Getting it in the Head. Mike McCormack

birth and interrogation – both are issues of truth and identity.

      I am young, very young, but I have the memory of eons. I can remember clearly the last time and all I can say is that father’s work or no father’s work I am not going to let it happen like that again. This time it will be different. The world will be given an even chance this time and no more.

      I am young and I am willing to admit that I am not in full possession of the facts. Maybe there are mitigating details that I cannot remember but I doubt it. Therefore my plan is simple. Bide my time quietly and keep my ear close to the ground, my eyes open and my mouth shut. I will hoard up knowledge. I have got a good thirty years before I make my entrance proper so I will be circumspect. But I do know a few things; I am and I have memory and this time it is going to be different.

      A IS FOR AXE

      A is for Axe

      Six pounds of forged iron hafted to a length of hickory with steel wedges driven into the end. During the autopsy the coroner dug from my father’s skull a small, triangular chip which was entered as prosecuting evidence by the State. It was passed among the jurors in a sealed plastic bag like the relic of a venerated saint.

      More than any detail of my crime it is this axe which has elevated me to a kind of cult status in this green and pleasant land of ours. I am not alone in sensing a general awe that at last, small-town Ireland has thrown up an axe murderer of its very own. It bespeaks a kind of burgeoning cosmopolitanism. At last our isolated province has birthed a genuine, late-twentieth-century hero, a B-movie schlock-horror character who is now the darling of down-market newsprint.

      As I was led to trial several of my peers had gathered on the steps of the court-house. Long-haired, goateed wasters to a man, they sported T-shirts emblazoned with my portrait and short lines of script: Gerard Quirke for President they read, or Gerard Quirke – A Cut Above the Rest. My favourite is Gerard Quirke: A Chip off the Old Block.

      B is for Birthday

      I have picked through the co-ordinates of my birth and I find nothing in them which points to the present calamity. I was born on the twentieth of October 1973, under the sign of Libra, the scales. It was the year when the sixth Fianna Fáil administration governed the land, added two pence to the price of a loaf and three on the pint. In human terms it was a year of no real distinction – if there was no special degree of bloodshed in the world of international affairs neither was there any universal meeting of minds, no new dawn bloomed on the horizon.

      I have these details from a computer printout which I got from James, a present on my eighteenth birthday. He bought it in one of those New Age shops specializing in tarot readings and incense that are now all the rage in the bohemian quarters of cities.

      I was named after St Gerard Majella whom my mother successfully petitioned during her troubled and only pregnancy.

      C is for Chance

      Chance is at the root of all. 20, 10, 3, 12, 27, 8. My date of birth, my father’s date and my mother’s also. These are the numbers my father chose on the solitary occasion he entered for that seven-million-pound jackpot, the biggest in the five-year history of our National Lottery. And for the first and only time in his life the God of providence smiled upon him.

      D is for Defence

      I had no defence. To the dismay of my lawyer, a young gun hoping to make a reputation, I took full responsibility and pleaded guilty. I was determined not to waste anyone’s time. I told him that I would have nothing to do with claims of diminished responsibility, self-defence or extreme provocation. Neither would I have anything to do with psychiatric evaluation. I declared that my mind was a disease-free zone and that I was the sanest man on the entire planet. As a result the trial was a short(ened) affair. After the evidence was presented and the judge had summed up, the jury needed only two hours to reach a unanimous verdict. I was complimented for not wasting the court’s time.

      E is for Election

      As a child, nothing marked me out from the ordinary, except for the fact that I had been hit by lightning. I had been left in the yard one summer’s day, sleeping in my high, springed pram when the sky darkened quickly to rain and then thunder. All of 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