“You'd want to get that seen to.”

 

“Ah! It'll be ok. What are you doing here?”

 

“I'm studying philosophy.”

 

“Fair play to yer fucken elbow. Philosophy bejaysus. Well, that’s a coincidence because only the other night I was reading a bit of shit on the Aristotle theory of actuality and potentiality. It sort of said that in studying the problem of potentiality it was important to step away from a rather trivial form of it in which the word potential merely acts as idle wisdom after the event..”

 

“Interesting Tommy.”

 

“Well if for instance, a fire was beginning to burn we can say that this is because it was potentially so even beforehand. But this is clearly no explanation at all.”

 

“About fires burning Tommy.”

 

Before the matter could be further explained Marsh jumped as the door, which had been ajar, crashed shut. The Professor had arrived.

 

The Professor was youthful and over six feet tall. He was well built and wore small round spectacles which reminded Marsh of Eamon de Valera. His light brown hair was cut short and hung over his forehead in a manicured fringe. It was deliberately combed forward as if the Professor was planning, in the future, to conceal a receding hairline. He surveyed the audience with a silly grin on his face and muttered something indecipherable. He reminded Marsh of a large boy in casual attire.

 

Marsh's eyes widened as he watched the Professor totter slightly towards the front of the lecture hall. He was convinced that he was "two sheets to the wind" as he told Jimmy Clarke later. He was also taken aback when he heard him say in his opening remark, “cunts devoid of cognitive content,” in a slurred accent that owed more to the slums of North Belfast than the groves of academe.

 

The Professor turned around and stared at the blackboard. On it was scrawled:

​

​

​

 

 

 

He stroked his jaw and swayed slightly. Then he turned around to the class.

 

“Who did this abomination?” he asked in a caustic tone.

 

“It was the previous lecturer, Professor Simon,” said a female student who was seated in the front row.

 

The Professor placed his hands on his hips and looked back at the equation. He shook his head up and down knowingly as if the whole conundrum had suddenly revealed itself, and only a complete idiot would not be capable of understanding the simplicity of the mathematical structure.

 

“That fucking arsehole,” he muttered. He removed a wooden handled duster from its place on the narrow blackboard ledge and proceeded to wipe off the equation. He did this with slow wide arcs of his right arm. Each time he drew his arm across to his left the duster squeaked on the board surface and it squeaked again as his arm arced its way slowly to its right.

 

At first, Marsh thought that he was hearing things and then he was astonished when he realized that the Professor was breaking wind in perfect synchronization with the squeaking of the duster. He would have laughed except that he was still preoccupied with the possibility that the Slug was mooching around the august College environs and his damaged thigh was sending darting messages to his brain. He shook his head and looked at Miss Reid. She looked straight ahead as if normality was lord of all. The other students appeared to do likewise.

 

The Professor put the duster back in its place and walked gingerly to a small study to the right of the blackboard. In a very short time, Marsh could hear someone in the room noisily throwing up. After, what seemed to Marsh to be about three bouts of vomiting, the ashen-faced Professor reappeared. He managed to engineer himself, with considerable difficulty, onto a highish wooden stool in front of the now blank blackboard. The class observed all of this in total silence.

 

“Today we are going to look at Carnap who died not that long ago,” the Professor announced as he vigorously rubbed his hands together. Marsh noticed that he was slurring his words slightly.

 

“Can anyone tell me what the principle of verifiability might have in common with the pragmatic theory of truth in Carnap's scheme of things?”

 

The class remained silent: the Professor shook his head, and Marsh thought that he muttered: “thick cunts.” Two students, one with long blond hair and wearing a miniskirt gathered their notes and left the theatre. The Professor watched them leave with lazy eyes and then he semi-focused bemusedly on the sullen faces in front of him before managing to conjure up enough energy to give a female student in the front row an intimate wink.

 

Marsh continued to study the Professor. His expression would have locked itself into a state of permanent befuddlement if it had not been for the darts of pain which were now increasing in frequency from his injured leg.

 

The Professor leaned back on the stool and took a stick of white chalk in his right hand. He examined it for a few moments and tapped it on the back of his hand. He placed it to his lips as if it was a cigarette and gave the class a supercilious smile. Then he leaned back on the stool and began to scrawl on the blackboard: “principle of ver...”

