It grew into a tree Family Drama, the stuff of Greek Tragedies and American soap operas. In the hours he spent tossing, turning and fiddling with the remains of his hair, lying in bed trying to summon the energy to make a cup of herbal tea to calm himself down, he wondered how exceptional his circumstances were. Wasn’t it the most natural thing in the world to reject your parents beliefs? If we all did the same things as our parents, wouldn’t we still be up trees in Africa, while the elk and the deer roamed in the oak forests here? Then he realised he was at an advanced enough state of consciousness to recognise the huge investment his parents had made in bringing him into the world and he shouldn’t do anything that should upset his mother. But then she’d shocked him by blaming everyone in the world for his injuries but the two English scumbags who inflicted them. She’d done things to shock her parents, like marrying his father. And they forgave her, her father even managing to make friends with his while he was on his deathbed. So if she couldn’t find it in her heart to forgive her, it was her fault. Case closed? I don't think so. Like the poor, this inner conflict wasn’t going away, and the cost in stress, lost sleep and furrowed brows would eventually have to be paid. There may not have been any point in brooding, but there was no point in ageing or dying either.
Late the next morning he strolled groggily up to the office. He reflected that when he was on the campaign trail he’d have to start sleeping more regularly. The last thing he wanted to do was take sedatives, having found out their toxic side effects the hard way at an earlier age. Perhaps the work would tire him out so much that his subconscious could bear the weight of his angst. Not that he didn’t have nightmares now, last night he dreamt that he’d gone into a hairdressers and when he looked in the mirror the two English thugs were behind him and... well, I’ll leave the rest to your imaginations. When he woke and his heart stopped pounding, he didn’t realise how apposite that dream would be. As he arrived at the office, he reflected on the irony of going round looking for signatures, telling everyone how hard working he was, when he hadn’t gotten out of bed till eleven. Still, he tried to look enthusiastic as he knocked on Caomhin’s door and, after being let in, asked if he was ready to get going.
Caomhin asked him how he had found out.
Seamus looked puzzled and asked “Found out what?”
After a slight pause, Caomhin replied, “Oh, you mean go out and get signatures. We can do that tomorrow. I’ve got a bit of a surprise for you today.”
Seamus asked what it was, Caomhin told him he’d tell him in the car, the sort of thing, he reflected nostalgically, that his father used to do to make the surprise more surprising. He even detected a paternal glint in Caomhin’s eyes as he said it. As they drove through the congested streets of Cork Caomhin was clearly keeping his eyes on the road, but as the inner city became suburban and the suburbs became warehouseland and then countryside, he couldn’t repress his curiosity any more.
“Where’re we going, exactly?”
“Down to Kerry.”
“What’s happening down in Kerry?”
Caomhin indulged in the fantasy that Seamus had forgotten his original motive for coming to him.
“Remember those two English guys that you came to us about a few months ago?
Seamus’ face lit up. “You found the second guy?”
“Yup, finally tracked him down. We got his name from a friend of ours in the Social welfare office, and, would you believe, we have someone on the inside of the Metropolitan police in London. That information is confidential, of course. Anyway, it turns out everything you said about him was right. He’s a member of Combat 18, wanted for a string of assaults on Africans in London, as well as drug dealing, rape, you name it, as long as it’s against the law, he’s probably done it. Anyway, luckily for us, our lads over in London have been fighting Combat 18 for a while, as you may know they have links with unionists up north, and there was that incident in Lansdowne a few years ago. We infiltrated one of their meetings, they don't have a very big following, thanks be to Jesus, so it wasn’t very hard to find him. We smuggled him over, bound and gagged in a cattle truck. The sort of thing that happens all the time with Immigrants.”
Seamus reflected that immigrants don’t really deserve to suffer that way, but the first thing that it came into his head to ask was:
“You think there’ll be reprisals from Combat 18?”
“I doubt it. They don't know it was us. They probably think it was their own cops.”
The irony of the British police helping Sinn Fein pleased him no end. “So what are we going to do with him now?”
“Same thing we’ve doing with the other fella, letting him slowly starve to death, between occasional bouts of torture.”
There was no indication, in the lush spring greenery, in the old-fashioned stone houses, in the traditional, confusing signposts, of the heart of darkness they were about to enter. Seamus tried to put some intellectual distance between himself and what he was about to do, expressing admiration for Caomhin’s sense of historical irony, discussing the hunger strikers, the siege of Drogheda, the famine and all the other atrocities this situation recalled. Yet they never peeled enough layers off the onion to ask the fundamental question, why is there so little love lost between the Irish and their most immediate neighbours. He’d read the views of all the experts in the universities and the op-ed pages of the newspapers: differences in culture, temperament, up ‘till recently, language. Religion couldn’t be discounted. But he thought there must be something more
But this was all he could get out of Caomhin:
“Y’know, I used to really hate the English. Not without reason, considering what they’ve done to our country. But then I realised what a pointless waste of energy it was to hate people. If people know that they hate you, they hate you back, if they don’t all the anger is turned in on yourself, either way you suffer. There’s no point in denying that we’re different, and that we’ve hurt each other in the past as a result of this difference, or that people are still suffering today in the north. But that’s no reason to perpetuate this hatred. You don’t like it when the Telegraph does it, do you?”
Seamus was a little surprised to hear Caomhin talk this way. It wasn’t that he didn’t have respect for his intellect, just that the moderation he was preaching was so apparently sincere. After all, it wasn’t as if there was anyone else listening, was it?
“So I take it you didn’t feel this way when you were trying to import semtex, then?”
“No, I really hated the Brits back then, the way you would if you’d been in their prisons. But then I began to understand that those yobs treated me the way they did back then. But then I realised that they acted this way because off all the propaganda in their media, and because they were at the bottom of the pile in their society, that they needed someone to look down upon; sadly, it had to be us. But we’re no better, look at the way we treat immigrants today.”
Seamus couldn’t deny that last part, but told Caomhin that what he observed in the two thugs that they were going to see was hatred of the most visceral, atavistic kind.
“From what I’ve heard they’re basically psychopaths. Of a kind found predominantly in Germanic races, I have to admit, but deviant even within their own society. One of the reasons we became disillusioned with that whole violent struggle was that everyone else in the world was defining our whole race by it. Still are, to an extent.” He grimaced slightly at those last words.
“So you’re pretty sure you’re never going to back to violent conflict?”
“I know if the leadership thought we had anything to gain from it, then we would. But I don’t think we do, not in the foreseeable future anyway.”
As this wasn’t an unequivocal “No”, Seamus pursued the matter further.
“You don’t seem to be opposed to the use of violence in principle, then.
“Well, who is?”
Seamus was going to suggest Buddhist, Jains, Hindus and the Amish, but Caomhin went on, “Everybody else believes that the end justifies the means, why shouldn’t we? You know, more people died as a result of national health service reforms in the first year of Margaret Thatcher’s reforms than we killed in Britain in the whole 30-year struggle. And, you probably know, she got back into power just because of the Falklands. But nobody calls her a murderer.”
