J1
In my cups I
lay down on the conveyor belt to pass through with the baggage. I was warned. I
asked why I could not travel that way for free as I weighed no more than “that
rich cunt over there’s golf clubs”. Passage was more accommodating of a man’s
means during the famine. They said it was dangerous down there without a
seatbelt amongst the baggage which sometimes shifted in heavy turbulence and I
replied that I was a grown man and they could let me worry about that. I asked
them why the prejudice against living matter in favour of inanimate and whether
they would allow me in the holds if I was a corpse, which they said they would.
It was a price slightly too steep to pay and after berating them as savages,
scalpers and butchers I reluctantly handed over the ticket which had cost me so
many months of toil in the local newsagent’s, a heartless Centra, heartless
like all the others, and full of Chinese now who don't celebrate Christmas and
will work mad hours just to make the rest of us look bad, but that is another
story. On board the plane there were many others who had gotten the visa like
me, all ebullient and stoking their Irishness with hearty but tense renditions
of “Athenry” to have it strong and ready upon arrival in that huge and uncaring
land. The lights went out half way in a meek suggestion that perhaps it was
time for us to sleep. The lad beside me was tossing his head from side to side,
half conscious only, emotionally slurring the first line of “Fields of Athenry”
again and again. After a few minutes the button for the hostess was jabbed
impatiently and he cried out “Nurse, Nurse!” for her to bring him an umpteenth
little whiskey in a plastic cup. Refreshed, he suggested to his friend they
take out the hurleys and the sloitar and have a bit of a lash in the aisle. The
friend said no, they’d kick us out. “They can’t fukken kick us out Mick we’re
in a fukken plane.” “What do ye think the fukken parachutes are there for
then?”
I make no
bones about stating that I crossed the water fully with the aim of doing my
best to live up to the sound reputation we built for ourselves here in the New
World since ever we poured forth from the holds of the first famine ships. I
came with noble ideals of paying homage to the struggles and triumphs of my
forbears. Many months have passed since I was pushed dazzled and wary through
the bowels of O’Hare and in my jetlagged daze shat out abruptly into the city
of Chicago, alone and utterly unprepared. I won’t worry you with an account of
my period of accustomisation, the time I spent living like a savage, sleeping
in bins during the day and stalking alleys by night like some Hibernian
Grendel, the only remnants of my clothing the filthy green and gold tatters of
my former County Kerry jersey proudly tied round my head and wrists and ankles.
Loping along in the dark clutching my hurley and with it cracking open the
heads of bums and pilfering their wretched goods. All that needs to be said is
that eventually I elevated myself which is what people come to America to do. I
rolled with the punches and got ahead, as they might say. There were others
like me and we banded together for insulation in shifting combinations in
various squalid flats, each a tribute to the Irish tenements of yore. In these
little bubbles of ignorance and inwardness and earthy affectation, our Celtic
nature was distilled into a heady purity unimaginable in our homes where it
could only be diluted by our families’ petty aspirations towards modern sophistication
and cosmopolitan blandness.
Now, I find
myself living in just such a place with six Meathmen, Pol, Walshie, Risteard,
John-Paul, Martin, and Johnno, and five Leitrim men, Miheal, Barry, The
Chancer, Gint, and Seanin, as well as a Louthman, Luckers, and a lass from
Carlow, Anne Marie. She is a majestic broth of a girl, stout and ruddy and
capped by a short and briary twist of greasy hair decidedly not brown yet which
could not be described as red either. Her brow is so low that the indeterminate
frazzle mercifully conceals her eyes, two obstinate little marbles which demand
submission without really expecting to get it. But she’s the best we have. In
fact she’s the only bit of hole in the place and the lads are always slinking
around her eying her and each other like a harem of cautious vultures lustfully
circling some stately swollen carcass. Recently the stork himself paid us a
visit and Anne Marie gave vent to a child out of herself, thankfully while in
her cups and so a little anaesthetised. She is so sweet we never even knew it
was there, and perhaps neither did she before she blasted it out of herself in
a hail of gore, bawling oaths to raise the roof and damning it all the while.
