Atomised

After his long, lonely, cycle home Seamus’ flat seemed empty in a way that it never had before. He fell asleep straight after dinner, woke at about two not really knowing where he was. He didn’t wake till early the following afternoon, made himself some breakfast and ambled up to see Caomhin.
“Where’ve you been, Seamus? I was trying to contact you all weekend.”
He said where he’d been and asked what Caomhin wanted to know so urgently.
“Well, while you were down with your hippy friends, I was getting phone calls all weekend from local radio, asking if you’d be willing to go on a pre-election debate.”
“Oh”, said Seamus, “and what did you tell them?”
“The truth - that you couldn’t be contacted and that I’d have to wait till you got back to give a response.”
“Why didn’t you just say yes?”
“I’m not sure you’re ready yet.”
“Of course I’m ready. If I’m not ready now, I’ll probably never be.”
Caomhin smiled enigmatically, in a way that suggested that he agreed more with the second half of that statement than with the first. “Before I ring up and say you’re willing to do it, there’s a few questions I need to ask. What did those spin doctors from head office tell you?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t really paying attention.”
“That’s good. Have you ever been a member of the IRA?”
“No.”
“Excellent. What have Sinn Fein got to offer the electorate in this country?”
“Social justice, responsible economic and environmental management, World class health care and education, and a peaceful resolution of the troubles in the north.”
“Have you ever been a member of the IRA?”
“No.”
“Very Good. What’s wrong with the way the government are running the country right now?”
“Short-sighted economic policies, high level corruption, kow-towing to market forces, lack of vision on the northern situation.”
“Thank you. Have you ever been a member of the IRA?”
“No”, Seamus replied once again, trying not betray his growing impatience.
“Yeah, I think you’re ready alright. It’s on Friday afternoon. Is that good for you?”
Seamus nodded, Caomhin picked up the phone. Seamus started to get the jitters. He hadn’t been in a debate since he was at school, when all he really had to do was read out something he’d written in advance, and even then he couldn’t read it loudly enough. And then there was nothing at stake, whereas now there was his whole future. And perhaps the future of Irish politics. Well, maybe not.
Once Caomhin had made the arrangements, he put the phone down and told him they were going campaigning.
“Postering?”, asked Seamus.
“No, the latest set haven’t come from the printers yet. We’re going door-to-door instead, around to the areas we’ve already postered. C’mon, get in the car. We’ve wasted enough time already.”
They were up in the Northside in a few minutes, as traffic was sparse at that hour of the day. Thankfully, none of the posters had been ripped down or defaced, which he saw as a good omen.
He was constantly asked about the question of vigilantism, which he could never talk about honestly, like the middle-class boy he was, he kept it well-concealed. He was encouraged by the support he was getting at the doorsteps, particularly from young, female voters. Sadly, many of them hadn’t registered to vote, which saddened him doubly as he remembered his own idealism at that age, rushing down to the post office to register and then getting a letter back telling him that he was an enfranchised citizen. He remembered going down to vote for Mary Robinson, feeling that her election would herald a new era in the country’s history. To be sure, some things had gotten better since then, but pregnant women were still being forced to flee to England like criminals, millions of people came out on the streets to worship the bones of dead saints, people still went to jail just for doing dope, and power was still in the hands of a cabal of vested interests. But it still hurt that the young ‘uns today weren’t as idealistic now as he was when he was their age. He’d give the speech about how their ancestors died so they could have this precious right, coating it with a layer of irony to make himself seem hipper. In return they’d promise to register for the next one. He’d smile and say thanks. He always tried to play to his strengths: they were starting their campaign early and concentrating on a narrow area, so he had time to listen to everybody’s complaints, like a lazy psychiatrist who takes £40 an hour just to listen to someone whining, getting all the anger and hostility out of their systems.
In Fourteenth-Century France people would walk round the streets whipping themselves to atone for everybody else’s sins.
He shared some of these feelings at night with Grainne, but tried to accentuate the positive, as he’d come to the conclusion that her staying with him was contingent on the possibility of his becoming rich in the near future. He didn’t resent her for it, knowing that her looks were as important to him as his possible future status was to her, he resented himself more for knowing this instead of being able to convince himself that what kept them together was some notion of romantic love.
He’d decided that he had to have sex with her the night before the debate. It would help his confidence and hopefully ensure he got a good nights sleep. He didn’t say it like that, of course. The night before the debate, one of his parents loomed large in his mind, the one, obviously, that was still alive. He knew that once his show had been on the radio, it was only a matter of time before she’d find out that he’d actually been telling the truth when he’d said he was standing for Sinn Fein. Only that night did it occur to him that it might have been better to tell her in advance rather than let her find out on the rumour mill that often seemed the axis around which her home town revolved. If he’d sent her an email a few days ago she probably would have got it by now, and he could have chosen not to read her reply, that was one of the advantages of the medium. He toyed with the idea of ringing her really late, hoping he’d just be asked to leave a message after the beep, but he was unsure how that message might go.
“Hey mum, I’m going to be standing as a candidate for the party you believe are apologists for the people you think are the most violent thugs in Europe. I’ll be on the radio tomorrow. Listen out for me, wontcha? Hope you’re all OK, Bye.”
This is what was going through his head as he tried to make love to Grainne. She sensed his mind was elsewhere, as when he was penetrating her he was looking at some blank space in the wall instead of into her eyes. He was sweating profusely, as he always was in these situations, little drops landing on her torso as if from the roof of some putrescent cave. As this process was giving neither of them any pleasure, she took it upon herself to grab him by the shoulders, rub his back gently as if giving him a massage, and ask him if there was something the matter. He asked what made her think that, she just said, vaguely that she felt he was a little preoccupied.
“Well, y’know”, he began, climbing off her and leaning over her, running his fingers through what there was of his own hair, “I’ve got that debate tomorrow and...”
“Don’t worry about that”, she interrupted, “You’re going to knock them dead.”, after which she smiled slightly, realising the irony. Seamus, for his part, was nonplussed.
“It’s not the other candidates I’m worried about, it’s my mother.”
“Oh”, she replied, a little chastened. “So you still haven’t told her?”
“No, and I’m afraid when she finds out she’ll never talk to me again.”
“I don’t think that’s going to happen, Seamus.”
“What makes you say that?”, he replied, a little taken aback. “Your family don't talk to you anymore.”
“That’s because my family are ignorant peasants. You’re mother is a teacher. She must be intelligent enough to know what an important part of human nature it is for children to rebel against their upbringing.”
Seamus laughed darkly at what he perceived to be her naiveté. “Maybe you don't know this already, but back when she was going to college there wasn’t no points system, just a simple one sentence entrance exam that read ‘Are you middle class?’” He was being a little unkind, as though there were many teachers in his school on whom the government were wasting their money, his mother was actually quite good at her job. But he trusted his own instincts when it came to her probable reaction to his candidature. Grainne, for her part, was a bit disillusioned, as what he said was such a blow to her notions of middle-class liberalism and social mobility.
“I really don't think your mother is anything like the way you describe her. You make her sound the complete opposite of you?”
“In what way?”, he asked, eager to get such an insight into her perception of him, like the mirror maker in a story by Primo Levi.
“Listen to yourself. You’re calm, well spoken, articulate. You make her seem like this raving, hysterical monster.”
“Maybe I exaggerate a little... but the reason I’m so soft spoken is because my parents never left me leave the house, that I retreated into my own little world, pretty much lost the will to live.” He might have added that he’d never quite gotten it back, that sometimes he felt he was just borrowing it and that some burly, coprolalic repoman would come knocking at his door some dark, rainy night and come looking for it back. But he’d probably bared too much of his heart as it were, leaving her to wonder what freaky disorders might be in his gene pool.
“You never lost the will to live”, she replied, as firmly in denial as it was impossible for an equivocator like Seamus to be. “No one who had could cycle the distance you did at the weekend, then work and party so hard all the weekend.”
“I’m happy now ‘cause I’m with you. But I’m worried that I could lose my mother tomorrow, then lose the election in a couple of month’s time, then...”
“Then what?” she asked, tetchily.
He knew he couldn’t tell the truth, but he didn’t know what to say in it’s place, so her let her assert herself as a member of the more voluble gender.
“You don't think I’m with you just ‘cause I think you’re going to be elected, do you?”
“I didn’t think that for a minute”, he replied, not entirely dishonestly, as he could never have dismissed such profound fears in such a short space of time. Judging this to be one of the situations where the truth and what a female wanted to hear were at polar opposites, he played some ethical gymnastics.
“No, I think we click in all sorts of ways. We’ve been through similar things, we feel about a lot of things in the same way, don’t you agree?”
“Yeah, totally”, she replied, smiling, but he sensed a complete lack of conviction in her voice. He reflected that openness and honesty might, like Marxism, be good ideas in theory, but never worked out so well in practice. But he decided to go with the flow of the conversation, asking her, “Can you prove it to me?” consciously imitating De Niro in Raging Bull. She took this as a cue to be more proactive, like the night when they first got together, that she would have to fuck him, rather than just letting him fuck her, which in doing she drew the sperm from his loins much quicker than she would have wanted.
He apologised for this.
“Hey, it’s Okay; I know you’ve got a lot on your mind right now. You’ll make it up to me, wontcha?”
Seamus just nodded; amazed that someone who males had taken so much from could be so giving. Perhaps, he thought, this is why we called the planet we lived on “Mother Earth”; no matter how much we shat on her, she would always try to provide us with more.
“I guess you want to go to sleep now. What time’s your debate in the morning?”
“Oh, em, I need to be in the studio for eleven.”
“I guess I’ll have to get up and make breakfast around 10, then.”
“You’re staying here?” he asked, a little surprised. “What about Diarmuid?”
“He’s staying over with some friends. Didn’t I tell you?”
“Um, no actually.
“Well, I guess I must have a lot on my mind as well.” As she bent down to get her toothbrush from her handbag, he wondered at the veracity of that statement but wasn’t in a mood to make an issue of it. When they’d both brushed their teeth - he wasn’t in the mood to make a cosy, young lovers event of it - they got under the quilts together in the foetal position, with his arms wrapped round her.
Pretty soon he could hear her gentle snoring, but sleep wasn’t going to come so easily for him. He pulled one of his arms under her, giving him the freedom to toss and turn. He reminded himself of the nights before exams, thinking of what he was going to write, how he was going to put it together in a coherent way. But he knew the arbiters of his words weren’t going to be bored university lecturers who’d read the same thing a hundred times over and would be ingratiated by the slightest spark of originality, but by alert, attentive radio listeners, most of whom were innately, implacably hostile and would cheer loudly if he was a Christian thrown to the lions at the Coliseum. His biggest fear was that he’d be forced to deny that he was a member of the IRA so much that they’d trick him into denying something he wasn’t supposed to.
“Have you ever been a teenager?” “No, I mean yes.”
Well, at least that might get him into the papers. The one thing he had in his favour was that, though his commitment to Sinn Fein was questionable, his contempt for Fianna Fail and the PDs was unequivocal. As there was no possibly of him being invited to a cabinet position, he could basically be honest, if he ever moved up the ladder he could put any untoward quotes he made now down to youthful indiscretion.
Yes, he was becoming a politician. Or was he always? Why, in democracies, where everyone, regardless of gender, had the vote, were the vast majority of our legislators still of the ungentle sex? Was it because women had some atavistic need to be led by men? Hell, no, only a recalcitrant sexist pig would think that. Was it because they were so eager to find fault with each other, and so willing to see the good in men? Well, maybe that was a factor. But Seamus thought the real reason was that men were all politicians. We all had to lie, to equivocate, to exaggerate, to make promises we couldn’t, or didn’t want to keep, just to get sex. If we wanted power as well, we just had to lie more. So we were all born politicians. Here in Ireland, he noticed, where it was particularly hard to get women to have sex, levels of civic participation were extremely high. Everyone seemed to be an activist of some sort, a member of some committee, or involved with some sort of union - at one stage, there were more unions in CIE than in Germany, before the whole partnership thing took off - and the country had more elected representatives per capita than some countries had doctors. It wasn’t because we were all so greedy for power, it was that we had the gift of the gab, which we needed to unlock the doors of our frigid, Catholic-guilt-ridden women’s hearts.
Next morning, he went and put on his tie and waistcoat, as noisily as he could, hoping he’d ‘accidentally’ wake her up. As this didn’t happen, he decided to leave her a note, took his bicycle and made for the studio, which wasn’t all that far away. He had this fantasy that he’d be on the front page of the paper on Monday, doing his bit for energy awareness. In reality, it turned out that there wasn’t much of a press gang there. He parked his bike anonymously, as he hadn’t put any posters up in city centre areas, no-one else recognised him, perhaps imagined he was one of the sound engineers or an over-dressed tea boy. When he got inside the studio was pretty cramped, the air quality wasn’t so good, and he’d forgotten to rub any tea tree oil at the base of his nose. While the other candidates consulted their spin doctors - Caomhin, to his surprise, was nowhere to be seen - he busied himself by looking through the music collection, by which he was so unimpressed that he thought of offering to lend some CDs after the debate was over. Then someone came up to him and asked who he was. He told them his name and his position, received a polite apology and hoped he could turn his anonymity to his advantage.
When they were seated around the narrow, claustrophobic table, he noticed some people from the other parties looking over at him. He recognised their faces, had seen them on television, knew what some of their weaknesses were, in general, he imagined it was stupidity, though he recognised that what may seem like simple-mindedness to him might strike others as being straight talking. One of the representatives was a Fianna Fail TD who’d made a bit of a splash by complaining that all the immigrants in the country were “freeloading scroungers” or something equally eloquent. Seamus loathed and despised him ,but had no idea how the debate with him was going to pan out.
The debate began with the chair announcing everybody’s name in the sort of unctuous, Dublin Four tones that made Seamus cringe. This made Seamus realise that he actually had no idea what he sounded like on radio. When he was a teenager and wanted to be a rock star, he had a mania for recording his voice on his fathers old 70s system, but since then his voice had broken, so he didn’t know what impression he’d make when his voice came out of the trannies and ghetto blasters and hi-fis throughout the city and beyond.
When Seamus’ name was announced, he noticed the other candidates nodding their heads as they realised who this young upstart was. If he got elected, he wouldn’t be the baby of the house, but he would be the youngest who didn’t get the job in his father’s will. The debate began, predictably enough, with the economy, with the Fine Gael candidate eager to puncture the smug aura that his Fianna Fail counterpart surrounded himself like so much cheap perfume. Taking a cue from his great leader, he just blew off his blueshirt antagonists criticisms with a litany of statistics: unemployment down, investment up, growth consistently high. The Labour candidate got his chance too, but the Fianna Fail man seemed to have the confidence of someone who was sure he knew he was right, that all the people out there in radioland agreed with him. His confidence only made his antagonists seem more irascible, and they were probably lucky the medium was radio and that no-one could see their angry gesticulations and spayed saliva. Seamus knew that he knew very little of the dismal science, and wasn’t on the firmest ground. So when he was invited to comment, he just said, “There’s no point in arguing that a lot of people in this country have gotten a lot richer in this country, and that many of them have Fianna Fail to thank.”
The response was of stunned silence in the studio, and probably of the gentle hissing that radios make when there isn’t any music or speech to drown it out elsewhere. It lasted a second or two, but radio, like nature, abhors a vacuum, so the presenter composed himself and asked Seamus if he really meant to agree with everything the Fianna Fail candidate had said. Seamus sensed that he’d just drawn back from the point of saying that the point of an opposition was to oppose, and the Fine Gael and Labour candidates were waiting to get their chance to accuse him of jockeying for a place in a future coalition. Seamus, for his part, just said:
“Yes. I think a lot of people have done very well. I’ve done well, even though I’ve been either at college or drawing the dole. The test for them economically is going to come when there’s going to be a recession, as inevitably there will. I think we should be concentrating on what Fianna Fail have actually with all the money they’ve inherited. They’ve had a chance to build a decent health service, do something about the mounting waste problem, and provide some decent public transport, but instead they’ve pissed it away on tax cuts for their rich cronies.”
Again, there was a moment of silence, and the look on the presenters face recalled that on some of the faces of teachers who didn’t quite know what to do with him. The Fianna Fail candidate broke the silence with the smugly uttered words, “That’s the sort of language I’d expect from a member of a terrorist organisation.”
Taking that accusation in his stride, Seamus replied, “I’m not, nor have I ever been a terrorist. But that is the sort of language I’d expect from a white supremicist, rabble-rousing thug.”
To Seamus’ disdain, but not to his surprise, the presenters response was, “You’ve never been a terrorist?”
“Look, if I was a terrorist, I wouldn’t be allowed stand in this election, and that goes for everyone else who stands for Sinn Fein. If anyone in this room is guilty of killing anyone, its the TD from the government, who’ve let hundreds of people die in the health system, while rich property speculators buy second and third houses. This man has blood on his hands, the blood, of decent, hard-working Irish people. Now he wants to build a toxic waste incinerator, which is going to kill even more.” As he finished uttering those rasping, bitter words, he took a drink of water. The presenter, eager to keep things on an even keel, took this opportunity to swing the topic round to the subject of the health service. Feeling they’d been given a licence to be honest by Seamus, the candidates from Fine Gael, Labour and the Greens rounded on their Fianna Fail counterpart. Seamus, having initiated the discussion, was content to play the role of Anna Pavlova Schrerer in War and Peace, watching the torch-paper he had lit explode. Just to annoy the Fianna Fail candidate, he put his hands behind his back and watched him stew in his own juice, hoping this would provoke him into the sort of outburst that would shatter his aura of supreme confidence. But he remained reasonably well balanced until his Achilles heel, the subject of immigration, came up. Seamus threw a glance at him, the sort of passive-aggressive thing at which he was an expert, letting him know that he wasn’t going to get off that easily this time. The Fianna Fail man gave his usual defence, saying his remarks had been taken out of context, exaggerated by the liberal media establishment, the usual spiel. Seamus listened carefully, then, just as the presenter was going to ask someone to respond, said, “Bullshit!”
“I beg your pardon”, asked the presenter, after a gulp.
“You heard what I said. He’s talking shit. Everybody knows what he said, and why he said it. He’s appealing to the lowest, basest instincts of voters, voters who’ve got nothing from the last five years of prosperity that he keeps banging on about, who need someone to look down on, and he’s only too happy to scapegoat refugees who’ve fled from terrors that a fat cat like him can’t possibly imagine.” He took another drink of water. The presenter, who felt he was learning how to deal with Seamus, just remarked, “Strong words from a man whose party’s name means ‘Ourselves Alone’.” Seamus, totally nonplussed, replied, “For hundreds of years we were treated like migrants in our own country, and up until very recently our compatriots in the North were treated the same way. We know what it’s like to be oppressed, to be exploited. That’s what make the deputy’s comments so inexcusable.” Seamus hated the word ‘deputy’ used in this context, as he knew the Fianna Fail man was serving no-one other than himself by being a TD, but it was preferable to uttering his reviled name. To Seamus’ surprise, the green candidate, who felt he wasn’t getting enough of a look in, took this opportunity to criticise Seamus, who he saw as being his rival for the radical vote.
“I don't think this whining about the past is going to get us anywhere”, he began, in a middle-class accent not all that dissimilar to Seamus’. “This is a modern, developed country, but we have challenges to face in our treatment of the environment and a host of other issues that our history has no relevance to.”
“I’m a little shocked to hear you say that”, said Seamus, who hadn’t been expecting criticism from such a quarter. “You ought to know that people are coming here as immigrants ‘cause they’re suffering the same fate we did in the past - people are stealing their land and exploiting it for their own greedy motives, destroying it’s environment in the long run, giving them no choice but to come here and be our slaves, cleaning up the shit we throw away. Our ‘history’ is happening to them right now.” The Green candidate couldn’t really disagree with that and looked a bit chastened, but the presenter was getting increasingly freaked out by Seamus’ coprolalia, and went for an ad break. Once he’d hit the button and everyone was being persuaded to buy things they didn’t need, he turned to Seamus and told him that he wasn’t at a Sinn Fein meeting now, and would have to mind his language. He just responded with a bitter, punkish scowl. The presenter gulped, and asked “Do I make myself clear?” There was no change in Seamus’ expression. “Look, I can have security come and have you removed from this room. This is radio, no-one will even know you’ve gone, just assumed you’ve shut the f...”
Seamus grinned as he noted the presenter was not immune to using a little coarse language himself, then replied, “Not until I tell the papers in the morning that you removed me from the debate, just for saying ‘shit’. How d’you think that’ll affect your listener demographic?” As he uttered those words, the red light came on to indicate that they were back on air. Panickly, the presenter told the listeners that they were back, and turned to the Fianna Fail candidate, asking him a question he felt could attack Seamus in answering.
“With increasing support for smaller parties, this promises to be a vituperative campaign. You’ve been in politics a long time, how do you deal with the new style of negative campaigning?”
“I feel enormous disdain for the style of muck-throwing politics we’re importing from America”, he began, clearly not afraid of sounding racist. “I feel that if someone’s positions are right, they can state them in a reasoned way and not resort to attacking their opponents personally. I know my positions are right, and so do most of the electorate. That’s why I’m going to top the poll with a comfortable majority.”
“Fucking Bullshit!” was Seamus’ response. “You’ve done nothing but peddle lies that play on people worst fears. You’re a corrupt, slimy fucking liar.”
With those words the presenter started Panickingly looking for the button that would save the listeners from Seamus’ foul language. When he found it, he summoned security to drag him from the studio. ‘Security’ came in the form of two burly bouncers, one of whom he thought he recognised from a club he used to go to, though he didn’t get such a good look at his face. As he was being carried unceremoniously out, the Fianna Fail man assumed his smug expression, pointed to him and said, “You’re finished, McIonnractaigh. You’re fucking finished.”
He was using the same language Seamus was being ejected for using, and he wasn’t pronouncing his surname very well either, but these were the least of his worries right now. Defiantly, he responded, “Yeah, well, we’ll fucking see”, which only made the bouncers grip tighten and his exit more hasty. He caught brief glances of the faces of people working in the building, sensing a mixture of disapprobation and wonder that someone so sallow and soft-spoken could be so ill-tempered. Soon he was at the door, the bouncers were simultaneously loosening their grip on him, as they’d no doubt learned to do as part of their PhD programme in Nightclub admission eligibility assessment, and as the Earth, in the form of the pavement, exerted it’s gravitational force on him, he scrambled to get his balance back, hoping his composure would follow some time soon. He sat on the pavement, pricking up his ears for snatches of the show on the station’s PA system. It didn’t occur to him that Caomhin might be looking for him, and might be bringing a few of his buddies with him. But curiously, his sense of honour compelled him to apologise to the Green candidate.
He didn’t hear much of the debate, picking up snatches and trying to piece together the whole like a Renaissance scholar trying to develop a composite picture of the glories of Greece or Rome. Another time the irony that he was so close to the debate which so many others could probably hear would have been poignant to him. Right now, he would have given a lot to have that tinny transistor radio he got for his thirteenth birthday with him. Eventually the debate ended. As he heard the footsteps approaching, he got up, leaned against the wall, tried to look nonchalant, unrepentant, like Jimmy Dean in Rebel without a Cause. The Fianna Fail candidate came out first, and wouldn’t you know, some of the people from the radio show were chatting amiably with him. In all probability, he was the man who’d got their licence for them in the first place - it was impossible to overestimate the cosiness between the soldiers of destiny and the private sector. At first none of them noticed Seamus, then when the candidate caught a glimpse of him he just turned his head and looked away in disgust, as if he was a beggar on the street, the action that was surely calculated to infuriate Seamus the most. Then came the Blueshirt, clearly both envious and frustrated at the little confab his Civil War opponent was having with the media. But he too, looked away in disgust as he passed Seamus. He never saw the Labour man, who probably spent the rest of the day complaining about alleged bias. The Green man, too, at first cast a contemptuous look in Seamus’ direction, but then after Seamus called out his name, which was Donal, he looked back, at first somewhat apprehensively.
“I’m sorry for what I said”, offered Seamus, diffidently.
“I don't see why you should be. You’ve probably done me a favour. Nobody’s going to vote for you now.” With those words he turned his head and walked away, imagining that this would be the last time he’d ever talk to Seamus.
“I’m one of you!”, shouted Seamus after him, still backed up against the wall.
Donal stopped in his tracks, turned round and asked Seamus what he could possibly mean by that.
“I’m a green. I’m an environmentalist. I love the Earth.”
Torn between leaving and choosing to find out why Seamus was approaching him like this, Donal’s curiosity got the better of him.
“I think you love one little small island in particular”, he gambitted.
“Dude, I spent all of last weekend at an organic farm.”
At first Donal’s look was one of incredulity, but then he seemed to reflect that this wasn’t the sort of thing one would make up.
“So what are you doing standing for Sinn Fein?”
Seamus paused and told him it was a long story, that he wished they didn’t have to be rivals, that if they co-operated there may be room for both of them.
“Y’know, Seamus, with all the respect in the world, I don't think I’ve got so much to gain from co-operating with you.”
“Well, you may be right. But you never know, that may just have been the display of integrity the electorate were waiting for.”
“Don't count on it”, said Donal, who was by now walking away.
“I’ll give you all my second preferences”, said Seamus, not without an element of desperation. Donal just turned his head, said “thanks” as he turned round the corner and out of Seamus’ sight.

