowledge of whether or not the whole wine-and-cheese business would ever be consummated, and whether the wherewithal would ever be there.
And these were the ways of the Ireland that was.
And they were of old Ireland, were the Quains and the O’Reillys. True was it that the boys had been neighbors out Connemara Road, and fighters together in playground re-creations of the Troubles; and true is it that young Ferdia Quain and his McCool cousins Fergus and Finn and equally-young Tom O’Reilly had made similar progressions through Loreto Convent school and Collins Comprehensive, with the outcome for Ferdia and the McCools that we have seen and an outcome for Thomas far cosier, that of not having to do much beyond hang about waiting for his old wan to go face down. This happened athwart the box hedge out back shortly before supper two years ago to the day as a direct result of a paroxysm of rage provoked by the recent appearance on the tube of the leader of the political party most directly opposed to the old fella’s Ireland-first philosophy. The result for Tom (who had no brothers and whose sisters Nan and Sinead were about as interested in running an electrical company as a Muslim cleric from, say, Iran might be in the history of Irish whiskey-distilling ), was that, from one day to the next, in time-tried hand-me-down Irish style, he took over the firm and right from the start got to boss around hard cases like the Horgan brothers in Bookkeeping and old Flannagan, who’d never missed a chance to call young Tom “young Tommy me lad” and who now had to call him “boss,” which he did with as much acid sarcasm as he could muster (lots) before retiring with Fionnula, his wife of 43 years, to an island hideaway in the Cayman chain.
Still, O’Reillys did a good business, overall, although much of it was via subcontract work fed back through a chain of connections to certain officially defunct organizations based up North. O’Reillys’ only local competition, Hashimoto’s Hypertensive Wires & Flex Worldwide, PLC, had been brought in under a subcontracting grandfather agreement with Maher World Estates in return for a nice cosy patch of prime real estate south of Oppama, on the island of Kyushu, halfway between Nitsun Motors Ltd. world HQ and the local Highland single-malt-whiskey import depot (frequently raided by Mr. Yokoyama, a desperate salaryman, on his weekly binge). Hashimoto’s remained to all intents and purposes the Maher in-house electrical contractor, needing interpreters and visual aids for the smallest job, all flown in from the Chrysanthemum Empire and housed and dined at Maher expense. Oddly, or perhaps not so, a small bomb had gone off the day Mr. Hashimoto flew in from Tokyo; he flew out again pronto and was now seriously contemplating a move to Slovakia, where taxes were lower and the natives less restless. Accordingly, O’Reillys, with their bona fide pinkish-grey complexions and South Munster accents (oddly blended with hints of deepest Belfast, although the closest public connection was a distant second cousin from Ballymena), were a hit with the local punters; they were on easy street, with branches in republican alleys. O’Reilly’s little blue vans were a well-known sight throughout Killoyle City and environs as far south as North Youghal and as far east as Crumstown West. Indeed, one such sky-hued rig hurtled past Ferdia, as with arms windmilling and knees akimbo he tensely navigated the abrupt downward slope of Uphill Street past Goddi’s ex-Disco, Mad Molloy’s Beer and Poteen Bar, and Heartland Autos, on his way to Dickery Dick’s, the insulation suppliers.
It was a fine day, so it was, oh it was that, thanks be to God arrah.
Before Ferdia reached his destination, however, there emerged from the dreary forecourt of Heartland Autos an intervention in his life that was to prove coincidental, if by no means crucial, in the form of a slumped figure clutched within the folds of a well-worn and –spotted mac, pulling guiltily on a cigarette and looking around as in an access or seizure of well-founded paranoia. Seeing Ferdia, Donal Duddy (for yes! ‘twas he) waved and called out.
“Oy!”
As he could see no other possible interlocutors behind, beside, or in front of him, Ferdia crossed the street, ready to bristle, but by the time he was close enough to Donal for conversation to take place, the latter’s placid smile of greeting was sufficient in its inherent Irish treacliness to disarm instinctive Irish suspicion of ridicule and / or the mickey and / or piss being taken.
“Howja doin’, squire,” Donal said.
“Good.”
“Fancy a motor? I’ve quite a few.”
“Nah. Got a fag?”
“Oh sure.”
Duddy handed over a wrinkled Imperial Turf Accountant Ultra-Lite Dual Hyper-Filter and followed the gesture with the warming gesture of a CLiC-flicked light. Inhalations followed on both sides, punctuated by microcoughs and shifts in posture.
“Better make sure there’s no sign of old Wet’s anti-smoking police, yeah?”
They chuckled in harmonious and mutually Irish maleness, side by side exhaling small tusks of smoke through their nostrils into the damp morning air and gazing as they did so at the painted faces upon the Strikers’ Wall.
“I knew that sod,” said Ferdia. With his cigarette pinched between his left hand’s thumb and forefinger, he indicated the middle of the three faces.
“Yeah? What sod’s that?”
“MacPayne. I reckon that’s supposed to be MacPayne, right? The one in the middle? The hoor they called Socks? Let me tell ya he was no hero. Mama’s boy, boyo. Worse, he was in touch with the Prods. Know that for a fact. And I can tell you this. He was one himself. And that’s not all. They were the ones let him fuckin starve to death.”
“The Prods, did they?”
“Right. United Red Hand of Ulster Orangeperson’s Army of Loyal Anti-Catholic No-Pope-Here-or-There True-Blue-Brit Protestant Covenanter Free Prebysterian All-Stars, the URHUOALACNPHOTTBBPCFPAS or Up Your Hole Hot Boob Chick Arse as they’re commonly known. Bastards had infiltrators everywhere. One in particular, nicknamed Tarquin the Terrible, passed himself off as one of us while secretly pumping your man for info under the cover of teaching him Spanish. Of course, fuckin RUC or whatever theyt call them now wouldn’t know the difference, bunch of uninformed uniformed Prods that they uniformly are, altogether.”
“Christ, I know you.”
“Do ya now.”
“You’re that bugger.”
“Could well be.”
“Sorry. I mean you’re the ex-Rah fella that was like.”
“Stop right there, sunshine.”
“No, but really.”
“Let’s leave it at that for the mo. Tell me about yourself, Fecky the ninth. Who’re you, for a start?”
“Ah,” Donal shrugged, as if who he was was the least consequential of things. “Donal Duddy.”
“Nice to meet ya, Donal. I’m Ferdia. So what is it you do?”
“Ah. I just run this place, Ferdia. Dull job. Still, it has its moments. Only yesterday,” he continued with breathless urgency, Donal being one of those fellas who have to give voice to their worries and describe their inmost fears, even to a total stranger, in the desperate hope of hearing “there, there, there’s nothing to worry about”: “I had a gal nick a car from me. A red Tortuga roadster. So I’m trying to make up the shortfall before the boss finds out about it.”
“Nicked? How’d she manage that?”
“Well, I gave her the keys, and she was off.”
“Christ you’re a sorry prat, but. You mean you just let her drive off without getting her name and address?”
“Oh I got her name right enough. Terpsichore O’Hanlon. Hard to forget.”
“Terpsichore? Muse of the dance? In a red Tortuga? No worries. I can track her down. Give her something to remember you by, too.”
“Ah no don’t do that,” said Donal.
“Well, a little something.”
“Nah. I’d just as soon drop the whole thing only the boss would do his nut. He doesn’t know yet, you see.”
“Leave it to me, sunshine. You can do me a favor someday. Who knows, I might need a fast car at a moment’s notice. A red Tortuga, for instance.” An idea was aborning in Ferdia’s brain—or rather, the seed of a long-dormant idea was blooming, planted there over his years as an organization man, for in the Rah fancy cars were reliable sources of ready cash, the fancier the better. Ferdia recalled one incident in particular, known in the organization archives as The Merc Incident; and although he personally had spent the balance of his career as Archivist arranging and re-arranging neatly alphabetized volumes on bookshelves in the basement library of Command HQ rather than hefting the actual Armalites, it wasn’t in the spirit of total ignorance that he’d cordially parted ways with the organization, and there might yet be mileage to be had out of that old connection . . . as for Donal, he saw where this was going and inwardly rejoiced. After all, he could hardly be held responsible if he told Byrne the Lads had got involved.
“OK. But don’t hurt the girl, Ferdia, there’s a good man.”
Ferdia raised a quizzical—no, interrogatory--eyebrow (his left).
“Oho,” said he, departing from cliche. “Sets the wind in that quarter, my liege?”
There followed an instructive moment or two of confusion. Donal, taken aback by the sudden, unexpected linguistic fancy that caparisoned a manly foul-mouthed soldier of the people’s army in poofy ruff and striped tights, only managed a gape that was misinterpreted by Ferdia, with his long and wide experience of gapers, as evidence of the good old rock-solid imbecility of the Plain People of Ireland, and therefore requiring translation into popular dialect.
“Spoony over her, arencha?” he said.
“Ah. Well. I suppose you could say that. You ought to see her, you’d understand in a minute.”
“Fair enough. I’ll look into it.”
Donal hopped back and forth in agitation. His spent cigarette described a leisurely loop-the-loop over his shoulder. “You’re not exactly the run of the mill Rah man, are you?”
“I account this world a tedious theatre, for I do play a part in't against my will,” replied Ferdia as he departed, avec superbe.
“Christ, another one,” muttered Donal, who was beginning to see himself as the sole sane person in a wilderness of nutters and glic old cobs.
(And this, for Donal Duddy, was the beginning of wisdom, as it is for so many of us.)

* * * *

Stan dabbed his lips with a Fairy Farmer’s serviette adorned with the company’s logo (a fat, bearded and gossamer-winged Farmer Giles in blue overalls, hovering like a menacing cherub over an idealized landscape of hills and dales that looked oddly erotic, in a greenish kind of way) and peered through the misted port porthole of the Rumpelstiltskin at the flame-red Tortuga placid under the canalside willow trees.
“Cripes Terps. You could at least have nicked a less conspicuous set of wheels. You’ll have every guard in Ireland after ya.”
Suddenly, like a singer about to belt out a tune, he slewed round, uprolled his eyes and fashioned his mouth into the semblance of a doughnut hole . . .
. . . Oh no, a burp’s on its way, thought Terpsichore, accurately. . .
“ORRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRP.”
Stan smacked his lips contentedly and drew the flowered curtain over the porthole, but not before peeking out again, worried that he’d misread a movement or a shadow and thereby missed a concealed brigade of brigands.
“Maybe you’re right,” said Terpsichore. And she knew he was, more or less, or near enough, for him. He wasn’t on the mark very often, after all, but he was now, the slob. Not that it took a genius; wasn’t she having second thoughts too? She’d be the first to admit it, at least to herself: Yes, she’d cocked up—AGAIN. Typical overreaction or overcompensation or something, whatever she’d done all her life, like driving to Coleraine on a whim when she was sixteen or taking that silly Italian film course because the prof was an Eye-tie named Gino with permanent five o’clock shadow and sad eyes and an accent and a manly aroma of stale cigarettes and espresso. Or hooking up with John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the eighteen-stone Harley-Davidson biker from Tipperary, when it was patently obvious that the man was a nutter and a waste of (quite a lot of) space, just as her parents had said. Then taking up with Stan on the basis of (basically) him having a barge, and he wasn’t much better than all the others, and the bloody barge was, well, a barge…And now what was she about? Stealing a car, for God’s sake? Ah sure wasn’t it the fantasy of all middle-class girls to turn bad for awhile and play Bonnie and Claude at the wheel of a red convertible (well, that was Thelma and Louise, right enough, but still), but Terpsichore was reluctantly conceding to herself that if she had within her anything resembling a criminal impulse it was buried beneath so many strata of her middle-class upbringing and ancestry that it would take another lifetime and a bulldozer to bring it to the surface. It was her lifelong bind, the bind of many a young middle-class romantic, to detest the middle class—those permed and buttoned-up four-by-four-driving, Chablis-sipping, Spain-visiting, DVD-buying bores who made life so supremely naff—yet to not really want to be anything else, not really, certainly not to be reduced to endless anti-government demos whilst taking handouts from the Sosh and sitting cross-legged on the floor smoking mary jane and watching television specials about AIDS in Uganda and eating Spam with Bovril and marmite and drinking cheap green Portuguese wine and listening to some awful Brazilian or African music and smoking Greek or Slovakian fags and trying so hard to be Bohemian or Czech. . . no, life with Stan was a sham. All very artistic and Bohemian on the surface—living on a barge after all—and the pair of them either marginal or jobless or the next thing, and him pretending to be a writer, like Rodolfo, or Luciano, or whatever his name was, in that Bohemian opera by the Italian composer (Verdini? Puccio?): but Stan was a fraud, and a layabout, and a sponge off the Sosh, and they both knew it (well, she knew it), and that was all there was to it.
And what was she, anyhow—and who? A waitress at Fairy Farmer’s, that was what, and a third-rate university graduate, just barely, that was who…and now a thief, too.
A THIEF!
Of a car off a dingy North Killoyle used-car lot, not a black postwar Italian bicycle in the melodious sunlit alleyways of Rome. (That was why she’d had that strange mental association when she saw that fella that ran the place, who wasn’t the least bit Italian, but for some reason she thought of him as … Beppo. Maybe it was the way he had of standing with his head tilted to one side, like that actor she’d always fancied: Giannino Giannini? Giancarlo Giuseppini? Gianbatista Giambucco?) No, there was no romance in it, nor in any part of her life. None at all. Her whole life was a yawn. Fuck it.
She yawned and looked through the crack in the musty curtains into the muggy evening light and beheld the hollowness of her own soul. She was nearly thirty, for the love of God. Well, twenty-nine, nearly (twenty-eight). And this was the distance she’d traveled from her home across town: here, to this barge, with this ridiculous masher. She looked at him, seeing him in an increasingly ridiculous light. There he sat, at his desk, finishing his tea: rashers, boxty, Vienna sausages, all sub-par to an unbelievable degree when he made them, which he insisted on doing on the grounds that “only a man can make a decent man’s tay for a real man, like.” It was like dog food, so it was. How appropriate, then, that the industrious up-and-down working of his jaws was like a dog’s rather than the normal human up-and-down and side-to-side style. It was a trait that had started to irritate her; and his nose, never small, seemed to have inflated to the size of a rugby ball in recent days, or maybe he was just drinking more.
“Are you drinking more?” she blurted out.
Not quite sure he’d heard right, he looked up from the article he was copying out for Belfers Belfry (“Twenty Months In the Trees: A Monkey Maiden’s Quest,” by Jean Godself in ApeWorld, Issue No. 5, May-June-July-August-September-October-November-December ’99) .
“More what?”
“Drinking more, just. Your nose looks red from here.”
“Ah give over girl. What’re you on about for God’s sake. Me nose looks red, now what kind of blether’s that.”
“Well it sort of matches the car, doesn’t it,” she said, spiking her words with malice. Stan slewed about and pointed a didactic index finger.
“Now you listen to me, Terpsichore my girl, never mind me fuckin nose you go and get rid of that bloody car right now if you know what’s good for you or so help me God I’m going straight over to that phone and dialing the fuckin guards so I am so help me God. Last thing I bleedin need right now is hauled off for being an accessory or accomplice or whatever it is.”
Driven to fears of excess by rising emotion, he rushed over to the porthole again and snatched the curtain aside.
“I knew it,” he raged. “They’re there.”
“Who’s there?”
“I dunno. The hard men. The guards. The southside wideboys. Look for yerself. Ah sure it’s a grand day’s work you’ve done, Terps me darlin.”
Indeed, around the low-slung silhouette that denoted the Tortuga a swarm of human shapes was apparently taking up position in readiness for a siege, or an attack, or…
“Jaysus Christ,” gasped Stan. “I knew it. You stupid bitch.”
Terpsichore flounced to the porthole, swallowing hard the retort that rose unbidden and fell just short of utterance: HOW DARE YOU CALL ME THAT YA FUCKIN SOD, or words to that effect, instead of which:
“They’re just kids,” she said evenly. “Admiring the flash wheels. As you can see.”
Stan pushed her aside.
“Kids, you say? Turn the lights out.”
“Oh for…”
“Right I’ll do it meself.”
Having duly extinguished the lights, Stan glared into the gloaming. Frolicking around the car on the opposite bank of the canal were the shapes of wee folk, not as described by emerald-dyed leprechaun-spotters like James Stephens and W. B. Yeats, but rather those that might be found on a daily basis on the macadamized playgrounds of any comprehensive school in any of the drab housing estates of Ireland, viz., boys of twelve or thirteen or so, or fourteen at a pinch.
Stan’s abrupt opening of the porthole with a sudden creak of the brasswork silenced the lads until one bright spark correctly assessed the origin of the sound and sang out,
“Eye mister. Nice view ya got, livin on that owld boat. Nice missus ya got too.”
Thuggish sniggering followed.
“Piss off you wankers,” bellowed Stan. “Or so help me God I’ll.”
“This yer car, mister?”
“It’s ah well ah what’s it to you?”
“Coz it’s still got the keys in.”
“It what.”
Coarse male-adolescent laughter swaggered through the air.
“And we’ll not be wasting an opportunity. So don’t lose your rag, big shot. You just stay on your boat and have a nice shag with the missus while we take the racer out for a spin, right?”
More snorts of mirth, then a car door slamming, then another, then the brisk sound of the Tortuga firing up, then the hiccupping descending drone of a departing car downshifted incompetently.
“Well I’m buggered,” said Stan. “There they go, acushla.”
“Right,” said Terpsichore. “They’re off.”
Stan grinned, revealing a potato shard between his front teeth.
“It’s good news, so. Let ‘em go, eh?”
“You’ve something stuck in your teeth.”
“I—what? Ah for God’s sake woman.”
He turned on his heel and took refuge in a huff, no longer concerned by the car or her or the fate of the world, apart from that monkey slag whose stuff he was copying out, changing “she” to “he” and “ape” to “man”…
So that was that, said Terpsichore to herself, doubtfully, immediately adding the mental post-it note:
Or was it?
Mental footnotes followed.
The car was gone, but for how long? The yobs might bring it back all bashed up and she’d be hauled into court for damages.
Or they might go for a joyride and never come back.
Or they could wreck the car, just, and that would bring in the guards, and the wee sods would spill their guts and tell them where they’d got it…
Then they’d trace it to that car place and that nice Italian fellow—no, not Italian, that was just her imagination, Irish he was, no doubt, with those clothes and the way he spoke and smelled of fags and stale pints and of course that awful complexion, but there was something—was it his resemblance to that other Italian actor, not Gino Gianni but Alfredo Squalido, no hang on a sec: Sordido, that was it, Alberto Sordido?—anyway, he’d be up the creek and he’d finger her and she’d be made out an accomplice, an accessory after the fact, and all that . . . or maybe not. He struck her as a bit of a washout but at the same time a simpatico sort of fella who might have you-know-what on his mind—they all did—but not so as to interfere with a certain intrinsic gentleness and even (haha) gentlemanliness.
Terpsichore longed to confide, to share, to elicit sympathy, but Stan’s back was turned, his desklamp was on, his prejudices firmly in place. His pen, clutched in his right hand as a child would hold a lollipop, was busily scratching the paper; his left hand was busily scratching his bum, and a smoke was in the offing, she could tell from those glances in a certain direction, the theatrical throat-clearing, the preparatory sighs. It was quite clear that as far as he was concerned the whole business was over and done with and WASN’T THAT TYPICAL, just life going its merry way, the way he’d been with that silly job, passive-aggressive that attitude was called, complain all the time but never actually go out there and take the initiative, oh no, you don’t want to stick your neck out too far, easy enough to sit at home and wait for the phone calls the way he’d done with that ludicrous Dutch balls factory (his last job ever, he swore)—and hope for some motte like her to show up for the snogging and shagging and general maintenance.
Not a forlorn hope, as it turned out: she had, hadn’t she?
But now she’d had it. She was done acting like a charwoman with her future behind her, always bending the knee to circumstances or saying yes to please the pocket Hitlers you always found in crummy jobs or popping up left and right to volunteer to clean up others’ shite. Enough of all that. Or, as Giangiacomo Gianpaolino says to his shiftless Sardinian cousins in that mid-70s Italian flick, the one about the anarchists kidnapping the politician who later takes over the group and pipe-bombs the Vatican :
Andate chiagare tutti.
She had herself to think about. She was young, not a total idiot, and some said she was on the fetching side, physically—well, she knew she was no nightmare to look at, the most common compliment was that she was a dead ringer for Nicolette Tedman, not that THAT came without a price tag, especially when you had to spend most of your life around men, the silly guys…but overall she had enough to be going on with, and it was well past time to be going on with it. Time to make a move and start fashioning life on her own behalf, to start putting herself first, her needs, her real desires. Not catering to some wanker on a barge. Yes, she’d face up to things, for once. She’d make a clean breast of it. She’d tell that non-Italian guy with the beaten-spaniel eyes everything and hope for the best.
I mean, after all, what’s to lose? as the Marion Blayne character says in the Antwerp love scene in Loose Hips, Looser Lips.
“Oy,” said Stan. “Where you going?”
“Out,” said the New Terpsichore, and she was as good as her word.
* * * * *

“Brrr, it’s cold.”
“Sure what do you expect if you go about in a singlet all the time. This is Killoyle, not the bloody Riviera.”
“Ah stop yer nagging, woman.”
In the depths of this dialogue with his girlfriend and fiancée-to-be Anthea, the “drinks hostess” (barmaid) at Mad Molloy’s Bar, Finn was hunched forward at the bar counter, hugging himself for warmth against the chillish March air trickling through the half-open door that wouldn’t open all the way and could be shut only with the greatest difficulty, usually with Finn’s help ‘round midnight. “Better have a drink,” said Finn, no great drinker. A rash of goose pimples spread up and down his bare arms. “Give me a Lemon Daiquiri, would you, darlin’?”
“It’s only just gone half one, but.”
“Yeah, I know. That’s why I’m not asking you for anything stronger.”
At this, impatience rippled across Anthea’s comely, if a trifle acne-scarred, oval face that was a well-fitting frame for her eyes of speedwell blue, top-fringed by an abundance of hair the chestnut-brown hue of the Anglo-Irish strain; for her name was Talbott, and she was the niece of the Assistant Commissioner of Gardai for the Southeast, so watch your step, smarty, as Ferdia always said to Finn. At the moment, she vividly displayed womanly impatience of a positively wifely stamp, rolling her eyes and emitting a sigh. Of course, she and Finn had been going out, and in, and in and out, together for three years now, so their togetherness was already becoming the settled known.
But she brought the bugger his daiquiri, anyhow.
He sipped, slurped, apologized for slurping, fired off a crisp belch.
“APP. Sorry.”
Anthea gave him a look of affectionate disdain that he attempted to dispel with a change of subject. After all, he was a man on a mission, charged by his cousin Ferdia to locate the whereabouts of one Turpsicle or Turbotop or…
“Look, Anthea, you know this gal, whatever the frig her name is, Ferdia told me, right?”
“Terpsichore? Yeah, I roomed a couple of years ago with her and another girl, Doreen—remember Doreen Grey, the one who ran off with her crazy dad and that idiotic barman and started robbing banks? She’s in rehab now, by the way, up North somewhere.”
“Is she now? Fancy that.” He sipped. “Well now this Terpsy gal, she’s waitressing over at Fairy Farmers, yeah?”
“Terps is a right knockout, everyone says so, no one can figure out why she stays on at that silly restaurant.”
“Beauty but no brains, that’s it. You see it all the time.”
“Thank you very much.”
“Nah, not you, darlin,” protested Finn. “You’re the exception that proves the rule.”
“Nice try. That’s what all you guys think. No halfway good-looking gal can possibly have an active brain cell in her head, that’s your take. Well, au contraire, Finn me lad. Terps once told me she’d graduated from UCD, I believe it was, with a two-one Honours in Italian or French.”
“There you go. And look where she ended up, eh? Like college degrees mean anything.”
“Well certainly not to you, Mr. Drop-Out, sorry I mean Mr. Work-Out, and would you be Mr. Carry-Out and take this lot round to the back?”
Finn sulkily humped a crate a-rattle with empties to Brown Alley behind the bar and stood there for a moment watching the bustle on Brendan Behan Avenue, a sliver of which was visible at alley’s end. He lifted his singlet to scratch his stomach and spent a second or so musing on the incalculable randomness of life, what with this here, that there, and the other fuck knows where.
“”Tis a funny old life,” he muttered. “Sure and bejesus ‘tis that so ‘tis.”
Then he returned to the bar, bolstered by a few good belly-deep sighs riven by shivers (“brr, it’s cold”).
Anthea was chirpily pouring pints for some students from Upper Killoyle College, utter yahoos with (in Finn’s opinion) no more upstairs than a kennel of dachshunds.
“Ya ballocks,” he sneered, then turned his back and nursed his Lemon Daiquiri and gave himself the occasional brisk rub-down for warmth, while listening contemptuously to the students’ nonsensical havering. Through the half-open door he gazed across Uphill Street at the chippie-packet-, gray-newspaper- and used-car-strewn expanse of Heartland Autos, outside which a man was standing, smoking in short, guilty spurts.
Meanwhile, behind him, the young bloods were hard at it.
“Is it yerself, then, Anthea?”
“And who else would I be.”
“Got a smile there, darlin’?”
“I did but I must have mislaid it.”
“You’re on the ball today, arencha. Had a rough night?”
“Right enough, I stayed home and worked on my college applications. That was rough.”
“The whole process well lubricated, no doubt.”
“With the strongest Oolong.”
“Tell me now, you’ve the bit of an edge to you today, haven’t ya? Boyfriend been cheatin’ on ya, yeah? The one who spends all day workin’ out?”
“Not that I’m aware, sunshine. But you never know, with these bodybuilders. Why don’t you ask him?”
Silence impaled chatter with the sudden awareness of said boyfriend’s brooding presence at the end of the bar. Conversation did a U-turn.
“Ned, why don’t you shut up and stop botherin the lady and give us a fag, for fuck’s sake.”
“Thought you gave ‘em up.”
“Ah that was for the Marathon, just. Wouldn’t look good with me joggin about in Spandex with a Regal hangin off me lip.”
Finn finished his drink.
“Well, Ferdia wants to meet her,” he resumed, once the college yobs had transferred their cacophony into the lounge next door, leaving Anthea with a moment to wipe up and shoot censorious glances at her boyfriend’s empty glass in anticipation of being asked for a refill; but he pushed it aside.
“Like I say.”
“Why? Seeking distraction from the home front? In the doldrums with Shirley again, is he?”
“Nah, Ferd’s no skirt-chaser, you know that. I dunno, it beats me, darlin. Something to do with a mate of his and a car he wants to sell. My dear old cuz plays his hand pretty close to the vest, as you well know.”
“Especially when he thinks the guards are listening. Or when he’s at sea himself, which is most of the time.”
“Yeh. Or whatever.”
Finn swung off the barstool with a grunt and briefly shadowboxed the air, head ducking spasmodically in accordance with Muhammad Ali’s theories of the noble art of rope-a-dope (“Duck, baby, duck”). It was a parody of the boxer in training, called “The Boxer in Training,” a tedious display Anthea had seen 88 times if she’d seen it once (which she had—89, actually, in three years). “So when can you set up a meeting, ducks?”
Anthea said nothing and only stared beyond him into the middle distance.
“Well?” said Finn with some asperity. Then, knowing his girlfriend wasn’t one to tug overmuch on his chain, he turned to follow her gaze and saw a couple approaching. That same scruffy article Finn had noticed standing across the street puffing on a fag was now crossing the street, shoulders hunched, with at his side a well-set-up young woman who appeared to be earnestly trying to engage him in conversation, to which his response appeared to be to stare at the ground and hope for oblivion.
“No need to set anything up,” said Anthea. “Speak of the devil.”
“You mean…?” said Finn.
“Yeh. It’s Terps right enough.”
Finn observed a strawberry-blonde of slightly average height and above-average attractiveness in a leather (or suede) coat, pullover and jeans, crossing the street with the quick stride of the woman who knows her worth, man-wise, and is fleeing from it.
“Nice,” murmured Finn to himself.
“Oh I knew you’d like her,” said, with droll emphasis, Anthea, who had the hearing of a fruitbat in the Celebean rainforest attuned to the plop of berries onto the forest floor amid the rustling and screeching of spider monkeys, Gibson’s macaques, and the like. “I’ll introduce you in a sec. They’re clearly on a direct course for Molloys.”
Finn stirred uneasily in anticipated discomfort of the encounter.
“Who’s the scab-picker with her?”
“Why don’t you ask him yourself? Hi, Terps!” sang out Anthea as the pair entered, Terps with confidence, her companion with diffidence bestriding him like a succubus…but he did strike a pose, somewhat, and ask a punter hanging out by the door for a light:
“Gotta light?”
“Nah.”
“It is, isn’t it?” said Anthea. “Terpsichore, isn’t it?”
“Anthea! God save us!”
A trilling feminine duet of greeting followed an embrace clumsily executed athwart the bar counter. Cries in the higher registers scaled the heights of emotions generated by such an experience, meeting once again in this unexpected fashion after so long…two years, was it, or three…?
“Ah God bless you sure it’s never three sure go on with you.”
“I’d swear it. Three at least, Anthea.”
“And all this time you’ve been…?”
“Ah don’t be asking me that, girl. It’s ashamed I am for the waste of time the past three and a half years have been, and that’s a fact.”
“Living on some old boat, weren’t you, with an artist or writer or some such? Very artistic, it sounded to dull old me.”
“Dull old you, is it? Not a bit of it. Wait till I tell you.”
Terpsichore perched on a barstool and as she did so glanced over her shoulder at gawking Finn.
“Oh, that’s Finn,” said Anthea. “He’s my.”
“Hello Finn.”
“Hello.”
Then the girls scrambled to top each other’s enthusiasm, real or sham, leaving the fellas awkwardly on the sidelines.
“Donal,” said that party, extending a hand to Finn in an uncharacteristic outburst of camaraderie, just to break the ice.
“Oh,” said Finn. “Finn.”
“I know, she just said.”
“Finn McCool,” said Finn, aggressively. Donal guffawed.
“You’re joking.”
“’Fraid not.”
“Cripes. Great name.”
“Thanks. At least you recognized it. There’s those who have no idea, you know. Depth of fucking ignorance these days is just mind-boggling.”
“Like walking around with a name like oh I don’t know Brian Boru, ah ha ha, and no one catching on, eh?”
“Who?”
“Ah.”
Came the horror of silence, when neither man had a tongue. Their mouths opened but only incoherence emerged. “Ah,” for instance, was intercepted by “S-s-s-…” or “So,” itself neutralized by “Oh” or “Aha!” or “Well!” or thunderous throat-clearing and pantomime coughing fits amended, invariably, with a “Well now” or two, then trailing off into a sequence of gutturals punctuated by nonsensical monosyllables approximating personal pronouns, thus:
“Well now, AHEM. I or you ah.”
“Well yes, you? I was AHEM uh.”
“Yes,” said Donal to nothing in particular, nodding. Finn took command.
“Pint?” he inquired, preferring the agony of his own spontaneous generosity to that, greater, of dead air. Donal accepted. Discussion of brands and relative strengths—say, of stout, boasting roasted hops bottom-brewed, as opposed to your common or garden beers top-brewed with unroasted hops, so typical of British-owned megabreweries themselves owned by Dutch or German multinational colossi (schweinhuenden)—opened great vistas of dialogue towards which the lads ambled gratefully, and before you knew it in no time flat Donal was entertaining Finn with a tour d’horizon of Godawful piss-like American beer, although mind you things were getting better over there, he’d had a brew in the States called Patch Patoski’s Steam Ale that wasn’t bad, not bad at all, as a matter of fact he took it back a bit, what he said, you know, in actual fact what he was talking about was your average Joe’s average six-pack of Sud Lite or Mailer Hi-Fi or Parscht Blue Belt or one of those…
“I went there once,” erupted Finn, interrupting. Anthea passed him the pints while in the midst of saying, to her new-found old pal Terpsichore,
“…and the pair of them took off, just up and left, would you believe, after all that time swearing up and down they’d never leave this blessed place all it took was the faintest hint of a job over there and wow, they were history…”
“Did you now?” inquired Donal, with feigned interest.
“I did. Me big brother lives in a place called New Ur of the Chaldees, Ohiowa. Anthea and I went to see him. He runs a bar.”
“You’re joking, so.”
“Joking? Not at all. Why, do you know him?”
“Not him. The town.” Hastily, pantingly, Donal explained.
“Well sod me. Quite a coincidence, I’d say, in a country that size. Still, I heard the college was big-time major-league, attracting all kinds of professorial types, so I reckon it wasn’t that much of a. But still.”
“And what’s your brother bar?”
“Fergus? He runs a gas little place called the Dew Drop Inn. Full of shamrocks and that. Maps of the Owld Sod, framed copies of the Easter Rising declaration, that kind of shite, you know.”
“Ah God I know it well as God’s my witness the times beyond the counting when they picked me up off the floor in that place and wasn’t it your brother Fergus God bless the man himself who offered me a job and between you and me I’m that tempted to go back and take him up on it. Grand wee bar, so ‘tis.”
“You don’t say. Yeah, nice place but we were there in July. Too fuckin’ hot and no pavements at all. Of course you couldn’t walk in that fuckin’ heat anyhow. Then we did Florida. Ten-day package. Palm Beach, Miami, Disney World. Too bloody hot, too. And God, the poofters.”
“Poofters, eh? In Disney World?”
“Nah. South Beach in Miami. God’s truth. Nancy boy heaven. You know the hairy ones in leather, who like to stick their arms up each other’s arseholes? All over the place in South Beach, sticking their arms up each others’ chutes, never mind if their own mums were about. Believe you me it was Back Against the Wall time for me. Anthea was quite safe, of course, although we did see a gang of motorcycle lizzies once. Dikes on Bikes, they’re called, if you can believe it.”
“Ah.”
Donal, as a man quasi-trained in the arts, preferred not to heap opprobrium on undeserving minorities, without of course going overboard and giving them first prize in everything just because of who they were; still, “nancy boys” and “poofters,” combined with a distasteful turn of phrase involving “arms” and “arseholes”…? His fastidiousness was trampled upon, despite the flimsy bond created by the pair of them having breathed the still air of New Ur of the Chaldees. Sure, they might have run into each other earlier, say one of those stag nights at the Dew Drop when half of Ireland seemed to have emigrated there…
Not that it was at all surprising, when you came down to it, what with the teeming legions of paddies you ran into everywhere, especially in bars.
Awkwardness flapped its heavy wings; threatened to alight; was shooed away by Finn.
“So, you run that car place over the road, yeah?”
Donal, muzzle plunged into his pint glass of Malone’s Special XXX (and wallowing in the experience of proto-intoxication with strong aromatic hints—and a nutty aftertaste—pointing to an imminent, and very pleasant, easeful state of full-flowered flewteredness), nodded, while contemplating
a) the glass itself, already half-empty;
b) Terpsichore’s blue-jeaned bum (surprisingly and pleasingly ample for one so slim);
c) the stubbled features of Finn McCool;
d) the general downmarket décor for which Molloys was so widely celebrated in Killoyle City and environs: church pews from deconsecrated St. Oinsias’ RC Church (briefly a disco called Goddi’s, now Wee Willie Wilson’s Wondrous World of Wax) converted to pub service; a faded poster depicting a idealized pint of Guinness with a smiling and slightly sinister face etched in the foam of the head and a toucan in the background proclaiming the goodness of the noble elixir; on the tabletops, cigarette burns dating back to the De Valera era; for no apparent reason, a framed CIE bus timetable, Killoyle (W.) — Waxford — Weterford—Gougane Barra—Bodenstown--CORK CENTRAL, summer-autumn 1977; a faded snapshot of Proinsias Molloy, the original “Mad” of that ilk, on Bundoran Strand sometime in the ‘30s, wearing one of those horizontally-striped bathing suits that were out of date even then and looking, yes, quite mad (staring eyes, mouth ajar, lolling tongue, white-coated attendants in the background with folded arms);
e) Terpsichore’s blue-jeaned bum;
f) a sudden incursion of yobs from the lounge next door;
g) his glass, still half-empty;
h) the nicotine-browned and fly-soiled map, circa 1954, of the ancient Kingdom of Munster, circa 1100, hanging athwart a cubbyhole door above the cigarette vending machine, circa 1971, bearing the no-longer-illuminated (and illegal, under the new Wet Wesson dispensations) legend, complete with No. 6-puffing Jolly Jack Tar: Players, Please;
i) Terpsichore’s…
j) On the above-bar telly, the silvery sheen on Lago Maggiore or Lago di Garda or Shepperton Studios with the brutal Judeo-American profile of Sid Nugent, Secret Agent, in the foreground, at the wheel of one of your standard-issue secret-agent supercars, complete with sensuous (in the background) Asiatic beauty (and Granny Award-winning) Ngo Thin Wench;
k) On the telly kept permanently tuned to the racing channel All Racing All The Time (RTE87), Fillet of Plaice romped home in the 1:30 at Newmarket, eliciting a loud hoarse wordless bark from the sole viewer, a judge from the nearby courts who’d virtually taken up residence at Molloys, at least for the duration of the racing season at Newmarket …
“Right enough,” Donal said. “I sell cars.”
But then, with the reflexive self-deprecation of his kind, he proceeded to demolish any semblance of respectability that might inhere, however improbably, in his profession of profession, thereby arming potential opponents—most of the world, in his considerable experience—with the wherewithal to join in the get-Donal rout.
“It’s all a cod, really, I mean I’m no good at sales, I know, I know, why on earth did I ever, yeah I’ve heard it before, well I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a position of shall we say joblessness…”
“I am now,” said Finn.
“Ah. Well then I’m sure you’ll appreciate the urgency, I mean I’d have taken a job as bedpan cleaner if I’d had to.”
“I know what you mean, yeah.”
“So there you are.”
“Got a job?”
“What, for you?”
“Right. I could sell cars. I’m a standout driver. First subscribed to Wheelself when I was a nipper. Owned a Lotus Seven I did when I was seventeen, soon as I got my driving license. Built it meself.”
“Well.”
Silence resumed between them, a touch less onerously than before, as Donal imagined the monotonous geyser of boring anecdote-cum-autobiography-cum apologia pro vita sua asking Byrne’s permission would unleash; Finn, however, his mood heightened by the Lemon Daiquiri he’d just had and the pint he was now on, saw his future car-selling incarnation in quite a dashing light, with himself as a devil-may-care chap unburdened by the taxing necessities of intellectual pursuits like going back to college, for God’s sake, or running a bloody silly business along the lines of what his bloody nutter of a cousin was proposing, I mean wine and cheese for God’s sake…still, there might be money in it if you went at it the right way, which old Ferdia was incapable of doing… for the moment, anyhow, he felt quite liberated, in fact, to imagine stalking about and polishing the odd motor whilst chatting up the passing crumpet and getting to drive some super fast machines, because well even in the dingiest car lot they ended up with the occasional Merc SL confiscated or repossessed from drug dealers and the Rah and that…yes, it sounded sound. He might even take over some day. Certainly he’d do no worse than this sorry shagspot.
He beamed.
“So! When do I start?”
Donal sidestepped the issue, for now.
“My round,” he replied, edging closer to the bar, where he belonged. Hanging about flapping jaws with dim appliances like Finn (who might actually, for that and allied reasons, be ideal for the job of assistant manager, now that he (Donal) thought about it), wasn’t his purpose in coming to Molloy’s, not with the woman of his dreams at hand…
…ah,‘twas indeed a dream a few minutes ago when he, forlorn as ever and well into his tenth smoke of the day and it not gone two p.m., happened to catch sight in the corner of his eye of an orchidean glow of robust femininity composed of ruddy cheek, bright blue eye, and reddish-blonde hair…
“Hello,” she’d said, striding towards him as, nervous as a cornered hare, he backed slowly towards the burrow of his office. “Can I talk to you?” she said. “No, scratch that, I know I can, because I am. May I talk to you?”
As an admirer of good grammar, crisp prose and lucid verse, Donal appreciated the distinction, but, too self-immersed to recognize a symptom of her own nervousness, wondered if she was always so pedantic.
“Of course. I’m all yours. Anyway. Not much going on right now, as you can see,” he said, gesturing at the unpeopled lot, the cars, the hunger strikers slowly emerging from the early-morning mist. “Divil the cars I sell anyhow until after lunch when people’ve had a drop and suddenly take a fancy to er to ah eh ahem cars.”
She was regarding him with a devouring expression of awe. If his circulation were up to it, he knew he’d be blushing, but his blood was turgid, stuck somewhere around his midriff. And he was in danger of seeing one of them movies running before his eyes, he could feel it.
“You’re being awfully nice, you know,” she said.
“Am I?”
“Well, I’m here to throw myself on your mercy. I mean, I took one of your cars, didn’t I?”
“Did you? My goodness. Oh yes, so you did.” For in truth Donal had entirely forgotten, so complete was his preoccupation with her as desired object. She, or a facsimile (a facsimile: much blonder than the real-life redhead), had lit up his unsettled dreams these three nights past. “The Tortuga.”
“That’s the one. And there’s worse. Someone nicked it from me and I don’t know where it is.”
“Do you know who did it?”
“I do, so. But not their names. A bunch of teenagers, just. Wide boys. From the Crannog Estates, out by the Belfers.”
“That’s where you live, yeah?”
“It is, yeah. Well, not in Crannog. On the canal.”
A pause as Donal hesitated between or among:
a) the reason, real or apparent, that had brought her back; and
b) getting more out of her a propos
1) where she lived
2) what she did
3) what books she read (not always advisable, that one)
4) whom she was shacked up with or married to (inconceivable that she might not be) (definitely not advisable, that one) (but in for a penny, in for a poke, as his old gran might have said if she hadn’t been a deaf-mute all her life).
In the end his natural reticence drove him to a), signposted Caution, leading nowhere. Still, he was lucky, for once, not knowing she fancied him (or the Italianate fantasy-him, Beppo, she’d invented as an antidote to seething non-Italian Stan) and therefore not tempted to overplay his hand or clumsily attempt to charm, a guarantee of failure, this last, proven oh-so-many times in the past.
“Well, I’ll tell you what. I’ll say the IRA nicked it from you when you were on a test drive and stopped to use a phone or something.”
“Fantastic. But aren’t they out of commission? I mean, disarmed, or something?”
“Nah. The Rah? You’re joking. Oh they might be using another name, but them lads are beavering away behind the scenes busier than ever, believe you me. And believe me, I’ve got contacts. Know what I mean?” He winked and tapped his nose, sideways, index-finger-wise, before the icy hand of dread closed firmly athwart his coccyx.
“Oh. I see. Well, whatever you say, then.”
“Well, maybe not.” He hastily backtracked. “It’s only what I see in the papers, you know.”
“Ah.”
She realized his generosity was far from normal for a used-car salesman, and, being a young woman of at least average brainpower and, more importantly, fairly sound intuition, she divined his reasons to be
a) normal human, i.e. sub-human, fear of confronting the boss with anything, especially bad news and
b) desire, pure and simple—or did she mean Lust? …
Yes, that instinct had developed around the same time as her womanly figure, when the gleam in the eye of the seducer replaced the twinkle in the eye of the favorite uncle (not infrequently one and the same, as with Uncle Dan “Deadeye” Diamond, whom she’d discovered lying face-up under a ladder in the public library at Coleraine, striving for a better view of her undies as she, on the same ladder, browsed the Blytons) , even if said seducer was timid as a field mouse and depressed as an ex-Communist from Eastern Europe, and unshaven in the morning light, with a faint whiff off him of coffee and cigarettes…ah, Beppo, Beppo!
All nonsense, of course, but then so was so much of life.
“That’s really nice of you.”
“Don’t mention it. Ah—drink?”
With that, they’d crossed the street, and entered their own intertwined history-to-come...but not yet, for at Molloy’s intercourse of the social kind was denied them by the circumstances of Terps running into Anthea, Finn, etc.—and by the way Terps actually quite liked Anthea, she’d always found her a down-to-earth sort who’d give you the shirt off her back, the time of day, oil the squeaky wheel, lend you her last five bob (or cents, these days), and so on, and most of all she’d shut the frig up, an always important consideration; in Terpsichore’s experience every problem in life stemmed from some idiot, usually Stan, not knowing when to shut his bloomin’ cakehole. And of course there was the unexpected and now seemingly unavoidable phenomenon of Finn McCool, who, with two—no, three drinks (Anthea was counting) under his belt had taken an unaccountable shine to poor dour Beppo, sensing perhaps an easy victory in any forthcoming machismo contests… Donal, that is, not Beppo (the sad-clown character from Il Vitello Milanese with Italo Svizzero in the principal role, the one who slowly rolls his Fiat Topolino off the Ponte Nuovo into the turbulent waters of the mighty Po and needs rescuing by the Squadra Volante).
She’d have to ask him his last name, too.
And Finn the absurdly named was now quizzing the poor sod about benefits, lay-away plans, and God knew what all, precisely as if he’d been offered a job…
Well, he hadn’t been, but he was now.
“Right,” said Donal, with the alarming boldness of the chronically shy. “You’re hired. Show up tomorrow at nine sharp. Sober. And not in that clobber. Wear a jacket and tie.”
“Great,” said Finn. “I’ll even put on trousers, if you like.” Mirthfully, he slapped his thigh with a rolled-up copy of the Clarion, the used-car pages of which he’d been briefly perusing in the guise of research for his new job. The gesture reminded Donal, alarmingly, of Hitler, and he wondered momentarily why, then he remembered the fall of France; the exultant Führer doing his “victory jig” in the glade at Compiègne; the sad dignity of the French generals and overhead, the booming blue of the sky of that merciless June …God, he thought, how he’d like to go sit in a corner and have a good old chinwag about World War II or something important, something more elevated anyway than just you and me and the pain I’ve been getting in my side .
“I just hired him,” said Donal, when Terpsichore finally took a moment away from her girlish nattering with Anthea. “Finn, that is. Should be top-notch used-car material.”
“So how long have you been doing this job?” she inquired, determined to make the man talk—talk, not just nod, or go “H’m!” (or “H’m?”) like all introverts. And talk he did. He explained himself, up to a point, starting with his dad “Dad” and ending here, in Killoyle, at Roofwalls; he recounted the myriad follies of a life that he still felt had just barely begun, and was constantly beginning all over again; he decried his own inability “to sell whiskey at a wake,” laughed uneasily and without humor at life’s little ironies, paused and frowned at his nearly-empty pint; THEN…
She struck. It was Now or Never time.
“Let’s go somewhere else,” she said, staring at him in a disconcerting way—disconcerting, that is, to a man in his depressed state. Anyone more attuned to the simple verities of life would have seen instantly what Cupidian daimon had taken possession of her, but Donal read concern, curiosity, amusement and an odd kind of avidity in her expression: anything but what truly burned there, for apart from Xiao-Lian (and she was Chinese, for God’s sake, and they were all trained in restraint, weren’t they) he’d not seen it crossing a woman’s face in years beyond the counting of them—except on the telly, of course.
“Where?”
“Your place. Mine’s, ah, occupied at the moment.”
Now he read her loud and clear. Comically, as in a slapstick movie scene, he was taking a sip of his drink at the time and had to be therapeutically slapped on the shoulders by Finn, so deep and retching was the fit of coughing that then befell him…but by happy chance, Roofwalls was a mere ten minutes from Mad Molloys as the crow flies; and man oh man, how our lovers flew!

