Nobody Told me there'd be days like these

He lay down and wondered how all this had come to pass, whether this state of affairs whereby he’d gone from being an aimless slacker to a philandering and possibly mass murdering politician was a result of arbitrary, aleatory coincidences or some malign fate. But he didn't believe in any form of higher power, except for the Earth, for life, for Pan. He knew of Gaia theory, the belief that the Earth was a self-regulating mechanism, though he’d never gotten round to reading James Lovelock’s book. A few months ago, the idea that Gaia had anointed him to save her by initiating this possible massacre of meat-eaters would have seemed outlandish to the point of psychosis. But now, the idea that she’d choose one of the Celts to slaughter the Earth-ravishing Saxons actually made a bizarre sort of sense, it was no crazier than adopting environmentalism as a sort of religion when living in a city, as if the Earth was something you believed in though you never saw it for yourself, like a miracle at Fatima. But people’s religions would make them believe bizarre things, that the Earth was flat, that animals were there for us to eat, that chopping a cows head off every Thursday and Saturday would palliate the god of destruction, that Priests were worthy of respect.
Where were these thoughts coming from? Was he becoming schizophrenic? This is what a psychiatrist would tell him, but did it really matter if he was mad or not? In a couple of hundred years their profession would be as dead as the Nazi and the Cunt were now, along with all the art, the music, the reality TV shows that added up to the sum of human accomplishment. But life would still go on, on the crust of this tiny planet. So his madness, if that’s what it was, was a mere epiphenomon. He learnt that word in college, around the same time that he learnt that language itself was an epiphenomon, that words were transient, that humanity was transient, knowledge that had little application except to keep his mind busy on lonely days like this, and, in this case, to lull him into sleep.
But as he made the long, lonely walk to the train station the next morning, they hadn't gone away. And as the train made it’s way out through the suburban sprawl, his thoughts became if anything, more discomforting; that it might not be such a bad thing if he’d been responsible for the deaths of a few sasanachs, it might, in some small way help to stem the tide of endless suburbanisation which was seemingly turning the planet into one big commuter belt, full of people whose lives would come to nothing, with deeds as well undone. Though humans and some of the other primates were the only creatures that killed each other, maybe the laws that prohibited the taking of a life were designed for a different set of circumstances, in a time when there were far fewer of us and more of the Earth was unexploited. The huge growth in world population and the decrease in resources was going to set nations against each other before too long and begin the spiral of entropy, if so he was only a victim of natural forces beyond his control, which should absolve him of any guilt. It’s not my fault, an’t please the yer honour, the universe is to blame.
Needless to say, this rationalisation didn't wash with his conscience, and he was soon mired in guilt. He knew what suffering was like, and he didn't want to inflict it on others, regardless of their race or diet. He picked up some of the papers, which in previous times would provide a form of escapism, except around budget time, when he was eager to find out how much better off he would be. Now, in every paper he turned the pages of, he was certain that he was making the news himself, that he was secretly responsible for the grotesque photos of people strapped to hospital beds, their brains turned to incoherent mush by this horrible disease he was so sure he’d unleashed on the world. One victim had been found dead in a flat in Burnley, his emaciated body missing an arm that he’d eaten in a forlorn attempt to save his own doomed life. The police had found been through his rubbish and found packaging for some black puddings from the same part of Ireland where Seamus had killed the Nazi and the Cunt. The British newspapers, particularly the right-wing, foreign owned ones, were calling for an end to ALL imports of meat from Ireland, which is the exact same thing Seamus would have been calling for if the opposite had happened. But he felt that in ten days time, he’d be in the invidious position of having to defend the Irish meat processing industry. But a lot of water would pass under the bridge before then. And some Saxon blood, too, he reflected, ruefully.
He walked from the train station in Dublin to their flat, hoping that the forty minute stroll would clear his head enough to allay any fears that Jenny was having that he was losing his slender grip on his sanity. When he got close, he went into a McDonalds, marched peremptorily up the stairs to the men’s room and had a look in the mirror. He didn't like what he saw; his hair, which had grown quickly since he got it cut, was becoming ragged, he hadn't shaved in days, there were rings around his eyes. There was little he could do to make himself look better, other than wet his hands and run them through his hair.
When he got to the flat Jenny was still asleep, though the clock had twice done salutation to the afternoon. She lifted up the bedsheets and asked if he’d been out as well.
“Well, in a manner of speaking. So where did you go last night?”
“Oh, some people from downstairs came looking for some milk, and we made friends, and ended up going on the batter and...”
“And what?”
“And we owe them thirty quid.”
Seamus nodded calmly, thinking that this was the least of his problems at the moment. He asked her if she’d had breakfast, she shook her head and he offered to make her some muesli. He took the papers out of his pocket and tossed them on the bed. She sat up, he put the muesli in her lap with one arm and put the other behind her neck. He asked if the neighbours had wanted to know what he did for a living.
“I told them you were a short story writer who wrote under some assumed names.”
He smiled, more impressed by her ingenuity than depressed by her shame about what he did, confident that he could slip into this persona as easily as any other.
“So, where do you want to go for the week, Galway or Kerry?”
Disingenuously, Seamus replied that he preferred Kerry but that Galway was nearer, and that it had been longer since he was there. She asked if they should book a package tour, he replied that he preferred to do everything spontaneously, though right now the idea of being taken care of by some experienced travel professionals was actually quite appealing.
“So when do you think we should head off?”
“Whenever you’re ready. We can get the train to Galway, get a tourist brochure in the train station there, find a B&B somewhere, then we can go trekking in the hills tomorrow morning. For a brief, fleeting moment he visualised himself in the Connemara bogs, the peat squelching under his wellies, the heather wafting into his nostrils, and he forgot, briefly, about all his problems. He tried to keep the conversation going, knowing that in any vacuum would be filled by his dark fears. He told of trips to Connemara as a child with his family, about the time he found some wild strawberries, the time he nearly sank in the mud, the time they found a bag of kittens washed up by the side of a stream and adopted a few of them. It might by this way with everyone who talks too much, their discourse swirling endlessly round an inner void.
He never discerned much enthusiasm in Jenny, he felt that she was doing this more for him than for her, as if to thank him for this life that he was giving her, though she’d far rather be going to Ibiza herself. But they were going west, westward ho, towards the setting sun, not to Hell but to Connaught.
But as soon as they were on the taxi to the train station, his demons returned to haunt him, as he passed so many ordinary, meat-eating people on the street, people who he’d never be able to distinguish from the people who’s deaths he might have been responsible for, at least not until they started talking, so long had Dublin been within the Anglo-Saxon sphere of influence. He believed that chimpanzees should be given rights because they shared 98% of DNA with us, yet he was trying to justify killing English people to himself because they were so intrinsically, ineluctably different from us.
Thankfully, they didn't have to wait that long for their train to arrive. When they found a seat he immediately started to embrace her, knowing that she cared no more than he did about public displays of affection.
Yet though she was enjoying the sensation of his lips being pressed against her neck, it wasn't her pleasure that was uppermost in his mind. He really needed an excuse to shy away from the endless suburbs that grew dendritically from Dublin like mould on a stale lump of bread and her bosom provided the perfect place for him to hide. He wondered why women liked being kissed on the neck so much, and his own gender were so happy to provide this service. This was where the blood flowed from their bodies to their brains, perhaps we thought we could intercept this flow and save them from the pain of menstruation. Or perhaps we thought we could suck out their precious, life-bearing essence and liberate ourselves from all the burdens of masculinity, which, like almost everything else in men’s life, would be an endless pursuit of something that was unattainable.
After her neck had been kissed so thoroughly that she’d have to have a shower just to get rid of the pungent saliva smell, he got up and looked out the window with vampire eyes, and found that they’d finally left the suburbs behind. He gave off a pleased look, which the other passengers might have thought had something to do with the kissing, as they were looking at him with a mixture of contempt and envy. In truth, the vista that greeted him was initially pretty underwhelming, as they were entering the most Holland-like part of the country, with pancake-flat bogs that were being depleted at an alarming rate to provide peat so that people who lived in council estates in England could have some floral colour in their lives. He despaired when he thought of how long it took these bogs to form and compared it with the life of an average pot plant. He tried to console himself with the thought that the nutrients would find their way back into the ecosystem, though he wasn't enough of a scientist to figure out how.
As they got closer to Galway, he was reminded of why they were coming here. Rolling hills and thatched cottages surrounded the city rather than the anthills that surrounded Cork or Dublin. Jenny had never been here before, and when she saw the street performers in Eyre Square she was so beguiled that she wanted to spend the night here. Seamus was so tired that he actually agreed without displaying any reluctance, so that when he brought her to a cheap place to stay she didn't argue.
He found a veggie restaurant and after dinner they went strolling round the streets. It was the first weekend of September and the evening sky was of a rubescent hue that might have come from a painting by Jack Yeats. Though the city was as funky as he remembered it, it seemed a lot more prosperous as well. All the little waif-like kids he seemed to remember wandering round aimlessly in their grey shorts which exposed their scrawny pink legs seemed to have either been gassed in some sinister, secret, ethnic cleansing programme, or grown up into suit-wearing, mobile-phone using shorthairs. Though he’d lived hand-to-mouth for most of the last ten years, he was still middle-class enough, and thus romantic about poverty to nostalgia the growing affluence of this town, which seemed like Cork with the Northside taken out. He thought maybe we should do more to remember where we came from, which for most of us was horrible, stinking, torn-clothes wearing poverty, perhaps by having a day every month where we lived on nothing but boiled spuds and turnips, though if up was up to him we’d drink Soya milk instead of the kind that came from cows.
It didn't take them long to see most of Galway, which had a population of around 40,000, the perfect size for a city pace Aristotle, though that philosopher lived in a time when there were no cars, bicycles, trains, buses, nor evidently anything better to do than speculate about what the perfect size for a city was. He had to admit, though, reluctantly, that this was one Irish town where the planners didn't fuck things up on their usual colossal scale. He could sense that Jenny wanted to linger here longer, as tourists often did in a way that they didn't in Cork, checking out the craft shops, the used music stores, the usual bohemian ecosystem. Even Seamus was feeling the odd respite from his fears that he may be a mass murderer; he didn't feel any desire to buy an evening paper nor watch the news nor go on the internet to find out what the latest news was, though he felt that if he stayed in the town eventually the feeling that he may be passing people on the street who were more up to speed than him would prove infuriating.
Sure enough, he was up early the next morning, and before Jenny had even woken up, he was carrying a big pile of printed paper into their bijou room. The news wasn't good, what had been subtle intimations from the British that the disease may have come from the west had mutated into fully fledged, no-two-ways-about-it finger pointing. It was only a matter of time before tests would be done on meat exported from Ireland to England, and he feared that it might be traced back to him, though he couldn't possible imagine how. Though he knew he couldn't hide, his response was to run, to somewhere where this news couldn't find him. He remembered his holiday in the Aran Islands with his family as a child, how it seemed like an information desert, where they only had a few fortnight-old comic books on the newsagent shelves. Though he knew that, like the rest of the country, it would have changed, he decided that this was where they were going. He looked at Jenny, saw that she was still in blissful, somnolent slumber, the sort that he may never have again, and went out to find a tourist office, which was like looking for a waffle shop in Brussels.
An hour and a half later he was rushing back to the B&B with a couple of bus and ferry tickets in his hands. He was shaking Jenny out of bed and telling her that she had half an hour to get up, have breakfast and rush down to the bus station so they could have their relaxing, stress-free week in the Aran Islands. It took her a few seconds to assimilate all of that, but her confusion seemed, like everything else about her, sexy to him, her frazzled hair and bleary eyes giving her a look of innocent vulnerability that was normally plastered over with a veneer of adult calm. She acquiesced, and they went to get the second ‘B’ that they paid for, she nibbling desultorily on her roll, he looking anxiously at his watch.
But they still made it in plenty of time, as punctuality wasn't the same virtue it was in more cosmopolitan, anglicised Cork. Jenny couldn't quite believe it when she saw the ferry, which seemed like little more than a fishing trawler to her, and, in objective truth, that’s probably all it was. It was a calm day, so they didn't get splashed too much. He was trying to make a virtue of this, but as he looked into Jenny’s tired face, all he could do was to remember all the times he’d made similar journeys, putting his entire fate in the hands of people who’d slept better than him, knowing that if there was any sort of accident he’d be too wasted to help any of the older more vulnerable people and that he’d probably be lifted out by some elderly woman. Perhaps this was why the world belonged to the people who slept well, who’d found some sort of modus vivendi with their issues and for whom morning was like a new friend rather than an oppressive parent.
At lest he enjoyed the fact that Jenny was holding him close, as if they were teenagers at some third-rate horror movie, both the physical contact and the irony that she felt safer in his arms. They didn't say that much, as anything they would have would be drowned out by Neptune’s mighty roar. If he’d had more sleep, it would have occurred to him that this was an apposite metaphor for his attempts to change the world by being a TD in the Dail. In his lethargic state, though, he let the waves seduce him into a slumber, as if he was a beggar who never knew where the next half hours nap was coming from and had to take every little bit of snooze that his oppressive sub-conscious would let him have.
Jenny, who was still blissfully unaware of what was going on behind his eyes, was the one to wake him, with words that included the phrase ‘sleeping beauty’, though if he was ever beautiful, this couldn't, to his mind, be one of those times. And when his drowsy eyes opened fully, the vista that greeted him didn't need any humans to enhance it, in the same way that a city street might. It looked as if it was doing quite well for itself before the first settlers landed there in their currachs, with it’s rugged shore that the Atlantic chipped away at but would never conquer and it’s beaches of the purest, whitest sand that either he or Jenny had ever seen.
As this wasn't Ko-Pha-Ngan, there weren't any touts combing the shore for tourist dollars. So they had to drag their bags into the village and hope their was a room in a B&B available. He wished they’d brought tents to provide contingency, but this whole holiday was all too spontaneous for that. After the silent, lugubrious journey had been made, Seamus was distressed to find a couple of cybercafes on the main street, which was like an alcoholic going into rehab only to find a free bar there. He thought of vowing to himself to keep away from them, but knew that such a promise would only cause guilt when he broke it.
They did find a place, and one which hadn't succumbed to the pressures of modernisation, with old-fashioned whitewashed walls and a thatched roof. Seamus had been told how these were made, though he could never figure out how they didn't decompose like so much weetabix when it rained. There weren't so many of these thatched roofs around any more, presumably because the word Thatcher had acquired such sinister connotations. With his darkish skin and his curly hair, and her nebulous, homogenous clothes and hair, they must’ve looked like foreigners to the middle-aged, shawl-wearing woman who greeted them, because the first thing she asked, in a particularly distinct voice, was where they came from.
“We’re from Cork”, Seamus replied, to her slight surprise, to which Jenny added, enthusiastically, that they’d just moved to Dublin.
“Ah, I suppose it’s good to get away from the big smoke for a while.”
Seamus merely nodded, clutching Jenny’s hand as if whatever enthusiasm he was demonstrating would be conducted through her like electrical current.
“And what is it you do up there in Dublin?”
“Government job”, muttered Seamus in response, as if indicating that it politics that he wanted to get away from.
“Oh, you must know that we’re the first people to vote in any election, then.”
Seamus didn't. The woman told them they must be tired and showed them to their room. It was small, white and full of mariolatric imagery. There was a view of the sea in the distance and bits of overhanging thatch in the foreground. Most importantly, there was a bed, covered in woollen blankets which looked as if they may be hand knitted. He paid the money and when she was gone, threw himself down there and beckoned Jenny to join him. She lay down next to him with her back facing him and he put his arms around her in what the Kama Sutra would call the nurturing position.
“Y’know, we could just as easily lie down in bed together back in Dublin.”
“Yeah, but the air we were breathing wouldn’t be as fresh”, he replied, without opening his eyes. Anyway, we’ll do something more active tomorrow. Would you like to go cycling?”
“Can we go swimming as well?”
Even in his exhausted, angst-ridden state he was amused at her naiveté. “You can if you want, but I think you might find the water a bit cold.”
“We’ll see about that.”
“We will indeed”, she replied, in an unusual display of assertiveness, which surprised him so much that he couldn't think of an appropriate response, so they lapsed back into silence. He remembered hearing that there was a puffin hole that any visitor who climbed into would be welcomed as a native to the island, his father was one of those honorary citizens. He would ask about this place whenever he found the energy to get back out of bed. In the meantime he dozed off, waking up three quarters of an hour later not having the slightest idea where he was. Jenny had dozed off as well, and he didn't want to wake her, but while he was waiting for her to arise his dark thoughts inevitably returned. He felt that this was the sort of isolated place people would be banished to in times past, before civilisation became so oppressive that it was something we needed to escape from now and again. The irony wasn't lost on him, as it might have been to backpackers who saved up years wages from menial jobs to go to places like Ko Tao.
Jenny woke up after a while, and as it always did, the sight of her arising lifted his spirits a little. He asked if she was hungry, she replied “yah” in an American sitcom sort of way, he wasn't yet so anti-American that he took exception to this, but...
They went downstairs and asked if dinner was ready to be served. They were given a menu but noticed that there weren't any veggie options, so he was forced to make an inquiry.
“Oh Lord, the woman replied, “we’re getting so many vegetarians these days that I keep meaning to do something. Hang on a while, there’s something in the fridge, I can’t remember what it’s called.
She came back a few minutes later with a block of tofu, wanting to know what to do with it. Seamus told her to fry it for a while with some vegetables and serve it with rice. Then, sounding like the man in the soup-from-a-stone story, he said some soy sauce and ginger would go well with it as well. She said she’d see what she could do. This haphazardness appealed to Seamus, though it drove some foreigners crazy.
The woman came back with something she’d obviously worked hard on, a fried block of tofu sitting on a plate of rice garnished with vegetables. He smiled and tried not to look too condescending. When she was gone he laughed gently and started to make the most of things, having to cut up a fried block of tofu was pretty trivial compared to some of his problems.
But when he was finished, he still wanted to go out and surf the net. For a while, he wished it was still Grainne he was with, as she’d be able to convince him that he’d come here to get away from all the stresses of his job. But Jenny didn't even think of that, and he was too exhausted, physically and in spirit, to convince himself not to.
