For the Good Times

by David Keenan

  I mind how we used to go our holidays to Kilkee. We used to stay in the caravan. Summers down there would break your heart. I decide to revisit it, even though this is the autumn, now, that I’m seeing it in.

  I pull up at the beach in Kilkee and I walk along the front, smoke a fag perched up on an old stone wall. I’m staring out to sea. I’m watching this young girl changing into a swimming costume beneath a towel on the sand, a pale Irish beauty in the soft light of the South, a little smudge of colour in the distance. There’s nobody else around except for a pair of old dears, sitting in their car, drinking their tea. Even the ocean is quiet this afternoon, sneaking up on us with a whisper. I watch as the girl walks out into the water. She doesn’t pause for a second. She keeps walking without looking back until the water is up to her armpits.

  Then she dives into the waves ( ).

  These moving waves (what breaks/like a silent) mirror.

  These silent waves (what moves/without making) sound.

  Doesn’t she feel the cold?

  I get back into the van and I drive further down the coast because I’m heading for Loop Head now, in my heart, although I hadn’t planned it. But now I want to see the lighthouse there. My father would drive us to the lighthouse when I was a kid. The two of us had a secret cave nearby, where we would build stone monuments in the summertime. On the way down I pull up to a town that’s barely a single street in the rain and take a walk around the graveyard. Now it feels cold enough to snow. A young couple are taking photographs of each other beside the stones. Get in the photo, I says to them, and I take a picture of the two of them in the cold rain together. I could’ve almost swore that it was the same young girl that had disappeared into the sea earlier. But that would be impossible. I make it to Loop Head just as it’s starting to get dark. The fog is coming in from the sea as I pull up. There’s another car in the car park, some clown is doing the karate moves in the headlights while his girlfriend sits in the car and reads her magazines. I park up on the other side and I sit there and watch him for a bit. He’s facing the car, doing all these moves in slow motion, and behind him his shadow is huge on the fog. He gets back in the car and they switch the lights off. I can’t see them anymore in the dark. I’m guessing they’re planning on staying the night, which is what I’m planning to do myself. I dig the wee black-and-white portable out the cupboard and I make myself a big bap and cheese and crack open a cold green one; the news is on. The lighthouse starts up. The light sweeps through the van as I sit there, in the dark, drinking, and now it’s the H Block protests. Wing shifts in the Blanket Blocks, punishment beatings, rectal searches over mirrors, sugar on your porridge if you behaved yourself, prisoners being forced to parade naked, the use of torture as standard procedure; we knew all about that, everybody did. But the woman on the TV says nothing about any of it. Instead she talks about screws being executed when they’re off duty, and she compares their killers to animals. It was animalistic, this killing, she says. I killed the TV dead and I walked outside and I stood there, in the dark. The beam of the lighthouse, lighting up the fog in the clouds, is what heaven used to look like in the bibles they would give you back when you were a wee kid. Across the way I can hear the young couple screwing in the back seat of their car. It’s heaven for them alright. And I thought about all The Boys in the H Blocks, sitting there, freezing, in their blankets, getting the shite kicked out them on a regular basis. Boys I grew up with. Boys what were just like me.

  For some reason, when you’re in Belfast, you don’t tend to spend that much time thinking about this stuff. You don’t get philosophical about it, for this reason or for that, but mostly because there just isn’t time. Because Belfast will get you in its teeth as soon as welcome you. But see as soon as you get some distance from it, that’s when it hits you. That it’s madness. That it’s complete madness. That this is not what God’s earth was made for. What was God’s earth made for? God’s earth was made for pulling up next to the sea, in the dark, and shagging your bird in the back seat of your car. That is what God’s earth was made for. And look what we did with it.

