Call Me the Breeze: A Novel

by Patrick McCabe

  ‘You got it, Boo!’ I cried. ‘Rockabilly!’ as I gave him the soul-brother handclasp and bought him another coke. He wasn’t drinking now. ‘Cleaning up my backyard, Joey! It’s all salads and still water now in the music biz,’ I was told.

  What changes were coming about in the country generally and in the quiet little town of Scotsfield! Boo Boo McGann the psychobilly man driving this great big motor (a Ford fucking Mustang, no less!) like he was the head of Island Records. His studio was used by all the major international acts.

  ‘You might as well have the garage for the rest of your campaign. I mean, it’s no good to me, and you really need a base!’

  So that’s how the Joey HQ came into existence. I really went to town on it that night, after Boo Boo gave me the go-ahead. Cleaning it from top to bottom — you want to see the state it was in; I mean, it hadn’t been used for years — and painting JOEY’S HQ in red letters three feet high! It really did look fantastic!

  Then I covered nearly every inch of the walls with photographs from the seventies and more coloured posters I’d got from the printers depicting me on my bike with the loudhailer and novelty hat, splashed across the top two simple words: THE BREEZE.

  So everything was in place. I had nothing to do only wait. But boy, let me tell you, was I one happy man when the punters started flocking in, either to sign the Reconciliation Petition or just chew the fat in general. Every so often I’d bellow into the loudhailer: ‘Don’t pass by Joey’s HQ! Come in and remember those who are gone! Show your solidarity with all the dead souls’. Bobby Sands! Sir Norman Stronge! Come on now, ladies and gentlemen! Remember the words of the poet! Get in here now and kiss Achilles’ hand!’

  I swung the megaphone and grinned at a passer-by.

  ‘You! Come on now, sir!’ I exhorted him. ‘Get your butt in here and sign! Joey, Joey, please don’t go-ey! Passer-by, you will rue, walking by Joey’s HQ! Do not pass, I entreat you, friend!’

  Another idea I hit on was the masks. I got the inspiration from the National Enquirer. You can’t beat the Americans when it comes to gimmicks! Some dude running for governor had come up with it during the last election. Got replicas made of his own fucking face!

  ‘This is terrific!’ I enthused when they handed me over the very first one. ‘It will give the campaign a whole new impetus!’

  I pulled the elastic band over my head and looked in the mirror.

  ‘For the love of fuck!’ I chortled. ‘This is the best yet!’

  ‘There’s a great demand for them, Joey,’ the guy in the workshop told me. ‘A lot of the kids go mad for them. Whether it’s Robbie Williams or David Beckham or whoever. You know yourself!’

  ‘I sure do!’ I replied as I struck a few poses and wagged my plastic ears.

  Well, honestly! The more I looked at that mask in the mirror! Such a great big potato head as I happened to be saddled with on the day of my birth! If you could imagine, say, your man on the cover of Mad magazine — but without the scattering of freckles — then you’ve managed to get a pretty good picture of what that reflection looked like!

  But did they turn out to be a hit or what! All you can say is, it was starting to look like ‘Joeytown’ now! Everywhere you went, potato heads! It was fantastic, really and truly it was!

  ‘Vote for Joey! The man you know-ey!’ I heard one day as I was coming back after lunch. ‘What the fuck’s this?’ I said as I turned around to see … myself. Until one of the kids pushed back his mask and gave me the thumbs up, grinning!

  They’d call in regularly on their way to school, and I have to say it — there really were some terrific discussions in that old HQ! Both with the schoolkids and the old-timers, who’d often take it into their heads to pop in on their way back from the pub to rap away and marvel at all the progress. ‘I can’t get over it,’ I remember an old fellow saying. ‘The place is getting like fucking New York, Joey!’

  They were particularly proud of what I was doing, they told me. ‘It’s people like you this country needs,’ they said. ‘Go-ahead people that are not afraid to speak their mind! Sure in the old days we were afraid to open our mouths for fear somebody’d be talking about us!’

  Encouraged by such comments, I’d grab the megaphone and stand in the doorway, shouting: ‘Remember blood in the snow! Remember poor Campbell Morris! Look, I implore you, into the depths of the animal pit! The dead! The dead! Remember the dead! Don’t let them be forgotten, those souls without names! Vote for Joey! Joey’s the man who will see that they are remembered! Hello there, missus!’

