by David Keenan
and then:
half a pound of kiddlies, please,
he says.
Do you not mean kidneys? I says
to him.
I said kiddlies, diddle I?
he says.
*
I’m cracking up over this. It’s like we’ve tapped into the automatic part of his brain and all it contains are jokes. Irish jokes. My wife’s a prostitute, he says to me. I says to him, keep it down Barney, for fuck sake, Shona’s just next door. A prostitute, Barney says to me, thank fuck for that, I thought you says she was a Protestant.
Here, I says to him, and I pour him another Bushmills: drink this, it’s the law. I finish sewing him up and it doesn’t look half bad, apart from it’s fuzzy and it looks like he has a weird blue weave in his hair. I put him on the couch and he falls asleep so as I shout Shona through. Some craic, innit? I says to her. But the joke’s lost on her. She sees the job I’ve done on his head and I think she’s going to take a fit but instead she just stands there and sighs. He looks like a wee angel, she says to me. It wasn’t the first description that came to mind but it’s a thumbs-up and I’ll take what I can get. I leave Barney to recover, hopefully, who knows, and I head back round to the house. But I can feel that something’s wrong. Something in the background there. Prophecy. There’s no one’s there, I says to myself. She’s gone, I says to myself. I’m like a wolf with a dirty rag. I break into a run. I burst through the door and in the living room there’s nothing but an empty chair with a pair of stilettos on it. It’s like the Invisible Woman hanged herself. Or was raised up, into the air, and disappeared.
*
Of course it was them fucking Conan comics what did it. Of course Barney has gone in there looking like he did and asked if they have any Sexy Sword of Conan. Of course the guy says he does, he’s got some in the back, and would you give him a minute, would you, and while he’s gone Barney locks the door so as it’s just the two of them, then he takes out his gun, and he goes into the back room, and by this point the guy is already halfways out the window, this tiny wee window at the top that he can barely fit through, and Barney gets up on the counter and starts pulling him back into the room by the legs, but the guy starts kicking with these boots on, these boots with the steel toecaps, and Barney says he feels it like it’s splitting his skull and he falls back off the counter, he falls back out of control, and he fucks his head off the edge of this metal table as he goes. He doesn’t remember much of anything else, after that.
But it turns out that not only did he make his way home like a wounded pigeon but that he’s somehow had the presence of mind to lock the shop behind him and to take the fucking keys: genius. I says to him, listen Barney, fuck that guy and his foul-mouthed wife. We’ll take the shop and its contents and we’ll make more money for the Ra than they ever knew they had coming to them. But first we drive round to the house where the guy lived with Kathy and we break in.
There’s no one around, of course, they’re both hiding out somewhere, obviously, so as we go looting from room to room. A TV, a video recorder – rare as dice in the Ardoyne at the time – plus a bunch of slasher videos; brilliant stuff. I get myself a pair of shoes, a nice pair of tan brogues, the bastard only went and had the same size feet as me. Barney goes through Kathy’s panties and takes a couple of pairs from her drawer. You dirty bastard, I says to him, but he’s like that, no, I’m giving them to Shona for an anniversary present. You give your wife dirty knickers for a present? I says to him. Sure, she’ll never know, he says. Besides, he says, I’ll break them in first myself, if you know what I’m saying. I wish I fucking didn’t, I says to him. Besides, I says to him, they’ll be a fucking tent on your Shona. Shut it, Barney says. They’re elasticated, designed to fit all comers. Then he laughs and he puts a pair of them over his head like a bally. See? he says. You’re fucking disgusting, I says to him. Something about it was just really uncouth to me.
When Tommy got back from his holidays, we broke the news. We got our own comic shop, I says to him, all profits straight to the Ra. You wee beauty, he says to us, and he spits on his hands and he rubs them together, like that.
