Getting it in the Head

by Mike McCormack

  While they were here the bikers rigged up two massive Marshall amps to the back of trikes and bludgeoned the town into submission with non-stop heavy metal. It seemed a deliberate policy to subdue the town. They were peaceable enough, however, their numbers and appearance so terrified the town they had no need of strongarm tactics. They reminded me of those northern hordes that streamed down on Rome in the fifth century and brought in the Dark Ages. But these bikers didn’t rape or pillage or anything even though they could have; the whole place was wide open to them. They could for instance have declared a separate state, the People’s Independent Republic of Louisburgh, and no one would have raised a finger against them. But they didn’t. By ten o’clock Monday morning they were gone, lifting camp like some nomadic tribe and leaving in their wake a lot of broken glass and a small town that breathed easily for the first time in three days. I was sorry when they had gone; they had left a real impression on me. I bought a leather jacket as soon as I could and some day I’m going to get a bike of my own.

  But that fire was the biggest thing in this town since those bikers. It was the early hours of the morning and I was walking from the bridge end of town, having come out the back entrance of a pub selling after hours. Walking up the street I saw that the sky was already orange with the fireglow and that a big crowd had gathered before the pub. Going round the corner I ran into Owl and Jamie sitting on a signpost at the back of the crowd. Owl’s my younger brother and I swear there’s not a weirder kid in the whole of creation. It was me that put Owl on him. Right from when he was an infant he was reading books. It seemed to damage his eyesight because he was only four when he was fitted with his first pair of specs, a big pair that made him look like a professor. But they also made him look like an owl and that’s the one that stuck. Right then he and Jamie were held rapt by the fire. They seemed to be concentrating hard, like they had to submit a report on it to someone.

  The sight of Owl maddened me, everything about him maddened me. Just him sitting there on the signpost in his cap and T-shirt, all golden-haired and clear-skinned, an identikit angel, made me sick. I never liked him. I loved him, he being my brother and all that, but I never liked him. You see, Owl did things to me, all sorts of things. I don’t mean torturing things and shit like that. That wasn’t Owl’s way. Instead he just filled my head full of things, dark crazy things. There were times he would say something just to madden me and I could feel the bones beneath my flesh straining out to hit him or do him some lasting injury. In moments like that I could easily picture him standing there bawling in pain and fright, a red mark on his face where I’d struck him. That was the kind of thing Owl inspired in me and I hated him for it. No one else could make me think that way.

  I looked up at him on the signpost and said something to him, something I can’t remember, I was that drunk. Owl didn’t bother replying. That was his way with people he knew were not as smart as himself and, as he was never slow to point out, there were plenty of those. I couldn’t argue with him there, his gifts were obvious. He kept getting glowing reports from school, reports that seemed to be always read out in the kitchen whenever I was near.

  ‘He is an excellent pupil with exceptional abilities. It is a pleasure to teach him,’ my mom would repeat, smiling cosily at Dad.

  That was the kind of thing I heard twice a year, Christmas and summer, ever since Owl started school. He would be there in the kitchen with Mom and Dad listening to the report being read out, basking in their pride and wearing that smirk on his face he used specially to madden me, making me itch to hit him. He knew that the reading out of his reports, which were a foregone conclusion anyway, was only an underhand rebuke to my own average efforts. Owl could do no wrong, he was the blue-eyed boy, literally. Mom would comment on those blue eyes of his, telling us wistfully they were a sure sign that he lacked iron. Owl lacked something all right but it was something more fundamental than iron. I think myself it was humanity or mercy or something like that, something you can’t quite put your hand on but if you don’t have it you’re not human. And it constantly amazed me that I seemed to be the only one in the whole world who saw this. No one else saw that there was something wrong with him, everyone seemed to believe that he exuded nothing but light and cheer. Was he really that beautiful that he blinded everyone to his real self? Whatever it was, most people thought that I was just plain jealous of him. ‘If you were more like Owl, worked hard like him, you would have no need to be giving out or be jealous of him.’ That’s what my mom said any time I talked of Owl to her. But she’s wrong. The last thing in the world I want to be is like Owl. I want to be as different from him as possible.

