In
his battered black coat Macken stalks the bar, wilfully out of his element.
“What a fucking meat market. Disgusting.” He glowers at the thighs and calves
with hunger, the rims of the short skirts, the high heels. At times his gaze flickers
up above the waists to take in the faces and check whether they complement the
bodies or cancel them out. He disapproves of the lack of self-consciousness to
be seen in them. Beasts. Mindless. Have they no shame? None. Envy soon gnaws
through his satisfaction and lust returns. They live in a natural bliss that no
religion nor vice could hope to impose on a man of his calibre. And he would
never have anything imposed on him, nor compromise his bleak vision with a
little metaphysical consolation. He is proud of what he lacks and proud to
yearn and suffer. He bears his cross with a straight back. Macken is a man who
stares into the abyss. That is not to say he is an ascetic. To resist is
against his philosophy, it is egocentric, a sin. Better to succumb with a sense
of disgust. That is the definition of decency.
On
amongst the revellers goes the righteous intruder, on into the brothel of
undeserved bliss to drag down a body, and how does he propose to do it, to daze
it with a shameful epiphany and then lead it off to hump in despairing
gratitude? They dance on oblivious to the man with the potent weapon, smuggling
in the ideas that would wilt them up if he let his mouth unleash them. A little
bit buoyed up now, he has the confidence of a jihadi with explosives strapped
under his jacket. He tries a predatory slink, that way of moving suits his
purpose. But he is buffeted and halted at every turn, his path cut off again
and again as he makes for gaps only to have them close before he gets to them.
Big men and loud women unconsciously push him out of the way to shout
propositions into each other’s ears. He shrinks, his bluster already shrivelling.
There is a haven over the far side. A table glimpsed in a strobe through a
fleeting window framed by backs and arms then shut by a torso. His own arm gets
trapped between two backs and he starts straining uselessly like some small but
poisonous serpent in a robust grip. His pint is splashing onto his hand. He
clings to it. He says excuse me once, then hisses it desperately. “Fuckin hold
on will you. What was that you were saying? Vodka.”
The
crowd finally relents and excretes him in a corner, shrunken, beaten, hackles
up. He makes it to the table and he sits down almost shivering in indignation
and awaits the arrival of his friend Pigott. Without the guidance of his eyes,
his spidery fingers roll a tight, mealy-mouthed cigarette as he scans the
rabble, attempting to appear aloof. Soon he sees him huddled up in disdain at
the bar, a murky smudge against the rest, awkward, unwilling to lean over and
wave his fiver, standing hunched as if against the wind behind the craning row
of backs and bottoms. He is equipped as usual with an English newspaper under
his arm and a bedraggled old paper bag in his hand containing a book and his
thoughts on it and everything else besides, scribbled on clumps of foolscap.
Perched on his grand hook of a nose, thick glasses magnify the sullenness of
his small elephant eyes as he waits in the dark to be noticed. A frown coils in
the recess beneath these more dominant features. Eventually succumbing to this
totem of gloom glaring out from amongst the outer fringe of his customers, the
barman takes his order and returns delivering two little drinks into his hands.
“Scotch and water, at his age, in these days.” mutters Macken. “Ponce.”
Pigott
reaches Macken and joins him without so much as a greeting, taking his paper
from beneath his arm and placing it down on the table beside Macken’s pint and
on top of a pile of nightclub flyers at which he chuckles, wishing to appear as
amused as a god by the inane frolics of lesser beings before extinguishing them
on a whim. He removes his own skins and pouch of Duma tobacco from the pocket
of the baggy overcoat which hangs about him as though it were the sloughing
hide of a reptile and sets to work, and for a few seconds as the two of them
are rolling and scanning in tandem they seem thrust back millions of years, a
pair of wary apes crouched over shelling nuts on the forest floor. They open
their mouths and they are human again.
“Out and smoke these?”
Elbowing
their way to the door they finally get through and find themselves standing out
on the greasy cobbles in front of the bar, hunched up in their coats. Enough
months have passed now that they don’t even bother to curse the ban anymore.