  *

  In the morning the car is gone and I’m on my own. I take a walk along the edge of the cliffs, trying to find where me and my da climbed down to the cave. There’s a little path at one point but it wasn’t anything like I minded. The way I remembered it was like climbing down this sheer cliff with your fingers and toes, grasping, and with the sea, crashing, miles beneath you, but this was more like a series of steps cut out of the rock, but there was a cave down there, right enough, a cave you had to climb back up and into, a cave with a ledge that stuck out into the sea, and I climbed up and I walked back in there, and in the corner there was a tower of stones, big stones running to small stones, till about half the height of my body. I couldn’t say if it was the one that me and my da built so long ago now in the past. I really couldn’t say, though probably not. How could something as precarious as that last so long? Even so, I make another tower next to it, about half its size again, and that was me and my da, then, me and my da, standing there, staring out at the Atlantic Ocean together. Who knows, maybe no sinner ever came here. Maybe it was just for us.

  *

  One night I’ve got the telly on, in the camper van, in County Clare, in the dark, at the foot of this lighthouse, and it’s the usual flagrant pish. The usual wilful misreporting, the usual foul propaganda. A crackdown in the H Block ‘caused’ by the popping of an off-duty screw in Belfast. It’s late. I change the channel. The boxing is on. There are two kids climbing into the ring, two brothers with their arms round each other, a fighter and his trainer. On the back of both their T-shirts it says the word Dad. I close my eyes. I’m starting to drift off. I can feel the beam of the lighthouse passing over my eyelids … every few seconds in time … and I feel myself … going under … Then I hear a noise, like a kitten, like a kitten miaowing, and I open up my eyes. I look around but I can’t see anything moving. Then I hear it again. It’s coming from inside the television. That’s when I realise they’re showing a whole different programme altogether.

  *

  Kathy’s on the telly, or inside the telly, and she’s all tied up in there, bound and with a silk hanky inside her mouth, is a gag, baby, a baby-blue silk hanky stuffed in her mouth is a gag, her long red hair run wild, baby her lipstick is smeared, and she is making the noise of a kitten. And she looks outside the screen, toward me, and in her eyes it’s as clear as any dream, it’s a masquerade, in her eyes, red lady, it is all a charade, and as soon as it comes to me this music starts up, with this crackling noise, this music from out of the past, and Como’s voice is come in, on the back of it, or is it Tommy, come in

  lady, dressed in jade,

  hold me tight at the masquerade

  if the music halts here,

  then my heart will waltz here,

  right on

  things is a pretend. An awful smile, she smiles, as willing victim. It’s unmistakable, around her soft, wet, blue silk gag. And from out of the screen a pair of hands can be seen, spread her thighs, part the lips, of her labia. There’s a face buried between her legs and though her thighs are in the way it is wearing a black balaclava. Her thighs are tensed up, her legs, tensed up too, her body, it is rising, in pleasure. And the man in the bally unbuttons his fly, why, says I, with the bally unbuttons, he’s right at the edge of the screen, and he starts to make love to her, savage love, forcing himself inside of her, and all the time she’s watching me and she’s smiling, even when the face in the bally leans over, puts its tongue between her lips wet silk, even then she is looking at me, and she is smiling. As she closes her eyes and bites down on the silk, her voice is muffled as it echoes in cruelty; stop, you make me dizzy, she is singing, you make me dizzy, in cruelty, is her song. And the man gasps, he holds himself inside her, then withdraws. Someone else steps up and puts his cock between her legs. At first I think it’s Tommy, it’s only fucking Tommy, somewhere in my lonesome mind, screwing h
er there, but then I think it’s Davy, it’s Kathy’s man Davy, who has been orchestrating the entire thing, and I’m watching her legs, tensed up, he’s slapping her tits, her teeth, pressed against her lips, the soft wet silk of her mouth, and her red nails, in his back, as he penetrates her, and black eyes, black eyes as inscrutable as any swan’s

  twelve o’clock is chiming

  on the clock up above

  now, if you unmask your heart

  I’ll love you,

  love you

  the after-image through the noise and the static, before it reforms: there is a scar between her breasts, a deep scar, between her breasts, as she looks toward me and she opens her mouth

  ba-by,

  she looks to me,

  bites her lips,

  gives her tits up

  to Tommy’s dead ringer

  and the place in between

  you and I can be seen

  as a prising apart

  with your fingers,

  taking hold of the heart,

  and grasping it, hard

  in your fist,

  is the work

  of a singer

  and its armoured skin,

  as it wriggles

  within,

  baby, feels like the first time,

  forever

  and something appears in its place, a face that has malformed as Miracle Baby, talking noise in a lingo that is impossible to understand, a grotesque face, a howling face, a horror show, but then I catch a word of it, here and there, and it’s the Irish lingo, Miracle Baby is transmitting in the Irish lingo so as we cannot be intercepted and no one must know, and though I couldn’t speak the Irish lingo back then, still I catch the names, your man Del Brogan, Davy, Tommy, and I says to myself, the masquerade is up, the game is over, it is finished.

