ESSEX QUAY - PART 2

“Starving the nation to be sure,” snarled Marsh, “and some of them shoneen fuckers in the Dail nowadays are knocking one another over in a rush to lick the arses of the heirs of those genocidal bastards.”

Then an older man, almost transparent with age and ill health who had been sitting quietly at the other end of the bar from Marsh, levered himself off his stool and sort of hanging onto the counter he managed to push himself onto his height. He filled what were left of his lungs and addressed the pub.

“That’s history yez are talking ‘bout. I know history. I’ve lived a lot of it. Now and then I’ve learned something about history from all the living in it. Once I learned a song that was written back in those days of the killing hunger by Thomas Madigan of Carnacalla Kilrush.

“In the last years of the Starvation, in three years between 1847 and 1849, three thousand nine hundred people died in the workhouse in Kilrush. And they were laid to fester nameless in a mound in Shanakyle Graveyard. And Thomas Madigan wrote the song about them. He wrote it for the fighting men and women that would follow after called ‘The Coffinless Graves of Ireland’ but I don’t remember the words anymore.”

Night fell. Time passed.

The void loomed as ever nothingness must. And atoms hauled their subatomic particles screaming, streaming through it. Quarks resonated. Marks mustered. So much in the names of Schrodinger and Finn and Finn again.

All that strangeness conserved in charm and beauty: a universe generating itself as serendipity.

And so space gathered itself unto no other. To be now upon the moment a place. A place with Tommy Marsh in it.

How then to configure its countenance? Easily done, just paint it suburban and call it Drimnagh. As good a name as any and, as it happens, one signifying the area which contains the housing estate currently housing Marsh’s mother.

Long before the Marsh family moved in the lands of Drimnagh were seized from their Irish owners by Strongbow. He gave them to his fellow Norman robbers the Barnwell family who had arrived with Strongbow to take part in the plunder in 1169. The family had settled in Barehaven in Munster. They failed to get the standard Cead Mile Failte and were murdered by the Munster people. Well, all except for the youngest member of the family Hugh de Barnwell and it was this youth who was given the lands of Drimnagh as compensation.

All this kerfuffle began when the lustful Dermot Mac Murrough decided to throw his leg over the Queen of Meath. This shocking deed and its consequences was tabulated, recorded, indexed and noted by none other than Saint Edmund Campion Jesuit 1540- 1581 and one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales who was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn who wrote in his history: ‘The Conquest of Ireland’ that: ‘D Ermot Mac Murrough, 1167 King of Leinster, halt and lecherous vowed dishonesty to serve his lust on the beautiful Queen of Meath, and in absence of her husband, allured the woman so farre, that she condisanded to be stolne away. This dishonourable wrong to avenge, O- Rorick the King her husband besought assistance of Rodericke O conor, King of Connaght at that season the generall Monarchs of all Ireland. The subjects of Leinster detesting the quarrel, and long ere this time hating their Prince, left him desolate in his greatest neede, so as with much difficulty he caught his boate, and fled over for succour to Henry the second King of England, then warring upon the French men, within his Dukedome of Aquitaine.

And Murrough urged all possible haste but as Henry was so busy he could not personaly intend that offer, but sent him honourably garded into England, with letters patents bearing this Tenour Henry the second, Earle of Angiow. To all our true subjects, English, Normans, Welchmen, Scotts and to all nations within our Dominions whatsoever. Greeting. Witt yee that the Baerer hereof, Dermot Mac Murrough King of Leinster, we have recieved into the soveraigne protection of our Grace and bounty, wherefore who so of you all our loving subjects will extend towards him, your ayde for his restoring, as to our trusty and welbeloved, know yee.....with ther letters and many gay additions of his owne, he arrived at Bristow, where he fell at conference with Richard Strongbow, Lo Strongbow al. Chepstowe Earle of Pembroke, with whom he covenanted, the delivery of his only daughter and heir unto marriage with plans drawn up to aid the Irish outcast Mac Murrough the ‘King stole secretely home, and wintered closely among the Cleargie of Fernes. According to covenant came FitzStephens with 30 Knights of his blood,  60 Squiers, and 300 footmen Archers, to whom in landing Dermot sent in aid his base sonne Duvelnaldus, and five hundred spears. The town and suburbs of Weixford marched forth against him: But when they saw Souldiours in array, diversly dighted weaponed, furnished with artillery, barbed horses and harnesse, they retyred to their walles and strengthned them, burning the villages thereabouts, and all the proisions they could not carry. The assault lasted 3 dayes in the 4 certaine Bishops resciant there, tooke up the variance, pacified the Townsmen to their King, and procured the rendring of the Towne. Dermot having tryed the valiantes of the Welchmen, immediately kept his touch, and gave possession of Weixford with the appurtenances aforesaid, to FitzStephens and his brother.’

And it was out of all this historical convulsions that the lone survivor of the de Barnwells Hugh, built a fine castle without planning permission with a mote fed by the river Camac. These lands were deemed safe as they were considered far enough away from the Dublin Mountains and the Featherbeds which were controlled then by the O’Byrnes and the O’Tooles. The castle with improvements, some architecturally aesthetic, made over the centuries to take account of climate change and that sort of thing survives to the present day and looks down on Tommy Marsh.

