The Good Servants

by Johnny Brennan

  OH FUCK, ME FIDDLE!!! I jumped up but there it was on the table, surrounded by money. I must’ve got paid. Imagine! I picked up one of the notes and fell back on the bed laughing. It had ‘The Wild Rover’ written on it.

  “... and the next thing I remember I’m waking up in bed”. I was talking to Brian. It was now Tuesday. I’d written off Monday as a duvet day. I skipped college and spent the day in serious recovery. My fuckin’ chest was killing me and I felt bruised and battered. I hoped I wasn’t fighting. Un-remembered injuries are the worst kind so I was fairly reticent to ring anyone. When the recovery still wasn’t progressing as I thought it should, I hit the offy and got myself four cans of Dutch medicine. Like the Irishman who tried to kill himself by taking a thousand aspirin, I felt better after two and great after four so I went down the local and met up with a couple of lads I knew there and eased myself into Tuesday morning. With hangovers like that you have to ease yourself down gently or it can be a bumpy landing. As it happened, Sunday’s cure was a little OTT, kinda like curing the disease by shooting the patient point blank in the face. So I was determined not to repeat that mistake, and anyway, the weekend was over, let the recovery commence. On Tuesday I felt ready to face up to Sunday night and I called Brian. I’d known Brian for a long time, I trusted him and didn’t mind embarrassing myself in front of him. I guess that’s what friendship meant.

  “What the fuck happened? I remember being in the bar, then drinking on the street with some guys ...”

  “Fuck’s sake, man, you missed all the craic, you were grand in the pub. You were talking to these two guys and you got them to come with us ...”

  “I remember two guys but I don’t remember talking to them ... Fuck’s sake.”

  “... then you and Spud decided to get a few cans as we were leavin’, which we drank by the fuckin’ canal ‘cos you couldn’t walk any further. Heh heh! What a fuckin’ gas, we were sitting around getting calmly pissed and chatting away, oh, I got me hole by the way!”

  “No fuckin’ way, with yer one? The yank?”

  “No, with you, ye fuckin’ steamer, and ye loved it, Heh Heh Heh.”

  “You’d better be jokin’ ... it’s about bleedin’ time, it’ll get you over whatsername.”

  “Yeah, I know. Anyway, we were sitting on the bank, havin’ a bevy, Dave was telling stories and you and Spud were mumbling shite, then Spud finished his pint which he still had from the pub and he went to the grass and threw the glass in the air and fuckin’ headed the fuckin’ thing into the canal. ‘He shoots he scores’ he shouts, and everyone’s watching with dropped jaws that he didn’t split himself open.”

  “Did it break?”

  “No, you just hear ‘duu’ and it bounces into the canal. Then you jump up, pull your jumper up over your head and start running around like a headless chicken, and, Heh Heh Heh, you fuckin’ gobshite, you ran straight into a canal locks and winded the fuck out of yourself. Heh Heh, scary fuckin’ scene man.”

  “Yeah, me ribs are still killing me.”

  “After that everyone was a bit freaked so we headed off. I was wrecked but still together enough to carry on a conversation with the lassies. You and Spud and Dave were bringing up the rear, finishing off the beers, singing bleedin’ Christmas songs for some reason, Heh Heh Heh, what a fuckin’ scene, man, what a scene, I can’t believe I got me hole ...”

  Brian was a good guy and outside of my family, the person I knew longest. He was one of life’s winners, good looking and easy going. The kind of guy girls liked to bring home to mammy but also great craic on the piss too. We met in secondary school and quickly became mates. We had a similar sense of humour and spent most of our remaining school days taking the piss out of everything left, right and centre. His family were originally country folk and were big trad-heads so he’d been playing whistle and flute since he was a childer. It seemed so cool that he’d spend his weekends sitting in pubs playing tunes with drunken adults, and I wanted in! Luckily, me ma was a middle-class wanna-be and she had me learning classical viola for a while with a view to joining the RTE concert orchestra sometime in the future, but I quickly switched to trad fiddle when I discovered ‘The Bothy Band’ and free pints!

  After we left school, Brian fucked off to Galway for a year of supposed study and we saw a lot less of each other. In the few years since he came back to Dublin we’d been going in different directions and we started having different groups of friends. But we were still conjoined at the brain by a shared sense of humour, world view and repertoire of tunes. We also managed to play together at least a couple of times a week, he’d come to my sessions or I’d go to his.

