Call Me the Breeze: A Novel

by Patrick McCabe

  Except the truth is, whether he knows it or not, all of my life I’ve secretly liked books. Right from a very young age. Even if I don’t know that much about them — yet. This being the first time since leaving school I’ve ever bothered with the library. And I know I have poor Una tortured. ‘Are you here again?’ she says every day, as off I go with a bundle. But I think she’s getting used to me. And I know it’s going to be worth it. Already I feel empowered. Like there’s been a muscle left slack for too long. Next on the list is the rest of Hermann Hesse. For putting me on to him, gracias, Seeker. Thanks, Eamon.

  I think of us sitting in the desert, just him and me and Hesse. Just talking away there about love. Where it comes from and what it means. I mean, you hear lots of things about it. You read about it all the time. But you never think you’ll experience it. That’s the thing you don’t expect. The most wonderful thing about it is not just the ethereal other-worldly feeling, but that once it strikes, you know things will never again be the same. Even the simplest thing like walking past Jackson’s Garage — whatever way the sunshine falls on it, the way it did today around two o’clock — you’ll find yourself saying: ‘Jackson’s Garage — it’s the same old garage and yet it’s not. It’s become something completely new. Somehow. I’m afraid I don’t understand it. I genuinely do not.’

  Which is perhaps the greatest thing of all about it — your not being able to understand. In the same way you can’t comprehend why you are being so personable all of a sudden. And which, by the looks of things, hasn’t gone unnoticed by a lot of other folks either! As Hoss said to me today: ‘Well, fuck me pink, who’s a happy camper? Monday morning and the shine off his eyes would blind you! I wouldn’t mind some of what you’re on, Tallon!’

  Except that I wasn’t on anything. Unless you meant an untroubled sea — the placidest ocean that’s ever existed, to my knowledge. And which, if I’d been asked about it before, I’d have described as ‘a load of bollocks’, the way they all do in Austie’s all the time.

  But it isn’t a load of bollocks. It is just about as far from being a load of bollocks as any human being can conceive, this fascinating mystery called love.

  Boo Boo

  I’d hardly finished writing that — it’s like yesterday, that particular night — when the next thing you know there’s this hammering at the door. Crazy. ‘Who the fuck’s that,’ I says. Not Mangan again because if it fucking well is, looking for fucking sugar or toilet paper again, I’ll —!

  Then who does it turn out to be? Only Boo Boo with this chick from Newtown and a big pink cockatoo head on her. ‘This is Anka,’ he says. Turns out that she’s German. Then what does he do? Announces that the boys have reached the final of the Battle of the Bands competition in Limerick. ‘Every journo in the country’ll be sniffing around. The word is they want punk. Every mag you pick up it’s The Clash this, The Sex Pistols that! They want “white riots”? Then we’ll fucking give it to them — street fucking guerrillas, Molotov cocktails! They don’t know what they’re talking about, fucking art school wankers — for that’s all they are, no matter what they say!’

  ‘You mind if I skin up?’ says Anka, sticking her Doc Martens right in front of my face. ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Go right ahead.’ I couldn’t believe this fucking news!

  ‘We’re an unexploded bomb,’ said Boo Boo as Anka slid her tongue along the gum line. ‘Right, Joey?’

  ‘An unexploded bomb,’ I agreed. Then he opened his palm to reveal a sellotaped tab; good old lysergic acid like a little eye looking up at you. Saying: ‘Well, hi there, Joey! Eat me!’

  I didn’t mind smoking draw. I had no problem with that at all. It was the acid I had begun to get worried about, and the effect it might be having on me. And I was feeling quite proud that I’d managed to cut it way down now that my life had begun to find direction. ‘It’s pyramid. The best you can get,’ he said as he pressed it on to his thumb. ‘Here, man. Take it!’ I definitely wasn’t going to do it. But when he popped one himself and she did as well, I just said: ‘OK, one last time!’ Then into the mouth and down she goes.

  It was the mellowest feeling just sitting there listening to Boo Boo as he went on raving — this gig, that gig, all these fucking gigs — as Anka’s dayglo head kept nodding: ‘Mohawks — band vot iz seh best, ja?’

