Here you go. "The Orphan and the Mob": A free, award-winning, and slightly rude story, to celebrate “The iHole” making the shortlist of the BBC International Short Story Award

Gareth Allen's fine drawing (from Jude in London) of a totally different and entirely fictional prize ceremony, at which Jude is borne aloft

Woo-hoo! as Blur so eloquently put it.

My story, "The iHole", has been shortlisted for this year’s super-special, one-off, BBC International Short Story Award. (This is the literary equivalent of qualifying for the 100 meters final at the Olympics. Only with fifteen grand for the winner instead of a gold medal. And you don’t have to run, thank God.)

The ten shortlisted stories, by such splendid writers as Deborah Levy, Lucy Caldwell, and MJ Hyland, are being broadcast on BBC Radio 4, and are (or will be) also available for two weeks as free podcasts from here, and published in this book here.

So, to celebrate all that, I'm giving away my best short story that ISN'T "The iHole".

“The Orphan and the Mob” is a serious comedy, about an orphan who desperately needs to go to the toilet. (It’s also an allegory of 20^th century Irish history, a visual pun on The Wizard of Oz, and quite a few other things, but shush, let’s not frighten the children.) It won the BBC National Short Story Prize in 2007 (at that time, the largest prize in the world for a single short story), and was broadcast twice on BBC Radio 4. It represented Ireland in the Dalkey Archive anthology, Best European Fiction 2010. It also forms the prologue to the novel Jude in Ireland (which the Sunday Tribune chose, in 2010, as their Irish Novel of the Decade).

OK, enough of that; you can lash into it online below. If you like it, please do tell me in the comments. And if you REALLY like it, buy the Jude novels and find out what happens next. (My long-suffering publisher, Ben, has, at my request, set the e-book prices particularly low, to entice and seduce you.)

Any questions? Ask them in the comments below, or mail me here. In fact mail me anyhow, say hello, and I’ll tell you what I’m up to, and send you the odd free story and poem.

Enjoy...

-Julian

The Orphan and the Mob

-Julian Gough

         If I had urinated immediately after breakfast, the Mob would never have burnt down the Orphanage. But, as I left the dining hall to relieve myself, the letterbox clattered. I turned in the long corridor. A single white envelope lay on the doormat.

I hesitated, and heard through the door the muffled roar of a motorcycle starting. With a crunching turn on the gravel drive and a splatter of pebbles against the door, it was gone.

Odd, I thought, for the postman has a bicycle. I walked to the large oak door, picked up the envelope, and gazed upon it.

                 

         Jude

The Orphanage

         Tipperary

         Ireland

         For me! On this day, of all significant days! I sniffed both sides of the smooth white envelope, in the hope of detecting a woman's perfume, or a man's cologne. It smelt, faintly, of itself.

I pondered. I was unaccustomed to letters, never having received one before, and I did not wish to use this one up in the One Go. As  I stood in silent thought, I could feel the Orphanage Coffee burning relentlessly through my small dark passages. Should I open the letter before, or after, urinating? It was a dilemma. I wished to open it immediately. But a full bladder distorts judgement, and is a great obstacle to understanding. Yet could I do justice to my very dilemma, with a full bladder?

         As I pondered,  both dilemma and letter were removed from my hands by the Master of Orphans, Brother Madrigal.

"You've no time for that now, boy," he said. "Organise the Honour Guard and get them out to the site. You may open your letter this evening, in my presence, after the Visit." He gazed at my letter with its handsome handwriting, and thrust it up the sleeve of his cassock.

I sighed, and went to find the Orphans of the Honour Guard.

…

         I found most of the young Orphans hiding under Brother Thomond in the darkness of the hay barn.

         "Excuse me, Sir," I said, lifting his skirts and ushering out the protesting infants.

         "He is Asleep," said a young Orphan, and indeed, as I looked closer, I saw Brother Thomond was at a slight tilt. Supported from behind by a pillar of the hay barn, he was maintained erect only by the stiffness of his ancient joints. Golden straws protruded from the neck and sleeves of his long black cassock, and emerged at all angles from his wild white hair.

         "He said he wished to speak to you, Jude," said another Orphan. I hesitated. We were already late. I decided not to wake him, for Brother Thomond, once he had Stopped, took a great deal of time to warm up and get rightly going again.

         "Where is Agamemnon?" I asked.

         The smallest Orphan removed one thumb from his mouth and jerked it upward, to the loft.

         "Agamemnon!" I called softly.

Old Agamemnon, my dearest companion and the Orphanage Pet, emerged slowly from the shadows of the loft and stepped, with a tread remarkably dainty for a dog of such enormous size, down the wooden ladder to the ground. He shook his great ruff of yellow hair and yawned at me loudly.

         "Walkies," I said, and he stepped to my side. We exited the hay barn into the golden light of a perfect Tipperary summer's day.

         I lined up the Honour Guard and counted them by the front door, in the shadow of the South Tower of the Orphanage. Its yellow brick façade glowed in the morning sun.

         We set out.

…

         From the gates of the Orphanage to the site of the speeches was several strong miles.

We passed through Town, and out the other side. The smaller Orphans began to wail, afraid they would see Black People, or be savaged by Beasts. Agamemnon stuck closely to my rear. We walked until we ran out of road. Then we followed a track, till we ran out of track.

We hopped over a fence, crossed a field, waded a dyke, cut through a ditch, traversed scrub land, forded a river and entered Nobber Nolan's bog. Spang plumb in the middle of Nobber Nolan's Bog, and therefore spang plumb in the middle of Tipperary, and thus Ireland, was the Nation's most famous Boghole, famed in song and story, in History book and Ballad sheet: the most desolate place in Ireland, and the last place God created.

         I had never seen the famous boghole, for Nobber Nolan had, until his recent death and his bequest of the Bog to the State, guarded it fiercely from locals and tourists alike. Many's the American was winged with birdshot over the years, attempting to make pilgrimage here. I looked about me for the Hole, but it was hid from my view by an enormous Car-Park, a concrete Interpretive Centre of imposing dimensions, and a tall, broad, wooden stage, or platform, bearing Politicians. Beyond Car-Park and Interpretive Centre, an eight-lane motorway of almost excessive straightness stretched clean to the Horizon, in the direction of Dublin.

Facing the stage stood fifty thousand farmers.

We made our way through the farmers to the stage. They parted politely, many raising their hats, and seemed in high good humour. "'Tis better than the Radio Head concert at Punchestown," said a sophisticated farmer from Cloughjordan, pulling on a shop-bought cigarette.

         Once onstage, I counted the smaller Orphans. We had lost only the one, which was good going over such a quantity of rough ground. I reported our arrival to Teddy “Noddy” Nolan, the Fianna Fáil TD for Tipperary Central, and a direct descendent of Neddy "Nobber" Nolan. Nodding vigorously, he waved us to our places, high at the back of the sloping stage. The Guard of Honour lined up in front of an enormous green cloth backdrop and stood to attention, flanked by groups of seated dignitaries. I myself sat where I could unobtrusively supervise, in a vacant seat at the end of a row. When the last of the stragglers had arrived in the crowd below us, Teddy cleared his throat. The crowd fell silent, as though shot. He began his speech.

         "It was in this place..." he said, with a generous gesture which incorporated much of Tipperary, "... that Eamonn DeValera..."

         Everybody removed their hats.

         "... hid heroically from the Entire British Army..."

         Everybody scowled and put their hats back on.

         "... during the War of Independence. It was in this very boghole that Eamonn DeValera..."

         Everybody removed their hats again.

         "...had his Vision: A Vision of Irish Maidens dancing barefoot at the crossroads, and of Irish Manhood dying heroically while refusing to the last breath to buy English shoes..."

         At the word English the crowd put their hats back on, though some took them off again when it turned out only to be Shoes. Others glared at them. They put the hats back on again.

         "We in Tipperary have fought long and hard to get the Government to make Brussels pay for this fine Interpretive Centre and its fine Car-Park, and in Brünhilde DeValera we found the ideal Minister to fight our corner. It is therefore with great pleasure, with great pride, that I invite the great grand-daughter of Eamonn DeValera's cousin... the Minister for Beef, Culture and the Islands... Brünhilde DeValera... to officially reopen... Dev's Hole!"

         The crowd roared and waved their hats in the air, though long experience ensured they kept a firm grip on the peak, for as all the hats were of the same design and entirely indistinguishable, the One from the Other, it was common practice at a Fianna Fáil hat-flinging rally for the less scrupulous farmers to loft an Old Hat, yet pick up a New.

         Brünhilde DeValera took the microphone, tapped it, and cleared her throat.

         "Spit on me, Brünhilde!" cried an excitable farmer down the front. The crowd surged forward, toppling and trampling the feeble-legged and bock-kneed, in expectation of Fiery Rhetoric. She began.

         "Although it is European Money which has paid for this fine Interpretive Centre… Although it is European Money which has paid for this fine new eight-lane Motorway from Dublin and this Car Park, that has Tarmacadamed Toomevara in its Entirety… Although it is European Money which has paid for everything built West of Grafton Street in my Lifetime… And although we are grateful to Europe for its Largesse..."

         She paused to draw a great Breath. The crowd were growing restless, not having a Bull's Notion where she was going with all this, and distressed by the use of a foreign word.

         "It is not for this I brought my Hat," said the Dignitary next to me, and spat on the foot of the Dignitary beside him.

         "Nonetheless," said Brünhilde DeValera, "Grateful as we are to the Europeans...

         ...we should never forget...

                  ...that...

                           ...they..."

         Fifty thousand right hands began to drift, with a wonderful easy slowness, up towards the brims of fifty thousand Hats in anticipation of a Climax.

         "...are a shower of Foreign Bastards who would Murder us in our Beds given Half a Chance!"

         A great cheer went up from the massive crowd and the air was filled with Hats till they hid the face of the sun and we cheered in an eerie half-light.

         The minister paused for some minutes while everybody recovered their own Hat and returned it to their own Head.

         "Those foreign bastards in Brussels think they can buy us with their money! They are Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! You cannot buy an Irishman's Heart, an Irishman's Soul, an Irishman's Loyalty! Remember '98!"

         There was a hesitation in the crowd, as the younger farmers tried to recall if we had won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1998.

         "1798!" Brünhilde clarified.

         A great cheer went up  as we recalled the gallant failed rebellion of 1798. "Was It For This That Wolfe Tone Died?" came a wisp of song from the back of the crowd.

         "Remember 1803!"

         We applauded Emmet's great failed rebellion of 1803. A quavering chorus came from the oldest farmers at the rear of the great crowd: “Bold Robert Emmet, the darling of Ireland… "

         "Remember 1916!"

         Grown men wept as they recalled the great failed rebellion of 1916, and so many contradictory songs were started that none got rightly going.

There was a pause.

All held their breath.

         "…Remember 1988!"

         Pride so great it felt like anguish filled our hearts as we recalled the year Ireland finally threw off her shackles and stood proud among the community of nations, with our heroic victory over England in the first match in Group Two of the Group Stage of the European Football Championship Finals. A brief chant went up from the Young Farmers in the Mosh Pit: "Who put the ball in the England net?"

         Older farmers, further back, added bass to the reply of "Houghton! Houghton!"

         I shifted uncomfortably in my seat.

         "My great grand-father's cousin did not Fight and Die in bed of old age so that foreign monkey-men could swing from our trees and rape our women! He did not walk out of the Daíl, start a Civil War and kill Michael Collins so a bunch of dirty foreign bastards could..."

         I missed a number of Fiery Words, as excited farmers began to leap up and down roaring at the front, the younger and more nimble mounting each other’s shoulders, then throwing themselves forward to surf toward the stage on a sea of hands, holding their Hats on as they went.

         "Never forget,” roared Brünhilde DeValera, “that a Vision of Ireland came out of Dev's Hole!"

         "Dev's Hole! Dev's Hole! Dev's Hole!" roared the crowd.

         By my side, Agamemnon began to howl, and tried to dig a hole in the stage with his long claws.

Neglecting to empty my bladder after breakfast had been an error the awful significance of which I only now began to grasp. A good Fianna Fáil Ministerial speech to a loyal audience in the heart of a Tipperary bog could go on for up to five hours. I pondered my situation. My only choice seemed to be as to precisely how I would disgrace myself in front of thousands. To rise and walk off the stage during a speech by a semi-descendent of DeValera would be tantamount to treason, and would earn me a series of beatings on my way to the portable toilets. The alternative was to relieve myself into my breeches where I sat.