  On Wednesday, we played together in Fitzgerald’s. Fitzer’s was in the city centre, near O’Connell St. but off the beaten track. A small, box shaped pub with wooden floors stained with puke and blood going back decades. Not touristy wooden floors mind, the kind that are chosen from a catalogue to give a pub an air of authenticity, no, this wooden floor was there because the pub hadn’t been redecorated since the thirties and wood didn’t soak up shit and then rot like carpet did. Oddly enough for the centre Fitzer’s had its regulars and a right rum bunch they were too. It was great to play for real people who sat in the same seats every night rather than anonymous passers-by just breezing through. We’d been playing together here for a couple of months. Initially, it was this guy Aiden on the box, Brian and a few local bodhràn players but then Aiden fucked off to England and Brian got me in his place. Now Aiden was back and had dropped in the last couple of weeks trying to mooch his gig back. It was all a bit awkward, but fuck it, a gig is a gig, and now it was my gig. He was there again this week with his box in tow, along with a guitarist (can’t back tunes to save his life but sings a couple of Country & Western songs to break up the tunes), bodhràn player (sorry, percussionist, spoons, bones, tuneable bodhràn, bongos, the works, either holds his chosen weapon and stares at you or plays intensely without being heard) and whistle (Davey, will play a set near the end of the night when he’s tanked up and sure that no-one is listening to him). Me, Brian and Aiden tend to ignore the other musicians for the most part. There’s a hierarchy at work here, you don’t associate with musicians worse than you are. The good musicians are the cool kids and the hangers on are the dorks, and it’s not cool to associate with a dork.

  We had a quick warm-up spliff around the side of the pub then went in, sat down and ordered pints. Me, Brian and Aiden, as the main instrumentalists, held court and were talking amongst ourselves when who walks in only Spud, with a dirty big grin on his face.

  “Fuck’s sake, man, what are you doing here?”

  “Ha Ha! You made me promise to come down, you cunt. Fuck! I could’ve stayed at home. Wha’? Ye don’t remember? Fuck’s sake. What’s the barman’s name?”

  I was delighted to see Spud and I suddenly knew that we’d be good mates. Within minutes we were comparing scars. My ribs were still bruised yellow and may well have been cracked or something. Spud had a lump on his head the size of Bunbulben. Old soldiers comparing war wounds, mine’s bigger than yours. Spud got pinted up and we found him a seat among the main event, further relegating the periphery of the session.

  We got ourselves into position and kicked off with the ...

  “What’s it called? The … em, ‘Silver Spear’, into that E minor, de-de-diddle-ee-idle-diddle-idle-da.”

  “Em, ‘Rossbeigh, the Green Fields of’, lovely, and something else at the end?”

  “Ah, we’ll see how it goes.”

  “The ‘we’ll see how it goes’ turned out to be ‘The Union Reel’, and it was savage. The crowd went nuts and we took a break.

  “That’s a lovely change, E minor to A, really rises it up.”

  Looney Looney made his first approach of the evening.

  “Sorry lads, I’m not going to hassle yiz ...”

  Which meant that he was.

  “... but do ye sing ‘Dicey Riley’? I only ask ‘cos I knew the woman meself and it was
her anniversary there on Sunday, God rest her soul, and if yiz’d sing her song I’d be much appreciated. Fine heifer of a woman she was, gave me a shockin’ dose of the clap she did ...”

  “Hang on, you got the clap from Dicey Riley?”

  “I sang that once and no-one clapped.”

  “Well, let’s just say it was more than likely her. Fell asleep on top of me she did.”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  Looney was in his seventies, with a smattering of broken brown teeth and greasy hair the colour of woodbine smoke.

  “Now that I come to think of it ... fuck her, fat cow ... sing that other one ye do do ...”

  “Fair enough, a bit later, we just started.”

  “Who’s yer man?” asked Spud.

  “Looney Looney, a fuckin’ headbanger.”

  “Wha’, don’t tell me, so looney they named him twice.”

  “No, he’s actually called Looney, Pat Looney, head case, pure mad, mark my words.”