Mrs Marsh has just cooked a healthy, nutritious fry for her usually wayward son. Who unusually for himself has just fallen out of his own bed into freshly laundered, aired and ironed clothes and half tumbled down the stairs to a table groaning with buttered bread and extra butter, and that fry. To say nothing of cups of tea and milk in them. And sea salt on the table in a cracked bowl of almost fine Waterford glass.

Around the house in Drimnagh, on the occasion of a fine change in the weather, bright and early, birds are chirping in surprise at the unexpected sunshine.

So Tommy Marsh is up with the larks. But not singing with them. He feels, not to put too fine a point on it, hung overdrawn and quartered. His head throbs like what he’s heard of Belfast after the bonfires, claustrophobia filled with marching bands, a wasted land of too too bright colour and loud loud noise. Above which his mother’s voice is unbearably sharp and piercing.  

“Its a wonder to me you can move at all this morning,” she said, “after the night you must have had to get into the state you arrived here on that bloody bike.”

“And a fine good morning to yourself, oul Mother Machree,” Marsh countered as brightly as he could before collapsing into a chair and groaning melodramatically.

“I’m dying,” he announced, “call a couple of doctors to pronounce me dead and an archbishop to read me the rites.”

“Ah, give over Tommy,” Mrs Marsh laughed. “There’s nothing wrong with you as rashers and black pudding and good strong tea won’t soon put you right.”

And right she was.

By his third cup, Marsh was beginning to gaze with an appetite’s bright eyes at the fine feast of a morning laid out upon the table as upon the day. One with the fine blue patches holding their own against the ragged cloud. The other lacking a respectable or indeed which is worse any tablecloth at all. Sure who needs respectability when you’ve got a feedagrub and then some? Within twenty wordless munching crunching and swallowing minutes, Marsh like a man having been set free from the Kilrush Poorhouse was finished full and feeding breakfast scraps of sausage and bread and eggshell to Joey, the Marsh family’s pet jackdaw.

Steady now and fixed as any rock he rose; his purpose for the day equally fixed and just as steady.

“I’ll be off to the lands of the West,” he proclaimed. “On a.....”

“......mission of national importance,” Mrs Marsh finished for him. “The Republic of Munster again!!”

“Of course. Yes. Munster today! And ahhm, oh I dunno....Portaferry tomorrow!”

“Portawhat. Where’s that?”

Marsh started lah lahing the tune of Ros Catha, not wanting to offend his mother with the only words he knew of it. “Oh, its up North someplace.”

Not so very much of such shenanigans left Marsh of a sudden pale and breathless and thinking that he must start running up and down the stairs for a few times every day to get a semblance of elasticity into his hamstrings like Redican and the O’Donnells. Grasping Ireland’s God’s curse on all alcoholic liquors he stumbled to the table and sat gathering his reserves, rehearsing his itinerary, preparing to launch himself purposefully upon a flood of possibilities. Readying then all his tomorrows to receive the full weight of history he strode to the front door.

“No time like the present,” he told his mother and went out onto the road to check for Branchmen hiding behind front garden bushes, secret agents hiding under cars, enemy agents pushing prams with dolls in them, women detectives with pillows under their dresses pretending to be merely pregnant women going for an appointment to the Coomb, straightforward informers, splitters and do gooders. No such being immediately apparent he put some items into the container behind the motorbike seat. Then he pulled the full-length sheepskin coat around him that he had picked up in the Cumberland Street clothes market and which he saw later something remarkably similar on the Garda Patrol television programme which alerted the public to various kinds of theft and crime in general.  

Now having anchored his trilby he pulled the sheepskin around him that he had shortly before pas encore recovered from several piles of ancient clothing scattered in raggedy shambles around his bedroom. Feeling sufficient at last onto the task before him he waved a fond farewell. Then he threw his left leg over the seat, revved her up giving her the diddy and let her go in an explosive toxic cloud in the direction of the Naas Road, with the noise of the speed of the wheels of her rattling like a baby Bren as she passed thirty, heading all the way up to forty miles an hour.

Traffic being light on the dual carriageway he soon made Naas where the usual slow line of vehicles was making its way through the town. Exercising a patience few of his comrades would have recognised he allowed his lovely Honda to take its time as likewise does the snail. Several eternities later he was somewhere East of Eden, approaching a town bereft of all innocence forsaken. The road ahead opened up again as the blue patches of sky disappeared, and there, in a grey mid-morning drizzle, Monasterevin appeared, its desolate stone Mill solid in the ephemeral weather.

Monasterevin, from magic and mystery, mired. In poesy and romance mired. Where whiskey was distilled by the King’s own Cassidys from 1784. One of which shower of bastards had the rebel priest Fr. Prendergast hanged in ’98. The Loyalist bastard it was said choked on his words, “Hang him” but still the rebel priest swung. And for years thereafter, at midnight on the anniversary of that traitorous deed, the Cassidy’s coach in a glimmer of ungodly light, pulled by four prancing black mares, with black plumes on their noble equine heads, with wreaths of black dahlias enshrining their necks, their hooves shooting sparks and clattering, rode out on the road to Ballyfarsoon. And it driven as all such spectral carriages are, by a headless coachman. And everyone who saw it was driven to drink. Many of whom were soon headless themselves and every mother’s shame and disappointment of them legless as well. And many others legless for not seeing anything at all.

