Tale 24

 AN ANTI-REVISIONIST INTERLUDE ENDS

The Slug was just beginning an unimportant interrogation at Bridewell Garda Station. Some wee scruff, a clerk maybe or a builder’s labourer, probably a clerk for he looked like the weight of a well-filled hod would scarify his narrow shoulders and break his scrawny back, had been apprehended on Saturday selling a Commie Rag at the entrance to the G.P.O.

Nobber’s curiosity had been caught by the title of the rag in question. Usually, these subversive arse-wipes were disguised as Ireland’s this, or Workers’ that, but this one openly proclaimed itself, The Irish Communist. Nobber had never seen anything so brazen. Suspecting this was a flowering that might best be nipped in the bud, himself and a uniform had invited this Irish Communist round to the station for some tea and biscuits and a bit of a chat. After a routine kicking then to set the tone the scruff had been left to stew away his Sunday in the cells. Now it was Monday and time for him to account for himself to the Slug. And the Slug was looking forward to the proceedings. Like Nobber he was intrigued by this love that for once dared speak its name.

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

The Cell

The Slug arrived in the Bridewell after first calling into Murt Leonard’s pub on Dame Street. The night before there had been a little too much drink consumed and in consequence a bit of a misunderstanding with this large cleaner from Rathmines when the Slug had, completely innocently, mistaken the sign on the ladies’ toilet door. Today he made sure all the staff there knew that a Garda’s a gent whatever it says on the door to the bog hole he shits in. A few pints and several large ones hammered the point home in fine style. All that for breakfast. And a commie for lunch.

So, the call from the Castle came to him as a bit of an October downpour, opening up at exactly the wrong time, precisely to rain on his parade. He had barely got into the higher decibel range of some of his favourite shouting, had hardly hit the stride of his standing long jump into an ungovernable rage (with Nobber primed to interject, begging him not to “kill this poor fucker like ye did the last one”), when the door of the interrogation cell opened and a lean and hungry Pah Wah entered, wringing his miserable hands and apologising for what he called “the interruption, Festy.”

The fires in the Slug’s normally cold, hooded, dull eyes burned out as he dropped into anti-climax, then stepped into the corridor where Pah Wah passed on Cullotty’s command, as O’Rawe had phrased it, for him to drop everything and go find “that Tipperary twat, Ernie Bates.”

“So much for fun and games then,” he thought, “it's back to the dreary oul grind of chasing fucking shadows and shadows that don’t leave shadows.” Every morning he woke up hoping almost expecting something marvellous might happen and every morning by midday he was disappointed. The electricity that surged through the Castle when a bank alarm almost jumped off the wall. The mad scatter of hearts thumping, sandwiched into cars always to find that when they arrived the robbers had hightailed it into the mists of the Featherbeds or disappeared into one of the safe houses set up by Timmins. Now more mooching around the Peacock environs trying not to be noticed while those inside are unconstrained in their enthusiasm for lawlessness. He might manage, he hoped, to hear of a suspicious-looking character entering O’Doherty’s flat off Grafton Street. A raid on that would give him a chance to have a ging at the young ones who were always lying around. Trinners with scholarships talking openly about sex. Short skirts. How these futureless thugs could swanny around with these young stunners hanging out of them he couldn’t figure out. It was not fair.

“There’s mischief afoot,” the Slug whispered to Nobber, “toss out that Stalin scutcher ‘cause I have to race over to the Castle an’ pick up me cosh, knuckleduster and notebook. I fear that we may be needing them before the fucken day is wrapped up an’ put to bed.”

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

Book Lying Open In The Cell

“Get outa here,” shouted Nobber giving the unsuspecting Marxist a kick into his bony backside. “Get up to the nearest Church and get Holy Communion, yeh feck.”

“Gestapo,” the communist shouted as he hurried down the corridor.

Not much later the Slug, having picked up his accoutrements, slunk out the Castle gate into what he thought of as His City, those parts of Dublin he had once described to O’Rawe as Sodom and Begorrah.

When he thought about it, as he did more often than his colleagues would ever have suspected, The Slug considered himself a Patriotic Irishman. And he had a clear notion as to what that Ireland was to which he pledged his unfailing allegiance.