My waist-band creaked under the terrible pressure.

         With the gravest reluctance, I willed the loosening of my urethral sphincter.

…

         Nothing happened. My subsequent efforts, over the next few minutes, to void my bladder, resulted only in the vigorous exercising of my superficial abdominal muscles. At length, I realised that there was a fundamental setting in my Subconscious, and it was set firmly against public voidance. To this adamant subconscious setting, my conscious mind had no access.

         Meanwhile, the pressure grew intolerable as the Orphanage Coffee continued to bore through my system.

         I grew desperate. Yet, within the line of sight of fifty thousand farmers, I could not unleash the torrent.

         Then, inspiration. The Velvet Curtain! All I needed was an instant's distraction, and I could step behind the billowing green backdrop beside me, and vanish. There would, no doubt, be an exit off the back of the stage, through which I could pass to relieve myself, before returning, unobserved, to my place.

         A magnificent gust of Nationalist Rhetoric lifted every hat again aloft and, in the moment of eclipse, I stood, took one step sideways, and vanished behind the Curtain.

…

I shuffled along, my face to the Emerald Curtain, my rear to the back wall of the stage, until the wall ceased. I turned, and beheld, to my astonished delight, the solution to all my problems.

Hidden from stage and crowd by the vast Curtain was a magnificent circular long-drop toilet of the type employed in the Orphanage. But where we sat around a splintered circle of rough wooden plank, our buttocks overhanging a fetid pit, here was elegant splendour: a great golden rail encircled a pit of surpassing beauty. Mossy walls ran down to a limpid pool into which a lone frog gently ‘plashed.

         Installed, no doubt, for the private convenience of the Minister, should she be caught short during the long hours of her speech, it was the most beautiful sight I had yet seen in this world. It seemed nearly a shame to urinate into so perfect a pastoral picture, and it was almost with reluctance that I unbuttoned my breeches and allowed my manhood its release.

         I aimed my member so as to inconvenience the Frog as little as possible. At last my Conscious made connection with my Unconscious; the Setting was Reset; Mind and Body were as One; Will became Action: I was Unified. In that transcendent moment all my senses were polished to perfection.

         I could smell the sweet pollen of the Heather and the Whitethorn, and the mingled Colognes of a thousand Bachelor Farmers.

         I could taste the lingering, bitter grounds of the Orphanage Coffee, and feel the grit of them lodged in the joins of my teeth.

         I could hear the murmur and sigh of the crowd like an ocean at my back, and Brünhilde DeValera's mighty voice bounding from rhetorical Peak to rhetorical Peak, ever higher.

And as this moment of Perfection began its slow decay into the past, and as the delicious frozen moment of Anticipation deliquesced into Attainment and the pent-up waters leaped forth, far forward, and fell in their glorious swoon, Brünhilde DeValera's voice rang out as from Olympus

         "I

          hereby

                  officially

                           reopen...

                                    Dev's Hole!"

         A suspicion dreadful beyond words began to dawn on me. I attempted to Arrest the Flow, but I may as well have attempted to block by effort of will the course of the mighty Amazon River.

         Thus the Great Curtain parted, to reveal me Urinating into Dev's Hole: into the very Source of the Sacred Spring of Irish Nationalism: the Headwater, the Holy Well, the Font of our Nation.

…

         I feel, looking back, that it would not have gone so badly against me, had I not turned at Brünhilde De Valera's shriek and hosed her with urine.

…

         They pursued me across rough ground for some considerable time.

…

         Agamemnon held my pursuers at the Gap in the Wall, as I crossed the grounds and gained the House. He had not had such vigorous exercise since running away from Fossetts' Circus and hiding in our hay barn a decade before, as a pup.

Now, undaunted, he slumped in the gap, panting at them.

         Slamming the Orphanage Door behind me, I came upon old Brother Thomond in the Long Corridor, beating a Small Orphan in a desultory manner.

         "Ah, Jude," said Brother Thomond, on seeing me. The brown leather of his face creaked as he smiled, revealing the perfect, white teeth of Brother Jasper.

         "A little lower, Sir, if you please," piped the Small Orphan, and Brother Thomond obliged. The weakness of Brother Thomond's brittle limbs made his beatings popular with the Lads, as a rest and a relief from those of the more supple and youthful Brothers.

         "Yes, Jude..." he began again, "I had something I wanted to... yes... to... yes..." He nodded his head, and was distracted by straw falling past his eyes, from his tangled hair.

         I moved from foot to foot, uncomfortably aware of the shouts of the approaching Mob. Agamemnon, by his roars, was now retreating heroically ahead of them as they crossed the grounds toward the front door.

         "'Tis the Orphanage!" I heard one cry.

         "'Tis full of Orphans!" cried another.

         "From Orphania!" cried a third.

         "As we suspected!" called a fourth. "He is a Foreigner!"

         I had a bad feeling about this. The voices were closer. There was the thud of Agamemnon's retreating buttocks against the door. Agamemnon stood firm at the steps, but no dog, however brave, can hold off a Mob forever.

         "Yes!" said Brother Thomond, and fixed me with a glare. "Very good." He fell asleep briefly, one arm aloft above the Small Orphan.

         The mob continued to discuss me on the far side of the door.

         "You're thinking of Romania, and of the Romanian orphans. You're confusing the two," said a level head, to my relief. I made to tiptoe past Brother Thomond and the Small Orphan.

         "Romanian, by God!"

         "He is Romanian?"

         "That man said so."

         "I did not..."

         "A Gypsy Bastard!"

         "Kill the Gypsy Bastard!"

         The Voice of Reason was lost in the hubbub, and a rock came in through the stained-glass window above the front door. It put a Hole in Jesus and it hit Brother Thomond in the back of the neck.

         Brother Thomond awoke.

         "Dismissed," he said to the Small Orphan sternly.

         "Oh but Sir you hadn't finished!"

         "No backchat from you, young fellow, or I shan't beat you for a week."

         The Small Orphan scampered away into the darkness of the Long Corridor. Brother Thomond sighed deeply, and rubbed his neck.

         "Jude, today is your eighteenth birthday, is it not?"

         I nodded.

         Brother Thomond sighed again. "I have carried a secret this long time, regarding your Birth. I feel it is only right to tell you now..."

He fell briefly asleep.

         The cries of the Mob grew as they assembled, eager to enter, and destroy me. The yelps and whimpers of brave Agamemnon were growing fainter. I had but little time. I poked Brother Thomond in the Clavicle with a Finger. He started awake. “What? WHAT? WHAT?”

         Though to rush Brother Thomond was usually counter-productive, circumstances dictated that I try. I shouted, the better to penetrate both the Yellow Wax and the Fog of Years.

"You were about to tell me the Secret of my Birth, Sir."

         "Ah yes. The secret..." He hesitated. "The secret of your birth... The secret I have held these many years... which was told to me by... by one of the... by Brother Feeny... who was one of the Cloughjordan Feenys... His mother was a Thornton..."

         "If you could Speed It Up, Sir," I suggested, as the Mob forced open the window-catch above us. Brother Thomond obliged.

         "The Secret of Your Birth..."

         Outside, with a last choking yelp, Agamemnon fell silent. There was a tremendous hammering on the old oak door.

         "I'll just get that," said Brother Thomond. "I think there was a knock."

         As he reached it, the door burst open with extraordinary violence, sweeping old Brother Thomond aside with a crackling of many bones in assorted sizes, and throwing him backwards against the wall where he impaled the back of his head on a coathook. Though he continued to speak, the rattle of his last breath rendered the Secret unintelligible. The Mob poured in.

         I ran on, into the dark of the Long Corridor.

…

         I found the Master of Orphans, Brother Madrigal, in his office in the South Tower, beating an orphan in a desultory manner.

         "Ah, Jude," he said. "Went the day well?"

         Wishing not to burden him with the lengthy Truth, and with both time and breath in short supply, I said "Yes."

         He nodded approvingly.

         "May I have my Letter, Sir?" I said.

         "Yes, yes, of course..." He dismissed the small orphan, who trudged off disconsolate. Brother Madrigal turned from his desk toward the Confiscation Safe, then paused by the open window. "Who are those strange men on the Lawn, waving blazing torches?"

         "I do not precisely know," I said truthfully.

He frowned.

"They followed me home," I felt moved to explain.

         "And who could blame them?" said Brother Madrigal. He smiled and tousled my hair, before moving again toward the Confiscation Safe, tucked into the room’s rear left corner. From the lawn far below could be heard confused cries.

         Unlocking the safe, he took out the letter and turned. Behind him, outside the window, I saw flames race along the dead ivy and creepers, and vanish up into the roof timbers. "Who," he mused, looking at the envelope, "could be writing to you...?" Suddenly he started, and looked up at me. " Of course! " he said. "Jude, it is your eighteenth birthday, is it not?"

         I nodded.

         He sighed, the tantalising letter now held disregarded in his right hand.  "Jude… I have carried a secret this long time, regarding your Birth. It is a secret known only to Brother Thomond and myself, and it has weighed heavy on us. I feel it is only right to tell you now... The secret of your birth..." He hesitated. "Is..."

My heart Clattered in its Cage at this Second Chance.

Brother Madrigal threw up his hands. "But where are my manners? Would you like a cup of tea first? And we must have music. Ah, music."

         He pressed Play on the record player that sat at the left edge of the broad desk. The turntable bearing the Orphanage single began to rotate at forty-five revolutions per minute. The tone-arm lifted, swung out, and dropped onto the broad opening groove of the record, nearly dislodging from the needle a Ball of Dust the size and colour of a small mouse.

         The blunt needle in its fuzzy ball of dust juddered through the scratched groove. Faintly, beneath the roar and crackle of its erratic passage, could be heard traces of an ancient tune.

         Brother Madrigal returned to the safe and switched on the old kettle that sat atop it. Leaving my letter leaning against the kettle, he came back to his desk and sat behind it in his old black leather armchair.

         Unfortunately, the rising roar of the old kettle and the roar and crackle of the record player disguised the rising roar and crackle of the flames in the dry timbers of the old tower roof.

         Brother Madrigal patted the side of the Record Player affectionately. "The sound is so much warmer than from all these new digital dohickeys, don't you find? And of course you can tell it is a good-quality machine from the way, when the needle hops free of the surface of the record, it often falls back into the self-same groove it has just left, with neither loss nor repetition of much music. The Arm..." He tapped his nose and slowly closed one eye. "...Is True."

         He dug out an Italia '90 cup and a USA '94 mug from his desk, and put a teabag in each.

         "Milk?"

         "No, thank you," I said. The ceiling above him had begun to bulge down in a manner alarming to me. The old leaded roof had undoubtedly begun to collapse, and I feared my second and last link to my past would be crushed along with all my hopes.

         "Very wise. Milk is fattening, and thickens the phlegm," said Brother Madrigal. "But you would like your letter, no doubt. And also... the Secret of your Birth." He arose, his head almost brushing the great Bulge in the Plaster, now yellowing from the intense heat of the blazing roof above it.

         "Thirty years old, that record player," said Brother Madrigal proudly, catching my glance at it. "And never had to replace the needle, or the record. It came with a wonderful record, thank God. I really must turn it over one of these days," he said, lifting the gently vibrating letter from alongside the rumbling kettle whose low tones, as it neared boiling, were lost in the bellow of flame above. "Have you any experience of turning records over, Jude?"

         "No sir," I said as he returned to the desk, my letter shining white against the black of his dress. Brother Madrigal extended the letter halfway across the table. I began to reach out for it. The envelope, containing perhaps the secret of my origin, brushed against my fingertips, electric with potential.

At that moment, with a crash, in a bravura finale of crackle, the record came to an end. The lifting mechanism hauled the Tone Arm up off the vinyl, and returned it to its rest position with a sturdy click.

         "Curious," said Brother Madrigal, absentmindedly taking back the letter. "It is most unusual for the Crackling to continue after the Record has stopped." He stood, and moved to the Record Player. The pop and crackle of flames was by now uncommonly loud. Tilting his head from side to side, he nodded slowly. "It is in Stereo," he said. "There are a lot of Mid-Range Frequencies. That is of course where the Human Voice is strongest... I subscribed for a time to the Hi-Fi Gazette."

         Behind Brother Madrigal, the Bulge in the ceiling gave a great Lurch downward. He turned, and looked up.

         "Ah! There's the problem!" he said. "A Flood! Note the bulging ceiling! The water tank must have overflowed in the attic, and the subsequent Damp is causing a Crackling in the Circuits of the Record Player. Damp” (here he touched his temple twice), “is the great Enemy of the Electrical Circuit."

