yell. ‘Leave him alone.’
Then he would wade into the centre of the circle, shouldering me aside, his Docs and fists flying, working his surprise to the limit by scoring busted noses and bruised balls. Sooner or later, however, he would find himself at the bottom of a pile of heaving bodies, curling into a tight foetal position to ward off the kicks and blows that rained down on him. Just as suddenly my tormentors would scatter, yelling and whooping, leaving James bloodied and bruised on the ground like carrion. In those moments I used to think that James was the victim not of his love for me but of his own rampant imagination. Now I can see him rising from the dust, his face bloodied and running like a clown’s make-up, and I curse myself for my cynicism.
K is for Kill
The axe swung through the air and cleft my father’s skull in two and he lay dead upon the floor.
L is for Lug
When I reached my teens I grew my hair to my shoulders. By then, however, it was already too late to prevent me from being teased mercilessly and earning a succession of nicknames. My peers were never short of cruel puns and covert abuse whenever I was near. ‘Ear ear,’ they would yell whenever I opened my mouth to speak or, ‘Ear we go, ear we go, ear we go,’ whenever we gathered to watch football matches. From national school my name was Lug and in secondary school the more technically minded tried to amend it to Mono. But Lug was the name that stuck and I hated them for it, hated them for their stupid wit and their lack of mercy. But I did not hate them as much as I hated my father on the day he discovered it. He returned from answering the phone in the hallway. It was one of my ‘friends’.
‘Lug,’ he said gleefully. ‘Christ, they have you well named there and no doubt about it. We used to have an ass with that name once – Lugs. Mind you, he was twice the creature you are. He could work and he had a full set of ears.’
I burst out crying and ran to my room. I stayed there the rest of the afternoon, weeping and grinding my teeth. I eventually dried my eyes and took a look at myself in the mirror and I resolved then that no one would ever make me cry again.
M is for Music
Because of my impaired hearing my love of music has caused much wonderment. Again this has proved a fertile snuffling ground for those commentators desperate to unearth truffles of reason in this tale of blood and woe.
I am a metal head, a self-confessed lover of bludgeoning rhythms in major chords and rhyming couplets dealing in death and mayhem. My record collection, now numbering in hundreds, reads like a medieval codex of arcana: Ministry, Obituary, Bathroy, Leather Angel, Black Sabbath and so on. My greatest solace now is that I can listen to these records in the privacy of my cell without maddening anyone. If there was anything certain to unleash my father’s temper it was the sound of these records throbbing through the house. He would come hammering at my bedroom door.
‘Turn that fucking shite off,’ he’d roar. ‘Christ, you would think a man of your age should have grown out of that sort of thing long ago.’
But I never did grow out of it and I don’t foresee a day when I will. This horror of this music is rooted within me as deep as my very soul and I would no more think of defending it than my father would his own lachrymose renditions of ‘Moonlight on the Silvery Rio Grande’.
N is for Never
As in never again. At the bottom of our souls all young men are sick. We do not grow sick or become sick nor is it some easy matter of hormonal determinism. This sickness is our very nature. Having suffered from the disease myself I know what I am talking about. It manifests itself generally as a disorder of the head, a slant of the imagination that preoccupies us with mayhem and blood, slashing and hacking, disease, waste and carnage. There is not a young man of my age who, in the privacy of his own heart, has not thought of killing someone. Many times James and I would sit fantasizing about a kill of our own, our very own corpse. We weighed up the options like assassins and narrowed it down to a single, clean strike in an airport terminal bathroom where there is an abundance of unwary victims and suspects. We were armchair psychos, already tasting the blood. Most young men grow out of this sort of thing, taking to heart second-hand lessons in mercy and compassion, turning in wonder and revulsion from their former selves. Some never learn and continue to stalk the earth with weapons, amassing victims in the darkness. But the truly wretched ones turn away also, not out of principle or humanity but from the antidote at the heart of the disease itself, the terrible soul-harrowing and puke-inducing disgust.
O is for Obsequies
QUIRKE (MARY ELIZABETH) died suddenly at her residence, Carron, Co. Mayo, May 21st 1993, in her fifty-ninth year. Deeply regretted by her sorrowing husband Thomas, her son Gerard and a large circle of relatives and friends. Removal to the Church of the Immaculate Conception, Carron, this (Wednesday) evening at 7 o’clock. Requiem mass tomorrow (Thursday) at 12 noon. Funeral afterwards to Cross Cemetery. No flowers. House private.
Your story on earth will never be told
The harp and the shamrock
Green white and gold.
P is for Patrimony
Four months ago James and I stood in a green field behind our county hospital, two unpaid extras witnessing a dedication. There was a small platform bedecked with ribbons, a few local politicians, the diocesan bishop and my father. The field was populated by a motley collection of patricians, merchants and outpatients; a few nurses stood at the fringes. Incredulity hung in the air like a fine mist. We were here to witness the sod turning on the foundation of the Thomas Quirke Institute for Alcoholic Research, a laboratory annexed to our county hospital and funded in equal measure by European grant aid and the single biggest bequest to the health services in the history of the state – my father’s entire lottery win. I listened as the politicians spoke on the straitened circumstances of the health services and on the pressing need for an institution of this sort in a province ravaged by alcoholism. My father was commended as a man of vision and philanthropy. I saw the bishop sprinkle holy water on the green earth and invoke the saints to guide the work of the institute. Then my father stepped forward to turn the first sod, his public awkwardness belying his easy skill with the spade. The audience whispered and shook their heads and as the earth split and turned I saw my fortune vanish before my eyes.
In honour of the occasion James and I left the field for the pub across the road and got sinfully and disastrously drunk.
Q is for Quietus
We sat in the kitchen drinking the last of the whiskey. It was two in the morning and darkness hummed beyond the windows. James was slumped at the table, his head resting in his extended arm, clutching a glass. His speech came thick and slow.
‘Every penny,’ he was saying, ‘every fucking penny gone up in smoke and pissed against the wall. I wouldn’t have believed it myself if I hadn’t seen it with my own two eyes. And every one of them bursting their holes laughing at him behind his back. The Thomas Quirke Institute for Alcoholic Research no less. Sheer bloody madness.’
‘Give it a rest, James, I’m fed up hearing it.’ It had been a long day and I badly needed sleep. A monstrous headache had begun to hammer behind my eyes.
‘Are you not mad, Ger? Christ, I’d be mad. A whole fortune squandered in one act of vanity. You’re his son, for Christ’s sake, it wasn’t just his to throw away. You’re his son and you could have been set up for life.’
‘I know, James. It’s
