Getting it in the Head Page 4

  I is for Indolence

  After my leaving cert I signed on as a government artist – I drew the dole. It was an issue of some scandal in the village; after all, my father was the possessor of probably the biggest private fortune in the county.

  One evening after signing on I sat in a local pub putting a sizeable hole in my first payment – I was quickly discovering the joys of solitary drinking. On an overhead TV I listened to the news and heard that the unemployment figures had topped three hundred thousand for the first time. The figure was greeted with equal measures of awe and disgust by the other drinkers.

  ‘Christ, it’s a shame, all those young people coming out of school and college and no jobs for them. The country is going to hell.’

  ‘In a hand cart,’ another added.

  A third was not so sure. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, a large, straight-talking man. ‘Half of those fuckers on the dole have no intention of working, they’d run a mile from it. And it’s not as if there isn’t plenty of it to do either. Look at the state of the roads or the graveyards for that matter. A crowd of friggin spongers the whole lot of them if the truth be told.’

  It was a brave thesis, particularly so in a townland surrounded by subsistence farms, the owners of which topped up their incomes with government hand-outs.

  But he was right, at least in my case he was. I went home that night and for the first time in my life I knew what I was. I was a sponger, a slacker, a parasite, a leech on the nation’s resources. Like most of my generation I had neither the will nor imagination to get up and do something useful with my life. And what was worse I took to my role joyfully, safe in the knowledge that I could fob off any queries by pointing to the statistics or by saying that I was indulging in a period of stocktaking and evaluation before I launched myself on the world with a definite plan. I could loftily declare that I was on sabbatical from life. Only in solitary moments of truth and pitiless insight would I speak the truth to myself: I had no worthwhile ideas and no courage; I was good for nothing.

  J is for James

  The only shaft of light in my childhood years was the presence of my friend James. Throughout my trial he was the one constant, sitting in the public gallery with his hair pulled back in a tight braid, chewing his bottom lip. I could feel his eyes upon me, placed like branding irons in the centre of my chest. Now he comes to me every week, bringing me my record collection and my books: Hesse, Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky, a young man’s reading or so I’m told.

  James was more than my friend, he was my champion. I would be at the centre of one of those taunting circles, my tormentors wheeling about me, dealing out cuffs to the side of my head and insults. ‘Ear we go, ear we go, ear we go,’ they would chant. My defence then was to disappear down inside myself, down into that part within me which was clear and painless, a place lit by fantasy, ideas, books and music. Almost inevitably James would round the corner. I would see in his eyes the dark fire that was already igniting his soul.

  ‘Leave him alone, you pack of cunts,’ he’d yell. ‘Leave him alone.’

  Then he would wade into the centre of the circle, shouldering me aside, his Docs and fists flying, working his surprise to the limit by scoring busted noses and bruised balls. Sooner or later, however, he would find himself at the bottom of a pile of heaving bodies, curling into a tight foetal position to ward off the kicks and blows that rained down on him. Just as suddenly my tormentors would scatter, yelling and whooping, leaving James bloodied and bruised on the ground like carrion. In those moments I used to think that James was the victim not of his love for me but of his own rampant imagination. Now I can see him rising from the dust, his face bloodied and running like a clown’s make-up, and I curse myself for my cynicism.

  K is for Kill

  The axe swung through the air and cleft my father’s skull in two and he lay dead upon the floor.

  L is for Lug

  When I reached my teens I grew my hair to my shoulders. By then, however, it was already too late to prevent me from being teased mercilessly and earning a succession of nicknames. My peers were never short of cruel puns and covert abuse whenever I was near. ‘Ear ear,’ they would yell whenever I opened my mouth to speak or, ‘Ear we go, ear we go, ear we go,’ whenever we gathered to watch football matches. From national school my name was Lug and in secondary school the more technically minded tried to amend it to Mono. But Lug was the name that stuck and I hated them for it, hated them for their stupid wit and their lack of mercy. But I did not hate them as much as I hated my father on the day he discovered it. He returned from answering the phone in the hallway. It was one of my ‘friends’.