         He was by now required to Shout on account of the great noise of the holocaust in the roofbeams. Smoke entered the room.

         "Do you smell smoke?" he enquired. I replied that I did. He nodded. "The Damp has caused a Short Circuit," he said. "Just as I suspected." He went to the corner of the room, removed a fire-ax from its glass-fronted wooden case, and strode to beneath the Bulge. "Nothing for it but to Pierce it, and relieve the pressure, or it'll have the roof down." He swung the ax up into the heart of the bulge.

         A stream of liquid metal poured over him, as the pool of molten lead from the burning roof found release. Both ax and man were coated in a thick sheet of still-bright lead that swiftly thickened and set as it ran down Brother Madrigal’s upstretched arm and upturned head, encasing his torso before pooling and solidifying in a thick base about his feet on the smoking carpet.

         Entirely covered, he shone under the electric light, ax aloft in his right hand, my letter smouldering and silvered in his left.

         I snatched the last uncovered corner of the letter from his metallic grasp, the heat-brittled triangle snapping cleanly off at the bright leaden boundary.

         In that little corner of envelope nestled a small triangle of yellowed paper.

         My fingers tingled with mingled dread and anticipation as they drew the scrap from its casing. Being the burnt corner of a single sheet, folded twice to form three rectangles of equal size, the scrap comprised a larger triangle of paper folded down the middle from apex to baseline, and a smaller, uncreased triangle of paper of the size and shape of its folded brother.

         I regarded the small triangle.

         Blank.

         I turned it over.

         Blank.

         I unfolded and regarded the larger triangle.

         Blank.

         I turned it over, and read…

gents

anal

cruise.

I tilted it obliquely to catch the light, the better to reread it.

gents

anal

cruise.

         The secret of my origin was not entirely clear from this fragment, and the tower was beginning to collapse around me. I sighed, for I could not help but feel a certain disappointment in how my birthday had turned out.

I left Brother Madrigal's office. Behind me, the floorboards gave way beneath his lead encased mass. I looked back, to see him vanish down through successive floors of the tower.

         I ran down the stairs. A breeze cooled my face as the fires above me sucked air up the stairwell. Chaos was by now general and Orphans and Brothers sprang from every door, laughing, and speculating that Brother McGee must have once again lost control of his Woodwork Class.

         The first members of the Mob began to push their way up the first flight of stairs, and, Our Lads not recognising the newcomers, fisticuffs ensued. I hesitated on the first-floor landing.

         One member of the Mob broke free of the mêlée and, seeing me, exclaimed "There he is, boys!" He threw his Hat at me, and made a leap in my direction. I leapt sideways, through the nearest door, and entered Nurse's quarters.

         Nurse, the most attractive woman in the Orphanage, and on whom we all had a crush, was absent, at her grandson's wedding in Borris-in-Ossary. I felt it prudent to disguise myself from the mob, and slipped into a charming blue gingham dress. Only briefly paralysed by pleasure at the scent of Nurse’s perfume, I soon made my way back out through the battle, as Orphans and Farmers knocked lumps out of each other.

         "Foreigners!" shouted the Farmers at the Orphans.

"Foreigners!" shouted the Orphans back, for some of the Farmers were from as far away as Cloughjordan, Ballylusky, Toomevara, Ardcrony, Lofty Bog, and even far-off South Tipperary itself, as could be told by the unusual sophistication of the stitching on the leather patches at the elbows of their tweed jackets and the richer, darker tones, redolent of the lush grasslands of the Suir valley, of the cowshit on their Wellington Boots.

         "Dirty Foreign Bastards!"

         "Fuck off back to Orphania!"

         "Ardcrony Ballocks!"

         The sophisticated farmer, who had seen The Radio Head at Punchestown, was hurled over the balcony, and his unconscious body looted of its shop-bought cigarettes by the Baby Infants.

         I appeared, in Nurse’s attire. The crowd parted to let me through, the Young Farmers removing their Hats as I passed. Some Orphans shouted "It is Jude in a Dress!" but the unfortunate sexual ambiguity of my name served me well on this occasion and allayed the suspicions of the more doubtful farmers, who took me for an ill-favoured girl who usually wore Slacks.

         At the bottom of the stairs, I found myself once again in the deserted Long Corridor.

         From behind me came the confused sounds of the Mob in fierce combat with the Orphans and the Brothers Of Jesus Christ Almighty. From above me came the crack of expanding brick, a crackle of burning timber, sharp explosions of window-panes in the blazing tower.

The Mob would not rest till they found me.

My actions had led to the destruction of the Orphanage.

I had brought bitter disgrace to my family, whoever they should turn out to be.

         I realised with a jolt that I would have to leave the place of my greatest happiness.

         With a creak and a bang, the South Tower settled a little. Dust and smoke gushed from the ragged hole in the ceiling through which the lead-encased body of Brother Madrigal had earlier plunged. I gazed upon him, standing proudly erect on his thick metal base, holding his axe aloft, the whole of him shining like a freshly washed baked bean tin in the light of the setting sun that shone in through the open front door at the end of the corridor,. 

         And by the front door, hanging from the coathook in his skull, his posture more alert than his old bones had been able to manage in life, was Brother Thomond. The bright yellow straw that burst up out of the neckhole of his cassock and jutted forth from his black sleeves was stained dark red by his old, slow blood on its slow voyage to the floor.

         And in the doorway itself, hung by his neck from a rope, was my old friend Agamemnon, his thick head of long golden hair fluffed up into a huge ruff by the noose, his mighty claws unsheathed, his tawny fur bristling as his dead tongue rolled from between his black lips to eclipse his fierce, yellow teeth.

         What was left for me here, now?

         With  a splintering crash, a dull movement of air through a long moment of near-silence, and a flat, rumbling, bursting impact, the entire facade of the South Tower detached itself, unpeeled, and fell in a long roll across the lawn and down the driveway, scattering warm bricks the length of the drive.

         Dislodged by the lurch of the tower, the Orphanage Record Player fell, tumbling, three stories, through the holes made by Brother Madrigal himself, and landed rightway up by his side with a smashing of innards.

         The tone arm lurched onto the Record and, with a twang of elastic, the turntable began to rotate. Music sweet and pure filled the air and a sweet voice sang words I had only ever heard dimly.

         "Some...

         Where...

         Oh…

         Werther…

Aon…

         Bó... "

         I filled to brimming with an ineffable emotion. I felt a great... presence? No, it was an absence, an absence of? Of... I could not name it. I wished I had someone to say goodbye to, to say goodbye to me.

It is a sad song, I think.

         The record ground to a slow halt with a crunching of broken gear-teeth. I felt a soft touch on my cheek, then on the back of my hand.

         I looked down to see the great ball of Dust, dislodged from the Record Player's needle during the long fall, drifting the last few inches to the ground.

I looked around me for the last time and sighed.

         "There is no place like home," I said quietly to nobody, and walked out the door onto the warm bricks in my blue dress. The heat came up through the soles of my shoes, so that I skipped nimbly along the warm yellow bricks, till they ended.

         I looked back once, to see the broken wall, the burning roof and tower.

         And Agamemnon dead.

                  END        

Jude's continuing adventures, on Amazon...



In Honour of the Moriarty Tribunal Report: guns, camels, icebergs, and brown envelopes.

In honour of the recently published (2,400 page) Moriarty Tribunal report, I thought I'd post 20 pages from my last novel, Jude: Level 1. In these chapters, (spoiler alert!) Jude is shot at by Charles J. Haughey, "heroic leader of the Fianna Fáil Party, former Taoiseach, Celtic Chieftain of all the Gaels, gun-runner, phone-tapper, tax-dodger, cute hoor and Saviour of Ireland." He also accidentally kills Dan Bunne, "Supermarket Magnate, and one of the great Political Donors of our Age". And he ends up in a Mexican stand-off with the man who made him homeless, Jimmy "Bungle" O'Bliss, "Ireland's greatest property developer"...

No similarity to any person either living or dead is intended or should be inferred. Especially to Charles J. Haughey, Ben Dunne, or, most of all

((Julian's lawyer wrenches Julian's hands off the keyboard at this point.))

            CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

            I determined to leave the hospital immediately, and have no more to do with women. My clothes having been destroyed, the hospital authorities issued me a pinstripe suit, from the stock of charitable clothing out of which they habitually re-clothed injured street drinkers before their discharge. The lady Doctor attempted to persuade me to stay for a week's further treatment, to stabilise my erectile nose, but I could not bear to stay another hour. When she realised there was no changing my mind, she left me, to return some minutes later with a brown paper bag.

            Silently she gave me the eloquent gift of sandwiches, and left the ward without turning back.

            I paused only to say good-bye to Miguel de Navarra, my Mexican neighbour. He looked up from the Galway Advertiser and shook my right hand sorrowfully with his right hand.

            "This Banana," he said, waving the Illustrative Fruit with his left, "Is a weapon of Oppression."

            I nodded. "Can I have it, so?" I said.

I left the hospital with only a brown paper bag full of sandwiches, a banana, and a broken heart.

            During the long morphine dream of my stay in hospital, Galway had changed. Most of its buildings had been knocked and replaced with buildings one storey taller. Many of these new buildings were now, in their turn, being replaced with buildings two storeys taller again. I grew confused and lost among the taller storeys and the construction's confusions. All about me as I walked I heard talk of Shares and Options, of New Technologies, Investment Properties, and Easy Money. Galway seemed to be accelerating into the new millennium in an explosion of optimism and cement dust. Fellow teenagers passed me in Mercedes-Benz cars, often several times, trying in vain to find a place to park.

            A shoe-shine boy offered me a share tip as I passed Griffins' Bakery, and the street entertainer, Johnny Massacre, was now swallowing swords of gold.

            I finally found Saint Nicholas's Church, my beloved home. I was surprised to see the entire Church of Ireland population of Galway outside it, weeping and wailing in the shelter of a golf umbrella. Far above them, a fat man atop a high ladder was nailing a "SOLD" sign to the Bell Tower. The fat man turned to address the crowd. His lower face was covered by a scarf.

            "Feck off,” he told them. “It's mine now.”

            "Who is that masked man?" I enquired.

            "'Tis Jimmy O' Bliss," sobbed the pensioner holding the umbrella.

            I reeled. Jimmy “Bungle” O'Bliss was Ireland's greatest living Property Developer. No deal of his had ever fallen through. His fame had spread even to Tipperary, where he had bought the abattoir and converted it into luxury eco-friendly apartments, using only paint and plywood. This was the crack of doom for Saint Nick's.

            O'Bliss descended, the better to address the pensioners.

            "Ye selfish bastards! Don't ye care about Galway's homeless?" He wiped a tear from his eye with a silken 'kerchief. "All those young, unmarried management consultants, without a roof over their heads? Dear God, you people have hearts of stone."

            "But 'tis our Church," quavered a pensioner.

            "Pah! I bought it fair and square, at auction, for a grand."

            "Auction?"

            "Look, it's not my fault if somebody forgot to put a reserve on the property. Next thing you'll be telling me it's my fault that the other bidder came down with the flu and broke both his arms."

            "The flu doesn't break your arms."

            "This flu does."

            "But where will we worship? Wed? Baptise?"

            "Amn't I providing you with a Portakabin out near Menlo, for the love of God? What more can I do? Do ye want to ruin me, with your religious shenanigans? Have ye any idea what it'll cost me to replace this knackered wreck with decent townhouses, with ground-level Retail Premises? If I hadn’t got an offshore client for all these old stones, I’d hardly bother."

            "But... what of my Bell Tower, my Home?" I burst out.

            "Oh the Bell Tower stays."

            I breathed a sigh of relief.

            He nodded. "We're enhancing it into a twelve-storey, Swedish, state-of-the-art, automated vehicle-storage tower facility."

            "So I can continue living there, then?" I said, in happy confusion.

            Jimmy O'Bliss winked at me.

            I relaxed.

            "No," he said. "It's a fecking carpark, you big gom."

            Having lost my Job, my Good Looks and my True Love in swift succession, I had come Home to find that I had also lost my Home. My sandwiches slipped from my fingers to land in the mud, my legs trembled and gave way, and I fell to my knees in the muck and rain...

CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN           

            The National Anthem rang out in thin, high, single notes from the inside pocket of the lumpy navy jacket of Jimmy "Bungle" O'Bliss.