  Sometimes, when things were lax, I’d just take out a book and spend a little time reading. The more I read of Dead Souls, the more I began to realize that that was the way I wanted to go about the business of telling my own story — to describe my past in the way that the ‘Little Russian’ had. I just couldn’t get enough of him and had Una Halpin tormented for every scrap he’d ever penned. ‘Get me more!’ I demanded. ‘He’s teaching me so much!’

  After having eaten up The Nose again — one of the first books she had ever ordered for me, actually, all about this fellow’s conk hopping down off his face and running around the town, before ending up living with other noses on the moon — I got so fired up by all these ideas that were gathering inside that I literally began ‘feeling’ the words, if you can understand my meaning, in the end having to close the garage. Because such a ‘movement’ within me, if I might call it that, was something that I’d never before experienced. Not quite so intensely at any rate. It was a sensation you imagined took hold of authors when you heard them announcing that the ‘Muse’ had struck.

  And, boy, had she struck or what! I nearly knocked over five or six people as I cycled off out to the caravan!

  I don’t know how long I’d been writing, but when I looked again, the sun was coming up, and if I’d been delirious before, I don’t know how you might describe what I was feeling now.

  All I can say is that the words were just continuing to pour out of me, crashing away there like some majestic waterfall.

  When — what do you know? — this rat-a-tat-tat comes hammering on the door.

  ‘All right, Mangan!’ I called. ‘I’ll be with you in a minute! Just go and get your water, can’t you? Can’t you see I’m busy in here?’

  I proceeded, preoccupied with my creations. But then — I couldn’t believe it! — he starts up again!

  ‘For Christ’s sake, damn you! Can’t you wait?’ I shouted. Adding: ‘Ah, hold on, will you, for the love of Jasus!’

  But no. He couldn’t. Rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat-tat, except this time he really annoyed me!

  ‘Right! That’s it! I warned you, didn’t I?’

  But I might as well have been talking to the wall, and of course I should have known that. For the next thing I look up and he’s outside the window, pressing his face to the glass.

  Except for one thing. It wasn’t Mangan’s face. It was mine! Mr Potato Head! Complete with plastic ears!

  ‘Ah, for Christ’s sake!’ I groaned.

  I mean, what could you say? What could you fucking say, you know?

  ‘Joey, Joey, will you let me in?’ he says then, plaintively tapping away and wagging the ears.

  I have to be honest, though, they really did look hilarious!

  ‘You drunken auld bollocks you, Mangan!’ I laughed — it was impossible not to do so — and went over to the door to open it, growling irascibly as I strode back to my desk, still grinning away, but privately, of course.

  Launch Party Contretemps

  Which, I suppose, if you were so disposed, you could feasibly interpret as further evidence supporting the ‘Johnston Farrell theory’ regarding the peculiar character of one Joseph Mary Tallon. Yet another indication of just how intemperate and unsociable that erratic loner and would-be scribe could be, of whom the feted artificer Mr Farrell had already written so eloquently and perspicaciously to that effect in his much-acclaimed masterpiece, The Cyclops Enigma.

&nb
sp; He could focus his genius now on this little development, could he not? In searing, indicting prose analyze the continuing heartlessness of Jake Carradine! I beg your pardon — Joseph Tallon. Tell all his readers of how he kept his poor neighbour waiting. Of his harsh, cruel treatment of a helpless old tinker who’d never harmed a soul in his life. He could write about that then, couldn’t he? Of course he could!

  This time, who knows, maybe scoop the jackpot altogether and wind up on the New York Times bestseller list. Doing coast-to-coast TV!

  ‘Yes, it’s Johnston Farrell with episode two of The Joey Tallon Story! The Potato Head Visitation!’

  Why, a man of his skills could stand to make millions by reworking an action-packed tale such as this! In its way much more surprising and full of more exciting twists and turns than that other silly kidnapping caper of his!

  Meaty, intense stuff providing him with an opportunity to deal with the material in his own much-lauded ‘individual and hard-hitting’ approach. But most of all — in keeping with this so-called ‘style’ — to ensure that nothing ending up between two covers bears the tiniest resemblance to what might generally be regarded as ‘the truth’!