 

There was a crash as the Professor lost his balance and tumbled off the stool onto the floor.

 

“It's time to go and get that leg dressed,” snapped Miss Reid.

 

“I've seen less drunkenness in the Peacock,” remarked Marsh.

 

“And heard less effing and blinding,” added Miss Reid.

 

After lending Marsh the taxi fare to the emergency ward whatshername in Summerhill Miss Reid walked aimlessly into the crowded streets between Trinity College and Stephen's Green. When it occurred to her to think about it she was conflicted. Some species or other of academic duty called her to the library and a wrestling match with Russell and Whitehead. It was a strong enough impulse that almost carried her back to college. But the leering gargoyles of her weaker nature, reminding her of the fragility of time and the passing of holy hours, pulled her straight across Grafton Street, in the non-syllogistic direction which is the way of licensed premises.

 

“Ah, to hell with it,” she thought. “Principia Mathematica, me trapezoidal arse! I'll see if there's any craic in Grogan's.”

 

Which is almost exactly the thought that occurred, at almost exactly the same moment, to Aengus Mac Og, as he exited the National Gallery onto Clare Street. Except of course, he being of a masculine orientation in this phase of the adventure of his life, the thought did not manifest itself to him with such precision.

 

“Ah, fuck it,” Aengus thought. “That's as much of art as flesh and blood can take. I'm gonna spend the rest of me life paralytic and comatose.”

 

It wasn't until catching sight of the Bank Of Ireland on the corner of College Green, and remembering the glory days of its earlier dispensation, that an inkling of Grogan's tickled the back of his mind and made him double back in that direction.

 

In the National Gallery, he had spent an inordinate amount of time with a painting of that house of finance's parliamentary incarnation: when the bank was a talking shop, and a knocking shop, and a shop where Henry sold himself by the pound, for guineas.

 

“Pork for gold,” he'd thought. “Fair exchange. No robbery.”

 

He had stared into the painting long and hard, remembering this stupid face here, recognizing that stupid wig there. “Bitches and whores,” he'd thought. “Wretches, ruffians, rogues, rapscallions, rascals. I know your sort.”

 

But really it was a notion of the painter that held him there. And his joy in what he knew the painter was really at that kept him looking into those rows of curly-wigged, heavy-jowled mugs of Henrys.

 

Francis Wheatley it was. An on the run from Covent Garden, one step ahead of the knee cappers, had arrived on this shore of the channel we share with Shoneen in seventeen hundred and diddley dee. The weather fine. The passage fair. Seaspray sparkling in the sunlight on his wife's blond hair. Or was it? And was she? Whatever...

 

Francis parked his easel and went to work. Painting the dandies of Merrion Square and their Christchurch belles. Portraits to wish a fortune on. Then Henry volunteered himself an independence and spoke to it in the Big House at the bottom of Dame Street. The hog pen on Hoggen Green where artist Francis sold those fat pigs the art con.

 

He opened a subscription for engravings of his painting of The Irish House Of Commons and oh! how the mugs of Henrys subscribed to sit for their place in history! When the canvas filled he rubbed the first lot out and started fresh. Then rubbed those out, and so on. A flood of Henrys rubbed out as the guineas rolled in.

 

But lackaday, cry how are the mighty ruptured, and its all alas for the ladies. Some floozy of a Henrietta spotted his Lizzie wife for a Mrs. Gresse and the roof fell in. Off on his toes again the bould Francis, a brush stroke ahead of new cappers now, still after his knees.

 

Turning into William Street Aengus thought “Rub-A-Dub Francis Wheatley” and guffawed.

 

And so, misstepping, he tumbled into Grogan's and saw Miss Reid there at the bar talking her easy way into all their good graces, those lords of the liquor at Grogan's. Glancing round she saw himself and sighed, “Need I ask?” He shook his head and she called it for him. “Set it up, Sarah, please. Sure, a pint of plain is still the only man for Young Aengus.”

 

Much later, with much red biddy and black porter poured in and pissed out, and the power of it pounding in the bloodstreams of the pair of them, Miss Reid told Aengus she was tired of analytical philosophy.

