a sudden a fork of lightning rent the sky and demolished my carriage. When my parents rushed into the yard they found me lying on the ground between the twin halves of my carriage, charred and blackened like a spoiled fruit. When they picked me up they found that the side of my head had been scored by such a perfect burn, so perfect in fact that, were it not for the ear it had carried with it, you could have admired the neatness and tidiness of it. While my mother carried me indoors my father stayed in the downpour, shaking his fist and bawling at the heavens, cursing God and his attendant angels.
In the coverage of my trial much has been made of this incident and the fact of my missing ear. Several column inches have been filled by popular psychologists who have repeatedly drawn parallels between the lightning strike and the axe. All have sought to deliver themselves of fanciful, apocalyptic axioms. It surprises me that at no time has a theologian been asked to proffer his opinion. I feel sure he would have found in it some evidence of a hand reaching out of the sky, a kind of infernal election.
F is for Future
My life sentence stretches ahead of me now, each day an identical fragment of clockwork routine piled one upon the other into middle age. I do not care to think about it.
Ten months ago, however, after my father came into his fortune, I dreamt of a real future. Hour after hour I spent in my room working out the scope and extent of it, embellishing it with detail. I polished it to a gleaming prospect of travel in foreign climes, sexual adventure and idle indulgence. Mapped it out as a Dionysian odyssey, a continual annihilation of the present moment with no care for the morrow. It would take me in glorious circumnavigation of the earth all the way to my grave, ending in a fabulous blow-out where I would announce my departure to the assembled, adoring masses – an elegant, wasted rake. I was careful enough to leave blank spaces in the fantasy, filling them out during moments of conscience with vague designs of good works and philanthropy. I confess that these were difficult assignments: my mind more often than not drew a blank. My belief is that I had not the heart for these imaginative forays. My cold and cruel adolescent mind was seized mainly by the sensual possibilities and I hungered cravenly for them.
G is for God
My father stayed in the downpour to decry the heavens and my mother pointed out in later years that it was at this moment God set his face against us and withdrew all favour. Whatever about God, it was at this moment that my father turned his back on all religious observance, an apostasy of no small bravery in our devout village and probably the only trait in his personality I inherited when I entered my own godless teens. A steady line of self-appointed evangelists beat a path to our door to try and rescue him out of the cocoon of hunkered bitterness into which he had retired. But my father’s mind was set. The God of mercy and forgiveness was nothing to him any more and the community of believers were only so many fools. He could be violently eloquent on the subject. In black anger he would wrest me from the cradle and brandish me in their faces.
‘There is no God of mercy and forgiveness,’ he would roar. ‘There is only the God of plague and affliction and justice and we are all well and truly fucked because of it. This child is the proof of that. More than any of you I believe in Him: I only have to look at this child to know. The only difference is I have no faith in Him.’
These rages would reduce my mother to a sobbing shambles. She would recover, however, and then redouble her observance on his behalf, attending the sacraments twice daily to atone for his pride. Icons flourished in our house and the shelves and sideboards seemed to sprout effigies overnight. My father ground his teeth and reined in his temper.
H is for History
I admitted my interest in killers at the pre-trial hearings. However, even now, I maintain that it is nothing more than the average male teen infatuation with all things bloody and destructive. Like most young men of my generation I can reel off a list of twentieth-century killers quicker than I can the names of the twelve apostles. At school I listened critically to the tales of the great ideological killers – Hitler, Stalin et al. I became convinced that the century was nothing more than a massive fiction, an elaborate snuff-movie hugely budgeted and badly edited, ending with an interminable list of credits. I came to believe that beneath this vast panorama of warring nations and heaving atrocities the true identity and history of my time was being written by solitary minds untouched by ideology or political gain – solitary night stalkers prowling alleyways and quiet, suburban homes, carrying their knives and axes and guns and garrottes. And I believed also it was only in this underworld that concepts of guilt and evil and justice had any meaning, this world where they were not ridiculed and overwhelmed by sheer weight of numbers. Bundy, Dahmer, Hindley, Chikatilo, Nielsen, the list goes on, an infernal Pantheon within which I will now discreetly take my humble place.
I is for Indolence
After my leaving cert I signed on as a government artist – I drew the dole. It was an issue of some scandal in the village; after all, my father was the possessor of probably the biggest private fortune in the county.
One evening after signing on I sat in a local pub putting a sizeable hole in my first payment – I was quickly discovering the joys of solitary drinking. On an overhead TV I listened to the news and heard that the unemployment figures had topped three hundred thousand for the first time. The figure was greeted with equal measures of awe and disgust by the other drinkers.
‘Christ, it’s a shame, all those young people coming out of school and college and no jobs for them. The country is going to hell.’
‘In a hand cart,’ another added.
A third was not so sure. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, a large, straight-talking man. ‘Half of those fuckers on the dole have no intention of working, they’d run a mile from it. And it’s not as if there isn’t plenty of it to do either. Look at the state of the roads or the graveyards for that matter. A crowd of friggin spongers the whole lot of them if the truth be told.’
It was a brave thesis, particularly so in a townland surrounded by subsistence farms, the owners of which topped up their incomes with government hand-outs.
But he was right, at least in my case he was. I went home that night and for the first time in my life I knew what I was. I was a sponger, a slacker, a parasite, a leech on the nation’s resources. Like most of my generation I had neither the will nor imagination to get up and do something useful with my life. And what was worse I took to my role joyfully, safe in the knowledge that I could fob off any queries by pointing to the statistics or by saying that I was indulging in a period of stocktaking and evaluation before I launched myself on the world with a definite plan. I could loftily declare that I was on sabbatical from life. Only in solitary moments of truth and pitiless insight would I speak the truth to myself: I had no worthwhile ideas and no courage; I was good for nothing.
J is for James
The only shaft of light in my childhood years was the presence of my friend James. Throughout my trial he was the one constant, sitting in the public gallery with his hair pulled back in a tight braid, chewing his bottom lip. I could feel his eyes upon me, placed like branding irons in the centre of my chest. Now he comes to me every week, bringing me my record collection and my books: Hesse, Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky, a young man’s reading or so I’m told.
James was more than my friend, he was my champion. I would be at the centre of one of those taunting circles, my tormentors wheeling about me, dealing out cuffs to the side of my head and insults. ‘Ear we go, ear we go, ear we go,’ they would chant. My defence then was to disappear down inside myself, down into that part within me which was clear and painless, a place lit by fantasy, ideas, books and music. Almost inevitably James would round the corner. I would see in his eyes the dark fire that was already igniting his soul.
‘Leave
