Call Me the Breeze: A Novel

by Patrick McCabe

  Meaning ‘burst’, of course.

  The tournament was, at first, exclusively kept inside the prison but, later on, other cons were allowed in for games. By the time the season was over, you could hardly see the rim of the wall there were so many footballs impaled on the razor wire. I’ll never forget the day Boo Boo came in to visit and slipped me a tab of acid. Unfortunately it was the day of the final and all I can remember is the ball arriving at my feet and Bonehead going: ‘Now, Joesup! Run!’ but being so out of it that all I could think of was: ‘Look at those fabulous footballs! Those amazingly beautiful footballs! Man! Jeez!’, with the nimble flicky flickies — your own private little solar system — going phwoosh! and all the lovely colours — mostly orange and white — bleeding into each other there on top of the wall. It was the most magnificent of visions. At least until I heard Bonehead shouting: ‘You stupid bollocks, Joesup! You’ve gone and loosed-ed the game on us!’

  Which I had. They won by three goals and a point to nil and the Bone didn’t speak to me for a week. ‘I’ll never forgive you, Joesup!’ he says. ‘Why did you do it? You let me down!’

  But then he went and forgot all about it, being much too busy tormenting a young fellow called Ward who’d just been put in for stealing lead. He couldn’t go anywhere without getting a clip from Bonehead. ‘Just because I lifted lead doesn’t mean I’m like you!’ you’d hear. ‘Get away from about me, Ward — and all belonging to you! It’s a wonder youse wouldn’t go and do a day’s work! Isn’t that right, Joesup?’

  Sometimes he’d just hit him a kick up the arse and run away. The poor young fellow didn’t have the life of a dog. But fortunately he was in for just six months and, after he left, poor Bone was at a loss as to know what to do with himself. That’s when he started reading. Westerns mostly, but generally anything he could get his hands on. ‘Did you ever see a traveller reading?’ he said to me one day, and before I could get a chance to answer, he’d said: ‘No, you didn’t, for they’re too fucking stupid, that’s why!’ going back to his volume like he’s Head of Critical Studies, Mountjoy Jail.

  (What I have to thank Mervin for, more than anything, is keeping at me until I admitted to him that, yes, I did scribble a bit, but not leaving it at that, insisting that I write down some of my experiences. He used to read my notes and stuff regularly, which gradually got me back into the swing of things.)

  6 April 1984

  The noise in the exercise yard you just would not believe! This evening they were all talking about the young fellow who hanged himself last night. There isn’t a blade of grass to be seen in the fucking place. It’s a long way from the reservoir here and that’s for fucking sure. But I don’t mind. I’m in no hurry out now. Sometimes I think: ‘It’s a pity they didn’t finish me off.’ The kicking squad, I mean. The minute just before I passed out beneath this sea of scything boots, I could see all the people lining up along the main street in Scotsfield. They were all there — Boyle Henry, Austie, pretty much everyone I’d ever known in the town. They were shaking their heads as they saw me coming. I was naked and covered in dried dirt. Smelling of Mountjoy. ‘That’s him,’ they said, ‘and it’s good enough for him.’ ‘He reeks of cabbage and dirty old drawers,’ I heard someone say, as another one mused: ‘There’s talk that he’s gone into a queer.’ ‘That’s right,’ came the reply, ‘I heard them saying that. With a bit of luck he’ll get AIDS, this new disease they’re all talking about. That will soon soften his cough for him. The way I understand, the pain is like nothing on earth. Your bowels collapse. Then your heart enlarges. And bursts out through your —!’

  They were all laughing when I saw Jacy standing in the doorway of Austie’s. She looked like a skeleton with hollow sunken eyes the very exact same as a junkie’s. She was shivering in a blanket and pointing as she asked me in this cracked voice: ‘Why, Joey? Why?’

  The judge was standing in the doorway of Austie’s, writing in a ledger. Then he looked up and said: ‘Joseph Tallon, you have been found guilty by a jury of your peers. My role in this case is to protect the interests of the public against the possibility of such heinous offences being repeated. In view of your previous conviction and the fact that you have put the victim through the additional agony of having to give evidence in this case, I direct that these three sentences — comprising possession of drugs with intent to supply, false imprisonment and assault occasioning bodily harm — are to run consecutively.’