  *

  The Anomaly awakens to the cosmic darkness.

  He rushes forward, blind, his arms stretched out in front of him.

  He rises off the ground in a straight line.

  He plunges forward through the air.

  The darkness is limitless and impenetrable.

  Wait!

  High above him he can make out a single source of light.

  Where is he?

  He is in the inverted tower.

  The Forever Family had entered the negative space of the inverted tower.

  The same tower that they had razed and buried.

  The Anomaly’s memory was shot. What happened after that?

  He had a brief vision of The X-Ray Kid turning his gaze on him. Of his bones turning white-hot with pain. Of his insides boiling. Of The X-Ray Kid parting the darkness like flesh and stepping through it. It was a trap!

  As he flies toward the light high above him he starts to make out details.

  There is something hovering in the pupil of light.

  There, suspended in the centre, is Neutrino, crucified, and in great agony.

  Hold still, my brother, The Anomaly booms and his words echo across the vast gulf of the inverted tower.

  He flies through the cavernous void toward him.

  Neutrino’s hands and feet disappear into the reflective luminescence that holds him.

  Hurry, Neutrino screams, I am impaled by the light.

  Who did this, friend? The Anomaly demands of him.

  The Sons Of Men, Neutrino says. The Sons Of Men have given up their girdle around the waist of the warrior and have come down to earth. I saw them! Ye Gods, I saw them! They were in conference with The X-Ray Kid. I disturbed them. He has brought the very stars to their knees.

  Quick, free me, Neutrino cries.

  The Anomaly plunges his hands into the great reflective field that holds Neutrino suspended above the void. It burns his hands like acid.

  How? How has he done this? The Anomaly demands. How has he come to have conference with the souls of the stars?

  By an act of disobedience so great that the entire universe stands rearranged, Neutrino says.

  Thought bubble: truly this was to be my fate, The Anomaly thinks, this is the fate that was predicted for me when I was first given my name.

  Neutrino’s arm comes free. It burns and pulses as if flitting in and out of reality.

  Then the other arm. He slumps forward onto The Anomaly’s shoulders.

  Hold fast to me, brother, The Anomaly tells him. Then he turns and with Neutrino on his back he rockets into the darkness, tearing Neutrino free from the coruscating field of light with a great cry.

  They circle back around and survey the destruction they have wrought.

  A tiny fissure hisses and pops with otherworldly radiation.

  The X-Ray Kid is not the only one capable of rending the very fabric of reality, The Anomaly announces. As long as I have my name that destiny is still mine.

  Then they pass through the tear, like crossing transdimensional razor wire, and begin their pursuit of the one that has betrayed them.

  Next time: The Fury Of The Stars!

  *

  Tommy was shot in the head and killed instantly on his way to The Shamrock on the 13th October 1979. He was with his partner, Patricia, who was drenched in his blood and his brains. It felt like the end of the world.

  *

  His ma collapsed and ended up in the same ward as Patricia suffering from the civilian equivalent of shell shock. The Boys called a meeting and Mack was in tears when he stood in front of us. Barney’s sat there weeping next to me. How could it happen to Tommy, how could it happen to our golden boy? Your man Del Brogan was there. I smoked a fag and stared at him and says nothing and I’ll tell you, the cunt seemed uncomfortable. Where were you when Tommy got hit? I says to him. Don’t start, Mack says to me, don’t even fucking start, the last thing we need is for us to start infighting. This cunt’s not even upset, I says to him. We all express it in our own way, your man Del Brogan says. Where were you when Tommy got hit? he says to me. You believe the fucking balls on this cunt? Fuck youse all, I says to them, and I storms outside.