            As I knelt, in my devastation, in a puddle, Jimmy O'Bliss high-stepped over me. Pulling a small telephone from his inside pocket, he dislodged a bulging Brown Envelope. It splashed into the puddle in front of me.

            A strangely familiar voice came tinny from the tiny telephone, its tone a question.

            "I got it, Big Man," replied Jimmy shortly. “Deal's done and dusted." He poked at the little machine, and slid it back into the empty inside pocket.

He stopped. Withdrew his hand. Slapped the pocket.

He stared all around, then down at the ground. With a start and a grunt, he glared at me, then scooped the soaking brown envelope from the muck and thrust it, mud and all, back into his inside pocket.

            "You saw nutting," he said, and walked rapidly away.

            Wet-kneed, I pulled a disconsolate sandwich from its damp brown wrapper.

My initial bite met with unexpected resistance. I could not recall a tougher crust. I removed it from my mouth to have a look at it. It was green. It had an elastic band around it. I looked at the wet brown paper bag I had taken it out of. It wasn't a bag.

            A curious hush had fallen over the crowd. "'Tis the legendary Brown Envelope," whispered one ancient.

            I looked back at my sandwich. It wasn't a sandwich.

            I gave pursuit.

            "Sir!" I cried as I ran.

            He did not appear to hear me over the noise of construction. I almost caught up with him on High Street, but the demolition of Sonny Molloy’s shop sent a cloud of dust billowing.

Jimmy O’Bliss vanished.

By the time the rain had damped the dust down, he was gone.

There! At the far end of Quay Street.

But when I got there, he had crossed to the Spanish Arch, where a helicopter sat, in the lashing rain, on Buckfast Plaza. Above it was a blur of whirling blades which blew the surface water off the Plaza in a great circle about it, so that it rained sideways, as well as from above, on the young men nearby as they leaped a limestone bench on their rollerskatingboards.

It rained sideways, too, on the woman in black who fed the white Corrib swans that had gathered below her on the river.

            The woman in black turned, to stare at me. I took a step towards her. The swans began to swim obliquely away, across the Corrib, towards the Claddagh Basin and its rich sewage outfalls.

            Her eyes, now, were all I could see; her body, her face, her head wrapped tightly in black as she stood in the horizontal and vertical rain.

            There was something unusual about her eyes…

            This woman, I thought, could mean something to me. This woman of whom I know nothing, could tangle her destiny with mine. I merely have to take another step, and speak, and the threads of our destiny cross, and who knows where it will end? Together on some tropical island? In wild flight? In love? In madness?

            She stared into my eyes. I shuddered with possibilities. On the blankness of her canvas I painted future after future.

            In the distance, the white birds moved, slowly.

            She turned, and walked away, over the bridge to the Claddagh, following them obliquely in her vertical rain.

            Behind me the helicopter’s blades sped up. I turned away from her, to face my horizontal rain.

The helicopter was marked with familiar bold greens. Celtic Helicopters, I thought. The company owned by the family of the much-loved Charles J. Haughey, heroic leader of the Fianna Fáil Party, former Taoiseach, Celtic Chieftain of all the Gaels, gun-runner, phone-tapper, tax-dodger, cute hoor and Saviour of Ireland.

            Jimmy O'Bliss leaped aboard, and the helicopter whined and rose immediately.

            As I reached it, it was already above my head. Eager both to return the poor man's envelope with its huge wad of banknotes, and to regain my sandwiches, I bounded up onto the limestone bench, scattering the rollerskatingboarders, and leaped high, grabbing with my free hand one of the two fat rails or skis on which it had previously been resting.

            I began to regret my rash impulse when the helicopter lurched, turned and began to head out across the water.

            The mouth of the river opened into the sea.

            The helicopter swung low above the rain-swept wave crests. My weight seemed to tug it lower by the second. My hand began to slip. With my other hand, I crammed the Brown Envelope down alongside the banana in the inside pocket of my pinstripe jacket. Then, with both hands, I hung on.

            Dear God, was this the end of me?

            Slowly, surely, my strength faded...

As we approached the Aran Islands I made out the black bulk of Inis Mór, then Inis Meáin, then Inis Óirr... Far below me I saw the rusting hulk of an enormous cargo vessel, hurled by storm up the beach and into the rocky fields, long before I was born.

            Then we were above the sea again, and into a thick wall of offshore mist. There was no sea and no sky and I had the curious illusion that, were I to let go of the helicopter, I would simply hang where I was, suspended, cushioned on all sides by the cotton wool mist, as the helicopter laboured away from me and vanished.

Cushioned, suspended, no effort, no noise...

My weary fingers began to relax their hold. No! I fought this treacherous vision of comfort, and with numb hands hauled myself higher on the ski, and slung a leg up onto it, and managed, at length, with difficulty, one-handed, to button my jacket around the ski so that my weight was half-supported by my jacket, in which I now hung as in a sling. My aching hands could relax a little.

Then, from out of the mist, loomed the terrible and wonderful shape of the fourth Aran Island.

Hy Brasil…

Yet it did not look right. Its bleak profile should have been familiar from old photographs in the Lifestyle Supplements, back when our Chieftain still gave interviews, before disgrace and self-imposed exile. But no, the familiar dark bulk was half-eclipsed by a great white mountain thrusting out of the water, hard against the island. White fog condensed and rolled off its sides, to form an enormous ring about the white mountain.

The white peak itself, to my exhausted, wind-wracked eyes, seemed to resemble a giant Nose rising from a submerged Face. There were two dark ovals near its peak resembling nostrils . Yes, a Nose sticking up out of the waves. But this, I realised, must be a Neurotic Delusion, caused by the traumatic mutilation of my own nose. I felt delighted at my sophistication. To have acquired my very own Neurosis after so short a time in the Big City! Or, I mused, perhaps I was Hallucinating: an even more sophisticated Metropolitan response to reality, and one conferring great status back at the Orphanage. Thady Donnelly had not been right for a week after doing mushrooms on his way to the 1996 All-Ireland hurling semi-finals in Thurles, and the younger orphans had followed him around the Orphanage Grounds, beseeching him to speak of his Visions, till he finally Came Down on the following Friday…

            We approached the white peak which masked the dark island. The helicopter flew low over it, and a powerful downdraft sucked us lower still, so that we staggered from the sky to within a few metres of the White Mountain. Even above the Roar of Blades and Engine, I heard Jimmy "Bungle" O'Bliss and the pilot exclaim to their Maker.

            The lurching recovery of the helicopter, as it shot back up to a decent height, was good news for the occupants of the helicopter, though of slightly less benefit to me. My numb fingers had been shaken loose by the sudden fall, and all the buttons on my Charity Suit now gave way under the tug of the sudden rise.

For a moment I hung suspended, as the ski-tip caught in my inside jacket pocket... But the pocket ripped. 

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

 

I fell thrice my height, to strike the White Mountain a glancing blow with my Arse.

The entire mountain rang like a bell, with a hollow, crystal-clear chime. I skidded, bounced, skidded and began to pick up speed as the sloping shoulder of the mountain dropped away beneath me. My sliding descent through the Arctic air grew pleasing to me, and I began to control my course by movements of the shoulders and hips.

            Bruised but exhilarated, I hurtled off the last ledge of the iceberg and crashed down to the shingly beach, which was knee-deep in a cushioning layer of  slush and fallen ice.

            I looked about me, as I brushed the slush from my pinstripe suit. The iceberg almost filled the tiny natural harbour of Hy Brasil.

I turned my back on harbour, iceberg, Aran Islands and Ireland, and walked inland.

            The shingly beach became, by imperceptible degrees, stony fields. There were signs of construction work: rough stone channels cut into the unique black limestone of the island and away across the desolate fields.

I looked back, and from this slight elevation could see that the towering mountain of ice was no longer a free-floating berg, but had been pushed or hauled or driven ashore, and up the gently sloping offshore sheet of basalt which surrounded the island.

            Why, he is irrigating the fourth Aran Island in the time-honoured way of the nomadic desert peoples of Arabia, I realised. He has towed an iceberg here from the poles. My respect for the genius of Charles J. Haughey grew greater still. Was this not a potent Metaphor for his benign stewardship of Ireland herself? Had he not inherited a desolate island, parched of self-belief, and remade her into an Earthly Paradise flowing with, awash with, drowning in...

            I was distracted from my Metaphor by a distant whinnying. Charles J. Haughey's famous string of racing camels! A generous gift to the then-Taoiseach from an Arabian admirer in the 1970s, all Ireland knew their fame. These beautiful beasts reputedly ran wild upon Hy Brasil. Further away again, I heard a curious cracking or crackling noise. It echoed back off the vast North Face of the towering iceberg and mingled with the whinnying, confusing my senses so that I could not make out the direction from which it came. I resolved to head further inland, for it was my vague recollection from the half-remembered Sunday colour supplements that Charles J. Haughey’s palatial retirement home was on the far side of the island from the harbour, facing only the bleak Atlantic waves, so that the great man would not have to look upon the Ireland that betrayed him.

            I headed directly across the black limestone island, featureless except for the dry stone walls around the dry stone fields and the occasional shallow labourer's grave, cut with a Kango hammer into the raw stone. Here and there, a white arm bone protruded.

            The going was extremely difficult, as I scrambled down and up the steep rocky gullies in whose shelter grew ferns and mosses and orchids.

            I was breathing heavily when the Salmon unexpectedly leapt in my rear pocket. I hauled it out, and received its Wisdom.

An oblique walk across an area of open crag is a continuous struggle with little cliffs and ridges and gullies, with no two successive steps on the same level, whereas if one follows the direction of the jointing, smooth flagged paths seem to unroll like carpets before one.

-Tim Robinson, English writer of Irish sympathy, Stones of Aran: Labyrinth, 1995

            Walking with the grain of the landscape, I made far better time.

            A thrill of delight ran through my chilled body at the thought that I might soon lay eyes upon the Great Banqueting Hall of our deposed Chief, and that I might be invited to partake in his fabled hospitality.

            As I crested the windswept hill I saw, sheltering behind a tall boulder from the wind, the noble profile and imposing brow, the long, sweeping eyelashes and strong jaw, of a racing camel. It turned and gazed with its warm, liquid eyes into my eyes.

"Hullo Camel," I said to it.

It whinnied. There was a crack, another crack, and the noble beast slumped to its knees as though shot.

            From the doorway of his palatial retirement mausoleum, former Taoiseach Charles J. Haughey, the smoke curling from the barrel of his rifle, trotted with dainty tread down the broad granite steps and across the gravel. He was followed by the masked figure of Jimmy O'Bliss, and by Dan Bunne, the Supermarket Magnate and one of the great Political Donors of our Age. Our greatest living Retailer, our greatest living Developer and our greatest living Politician! We would have been naked, homeless and ideologically incoherent without them. They had given us so much, no wonder they looked so Wrecked.

            "Great shot, Big Man, great shot, head shot, hard shot, great shot," said Dan Bunne, his voice somewhat muffled by his constant chewing on a piece of gum.

            "Shut your hole, Bunne, you fucking spastic mong," said Charles J, "You're giving me a fucking headache."

            The camel, its eyes now glazed and untenanted, toppled slowly sideways. Charles walked up to the dying beast and, carefully aiming behind its ear, fired a final shot into its brain. The camel’s flanks subsided as its last breath shuddered from its throat, rattling its relaxing tongue out of the way in a staccato spray of spittle.

            It was not how I had imagined meeting my hero, Charles J. Haughey, but one cannot entirely control one’s destiny. I stepped forward and reached for my inside pocket, intending to return the brown envelope full of money to its rightful owner, Jimmy O'Bliss. I cleared my throat.

The three Giants of Old Ireland failed to notice me, Dan Bunne being distracted by a lock of his own matted hair, and the others being distracted by Dan Bunne. The lock of Dan Bunne’s hair swung in the breeze, slightly to the right of his right eye. Unable to see it clearly by turning his eyes, he was turning his head.

The hair, being part of his head, turned an equal amount.

He swung around on his heel in an attempt to take the lock of hair by surprise. It remained slightly to the right of his field of vision. He began to pirouette, then reversed direction.

He fell over. Charles J. Haughey sighed.

            My fingers, still numb with the cold and locked in a clawlike grip from my helicopter ride, fumbled in my torn jacket pocket for the envelope and grabbed the banana instead, which had become stuck in the lining.

            "Shite," I said.

            Charles Haughey and Jimmy spun around and saw me for the first time. Dan looked up, blinking and chewing.

Charles Haughey stared at me with the most bloodshot eyes I had ever seen, until I looked down at Dan Bunne's. Their shirts were delightful.