  When I looked again he had gone back inside with the door marked ‘Austie’s’ in gold leaf just swinging there behind him.

  It was Austie himself who walked out of the crowd and came over and knocked me to the ground with one single well-aimed blow. Far away I heard my own voice pleading: ‘Harder there, please! Please, do it again!’

  But they were gone and all you could hear was, why Joey why why oh why did you have to do it she was really such a lovely girl and we know you liked her why oh why did you do it Joey why?

  There is a little booth which acts as a lost-and-found point; in another part of the yard, prisoners queue up to buy stuff at the shop. Others are waiting to go to the workshops. You can watch TV or play pool in the recreation room. I managed to get myself a Walkman — Boo Boo brought it in — but I don’t listen to the old music now. It’s too hard for me. Abraxas would only remind me of The Seeker and Joni Mitchell. So I just listen to Bonehead’s country-and-western tapes (‘Boys but I loves Daniel O’Donnell!’) and any other old rubbish I can find. I don’t care, so long as it takes me away from the stink of boiled cabbage and the all-pervasive rankness of other men’s drawers.

  (Even flipping through it is enough to make the gloominess start insinuating itself again. You almost go into a foetal crouch as you turn each weighted and weary page, with talk of nothing — only strikes and abortion referenda, rain and misery in a country that seemed ruined.)

  2 May 1985

  Sleep broken all the way through the night. I woke up and said: ‘Don’t let me think about her,’ but when my eyes closed again I saw them all coming up the main street, sort of like in a movie but with the sound turned way down. It was like a funeral cortège, with Austie at the head of it dressed all in black. But a funeral that was taking place years ago with the hearse being pulled by two plumed horses and the Big Fellow inside driving it, wearing these breeches and buckled shoes. They looked ridiculous along with his fedora, but he didn’t care. He just smiled at the mourners lined along the streets as if to say: ‘All in a day’s work!’, and lashed the horses as they trotted onwards. Now I could see that the mourners were laughing too. When we got to the graveyard Jacy was there, attired in this beautiful floaty print dress — it alarmed me that it was a little bit like Mona’s — and a daffodil-yellow sunhat. When she opened the coffin it was filled with light, and when that had gone I saw quite clearly who was in there beneath the lid. It was me — in a starched white shirt and red tie, the one I used to wear when I’d go to Mona’s.

  ‘Hello, Joey,’ she said and stroked my forehead with her palm. ‘How are you in there? Is it nice being dead? Never mind, you’re alive now!’

  Hoss appeared then, directing the men who were carrying the cross. I can still feel the pain of the nails as they went in. But it was nothing compared to the shame when Jacy approached me on the cross and started tugging at the strip of cloth they’d tied around my groin. She chuckled into her hand and then turned to the mourners, going — not in a Californian accent now but in a really drab country Irish one, from around County Wicklow or thereabouts it sounded — ‘Did you see the little yoke the fucker has in there? Tsk! Tsk!’

  I died then and they all went back down to Austie’s. I can still hear her saying that, and the more I try to block it out the louder it seems to get.

  23 June 1985

  There is talk of establishing a Prisoners’ Revenge group to put a stop to the kicking squad and their intimidating bullshit. I don’t know. Everywhere you go there seems to be violence. Times the bad feelings star
t coming again, then you get over them and think, no, it’s not so bad in here. Maybe I’ll survive.

  (A lot of the later entries are undated — a sign of growing contentment, I think, and a preoccupation with Mervin’s schemes. There is definitely a lighter touch to the prose, as in this little pen picture of our custodian.)

  Mervin (and ‘The Poetry Association’)

  Mervin, Mervin, Mr Governor Mervin, where the fuck did he come out of? Don’t ask me — but what a guy! What a motherfucking cool fucking guy …!

  What I mean by that is, he’s so full of ideas and enthusiasm. And really good at imparting them. ‘I think it would be a real good idea,’ he says to me the other day in his study. ‘Might get rid of the stink of piss!’

