Tale 19 - PART 1

CODICIL - PART 1

Marsh shook hands with Skinner, the chicken choker, in the Peacock.

“We have a deal so, give me about three weeks.”

He sat down with Ructions and Davis, giving his shoulder a bit of a twitch.

“What the fuck!” Ructions shrugged, “Have youse resolved the contradiction between official and unofficial strikes?”

Marsh gave his cigarette a business-like tap on the box before he lit it.

“He bought a house in Wicklow, on the Carlow border, and needs a few things for it. The fucken leprechauns are a bit on the slow side at the moment, so I reckon that Edwards and meself could help him out for a few bob.”

“Sure, knowing your entrepreneurial expertise, he couldn't have come to a better man, isn't that right Sean?”

“Right, bejaysus, isn't Tito himself using Tommy's formula for a mixed economy.”

Skinner needed three long windows for the nearly completed cottage extension and materials for a large garden pond that the official had himself half dug out, using a pickaxe and wheelbarrow over a prolonged spell. Marsh promised that, because of his vast range of business contacts, he would be able to supply the necessary materials at bargain prices.

On a sunny Saturday afternoon, Marsh arrived down with Edwards to the cottage. Two men, one wielding a pickaxe, the other a shovel, were working in the area partly dug out for the garden pond. This was in the shape of a large elongated eight figure.

“Have yis found any gold yet?” Edwards shouted jovially.

Both men stared blankly at him as a third, stout, man emerged from the extension shell.

“They've no English mister,” he shouted in a Wicklow accent, “but they're both Catholics.”

Marsh scanned the horizon. “D’yeh know who lives a few fields over there to the west?”

“No.”

“Peter Mew.”

“The philosopher?”

“Philosopher, poet, revolutionary. Nobody on the run would be turned away from his house, I can tell you that....well maybe a poet with a weak wrist who would refuse to carry down and empty his own piss pot,” he laughed.

Marsh cursed as he remembered he had forgotten his measuring tape. Taking the old line, from the top of his fingers on his outstretched hand to his elbow, he measured up the three long narrow windows. Then while taking long strides and counting out loud, he marched around the pond perimeter twice. The two figures stared after the tramping figure and then at one another.

“Jaysus Tommy, I thought you were after joining the Gestapo,” Edwards called out.

Marsh ignored him. He was muttering to himself. “Thirty-seven,” he suddenly shouted out to Edwards.

“Thirty-seven what?”

“That's the question. Remember to survive Joe man must have the numbers. Once you have the numbers you can fucken bend the forces of nature to your will. Without the numbers, you cannot talk about the atomic theory that was further developed by Democritus unless you want to talk gibberish, get me, Joe?”

Joe looked blankly and nodded his head.

“Ah yes, Joe. Numerical infinity has been fucken up things since the time of Zeno,” continued Marsh as the pair headed back. “You know Achilles and the fucken tortoise. The logic seems to run counter to the common sense notion that the whole is greater than the part. But once we deal with infinite collections this is no longer so. Remember Joe every infinite collection of positive integers has in it odd and even numbers. So if you fuck out all the odd numbers you might probably think that what is left is half of what you began with but actually there still remains as many even numbers as there were odd numbers. Isn’t that fucken odd?”

“Very fucking odd,” agreed Joe wondering how he had ended up in such a predicament.

“Well it's not actually,” he mumbled as he lit two cigarettes and passed one to Edwards, “and it's easily demonstrated.”

“It is?”

“Yeah. First you write down the series of natural numbers, and then, beside it a series resulting from it by doubling each member in turn and you’ll find, don’t take my word for it Joe try it out at home tonight...”

“Find what?”

“Find that for every number in the first series there is a corresponding entry in the second.”

“Jaysus!!”

Soon after passing Blessington he ordered Edwards to swing right at the Brittas Inn.

“Head for Glenasmole,” he ordered.

When they stopped Marsh got out of the Volkswagen and led the way on foot through a steep wooded area. After about ten minutes of fast climbing, they came to a clearing. Edwards looked towards the setting sun.

The sky beyond the mountains was a flood of light. Beneath the cosmic calm, the distant mountains appeared to swim in a hallucinatory intensity while those in the foreground were already beginning to merge into the long shadows of the twilight.

“Jesus! That's fucking spectacular.”

