For the Good Times

by David Keenan

  *

  and I lie there, like a little baby, until the lights come up, and a pair of friendly punks drag me outside for air, gasping, in my lungs, for air. The five of us walk home in a daze. An armoured car follows us part of the way. They’re looking for us to start something. But we’re somewhere else entirely. I thought Saint Patrick kicked all the snakes out of Ireland? Tommy says to me. I thought he told them to beat it?

  *

  Me: Is Christ Jayzus a Catholic?

  McManus:

  Tommy: Course he’s a Tim, don’t be so fucking stupid.

  Me: How do you mean, of course? How is he not a Protestant?

  Tommy: If he was a Hun, then we’d know all about it.

  Me: How’s that?

  Tommy: If Jayzus was a Hun, then he’d hate the look of his own coupon.

  McManus:

  Me: How do you work that one out?

  Tommy: That’s what the Protestants want. They want Jayzus out the picture, basically, so why would your man Christ Jayzus go about telling everybody that he was a Protestant? That would be like me going about saying I was a lesbian.

  McManus:

  Me:

  Tommy: Listen, Huns come out of Tims, the way women come out of men.

  Me: What? Men come out of women, what are you talking about?

  Tommy: The first man does not come out the first woman, that would be impossible, because who infertilised the woman, so as they had to create the first woman using a spare rib from Adam’s body, only he didn’t know anything about all of this, at this point, to him a rib wasn’t even a rib, so as he was oblivious.

  Me: You’d think if you were putting together a woman you’d use something a bit more attractive than a fucking spare rib, like a nice fleshy part of your hoop or the blue pupil out one of your lamps or a bit of long dark hair, even. How comes a rib?

  McManus:

  Tommy: What the fuck is all these questions about? Because that builds a place for the heart, that’s what Catholics believe, have you never heard of the heart of immaculate deception?

  Me: Conception.

  Tommy: Besides, Jayzus is probably a Zoro-as-trian, in reality.

  Me: Zorro, what? Zorro-ism?

  Tommy: Zoro-as-trian-ism. That is the belief what Jayzus had his own teaching what is not in The Bible.

  Me: Where the fuck are you getting all of this dubious shite from?

  Tommy: Reader’s Digest.

  McManus:

  Me: And what was Jayzus’s secret teaching all about?

  Tommy: We’ll never know for sure, they are lost in caves and in secret temples and in the winds of time, somewhere around the Dead Sea, probably. But we can take a guess.

  Me: Like?

  Tommy: Like, for instance, he didn’t die on the cross, he had a thing for the women, plus he knew everything that was going to happen ahead of the game.

  Me: You’re trying to tell me that Jayzus knew exactly what was going to happen to him?

  Tommy: He knew he’d be born in a manger, he knew he’d be crying a lot, and he knew that he would have twelve pals, and that his job was to get everybody to repent to his da. But he didn’t think about it that much, he just got on with being the Son of God.

  Me: So it was all down to his fucking da and here’s Christ Jayzus, just going through the motions?

  Tommy: You end up martyring yourself to your da’s ideas, and that’s what happened to Jayzus.

  Me: This isn’t Zoro-ism, though, is it? What is the secret teaching? Also, how comes it has to be a fucking secret all the time?

  McManus:

  Tommy: I can see I’m going to have to teach you.

  Me: Why can’t you just tell me the secret teaching? Right now? If you even know it, that is. What’s so hard about it?

  Tommy: That’s the whole point, you can’t tell it. You can’t think it. You can’t speak it. That’s why Jayzus had to live it. You can’t tell it any other way than by doing it. And if you put a word to it, then that’s not it.

  McManus:

  Tommy: That’s what I’m talking about, right there.

  McManus:

  Tommy: But I’ll tell you this.

  Me:

  McManus:

  Tommy:

  Me:

  McManus:

  Jayzus:

  Tommy: See?

  Me:

  McManus:

  Jayzus:

  Tommy: And that there were two Jayzus, all along.

  *

  Then they blew up my ma’s house with my ma in it and two of Billy McNab’s weans got taken to hospital into the bargain. It was the FSV, is what they says. They’ve upped their game, they says to us. You’re a fucking marked man, they says, that’s what comes with being a hero for the cause.