The distillery closed in 1921when the Free State opened, and the mourning King’s Cassidys closed up, shuttered up and down for lack of sympathy and took themselves off. The ghastly coach and its devilish driver were seen no more. And Monasterevin winced at this abrupt loss of its midnight tourist attraction and never looked back.

Monasterevin. Where an angel is looking homeward.

It was about noon when Marsh made a noisy stop outside Uniac’s pub on the main street. Straightaway he went through to the counter where a dark-haired woman was cleaning up around her, getting ready for the coming lunchtime rush. She didn’t look to be one of Uniac’s regular convent school dropouts so Marsh quickly swallowed his usual, top-of-the-morning, banter like “is yer oulwan in the phonebook?” and bade her no more than a civil “Good day, miss,” noticing the name Cassie on her breast name tag.

Not that she appeared to notice. Whether she did or not she certainly didn’t reply. Her mind’s eyes closed, the tongue of her inner being still. She was deep in the tumultuous chasms of herself. Or rather it was. Deep in the tumultuous chasms of itself.

Now going by the name of Cassie O’Neill. Sweeping up and dusting, slopping out and tending bar for a gombeen bourgeoisie and others more deserving of curiosity on an unimportant island on the clapped-out edge of the North Atlantic. When once it was so much, but now less.

All that beauty gone. Bent and broken. So, order of the seven blown over. Its key gone. Its lock tumbled. Now life shatters. Love is humbled. So much of more is gone. So all is less.

It was once Cassiel. Archangel of Constance Sorrow. Avatar of all those who would sit upon the ground, telling sad stories of the death of kings. Standing by the gates of His Seventh Heaven. Inhaling the incense of myrrh and patchouli, nurturing depression and attacks of debilitating panic, tending to its gardens of belladonna and opium. Cassiel of the donkey, the peacock, the bat, the goose and the goat.

Once great amongst the Archangels, guarding the Throne of God, where Choirs of Powers and Dominions sing Praise Eternal. No taint of male or female. No thought of anything human. For in all the heavens, from one to seven, no sex is known.

How then is this Mighty fallen? From the side, in the sight, of the Ancient of Days, caught up in the phases of creation, impaled on arrowed time. Fallen through the orders, down the ranks of Angels and exiled into association with the human.

Now, as much as many awash with years, unsolaced with tears. Standing to your last post, Guardian of this flock. Yes, Angel yes. Look Homeward.

In the meantime, Marsh was trying to attract the attention of barmaid Cassie. Easier said than done. For his own attention was fixed on the angelic Nefertiti look and figure divine curving motionless before him. Almost motionless. Her brown eyes couldn’t help but sparkle through the lights of a mundane spectrum. Her steady quiet breathing carried the pride of her breasts pushing at the shoddy material of her Uniac-supplied tee-shirt that was attempting to advertise Uniac’s bar.

There is no sex in heaven. In heaven, this Angel knew nothing of it. At least until the Patriarch and Prophet Enoch, Noah’s great-grandfather arrived in the Araboth Reqia, its Seventh Heaven, and consigned the whole kit and caboodle, in Cassiel’s not in the least bit at all humble opinion, to Hell.

For God looked on Enoch and saw Metatron, entitling him, for all his human origin, him Prince of the Presence and bearer of the Holy Name of God.

Cassiel heard the complaints of the Ministering Angels, ‘Uzza, ‘Azza, and ‘Azazel. Against how Enoch had been thus taken up body and soul, upon the Wings of the Divine Presence, translated so into the Seventh Heaven. Where he, he, him was raised and enlarged, given 72 wings and 365 eyes. Him, him, this human piece of human shit. Thence was there sex in heaven.

And God said. And God said.

“Every Angel and all Princes who would speak a word in My Presence must go into his presence, speaking first to him. All commands he commands in My Name you must all observe, fulfilling all.”

And God called this Enoch now Metatron The Lesser VHWH. In the presence of all His heavenly household. And blessed him with the letters of creation.

And Cassiel for one dared call this Treason and a rotten fucking coup de fucking tat. So Cassiel fell, like Lucifer before, but farther. Beyond Outar Darkness to labour in non-union Dublin night clubs where people besotted with drink shouted gibberish at each other and laughed hysterically at nothing or at nothing again and again and again. A woman she met on a walk-in Stephen’s Green got her the job in Monasterevin which was at least more homely but still, she had come from Archangel of Seventh Heaven to a Guardian Angel of it hadn’t even been told just who or whatever, skivvying and still raging against the ineffable injustice of the Divine.

Cassie O’Neill turned to Marsh who was leaning over the counter, looking, staring at the highly polished wooden floor, staring at the spot where Cassie in a red miniskirt was standing with her hands on her hips, and roared. Her eyes flashing neon lightening, breasts bursting out all over. And roared. Levithan roaring biblically out of all depths. The whale that masticated Jonah, pulped him and spewed a mash of flesh and bone and blood across the glittering floor. Cassie roared: “Who the fuck do you think you are? Fuck off.”

