“That's what I was coming to because just say, for a laugh, that in the Peacock you were to ask Tommy to dig up this Blueshirt like and then Tommy said to you, I have a better fucking plan pal. You dig him fucking up and he smiles at you? What are you going to fucking do then? What's your missus going to say when you arrive home smelling like a bombed-out slaughterhouse?”

 

“The last I heard,” Ructions told the others, “is that the Blueshirt or his ghost had stolen all the fucking blue stones.”

 

O’Neill left Ructions and his group and joined Bates who was talking to the Maoists. “I did hear Mao talking once,” said Bates.

 

The student revolutionaries were surprised and in awe of this revelation. “Where?” asked the dark-haired woman.

 

“On French television, when I was in Paris some time ago.” “Really! What did he sound like?”

 

“He sounded like a chicken.” “What?”

 

“He sounded like a Rhode Island Red.”

 

The students gave one another quizzical looks as Bates threw back his well-formed head. He placed one hand to his right ear, Ewan McColl style, and then imitating what he considered to be a humanised fowl he cackled and squawked:

 

“Number one in the Chinese hit parade, the International, number two in the Chinese hit parade, the International, number three in the Chinese hit parade, the Intern…”

 

Mrs Roe grabbed Mrs Russell, the wife of Hookie Russell, and Mrs Murphy by the arms, “Is Ernie choking?”

 

“Maybe a bear is squeezing his balls,” Hookie laughed.

 

Clarke was on the tips of his toes trying to source an explanation for the strange utterances. Plopps said that somebody should send for an ambulance but nobody understood him. Curious and anxious customers were inching towards the disturbing outbursts when Bates, who had reached number six in the Chinese hit parade, stopped. He took a few more gulps from his pint and then in a strong, low tenor voice, he sang:

 

“Arise you who refuse to be bound slaves and stand up and fight for liberty and true democracy, all the world is facing…”

 

“Well d’yah hear thah now Mrs Roe an him singin like a lark after nearly putting the fuckin heart crossways in all of us an me thinkin tha' the grim reaper was clutchin at his short an curlies.”

 

“He nearly caused me to wet me knickers, not that they’re ever very fucking dry,” laughed Mrs Murphy.

 

“Is that one of his poems that he’s put to marching music?” inquired Clarke.

 

 “It’s the Chinese National Anthem in English,” said Redican.

 

“Holy Jaysus! Where does he get them from!”

 

“Look”, said O’Neill, “the fellow at the counter drinking what looks like a double Irish.”

 

“Do you know him?” inquired Casey.

 

“Sort of, he tried to break into Bates’ place earlier.”

 

“Ah, he’d be a well-known housebreaker all right. Rumour is that he has his missus on the game. In and out of nick like a yoyo.”

 

“Fuck.”

 

A featureless man with a dark appearance walked into the Peacock pub. The man called a pint and stood dead still at the counter. Marsh, who was talking to Bates, about an impending protest march for better housing, after he had inquired if Bates knew where the Maoist with the pert arse lived, studied his descriptionless features, his black hat and coat and his stillness. He opened a pack of cigarettes, gave one to Bates and struck a match. “He looks like someone from the back roads.”

 

“From the old back roads. What calm there is in his agitation.”

 

Marsh scoffed. “Never saw the fucker in here before d’yah know him?”

 

Bates peered over his glasses at the figure who as well as melancholia and other vicissitudes gave him a hint of the imminence of night. “I have seen him before but I don’t know where that place was.”

 

“Grogans?”

 

“Some faraway place. A place in ruins I suspect. The landmarks won’t come.”

 

“But you know him?” inquired Marsh as he studied the figure’s indeterminate uncertainty.”

 

“He is an expert on Redmond. The Redmondites call him a shit stirrer and as far as I know, he’s stirring still. I remember him quoting Redmond – ‘No people can be said to have rightly proved their nationhood and their power to maintain it, until they have demonstrated their military prowess, and though Irish blood has reddened the earth of every continent, never until now have we as a people set a national army in the field.’”