Seamus found the cold, utilitarian thrust of his argument send a shiver up his spine, whether because he recognised the horrible truth at it’s core or because he’d never heard it expressed with such chilling simplicity before. He’d studied history, of course, knew the theories, conflict was inherent in human nature, war was necessary for progress, in Latin, the word “war” had the same roots as “Good”. It was the engine that drove human progress. But he’d never been face to face with someone who believed it with some conviction before, at least that was how Seamus chose to interpret him. Yet he wondered what he Caomhin might do to someone he actually did hate. Perhaps Caomhin was merely playing devil’s advocate, forcing him to reconsider his own motives for being here. If so, he was successful. Yet Seamus knew that when he saw their faces, he wouldn’t be able to resist committing acts of violence himself.
As the roads got narrower and more potholey, he knew they were reaching the areas that the EU’s coffers couldn’t reach. The sun was on their left and they were heading north, into the nationalist stronghold of North Kerry. Paradoxically, this was where his paternal grandfather, a West Brit as passionate as his mother came from, but he’d never had much contact with his family down there, it didn’t seem like any sort of homecoming. The jagged hills where all the tourist busses spilled out their corpulent loads were mellowing into anonymous hills where the sheep munched almost undisturbed. Strange that in our small island there could be somewhere so remote. This is the sort of area where nineteenth-century English anthropologists came and remarked that the awful wretches staggering round in their rags were surely better off under their rule. Old walls separating tiny fields since penal times still sustained rich and diverse ecosystems. He’d read somewhere that you could tell the age of a hedgerow by the number of species of tree in a 30-yard stretch, but in spite of the potholes, the bends, the dogs and the cows strolling out onto the narrow roads, he never got a chance to test out this theory. But in trying, he took his mind off the terrible thing he was about to do. “Terrible”, he thought, because though he’d renounced his Catholic upbringing in as dramatic a way as it was possible to do in a sleepy school in a sleepy village on the sleepy south coast of Ireland, a lot of Christian teaching, “Christian” in the sense of the words of Jesus Christ himself, still had an impact on his thinking. He believed in forgiveness, in the same sense that many Christians “believed” in an afterlife. Yet, with characteristic logic, he rationalised that he’d never forgive himself if he didn’t avail of this opportunity to inflict justice.
A farmhouse came into view, dark and gothic like something out of Poe’s tales or Whale’s movies. They had to drive over a bridge over a stream to reach the driveway, babbling gently as if near it’s source. Caomhin unstrapped his seatbelt, cursing himself silently that he hadn’t done it already. He pulled up to the driveway, past the barking dogs and the handful of stray chickens. In the front of the house, from which the paint peeled and on which the ivy grew desultorily, Seamus caught sight of the net curtains tentatively being opened from the inside. A few seconds later, a middle-aged, shaven-headed man came to the door, and embraced Caomhin warmly, while Seamus looked awkwardly on, a feeling he knew only too well. They talked of old times the way old friends do, then finally Seamus was introduced.
“Seamus, this is Padraig. We’ve had some good times together, haven’t we, bouy?”
“Oh, Bhi taim go haillian again. An bhfuill aon Gaelige agat?”, he added, turning to Seamus.
“Oh, cuiseamh mhaith”, he replied tentatively.
“Well, don’t suppose you need it that much up there in Cork. So, d’ye think yeh can win a seat for us up there, bouy?”
“Well, I’ll try my best, I suppose.”
“Can’t do more than that. You seem like a pretty laid-back sort of fella. The voters like that.”
Seamus was a bit disconcerted by his affable tone, which seemed a little out of place.
“Well, Caomhin seems to have a lot of faith in me. I just hope I can repay him.”
Immediately he reflected on the irony of his choice of words, as “payback” was exactly what he had come here for. As if interpreting his Freudian slip, Padraig beckoned them both to come down into his shed.
“Well, I suppose you’re both busy men, I suppose you came here for one thing. You’re welcome to stay for dinner, afterwards, if you want.”
Caomhin threw a glance at Seamus and then decided they did, and said, “Sure, why not. We’ll probably be tired after… well y’know. Seamus is a vegetarian, mind.”
“Ah, not to worry, so’s my daughter.”
Needless to mention, thoughts of possible involvement with this laid-back Kerryman’s herbivorous progeny flashed across Seamus’ mind. But there were more important matters to attend to. They went into the shed, and Seamus was astounded at how close it was to his imaginings. They entered the shed, Padraig kicked some straw away from a certain area in the ground, revealing a trapdoor that opened onto a staircase. It was dark, but when Padraig flicked on a switch revealing something Seamus would never forget. Kalashnikovs scattered all over the floor, ammunition going rusty, posters on the walls from 35 years or more, daggers, flick knives, maces and baseball bats on the table. Then, in the corner of the room, bound and gagged, blindfolded and bruised, was the heavily emaciated and bearded face of the cunt and the more filled-out, but pale-faced body of the Nazi.
“We’ve given them a bit of a going over, but we saved the best for you, Seamus”, said Padraig, no change in his affable tone. “I guess it’s up to you to choose your weapons.” He could see the faces of the two thugs writhe as Padraig utter those words. He tried to make as much noise as possible as he went through the knives on the table, increasing the tension, the way he used to sneak up on rugby players and Man Utd fans when he invigorated exams. Eventually he came across a steak knife, something he’d never had any other cause to use. Seamus knew that, if it was possible to turn back to his previous life before, which it wasn’t after being revealed the location of a secret arms dump, that it wouldn’t be after he took this weapon in his hands. Yet there was no hesitation as he picked it up, walked over towards the thugs, stood close to their faces, then repelled by the smell, drew back a bit and asked this of Caomhin and Padraig:
“Tell me a truth.”
Caomhin and Padraig looked at each other and then Padraig, who had a look on his face that suggested that he knew where Seamus was coming from, said that over a million and a half Irish people died during the famine.
Seamus took the knife and thrust it into the Nazi’s left shoulder. He listened to the muffled screams and wiped some of the blood off of himself and asked:
“Tell me another truth.”
“Many people in the British government at the time sincerely believed that the famine had been sent by a benign, Protestant god.”
Seamus held the knife in both hands behind his head, executioner-style, and thrust it into the Nazi’s right thigh, just below his groin.
He took a deep breath and asked for a third truth.
“Thirteen Irish people were slaughtered and many more injured as a direct consequence of British government orders in 1972”, averred Padraig.
Seamus cast the knife into the Nazi’s left thigh.
“Tell me a fourth, and final truth.”
“The British government colluded with loyalist paramilitaries in the slaughter of innocent Irish people in Dublin and Monaghan in 1974.”
Seamus stabbed the right shoulder of the Nazi. He wiped more of the blood off his hands and scratched his beard and looked over at the shivering cunt to decide what to do with him. By now the Nazi’s clothes were soaked in blood and some of the blood was starting to flow onto the floor.