Marsh fled from out of the pub, down the labyrinthine ways of his own mind, terror propelled, he fled. Howling he fled and found himself back on his Honda, on a sandy road that was a slight cut above a boreen. He whizzed past a small cottage. A young boy who had imprisoned some flies in his mother’s kitchen strainer and was now plucking their wings off so that he could have them as pets took one glance at the howling figure speeding past in the flapping, full-length sheepskin coat and fled inside shouting: “Mammy! Mammy, the Pooka has gone past.”

Oblivious to this or to the sharp alarm calls of the startled birds in the hedgerows, Marsh rattled on. It was the appearance of something like a macabre apparition in the distance that at first forced Marsh to consider that he had lost complete control of his senses and that he was falling through the deeper and darker chasms of his imagination. He brought the Honda to a halt and stared ahead.

“What in the name of the bubonic fuck is that?” he muttered to himself, thinking that he might be seeing a flock of giant crows up ahead on the track. He thought of Jacko, the tame Drimnagh jackdaw and felt a shiver run through him. Having slipped the bike into gear he was relieved to find that the black fluttering clutter was simply a smack group of cycling priests or Jesuits to be exact. After exchanging pleasantries Marsh learned that they had cycled out from a Portarlington guesthouse to pay a nostalgic visit to Gandon House where they had once been novices having their theological fangs honed and now, through happenchance they found themselves acting as a fantastical escort to Marsh and his Honda.

“The day is definitely brightening again, thank God,” said Joe. He appeared to be the leader. He was a good-looking priest whose pale blue eyes and eagle-like nose suggested intelligence assuming intelligence is considered a necessary attribute of fine features.

“Positivity is lurking,” Marsh replied as he threw a glance skywards.

“Isn’t it a coincidence all the same meeting our friend here on the feast day of Saint Leonard?” remarked Eamon in a kind of falsetto voice. He was podgy in build.

“But didn’t he say his name is Tommy?” said George who had a good mane of wavy brown hair.

“Thomas!” corrected Joe.

“That’s right,” agreed Robert. “There is no Saint Tommy.” He had black curly hair above a fresh red complexion which suggested to Marsh, lots of dinners of pig’s head and green cabbage.

“I have a cousin called Lennie,” explained Marsh almost apologetically now that his heart had ceased hammering in his chest.

“That nails it,” Robert said triumphantly, “its not chance.....its....”

Marsh gave Robert a quizzical look, “And what is it?” he asked in a loud voice for the conversation now had to compete against the whirr of the bicycle gears, the light crunching of rubber on sand and the spluttering Honda which periodically misfired with a loud bang as if it was demanding a certain quota of attention.

Despite the sporadic nature of the conversation, Marsh learned that Saint Leonard was a Frankish noble in the court of Clovis1 and that Clovis was a founder of the Merovingian dynasty whatever that was. Marsh gathered that because Saint Leonard was a disciple of Saint Remigius he had the prerogative to visit prisons and free any of the prisoners there. It was said by someone in authority or else it would hardly have discovered parchment, that prisoners who invoked Saint Leonard saw their prison chains break before their eyes. Marsh reckoned that he could have enjoyed the company of Saint Leonard over a couple of pints in the Peacock.

“I wouldn’t describe myself as religious,” explained Marsh.

“How would you describe yourself?” asked George.

“Non-religious, I suppose,” Marsh replied limply denying his public Peacock atheism for he felt he wouldn’t be capable of holding his own with these theologians when it came to a philosophical discussion about cause and effect or the original prime mover they might claim who gave the whole box of tricks the initial impulse. Anyway, he did not believe in the faith or the authoritarian principles that religion was based on no more than he believed in religion itself.

“So what happens when you die?” asked Robert in a slithery tone.

“You stop being alive,” said Marsh casually while he admitted to himself that even as an atheist he found death intriguing.

“No need to be facetious,” said Joe. “I mean where d’yeh thing you toddle off to when the Lord comes round?

“Well, I worked once as a mortician,” Marsh lied, though he did at one time have a job which entailed washing down dead bodies in a hospital morgue, “and I never saw one of them going anywhere on their own.”

“You know I was referring to the soul.”

“Well, I never saw one of those.”

“Well you see,” said Joe with enthusiasm as Marsh noticed that the podgy priest’s saddle had almost disappeared, “if we accept and indeed we must that Saint Thomas Aquinas is the founder of the official philosophy of the Church. God is the fount of all existence and every other thing’s existence depends for its existence either directly or indirectly on something which exists of necessity, and this something is God ....while on the other hand Aristotle’s God is a kind of disinterested architect...”

Marsh listened with interest as the philosophical peloton rolled on and Joe continued, “Now William of Occam was probably the greatest of the Franciscan scholars. In 1324 because his doctrines were considered somewhat unorthodox he was ordered to attend the Pope in Avignon.

“A sort of special criminal court!”

“Sort of Thomas but he survived the bread and water even though his philosophy goes much further down the road towards empiricism than any of the other Franciscans. For instance, while Duns Scotus removed God...”

“He did so....” interjected, Robert.

“Don’t fucking interrupt me Bob,” snapped Joe irritably, “as I was saying while Scotus removed God from the sphere of rational thought he still retained a metaphysic that was less traditional.”

