An affable irregular then bluff, big-bellied, fair-haired figure moved through the Peacock. Moved front and centre like a ghost of Fianna parade drills had through generations to the bone.

 

And then irregularly but still affably spoke. Spoke in an amalgam of a voice that was mostly Cork with a little Dublin thrown in. Some London vowels too and the whisper of years in English jails. A Fenian voice.

 

“Who’s that then?” Marsh asked.

 

“Its Conor Lynch,” said Pat Murphy who had just appeared with a bundle of papers with Denis Dennehy.

 

So as Marsh demanded silence by banging the counter with the bottom end of an empty pint bottle Lynch spoke. In the jailhouse whisper, all Fenians hear with ease. “There was a year in which Padraig Pearse became himself when the boldness in him that he took from Fintan Lalor and honed, when the boldness became him when it had led him from his schoolhouse to the steps of the GPO and from there all the way boldly, to the Stonebreaker’s Yard in Kilmainham and his grave. And don’t tell me that he’s at rest. That Fenian dead man Padraig Pearse.”

 

Ructions strummed Christy Moore’s guitar and began to sing, in a surprisingly light tenor for the bulk and the weight in the size of the ghost of him. “Glory O! Glory O! To the Bold Fenian Men!” and Marsh even joined in with the rest of them and sang also. All of them carried away with the sense of the occasion and the copious amounts of dead cheap liquor that flowed from the taps and the optics of the long-dead Peacock.

 

And Miss Reid, who had made her way from Grogans by way of the Cobblestone to join whatever it was that was going on, joined the song singing, “We may have great men but we’ll never have better, Glory O! Glory O......”

 

Around the music, while Ructions strummed and sang, the rest of the rapidly filling bar sang, it filling rapidly with the quick and the dead, of which some were quicker yet than the living, and the bar itself being dead as death’s own doornail, Lynch continued:

 

There was a year in which James Connolly, the Republican Syndicalist, for the boldness in him that he took from Karl Marx, even more than from Fintan Lalor when the boldness became him when it led him from Liberty Hall to the steps of the GPO and from there all the way boldly to the Stonebreaker’s Yard in Kilmainham and his grave. And don’t tell me he’s at peace there, with Ireland yet unfree. That Fenian man James Connolly.”

 

So far had he got, with the party all around him but without interruption but no further. From the corner she had liberated and occupied with the boldness of herself, the yet not cold in the grave Miss Reid called out: “And what about the Countess then? And what about Lady Gregory who told the Tans in Abbey Street, ‘Up the Republic!’”

 

Then an oulwan from Gardiner Street joined the heckle, shouting out, “What about Hanna?” and when Lynch looked blankly back added, “Sheehy Skeffington, you ignorant lout of a man! She stood beside me in Liberty Hall in the Lockout, dishing out dinners.”

 

And then Marsh, his fraternal instincts demanding that he offer solidarity to the oulwan from Gardiner Street, shouted to Lynch, “Give over yer fucken chauvinism, yeh fucken Cork hooligan and Marsh sang in bursts, “Glory O! Glory O! To the Bold Fenian Women.”

 

“O Tommy,” Miss Reid said quietly, “How death becomes you! Sure you never have uttered such plain good sense and you living. You should have died years ago, you darling man.”

 

Marsh was about to query the lack of logic, not to mention the questionable good fellowship, of that remark when Lynch piped up again in an attempt to answer the hecklers.

 

“Come on now, its not as if I wrote the song and anyway its you were singing, Miss Reid, and anyway ‘Fenian Men’ is just a manner of speaking to mean Fenian Women as well. I’ve nothing but respect for Fenian women. The greatest respect. Sure wasn’t my mother God bless her, one of the best of them. Its not my fault that the Fenians were the Irish Republican Brotherhood and if there’d be a Sisterhood that wouldn’t have stopped me joining and.....”

 

At which point Miss Reid interrupted the flow of his exculpatory tirade. “Calm yourself Conor. I’ll not have you talking on so Ego Te Absolvo. Just compose yourself now and go back to what you were saying.”

 

So he did.

 

“The thing is this, you see,” he said. “Its the boldness is the thing. Its what’s in us when we’re in it, d’ye see what I mean?”