 

“Redmond the extremist,” said Marsh with a wry smile.

 

“Exactly. He debunked any idea that Redmond was non-violent, in fact, he pointed out that Redmond got more Irishmen killed as cannon fodder for the Brits in the Great War than anyone else, and just as important he exposed how they were behind the gun attack on de Valera in Clare and how they instigated bloody war in Waterford, to say nothing about how fucking notorious they were when they were going about their business in Cork.”

 

Marsh gave a low whistle. “Jaysus! And a lot of people to this day see them as pacifists, almost bleedin' altar boys.”

 

The undefined man moved. He took his pint from Clarke and paid with a grateful nod of his head and without a word passing his lips he sat down at the only vacant table in the pub. He placed his pint glass on a beer mat adorned with a portrait of Father Matthew, the famous temperance priest, and faced in the direction of the door.

 

Bates took a bundle of papers out of his heavy overcoat. Marsh watched him leaf through the papers. Eventually, he pulled out a sheet and gave a satisfied grunt. “Wait an you hear this,” he said in an officious tone, “this will put hairs on the crease on your bollocks.”

 

Marsh laughed. “Is this from the enigma?”

 

“No. It’s a statement to the Bureau of Military History in the 1920s regarding the East Clare bye-election which featured Dev in his first outing against the Irish Parliamentary Party. The holder of the seat, Willie Redmond, had been killed in World War 1. It was himself up there who gave me the statement after he got it as a result of meticulous research. Well, so he fucking said.”

 

Marsh gave an approving nod.

 

Bates held up the page and read in a deep voice: “Statement of William Mc Namera of Corbally House, Quinn, County Clare. The Parliamentary Party was composed of ex-British Army men and the riff-raff of the towns both men and women. They attacked anywhere they saw a Sinn Fein supporter, especially if he was wearing the Sinn Fein colours and if he happened to be alone.”

 

“Fuck! They were mad for fight.”

 

“Is that Ernie standing up over there with the sheet of paper?” inquired Mrs Rowe.

 

“It's him all right. He seems to be reading out something, maybe it’s a call to the people of Ireland or…” said Mrs Russell.

 

“Maybe it’s a court martial of my bleeden waster of a husband. Hopefully, he’s to be shot at dawn and I’ll pick up some insurance money.” Mrs Murphy laughed.

 

“Maybe he’s reading his last Will and Testament!!”

 

“Hope he won't forget me because I’m wearing flitters after Hookey’s tax was increased when some dirty, ferrety-faced bastard reported him for doing a bit of overtime,” said Mrs Russell.

 

“The country is full of fucking informers Mrs Russell,” agreed Mrs Murphy. “In fact, my hubby, Bennie, says that there are more bleeden squealers around now than when the British were here. He says that Mountjoy is riddled with them. They’d tell that silvery-haired, purply-faced geit in Fitzgibbon Street anything he’d want to know for ten Woodbines.”

 

Bates cleared his throat and continued to read Mc Namera’s statement to the Bureau of Military History: “They were supplied with free drink by many of the publicans the majority of whom were hostile to Sinn Fein. At times they were like lunatics attacking with knives and heavy sticks…On the previous Sunday, Mr de Valera and a carload of his supporters were fired at as they were travelling along this road and the car was riddled with bullets. Fortunately, there were no casualties.”

 

“Fucking tearaways,” agreed Marsh.

 

Mrs Murphy shook her head; “Is Ernie drunk or whah, sure isn’t Dev sitting up in the park like Lord Muck looking at the deer rutting their antlers off and I’d like to know what pubs were they getting the free drinks from.”

 

“I don’t think he’d see much of the deer,” Mrs Murphy, “they say, you know, those in the know, that he’s as blind as a bat.”