“Marsh nodded approvingly giving Joe the impression that he was in some way in sync with the conversational drift, that in his brain’s thought processes the microscopic electrical pulsars were flitting at the correct terminals. He did think of posing the question he heard a heckler pose to a religious preacher on the corner of Abbey Street one Saturday night, “if God is omnipotent can he make a boulder so heavy that he wouldn’t be able to lift it....but then he decided that it wasn’t the time for theological conundrums.”

“To avoid absurdities we need to be careful to differentiate statements about things and statements about words and not to confuse them,” continued Joe. “Just as in science the terms used are said to be of first intention when we talk about things. Likewise, the terms are said to be of second intention when we talk about words. In argument therefore we must ensure that all terms used have the same intention. Once we use this definition we may hold the nominalist position, that is to say, we conclude the terms universal is of second intention. Now the realists don’t hold,” he shook his head and almost steered into George’s bike.”

“There’s always someone,” said Marsh.

“So Occam rejected Anselm as well as Aquinas,” said Joe in a flustered tone as he regained his balance.

Marsh perked up. “Anselm!! Isn’t that the saint mentioned by Joyce in the missioner’s tirade in Portrait of the Artist?”

“Yes Thomas, the very man who wrote in his book of similitudes that the damned in Hell are not even able to remove from the eye the worm that gnaws it.”

“Just like being in a one-bedroom apartment,” quipped Marsh.

“Mr Joyce has first-hand experience of that now,” piped up Hugh in a northern accent. He was cycling behind Marsh and panting a little.

“A cell Thomas, a monk’s cell some of them want the people to live in but anyway remember Occam was pushing out the boat into choppy waters when he held that God cannot be known through sense experience and rational investigation cannot establish anything about him. It is only our faith Thomas which fastens our belief in him in this so-called scientific age. The smart alecs can make sneering conclusions like the mind is a by-product of bodily organisation and that religion in any form is nothing but a pernicious and deliberate falsehood, something that is spread and encouraged by rulers in their own interests because they believe that allows them to exercise control over the ignorant. The opium of the people as Marx referred and Voltaire claimed that if God did not exist we should have to invent him. But Voltaire was bitterly opposed to institutional Christianity although he did believe in some kind of supernatural power and ridiculed the Leibnizian view....”

“Never heard of him.”

The priest laughed. Ah well, we won’t come across him cycling on this road. He sort of preceded the French materialists like Lamettrie...”

“Missed out on him to...”

“Don’t be talking Thomas!! I’m sure you were doing more interesting things when we had our heads buried in books back there. But they were an interesting bunch all the same who’s doctrine is a development of Descarte’s theory of substance. It was unnecessary to study mind as well as matter since both function in a strictly parallel manner we can dispense with either matter or mind. A good account of the materialist doctrine is to be found in Lamettrie’s ‘L’homme machine where he rejects the Cartesian dualism and allows only a single substance, matter....”

“You’re the first priest to impress me Joe.”

“He impresses all of us,” said George.

“I’m honoured but this isn’t about impressing this is about how we come to Him above and just to finish...Now with Lamettrie, his matter is not an innate substance like in the earlier mechanistic theories but matter that is in motion so that there is no need to be a prime mover and God becomes what Laplace referred to as an unnecessary hypothesis. Thus mentality is a function of the material world. By replacing religion and metaphysical with reason and science the materialists hoped that they would usher in an earthly paradise but you know Thomas a couple of attempts at that have not gone too well...”

“Not when the countries who tried it were economically blockaded or invaded by armies of robber barons and....”

“Oh I’m not excusing that now, not a bit of it and ourselves supporting liberation theology as they call it in Latin America, but for instance after the French Revolution which disestablished the reigning religion, which I agree was very corrupt, the revolutionaries invented a supreme being as a sort of deification of reason and even set aside a day for it while at the same time the revolution showed scant regard for reason...”

“Can reason have no flaws? Somebody said that you can’t have a revolution without breaking eggs.”

Well yes, but one of the eggs they broke was Lavoisier, the founder of modern chemistry. When he was arraigned before a revolutionary tribunal as an official of the ancien regime and although he had been Farmer-general and had suggested some valuable reforms and also presented as one of the greatest scientists, the court replied that the republic had no need of scientists. Despite all this, he was guillotined. At the end of the day Thomas what we have that the intellectuals have lost is our faith which fastens our belief in Him. The creation, the Holy Trinity, the immortality of the soul. The soul Thomas.....”

“That’s some case and a half Joe, the soul......”  The word recalled a dread in Marsh when all those years back he believed, like all the others he believed. Those nights all alone in the dark bedroom him and his soul. In the dark condemning his soul to fire and brimstone for all eternity. Always at night that thought. Whether the moon or moonless that thought taking over his soul. In the night in bed. Attempts to resist futile. What was the point with the soul probably damned. He wondered could it be denied, maybe forgotten when he died like he did in confession. The shutter slid back. Bless me father for I have sinned. Is it long since your last confession? A month father. Go on. I had impure thoughts father. Did you entertain them my child? Oh, no father. A lie. Too full of shame. Did this mean he had added another mortal sin to the growing pile. It bothered him sometimes. What if he was to be hit by a bus coming out of the church after telling the priest a lie? A lie about him lying in the dark in his bedroom at night giving in to that thought. Convulsed with desire going hammer and tongs at it under the blankets on his back. Often sank on his knees face into the blankets. Sometimes a sudden halt. Was that a creak on the landing? A creak in the dark outside his bedroom door? Face in the blankets to smother the heavy breathing. Listening. Was his mother outside his bedroom door listening? Was it his father? Were both of them standing there looking at one another in the dark listening? Staring at one another in the dark outside his bedroom door listening for a telltale noise. Silence confirmed as thought faded temporarily. Then slowly out of the dark the terrible thought returns. What if he was to expire while he was doing it and he was to be found lying there with his hands in dilicto flagrante? That final image when nothing remains!