Seamus tried to figure out what to do now. He really needed comforting, and felt that Grainne would be the one to provide it. So he bent down to unlock his bike, scared all the time that he’d look over his shoulder to find Caomhin’s angry face staring down at him. He cycled through the streets nervously, staring through the window of every car that passed, getting opprobrious looks in return. As he got closer to Grainne’s house he started noticing the posters he’d put up, he bent his head down, dangerously close to the handlebars, feeling that the risk of toppling over on his bike was worse that that of being recognised. He’d known similar feelings of shame before, looking at porn in newsagents and on the web, and most similarly, one time he’d been evicted for sweeping sugar under the mat and ended up going back to live with his none-too-pleased mother. This time he could hardly go back to her, and Grainne was probably the only woman in the world who he could go to now.










But when he knocked on her door, he found her closing the security latch on her door before she opened it just a few inches. Seamus’ heart suddenly dropped, realising he had placed far too much trust in her, as she yelled out that he was a fuckin’ eegit in a tone that was chillingly close to that of his mother’s. Diffidently, he tried to explain but she wouldn’t let him get a word in, telling him that he’d blown his chance. Whether she meant with the electorate or with her he wasn’t sure, but it was probably both. So he’d lost the two things that were going to give him order in his life, just because he used two commonly used words on the radio. Life was full of little ironies. He knew that Caomhin would be looking for him all over as well, so he felt the only thing he could do was go down to stay with Man 4, who after all didn’t know what his real name was, for a while. He thought about going back home to get some vitamins and stuff, but decided that was not worth the risk. So he decided to cycle straight down.
His head was spinning all the while, prompting him into Harold Lloyd-like errors the whole way down, prompting angry horns from motorists. When he got to the open road he felt he could finally relax a bit. Yet when he got to Man 4’s place he was sweaty, dishevelled, gasping for breath, his hair all over the place, his skin sallow from worry. At first Man 4 didn’t let on.
“Hey, Sandman, what are you doing back so soon?”
“Oh, well, I, er, had such a good time and I thought you might need some help, so I thought, y’know, why not?”
Man 4 nodded in a way that suggested he thought it was a reasonable explanation. He said there was some weeding to be done if he wanted, though he wasn’t really dressed for it. Just then Seamus realised he was still wearing a suit and how ridiculous he must look, and what sort of explanation he could provide that would hold any water.
“All my cool threads are at the cleaners.” Before he’d even finished that sentence, he realised how lame it must sound. But Man 4 casually told him he had some overalls round the place somewhere, to sit down and have some herbal tea. Then Seamus noticed the radio was on. He looked at his watch, to see how long it would be until the next news bulliten. It would be around half an hour ‘till then, so he’d have to make his herbal tea last that long, listening to the steady diet of middle-of-the-road pop till then. The place had a diffferent aura about it, bereft of people, it felt somehow naked, the way his hometown did in winter.
“Have you ever considered getting any WWOOFer volunteers to work in her semi-permantly?”, asked Seamus, who regained a little composure.
“Don't really need them”, replied Man 4. I do all the little stuff myself, and then when the festivals are on there’s people to do all the big jobs. And sometimes people like yourself come down and offer a hand.” This made Seamus feel slightly more at ease, that he wasn’t just running away from something, but running to something. They talked, amiably enough, for half an hour, though Seamus was still figuring out who he should phone and who he should email and what he should say, looking up at the clock to see when the news would be coming on. Seamus sensed that Man 4 could sense his preoccupation’s, but didn’t want to let the outside world impinge on their slice of heaven.
When the news came on the radio, Seamus suddenly became silent. As they were listening to the same station that the debate had been on, and it was otherwise a slow news day, they’d chosen, to Seamus’ horror, to lead with the story of the fracas.
A political debate on this radio station descended into farce as the Sinn Fein candidate launched into a foul-mouthed tirade against his Fianna Fail opponent.
They played back the offending passage, with the offensive words beeped out. It was the first time Seamus had heard his voice in a long time, and before he even considered if Man 4 was making the connection between the voice on the radio and that across the table from him, he noticed how enervated he sounded, even when he was being coprolalically aggressive. In reference to anyone else, this would probably have been a paradox, but not Seamus.
With a general election less than two months away, this could prove a major blow to Sinn Fein’s chances of snatching a seat in Cork North Central.
There followed an interview with the Fianna Fail candidate, who was smugly telling his radio station buddies that this is the sort of behaviour he expected from criminals and terrorists. Seamus tried not to look too upset by all this, as he suspected Man 4 was already starting to put two and two together.
So far the Sinn Fein office in Cork have remained unavailable for comment. In other stories...
Seamus switched off mentally, and trying not to show any signs of the strain he was obviously under, asked Man 4 where he might find the overalls. Man 4 told him to chill, there was no hurry, asked him if he wanted to stay for the night. Seamus said he’d like to, if there was no trouble. Man 4 just responded with a benign, mui casa sui casa look. Then Seamus asked if there was, perchance, a cybercafe in town.
“One of those places where you surf the net? I doubt it, but you can use my connection if you want.”
“You have net access here?” Seamus asked, sounding a little shocked.
“I can see why you’re surprised, and I resisted for quite a while, but there’s so much amazing information there on farming methods, and so much other stuff. Besides, in winter it can get really boring down here.”
Seamus nodded in agreement, then started composing emails mentally in his head, something he continue doing as he was in his outsized overalls which made him look like he was in some 70s novelty band. The weeding was therapeutic, as it was when his father had died all those years ago, that famously warm summer of ‘89, when he could here the pounding acid house rhythms from the merries as he ran his fingers through the soil on those warm summer nights. This was the sort of job that appealed to one side of his character, allowing his mind to run free as his body let the garden become an extension of itself, or vice versa as it let him excommunicate the free radicals. Another part of him preffered work that kept his mind at work and allowed his angst to be pushed to one side. But all the jobs he’d had were just like doing nothing, only more tiring.
He set about composing emails in his head, so that by the time he’d get to Man 4’s computer he’d just have to type. It was the way he used to write essays in school and college, staying up all night in his damp, cold bedsits and letting the inspiration come like some manifestation of the some unseen power dwelts among us Keatsian sublime. It was the way he imagined he’d eventually write his novel, after he’d been elected and gone to Asia and... well, he might have to put that fantasy on ice for a while.
After he’d served his time in the garden, and been fed with some of it’s produce, he was beckoned upstairs, into Man 4’s funky, psychedelically painted room, to type the following on his Mac (natch)











































Date: 7 July 2001 11.30 PST
From: “James MacIonnractaigh”
To: Caomhin O’ Donnell
Subject: Apology

Caomhin,
I’m dreadfully sorry for my performance on the radio today. I brought shame upon myself and on everyone our party stands for. I only hope that you’ll understand the frustrations I feel at being part of a nominally democratic system where the system is weighted so hopelessly against dissenting voices of any sort in favour of a corrupt, nepotistic establishment. It’s my hope that my display of integrity will do me more good than harm, though this is more of a hope than an expectation. In any case, I hope you’ll forgive me, the feeling that the friendship we’ve built up over the last few months was meaningless would hurt more than any physical pain that could be inflicted upon me.
Yours,
Seamus MacIonnractaigh

































Date: 7 July 2001 11.47 PST
From: “James MacIonnractaigh”
To: “Grainne Madden” <>
Subject: Apology

Grainne,
I understand your anger today and will also understand if you never want to see me again. But I think this would be a tragedy for both of us, as the time we had together was one of the best of my life, and, I don't think I’m being too pretentious in saying, of yours as well. It’s true that my prospects of ever making anything of my life have severely diminished to the point where they may never recover, but it’s my sincere hope that it was me you were interested in and not some mythical future Seamus MacIonnractaigh TD. In the unlikely event that this debacle redounds to my advantage - and stranger things have happened in politics - I may never know but it’s a risk I’m willing to take as spending the rest of my life with you is such a desirable prospect. If not, then try to think of what I did as a display of integrity rather than the foul-mouthed outburst which the papers and radio will inevitably describe it as being.
Yours, Seamus



















Date: 7 July 2001 12.03PST
From: “James MacIonnractaigh”
To: “Aine MacIonnractaigh” <>
Subject: Apology

Mother,
This is undoubtedly the hardest if the emails I’ve had to write this weekend. By now you’ll have found out that when I told you that I was standing for Sinn Fein I wasn’t taunting you or pulling your chain, but telling the honest truth. Please try to understand my motivations: I wasn’t doing it just to hurt you, or to show my independence, but to thank the people in the movement for doing what my family, my friends, and the gardai were all to cowardly, too supine and too pusillanimous to do: deal with those thugs that hurt me, and by extension, you and the rest of the family so much. You’ve always criticised me for being unemployed and having such a lack of ambition so I hope you won’t begrudge me for having grasped this chance to make something of myself, even if it’s not quite the way you wanted, and even if I fucked it up like I have everything else in my life. I beg you not to think of how you will explain this to friends, but of the fear I am now feeling and the regret that my integrity may have cost me the only chance I ever had to make a success of my life.
Yours, James.
























As he clicked on send for this last message, his head hit the keyboard and he lay there for about two minutes. When the possible carcinogenic effects of this course of action dawned on him, he got up, composed himself and started to see if his outburst had generated any buzz on the talkboards. He logged onto peoplesrepublicofcork.com, nervously, the way he opened exam results, letters from the social welfare office, anything that had a bearing on the rest of his life. For all he knew, there could be a message from Caomhin which could be tantamount to a virtual death sentence. While the page was booting up, and this took a while, as Man 4’s connection wasn’t the fastest, he reminded himself that the reaction would surely be mixed and that it would be a mistake to leap to any rash conclusions. He saw that his turning of the radio waves blue had indeed set the Cork area of cyberspace alight, with over two hundred Corkonians offering their collective two cents. Why? Had they nothing better to do? Why were they using such a precious resource as a mere substitute for the proverbial garden fence? Man doesn’t advance as fast as his creations do.
The first postings were, predictably enough, from Blueshirts and Fianna Failers who were tripping over themselves in the race to cast the first stone. Seamus’ behaviour typified, for these purveyors of cliché, the brutality of his party, not to mention their coarseness, vulgarity and general lack of fitness to serve in office. One particularly venomous attack blazed off the screen, remarkable both for the intensity of hatred and the smug, condescending nature in which it was cast:


Master_Cam 7/7/01 14.46

If the Sinn Fein leadership were really determined to become a democratic party, then surely they would have a vetting system for candidates which would exclude the coprolalic Mr. McUnractaig, or whatever it is he chooses to call himself; or at the very least provide a system of house-training whereby he is given some grasp of English beyond the most elementary Anglo-Saxon. His defenders will make claims of ‘honesty’ and ‘integrity’ on his behalf, and his foul-mouthed outburst will undoubtedly win him some admirers in working class areas of his constituency. Yet it would be another dark day in Ireland’s tragic history if this troglodyte were to win a seat in theDail.

