weight of a big bunch of flowers. I asked the man how the game went. He threw his eyes up to heaven.
“A draw,” he said. “They threw it away.”
________________
1 The images are by now familiar, part of the nation’s dreaming. Shot in real time and relayed across five countries and four time zones they come across, even in memory, as pure theatre. Solemnised and ritualised, the live transmission shows them walking down the slipway in single file. Spaced at three-yard intervals and moving between the guards on the pier side and the soldiers in the slipway.
Point man is twenty-four-year-old Swede Haakan Luftig. One-time leader of Doctrinal Corpse and boy soldier in the Scandinavian death-metal wars of the early nineties, he now stands convicted of four charges of copyright infringement. Six foot four, goateed and expressionless, his long-distance stare is fixed on a point somewhere in the middle of the fjord. His T-shirt, stencilled in fifty-two-point Day-Glo Gothic, tells us that Christ is a Cunt.
Behind him comes Emile Perec, twenty-four and convicted in Lille of seventeen driving offences while in charge of a public-school bus. In the grey light Perec has the pallid look of one who has spent too much time under artificial light—a snooker player or lab technician perhaps. Beneath his outsize shirt, however, is the greyhound physique of a man who at one time represented the future of French middle-distance running.
Third up is Jimmy Callanan, a twenty-six-year-old Scottish nationalist, sentenced to fifteen months at the Old Bailey for driving a white Mercedes bearing diplomatic number plates and tax and insurance discs registered to the Republic of Pictland—a two-acre field of scrubland outside the town of Arbroath.
Second last is Didac Jorda. Sporting the colours of FC Barcelona, he is the only one with a smile on his face. His career as a locksmith with los servicios sociales de Cataluña is on hold while he serves out an eight-month sentence for carrying a concealed weapon inside the Bernabeau Stadium.
Last up is JJ O’Malley. Eyes fixed to the ground, he moves with a stiffness which has everything to do with an easy sense of embarrassment at being the focus of such drama. The clueless onlooker would pick him out as the one carrying the most grievous sin. It is all the more ironic therefore that he is the only one of the five not carrying a criminal conviction. His very innocence, in fact, is one of the conditions of him being here as he is.
2 They drift in from the wings, rotating through six-hour shifts, the supporting cast of neuro-ICU nurses. Moving in the hyphenated time-lapse motion of the webcast there is something of the crisis apparition about them. Their white uniforms, fluorescing on our screens and moni tors beyond accurate definition, lend them this aura of electedness.
A hand-picked elite, lured here by professional curiosity and a time-and-a-half pay deal, they shepherd their charges one on one through the cloudless echoing topography of this three-month interregnum. Their own essential cluelessness, the impossible empathy gap, proves no hindrance to the essential tasks of provisioning and orienting their subjects through the staging posts of this journey.
Confidentiality clauses bind them into their supporting role. However, like any elite happy in their work, they have their own anthem. Stitched together from snatched phrases off the webcast, in five-part harmony and to the tune of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” . . .
MRIs wing through the skies
On broadbands straight and true
Drawn down to LEDs
Plasma monitors too.
PETs and encephalographs
All our readings true
Oh-oh tidings of comfort and joy
Comfort and joy
Oh-oh tidings of comfort and joy.
It needs work but it’s to their credit that they’d be the first to admit it.
GERARD FALLON
The altar boy from hell?—yes, I remember that. Don’t ask me who put it on him but from what I remember it was on him the first day he came to this school. The funny thing about it is that he never really was an altar boy. That day he went on fire and was nearly destroyed—that was his last day ever in a church as far as I know. But that’s how it is in a small town like this, an incident like that can mark you in more ways than one.
I’d say in thirty years of teaching JJ O’Malley was the brightest young fella I’ve ever come across; the brightest by some distance. This school’s never had a student with his abilities across the whole curriculum—our very own genius. Of course we’d seen those exam results of his and marvelled at them but it was one thing seeing them and another thing entirely coming face to face with the lad himself. There was nothing he wasn’t good at, no subject he wasn’t better at than any of his peers. Maths, physics, geography, literature, you name it, there was nothing he couldn’t turn his mind to. He flew through any exam he ever sat without breaking sweat: brains to burn as they say.
But of course not everything interested him. The science subjects, maths, physics, chemistry—he had little enough interest in anything built on formulas or that argued towards definite conclusions. It was the discursive ones that drew him out and got him excited. English, history, religious instruction, civics—anything that led to argument and debate and multiple interpretation—that’s where he was in his element. And of course he was the bookish sort too who liked flourishing big jawbreakers of words. Ontological for instance— you won’t hear too many fifteen-year-olds coming out with that one. No, nor secondary school civics teachers either. I remember going to the dictionary for that one and I remember as well being none the wiser after I found it.
“There is an ontological and ethical priority established in the first paragraph,” JJ repeated nervously.
“I’ll take your word for it, JJ. But could you render that into plain English for the rest of us?”
He leaned forward on his elbows then, his hands clasped on the desk. This was a bad sign; JJ was about to get up on one of his hobby horses. If past form was anything to go by the class would pass in a blizzard of words and ideas and most of it would be lost on everyone around him. Still though, it was always worth seeing JJ vexed with the world and in full flow.
“The problem is that the constitution contradicts itself in the preamble, the opening paragraph. It recognises not itself but God as the Supreme Authority, the source of all laws including itself. The phrase . . .”
“I don’t see the problem, JJ. The constitution is the bedrock of civil law in this country, just as it is in liberal democracies the world over.”
“No, it is not and that is exactly the point. God is the foundation of civil law in this country.”
He was clasping his hands under the table now to stop himself trembling. You could see he loved these discussions but you could see also that he was almost afraid of himself. He told me once he suffered from a kind of mind-racing— what he called his mindrot meditations. Sometimes ideas would come to him in the middle of the night and keep him awake till all hours, chasing after them to wherever they led him—up blind alleys and down dead ends as he put it himself. This sounded like one of them.
“Granted