While Jenny emailed her family and friends to ensure them that she was Okay and catch up on some gossip, the news Seamus found wasn't good. The British had indeed carried out their threat to ban imports of Irish meat, prompting the worst diplomatic crisis in a long time. Though he despaired at the news, he kept wanting more, and he found out that the characteristic Irish government response was to wait a while and hope the whole thing would blow over and we could all be friends again. Needless to mention, they were talking out of both sides of their mouths at once, arguing that scientific tests would prove the meat processing industry in Ireland to be safe, but adding that the concerns of the British were “understandable”. This pusillanimity enraged Seamus. He felt that any other nation would take any other nation to the WTO if they pulled a stunt like this, but the FF/PD coalition were so entranced by Thatcherite economics that they’d never challenge the nation where their creed originated. He looked everywhere to find Sinn Fein’s reaction but there wasn't any, which made him feel like he should be back in Dublin.
He itched to ring Caomhin but there were a few other things he wanted to do on the internet. He checked his email, as he always did, in the hope that his family might be trying to make some sort of rapprochement with him. He knew deep down that he would have to make the first move, but was too preoccupied right now to do so. He signalled to Jenny that he was going out to make a phone call, and told the young, spiky-haired man behind the counter that he’d return to pay for both of them.
It was late evening and there was a gentle breeze that helped to calm him down a little. Caomhin was rather surprised to hear from him.
“I thought you were gone to Galway”, was his incredulous reply.
“I am, I’m in Inishmore right now.”
“But... but... why did you bring your mobile phone out there?”
“For emergencies, I guess.”
“Oh, Seamus, Seamus, don't you know that it’s an emergency that brought you out there in the first place? And since when have they had mobile phone transmitters in Inishmore?”
“Since... I don't know. Anyway, what are we doing about these British sanctions?”
“I’ll tell you what you’re doing, that’s nothing. You’re going to stay there and rent a tent and cycle to the remotest part of the island and stay there for three or four days and leave your mobile phone behind and get some fresh air and fuck your beautiful young girlfriend till you forget about this whole thing.”
“But... I’m Sinn Fein’s spokesman on the environment. Aren’t people going to expect me to make some sort of statement?”
“Yeah, when the Dail is back in sessionin a few weeks.”
“And what statement is that going to be?”
“Time will tell. You don't still think that you’re responsible for this whole mess, do you?”
“Well, yes, actually.”
“Well, that’s why you need to take time off from all of this. It’s clearly wrecking your head.”
Seamus couldn't disagree with this last statement and bowed to the older man’s advice. He bade Caomhin farewell, stood outside, let the fresh, saline air enter his nostrils and thought that perhaps the older man was right after all, though if he was then he’d have a hard task selling the idea of cycling across the island to Jenny.
She was still surfing inside, he didn't really want to go back online, so he waited patiently for her. His eyes inevitably strayed to the other surfers, some Americans assuring their mothers that they were safe, and some locals wondering what was going on in the wide world outside their own windswept island. It seemed that they were all viewing something basically wholesome, though he didn't know how the diffident youngfella behind the counter would react if anyone breached the ‘No Porn’ rule. As if to thank Seamus for his patience, Jenny asked if he was in a hurry. He responded that he wasn't in any hurry, that they didn't have any TV in their hotel, so there was no imperative to be anywhere. She said she’d be finished in ten minutes, which would give him time to think of a way to ingratiate her enough to convince her to go on the following day’s arduous journey.
As they were walking back to his hotel, he reminded her of the time they went camping in West Cork.
“Yeah, I got really high that night, if I’m not mistaken.”
“Yeah, we had fun, didn't we? We could probably do the same thing here.”
“Didn't you already pay for the hotel?”
“Only for one night. We could probably rent a tent for a few days and stay somewhere remote, just you and me.”
She gave a puzzled look and replied, “What would we do all day, just the two of us?”
“Oh, y’know, just talk, swim, make love, sleep, dream, eat, drink... same stuff we’d do anywhere else.”
“What would we eat exactly?”
Having not thought this out properly, he paused before replying, “Am... just beans and stuff. It’ll be nice, to totally get away from civilisation.”
“Aren’t you far away enough already?”
“Well, no really, not while we’ve got net access here.”
Jenny gave a look to suggest she saw his point, but looked like she was only going to agree to this if she could get something in return. She bade her time before deciding what this was going to be.
The next morning Seamus resisted the temptation to surf the net again. He’d slept relatively late, the darkness and silence of the place paradoxically having made it harder for him to sleep and leaving him to wrestle with his demons instead. Once again, he left Jenny sleep while he went to go and rent some bikes and tents. He didn't have any difficulty finding the tourist office, it was as if all paths led to this location from which the island’s entire wealth trickled down from. He was greeted cordially, even sycophantically, ‘till the middle-aged, sweater-wearing man realised Seamus was Irish and decided that he could keep the Darby O Gill spiel for the foreigners.
“Sorry for thinking you were foreign... what did you say your name was?”
“Seamus. But don't, worry, I get that a lot.” Eager to get on the road as soon as possible, he didn't go into the story about his part-jewishness.
“It’s just... you have very dark skin and curly hair, I thought you might be Italian, Spanish maybe.”
Seamus got the sense that this man didn't meet that many Irish people in his line of work and that the foreign tourists he met treated him with condescension. It wasn't that he didn't feel his pain, just that he had problems of his own and hadn't slept so well.
“Yeah, well maybe a few days cycling into the Atlantic wind will straighten out my hair for me.”
The man laughed politely but took the hint. He brought out some world-weary mountain bikes that had seen better days and done better things. Seamus immediately wondered how many British and German backsides had rested on their seats and what other hard, firm protuberances they might have rested upon. He asked where he could get some provisions and was told and asked if he had a Swiss army knife to open them. He admitted that he hadn't, and could sense an acknowledgement that Seamus hadn't really thought this out properly, that he was doing it on impulse, that he was doing it to get away from something. But he didn't pry into what it may be, just sold him a knife, taciturnly, which made Seamus feel guilty for not making more of an effort to communicate with him.
He pushed the bikes back to the hotel and locked them outside the door, more out of force of habit than any real fear that they might be stolen. Jenny was still asleep when he got inside, though it pained him to do so, he shook her out of her slumber and told her to get up and have some breakfast. She looked at her watch and wondered how she’d managed to sleep for so long, and then gave Seamus a look that she knew he couldn’t resist and asked her to bring him up something. Reluctantly he agreed, and when he came back half an hour later with enough food to fill a whole rucksack, he took out a roll and handed it to her. She dug into it ravenously, the crumbs falling onto the sheets like refugees flying from some sudden, unprecipitated conflict, and she didn't wait for the first bite to reach her gullet before she said, “thankf, thif if good.” Patiently, he explained that she’d probably need a change of clothes or two and that the only place she’d be able to wash them would be the sea. She didn't pay that much attention, being at a stage in life where everything always just sort of fell into place, where adversity was a just another source for laughter. Seamus chose to treat her concentration on the sandwich as confidence in his judgement. When she finished the roll she brushed the crumbs aside and got up from under the sheets, only to rush back in again. Normally Seamus would have been amused but today he was so eager to get on the road that just breathed deeply and said,
“C’mon, I know it’s a little colder here, and it’s going to be even colder in a tent, but you have to get out of bed sometime.”
She gave him that look again and asked if he could pass her clothes. Reluctantly he did so and she got into them without getting up from under the sheets. He used to do the same thing on winter mornings when the idea of staying in bed was so much more preferable than going to school, but instead of a nostalgic pang for the past he felt deprived of the tantalisingly erotic sight of her getting dressed. He realised that she’d want to sleep in her clothes in the tent, which would make intercourse rather difficult, though he feared his chances of sleeping would disappear completely if they didn't do it.
But he put such thoughts out of his mind, and strapped the tent around Jenny’s back, reminding himself of the way his mother would prepare him for school, except that he planted an effusive kiss on her lips at the end.
“It’s just going to be you and me for three or four days. You’re not going to get bored of me, are you?”
“I’m sure we’ll find something to do”, she replied, stroking his chest and kissing him again.
Then she asked which way they were going, he said it didn't really matter, they could go around the island either clockwise or anticlockwise, but they’d get back to the same place eventually. She looked at him askew and said, “no, seriously, which way”, and randomly, he pointed right.
Soon they had had left the town and were passing the random bungalows that blighted this part of Ireland as they did any other. He had a feeling that he was entering the unknown, even though he’d been all round the island with his parents as a child. He hoped he might see another side of Jenny than the carefree teenager image she always projected of herself, to determine if she had demons of her own that the cold, saline wind could blow to the surface, or anything that suggested they weren't as horribly mismatched as they seemed, that their relationship was based on something other than lust and money. But for now the scene was more like an Ann and Barry book than the Ingmar Bergman movie he was anticipating. He didn't know why he wanted her problems to come to the surface, perhaps he wanted some empathy when he explained his own to her, perhaps he thought the endless ballo in maschara of secrets and lies that constituted their time together was no way to conduct a relationship.
Eventually the hills got steeper and the roads bumpier, and his thoughts turned outward, or at least to parts of his body other than his tortured, tormented mind, to the burning pains in his calves and the dryness in his chest. Surprisingly, Jenny was doing fine, cycling slightly ahead of him, her buttock muscles raised from the saddle and flexing with every push on the pedals. After they’d cycled around fifteen miles he decided it was time for a break, and he made an anhelated push to catch up with her. His face red and his voice crackling, he asked if she wanted to take a break. Casually, she replied that she did.
They sat down by the side of the road, though it was so quiet that they could have sat on the road if they wanted to. There wasn't much grass growing by the side of the road, certainly not enough to relieve the pain that was welling up in his thighs. After he’d taken a drink, he felt compelled to ask Jenny something.
“Have you cycled a lot before?”
“I used to have to cycle to school and back, though that was only a ten-minute cycle. Otherwise, not so much.”
This left Seamus having to confront the rather discomforting thought that the reason she was able to out-cycle him was that she was younger and fitter, and, as they had no plans to have kids, was going to be for a while. But it seemed she had no desire to turn the tables on him and treat him as paternalistically as he did her, which was sobering to him.
They got on the road again and after another 45 minutes they came to a inlet where there was a deserted beach. Jenny stopped her bike and when Seamus caught up, she suggested going for a swim Seamus looked sceptical, but didn't want to appear cowardly, so just said that he didn't bring any swimming trunks. Jenny looked around at the rocky landscape, from where there was no-one to look back, and said that she hadn't either. She dumped the tent on the ground and beckoned him to follow. She jogged towards the sea and cast her clothes off along the way, leaving a trail behind her. If she found the water cold, she wasn't showing it, as she dashed in and only looked behind to see if Seamus was following her, which he was, reluctantly, leaving his clothes in a neat pile, taking his underwear off with adolescent diffidence, knowing that his penis would become laughably small if he went anywhere near that water, like a grape becomes a raisin in the sun. But he peeled off his clothes like a servant would peel a grape for their dyspeptic master and took a deep breath and ran in. And it was cold, cold like the blood of the English thugs whose bodies he’d given back to the Earth, cold like the hearts of his family that had rejected him, cold like heaven would seem to someone who’d been to hell. But he endured, as if the last few months of his life had given him some immunity to reality, as if he’d been denying so many things to himself that the capacity for denial had spread from his mind to his body, as if he was one of those Indian sadhus who could stand on a bridge and tie a rock to their penis and throw the rock into the river and pull it back like a fish and then go home and eat some rice and dal. But what were the beliefs that allowed Seamus to practice such denial?
He didn't believe in what he stood for, he didn't think that the IRAs campaign of violence was justified, didn't think for a moment that by taking the six counties back that the relentless march of Anglo-Saxon industrialisation could be halted, how naive would he be if he thought otherwise? But he did believe in defensive violence, and the Earth had to be defended. Was the food scare that he may have initiated the beginning of this, the start of his fight to save the Earth? Was Gaia summoning him here, to the cold waters of the Aran Islands, for a purifying ablution? If so, what were his next steps to be? How could he ask her? Would he look for omens in dead animals, as the Greek and Roman augererrs did, or in living trees, as his own Celtic ancestors did? And what was the role of Jenny, this girl who seemed to move between the worlds of man and nature with the facility of a shape-shifting Celtic Shaman, in all this? He knew the answers would have to come from himself, that his destiny was in his own hands.
In the meantime he splashed around nakedly in the water with Jenny, then pulled her out to the edge of the shore and lay down with her, in a conscious nod to From here to Eternity, that movie about the worst attack on America in history. They kissed and fondled and rolled around and let the cold, clear, water flow over them until Seamus decided it was time to stop and he lay over her and looked straight into her eyes and said:
“Isn't this great? Wouldn’t it be great if we could do this forever?”
He had no idea what her reply was going to be, he didn't know her well enough to know what she really wanted from life, didn't know if she knew herself, didn't know if living the high life in Dublin was what she was brought up to want or whether she was following some primordial acquisitive instinct. But he knew he wanted to be with her, and wanted to think there was something more to her than her physical beauty and passionate lovemaking ability.
“This is fun, much more than I expected, actually, but wouldn’t we get bored of it after a while?”
“I don't know? Would we?” Seamus didn't actually know himself, suspected that part of his own soul was urbanite to the core as well. It was all he could do to answer:
“I guess it’s possible to enjoy the best of both worlds. I think that humans have a need to be with other humans, but I think we need to be close to the Earth as well. Reconciling the two imperatives is difficult.”
“You smart”, she said in a baby voice.
“‘Course I’m smart. Look who I chose to be with. I’m with the most beautiful girl in the world, in the most beautiful place in the world. How could anyone want anything more?”
“I think if it was just the two of us all the time then we’d get bored of each other after a while.”
“I don't think I’ll ever tire of you”, he replied, speciously, as there was hardly a day that went by without his thinking of Grainne. “But there is a way that we could have both, all the time, for the rest of our lives.”
Her eyes lit up with a mixture of surprise and curiosity, wondering what plan was hatching behind his eyes that he was yet to let soar free on the waves of speech. She didn't need to ask what it was.
“I’ve had this idea for a while, since I got the nomination from Sinn Fein, actually, but I can’t tell anyone about it, not even you, I didn't tell Grainne either. If anyone found out, I’d be found dead in the woods. But now something else has happened, something that complicates everything...”
“Why can’t you tell me? Don't you trust me?”, she asked, plaintively, displaying a side of herself he couldn't recall seeing before.
“Well, I hate to say this, but no, I don't. I can’t tell you until I know what it is that you really want from life, until I’ve met your family and find out what it is that they have against me.”
She looked querulous as she realised that he had a major life plan that he hadn't shared with her, understandably, as so many of her own life plans were so intricately bound up with his. He sensed this and told her that after they’d lived together for a year or so he could share it would her, that if it ever came to fruition that everything he’d done before would make sense.
“I know that’s a lot to ask, but I’m so scared of what would happen to me - and to you - if people ever found out about this.” He caressed her cheeks and had to keep blinking to stop a tear from falling onto her face and making him appear weak when he needed to seem strong.
“Who do you think is going to kill you?”, she asked. She was displaying a certain amount of trust by asking this when he was lying on top of her.
“I’ve done some bad things”, was his enigmatic answer. “I wasn't in the IRA, before you ask, but... I got involved with Sinn Fein because... I’m sorry, I can’t tell you, not yet.”
“Did you kill someone?”
He looked away, then removed himself from her and lay down in the sand and looked in the other direction by way of response. Her reaction was not shock, nor horror nor disdain, but excitement and curiosity. She lay on top of him and pressed her hands against his cheeks and turned her head till his eyes were looking straight into hers and asked him to tell her the whole story.
So he did, and it was cathartic, to tell the whole story to someone who was neither a protagonist nor a lawyer. Her eyes were wide open for the whole account, in his naked state he felt like he was exposing everything about himself, and feeling such a state of Zen-like calm that he wanted to tell her more and more about himself, but first had to be sure that she wouldn’t share this with anyone.
She took a deep breath, composed her thoughts, and said: “Why would I tell anyone this? Then my meal ticket would be in jail, I’d have to go back to Cork to live in shame with my family... my life would suck. C’mon, tell me about what your plan is and what the new complications are.”
This stopped the flow of information that had been pouring out of Seamus in it’s tracks.
“I’m sorry, I still don't trust you enough to tell you that.”
She looked astonished and cried, “You told me that you killed those two Englishmen!”
“Yeah, but no-one will believe you if you tell them that. You don't know their names, nor where their bodies are, besides which, they were basically the scum of the Earth, and no-one gives a shit about them. If you tell anyone, they’ll think you’re a jilted lover and dismiss you. My plan, however, is actually quite plausible, which is why I can’t share it with you.”
She gave him a look that suggested that she knew she was going to get it out of him before this trip was over, as surely as she get the semen flowing from his loins. By now afternoon was turning into evening and the sun was deciding that she was going to turn in, kissing the gentle waves before she did. The seagulls were flying home to wherever it was they flew home to, and Seamus thought that maybe they should pitch their tent here, near the beach. He was thinking ‘they’ because he realised that she was probably better at pitching tents than him, though he’d make an effort to make it look like a joint effort. Actually, as it turned out, she did most of the tent-construction work while he mainly thought about the philosophical implications of what they were doing. Why was it so easy for humans to impose their version of order on the universe, to build little canvas houses and have hidden, concealed intercourse in them and do their cooking over a gas stove and leave the tin cans that would probably still be there after a volcano had erupted and shrouded the earth in toxic ash? No other animals could have such a dominance over their environment, except maybe elephants, though most of us didn't think about it consciously any more than our pachydermous friends did, only people like Seamus, and he had major doubts about his own personal sanity.
He let her boil the beans while he went out to search for wild berries. He liked the inversion of atavistic norms that this implied, the female taking care of the protein while he sought out vitamins. Still, though, he managed to concentrate on finding wild strawberries instead of the more plentiful blackberries. He realised that in searching for wild strawberries he was really searching for his own past, for a time when he loved his father and mother unreservedly, when they were letting him play and be before they decided it was time for him to knuckle down and become a doctor. He was searching for something he could never find, like we all were, although if he didn't find it he’d probably admit it to himself rather rationalise like the rest of us.
He did find lots of blackberries, and of course, he asked himself why he was looking for them. The obvious answer was that they tasted sweet, the slightly less obvious answer was that they provided vitamin C and sugar in the form of fructose, an even less obvious answer was that we were satisfying primitive hunter-gatherer instincts by doing so. But this was still to obvious for Seamus. He decided that blackberries were an unconscious metaphor for human culture. Say what? Well, briars completely dominated any ecosystem where they were allowed to take a foothold, choking any plants that tried to grow around them. They fought among themselves, and drew blood from any animals that tried to get near them. And yet, and yet, every year they produced fruit that tasted as sweet as the lips of the woman who taught him what the word ‘love’ meant.
