For the Good Times

by David Keenan

  I have no idea where he was getting these terms from.

  Exactly, Barney says to him. Cube-ism is drawing in wee fucking squares like in the comic books. That is exactly what the point I’m saying is. That kid is as good as your man Picatsto. Then Barney shows us this picture that he had done, this picture of a guy with the head of a reindeer, it looked like, the head of a reindeer on top of his own head and with a tattooed face, and with a bow and arrow, standing on the top of this mountain, and behind him there are all these ships, like Viking warships, raised up, and floating up, into the air. Fuck me, Tommy says, but that’s better than your man Picatsto. Give me a boy with imagination every time, he says, and he shakes his head. Do you think he would draw me?

  Fuck that, Barney says. He should draw all three of us. He should put us in an adventure, he says. He should make a comic book out of us. Sure, you couldn’t print half of what we get up to, I says to them. Well, we could always make something up, Barney says. A fantasy story. Or we can tell him a story from our past, something that wouldn’t get us arrested, and he can write it up and draw us into it.

  What are you trying to say? I says to Barney. Have you done something legal in the past? That got a good laugh. Then we get back to the brainstorming. A bomb in the elevator, Tommy says. Think about it. Going up! A bomb in the water tank, Barney says. Think about it. Flood the fucking place! A bomb in the basement, Tommy says. Think about it. Bring it down around their fucking heads! Bomb Bomb Bomb, I says to them, that’s a fucking punk rock song right there. What degree of headcase works in a place like that anyway? Barney says. They must pay you danger money. Wait a minute, he says. Didn’t that wee bird we kidnapped work in the Europa?

  I can’t remember, I says. So she did, Tommy says. It’s a fucking shame we let her slip through our fingers, Barney says. She could have been our way in. Don’t forget, Oddjob, I says to him, I was busy saving your life. That’s how she fucking escaped in the first place. Maybe we should recapture her, Barney says. Save face and get the keys to the fucking kingdom at the same time, know what I’m saying?

  She disappeared, mind? I says to him. Half these fucking shelves are filled with her belongings.

  She was a good-looking doll, Tommy says. I wouldn’t say no to an hour in a spare room at the Europa with her, know what I’m saying? Then he turns round and he looks at me, without saying a word. That’s when all the paranoia about transparency really began to kick in.

  *

  Me: What is a dip-so-maniac?

  Tommy: A guy what can’t stop swimming in the sea.

  Me: What does ‘A Rolling Stone Gathers No Moss’ mean?

  Tommy: That if a stone keeps moving, then moss will never be able to grow on it, obviously.

  Me: Why do trees lose their leaves in the winter?

  Tommy: Because all of the sap has gone back down into the ground so as that the snow won’t break the branches by being too heavy for the leaves.

  Me: When was the Easter Uprising?

  Tommy: 24th to 29th April 1916. Five days what shook the world. Six. Days.

  Me: Where do birds hibernate in the winter?

  Tommy: Bottom of ponds and rivers.

  Me: In that case, how do they breathe?

  Tommy: Through their gills.

  Me: What is the best movie what was ever made?

  Tommy: Quiet Man.

  Me: What would the story of your life be called if you could write it?

  Tommy: The Twelve Judases.

  Me: ?

  Tommy:

  Me: What is the terrible date of Bloody Sunday?

  Tommy: 30th January 1972.

  Me: How many people were killed by the Brits on that terrible date?

  Tommy: That date? Thirteen.

  Me: What is the best advice anybody ever gave you?

  Tommy: Trap it.

  Me: Where does honey come from?

  Tommy: Bees. Is that a trick question?

  Me: What do you call a baby bird?

  Tommy: A younker.

  Me: Quick, what’s that planet up there?

  Tommy: Mars. Jupiter.

  Me: What is your favourite line from your man Shakespeare?

  Tommy: If’n musice be the foode of love, leade on, MacDuff.

  Me: When was the Battle of the Boyne?

  Tommy: 1st July 1690.

  Me: Who was Abraham in The Bible?

  Tommy: King of the Murphs.

  Me: What is the best musical ever made?

  Tommy: Jolson Story.

  Me: When was the Great Flood of London?

  Tommy: 1066.