* * * * *

There was a naked man at Heartland Autos. Well, nearly naked.
Byrne was surprised, even aghast. His eyes, as bulging to start with as those on a Mesopotamian statuette of the Akkad era, swung back and forth in wild surmise in such a manner as might bring to the observer’s mind not so much Sumerian statuary as the leering visage in one of those hand-held pinball games, or the carnival face swallowing the toy train in your local Luna Park’s House of Horrors.
“What the blazes are you? An arse bandit?”
“Au contraire, squire. Finn McCool, at your service,” stated Finn, coolly.
“Finn McCool? Oh, right. And I’m bloomin’ Cu Chulainn. Nice to meet ya, big man. Now get on out of that.”
“True bill. Hang on, here’s me driving license.”
Finn handed over the doument. Byrne goggled at it.
“Well be janey that’s what it says so it does.”
“Oh ye of little faith.”
“What? Oh, right. Well, you know. Still.”
“Brrr, it’s cold. Or is it just me?”
“Just you, I’d say, wearing that getup in March weather.”
“Yeh, well, sorry about that, couldn’t put my hands on me trusty suit and tie, but don’t worry, I’ll find ‘em by the time I come in tomorrow.”
“Worry? I’m not worried.”
“Good. The place is a little less formal to work in than I was led to believe, then, is it?”
Byrne digested these words, pondering; then, abruptly, as if jerked awake:
“Wait a minute. I don’t quite follow your drift. You’re not supposed to be working for me, are you?”
“Depends. Who are you?”
“Byrne. I own the place.”
“Byrne, is it. Well then I am working for you, God bless you Byrne and all you survey, including or should I say especially me, haha.”
“Jaysus.”
“Well no, I should have told you, or rather Mr. Duddy should have told you, but he’s away for the moment.”
“Mr. Duddy, is it? Away? Where, for God’s sake? He’s supposed to be here selling cars, the useless gawm.”
“Ah, well. He had an urgent eh appointment.” Finn tapped the side of his nose with an index finger and gave a heavy wink to underscore the significance. Both were lost on Byrne. “He’s busy, I ought to say. ‘Otherwise engaged,’ you know. If you know what I mean.”
“No, I don’t know what you mean and let me tell you mister Finn McCool no you’re joking is that really your name not taking the mickey are you because just between the two of us and that lamp post over there no that one there no no THAT one THERE that’s right I’m in no mood do you hear me no mood for that kind of malarkey well all right you showed me your driving license fair enough unless it’s a forgery and as a matter of fact it might well be because half of all the driving licenses in the EU are forgeries did you know that I bet you didn’t aha didn’t think so oh yes yes ‘tis too true true bill they’re used by illegal Arabs and Israelis and that lot you know the wild-eyed bearded Kill ‘Em All class of fella from the Mideast or somewhere like that well well Finn McCool eh well it’s certainly a fine old Irish name you can’t deny that ah ha ha ha not that I’ve not met people with shall we say unusual names before in point of fact quite honestly I remember meeting a Greek fellow named Polyphemus in Athens Greece once when I was over there at a Greek car convention you know the class of caper with wine women and song good thing my wife thought I was in Bundoran ah ah ah ah ah ah ahhahahahahahahaha no just joking she came with me actually nearly ran off with an Irish fisherman named Anthony Quinn if you can believe it down by the docks it was in Piraeus or somewhere else never on Sunday eh or do I mean always ah ha ha ha ha anyway ah ha ha ha anyway she was quite right I was spending too much time on business so we got together afterwards sans Anthony I hasten to add dunno what happened to him maybe he was blown out to sea or eaten by a giant conger eel or be janey who knows set upon by a huge old one-eyed bastard named Polyphemus ah ha ha ha ha anyway my God the vino you wouldn’t believe it went down like water so it did but it came out like wine let me tell you ah ha ha ha white wine of course yellowish actually if you follow my meaning ah ha ha ha ha ha ah anyway this Polyphemus article was Greek like I say needless to say really I suppose you’d say and fair enough with a name like that anyway would you believe it he was a Poseidon car dealer from Thessaloniki or Salonica as we say and don’t ask me where that is there’s a good fellow I’m quite hopeless at geography as a matter of fact let me tell you I had a geography teacher back at Father Cormorant Academy in Buncastle Buncastle Co. Wicklow you know near Powerscourt Estate the one that burned down back in the what was it seventies no it was around the time that lot were assassinated over in America so back in the sixties sometime or maybe later anyhow Missus Ryan her name was Missus Irma Ryan that was it not a bad old stick really I suppose but I’ll never forget the way she sat there with her mouth hanging open do you know let me tell you there she was one summer morning sitting there staring out the window with her gob hanging wide open and what should come flying in but a horsefly I kid you not it buzzed through the window straight into her cakehole which went snap and she swallowed it just like a frog oh we all rolled about laughing at that I can tell you oh there were sore hands and other parts that day let me tell you ANYWAY she once told me if I ever got the hang of the map of Europe she’d bake me a gooseberry pie well I never did I mean the capital of Slovenia or Slovakia or whatever the blazes your guess is as good as mine and that’s how it should be I mean who bloody cares right so Missus Ryan never did bake me a gooseberry pie but truly I’m not that bad at geography I can tell you where all the main car manufacturers are at least go on ask me go on Volkswagen Wolfsburg go ahead what about Fiat Turin see I knew that go on Ferrari Modena Ford Dagenham Renault Boulogne Debbler-Bertz Stuttgart Poseidon Salonica you see well all right maybe later now where was I oh yes AND here’s the important part not much point to the story without it is there dear oh dear there I was half-forgetting it the point that is well anyhow the point is he only had one eye do you get me the man was a one-eyed Greek named Polyphemus just like the fella in the Homeric poem Ulric the Greek no that wasn’t it and it wasn’t Eric the Greek either no well it was something or other anyway and something tells me there was also a dirty book written by some Irishman with the same title as well oh well I was never too good at literature either if you follow me no just give me the day’s Sporting News or the Sunday Dependent and I’ve got all the literature I can handle bloomin’ toffy-nosed snots I hope you’re not one of them I’ve more than a slight suspicion that your man Duddy is oh dahling pass me the Prowst please oh thank you dahling and would you like a touch of sodomy with that oh ta very much dahling I mean what’s the point of bloody novels anyhow when all you need to do is pick up the paper to read about real-life dramas ten times as ah as ah well dramatic as anything in those crummy novels full of ridiculous characters you’d never meet in a month of Sundays and nonsensical situations that might happen to the man in the friggin moon but divil the chance they’d ever happen to you or me oh all they’re really about is you know what if you know what I mean know what I mean oh come on you know what I mean well sex there tell me it’s not so they’re all about bloomin’ sex aren’t they only half the so-called bloody authors are such tight-arsed ninnies they don’t have the guts or the intestinal fortitude as me owld uncle Davie used to say Intestinal Fortitude Lad he used to say well roar really after a half dozen or more of his dear wee baby Powerses down the Harborside Bar in the old days when Tone Gartery ran the place and no nonsense no women for a start get out you slag he’d say even if it was the Queen of bloomin’ England herself boozers are meant to be places where men can get away from women oh that was his philosophy right enough and between you and me and that lamp post over there no THAT one the one beside the dustbin there are times when I’m quite sympathetic to that brand of thinking as well not married are you lad no I didn’t think so not in that get-up devil the chance my wife would let me dress up or should that be down ah hahahahaha like that well anyway where was I oh yes half the bloody self-styled bloomin’ writers don’t have the intestinal fortitude to borrow uncle Davie’s phrase the intestinal fortitude to get down and write about it I mean if that’s what you’re on about why don’t you just come out with it as it were do you know what I mean Jaysus Christ nah give me a good old car mag any day full of facts they are facts you can live with and deal with not phony pretentious made-up shite disguised as facts or man-of-the-world kind of pseudy pretentiousness all got up as well sex or vicey versy well anyway where was I well anyway there I was and you could have knocked me down with the proverbial ostrich feather when this one-eyed Greek bloke pretty tall he was too eight foot six if he was an inch and of course he was much more than an inch ah ah ha ha hang about we’re all metric and continental now aren’t we so what’s that oh I don’t know a meter eighty five I never could get the hang of all that metric ballocks if you’ll pardon my aha ha so back to Polyphemus well there he was one eye and all asking me if I wanted to meet his sister not if she looks like you old sport says I ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha no just joking actually he was trying to sell me a restored seventy three racing Escort first prize at the 1975 Acropolis rally blessed by the pope he said what the fella in the Vatican old redsocks himself says I no no he said the village priest that’s what they call them in Greece popes I bet you didn’t know that did you boy no I thought not well by janey of course I declined what the blazes was I going to do with an old banger like that well what exactly is your point say you fair enough say I the point is this with names you never bloody well know do you I mean look at me I have the same name as three butties of mine back in Buncastle they’re all named Byrne too you see Byrne you know Byrne’s the name as we all say when we get together for a laugh Byrne’s the name what’s yours and mine’s a pint of Murphy’s ah ha ha ha ha actually just between you and me I can’t take the stuff no after a pint I feel all poxy and itchy like and once my lips swelled up like balloons and when I woke up I was lying face down in a puddle at the bus station impeding the progress of the thirty eight to Enniskerry anyway what was I saying anyway so here we are with you working for me and Duddy dandering about somewhere else and all and listen to me Finn McCool if that’s really your name I live up in Dublin I’ll have you know and it’s the bit of a hardship for me to get out of me bed at five forty five in the bloomin’ a.m. and drag me fuckin owld carcass halfway across the city to Westland Row pardon my French to catch the half six express to Killoyle or should I say so-called express express me arse that’s a laugh and a half do you know it was an hour and a half late this morning typical isn’t it and that’s after Wet Wesson’s spent what was it half a bloody billion quid or I suppose it’s euros now isn’t it bloody confusing the way they keep on changing the names of everything and going on about quote upgrading the system unquote well you know what that means I mean take the local trains for a start I mean we all know Iarnrod’s a joke especially since that eejit took over and I don’t mean Wesson well yes Wesson’s an eejit too but I was thinking of Spotty Bolger the new minister of transport and let me tell you I have a certain privileged vantage point here because do you know Spotty and I go way back oh yes believe you me when I call the man an eejit I know whereof I speak weren’t we roommates oh yes we were no less back in rented digs down on the Circle with a right owld harridan of a landlady Mrs. Treadmill she was the one with the pet anteater God that animal was an unwelcome sight first thing of a morning with its tongue shooting in and out as it inspected the tenants for ants anyhow we were both signed up at Lovelace’s School for Auto Salesmen on the Drumcondra Road yes salesmen well back then we were all fellas weren’t we they changed the name later anyhow we were there for an intensive seminar in car-selling theory along of course back then Spotty had no idea he’d be in government one day like every young radical he was against everything everybody else was for so there he was arguing in favor of lowering the VAT if you can imagine and giving salespeople every possible break including obligatory commissions paid for by the government well of course he had every intention of becoming a salesman himself if you know what I mean or should that be person even if you’re talking about a fella ah hahaha ha ha ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha AHACK sorry well you know how these politicians work eh I’m sure I don’t need to go into that as Spotty would say well anyhow my oh my wasn’t it a surprise when I picked up the paper and saw his hideous spotty mug leering at me from page one like a flounder under a rock I mean I knew he was an owld mate of Wet’s they were on the same hurling team back at Donleavy Comprehensive but surprise surprise there he was minister of railways and only two days before he’d taken ten people hostage in the Mullingar post office and threatened to shoot them one by one if he didn’t get enough in unmarked ten-euro banknotes to pay the arrears of his mortgage on a pebbledash semi-detached with two-car garage and all mod cons you remember that it was all over the papers and RTE6 had a special all-night Live From Mullingar programme well there you are it just goes to show doesn’t it you never know or Ya never fuckin know do ya lad as me owld uncle Davie used to say ah uncle Davie he was a card and a half so he was wait till I tell you you remember don’t you the one with the intestinal fortitude down at the Harborside Bar well he lived as alone as possible in a potting shed at the bottom of his garden while auntie Nora lived in the house with her fourteen cats I kid you not fourteen and that should tell you all you need to know about auntie Nora as a matter of fact do you know what my philosophy’s always been well wait till I tell you it’s quite simple if you have more than three cats in one house you’re bonkers that’s right raving bloody nuts and so far it’s been an effective rule of thumb I mean I’ve met plenty of people with three and under who were as normal as you or me well maybe a sight more normal ah ha ha ha ha ha ahh haaaha hack ah HACK sorry touch of asthma let me tell you one good thing Wet’s done is push through that anti-smoking bill what with every Seamus in Ireland and his wife and daughter puffing away at the fags it wasn’t only themselves they were killing but the rest of us as well AHACK now if you can believe it I can actually go into my local French bistro that’s Piquepoquet’s out the Crumstown Road nice old place despite the dry rot in the back and the rising damp in the jakes upstairs my God in the old days it was like stepping into of them old London pea-soupers just to pop in there for a short one but let me tell you they looked sharp down at Piquepoquet’s and there’s nary a fag in sight in the place well well well you’d never believe it look who’s here swanning in an hour late or more.”
Duddy was crossing the street with Terpsichore. He had, thought Finn (still more than slightly knocked sideways by the foregoing blast of bletherskite and seriously rethinking his commitment to working in a place with a boss who’d go on like that at a moment’s notice) a slight swagger in his gait, or swing to his hips, as did she (the swing, not the swagger)...
Indeed, there was a fleeting moment when Finn could have sworn their hands—his, hers—brushed together and hinted at the reciprocity of, say, clinging fingers interlaced, and much more besides . . .
“Imagine,” mumbled Finn to himself. “Jeez. That friggin’ git with a knockout babe like that. Fuckinell. What a world.”
“About time, too,” said Byrne. “But who’s the gell?” He stepped to the door. “Now listen here, Duddy.”
“Dia duit, Mr. Byrne,” said Duddy, airily. “This is Miss O’Hanlon. Miss O’Hanlon, Mr. O’Byrne.”
“Jaysus, Duddy, I’ll have a word with you in a bit. Hello, ah, Miss, Hamlin is it? Ah, I don’t…”
Byrne paused, his righteous wrath held back, lest he discover himself to be addressing a potential customer.
“May I help you?” he inquired, obsequiously, hands a-wring, shoulders Uriah Heeped. “Mr. Byrne, is it? Terpsichore O’Hanlon.”
“Terps…ah. Nice to eh.” A limp hand was extended, withdrawn. (Her handshake was like a lorry driver’s.)
“I’m dreadfully sorry,” said Terpsichore, “but Donal was detained this morning on an investigation at my request.”
Byrne’s goggle-eyes bugged.
“A…what?”
“Well, we’re,” she glanced nervously at Donal, who gave her a nod of encouragement, “trying to find whoever stole a car off your lot.”
“I, I, I,” thundered Byrne, at a loss for words for once in his fatuous bleeding garrulous existence (and yet in his fashion he was a loving husband and father, poor man) . “I.”
“Well, yes,” said Donal.
“I!” (or “Aie!”) howled Byrne. He was a man on the verge of going mental, or damn near. He ran out of the booth into the lot, arms swinging pretty freely in the manner of our Great Ape cousins, muttering to himself whilst mentally totting up the cars. On display for his viewing displeasure were:
a) the Cadnaeum Piazzetta Vacazione family vacation van with internal control adjustments and full-width DVD plasma screen;
b) the JBM Titan LX;
c) the two Mercs, one black, one radium;
d) the Hanomag Walpurgisnacht drophead street racer with polished titanium inserts and individual footbaths;
e) the Dragoman Janissary TT in Polenta ochre with hydromatic steering and flick-switch transmission (7 speeds and counting);
f) the Pusillanimo Gatto-Plus 575TX hybrid sports lorry with interchangeable moonroofs;
g) the three Squires (Country, Breakfast and High Tea PLS);
h) the Weedon-Grossmith Super-Plodder delivery van;
i) the Polish “Wojtyla SST” racing dragster-coupe with double-overhead cams and built-in illuminated shrine;
j) the five Frog Estate estates;
k) the Spratt-Mondale GLX with twin turbos;
l) sundry motorcycles, bikes, a Burleigh-Hynes pickup truck, and motorized Crawford-Bush tricycles;
m) But not the…
“Fuck!” Byrne slewed around, eyes egg-sized and side-rolling like wild beads on a rickety abacus (say, one left behind in the hurried exit of the nomenklatura from their Moscow offices, circa 1991). Accusatory fingers, two index, one middle, one ring, stabbed the air, Sicilian- (or at least not Irish) style. “It’s the Tortuga! Yez bastards! Ya heisted the Tortuga! Yez bastards! The Tortuga! Yez bastards!”
“Now, now, Mr. Byrne,” said Terpsichore. She went over and placed a soothing hand on the man’s trembling shoulder. His eyes canted wide laterally, like those of a startled cow. “No one said anything about us stealing your lovely car. We’d never do that. No, as a matter of fact,” and she managed this line of patter so convincingly, without so much as a backward or sideways glance at Donal—who knew of course it was all your granny but gazed upon the woman with whom he’d spent the night with ever-increasing awe as well as desire that was in no way on the wane, in fact au contraire as the frogs say (why, even the ghost of Sub-Viceroy Sir Buckley “Boomer” Sykes-Buckingham had interrupted his nocturnal throat-clearing to mutter to himself “Crikey, the lucky sod”)—“as a matter of fact,” she went on, “we saw the culprits, Donal and I, and you’ll not be surprised to learn that they’re affiliated with the IRA. Some splinter group, I gathered. Ex-terrorists, future politicians. You know the type.”
“Aye, missy, I do,” spluttered Byrne, sounding momentarily like a character out of Shirley Soup’s past, or a rugged Yorkshire Dales walk-on in a James Herriot animal weepie. “I do indeed. And believe you me and I hope you’re listening Duddy because by janey I do not repeat do not intend to repeat myself repeat do not intend to repeat myself because it’s taken me ten years to build up this business and I’ve seen too many businesses like it go down the friggin tubes begging your pardon Miss but facts are facts and many a good man’s gone down those tubes as well oh I could tell you tales that would make the hair stand up on your head…”
“In fact, cause each particular hair to stand on end like quills upon the fretful porpentine, as you might say,” interjected Donal, an occasional, if yawning, reader of The Bard, usually when there wasn’t much on telly, or when pseudie-ness was called for to impress the ladies (as now) (or so he thought).
“Something to be reined in,” mused Terpsichore. “He can’t go on thinking he’s going to impress me with silly shite like that.”
“Oh dear,” self-lamented Donal. “I do hope that bit of throwing out learned scraps wasn’t overdone.”
“Still, it’s more than Stan could come up with,” amended Terps, mentally.
“On the other hand, why not?” defiantly self-urged Duddy. “I mean for the love of God.”
Their telepathic duet, or duel, was barged into by Byrne.
“Shite and onions I knew you were one of those literary types Duddy well literary type or not let me tell you this if you want to keep your job here mister me man you can bloody well go out and like this young lady here says investigate what happened to the Tortuga good God and all the massed saints of heaven that was the primo priciest motor on the lot do you realize practically brand friggin new and that baby cost more than any of the others not one NOT ONE of them cost more repeat more repeat not even those Mercs and the Hanomag drophead a steal at just thirty grand a steal did I say ha you can say that twice eh by the way yes I decided to come down from thirty one but we’ll talk about that later at the staff meeting but for the moment on your bike Duddy and find out which particular splinter group nicked the Tortuga and I hope you appreciate the confidence I’ve placed in you in not dragging the pair of youse directly to the guards as being let’s face it Prime Suspect Numero Uno and Dos, or should that be Due, ah ah ah hahaha your tale about the Rah notwithstanding so anyway I’ll get on to the guards and initiate the official enquiry my God the insurance company will have my ballocks swimming in a garlic butter sauce for supper begging pardon oh they will so they will so off you go Duddy with this most obliging young lady who my goodness seems very eager to help and I’m not quite sure why is it because wait a sec oh oh oho no no just hang on there a mo aha I see it all now aHA is that the way the wind blows as my old uncle Trev used to say he was the coracle fisherman out by the Blaskets great fishing when the wind drops to below fifty miles p. h. which is about once a year if you’ve ever been down there and for God’s sake don’t ask me what that is in kilometers as I may have told you stop me if you’ve heard this before—”
“Stop,” pleaded Finn, unheard.
“—I’ve no idea how to convert the bastards anymore I mean there you are you grow up with one bleeding system the English or customary system or whatever the blazes they called it good old miles and yards and what not furlongs and inches and that or for that matter degrees Fahrenheit and all that kind of caper and then wham all of a sudden overnight from one day to the next the likes of Wet Wesson and Gar Looney are telling us we’re all Europeans when between you and me and the lamp post no that one over there no no THAT one next to the wall no one in this country ever thought of being European no we always preferred to leave that to the frogs and jerries and that lot no I’d say we were East Yanks if anything not West Britons East Yanks do you follow ah ha ha ha East Yanks not West Britons ah get it you know the old expression West Britons well I’m saying we’re not West Britons but East Yanks East Yanks do you follow me there East Yanks ah hahahahahahahahahaha ah with me are you fine fine anyhow that was what old uncle Trev used to say whenever the wind was blowing which it always is down around the Blaskets I don’t know if you’ve ever been there good heavens yes that old wind can be blowing there for three days flat before you can even venture outdoors upright not that there’s much indoors left to venture outdoors from if you catch my drift no the locals up and buggered off from there a good while back if memory serves anyway AHA as I was saying so that’s where the wind blows is it well well well well well what do you know so that’s how things are is it this ah character here Finn McCool HE says but never mind his driving license I’m still that dubious if you know what I mean I mean Finn McCool in this day and age honestly anyway he said you were detained on a business engagement well business engagement me arse begging your pardon miss but you know I mean I can’t say that Duddy here’s mentioned you before no he’s been keeping you a secret from his owld butties haven’t you Duddy I mean Donal or whatever the blazes they call you well well well who woulda thunk it as the characters in that Yank cartoon say you know the one with the hairy rodents mice are they or rats Doc and Drooley they’re called there was something about them on Rattlebag last week no the radio programme not the telly I don’t watch it myself no thank you very much but Colm he’s my young un he’s addicted I’m afraid oh yes every time I come into the parlor there he is gooing and slobbering all over the place with those two bloody caterpillars no that’s it caterpillars not rats of course fair enough the kiddies go in for that kind of tripe and Colm’s only five now or is it four no he’s four now young Colm yes that’s the one here have a look got a minute of course you do what would you be doing here if you didn’t have a minute for me anyway amn’t I the boss so if I say Have a gander at me snaps of the wee laddeen what choice do you have aha hahahahahahahahahahahahaha here he is no that’s the dog Purvis is his name he’s a setter as you can see I think that was taken shortly before feeding time which would explain the tense expression on his face hang on a sec ah here we are there he is there’s Colm or Daddy Junior as he says look at him if that isn’t the gleam of the salesman in his eyes I tell you I’m a Hindoo oh yes oh yes regular chip off the owld block isn’t he oh that’s the three of us in Marbella last year well anyway…”
“Fuck this for a lark,” muttered Finn. He discreetly edged away to rethink his employment.

* * * * *

Ferdia was looking for Terpsichore as the presumed thief of a flash set of wheels that he reckoned might fetch twenty grand “in the black,” easy, with the help of a few ex-Rah butties up in Dundalk and West Belfast. Dough like that would improve the prospects for the dear old Wine and Cheese shop’s coming into existence, you bet it would, my (or his) God, oh yes, each euro of that juicy sum would be twenty thousand benisons from which would flow still more, even as many as a hundred thousand or more beyond the counting of them, including the payment of bills and concomitant absence of creditors, corollary coronary pulse-rate steadiness, full employment, satisfied ambition, rosy cast to the future’s prospects, myriads of small daily charms against the evil eye, the omnipresence of pleasant music (i.e. not flutes, or heavy-metal), wine-buying excursions to Burgundy, a nice car, the return of Shirley, etc.: Dreamland, in short.
“Aye. A Tortuga. Right upmarket bugger. Italian, I think. Or is it Japanese?”
Japanese, said “Pats” Bewley, in Belfast. He should know: He’d once been Head Tester for now-bankrupt Jocelyn Motors, a firm of Irish automobile manufacturers notorious for sending their cars onto the nation’s highways without brakes.
“Sure, fockin’ useless, they were, so they were,” said Bewley, with a more Northern accent than he, as a Southerner, had any right to; but after all he did have certain cultural responsibilities to his flock, as the newly-installed Commandant of the Andersonstown Brigade, which, along with the rest of the fabled organization, had officially ceased to exist in the aftermath of the Portadown codicils to the Derry Treaties, signed last month by the IRA Senior Command, the UVF Inner Senate, the UDA (the latter somewhat grudgingly, in heavy disguise, with many a muttered “We can stull get yaz bahstards if we feel layke ut”), Wet Wesson, and the bloke at No. 10.
“More bahthroom applay-ances than cahrs.”
“Really,” said Ferdia, uninterested beyond belief, and heartily despising the fund-raising need for obsequious attentiveness to such fatuous emissions of verbal gas. But Bewley wrapped up soon, merely adding something about the Manx market in purloined motors being particularly good, what with the TT expanding to include U.S.-style stock-car racing and the recent discovery of oil and shale deposits in Ochran, in the northern outskirts of Douglas, serene capital city of the Isle of Man (and GHQ of various Armies-in-Exile).
“Synds fockin’ graït, Ferd,” he said. “Send it op when ya’ve got it, then.”
“Cheers, Pats. How’s the missus?”
“Don’t have one, lad.”
“Ah. Right you are.”
After a tasty tea of fried Spam and chips washed down by the suds of an aging Carlsberg or two in dusty bottles that evoked the even dustier windowpanes of Scandinavian palaces, say Drottningholm, and produced cavernous belching that spoke of dungeon life and the netherworld of drains, Ferdia wandered—no, sauntered, hands in pockets, toothpick in teeth, the very picture of ease—down the street to Fairy Farmer’s, the place he’d heard (from Finn, via Anthea) she (Terps) worked. A cross-hatched rhomboid of light sprawled athwart the damp patch of pavement outside the dive’s fake-mullioned front windows. Guys and gals swarmed about, inside and out. It was the in-between time of Happy Hour Tea Time, when, after the day’s dull-as-ditchwater wage-slavery was done, Killoyle’s cubicle- and office-dwellers streamed to bars and restaurants and the kind of with-it wee joint like Farmer’s that had superseded the pub in so many cases, and proceeded to try to seduce each other and tilt as many oblivion-giving drinks down their gullets as possible, both or all in the interests of dulling ordinary life’s interminable low-level ennui. Wild techno-rhythms pounded the air like maraccas wielded by beefy beach boys. A portly Garda/security officer looked round, then headed for the door (see below). Ferdia peered inside, keenly aware that the diners and drinkers and party-timers had only to look up from their menus or away from their companions or over the latter’s shoulders or around their neighbours’ heads to see an elongated saurian face (Ferd’s) framed in the window like an advert for the latest horror film (“Zombie Lizards from Hell”; “The Thing at the Window”); indeed, one tipsy tippler did, eyes widening, mouth agape, a cry of horror (perhaps exaggerated) trembling on her lips.
“AAAAAHHHHeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”
Ferdia backed away.
“All right all right easy does it for fuck’s sake I’m not bloody Count friggin’ Dracula am I?”
Like Count Dracula, Ferdia sought the safety and discretion of the darkness. Behind Fairy Farmer’s, in the car park, he lit and fiercely smoked a fag, with scant satisfaction. All it did was illuminate him from the nose up with sufficient clarity for Shirley, who was getting out of her (once their) car, a Nitsun Bunker LSE with gold pinstriping on the wings (heavily waxed by Ferd in the halcyon days of yore), to catch sight of him right away.
“Blimey,” she said.
“Bugger me,” said Ferdia.
They stood looking at one another, with the late-evening sound-and-light show of homeward-bound traffic creating a distraction both visual (headlights, turn signals) and aural (pistons, poorly-seated gaskets, tappets athrash).
“Hello.”
A coal lorry toiling up the road produced an incredible variety of booming, coughing, belching and grinding noises as it negotiated the wide sweeping curve below the MacLiammoir Bypass. Tilted laterally out of the window was the driver’s ugly mug, encompassing a red nose and a fag, united in a scowl (Finbarr O’Male, 56, heading home after a hundred-miler down from Derry).
“G-R-R-R-R-uh,” went the lorry. “Owf owf owf owf owf owf owf owf GRRRRRRRUH owf owf owf. Owf owf. GRRRRRRRRRRRUUUUUUUUHHHH.”
Meanwhile, Shirley’s mouth opened and closed silently, like that of a fish in an aquarium. Her face wore an expression of such sleepy blandness she could have been saying anything, like “don’t forget to water the gardenias” or “Tescos raised the price of their frozen cheese casseroles” or “have you ever worked out the main difference between Freudian and Adlerian psychoanalysis?”; but all Ferdia heard was,
“Here.” He deduced the missing words to be “What are you doing,” and, giving full vent to his wretched inclination toward flippancy, he replied,
“Ah, looking for a gal, actually.”
Well, she shrugged that one off, both the fact and the flippant style of its reporting, for what she’d actually said was, “The last thing I want is to talk to you here,”—or “to you here”--and her reason for saying it was the oldest one in the world, the stuff of farceurs and anecdotalists since the world began: she, a married woman, was meeting a man not her husband.
“Can we talk later?” she inquired.
“Why?”
“Because now is not a good time.” She emphasized every other word, like an elocution teacher.
A shiver went down Ferdia’s spine, then up, then down again, then out. He felt the shock waves of this betrayal coming at him repeatedly, like the ripples from a distant eruption. It was dreadful, worse than he’d imagined. Standing in mute uncertainty in front of his own wife was as sinister an experience as being held up by an anonymous mugger, not knowing what was coming next, with or without violence—without, for now, because at least for the moment (and he knew better than most how soon that could change) she wasn’t shouting and bawling at him, nor did she have that gimlet glint in the eye which heralded major showdowns, and she wasn’t advancing towards him in that bully-gal way of hers when (for example) she’d just discovered a secret cache of vitamin pills, or evidence of recent surreptitious credit card purchases (books, CDs, videos of old Crimean War movies); no, she seemed bemused, even embarrassed, and kept looking down and sideways in mock-bashfulness, like a girl guiltily on the verge of allowing herself to be seduced.
Which she was, but not by her husband.
“Be seeing ya, then.”
“Telling me to piss off, arencha?”
“Well you were never much good at taking a hint.”
“Hint? When did you ever hint? It was always full speed ahead with you, never mind my feelings…”
“Oh he’s on about his precious feelings again, poor baby, Christ all you ever think about is yourself isn’t it and that’s never going to change is it me me me me me me and by the way ME, that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it, so I might as well as face up to it and get in touch with the lawyers eh sap.”
“Eh what?”
“Sap. As soon as possible. Man,” she shook her head, “you’ve a brilliant future ahead of you as a businessman, I can just see it now.”
A succession of poorly-maintained cars sputtered and snored and hiccoughed and entirely erased Ferdia’s bellowed response except for the venerable Saxon monosyllable so much in use during tense encounters domestic or otherwise:
“Fuck…fuck…fuck,” was what Shirley heard. In a perverse way it was exactly what she wanted to hear. Out-and-out abuse, like the warfare it echoed, clarified things wonderfully. Like a Russian yearning for the imaginary order and cleanliness of Stalinism, she longed to clear the decks; she was tired of ambiguity.
“Good bye then, Ferdia Quain,” said his wife, striding purposefully away in imaginary jodhpurs and hitting him hard in the very heart of his heart, such jauntiness whether real or feigned piling insult upon injury in the face of what had to be—in this as in every marriage, no matter how shaky—utter disaster, for it spelled the end of the essence of civilization itself: a man, a woman, a household, a brave effort to build anew from the wreckage of the world. And of course there were, all too occasionally, the creaking conjugations of the mattress, and there was passing joy in them too; but after awhile they were the very least of it, being common to all .
“Oh God,” groaned Ferd. He impulsively grabbed and lit a fag, then tossed it away after two or three puffs.
“Oy, you,” piped a voice huskily. Ferdia, in a welter of deep and mostly nameless feelings, glanced round, distractedly finger-combing his thin tapestry of hair. His heart puffed itself in and out, like a bullfrog in his chest.
“Oy, you,” insisted the voice, which soon revealed its origin to be the mouth of the law. He appeared from behind the hedge wearing a Garda’s uniform and advancing at a manly waddle in the manner of a vastly overweight American of the type usually (but by no means always) typified in the black and/or (no offense) Latino communities. In one plump fist he held a truncheon or billy club, a bobbing pocket torch in the other.
“Oy, you,” he said, revealing a taste for monotonous repetition. Ferdia’s mind raced through mental files containing recent traffic, arms and/or drug infractions: Nothing—well, not since Belfast. Anyway, this joker was just some ludicrous fat bastard of a low-level beat cop, probably doing a little extra moonlight work as a nighttime bouncer for Fairy Farmers and Bali, Hi!, the Javanese disco club downstairs from the restaurant.
Ferdia eased into the manly view-halloo.
“How’s it doin, sham.”
To no effect.
“Pick up that fag end, mister.”
“What?”
“I said, Pick up that fag end, mister. Where d’ya think y’are, the local rubbish tip?”
Ferd gaped, incredulous that Fate had dumped this prize eejit at his feet at precisely the extremely inopportune kind of moment so often chosen by Fate for its, or her (or his) major cock-ups, or harassments of the innocent, i.e, you and me. Our man was also painfully aware that his wife was disappearing from the car park and, very possibly, from his life, so he had no time to spare for debating the niceties of refuse disposal, and framed his reply accordingly.
“You fuck off, fattie. Pick it up yourself and stick it up yer arse, if you can reach that far.”
“Now you listen here, mister me man, I’ll have none of that talk. Unless you want a stiff fine I’d pick that fag end up and be quick about it.”
Ferdia estimated that about three seconds’ quick sprint separated him from Shirley’s rapidly retreating figure and about the same travel time separated her from the back door of Fairy Farmers, toward which she was headed briskly, head bowed in the way he’d seen so many times when she was on an errand of great urgency—the urgency in this case being the need to get away from him, her own, her dear, her (so far) only dear hubby.
“Shirl!” bellowed Ferd, raising his face to the indifferent sky—and creating a scene pregnant with great cinematic possibilities, as in a film from the ‘60s directed by, say, Camillo Ciobatta . . . or an early Jules Dinard flick, in which the protagonist’s anguished face, preferably awash in heavy rain, real or fake, eyes screwed shut, and mouth hanging wide open, would be upturned to the sky and possibly (depending on the cinéaste’s persuasion) to God…his beloved would then pause, the camera would probe her troubled visage, then pull away for the sloshing-through-the-rain-coming-together number followed by the rainsoaked embrace, him whirling her around in his arms, the soundtrack swelling to bursting point with some bass-heavy shite by the likes of Johnny O’Berry or Sy Sydenham, etc., etc, ad bloody nauseam. . . Indeed, for all that Ferdia was something of a cynico-realist along the lines of the afore-mentioned Camillo or Jules, he had something very similar in mind, bar the rain, as it wasn’t raining, and absent the whirling-around-in-arms, not with Shirl weighing in at fifteen stone; but it didn’t happen, none of it. She didn’t even seem to have heard him, and damned if he was going to keep shouting and bawling all night long.
Still, he was disappointed, watching her walk away, although it had always been her way, walking away whenever they quarreled, until the time he took the initiative by walking away himself—and look where it had got him.
“Ah ya fuckin stew-pid bitch, will ya give over,” he groaned. But it was no use. Like all of us, he’d overlooked the obvious and unsavory fact that all this melodrama and carryon is what is popularly known as Life, boys and girls, an experience during which—at the very least, and in some instances if you’re lucky—women all too often walk away from their hapless mates. As Shirley had from her Ferdia, world without end, Amen. The door clicked gently behind her, with awful symbolism.
“If you don’t pick up that cigarette end, I’m going to have to write you up.”
“Right, Two-Ton, that does it,” said Ferdia, who, although being extrusive and gangly to the point of provoking comment on probable reptilian antecedents, nonetheless managed on this occasion to give off a distinctive air of menace by loping out of the sinister darkness at an ever-faster clip towards his unscheduled tormentor who, unfortunately as it turned out for Ferd, possessed an unexpected, and unexpectedly deft, foot-and-ankle movement that enabled him to neatly sidestep the oncoming rush and land a solid left hook on Ferdia’s jaw, which jaw was, however, hewn of solid Irish granite, as had been all the jaws of all the Quains, man and woman, since the dawn of Milesian time; so ‘twas merely a momentary sideswipe that Ferd threw off as casually as a dog tossing a floppy toy, and man oh man did Fattie (real name: Aloysius Schwarzkopf, always spelled “Schwarzkopf with a ‘p’,” great emphasis having always been placed on the ‘p’ by himself and his Mum, an ex-gentleman’s private entertainer and lifelong charter member of the Lucan, Co. Kildare, Ladies’ Floral Society—and never mind his dad, ex-Wehrmacht Oberst and anthropologist of primitive cultures Othmar Schwarzkopf, the old tippling Teuton) ever regret his opening gambit when Ferdia, recoiling from the momentary setback, metamorphosed into a gangling whirlwind flailing punches, slaps and even (twice) kicks, punctuated by deep gasps and cries of “shit,” “shite,” and, I’m afraid, “fuck,” thereby bringing to his knees Aloysius, once known back in Templemore, Co. Tipperary, where in May of 1986 he’d graduated second in his class of twelve at Garda College, as “Shitecough”; but Aloysius Schartzkopf, Esq., was no ordinary fattie, no, nor a common or garden or plodding P.C. Plod, for he possessed recourse to certain simple yet effective Kuo-Do-Dan techniques absorbed from Sensai “King” Kong’s Kuo-Do For Singles videos over a series of lonely rainy bachelor nights in a basement flat in Michael Flatley Towers, Dub. 12, May-September 1987, in between soft-core flicks with twittery, nudging titles like “Silken Ladies of Cathay” and “Saucy Soho Schoolgirls” and “Velvet Valleys, Obsidian Orbs” (soft- as opposed to hard-core because Aloysius could never really stomach—not that he hadn’t tried, often enough—the industrial-strength thrusting and grunting of the hard-core variety, especially with the same dreary worn-out manic depressives appearing starkers again and again), techniques developed and refined over the centuries by the “Desperate” Dan order of austere Hokkaido monks in the wintry fastnesses of then-Japanese, now-Russian Kamchatka (and well-paid for their pains by the late unlamented KGB, rumor had it) who (not infrequently caught on their knees deep in prayer to their deity, known affectionately as Budd-Ha!) had not only rival hunter-monks to contend with but also bright-red bears, oddly-shaped marsupials with webbed digits, a really peculiar badger-wolverine hybrid called the Urh-Khââkh (in the local Siberian dialect) or Mami-San (in Japanese) , and assorted species of wolf, fox, loping nameless canid, ocelot, etc….well, suffice it to say that under those conditions monks of such caliber, set upon by the beasts just described or their human counterparts—viz. rabid ronin, highwaymen, out-of-work yeomen, or just plain sadists—stopped at nothing to perfect their methods of self-defence; and the package in its 700-year-old entirety came in pretty handy now for Aloysius Schwarzkopf and the parlous tight spot in which he had suddenly found himself.
WHAMMO using Monk No. 1 Diving Posture, even from a kneeling position, and hey presto, his assailant reeled back, stunned; and SLAMMO, via Grand Monk Flying Fruit Bat from a half-erect position and it was Bye For Now, Mr. Quain.
“Nice try, lad.”
But our Ferd still had the last laugh. All dazed and knocked about as he was, and half-prone on the moist macadam of the carpark, leaning on his elbow like a Grecian statue of the god Triton, he nonetheless had the presence of mind to croak:
“I’m Rah, you fat fucker.”
Well, that changed the balance of power fast enough, faster than you could say Jack (or Mary) (or Edwin Arlington) Robinson; and judging by the stately convoy of expressions crossing Aloysius Schwarzkopf’s honest Ulster features (oddly, though, he hadn’t a drop of Ulster blood, being a Germano-Munsterman born and bred, even with that churchgoing-pious-Petey-wanking-Willie-holy-roller-South-Armagh-sounding Christian moniker of his), including curiosity, incredulity, comprehension and dismay—especially the latter, as he nonetheless made a token effort to help Ferdia to his feet, seeking refuge in the age-old excuse of merely doing his job, obeying orders, following instructions, acting in self-defence, and generally shirking any semblance of responsibility in its entirety.
Then he paused.
“Anyhow, how do I know you are what you say?” He loomed, ominously. “EH?” he boomed, feebly.
Ferdia said nothing, but rolled his left sleeve up high enough to expose his Easter Lily tattoo.
“Ah, it’s on the left shoulder, because you’re right-handed,” said Aloysius. “Is that right, so?” Now the full import started to sink in. “Oh Jesus, God and Mary,” he said. “Provos? Now just a sec.” He felt guilty, worried, stained, self-contemptuous, as after a jumbo wank.
“You’re not going to shoot me in the knees or anything, are you?” As if in anticipation, the knobbly knees of Aloysius Schwarzkopf with a “p” (although not themselves visible through his bagging policeman’s trousers) began to wobble visibly.
“Nah, not at all,” said Ferdia, springing to his feet and brushing off his own kneecaps (and no mean specimens were they, you have my assurance of that), as if he’d only taken a fall on a slick patch of pavement. “Tell you what, fattie: Buy me a pint in there and introduce me to a certain Miss Terpsichore O’Whatsit and we’ll say no more on the subject.”
“Done. Just so long as you don’t call me ‘fattie.’”
“Aw shut yer trap, fattie.”
Aloysius briefly considered resumption of hostilities, featuring Hokkaido’s finest techniques of all-out bushido one-on-one elbow-combat, but decided against. The upper hand was undeniably Ferdia’s and the mythical (but still shite-scary) organization to which he had once belonged.
So they repaired, or staggered, into the bar.
Shirley Quain, at a corner table behind a pillar decorated with fake vinery and other vaguely rustic details—a straw hat, a cowbell, matching his and hers shillelaghs—looked up, then away, face afire, to re-engage her companion, Lance the visiting American, in the exceedingly bland chit-chat she was beginning to fear (accurately) was his stock in trade.
“Look,” he said. “A souse.”
But Aloysius raised soothing hands hushingly to the assembled customers to quell fears of a sudden incursion by drunks.
“It’s all right, guys and gals, we’re fine, your man here just had a bit of a tumble, carry on, go back to your drinks.”
Ferdia’s intentions were dual, of course, as you had no doubt already surmised, dear reader: primo, to suss out Shirley’s assignation; secondo, formerly primo, to first meet, then bribe or cajole, the Terpischore gal. He looked for Shirl, but didn’t see her, behind that pillar, so second came first, in the event: There was Terpsichore, nodded to by Aloysius, to whom she nodded, in turn, confirming acquaintance.
“That’s her, so.”
She appeared to be more or less on the job, although not wearing the same red-and-white chequered gear that the other waitresses were wearing—and (observed Ferd) there was that unshaven bleeder Duddy from the car place hanging about at the bar, and would you friggin believe it not as an unwelcome accessory, to judge by her simpering and smirking in that direction, and once a willowy mock-bump-and-grind…then she turned in Ferdia’s direction and he did a double take, as if Princess Grace Kelly Grimaldi herself had walked in the door. Holy mother of God, is that the woman? self-inquired he, with a silent screech in his inner voice. Later, in the far distant gloaming of many a future evening, he would compare the experience to that of Ruskin on La Faucille, beholding Mont Blanc in the rosy sunset, or himself, Ferdia Quain, seeing Mont Saint Michel at the opposite end of the country (la belle F.) and day (sunrise) for the first time. . . (oddly enough, come to think of it, he’d been aching like fuck back then, too, not as a result of having been beaten up by a fat guard but because of a tit-over-arse tumble he’d taken from his bike, back in those dear old bike-riding days in his early twenties when a gangler like himself could actually show off with a turn of speed in front of his peers—until, glancing over his shoulder at someone he wants to impress (invariably a gal), he hits a misplaced road rock or two and—Whoopee!) Aloysius proceeded with the introductions, in his clumsy fashion, sounding like the policeman in a provincial production of an Agatha Christie mystery.
“Ello ello. Who have we here, then? Are you eh Terpsichore O’Hanlon?”
“Hello, fattie. You know perfectly well who I am. How can I help you guys?”
She came over and stood by their table, smiling. What a beor. Had Ferdia fashioned a mental image of what a “Terpsichore O’Hanlon” might look like, that image might have featured dumpiness, a stooped back, eyeglasses for sure, bad skin, and no doubt a cumbersome handbag—oh, and midriff-length dugs like the mammaries of an orang-utan, sagging from Day One. Instead of which he got the spitting image of Nicoletta Tedman, the superstar from Down Under , only better-looking.
“Ah—I, I, I, I,” was all he could manage.
Another thing, along with this ridiculous tongue-tiedness, was the sheer unlikelihood of “love at first sight,” it just made no sense, unless you were talking about snogging and shagging there was no such bloody thing, a man and a woman had to get to know each other first, didn’t they, you fell in love gradually, with first one characteristic, then another, then another…or not. But there was no such sentimental romantic rubbish as glimpsing the beloved across a crowded room and falling in love for the rest of your life. Ironically, at that precise moment he glimpsed Shirley across the crowded room and felt like the man who’s just missed the 12 bus, but he’s not bothered because it’s a beautiful day and he’s under doctor’s orders to take a daily walk anyway…
Which was irritating, given the histrionics of only a few minutes past.

* * * *
As the world isn’t populated exclusively, or mainly, or primarily (or mostly), or even in large part, or even to a substantial degree—or even at all, really—by prurient lip-licking sex-mad readers avid for a bit of nookie in any guise whatsoever by Page 20 or so (got to give the writer fella a little time to set things up, like) I’ve chosen deliberately to sidestep such scenes, notably (to date) the predictable embracing and undressing and flesh-kneading and turning-out-of-the-lights and subsequent heaving and panting that we all knew took place under the gabled and storied roof of Roofwalls that night—last night, to be precise, or the one before, or the one before that (but certainly not the one before that), or all three.
This is my prerogative, and I do hereby exercise it.
That Donal and Terpsichore had struck flame from each other’s tinders, as men and women do, there being most of the time no apparent reason for the reciprocity of such passion, or at least no reason apparent to me (their creator), or God (mine), is sufficient unto the forward thrust, so to speak, of this narrative without the expedient of the lot of us—you, me, Uncle Toby, the kitchen staff—falling to our knees with eyes applied to the draughty keyhole of Don and Terps’s bedroom door (Don’s, actually—not that anyone ever called him Don, not since sixth form anyhow), in the hope of catching a glimpse of his bony torso and/or her fleshy backside (and/or…well, never mind) forming part of the ensemble engaged in what is, when all is said and done, an entirely mundane and banal, and totally mechanical, not to say diuretic, event, visible in your local barnyard, or in a direct line from your front balcony, or under the greenwood tree (or in its branches) at most times of the day or night and in between.
So up yours, as it were.
Sufficient, too, is the effect Terps had on poor Ferdia Quain, ex-archivist, apprentice ex-husband, fringe terrorist, would-be entrepreneur, and amorous duffer entirely. Case in point, it being practically the only time he’d ever made a direct advance, before Shirl (except that once when he’d suggested to Pam, the likely lass over the road, that she join him in a rousing old game of Doctor’s In: she had): “Do you like mood music, of the woodwind as opposed to the shall we say ah ha ha ha percussive variety?” he’d once, with the overly-precise enunciation of total drunkenness, asked a heavily mascara’d blonde-haired black-clad bell-boobed sensualist at a TCD cast party the evening after the Limelights crew had put on their famed production of Ten Feet Down and Counting by the North Country playwright Alf Playwright, against which ambient din he’d had to repeat himself three times, his voice cracking third time round on the words “wood” and “wind.” She’d turned and surveyed him coolly before taking a long cool drag through an ebony cigarette holder of her black-and-gold Combs & Duncan and saying, “Naff off, boney.”
So he’d retreated to that St. Helena of lonely guys: the bar, haven not only of the lonely but of the satirists, not to mention the cynics, not a few permanently tongue-tied by the booze.
Weariness, not to say despair, re: the sex chase ensued in Ferdia’s heart and mind, not surprisingly.
Although, hang about—wait a sec—half a tick—just how much of a cynic is your man, really? Come, come, we all know cynicism is merely the obverse of romanticism, minted of the same alloy. After all, Ferdia Quain, as far as we know, is much given to puffing and blowing of a romantic nature; to deep contemplation of faraway horizons beyond the boring brick of Brosnan’s Garage next door; to late-night listen-tos of such as Ralph “Rafe” Vaughan Williams, Claude “W.C.” Debussy, Sir Ed “Ted” Elgar, Richard “Mein Gott” Wagner (especially the Good Friday music from Parsifal ) et al.; to the reveries of the solitary stroller; to heartfelt sighs at the sight and sound, both quite Zen, of raindrops plinkplankplunking in the outrippling puddle-reflections of autumnally leafless trees; to external manifestation of innate distrust of the world, as manifested by slumped shoulders, tatty old macs, deeply inhaled cigarettes, and a face slowly melting downwards around the edges in the solid Celtic tradition of, say, Richard “Dicko” Burton, né Jenkins, specifically as regards that splendid Welsh thespian’s splendid performance in The Spy Who Caught A Cold, and the nugget-solid pleasure that resided in Ferd’s heart at the prospect of a winter’s walk over the South Killoyle hills, or a quiet Saturday at home with Shirley (or not) and telly and a pint and the car wax…or, God bless and save us (well, perhaps not), a few jars with his former OC Crankshaft O’Deane in a pub less frequented by the hoi polloi and their cousins than Mad Molloys: O’Lesbihan’s, for instance. So that night, Ferdia made his farewells to Aloysius Schwarzkopf with a “p” (brisk, hopeful—indeed, confident—of never having to renew the acquaintance) and Terpsichore (hopeful but by no means confident of an au revoir—trying to hold her gaze without being downright sleazy about it, obstinately not looking at her tits, that sort of carry-on) (and that sappy sod Duddy, with his wandering bloodshot gaze—did he suspect something?) and called Crankshaft, who always answered his phone in the same way.
“Who the fuck’s that?”
“Me.”
“Quain?”
“The same.”
“Fuck sake.”
So, on a prearranged signal (three short rings of the phone bell, then two isolated ones rung off halfway through, signifying queerness) they met at Molly O’Lesbihans, down by the harbour, where the girlies were burly and into (and up) each other and the drink never stopped flowing and a fella could blether to his heart’s content with only the slimmest chance of arousing interest among the regulars. As per usual, they were the only male men there, amid a press of ogling same-sex fantasists, nominally female, many heavily unshaven in black leather wearing studded bracelets and neck jobs with padlocks and upon their heads hair spikes sticking up like the plaster auras of a saint in a forgotten country church. In that crowd the boys were as fully ignored in their corner, excepting the occasional glance of neo-masculine matiness (“Hey guys! What’s your secret for picking up chicks?”) or, more commonly, sheer disdain (“Dicks!? You actually go through life with those things? UGGHHH!”), as they might have been atop the windswept fastnesses of Ben Bulben.
“What about ya, big lad?” said Crankshaft, hailing Ferdia like the Belfastman he once was, and was yet.
“Dia duit, Crankshaft.”
They mused and drank, Ferd with a nervous eye on his surroundings.
“A Tortuga, is it?” growled Crankshaft. “Fine motor, that. Had one once meself, over in Lisdoonvarna. Wrecked it one night chasin’ a Prod, but. Hit a wall after I ran the bastard over, but don’t tell anyone. Run-‘n’-hit, not hit-‘n’-run, ahha ha. He was a poof, anyhow.” He cackled harshly, coughed with a voiced afterhum (“ah—hhhmmmmmm”) and fixed Ferdia with a steady, if bleary, eye. “So where were you the night I planted that thirty-pounder in the Food Hall?”
“Ah God bless you that was a master fuckin’ stroke Crankshaft sure ‘twas. Just imagine, delaying detonation until the first shoppers started showing up…!”
You stupid bastard, thought Ferdia. Better than you died that day.
“You must have been inhaling the dust of your fucking archives, up in Belfast, at the time.”
“I was, so.”
Crankshaft searched anxiously for a fag. Ferdia whipped out his Combs & Duncans and proffered them—a touch too much eagerness there, lad, he read in the narrow gaze gathering like a freak storm ‘neath the thunderhead of Crankshaft’s brow—and broadcast the crisp whiff of their Turkish tobacco and gilt papers before the questing hairs of his ex-colleague’s unplucked nostrils.
“Combs and Duncans? Fuck off. I’ll take me Regals, thanks very much. Ah, here we are.” The ritual of extraction, implantation, and ignition over, he inhaled, coughed, exhaled, and leaned back. Crankshaft O’Deane was the kind of bone-thin marrow-narrow heavy-smoking never-exercising pockmarked and nicotine-stained alcoholic wreck whose image Ferdia found it inspiring to conjure up during times of ill-health, depression or pessimism, what with the entire world seeming to buy into quack remedies for total health (such as vitamin tablets of unnamed origin) and televised adverts depicting snowy-haired octogenarians jogging on the beach. Crankshaft was nearer fifty-five as made no difference and with his habits and associations he should have been dead ten years since.
“A late-model Tortuga? Worth a good twenty grand, easy, maybe more if we can find a fuckin’ Ay-rab to flog it to.” His tiny eyes still fixed on Ferdia, he took a great gagging swallow of his pint (Earwicker’s Reddish-Brown). “Who’s the fall guy this time, then?”
“Ah, well, now I’ve a problem. I want you lads to flog it for me, just. I don’t want any fall guys—or gals.”
“Do you have it?”
“Nah. But I’m hopeful. I mean I reckon I know where I can get it.”
“Aha,” said Crankshaft. His wee piggy eyes popped open for a split second, then half-closed again, and his re-knitted single eyebrow settled back onto its broad shelf of solid Celtic brow-bone. (Ferdia resisted the nearly-irresistible mental comparison to the similarly unibrowed Mexican artistic lesbita, resident icon and icon of all those who lean hard left and harder lesbic, whose portrait hung prominently behind the broad shoulders of Robb Manlove, the barmaid—sorry, -tender; Rudolf Hess, too, he reminded himself was similarly afflicted, or blessed, as was “Omnibus” O’Kane, centerforward for Laois East, and Dirk Porteus, the golfer.)
“Well, we usually need a fall guy, Quain. A scapegoat. You know that. Unless it’s part of an official campaign, like, then we can claim responsibility. Otherwise it’s to throw the guards off, especially these days with all these bloomin’ treaties and the Prods cosying up to us and journalists sticking their noses in and all that. Too much exposure, if you ask me, but what do I know. They also serve who only sit about on their arse, eh?”
Crankshaft then paused, cigarette in hand, with the hangdog-yet-expectant expression on his face of a man who senses the approach of disaster, which, obligingly, struck. It came like one of those convenient anti-smoking moments in lesser Hollywood films in which the protagonist snatches a cigarette from the hands of his haplessly puffing parent, spouse or sibling, exclaiming “Mom!? / Sis!? / Dad!? / Honey!? You promised to quit!” Well, Crankshaft went Hollywood one better by having a coughing seizure that began as an innocuous pair of hums (“hhhmmmmm” “hmmmmmm”) and gravelly throat-clearings and shimmerings of the jowls, then metamorphosed suddenly into violent barks of irate-Rotweiler intensity; then (Ferdia, looking elsewhere in his embarrassment, met from across the bar the narrowed eyes of Robb, the house Don Juana who, offended by
a) the coughing;
b) the presence of males of the human species; and
c) the obstruction of her view of a comely newcomer (Lizette, twice divorced,
excitedly experimenting) by Ferdia’s great prominent MALE hooter, poured into her gaze no less than the very molten lava of hatred itself, causing Ferd to glance back timidly only after Crankshaft’s fit was over), introduced by a roaring retch in the major key of F with much fine spray of mucal saliva, leading almost to complete implosion of the chest cavity together with a spasmodic jigging-up-and-down of the shoulders and an involuntary and feeble flailing of the arms and a sequence of raucous gagging, thus: EWWW EWWW EWWW EWWW EWWW EWWWK, so loud that it actually filtered through the brisk chit-chat of the misandrists at the bar and brought things to a halt momentarily, until Robb (or someone very much like her) picked up the ball of conversation again and ran with:
“Men, well what do you expect? You know they die like ten years younger than we do, the useless wets. Running about with those things between their legs, I mean honestly. Strap it on when you need it, and when you don’t, lock it away, that’s my philosophy. Anyway, about Lucie, yeah, I had to ditch her, she was just the most total control freak I ever met, like she’d call me like ten times a day just to make sure I wasn’t cheating on her, ‘You cheatin’ on me yet, you rug-chewing bitch?’ she’d say, till one day I was like ‘up yours, honey, with knobs on,’ you can put away the chains ‘coz this time I’m going after the femme type, know what I mean? Is that your type, darlin’?”
“Grrrrr-ahem,” declared Crankshaft.
“OK now?” inquired Ferd, annoyed at being made a party to such a display of general physical dissolution. Crankshaft lit another cigarette.
“Hmmm. Oh aye. HMMMMMMM. Arrh. We’re in grand fightin’ trim now. AH-hrrrrrm. So what’s in it for you, Quain?”
“Moolah. Brass. The nicker.”
“We get most of it.”
“Fair enough. Well, not really, but I know you lot. Yez are right bastards, and I’m saying that as should know better than most. And there’s one thing I want to make clear.”
Here Crankshaft cleared his throat with great intricacy: “HHHRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRahhhhhhhmmmffff.”
“No car bombs, right?”
“What are you on about. You know we don’t do that sort of thing anymore.” He winked, ambiguously.

“Arrh. Me arse. Just don’t let me down on this one, Crankshaft. Don’t use the thing as a bomb. Just sell the car and pocket the cash.”
“You’re on. But we still get three fourths.”
“Half.”
“Yer ballocks.”
“Half or it’s off.”
“Then it’s off.” Crankshaft made as if to gather up his belongings, in token of imminent departure.
“Right. Like I said, I know yez bastards. So you get whatever, as you said. Still, that should leave ten grand or so,” said Ferd, hopefully.
“It’s for your fuckin’ cheese shop, isn’t it?”
“’Tis. Howja know?”
In reply, Crankshaft only tapped the side of his nose with an index finger (his right) and winked.
“Word gets round, me owld love. Jesus,” he said, warming to his subject (and quivering with the spasms of re-ignited incipient coughs), “how many ex-Rah archivists d’ya think there are in this town, let alone who want to open a fuckin’ cheese shop? We all know each other’s business, especially yours, bukes. Even if you’re not a member of an active service unit anymore.”
“Ah—wine and cheese, actually.”
This precision was ignored.
“I mean, how many ex-soldiers would think of going to go open up a cheese shop anyway? What are you, Quain, a shirtlifter?”
“Get out of it.”
Crankshaft felt entitled to address Ferdia in such brutal terms, like those used by a rude and crude boss to his underlings, because back in ’76… well, let’s begin at the beginning, shall we? It was like this: When young (24) Ferdia Quain began his stint in the organization, all plough-and-starry-eyed at the prospect of serving Oglaigh na hEireann and Poblacht na hEireann and the dreams of his Fenian ancestors (bar his da, that old Fine Gaeler), Crankshaft O’Deane had been his recruiter, as they called it then—“mentor” nowadays, with a touch of sensitivity training (more than a few of the Lads had been on package tours to California, Land of the Future, God help us) —and on his way to becoming OC he showed young Quain old ropes, as it were, from which the lad’s future dangled like a cracked bell in an old country church. “But I’m just the archivist,” Ferdia had protested, to no avail. Crankshaft was a bomb man, he explained, first and last, as were the best of the tricolor-blooded Lads, whatever their job descriptions. So Ferdia learned at the hands of a master the fine art of blowing people to bits. At 25, having recently received his Easter lily tattoo and sworn the highest oath man can swear after those addressed to God or one’s wife, he attended the first in a series of “workshops” held by the Organization’s best and brightest academic minds from institutions of higher learning throughout the Emerald and adjoining isles (the Orkneys, Shetlands, Greater Britain, Sark, Guernsey, L’Ile d’Yeu, Jersey, etc.)—Len McGuinness from Limavady College; Turlow O’Sperrin from East Loughborough Polytech; Hamish MacNape from Lerwick University; Pierre Kartouffel from Le Collège Unijambiste de Brest—on such topics as:
a) Hello, everyone! Welcome to the stability and detonability of ammonium nitrate, Part I;
b) Hi! Today it’s toxic effects from a fire involving ammonium nitrate;
c) Hello, everybody. We’re going to look at ammonium nitrate safety tests, just to be on the safe side; after all, bombers are people, too!;
d) Good afternoon, one and all. Today, it’s a hierarchy of control measures for the storage and handling of ammonium nitrate;
e) Lads, let’s swing right into the best practices for the storage and handling of ammonium nitrate fertilizers;
f) And last but not least, people, we’ll take a quick look at the best prices of ammonium nitrate from Middle Eastern sources.

These neo-New Age disquisitions, all in dusty underlit warehouses down by the murky Lagan, were followed by exams verbal and written punctuated by backslaps, the grim did-diddle-diddle of folk music, and outbursts of unshaven laughter, with much unNew Age heavy smoking and chipped mugs brimming with sweet tea. Finally, the best students were assigned to active service units and classes moved on to actual missions in the field—“the field” generally being an actual field in or near Newry, Co. Armagh, the northwest end, just past O’Foyle’s car dealership (Fords, Rovers, Shoguns)—for practice in how to design, manufacture and/or defuse the essential ammonium nitrate explosive that, along with its kissing cousin, Semtex, was the bomber’s best friend and usually the sole cause of limbs, balls, tits, legs, ears, etc., getting themselves blown off innocent civilians in places like Teddy Whelan’s Bar in the Short Strand and Harold Wilson’s Caff in Dungannon, Co. Tyrone. Tally, on Ferdia’s credit (or debit) sheet: no one actually killed (whew), but one wifey, Mrs. Ruth McMurdo, 50, had lost both her legs in Whelan’s (not that she missed ‘em much, after all she’d only used ‘em to go down to the sweet shop for her daily fifty or so Embassy Regals and a copy of the Telegraph, and once a week to toddle over to the Tesco for the spuds and rashers) and now sat legless in the darkness, staring through a fog of fag smoke (she’s up to 50 per diem now and counting) at her favorite talk shows—Ern, Jerry, George, Petey, Nina—on a magnificent Kamikaze 27-inch TV that she’d received the Christmas following her injury by way of compensation from the leadership of the local Invalids’ Rehabiliation Association (Official).
Another victim, a Papist by sheer accident and/or coincidence, had been Bernadette O’Popery, 49—and what was she doing in Harry Anderson’s notorious UDA hangout in the heart of the Holy Land, anyway, you might well ask? Taking a short cut, she said. Oh aye. Visiting her Prod lover, Billy Blow the radiologist on Jericho Street, they said. Anyhow, her handbag had taken the brunt of the blast, stuffed as it was with
• unredeemed shoppers’ coupons;
• worthless Lotto tickets;
• read and reread copies of The News of the World with front-page stories on recent sightings of the Holy Mother, Elvis, Charles Haughey, UFOs, and Princess Diana;
• a compilation of melancholy verses dedicated to the Holy Mother;
• a selection of popular fortune-cookie slogans by Ern Vasely, the famous Channel 11 talk-show host (Smile When You Say I’m Tall, Dark, and Handsome, Dragon Lady!);
• an unused compact;
• a sheaf of beribboned letters from Bernard, her youngest, who was working the building circuit in the Northeastern States (just like his da, dead on her these ten years after falling head-first into the Bog of Allen while in transit to a construction project at Knock Intercontinental Airport, God rest him);
• and a ton or so of (well, maybe eleven) half-empty fag ten-packets, the least empty of which contained stale fags she’d just never got round to, persecuted as she was by the demon of Quitting Smoking when she’d really just as easily keep on puffin’;
all of which cushioned her against the hissing blast of the 20 kg. Semtex double-agent nestling inside the mighty Lambeg drum and primed to go boom at the shuddering, Papist-hating climax of the Orange parade that sunny July 12th—but that had resulted in mere removal of her left arm (nah, no problem, she was a rightie anyhow, not that it didn’t hurt like the blazes at first, what with the phantom cramps and an odd impulse to give the fig to everybody with the nonexistent fingers of her left hand) and a touch more of the old corn-beefiness in the corresponding earhole. Oh, and every so often she fell to the floor trembling uncontrollably, “post-blast afterblasts, God I wish I’d a penny for every case of those I’ve seen, YAWN, could you check my agenda and see who I’m lunching with, Miss Ripper?” in the dry formulation of her doctor, Dr. Ivor Isinglass of Lord Carson Estates, off the Ormeau Road.
But these were idle human details of which Ferdia, as a soldier of the revolution, was mercifully unaware.
Then—third of the three shades who would come shuffling accusingly out of the dark mists toward Ferdia Quain on his arrival in the underworld—there was the Rev. Mustafa Bumm, visiting Anglislamic minister from East Grinstead, Surrey, on the prowl for likely lads to engage in the fine old distinguished act of bloke-on (or in)-lad sodomy in the plastic-and-vinyl surroundings of the Phrygian Hotel, Cavafy Lane, around the rent areas down by the old Trixy wine bar—and on the verge of hailing a potential candidate with the time-tried formula, “Ullo Ducky! Fucky sucky suck?” when to his horror the good Rev. realized a) that the “boy” was a girl (tits; hips; those girlish thighs—yecchh!) and b) that a bomb was in the process of going off nearby, quite loudly actually. The Rev. promptly found himself being struck by several flying pieces of balsa wood dislodged from Rivet-Way airplane models (Spitfires, Hurricanes, Hawker Hawks) sitting on a shelf in Brosnahan’s Toy Emporium just down the way when the bomb, courtesy of Ferdia (“Well done, lad,” said Crankshaft, turning away from the stiff spring wind to light up a fag), went ka-boom as a gesture of disrespect to the installation nearby on Donegall Place of Fred Turpentine, newly-appointed British Minister of Catholics (Ulster), Ltd. Dislodged were the Rev.’s left eye and a goodly if not godly part of his entire left side, including a shard of jaw, a rib or so and not excluding (glad you asked) those dear old gonads, now rendered officially (as opposed to merely recreationally) useless. But not to worry: The Rev. Bumm, now married in Canada to Jake, his lifelong life-partner of twenty days or so (they met down at Spike’s Butt-O-Reama last Whitsuntide), now sports a stylish eye patch to match his grey ponytail and alternative lifestyle .
All in all, a fair trade, ultimately, when all was said and done, at the end of the day, than which there had been worse, in the world’s history.
So there were worse, too, than Ferd. He’d opted for archives, soon after that. No, there were far worse than our lad. Crankshaft himself, for starters, ex-OC and certified nutter. Not only had he run the world’s most prestigious bomb-manufacturing clinics for upward of fifteen years, graduating such illuminati of darkness as Omar “Sally” Bin Salaad, Tikki Ben-Tintin, Harry Batasuna, Abu Ibn Jabr-Woki, Sean Freedman, Mahmoud Hamster, and (some said) Gerry Odom himself; he’d personally supervised the installation of Semtex and ammonium nitrate (and corollary triggering devices) in such sensitive areas as the House of Commons restrooms, the Food Hall at Howards, the Hotel Thatcher in Barton-on-Sea, the underarms of PC Daniel Boone (later found—as the local rag, always good for a laugh, had it—“to be, after all, a man of many parts: eyes here, toes there…”)—and that wasn’t the half of it.
Limerick ’89, five dead, nineteen injured?
Old Crankshaft’s handiwork.
Victoria Station ’91, three blown to shite instanter, the others lingering in agony for a few days?
Take a bow, O’Deane.
Valletta Docks, ’95, nine wiped out, eight of them members of the local Maltese Falcons rugby team, the other a hapless tourist from Brum named Tom Higgins (or ‘Iggins)?
Mais oui! Signé Crankshaft.
In a word, whereas a case might be made that Ferdia was an innocent despite his previous political affiliations, no such argument could be adduced in Crankshaft’s behalf.
“Baby, that’s what I want,” roared Robb to Lizette, who simpered prettily, rather overplaying the effeminate-femme role in awe of Robb’s butch he-womanliness. “Hey, let’s get down and dirty in the loo this very minute, how ‘bout it?”
“Oooo,” tittered Lizette. “Robb darling, you are a goer, aren’t you.”
“Too right, babe. Hey, life’s short. Grab yourself a dildo and let’s get it on.”
Ferdia mused irrelevantly on how Americanisms, being trendy, seemed to come naturally to these trendy subgroups but never to the Lads, who still spoke as if living in yesterday’s grim Ireland of, say, 1949—but wasn’t said grim Ireland their paradise, land of fried scrape and winkers and belly bands and cartloads of horse dung and sugared tea and filterless Players please and rutted boreens and omnipresent country priests and hurried onanism and rainy whiskey nights and timid prom dances at draughty local spa hotels and maybe the odd knee-trembler up against a mossy wall …
“All right,” said Crankshaft. “You point us in the right direction, we nab the motor, and we’ll split the difference seventy-thirty and none of your fifty-fifty shite. But let’s get it done before next Tuesday. I’m expected in Bilbao on assignment by end of the week.”
“Fair enough,” said Ferdia. His heart fluctuated coyly, like a pair of used condoms on the incoming tide, and his stomach tightened, like an angry snake coiling, then relaxed, like the uncoiling of same. He was thinking of the car, yes, and the likely windfall therefrom (for the lads, once engaged, never backed away from a job, that was one thing you couldn’t accuse them of, oh no, no shirkers they, worst they ever did from that point of view was put things off for a wee while, like, while Brig Com sussed things out as, for instance, when a visit was expected by the British PM, or a new Super in the ex-RUC); but madly, deeply, truly, his mind was on:
“Terpsichore,” mumbled he, drunk already (and he hardly knew it, or her).
“What?” snapped Crankshaft, pocketing his fags. “Let’s get out of here. The lizzies will be ganging up on us any minute now.”
“Girl,” roared Robb.“I’ll see you in the loo in two ticks, I’ve just got to settle up with the boyfriends here. Oy! Youse lot!”
Resembling in her leathers the führerin of a neo-Nazi motorcycle gang, she slammed open the countertop trapdoor and marched toward the lads, but they were gone, leaving behind a spillage of coins atop a well-thumbed fiver next to a smouldering ashtray (Ricard, imported from Dinard last Bank Holiday).
“Men,” sniffed Robb, scooping up the dough. “Can’t stand ‘em, personally. Wish I was one, though.”
“Well, have you read about the incredible new Gal’s SuperWillie?” breathlessly inquired Tammy, a renowned local beautician and crew-cut dildo specialist known in certain circles as La Vibratrix, who was sitting nearby reading a copy of ButchBabe over her vodka daiquiri. “It says here there’s a doctor in Latvia or Estonia or someplace out there who guarantees 100% effectiveness. Plus you get chest hair and no tits. Not for me, thanks. Couldn’t live without tits. But it might be right up your whatsit.”
“Ouch. Do you mind. Hey, let me see that. Won’t be a mo, hon,” Robb roared over her shoulder. “Keep the door locked, I’ll knock twice.” Then, pensively: “Estonia, eh? Where the fuck’s that?”
Meanwhile, outside, indifferent to trends in orifices, members, and the like, heterosexuality went about its monotonous, unshakeable, eternal business.