He came back with his hands cupped and full of blackberries, knelt down as if making some sort of religious offering. She took one, stuck out her tongue and placed one upon it, eased it gently in and sucked of it’s essences, then licked her lips and took another. He figured this was part of her plan to seduce him so much that he’d part with the information that he wanted to keep from her. But knowing the opponents battle plan doesn’t always guarantee victory. He placed the blackberries in her groin, where they formed a v-shape such as a 17th-Century Hapsburg fruit painter would paint if he ever turned his hand to erotic art. He put his hands inside his sleeves and took the warm tin of kidney beans that she’d been cooking in his hands. He dipped his finger in it and licked the salty brine from his fingers. She did the same with the blackberries in her lap, then took a big handful and pressed them into her mouth till the juice flowed out. Then he started to laugh at the absurdity of all this, and laughing, coughed, and coughing, spat out some half-chewed fragments of kidney beans, which ruined the erotic moment they’d been building towards. She looked a bit disgruntled and took the tin from him and ate a few of the beans, as if she wasn't willing to waste any more food.
Feeling that having punctured their attempt to communicate non-verbally, he needed to say something to fill the vacuum, the first thing he could come out with was, “I’ve got some sandwiches in the bag.”She smiled wryly and said, “toss it over, then.” He wasn't sure if this was a good thing or a bad thing, he loved the idea of getting laid out here in the open, but he wasn't willing to put himself in a sort of vulnerable position where he might tell her his long-term plans. But, as Jenny ate the sandwich, he sensed she was concocting some new seduction ritual. But he knew that she wanted sex just as much as he did, and that if she tried to withhold it from him after performing any such seduction ritual that she’d be the one who’d end up more frustrated. His tactic should have been to gradually drip-feed her information about his plans, unfortunately they were so brilliantly uncomplicated that it would only take two minutes to explain them. But if anyone found them out right now, before he’d even got his first pay cheque, then he may as well go out to the sea and drink salt water until the wrenching pain in his chest signalled that he was bound for that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns. So he would just have to play the coquette to her seductress.
He watched her eat the sandwich, and what an unerotic sight it was, consuming the ultimate functional food, invented by an anally-retentive English Earl, presumably so that his peasants would have more time to till his fields to grow grain to fatten his cows. When she finished it, she commented that it was starting to get cold, though she’d been in the freezing water a few hours earlier. In truth, though, it was heading for that time of night when a hazy, browny grey tint that shrouds the Earth on spring and autumn evenings, and a chill had crept into the air, and a breeze that made the long wild grasses that grew on the sand dunes jitter as if they wanted to be somewhere else. So he followed her lead and asked if she wanted to go inside the tent.
“Well, do you?”
“If you do, then I want to.”
“Let’s do it, then.”
He made the after you signal and watched as she bent over to crawl in, sensing that she was taking her time about it and wiggling her hips more than she strictly needed to. She made herself comfortable by adopting the Olympia pose from Manet’s painting, but when Seamus tried to make his way in, she leant over and grabbed one of his hands and pulled him down on top of her. Then she leant over him and pressed her lips against his and started to roll her tongue around his mouth. But immediately he could sense that she knew that he knew that she was up to something. But she kept at it all the same, like a teenager who was discovering the pleasures of kissing for the first time, running her hands through his hair and pressing her breasts into his face. As if eager to see if she was arousing him, she placed her hand gently down his pants and felt his penis to see if it was hard. And it was, throbbing and tumescent, and his testicles had tightened, and she asked,
“You really want to fuck me tonight, don’t you?”
“I really want to fuck you every night... but...”
“But what?”
“But I think you want to get something out of me first, and it’s something I really need to keep to myself.”
She took her hand back and wiped it off the floor of the tent and folded her arms and said:
“I really resent that implication, Seamus. I want to have sex tonight because I care for you, in spite of what you just told me, and I think you care for me. But then, if you did, I wouldn’t need to resort to any elaborate plans to get you to share your secrets with me.”
Seamus, who hadn't thought her capable of doublespeak on this level, didn't know how to respond and panickingly said:
“I’ll tell you my plan when... we’re financially secure.”
“And when will that be?”, she asked, her arms remaining folded.
“Well, if we keep spending money the way we have been for the last week, then... never, probably, but if we’re really careful, maybe two years.”
“TWO YEARS!” That’s how long I’ve got to wait before you’re honest with me! And what do you mean by being ‘careful’ exactly?”
Seamus took a deep breath before answering: “I know you like living the high life in Dublin, and that’s at least part of the reason that you’re with me. But... I think we need to be careful, at least till I’ve got a nest-egg together.” Then he paused and added: “I’ll be able to save one up on my income within two years if we live frugally. If you want anything extra, more clothes, more nights out, whatever, then you can get some sort of part-time job yourself.”
He was sounding so reasonable that it was hard for her to react as angrily as she wanted to.
“Well, it is a bit boring just sitting round the flat all day...and if I go shopping with your money then you’ll never tell me what your plan is... but two years? Don't you think that if I live with you for even one year it must mean that I must really care for you, and that you must be able to trust me?” It terrified him to think that the only things she seemed to know what to do were earn money and spend money, that these were the only things the educational system had equipped her to do, but he responded: “I’d never presume to know someone else so well that I could trust them with my most intimate secrets, so the fact that I’m going to share them with you after only a year is a testament to how much I like you”, in a futile attempt to win back the high moral ground.
“You’re not a very trusting person, are you?”
He paused before answering: “I think you are because your family were much more honest with you when you were a child, and probably now as well, and you’ve never lied to me about what it is you want from me. I’m not like that, my family kept things from me, pretended to be a lot of things that they weren't... perhaps it was because they didn't know what it was they wanted from their own lives... and I’ve had to lie so much to get elected, it’s no wonder I don't trust anyone, but if I was going to trust anyone, it would be you, you’re the most honest person I’ve ever met.”
As it turned out, that was actually enough for her. Deep down, she must have realised that her own plan of going to Dublin with Seamus and living like a Duchess was too good, or at least too unrealistic, to be true, and maybe, just perhaps, Seamus thought, not what she really wanted herself. She drew closer to him and they made the most passionate love they’d made in a while, it went on for so long that they both slept soundly, for Seamus this was the first time in a week, and this in spite of the bruises he’d incurred in the process.
In the morning he felt a grogginess that he thought could be cured by a swim. As he walked through the reeds he thought that he might briefly have seen a rabbit drifting through the reeds, but perhaps aurora was playing tricks with his addled brain. He swam nakedly again, on the way back picked some blackberries nakedly as our ancestors must once have done, and sat around the stove nakedly and dried out and let the cooking aromas draw Jenny back to the world of the conscious.
When she staggered bleary-eyed out of the tent, she couldn't help but laugh at the image of Seamus’ scrawny naked body arched around the stove. And it was the actual physical sight that amused her, he reckoned, not the fact that he was patently so unwilling to expose himself emotionally.
Though this place would be remembered by them both as a place where their relationship reached a higher level of emotional intimacy, they decided it was time to press on. So they cycled round the island for three more days, repeating the pattern that they’d established in the first day, picking berries, swimming nakedly, fucking like the bunnies that Seamus kept thinking he was seeing. Seamus was reassured to find her not talking about Dublin too much or appearing to yearn for it, though in his more paranoid moments he often imagined that she’d figured out his plan and was trying to lull him into sharing it with her. As the days wore on he brooded less and less about the deaths he thought he’d caused, as if they’d been drawn into a benign, prelapsarian dual solipsism where the rest of the world didn't matter any more. To Seamus’s surprise, when they passed other cyclists on the road, she didn't really want to talk to them, beyond a few courtesies and offers of direction, as if it was really that Seamus was the only thing she wanted in the world.
But the illusion of living in this paradise was really just an illusion, they were as dependent on agriculture and the cash economy as anyone else, their beans were running out and they were going to start going hungry if they didn't get back to the town. It was a Tuesday, and Seamus was eager to get on the internet and find out the soccer results from the weekend. But when they got back it was eerily quiet for such a mild September day. He wondered where everyone was, what they were doing inside on such a pleasant day. When they went into the hotel, there was no-one behind the desk, as if they were in that spooky Claude Rains movie, Strange Holiday. He rung the bell several times and eventually a door opened somewhere and the sound of a TV news broadcast came filtering through to reveal that there was still a life outside themselves and the woman who ran the hotel came out, her jovial manner of a few days ago replaced by a tremulous, shivering, stuttering display of nerves that she tried to palliate by clutching her rosary beads.
“Come in, there’s something you should see”, she said. Puzzled as to what it might be, they followed her into the TV room tentatively, and saw grainy, black-and-white images that stunned even Seamus.























Yes, September 11th had happened. It happened every year, though Seamus couldn't have told anyone what he was doing on any of the other 28 that happened in his life. But this one would be remembered, as long as civilisation existed. Books would be written about it, films made, and in books and films that took place in the first years of the twentieth century it could not be ignored, it would be a historical backdrop to even the even the dreamiest novels and the most fantastic films. Even the name of the day would be appropriated, as a synonym for fear and terror. And it would fill the newspapers, a tissue paper suks up oil.
But it didn't sink in right away into Seamus’ mind, as if it was too big to get in through the front door of his psyche and elected to go in the sliding doors at the back. He went to a cybercafe with Jenny, where everyone was trying to find out what was going on. But he wanted to know what the latest was on the epidemic that he thought he’d caused.
The news there, when he eventually found it, wasn't so good either. Both sides were refusing to back down, and acting like neighbours who didn't get on at first but then made friends and then had a row where all the latent tensions came back to the forefront. He came across more gory photos of victims, but knew that by now, nobody really cared about them, it was as if they died deserting at Capperetto rather than in a heroic victory like D-Day. And there was a little part of Seamus, too, that wished that it had happened a week or ten days earlier, when a triviality like a food scare would have been pushed to the inside pages where it belonged.
And there was another part of him that admired the courage and conviction of whoever had done this, willing to give their lives for whatever it was that they believed in. If he’d become an eco-terrorist, it was almost by accident, the way some people end up in telemarketing. These were people who’d grasped their destiny and decided that they were put on the Earth for this macabre purpose. He would love to have believed that they shared his motivation, that they saw the twin towers as arrogant, vain, phallic symbols of a system that prioritised money above all other things. But he knew in his heart that someone who shared his believes would never inflict such pain on the mere minions of global capital. He believed that the Earth would punish mankind for their arrogance and profligacy, the people who did this were obviously people with a sense of their destiny that only a dogmatic belief in a supernatural force could give.
He read the figures about the deaths; 20,000 was the figure being quoted. That was a lot of people, around what the entire population of Cork was in the eighteenth century. Had he met that many people in his life, even including the people he’d only ever meet once, giving him a lift in a cab or telling him they didn't have any rooms in their hotel? It seemed unlikely, though even that figure was equivalent to the number of people who died every week in Ireland during the famine, or every day in the third world today. How could we build monuments to the supremacy of our culture when things like this happened?
After surfing the web for two hours seeking information, explanation, and exegeses he was no closer to closure and turned to Jenny, who was also wondering how such a thing could have happened, puzzled as to how people who breathed the same air and ate broadly the same food could act in a way that was so fundamentally different. She asked Seamus to try to enlighten her, as if, just because he had a penis he could empathise with the people who did this. He tried to put a brave face on it, telling her that in 50 years time when the history books were being written it would all make sense. She didn't know whether he was serious or not, so incapable was he of talking in an ironic tone of voice on this most sombre of days. They went back to the B&B and had dinner in a morose, Ingmar Bergman movie silence, which seemed to pervade this place, which ironically, it could only have in this Globalised informocracy in which we lived. One of history teachers used to joke that on Christmas Day 800 people didn't wake up and say “Good God, We’re no longer living in the dark ages!”, but Seamus suspected that within a few hours they’d be discussing this over their cassava in the jungles of the Amazon. Yes, it seemed Shaw was right about this as he was about most things, that man’s, (and he meant ‘man’ in the smaller-case, penis-owning sense of the word) greatest skill was creating newer more efficient ways to generate pain and fear.
They didn't make love that night, as if his own tower was cowering into flaccidity in empathy, and he suspected that she was dry, like the pile of rubble and concrete and dust and nothing that existed in nature. They were on the boat back to the mainland in the morning, this time finding nothing funny about the waves that tossed them around. Seamus bought a big pile of newspapers to read on the journey back, though when he was weary of reading the endless accounts of the tragedy and the speculations about who might be responsible, he phoned Caomhin to try to find out what he made of it all.
He’d never known Caomhin to be so reticent, which unnerved him, almost as much as if Caomhin had told him he was gay. But Seamus genuinely didn't know whether Caomhin was so taciturn as a result of realising the awful human consequences of terrorism, or whether he was angry that no-one in the republican movement had ever thought of this, or whether it was simply because so many Irish people had been killed. In any case, he didn't ask him any more about the food scare, which that day’s papers were loathe to discuss. Disturbingly, he didn't make much eye contact with Jenny, her beauty seeming out of place on such a dark day. He looked at the fields outside, which remained green and fecund, the microoganisms that kept that ecosystem going clearly not taking any days off to mourn.
In the days that followed, his sorrow gave way to anger as he witnessed the massive propaganda exercise against the Taliban, who were being described as woman-haters by the same people who were taking contraception away from women in the poorest parts of the world, not to mention having done so much to put them in power in the first place. Everyone in Dublin was talking about how awful they were, though they’d been in power for four of five years and no-one had seemed to care that much about the poor women of Afghanistan before. He could only imagine how bad it was in New York. In the weeks that followed when all the talk was of the weapons of mass destruction that Uncle Sam was going to use to liberate the Arab Women, the food scare gradually insinuated it’s way back into the papers. The Irish government were finally backing down, finally admitting that for all their endless, nauseating boasting about how the tech sector was pushing growth rates into the stratosphere, that their country was still hugely dependent on the land and new structures would be put in place to ensure that no more diseases like this would ever be transmitted. The British had responded with a quid pro quo, saying that once they were assured of safety, then the sanctions would be lifted.
All of this gave Seamus plenty of material for his first speech in the Dail. He thought he’d want to address some of the issues that his constituents had raised, but 9/11 was the only thing they wanted to talk about as well. He gave Jenny the impression of preoccupation and not wanting to talk about his long-term plans and their financial situation, she gave him the impression that she could only keep up the dutiful wife act for so long.
When the big day came, he’d managed to score some beta-blockers from a chemist in Cork in whose way Seamus had pushed quite a bit of medical card trade in the short time he’d been a TD, with some help from Caomhin, who had convinced him that everybody did this sort of thing. He told himself it would just be for this one time. He had shaved carefully and had his hair cut about ten days before. Jenny joined him in the Taxi to Leinster House, though once he got in, the atmosphere was profoundly anti-climatic. The chamber was only about a quarter full, meaning that he had an audience of about forty T.Ds, among whom he could recognise no government front benches, and the group in the lobby, some kids in school uniform, some winos who were hanging around to stay out of the cold, the usual clutch of newspaper hacks, and Jenny, whom he convinced himself that all this was for, and whom he would let act as his muse, though it would strain his eyes and his neck to look at her too often. He politely shook hands with the other Sinn Fein TDs and took his place and did some deep breathing exercises and remained impervious to what the other speakers were saying.
When it came his time to speak, he adjusted his tie, took a deep breath, and uttered, in his civil, middle-class tones, the following:
“A Cheann Chaibrle, Normally the opportunity to represent the people of the great City and County of Cork would be a cause for celebration, and my first priority would be to address the shocking neglect that this government has shown to the area. But these, regrettably, are not normal times. We are on the verge of the first great imperial war of the twenty-first century. The US government has cynically taken advantage of a horrible human tragedy to pursue a resource war in the Middle East.”
Seamus looked around and noticed that the silence around him was palpable, that the faces of the TDs around him betrayed shock and awe that he would take such a stance at this stage when there was still so much sympathy for the US around the world. But he gulped and continued, even as the silence started to mutate into heckles, about how Afghanistan was a vital conduit for Oil from the Central Asian republics, Oil that was being drilled by the same companies that were owned by the same politicians that were conducting this war. He saw someone leave from one of the government benches, though he didn't see his face, only his sloping shoulders and waddling buttocks and closely shaved few last sad grey hairs and the gaggle of hacks that chased him out. But Seamus remained unperturbed, continuing as follows:
“The Short term consequences of this are clear to everyone. Innocent women and children, who have no idea of the conflicting ideologies that have caused this conflagration, who have known only drought and poverty, oppression and suffering, will be burnt alive, their homes razed to the ground, in numbers that will dwarf the numbers that died on September 11th. The long term consequences are harder to fathom, but let us consider this scenario. The US, emboldened by it’s victory in Afghanistan, decides to attack Iraq, the Central Asian republics, even China and India. It acquires a stockpile of oil that allows it to continue it’s flagrant, reckless way of life, which it doesn’t even think twice about imposing on their new colonies. To adopt the American way, they need more oil, more water, more grain. This, then, could be the beginning of a new type of war for this century, countries squabbling over increasingly dwindling resources to feed an increasingly extravagant lifestyle and a rapidly growing population. As a country that was exploited for hundreds of years for it’s land and it’s labour, one would think that our government would oppose this process. But no, dependent on the US for inward investment to fund our own extravagant lifestyles, we kow-tow pusilanimously towards the giant to our west.”
By now nearly all the Fianna Fail deputies that he was facing had left and he was talking almost to an empty chamber, except for the press gallery, whom he’d woken from their usual lethargy. He jerked his head in their direction as he continued with the following:
“This is of course my personal perspective as environment spokesman. But there’s a more pertinent issue that our government is taking an equally supine line on. It is of course, the food scare that afflicts Britain at the moment. Instead of taking this opportunity to criticise a former colonial power we cave in and accept responsibility without even seeing all the evidence. We agree to a rigorous inspection programme without asking for any reciprocal obligations, knowing that if the opposite happened we would never get the same sycophantic treatment. Let me assure everyone listening to this speech that a day is coming when the people of this country- all 32 counties - will have a government that stands up for their interests, and that is the day in which a Sinn Fein-led government is returned.”
He sat down, having given the sort of barnstorming speech that might have merited applause, and would have got some if it had been addressed to a different audience. Instead, the atmosphere was profoundly anti-climatic. His colleagues clapped politely, the jounos in the press box scribbled away. The next speaker spoke, Seamus paid little attention, only looking up at Jenny to make sure she was still there, and imagining what words the journos were writing about him. When the session ended, one of his colleagues tried to warn him that he might have might have been a little a too controversial for the leadership, but then Seamus was surrounded by a covey of hacks, who wanted variously to know if Sinn Fein was now an anti-war party, if Seamus had joined the right party and if he wouldn’t be happier in the greens, if the speech had been vetted by the leadership. He simply replied: “Sinn Fein has always been a party committed to a peaceful resolution of Ireland and the World’s problems, whether social, political, or environmental.” Then he walked away with his hands in front of his face, the way he’d seen so many people do on TV, and looked for Jenny.