  ‘Lug,’ he said gleefully. ‘Christ, they have you well named there and no doubt about it. We used to have an ass with that name once – Lugs. Mind you, he was twice the creature you are. He could work and he had a full set of ears.’

  I burst out crying and ran to my room. I stayed there the rest of the afternoon, weeping and grinding my teeth. I eventually dried my eyes and took a look at myself in the mirror and I resolved then that no one would ever make me cry again.

  M is for Music

  Because of my impaired hearing my love of music has caused much wonderment. Again this has proved a fertile snuffling ground for those commentators desperate to unearth truffles of reason in this tale of blood and woe.

  I am a metal head, a self-confessed lover of bludgeoning rhythms in major chords and rhyming couplets dealing in death and mayhem. My record collection, now numbering in hundreds, reads like a medieval codex of arcana: Ministry, Obituary, Bathroy, Leather Angel, Black Sabbath and so on. My greatest solace now is that I can listen to these records in the privacy of my cell without maddening anyone. If there was anything certain to unleash my father’s temper it was the sound of these records throbbing through the house. He would come hammering at my bedroom door.

  ‘Turn that fucking shite off,’ he’d roar. ‘Christ, you would think a man of your age should have grown out of that sort of thing long ago.’

  But I never did grow out of it and I don’t foresee a day when I will. This horror of this music is rooted within me as deep as my very soul and I would no more think of defending it than my father would his own lachrymose renditions of ‘Moonlight on the Silvery Rio Grande’.

  N is for Never

  As in never again. At the bottom of our souls all young men are sick. We do not grow sick or become sick nor is it some easy matter of hormonal determinism. This sickness is our very nature. Having suffered from the disease myself I know what I am talking about. It manifests itself generally as a disorder of the head, a slant of the imagination that preoccupies us with mayhem and blood, slashing and hacking, disease, waste and carnage. There is not a young man of my age who, in the privacy of his own heart, has not thought of killing someone. Many times James and I would sit fantasizing about a kill of our own, our very own corpse. We weighed up the options like assassins and narrowed it down to a single, clean strike in an airport terminal bathroom where there is an abundance of unwary victims and suspects. We were armchair psychos, already tasting the blood. Most young men grow out of this sort of thing, taking to heart second-hand lessons in mercy and compassion, turning in wonder and revulsion from their former selves. Some never learn and continue to stalk the earth with weapons, amassing victims in the darkness. But the truly wretched ones turn away also, not out of principle or humanity but from the antidote at the heart of the disease itself, the terrible soul-harrowing and puke-inducing disgust.

  O is for Obsequies

  QUIRKE (MARY ELIZABETH) died suddenly at her residence, Carron, Co. Mayo, May 21st 1993, in her fifty-ninth year. Deeply regretted by her sorrowing husband Thomas, her son Gerard and a large circle of relatives and friends. Removal to the Church of the Immaculate Conception, Carron, this (Wednesday) evening at 7 o’clock. Requiem mass tomorrow (Thursday) at 12 noon. Funeral afterwards to Cross Cemetery. No flowers. House private.

  Your story on earth will never
be told

  The harp and the shamrock

  Green white and gold.

  P is for Patrimony

  Four months ago James and I stood in a green field behind our county hospital, two unpaid extras witnessing a dedication. There was a small platform bedecked with ribbons, a few local politicians, the diocesan bishop and my father. The field was populated by a motley collection of patricians, merchants and outpatients; a few nurses stood at the fringes. Incredulity hung in the air like a fine mist. We were here to witness the sod turning on the foundation of the Thomas Quirke Institute for Alcoholic Research, a laboratory annexed to our county hospital and funded in equal measure by European grant aid and the single biggest bequest to the health services in the history of the state – my father’s entire lottery win. I listened as the politicians spoke on the straitened circumstances of the health services and on the pressing need for an institution of this sort in a province ravaged by alcoholism. My father was commended as a man of vision and philanthropy. I saw the bishop sprinkle holy water on the green earth and invoke the saints to guide the work of the institute. Then my father stepped forward to turn the first sod, his public awkwardness belying his easy skill with the spade. The audience whispered and shook their heads and as the earth split and turned I saw my fortune vanish before my eyes.

