Puckoon (13 page)
' Hellooooooo
!'
he wailed.
'Helloooooooo!
I'm getting the hang of
this,' he chuckled.
There was no moon; even with it,
Foggerty would have been none the brighter. So, collecting evening dew in his
hat and calling 'Hello!' he wandered into Northern Ireland, a strange and
awesome sight. Even a hungry black panther skulked to the safety of the trees.
In his flight Foggerty stumbled over two bodies on the ground. 'Opsss, sorry,'
he said, disregarding the rock they threw at him. They waited till he had gone,
then continued in their practice of the noble art of nudism, or sunbathing as
some say. These two were coming to the end of a long hard day.
On this dark night the sun tan oil
glistened on their undulating skins. Locked in a passionate embrace they rolled
hither and thither, backwards and forwards through the bushes, drenched with
rain, their bodies adhered with passion and clay. They had travelled some
thirteen miles like this, not ideal travel but economical.
Watching from the safety of a tree
was a man called D. H.
Lawrence. He made a hurried note.'
This will make a damned good novel,' he said and hurried off to his Queen's
Counsel.
The two sunbathers were now
ecstatically groping each other and travelling up a slight incline. For several
pubic hours they had fought to extricate all the animal pleasures that were
locked in their heaving bodies. Mutual steam was rising from their loins, and
the nearest fire brigade ten miles away! Oh, for a bucket of water! Her
protruding breasts were pressed flat between his body and hers. He had felt
them, he had fondled them; he lifted them, he pressed them, he weighed them, he
valued them, he counted them, he massaged them, he stood back from them, he
pulled them, he sat on them and picking up a banjo he played them. She clawed
at the grass, she clawed at her hair, she clawed the air, she dug her nails
into the earth,
she
dug them into his buttocks.'
Ouch!' he said. Their two mouths were locked in the vacuum of a kiss taut with
pulling tongues. Their buttocks tightened and relaxed in never-ending bursts of
uncontrollable thrusts of hot coursing gyrations. Inside her, great earthquakes
of seminal delight were coursing through her body. He took her nipples in his
mouth and drew them into pulsating erection.
'Naughty!' she said. How she loved
him, how she worshipped him, this silly old soft-hearted one-eyed
negro
Lascar off a coaling ship at
helping to cement black-white relationships. He could return to Kenyatta and
say the white people love us, let's go back for more. It was over. They lay
back gasping.
Next day she took him to meet
'Daddy', the Marshal of the County, Lord Cecil Kasingbroke, v.c, d.s.o. It was
the first intimation he had of his daughter's colour blindness. Umboko had run
from the stately home, his yellow suit shattered by gun-fire and bull mastiffs,
the tribal seat pulverized with buck-shot. For weeks he was unable to sit down,
even worse, he couldn't stand up. It did, however, prevent white members of the
crew having recourse to a certain unsavoury sailor habit.
The heavy metal cutters minced
through the barbed wire.
O'Brien had cut close to the wooden
posts. Father Rudden at his side gave the thumbs up sign. Through the gap, the
five men crawled towards the grave of Dan Doonan, rapidly becoming the most
travelled corpse in Ireland. Milligan, in the van, cast anxious eyes towards
the sentry three hundred yards to their left. A light from the guard hut glinted
on the soldier's bayonet. The five men moved to the temporary shelter of an
ancient mulberry.
Only one hour before two ragged-arsed
men had hid in the self-same place. They too had felt for the grave with the
loose earth. Soon they were digging up the coffin of Dan Doonan.
'Strange dis t.n.t. doesn't feel so
heavy now,' said Shamus.
'No, it doesn't,' said Lenny
struggling manfully alone under the weight of the coffin.
Father Rudden led his men forward,
his hand too felt for a grave with loose earth.
'Funny, I could have sworn it was
over there,' said the Milligan as the shovels set to work. Soon the coffin of
'Mrs Eileen Spoleen' with its 200 lb. of t.n.t. was rising.
'Freeze!' said Goldstein.
The party stood, knelt and lay
transfixed as a soldier came suspiciously forward. He held his rifle at the
ready, he came closer. He stopped, looked cautiously left and right, placed his
rifle against a tree
..