  Me: Name your man, the poet, what led the 1916 rebellion.

  Tommy: Your man Big Patty Pearse.

  Me: What is the capital of Scotland?

  Tommy: Glasgow. Easy.

  Me: What is the best way of getting God’s attention?

  Tommy: Pain.

  Me: What is the animal that has the most fun, probably?

  Tommy: Dolphins. After that, dogs.

  Me: What is the correct term for a man what has no hairs upon his head?

  Tommy: Balledosit’t.

  Me: Name three paintings by your man Picatsto.

  Tommy: Nowhere Known, The Face, and A Bowl of Plums.

  Me: What was Christ Jayzus’s first words after he rose from the dead?

  Tommy: You’re on a hiding to nothing.

  Me: Does the Pope shite in the woods?

  Tommy: Is a bear a Catholic?

  *

  When we were kids my da loved to take me and my brother to the reptile house in the Belfast Zoo at the Cave Hill. I was never a fan of snakes, but I always loved that bit when you walk through the door and you’re plunged into darkness and it takes you whole minutes to get your eyes accustomed to the light, that bit when you have your arms out in front of you to steady yourself and all you can see are these aquariums floating in mid-air, all of these colour tellies from hell.

  My da always says to us that snakes are the most innocent creatures in the world. Look into their eyes, he says to us, take a good look and be honest with yourself. There’s not a bad bone in their bodies, he says. I didn’t even know snakes had bones in their bodies.

  Then, one day, he brings one home, as a present, for my brother. He brings a real-life snake home as a pet and starts feeding it on live hamsters, live hamsters that he’s breeding in the garage and that never see the light of day outside of when he marches across the back garden with one of them squirming in his hand on its way to getting eaten whole.

  I need to teach you, he says to us, then he would sit us down, in the dark, in Peter’s room, in front of this lit-up aquarium, like we were at the movies, and he would educate us. A snake is just doing what it does, he says to us, with no malice whatsoever. It’s playing with it, Peter says to him, look, it’s taunting it. Snakes don’t taunt, my da says, what are you talking about? Then the snake would pounce and its big hinged jaw would go back and it would swallow half the body of the hamster, whose legs would be kicking out behind it as its head disappeared down this great black throat and endless belly that God Himself had created, that’s what my da says, God Almighty Himself created snakes, he says to us, and then Saint Patrick kicked them out of Ireland. Beat it, Patrick says to them, go on.

  But that was your man Saint Pat’s big mistake, my da says. Saint Paddy’s original balls-up was booting the snakes out of Ireland in the first place, because that meant there was no one left, no thing left, is what he meant to say, no thing left to get victimised, no thing left to take all of the blame for the suffering of the world, and so the Irish turned on one another. In the absence of snakes they just fucking went at it, but they went at it as innocent as snakes themselves, with that same look in their eyes, that same look that says, what about you?

  If snakes could shrug, my da says to us, they’d be at it all day. But you need shoulders for that.

  So you see, that’s why, in The Bible, there’s a snake in the Garden of Eden what takes the
rap for everything, my da says to us, and when Peter would say to him, but wait a minute, da, wasn’t it Jayzus that was supposed to take on all the sins of the world, wasn’t that his job, then my da would look at us both and he would laugh with those eyes of his, eyes like a happy snake that could shrug all it wanted, and he would grab our shoulders and he would kill himself, he’d be cracking up, as if we were the most naive kids in the world, and he loved it, but one day we were going to have to wake up to the reality of Christ Jayzus and snakes and what goes on in Ireland, and in Eden.

  My brother came out as a gay when he was eighteen year old. My da threatened to beat it out him. What about snakes, I says to him, what about innocent snakes? We were having this big fight in the living room the night Peter dropped the bomb. Snakes don’t turn gay, my da says. You don’t know anything, Peter says to him. All snakes do it up the arse. My da knocked him halfways across the living room for that one.

  In the end Peter moved to Canada just so as he could get away from the fucking Garden of Eden. But it’s true, I found out later, Peter was right, all snakes do it up the arse.