He went back over to the table and perused the arsenal that he found there. He finally decided on a bow saw. He walked over to the cunt and asked this of him:
“Do you know about the siege of Drogheda, cunt? No, I don’t suppose you do. Your people caused ours a lot of pain, back then, thought you’d’ve had your fill. But no, you never seem to get enough of going to other countries do you, you FUCKING...” He made the first incision through the cunt’s pants, “ANGLO-SAXON CUNTS!” He starting sawing through his thigh, the look on his face becoming savage like a villain in a silent movie. He was surprised how easy it was, how vulnerable the mighty Anglo-Saxons who ruled the world really were. And he knew that, though the creature he was sawing was an ogre, that his severed organ would never regrow. Yet he became a little tired about half way through, and, stopping for breath, looked over at Caomhin and Padraig.
“Sorry ‘bout the mess I’m making”, was all he could think of to say.
“Oh, don’t worry about it. We can sell the blood to the farmers for black puddings.”
Seamus looked a little repelled.
“Don’t worry, they’re for the export market.”
Seamus took a couple of seconds to assimilate this, then laughed ironically. Yes, their society was a cannibalistic, dog-eat-dog one, wasn’t it? Ours was heading that way, but he didn’t really want to think about that right now. He wanted to have the cunts leg sawn off before he bled to death. He sawed furiously, the sweat pouring off him and making a big stain on his T-shirt. Before he was finished, he tried, naively, to break the last bit off, but found there was a minute or so’s sawing still to do. When he finished, he picked up the leg by it’s emaciated ankle. The bovver boot he was wearing made it seem heavier. Then he bludgeoned him over the head with it. He went over and did the same to the nazi. Then he tossed the leg down on the floor, went over and sat down next Caomhin and Padraig. Finding it hard to find the words to express his emotions, he let Padraig do the talking.
“You bludgeoned well, boy. Jolly Good Show.”
Seamus laughed, recognising the allusion to something a Daily Telegraph journalist had said in 1972, but could think of little else to say, so just asked what they were going to do with the bodies.
“Well, what do you think, butcher boy?”
“I suppose a Tibetan Buddhist funeral is out of the question?”, he asked, regaining some of his composure.
“I suppose so”, said Padraig, who didn’t appear to know what that entailed. Caomhin, who probably did, smiled.
“So, will we have to take them out and bury them?”
“No. You’ll have to take them out and bury them. But we’ll drive you to somewhere you can do it.”
This was the bit where the supposedly dead guy twitched.
“Oh pardon me, thow bleeding piece of Earth”, said Paidraig to the Nazi. “It’s so impolite to talk about your burial while you’re still alive.” He got up and walked towards his near-cadaver, pulling up the legs of his pants to avoid getting blood on his trousers. He leaned into his face, continued, in a more aggressive tone, “But it wasn’t very polite of you to come over here and assault four people, was it now?” He spat in his face, looked over at the cunt for any signs of life, decided he was dead and walked back.
“Think of it this way, their bodies will fertilise the soil. They’ve taken so much out of this country, now it’s time for them to put something back.”
Seamus reflected ironically that it may have been Irish beef that made them so aggressive in the first place. But he asked Padraig something more pertinent.
“Clean clothes?” was his reply. “Yeah, sure, we’ll find something. I’ll show you where the shower is, I’ll leave some clothes outside.”
Seamus took one more look at both the bodies and decided they were both cadavers. He didn’t know what to feel, someone who’d always thought of himself as a pacifist, having killed two people in such a brutal way. It wasn’t relief, it certainly wasn’t pride. It didn’t make him feel like more of a man. He felt no closer to knowing why there was so much bloodshed in history than he did before. Yet when he ran through the utilitarian arguments in his head, he had no regrets about what he’d done.
Though he would have loved to have gone out into the stream to wash, he thought better of it and had a shower instead.
The English blood swirled down the drain like in Psycho.
When he came back they had prepared a seitan stew for him that wasn't all that dissimilar from the meatier ones that his father used to make. It was clear that they had been talking about him, because the first thing that Padraig asked was:
“Be God, there must’ve been some strange stuff going on in that house.”
“I think it must have some sort of curse on it, especially the room I was in.” He went on to relate how on time he was sitting in his room, watching TV, when he heard a splashing sound, then a strange moaning. Afterwards, he went out and smelled some urine. He figured out, eventually, that the guy who used to live on the ground floor and had moved up to the first had come back drunk from the pub, and, being in the habit of climbing up one floor to get to the bog, had staggered up the stairs and pissed all over Seamus’ outside wall. Then, realising what he’d done, he’d tried to apologise but was too langersed, as they say in Cork.
“Weird shit. But I’d still be in that house if it wasn’t for some weirder shit.”
“Yeah, about that”, said Paidraig, “We, or rather you, need to get cracking on those bodies, before it gets dark.”
“Before it gets dark? I thought it might be better to wait ‘till after dark”, was Seamus’ bemused reply.
“Yeah, I suppose that would be logical... but there’s a lot of power cuts in this area, and you wouldn’t want to be stuck down in that basement with two cadavers in the dark, I don’t suppose.”
Seamus grimaced a little, then reasoned that if having to wipe up all that blood and gore was his entire karmic punishment for the horrors he had inflicted, he would have gotten off pretty easily. Some people worked in abattoirs their whole life long, making happy meals from unhappy animals. What must they have done in their previous incarnations?
Padraig got some j-cloths and a big plastic apron from the kitchen, then led Seamus out into the yard. Caomhin followed, unenthusiastically. Padraig pointed out a big plastic barrel, instructed Seamus to put all the blood and any bits of gore that he found in there. At that point Seamus realised that he wasn’t kidding about the black puddings. Caomhin just shuddered, inwardly. In an attempt to put off the moment just a little longer, Seamus asked if Padraig was worried about the Celtic strip he was wearing getting all bloody. Padraig said Nah, he used a certain type of washing powder that was good for getting out such stains. Seamus, who’d seen the same TV ads, asked, clutching at straws a little, if it was Earth-Friendly.
“I’ve never heard Gaia complaining yet”, replied Paidraig. Seamus was surprised at his wit and erudition, almost as much as he was distressed at the idea of wiping up bits of dead Englishman from the floor. He went towards the shed, ominously being told he should put on a pair of wellies before he did so. As he was putting them on, he asked Caomhin and Padraig if these weren’t originally named after the Duke of Wellington.
“Yeah, that’s right”, replied Caomhin. “He was born in Dublin, but when asked if he was Irish, replied, `Being Born in a stable does not make one a horse’” Padraig and Seamus joined in towards the end, then laughing privately at whatever ironies this conjured up in their respective minds. Then Padraig jerked his head in the direction of the shed, making an almost imperceptible look of contrition as he did.