            I was pleased that I looked so natty in my pinstriped suit. The bulge of the stuck banana, though, was ruining the cut of my jacket. I tried to jerk it free.

            “Drop the gun,” said Charles Haughey.

            “Gun?” I said, bewildered, and gave another tug on my banana.

            “Don’t play the innocent with me," said the former Taoiseach. "Freeze."

            "I'm already frozen."

            "Shut it, funnyman," said Charles J. Haughey.

            "He's after the fifty grand," said Jimmy O'Bliss. "I know that fecker from earlier, at Saint Nick's. Oldest trick in the book, kneeling, trying to trip me. He must have followed me in another chopper."

            "Which reminds me," said Charles Haughey. "Give me that money for safekeeping while I think what to do with our Mafia chum here."

I began to realise that they had grasped entirely the wrong end of the metaphorical stick.

            Jimmy reached into his pocket and brought out a sodden brown paper package. "It fell in a puddle boss, sorry," he said.

            Charles J. Haughey grunted and, without taking his eyes off me, ripped open the brown paper with his teeth.

            He glanced down at what he held.

            "What. The fuck. Is this."

            He looked upon my cold toast and chocolate spread sandwiches with a wild surmise. He looked up at me, then across at Jimmy. His eyes grew more bloodshot on the instant, as though a small blood vessel had burst.

            "My God. He takes my money and he comes back for more." He looked me up and down with an expression that bore a most curious resemblance to respect.

            "I can explain," I said.

            "Or die trying.”

            "I have your money here in my pocket. I merely wish to return it..."

            "Bollocks. You have a gun in that pocket."

            "No, that is a banana."

            "Who are you trying to cod? It's a gun."

            "A banana"

            "Gun"

            "Banana"

            "Gun"

            "Banana"

            Dan Bunne had meanwhile stood up, and now chose this moment to spin anti-clockwise upon his left heel, in an attempt to sneak up on his lock of hair from the far side.

            He failed. He fell over. His gun went off.

I jerked in reaction, and the banana flew out of my pocket, as Dan Bunne said, "Sweet Jesus Big Man, I've shot myself in the foot!"

Jimmy O’Bliss fell over.

“Oh no, wrong, cancel that, I’ve shot Jimmy in the foot,” said Dan Bunne, and tried to spit out his chewing gum. Nothing emerged but a small quantity of pink spit. "Dear God! I have been chewing my own cheek this past hour!" exclaimed Bunne. “Isn't that gas, now? Hah? Hah? Hah?" He spat more pink spit and had a poke at the inside of his mouth with a jittery finger.

            Charles J. ignored him and the yelping Jimmy. "Well, you were telling the truth about that banana. So give me my money."

            I delved deeper into my pocket to retrieve the fifty thousand pounds. My fingers slid down, and along the bottom seam, and up the side seam, and out the gaping flap of the ripped, empty pocket.

            "You'll never believe what I'm going to tell you," I said to Charles J. Haughey.

            Charles took a step towards me, raising his gun, a semi-automatic weapon that appeared custom built. Dan Bunne’s long barrelled goose-gun had a magazine big enough to contain a full box of cartridges. Jimmy O'Bliss had just dropped a Browning large-calibre sniper rifle.

            "Are such weapons not illegal in the Republic?" I enquired, interested.

"We're not in the Republic now, Pinocchio,” said the former Taoiseach, stroking his trigger and stepping closer. “This island is extra-territorial. It's beyond the remit of the glorious fucking Republic."

            "Which is handy if you're bringing in workers, and you don’t fancy the paperwork…" said Dan Bunne cryptically, with a wink.

            "Shut the fuck up, Bunne," said Charles J. Haughey, scowling. He turned back to me. "I am the law here. I am Judge, Jury and fucking Executioner."

            A vivid metaphor indeed, I thought. He had not lost his oratorical panache.

            “Hang on here a minute,” I said.

            I picked up my banana, and ran.

CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

            Obviously, the pocket had ripped open after being snagged on my fall from the helicopter. The great wad of cash could have slipped out at any point since. My only hope of clearing up this misunderstanding lay in recovering the money from where it had fallen and returning it, as proof of my bona fides. No doubt we would soon be laughing about their ludicrous mistake over a pewter goblet of hot mead. I retraced my route as exactly as possible, hopping into the fern-filled high-walled channels in the limestone and running along them for a while before leaping out and tacking across the grain of the land, leaping the channels at right angles, before dropping back into another for a long, oblique run.

            Further and further behind me followed Charles and Dan.

            I made it back to the beach with little incident, but there was no sign of the envelope. I clambered from the beach to the iceberg across a shifting mass of collapsed, melting debris.

            Cracks and fissures provided hand- and foot-holds in the hard, frictionless surface, and with difficulty, often on all fours, I retraced the path of my easy descent. The ice creaked and cracked beneath me, whole slabs sometimes peeling away as I searched for a solid handhold.

            At one point, spread-eagled on the face of a flat cliff of ice, I noticed a curious phenomenon: the ice exploded out in a small spray of shattered fragments just a foot to the left of my head. When I leaned across to look at the strange hole or crater revealed, the same phenomenon took place a foot to the right of my head. I looked back at Charles and Dan to see if they could explain this curiosity, but they seemed busy, a little way up from the base of the iceberg, fiddling with their guns. Not wishing to distract them, I pulled myself up over the lip of the cliff and kept climbing, hidden from them now by the high flank of the berg.

            At last, I reached the top:

            And there it was, pristine upon the peak: the Brown Envelope, lying where it, and I, had first fallen.

            I relaxed and awaited the others’ arrival. It had been an exhausting climb, and I was glad of the chance to rest and eat my banana. Though bruised from the morning's events, its flesh was sweet ambrosia to me. I warmed myself with the thought of how relieved and delighted they would be to have their money returned to them.

They seemed a long time coming. Dan Bunne had no doubt been slowed by his unsuitable shoes.

            At length I heard their slow, almost cautious approach. "Up here!" I cried. "Come and get it!"

            The boom and echo of my voice shook free several ledges of snow, and, disintegrating, they were whirled away down the berg by the chill wind. A split in the ice at my feet widened. I dropped my banana skin into it. The splayed yellow star vanished, tumbling, into the darkness.

            A low creak came from the depths.

            Charles Haughey’s rifle barrel appeared over the ridge, wearing a hat. I laughed at his prank. "Come up here and I'll give it to you!" I shouted, anxious to put the whole embarrassing misunderstanding behind me.

            From behind me, I heard the crunch of footsteps on fresh ice crystals. I turned in time to see Dan Bunne appear from over the far side of the frozen peak. He was looking at his feet, stepping carefully around the rim of the enormous nose-holes.

            “I’ll give it to you right now. You asked for it,” I said, reaching for my pocket, “And now you’re going to get it.”

            Dan Bunne swung the long barrel of his goose-gun in my general direction and convulsively pulled the trigger. The massive recoil sent him skidding a full three yards backwards on the smooth leather soles of his Italian shoes. This would not have been so bad had he not been standing two yards from the edge of the Northernmost Hole.

            I reached the edge too late to save him. "Dear God!" he cried as he fell. "The Snorter has become the Snorted! It is a judgement on me!"

            His hands still gripped the gun, and as he fell he fired, the recoils tumbling him end over end faster and faster till he vanished into the darkness spinning like a Catherine Wheel and emitting great blazing gouts of burning cordite with each report of his weapon until he had exhausted its capacity.

            The explosions echoed and re-echoed long after the last blast of flaming gunpowder had scorched the Arctic air. A booming rumble began as the last echoes died, and grew louder. Ice cracked and split far below.

            I stepped back from the edge of the Hole as the edge crumbled and fell in. A hairline fracture appeared in the hard ice beneath me. It ran past me in both directions, to the cliff edges.

             It widened to an inch, two inches...

The left side of the peak suddenly fell a full foot.

            I had a remarkably bad feeling about this.

            With awful slowness, the iceberg began to split down the middle.

CHAPTER THIRTY           

            As the shuddering iceberg began to split, I tried to decide which side of the divide would be the better one to ride out the collapse upon. Yet the great noise made thinking difficult.

My mind was finally made up by the arrival over the ridge of Charles J. Haughey. Perhaps in some way blaming me for the destruction of his iceberg and the death of his oldest friend, he loosed a wild shot at me from close range. I prudently leaped the widening chasm, and found myself falling inland atop a cliff of ice, as Charles J. Haughey’s side of the iceberg fell away from me, out to sea.

            I wedged myself in a fissure, and endured the accelerating fall.

            My half of the split mountain toppled inland, its broad point of contact rolling up the shingly beach and across the stony fields, ever faster, until the very peak slapped against the stony hill crest and snapped off, countless tons of ice now tobogganing down the far slope to overrun the retirement home of Our Great Leader, coming to a halt now in its ruins.

            I emerged from my fissure, and slid and fell down off the ice, through the shattered roof, and into the Imperial Bedroom.

            I landed upon the plumped, heaped, purple satin pillows.

            Sitting at the foot of the bed, bathing his wounded foot, happily untouched by the falling lumber, masonry, and ice, was Jimmy O'Bliss. He looked back at me over his shoulder with an expression I found difficult to interpret, due to the scarf obscuring his lower face.

            He stood, and hopped at high speed from the room.

            CHAPTER THIRTY ONE

            I was delighted by this unexpected chance to return to Jimmy O' Bliss his packet of money. Still shivering from the icy peak, I wrapped myself in a beautifully soft sheet of rich Egyptian cotton, and pursued him down the main stairs, through the banqueting hall, into the kitchens, down into the cellars, and further down into the sub-cellars and past a dark tunnel-mouth.

            Then back up again.

            Finally, as loss of blood slowed the modest and reluctant old fellow, I cornered him in the banqueting hall. Above us, the clear glass roof was spangled with chunks of ice, and, above that, the shuddering overhang of the iceberg itself was a rich, dark blue you could almost mistake for an evening sky, were it not for the facthe
that it dripped and creaked. Out through the French windows I could see the open-air swimming pool. A camel swam in its limpid waters. I advanced towards Jimmy and pressed the banknotes into his trembling hands. "You dropped this," I said, and turned to go.

            "Wait," said Jimmy in a weak voice, and I stopped, and turned. "One moment... I know it's here somewhere..." He opened a wooden cabinet and rooted around in its interior. Was I finally to be offered a glass of mead, in thanks for my kind deed? Jimmy O'Bliss emerged with a bolt-action rifle.

            "You're too fucking dangerous to live, Sonny Jim," he said, cocking the gun with a snap of the bolt. A tremor ran through the cliff of ice overhanging us, rattling the glass roof in its frame. A little avalanche of slush and melt-water ran across the glass, rippling the blue light that filtered through to us so that we seemed to move underwater. "It is a thing I never understood, in the James Bond fillums," said Jimmy O'Bliss, "why it is they always explain their nefarious plans to James Bond, and then leave him to be killed by some complicated, untried, and unsupervised stratagem. Lasers, indeed. Volcanoes. Fecking alligators… Myself and Charlie would always be roaring at the telly, 'Shoot him in the head! Just shoot him in the head!'" He sighed, pointed the gun at my head and pulled the trigger. The loud click of the firing pin on the empty chamber caused the cliff of ice above us to rumble, and lurch forward some inches. "Feck. No bullets. Hang on." He found a box of bullets in the cabinet.

            "You are planning to shoot me in the head?" I said, somewhat taken aback.

            "I am," he said, sliding out the empty magazine and loading it swiftly with bullets.

            "That thought is a source of sorrow to me," I said, "for I am on a quest to win the heart of my true love, the most beautiful woman in Ireland and possibly the world."

            "You intrigue me strangely," said Jimmy O'Bliss, pausing. "Tell me more."

            I told him more.

            "Sounds great. Where does she work?"

            "In SuperMacs of Eyre Square."

            He nodded, and closed his eyes, and smiled. “Ah, young love.” He opened his eyes. “God, I haven't ridden the hole off a young one in a long while. Yes, I have neglected the needs of the Heart.” He slammed the full magazine up into the gut of the gun with the palm of his hand. The tremendous blue ice-cliff overhanging us swayed and dropped a foot at the report. "Ah,” he sighed, “youth is wasted on the young." He swung up the barrel.

"I was intrigued by the tunnel mouth," I said.

"What?" said Jimmy.

"Mr Bunne said something, too, about workers..."

