The Good Servants

by Johnny Brennan

  “Doc! Well there’s a sight to behold,” said an old fat gentleman coming out of the back of the pub who I could only presume was Malachy. He looked casually put together and absent mindedly kept, sporting a big pot belly and wilful hair that looked like it had last seen a comb when Charlie Haughey was in power. He held a torn newspaper in his hand and I got the feeling he was coming back from the jax.

  “Are you well, Malachy?” said Doc, our hitcher, shaking Malachy’s hand, “aren’t you very polite, sitting there waiting to be served, what’ll it be?”

  “Four lovely pints, please ... and whatever the Jackeens are havin’, Ha Ha Ha!! These lads picked us up in Ballin, off to the oyster fest, gaggin’ for it, they are.”

  “That’s what you want lads, a couple of Galway heifers full of oysters. Jaysus boy, they do be takin’ it every way, you’ll be red raw come Monday morning, mark my words ...”

  That sounded spot on. I was in desperate need of a ride.

  “Do you live in Ballinasloe, Doc?” asked Brian again, backing up the conversation a little.

  “I don’t ... I live in Loughrea, I ride in Ballinasloe.”

  “For fuck’s sake.”

  “That’s another fine weekend for getting yer hole, the Ballinasloe horse fair. There does be money and drink and horses and money, and where you find the money and drink, that’s where you’ll find your hole to be gettin’ up on.”

  “Plenty of ridin’ at the oul’ horse fairs all right.”

  “You’d better believe it, man, especially the Ballin horse fair, biggest horse fair in Ireland. You do have money, men and quare ones comin’ in from all over the country and the Jackeens carrying every class of disease, no offence mind.”

  “None taken.”

  We started eyeing each other. We’d just come to the end of our pints and to be honest I don’t think any of us wanted to move just yet. This guy, Doc was a gas cunt and while there was craic, there was us. I looked at Brian. He was the one under pressure. After all, we were just the designated passengers. He was relaxed and laughing, and I knew him well enough to know that he was going to have another one before going anywhere.

  “Stick us on another four there, Malachy, please, when yer ready,” I said decisively without any sign of contradiction.

  “... that’s why the river down here is called the Suck, every morning you do have to be pullin’ the bed-clothes out of your arse, I’m tellin’ yiz, Ha Ha Ha!!”

  “What do you make of the Jackeen women Doc? Any luck there?”

  “You must be jokin’! I wouldn’t dilute me mickey-juice by mixing it with a west-Brit pale faced Jackeen woman, no way man. They haven’t got what it takes, at all, at all … they learn the facts of life by watching Coronation Street. Down here they’re watching the cows in the field from the pram, it’s instinctive.”

  Two oul’ fellas entered the pub and took their seats at the bar with a nod and a ‘howsitgoin’ in our direction. This bar was the business, the genuine article that’s copied in Irish pubs from here to Taiwan, low ceiling, ancient artefacts and oddities casually strewn around the shelves and walls. The dust on some of the shelves was an inch thick and there were cut-up strips of a ‘Daily Mirror’ in the jax. Let’s just say that it lacked a woman’s touch. But the pint was only gorgeous. I can never tell if it’s the pint itself or just being in the country that gives the Guinness that extra something, but fuck it, I was enjoying myself and I finished my second in half the time of the first. Spud was right behind me and Doc waited ‘til we were nearly finished then sank his in three mouthfuls. Brian was taking it handy for no other reason other than he knew he had to.

  “... well, if I’m a Jackeen then that would make you a culchie,” said Brian getting fed up with being referred to as a Jackeen all the time without any come back.

  “Ay, it would indeed, but I like to think that culchie comes from the word ‘cultured’, as in refined and ...”

  “... as in pullin’ bed sheets out of your arse at drunken hairyarsed horse fairs, Heh Heh Heh.”

  “Well, it’s better than pullin’ a half full rubber Johnny out of your arse like you feckin’ pale faces, Ha Ha Ha!!”

  We were all in stitches laughing at Brian and Doc going at each other during which I sneakily ordered another round.

  “Why are we pale faces in Dublin? ‘Cos you’re all a bunch of cowboys?”

  “Not at all. ‘Cos you’re from the pale, ye gobsheen. Do they not teach yiz anything at school up there?”

  “Why are we called Jackeens?” I asked enquiringly.

  “Because you’re from that jax, Dublin.”