  Owl was real happy looking at that fire, just like I knew he would be. Anywhere there was a chance of death and destruction I reckoned that was where Owl belonged, gazing out of those glasses with that grin on his face. Sometimes I thought he belonged in a different age to this, in some age where death and destruction were daily catastrophes. Maybe Europe during the world wars or during the plague years was where he belonged, walking through devastated cities, a beautiful and untouchable angel of death surrounded by corpses and the sound of shutters clattering in the breeze. That was the way I pictured Owl and despite how young he was I have no qualms admitting that he frightened me. He should have frightened other people as well.

  Once when he was an infant, about two or three, we had relatives visiting us. One of them was a nun. Owl was playing on the floor and they were making a big deal of him, how gorgeous he was and how good his talk was. Then this nun starts rubbing his head and asks him, ‘And what does the little man want to be when he grows up?’ I suppose she was expecting some guff about driving trains or being a fireman or something. She got some shock when Owl looked up from his toys with those blue eyes of his and said out clear as day, ‘When I grow up I want to be an executioner.’ Man, I could have sworn the temperature in the room dropped a few degrees when he said that. The nun was real stunned. Everyone tried to laugh it off, giggling, saying wasn’t he a great boy to know such a long word. But it didn’t work. Owl just sat there looking up with those blue eyes. He’d spoken and there was no unsaying what he’d said.

  That was the moment my parents should have seen into him, into his heart. But they didn’t. Even in those early days they were blinded by his beauty. I used to wonder too, did they ever guess the type of books he read? Most twelve-year-olds are stuck in Enid Blyton or Roald Dahl or such like. But not Owl. Owl’s two principal books were Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year and John Hershey’s Hiroshima. I asked him lately how he got his hands on those books and he told me blithely that he got them in the local library. I knew he couldn’t have got them checked out because they weren’t in the kids’ section and he said he hadn’t had them checked out, he’d stolen them and thrown them out the window. He would read these books at night underneath the bedclothes, and I swear I could hear him laughing grimly as he turned the pages. I don’t know how many times he’d read them; he’d had them for about three years but a week barely passed without him taking them out just once. He would hunker down under the bedclothes with his torch, reading and laughing, surfacing now and again to test me with the meaning of some gruesome word he’d come across. That used to frighten the fuck out of me.

  ‘I’ll bet you don’t know the meaning of the word septicaemia?’

  He would speak that out of the darkness like a ghoul and even in my bed it would strike me with a chill. ‘Septicaemia is the deadliest of the three forms of plague; it has a hundred per cent fatality rate. It can be transmitted by the human flea, Pulex irritans, or the human louse, Pediculus humanus. A rash develops within a few hours of infection and if you are not dead within one day you certainly will be within three.’

  He would speak that out with slow deliberation, savouring the Latin terms like they were delicacies.

  ‘It was one of the forms of plague that in the middle of the fourteenth century wiped out a third of the population of Europe; ten mil
lion people.’

  ‘Shut up, you fucker, and get to sleep.’ These were the moments in which I ached to hit him. I never did though. I felt sometimes that that was what he wanted. Another of his preoccupations was hanging.

  ‘Guess how long it took for the quickest hanging in the history of the British penal system? How long did it take to get the prisoner from his cell to the scaffold and hung? Seven seconds. Isn’t that amazing, seven seconds? Imagine the speed and the panic of that.’

  He would laugh then and settle back to reading again but my sleep would be gone for the night. It was incidents like this which left me with my most vivid image of Owl, a golden head with blue eyes looking up from some grisly book to see how the world was squaring up to the bloody word he was reading.