  When my da was killed a few year later, Peter didn’t even come back for the funeral. No snakes in Ireland, he says when I called him on the phone, remember? The night Peter left my da took the big fucking snake that he had bought for him and forced it down the toilet. I watched him do it, just feeding this massive fucking thing head first into the bog. The thing made a dash for freedom. Just fucking scooted round the U-bend, never to be seen again. It would rather sleep in a sewage pipe for the rest of its days, I remember thinking, than spend another night in my da’s house with an endless supply of live hamsters. That says it all.

  Then another snake came along and killed my da. A snake what hit him over the head with a fire extinguisher in a pub, and what snapped his head half off his body. Years earlier, when me and Peter were still living at home, his own da had died and his body had lain upstair at my gran’s house in an open coffin. Do you want to see your grandfather? my da says to us, and he has a gleeful look on his face like he is asking us if we wanted to bunk off school and drink a can of cider in a car park. It was another opportunity to teach us, this time about the big one. He took both our hands and led us into this grey room with the last of the light coming through. There was my grandfather, lying there, dead. It’s alright, my da says to us, it’s okay. Have a good look, he says. Take it all in. You need to learn.

  I can’t even remember what he looked like. I can’t even remember my grandfather’s body lying there in his coffin at all. All I can remember, and it’s clear as a dream, is me and Peter, standing there, holding hands with my da in this grey room, next to a coffin, and him smiling and saying to us, go on, don’t be scared. There’s worse things to take to your grave, I’ll tell you that.

  *

  So Tommy goes ahead and subscribes to the Reader’s Digest, which he can’t even fucking read, which tells you all you need to know about Tommy right there. He would sit in the shop with his feet up on the desk, and he would flick through the pages and make an act like he was reading. I mean, what he was taking in, god only knows, but he was taking in something, because he would bring all these strange and alluring facts up to me and Barney and he would use them to lord it over us. We’d be sitting there reading our comics. This is what we should be reading, he says to us, and he comes over and smacks me round the head with a Digest. It fucking hurt, they were compact wee bastards. We should be educating ourselves, he says to us. Reading up about the world. They’re talking about hypnotism in here, Tommy says to us. The Boys should be making full use of this. They do alreadies, Barney says. What do you think the suits and the gold rings are for? Don’t fucking cheek me, Tommy says to him, I’m talking about autosuggestions. Don’t you know the Reader’s Digest is funded by the CIA? I says to him. Even better, he says. We’re learning from the pros. Naw, Barney says, all that means is that the fucking FBI or the CIA or whatever this mob is just put the idea of autosuccession into your head. You could see Tommy was thinking about that one.

  Then the wee kid shops up, the wee midget Picatsto, and he’s drawn a comic strip of us. Did you ever see that cartoon Beavis & Butt-Head? That wasn’t out at the time but that’s the only thing that comes to mind when I try to remember what he looked like, this guy what looked like Beavis from your Beavis & Butt-Head. So Beavis goes up to Barney – Barney’s his mentor and his main collector at this point – and he hands him the strip. He’s drawn the three of us as superheroes and the title of it is The Forever Family. That was the name of our superhero group. Alright, so try and guess what our superpowers were. Try and guess.

  Naw, no invisibility. That was a pity. That was me and my partner in real life, The Invisible Kathy M.

  Check it out: Barney was radioactive, ha ha. He had some traumatic accident where he had got caught in the birth of a star or a planet and he had become like a mini supernova giving off all this radioactive power so as he had to be strapped into like titanium-grade armour to deal with this galactic deformity so as that he looked like a goddamned man-machine because he would literally burn up anybody who had contact with him, which made him like The Thing from The Fantastic Four, in a way, like tragic and sad and with no way of getting a girlfriend but with the power to destroy an entire fucking planet. But the thing is, he could be in two places at once, because his particles had deformed and gone subatomic so as he was like a one-man army. The name Beavis gave him? Neutrino.

  And Tommy? Tommy was The X-Ray Kid. And get this: he had hypnotic eyes. No bull. He could shoot a beam from his eyes that would reveal anything. That could strip a woman’s clothes off to her ankles. That could read thoughts. That could see through walls. That could hypnotise you into believing that every star is a planet just like ours. That would mean that all he needed to do was to stare at a copy of the Reader’s Digest and he could download everything in there and get special knowledge without even fucking bothering to read it. He had to wear these special visors, mind, otherwise he would be going about turning the whole world upside down with a glance. I says to myself, that’s autosuggestion right there, The X-Ray Kid is writing the damn book, that’s true superpowers, all this mad stuff is real.