            "Oh, Big Mouth Strikes Again," said Jimmy. He put aside his rifle. "Sure, I suppose it won’t do any harm… This is where the Blacks are brought in. Hy Brasil is, by a curiosity of the law, in extra-territorial waters. Then down the tunnels with them, and Barney writes the cheque....”

            I was puzzled. “Is such importation of shackled humanity strictly legal?"

            “Our once and future King can do whatever he fucking wants here, sonny boy. It's his rocky kingdom, the barren field of his exile. From this stony grey soil he shall gather his strength, till the people repent their treachery and call for him..." Jimmy sighed. “He dragged this shit-hole out of the middle ages and into the twentieth fucking century, and how did the people thank him? They shafted him.” He brooded a bit on this, and clarified. “They fucked him up the arse and hung him out to dry. But why am I still yapping? Old age..." He snapped up the bolt on the rifle, hauled it back, baring the chamber into which popped up, spring-loaded, a large bullet. He then slammed forward the bolt, knocking the bullet into position.

            The cliff of ice above and behind him shifted, shifted again, lurched, and fell in its entirety on the banqueting hall, driving its stout pillars down through the next two floors, collapsing its own great wooden floor, the ancient carpet ripping free and sliding down the hole, so that I fell through the cellar, into the sub-cellar and rolled down the mouth of the tunnel wrapped in sheet and carpet. Jimmy, his suit snagging on a splintered joist as he fell through the cellar, did not follow me down. His rifle, jerked from his hands by his sudden arrest, did.

            Now I had a gun. Jimmy did not. My position had improved.

            Unfortunately, the collapsing iceberg had also breached the side wall of the open-air swimming pool, in which a camel still swam, alongside the banqueting hall.

            It would have gone easier with me if the swimming pool had not been connected by a deep channel to the sea, to ensure the freshness of the bathing water: but it was: and the tide, too, being high, all the broad Atlantic attempted to follow me, camel and all, into the cellar, the sub-cellar, and, subsequently, the Tunnel.

Jude: Level 1((There you go... This episode is taken from Jude: Level 1, which will be reprinted later this year as Jude in Ireland. Jude's adventures will continue in the new novel, Jude in London, due out this September from Old Street Publishing.))

I'm reading in Kaffee Burger on Wednesday

Just a reminder that I'm reading in Kaffee Burger, on Torstrasse, this Wednesday (March 25th 2009), at 9pm... Five euro in, and there's a band on after (a New England electrofolk trio called Erving).

I will extend to you the offer I just extended to my Berlin friends by email: If you'd like to come and you're broke this week, give me a shout and I'll try and get you in free... (There's an "Email me" button lurking somewhere on the sidebar.)

(Er, this offer is going to collapse into ignominious chaos, failure and bitter recrimination if more than three of you ask. But, this being Literature, that's not very likely...)

Not sure what I'm going to read... I might read The Orphan and the Mob, because it's won prizes, and it works well live, and I haven't read it here before. But it is also the opening section of Jude: Level 1, so some of you will be bored sick of it already.

Anyway, more information here.

And here.

And there's a charming picture of the magnificent venue here (it's not known as the Taj Mahal of Torstrasse for nothing).

See you down the mosh pit...

American Stars 'n' Bars

If you've read Jude: Level 1, you'll know I'm highly entertained by the glorious free-market energy of the US prison system. (The total number of people in prison, on parole, and on probation, in the US at the end of 2007 was 7.2 million - damn near twice the population of Ireland - so that's a lot of entertainment.)

But a magnificent new twist has emerged, which even I hadn't thought of. Over in Pennsylvania, people eventually started to wonder why the local judge was sentencing teenagers to serious time for crimes like putting up a spoof Myspace page about their assistant headmaster (a page marked "this is a joke"). As the New York Times reports..

"The answers became a bit clearer on Thursday as the judge, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., and a colleague, Michael T. Conahan, appeared in federal court in Scranton, Pa., to plead guilty to wire fraud and income tax fraud for taking more than $2.6 million in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers run by PA Child Care and a sister company, Western PA Child Care.

While prosecutors say that Judge Conahan, 56, secured contracts for the two centers to house juvenile offenders, Judge Ciavarella, 58, was the one who carried out the sentencing to keep the centers filled."

Brilliant... Sigh. I am simply too innocent to be a real satirist. It never occurred to me to formally employ the judges.... Anyway - and skip this if you've read it before - while I'm at it I thought I might as well paste in a big chunk of Jude: Level 1 at this point, for the amusement of new readers. (I'm hardly going to sue myself for copyright infringement.)

In this bit, Jude has lost his voice, got a crick in his neck, is stuck in a wheelchair, and has been mistaken for Professor Steven Hawking. Barney O'Reilly FitzPatrick McGee, the Irish-American CEO of the great American communications company, Westcom,  is showing him around a huge, secret, underground unit in their Galway plant...

From Jude: Level 1...

    “You’ve noticed they’re mostly Black, huh?” said Barney.

    I looked closer, and saw that most of the faces around me were indeed unusually deeply tanned for an underground Irish workforce in mid-winter.

Barney nodded. “Might be the last generation of authentic, home-grown Blacks to work for Westcom, and I’ll tell you why…” He looked about the great space, and a drop of moisture swelled in the corner of each eye.

    I settled back in my chair. I liked a story.

    He blew his nose, and cleared his throat. “Back when old man Fitzpatrick grew tobacco, the procuring of labour was an arduous, expensive, time-consuming business. Black men had to be sourced and purchased from unscrupulous Arab middlemen and imported by ship from West Africa. Spoilage rates were as high as 50%. Oh, times were tough for old man Fitzpatrick. Sure, eventually we had sufficient spare capacity to provide a breeding stock, and we were self-sufficient in labour. But then the cost of raising our African workers fell entirely on our family, a manifestly unfair situation. Often we’d get a good crop of sturdy young Blacks raised up to five or six years of age, near enough ready to do productive work and repay our investment: and they would all sicken and die in the sheds, and we had all the weary work to do all over again. The situation was intolerable, it was against natural justice: and so we campaigned for the abolition of slavery.”

I nodded my approval of this virtuous campaign.

“Came the glorious day, and we could kick them all out and they could rear their own brats on their own time, and their own dime. We rehired them, as needed, when they had matured. This improved profitability enormously. Productivity shot up too, for now the workers no longer had a cushy berth for life. The excess money saved, we invested in mining and smelting the iron ore in the hills too steep for cultivation. But, for that, a steady supply of strong male labour was required. We couldn’t be willy-nilly hiring by ones and twos. And so we contracted with the local prisons to supply our needs. They sourced the male labour as required. A vagrancy sweep, or a crackdown on gambling would supply peak labour demand at the mine. By now we were Western American Steel... But pretty soon we were paying so much out to the prisons for convict labour that we had a change of heart. Old grandpappy Fitzpatrick built our first prison. And so we could get the State, then later as we expanded into Federal Prisons, the Federal Government to pay to feed and house our workers, and we could pay ourselves for their services. So we were getting paid for them to work for us. It was soon our most profitable unit… You may have heard of our correctional subsidiary, American Stars ‘n’ Bars? Our Patriot Prison? With its uniquely flexible modular system?"

“Hmm?” I had been watching the green-eyed woman, who was very carefully taking something out of a safe and transferring it to a silver container that bounced light across her cheekbones, her noble nose… I shook my head, though as my head was on its side this involved rotating my face vertically rather than horizontally relative to the surface of the earth. Barney tilted his head in sympathy with mine.

"That's a... yes. Ha ha. Are you nodding or, ha ha... Anyway, as WAS became Westcom, and our jobs moved up the value chain, our prisoners, chiefly Negroes of little educational attainment, simply weren’t cutting it. Oh, they were bright and willing, but training them up costs time and money, and these guys simply weren’t inside long enough to make the investment worthwhile. They were missing out on training opportunities, the chance of betterment… Why, it was a crime. It was worse than a crime: it was a tragedy. So we lobbied Congress long and hard to give us time to really make a difference to these young men’s lives. And so we got their sentences doubled.”

I nodded, sideways, and stared at the face of the dark haired, green eyed woman. Head bowed over the silver container, staring into its depths.

“…But as Westcom became a favoured contractor on Federal Government Defence contracts, and we came to understand the Federal Government better, we came to… if I may use the word… love the Federal Government. And we began to feel concern for its welfare. You’ve got to see the bigger picture, and take the longer view. As the Federal Government pays us up to $500 for a screwdriver on our Defence contracts, it makes sense to maximise the State’s revenues so that they can pay us… Thus, if we can lower the burden on the Government, we can increase our income and profitability. And our prisoners are fine, fine, people. But they cost the Government a fortune in benefits, in healthcare and education, in providing streetlighting to their ghettos and so forth, before they are old enough to graduate to prison. It is the old problem my ancestor faced, of covering the overhead on their unproductive years. So the future lies in outsourcing labour to foreign slave-states. Let the Chinese and Hindus and so forth raise the whining infants to maturity. Not on America’s tab… We will build our prisons abroad, and ship the goods home. Indeed, we have used this opportunity to rethink the entire prison paradigm. In our next-generation foreign prisons, the prisoners will be kicked out after their shift and will have to feed and house themselves at their own expense. It is quite, quite brilliant, and will enhance profitability threefold… And so these are the last, I fear, of the great Black American workforce which my family has served so proudly and so humbly for so long. Here, meet some, before they vanish, like the Buffalo…”

He waved, and two young men in dark suits walked over to us. Barney whispered in my upturned ear, “Lately many of them have discovered Religion. I have encouraged it, for it makes them more Punctual, but Christ Almighty, they tend to go on about it… Gentlemen! I’d like you to meet Professor Stephen Hawking.”

“Sir.”

“Sir.”

I asked them about their religion. Barney groaned.

“Well sir, we are brothers in the Brotherhood of Brothers of Muhammad in the Hood.”

“Followers of the teachings of Muhammad…”

“It is a little known fact that Muhammad was a Black man, of Africa…”

“It is a little known fact that the first man to whom the Prophet gave the honour of giving the Call to Prayer was a freed Black slave, Bilal…”

“And so we follow that great Religion…”

“A Religion blind to the colour of a man’s skin.”

”A Religion of compassion.”

    “Religion of Love.”

    “Religion of tolerance.”

    "... for the Prophet taught us to hate no-one.”

    "And thus we hate no one."

    "Except the fucking Mexicans."

    "Yeah the Mexicans. And the fucking Koreans."

    "…’king Koreans. And whitey."

    "Yeah, whitey."

    "Fuck the Man."

    "And the cops."

    "Fuck the cops."

    "Nothing worse than a black man in a cop jacket."

    "Fuck those negroes."

    "Yes, fuck them."

    “Thank you, gentlemen,” said Barney.

    “Sir.”

    “Sir.”

    They bowed and left.

    “Oh well, it is better than Marxism,” said Barney.

(From Jude: Level 1, published in the UK by Old Street Publishing. And published in Greek by Topos Books, very handy if you're Greek...)

(Oh, and the terrific image is borrowed from Prison Penpals, check 'em out.)

The Great Irish Bank Collapse Sweepstakes - and they're off!

Well, it's not the end of the world, but it's going to feel like it for quite a while. The US government bail-out plan was voted down by Congress a few hours ago. If the plan had been passed, it would have given the illusion that things were going to be OK. (Things would not have been OK.)

Now, we won't even have the comforting illusion.

An an Irishman with my fortune (eleven euro) in an Irish bank account, I have a keen interest in the future of the Irish banking system. The main question seems to me to be, in what order will they fail? I reckon it's going to be a photo-finish for first place between Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Life and Permanent. (Though will dark horse Irish Nationwide Building Society make a late surge for the line?) After that, who knows. But they're all banjaxed.

Every Irish bank is massively over-exposed to Irish and UK residential and commercial property, and to Irish developers who can no longer service their vast loans. The Irish banks have been keeping their developers afloat artificially for the past year, in the hope things would miraculously turn around. Things haven't, they won't for years, and soon all the bad debts will have to appear on the books, dragging both banks and developers under. If the Germans and Swiss find the books of the Irish banks too revolting, and can't bring themselves to purchase the wreckage, then the Irish government (with some very irritated help from the European Central Bank) will have to recapitalise the entire banking sector. All this will have to be done during a global financial crisis. It's going to be comically awful, like having to change your tyre in the middle of a demolition derby.