* * * *

Ructions could be heard aboard the Rumpelstiltskin when Terpsichore returned and had it out with Stan. He’d half-expected such a scene, half not, or maybe the second half of his expectation was mere hoping. After all, they’d had slinging matches before. But she’d never stayed away all night, and without calling, the slag.
No, this time the imp of realism that resided deep in the rear recesses of his brain spoke up loudly and cruelly, with admirable Shakespearean economy of metre:
It’s done, son.
“I’ve come for my things,” said Terpsichore, suddenly conscious that they were always saying that in the films, weren’t they, usually before the kid or kids burst into the room and set them all off weeping and bawling, or to set up a scene of teary reconciliation (well, that wouldn’t happen here, you could bet your knickers)…in fact, the gal in Un Bacio Cosi had said pretty much the same thing, hadn’t she, after (or before) Gottfreddo Baldi threw her over for Manfredina Puella?
On the other hand, what else was she supposed to say? “I’ve come for my things” covered the situation exactly: There was nothing else. So she said it again, as if doubting that he’d heard it the first time.
“I’ve come for my things.”
“Have you, now?” said Stan, seated at his desk, back turned to her, pen in hand, eyes raised to the signed portrait of Sean Pitts the bouzouki player that Terry Whelan had nailed to the wall just before scarpering to Australia (“Ah that Sean he’s a gas man altogether so he is ah he is that ah so he is, would ya sign this at all Sean, I asked him one night up at Banville’s on the Norrier, and ‘Sure now ladeen what name would ya like me to use?’ says he, well old Sean he’s a bit of a joker is he I said to meself so ‘Why not Lester Pigott?’ I says, so as you can see that’s how he signed it, Lester Pigott—oy Stan, gotta quid, I mean a euro? I’ll let you have it back tomorrow, or whenever”).
Slowly turning, Stan at first tried to adopt the cold, indifferent mien of a man of the world, lancing her defenses with such cruel mots as
“Brought the boyfriend home to meet the folks, have we?”
or
“Nice of you to remember me in the mad whirl of your existence,” this last requiring much—too much—thought and preparation and well-laid groundwork. It would best have been spoken in the echoing depths of a reproachful silence, but unfortunately (and how like life, you say!) the minute he spoke the words, she spoke too and drowned him out with,
“Gosh, Stan, I’m sorry you feel this way, but sod it,” upon which, feeling sorrier for himself than ever (and believe you me, when it came to feeling sorry for himself Stan was a virtuoso in the class of Yehudi Menuhin), he undermined the sad reflectiveness of his comment by raising his voice and bawling,
“NICE OF YOU, as I was saying, to remember me, in the ah ah ah…”
“Oh shut up.”
Well, that was when the ructions really started. She’d been putting one or two things—a compact, a soap dish—in a suitcase, and they re-emerged immediately, adapted for use as missiles. The soap dish came close, and the compact hit the bull’s-eye…or rather, in the event, Stan’s left cheekbone, just over the hairy part.
“You stupid bastard, God you’re useless, what a sponge, I just don’t know what I thought I ever saw in you, I mean good God there you sit stealing other people’s stories and selling them as your own, plagiarizing day in and day out and expecting to get paid for it, no even more incredibly actually getting paid for it, God you’re nothing but a fraud and a lazy unprincipled layabout, you stupid bastard.” She quite screamed most of this, and her normally pinky-white features were chalky with emotion. Her hands clenched themselves into fists, then opened, as if to administer palm slaps. The gal was beside herself, and it was a frightening sight. She was capable of giving out a few clatters at the very least.
“Right, that’s the limit,” said Stan, himself alternating hues of scarlet and white with rage and fear. Fear (white) won out. He ran into the bathroom and locked the door, through which he yelled, “You’re a mad bitch, so you are. If you don’t go away I’ll call the guards and tell ‘em about the motor you stole, so I will, so help me God.”
“You stupid bastard,” she screamed again, delighted to be able to
a) scream and
b) scream “You stupid bastard” so often.
The boat itself seemed agitated by the emotions on board and rocked gently back and forth, but the motion was a mere function of fluid dynamics in the wake of a passing barge. Oblivious to this manifestation of the unchanging laws of physics, Stan sat on the loo, arms akimbo. It was a haimes and a half, so it was. Jaysus. And barely a month ago he’d been the world’s own lover, the singing oysterman, your actual Ginger Man. He’d just quit that fuckin’ job; he had a knockout motte in his bed; he was making some sort of half-arse of a living by copying things out of magazines; his health was jake; he had plans; it was all rolling nicely in the right direction.
In short, he’d been the most happy fella, and he’d hardly realized it.
The door slammed. Hard footsteps pounded their way up the gangplank. Terpsichore had gone.
“Sob,” declared Stan tearfully, deeply moved by his own plight. “Sob sob aha aha.”
When he emerged the barge was empty. Wiping away his tears, he looked out the window.
“Sob sob aha ah arrah ah the feckin’ bitch look at her will ya Jaysus Christ.”
She was walking away with that arseproud hipswinging gait she’d had when he first saw her maneuvering through the tables at Fairy Farmers balancing on one hand like a trapeze artist a tray atop which tottered beer bottles; and in the distance that long-ago night it had been a scene like the parable of Beauty and the Beast, or one of those weird cartoons of fellas with long hairy faces and shaggy beards and haloes blazing out of unexpected places by that daft bloke Bloke (or was it Blake? or Black…?). The haunting unattainability of her ruthless beauty had shone through the nocturnal fog of smoke through which the ugly stubbled pockmarked mugs of useless wankers like himself gaped desirously at their love-goddess from behind a dense undergrowth of empty pints and beercans . . .much like the hideous mug that popped out of the bushes as Terps approached, on the other side of the canal. And although ‘twas a sight of uncommon horror to Stan, the face slowly and incredibly (and as he watched, Stan felt his youth ebbing away) revealed itself to be a welcome sight to Terpsichore. One arm was casually slung round the bastard’s neck as if the pair of them were posing for one of those snooty bluejean or automobile adverts in glossy mags, only the fella in this case was wearing a wrinkled old mac and smoking a fag and hadn’t shaved and generally looked like a down-and-out recently roused from an oil puddle at the lower end of East Killoyle Docks.
“Jaysus,” fumed Stan.
Worst of all, she knew he was watching, she knew his habits, God it was a real pisser when they walked out on you after spending a year or so getting to know your whims and oddities and memorizing the number of vertebral humps on your back (9, or was it 11?) and which films you absolutely refused to watch and what time of day’s best for whambang and why you prefer to sleep on the left side and when you’re best avoided moodwise and what kind of awful pop music you like to listen to on the radio (Apart from the Chieftains, and Stan was a Chieftains man first and last, Ernie Earwig and the Shrimps was always one of his favorites, along with Peter Pecker, The You-Toos, Father Ulrich Heselius and his Bavarian Altarboys and, of course, the Bootles). Christ, it was like memorizing the bloody Encyclopedia Britannica for some telly contest like Meistermann or Meet Mr. Memory and then waking up one fine morning with all of it blasted clear out of your head by the dream you’ve just had about being a Formula One racing driver or one of the Medici popes (Stan I) running naked along the marbled hallways of the Vatican, Swiss Guards bowing from all sides, or the old Paki fella in charge of the local sweet shop (Iqbal’s, across from St. Thor’s, just down the road). Only, no one’s heart broke if you forgot what was in Vol. 1: A to Baz, or indeed in any other volume, unless there was an entry under “O’Hanlon, Terpsichore” . . . oh he knew she knew he was watching right enough because he knew she knew he always watched when anyone left the barge, it was a reflex he couldn’t explain, he just loved to watch people come and go, especially her. And of course in her case there was that smug, extra feeling of proprietorship that wouldn’t apply anymore, now would it Stan me man…?
The two of them disappeared from Stan’s view and a second later he heard the sound of a car starting up and driving away, whether it was the Tortuga or not he couldn’t say but if pressed would have inclined toward the negative, the sound being a little four-cylinderish and raucous for the smooth-revving six-cylinder red roadster (in truth, it was the old Stebler-Bertz Donal had borrowed off the lot)—not that Stan knew, or cared, but he could tell one sound from another, as he could tell from a distance without his specs when a gal went for a guy and when she didn’t and whether she was worth going for or not.
“Shite.”
This choice Saxon monosyllable accompanied him through the low-ceilinged rooms of the barge as far as the kitchen, uncleaned and unswept since she’d stopped doing those things, a week or so previously.
Happily, though (if anything could be said to be happy in this miserable hour of loss and lovelornness), a pair of Earwickers Reds remained, standing stern sentinel like a pair of stern sentinels upon the otherwise-empty third shelf of his undefrosted—and therefore ice-bedecked—fridge (a Global Electric model dating to the early ‘70s). Stan opened one of the beers and was pouring its solace down his throat when, laterally, a movement caught his eye, the upward surge of a fella out of the canal, or off the next barge, and squarely onto the side deck of the Rumpelstiltskin, which rocked abruptly as the invader fought for a handhold.
“Christ,” spluttered Stan. His first thought, quite naturally, was that the grotty specimen he’d just seen her with had somehow doubled back on his tracks and was now coming at him with murderous intent, as if to erase from the face of the earth all vestiges of her chequered past … but before Stan could put the bottle down he realized the man, whose face was completely and stagily masked under a balaclava, was a) not that other fella, b) already aboard the Rumpelstiltskin and indeed c) solidly inside and d) wielding a stout blackthorn stick like a crazy old-age pensioner or giant Leprechaun and/or Rah send-up.
“Right, Fecky the ninth,” bawled the intruder, whom we know well, “up against the wall.”
“Piss off, you,” said Stan, who’d really just about had it after the scene with Terps, and although he was a shite-scared lily-livered coward right down to his socks, he was in no mood for a silly berk waving a shillelagh, never mind how tall the bugger was—fairly tall, actually, although not to an extent that might be deemed intimidating, or scary; au contraire, he seemed a bit loose-limbed and gangling, and effortlessly demonstrated an innate clumsiness by staggering from left to right and vice-versa, then sweeping a pair of porcelain King Charles spaniels (sent to Stan by his mum on his twenty-eighth birthday) from the sideboard onto the heaving floor (another barge had just passed), where they crashed into smithereens, and barely keeping himself upright all the while with wild grabs at the door as the vessel tipped, lurched, and rolled.
“Lamb of sweet Jaysus, what’s up?” roared the intruder, clutching at the doorframe. He held up his shillelagh in the other hand like a policeman bringing a line of traffic to a halt. “Oh I forgot, we’re on a fuckin’ boat.”
“Yeh. Leastways, I am. And I’m staying. So now you can sod off, Mickey Mouse. After you clean that lot up.”
“Not till I get what I came for.”
“Namely?”
“Axe me sack, scrum half. No, let me put it this way. Ever seen an outfit like this one before?”
“I have. It was on RTE7 about six months ago, a rerun of The Golloglys with Niall Griffiths. Some arsehole kitted up like that with the ski mask and all and went mincing into a birthday party…”
“Nah, I saw that too, lousy flick if you want me frank opinion.”
“Fair enough, the ending was shite-poor.”
“Too right. See that stocious old fart down the local, that Niall Griffiths character? No way he was in any condition to knock down Garda Mulligan.”
Stan took a long thoughtful swig of his Red.
“You’re right there. But what really got me was the local rich girl’s accent. One minute she was a Yank, the next she sounded broad Bogside.”
“Ah sure ‘twas a great big steaming piece of shite, so ‘twas.”
“Won an Oswald, but.”
“Did it now, do you say so.”
“It did. The same silly cow with the mixed-up accent, Brigitte Fessey was it? Best Supporting Actress, no less.”
“Sod off.”
“Oh yes.”
Silence interposed its corduroy elbows between them.
“But apart from that film, did you ever see the like of me outfit before?” inquired Ferdia (for of course it was he) with the typical persistence of the sensitive guy he was, ever desirous of just a little more respect and/or deference than the world was willing to provide. Stan, who was by now lounging casually in the captain’s armchair behind his writing desk, stared at the ceiling as if thinking.
“Do you know, I have. At Bodenstown it was, for the Easter Rising anniversary a couple of years back. I was installing the ball bearings in one of the bread delivery vans down the road—well, never mind that. My attention was distracted, you might say, by the sound of guns firing off above the graves, and there were a bunch of boyos with those things on. So you’re one of the Lads, are ya, or pretending to be? No skin off my nose, mister me man. I’m still telling ya to fuck off. But have a drink first. Then clean that lot up, with scrubbers if you please.”
“Ballocks to that. But a beer? Thanks, I will. In there?” Ferdia put down his shillelagh and sought the fridge, in which a solitary Earwickers` yet dwelt. He opened it and drank. “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.” The beer was no more. “Got any more?”
“Nah, let’s go over to Moylan’s and have a jar. It’s about that time, isn’t it?” Stan glanced at his wrist, formerly adorned with an imitation Bolux that had slipped off his wrist one wild evening of (sob) lovemaking and shot through the porthole into the sallow shallow waters of the canal…
“In Japan, certainly.”
“Oh come on. Maybe Turkey.”
“Well fair enough, how’s Greece? Ever been there? It gets pretty hot, I hear. Christ, speaking of hot, it’s fucking hot with this thing on. Don’t mind, do ya?”
“Not at all. Let’s have a look at ya.”
As Ferdia’s gaunt skin-wrapped skull, sporting eyeballs of alarming plasticity, emerged from beneath the stocking cap, Stan—once he’d resisted the urge to emit thin screams of terror— found himself reminded of a) the reconstructed Allosaurus in the Kilkenny Museum of Natural Science, where he’d stopped in once during holy hour and b) the face of that old Irish playwright who’d emigrated to France a while back, the bony old party who’d churned out a tidal wave of monosyllabic barfs under the (to him) humorous guise of drama, fiction, poetry, whatever…
What was his name now…?
“Know what? You look just like Simon Buckley.”
“Who’s that?”
“Oh some fella.”
“Well I’m glad it’s a fella not a gal. Speaking of which, or whom…”
“Ah, gals, is it. Well, you’ve come to the wrong place, I’m afraid to say.”
“Oh really? Surely not.”
“Sure. I can’t stand ‘em. I’m thinking of turning poofter.”
“Aw get out of that, boy.”
They strolled amiably down the gangplank onto dry land, upon which Ferdia felt unmistakable relief, as he wasn’t cut out for the seafaring life. No, you needed a spot of terra firma underfoot if you wanted to get about properly, so you did, otherwise what was the point of having a pair of long skinny legs with size 12 feet attached? To top things off, or make them easier to bear, a fine swift late-March afternoon was in progress outside, stirring up all the random muchness of the Great Outdoors. Leaves rustled, bushes shook, trees sighed and groaned and their wild branches grabbed at the wind that flowed like a great cooling river of air down from the trackless hills. Thrushes swooped, starlings sailed by, a hawk glided through the on-and-off sunlight, and the same sun thrust Michelangeloesque shafts of gold through the racing clouds (atop which, stage left: Adam; to his right, Himself). Faraway, the neo-Neolithic stone walls uncoiled their agelessness over the gentle green breast of the Belfers. A boat was disappearing along the long oily line of the canal under the dual-eyes of the Belfer Bridge. It was one of those rare moments when the whole world seemed made for pleasure. Ferdia took a deep breath, quite enjoying himself despite a congeries of inner emotions madder than any he’d experienced in a long time. He was drunk without having had a drink, bar the one just now. The whole thing was a crazy one-off, not just the assault on the barge. The balaclava helmet, for instance, had been a last-minute impulse, the excessive dramatic flair of the inebriate, that owed something no doubt to telly and Hollywood and something to a certain deep-rooted nostalgia for the simple cachet the old organization still bloody well had when you were out trying to get things done: People sat up and took notice, so they did, by the love and honor of God, and by janey they surely wouldn’t give you the time of this or any day if you said you were the local representative of the Basque Liberation Front, or El-Wazda, or the Tamil Nudist gang, or any of the other half a dozen groupings of flaming loonies the world over…no, there was one that commanded respect and got people’s attention, and that was the good old Rah, all decommissioned and respectable and clean-shaven as it was. So he’d decided to go for it: find Terpsichore, work over the boyfriend with a shillelagh (common practice back in the ‘50s, he’d heard, in the remoter townlands of Co. Tyrone, when time hung heavy on many a Catholic-nationalist hand), get the car and sell it himself, obviating the fear that was still lurking inside him, like the periodic pressure of cancer of the gall bladder, of the vehicle’s being pressed into service as mobile Semtex, a rolling bit of plastique that might backfire, as ‘twere, more ways than one. Yes (or Yeah), he’d just grab the whole Goddamned box of coglioni, as those tough swaggering Italian-American actors in The Maestros always said, usually with piggy eyes narrowed and thin lips scarcely parted in their eternally-simmering masculine rage, eager to fuck, punch, and shoot à gogo.
They came to Moylans bar. It was a decent old place with wood floors and plain linoleum in the jakes and a few ordinary tables and chairs scattered about. Behind the bar was a picture of Father Mathew the anti-drink Pioneer, an ironic touch on Management’s part. The bar was diagonally opposite the entrance. Behind it stood Moylan, presiding curate of the altar of beer-engines that included Thigpen’s Bitter, Schwarzenhuber’s Full-Strength, O’Balls’s Malt, and of course Earwicker’s Stout, toward which Stan and Ferdia directed their steps.
“Cheers, Rory,” said Stan to Moylan, whose first name was rendered variously as Roddy, Roderick, Roger or Bob, depending on his mood. Days on which he insisted on “Rory” indicated a passionate, devil-may-care frame of mind. “Roderick” gave you a lip-licker and cheapskate, with disapproving gaze; “Roger” a prissy twit with thick eyeglasses and an Ascot; “Bob” a sportsman given to prolonged soliloquies about hurling teams and fly fishing. “It is Rory today, isn’t it?
“’Tis indeed. How’s yourself, Stan,” said Rory. Dashingly, he lit a long panatella and hissed out the smoke between his front teeth, like George Craft in The Wendigos of Warren Street. “Let Wet Wesson catch me smoking this ‘un in me own bar, eh? Well, you know what I say? Up yours, Wet, and carpe diem. Seize the day, for fuck’s sake. Life’s for the living and fuck what went before. Two of the black stuff?”
Somewhere in the distance Norma Bellini or someone who sounded just like her on the radio hit the high C in Un Bel Di from your man’s opera Madama Butterfly.
“Hear bloody hear to that,” said Stan.
“Blonde in a black skirt for me, right enough, curate,” rumbled Ferdia. “Cheers.” He polished off the Earwicker’s in no time flat. An unreasonable thirst that had come over him (along with everything else).
“Rah, yeah?” were Stan’s first words after those necessary to determining what brand of beer to continue buying, and in what quantity (stout, pints).
“Yeah.”
“Well now surely to God I’ve done nothing to get in stir with youse lads. Not political, that’s me. Lifelong indifference to all that shite. Mind you, I was a touch let down when your lot signed the Derry agreements or the Penicillin code or whatever the frig you call ‘em…”
“That wasn’t me,” said Ferd. “Management. Typical management decision. Stiffs upstairs. You know.”
“Ah.”
“And you know what they’re like,” said Ferdia. “If you’ve ever had a job with a boss. Because they’re all the same. Bosses, stuffed shirts, management, the bureaucracy, dickie-tie wankers, junk jockeys, whatever you want to call ‘em. Bunch of paltry hemorrhoidal jumped-up self-important dickheads with no imagination or vision beyond the four wheel drives in their driveways and the balance in their savings accounts, the fuckers, and not a jot of interest in anyone’s welfare, not to mention life, art, literature, wine, cheese, and everything that matters.”
“Hear hear,” said Stan, recalling Ruud the Dutchman.
“Another jar?” inquired Ferdia. “Then to business?” A wave of regret swept over him as he said these words. This Stan specimen wasn’t a bad old masher to sit and have a jar with, even if he was the bedman of Ferdia’s now- (and no doubt briefly) favorite female in all the wide world, and even if Ferdia was at heart enough of an intelligent man to appreciate the thorough unlikelihood of his tryst ever climaxing, as it were, in a situation of mutuality mutually arrived at and satisfactory to both. But intelligence has nothing whatever to do with common sense, and if you don’t know that, you soon will. Even the most sensible among us will fall prey now and then to the demon of the possible, having heard as we all have that you gotta take risks, nice guys finish last, nothing is gained that hasn’t first been ventured, faint heart never won fair lady, that life is for the…well, you know the bromides. More harm than good has been done by their being taken too seriously by the tender-hearted among us, as well as the incompetent, the brainless, the wilful, the idiotic, the credulous, the downright dangerous, & co. Time to stand aside and weigh the options, Ferdia me lad, as a down-to-earth counselor might have told him. You’re a married man of forty-seven, no, eight, and you’re getting no younger. What’s more, you’re an out-of-work member of a terrorist organization itself made redundant by the Derry accords. You’re no one’s idea of a beauty; on the contrary, you have all the pulchritude of the back end of a bus, say the 12A to Crumstown after a week of heavy rains. You’re no better in bed than a vibrator with a low battery or an aging monkey in moderate heat, so thank your lucky stars, Jacko, that you’ve a woman at all.
Oh, and by the way you’re skint, or damned near.
Unfortunately, there was no such wise counselor at hand. Finn was at the shop warding off vandals and bailiffs and later on he was going over to Anthea’s and helping with the preparations for her young brother’s birthday party (oh the cosy domesticity, sob sob). Shirley was…well, that has to wait for a forthcoming chapter. Ferdia’s mam was dead, and his da, by now a permanent invalid, would sooner insert nappy-pins one by one through the fleshy part of his leg rather than have a heart-to-heart with his own son (“What son?” he’d likely say. “Oh you mean the Fianna Failer, that long streak of piss? Arrh. Splat.”). Truly, ‘twas a poignant, not to say sad situation, one that cried out for expression in the most throbbing, heartfelt terms, as in the bell’aria of an opera, or bel canto, foolishly costumed (say, in cross-garters, with neck-ruff) with stylized eyes uprolled, and hands moving expressively; or in the several hundred solemnly tolling pages of a lugubrious yet bitingly ironic nineteenth-century novel, narrated by some lofty old party like William Makepeace Thackeray, the Trollopes mère et fils, Honoré de Balzac né de Balssa, or C. Dickens, Esq. …but failing those outlets, what better venue for such confession than Moylan’s unpretentious beer-and-whiskey bar overlooking the stilly greeny waters of the Mangan canal? In the company of an all-right fella named—well, Sam or Sid or something, a decent specimen who’d already bought him two pints…
Besides, Ferdia was starting to feel that—as the Gaels had, and have, it—"maith go leor" sensation after three drinks on an empty stomach this early in the day and all the attendant excitement...and huge white clouds through the window, straight out of one of those Dutch paintings with the fellas with the distorted red faces (Rembrandt? Van something?) and the meandering boreens and the awkward dogs and the still rivers (Vermeer?) and the stiff-standing burghers quietly brooding in the huge stalls of luminous churches (De Koch? Der Hootch?)…
“This one’s mine,” loudly insisted Ferd, rising majestically yet still steadily to his size 12 feet, with the aid of the blackthorn stick (once the property of his da, whose name still adorned it as the centerpiece of a presentation from the Munster and Leinster Fine Gael Hunting Association). “No, no. No sir. Put your dough away. It’s my round for the next two rounds. This time the cupla deoram's on me. Eh—what’s your name?”
“Stan.”
This forged a bond that, although not indissoluble, was going to make it much more difficult for Ferdia to continue the assault, anonymity being the key in brutal one-on-one attacks, unless you were talking about a lover’s tiff—and by the by, while we’re on that subject:
“Walked out on me, she did, the scrubber,” stated Stan emphatically, staring straight ahead and smacking stout-moist lips fresh from the tasting. “And that’s not the sum of it. I was just like, who do you think you are, and here's her, I know who I am, sweetie, and I'm like, don't you fucking sweetie me, wee doll of mine. And would you believe me now, there was a guy waiting for her in the bushes, some pop-eyed shagger in a filthy old mac looking like he’d just had a good kip on a dosshouse scratcher somewhere.”
“In the bushes?” Ferdia licked his lips free of Earwicker’s. “You don’t say.”
“Oh I do, pal. The bastard let himself be kissed by her, and I still don’t believe what I saw, I’m tellin’ ya that.”
“Sure women are that way and that’s a fact.” The dirty elation shamefully felt by Ferdia at the revelation of a rift in the Stan-Terpsichore ménage was lopsidedly offset by the swooning letdown of another fella. This meant they were both united in their outrage, and not much remained of his all-out barrage to be directed at poor Stan.
“Oh it’s a fact all right.”
“You’d be wanting to get back at her.”
“Nah. Let it go.”
“She’s the one nicked the motor, but.”
Stan gaped.
“How the blazes did you…”
Ferdia raised a forefinger.
“Ask no questions and ye’ll hear no lies.”
“Of course. You lads, well, you’re connected.”
“You’re right enough. And my connections tell me a red late model Tortuga drophead went missing the other day.”
“Do they now.”
“And that said red Tortuga was seen hereabouts somewhere. In the possession of your eh girlfriend, if I may…” This was pure speculation of course, but it hit its mark.
“You may not. That slag’s no girlfriend of mine. The brass of it, snogging that poxy bastard right outside my own front door.”
“Well, then.”
“Knowing I’d be watching, d’you see. Oh she did it on purpose, so.”
“Did she at all.”
“And let me tell you squire the mangy specimen she’s chosen, well it’s enough to make you go off ‘em altogether, as I was saying to ya earlier I’d consider turning poofter if it didn’t mean having to bugger big hairy fellas up the arse, and I surely to God don’t fancy that for one minute, if you catch my drift.”
“I’m with you there.”
“So I’ll sit it out for awhile, just. Call in the old five sisters. You know.”
“Sure I do.”
“But ‘twas the sheer ballocking brass of it that got me, do you know? Herself snogging with a guy in a tatty old mac right outside me own front door, CHRIST.”
Stan slammed his fist into the table, causing glasses to jump, table legs to flex in shock, and Rory to sing out from behind the bar and his panatella:
“Steady on there, Stan. Whatever it is, it’s just not worth the trouble, me man. Sit back and take a sip of your pint. Carpe bleedin’ diem, remember.”
“You’re right there, Rory. Oh, you’re bloody right and that’s a fact.”
Here, as suddenly as it had been ignited, Ferdia’s flame flickered and nearly died in the cold draft blowing through the mental image of Terpsichore flinging herself at some grotty bloke in the deliberate hope of stirring jealousy in her soon-to-be ex; why, she was no better than a conniving scupper, when you got right down to it. Sure, he might as well go spoony over a Hollywood movie star (as he had done briefly over that Swedish bint, or was she Norwegian?), or Cleopatra of the Nile, or Wet Wesson’s common-law wife (oh yes, quite the lad, is Wet) Sinead the pavement artist; or for that matter Queen bloomin’ Madb of Connacht herself.
But she was a woman, and women, after all…
Yes. Trouble was, the itch remained. The thought of her still prompted a muddy little thrill below his belt, like the first, pleasurable part of an onset of diarrhea. I mean, you can’t go about falling hopelessly in love one day and airily respond “Who’s that?” to the erstwhile beloved’s name the next, can you?
Yet…well, Inconstancy, thy name is Love, as the poet has it.
Still.
“’Tis pity she’s a whore,” mused Ferd . “But if she is she’ll be that much easier to bait. If she isn’t, she’ll have the golden cap of virtue that’s so alluring in a sexy bint. Shite,” he muttered. He thought, not for the first time that day, of Shirley, and he determined at least for the moment to see the thing through; by God he’d call her that very day, that very hour, within the minute. Then he’d give the other one a call and declare his fruitless campaign, never begun, at an end.
Or not.
Odd, isn’t it, how we can storm ahead and make utter charlies of ourselves without a hint of remorse, or a second thought, until suddenly we’re damned near laid low by the sudden realization of how bloody stupid we’ve been, with that awe that comes with great revelations of the type that Copernicus and Galileo and Archimedes must have felt when they sat up in bed and said “Oh balls, so that’s the answer,” or “Eureka!” or “Fuck me, I’ve got it.” Lindbergh must have felt it when the lights on the ground to starboard spelled out “Le Bourget”; Pasteur when he saw those old sheep coming groggily round from smallpox (“Zut! Les moutons sont bons!”); Neil Armstrong when he stumbled onto the dead grey powder of the moon , . So Ferdia felt, anyway, when rendered sober by his drunkenness he looked back with the greatest incredulity and self-abnegation upon the events of the day and his starring role in them.
“Sorry I came at you with that thing,” he mumbled, looking down at the blackthorn stick. “Don’t know why. Tell ya the truth, Sam…”
“Eh, Stan, actually.”
“Stan. Tell ya the truth, I’m in the middle of the bit of a gal crisis meself. I’m married to an Englishwoman and the woman’s a loony, quite.” There then ensued a rambling account of the extent of Shirley’s looniness and concrete examples thereof, not forgetting the monthly or bimonthly vitamin crises and frequent hegiras to Finn’s dingy digs across town.
“No, that’s the wrong word, dingy doesn’t begin to describe it, I mean the man lives like a squirrel, or a badger, nothing but piles of this and that everywhere, and where there aren’t piles of third-rate paperbacks there’s his exercise equipment, barbells and treadmills and who knows what else, nuts and barley and empty orange juice bottles, surely to God the man should have better sense but what d’ye expect from a fella named Finn McCool?”
The ensuing hilarity was subdued but no less joint for that.
“And to top it off he’s the only one will give me a kip when I’ve had a tiff with the missus—well, maybe tiff isn’t quite the right word, bleeding civil war is more like it, I mean the woman threatens to denounce me to the guards whenever she finds the vitamin pills I’m forced to hide in my shoes…”
“Sure they’re all a trial and a burden and a gang of immoral bibes, so they are, the women, and you and I know that’s the God’s only truth of it.”
“But now she’s sloped off with some fella. At least that’s my theory, because she’s never out-and-out refused to talk to me on the phone before.”
“Sure it must be a fella.”
“That’s my theory, anyhow.”
“I’ll come with you and beat him up.” (Caveat lector: Actually, what Stan said sounded much more like Oy’ll come witcha and bate him op, but in the interests of reader harmony I, as Author, have resolved no longer to attempt rendition of quaint, folkloric brogue and/or burr; all of it will be shown as if spoken in Standard English, the kind of bland telly newsreader-speak you hear from Newcastle to Newcastlewest, en passant par Chicago, San Marcos, Toronto and L.A. )
(Well, almost all of it.)
“No, forget it.”
“No, honestly. I will. I’m feeling a touch punchy today, know what I mean?”
“I know exactly what you mean. But there’s no dividends in it, sport. Believe you me. She’ll just have to get over it herself.”
Hard as it was for Ferdia to speak these words, it was even harder for him to genuinely believe them; but he did, swallowing hard (saliva first, Earwicker’s Red second), reminding himself that it was ever thus, that the placid marriage was the dead marriage, and that she’d come round sooner or later if he just kept a) out of the way and b) his mouth shut but probably not if c) he went after Terpsichore O’Hanlon at all.
Still, it was a nice fantasy, but, and didn’t hold a candle to his six-month-long obsession with the Swedish actress Liv Dahl, whom he glimpsed once coming out of Clery’s in the Thomas Maher Shopping Arcade, and who ministered tenderly to his dreamy needs, usually (but not invariably) with the right hand…
“So tell me this,” he said to Stan, raising his glass for the final draining and confident in his anticipation of further rounds, furnished by Stan and perhaps even by jolly Rory behind the bar. “What happened to that red roadster we were talking about?”

* * * * *

Enough of Ferdia for now. Let our attention wander to his wandering wife, Shirley, who hadn’t really wandered far herself except mentally to sunny Arcady, which in her mind’s eye looked something like the Yorkshire Dales in the spring, minus the sheep afterbirths. Otherwise it was grey Killoyle all the way, alas; for on the one hand there was Ferdia, the devil she knew, and on the other, Lance the American from work, the devil she didn’t particularly want to know. He’d been sent over from the parent office in Ohiowa or Indianola or some bloody place to do a time-and-motion survey, or something about workperson-hours efficiency, or Personal Development Initiatives, or some such corporate rubbish. Or maybe something quite different. Accounts, was it? Well, once he’d come “on board,” as they said, he’d started out by asking her, nosily, smelling of (she thought) ether, how she spent her time at the office. “Piss off, mister,” had been her instinctive response, quashed at the last minute by the greater weight of the more diplomatic “Well, working, I suppose,” a response that elicited peals of chuckles as dry as dried tangerine peels rattling in a gourd. That was what had led him to asking her out, after casting a series of poutingly desirous glances at her from across the room in meetings and sidling up at inopportune moments, like when she was just coming out of the loo, or having an illegal dekko at the old World-Wide Web (Tina Utter’s Fashion Accessory Parade Dot Com), or sitting at her desk squinting into her hand mirror and trying to doll herself up a bit (not for him, just on general principles). Hard to say what turned him on, I mean there she was, all Yorkshire and blowsy and fortyish, and there was Lance, an American of the old-fashioned long lean clean Marine type—which type, admittedly, as she’d often thought, usually concealed profound weirdness along the lines of exercising in the nude with Indian clubs or squatting in a loincloth making constipated Japanese noises or running eighty-seven miles a day with pedometers and heart-rate monitors and blood-pressure gauges and the like strapped to one’s arms and legs or spending all night on Internet chat boards discussing the exchange of bodily fluids (so American was that phrase, “exchanging baa-dily fluids,” that she couldn’t imagine an English person, or even an Irish one, ever saying it, but of course you never knew, these (or those) days; why, the way things were going, she wouldn’t be that surprised if the bus conductor on the No. 12 turned round and said it to her—“Fancy an exchoynge of bahdily fluids, darlin’?”—next time she went down the shops). So when Lance Lancem asked her out the first time she balked, not least because she was, of course, Mrs. Ferdia Quain, although he didn’t know that; she wore no wedding bands nor announced her marital state either in words or with pictures of hubby in her corner cubicle—indeed, there were no pictures of Ferdia at all anywhere, not even on the mantelpiece at home, where Mum and Dad reigned supreme, captured at various stages of their cantankerous lives, usually facing in opposite direction with matching snarls and West Highland Terriers, the poor dears (dead, alas). And Ferdia? “You don’t photograph well,” she’d said to him on many an occasion, meaning (or at least he interpreted it thus) (accurately) “I don’t want to look at your ugly mug any more than I have to.” But Argus, the old poodle they’d had put down when he started shitting all over the house, garage, pathway and marrow patch, poor old tyke, well she had three—no, four pictures of him, one of her holding him in the early days in Scunthorpe, then the eager panting look of canine youth when he and his mistress took a motoring holiday to Scotland, then the decline setting in with glazed blankness in the eye, and finally one of the old dog defecating on her lap as, oblivious, she waved the telly remote control in the air, aerially navigating from RTE64 to BBC32 (Maid Marian of the Forest to Oopsy-Daisy, Lads!, Saturday nights at 9:30)...
Ferdia put it all down to woman’s ways, but. He was easy, that way.
Then one day this Lance fellow came up to her as she sat fuming impotently in her cubicle (that time of month again, plus just getting over a series of meetings with a ghastly gang of overly-ambitious young graphic designers whose vocabulary seemed to consist of the words “cool” and “hey” and the occasional misplaced conjunctive link between them, such as “like,” as in, “I’m like, cool”) and said,
“Shirley, I’ve got a business meeting over at the Spudorgan Inn, then I’m planning to swing on down to this Fairy Farmer’s place for a bite, it’s supposed to be a pretty cool place, anyway a guy I know gave me a couple of meal vouchers, what do you say?”
“Eh? What should I say?”
“I mean, would you care to join me?”
“Oh ah eh sure.”
Oh sure. Are you off your friggin’ trolley, woman, she screamed inwardly. She’d never even mentioned being married, not that she was so inclined, now that she and Ferd were deep in a definite rift. But still.
So back home she had a drink first, just like the old days when she was a single gal and the offers came in thick and fast and she had to steady herself before putting on the simpering mask of sociability.
Then, of course, wouldn’t you know it, she made it to Fairy Farmer’s all right even with the brake pedal sticking but then ran into her errant and probably drunk husband in the car park doing God knew what apart from staggering about and making incredibly ill-timed and feeble jokes about picking up girls or something (yes, probably pissed, the old piss artist) (I do hope he’s taking his vitamins, self-said she—but not too many, she hastily self-amended, bedeviled by visions of Ferd bulging in odd places and turning a light puce, or carrot-orange, while continuing to knock back handfuls of pills), then swearing at her and all in all making himself out to be about as repulsive a proposition as imaginable, in fact for a moment or two Ferdia’s ludicrous sideshow had almost made her look forward to her evening with Lance, but then the evening started happening and regret wasn’t slow in coming. Not to put too fine a point on it, the entire episode was a disaster—a flop—a fiasco—a haimes deluxe. She burned to recall it. It began at Fairy Farmer’s … of course, it hadn’t been enough to run bung into him in the car park, then he’d come staggering into the restaurant arm-in-arm with that fat polis or security guard or Old Bill or whoever he was, she’d thought at first Ferdia had been nabbed for drunk and disorderly, for goodness’ sake—and serve him bloody well right–with the pair of them looking like they were pissed out of their foreskins, not an edifying spectacle whatever your politics or morals, but on the other hand she hadn’t been too chuffed when Lance took a look and said,
“Whoa, there’s a real pair of natives, huh?”
“Well, the one on the left’s my husband,” she blurted, but her words were drowned out by a sudden cyclone of laughter from two ill-dressed young couples at the adjoining table. For some reason (embarrassment, mostly, plus the insistent nibbling of hope) she didn’t feel like reviving the topic. And it had all gone downhill from there like a great big potato pancake slipping from her grasp, or a luge race in Kitzbuhel at the height of ice season.
AH Kitzbuhel. . . the mountaintops etched as if by diamond against the glass sunroof of the blue sky, or moonroof when the moon hovered hugely above the slopes like a great big paper lantern…church bells in the sharp air… the scent of glue wine or whatever they called it… horse shit… and chocolate everywhere… and oh, that tanned and incredibly tall ski instructor with the crinkly hair and astringent cologne, what was his name, Schmidt, Muller, Schubert, Zorn…?
The one she’d caught in the sauna with that fat bitch from Woking.
(Lothar. Lothar von Gödelescherbach, that was it.)
Then he started in with the eye movements. First he rolled them upward for uncomfortably (to her) long periods, looking a bit like some sort of religious nutter, or one of those old Renaissance saints who were always hanging about staring upwards and getting shot or flogged to death or something …then he started pausing on the downward roll and, for a brief but disconcerting interval, he screwed his eyes tight shut like someone afflicted with Parker’s Syndrome, then opened them, then shut them again, then opened them, then shut them, etc.; then, eyes wide open, looking slightly hypnotized, he started ogling back and forth, first at the girls in general, then her in particular when she wasn’t looking (well, out of the corner of her eyes, laterally, like, she could see him craning his neck to have a look at her legs under the table), looking away when she returned his gaze…anyway, that kind of thing. It made him seem a bit like a variety number on one of those telly programmes. Then he started on about how great it was that Ireland had finally turned civilized now that they had all those government-mandated jogging programmes and anti-alcohol adverts and had banned smoking everywhere, including at home (and herself dying for a fag the whole time) but now they’d have to start focusing on their diet, with all that salt and greasy stuff.
“Not that I’m a prude, I mean I enjoy a beer as much as the next guy, but I’ve heard they used to serve fish and chips in newspapers that were so soaked with grease that by the time you finished your hands were black from the newsprint leaking through.”
“Yes, I remember that,” she said. “Yummy. I had a fish dinner just like that at Whitby last summer.”
“Wow. Lucky you’re still alive.” Which remark he followed up with an extraordinary medley of snorting and gasping that, she realized, was his variation on the theme of laughter. But he soon quieted down, and the restless eyes resumed their wandering.
And the food was mediocre beyond belief. She had a Malteser salad that was smelly round the edges, then a slice of roast beef that sagged about in what was billed as “pecan and parsley sauce, Tarragona style,” but that tasted like the last scrapings at the bottom of her Great-Aunt Marion Jones’s old saucepan, the one dear Auntie M. had used for thirty years of fry-ups of everything from scrambled pigeon eggs to rashers to Sunday morning bread and scrape when times were hard to mushrooms à la provençale in times of plenty to Great-Uncle Burt’s tongue sandwich on rest days when the old blighter was at home resting his ticker in front of a) the radio and b) the telly, the two appliances vying with each other for the greater output of noise. . . how she wished she could talk to someone about dear old Marion and Burt. But she’d hardly know where to begin, especially with…
Lance suddenly leered directly at her, his teeth studded with rabbit food.
“Great chow, huh?” he inquired, halfway through his Salade de Roubaix-Tourcoing. Scraps of lettuce peeked through the considerable gap between two of his lower teeth like an unkempt bush growing through a fence. He washed the shrubbery down with a gulp of beer shandy. “Irish cooking’s pretty good these days, not what I expected, I gotta say.”
“I’ve had better.”
“British understatement, right?” he said, with a slightly glassy-eyed stare meant, no doubt, to be seductive, but it wasn’t, quite the contrary, in fact so unseductive was it that Shirley unexpectedly found herself thinking, not of cozying up to lean Lance, but of doing the same, or rather re-doing the same, with of all people her lawful married hubby, the Fenian arsehole and gangler and general layabout Quain, who was at that very moment (she mused) doing God only knew what, probably brooding over the blueprints for his silly old cheese shop, certainly not going after the talent downtown, she knew her man better than that…didn’t she?
Perhaps she should give the silly old fart a buzz, after all. Just to check up and that.
After dinner they went into the car park and scrutinized the concealment of the night.
“There’s a pretty nice place down along the Strand area,” he said. “How about a nightcap?”
“Oh I don’t think so.”
“C’mon. Buy you a Bailey’s.”
“Sorry, Lance, it’s been a lovely evening, but I’m actually not feeling too well, what I really need is to go home to bed.”
“I’m heartbroken, Shirl.”
“Sorry, must go, had a lovely time, see you tomorrow,” she blurted, in rapid succession, upon Lance’s pressing his suit a little closely. He started moving in as for a farewell smooch, but she outstepped him. Actually, she quite surprised and pleased herself with her firmness, and as she was lighting the first fag of the evening with trembling fingers she had the exquisite pleasure of seeing Lance wave awkwardly from the darkness before speeding off in his hired Rover, trailed by a nearly-palpable wake of frustration, himself frowning disapprovingly into the wing mirror at the sight—illuminated by the lights of the long-distance lorries belching and growling up Uphill Street to the MacLiammoir Bypass—of cigarette smoke luxuriantly emerging, tusk-like, from her nostrils.
She went home, contentment and anxiety wrestling sluggishly in her soul. The house stood dark, damp and silent. Wish we still had a dog at least, she thought, sadly remembering the scampering and whimpering and asthmatic barking of poor old Argus. She turned on the lights and illuminated only the dreary hallway with its wall-climbing ceramic flight of ducks, the telephone stand, an umbrella rack, diminutive bookshelves with various old Baedekers and Blue Guides (Cornwall and Devon, Munich, the Tirol, the Costa Brava) and an old portrait of Michael Collins (at least he said it was Collins; she’d always detected a closer resemblance to Armand Pinero, the American actor). The wallpaper, striped vertically, reminded her at bad moments (of which this was one, although there’d been worse) of the bars of a gaol cell.
“Need a drink,” she muttered. Three glasses of Chardonnay later, she went for the phone, fag in mouth.
“Yeah?” inquired Finn’s sleep-thickened voice.
“Finn? It’s Shirley.”
“Yeah.”
“Is he there?”
“No.”
“Tell him I called, will you?”
“Yeah.”
The line cooed in her ear. Damn, she thought, and blast. I really fancied a little chinwag with the old sod.
Well, tomorrow’s another day, she thought, two Chardonnays after that. With any luck.

* * * *

“Tortuga GT drophead roadster of recent manufacture,” read the Gardai report. “Scarlet to burgundy in color. Found abandoned in the ditch on the SE side of N111, 12 ft. (3.60 m.) past the three-mile (4.8 km) marker in the Killoyle-Crumstown direction, southbound, at 1445 hours, Thursday March 24th. No petrol was in the vehicle at the time of discovery, no doubt occasioning its abandonment. Action was promptly taken, in a timely manner. Rather than entail the cost of requesting a tractor hitch from the Gardai motor pool, Garda Liam Cahill of the East Killoyle force, who had come upon the vehicle while performing his standard afternoon tour of duty via bicycle, volunteered to cycle with a jerrycan to the nearest service station, a Frisky Petrolio outlet 0.8 km. ESW, an intended course of action that was accepted by his superior, Inspector Gray, via mobile telephone, and which plan of action was duly noted in Sgt. Cahill’s record by the sergeant on duty, Sgt. Eomer Burke. After a total of 1 hr. 35 minutes had elapsed, Garda Cahill returned with the jerrycan and filled the automobile’s petrol tank with 7 litres of petrol (87 octane). Then, having handed his bicycle over to Garda Smith, and attired in mac and standard-issue felt gloves so as not to deface or inadvertently erase traces of the vehicle’s previous occupants, at 1630 hours Garda Cahill drove the vehicle to the carpark at Gardai Headquarters on Haughey Circle in Killoyle City, upon which an examination of the vehicle was made under the supervision of Inspector Gray and Gardai Sgt. Micheal O Suilleabhain, Director of Stain and Discoloration Analysis (Leinster and Munster). On examination of the vehicle, evidence of human micturation was found upon and below the driver’s seat in the form of a) a long stain yellow-brown in hue and b) puddling on the floormats, of indeterminate tint. DNA tests are under way at Gardai forensic laboratories in Killoyle City. Also, slight denting was noted by Inspector Gray on the front left wing of the vehicle, implying sudden contact with an immovable or sluggish object of considerable mass. The 5 km. marker had been observed to have a chip missing at precisely the location at which the vehicle would have collided with it (the marker), had it (the vehicle) done so, this observation lending some credence to Garda Cahill’s and Inspector Gray’s theory positing same. The legend ‘Crannog Rules OK’ was noted to have been carved, possibly with a flick knife, into the mock-leatherette or PVC surface of the passenger seatback. This was taken to refer to the Crannog gang, an association of professional hooligans based in the Lord Thomas Maher housing estate, Killoyle City (SW). The automobile was subsequently determined to be ownerless, being the retail property of a firm rather than an individual, the aforesaid firm being Heartland Autos, Ltd., a used-automobile enterprise located at No. 112, Uphill Street, in Killoyle City (W.). The owner, an individual of masculine gender, or “man,” who is general manager of Heartland Autos, Mr. Brendan Byrne of 45, Glacier Gardens, Sandymount, Dublin 4, made the following statement to Garda O Suilleabhain:
“’Shite.’
“Mr. Byrne repeated his statement at Gardai headquarters and was detained following enquiries. At 20:00 he was remanded in custody before being released on his own recognizance into the stewardship of his wife, Mrs. Colleen McCracken Byrne.”
Well, so much for that. The report is fine as far as it goes, which isn’t far. Nowhere do we learn from these turgid lines, for instance, that eager Garda Cahill, mentioned twice in dispatches, was (and still is, the not-so-lucky lad) none other than the young brother of Finnbarr “Petey” Cahill, former OC of North Munster’s Padraig Pearse Brigade, himself at one time the coffee boy and general factotum of “Crankshaft” O’Deane in Crankshaft’s glory days as OC of the Belfast Brigade (the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, when professional terrorism was only just beginning to hit its stride). It takes a mind possessing less than the analytical and/or deductive powers of a Poirot, let alone a Sherlock Holmes, to conclude that Garda Cahill’s 1 hour and 35 minute absence from the scene of the crime was an unconscionably long time to cycle half a mile in either direction, and that the time had been actually employed in pursuance of other ends, ends entirely distinct from those adduced: Yes, you guessed it. Nefarious ends, even by the normal standards of the day.
In the event, Cahill got on the horn to his big brother, who was au fait to every development and plan afoot in East Munster’s small but tight community of Lads, and told him where the red Tortuga would be.
“Grand, boy.”
“That’s the one youse are after, right?”
“It is, it is.”
“Will you be doing the renegade with it?”
“Your man Quain? Now why would I be telling you that at all?”
“Well Jesus I just risked my job to get you this info you bastard.”
“Now you listen to me you mind your own business you wee fucker or so help me Jaysus I’ll.”
“Well how do you like that when I’ve put me career and good name on the line for youse bastards.”
“Now you listen to me you watch your tongue you cheeky bugger or so help me Jaysus I’ll.”
“Cheeky bugger yourself.”
“Now listen to me you watch your tongue you young spalpeen or by the holy Mary mother of God I’ll, Jesus save us the brass of the lad, what would our poor old father say and he in heaven looking down on us this very moment.”
“Up yer arse.”
It was an exchange typical of the spirited Cahill clan of South Killoyle—nine lads, all doughty as Fuller’s earth, and their mam and da, burly old parties with criminal records long as your leg and hoary lined faces like a pair of rustic W. H. Audens and scant patience for nonsense—and no offense was meant, or taken. Petey, once he’d slammed down the antiquated wire-in-the-wall rotary-dial phone, sucked on a lemon-flavored Glow-O and picked the phone up again, thereby circuitously—via his American girlfriend Babes, Dr. Hector Blow the dentist, Sweetco’s Up-In-A-Jiffy Food, Wine and Video Mart, and finally Crankshaft himself—letting it be known that the much-coveted red roadster was sitting under an elm in the northwest corner of the confiscated section of the car park at Gardai HQ on Haughey Circle…
“I can’t understand a word you’re saying,” said Crankshaft. “You got something in your mouth?”
“Ah sorry about that.” Petey removed the Glow-O and held it at arm’s length, disdain sweeping his features at the prospect of so much stickiness on his index and thumb (the right). He then reiterated his message, speaking slowly and clearly, as if to a Thai, or Vietnamese, or other utter foreigner.
“So… it…will… be… at… Gardai…headquarters.”
“Gardai Haitch Kyu?” repeated Crankshaft.
“Right… The… big… one … , you… know. Down…town… Where… the… old… bill… hang… out.”

“Old bill, is it. And what bleeding ballock-brains of an eejit thought it would be a good idea to go in and nick a car from under the guards’ noses, for the love of sweet sufferin’ Jay?”
“Well …, now…, I ...”
“You bleedin’ moron. No, wait. Hang on a sec.” Crankshaft paused in his invective.
Eureka!
Not being privy to Petey and Co.’s plans, he’d suddenly thought of precisely the class of bleeding ballock-brains of an eejit for these circumstances: himself, with the Gardai and Ferdia Quain in his crosshairs. The Gardai were bad enough, bloody Brit-loving traitors and Quaker-style wankers and vegetarian pacifists the lot of them, bar a few who had the good sense and patriotism to collaborate, and eat good Irish sausages and rashers…but as for Quain, well, the other night was the limit. “We’ll go fifty-fifty,” will we? Me arse we will, shrieked Crankshaft in inward rage. Granted, he was investing the episode with excessive significance out of pure undiluted paranoia on his part, and long-simmering resentment of Ferdia Quain, starting at the beginning when he could never quite get a handle on what the young snapper was saying, let alone thinking; then progressing to Ferd’s “retirement” from the cause (lucky he wasn’t hauled out and shot for desertion) and the younger (by seven years) man’s barely-suppressed insolence, even during field outings and actual missions—not to mention the colossal brass of him dandering about on his uppers for a couple of years with a fat English wife supporting him with that boring old job of hers and probably getting up to all kinds of things between the sheets (ugh), then would you credit it he turns up out of the blue after ages of silence not caring a jot about his, Crankshaft’s welfare, to ask him, Crankshaft, to reactivate the old connections as if they’d been comrades-in-arms all along and put in a bid for half the proceeds of this bloody car, would you believe it…!
And to tell you the honest truth of it there’d been times when Crankshaft had wondered, sometimes idly, sometimes not, whether the names Ferdia and Supergrass might not conceivably be linked, what with the unusual rash of defections and arrests that had occurred up in the Falls command just before and after Quain had handed in his resignation, that foul spitting not-so-long-ago October day…
Plus, sonless, he’d always seen himself as a fatherly mentor to the gangling bastard. If not your actual father figure, then maybe the big brother the big galoot’d look up to, just. Go out for a drink with, cast a line into the rushing salmon-shy waters of the purling Suir, laugh manlily together in the ochre beams of the westering sun, take in a hurling match at the Croker with manly cans of Harp in hand, do a touch of manly arm-wrestling in the snug of a Connemara wayside inn, that sort of manly carry on.

[Note, parenthetically but perhaps not entirely irrelevantly, that Crankshaft had never married, had never proposed marriage, had never been invited or tempted to marry, nor had ever gone so far as to get engaged, and indeed viewed the entire female sex, even its more alluring members, as something of a royal pain in the arse.]
Anyhow.
“I’ve just the thing,” he said to Petey. “Leave it to me.”
(Had he but asked, he could have saved himself a world of trouble, and Ferdia would have paid dearly for his “resignation”; but ‘twas The Lads, and Mum’s the word’s the word in that outfit, more’s the pity for most of them.)
Crankshaft’s first idea was to get Ferdia to deliver the goods somehow. But repeated telephonic summonses resulted in the same: a silence as deep as that prevailing in the Kalahari just before a rainstorm, or in the environs of a dustbin in Nighttown unmolested by dogs.
“Fuck,” snarled Crankshaft. Balling his hand into a fist, he applied fist to mouth in a reflex effort to stem the spray of saliva and germs disseminated by the next coughing fit—not a gold-medal seizure, mind you, just a prize gob or two and a few hoarse, whistling hawks and hacks.
“Hawk,” Crankshaft declared. “Hack. A Hawk ahawk aha ahack AHACK ahem.”
He lit a fag. A mighty intake of smoke cut through the swirling monads of accumulating throat-mucus.
“HAHAAAAAAAAACCK.”
Truly it was a delicate moment, one requiring a trapeze act of astute judgment and prompt action. On the one hand you had that bleedin’ motor (and be janey was he getting that teensy-ensiest bit sick of that bloody junker), sitting where it could be found, but not for long: the guards’d be sending it back to the used-car lot once they’d done their Forensics 101 chemical analysis (and by the way he’d learned a fair amount from that particular link on the Gardai Siochana web page, the kind of thing your average bomber might really find quite useful, like the different acidities of various chemical explosives; whether one form of the explosive was edible, the others not, and whether (or why) coloration and tincture bore any relation to intensity of afterblast and consequent conflagration; etc.); on the other (hand, that is), you had the distinct probability (he could feel it in his gut, unless that was the Chef Gino scampi-stuffed ravioli he’d scarfed down for lunch, tepid at best, damned near lukewarm at worst, and the scampi with that very dubious dead-for-six-months smell) that Quain or someone very much like him (or someone working with him, after all every day God sent you had new bloody splinter groups each claiming greater purity of purpose than the next) would stroll in and drive off in the bloody car. And bang would go a solid twenty grand. And his, Crankshaft’s, credibility would be the bit to mostly up the bleedin’ spout too, wouldn’t it, after the way he’d promised the (officially no-longer-existent) Army Executive Council boys up in the Falls they’d be counting ten to fifteen grand worth of crisp new banknotes (no way he was going for that fifty-fifty deal, who did Quain think he was dealing with for God’s sake, Doctor fuckin’ Barnardo?) to underwrite a couple of discreet sidebar operations their phony “splinter” group would undertake, the new 100% Ultra-Pure IRA or the newly-revived Soldiers of Brian O’Nolan: the blowing up of the Larne-Stranraer ferry, for one (mind you, that was a grand old idea and a half, man oh man, what he’d not do to see that old puke-bucket and its cargo of nasty spotty bum-scratching Loyalist pricks go sky-high, oh man that would be worth the price of admission in itself); an ambush somewhere in South Armagh, ah sure sheer nostalgia that was, no doubt about it, trying to revive the glory days of bandit country round Poyntzpass and Newry: let a Saracen have it, preferably with a Katyusha or another article from those awful old heaps of Soviet ordnance that were sitting mouldering in various garages and safety deposit boxes round the island of Ireland and environs…
In his garage, for instance, in which no car had sat for many a year, not since he’d pensioned off Aunt Eva’s old Wolseley.
Suddenly the idea lightbulb flashed again above Crankshaft’s crazy tousled head.
Why not do a number on that rat Quain and the treacherous West Brits at Gardai Central and the Army Executive at one and the same time? And who better to do it than the Sane Bomber himself (his own self-sobriquet, joking, like), the best bloody Semtex-and-plastique man the Rah ever had bar none, even if he did say so himself, to himself?
He wheezed a semblance of mirthful delight and lit another fag and pinched off the filter at the end (too bad you can’t get a decent Player’s Full Strength anymore, of course the way things were going they’d have spies doing a supergrass number on anyone who bought a packet of fags of any description at all even one of them poofy scented jobs), then lowered his head between his legs for the subsequent coughing seizure to pass. It sounded at first like soup coming to the boil, then, cleared of its congestive mucus, ratcheted into the piercing whistle of a jet engine revving up.
“Ahack HEE ahack ahack HEE ahack ahack ahack HEE ahack AHEE,” he stated, clearly, although his mouth was within kissing distance of his inner thighs. “AHAWK aha ahee ahack ahack hee,”etc.
Once he could breathe again, he gingerly sat up, drew deeply on his cigarette and contemplated his inspiration. It was a fine one indeed. With no expenditure of money and precious little Semtex (ten to fifteen pounds max), he could send the car and half the Gardai building sky-high in minutes, and of course he’d be phoning in a claim to whatever remained of the Gardai and blaming it squarely on one of them new so-called splinter groups that were really only figments of the imagination of an increasingly desperate and isolated Army Executive, who’d disdained him because, incredibly, he was so good at his job…no, it was all three-piece suits and chauffeur-driven StebblerBertzes now, so serve ‘em right if it tore the whole chain of command apart and they turned in vain to the one man they knew they could trust, the only hope they had of unifying the scattered remnants of the once-great army…!
And after he gave his warning over the phone he’d mention a name, casually, the way a real amateur would bollix it up, say the name Ferdia Quain, as brigade officer or colonel or whatsit, say of the Soldiers of Brian, as if boasting of his rank in tried-and-true amateur fashion (pros never boasted, that was the difference), and you could bet your bottom euro that sod’s hideaway would be swarming with guards before you could say Jack Daniel’s, or Pat Robertson, or Ozymandias King of Kings…!
General Proinsias “Crankshaft” O’Deane, take a bow! What a blow wilt thou strike on behalf of Ireland and her dead generations, from whom thou hast received this torch…!
Well, once he’d made up his mind he wasn’t one to sit about with his thumb or anyone else’s up his arse. No, it wasn’t for nothing he used to be known as Greased Crankshaft back in the Omagh and Magherafelt days.
Oh, it was a gas, so it was, being back in harness again! Tra-la-la-la-lee! And with the worthiest of objectives: Mass mayhem, not to say murder—better not to: executions was more like it, after all they all deserved it, didn’t they, the bloody cowardly middle-class do-gooder pro-Brit two-car-owning cable-TV-connected mobile-phone-jabbering sex-obsessed suburban sacks of shite on legs; and of course the humiliation of the hated national West Brit police! Not to mention the possible extinction of that treacherous bastard Quain, if he was snooping about. If not, well, he’d get the blame, thanks to Crankshaft’s intended telephone “warning”—and that would be that, a good day’s work and a pint or two at Molly’s at the end of it, keeping a weather eye out for lateral assault by the lizzies (tough bunch of lads, those gals, come to think of it he could use one or two in the imaginary ranks of his resuscitated Grand Republican Army marching ninety-two abreast across the greensward his so-oft-martyred native land, say an all-Dyke regiment commanded by your man or woman Robb Manlove, a fine laddeen she’d make, oh aye, all in all)...