And no sooner had she excreted him than the intemperate little bastard
(and I use that term strictly in the technical sense) set up an awful bleedin
racket out of himself which prompted his mother to roar at him repeatedly to
shut his fukken gob, and it took Gint to explain that perhaps the child hadn’t
been born with the English on him and if that were so the surest way to shut
the wailing gob would be to shove one of her udders in it, which she did. And
Luckers did come out of the bathroom trailing a wisp of bogroll torn from a
roll stolen from the jacks of the Marriot Hotel no less and wiped the infant
down, prompting with this regal tribute speculation as to whether the squawking
boiled-looking child had its origins in his loins. Then there was the issue of
where to bed the child in that cramped one room flat. Since every inch of floor
was taken up with slumbering Irishmen, and the single bed in the midst of them
was indisputably dominated every inch by the massive corpulence of her ladyship
Anne Marie, it was quite the task to find space for the newborn. The problem
was solved by Gint, who had the bright idea of making a crib of the auld
microwave in the corner, and blankets were placed in it and the device was
turned with the door facing upwards and quite an accommodating little crib it
proved.
Anyway, on
the day following the birth a lad called to the door, he was one of them black
fellas, but he had the education on him and it was Pol who answered the door to
him.
“He wants
the child,” hissed Anne Marie to the hushed room, full of only the faintest
vigilant mutterings, as he did so.
“Would you
like to buy an encyclopedia?” enquired blackie innocently enough, but Pol was
wise to him and looked at the fecker and said, “Buy a what? Why would I want
your fukken encyclermejig? Do you think I have the fukken money for it? What am
I going to do with it but feed the fire, and there’s cheaper ways of feeding
the fukken fire,” to which the blackie responded, “Well it’s for reading sir,
it’s a reference book,” an answer which Pol found unsatisfactory and to which
he retorted, “No! I said what am I going to fukken do with it but wipe the
shite off me arse with its pages and there’s cheaper things a boy could use to
wipe the fukken shite off his arse like,” at which point Anne Marie interjected
with the words, “He thinks he’s better than you because he has the reading on
him,” which Martin embellished by commenting on the cheek of the cunt and
called to Miheal to come and observe this cheek, and Miheal came and attested
that the cunt was indeed displaying awful cheek and was acting superior even,
and added his own suggestion, namely that Pol should “Kick in the teeth of him”
to which Pol found himself in agreement. And before the blackie knew what hit
him, Pol was through the door and his fist mashed the fellow’s nose flatter even
than it was before and he fell gouting the red stuff from it to the ground
where Pol carried out Miheal’s suggestion to the letter and with the heel of
his right boot left of the fellows mouth a vision of the apocalypse, a
strawberry red mess from which sprung the jagged remains of broken teeth like
ice capped peaks reeling above a swallowing sea of lava.
“We don’t
like cleverness here,” said Pol when he looked down again, and the lads agreed
with him, and Anne-Marie agreed with him to an even greater extent, wordless
and red and looking around with flashing eyes to make sure the righteous act
had been fully appreciated and as proud of Pol as if he had been her husband or
brother or son or all three. Clutching her nameless infant to her breast, she
shattered the silence with a tormented shriek: “Go back to the Congo with
you!”, to no response.