Marsh gave a loud gasp.

“Are you alright?” asked Vincent, a slightly built priest with a pallid face who was cycling to the right of Marsh.

“Ah yes, fine.” Marsh croaked.

“You sure?” inquired Joe, concern raising the pitch of his midland’s accent.

Marsh coughed. “Yes. Think it was a blue bottle or horsefly or something straight down me throat.”

“Jesus!” Robert laughed.

“No laughing matter Robert,” Joe admonished. “That lad could have come straight out of a farmer’s arse.”

There was a burst of uproarious laughter as the party rolled on.

“Have you heard of Adam Marsh, the famous Franciscan theologian?” Joe asked when the laughter had subsided.

Marsh shook his head. “The only church Marsh I heard of was a Thomas Marsh who was one of the early members of the Mormons.”

“Ah we’ll give him a miss and concentrate on Adam who would make anybody proud.”

 It was obvious that Joe was determined to tell Marsh about his eminent namesake. A rabbit scurried across the path up front and disappeared into a low ditch as they were now heading to a section where the path was skirted on both sides by bogland.

“Adam was educated in Oxford way back in twelve something or other. In around 1230 he entered the Franciscan Order of Worcester where he soon became Rector of the Franciscan House in Oxford.”

Marsh nodded approvingly. His thoughts now were focusing on Uniac’s pub and in particular on Cassie the sassy barwoman. This Oxford stuff about this Marsh by Joe who certainly knew his stuff sounded very positive. Perhaps an extra string to his seduction bow so long as Joe didn’t spring a surprise and tell them he was burned at the stake for putting a Reverent Mother up the pole!

“And it wasn’t long after that he was regarded as an intellectual and spiritual leader,” continued Joe. “One of his pupils was Roger Bacon the great English medieval philosopher and Franciscan friar who praised Adam's high attainments in theological mathematics. The French theologian Thomas Gallus was a close acquaintance and correspondent of Adam Marsh.”

“Grist to the mill,” Marsh muttered.

“Because he was so well known and respected his opinion regarding ecclesiastical appointments in the diocese was relied on by the Bishop of Lincoln and he was consulted as a spiritual director by the like of Simon de Montfort, the countess of Leicester and the queen.....”

“This is the real McCoy”, thought Marsh, “this will leave her gobsmacked.”

“But not just as a theologian but as a lawyer as well,” continued Joe. “He would have been a Jesuit if we had been in existence then Thomas.”

He smiled weakly which gave Marsh an uneasy feeling.

“Adam helped to guide both the opposition and the court in all matters affecting the interests of the church but he remained strictly neutral in secular politics. I should say mediation was a principal of the Franciscans....” said Joe.

“He would have been a great asset to the J’s alright Joe. A man with that amount of spunk and genius, by God!!!”  shrugged George.

“Such a man would have kept us out of the Spanish Inquisition,” said Robert.

“A bloody messy business that.” Joe winced.

The floor reflection in Uniac’s pub tore into Marsh’s brain. He had to get back there to explain to Cassie. He swung the bike around, revved the engine and above the rattle he shouted “Toora loo lads, I’m off.”

“What did you mention the Spanish Inquisition for?”  Joe shouted as the priests dismounted from their bicycles and watched Marsh disappear in a cloud of dust.

“What’s the Inquisition got to do with anything?” asked Robert.

“It was the mention of it which obviously put the wind up him. I mean we could have had a double whammy there, you know, we could have got a conversion as well as maybe.... a gardener,” replied Joe.

“Or a cook,” mused Eamon.

“Maybe an altar boy,” suggested George.

“Too old.  Anyway one could get a dose of the clap off a fella like that,” said Joe as he gazed absently at the dying dust.

Marsh’s mind was in turmoil as the bike rattled on, sometimes bouncing on the bumpy boreen surface. He was unaware of the same terrified child making another dash for the comfort of his mother’s arms as he motored past the small cottage this time in the opposite direction.

Since moving back with his mother after the breakdown of his last relationship, which was also his first, he countered a period of regret and overwrought melancholia by immersing himself completely in the class struggle.  

He was suspected by Festy Spratt of being foremost in having his special Branchmen running round in circles as he planted bombs in strategic places the logic of which was understood only by Marsh. Spratt also believed that Marsh was a prime mover in keeping members of the fire brigade on their toes by launching incendiary campaigns in stores owned by people who had never heard of Frank Keane and finally he suspected that Marsh was the old man who scared the living daylights out of bank staff and customers as he jumped over counters shouting threats about heroes and do-gooders. As a result, he had given top priority in house raids in finding a rubber face mask which could link Marsh to the crimes as he was too long in the tooth to believe a man one hundred years or more was capable of vaulting mahogany bank counters like some spring chicken. The same mask business was responsible for a number of hospitalisations of old feeble men who were rumbled and jostled by hefty Branchmen thinking they were the suspect Marsh when going to check their ‘Golden Years’ bank accounts.

