Good old snake-hips, author of Confessio, and a much more nervous man than you’d expect.
He stole the car. He stole the car and crashed it into the fence and died and went to heaven and came back because it wasn’t his time or because there wasn’t enough room there or in the other place. Whatever the reason Tom ‘Bopper’ Keys came back, yes.
Tom ‘Bopper’ Keys was returned unto the earthly Earth. That much was certain.
“You will find it all rather difficult I’m afraid. Going back will be confusing, but we’ve decided that, as most of this was our fault, we’re going to remove your sense of fear as a bonus”, explained his rather forlorn and embarrassed spirit guide. No names, no pack drill.
It was St Patrick, of course. Good old snake-hips Pádraig, author of Confessio, and a much more nervous man than you’d expect.
“Oh, righto, no worries then, cheers”, said Tom looking from purgatory into the world and not seeing much of it.
“Is it working yet?”
“No, not yet, it won’t start working until you’re back on earth.”
Then Boom! There he was, inside a box, under the ground, with only foetid air. He was returned again but not born again.
“Bugger it,” he considered as he began scratching languorously as his new ceiling panel, “Bugger it, this is going to take some time,” he continued.
“You’re not afraid though, are you?”, queried Saint Pat.
“No, no I’m not.”
“Right-ho. No worries then. I’ll look in on you after tea. Take care now.”
I’ve heard of thousand dollar bottles, dug from a Napoleonic cellars over which a shopping mall was soon to rise.
The thing about expensive wine, by which I mean wine that costs more than $200 a bottle, is that I can’t imagine anybody slooshing its dregs down the sink at the end of an evening.
To my mind, $10 worth of Château De Plume du Plom at the bottom of a glass heading for the waste disposal of a stainless steel kitchen sink is an image of pure sadness.
Of course, wealth, real wealth is all about surplus. It’s not about what you keep; it’s about what you can afford to throw away without a second glance. The after-thought boys might chipping the crystal the enforced guests might be gurning over the latest piece of art, their fingers stained with labour about the stain the frame, but the wine doesn’t get a thought.
I’ve heard of thousand dollar bottles, dug from Napoleonic cellars over which a shopping mall was soon to rise. A thousand dollar bottle of plonk? How? Do you drink it? Do you share it with friends or save it for yourself? Is anybody rich enough to slob out on the couch, dressed in silk boxer shorts, crackling sea-salt and basil-flavoured fried oyster snacks down their fronts watching bad television and drinking the thousand dollar bottle in $50 swigs straight from the bottleneck?
This is what I was thinking as I looked out into the bright rain from the sweated front seat of a cab that I could barely afford, heading down the Paramatta Road in Sydney, Australia. My driver was a German who looked frighteningly like my maternal grandfather. So I immediately assumed that he was a gutter-bastard with no concerns for humanity other than how they were getting at him.
“You are Australian?”, he asked without moving his gaze from the bus in front?
“No, I’m English.”
“Did you find it easy to get into Australia?” His head was gently spiked with a fine blond crew cut, his eyebrows were translucent and I could see no other evidence of hair aside from the tufts that came like tendrils out of his ears – showing him to be at least sixty years old.
“Not really, not a problem, no.” I wanted to continue my train of thought, to work out why my visions of wealth had ended up sprawled alone in a room watching television.
“It was hell for me, forty years ago, so much paper, so many problems. Not like these Asians today coming in like drones. The drugs and the gangs now. Sydney is not like when I was first here.” He smiled and finally looked at me as we waited at the lights that turned the Paramatta Road into Broadway. It was a genuine smile, one that begged me to agree with him. Had I been in another mood, I might have forgiven him the tattered rhetoric and predictable spew that had already turned my day into a cliché. I would have looked into his speech and discovered a man with a past, and a few bricks to build a safe house in a confusing world. That day, however, I was in no mood for it. I needed a fresh day – a fresh afternoon at least, it was already two o’clock in the afternoon – and here I was mired in rain and a cabbie who could have come straight out of a left-wing agit-prop production.