Muttering delightedly, O’Deane raised himself to an erect position with a final roaring cough as loud and resonant as the mating call of a silverbacked mountain gorilla atop the jungly mountaintops of the Congo and went out to the garage, where, under lock and key and sirens and tripwires and damn near everything else they had by way of security equipment, he kept what remained of the Newtownabbey stash, the one everyone thought had been spirited out of the country by Basques or Eye-ranians or Eye-raqis or somebody…well, here it was, with none the wiser, North or South. Panting as in sexual heat, Crankshaft sped from one drum to another, eagerly rapping on each one with his knuckles to test for hollowness, i.e. capacity, i.e. amount of the good stuff left. Together they contained at least the twenty-plus pounds deemed more than sufficient to demolish a car or two and bring down one side at least of that dreary old Gardai HQ and a few of those bastards in their stupid Brit uniforms…yes, just like in the Keady operation in ’76, when they’d done the Shandon Bells for serving food and drink to Protestant customers . . . nothing suspected about it, hadn’t he seen the mugs on ‘em himself, and could anything look more Prod than that fella’s face, like of them proboscis monkeys in the zoo, your men with the purple arses? (Odd: He’d turned out to be Catholic after all, but ah well, well, them’s the brakes, as they said on that Yank car-repair programme on the telly he and Aunt Eva used to enjoy so much before they got on all those slant-eyed Orientals named Fang or Hang)—aye, he’d carry the stuff himself (“if you want a job done right, son,” as old Father Tam used to say, mulling the communion wine in his digs round Christmastime, one hand in his britches, a catch in his voice, “do it your friggin’ self—here, come and help me with this”) in one of the old reliables, a lunchpail of the type commonly used by manual workers on their lunchbreaks, one depicting silly television creatures like Big Boob and Murdoch the Marionette, or a noble Celtic Cross, say that of Monasterboice; or the Emerald Fields of Ireland in all their kitschy souvenir greenery, plus leprechauns. That way nothing about it or him would arouse suspicion—especially if he had a fag stuck in his gob and wore his re-patched corduroys and had his old walking hat on his noodle, sure he’d look the spitting image of Homo Gobshitus in person.
And indeed he did, once he’d put on his hat, a battered Donegal weeper once flung with a brick inside it and a note cellotaped to the brick saying “Here You Are You Old Brick” over the wall of his Aunt Eva’s back garden by an unknown hand three years since.
“Jaysus, what’s that?” Cranskhaft had cried out, dead jittery he was, rattling his teacup (black, strong, Darjeeling) like nobody’s business as the missile hurtled past and came to rest with a CRUMP but no explosion in the small topiary of Disney-inspired animals Aunt Eva maintained with MI5-like vigilance outside her bedroom window.

“Sure, it’s a hat, never mind the brick,” Aunt Eva said. “Put it on. Ah sure you look winsome enough for the Prince Charming himself so ya do sure God bless yer eyes ya winsome lad ya.”
Despite all that, he’d worn it since, especially on his bimonthly visits to Aunt Eva at teatime.
“Perfect,” he said, with a wink at his own reflection in the mock-Robert Adam vestibule mirror. There was a faint sugary scent emanating from the plastique in the lunch pail, but nothing the smell of a burning cigarette couldn’t conceal—at least until he got to the actual place itself, like, when he’d no doubt (oh he knew the vagaries of his old intestinal tract, surely be dad he did) be farting out enough gas to smother a half ton of sweetish aromatics, or a posy of Queen Anne roses themselves!
Ten-SHUN!
And so General P. Crankshaft O’Deane left his house wearing the beamish look of a man on a mission destined for success, jauntily swinging his lunchpail like an old whore on parade on the old Parade, quite enjoying the short walk to the bus stop, much as he detested exercise of any type. It was a good mile or so from his semi-detached on the corner of West Whitewalls Woodlands Way and the bottom end of the MacLiammoir Bypass to the Gardai HQ on Haughey Circle, but, and he was sodarsed if he was going to go the whole distance on foot. What was he, a bloody Yank, or one of them nouveau yuppies with the mobiles? Never in living memory of himself or that of others had he taken any exercise whatsoever, and the over-ripe age of fifty-four, nearly fifty-five was no time to start (“pushing sixty’s enough exercise for me,” as he liked to say, with an amiable as opposed to sinister chortle, Saturday nights down at Mad Molloy’s, or Molly O’Lesbihan’s, savoring the intoxicant of the hour as it trickled down his throat, tore through his lungs, and electrified his already-narrowing arteries); so he stood stock still, staring down the street, and lit another fag while waiting for the No. 10 to come lurching in its friendly elephantine way round the bend…interesting, how a bus quite capable of crawling along in downtown traffic at a pace of no more than, say, 15 m.p.h. (24 k.p.h.) could, in the relative uncrowdedness of the leafy inner suburbs wherein dwelt Crankshaft and other successful professionals of his ilk, attain the phenomenal velocity of fifty miles per h. (eighty k.’s) or up

. . . Anyway, here it came, tearing along like a ball leaving the hands of Eochan O Riada, the legendary Kilkenny centreforward . Fag firmly in lips, eyes half-closed against the upstreaming smoke, Crankshaft swung himself lightly up by the rail and onto the open rear platform—for there remain two or three of the old open buses in backward Killoyle, even to this day—and made as if to climb the stairs to the upper deck when, unadvisedly, the conductor, one Bingo O’Herne, 51, a burly pockmarked berk with an absurd mousse’d silver pompadour who got most of his thrills timing himself at Seawallop’s on the Strand in the nightly karaoke contest against a musical background of the most odious paddywhackery (O Me Owld Grey Wan, Ballykilloran Mine, March of the Clurichauns, etc.) and who was standing in an overly portly manner directly in Crankshaft’s path.
Worse, he said,
“Sorry, chum. You can’t get on with that. There’s no smoking, me man. Don’t you read the papers?”
Not used to this kind of rude interference in the sole remaining sensual pleasure of his life (except for—oh, never mind), Crankshaft pushed Bingo in the face and said, with a satisfying phlegmatic rumble,
“Try that again and you’ll be picking up yer balls in those fields over there, sport,” half-indicating with a raised right eyebrow the fleeting greenness—but a dull and heavy green after a winter’s sogginess, rain and half-hearted snow trailing feebly into the intemperate blustering of mid-March—beyond the ever-narrowing gaps in the houses.
Whoops!
He very nearly dropped his lunch pail!!
But he promptly righted himself and took his burden up the narrow winding stairs, so reminiscent in their steepness and straitness of spiraling stairs in the constrained medieval parts of various old buildings scattered around Europe, not excluding her outermost isles, such as this one…

“Ya shitebastard sonofabitch,” thundered Bingo O’Herne impotently, playing to his female audience but hiding behind and under the stairs just in case, “when we get to Busaras I’ll have ya by yer short and curlies.”
“Whistle for them, misther Dooley.”
Oh it was a happy Crankshaft who then seated himself in his favorite right-at-the-back-end seat on the left and with the delicacy of a seamstress laying aside her morning’s sewing basket put his lunch pail down on the seat next to him and alternated continuing puffs on his fag with big rattling coughs of a burliness out of all proportion to his size, coughs better suited to a Wolf Larsen or Grizzly Hazard type of fella, or Jack “Two Log Cabins” London while we’re at it, in other words some forest-dwelling whiskey man with a big chest and strong belly, beard optional, in any case not the emaciated endomorph with the pimply whiskey-incarnadined nose and sunken tits that O’Deane had become in his one-man race to the grave (although in his inner eye he persisted in seeing himself as a real old fella me lad, all twinkles and dimples and merry-the-livelong-day-o, a Pied Piper of the chameleons of death)…

* * * * *

Ferd was a bit worried about what Crankshaft might be about, so he called Petey Cahill, who affected the Gaeilge. They’d never met, but each knew of the other, and nothing of what each knew was particularly nice.
“Cé atá ag glaoch, le do thoil?”
“Wha…?” Ferdia was a bit taken aback, and taken aback even further when assaulted again by the same gibberish:
“Cé atá ag glaoch, le do thoil?”
“Oh, right! You’re talking Irish. Ah…hang on a sec.” As befitted one with his heroic Celtic name, Ferdia had once taken extensive Irish after the obligatory rubbish for his Leaving Cert, mostly long rainy-afternoon sessions dozing arm-in-arm with Paddy O’Monk, resident Gaelic scholar where young Ferdia had served his apprenticeship as an archivist: the Ardoyne IRA sub-brigade headquarters library and archive, a peaceful venue designed by a student of the Neo-Palladian Robert Adam school (Sam Livingston, F.R.C.A.D.). Yet nothing remained, bar the elementary Beannachtai na Feile Padraig and aon, do, tri, ceithir, cuig, se, seacht, ocht, naoi, deich, An bhfuil Gaelige agat? and so on. So Ferdia trawled the empty shoals of his memory for a suitable greeting. He surfaced with “A duin an doras?” It sounded suitably inquisitive, in a courteous way. Nevertheless, it was received at the other end of the phone by plosive sounds of a glottis slapping the mouth’s anterior roof, denoting mirth—risibility—the perception of astonishing stupidity—therefore, presumably: Error, on Ferdia’s part.
“I don’t think you mean that, mister Quain,” said Petey, in English. “Do you have any idea at all what you just said, at all?”

“’How are you today’ or some such rubbish.”
“Not at all at all, God bless and keep you for a gawm. You said ‘shut the door,’ you great twit.” There followed another braying go-round with the glottis, maximum strength. Incensed by Cahill’s cavalierness, which, coming from a hop-o’-my-thumb half his age (26, actually), was pretty damn near intolerable, Ferdia raved a bit.
“Well I was never much for the Irish palaver, as in the dead lingo of the Gaels, if you know what I mean. I mean it always struck me as a waste of time deluxe and then some, speaking Erse or Irish or Gaelic or whatever the hell just to please a bunch of sentimental West Coast fiddlers bawling into their jars about the demise of the Irish and all that shite. I mean, speaking Welsh or Manx or whatever is all very well for the Welsh or Manx or whoever the blazes they are because they need some way of telling themselves apart from the English who keep them going and who are otherwise exactly like them right down to the bloody Smarties and pimples and teeth and gray flannel shorts and bicycle clips. But when an Irishman speaks English he sounds twice as Irish as he does when he speaks Irish and I don’t care if he’s wearing gray flannel trousers or a kilt or a Brazilian string bikini.”
This was no less than heresy for an ex-IRA man, and the kiss of death in some quarters (such as this one). In that organization the sanctity of ancient Irish culture and the tongue that expressed it is second only to that of the Pope, or Padraig Pearse himself; but Ferdia was becoming aware in his mid- to late middle years of burgeoning opinions at variance with conventional wisdom. Petey, on the other hand, was quite at home with conventional wisdom, especially that of the IRA, which stated baldly that heresy was heresy and heretics had to pay for their sins. (Not for nothing had they been known as The Church.) He knew his duty, and his conscience was clear. So he took the low road, and affected badinage.
“A string bikini? Not even gray trews and bicycle clips?” he inquired, with another glottal vibrato of high good humour.
“Right.”
All this, of course, was an unscheduled meander through small talk, far from the main point of the conversation; and what that was Petey could not hope to glean until Ferdia finally (“shut the door,” indeed!) came to it.
“Eh—about Crankshaft.”
“Never you mind that. Me motor’s runnin’ fine, thanks very much.” More gurgling laughter. Was the fool drunk?
“Now listen to me, this could be serious. I know the fella. So do you, but I know him better. I just have a feeling.”

“Better than not having one. Or having too many.” This time the intoxicated peal in the higher registers was unmistakable. The eejit was off his rocker, or under the table. Either way he’d be no good.
“Ah shite, then. Shite and onions to ya, with a good seasoning of cow piss while ye’re about it.”
“Slainte go bragh yourself, Comrade Quain.”
Petey rang off and rubbed his hands with the anticipatory briskness of a gourmet about to sit down to a three-course meal at Les Troisgros in Roanne. Meanwhile, Ferdia irritably pressed the Off button on his mobile and snapped the mouthpiece shut, then snapped it open and shut again, doubly annoyed at the absence in the age of the mobile phone of earpieces to slam down in high dudgeon.
Well, it was obvious he’d have to go himself. Not a problem, really, as a fully-formed plan had already taken shape: to warn the Guards, via that walking tureen of potage Aloysius Schwarzkopf (with a “p,” as in Perpignan), that Crankshaft was on the prowl, plus probable Semtex.
(Meanwhile. . .)
Yes, yes, mused Ferd. There were those who’d call it treachery, or betrayal of trust at the basest level; and there would go all his hopes for the wine and cheese shop and its gilded ampersand. But it was better than the Big Bang of revolutionary theory as practiced by the Mother of all Terrorist Groups and their acolytes and spin-offs. Plus anyhow, you know, when the end of life’s long road comes into view in the distance, the last thing you want is a really bad conscience, if you’re a decent class of a man at all; and Ferdia already had a bad enough conscience, considering the numbers who’d been maimed by his bombs and bullets back in the bad old days . . .
So was he finally beginning to see the true virtues of an ordinary life decently lived?

He was; and it was thanks in no small degree to Shirley and the ambience of dull and cosy domesticity she’d provided, i.e. civilization itself: a successful marriage, in the end, once it had ended (or maybe not) . . . oh, his fevered mind might project shaky yellowish mind-flicks depicting the bare plump she-buttocks and limber she-limbs of every he-man’s fantasy harem, the addled brain sending false messages to its body about the likelihood of pursuing dimpled she-arse-cheeks—say Terpsichore’s, or Nicolette Tedman’sor a pair of alabaster she—legs, also Terpsichore’s (or Nicolette Tedman’s)—unless they belonged to that other actress (what was her name?); or abreast, as it were, of bouncing she-diddies (Terpsichore’s) over breezy hills not unlike Wicklow’s…yet finally to entangle hotly in the warmth and clarity of Attic sunlight and with a satyr-like vitality more appropriate to ancient (rather than modern) Greece (or Ireland)…but he’d never act on any of it, any more than he’d hike the Appalachian trail, or step onto the stage at La Scala fist on breastbone and belt out “Nessun Dorma,” or survive a claymore explosion, or drive a Ferrari at Le Mans (or anywhere else), or ignite a Gallowglass (the crème de la crème of plastique explosives in the Six Counties), or play the clarinet at the RTE Concert Hall, or give Wet Wesson a swift kick in the corduroys. Life wasn’t a French movie, after all. It was all due to the imbalance between the slow degradation of a man’s body long before the mind had a chance to catch up.
But some good would come of all of it, come what may (or might).
So he went back to the flat and fumbled anew with the mobile.
“Finn?”
Then he remembered his cousin was up at the lawyer’s trying for a postponement of foreclosure on the shop premises, en route no doubt to Jim’s Gym and Molloy’s, later, for marriage practice in the upstairs room with Anthea. Ferdia helped himself to a ghastly health nut-and-raisin concoction in a bowl that Finn had left sitting on the coffee table; then, taking a gradated series of ever-deeper breaths, he called Aloysius Schwarzkopf, with a “p,” as in Paramaribo; but at first no one chez the rozzers seemed to recognize the name.
“For God’s sake, how many three-hundred-pound guards named Schwarzkopf can there be?” barked Ferd into a stunned silence that was timidly broken by the words, “How rude.”
“Sod off. Rude yourself. Just get me that Schwarzkopf article, will you.”

Eventually, after meandering ludicrously from one half-witted jackanapes of a desk-bound time-server to another, Ferdia ended up telephonically tête-à-tête with the Superintendent, Sherlock Neame himself, who turned out to be the sole local representative of the nation’s national police force able to pronounce “Schwarzkopf.”
“Sure the hefty fella. Hold on a sec while I just.”
Accordingly, he transferred Ferdia thereto, with an ironic cough and the rapid hissing sound of cross-denture breath intake instigated by an access of emotion (the phone call; that new bit of crumpet down the corridor, the one with the big bulbous ahem ahem knack ‘ems; his wife walking in the door; that kind of caper, better suited to the grands boulevards, circa 1895). Finally, Aloysius Schwarzkopf’s fat tenor voice came crawling out of the phone’s earpiece like a newt from under a rock.
“Hullo-o-o?”
“Schwarzkopf? With a ‘p’?”
“Who’s this?”
“Quain.”
“Wayne?”
“Quain.”
“Twain?”
“Ah for the love of…”
But Ferdia held his tetchiness in check and riffed briefly on the theme of Easter Lily tattoos, placement of and reason for, the need for cooperation between former adversaries, and the methods of vengeance that might ensue if such cooperation were to fail.
“Ah. Quain, is it,” said Aloysius, with a manufactured air of breezy self-assurance. “I’m with you. How may I help you this fine day in the morning-o?”
Ferdia explained.

“A crankshaft, you say?”inquired Aloysius, something of a car buff in his spare time. “What’s it done, seized up?”
“No, no. That’s your man’s nickname. It’s a bomb he’d be carrying, I’ve no doubt.”
“A bomb, you say?”
“I do. Well, there may be and there may not be. But I urge you to assume that there is one and get everyone the hell out.”
“The hell out? The hell. You mean go round politely asking Inspectors and Supers to clear out of their offices? You’re a cod, aren’t you, Quaid? Still trying to get your own back at me for beating you fair and square.”
“No, no. The opposite, piss-for-brains. I’m trying to help you save your fat arse. Listen to me, now.”

Etc. Well, by the end of this rigmarole, Aloysius was in quite a state, yet inclined to give his interlocutor the benefit of the doubt. For one thing, the built-in Caller Voice Monitor on his phone console confirmed that his caller was indeed Ferdia Quain, a copy of whose digitized voiceprint was part of a permanent Gardai computer file (along with youthful enthusiasms and misdemeanours along the lines of setting off Catherine’s Wheels during an Orange parade and slowly and methodically reversing his 1978 Escort into a line of marching Apprentice Boys in 1985). For another, it was a well-known fact among those who read newspapers such as The Clarion and The Dependent that an organization member always phoned in a warning just before the infernal device went off. This situation seemed to fall into that category, which lent it verisimilitude, even glamour; but before ringing off, Aloysius assayed a clever gambit.
“What’s the code word?”
“Fuck Owen Parsley.”
Aloysius ran an instant scan, and sure enough it checked out as a commonly used code for Republican bombers, not used for a while but still classified as active. Well, Aloysius was more than partly convinced, and eager to get the ball rolling for, publicly disdainful as he was of what was known around the office as “the career path,” he was nonetheless susceptible in idle moments to visions of himself in the uniform of a DI, or even a DCI, or even—fevered and fantastic as it might seem, like the opium dreams of Thomas De Quincey—as “Superintendent Schwarzkopf (with a ‘p,’ as in Philadelphia) of the Southeastern Antiterror Task Force,”…”who is of course best known for having foiled the bombing of Killoyle City Gardai HQ back in ’02 ½—or was it ’013/4?”
“All right. But I’ll need your help spotting them, Quain. Come round immediately or I’ll bloody well send you away for conspiracy to conspire.”
Ferdia refused. Him, in Gardai HQ?
“Not on your life. I’m just the messenger, just.”
“Or incitement to incite.”
“Well I…”
“I need a witness, man. I can’t just go about shouting Fire.”

Now, Ferdia perceived, the shoe was on the other foot, and it was a policeman’s shoe, size nine at least, and the other foot was the long arm of the law, so to speak, squarely planted in Ferdia’s mouth, the bleeding eejit; so, after cursing himself (“you fuckin’ stupid dickhead”; “you gormless halfwit”; “you senseless galoot of a moron”) for making the call, he left the flat, desiring nothing quite so much as a return to the dull daily routine that had seemed eternal and unchangeable only a day or so since and which now held out the promise of all the comforts of hearth and home... and yet. He also felt a transcendent self-adulation, not to say pride, born of the certain knowledge that Crankshaft was up to something, somewhere, not a million miles from Haughey Circle; and that he, Quain, like Perseus, was on his way to thwart him, as Perseus did the Kraken (Ferdia had always enjoyed the old Greek myths, like Boys’ Own fireside tales most of them were, with antics galore and the misbehavior of those deities who were no worse than most men and certainly no better and a great deal sexier than most women and while you’re at it great shags and gamesplayers when you came right down to it); not that there was much heroic in what he was doing. No, he knew his own motivations well enough to see through his own sham. It was no Nobel Peace Prize he was after. In fact, his hopes were two, or three at most:
1) To save people from being blown up;
2) To put away Crankshaft;
3) To impress Shirley; and
4) wow Terpsichore.

(Only he had the unswerving notion that the last-named was the class of gal who’d not pay the slightest attention to a news event if it happened under his own nose unless she was involved in it full frontal and center) . . . so anyhow.
So, he—dressed in his favourite Gianfranco Mafioso double-breasted blue-and-white twill pinstripe suit with Principessa Benita Fanculo silk tie depicting the urbane profile of Federico, Duke of Urbino—set off. Soon, after ten minutes’ or so well-aimed walking, he found himself standing outside the Gardai HQ on Haughey Circle, gazing upward at the seven-and-a-bit bluntly hideous floors of the red-brick box-shaped edifice, with handy parking garage (Sir Bill Spencer & Associates, ca. 1976). He stopped and smoked a Regal; his last, he noted, as he crushed the packet in his hand in a gesture lacking only meaning to make it deeply symbolic to a hypothetical passing cinéaste. Haughey Circle was one of the traffic hubs of the city, but it was soothingly, or strangely, quiet, depending on your point of view, or the time of day; or perhaps the new growth of green on the trees in the pocket garden in the middle, the one with the statue of Ernie Wells the Great (the cabdriver who’d saved a former Lord Mayor’s Norwegian elkhound, Gunnar, from drowning) helped to muffle the car sounds. Horns and loosely-wired two-strokes with aging valves sounded harsh against the background of gently swishing tyres. On the corner opposite Gardai HQ was the regional office of Iarnrod Eireann, next to which was a former Gardyloo bathroom fixtures superstore that had closed down in the great freeze of ‘03 and was being renovated by none other than Shirley’s firm Maher Global International Intercontinental Worldwide PLC into a block of six smart condominiums, or “town houses,” resembling in the most superficial way Georgian terrace houses in Dublin or, farther afield, Bath, or Exeter (or parts of St. Petersburg). Established residents, most of them descendants of generations of hooligans, lived in rows of brick two-family semi-detached houses dating from the Emergency era, but the poor sods hadn’t long left. These humble dwellings, too, were doomed, as a large sign euphemistically stated, near-bursting with the false bonhomie of the advertiser’s art:
“Coming Soon! Very Desirable Exclusive Upscale State-of-the-Art City Apartments for the Discerning Professional. All With Super-fast Internet Hookup and Fine City Views. Contact S. Quain, Maher Properties Global International Intercontinental Worldwide, PLC.”
“Ya bitch ya,” muttered Ferd. Bloody hell. It wasn’t as if her record was as clean as the driven bleeding snow, was it? I mean, there she was, large as life, her name (his name, actually, thank you very much) emblazoned across an advert for a firm whose money-grubbing and greed spelled homelessness, financial ruin, and despair for the underprivileged and defenceless, like all those poor ruddy bastards on the block. Whoever lived behind the immaculately maintained lace curtains through which a green fern peeped, for instance. Or that pair of cute mud-spattered kids at the end of the row, poor little beggars, ah sure will ye just have a look at them (thought Ferdia, ever the sentimentalist, and an Irish one to boot), all unsuspecting like, innocently playing in the warm spring sunshine with that…
Jaysus. He galloped over.
“Oy, ya wee fuckers, leave that animal alone.” The cat streaked off to safety. The brats backed off, then turned to jibe.
“Up yer bunghole, misther,” cawed one.
“With barnacles,” screeched the other.
“Flamin’ wee bastards. Shut up, yez bowsies.”
“Aw shove it.”

“I’ll tell me da on you misther and he’ll cut yer ballocks off if you have any ya great big brown-hatter.”
Good God what a world, marveled Ferdia, shaking his head. The filthy little gurriers. He at that age, spewing such words, would have been damn near flayed alive, then expelled from school and polite society and forced to contemplate his misdemeanours in the anguish of solitary meditation. But now … (the age-old lament of the middle-aged, struck dumb with horror at the spectacle of emergent youth)…(not that it was any less justified for that reason)…He crossed the square, with in his ears the foul-mouthed excoriations of the coming generation of movers and shapers of the Ireland to be.
“Pansy.”
“Pig’s willie.”
“Go play your flute.”
“Baldy shite.”
“Think yer a hardchaw, do ya? Wait till ya meet me owld wan.”
“Ball bag.”
Holy Mother of God.
Still, Ferdia reflected, the point was a good one, it pricked, even if those particular horrid wee snappers deserved to be evicted instanter. With the awesome responsibility of what he was undertaking pressing down on him all he could think of, with the ever-replenished resentment of the spouse, was how Shirley, with her name in lights up there, was in no position to be lecturing him on the morality of what he did, and had done (but no longer would do: there, she had no faith). For use in future set-tos he tucked away these thoughts into his mental filing cabinet and briskly trotted towards Gardai HQ and, perhaps (who knows?) his doom, or salvation, or neither at all (at all) …

* * * * *

“Ahem. Ah-ah-ah ah HEM. AHHHHHHHH hem. AHEM.”
“Oh God Beppo that ghost of yours is back.”
“Top of the day to you, Sir Buckley.”
“Ahem ahem.”
“Fair play to him, he hasn’t seen a naked gal in a good while. Have you, Sir Buckley me old buck?”
“AHHHHHH-hem-hem. A-HEMhemhemhem. Ahem.”
“Piss off now, there’s a good fellow.”
“Ahem hem hem.”
“I’ve not actually seen him, but.”
“Ahem hem.”
“No, neither have I, after all these years. Once I thought I caught his nose peeking round the shower curtains, but it was just the wind. No, all Sir Buckley does is clear his throat something fierce. He must have picked up a rotten case of phlegm over the past couple of centuries. Or he never got over the chill that carried him off that wild and stormy night in what was it, 1789? July, was it? Say, the fourteenth, for argument’s sake?”
Ah, he was being the lad, so he was, and who can blame him, with a handsome piece like that at his side...!
And the wind keened “Mariah.”
“Ach Beppo.”
“Well, the eighteenth century, you know. Gout, claret, silk stockings and the rising damp rising ever higher.”
“Ahem.”
“You see? He agrees.”
“Ach Beppo.”
“Ach Terpsy.”
She lay prone at Donal’s side, head nestled on the crook of her arm, the pair of them in amorous propinquity on the sagging bed that for so long had accommodated only him and his stressful, sweaty dreams and hard-working nocturnal emissions. He, and the bed, had more than made up for it in the past two days. Yes, he’d recaptured the essence of sex, recalling its ease and elementary titillation, and how with the exact combination of mood, positioning, and mental imagery (vital to an artist, even a would-be one) you had within you the hidden Casanova .
And how it didn’t work too well with the mind going full steam on parallel tracks, lugging say a cargo of worries financial and physical, or a plan to win the sweeps, or pimples aborning on the chin, or thinking about how to garner the boss’s approval at work.
And the way it combined the physical upsurge and a strange sort of psychological ecstasy, like reaching out and discovering that a long-admired painting was actually three-dimensional and you could walk into it and disappear, if you chose.
And how at its best it was good .
Physical tumescence had also inspired its moral counterpart, a stiffening of the resolve, a hardening of purpose, an erection of personal goals. How much a part of celibacy was all that dread and slouching about and fashionable anomie and grey-browed depression shrouded in cigarette smoke! Why, give a man a decent roll in the hay with a looker like Terps and the sun came out, palpitations ceased, the temperature held steady at 75 F, the birds twittered in the trees (but all the magpies considerately migrated), such elementary humiliations as constipation and urinary afterdrip stopped for good, and the most annoying ailments—especially the hacking bronchial or menopausal or pubescent or painfully terminal or flipflop cardiac ones--went away in their turn. Too, mutual physical attraction and its consummation became a matter negotiated exclusively between mature men and women and improved beyond the absurd congeries of a mess of any old sex with any old orifice any old how and by janey I’m proud of my choice of orifice, or his (or hers) and it’s my nation, my purpose, my raison d’etre ... Billboards and baseball caps and loose Bermuda shorts and mobile phones and pre-manufactured neo-Palladian housing all melted away, then rap music and hip-hop fell silent forever and God was truly in His world, and we in His.
They did it again, in standard fashion, Terps luxuriantly compliant, Donal doing all the heavy lifting but not having to manufacture a fantasy partner to spur himself on, because there she was, under him, naked and compliant, and so gorgeously so.
Then they smoked, like the cliché lovers they were, and Donal started making plans that extended far beyond the next car sale at Heartland Autos.
“What do you fancy next, Terpsy?”
“Well not another one of those, for a start. That’s three today. You’ll rub me raw.”
“No. I mean in life.”
“Not Fairy bleeding Farmer’s you can count on that.”
“Emigration?”
“But people are immigrating here now.”
“Yeah. But it’s still, you know. Ireland.”
“True enough.”

Anyhow Donal was coming to see himself, with some poetic license, as a real old paramour—well, more of one, at least, than the sullen slope-shouldered git he’d cast off like a snake its skin, as he was wont to think, trying to elicit from his soul the secret of whatever it was the turned her on; yes, more of a sulkily sullen apache from the demi-monde of a Brassai photograph, crica 1937; or the young Brando, circa 1955. Visions of the States returned, and the generous heartland of Ohiowa, and with those visions strode a tentative plan, sketched later to Terpsichore as the two of them sat in the kitchen watching a his-and-her pair of meat pies rotating in hopeless pursuit of each other upon the turntable in the microwave. Capturing to perfection the spirit of an ideal domesticity that had always eluded Donal—even, or especially, during his eighteen-month marriage to Jen, the creature with the soul of Himmler and the body of Aphrodite, or at least the young Leni Riefenstahl (that old Nazi)—Terps was sitting back in her chair, smoking in meditative position, wearing a loose blue bathrobe under which her fine onion-, or rather onion-dome-, shaped breasts awaited further kneading on the part of her “Beppo.”
“Ah leave off can’t you Beppo dear holy Christ you’re a desperate man and believe me I’ve known a few.”
“Was. Not so much now.”
After kneading a bit more, Donal sat down again and resumed watching the stolid march of the meat pies until a shrill electronic peeping announced doneness. Terps served, with much gentle breathing and not-so-accidental brushing against, in the extravagant manner of one freshly in love. They ate the warm mush in the warm mush of sex-sated silence. Then Terps spoke, turning her bluey greeny gaze on Donal.
“I reckon I should go over to the guards and tell ‘em about that car before Stan beats me to it. Or your man Byrne.”
“Yeah, probably best.” Donal said this not without a gut spasm or so at the memory of his last visit there, when he was interrogated by the nasty Neame, Chief Inspector Sherlock of that name (“You’ll spill the beans about your drug-peddling pals, won’t you, you narky Yank? Eh? Eh?”) but true love has no bounds…
“I mean you know.”
And anyway they’d never actually come up with anything to book him on. So sod it, eh?
“Yeah,” he said, musingly. Might get a fine but devil the chance they’ll throw the book at you, not with no record at all.”
“Nah. Anyway I was kinda thinking it might be time to reconcile with my old wan, now that I’ve thrown Stan over. He never could stand Stan, nor he could. Da’s a doctor, you know. Nick O’Hanlon, M.D.”
“Nick? Greek, is he?”
“Greek? Me da? Not with the name O’Hanlon, no, I reckon not. Anyhow it’s not Nicholas, it’s Nicodemus. But you’re right, there is the bit of a like Latin and Greek influence in my family, now that you mention it, because of some old fella who went to Oxford, or was it Cambridge, or Trinity. Maybe it was my granda. Anyhow, Mam and Da O.D.’d on the Greek myths and legends, hence me moniker. But there’s worse. The big brother’s called Pegasus, for God’s sake.”
“Charming.” As indeed it was, part of the once-unknown, now so vital, World of Terpsichore.
“But he goes by Mike.”
“Very wise.”
Planning resumed. The Midwest stretched across Donal’s mind like a giant canvas by Jakob van Ruisdael. He’d received a letter from Dean McCantinflas, advising him “off the record” that his old job would be revived, and that a personal appearance by him, Donal, would do him no end of good, not that the university was prepared to contribute one cent to the cost of airfare, etc.; but it was a word to the wise, and it fell on eagerly-listening ears and eyes that thirsted for the sight of American academe. (Yes, despite everything.)
“Sounds like you’ve a fair chance. But you reckon I’d find a decent job in the States too, yeah?”
“I dunno, Terps. But it’s still the land of opportunity. I mean I know I had a rotten break there, but it could’ve happened to anyone, and besides they gave me another go round, didn’t they? Wouldn’t happen here. Nah, here they’d shut the gate as soon as they fill their bleeding quota, and leave the punters to stand about outside with their Sosh forms in their hands and nothing to do but fill pint glasses with their own piss.”
“Ah bless you I know all that.”
“And the typical Irish entrepreneur’s some sorry git like Byrne, full of himself and constantly hatching fantastic schemes without the slightest semblance of an idea in his head nor any notion of reality even if it up and sank its teeth into his ballocks, begging your pardon.”
“You’re pardoned. And I’m with you.”
“Grand. But first the rozzers, eh? Better get it over with.”
“Now?”

Well, they reckoned they might as well nip into the Gardai station and get the whole business over with in time for a drink at Molloy’s, and having spent the balance of the day in bed they were ready for a sortie; so within minutes, with the kind of minimal chitchat typical of couples much older, they were out in the draughty damp air, and Donal felt the proprietary warmth of the moment as he walked down familiar Roofwalls Row--along which he had walked, shuffled, staggered, and stumbled so often in his lonely cups, arm in arm with himself--with Terpsichore O’Hanlon at his side.

* * *

On the other hand, at the same time as the above goings-on were going on, Crankshaft O’Deane was loitering on the opposite side of Haughey Circle from Gardai HQ next to the sign that read “Coming Soon! Very Desirable Exclusive Upscale State-of-the-Art City Apartments for the Discerning Professional.All With Super-fast Internet Hookup and Fine City Views. Contact S. Quain, Maher Properties Global International Intercontinental Worldwide, PLC,” with his lunch pail in one hand (a detail likely to become suspicious the longer the day wore on, as it were, lunch pails generally seeing little or no service qua lunch pails after, say, two p.m.) and a fag in the other. Emitting soft sounds composed equally of cackling, coughing, and the humming of a half-forgotten tune (“Mermaids,” made famous by Pratt Tuohy, winner of the 1999 Gobbovision song contest), he was visually measuring the distance he had to cover before and after (if there was to be an after ) he got to a suitable place (the Gardai HQ carpark) for placement of appropriately-moulded Semtex—which, by the by, was of a variety produced by Explosia of Prague long before the Czech State got its protective hands on the stuff; a classic, you might say, a vintage of the finest quality, the Chateau-Yquem ’49 of plastique…which would have been a most unpromising fact to its intended victims, had they known it (but knowing it would obviate victimhood, and such was not part of the plan).
“Ha ha ha ha,” chortled Crankshaft, then “ahahaha,” then “AHACK akakakakahaaaack,” he coughed boisterously, attracting the attention of a pair of small boys playing ringtoss.
“Ye’ve a bad cough, Mister,” said one.
“Are ya gonna die?” inquired the other
“Surely,” said Crankshaft. “But in my own time, in my own way, not like the rest o’ yez bastards. Got it, lads? By the by, either of you fancy a little ride up and down the pole? Know what I mean?”

The boys scarpered, sensing dangerous oddness beyond mockery. Crankshaft chuckled, then coughed, and re-chuckled. Oh, he was high on life, so he was, oh he was that—for the moment.
* * * * *

Now. I don’t know whether you, dear reader, or anyone you know, has ever been blown to shite in a bomb blast, but no two blasts are alike, as the cognoscenti will tell you, and motives differ as widely as circumstances. Let us examine a few of the nastier and more notorious explosions, going back to the December 1867 Fenian Clerkenwell 15-pound black-powder bomb in London that rang in the changes for 12 poor souls, may their names be forever enshrined among the martyrs (sorry to be sounding all flowery and Muslim here, but I actually mean it) and embarrassed the shite out of the fledgling Metropolitan Police, who later went on to not catch Jack the Ripper, yet allowed themselves to be bombed five more times--or was it six? Good job, lads. Then, nineteen years later, came the Haymarket bomb in Chicago in 1886: a primitive hand-held and –thrown device, probably by a bearded Polish anarchist wearing a stiff collar and a bowler hat, the device containing only a few (say, five to seven) pounds’ worth of powder explosive, result: an unknown number of civilian dead, as the bodies were whisked away pronto by the then-police-fearing populace; but nine peelers gave up the ghost that day.

Closer to our own time—leapfrogging the Geneva attacks of ’09, the Les Halles bomb of ’21, the various and sundry Dublin atrocities of the ’16-’22 period (and even one small one in Killoyle, seven to nine pounds or so, down by the old Soldiers and Sailors monument, famed rendezvous point for the professional ladies and gentlemen of the world’s oldest profession: it went FUT very loudly one night after one and awoke all and sundry, causing lights, mostly gas-ignited, to go on softly in curtained windows as far south as Youghal; but it caused no damage except to Myrtle and her fresh-from-Flanders date: “Dive!” he cried, “dive dive dive!” so she dove, and the week after that they walked up the altar; then he went back to a cozy resort called Passchendaele, and, well…), and long after the Red Brigades blew out Bologna station with 300+ lbs. in ’76 and Baader-Meinhof got into the act with a feeble 15-pounder in Frankfurt, ’77, and more, much more—but farther from our shores: 250 lbs. of gelignite was used in the January 11, 1987 Jerusalem bomb that rang in the intifada, Act One. It did for 18, maiming an extra 40 (many of them children and old folks, big points for that) in the process. Then, late ’89, out Eastern Europe way, the Wall came down and communism was swept from the ministries of the East into the boudoirs and television studios of the bien-pensant West and things over there got more modern generally and the factories of quondam Marxland started applying consumer rules. The old industries imported new talent and the world’s most efficient explosive was mass-produced: it was all-Czech Semtex, all the time. But there were still hitches, linked inexorably to man’s tendency to fuck up. So in Canary Wharf, London, on December 11, ’91, a car bomb consisting of a glass vial containing 2lb of Semtex equipped with a tilt switch and a mark-15 timer power unit tucked into the glove box of an aging Ford Fiesta (powder-blue, nicked from someone’s gran), went off quite spectacularly round 1 a.m., fortunately, not at 1 p.m. as planned: the berk turned the dial on the timer too far and the fireworks started, not at high lunch hour, but ten minutes after the last Indo-Pak cleaning person had gone home. It accounted for a million quid’s damage in physical plant, cars and newspapers boxes; but no actual lives were lost, so yer man was kneecapped soundly and sent home to his wife and little ones with a flea in his ear.
Par contre—and here that age-old talent for fucking up really gets nasty--the Omagh blast in August 1998 killed 29, blinded 45, and deafened 300. It was a 500-lb. charge of gelignite hidden in a parked maroon Vauxhall Cavalier, the most innocuous of cars, on one of the busiest streets in the most innocuous of towns. The bomb went off at the peak hour of a market day. Its victims were the very definition of innocents: babies, children, hard-working mothers. The whole thing was amateurish bungling elevated to the nth degree. The culprits, calling themselves the Real IRA, immediately, as might have been (indeed, had been) predicted, tried to blame someone else, first another splinter group of morons named The Continuity IRA, then the local RUC, then both together, stopping just short of accusing the victims themselves: “Despite media reports, it was not our intention at any time to kill any civilians,” the fuckers whinged in a misspelled press release. “It was a commercial target, part of the ongoing war against the Britts [sic]. We offer apollogies [sic] to the civilians. There were three warnings put in. There were 40-minute warnings on each of them.” This is like a drunkard who runs over an old lady and then blames the local constabulary for not manning the barricades along his drunken route home, just in case he loses control of his car and runs over an old lady. Or like a child who fails to understand the concept of blame and/or responsibility: “he made me do it,” pointing to his wee brother who, oblivious, sucks on his thumb, or a forbidden lolly. In short, men whose moral level is that of sots and infants were given the power of execution over 29 people who’d never done anything to harm them, or anyone else, in their lives.

A final, nobler note from the bomb annals: At Warrenpoint, Co. Down, in 1979, the Provos had set off an even bigger bomb than the Omagh monster of nineteen years later, an 800 lb. load of gelignite hidden behind bales of hay as the Parachute Regiment and Queen’s Own Highlanders trundled by in their Saracens and heavy lorries down the narrow beauteous brackenish glen that sweeps down to Carlingford Lough hard by the border of Cos. Louth and Down. The blast did for a few of the Brits and kicked off a ferocious gun battle between the Rah and the Paras--I’m tempted to say Our Lads and theirs, with due honor to both sides, for the Provos were battle-hardened and trained in venues as disparate as the Bogside and the back alleys of the Falls and the snows of the Pyrenees and the sands of Libya; and the Paras of course were, and are, one tough bunch of boyos trained in pretty much the same venues, who nevertheless finished up that day with 18 of their own dead—and yet this is an honorable statistic, for it was a battle fought between H.M. soldiers and the self-appointed soldiers of the IRA, who also lost men (6). No civilians were involved. If you’re in a war, go for the enemy’s troops; then none can gainsay your efforts. That was the credo of the original IRA, and their precursors the Fenians (well, most of them) and the IRB; and it was the credo of the few remaining honorable men among their ranks past or present, and that included Ferdia Quain, retired archivist, which is why your man was on his way, risking life and liberty, to cooperate with the authorities. This credo did not include among its adherents Crankshaft O’Deane. No, he was a far more typical Rah creature, delighting in the murder of unsuspecting innocents and reveling in the unseen potency of the impotent man. His sadism had been crafted since childhood via the usual stages (stuffed animals, other kids, oneself, etc.) and neo-Hitlerian disdain for the human race, most of whom (bar his own dear--and unthreateniingly hideous--Aunt Eva) he reckoned were pretty dire threats to himself, humans en masse being, from his narrow, piggy viewpoint, obnoxiously healthy, married, happy, prosperous, fecund, normal, conventional, telly-watching, overly sexed, salary-making, drab-and-dreary-nine-to-fiving, bean-eating, vacationing-in-Torremolinos, Pooterish scum…i.e., the exact opposite of Crankshaft in all respects.
And true it is that the Crankshafts of this world despise peacemongering such as the Derry Accords and its codicils and devote themselves heart and soul to combating it. Like the burning-eyed excessively-unshaven towelheaded rapists of Clan Bin Salaad, they live to kill.
Fortunately, however, through a bit of last-minute fumbling as thoroughgoing as that of the Canary Wharf non-starter, O’Deane died in his own blast, which took place in the following stages:
BOOM.
It happened thusly: On his way to the carpark at Gardai HQ to plant the lunchbox, O’Deane was distracted for a crucial moment by the unexpected spectacle of Garda Aloysius Schwarzkopf (with a “p,” as in Palestine) who, having duly passed on Ferdia’s “warning” to his superior, Insp. Davey Callan (who had nodded, yawned and retired to the gents’ with a fresh copy of the sports page of The Dependent), was waddling briskly, arms swinging wide and splayed feet seeking distant perches perpendicular to the rest of him, down the front steps of the Gardai station en route (as it happened) to Mrs. Beatty’s across the way for a quick bite of tea before the arrival of his distinguished guest Ferdia Quain, probable mad-bomber suspect and pretty certain feather in his, Aloysius’, cap--figuratively speaking, of course. A lip-smackingly delicious garlic-sausage-and-French-bread sandwich lathered in Colman’s Extra-Spicy and washed down with a sparkling Lucozade, and the most deeply satisfying of subsequent gaseous expulsions in the minor key of C, was on the menu, or agenda, the ensemble to be consummated against the anticipated (based on long experience) backdrop of a high-pitched jeremiad by Mrs. Beatty, who, in an odd coincidence of prejudice vis-à-vis Crankshaft O’Deane, despised foreigners; the young; married couples; technology; and men, except for homosexuals (conceived by her as men who routinely emasculated masculinity through the ritual of buggery) and Aloysius, big softie that he was . . . and himself all agog at the prospect of tea, a guaranteed ticket to tummy grumbles but never mind, at the moment of ingestion: YUM YUM OH YUM!
ALAS.
Garda Aloysius Schwarzkopf failed to keep his appointment with the garlic-sausage sandwich of his dreams. At the very moment that he got to the bottom of the stairs O’Deane spotted him and, gaping in amazement at the spectacle of the fattest rozzer he’d ever seen (“Holy mother of God they never used to allow tubs of lard like that into the force, just goes to show how far downhill they’ve gone”), Crankshaft rounded the building on the east, MacLiammoir Overpass side, whence (or such was his plan) he would then re-enter the carpark past the sentry box, concealed by a misplaced row of box hedges, and plant his plastique; but as luck (everyone else’s) would have it, the spectacle of Aloysius billowing downstairs in his oversized policeman’s trews caused Crankshaft to lose his balance on the second of the six steps leading from the side of Gardai HQ to the pavement alongside the MacLiammoir Bypass…
“Oh fuck,” were his last words, as the lunch box flew forward, struck the brick-faced edge of the building and rebounded, as it were, directly at him, the hapless sod. Wildly, with the grim certainty of impending disaster coming at him like a hungry T-rex exiting its primeval swamp, he flailed at the ricocheting lunchbox, but thereby only incited enough of an impact to compress the lid half an inch further, creating within the suddenly-airtight box the precise degree of pressure (28 p.s.i. at an ambient temperature of 10 C.) needed for the plastique to ignite.
Which it did, with the aural effect described above:
BOOM.
As for Aloysius, you can bet he hit the pavement like a man ten stone slimmer than he. After the blast and its afterblasts died away, he arose majestically, his trouserlegs covered in the stale leaves of an early spring.
“Bloody hell, Quin was right,” said he. “This is terrific. Oh boy. Just let me get my hands on him.”
The blast had succeeded in gouging out part of the supporting wall of the Gardai HQ building and smashing all the windows on that side. Through the gap in the masonry, floorboards and beams hung at useless, riven angles. Next to the building a shiny new Nitsun Hymen TS, pride and joy of Annie Neeson, assistant chief word processor in Forensics, slumped sideways, executed, its bonnet gaping wide. Several of the human wounded lay about, moaning, simply staring upward in shock, or cradling themselves in their own arms. The good news was that none was killed, although this didn’t come out until much later, when the much-admired West Country playwright Sid Cyder wrote a Sunday TV play called Highway to Haughey Circle, starring Clyde Fodder and Ursula Willing, which linked the incident to the pernicious influence of globalization and ongoing Nazi-American imperialism in the Middle East, South and East and Southeast Asia, Europe, Africa, Latin America and the Pacific, including Pitcairn and Easter Islands. Actually, the only fatality, in a bit of all-too-uncommon divine justice, was Crankshaft, bits of whom littered the landscape: His left pinkie, for instance, perched atop the public intercom at MacShiney’s Sausages and was for several days mistaken for a discarded speciality of the house. His eyeballs, both detached intact from the rapidly-disintegrating remainder of him, followed divergent trajectories: The left orb shot like a small meteor into the carefully-trimmed hedge outside House Mansion, the Lord Mayoral residence, where it was retrieved within minutes by a peckish magpie. Its mate sailed over the wall dividing the carpark from the MacLiammoir Bypass and bounced off the windscreen of a Brosnahan’s Dairies milk lorry driven by jolly Ernie Cahan, just 26 last Tuesday, who paused in his jaunty whistling of “Billy Bobby’s Girly Curls,” the latest hit by the all-boygirl Cleveland tango-dreck band The Ringworms, to exclaim: “What the feck was that?” as the afterblasts echoed and re-echoed; then the eyeball appeared, like a very unconvincing stage accessory, and bounced squishily across his windscreen before disappearing. Indeed, an astute observer might remark that it behaved in the physics of its plasticity very much as, say, an olive might, if stuffed with a pimento: buoyant, yet easily squashed. Subsequent tyres did the job:
PLATCH.
“Feckin’ Rah again,” was Ernie’s assessment of these events. He brought his lorry to a shuddering halt with much clinking of milk bottles and pulled over to the side of the street; for the show was far from over. In fine slasher-flick tradition, a detached arm landed heavily on Ernie’s bonnet, spraying blood in an archipelago-like pattern (as in say, Indonesia, even down to the pair of big blotches for Java and Sumatra), a half-smoked smouldering fag pinned between index and middle fingers.
“Gawd,” piped Ernie. “Big one, that.”
Then, like the first soaping in a drive-through car wash, brain tissue splattered across the passenger-side window.
“Aw Jaysus.”
An unidentifiable patch of scalp adhered, then slithered off.
“Aw shite.”
Then:
PLOPF!
Crankshaft’s right foot, shod in its slightly-scuffed Clarks desert boot, planted itself on the bonnet, still upright, like the whimsical advert for, say, a roving podiatrist.
“Feck this,” said Ernie. “A bit more and I can make me own Frankenstein fella.”
But all things must come to an end, and so did the rain of Crankshaft’s body parts. Ernie’s first thought, being as he was a generally law-abiding citizen of the Republic, was to call the Guards on the mobile phone his fiancée, Ducks Plunkett, had given him for his birthday. He duly tried, but the number was busy, and the boring poop-poop of the ringing was soon invaded by a swarm of tinny recorded voices urging the caller to try again, or not at all, or savor his importance to the anonymous firm, or leave a message, or press any number of numbered buttons on his mobile phone, all of which Ernie did, or attempted to do.
“Ah… yeah? This is Ernie Cahan, hallo, anyone there, it’s all goin’ to shite out here…Hallo?”
A cold voice in distant Cork City responded with stern instructions to try again later, as Southeast Command was currently “overbooked.” As indeed it was. Things were hectic at Gardai HQ. Garda Schwarzkopf, whose only injuries had been bruised knees (2) from his hurried genuflection upon the steps, and a small cut on the bridge of his nose from a passing shard of Crankshaft’s pulverized femur, sensed opportunity and mobilized his mobiles accordingly. Soon ambulance men and assistant Gardai units from as far away as Dungarvan and Youghal were rolling up to the main entrance. Survivors were taken to the Mater Misericordiae. The telly boys and girls showed up in no time, of course, having little else to cover that day bar the impounding of Capt. McDermot’s prawn-fishing trawler, the Jugs O’Keady, for suspected ties to continental smuggling groups seeking to import illicit quantities of cognac, cigarettes, shaving brushes, bar mirrors, and the like . . . nah, a bombing was much sexier. The lads and lasses of RTE Southeast inspected the manifests of the wounded, hoping for oodles of schadenfreude to run past the avaricious gaze of the masses, but really not turning much up at all. Those so far identified were mostly boring and included some being held overnight in the cells, including Herr Wilhelm Meister, a businessman from Hamburg arrested in last night’s raid on the immigrant-run brothels on The Strand; Mr. Turlow O’Neil, Sinn Fein M.P. from North Armagh, rounded up in the same exercise; a Mr. Nolan of Bord Pleanala, idem; Det. Garda Liam Cahill; Miss Terpsichore O’Hanlon, heavily bruised by flying cement, shapely left leg broken but not sundered; Mr. Donal Duddy, who at the moment of explosion had been hurrying into the loo that overlooked the car park, having just spotted DCI Sherlock Neame and having no desire to undergo more questioning of the “Well, you narky Yank? Eh? Eh, you narky Yank?” variety; Gardas Hogg and Ypsilon, engaged to be married (Garda Ypsilon was expecting, gender unknown); Chief Inspector Martin O’Dwyer; a visiting Polish diplomatic courier, Mr. Oskar Frantiszek, who’d been scheduled for tea at the Lord Mayor’s; and Madame Marie Walewska, in town to renew her brothel license. Nothing daunted, pert and perky Siobhan Grimes, up-and-coming anchorperson (oh, she had her sights set on the RTE-ITV-BBC-CNN roving-correspondent trajectory ) stood facing the camera facing her and declared, “We’re live at the scene of devastation in Killoyle City. Behind me you can see what remains of …,” etc. In the distance, watching the to-and-fro, stood onlookers, prominent among whom was Ferdia Quain.
“Well, bugger it,” he said to no one in particular. His presence now, he felt, was redundant, even a liability. Knowing the law’s tendency to thrash about wildly in search of a culprit, and accurately assessing Garda Schwarzkopf’s innate ambitions careerwise—and painfully aware of the roving eye of the telly cameras that would inevitably capture his bony frame towering above everybody else (or else’s)—Ferdia resolved then and there upon a course of action that would postpone indefinitely the prospect of his ever owning and managing a boutique in Ireland (or, indeed, anywhere) named Killoyle Wine and Cheese (or, indeed, anything):
He’d emigrate, so he would.
To America, naturally. He had that cousin, Fergus McCool, in a town in Ohiowa, of all places. Finn’s big brother. Ran a bar with some twee name. Bit of a gawm, and you know what those emigrants were like, they always had to know ten times as much as the boring old stay-at-homes did. But needs were needs, and times were perilous, and that RTE6 camera lens was swooping in for a closeup like the glaring eye of a heron in quest of lunch, and there was no going back. Besides, he’d never been to the States, Shirl didn’t want him, he was fed up with her and with women in general and by God hadn’t he had it up here with Killoyle and Ireland anyhow and the other lot would soon be coming after him to get their investment back for the wineshop that would never be, foreclosure being a foregone conclusion at this point; so…
“Hi-ho,” he said, and was off, but not unnoticed, for once in his life.