I lived through the Irish property boom of the past decade with ever-mounting incredulity. It really was the most extraordinary case of mass delusion since everybody drank Kool-Aid in Jonestown. And if you want cast-iron evidence that I'm not pretending to be wise after the fact, here I am on Irish television, in May of 2007, saying exactly that, to the stony silence of the studio audience, all of whom had just bought an investment property the day before, and would be buying another one the day after.

(Oh yeah. banks and hedge funds and other financial institutions will also be imploding across America and around the world after this, but I'm so bored with the USA, I thought I'd talk about Ireland for a change... Ah heck, one more US prediction: good, old-fashioned, retro, Depression-era bank runs in America, starting tomorrow.)

Jude: Level 1 is the Book on One in Ireland this week, again...

I just discovered that Jude: Level 1 will be (again!) the Book on One, on RTE Radio 1, each night this week (Monday August 11th till Friday August 15th 2008). Each episode will start at 11.45pm, local Irish time (which is, in fact, UK Daylight Saving Time... which is one hour ahead of Greenwich Mean Time... and an hour behind Berlin time... which is Central European Time... you still with me? An hour ahead of me? Or behind?), and will run for 15 minutes. RTE Radio 1 streams live, so you should be able to catch it anywhere. (Here's how to listen... I've never been able to make it work, but you might have better luck.)

Incidentally, I found out my book was being broadcast across Ireland next week by reading the news in the Galway Advertiser. Jeeez, nobody tells me anything.

Jude was the Book on One in April, so this is quite a quick repeat. I didn't do the adaptation, which is by the producer, Aidan Stanley. Conor Lovett is marvellous as Jude.

Séamus Brennan, 1948 - 2008

(Photo: Michael D. Higgins, Julian Gough, and the late Séamus Brennan, at the NUIG Alumni Awards Gala Banquet, on March 1st 2008. Photo by Aengus McMahon.)

The funeral of Séamus Brennan, the Fianna Fáil politician and former government minister, was held yesterday. Given that there's hardly a page of Jude: Level 1 that doesn't feature a prominent member of Fianna Fáil inciting vast crowds into a homicidal xenophobic frenzy, taking bribes from property developers, or using an illegally held firearm to try and kill a defenceless orphan, it's only fair to say that Séamus Brennan was one of the good guys. He stood up to Charlie Haughey when that was a dangerous thing to do, and he tried to clean up a corrupt and scandal-banjaxed Fianna Fáil when the task seemed impossible.

I met Séamus Brennan, for the first and only time, earlier this year. We were both receiving awards from NUIG (or University College Galway, as it was when we were there, back in the early Middle Ages). My award was for my contribution of the term "Ardcrony ballocks" to Irish literature. His was for his contribution to Irish politics, which was considerable. As Ireland's Minister for Transport in the early 1990s, he had broken the (state-owned) Aer Lingus monopoly on flights to Britain, and thus freed a tiny and struggling Irish airline called Ryanair to survive, then thrive. (The young, and the non-Irish, cursing at the 3 euros they've just paid for a small bottle of water on their 1 euro Ryanair flight, will not be aware that air travel out of Ireland, until Séamus Brennan's reforms, was far, far too expensive for 90% of the Irish population. Which was the only reason there was anyone left in Ireland by the early 1990s... My generation had to emigrate by bus.) Later, he was a highly regarded Minister for Social and Family Affairs. When I met him, this year, he was Minster for Arts, Sport and Tourism (the ever-mutating ministry which appears in Jude: Level 1, thinly disguised as the Ministry for Beef, Culture, and the Islands).

The NUIG Alumni Awards ceremony was a black tie affair, Gala Ball and all, and my noble punk spirit was seething after the third round of photographs, "Stand there", "Sit there", "Hold the award a little higher."

I said to Séamus Brennan (who was patiently cooperating, changing seats when asked, standing up, sitting down), you must get awfully sick of these events, I'd imagine this must be astoundingly boring for you. No, actually, he said. Politicians are always handing these things out, but we never get to keep one. In fact, I think this is the first award I've ever received. And it's a great feeling, it's a great honour.

He was so pleased, and humble, and as a result dignified, that I felt like a spoilt little shitehawk for not accepting the award more graciously. So I amended my attitude, and my mood improved enormously, and I had a great night, with my beloved and my family, feasting and dancing and generally knocking seven kinds of crack out of it.

I also talked quite a bit that night with Séamus Brennan, and with the blessed Michael D. Higgins, another former Minister for the Arts, and former recipient of an NUIG Alumni Award (and a former lecturer of mine, in sociology, who used to put the Labour Party's noble redistributionist policies into action by buying me coffee and buns in the canteen after lectures, when I was seventeen and staaaarving). We talked about everything from Beckett to Braveheart, and Séamus Brennan came across as a gentle, thoughtful man, at peace with himself. The shoptalk of two Ministers for the Arts gives a very entertaining insight into the peculiar mix of glamour and grind in the job. At one point, Séamus passed on Mel Gibson's best wishes (from a party the week before) to Michael D. (Michael D. Higgins had, as Minister, helped Mel shoot Braveheart here in Ireland by loaning him, among other things, the Irish Army.) I also heard some very entertaining stories about paperwork and three-foot-high piles of receipts (which reflected very well on Mel Gibson, and less well on some of our much smaller, native Irish film makers.) A mighty night.

Séamus Brennan was diagnosed with cancer a year ago, so he must have known he was dying that night. (Or dying a little faster than the rest of us, as Beckett would probably point out.) He still managed to bring something to the party.

I liked him a lot. May he rest in peace.

Listowel Writers' Week

I'm going to be reading at Listowel Writers' Week, on Friday 30th of May 2008, at 2pm, in the Arms Hotel. It's a programme packed with some pretty heavy Irish names - Seamus Heaney, Anne Enright, John Banville, and my favourite Irish economist, David McWilliams - as well as the occasional top-quality foreigner, such as Lloyd Jones (author of Mister Pip).

There's also some good films showing in their Film Club. May I most heartily recommend Todd Haynes' astonishing, poetic, jittery, thrilling dream life of Bob Dylan, I'm Not There. In particular, Cate Blanchett's performance is as good as acting can get. It is more alive and true than most of our own lived moments. See it.

If you see me wandering down Church Street, don't be afraid to give me a shout.

Listowel rocks.

Jude: Level 1 in Greek

I know that some reviewers felt that Jude: Level 1 was all Greek to them. Well, now Jude: Level 1 can be all Greek to EVERYBODY. It's being published next week by Topos Books of Athens, in a translation by George Betsos. George and I have exchanged many profound, cultured and erudite emails over the past year, as we tried to work out the best way to translate "Ardcrony ballocks" into Greek, so I know that he has done as fine and conscientious a job as could be humanly achieved. (And what a fecker of a book to translate, the man is a hero.)

One of the great, odd pleasures of being translated lies in checking out who you're now being published alongside. It's a bit like joining a very, very peculiar football team. Like the players signed by a football manager, the writers signed to a publisher's list do tend to share some indefinable attitude.  Some publishers are attack-minded (lots of odd books, young writers, high-risk experimental fiction narrated by a squid). Some are defensive (rather obvious mainstream contemporary stuff and a lot of the more tedious classics).

If Topos were a football team, it would be very entertaining to watch. I was delighted to see that I now share a list with Philip K. Dick's Ubik (a book I bought for the second time, and reread with pleasure, earlier this year. Indeed, I've raved about Dick elsewhere on the blog).  An impetuous, unreliable, unpredictable and possibly drug-crazed star striker of a novel, very likely to score the winner with a spectacular bicycle kick in the dying seconds of extra time. Also, unfortunately, quite likely to get arrested just before the match.

And, though I have no idea what position it would play in,  I am deeply intrigued by a book called The Insane President and Female Pleasure by the Greek writer Pepi Rigopoulou. Freud, Bosch, Goya, Ovid, Duchamp... definitely my kind of book. Good to see, too, that Topos have an experienced midfield general in Fidel Castro, whose memoirs they publish in the autumn. Though Alain Robbe-Grillet may have trouble passing a late fitness test after dying earlier this year.

Anyway, Jude: Level 1, in Greek.

Tell all your Greek friends. You don't have Greek friends? Shame on you. Go to Greece at once, make some friends, and tell them. 

Senile Dementia versus Penile Dementia - the Queen and Jude battle it out for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize

Well, it seems I have been shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, alongside Alan Bennett (he wrote The Madness of King George!), Will Self (he wrote Great Apes!), Garrison Keillor (he wrote Lake Wobegon Days!), John Walsh (he once wrote in the Independent that I looked like a member of the Proclaimers!), and Joe Dunthorne (he wrote the extremely acclaimed first novel Submarine, and is only eight years old!)

Very very exciting. Previous winners include DBC Pierre, for Vernon God Little, Jonathan Coe, for The Rotters' Club, Jasper Fforde, for The Well of Lost Plots, and Marina Lewycka, for A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian.

 They do not insult you with money, either. Bollinger give you a shitload of champagne, Everyman give you sixty volumes of PG Wodehouse in hardback, and the Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival names a large pig after your book. What a year you could have, reading Wodehouse, drinking Bollinger, and... er... whatever it is that you do with pigs.

Unsurprisingly, for it is marvellous, I had picked Alan Bennett's The Uncommon Reader as one of my Books of 2007. I even bought my mother a copy for Christmas. Now he and I rub shoulders on a shortlist. My mother is delighted. I can only hope that none of the others bought their mothers a copy of my book for Christmas, considering how filthy it is. Personally, I hope Alan Bennett wins. His book is far more suitable for the nation's impressionable youth.

I have always argued that comedy is superior to tragedy, and this excellent shortlist proves my point. The tragic is a rather narrow genre, the comic is infinite. What other prize would place a story about a refined elderly lady reading books, in competition with the adventures of a Tipperary orphan with two penises who urinates on a politician while a mob of fifty thousand enraged farmers burn down his orphanage? Now, that's what the people want to see in a literary prize - senile dementia versus penile dementia.

May the best book win. Or, failing that, my one.


Indeed, I do believe that Jude: Level 1 is the first book featuring a hero with two penises to be nominated for a major UK literary award. Of course, it merely follows the American success of Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, which won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize with a hero who had both a penis and a vagina.

In the everevolving literary world, are two sets of genitals the new one set of genitals? Will the next Booker winner be a realistic, psychologically nuanced, slightly depressed novel featuring a funeral at which a dark family secret is finally revealed and it turns out to be sex abuse yet again, but with two penises?

We shall see. 

My Enormous Gherkin

As I passed through Orly airport on Saturday (about to fly home to Berlin), the woman running the x-ray machine frowned. She signaled to the man beside her. He frowned, and  signaled to the second woman, further along the conveyer belt.

The second woman grabbed my rucksack as it came out of the X-ray machine.

"Is this your bag?" she said in French.

Oui, I said.

She frowned, perhaps at my pronunciation, and began to pull on her black gloves. I tried to think what the heck I was carrying, that could look so suspicious on an X-ray. The woman plunged her gloved hands deep into my rucksack, and rummaged. I remembered what she was going to find just before she found it...

 Let us pause a moment, while I give you a little backstory.

I had spent the previous few days just outside Paris, working on the stage version of Jude: Level 1. I had wished to bring my noble co-workers a gift from Berlin, to give them strength for the coming ordeal, but there is no point bringing wine to France, chocolate is a problematic present, and what else is there? In duty-free I had almost despaired when I saw the discreet pile of cans marked in big letters Get One!, and in little letters, 1 große echte Spreewälder Gewürzgurke.

The perfect gift from Berlin! A huge local gherkin, in a can. "The gherkin snack from the homelandplace for gherkinfans" as the can said. ("Der Gurken-Snack vom Heimathof für Gurkenfans.")

 So I loaded up with enormous gherkins, one to a can, and brought them to France. We had one each. However, I was so busy I forgot to eat mine, and thus it was that on my way back through Orly airport this refined French lady now found herself holding my enormous gherkin, canned, in her black-gloved hand. "What," she said in elegant French, "is THIS?"

I was distracted from her question by the dawning realisation that I was living through a postmodern, canned version of the great moment in the rockumentary This Is Spinal Tap, when bass player Derek Smalls sets off the metal detector at an American airport by walking through it with a cucumber, wrapped in tinfoil, stuffed down his pants.

Blinded by this vision, I couldn't remember the French for gherkin. Our conversation got increasingly surreal as she tried to guess what the lurid, warty, green thing, pictured on the can, might be. "Get One!" didn't really help, and she couldn't read German. At one point you could see her thinking "Glow-in-the-dark vibrator? Dildo?" In French. ("Vibrateur phosphorescent ? Dildo?")