 

Bates took a drink from his pint and smacked his lips. “Ah sure they had the backing of all the usual fucks, just like today,” he said casually. “The DMP who were Martin Murphy’s bodyguards when they were cracking the skulls of Dublin workers who had the audacity to want to form a union, the RIC, just as fucking pugnacious and almost to a man were Redmond supporters and then in June 1919 Dail Eireann at its fourth session decreed the establishment in every county of National Arbitration Courts. In this County Clare was the first to take action…”

 

“Up the Banner,” a Dublin voice shouted.

 

“Yes,” agreed Bates, “and immediately after the session at which the decree was passed the member for West Clare summoned a conference which decided to set up at once a District Arbitration with jurisdiction throughout the whole constituency. West Clare was also the first to take up the initiative for a National Scheme for Civil Courts.”

 

“Biddy Early had them by the short an curlies,” said the same voice.

 

Bates laughed, took another drink and continued, “and these courts were necessary because during the winter of 1919-1920 some 500 RIC barracks in villages had been destroyed with the result that the RIC were forced to concentrate themselves in larger towns where they were practically useless in the matter of upholding the law.”

 

A malicious leer came crawling over Marsh’s face. “Say if I refused to recognise their court, Ernie?”

 

“You’d be a bold boy Tommy, a very bold boy but of course, you could always be handed over to the Auxies or the Tans who were almost as vicious as the Collin’s gang in the so-called Civil War, you know no need for walls an bars when there’s always an oul mine to tie an obstreperous fella to,” Bates mused. “The revolutionary oddball on his ownio up there has exposed it all with bold words of revolt and revolution, pertinacious words, informative words that send the revisionist historians running to the jacks with the scutters but will rally the masses to get up off their arses and fight, actually he has a way with words that disturb the chattering classes and leaves them speechless, fucking dumbstruck in screaming silence.”

 

“Without fucken words!?”

 

“Without even a fuck to embellish a noun or a micromillisyllable. He also has impenetrable words to probe and interrogate the intellectuals, questioning words, strained words about me and…”

 

Marsh blinked in surprise. “About you! Fuck!”

 

“About you too an all of us here an all of us out there up to our bollocks digging in the bog holes of the Featherbeds with piercing perplexity.”

 

“Jesus!”

 

“And crawling around in the back of beyonds and hiding in the long grass with armies of pismires advancing up the legs of our trousers…..”

 

“Don’t tell me. The fucken unforgettable. Hiding in the gloom and staring into the void because some useless fuck has skimped on the dosh and let the getaway car pant, chug, and expire, juice dead before it had reached Leslie Allens. And then furious roadside cursing, noun free flurries, to be followed by a temper strewn hike across the barrenness, lashing out at the bracken before disappearing into the mist…”

 

Bates laughed. “I think I remember hearing about that Tommy, aaah the futile sacrifices forced upon us by gobshites who should have been in the Legion of Mary instead of….but at any other time could anyone find a better place to run out of juice than a snug mountain pub!!”

 

“Except that in the peloton was the Slug’s green Morris Minor, crammed with armed harriers, and arsing its way up the hill not half a mile behind,” explained Marsh as he gave his cigarette an industrious drag.

 

Bates gave a hearty laugh. “But Shambo there has noble words for sacrifice Tommy and stern words to counter the spoofers who are talking through their arses about stashing stuff in bedrooms when all they are trying to do is to get into your sister’s knickers for the glory of Ireland and then he has evocative words explaining the dialectical me historical bollocks sort of thing and exposing the famine for what it really was…..a fucking English genocide which sort of failed because it left the likes of you an me an Ructions to give Clarke a pain in the hole not to mention the Slug. We are the proof of its failure Tommy, pusillanimous proof I admit but God save Ireland, it's all she’s got.”

 

“That’s it, they lived, drank and sometimes pissed for Ireland,” agreed Marsh.

