Martin Incidentally

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MARTIN INCIDENTALLY

GERRY MCDONNELL ————————————————

Belfast Lapwing

MARTIN INCID INC IDEN ID ENTA ENTALLY TALLY

A NOVELLA

GERRY MCDONNELL

Belfast LAPWING

First Published by Lapwing Publications c/o 1, Ballysillan Drive Belfast BT14 8HQ lapwing.poetry@ntlworld.com http://www.freewebs.com/lapwingpoetry/ Copyright Š Gerry McDonnell 2013 All rights reserved The author has asserted her/his right under Section 77 of the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Since before 1632 The Greig sept of the MacGregor Clan Has been printing and binding books

Lapwing Publications are printed at Kestrel Print Unit 1, Spectrum Centre Shankill Road Belfast BT13 3AA 028 90 319211 E:kestrelprint@btconnect.com Hand-bound in Belfast at the Winepress Set in Aldine 721 BT

ISBN 978-1-909252-15-8

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MARTIN INCIDENTALLY

GERRY MCDONNELL

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Gerry McDonnell

MARTIN INCIDENTALLY… In the beginning

I was in the case room reading texts with titles - Angelina, Honeymoon, The Cause of Matt Talbot. Suddenly a censor and muscle man came in and smashed the texts. I was escorted out. I didn’t mind leaving the place but I wondered what would happen to all those words. Would the broken letters be melted down to make new ones by Pascal Henry as he coughed his lungs up? I had kept secret proofs of the texts in my pocket, with my name on them. Then I was in the case room again, in love with Molly Dunne’s daughter Angelina from the bindery but I was being warned off by a journeyman Joey Breen who fancied her.

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ANGELINA Old Mr Keogh was gingerly pushing a sixteen page form to the machine room when one of the men threw a handful of letters on the floor causing him to freeze.

In the house Angelina asked me did I eat here alone at this table every day? I was embarrassed that I did. She was referring to a bare formica table with just a rusted bread bin on it. We were drinking tea and I felt cornered by her question. She was twenty-one and I was a thirty-year-old, mature student at her college. Her parents were Italian and owned a local chipper. Her mother was a sensation when she came from Italy to marry Angelo, a dark, stubby, dynamic man. People said she looked like the movie star Sophia Loren. She smiled in the chipper with large autumn-coloured eyes and perfectly even, white teeth. Angelina has her mother’s looks.

I suggested we go out to the garden. It was more a yard now since I had agreed with the next door neighbour, a builder, to concrete over it.

“It’ll tidy the place up”, he said.

It used to be a mature garden with yellow laburnum blossoms, and along the stone wall, there were blackberry and loganberry bushes.

Mercifully a lilac tree at the end of the garden was spared. It laid its blooms on the corrugated-iron roof of an old shed.

I told Angelina that my mother used to love the tree when she was alive; that I used to break off a branch for her. Suddenly she clambered up onto the wall and roof to snap a plume of perfumed, bluish petals.

She was unabashed when her skirt lifted in the breeze. I noticed she had dark bruises on her thighs. I held her hand as she jumped down from the wall. She handed me the blossoms.

“For the table”, she said.

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We went inside to put the lilac flowers in a vase but a jam jar had to suffice. We sat sipping tea and smelling the petals. In the silence I wanted to touch her hand. Suddenly she became agitated.

“I had an abortion”.

I didn’t know what to say. To console her could be interpreted that she had done something wrong. To say nothing would be to make little of it.

“I got a girlfriend pregnant once. She insisted that I pay for an abortion in England. None of us had any money in those days”. What was I saying?

“I haven’t told anybody else”, she said.

We sat simmering in our confessions. She had a seminar to attend in the college so she took her bike from the hall and cycled away looking back to smile.

That evening I went upstairs for something and found underwear neatly placed on by bed. I was dumfounded. It had to be Angelina’s.

She must have gone upstairs when I was in the toilet. What kind of girl was she?

The next day I cycled up the avenue to the back of the college, the route she took. Often I had timed it to bump into her ‘by chance.’ I wasn’t sure how I would broach the subject of the underwear.

However, I didn’t see her, not during the entire day at college, or the next day, or the next week. I asked her friends about her but they knew nothing. A month later I got a letter from her from Italy.

She went to get away from an uncle who had been abusing her since she was twelve. She was staying with her grandmother until she decided what to do. One evening, when I was eating at the table, there was a hammering on the hall door. I opened it to find a swarthy man, not unlike Angelina’s father, in a state, sweating profusely. I guessed it was the uncle who had been abusing her.

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“You know where is Angelina”?

He was aggressive. I tried to shut the door but he had his foot jammed in it.

“She with you”?

I threatened him with the Guards. He punched the door, cracking a wooden panel and turned to go. I slammed the door shut and went to the sitting room window to see him lift the front gate with great force. He left it broken, sticking in the air. A couple of months had passed when I got a letter from Angelina from Sweden. She said she was getting married, that she was pregnant! I felt robbed of a chance of happiness with her. I wanted to feel her belly with our child inside.

Her uncle paid me a few more, nasty visits. But things settled down. I saw him once, in a local park, walking, holding hands with a very young girl. Shortly after that, I read that a man had been badly beaten in that park and was in a coma. It was him. He recovered, I heard, but went back to Italy blind in one eye. He picked the wrong girl and messed with the wrong people!

One day in December the phone rang. It was Angelina. She was back in Dublin.

“Could I call over?

“Of course”!

We drank some tea and talked. She told me she was pregnant by her uncle when she left Dublin; that she couldn’t face another abortion and chose to have Michael. She had met a Swedish man in Italy and moved to Stockholm. He was kind and loving at first but he turned physically abusive referring to her as ‘damaged goods.’

She left with her baby and came back home where she wasn’t welcome.

Her parents, particularly her father, didn’t want to know her.

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He said she had besmirched the family’s good name by accusing his brother of abusing her.

She was staying in a B and B, paid for by the government. She had to be out of the accommodation early in the morning and couldn’t return until evening.

“I don’t know how much longer I can push a buggy around the city in this weather. We go into a MacDonald’s to get warm.

I don’t want to burden you but I am desperate”.

I assured her that she was welcome to stay with me. She sobbed and thanked me.

She stayed over Christmas. In spring I came home one day and saw her sitting in the back garden with Michael who was absorbed with piling up coloured cubes. I had made an attempt to recreate the garden, planting a laburnum tree and loganberry bushes. Daffodils lolled in the breeze around the sapling. I called her name but she didn’t answer. When I walked up to her she turned away and lowered her head. She was holding a letter. I hunched down beside her. When she looked up I was completely shocked. Her forehead was scratched with red lines, there were wipes of blood on her cheeks and she was shaking.

“I don’t know what happened. I must have blacked out”!

The letter trembled in her hand. I helped her inside to the bathroom to wipe the blood off her face. The scratches looked like letters. She stood looking into the bathroom mirror. I could see the words I love you on her forehead. Who did she love? I picked the letter out of the sink. It was written in Italian but I recognised the heavy hand from the ugly notes her uncle had dropped in the letterbox from time to time.

She was mumbling as I led her to her bed to rest.

“Don’t call a doctor. I am too ashamed”.

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Gradually she felt up to going out, wearing her hair in a fringe.

Neighbours said hello, while trying to get their heads around this apparently, sudden, family. We walked out by the sea in the summer. I hadn’t appreciated before how close I lived to the sea.

When the tide was out there was a pungent smell of mud and seaweed but if we walked far enough along the coast we came to a wooden bridge to an island which brought us closer to the sea. I pushed the buggy, with Michael asleep in it, over the warm, lumpy sand barbed with bunches of sun-dried seaweed and empty beer cans. After eating sandwiches in the afternoon sun, we would walk along the cool, dark strand. Sometimes her eyes would well up.

“It’s nothing really, just small things now, just small things”, she said.

As if to demonstrate her growing freedom, she slipped her feet gracefully from her sandals. I was attentive as she balanced lightly on the hurting, hard-ribbed sand. She inhaled in surprise as the wind blew wavelets over her feet.

“Let’s go for a swim”, she said.

“But we’ve no togs or anything”.

“We can skinny dip. Look, there’s nobody around”.

A couple in the distance were walking their dog.

“Come on”, she said.

She took off her dress and waded out. She swam about and floated silently with the tide, her breasts exposed to the evening sun.

“Come back, you’re going out too far”.

She stayed floating, her eyes closed before she turned and swam back with ease. She dried herself with a blanket and put her clothes back on. She was invigorated, spontaneous.

“I’m going back to Italy and I’d like you to come with me, with us”.

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I felt dizzy and hunkered down. The incoming sea crept over my sandals. I looked at the sand shifting under the water.

“It’s a bit sudden, isn’t it? It’s a lot to take in”.

“I think it is the right thing to do. I want Michael to grow up in Italy, to feel the light and the sun and not end up drinking in gloomy pubs”!

The light was dimming turning the sea grey and the sand had lost its sparkle. I looked at her kissing and settling Michael for the walk home and wondered how she could show love against all the odds.

“Angelina, I want to go with you, I will try but will you forgive me if I fail”?

“Yes, but you won’t fail”!

We strolled back in silence, along the beach, back to the wooden bridge, under the jaded sky.

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DEPORTEE I was with the proof-reader in his wooden hut struggling to read stories written in Irish by An Seabhac.

Leo was adopted and was dark-skinned and so felt that the social mores of his working class background didn’t really apply to him.

With little education he would have been expected to find labouring work. Instead he became a model in a college of art. He was tall, strikingly handsome and walked with outward confidence.

The alluring Phillipa, a student at the college called him ‘the Prince’ which gave him notions that she could see something aristocratic in him.

Phillipa had long blonde hair and smooth skin the colour of the plaster busts the students were smashing in revolt against the college system. She had different coloured eyes; one deep blue and the other hazel. This ‘defect’ only enhanced her unique beauty. Her family were wealthy with ‘old money’ and she was way out of Leo’s league but that didn’t stop him falling in love with her. He took to wearing a navy cloak with scarlet lining and a gold coloured clasp when he was out drinking with the students on a Friday night.

When he could swallow no more pints he would go on the ‘bloody Mary’s’ and become maudlin, pine for Phillipa and sing the Woody Guthrie song ‘Deportee.’

This went on for the three years Phillipa was an art student. She had many boyfriends in that time but some twist in her character, maybe because she had different coloured eyes, set her on a path of breaking hearts. She was toying with an actor who was ‘destined for greatness,’ and she was also playing with the feelings of a successful sculptor whose work could be seen around the city.

The pencil drawings of a vastly talented student were to be shown at a gallery in town. Leo was invited and he brought a woman with him who had a turned eye and a look of engrained hardship.

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She stood in a corner of the exhibition room for the whole evening, away from the hubbub, holding a glass of wine with both hands. Leo got very drunk on the wine which flowed freely.

During the opening talk by a politician who admitted he knew little about art, there was a kerfuffle at the back of the crowd. Leo was kneeling in front of Phillipa declaring his undying love for her.

Indifferent to his feelings for her, she walked away to link her latest boyfriend. Two of the students helped Leo to his feet and got a taxi for him and his partner.

The students graduated and Leo left the college and got a labouring job. Years later Paul, one of the graduates who worked in an advertising agency, saw Leo digging in a trench, laying cables close to his house in a suburb. He went over to him but they hadn’t a lot to say to each other. Anyway the foreman wouldn’t have been too happy with Leo laying down his shovel to reminisce about his art college days and Leo wouldn’t want his work mates to know he was a model in an art college. Paul told his wife Vera about him when he got home with the paper. Later that afternoon she came home with some shopping.

“I saw that man in the trench; very handsome with such wonderful dark eyes”.

“That’s him”.

“I invited him for tea”.

“What? Why did you do that”?

“I thought it was the proper thing to do. You did know him for three years after all. Anyway I want to find out more about your wild, art college days. Your revolution! When you think of it he was the only real proletariat among the lot of you”.

“He was just the model”!

“From working class Crumlin! I think that’s fascinating! What must he have thought of you artists”?

“Vera, you’re incorrigible! He’ll hardly call in anyway.

He’s too shy”.

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There was a knock on the door. Paul looked through the front room curtains.

“It’s him”!

“Oh, good! Darling you answer it.

I’ll bring in some snacks”.

Leo came in wearing an old black overcoat, carrying a paper bag in one hand and a shovel in the other.

“Sorry I had to bring the shovel. The truck left it in the gutter”.

“That’s alright. Just put it there beside the umbrella stand”.

“I hope I’m not intruding. Your wife is a nice woman.

She asked me up”.

Not at all”!

“You’ve a nice gaff here. You must be getting good money with your art”.

Paul laughed a little. He got a strong whiff of alcohol from Leo who had a fixed smile on his face. They went into the dining room. Vera came in with a tray of finger food.

“Take a seat”.

“Leo, this is my wife Vera”.

“We met in the trenches, didn’t we”?

“That’s a good one”!

“Do you want to wash your hands”?

“No, I’ll wait ‘til I go home”.

