chapter one
just read it and see if you like it. And if you do, buy the thing. If you don't, Tim Pat Fecking Coogan's waiting for your call.
"Hey," he says, "Look at the colours. Green, and white, well, ish, and orange, that'll be from the chicken roghon. It's the colours of your fockin' flag. It's a fockin' Irish tricolour."
Pronounced, needless to say, trickler, a perfectly natural thing to do in an accent which misses out middle vowels as a matter of course, but also, suspiciously, the way you might say it if you wanted to annoy them but didn't want it to sound deliberate. He said all this with a kind of bright cheerfulness which suggested that he felt he'd done nothing out of the ordinary, which was fair enough in a sense since if you live on beer and curry this sort of thing is going to be part and parcel of your daily life. The guide clearly felt differently.
Have you ever been to Kilmainham Gaol? Do go. It's an education, which I suppose is the idea. It's a whopping great prison in Dublin, that was built to house the United Irishmen in the eighteenth century, a bleak and nightmarish place that's bollock-freezing even at the height of summer and looks like something out of a Hammer horror film. Whatever happened to them, incidentally? My childhood was traumatised, and my drunken after-closing-time-in-front-of-the-telly adulthood enhanced, by Christopher Lee and his pals, especially the lovely Ingrid Pitt. Now there was a bosom made to heave. Sorry, that reminds me, Kilmainham, the scene of Derek McKibben's vile stomach antics. It was, come to think of it, actually Derek's idea that we go there.
"What'll we do today, lads?" he asked, after heaving his twenty stone bulk out of the creaking bed which had had the misfortune of bearing his weight for the night, "I fancy Kilmainham Gaol. I've never been, like."
No-one said anything at first, but, once it had sunk into the alcoholic wadding that surrounded their brains, the polysyllabic word was just the spark that Arthur and Fergus needed. They were off. Fergus had taken those pupils of his, very noble, and Arthur had got shown round by one of his mates from the Dail. I sometimes think he's got mates in every legislature in Europe. If the lads from the Dail knew the kind of orange sauce he spews out when he's had a few they'd be less keen on him, but somehow he manages to hold it in when he's with them.
"It'll be a laugh," he said, "Every important Irish nationalist for the past two hundred years has been imprisoned there, and you can see the bleak misery of their conditions."
Arthur talks like that sometimes. It's a bit like hearing someone read from an invisible book. There's a library in his head. Not a very nice library. The sort of thing you accumulate by picking things off the ten pee shelf in charity shops over a period of years. He's got an encyclopaedic knowledge of serial killers, the final solution, and third world dictators. And house music.
"The really great thing is that some of them were imprisoned for things they didn't actually do," chimes in Fergus, who, like most teachers, has a very highly-tuned sense of how the lesser breeds without the law ought to be treated.
"The 1916 rebels were shot there," says Arthur, "It is the holy of holies of Irish nationalism. It's where they feed their martyr fixation. It's a really spooky place."
People were still looking a bit dubious, but that may have been the Guinness. Anyone who's spent the night shipping enough booze to float the Black Sea Fleet is never going to look like a bright and enthusiastic little punter. I'd seen healthier creatures lying on the slab in a butcher's shop. Have I explained why? Reunion. Reunion and rugby. We were all at school together in Belfast, years ago, but Fergus moved to England, slightly less years ago, and teaches in a boarding-school there. He had taken his brats on a trip to Dublin to see the historical sights and wallow in overpriced Guinness in Temple Bar, and we thought, well, there's an ideal opportunity to meet up with the old sod, possibly with the off-chance of being introduced to a few of his upper sixth birds. There was also, as luck would have it, an Ireland-Scotland rugby match on, which I am delighted to say that Ireland won, much to the disappointment of the hordes of kilted Picts wandering about the town. This was why we were all hung over, you see. Does that make things clearer? I hope so. Anyway, I digress. But you understand that there were very good reasons for everyone's dismal state, and the frankly mediocre level of banter.
It was all going pretty sluggishly when Arthur said to me,
"Och, come on, Steve; they filmed the Noel Coward prison sequences of the Italian Job there."
Well, as I'm sure you can imagine, he didn't need to tell us twice. The Doctor lurched out of the armchair where he was flicking through one of our leftover copies of Whitehouse (we always bring porn to the Republic and ostentatiously read it in public to annoy the local yokels, who can't buy it. Oh, the joys of living in a free and Protestant country) and pointed to the door.
"Come, my children," he bawled, then sniggered, predictably and childishly.