 

“That’s right Tommy an then there is the others this fucker of infinite nothingness has exposed, you know the hypocrisy of the Somme cap doffers and Poppy promoters and the shoneens in the Dail protected by the Slug and his latchicos up in the Castle and the presstitute…”

 

Marsh gave his shoulder a twitch. “Yeah, well the country is full of fucks trying to confuse the people with honey-coated palaver about freedom and individuality when we all know they’re only fucken promoting a big Ponzi scheme that keeps itself afloat by dropping napalm on peasants in Vietnam and then there’s the delusional left believing that without bothering yer bollix the revolution is just around the corner that’s around the other corner and the next fucken corner after the last bollixing corner and who are as much in thrall with banal consumerism…”

 

“But Tommy…”

 

“But me bollix. Know what I want to know?”

 

“How the fuck can anyone see around all those corners?"

 

“I’d say you’d need to sink a few dept chargers to have such piercing sight,” Bates laughed, “that you wouldn’t get served up to you in a premises of this calibre.”

 

“You’d need to join the navy for those,” Clarke advised.

 

Marsh nodded in agreement and called “two of the best Jimmy, please. Isn’t that trust now?”

 

“That’s what I expect from my paying customers.”

 

“You mean he’s the unknown author with special features?” inquired Marsh getting back to the talk about the anonymous writer.”

 

“I believe so. With featureless features. The writer, the scribe, the ink terrorist.”

 

“What’s he doing here?”

 

“Possibly waiting for his muse so that he can finish the story.”

 

Marsh shook his head. “All those words an you say he’s not fucken finished?”

 

“It may not be finished.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Because it’s a quare sort of a bollocksological winding kind of a tale that is unconstrained in its onslaught on those wordshits who mutilate history so’s to ingratiate themselves with their conniving nobility,” Bates laughed as Marsh studied the woman Maoist with the long black hair. “It’s a story that runs around corners and has no endings, only beginnings in peculiar places,” continued Bates.

 

“Like where Ernie…?”

 

“Like up the fat woman’s arse in Moore Street near where the O’Rahilly fell and died beneath the ruins of a grey sky….”

 

“Where there’s a whiff of gunpowder in the air.”

 

“Where there’s the smell of Revolution mingling with the stench of gutted fish.”

 

“Yes. I’ve heard it said that you can’t have a revolution without gutting fish.”

 

A woman, who seemed to Bates to be in her late forties, entered the pub. Her face was pale and Bates thought that there was something fraught about her appearance. She tossed her straight grey/black hair over her shoulder with a flick of her head then she nodded to Marsh and fixed a penetrating look from her dark eyes on Bates.

 

“Are you here long Tommy?” she asked in a thin voice.

 

“I’m here awhile Eileen. Just came in to get out of the cold,” he laughed. She gave a faint smile. “Did Ann come in Tommy?”

 

“No Eileen. Would you like a drink?”

 

“Thanks, Tommy but I best be getting home because she has no key.” “Fair enough Eileen, if she comes in I will tell her you were looking.”

 

“Thanks, Tommy.”

 

Marsh shook his head as if to suggest to Bates that he was relieved that the conversation, inane as it was, was over. Bates watched the figure in the shabby coat disappear out the door.

 

“Who was that?”

 

“Miss Strangeways.” “What?”

 

“That’s what the kids around here call her. She’s away with the fairies. Pitiful really.”

 

“She still looks well.”

 

“Yeah. I heard she was a real beaut before some fella stuck her up the pole and fucked off to England years ago.”

 

“Fuck!”

 

“That’s the exact word. She ended up in one of those dirt-box laundries run by the nuns. Story is she gave birth to a baby girl. Came out years later with a mind clogged with confused memories.”

 

“To bring up a baby in the spiritual tranquillity of the dirty tenement buildings around here,” muttered Bates in a sardonic tone.