*
It’s our grand first day of trading and Barney is only sitting there behind the counter with a fucking bowler hat on. You look like a fucking Orangeman, I says to him, what the fuck. Have you never clocked The New Avengers on the telly? he says to me. This is Steed, he says, pointing to the hat on his head. This will appeal to the geeks, he says. They’ll lap it right up. Steed is a fucking Orangeman, I says to him. That’s fucking heresy, he says to me. Besides, he says, it’s this or it’s fucking Bagpuss, and he raises his hat to reveal the state of my botched knitting job on his noggin. Either way, I says to him, you look like a villain. A supervillain, he says to me, and he takes his hat off and spins it at me like a Frisbee. Wait a minute, I says to him. Now I know who you remind me of. It’s not Steed. It’s fucking Oddjob out the James Bond movies. Oddjob’s a chinky, Barney says to me, what are you trying to say? And without a word of a lie, Tommy comes in right then and soon as he sees Barney sitting there in that hat, he says to him, alright Oddjob? After that it was all over: Barney was Oddjob, even if in real life he was a chinky.
*
It’s frightening what fear can do when you think about it. Think about it. We helped ourselves to these people’s worldly possessions, we took over their shop, we tied this poor woman up and made her wear a pillowcase for a mask and kept her in a boarded-up house with no floors, just because the Ra says they needed the money and not a sinner raised a finger against us. It was good times, if you were on the right side, or at least one of them. But if you fell through the cracks: forget it.
And not a sinner questioned us about running this comic shop neither. Sometimes weans would come in and ask about where’s Davy what runs it but we just says to them he was gone and that’s that and they shrugged and bought their comics as usual and left, or even weirder, some of them would catch sight of Tommy and think that he was Davy and some of them even called him Davy, see you later, Davy, they would shout to him as they left. I says to Barney, do you think our Tommy looks like your man Davy? Sure, he looks nothing like him, Barney says to me.
One time the landlord even stuck his head round the door but we just says to him we was under new management and he never called us again because I think he got the message. We spent all day, every day, with our feet up, reading the comics. That’s when I got into what they call the underground comics. Super Furry Freak Brothers, Mr Natural. Comics aren’t for weans anymore, I says to Tommy and Barney. They’re still sat there reading Tarzan like a pair of mental defectives. And it was more than comics what we sold. We sold war games. Everything from the Nazis in Europe to the Elves in La-La Land. There was a magazine called Dragon where they would talk about rules for defeating dwarves and skills for supernatural sorcerers and with pictures of women with big huge tits in skimpy leather outfits disembowelling priests with double-headed axes. I felt right at home. This is Ireland, I says to myself, everybody’s at it, it’s just that we’re the only ones up front about it. I don’t need a map of Middle-earth to find my way into slaughtering a troop of Huns. They called them role-playing games, RPGs for short. These are games where what you do is you pretend to be somebody else. But here’s the thing: the point of the game is not to win. The point is to play your part. I mean, you could get points and gain skills and stuff like that, but the real, serious gamers would try to get into the mindset of their characters and make the decisions that they would make, whether it was to their advantage or not. What I’m trying to say is, it was about being true, to a fantasy, for sure, but being true to it all the same.
Now this appealed to me right down to the ground. Think about it. It’s not like a game of football where you just try your best. You’re given handicaps right from the start. Like, for instance, elves are rubbish at magic. Alright. And then you go along with that. You’ll need to figure it out without magic, in that c
ase. Then you have a guy upstair called The Dungeon Master. This is the guy what creates the entire scenario. Only he doesn’t get to make the final call. That comes down to the roll of a dice. And not any normal dice, mind. You get four-sided dice and six-sided dice and eight-sided dice and ten-sided dice and twelve-sided dice and twenty-sided dice; all these dice. I thought the roll of a dice was simple. I was kidding myself. The reality is that you roll the dice and you roll the dice again. And you can’t lose, really, as long as you play your part. But see as soon as you quit doing that, see as soon as it’s all about getting ahead in the game, regardless of what gamers call your characteristics, which is the map of your dungeons, which is the home of your dragons, then the game is up, and it’s a bogey.
*
I look up at Tommy and Barney, sitting there, reading the comics. Tommy takes a piece of chewing gum out his mouth, sticks it underneath the desk. He looks up at me and he winks – did you see that, did you see him there? – then he goes back to reading. I hope to fuck we’ve got a dice that’s big enough, is what I says to myself, when I first seen that.