Who was this Master-Cam? He didn’t sound like a Cork person, giving himself the sort of Olympian status that only Daily Telegraph editorial writers usually granted themselves. His aloof tone suggested he was English, or at least some bastard scion of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. But this was the net, and he could create such a persona for himself. In reality he was probably a short, fat, ugly, spotty, insecure little nerd. But Seamus too could create such a persona for himself. First, he looked through some of the other comments, many of which consisted of the same clichés, some of which were intelligent without being meretricious. Some pointed out that a former Taoiseach had used similar language on the air, and in reference to the peace process to boot, and was treated quite differently. Others pointed out that the last president of the US had had fellatio performed on him, and that the current on was a former alcoholic and cocaine addict who’d described a reporter as a ‘major-league asshole’. Others invoked Brando’s famous line from towards the end of Apocalypse Now. Emboldened by some of the support he was getting, he invented a new persona for himself, which didn’t take that long. If only it was as easy, he thought, to change the way people perceive you in the real world. Then he posted the following

Setanta_4_Now 7/7/01 20.04

What’s in a name? Moreover, what’s in a word? Up until recently we banned certain words from polite conversation, the way we denied that homosexuality existed, allowed them to be spoken on cargo ships and building sites the way we send ethnic minorities to live in ghettos. Yet, like beggars and tramps, they weren’t allowed into posh restaurant. They knew their place. But lately the barriers have broken down. We have more rational things to be scared of than mere words: global warming, international terrorism. So we’ve brought words like fuck into our homes, domesticated them until they’ve lost all their force. But there are those of us who remain in fear of them, as if scared some angel of probity would smite them for using such a word. And some of these sensitive souls have radios, so the airwaves have to be as pure as the driven snow. So what greater crime could there be for an aspiring politician, someone who should be setting a positive example to those he would lead, than to say ‘fuck’ on the radio? Avoiding taxes? Surely not. Defending paedophiles? I don't know what that last word means, It wasn’t used when I was a young man. Taking bribes from corrupt planning officials? Oh, Please, don’t you know that corruption is the lubrication that gets work done? No, using such profane language to describe a corrupt, xenophobic political opponent represents a new nadir for our once-great nation and Mr. McIonnractaigh will suffer at the ballot box for his profanity. Or, if I may be so bold as to say, he’s fucked.

Seamus looked at what he had written and wondered if it was a bit too subtle and liable to misinterpretation. He decided that though it might be for some people, it was such a brilliant piece of rhetoric that it deserved an audience. It would never attain the same status as the Gettysburg address, but who knows, it might find it’s way into some school textbook. Just before he clicked on the submit icon, he realised that he had spelled his name properly and that that might give him away. So he changed it a little, then submitted, then logged off and went back down to Caomhin. Hopefully he’d allow him log on again in the morning, see what the night-owls in the local cybercafes had made of his little piece of Demosthenean oratory.
When he got downstairs Man 4 told him he was just in time to go and see the sunset with him. As they climbed to the peak where a few weeks ago all had been Dionysian excess, Man 4 asked him what he’d been doing on the internet. Seamus replied that he’d just been reading a few newspaper articles and stuff, checking his email. When asked which articles in particular, he said he was mainly reading the football scores, which he knew would preclude any awkward follow-up questions.
“I didn’t know you were into soccer”, Man 4 replied, looking a bit surprised.
“There’s a lot about me you don't know. But then there’s a lot about me I don't know about myself, how my brain works, how my body works, things that happened in my childhood...”
“Stop bullshitting, man. That’s my job. I don't even know your real name, for Lugh’s sake.
Seamus laughed politely and remarked to himself that it was better it stayed that way. They went up to the top of the hill and the sun seemed to be obliging them by turning the whole sky a mellow shade of crimson. He wondered if the sun was setting on his chances of making it in politics, and his chances of making it to thirty alive. Then he thought about what a stupid metaphor that was. How could anyone, or anything’s demise by compared to such a sublime, restorative, prophylactic sight as this? Oh Wind, if winter comes, can spring be far behind? Only westerners, with our notions of linearity and progress could think up such a lame metaphor. They watched the sunset in silence, as unable to articulate their wonder as thier Simian ancestors, letting the crickets provide their own gentle hum of a soundtrack.
They walked back down, Man 4 asked Seamus if he’d brought down any tunes or any books to read. Seamus replied with an element of truth that his decision to come down had been last-minute. Dissapointed, Man 4 told him he could borrow any of his stuff. Seamus took a close look at his library. He wasn’t looking for anything to change his life, as his life had been changed enough for one day, thank you very much. He found a book of old, lucidly-translated Celtic myths, some of which were familiar to him from school, others which were new to him. Though his concentration was severely impaired, they did offer him some escapism into a land where people were judged by their deeds, not by their words. He often felt, like one of Thomas Mann’s brooding, promethean tragic heroes, that being a wordsmith, which was the only talent he had, was a curse, that words were a veritable fad in evolutionary terms, that there was music, in the form of birdsong, long before humans existed, and art, in the form of their plumage, and their would be long after we had cheated ourselves out of dominion by our greed and rapacity.
Man 4 introduced Seamus to his music collection, then went to bed, saying he needed to be up early in the morning.
Seamus stayed up for a while, listening to an eclectic selection. He thought this wouldn’t be a bad way to spend his last few days, if Caomhin was indeed gunning for him
He didn’t sleep so well that night, almost as if he was keeping himself awake to avoid the horrible dreams he was likely to have. Infuriatingly, he was still awake at the crack of dawn, after which time Man 4 had gotten a good seven or eight hours. He heard him get out of bed, go downstairs and make breakfast, and if he’d had the energy and inclination, he could have leaned against the window and watched him do his tai chai out in the garden. But this would have cast his own misery in an even harsher light.
Why were some people happier and more well adjusted than others? There’s a theory that depression is a hangover from an earlier stage of evolution, that if we didn’t acquisecently go oh alright so chief I’ll drag that plough for you we’d never have gotten where we are today, that we’d have no ipods, no text messaging, no game cubes. Which is plausible enough as far as it goes, but tell us, Mr. Smarty pants evolutionary psychologist with a string of letters after your name, what evolutionary advantage does staying up all night tossing and turning and then finally getting to sleep and waking up a few hours later in a cold sweat confer upon us, exactly? I’m sure there’s PhD theses written on the subject already, if only I could be bothered to look. There’s also a theory, which was popular with Seamus at this time, that some people were born out of time. Earlier in his life he’d wished he’d been born only twenty years earlier, that the age d’or was in the late 60s and early 70s. Then he realised what it was really like in Ireland at the time, women still being put in prison for having sex outside marriage, having to get the train to Belfast to buy contraceptives, solemn, dreary celebrations of the men of 1916 in cold, wooden classrooms, GAA matches in muddy pitches wearing soggy boots... it didn’t sound all that great after all. Lately the idea of living in prehistoric times appealed to him more, but he was coming to realise that these were no times for a sensitive, skinny vegetarian like him. The Bible, the Gita, and for that matter the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings movies taught us to accept the parameters of whatever times we were living in, but Seamus was convinced that, though if he’d had a choice to live at any time and in any place he wouldn’t necessarily have leapt to the front of the petit-bourgeois family in Ireland in the early 1970s queue, that this was probably the only place and time he could live in now. None of this theorising could dispel the fear that Caomhin was out for his blood, or reverse positions between him and Man 4, but it did eventually put him to sleep.
He woke up a few hours later, staggered down to the kitchen for some food, then let himself into Man 4’s computer room and somehow found the cohesion to switch the computer on.
He waved the cursor around the screen as if delegating to it the responsibility of deciding which message to read first. After vacillating for an unconscionable length of time, he eventually settled on the mail from his mother. He bent his heavy head towards the keyboard and through the haze read the following:





























Date: 7 July 2001 15.21PST
From: “Aine MacIonnractaigh” <>
To: “James MacIonnractaigh”
Subject: Re: Apology

How could you do something like this to me? You say you didn’t do it to hurt me but you must have known it would. Why couldn’t you just accept responsibility for your actions, accept that if you make friends with people like Dan and Maude you’ll get into horrible trouble? You say that Sinn Fein were the only people willing to “deal with” those two English boys, what does that entail, exactly? Did you once stop to think about how this might affect me? My phone has been ringing all night with people asking how you could have got yourself into all this trouble, and how I didn’t know that you had any involvement with those murdering bastards. If you’ve done anything violent to those English boys don’t expect me to help you out this time, the last thing I want is to have the IRA coming down to my house. You’re almost thirty years old and you should know better than to do what you’ve done. I did my best to bring you up as well as I couldbut while my other children have turned out well, you’ve proved to be a horrible mistake. I had you when I was only twenty-four years old and I could have been enjoying myself and this is what I get for my sacrifices. Don’t email me anymore, you’ve gotten yourself into this horrible mess, you can get yourself out of it: I have enough trouble on my hands trying to explain to my friends and relatives what you’ve done. When I’m in an early grave like your father, I hope you’ll remember this day.



















Predictably, Seamus’ heart sank when he read those words. He wasn’t expecting a wholehearted message of support, but the venomous intensity was surprising, even for his vituperative mother. Before the message could sink any further into his shattered psyche, he looked for solace in Grainne’s email.





Date: 7 July 2001 21.34 PST
From: “Grainne Madden” <>
To: “James MacIonnractaigh” Subject: Re: Apology

Seamus,
I’m sorry I reacted the way I did to your outburst yesterday. I know how frustrating it must be for you when all the media and all the other parties are lined up against you as they are. And I have to admit that, yes, the time I spent with you was one of the best times of my life as well. Caomhin has been round and he urges you not to be scared, he says that all publicity is good publicity, that somebody needed to tell that scumbag to go fuck himself and that he admires your honesty. I don't know if that’s just a ruse but he seemed sincere enough. I really want to see you again, I don’t think my life will be the same without you. As soon as you feel it’s safe to come back to Cork call in to see me, otherwise let me know where you are and I can come to visit you. Email me back right away so I can be sure you’re OK.
XXX. Grainne.




















This was certainly more encouraging, but again his reaction was to go back to his inbox and see what Caomhin had to say, which was the following:


Date: 7 July 2001 22.17 PST
To: “James MacIonnractaigh”
From: Caomhin O’ Donnell
Subject: Re: Apology

Seamus,
What can I say? I nominate a middle-class pretty boy with no prior convictions and no history of violence, or so he tells me, and he turns out to be a foul-mouthed lout. I’m given to understand that you think I’m looking for you in order to exact some sort of violent retribution so I suppose neither of us understood each other very well. Even if I was that angry, everybody would know who was responsible if anything happened you, and that would damage our profile nationally, whereas Cork NC was only about 18th on our list of target seats nationally. As it is, I’m willing to wait a few days and see how this whole affair plays out - it’s my guess that it won’t do us that much harm among our target demographic - before I make a decision on rescinding your candidacy. If I do, please believe me that that’s the worst fate that’ll befall you at my hands, while there’s no point in denying that we’re involved in vigilantism, it’s aimed at the thugs who beat you so badly, not people who tell that opportunistic, self-righteous Fianna Fail shagger to go fuck himself. Hope to see you back in town, I haven’t given up hope of seeing you in Leinster House just yet. And stop hiding from me, if that’s what you’re doing - it’s a course of action that does neither of us any credit.
Caomhin.

Though Seamus knew how to react to those other emails, he was less sure about this one, strangely, as it was the one he agreed with the most. As he thought about composing his replies, he struggled to remember any time that Caomhin had actually acted violently. It was actually Seamus himself who’d cut the cunt and the nazi’s limbs off, while he wasn’t sure if Caomhin even watched. He was well-read and literate, and never did anything to indicate that he was motivated by a love of violence rather than justice, as was the case with some in his party. But then Seamus remembered that Caomhin had told him varying stories about his own history, that the truth about him kept evading him like some slippery eel. But then Seamus, too lied about his age and background, particularly to women, until he met Grainne, someone to whom it was more profitable to be honest with. He looked through the email again, studying it with the assiduity of a scholar who’d come across some particularly valuable document. Again, every word rang true and glowed like burning coals. Yet before he replied, he chose to go on the talkboards and see how the whole affair was “Playing out”, to use Caomhin’s carefully chosen words. Before you could say “storm” or “teacup”, he was reading many of the messages that had been posted up overnight. Though his impression was that support from him was increasing, he wondered if what he had done was worth all the commotion, so much so, that though he was exhausted and three of the people closest to him were in all probability sat at their keyboards waiting for his replies, he felt compelled to write the following:

Setanta_4_Now 8/7/01 12.26

Since I posted my last message, around ten thousand people have died of preventable diseases. The Earth has grown incrementally warmer, continuing the process of global warming, glacial meltdown and climate change. Several species which have predated us by millions of years will have gone out of existence. Children in Asia, Africa and Latin America have continued working in sweat shops and often as prostitutes. But what’s the “Hot Topic” here in cold Cork? It’s whether someone was right or wrong to use the word ‘fuck’ on the radio. Are we so secure in our little middle-class bubbles that something so trivial can upset us so much? So much so that some of you seem to have missed the sarcasm in my piece last night. The rights and wrongs of Mr. MacIonnractaigh’s actions hardly seem to justify the rancorous debate going on here right now. My advice to the rest of you is to move on, get over it, grow up and let politics be about the issue and not about the personalities like it is in advanced democracies, about deeds and not about mere words.