 

Marsh took a gulp from his pint and shrugged. “The baby girl never saw the tenements, well not the Dublin ones anyway, the story goes that the baby was sold by the nuns to Americans. Not the only one by all accounts. Smuggled out on false passports…probably never finding out that they were someone else. Imagine going about all your bleeden life believing that you were someone who you were not. Living in the wrong history, fighting the wrong battles, listening to the wrong music, thinking the wrong thoughts, drinking with the scroungers, maybe scroungers with even more scrounging in them than the scroungers I know assuming their penniless presence is who they claim it is and I am who I am and not in the fucken wrong pub and after all that bollocksology ending up in the wrong coffin in the wrong graveyard beneath the wrong tombstone with the wrong name."

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The Laundry

 

Bates was shocked. “Jesus!! Some of them are probably now being used as fucking cannon fodder in Vietnam.”

 

“It's possible. The whole carry-on left Eileen touched. When she asked me about Ann well that was the daughter who was laundry born who she thinks is still out there and is coming home every fucken night…”

 

Bates continued to shake his head in disgust as he headed towards the toilets. Mrs Russell nodded after him. “He looks very downcast all of a sudden Mrs Murphy.”

 

“Maybe he’s heard that he’s not getting his hole tonight,” laughed Mrs Murphy.

 

“Yeh missed it,” said Marsh to Frank Davis. Davis had Joe Edwards and Tommy Byrne in tow. They had been in Gaj’s restaurant in Baggot Street where they had discussed the difficulties of getting the Trinity women into bed despite the widespread advances of contraception and putting a picket on the American Embassy in protest over the bombing of Vietnam.

 

“Missed what?” asked Davis.

 

“Ernie here after giving the fucken melodeon of a speech about the Redmondites trying to kill de Valera in Clare.”

 

“Pity they didn’t blow the ballocks outav him,” muttered Edwards.

 

Davis looked from Edwards to Marsh to the pale, pointy, wizened face of Byrne, a puzzled expression growing on the puzzled expression that was a permanent feature of his face.

 

“He did keep us out of the war,” said Kenny the intellectual who had been taking notes of Bates's speech.

 

Edwards glared at Kenny while Byrne rolled a cigarette. “It was a war against fascism, wasn’t it? I mean an uncle of mine was in Spain…?”

 

“Yeah,” said Kenny. “He was fighting the Francoists but he was also fighting the British who denied the Spanish Government its right under international law to buy arms to defend itself from rebellion and foreign aggression from the German Luftwaffe and the Italian fascists while Franco the rebel, who had no standing in international law was allowed to exercise the right of blockade. In fact, it got so fucking hypocritical that the few British sea captains that tried to run the blockade to bring food to the Spanish people were denounced as mercenaries by the Tories.”

 

“You know your stuff,” conceded Edwards.

 

“Thanks, Joe. This was the Tory’s obsession with preventing Spain going communist and the gas thing is that there were no Communists in the Spanish Republican Government when Franco rebelled.”

 

“Somebody said that the Tories, and in particular Churchill, were obsessed with seeing the red rat of Bolshevism gnawing its way into the cellars of the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street,” added Bates.

 

“Every time I hear that fucker’s name mentioned I feel like reaching for my log splitter,” remarked Marsh.

 

“You might as well say that Hitler was Churchill’s baby…” added Liam Sutcliffe. He had joined the group having been inactive for a few years and having, in his own words, been ‘bored ballocks’ with the same old politics.

 

Marsh welcomed his re-entry into militant politics saying that his previous activities spoke volumes and that all he needed to do now was to present himself to Clarke and “order a round of drinks for the lads.”

 

“Blame the Brits for Hitler, I mean come on!” appealed Edwards.

 

“He has a point,” said Bates, “remember that as late as 1938 that lovable man, Churchill, was praising Mussolini to the high heavens for his victory over Communism. And about Hitler in the same year, he said that if Great Britain were defeated in a war they would have to find a Hitler to regain their rightful place among the nations.”