And the lads
fell to talking about what should be done with auld blackie, and it was decided
that times being what they were, and with a new mouth to feed to boot, it would
be best that he be put to use as feed for the lot of them. But alas, Seanin was
among them, a conscientious lad with an acute sense of the perils of Hell, and
he put a spanner in the works by suggesting that to do so would be cannibalism,
the blackest of sins. Thankfully Risteard, very well versed in scriptural
matters, chimed in to save the day by saying that only if you ate the same sort
of fellow as yourself was it cannibalism, and to eat the blackie would be no
more sinful than to eat a dog or cat, which was something the Chinese were
known to do, which prompted Luckers to ask whether then it was acceptable to
eat a Chinaman, to which Risteard responded that there was no moral dimension
to the Chinaman question, but on the other hand that the meat of them was known
to be awful stringy and sparse on the bones and as such he would not advise the
consuming of them. And Luckers pursued the matter by inquiring what then of a
Frenchie, or a Spicker, for example, to which Risteard replied that they were borderline
cases. And in response, Luckers, ever the logical one, pointed out that if they
were borderline cases then an Englishman must be on our side of the border and
that an Irishman and an Englishman must be close enough kin to be called the
same type of fellow then, to which Risteard responded that any more of that
talk would be cause for him to blacken Luckers’ eye for him, whose words at
that moment he found malign and unpatriotic, and that anyway having long
renounced goodness, the English had knowingly thrust themselves further from
the grace of God than even the blackest heathen, who at least could plead
ignorance before St. Peter at the Gates, and being so blackened of soul
deserved less consideration than even a perch or a ray or an eel when it came
to a fellow’s gastronomic needs, for at least those lowly creatures were merely
absent of soul rather than accursed and fallen and thus deserving of
destruction in the manner of the Sasanach.
Risteard
found himself drawn into a metaphysical disquisition at this point, and
revealed that it had been made known to him by no less of an authority than
Father Garret that if one could see the soul of the Irishman, despite his
uncouth exterior, it would be, to use the Father’s words, luminescent and of
such transcendent beauty that any walking, flying, swimming, crawling or
slithering thing encountering it would by necessity have to avert its eyes at
once or risk falling into an unseverable state of rapture. Yet the soul of the
Englishman was of all meager things most like a fig or date, that is small and
shriveled and black, the only difference being that it bore a wizened and
ill-tempered face, a visage which is the same for all of their souls
irrespective of the sex or beauty of the body from which they might be drawn.
And all such souls rather than giving off a radiance give off the same vile
odour, namely a mixture of hospital disinfectant and cabbage farts. In this way
that which seems most similar is sometimes rather the most alien if its hidden
and profound attributes be taken into account. One must always consider the
soul.
It was the
day after this discussion that the lads took their hurlies and sloitars to
Wicker Park dressed with bloated and defensive pride in the tribal garb of
their insignificant counties. After flatulently whipping the sloitar around the
field for a half hour or so and failing to establish the interest due them
among the various yanks loitering about the place, it was decided begrudgingly
but with relief that pints should be drank as soon as possible at the nearest
pub, where they then were, copiously.
The lads,
drunk past the peak of euphoria to the point of fatigue, eventually gave up on
the enterprise and went home each and all but for Pol, who was in his cups and
stayed out in the streets bottle in hand to hassle the tanned and toned women
of America like a randy auld dog, a stinking musk of frustrated misogyny
clinging to him. Needless to say Pol was unsuccessful in voiding his balls of
their burden, but he did however succeed in intoxicating himself thoroughly and
irredeemably.
It was late
indeed when Pol returned to the house, and to say that he was not only in his
cups but drowning in them would be an understatement of the highest order. He
barged in the door wailing and cursing, trampling heedlessly across the
sleepers who clogged the floor, thick tongued and flailing about himself as if
he were beating off a horde of assailing vampire bats. Luckers, still a little
in his cups himself, believing that among the wordless effluvia spilling from
Pol’s mouth he detected his own name attached to the noun “cunt”, stood up with
a truculent bellow and hit Pol a box to the face, whereupon Pol lost his senses
and collapsed like a toppling redwood. Lord it pains me to relate what
followed. Pol’s meaty head fell against the door of the microwave in which the
baby was sleeping, slamming it shut, and his puce cabbage leaf of an ear
depressed the ON button. And wasn’t the babog God rest him spinning and
sizzling and wailing inside the bloody device, and despite the bloodcurdling
shrieks and the blows of the lot of them and the tormented screams of Anne
Marie nothing would wake him and no amount of effort would stir him for he was
a huge man and given to oaken narcolepsy when drunk, and some of his hair being
stuck inside the range with the poor child, that vast lump of a head couldn’t
be shifted an inch. And only when the microwave said “ping!” did Pol’s eyes
flick open, and sniffing he declared “What’s that smell? Have ye the morning
meal on fer us Anne Marie?” to which Anne Marie replied “Ye bastard ye bastard
its only me only fukken child roasting ye bastard ye bastard” to which Pol
replied that it was well known that it was the child, not he, who was the
bastard, and that now he was cooked he had better be put to some use by God,
and didn’t he only smell delicious, you never would have thought it looking at
the ugly little bastard only he might have done it sooner by God.
