Puckoon (4 page)

'Oh, you're a hard man tell me,
what's your feeling about abortions
den ?'

'You're a Catholic. You know the
answer to that.'

'True, but what's your opinion as a
medical man?'

' Murder
.'

'How about that
London
surgeon?
The girl had been raped and he took it away. Was he right or
wrong
?'

'I'll ask you the question which goes
before that. Was the child right or
wrong ?'

O'Brien noticed a heated tone
creeping into Goldstein's voice.

'Well Doc, at the time it wasn't
really a child.'

' If
it
wasn't really a child O'Brien, what was all the fuss about ?'

'Well,' began O'Brien, but was shut
up by Goldstein -

'It's a bloody cosy little argument
that, for the likes of get-rich-quick abortionists. It's not a child, it's just
formed,
it's
just

- it's
just
- just anything they want to call it to ease their bloody consciences! A mother
sees her child born deformed due to some drug she took during pregnancy and has
the child put to sleep! What right have
we ?
When a
man is mutilated in the war we don't kill him! We are the cowards. We can't
stand seeing a deformed child. That child could grow up and enjoy life.

Happiness is a state of mind, not
body.

O'Brien paused,
then
drank his drink, thoughtfully.

' Oh
yes, oh
yes, I was in der fightin' all of der way.' Little Mister Pearce in the corner
was holding forth. From a parchment dry face, locked under a flat cap,
twinkling blue eyes peered through heavy pebble glass lenses, giving him the
appearance of a goiterous elf. Both his weathered hands rested on a walking
stick.' In all the fightin' and the English never caught me.' He was speaking
rapidly to a Mr Foggerty.

Foggerty wore a long, foul, ragged
black overcoat, which seemed to have grown on him. It was secured round the
middle with repeatedly knotted string, from which hung various accoutrements,
mug, hairbrush, spoon, fly-swat, tin opener. An outsize greasy brown trilby,
set low on his forehead, gave him the appearance of having no top to his head,
which in fact he hadn't.

Son of a long line of camp followers,
he had been relieved of his post as lighthouse keeper at the shale rock when he
drew the blinds, to ' stop the light shining into the poor sailors' eyes'.

The light was closed down, and these
days
ships have to find their own way on to the rocks. His
father had been drowned after a brawl on the edge of a whisky vat, not that he
couldn't swim; he tried to drink his way out. Alcoholic poisoning was the
Coroner's verdict.

'I tell you, he was so beautifully
preserved, it seemed a shame ter bury him,' said the amazed mortician.

'Yes,' went on Mr Pearce, 'I was
wounded twice, once by me own side.' He said it with the same surprise

as
when it
happened, and moved his biddy pipe to the other corner. 'You see, the Tans and
the police
was
lookin' fer rebels; we was hid up in

It was bloody
murder,
you should have seen the bill he sent me.

Still, I survived.' He tapped his
wooden leg with his pipe.' It's hollow.... You know
why ?'

' No
,' said
Foggerty, nodding his head.

' It's
hollow because I made it so. You see,' he puffed his pipe and looked up at the
nicotined ceiling, 'Michael Leary wanted someone ter smuggle hand grenades out
through the police cordon, so, I hollows me leg and I travels the bombs in
that. And,' he laughed,' they never caught me.'

Foggerty looked at Mr Pearce.

Pearce looked at Mr Foggerty. It
appeared to Foggerty that Mr Pearce had finished.

'Oh!'
he
said.

'Oh?' said Mr Pearce, 'Oh? I tell you
a tale of Irish courage and hero-ism and all you can say is, Oh?'

Foggerty seemed to struggle with his
mind. Gradually a pathetic smile spread over his face.
' Fish
!'
he said.

'
Fish ?
'
said Pearce,' Fish ? What about
fish ?'

'Well, it's different from
"Oh".'

Mr Pearce just looked at Foggerty.
There was something amiss in this lad. Only that day someone had said ' Good
morning' to him, and he seemed at a loss for a reply. Then again, Foggerty was
the only one who had been a failure during the boom.

'You'da been
in real trouble if dem bombs had gone off in yer leg, mate. Yer arse would ha'
been half way up yer back.'

The voice came booming from Thomas
Rafferty who stood six foot square. The pockets of his dark green jacket were
congealed with blood, fur and feathers. When he wasn't poaching he was writing
bits of poetry, but he lived by the trap.

There was nothing like it.
To sit on the banks of the Puckoon, eating a whole fresh salmon
when the nobs in
London
were payin' ten shillings a slice for it.

To walk on a silver cold moonlight
night, in ankle-deep mist swirling in from the Atlantic; the repetitive crunch
of boots on hard frost, hearing a barn owl shriek from the soot-black line of
the venal trees, and the best of all the barking of a dog fox across the
winter-tight countryside.

'Yarowwwww!' he gave an imitation.
'If that sound doesn't give you a thrill, youse dead,' he grinned,
then
upended a box of dominoes on the table.

' I'll
give
you a game,' said Foggerty, eagerly.
' No
you bloody
well don't!'
' I
beat you last time.'

'I know you did and I haven't lived
that down! Being beat by you is an admission of insanity, you stupid bloody
idiot! No offence meant, mark you.'

Behind the bar, Mr O'Toole was speaking
to the pig-of-a-face that was his wife. He had married her twenty years ago,
but still woke up white and sweating. On leave from France, he had come out of
a drinking-hole in Sackville Street and bumped into a girl. It was dark, he was
drunk,
she
was keen. He awoke next morning to find her
in bed with him. He ran screaming from the house, her purse under his arm. He
didn't get away with it. Seven weeks later, a giant of a man, seven foot high
and smothered in red hair, walked through the door holding her by the hand.