  And as for me? I’m not going to tell you my superpower. See if you can’t figure it out for yourself. But I’ll give you my name: my name was The Anomaly.

  *

  That’s when we realised that Miracle Baby could read the future. That was his superpower. Thing is, if you asked him something that he knew, he would tell you the truth, you would get the full story, no problem. But he was just like a Weegie board, because if you asked him something that he didn’t know, then he would just start making it up. But then everything he made up started coming true. Only but it takes us a while to figure it out.

  We’re sitting in Tommy’s back garden and Miracle Baby is working on some rock formation he was making for the equivalent of ten pence an hour. Miracle Baby, Tommy says to him, do you know your man Jinksy O’Connor? Very neat, Miracle Baby says, Jinksy O’Connor is very neat. It was true, Jinksy was a pal of Mack’s and even though he was half-blind he dressed well plus he was always polite and decent, except when he was sticking you in the ribs with a sharpened chisel, which was his weapon of choice, that and strangulation with women’s nylons, it turns out.

  Do you think we can trust him? Tommy says to Miracle Baby. Tommy and Jinksy had been set up with some low-key racket down one end of the Falls Road and Tommy was convinced that Jinksy was out collecting on his lonesome. Jinksy O’Connor can’t be trusted with his ma’s underwear, Miracle Baby says. What?! He can’t keep his hands out his ma’s panties, Miracle Baby says, which is going to do for him in the end, he says. Then he starts giggling to himself. Fuck is he talking about? Tommy says. Fucking wee daftie. Then a week later, and I’m not kidding you, Jinksy O’Connor is discovered, by his own sister, half-naked and hanging from the ceiling, with a set of tights round his neck and wearing a pair of his ma’s
panties. The stupid cunt only went and asphyxiated himself to death in one of these accidental sex murders; what the fuck just happened.

  We round up Miracle Baby, pull him into a car as he’s walking down Jamaica Street, his face all snottery and with ice cream all down his top. Tommy’s driving, I’m in the back seat. Miracle Baby, how the fuck did you know about Jinksy O’Connor? Tommy says to him. Everybody knows about Jinksy O’Connor, he says. No fucker knew about Jinksy O’Connor: fact. Miracle Baby was become prophetic, he was pulling this knowledge out of the air, which is what it means, prophecy, to get your information from the future. So as we started asking him all this other madness.

  Will there ever be a united Ireland? Naw, never, he says. That’s fucking mutinous talk right there, Tommy says to him, but guess what, he’s still right. Will I get laid at The Shamrock on Saturday night? Yes, Tommy, he says, but that didn’t take a fucking mind reader. Wait, I says to him, do you think the Ra are going to hit Mad Dog McPaik? He’s a dead man, Miracle Baby says, and so he was, a week later. Who killed Arlene McDaid? Tommy says to him, and time stops dead.

  I’m looking down at Miracle Baby, who is lying on the back seat with all of this pink ice cream down his jumper, and with snots and saliva on his face, and he’s writhing down there, like a terrible grotesque nightmare he’s wriggling, and he looks up at me, and he sticks his tongue out and he crosses his eyes, but before he can say anything else I says to him, wait a minute, I says, wait, I’ve got a better one, let’s get fucking serious here for a moment why don’t we, is the Europa still standing, I says to him, and he says it right back to me: the Europa is a mighty fortress. What the fuck.

  Does anybody die in the Europa? I says to him. Does anybody die when we bring it down around their fucking ears? The Europa is still standing, Miracle Baby says, and it’s like his eyes have frosted over, like there’s a film over his eyes that has blotted out his pupils and he says to me, no one dies, with his blind eyes he says to us, no one dies. Tommy looks at me in the rear-view mirror. I know what he’s thinking. No one dies. The Europa is a mighty fortress. We walk in there with a suitcase full of Semtex and we make our mark without taking a single fucking life. Clean, and easy. We pull over to the side of the Alliance Road, give Miracle Baby twenty pence for more ice cream, and scream off into the future that had been promised us by a retarded baby.