  I couldn’t believe it when I heard him swearing like that. But then, Mountjoy can get to him too, with its fucking grey walls and its fucking grey skies, with its endless fucking rules and interminable head-counts. At first I didn’t believe his idea would work and nearly laughed straight out in his face. ‘What would the dumb fuckers in here know about poetry?’ I said. And was pretty damned cocky about it too, the way it came out. But not quite so much so after Mervin had done with me. ‘What gives you the right to say that?’ he asked me. ‘Where’s your evidence for such an assertion?’ By the time he was finished with me I felt like I’d gone ten rounds with Rocky. I won’t say that when I left the office I was a completely changed Joey Tallon, but one thing for sure — he had made me see how arrogant I could be.

  ‘That’s exactly the attitude that prevented you from writing!’ he told me. ‘That prevented you from bothering to articulate how you felt. Don’t give me that shit, Joey! Get out there and form that Poetry Association!’

  At first I thought I had fucked it in one! For the minute I mentioned it to Bonehead he started getting all fired up, suggesting all these ridiculous projects, such as inviting T. S. Eliot in to speak to the prisoners! (He saw I had been reading him and picked it up in the cell one night.)

  ‘The fucker is dead!’ I told him. ‘Bonehead, T. S. Eliot is dead!’, making no more impression on him than the man in the moon, before eventually having to grab him by the bollocks and rasp into his face: ‘Will you fucking listen to me, will you? You can’t invite in dead people!’

  ‘Jasus, Joesup, will you take it aisy!’ he says. ‘Sure there’s bound to be people that’s alive can write pomes as good as him!’

  I’m Reading!

  In the end, anyway, we got it up and running, although it wasn’t called the ‘Poetry Association’ and wasn’t confined to verse. The name we decided on was the ‘Mountjoy Literary Society’, and after the first three or four meetings — which consisted just of me, Eddie ‘Mouse’ Gallagher, or perhaps what was a close relative of his who popped by the recreation room for a snoop — things began to pick up and, before you knew it, you were beating the fucking bastards off with a stick. Mervin managed to wangle us a grant and, after a while, we did start bringing in writers, although not well-known ones like T. S. and not because they weren’t alive, either, but on account of our budget not stretching that far.

  It was the making of Bonehead too, for that was where the ‘secretarial’ aspirations began, culminating in, of course, his compilation of the definitive ‘Joey Tallon Archibe’.

  He had even started to wear his glasses on a cord — or in his case, a shoelace — and I couldn’t go anywhere now without him coming up to me with questions. I nearly pissed myself the day I came upon him in a corner of the exercise yard, leafing his way through Joseph Conrad. ‘How are you getting on with that?’ I asked him, and what does he do? Puts the hand up, as much as to say: ‘Do you mind, Joesup? I’m reading!’

  Literary Soirées

  There were some fabulous nights you couldn’t forget at our ‘soirées’, as I’d taken to calling them.

  ‘You fucking bastards you put me in the Joy/Me just a decent young boy! You put me in here where there is no joy!’ this fellow delivered one night — and that wasn’t the worst of them either! Not by a long shot! Another time a junkie got up and started punching the air, all these rat-a-tat-tat smacks as he went blue in the face going on about ‘smack!’ and how it ‘fucks your bleedin’ head!’ ‘But they don’t care!’ he says, ‘’cos all they bleedin’ care about is their share — of cash!’

  It was after that we got put in charge of the library, and I suppose it was there Bonehead learnt his other skills — became ‘The Catalogue Meister’, I suppose you could say — which has resulted, happily, as I say, in this quite extensive chronology.

  He has even included on bits of wrapping paper little quotes — just random thoughts, I suppose you could call them — that he’s found. One, believe it or not, in pencil on the back of a Rizla!

  The worst thing about it was that it turned him into Hitler. ‘What the fuck do you mean you don’t know where you left it? That’s library property! What are you, a traveller? You needn’t think you’ll lift all about here, you thieving cunt!’ I heard him saying to this fellow one day. ‘So you’d better go and find it! And if I catch you taking ency-clomapaedias out of here again, it’ll not be good for you! Them’s reference books!’