* * * *

Stan, too, was off, figuratively as well as (for part of the way, at least) literally, in the direction of Moylan’s Bar and/or hell, from the Belfers and the Rumpelstiltskin, whose calm gyrations atop the canal waters now made him want to puke day and night and in between. Farther, after a drink or so: Haughey Circle, domain of the Law and Supergrass. Yes, he was going to grass on her, give her up, squeal on his motte, snitch on the bitch. Yes, officer, he was prepared to say (he’d been rehearsing, silently, lips moving theatrically, in the bog and elsewhere), yes, oh yes yes, she took the Tortuga and no mistake, I’d nick her if I was you and that right sharpish. Then throw her in the lizzie wing.
(But at that horrid idea reluctance intervened, even now. No, just stick her in solitary for a month or so, without any make-up or access to broadcast media or the fancy-arsed alcoholic drinks that she always liked, the one served by super-tanned rent boys in striped jerseys and topped off with a cherry or a paper umbrella.)
It wasn’t very nice, admittedly. Oh, he admitted it, especially with his own hideous mug in view, grayish-yellow with smoky mascara shadows under the eyes and faintly green jowl-edgings to match his pale green eyes, staring blearily back from the black-and-silver shaving mirror:
Not nice at all, chump!
But sod it, eh?
“What the blazes,” mumbled stumbling Stan, pausing at the kerb as yet another Gardai panda car sped by with its blue roof light rotating, followed by an ambulance and another panda car and even a Crumstown fire engine, all clanging and hooting hysterically like a herd of panic-stricken bell- and-siren-equipped bison, all seemingly converging on the Belfers roundabout that sat poised atop the cusp of the city centre (“Cathair,” read the sign, “ City Centre, 3 km”). The caravan tumbled higgledy-piggledy down the slope and were soon lost to view, although their yelling wake of sirens, klaxons, horns, etc., was much slower to fade away.
“Fire, probably,” replied Stan to his inner questioner, imagining a dingy bedsit comfortably ablaze thanks to the haplessness of profoundly ignorant immigrants of the type the Government damned near bribed to come over these days, people whose sole contribution to culture (self-raved Stan, relieved to find a tangential target for excess emotion) was incest and wife-beating and pederasty and five daily prayers to some loony desert god and the growing of unkempt beards as well as the indoor campfire, also used to grill camel dung and dromedary thighs and shank of dishonored daughter, etc., the fucking barbarians… Well, anyhow: Long and short of it was, your man was downright and totally fed-up, entirely, and what’s more he’d had it up to there (his hairline, of about average lowness). Oh, he had, he’d had a real haimes and bags of a day or so, so he had, and it was all that slag’s fault, when you got down to it, so it was. And if she hadn’t got the notion of pinching that car into her thick skull in the first place, well, none of this would have happened, would it, or at least not in the way it was happening, or at least at another time in another place to someone else—in which case, could it be said to be happening to him at all, from Stan’s point of view, or yours? …
… and the worst part of it was the loneliness that came coldly sniggering in the door, deep in the graveyard watch past 3 a.m. when the fox and the badger bark and an ill wind sighs through the reeds and the barge rocks to and fro in the wake of a ghost and there’s sod-all to watch on the telly…
Sad to say, under the circumstances, given the choice between valiant resistance to humiliation in the style of immemorial Anglo-Irish soldiers and statesmen (Wellington, say, or Robert Graves in the trenches, or O’Boylan of Omdurman) and succumbing to said humiliation lock, stock and barrel, Stan unhesitatingly chose the latter avenue of least resistance so well-trodden by, say, the Syrians on the Golan, 1973, or Wet Wesson when confronted with the pleading of well-placed special interest groups, or any average dog-owner in the face of his (or her) pet’s cajoling for ball-throwing or food; and what’s more Stan did it the Irish way, with wails of abnegation, thunderous bodhran music in the background, snout firmly lodged within the confines of a pint jar, self-pity off the charts and never mind the consequences, in spite of Rory’s uplifting bonhomie … and that was a thing of the past, because the man himself no longer answered to the name Rory at all. He’d metamorphosed into Roger, probably because the hard-drinking devil-may-care dash and élan of the previous day’s Rory had yielded, this a.m., a man-size hangover, summoning from the wings vicarish and sober Roger, who was now (or had been, earlier that day) wearing a blue blazer, white Sunday polo shirt and sporting a neat navy-blue Ascot tie with white piping, the ensemble bringing him in line with the fashions of, say, the early James Bond era, all of it topped off with a poncey pompadour and great thick eyeglasses of the squarish horn-rimmed type favoured by Sir Maurice Micklewhite in one of his countless cinematic incarnations, that of the ersatz spy H. Palmer, Esq., ca. 1966 (heart of the Mini age, sartorially and automotively); moreover, Roger made no secret of his disapproval when unshaven Stan lurched into view one minute and twenty seconds after opening and hoarsely called for a pint of Red Reamer.
“Shouldn’t be imbibing quite so early on, old bean,” said Roger severely, nonetheless going about his pint-pulling duties with the instinct of the professional curate, “or what’s there to look forward to in the evening, I always say?”
“Get out of it,” snarled Stan.
“Dear me the dog’s bitten hard this time, hasn’t he,” said Roger. “I’d recommend a bromide, or two aspirin, after you’ve had the hair of it.”
“Ya ballocks. Seize the day, you said.”
“That was yesterday, sport. Today’s another kettle of halibut entirely. How about a half for starters, and then ending it all? The drinking, I mean.”
“A pint, or by Jesus I’m off to Whalen’s.”
Whalen’s Bar, down the road, was a dimly-lit shebeen notorious for last-timers, wide boys, Westies, and others of ruthless stamp, including the barman, one Colin O’Wilson, nighttime stargazer and daylong arm-wrestler, long-range precision spitter and in-his-cups pugilist.
“Desperate,” said Roger, meditatively. “Quite bloody desperate, that’s what you are. Well, there’s your pint. Now how’s about stabilizing the old tum with a meat pie, or the missus’s nonpareil hare in molé sauce that she only concocts on special occasions, one of which is this very day, God save us?”
“Puke,” said Stan.
He took his pint to the same corner he and Ferdia had occupied on the day previous. A somnolent telly drowsed atop its platform, awaiting the moment when some gobshite bereft of inner resources, newspaper, and / or conversation, would reach up and turn it on. As it happened, Stan was that very gobshite. The telly, suddenly awakening at his touch, disrupted the votive peace of the pub with its vacant booming and the crackle of static interference from the nearby Bord Na Mona peat-fired power reactor. Roger frowned, wringing his hands in a dishtowel he kept handy for purposes of handwringing and glass drying.
“I say, you there, could you keep it on the news channel and turn the volume down?”
“Shiteballs,” said Stan, but obeyed, switching over from a grim BBC sitcom featuring a pair of human pseudo-dregs in a Pebble Mill studio set intended to resemble a decrepit bedsit or boarding house (electric flames swarming mock-cheerfully in grate, dim sub-Millet landscape paintings on wall, teacups galore, a saucer overflowing with fag ends, no books) to An Nuacht/News on Southeastern RTE Channel 61 (English, subtitles)—and sat back, banjaxed; for as he stared at the image kaleidoscoping into life on the screen he found to his considerable astonishment, amazement, and/or even horror that he was staring at the face of his drinking companion of yesterday, Ferdia Quain, recognizable—despite the snap’s having been taken a good ten to fifteen years previously, judging by the mid-90s shirt and blazer, ridiculous spiky hair, aviator shades, and ludicrous gold chain around the berk’s scrawny neck--by the saurian heaviness of jawline and flat reptilian nasal flanges, as well as a certain lizard-like quiddity of demeanour that would finger him in a crowd of doppelgangers, or Komodo dragons...
A narrator’s voice was plodding onward and upward in the background, as wearily as a hunched figure ascending a steep hillside in symbolic token of life’s fearsome burdens.
“Authorities are looking for this man,” said the voice in the factual drone of one reading the prices of agricultural commodities. Indeed, so spiritless was this voice that it took Stan a good five minutes and nine to ten sips of his first pint and one or two sips of its successor, as well as the ravenous consumption of an entire bag of salt-and-vinegar crisps (not much of a lunch, but “fuck lunch, save your nicker for the bevvy,”as his old da Manny “Mandrake” MacKnee had always said in his hoarse roar of a voice, listing slightly to one side with his good eye (the left) cocked upward, the bad one (you guessed it, the right) lolling in a vaguely rightward direction), before it dawned on him what the television voice was on about: the Gardai HQ in Killoyle City, the voice said by way of recap for those just joining them, had been partly to entirely destroyed by a powerful bomb blast, and the prime suspect was (all together now):
“Ferdinand Khan, a local resident and well-known member of the organization formerly known as the Irish Republican Army, Provisional Wing.” The voice fell silent and another voice rumbled. The first voice resumed. “I beg your pardon, that should be Quaid, Ferdinand Quaid, said to be one of the organization’s masterminds and at the very least a brilliant if erratic political theorist. Indeed, one of the survivors, Garda Aloysius eh,” a sound of papers briskly being shuffled, “Shwat, Shwart, I beg your pardon,” and here--simultaneous with the disappearance of Ferdia’s mug from the screen and its prompt replacement by standard TV-news crisis-footage of flashing blue lights, bustling medics, yellow crime-scene tape, conferring police officers, etc., with a freshly-coiffed, pert and perky young female newsanchorperson (yes, Siobhan Grimes herself) staring glassily at the camera and enunciating falsely-dolorous expressions of grief--a new studio-voice thundered, in a parade-ground Prussian accent, “SCHWARZKOPF.”
“Yes, that’s it,” said the first voice, excited momentarily into a hiccup of emotion, brusquely consigning fresh-faced Siobhan Grimes to the televisual netherworld, “with a ‘p,’ as in Pluto—the Garda said, in any event, as he exited the building, he claimed to have spoken to Quorn shortly before the blast. ‘He phoned in a warning, they always do,’ said Shwatcop.”
“SCHWARZKOPF,” repeated the Prussian voice in a rough bellow.
“Do turn the bloody thing down,” sniped Roger, peevishly. “I can’t tell if that’s the phone ringing or do I need to go to the jakes again.”
“Ah shaddup,” said Stan, in the strong, stentorian tones of he who will brook no dissent. “They’ve done the guards. Give us another.” He brandished the again-empty pint glass.
Ferdia, eh? Jesus Mary and Joseph. You never flamin’ knew about people, did you—I mean, there he was, buying rounds one moment and flinging about Semtex the next…
Indeed, so extensive was the disaster—the result, experts theorized, of a bomb at least the size of the one in Ennis and probably bigger than that, a good 20+ lbs. of Semtex at the very least in the well-mulled-over words of a vacationing English ex-Superintendent from the fen-fed neo-Dutch county of south Lincolnshire-on-the-Wash. It was nothing short of a miracle that Garda Sharpcop and the others had survived at all, and the stout Garda himself attributed it (quite garrulously, under the circumstances) to the following:
1) God;
2) the fact that he’d been on the front steps at the time, well away from the focal point of the initial blast (there’d been three, said the vacationing ex-Super; no, two, said a bystander, Theo Redfern, Thermo-Suds sales rep from Levington Park, Co. Westmeath; no, four or five, said Mrs. Henry, who lived across the street with her twin boys Sean and Dermot. All were wrong: one blast, as per original intent); and
3) pure blind luck.
“Lucky sod, eh,” announced Stan to Roger, who, finally realizing something larger was up than the hurling final, had joined him in the snug, the pair of them gazing up at the television like a pair of dogs anticipating handouts from a withheld hand. Indeed, the idiot box had not quite finished distributing titbits. The droner had the following yet to drone:
“Survivors have been taken to the Mater Misericordiae in Killoyle City. Those so far identified include Herr Wilhelm Meister, a businessman from Hamburg; Turlow O’Neil, Sinn Fein M.P. from North Armagh; a Mr. Nolan of Bord Pleanala; Gardas Eomer Burke and Liam Cahill; a woman identified only as O’Hanlon, aged is it believed 28; Assistant Commissioner Talbott; Gardas Hogg and Ypsilon, engaged to be married; Chief Inspector Martin O’Dwyer; a visiting Polish diplomatic courrier named Oskar Frantiszek (or –szek?) who was scheduled for tea at the Lord Mayor’s…”
“Hang on a sec,” said Stan. “He said a woman named O’Hanlon?”
“Did he? Didn’t catch it.”
“Nah, I must be wrong. Jaysus.”
“…a former brothel keeper named Marie Walewska, operating undercover as Mrs. Mule…”
But within the minute Stan was in a pushbutton phone box, left over from the ‘70s at the corner of Belfers Road, which contained three sets of phone directory covers sans phone directories and a few empty fag packets (Regals, Woodbines). He inserted numerous coins of various denominations (sterling, punt, euro) before getting through, at which point confusion reigned and was hardly sorted out by an administrative chorus of recorded voices instructing the near-frantic caller—dans l’occurrence, Stan--to press this and that and the other, all against episodic intermissions of the most hideous regurgitated 1990s pop music (Stan was a solid Chieftains man, as we know), and all perfectly useless in the folkloric context of a rotary-dial phone; but finally he got through that particular small hell only to emerge into a larger one: confirmation of his worst (well, almost worst) fears.
“Terpsy, ah…”
“Cripes. Terpsichore? With a ‘ch’?”
“Yes, that appears to be it. Funny name. What is she, Italian? Greek? One of those Albanians we’re always reading about, the ones in drugs raids and gangs and what have you?”
“I, ah, UH.”
“Well, we have to get used to it, don’t we, I mean that seems to be the way things are going in the brave new world of the blessed European Union, wouldn’t you say? Heil Brussels! Oy, Ireland! Want our nicker? they ask, waving bundles of Euros under our collective nose. You bet your granny, we say, with all the morality of the prize saps we are. Then take our surplus Third World immigrants, says Brussels, and of course Oh OK say we, or rather Wet Wesson and his gang of Westmeath Mafiosi say, Bring ‘em on, unload ‘em on the walking bumwipes out there, upshot: You know how they used to call us the Third World of Europe? Well, just as we seemed to be getting out of it financially here they come and dump a half million Asians on us and bingo, we’re the Third World in Europe. I mean, I don’t know if you’ve ever been near one of those holding pens or internment camps for illegal immigrants or whatever they call them, there’s one out by Kildare, in fact I think it’s the old Curragh itself, well let me tell you the stink would knock you back on your heels for a start. Dumping ground for England’s derelicts, that’s what we’ve become, thank you very much E.U. and Wet Wesson. Bloody Brussels, eh? I know, I know, they give us plenty of money to build roads and to keep us from growing more wheat than the bloody Danes or Dutch or French or whoever, but if you ask me it’s been yet another case of dear old Ireland getting the short end of the stick. Well, I mean look at our history. First we had the bloody English for all that time, what was it, seven hundred years? Then there was that half-arsed De Valera and his emerald-green bullshit and we started building peat-fired power stations and going on about how we could go it alone, then the boom dropped and the Brussels bureaucrats showed up on our front doorstep with a warrant in one hand and a blank check in the other. I mean honestly.”
“Will…you…”
“All right, all right, I’ve been going on a bit, sorry about that, well now let’s have a look at this lady of yours. Terpsi…ah here we are. Yes, rather badly knocked about, I’m afraid. Concussion, broken ribs, massive loss of blood, that line of country.”
“What the blazes was she doing there?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. We’ve only recovered some of the records. Otherwise we’re relying on eyewitnesses. Relative of yours is she? We have counselors standing by…”
“Sod your counselors.”
“Hear hear to that, my friend. Bunch of mewling pantywaists they are, if you want my frank opinion. I mean to say: Counselors, indeed! What a culture. Wait till I tell you. My gran grew up in the Liberties back in the days when that meant one thing: shite, if you’ll pardon my French. Meaning daily drubbings from her old wan who, needless to say, had a skinful in him any day he could afford the five bob, and meanwhile at home she had to cope with the bedbugs and typhoid and TB and rats the size of racehorses, you name it. Read your man Boyle’s book, whatsitsname now, The Sun’s Called Paddy, that’s it, that’s right, have a dekko at that when you get the chance. The Liberties in the old days, it’s all in there, and I’m telling you boyo the black hole of Calcutta itself had nothing on it. And how did they get through it, the few who survived, like my gran? Did they have counselors standing by? Not bloody likely…”
By which time Stan had departed the general area of Moylans Bar the public, leaving the phone squawking its ire, and with a farewell from Roger blowing through his ears: “Wisha, stay dry, now, and don’t drink all day you useless git or I swear before God you’ll not be let back into this establishment. And cheers to yourself and have a nice day and say hello to the wife and kiddies.” Roger was evidently in the process of becoming full-blown in his looniness, but Stan cared not; Stan was in a hurry to get to Terpsichore’s side, all slights and insults forgiven and forgotten; he didn’t blame her. On the contrary, Guilt rode him as a jockey his mount. He mumbled like a derelict as he walked along, staring unseeingly at the slick pavement; he barely missed stepping on the occasional dog turd, fag packet (Regals), or scrap of newspaper (“ROVERS PULL IT OUT”).
“Ah God,” he lamented, “me poor darlin’ gell what did they do to you the bastards not much worse than what I did to you was it ah God you poor wee bird you God what a bastard I am I hate myself Stan you’re a right shite did you know that you bastard?”
He crossed the Crumstown Road and hailed a 34 bus in preference to driving the old Nitsun, not a bad idea under the circs what with the emotional extremism and roadblocks and beer and what have you. Anyway, good old 34, eh? It ran directly from the front of Moylan’s via the locks and tattered edges of The Belfers into the MacLiammoir Bypass and thence into the city center, passing by Haughey Circle, where Stan hopped off.
“Jesus,” he said. As expected, there were ructions galore on the opposite, Gardai HQ, side. Yellow police tape kept people away from the devastation, but the ranks of the onlookers swelled by the minute. They huddled and pointed things out to one another in strident voices: the smouldering pile of old bricks, the blue lights winking, the rozzers everywhere, the TV crew interviewing some crewcut bugger by the main door, the crews in army fatigues, the construction team with a bulldozer, three Mater Misericordiae ambulances, and, last but by no means least, a group of men and women in civvies hanging about at the foot of the steps.
Stan, with sudden insight, said “counselors” to himself.

* * * * *
Lance Lancem, the American, was amazed to see three local cops, or “guards” as they called them, marching Shirley out the front door of the office, and said so, loudly.
“Hey, what the heck’s going on?”
“Never you mind, sonny,” said one of the cops, who wore a camouflage jacket (like it would do any good in a God damned office, thought Lance—if the guy was trying to hide, that is, unless he hid behind like the potted plants, and even then…). “Official business. You just get on with your work.”
“You won’t believe it,” said Shirley piteously, before disappearing through the door with the third policeman.
Lance’s byword had always been: Take your questions to the top. The worst that can happen? They can fire you. Well, that’s pretty bad, admittedly. But hey! Say la vee, guys!! Curious, he immediately made an appointment with the executive secretary, crabby, wen-bedecked, spit-and-spite-driven Ms. Winsome (not), who then arranged for Lance to enter the sanctum sanctorum (adjoining his cubicle, as it happened) of Noreen Maher, company president, savvy investrix and wife of Tom, the CEO and Grand Fella Altogether, or GFA.
“Camouflage? I know. It seems a bit silly, doesn’t it? But those fellas were SDU, Special Detective Unit. They wear it when they’re on a case. Well, it is a bit touchy, Lance,”said Noreen. She was sitting at her desk in her sumptuous teak-lined office, with a view of Killoyle Harbour and the stout-dark sea that wine-windy day. Upon her desk crowded neo-neolithic stone knick-knacks acquired during an “antiquing” junket to the Morbihan peninsula; conference phones in the style of the French Third Republic (1882-1940), one, actually dating from that period of grandeurs et misères, actually used by Paul Reynaud to telephone his mistress on the afternoon of June 14, 1940 just before he loaded up the trusty Peugeot and headed south for Bordeaux; leatherbound falsehoods from the Accounting Dept. neatly divided off into sections denoting certain lies from probable; framed photos of herself and hubby Tom (“The Greek” ), feigning marital bliss; and framed photos of herself in the company of celebrities such as Davey “Breasts” Callan, the transgendered philanthropist from Co. Cavan; Proinsias “Straw Man” O’Burns, the film star from An Uaimh; Peter Clouseau, the Jersey lolly; Gar “The Loony” Looney, ex-Taoiseach na h-Eireann; the Polish click’n’drag singer Vlad Balloonia; and Commendatore Lucca DiStronzo, former star centre-forward of Avanti Perugia FC and current mayor of the ancient Tuscan city of Poggibonsi that would soon, at an internationally-televised ceremony presided over by Signore Sinistrino Berninoni, the Italian Prime Minister, be renamed Citta Berninoni-Maher (pronounced, roughly, Cheetaberninonimayy’r) in honor of the world’s greatest estate agent, who had an especially soft spot in his owld green Oyrish heart for Italy, ah a grand wee country, ‘tis so ‘tis, ah God bless yez so‘tis, etc… Also on her desk, indeed sprawling athwart it in unseemly déshabille, was the day’s Clarion, bearing the boisterous front-page headline “KA-BAM!” above photos of the Gardai HQ building and, displaced from the news item on page 15 that proclaimed the coronation of a new Miss Cosmos, the beaming face and busty twin breasts (concealed, barely) of Nefertiti-profiled Miss Mozambique, prime candidate for that title.
Noreen pointed to the headline.
“Did you hear about this?”
“The bomb? Yeah. IRA, huh. What happened to the cease-fire? I thought they’d signed a treaty or something. Good thing nobody was killed.”
“Well, now. Somebody was, but they don’t know who. They just found body parts scattered about, some as far away as the outer suburbs. Now. I don’t know how much you know about Shirley, and by the way this isn’t meant as criticism of her, she’s a wonderful colleague and I love her to death...”
Uh-oh, piped Lance’s inner monitor, scarred by years of corporate prolefeed: “I love him/her to death” was the standard euphemism, rigorously taught at the Corporate Executive College in Xenophon, Ga., that preceded “and I’m just about to fire the bitch/bastard,” “but I’m going to have to let him/her go,” or words to that effect...
“…but she bears watching.”
“Hey,” Lance said. “Shirl’s a great gal. She got me those Italian quotes right on time the other day. And the other week she worked right through the night to finish up the van Gadesdesdesdesden report. (Should there be one more ‘des’ in there?) That’s team spirit, if you ask me. And she’s always got a smile.”
“For you, maybe. By the way, did you know she’s married?”
“Aha! Married?” The revelation was something less than the wrenching shock it might have been a day or so earlier. Lance had, indeed suspected something of the sort, amid drinking-fountain gossip and a stray photograph somewhere, maybe on a Web page, of Shirl or someone who looked very much like her holding hands with a blurry man against a misty background, perhaps the moors. Some kind of oddball wine-shop owner or something, or was he a writer or actor or anarchist or something way out in left field like that…Irish, of course, maybe too much so, Shirl being British.
“Right. Didn’t think so,” said Mrs. Maher—who, by the way, was quite a striking woman, as her husband put it, especially when she’d just hauled off and copped him a nice pigeon’s-egg above his left eye; far less than beautiful she was, but a notch or two above hideous, especially for one of her age (50+, give or take). Full-hipped and broad-beamed like the amateur lady prizefighter she’d once been (All-Ireland welterweight gold medalist, 1969, silver 1970, bronze 1971, cashiered 1972), she favored classic tweed business suits and loosely knotted Hermès foulards for that touch of je ne sais quoi. She found that this combination of the dowdily respectable and the chic—evocative at once of headmistresses and chief librarians and other severe yet competent ladies, yet also hinting at Jaguars and shooting holidays and lodges in the Alps (and, why not, yachts in the Aegean)—reassured recalcitrant landowners, civic groups, raving environmentalists and the like, thereby rendering them infinitely more gullible and, as a direct result, available for swindling. Like her husband Tom (currently working assiduously with various Neapolitan condottieri of ‘Ndranghetta, S.p.A. on a new hillside development of two-storied holiday semi-detached chalets called SuperVesuvio “atop the very cusp of historic Mount Vesuvius, with an unbeatable view of the crater that caused the eruption that launched the bestselling novel and the sensational hit movie starring Nicoletta Mammarino”), she was superficially gormless, given to excessive Irishry on occasion (“ah me boys aw me darlin’ boys,” “shure God bless ya, bukes,” “bedad,” “great big feckin’ hairy ballocks,” etc.) and those unsettling Irish sidelong glances; but inwardly she was as canny as an old Aberdeen terrier, or Maltese money-changer. Along with her intimate knowledge of Tom’s inside arrangements in Italy and elsewhere (including right here in dear old dull Killoyle, yo-ho-ho-hum), and the invaluable past experience of having literally taken her own dear hubby to court (and beyond, to the cleaners) when he’d overstepped the bounds of propriety —all legalistic bletherskite, to be sure, but she’d got The Greek where she wanted him, thanks to which prescience her own savings account was getting fatter by the day. Oh, she’d made him sit up and take notice, so she had, and then some. Things of the past were his jocular put-downs of women and wives, and macho cries of “Bend over now” and “Wet the tay, woman,” first thing in the morning, or last thing at night. All this, together with her own not-inconsiderable charisma, guaranteed her a place, as Tom put it, “at the top of the company mizzenmast, or, more authentically: . . . or do Oy mean crow’s nest, shure God bless yez Oy’ve hardly been near a feckin’ ship in me loyfe but God bless yez I watched all yer man’s films wotsisname now Captain Trumpet-Major, or was it Admiral, the one with the hooter on him anyhow, no Hooter that was his name, Commodore Hooter, ah shure yer never a Trinity man are ya, shure and God bless ya bejaney no Oy never was, what made ya think Oy was, ah ‘tis the owld school toye, shure ya never…?
Oh Danny Boy
The pipes
The pipes are ca-a-ha-a-lling,”
etc.
Long and short of it was: Noreen was one tough cookie, and if Shirley Quain was trotted off by the rozzers, well, it was no skin off her (Noreen’s) nose (bold; Romanesque; slightly retroussé).
“Shirl’s husband’s an old IRA man,” she explained. “She always said he was retired, but I never took that seriously. They don’t retire, those boys. And now the police are calling him Suspect Number One for that bombing last night at the Gardai Headquarters.”
“Jeez. You’re kidding.”
“Wish I was, Lance. Ah—Lance?”
“Yes?”
“You don’t have that Silverside report for me, do you?”
“Just finishing it, Noreen. Be on your desk by close of business.’
“Make sure it is, won’t you? Or I’ll be asking you to stay overnight and finish it up by breakfast, if you don’t mind. Thanks an awful lot.”
The air, manner, and ceremonial gestures of executive dismissal were unmistakable to one as well-schooled in the subtleties of managerial life as Lance Lancem . . .of whom, as we will be spending time in his company, herewith a brief resume:
Born and raised in one of New Ur of the Chaldees, Ohiowa’s old Polish-Irish-German-Manx neighborhoods, “the Claw-Footed Bathtub District,” just on the other side of Salamander Oaks (later world HQ of Zyth, de Warth and Wenn, the real-estate giants), Lance, class valedictorian at Richard Brautigan High and all-star varsity running back at Downstairs State, had knocked around Mexico and the Caribbean before taking his law degree at Harvarford Law. Upon graduating, he started as a limited junior partner at Holliwell, Deng, Mordred and Dutchman on Pine Street in the dim purlieus of downtown New York, where the twin shadows once daily fell, then fell for good one bright September morn when Lance was away in Cancun, attending a reunion of the Balsam High Debating Society: “Shit,” he said, when he saw the TV images, “that was a close call, hey man, hey! What happened to the tacos, man?”…Scrambling thereafter with simian ease up the corporate ladder (and this is a direct quotation from Onward and Upward, the company newsletter): “within six months of coming on board with us, Lance made Assistant Executive Associate Vice-President Pro Tem For Marketing, one of the most dramatic upward rises seen in this company for many a year. Way to go! Onward and Upward, Lance!”). Things seemed good, a rich career beckoned, Lance bade fair to rise right to the top. But then (the tolling dong of fate, D minor might be just right) came the Bonnie Vole-Spencer incident, as a result of which . . . well, here he was in Ireland, not New York, or Houston, or L.A., or even London, and that says it all, doesn’t it?
Poor Lance. It happened this way.
As we have already surmised, he was the bit of a lad under his sterile tanned-Yank ways. He had the eye for the girls; not only girls, to be brutally honest, but women, and indeed human females of any description bar “eighty years old” or “monstrous” or “heavily scarred” or “lesbian” or “one-eyed” or “-legged” and/or “titless” (as a milkfed American, his preoccupation was more with that area than your average European’s zone of interest, viz. the bum, deemed far too naughty by generations of Puritans more enamored of motherhood, milk and the great cumulus-tits of their Protestant heaven ); indeed, he’d acquired quite the Don Juanian reputation in the plushly carpeted corridors of Holliwell, Deng, Mordred, and Dutchman, a firm consisting largely of lantern-jawed male blonds and sinuous and loud yet chaste brown- and redhaired temptresses of the class of Bonnie Vole-Spencer, Senior Associate Vice-Executive Vice-President for Sales (and sole blonde on board). . . so. One fine New York October day, with a brisk breeze off the Harbo(u)r and small wisps of cloud racing westward and flurries of crisp fall foliage whirling in the gutters, Lance found himself with Bonnie in the corporate lift, or “elevator,” elevating silently upward past the 38 floors that intervened between the lobby and its plateglass view of the mostly-yellow traffic blips moving evenly up and down the grid at Park Avenue and 47th Street (near the Mercedes dealership, yes, you’ve got it ) and the main, pergo-panelled mezzanine of HDM&D, when Lance, who’d been discreetly (or so he thought) eyeing, from a lateral distance of one elevator’s-width (aha! but he forgot about the mirrored walls), the trim Valenciana-clad form of Ms. Vole-Spencer but crucially overlooking (along with the mirrored walls) the utter lack of makeup on her severely handsome features, nonetheless barged ahead and said, with a roguish twinkle, feeling quite on form with his new double-breasted Caltanisetta suit and the weight on his left wrist of the Deluxis underwater chronometer he’d just bought on a short weekend jaunt to the Caymans:
“Wow, it’d be a great day to lie on the beach.” Then, fatally, before he could wrest control of his tongue from the imp of the perverse: “Huh, babe, whaddaya say?”
Ms. Vole-Spencer, although married, was married to Ken Spencer, the mousiest pipsqueak of a leftish ponytailed folk-singing anti-war jalopy-driving social-working peacenik nonentity to be found in Manhattan, where his ilk was legion; and Bonnie Vole had been raised by her guitar-adoring Sixties parents, long divorced (well, her mother, actually: Les Liverwright, hard-bitten leftie columnist on the Rebel Ghetto newspaper out of Berkeley, Calif.) to regard any human male above the age of ten and below that of ninety as a probable source of rape, except her husband, especially since last March when he’d become conclusively impotent, as he’d told his anti-war counseling group, having to raise his voice to be heard above the soundtrack of Andean flute music (Los Panjandrumos, ex- Cuzco)…so anyway, confronted with a probable rapist, she turned with candidly unblinking eyes and an aggressive jut of her jaw, lithe karate-trained muscles tensing in righteous fury, and said,
“I beg your pardon? ‘Babe’? Do I know you?”
Upon which Larkin, the eejit, made matters worse—far worse—for himself by quipping, airily, with a hint of cracked hysteria:
“No, but what’s stopping you?” And even that wasn’t enough. With a sly grin, and an unexpected (to him), sudden sideways movement of the head suggesting adjacent nooky, or secrets best left untold, he added, “Boy, I bet you wear the pants in your house, but not after dinner, huh?” It was like interrupting a sermon by your local bishop, or an after-dinner speech by the CEO, with an explosion of crisp farts interspersed with loud laughter. Bonnie, staring as if shell-shocked, panted through moist parted lips, not in sexual desire but its opposite. Only then did the silly sod realized how far he’d gone, how irredeemably he’d tripped over the iron boundaries of politico-cultural correctness, how far up the spout his job prospects were now…! And yet, even then, he attempted to make up for it all by excitedly stammering,
“On-on a b-beautiful day like this, I mean, I mean wow! Is this football weather or what? Sorry about the ‘babe,’ I don’t know, you just reminded me of. Heck, I don’t know. A chick called Babe I once knew.”
“A chick .. . ?”
The steely gaze hardened and lingered, even past the soft bounce indicating the arrival at the 38th floor of the swift elevator, promptly embarked upon by businessmen in navy and gray suits and blue ties who were discussing sports in the code of their kind.
“Man, the minute Dweekins fumbled that pass I was on the phone to my accountant.”
“HAHAHAHAHA.”
“Good thing I live on the Island. We lost power all weekend because of the storm, or I know I’d have bet my bonus on the Dunehawks taking the title.”
“But man did you see that dee-fense?”
“Dee-fense? What dee-fense?”
“HAHAHAHAHAHA.”
The elevator door closed and the fools were sped on their way.
“You report to Ben Sprocket, don’t you?” inquired Bonnie in the voice of a high-school headmistress as both she and Lance found themselves headed in the direction of the offices of the said Sprocket, Senior Executive Vice-President for Assistant Vice-Presidents (Global Strategies).
“Spor Sprah Sprocket?” yammered Lance and, faced with her gaping face, his own mouth agape in horror, he fled in the opposite direction, shedding self-respect, goodwill and career respectively, jogging determinedly through the pergo-panelled cells and antechambers of corporate greed away from the horrors of Bonnie Vole-Spence and the sham good humor of Ben Sprocket, Lance’s senior classmate at Harvarford (and the reason he’d come to work at HDM&D in the first place, old pal, good buddy, old chum). He fled like a John Cheever commuter driven mad, from the phony-elegant gloom toward the dazzling October light of New York, from which he fled again into the darkness of movie theatres, and there he spent many a subsequent afternoon munching on unbuttered popcorn and watching a series of inconsequential middle-aged romantic dramas featuring leering actors long past their prime and grandmotherly actresses with the placid faces of American innocents and, sometimes on a double bill, implausible and quite brainless action thrillers with incessant explosions, frowning villains with Arabic and/or French accents, and cars improbably taking corners on two wheels. Mind you, Lance, although disgraced, was nonetheless impeccably dressed all the while in Caltanisetta and Zuppa Inglese suits, and he made sure to keep his Samsonite and Broad Street Journal to hand so as to keep up appearances with his neighbors at 37-50 Idlewild Avenue in Queens Village, especially Joe and Aileen Krassner, the Seventh Avenue haberdashers who always greeted him with a strange combination of loud haloos and grumbled sotto-voce imprecations (“Hey how ya doin’ yeah nice day ah the fuck he cares”).
He’d called in sick the first three days, but on the fourth day Ben Sprocket called him and said,
“Hey buddy we gotta talk. I just got off the plane from Vegas when I got a call from Bonnie Vole and man, what didja do, try in rape her? She’s like having a cow.”
“She is a cow,” screeched Lance. “Cow cow cow cow cow. Meuh-euh-euh-euh,” he lowed, sounding quite a bit like those cows who’d bugged him so much in Telluride the year before (or was it Fort Collins?) (or the year before that?)…wisely, he then hung up on Ben and proceeded, as they say, to get on with his life while operating on the assumption that his meteoric rise at HDM&D had turned into a plunge at similar or greater velocity. Official notification of this hypothesis arrived in the mail a week later, together with an abbreviated paycheck and a handwritten note from Ben reading, simply, “Sorry, guy. Have a good life.” Lance shrugged; hey, it happens.
“I mean, like, say la vee, guy.”
He drew on his savings for a walking tour of the Poconos, in the course of which, such is the unpredictability of life, he met a guy just back from Europe who told him they were hiring American corporate lawyers over there like crazy--especially in like Ireland? It saved those guys a lot of dough in training costs, OK right now they were mostly just temporary positions but he’d heard of a couple of guys who’d parlayed THAT into real cushy jobs with offices on the Thames or some fuckin’ place, in like London??
England!!??
So Lance set his job scouts to work, and for a hefty sum they all came up with:
Nothing.
So he trawled painstakingly through the want-ads himself, usually sitting at his corner spot in the local Sparkles Coffee Shop and Cantina, from which vantage point he could see the steady flow of traffic on the distant but ever-visible (and audible) BQE, and the girls climbing and descending the stairs to the Thai restaurant and take-away next door. One day, well into the iron-grayness of November, he came upon the notice, in the business section of the New York Minute, of the buy-out of an American realtor, none other than Zyth, de Warth and Wenn of Lance’s home town of New Ur, Ohiowa, by Maher Global International Worldwide PLC of Killhoole (sic), Ireland; and Lance Lancem said to himself,
“Lance big guy, those guys must be on the ball to afford a buyout like that, so I’m betting they need a smart young American corporate lawyer just like you, buddy, so dust off that rayzumay and get your ass in gear.”
Without further ado, therefore, he took a sip of his Ultra-Latte-Senza-Zucchero-E-Caffe-Ma-Con-Molta-Mocha-Gigante and whipped out the trusty mobile.
“Hello, yes, I’d like to speak to the recruiting officer at Mah-har Global? International? Worldwide? PLC?”
And the rest was his story, entirely. Three weeks later, Lance Lancem, the new Chief Legal Counsel (U.S.) (Provisional) at Maher Global International, etc., was disembarking onto the rainy tarmac at Shannon Airport, murmuring, “wow” to himself at the toy-like foreignness of it all, even more so than Mexico, where at least they drove American cars (except the vee double you’s). In fact, things in the wet green landscape kept on getting smaller and smaller as viewed through the scratched and misty bus window until they finally reached Killoyle City, and that seemed like a bunch of little toy houses to Lance of the boundless heartland and skyscraping Manhattan. Then there were the people. They were an odd combination of half-normal, almost-American appearance, clothes, music tastes, etc., and downright weirdness, viz., extremely foreign, as in bad complexions, smoking despite the (now-ubiquitous) No Smoking signs; the wearing of cloth caps apparently not for artistic effect, or because the wearers were all gay, but because the guys actually just wore the things; an odd absence of grotesque obesity, despite the amount of beer they apparently drank, judging by the ads; the driving at high speeds of small, silly cars, mostly diesels to judge by the pollution, in plastic-toy-like colors; certain habits, such as the nightly consumption of “paints” at the local “bar,” and the overuse of the eff word, which Lance mistook at first for a colorful instance of the local dialect that sounded like “weck” or “weckin,” which he took to be regional variants of “wreck” and “wrecking” and went so far as to use those very same words for emphasis the first time he went inside a night club (Goddi’s Disco), blurting out, “Great wreckin’ place,” to the consternation of the other patrons, some of whom gave him those typical Irish sidelong glances when they thought he wasn’t looking (but he was, he was) . . . Then there was their habit of saying “Well, of course, you’re from the States” every two minutes, as in “Not too bad today, is it? A bit on the windy side. Of course, you’re from the States,” or “I’d recommend the prawn flambé…well, of course, you’re from the States, aren’t you?”
In a word:
FOREIGNERS. Jeez.
It took him awhile to adjust, as may be imagined. But the job was good, the pay decent, and no one seemed to have heard of the Bonnie episode. He knew his stuff and got along well with everybody, or at least as well as the constraints of corporate hypocrisy permitted, with a minimum of flirting, at least until he met Shirley; but now, with Shirley, things were different.
“Ah, Shirl,” he was wont to sigh. The night of their inconclusive dinner at Fairy Farmer’s, Lance had returned to the sprawling bedsit he rented from Mrs. Nora Man, the Crumstown postmistress, at 45, Popcorn Place (upstairs on the left, ring the bell marked “Barnacle”) to do quite a lot of sighing, then, after a cold Pud imported from Anheuser, Michigan, he had contemplated suicide and the TV at one and the same time. Sleeping pills, twenty five or so? Rerun of “Bride of Columbus, PI”? Gun in mouth? Documentary on the White House of the previous incumbent, the one with the elfin smile? Self-stabbing in the groin and/or heart areas? The news, anchored in incredibly low-key style by a couple of guys with REALLY weird accents who looked like high school seniors with bad skin? A rapid drive off the jetty into the icy waters of the Irish (as he thought he’d heard it called; made sense when you thought about it) Sea, with weights attached just to make sure?
He settled on the two weird-sounding news anchor guys (I mean just take the way they said “Now” and “how,” it sounded more like “Nye” and “Hi”), as being more easily ignored than TV drama, however predictable. Drinking another cold Pud by the neck, he concentrated on parallel thoughts of suicide and pleasurable anticipation of There’s a Girl In My Sharkfin Soup, the Chinese sitcom on the Hong Kong channel at 11 that he used to watch in New York on quiet evenings with a Chinese take-out and a six-pack and omnipresent thoughts of killing himself just for the heck of it (in Manhattan the high-dive option had been a constant temptation) . . . these suicide thoughts were fairly frequent, actually. Lance suffered from PUGS, or Possessive Urinary-Gastric Syndrome, in which the patient desires nothing more than to curl up in the foetal position in a (preferably carpeted) corner and pull violently on his willie (this is a male condition exclusively, it is perhaps needless to add) until some sort of wretched climax is reached; then, if a weapon is available, he will not infrequently turn it on himself in an attempt at self-mutilation, or even self-extinction, howling like a timber wolf all the while. The syndrome has really caught on among the central European artist set, notably the post-Bauhaus Baumeister movement in Vienna, Graz and Bregenz; however, Lance, not being an artist by any stretch, had never done anything quite so extreme as, say, paring layers of skin off his dick in public under a spotlight, like that so-called artist dude in Vienna; but as a precaution (hey, ya never know) he took medication prescribed by Dr. Israel Lawn of Queens Village, twice-daily doses to ward off the worst and also, incidentally, get him out of awkward or unwanted social occasions by impelling him to the nearest lavatory with a hurried “’Scuse me”. . . that night, too, in fact, the lavatory beckoned, and he spent some quality time sitting there and taking pulls by the neck from a series of imported Puds and leafing through an old copy of Rim ‘Em Good, the counterculture rock ‘n’ roll shock magazine from South Carolina. Mostly he was thinking things over, not exclusively about Shirley but almost.
a) Why did he like Shirley, when you come right down to it? I mean, she was chubby, to be nice about it; not too bright; very British (not “veddy B’ditish,” as the Hollywood crowd had it, seeing all Brits through the prism of long-ago obsolete What Ho fox-and-hounds clichés); a co-worker; and a (yuck) smoker.
b) She was married.
c) She was married to an IRA guy.
Well, OK. Let’s take them one by one.
a) Because she had nice sad eyes and one of the finest racks he’d ever seen. Man, he could hardly keep his eyes off. And speaking of his eyes, he’d seen with them, twice, how she’d cracked a smile at one of his jokes. (And man what a hit that British accent would be with his friends back home.)
b) So what if she was married? So was Elizabeth Taylor when she met Richard Bronson, or whatever his Goldarn name was, and he had no problem taking her away from Troy or Trey or Ted or what-was-his-name, did he (all ancient history anyway).
c) Hey, the IRA might be a bit of a problem—but not in the States. Not in Ohiowa, anyway. No micks there. Well, not too many. (There was the state director of public safety, name of Sean Oh something, a real cut-up when he was on a roll, but that was about it. And then there was Mrs. O’Leary down the street, the chainsmoking one with the gravelly baritone. But that was about it.)
d) No, maybe that other guy was Japanese. He remembered: The guy’s name was actually Oh, Sean Oh.
e) Oh well.
Anyway, with the electrifying 20/20 vision of an oracle, Lance had solved his problem. He’d about had it with Ireland already, so it felt good to be planning a return Stateside, what with the watery Brussels sprouts and warm beer and cars no bigger than the phone booth that used to stand outside his grandma’s house in Dubuque and gals with acne and those accents that were beginning to sound weirder and weirder (indeed, there had been times when Lance, still uncomprehending even after two or more repetitions, had had no choice but to depart the conversation, or smile blankly and say “Hmmm” or “Hmmm?”) and too much rain and roads narrower than the hallway outside his bathroom and buildings that looked like those pictures of Auschwitz or someplace and people still smoking everywhere despite the Law and lousy TV with too many French programs and bacon that looked and tasted like pigs’ assholes and…
Not to mention the damned IRA that had all of a sudden become a factor with that bombing, and Shirl’s husband (another good reason to get her the hell out), and them on the prowl day and night, behind lampposts and lurking in the dark corners, and this country being full of dark corners, especially behind the hedges and in those funny old alleyways they called “boreens”…
So that was it: They’d go back to the States.
“Radical, dude,” he gurgled drunkenly to himself. He then rolled off the toilet onto Mrs. Man’s Daffy Duck bathmat, where he passed the night.
Next day, quite recovered after a shot of Hawaiian noni juice, half a cup of decaf, a bowl of non-fat Silver Slivers, and an OK workout at that smelly place they called Jim’s Gym, with the French bubblegum-pop music blaring in the background, he invited Noreen out to lunch and put the idea to her over the horrible reddish crawdad-like things with tons of antennae they called prawns that for some reason (foreignness) were so damn popular over here.
“Well, Noreen. The London papers had an article the other day about our new acquisition over in the States, you know, Zyth, de Warth and Wenn? How they’re restructuring? How they need a new budget plan? Well, it occurred to me that I might? Like?”
“Be just the man for the job. I know, I’ve put in a word.”
“Noreen. I owe you one.”
“All right. You can owe me this lunch, for a start.”
“No, I mean really owe you. The way you worked this thing out. I mean Shirl was in a pretty tight spot.”
“Still is. She’s married to an IRA man who’s on the lam, by all accounts, so they’ve only released her on her own recognizance on the understanding that she have no contact with him before consulting them. But I know those lads. Actually, they’d rather she had no contact with your man at all. Far from leading the law to him, she’d be more likely to tip him off and remove all hope of the Gardai, that’s our national police, ever getting hold of him. So sending her to America for awhile seemed the best solution for all concerned.”
She gave him a look that would would have been veiled in slow-exhaled cigarette smoke had she been a smoker, and had Pableaux’s, where they were lunching, not been an anti-smoker’s preserve, and had the Wesson government not knuckled under to the cause of the day...
“Noreen, gee, I.”
“Aw shaddup. Pay the bill and drive me.”
“Where?”
“I dunno, sailor. Your place or mine?”
Lance’s stomach sat up and did a back-flip, and for the next hour or so, while struggling manfully with the boss’s wife in her three favorite Kama Sutra positions (tandem monkeys; upside-down treefrogs; bareback triple-humped Bactrian dromedaries) he struggled equally manfully to hold at bay the attack of PUGS he felt coming on.
* * * * *