While Marsh invested boundless energy and ingenuity into the cutting edge of class struggle, faithfully adhering to the dictum claimed by Bates, ‘actions speak louder than words’ he did not forgo diligence on the theoretical side. In the shoplifters flat on York Street, in the Peacock, in Club Ui Chadhain on Gardiner Place and in the basement of 44 Parnell Square he made many speeches, almost as many as the master orator Bates himself.

He asked “Why is the world controlled by a crowd of useless fucks who make up one per cent of the population? Why did we allow our government, who we elect and pay wallet-stretching salaries and pensions to look after our interests, more or less hand over the natural resources of the country to the same one per cent? Why do we have laws which allow houses to be used as a commodity in which some people can make a living out of renting them to others who as a result bust their guts working for years in the hope that one day they will be able to afford one of their own? Why have we got a two-tier health system? Why are our schools controlled by church interests?

He made speeches denouncing revisionist historians, supiners he called them, who thought that we should apologise for the 1916 Rising: speeches exposing some of the Poppy huggers in the Dail who viewed the men who fought in the War of Independence as little above murderers while making cringing excuses for the RIC collaborators of the British murder machine: speeches supporting the War against the sectarian Northern Ireland statelet. He put a lot of energy and emotion into these passionate tirades and there were times when he became so convulsed with rage that he had to be helped down from the pub table whereby he was besieged for autographs by yelling, foot-stomping Peacockers.

He was not as hostile as some on the fashionable Left were on Ireland joining the EEC as he concluded that it would speed up progressive legislation on divorce and abortion and enhance the prospects of a united European trade union movement whereby a strike in one part of Europe would mean an all-out European strike.

He had abandoned this hope and was now seething in his condemnation of the European project. He now saw that what was originally presented to the people as a market for free trade between some European countries had been hijacked by a small cabal of globalists. These, Marsh had no doubts, were set on complete monetary, economic and military integration. And further that this forced union, whereby the results of referenda were rejected if the electorate’s vote did not comply with the wishes of the unelected bureaucrats was to be rolled out as a behemoth for the privatisation of the complete state. The European project was to be handed lock, stock and barrel over to the everything goes to the highest bidder mob.

However, it was not his passionate oratory that caused problems with his relationship with the formidable Deirdre from Rathmines but aspects of his revolutionary activity.

Deirdre began suffering headaches. Debilitating headaches, which Marsh blamed on the semi-fermented home brew, they sometimes drank in the Rathmines squat after the Peacock. She had a number of medical tests which were inconclusive. Marsh skirted around the issue with Bates who wondered if a psychological overhaul might be an option. Marsh rejected the suggestion and told Bates that no way had he the nerve to advise Deirdre that she might be off her rocker.....in cuckoo land!

Deirdre was ‘arty’ according to Marsh. Her favourite painter was Graham Sutherland and she talked about the Greek playwrights like Aeschylus who she said was a literary hatchet man but more interesting than the joyful doom of the more polished playwrights like Sophocles and Euripides. Marsh, on the other hand, liked the black mischievous humour of Beckett and in painting, he adored the brooding savagery of Bacon.

Returning from a week’s sojourn in London where, according to himself, he had been away on work of great national importance, he headed for the squat. He had in his travel bag the rubber theatrical face mask which made the wearer look like he could be eligible for a second President’s cheque and which later almost drove Spratt crazy. He pulled the mask on in the hall and knocked on Deirdre’s door. On opening it she gave a horrified gasp and Marsh guffawed. That was the end of the frivolities.

While Marsh was away, Deirdre discovered on the top wardrobe shelf, a brown paper package. Something weeping seemed to be in it and it gave off a strange smell. Deirdre headed straight for the Peacock. Bates volunteered to accompany her back to investigate.

On inspection, Bates told Deirdre that it was gelignite that was in the package and that it was in a dangerous condition. He said that she could be fairly certain that the weeping nitro-glycerine was the source of her headaches. He wrapped the package in a damp towel telling Deirdre he had a safe place for it. He said that if she heard a loud bang she should forget about an ambulance and call a hearse.

The first mistake Marsh made was to deny the package was his.

“I could have blown meself up and me a smoker you irresponsible cunt. And if Spratt had raided I’d be facing a long stretch. My velvet coat is destroyed with that sticky goo on it.”

Marsh explained the unexplainable knowing that his lame excuses were falling on deaf ears. One angry word led to another. “Go an’ fuck yourself,” she said. “Go an double fuck yerself,” he said.

Two months later, on the advice of Miss Reid, Marsh called round to the squat with a peace offering. Another tenant squatting there told him that Deirdre had gone to Liverpool.

Now he reckoned that the only rational decision his feverish mind could decide on was to leave the issue of the Stacpooles, Labasheeda and Gurraun simmering on the back burner and get back to exotic Monasterevin.