  ‘You better believe it! Snarling genius from the bog’s black heart!’ says Boo, blasting a chord from an air guitar as the ‘I Love The Sonics!’ tattoo rippled on his arm, living words of deep blue and red.

  Outside, the moon looked in with these great big heavy-lidded eyes. I don’t know what we started laughing about but we were still at it when morning broke. So we went into Austie’s for a pint. There was talk of us going home around lunchtime but it was my day off so we stayed there drinking all day. ‘Would you look at that!’ says Boo Boo as Anka got sick out in the backyard. ‘Jeez!’ I said. This expanding yellowish pool full of all these amazing colours. We must have been standing staring at it for ages, a lake to us now studded with bright shining gems as poor Anka barfed up again. ‘Bwoagh!’ she says and doubles over. ‘I love her so much I’d eat it!’ says Boo Boo as we staggered back inside, wrapped around one another like lovers.

  A Sign

  At times Austie’s could have you in stitches. It could really be a fucking hilarious place with the boys all the business coming into the bar: ‘Ah she’s a great girl, my missus, I don’t know what I’d do without her! Worth her weight in gold, she is!’ Then, before you know it, rubbing hands and making plans after the disco to go out to the blues in The Ritzy.

  I was rarely interested, in those faraway days being much too preoccupied with higher things. The only thing that bothered me then were the lies I’d think about them telling — not only to their wives but to themselves. Which, the more I thought about it, made me think something else about love that made it seem so really special. That if it was the real thing, it had the effect of making you feel like you were the only two people to whom it had ever happened. The only two in the world chosen to be so lucky. And almost feeling sorry for everyone else who hadn’t been so fortunate. But who would think they had.

  Then you’d find yourself saying: ‘Ah yes! Those poor old fucks trotting out to dirty films! Who’ll never know what the real thing is! Who’ll never know love, I mean, not sex.’ I’d sit there in the caravan for hours, really stoned, feeling sorry for them, strumming away at ‘The Only One’. It went: ‘The Only One/When that day comes/In the burning sun/She’ll surely be the one …’

  Or listening to them as they sat at the counter in the bar, muttering about women and going: ‘I wouldn’t mind shifting that, would you?’ or ‘Did you see the tits on you?’, and all of a sudden they’d seem like nothing so much as the saddest men in the world. Not being able to help the glow you’d feel growing all around you and seeing it, in a way, as a kind of sign that you’d been chosen. And why you’d find yourself writing in Reflections — just a children’s copybook that I’d used as a diary —

  25 July 1976

  It’s 3 a.m. or so and I just got home. Went to the disco after Austie’s and waited but no show, at least not while I was there. I feel especially close to her tonight. They all went out to the blues but I had everything I wanted in Barbarella’s — well, almost. They played you-know-what and I swear I was in dreamland. When that song is playing you just want to get the guy and say: ‘You are in love, so stop denying it! Admit that you’re in that place which is so pure and precious and wholesome …’

  Just admit it for God’s sake!

  Am working 11–7 tomorrow so I better get some shut eye.

  Love you.

  Mona at Dawn

  The cops pulled me in — by the looks of things everyone was a suspect now — and started asking me about Hoss, whether I thought he’d been involved in the Ambassador job or not and threatening to knock seven different kinds of shit out of me if I didn’t co-operate. There was this guy Tuite from Dublin, the head of a speci
al new outfit called The Heavy Gang, who’d been sent down to shake the place up and come up with ‘some fucking answers’, as he put it himself. He had fists like fucking lump hammers and you knew he wouldn’t be afraid to use them. ‘You must hear plenty of Provo gossip in that place!’ he said, meaning Austie’s. I told him what I thought: that Hoss was innocent — of that job, anyway, I said. For I believed what he’d told me that night in the bar. When Tuite said: ‘I’m not sure I believe you, Tallon,’ I just shrugged and said: ‘Believe what you like.’

  That drove him mad — all you could hear before they threw me out on the street was: ‘You’re all in on it! You’re all in it together! You all know something! I fucking well know — and I’ll find out! You mark my words!