“Have something to eat then. Do you like smoked salmon”?

“I don’t think I like the look of it to be honest”.

“Never mind, there are some sandwiches and some biscuits and cheese”.

“I’m not very hungry”.

“Well, you’ll have some tea or coffee”?

“I’d murder a pint now.”

He took a bottle of whiskey from a paper bag.

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“Will we have a little sup of the hard stuff”?

“It’s a bit early for that”, said Paul.

“No, sure remember the drinking we did in the art college”.

“Oh, I want to know more about this”!

Vera took three glasses from the china cabinet.

“This is a kind of reunion after all”!

Vera could feel Paul glaring at her to shut up. They drank whiskey and reminisced about the past.

“It’s funny. I can hardly remember what happened yesterday but I remember all the art college days! One of the students, I think his name was Conor, gave me a picture of me in the nude.

The wife takes it down if anyone calls to the house and then I put it up again later”.

“I’m afraid Conor committed suicide”.

“Jaysus. I knew there was something about him that wasn’t right but he was a genius”!

“Aren’t they all”, said Vera.

“Ah, no. He was a genuine genius”.

“And what does he go and do? Drowns himself”?

“Did he? That’s desperate”.

“He had a breakdown,” said Paul.

“He was in a mental hospital with his drawings under his bed, convinced that somebody was going to steal them.”

“What a way for a so called genius to end up”.

“The poor chap”.

“I think it’s an act of cowardice to commit suicide”.

“Ah no, the person isn’t in their right mind. Let’s drink to his memory”!

“You knew Paul back then. Tell me something juicy”.

“I think you’ve had enough to drink Vera”!

“Something juicy? He was always very quiet as far as I can remember. He was sensible you could say”.

“Boringly so, perhaps”?

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“I could always rely on Paul to get me home on a Friday night when I’d be drunk. You could bet your life on Paul”.

“And you might lose it”!

Leo looked at Paul.

“Don’t mind her. Vera gets drunk too easily. Alcohol doesn’t agree with her medication. She’s diabetic”.

“However, in vino veritas”!

“I’m sorry I brought the whiskey then”.

“Don’t be sorry. So you’re married?

Did you marry the woman with the turned eye”?

“What”?

“Vera, stop it”!

“And the love of your life, Phillipa. She called you ‘the Prince’ didn’t she? She was just playing with you, you know?

She married a solicitor who owns one of the biggest firms in Dublin”.

“Paul, did ye tell her all that”?

“I just mentioned it”.

“You must have a thing about eyes. Phillipa with different coloured ones and your wife with a turned one, more working class, poor nourishment”!

“You know you’d get a few slaps for saying that where I come from”.

“Yes, Crumlin is it?

It must have been strange to be the only black man there”!

“Shut up Vera”.

“Sing us a song. Deportee! Working class tripe”!

Vera was slurring her words now and laid her head on the table.

“Where the jacks”?

“Upstairs, second door on your right”.

Paul was trying to wake Vera. Had she taken her medication, he wondered?

He had to remind her constantly. He looked around. Leo was standing in the doorway in his shabby overcoat, with his shovel in his hand.

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“Are you going”?

“So you told her everything!

Making fun of me; telling her about Phillipa”.

“I just told her about the good old days.

There was no malice in it”.

“I still love Phillipa. Would you believe that”?

“I understand”.

“I thought you did, but you don’t”!

Leo began to wave his shovel about and brought it down on Vera’s head. She groaned and went quiet as a pool of blood spread from her hair. He swiped at Paul catching him on the face with the side of the blade. Blood spurted from Paul’s head as he fell to the floor.

Leo left the house. He looked up and down the avenue but didn’t know where he was with all the cherry blossom trees. He chose a course for home, trailing the shovel behind him.

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EYES OF A COWARD The arthritic foreman Mr Clarke couldn’t eat his lunch with the pain in his jaws.

I was reading in the newspaper about a document which was released under the thirty year rule. It read, ‘Aras Invite for ‘Cranky’ Writer.’ It has been revealed that President Patrick Hillary was advised to decline an invitation to present a literary award to a writer who was “frequently very cranky” and might behave in such a manner at the presentation of the award, even though he was getting £1,000. It was decided that he should be invited to the Aras for a short visit. However, arrangements for the invitation were postponed when the writer was injured in a road accident. The writer, then 82, accepted the award in a wheel chair.

Thirty years ago I was sitting with some student friends in a horseshoe of brown leather seating in a pub. We were celebrating the publication of a story by James, one of our group, in a literary magazine. Light shone through amber windows causing our table of drinks to glow. I noticed a man struggling with Switzer’s shopping bags and parcels at the door. It was the writer mentioned in the article. I recognised him from the dust jacket of one of his books and alerted the others to his presence. He was handsome and tanned and well turned-out in a grey tweed suit. Ice blue eyes which sparkled were his most striking feature.

He was a successful writer of short stories and had made it onto the school curriculum. Bolstered by the drink I asked him would he like to join us? To my surprise and delight he said he would. He quickly established himself as mentor to a callow group.

“So you’re all writers and poets? How many of you will be writers in ten years time? Will you stick it out? It takes guts! The writing game is littered with failures, deserters and cowards”!

He ordered a round of drinks.

“You know, I can tell a coward by looking into his eyes”.

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He proceeded to go around the group looking at each of us in turn. He stopped at James who was the more sensitive one among us. He was often discovered day dreaming, oblivious to the topic of conversation at hand.

“You have weak eyes, the eyes of a coward”.

James’s face was expressionless, like cardboard. We laughed, proclaiming our allegiance to him and relieved that we had passed the test. The conversation was more subdued after that ‘trick’ and the famous writer left us. James looked as though all the life had been drained from his face which had caved in. He looked like somebody else. We tried to reassure him.

“Don’t mind him! Sure he’s pissed anyway”!

James left without saying anything. In my second year at college my father died. I was the bread-winner in our household now and needed to find paid work. The simplest thing to do was to join the Civil Service. I waited in a green corridor for an interview. A man carrying a sheave of papers came up to me.

“What are you doing here”, he asked.

“We’re closing the building now”.

“I’m waiting to be interviewed for a position”.

“Ah, don’t mind that”, he said.

“You can start on Monday and don’t be late. If you don’t do much here, at least you’ll be punctual doing it”, he joked, and was on his way.

I stayed in the Civil Service, got married and started a family. I wrote whenever I could find the time and had some success - a poem was published in a literary journal and I was shortlisted in a short story competition. I lost touch with the others and didn’t see any of their names appear as writers over the years. I took early retirement and was enjoying afternoons in a cafe in town, reading the paper and scribbling notes for a poem or short story.

I saw a man come in and sit at a corner table. His face was deeply lined.

He sat stooped over a coffee, rolling a cigarette. His hair hadn’t thinned 19

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or turned grey but I felt sure it was James. I went over to him. He wasn’t at all as excited about meeting up as I was. He was living in a hostel not far from the cafe and I felt, selfishly, that my times alone were under threat. His hands were claw-like, with long nails on fingers black with nicotine. Our conversation was confined to the past. That’s all he had and we had nothing in common in the present.

I showed him the article in the newspaper pointing out that the writer was “frequently very cranky” which would account for the ‘eyes of a coward’ incident. I thought he would feel vindicated in some way. James stiffened and looked around him on the ground as if he had lost something. He stood up abruptly and left like the time he left the pub, in silence. I watched him lope down the road, dodging the throngs of Saturday shoppers. I felt like such a fool for upsetting him but what was I to do? I couldn’t let the chance go to speak to him. It was almost fated that I should meet him after thirty years and on the very day the article about the writer was published.

After a week thinking about him I went to the hostel in which he was staying. I discovered he was back in hospital. The following Saturday I was in town with my wife. She was buying clothes to wear for our daughter’s wedding. I said I’d visit James in hospital and meet her back in the cafe later. As luck would have it James’s psychiatrist was doing his rounds that day. He agreed to speak to me in his rooms. He looked as though a gush of wind had blown his shock of white hair back from an unusually narrow face.

“James has had a relapse and is under heavy sedation.

He has slipped out of the world as we know it.

We thought we’d lost him altogether”.

I told the doctor about the incident in the pub with the famous writer.

“I’ve no time for such parlour tricks. James is a courageous man, battling his illness for almost thirty years”.

“Would meeting me, talking about the past, have caused him to relapse”?

“Possibly, but I wouldn’t feel guilty about it”.

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“Should I visit him”?

“Leave it for now. Let him rest”.

I went back to the cafe to meet my wife. I told her about James but she was preoccupied with a dress she had bought.

“It’s terrible to think that the kindest thing to do is to leave him alone in an old grey asylum”.

“What’s that, love”?

Her mobile phone rang just then. It was our daughter wondering how the shopping was going.

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F.A.O. SOMEBODY There was a contest to see who could pronounce the word d i a r r h o e a.

Dear somebody, This is the last shirt I’m going to iron. I’m sick to death of washing them in the sink and drying them at a two-bar heater in my tiny flat in Golders Green in London. It’s a Jewish area. I’ve always had an affinity for the Jews, the persecuted outsiders.

When I was a boy of three I lost my mother. That left just me and my father in the house. He took it bad and drank himself to death.

He was found in a ditch. I remember waiting for him to come home. I stayed in the house for a whole day on my own. I was six.

My grandparents who had a farm took me in and worked me to the bone. My grandfather sexually abused me right into my teenage years. I used to talk to my hand when I’d hear his footsteps on the stairs at night. I think my grandmother knew what was going on but was afraid to say anything. He was a tyrant and would go into a rage if she hadn’t got a spotlessly white shirt collar ready for him for Sunday Mass. I took refuge in books which my grandmother got from the mobile library behind my grandfather’s back.

When I was eighteen I emigrated to London. I had menial jobs in hospitals and hotels where I was assured of two meals a day. I found the English to be decent and honest. Coming from a nod and a wink society, this was a revelation to me. I came out of myself for a little while. I was shocked to discover that I found men more attractive than women. I invited a homeless man back to my flat once. I made scrambled eggs for him and gave him fresh clothes. I don’t know what I was thinking when I said he could sleep in my bed. I jumped up when I felt myself getting aroused as he moved his hand along my leg. I had to ask him to leave and I watched him from my window, walking down the street under the yellow lights which were still on even though it was dawn. In the summer,

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depending on what shift I was working, I often sat at the window reading biographies. It was my way of getting to know people.

A pub I frequented had a public phone on the wall. So as to give the impression that I was not entirely alone in the world, I used to make fake phone calls. One night in the pub the phone rang. The barman said it must be for me. I said I wasn’t expecting a call. He said nobody uses the phone except you. I panicked and said I was late for an appointment.

I’ve been living in London now for twenty odd years and it is my true home. I’ve always stayed away from Irish quarters such as Cricklewood and Kentish Town. I was lucky to find love once and was debonair for a short while. I even bought a suit from a bespoke tailor on Savile Row. Our love was platonic. He was young and I was going nowhere, so he left. I cherish the memories of walking in Hyde Park touching hands and sitting in a speciality coffee shop, inhaling the aromas, after a visit to the British Museum. I have dwelt on those times for years even though it has prolonged the pain of losing him. I’m tired; I’ve come as far as I can. Wasn’t it Johnson who said, if you tire of London, you tire of life itself?

Well, I’m tired, but not of London. It’s time the flickering candle was pinched out. I have reached a point of isolation where I can think that the collision of two cars is a wish for intimacy.

Today, I’m going to kill myself after work. I won’t involve other people in my death, such as a train driver in the underground, for instance. I’ll probably just slip into the Thames River after a few drinks. I can’t say who will attend my funeral. I haven’t any relatives as far as I know. I have made acquaintances not friends; intimate strangers you could say. If you find this before my burial I would like you to say of me: Albert always worked and paid his way, and he never lost his faith in God. Yours sincerely, Albert Tully

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IT’S JUST MURDER! Letter one I replaced Mr Clarke’s perfect wooden wedges with odd-sized ones before he came back from washing his hands, humming the song, ‘Martha.’

Dear Mother,

Wish you were here. The weather is lovely. I’ve just murdered the family in the mobile home next to me. They were making a lot of noise at night. When I went to their door to complain, a foulmouthed granny told me where to go. She got it in the gut. Just before she died she looked at me bemused, cocking her head to one side like a curious dog as she fell to the ground. I left her bony frame where it lay, the better to frighten the others. I hope her life flashed before her as they say it does; her filthy, selfish, in-bred life.

The man of the family, so to speak, a sinewy, tattooed, drink-sodden waster, came to the door. He was nearly black from the sun, the lazy prick, baking in it, drinking his cans with his ghetto-blaster blaring. It was his mother I’d just shot. He stared at her limp body lying on the steps.

“What the fuck”, he said.

His body jerked back, like a stick insect, a look of terror on his face. I believe I was standing up to this bully for all those people he made to feel small. He looked at me with his gob open, his dentures sitting on his tongue. He tried to smile, as if to say, let’s be friends. I shot him in the mouth. I probably severed his spinal cord because he collapsed wheezing, like an accordion.