II
“You one of ‘em Goddam fuckin’ rich fag kids whyncha give me somma yer daddy's dough instead of buyin' your fuckin' fag ski lodges and fag bee em double u's fuck you anyway whyncha get a job Goddam fuckin’ fag students whyncha go drive a cab get a real job for a change Goddam fuckin Ay-rab fags whyncha go back to fuckin’ Eye-raq Goddam fuckin’ French fags whyncha go back to fuckin’ Paris Goddam fuckin’ fags whyncha fuck yerselves and drop dead Goddam fuckin’ fag bellydancers whyncha go back to fuckin' Egypt or what the hell fuck you anyway Goddam fuckin’ fag students ah fuck you anyway Goddam fuckin’ fag cabdrivers whyncha get a real job 'stead of drivin' yer fuckin’ cabs round in circles all day Goddam fuckin’ fag Jews whyncha go back to fuckin’ Israel Goddam fuckin’ fag liberals whyncha go back to New York fuck you anyway Goddam fuckin’ Jesus freak fags whyncha go fuck yourselves Goddam fuckin’ fag micks whyncha go back to fuckin’ Ireland. ..”
“Oy,” said Ferdia.
Trev Romanov paused in his spittle-strewn tirade to cock his head to one side, like a bird disturbed in mid-worming.
“Eh?”
“Shaddup.”
“Wodjewsay?”
“You heard me. Shut yer gob. Fermez la cakehole. Zip it. I’m not on top form today and the last thing I need is some pissed old git bawling in my ear, got it?”
“Well shit,” said Trev. Roiling within him like the tormented waters of a Hiroshige tempest were the exasperations of:
• an alkie off his drink who hadn’t been able to take a sip for two days because of a brand new unidentifiable but not at all reassuring woofing-and-wowing kind of pain in his lower intestine, but not having what you would call actual health insurance he didn’t know what else to do but take it out on his usual victim, viz. the world, specifically the college students and multitudinous fags thereof;
• amazement at being addressed directly, man to man, eye to eye, by another human being who appeared uncowed by close contact with he who regarded himself to be no less than town crier of New Ur of the Chaldees and an institution to said college students—most of whom had neither the guts nor the wits to tell him to get out of it (au contrary, they kept the old souse going with handouts excerpted from handouts from their parents)—and not a student either but one of distinctly related subspecies, to judge by his five o’clock shadow, bleary eyes and ever-so-slight list to one side (his left, your right)— but not by that foreign fag accent;
• hunger, his last square meal of meatloaf, mashed potatoes and string beans having been consumed (by him) in May, 1987, just before he walked out on his family in Oreoville, Indianola, the day of the big Viet Vets’ reunion when it occurred to Trev what a bunch of fuckin’ pussies his wife and three kids were and how much happier he’d been in the Mekong Delta back in circa, oh, 1967 (and how off-limits that Delta was these days, thanks to those fag politicians);
• on-and-off lust for a cigarette, mitigated by that contrapuntally on-and-off pain in his gut that had the annoying side-effect, while it lasted, of killing everything else, including, probably, him;
• but who cared.
“Hey man,” he croaked at Ferdia’s receding figure. “Got any spare change?” Receiving in response nothing more than a Gaelic shrug, Trev recovered some of his customary piss and vinegar and unleashed a spate of “whoja think you are you Goddamn fag whyncha go back to fuckin New York you Goddamn ballet dancer,” but he realized this was a poor epithet to apply to the likes of Ferdia, who even at a distance that was becoming greater by the second bore an unmistakable resemblance not so much to a ballet dancer (indeed, the mental associations set in train by such a comparison were ludicrous in the extreme) as to TeeTee The Tiny T-Rex on that Saturday morning kid’s program Trev sometimes caught in the common room at the William Burroughs Men’s Shelter down by the Brickyard district—and speaking of the Brickyard district you talk about Goddamn rich fags, man alive…which he, Trev, yet was, if barely, for unbenownst to him the great hand of Providence was shaping a future unsuspected and unavoidable and almost certainly not the one he’d have chosen (but what sort of future would an old slagheap like Trev Romanov choose for himself, anyway?) …well, maybe he’d go see a doc after all. He’d heard there was one on Thursdays down at the Undershaft, some fag from back East probably but he’d make damn sure no Goddamn candy-assed eastern fag doctor put his hand up his, Trev’s, kiester, no sireebob.
MEANWHILE…New Ur of the Chaldees’s latest arrival continued down the street, taking it all in, knackered after nineteen hours of nonstop air and coach travel. Ferdia Quain, fugitive from Irish justice, put down his suitcase and stood on the corner of Judith Fowler Boulevard and Elm Street Loop South (U.S. 183b) to have a smoke and witness for the first time in his life the daily pageant of life in the United States of America. Actually, it looked just like home, with bigger buildings and cars, only with a vaguely surreal edge, like a children’s cartoon populated by real actors. A Mrs. Bread’s bread van rumbled past, followed by a black jeep driven by a weedy adolescent wearing a backward-facing baseball cap; from deep within the vehicle emerged amplified grunts, as of the coitus of swine, tracing deep vibrations through the earth underfoot.
“Shite,” muttered Ferd. “Bad as the Strand on a Saturday night.” Homesickness swam like a tired but determined bacterium through his travel-wracked body. “Bugger it,” he added, somewhat predictably. The foreignness would go away soon enough, he reckoned, and with it the nostalgia, the silly little-boy-lost longing for home. Sure, you get used to anything in this bloody life. And at least he’d made it unscathed and unscarred, even if it was the royal sod-all of a trip, the longest he’d ever taken in his life, longer even than Spain (the Basque country, to be precise), ‘89… the whole thing had turned out to be a cakewalk, but. Back home the guards were on the qui vive round the Gardai HQ, right enough, and he’d caught sight of a couple not far from Cretino Crescent (after he’d dashed back there in a futile quest for vitamins), but not at Shannon, nor on the meandering silver rails of Iarnrod Eireann, nor behind or on or adjacent to the hedge-high highways of the West. In fact, it all turned out to be dead easy: After the explosion, he’d nipped along home, where he took his books with him in his old Rah duffelbag, the one with the Easter lilies on one side, “Poblacht na h-Eireann” on the other. Wary of encountering Shirl, he returned to Finn’s place, which was empty: The lad was engaged in full-fledged full-time marriage practice, God bless him. That night Ferdia had slept fitfully, alert to noises at and around the door and dreaming mostly of uneasy schooldays: missed exams, surly acquaintances circling round, unread schoolbooks, flirtatious schoolgirls . . . He’d got up around four a.m., treating himself before a frugal breakfast of Whoopsy-Hoops to a fine old coughing fit worthy of the late Crankshaft, then he threw together a few things in his bag (Y-fronts, socks, leftover vitamins) and, jittery yet exhilarated, like the star of a murky World War II thriller expecting any minute to be stopped at any minute by Heinz Gestapo (“Halt! Moment, mal!! Ihre ausweis, bitte!!!”), he visited the nearest Bank of Munster ATM to get cash, a moment of truth he’d not soon be forgetting:
“Fuck. I’m skint.”
Well, near enough. He’d taken it all out anyway, all 390 friggin’ euros, fat lot of American apple pie that was going to buy. The rest would go on the card. So much for wine-and-cheese shops, eh? Bitterly, he engaged in self-mockery, causing concern in the narrow precincts of the mind of Mrs. Abel Gance, who was standing just behind him in the ATM queue, waiting to enjoy the fruits of her first two weeks as Assistant Associate Data Processing Input Artist (Part-time) (Temporary) (Second Shift) (Unexempt) at NaughtyBoy Graphics, a local web-and-wunderkind operation renowned for long hours, casual dress, video-game parties, and great pay until they sacked you.
“Ha Ha,” declared Ferdia. “Ho. Ha. Hee. Killoyle Wine and Cheese? Indeed. Ha Ha HA. Oh yes.”
“Are you ah all right?” inquired Ms. Gance, somewhat apprehensive of contact with strangers, especially after reading the news on NoNewsIsGoodNews.com of the boyo in a web parlour in California who’d strafed his colleagues with the contents of a fully-loaded AK-47, killing 300 (or was it 30? Or 3?); but somehow this fella didn’t look like a hotwired nerd, there was too much of a pong of Old Ireland off him. Still, it paid to be cautious, so Ms. Gance backed away slightly, with sidelong visual reassurance of the accessibility of possible escape routes.
But, collar turned up, hat turned down, he’d gone muttering right past her.
“Well, all right then,” she said, mostly to herself, not without some relief.
Ferdia went straight to the railway station and bought a return to Kildare town. Clever bit of track-covering, that, he reckoned. (He was a lifelong Frederic Galveston reader, and derived great pleasure from the intricacies of the typical Galveston plot ). He took the dawn local from Killoyle to Naas rather than to Kildare, then boarded a bus for Galway in the rainy dawn. After lunchtime (a soggy meat pie in Winn’s Bar in Gigglegormley, eyes peeled for the peelers) he hitched in a full-fledged March downpour via Limerick to the Shannon Industrial Zone where, after several appalling moments when he thought he saw a brigade of guards heading straight for him (merely the airport cleaning staff mustering for morning duty), or when he swore black and blue he’d lost his passport—his mind feverishly aswarm with ridiculous alternative plans like mugging a fellow-traveler on the q.t., or risking a phone call and having Finn fax him a fake.
In fact, the beastly document had slipped through a hole in his pocket into the lining of his jacket, as he discovered during a full-press self-search in the gents’ stalls.
In the end he slunk aboard Aer Lingus 109 for Boston, the 6:20 “Hail Mary” flight as they called it, full of returning sisters-in-law and Boston bartenders and priests and giggling sophomores and the brothers of famous and not-so-famous writers and actors and various and sundry other bores of the gaseous genus Homo Hiberno-Americanus. From Boston under a leaden sky to Macropolis it was an easy matter of changing Greyhounds in even-more leaden-skied Cleveland; and by 8 a.m. the next day, after a restless night’s coach ride made to seem longer than 7 hours or so by the ever-present stink of puke and detergent, like a grotty Killoyle bar (say, the Harbourside), and two copulating young drug addicts in the seat behind him (his depression held at bay by a six-pack of Henry the Eighth Malt Liquor purchased from a grayish-blue Indian in the bluish-gray fluorescent glare of a liquor store at midnight somewhere on the bleak black outskirts of Toledo, Ohio), Ferdia Quain was in the heartland of America, actually in New Ur of the bleedin’ Chaldees no less, searching for he knew not what—well, a job, for a start, and a chance to forget all that shite back home. . . pretty much the reason for all immigration since the beginning of time.
But first he searched for, and found, a cigarette, his last Irish Woodbine as it happened, and lit up, impatient to dispel homeward-bound thoughts of Shirley, the bar, the shop, Terpsichore--even Finn, for the love and honor of Jesus. Three joggers jogged across the street in front of him, two of them carrying on distinct, breathy conversations on mobile headsets, the third bearing in each hand a barbell, all three casting disdainful side-glances at the spectacle of a man smoking . . . A red convertible driven by a silver-haired oldster in wrap-around shades narrowly missed a pair of awesomely obese black ladies, dressed as for church in 1953 with bell-shaped hats and the coy peep of petticoats from beneath their floral-patterned dresses, toddling their elephantine way across a crosswalk and loudly talking in unison about an unnamed “she,” as in “she been there” and “she don’t have no sense” and”she gonna call me later”. . . Somewhat behind and to the left of them, as a reminder to all and sundry what country they were in, the Stars and Stripes hung limply from a pole above Bedstead’s Drugs (identified in a gilded sign with a very fine ampersand, Ferdia observed, covetously, nostalgically), on the façade of which was a handlettered sign reading, “God Bless the USA”: No spelling mistakes there, observed ever-critical (for his sins) Ferdia . . . A black-and-white police car like the one driven by Jarhead the edgy rookie in Bloodhound P.I. took the corner, going weeweeweeweeweewaw and about fifty miles p.h. and soon disappeared into the vortex of its own noise and speed. Then, as Ferdia watched and puffed, a young woman in singlet and jeans, with midriff bare, walked up to the kerb, looked the scruffy smoker up and down haughtily as if she were a Duchess, he an applicant for the position of (say) Irish undergardener, and said “No way, man,” before sashaying off, the ideally-synchronized faded-denim globes of her bluejeaned bum conjuring up in Ferdia’s mind the image of two eggs, say plover’s, in a handkerchief, a detached mental image that instantly yielded to red-edged images of sexual congress which Ferdia unhesitatingly squelched, with an effort.
“None of that now, boy,” he self-remonstrated.
A greenish van bearing on its side the slogan “Redd’s Sandiwch Service,” driven by a coal-black man in coal-black garments and sunglasses, drove slowly by and shook and vibrated with rhythms of which the man’s ancestors could only have dreamed, from which dreams they would have awoken screaming.
“Rum place, eh,” muttered Ferd. He finished his smoke. Time to find a place to kip. Time first to track down Fergus McCool and the (puke) Dew Drop Inn, for he and it were the shape of things to come, in Ferdia’s New World.
* * * *
April Fool’s Day, back in the windy winsome greenish hideaways of your man the leprechaun and his cousin the noble clurichaun. Ah ‘twas a fine grand moment ‘neath piled cloudbanks of mashed-potato hue when Stan MacKnee, with the excessive effort born of these many years’ fags and pints and short ones and fucking and fuck-all exercise bar that, slipped the rusted moorings so the Rumpelstiltskin, in disbelief, could cast off slowly and warily into the canal for the first time since Terry Whelan, its true owner, had scarpered down under.
“Thar she blows,” said Stan, buffering the remark with deep chuckles of self-knowledge and irony.
Once the 1979-vintage 214 HP Evinrude motor was fired up and doing a relatively decent job of processing its accumulated sludge and oily petrol, the Rumpelstiltskin threw out a couple of deck-twisting shudders and a smoke-expelling bark or two and settled down to the business of being, once again, a barge rather than a houseboat, tracing a shining ribbed wake on the still canal waters.
“Ta-ra-tum-da-ra-lay,” sang out Captain Stan MacKnee, standing tall and proud at the wheel with a just-popped bottle of Old Aardvark India Pale in one hand, the other retaining firm control of the wheel, himself keeping a stern and firmly-focused eye the while on the boat’s substantial array of gauges for speed, vacuum pressure, fuel, and the like. An uncluttered panorama of the canal and upcoming Belfers Bridge and the surrounding countryside opened up through the windows, which were now stripped of the buttercup-and-bunny curtains he’d come home one night to discover; a present from Terpsichore . . .
. . .THE SODDING BITCH . . .
…which he’d been only too happy to tear down and chuck in the bleedin’ dustbin.
And that was another advantage of casting off, weighing anchor, buggering off, hightailing it, and moving on, along with being somewhere else at long last and never having to wonder if by some million-to-one chance that footstep on the gangplank might be HERS instead of the bailiff’s or that old chancer’s, the ex-ecclesiastic who hung about the dustbins: yes, leaving it all behind also cut down on the number of times he’d wake up and see some shabby arsehole rooting about in his garbage, always a problem back at Moylan’s, with the grade of customer they tended to attract, especially on weekends…well, of course there were exceptions, like the now-incarcerated ex-cardinal of All Ireland: Purvis was it? Or Jarvis? Like the ale…? Anyhow, His ex-Eminence, who’d been cashiered from Holy Mother Church for interfering with the wives of some his senior shareholders , was out there for awhile last May, morning noon and night, looking for “the wee beggars,” as he called empty whiskey bottles, “me dear wee beggars, d’you see,” as he’d explained in his wheedling way to Stan one irritating Sunday morning before sunup, “for without them God bless and save us I’ve no way of keeping meself in drink and otherwise what’s the pint, I mean point?”
God, what a world, when you got right up close.
A belch roared forth.
“ORRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRP.”
Ahhhhhhh. ‘Twas good. Too, ‘twas good, so ‘twas, to feel the now-warmish, now-coolish early April breeze ruffle through his hair and to admire the ripply canal-reflections of the pearly-glowing clouds and to see the placid cud-chewing yeomanry and their lovely kine and with every chug of Rumpelstiltskin’s doughty old Evinrude to put all that bloody mess farther behind him. It was ten in the a.m., he’d sold his old Nitsun Micro for a couple hundred euros with which he’d paid his bills and his debts to society, and most importantly he’d had it out for the last time with that bloody sow… I mean there he was, he’d rushed up to her bedside at the hospital and all she could do after barely acknowledging his presence was talk about Donal this, Donal that, Donal the other, and how Donal the drug-addict ex-car salesman with a bad case of acne was all set on taking her back to America, to the college where Donal the fuckin’ genius had once taught and where Donal Esquire had another job offer, again, or some such shite, the worthless sod, lurking about behind the screen squeezing his pimples because he was afraid, with some reason, that Stan would give him the whaling of a lifetime and no mistake.
“You’re going to America, so?”
“Oh you bet I am, and so is Donal,” said Terpsichore, who wasn’t really hurt at all, just her leg broken in three places, not the best outcome but it gave her a few days at taxpayer’s expense in the Mater; she’d looked dead sexy lying there, but, and it took all Stan’s self-control to turn on his heel and walk out without a backward word or gesture save,
“Cheerio, then. I’m off,” which, if you’d asked him at the time he’d have said was just about the acme of cool, under the circs. At least he finally had the cop-on, the presence of mind, the bowing of the knee to the inevitable. Good-bye, Terpsichore, muse of my chance, mused Stan, the chancer with the writer’s (or copier’s) dreamy eye. Coming full circle, then, he’d realized over a Red Reamer at Williamson’s down the Strand (poncey sort of place, not his style but OK with the imported brews) that after all his house was a boat, and that boats had this tendency to float down rivers, canals, waterways, and the like, like; and that he’d never wanted to pull up stakes quite as much as now, when every streetcorner in the city of Killoyle shimmered with the ghosts of their mutual past: There, where she’d felt sick, by the roundabout, and they’d reckoned she was preggers; there, by Roaches Chemists, where he’d announced his intention of being a writer or copier; up the way, by the ex-church, where they’d first kissed; next to the harbour, the scene of their first night out…and on it went, except down the Strand, which was too expensive for either of them, so if he decided to stay on he pretty much confined himself to that square mile of boutiques and toffee-nosed coffee shops, and that meant, realistically, he’d not be staying at all. No, time to say sayonara. Arrividerci Killoyle. Time to go west, young man. He had a mate or two out West (Liam Smith, Osgood Casey, that Slovak fella Bohumil—or was he Slovenian?) with a good line in import-export, and the canals were a-beckoning this time of time of year, and the Shannon a-flowing and the fishies a-jumpin’; ah that was right enough, he’d sail the old Rumplestiltskin down to Garlick-on-Shannon and get in a fair bit of fishing and swimming and that and maybe hook up with one of them French tourist girls with the golden tans and long legs, they were thick on the ground come the summer months. The writing gig could go on, too, there was no statute of limitations on that, and his employers seemed quite satisfied with the amount and quality of the shite he was copying out on a regular basis, like.
Oh he had it sussed, right enough. And wasn’t he the world’s own darlin’ boy?
“ORRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRP.”
* * * *
“You here on business?”
“Yes.”
“Got any vegetable foodstuffs, goat cheese, fruit, old shoes, saddles, tuna fish, toilet paper, tires, perishables like that?
“No.”
The customs inspector peered over half-moon spectacles at Shirley in the irritating way in which people who wear half-moon spectacles tend to peer over them at other people. Who do they think they are, bloomin’ Benjamin Franklin (or was that Isaac Newton?)…?
“You British?” Birdish?
“Yes.”
Well, you have my passport, don’t you, you silly mongoose, she thoughtwaved violently in the customs inspector’s direction. He was fiftyish, heavy-jowled, gray-haired and brownish-gray of complexion; officially black, she supposed, although it was hard to tell, and that was something she reckoned she’d have to get used to, what with all the blacks about, even if most of them were rather browner than black, and some downright whiteish or even gray round the edges, only black by default, as it were… this bloke was one of the grayish ones, but he wasn’t in the best of health, she reckoned, and working in the Immigration Hall couldn’t help. She glanced around. On the far, fake-panelled wall, above the turnstiles through which trickled two streams of arrivals, one U.S., the other non-, hung a portrait of the President of the United States, a white man with even whiter even white teeth regularly on display, as in the portrait. Framing him were unknown locals: the Governor, the Mayor, the State Ombudsperson, a distinguished car salesman / philanthropist who had contributed one of the outside walls of the main terminal building. The left wall was covered by a mural done in the Neo-Expressionist mode of the WPA depicting idealized woodlands and prairies in which disproportionately large and muscular farmers toiled under overdone cumulus-laden skies; opposite, an honor roll made much of the Macropolis Airport staff’s contributions to the cannon fodder requirements of the world war and subsequent conflicts: Vietnam, Cambodia. An IndoPak with pink-rimmed eyes was coughing stranglingly, mucally, in the next queue. Shirley glared. One of those Asian diseases, no doubt. Banyan flu, or something. Comes of living in the midst of all those ducks or herons, with pigs under your bed, or something. They really should stay at home, they really should. Sigh, she sighed. Perhaps the same should be said of her; after all, what the devil was she doing here, in the Macropolis Airport, Ohiowa, U.S.A.?
Running away, that was what.
As for Lance, the cool guy, the honest Injun, he was just happy to be home. And it felt like home, even in the airport: The Pepsi signs; the obese security guards, one black, one white; the patriotic red, white and blue, those three colors set off to their own advantage in flag form with golden tassels against the greenish-gray walls; the vending machines containing M&Ms and Ridgies and Oreos, visible through the glass partition, through which, also, expectant relatives, limousine drivers, creditors, pimps, and the like waited with cow-like patience behind a velvet rope cordoning them off from the arrival hall: America!
America, America, God shed his grace on thee…
Even the smell, of humanity cleansed, was American, with none of that Irish aroma of barely-dried sweat and Guinness overlaid with detergent and piss and salt-and-vinegar chips (or “crisps,” as they annoyingly said over there).
“Welcome back,” the customs agent in his—the U.S.—queue said. Lance thanked him with a jaunty salute and walked through. Outside, he retrieved his suitcase and waited for Shirley, who as a foreigner was taking a little longer.
“Been here before?” inquired the weary, unwell-looking customs officer, with what Shirley realized was an attempt at a smile.
“Well, no,” she said, gamely making a matching attempt of her own. “Actually.”
“Welcome to America.” Imaginary legions of Marines stiffened to attention. “Hope you have a good time,” he said, and handed her her passport.
“Well, thanks, I’m sure I will.”
Only in Ireland had the customs guards been as considerate, she thought, if somewhat close to the cheeky department, with their “darlin’s” and “sweeties” and “chubs” and “ooo biggies” and “ta-ta, duckses”; certainly they weren’t like that at home. She remembered the imperious H.M. Customs officers at Dover and Plymouth and Windscale, tall as admirals, eyeing her as scientists might eye a specimen and snapping out cold, unpleasant observations (“Undress from the waist up, please”; “Mind them buttons”; “University? No, you don’t strike me as being educated at all”; “No sneezing here”); and her initial opinions of the U.S.A., a country which, like most Britons, she had been raised to regard as a country cousin with muscles, money, but no manners, edged upward accordingly, if only slightly, like a snail on a damp English garden wall.
She left the arrivals hall at a half-rush, dragging her carryall with one hand and fumbling with the other with the detritus of plane travel, a jumble of passport, ticket, and frayed boarding passes (Killoyle-Shannon; Shannon-Knock; Knock-Macropolis), peering myopically for Lance. He waved, as if he’d been waiting for her.
“Welcome to the U. S. of A., Shirley,” Lance said, successful in resisting the temptation to say “honey.”
“Yes,” she said, sensing the unspoken “honey,” or its ghost. “Welcome home, Lance.”
Home: Outside, vast car parks under vaster white-and-blue-streaked skies; yellow Big Bird buses carrying schoolchildren or manual laborers; yellow taxis; Val-Hall Superstores interspersed with strips of the nearly-identical quickie-foodshops of R. B.’s, MacDugald’s, Burger Tsar, Peter Pan’s, Treasure Island, Desmond Tutu’s, Warren’s Burgers, etc., etc., stretching out in an infinity of winking electric sameness horrific to some, reassuring to others (such as Lance). And, of course, he knew, beyond the strip malls, the shopping centers, and the suburban tracts yclept Whispering Vales and Georgian Estates and Pioneer Ridge rolled the eternal Plains, the Great Plains, those waving, magnificent seas of umber–or was that amber waves of . . . ? Uh-oh say can you see…? Seas of wheat and corn, anyway, interspersed with farms, Nixnoco gas stations, ribboning highways, Jonathan Beare dealerships, and 24-hour “convenience” stores amid islands of rural Victoriana like Lance’s own great-aunt Nancy’s two-storey woodframe farmhouse outside Froggerton, the house that was used in that movie In Your Face the Third Way starring Cheri Godd and Urs Plankton (he’d met Urs during the filming, the guy was a real asshole, all he could say was, like, “What are your, like, sexual preferences, dude?” and “Get real, dude!” and “Dude!”); and the woods tumbling down to the riverbank, and the fishing hole Lance had never known but had dreamed of, like any self-respecting red-blooded American youth; and the equally imaginary but seminal Little League triumphs, and That (non-existent) Championship Season in the late-summer twilight, scented with fresh-mown grass and sun-warmed asphalt and hot chicks’ perfume….and now he was back, with Shirley by his side. She’d never been here. It was his victory, and he couldn’t wait to share it with his friends. Not that conjugal cohabitation or anything like that was on the agenda, not officially. God, no. They were here strictly as business partners on a six-month contract, scheduled to go back to Ireland in September; but September was the best part of the year around here and he was doggone if he’d be leaving paradise to go back to that weird little place where it was always damp and they had those pasty complexions and crooked (and jagged) teeth and everything smelled of armpits and warm beer and yesterday’s piss and the roads were narrower than his hips and the phones were so weird and smelled of stale cigarettes and everything leaked, including the shoes and the umbrellas…
“Well, here it is,” said Lance, in a proprietary fashion, taking charge of all 50 states, 5 time zones, 5,824,112 square miles, and 300 million inhabitants.
“Crikey,” said Shirley, overwhelmed. “I’m really here, aren’t I?”
And she still couldn’t believe she’d taken this plunge when Lance came in last Friday to ask her if she was interested, that Noreen was offering to send them both Stateside to help streamline the new company…well, she’d always lived on impulse, had Shirl, and that was the truth of it. After all, she’d gone to Ireland on impulse. She’d taken the job on impulse, too. She’d married Ferdia on impulse, hadn’t she? And here she was again, impulsively throwing things over, letting the house on Cretino Crescent to Angel Fisher from the office, one of the “word processors” or “input coordinators” (or “secretaries” as she’d always called ‘em), then up and moving across the ocean, closing down her checking accounts, putting the Nitsun up on blocks, getting away from those awful coppers, especially the inspector—Neame, he was called, Sherlock (oddly) Neame—who’d kept on staring at her chest and repeating “Ya know, doncha, Tits? Ya know where the bastard is and you’re holding out on us, arencha, Tits?”—then jumping to his feet and peering down her cleavage. That nightmare had lasted two hours or so, and it was enough to sour her on Ireland, not to mention coppers, for a good while, so she was ready for a change; and as for abandoning her lawful husband, the mad bomb-throwing nit, well, not before he’d abandoned her, buggering off as he had without a word, the old sod. IRA, indeed! Not that she really believed that. Actually, knowing him as she did it was hard for her to accept his ever having been in the IRA at all, introverted, bookish, self-absorbed, hypochondriacal, undersexed bag of bones that he was. But enough of those Gardai blokes seemed to believe it, like that dreadful Inspector Neame, and after a few days the coppers were all out by the side of the road and under hedges and even one dangling from the eaves, peering into her bedroom through a telescopic zoom lens, and that gave her the jitters, it did, and it was the bloody limit, so it was.
Anyhow, Noreen Maher was so reassuring about it all: “Now don’t you worry darling, you’ll gain valuable experience over there and by the time you get back the whole mess will have worked itself out one way or another, and you can rest assured I’ll keep you updated on the latest developments and you can trust the company to back you all the way. Just think how it’ll look on your c.v.: Six months restructuring the American branch!”
Jolly good, as far as it went.
As for him, she hadn’t heard in days, no, weeks, and Finn wasn’t much use, of course he never was, was he, smarmy little eel with his jutting jaw and bulging biceps, like some kind of wind-up toy Mussolini. She’d called, twice, the week before they left, and both times all Finn had said was “He left and he’s not coming back, yeah? So don’t call back AGAIN just to ask me to give him a message, right? Cos I dunno where the frig he is, OK? Christ.”
So all in all America was a bit of a treat, when you got down to it.
They emerged from the terminal into the snow-scented wind of a Middle Western spring. Clouds tattered westward across a sky of, well, Grecian blue (Shirley HAD taken a cruise to Patmos). Immense vehicles lumbered by: a yellow bus; a lorry; a series of automobiles comprising ill-assorted elements of armed-forces assault vehicle and family saloon; another, even bigger lorry; a series of rock-music-exuding lime-green vans with various slogans painted on their sides: “Bill’s Lawn Doctor”; “Mid-Cities Lumber”; “Redd’s Sandwich Service”; “Onofrios Cafeteria Supplies”; “VOOM Home Repair”; a tractor pulling a tomato-red trailer bearing another tractor, also tomato-red, followed by a bus once tomato-red, now puce from age and neglect. No one looked, or looked up. Shirley followed Lance across the street. Middle-aged brownish-gray black men in burgundy and black uniforms stood about talking, laughing in their black, chesty, John Erroll Jenkins way, occasionally glancing up, then away, while initiating conversations along the lines of “Need a cab?” or “Let me help you with those, ma’am” or “Sheee-yit.” Lance displayed toward these importunates the arrogance and certitude expected of the returned (middle-class) native, striding confidently across the carpark, sporty rucksack dangling from his right shoulder, in his left hand his flight bag, courtesy of Ozarkia Worldwide Airways. He looked quite the lad. And he was easier to take now, thought Shirley. Once they’d accepted the implicit business arrangement, he’d been all business, and used his eyes for merely looking, not for rolling left and right and fixing on her chest and screwing upward and what have you. He’d dropped the tiresome double ententes, too, and really seemed quite normal all of a sudden, actually quite a nice guy.
(Well, let’s not go too far.)
Newly-normalized Lance led Shirley to the Beavis Rent-A-Car agency, where a pale blue Hermes Majordomo GLS was made available to them, with (Shirl noticed) a minimum of fuss, obsequiousness and paper shuffling; indeed, the whole boring process took under ten minutes and seemed to be quite a jolly affair, judging by the loud laughter and high-fives of the (black) people behind the counter. It was all so American, so soon. The car, too, exuded America: big, automatic-transmissioned, power-powered, smelling of aerosol anti-scent scents, with enough room in the front seat for two people to stretch out side by side (and didn’t she reckon he might be thinking along those lines, as it were, and not a little bit either; oh no, she hadn’t been around a few blocks in her long journey from West Yorkshire to Ohiowa not to recognize lovey-doveyness when she saw it, only—funny thing—this time it was the fella who’d taken the initiative, not her, as she’d so often and so disastrously done in the past, and of course it would have to happen now, in the middle of her marriage, wouldn’t it, with all that rubbish unspoken and up in the air and all over the place)…suddenly, after a few hours’ feeling queasy, she wanted a smoke. She hadn’t lit a fag since a hasty last one on the rain-slicked tarmac of Maher International Airport in Killoyle, and she still had half a packet of untouched Bugles in her coat pocket, but small red no-smoking roundels were affixed to the car windows, sternly displaying cigarettes bisected with red bars. It was just something else she’d have to put up with, she supposed; oh, they were going through all that in Ireland, too, but in their half-hearted Irish way, not taking it to the fair the way the Yanks always did, or so she’d heard.
Lance expertly swung the wheel left, then right, using no more than the index finger and thumb of his right hand. The great land-barge lunged forward onto ever-widening thoroughfares hemmed by wire fences and more carparks and green roadsigns reading “Macropolis” and “Fort Wayne” and “South Bend” and “New Ur” (their destination) and “Turnaround” and, mystically, musically (Chi-ca-go, you wunnerful town…), “Chicago.”
“Oh, I do so want to go to Chicago,” she said.
“Oh yeah?”
To Lance, there was no romance in the name. To him, it was a memory of baseball games and boring museums and college entrance exams and a failed romance (Lauren something, Jewish girl from Skokie, summer of ’93). To Lance, New Ur sufficed, for the time being.
Of course, it all depended how things went with Shirl.
* * * * *
“Well let me say I really appreciate getting that car back I mean the Tortuga is a real gem do you know that as a matter of fact you might be interested in purchasing it yourself we do excellent credit deals and the car’s in outstanding condition just run in really not a kilometer over twenty thousand and the motor purrs like a kitty and I’m just after taking a look at her not a thing wrong that I can see bit of a miracle really considering the building just blew up all round her well that’s Asian quality manufacturing for you ah when all’s said and done Made in Asia’s what you want to see on the underside of your car if not on your own backside if you follow my drift ah ha ha AHACK beg pardon no not a scratch on her that I could see or that my expert restorers can’t mend in a jiffy of course there are those piss stains but I can assure you she’ll be clean as a pig’s whistle or hen’s tooth if you will before you can say Tortuga ah ha ha well that’s simply grand and I’ll certainly keep you in mind well how can you be sure and yourself clearly going through a midlife crisis of some severity judging by your expression or is it unwell you’re feeling if you don’t mind me asking well all right then how about the missus mightn’t she fancy a nice drophead roadster with a bit of pizzazz to help over over the midlife hump ah ah ah ah well if you’re quite sure anyway here’s my card in case you change your mind no no do please take it I have others no no I insist there you go and don’t forget Heartland Autos if you’re ever in need of a racing good deal on wheels ah ha ha now let me see what was that other thing oh yes about your men Duddy and Quain well I’m not quite sure what you mean I’m not sure I know this Quain bloke at all after all you must remember I don’t live here I live in Dublin and commute down mostly by so-called express train and believe you me thereby hangs another tale express me arse if you’ll pardon my anyhow as for Duddy how should know where he is Inspector you are an Inspector aren’t you always a sore point with youse lot I know getting the ranks right and that once I remember going in for a spot of tea at the local gardai station in Tallaght where me old fella worked as a boiler cleaner and general factotum meaning jack-of-all-trades of course I mean he cleaned the boilers and mended their trousers and swept up the carpark you know that kind of caper anyhow there was I age ten or so mistakenly calling the superintendent superintendent Devious I believe he was called or Delius one of those or perhaps Dillon so anyway I called him in my blinking utter ignorance constable Ullo Constable I said How’s she cuttin’ well my God the look he gave me there were handcuffs and a long gaol sentence in it or maybe he was a poofter no not in the Gardai Siochana eh never ah ah ha ha ha ahem ANYhow ever since then I’ve been very careful to get the ranks right if you know what I mean so it is Inspector Inspector not Chief Inspector or DCI or Herr Commandant or whatever they call them these days ah ha ha ha ha ha hahahahahahahaha now let me see where were we ah yes you were asking about this man Quain well Inspector all I can say is that I never met the man but he sounds a bit shady from your description and as for that narky Yank as you call him Donal Duddy well first off he’s not a Yank I mean he may be narky whatever that is and he did live over there right enough but he’s no Yank I know that for a fact knew his da so I did a fine old wanker I mean banker ah ha ha hahahahahahaha anyway as to your hypothesis that Duddy’s gone back Stateside well I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s taken off there again and as a matter if fact why shouldn’t that other fella that Quain article why shouldn’t he have gone there too I mean where else do Irish go when the going gets tough ah ha ha anyway wait till I tell you your man Duddy and I had a little chat a few days back oh he was in a shocking state so he was entirely gray from tip to toe and shaking like a leaf and not selling sweet eff ay I mean it was like three cars in six weeks so I told him all about my experiences selling cars over in the States in Texas it was a place called El Brando Texas near Houston but you wouldn’t know it it was like the middle of the bloody moon only hot as Hades and I’m talking about early April me man anyhow my impression and it’s just an impression mind my impression is that my little speech had quite an impact on the boyo if I do say so meself so if he’s headed west young man ah ha ha ha ha ha AHACK I do beg your pardon if he is actually en route to the New World as it were I take some credit for it but let me put it this way first I never know where Duddy is even when he’s there if you know what I mean I mean Christ there I was when I got your call at home talking things over with the missus who’s about to go in for an operation binary cyst they say benign thank God or is it urinary one of those but still you never know especially in the wee small hours when you can’t tell if it’s your owld lungs wheezing or somebody sawing down a tree next door and believe me those lunatics next door are capable of it bloody Greeks good God once they woke us up at three in the morning I kid you not tuning their bouzoukis at three in the bloody a.m. the miserable gits that’s right I know you can scarcely credit it of course you live down here where it’s nice and quiet but I’m in business I have to be where the action is as they say if you know what I mean anyhow after I got your call or a call from someone in your office don’t know who it was didn’t catch his name but he did go on a bit about immigrants and gypsies sorry travelers and so on but anyhow when I finally got the message I was needed back down here I knew I had to come down from Dublin again and I’d just got back so there I was I had to get up at four thirty in the morning that’s right I did say four-thirty in the morning sunshine I’ll have you know just to be in time for the express from Heuston to Killoyle express is it ahhaha don’t make me laugh it was a friggin milk train I mean it stopped at every crossroads and dairy farm between here and the Great Blasket Island itself so I hear you saying it did so why not drive then I know I know bloody strange isn’t it that a fella who sells cars won’t drive one a hundred miles or so down the road like well too bad because I won’t and that’s flat I mean have you tried to drive on those roads never mind if they call them jewel bloody carriageways or whatever jewel carriageways indeed that’s a good one pardon me while I laugh jewel carriageways me arse pardon my French well hah hah Jaysus it’s typical isn’t it typical of the kind of bletherskite coming out of the government these days isn’t it still never mind I made it to your office didn’t I because here I am amn’t I and it’s not exactly as if I don’t have anything to occupy myself with up in Dublin I’ll have you know oh no not exactly I mean there’s the new car lot over at Tallaght for a start great location if you ask me with all mod cons and easy access to the Ring Road then we’re also looking to acquire a Shogun dealership out on the Swords road somewhere now I know what you’re going to say Shoguns are going through a bit of a bad patch just now well I grant you that but believe you me with that new eleven-cylinder six-wheel-drive of theirs they’re positioned perfectly to take off in this market and I intend to be there when the nicker starts flooding in so anyway that old place would be an ideal location just between you and me and the lamppost no not that one that one over there no no THAT ONE right where was I oh yes the Swords road I mean honestly you could hardly do better than that right off the main highway to the airport and even heading North to Dundalk and Drogheda and Belfast those places are booming these days oh yes anyhow that’s just one of the many things I have on my plate at the moment and I haven’t even mentioned the operation my wife has to go in for next week it’s a binary cyst at the tip of her spine benign thank God or is it urinary one or the other a cyst’s a cyst eh ah ha ha but still you never know especially in the middle of the night when you’re not sure if it’s your heart going west or if the bloody grandfather clock’s breaking down AGAIN know what I mean I’m sure you do ahahahahahaha I mean there you go and as for Duddy why don’t you bleeding well go and find him yourself what do you want me to do about it eh do you want me to do your job for you well why don’t you do my job for me then how about it pal now that it seems I’ve an opening up at Heartland Autos because I may not know where the bugger went but I can tell you with utter and absolute confidence that the bugger’s buggered off that much I do know and I have a strong suspicion that girl he was with is in all this somehow but don’t ask me how I couldn’t tell you well all right I have made a few discreet enquiries on me own like and found out one or two things that might interest you for instance did you know she lived with a fella a right waster by all accounts some kind of poncey so-called writer with a ponytail well we all know what that means don’t we I mean put those things together the wee colleen the barge and a so-called writer with a ponytail no less and what does it spell that’s right apart from permanent unemployment and sponging off the Sosh well let’s be frank about it ess ee eks is what it spells all right I mean pardon my French and all but where you have ess ee eks you have drugs too more than likely and the whole carryon I mean illegal immigration and Indian food and hashish and marijuana and gay lifestyles and Dutchmen and blacks and God knows what else anyhow the bloke was called Sam I believe or Sean and the pair of them lived on board a barge of all things well a houseboat is what they called it but it’s a barge to all intents and purposes isn’t out no not in the harbour they don’t have barges down there for goodness’ sake out by Moylan’s Wharf on the canal in the Belfers area you know where that is oh you don’t well you take the MacLiammoir Bypass until you get to Haughey Circle I mean well just look out your bleeding window you silly fucking nit oh dear I am sorry Inspector I didn’t mean that but I’ve been under considerable stress oh considerable oh yes indeed you wouldn’t believe I’m terribly sorry I say would you like an ArfDog I have one in my pocket not that I wouldn’t fancy a nibble of that myself all melted and gooey that it is I mean I’ve scarcely eaten a bite since I got up this morning at four thirty to catch that bloody so-called express train express me granny well anyhow as we were saying you go up Uphill Street until you come to the MacLiammoir Bypass and turn left across Haughey Circle to where you can see those trees that’s the other side of the canal and those hills you see just beyond the Wax Museum no no over there where I’m pointing between the goalposts of the Novitiate Academy’s football field right over that way no no that way Jaysus are you fucking blind oh dear there I go again I AM sorry I must be under more stress than I thought not that I have anything to hide you understand ahhahahahahahahahahahahaha ANYhow somewhere in that neck of the woods is where the young lovers kept their houseboat or barge or what have you or so I heard and as I told you a little bird told me well all right I asked that stupid bloke who wears the singlets the one who claims to be named Finn McCool that one yeah a bit of a chancer if you ask me I’d keep my eye on that one if I were you by God I would Finn McCool me arse begging your pardon that’s what HE says and he showed me his driving license but never mind his driving license I’m still that dubious if you know what I mean I mean Finn McCool in this day and age honestly anyway I was thinking of taking him on that way I could keep an eye on him after all he turned up at the car lot the other day ready to go to work oh yes I kid you not he probably got the idea from Duddy who was even then as the fella says even then plotting his departure anyhow I’m not sure about that McCool article he might be good at flogging cars to a certain kind of woman but you know there’s something how shall I put it well something downright funny about a fella who goes about in a singlet in weather like this I mean did you hear the radio this morning I heard it on the way down not that I carry one all the time you understand but it’s useful anyway it’s supposed to get down to three tonight or what is it forty I always used the old Fahrenheit myself it gets too bleeding confusing they way they keep switching back and forth one day it’s punts the next day it’s kilometers then before you know it they’ve sprung euros and milligrams on you I mean honestly it’s all part of the master plan you know the Westmeath cabal that Wet Wesson and his gang the sooner we turf them out the better if you want my frank opinion anyway speaking of listening to the radio I also heard and this might be of some interest to you actually you probably know it already and I know what you’re going to say ah ha ha ha you’re going to say something like Shut up you total bloody arsehole—”
“All right,” interjected Chief Inspector Neame in a high bleating voice not his own. “Shut up, you total bloody arsehole.”
“—ah ha ha ha ha there you go my word you’ve quite the sense of humour haven’t you Inspector always good to know when one’s dealing with the law shut up you bloody arsehole indeed oh that’s a laugh so it is just fancy that an Inspector can’t wait till I can tell the wife ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha hahahahahahahahahahaha but seriously folks as that Yank comedian always used to say you remember the one who was it now little fella with a big nose that was him definitely with the glasses and the outsize wig on his head no no hang on just a sec I tell a lie a big fella he was with a very small nose I knew it was one or the other and hang on he had sideboards as well and he was no hang on he was six foot five if an inch Willie no Woody maybe that was it Harvey was it or Jerry could be you remember the one Jewish you can be sure of that no that I’ve anything against in fact an old fella who lived five doors down from me when I was rooming with Spotty Bolger you know who he is don’t you Wet’s new transport minister anyhow there we were no back in rented digs down on the Circle with a right owld harridan of a landlady Mrs. Treadmill she was the one with the pet anteater God that animal was an unwelcome sight first thing of a morning with its tongue shooting in and out as it inspected the tenants for ants anyhow one of her other tenants thet old fella I was telling you about the one who lived five no it must have been six doors down anyway I’m fairly sure he was Jewish but where was I oh yes Harv or Merv or whatever his name is but seriously folks he always says and the audience goes wild silly berks so where was I ah right the radio wasn’t it well now as I heard it they arrested five fellas setting up dynamite charges or something up near Strabane or was it Letterkenny ANYhow they nabbed these five galoots when they tried to rob a bank dressed as RUC that’s right impersonating RUC officers they were oh no they call it something different now don’t they Northern Ireland Police Service is it the Prod Plods that’s what I call them Prod Plods do you follow me Prod as in Protestant and Plod as in well of course you’re one yourself oh good I’m glad you’re with me don’t like to miss the target with a little humour you know ahhahahahahahahahahahahahahaha AHACK ah ah ah HAAAACK oh dear I do beg your pardon must be sitting in that draught does it I don’t know why but every time I go to somebody else’s office they always make me sit in a bloody draught AHACK well anyhow as I was saying AHACK shite I do beg your pardon I wonder if I could have a glass of water oh no don’t bother I can go and get it myself no need to trouble yourself like that no no really all you have to do is tell me where to go and I’ll go fetch it AHACK AHEM myself I beg your pardon I thought I saw a water fountain of sorts just through there in the corridor didn’t I AHACK AHACK AHACK AHOO AHEM I DO beg your pardon hello well well it looks like the Inspector’s buggered off too.”
In the suddenly empty office, Byrne contemplated the plump waddling of well-fed pigeons on the windowsill, beyond which a still-bare tree shook stiffly in the wind.
* * * *
“Shag me. It’s himself. In the flesh.”
“It’s never you, is it? Jesus Mary and Joseph, so it is.”
“I’ll be buggered. So Tone McGirl’s you?”
“It is. Or should be. Mum’s the word. Tell me. Just coincidence? Or did you…?”
“Yeah, as a matter of fact I used to live here.”
“Doing what, for God’s sake?”
“I taught a course at the local college, then they hit bad times and gave me the boot. But they just got a twenty-million-dollar grant from Maher, the building tycoon from back home, so they’re taking me on again. I came back last week. Mainly to get shut of Killoyle, like. But the college job doesn’t start until September, so I needed a bit of table money to see me through.”
“So I’m on days, you nights. That it?”
“Right. Until his nibs decides otherwise.”
It was the changing of the guard behind the bar at New Ur’s Dew Drop Inn on the Fort Dean Highway (US 182): 4 p.m., time for Ferdia, who was on the 8-to-4 shift (early-bird specials to kick things off for the early birds with the shakes: a pint of stout or mug of Bod’s, a raw egg, a short Wild Turkey, a trembling hand, a rheumy eye), to hang up his bumfreezer and keys and hand over control to his 4-to-12 successor, who turned out to be none other than (as the astute reader will have already surmised) Donal Duddy, former used-car salesman from Killoyle of the eponymous county in the fair now-faraway land of Oyrland. Donal was in comfortable circs for the second time in his life, having put Roofwalls on the market for an advance of twelve percent on the assessed value from Drympna Collins, estate agent and former mistress of his Dad’s. It was a real burning of bridges. Right enough, this time he’d never go back, but. Oh he’d miss his pints, and the old throat-clearing spook, and the view from the roof of Roofwalls, and the hissing of lorry tyres on the Crumstown Road on a wet Sunday morning; but otherwise he’d had it right up the owld bunghole with Mother bleeding Ireland. The gombeen men, the small-mindedness, the envy. The bombers, the politicians. The gobshites. The bastards. And now here was one of them turning up right under his nose. There had never been what you might call friendship between the two men, who had, after all, only met once, casually, on the street, over a smoke…but even at such moments (he reflected) a bond may form, especially these days between smoking Irishmen, so there was no acrimony between them either, nor its cousin, machismo, your average Irishman generally not being given to that, nor to automatic assumptions of poofery on the other’s part (that being the bane of the true macho) unless evidence to that effect presents itself, i.e. winking, nudging, the mouthing of silent endearments, chains, finger movements, etc. So Donal greeted his compatriot not with fervor but with cordiality. And Ferdia submitted his tallies and bar receipts (“tabs” in the local vernacular) to Ken, the gloomy man who managed the dump on Fergus’s behalf while Fergus sat at home contemplating his navel while giving money to, and accepting more of same from, local Hibernian charity organizations—and making, and taking mysterious phone calls, many of them from overseas (more of that anon) . . .
Having unknotted and disposed of his apron, Ferdia swung round the bar, lit up a Manlyburgh Lite and sat down on a barstool to resume or pursue conversation, which went pleasantly enough but for a slight, teasing tic of apprehension on one side of Donal’s face, as if he had just suffered a mild stroke. For in the back of Donal’s mind and moving steadily forward was the unsettling notion that he might well be talking to a mass murderer, a jovial mass murderer, granted, and one with whom one could share a pint and a laugh, but a mass murderer nonetheless. What else could you call a man who’d tossed twenty pounds of plastique into a crowded building, even one full of guards?
Ferdia parried with philosophical ease.
“Aye. Barbaric, it was. I’m with you there, son. But not as bad as some of their attacks. At least this time the guards were the clear target, which of course didn’t prevent your odd civilian from getting caught in the crossfire, as you might say.” Ferdia inhaled profoundly and took note of the skeptical slant of Donal’s spruced-up features. Back in Killoyle the fella’d looked and sounded like a zombie with a head cold; here, apart from the momentary paralysis of the left side of his face, he looked quite fresh-faced, even displaying evidence of having had a shave sometime in the past two or three days. “Only thing is, I didn’t do it. What’s more, I know who did, but he blew himself up in the process, so there’s no proof, so sod me, eh? So you may well be looking at a man on the run for the rest of his days. Rio de Janeiro, here I come!”
“How’d you end up in this place?”
“Owner’s me cousin.”
“Fergus?”
“The very man.”
“Jaysus. What do you know, or what you don’t. Small world, dare I say? Nah,” said Donal, leaning on the bar, “I didn’t really figure you for the bomber. It’s just what they said, you know, on the radio and that. Still, you can’t help wondering, you know. I mean, you were in the Rah once, weren’t you?”
Donal was emboldened by being squarely, safely, and undeniably in New Ur of the Chaldees, Ohiowa, U.S.A., within reach of firm but fair American law enforcement; yet it was at that moment that he realized how long was the shadow of the gunman, and once again felt relief that he’d put that bloody country behind him. And despite his matey bluster he really had no idea whether Ferdia was one of them or not.
“True for you, I was in the Rah,” said Ferdia, with the weariness of one who has explained himself too often. “But not any more, right? And anyway I was only the bloomin’ archivist.” And it was at that moment that he realized how deeply Ireland, and the Cause, had rooted themselves in his soul, and he felt a desperate lust for his native sod. At the same moment, he exhaled his misgivings together with the last of the cigarette’s smoke, extinguished the fag end, and bade Donal farewell, having exhausted his stock of conversational topics, or so he felt, especially since the fella seemed to want to go over ground long laid waste by others . . . and anyway it was time to go home after a hard day’s serving up the sauce to New Ur’s many and varied alcoholics. Not that home in its current incarnation was much to go back to: a first-floor walk-up room (second-floor here, in Yank parlance) in a pre-WWII residence motel renovated in 1991 called The Tudor Court, with its freshly repainted fake half-timbering and Ye Olde English lettering on its sign striking just the right note of down-at-heels shoddiness and long-ago one-night stands. Whores still lived there, and a commercial rep, a few Mexican or Guatemalan immigrants, a hot-dog vendor, some students at the local college, Downstairs State, and a postman (or woman). At night the tellies bloomed behind flimsy curtains and boomed in unison across the court, as most were tuned to the same virtual reality news programmes and The Mr. Plop-Plop Show after 9 p.m., when Al, the manager, a Bengali (short for Ali), no lover of television, could often be seen standing at the door of the office in his shirtsleeves just below the pink neon VACANCY sign that always seemed just about to flicker off permanently, smoking, watching, dreaming no doubt of a better Bengal, or American girls (or both), or a world made safe for Islam (or all three).
“Cheers, now,” said Donal, like the professional barman he now was, if only provisionally.
“See ya,” said Ferdia. He shrugged on the tartan mac he’d bought at the Zip Mart on Highway 67 in the northeastern, Macropolis-bound suburbs and stepped out of the guilt-laden dimness of the Dew Drop Inn into the cacophonous brilliance of a spring evening in New Ur of the Chaldees, Ohiowa, U.S.A., blue and hard and deafeningly alive with the sound of cars and radios and the song of migrant birds—all of which, mind you, still fell under the rubric “Exotica” to Ferdia, who had never traveled further from home than to London’s Archway, except to Strasbourg, once, with the vague intention of blowing up a prominent member of the European parliament who was also a crazy Ulster Prod (too bad the plan had gone west, with the intended victim called back for a rugby special on UTV) and that other occasion to Spain, or rather its northern, breakaway province of Euzkadi, on “business,” the business of making things go boom (which he hadn’t, because that was just before he quit, and anyway he’d had too much Ixarra in that roadside tavern outside San Sebastian to aim straight). He’d never really had any deep desire to see places until now that he’d actually hit the road. Now he felt stirring deep within him thoughts of The Faraway, and found himself idly wondering what it might be like to look down on Macchu Picchu, or up at Everest, or across a café table at a Buenos Aires beauty against strange alien sunlight and shadows, or at drifting sampongs on the Irrawaddy (or Mekong). The sham freedom of his new life afforded him the fleeting luxuries of indolence, dreaming, and fantasy, preferable to the drab reality of legal pursuit, or the lads sending an agent after him (what the Yanks called a “hit man”), or the absence of womanhood in his life—ya, the bitches, starting with Shirl (where was she now? Why hadn’t he heard? Shagged off just like that, after eight bloody years of marriage? It wasn’t fair, that’s what it wasn’t, nor it wasn’t, so it was)—and general overall disbelief that his previous life, which had seemed a bit to mostly rickety and unstable not too long ago (try a fortnight, say, or three weeks), now seemed, from the unsought-for perspective of a man on the run, to have been a paragon of stability, virtue, and moderation, and never mind the marital spats, vitamin crises, business ventures (and failures), night sweats, empty pockets, etc.
It just went to show, didn’t it: Ya never fuckin’ know in this life what’s just round the corner, me owld love, or what’s just passed you by.
The residents of Tudor Court were elusive, and the drinkers at the Dew Drop Inn were, for the most part, old dipsos given to rambling pronouncements on topics of interest exclusively to themselves; quite irrelevant to that branch of the great worldwide boozing fraternity were the identity, background and bona fides of the owner of the hand that poured the drinks. Ferdia could have been Bigfoot, Hermann the German, Big Billy Bitch the transgendered rock star, or Milo Rogers the Poet Laureate of Munster, for all they cared. Of course, such anonymity made for a great hideaway. Only Fergus, and now Donal, knew Ferdia’s identity, or so Ferdia thought, and Donal didn’t know much (yet suspected a bit more than he knew: he’d bear watching, would that boyo), and Fergus McCool was a genial owld hoor (or so Ferdia thought) with, like so many Irish exiles—he’d legged it to the States in ’74 after a failed attempt to kidnap the statue of Cu Chulainn from the GPO in Dublin —a rooted allegiance to the three colours and The Cause and all the multi-sheened shamrock hues of emerald blarney.
“Sure and be janey,” he’d said, on seeing Ferdia on his doorstep (also like many an Irish exile he spoke the imaginary language of the little people, rather than that, real, of the plain people of Ireland) “and me just afther sayin’ to the missus that it was well and long past bloody time for us to do something for The Lads that are caught on the twin horns of a dilemmy, so to speak, what with the keening pipes of the green pastures of Peace beckoning on the one hand and the immortal Cause singing her mournful strains on the Harp on t’other and in betwain the perfidious Brits lurkin’ behind every bush and hedgerow to trip ‘em up and bite off their goolies and make minced pie out of their poor wee guts. Well then, Oy says to meself Oy says, fair play to the lads. Time for you, misther me man, to putcher money where yer mouth is and write ‘em a cheque, or host a fund-raiser, or hold a prayer breakfast (they’re very big on the owld prayer breakfasts over here, oh it’s a lucky wan you’ll be if you don’t get dragged into one of them things), but then suddenly, out of the blue, like an answer to me prayers, doesn’t me own owld cousin Ferdia Quain from the fair city of Killoyle atself in the fair dear owld land of Oyrland God’s blessing upon her sweet and verdant shores doesn’t the very lad himself show up on me own doorstep here in far Amerikay, God bless and keep us and the masses of saints in heaven altogether!?”
In spite of which greenish blether he impressed Ferdia as not really being surprised to behold on his front doorstep, standing next to the statuette of a Negro lawn jockey, his cousin not seen these seventeen years; in fact his wandering gaze gave the impression that he had have somehow been expecting Ferdia’s arrival, or that it was very low on his to-do list for that day. But Ferdia shrugged off the feeling, needing (after all) a job and some sort of halfway decent accommodation, down the road.
“Dia duit. How’s she hangin’, Fergus?”
Of course, with such a stellar background, Ferdia strolled into a job pouring shots and pulling pints at the Dew Drop. Better yet, he was on the up-and-up, fully furnished with work permits, although not as himself: He took the moniker Tone McGirl from the distant memory of a famous Skerries whelk fisherman and cousin of his mother’s. It was a small deception (what’s in a name, and so on) with which Fergus McCool was only too happy to collaborate, in the ostensible interests of keeping aloft the dear old Plough and Stars (while garnering more income by discreetly selling out over the phone—but we’ll be coming to that)—a faded version of which sagged limply behind the bar at the Dew Drop (“ah God bless ya sure haven’t had I had that owld flag for donkey’s years, ‘twas back in me student days at Galway so ‘twas, ah them were the days right enough, ah good Goddy Goddy God, faol saol agat agus bas in Eirinn, eh, Ferdia? … sorry, I mean Tone he he?”). In due course, with much telephonic urging and a bribe or two, and—through even teeth, with a smile—the hint of force, mock permits were arranged, fake visas obtained, and an ersatz green card was soon on its way from the subsection of an immigration department in Macropolis that specialized in nonIslamic visa applicants. Ferdia felt like a bloomin’ hypocrite for simultaneously running away from and embracing his past, and by God he was never a hypocrite if he could help it; but as we all know, sometimes hypocrisy is the only way out, and in any event the whole caper was an expedient to get a job and go to ground for a wee while, just. Next stop Rio? Another new identity? The American Dream? Or cravenly (or boldly) back to Killoyle? Too, at odd moments (on the bus; in the jakes; during TV commercials; while groin-scratching meditatively late at night in the dark), he found himself wondering if there was any point at all in this life in trying for some kind of reconciliation with Shirley. When he thought of her it was like thinking of a stranger, or damn near, and for a second or so it seemed downright odd, not to say barmy, to think that he was actually married to the cow. On the other hand, he quite fancied strange women—some of ‘em, anyway—so maybe if he waited a little longer she’d seem like a total stranger all over again and he’d fancy her, again, too. Or maybe the problem was, as the film-score-composer and rap-opera lyricist Wes Wonderwoman had said the night before on the Mr. Plop-Plop Show, “like, sexual incompatibility from the get-go, I mean she went all languid and gooey and romance novel kinda shit and I’m like the ride ‘em cowboy guy so we broke up, she got the Malibu place and I got the Lambo so that’s cool.”
Mostly, however, Ferdia’s thoughts centered on a stranger (Terpsichore), as you might expect of a poor fella who’s just been uprooted from all he knows and who drifts from memory to hope to illusion without distinction, while fighting a losing battle against self-doubt and the nightly temptations that come in a bottle, or the palm of your hand ... Anyhow, Terps was no less real than Shirley, and a damn sight sexier, especially (and here she was far less than really herself, or more) behind the veils of memory which transmogrified her into a more beautiful version of Mata Hari, or the Empress Eugenie, or that Aussie movie-star number, Nicolette Tedman or whatever her name was: Deadman? Redman? De Man? Mann? . . .
Anyway, he was dying for some lemon chicken. At the Two Hangs Chinese Takeaway, Hang Junior was behind the counter and smiled to see Ferdia. Hang Junior was one of Ferdia’s few speaking acquaintances in New Ur.
“You go home now?” inquired Hang Junior, with the expression of a cynical bookmaker. “You want dim sum?”
“Nah.Lemon chicken’s the man. Do me a decent fry-up. Lots o’ rice, squeeze a few lemons.”
“Oh lemon bad luck in China. Too many lemon mean you gonna die.”
“Well we’re not in fuckin’ China are we. So squeeze away, Hang.”
Hang Junior emitted the cawing bellow of mirth Ferdia’s down-to-old-sod Irish manner always elicited (if the experience of three encounters can be referred to as “always”), and he proved more than generous in his helpings of rice, lemon peel, and the crusty chicken bits Ferdia craved more than Ireland itself.
“Tony,” said Hang, addressing Ferdia in the only way he could manage, “you go back Ireland soon? Or stay States?”
“Stay States, I reckon. At least till they call off the hounds. You know—woof, woof?”
Another burst of mirth: “AWWWW-heeeeee. You funny guy, Tony. Tony very funny guy. Ah, Jimmy?” Hang Junior turned to the wizened cook, his father Hang Senior, a non-English speaker who insisted, because of Jimmy Cagney (a great favorite in China), on being called Jimmy now that they were in America, home of Cagney. “Tony nao-mao shung hee, wa?” said Hang Junior, or words (or sounds) to that effect. Jimmy-Hang Senior nodded, his face aglow from the steam from his woks, his mind tottering in sympathy with his remembered trek through the hot humid province down to the planks of the boat pier in Guangzhou, the air scented with industrial effluent, vegetable oil, soybean, cheap tobacco, and diesel fumes: China, his China!
“Nee hao pa-hao,” he muttered. “Weh.”
Buffoons they were to the locals, with their peasant faces and spidery limbs, and their dialect of deepest Guangzhou sounded to middle-class Americans like turkeys gobbling, and didn’t they (the Hangs) know it; but descendants and beneficiaries of an ancient culture they were too, and as such they were its representatives among the semi-barbarians whose only knowledge, however slim, of that great culture came through its food and those awful kung fu movies. The responsibilities of the Chinese cook abroad were, therefore, enormous. He was the sole representative of 5,000 years of Li Po, Confucius, Meng Zhi, Li Yü, Kublai Khan, Sun Yat-Sen, Mao Zedong, and Peking duck. Barbaric as they were over here, and their fat behinds, cars, milk drinking, and TV shows proved them to be just that, Hang Senior knew he could make a difference, however small, with decent Chinese takeaway food. So many more converts, so many more admirers of Chinese culture.
It was s’su tuan, and all in your basic Confucius.