 

“Carnap was catnip to me once, so he was. Rudolf my red-nosed Positivist, that all my feline pheromones mimicked a response to. Metaphysician heal thyself, he told me and propositioned me with logic and with science. Flash dresser, smooth talker, with his high brow and his tiny glasses. I only wanted to see Vienna but he tried to drag me to Chicago. He was unhappy there he said. His wives didn't understand him. So who did? Not me Aengus. Never me.”

 

It seemed to Aengus, who was prone to alcoholic paranoia, there was too much glass and too many heavy ashtrays in the neighbourhood of their snug corner table for him to risk an honest response. In this kind of mood he feared Miss Reid was likely to slash or smash him without giving it a second thought until after the ambulance was gone, the pub had closed and the hangover had passed. That left way too much time for pain and hospital waiting rooms and stitches and more pain. He didn't care for any of that, so he took the coward's way out. Tried and tested. An empirical resort to humour; what Bates had once denounced as the last refuge of the scoundrel. Empiricism that is.

 

“For myself, Miss Reid,” he replied slowly, his phrasing an eerily correct exercise in wino-precise auto-speak, “I am a transcendental idealist. Call me to action. My path is categorically clear. Imperative, even. I will. I must. I Kant. D'ye wanna come to my place for coffee? I'm in Pearse Street these days.”

 

“Coffee would be grand,” she said, “And Pearse Street's not too far.”

 

And Pearse Street wasn't too far. Just far enough, after stopping for a one and one, for them to sober up a little. Not too much though. Just enough.

 

Arrived then at the Pearse Street bedsit they proceeded to coffee which, in a gesture to national culture, they drank in the Irish style. In a gesture to national unity, the whiskey in the coffee was Bushmills, distilled in the Occupied North. In a gesture to simple good taste, it was the Black Bush.

 

Each settled comfortably, in an easy rhythm of thought and feeling, one with the other attuned. Conversation moved freely; all the more so as Aengus did most of the talking.

 

Miss Reid mentioned a prominent politician of the Fine Gael party whom Aengus mistook for a Geraldine earl of the same name. Garrett Fitzgerald of Desmond, a practitioner of the arcane arts, a lover of books who had once given twenty fine cows for a copy of the Lilium Medicinae.

 

He then spoke of that Munster woman, Celia Roche, a paragon of beauty and wit. She was annoyed by many stalkers and had them exorcised by friendly bards with sharp satires, all played upon the glory of a harp that was Sir John Fitzgerald's, the lord of Cloyne.

 

“Celia was grand, Miss Reid,” he said, “But she couldn't hold a candle to you.”

 

And he recalled fair-cheeked Eileen MacSweeney, a faultless flower among the Gallowglasses of the Boggeragh Mountains.

 

“Eileen was fine, Miss Reid,” he said, “But she couldn't hold a candle to you.”

 

“I know those mountains,” Miss Reid replied, “Down Muskerry way, where the Blarney roses grow. I've had blarney enough from you, Young Aengus. Tell me a proper story now, and no more of this aul' nonsense.”

 

Though in herself she felt well flattered and very pleased with the warmth of the blush of it spreading from her cheeks to the bloom of her. “I'm flowering,” she thought, secretly. “Bees are rushing to me for the honey-makings in the sweetness of me.”

 

“Okay,” Aengus conceded. “A proper story, so. Shall I tell you of how Senchán Torpéist, the Connacht man, then Chief of all the Poets of Ireland, was offended by the Mice of Galway?”

 

“I'll listen to that,” Miss Reid said.

 

So Aengus began.

 

“It was the year of our lord, six hundred and change, some twenty years or so after the great Bardic conference at Dromceat had reformed the institutions and the stipends of the Art of Poetry. Chief of all the poets of Ireland, the blind bard, Dallan Forgaill, had died. Our man Senchán was selected to deliver his funeral oration and, with that out of the way, was elected to fill his sandals. He then proceeded to make his rounds of the courts of the provincial kings of Ireland.