Killing the son was easy and was done in a very appropriate manner. It was poetic justice really. He tried to climb out a side widow but his obese body got stuck half way. He was crying and screaming as I pulled down his shorts and shot him up the ass, as the American’s say, 24

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that same ass that mooned at me on my first day there. He would’ve taken some time to die in excruciating pain, I imagine.

I read later that they were members of a notorious drug dealing family and that the crime had all the viciousness of a gangland murder. It could not have worked out better. Who’d miss them, spreading misery to all and sundry?

I’m sitting in a small cafe, in a little fishing village, further on down the coast, just to be out of harm’s way, until things die down, so to speak. It’s just a precaution since I don’t think a judge in the land would convict me. I’m having a nice cup of tea and guess what, a sausage sandwich! Of course, not a patch on yours.

Remember the winter days when I used to prevail on you to let me stay at home from school? I usually succeeded and you used to bring me up a sausage sandwich in bed. Those were the days!

Will be home soon.

Your loving son, Martin.

PS. It gets better. I got the gun from their mobile home when they were out drinking the night before, no doubt intimidating people in the local town. I don’t think I’ll go on a holiday like that again, thrown together with all sorts. You were right. I’m much too sensitive!

25

Martin Incidentally

IT’S JUST MURDER Letter two Molly Dunne is suing the Corporation for building the footpath too near her arse!

Dear Mother,

Remember that fat man I was telling you about; the bore who talks incessantly and loudly on his mobile phone, in the cafe I like to frequent? Well, he’s in the boot of my car for the last three days! I wonder how long he’ll last? I am driving along a coastline which I can only describe as intoxicating. The light on the silent water, the sparkling rocks all comingle to create a magical place. I can still hear my friend in the boot of my car. His voice is weak now.

In the cafe I put up with him talking for a solid hour; a selfish, drunken, monologue! I turned around to glare at him. Imagine my surprise when I saw him seated with a woman who’s face looked as if it was about to shatter. I thought he was alone on his mobile phone all along! I could hardly believe it! Then I heard the poor woman say that she didn’t understand him. In a temper, he said she doesn’t have to understand him, just listen to him! That put the tin hat on it! When they were leaving he swayed up onto his feet and barked at the waiter for the bill. The woman struggled to get him out the door. His great belly was preventing the door from opening fully. This was my opportunity to involve myself. I went to her aid.

I said I would help her get him to their bus stop at the top of the street. In the struggle to get him out of the cafe, his hat fell to the ground and rolled away. I went to get it, leaving the little woman to bear his weight. He went on about his hat: how he had bought it in the oldest hat shop in Ireland; how it was handmade because of his unusual head size. And so on.

There was a slight incline on the street which made our task doubly difficult. Then I remembered my car was parked half-way along the street. As we came abreast of it, we leaned him against it to catch our 26

Gerry McDonnell

breath. I opened the boot and rolled him along the length of the car. I was pleased to see how easily he fitted into the spacious boot, in a foetal position. He lay there like a baby, probably thinking he was home in bed. The woman got worked up and asked me what I was doing and where I was taking him? I assured her I would take good care of him. I slammed the boot shut and drove away. In the mirror I could she her waving her arms wildly. It was a poignant moment.

All is quiet now. It’s appropriate I think to have him talk himself to death!

Your loving son, Martin.

P.S. I wish you could see the spectacular sunset, all red and purple like a bruised body.

27

Martin Incidentally

LA PETITE MORT It’s a job for life, something to fall back on.

Carol and Martin sat on a low wall at a water feature outside the art house cinema. It was the French Film Festival and they were waiting for an evening showing. Carol had bought a designer shoulder bag. She had expensive tastes. When she was still a school girl she used her mother’s credit card to buy a lime-coloured bra. It was hot and they were glad of the rest having scoured all the big shops. They sat in silence, day-dreaming. A crowd poured out of the cinema, some talking and laughing, others alone, blinking in the sunlight. They waited for the crowd to clear and went in showing the tickets they had bought earlier to a gangly, friendly usher who had bad breath. Carol chose seats near the front, too near the screen for Martin’s liking but he put up with it. The cinema soon filled up and she got comfortable placing a leg across Martin’s knees. He didn’t object and put his hand on her soft flesh. How he would have liked to slide his hand under her summer dress, along her thigh. He hoped that he could persuade her to come back to his house later to indulge in the erotic ritual which they had indulged in for years now.

Suddenly she sat up straight!

“Shit! Where’s my bag”?

She looked under her seat. Martin did the same, conscious of the fuss they were making. The bag just wasn’t there.

“I’ll go and see if it was handed in”.

Martin went up to the friendly usher.

“We’ve lost a leather bag, an expensive one.

Did anybody leave one in”?

“Wait till I see”.

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Gerry McDonnell

He went over to the truculent Head Usher who shook his head.

“Sorry. No bag was left in”.

Martin went back to his seat with the bad news. He tried to concentrate on the film but he was still preoccupied with how he would get her to go back to his house especially now that she was fuming over the bag.

She might want to just go home. Suddenly the gangly usher shone his torch at Martin gesticulating to him to come out.

“The fellah who has your bag is standing behind a car”!

“How do you know it’s him”?

“The boss saw him putting a leather bag under his coat”.

“Stand here so he won’t see ye. There, do ye see him behind the car”.

“Yes. What do you think I should do”?

“I don’t know. He might be carrying a knife.

Ye better do something quick though! He won’t hang around.”

“Why did he come back?

“Who knows”?

Martin, normally a physical coward, knew he would gain brownie points with Carol if he could get back the bag. She would be more in the mood to go back to his house. He strode out of the cinema towards a white van which blocked the man’s view of him. He surprised the man, standing up close to him.

“Give me the bag”!

“What bag”?

“The bag you have under your coat”.

“Are you mad”?

“Just give me the bag”!

“Give me a cigarette”.

The man spoke softly. He wore a cravat. He could have been a student in Trinity College which was opposite them.

“I don’t smoke”.

29

Martin Incidentally

He pulled the bag from under his coat and handed it to Martin.

“Here take it”.

They stood for a moment, taking each other in, before Martin walked back to the cinema with the bag, his heart pounding.

“Fair play to ye”, said the usher.

Martin took his seat and handed the bag to Carol who let out a gasp of surprise. She kissed him and placed her leg over his knees again.

After the film they walked to Carol’s car which was parked on a cobble-stoned hill. They rumbled down and crossed the River Liffey in the direction of Martin’s house in silence. They parked outside and went in. Martin’s heart beat fast.

“That was so weird about the bag”!

“It certainly was”!

“You were very brave”.

Carol lay down on the sofa, plucked her earrings off and carefully placed them on the floor. This was usually a sign that she wanted to begin their ritual. Martin sat beside her, nervous that she might change her mind. Without speaking he lifted up her t-shirt and she raised herself to enable him take it off. He took his time freeing her generous breasts from her bra and fondled them. He moved his hand along her thigh, pushing up her skirt as he had wished to do in the cinema. He got a thrill seeing the kind of knickers she was wearing; the colour, how lacy they were, how low they plunged. He felt he was in charge now, that he could dictate when she would have an orgasm. She really wanted to make love and, in her eyes, this eroticism was second best. However, it was first best for Martin. He turned her on her side and eased her knickers down a few inches and pushed his fingers inside her. When she had enough of his fascination with her behind, she lay on her back again.

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Gerry McDonnell

He took her knickers off and she put one leg high on the back of the sofa; she laid with her other leg open. Sometimes he would kiss between her legs. She began to stroke herself and he vibrated his fingers inside her. She was a vocal lover and cried out. Other women went quiet when having an orgasm. They might have gone out for a litre of milk for all the noise they made.

Occasionally the ritual ended in tears.

“I want to make love properly.

My therapist says this is just an addiction, that you’re a fantasist”!

“I’m afraid of ‘the little death’; when I make love a part of me dies inside”.

“That’s pathetic! You’re so fucked up”!

She was putting her clothes back on.

“The man with no penis! I’m not doing this anymore”!

She slammed the hall door shut on her way out. He knew it was an addiction and occasionally he did feel remorseful. However, at night he would replay the ritual in his mind and sometimes would experience ‘la petite mort’ in spite of himself!

31

Martin Incidentally

THE CAUSE OF MATT TALBOT Miracles are reported in order to move Matt Talbot up to sainthood.

A grey-faced man in a brown shop coat came to talk to me about the forty-year pension plan.

Martin stood holding an unopened letter at the rear of the gloomy church. It felt bulky for just a letter. Maybe it contained money, a small bequest to the Church? He had travelled from his home in San Diego on a mission, having promised his dying mother that he would visit the tomb of Matt Talbot, patron saint of the worker and reformed alcoholic.

Martin had given up the drink himself and his mother was convinced that it was through her prayers to Matt Talbot that he was cured of his addiction. Martin wasn’t so convinced. She had asked him to contribute to this saintly man’s Cause by handing in notification of a favour received.

“Can I help you”?

Martin was startled by the sacristan. He wasn’t sober very long and his nerves were still raw. He was on a twelve step programme but recoiled from anything to do with religion.

“I have a letter relating to the Cause of Matt Talbot. Is there somewhere, a box or something where I can put it”?

“You’ll have to wait until Mass is over.

You can talk to Fr. Meehan then.

Do you want to wait in the sacristy or will you stay here”?

“I’ll stay here, Martin said.

“I’ll leave you then. I’m sure you’ll want to say a few prayers”.

Martin resented this assumption. From what he could see in candle light the elderly sacristan had a dark lacquered complexion. He spoke quietly and moved away silently, his head bowed at an angle.

Martin put his envelope in his inside pocket and prepared to wait.

He looked around him. The once stained glass windows were blocked up, vandalised by the local gurriers, no doubt, he thought.

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Gerry McDonnell

The church was practically empty with just a dozen or so old people, kneeling in their chosen positions, close to a favourite saint, perhaps, or to a particular stage in the Stations of the Cross. He checked his watch, something he did repeatedly.

He didn’t expect a Mass to be on at five o’clock! He had a plane to catch at half seven. He was exact and liked to leave plenty of time for the check-in at the airport. An old lady who was a little dark bundle on the far side of the church started to sing a hymn as the faithful shuffled up to receive communion. The singing reminded him of the May processions of his childhood, when the life-size statue of Our Blessed Lady, mother of God, was carried at a precarious height to the perimeter of the parish and back again. He ran along the processions, back and forth, inhaling the scent of flowers placed at Our Lady’s feet.

He was startled by the sacristan who slid in silently on the polished bench beside him. At close quarters he reeked of cigarettes.

“You know, Matt grants any favour, within reason, through his intercession”.

Martin didn’t respond.

“I was going for the priesthood myself you know?

Yes, but God had other plans for me.

If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.

That’s a good one isn’t it”?

Martin thought he smelled alcohol on the sacristan’s breath.

This would explain his sudden loquaciousness.

“Do you think the priest will be much longer”?

“Are you in a hurry”?

“I am yes. I’ve to catch a plane at seven thirty”.

“Oh, you’d want to be making a move alright”.

33

Martin Incidentally

Martin stood up impatiently and walked over to the shrine of Matt Talbot. There were fresh flowers and a print of him in a praying pose framed in glass. Martin picked up a pamphlet on Matt Talbot’s life and read that he and a brother were standing outside a pub on a Sunday evening, hoping somebody would come along with at least ‘the entrance fee.’ Matt had ‘a moment of clarity’ and made the decision to go home.

“He was twenty-eight years of age when he gave the drink up and he never drank again to this day”!

The sacristan was at his shoulder again.

“That’s some achievement isn’t it”?

“Yes”, Martin said.

“I gave up the drink myself you know”!

“Did you”?

“Yes, on a Sunday too, after Mass.

My mother was always praying to Matt for an intercession and she swears it was a miracle. Maybe it was.

What do you think? Do you believe in miracles?”

“No, I don’t”.

“Fr. Meehan has no doubt that miracles do happen.

Of course priests would be closer to the action than you or me.”

“I don’t know about that”!

The Mass was over but Fr. Meehan was standing in the aisle talking to his elderly parishioners in turn, touching each of their foreheads and whispering a few words. This will never end, thought Martin.

“I’ll have to go”, he said.

“Can you give this envelope to the priest”?

“Of course I will.

Sure isn’t that one of my duties in his absence”?

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Gerry McDonnell

He gave the envelope to the sacristan who slinked away. He went over to the shrine and lit a candle for his mother. He felt conflicted about kneeling. He stood and tried to say a prayer. He heard a voice behind him.

“Fr. Meehan will see you in a few minutes. He always gives an encouraging word to each parishioner, and a blessing.

He has the healing gift”.

In the gloom he could just about make out the sacristan’s face.

“Have you got my letter”?

“What letter”?

“I gave it to you a few minutes ago”!

“I don’t think so”.

“Check your pockets! You must have it”!

“Oh, I think I know what’s happened”.

“What”?

“I should have warned you.

I’d say it’s in the hands of my unfortunate brother William.