Pigott flicks his Zippo open and they light up in its fat quivering flame.
“So, Graham, how was your day?” enquires Pigott out one side of his
mouth, his rollie clasped in the other.
“What?”
Macken
is distracted by the street life. He is insatiable and his eyes flicker and
dart as they try to grab at everything at once. It is a Saturday, far from
empty despite the drizzle. In the dim orange light cast from the lampposts the
cobbles glisten like the backs of toads clogged in a breeding pool. The night
sky above is choked with cloud tainted the same dull orange. Girls in heels
totter about on the slimy domes, their ankles ready to break, their short
jackets pulled up over their heads to keep off the rain. One of the headless sluts
squawks in alarm as her pin heels scrabble, then curses in triumph as she
regains balance and spits from under the jacket collar between her fists onto
the ground. Men on the other hand swagger, taking the rain as men are supposed
to. Voices are all around, raised by drink, belligerent, repetitive, full of
emphasis, drilling in their points. “I told you Mark, I fucking told you. I
told you Mark. I told you to fucking watch yourself.” Another, Mark presumably,
“Do you want your go then, come on, I said do you want your go then? Do you
want your go then Nialler, you fucking hypocrite?”
“Your day, how was it?” repeats Pigott.
“Always speaking into your throat like that. I can’t make you out half
the time. Chin up, literally, physically. Fine, fine, whatever, the same. Let’s
watch this for a minute. It looks like it might take off.”
And
it does. Mark swings at Niall and misses, Niall head butts Mark with a solid
and brainless thud. Two cement blocks colliding. A crowd gathers. Mark is
struck in the face again and he goes down, slipping on a knotted plastic bag
that has risen from the muck to become wrapped around his foot somehow, as if
the city ever vigilant and ever thirsting sends its shreds and its waste to aid
in the drawing of blood where they can. This draws a sarcastic cheer or two.
Niall is on top of Mark, Mark is cursing, saying he told Niall, he fucking told
him, again and again, biting at his hand with his horse-like gummy jaws, and
then Niall is asking how he likes what’s happening to him, repeatedly, while
pushing his face into the slime, his cheekbone against the cobble till the
cobble slips to the hollow below it to the point where he can no longer even
scream as the teeth begin to pop, till the police in their luminous jackets are
suddenly on top of them from somewhere, “Break it the fuck up lads”, hissed
through a lipless rectangle of clenched bone in a red beefy face boiling with
exertion, the two police wrenching the two off one another, stretching their
sweaters to the limit as they strain forward like rabid dogs on choke-chains,
flailing at the air, cursing, cursing, and cursing till it’s nothing but
howling roars, then howling pleas as the heaving cops at last have them in some
sort of Garda college restraining grip, their limbs tangled up behind their
backs, “my arm, my arm, your breaking my arm”, the unusually eloquent
exclamation from nowhere “I’m in agony, oh, oh it’s fucking agony,” then the
back of the van, the dispersal of the jeering mob, and it’s all finished. They
flick the roaches of their smokes to the gutter.
“Well, that was worth it.”
“Madness”
Back
inside to the table.
“Any plans to go home?”
“None yet. Hideous place this. Why are we here anyway?”
“Why not? What’s the book? Why is it here more to the point?”
“I came from the library. Othello.”
Macken
groans. “The bard, the bloody bard, again and again, you’d stalk him if he was
alive. Spit on me Shakespeare! Just don’t talk about it, that’s all I ask, and
I hope you didn’t bring it here and plonk it down in front of me in this of all
places for that purpose. And don’t talk about the NHS, the middle classes,
Proust, psychiatry or any of the others, because I will just reply on auto, if
at all. Imagine it, a shouted conversation about Proust in a meat market like
this, could there be anything more stupid?”
Pigott
is a romantic. Macken considers Pigott a stage on the way to himself, perhaps
incapable of the full descent. He enjoys tugging at his ankle.
“Well what will you allow me to talk about then? And must you be so
overbearing? I’ve barely even sat down.”