  Anyway I stood there beneath Owl and Jamie watching that fire rage on and on. The building was now totally devastated, the roof having fallen into the centre of the building, and sending up a tower of flame. I got to wondering what would happen if those petrol pumps and the gas store opposite blew up. The explosion wouldn’t leave a living soul or a building standing in the whole area. Human torches would reel out of the darkness and bodies would litter the streets in every direction. All the emergency services would be mobilized to no effect. Politicians would come wringing their hands, bemoaning the loss of life and talking of the need for sterner safety measures. A full public inquiry with accountability would be promised. This whole vision, all its death and hypocrisy, made me weak and nauseous. I couldn’t handle it. I wondered why the town hadn’t been evacuated and why all those people stood looking up at the fire like it was some sort of show or something. They were just standing there, a couple of hundred of them rooted to the spot without talking, except for now and then someone raising their hands like a zombie to point out some detail in the midst of the flames. I wondered why they were so fascinated with it, all these ordinary people moved to leave their beds in the middle of the night to watch this disaster. I wondered, would they have been so quick to come in such numbers if, instead of a fire, word got out that a public exhibition of lovemaking was taking place here on the square? I doubted it. Probably the only people to turn up would be there to put an end to it. They would speak of public decency and the need to protect family values. But the real difference is that lovemaking wouldn’t give the same thrill as this fire; it’s not death-centred like disasters and killings and fires and that’s why it wouldn’t rivet the minds of these people. They would walk away muttering about morals and decency but in their hearts they’d be pissed off because their minds hadn’t been gripped by some image of death.

  Anyway my mind began to wander thinking these thoughts. It didn’t help either that the heat and the fresh air was making me feel the effect of all that drink I’d taken. I decided to go home and leave those people to their fire-gazing. That way if the whole town went up I’d know nothing about it in my sleep. I staggered home in the lamplight, my head reeling, fighting down an unbelievable desire to puke.

  When I got in the house was empty. Like everyone else in town my parents were on the street watching the fire. I went straight to the bathroom and spent ten minutes on my knees in front of the toilet, puking up my arsehole. I had drunk too much again. This was becoming a habit recently, a habit I badly needed to get under control. I gripped onto the bowl, fighting to keep my eyes open. I didn’t want to fall asleep beside the bowl and the old pair coming in finding me there, giving me grief. That’s all I seem to get from them recently, misery and grief. I don’t care to stay around the house much any more. I just get up in the afternoon and leave for the pub and stay there most of the day drinking, playing pool and backing horses. I only come back in the evening to eat and they start giving me grief about returning to university and re-sitting those exams I should have done in early June. I didn’t want to hear anything about it that time of night nor about how much I was drinking and how much I was letting the family down. I’d heard enough of that shite lately.

  I staggered out of the bathroom and along the hallway to the bedroom I shared with Owl. I flopped onto the bed fully clothed and into the type of coma that only too much drink can bring on.

  III

  The next day at school we were the only two kids to have seen the whole thing. We told the whole story at lunch break and there was a lot of talk as to whether the fire had been accidental or an insurance scam. Some of us thought that maybe someone had come in the night and torched the place in some sort of revenge mission none of us knew anything about. This was the best idea and we hoped hard that it was true.

  Anyway, when we went home that evening, the charred husk of the nightclub was sectioned off with caution tape and crawling with detectives. They didn’t look a bit like the detectives you see on telly. There wasn’t a sharp suit in sight and I’ll bet they hadn’t a shoulder holster between them. They were wearing sensible anoraks with hoods and were walking carefully over the steaming timbers so as not to get soot on themselves. They looked more like auctioneers who were going to buy the place and rebuild it than detectives; they definitely didn’t seem too interested in fingerprints and that sort of thing. The two local cops walked up and down outside the caution tape shooing away anyone like ourselves who came too close. So, after we had our tea and changed, Jamie and I sneaked up the back way to the pub from the river. We lay on our bellies in the long grass like two snakes, about fifteen yards from the building. The detectives were still prowling around inside or standing about pointing at the walls and the blown windows and the roof that lay on the floor like a shipwreck.