Not a cultural construct of diddley dee, bainne na monas, stained glass windows and the harp that once. No! No! None of that bored oul’ Failte energised The Slug, made his heart race, his fists clench and his boots swing. Not at all.

What buoyed Slug’s boat, to settle and to float it, was the idea of Ireland as a mode of being - a state of ordered ranks, a piece of legal tradecraft in which laws were tinkered with, tailor-made, and not so much applied as bespoke. In which a father of ten who stole a loaf of bread to feed them got a kicking round the nick and six months in the House of Joy, while a father of none who raped ten got a bishopric and the Artane Boys’ Band for Christmas.

The Slug knew that fairness and equality were laws of a state of nature that had to be, all the flora and fauna of it, every bit, abhorred. Which he duly did. Nature to one side then and trampled underfoot, his ideal was a state of social being: a well-ordered hierarchy with One Law for Power, another for the poor.

The Slug genuflected to the Great Be All and End All in which all other being ceases. He knelt to the Emperor of Seem who had broken Behemoth to his hand; who rode roughly shod Leviathan. And through it, all The Slug esteemed himself, by virtue of his virtuous service to this state of things, A Patriotic Irishman.

When the Slug returned to the Bridewell cell he found Pah Wah sitting on the bare wooden, wide, plank which was hitched to the grimy, graffiti-strewn wall and acted as a bed. He was reading the confiscated ‘Irish Communist’ paper.

“Nobber had to go to Fitzgibbon Street. What’s this dialectical and historical materialism stuff?” he asked with a puzzled expression on his grey face.

The Slug shrugged. “It’s supposed to be an explosive that they smuggle in from Russia. It's like, yeh know, cocaine that they have in the States. Blows the brain cells all over the place making them completely delusional and wanting to confiscate everybody’s property and give it to the state. Yeh shouldn’t be reading that stuff unless yeh want to end up with a fucking loose screw. Put that away 'cause we’re going to have to head over to Gardiner Place an’ see can we get the dog to see the rabbit.”

The Slug took the book from his overcoat pocket and began leafing through the pages. He became agitated as he leafed backwards and forwards. A grim expression endeavoured to crawl over the flabby face. “Did you have this book?”

“Your book!” exclaimed Pah Wah. “What the fuck would I be doing with your book when I have me own book. Why only the other night I was going through it, perusing it like, changing a few addresses and its hard, I can tell you to keep up with some of the fuckers who seem to live in a different place every time the sun goes down but what yeh think I discovered. I discovered that I had put two R’s into Redican’s name. Can you imagine that, two fucking R’s! I know that you have more names in yours than I have and I’m still waiting for you to give me some of the addresses of the young ones who are hanging around them....”

A cloud cast a barred shadow on the dilapidated wall. The Slug muttered something which Pah Wah didn’t catch.”

“those young ones’ addresses you were.....”

“Did you not fucking hear what I said?” the Slug asked angrily.

“No you were mumbling. I can’t understand your Kerry brogue when you mumble and I think that commie you had in might have been a little more cooperative if you didn’t roar and mumble at the same time, so what did you say, what ingenuity were you going to impart to me, to maybe change my life?”

“There’s a fucking A and a B and a C missing,” the Slug announced.

“What the fuck are yeh on about, an A and a B and a C?” retorted an angry Pah Wah.

“I’m sorry,” the Slug apologised. “I didn’t mean to accuse you. It’s just that someone has tipp-exed out the details of some A.”

“Arsehole! Can’t think of any A we have, that would need to be an Aberneety or Adams or something, you might be better off without that A whoever the fuck it was because I definitely don’t have any A in mine. I did have an Ahern once but he might have signed into some other codology,” advised Pah Wah.

The Slug scratched his head and looked all round the cell. “It's more serious than that,” he said grimly. “The details of Bates and Casey have also disappeared,” he added.

“Just like them,” observed Pah Wah.

“This never happened before,”

“What the fuck do we do?”

“Back to the Castle, the file room, there’s duplicates there,” said the Slug suddenly after a moment’s thought as Pah Wah grabbed his coat from the squalid door.

“This beats Cathy Barry, and then some,” muttered Pah Wah as the engine of the Morris Minor spluttered into life.