Getting it in the Head

by Mike McCormack

  I gazed past the checkpoint into the occupied country. The dirt road beyond the sentry post curved past an isolated grove of cedars, wending its way to the top of a low summit. Halfway up the slope a woman led a donkey carrying a huge bundle of kindling. Beyond the hill the city cast up a grey pall of smoke, shrouding the summit. Beneath the smoke vague shadows moved. I took my binoculars and gazed into the fug; I saw that the joiners were already working on the crosses.

  I suppose, looking back on it, there were easier ways of getting our hands on those bottles. We could and should have used a hacksaw to cut our way past the iron grid that covered the window and then got a stone to smash through the glass into the store where we knew those bottles of Coke and orange were stacked up to the roof. But the hacksaw never even dawned on us. Right from the beginning we knew it had to be an explosion or nothing. Isn’t that strange, the way your mind fixes on something and you cannot see anything but that one thing? Now that I think of it we could have limited the damage by using a screwdriver to unscrew those grids. It would have probably taken a lot less time than a hacksaw as well. But it’s too late thinking of hacksaws and screwdrivers now; we didn’t think of them then and that’s all there is to it. They were no fun, not when the alternative was a good, roaring explosion. Besides, we had been disappointed by the fire when it hadn’t given us an explosion – the world had let us down, we had felt hard done by. There was nothing for it then but to have an explosion of our very own.

  A few nights ago I woke in the middle of the night to find my room filled with a queer, orange, jerky light. The night seemed full of crashing noises and raised voices. From my second-storey window I saw down the street that Coen’s bar and nightclub was ablaze and that it had been for some time. Already the first timbers from the roof were crashing down inside the building. Through the blown-out windows I could see them hitting the floor with a great gush of sparks. It looked as if at any moment the whole roof was going to fall in. I began to dress in a real hurry, pulling on two pullovers, my jeans, boots and baseball cap that had come all the way from America and which I never went anywhere without. I had already seen my parents in the crowd on the street, looking at the fire with their mouths open, so I knew there was no one to hold me back. In a minute I was legging it through the back garden and over the fences that separated my house from my friend Jamie’s.

  I was hoping Jamie wasn’t in too deep a sleep. If he was I might never wake him. Last year when we went camping in the football pitch outside the town (we had wanted to go to Clare Island but our parents said, ‘You’re too young, you’re only ten’) a bull had wandered into the pitch during the night and raised such a racket bellowing and roaring when it saw our red tent that I didn’t get a wink of sleep the whole night. But Jamie never knew a thing about it, he just snored his way through the whole thing. I never saw anyone like him for sleep.

  Anyway I had to rap hard on the window before he pulled back the curtain. He didn’t look his best standing there in his pyjamas with his hair sticking out like he’d been electrocuted. He pushed up the window, wiping the sleep from his eyes.

  ‘What is it, Owl? It’s the middle of the night.’

  ‘Come on quick, get dressed. Coen’s pub is on fire.’ Being so full of sleep he wasn’t so quick on the uptake.

  ‘On fire?’

  ‘Yes, on fire. The roof is about to cave in any minute. Pull on your clothes, we’ll go for a look.’

  ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘Hang on a sec.’

  He was fully awake now. It probably took him just a minute to dress and he was still tucking in his shirt when we rounded the alleyway by the fire house and came into the main street, which was now lined with fire hoses connected to the water main. Four or five men from the local fire brigade were standing in a clearing in front of the pub, jetting water onto the roof and through the windows. But they looked like they were fighting a losing battle: the roof looked just ready to fall in. To get a better view me and Jamie climbed onto one of those right-angled direction signs that stood by the wall at the back of the crowd. It was real comfortable up there, dangling our legs from the round bar and the wall nicely to our backs. The night was warm as well. We could see everything, all the people milling around in a semicircle and the local cops with their arms out keeping them back from the fire. Between the cops and the building were the firemen. They looked great in that weird light with their helmets and long, black coats and heavy hoses tucked up under their arms. They looked real cool even though I knew every one of them and knew they were only part-time firemen, really shopkeepers and barmen. Everyone’s eyes were on them like they were gladiators in some sort of contest, willing them on to win. Just right then they seemed to lose the fight. With a great roar, the sort you imagine a dragon makes, a huge section of the roof caved into the middle of the pub. Flames leaped high and a mushroom of sparks bloomed from the pub. A huge wave of heat drove the crowd back. Now the fire really raged and all the firemen could do was contain it until it burned itself out in its own good time.