When Seamus got downstairs, he realised why he would need the wellies. The blood had really gushed out of the bodies, and would take a while to mop up. Knowing that using the j-cloths would take too long, he sidestepped the puddle of blood, taking care not to slip like Nick Nolte in the mediocre 1991 remake of Cape Fear, and picked up the mop that was on the other side. He tried not to look at the bodies, which were starting to smell bad and attracting a few tentative flies, the flies that in the human world would be called “trendsetters” or “mavens”, the ones that would go back and communicate to all the more conservative flies the great bounty they had located. He got the mop, started squeezing the blood into the big plastic barrel. He thought of those people in England eating their Saturday morning fry-up, reading the Sun, planning their package holiday in Benidorm or their Sunday shopping in MFI. If they knew where the puddings came from, how disgusted would they be? The irony was that this would probably not by a long chalk be the unhealthiest thing they’d ever eaten. In fact, given the number of accidents in industrial farming, the chances are every carnivore in the west had eaten some human flesh at one time or other. When he’d gotten into stupid arguments with carnivores about the ethics of eating meat, one of the craziest, to his mind, was that the animals lives were “being given meaning” by being eaten by creatures with immortal souls in McDonalds or Burger King.
Well, step up, Father Seamus. Introibo ad altere Dei. He was going to take this flesh and this blood and bestow meaning on it, and to the sorry, pathetic lives of the people in whose bodies it ran. It was red blood, indistinguishable to the naked eye from that of a rat or a snake, not the ichor that the Anglo-Saxons, so long convinced they were God’s chosen race, might have believed ran in their veins. Yet wasn’t it cheap? How much would they get for this bucket of blood? Twenty, thirty quid? A little cheaper than David Beckham, who was also made from English flesh and blood. Yes the blood price they earned would be fairly small, but at least they’d have taken comfort in knowing that their lives weren’t wasted.
At any other time these thoughts would have seemed dark and nihilistic, but now, they provided him with a comic divertissement from his ugly task. Yet it wasn’t that ugly, he started to think, no uglier than walking through the meat section of the supermarket, separated from death by only a thin plastic wrapper and some annoyingly antiseptic air. Yet wasn’t it cold in there, between those aisles, cold like the bodies he was about to pick up, cold like we always personified death as being? How many cows died in north America when refrigerated shipping was invented? It’s too early to say. Would we all die because of refrigeration, the toxins in produced tearing a hole in the ozone layer, melting the ice caps, and freezing us, inverted, bastard children of Prometheus?
When he was talking to the cops he described the Cunt and the Nazi as being “cold-blooded”. Now, as he squeezed it into the bucket and felt it running down his wrists, he found out just how cold that blood was.
When the puddle of blood was cleared, he set himself about the more onerous task of cleaning up any bits of gore that were lying around. As that basically entailed the Nazi’s genitals, he gritted his teeth, closed his eyes, reached down into his pants, and took them out. Perhaps the cunt had a hard-on, as they were known to last hours after death. Some female morticians often seemed happier than they ought to be... But as he grabbed the Nazi’s meat and two potatoes, they really did feel like that, mushy, inert, not to mention pathetically small. He tossed them in the plastic barrel the way he’d casually throw a crisp-packet into the bin. But he did this consciously, perhaps demonstrating the self consciousness that would later, briefly make him such a good politician, or the paranoia of someone who felt that his every action was being watched. He searched around for other small bits of flesh, examined the bodies to see if they were still bleeding, decided they weren’t and that this part of the job was done.
He went upstairs, found one of those late-spring Irish evenings, the silence broken by only the occasional twittering of a sparrow. He took off the wellies, ran them under the outside tap, and tiptoed through the gravel back into the house.
Inside, he found Padraig and Caomhin casually watching TV.
“Good day at the abattoir?” asked the former.
Seamus laughed, asked if they wanted to go down and see his work.
“No, we trust you. We can see by the sweat on your brow that you’ve done a good job. You’d better take another shower.”
Seamus asked if he could get some more clean clothes, Padraig looked a bit bothered and said he’d leave something out there.
He spent more time washing his hands than the rest of his body, checking his fingernails for bit as flesh as if worried that they could incubate asexually inside his body and that one day he would wake up and find an Anglo-Saxon homunculus thrusting out through his stomach, gibbering incoherently through it’s irregular brown teeth about it’s wish to pour the sweet milk of concord into Hell, looking for household objects to burn to fry it’s bangers and mash, and exposing it’s puny, homonculoid hips at sensitive old ladies. He’d once read that the reason the Anglo-Saxons behaved in such an id-like way abroad was that their own society was a repressed land of the superego. Bollocks! For him, the Anglo-Saxons had raped and ravaged their way across Eurasia ‘till they found a cold grey island which they could use as their base to rape and ravage the rest of the world.
He checked his fingernails again, then dried himself and looked outside the door for clothes. While Seamus had been freaking himself out with his Alien fantasies, Padraig had been busy finding some clothes that might fit him. The only things he’d been able to find were some stereotypical farmers clothes, a check shirt and pair of green trousers that he would never be seen dead in the city. He wondered what sort of value system we had developed that made us condescend to the people that provided us with our most basic needs and revere those who gave us luxuries, like Hollywood movies, from that artificial oasis in the desert. What made us want to move away from the land, to reach for the stars? Was it our Christian soteriology, with it’s imagery of salvation in terms of ascent? If so, where did that come from? One article he’d read somewhere, in his aimless days in the library or on the web, revealed an 18th century cosmology that ranked all entities in terms of divinity, God was at the top, insects at the bottom. What struck Seamus was that flying fish were ranked above the other fish, so compelling was the idea of ascent. Today we were rising above the land more than ever, building higher skyscrapers, flying to the moon and ripping the ozone layer like a string vest. Yet we fuelled our need for ascent by digging deep into the Earth for fuels that lay there undisturbed for millions of years. Our connection to the earth could be denied but never severed.
Anyway Seamus got into the farmers trousers, in which there was enough space for a pair of ferrets to have a particularly venomous fight without risking damage to the fabric. He felt, in yet another allusion to that Scottish play he did for his leaving cert, like a dwarfish thief in a Giant’s robe. He remembered the consultants advice that he should pump some iron, and staggered uncomfortably downstairs. Padraig and Caomhin were still watching the TV. There was a current affairs show on, and people were discussing the situation in the North, with what Caomhin and Padraig regarded as the usual bias. They fondly remembered the very early ‘70’s, the days before the bombing campaign in Britain eroded most of the support. They debated about how it could all been different if they’d concentrated on military rather than civilian targets. Padraig, who’d had a particularly violent animus against the British establishment had always wanted to attack Tory party offices in small villages, but that had never happened. If Seamus had been allowed to get a word in edgeways, it probably wouldn’t have been appropriate to mention that Irish broadcasters and newspapers were routinely accused by the other side of bias as well, so they must be doing a reasonably balanced job in a difficult situation. So when Caomhin eventually turned to him and remarked, “That’s the sort of bias you’ll be up against, young man”, he just did his best impression of looking stoically resigned. What Seamus really wanted to know was when he would get back into some proper clothes. Padraig took a look at him and laughed.
