Emerald Germs of Ireland (32 page)

“No! It isn’t fair!” inteijected Carole, turning a chip. “It isn’t—really, Scott.”

“Oh, come on,” chortled Scott, “it’s just a bit of a laugh! We’ll do it after the gig tomorrow night! What do you say, Nikki?”

Nikki flung her arms in the air and gave Carole—who shrugged—an encouraging push.

“Oh what the hell, Scott!” yelped Nikki. “It’s the sixties, I guess!”

Yeah, it was the sixties all right, Pat was often to reflect many years later. The dirty rotten miserable sixties that turned out to be the most hateful time of his life. The effing cunting hooring bastarding sixties when all the things that you ever wanted to do should have been possible but walked away from you as though each of them was but a private in some vomit-inducing army of nothingness. Not that he blamed Nikki, for he knew that in her heart she had been forced into it. Deep down he knew that and had forgiven her for it, suspecting from time to time that they might well have compelled her to proceed with the dastardly plan while under the influence of drugs.

It was quite an ordinary night in the Psychedelic Shack, with
“Everybody Loves a Clown” by Gary Lewis and the Playboys jauntly playing and Nikki looking into Pat’s eyes as she slowly circled her arms about his neck. Her eyes seemed to melt like small marbles of ice. “I love you, Pat,” she said, in the most beautifully husky voice Pat had ever heard. “Let’s go to San Fran and get married. What do you say?”

“I wish I could, Nikki,” Pat replied, trembling ever so slightly, “I only wish that I could.”

“Oh, Pat,” whispered Nikki, stroking his neck with one of her nails, “you’re such a sexy man, do you know that?”

It is to Pat’s eternal credit that never once after he overheard Scott and his highly amused colleagues discussing the hilarious “setup” as they called it (they had been surreptitiously ensconced behind some chairs close by the gents’ toilets) did he blame Nikki. Never once occurring to him to do so. Indeed, the truth being that, deep in his heart, he knew who he blamed. Particularly when that very day he encountered him outside the Congo Bar, Scott clicking perkily as he winked, “Wo! Pat! Nikki got the hots for you then, has she? Nice!”

The effect on him was catastrophic, however—Pat, that is, for in the days that followed sleep became a thing of the past and it might be an accurate enough description to say that he resembled at this time an extremely tightly wound spring or crackling, perambulating time bomb. A state which only his mother was capable of understanding, especially now that she had become aware (Pat having sobbed his heart out to her one particularly bleak evening) of the events which had led up to it. “Yes!” she repeated, as Pat paced—almost ran around, in fact!—the floor of the kitchen. “He thinks I want to wear his glasses! I never wanted to wear his stupid old glasses! I didn’t, did I, Mammy? I only pretended to! I’d see them sitting on the wall and I’d think—I want to be him! But it was only pretending! It was only pretending, Mammy!”

His mother shook her head and poked something out of the inside of her furry slipper.

“God, but weren’t you the right eejit all the same,” she said. “You’re an even bigger eejit than I took you for.” Her voice fizzed with disdain.

“Me thinking I could go off around the world in a colored bus! And me only auld Pat McNab! Imagine Pat McNab doing that, Mammy! Doesn’t it just show you!”

His mother nodded and her lips went quite thin.

“It does,” she replied. “It shows you the kind of gobalooka I reared! Letting himself be led up the garden path by every drug addict and Antichrist that comes about the place.”

“Oh now, Ma! And them laughing at me the whole time!”

“Oh, they’d laugh. They’d laugh at you all right!”

“Aye—laughing at me all along! Saying, ‘This McNab—what an eejit!’ God, when I think of what I let them away with I can hardly believe how big an eejit I am myself!”

“You’re an eejit, are you? You’re no eejit. No son of Maimie McNab should ever call or let himself be called the like of that!”

“What, Ma?” Pat choked.

His mother stopped by the radio. Her voice was hoarse now, and tense.