  They used a word: inter-necine. That was it. It was an internecine feud that had exploded. But I knew fine well what it was that had exploded. I knew it, and it ate me up the same way the mice under my bed must’ve ate up the detonator on the explosives and blew my ma sky-high by mistake. It ate me up like the punchline of the worst Paddy joke of all time. While they consoled me and told me they would get the human scum what did this to my poor suffering ma. That it was lower than low, for a supposedly Republican group to target their own like that, and that it had come to this, and that this was fucking despicable. That’s the word that Tommy used. He was pacing back and forth. It’s fucking despicable, he says to me. What was I going to say? That I killed my own ma with a bomb hidden under my bed, a bomb that I never set at the Europa in the first place, a bomb what had already cost the lives of two members of the FSV? The whole thing was spiralling. Snakes are back in Ireland, I says to myself. There’s no doubt about it.

  Let’s get Miracle Baby involved, Tommy says. What the fuck is a Miracle Baby? Mack says to him. I started panicking right then. I don’t want no Miracle Baby telling my mind or reading the future or knowing the past at this point. Miracle Baby is the ultimate informer, Tommy says. All the time I’m looking at Tommy as if to say, no, don’t do it, Tommy, don’t give away our wee secret source, but really I’m trying to kill the idea dead altogether. Miracle Baby is just a wee retard that thinks he knows everybody’s business, I says to Mack. Come on, you, Tommy says, don’t talk about Miracle Baby like that. This guy is like fucking Delphine’s Oracle, he says. The Delphic Oracle, Mack says.

  Whatever fucking oracle, Tommy says to him. He knows everything.

  Barney and your man Del Brogan go out and grab Miracle Baby off the street and bring him in. So you’re this Miracle Baby, Mack says to him. He looks like hell, his underpants are coming up out his jeans, these ghastly stained underpants with the Six Million Dollar Man on them, and his jumper is tucked into his underpants and there is snot across his face and horrible … drool. I’m Miracle Baby, he says. Is it true you have knowledge of other worlds? Mack says to him. Word for word. Miracle Baby stands there silently, just blinking, saying nothing. Are you communicating with the other world right now? Mack says to him. Suddenly there’s this smell in the room, this atrocious smell. I just went in my pants, Miracle Baby says, and there’s fucking uproar. Get him out of here, Mack shouts, what are we doing with this retard in the first place, and Barney fucking kicks him out the door but not before Miracle Baby turns and winks at me and he says, it smells like a fucking hamster’s cage in here, and he laughs, and then he’s gone, the fucking snake.

  *

  Origins Of The Anomaly:

  Atop a great mountain, somewhere on the north coast of Ireland.

  Ériu, the keeper of the river of the stars, weeps at the nativity of her first-born.

  There is uproar in the heavens.

  The constellations have realigned.

  New fates are written in their fires.

  Three blazing suns appear to break from the belt of O’Ryan.

  Wait! They approach!

  These are no suns. These are The Sons Of Men!

  The Sons Of Men, three beings of light, arrive to
console the grieving mother.

  Ériu, they implore her. Do not weep for the way the stars have turned.

  All things move toward their end, in which is their returning.

  Why him? she demands of them. Why my first son?

  The Sons Of Men cannot answer.

  We are merely the effluence of stars, they explain to her. In your heart you know this. We can console and project and we can bathe you in our light but we too are sons with destinies all our own.

  And what of the star behind the stars? she thunders. What of our heavenly father who made love to me in the form of a swan?

  He crossed the great gulfs of space for the joy of union, The Sons Of Men tell her. He crossed the great desert where even our light cannot penetrate.

  He came through the fields of anti-matter where reality is made to stand upon its head and where the air itself hungers for flesh.

  You have been given an earthly husband. Return to him and speak not of what has been revealed to you amongst the peaks.

  But how can I live with such foreknowledge? Ériu demands of The Sons Of Men.

  How can I live when I know his destiny is to suffer and to be a scourge and to be shunned by the men of this island?

  How can we live as we hang suspended in space and our father turns his gaze upon us and through the eternal vehicle of our bodies, which we term the fire unsound, the lives and loves of our first-borns are written in heavenly fire? they ask as one voice in return.

  In the folds of his body every one of us is entwined.

  It is as the body of a mother, The Sons Of Men sing together.

  It is a body of love, a love that it is not ours to understand.

  I will tear the umbilical with my own teeth, Ériu replies. I will gorge myself on the placenta. I will become the air that devours.

  The light that does not cast a shadow. And my son will walk in the way of his heavenly father. Free and self-willed. And refute his role in this game of Hibernia.

  The Sons Of Men look to each other with empty eyes of silver. Something sparkles on each of their cheeks. They rise as one and as a trio of comets return to their station as the girdle of the warrior, leaving a trail of soft, silent tears across the skies as they go.

  Ériu leans into the woven basket where the baby lies sleeping.