  “He’s like a hatter, a brush and a march hare all mixed together,” said Brian.

  Aiden then did an impossibly long slow air that bored the Jaysus out of everyone. It was so fucking long that I even had time to compose a limerick in its honour.

  Aiden played us a song,

  and didn’t put a note wrong,

  ‘twas a lovely slow air,

  from Ballisodare,

  but Jesus Christ, it was long!

  I went to whisper it to Brian but he’d gone AWOL again, leaving me and Aiden to carry the session for the next twenty minutes. The fucker! It was often a source of annoyance to me that Brian was so reluctant to play and was always the first to put his flute down. He’s a top player and the tunes positively oozed from his fingers, but he usually gets bored quickly and prefers to lig and hobnob. I guess it was starting to play so young that did that. Jigs and reels were seared into his neurological matrix and it doesn’t seem so special to him to whack them out for hours on end. Aiden, on the other hand, started playing in his early twenties and was always the last to pack his instrument away. He positively emanated an infectious enthusiasm for the music that Brian had long lost. It seems the younger you start, the better you play but less you enjoy it! Or maybe it’s the process of getting good that’s fun, not the state of being good.

  Jesus! That was some good spliff we had.

  Then, as quickly as he’d disappeared, Brian reappeared, fluted up and assumed the position.

  “OK, seriously, c’mon lads, for fuck’s sake, fast reel, the genetic chords ...”

  “The genetic chords? What the fuck are they?”

  “D ‘n’ A!”

  “Ha Ha!! Good one.”

  This then became a running gag all night.

  The ‘Anti-Nuclear Chords’ … C ‘n’ D (but we couldn’t find any tunes in C and D).

  The ‘Descartes Chord’ ... (I think therefore I ‘Am’).

  The ‘Micheal Jackson Chords’ ... (B,A,D).

  “Ah c’mon, do you play any tunes in B,A,D?”

  “I could write one.”

  ‘The Paternal Chords’ for the Dublin Reel,

  and ‘The Unhappy Sailor Chords’ ... (F ‘n C).

  “Hey, Welsh career advice ... B,Am! eh?”

  “Boooo!”

  “That’s scraping the barrel, that is.”

  “What do you get if you throw a piano down a mineshaft?”

  “I don’t know, what do you yadda yadda yadda?”

  “A♭m .. Heh Heh Heh Heh!!”

  “Ah Ha Ha Ha!” Brilliant! We had a good laugh at that one.

  Dan and Vera were a couple of old alcos who were always in Fitzer’s, come hail, rain or shine. Tonight was their anniversary and they were already locked and singing over us. “We’re only married forty-three years, but it feels like a hundred,” that was to be just the first of many times to hear that sentence tonight. We played a few tunes and then discussed them, who wrote the tune or who played it and in what key. I loved this session for that. As I said, Aiden was mad for trad and knew the names and origins of all the tunes. He couldn’t play them all but he knew if they were fiddle, flute or pipe tunes, plus whether they were Donegal, Roscommon, Clare or Kerry tunes. For example, ‘The Earl’s Chair’ was composed by fluter Pakie Maloney in the Derrycraig Wood while sitting on a rock that used to be used as a resting place by some Earl, ‘The Rights of Man’ was a book written in the late eighteen hundreds by Thomas Paine, ‘The Home Ruler’ was not Parnell, as was commonly supposed, but her indoors, who ruled the home of the composer, etc. ... would you fuckin’ credit it? Good stories, but of dubious authenticity, and to be honest I’m just happy playing the tunes and am not too concerned about their etymology. Spud arrived back from the jax fully armed with the last of our three free pints. We’d be drinking down our gig money for the rest of the night and would probably leave owing the bar money. But fuck it! It was Wednesday after all, the weekend was just around the corner.