“Lord, I didn’t think they’d be that big on you. But then y’are a vegetarian, I s’pose. We’ll have your clothes ready in the morning.” Seamus looked a little quizzical, Caomhin looked over and said they were staying the night, after they’d buried those fucking bodies. Seamus nodded acquiescently and then Padraig told him he could sleep in his daughter’s room, as she was working in the city for the week. He felt a mixture of regret that he wasn’t going to meet this fabled daughter tonight and unease at sleeping in a girls room while she wasn’t there. He thought of asking if she was attached in any way or if she had a phone number or email address but decided to let Padraig make any such first move on his daughter’s behalf. When the proper TV shows were over and the unctuous religious bit came on, Padraig offered to make some tea. Caomhin asked to go to the bathroom, Seamus gave a slightly guilty look, and Padraig beckoned him into the kitchen. Then they had one of those groggily intimate conversations people have at that hour of the night.
“God, you do look a right hames in those clothes, Seamus. I didn’t realise you were that thin.”
“Yeah, well, like you said, I’m a veggie, and I come from a long line of anorexics and bulimics on one side of the family. And some glutinous savages on the other. So I eat a lot of high-fibre veggie food and never put on any weight.”
To Padraig, who came from an area where physical strength was still revered, where they had contests to see who could throw a steel ball a certain distance in the shortest space of time, where they’d produced Olympic wrestlers who’d grown bulky on the fruits of the harsh Atlantic soil, this was anathema. But he realised that if their party was ever going to grow democratically, it would have to become a broader church. So he responded diplomatically, “Well, you should try to put on some weight anyway. Lift some dumb-bellls.” He made a bicep-clenching gesture. Seamus nodded, the way you do when a the same point has been made repeatedly.
“I guess if it’s my job to be a young pretty-boy face of the party I should.”
Padraig grimaced slightly at this candour. “Caomhin tells me you’re fairly able intellectually as well.”
Seamus blushed slightly, but then felt regret that Padraig had responded to his gambit by setting up an introduction to his daughter. There followed a Chekovian, or McGahernian, silence, which Padraig broke more to Seamus’ relief than shock, with the words, “Well, how does it feel to be a killer?”
Relishing the opportunity to talk about his feelings in a non-ironic way, Seamus replied, “It’s not something I plan to make a habit of. I’ve got to admit there was a moment where I felt an adrenaline surge, or maybe it was an endorphin surge, I’m not sure. I guess they felt the same thing when they were assaulting me. But then I’d never done anything to hurt them. I guess we’re all killers, we use up so much resources, while there’s people in the world starving, we’re killing the earth, day by day. We all get a thrill from watching violence in the movies, boxing, what have you. Males anyway. I guess we used to go and hunt for food, not so long ago in evolutionary terms, that instinct’s never gone away. I don’t know how this is going to affect me in the long term...” He thought of asking Padraig if he’d ever killed anyone himself, but decided now wasn’t the time nor the place, so instead tentatively sipped his tea. Padraig assured him that what he’d done was no crime, morally, that he was just administering justice. Seamus nodded, looking less than totally convinced, Padraig, hearing Caomhin come down the stairs, patted his slender back in a paternal way. “C’mon, we’ve got to go and bury those bodies.” Seamus was relieved by the use of the first personal plural in this instance. “Can you go and find that Saw, and a pick and shovel in the shed”, he said, “We’ll follow you down in a few minutes. I’ll bring a few bin-liners.”
Seamus didn’t have much trouble finding the tools, but found the presence of the cadavers too uncomfortable to be on his own with. To fill the vacuum, he started sawing up some limbs. He was about half way through the Cunt’s second leg, having worked up a healthy layer of sweat, sawing so feverishly that he didn’t hear Padraig and Caomhin come in. They stared at him silently, as if in admiration for his craft of sawing up Englishmen. Needless to say, he got a bit of a shock when he was admiring his work when he heard Padraig call out, “Oibhir mhaith, a chara”. His heart almost stopped, if he didn’t get so much fruit an veg in his diet, he might have had a stroke.. While Caomhin looked on, Padraig took off his shirt, revealing the sort of string vest Seamus had once had the misfortune to see on one of his grandfathers, through which his voluminous chest hair bristled and his wide, farm labourer arms hung like flying buttresses on a mediaeval cathedral. Seamus understood the import of this gesture, made in the manner of a building site foreman showing a novice how to do his job. He remembered one incident from his building site days, when he was helping a big hulking bull of a man from north Cork with something when the foreman came and dragged him away to do something else. He remembered the look on the hulks face, like a sinuous Siberian tiger forlornly trapped in a cage. He passed the saw to Padraig, and busied himself with cleaning up the blood.
When he’d finished cutting up one of the arms, he turned over to Seamus and said, with the easy camaraderie of labouring colleagues, “We could have a nice little earner going here, selling their blood back to them, couldn’t we?”
“What’s the first rule of our organisation going to be?”, asked Seamus.
Padraig smiled in a way that didn’t reveal if he recognised the allusion or not. Seamus looked over at Caomhin, who clearly did. Then Padraig looked over and asked Caomhin if he’d like to come over and give a hand.
“I don't think these old bones are fit for this sort of work. I’m happy to act in an advisory capacity.”
“And what advice are you offering?”
“Keep Going. You’re doing fine.”
Seamus tittered politely, the way he used to do when he was working in a building and the other workers would make some of their not-very-witty banter. Yet just like back then, the humour never had much success at dispelling his dark thoughts. This time his thoughts were turning to Austwicth. Lots of things made his part-German-Jewish mind think of the death camps; factories, smoke, Israeli government spokesmen, bones; so it wasn’t a surprise that it came into his head right now.
What set the concentration camps apart from all the other genocides in history, for most people was the brutal, clinical efficiency. But he wondered if they were really that efficient. He wondered what happened the ashes after they’d been finished with. Were they used to fertilise the soil, or would that have been au contre to the blut und boden ethic? And why did they burn the bodies, allowing their remains to waft towards heaven rather than sink towards hell? Six million Jews incinerated. Think of the pollution. Surely the wind from the east blew some few atoms of Semitic carbon dioxide into the lungs of every teuton? He’d never been good enough at physics to give a definitive answer to that question. And the people who were good enough at physics would probably never ask that question, the sort that only troubled minds like his own.
Eventually the arbeit was finished, though he didn’t feel he’d achieved any sort of Freiheit. The blud was all mopped up. The body parts were all put into bin-liners, biodegradable, Seamus was assured. Seamus thought about indulging in some Becketian gallows humour with the skulls but thought better of it. He was as sick of the sight of blood as an African warrior who’d been fighting a tribe of haemophiliacs. And who knows, there might have been such a tribe, given the patrilinear structure of pre-historical African tribal groups. It’s certain they would have died out after pointed spears were invented, though. Anyway, no more blood. It could flow around in his veins, to his hearts content, as long as there was a thick epidermal layer between his optical range and it. His teeth used to bleed, as his teeth were too closely packed, like Ireland was in the ‘80s, according to one famously mendacious government minister. He used to spit out blood and thought he was becoming a haemophiliac or getting hepatitis. But then he started using floss, and like some waxed Morrison visas the situation was resolved.