* * * * *
In Killoyle the day before, a drone droned on.
“The Special Detective Unit has intensified its monitoring of persons who are residents of or currently in this jurisdiction who are suspected of involvement with international terrorist groups.” Thus spake Chief Inspector Sherlock Neame, head of the newly-created Killoyle branch of the SDU. The room in which he spoke, Ops HQ on the third floor of Gardai HQ, was stifling and smelled of boredom, a cheesy blend of ill-digested breakfast, stained underarms, and lurid aftershave. “The Special Detective Unit's responsibilities,” continued Neame in a nasal voice punctuated by whistling sibilants, “include State Protection; monitoring the activities of subversive and extremist groups; investigation of subversive and terrorist crime, national and international; protection of VIPs; protection of cash in transit; provision of armed response; operation of the witness security programme; observation of fugitive movement in and out of the Republic; and nabbing the bastard who blew us up last month. Inspector Schwarzkopf here will lead a unit to America, with the cooperation of our friends from the FBI, Special Agents Mutt Overcoat and Simon Twain,” a solemn pair, judging by their faces, both black, by race and temperament—or perhaps they were in somber mood because “Mutt” was actually Matt and “Simon Twain” really De Wayne Simons (or Simmons)—“and with any luck they’ll track down the fugitive and prime suspect, Ferdia Quain, and bring him back to face the music.”
“Hear, hear,” bellowed Aloysius Schwarzkopf, Inspector of that name since the day previous, rising bulkily and unsteadily to his feet at the back of the room. “Hear hear bloody hear,” he re-bellowed, causing heads to turn and puzzled faces to plainly wonder if the fat eejit was drunk. He was not; rather, he was on a personal high. It was the shiny new Inspector’s badge on the left side of his belt buckle that did it. Lumbering up to the rostrum like a sea lion mounting a sea lioness, he went on, “Hear hear again, one and all. And let me assure you, sir, that with the help of our FBI friends I and my team will wrap this up in a jiffy. A jiffy, so we will. The vagrant bastard Quain, with whom I’m acquainted, I’m sorry to say—and let me add parenthetically, oh I could tell you tales—well I can assure you that your man will be brought home in irons, in a manner of speaking. And let me further assure youse both, and all three, and assembled ladies and gentlemen and all your boyfriends and girlfriends of whatever gender, that we will tarry not, nor will we hang about with our thumbs jammed up our bums, begging your pardon, especially the gay ones, if any. Peace be with you.”
Chief (that day anointed) Inspector Neame displayed sudden sourness on his face, as if hit with the ghost-scent of ancient urine in a long-unscrubbed wayside jakes.
“That’s quite enough. It will take,” he said, “as long as it has to take, Inspector Schwarz, ah, kopf.”
Aloysius retreated from the lofty heights of fawning with the nimbleness of a nineteen-stone Morris dancer.
“Of course, sir. I only wanted to convey my enthusiasm. Beg pardon, sir.”
“Splendid. Carry on.”
The expendables—typists, sergeants, community coordinators, eager beavers, etc.—took themselves back to their cubicles and another bleak day of low-level anxiety and indigestion and surreptitious Web-surfing while the action team, or corps (or ActCorps) repaired to Neame’s office (or Ops HQ) for a final look over their preparations for action (or ActPreps). The plan, worked out with the FBI, was a simple one, made simpler by the apparent simple-mindedness of the quarry, Quain, who so far had allowed himself to be closely followed on his zig-zag trail from Killoyle across the midlands and the West to Shannon and from thence to Boston and Macropolis via express coach, and so ultimately to New Ur of the Chaldees by not one but three FBI tails, one of whom sold him beer in Toledo and two of whom had feigned amorous involvement in the bus seat behind him. True, initial hopes for a mass reunion with IRA bankrollers in the States were dashed, but surveillance was “ongoing,” in the word of Agent Simons. And a tip from the FBI’s Irish contact in New Ur, the mock-stage-Irishman Fergus McCool, had “solidified” the Bureau’s info. The suspect Quain, it transpired, had been hired on by McCool as a bartender under the name of Tone McGirl and so far appeared to suspect nothing (“why he’s just a great big goshdarn stupid ignorant Irish asshole,” in the memorable words of Agent Overcoat).
So the plan was this: On D-day, Ferdia—sorry, Tone McGirl—would be approached in his bar by the American agents (not by Schwarzkopf, whom he knew, and who would be there strictly in loco parentis, as it were) posing as innocent drinkers, lured away with banal assurances of sex and/or money, possibly clocked on the noggin if resistant, identified, booked, and held overnight before being released into the custody of his compatriots, Inspector Schwarzkopf (with a “p,” as in psychodrama) and Chief Inspector Neame, who would a) identify him and b) escort him on board an Aer Rianta special undercover-express nighttime Boeing 7E7 flight out of Macropolis International direct to Killoyle (via Shannon), followed promptly by a televised show trial to reassure the nation, in the words of the Taoiseach, Mr. Wesson (who was following progress closely as a means of distraction from the daily tedium of his job and the burgeoning scandal of his Iranian mistress, Faluja, and her seaside house in Civitavecchia) that “the day of the gunman was over”—“and the smoker, too, by the way,” he added, adding too that he wasn’t sure which of the two would face the longer prison term in a hypothetical future second Wesson administration .
Ferdia would, in short, be a scapegoat. And what a goat! Six foot three; big-nosed beyond belief; awkward, dilatory, episodically arrogant, an ex-IRA OC (archives): much better than going after some small fry like one of those local lads everybody knew about and kept around mostly as bait for the big boys like McArdle of unlamented memory and the mysterious “General” O’Deane.
As plans go, it had legs, and went.
“En garde, Quain,” mumbled Aloysius into his Ovaltine (third of the day), moved nearly to tears by his own magnificence and the flirtatious glitter of that Inspector’s badge.
* * * *
The hideously tall and bony man named Tony or something left, taking with him his scent of tobacco and urine (he sprayed down one trouserleg, probably his left: Jimmy-Hang Senior knew, having himself been guilty of it on occasion). There was no one else in the shop, so Hang Junior turned up the huang chung program on the short-wave from Taiwan, a program featuring Yo-Yo Pa, the lu master from Taipei playing favorite excerpts from the opera K'ung-ch'eng chi.
“Hung hu ch'ih-wei t'ui,” murmured Jimmy-Hang Senior, swaying with nostalgia. Suddenly, remembering midafternoon smoking breaks in the grove of pine trees outside No.2 Industrial Zone offices back in Guangzhou, he craved a smoke and was about to set off when, barely two minutes after the droopy malodorous gangler had left with his lemon chicken, in came someone else from Ireland, whatever or wherever that was, a red-haired gai-jin girl with a cane, named Teppy or Toppy or Taipei or something even more complicated. Hang Senior cared not a jot. Face averted, he hurried past her on his way to a good old solo spitting-and-smoking session in the alleyway behind the building, where he could look up through a tangled mass of power lines and a tree branch or two at the calm blue sky beyond and imagine for a moment that all around him was the teeming, consoling immensity of China.
Hang Junior, on the other hand, quite fancied the girl. He enjoyed imagining her pubic hair (red, too?). He even liked her slight limp and the walking stick, topped with a silver dog’s-head, that she used to compensate for the limp. A broken leg, as she’d explained, in an accident in Ireland. She was friendly but not excessively so, and not quite as stupid as most of them seemed to be—although of course all that was relative, and the girls he’d known back in China were certainly no geniuses, either.
But nor did any of them have tits like these, or those.
“Hello, Hang,” she said. “You know what I want.”
“Hello Miss Teppy. Ah—you want beef lo mein, no garlic, ri’?”
“Right.”
So completely gai-jin had she appeared at first, with her reddish hair and white skin, that Hang Junior had been quite reluctant to believe she was anything but a local Ohiowa American. But her accent was different, he could tell that much. He asked her about it one day. She described Ireland, and Hang Junior was transported in his lively mind to a place of deep greens below and soft grays above with calm ponds and hidden woods and gray stone houses in between, a bit like (or so he fancied) northern Kwangji province, plus more private cars and houses and minus the construction cranes and pollution and government nosy parkers.
“You know Teppy, another guy from Ireland, he just in shop,” said Hang Junior, bursting with the momentousness of the coincidence. A month previously he’d never heard of Ireland, and now here were Irishmen and Irishwomen coming at him from all directions. “Big guy, he up to maybe here maybe,” holding his right hand above his head an inch or two, although Hang Junior himself, at a meter eighty-two, was on the tall side for someone from the back country of Guangdong province where scrawny chicken and boiled rice was your average dish after a hard day’s hoeing in the paddies.
“Ha?”
Terpsichore had a hard enough time following what the Chinese bugger said at the best of times, and when he changed the subject on her like that it was damn near impossible; but he was even-tempered enough and happily repeated:
“Guy from Ireland. He name Tommy.”
“Tommy?”
“Maybe not. Maybe my English not too good. Maybe he name Tony, ri’?”
Tony?
“Well, I’m sure there are a lot of guys from Ireland over here,” she said, wondering if he might be talking about Donal who, she knew, popped out “for a chinkie” two or three times a week, especially now, in the Middle West of America, where Indian restaurants weren’t one a block. But his name didn’t sound remotely like Tommy or Tony (well, except maybe to a Chinese ear), and surely there were other Irish about, good heavens wasn’t the chainsmoking old hag who ran their boarding house named Mrs. O’Leary, even if she did have a voice like John Wayne’s (who, it appeared, had actually gone to school a mile or two down the road) with a hangover? (Looked like him, too.) And anyway who bloody well cared? As if she’d come all the way from Killoyle via Dun Laoighaire, Holyhead, Paddington, and Stansted, just to meet other Irish. No, thanks.
“Thank you, Hang,” she said. He handed her the greasy, redolent lo mein in an oil-blotched brown bag. She took it with one hand and with the other expertly maneuvered her cane, remembering Audrey Hepburn in Wait Until Dark and even feeling a little blind, in retroactive sympathy. Hang opened the door for her.
“Say hi to other Irish guy, Miss Teppy,” he said. “Maybe you meet him, ah?”
“Maybe.”
On her way out she encountered Hang Senior coming back from his cigarette break and brief mental return flight to China, his eyes glazed, his breath rank, his brow crumpled, his expression…. inscrutable. (Actually he was remembering the money he’d made as Assistant District Team Leader in Industrial Zone No. 2 headquarters of Asia Rising Perfume Manufacture in Guangzhou and wondering how long he’d have to slave over the woks over here before he could hope to make as much: four and a half years with no weekends, he’d reckoned, given current income, exclusive of bank interest rates, heart failure, and other imponderables.) Funny, thought Terps. Look at us. Both of us immigrants, one from China, the other from Ireland. The stuff of do-good encounters and liberal hand-wringing and television soaps, but really it was everyone out for him- or herself, or trying to get away from the cops, or finding a good place to stash the money— or, like her, leaving behind a mate you didn’t want any more. So it was a new life. And this time she wasn’t going to blow it, limp or no limp. Anyway, the quacks in Ireland (Dublin) and England (Stansted Airport) had assured Terpsichore the leg would heal fine, nothing to show, no scar, no limp. Bloody lucky that was, so. Debris flung by the blast had broken her left leg neatly in two places. She remembered nothing until afterward, when she woke up on a stretcher with strange policemen’s bulbous noses sniffing at her and Donal hovering on the sidelines (the best place for him, in a way) wringing his hands, afraid he’d be blamed, somehow. Some inspector or other had it in for him, he said. Pure paranoia, she said, pointing out that she was the one who’d borne the burden of suffering: she’d been on her way to the sergeant’s desk to give a statement about the car when the bomb went off and chucked a few dozen bricks and lumps of mortar through a window she happened to be passing. Noise, pain, then nothing; the docs guessed she’d been conked on the noggin by another brick. Still, could have been worse, eh? Like six feet under. Best thing was, when she came round and all, they’d completely forgotten why she’d come in the first place, so she chucked the notion of owning up to nicking the car, as long as she could get away. Donal’s offer of company Stateside came at just about the right moment for that, even though she’d cooled a bit on her Beppo—whom she no longer called Beppo, for one thing, because a) it was too bloody silly and b) it cheesed him off and c) he seemed 100% Irish to her now that she’d got to know him. The moping, the whinging, the sidelong looks. Not a trace of Italian. And he was the bit of a wet, she could see that. Just like Stan, and it wasn’t like she had any intention of going back to THAT berk, oh no thank you very much. Difference was, Donal was a sweet guy, and fairly spoony over her; so she’d hang around for awhile until he was set up at the college and she got her (as it were) sea legs and, once she had the green card in hand, find a real job to replace the temp position she’d landed at Overstreet and Undershaft, Attorneys…amazing how respectable and boring she was all of a sudden, the ex-biking chick and 24/7 rebel from the East End of Killoyle, throwing away all her parents had given her only to retrace her steps back to it again, on her own terms, in her own way, in the Newer World. But the way of the world it was, once you grew up. Problem was (and her mind’s eye vividly saw Stan slumped sideways across his desk, copying out other people’s articles, scratching his bum, screwing up his face in readiness for one of his burps) so many never did. Especially fellas.
But she did have a job, of sorts. Her desk was in the front lobby of Overstreet and Undershaft. A name plaque had arrived that morning: “T. O’Hanlon.” They hadn’t wanted to bother with Terpsichore, or a thumbnail job description. It was basic: typist, no matter how they dressed it up in polite euphemisms. She wasn’t fazed. It was money, earned. And somewhere along the line, probably at university between the sit-ins and Italian films, she’d learned how to type 74 words a minute without looking down, or even up. Her fingers flew over the keyboard of her computer like Paderewski’s over the keys of his Bechstein. This, and a lucky shot at the six-month non-Islamic visa lottery, got her the job at the attorneys’ office. Gary Overstreet, the senior partner, was a bald, worried Midwesterner with a Philippines-shaped archipelago of birthmarks across his pate. These seemed not to worry him, fixated as he was rather on his girth (not considerable but too much for his taste or that of current society, judging by the number of exercise machines that resided in his office) and on the upward mobility of his life; on cultivating the cream of local criminal cases with a view to TV coverage and pushing on ultimately to Macropolis, Chicago, New York, and glory at the edges of the known universe. Meanwhile, he needed a typist, or, as the newspaper advert put it, a “word processing specialist, non-smoking.” Terpsichore had arrived in New Ur of the Chaldees off the 7:34 bus from Killoyle via Dublin, Wales, London-Stansted, Boston, and Macropolis two weeks ago last Thursday. By Monday she was in harness, working for Overstreet. Oh, her appearance harmed her chances not at all, Overstreet being quite your average buttoned-up would-be Lothario, married with two kids, mortgages, that carry-on. And Terpsichore had coyly exposed a smooth slope of breast. And his voice had sounded a little strangled when he said, “Well, Miss O’Hanlon, welcome to America—and to Overstreet and Undershaft.” Overstreet was all right, Terps reckoned. He’d slurp from a distance but never try for your actual leg-over. As for Undershaft, known as Greg, real name Arthur G. (Greg), he was an enigma, even to himself. “Did I say that?” he was wont to wonder, pondering. “What did I mean?” At lunch he often ordered, then left and went to another restaurant, where he ordered again, then left and returned to the first restaurant, by which time his first order would be ready. Dessert he eschewed in both places, preferring a quick Eskimo Pie from the local Buy ‘n’ Fly. It was “expensive but effective,” in his memorable phrase. Driving in winter, he tended toward reckless speed, and indeed had been caught by the radar of the Ohiowa State Highway Patrol going 120 in a 35 zone; yet in summer, he was the slowest poke in the slow lane and had been stopped going 30 on the freeway by a patrolman who had stopped him a scant six weeks previously for going 105 in a school zone. His golf game, too, reflected this conjunction of co-eval personalities: handicapped 44, he trounced the great Cheetah Rivers at the Binns Canyon tournament, but negated his victory by rushing up afterward and striking Cheetah repeatedly on the knees with his No. 5 iron. He was then whisked away to a mental home, where he wrote his now-legendary Prison Letters to an imaginary friend named Rudy. At the age of 31 he applied to join the U.S. Olympic Pentathlon team and embarked on a schedule of rigorous training that involved running 27 miles daily and bench-pressing four half-tons, once each. Miraculously, he re-invented the body of a 19-year-old and was admitted to the team, only to be disqualified for smoking a cigarette at the starting blocks of the 100-metre dash at the European Heats in Neu Herrengotz, Germany. All in all, a human oddity of the first water, although rumor had it he was mad for Italian movies and, indeed, seen from certain angles, there was something of the sad-clown actor Orsini Orsinetti about him, or so Terpsichore imagined. But he was a raving nutter, as Gary Overstreet confided to Terpsichore, his eyes straining away from the plunging gorge of her soutien-gorge; Greg was entirely unsuited to working at, let alone practicing for, a law firm—
“But he inherited it all, so what can I say. Hey,” blurted Gary, unable to control himself, “what are you doing for dinner tonight?”
“Stopping at Hang’s Takeaway.”
Later that day she did precisely that, as we have seen. Afterward she walked, or limped briskly (alert to the temptation a handicapped woman must offer to the muggers of this world) down Judith Fowler Boulevard toward Mrs. O’Leary’s, where the college had found Assistant Adjunct Professor Donal Duddy and his companion “temporary” accommodations—a bedroom, a bathroom, a kitchen smaller than any she’d seen, containing historical artifacts of the McCarthy (U.S.) / De Valera (Ire.) era, such as a side-opening toaster, an icebox, and general frumpy-yet-cozy décor of the early ‘50s.
Coming up to the zebra crossing at the intersection of Fowler and Jupiter Terpsichore glanced cautiously at the man waiting at the crosswalk, a tall, gangling figure, a human dinosaur with prehensile overbite and eyes a-bulge, the ensemble familiar to her from...
…Killoyle. Yes, it was that fella with the fat guard at Fairy Farmer’s, the one who’d given her the woozy once-over she could still feel at the base of her spine. The Irish guy Hang had mentioned, no doubt: yes, he was carrying a Hang Takeaway carrier bag. She’d seen him somewhere else, too, but couldn’t place it…the tobacconist’s? The bus station? No, somewhere more sinister, judging by the depth of her revulsion. (The papers? The telly?) Well, no thanks anyway, and cheerio. She hadn’t come this far just to throw herself on the mercy of some desperate scrubber from back home. He, and Killoyle, and all that, were in the merciless Past.
“Jesus,” she muttered to herself.
Unsettled by the spectacle, and unnoticed by the neo-saurian mutant, who was breathing heavily and uttering muttered syllables to himself while awaiting the green man, Terpsichore quietly turned away into her rewritten Future and crossed the street farther down, depriving them both of a coincidence that would have been more than they, or I, could bear. Nor did she feel like the confinement and inevitable small talk of Mrs. O’Leary just yet, so she went to eat her carry-out on a grassy knoll diagonally across the way, on the other side of a kind of semi-roundabout, or traffic circle or whatever they called ‘em here: “Handsome Harvey State Park,” declared a sign, boldly, declaring also Handsome Harvey’s bio in a nutshell: former pitcher for the Macropolis Micromanagers, coach of the Edison (N.J.) Editors, member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, native of New Ur, and (no doubt) near-god to Joe Six-Pack, the American punter. A bench and picnic tables were visible, along with the bush or two (or more), treescape, lawns, and what not that you expect to find in a park, however humble. At the entrance was a statue of Handsome Harvey.
“Hello, Handsome,” said Terpsichore, seeing in the baseballer’s effigy a resemblance to all toothy, strapping American men, more like Greg Undershaft than Donal, or the poor freak she’d seen at the zebra crossing. What was he doing over here, anyway, modeling for The Fossil Review?
(No, it was the telly, on some sort of news show, when she was in hospital. Maybe he’d won the lotto. Well, never mind now. Goodbye to all that, and a hearty good bloody riddance.)
She tucked into her beef lo mein with renewed contentment and a semblance of joie de vivre, despite the walking stick.
* * * * *
At roughly the same time, or as nearly as makes no difference to our narrative or anything else, across a quarter of the globe and the greenish lump of Erin and, at its southeastern corner, athwart the sprawling urban mass of Killoyle—somewhere actually not far from the southeastern wedge of our fair city in which once the Quains had dwelt as a couple down by Cretino Crescent and its wooded and gladed purlieus—Petey Cahill, plumber, electrician and local IRA brigade commander, was affixing a false mustache to his upper lip and admiring the effect in a mirror on the wall of the jakes in O’Reillys Wiring and Electrical Supplies, where he held down his day job as Track Lighting Specialist, Senior Grade. “Doubting” Thomas (“Tom”) O’Reilly of O’Reilly’s Wiring and Electrical Supplies looked glumly on from the side, like a memento mori in a Renaissance painting.
“How ya doin’, Niall ya fuckin old ballox,” Petey shouted at his reflected, false-mustached face, which, for their plan to succeed, must become registered and known as the mug of Niall N. Hostager, master electrician and purveyor of rubber-flex cords to the industry worldwide, including Western Europe, the Middle East and North America. In this duplicity Petey’s young brother Liam (he of the Gardai now promoted to Sergeant in the churning wake of higher-level kickings-upstairs) and their old mate and Petey’s employer T. O’Reilly, Esq., were only to happy to help out, a happiness tripled when O’Reilly learned of the involvement of that Fianna Failer Ferdia Quain, neighbour of his childhood years and the one Fianna Fail bastard—“da wan bahsterd,” in his odd vernacular (West Corkish with a soupçon of Lancashire, where he’d spent his honeymoon)—he’d always detested enough to want to see humiliated, “dat fohkin’ stock-op owld Fianna Failer wiff ahl his towk aboawht fohkin wayne and chayz shops, Chaysus Chroyst aw-mayty who dah fohk does he tayke hemself fahr, Eamonn fohkin De Valera?” (All right, all right, I’ve heard you loud and clear, as of now I declare a moratorium on renditions in writing of all dialects, however quaint.) This animus would come as startling news to beleaguered Ferdia, who had always regarded Tom O’Reilly of O’Reillys Wiring and Electrical Supplies as a grand old hoor, a harmless and quite decent fella if a Fine Gaeler like Ferdia’s own da and occasionally—again, not unlike the da—given to surliness; but an old friend anyway from way back in the tousled-headed, gray-bagged and red-kneed South Killoyle Comprehensive days…
Well, it just goes to show, doesn’t it? The most placid face encountered on your daily grind may conceal the machinations of a Machiavelli—and worse. And don’t think that the spotty girleen behind the perfume counter, or the wheezing old fruitbat who sells papers by the bus stop, are exempt from this formulation. Au contraire: The lesser the person, the viler the malice. As with Tom O’Reilly of O’Reillys Wiring and Electrical Supplies, a lesser person than whom it would be hard to imagine. Indeed, close perusal of the records will reveal (and I don’t think I’m giving anything away here) that the very same O’Reilly had been instrumental in scuppering the Wine and Cheese shop— which he regarded as a Fianna Fail/Provo ploy—by ensuring that crucial deliveries were scarce, belatedly timed, or timed for delivery on (say) St. Patrick’s Day, and given the wrong directions. These measures were all very productive, in their counterproductive way. Indeed, one lorry driver, Heinrich von Falkenhayn, had ended up perched behind the wheel of his lorry on the coast road above Skibbereen at 2:30 a.m., listening to “Wide World of Gumbo” on short-wave radio direct from the bayous of Lafayette Parish, Louisiana, while fifty kilograms of undelivered wiring, transformers, and outlet caps sat in the back of his truck, undeliverable and undelivered…
Too, the whole Gardai HQ bomb-a-rama had played into O’Reilly’s and Petey Cahill’s hands. They needed publicity; they wanted power, however trivial; so Ferdia had to go. For one thing, he knew too much, as an ex-OC. For another, he was a Fianna Failer. Not to mention a stuck-up standoffish snobbish owld gawm, with his expensive fags and “wine and cheese” shops, for goodness’ sake. For another, his wife, that overweight English slag, worked for Maher Global Worldwide PLC, and THEY were the ones who’d brought in those bloody Nips to do the wiring in all their properties and, being Nips, they hadn’t stopped there; word had it that Pico’s Palace, the new Indonesian-Spanish restaurant, massage parlour and rainwear boutique on The Strand, had contracted with Hashimoto’s for the complete wiring and maintenance of all their electrics. Worst of it was, the bloody Nips had been on the verge of relocating to Slovakia or Slovenia or one of them places when old man Maher pulled one of his stunts and offered Hashimoto Senior an honorary seat on the Board, upshot: “OK, Maher-san, you son of a bitch. I stay.” Well, that was enough to make the board of O’Reillys Wiring and Electrical Supplies (Tom, the missus, and Cousin George from Dungarvan) sit up and take notice and no bloody mistake. Between O’Reillys Wiring and Electrical and Hashimoto’s Hypertensive Wires & Flex Worldwide there existed, therefore, a state of undeclared but total war, abetted by the odds and ends of the Lads from Belfast and sundry human fag-ends like Petey Cahill, alias Niall N. Hostager.
“Right, then, Petey, I mean Niall,” said Tom. His eyebrows reached for the sky, forming chevrons. “I’ll send along the code to the lads up North when you’ve made contact. Got your passport and whatever?”
‘Twas the day of Petey’s departure.
“Yeah. Passport, driving license, all that bumf. And I’ll pick up the gun from McCool in America and then I’ll go huntin’ and you just watch, I’ll get the bastard with a single shot. After all, he’s never seen me, so I can move in for the kill no problem, like.” He mimed a rifle with index fingers, aimed, and mouthed “pow.”
“Well, if you can, I mean you’ll be abroad, so you don’t want to hit any Yanks and get yourself splashed across the front pages. Damn dodgy over there these days, with all them Arabs running about. You want to take good care, boyo.”
“Aw sure don’t you worry. Sure we can’t afford to have him shooting off his bloody great gob to everybody and his brother, can we? Jesus he was in the Rah for eight years. Can you imagine what he knows, just?”
“Yeah, we’ve been over all that.”
“I know, but it still fuckin amazes me no one’s gone after him before.”
“Well, they say Crankshaft did it.”
“None of that. They don’t say a fuckin thing, boy. Remember that.” Petey for a moment looked quite serious, not his usual demeanour.“Loose lips sink ships, Tom me lad. Or worse.”
A chill flapped through the room like a bat en route to (or from) the Count’s castle.
“Right enough,” muttered Tom O’Reilly. He suddenly remembered the grisly end of “Pope” Patrick J. “P.J.” O’Donoghue, who’d gone on “the Sheelagh Bonaparte Show” (RTE75 Friday nights at 11:03) and with unbecoming eagerness had spilled the beans about five past and four upcoming IRA operations, including the near-miss at Brighton and the big bang at Canary Wharf, as well as the names of the main lads in key cities of the U.K.
A cautionary tale, ruminated O’Reilly. What’s more, it came out at the inquest that every one of the other fellas “Pope” had mentioned had also been watching the show via satellite, by an astonishing coincidence of the type usually encountered only in works of fiction, and all had promptly booked seats on late-night flights to Dublin from their various home towns in Blighty. So if Eddie hadn’t got him, they would have, and either way he was a goner the moment he opened his gob.
“Right you are,” said Tom. “Crankshaft? Never heard of him.”
* * * * *
Somehow, via wife radar, Shirley found out that he’d been hiding bottles of Vitamin T+ or - and several severed heads—including that, highly sought-after by the severed-head collecting fraternity, of “Crankshaft” O’Deane—under freshly-laundered Y-fronts in the bedroom closets in the belief that she wouldn’t go prying through piles of clothing she’d just washed: Wrong again! With the zeal of a heavily-bearded Muslim seeking infidels, she pawed through the layers of multicolored Y-fronts scattered through various closets and held up first one vitamin bottle, then another, then one severed head (not Crankshaft’s), then another, as prime facie exhibits in her never-ending case against him.
Then (or But) he suddenly (or, Suddenly, he…) looked up to find her looming over him. For no apparent reason he was lying on the floor of the sitting room in front of the telly but facing away from it, although he was dimly aware that the programme “Birdgirls of Hilversum” was on, so it must have been ‘round midnight, or after. Seen from that angle, Shirl’s tits were enormous bladder-like dependencies, less erotic than bovine. Indeed, her entire person was cow-like. As he watched, paralysed and nailed to the floor, she slowly changed into a spiky-haired primitive in rough muslin who might have been Queen Maeve of Connacht herself, said to have actually been a cow (or at least a heavily mammaried ungulate)…but then he discovered that he was actually watching all this from atop the mainmast of a sailing ship, or a very tall flagpole, with Argus, their now-deceased old poodle, slipping from his grasp just as he, Ferd, was slipping slowly but inexorably down the pole (or mast). Far below stood Shirley, yelling insults and/or imprecations all the while as bottles of Vitamin T+ or - and various severed heads began falling out of his pockets and bopping her on the noggin while she raised her hands in a futile attempt to ward off the in- and downcoming missiles (“Sorry,” he mumbled each time) while struggling not to let Argus slide out of his grip; but there went the old dog too, gazing reproachfully upward at Ferdia as he shot down to his doom along with a fresh downpour of vitamin bottles and severed heads and Shirley getting into more and more of a wax about it all, hopping up and down and shaking her fist…
Then, as happens in dreams, the scene abruptly changed and he was trying to get his sea-legs aboard the rocking and rolling Dublin-Belfast express, an experience he’d had in real life ten or more times when he was commuting to his archival job from Killoyle to West Belfast. It was a somewhat comforting change of scene, in its drab familiarity, but just as he was about to take the only empty seat in a compartment full of swarthy and heavily-smoking Continentals (Spaniards, he thought, or their Lusitanian cousins) and start a conversation with the current president of the United States, who was seated opposite with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, yet somehow also hiding behind a rosebush, Ferdia decided he was bored with this particular dream-video, or incapable of working out the plot intricacies; so he snapped his fingers in the president’s face and woke up just as a nine-a-side rugger game featuring several naked girls was starting up in the train aisle.
All of which was much more entertaining than the prospect of New Ur, the Dew Drop Inn, and the Tudor Motel that greeted him when he opened his eyes.
But then (he realized, to great consternation) (his) his cheeks were damp with tears. He must have been blubbering like a babby during the night. And why oh why?
Killoyle!
Homesickness pierced his heart like a needle. It had been less than two months, but they were months of exile, not holiday, and God how he suddenly missed home, that boring old ever-the-same town by the choppy green-gray sea. The muttering traffic. The aroma of damp earth carried down the city streets on breezes from the imminent hinterland. The imminent hinterland, always there whether you needed it or not. The streets loud with the secondhand music of the bars. The cat-scented alleyways down which scraps of newspaper danced in the winds. The local banalities enshrined in those newspapers. The silent crescents in the blank and burgeoning suburbs. The smell of diesel fumes and batter frying and the tangy sea-pong of fish at harbourside. The bell of SS. Peter and Laurence O’Toole’s ringing out Matins and the Angelus and the weddings and funerals of the well-heeled. The whiff of yeast from Molloys’ Brewery. The Bay Window Tea Room as a cozy refuge from the on-and-off squalls. The bogstink of old bars and the blurry pleasure of a pint or two at lunchtime with the prospect of a nap before nightfall. The honk of the foghorning ferryboats setting out for Plymouth and Brest. The chug-chug of the prawn boats prawning the coast by dawn’s first light. The voices, the accents, the faces, the “How’rya, me big man,” the “cheers to ya me owld butty,” the “slaunchies” galore. The…
“Shite.”
Sleep eluded him after that, and anyway he was certain his heart was about to give over entirely.

* * * * *
In another bed, four thousand miles away:
“Ahhh,” breathed Stan. It was the first breath of wakefulness after a night’s rolling about with Rosie aiming for the sweet spot (and hitting it, once) and, later, dreams of barking dogs and fast cars and the moon rising over Gougane Barra or Greece or someplace with barren hills and a lake or two and a awful lot of tangled gorse to trip up the unwary. Silly old dreams. Why did they always contain a hint of panic, somewhere around the lower arse or groin area?
He unglued his eyes.
Happily, the view that fine morning from the room known as The Judge’s Chamber in the Grand Hotel Pumps in Garlick-on-Shannon was as fine as the morning itself. Across the frozen tsunami of sheets and blankets that swaddled the plump body of Rosie O’Connell, hotel proprietress, the half-open window looked out onto the road and the soughing reedbeds that fringed the silver-rippling Shannon, and beyond, above the tangled thickets and groves of Hyneswood Estates, the hunting reserve for the wealthy from which the occasional loud report could be heard, there towered a piled-mash bank of westering gilded West of Ireland clouds, an approach to the mighty gates of the ideal paradise of the romantic imagination, of the type depicted by Novalis, or your man Friedrich (Caspar David), with neither of whom our man Stan was acquainted personally, like, or even by reputation…
At the end of the pier, just visible from the corner window of Rosie’s room in the Grand Hotel Pumps, the Rumpelstiltskin gently rode the pulsations of the river.
“Orrrrrp.”
Stan was up; he was rude, emitting a pungent posterior blare (TRRRRRRRRRRT); he was nude; then he wasn’t, drawing on his drawers and making hasty ablutions, for once in a way he was a busy man. His mate Bohumil the Czech or Slovenian “import-export” expert had some great “imports” from his old homeland in the quaint castellated heart of Europe coming up from the coast via Athlone. Some of them were quite dodgy, it seemed, being of ordinance and ammo composed, ex-Red Army of course, and God (or Allah) only knew where they’d end up, but Stan didn’t care. His job was to load them aboard the Rumpelstiltskin and transport them farther upstream, to Logan’s Landing, just this side of Drumshanbo on Lough Allen. It was a gas plan. No one suspected the river traffic anymore. It was all tourist trade, sightseeing barges and that, under the auspices of Bord Failte. He’d have an easy trip of it, he was sure, all the way to Drumshanbo. There Bohumil and a driver from Speedy Lorries, Ltd., would meet him, thence to transport the merchandise into Swanlinbar in the black North and from there to Belfast or Larne and the entire U.K., and all without British taxes, import licenses, or revenue, all of which still applied to Eastern European imports, even in these days of putative European union. Stan’s kickback was a decent 500 euros, payable on the spot. It was a grand old caper, so it was. He’d fit out the barge with that: a mirror, a CD player, a couple of rugs. Plus a case or two of Reamer’s. Oh yes.
Problem was, Stan had never learned to keep his gob shut.
“Off already?”
Rosie, a voluminous former maiden of some thirty-six summers and the owner of the hotel, awoke and stretched, exposing unshaven armpits and uneven teeth. She was a cute one altogether, an easy ride and a good laugh after hours, and it hadn’t taken much of Stan’s dubious yet still effective (to a point) seductive powers to land a spot in her bed when the lights in the bar downstairs had gone off ‘round midngiht, him not having a bed of his own just yet, or at least not on terra firma, as it were; and the barge bearing its own cargo of memories he wasn’t shut of, not as much as he’d thought he was.
Sure wasn’t Rosie the trump. He’d sat in the corner with his mate Bohumil and the minute he’d walked in he spotted her and she him and the unspoken plan for a good old rut was well laid well before the customary five pints and a chaser and a wee singalong, just, in which even old Bohumil had joined, rustily, in his weird patois, those Mongol-looking eyes of his ever restless, ever darting (“Communist police,” as he explained to Stan, “make a guy paranoiac, Stan my good man”). Rosie even bought them drinks. Ah she was a ready lay, so she was. Far and wide in these parts the hefty damsel was known as “Everyman’s Rosie,” except to the circuit judge from Killoyle, Jay Larkin, to whom she was “the Judge’s own,” and who believed, in his self-besotted foolishness, that she was his own undyingly loyal and faithful acushla.
Well, she was, but that didn’t rule out other blokes from time to time, especially as a means to an end.
“Off already,” she sleepily inquired, as we have seen.
“Yeah, I’ve a few things set up, darlin’,” said Stan, already taking a pull off the day’s first Turf Accountant Filter DeLuxe. “Your man Bohumil’s running some stuff up from the coast, so I’m off on the old barge. Supposed to meet a fella from Speedy Lorries who’ll take it through the North and over to England. Be on the streets of London within the week. See ya tonight, but.”
An airy kiss and the new lovers separated, he to his barge and a breakfast of thawed fish fingers and chips and a Red Reamer or two, she to the privacy of her office and the phone that would transport her fluting tones to the ear of a) Inspector Down, of the Drumshanbo Gardai; and b) Judge Jeremiah “Jay” Larkin, in Killoyle.
She wasted no time, not being known as a gal who did.
“Hello, Inspector?” she fluted. “Yes, it’s Rosie. In? That young man I told you about? Stan MacKnee, that’s the one. Well, he’s on his way. But you’ve all the time in the world. It’ll take him a good three hours to get there, on that barge. You can’t miss it. It’s called ‘Rumpelstiltskin’.”
Not without the ghost of a pang of conscience at betraying the stupid boy’s babbling candor—after all, he’d been up to her standards in bed, and that wasn’t something you could say of the Judge, drunk or sober—she went on to explain the intricacies of Stan’s transfer of smuggled goods to Ulster, and invited the full force of the Gardai Siochana to bear down on any vehicle bearing the legend Speedy Lorries. True, Rosie was a snitch, a canary, a two-timer, a traitress, if you must; but she was utterly true, in her way, to what mattered to her, and that was comfort and the promise of remaining a circuit judge’s mistress for the duration.
“Judge? Good morning, Judgie darling. It’s me.”

* * *

As if by divine intervention, the phone by Ferdia’s bed rang and it was Killoyle, in the person of Finn McCool. Yes, while Ferdia was raising his sweat-slicked saurian physiognomy from the crushed pillow and twisted blankets and emitting stored-up nighttime noises, Cousin Finn (or just Finn) was standing four thousand eight hundred and forty-three miles away at the door of the manager’s booth, now his, at Heartland Autos, looking over a couple of dozen used cars at the faces on the wall of the Hunger Strikers smiling in the cloud-strewn sunshine of a cool brisk May day.
“Brrr, it’s cold,” said Finn. “Sunny, at least. Radio says it might rain later, but. I’m working at the car place now. Oy, you there at all? Woke you up, didn’t I? Man, that sounds bad. Got yerself a touch of bronchitis, or is it the bloody fags, when will you listen to reason and give the bastards up? Lazy old fucker arencha. I’ve been at work six hours already. Course, we are six hours ahead of youse lot over in America, aren’t we? Or is it seven?”
Ferdia had no idea, and cared not. He’d always found himself in the position of father confessor to bores both within and outside his family. He mused, phone to ear, as Finn talked in his monotonous, insistent way, like a neighbor’s radio on an otherwise quiet morning.
“Yeah,” grunted Ferdia.
“Anyhow,” said Finn. “I’ve got meself a job, believe it or not. I’m working for Byrne, the used-car fella. Your man Duddy buggered off, so he needed someone right away, and here I am. Not too bad. Pays OK, but not much. Still, it’s nice to hang about the motors, like.”
“Sold any?”
“Nah. Just took a Merc for a spin, but. Great fun.”
“Well, cheerio.”
“Right. Oh, by the by, Byrne told me the other day he’d been questioned by the peelers about that eejit Duddy and your name came up more than once.”
“Not surprising. I reckoned they’d try to do me for the job, didn’t I? It’s why I’m over here, isn’t it? Halfwit.”
“Yeah, but like, you old ballocks, they were talking like they wanted to nab you then and there. They were even asking Byrne if he knew where you were. Like they thought you and that shagger Duddy were in it together. He said he reckoned you’d gone to America. Helpful, eh? Sure I’d get the frig out of there,” he said. “Go to California or Texas or someplace like that. Or Brazil, where the crumpet is. And I’d steer clear of big brother Fergus as well. I mean you were away off before I could give you my take on that effing brother of mine. Sheesh, I’ve not talked to Fergus in oh Christ I don’t know two years? Three? And do you know what he had to say then? He’s as bad as that berk Byrne, he never listens to anything bar the sound of his own fuckin’ voice.‘Come over and get a decent job instead of wasting yer life over in Ireland, Junior,’ he says. (He calls me Junior.) ‘Ireland’s done,’ he says, and himself the very same wanker who makes his living gassing on about the green vales and shamrock fields and Dromo-fucking-land Castle and ah yer arse.”
“Yawn,” yawned Ferdia.
“Yawn, is it? Well all right then you silly prat I’ll not waste me breath any more then. Cheerio.”
“Ah.”
Well, another day beckoned, and Ferdia responded to the summons with all the gusto of a half-blind, paralytic dotard, or even a para- (or quadri-) plegic. And yet he was shaved, abluted, and presentable to the world within minutes, such was the force of habit, or ritual, not to mention (best not to) the fear of being fired.
* * * *
Speaking of firing, Niall N. Hostager, well supplied by Fergus McCool with directions, rebuilt Armalite, Zeiss sight, ammo, Glow-Os, and salty snacks, had been waiting across the street in the doorway of an abandoned liquor store (“Jonny’s Fast Drinks”) for the balance of the previous night. His trip over had been uneventful if a bit nerve-wracking (twice he’d blurted out “Howja doin,’ me name’s Petey I mean Niall”), and the customs fellas at Dorval had been a touch too thorough, and once one of them made a phone call, frowning at Niall the while; but after an hour or so they let him through, with stern admonitions in mumbled French, or whatever it was. Anyhow, from Canada he’d slipped easily into the Lower Forty Eight through the woods at a place called Laplace, Quebec, from where a pickup truck driven by a real washer named Pierre and a sixteen-hour bus journey, just the thing to catch up on his sleep, had taken him across flat if occasionally rolling farmland of entirely unIrish vastness to a sprawling amoeba of a place called Macropolis, and thence to New Ur of the Chaldees in its pastoral, picturesque setting asquat the rushing Little Wabash. Niall had a map, and was all set to kick down the bastard’s door and let fly, but there was tedious coming and going in the forecourt of the Tudor Inn, so he settled in on the rubbish-strewn threshold of Jonny’s Fast Drinks across the way with a plan of action etched on his brain:
1) Do the job;
2) Get with Fergus;
3) Get the hell out;
4) Be back at work at O’Reilly’s by eight a.m. Tuesday;
5) Forget about foreign travel for the rest of his life.
It was a long and malodorous and unsettled night, broken by occasional sirens and the thumping of radio boxes and the scurrying of unseen rodents, and once a curious dog on the prowl; and by the time Ferdia’s unmistakable profile finally appeared in the forecourt of the Tudor Inn across the way Niall was drowsing and nearly missed his chance.
“Ah God there’s the man himself.”
Yes, there he was, the ugly bastard, so it was the work of a moment (“finally”) to take aim and fire, but (“naturally, ya missed, ah the fuck ya eejit”) he missed his target, even after weeks of training and six hours of target practice with aubergines and Majorca oranges and a promised bonus of five hundred dollars if he hit the bastard with the first shot. Instead, the misdirected bullet led straight into a moment of unexpected, pure Americana: It pinged off the right rear wing (Am.: “fender”) of a slow-moving vintage Chevy van, chartreuse in color and bearing the slogan “Redd’s Sandwich Service,” that had momentarily blocked Niall’s view of Ferdia’s nodding noggin. The van stopped and three men in leather jackets got out. One was white, the other two black. The larger of the black blokes pointed aa sausage-thick index finger at Niall as the others unloaded from the van a crowbar and what looked like a shovel, mouthing loud, elementary imprecations consisting of copulatory and maternal exhortations, elided to Asiatic simplicity:
“Yo, mo’ fu’. We go’ kill you.”
But Niall—Petey—understood, and understood also that his mission was over. “Aw, shite,” said he and tossed aside the gun and salty snacks and snatched up the Glow-Os and took off down the alleyway. Slamming doors, screeching rubber, and the roar of a six- or eight-cylinder engine hinted at hot pursuit. The drama was unfolding in its full cinematic absurdity as Ferdia boarded his bus, a No. 1555M driven as usual by Claysius Root, depressed father of three (Saltine, Zesta, Oreo)—“Morning, Claysius”; “Mornin’, Tony”—and took his customary seat at the very back of the bus, at which point, glancing out the window, he wondered idly why a van or lorry was disappearing rapidly down the alleyway into an unknown distance of shouted insults and, surely (surely he’d recognize the sound) gunshots, not firecrackers…?
Ah, ‘twas all about drugs, certainly. Just like Ballymun, or the Crannog mob at Crumstown West Housing Estates. Another gang rubout. And in due course—actually, before the No. 1555M turned the corner—the cops appeared, right on schedule, and joined in the fun, tyres and sirens wailing. Jayz, thought Ferd. Everyday American life itself was just like the bloomin’ TV.
Which, on the 5 o’clock news that night, announced the wounding and capture of “Nid Al-Hastajah,” a foreign terrorist of no known abode, presumed to be a native of Afghanistan despite his sandy hair and freckles and fluent if heavily-accented English, suspected of planning a raid on New Ur’s vital centers of finance and commerce in the first foray by international terrorism into the very heart of the American heartland.
The bus took Ferdia down Fowler Boulevard to the corner of Benjamin Disraeli Avenue, from whence it was a two-minute stride to the Dew Drop Inn. The early-morning soaks, a touching study in racial diversity, were already beginning to congregate in the empty lot behind the bar. Some of them were quite stroppy, Ferdia discovered.
“There he is, finally. Hey, the clock’s running out, man. What kept you? We thought you weren’t coming.”
“Yeah,” said another. “It’s almost ten.”
“Irishmen, well waddaya expect,” said a third.
“AHHHH Hack hawk huck huck huck huck huh huh huh huh huh ah-huh huh,” stated a fourth.
“Christ. Cool it, the lot o’yez. I’m here, aren’t I?”
“And he’s got a tongue in his head.”
“Guys these days, you give ‘em an inch.”
“I mean every stupid fuckin’ asshole in a tie goes around imagining he’s somebody when he’s just a stupid fuckin’ asshole. Know what I’m sayin’?”
“AHHHH Hack hawk huck huck huck huck huh huh huh huh huh huh huh ah-huh huh.”
And yet! All unknown to them, those bruised and battered old losers were kith and kin to their fellows thousands of miles across the ocean. And hadn’t Ferdia grown up around them, in the pocket-hankie front gardens and dark murmuring pubs of South Killoyle City? Those old men with their dreams demolished, their ambitions and coatsleeves torn to tatters, their libidos quelled, and their marriages long wrecked. The same punchlines, the same jokes, the same dulled apprehensions and the same memories flew like pinballs along the groove in their brains worn deep by the routine process of every day’s thoughts, even as the great churning Irish-stew of life with its wonders, its horrors, its moments of love, its moments of irritation, its strange exaltations, its barreling depressions, and its sudden mysterious epiphanies sweeping in from the far corners of the galaxy were all reduced to the size of a shot glass containing an ice cube, a swizzle stick and two fingers of Scotch—or, on flush days after the Social Security check arrived, Bourbon from Old Kentucky. The old mens’ semblables on the barstools and in the snugs of Ireland differed only in accent, experience and choice of beverage. Otherwise, Ferdia felt quite—indeed, frighteningly—at home. He knew someday he’d be an old fucker like that, too, if God were kind to him.
On that day God was of two minds. Having already intervened in Ferdia’s favor, as if to redress the balance, He now tossed in a wild card: Two customers neither old nor, apparently, alcoholic. Upon their faces was the bloom of health and youth, hard as it is to detect such a bloom upon the dusky features of African heritage; and African American indeed were they both. When he came in, Ferdia noted nothing, bar a black fella, youngish for the early hour. When this bloke sat down at a table in the corner and was joined by another, equally stern, young black fella, Ferdia looked up, mildly intrigued; when Simmons and his cohort Agent Overcoat ordered Cokes from their table, Ferdia got worried… In short, Ferdia was quite suddenly on the qui vive, big time. His thoughts went something like this:
“Jesus Christ and God Almighty and what the bleedin’ fuck do I do now if those Yanks aren’t G-men I’m a ballet or belly dancer and I’ve seen no films at all at all but maybe they’re making some kind of ‘Percival Files’ telly drama or God knows what. Anyway, best bugger off.” He sought discreet distracion. “Fire!”? Too obvious. “Look out!”? More so. “Aiiiieeeeee”? Ludicrous. His answer came blowing on the wind from tattered lungs.
“AHHHH Hack hawk huck huck huck huck huh huh huh huh huh huh huh ah-huh huh.”
Taking advantage of the storm of coughing from the bar, Ferdia
a) turned up the volume on the television, eliciting more coughing punctuated with grumbles until the winsome contours of Miss North Carolina came into focus (it was the annual Miss Tutu USA contest), provoking murmurs of long-unfulfilled lust and pithy comments like “Wow” and “hey” and “didja ever see” and “check out that ahhahahahahahACK hawk huck huck huck huck huh huh huh huh huh huh huh ah-huh huh”;
b) shouted an semi-coherent comment (“Oy! Fuckface! Yeraggadunthetummytum?”) down the bar to the most obtuse of the old soaks, who, duly provoked, shouted back wordless abuse—CHRYGOTTAFUCKINASSHOLNEVEWADDYA HACKAHAWKahhahahahahahACK hawk huck huck huck huck huh huh huh —as Ferdia had suspected he would, neatly distracting the Feds and their crony
(-ies, as another lad just came in) (funny, he seemed to be in some sort of barney
with the first fella) (never mind, it really was time to up stakes);
c) went down behind the bar on all fours like Blake’s Nebuchadnezzar and made rapid progress thusly toward the kitchen, unnoticed by the old drinkers (although one did say “huh? They got a dog?”);
d) emerged blinking, via the storage area and the ever-aromatic environs of the lav, into the hazy late-morning sun and ozone of New Ur of the Chaldees, discarding his bumfreezer like the sloughed-off skin of a snake’s earlier life.
It was one of those rum turnarounds in life when standing still and yammering nonsense or protesting your innocence was what got you killed, or sent away, or fucked somehow. He’d been there before, and Ferdia Quain had no intention of getting killed or being sent anywhere he didn’t want to go. And that meant even if he had to disappear and never see the cool green fields of Erin, or a pay stub from Fergus McCool, again.
So he legged it again.
* * * *
Shortly after the preceding tragicomedy , Shirley Quain née Soup was standing in the shadow cast by an immense concrete bollard upon which was carved the single word MAHER, as of a well-sung war hero. Above and behind the giant bollard a building composed mostly of mirrored windows and thin steel girders crouched on skinny metal stilts, like a futuristic robot from a 1950s scifi movie. The area, paved with red bricks, was grandly known as The Concourse, where corporate events like Run For Your Life Day and VisionQuest were held. Painstakingly new-mown lawns emitted the scent of recent lawnmowing and the greenish sheen of corporate bucks. The place was Shirley’s of employment; formerly Zyth, de Warth and Wenn, it had been boldly renamed by the deus ex machine, Maher himself, via conference speakerphone the week before. “Shure and God bless yez, Brute,” had bellowed the Greek, all the way from Killoyle, to Brutus Burt, the resident CEO whose office was next to Shirley’s cubicle, “it’s the bit of a mouthful, that Zit, Fart and what have you all the rest of that feckin’ shite, tell ya what Brute me owld lover why don’t we just axe the rest and call it Maher, just? Are ya on board with that, me man? Make sure it’s on all the signs and stationery by this time next week or you’re for the high jump and no mistake, pal. Shure and God bless yez and tell the missus Oy called and the little wans God bless and keep their bright little eyes shoynin’ in the dark,” etc., etc. Well, what’s the dif, thought Shirl at the time, and she thought it again now. What’s in a name, as the fella said. (Shakespeare? God? David Frost?) She was fed up anyhow. From being Assistant Executive in charge of Accounts Domestic and Foreign (Assistant Vice-President’s Office) back in Killoyle, over the past few weeks she’d been shifted to Assistant Compiler of Bad Accounts (International) (Temporary). The job was a drag, a burden, an arse-paralysing bore; “All winks and no money,” as she was wont to say, too often for Ferdia’s liking. She rated a cubicle, and a small one, next to an eternally sniffing administrative assistant and her assistant, who used up the days nattering on the phone to her boyfriend and typing at her computer with the loud plasticky clattering of great spatula hands, at the blunt ends of which her fingernails were permanently red-varnished, with chipped parts round the edges. It was hell, of a mild but debilitating sort. But if the job was bad, the town was worse. Talk about being in the middle of nowhere. Shirley knew no one, except the featherbrains on her “team” who were always going on about their personal athletic trainers and men and rock music and silly movies and “shopping malls” and a TV show called “Mice” or “Lice”— or “Rice”? … As for Lance, he was turning downright weird again, something about having to take sick days because of bugs and once calling her in the middle of the night and pretending to be someone else by putting on what he fancied was an Irish accent but actually sounding like he was Bosnian, or Polish, or from one of those places, it could actually have ended up being a bit of a chuckle, but then he went and ruined it by ringing off after a huge wet sneeze, right on the phone…so yes, it had been all of five weeks and already she missed her old life in the old place. Killoyle, that is. And this was after a weekend in Chicago, where she’d gone alone, by bus. That was a non-starter and a mistake and no mistake. The weather was drab, gray, and misty. Exhausted when she got there from the stress of keeping an eye on the bus on an old guy in a sort of fedora hat across the aisle who for some unknown reason got it into his head that she was Russian and kept winking at her and pointing to and identifying different parts of himself, like a lewd language instructor (“knee”; “ankle”; “dick”), then she finally got there and once she’d eluded the horrid old man (“calf”; “elbow”; “cock”) she found her way out of the bus terminal, which was full of leering blackish-brown men and extraordinarily fat people, most of them blackish-brown or brownish-black, waddling to and fro, like something out of Alice in Wonderland (Tweedledum?), then when she finally got out of the fearful place she found herself trudging along an endless monumental avenue, Michigan or Miracle or Madigan or something, with no pubs or caffs or benches to sit down on or anything; but when she turned off onto a sidestreet, there she was, surrounded by juvenile delinquents or whatever they called them over here and police sirens were going off everywhere just like the TV dramas, and there was nowhere to go but branches of the same identical hamburger place they had in Leeds, with raucous disco music and burnt-out light bulbs and newspapers on the floor and depressed kids everywhere. Otherwise the shops were huge and everything in them was incredibly dear and you could barely see the lake and when you could through the mist it wasn’t a bloody lake at all it was about the size of the North Sea and there was no way she could see to get down to it and have a stroll. It wasn’t like Harrogate, or the Promenade at Blackpool. Then the pubs—all called “pub,” well that was wrong for a start, it was like hanging a sign saying “church” outside a church—were fake, or too expensive, or too low-rent, with (for some reason) too much sawdust and too many staring young men with pursed lips, one of whom started blowing kisses at her and writing words like “YOU” and “ME” and “YOU AND ME” in the air. So then she was knackered and went into a park for a quick fag, but didn’t stay long when she saw a bunch of blackish-brown fellas glaring at her from under a hedge. One of them said “Yo baby you got what I like.” No, it wasn’t a town like she was used to, like Leeds. Or Killoyle.
She’d come home on the next bus, with a spindly teenager sprawled across three rows of seats listening to the most excruciating thump-thump-BANG pop stuff.
“Sigh,” she sighed. Hard to know just what’s going to work out in life and what isn’t, eh? Mostly nothing. God, she even missed HIM. Yes, HIM. The silly gangling bugger. Rumor had it—Angel Fisher, actually, back in Killoyle, the one who was living at Cretino Crescent with her boyfriend the all-in wrestler; well, Angel was her, Shirley’s, one link to civilization, so she’d become a bit friendlier with that gal over the phone than she ever would have if she’d stayed…according to Angel, anyhow, general sentiment (at the office and places like Molloy’s and that Irish-Spanish place down on the Strand) was that he probably hadn’t anything to do with that bombing but rumors were circulating that he’d got out anyway and the real culprits were after him and he was in America, too, probably somewhere near Shirley because somebody in his family had a bar (how Irish, how typical) somewhere roundabout, in Macropolis or Deansburg or even New Ur (which Angel pronounced New Your, so Shirl at first thought she was saying New York, and momentarily despaired of ever finding the silly sod in that huge metropolis). . . well, that possibility, or its opposite, was quite likely, as was the case with so much of life. But Shirley knew she couldn’t take much more of this shite. All she did all day was make entries into a computer spreadsheet and check the ones she’d made the day before and then print them all out and hand them off to a bored black (brown, actually) woman named Shermiyah or Shermaniyah or Shenandoah or something. It was torture. Couldn’t they, she wondered, get a machine to do it? Or at least an immigrant from Mexico or one of those places? She read a bit when she could (currently she was halfway through One Toe At a Time, by Clay Schouest, a bit of a drag but oh! That wardrobe scene), so just hanging about and reminiscing was beginning to occupy too much of her time. That, and smoking clandestinely outside, and watching old films on the telly…one good thing about the place, mind you, there was a free 24-hour disposable-video DVD delivery pipeline attached to her flat, all you had to do was enter the name of a film you wanted to see—British oldies for the most part, Jane’s Potting Shed (1967), for instance, with Brendan Bracken and Errol Plasticine, or Sideways Belowstairs, with Una Pole-Jones (1958)—pop in your twenty-five cents and bingo, the video shot out onto the carpet, fresh and glistening, ready for immediate viewing and disposal in the video-recycling bin.
What wouldn’t they think of next?
So, apart from that, she had nothing better to do than smoke and reminisce, and the giant bollard was a convenient place to do both. It blocked the view from the five rows of mirrored windows in HQ above, so to keep the employees permanently in view they’d installed videocams that tracked slowly and continually, turning side to side like the heads of curious giraffes. Across a couple of sparkling lawns and ribboning driveways and another mirror-windowed building (the Tech Campus, where the computer nerds were) was the main road she took every day on the No. 1555A bus to and from her “efficiency” in town… which, not coincidentally, was next door to Lance’s flat, which he called “an inefficiency.” Ha ha bloody ha.
Shirl took a deep, satisfying drag that trembled on the edge of a cough, promptly suppressed; then she said, to herself (as there was no one else around to hear her, to the best of her knowledge):
“Odd. Bloody odd, that is.”
She was referring to the spectacle, just beyond the low wall that encircled the Maher campus, of a jumping, hopping, sprinting, stumbling, jitterbugging, skittering, tottering…GANGLING…human (well, barely—humanlike) figure visible at the end of the upward-sloping greensward, like a puppet in a Punch-and-Judy show. Mad? Drunk? On drugs? But there was something intimately familiar about it… as if, even from this distance (considerably shorter than the four thousand plus miles she’d thought they were separated by—along with his habits, of course, like those idiotic vitamins, and all the books he piled up without reading—and the self-absorbed way he huddled in the corner, face to the wall, lip-synching to audio recordings of what he said was the Dalai Lama reading Yeats but that sounded to her more like one of those announcements over the p.a. system in Sainsbury’s, or Leeds Station) and among the world’s infinite (or was it so infinite? ) variety of human types and twits, she could have no doubt that she was watching…
HIM.
Her lawfully wedded, in bleeding person. Or someone who looked so bloody like him it might as well be.
“Sod me,” she gasped. Her knees liquefied like toffee in the sun, just as they’d done when she’d spewed up her drink at the Proms, or when she and Ferdia’d had their second date, or when she’d heard those great jackboots coming up the front stairs of her first flat away from home at half eleven and she couldn’t remember if she’d locked the door and whether the Ripper was still at large (he wasn’t; it turned out to be Bren, the neighbor’s boy, dressed up as a Storm trooper for the school pantomime)... “It can’t be.” But why not? She’d heard rumors he was about, according to Angel anyway.
Yes, it was him, there was no doubt about it. It was that gesture round the hair that confirmed it: head to one side, right hand rapidly brushing forelock back with an unexpected hint of delicacy (Hitler’d had the same gesture, as she knew because she used to watch all those old documentaries when she was at home in the evenings whilst her parents went a-whirling and a-twirling through the fashionable high-society balls and cocktail parties of Leeds, Bradford, and Harrogate, otherwise known as The Bell and Michael down the street and Bulby’s Saloon Bar on the Headrow), that slight shake of the head which then reared up like that of a stallion in heat…oh, it was him, all right. God bless us, so it was. So she tossed away her fag and, for the first time since that humiliation at the hands of Joel Bourgeois and family, as soon as her knees unwobbled themselves she broke into a trot, then a run, then a gallop, then a full-tilt sprint, tits galore. A wonderful spectacle it was not; an impressive one, undoubtedly.
Lance, who knew her habits, and therefore knew she would be outside huddled over a cigarette, and wanted to suggest they catch a calf-roping festival in nearby New Uri the following weekend, came out of the building just as she went into high gear.
“Holy shit,” he said.
“It’s me husband,” she shouted in passing, giving Lance, in his overly sensitive opinion, the verbal-metaphorical equivalent of the fig, or finger, or Italo-French forearm; for the words “my husband,” which were a deadly insult to the suitor of any married woman, had by Lance’s calculations passed her lips on no more than three occasions since he’d known her, and that, by further rapid calculation, amounted to a good four months by now. Regardless, their utterance at this point constituted a real bummer.
“Bummer,” he self-confirmed. And with him just getting over a bad bout of PUGS, near-fatal this time. (Supine in the john at two a.m.) It wasn’t fair. He felt a sudden tremor in the groin area that betokened an imminent return of problems there, and fumbled for his medication. While so fumbling, he chattered nervously and irritably to himself.
“Husband why the hell God damn I thought she was over it and what’s the sumbitch doing over here anyway God damn what a fuck-up why’d I ever…oh hello Brutus, hey how’s it goin.’”
Brutus Burt, CEO of Maher, a towering man of bronze born, built and designed to be a CEO, was striding across The Concourse from one meeting to another. Under his arm he held sheaves of papers. His glasses were pushed back to the top of his tanned cranium. With his left thumb he was deftly composing a number on his cell phone. As he passed, he put the phone to his left ear and looked down at not-so-short Lance (6’ even, in his stocking feet) (but the boss was 6’ 3’’, so there) with the genial condescension of the best dyed-in-the-wool corporate specimens, much as a tropical-monkey specialist might look at his subjects before administering the muscle spasmogens.
“Hi Luke,” he said, by way of greeting. Then into the phone, without missing a beat in either his stride or the indifferent gaze at the hapless twit he’d addressed as Luke: “Get me Stash Rutherford in Aitch Are, please. Yes, it’s Brutus.”
“Shit,” said Lance to himself, after the one-man caravan of self-preening grandeur had passed. He’d caught the glint of the predator in that cold gaze: “You’re history, buddy.” “Now what?” he asked himself, with a sobbing intake of breath. At the bottom of his spine was the spiderleg-tickle of nameless concern, as if the boss’s presence had laid a curse across his person. And on top of that, there was Shirley running across the lawn to…
Hell or her husband, either way. He, Lance, was out of it, anyway, and he might as well look that fact squarely in the face. Yes, it was over. His job too, probably. But Shirley, definitely, was over. He was completely out of the running—an apt metaphor, with her stumbling, already halfway across the lawn …whoops! Down she went, flashing undies, fat legs after all, God what did he ever see in her? Tricky area that Japanese garden (a gift from Hashimoto’s Hypertensive Wires & Flex Worldwide, PLC, now 49% owned by Global Maher), all lilypads and cutesey stone lanterns and bridges and the sunken part Shirl’d tripped over…but she gamely got up, brushed off her knees, and set off again, ah that British pluck they always talked about in WW2 movies while the French were lying facedown getting fucked over by the Nazis and the Russians were moving glacially in vast armies of the dead . . . Lancelot watched his lady fall, offering no help where in days previous he’d have been a veritable Lancelot to her Guinevere. Now his thoughts ran more along the lines of “Forget about it” or, more basically, “Fuck it.” Shirley’s faint cries wafted to his ears as she ran on, waving at the guy on the street, who was running, too, in a weird jerky kind of way, away from her, like he was spooked or something, or someone had just cut his wires. (God, thought Lance. What a life. If he smoked, he’d light one up round about now.) But the guy couldn’t keep on going, Lance could see he was in bad shape the way he was giving up, stopping, bending over, trying to breathe, when (the way he suddenly straightened up) all of a sudden he heard her shouts and turned around and even from a mile away, across the sunken Japanese gardens and 1800+ square feet of blindingly green Bermuda grass and a wide snaking driveway, Lance Lancem could see how love and happiness and all that guff really does triumph over everything else if you give it enough time. It was like a God damn TV movie, like that one he’d seen last Friday in lieu of asking Shirley out to dinner (three headaches in a row and he started to get the message), the one where Trish Dickerson gets reunited with Hamish Jeffries after he’s been away in Mesopotamia fighting the Druids or whoever and she’s like at the home front with the kids Megan and Justin (or Joshua?). Man. They hugged long and hard, just like Shirley and that guy were doing now. Just like he’d like to do, some day, with or without a soundtrack (Binn Bulimi and his Thousand Strings, that was one of his favorites ever since he saw the Binn Live At the Hutto Hippoplex special last May). Lance struggled not to cry, but lost the struggle. His tears were for himself. Man, they just splashed out. He wiped one away. Man, it was something to see.
Then, just as he was getting like real sentimental, there was a bit of real-life TV drama straight out of a Schlotzky and Burke episode. A green van with something on its side he couldn’t make out, at that distance, pulled up with a jerk and a sudden squeal of tires that reached Lance’s ears about two seconds after it happened. The guy—Shirl’s husband, whatever his name was (Ted? Fred?)—tried to run away, but Shirl seemed to be hanging onto his arm, and Lance heard faint time-delayed shouts and screams. Then three guys jumped out of the car: one really fat white guy and a pair of black guys, all three in suits, like police detectives or FBI or something. The fat guy waddled around a bit, talking into a cell phone, or maybe a walkie-talkie. The two other guys were in much better shape. In no time, after a silly dash around the van, they had Fred pinned down, with Shirl trying to intervene. As Lance watched, dully, open-mouthed, unsure exactly what he was watching, one of the black guys made the time-honored movie gesture of handcuffs being snapped into place and Jeez there they went, after bundling Shirl and Fred into the van, like they were a pair of drug dealers or something, tires squealing again after a two-second lapse, as the van lurched away…
Now what the hell was all that about?
“The IRA,” self-muttered Lance. “I bet. The IRA. Yep. Gotta be.” He searched his memory for telltale comments by Shirley or others, and was on the point of recalling one or two semi-germane ones, including something to do with that bombing (oh God it was Noreen Maher who’d told him, and he still felt guilty about what had happened between him and Noreen, just to get this crappy job when he was going to be fired anyway, he knew it, he felt it in his bones, unless that was the PUGS again)…
“Lucian!”
Lucian…? Did he mean…? Lance turned, cautiously. Yes, Brutus Burt was back, striding purposefully back across The Concourse.
“You got a minute there, Lucian buddy?”
You always had “a minute” for the boss, didn’t you…?
“Sure, Brutus.” Never “sir,” or “Mr. Burt,” the rigid code of pseudo-informality had to be followed to the end—as indeed it turned out to be, for Lance: the end, that is, couched in manly American terms of missed goals and fumbled passes, with an avuncular ex-coach’s hand on the shoulder, expressions of regret held back in the interest of the greater good, keeping your eye on the prize, just not really relating to the rest of the team…and anyway with a guy like him there was no doubt he’d go on to greater things, hey maybe Maher’s just wasn’t the right fit, like, shit happens, man; why, said Brutus, I was canned myself (not that that’s how I look at this) from my first three jobs and I’da gone on getting canned if I hadn’ta taken a long hard look at myself and my real talents and it just might be the time for you to take one of those long hard looks at yourself, hey who knows with your international background (you were over in like England for a while, right?) you might stop and think about joining one of those government agencies, the DIA or Peace Corps or AmeriVantage or one of those, great experience for a young guy and hey it wouldn’t look too bad on the old c.v., so if I were you, Larry…
“Shit, man, if you’re going to fire me you could at least get my God damn name right,” blurted Lance with vehemence under which simmered that candor of character that—when allied with a deep indolence in his nature and hostility toward any group endeavor involving “teams” or “projects” or “winners”—had hitherto doomed him in any corporation in America. “It sucks, man.” Brutus paused, cell phone at hand (“Security? Get over here on the double!”). He looked Lance straight in the eye for the first time. Lance’s bowels folded in upon themselves.
“What is your name, son?”
Lance told him. Brutus continued to hold his gaze with his and again deftly dialed by left thumb and got through to “Aitch Are” on the cell phone.
“Stash? Yeah, me. Hey, you remember that termination we were talking about? Lunchem, or Launchem”—he placed his hand over the phone and mouthed “sorry”—“Lancem, that guy in Legal? The one who came back from overseas oh I don’t know two, three…?”—he looked quizzically at Lance, who held up three fingers—“three months ago, yeah. Well, hold off for a while, will you, Stash? Like, freeze that file for me, wouldya?” Not waiting for a reply, he rang off and tucked the phone into his breast pocket; then looked at Lance with the toothy grin of a cartoon shark.
“Lance, buddy, I gotta tell you, I like your spirit. Maybe we can work together after all. Hey, come on, walk with me.”
And so did Lance Lancem veer away from the precipice of dismissal to find himself rehired, all because of that “it sucks, man” that, in Brutus Burt’s book, was a ballsy thing to say, the kind of thing a real guy would come out with and God knows there weren’t too many of them in this crazy, mixed-up world. In due course (two weeks or so), Lance was promoted to wear a red tie and become one of the CEO’s most trusted senior red-tie aides, “Launchpad Lance,” they called him, valued as much for his cussing as for the way he made those foreigners eat crow and kept the non-red-tied undesirables at arms’ length from the boss, whose private gym he was privileged to work out in, when he chose (and whose mistress, a gal from SLC called Hillie, became his, too, on long weekends when Brutus when skiing).
And yet! Not even this fortuitous turn of events could entirely placate troubled Lance, for he had to live in the receding shadow of bulbous Shirl and in the looming shadow of PUGS, in an age of little faith and less and less decent rock music.
* * * * *
But across town at Downstairs State the rock music was jumping and the freshmen were flirting, mostly cross-sexually, and Trev Romanov, sober for three weeks on the crest of a throbbing abdominal pain, was on hand to spread venom and pick up a little spare change.
“Goddam fuckin’ rich fag kids whyncha give me somma yer daddy's dough instead of buyin' your fuckin' fag beach resorts and fag Mercedes Benzes whyncha get a job Goddam fuckin’ fag students whyncha go drive a truck get a real job for a change Goddam fuckin fags whyncha go back to fuckin’ New York Goddam fuckin’ French fags whyncha go back to fuckin’ Paris Goddam fuckin’ fags whyncha fuck yerselves and drop dead Goddam fuckin’ fag bellydancers whyncha go back to fuckin' Egypt or what the hell fuck you anyway Goddam fuckin’ fag students ah fuck you anyway Goddam fuckin’ fag cabdrivers whyncha get a real job 'stead of drivin' yer fuckin’ cabs round in circles all day Goddam fuckin’ fag Jews whyncha go back to fuckin’ Israel Goddam fuckin’ fag liberals whyncha go back to New York fuck you anyway Goddam fuckin’ Jesus freak fags whyncha go fuck yourselves Goddam fuckin’ fag micks whyncha go back to fuckin’ Ireland...”
“Cool,” said a coed in cutoffs, and gave him a crumpled buck.
“Goddam fuckin’ hookers whyncha go back to fuckin' Times Square or what the hell fuck you anyway Goddam fuckin’ students ah fuck you anyway Goddam fuckin’ fag cabdrivers whyncha get a real job 'stead of drivin' yer fuckin’ cabs round in circles all day Goddam fuckin’ fag Jews whyncha go back to fuckin’ Israel Goddam fuckin’ fag liberals whyncha go back to New York…”
“Awesome, dude,” said a football-bound sophomore, dispensing lagniappe totaling $1.75. Trev, totting up his haul, decided on a mocha latte supreme at that Eye-talian coffee wagon down the road, just before his appointment with the Goddam shyster Jewish doctor from back East who’d probably have his fingers up his chute before he knew what was happening but man that pain was getting to be pretty steady these days, so he’d better get it checked out, and a guy in his position was in no position to pick and choose when it came to docs, anyway one was pretty much like the other…
“Goddam fags.”
Around the Quad, as Downstairs State called their main square in distant, unconscious homage to British archetypes (“colleges” were also to be found, some with mullioned windows behind which “tutors” bored their students, bored by them), the fall-semester registration was underway. Booths gaily caparisoned in the elemental colors of the Rainbow Spectrum of Diversity were identified by subject. Dean “Chuck” McCantinflas was behind the booth for “Gender Studies of the Americas,” which he thought of as a total Goddamn waste of time and the stupidest shit he’d ever been involved in, personally, but you did what you had to do to get a paycheck: he’d signed up for a whole year of “The Groin in Modern LTGB Fiction.” So there you had it. Guys sucking each other off on one hand, as it were (not Chuck’s scene at all), but an extra five grand in his paycheck in the other (very much his scene, especially with those credit card bills and the new pool he and Lorna were building, or having built, by undocumented MesoAmerican labor). So there he sat. And watched the students. Bunch of morons. What was the point, when all they cared about was rock music, computers and dance clubs? Half the universities in the country should be closed down. Hell, three-quarters of ‘em, especially third-rate dumps like Downstairs State that existed solely for the benefit of a few sports coaches (Go Buccaneers!). No more Gender Studies, no more Historicity of Ethnicity, no more Discourse of the Underclass of Color, no more Anglo-Irish and –Saxon Literature or Whatever, no more Advanced Batik 101. Their absence would hardly cause a ripple. The nation would survive, even thrive. But suck-ups like him would be out of a job: no pool, no timeshare in Key West, no state pension...
“What a shitty life, God it sucks,” Dean McCantinflas self-expostulated, inflating and deflating like a huge blowfish. The young woman assisting him in distributing Gender Studies information, a wide-eyed devotee of gender options and all the wonders of diversity, turned away in mild horror from a conversation with a crewcut woman with nappy pins dangling from her earlobes.
“Sorry,” muttered Dean Chuck, through gritted teeth. Around ten thirty, up sauntered his once and future Assistant Professor of Anglo-Irish and –Saxon Literature Studies or Whatever, Donal Duddy the Irishman, beaming like the cat who’d swallowed the parakeet or whatever, or a guy who’d (as long as we’re on the subject) just had a hand-job (blow-, actually, back at the flat, Terps thoughtfully taking the time on her way to work ); looking better anyway than he had last time he was over, when he could have routinely turned up on a slab in a morgue without raising an eyebrow among the living.
“Well, Dean McCa, McCa, eh, how’re ya? I’m back, you see.”
“So I see. Welcome back, Cotter.”
“Eh?”
“Nothing. TV series. Before your time. Welcome back, Duddy-o.”
“Thanks. Glad to be back. Glad I got the job back.”
“Good. By the way, you know why?”
“Why what?”
“Why you got your job back, Einstein.”
“Because, eh, the position came open again and Maher dished out the dough and I applied…?”
“Not entirely, peppermint-breath. Well, your compatriot’s generous gift didn’t hurt. But mainly it was because I put in a word for you, yes yours truly actually went to bat on your behalf.” Because I wanted one halfway normal straight guy around to talk to, the Dean failed to add.
“Oh really?”
“Really. They were against, to be frank. Too much heavy petting with that Chinese gal, for one thing. She’s back, by the way.”
“Xiao-Lian?” Donal’s heart did some slow calisthenics.
“Yeah, Sugar Lily is what we, I mean I, called her, old fruit. But it’s OK, she’s out of the running, she’ll be a homemaker, cookies and coffee circuit, no more strip clubs and so on. She got married out in Taiwan to a Presbyterian missionary named Ted Gill who’s going to be our Dean of Theology, like we needed one.”
“Jesus. I thought she was thrown out of the country for manufacturing bombs.”
“Oh, the Rev. Gill got the higher-ups in the Presbyterian Church to put in a word at INS and circumvent a few interdictions, as it were. Anyway, she’s got religion now. But she still looks great, so be on the qui vive, Don my boy.”
“Yeah. Well. I’m, eh.” In a relationship? Committed? In love? Engaged? “Married, myself. Well, all but.”
“You don’t say. Congrats. Who is she?”
“Oh, Irish. From back home. Works in a law office, but she’s got ambition, that girl.”
The crewcut girl and her friend paused at the word “girl,” looked Donal up and down with no great enthusiasm, and returned to their cozy chat.
“Hey, that’s great,” enthused Dean McCantinflas, with a yawn catching at the back of his throat.
“Oh, and I’m off the hard stuff.”
“Hard stuff?”
Between them was the gulf of the Atlantic, over which feel-bad Brit/ Irish plain speech ran up against feel-good American euphemism.
“Yeah, you know. No more whiskey, cognac, tequila, that kind of thing. Just the odd beer now and again.”
“Like every night, eh? In between bouts with the new missus. Hey, good for you, soldier. Well, how about supplementing your schedule with a Gender Studies course or two? I can spare them.”
“Sorry, Dean. Not on your life. I never saw what there was to study. A, male, B female, end of story. Load of shite, if you ask me.”
“I don’t entirely disagree, but you know…”
Disapproving glances were fired their way like shells from encircling howitzers. Cautiously, the conversation meandered away into the drier creek beds of scheduling and book curricula. Across the Quad, students sized up their professors and made dates with each other and wrote down the times of pop concerts and lectures on esoteric subjects. In the distance, as Dean McCantinflas explained the difference between the pain of gallstones and that, much worse, of kidney stones (“man, that’s a sumbitch, Don”), Donal thought he saw, beneath the sunwashed trees of Tree Walk, a sensual shape in a clinging black dress, Asiatic in overall effect, the beckoning dark one of his dreams…
The sun shone on and on and across town (back in the other direction, rather closer to the madcap antics in and near Maher Global) it shone down on, and was reflected off, the mirror-windowed offices of Overstreet and Undershaft, in which Terpsichore O’Hanlon, dressed to the nines and beyond in a simply divine Fernando Arrabal lace and denim creation that she’d bought off the rack at the local Prime Outlets…well, there she was entirely, pert and polished, her walking stick soon to be a thing of the past, thank God (although it leaned, yet, jauntily, against her desk), data-entering fiercely at five before twelve so as to have time for meeting Greg at his house later that lunchtime, then, with the approval of both him and Gary Overstreet, taking the afternoon off to meet Donal at the local registry of births, marriages and death and sign up to become Mrs. Donal Duddy, not so much because she was spoony over the fella but rather because
1) he was a bit full-on but a sweet bloke really, better than Stan hands down (or all over the place);
2) he had no ambition himself, so he’d let her go the distance professionally;
3) he was desperate, and she wasn’t, so…
4) he’d turn a blind eye to any affairs she might have, starting with the one she’d started with Greg Undershaft, who as it turned out could put on a wonderful Italian accent and rode a Moto Guzzi and had actually seen all of Piero di Secca’s Ostia movies and who’d promised to promote her as soon as poss.
Really, it was a no-brainer, as they said over here.