  ‘You want to know what I think of this town?’ he’d bawled at me then, clenching and unclenching his fists. ‘I think it’s full of felons, full of twisted fucking felons living treacherous felon lives! Provo filth — that’s what it’s full of!’

  He went on and on like that, with spit on his lips. But I didn’t care, because when you’re in love that’s the way it is. All you care about is a small soft hand and that windblown hair as she comes stepping right out of the ocean.

  I had just nodded and said: ‘That’s fine.’

  ‘Don’t you worry!’ he said. ‘I’ll nail that Watson cunt! And you’d better not be hiding anything, Tallon!’

  The dawn was breaking when I got back to the camp. The dogs were at it again and I could see Mangan peeping through the curtain. The smack or two that Tuite had given me at the end had unnerved me slightly and now the dogs were starting to unsettle me too, so that’s why I lost it a bit that night. ‘Shut up!’ I shouted and swung the boot. Without even realizing I was doing it.

  ‘You leave them alone!’ I heard Mangan squealing from the caravan doorway in his nightshirt. ‘You think I don’t know what you be at? Who’s that woman you have in there? Who do you be talking to at night? Eh? Who is she? I can hear you! You think that I can’t hear you? Eh?’

  ‘Leave it!’ I growled. ‘Do you hear me? Leave it!’ and slammed the door behind me. As a result I needed Mona more than ever that night and it made me feel very confused.

  ‘Joseph,’ she said, ‘you look pale …’

  I couldn’t think straight, mostly because deep inside I was trying hard to find a way — the best way of breaking the news. ‘Mona, there’s something I want to talk to you about,’ I began to say. But when she looked at me and said: ‘Come here,’ all the words just withered on my lips.

  When I awoke the sun was slanting through the window and she was sitting staring down at me, pushing my hair back from my —

  ‘The place of peace,’ she whispered in my ear. ‘I’m the only one who knows where it is. And you know it. There’s no one else who knows. Would you like me to tell you, Joseph? Would you like me to tell you where it is, that precious harbour? Would you? Tell me …’

  I was groaning, thinking of an island out there across a stretch of cobalt blue water towards which the twinkling lights beckoned you, where you knew once you reached it you would always be safe. I groaned again.

  ‘He used to sing it to me,’ said Mona. ‘His favourite song — “Harbour Lights”.’

  It was my father she was talking about. Sometimes she sang it too — ever so softly. I used to love listening to it, although you had to strain hard to hear her. I don’t think she even knew she was singing it at all. It went:

  One evening long ago

  A big ship was leaving

  One evening long ago

  Two lovers they were grieving …

  ‘But we never reached it, Joey. We never got to that harbour.’

  Then she started crying. Stroking my face with her pale pink palm.

  ‘But you will, Joseph. I’ll help you.’

  It was making everything harder now than ever. I heard someone moving about outside and then I saw a shadow moving past the window. ‘Who’s there?’ I shouted and covered myself with a blanket. ‘I said, who’s there?’

  There was no one there when I looked again but I was sure it must have been Mangan. I was sweating all over and although I didn’t want a spliff I had one anyway, but it didn’t do me much good. All I could think of was organization. T. O. — fixing on the words so much that it was making it harder for me even to put the two of them together. So I decided to gather my thoughts instead by writing them down on a loose piece of paper now yellowed with age and simply marked Charlie — The Truth …

  Late — no date

  Charlie the Gardener could have been good if things had worked out the karma if that had been meant to be we can all be good you know that Jacy if you follow the path of Siddhartha if you drink from the fountain of love for love is the drug love is all as she who is The Only One is I’m Not in Love but I am you see you see I am I — love love love love you Jacy The Jacy love is all is everything …

  I must have fallen asleep.

  Hoss

  I felt sorry for Hoss after they took him in and gave him the hiding. The new law was that anyone caught singing a Republican song could be arrested and given a kicking. Not that they said that, but in practice that’s more or less what happened. Hoss was in the middle of ‘The Ballad of James Connolly’ — ‘God’s curse on you, England, you cruel-hearted monster’ — when in comes Tuite and the Heavy Gang. Before you know what’s happening they have him out the door and the next time you see him, well, all you can say is recognizing him — even up close — might have been a problem. He had three teeth missing and one of his eyes was the size of Detective Tuite’s fist. They’d said they’d get him and so they had. It was clear now they had a licence to do whatever they wanted, the new emergency legislation taking care of all that. Which more or less meant if you had the temerity to open your mouth and say something they didn’t like, you could well find yourself slung in jail, with fuck-all chance of appeal. Or pulled in so often it would make your life a misery.