Padraig and Seamus shared the burden of carrying the dead thugs on their backs. They didn’t even ask Caomhin for help, not wanting to hear his pleas of being old, weak, intellectual or any of that stuff. Seamus walked upstairs with two bags of body parts, constantly looking over his shoulder to ensure that no blood was dripping out through any holes that may have emerged. Eventually they got into the van, Seamus seated in the middle of these two big, beer-filled men like a solitary leaf of lettuce in a big baguette, one of those big ones with sesame seeds on top. He asked if they were going to go and bury the bodies in some field. Caomhin, who’d been pretty quiet up till now, replied that this wasn’t what people meant by getting in touch with the grassroots. Seamus and Padraig looked over at him with mock anger, he grinned embarrassedly and apologised. Then Padraig told him they were going to be buried in a forest. It used be old-growth Irish Oaks before the Saxons and the Normans burnt it down so the Celts would have no place to hide, said Padraig, relishing the irony. Now there were just straight lines of Scandinavian conifers, he sighed. Caomhin felt compelled to offer his two cents, which was that civilisations could be defined by their attitudes to trees. For the Romans they represented barbarism, seemed dark and foreboding. For the Germanic tribes they suggested freedom to hunt for prey. For the Americans they symbolised the expanse and majesty of the new world. For the Celts they were sacred, graded into four degrees of “nobility” with increasingly stiff penalties for cutting down each type of tree, of which the most noble, naturally, was the Oak.
“What about the English?”, Seamus asked.
Anticipating the question, Caomhin said “Building ships to conquer and destroy other nations to cut down their forests and conquer other nations.”
Seamus laughed ironically, knowing that wasn’t all that far from the truth. He smiled, thinking they were doing their little bit to promote reforestation.
The van stopped off in a field next to the farmed forest. Seamus caught sight of a bird rising from one of the fields, it might have been a lark, too dark it was to tell. Padraig led the way with a torch in one hand and a bag of dead Englishmen over one shoulder, Seamus followed with a pick and shovel over one shoulder and some dead Saxon flesh in the other, feeling for all the world like one of the seven dwarves. Caomhin, ever the urbanite, staggered on nervously behind. Seamus pretended he needed to urinate, and let Caomhin go ahead.
He really just wanted to hug one of the trees. Sure, they weren’t old-growth, they weren’t indigenous, and they were there to make money by being converted into furnishings for trendy suburban homes. But they were alive, rooted in the soil that would be his ultimate home, breathing in the carbon dioxide that his species pumped out in increasing volumes. Sadly they all looked alike, they were in the same stage of growth and all looked equally as worthy of being hugged as the next, almost like contestants on one of those Pop Idol shows. He made his totally arbitrary choice, put his arms round the tree, the tips of his fingers just about touching his other. He felt revivified by this, felt Gaia’s energy surge through him like an electric shock. To his amazement, he’d lost his chances with a number of women by beckoning them to share this atavistic pleasure with him, watching them react as if he’d invited them to do a few vials of heroin with him. It seemed that tree-hugging, like pornography, still wasn’t a socially acceptable activity.
He followed the light from the torch till he reached Caomhin and Padraig, who were sitting round the torch like cub scouts at a campfire. He excused himself by saying that he couldn’t find the bag after he’d micturated. Padraig told him he should have saved his urine to piss into the grave, Seamus said he’d probably drunk enough tea to come up with some more. He asked how big the hole should be, Padraig took a look at the bags, said about four feet long, three feet wide, six feet deep. Needing no further encouragement, Seamus started clearing the pine needles, then the leafmould, till he got to the thick, rich, humus-laden soil below. It was refreshing that there was one crop that used soil for nourishment, rather than just keeping it in place. He starting digging and it wasn’t long before his shovel was getting entangled in the adventitious roots of the trees. He looked up, wishing there was some way he could apologise and reassure them that they were getting some nutritious humus to put some bark on their epidermi. Then he dug some more, finding the soil beneath get more clayey and rocky, so much so that the pick would have to get up off it’s arse and start earning it’s keep. As he picked, he reflected that his people had become a labouring race only recently while it was second nature to the Saxons. The rocks were old red sandstone, soft, brittle rocks that were as new in geological terms as blip-hop was in music. They cracked easily under the thrust of the Saxon steel that Seamus wrought upon them with near-biblical fury. He’d read somewhere that it was better to take out your anger on inanimate objects, and, like the chicken pox he’d had when he was sixteen, it made a big impression on him.
When this hole was dug, he’d still have some unresolved anger to work off. When he’d gotten at least half the way there, in terms of volume, he looked up and asked Padraig if he’d brought any water along, Padraig, anticipating the question, looked guilty and said that he hadn’t but that he knew where there was a well. Seamus asked if Padraig would go and get some water from there, he said he didn’t have anything to carry it in, that he’d have to go and get it himself. He gave Seamus directions to the well, said he’d take over the digging.
“I s’pose you’d better take it”, was his eventual decision. Seamus took the torch, jokingly asked if he had a divining rod as well, and handed the pick to Padraig, while Caomhin looked on, patently wishing he was somewhere else. Thankfully, it was a moonlit spring night, but he ran his fingers round some of the trees to find out which way was north anyway. It didn’t take him that long to find the well, the sound of it’s babbling waters drawing him like some nymphomaniac on an ancient Greek island. It was an ancient well, in the sense that the rocks around it had been there for quite a while, allowing a whole ecosystem to form. Geologically, it was a new kid on the rock. So it’s waters weren’t particularly rich in minerals, it wouldn’t ever be the centre of a multi-million pound sparkling water industry. That didn’t stop Seamus from leaning over in the missionary position and guzzling greedily. Wasn’t it strange, Seamus thought as he made his nervous way back through the forest, that we took water for granted, right here, right now, in this part of the world, when so many cultures had revered and antropomorphised and deified rivers? Yet our water supply was running out. What new hydrotheologies would the Twenty-first century bring, when the dams dried up and the water wars began?
He hadn’t answered this question by the time he’d gotten back to Padraig and Caomhin. Though he hadn’t left any trail of biscuits or yellow paint behind, it didn’t take him that long to find them. But then he was mother nature’s son.
He shone the light in Padraig’s face, looking down at him the same way his building site foreman used to look down on him, when Seamus could see the time-and-motion calculations going on behind his eyes.
“So, are we making much progress?” asked Seamus.
“Well, there’s only one way to go”, he replied diplomatically, wiping the sweat from his brow, visibly tired from his rigours. “I don’t suppose you want to lend a hand, he asked, looking over at Caomhin. Caomhin replied that he wouldn’t be much help, Seamus and Padraig looked at each other and decided they didn’t want to test out this proposition, so Seamus took the pick and Padraig sought out the well.
Digging in the dark wasn’t a very pleasurable activity, right then Seamus thought he knew why builders started so early in the morning. He never knew what he was aiming for, just had to trust that his wild swings would hit the target. Wasn’t that the way scientists often worked, trying random permutations, until eventually they struck upon the right formula, then ran around the streets shouting nakedly? He shrugged internally, unaware of the answer.