  And by that I don’t mean exactly the ‘events’! Or the chronology of things — as they happened!

  I’m not that fucking well pedantic!

  I mean, like I’ve said, the real and, more importantly, emotional truth!

  For who gives a fuck what really happened? They’re just the facts, for Jesus’s sake! That’s what I was trying to tell him on the night of the book launch, but of course he pulled the usual stunt. Pretended to be ‘bewildered’.

  ‘You fucking cunt!’ I said. ‘You were pumping me all along! And now you’re trying to do it again! I’ll have you! I’ll fucking have you, Farrell! Call yourself a writer? You know what you are? You’re a fucking bloodsucker!’

  The funniest thing about Johnston, though, are these new mannerisms. That English sort of refinement, I guess, that he reckons should accompany the fame.

  ‘No, no,’ he says, ‘you don’t understand! I would always treat a person’s story with respect! I did actually try to be fair to everyone in the drama! Which is why I’m devastated by your attitude, Joey! I really am! I always thought we —’

  That was more than enough. I sneered and turned my back on him. But not before saying: ‘And you’d do it again, wouldn’t you? Write it all over again so you would! You and your lies! You think you understood her? You don’t know the first thing about her, man! You got it wrong! Way wrong! Like everything else in your fucking book!’

  I could see them all looking away, wishing to God there was somewhere they could hide. And I’m sorry it had to work out like that. For they were really fine people. Even Johnston, before his head went whoomph! and he got to thinking that The Cyclops Enigma (‘The first in a series of “Jake Carradine” thrillers set in border bandit country in the feral, explosive mid-1970s, this book will blow your mind!’) was the successor to fucking Ulysses!

  A perception which I did little to propagate, I have to say! All I can remember is coming back across the floor and stabbing my finger at him. ‘No,’ I went on, ‘you’ll get no more stories. Because this time I’ll tell it myself! I’ll write my own life story, no matter how illiterate you might think I am, and this time see to it that the truth will be told!’

  ‘I don’t think you’re illiterate, Joey!’ was all I could hear as I walked away.

  ‘Leave it,’ I called back, ‘Mr university graduate! The truth, that’s what you’re gonna get this time around! The fucking truth, man, got it? Something that you’ll never know about, you or your travesty of a book, you and your dime novel ephemera!’

  I think I must have knocked something over, glasses or some shit, for all you could hear was ‘Oh!’ and them all looking over as I stumbled down the stairwell, the very last thing I heard being: ‘It just wasn’t quite good enough now, really!’ All these black cocktail dresses with shocked pale faces going ‘Tsk! tsk! tsk!’, shaking their heads as Bonehead shouted after me: ‘Hey! Joesup! Wait for me!’

  Beaming with pride and pulling on his coat as the two of us fell out into the night. He threw his arm around me, with the traffic swooshing past, bawling: ‘Ha ha, Farrell! You dirty auld fucker! You couldn’t write your fucking name! Haw, Joesup! Come on now, Rooster Cog-burn! Get up there, Moshe Dyan! The one and only Big Joey Tallon from fucking Mountjoy jail!’

  Of course, now that I can look back with some degree of objectivity, it’s plainly obvious that that isn’t strictly accurate — Bonehead’s somewhat ungenerous appraisal of Johnston’s literary abilities, I mean.

  For, regardless of what I have said myself and what we might like to think, there is incontestably a certain amount of rigour and skill that’s necessary when you approach the writing of thrillers or crime novels —and, believe you me, neither happen to be in my possession. So, hats off to you then — however belatedly — Johnston Farrell, and all your midnight oil-burning fellow wordsmith travellers!

  All I can say is, I hope you’re out there doing your job better than I’ve been managing here tonight! And that your publishers will endow you with wagonloads of cash, which I certainly won’t be getting for the discursive ramblings I’ve been tapping away at here for hours, regardless of my extensive researches in the depths of the famous ‘Archibe’ (!).