He found her outside, looking disorientated, whether because she feared the consequences of his speech or because the attention of all the men in the area had been focused on him rather than her. He took her hand and was about to ask for some clarification, but he saw another journo chasing after him, so he pulled her towards the nearest cab. It was times like this he wished they had their own car, though, thankfully the driver didn't recognise him, and he pretended they were tourists again, this time from Canada, eh? They asked to be let off in Grafton Street, eh, but then Seamus’ cover was blown when his mobile phone went off and Caomhin’s number came up and Seamus was put in the invidious position of pretending that his mom was ringing him from Winnipeg, eh?
“Hey ma, hoo’s it’s going? Why’re yoo ringin so early? It must only be aboot 9 in the mornin over there.”
“Oh, I’m very sorry. I think I’ve got the wrong number”, replied Caomhin, though it was hard to imagine that he didn't have Seamus’ number stored on his phone. Seamus kept the conversation with his fictional Canadian mother going for a few minutes while he gently switched his phone off. Ireland was great and they weren't planning to spend that much time in England, too expensive, eh, no, he wasn't worried that there was going to be any sort of attack, and no, the IRA didn't have any links with Al-Queda. The driver laughed at the Canadian’s mother’s naiveté, shaking his head condescendingly. He put the phone back in his pocket and looked at Jenny, who was looking back at him disgruntledly, whether because of his speech or because he was forcing her to pretend to be a tourist again he wasn't sure. Not wanting to confront the issue, he asked the driver whereaboots he was from.
“Roscommon.”
“Awesome. Is that worth visiting, eh?”
“I’ve got to be honest with you, it’s basically the Iowa of Ireland.”
Seamus laughed and said he was actually from Canada, not the US, and while the driver looked contrite, but was thankful that he didn't have to be honest with him or anyone else at this moment, that his honesty had gotten him into enough potential trouble already.
As they got out of the car and Seamus handed over aboot five of your Irish pounds to the driver, he considered who he was most afraid to confront, Jenny or Caomhin. He decided it was Jenny and switched his phone back on, and Caomhin was trying to get through.
He walked down the street with the phone in one hand and Jenny’s hand in the other, as he’d always imagined people of power and influence did. He put Caomhin through and apologised for his not being able to get through by saying that he’d forgot to switch it back on after the his speech, which was the complete opposite of the truth.
“Yeah, Seamus, about that, WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU THINKING OF?”
Seamus had to hold the phone a few inches away from his face, as he’d often had to do in the past when ringing his mother. By now they were at their doorstep, and, without worrying about looking sexist, he gestured that he wanted to stay outside and defend himself against Caomhin’s barbs while she went back in the house.
“Well, Caomhin”, he began in his most diplomatic tone of voice, “I was thinking that on the doorsteps I promised voters a new type of politics, one based on principle rather than expedience, on honesty rather than circumlocution, on...”
“What are you talking about? You never promised anything like that. You let your pretty face and your mild, middle-class manner win votes for you.”
“Well... that’s not entirely untrue, but this is what I want to deliver. I don't see any point in having an opposition unless we oppose the government on the major issues.”
“Seamus, Seamus, I’m sure you realise that we need the US just as much as Fianna Fail and the PDs do, America is our biggest source of funds. You probably wouldn’t be where you are now if it wasn't for NorAid.” He looked around at the traffic and the people walking by in a mad rush to god knows where stuffing hamburgers into their faces and jabbering into their mobile phones, much as he was doing, and wondered if that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
“Yeah, well, I think the ol’ NorAid funds might start to dry up after this whole 9/11 thing.”
“Jesus, Seamus, how can you be so fucking flippant? I’m going to have to ring the leadership yet again to apologise for your loose tongue.”
Seamus gulped, but not wanting to show his fear, he said he could deal with them himself and that they were probably fund-raising in Boston and wouldn’t here get back until the media forgot about his speech anyway. The last thing he heard was an exasperated snarl after which the line went dead. No, not dead, that wasn't the right word to use. Silent, perhaps, or disconnected, cut off, set adrift, decommissioned, even. He didn't know where he got the confidence to talk to Caomhin like that, whether it came from being on TV, being able to speak to the country, or at least the journos gathered in the press box, from having a beautiful girlfriend, or from a combination of the above. He didn't even know if the last one was still applying after what happened just a while back. So he climbed the stairs with apprehension, having taking a dislike to the elevator in his building, and wanting, perhaps to take a break to reflect on how she might react when he entered and how he might respond.
To his surprise she wasn't that disturbed at all, and though he’d like to think that that was because she had such confidence in his ability to wriggle out of trouble, he suspected that it was because she didn't really understand the import of his speech. She was lying down on the bed with her head resting on her arm, she’d put some Air on the stereo and the sharp autumnal afternoon light that refracted through the windows gave the room an aura of celestial iridescence, even against the backdrop of the grey, smoke-encrusted roofs of Dublin. She beckoned him to join him on the bed with her, trying to do the same Canadian accent that he did, with only a limited amount of success.
It was then that he realised that he was in agreement with the gravel-voiced Semitic short ugly wrinkly brylcreamed former secretary of state and national security adviser for the US. Power was indeed a great aphrodisiac, whether that power was used to disseminate the truth or to bomb innocent children back to the stone age. And though she may not have understood his speech fully, he was prepared to acknowledge that she could understand on some deep level that he was speaking the truth, and to do so took courage. But she might never be able to discuss it with him, just as Seamus would never be able to articulate why Notre Dame or St Peters or the Taj Mahal was such a great work of art that transcended our mere humanity, but he knew somehow, down in some deep place that he could never locate, that they were.
“So hoo’s my little TD, eh?”, she asked, as he joined her on the bed, looking wide-eyed and revelling in his ability to be able to do so, here where the cameras left him alone and the real him could dance around like a young puppy freed from it’s leash for the first time.
“I’m dooin OK. What aboot you?”
“I’m doin good. What aboot one of those speeches for me?”
“Is that what you really want?
She nodded her head, giggling slightly. He jumped back from the bed and improvised the following, starting off in Canadian but gradually drifting back into Hibernian.
“Ladies and... We stand here poised at the edge of... a bed. On this bed we find ourselves confronted with range of major issues. We see a young woman, lying there, talking in a Canadian accent in a flirtatious tone of voice. We see her running her fingers through her hair. How are we to respond to this? This is a situation that requires courage, judgement and foresight. I propose the following 45 minute plan. We will begin with a preliminary policy inquiry in which the young ladies needs are established. We will then endeavour to satisfy those needs. We will begin by removing any obstacles to those needs, following this with a period of intense osculation that will cover every part of her body. We will then focus our efforts more on a carefully targeted area of her anatomy that we have set aside for special treatment from the ministry of tumescence, which will receive the bulk of our funding at this period. After establishing that our efforts to provide concupiscent satisfaction come to fruition, acknowledging, of course, the difficulty of establishing this, we will allow the ministry of tumescence to quickly release it’s funds which will have been built up over the period. We will then commission a study into the results of our efforts, and a feasibility study into the prospects of repeating the process. All in favour?”
Seamus put his hand up, after which Jenny did and then he leapt onto the bed and started to fuck her senseless. But, just as he was about to travel to that frequently discovered country where every traveller returned with a smile on his face, that damned mobile phone went off again. He cursed his luck, tried to keep going, Jenny, too tried to reach for the phone to switch it off but it was too out of the way and too much of a distraction to allow the process of fornication to continue. So he stopped, and holding his bright pink, throbbing penis in one hand, he yelled ‘Yes?’ angrily into the phone.
“Have I caught you at a bad time, Seamus?” came the soft, Northern accent on the other side of the phone. As he recognised the voice that he’d heard on the TV so many times, and briefly in person, he penis shrivelled and his Adams Apple expanded, as if his hysteria had migrated instantaneously.
“No, no”, he responded panickingly, to the disdain of Jenny, who wondered what could be more important than fucking her, “I’m just... um... I suppose you heard of my speech a while ago.”
“Ye-es. I gather that Caomhin was already on the phone to you and that he made our reservations clear. I know that you’re a new TD and you’re young and passionate, but it’s really important to maintain a united front at the moment and there aren’t any votes to be gained by opposing US policy right now. We’re prepared to let this go, just this once, but if there’s one more incident like this, then...”
Seamus wasn't even prepared to ask how that ultimatum was supposed to end. He just thanked the bearded one for calling and slinked back to the bed, where he lay down in foetal position, implicitly beckoning Jenny to comfort him.
“What happened, she asked, wondering how a 1-minute phone call could diminish his libido so much.
“It seems not everyone liked my speech as much as you did.”
“Oh, I see.”
“Yeah, thing is, I’m not really sure that you do. I think I may have gotten myself in over my depth a little”, he replied, imagining that as she’d been floating through their relationship on air bags for the last few months, she might empathise. Instead, seeing that he was vulnerable, she took the opportunity to try to find out what his big, long-term plan was.
“Are you afraid that you might not get elected next time, then?”, she asked, clearly having guessed that he only planned to be in Dublin for five years.
“I’m worried that I might not even be alive in five years time”, he replied.
At those words she leapt up in alarm.
“Hey, no need to be frightened, if I do get killed you’ll be set up for life, with a widows pension on top of a TDs pension.”
“That’s a horrible thing to say. And besides, we’re not married.”
Seamus imagined how addled his brain must be to make such a fundamental mistake. He tried to paper over this crack by saying that she could claim that she was his common law wife, that she just needed to go out and get pregnant the day he died. He was trying to sound sardonic but the seriousness in his voice was evident, because Jenny replied:
“I don't care about the money, I care about you.”
“Really?”, he asked, sounding a little surprised.
She paused and took a deep breath, realising that she felt just as awkward bearing her heart as he did. When she did, the sound the cardiac exposure made sounded like this from where Seamus was sitting:
“When I met you first, it was just a physical thing, I loved the way the way you looked, the way you danced. I thought you were much younger, I didn't think you were looking for anything long term. Then when I found out more about you, that there was a prospect that you could become rich and powerful, I thought I should grasp this opportunity. I could see that you really loved Grainne and that she really loved you, but when I found out that Diarmuid was there as well I thought maybe I could have you, and that I’d never have a chance to meet anyone like you again. You seemed to have everything; looks, energy, talent, and the prospect of wealth. When I got to know you I realised that you weren’t nearly as confident or as focused as you seemed at first, that deep down you’re just a scared little child, but that only made me love you more. These last few weeks have been amazing, and for the total opposite reason I expected; I thought we’d be going out partying every night, meeting famous people and stuff, but instead I’ve just been here with you all the time and it’s been the best time of my life.”
Seamus was stunned at both the sentiments she was expressing and the lucidity with which she was expressing him, it was usually him that could express his emotions better, which he’d always considered a delicious irony. Right now, he couldn’t think of any way to respond, except to take a deep breath and say “Let’s get married.”
Her eyebrows raised and she sat upright and said, “Seriously?”
He responded just by nodding his head, vigorously.
“I thought you never wanted to get married.”
“I didn't, before now.”
“Really?”
“Really. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. I don't know how long that’s going to be, it might be 50 years, it might be only a few weeks. But, for you, it’s a win-win situation, if I get killed you can live quite well on the pension. If I become a success at this politics thing, you’ll be a successful politicians wife.”
“You’re not going to die, Seamus. Promise me that.”
He paused and told her he wasn't going to make any promises that he couldn't keep, that he’d promise to love and honour her till death did them part, but he couldn't promise when that would be. She pressed her fingers against her temples and paused to think, a habit she’d clearly picked up from him, and she took a few seconds to evidently weigh up the emotional calculus.
“What am I going to do with all that money after you’re dead?”
“Whatever you want. You’re a beautiful young girl, the world is at your feet.”
She moved closer to him to look into his eyes to see if was being sincere, and when she realised he was, a tear came to her own eye. She asked when the marriage could take place.
“How ‘bout tomorrow?”
“Don't you have work?”
“I’m probably going to have far more work after that fight with Caomhin, but we can squeeze it in somewhere. It just has to be a simple registry office job... but, hey, y’know, in the summer, I’ve got some friends who practice druidry - at least I think I do - and they could put on a big traditional Celtic Wedding for us, just the sort of thing you deserve, assuming I’m still alive, that is.”
That was a lot for her to assimilate, like the casual sayings of a sadhu that are picked over for years by scholars eager to locate their central core of truth. The first thing she asked was how he’d come to have druidic friends and he was ashamed to admit that it was only as a result of being an Sinn Fein candidate. He wondered why neither he nor Grainne had never mentioned that infamous weekend to her, nor the time he hid down there after that embarrassing debate. There was so much about him that she didn't know, and undoubtedly the reverse was true as well, but right now marriage seemed the right option for both of them, as he listened to that laugh that always made him shiver as he told her his wild adventures. Then she wanted to know why the fight with Caomhin would enlarge his workload. He didn't even want to talk about this, as he despised politicians who let someone else do all the dirty work for him, even though Caomhin seemed to like doing the dirty work. But, if she was to be his wife, he’d have to tell her, so he did. She seemed to pay increasingly less attention, as if there was something else more pressing on her mind that she was just leading up to.
“There’s just one more thing: Am I the person you really want to marry, or is it Grainne?”
Seamus was dreading this question, but knew that the one thing she wanted was an honest answer.
“I guess in a perfect world I could marry both you and Grainne and things could be the way they were this summer forever, but it’s not so we can’t. Unless she can persuade Diarmuid to move to Utah with us and convert to Mormonism.”
The last piece of humour was ill-judged but the essential honesty of the first statement convinced her that marrying him would be the right decision. The only thing she asked was that he propose formally, so they went out to buy a ring. He suspected that she knew that he wasn't going to splash out on anything expensive. It was another of those times that he felt an alien in Dublin, as down in Cork he would have known exactly where to go to get an inexpensive but tasteful ring, the place with the white cat, probably. Eventually they found a place on one of the streets off O’Connell street where they found one that he thought matched her personality perfectly, elegant but slightly outré, a sterling silver Celtic Cross. They crossed the bridge and walked down to Stephen’s Green, where she sat on a bench and he knelt down and proposed. He took her to that vegetarian place that he liked, let her order whatever she wanted, though he only had a main course and a herbal tea himself. They made the wedding arrangements as they waited to be served, she was happy to forego the ritual of wearing a flashy, uncomfortable dress until they had the druidic wedding, which relieved Seamus no end. It was so different from what his parents and probably hers as well wanted, and he had one of his flashbacks to the time when his father was accumulating a stamp collection for him in the hope that it might prove a wise investment for his wedding. It probably would pay for this wedding, he thought, forlornly, as his eyes focused on a random point in the distance beyond the tofu and the couscous and the raspberry and loganberry tea. On the way home they passed a number of posters advertising an anti-war rally the following Saturday. He didn't want to be seen to be stopping to look at any, but he gathered that the tribes of Ireland would be gathering in Temple Bar to protest at the coming American invasion of Afghanistan.
To Seamus, this posed an insufferable dilemma. He really wanted to be there, but he knew that if he was seen to oppose the Sinn Fein line again he would be putting his life in more danger. But if he gave in, he would become everything he hated, a stooge of the establishment, a lackey, a patsy. Thus, on this night when he should have been looking forward to a life of marital bliss, he was agonising about whether he would go to an anti-war rally or not. He decided he would have to go, and the next night, when he was married and felt that the whole world belonged to him, he felt defiant enough to email the organisers and offer himself as a speaker, without informing the leadership of this. Perhaps he had some sort of death wish, perhaps his guilt at the resources he was using and the knowledge that he was too westernised to go and live a simple life in Asia or anywhere else was too much to bear. Perhaps he thought that Jenny would be better off if he was dead, perhaps he was just following his conscience. In any case he gave Jenny one of the best lays of her short but not sexually inactive life that night, so beneath his bruised, fractured ego there must have been some procreative instinct. Afterwards Jenny rang her family and Seamus sensed that she wanted to tell them what had just happened, but that she was afraid of how they would react. He felt her pain. He wanted to tell her his grand plan as well, but was too busy mentally composing his speech to the anti-war rally in his head, though he’d got no confirmation that he would speak; his head had been set on an inexorable course of rhetoric composition in a way that took him back to his college days.










































The next morning he found out that he was going to speak and he got the sort of buzz that other men would get from realising that they were going to spend the rest of their life with a beautiful woman. He convinced Jenny to come along, not by suggesting that they were newlyweds and should be doing everything together, but that it was going to be a nice day, here in Ireland, and he wanted it to be a nice day all over the world.
They dressed casually, Seamus wearing a saffron top and a flared pair of corduroys. He thought of hennaing the words ‘Peace’ and ‘Love’ on his face but realised that that would be an ironic bridge too far for some.
It was what our Victorian ancestors would have called a gay day. Against advice from the organisers, Seamus had chosen to march with everyone else, from the fluffy hippies with flowers in their hair to the socialists in their black denim to the weird fringe groups like the Sparticists. Rather than saving his voice for the speech at the end, he joined passionately in the chanting, though deep in his heart he knew it was like the sound a tree made when it fell in a forest when no-one was there. He realised that what he was doing was essentially masturbatory, that while it might help to get the anger out of his own system, it wasn't going to elicit any sort of response from the neo-conservative cabal in Washington. Yet as he shouted he was constantly on the look-out for former friends from Cork that had probably deserted him since he became a Sinn Fein TD, knowing that he would remove some of the focus from their anger towards the Washington and Westminister Warlords. He really should have kept his head down and tried to remain anonymous but that wasn't in his nature, he was really looking for a past that he’d never really enjoyed, a golden age before he was attacked that wasn't all that golden really.