“We didn't come up here to look at the fucken sky,” said Marsh, directing his eyes downwards. They were looking into an area about the size of a football pitch. The ground was covered in an ominous-looking black plastic sheet.

“What the fuck!” exclaimed Edwards.

“It was going to be a dump,” explained Marsh. “You know, the usual, a few backhanders. But the local residents fucked them up and the plan was abandoned. Left all the fucken plastic just lying here. The local farmers are taking it and covering their barn roofs with it. One of them told me the other night that they call the stuff the Third Reich, it'll last a thousand years.”

He took out a Stanley knife. Edwards looked on in panic.

“We couldn't fit that in the car,” he protested, “besides, I told Ructions that I'd see him in the Peacock later.”

“We're not putting it in the car,” explained Marsh. “We're just cutting it now an' later we'll collect it in Hackett's trailer.”

Marsh strode across the plastic, counting each stride. Then, sliding along on one knee, he cut a large rectangular section with the Stanley blade. The two men rolled up the plastic. At Marsh's behest, they dragged the roll some distance and hid it in the undergrowth at the wood's edge.

On the following Wednesday evening, Marsh, Edwards and Davis were back at the abandoned dump. They had Hackett's trailer hitched to the tow bar of the Volkswagen. Marsh was scanning the area through binoculars. Suddenly he shouted: “Wrozzers. Get the fucken trailer.”

The three unhitched the trailer and pushed it into the wood. They were standing beside the Volkswagen when the garda patrol car pulled up. Two guards got out of the car.

“Lovely evening guard,” said Edwards pleasantly, as the five figures stood in ribboned sunlight.

“It is. What are youse doing here?” asked the older of the two policemen.

“Bird watching,” snapped Marsh who possessed an alert as well as a devious mind. He lifted up the binoculars. The younger, cherub-faced, guard laughed.

“Really!” said the older one, his eyes closing into a suspicious squint beneath a protuberant skull. He studied Marsh as if he was an alien.

“Yep. I received information that an azure tit was seen in the area,” Marsh announced confidently.

“Isn't Ireland full of tits?”

“And false information,” suggested the distrustful older guard.

“The azure tit is a rare migrant to Ireland,” explained Marsh. He then cupped his hands in front of his mouth and blew in.

“Tsi-tsi-tserri-de-de-de,” he whistled out.

The two gardai exchanged curious glances.

Edwards stared up at the nearest tall tree as if he was expecting, at any moment, to see an azure tit. Of course, he did not know what an azure tit looked like. He also did not expect to see Marsh smothered in azure tits, like a Dublin Saint Francis. Davis thoughtfully stroked his newly grown Mexican moustache as Marsh whistled another sharp rasp through the glowing woods.

“That's as close as I can get to a mating call at this altitude,” he apologized.

The older guard seemed to lose interest in Marsh's whistling as he looked over the red Volkswagen.

“Who owns this?”

“I do,” Marsh and Edwards chimed together.

“It's a company car, fully comprehensive,” Marsh explained, still continuing to glance around at the darkening sky.

The older guard took down the names and inquired if Edwards was Irish when he gave his name as Lambert Simnel. The young guard checked the tax and insurance discs on the windscreen then the garda car radio cackled into life. The gardai drove off in a hurry.

“Best of luck with the tits.”

Dusk was beginning to set in when the car and trailer headed towards Blessington. Marsh was in the rear seat. He periodically looked out the back window with the binoculars.

“What are you looking for?” inquired Davis.

“Smoke.”

“Smoke!”

“Yep, cause when they put those names into the transmitter in Tallaght it's gonna go up in fucken smoke.”

That Friday after closing time Marsh left the Peacock pub and headed for the Northbrook Hotel on Northbrook Road. He had an appointment with a political journalist who worked for the Irish Times. Marsh had discovered that the Saoirse Eire faction had linked him to their simplistic “Brits out” policy and he wanted to ensure that the journalist knew that his campaign to destroy the Southern State had not, because of the Provisional IRA campaign in the North, been relegated to the back burner.

He had studied the Bates thesis and now he had it all worked out in his head as he entered the cosy basement bar. He had deliberately only drank half a dozen pints in the Peacock earlier so that he would confront the journalist with a clear mind.