When Padraig did get back, refreshed and rejuvenated, he scanned the hole as well and, looking over at the somniferous Caomhin, decided it was big enough to bury the dead Englishmen in. Seamus responded by clearing away any remaining bits of soil or rock and looking around desultorily by way of assent. As if by some telepathy, they decided silently among themselves that tossing the bodies in without any gesture would be the most appropriate end to their useless and pointless lives. When this was done, though, Padraig said he needed to urinate and Seamus suddenly felt a similar urge. Almost in unison, they confidently pulled out their favourite appendages and allowed their urine to fall gently onto the body bags, the sound of the piss gently hitting the plastic, rolling off and being sucked up by the soil sounded like some sweet celestial nachtmusik to their ears. They filled in the hole, made a desultory effort to cover it over with leafmould, but Padraig assured him that no-one would be around before a new layer of leaves fell in the autumn anyway, so they may as well start making their way home. Caomhin found a sudden burst of energy from somewhere, leapt up and they all made their way home.
He slept well that night, like Rashkolikov.
In the morning Seamus walked into the middle of a breakfast time discussion. It turns out that Padraig was trying to convince them to stay for another few days, with Caomhin insisting that with the election coming up soon and all, they needed to be moseying on.
“Sure we’ve got a phone here and there’s one of those whaddyamacallits, cybercafes in town”, Padraig protested. Caomhin sighed and told him that the day the Cork Sinn Fein Branch could conduct all it’s business on the internet was a long way off yet. Padraig reluctantly accepted this and settled for inviting them down when the election was over, which would probably be during the summer. Then Padraig asked Seamus if he wanted any breakfast. He said he was starving, then realised the irony that some people really were starving in the shed before he brutally killed them. He used to live with a Nigerian and Zambian guy and when he’d get home from a hard day’s leering at girls in the college library, he’d make the same comment, and it took him a while to realise why they were so disconcerted. This time Padraig just laughed and gave him the run of the kitchen and told him there was some soya milk and dairy free margarine there if he wanted it. Seamus didn’t need any more encouragement than this. When he came back with an overflowing bowl of bran flakes and started to tear into them with... in the context, I’m lost for appropriate metaphors, so let’s just say he ate them hungrily. As he was doing this, Padraig asked him if he’d had any bad dreams.
Seamus tossed the food round his mouth and said he’d slept pretty well, actually. Padraig and Caomhin’s eyelids both raised themselves. “You’re lucky, so far”, said Caomhin. I remember the first time I killed someone, I couldn’t sleep for weeks afterwards.” “Me neither”, said Caomhin, as Seamus realised that Caomhin had never said anything about killing anyone before, adding “these youngsters see so much violence on TV, they must be totally desensitised to it.”
Seamus didn't even bother counting the levels of irony in that statement. Later, after the valedictions had been made and the invitations to return renewed and they were back on the road to Cork, Seamus asked Caomhin another thing that had been troubling him.
“Y’know when you were telling me about your time with the IRA?”
Caomhin nodded, pretending to keep his eyes on the road.
“You never said anything about killing anybody.”
“Did I not?” He paused a little and asked, “What story did I tell you, then?”
Seamus gulped, realising the sinister import of that inquiry, and told him which one.
“Ah, the Prague story, that’s one of my favourites.”
“Is it true?” Seamus asked, trying to sound matter-of-fact but just coming across as nervous.
“It’s not without an element of truth”, he replied, guardedly.
“So... have you ever killed anybody?”
“When I’m with people like Padraig, I have. You, on the other hand, I knew, would be more impressed with that Prague story. When you’re a politician you have to be all things to all men. For you it’s easy, you’re a blank slate, a tabula rasa. For me, with my complicated past, it’s a different story. Do you want to drive for a while?”, he added, awkwardly, keen to change the subject.
“I don’t know how to drive”, replied Seamus, a little stunned by this abrupt shift in the conversation.
“Are you going to learn before the election?” Caomhin asked, not really feeling like he had any right to pry.
“Nah, don’t think so. I think the constituency is small enough to get round by bike.”
“What about if you get elected, and have to move to Dublin?”
“They still have a train on that route, last I heard.”
“What about getting round Dublin?”
“I don’t even want to think about that.”
“Hmm... well I hope the voters buy your holier-than-thou eco-boy image. Actually, I’ve a feeling they might. We’ve got to go round getting signatures tomorrow, in case you’d forgotten.”
“Why would I have forgotten?”
“Oh, I don’t know, killing a man for the first time, burying his body in the woods, alienating your family, moving house, you’ve had a lot on your mind.”
“Hmmm... that’s true. What time do you want to see me tomorrow?”
“What time’s good for you?”
“Around noon?”
“Sounds good to me.”
“Noon it is then. Bear in mind that if you’re elected, you’ll have to start getting up earlier.”
“Yeah, I know, but... That’s manana.”
“Amarach?”
“Ar La.”
They laughed, then just admired the scenery for the rest of the trip, while Seamus Fantasised about who the real Caomhin might be.
They were back in Cork within an hour. It seemed bustling and urban, as it always did when he arrived back from the countryside. He looked at the faces of the people he passed in the street, wondering how they would react if they knew he was a murderer.
All he saw was the same listless, apathetic looks that he saw at this time of day and year.
That night, bizarre alcheringa, in which the cunt was still at large in Cork and Seamus had decided to put posters of the him all over Cork, informing people what a vile, monstrous scumbag he was. He ended up postering a wooden hut in the American west, like in Jim Jarmusch’s excellent Dead Man. When he took one of the posters out of his bag, it was blank, but when he put it up on a window the wilderness behind it made the cunts face appear, gradually, like on the Turin Shroud.
What did this mean?
He concluded that, though the police would have left the cunt escape back to England, there was a higher power in the universe that would punish him. Was it Gaia? The rustic setting of the dream allowed for this possibility. Were Sinn Fein therefore agents of Gaia? This was surely stretching it a bit, but the idea was beguiling all the same.
More importantly, it seemed to Seamus at the time, was where did this dream come from? Some Cork in a parallel universe where the cunt was still alive and the only thing Seamus could so to stop him from going round terrorising people was put up a few forlorn, photocopied posters? Seamus was glad he didn’t live in such a brutal, aleatory, unjust world.
Anyway, he couldn’t lie there and try to interpret his dreams forever. He had to go and annoy people until they signed their names on a sheet of paper to give the country’s legislators the impression that they wanted him to be elected.
The next morning he got to Caomhin’s office a little late, finding him at the door pointing at his watch.
“Yeah, sorry about that, I had a few weird dreams last night. Didn’t sleep very well as a result.”
“That’s Okay. I was starting to think you weren’t going to show up at all.”