It wasn't till he had been lifted up onto the platform as if in some 80’s stadium-rock video, leaving Jenny to fend for herself in the mosh-pit, that he began to recognise any of the faces in the crowd. He wasn't the first to speak, but rather than listen carefully to what the others were saying, his attention was fixed to a bevy of dreadlocks under which a half dozen pairs of eyes were staring at him. He had to squint to try to pick them out, to make out their faces in the bustling, amorphous throng that swayed as if being conducted by some high-cheekboned Germanic maestro. Yet it seemed they were moving more than the usual chaos-theory domino-effect imperatives of crowds-and-power gatherings would have impelled them to, they were jostling their way to the front of the crowd, to just beneath the platform, to where their identity was made plain to Seamus. It was indeed Man 4, Moon Child, Elf and the others from his days on the organic farm earlier that year. It was a shock to see them here, his real identity laid bare as his body had been in some of his scariest dreams, though it must have been a shock to them to find out that he was a Shinner as well. And there was something oneiric, surreal about the way they edged their way forward to the front of the crowd, silently, their angry eyes focused on Seamus like a starved hunting dog on its prey. Seamus tried to look composed, trying to focus on the back of the crowd where the faces were blurry like a Monet, but his former hippy friends were there, at the front of the crowd, like a buxom girl’s exposed cleavage, making ineluctable demands on his attention, except it was his Adam’s Apple that was expanding as a result of their presence.
It was a nerve-racking situation. Someone who was better at dealing with stressful situations would have gone to some psychological happy place, but Seamus was too cynical to imagine that there were any happy places, that the red-in-tooth-and-claw cycle of death and rebirth went on under the surface of the most placid Japanese gardens and untouched rural babbling brooks. It was all he could do to take deep breaths but as he looked down he could sense that his former friends were confident that they were rattling him with their stare-a-thon much more than he was rattling the powers that be.
Finally it came his time to speak. Like everyone else, he dispensed with the sort of formalities that he had to go through in the Dail, and just began, “Friends...”, but before he got any further the congries of erstwhile friends shouted “Judas!” in unison. He could only try to keep going, but as he began to criticise the American government for their rash, brutal response to the twin towers attack, the continuing shouts of “hypocrite” and “Traitor” made him more and more jittery.
“Friends, we’re all here united in a common purpose, to oppose imperialism, to bring about a more peaceful world with a safer environment for our children...”
“You’re a fucking liar!”, shouted Man 4 in response, at which point the chief speaker felt compelled to intervene and remind everyone that this was a peaceful, democratic protest and that a wide range of views were going to be given an airing. This quietened his supposed former friends, but it also took the wind out of Seamus’ sails, making him feel like the nerdy child in school who was only allowed speak because the teacher had hushed the rest of the class down. He uttered the rest of it with little conviction, as if he’d taken their comments to heart. The applause at the end was muted and the thanks he got from the chief speaker were polite at best. He looked down towards the flush of hippies as if to say thanks in an dryly ironic way for ruining one of the most important days of his life. Then he scanned the crowd to find the face of Jenny, which was contorted into a frown by her concerns about why these people were shouting at Seamus and what he might have done to hurt him. When the speech was over he lifted Jenny up onto the platform with him and hoped the crowd would disperse. He held onto Jenny’s hand and apologised for letting himself be intimidated by these people, who weren’t dispersing to the coffee houses like everyone else.
Jenny looked down at them and asked Seamus if he actually knew these people and what he might have done to antagonise them. After Seamus told them, she took the highly unusual step of confronting them, leaving Seamus a bit stunned and wondering whether this was how she perceived her marital duties, when all he really wanted was her love.
“Are you happy you’ve ruined my husband’s speech? All he’s ever done for you is sow your fields, tend your crops, and this is how you repay him.”
Another time Seamus would have pondered on the biblical resonance’s of this statement, but right now he was as stunned at seeing this side of Jenny as the hippies were at seeing this side of him. Their response merely, as expressed by Man 4, was to say that he shouldn’t have brought his negative murderers karma to their farm. Jenny’s response was to say, loudly, that her husband would never hurt a fly, though she knew that, although this was true in a literal sense, he did have a history of murderous violence behind him, though not in the way the hippies might have imagined. There were some raised eyebrows among the other stragglers, Seamus hoped that there were no members of the fourth estate among them.
“So what’s he doing in Sinn Fein?”, asked Man 4.
Jenny let Seamus field this one, which he did by raising both hands in peace v-signs and awaiting a quid pro quo from Man 4 and the others. When he was confident that he’d gotten it, he jumped off the platform and let Jenny fall into his arms. “It’s a long story”, he gambitted, “I can explain it to you in the park if you like. What time’s the bus back to Cork?”
“Um, we came up in the van. We’re going to chill here tonight.”
“The park it is then?”, he asked, in an Aussie inquiry inflection sort of way, to which they agreed, though he could sense that they remained unconvinced about his karma and kept themselves at a distance. As they walked towards St Stephen’s Green, Jenny held his hand and Man 4 remained a foot or two away from them, while the rest trailed a few yards behind, as if Man 4 was an envoy sent by the native Celts to negotiate with the steel-clad Romans.
He seemed determined to hold himself to the agreement he’d made with Seamus to only talk about the Sinn Fein thing when he got to the park, and kept himself to smalltalk like, “When did you get married? What happened Grainne?”
“Grainne, Grainne. I love her, Jenny, here loves her, she’s the second most perfect woman I’ve ever met and there’s nothing we’d like better than for her to come up to Dublin and live with us. But it’s not to be. The fates have another plan for us.”
Man 4 looked puzzled, as if trying to figure out whether the real Seamus was the one talking to him now or the one who was singing nationalist songs in a bar in the Northside of Cork, and broke the agreement by asking, “What are you doing in Sinn Fein, man?”
Seamus, who was convinced that he would be able to resolve this dichotomy, just tried to sound relaxed when he repeated that it was a long story, and indeed it was, even if you left out all the really gory bits. Then, casually, he asked Man 4 what he’d been up to. He’d had a good harvest this year and would be able to relax for the winter, as the demand for organic produce was increasing all the time. He even had saved enough money to be able to spend a few months in India in the Winter. Seamus just repeated that Imperialist, historically inaccurate name for Bharat or Hindustan to himself and let the images of psychedelic sadhus smoking ganga by the banks of the Ganges float through his head. Then he realised what an awkward position he’d put himself in, that this would have been the perfect time to tell Man 4 and his friends of his plans to go to Asia, if only he’d told his wife before. But, as they passed the stragglers and the kids who were also going to the park to get pissed on cheap cider and the cops who were giving them the usual suspicious glances, he was confident in a Taoist, Micawberish way that a solution would present itself.
Soon they were in the park, and with the grass under their feet the hippies felt like they’d already returned home. Soma went over to one of the flower beds which Autumn had in it’s withering, cadaverous grasp, as if her sublime, ethereal beauty could breathe life back into them. Oisin let her go with an if-you-love-somebody-set-them-free gesture, though after she had skipped off, he looked around to make sure no-one was admiring her taut, calipygous hips as she bent down to touch the flowers. In a strange way, this emboldened Seamus, who realised that none of them could accept all aspects of the hippy ethos, any more than they could a more homogenising weltanschaung like Christianity or Islam. So when Man 4 asked him to finally explain what he was doing in Sinn Fein, he told them something very close to the truth, omitting only the fact that the two thugs were dead.
As he told the story, the hippies nodded their heads in various degrees of assent, but there was one thing that was still troubling Man 4 that he wanted to clear up.
“But when they asked you to stand for them, you could have just said ‘no’, couldn’t you?”
Seamus scratched his three-day stubble and wondered if he could have or not.
“I really don't know. They did put themselves on the line for me. It didn't seem like that much to ask in return, and...”
“But you didn't have to campaign really hard, did you? You couldn't have done, unless you really believed in what you were standing for, could you?”
“Believe me, I’ve asked myself the same question over and over and over again. I tried to convince myself that I want the exact same things that Sinn Fein do, and Jim helped me there, but it was never convincing to myself. Then I rationalised that I was doing it to give Grainne, then Jenny, a better life - at one stage both of them together, it’s a bit complicated - and I guess that’s what I still believe. But deep down I think what I really want is what everyone else in this day and age seems to want - to be rich and famous. Thing is, I’ve already alienated the party establishment so much in the first month I’ve been a TD that I’m likely to be deselected before the next election. So I’ll probably be back on the dole within four or five years.”
Man 4 scratched his goatee and said, “Y’know, the money you earn as a TD in five years wouldn’t set you up for life here but, y’know, if you put an adequate amount away, you could go and live in India forever.
Seamus couldn't help but grin a little as he looked over at Jenny who was realising that that was his plan all the time, and said, “You know, that’s not a bad idea.” Man 4, for his part, realised that Seamus was indeed one of them, he leaned over to hug Seamus and apologise for fucking up his speech. Seamus said that it was nothing, that he could understand why they felt so betrayed, and then he invited them back to his place to stay for the night, casting a glance over at Jenny to make sure she approved.
Within an hour Seamus’ floor was covered in hemp seed bar crumbs and organic yoghurt, and the air was filled with dope smoke. Seamus and Jenny sat overlooking the scene on their double bed, like a Roman couple overseeing a decadent orgy, though Seamus seemed to be the least decadent one there. Jenny seemed to hope that Seamus would passively inhale enough smoke to become more forthcoming but she could sense that his middle class neurosis was still clinging onto him like the eel to that woman’s vagina in The Tin Drum. She didn't want to let this opportunity to find out what his long term plans were, so she tried to call everyone to attention. First she shouted out the words ‘people’ and ‘guys’ and ‘dudes’ but none of that seemed to work, so she clapped her hands and went over to the stereo to turn down the Buddha Bar CD that was playing and asked if anyone knew how to make some good hash tea. Elf put up his hand and then Man 4 remembered how militantly anti-smoking Seamus was. While Elf went over to the kettle and started looking for some tea bags in the cupboards Seamus asked Jenny why she was so eager to get him high.
“It’s our party, we should be setting an example to the rest of them.”
Seamus looked around and argued that they didn't seem to need any encouragement. Jenny laughed in agreement, but said that much as she liked the sober version of him, the high version was even more fun. It didn't really matter, as she’d put him in a position where he couldn’t possibly refuse the libation that Elf was so meticulously preparing. He knew that once the potion passed his not-very-immune-to-narcotics lips, he would be forthcoming about those plans and he could only hope that they didn't seem as ridiculous to her as they did to a part of himself. After Elf had brought it over, in the manner of a servant to an English aristocrat, after which he morphed back into a swirling, flailing disciple of Terpsichore, Seamus could sense her counting the minutes until that vacant, Zen-like look came into his eyes. At first he was disconcerted by her cynicism and manipulativeness, but after a while, hey, shit happened, it didn't seem to matter all that much. But still, even in his hazy, somnolent state, he didn't want her to get the impression that she’d been allowed to manipulate him.
“So, I guess you want to know why I reacted the way I did when Man 4 suggested that we go and live in India, then.”
“I think I already know the answer.”
“Well, you wouldn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to have worked it out., and y’know...”
“What?”
“Nothing...”, he replied, having dismissed the idea of telling her about Arthur Conan Doyle’s Irish origins and how Sherlock, for him, represented the apogee of the Enlightenment tradition of Logical positivism, but he thought he’d leave that for some other time; “... what do you think the answer is?”
“Do you want to save up enough money to go and live in India forever?”
“Yes. Well, not India, necessarily. South East Asia, maybe, or Latin America.”
“Do you want me to come with you?”
“That wasn't my plan at first, but yes.”
“Why haven’t you told me before now?”
“Well, um I guess I was scared that that wasn't what you wanted and that you might leave me and tell someone and I’d be found dead in the woods.”
“Right... so, when did you decide that I might actually want to come?”
“Oh... I’m not sure, I think it was that time you were dancing along the cliffs down in West Cork and you seemed happier than any time since we came up here, except now, maybe.”
“So... what if you decided that I wouldn’t go for that plan?”
“That was the worst-case scenario. Well, second worst, after being killed. I figured, though, that I’d be able to keep it from you by some means and that if you didn't like it you could leave me and if you didn't leave me or want to come with me then I could have fucked off and left you. It wouldn’t have been the end of the world for you, you’d only have been 25 or 26, almost any guy would have been happy to marry you.”
“Well, I’m not sure about that, but thanks for thinking of me, anyway, but... what happens if you don't save up enough money and you don't get your seat back at the next election?”
“Then we’re fucked. At least I’m fucked. But I’m not going to let that happen. I’m really careful with money. I’m part Jewish, remember?”
“You’re part Jewish?”
“Did I never tell you that before?”
Jenny, who was a little high herself, said that she didn't and then shouted out, “Hey, everyone, Seamus is part-Jewish”, which, unsurprisingly, brought whatever rambling monologues that were going on to a shuddering halt.
“Yeah... it’s true, but, y’know, Jesus and Karl Marx and Mendelson and Christ was a Jew like me. Not to mention Woody Allen and Abie Hoffman. Free Palestine!”
That was enough to allow the murmuring discourse to resume, and Seamus was confident that everyone in the room was open-minded enough to judge someone on the basis of their actions rather than their ethnicity or religion. He didn't even reprimand her for making his semitism so public, they just started to plan the rest of their lives, though Seamus, with his far superior sense of geography gained partly from spending quite a few afternoons in Waterstones reading lonely planet guides had a big advantage here. He leaned towards India because of their ancient tradition of vegetarian cookery, ideally somewhere near Goa. But Thailand had it’s attractions too, it was so easy to get a visa and there were so many westerners there that it wouldn’t seem like they were away at all. Latin America was a place where there was already a burgeoning organic farming scene, but the fear of robbery or disease made him lean Eastwards. Jenny didn't seem to care as long as there was sun and beaches. They vowed to go on the internet some time when the screen wouldn’t appear all blurry and Monet-like and make some definite plans. But then Seamus decided that he was being an inhospitable host and decided to mingle.
When he climbed down from the bed and started chatting to Man 4 and Elf, the first thing they wanted to know was if what Jenny had just blurted out was the truth.
“Yup. Part Irish, part Jewish, a member of the two great wandering races.”
“So how come you want to go to India rather than work on a Kibbutz?”
“Too many issues with the Israeli government”, was Seamus predictable response, though he was vaguely aware that more Muslims were being killed in Kashmir than in Palestine.
“So you really think you can pull this off, hanging around here for five years, then fucking off to live in Asia?”
“I really don't know. I thought the biggest obstacle would be Jenny, but now it turns out that she wants this just as much as me. I guess it’s the Sinn Fein leadership I’ve got to worry about now.”
“You think you might end up with an ice-pick in your head?”
Seamus laughed sardonically and replied: “I don't think they’re going to follow me to the ends of the Earth, it’s really my family that I’m worried about.”
“I thought you didn't get on that well with them.”
“Yeah, but not so much that I want to see them killed”, he replied, sounding a little alarmed, and Man 4 realised what an insensitive question he had asked.
“So you’re just going to be a stooge for Sinn Fein for the next five years, then?”
“Well”, he laughed, “I haven’t been doing such a good job so far, my integrity has kept tripping me up. The funny thing is, I hate the Anglo-Saxons just as much as they do, just for a whole different set of reasons.”
Man 4 scratched his beard and wondered if they had more in common than he might have thought.
“I can tell that you’re basically a peace-loving guy and that’s why I was so amazed to see you in Sinn Fein. But y’know... remember when we were all down at my place for the Midsummerfest and we were talking about all our crazy ecoterrorist plans?”
“Vaguely”, Seamus averred.
“Yeah, well, maybe they weren't so crazy after all. Maybe those English thugs came to your house for a reason, maybe you ended up in Sinn Fein for a reason.”
Seamus’ affected a puzzled expression that suggested that he didn't know what Man 4 might have been talking about.
“C’mon, man, it all makes sense. We have all these ideas about how to change the world for the better, you know the people who have the wherewithal to make it happen. They still have all those guns, right?”
“I don't know, I’m not really in the loop, but... what’re you saying, that all those plans you had weren't just the drugs talking, that you’d really carry them out given the opportunity?”
“‘Course we would, man. Because we hate violence. We hate to see the violence that the corporations are doing to the Earth, we need to stop them. And we know they’re not invincible any more, after what happened a few weeks ago.”
Seamus looked even more stunned.
“Alright, it’s not that I sympathise with the likes of Al-Queda. When the attacks happened first, I thought it was people on our side. When it turned out to be those Islamic scumbags I was horrified. I didn't know what to think. But now I think that anything that discourages air travel is a good thing, in the bigger scheme of things.”
Seamus’ jaw dropped even lower than it had before.
“I know that all sounds really cold-blooded and utilitarian. But that’s the way they think; they’ll force people to endure any form of suffering as long as they think it might lead to economic growth in the long run. We have to start thinking like them if we’re going to win. And that’s why we need your help.”
“I...I, fuck...I... please tell me that this is all a big joke, that you know really that I don't know anybody who knows where the guns are, and that if I did I wouldn’t be able to get my hands on them in a million years.”
“I’m deadly serious”, he replied, and while Seamus was trying to regain his equilibrium, a plan was hatching in Man 4’s head.
“Let’s see, suppose we set up an ecoterrorist organisation, give ourselves a name like, Oh, I don't know, Humans for Gaia or something. We meet with the leadership of the IRA and an arrange a small handover of guns and explosives. We agree to attack a number of mutually agreed targets, accepting complete responsibility. For example, the distribution centres for Supermarkets in Britain, something like that. Everybody’s happy.”
Seamus gulped and replied, “Except the people who get killed, and the people who have to do without food.”
“But they won't have to go without food; they’ll just have to go back to using locally sourced produce. That’s the whole point.”
“Man, I hate to burst your bubble, but none of this is ever going to happen. I don't know anyone in the IRA leadership. Even if I did, they’d never go for a scheme like this. It’s just too... crazy, basically.”
“Seamus, it was crazy for Gandhi to think he could get the British out of India through passive resistance. It was crazy for Osama to think he could bring the twin towers crashing to the ground. Just get us one meeting with the leadership of Sinn Fein, man, that’s all I asked. We helped you when you were in trouble, didn't we?”
“I can’t make any promises, but I’ll do what I can. But y’know, I really think they’ve given up on violence.”
“If you really believe that, then I think you’re the crazy one.”
Seamus wished he’d stayed up on the bed with Jenny and not let this new can of worms be opened.
“Y’know, if you really do want to become an ecoterrorist, and it sounds horribly like you really do, I think biological terror might be the way forward.”
“Why’d you say that?”
Seamus related the whole weird, bizarre, almost implausible story of how he was probably responsible for that food scare in the yUcKy. Though he showed increasing signs of amazement as the story was relayed, in the end, Man 4 didn't need convincing, this was not the sort of thing that anyone could have made up. Man 4 was happy to take this as a sign.
“You’re the One, man. Do you have any idea how many people you might have saved by doing this? How many people have stopped eating meat altogether? How fewer animals may be killed? How much more rainforest will survive? You can do this for us, man, I know you can. You’re the One.”
Seamus was surprised that Man 4 was into the futuristic, technocentic Matrix movies rather than, say, the Lord of the Rings or Star Wars. Perhaps it was the influence of the hash tea, but the idea that he, this thin, often bearded 30-year old part-Jew was chosen by some higher power to save the Earth was beguiling. He promised he would set up this meeting some time.