  “Actually ...” came a voice from the end of the bar, the two old geezers who came in had been hanging onto our every word while they drank their pints, “ ... the reason the people of Dublin are called Jackeens is because the last time a British monarch visited Ireland was when Queen Victoria came to Ireland in the mid eighteen hundreds, she dared not go beyond the pale, but she didn’t have to anyway because the streets of Dublin were lined with, at the time, loyal subjects waving Union Jacks at Her Majesty, and because of this from then on they were known as ‘Jackeens’ by the country folk.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “‘Tis.”

  “I fuckin’ knew it! The last British royal to set foot in Ireland without getting blown apart and you lot wave that butcher’s apron at her. May God forgive yiz and have mercy on yer souls.”

  Doc’s point of view on this matter was not in question.

  “What about ‘culchie’?”

  “Didn’t he already tell yiz, that’s because were a bunch of cultured and refined people.”

  “What about ‘bog-warrior’? ... and ‘mulchie’?”

  “... and muck-savage.”

  “... mull-ah?”

  “I heard yiz ate yizer childer ...”

  “Well that just goes to show how cultured and refined you feckin’ pale faced Jackeen jack offs are, Ha Ha Ha!!”

  I should point out that these seemingly viscous insults were being received with the good humour with which they were given, each blow and counter blow brought louder laughs and higher stakes. The next insult would have to be a little closer to the line of acceptability without going over. This was a definition of slagging, the Irish version of limbo dancing. How low could you go? How insulting could you be without actually knocking the stick off the bar? I don’t think we could get much lower than we were now. We were on the edge of our seats, waiting with held breath, beaming with anticipatory glee. Who would strike next? Who would knock off the stick, genuinely and unfunnily insult someone and get a dig in the jaw?

  No-one as it turned out.

  “Does anyone fancy a few tunes?” asked Spud hesitantly, instantly deflating the tension and calling it a draw.

  “Yeah, a few tunes. We’ll see if we can round up a couple of fillies for a bit of a dance. I have a grand song for yiz too while we’re on the subject of the British royals.”

  beep, beep. SMS.

  Me and Brian looked at each other.

  “Fuck, we’re supposed to be in Galway by now and Paul will be waiting. Oh shit!”

  Brian takes out his phone and holds it out a foot in front of his face.

  “HELLO? ... HELLO? ... PRESS BUTTON ‘B’ ... PRESS BUTTON ‘B’ ... Foy, it’s doing it again, THIS IS LOUGHREA CALLING GALWAY, COME IN GALWAY ... COULD WE HAVE THE VOTES FROM THE GALWAY JURY PLEASE, Heh Heh Heh.”

  “Garçon, douze points ... Barman, twelve pints, Ah Ha Ha.”

  The whole pub was laughing at Brian’s po-faced idiocy. I hoped that Paul was in as good a mood. Eventually Brian read us the msg, “sory. will b late. have pint r 2. pol’, to which Brian replied, “Dont rush, alredy having few pints + tunes near loughrea, will msg when coming”.

  “Well, that’s that sorted.”

  Spud was now encouraged, mad eager to get the instruments and have a few tunes, and the locals were egging us on. Plus, there was the fact that a few tunes mean
t a few more pints, and probably on the house as well. I looked at Brian, we both knew well what would happen if we took the instruments out. We would drink and play until we could neither drink nor play no more. That suited me fine, we didn’t have to be in Galway ‘til tomorrow anyway but we’d nowhere to stay here if Brian got locked ... I’m not sure Spud was thinking that far ahead ...

  “Fuck it, let’s have a few tunes.”

  “Yeah, let’s get the instruments.”

  “Stick us on another four there, Malachy, please, would ye?”

  ... and the instruments were went and got.

  We removed ourselves from the bar and adjourned to a more appropriate location for a sessoon. We chose a spacious table in the corner with plenty of room for instrument pieces, fags, flute-cleaners, rosin, cigarette papers, strings, plectrums, empty glasses and of course, full glasses. We could see the jax without smelling it, and we were well within shouting distance of the bar so we’d never be cut off from the supply that fed the demand. We looked around at each other with self congratulatory grins. A job well done.

  It was just gone five of a Friday and a couple more people came in. It was rush hour in Dublin now, the weekend starts here. The starter’s pistol sounded and everyone raced to the bar, eager to take an early lead. But here in pre-industrial Loughrea, a quiet session was about to commence, calmly observed by a handful of people enjoying a relaxing after-work pint or two. Savage!