“I said—you’re no eejit. We’ll soon see who’s the eejit.”

Pat’s eyes lit up and his voice seemed to leapfrog into life.

“That’s right, Ma!” he cried. “It’s him’s the eejit! Buglass! Thinking he could cod me with Nikki! Sure I knew well what she was up to!”

Mrs. McNab’s face was suffused with a troubling grayness.

“It’s him’s the eejit! For only an eejit would risk making a cod of the McNabs!”

Pat nodded vigorously and laced his fingers tightly.

“That’s right, Ma!” he cried. “Only an eejit would do it. An eejit from England into the bargain!”

‘Yes,” replied his mother, “an eejit who’ll have the best going-away party ever! Isn’t that right, Pat?”

Pat had never before smiled so broadly.

“That’s right, Ma!” he retorted excitedly. “He’s going away on Monday!”

His mother’s expression was impassive. She looked at the clothes pegs in her pocket and replied in a monotone, Yes, Pat. I knew that.”

Outside a car drove past on the road and someone whistled far away off in the town. Ironically, and with eerie prescience, the melody from the TV series
Kidnapped.

“Why Pat, that’s fantastic!” ejaculated Scott when Pat told him the news. “Thanks a lot, mate! You’re a real pal!”

“I want it to be the best party you ever had, Scott! Because I know you’ve been to lots of parties!”

The expressions on all their faces had to be seen to be believed. “It’s going to be the fabbo party of all time!” they cried in unison. “It really is!”

“Four more coffees, man!” exclaimed Scott as he flicked his ash into the tray. “We’ve just had some fantastic news!”

It was not common in the town to see decorations such as
SCOTT’S GOING-AWAY PARTY
, which the banner draped over the entrance to the McNab house proclaimed in vivid red, or lightbulbs strung along the privet hedge at the end of the lane so that they gave the impression of being even more spectacular than perhaps they actually were. Neither was it particularly common for Pat to greet visitors attired in a flower-specked headband (his mother’s scarf in reality) with eyeballs so wide they would have suggested
he
was under the influence, greeting, as he did, visitors with the words, “Mammy wants to know if youse have any drugs on youse? Ha ha!” Ordinarily, this might have been taken as a rather odd statement, but such was the level of abandon and frivolity that very little attention at all was paid to it.

Although it might have been a lot better if it had, considering that a mere one hour and a half later, Scott Buglass was lying in a rumpled heap beneath the Sacred Heart picture in the library, with his shades more than a litde askew as Pat’s mother shook her head vehemently, uncorking another bottle of wine as she cried, “No, Scott! Have another drop now out of that! Sure you’ll never find till you’re back in England and neither Pat nor me will ever see you again!”

Scott’s grin was lopsided and there was ash all over his candy-striped blazer.

“Somehow, Mrs. McNab, I think if I keep this up I’m not going to make it.”

“I know what you mean, love,” said Mrs. McNab, rather oddly, as she splashed some more Blue Nun into the muso’s glass.

“Mind your hipsters now!” she continued as the liquid wobbled precariously over the brim, continuing, “Now who’s for another little drinkie!” as she made her way toward a bleary-eyed groupie in the corner who gave all the impression of being a bell-sleeved, gamine-haired octopus.

It was approaching 3:00
A.M
. when a rather unsteady Nikki sought for her hessian bag behind some bottles, stumbled a litde, and put her hand to her forehead as she edgily enquired, “Have any of you seen Scott?”

“No,” hiccuped Carole, sucking hopelessly on a long since spent roll-up cigarette. “I guess he must have gone home. He has an early start in the morning.”

“Good-bye,” waved Mrs. McNab as they departed into the night, their shoulder bags swinging as they negotiated the squelching mud which the heavy rain had now begun to soften and churn up, “goodbye—ee!”

They waved and were gone, as into the heaving maw of a sodden, velvet-black beast.