By now the party was reaching its chill-out stage, people were leaning on each other or clutching onto whatever soft materials they could find. Seamus elected to go back and lie down in bed with Jenny. Though no-one would have been shocked if they’d had sex in front of them, they were both too tired.
The following morning everyone was a bit too wasted to indulge in much conversation, but as Seamus was handing Man 4 his guarana tea he asked if he was really serious about what he was talking about the night before.
“‘Course I was serious, man. When do you think you can get us this meeting?”
“It’s a case of ‘if’ rather than ‘when’. I’ve seriously got myself on the wrong side of the people you want to meet. But I’ll do all I can.”
Cue handshakes and bear hugs all round, after which Seamus went back to bed and wondered what weird turns his life would take next. He didn't know how he was going to effect the rapprochement that he’d need to regain the ear of the leadership. He didn't know what beans they would spill if it didn't happen. He didn't know if he’d be expected to help with planning their attacks, or if his work would be considered to have been done. He tried to console himself by saying that uncertainty was everyone’s lot in these wild, topsy-turvy times, but he knew that his own life had become more subject to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune than most, at least those of us in the west.
He didn't discuss any of this with Jenny, preferring to fantasise about the possibility of going to live in Asia together, though the prospect seemed more remote than ever.
He reckoned that by knuckling down and working hard, he might get himself back into the leadership’s good books. He did all his constituency work assiduously, going down to Cork once a week and listening to the concerns of Cork’s northsiders with Job-like patience. He made a few speeches in the Dail on environmental issues, which, though not lacking in passion, were calculated not to ruffle too many feathers. The one thing that kept him going in these dull, autumnal days was Jenny and their mutual plans to go and live in Asia together. He was relieved so much to finally be saving some money, they weren't going out much at nights, staying in watching TV and videos, reading the papers and books he got from the library. He had no idea if he’d be able to keep up this lugubrious, bourgeois existence for another four years or more, with only the vague hope of a better life in the future to sustain them, but it was going reasonably well so far.
By the time of the next meeting of the Sinn Fein parliamentary party, he was back on good enough terms with the leader to ask him if he could meet up with his friends for a discussion, his earlier outbursts clearly having been put down to his youthful exuberance. But what was it his friends wanted to talk about, then?
“Well, it’s about the peace process, and some, um, new directions in which you might consider taking it, looking at the process from some new angles, exploring some other avenues, y’know... I really think it’s better that you meet them personally.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Yeah. Just name a time and place.”
Seamus was amazed that such a vague proposal had been accepted, and wondered if the fashion for ‘blue skies’ thinking had infected the Sinn Fein party or if they were just making a gesture to show that they’d forgiven him for his earlier outbursts, or perhaps to get a sense of where it was that Seamus had come from and what it was that he believed in. In any case he was emailing Man 4 later on that evening to confirm that a meeting had been organised.
It took a few days for Man 4 to get back to him, Seamus guessed that either it was coming up to harvest time or else he was just too lazy to get the generator going. Man 4 was also surprised that Seamus had gotten beck to him so soon. He wanted to know how formal the meeting would be, if they’d have to get dressed up and if the ever-vigilant Dublin media would sense that something was afoot if they saw a group of hippies entering the Sinn Fein offices in Dublin. Seamus figured that it would be better if the leadership came down to Cork, though Seamus would have to give more concrete plans than he already had if such a meeting was ever to take place. He ended his email by passing on the leader’s email address, realising that this could move him away from the epicentre of the terrible beauty that he may have been bringing into the world. This was probably what he wanted, to disengage from the whole thing and hope he could ride out the next four years without anyone making the link; he even fantasised that the leader would be so grateful that he’d agree to Seamus’ own self-centred plan.
Needless to mention, it didn't pan out that way. Within a week, at a time when he was trying to sit down and watch TV in peace with his lovely wife after an exhausting day in the Dail, his phone rang. He got up lugubriously and saw that it was the leader. He walked into the kitchen and wondered what he could want at this late hour.
“Hi, Seamus”, he began in his Ulster brogue. “I’ve been emailing your friend Man 4. He’s a really fascinating character, with some amazing ideas. I really want to go and meet him, trouble is, I don't have the faintest idea how to find him. I was hoping that you could help me there.”
Puzzled, Seamus asked why man 4 couldn't give directions himself. His reply was that it was so far out of the way that he’d undoubtedly have to ask for directions several times along the way and this would draw attention to the fact that he was there, and that people would ask why.
“Couldn't you just say that you were on holiday or something?”
“Look, Seamus, are you going to lead me down there or aren’t you?”, he asked, that sinister tone creeping into his voice.
Seamus looked out the window for a few seconds and took a deep breath and asked what would be a good time. He was going down to Cork for some constituency work the following Monday, he said, to which the response he heard was a generally fumbling about for a few seconds, followed by the words, Can you stay there for the night? Tuesday’s good for me.” Seamus nodded, a habit he’d never gotten out of, then acquiestently said that was fine. He gave his address in Cork and glumly said goodbye and switched the phone off and sat back down.
“Who was that”, asked Jenny.
“Nothing, just political stuff.”
She sighed, recognising the tone that meant that there wasn't going to be any lovemaking that night. He knew that she knew that as well, the two of them having been together long enough to have evolved a systems of semiotics to communicate non-verbally, which was a relief to him because, in spite of the fact that he was a language graduate, and however much he loved getting up to speak in the Dail, in some deep part of himself he was deeply distrustful of words. He compensated by letting her have the remote control for the night, letting her watch what she wanted, which was any old shit.
The following Monday he was back in his old place in Cork, trying to sleep, though a part of him kept him awake, the part that feared the horrible nightmares he’d have more than the bleary-eyed languor of the insomniac. Eventually the fatigue from the Stakhanovite labours of the day before won out over the fears of how his subconscious would punish him for what he was about to do. But he woke several times during the night, having variously dreamt that he was a titubant English Krusty and a balaclava’d terrorist with blood dripping from his hands, and mysteriously, that he was back down by his seaside town walking along by the rocks, but found shops where there had been only rocks and stones and the sort of wild flowers that thrived on saline air. After the final dream, he couldn't get back to sleep and began the long, tortuous process of rationalising his dreams, as if his subconscious was a rational other entity who he could have a debate with. He knew that this wasn't the case, but all the same, his rationalisations went broadly as follows:
- If any terrorism did come about because of this meeting, it wasn't really terrorism, it was counter-terrorism, the real terrorists were the corporations that were destroying the Earth.

- It’s impossible to change society fundamentally without hurting some people. The End justifies the means. If we kept going down our current path then life on Earth would end in a century. What were a few deaths in comparison with the apocalypse?

- History wasn't made by individuals, but by social forces. If Seamus didn't catalyse this ecoterrorist process then someone else inevitably would.

- This was something that had to happen for the good of the Earth, a.k.a. Gaia was making him do it.
























He was still rationalising like this when the doorbell rang and he took a look at his watch and realised that the appointed hour had arrived. He panicingly put some clothes on and got up and answered the door. The leader took one look at his shabby, crumpled, clothes, and asked him in a disgruntled schoolteacher voice if he’d been asleep.
“Er, no, I, um was just about to get out of bed.”
“Relax, Seamus, I know how constituency work can take it out of you. I’m so glad I have someone else to do it for me. Make some breakfast for yourself, why dontcha?”
This relaxed Seamus and he offered the leader some tea or coffee, and asked him how his journey down was.
He shouldn’t have gotten him started, as this precipitated a discussion about the housing and transport problems in Dublin, which were closer to his heart than Seamus had imagined. But when Seamus asked him what the solution was, he didn't really have one. He was pleased that the Irish population was getting back up towards it’s pre-famine levels, but realised the heavy demands this made on the environment. He was as disdainful of the suburban sprawl that was engulfing the countryside as Seamus was, but he was enenthusiastic about the prospect of high-density urban housing as well, and as for one-off rural housing...
“Maybe the solution is to get people to live more simply, without their big cars and big houses, we managed without them for thousands and thousands of years”, offered Seamus.
“Yeah... but it’s really difficult to get the genie back in the bottle; when people have had all these things it’s really hard to do without them.”
“Yeah, but they’ll have to sooner or later, when the oil and the gas run out.”
“Well, we’re not going to win any votes by telling people that.”
Seamus started to chew his muesli and frowned inwardly at the idea that if politics was the art of the possible, then telling the truth was beyond the pale of what was viable.
When he’d had a sip of guarana tea and his brain was working again, he thought that a bit of small talk was appropriate. He asked if anyone had recognised him on the way down, he replied that he’d been wearing shades and that gave him enough anonymity. Then he jocularly asked Seamus if he was the one who’d painted the letters IRA on a nearby wall.
“No, but hopefully they’ll be able to vote for me at the next election”, he gambitted, and looked at the leader’s face for any indication that Man 4 had told him of his plan. Thankfully, there wasn't, instead it got him started on a spiel about how the voting age should be reduced to 15 or 16. If the political wasn't personal for everyone, thought Seamus, then it certainly was for this bearded, bespectacled gent across his breakfast table.
“I mean, we give them so many responsibilities, we make them study so hard for so long, we make them work in shitty jobs and tax the things they buy, and don't let them vote - it’s taxation without representation.”
“At least they get to vote on who gets to stay on those reality TV shows”, Seamus joked, which appeared to send the leader into a reverie where he wondered how western civilisation had reached this apparent nadir.
Soon the rumblings in Seamus’ stomach had been subdued and they were in the car on the way to West Cork. He briefly worried that his mother might see him, but then he realised that she was at school, teaching the students in their grey uniforms under grey skies the grey science of accountancy when he was perhaps about to catalyse one of the most important developments in the history of the nation, perhaps even of the world, about to heal the fissure between Gaia and her Celtic sons and daughters that had ripped our souls out and sold them to the Anglo-Saxons for a few high-tech beans from which grew a tree of consumerism and greed that led to a land of permanent dissatisfaction. Perhaps it wouldn’t be nearly so monumental, perhaps nothing would come of this, perhaps he could forget about it and go back to his tenuous plan to save up to go and live in Asia. But he felt that a Rubicon was being crossed, and that when they got to the other side that things would be changed, changed utterly.
He felt he needed to know just how serious the leader was about this whole endeavour, but he didn't quite know how to broach the subject. As they reached the edge of the city, where the homes and gardens metamorphosed into fields, he began by asking why Caomhin hadn't been invited along.
“I think the fewer people we keep in the loop in this thing, the better. The truth is, I wouldn’t even have told you if I didn't need your help getting down here.”
Seamus gulped and realised how serious he actually was. He asked if he knew what a radically different agenda Man 4 and his friends had from him.
“I’m not so sure about that, Seamus. I think they want to keep life on Earth going for as long as possible. I don't see much point in getting the six counties back if everybody dies within a century.”
“So you do think we’re going to get the six counties back, then?”
“Oh, definitely, within ten to fifteen years. There’s no point in fighting that war anymore. But don't tell anyone that I said that. I think it’s time we started taking the twenty-six counties back, from the corporations, from the multinationals, from the chain stores, from the IMF.”
Seamus was stunned to hear him talking like this, to find out what a kindred spirit he was, this mild-mannered boffin who the media and the political establishment had gone so far out of their way to depict as being a monster.
“And you have the wherewithal to do this?”
“‘Course. We just need a whole new set of people to do this. Our existing army is either on parole or in some cushy job in the Belfast assembly. But your friend Man Four - what’s his real name?”
Seamus didn't know.
“Man Four, he’s got the passion, he’s got the ideas, whether he has the moral strength you need to know that whatever you do is for the best, no matter how horrible or grotesque it seems at the time - what do you think?”
“I think he’s a peace-loving sort of guy”, Seamus offered, diffidently.
“Christ, Seamus, we all love peace, but sometimes the only way you can achieve peace is with a sword. You ought to know that by now.”
Seamus didn't want to argue that that was an opinion rather than an indisputable fact. Instead he asked how their attacks could be planned, in this age of 24/7 surveillance.
“Look around you”, he imprecated in response, and as Seamus looked around the green fields he would indeed have been surprised to see a security camera anywhere.
“It’s like the so-called war on terror that the Americans are trying to fight right now. No matter how many Arabs they kill, they’re’ll always be a few left to keep on the struggle. It’s like a frog jumping across a room, if it keeps jumping half the distance again it’ll never quite get to the other side. It’s like quantum particles, there’s always a little part of the universe that we’ll never quite get a grip on.”
Seamus found this idea beguiling, that he was a random particle in a universe that otherwise seemed ordered and coherent. Though he despised the ideas of Al-Queada and their ilk, he loved to see the arrogance of Protestant, Anglo-Saxon America punctured with such ease and alacrity, finding out to their horror that not everybody wanted to live the way they did, with big houses and big cars and big stomachs.
This reverie kept Seamus going well through the bumpy road that led to Man 4’s house, interrupted only by the need to give directions now and again. When they finally got there, Man 4 was in the garden, shaking the soil from one of his organic lettuces when the Silver, not-very-fuel-efficient Swedish car that brought Seamus to this part of the world pulled up, like a tractor arriving in a Russian village in a Stalin era propaganda painting. Man 4 brushed the soil off his hands and shook both of their hands, Seamus’ with a jocular familiarity, the leader’s with a diffident reverence. Seamus fantasised that this meeting would be eulogised many times in the future, from some distant age of Gaiaist eco-communtarian utopia, the way Siddharta’s epiphany under the bo tree in Bodgaya was in the East today. How would people picture the car, from photographs or shells they might have seen in museums, or the clothes they wore spun from petrochemicals? The truth was that the culture that they were living in, no matter how transient and ephemeral it seemed, would leave traces that would last long after the last human being was dead.
Thinking perhaps of more mundane things, Man 4 invited them both in for some tea. It seemed to Seamus that they’d already struck up such a good relationship over the net that they didn't need to use Seamus as an Anna Pavlova Scherer, as he’d expected, which left him feeling a bit sidelined, like a diplomat who’d done all the hard work before the politicians came to take the credit.
The leader was fascinated with all the ideas that Man 4 was passing off as his own, though Seamus had heard many of his friends expressing them that time during the summer. There were a few that he hadn't heard before, like putting contraceptives in the water supply in areas where the population was growing uncontrollably, or even it was shrinking, in the case of Protestant areas in the north. But there was one nagging question that the leader felt compelled to ask. They had the guns; had Man 4 got the numbers?”
“Well, the eco-warrior community is definitely growing. The problem is a lack of cohesion, it’s mostly people that just want to do their own thing. Most of them, understandably, have an issue with any sort of leadership, most of them, too, are opposed to any sort of violence. But I think we only need a thousand or so really committed people - how many did you have at the peak of the struggle up north?”
“About four hundred active.”
“Four Hundred? And you did all that damage?”
He nodded in response, and asked if they had any contacts in the yUcKy or US.
“Some in England, I guess they might have some in the states. I’ll need to get the computer going to find their addresses.” He looked over at Seamus as he said this, and Seamus knew that it was going to be his job to get the generator going. In the meantime, Man 4 was eager to know how they were going to get the explosives over there.
“The beauty of semtex is that you need such a small amount. Most of the explosive is actually made from ammonium nitrate, which is the most common agricultural fertiliser that is used in this part of the world.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“No, not at all. If the yUcKy had been entirely organic for the last 40 years then there’d have been no IRA campaign.”
Seamus and Man 4 savoured this delicious irony, that a food policy designed to insulate against the fear of hunger left them so vulnerable to the fear of a horrible death, however much the chances of that happening were exaggerated. After which Man 4 said they were going up to use the computer in a minute, which Seamus took as his cue to go outside and work that goddamned generator. No, he was not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be, was an attendant lord, glad to be of use. TS Eliot - Hibernophobe. There was a part of him that would have found the irony of generating power for the most sophisticated of technologies in such a primitive way ironic, if it wasn't such a cold, autumnal out. Now he could only think that when he studied so hard at school that it was because he hoped he’d never have to do work like this again. He knew, of course, that every time someone played the most plaintive piano sonata on their stereo or read the most melancholy poem by electric light, that someone, somewhere was suffering, breathing in Coal dust in a South African mine or dredging oil from the bottom of the ocean; he was just confident that it would never have to be him. After a while, when the sweat was had built up so much that he could feel the breeze taunting him for thinking that he could summon energy from Gaia without having to pay some horrible price, the window opened and Man 4 invited him back in, deciding that they had enough power for while. As he made his way up the stairs, he figured that it would be better if everyone exercised this way, instead of running on ambulators that someone else provided the power for with their sweat and toil and tears.
When he got to the computer room, he wiped some of the sweat from his brow and bigged it up to Man 4 for being able to do this every day.
“I don't really have to do it every day. I get heat by burning manure, so the only things I need this for are my stereo and this computer. Often, if I feel fit enough, I can generate enough power for a week in one two hour session.”
Seamus wondered where he got the internal power to generate this external power, but didn't want to ask in front of his illustrious visitor, who also seemed impressed. Instead he asked if they’d found anything interesting on the net.
“Yeah, we downloaded the new Britney single from Napster”, he joked. “But seriously, come and have a look at this.” He clicked on the back icon on his browser (he was a Netscape refusnik, as if you needed to ask) and it showed that his google search for “ecoterrorism” had provided him with 15,763 matches, and who knows, if he’d refreshed it might have been 15,764, someone burning the midnight oil in a bedroom in Omaha might have just sent their baby into cyberspace, hoping that there were some wolves out there who were willing to raise it and unleash it’s fearsome potential on the world. Man 4 showed Seamus some of the more interesting sites, with ideas so wild an unpredictable that he wondered why no-one had ever put them into practice.
“I guess they lack the people with the guts to put them into practice. The problem - well, one of the problems with American society - is that the only cause that people are willing to commit acts of violence for is self-enrichment. Most of the people who design these sites will probably end up working for the FBI or CIA in counter-terrorism, even though there’s precious little terrorism to counter, or at least there wasn't up till a while ago.”
The leader gave the other two a few seconds to let this trenchant truth sink in. It was profoundly depressing to Seamus that people were willing to risk the brutalities of the American penal system to pay for big houses and cars, but not for a cause as important as saving the Earth. He would have liked to have thought that this was a symptom of a society in decline, bloated and obese like the Roman empire in it’s decadent, protracted decline. But he was too innately pessimistic to believe this. He knew that this was going to be another American century, that it’s empire was going to expand more before it started to contract. (The idea that the people with these ideas were probably vegans and therefore too lazy to put the ideas into practice briefly crossed his mind as well) He knew that the other two didn't see it this way, that they believed that if someone showed that these wild crazy ideas could be put into practice, here in our small island, that the rest of the world might follow, that terrorism got an extremely bad name on 9/11 would be blocked from their minds.