  Phase 1: The instruments were extracted, then they were looked at from a variety of different angles and shown to each other, then they were rubbed, warmed, blown, bowed, strummed, greased, rosined, loosened and oiled up until they were ready to go.

  Phase 2: We’d play our little test improvs, one or two bars of a scale of some sort to test the sound and the acoustics, and to make sure our fingers, wrists, arms and brains were working in unison. Each player had his own little trademark warmer. Mine was usually the third part of ‘The Belfast Hornpipe’, a run of triplets all the way down from the high ‘A’ to the low ‘E’. It tested both the volume and timbre, it loosened the fingers and trekked across the three main strings. Brian was hitting a succession of ‘D’s, low high top, low high top, low high top. Spud started the tune he taught me earlier.

  “No chance,” I said, “a bit later maybe ...”

  Phase 3: We put the instruments down on the table, sat back and called for the man of the moment.

  Phase 4 would have to wait.

  “Malachy,” shouted Brian, clapping once and rubbing his hands in the exaggerated fashion of a man who has just done a satisfyingly hard days work, “decorate the woodwork, please, like a good man. I’ve a thirst on me ye could photograph.”

  “Was that fuckin’ it?” protested Doc, obviously deflated at the deferment of Phase 4.

  “Hold yer horses, would ye? It’s only Friday, for fuck’s sake.”

  “Holy mother o’God. I thought ye were actually going to play something there for us ... for the love o’ ... Malachy, just in time, ye know what, I think I need this one more than I needed the first three.” Malachy transferred our round from an antique tin tray to the antique wooden table.

  “Good man yerself.”

  “Fair play.”

  “Cheers.”

  “Spot on, boy.”

  He stood up straight and looked at us very seriously, then bent down to us again, put his head among ours and said, very gently, “they say that the Eskimos have over fifty different words for snow ...” We looked at each other ever so slightly bewildered. Malachy looked over his shoulders coyly, like he was about to reveal the third secret of Fatima, “... I’d say that the Irish have a similar amount of ways of thanking someone who just bought you a pint.” He turned and left.

  Then, with our whistles wetted and our flutes and fiddles whetted we tore into a set of reels like a hungry pit bull into a postman’s arse. We did the ‘Congress’ into a couple of Bothy Band tunes and the crowd went wild ... well, when I say crowd, I mean the ten to fifteen people that were there, and when I say wild I mean that they stopped staring at us and rejoiced quietly in their pints. Statler and Waldorf at the bar clapped and Doc just repeated “mighty, mighty,” seemingly to himself.

  After that we played for ourselves, the way it should be. Pints came down out of nowhere. Spud gave us a couple of songs to change the pace, and though his speaking voice was normal enough his singing voice was deep and husky. You could almost imagine that he was a little skinny guy miming to Johnny Cash. A few great songs too, not too common ones but known and beautiful, ‘The Mero’, ‘A Miner’s Life’ and ‘Now I’m Easy’, which brought a lump to my throat. This was what I called a nice session.

  About seven-ish a tray of sandwiches were sent down, to stop us getting too drunk I’m sure, and they were well timed. We stopped to eat and have a break for a half an hour or so. Spud rolled up a spliff in the jax and we went outside to get some air. I don’t want to sound like your archetypal Dub, but I was bleedin’ buzzin’! Doc had disappeared into the ever growing crowd and was circling around like a social butterfly. He seemed to know just about everyone in the place. On the way back from the jax I was stopped by a couple of oul’ dears and asked where I was from and were we down for the weekend. The truth was stranger than fiction I told them, we picked up a hitcher about three this afternoon and now we were merrily drunk and fed in an off the road little pub miles from anywhere.

  “Will you play the Bord na Móna ad tune for us on your fiddle? You love that one, don’t ye, Bridie?”

  “Yeah, lovely, de du du DU du dudu ...”

  “Ah well, yeah, ye see, I don’t play that anymore. I played that at me mate’s funeral and I swore I’d never play it again, out of respect, y’know yourself ...”

  “Oh Jaysus, I’m very sorry.”

  “... but yer man over there will play “The Lonesome Boatman’ on his whistle if ye ask him nicely.”

  Divilment, pure divilment.