 

“First off, he being from that neck of the woods himself, Senchán decided to visit the court of Guairè Aidne mac Colmáin, Guaire the Hospitable, King of Connacht. Gathering the Great Company of his bardic officers and his pupils in the arts of Poetry, their families and servants; gathering to him his children and his wife, Bridget, he set out for the palace of King Guairè at Gort in the County Galway.

 

"In those days, at least as the rhymers tell it, the Kings of Ireland were in a healthy competition to win the grace and favour of her poets. Only the best of accommodations with the grandest linens and bedcoverings and wall-hangings, only the finest foodstuffs, the worthiest whiskies and wines, the most delicate of dainty treats; only the best of all kinds of everything was thought to be good enough to be extended in guest-friendship to the Great Company of Senchán Torpéist, the Chief of all the Poets of Ireland. King Guairè the Hospitable was living up to his name.

 

“Some days into the Great Company's happy stay, Senchán's wife being at table while her husband remained in his apartment, she thought to herself he would be sorry to learn he had missed the delicacy which was being served as a starter to the assembly's long luncheon. The dish in question was a Toastie from Arbroath, featuring smoked haddock, eggs and hard cheese, all ingeniously combined and grilled to a very tasty conclusion. Senchán had travelled among the Picts in his youth, teaching those savages how to carve the most allusively poetic images into stone, and had often spoken to Bridget of the wonders of that region, most wonderful of which, to his mind, was the Arbroath Toastie.

 

“With this thought in her mind, Bridget had a portion of the exquisite dish turned onto a plate and sent her maid Grainne to deliver it up to her husband. Unfortunately, just before Grainne arrived to fulfil her charge, Senchán stepped out for a word with the Mayor of his home town of Kinvara, a word that kept him busy for no more than a mere ten minutes. And so, receiving no answer to several knocks and a few shouts, the maid left the plate of Arbroath Toastie on a table in the Chief Poet's room and went back to her place at her mistress's side. “Having done his duty by the Mayor of Kinvara, Senchán Torpéist, returned to his apartment and was puzzled to discover a fine plate with nothing but well-gnawed bones scattered upon and around it. A little perplexed as to what oddness might have transpired in the brief time he was around the corner talking to the Mayor, Senchán went down to inquire about this among his Great Company and the members of the King's Household, who were still at luncheon in the grand banqueting hall of Guairè's Palace.

 

“In no time at all a jury was enjoined to consider the evidence and render a verdict. In no time at all its commission was discharged. The guilt, the whole guilt and nothing but the guilt of the illegal seizure and felonious consumption of Senchán Torpéist's portion of the Arbroath Toastie was laid to the account of those impudent beasts, the Galway Mice. The Chief Poet himself spoke a doom upon the thieving rodents. In five hundred rhyming stanzas he satirized them to their deaths, declaiming at the end:

 

'Galway mice have sharp teeth,
But no other weapons.
They are lazy, fat and greedy,
And have no skill in war.
For a whim, they ate the present
Which Bridget sent to me.
You Galway mice, in the roof of this fine house,
Fall down dead, the lot of you, every mouse.'

 

“Upon that instant, the rafters opened and the roof rained rodents, each and all of them dead as doornails. And upon that instant Senchán Torpéist knew in his heart, the mice were innocent. They had, he now realised, been framed by the cats. And so he began to declaim a satire upon the King of Cats, whose chief residence is in the Cave of Knowth, near Slane, in the county of Meath.”

 

“Ah come on now Aengus,” Miss Reid exploded. “I love all cats dearly, and I know them well. Like all intelligent beings they live in society, but they are much too independent, much too spirited as individuals, to tolerate for a moment any trace of social hierarchy. There is no monarchical principle evident, or even possible, in cat society. Cats are anarchists, plain and simple. And you, Young Aengus, are an eejit! You and your Galway Mice. Do you take me for some Galway Shawlie? If that's what you call a proper story I'll have no more of it.”

 

She was about to announce she'd have no more of his company either, and take her leave, when she noticed a well-used, well-scrubbed, guitar propped up against the foot of the bed. “Aengus,” she said, “Give me music now or give me peace.”