He prowls in and around the church, sometimes begging, sometimes selling a bit of wood from Matt’s bed to a gullible tourist”!

“He has my letter? It’s a wasted trip then”!

“I’ll explain the situation to Fr. Meehan”.

When the priest had spoken to the last parishioner, the sacristan whispered in his ear pointing to Martin. How could he have been so naive? Why did he not distinguish between the brothers? It’s this damn gloom, he fumed. The priest greeted Martin, apologising about William and reassuring him that everything will turn out fine, all the time holding Martin’s hand cupped in his.

“I had a letter from my mother for the Cause of Matt Talbot but it has been stolen by the sacristan’s brother”!

“So Dermot told me”.

“There probably was money with that letter.

Can anything can be done about it”?

“Not much I think”.

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Martin Incidentally

“Why do you put up with his brother drinking, hanging around the church, stealing letters”?

“We’re a happy little flock of saints and sinners.

And sure isn’t it the best place for him, close to Matt?

Please God one day Dermot, our sacristan, will notify the Church of favours received and William will have miraculously left down the drink”.

The sacristan waited with a fixed smile on his face a few benches away.

“I understand you have a plane to catch?

Where are you heading for”?

“San Diego”.

“San Diego, in California?

And you came all the way to help Matt’s Cause”?

“I promised my dying mother I would”.

“You should be proud of yourself and your trip won’t be wasted.

A verbal notification of a favour received will count with me.

Don’t worry about that!”

Martin didn’t want to continue this conversation. He looked at his watch.

“I can see you’re in a hurry”.

“Yes, I’d better get moving”.

“Would you like a blessing for your journey”?

Martin was flummoxed.

“I don’t really believe in all that”.

“Sure it won’t do you any harm, will it”?

“I’d rather not”.

“Fair enough! Unfortunately we have to shut the doors at this time of the day because of vandalism. Shameful isn’t it?

Come on I’ll walk you to the gates”.

The priest fumbled with the heavy chains and padlock while Martin looked up and down the street in a vain attempt to spot the sacristan’s brother.

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Gerry McDonnell

“I’m sure you’ve heard that Matt used to wear chains on his body. He was not a masochist as some would have it.

He wore them to remember he was a sinner as we all are”.

The priest held Martin’s hand through the gates.

He looked him in the eye.

“God bless you”, he said.

It wasn’t a throw away ‘God bless.’ Martin felt it in his core. Walking away from the church he had a feeling of peace. The constant chattering in his mind had ceased. His surroundings looked brilliant, shone like how a child might see them, for the first time. It was as if he had fallen in love with everything around him. The angelus bells rang six o’clock and ironically broke the spell he was under, if it was a spell. He checked his watch and hailed a taxi for the airport. On the plane he closed his eyes. He didn’t want to strike up a conversation with the passenger next to him. He wanted to reflect on what had happened. Was it an episode of elation, or a flash-back to the days when he took LSD? He felt ungrateful and ashamed to be thinking like this. However, he had to remain true to himself. Reservations about God and all that still hung like heavy overcoats on the back of his door. He might never wear them but he knew they were there.

37

Martin Incidentally

THE TENT Mr Clarke said I was too tall for my age and I said that maybe he was too small for his age.

Martin walked from his small, terraced house to a cafe which had a smoking area at the back. He didn’t smoke but it was a fine day, a pet day, and he wanted to take full advantage of the autumn sun which gilded windows, leaves and facades of yellow brick. The low sun blinded him at times, making his eyes water. He had recently inherited his house from an uncle and it had come at an opportune time, since his short marriage to Lily had just ended. Lily was staying on in London where they lived for a year, and where he spent the last month of their marriage, sleeping in a tent in the back garden. They thought that since they were both loners, this would make for a happy marriage, being alone together and together alone. They were deluded long enough to give it a try.

He had a good feeling about this new place which was located on a rise and seemed to have a surplus of sky compared to the shady inner city streets. As he turned a corner he felt the warm sun on his shoulders and thought he could make a fresh start here, maybe even find love. He reached the cafe and went to the smoking area where there was a smattering of regulars. They sat apart at separate tables, talking loudly to each other about personal things; one had inherited money and one had been jilted. Martin envied their lack of reticence and self-consciousness.

They lamented the passing of John, a man who used to beg outside the Spar shop near the cafe. Martin knew who they were talking about, having seen him sitting on the step with a crippled leg, head bowed and hand out, muttering blessings. Each of them knew some detail the others didn’t know, so they talked about him for a good half hour. Martin took a note book and fountain pen from his jacket pocket and placed theem on the perforated metal table. He wasn’t a serious writer but he had developed the habit of describing the odd characters in the area.

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Gerry McDonnell

A woman walked into the smoking area, and greeted some of the regulars by name. She sounded American. She was followed by an older woman and they sat at a table near to Martin, immediately lowering their heads in earnest conversation. The younger woman’s clothes were colourful, sequined, embroidered. She had a slim body and short hair dyed red. She must be in her late forties, he thought, around his own age. As she listened intently to the other woman, creases appeared above her pursed lips and disappeared again when she smiled. She ordered coffee while responding to a remark from one of the men, with quick wit.

She rolled a cigarette, still taking in all that the other woman was saying and glancing at Martin more than once. Her fingers were encrusted with silver rings and gemstones. She removed her embroidered jacket, displaying a tattoo of an angel on her slim upper arm. Smoke rose from her cigarette and blew Martin’s way, carrying on it a scent of lavender. He inhaled the wafts of perfumed smoke. Just then his phone rang in his jeans’ pocket and as he stood up abruptly to answer it, he knocked over his full mug of coffee. It poured fast, doing an inordinate amount of damage for its size. The open pages of his notebook were stained brown. It spilled onto his shoe, burning his foot through his sock.

The woman turned around hearing the fuss and passed him some paper napkins, giving him a wide smile. Her teeth were stained with nicotine. What a tragedy! Though maybe they could be whitened, he thought. The waiter insisted on getting him a fresh coffee and he sat down to stay awhile, mopping up the last drops on the table. He forgot about his phone.

The woman’s older companion left and she opened a book, leafing through it. It was not a place where you could easily concentrate, with the incessant talking of the others who interrupted her from time to time. The wafts of scented smoke weakened Martin’s natural inhibitions, tempting him to ask the woman what she was reading. However, he resisted the usually awkward outcome. There was nothing more to keep him there and he prepared to go. Suddenly the woman turned around and said, 39

Martin Incidentally

“Would you like to join me? You look all alone there”!

He was taken aback by her boldness.

“My name is Susan. I’m an American, as you can guess, from Oregon, Ohio”.

“I’m Martin”.

“Take a seat”.

“Are you here on holidays”?

“Oh that’s a story”, she laughed.

“When my second marriage was on the rocks and my children were grown up, I asked myself one night, ‘do I want to die in Oregon or say, Paris?’ There was no contest”!

“So you settled for Dublin instead of Paris”?

“No. I commute from Paris to here, sometimes visiting a castle in Wexford where I worship the Goddess Isis, along with a coven of white witches”, she laughed.

“I stay with my Reiki Master friend, the older woman I was talking to just now, when I’m in town. However, we’ve fallen out. I’ll have to find another place. I’m not worried though.

The universe will provide”!

“What do you do in Paris”?

“Not a lot. Just to walk around the beautiful city is enough.

I suppose you’re wondering how I survive financially”?

“Well, I know it’s none of my business…”

“You’re right, but that’s ok! I read tarot cards and do astrology charts for money. But I don’t speak French so I don’t have many customers in Paris, ex-pats mostly. I commute here on cheap flights to earn my living. Sounds crazy to you, I bet”?

“No. It’s unusual, though”.

“Not that unusual! It’s no big deal”!

Although Martin was at best a sceptic regarding anything ‘alternative,’ he managed to strike a spark or two of feigned interest.

“Would you like me to read your palm? No money!

On the house”!

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Gerry McDonnell

Before he could decline she was pointing out life lines and conflict lines. It was all beyond him but his heart was beating as she stroked the contours of his hand. He was feeling his loneliness, his need for physical intimacy, acutely. Up close he sneaked looks at her eyes, darkened by large, black pupils and at her full sensual lips. She rolled a cigarette and they drank more coffee.

“I noticed you were writing in a note book.

Are you a writer, getting your material here?

You are, aren’t you”?

“No. I just try to describe the characters in the area, but not in here. I wouldn’t take a chance with these people”.

“Take it from me, they’re not very interesting.

What would I say? Dull, yes, that’s it, dull as mud.

So who have you described so far? Come on show me”.

“I’d rather not. You might recognize them.

Then I’d feel I was betraying them, using them”.

“God, you Irish are secretive. I’m not going to broadcast it”, she teased.

Martin could feel he was conceding ground as he opened the notebook. Susan snatched it from him in a playful way. She read: “There’s a man who sets out in the morning walking on the road towards the mountains or the sea and does not return until evening.

His heels are worn down these days, to such an extent as to turn his toes upwards, into those of a court jester or an inquisitor! He will soon find a new pair in a charity shop and wear them down and so it goes.

I passed him by one day. He was on the footpath, weighed down with Aldi bags and buoyed up a little by drink I would say, singing to himself through a bleak smile, ‘I can make it on my own!’ There must be a deluge of tears in him”!

“Wow! That is sad! Anything more cheerful”?

Martin took the note book and flicked through the pages.

“Here”, he said, handing it back to her.

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Martin Incidentally

“This is fun”, she sniggered, and read: ‘An old woman, balding, with smeared red lipstick in a man’s mustard, cashmere overcoat came up to me as I looked in a bookshop window. She said, you know, this recession doesn’t bother me. I’ve survived on cups of tea, cigarettes, valium and the occasional meals-on-wheels. The men are getting more handsome the older I get. Are you playing hard to get, she giggled and walked off.’

“That’s Mary! I always have a chat with her when I’m over!

Did she really say that about the valium”?

“Yes, as far as I can remember”.

“You writers! Nobody’s safe”!

Martin took this as a compliment.

“I have to go now, to give a tarot card reading, make some money”!

They swopped numbers and Martin hinted that she could perhaps stay in his place the next time she was over.

“There’s a spare room”.

“I might take you up on that. I would pay rent, of course”.

“Not at all”!

She didn’t argue with him; she left and her perfume lingered in the air. Martin sat, pleasantly ruminating, going over what she said and how she looked. He heard her name mentioned.

“Susan’s looking well”, said one of the regulars, who was puffing on his pipe!

The heavy smell of tobacco was slightly nauseating. He remembered his grandfather’s tobacco which looked like of a square of bog.

“She is, much better than before”, another said!

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Gerry McDonnell

“It’s all that hokus pokus, she’s into.

Sure that’d put anyone into the puzzle factory”!

Martin looked over at the one talking. He was stooped over the table.

He looked smug holding a mug of tea in his hands.

“It wouldn’t be for me, anyways”.

Martin picked up his coffee-stained note book and put it in his pocket.

He didn’t know the regulars well enough to say anything, so he just left.

‘Puzzle factory?’ So Susan was in a psychiatric hospital. Nothing wrong with that, he tried to convince himself. As he walked home it was dusk. Leaves shivered to the ground, shops were shut, their windows opaque; all traces of gold gone. His feeling of elation, from his encounter with Susan and the numerous cups of coffee he drank, was fading. He checked his phone and saw there was a missed call from Lily. Just then she rang again.

“Martin, what do you want to do with the tent in the back garden”?

“You didn’t have to ring me about that”!

“I just want to tie up loose ends”.

“Yes, obsessively! You know Lily, you were always very considerate, but sometimes to an irritating degree”!

There was a silence at the other end of the phone.

“I’m sorry I said that.”

He felt his mood dip and he started to blame himself for being such an idiot earlier, showing an interest in tarot cards and universal energy, all because a woman was attractive. And now, he thought, I’ve given an open invitation to my house to a complete stranger!

He was instantly confused, floundering. He could hear Lily, in the background, still going on about the tent.

“Send it over!” He said, “I might need it!”

43

Martin Incidentally

ANGUISH I waited in vain, the machines rattling, for the aged journeyman who would show me the secrets of the trade in silence.

The morning train moved smoothly, voyeuristically, through the suburbs above the long gardens with apple and pear trees and the back yards with perhaps a rose bush or fuchsia surviving on a patch of earth.

The train paused and discharged a scattering of office workers. I thought of my own office and my desk on which there was a growing pyramid of paper. My work was tedious and careering out of control. I was feeling bored and stressed at the same time and I wondered how much longer I could last in my permanent and pensionable job? My ambition was to become a writer but I had little chance of this happening if I stayed with this enervating paper work.

I was sitting, as usual, in the last carriage, facing backwards watching the present disappear instantly into the past. The train pulled out and as it gathered speed I saw a woman engulfed in flames. She was standing in a garden with her hands joined above her head in a prayer-like pose. I turned around to see if anybody else had seen her but nobody had. The passengers has thinned out with just a few on my side of the train, their heads against the windows, probably dosing. Did I imagine it? Since it was autumn it could have been a blaze of dead wood and leaves. Maybe a woman was standing behind the fire, tending it. I felt sure I saw a woman’s white, oval face, seconds before the flames soared up.