  ‘Those fuckers are going to be there all day,’ Jamie said. He spat into the grass. ‘I’ll bet if a clue fell out of the sky and clocked one of them on the head they wouldn’t recognize it.’

  That made me laugh. I could just see a clue falling out of the blue air and clocking one of them on the head. The clue didn’t have any shape and it wasn’t made of anything I knew of but I thought of it as one of those rocks you see lying nice and tidy on the side of the road in a Road Runner cartoon. I saw that rock falling out of the sky with a whistle and burying one of those detectives beneath it so that all you could see was two legs kicking out from underneath it. I got a fit of the giggles then and I had to bite a mouthful of grass to stop laughing but some of it went with my breath and I started coughing and choking and I thought I’d die for lack of breath but Jamie started thumping me on the back and telling me to keep quiet. It was a close thing but I stopped choking eventually and I must have been crying or something because my sight was blurred with all the tears in my eyes and I had to take off my glasses and wipe them.

  ‘Christ, don’t they give you anything to eat at home?’ said Jamie. ‘You must be fierce hungry when you try a feed of grass. If you’d told me I’d have brought a handful of hay.’

  He was my friend and I was grateful to him for saving my life but I told him to fuck off anyway. ‘Look,’ I said. The detectives were leaving the back of the building and going through to the front. We leaped up and ran through the grass to the back of the pub. The back door, or what was left of it, was wide open so we entered quietly, a bit awed. I had read a lot about fires and explosions and the damage they left behind them and the inside of this pub was just as I had imagined it would be. It looked great, all blackened timber, blown glass and the roof open to the sky. Even the light inside the building looked strange, hanging there kinda sooty, a piece of darkness from the night before. Oddest of all I saw that the bottles on the shelves behind the bar had been melted down to smoky blobs and some of them had even run over the edge in long, black icicles. I was just going to cross to the shelves and break one of them off – they looked so sharp – when Jamie started calling me from outside. He was standing on a pile of blocks looking into the store, a square lean-to running straight off the back with an asbestos roof. The whole structure was blackened with smoke but seemed to be fine otherwise.

  ‘Come here and have a look at this.’

  I pulled myself u
p on the blocks and gripped the iron grid over the window. It took me a second to see through the cobwebs and dust on the window but gradually I could make out the red and yellow crates that were stacked in columns up to the roof. I had seen them several times out front, stacked on the sidewalk, waiting to be brought in here so I recognized them straight off. They were bottles full of Coke and lemonade and orange and stuff like that. We both must have had the same idea at the same time because we looked at each other with wide grins all over our faces.

  ‘There’s thousands in there,’ Jamie said, ‘thousands. If we could get our hands on them they’d be worth a fortune.’

  I checked out the door, a heavy teak one, but it was locked with a padlock. The grids over the windows weren’t moving either.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s go back and have a think about it.’ We ran down to the end of the garden and sat in the long grass chewing stalks.

  ‘If we could get our hands on those bottles we’d make a fortune,’ Jamie was saying. ‘If we don’t get them they’ll only be given out to the other pubs in town.’

  ‘We could sell them on the Reek.’ Like all my best ideas that came to me out of a mixture of deep thought and a sudden flash of inspiration. Reek Sunday was just three months away and if we could set up a stall halfway up the pilgrim path we’d make a fortune.

  ‘A bottle of Coke sells for one fifty. That’s one fifty clear profit on every bottle. We’d be set up for the summer if we could pull it off.’

  ‘Yah,’ said Jamie, his eyes opening wide. ‘I’d buy a leather jacket with the money.’

  I couldn’t think right off what I’d buy but a leather jacket sounded daft. He’d need a new one in two years’ time when he’d grown a bit. I was thinking maybe I’d buy a pile of books. What I really wanted was a set of Encyclopaedia Britannicas, my favourite books. I wondered how much they’d cost.