 

“Alright, it was a Fenian boldness led Pearse and Connolly out in 1916. All those Fenian men and women and the boldness that was in them. A boldness that came of working people to stiffen the resolve of a nation. And don’t ever say that was defeated at all, for it never was. The resolve of the nation was stiffened so that it voted in the 1918 general election, on damn near a universal suffrage, for independence for Ireland. Which the English then told them to fuck the rights of small nations and go shove it up yer arses, rather unaffectionately. But they refused to shove it. They showed they meant it. The men and women armed and the columns flew. The War of Independence was fought with all the boldness that any Fenian could wish for...... ”

 

A clipped, authoritative voice with a Corkonian hint in it came from further down the pub. “They said I was ruthless, daring, savage, bloodthirsty, even heartless. The clergy called me and my comrades murderers: but the British were met with their own weapons. They had gone down in the mire to destroy us and our nation and down after them we had to go.”

 

“Tom Barry,” Bates nodded to Marsh.

 

“And then the victories of those years were fucking negotiated away by Collins, the fly men, the clever fuckers with the deep pockets full of other people’s money for there’s no such thing as Fenian cleverness. We’re bold enough for anyone but we’re not smart at all!

 

“Followed by the fratricidal war that had nothing the least bit civil about it. After which, Collins having agreed to partition the territory of the country, Dev took it upon himself to partition the people. This when he reformed Sinn Fein as the 26 county Soldiers of Destiny who wouldn’t accept people living in Belfast or Derry to be members. On the Labour side of things, Tom Johnson, who with Connolly O’Brien and Campbell, formed the Irish Trade Union Congress and Labour Party. Tom Johnson led it into the Treatyite Dail to be such a very loyal opposition. That was clever of him.

 

“Fenian boldness laid the ground that the War of independence was fought on. Fenian boldness won the war. Then Fenian renegades undercut that victory and gave over the people of Ireland to the fucking profiteers, yes, Fenian renegades, old Fenians, so they knew what they were doing and how to do it well. And they did it well. When we came along in the sixties they had all the power and all the politics, the flummery and the flim-flam and we had nothing but what we always had; the boldness that is in us when we’re in the struggle. We had that but it wasn’t enough.”

 

Edwards, who appeared to have a tusk growing out of his head, stepped into the gloom. He had been just waiting for a chance to cut in on Lynch’s dolly mixture of accents, which were straining his ears and hurting his brain. He was accompanied by Sheehan, the intellectual and former athlete whose genius ran directly back to Robert Emmet. “No, it wasn’t enough, not nearly,” he snapped. “Sure we were the bold Fenian men and so were the women, Fenian women and just as bold. We were all ready for anything. But the Brigadiers collectively are wrong not to take the time into consideration. In that fucking book that has us all here and now living and dead, going over the same oul shite for the hundredth time. They’re not right the fuckers....to say we fucked it up. Jaysus! But I’m sick of history! I’ve read it all at one time or another. At one time or another, I’ve known every line and delineation of it. If I could blame history for the failure I made of my part in the revolutionary struggle I would and there isn’t a fucker living or dead could stop me,” he said, with emotion tapping his middle finger on the tusk.”

 

“I think you’re too hard on yourself there Joe,” Bates sympathized in his best Glen of Aherlow accent. “History, in a sense, did do us in. The land question had been solved a century earlier. Capitalism had become sort of cosy because of the presence of the Soviet Union, the housing, thanks to Fianna Fail’s public housing building programme had been sort of alleviated, the dole and the medical card helped to some extent those who fell between the cracks and all of this left us as rebels without a cause!”

 

“And now with free travel to hell, thanks to King Charlie,” shouted the Red Messer.

 

Bates leaned close to Clarke and discreetly pointed to his right. “See over there, Jimmy, Goulding, and with him standing as straight as a pikestaff, Dick Walsh with not a hint of his stoop?”

 

“That’s them alright,”

 

“You know in the Leeson Lounge Walsh told O’Donnell and Redican that Doherty was a liar, that Charlie did not know about the phone tapping, Walsh was emphatic about it and as you know Walsh was not a Haughey supporter.”

 

“That’s the last thing he was and Dick would not be the man to tell a lie.”

 

 “I’ve known comrades who have had too many thoughts,” continued Bates, raising his voice to just below bawling tone, “and I’m not talking about the sexual instinct. I’ve listened to fellows insisting on the positive aspects of nothingness, fellows waffling in fucking riddles about the substance of their buffoonery when their deep substance is mere humbug, comrades with inexhaustible theories of permanent revolution...”

 

“And permanent copulation...” muttered Marsh.