I reached my office, checked my phone and email messages and went for a tea break. I told my work colleagues what I saw. They were, at one and the same time, horrified and incredulous. They asked me how did I know it was a woman?

“She had the slim arms of a woman”, I said.

They laughed at this, showing fleshy and sturdy arms. They doubted what I saw, saying it will be on the six o’clock news, if it happened.

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Gerry McDonnell

“She was standing in the middle of her garden, hands joined upwards, like the steeple of a church”.

They looked at each other as if to say he’s losing it.

“Very poetic”, remarked Dennis.

He sat relaxed, smoking his pipe. He was the quintessential civil servant of the old school, nearing retirement. It was said that he would be sorely missed having fluent Irish and a good command of Latin and Greek. He was round shouldered, and had an inverted chest under an off-white polyester shirt, and limbs that were bony in his grey-brown suit. The tea-woman blessed herself.

“To set fire to yourself! It must be the worst way to go”.

“I would walk out into the sea on a nice summer’s evening”.

“I’d take a handful of pills and a bottle of vodka”.

“I’d hang myself”, said a usually quiet woman.

“I know a man who tried to kill himself three times in as many hours”, I said.

“He walked out of his house in his pyjamas and made his way to a dry canal. He crossed over to the parallel railway line but no train came. He finally put his head through a shop window emerging covered in blood but with no life threatening wounds”.

“Full marks for trying,” Dennis said, in his characteristically droll manner.

The women tittered as they washed their plates and mugs and went back to their work. I poured another mug of tea and sat back at the table.

“Why would anybody kill themselves by setting themselves on fire”?

“Anguish”, Dennis said, in a hushed voice as if from a distant sea.

“Great anguish! To fight mental pain with greater physical pain”.

“Fighting fire with fire”, I said.

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He didn’t respond, causing me to feel that my contribution was inadequate. We often talked about literature and art, and about opera, his great love.

“Balm to a thousand paper cuts”, he would say.

I was very much the pupil in these conversations but they were oases in the dry, mounting dunes of work.

“I would say that in all the operas in the world there is not a death such as that unfortunate lady had”.

His referring to her as ‘an unfortunate lady’ took all the shame, blame, guilt and anger from the incident, but relating her death to a plot in an opera was inappropriate, I thought.

“I may be wrong. I’ll have to consult my Kobbe’s reference work on opera this evening”.

He fell silent. I sipped my tea in deference to his superior knowledge. The silence was becoming awkward.

“You know, not that you could know, a brother of mine committed suicide”?

I was shocked by the suddenness of this revelation. I stammered and commiserated as best I could.

“Yes,” he said, “he put his head in a gas oven. He was floundering in the city, couldn’t find his feet, coming from a small village in the west of Ireland. He got soulless jobs in hotel kitchens but could only last six weeks at a time. That’s what he said to me, six weeks was his limit”.

“Why six,” I asked?

“It was as much as his nerves could stand, I suppose. He said it felt as if he took a deep breath starting a new job and held it for six weeks.

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He couldn’t mix and didn’t speak until he could bear it no longer. You know the way people thrive on mocking eccentricity? Well, it always came to that too. The sniggering would start and then ‘taking the piss.’

I was surprised at him using the vernacular, abandoning his studied English.

“His work colleagues mimicked his accent, his phraseology. You see Irish was our first language at home. At the end of the six weeks he would get drunk and throw pots and pans around the kitchen and walk out”.

He stood up with a great sigh.

“Oh, it’s all a long ways back now”, he said. “We better get back to our pen-pushing or the country won’t know what to do with itself, will come to a halt”!

That evening on the train home I wondered what I would see in the garden of the ‘unfortunate lady.’ Would there be a heap of ashes from burned leaves and branches or would there be a charred body? If it was the latter would I say something, point it out? My heart was racing. I sat facing the back of the train as usual. When we reached the garden there was a white tent and a steady police presence. The image of the woman in flames hit me anew. Passengers peered down into the garden. Was I the only passenger to have witnessed the horrific incident?

Over the following weeks I was having nightmares where ordinary, everyday situations were threatened by sudden conflagration. I took sick leave. One night I even climbed into the garden where the woman had died. I stood where she stood and waited for a train. It stopped as usual in an arc, above the garden. This surely meant that passengers further down the train had a clear view of where I was standing, that somebody in the other carriages had seen the incident. I needed to believe this. It was becoming impossible for me to bear this holocaust of anguish, alone.

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Martin Incidentally

FATED MEETING I toiled with ‘The New Press’ in the evenings, producing a hand-printed book of poems by Louis Borges.

It was early Sunday morning as he sat in a booth in an empty, gaudy ice cream parlour. He had just enough money for a pot of tea.

It would have been twenty years since he was taken by an older sister to this cafe for a banana split or a knicker-bocker-glory. He was coming from an all night party where he had slept on the grimy carpeted floor. He was hung-over, unshaven and his long black hair was lank. Suddenly a young woman slid into his booth sitting opposite him. She was crying. She had come all the way from Holland to meet her boyfriend at the ferry but he wasn’t there when it docked. She was bereft. There could be no other reason why she would sit with him, he thought. He couldn’t believe his luck but was aware that she might disappear just as quickly as she had appeared. She dried her tears and despite her heartache was set on keeping to her itinerary. She wanted to visit the Civic Museum.

He persuaded her to let him accompany her.

“I know Dublin like the back of my hand.”

The Civic Museum was opposite a pub where he drank, but he had never been in it. He went with her, careful not to upset his good fortune. He wasn’t into museums and definitely not when hung over. The only thing he found vaguely interesting was the head of Admiral Nelson which survived the blowing up of his monument by the IRA. After a painful tour of the museum and other city landmarks, he asked her would she like to go for a drink since the pubs were open now. She conceded and to add insult to injury she had to buy the drinks. The barman gave him a dirty luck, obviously thinking that he was taking advantage of her which he was, up to a point. He cured his hangover and his spirits rose a little and as it was turning out to be a sunny, pristine day, he brought her to Stephen’s Green. They took the circuitous walks and leaned over the small stone bridge at the pond where there was a squabble of sea-gulls and ducks around the pieces of bread thrown by a woman, 48

Gerry McDonnell

aided by her child. They moved into the centre of the Green catching the wafts of perfume from the meticulously groomed flower beds and rested on a marble seat. They soon fell to touching and kissing but were aware of people passing, looking.

“It is a pity there is no bed”, she said.

He suggested they go back to his place and they hailed a taxi. They went straight to the bedroom and after some bashfulness they had sex. She cried out something in Dutch and he grunted. They lay there.

“It is a long time since I had sex. I used to be afraid of men”.

“I used to be afraid of women. Still am”.

They laughed in the warmth and closeness of their bodies. She had her arms above her head and he saw a large mole in her armpit. She saw him looking at it and lowered her arms quickly. She wanted to stay overnight. They went to buy some food and he was acutely aware of the looks they were getting from neighbours. He didn’t engage in small talk with them so nothing was said. They lay awake that night talking.

“You know, I had planned to travel around Ireland, sleeping in a tent. Would you come with me”?

He remained silent. He wished he had the wherewithal to go with her but he hadn’t. He feared prolonged intimacy, or more accurately, he was incapable of it.

“I understand if you don’t want to come.

You have your own problems, I think”.

He felt a failure but also felt relieved. He could have sex with her one more time with no strings attached. A week later they saw each other in a late night cafe. She was with somebody, the boyfriend he presumed, and she ignored him. He passed by and said nothing.

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HONEYMOON I stole letters from the job for the Borges book; hand-fulls of A’s and E’s mostly.

Helga came to Dublin for a few summers in the early 1970’s. She was a teacher in Germany and liked to sample the Irish culture and tell her students about Ireland. People didn’t travel that much at that time, so her students would no doubt be interested in what she had to report. Ostensibly she was here for the culture but not really.

She was here for the drink and sex and maybe love. I spent a night at her guesthouse and in the morning, hung over, we went to a nearby pub for a cure. She must have talked to some of the guests about seeing the countryside because she suggested that we should get out of the city, get some fresh air! I agreed and said we could go to Glendalough, picturesque and not too far away.

“We can go for the weekend” she said.

She would pick me up at my flat the next day. She called the shots since she had the money. A tenant called up to me that I had a visitor. I looked down over the banisters and saw Helga standing in the doorway, dwarfing the woman and wearing sun glasses even though the day was overcast. I went down and we left the house. I offered to carry one of the plastic bags she was carrying.

“It’s heavy! Have you got rocks in it”?

“It has bottles in case we need a drink at night”.

By the sound of clinging in her bag she was carrying more bottles.

My heart lifted. I didn’t like to go anywhere unless there was alcohol at the beginning, the middle or at least the end. We got the single-decker bus to Glendagough called the St. Kevin after the saint who had lived in a cave there, and had resolutely resisted the lure of women. We arrived in the evening and booked into a small family hotel. There were framed photographs of the village as it was a hundred year ago on the walls. The prevailing colour of the place was a faded red.

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Dark wood wainscoting contributed to the gloom of the place.

Helga filled out the register presided over by the disapproving eye of the manageress, who’s lips were narrow and clamped and who’s eyes, behind winged sparkling glasses, were darting and suspicious.

She reminded me of an ostrich. Helga said we were on our honeymoon; she didn’t smile or say anything. We didn’t have any luggage so the elderly porter stood there with nothing to do. We went upstairs with our bags clinking. In the small room we were feeling shy, since we hardly knew anything about each other.

However, with help of alcohol we talked about our lives, had sex, continued to drink, talk, have more sex and passed out.

There was a loud knocking on the door.

“Are you having breakfast”?

“No”.

We continued to drink and talk, have sex and fall asleep. We woke in the afternoon, spent and hungry. Helga’s dark glasses concealed a badly bruised eye which she got from a fall on the granite steps of her guesthouse. We needed to eat. She was too embarrassed to go, so she gave me some money to go down to the lounge and order sandwiches and coffee. I threw some water on my face, put on my shirt and went down the stairs gingerly.

The lounge was empty except for a young couple sitting in two winged armchairs. They each had a pint of black Guinness sitting on a low table in front of them. The woman’s pint had a trace of raspberry on the creamy top. By the look of them they weren’t drinkers and were probably pushing the boat out having a whole pint each. He looked like a solicitor or an accountant. He wore a white shirt under a steel-grey, shiny suit and had polished, leather slip-ons. One foot moved like a metronome, indicating contentment or not. The woman was marginally hippyish, wearing a long floral skirt and long mousey hair. I managed to inveigle my way into their company. I could be very affable and entertaining, especially with drink on me, for a time anyway. I was probably a curiosity to them.

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They bought me a whiskey and then another one. I was telling them about my life, how I intended to go back to evening classes and go on to university. They were on their honeymoon. They were students at Trinity College where I intended to go myself, I told them.

This was a small honeymoon until they were both working when they would go abroad for a real one. I said that this was probably the best honeymoon, since it was all they could afford. When they had real money it wouldn’t be the same. They were pleased with this reasoning. I told them I was on a honeymoon of sorts as well and we drank to that. I proposed a toast to their future together. I insisted on buying the drinks, three large whiskeys and gave the money to the woman, who was proving to be an ally. She went to the lounge. The whiskey had me buoyed up again. I challenged the man to an arm wrestle. I kept at him, needling him, reminding him of his pen-pushing, soft life. Finally he agreed, just as the woman came back with the drinks.

The manageress stuck her head around the corner suspicious no doubt about the order of three large whiskeys. I had the feeling that the man had had enough of me and maybe thought that a convincing victory in the arm wrestle would shame me into leaving them. The woman was delighted at this manly game. He was stronger than I thought and it took all my strength, gained from lifting heavy boxes, to beat him. I slammed his arm down on the table doing some damage because he winced in pain. He sat silently holding his arm to his chest. I apologised profusely, insincerely.

“Are you alright love?”

I suggested he drink the whiskey to kill the pain but he refused. The woman reminded us about the toast. He couldn’t raise his glass. Having entertained them for the past hour – I even sang a verse or two of a bawdy song about Saint Kevin - I started to resent them. My mood soured. I said I didn’t have mammy and daddy to pay my way in university; that I had to work to get the fees. I said I worked in a place on Dublin’s docks called San Quentin.

“Why is it called San Quentin”, the woman asked?

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“Because you never see a woman there! And because it has a gangway where we troop to a dingy room on our lunchbreak”!

“And what do you do there, what kind of work”?

It felt like she was building up to sympathy, or empathy by way of a cause, like the rights of the worker.

“We form a line and load wagons with goods for all the shops in the cities and towns in Ireland; boxes of soap powder, cans of fruit, that type of thing and when we see Fragile written on a box, we throw it extra hard! It’s a sick place to work in.

There’s a man there, not much older than you, who carries around with him a naked woman, a plastic one, which is a radio.