Everyone got up and stuck their coats on. The thought of seeing where they filmed bits of the Italian Job, (can there be a red-blooded patriotic male in Britain who doesn't know at least some of the dialogue?) was the prime motivation. I have to say that most of us gave not a toss for the Irish nationalist aspect of the place. Well, I say Irish nationalist aspect, it's not an aspect, it's actually the dominant theme - or at least it is for everyone except scumbags like us. You go in and they take you to the old prison chapel, which is set up to show films, and they show you this great load of old guff about how all these great heroes of Ireland were imprisoned by the Brits. Arthur, who's not a hefty type - he's kept himself slim by years of clubbing and using drugs rather than booze to get off his trolley, with corresponding erosion of his mental equilibrium - and so ought to have had more sense, kept up a stream of heartless remarks:
"Good."
"Nice to know the old taxes went on something useful."
"That gallows looks a bit too comfy for my liking."
And so on. You can imagine, I dare say. The guide looked cross.
So, then you go through miles of cold, dank corridors, and you see the cells, and presumably it's all very moving, if you've got a compassionate side to your nature. They have this bit where the heroes of 1916 were put just before they were shot. The guide was a big lad with a beard, who for reasons best known to himself insisted on referring to all the rebels in Gaelic.
"I mean to say," hissed Arthur, "Do we mince around spouting Rabbie Burns gibberish about there being a moose loose aboot this hoose?"
The Master and Fergus tried to look interested and pious as Gerry Adams' brother woffled on about Paddy Pearse's wee school, as if the army shot him for being a teacher and not for wrecking half Dublin. A funny pair; one of his ex-girlfriends once said the Master looked like Michael J. Fox, which he does a bit insofar as he's a short-arse but good-looking with it, made all the more so by his decision to stand beside Fergus, who is also a short-arse but is increasingly portly and about as handsome as a Halloween lantern. The Doctor merely looked bored, resting his stocky frame against a doorway and idly picking paint off the walls with his fingernails. I suppose that in retrospect, Derek was looking a bit green at this point, but of course none of us were in the best of health after the previous night's cavorting, and it was only two hours since we'd got up and eaten a thoroughly unwise kebab for brekkers. Arthur and The Doctor weren't looking too happy either, but they kept one another amused with sick jokes about bending over to pick up the soap in the prison showers. The guide overheard them and gave them a look that would have cut a hole in boiler-plate. I'm not telepathic but I'm sure my mind picked up the words "kneecap" and "cunt". He told some moving tale about how Count Plunkett, whoever he was, married someone called Grace Gifford just before his execution. They were never allowed to be alone together. After the wedding they got to sit for a couple of hours with a dozen squaddies in the room. More sniggering from the lads, guide turns colour of plums.
"For crying out loud," the Doctor whispered,"What does he expect? It's the twenty-first century. Things have come on a bit, comedy wise, from the stuff he presumably hears down at the shebeen. You know, Father Dingle O'Crinkly tells a few mildly diverting anecdotes about his trip to Lourdes, that sort of crap."
"Shut up before we get shot," I whispered back.
And then we got outside. It's a bitter, cold sort of place, but then, so's the inside. Derek remarked to me, in one of those enlightened moments of his, that you wouldn't want your popish pals locked up somewhere nice, would you? I don't suppose he would.
So, it's at this point that we go into the old stonebreaking yard. This is where Paddy Pearse and the others were shot by the Brits for the minor misdemeanour of starting a civil war when His Majesty's Forces were already quite busy dealing with the spiky-helmeted Kraut. How humourless can the English get, eh? This, we were told, is one of the most important places for our Celtic cousins, so by a process of tragic inevitability it's also where Derek does his thang with his stomach contents. Finbar O'Semtex has just delivered his moving peroration about how Jim Connolly, who Arthur claims was a Jock and arguably just another freelance arse looking for a troublespot, was brought in by the door at the side, tied to a chair because a British bullet had smashed his ankle, and he was already mortally wounded, and shot. This is a sensitive moment, in a hallowed place, and the lad Garrity empties his guts over the very spot. I tell you, you could have cut the atmosphere with a knife. Actually, you could have cut it with a spoon - it was pretty soupy, what with the stench and everything. And Derek McKibben, not content with what even by his robustly insensitive Ulster standards might be considered a bit of a faux pas, compounds his error with the remark I reported earlier.
I looked at the others. It was like a cross-section of Northern Ireland society. The Doctor was crying with laughter (the black humour of the shipyard), Arthur was trying not to laugh (emotional repression), the Master was trying to pretend it wasn't happening (middle-class avoidance tactic) and Fergus was trying to sneak out the back door (which in a way he did when he emigrated to England). What did I feel? I don't know. Not sympathetic, anyway. You may have noticed that none of us asked McKibben how he was. We don't do that. Ulstermen don't need it, you see. I often suspect that this is how we performed so well at the Battle of the Somme. Jimmy takes a round in the thigh and goes down, badly wounded. Sammy and Joe just ignore him. It's for the best, he wouldn't want us talking about it, it'll get better soon, let's not fuss like a load of oul weemin. We're being paid to bayonet yon sausage-eaters so let's get on wi' it.