 

“I’ve known heads whose atavistic hunger for quoting Marx almost levitates them into a Dionysiac frenzy,” continued Bates as eyebrows were raised questionably, “and yes,” he shouted, “and Enver Hoxha because they considered ordinary language, English or Gaelic to be inadequate they go gasbagging out of the corner of their mouths,” he said, now switching to a Belfast accent, “about the nameless terror that stalked the history of Ireland and I’ve soldiered with lads whose clueless whims lurked in the bowels of their brains before rising slowly like bubbles from a gassy swamp, but who nevertheless, without the benefit or assistance of articulate theory, still fucking stood on the side of the Fenians.”

 

“Sometimes its the clever fellows that let you down,” said Miss Reid.

 

“Ah yes,” agreed Edwards, giving his tusk another tap with the knuckle of his middle finger,” there were a lot of groups around the great subversion in 1964. All of them would have said that they were Fenians but I’d say now that every fucking one of them were based less on ideology, whatever the fuck that is when its at home, than on a series of accidents as to who was available at a given time and up for a bit of divilment, real fucking divilment. It was always political, to begin with like me auntie Mary with the canary, but who knows where the politics went when the blood goes rushing to the head...”

 

“You might have something there,” agreed Bates, “there was an ego-driven-feeding-frenzy for arms that, at times, took precedence over the struggle against the capitalist-imperialist tinga-ma-fucking-jig, when we should have been mobilizing a citizen’s army as an armed cutting force to prevent the privatisation of our public services and the economic shafting of the ninety nine percent of the great unwashed instead of being doomed to remain a curious, temporary, unrepresentative phenomenon being shadowed around the back lanes by gobshites like Pah Wah and Mickser and....”

 

“Yes, yes, right Ernie,” Lynch interjected, “I see what yuh mean, but it just underscores what I’m saying about the need for politics. As Lenin said about a revolutionary theory....”

 

Redican raised a hand. “Sheeeee....listen.”

 

“What?” asked Ructions.

 

“Do yis not hear it? A kind of perturbation in the jacks.”

 

“That’s the right place for that sort of thing,” Marsh laughed.

 

Even the expansive Lynch was forced to shut his trap as a sort of whooshing sound could be heard in the toilet region of the grimly grey and grisly ghost of a pub. The pale-faced revellers gathered in a curious bunch at the top table and watched wide-eyed at what appeared to be a gurgling disturbance materialising in the whirling gloom.”

 

“I think someone is trying to come through,” said Murphy.

 

“Maybe its Karl Marx!!! Looking to have a word in Connolly’s ear,” Bates speculated as he peered into the grey turbulence. “He did support the Fenians after all an sure didn’t he kip up with a Fenian or was that Engels?”

 

“Once he doesn’t get on Marsh’s wick!” O’Donnell warned.

 

“Marry a Fenian too?” asked one.

 

“Marry Engels?” asked another.

 

“Marry a fucken Fenian woman,” explained Marsh.

 

“Oh!”

 

Redican took advantage of this most recent confusion to draw O’Donnell aside for a conversation both sotto voce and strategic. “This is getting ridiculous,” he said.

 

“Whaddya mean getting ridiculous!” O’Donnell replied. “It started out ridiculous. Then it got bizarre. And now its somewhere or other up Salvador Dali’s fucking arse. The question is what are the two of us going to do about it? We-re the go-betweens, the sort of like responsible adults that don’t have our initials carved into the desks at the back of the class.”

 

“Us! Responsible?”

 

“I know, I know,” groaned O’Donnell wearily. “But we have to do something, I mean this is supposed to be the introduction which provides the explanation to hold the Collective’s stories together as a book. But its fucking nothing of the sort. With this at the beginning there isn’t a bleeden sinner is going to read the stories. Know what I mean?”

 

“Well,” Redican said tentatively, ruminating as he spoke, “Maybe we could move it somewhere near the end where nobody would see it.”

 

O’Donnell brightened up on the spot. “Noel you’re a genius....well sort of, we’ll stuff it round near the back where nobody will ever read the fucking thing. Come on, lets round up some navies an get the fucker shifted.”

 

“Sure nobody will ever know it was us,” said Redican, “they’ll just see ‘Introduction’ up the back of beyonds and wonder what fucker of a gobshite typesetter was the bastard.”

 

“O’Donnell laughed. “The anonymous author will be shitting bricks when he sees it.”

 

“Ah well, they also serve.”

 

The pair moved quietly, surreptitiously slipping out of the paranoiac bar as it continued a war against death and into which something ominous was still trying to gain access. As they exited into Dublin it entered the Peacock by way of the jacks.