  I was starting to feel locked now and felt that we should get back into the tunes ASAP. Playing tunes keeps you sober, well, relatively sober, ‘cos you’re concentrated so much and focused on the job in hand, but it has a habit of turning on you all at once once you stop playing. Yeah, more tunes were on the cards alright, but so were more pints. I got back from the bar skillfully and unnaturally clasping four pints.

  “Hey! Doc! Pint!”

  Brian was looking at me funny. “Foy, ye cunt ...”

  “Wha’?” I said laughing.

  “Did you tell some oul’ one that I’d play “The Lonesome Fuckwank’? Ye bollix.”

  “Ah Ha Ha Ha.”

  “Any more messin’ from you and you’ll wait in the car with a bottle o’Coke and a patchet o’crips.”

  Doc sat down looking very serious indeed, “Lads, we might be on for a bit of a hooley later on ... is this mine?”

  About the time we started up again, this guy Eoin came in with a banjo and a couple of chicks. He’d obviously got wind somehow that there was a session going down with some blowins from Dublin and he wanted in on the action.

  “How’s it goin’ lads? D’ye mind if I have a couple of tunes with ye?”

  Well his session manners were up to scratch.

  “Are ye any good?”

  At this stage ours weren’t.

  “Ah sure, I can knock out a tune or two.”

  We’d have to see about that. We’d politely ignore him at first, give him the oul’ session-psyche-out, avoid making any eye contact until he showed what he could do and revealed his place in the hierarchy. I knew this treatment well ‘cos it wasn’t so long ago that I didn’t remember being a beginner myself. It went like this, there were three possibilities ...

  1.) He would start off some really simple tunes, ‘The Kesh’ and ‘Morrison’s’ or ‘Egan’s Polka’ for example, and play them badly to boot. We’d patronise him, say ‘very nice’ but then just ignore him all night and play flash tunes constantly just to freak him out.

  2.) He
would be bloody brilliant! He’d play some really obscure Donegal reels that he learned directly from Francie Byrne and used to duet with Kevin Burke in Philadelphia. In that case we would kiss his arse, laugh at all his jokes and start to firstname-drop mercilessly. We’d talk about Sharon and Frankie being in town this weekend or calling Mary to drop in and bring Alec and her whistle with her.

  3.) He would be as good as we were, maybe a little better or a little worse, and in which case we would become mates, play tunes all night and he’d call us when he came up to Dublin and wanted a session and a sofa to crash out on.

  As far as I was concerned the third possibility was the best and the second was the worst, but I reckoned that for Brian, the second would be the best and the first would be the worst. I didn’t yet know what that said but I was sure it said something.

  I was pretty sure that Spud didn’t give a fuck either way.

  With no seats being readily available we had to shift coats, paraphernalia and arses thus restricting space currently allotted for elbows, necks, bows and flute spittle.

  Introductions were made, with particular care taken on my behalf to remember the lassies names, Dervla and the other one, whose name I promptly forgot as soon as it became apparent that she was Eoin’s squeeze. His banjo was removed from its case like Excalibur from its scabbard and it glinted and sparkled through the last dusty sunbeam of the evening.

  “New banjo is it?”

  “Yeah, about two weeks, had it sent over from this guy in Germany.”

  An ‘A’ 440 was given and we all took the opportunity to realign ourselves with each other. As soon as we were ready, Eoin did the decent thing, he put down his banjo to go for a piss and to wave and nod to half the bar. His session manners were beyond reproach.

  In his absence we played a couple of flash tunes to show our mettle. I did ‘The Beatrice Reel’ and made a mental note half way through not to play anymore solo tunes tonight, and then into ‘Bunker Hill’ which is a fuckin’ savage tune and kicked ass. When Eoin came back there were full pints in front of everyone at the table and feeling a little more settled he tore straight into a set of jigs that I’d never heard before. Great! It was the third. Afterwards, we chatted to Eoin a little bit. Predictably, he spent a lot of time in Galway (and was well versed in first-namedropping) but lived in Loughrea and was delighted to have some good musos playing local. We discovered that we didn’t have many tunes in common though. How the Jaysus can you play banjo for nearly twenty years and not know ‘The Congress Reel’ and the one that goes after it? I don’t know where the fuck all the tunes come from. Just when you think you’ve heard most tunes, along comes someone from a different parish with a totally different repertoire. But what jazzers call ‘variations’, tradders called ‘new tunes’. That was Brian’s theory.