 

“Yes,” agreed Ructions, “there was a whole swathe of the British ruling class which saw Fascism as an antidote to Communism.”

 

“All ruling classes see anything as an antidote to Communism. Their loyalty to democracy is strictly conditioned by democracy’s fidelity to Capitalism,’ argued Casey.

 

“That’s it in a nutshell,” Marsh enthused, his face reddening. “When those cunts say they support democracy what they mean is that they support capitalism an they’ll kill any fucker who says otherwise…”

 

“And when they’re supporting imperialism they’re promoting human rights,” sneered Byrne.

 

“Of course, it wasn’t only Tories who suffered from this affliction,” Kenny cut in. “Sure Lloyd George, the king of the Liberals in a speech in Barmouth in late 1933 entreated the Government to proceed cautiously referring to demands by the French and the Poles that Britain join them to prevent Nazi rearmament. He warned that ‘if the powers succeeded in overthrowing Nazism in Germany, what would follow? Not a Conservative, Socialist or Liberal regime, but extreme Communism.’ In fact, a year later he said in the House of Commons ‘if Germany is seized by the Communists, Europe will follow; because the Germans could make a better job of it than any other country. Do not let us be in a hurry to condemn Germany. We shall be welcoming Germany as our friend.’”

 

Davis gave a low whistle. “Never heard that in school!”

 

“Or this,” continued Kenny, “that when the Soviet Union offered to stand by Czechoslovakia if it resisted Hitler, the Czechs were told by Chamberlain and Georges Bonnet the French Foreign Secretary, that if they fought with the Soviet Union as their ally, France and Britain might not remain neutral and might supply Hitler with arms and munitions.”

 

“Become the arsenal for Fascism,” quipped Byrne.

 

“And when the war started sure didn’t a substantial section of the Tories believe that they were fighting the wrong war and were calling for a switch the war policy,” said Bates.

 

“That’s right,” agreed Kenny. “In fact, the period when all was quiet on the Western front as Hitler ripped into Russia was known as the phoney war and letting Hitler rip into the Soviet Union was the guiding motive of Tory foreign policy and sure from 1943 onwards Churchill was waging war against the resistance movements and conspiring against the Soviet Union just as he had been at the end of the first world war when he was trying to fucking strangle the Russian Revolution while it was still in its cradle. So you see it's not stretching things too far to say that Hitler and Fascism were Churchill’s adopted bastards.”

 

“When you’re talking about slaughterhouse Churchill you’re talking about one of the great creepy crawlies of history,” explained Bates. “In the same year, 4.3 million people died in the Bengal famine or genocide to give it its proper name because Churchill persisted in exporting grain to Europe to add to the buffer stocks for a future invasion of Greece and Yugoslavia. In fact, he said about the famine or starvation in 1943; ‘I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine is their own fault for breeding like rabbits.’ And when British officials wrote to him in London about the needless loss of life he wrote ‘why hasn’t Gandhi died yet?’”

 

“It’s a fucking miracle,” declared Byrne as Sutcliffe, after rooting in his back pocket for a considerable time, paid Clarke for a round of drink.

 

“That fella would peel an orange blindfolded in his pocket,” muttered O’Neill. He had been detained in the toilets with a dose of the runs and was wondering how old was the lump of bacon that Bates had fed him.

 

“Jesus! That’s powerful stuff,” said Edwards thoughtfully, an appalled expression on his face, “and we should remember that a famine is when there’s no food. There was plenty of food in the Bengal as there was here a hundred years earlier.”

 

“Don’t forget that the so-called Great War that Redmond was so in love with was been planned in Britain from about 1903 or 1904. The aim was to prevent the Germans from building a Navy that could compete with the British…” said Kenny.

 

“Here’s to Ireland and Empire,” a voice called out. And then again louder and with overpowering emotion, “To Ireland and Empiiiiiiire!”