After some small talk about hurling in East Clare, the affable journalist explained how he had started working in the fifties as a young journalist in the Clare Champion newspaper. He relayed how he was not long working there when he was given a story about a particular fisherman who had caught a trout while fishing in the Cloon River near Cranny in Clare.

The unusual aspect of the story was that when the trout was cut open for the pan, a young trout was discovered in the hooked trout's belly. The young journalist was quite pleased with the amount of publicity that his story attracted. Inquiries were even made from members of the fishing community abroad.

Two weeks later the young journalist was about to leave the newspaper office after his day's work. The Editor suggested that it would be advisable if he left by the back window instead of the front door. He was told that the fisherman he had named in the story was waiting across the road from the newspaper offices and as well as his bicycle he had an ash plant stick in his hand.

To his surprise, the rookie journalist learned that the same man had got married on the very same day that he was alleged, in the newspaper story, to have caught the trout with the baby trout in its belly.

“Everybody in the surrounding countryside knew about the bride's reputation except the would-be husband.”

“The fucker who gave you that bum steer was a handy bit of nasty work,” said Marsh.

Marsh was determined not to give the journalist and raconteur a second bum steer as he outlined to him how his campaign to overthrow the Free State in the South of Ireland would not in the least be scaled down because of ongoing Northern shenanigans.

“We started ours when Adams was a baby,” he declared.

The two were on their second whisky and their third cigarette as Marsh went into theoretical detail. He lectured the journalist on how consonant cluster conspiracies had failed to find a frictionless epenthesis along a continuous scale whether from one extreme point, the cardinally phonemic to the cardinally prosodic.

The journalist's eyes widened as he peered over his glasses. Although a long-standing back problem had him physically badly stooped he seemed to straighten himself as he reached for his whisky. He sipped it while continuing to look at Marsh, frozen-faced as if his head had turned into a smoking bazooka.

Marsh was now slurring his words slightly and gesticulating carelessly with his hands. The journalist pulled his chair back from the table a little. He feared that at any moment Marsh might accidentally send the whiskies flying.

Marsh leaned forward and insisted that not even a "fucken homogeneous pharyngealization" would deter his men.

The journalist threw his blank notebook on the table.

“I haven't a clue what you're talking about,” he apologized.

“I'm talking about my bullets flying on this side of the track. Tell Blaney and his Catholics that. That's an exclusive Pal.”

Marsh stepped out into a flaunting breeze and tumbled headlong over a protruding granite kerb stone.

“I nearly broke me bollocks,” he told Ructions in the Peacock the following Sunday night. Then he followed Edwards out to the toilets.

“Don't tell me,” moaned Edwards, “There's a harrier at the counter.”

“No. It's more serious than that Joe. Don't drink too much tonight.”

“Why?”

“We have to go to war after the pubs close.”

“War?”

“Yep. I have a loan of a pick-up from old Matt Skelly and I have a crowbar.”

“Jaysus!”

When Marsh rejoined Ructions he jerked a thumb in Edward's direction and shook his head.

“That man is beginning to put on a bit of weight. Overdosing on the calories. You know what the doctors say.”

“Very dangerous,” agreed Ructions. He stubbed out a cigarette. “Like these.”

“He needs exercise. He's becoming too solid.”

Despite the cursing of Edwards, that night Marsh and himself set to work lifting granite kerb stones from Northbrook Road and some other roads in the vicinity. They heaved them into the pick-up which had sacking on its steel floor to reduce noise.

“That's thirty,” gasped Edwards. “The tyres will burst if we put on anymore,” he advised as the sweat poured down his face. He was staggering with exhaustion.

Marsh returned to the Northbrook the following night. The main topic of conversation was the disappearance of the kerb stones.

“Wicklow granite. Hand cut. Over a hundred years old,” one man with a refined accent groaned.

“Architects,” announced Marsh. “Everyone knows that an architect and a jerry builder is as lethal a combination as a solicitor and an auctioneer in a small town.”

“I am a solicitor sir,” a red-faced man protested.

“Then you know what I mean,” said Marsh.

Jim Sullivan, a communist from the fifties era, had died a few years earlier. He had a barber's shop on Pearse Street. The shop was now derelict. It had been in a ruinous state for some time when Marsh climbed inside one Friday night. With a hammer, screwdriver and pliers he removed most of the fixings holding the plate glass window in place.