The nipples act as the tuner and the volume. He’s not long married and he says, ‘does anyone want a wife? You can buy her”’.

They were quiet now, looking at their drinks which were still half full.

They must’ve regretted getting the pints. I told them that Helga upstairs was a teacher, a lecturer even, in Hamburg and that she was great in bed. The woman giggled. I said she gave a great blow job.

“What do you think of blow-jobs”?

There was a look of disbelief on the woman’s face, but she stared at me as if she was up to the question. Talking openly about sex was probably one of her ambitions.

“That’s enough”, the man said, and stood up to go.

“Are you coming or are you staying to listen to anymore from this low life”?

They left the lounge, him outraged, her confused, apologetic. I poured their whiskeys into one glass and went back upstairs taking a bowl of peanuts with me. Helga was in her underwear, lying on the bed crying. She thought I had left her.

“Where are the sandwiches and coffee”?

“Look I have peanuts”.

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Martin Incidentally

Her eye looked worse from crying and she had cut her hand.

“I can’t open the beer”!

“What beer”?

She had been carrying a six pack of beer in her shoulder bag. She was trying to open a bottle in the bathroom with a scissors.

“Give it to me”!

We drank the whiskey. I opened the beer with my teeth. We were falling over things at this stage – bags, shoes, bottles. When we’d drank everything we fell back onto the bed unconscious. A loud banging on the door woke us.

“What do they want? Why don’t they leave us alone? I want to sleep”, Helga said, slurring her words.

There was more loud banging.

“If you don’t open the door I’ll have to call the police”.

It was a woman’s voice, probably the manageress, I thought. The police? What is she talking about? I didn’t know what time it was.

“We don’t want breakfast”, I shouted!

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FORBIDDEN FRUIT Business cards and stationary broke the monotony; sometimes I could even choose a type face.

Martin waited around one empty Sunday, kicking car tyres as he heard the distant roar from the match. His father had promised to take him there and to buy him a pear but he wasn’t home yet.

“Sure you’ll be able to get the second half”, his mother said.

“He’ll have me to answer to when he comes home.

I’ll make him take you up, without his dinner! Stay in here love.

You shouldn’t be wandering around the road on a Sunday”!

His mother didn’t insist too much though. She knew how disappointed he was. His brothers and sisters had gone to the sea side by bus and bikes. Martin went out again hoping to see his father’s hat rise above the wall at the end of the road.

He kicked the car tyres harder and harder not caring who might see him and left the road in tears, bent on vandalism of some kind.

Maybe he could break a window or kick over a full rubbish bin, left out for Monday’s collection. He walked up an avenue which had long front gardens, neatly kept. He picked up a smooth, black stone and felt it cold in his hand. He chose a dilapidated house where a man, who often stood talking to his father outside McGrath’s pub, lived. He skimmed the stone through the air and smashed the big front window. He ran, looking back a few times but nobody came out. He reached the high, recessed, wrought iron gates of the Canon’s house and hid there.

It was said among his friends that the Canon had an orchard and even grapes in a glass house at the back of his house. Martin grazed his bare knees clambering up and over the stone wall which was hidden from the Canon’s house by mature trees and ivy bushes. His pulse raced at his outrageous plan to rob the orchard and on a Sunday too! He crept around to the back of the house. He had no choice but to break cover and grab as many apples and pears as he could and get back out.

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Martin Incidentally

He ran to the trees and tried to pluck the fruit but the apples and pears were as hard as rocks and stubbornly clung to the branches. He couldn’t leave with nothing so he ran to the glass house and went inside breathing in the humid air. He looked around and saw tomatoes. He took a few and put them in his pockets. Then he saw the grapes. They were a bit on the small side but he broke off a bunch anyway and shoved them up his jumper. His heart jumped when he heard the crunching of footsteps on the gravel. He peeked out and saw the Canon striding in his direction wielding a shillelagh, black and knobbly like himself.

Martin ran to the back of the glass house and cowered down behind some flower pots on an old wooden table.

“Come out you little gurrier”!

The Canon had a gruff, coarse voice which he used to good effect to reprimand the congregation at Mass and the sinners in the confessional. Martin stayed put hoping the Canon wouldn’t see him.

However, he yelped when he felt a blow of the shillelagh on his leg.

He jumped up and tried to get past the Canon who waved his stick wildly. Martin got several more blows and fell back against the grapes, bringing down the plants.

“Oh my God, look at my grapes! Destroyed”!

He was purple in the face as he kicked Martin on the ground.

“I’m going to tell me Da”, Martin sobbed.

“Don’t worry, I’ll be telling him myself what a cur of a son he has! Where do you live”?

Martin was too afraid not to give his right address.

“51 Cardigan Road”, he mumbled.

“And what’s your name”?

“Martin Dunne”.

The Canon pulled up a metal chair and sat down to catch his breath.

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“What have you got in your pockets”?

Martin took out squashed tomatoes.

“Ruined! What’s that you have up your jumper”?

Martin lifted his jumper and out fell the bunch of grapes. They thudded on the concrete like a dead bird.

“Ate them! Isn’t that what you came for?

Go on, pick them up and ate them”!

Martin picked a grape and put it in his mouth. He was too petrified to blow the dirt from it. He bit into it. It was hard and bitter.

“Go on, pick up another one. You can ate them all”!

“They’re not ripe”, Martin said.

“Don’t I know that, you blackguard?

By God, I’ll murder you! Give me over that bamboo cane”.

Martin picked up the cane, which had been holding up the grapes, and handed it to the Canon who took a swipe at him but missed.

“Do you know what the boards of wisdom are”?

“No Canon”.

“Ah, sure they don’t know how to teach boys these days.

Once a boy got the boards of wisdom he never forgot a right answer. Spread your legs!

You haven’t made your conformation yet, have you”?

“No, but next year I will be”, Martin said, hoping it might appease the Canon.

“Repeat after me, Bless me father for I have sinned. Go on, say it! It’s the truth isn’t it? Well isn’t it”?

“Yes, Canon”.

“Didn’t I tell you to spread your legs; legs like two straws hanging from a loft. Does your mother not feed you? A summer in the country; hard work on a farm, fresh eggs and brown bread. That’s what you need. That’s what all the skinny little Dublin gurriers need! Well, down to the lesson of the day”.

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The Canon put the cane between Martin’s legs, just below his short trousers.

“Now, he said. “I’ll ask you a question and if you answer it wrong you’ll feel the boards of wisdom. Who made the World”?

“God made the world”.

“Speak up. Who is God”?

Martin’s mind went blank.

“Who is God? Surely you know that much”?

The Canon began moving the cane backwards and forwards against Martin’s thighs. It was a light touch at first. But soon he went faster and harder reaching a crescendo. Martin jumped with the pain.

“Do you remember who God is now”?

“God is our Father in heaven”.

“You see, the boards of wisdom never fail.

But there’s more of it! Go on, God is our father in heaven…”

Martin’s mind went blank again. He felt the cane touch his thighs. Fear of greater pain propelled him up and over the Canon who fell back and banged his head on the concrete floor. He lay there with his legs in the air, dazed. Martin raced, his heart pounding, to that part of the wall he had climbed earlier. He jumped and ran down the empty avenue to a back lane, a short cut he and his friends used to take to school. He reached the bottom of the lane and ran into the crowds coming from the match. He would have to battle his way against them to get home.

But he was afraid to go home. He saw his father standing outside a pub, with the man whose window he’d smashed, gesticulating and laughing.

He didn’t go over to him. He went with the crowd away from his home and dodged to a park where he played football every evening in the summer holidays.

He sat down behind a copse of trees and bushes at the far end of the park.

His thighs were red-raw, sore as if stung repeatedly by tall nettles and his ribs hurt where the Canon had kicked him. He knelt praying at a little pile of stones that he and his class mate had made to mark a holy place, when the

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missionaries visited the school and talked about vocations and miracles.

They used to pray there secretly after school, hoping for an apparition.

The Canon was in the front room talking to Martin’s mother.

“Mrs. Dunne, the boy is out of control. He tried to rob me and attacked me, knocking me down. Look at my head.

There’ll be a nice lump on that tomorrow”.

“I’m terrible sorry Canon. He never done anything like this before. You see he was waiting for his father to take him to the match but he got delayed,” she explained.

“Martin was very disappointed”.

“Got delayed? What do you take me for woman? He got drunk, that’s what it is. The boy is not getting proper parenting from a drunk father. I know everything that’s going on in my parish”.

“But I’m here for him”, she said.

“That’s not enough. You’ve eight or nine others to look after. He needs a male influence to guide him through his formative years. I would suggest that he be sent to an industrial school until he’s ready to take his place in the adult world and not be a criminal”!

“Sure he doesn’t need that. He’ll behave himself for me”.

“Do you know that he’s been missing school”?

“He’s sickly”, she said.

“Oh no, this is poor attendance. What he needs is his father and he’s not available as I think we agree. I mean, where’s the boy now? Out roaming the streets, no doubt, when he should be home doing his homework”!

“He’s probably afraid to come home. You can understand that, Canon, can’t you”, Martin’s mother pleaded.

“There, you’ve made my point for me!

He’s needs disciplining”!

“Please Canon. Martin wouldn’t be able for an industrial school. He’s a sensitive child”.

“Maybe it’d make a man of him. I’ll get in touch with the authorities. You’ll be hearing from me soon. Best thing for him”, the Canon said as he left the house.

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Mrs. Dunne sobbed into her apron. She jumped up and went into her husband who was sleeping off the afternoon drinking session.

She hit him with her fists.

“Get up and do something”, she screamed, but he only groaned, still unconscious.

She put her coat on and went to look for Martin. She had an idea he was hiding in the park. He had told her about the ‘altar.’ She came up to him.

“Martin, what are you after doing”?

He turned and saw his mother and broke down in tears.

“Ma, I robbed the Canon’s grapes in his glass house. It’s all because Da didn’t take me to the match! Look at me legs.

That’s where he hit me”!

She could see he was beside himself with fear and drew him to her.

“We’ll say a prayer to Our Lady. She’ll look after us”, she whispered.

They knelt, heads bowed for a few minutes. They blessed themselves and stood up.

“Come on love, it’s getting dark. I have your favourite stuffed tomatoes for tea, if they’re not burned and dried up”.

She held his hand as he trotted behind her.

“Will everything be alright Ma”?

She couldn’t answer him.

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GOOD LUCK!!!

I had a little dictionary to look up words which was almost as good as a book.

Martin’s father Jack had done well in the war years owning his own bakery. In a relatively short time he was able to afford to buy, for cash, a house in the leafy suburbs of Dublin. It was large and airy with French windows opening on to a one hundred foot garden at the rear.

He kept greyhounds, had a pony and trap and an Austin Cambridge.

But this affluence was short-lived. The star that led him to such grandeur now hung, in the economic depression of the fifties, over a dingy labourer’s cottage on the north docks area of the city.

It was four fifteen a.m. and pitch black. Jack moved along a derelict stretch of the canal making his way to the early shift at Doran’s bakery.

Ice splintered under his boots at the edge of wide muddy puddles. The fact that he was now a casual worker for a man he served his time with was a hard pill to swallow. He was thinking about a yankee bet. If the four horses came in for him, he planned to open a bread and cake shop.

That was his dream now, a small family business, his wife Rose running the shop and him making bread and cakes at the back. Reaching dryer ground beyond a bridge, he hurried on flicking a drained fag through the cold air into the freezing canal water.

Jack’s shift finished at eleven. As usual he and Ted Griffin went for a pint.

“Any nags for today Jack?”

“I might try The Joker at Newmarket”.

Jack wasn’t giving any more away.

“I’ve nothin’ picked meself but ye fancy The Joker”?

“Does Leo not back at all now? I notice he goes straight home after our shift”.

“No, he was cured years ago.”

“Yeah?”

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“Ye didn’t hear that story? Well, he used to have a bet every day. It was coming up to the Grand National. Leo was swearing by Mr What.

He even dreamt that the horse won. He was engaged and they were saving to get married. Leo put all the savin’s on Mr What.

He said nothing to his fiancée of course! Well, the horse came in second, at twenty two to one but the eejit backed him to win.”

“You don’t back a horse to win in the National, always to place”!

“Anyway, when it came out, the engagement was off.

He was going to kill himself.”

“He should’ve, said Jack.”

“He pleaded with the girlfriend. She had a gun to his head now.

No more backing horses, ever and no drink until he got every penny of the money back in the Post Office.”

“Jaysus! Will ye have another Ted?” “I will.”

When the lunchtime crowd started to come in Jack and Ted left to go home and get some sleep. On his way down the North Circular Road Jack reflected on Leo and Mr What. Pure madness! Did anyone he knew ever win? All the sob stories, the nearly wons! When he reached a bookies office where he usually placed his bets, he paused outside.

He scanned the form posted up in the window and saw all his four horses at good prices. Suddenly a figure materialised in the glass.