But Seanin
was distressed and said surely it was cannibalism, there could be no doubt this
time, and that cannibalism was a sin. Risteard, who had heretofore remained
mute, interjected at this stage, and said that when in his cups he had
addressed the infant and asked it whether it supported Leitrim or Meath in the
GAA, to which the child had responded with only a burbling piglike squeal, a
negative utterance surely, attesting to the fact that the soul in the child
hailed neither from Leitrim nor Meath, and may indeed rather be the soul of a
swine, the child’s looks taken into account, so that a Meathman or a Leitrim
man might consume it without his immortal soul being imperiled. Then Miheal
revealed a conversation he had had with the Louthman Luckers while Luckers was
in his cups during which Luckers had asked him of his opinion of Anne Marie,
and to Miheal saying he thought little of her looks, Luckers with an ugly glint
in his eye had responded with the statement “She’s an ugly cunt, but I’d fuck
her” prior to passing into a stupor, and that this was evidence enough for him
that the Louthman had sowed the seed, and that any Leitrim or Meath man present
need not fear for his soul but could feast on fortune’s tragic bounty with an
easy conscience, which was a relief to all. The case and the relief were
cemented by the ravenous Chancer’s revelation that he himself had woken one
drunken night to see by moonlight on the altar of the bed Lucker’s hirsute arse
beaming at him from between Anne Marie’s thighs as it energetically dashed
itself against the base of that mountain of mottled pink blubber. Yet Seanin,
ever vigilant, called out for the host to hold their chops, that it was a
Friday, and Friday was a day upon which meat could not be taken. And although
Miheal attempted to liken the visage of the fried child with its popping eyes
and vulgar lips to that of a trout and so build a case for starting the meal
now, there are times when the boundaries between things are sufficiently
clear-cut for anyone to see, and it was agreed that all save Luckers and Anne
Marie could tuck in without imperiling their immortal souls, provided they wait
until the following day, Saturday.
Saturday
came, and all decided that it was a special day, and as such it wouldn’t do to
serve Anne Marie’s own bastard in a haphazard manner. The one plate once
squabbled over before it was forgotten about was remembered and retrieved from
under the couch and brushed free of mould by Gint, who outdid himself by
removing the hardened ketchup stains and polishing it to a blinding intensity,
using only a Kleenex and his spittle, albeit liberally applied. In a gesture
thought overgenerous by Pol, the Chancer revealed the packet of chicken ramen
he had been saving up to this point, boiled it in his own piss to save on the
water bills, thus placating Pol, and arranged its contents around the platter
to form a bed on which the little fried child was lain. Anne Marie, wailing
self-consciously as the tears streamed down her cheeks, her modesty overcome by
the unfairness of being barred from tasting the fruits of her labour, sensed
that this was nevertheless her occasion and she shouldn’t let others monopolise
it; she revealed an artistic streak she had hitherto kept well hidden and drew
a little suit and buttons on the mite using only the ketchup which was squeezed
from the almost-empty bottle in a requiem of desultory farts. Pol
finished sharpening the carving knife and when they had the plate down on the
floor between the lot of them he barked at them to keep their mitts off, and
standing up, said grace on behalf of them all.