 

“Get out of the way,” yuh cunt,” an angry voice demanded. “I know me rights yuh know. I know the fuckers in there are transgressing every law in the green book.”

 

“That’s no Kraut, that’s a Kerry jabberer,” said Dennehy the Kerry anarcho-communist who despite his years in London and Dublin could distinguish country accents to the nearest ten miles or so he claimed. (In London he had correctly identified the exiled Brendan Clifford as being a Kerryman, but then some officious clerk fiddled the townland borders around Boherbue and Clifford discovered he’s been from Cork all along).

 

The toilet door burst open and the sucking sound ceased as a hefty figure in a dark hat and a heavy full-length overcoat solidified in front of the gaunt merrymakers.

 

“Its Festy Spratt, the Slug,” Ructions shouted raising Moore’s guitar above his shaggy head. “I’ll banjo the fucker with an F major.”

 

“Take it easy,” advised Murphy who reckoned he could pacify anyone with a quick explanation of dialectical and historical materialism.

 

“Erect a barricade,” ordered Bates. “There could be a moxy load of filth in the sewers behind him.”

 

“Not in my pub,” warned Clarke, having been woken by the commotion. “Yis are not in Derry now.”

 

“I have yis after all this time,” the Slug proclaimed. “After all this time I have the fucken lot of yis, after all the bum steers by those knackers, Josh and Nobber who tried to throw me off the scent so that they would get all the glory, the fuckers,” he gave a gurgling laugh as he slapped his thigh, “they have worked well in secret. They think that they have pulled the wool over me eyes as youse fuckers thought. They think that they have foreseen everything, think that they have provided against everything, but the fools, the fools they don’t know that I have yis under the Offences against the State Act....the fools.”

 

“Here we go again,” muttered Miss Reid.

 

“The intoxicating Liquor Act and as for you yuh little bootlegger from the border, gee-eyed behind the counter of a licensed premises in the middle of a capital city.”

 

Ructions wrestled a bottle of Jack Daniels away from Clarke who was about to fire it at the Slug. “Jeesus Jimmy, that’s the last bottle.”

 

“There’s more in the cellar.”

 

“O’Donnell gave them out when he took it upon himself to become manager of the shop.”

 

“Where is the fucker? He’s barred. Barred for the rest of his fucking aimless life.”

 

“Isn’t that plagiarism?” remarked Lynch, referring to the Slug’s rambling.

 

“Well he may as well throw in conspiracy while he’s at it,” suggested a sneering Marsh.

 

“You won’t be arresting anyone here tonight, because you’re not here, factually speaking,” alleged Murphy.

 

“And what would yuh know about it yuh gimpy fucker with O’Riordan and you and your Irish Communist rag outside the GPO, frightening the American tourists who thought they were coming to a land of saints and scholars, don’t think I haven’t seen yus and so I’m not here!!” The Slug stamped on the floor and some small pieces of plaster fell from the nicotine-stained ceiling. An where the fuck would you think I am, factually speaking?”

 

“Somewhere fucking else like,” suggested Dennehy.

 

“Like where?”

 

“Like up someone’s arse maybe. For all we know you could be the walking reincarnation of the last good shit that Jack Lynch ever had. But the one thing we do know for certain is that you’re not Fenian dead.”

 

“Definitely not Fenian dead,” Ructions agreed.

 

“You could be on the beat dead or up the Garda Commissioner’s arse dead,” suggested Bates.

 

“Or baton charge dead,” added Marsh.

 

“Or doctored evidence and in breach of copyright dead,” mused Sheehan.

 

“Not to mention....” said Ructions.

 

“Not to mention talking through your arses dead,” responded the Slug as he slapped himself hard on the face. “Hear that? I’m alive and what’s more to the point yees are here an we can let the dear departed rest and let the living...”

 

“That’s the point yeh see we can’t rest because we are Fenian dead and while Ireland holds these graves.....” explained Bates.

 

“Yes! Yes! Yes. Ireland unfree. I know all that baloney...”

 

“All that baloney means is that you’re dead, religious dead, an you shouldn’t be here...”

 

“Religious dead, Fenian dead. Have yees cunts been on the poteen or what because it wouldn’t surprise me at all, nare a bit, that if I was to search Clarke’s cellar I’d find a still down there...”

 

“You’d need a warrant and you’d need evidence for one and you might never come back out of that cellar,” warned Clarke.