He’d like to have pretended he’d played the prodigal son/Prince Hal trick, but was a little too tired to indulge in such a pretence. As they walked across the river into their Northside heartland, Caomhin told Seamus that they were only going to houses where they’d be sure of support. At first, Caomhin would introduce him, and he’d shake their hands, gradually, he’d let Seamus do all the work himself. They finally reached the area where Caomhin’s documents led as ineluctably as a Lonely Planet map.
It was Sinn Fein heartland alright, this patch of gloomy estates and incontinent puppies. While there were none of the flamboyant murals that you might find north of the border, the three letters that struck fear into almost every Englishmen were painted on walls everywhere.
They came to the first house, in the middle of a council estate, where the lawn remained uncut and replete with dandelions and daisies. Seamus would have loved to think that it was like this because the occupants shared his view that nature was not to be interfered with. But he knew they couldn’t afford to even rent a lawnmower, or even know someone rich enough to borrow one off. It was hard getting out of these places, even in today’s booming economy, the odds were stacked against people who looked and talked like they came from places like this. Perhaps that was why they got such a welcome, these representatives of the Ourselves alone party. It was always the people who were most fucked over by their country that loved it the most. Seamus also couldn’t help but notice all the litter that piled up in the area. On a more alert, less nervous day, he would have tried to calculate the value of all this waste, think of how much better their lives would be if the corporations were forced to pay for their own waste. When Caomhin introduced Seamus as their candidate in the election, the middle-aged, red-faced woman on the other side of the threshold invited them both in, Caomhin said they’d love to but they’d have to be pressing on. Depressingly, the talk was more about the minutiae of their daily lives, the medical cards and the rent allowance, rather than the historic struggle in his island. Disturbingly, the subject of immigration also came up. Seamus drifted off into one of reveries, only to be brought back to the land of the living, if you could call this life, by Caomhin asking him, “You’ll sort this out when you’re elected, wontcha Seamus” periodically, to which he’d nod, feigning enthusiasm as best as he could. When they’d shaken her pink, wrinkly hand and left and was sure she was out of earshot, Caomhin delivered the following lecture:
“Have you forgotten everything I’ve told you? Agree with everything they say. Nod your head. Make eye contact. And show some enthusiasm, Goddammit.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry, it’s just...”
“Just what?”
“Just that whether I get elected or not, these people are still going to be eking out a living in these estates, just scraping by. And there’s fuck all we can do to make it better.”
“Listen”, Caomhin responded, “This isn’t the time for fucking idealism. We give these people hope. Hope that their compatriots in the North will be free. Hope that this society will be more equitable. And you’re the face that represents that hope. It’s Your fucking face that’s going to be up on those posters, come election time. So look fucking alive. We’ve invested a lot of effort in getting you to this stage, and you’re not going to fuck up now.”
Seamus apologised, deciding not even to think about what might be on the other side of that ultimatum, and said he was going to look more lively. To his good fortune, the person at the next door had concerns that were closer to his heart. Though the flat was equally indigent, Seamus noticed some signs that it’s owner was someone who chose a life of poverty rather than been forced into it. He heard a tape of some scratchy Indian music playing in the background, one that had probably been copied from the music library. He saw a copy of the Guardian on the table, a newspaper Seamus used to read frequently before he became so anti-English. And perhaps, that was a scent of marijuana smoke in the air, from a joint hastily put out in case the people knocking at the door were police, or people from the social welfare. The face of the person who’d just wasted some good gear was a little older than Seamus, late 30’s, early 40’s perhaps, but the lines of experience and adventure were etched on his face and his long, curly greying hair made Seamus wonder what he could possibly be doing voting for Sinn Fein. As he signed the paper that Caomhin handed him, Seamus got his answer.
“You know, I’m probably going to vote for the greens this time. I might still give you my first preference, depending on which way the opinion polls go.”
“I don’t know, Jim, we’ve got a pretty promising candidate this time”, replied Caomhin, looking over at a slightly embarrassed Seamus.
“Yeah, you’re going to get more votes, but only ‘cause you’ve sold out. I don’t think you’re a socialist party any more, not since that PFI thing in the North. I think you’re quite happy to go along with this Celtic Tiger thing.” He grimaced slightly, then asked, “Aren’t you sickened by what’s happening to us, working round the clock to pay for our SUVs and our houses built on rezoned fields and forests?”
Caomhin said they’d been through all of this before, and got ready to move on, but Seamus was intrigued. Seamus made a tentative move to engage him in conversation, while still trying to sound like the politico that Caomhin was training him to be.
“We’re sensitive to your concerns, Jim. In our manifesto, we call for better public transport, and more high-density urban housing. We’re in favour of more recycling, and we’re opposed to incineration.” Caomhin watched, eager to see where this was going.
“What about legalising dope?”
“Well, y’know, Jim, that’s a pretty contentious issue still, especially among the conservative Catholics who we get a lot of our votes from.”
Jim nodded, in a way that suggested he’d heard this argument before. “Ah yes, Catholicism. Still with us. When I was younger, it was my dream that when we got a United Ireland we could go back to worshipping the old Celtic gods. As I grow older, I’m realising how unrealistic that is. But I still live in hope. It’s basically Christianity that’s caused all this country’s problems. Come round some time, youngfella, when you’ve got all the ink you need, I’ll explain it all to you.”
Seamus shook his hand, said he might take him up on that, as Caomhin jerked his head in the opposite direction.
As they moved on towards the next house, Seamus remarked that Jim seemed like an interesting character.
“Ah, he’s only an old hippy”, replied Caomhin.
“What’s wrong with hippies?”
“Well, nothing, really, except that their heads are up in the air, in a constant haze of dope smoke. In this party we’re concerned with trying to make real people’s lives better, getting them freedom in the North, better health care, things that really concern them.”
“I think quite a lot of people would be interested in drug legalisation as well”, Seamus averred.
“Well, yeah”, said Caomhin, who was sympathetic in his heart, “but we have to be pragmatic”
“Why?”, asked Seamus, to Caomhin’s surprise.
“Because that’s the only way we’re going to achieve anything”, he said, sounding a little shocked.
“Where did all this pragmatism come from? Would you say Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet and Pearse and Connoly were pragmatists?”
“I’d say O’Connell and Parnell and Collins and De Valera were”, he replied, worried about where this might be going.
“And what did they get us? Votes for rich Catholics, the promise of home rule, and the most reactionary state in Europe.”
“Look”, said Caomhin, showing an angry side of himself that Seamus had never seen before and which worried him a bit, “You owe us. We risked a lot to kill those two fucking English thugs for you. In return, you’re going to get elected. And to do that you’re going to stay on-message.” With those last two words, Caomhin realised what he was saying and that he could as well have been talking to an earlier version of himself, and his tone mellowed. “Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound threatening. I shouldn’t talk to you like this. It’s just... this movement is what I’ve devoted my life to. I miss the idealism we used to have as well, but the world changes, people grow older... just get fucking elected for me... Please?” With those last words he put his arm paternalistically round Seamus. Seamus too mellowed in tone and agreed to keep his idealism on hold. But he made a promise to himself to visit Jim at some point in the future.