O’Donnell had been a friend of Sullivan and Marsh sought his help as Edwards had told him that he thought his spine was out of place after the Wicklow granite caper. He told O’Donnell that Sullivan’s widow was delighted to give him the window which was a danger to the passing pedestrians owing to the shop’s dereliction. O’Donnell drove out to the magnanimous Hackett and borrowed the trailer. As the van had no tow bar the trailer was securely tied to the van.

On Saturday afternoon the van with the trailer in tow pulled up outside the shop.

“Jesus,” said O’Donnell, “I didn't know that it was that fucking big.” He surveyed the eight-foot by six-foot shop window.

Davis looked up and down the busy street. It was full of shoppers going and coming.

“You're going to have to keep them off the footpath,” ordered Marsh.

“They'll be safer taking their chances with the lorries on the road,” laughed O’Donnell.

Marsh and Davis lifted the sheet of glass from its dilapidated frame as O’Donnell put on his most authoritative accent.

“Men at work madam, step away, glass, danger,” he snapped as he ushered women shoppers, some with children, some pushing prams, out onto the busy roadway. Marsh and Davis grunted as they edged the heavy sheet of glass across the footpath.

“We'll have to lower it onto the trailer,” said Marsh.

“If we can't hold it just let it fucking go,” advised Davis.

“We need it,” insisted Marsh.

“I'm not thinking of the fucking glass. I'm thinking of me fucking fingers. I don't want to see me looking at them and them lying on the pavement if you see what I mean.”

They successfully lowered the sheet of glass onto some planks that they had placed across the trailer sides. O’Donnell shook his head.

“This is not the way to carry glass.”

“It's the fucken best we can do.”

Across the road, O’Donnell spotted a middle-aged man sitting in a pickup. An apparently retarded boy sat beside him shaking to and fro.

“That oulfella over there is watching us,” said O’Donnell. “Didn’t Missus Sullivan tell you to take the window?”

“Take the whole shop if you want Tommy she said. Of course, that oul git is watching us. Isn't there a recession sweeping through the fucken land? Sure it must be ages since he saw men working, and on a Saturday evening too.”

“That's what's wrong with the country. Nobody willing to do a decent day's work for a decent day's pay,” agreed Davis.

“Are we getting paid for this?” inquired O’Donnell.

“It's just a figure of speech.”

O’Donnell drove the Renault van slowly down Pearse Street as Davis hurried back to the Peacock. The car then headed towards Pearse House flats and then onto Grand Canal Street.

“That oulfella is definitely tailing us,” said Marsh, looking into the passenger mirror. “Is this Renault hot?”

“Might be something else that’s hot,” remarked O’Donnell.

"Maybe he thinks we're knackers and he's hoping we'll lead him to the nearest halting site," Marsh laughed.

They crossed Hubband Bridge, then passed Parson's bookshop and drove up Mespil Road. The van remained about fifty yards behind.

“I know this mot in Mespil Flats. Maybe we should leave it. But we have to shake off Sherlockfuckenholmes,” suggested Marsh.

Halfway up Mespil Road O’Donnell pulled the van into the kerb. The pickup did likewise some distance behind. Marsh and O’Donnell got out of the car. They walked into a front garden and up to a hall door. Marsh instructed O’Donnell to pretend to ring the front doorbell while he watched the parked pickup through the front garden hedge. He saw the pickup driver and the retarded boy get out of the vehicle and cross the road onto the canal bank. The driver appeared to be trying to interest the boy in a swan which was flexing its wings. Marsh shouted, “Run.”

Both men raced down the long front garden and dived into the Renault. As they took off hurriedly they could see the pickup driver trying to pull the retarded boy from the canal bank. The boy was shouting and putting up a stubborn resistance. The man was dragging him, and the pair fought in the middle of the road oblivious to the passing traffic.

The sheet of glass bounced up and down on the trailer planks as O’Donnell revved up the road. In his mirror, he could see one man leap from a car and another rush from the canal bank to confront the brawling pair. The car and trailer turned left onto Sussex Road and then immediately left again into the Mespil Flats complex.

The car drove around the administration buildings and came to a halt at the Oak House block. Marsh skipped up the few concrete steps and hammered on the ground floor door. A woman in her thirties jerked open the door.