Pat was often to reflect, years later, on how it had been the best party ever. The best in his wildest dreams, especially when it had been held—thrown!—by clodhopping idiots who were more than faintly redolent of cow dung smells and ragwort! Namely Pat and his mother, of course! Oh yes!

What amused Pat more than anything, however, when sitting by the fire staring into the wavy flames and looking back upon that night, was how nobody had ever bothered—perhaps did not see the need to, considering Scott was due to return to England the following morning—to enquire after him or his welfare—there had not been so much as a single, inquisitive knock upon the door or even a meek, “I wonder—have you seen Scott Buglass at all?”

It was as though poor old Bugie had disappeared in a single puff of incense!

Pat shook his head and raked the fire. Outside there was a bit of a wind blowing. It had all been so simple, he thought. Scott rooting around in a drawer—their
private
drawer!—and Pat’s mammy just standing there, for
ages!
—looking at him before he ever noticed.

“You’re a very cheeky fellow,” she said to him. “You know you really shouldn’t talk to people like that.”

“Like what?” Scott said, continuing—unbelievably!—to fumble around in the drawer!

“Like the way you talk to my Pat.”

“Oh yeah—that!” he replied—at least admitting it. ‘Yeah, but it was just a joke!”

Mrs. McNab did not betray any hint of emotion in her voice as she, quite reasonably, said, Yes, but of course what’s a joke to one person might not be a joke to someone else.”

Scott—having found the matches he was searching for—lit the cigarette awkwardly and said, “Oh yeah—but come on, Mumsy …”

He was about to cheekily extend this response (he was becoming impatient now and his artificial attempts at “manners” were at an end) when he heard Mrs. McNab say, “For example—would you call this a joke?”

The single glimpse of the maraca permitted to Scott Buglass was that of a flickering red blur as Mrs. McNab produced it from behind her back and deftly brought same into contact with his forehead. Neither did he entirely, clearly hear her next words which were, “Or this?” as its twin surfaced in her left hand, his forehead receiving an equally fierce “twin” blow which effectively terminated his conscious state. There can be no describing the state of—perhaps inexcusable!—utter glee in which Pat and his mother (Pat had slipped in unnoticed and gently closed the door behind him) reduced the tormented musician to a helpless mass of unrecognizable pulp in what might be described as an orgy of bloody, frenzied, alternative “bebop” improvisation.

There were the occasional references to Scott Buglass throughout the district afterward, along the lines of (advanced by perplexed members of Scott’s “crew”), “We’ve never heard from him since” or “Now that he’s in England, he’s forgotten all about us!” But in the end these too began to fade as flowers might at the onset of winter or those once eagerly inserted into the barrels of military firearms; and when the rumors of “drugs”—initially advanced in the grocer’s by Mrs. McNab—began, all talk of Scott Buglass and the so-called “Fabulous Groovers of the 1960s” began to disappear, eventually, like the sad protagonist, fading without leaving so much as a single trace.

Sometimes, for years afterward, late at night in the library, Pat would place his only remaining talisman of that time (a record by Alan Price, “I Put a Spell on You,” which Nikki had given him—”I want you to have this”) and sit with his chin in his hand wistfully reflecting upon
those times. And as the flames in the fire danced once more, he would fancy he heard the voice of a poor deluded musician, a sunglassed sexbomb in a candy-striped blazer, crying out from where he was trying to reach him. And, you know, sometimes, the strangest thing of all is, it would be as though he were saying, “u”Pat! Pat, I’m sorry for what happened—and, if we ever meet again, this time I know that we’ll be the best of friends. The way it should have been all along!” small coals shifting as outside the huge night turned toward sleep, the thin sound of a plangent guitar seeming to issue from a jasmine-scented bedsit many light-years away, in a galaxy not yet born.