Part Two: The Best Decade What Ever Lived
Once a month me and Pat would go on a night out, just the two of us. It always cost a fortune because Pat would make us get a taxi there and back and we’d go to these expensive bars and then a discotheque afterward. There was this place he liked to go, The Diamond in the city centre. There were some cracking birds in there, to be fair, dancing in the leotards and with the high heels and the leg warmers and the pink lipstick. To this day it’s the look that I go for the most, but nobody dresses like that anymore so as all I’m left with is the internet and some fucking unplayable videos from the seventies, so that’s me snookered, in real life.
Me and Pat go out for a few beers, meet some of the boys. Pat would fuck anything, no debate, and he’s with this chick Arlene, who is as rough as get out, and he’s arranged to meet her at The Diamond, so at about eleven o’clock we start making our way over there. I’m dying for a pish so as I nip down this lane and as I’m standing there taking a leak I hear these footsteps, the sound of people fucking charging toward me. Ah fuck, I says to myself, this could be anything. I whip round with my dick still hanging out and there’s three guys in black balaclavas headed straight for me. I’m going to get hit, I says to myself. I start panicking; ah fuck, this is it, I says. I can feel my dick crawling back into my scrotum just trying to get away. One of the guys runs right up to me and he says to me: put it away, Sammy, you flasher.
He obviously knows who I am, but the guy’s wearing a bally, so as I have no idea who he is, and I don’t want to ask. That’s the thing about ballys, you forget you’re wearing one, and you think that people still recognise you. Anyway, he says to me, how’s your ma? Ah, she’s grand, I says to him. That’s the game, he says. Look, he says to me, we’ve got to run. Just fucking set a house on fire, so we did. Catch up with you later, right? he says, and then he runs off with these two guys down the lane. I got a fucking fright, I’ll tell you that for nothing. And to this day I have no idea who he was. I says to Patrick, did you see those fucking guys in the black balaclavas going past? He saw nothing, would you believe it? I mean he was half-blocked, but still, it only proves that the IRA were like ghosts back then. They could move around Belfast without making a sound. They could float above the pavements and rise up, into the skies, on mass, when they had to. That’s how they got away with murder.
*
Patrick’s fucking whining, fucking whining about how as Arlene won’t fuck him how he likes. She thinks cocks are fucking disgusting, he says to me, in this fucking whining voice. Sounds like a no-use lesbo to me, I says to him. Naw, he says to me, naw, Arlene’s not a lesbo. She just thinks it’s dirty, is all. It is, I says to him, especially your fucking rancid member. I have two baths a day, Patrick says, my cock’s as clean as a whistle, he says, she just doesn’t want it in her mouth, regardless. To be honest with you, getting your cock sucked, in Ireland, in the 1970s, was a fucking task. Catholic girls were just not into it back then and a guy eating out a woman? Forget it. Part of the problem, on both sides, was the amount of pubic hair going down back then, but I’m straying from my point, which is to inform you that all this conversation is getting me horny and now I’m popping one.
*
So as we get to The Diamond and they’re playing Donna Summers. There are women on roller skates cutting round the dance floor in the fluorescent lights. We get the drinks in and there’s Arlene and she’s a got a pal with her, whose name I can’t even mind now, but she has her hair up in a bun and with the two curls hanging down sexy, like. But she has this voice. This fucking Dublin voice that I just cannot stand. Pat’s got Arlene up against a wall and he’s whispering in her ear and they’re both rubbing up on each other. I can see Arlene’s panties through the pattern on her dress. The Rolling Stones comes on. ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’. I take a swatch at Arlene’s mouth. You can tell it has never had a cock in it in its life. It’s flat and it’s tight and it’s even got pubic hair on its fucking lip. Her pal is telling me about going to the college, she’s a nurse. She’s telling me that death is recession-proof, especially in Ireland, she says. What the fuck ever, I’m saying to myself.
Your man Rod Stewart comes on. ‘Hot Legs’. Arlene’s pal asks me if I want to dance. I don’t really want to dance, love, what I want to do is explode all over the front of your dress, darling, but I dance with her anyway. I lift my arm up as she does a pirouette. Her dress spins all around her, like colour into water. We take a seat. She tells me about a car she’s saving up for. A Vauxhall Viva. Is that right, love? But I’m elsewhere, darling. I’m looking at all these women on the dance floor, these women dressed so fine. Who are these women? And who are the men they’re going home to? I look at Arlene’s pal with her own stupid mouth, tight as a mouse’s ear. I think of the women in the Dragon magazines; in a dungeon beneath Belfast, the prizes. And that’s when I see her.