He was looking at his dead father; a hooked nose, hollow cheeks and greased back hair. The eyes looked at him from deep in their sockets. He rallied realising it was his own reflection. I’ll have to do something to get out of this rut before it’s too bloody late, he thought. Mr What! He didn’t tell Ted that he had placed a hundred pounds to win on the horse the same year as Leo. He walked on home without placing the bet, taking the short cut along the canal.

Two swans sailed on the water, skirting the shadow of the bridge.

When Jack opened his hall door he could hear his brother Cyril’s voice through the open kitchen; his signature “don’t you know” punctuating every other sentence. Jack couldn’t stand him. He considered going straight upstairs to bed but he needed his mug of tea.

“How’ye Jack. Am I in your chair?”

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“You’re alright.”

“Just finished your shift?”

“Yeah. Is there any tea?”

“Its two o’clock in the afternoon,” said Rose.

“Your shift finishes at eleven!”

“Ah, I went for a pint with Ted Griffin.”

“Ted Griffin? I haven’t seen him in an age.

Do you know who I saw in a chauffeur-driven car the other day?”

“Who?” “Your boss Doran, no doubt heading for his mansion on Howth Head. He’s done well for himself. I still say it could’ve been us.”

Rose poured Jack a mug of tea. He had heard this refrain before, about how the Byrnes could have been millionaires. The mention of Doran in a chauffeur-driven car irked Jack. Cyril put that rub in deliberately! He’s hinting about the money I lost on Mr What, he thought. Jack was eager to change the subject.

“Is this paper for us?”

“Yes, I brought it down to you. Nothin’ much in it on the home front, but I’d say it’s only a matter of time before the whole of the Middle-East blows up.”

Cyril had a menial job in The Irish Press and got the paper for nothing every day. He liked to appear knowledgeable on world affairs. His pretensions further irritated Jack.

“I’m going to get some kip.”

“Right, I’ll be going home myself soon.

I have to look after me prize birds, don’t you know.”

Upstairs, Jack sat on the edge of the bed unlacing his boots. He’s married to those pigeons, he thought; sleeping out in the loft with them when they’re hatching! Jaysus! Have to be there at the birth, don’t you know, he mocked. He took off his trousers and sat up in the bed.

He lit a cigarette and went straight to the racing pages in the newspaper. Cyril’s talk of Doran and how it could’ve been them rekindled

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his obsession with the yankee. He leaned out of the bed and got a pencil from the top pocket of his jacket. He tore the back off his cigarette packet and wrote down the names of the four horses. He called down to Rose to come up.

“Put this bet on love, will ye?”

“I’m not going into any bookies office!

Anyway, we can’t afford to be losing money on horses”.

“Is Cyril still there? Give it to him.

He can go in on his way home.

I’ll see him in the Wine Lodge tonight.”

“Give it to me then. I’m going into town to get a few things.

I’ll be home at six.”

“Alright, give me a shout then.”

As Cyril passed over the Tolka bridge he bumped into George Creedon, a fellow pigeon fancier. They leaned on the bridge facing up-river. Mesmerised by the flowing water they broke the silence only occasionally.

“Did the eggs hatch yet, Cyril?”

“No, I’d say soon though.”

“How’s Jack? Is he still working in Dorans?”

“Oh, Jaysus!” said Cyril “What time is it?”

“It’s five to three, why?”

“I’m supposed to put a bet on for Jack. I’ll never make it down to Kilmartin’s for the first race at three o clock.”

“Sure go in to your man in the lane beside the barbers.

He’s just opened up. You’ll make that.”

“Right. I better run. I’ll see ye later George.”

Cyril made it to the lane in a sweat. There was no sign of any bookies beside the barber, only the boarded up shoemaker’s. What was George talking about? What am I going to do now, he thought?

That evening, reading the results in Kilmartin’s window, Jack couldn’t believe his eyes. All his four horses came in for him. He had calculated that he would win around seven hundred pounds. He strode down to the

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Wine Lodge, his mind brimming with ideas. There was no sign of Cyril.

He spotted George Creedon and made a bee line for him.

“How’ye George.

“Hello Jack”.

“No sign of Cyril”?

“No. Maybe the birds are hatching. I’d say he’ll be down yet.”

“A yankee bet came up for me, George.”

“What?”

“Nearly seven hundred pounds! What’ll ye have to drink?”

“I’ll have another pint, thanks Jack.”

“And you’ll have a large Paddy too!”

“Oh, be the jay!”

“The Byrnes’ill rise again George. We’ll rise again!”

Jack went to bed for a few hours before his early shift. Rose was asleep beside him. His Sweet Afton glowed in the dark each time he took a pull. He had them all beaten now, he thought; Doran, Cyril and Mr bloody What! He dropped his cigarette butt into the po under the bed and took a fit of coughing before turning over on his side.

“A yankee”, he thrilled in the dark. “An effing bloody yankee!”

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IDENTITIES I left before serving my time to go to Trinity College where I edited ICARUS, the college literary magazine.

I was christened Cecil after my mother’s favourite brother. My father was dead set against this. He had a hatred of Cecil, who was effeminate and bookish and represented all that was unmanly, in his eyes.

My mother had had a difficult pregnancy and a protracted labour.

“With all I went through I can call him Genghis Khan if I like”, she said.

My uncle Cecil had died by misadventure. He was found hanging by his tie from his back bedroom window.

“He was cleaning the window when he lost his balance and his tie got caught in it when it slammed shut”, she explained to anyone who asked.

“He hung himself”, my father insisted.

“Cecil was too intelligent to hang himself”, she screeched, reminding him that Cecil was always reading books, in his bedroom, or in the local library. My father was always stymied by this fact, not being a great reader himself, having left school at twelve years of age.

“He never worked a day in his life and he robbed those Readers’ Digests from all the bloody doctors’ surgeries he went to with his so-called complaints”, he reminded her.

I was a hapless witness to these shouting matches and because my name was Cecil I felt implicated in some way. I became a worrier, a nervous child; my mother’s son more than my father’s son. I disappointed him on many occasions. I was afraid to sleep in the back room where the shadows were.

“He even comes between us in the bed”!

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The three of us went on a day-trip to Belfast once. He found a restaurant over a shop, where they served dinners. I hated dinners. A plate of meat, potatoes, cabbage and gravy was put in front of me.

I started to cry.

“What’s wrong with him now”?

However, in my teens it was clear that I had inherited the sturdy body of my father. He welcomed this as it edged me closer to him.

He always wanted me to follow in his footsteps into the baking trade but my mother was vehemently opposed to this.

“Cecil is going to stay in school and do his Leaving Certificate, go on to university even”.

To this end she employed Mr Deasy, a teacher, to give me grinds.

He called to the house once a week. After the lesson my mother brought in tea and chocolate biscuits to the front room, to chat with him.

“Mr Deasy believes Cecil can go far”, she said proudly. “He only needs a bit of encouragement”.

“A waste of good money if you ask me”!

“Well, nobody is asking you”!

My father muttered as he sought refuge in the racing pages of the newspaper.

I was seventeen when my mother died. It was as if a cannonball had ripped through the mesh of the family. The centre was blown open, left in flitters. I buried my grief and grew sullen. My father kept going, working. He was most spontaneous, happiest when he was busy with his hands. One Sunday when he was preparing the dinner, he said, ‘Jimmy, give me over those plates, son.’ I don’t know why he called me Jimmy. Maybe it was a pet name, his attempt at intimacy, maybe he just couldn’t bring himself to say Cecil or maybe it was his way of winning me back from my mother.

Whatever the reason, and whether it was calculated or not, it had a profound effect on me. I ate the dinner with a new appetite.

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I left school and was soon going to work with him, serving my time as a baker. I was muscular and relished the heavy work of stacking sacks of flour and kneading mounds of dough. I was my father’s son now.

At four in the morning, in winter, we hurried along a derelict stretch of canal, for the early shift. Ice splintered under our boots. He flicked a cigarette butt sparking across the frozen water at scurrying rats. We fed oven maws, stripped to the waist, bare feet on sacks, dripping sweat. He brought me down to his local when I was eighteen. Incredibly, he was showing me off, his son the worker.

I got to know some young people, sons and daughters of his friends. Once I went to a party and brought a girl upstairs. I moved my hand under her skirt and felt the soft hair between her legs as she gasped for air.

“I don’t want to have a baby”!

Neither did I, especially in that close-knit community where you would have to account for your actions. We started doing a line, drinking in the same local. I met her parents and brothers. There was no escaping family and I was beginning to feel trapped. I said little in company and was drinking a lot in our sessions, drinking whiskey at last orders. My father took note.

“Lay off that stuff, stick to the pints”.

Around this time I met Graham, the son of one of my father’s drinking buddies. He wore thick, round glasses which looked to keep him at one remove from his surroundings. He was a student at Trinity College and had a book sticking out of his jacket pocket. When I got to know him better he lent me the book, called The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropist about the exploitation of the worker. My father noted this exchange with disapproval. He had a fear and a hatred of books because of the way they made him feel small in the face of so many words and of course because of the association with Cecil. Graham gave me more books. I was staying up late, reading. At the end of that year I gave up work, broke my apprenticeship, disappointing my father again.

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Graham and I decided to move out of the area and got a fIat on the leafy southside. We started to drink with all the other misfits, exiles, excommunicates, poets, artists, musicians, communists, bank robbers and republicans. It was a heady cocktail. There was LSD, mescaline, hash, every drug you might desire to enhance or at least alter your experience of life. Graham dropped out of college and became an artist. It seemed as though anything was possible. I decided to become a poet. We moved around dingy bedsits and rarely had money for a decent meal. Graham wore a cavalry cloak and I had a duffle-coat dyed turquoise, wore long hair and had a heavy, black moustache. We bought a second-hand hearse and planned to sell Graham’s paintings from it. We were living perfectly valid lives, we thought.

I hadn’t been in contact with my father for two years when I heard he was sick, in hospital, had had a stroke and lost his sight. The bakery had been shut down and somebody had gotten him a job as a security man, in an oil refinery on the docks. He must have had to climb the oil containers, monsters, spawning shadows in the small hours. I sat on a bench and looked across the bay at the soulless refinery. I saw the sun on the sea like a shoal of fish; a lovers’ picnic on the granite rocks; a windcombed tree; and high on the twisting cycle-path, a lunch-time cyclist riding across the sea. I was a poet now, my mother’s son again. And there was no going back.

I stood at the end of his hospital bed until he sensed me.

“Jimmy, is that you”?

“It’s Cecil”.

“Are you wearing a turquoise duffle coat, like the nurse told me”?

“I’m afraid so”.

“Wear my suit, when you’re visiting me the next time, will ye?

It’s in the wardrobe”.

“It would only be a pretence”.

“Well pretend then”!

“I’m trying to live the truth”.

“Don’t be coddin’ yourself.

Is there anything to drink on the locker”?

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He sat up in the bed as I poured him a glass of Lucozade.

“Thanks son. Is there a newspaper there”?

“Yes”.

“They leave it on my locker everyday even though I’m gone blind.

They don’t pay attention”.

“Would you like me to read it to you”?

“I’ll tell you what. Read the names of the horses on the racing page. I’d enjoy that”.

I visited him every day, always wearing my duffle-coat. He talked about the times we walked to work together on winter mornings.

“Look at me now. How am I going to manage if I get out of this place? Who’ll look after me”?

I said nothing. One evening he grabbed me by my coat and pulled me to him. I could feel his strength in his grip.

“Are you sure you want to call yourself Cecil son”?

“That’s the name I was christened”.

“Look what happened to him? And I have my suspicions he was a queer as well. There used to be this fellah calling to your mother’s. He was a student in Trinity College and he gave Cecil his college tie. He wore it to bed with him”.

I was holding out, saying nothing.

“A name can do strange things to you, son”.

He let his grip relax. He was sweating. I poured some more Lucozade for him.

“I have to go. I’ll call up tomorrow”.

His brother Joe was calling up soon and I didn’t want a lecture from him about getting a job.

“Wear the suit will you”, he said, as he did every evening.

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I stood in the portico of the hospital as the first drops of a sunshower fell on the granite steps. I decided to wait until the shower was over and lapsed into a day-dream in which I heard my mother and him arguing.

“Let me take him up to the bakery to see how the cakes are made and meet the men, for God’s sake”.

“Over my dead body”!

“Ah, he’ll be holding onto your apron strings ‘til he’s forty”.

“And what’d be so terrible about that”?

I came to with my heart pounding. I could smell the carbolic soap in the kitchen where these rows took place. I wanted to go back to my father but what could I say to him? It was still pouring rain as I put up my duffle-coat hood and walked back to the house. I went to his wardrobe, took out his suit and tried it on. It was swimming on me.

It struck me that I could tell him that I looked like a circus clown in it and that he wouldn’t want the neighbours or the nurses seeing that. I lay down on the sofa and fell asleep. A phone call from the hospital woke me. I hurried back up and joined his brother Joe at his bedside. He was delirious, falling in and out of consciousness. I leaned over so, perhaps, he would hear me.

“I’m wearing your suit”.

A fan blew cold air at his small, sweating head, lifting wisps of his hair. His eyes opened, squinting at me.