.. The dirty swine! No wonder
the place was starting to smell. They heaved on ropes, sweat was pouring down
Milligan's arms.
'Freeze!'
The bloody sentry was coming back;
the diggers, gasping, lay flat and still, the ropes cutting their hands.
'Anybody out
there
?
' called the soldier.
' If
there's anyone out
there say so and I'll fire.' He raised his rifle.
Milligan looked imploringly out of
the page.
' For
God's sake don't let him shoot,
Mister.'
The soldier about-turned and marched away.
Milligan grinned.
'God, you got all the power in this
book.'
He stroked the stubble on his chin.
'You havin' the power of de author, can I have a
request ?'
'Yes.'
'Dat dirty soldier that nearly pissed
on us, make him do something that will get him into trouble.'
The soldier returned to his post,
sloped arms, fired three rounds in the air, dropped his trousers and sang Ave
Maria. The Sgt of the Guard came hurrying from his tent.
'Private Worms?' he shouted, 'You're
under arrest.'
A powerhouse raspberry was the reply.
'What's going on here?' said Lt
Walker, arriving pyjama-clad on the scene.
'I'll show you, sir,' said the
sergeant, and inexplicably launched into a series of cartwheels, back
somersaults and impressions of Al Jolson in Maltese.
'Both under arrest
for being drunk and disorderly.
Turn out the guard.'
At the command, the guard assembled
and watched him, the Lieutenant, return to his tent with a series of animal
noises and great backward leaps on one leg. What would his father Field Marshal
Walker,
m.c
. and Bar, say? Nothing; at this self-same
moment he was performing the same feats before his puzzled sovereign at the
Passing
Out
Parade at
Milligan watched the Lieutenant's
antics with a great piano-keyboard smile.
' By
Gor,
you got the power all right. I wish I was a writer.'
O'Mara put his great shoulders to the
rope and pulled the coffin towards the church. 'God, he's heavier since he
died, it must suit him.'
They all headed for the church
leaving Milligan to fill in the grave.
Ah Pong lay lynx-like and silent in a
tree of his own choosing. He was about to descend when two shadowy ragged-arsed
figures carrying another box headed in the opposite direction. Shamus and Lenny
heard a sneeze above them and were hit by a bare-footed falling Chinaman.
Running with a coffin-cart they disappeared, firing their pistols in all
directions. Ah Pong replied with a burst of whistle-blowing, took a pace
backwards and disappeared into an empty grave.
The guard turned out and opened
fire.' The i.r.a
. !
' went up a cry.
A bewildered bugler in underpants
blew the lights out and put the whole camp in darkness. Webster leapt from his
bed into the po.
Barring-ton fainted in his sleep.
Father Rudden and Co. dropped their coffin and ran like hares for cover.
Incendiary bullets criss-crossed the night sky, verey fights burst in the darkness.
Private Dawson saw a gamboge Chinese
face arising from a grave and promptly did in his trousers what cascara takes
24 hours to do.
' Halt
, who
goes there ?' he said, hurriedly tearing up a newspaper.
Quaking with fear the Chinese
answered in Pekinese and was immediately fired at in Gaelic. The shot knocked
the top off his truncheon. Hysterically he walked up the grave wall and ran
chattering into the night. 'Sod that for a lark,' he said. He really was
getting a grip on the language.
It was 4.32. The firing had died
away. There was an uneasy silence. The soldiers strained their ears. Then from
the distance came the unmistakable sound of an unidentified noise.'
Helloooooooo!' it went. The voice was
strange to them, but not to Foggerty. The corporal made a signal to his men.
' This
might
be a trick, hold yer fire till I give three short blasts on me whistle.'
'Hellooooo!'
It was coming closer.
Running.
Ah Pong tripped over
Milligan's shovel. Heroically he blew three blasts on his whistle, and Foggerty
received the full ballistic weight of B Coy's fire power.
The moon came out, its silver beams
streaming through the bullet holes in Foggerty's trousers and hat. Life is a
matter of majorities, either you have one or you haven't. Right now Foggerty
was outvoted.