 

“I'll play a bit,” he said and tuned his instrument to the key of apology. Then he played 'The Blackbird,' and 'The Stack of Barley.' He played 'Rodney's Glory.' And 'The Foggy Dew.' She sang beside him, like an Irish Linnet. As the salt tears welled in her eyes of blue.

 

“Miss Reid,” he murmured in the key of languish.

 

As he sang the song of heart's desire, Miss Reid recoiled out of her quiet times and retiring ways. She woke into her startled hearing of harp string and drumbeat, the pipe-swirled music of new stirred spring. And woke withal to sounds of the beetle's horn on twilit Lagan banks.

 

“Fuck me!” she thought.

 

“Call me Maggie,” she said.

 

The shades of night had long since come down. Aengus's blackouts and curtains had followed. The room stayed dark until late next morning, when the young couple arose, pleased beyond reach of even the worst hangovers, ready for bangers and rashers and fried eggs dripping grease with sunny sides up.

 

In an Italian café on Westland Row, they faced as much as they could see of their immediate futures.

 

“Maggie,” Aengus said, pleased to be getting used to the sound of her first name as he spoke it, of being one of a few who so much as knew it, “Would you like to come down to Clare?”

 

“Okay,” she replied, “Where in Clare? How long? What for? D'ye have family there?”

 

“Nah, no family. I'm a gap-of-the-northerner, me. Up by the Boyne kinda way. Long while back. Long time no see. As for Clare... It's just there's a session in Milltown Malbay on Sunday. There'll be people there we both know. Good craic. And I'll need to swing round by Ballyvaughan. There's an artist chap there promised me a painting of Valparaiso. I might want to call into the boneyard at Kilferagh. I'm told there's work for a poet round that way. Dirge for lost outlaws, you know the kind of thing. So three maybe four days driving around. As long as I can borrow a car. You know anybody has a spare motor?”

 

Maggie didn't even have to think about that one. “Joe Edwards!” she said. “Always has something lying around, friends for the use of. Four days is fine. Or five. Whatever. I've no classes I need to worry about. I'll have to call home for some clothes and stuff. And be back in a week or so to help with another one of Tommy's schemes for redeveloping the inner city.”

 

“That's that sorted then,” said Aengus, smiling.

 

Maggie smiled back.

 

Together they sipped thick well-sugared tea with just enough milk to take an edge off it. Planning on the night to come. To be sipping again at one another.

 

Marsh's leg had healed when he got a few of the women shoplifters he knew to arrange a meeting with some of the women in the York Street area who were in hock to hire purchase repayments.

 

About a week after the phone call Bates ushered a dozen or so women up the shabby stairs to the second-storey flat. The women filed into the front room. They brought some letters demanding that immediate payments be made on hire purchase agreements that had fallen into arrears. A few of them had letters warning of court proceedings.

 

As the flat filled, Marsh peered through a chink in the drawn curtains overlooking the street below. He was there for several minutes, then he suddenly swung around to face the gathering. His straight black hair was sleeked back as he took off his trilby hat and threw it on the table. He stared at the women and gave his shoulder a quick series of slight twitches. Then he removed a white handkerchief from a pocket and gave it a quick swish, Tommy Cooper fashion, before blowing his nose hard into it.

 

“Have you got a cold Tommy, I could get ye...”

 

He dismissed the woman with a wave of his hand.

 

“Cut out the fucken blathern,” he ordered, “has everyone brought their letters?”

 

“Most of us braw dem Tommy.”

 

“I shouldn't be getting any letters,” another complained.

 

“That's a fucken start. Let me just say that there is no shame in owing these cunts dosh. Remember its only fucken numbers. Numbers the one as Joey Betts used to say in McDaids. The infinitesimal calculus formulated by Leibniz and apple head Newton over a hundred years ago led to a great outburst of numbers. Numbers to beat the Barney. Big numbers, small numbers, even numbers, odd numbers, positive integers, prime numbers, George Cantor investigated the general problems of continuity and infinite numbers and further he showed that there are infinite numbers of different sizes,” he picked up a letter and stared at it and grunted, “I see a little nought on this letter. Well nought is a number that’s worth fuck all unless it's after a number between one and nine. So if we take these letters and from the bills we tipp-ex out, Briege O’Doherty who took time off teaching to help us out here will give youse the tipp-ex, so we tipp-ex out the numbers before the nought but not the nought. Just leave the nought. Remember youse have to show the same empathy to them as they show to youse. They fucken despise youse. Always remember that. If they could get youse into gas chambers in the morning they wouldn't think twice about it.”