He logged off, and emboldened by what he’d written (quelle irony) he felt able to reply to his replies. First to Grainne.


Date: 8 July 2001 04.49 PST
From: “James MacIonnractaigh”
To: “Grainne Madden” <>
Subject: Re: Re: Apology

Grainne,
You don’t know how important that show of support was to me. I totally forgive you for getting so angry at me, I probably would have done the same in the circumstances, though it’s hard to see how the positions could be reversed. I’ve almost reached a decision to come back to the city either tonight or tomorrow, though I still, Paranoically need reassurance that Caomhin really doesn’t want to hurt me, though I am getting the impression that saying fuck on the radio really isn’t that great a crime in the electorates collective eyes. If you meet Caomhin again today I’d appreciate knowing what his true feelings are. If I don't come back for a while I’ll let you know where I am. I know it must be hard not being able to talk about this honestly to Diarmuid, but I’d like to know what he thinks about me in the abstract, as he does represent future voters. I’m so glad you’ve forgiven me; I don't think I’ve ever said this before and this is probably the wrong time and place to say it, but I think I Love You.
XXX, Seamus.

Seamus looked long and hard at the screen, particularly at that last passage, before he clicked on the ‘send’ icon. He wondered if it was just his exhaustion talking, saying something impulsive that he would have cause to regret later. One of the advantages of email as a form of communication, that it gave the users more time to compose their replies than on the phone or a good old fashioned tête-à-tête, didn’t really apply to someone as wildly impulsive and irrational as Seamus. So he clicked, without really weighing up the possible consequences, and then got back to Caomhin.

Date: 8 July 2001 05.07 PST
From: “James MacIonnractaigh”
To: Caomhin O’ Donnell
Subject: Re: Re:Apology

Caomhin,
Many thanks for your reassurance. You can’t imagine how difficult the last day has been for me. Actually, maybe you can, which might explain why you’ve been so empathetic. Though you might not be wrong in suggesting that my profanity on the radio might actually be beneficial to my campaign, I’m going to try not to make a habit of it, if you’ll give me the chance, which I’m hopeful you will. I’m sorry I ran away like I did but I’m sure you can understand what was going on in my head at the time. I’ll probably be back in the city either tonight or tomorrow so I’ll come by the office some time and apologise in person.
Thanks for being so supportive.
Seamus.

Seamus didn’t actually believe these words himself, at least not wholeheartedly, but he’d told the truth the day before and it brought him nothing but trouble. Then he went into one of the rambling, psuedo-Joycean stream-of-consciousness reveries with which you’ll by now be familiar. Why was deceit, he wondered, proscribed in every world religion but so essential to gain power or wealth? He postulated to a silent, internal audience somewhere in the back of his head that it was because Western Civilisation itself was built on one big lie, that humans were the supreme species, given power by a transcendent deity, fallen angels rather than risen apes. That was why politicians, priests, teachers, advertisers and lawyers lied, why we lied on our CVs, on our tax and social welfare forms, why we lied to our significant others about how beautiful and clever they were. And that was why Caomhin might be lying to him now. But he couldn’t stay here with Man 4 forever, unless he invented some really original lies. He couldn’t skip the country, he could try and live in another part of the island, but there was little chance that Grainne would be able to follow him. So he would have to put his trust in Caomhin and make his way back to the city. But he’d have to stay another day here as it was already afternoon and he’d promised to do some work in the garden. So he logged off and went downstairs. When he got to the kitchen he noticed that Man 4 was already there, having his lunch, and asked Seamus to join him.
“No thanks, man, I just had breakfast.”
“Don't you want me to do some gardening?”
“Actually, if you could go and get the papers for me, I’d appreciate it more.”
Seamus looked puzzled as if wondering why he couldn’t go and get the papers himself.
“I had a bit of a disagreement with the people in the local grocers a while ago. I wanted them to sell some of my produce but they wouldn’t. There was some... unpleasantness which it’ll take a while to blow over. I don't fancy going all the way to the city, so I was hoping you could get the papers for me today. D’you how to drive?” Seamus looked a bit exasperated, replying “You know how I feel about automated vehicles.”
“No, I don't, actually.”
In no mood to give the anti-private transport spiel, he just said that he didn’t know how to drive, but that he could cycle if Man 4 wanted. Man 4 looked guilty for imposing such an onerous task on him but Seamus felt it was the least he could do in the circumstances, though he’d much rather be doing some gentle gardening. So he was soon groggily on the road again, wearily pushing the pedals, hoping no professional cyclist in cycling shorts with a tube of isotonic energy drink would whiz by and humiliate him. It wasn’t ideal cycling weather, as it was a bit blustery, but for most of the journey the umbragenous hedgerows offered some shelter. In a while he was at the village, the same one where, not all that long ago, he’d bid Grainne farewell, happier days, before a four-letter word changed everything. When he went into the grocery store he got the familiar once-over that strangers get when they walk into a new town from the girl behind the counter. He picked up a Turbine as Man 4 had requested, but couldn’t find an Observer and went for the Independent on Sunday instead of the Sunday Times, not wanting to support the Murdoch press. When he got outside he opened up the Tribune to see if there was anything about himself - he knew, at such short notice that they wouldn’t have been able to get any pictures, but when he opened the paper it started blowing around uncontrollably, so much so that some passing old women started to watch and laugh. When he finally got the recalcitrant paper back in order he thought of going into the pub to have a quick look through but, though this area was falling victim to creeping suburbanistion like the rest of Cork, he’d still feel a paranoid, Deliverance vibe if he went in there. So he stuffed the papers into his rucksack and made his way back to Man 4’s place. By now it was 3 O’ Clock on a Sunday afternoon, everybody else was probably finishing their dinners and getting ready to go down the pub and watch the football. Man 4, instead was spreading compost around his garden, awaiting the arrival of the news like some medieval knight awaiting news from the kings court. He asked Seamus to drop the papers on the table while he washed his hands. Seamus didn’t want to lose this opportunity to see if his outburst had made the national press. He scanned the first few pages of home news intensely, but it wasn’t till he came to the “other news” column on page 9 that he saw the following brief report:

A debate on a Cork local radio station descended into farce when the Sinn Fein candidate Seamus MacIonnractaigh unleashed a torrent of obscene words in a pre-election debate. The station apologised for the incident, the Sinn Fein office in Cork refused to make any comment.