 

“Holy Jesus! Wouldn’t that put the wind up a corpse,” declared Mrs Russell. “It's Finnegan the poet,” announced Byrne.

 

The thin wavy-haired figure who retained traces of better times, raised his arms Messiah-like above his head. “I saw him in a dream, in a dream in which there was great slaughter and savage hatred and the earth was mangled with gore,” the poet cried out while snorting vigorously, his bright eyes dancing in his musket ball head.

 

“John Redmond covered in blood from head to toe sitting back on a poppy strewn throne as righteous as God, almost deranged in grief, exalted, he was in his outrage, he swore to trample down and destroy all those who had spurned his call for war for the Empire and he swore vengeance and fury on the dead Pearse who looked at him from the great unchanging whiteness with a blind eye and then I saw the throne, hoisted as it was, on the shoulders of a cadaverous crowd slowly sink with them into a cesspool of the new dead of the Great War and they crushing down on the Starvation dead and down the throne slipped into the human mire and all the terrible time a cursing splurge coming from the frothing Redmond his fury only dissipating into a choking gurgle as he disappeared into the gory morass,” Finnegan uttered in a high trembling voice as he punched the air to wild cheering.

 

“That’s definitely Finnegan’s Magnum Opus,” declared Marsh, “the best fucken eulogy I ever heard.”

 

Kenny looked miffed at Finnegan’s uninvited recitation. “The Great War,” he emphasised was about ensuring England’s commercial supremacy in the world by using the Royal Navy to blockade Germany so that it would be impossible for her to feed herself….”

 

“Starvation!! Now where did we hear that before!” muttered Casey.

 

Kenny began a quick shuffle of his paper sheets. He stared into one. “Ah yes,” he mumbled, “here we are now and this is important. In 1910 there was a conversation between Arthur Balfour who replaced Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty in the 1915 Coalition Government and Henry White the United States Ambassador in London…”

 

“Read it out yeh fucking boy yeh,” shouted the Retcher Hannigan.

 

“Shut the fuck up,” warned Marsh, “This isn’t a school production of Julius Caesar’s fucken Will.”

 

“Balfour,” began Kenny, in a hesitant voice, said: ‘We are probably fools not to find a reason for declaring war on Germany before she builds too many ships and takes away our trade.’”

 

“White: You are a very high-minded man in private life. How can you possibly contemplate anything so politically immoral as provoking a war against a harmless nation which has as good a right to a navy as you have? If you wish to compete with German trade, work harder.’”

 

“Balfour: That would mean lowering our standard of living. Perhaps it would be simpler for us to have our war.’”

 

“White: I am shocked that you of all men should enunciate such principles.’”

 

“Balfour: Is it a question of right or wrong? Maybe it is just a question of keeping our supremacy.’”

 

“Sure didn’t the oul King, Edward V tell Sir Edward Grey that it was ‘absolutely essential’ that Britain go to war in order to prevent Germany from achieving complete domination of the country. That was at Buckingham Palace on August 2nd 1914 two days before Britain went to war,” said O’Donnell. He had been unsuccessfully trying to chat up the long-haired woman Maoist. “She gets it off on dialectical and historical materialism,” he told O’Neill who assured him that there was no competing with that.

 

“All smothered by false propaganda disguised as news but I’m still surprised,” said Edwards.

 

“You shouldn’t be because James Connolly always saw the Great War as a British trade war on Germany,” explained Kenny, “and he knew that German capitalism was superior to the British variety and that the German working class were part of the most prosperous economy in Europe in 1910. You see the Great War was a war by Britain on the German state and not a war by Germany on England. It was a war that was planned by Edward Grey and the Liberal Imperialists long before 1914 and it was completely fucking unnecessary.”

 

“Of course it didn’t matter a fuck to them when they were going to use millions of workers as cannon fodder while they continued to wine and dine, instructing their presstitute to fucking spew out the lies and propaganda like the Americans are doing now about Vietnam,” said O’Neill.