The monster lifted O'Toole off the
floor and told him to get ready 'for marriage or death'. He had started to
object, whereupon the monster had started to hit him with great bone-crunching
knuckles. All he remembered was birds twittering and her shouting 'Don't ruin
him for the honeymoon, hit him above the waist.' Leaving a trail of broken
teeth he was dragged to the altar in the grip of two monsters
who
looked like kinfolk of Grendel.

Finally, when the priest asked 'Will
you take this woman - ' a hired ventriloquist from Cork said, 'I do.' And he
was done. The marriage hadn't turned out too bad, well, actually it had, but
otherwise it wasn't too bad.

The red monster, her father, had died
mysteriously of heart failure after falling under a train but not before
willing them the Holy Drinker.

'Where's the Milligan tonight,
Maudie?'

'I don't know. He was here this
morning trying to cadge a drink,' she replied, looking over his shoulder at the
handsome O'Brien.

She had, in moments of dreaming
eroticism, imagined herself clutching his members under the sheets. Whenever
she saw a sign ' Members Only' she thought of him.

The pub door opened, and in bore a
podgy police uniform carrying the body of Sgt MacGillikudie. There was a rush
for the door. He held up a calming hand but was knocked flat by the exodus.

Arising, he dusted himself.

'I'll be glad when dis town gets
prison cells with locks on. Now
- '

he
felt in
his breast pocket, '- I'm here to read a brief notice.' He removed his helmet
and inadvertently placed it over Blind Devine's beer. 'To all Citizens of the
Free State,' he commenced.

His speech was hesitant and clipped;
a black Lord Kitchener moustache cut his face in two.' Next week military and
civil members of the Ulster Boundary Commission will be passing through this
area. Any hostility towards them will be penalized with fines from a shilling
up to death.

Ah, tank you - ' he accepted a free
beer from O'Toole. 'Cheers!' he said and drained it to eternity. Blind Devine
was groping.

' Some
thievin' swine's stolen me beer!' he shouted angrily as only the blind have
courage to.

' You might ha'
drunk it.'

' I
never
forget any beer I drink!' shouted Devine. He flourished his stick, striking
Foggerty a sickening blow on the shin.

'Owwww!' screamed Foggerty, clutching
his elbow.

'Here, man,' said O'Toole, giving
Devine a beer, ' drink this on the house and calm down.'

'Well, I'll be on me way now,' said
MacGillikudie, picking up his helmet.

'What's this, then?' said O'Toole,
pointing to the glass of beer revealed.
' Oh
, dat's
mine,' said Foggerty, who was not such a fool after all.

'Come on, Stan lad,' said O'Brien,
'give us one of yer love songs, one of dem with all the strains.'

The spotty lad gave Mrs O'Toole an
appealing look.

'All right then, we're not too busy.'
Despite the absence of a piano player, the lad came and stood dutifully by the
mute instrument. '

Ladies and Gentlemen - ' he began.
' Order
, please.'
' Silence
for the
singer.' 'Is it free?'

The lad went on: 'I should like to
sing the late J. Collard Jackson's lovely song "Eileen, My Eileen."'

He raised the lid of the
beer-saturated piano, struck a note and started singing a different one. The
lad opened a raw red mouth, revealing great harp strings of saliva. At first no
sound same, then, welling from the back of his body there came a quivering,
tense, tinny sound, like a tram issuing from a tunnel. With the arrival of the
first uncertain note, the lad's eyes glazed over, as though a stricture of the
bowels was imminent; the singer's body went rigid, a series of stomach
convulsions ensued,
then
the whole body quivered. It
even frightened Dr Goldstein.

'
Eileeeeeeeeeeeeeen
! Yoooou arrree my Queeeeennnn . . .'

The agonized notes seemed to swell up
from the thorax and pass hurriedly inwards towards the back of the head, where
they were apparently trapped and reduced by a three-inch cavity skull;
rebounding, they escaped by struggling down one side of his clogged nose at
strength three.

' My
Queeeeeeeeeeeeenn The finest I've ever seeeeeeeeeeeeeen ...'

Puzzled spectators observed that his
lower jaw, unlike yours or mine, remained static; it was the top of his head
that moved. On high notes it was so acutely angled, most of the time was spent
looking up the singer's nose, a terrible sight to behold. He in-dulged in an
orgy of meaningless gestures, even the word 'it' was sung, trembling with
catarrhal extasy; time and again he raised his skinny arms to heaven, revealing
a ragged armpit from which protruded tufts of brown hair. Veins stood out on
his forehead, and sweat ran down his face as, purple with strain, he braced
himself for the last great note; bending his knees, clenching his fists, he
closed his eyes and threw back his head. In that tacit moment the observant
Foggerty spoke:

' Hey
,
Mister, you got a bogey up yer nose.'

The last great note burst and was
lost in a sea of irreverent laughter. Red-faced, tears drowning his eyes, he
returned to the bar. The world of music was safer by far and J. Collard Jackson
stopped turning in his grave.

The air outside was still and humid.
Without warning, the sky lit up in a moment of fluorescent anger: a fistful of
thunder racketed over Puckoon.
' God
save us all from
the Protestant thunder,' gasped two wax-white old biddies, clutching their
bedclothes and making arthritic signs of the cross.
' Quick
,
Millie, the
Po
,' gasped the elder sister.
' Coming
, coming, Sarah!'