 

Marsh pointed and extended arm. “You are religious dead, yeh thick cunt. Flattened, squashed by a double-decker bus in Westmoreland Street when you were chasing a dipper from York Street,” Marsh snarled, almost once again overextending his limited reserves of patience.

 

“I’m Special Branch dead,” the Slug shouted triumphantly, “we didn’t do pickpockets, only vermin like yees.”

 

“You were Special Branch before the cutbacks,” explained Bates,

 

“Cutbacks?”

 

“Yep. Cutbacks because of the PD’s wanting to privatise everything, the recession and then there was the Peace Process.”

 

The Slug looked bewildered. He lit a cigarette. “I never heard any of this.”

 

“Sure how could you,” Bates sympathised, “and you lying in an arsehole of a Kerry graveyard until I suppose, a few moments ago...”

 

Marsh gave a snigger. “In fact when news of your eh squashing on Westmoreland Street reached here the cheering nearly lifted the roof off and Redican or O’Donnell called for a drink on the house.”

 

“I haven’t been paid for that yet,” remarked Clarke stoically.

 

“Wonder you didn’t hear the roar when they were shovelling you into a plastic bag,” said Ructions.

 

“Well since then you’ve been lying in that Kerry graveyard and it now in the middle of winter and the snow falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills because the Brits cut down all our woodlands to build their navy so that they could pillage and plunder the world, and the snow falling softly...” continued Bates.

 

“Is that the falling on the living and the dead bit?” inquired Marsh.

 

“Yep.”

 

“Is that not copyright?”

 

“Sure how could it be copyright Tommy? I’m not fucking writing it. Repeating what Tommy Byrne just said.”

 

“Lack of evidence,” snapped Sheehan with an authoritative wave of his hand.

 

“Is Byrne here? The Byrne who lived in Hardwicke Street flats opposite George’s church who kept on about the whirr in the air high up, the bells bla, blab, bla loud dark iron?”

 

“The very same. He just walked in, white as a sheet, saying that the snow was falling on the living and the brown bread.”

 

“Ah!”

 

Bates took a gulp from his Guinness and pulled his chair forward. He apologised to the Slug for the interruption and beckoned him to sit down. Then he examined some of his fingernails and cleared his throat. Others crowded around the table.

 

Dick Timmons, like a phantom, sidled alongside the table. “Does he need a solicitor Ernie?”

 

“No Dick. I’m only marking his card about what is going on.”

 

“A clueless Branchman.”

 

“Its simple really. Two words” began Bates. “Two powerful words with a hyphen. Neo-liberalism. Fuck the labour theory of surplus value and all that jazz...fuck Marx, fuck even Keynes, fuck anyone who doesn’t want to drag the whole machinery of government into a bathroom and drown it.”

 

“I’m not with you,” admitted the Slug, whose ham-like face had adopted a quizzical look.

 

“I know, its a bit complicated for the likes of you,” Bates continued, “but bear with me as all this happened after the loud screech of bus brakes, remember.”  

 

The Slug winced. As he was about to speak Bates gave an authoritative shake of his head. “Cutbacks in the public sector. Chop, chop, chop.” He made pretend karate chops with his hand on the table. The glasses hopped a little. “Nurses, teachers...maybe community cops! You think of any body of workers that society needs and they were chopped and replaced by people who produce nothing but share certificates. Financial centres became the new houses of worship and the vital industries were exported to China and such places. Rentier capitalism became the order of the day.”

 

The Slug gave more confused grimaces. “Why?”

 

“They didn’t believe in society,” ventured Lynch.

 

“Conor is right,” agreed Marsh. “They call themselves tax choppers and they prey on people’s greed. Low taxes for the rich, low wages for the poor.”

 

“Exactly, like Thatcher, they made greed the greatest human virtue, the only virtue,” said Murphy who had been seated at the counter working on a programme that would give unionised workers the right to examine company books.

 

“Then there was the oil crisis, unemployment, emigration and naturally a big increase in dippers,” added Marsh.

 

“Dippers galore!” confirmed Byrne.

 

“I told you I was Special Branch. We didn’t do dippers.”

 

“That was before the Peace Process,” explained Lynch.

 

“The peace...?”

 

Bates stubbed his cigarette and blew smoke rings over the head of the hapless Slug from the remains of his last drag. “Yep, the Shinners did a deal with the Prods.”

 

“As Denis and meself said years ago that they would have to but it was a winning deal, a royal flush,” said Murphy.