I
t is a fine fresh day in the garden, and there can be no doubt but that Pat McNab is feeling happy and contented with himself as he digs away at his drills beneath the hot burning sun, thinking to himself, “As soon as I have this done, I’ll move on up above there to my turnips and, who knows, perhaps the lettuces too if I have time.” Whistling away (a familiar tune, and one which was a favorite of his mammy’s: Cliff Richard’s top ten hit “Bachelor Boy”), he turns over a clod with the corner of his spade, fancying he sees something glittering in it and is bending down to examine it more closely when he receives a large resounding slap to the middle of his back and turns to see what can only be described as the “colossal” figure of Sergeant Foley towering above him with a broad smile, exclaiming, “Pat!”

“Jesus Mary and Joseph, Sergeant, you put the heart crossways in me!” was Pat’s reply as he struggled to his feet.

The sergeant doffed his cap and stared morosely into the small amphitheater of its darkness.

“Pat,” he sighed, placing both hands on his hips, “you’ll never guess what’s after happening.”

Pat knitted his brow and touched his chin with the fingers of his right hand.

“What, Sergeant?” he ventured querulously. “Someone shot? The bank! The bank’s been robbed! That’s it, isn’t it, Sergeant? Oh my God! How much? Everything in the safe taken!”

The sergeant shook his head and drummed a little tune on the
circumference of the cap as he continued, “No, Pat! I only wish to God it had! I could be doing with something like that on my CV, to be honest with you! No, I’ll tell you what it is, Pat—the station’s been burned down!”

Pat gulped as he felt the color drain from his face.

“Ah no, Sergeant!” he chokingly replied. “Not the lovely station where you’ve spent God knows how many years toiling away in the service of the community!”

“Burned to a crisp, Pat!” the sergeant confirmed wearily. “The ganger told me this very minute. She’ll have to be built from the ground up.”

“Jesus Mary and Joseph, Sergeant!” gasped Pat.

The sergeant’s face grew tense.

“You can say that again, Pat. I’d say you’re looking at the guts of half a million.”

Pat could not believe his ears.

“Half a million!” he croaked.

“At the very least,” nodded the sergeant, continuing, “Well—I wouldn’t like to be in Guard Timmoney’s shoes, that’s all I can say.”

Pat was puzzled.

“Guard Timmoney?” he asked.

The sergeant drew a long, deep breath.

“Him and his deep-fat fryers,” he said. “Well—you know what this means, don’t you, Pat?”

“Yes, Sergeant,” agreed Pat, before diffidently adding, “What, Sergeant?”

“I’ll have to stop with you for a while. That’s the best way out of it. I can do my investigating from here.”

Pat felt the skin above his eyes tightening.

“Investigating?” he wondered. “What investigating?”

Without warning, the sergeant drew himself up to his full height and became stiff as a plank, delivering himself of the following sentence in a tone that was unmistakably frosty, officious, and uncompromising.

“I would appreciate it if you would account for your movements between the hours of three
A.M
. and seven
A.M
. on Thursday the seventeenth of September last.”

He paused and went on, “Well?”

Waspishly, Pat replied, “I was here!”

There was no mistaking the officer of the law’s wide grin. “Sure don’t I know you were, Pat, you auld cod you! I’m only pretending to be invesdgating! Slagging you, like!”

Pat felt such a fool, his downcast eyes as small reconnaissance spaceships endeavoring to decode the complexity of his situation as he raised his head and, crimson-cheeked, replied, “Of course, Sergeant! Oh, aye! Of course! Sergeant—do you hear the old carry-on I’m going on with!”

The sergeant sank his right hand deep in his pocket and said, “Indeed and I do surely, Pat! Sure don’t I know you from when you were a nipper! And your father!”

“That’s right, Sergeant!” replied Pat, a warm feeling beginning to assert itself in the region of his abdomen.

“And your mother!” continued Sergeant Foley.

‘Yes!” affirmed Pat, touching some crumbly clay with the toe of his Wellington.

“And all belonging to you!”

“All belonging to me!” grinned Pat. “Like they say in the films—
yes sir!”

“Yes
“beamed the sergeant.

“Yes
Sir.’”grinned Pat, perspiring a litde uncomfortably.