The Monasterevin of Gerard Manly Hopkins. The Monasterevin of Count John McCormack and the Monasterevin of Cassie.

He knew the danger as he raced on beneath a wide sky but his brain was in overload and his body tingled with excitement and expectation. He would tell her he was the bearer of a high ancestral name, look her straight in the eye and swear that he was no Droit du seigneur and that his intentions were as noble as his name.

He felt very young again, giddy, as she in his mind drifted dressless among the women in Le Bain ture painting by Ingres. He guessed that she was in her late twenties not that far behind himself in age and probably wisdom. There was definitely a possibility of something with profound implications just down the road. Maybe a permanent relationship that might bring a measure of stability into his partisan existence. He must be careful, he warned himself, not to allow his emotions to run riot for he knew it was imperative to keep his desires on a tight rein and not to confuse fantasy with the rational.

It was obvious to Marsh that Cassie was unhappy in Uniacs. He would put it to her, tactfully, that with a word in the right ear he could get her some part-time hours behind the Peacock bar where she would serve some of the most illuminating, interesting and original drunkards in Ireland....well in Marlborough Street. He would leave the business of finding a decent squat with Dennehy who was always obliging and an expert in that field. He let out a whoop as he glimpsed the tower of the Church of Saint John the Evangelist ahead.

Marsh, confused and panic-stricken, drove up and down the few streets of historic Monasterevin a number of times and failed to find Uniac’s pub.

He dismounted in a daze at where he was sure the pub had been. There was nothing there. Nothing in front of him but an old stone wall. Old, grey, mottled with age and memories but nevertheless a solid stone wall which must have witnessed the Cassidy’s ghostly coach as it trundled and clattered its way with the all-seeing headless driver towards Ballyfarsoon. Marsh extended his arm and rubbed his fingers against its time-ravaged surface and then stepped back in bewilderment.

He stared at the Honda and touched it. It was definitely real. His mind was in a spin. Could the power of Dennehy’s speech about the Starvation the night before have affected his mind in some way he wondered. And if that was not the cause.....

An old man passed. Gaunt and head lowered. Marsh looked after him.  His black overcoat stained and bleached with age so that its blackness was now grey in patches and seemed to be trying to blend in with the wall.

“Excuse me?” Marsh shouted.

The man turned round slowly and gave Marsh a cadaverous stare.

“Uniacs?” asked Marsh.

“Gone. Long gone,” said the man with a dismissive wave of his hand.

Sometime later Marsh, a little sheepishly, mentioned the incident in strict confidence to O’Donnell. In strict confidence, O’Donnell told O’Neill.

“Maybe it was some kind of hay fever fit?”

“For Jaysus sake Charlie it was November.”

“Then it must have been a cosmic organism.”

“Never thought of that.”

In strict confidence, O’Neill told Bates.

Sometime after that Marsh and Bates were sitting in front of the window in the York Street flat. The flat was in semi-darkness with the light off. The pair were looking at the street below through a musty net curtain and taking no notice of a spider which was trying to ensnare a listless blue bottle into a web it had spun between the curtain and a flaked window run.  A black Anglia car parked on the far side of the street almost opposite the York Street address was the focus of their attention. It had been there for over an hour.

Marsh was talking in a low voice. “So you think the notion of infinity goes all the way back to Anaxagoras?”

“Well he talks about the infinity divisibility of matter or cutting things into smaller pieces does not eventually lead us into something different kina bit of bollocksology  I think but the importance of the dictum leads him to conclude that the things that are in the world are not divided nor cut off from one another and that in everything there is a portion of Nous, by which he meant intelligence.”

“Fuck! He was ahead of Johnnie the Greek.”

“You can say that again. For the origin of the world, he held the Nous set off a motion which separated things and that these became stars or other worlds though some crackhead said he also investigated a concept of empty space.”

“Fuck! It takes all kinds. What about the fucks who were running Athens?”

“Yeah, well why it would be incorrect to refer to Anaxagoras as an atheist because his conception of God was philosophical this did not conform to the Athens intelligentsia. In fact, as he equated god with Nous the active ingredient of all motions this left the established ritual performers looking like they were playing silly buggers.

Marsh gave a soft laugh.

“He was equally, you know, interesting concerning perception.”

“Yeah?”

“Did you ever see something that was not there?”

Marsh made no reply. He stared at Bates. His pale face seemed to glow in the half-light as if it was insinuating itself into the gloom. Bates stiffened. Fear had him frozen to his chair as Marsh’s eyes blazed into him in the electric atmosphere of the room. He stared back at Marsh because he was afraid to make the slightest move and did not notice that the spider had captured the aimless fly.

The engine of the black Anglia spluttered into life and the car headed off in the direction of Wexford Street. Marsh stood up and left without a word.

“He scared the shit out of me,” Bates told O’Donnell and Casey later. “Even that time when Spratt cocked the .38 and put it to me balls in the Bridewell was like a walk in the park compared to sitting there with him staring at me in the dark. Biggest dose of the jitters ever....me legs were shaking so fucking much that he was gone down the stone stairs and out the hall door because the house shook when he slammed it, he was out on the street before I could stand. And youse know, I’m a bigger fucker than him but there’s something there, you know there’s something that you don’t fucking dare release there.”