“Do you not have any clothes of your own?” he mumbled.

It was almost comical, but it reinforced in me the belief that, no matter what, we would never have gotten on.

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HERMES What would Mr Clarke have made of all this?

Although it happened almost twenty years ago, Martin continued to think of Jane, and yesterday, he thought to Google her name, only to find her obituary, written two years ago. There was no photograph, so maybe it was somebody else with the same name, he hoped? He read, trying to match the facts of her life against the things she told him about herself. Finally, there was no doubting it was her. Martin decided not to tell anybody about her death just yet; not that he had told many about her at all.

They first met one summer on a writers’ retreat in Devon in England.

He was making his way down a long, winding path hemmed in by hedges, to the house where the aspiring writers would live. A car slowed behind him to offer him a lift. He sat in beside her on the back seat. She was one of two tutors. She was slight, alert with azure eyes and had an educated English accent. As they were getting out of the car, her skirt snagged on George’s haversack and lifted. They smiled, a little embarrassed. She went to the tutors’ quarters while he unpacked in the room he was to share with a retired clergyman who was trying his hand at writing and who had been reading the poet Philip Larkin.

He couldn’t get over the poet likening the sky to a pig’s arse. They laughed about it in the dark.

Jane could be abrasive at times. She snapped at Martin on the first morning after breakfast, when he was beset with nerves.

“Pull yourself together”!

She apologised immediately and said that her private self is much kinder than her public self.

On another occasion she called on Cyril, her fellow tutor, to participate in a discussion.

“If you’re not dead that is”!

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On a one-to-one Jane critiqued Martin’s attempts at writing. She gave him more time than the others got, he noted. He could see that her hands were those of a homemaker, scarred by burns, chaffed and scratched from growing a garden. Home for her meant a partner and three children. Martin lived alone. They were straying into personal matters, both of them coincidently having lost their mothers at seventeen. They were uniquely privy to each other’s awful loss. But something else was happening. It was on the last night of the course that they knew they had fallen in love. Earlier that day she had signed her book, love Jane. Martin was taken aback at this surprising admission. Like an underground stream their love for each other had been seeping into them all week but could find no easy expression in the intense, rarefied atmosphere of the writers’ retreat.

On that last night they sat apart from the group, in the dim light of an alcove. He went to kiss her. She trembled a little saying that she tasted of toothpaste. Their lips touched only briefly. The next morning as the writers and tutors said their good-byes, their lips touched again and lingered.

“I’ll write to you if I still feel the same way when I get home”, she said.

A week later Martin received a letter. I felt I was hurtling back to a prison. I wanted something to happen, a bomb blast, an earthquake, to stop me moving away from you, mile after mile. I tried to get to the train station before your train left, but you were gone.

Martin obliterated everybody else, her partner and her children from his mind. He was primed to act irresponsibly. In one of her letters she sent him an open-winged sea-gull wrapped in blue cloth; a keepsake. He sent her an old coin with a bird on it. I have to be first to get the post, to slip your letters into my apron pocket. The subterfuge is killing me. The word trollop comes easily to mind. I shouldn’t be let out.

As the weeks went by they were both unravelling; waiting for letters, making phone calls. Jane, in desperation, suggested he come over as a special friend, to stay with her and her family. She said she would keep some late summer strawberries from her garden for him but

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Martin wasn’t able to be just a special friend. He was floundering. He asked everyone for advice and became the victim of everyone’s experience in these matters. They were both near breaking point.

Her final letter crossed the sea. I wonder is love a potion in a dark bottle, best kept on an alchemist’s top shelf?

Some years later they met again. Jane had secured a residency in a college in the west of Ireland. They looked for each other in the arrivals lounge and embraced lightly. There was none of the capsizing love about them this time. Jane had to get to the west that day so they got a taxi to the train station.

During her residency Martin spent some weekends with her. They hired a car and drove down to Clare where the low countryside appeared to be just a lip above the sea. Boundaries and thresholds were cajoled into redundancy. They watched swans in the evening, heave from the low water, straining to bear their own weight with their slow, determined beating of wings. The sunsets were pink with streaks of dark red and purple. They wished to be just a normal couple, returning home with the shopping but they were in thrall to Hermes, the messenger, the patron of travellers and rogues, vagabonds and thieves.

Autumn was advancing. A bog-stained sky began to sag under the weight of water. Jane got a call saying her son had been injured in a road accident. She sped to him. The boy didn’t recover and her loss broke the spell she had been under, slackened the tightrope she had been walking. Her focus was sharply on her family again. I’m so fragile you could pour me like water into a glass. She related the story of the old couple who had postponed their love affair until they were in their nineties.

“We wanted to wait until the children were dead”!

Jane and Martin prepared to put away their love for a very long time.

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THE LEGACY Mr Clarke, the foreman, was crossing the river Liffey after his lunch when he saw cases of type flying out the window of the printing works into the river beside Swift’s asylum; a nervy, worried man had cracked.

Martin was in the event room of the central library in Dublin. The room had glass walls, translucent half way up, providing some privacy. It seated fifty or so, but the historical talks and poetry readings which took place there, were usually attended by just a small group of people, fifteen at best; senior citizens, students, the enthusiast, the autodidact. Diminutive twin sisters turned up at every event. In their sixties, they sat pert in tweed skirts, brown tights and white trainers, holding their handbags in their laps. The talk that day was on the Jews in Ireland. Martin was there because he was researching Dublin Jewry for a dissertation.

The man giving the talk was an elderly Jew. He had a polished, bald head, wore black horn-rimmed glasses which magnified his large eyes which seemed to be pleading something. Although it was a summer’s day he had a rain coat on which he didn’t remove all the time he was in the room. He was stooped a little but more from the way he carried his broad, barrel-chested frame than from any frailty. His hands had a noticeable tremor as he made a futile attempt to order his notes on a small table covered with green baize. A tatty leather briefcase took up half the table. Martin had gone up to him to introduce himself earlier but he just muttered and continued to shuffle his notes. He was sure he got a smell of drink off him.

A younger woman with a pale, smooth face and a mane of greying hair rushed through the open doors and up to him. He seemed relieved by her presence. She ordered his notes with a minimum of fuss, closed over the door and asked for our attention.

“I would like to introduce Mr David White. David would like to talk to you about the Jewish community in Ireland in the 20th century”.

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She sat down in the front row. Once he’d started talking about the Jews, his own people, he was in his stride.

He took some pleasure in referring to James Joyce’s Ulysses and took issue with the character Mr Deasy, who said the Irish only tolerated the Jews because they didn’t let them in in the first place. In fact, in June 16th 1904, the day in which Ulysses is set, he informed the audience, there existed a thriving Jewish community in Dublin. He was in his element educating them, speaking with authority about how the Jews who came from Eastern Europe, integrated, how they made a living, at first peddling wares and ultimately succeeding in business and politics. He talked for about three quarters of an hour.

The audience applauded enthusiastically when he’d finished. Martin went up to him again to congratulate him and tell him about his research. The woman and he were arguing.

“You must tell them”, she said.

“Please, I am too tired.”

“It is your duty, our duty, to say what happened at every opportunity. They must know! ” “Alright, just this last time. I’m getting too old!”

“I’m here with you always, you know that”!

“I need a drink”!

“Not too much now”, she said, as he headed for the toilet.

When he came back the woman spoke in a measured tone.

“David would now like to tell you a personal story, to give you a unique and privileged insight into the Irish Jewish experience”.

He looked a bit flushed as he placed a half empty naggin of whiskey face down on the table, pointing at us accusingly. People were taken aback and whispered to each other. The two sisters went to go, never having experienced anything like this in their long years of attending cultural events, but he stared them back to their seats.

He spoke in a low rumbling voice, obliging the audience to listen attentively.

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“A Jewish man and his family lived in Germany when Hitler rose to power. They were trying to escape Nazi persecution and find asylum in Ireland. They got as far as Paris. The man’s brother, a successful Irish businessman, offered to take them in, ‘at no extra cost to the State,’ he stressed. Urgent letters were sent backwards and forwards to the relevant government departments, to the bureaucrats, the pen pushers, the paper shufflers, the time killers!

When an official letter came saying that they would be accepted as refugees it was too late. They had been sent to a concentration camp and died there”.

The small metal table almost bucked under his weight as he leaned on his fists.

“Those people were my uncle, my aunt and two cousins”.

He looked furtively at the audience, testing their reaction. The silence in the room was complete. He continued as if in a trance, a reverie.

“As a child I used to visit my cousins in the summer in a small village in Germany. We played in the fields, by a river in a golden landscape. I longed for these summers away from the dusty streets of Dublin. I cried on my way home each year. We wrote letters to each other. I answered my cousin Sarah’s letters with care, using big words, trying to impress. I suppose, I was feeling the first inklings of love. My soul was opening but when the soul is wounded early on, happiness is not ever possible”.

He was sweating profusely, spent! The florescent light bounced off the sheen of his lowered head. There was an awkward silence. The woman went to him. She put her hand on his, caressing it. She took the bottle and his notes and put them in his brief case. Martin tried to speak to him again but stood out of his way as he moved determinedly towards the exit door, linked by the woman. They pushed through the doors of the event room and were gone.

A year or so later, Martin was leafing through a copy of a Jewish journal in Trinity College library when he came across an obituary of the man with a photograph of him in a black suit, white shirt

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and dark tie, dressed you could say for a day at the office. It seems he was a gifted amateur golfer and musician and a local historian with published chapbooks to his name. He was fluent in a number of languages including Irish. He was an Irish Jew who had a distinguished career in the Diplomatic Service, representing Ireland abroad.

Could this be the man whose relatives had been sent to Auschwitz or some other hellish place because of the inept paper shuffling in government departments? Could he have possessed such forbearance?

Perhaps he chose to believe that circumstances, such as Ireland’s impoverished condition at the beginning of the Second World War, conspired against her natural generosity.

However, the pall over his life which was so evident at the talk he gave that day, was underlined in the final sentence of the obituary David could never reconcile himself to the anti-Semitic policy of the Irish Government in the Second World War of not admitting Jewish refugees; she should have opened her doors on humanitarian grounds and gained the advantage of importing the finest talents in Europe. Martin imagined that this final sentence was composed by him before his death, to express, to register his disillusionment. He read that he was survived by his only daughter, Sarah. This was the woman at the talk, he thought, and he suspected he saw her hand in that sentence also.

While visiting the library some time after this Martin saw a poster which read; An Account of Jews in 20th century Ireland by Sarah White.

She was obviously not prepared to let her father’s story, and now hers, be forgotten. Martin questioned would he have wanted to ensure that each new generation would not go unscathed by his terrible legacy.

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MARTIN INCIDENTALLY… Dramatis Interruptus

I was sitting on top of the fire in a freezing house. There was a pile of books beside me - The Master and Margarita, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, The Trial, Steppenwolf, Nausea. The book I was reading had my name on it. There was a print over the fireplace by Dad, who went mad and murdered his father. I was drinking a large bottle of stout to get the spunk to go into town, to ‘the strip,’ to get really drunk. A man appeared on the other side of the fireplace.

There was a smell of trainstations off him. He asked me did I ever hear of an Irish Jew? I said I did.

The End

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j 80

L A P W I N G PUB L I C A T I O N S

GERRY McDONNELL

GERRY MC DONNELL was born and lives in Dublin. He was educated in Trinity College, Dublin where he edited two issues of ICARUS, the college literary magazine; and at Dublin City University. He has had four collections of poetry published by Lapwing Publications, Belfast. He has also written for stage, radio and television. His play Making It Home, a two-hander father and son relationship, was first performed at the Crypt Theatre at Dublin Castle in 2001. A radio adaptation of this play was broadcast on RTE Radio 1 in 2008 starring the acclaimed Irish actor David Kelly as the father and Mark Lambert as the son. It has been translated into Breton. His play Whose Veins Ran Lightning, based on the life and work of the Irish poet James Clarence Mangan (1803-1849), was performed at The New Theatre in Dublin in 2003. His libretto for a chamber opera, The Poet and the Muse, (music by composer John Byrne) also deals with Mangan. He has written for the Irish television series Fair City.

His interest in Irish Jewry has resulted in the chapbook; Jewish Influences in Ulysses and a collection of monologues, Mud Island Elegy, in which Jews of 19th century Ireland speak about their lives from beyond the grave. Lost and Found concerns a homeless Jewish man living in the Phoenix Park in Dublin. His stage play Song of Solomon, set on the Royal canal in Dublin, has a Jewish theme. Mud Island Anthology, concerning ‘ordinary’ Dublin gentiles who lived in the latter half of the 20th century was published in 2009 and is a companion collection to the ‘Elegy’ poems. His latest collection of poetry, Ragged Star, was published in 2011 by Lapwing. He is a member of the Irish Playwrights’ and Screenwriters’ Guild and the Irish Writers’ Union.

The Lapwing is a bird, in Irish lore - so it has been written indicative of hope.

Printed by Kestrel Print Hand-bound at the Winepress, Ireland

ISBN 978-1-909252-15-8 £10.00