And that was it. While his invective had set the talkboards alight in the proud, insular city of Cork, it barely showed up on the radar of the national media, let alone the op-ed page of the New York Times or the South China Morning Post. Though he did just put up a posting himself saying how trivial the whole thing was, privately he wanted the whole thing to gain just a bit more attention in the outside world. As he was thus mourning the country’s distorted sense of news values, Man 4 came in. His clothes were dirty but his hands were clean. He asked Seamus if he could finish off spreading the manure outside. Seamus said sure, and asked if he had some rubber gloves. Man 4 gave him a casually sneering, do I have rubber gloves look, and then told him compost was actually far better for your hands than the asbestos lining in rubber gloves. He shook his head, suggesting that he thought Seamus should know better, then sat down to probably not read about Seamus.
Seamus went outside to get his hands in some shit, and though he’d been aware of Man 4’s viewpoint before, he’d still rather be wearing rubber gloves. There was no reason, he knew, he was aiding a cycle of death and regeneration that was as old as life and didn’t need a chemical shield to protect him from this. In India they still washed their asses with their hands and though there was a lot of disease there, there were still a billion somehow survived. But Seamus was a Spock baby at heart and it was hard to shake this middle class neurosis off. It was a pity, because though it’s not a good idea to eat compost or let it get into your eyes, compost feels as good on your hands as it would to the Earth if it had a tactile sense in the same way that we do, moist and smooth like... well, let’s not get into that. After a while he wondered how the newspapers would react if they got a shot of him spreading shit like this. He could imagine the sneers of the Examiner journos, who liked to think of themselves as being urban and sophisticated, as they offered an explanation for the roots of his coprolalia. The image would pander too, to those morons in the National Front and Combat 18, Ukip and the BNP, in that other island, of members of Sinn Fein as being shit-spreading bog trotters. And yet Seamus was happy to be here, he’d rather eat food grown this way than the combination of factory-farmed red meat and poisonous chemicals that filled thier palates. He had high hopes for steroids too, hoping that all the fascists and Ulster Unionists and rugby players who took them would become impotent and their eyes would pop out and they’d have no use for their hulking muscles but to point a stick at the pavement or keep their guide dogs on a leash.
Seamus eventually got all the manure spread. As ever, it was therapeutic, by the time he’d finished he’d forgotten most of his fears and his animosities, rational and irrational. He looked upon his work and saw that it was good, that it was time for the micro-organisms to take it from here. They didn’t need any supervisor or any overtime payments or any pension scheme, they were just doing what was natural to them, in the same way that leering at young women or looking at porn was to Seamus.
He went and had a shower in that rickety contraption that Man 4 had built, and then dried off. He’d managed to keep his clothes relatively clean, so he didn’t feel the need to ask Man 4 to borrow anything. He announced his presence in the kitchen, Man 4 told him he was just in time, that he was just about to make dinner.
The evening was an oasis of calm like the adagio from Mahler’s 5th. Seamus had known times like this before, when things had reached such a nadir that they couldn’t get much worse and there was no point in worrying about them. In addition the fresh air had cleared his head, and though he could still feel the lack of vitamins drawing on his energy reserves, Man 4 had put together such a nutritious feast that he was able to keep his mind on the newspapers for a few hours, learning about things of more importance, in the bigger scheme of things, than his outburst the day before. But then maybe there was no bigger scheme of things, maybe we were all just headless chickens bumping into each other in an aleatory, morally neutral universe.
Whether we were or not, Seamus slept a little easier that night. He went to bed at the same time as Man 4, though, having lost so much sleep the night before, he slept a little longer in the morning. He made some breakfast and bid Man 4 farewell, promising to return soon, though he had no idea what the future would bring. Though the trembling had subsided, the fear was still there. Nevertheless he was back in the outskirts of the city within an hour and a quarter. He looked into the faces of many people he passed, wondering how they would react if they knew he was the same person who’d made those ill-fated gestures on the radio a couple of days before. It was Monday afternoon, and the usual sense of hangover was palpable. Soon he got home, without having recognised anybody, took his vitamins and decided to go for a quick nap before he went to see Grainne and Caomhin.
After he had rested, he cycled through the dreary streets of Cork’s Northside, through which the Summer Sun’s rays poked their way around like some lost foreign tourist. Seamus, for his part was torn between his instinct to look around and examine the faces and clothes and behaviour of everyone he passed and his fear that he would be recognised as the person on the posters, and, by extension, the person on the radio a few days before. But he noticed no recognition, to motorists he was just another cyclist getting in the way of their range rovers on the roads that their taxes had paid for. Female pedestrians generally assumed that he was looking at their heavily made up and exposed bodies, their male counterparts just gave the threatening, whatcha-fuckin-lookin-at-bouy look. In truth, Seamus was a little disappointed by this. He looked up at the posters and saw that it was indeed a pretty good likeness, even if his hair had grown a little since. Perhaps if he’d cycled round the leafy avenues of Bishopstown or Douglas he might have been regarded as an enfant terrible, but here in the Northside just saying “fuck” on the radio was hardly enough to warrant notoriety.
Eventually he did get recognised, though he was almost at Grainne’s door by the time he did, and her proximity was being adverted to by symbolism symmetrical enough to come from a nineteenth century novel. He was cycling past a group of kids playing soccer, thinking what he was going to say to Grainne, when he heard his name being called out. It was Diarmuid, who’d placed his foot on the tattered ball they’d been kicking around, bringing the play to an abrupt halt. Seamus was torn between just waving politely and trying to get a better indication of how his mother might be feeling than the one he got from her emails, but eventually his curiosity got the better of him and he swung round on his bike causing the sort of skid that people of Seamus’ generation were always trying for on their BMXs when they were Diarmuid’s age.
Diarmuid picked up the ball and held it under his arm the way a soccer teams captain does when leading the team out onto the field, and walked over to Seamus, while the rest followed, whispering to each other and pointing to one of the posters of Seamus and giggling the way little boys do. Such was Seamus’ way with children that Diarmuid felt he could approach him like this. He probably could have been a primary school teacher if he had a little more patience and had the concentration to study better at school and the bright colours didn’t fill him with painful nostalgia for his own youth and he wasn’t a little bit afraid he could potentially be a paedophile.
Cutting straight to the chase, Diarmuid asked his if it was true that he’d said “fuck” on the radio the day before. Another adult might have told him that he shouldn’t have been using that sort of language, but that was the sort of hypocrisy that would have made Seamus’ own juvenile blood boil, so he just said he had.
“Aren’t you setting a bad example to the likes of us by using that sort of language?”
Almost instinctively, Seamus gave the condescending-adult laugh, but knowing how annoying this could be, he adopted a more respectful tone and said that if anyone was guilty of setting a bad example, it was the Fianna Fail man. Thankfully, no-one chose to defend his right to demonise racial minorities, as Seamus knew how hard it could be to reason with pre-pubescent kids who weren’t quite ready to reject their parents value systems outright. But then Diarmuid asked the question he’d probably been meaning to ask all the time.
“Are you going to see my mother now?” Needless to mention, this prompted another round of giggles. Seamus, for his part gulped so much that the protuberance in his Adam’s Apple was visible. Again, he merely said that he was.
“I hope your intentions towards her are honourable.”
Seamus gasped and his eyebrows raised that Diarmuid could talk like that and could only assume, with a condescension that was both ageist and classist, that he’d picked it up on TV somewhere. He smiled nervously and said they were, Diarmuid told him they’d better be and jerked his head in the direction of the other kids to signal that the game was starting again, leaving Seamus to wonder what the possible consequences might be if they weren’t, though of course they were, at least according to his own definition of honour.
A few minutes later Seamus was tying his bike to the front gate of Grainne’s house and ringing her doorbell. She answered it with neither the pugnacity of the previous occasion nor the lustful passion of earlier visits, but with a calm, businesslike politeness. She told him he wasn’t looking so good, he just shrugged his shoulders and said that that was to be expected. Then she asked him if he’d called up to Caomhin yet and he told her why he hadn’t. She shook her head and asked if he hadn’t already done enough to piss him off. Seamus dithered sheepishly, while Grainne took a mobile phone out of her pocket, pointed in Seamus’ face, and said “Call him - Now!”
Nervously, Seamus dialled his home number, waited tremulously for the reply, which when it came was surprisingly muted.
“Oh, Hi, Seamus. Are you alright?”
“Yeah I’m sorry I didn’t come today, I...”
“Oh, that’s alright, you must be knackered. You’ll be up some time tomorrow, though, wontcha?”
“Yeah, I’ll try. Sorry again for all that’s happened.”
“Don't worry. I’m used to defending atrocities. See you tomorrow then.”
His apathetic tone was disconcerting to Seamus, who thought at least that he’d want to say more, that the event which caused him so much trauma had so little impact on the world around him, even on the one person who he’d expected would be most affected. He gave back the phone, said, “everything seems OK” with an uncertainty worthy of the most tortured French Philosopher while massaging the side of his head that he’d held the phone to.
“What do you mean everything seems OK?”
“Can we go into the living room and talk about it?”
She beckoned him in, he told her all about what a slippery customer he thought Caomhin was and how he feared the friendly approach may just be a ruse. Grainne tried to convince him not to be so paranoid, but the fear proved to be as elusive as the thing it feared, unresponsive to Grainne’s hard reasoning and soft voice. Sensing she was getting nowhere and that Seamus would just have to confront his own fears, she changed the subject of conversation.
“I told Diarmuid about us.”
“Yeah, I know.”
A little taken aback, she asked how this could be, and he told her how he’d met him on the street, and then asked why she chose this particularly awkward moment to tell him about them. She expired a puff of air, breathed deeply, and said,
“I think he’s been suspecting that something’s been going on for a while. He’s an intelligent boy, as you probably know. After that incident on Saturday I was totally freaking out, as you can imagine. He was suspicious, and wanted to know what was going on. I was too drained to make up anything, and anyway he was going to find out sooner or later, so I thought it better to tell him the truth.”
This made sense to Seamus, who went on to ask how Diarmuid was taking it.
“I’m not really sure. He hasn’t really said anything to me. There’s never really been a man around the house before, so I suppose he feels a bit threatened, but I think he trusts me. I think he knows about the birds and the bees and all that stuff. It’d be hard to grow up in an area like this and stay ignorant.”
Seamus leaned over, started to stroke her hair, and asked:
“Does he know about... y’know, his father and all?”
She sighed, and replied, “Well, that’s a little more difficult to be open about. You can’t just tell your son that his father is an English scumbag who ran away before he was born.”
Seamus nodded, asked if Diarmuid knew that he was part English.
“ I think he senses that there’s something a little different about him. I don't know if you’ve noticed this, but he has this tendency to dominate other children, as if he somehow feels superior to them. It could be because he’s been brought up by a single parent and has had to do a lot of things for himself but then...” she felt like ending of that sentence was best left unspoken, that as there was nothing she could do about any innate Anglo-Saxon superiority complex her son may have, there was no point in talking about it. Seamus remembered Barry Lyndon and the pompous little half-English shit that Ryan O Neal had fathered and wondered if Diarmuid might have turned out the same if he knew his ethnicity. Just then he looked into her eyes and thought he understood why women nagged and bitched and judged men by their status and their wealth with a sort of clarity that he never had before, the sort of epiphany people normally only get on pot. He thought he could understand what it was like to make a commitment to have someone else’s offspring in your womb for nine months and then hanging around you for a quarter of a century. But then he realised that he never could really understand such a thing, and snapped out of his reverie, awkwardly, saying, “Yeah, right, I know what you mean”, though he’d just acknowledged to himself that he didn’t. Then he asked about something that had been nagging him for a bit.
Supposing, let’s say Caomhin doesn’t kill me and this whole profanity-on-the-radio thing all works out for the best and I get elected. You’ll never be able to tell him then, will you?”
“Not as long as you’re with me”, she replied, becoming a little more like her old flirtatious self, which surprised Seamus, who wasn’t expecting to find her fishing around for any degree of commitment after what happened in the last few days, though she wouldn’t have forgiven him for what happened if he she hadn’t been serious about him all along. He felt he should respond with some sort of quid pro quo.
“If I get elected I’d love you to come to Dublin with me, if that’s what you want. I’ve lived here for such a long time that I don't think I’d be able to go and live anywhere else by myself.”
Grainne smiled a smile that seemed to reflect relief more than anything else. Yet the uncertainty remained, he was still afraid that if he wasn’t elected, she might leave him. But he felt there was nothing to be gained at this moment by putting his cards on the table, so he went on to speculate about the life they might lead if the voters put their trust in him.
“It’s going to be hard to find a place up there, with the property market the way it is, even on a TD’s salary.”
She just gave a sceptical look in response, and then he filled the vacuum with the words:
“How do you think Diarmuid would cope with living there? Down here he seems to rule the roost among his friends, up there he’d be the new kid on the block.” He lambasted himself for using such a trite cliché, Grainne just laughed and said “we wouldn’t be living on a ‘block’, we’d be living out in the suburbs... wouldn’t we?”
Seamus just diffidently responded, “I suppose so”, which had just won the battle with ‘we’ll see’ to be his noncommittal response. In a strained effort to regain his credibility with her, he said that teenagers went through all sorts of changes in their lives and that moving house would probably be the least of them. He pondered the idea of her being able to keep her council house but then scolded himself silently for thinking more about what his country could do for him than what he could do for his country. Grainne, to Seamus’ chagrin told him that they’d be able to buy lots of nice things for him that would ease the pain of transition. Seamus smiled, trying to discern how much of the equivoque that she could perceive in his tone and gestures. He started to think that if his plan to go to Asia ever came to fruition, that he would have to abandon them, that although he could afford to bring them with him, that Diarmuid would never want to come, in five years time he’d be sixteen, he’d never want to live that way, he’d want to go out drinking with his buddies and get laid and vomit in the street like other kids that age, then probably go to university. At this moment he realised it might be better, if he did get elected, to pick up gold-diggers in Temple Bar or wherever - he wouldn’t ever care about getting re-elected, after all; and it would be more humane never to raise Grainne’s standard of living only to let her fall down again. But if he came clean with her, then she would tell the press of his wild scheme, and if Caomhin let him live then he’d never get elected. While he pondered on the tangled web that he had wove, she drew closer to him, asked him to stop worrying about everything, and come up to the bedroom. He kissed her on the lips, took her hand, and followed her up there.
As they caressed and fondled, she noticed that he wasn’t displaying the passion that he normally did. He’d let her take the pro-active role before, but he’d always offered some form of response, whereas today she felt like a necrophiliac. Eventually she pressed her fingertips against each of his cheeks, looked right into his eyes, and asked him if there was somewhere else he’d rather be.