  They shall call you The Anomaly, she says.

  Next time: The Tower That Rises Down!

  *

  Summer of ’78, I remember virtually all of their names, except for some of them, mind, except, for example, for the guy what got his head caved in with a baseball bat, now that was showing off, you had to go out your way to get a baseball bat in Ireland, that’s when you think you’re in the movies, that’s when you’re whacking people like a Hollywood gangster.

  That was Tommy, of course, who whacked him, who took a baseball bat from under his Crombie and who caved his fucking head in on the spot. Then Tommy clutches his chest and collapses on the ground right on top of him. His heart is playing tricks on him again. This is at the bottom of Royal Avenue, and now there’s a pile of bodies at my feet. A wee old woman passing asks me if they’re alright. Sure, your man’s had a heart attack, I says to her. She spots the blood flowing out from beneath him and she lets out a scream. Tommy’s lying on this guy’s caved-in head so as you can’t see he’s had his melt panned but all the blood is starting to flow out onto the pavement and the old dear is standing there, screaming, like that.

  Listen, I says to the old dear, I need you to help me out here, love, I need you to run over to that phone box, love, and to phone us an ambulance, would you do that? At this point Tommy wasn’t banned from the hospital like the rest of us. Soon as she leaves I pull Tommy’s body off this poor bugger with no name and I check to make sure Tommy’s still alive. He’s breathing, but his heart is all over the shop. Now there are these big industrial bins down the side of this place that sells the pizza pies. I start to drag the man with no name over to them. I’m trying to dump this body, in broad daylight, before the ambulance comes or before somebody sees us. It’s seven in the morning, so it’s still quiet, because we were trying to catch the unknown soldier on his way to work. I drag this guy with no face and no name over to these bins but I can’t lift him up. I rest him against the side of the bin, I’ve got my arms around him, his poor caved-in head is leaning on my shoulder, I’ve got my arms up under his oxters, his jumper is all torn and he has a bit of black masking tape wrapped around the bust-up toe of one of his shoes. This guy’s had it rough, I says to myself. I couldn’t even tell you now why we had to whack him. Not a clue. I don’t think he was FSV. Was he a Hun even, who knows? A foot soldier, at best, judging by the nick of him. So as I’ve got him up over one shoulder but he keeps sliding off and back down onto the ground and I’m cursing him, under my breath, when I hear this voice, coming from the back of the bins. Do you need a light, pal? it says. Do you need a light, my friend? You believe this? There’s this fucking tinker, lying in there, behind the bins, on a bit of cardboard, still blocked, and he thinks I need a fucking light, and now he’s sprung into life, and he gets up and he comes staggering out with this fucking lighter in his hand, ready to go.

  I pull the unknown soldier’s torn jumper up round his head so as he can’t see his messed-up face. Your man’s in some state there, this old ancient tinker with a purple face says to me. Aye, I says to him. I’m fucking thinking on my feet here, so as I says to him, aye, we’ve been at it all night, I says. This cunt’s on his stag do, I says to him. Give us a hand, pal, will you, I says to him, he’s getting married in the morning so I’m going to dump him in this fucking bin so as when he wakes up he has no idea what the fuck just happened. Nice one, the wee tinker says to me, ha ha, pal, that’s a nice one, he’s fucking killing himself like it’s the best one ever. Sure, that’s some laugh, he says, sure that’s the best laugh I’ve had all week, he says. Give us a hand, I says to him, and the two of us’ll fucking launch him right in there. I thought you wanted a light, pal, the wee tinker says to me. Aye, mate, I do, I says to him, we’ll get us a bifter in a minute, and between the two of us we hoist the unknown soldier up on our shoulders and we topple him into the bin but it catches on the waist of his trousers and he’s left swinging there, with his legs up in the air and his head and shoulders in the bin. But the wee tinker is getting creative. This wee bum is inspired, and he goes and gets a wee box to stand on and he’s instructing me by this point, like, sure, your angle is all wrong, or like, shoogle him this way, that’s what he says, shoogle him this way, I’ve got his fucking shoulders, he says to me, we’re a ball hair off now, he says, one, two, three, heave him up, there we go. I get down underneath him and I put my shoulders in between his legs and I can feel that he has pished himself. The unknown soldier has pished his pants. That’s what happens when you snuff it. It’s all in his taped-up shoes, all soaked into his trousers that are all patched up and worn through, and at first I’m disgusted, but then I says to myself, poor sod, poor fucking sod with no name, getting tipped into a bin on Royal Avenue in his best clothes with the help of a friendly tramp, what a sin.