* * * * *
“Right. Who’s next?”
“Tony McGirl. Alias Ferdia Quain. The big fella.”
“What big fella? The Crumstown sweetshop bandit? Your man with the false beard?”
“Nah, not him. He’s in Cork. I mean the Rah fella. Him from America.”
“Ah that bollox. Are the witnesses here?”
“Yes, Yer Honour.”
“And that fat rozzer with the German name?”
“DCI Schwarzkopf? Yes, Yer Honour.”
“You pronounce that very well, Sheehan. Speak German, do you?”
“Jawohl, mein Kommandant. Eh heh heh. Sorry, Yer Honour. Ever watch Kapitan Dolly, the teevee series about the cross-dressing U-boat captain? ‘Dolly’ von Schlumm? No? Real riot, you should have a look, RTE75 I think, Saturdays ‘round midnight. I mean, picture this, if you will: There’s your man, clattering up and down the catwalks in high heels and fishnet stockings, shouting Up Periscope... or Auf Periskop or whatever it is in Jair-man…whilst at the same time hunting through his handbag for his lip gloss, oh it’s priceless. Yeah, actually I do speak a few words. Ein, zwei, drei. Ein ei, bitte. Mein Gott! Links rechts, schweinhund. Achtung! Eh heh heh. War movie stuff, you know. Actually, me wife is Jair-man. Ursula. You know her. You’ve seen her down at the Petite-Grande Lingerie Boutique on the Strand, she says you’re dropping in there all the time to buy lace undies, the ones with bows on the sides. She’s the blonde one in leathers? Met her in Spain, I did, and she can still hardly speak English—not that she really needs to, if you take my meaning, eh heh heh.”
“Right, that’s enough of that. Send ‘em all in, then. But not right away. I’m just nipping out for a breather.”
“Course you are, Yer Honour. Have one for me while you’re at it. I gave ‘em up ten years ago last Sunday. Oy! Yez lot! Stay seated! Yer not in the bleedin’ Croker!”
“Irritating wee bastard,” thought Judge “Jay” Larkin. He hurried through the side door of Chambers into the corridor and thence out of the Courts building entirely and into the fulsome alleyway beyond. It had been a tiring day so far, even without Sheehan’s constant blatherskite and giggling and those odd faces the man pulled when he thought no one was looking: one, heavily dentate, resembling Bela Lugosi as Dracula, the other, also toothy, the spitting image of George Hamilton, also as Dracula; and the sanguinary Count came to mind again in the third, in which incisors were very much front and centre, the ensemble resembling Frank Langella as Drac in the sexy 1979 remake…. moreover, Judge Jay had the misfortune to be currently serving the Hilary term of the High Court’s southeastern circuit and was therefore the man (or judge) on the spot AGAIN.
Fortunately there was Molloy’s across the way and the snug therein reserved for the All Racing channel.
Last Monday the call had come from the Four Courts that there was a Rah fella whom certain highly placed members of the Government wanted in jail: one Ferdia Quain, suspected Mad Bomber of Haughey Circle.
“Ferdia, eh,” muttered the judge. “No bleeding Cu Chulainn, I’ll wager.”
Ferdia? Christ. He thought it was a girl’s name at first, then he checked his Ancient Irish Folklore. (Diehard Celticists remember: He’s a Prod.) Imagine giving your boy the name of a fella known to history solely for getting the shite beaten out of him, he mused. God, people were stupid, weren’t they? But some were stupider than others; and that was the one big thing nineteen years on the bench had taught him. Anyway, he wasn’t sure he believed this Ferdia bloke was guilty at all, achall, ac-tually. There was a frenzied air to the whole business that spelled P-O-L-I-T-I-C-S, something else he’d seen a bit too much of in his day. And the way your man’s missus clung to him, well that wasn’t something you usually saw with your standard villains, either. Screaming insults from the gallery, that was more like it. Like Nicolette Harrison, the Madwoman of Skibberreen, who’d been left for dead in a coracle off the Great Blasket by “Darkie” Harrison, her husband of twenty-odd years. Well, she’d only been faking it, of course, and by janey did she ever start shouting and bawling the minute she walked into the courtroom and desisted only when removed by main force. Her tirades forced them to conduct the entire trial in dumb show and pantomime, via shorthand notes. “Now d’yez see why I had a go?” said “Darkie” when the jury were retiring for deliberations. “Who’d like to finish the job?” Deeply sympathetic, they let him off with a warning and Judge Jay threw in a twenty-punt Tesco’s coupon good for all Catseye frozen foods and Bingo! cleaning products.
‘Twas ever thus.
The sky shimmered, patchily blue above Judge Larkin’s musty comb-over. Between pate and heaven the wind blew, desultorily, dribbling the odd drop upon His Honour. The alleyway was still mucky from last night’s downpour. The judge sidestepped a puddle and, with the slow languor of an ecdysiast or a boutiquier arranging posies, slipped his hands under the front of his gown and massaged himself in the crotch area before bringing forth from his right-hand hip pocket a crumpled packet of Turf Accountant Super Lites. He’d started smoking again three days previously after six years of virtuous abstinence. It made him feel more deliciously guilty than he had in all those unending years. It was a thumb to the nose at Wet Wesson and his spineless anti-smoking laws, too. Still, one had to be cautious. He looked round: no one there. He checked the rooftops, too, just in case. All clear. Then, like one of his torch-bearing Milesian ancestors, he bore aloft a flame, this one at the end of a Swan Vesta that was promptly married to the business end of the cigarette, result: conflagration, bluish tendrils of smoke, dangerous tobacco odor, and all that sort of thing…as well as a possible shaving-off of five seconds or so from his life expectancy, adding up over an entire smoking career to a solid six hours of the future sacrificed to present pleasure. The judge smoked nervously and paced slowly around puddles leftover from last night’s pisser of a rainstorm…thundering down for twenty minutes at least Christ you’d have thought you were in the bloomin Amazon or somewhere, maybe they’re right about this global warming shite…on its side lay an empty grease-stained box, emblazoned with the goatee’d image of a long-dead American chicken-wing millionaire, that had once in its heyday contained fried chicken wings and onion rings and was now a battleground for two converging armies of ants…
“Carpenter ants,” said the judge to himself, with legalistic literal-mindedness.
The alleyway, known as Brown Lane after a local nobody (Declan X. Brown, retired printer), led to Behan Avenue, along a narrow segment of which—the half-block or so facing Burke’s Pets, just down from the New Koh-I-Noor Indian restaurant—were visible your common or garden newspaper- and milk-delivery vans and lorries interspersed with the average vehicular traffic of an ordinary Killoyle day. But this was a day less, or more, than ordinary, on Judge Larkin’s docket: At the start of it, as at its end, was Ferdia Quain, brought back from America in handcuffs by Detective Chief Inspector Schwarzkopf of the Gardai Special Forces Unit, who’d been very suddenly promoted upon the resignation, equally sudden, of the alleged madman DCI Sherlock Neame consequent to Neame’s being accused of “initiating lewd advances and imposing an unwanted massage,” of all silly things . . . and there was Quain’s “British-born” (as the papers said) wife, at his side in a “touching display” (to quote the papers) of “marital loyalty” (in the words of the papers). “Get him off!” she’d shouted at Judge Larkin, awakening uneasy memories of “Darkie” and his Nicolette and many another case featuring hysterical wifies. Quain had been arraigned and held over in the “tepid anterooms,” as the temporary cells at Haughey Circle Gardai HQ were coyly called. “That’s right, throw him into the place he tried to blow up, and lose the key,” bellowed the Gardai’s Chief Prosecutor, Pierre O’Bunion, ever bellicose in defense of what he viewed as right, or might bring in money. Some said the case would have to be moved to the Special Criminal Court in Dublin if any of the allegations were proven. It was a fast-track case in a country notorious for legal backlogs. P-O-L-I-T-I-C-S again, no mistaking it. But your man was, after all, Prime Suspect in the Gardai bombing, which the Taoiseach himself (an old King’s Inns butty and fellow salmon fisherman à ses heures, notwithstanding which Jay couldn’t stand the oleaginous bugger) had said to Judge Larkin over the phone “warranted prosecution to the max, to the max, do you catch my drift, Jay ya gormless bastard? Ahem.” Angry witnesses to the bombing were queueing up to hurl abuse. Eyewitnesses who claimed to have seen Quain at the very site of the bombing were on the judge’s list. The man himself was being defended by a renowned Buddhist barrister named Todd Gilbey, known for defending the anti-establishment, working with his wife, a rich Buddhist solicitor named Nuala O’Fintan , and Gilbey was holding his cards close to his chest, possibly because he had none to play…
Anyway, the news wasn’t all bad these days. Judge Jay was heading West as soon as this caper was over. And they’d be throwing a dinner for him at Gardai HQ in Garlick, for ‘twas thanks to Rosie O’Connell and a tip from Judge Jay himself that the local guards had managed to put away that MacKnee desperado, the one with the stolen barge, oh a right chancer was that one, pretending to be a poet or something while all the time he was in cahoots with that Czech bandit Bohumil Yourwhatsit, smuggling vats of Greek olive oil past the customs at Galway then back along the river to Garlick, not a bad little business for a fella who described himself first as a “copier,” then as a “writer,” then as a “scribe,” then finally “unemployed.” (Bohumil Thingummy they’d deported, just.) Immediately upon giving this statement, MacKnee had attempted to bolt across the nearby nighttime wheatfields but his hands got tangled in a stray bale of hay and he came a cropper. “Please don’t shoot,” he whimpered in the dark. “I have a wife and young ‘uns.” “How many?” “Six, no, seven.” “We’re not armed, ya silly shite,” replied Gardas Smith and Jones, before taking him in. In a word, the wee waster was a waster, so he was. Verdict: three to five at Portlaoise, with the barge, confiscated, being turned over to the AquaWorld theme park in Toolbridge, Co. Mayo. There it would become the centerpiece of a nautical horror show featuring fake treasure chests, plastic skeletons dancing along mock-cobwebs, greenish underlighting, hidden loudspeakers calling “oh-hoo-hoo” from the bushes, make-believe pirates, etc.
“Oh make de merry wit’ funny old me,” crooned the Judge. “Oh oh oh aw de livelong day-o, all de livelong day. O!”
“All rise,” roared Sheehan minutes later, when Judge Larkin returned. “All sit” followed: All sat. The sitters included Finn and Anthea, in the public gallery. As niece of the Assistant Commissioner for the Southeast Region (now promoted to full Associate Commissioner), Anthea rated a permanent seat in all public hearings. The couple had come for a lark on Finn’s first day off from the car lot (“ah you’ve got to see that old judge Larkin, Finn, he’s a gas fella altogether”) and discovered Cousin Ferdia in the dock (“holy bloody shite it’s him so ‘tis, he’s back, the silly old prat, oy how’re ya doin’, nah he doesn’t hear or maybe he thinks he’s too grand”).
Judge Jay read the indictment and invited opening statements and the prosecution, led by Pierre O’Bunion, launched a merciless attack on the defendant’s antecedents and morals as the latter sat stonily staring, apparently into nothingness but in truth into somethingness (see below).
“At a moment in this nation’s history when we believed we were witnessing the dispersal of the breed of baby-killers for which we have alas become renowned, at a moment when the ink on the newest peace treaty was barely dry, at a moment of hope for the Irish nation, at that very moment of renewal, out of the shadows we had foolishly hoped were expelled forever came this shambling ne’er-do-well, this primeval cretin dragging his knuckles along the swept pavements of our fine city, this murderous sociopath thirsting for the blood of innocents…”
“For Christ’s sake, Pierre,” hissed Judge Larkin in exasperation. “You’re not on the bloomin’ Abbey stage. Get to the point.”
“I am attempting to do so, Your Honour,” boomed O’Bunion. “As Your Honour will recognize, if he permits me to continue. My goodness. His Honour’s idiosyncracies are well-known. Of course, the arrogance of Irish judges in general has long been legendary. But think not, Your Honour, that you can whitewash this case or any other. The Houses of the Oireachtas are the sovereign assemblies of the elected representatives of the Irish people, and the notion that judges should not be accountable to those assemblies is subversive of democracy. I am the democrat’s true friend, not the lickspittle of any judge, with due respect. Here today, as the representative of Irish democracy, I am presenting a case in which will figure prominently—as prominently as the nose on your man’s face—what I have called the exegesis of a killer. For we all need to know what is going on in the mind of this man, do we not?”
“Oh I don’t know, just get on with it,” grumbled Jay. He reached under the bench and switched on the small television set he kept down there for emergencies, taking care not to turn up the volume too far; as far as the judge knew, only Sheehan and Mrs. Tooley the stenographer were aware of the television’s existence, and small bribes took care of their discretion—well, not so small in Sheehan’s case, but he did come up with some good tips on the nags. (“Look,” said Anthea, nudging Finn. “He’s turning on his telly.”) After glancing at Mrs. Tooley, who feigned absorption in her stenographing, Judge Jay took a long look at his watch, a look signifying a) impatience with life and all its bloody waiting around and b) foreknowledge of the day’s racing schedule. He had a two-way spread on All The King’s Men, 2:15 at Fairyhouse and Panters Down, 2:45 at Leopardstown and, based on Sheehan’s repeated assurances, ten euros to win on Fillet of Plaice at twenty to one odds, 3:15 at Newmarket. He could see the first two races under the table, but for Newmarket he’d need to be across the way at Mad Molloy’s, where he had a permanent order of Red Reamer half-pints and wee half-Powerses on the side during racing season. So he damned well hoped this stupid bloody trial would be over by then, or he’d give it a miss, or declare it a mis-, never mind what was going on in the mind of that Ferdia article, or in Pierre O’Bunion’s for that matter…ten euros was ten euros, after all, especially if it could become two hundred. That would buy a cartload of frilly knickers. He raised himself and glared out over the courtroom. The defendant, thought Judge Jay not without sympathy, looked limp and dazed, albeit quite dashingly dressed in elegant Gianfranco Mafioso double-breasted blue-and-white twill pinstripe suit with a loosely knotted Principessa Benita Fanculo silk tie depicting rampant Dalmatians, set off nicely by a touch of gold round the sock area and a yellowish-hued hankie that peeped out coyly from the breast pocket like a sunflower on a heap of cow pies. Shirley had ascertained sartorial conformity and retrieved several of his suits (in the pockets of one of which she’d found a forgotten bottle of Vitamin X), arguing “they won’t expect a bloody IRA man to be well-dressed, so you want to catch ‘em unawares.”
As the judge looked from his television to the defendant, uncertain which had the greater claim on his attention, Ferdia was mentally viewing a repeat loop of his last moments on American soil in tedious sequence, as follows:
6) the absurd dash for freedom down the dreary boulevards of New Ur, past skulking blackish-brown rap musicians, free-cash outlets and McHeaven burger restaurants;
7) the reunion with Shirley in a great sweaty hot blubbering mass of kisses and sobs;
8) the nasty Feds putting the boot in, with the encouragement of that fat cartoon animal Schwarzkopf;
9) the dual interrogations at Macropolis Airport, one conducted by the Feds, the other by the Department of Homeland Security, with interjections from Schwarzkopf and that grim-faced bloke from the Foreign Ministry (one of Wet’s goons);
10) the hasty dismissal of the extradition lawyers who’d popped out from behind a drinks dispenser like Easter puppets and introduced themselves as Mo and Jeff;
11) the flight home in the last row of a standard Aer Rianta flight out of O’Hare, Failure embracing him with its empty fleshless arms, Shirley cuddling him with her fleshy fleshly ones…
Well, thought Ferdia, two good things have come of this pandemonium. I’m back in Ireland, and Shirl’s back too.
(If that is a good thing, he counter-mused, remembering his longing for Terpsichore …still, Shirl’d quit that awful job, and that was something. If he managed to get out of this mess.)
O’Bunion wound up his peroration with a mangled misquotation from Padraig Pearse (“oh the awful bloody eejits/ They have left us our Fenian dead/ And while Ireland holds these graves / Ireland unfree shall never be something or other, ta-ra-dee-dum”) and called his first witness at ten after ten: Robb Manlove, bartender at Molly O’Lesbihan’s.
“Was he at your bar the night before?”
“Yeah, I saw him. He didn’t drink much. Looked like a real wimp, if you ask me.”
Gilbey the defender leaped to his feet.
“Objection,” “allowed,” “approach,” “be seated,” “no smoking,” “shut your face,” “approach,” “shut up,” “SILENCE,” etc.: the old courtroom rigmarole, in short, as played out every weekday in countless dismal legal cubbyholes and on televisions beyond the counting of them all over the English-speaking world and beyond.
Gilbey leaped again.
“Was he alone?”
“Objection,” “sustained,” “approach,” etc.
“Please proceed, Miss…it is Miss, isn’t it…Miss ah Manlove.”
“OK, Judge, OK. Can I talk now? Him, over there, the man-ape with the big nose…Yeah, he was at Molly’s that night. He was with an old gay guy who could’ve been his lover but probably wasn’t because he’s like straight, right? Or he thinks he is. But you know what they’re like. Straights, that is. Most of them are really gay under all that pretend-macho swagger. The truth is, the whole world is gay, my friends. Give one of your macho footballers half a mo’ with a guy’s dick and they’re sold. Or one of your mincing pussy queens five minutes in the loo with yours truly. I’d take five minutes with any one of ‘em to win ‘er over, just me and me trusty dildo.”
“Come to the point, Miss, eh. Bugger.”
“That is the point, Judge. It’s an important statement to make.”
“No it bloody isn’t.”
“The jockeys are leading their mounts past the paddock,” loudly announced the TV under the judge’s rostrum. Mrs. Tooley typed with heightened desperation and Sheehan, alerted, sprang to his feet and sang out,
“Stay seated, all of yez,”
and sat down again with a reproachful look at Judge Jay, who reached under the bench and turned the sound down (bloody thing was on the blink again) before resuming—before any simulacrum of comprehension could dawn on anyone’s face (but Anthea was creasing herself, “told ya din’t I,” she whispered to Finn, himself tickled, too)—with a hard-line commentary directed at Robb:
“The point, you ghastly gob of sputum, is not how gay you are or how gay you happen to think anyone is, but whether or not you saw the accused the night before the bombing, as has been claimed, conversing with Julian O’Deane, known as ‘Crankshaft,’ former Operations Commander of the IRA…”
“And the one who set off the bloody bomb and blew himself up with it,” shouted Gilbey, “and I’ll prove it, or Siddhartha was no Buddhist.”
“Silence in the court,” “shut up yourself,” “approach the bench,” by the by, are you Mahayana or Hinayana?” “oh Mahayana, you see those Hinayana characters, what a shower” “all right now shut yer face,” “objection,” “allowed,” “no, overruled,” “be seated,” “no smoking,” “ace jockey Clif Cramblitt, justifiably proud of his past two victories in the Grand National, leads Panters Down onto the racecourse,” “damn Sheehan will you come here, bloody thing’s gone west,” “oh look he’s wearing Lord Seacup’s colours today,” “silence in the courtroom or I’ll have yez all thrown out,” etc.
Robb waxed eloquent. She faced the jury. The judge was nowhere to be seen, having disappeared under his bench to fine-tune the volume on his television.
“Sure your man was there for about an hour I’d guess, the night as you say before the bomb went off, well I don’t know do I? What am I, a flamin’ detective? I mean, I was pretty deeply involved with Lizette at the time, she’s my new squeeze, matter of fact we’re flying to Connecticut after this is over to get married and then to Hong Kong to adopt a set of Chinese triplets, so what do you think of that then, you bunch of homophobes? By the way, personally I don’t think Quin did it, he just doesn’t have the balls, he wouldn’t even meet my eye, look at him now, always looking away like some kind of frightened ewe, not much of a cold-blooded killer if you can’t look people straight in the eye if you want my opinion. Nah, I’d put my money on Crankshaft. Oh he was an old horror right enough. He once tried to pay my young brother Cyril to polish his horn, if you take my meaning, but the worst part is he denied it later and accused Cyril of coming on to him. Well, why didn’t he just come out, the old hypocrite? Yeah he was a perfect argument for coming out. He wanted to do boys so bad he hated himself and ended up hating all people, did that bastard. Oh, he was a right bastard.”
Stuttering accusations of ignorance and tendentiousness hurled by O’Bunion notwithstanding, Robb descended from the witness stand in high good humour, blowing kisses to her sorority in the public gallery. Finn applauded loudly. Red from his exertions, Judge Jay reappeared above his bench like the winter sun over Mongolia.
“There, that should fix it. Now stop that bloody row or I’ll chuck yez all out. Next.”
Next up was DCI Aloysius Schwarzkopf, who billowed down the stairs and mounted the witness box. Name spelled (“with a ‘p’ as in Palestrina” “who?” “Palestrina, the Eye-talian bloke, you know, the one who wrote Renaissance motets” “Moe who? Never heard of him” “all right all right then with a ‘p’ as in Plunkett” “gotcha, that was me auntie’s name, Lavinia Plunkett from Dundalk” “yer don’t say, I knew a Plunkett in Dundalk, Ozzie he called himself,” “holy Jay that’s me cousin”), oath and seat taken with some diffculty. The interrogation got underway.
“Yes, yes, Your Worship. I’d my eye on the suspect for a good long wee while, oh aye.”
Judge Jay broke in.
“Are you Scots, Schwarz whatsit? Or a Northerner?”
“Ah no Your Honour. Not quite. Not at all, really.”
“Then knock off the ‘oh ayes’ and ‘good wee whiles,’ IF you don’t mind.”
“Sorry sir. Yes sir.”
“Three bags full,” shouted a hoarse voice (Finn’s) from the public gallery.
“Silence,” thundered Sheehan. “Or I’m clearing the court.”
“Shaddup the lot o’ yez,” said the judge. “Proceed, Inspector whatsit thungummy. Schwarzwald.”
“Thank you, Your Honour. As to the suspect, then. Well, we met by accident and his very first act was to launch himself at me in pure aggression. Happily, I’m well trained in various Asian martial sports, and had no trouble subduing the miscreant. My instinct told me right then and there that I was dealing with a desperate chancer, a man who’d stop at nothing…”
“…to further his nefarious ends?” supplied Judge Jay, with testy pseudo-helpfulness. “Knock off the clichés, Chief Inspector whatever your bleeding name is, and stick to the facts. German, are you? You bloody fattie. Why don’t you stop stuffing your gob and lose a few dozen stone?”
“Yes, Your Honour.” Schwarzkopf was a man who, like a well-trained dog, responded with instant cringing obedience to the whims and mandates of authority, however abusive. Especially in the present circs, after a whirlwind of events lifting him from nonentityhood, via America and the F.B.I., to überprominence as head of the Special Detective Unit, Southeastern District, he felt exposed—out on a (very stout) limb—front and centre—in the spotlight, as if the slightest slip-up, or visit to the wrong Web page, or indiscreet eye-roll in the wrong direction, might usher him straight to his doom. Look at poor Neame, after all. One moment’s madness, and “a promising career” lay…
“ …in ruins…”
“…shattered…”
“…blighted…”
…and other newspaperisms appropriate to the occasion. Mind you, it had been a bit off, by all accounts, to see Neame—and this was on the day of his (Neame’s) big victory too, with the culprit Quain on his way home to stand trial—anyhow, from what he’d heard from the others, the old bugger suddenly popped out of his office staggering, like, as if he’d drink taken (but he hadn’t, according to all reports) and rushed down the corridor, flexing his fingers, then his hands, then waving his arms; then, just past the men’s loo, he broke into a sprint and leapt onto that poor Slumbers girl in an entirely depraved way, chattering like a chimpanzee and snarling “Gotta see them knackers”… Of course, Neame’s parting comment might shed some light on the matter: “Now at last I’m away from her,” meaning Mrs. Neame, a right old firebreathing snapdragon according to what one heard down at Haughey Circle…
“So you have no direct evidence?”
“Well, no, Your Honour. Apart from the phone call.”
“Which we’ll now hear.” Judge Jay snapped his fingers. “Now. Sheehan.”
Sheehan maneuvered the machine clumsily. It clicked into action with a repetitive “ga-thump, ga-thump,” then heavy breathing, or heavy-breathing static, filled the courtroom and a strongly-accented West Cork voice (that of Garda Ypsilon, keeper of tape recordings) announced the date and time of the recording; then Ferdia’s voice came on in unmusical counterpoint with then-Garda Schwarzkopf’s.
“Hullo-o-o?”
“Schwarzkopf? With a ‘p’?”
“Who’s this?”
“Quain.”
“Wayne?”
“Quain.”
“Twain?”
“Ah for the love of…”
“Ah. Quain, is it, I’m with you. How may I help you this fine day in the morning-o?”
Laughter rippled through the jury and slithered up to the public galleries where it was reinforced by a guffaw from Finn and promptly kicked out by Sheehan, who sprang to his feet and shouted red-facedly,
“Sharrup yez arseholes or I’m clearing the court, right, eh, Your Honour?”
No reply came from the judge, who sat, hands clasped, head bowed under his deak, eyes fixed despairingly on his television, which obligingly showed him All The Kings’ Men cantering in a leisurely fashion out of the starting gates at Fairyhouse.
“Run, you bastard,” muttered His Honour.
“Anyhoo. Sharrup.”
Sheehan sat. Schwarzkopf’s voice came scratchily out of the tape recorder.
“A crankshaft, you say? What’s it done, seized up?”
“No, no. That’s your man’s nickname. It’s a bomb he’d be carrying, I’ve no doubt.”
“A bomb, you say?”
Gilbey leapt up, with a full-throated comment.
“Proves what I’ve been saying all along. Proof positive defendant was acting out of the best motives. Warning, for the love of Buddha.”
“Sit down,” “order in the court,” “sharrup,” “no really this is intolerable,” “I said sharrup,” “objection! objection!” “approach the bench,” “and they’re off,” “no, don’t approach, go back to your seats, call a recess, Sheehan,” “I call for a mistrial,” “recess,” “yes, Your Honour. Recess! Back in oh I don’t know,” “half an hour,” “half an hour,” “and it doesn’t look good for All the King’s Men, he’s been overtaken in the outside stretch by Brown Bess, ridden by Alan O’Jenkins…”
Judge Jay took another turn in Brown Alley, smoking, and seethed at All the King’s Men’s fourth-place finish. Then Panters Down romped in fifth and he was on the verge of declaring a mistrial then and there, but the defense called Ernie Cahan the milkman.
“Milk, for fuck’s sake?” exclaimed the judge, his upright combover and flushed features testimony to the difficulties he’d been having with his telly and Lady Luck.
“Milk, aye. And yogurt, and that.”
“You mean you actually drink the stuff?”
“Nah, not really. Prefer a pint of Earwickers, meself. I just deliver it, like. Well, it’s a living.”
“Undoubtedly.”
Assisted by Special Officer Shirtwaist, Forensic and DNA Specialist, Ernie presented the court with a severed foot, plus DNA evidence on a wad of spreadsheets and a letter that began “Dear Client,” that the foot, which had landed on the bonnet of Ernie’s milk lorry during or shortly after the explosion, was in fact the left foot of Crankshaft O’Deane, putative (not a word Ernie would have known) mad bomber.
“Well I’ll be gobsmacked,” said Judge Jay. “Who?”
“O’Deane, Your Honour,” hollered Gilbey. “Prime suspect numero uno from start to finish, as I’ve been trying to tell you, you cloth-eared git, not to mention that gaseous arsehole O’Bunion, who’s probably a closet Hindu.”
“Fair enough,” ruled the judge. “That does it. I’ve had it up to here with your insulting innuendo, all of yez. I hereby declare a mistrial.” To Gilbey and his wife, who had understood “mistral,” and were already making plans for their next trip to Boddhisatva-sur-Rhộne, that wonderful little Buddhist enclave in Provence, the judge roared, “Get out!” He slammed onto his desk a clawfoot hammer he kept under his chair in lieu of a gavel. “If you want an appeal, prepare your briefs you worthless ambulance chasers. But for now, youse can all go home. Especially you, Gilbey.”
“Om,” retorted Gilbey, and left in a first-class huff, followed by his flouncing wife, whose tongue protruded lengthily from her mouth, whether by accident or design it was impossible to say.
So Crankshaft’s foot, despite having been certified by DNA testing, along with the recorded conversation and Robb Manlove’s fervent testimony, all tumbled into the legal morass known as a mistrial. Despite O’Bunion’s and Gilbey’s best efforts, it all ended in spluttering irrelevance. The barristers looked pretty bloody silly, much to Judge Jay’s delight, as did DCI Schwarzkopf, that “disgusting fat Boche hippo fucking potamus” in the words of the judge.
“Thank you, Your Honour,” said Schwarzkopf.
Judge Jay then rose for the last time and reiterated “Mistrial” and swept majestically out of the building, followed close behind by Sheehan and Mrs. Tooley, who both expected free drinks, given His Honour’s relative good humour, despite the racing results. Sure enough, across the way to Mad Molloy’s, the judge stood a round for everyone except the Gilbeys, who as Buddhists forbore alcoholic relaxation; even Pierre O’Bunion partook, and again when another round was called to celebrate Fillet of Plaice’s coming in by a Roman nose at Newmarket, rendering the judge a regular font of high spirits alcoholic and otherwise, beery exhalations, and cash giveaways for all.
* * * * *
“Well,” said Ferdia Quain, unimaginatively, to his wife. “That’s over, eh?” Ignored now that all the legal fuss was done, they sat in a corner adjacent to the snug in which Judge Jay and one or two cronies—Sheehan, Mrs. Tooley, an unnamed ex-jockey once incarcerated, now free on bond —were emitting trills of admiration at the Newmarket results, torsos gently jigging to the reggae that spilled out from the judge’s hand-carried shortwave radio in frequent freshets of o-yay-o and de-dum rhythm, straight from Radio Marley 24, Kingston, Jamaica.
“What a fucking din,” said Ferdia. “What’s your poison?” he inquired of Mrs. Quain.
Shirley had a Bon Séjour: one part Dubonnet, one part Cointreau, the third part ginger ale, with a twist of lime and several ice cubes, American style. Ferdia, untouched in any way by his American experience, cradled a pint of Earwicker’s Special, then another, both poured and sculpted by the expert hands of Anthea, his cousin-in-law-to-be. Ah, ‘twas good to be back, at that moment, so ‘twas. But:
“What a silly bloody carry-on that was,” said Shirley. “Now we’re both unemployed, I’m back in bloody Ireland, we’re both skint, and someone else is living in our house.”
“Ah, but look at the bright side, acushla,” said Ferdia. Shirley braced herself for vapid self-referential expressions of relief at the verdict and sundry stuttered items of self-praise laced with sunny green Irish blather, but instead what she got was:
“At least it isn’t me da living there.”
“Well,” she snapped, “that’s as may be. And I’m not sure that wouldn’t be preferable. Because it doesn’t change the fact that what we’ve got is that Angel creature who’s moved in her boyfriend who’s some kind of professional all-in wrestler and he brought in two of his mates who are sleeping in our sitting room.”
“Bit of a pain in the arse, I give you that.”
“Bit of a…? I’ll give you pain. We’re skint, dearie. Not only that, until we get that lot out of our house, we’re homeless. All because of that idiotic impulse that possessed you to scarper like that, I mean of all the things that might arouse suspicions, your buggering off to America was at the top of the list.”
“Seemed the best thing to do. They had cameras everywhere, and I didn’t want you involved.”
“So you abandoned me. Oh well done. Not that I’m anyone to. I mean, admittedly, I went over there, too, on the off chance. And now we’re back. Face it, love, we’re both failed immigrants. Failed here, failed there.”
“The old story. Time for new beginnings.”
Finn was listening.
“Oy, if yez are hard up, why not move into your man’s house.”
“Who?”
“Your man. That fella. Whatsit. Duddy. He put his owld pile up for sale before he went to America and Byrne’s thinking of buying it so he gave me the key to go look it over and help meself to odds and ends, if I fancied.”
Shirley had another Bon Séjour.
“Duddy, eh? He doesn’t have vitamins all the place, does he?”
“Search me, missus,” said Finn. “But if he does he could have worse, if you take me meaning.” He went off in search of Anthea, muttering “Brrr, it’s cold.” Warmth awaited him later in Anthea’s arms, however, as she was unusually chuffed that day; not only had the court session been a gas, but that old clock Finn had carried out of Roofwalls? The Dutch one? The one he’d wanted to flog for the price of down payment on a new car, down at Arbuckles’ the pawnshop? Well, it had turned out, on the say-so of an antiquarian regular at Molloy’s, whiskey-drinking Mr. Spayne of Spayne and Nimble of Grafton St., Ltd., to be worth (in Mr. Spayne’s words) “a fair old packet” on the open market. Four figures were mentioned assuredly, and five to six hinted at, coyly. Mr. Spayne excitedly offered to intervene, but was coolly turned down: as Finn said, in an uncharacteristic burst of eloquence, you don’t want to hand opportunity off to strangers when it comes knocking for the first time in your bleedin’ life instead of stiffing you up the backside. Discreetly, then, he and Anthea, neither of whom had ever been abroad anyway bar that awful trip to Florida and Finn’s dirty-weekender in Stevenage when he turned 23, were planning a short hop over to the Continent and a place called Karim Zogby’s Auction Palace in Geneva where, it was said all across the Internet, they routinely racked up auctions of a million or more. Afterward, if all went well, it’d be Sod off to Molloys and he, Finn, would buy into half of whatever Byrne had going; and who knew, he might put his silly old cousin Ferdia in charge of something or other…or not.
So, all unknowing-like, Ferdia and Shirley to Roofwalls went, and there, by the shuttered light of the shrouded silvery moon, where Donal and Terpsichore and many another couple had had their sport, they lay and held each other with conjugal tightness through their first night as husband and wife in many a long age, and the soft whistling of the wind was broken only by the silvery wheeze of Ferdia’s smoker’s breathing and Shirley’s burly North Country snoring—and, ‘round midnight, by throat-clearing in the hallway, timid at first, then more assertive, then downright bellicose.
“Ahem ahem. AH-hemahem hem. Ahem. AHH-hem hem HEM hem. AHEMM.” Etc.
But Sir Buckley was ignored, and drifted away. Ferdia and Shirley were sound asleep, and anyway neither of them gave a toss about ghosts. Instead, Ferdia dreamt about a great big severed head bouncing down a road at him, and no matter how fast he ran he couldn’t outrun it, and as it approached, turned out to be grinning Crankshaft O’Deane’s. The jaws fastened onto the seat of his trousers.
“Gotcha!” said the head.

* * * * *
“Now tell me where you think the lighting for the main counter area should go I rather fancy over there no over there no no over THERE where you can see the customer as he comes in through the door and gets an eyeful of the Wall to his right right that’s it well do I have tell you everything what kind of wiring fella are you anyway don’t seem to know your arse from a breach in the Ballymullet High Dam sorry sorry it’s been a trying sort of a day I mean first off there I was at four thirty in the bleeding a.m. getting out of me kip and heading all the way across town to Heuston to catch the Killoyle express express is it ahhaha don’t make me laugh it was a friggin milk train I mean it stopped at every crossroads and dairy farm between here and the Great Blasket Island itself so I hear you saying it did so why not drive then I know I know bloody strange isn’t it that a fella who sells cars won’t drive one a hundred miles or so down the road like well too bad because I don’t sell cars any more now that I’ve decided to become a respectable shopkeeper slash tourist attraction I don’t want anything to do with bloody cars cars is it get out of that not that I can’t find a nice one for meself or the missus oh no twenty odd years in the business and you learn which ones to avoid you know but be janey it was time for a change so it was oh it was so it was so here we are and I’m starting out all over again as the future owner of Killoyle’s only wine and cheese shop by the by do you think Killoyle Wine and Cheese is a good name that was Finn’s idea not terribly original I grant you but it gets to the point then on the other hand I was thinking about The Hunger Strike as a sort of well I dunno comical moniker for a nosh stand plus the fact that a fair number of people will come by to have a look at the Hunger Strikers’ Wall anyway now that it’s incorporated into the shop well I just thought maybe we should mention that fact but no biggie either way as the Yanks say and the thought also popped into me head that The Hunger Strike sounds more like the name of a bar than a wine and cheese shop and you can’t be too careful when it comes to keeping away the riff raff oh believe you me I know whereof I speak after twenty odd years in the car trade anyway whatever we end up naming it you can be sure word will get out and either way I’m the happy fella because I got rid of that used-car business that was dragging me down as well as dragging down a piece of absolutely prime real estate I mean just look at it will you with that view and everything and right on Uphill Street and right off all the main bus routes now I’ve got to give your man Finn that’s my manager Finn McCool I know I know believe it or no I didn’t either but he showed me his driving license but never mind his driving license I’m still that dubious if you know what I mean I mean Finn McCool in this day and age honestly well anyway what was I oh yes I’ve got to give him fair due after all he was the one who looked round one day and said Sod the car business let’s build a wine and cheese shop AND what’s more let’s buy that ugly old wall and tear it down he said oh no I says I we’ll not do that the thing’s a cash cow as they say over in the States a real honest to God mooing old cash cow so ‘tis no here’s what we’ll do I says we’ll make it into part of the shop to bring in the tourists who come down here to stand about and goggle at those friggin hideous drawings well I don’t mind saying the moment the words came out of my mouth and I realized what I was contemplating I was right shocked so I was but on mature reflection if you know what I mean things fell into place so they did so here we are and we’re set to open middle of next month what’s that round about Patrick’s Day my my there’s yet another theme we could use a patriotic inauguration with the Hunger Strikers’ Wall and all that do you know it could bring ‘em in by the coachload I’ll need to be doing some work on that now where was I oh yes as I was saying I won’t drive on those roads and that’s flat I mean have you tried to drive on those roads never mind if they call them jewel bloody carriageways or whatever jewel carriageways indeed that’s a good one pardon me while I laugh jewel carriageways me arse pardon my French ANYhoo here I am and here I stay ah ha ha ha ha O’Reilly isn’t it yes well once again we can thank the dreaded Finn McCool he’s the one who suggested I hire you for the job only game in town he said bar some Japanese outfit that mainly does prestige wiring for that Maher article by the by while we’re on that subject here’s a tidbit just between you and me and the lamppost no not that one that one no not that one that one no no THAT one over by the Hunger Strikers’ Wall anyway what was I saying well I’ll just let you get on with it then the wiring I mean now don’t forget we said the track lighting will need to be along the top of the Hunger Wall over there I want it to be like a museum feature you know like one of them Roman mosaics out in those Italian museums or that collection of old CIE posters at the Transport Museum in Copperbottom Street oh well worth a visit that is they have posters dating back to the Emergency a damn sight better than your man Vincent Bingo or whatever his bleeding name was that Dutch or Belgian waster with the beard and the ear cut off and the loony stare no thanks give me something practical and real-life to look at like a poster actually I was thinking of getting a few in here real period pieces they are and the prices for coach travel back then you would not believe I mean Dublin Galway three bob return for a start and let me see Dublin Belfast a tanner or was it it five bob nothing at all anyway boy nothing at all all right then I’ll let you get on with it now as I was saying the track lighting should go over there and there so we have this welcoming area you see the moment you step in the front door and speaking of which I’d quite fancy one of those pseudo gas lamp jobs right outside we’re going for the ye oldee antiquey look in case you hadn’t guessed you know striped awnings and gilded flowerpots and the like and well I was thinking a set of those fake Victorian gas lamps would be just the thing one on either side if you catch my drift one on either side of the front door what do you think could you manage that as part of the package like oh no I’m not willing to renegotiate we already decided on your fee mister me man it’s not like I’m some blooming King Minos or whatever his name was not like your man ah ha ha ha how appropriate your man The Greek Maher oh yes I just remembered what I was saying eh but seriously of course if I’m asking you to install new units I’ll adjust the pay scale upward somewhat now if I do that I’d expect your cooperation in say hooking up a pair of electric signs down the way a ways oh you know the kind of thing Come Relax With the Bries at Killoyle Wine and Cheese is one young Finn thought that up or what was the other one let me see If Roque’s Your Forte Then Stop in at Killoyle Wine and Cheese and so on no I know it’s not exactly flaming Shakespeare is it but all’s fair in love and advertising as me da always said ah he was the card to end all cards let me tell you once he was standing outside the door and a fella walked by and says to him Allo he says not looking too well these days are we and Well I dunno says the da I haven’t seen meself in awhile ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha I haven’t seen meself in awhile get it seen meself ah God it makes me feel better to think of that owld bugger so it does ah the things that man had to put up with from women you wouldn’t believe nor would you I can promise that and I know better than most because they were me own mam and sis and still are God bless and keep them not that sis needs much of either no she up stakes and emigrated to a fishing village somewhere on the Outer Banks or is the Inner Banks or the Upper Banks or Banks is it well somewhere over there anyhow but never mind all that as me uncle Davie used to say Never Mind All That he’d say when we sat down to tea and mam brought in the colcannon and rashers Where’s the Fuckin Whiskey and oh how he’d split his sides after that and from time to time have the devil’s own coughing fit like the blooming house was going to fall down but that was Uncle Davie for you ah a real prince of a man he was so he was why once didn’t he catch one of those Cahill boys in his cellar and let him go you know the ones didn’t one of them used to work at your shop what was his name Paulie Philly Petey that was it you know I heard the oddest thing about that lad who was it told me now ah now I have it ‘twas me owld butty Judge Larkin a gas man entirely and a gold mine when it comes to tips on the nags the pair of us downright cleaned up the other day when Fillet of Plaice a four year-old filly romped in ahead of Gulfstream at Newmarket and I pocketed a cool two fifty thank you very much ah Judge Larkin’s your man he is if you’re ever after a hot tip anyhow where was I ah yes Petey Cahill well now rumour has it he was nabbed be the Feds over in America for how shall I put it…”
“By the front door, did you say?” interjected O’Reilly, hastily. “How many outlets?”
“…how many ah ah right very well then let me have a look six I reckon or eight no eight we’ll be wanting as many as possible for that track lighting above and below so the punters will see your men’s faces as clearly as possible not that anyone in his right mind would want to get a really close look I mean honestly just look at that fella on the left whatsisname Socks is it holy Jay he looks like the back end of the No. 112 bus on a rainy day of course I suppose you’ll say I wouldn’t look like Rudolf Schwarzenegger meself if I’d not eaten for seven weeks well fair play to you not that I’d ever have the well I suppose courage is the word or do I mean plain old-fashioned looniness because quite honestly when you get right down to it at the end of the day what’s the fucking point pardon my French I mean if you ask me a united Ireland is all me arse and isn’t worth blowing off the tip of one man’s little finger let alone poor innocent babbies and their mams I mean there are times when you’re ashamed to call yourself an Irishman so I didn’t I always called myself a West Norman ah ha ha ha ha ha from West Killoyle ah ha ha ha ha ha ha do ya get it now West Norman like West Briton you know what they called the unionists and the like so West Norman and these days with all those French tourists and the Dutch and all well I don’t know maybe I’d be better off opening a condom shop ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha well there’s no rule against branching out so to speak is there at all ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha of course wine’s all the rage these days isn’t it what with us trying to be French or Italian or anything but Brits and everyone opening up restaurants serving lemon soup with grass cuttings washed down with a crisp Vouvray and what have you mind you I’ve nothing against the noble grape myself no I’ve always made it a point to educate myself almost as if I knew one day I’d own a wine shop now let me see O’Reilly what would you drink with shellfish no idea eh no I wouldn’t expect it a pint of Reamer’s more up your alley well personally I would choose a green-gold Chablis with the flinty personality of me auntie Charlotte as the man said and then of course moving on to the main course shall we say lobster well now that might demand something richer and rounder like a buttery concentrated Meursault with a big bottom on it like that actress whatsername the one from Down Under Michelle is it or whatever you know the one she was just in what was it called Spit and Polish or Polish Sausage oh grrrrr that’s what I always say and me wife says watch out whenever he sees a picture of that bint he comes over all narky and goes grrrrrrrrr ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ANYway then there’d be stylish Puligny-Montrachet for your high-end days and everyday Maconnais whites for booze-ups mind if you insist on the cheapest and rest assured we’ll have a full range of price options I’d say go with the old Andalusian red that’s the plonk for the punter so you see I know something about it after all not the run of the mill used-car salesman oh no not I moi non as they say pardon my French ah ha ha and certainly not like that fucking gombeen man Maher whose taste is centered squarely in his bunghole thank you very much why would you believe it NOW I remember what I was going to say as soon as I let it be known I what I was planning for this little parcel of property old Greek Maher himself gets on the blower and does his emerald paddy shure and begorra and a thousand leprechauns number on me and comes right out and offers me a couple of million for the lot and I mean the lot including the Wall up yours is my response two can play at that game anyhow don’t you own half the bloody town as it is no monopolies here where do you think you are I said and then I meant to say Russia or Nazi Germany or one of those but for some unknown reason well no not totally unknown it’s pretty obvious really what I said was where do you think you are Greece well of course it’s hardly a secret he’s been known as The Greek lo these many years and equally well-known is the fact that he bloody hates it because he thinks it makes him sound like some kind of poofter so and I had this on very good authority my wife knows someone who works at Mahers so believe it or not he actually circulated a memorandum throughout his companies warning the employees against calling him The Greek either to his face or behind his back or they’d be sacked I kid you not sacked now I asked meself when I heard this what if some poor sod is taking his tea break and happens to be overheard talking about a friend of his from Greece and comes out with it like oh I don’t know Whatcher think of yer man The Greek like he was talking about football as he might be or oh I don’t know yachting or some other fucking caper well didja see The Greek on the box last night well what then does he get sacked on the spot or what does Maher’s security team move in and do a little kneecapping I don’t know I reckon it’s a subject the Human Rights blokes ought to get involved in but to be quite honest with you it comes as no surprise to anyone who’s followed that bastard’s career I mean honestly starting out letting slum flats and fumigating the poor into the street and once or twice or so rumour has it going in himself dressed up as a ninja if you can imagine that the world’s fattest ninja that would be boy and no mistake and what I heard was he let fly with fertilizer just to drive out a wee man he didn’t care for well you know how these stories get started there’s always some chancer down the way standing at the bar spreading rumour and innuendo but there’s never smoke without fire as they say eh or is it fire without smoke well anyway then your man sensing defeat as it were has the brass to suggest we go into business together and when he said it I was looking at the Hunger Strikers’ Wall and I thought as well him as another if he can make money for me and then I asked him if he’d ask again only for a higher price oh no said he so I named it and then he asked me would I go down a notch no I said no sod off you smarmy spalpeen I wouldn’t go into business with St. Michael himself for that oh no and then I lowered the boom on him no business with you no I know you’re a crook and I’ll tell ‘em all then he went down a thousand or so but no I said no so he could feel I was sincere no not a penny and my mind was going like mad and no I said no I will not No.”

The End

Source: http://killoylewineandcheese.blogspot.com/2008/09/killoyle-wine-and-cheese-irish-american.html