Seconds from disaster, we finally communicated. "Cornichon!" I cried. "Ein große, er sorry, c'est un grand cornichon."  "Ah!" she cried, enormously relieved. "Un cornichon!" All smiles, she handed it back to me, and I was able to bring meine große Essiggurke home to the banks of the Spree.

(An aside: I am shocked to discover that, according to Google, nobody in the long, rich, and well-documented history of the world has ever, before this glorious day, used the phrase "My Enormous Gherkin" on the internet. This seems to me extraordinary. Hardly a day goes by when I don't say it at least twice.)

Jude: Level 1 is the Book on One in Ireland this week

RTÉ Radio 1 (the Irish national broadcaster) will be nationally broadcasting little lumps of Jude: Level 1 all this week, from Monday to Friday. The short extracts will go out at 11.45pm each night (Irish time), and can be heard live, anywhere on earth, and probably far out into space, on the RTÉ Radio 1 stream. They are read by the brilliant Beckett actor Conor Lovett. (One of the select few actors - a band apart, a very special breed - who have appeared in both Waiting For Godot and Father Ted).

I would have posted this earlier and given you a bit of warning, but nobody had officially told me that it was happening, and I couldn't find any advance mention of it on the RTÉ website. Maybe it's a secret. Maybe I shouldn't even be telling you. (Or maybe I'm just not very good at navigating the RTÉ website...)

No, I've had another poke around the RTÉ website, and they've just updated the Book on One page (after the first episode had aired, naturally) to plug Jude. Ah, there is more rejoicing in heaven over the sinner who repents than over the goody-two-shoes who updates his website punctually.

And I've just noticed, Lucille Redmond in the Sunday Business Post previewed it, in their Radio Review section:

The Book on One this coming week sounds enticing. It’s Jude: Level 1, in which a Tipperary orphan sets off for Galway, ‘the Sodom of the West’, when the Mob burns down his orphanage. After facial surgery reconstructing him in the image of Leonardo DiCaprio (but for an erectile nose), he endures a chase through the Dublin of Ulysses. It’s to be read by Beckett interpreter Conor Lovett. 

A woman of great taste and discernment, Lucille Redmond.

Anyway, I  heard some of the first episode as it went out (the live streaming kept breaking up, I really must tinker with my internet connection... chase those storks off my chimney, hunt the voles out of the DSL box, unpeel the clinging vines from my cables), and the bits I heard sounded mighty. Sorry I couldn't warn you in advance about the first episode, but you can tune in Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday at 11.45pm Irish time for more, more, MORE of Jude's adventures across Ireland.

I  think he'll be walking through Tipperary, in the dark, tonight, and may well meet the mysterious Pat Sheeran, who will give him a lift on his motorbike to the Sodom of the West... I'm not sure where Jude will be tomorrow (possibly doing battle with James Bond super-villain Charlie Haughey, on Haughey's private island). On Thursday and Friday I do believe he'll be trying to preserve his innocence as he pursues former Supermacs employee, and his true love, Angela, through the Inferno of Dublin...

And if you like that sort of filth, you can buy the book here...

Review Jude: Level 1 by Wednesday, and win a €100 book token

 

Should have mentioned this weeks ago, forgot.

Start magazine (which covers arts and culture in the south-east of Ireland) is running an open competition to review Jude: Level 1.  Reviews can be up to 600 words long, and should be sent to startmagazine@eircom.net . The best review will win a €100 book token, and will be printed in the summer issue of the magazine.

Closing date is the 16th of April, so not a lot of time left... 

Blogging Live from Prague

Well, I've just had two blindingly good days in Prague. Met enough lovely people to hold a World Hugging Championships. Read to two of the finest, most receptive audiences ever assembled (in the Globe, and Shakespeare & Sons). They were both engaged and engaging, which is a heck of a feat. Sold all my copies of Jude: Level 1, which shows you how fabulously discerning they were. Wrote some of the new opening to Jude: Level 2 while sitting sipping cappuccino, in the sunlight, outside a cafe in Náměstí Míru (Peace Square). Bought all of Kafka's short fiction, again. And spent many fine hours in bars where the smoke grew so thick you could lie down on it and have a brief nap before returning, refreshed, to the scintillating conversation.

In short, I have been having far too good a time to blog, so that'll have to wait till I'm back in Berlin.

I'm reading in Prague! Later today! And again tomorrow!

 

Holy guacamole, I totally forgot to mention that I'm  reading in Prague later today, and again tomorrow. (Monday 7th of April 2008, and Tuesday 8th of same...) I should have had this up as a news thing weeks ago. Months ago.

Anyway, if you've any English-speaking  friends in Prague, tell them it'll be funny, intellectually titillating, and I may get my kit off if enough people throw their underwear at me.

I note with gloom that the Prague Daily Monitor has listed it as a poetry reading, so there goes my casual walk-in audience. (Just to clarify: It won't be a poetry reading. 100% uncut, hardcore prose, all the way.)

I'm planning to read the award-winning short story "The Orphan and the Mob" tonight, that's Monday night, in the Globe bookshop (as part of Alchemy Prague)... (For new readers, "The Orphan and the Mob" is also the prologue to my fab, book-of-the-year, comic novel, Jude: Level 1), which I strongly advise you to buy immediately.)

...and I'll be reading "The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble" (which had the peculiar honour of being the first short story ever published in the Financial Times), on Tuesday night in  Shakespeare and Sons.

It's practically a world tour!

And the Ossian for Rudest Book goes to...

 

Thank you Kevin, Siobhán and Ariel for the congratulations and comments on my last post...

I did indeed get given a nice piece of bog oak, Kevin. Apparently it's called an Ossian.

The award (and I will probably give myself RSI typing this out in full), is one of the annual NUIG (National University of Ireland Galway) Alumni Awards. Mine was the AIB Award for Literature, Communications and the Arts.

Met some very interesting people there. The other award winners included Gráinne Seoige of Irish-language TV fame, and Séamus Brennan, the current minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism (the ever-mutating government department which inspired the Ministry for Beef, Culture and the Islands in Jude: Level 1). As you can see above, I flirted outrageously with Séamus, while grilling Gráinne on the leading political questions of the day.

A fun night out, and Aengus has sent me many other nice pictures, which I do intend to put up on the site... But, right now, I'm more excited by the goings-on in the credit markets. You don't normally see the words "wild and inexplicable" popping up on the front page of the Financial Times...

I'm reading at Bookslam, in London, on Thursday, February 28th 2008

I'm reading at Bookslam, in London, on Thursday, February 28th, this year of our lord 2008. (That is, later this week). Please do come if you can. Or tell any of your London friends you think might enjoy it. I will not only read from, but also sign, copies of Jude: Level 1, while flirting with your disapproving partner. And I fully intend to end the night by disgracing myself thoroughly in a new and entertaining fashion.

 

 I am operating on 2 hours sleep, so if this ends abruptly, it's because I've fallen asleep and my forehead, as it sinks gently to the keyboard, has posted an unfinished message.

I will awake in a few hours, with much of the alphabet embossed in small squares on my forehead, like a man punished by the Puritans for writing fiction.

(That's three paragraphs in a row that start with "I". A sin I wouldn't commit, even in a blog, were I sufficiently rested.)

Bookslam, for those of you too lazy to click on the hyper-link, is a kick-ass literary night out in London, with live music, a DJ, a poet and, on this particularly marvellous Thursday, me.

It's on in the west-end club now known as Neighbourhood, at No. 12 Acklam Road, London, W10 5QZ.

(Back when I were but a lad wearing nowt but clogs and a loincloth, No. 12 Acklam Road was better known as  Subterania, and hosted everyone from My Bloody Valentine to We've Got A Fuzzbox And We're Gonna Use It.)

 On Thursday, the culture will be provided by NOT ONLY Julian Gough BUT ALSO:

Zubz (known to his mum as Ndabaningi Mabuye), the Zambian-born, Zimbabwe-raised, South Africa-based MC, flying in, fresh as a daisy, from Johannesberg, with a feather in his flat but sexy cap.

 James Yuill, the hippy zippy folk bloke who's not afraid of electricity. (Not to be confused with the recently deceased Scottish road haulage industry legend).

 And Salena Saliva Godden, the writer and poet and musician and assassin and astronaut and...

(THUD) 

 

Paris for Love

 

The reading in the cave was great. Conor Lovett IS Jude, which is a scary thought. And a tribute to the weird and timeless miracle of good acting. The first time I ever saw him act, he was totally convincing as an old man on the brink of death. Now, years later, he's totally convincing as an eighteen-year-old Tipperary orphan with two penises. Go figure.

(An aside: I know most of you proud and upright citizens avoid the theatre for religious reasons, but you might know Conor Lovett as Ronald, in The Mainland episode of Fr. Ted.)

We got great feedback from the assembled dignitaries (most of them theatre people, so their criticism was informed and knowledgeable). I was particularly happy with the negative feedback, because it was all stuff we can fix. The positive feedback was jolly nice too, though less useful. Most of the negative stuff was simply due to how brutally I'd edited it. I'd cut out so much to bring the reading down to 50 minutes that people, understandably, got lost. Scenes and characters weren't properly introduced. But the alternative would have been a two-hour edit where nobody would have got lost, but several would have died of hypothermia in the cave.

The finished show will be a lot longer, but the venues will be a lot warmer. 

People laughed all the way through the reading, and the dinner afterwards was very jolly and went on for hours. A good start. One of the guests, Albert, reckons the cave is a lot older than the War, and that the Germans definitely didn't build it. As he fought his way across Europe back in the day, liberating Paris en route (he was in US Military Intelligence during the War), he should know.

He also liberated the very beautiful Micheline on his way through Paris. Sixty two years later, they're still married, and a heck of a good couple they make. Even Albert's family are beginning to think it might work out.

To quote the wise words of Jimmy "Bungle" O'Bliss, from Jude: Level 1: "Ah, Paris for love... Dublin for the Fumbled Handjob. Dublin for the Drunken Fuck... Paris for Love."

 

Blogging Live from a Cave near Paris

 

I'm just outside Paris for a few days, helping adapt Jude: Level 1 into a stageplay for the Galway Arts Festival later this year. Very, very exciting. I'm working with Conor Lovett, the best Beckett actor of his generation, and Judy Hegarty Lovett, who directed him so brilliantly in the Gare St Lazare Players' production of Molloy, and indeed in the entire Beckett trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable).

Anyone who can adapt The Unnameable (fondly known even by many Beckett fans as The Unreadable) into totally gripping theatre can do anything.

We spend all day underground, in a cave cut into the chalk hillside. Looking up at the chalk-and-flint arches above us, as a heater slowly warms the dark space, I feel rather as early Christians must have in the catacombs, if they ever put on theatre. ("Waiting for God", now in its two thousandth triumphant year!)

Conor and Judy think the cave was probably built by the German army during World War II, perhaps as a bomb shelter, perhaps to store ammunition. (The Germans also placed a rather large gun on the nearby hill, a couple of hundred yards away, overlooking the Seine. Didn't work, the Allies made their first successful crossing of the Seine about two miles upriver from here.)

We've invited some people out to see Conor as Jude tonight, in the cave.  It'll be a short (55 minute) demo version, read rather than acted. Then we'll ask the audience for their responses, and suggestions.

Then we all go for dinner together. Theatre rocks! It's all talking and eating! Beats the shite out of sitting on your own, writing novels.

Sunday Tribune Books of the Year - Jude: Level 1

Back in Ireland, the Sunday Tribune just picked its books of the year.

I was INTENSELY pleased to see Jude: Level 1 among the (eight) Irish fiction titles. Especially when they called my darling little book "the picaresque bastard lovechild of Flann O'Brien and Matt Groening".

Anyway, here's what they said in full:

"Jude: Level 1

Julian Gough (Old Street Publishing)

Gough's novel is like the picaresque bastard lovechild of Flann O'Brien and Matt Groening, and yet is all Julian Gough. Possibly the finest comic novel to come out of Ireland since At Swim Two Birds, it recounts the story of Jude, an orphan, as he wanders through Ireland in a quest to find his true love and uncover the secret behind his parentage. Along the way he gains an erectile nose, and a startling resemblance to Leonardo Di Caprio. Each absurd episode is constructed meticulously, and is delivered with the kind of momentum which should collapse in on itself, and amazingly manages to ascend even greater heights of hilarity. Gough makes it look deceptively easy, with an instinctive sense of timing, and a razor-sharp and subversive intellect."

 The entire list can be found here...