 

“They won’t have to take the boats back to Scotland after all,” Ructions declared, “come back Ian, all is forgiven.”

 

Bates laughed. “Know what he means?”

 

The Slug perked up a little. “Of course. Then we could concentrate all our  resources into nabbing yee, the most dangerous, the most evil, the most....”

 

“Wrong time. You see we had all retired by then and anyway youse only managed to lock up a few of us.”

 

“And that’s despite the fact that you knew us all. Disgraceful really. All that overtime sitting outside of houses all night long that we were not in,” tut-tutted Timmons.

 

Bates gave a loud laugh. “I nearly forgot, the good old telephonists and their hoax phone calls returning the favour after we helped them out in their industrial dispute.”

 

The Slug stared at Marsh. “We got you, Tommy.”

 

“Wrong again pal. I’m the proud possessor of a blemish-free record.”

 

“Well with us off the scene as well, the special branch or the harriers as we knew them was cut to ribbons and the likes of yourself was sent off chasing dippers until you got....you know. But mind you, you did get a big funeral for a....” said Bates.

 

“For a hopeless messer,” interjected Marsh.

 

“Don’t be cruel Tommy,” Miss Reid appealed.

 

The Slug was devastated by this sorrowful historical recitation. He sagged on the stool. Murphy, stepping over Clarke who was sleeping on the counter, balanced dangerously as he reached and took down a bottle of Paddy from the countertop shelf. He placed a double measure in front of the Slug and an extra measure again in front of himself. “On the house.”

 

“Galvin was at the funeral as an official intelligence officer,” Marsh whispered to Bates. “Hiding in one of the Confession boxes he watched them all rush up to shake the widow’s hand and some giving her long hefty hugs, all bum and tits she was, and they were telling her that he was the fucking greatest thing since Sherlock Holmes. Then in the pub later he heard Josh and Nobber talking in the toilets because he had locked himself in one and agreeing with one another that he was the sneakiest thing that ever crawled across the yard of Dublin Castle.”

 

“That was a glowing reference for a harrier all the same,” Bates agreed.

 

Marsh’s left shoulder twitched and twitched again, a sure sign that something was going on in his head.

 

“What?” Ructions asked.

 

“I was just thinking that O’Donovan Rossa fucked up our deaths and we can’t be at peace.”

 

“Yeah!”

 

“Well, how did he get here? I mean he should still be in the Kerry graveyard with the snow pelting down on him, shouldn’t he?”

 

“That’s a good point,” agreed Edwards.

 

“I mean he’s religious dead, Bishop’s balls an all that. He shouldn’t be running round chasing us.” Marsh turned to the Slug. “You are religious dead, arn’t you, yeh know like wearing the caps off yer knees kneeling and trying to see the divine presence, lighting candles to beat the band praying to Saint Miraculous hoping you won’t be fucken caught out doctoring statements and...”

 

“I’m a daily communicant,” confirmed the Slug, “I would die for me faith and I never doctored a statement, no meat on a Friday, here look at these.”

 

The Slug stood up and began to forage in his overcoat inside pockets. An anxious look crawled over his large face. “Jeeeesus!!”

 

His hands began to move quickly from his inside pockets to his trouser pockets and then onto his jacket pockets. He then initiated a furious search of whatever other pockets his clothing contained before he started to pat himself all over his podgy body as his agitation grew.

 

“Is he full of fleas or pismires or what?” wondered Ructions as he gave his somewhat frazzled beard a brisk scratch.

 

“Me Rosary beads,” said the Slug in a trembling voice. “I’ve never been without them, never, pure Mother of Pearl, Blessed by the Cistercians, Jesus! But wait an I show yee these.” He began to fooster inside his shirt. Soon he was desperately slapping his chest as he tore inside the shirt. “Me scapulars! Fucken gone. Me Miraculous Medal dedicated to the chastity of the Virgin Mary also gone.” He looked at the curious audience, a desperate expression on his face. “Wait,” he shouted, “wait an yee see this.” He loosened his trousers and lowered them to his knees.

 

“He wants to show us his cock,” said Bates as Miss Reid turned away.

 

“Me red flannel to Saint Blaize. I had it around me waist for years to protect me from shingles. Its gone too,” he cried out.

 

Bates stared at the shocked figure. The news, for the second time, detonated an irrational frenzy which cybernetically crisscrossed at the speed of light the molecular structures of deoxyribonucleic acid still somehow sparking in his feverish brain. “That’s it,” he shouted, “he’s fucking contaminated.”

