lived as long as I have it takes more than a few pounds to surprise you.’
‘How did you find out that you’d won?’
‘I just checked my numbers on the nine o’clock news and when I found out that I’d won I went and had a few pints in my local like I always do.’
‘You didn’t throw a party or buy a drink for the pub?’
‘I bought my round as I always do, I’ve always had money to buy my own drink, anyone will tell you that.’
‘Now that you have all this money, surely it will bring some changes to your lives, a new car or a holiday perhaps?’
‘The car we have is perfectly good,’ he answered bluntly. ‘It gets us from A to B and back again. If we wanted to live somewhere else we wouldn’t be living here. There’ll be no changes.’
The interviewer hurriedly thrust the microphone to my face.
‘Gerard, you are the only child of this new millionaire, no doubt you have high hopes of getting your hands on a sizeable share of it,’ she said hopefully.
‘My father has a sound head on his shoulders, he’ll not do anything foolish with it,’ I said simply, barely able to keep from laughing.
The interview ended in freeze-frame, catching my father with his jaw struck forward in absurd defiance and the halfwit’s leer spread back to my ears. In the news coverage of my trial it was this image which defined the tone of all articles. The national press barely managed to suppress a tone of there-but-for-the-grace-of-God righteousness. Their articles were snide exercises in anguished hand-wringing and between-the-lines sneering at their dim, western cousins. Some day soon I expect to read accounts of sheep shagging and incest purely for tone.
Y is for Yes
Yes, I have my remorse. All that night I sat over my father’s corpse and watched the blood drain from his skull over the floor. I was experiencing a lesson in how death diminishes and destroys not just life, but memories also. All that night I had trouble with my recollection. I could not square this overweight, middle-aged corpse with the towering ogre who had terrorized and destroyed my teenage years. That was a creature from a different era, a prehistory of myth and violent legend. It had nothing to do with this small, west-of-Ireland farmer, this lord of forty acres with his fondness for whiskey and cowboy songs.
There was a clear and horrible disparity in that room, a terrible and universal lack of proportion.
Z is for Zenith
On the first morning of my detention a small deputation of prisoners greeted me in the exercise yard. I was amazed to see that they bore several gifts for me – a ten spot of hash, a quart of whiskey and a list of warders who could be bought off for privileges. I stood bemusedly trying to conceal these gifts in my baggy overalls, watching the bearers retreat diffidently across the yard. Evidently my reputation had preceded me, elevating me on arrival into that elite category of prisoner who were not to be fucked with. I had a secret laugh about that. This of course is on account of the axe. There is no doubt but that the nature of my crime has made it a transgression of a different order, even in here, where there are men doing time for crimes that are barely speakable. Knives or guns are understandable – they are the instruments of run-of the-mill savageries. But an axe is something else again. It is the stuff of myth, the instrument of the truly sick of soul.
From the beginning I have received fan mail, curious and vaguely imploring missives from faceless well-wishers. Dear Gerard Quirke, Not a day passes when I do not think of you alone in the isolation of your cell. You are in my thoughts every day and I pray for the deliverance of your wounded soul. Today I received my first proposal of marriage.
I have begun to think again of my future and I have made some tentative plans. Yesterday I signed for an Open University degree in English Literature and History; it will take me four years. Now my days are full, neatly ordered within the precise routine of the penal system, meals and exercise alternating between longer periods of study and my record collection. At night I lie in this bed, plugged into my stereo and smoking the good quality dope that is so plentiful here. The lights go down and peace and quiet reigns all about. I spend the hours before sleep remembering back to the final day of my trial and I acknowledge now without irony the wisdom of that judge when he handed me this life sentence.
OLD MAN, MY SON
I have just returned from burying my son, I think. I say that not out of certainty but defiance. What is beyond doubt is that I have returned from burying someone and he was very small and a blood relation. To me and my wife he was our only child, our son Francis, nine and a half years old. But that is a minority opinion. To the greater world there seems no doubt but that he was my father, also named Francis, an aged hero of the War of Independence. The old men who came up to me on sticks as I stood by the graveside were in no doubt as to the identity of the corpse. Grabbing me by the arm with their claw-like hands they spoke fervently:
‘I’m sorry about your father, John. He was the last of a breed of heroes. It’s a shame the way time passes.’ Or a variation: ‘I remember him well, John. We all looked up at him. He was an inspiration.’
I stood there on the graveside as the rain fell steadily, darkening the soil which the grave diggers were heaping on the coffin. I continued to receive this doddery procession of old men who made their way cautiously over the slippery ground. They shook my hand and offered their sympathies and I shook theirs and nodded in acceptance. But in truth I had not a clue what was happening about me. Here was the world, present on the twenty-eighth of March 1991, at the funeral of my father while me and my wife could have sworn that three years previous to the day we had buried him and now we were here at the graveside of our only son Francis.
My wife, surrounded by the emotional scaffolding of her brothers and sisters, is in the next room grieving. She does not have a clue either, we seem to be all alone in this horror. And it is precisely because of this aloneness that some sense has to be made of the whole thing, some sense no matter how small. It is this lack of sense which has me here writing.
Let me be clear. When I have finished writing I do not expect to have achieved some all-explaining insight into the unique horror which has held sway in our home for the last six months. That onus of explanation seems to me an almost intolerable burden to place upon any writer. Even before I start, I know I will never be able to write an explanation and even if by some miracle I were to achieve one I do not think that any written one would satisfy my heart. A written explanation, lying on a page, bloodless and incapable of making itself felt in my heart – the only place where an explanation has any validity – is no explanation. Therefore my task in this writing is more modest. All I hope to do is lay down the facts so that in these at least there will be some clarity. From the whole debris of this horror salvaging the facts is the least I can do for my wife and myself.
I will start with my father. The relevant thing about my father is that he was a hero of the War of Independence and probably of the Civil War also although he rarely spoke of this second adventure. In one of the few Risings outside Dublin in 1916 my father, as a very young man, commanded a small company of volunteers based in the Mweelera mountains above Killary harbour. From this redoubt they attacked and occupied the police barracks on Westport. In an incident which has gone largely unchronicled my father then stood in the smashed bay window of the station and read out a self-penned version of the Proclamation of Independence to the bewildered township who had gathered in its square. The occupation of the barracks lasted till the weekend when military intelligence informed them that a Royal Irish Infantry detachment with artillery back-up was being deployed from