 

“Yes,” agreed Bates. “For most of the war, the Germans were a besieged garrison, blockaded by the Royal Navy on one side until 1919 and the Tsar’s Russian steam roller on the other until 1917.”

 

“Why was the blockade still on in 1919?” inquired Davis.

 

“I’ll tell you exactly why,” said Kenny, taking out a sheet of paper and holding it up.”

 

“Be Jesus, this place is getting more like a courtroom than a pub,” Mrs Russell laughed.

 

“This is by Professor A.C. Bell the eminent navy history researcher who estimated that the naval blockade caused the deaths of over a million men, women and children from 1914 to 1919,” said Kenny.

 

Marsh gave the table a thump. “Jeesus! They were fucken crazy about famines.”

 

“Here’s to a beastly starvation,” declared Davis in a mock upper-class English accent.

 

“The starvation blockade was actually tightened in 1919 and continued as a weapon of war to ensure the Germans would submit to the full Allied demands of the Versailles Treaty,” Kenny continued, “and turn their conditional surrender at the Armistice into an unconditional one in July 1919 to ensure the demise of a commercial competitor.”

 

“And the result was that the bastards turned the so-called war for the freedom of small nations into an ever-escalating war of Imperialistic expansion and left Germany so crippled that Fascism was the result,” concluded O’Neill.

 

A barefoot woman in a dark cloak entered the pub. The woman, her thick black hair in disarray, looked towards the unknown author with bottomless eyes.

 

“Is that spooky Reid?” inquired Marsh.

 

 “It might be,” said Bates.

 

The woman appeared to glide across the pub floor until she stood in front of the indescribable man’s table. She opened the clasp of her cloak with one hand, and holding it lightly with the other she let the cloak slide gently to the floor.

 

A hush descended on the crowded pub as she stood in faint fade white nakedness. Plopps, sitting at his usual perch by the counter, opened the neck of his shirt. The nude muse leaned forward and removed a comb from the undefinable man’s inside coat pocket. She began to gently comb her pubic hair. Many pairs of eyes, as if hypnotised, followed her hand up and down, up and down.

 

“I came over here tonight on me Honda,” said Marsh, “if I had known that she was going to be here I’d have got a helicopter. I think I’ll become a writer.”

 

“That must be the dialectical foreplay,” guessed O’Donnell.

 

The woman placed the comb in the nameless man’s three-quarter full pint glass. She slowly stirred the black liquid around for some seconds then she gave the comb a delicate flick and placed it back in the author’s inside coat pocket.

 

“What a fucking liberty!” exclaimed Mrs Murphy.

 

 “I’ll borrow that comb,” gurgled Plopps.

 

“You’re billiard bald,” snapped Clarke.

 

The featureless man stood up and in one long quaff emptied the glass. The pub erupted in wild cheering and shouts of ‘Tiocfaidh ár lá.’ The unknown individual then picked up the woman’s cloak and placed it over her shoulders. They left the pub and entered the darkening street.

 

“Whoever the fuck he was, he’s definitely one of us,” said O’Neill.

 

Soon after Galvin, the spy arrived in with the news that the Special Branch were outside in their green Morris Minor.

 

At the merry evening’s end, Casey turned to Ructions. “Cause a diversion, a few of us need to disappear tonight.”

 

As the revellers poured out into the dank Dublin night, the Retcher Hannigan staggered towards a green Morris Minor which contained three watching Branchmen and without further ado, he puked all over the windscreen. The car quickly emptied and three very disgruntled sleuths looked for a bucket of water from Clarke.

 

“I’m sorry,” he said firmly, “I only serve alcohol and strictly on the premises.”

 

While the Branchmen were running around Marlborough Street like headless chickens they did not notice Bates and a number of others heading up Parnell Street past the Blue Lion pub towards Summerhill.