  During the session we made tentative arrangements for the weekend. We decided to head down on Friday just to get settled. Brian had recruited Tony, but he was coming down by train on Saturday afternoon. Tony had a fairly flexible and cushy desk job in some basement section of the post office but he couldn’t swap the Friday for whatever reason. Brian could borrow his oul’ fella’s van so transport was sorted. We invited Spud ‘cos we had the room and we needed a guitarist. He jumped at the chance of a weekend in Galway, carousing and gallivanting. We had somewhere to crash out but we weren’t sure what it was like. Fuck it! We’d probably be too smashed to care. The deal was three gigs, Saturday and Sunday night and Sunday afternoon, we’d get a place to kip, drink and a couple of ton per session, that’s two ton each for the three gigs. But now Spud was coming I didn’t know if we’d divvy it up by four. Aiden’s mate gave us a break by singing a couple of songs, ‘You come home late and you come home early ...’ and ‘Past the Point of Rescue’, a couple of well chosen crowd pleasers that got everyone going. He was delighted with himself and was bought a pint for his troubles.

  We launched into the last hour of the session and it was livening up as the punters got drunker. Looney Looney gave us a speech on the European Union and the price of drink, oblivious to the fact that we were playing a set at the time, and the bodhràn player took out his bongos and started to whack away with all the rhythm of a blind virgin giving her first hand-job.

  Spud turned white when some oul’ dear at the bar squeezed his arse. “She was fuckin’ sixty years old!!! Dirty oul’ cow.” Then the barman, John, the young fella’, nearly got in a scrap with two guys sitting at opposite ends of the bar who were sharing a packet of fags and kept throwing them back and forth to each other as they went in and out, narrowly missing John’s head every time. Dan and Vera were dancing around and inadvertently started a two man conga around the bar to the strains of the ‘Golden Eagle Hornpipe’. Brian got pulled up and roped in and that made it three. Then like a game of snake the line gradually expanded, “LA LA LA LA LA LA HEY!! LA LAAAA LAAA LAAAA,” soon half the pub was linked to Vera by Brian looking embarrassed but conga-ing away for all he was worth. We were breaking our bollixes laughing. We started playing the conga tune but by the time we’d got it they’d had enough and the line broke up. Everyone cheered and Brian headed straight to the bar. He looked like he was going for a strong one, but I’d underestimated him. He’d gone for a round of strong ones, six whiskeys, courtesy of Vera and Dan.

  “... And he brought forth ambrosia from the Gods, manna from heaven, and he saw that it was good, so he ordered a double for himself ...”

  “Cheers, Vera and Dan, Happy Anniversary, and many happy returns.”

  Dan was crying or throwing some kind of tantrum for some reason, probably the lack of drink on his table ‘cos two minutes later he was telling jokes. Jack came over, “did you hear about the Spanish student who thought the Real IRA was a football team?”

  “Ah Ha Ha Ha”, nice one, Jack.

  “No,”
said Spud, but Jack had gone.

  Brian called up to John the barman, “hey John, can I have a Mars bar and two fried eggs?”

  “Ye wha’?”

  “A Mars bar and two fried eggs.”

  I loved Brian’s stoney faced surrealist humour. You never knew when he was taking the piss. Right now John the barman was questioning both his hearing and his sanity.

  John came out from behind the bar to the table, “what are ye sayin’?”

  “I said the dancers in this bar have two right legs.”

  “Yeah, and the band in this bar has one right gobshite.”

  “Ah Ha Ha Ha!”

  “Touché D’Artagnan.”

  “Bah, foiled again, and I would’ve gotten away with if it wasn’t for that pesky barman.”

  “Touché or not touché, that is the question.”

  “Why were the Three Musketeers called the Three Musketeers?”

  “OK, I don’t know, why were the Three Musketeers called the Three Musketeers?”

  “No, it’s not a joke, I mean, there were four of them not three ...”

  “Well, D’Artagnan wasn’t technically a musketeer ...”

  “Look who’s talking” said Brian.

  “Wha’?”

  “... but he was the hero, it should’ve been called the One Non-Musketeer.”

  “They didn’t use muskets either. It should’ve been called The Four Swordsmen.”

  “No, that’s us.”

  “Yeah, right on.”

  “Spud, take a letter ...”

  “G.”

  “Dear Mr Dumas, We have noticed ...”

  “... while on the piss ...”

  “... while on the piss ... some inconsistencies in the naming of your literary work entitled ‘The Three Musketeers’. Furthermore we would strongly object to you using the alternative title ‘The Four Swordsmen’, as my friend and associate, Mr Foy has correctly pointed out ‘that is us’, and we are rightly up for doing some horizontal fencing tonight if we can find some ladies of the opposite gender ...”