  In honour of the occasion James and I left the field for the pub across the road and got sinfully and disastrously drunk.

  Q is for Quietus

  We sat in the kitchen drinking the last of the whiskey. It was two in the morning and darkness hummed beyond the windows. James was slumped at the table, his head resting in his extended arm, clutching a glass. His speech came thick and slow.

  ‘Every penny,’ he was saying, ‘every fucking penny gone up in smoke and pissed against the wall. I wouldn’t have believed it myself if I hadn’t seen it with my own two eyes. And every one of them bursting their holes laughing at him behind his back. The Thomas Quirke Institute for Alcoholic Research no less. Sheer bloody madness.’

  ‘Give it a rest, James, I’m fed up hearing it.’ It had been a long day and I badly needed sleep. A monstrous headache had begun to hammer behind my eyes.

  ‘Are you not mad, Ger? Christ, I’d be mad. A whole fortune squandered in one act of vanity. You’re his son, for Christ’s sake, it wasn’t just his to throw away. You’re his son and you could have been set up for life.’

  ‘I know, James. It’s all over now, though, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. It’s all over.’

  ‘I’d kill him,’ he said suddenly, rising up and swinging the bottle wildly. ‘Stone dead I’d kill him. He hadn’t the right, he hadn’t the fucking right.’

  My father entered at that moment, his face flushed with drink, the knot of his tie well over his collarbone. James sat down at the table.

  ‘Hadn’t the right to do what, James, hadn’t the right to do what? Go on, you young shit, spell it out.’

  He was standing with his legs apart inside the door, the cage of his chest rising and falling. He looked like a man who was going to reach for a gun.

  ‘I was just saying, Mr Quirke, it was a real pity that all that money couldn’t be put to better use where right people might benefit from it.’

  ‘Is that so? And I suppose if it was your money you’d know what to do with it.’

  James’ head was lolling heavily, a wide smirk crawling to his ears.

  ‘I’d have given it to the poor of the parish,’ he said, guffawing loudly and gulping from his glass. ‘Every last penny. And I’d have put a new roof on the church,’ he finished, now giggling helplessly.

  ‘And I suppose you wouldn’t have left yourself short either, James? You being one of these poor that weigh so heavily on your mind.’

  He was leaning with both hands on the table now, towering over James. He wasn’t totally drunk, just in that dangerous condition where he could argue forever or loose his temper suddenly.

  ‘Do you know what it is, Mr Quirke? Something I saw today. Every one of those people were there patting you on the back with one hand and smirking behind the other. Telling you what a great man you were and then going away bursting their holes laughing at you. I saw it with my own two eyes.’

  James had lost the run of himself now, he didn’t care what he said. I stood between them. ‘Cut it out both of you. James, it’s time you left, I need to get to bed.’ I began hauling him to his feet.

  ‘He’ll leave when I’m finished with him,’ my father hissed, squeezing out the words between his clenched teeth. ‘When I’m finished and only then. What about you, James, were you laughing?’

  ‘I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry, Mr Quirke, I was in two minds.’ He was swaying drunkenly now, bracing himself between the chair and the table. ‘I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. I was standing there thinking that some people have more money than sense.’

  My father lunged at him, his outstretched hands reaching for his throat. James keeled backwards spilling the chair and my father landed across him, bellowing in rage and surprise. They grappled wildly for an instant. I threw aside the chair and James’ boot flicked up as he rolled over, catching me under the chin and knocking me sideways into the table. I fell down, grabbing the tablecloth and bringing the bottle and glass shattering to the floor. We scuttled to the end of the room and my father came off the floor clutching the neck of the bottle at arm’s length.