  Another great thing about it was I could get extra privileges for myself. Mervin saw that I had special entitlements, which he could justify to his board on account of membership of the library being up fivefold since me and the Bone took over. Although, to tell you the truth, I think it had more to do with Bone’s eccentric style of management than any dramatic refinement of literary tastes. On the other hand, maybe that isn’t quite fair, for the literary society was definitely turning a lot of people on. I used to love reading The Poetry of T. S. Eliot aloud, even though I have to admit there was a lot of it I still didn’t understand, and St John of the Cross, which, despite the fact that it still reminded me of The Seeker and the old days, I was beginning to warm to again.

  ‘I didn’t know you were holy, Joesup,’ said the Bone to me one night in the recreation room. ‘You never said anything to me about being holy.’

  Another time he caught a fellow by the shirt and fired him out the door. At that point I had to take action. ‘You can’t be at this, Bone!’ I said to him, quite forcibly. ‘You’ll lose the pair of us our jobs!’

  ‘I know,’ he says and starts going all shaky, ‘but he was cutting pictures out them special books to take back to the cell to wank with. It’s not good enough, Joey!’

  Then he shows me this book of Rembrandt plates and shakes his head, disgusted. ‘Even an itinerant wouldn’t do it,’ he says, ruefully.

  Diary of a Kip: 24 June 1985

  We have had the best of crack all morning talking about these moving statues. This smack dealer called Crowe, who has just been locked up, was telling us about going down to Ballinspittle, where the whole thing’s been happening. ‘You wouldn’t believe it!’ he says. ‘Half the country is down there and swear they seen her talking. She came down off the plinth and walked over to a fellow. Apparently the auld bollocks couldn’t walk and now he’s kicking football!’

  ‘Maybe we could get him on the team,’ says Bone-head.

  ‘They’re coming from all over,’ the dealer replies. ‘Only the cops fucking caught me I could be down there making a fortune selling burgers.’

  ‘Shut up, you fucker you! We don’t want pushers in here!’ snarls Bonehead the other day when an argument started. ‘You’re giving us a bad name!’ Your man, of course, goes for him then! Bonehead never knows when to shut up.

  There is great excitement too about the boxing.

  Barry McGuigan looks set to win the world title. He’s from near Scotsfield, so I can imagine what the crack must be like in Austie’s right now. I wish I was there. But I don’t suppose they’ll ever want to see me after what I went and done, stupid bollocks that I am. I have only myself to blame, no matter what the governor says. He’s a great man to talk to is Mervin, he’ll just sit there and yap for hours. ‘What about your friend St John of th
e Cross — what has he to say about forgiveness?’ he asked me. I could have given him a couple of quotes right there off the top of my head. But I knew there’d be no point. It isn’t St John I want forgiveness from.

  He says he’s delighted with the way things have gone, both in the library and the literary society generally. ‘Now,’ he says, ‘I have a proposition to put to you.’

  Then he says — I nearly shit myself! — ‘Did you ever think of putting on a play?’

  Take Five!

  That was the first time it had ever entered my head. At first I completely rejected the idea, but when Mervin said he would help — he had directed a lot of plays himself, he said, he was a member of an amateur company — I decided I would give it a go.

  When Bonehead heard about it first, he said: ‘What? You? Sure you couldn’t do plays! We’re in charge of libraries and pomes, Joesup, that’s enough!’

  But, of course, as soon as things got started, there was the fucker in the thick of it, running around with a clipboard, flapping his arms with the glasses swinging. It didn’t take him long to learn the jargon. ‘Take five!’ he says to this crackhead who was playing the lead.

  ‘What?’ says your man and looks at me with his mouth open, as Bonehead gives me this painful look as though saying: ‘Do you see what I have to put up with?’

  Diary of a Kip: 3 July 1985

  Have been in the library all day, studying and getting ready to begin the play. Came across a great book called The First-Time Director: A Guide and it really is excellent. I can’t wait to get started. It says in the book that it’s like a general getting ready to go into battle, and that’s exactly what it feels like now. You read and you read and you read and then you find yourself standing in front of the mirror going: ‘This has to be a production that will set this prison alight! It has got to be something really special! Something that they’ll be talking about for years. For years to come, you got that, Joey?’ Then, adjusting this imaginary dicky bow as off you go, thinking to yourself: This is gonna be a piece o’ cake, pal! Dig?