  ‘It’s just like a movie,’ said Jamie.

  That was the truth. Right at that moment I was thinking the whole thing would be perfect if I had a tin of Coke and a packet of crisps to eat while I watched.

  ‘Yah,’ I said. ‘Just like at the cinema.’

  Into the golden light, from around the corner, my older brother showed up under the signpost. He looked the way he always looked, sorta cool, sorta wrecked, long black hair, leather jacket and a fag sticking out of his pale face. Jamie and I admire that leather jacket of his a lot, it’s one of those biker ones with brass buckles and zips. Sometimes when he’s in bed I pull it on just to see what it looks like but of course it’s far too big for me. Anyway Jamie and I plan to buy one like it when we get older. But Jamie doesn’t think it will work for me. He says you never see a fellow with specs wearing a leather jacket, it looks daft. I think I could be different though, I could set a new trend. Just to be sure, though, I’m on the lookout now for a fellow with specs wearing a leather jacket. So far my luck hasn’t been good.

  ‘How are the men?’ my brother said. ‘The men they couldn’t hang.’

  I hated that joke and he knew it. He looked pissed, as he always did this time of night. Even on our signpost we could smell the beer coming off his clothes. He was smoking a rollie, a really long one, sucking deep on it with his eyes closed.

  ‘What do you men make of this little conflagration?’ he mocked suddenly. ‘You there, Owl, at the head of the class, have you any light to throw on the subject? All those books you read, there must be something in them about the significance of fires and pyrolatry in primitive communities – discussions and analysis and so forth.’

  He was laughing now, leaning heavily on the wall and sucking his fag. I was wishing he’d go away, he was pissing me off and getting in the way of my movie. He couldn’t even stand straight now, he had one hand on our signpost. He pulled the fag from his mouth and gesticulated across the street with the red tip. Then, for the first time in his life, he said something interesting.

  ‘There’ll be one hell of a bang if those petrol pumps go up.’ He was pointing to the garage a few doors down on the opposite side of the street.

  ‘Those pumps,’ he said. ‘They’ll have more to put out than that little blaze if all that petrol goes up. There won’t be two bricks on top of each other in the whole friggin town.’ He stood shaking his head in disbelief for a moment and then pushed himself off the wall and staggered away. Jamie was thinking the same thing I was.

  ‘Imagine if there was an explosion.’ The fire danced in his eyes like tiny demons as he spoke.

  ‘Yah,’ I said. ‘It’d be brilliant. The whole town going up in one big fucker of a bang.’

  I could see the whole thing already, the collapsed buildings, the smoke drifting over the charred timber, the corpses everywhere. I wondered what it would be like without my parents. I decided quickly enough that I’d get over it, I’d often thought of killing
them anyway. I’d have the house to myself, that would be a good thing, no one to tell me what to do. I could read all night if I wanted to, another good thing. I’d have ice-cream for breakfast. There’d be no school so I could educate myself as I wanted to. I’d read up all about wars and plagues and dinosaurs and things like that. It would be heaven.

  Jamie was speaking. ‘God, the whole town would be wiped out. There would be nothing left but a black hole like you see in a Road Runner cartoon.’

  It was then that I began to wish with all my heart for that explosion. I could even hear it already in my head, a deep roar that filled out the night with nothing but itself, a huge light and rushing wind. Jamie must have been thinking the same thing.