“Don’t be so testy. Just don’t make me feel I have Alain de Botton here
at my elbow again. How about women for once? And not the one you’ve been
moaning about and trailing around after for the past year, I mean women,
Woman.”
“You mean ‘pussy’, don’t you?”
“Well I never thought I’d hear such filth from your hallowed mouth. You
beast. Be decent. Look over there. Envoys from your fair land. Here on a Celtic
cock hunt no doubt. You must be proud. Tell me, how does one best approach women
from your Kingdom? ”
By
the bar a group of English girls, drunk, whooping and cackling, their accents
seemingly hacking through a quagmire of phlegm on the way out of their gobs. A
hen party. Despite coming from some ash-grey city of the north they are tanned
somehow, clad in matching skimpy clothes with long blond or brown manes
tumbling down their backs from under cowboy hats with crude alliterative
nicknames in rhinestone. Lusty Linda is about the best of them, younger than
the rest. All with a decent amount of make-up round the front though. Macken’s
real type. Not the American wallflowers who give little apologetic disclaimers
about Bush, write bad poetry, and swoon at his sermons on philosophy, his
brittle body and his refined, effeminate features. He is their type. They can
go to hell. “As asexual as potatoes.” Macken wants flesh and filth, because in
his view they complement each other like cheese and red wine. He specifically
does not want an equal, if indeed there could be anyone he considers as such.
With an equal there are feelings of guilt attached to the physical terms of his
satisfaction, not to mention that dismal obligation of courtship, pulling off
some sort of meeting of minds. There is a responsibility to satisfy, physically
and intellectually. Macken wants none of that, no considerations, a taking and
sating, a slaking of thirst, not a pretence of sharing some holy thing or a
meeting of anything other than organs, and if the pleasure happens to be mutual
then all the better. No self-consciousness and no human relations. He wants to
unleash his lust and his cruelty and his frustration and get a taste of what he
thinks real life is, the beast life, with a woman who wants merely the beast
from him, or anyone. Man and beast.
“Did you bring me here specifically to make an attack on England? I
won’t be embarrassed. Are Dubliners really so much better in comparison? I’d
beg to differ. There was another one taking a shit in the entrance of my
building again yesterday. She was crouched over like a dog in a park. A junkie
probably. She asked me what I was looking at as she squatted there uncoiling
her big stinking brown rope all over my doorstep, as if I was somehow the one
impinging on her life.”
He
sees Pigott at the door of his Temple Bar complex with his lofty misanthropy
bolstered, holding his nose above the turd as he reaches over it to slip his
cardkey through the slot. The indignant woman shambling away from her mess at a
diagonal angle in the unstable gait of an addict, dragged along, tottering
against gravity as if loping downhill, moaning curses.
“Perhaps she was a performance artist. You do live in the cultural
quarter. No, Pigott, that’s not why I brought you here, though of course you
should feel a certain measure of shame at their carry on. I came here because I
am hungry for something, and I needed someone else at the table to prevent me
from looking desperate for it, and you were the only one I thought might come.”
“Why?”
“Because I know you enjoy scowling.”
“Well I’ve heard women like it if you just be yourself.”
“Thank you, oh thank you, how invaluable. All your Shakespeare, your
Proust, your great faith in love, and that’s the best you can come up with?
Would they even be vacuous enough say that in Friends? Why don’t you go over and
mutter in their ear about your beloved bed-wetter Marcel then, and give them
your best pent-up scowl? I’m sure they’d love that.”
“I don’t want to talk to them. I think you’re forgetting that you are
the one who wanted to come here.”
“Oh yes, you believe in love, don’t you. Well yours will be unrequited
forever I’m afraid. You’ll never get her in your cage and thank God for her
sake. You’ve seen the kinds she likes. Good looking arty boys. Men of
appearances, not hidden reservoirs of substance like yourself, patiently
simmering for the day when that special someone takes the time to drill through
the crust. Ponces admittedly, but not at all the same variety as yourself.
Well, as for those lovely tarts of yours over there, first we have to make
ourselves as thick as they are. Then we strike. More drink?”
“Good God I’ll need it to put up with this much longer. You’re buying.