 

“He did come out of the jacks,” Byrne concurred.

 

“My jacks are always spotless,” declared Clarke as he came to life.

 

“Its nothing to do with your jacks Jimmy,” Bates assured Clarke, “its just that chasing us has contaminated him, anthropologically speaking.”

 

“Whatever yer having yerself Ernie,” Marsh muttered.

 

“Contaminated! The jacks! How dare yee,” the Slug protested. “I was one of the first gardai to use Old Spice as I, yee know, spent my whole life devoted to promoting law and order.”

 

“For the rich,” Ructions hissed.

 

“For the benefit of all of society. Wasn’t all before me in the service of the state.”

 

“How do you mean all before you?” inquired Miss Reid.

 

“Didn’t me great uncle come all the way up from Kerry to serve in the DMP?”

 

“William Martin Murphy’s private police force who cracked worker’s skulls in the 1913 Lock-Out. I’d have loved to have fucken bumped into yer great uncle in a dark alley,” said Marsh.

 

“And didn’t his brother make the ultimate sacrifice in the Great War fighting for the freedom of small nations,” continued the Slug ignoring Marsh’s wish to alter the course of history of the 1913 Lock-Out.

 

The desolation was filled by a squelching sound as Plopps entered and uttered an indecipherable greeting from the bowels of one of his bellies.

 

“The British Army fellow could have been on Connolly’s firing squad,” conjectured Ructions.

 

“He was in Ypres from 1915,” the Slug replied in a low voice.

 

“Invading Europe,” Dennehy snapped

 

“He was at war doing his duty. Protecting England and Ireland He wasn’t invading places,” the Slug protested.

 

“Germany or the Austro-Hungarians didn’t attack or invade England. It was the Brits who declared war and invaded them,” said Bates. “In fact, the Brits have invaded and plundered almost every country on the globe. And sadly they were helped in this by thousands of Irishmen who were turned into deluded killers.”

 

Bates ordered another round of drinks from Byrne who was now helping Clarke from behind the counter. “Well the way I see it, Denis,” Bates reasoned, “is that these Irishmen in the Great War either joined the British Army because they were mercenaries, were looking for a bit of fucking excitement not realising the hell that is war or were deluded into thinking that they were fighting for a good cause and for that they were galivanting around Europe killing people in their thousands and in turn being killed in their thousands, while promoting British imperialism by the bayonet, and that’s not to count the surrogates who remained here as RIC men and DMP men and helped the Black an Tans and the Auxies to burn towns and plunder and murder Irishmen.”

 

The Slug gave a bit of a grunt as he lit a cigarette. “Now why does burning towns remind me of someone here?” he muttered. Then he stared dolefully into his whiskey glass.

 

“Have another drop in that,” advised Edwards, “you look a bit shocked. Doesn’t he look a bit shocked Sean?”

 

“He looks like he’s seen a ghost.”

 

“They don’t teach that kind of history in the Castle,” said Dennehy.

 

A strange whooshing sound emanated from the toilet area. This was followed by a thumping in the dark air and pulsating plopping noises.

 

“I didn’t see anyone go into the jacks,” said Marsh.

 

“It sounds a bit like Plopps but he’s at the counter,” confirmed Bates.

 

Suddenly the toilet door burst open and out sprang the lithe, late figure of Blackie Byrne the Branchman.

 

“Its another fucking contaminant,” warned Bates.

 

Byrne, his greying black hair combed back, was dressed in a smart dark suit. He peered into the gloomy interior for a few seconds. Then he pulled a .38 colt from a shoulder holster and stepped forward like a cock on the sixth of January.

 

“I have yis now,” he shouted. “Where’s the fucker who blew up me car in Pearse Street?” he demanded, “I could have been sitting in it...”

 

“I think that was the idea,” muttered Marsh.

 

“Come out an face the music yiz fucking cowardly bunch of mother fuckers.”

 

“Its alright Blackie, we’re really not here because we’re all dead,” appealed the Slug.

 

“What are you gasbagging about an what are you doing with those fuckers you sneaky fucker with yer trousers down around yer ankles?”

 

“Why doesn’t he fuck off and complain to the confidential recipient,” suggested Dennehy.