The sergeant shook his head.

“Oh now!” he went on. “Don’t be talking! Pat, do you know what I was just thinking? You must be tired from all that digging you’re doing there. Are you not exhausted?”

Pat was a litde taken aback by the sergeant’s sudden concern and hastened to reassure him.

“Exhausted?” he replied. “No, Sergeant! Sure, what would have me exhausted?”

“Digging, Pat!” came the sergeant’s brusque reply. “Digging a hole for the body!”

A sickening taste came into Pat’s mouth.

“For the body?” he replied weakly.

“Aye!” the sergeant replied. “The latest one, I mean!”

The corners of Pat’s mouth jerked like the flick of whip.

“Oh, aye!” he laughed. “The latest one!”

The sergeant nodded.

“Sure that would have anyone exhausted! Not to mention the poor fellow that has to go and prove it!”

A muscle leaped in Pat’s right cheek—-just under his eye.

“Oh, aye!” he said. “Sure it’d be nearly as hard on him in the long run! Having to gather up all the evidence and everything!”

“And then go and convince the bloody judge! And you know what they’re like! Think it was us was on trial or something! I say, you know what they’re like, my old friend!”

Pat threw back his head.

“What they’re like?” he guffawed. “Oh, now, Sergeant, don’t be talking!”

Pat frowned and grasped the shaft of the spade tightly. His fingers left sweat marks, he noted.

“Don’t be talking to me now!” he chortled, although less insouciantly than he would have preferred.

“I will not!” declared the sergeant abruptly. “I’ll say nothing more to you now, only maybe yourself and myself go right up there to the old McNab Hotel and have ourselves a great big hot mug of tay this very second! What do you say, Pat?”

A huge sense of relief seemed to sweep over Pat McNab as he released his grip on the spade and smiled, saying, “You know what I’d say to that, Sergeant? I’d say there’s nothing now on God’s earth would taste as sweet!”

The sergeant placed a large, oar-shaped hand on his shoulder.

“Come on out of that so,” he said, “you great big digging man you, Pat McNab!”

It is the following morning and Pat and his newfound lodger (the sergeant having made it clear in no uncertain terms that it was his intention to remain) are reclining in the sun-filled kitchen eating a hearty breakfast which has been prepared by the proprietor of the house. They both seem in exceptionally high spirits.

“I saw you last night, Sergeant!” says Pat then, expertly spearing a sausage, “and it was great! It was like the FBI or something!”

“Saw me, did you then?” is the sergeant’s response. “And how would that be now?”

“I saw you when I was going by your room. Your room was full of
pipe smoke and you were bashing out a report on the typewriter! Clack clack! The noise of it!”

The sergeant nodded as a thin river of yolk was released from the tremulous table mountain of his egg. He smiled as he masucated.

“Up half the night I was with it too, Pat. But it’s all over now, thank God. And before too long, with the help of God, that’ll be another fellow whistling his twenty-one years.”

The circle of black pudding paused before it attained Pat’s lips.

“Whistling twenty-one years?” asked Pat, perplexed.

The sergeant placed his fork on his plate and, extricating a small portion of food from the canyon of his back tooth, explained, “Aye, Pat! That’s what I used to say to the missus, God rest her! Every time I put another gangster behind bars, Mary, I’d say, ‘Mary, there’s another go-boy’ll soon be whistling his twenty-one years!’ Did you never hear it, Pat? The song, I mean!”

“I think Mammy used to know it!” Pat said, enjoying some tomato.

“Indeed and she did surely! And she’d be the woman to sing it for us—if she was here now, Pat! Which she isn’t, of course! Mysteriously!”

The sergeant’s head was a red ball placed upon his shoulders facing Pat across the table. It disquieted him.

“Ha ha!” he laughed uneasily as the sergeant, good-humoredly, proceeded.

“Oh, indeed she’d be the woman to give us a verse of it, all right! For there was no better woman about this town for a bar of a song—would I be right there, Pat?”