 

He tapped the table. “Yuh know that these fuckers devote their whole lives into promoting inequality, which Joe and meself consider to be a war crime against the decent majority.”

 

“A war crime,” confirmed Bates.

 

Some of the women crossed themselves.

 

“Distribution! That is the magic word,” Marsh announced as he lit a cigarette and blew smoke wildly in all directions around himself, “that fucken cheap perfume, phew,” he muttered to Edwards. Then he began to sing in a shaky voice:

 

‘Oh where are you going,
Said Milder to Moulder,
Oh, we may not tell you,
Said Festal to Foe,
We'll hunt the Cutty wren,
Said John the Red Nose,
We'll...’

 

The women exchanged curious glances.

 

“That's about a mythical wren which is divided out to feed the poor,” explained Marsh as he gushed out more cigarette smoke.

 

A tall thin woman, whose permanently nodding head seemed to sit precariously on a long slender neck laughed. "Feed the poor on a wren!!!"

 

“It's a fucking mythical wren,” cut in Edwards. “Yis know, it could be as fucking big as Croke Park.” He flapped his arms.

 

Some of the women blessed themselves.

 

“Youse are a tax burden to these people. Youse piss on their parade. Remember these fuckers represent a tiny proportion of the population who have grabbed a huge portion of the swag and that's the way they mean to keep it. This is just a sophisticated pyramid scheme and when it crashes youse are left holding the baby.”

 

“Baby. What baby? Is someone up the pole?”

 

“Shhhh.”

 

“My mother,” Marsh continued, “had no running water for the toilets and she went around with the ring of the bucket on her arse.”

 

“The wha' on her arse?”

 

“In fact,” Marsh explained, “the first time she went in to a flush toilet after someone else and found it empty she came out wondering who would bother to steal someone else's shite. Here let me look at that, pal,” he asked as he snatched one of the letters.

 

“Be careful with it Tommy.”

 

He held the letter away from him at a distance. Recently he had noticed himself becoming long-sighted. He was wondering if the Christian Brothers had the rights of it all those years ago with their dire warnings about wanking and blindness. He mumbled as his eyes focused in on the documents, as if he was telling his beads over some Satanic ritual, and giving evil little laughs at the impiety of it all: “Fucken court proceedings ... corporate totalitarianism...”

 

“Spreading over the earth like the pox,” interjected Edwards.

 

“Hmmmm...final fucken warning,” continued Marsh, “fucken disinformation...wait 'til this cunt gets a letter from me...publish or perish.” He turned the letter around and stared intently at the back. It was blank.

 

“Wha' d'ya think Tommy?”

 

“Is there anything, like, can be done?”

 

The women looked on.

 

“My Johnnie said he was a communist and old Nick was hiding under his hat,” one whispered to another.

 

“He is a communist,” retorted Edwards, who had overheard the remark, “a special kind of communist. Isn't that right Tommy?”

 

“Oh yeah,” Marsh agreed, placing the letter on the table. “I'm a simple communist. My Communism is a very fucken simple thing that does not immediately imply any formal philosophy or fixed dogma or predetermined habits of thought.”

 

Johnnie's wife gave the other women a bewildered look.

 

“It is not to begin with,” continued Marsh, “Anarchist, Marxist, Social Democratic, or Bolshevik, Leninist, Stalinist or Trotskyist. All I mean by Communism is a clear political commitment to the working class interest which is why we are all standing in this dump at the moment.”

 

“Tommy is a Marshist,” added Edwards.

 

“That's the fucken be all and end all and all in between of it: an acceptance that the fucken first and most important consideration in any political activity or programme is the present and future well-being of workers and the poor from which the working class emerged and from which it is constantly replenished. A fucken small enough thing in a way. And at the same time, everything,” Marsh continued.

 

Edwards applauded and he was joined by some of the women. Marsh stared at Edwards. Then he stared at Johnnie's wife.