Dancing with another redhead. The two of them in the leotards and the high heels. It’s like my dick is going to pop out the centre of my forehead like the Buddha Himself. It’s only Kathy M. It’s only the fucking girl we kidnapped. And she looks fucking unbelievable. I picture that drawer she had, filled brimming with her panties. I picture Barney rifling through them. I catch the curve of her hips. She has her hair curled round her face like Farrah Fawcett. What’s that word for the crease at the top of her thighs. She’s laughing and dancing with a friend. What a moment.
I make my excuses and walk round to the other side of the dance floor. I stand there and watch her, in secret. I see her take her handbag and go into the toilet and I don’t think twice. I follow her in there. There’s no one else inside. She goes to walk into one of the cubicles and I grab her and push her in and lock the door behind us. She’s as cool as a kitten.
You look better with your hair long, she says to me. Then she pulls her leggings down and she sits on the toilet and starts to go, right in front of me. I’d never seen a woman take a pish before in real life. Please don’t take me away, she says to me, sitting there with this sound, this stream, that is echoing, in the bowl. You ever hear that echoing sound, from a woman? What a sound. And she’s all smiling up at me. Playing with me. Don’t tie me up, she says to me, along with this sound, that’s accompanying her, that’s echoing. Don’t feed me with a spoon, she says, to this incredible sound.
I want to fuck her so badly.
Did you get my heels? she says to me. I left them for you. Here, she says to me, and she takes out a little mirror from her handbag, have some, she says, and she sprinkles a little magic powder on the mirror. Bam. She leans over and unzips my trousers. She takes my cock in her mouth. She has tight pink lipstick on. I can see it smearing, up and down my shaft, leaving its trail. She hasn’t pulled her leggings up. They’re down round her ankles, round her heels, spread tight. I put my hands in her hair. This smell comes up, this dark shampoo smell. The music is insides, is ban
ging against, is the walls now. Is Roxy Music. Is ‘Love Is the Drug’. I’m going to come, baby, I says, and I pull out and it’s like a shotgun going off. I feel like I’ve damaged myself, like I’ve used up every orgasm promised me by God Almighty in one fevered religious torrent. There’s cum in her hair and on her face. She’s laughing, looking up at me. Now it’s me that’s the prisoner. Now it’s me that’s being spoon-fed. Now it’s me that is set free.
We can keep this between ourselves, she says, can we not? She wipes a little weight of cum from the corner of her mouth. Of course, I says to her. Yes, I says. Yes. Okay, she says. Okay, sweetie. You can ring me. But only at a certain time. We can work this out our way, just the two of us, don’t you think? I think we can, I says to her, I really think we can, I says, even though in reality she is talking to a rubbered fucking jellyfish right now. She pulls up her leggings. She wipes her face and her hair with a piece of toilet paper and she says to me, I’ll leave you to clean up. She winks at me as she squeezes past, that smell of hers.
When I get out of there she’s long gone. Arlene’s crap pal has split the scene. Patrick and Arlene are fighting. Fuck this, Patrick says, let’s get a fucking taxi called. The entire night is a total fucking write-off, he says. On the way home I’m sitting in the back seat and I pull my cock out and I show Patrick the pink lipstick all over it. He lets out a gasp. The taxi driver clocks it in the mirror. Fuck me, he says, you’re an example to us all, my friend. Pat just sat there looking at it with his jaw on the floor like it was an alien come down to earth just to taunt the fucking life out him.
*
Kathy had gone back to her job at the Europa after an extended sick leave where her and her husband Davy had fled their home and moved in with the mother-in-law; she told me this on our first date. Was it a date? She never, explicitly, says that she was doing it to keep the Ra away. And to protect her husband. I never once says that I could. But in the back of my mind, and in her mind too, I believed, there was an element of pay-off, of protection.