For them, it seemed the only problem was which target to attack first. From where they were sitting, it seemed that capitalism was one big conspiracy to destroy the Earth, suck the oil out of it to make fertilisers to grow crops which were grown in one part of the world and shipped, using more oil to other parts of the world to be fed to cows which, when fattened, were shipped to other countries, using more oil, and chopped up and packaged in plastic, which was again made from oil, cooked in cookers that were powered by oil, oil which had taken millions of years to developed but would be exhausted within another century... and yet why was it that not one person in this vast network didn't stop and ask why this madness was being perpetuated? Too alienated, too atomised, too unwilling to find another job, he guessed. The good news was that if you could break just one link in this chain, the whole mad apparatus could be exposed as fragile, like the Giant Green wizard in The Wizard of Oz.
Seamus suggested that they should start attacking supermarket distribution centres here in Ireland, the supermarket chain that was British-owned, of course. As theirs was such a small little island there was proportionally very little oil to be wasted , but others might be inspired, particularly in the US, to try the same thing. Then someone might eventually be able to sink a ship that was bringing a consignment of Soya beans from Latin America to be fed to European cattle.
Man 4 was alarmed at the environmental impact of such an action, but rather than say something glib like ‘bigger picture’ he pointed out that there were already a huge number of ‘dead zones’ in the oceans of the world, caused overfishing, and if the ecological damage wasn't irreversible, then it wasn't going to be reversed any time in their collective lifetime. Perhaps the Soya beans would eventually soften and attract bigger fish back to the dead zones... or perhaps not. Seamus wondered how easy it was to blow up one of those ships, no-one had a really satisfactory answer, except that, like everything else, these behemoths of modern industrial capitalism must have had a weak point like anything else. It didn't seem to matter that much, as Seamus still wasn't sure if any of their plans would ever come to fruition or if they were doomed to remain inert and hypothetical like the texts flickering from Man 4’s Mac screen.












The next few months would give Seamus his answer. Neither the leader nor Man 4 contacted him that much in those weeks in which the nights drew in and winter snatched them in it’s cold, drizzly embrace, he almost forgot about this meeting, and some nights as he sat under a blanket and watched TV with Jenny, it could have been as if the last ten wild, bizarre months had never happened. But something would always creep back and remind him that they weren’t the nice, normal couple that they might have appeared on the surface to be. Often it would be a desire to phone his family and ask if secretly they weren't proud that he was up there in Dublin with a highly-paying job and a beautiful wife and a reasonably salubrious and clean flat which he’d wrestle with by going into the bathroom and not coming out again for 45 minutes or an hour and would come back to the Jenny’s comforting bosom with the thought that that sleeping dog was better left untouched. The tragic thing was, if they knew that he was planning to fleece Sinn Fein they’d immediately be sympathetic but he couldn't share this with them because he knew how gossipy they were. He had to content himself with the thought that when he was in his tropical paradise he could invite them there and laugh about how stupid they were to avoid each other for years because of something as trivial as an ideological chasm. Other nights his recurring nightmares about the incident that changed his life would thrust his head from his sweaty pillow, after a while Jenny became so acclimatised to this that his nightmares must have been integrated into hers, as if in some perverted Wes Craven fantasy. Other times he’d indulge in some self-pitying irritation about the fact that Man 4 was never calling him but those lines from Prufrock would be enough to mollify him. And then, at the bottom of his pyramid were his constituents with their petty, untermensch concerns, none of which would ever make the slightest difference to society as a whole, except to add or subtract one number from the government statistics of a country that most people in the world were unaware of the existence of.
He became less and less active in the Dail, his early passion diluted by a combination of a growing certainty that this job would only be for five years and a realisation that any speeches he made about the incinerator, about Ireland’s shameful record on recycling or it’s piss-poor attempt to implement Kyoto were totally masturbatory, that, no matter how badly big business treated the Government they were always going to come back to him like a battered wife, and that the Fianna Fail party had much the same relationship with the country. And yet occasionally he would make the odd passionate speech and then come home and watch that late-night coverage of Dail proceedings on the TV and laugh with his wife about how deadly earnest he looked, and how nervous he’d become when the swine on the Fianna Fail back benches would cast his pearls opprobriously back in his face, waiting for the Ceann Comhraible to rescue him like an earlier version of himself from the school bullies by the principle.
He didn't hang around with the other Sinn Fein TDs that much, preferring the company of the greens, which prompted gossip writers from the Sunday Independent and the Phoenix, who clearly had nothing better to do, to wonder if a defection was in the offing. Whenever asked, he’d go out of his way to give the most boring answer possible, that he was committed to working for a 32-county socialist Ireland but recognised that a Sinn Fein majority government was unlikely within the current parameters and that it was important to build bridges with... are you still there? The problem was, it wasn't so easy to brush the concerns of the members of the green party themselves aside, as he got a sense that they actually did want to poach them. He’d always make the same joke about being found dead in the woods if he did defect, but this never satisfied there curiosity as to why he was part of Sinn Fein in the first place. He generally fobbed them off with the Pantalegrulean suppressio veri that he was from a staunchly nationalist family, though he could tell from the enigmatic, indulgent smiles he got in response that they didn't really believe him but knew that he couldn't tell them the real reason. He rationalised that this was neither the first nor the last person to be economical with the truth within the walls of Leinster House, but that his lies hurt no-one but himself, and he knew, like Adam, like Oedipus and like Hamlet that sometimes the truth could hurt more, or if, you will, like the character that Jack Nicholson played in A Few Good Men, that not everyone was able to handle the truth, that the searing, white-hot veracity of the events of Seamus’ life would burn scars in their cosseted, middle-class hands that might never heal. Perhaps when he’d served his time in the Dail and was in Asia then he could write his memoirs, when the truth was so far away that it wasn't a threat anymore.
Actually, he could write them now if he wanted, so little time was he spending either in the Dail or in his constituency clinic in Cork. He didn't even show up for that many votes, concurring with the anarchist graffiti principle that the government would always get in. He spent a lot of time reading during the day; rejecting the smoky, bucolic atmosphere of the Dail bar and instead bringing home a huge pile of newspapers and the odd magazine which he’d read and then take to be recycled, secretly hoping that he’d be photographed some day and be able to read what passed for wit in the right-wing press in the following days, though it always seemed they had bigger fish to fry. It certainly wasn't a boring existence, sitting around reading the newspapers all day, what with everything that was going on in the world in that second winter of the twenty-first century. There was some good news, the food scare had ended over there in the yUcKy, as the last of the cunt and the nazis blood, and some of some other animals was incinerated and the Irish health and agriculture ministers had kissed and made up, though, as some commentators hastened to add, not in a literal sense. Further afield, though, it seemed that the prodigal son of the Bin Laden family wasn't ever going to be welcomed back into the fold and all those commentators who were so shocked and awed by the events of 9/11 had sufficiently recovered their equilibrium to pen prolix pieces about the clash of civilisations that had finally buried the myth of progress that had persisted from the Victorian era like an ageing relative on life support, exposing fissures in the west as chasmic as the deepest valleys in the Atlantic, it often seemed that the West was as divided as what we solipsistically called the Middle East.
Seamus read these articles with the detached interest of someone who’s thirst for knowledge could never be quenched, but who felt he’d moved to a place beyond these petty regional rivalries to somewhere where he realised that the only war worth fighting was the one to save the Earth. He was totally convinced of this, but realised that it would only make sense to everyone else in retrospect. He pictured himself in fifty years time as this ageing Cassandra who’d be asked in the barren wastland that the Earth had become. And he’d laugh condescendingly the way old people do and tell them they thought the real threat at the time was from a bunch of religious fanatics in caves in Afghanistan. Then he saw this programme on the TV that struck him with the same sort of epiphany that met another religious fruitcake, in one of George Eliot’s novels, when they came across the words ‘calling and election sure’ in their King James Bible.
It was about those people who used to run Germany in the 30’s and who documentary-makers never got tired of documenting, beguiled by their absolute power and their myths of racial supremacy and their fetishistic leather uniforms. Far from gassing six million Jews, as some scurrilous Jewish historians and photo-montage experts were constantly implying, they were actually designing what would today be called a ‘dirty bomb’, depending, that is, on who used it. They had gotten so close, those white-coated teutonic scientists with their monocles and their high foreheads full of equations that had been crammed in there on summer evenings when they could have been out seducing young madchen, in fact, if their leaders hadn't swallowed their own propaganda and believed they were the master race and declared war on the rest of the world, they could have sent a bomb all the way from Scheviningen to Manhattan and ensure that the big apples core would be forever rotted by poisonous radiation...
This was where America was right now, Seamus surmised. They were on the verge of so many scientific breakthroughs. Eternal life was only a matter of ensuring that when cells died, new ones constantly emerged to replace them... how hard could that be? Time travel, another holy grail for scientists, was apparently only about 50 years away, although we’d only be able to move around the future. Matter transporters were already up and running, though only for sub-atomic particles. But none of these projects would ever reach fruition, because they were squandering so many resources on hubristic foreign wars and on a greater, unspoken war against the Earth, where the foot soldiers never thought they were doing more than eating a few hamburgers that would give them cancer or heart disease or driving a hummer that was bigger than that of their neighbours. Yes, he smugly reassured himself, the eternal truth that absolute power corrupts absolutely was being proved to be true once again, and the dirty, immoral old Italian man in Catch-22 was going to be proved right. The problem was, that when Gaia won her war against the US, we would all be the losers.
As he was thinking this, he was staring into some blank spot in the distance. Jenny had already gotten sick of trying to get his attention and had picked up the remote control and started flicking around the channels. She couldn't be bothered asking what he’d been thinking about, as if accepting that he had a sort of mistress that could give him something she couldn’t - visions of apocalyptic nihilism - but then the dark side of Seamus’ mind couldn't give him a blow job so there was a sort of modus vivendi there. When he did come back down to planet Earth he apologised for ignoring her, she didn't seem to mind, she just leant over and felt his groin, knowing that when he went into one of those trance-like states it was as if his brain and body became separated and his body went off on its own atavistic path.
They switched off the lights and left the TV on, its glowing, iridescent light acting like a smouldering fire to their distant ancestors. He fucked her with the same implicit knowledge that theirs might be the end of the line, that any children they had might not have enough food to keep going, except that this belief had been universalised. He fucked her with throbbing, pumping Achilles-like defiance of what he saw as his, and humanity’s fate, as if he’d been dragged through the Inferno and had reached the shining, blinding light of the Paradiso or {insert your own analogies here}. When they finished, she ran her fingers through his hair, skimming the surface of the same head that had just been thinking those dark, Stygian thoughts. What a piece of work is man...
Then an image on TV caught his attention, turning it from a passive background glow to the unrivalled focus for their attention. There were flames and there was smoke, but the smoke was against the same leaden background as the skies outside their own window, and the faces that were displaying panic were the same ruddy hue as their own. This prompted Seamus to turn the sound back on and find out what had happened.
As they watched the pictures of grey concrete buildings emitting grey flames against a backdrop of grey skies, it suddenly dawned on Seamus that the mad, implausible schemes he’d been discussing with Man 4 and the leader weren’t that implausible after all. For the site of the attack was a supermarket distribution centre, somewhere near a motorway in some anonymous part of England. The attackers had hired a truck and claimed that they were delivering a consignment of ‘budget’ hamburgers made from recovered abattoir meat. The truck had actually been full of semtex and ammonium nitrate.
Immediately Seamus knew who was responsible and felt a welter of emotions. The first was anger that no-one had asked him for his opinion or input or even called him to let him know that it was going to happen, that he had to find out the same way as the people who were watching TV and scratching their heads in wonder. He knew the reason, of course, was that he was too loose-lipped and flaky, that though he had ideas he didn't have the foggiest idea how to put them into practice. But still...
Then he wondered how many people had been killed and if they deserved to die just because they were small cogs in a machine that was slowly killing the Earth, that they and their families probably had no idea why anyone would want to hurt them. Was ignorance a mortal sin? Then he wondered if this would make any difference, if anyone would understand why this target had been chosen and change their lifestyle accordingly, or if it would result in a plethora of new, civil liberty-eroding anti-terror legislation. And then he felt his own moment of terror when he realised that this event could be connected with him. But then he was used to terror, wasn't he?
He flicked through the channels and listened to what the ‘security experts’ had to say, smugly wondering why, if they were such experts, they’d allowed this to happen. Unlike on 9/11, they weren't shy about pointing their fingers in the direction of Mecca, which left Seamus with mixed feelings. Some, however, were more prescient in wondering why such a target was chosen. Some suggested that it was because of the freedom of choice that supermarkets offered, which struck him as being faintly ridiculous, the words of someone that would be at home reading bedtime stories to their kids if this hadn't happened. Seamus watched the debate with the Olympian detachment of an omniscient god in a Greek Drama, laughing at the mere mortals falling over themselves trying to make sense of this aberration in the heartland of the real.
Then, as one of those computer-generated diagrams was explaining how these distribution centres helped food to get from a farm in one part of the yUcKy to a dinner table in another, a news flash came up on the screen telling the world, or at least the people who were watching that channel at that time, that a group calling itself the Humans for Gaia claimed responsibility for the ‘atrocity’. Jenny asked him if he’d ever heard of them before. He shrugged his shoulders and smiled inwardly at the image of all those journos typing those words into Google and discovering the radical agenda that Seamus himself had helped to map out on that small farmhouse just a few weeks before. He hoped they’d had the same prescience to run some mirror sites, for surely the firewalls were about to go up.
He logged on himself the next day, after he’d read every newspaper columnists two cents on the issue. He was surprised that it was still there, that its cornucopia of ideas for ecoterrorism were still out there for anyone to peruse and perhaps put into practice; not all of them required contacts with feared terrorists, some of them needed little more than a monkey wrench and a bucketful of guile. He feared that the powers that be were monitoring internet use more than they were letting on, that many young, idealistic men (and they would tend, generally, to be men) would just be waking up to what a vulnerable giant capitalism was when a SWAT team would burst into their bedrooms and carry them off, not letting them put on their shoes, dragging them barefoot through the concrete into the paddy-wagon and into a jail with rapists, arsonists and other thugs... but what about the people in cybercafes, who’d hotfoot it before the cops arrived, perhaps walking right past them, like his great-grandmother’s friend, Michael Collins? Truly, a terrible beauty had been born.
And some of the ideas did have a dark, pulchritudinous beauty about them, in the same cruelly paradoxical way that the skyline of Manhattan or the Hoover Dam or the final diminuendo of Gotterdammerung or the breasts of a woman who’s had implants... there was beauty in everything, if you realised that you were a mortal risen ape and too would die, beauty in the most squalid slums in Calcutta or the most disfigured cripples mutilated limbs... but some of these ideas were beautiful precisely because they would only ever be ideas, that no-one would ever be able to put them into practice, inside the febrile heads that woke up in the morning and prayed for rain, in the life behind the eyes, in the three or four pounds of squishy tissue that separated us from the apes; but then people would have said the same thing about what happened the day before.
One naive soul was convinced that monkeys could be trained to protect their own rainforests, by engendering a negative reaction to the sound of chainsaws, it couldn't be that hard, he figured, to train them to use firearms. Another thought that you could breed killer bees and attach a hive to random trees, though presumably one would have to develop immunity over time. Others were more thoughtful, arguing that that as the microrganisms that lived in the jungle were going to develop immunity to our vaccines after a while, we should expedite the process by introducing them to new strains of medicine in labs, which of course presupposed that we shouldn’t go into the rainforest for any reason.
Others were beautiful in their simplicity and practicality, requiring little more than a wrench to loosen the screws on those lumbering dinomorphs they called bulldozers, a few stakes and a hammer, or a basic knowledge of car mechanics with a special interest in SUVs. He pondered that last one for a while, wondering how many more people would have to be killed in road accidents than in terrorist attacks before people would be more scared of the former than the latter.
He wondered, in more general terms, why nations were more angered by what others did to them than by what they did to themselves. Perhaps it was because the state was an extension of the individual, and we were all more angered by someone else hitting us than by the harm we did ourselves with sugar, fat, or antiperspirant, or late-night soft-core porn TV. Or dry-cleaning our clothes, a possible source of carcinogens. Or leaving the house on a cold winters day without an umbrella. Or wearing high-heeled shoes. Or working in a building which to which we were allergic. Or not cutting the top inch of a carrot that wasn't grown organically. Or drinking too much coffee. Or wearing underpants that were too tight. Or using margarine or I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-butter that was high in saturates. Or listening to heavy metal music at high volumes. Or trying to learn Polish if you didn't have much of a flair for languages. Or counting fried potatoes toward our serving of 5 servings of fruit and veg a day. Or not inhaling deeply before opening a tube of glue. Or failing to ‘mind the gap’ on the London Underground. Or being too focused on money and status. Or taking off a plaster before the wound was fully healed. Or not exercising while on creatine. Or watching too much news on TV. Or not having enough structure in your life if you were from Germany or Austria or the German-speaking part of Switzerland. Or focusing too much on our fears and too little on our hopes. Or drinking more than two units of alcohol a day. Or trying to carry an eight foot beam up a ladder even though you weren't a career construction worker but a student trying to earn money to pay his fees. Or reading The Onion if you were left-brain deficient and didn't understand the concept of satire. Or moving out to the suburbs if you didn't like commuting. Or reading the small print in the horse racing or financial sections of newspapers if there was a history of poor eyesight in one’s family. Or obsessing too much about celebrities and thereby weakening your own self esteem. Or trying to reconcile the existence of a benign anthropomorphic deity with something like Austwich. Or reading the Daily Mail if you were liberal in your political views and had high blood pressure. Or not having enough contact with nature. Or not replacing the batteries in your smoke alarm frequently enough. Or not waiting long enough between switching on the gas and lighting a match. Or not cutting our nails that often and leaving them open to the possibility of breaking. Or eating red meat. Or holding a carving knife by the wrong end. Or being a Calvinist. Or by drinking black tea that hadn't had sufficient time to cool down. Or accidentally finding out the result of a soccer match that you were going to watch the highlights of later. Or trying to convince a fundamentalist Catholic that abortion was justified in certain circumstances. Or having a distaste for broccoli, which is rich in all sorts of nutrients. Or not washing your bedclothes frequently enough. Or not accepting who you are. Or getting out on the wrong side of bed, especially if your bed is pressed up against the wall. Or living in an area where there were lots of dogs that barked at night for no apparent reason. Or putting too much chilli pepper in your chana masala. Or taking more than 8 paracetomol tablets (500mg) in the space of 24 hours. Or taking a day off without informing your angry, power-crazed boss. Or going for a weekend in Venice in the high season without booking a place in advance. Or not knowing what love is. Or getting to the cinema at the time it said the picture was going to start even though you found several of the ads infuriating, particularly one for a brand of French lager. Or having a 100 watt light bulb in a reading lamp. Or eating cheap white bread from the supermarket. Or doing a college course only because it was what your parents wanted you to do. Or boiling your vegetables too much. Or not realising what a precious gift youth is. Or buying shoelaces that were just a little bit too small for our shoes. Or knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Perhaps one day he’d collate all these small acts of self-harm into his own website. There was no reason not to do it now, except that he had to find out if there was any way that he could be linked to what had just happened. He googled for the words “distribution centre bombing IRA link” and spent a nervous 1.086 seconds awaiting the results.