The guide stares at McKibben for a minute, as if the most horrible thing in the world has just happened. It was obvious that your man was more upset than a bag of badgers that's been poked with a stick. This place was the holiest place in his universe, and some fat alcoholic yobbo from Belfast had not just parked his breakfast on it but had gone on to compare the aforementioned pavement pizza with the Irish national flag. He was absolutely livid, incandescent like a napalm exploding in a petrol station. To be honest, this didn't get to me particularly either. If there is one thing that growing up in Northern Ireland teaches you, it is that deeply held feelings and convictions are not innately and invariably worthy of respect. Ulster is full of comedians with fervent views on everything, and a good ninety per cent of them are stupid or evil or both. Had our guide been in Ulster, he'd have been one of the starry-eyed dreamers of dreams from the IRA's explosives department, so I can't say I felt a lot of sympathy for him. But that wasn't the point; it never is. What was important was what he was going to do to us.
It was at this point that Derek recognised that he might have done a bad thing. He always did have a sensitive spot deep down, and if you're twenty stone like him that's very deep indeed. He'd obviously deployed his own personal Captain Nemo to go and find it.
"Gie' us a bit of a rag, mate, and I'll clean it up for ye," he said.
The guide continued to stare at him. It was a bit unnerving, actually. I've never liked people who stare. There was a kid at our school who used to stare at you in lessons. Evans. He was a bit odd, a loner. We called him Stareway to Evans. And set fire to his schoolbag in the middle of the common room one day. It was made of some plasticky material and stank the place out. We all got Saturday detentions and Stareway got thirty pieces of silver chucked at him (well, thirty five pee pieces) and a bloody good hiding.
The guide finally spoke. Actually, he started in a whisper and moved up in volume and pitch, a bit like a Harrier jump jet.
"You bastard. You fockin' bastard, you fockin' fat orange black northern hun bastard. That's where they shot one of the greatest heroes in Irish history and you chuck all over it."
"Easy on the 'fat' bit, mate," says Derek, who looked a bit hurt, "I'm just big boned."
"You cont," shouts beardie, "Get out, get out."
"But we haven't seen where they filmed the Noel Coward sequence in the Italian Job yet," says the Doctor, as always a doyen of sensitivity and tact.
His career as a bereavement counsellor didn't last long, I can tell you.
"You bleedin' bollocks," the guide rounds on him like a hairy crocodile with a Father Ted accent, "That's all this place is to you orange shites, isn't it? A fockin' film set. Youse loyalist bastards make me sick."
"Oh dear, hasn't there been enough sick here for one day?" the Master tries to inject a bit of jocularity into the proceedings, hoping that this might mollify Beardy O'Weirdy.
And fails miserably.
"Get out, get out, you basthards," the guide's hopping mad by now. Saliva is beginning to fleck his fine big beard, as if he's been perched on the prow of a ship in a roaring storm.
We shuffle for the exit, Fergus occasionally bowing and scraping and apologising. He hates any kind of a scene.
"Ever so sorry, cahn't apologise enough, grayte pity," he murmurs.
"And you can fock off too, you West Brit bastard," snarls Gerry Adams II.
"Well, up yours then," says Fergus, "And the word's fuck, you Fenian peasant."
A credit to the teaching profession.
Arthur, who presumably still had a fair bit of lager in his system from the previous night, or may simply have swiped some of the quarter bottle of vodka I'd had for breakfast, then offers the absolute classic.
"I fucking know people," he shouts, his slight but fashionable figure swaying as he jabbed his finger at Beardy, "I'll have you done, you and the rest of the nationalist war machine here. You want to fucking watch your step, pal. Don't mess with the loyalist people of Ulster."
Arthur, as is perhaps obvious, works as a counsellor and lobbyist for the Alternative Sexualities Consultative Service, and is one of the most prominent figures in Northern Ireland's voluntary sector and caring vocations. His cv, which I have read, is more politically-correct than brunch with the Blairs at Granita. It's littered with words like "facilitate" and "empowerment" and "values". To be fair, at the end of a hard day, after all his colleagues have gone home, he runs naked round the office yelling "tits", "bums" and "fucking queer fenian bastards", just as a way of keeping in touch with the version of reality he finds most appealing.
The guide, waving a broom, shoved us out into the road. Outside the prison, there were a few big black cars, but he chased us past those, and we ran off towards the bus stop up the way a bit. He stopped, yelling colourful celtic abuse all the while, then trudged back into the gaol taking his bad vibes with him.
We were all breathing pretty raggedly, and the arrival of the town centre bus was a real relief, I must say. Somebody managed to wheeze out, "Centre. Six," and pay before we collapsed onto the seats. It lurched off and we stared at one another, wide-eyed with exhaustion, as our heart-rates returned to a rough impression of normal.
We had just crossed the river when we heard the explosion.