Getting it in the Head. Mike McCormack

a floor, nearly a hundred square yards. And damn the bit of harm it did us. It made men out of us, real men who knew the value of money. Now all this country has is young fuckers like you spending all day on your frigging arses, cunts who know the price of everything and the value of nothing, eating and drinking the quarter session with no thought of tomorrow. I’m sick of the fucking sight of you.’

      He would grab a hank of my hair then and lift my face up, his whiskey breath burning my skin.

      ‘But if your mother was alive there’d be a different tune out of you, I’ll bet. She’d have put skates under you and not have you sitting here all day like a frigging imbecile.’

      This was the inevitable point of breakdown, the moment at which all his vehemence would drain away, rendering him mawkish and pathetic. He would collapse by the stove, weeping and snuffling into his hands.

      ‘Oh Mary, Mary my love.’

      I did not know which was the most terrifying, the honest and direct terror from which there was no escape or this genuine grief which was his alone.

      X is for Xenophobe

      We watched the interview on television the following evening. A study in western gothic, it showed the three of us standing in the doorway, my mother staring into her hands, plainly abashed by the attention, my father square-jawed and sullen, glowering darkly at the camera. At their backs I rose up between them, a halfwit’s leer covering my face. The bright young interviewer, all smiles and bonhomie, waved a microphone in my father’s face.

      ‘Mr Quirke, you are the latest Lotto millionaire, the biggest in its history, it must have come as a complete shock to you.’

      Father avoided the bait skilfully.

      ‘No,’ he said drily, barely hiding his contempt. ‘When you have 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