  It was around that time that Sandy McGloin reappeared. He had been away for a while. You didn’t ask where. He was an old friend of Hoss’s but just about as different from him as it was possible to imagine. Sandy was quiet and inoffensive, always neatly dressed in a grey or black suit and tie, standing at the end of the bar with not a pick on him, chain-smoking Major cigarettes and sipping Johnnie Walker whiskey, agreeing with everything you said. One night he even said to me: ‘I wonder why they can’t agree and put an end to it all, this business up in the north. What do you think, Joey — don’t you think it’s time it quit?’

  I said I thought it was. ‘Yes, it is, I think.’ But to tell you the truth I was watching the door to see might she come in and didn’t hear a word Sandy said.

  When I looked around, the Minister for Justice was back on the telly. Now what had happened a young cop had been killed by a booby-trap bomb — in a town only twenty miles from Scotsfield. He said that this meant the gloves were off for sure and the crackdown was going to intensify. When the boys heard that, they all started laughing. ‘That’s what they think!’ they snorted, and smirked over at Sandy. Knowingly. But Sandy said nothing. Just went on drinking and staring straight ahead, as if to say: ‘I know nothing about any of that. All of that political stuff — it just goes over my head, I’m afraid.’

  The only things he liked to talk about, really, were his wife and kids up in Belfast. He was always telling me that the day he was looking forward to most was when they could come to Scotsfield and join him.

  ‘Thanks very much, Joey,’ he said as I brought him his whiskey. ‘Have a wee one yourself.’

  But I didn’t bother. Very soon my regime would be starting in earnest. For I had now finally reached my decision.

  I don’t think many of them went out to the blues that night. Sandy didn’t anyway. He said he was going home. That was the impression he gave you — that he didn’t mind other people indulging, but couldn’t really be bothered himself. Once he showed me a picture of his wife. She
was very beautiful indeed. ‘She’s a schoolteacher,’ he told me. ‘I don’t know my luck.’

  The Laughing Boy

  I went out to The Ritzy myself for a laugh the next weekend. We all got a lift with Hoss and, despite what had happened with the cops, he seemed to be in great old form. There was nothing he loved more than telling yarns about Brendan Behan — the ‘Laughing Boy’ — writer and big-time IRA man of the fifties. A lot of the lads said it was because he looked the spit of him, with his wee short legs and greasy curls. ‘So anyway,’ he was saying, ‘the Laughing Boy’s in France without a tosser and he says, he says, how will I earn me a crust? So he goes over to Froggy: “C’mere, Henri,” he says. “How about I paint a welcome sign over your bar to get the tourists in? Let me paint you a sign and your pub’ll be fucking hopping!” “Right,” says your man, “then away you go,” and off goes Brendan, off he goes with his bucket and brush, and by Christ if next day the fucking bar’s not stuffed — stuffed with English fucking tourists and Behan there half-twisted like the cat who got the cream. “By Jasus, how did he do it,” says the owner. “How did he fucking do it?” Then he looks outside and what does he see in big bright painted letters — en Anglaise, as they say! — “This Is The Best Fucking Bar In Paris!’”

  We were all in stitches after that, and then the blues came on. Mostly all you heard were grunts and groans. Some of the time it was OK but after a while you’d’ve had so much bad sound and out-of-focus scenes — as well as being tired from working hard all day — that you’d find yourself just drifting off to sleep. It was at times like that you’d see her, more clearly and far sharper than any dumb, stupid movie, blue or otherwise.

  Waiting, maybe, in this little place in Mexico, with the dust all blowing around her and me just coming out of the haze to take her hand. ‘I knew you’d come,’ I could hear her saying. ‘I knew if I waited long enough that sooner or later you’d appear.’