  ‘Let’s go to the Protestant church,’ he said. ‘It’ll be safer there if anything happens and we’ll have a better view.’

  We sprinted by the back of the crowd to the end of the street and into the church grounds, weaving through the trees and headstones. Even at this distance, about a hundred yards, the church walls danced with the shadow of flames. We climbed up the yew tree and moved on our bellies out onto the branch that allowed us to reach out and pull ourselves through the narrow, slitted window into the bell tower. We came here sometimes when we were looking for bats and things like that. We climbed up the stairs into the belfry, ducked under the huge bell and out onto the window ledge where we could sit side by side. We were comfortable then and I knew that if the town went up we were at a safe distance. We could see over the heads of the whole crowd and almost down into the blazing pub itself – we were that high. We could see the floor plan of the pub and the flames really raging up off the timber floors. The wooden bar, running along the wall backwards into the nightclub, was throwing up a wall of flames curtaining the whole inside. By this time the firemen seemed to be concentrating their water on cooling down what was left of the roof so as to stop the fire spreading. I was beginning to have second thoughts about those firemen. If they kept jetting water like they were doing then there wouldn’t be any explosion. Already with the water falling down inside from the roof the flames along the bar seemed to be dying down a bit. Jamie was having his doubts too.

  ‘Those firemen will ruin everything,’ he said. ‘Any more of that water and there will be no chance of any explosion.’

  And that was exactly what happened. More and more water went in over the walls and down from the roof and bit by bit the flames died down. By the time we came down from the tower there was nothing but a dull glow somewhere in the middle of the building and the firemen were walking in and out through it as they pleased. I imagined the dragon lying there in the middle of the building groaning, just about to die from some massive wound. All I could think of as I ran home was how bitter I felt towards those firemen. They had stolen something from us and even though I knew them and knew that some of them were my friends’ dads I would gladly have killed all of them right then.

  II

  My father’s always said that my temper would get me into trouble some day. He knows everything, my old man, or at least he thinks he does. I guess it’s this self-assumed omniscience which makes him my old man. Well, I have to admit it, he was right, my temper has got me into trouble. But what he doesn’t know is just how much trouble it is and how seriously it’s going to affect him. It just goes to show that no matter how much you think you know, you ultimately know damn all.

  When I was a kid, younger than Owl, my old man had to make several trips to the school because my teachers were always ringing him up, complaining about all the fights I got into. I was having problems with discipline, he was told. It was true I got into a lot of fights but none of them were my fault. I just wanted things done fair and square, that’s all, games played without any cheating and so on, and I was prepared to fight to see that it was done.

  I remember one really vivid incident. I was playing football in an under-twelve match and I was being marked closely by this lanky kid who was stronger than me but not as quick. All through the game I had half a yard on him but it was no use. He kept pulling and clinging to me and holding my jersey and the ref must have been blind because he blew for none of it despite all the abuse he was getting from the sideline. Late in the game I was running to the ball, one stride ahead of him, and had it nearly in my hands when I felt my jersey stretching out behind me and my legs losing ground. He was hanging out of me again and I could take no more of it. I spun round with my boot swinging upward and it caught him clean in the groin. If anyone tells you that kids don’t feel that kind of thing they’re talking shite because that kid just stood there in shock, with the colour draining from his lips and his eyes clouding over with something milky before he toppled forward, face down on the grass. The ref grabbed me by the neck and called me a little bastard under his breath and I saw a woman come shrieking out onto the pitch, all flying skirts, yelling, ‘My baby, my baby!’ I was so blind with rage I lashed out again, this time with the other boot, catching the ref under the kneecap. He went down too and all of a sudden there was a big crowd around us shouting and cursing and throwing punches over my head as more and more parents spilled in from the sidelines. There was now almost a full-scale riot. The ref and a few others got a bad beating and the match was eventually abandoned. The organizing committee set up an investigation that evening to find out what the hell had happened.