Pat felt his cheeks reddening a litde.

“Oh now, Sergeant!” he responded.

“Oh now nothing, Pat! If she was here now she’d shift that table yonder and away she’d go on twinkle toes, round the house and mind the dresser! Wouldn’t she, Pat?”

‘Yes! I think she would, Sergeant!” Pat found himself replying, a spot of grease bisecting itself and dribbling down his chin.

“Think
she would?” the sergeant said. “No thinking about it, Pat! ‘Come here to me, Pat,’ is what she’d say, ‘before we go off to work, what better way to start the day than a few bars of a song!’ Isn’t that what she’d say, Pat? Look at me now and tell me that it isn’t!”

“It is, Sergeant!” said Pat, quietly.

The sergeant’s fork clanged on his plate.

“It is indeed!” he cried. “‘Give me your hand!’ she’d say. ‘Give me that paw, me jewel and darlin’, and away the pair of us will go!’ Oh boys ah-dear, would she not say that or what!”

“Sergeant! Stop!” Pat suddenly heard himself cry as the officer’s large fingers curled about his arm and he found himself maneuvered if not propelled in a semicircular motion across the linoleum-covered floor of the kitchen as the lawman, in full flight, cleared his throat and, fixing Pat with what might be accurately described as a piercing, menacing gaze, began to sing:

Pat endeavored to unlock his fingers from the officer’s vicelike grip.

“Sergeant! Sergeant! I don’t like dancing!” he pleaded. “I’m tired!”

The sergeant squeezed his fingers and pooh-poohed such an idea.

“Ah, Pat, would you go away out of that now!” he laughed, and clearing his throat once more he began:

Pat grimaced and cried, “Sergeant! Please! You’re hurting my hand!”

“Oh, am I?” the sergeant replied. “Right you be, Pat! It’s time I was at work anyway! In the prefab! Ha ha!”

“Of course! I’ll get you your topcoat, Sergeant!” replied Pat, eagerly, hurtling toward the hallway.

The officer thanked Pat for the proffered mande.

“Sergeant,” Pat said, “what exactly did he do, that McClarkey fellow you mentioned to me a few nights back?”

“Something he won’t be doing for another twenty-one years,” replied the sergeant as he slipped into the heavy blue topcoat, continuing, “I can tell you that, Pat. Smashed his mother over the head with a spade and buried her in the front garden! The front bucking garden!”

Pat gave a litde shiver.

“The front garden?” he gasped incredulously.

The sergeant nodded.

“Aye. Her and God knows how many others. And maybe a donkey.”

“A donkey?” gulped Pat.

The sergeant examined his nails.

“That bit I’m not sure about yet. But one thing I am sure about—he’s going down. Did you ever hear them say that on the telly, Pat? Going down!”

“I think I might have,” Pat replied, his mind a litde preoccupied.

“‘Going down for twenty-one years! ‘ they say. And so he would—if it was true! But sure poor old McClarkey never hurt a flea in his life! All he ever did was rob the poor box, the big fool!”

“The poor box?”

Pat scratched his leg with his index finger.

“Aye!” the sergeant nodded. “Didn’t he rob the poor box out of Father McGivney’s Volkswagen! The dirty lug! Well, Pat—I’d best be off! Duty calls!”

In the doorway, a wan Pat stared after him, perplexed, already perceiving himself to be not a little troubled.

Which was why some half an hour later he found himself in the privacy of his new lodger’s bedroom, pinpricks of sweat breaking out on his palms as the corners of his mouth jerked perpendicularly and he repeated to himself, all the while investigating scraps of typescript discarded by the machine, “You see what happened is that once we had a sergeant you see, and a very good sergeant he was, except he wasn’t happy being a sergeant, was he? No—he wanted to be something else. He wanted to be a big-time investigator, coming around planting things in people’s heads to make them say things they didn’t want to say and to look at them in funny ways so they’d get all nervous and drop things and make fools of themselves!”