 

Byrne craned his neck and squinted into the embedding gloom before uttering a triumphant shout: “Don’t think I don’t see yeh Miss Reid and don’t think I’ve forgotten. I’ll have yeh fucking know that there was never a tincture of dementia in the last seven generations of the Byrnes. Not a sniff of it. No sir. I remember everything. Every fucking thing of that night. That evening. Oh yes you did yer outmost to turn my acceptance speech on receiving my bravery, beyond the call of duty award, all those years ago into a ah, a, a, muddled disaster. You tried yer damnest to twist something that should be lucid, intelligent, mellifluous, imaginative, grandiloquent, dignified, enigmatically pregnant and sumptuous like a passage from Milton who may in some minds be an untutored genius though I would not have him refined like Hardy or Donne and where was I now....”

 

 

 

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Miss Reid 1970

 

“Does he ever take a breath?” muttered Ructions.

 

“......Oh yes, you were hoping,” Byrne continued, “for something uncouth, semi-barbarous, bombastic, metaphorically confused, an unconstrained heap of verbal shite. That’s what you were looking for as you sat there in the front row and to this very day I can’t for the life of me know how you got into that prestige event to sit there in front of me in your leather mini with no knickers and you flashing me every time my gaze lowered, ha, ha, well that wouldn’t work now with yer skinny, wrinkled, shrivelled legs, no.....”

 

“Shame! Shame,” screeched Mrs Russell the dead, Fenian-contaminated, wife of the long-dead Hookie Russell.

 

“Get off the stage yah fucken fanny basher,” Marsh yelled as pandemonium burst upon the throbbing gloom.

 

The commotion brought Clarke, who was about to nod off, to full life of a kind. He jumped to his feet and couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw Byrne dancing around with the unholstered gun. This was in contravention of his notice, prominently displayed, which was lovingly painted by a local artist who had correctly spelled the word ‘prohibited’ on the third attempt, banning firearms on the premises.

 

Without any thought for his own personal safety, the uncompromising republican of small stature, hurled himself at Byrne, grabbing his wrist. There was a brief struggle and the gun went off with a loud bang, the sound somewhat muffled because at the same time Plopps happened to be clearing his throat so that he would be able to deliver an erudite rendition of his favourite song, the Men behind the Wire.

 

The bullet ricocheted off the elongated heel of the boot which the communist, Murphy, wore on his short leg and disappeared in the direction of the toilets. The sudden excitement caused the hairs to bristle on the back of Marsh’s neck and he delivered a straight left into the Slug’s face. A loud gasping sound filled the toilet area and Dennehy felt something cold grab him around the throat.

 

“There’s fucking more of them Bates roared as the seven pillars of wisdom collapsed and heaven and hell descended on the Peacock tooled up, ready for action and rearing for a row.

 

Ragnarok, the Twilight of the Gods and the end of life as we once knew it, was transpired, much as the Northmen had expected and sung about. The Midgard Serpent Jormungandr, raised his head in O’Connell Street by the Spike and demanded his immigrant’s right to unemployment benefits. Fenrisulfr Wolf jumped on Howth Head and howled at the passing ferries.

 

Hela Lokidottir transported herself to Ballyfermot when a chanting cove of the Connolly Youth Movement had summoned her for purposes of which Mick O’Riordan may have disapproved.

 

“Oh happy days,” exulted Marsh, in the middle of he knew not what.

 

“Are here again,” sang Ructions brandishing the Portarlington guitar like a weapon of mass destruction as he jumped headlong for the fun of whatever the fuck fray it chanced to be.

 

Cries of “Author,” “Author,”  “Come out the fuck whoever you are!” “Where’s the fucking eejits authored but not anchored to this pile of literary bilge?” Mingled with a general chorus of disapprobation as the howling mob of unquiet Fenians and rioting Branchmen cascaded from the overflowing Peacock, heading for the river and the bridges over it. Lemming like they were making for Grogans and the approval of Sarah in the civilized calm on the South Side, where they could avoid the RTE news.

 

Meanwhile, floating down from darkest Cobblestone through darker Smithfield to land darksome on the quays, young Aengus composed himself. Walking now with two flaming-haired Gaelic beauties, one on each arm, The Chairman of the Hungry Brigade Collective addressed the night.

 

“Don’t worry lads and lassies,” he announced. “The moral of our tale will soon be clear. So he filled such of his lungs as Gold Flake and John Player had left intact, “Ahhh but its fine to walk again and walk the riverrun....”

 

“No Aengus. No!” whispered Helen to the right of him, “sure that’s the start of a whole other book.”

 

From his left, Fidelma smiled, “Yes.”

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Still Protesting on Moore Street