“No, I’m happy to be with you, right here, right now. I guess I’m just too tired to really enjoy your company as much as I normally do.”
“Well, do you want to sleep here tonight?”
“Actually, I’m so tired that I would really appreciate it.”
“Well, can you do something for me that I’ll really appreciate?”
“Well, I can try, but...” before he could say anymore she was placing her fingers over his lips, pulling down his pants, and stroking his penis until it became firm reaching over for a condom from the drawer which she dressed him with unaided, carefully, like a sculptress. Then she pulled down her own skirt, pressed her vagina down against his penis, and kept fucking him until he came. As someone who knew enough about men to know that coitus took a lot out of them, she tried not to act too disappointed when he offered only the merest, bleary-eyed rictus in response, then asked if she would let him sleep in the morning. She said sure, he just pulled the blankets over himself and settled into a fraught, oneirically charged sleep. He woke several times with a shudder, looked round without knowing where he was, only to find Grainne’s body next to him in a deep, restful sleep. In the morning he woke slightly before her, the sounds of traffic from the street rescuing him from a particularly frightening dream with the familiar leitmotif of the cunt and the nazi still being alive. He admired her through the auroral haze for a few minutes, until her clock radio woke her up with the ads before the 8 O clock news. She turned around, looked at Seamus with surprise, expecting him to be still asleep, and asked why he was up so early.
“I’m an erratic sleeper”, he whispered, not wanting to wake Diarmuid. “Did I not mention that before?”
“I don't know, maybe you did. I s’pose you want to go back to sleep now?”
“Yeah, I think I’ll drift off again some time soon.”
“‘Tis fine for ya”, she smiled.
“Yeah, well, when I’m a TD I’ll be getting up at 8 every morning and you’ll be sleeping in.”
“Well, that’s only going to happen if you go and see Caomhin today. You are going to go and see him today, arencha?”
“‘Course.”
“Oh, one thing. Try and make sure Diarmuid is still asleep or else out of the house when you get up, and don't try to make too much noise ‘cause... y’know.”
Seamus nodded his head and then pressed his head against the pillow and watched her getting dressed. As soon as she had quietly closed the door he was feeling heavy-eyed and was soon back to sleep again. A couple of hours later he was up again, scavenging around Grainne’s kitchen for breakfast, trying a little too hard not to make any of the sorts of noise that might wake up the young ‘un, assuming he wasn’t already out on the streets kicking a ball around. But why should he be? They’re’d be enough cold mornings in the winter when he’d have to drag himself out of bed and into school to be filled with religious dogma and dreary mathematical formulae. And if Seamus didn’t get elected, he might spend his whole life the way his mother was doing, working at a dreary job that she, as would anyone else with any imagination, hated. This provided him with an unexpected additional incentive to mosey on down to Caomhin. Once again he was looking all around to see if there was any recognition. Most people walked on by, the teenagers talking into their mobiles, the old women dragging their shopping bags, the businessmen looking aloof.
But then he came across one face that knew his. It was one of his friends from either the socialist party or the socialist workers party, in any case one of Sinn Fein’s rivals for the radical vote. He’d met him at some protest or other, against globalistion or health cuts, think global, act local. He gave Seamus an angry stare with piercing eyes, the sort of anger that would never be directed at a mere enemy but only at a traitor. Seamus thought of explaining his position, why he was doing what he was doing, but decided that this was neither the time nor the place. Yet the negative karma that this incident generated would create a fissure in his soul that would pollute his meeting with Caomhin. At another time this would have prompted him to think about believing that there was some sort of higher power that had put his socialist friend in his way to tell him that his life was going in the wrong direction, but Seamus was in no mood for mysticism. He had his pragmatic hat on, it was the only apparel suitable for the circumstances, the only one that might shield him from the winds of caprice and the rains of fate.
After he reached the Sinn Fein office, he took as deep a breath as someone with his nasal sinuses could take and knocked on the door. Caomhin answered, shook his hand and patted his back with the other, and, to Seamus’ surprise, told him he was looking well in the circumstances, and asked him if by any chance, he’d seen the Evening Echo on sale anywhere. Seamus wondered if he was compounding the cruel joke that the local newspaper proprietors seemed to play on him by often having the local evening paper out on the streets before he’d gotten out of bed, but figured that this was no time for cheap laughs such as these. He asked Caomhin why he was so interested to read what Seamus regarded as a pretty tacky paper today.
“Oh, I heard from one of my sources down there that they were doing one of their little vox pop things about nothing other than your little profanity on Saturday.”
Seamus’ first reaction was to wonder how Caomhin might have any contacts at the Examiner, whose shirts were so blue that if you put a white t-shirt into the wash with them it would come out cyan, even at a low temperature. He also remembered the one time some Echo journalists approached him in Academy Street when he was in a particularly foul mood and asked him what he thought of the festivals in Cork, to which he replied they were all a fucking big excuse for a piss-up, which in the sanitised version in which it was printed pleased some people in his family. But this was also his first indication, having not seen the Examiner that morning, that the incident had ruffled feathers in the real, flesh-and-blood, bricks-and-mortar world of Cork instead of just the cyberspace version, where no subject was considered too trivial for discussion. He looked at his watch and said it was probably a bit early, Caomhin agreed, and led him into the main office. Offered him a seat. Seamus accepted, and the tense conversation he’d been anticipating began.
“So, Seamus, why’d d’you do it?”
“Oh, Lord, I guess it made me angry, the things he said, the way he said them...”
Caomhin shook his head and crossed his palms over one another and interrupted, saying,
“I’m not talking about you saying ‘fuck’, I’m talking about you running away.”
“Oh... I see. Well, y’know, my head wasn’t clear, the first thing I did was go up to Grainne’s and she told me you’d be looking for me and...”
“Don't try to blame this on your girlfriend. You can blame anyone you want for anything you want when you’re a T.D., but right here you tell the truth. Why’d you do it?”
“I know you’re a good man, Caomhin. I respect you. I like you as well. It’s just...”
“Just that you think I could turn nasty if you ever got on the wrong side of me?
Seamus breathed deeply, and replied, as diplomatically as he could, “You’ve done a lot for me, placed a lot of trust in me, and I betrayed you. And, after what you did to those English cunts, I know you’re capable of being violent.”
“We didn’t do anything to those scumbags, except capture them and bring them to you. It was you that severed their limbs, you that buried their bodies. We brought them to you because we believed your story. Was it true?”
“Of course it was fucking true”, rasped Seamus in response, the first time in the course of the discussion that he’d raised his voice.
“When I heard it first, I thought you couldn’t have made it up, but now I’m not so sure. An honest man never runs away.” It was very difficult to make that last statement without sounding pretentious, and Caomhin failed miserably.
“There was no reason for you not to trust me, and I guess there was no reason for me not to trust you. But I panicked, I acted irrationally. I didn’t even think that you’d be offended. It was the last thing on my mind.”
“Well maybe you should have thought a bit more. Thought about how we’re possibly going to convince people that we’ve abandoned violence when we can’t even convince one of own fucking candidates.”
Seamus gulped when he realised how much sense that made, and asked if anyone knew if he’d run away. Caomhin gasped in response, said that Seamus would be able to answer that question better than he was, but Seamus also sensed that Caomhin had just realised how scattered and irrational Seamus could be and might just have become a little more sympathetic.
“Let’s see, I told Grainne, obviously, I doubt if she told anyone, but I’ll check later. The place I hid was a hippy commune, where I’m known by a pseudonym, and in any case I don't think I’d be informed on by anyone.”
“What’s your pseudonym, by the way?”, Caomhin asked, sounding genuinely curious.
Seamus winced a little as he replied. Caomhin’s cachination as he called out the word “Sandman” repeatedly lightened the mood considerably.
“So, Sandman, will you trust me a little bit more in future. I’m really not a violent man, even if I’ve done violent things in the past. And even if I was, I’d only do it for a good reason, not just ‘cause you said ‘fuck’ to that fucker on the fucking radio. Don't do it again, though, sure you won’t?”
Seamus grimaced as he said he wouldn’t. Then Caomhin asked him if he’d seen the Examiner that morning. He said he hadn’t. Caomhin told him there was something about him, opened his copy at the relevant page, and passed it across the table. Seamus read with increasing incredulity an article by one of the Examiner’s esteemed columnists which suggested that his outburst had been planned all along, that his use of obscenity was something that was cynically planned by his spin doctors as a way to ingratiate himself with the radical young vote, which in turn reflected a deeper malaise at the heart of our society that left the columnist in deep state of unease about the future of his country though not in a sufficient state of ennui to neglect writing a 2000-word article. Caomhin could see Seamus’ face turning crimson as he read the piece, and as he finished, Caomhin suggest he let the anger out of his system straight away. Seamus replied in his normal, subdued, tone of voice, that he’d always had a problem with anger management and that he couldn’t spontaneously become angry.
“You showed a lot of anger down there in Kerry.”
“Yeah, but, y’know, there, I had, y’know, a stimulus.”
“There’s your stimulus”, he replied, pointing to the paper.
“It’s just words on a page.”
“Words on a page calling you a cynical, dishonest politician, everything you’re not”, he replied, with some surprise. “Just shout out every obscene word you can think of. It’s better to do it here than on the radio.”
Reluctantly, Seamus took a deep breath and shouted out “FUCK PISS SHIT BOLLOCKS RIGHT WING EXAMINER HORSESHIT DONKEYFUCKING MOTHERFUCKING BUTTFUCKING ANGLO IRISH BOURGEOIS ESTABLISHMENT BLUESHIRT CUNTS!”
“Does that make you feel any better?”, asked Caomhin?”
“A little”, replied Seamus, with not a great deal of conviction.
Caomhin looked at his watch and told him to go out and look for the Echo. Any other time, he would have resented being spoken to in such a condescending way, but such was his guilt after acting like such a petulant child that he accepted. He thought of asking for the money to pay for it but realised how ridiculous that this would make him look so he just went out onto the street. There weren’t any echo boys out on this street, so he went over to the nearest newsagents. To his surprise, the headline, in the bold, tabloid-page-filling text of which the Echo subeditors were fond, read ELECTION IN A MONTH. He bought a copy immediately and read the report on the way back to the Sinn Fein office. It was an open secret in what passed for the corridors of power in Leinster House that the Taoiseach was going to call an election in the next week, it seemed. It didn’t surprise Seamus, who’d seen photos of his smug, self-satisfied face on billboards already, but it did lend a new urgency to his campaign. He let himself into the office and handed the paper to Caomhin, who scanned the report the way his grandparents scanned the death notices, then got up and told Seamus to c’mon, there was no time left to lose. Seamus, who shared his flair for drama hopped into the car.
Half an hour later Seamus was half way up a pole in Bishopstown,
From this lofty perch he could see a group of teenagers looking over in their direction and then looking back at each other, as if debating whether to go over and talk to them or not. He couldn’t be more specific about their age because they were so far away and it was so hard to tell these days anyway. As he hammered into the pole with Siegfriedian gusto, he noticed that they were indeed coming their way. He pretended not to notice, as if focused purely on his work, although, as you probably know by now, Seamus was never able to really keep his mind on anything. By the time he was on his way back down again they were already in conversation with Caomhin, who, wily old charmer that he was, had offered them some cigarettes. As it was so windy, Seamus didn’t start to pick up snatches of the conversation ‘till he was near the bottom but he did hear Caomhin describing him as the man they were all talking about, which made his face even redder than the wind and the lack of air way up there had already made it. Caomhin apologised for not remembering all the girls names, but introduced Seamus to them anyway.
“I guess you all heard about that famous radio interview a few days ago, then?”, asked Seamus in a tone of voice that would have suggested to someone more cynical that he still hadn’t gotten over the fear of teenage girls he’d developed as a teenager, and, in truth, it still made him uneasy to have a group of teenage girls looking at him all at one, which was one of the reasons he never became a teacher. One of the girls took the pressure off him by saying she did, and that it was about time someone told that fascist pig to go and fuck himself. The other girls agreed, the way teenage girls do.
“Y’know, keep this to yourselves, but as I was leaving the studio, he told me much the same thing.”
“We never heard that.”
“Why would you? The media are so biased towards the establishment parties that stuff like that never comes out.” That got the sort of response that Seamus wanted, which was general disdainful shaking of heads.
“So are any of you ladies old enough to vote?”, Seamus asked, a little too precipitously, as was his way when dealing with women generally. There was some nodding of heads, but Seamus was confident enough to hope that the impression he’d made with them precluded the necessity of actually asking for their votes. He shook their hands respectfully, and made like he was on his way. Just as he had all the equipment together, one of the girls, who’d been quiet up til now, asked him if he had a girlfriend. With a mixture of embarrassment, guilt and regret that no teenage girls found him attractive when he was a teenager himself, he said that he had. Out of the corner of his eye he could see one of her friends telling her that she told her so.
When they were out of earshot, Caomhin told him how he wished Seamus was as good at dealing with adults.
“Whaddaya mean? They are adults. Some of them are old enough to vote”, replied Seamus, irascibly and evasively.
“Well, that’s true, but I’ve noticed that you’re always more comfortable talking to children than to adults. Sometimes talking to older people you seem nervous and tongue-tied, but with kids you have no such inhibitions.”
Seamus knew that this was true, that he often found the company of adults intimidating and was much more confident with kids, it was probably the product of being the oldest child in a family and of his innate shyness, that Emily Dickinson, another introverted, sensitive-artist type, could only ever talk to kids, but this was neither the time nor the place nor the person to discuss this with. So he just said that it would probably be to his advantage, as most of the people in Leinster House are just big, spoilt, greedy kids anyway. Caomhin laughed, whether because of the inherent humorousness of that statement of in admiration of Seamus’ ability to talk his way out of a corner he didn’t know. They put up a few more posters without being disturbed, Seamus looking from his Olympian perch at the fields and hedgerows beyond and wondering what developer was holding a sword of Damocles over them.
The rest of the day’s campaigning was as he expected getting some flirting and a lot of abuse from middle-aged, middle-class women.
When that day was given it’s name by Caomhin, Seamus asked Caomhin to drop him off at Grainne’s house. Caomhin looked at the clock on his dashboard and asked if she’d be home this early. He said probably not, but that he had his own key. Caomhin reacted with surprise, saying he hadn't thought they were at that stage yet, then asked if she knew about what happened yesterday. Seamus almost choked and then said that she wasn’t ever going to find out unless they got married, and then it would only be on his deathbed and that they weren’t going to get married and he wasn’t going to die in bed, but in some violent political episode, that it would be another bizarre episode in his wacky life that he’d take back to the Earth with him. Caomhin laughed forlornly and said he wished Seamus had used some of that sparkling word play back there on the trail.
“Pearls before swine”, he cliched in response as Caomhin took the turn for Grainne’s place, and Caomhin couldn’t really argue.