Remember? You owe me.”
“Very well. Need I ask what you want?”
“No.”
“I will honour my debt to you Pigott. I will make a twat of myself at
the bar ordering your usual. Now watch me and see how it’s done.”
*
By
half past two Macken is clutching the table in a pinched sort of a rage,
speaking between his teeth, seething with frustration, drunkenness, and lust,
and channelling these feelings into wild rants against modern society, lacking
even an effort at coherence. Pigott has entered a brown study, and sits with
his legs stretched out and his arms folded, his lower lip pushing his frown
into the base of his nose, staring with sad condemnation through the slabs of
his spectacles at the dwindling froth in a small puddle of spilt lager on the
table in front of him, as if reading in it the whole sorry mess of human civilisation
as it fizzles out into an apocalypse brought on by fools who didn’t have
patience enough to suspend history until he arrived on the scene, reached
maturity, and told them how it should have all been done.
“The time has come, Pigott. Listen. The music itself is commanding us to
‘get retarded’. Christ, the utter thickness of it. Look. Civilisation has come
full circle and bored back into its own arsehole. Dancing used to be a
beautiful, formal thing, a sublimation of the sex act rather than a crude ape
of it. Oh, bring back the waltz, bring back the tango even. They call this dancing
now, you know, but it’s nothing. ‘Hump to the Thump.’ At least the same moves
had meaning when we were all flailing about naked in front of the shaman. Now
they shuffle on the spot like mesmerised drones, like that junkie of yours,
until they bump into a receptive member of the opposite sex, whereupon they rub
crotches. The rituals of pigeons are more artful and more modest. If that goes
well, they slaver into each other’s gobs, never mind the lager breath, the
kebab breath, the Tayto stink, the puke breath, it’s all obliterated by drink
and drugs anyway. That pretty much seals the deal and they go off to copulate,
if that’s even what you could call the slobbish fumbling squattle in the dark
with the numbed organs, all just to put another notch on the bedpost of the
soul if you could even say they have one. It seems so simple. Why can’t we do
it then, Pigott?”
“Speak for yourself. Why would I want to do it? How many sexual
infections do you think there are in a place like this anyway? How many tens of
thousands of herpal blastocycts, gonnhorrheic oolegomytes? I’ve seen the
statistics, my father showed me. There’s a plague out there. Besides, apart
from the risks, it’s meaningless, there’s no meaning in it. It’s cheap.”
“Meaning?” He hisses back,
enraged. And again. “Meaning? It’s life, life, life! Who cares about
meaning? Do chickens care about meaning? Do elephants care about meaning? Do
foxes? Do bats? Do cockroaches? Do ants? Then why should we naked apes? Cheap!
Your bloody standards Pigott, you celibate. You never have to embarrass
yourself by failing since you’ve never met anyone who meets them except the
One, who’s conveniently always taken. And you’ll go off home now and toss one
off over her, the bohemian belle of every London prick in Trinity, except for
you. Do you cry after your lonely lapses, your auto-administered crimes of
passion? Do they have meaning?”
“That’s it. I’m going. Enough. I’ve had enough of this ranting of yours,
this bile. I almost feel I’ll hit you if I stay any longer.”
“Oh do, Queensbury rules shall apply I hope. To be honest it would be
refreshing if you did. I wish you would give me something to remember. I wish
you’d show a little life for once, you fucking Vicar.”
Exit
Pigott, sweeping up his plastic bag and knocking over a good soggy Irish pint
on the way out.
Macken
rises, rocking the table, not quite feeling regret about the way he treated his
friend, but eager to fling himself into some annihilating experience at once.
He sees Lusty Linda and plots a course to intercept. Neurons pop and whiz as he
attempts to compose an opening gambit while dealing with the task of
negotiating the crowd and his own lack of balance, yet somehow he gets to her.
No, not conversation. As if! A kiss straight off, he thinks, remembering
childhood discos, standing on the sidelines, never learning. He’s learned, he
thinks.
Everything.
I have learned everything.
In
he leans,
tripping...
tripping...
“Christ,
get the fuck off me!”