The dawn came up like thunder out of
China across the bay. It didn't do that in Ulster. Shivering and swearing,
Lenny and Shamus scraped the hoar frost from their faces and pushed Dan
Doonan's coffin into the bushes.
'We can't hang around here,
Lenny,
they'll be looking for us on both sides now. What
bloody bad
luck.
We'll leave this t.n.t. there till
the hooha dies down.'
Lenny nodded woefully as he arranged
the bracken on top of the coffin. Sad yes, this little lot was supposed to blow
up that police station at Durragh. The sound of a bugle being bugled broke the
morning silence. Lenny hid behind Shamus.
'Is that the Military?' he said.
' I
don't
know, it cummed from over there.'
The two men climbed to the lip of a
hill and peered cautiously over. A fine sight met their eyes; gleaming white in
the morning sun were the tents of that knobbly-kneed society, the Scouts.
It was the Ulster Annual Jamboree.
For weeks past, hundreds of spotty-faced herberts, with yodelling voices and
chin fuzz, had tied three million knots, started ten thousand twig fires, and
completed six hundred leaf shelters; perfect training for round about 3,000 bc
but bloody useless in the twentieth century.
Where were their geiger counters?
Their strontium detectors?
Their books on how to bury ten
million incinerated
children ?
Be
prepared
?
Ha! Ha!
Shamus could just read the sign,
'Scout Store.
Re-kitting Section.'
Scouts of all sizes
were lining up for a fine breakfast of burnt eggs and carbonized toast when two
ragged-arsed men slipped unnoticed under the flaps of a marquee. Chief
Scoutmaster Theobald Dring looked on approvingly. What a fine bunch of lads. He
felt fine too. He examined himself. He was fine.
He looked fine. Fifty-seven fine
years old, tall, erect, clear skinned, fine broad shoulders, slender hips; fine
muscular arms, short bow legs. He had overcome this latter handicap by stuffing
newspapers down the inside of his hose, and thus managed to build up the calves
sufficiently to match the extensive outward curve of the leg. It did however
give him the unfortunate appearance of a man with 29-inch calves, and a man
with 13-inch thighs can't do that sort of thing.
He yawned and rose from his sapling
and sheepshank bed.
Strange, he thought as he searched
for his shaving kit, it was there last night.
Two cleanly shaved scouts in new but
ill-fitting uniforms enjoyed the pleasure of an alfresco breakfast without
payment.
'Oh-ho,' said Lenny, 'dis is a stroke
of luck, no one but Baden-Powell would tink of lookin' for us here.'
Shamus nodded in agreement, his mouth
moving relentlessly on a slice of dead pig recumbent on a sea of porridge.
' Pardon
me,
sir,' said a small scout sitting opposite, his face held together with pimples,
'what troop are you from ?'
'The 3rd Puckoon Rangers,' said
Shamus, licking his lips, plate, knife, fork, spoon, fingers and thumbs.
Twelve miles north of Puckoon, set in
rolling acres, rose the delicate Georgian facades of Brent Lodge, built in an
age when craftsmen loved the excitement of creation,
be
it only brick upon brick. Now it lay open to its greatest enemy, the twentieth
century. The proportions were for all to see, uncrowded, with an eternal grace
culled from Ancient Greece. Soane had built it for the Dukes of Munster, who,
falling short of money and an
heir,
willed it to the
people of
of Housing'. Aged gentlefolk, retired Colonels and widowed matrons now lived
out their lives in the grim indifference of local government. The tall,
beautiful, curved glass windows looked out on once toparied hedges, now long
un-trimmed; lily ponds and choked fountains graced the lawns the local council
had recently officially 'cut', with a bread knife it would appear.
There it now
stood,
a masterpiece of yesterday, ignored by the bureaucratic barbarism of today.
Soon, the Chairman of the Council Planning Committee would gather strength from
statistics, revenue, and a chorus of 'Ayes' from his sycophantic minions, and
order it to be 'pulled down'. To the press he would issue a well-thumbed paper
' - too expensive to maintain, etc., etc., etc., make way for etc., etc., etc.,
sentimentalism must not stop progress etc., etc., etc' Bureaucracy was the
counterpart of cancer, it grew bigger and destroyed everything except itself.