“The reason I found it so easy to get in was that I flew in from Timor under cover of darkness last Tuesday. It’s simple if you know the right people. I paid about $10,000 US and had some papers forged by a man I know in Bali. The problem with these other queue jumpers is that they don’t have any style. No flair.”
“And too many children! The fucking Asians!” His smile had broadened and I thought for a moment that he was going to try and shake my hand. Maybe he’d got the gist that I was joshing him, or maybe he was simply so bitter that it didn’t matter. Either way, we were edging towards the lights that turned Broadway into George Street, just in front of the Central Station Bus depot and, looking at the meter, it was my time to get out.
As I left him, his smile reframed itself to a blank stare – no tip – and he headed off into the CBD. I was standing at the small crossroads that lead down into Quay Street, on into the Exhibition Centre and down to Darling Harbour or straight on to George Street. Quay Street – Sydney’s plaguey, rum-roasted past sliced back into sanitary futurism.
I decided instead to head into the crumbly, up and coming, old fashioned main street. George Street is bullied by an architectural gangbang where the old Empire arrogances of thick rock “establishments” more fitting of Manchester or Liverpool or Leeds battle it out with rorted high rises to shame the venerable old thoroughfare into their way of life.
What she said added to my later tears but there were so many of those and their reasons flowed into each other so easily that I can’t distinguish their flow today.
“Carry me quickly to the last place you remember us being happy together”, was the last thing Séan Curran had written. There it was on a leaf of grimy note paper that I took from the undertaker the day we all buried Curran. Too late. As ever.
On the other side of the note he’d written, ‘To You All of Ye, You Know Who You Are!’.
He was buried in the one suit he owned. A grey, woollen single-breasted job at least twenty years old. He’d popped the note into its inside pocket before going out into town for his last night. The undertakers found it on the Tuesday before the Wednesday burial. As ever, too late for Curran.
The thing with Curran was that he was forever leaving notes about the place. The beginnings of poems and stories, rehearsals for suicide notes. Oftentimes you simply couldn’t tell exactly what he meant.
He had worked for years on the railways doing a variety of jobs. He was tall and slim, dark, he wore spectacles and what used to be known as stout boots. He was an atheist and a small drinker but only on Fridays. I met him on the railways. I met him in the pub. I wouldn’t say we became friends but we certainly became brothers-in-books.
I’ll miss him when it’s all sunk in. When it’s all been soaked up. See, I’ve distanced myself from the process. That’ll happen all by itself. At least I hope so.
Curran emerged from prison a ruined old man. He told me that after several chats with the chaplain a Swiftian descent into religion had caused his loss of faith in God. That said, it also gave him a firm sense of belonging.
“Now”, he wrote, “I have the Pope and all the cardinals on earth!”
He came directly to my home to remind me of our times together. He impressed on me that, before he went into prison, my wife Mary should have been his wife.
Mary, Curran and I had revolved around each other before he had taken up what some called crime and others called patriotism. I’m now convinced that Mary had taken up with me purely out of heartbreak. I adored her with all the adoration I had. I loved her with all my stinking heart. But today, before his funeral, it rankles me that Mary and Curran loved each other.
I always thought the reason that my late wife, Mary, was my wife and not his was because I’d listened to her talk all about Flann O’Brien one pub night. He’d disagreed vehemently with what she said because she’d folded Myles na gCopaleen into her dialogue.
“Different names. Different people!” I remember him yelling, and her laughing.
“Different names. Same man. Different tones”, she replied quietly enough.
Boy, how he’d sulked. How he’d fallen for her.
It turns out that she married me because she thought; she hoped she would love me and there’d be less conflict in the marriage. She told me this in the cancer ward. She felt she had to. I agreed.
What she said added to my later tears but there were so many of those and their reasons flowed into each other so easily that I can’t distinguish their flow today.
She was my friend and we had this glorious house. We had two children, both abroad and doing very well. I talk to her ghost about Curran. I’d like to imagine they’re now chatting to each other, and now she knows the truth.
It’s a relief that I no longer need to hide the fact that Curran murdered her father on his doorstep. He’d told me that when he came to see me after he got out of prison.