  ‘I’ll cut the fucking head clean off you,’ he roared.

  He moved towards James slowly, as if walking over broken ground. It was at this instant that the axe rose into the air, just off my left shoulder, and passed in a slow arc over my head. And it was at this instant also that there was a sound of breaking glass and the light went out. The fluorescent light showered down around our shoulders as the axe clipped it and there was a sudden rush of cold air in the darkness, a grim sound of something splitting with a soft crunch. I rushed to the wall and turned on the bulb.

  ‘Oh Jesus, oh fucking Christ.’

  My father lay face down on the floor, his head split open and the axe standing upright in it as if marking the spot. He was dead beyond any salvation. James was doing some frantic, crazy dance about his head and there was a smell of shit in the room.

  ‘Oh Jesus, oh fucking Christ, what are we going to do, what are we going to do?’

  I was stone-cold sober then, hiccupping with fright but perfectly in control. I started dragging James towards the door, hauling him by the collar.

  ‘Go home now, James, there’s nothing you can do. Go home.’

  I pushed him out into the darkness and slammed the door. My breathing came in jagged bursts and I needed to sit down. I righted the chair and sat at my father’s head, a four-hour vigil into the dawn with no thought in my head save that now, for the first time in my life, I had nothing.

  When the grey sun rose I stepped into the hall and rang the cops.

  R is for Responsibility

  Not for the first time James was picking himself up off the tarmac, wiping the blood from his face. I was after telling him rather imperiously that his imagination was running away with him. He was having none of it.

  ‘Those fuckers walk all over you,’ he sobbed. ‘When are you going to stick up for yourself?’ He was near crying.

  ‘I can take care of them in my own time,’ I said cryptically.

  ‘Well, it’s about time you started. Look at the size of you, you’re well able for them, what the hell are you afraid of? And your father too, Christ, you put up with so much shit, it’s about time you started hitting back. You have to be every bit as cruel as they are. You have to meet every blow with a kick and every insult with a curse. You shouldn’t take this any more, it’s not right.’

  ‘I never asked for your help,’ I said coldly.

  ‘Well, this is the last time,’ he yelled. ‘From now on you can be your own martyr or your own coward. I want nothing more to do with it.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘yo
u’ll always be there. You can’t help it, you have the imagination for it.’

  I walked away, leaving him sobbing on the ground.

  S is for Summary

  Even now, in the fifth month of my sentence, I still receive weekly visits from my lawyer. There are loose ends still in need of tying up, details to be put to rest. He informs me that public interest in my case has not waned – apparently its notoriety is being seen as indicative of some sort of widespread malaise in the minds of our young people, a kind of national tumour in need of lancing. He tells me that there is much probing of the national psyche in the media.

  More recently he has presented me with a sheaf of proposals from publishers and film producers, all of them looking for the complete story, the first-person account. I have refused all of them, returned the documents through the wire mesh. I have no interest in the superfluities that necessarily accrue within the scope of the extended narrative. I have chosen this alphabet for its finitude and narrow compass. It places strictures on my story which confine me to the essential substratum of events and feelings. Within its confines there is no danger of me wandering off like a maddened thing into sloughs of self-pity and righteousness.

  T is for Truth

  Under oath and on the Bible I swore to tell the truth. I confined myself to the facts, which may or may not be the same thing. I believe now that this preoccupation with the facts is exactly the problem with all kinds of testimony. A clear re-telling of the facts, no matter how accurately they record actual events, is a lamentable falling short of the truth. I know now that the true identity of things lies beyond the parameter of the facts. It lies in the treacherous and delusive ground of the fiction writer and the fabulist, those seekers after truth who speak it for no one but themselves with no motive of defence or self-justification. This is the terrain in which someone other than myself will one day stake his ground.