The house was indeed empty when he got there.
He took a look at his watch, figured she’d be home in around half an hour. He took a look around and started making some dinner. As he was chopping the onions and struggling not to start crying, he thought how embarrassing it would be it Diarmuid were to walk in at that moment. Yet he never seemed to be at home, in spite of all the things his mother’s tedious, repetitive labour bought him: a PC with web access and a playstation. It seemed harsh, almost spiteful to reject these things in favour of the dubious pleasures of kicking a ball around the streets of Cork’s Northside. If Seamus had had those things in his relatively recent youth then being forced to stay in the house all the time mightn’t have been so bad. But perhaps he shouldn’t be so captious, as he’d only known them since the spring and the winter months might force him to share her house with hordes of Diarmuid’s less fortunate buddies. Then, perhaps it would be better to bring her down to his place and stroke her joypad there.
Was it the aroma from the Kichdi that inspired this lame single entendre? If you don't know what Kichdi is, I’m not surprised. As far as I know, it exists only in the mind of the late Lynda McCartney and her cookbook-buying acolytes. It’s a little like pilau, which in turn is a milder version of Biriyani, though texturally it’s more like Dal. It’s an easy dish to cook, and as Seamus suspected, it was ready just as Grainne was walking in the door. When he saw the look on her face, he estimated in his quantifying, labelling male way that it was about 85% pleasant surprise and 15% feeling violated and intruded upon. Seamus, for his part, got a sort of liberal frisson from the gender reversal that this seemed to imply, the same sort he got from having gay friends round to his house. He indicated this by asking “Hi honey, how was work?” like a wife from a fifties US sitcom and not a 21st Century Irish male who’d recently severed the limbs of some English thugs before standing for the Dail, permanently antagonising his family by doing so. Yes, identity is a nebulous concept, aint’ it?
Grainne said work was same old, same old. She asked why he was back so early and he more or less told her the truth, that their experiences in Exurbia weren’t very encouraging. Slipping effortlessly back into the comforting wife role, she told him that that wasn’t anything to worry about, that they didn't need to win their support to get elected, that he just had to concentrate on their inner city heartlands. Seamus joked that Grainne might make a better campaign manager than Caomhin. Grainne in turn joked that he’d probably not have gone back to see Caomhin if it wasn’t for her prompting, which dissapointed Seamus, who was sad to see her adopt the behind-every-great-man-there’s-a-great-woman position, but he couldn’t fail to acknowledge that that was probably true.
“Yeah, I overestimated his anger, and I think my outburst may have done me more harm than good, but...”
“But what?”
He didn't want to talk shop. Yet as they ate, he noticed the fissure that the expression of this wish caused between them, that between them everything was political, the personal was political as much as vice versa. They’d never spent much time talking about movies or music, never even been to a movie together. The books they’d read in common were all about the situation in the north. So when they tried to make small talk it was like one of those times he tried to make conversations with his teachers outside school, awkward and staccato. It was a shame, as, with politics placed to one side, this should have been an opportunity to really get to know one another. But his efforts to talk about Diarmuid, about her boring unfulfilling job and some other small talk stalwarts all led them down conversational cul-de-sacs. Then he asked if she’d read the papers and suddenly the discourse got going like a guard dog that that scented an intruder. The kitchen was suddenly filled with talk of when there might be an election, with rumours she’d heard around the legendary water-cooler intersplicing with things he’d heard from Caomhin. Sinn Fein didn't have a water-cooler in their office, in fact, being a stranger to office work and work in general, Seamus was only vaguely aware of what a water-cooler was and what they looked like. They discussed other stuff as well, the Bloody Sunday inquiry and the situation in Palestine, which were both personal favourites. As they got their information from different sources; Seamus had access to all the papers from Caomhin, while Grainne had lots of free time to surf the net at work, they always had new things to tell each other about every subject. Yet in the back of Seamus’ mind at least, was a fear that this was a poor substitute for real communication, that he may as well have been discussing the football with his mates. But then maybe they were forming a bond in this way, one born of their shared tragedies. And there were the things that were unsaid, expressed only in gestures and nods in little laughs, the things that Grainne was supposed to be better at interpreting, the things Seamus needed to work on, and that he thought he was making progress with. He was making more eye contact with voters, smiling more, even when he was getting abuse, though he never looked anyone as directly into the eyes as the image of him on those posters did.