  Barney comes out after me. Come on, Sammy, he says to me. We need to pull together here, we need to stay cool for Tommy’s sake. We need to make sure his murder doesn’t go unavenged. I sat on the wall outside his house in Jamaica Street and I cried that hard it felt like I was crying blood.

  We received a communication from the FSV: nothing to do with them. In fact they were calling off hostilities. In the wake of Tommy’s death everybody was coming together. Fuck me, there’ll be peace in Ireland next, I says to Barney. Don’t fucking count on it, he says. Turns out that the screw what had been popped, the screw whose death had caused all of the beatings and recriminations in the H Block that I heard about on the telly in Clare, turns out it was Tommy what had taken him out. Best bet then was that it was UDA or UDF or UVF men working in collusion with the Brits that had popped Tommy in return. But how did they know it was him? There had been no witnesses to the shooting. The getaway car had been destroyed. Tommy even wore a bally when he did the deed. Somebody had talked, we had a fucking squealer in the ranks, and I was sure I knew who it was.

  That night I go home on my own and I sit on the couch and I look at that Mr Kipling poem Tommy had given me. That poem that he probably couldn’t even read himself. Where did he even hear about it? Then I read them lines, them famous lines, and I realise. I realise what he was trying to tell me. Make of your heart a mighty fortress. It was the most beautiful gift anybody ever gave me.

  *

  Tommy’s funeral was a week later and we got to go and see him at the funeral home where he was lying there in a coffin, in a room of his own, with the lid propped up against the wall, just like my old da, and his da before him. Thomas James Kentigern, it says, in gold letters. The kingdom of heaven awaiteth Thomas James Kentigern. I looked down at his face, it was a heartbreaking mess of stuff and I couldn’t bring myself to touch it. I tried but I couldn’t. I’m so sorry, Tommy. Everything my da taught me was out the window with that handsome face and now it was a
jigsaw puzzle. I could see the cellophane wrapped around his arms, sticking out from the sleeves of his suit. This beautiful dog-tooth suit. And everybody had put photos and notes and mementoes into the coffin like it was Como himself that had passed on. I took a silk handkerchief out my top bin and dropped it in. I says to myself, as human beings we’ve been doing this forever. It’s a cycle that’s been going on since the first day of God’s creation. So how come it doesn’t get any easier?

  In the silent Tomb we leave him

  Till the Resurrection Morn

  When his Saviour will Receive him

  And Restore his lovely Form

  Thomas James Kentigern was buried with full military honours, with a pair of black gloves and a beret on his coffin and a tricolour flag led by a lone piper. Three masked soldiers let off a volley of automatic weapons over his coffin before disappearing into the Ardoyne.

  *

  Warm prunes. I have such a strong memory of warm prunes.

  *

  The next morning I drive round the Ardoyne in the car until I spot Miracle Baby and I bundle him in. Tommy’s gone, he says to me. Tommy’s gone away. I know, son, I says to him. I know. It’s awful hard for all of us. What can you tell me, son? I says to him. Can you help us get the people what took Tommy away from us? Sure, we can just ask Tommy, Miracle Baby says. Son, Tommy’s gone, I says to him. We can’t talk to Tommy anymore. He’s been taken away to heaven. We can talk to him in heaven, Miracle Baby says. Okay, I’m about to boot this wee retard out the car by this point. Maybe it was only Tommy that was able to get the vision out him. Then I says to him, were you sending me transmissions? Miracle Baby just giggles. Were you sending me fucking transmissions while I was down in the County Clare on my holidays? He’s sitting there laughing. Sometimes my pictures go out of my head at night, he says to me. Sometimes they float away. Did you catch them? he says to me. Then he bursts out laughing. Did you catch my pictures? he says to me. Do the pictures in my mind make me a bad boy? he says but he’s laughing the whole time he’s saying it. You’re a bad wee bastard, I says to him, if that’s what’s going on in your mind. By this point we’re both laughing. Okay, I says to him, tell me how do we go about reaching Tommy in heaven, because I’m willing to believe anything by this point. Table-rapping, Miracle Baby says. The fuck is table-rapping? Then I realise he’s talking about conducting a fucking seance. Table-rapping is what the old witches called it.