  The next day a lawyer’s letter was delivered to our house and the old man received it at the front door. I didn’t know what it was at the time but I had a fair idea it wasn’t exactly singing my praises. When Dad came in from the hallway he looked like he could chew iron. He kept looking at me and I was sure he was going to deliver one of those long speeches about good manners and doing the right thing. But for some reason – maybe even then he sensed I had stopped listening to him – he just cut the whole thing down to a few words.

  ‘Before you do something like that again, think, just think.’

  That was all he said and it was enough. I didn’t care to hear any sermons then because I was adamant I’d done nothing wrong. That evening I was called to the town hall to answer questions from the investigating committee. They had to submit a report to the Mayo GAA Board. I knew all the old men asking the questions so I wasn’t a bit afraid. I just told them what happened, that I wanted to play football but that the other kid wouldn’t let me and that I’d had to do something, because the ref was doing nothing at all and that no, I wasn’t sorry about the whole thing. I was dead proud of that testimony at the time and even today my composure and cockiness impresses me. I don’t know, however, if I feel so proud of the whole thing now. I think I may have castrated that kid. But my most vivid memory of the whole thing is the blind rage in which I had struck out, how the whole world suddenly darkened and I became a lashing knot of fury. Well, that was what I started talking about here, my temper and how it was going to get me in trouble. Now it finally has and it’s trouble of a real serious sort.

  It all started at that fire a few nights ago, the night Coen’s pub went up in flames. That was a dangerous fire too, so near those petrol pumps and gas containers. The whole town could have gone up. It was a bit of excitement though, the biggest since those Hell’s Angels pulled in here two years ago. Now that was a piece of real excitement. No one ever knew who invited them or why they came here but for three days in September our little town was overrun with hundreds of bikers in long hair and chains. Why they should choose Louisburgh I’ll never know. Louisburgh’s only a built-up crossroads and so far west against the coast we don’t even get tinkers. The most glamorous thing about it is the name.

  Mention it to someone and they invariably say that it sounds like somewhere in America. There is a Louisburgh in Philadelphia, I think, but I know nothing about it. All I know is that Louisburgh in west Mayo is one of the unlikeliest places on the planet for six hundred bikers to dock up in for no good reason.

  They came in bunches, a few at a time from early morning swelling to a steady stream during the day.
By late evening there were six hundred bikes lined up throughout the town, taking up every inch of parking space so that any locals who chanced coming to town for a pint that night had to park beyond the bridge at one end and the church at the other. They seemed to bring the good weather to an end also. The warm days of July and August had lingered on until the schools had opened up but right from the appearance of the first bike the sky had darkened and the rain began to fall. It would piss continuously for the whole of that weekend.

  Everywhere you looked for those three days there was wildness and freedom. Heavy bikers with beer bellies sat astride customized hogs – none of that production-line shite and every one of them, despite their greasy looks, carrying a horny-looking girl in tight jeans and T-shirt. I remember one especially big biker steering a trike with a single arm – he had left the other one in the Falklands two years previous. He stopped his trike in the middle of the square and stood up in the saddle with his head thrown back, letting out a big, strangled howl at the sky for no reason it seemed to me other than the sheer hell of it. I thought it was the most eloquent and sensible thing I had heard in my whole life and I envied him being able to speak it out like that. For those three days I never took my eyes off him. He enthralled me as if he were some sort of barbarian prince. Everywhere he walked a crowd seemed to gather about him and now and again he would leap onto the roof of a parked car, the armless sleeve of his jacket flying, and stand there howling out his soliloquy or whatever it was and all those about him seemed to have a perfect understanding of what he was on about. On the Monday morning he rode out of town at the head of one hundred bikes with two yards of heavy chain manacled to his wrist at the end of which was the prettiest girl of the whole weekend, the winner of the wet T-shirt competition that had been held in the open rain.