“Christ Tommy, what's the matter?”

“Nothing. Where's Lorricks?”

"He's in bed. He's on nights this week."

Marsh pushed past her into the front room.

“Lorricks, Lorricks,” he shouted, “Come out an' givus a hand.”

“What is it Tommy?” the woman repeated.

Soon a stocky man emerged. He pushed his black shirt into his jeans and then patted down his dishevelled dark hair.

“Jesus, yeh look like yeh just jumped out of bed,” O’Donnell laughed.

“What the fuck Tommy?”

“It's Hackett. I have to get his trailer back. Givus a hand with this sheet of fucken glass. We need to put it in your place for a day or two, it's for a pal in the movement.”

“Who Tommy?”

“Dick.”

“He's a queer, Tommy.”

“Not that Dick. It's Dick Yaah. I don't think yeh know him. He's a fucker for glass.”

“He is,” agreed O’Donnell. “He has stained glass, opaque glass, frosted glass, laminated glass, bullet-proof glass, reinforced glass, one-way glass, antique glass, tinted glass, bevelled glass, leaded glass and stove glass. This is plate glass.”

“He's lucky he doesn't have broken glass with the state of the springs on that trailer, and his jerky driving,” added Marsh.

The three, with a little effort, carried the sheet of glass into the flat.

“Put it up against the wall,” ordered Marsh.

“That's it. Up against the fucking wall,” O’Donnell laughed.

“What about the kids Tommy?” the woman pleaded.

“Put some chairs in front of it. I'll have a glazier up, it'll be gone in no time, the kids won't even know it's there.”

The woman was quite religious. She sidled up to Marsh.

“Tommy, I heard you're doing lovely statues,” she purred in a tone that could be described as the coquetry of the seducer.

Marsh gave her a curious look.

“You know,” she appealed, “I'd love a statue of Our Lady, like, for the mantelpiece.”

“Tommy is an expert in statues. He has a distinction in sculpture and a room full of fucking plaster leprechauns,” O’Donnell explained.

“Leprechauns!”

“Every kind. Running, jumping, walking and jogging leprechauns. Leprechauns of God the Father, of God the Son, of God the Holy Ghost. Leprechauns in Heaven, in Hell, in Purgatory, in Limbo or anywhere in between. Leprechauns of the Ascension, the Assumption, the Immaculate Conception and the evaporation of the Body of Christ. Leprechauns of Our Lady of Lourdes, Our Lady of Knock, Our Lady of Fatima, Our Lady of Guadelupe, Our Lady of Sorrows, Our Lady of Medjugorie, Our Lady of Czestochowa, Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, Our Lady of Dolly Fossetts, Leprechauns of Angels, Devils, Saints, levitating apparitions, bleeding apparitions and winking apparitions. Leprechauns committing mortal sins, venial sins, sins of omission and leprechauns with no souls or is it no holes and clenched buttocks. I've forgotten now.”

Marsh and O’Donnell left the flat. They drove out to Hackett's.

“What about the kids Tommy?” Marsh scoffed, imitating the woman in Oak House. “Did she never hear of discipfuckenplin!”

“That's what I was thinking.”

A fortnight later Clarke shouted to O’Donnell in the Peacock, “Simon the blower. It's Hackett.”

O’Donnell took the phone.

“Hello, Kevin,”

“What did you want the trailer for?” Hackett inquired in a sharpish tone.

“I told you, to collect a sheet of glass. Why?”

“It's just that last night this oulfella banged on my front door and in front of me wife and children accused me of stealing his shop front window.”

“What did you say?”

“I told him that he was a fucking lunatic and that if he didn't remove himself from my front lawn I would be left with no alternative but to use force.”

“Sullivan's widow must have sold the shop,” explained Ructions as the others laughed. They imagined the old fellow, whom they presumed was the pickup driver, telling his friends in his local pub how his complete shop window had been stolen in the middle of a Saturday afternoon in one of Dublin's busiest thoroughfares.

“They'd ask him was he on the poitin before he came out.”

The group at the table were debating on the dispute between Oskar Lange and Ota Sik, the Polish and Czech economists, trying to figure out if there was an objective necessity for the existence of commodity-money relations and the market in a socialist economy when Clarke shouted to Marsh: “Tommy, the blower, a woman!”