To his horror, he got a few hits. It shouldn’t have surprised him, as the if-you’re-not-us-us-you’re-against-us belief had already taken a firm hold and in many people’s minds all terrorists were part of a global conspiracy against the values of the west. The problem was, that just as a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day, this time the right-wing fruitcakes were right. But then there’d been more bizarre alliances in history, hadn't there? He was confident that it didn't really matter, that the gardai’s intelligence was so poor that no link between him and the events that had happened could never be established. As if in defiance, or out of some quasi-suicidal fear that he wouldn’t be able to handle the constant worrying about whether people would find out, he even went back to the ecoterror page and uploaded his own idea, having first paranoically looked around to make sure that no other eye might cast a wayward glance at his screen. There were only two other people in the Dail computer centre, both of them old, ruddy-faced TDs, Fianna Fail, probably, Seamus figured they were probably just waiting for him to leave so they could download some porn. Then, when he’d told anyone who wanted to know how they could create the next mad cow disease, he strolled out onto the streets and wondered how things would be if this war that he’d started was ever won.
There wouldn’t be so many cars on the streets, that was for sure. There wouldn’t be all those gaudy plastic signs and people wouldn’t be wearing clothes spun from petrochemicals. There wouldn't be nearly so much litter around. There wouldn't be nearly as many fat people. With less traffic, there’d be more green spaces, more flowers. People would eat a healthier diet and not grow old nearly as fast. People wouldn't be as competitive or work as hard or have as many children, spending more time doing the things that were really important, like reading, listening to music, or enjoying nature. That was one scenario that he envisaged, a sort of prelapsarian fantasy where Jehovah had decided that the apple-eating thing was a first offence and let our forebears off with a warning. It was a Haight-Ashbury in the summer of love vision of a society at peace with itself and the environment.
Then another, darker vision enfolded itself. The chaos that his acolytes cause results not in people rethinking their lifestyles but in governments spending more and more money trying to fight them, draining resources even more. Eating less meat would result in birth rates dropping, while in the Muslim world they keep going up and up. As the west fights it’s enemy within, they bide their time, pretending to be moderate while waiting for the opportunity to finally take revenge for the crusades. They finally Islamicise western Europe, turning all the great cathedrals and concert halls into mosques, forcing the beautiful, thin blonde women to wear hajibs over their faces, banning sport, cinema and anything else they considered decadent.
Yeah... sometimes Seamus’ mind could run away with itself... but the truth was that he had no idea what the future was like, any more than anyone else. Hey, it was 2001; where were the flying cars and the robot servants? Yet he was confident that what he had just caused would set the tone for the rest of the century, the same way that the so-called first world war set the tone for the twentieth or the French revolution for the nineteenth or the reformation for the sixteenth or... you get the picture. Was it just a delusion of grandeur, or a certainty that his own life matched the pattern of those other world-shapers, Hitler and Stalin so closely that he really was the One?
One thing that he did know was that what he believed he had just caused would have immediate repercussions. They were there on the TV when he got home, pictures of people panic-buying from supermarkets after hearing the warnings that there would be distribution problems for weeks ahead, armed guards being employed at checkpoints near similar centres, nervous-looking supermarket executives assuring everyone that there was no need to worry, ‘security experts’ wondering what the next target might be, and, of course, who’d done this. Most instincts pointed to Al-Quaeda, but after traces of ammonium nitrate were found, the Brits started to look in a westerly direction. This made Seamus nervous, knowing that if a link with the IRA was established, that while he might never be fingered himself, the Irish community in London would certainly get some visits from some shaven-headed thugs, fuelling his fear that the only thing violence begat was more violence.
Jenny could sense, in these dark, indie-rock video days, that Seamus was preoccupied and noticed that all her attempts to engage him in conversation led down blind, aimless cul-de-sacs. When she asked who he thought was responsible for what happened the day before, he grunted that he didn't know stuff like that just because he was a highly paid public representative. And yet there was another part of him that wanted to share with her his part in this event, the biggest terrorist attack ever on England, unless you counted the massive bombings by the Nazis during the second world war. He had helped to make history, and yet history would probably never mention his name as he wanted so much for his role to remain a secret, so that he could just live out the rest of his life in peace.
Yes, he recognised the paradox. But he reckoned that it was a universal one, that there could be no peace without conflict, that the most ethereal sonatas were a result of the most tumultuous inner struggles, that the most serene mountain view was the product of aegis-shattering convulsions in the Earth’s surface, that the most genteel Edwardian tea party was built on the broken backs of the suffering of thousands, that order, in one of the few sentences he understood in one William Gaddis’ books, was just a thin patina which we papered over the reality of chaos.
After a few days of this Stygian brooding and obsessive reading of newspapers, he could sense that he needed to re-engage with the reality of his own life and started to communicate with his wife a little more, to her intense relief, as the person she married might have unpredictable mood swings but had never spent this much time in such an accidie before, fending off her concerns pathetically with mendacious stories of toothaches and nasal sinuses and spending more time than was healthy sitting with his head in his hands on the toilet.
After staggering in from a Dail debate in which his peers had outdone themselves in prolix circumlocution, he threw himself down on the sofa and accepted a cup of tea from her, and, when he caught his breath, he began, “I’m sorry if I’ve been a bit uncommunicative these last few days.”
“Oh, that’s okay, I know what it’s like having a toothache.”
He rolled his tongue around his mouth just to check that he didn't have one in addition to all his other problems.
“Actually, these guys are Okay”, he replied, tapping his upper incisors with his tongue. “It’s just, I’m sure I told you this when we agreed to move in together first, but I go through these phases where I need time to myself, when I’m not able to communicate with anyone. You probably know as well that guys have a tendency to retreat into silence when they come home from work.”
“Well, my dad was like that, but...”
“But you thought I was different? Yeah, women have a tendency to do that as well, to idealise men and think that they’re perfect. But none of us are, we all suffer and brood no matter how brave a face we feel we need to put on things.”
“So what has been getting you down, then, if it’s not your teeth?”
“I wish I could tell you, but...”
“C’mon, Seamus, let’s not play this game, you share everything with me eventually. You told me about how you got involved with Sinn Fein. You told me about your plan to save up all your money and then go and live in Asia. You told me how you were responsible for that food scare in England. I know that you’re going to share this with me sooner or later. Why make me go through this?”
“There’s a lot of things I haven’t shared with you as well, and there’s a lot of things you haven’t told me”, was his evasive response.
She breathed deeply and then came out with this: “I think it’s about that bomb in England the other day. I think the IRA have something to do with it, and you’re in the loop, but you’re too scared or too guilty to talk about it.”
“What’re you talking about?”, he rasped back defensively, “didn't you hear that a group called H4G accepted responsibility?”
“Yes, but no-one had ever heard of them before. They don't have a website. They used ammonium nitrate and semtex, which is the classic IRA formula.”
A little stunned, Seamus asked when she’d become such a news-hound. By way of answering, she cast a glance in the direction of a huge pile of papers that Seamus had accumulated and hadn't found their way to the recycling bin yet.
“Alright, I guess you’re going to find out sooner or later. But you’ve got to promise not to tell anyone this, if you do, I’ll probably end up in jail, and you’ll lose all of this.”
She gave him a dirty look in response, the sort of look that might not kill if looks could do so, but might send him to the A&E ward for some intensive surgery.
He genuinely didn't know what the matter was, but she was only too eager to fill him in.
“You think I couldn't keep it to myself, just ‘cause I’m a woman, dontcha? You’ve told me so much and I’ve always managed to remain silent. If I’d gone to the press with these stories, I might have made far more money and had a far better way of life than I have with you. But I’d never do that to you, because I love you, and I wish you’d appreciate that a little more.”
Seamus gulped and realised that these acerbic words expressed a truth that couldn't be rationalised away. So, as her eyebrows raised higher and her mouth grew agaper, he told her this latest tale of how he’d gotten into something way, way over his depth. Yet, though other women may have been distressed or alarmed, she only wanted to know if there was a possibility that he could be caught. He told her what he’d told himself, that there was no way that any connection between him and them could be proved. Then she asked if there were going to be more attacks, he told her that her guess was probably as good as his. Then she asked the most difficult question of all, which was if he believed that what they were doing was right.
This was probably the moment that saved him from having a nervous breakdown, a stroke, a brain haemorrhage or a heart attack, when he slowly shared all the fears and stresses that had occupied him for the last number of days. She seemed rapt as the frenzied, hypertrophied workings of the mind behind those bleary eyes was laid out before her, as if a peasant from a Bengali village was being shown around Calcutta for the first time. Then he asked her what she thought.
“Well, I guess I haven’t thought about it as much as you have, but...”
He could sense that she was struggling to formulate a response and suspected that it was because the issues were too complicated for her. But then she came out with the following:
“Well, if I was totally convinced of the argument in favour of global warming and that a couple of attacks on supermarket distribution centres could lead to a serious enough dent in carbon dioxide emissions to lead to a long-term stabilisation in the Earth’s temperature, then, I guess, from a utilitarian perspective at least, then this might be justified. But I’m convinced of none of these things. While the circumstantial evidence for global warming is large, bear in mind that fluctuations in the Earth’s temperature are normal. And while these attacks might lead to less fossil fuels being used here in Europe, it probably won’t have any effect on the US, which is responsible for over a quarter of the world’s fossil fuel use. So I have deep reservations, as I know you have.”
If anyone else had made the same argument, he would have known what response to make. But he was so stunned to hear it coming from her, having assumed that it was only his life that had been changing beyond recognition in the last few years. For the ten years up till ten, from the gloom-laden grunge era to the cusp of the foreboding, post 9/11 era, it had always been the opposite, as his friends and his family got jobs, got married, had children, bought houses, and he stayed in the same slacker rut. Up till a few minutes before he’d assumed that he’d found a rock of stability that was going to give his mad, roller-coaster life some sort of grounding. But now, as he realised that quietly, while he was snoring in the Dail or pretending to be interested in the concerns of his voters, she was reading voraciously ploughing through all of his books, or in the library or on the internet, to bring herself up to his intellectual level. All was changed, changed utterly.
Yet when he recovered from the shock, a lively debate ensued. It was as if she’d finally become a complete person, become his equal in every respect, a more level-headed version of himself. Never did the idea of going to Asia and allowing her to become the matriarch of a family of adopted children running their organic farm seem so plausible or so desirable. Or, as some malign fate would have it, more under threat.
But she’d thought about it as well, as he no longer had a house monopoly on hypercognition.
“Y’know, I suppose that it’s possible that these attacks could continue for another four years without any connection to you being established, but... it’s taking a risk. Tell me, you didn't organise any of these liaisons through your Dail email address, did you?”
He shook his head.
She went through all the other possible avenues that might lead the long arm of the law in his direction, and felt able to dismiss them all.
Then she suggested that they should have some sort of contingency plan just in case he was caught. She asked how much money he’d saved up already, it turned out to be not nearly enough to buy an organic farm in Asia.
“Maybe you could get a job as well”, he suggested.
“Yeah, maybe”, she replied, without a whole lot of conviction. “Or maybe you could go and live in Asia and still be a TD while you’re there.”
Seamus spluttered as he tried to assimilate this, then meekly suggested that he didn't really think that that was possible.
“Why not? Everything’s being outsourced to Asia these days; call centre jobs, textile jobs, poultry production jobs... why not politics?”
He spluttered some more and then scrambled to find an answer to a question to which the answer was so obvious that it was almost impossible to express, like giving directions to his own house.
“Because you need personal contact, you need to be there for voting... it’s not like being an absentee landlord. Anyway, I’m sure it’s against every possible regulation. If I did it, I’m sure everyone would do the same thing, and the fabric of democracy would break down.”
“Fabric of democracy!”, she sneered, sarcastically, as if he was the one that was being absurd. “Seriously, though, there must be something that sets you apart from the other TDs. Maybe if you could establish that you’re life was under threat and that it would be cheaper to conduct your work from abroad than have all the security that was needed to keep you alive.”
Realising that she wasn't going to drop this ball for a while, he decided that he was going to indulge her for a while.
“So... how could we convince them that my life was under threat?”
“Easy... just get someone to ring your office saying that they’re from the continuity IRA or something and that they’ve found out that you’re not a real Shinner and that they want your blood. You leak the tape to the media, saying that you’re not scared of these dissidents who are stuck in the past, blah blah blah. Then you stage an explosion that would appear to have been aimed at you, a letter bomb, say, that you discover in the nick of time. You repeat your assertion that you’re not scared, but appear visibly shaken while doing so. You keep on insisting that you represent the tradition of Wolfe Tone, Robert Emmet, etc, much more than the people that are trying to kill you. Then arrange for another attack that comes perilously close to killing you and get one of your colleagues to insist that you need 24 hour Garda protection. Then... arrange for one of the cops to be killed... no, injured, dramatically. Keep insisting that you’re not scared, even though by now people will be asking if all the money being spent on your protection is money well spent. Then get another of your colleagues to suggest that you shouldn’t have to work under this constant threat of attack and that you should work from a secret, undisclosed location. You say that you’re flattered by his concern for your safety but that you can’t be seen to give into terrorism, and that there’s nowhere safe in Ireland anyway. Then you go on a holiday to India, to Thailand or wherever it is you want to buy that organic farm you’ve always dreamed of. Arrange for... this place to be attacked while you’re there, while your colleagues fear loudly for your safety if you return. Then get the ‘terrorists’ to say that they had no idea that you were on holiday and that as soon as you got back you’re going to be a dead man. By now, no-one will want you back, not the cops, not your constituents, not the rest of the Sinn Fein party. Then allow someone to facetiously say that you never did that much work anyway and that if people on UN peacekeeping missions can vote by post, then why couldn't you? Then I come in, giving an interview to a journalist a la Lady Di saying that I’m scared to ever come home and if there was any way that you could do your work from here then please, please, make it happen. Then we just wait for them to set up a satellite link.”
Jenny took a deep breath. Seamus didn't know how to tell her what a crazy idea this was, he knew how it hurt to be told that an idea that someone had obviously been working on for a long time was implausible. So he decided to let her down gently, like this:
“Y’know, I’ve seen a whole different side of you today. I always knew you were smart, that you were a walking advertisement for how crappy the educational system is in this country, that you were just let to rot because you came from a working class area and were expected to work in a factory or breed and that you’ve learned far more just by visiting the library and surfing the net and hanging around me than from any of those mongrel dogs that teach... but I don't think I’ll ever have to put that plan into practice. But, y’know, you’ve got such an imagination, maybe you could start writing creatively, for TV, for the movies, even for novels...”
She looked a bit disconcerted there for a while before realising what an element of fantasy her plan contained, and replied, “Hmm... I do have a lot of free time on my hands... maybe I could write something based on your life... and I’m related to a famous politician.”
“Only by marriage”, He laughed and then said that there were always going to be gaps, that there were things he’d always want to keep from her, not to mention the rest of the world.
“Well, duh! Obviously I’d concentrate on the positive stuff, like how funny and smart and what a brilliant lover you are.”
“Well... thanks, but you know, really, my life was pretty boring until just before I met you...but I’m glad you think I’m a good lover.”
“The best.”
Cue fucking, of the spontaneous, instantaneous kind that doesn’t involve candlelight or soft music or essential oils, or even condoms. When it was over, they were both so pleasantly tired that there was nothing either of them could do but pick up the remote control and see what was on the TV. He let the same gentle hands that had been caressing his penis just a while before search for whatever the TV’s erogenous zones were. After surfing for a few minutes, she settled on a documentary about one of the greatest problems facing the Western World at the moment, which wasn't terrorism, global warming or overpopulation, but obesity. As Seamus watched the fatties waddling around in clothes that were too small for them, stray bits of flesh that scientists probably didn't have names for yet making futile attempts at escape, as if they knew that they served no purpose, that they weren't ever going to be converted into energy, that their fate was to be squeezed into an undersized coffin, he was increasingly angered by how these people thought only of themselves, how they complained about how society treated them, as if they were the victims, and not the people who suffered to provide them with their indulgent, greedy lifestyles. His anger reached as high a pitch as it could in someone who just had sex when the cameras visited a food-eating contest where a sounder of corpulent Texans competed to eat as much red meat in the shortest possible space of time. He had to look away as the cuts of beef were fried over a barbecue stove, the way some older people would look away from images of bare breasts. But he did watch the aftermath, the hicks passing out and going to have their Falstaffian stomachs pumped, Seamus remarked that he’d like to go there and give Heart disease and Cancer a little helping hand by mowing them all down with a kalishnikov, fantasising that their lubberly bellies would burst like Terry Jones in Monthy Pythons Meaning of Life. Jenny gave the sort of look that suggested that she’d not only caught up with him intellectually but even overtaken him.
“I suppose the point needs to be made, they need to wake up to how profligate their lifestyle is. But you don't really want to spend the next ten or twelve years on death row in Texas, do you?”
“No... maybe it might be better to do in a state where they don't have the death penalty.”
“Yeah... or maybe you could do something more subtle, like getting a job there, and poisoning the food.”
“Hmmm... well I guess I’m never going to have the opportunity to do any of these things, but I’m sure there are people out there who could...”
He told her all about the website he’d come across and they shared some ideas. He never thought that this was what married life would be like, he always assumed that there’d be a lot of arguing and fighting and constant financial struggle, as it had been for his parents. He always thought that it was a romantic myth that there was someone out there who was totally perfect for someone else, that that only happened in fanciful novels and cheesy TV series, that the best that would ever happen was that he’d eventually get used to whoever was naive enough to marry him. But this, he felt was marriage as the most bibacious Roman poet would have conceived it.