  Perhaps what I ought to do the minute I’m finished is mail it off to Johnston, with a letter enclosed eating lots of humble pie. Thereby wheedling my way into having my story reinvented by a gifted, proven master! In particular, perhaps — if the maestro should deem it worthy! — the following little set piece. Anticipating his assent, already, somewhat grandiosely perhaps, entitled:

  VISITORS AT DAWN!, from The Potato Head Visitation

  The Candidate continued standing in the middle of the floor of his caravan thinking to himself about the next part of his novel, every so often raising his hand to caution his elderly neighbour, who was continuing to potter about noisily behind him as he made his way back to his desk, at which he then sat down to resume his labours. Not just a little irritated by the persistent interruptions, which took the form of irritating coughs, unnecessarily loud sighs and the idle and deliberate squeaking of shoes. Eventually it reached the point where he could endure it no longer, snapping: ‘Will you for fuck’s sake sit down, Mangan! I told you I’ll be with you just as soon as I complete this sentence!’

  For the briefest of seconds, he could have sworn he heard laughing in reponse to his injunctions. Not so much laughing as muffled chuckling, in fact. But almost instantaneously he dismissed such fanciful notions, his calm appraisal of the situation being that when you were up half the night typing, it was only to be expected that you might find yourself prone to the occasional lapse of judgement. Even to the extent of imagining … well, silly things, to put it mildly.

  Such as a chicken, for example, aimlessly fluttering about your abode. Was it any wonder, he considered, that you might find yourself saying: ‘It’s absurd, these things you find yourself thinking when you fall victim to the unspoken pressures that tend to go along with creative work!’

  Then, to your astonishment, discovering that you hadn’t been imagining them at all! Perceiving that there were already some feathers —plain to see! — decorating the cornflakes bowl and others coming floating down from the top of the wardrobe where the so-called ‘imaginary’ chicken was brashly flapping its wings. The Candidate, taken aback by this new ‘reality’, made sure to take a long hard look at the bird. It was scarlet in colour with a small rose comb and beneath its chin a livid quivering wattle. Where had it come from? Why, Mangan, the mischievous rascal, he suddenly realized, had obviously brought it along as a present!

  Such noise in his life Joey had never heard coming out of any animal! He stood looking at it for another moment or so, considering what his approach might be to the situation. In the end he decided to confront Mangan — to clear his throat, then reprim
and him forcibly. Which he was on the verge of doing when he heard a familiar voice.

  ‘It’s a Rhode Island Red, Joey,’ said Boyle Henry, pushing back the plastic mask.

  The blood drained from Joey’s face as he saw the senator smile. His visitor contemplated an unlit Hamlet.

  ‘Did you hear a knock?’ he said impassively. He went over to the door.

  ‘Ah, hello there!’ he exclaimed breezily as he opened it.

  Hoss Watson and Sandy were standing outside. Joey saw that Jacy was with them, pale in her imitation leather coat.

  ‘Look, Joey, it’s the Three Stooges,’ said Boyle. ‘Come on in out of the cold.’

  She was as beautiful as ever, all right, even though she had put on a lot of weight and was dressed in a hooded jersey shirt and sweatpants. Her lovely blonde hair was black at the roots now and looked like it hadn’t been washed.

  ‘An old friend of yours, Joey. Remember her?’

  ‘Boyle, no!’ she pleaded anxiously. ‘Don’t go through with this! It’s unnecessary! Can’t we just go now, please?’

  ‘Go? What are you talking about, go? You have to say hello to your old friend, don’t you? You seemed very keen a couple of nights ago.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that. You talked me into it.’

  ‘Fucking women. Can’t stick with anything. Make a decision, then go and fucking change it. Hormones, maybe. But what the fuck. Come on now, Jacy. There’s a good girl.’

  He shot Joey a glance. ‘You want her to stay here, don’t you, Joey?’

  Before Joey could answer, Boyle gave Jacy a hug and said: ‘You see? Of course he does, baby! You two have a lot to talk about!’

  He smiled over at Joey. ‘After all, it’s been a long time, Josie!’

  Jacy averted her eyes and dragged on her cigarette.

  ‘Come on now, girl!’ barked Boyle Henry as he slapped her backside smartly. ‘Shape up out of that!’

  He reached into the pocket of his cream-white suit and produced a cellophane package, winking over at Joey as he pulled up a chair.