 

“Tell Johnnie if I bump into him I'll shove me hat up his fucken arse,” he muttered.

 

Marsh walked back to the window and again placed one eye to the chink in the curtains.

 

“Any of yez followed over here?”

 

“Follied by who Tommy?”

 

“Is there an allergic or something?”

 

“Doesn't matter,” he muttered as he walked back to the table. “I tell yis what. Forget about the fucken tipp-ex and the noughts that are worth fuck all anyway. Put the fucken things on the table. C'mon, c'mon we haven't got all day. C'mon. Every fucken letter.”

 

He was leaning over the table slightly on one hand. His long nose gave him a birdlike appearance. He slapped the table with the palm of his free hand. The audience was uneasy: trapped in the uncertainty.

 

“Wha d'ya want dem for Tommy?”

 

“C'mon, c'mon,. Put them on the table. I'm a busy man, a very busy man. I have things yis know in me front room. Lots of 'em.”

 

Some of the women reluctantly put the letters on the table.

 

“That's it. Lovely, lovely. Every fucken one.”

 

He picked up the documents and showed them to the anxious crowd.

 

“Watch fucken this.”

 

He began to shred the letters with his hands and threw the large confetti-like pieces over the dumbfounded gathering.

 

“See them fall,” he shouted. “The race to the fucken bottom. That's what the rich cunts want us to accept as the natural order of the world.”

 

“Like the snow in Joyce,” said Edwards, “falling arse over bollocks all over Ireland.”

 

“Jeesus, me fucken letters! Johnnie will do his nut.”

 

“He's fucken lost it.”

 

“Leave it out, Tommy.”

 

Marsh stood staring at the crowd with a manic leer on his face.

 

“Look at me, look at me,” he commanded, “do I look fucken mad? That's the problem sorted. Youse can all go home. The problem is fucken sorted. Got that? Fucken fixed.”

 

He began ushering the bewildered women out of the flat.

 

“Are yah sure Tommy?”

 

“Of course, it's all right,” Edwards assured a woman, “sure Tommy knows the law. He knows it inside fucking out, habeas corpus, mandamus, De Bonis Non, you call it.”

 

The women nudged one another down the dim stairway.

 

“There's no need to rush down the stairs, there's no fucking race to the bottom down here,” laughed Edwards.

 

Nevertheless, others threw the most reproachful glances skywards as March leaned over the landing above them and echoed out: “Any other fucken letters arrive, tear them up. No better still, send 'em back. No stamp remember. No fucken stamp. Watch the newspapers. Have yis got that? The rag sheets. Watch the sky at night.”

 

On the following Thursday at twelve forty-five a.m. on May 3rd 1973, an elderly man was out with his ageing dog for a late-night stroll. He stood to admire his reflection in the darkened windows of Thomas Dockrell Sons and Company Limited on South Great George's Street. He turned sideways and complimented himself on his carriage. Despite his age, his stoop, it appeared to him, had not indulged itself in the past year.

 

He thought that he could see the reflection of a red neon light from across the street in the window above the reflection of his dog's head. Just as he realized that the far side of the street was devoid of illumination of any colour the building was suddenly enveloped in a fireball which prompted the citizen and his dog to run for their lives.

 

Within minutes the entire block stretching along South Great George's Street and then back along Drury Street was a raging inferno. A short time later, the paint department in the rear of Drury Street exploded and the wall was blown across the street. At the height of the blaze heavy explosions ripped through the whole block as hundreds of people were evacuated from hotels, and guest houses filled with Spring Show visitors and people evacuated from homes in the area by gardai using loud hailers. The fire was one of the biggest seen in Dublin since the 1916 Easter Rising.

 

In the Peacock some time later Marsh twitched his shoulder and quizzed Edwards.

 

“Remember the geebags in York Street with the in hoc letters?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“Were those letters from Dockrells or Cavendishes?”

 

“Sure how would I know? Weren't you the one who read them? Why?”

 

“Ah, I was just wondering like.”

 

 Cavendishes Furniture store on Grafton Street was later burned down with an incendiary device. All hire purchase files were destroyed. The fire was so intense that plastic signs on the far side of the street drooped like Dali sculptures.