“Jesus a woman," observed Bates, as Marsh engineered himself behind the counter past Plopps.

After a minute or more Marsh slammed down the phone. He was angry. Indeed since he had teamed up with some of the irregulars in the Angry Brigade faction, he had become known as the angry man of the angry brigade.

“A dear John?” inquired Ructions.

“Ah, another oulwan in hoc to the Proddies,” said Marsh. He was a little on the weary side, having, the previous night, celebrated a black tie party for one of the pub regulars who had reached twenty-one years on the dole.

“They've a cheek ringing you here,” said Long, who had an insouciant attitude to the commonality, “let her go to a brief.”

“She saw one. He pointed out that a woman can be said to intend a consequence which is not desired in itself if that consequence is a condition precedent to the achievement of a desired consequence and she decides to cause that consequence insofar as it lies within her power but the fact that foresight of a substantially certain and eh up me Nat King Cole.”

“It sounds like that's what he was trying to do to her,” Ructions laughed.

“We need a plan of action, like the last time,” Long sneered.

“Don't go down that road,” Marsh warned.

At that meeting, held the previous autumn, the Angry Brigade had decided to smash the low-wage, non-union policy of some of Dublin's big stores by burning them down. When Necker, the union official, suggested that such a policy might incur job losses, it was explained to him that the seventies would be socialist and that the day of the innocent passer-by had disappeared with the Indians.

The plan failed because the incendiaries needed non-lubricated condoms to contain the catalyst. These could only be got in the North, and Marsh, without telling anyone, could not bring himself to stroll into some Belfast Well Woman centre and ask for one hundred non-lubricated durex...Instead, he drank the train fare in the Peacock and bought a box of cheap blue balloons in Hector Greys.

On the appointed day Marsh, like some wages clerk, dished out the primed incendiaries to the teams of arsonists who arrived at the York Street flat. Soon, immersed in the new culture of bling, they were moving among excited shoppers in the large city stores.

Incendiaries contained in matchboxes were planted under ornate cushions of armchairs, under mattresses of double and single beds, into overcoat pockets which hung on racks in rows with 'bargain' labels attached to them: silky curtains were unrolled and rolled back again and placed beneath the bottom of the pile was a matchbox with a blue balloon nestling inside.

It was then that Marsh's sexual inhibitions came to the rescue of Dublin. The incendiaries, which were supposed to explode when the city was sleeping, began to ignite. Sometimes, the arsonists had not even made it to the front door of their targets before shouts of ‘Fire’, ‘Fire’ smote the savage air.

Marsh himself was heading for a personally selected place of sabotage when he felt a deep burning pain down his leg. Fortunately, he was passing Kennedy's pub on Westland Row at the time. He burst into the quiet premises and dashed for the toilets, prompting the lone customer to remark to the barman, “tethered to his bowels, poor chap.”

Marsh gave the toilet downpipe a vicious jerk, pulling the cistern down on top of himself. There was a tremendous crash of breaking porcelain and the inoffensive barman, who had been glancing at the three-thirty from Doncaster on the television, gingerly went to investigate. A sopping figure pushed roughly past him shouting “that cunten jacks is dangerous, pal.” The figure then disappeared out through the door and into the back entrance to Trinity College.

Marsh squelched past the pathology building and across the College Park. He stopped suddenly at the corner of the Trinity Library and stared, eyes fixed on a heavy-set older chap who was standing close to the Campanile, apparently watching the Front Arch entrance to the College.

Puckering his brow, Marsh took a step back so that he was almost hidden behind the Library building. He could not be certain, but the figure, distinguished by its long dark coat and hat was at variance with the casual attire of the many young figures passing it in both directions. To Marsh, it bore a remarkable resemblance to the Slug. He turned on his heel and headed towards the Arts Building.

He entered one of the lecture theatres and sat down at the back of the room. There were approximately forty students there. Some were reading their notes: most were talking to one another, and a few looked at Marsh as he removed his soaking coat.

He was discreetly examining his scorched trousers and singed thigh when he heard a woman exclaim: “Tommy!”

It was Miss Reid.

“What happened to you? You're soaking and...”

“Oh I had a bit of an accident doing a plumbing job for that cunt Edwards. He lit up a cigarette just as I was checking out the fucken gas immersion.” He shook his head in disgust. “Fucken eejit!”