After fucking that night, Seamus seemed more exhausted and abstracted than usual. When Grainne asked why, he replied between puffs and pants that he’d had a hard few days, with which she couldn’t argue. Stroking the few forlorn wisps of hair on Seamus’ chest, the bastardised inheritance from his simian forebears, she asked if he’d prefer to stay here tonight. He breathed as deeply as he needed to do in order to formulate a coherent response, which was, of course, in the affirmative. He felt guilty, in a way he never did as a result of the way he’d treated the English thugs or antagonised his family, at this betrayal, which didn't seem like any less of a betrayal for having nothing to do with lust or desire. He held her closer that night, closer than he ever held her before, so close that she often had to wriggle out of his Gordian grip to feel comfortable.
When he woke in the morning his arms were wrapped only around himself, in a comical, almost onanistic embrace, as if Grainne had released herself in order to make it to work, and wrapped his arms back around his chest in order not to disturb his sleeping pattern. It made him feel a little vulnerable, a little needy, though it was guilt rather than ardour that led him into this position.
When he finally got to the office, Caomhin had already read all the daily papers and moved onto a freshly minted copy of An Phoblact. He greeted Seamus with mock surprise.
“So, it seems that yesterdays punctuality was an aberration, from which you’ve returned like Oisin to the world of tardiness.”
Seamus knew he hadn't made that up on the spot, and wondered how much time he’d spent making up an aphorism which, in truth, wasn't all that spell-binding and wasn't going to make it into the Oxford dictionary of quotations. Not as much time as Seamus had spent in bed since 8 O Clock that morning, he reckoned. That day, Seamus was told, they were going to ‘re-energise their urban base’. Seamus was surprised to hear Caomhin talk so much like those consultants they’d had a while back, but he knew that he meant that they were going back up the Northside, and was relieved.
They had a pretty good day up there, there were far more young people around, as few of them were going to college and hardly any of them could get J-1 visas to go to the US to work in shitty exploitation jobs for the summer, doomed instead to spend the summer in the grey estates and old red-brick terraces of Blackpool and Mayfield, names that belied their essential bleakness, like Sunday’s Well, Friday’s Hill, Spring Lane. He was pleased to see that his use of profanity brought him so much closer to them, though he never felt really at one with them, though there was no reason that he shouldn’t have. His own grandfather had been forced to leave the land as well, pushed by the relentless march of mechanisation. He, too was prone to profanity, as he’d demonstrated a few days before, though occasionally he could construct a sentence without the use of the words ‘fuckin’’ and ‘boy’, but in each case it was as a result of their common native tongue having been taken away from them. So beneath his soft-spokenness and middle-class gentility, beneath his vegetarianism and his enormous literacy, he wasn't all that different from them. Today he tried to accentuate the things he had in common. Some of them surprised Caomhin a little, Seamus had an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of Premiership soccer, something he’d never discussed with him. He knew a little bit about hip-hop and about techno as well, recognising some of the music coming from their ghetto blasters that all sounded like one big tinny cacophony to Caomhin. Later he’d explain Jim’s theory about displaced agricultural workers and rhythm-based music to a sceptical Caomhin.
But it wasn't all fun and games up there. A lot of people, even among the young blamed immigrants for their misfortunes and sympathised with the Fianna Fail man whose name Seamus could never bring himself to utter. He could see a pretty even split between the two camps and would like to have thought that the campaign was becoming more presidential, with two diametrically opposed visions on offer. But this would only be true, at best, among younger voters and the mythical ‘swing’ voters. In any case, the Fianna Fail man would top the poll while Seamus would do well to take the last seat. But why deny himself these little fantasies? He was much more coy about answering the terrorist past question among these people as well, while remaining as noncommittal as the lawyer his parents had wanted him to be, he’d read a lot of DeLillo and Pynchon, some Gaddis and McElroy as well, and paranoia was a bit of a default mode for him. But he felt like he was finally succeeding in becoming all things to all men.
That Friday he came across a group of youths he’d been talking to the Wednesday before. He’d promised one of them to make a tape of some ambient techno music, and, though he was a politician, he’d kept his promise. While Caomhin waited patiently, as if Seamus was a dog going for a pee, they chatted, as Seamus was thanked effusively and invited to go to a rave party. He didn't even know these still went on, he thought it was more of a twentieth century thing. Dave, his interlocutor, laughed and said he knew, it was a bit retro, but that the venue was secret, the van was picking them up at such and such a place. Seamus was noncommittal, he said he’d have to check with the significant other first, but he wouldn’t mind a good olde time rave. He rubbed fists with Dave and went back to Caomhin, who was impressed with his rapport with the locals.
“Nothing human is alien to me”, he responded, switching effortlessly into pretentious-intellectual mode, then thought about how he was going to convince Grainne to come to the rave that night. He knew that if he went by himself girls would start cracking on to him and he wouldn’t be so nervous because he already had a girlfriend and his love-life was already complicated enough, go raibh mile maith agat but if he took her then it would be hard for her to convince Diarmuid that drugs were bad, m’kay if she was going to dance in an environment where grade-A narcotics would undoubtedly be present even if she didn't partake of any of them herself and not sound hypocritical so maybe she convince him that they were going to a play or something and dress up in her most respectable going-out clothes but secretly have a lycra tank-top and a pair of cycling shorts on underneath and then go into a phone box and make the metamorphosis except that would be easier said than done because there were so few phone boxes around ‘cause everyone had a freakin’ mobile days but in any case Grainne might not want to go not because she was afraid of the impact it might have on her offspring but because she was simply too old or too mature for that sort of thing but he never even thought of how it might appear if the candidate for a party who’d put so much stock in anti-drugs vigilantism was seen or photographed in an atmosphere so replete with MDMA but in any case that probably wouldn’t be an issue if the venue was indeed as he’d been told a secret and being a male he could only deal with one perplexing issue at a time so he kept his mind on the matter at hand which was Grainne.
So he went through the last few hours of campaigning in auto-pilot mode, chanting the mantras like a Buddhist monk and hoping his boyish good looks conveyed a sense of youthful vigour which would win over some swing voters while all the time he was figuring out if he had the time and the persuasive ability to get Grainne to come raving. Caomhin noticed he was a bit abstracted from what he was supposed to be doing as many of his teachers had in the past and took some of the time between houses to ask why.
Seamus responded in his crypto-Shamanical way with another question, which was why Caomhin didn't seem to have any woman in his life. Taken aback by both the effrontery and the apparent inappropriateness of that question, Caomhin could only ask what the hell that had to do with anything.
Seamus, who’d already stopped giving direct answers to any question, told Caomhin he didn’t believe his story about Prague, mainly because Caomhin himself had cast so much doubt upon it, and asked how he could possibly imagine how he could know what was best for the country as a whole if he couldn’t even manage to deal with one woman. Caomhin then realised where he was coming from and guessed that Seamus had yet another problem with Grainne.
“No, things are going well, really, she’s totally forgiven me for that incident last week, at least I think so, but... sometimes it’s weird, y’know, I go to people’s doors and straight away I can tell what their political orientation is and stuff but Grainne, I just can’t figure her out sometimes. I want to ask her to come to a rave with me tonight but I don't know for the life of me whether she’ll say yes or no.”
Caomhin put aside his reservations about whether it was appropriate for Seamus to be at a rave or not and started off on one of his spiels.
“Well, as a whole, the populace, men and women both are fairly conservative, which is why change only comes so incrementally. People join or vote for political parties partly to belong to something, but then all of their views have to be accommodated for so they always have to tend towards consensus. Individuals, on the other hand can be as capricious as they like and females can be the most capricious of all. That’s why it can be harder to give an audition in front of a handful of people than to play to a packed crowd at a theatre. And that’s why I think I’m so much better at dealing with the electorate than dealing with women. Call it Coriolanus syndrome if you like.”
This made plenty of sense to Seamus, but he didn't want to be outdone in the philosophical rambling stakes, so responded with the following.
“It’s like innerspace and outerspace isn’t it? We know how infinitely massive the universe is but we’ve got no idea what goes on the inside of own heads, let alone the heads of other people. And every time we think we’ve got a grip on why we act, it seems like we only uncover more complexities.”
Caomhin took a deep breath and said, “If you do go to that rave tonight, make sure you don't take any ecstasy ‘cause you talk enough bullshit already.” Seamus didn't know whether he was being serious or not, but he had a dark suspicion that he had, and this brought the conversation to an abrupt halt. Seamus felt he could sense a jealousy, as if Caomhin had become aware that Seamus was not only younger, better looking, more popular with women, but also able to challenge Caomhin at the one thing he was best at - talking shit - and felt a sort of oedipal anger at this that it would be too humiliating to express openly and instead let it fester like an unattended brain tumour, but Seamus suspected that a few beers in his local would cure him of this angst. He also reflected on how vulnerable and wounded they both were, these betes noire of the bien pensants of the Dublin Four media commentators, these dark brooding bogeymen who had fears and troubles of their own, though, compared to some of the shit Seamus had been through lately, trying to convince his girlfriend to come to a rave would be relatively small beer.