Lightness and wellbeing

Yesterday, rather sweetly, my mother contacted me to enquire as to my psychological wellbeing. She was concerned to see a dark undercurrent in my work which could point to either instability or murderous intent. In an effort to ease her fears, I searched through my work and found nothing which could dissuade her that her son would soon be convicted for heinous crimes involving chainsaws. Becoming more frantic, I looked to uncompleted projects - those stabs in the dark which tend to lurk discontentedly in the far regions of my hard drive, desperately seeking light and recognition. I stumbled upon something that I had written a few years ago. It appears horribly dated to me and I can't even remember where I wanted to go with it. I re-read it and some parts of it are salvageable. Anyway, read it yourselves and please leave any comments as to whether I should try and pursue it or not. Here you go, Mum, I wasn't a miserable bastard, for a very short period, 3 years ago!

July 18th 2008

Being forcefully ejected from any premises is generally considered a bad experience at the best of times. When this ejection happens to be during a rather heavy downpour outside a pub in the west of Ireland, the experience is greatly reduced in stature.

“Why to fuck?” sputtered the ejectee, evidently in some distress, as he desperately tried to retrieve his hat from the puddle in which it had landed, all the while fighting his arm into the wrong sleeve of his tweed overcoat.

“Generally, it is considered necessary for the survival of the species. But do you not find it a little wet for a lesson in biology?” replied the ejector, in this case the barman of the “Puddle of water”, more affectionately known to the locals as the “puddle of piss” due to the olfactory assault upon entering the lavvies around the back.

“Each time I expound upon a theory which doesn’t tie in closely with your bigoted views you throw me out in the street; can’t we for once have a heated debate without you resorting to violence when I stun you out of your dim-witted misapprehension of the real state of affairs? Goddammit! I’m like the sunlight in your medieval existence!”

“You are no such thing! You purposefully ridicule my religious beliefs and act all stunned when I get riled! If you didn’t have such an extensive bar tab, I’d bar you!”

Emmitt visibly paled at these words, momentarily forgetting his struggle with things sartorial.

“Surely not..” he gasped, “that would mean..!”

That would mean going an extra five miles down the road to a pub which could only be termed a den of iniquity, a haven of drugs, thugs and wenches of dubious intent. Drugs and wenches, of course, were no bad thing in themselves, on occasion, Emmitt had been known to procure both at a reasonable price. An ounce of grass for a hundred euros and the company of a buxom, bawdy young lady for the price of a few pints often led to a pleasurable if somewhat hazy evening of debauchery. But the thugs, these track-suit wearing, shaven-headed, leering lobotomies who were perched so precariously on the knife edge of violent potentiality, scared the bejeesus out of him. I mean he never intended to treat them with anything but abject humility but each time he seemed to get himself into situations where he would confusedly find himself defending the honour of some trollop he had just met against the troglodytic advances of one of their number. And being pack animals, you, invariably, ended with having inadvertently declared war on his entire clan of reprobate buddies. So, needless to say, this was not Emmitt’s idea of the utopian ideal, and forays into this wilderness were kept to a minimum, usually, until his biological urges got the better of him.

“Right, the Pig in Knickers!” finished the barman, nodding emphatically.

“Well, if you won’t behave like an adult, I can see that this conversation is over!”

Having, finally, brought his rebellious attire under some semblance of control, he pirouetted neatly and set off a few paces in the direction of home, head held high and aloof, even if the effect was slightly spoiled by the streams of water running down his face from the drenched hat. He paused reflectively for a few moments, span round again, shuffled back towards his assailant and doffed his cap.

“We’re still on for tomorrow, right? The pub quiz, I mean. It would be a shame to set asunder such a wondrous celebration of the intellect over such a petty difference of opinion.”

“See you tomorrow, now bugger off!” the barman exclaimed with some weariness.

As the warm light emitting from the porch was extinguished by the energetic thumping to of the door, Emmitt resumed his journey homeward contentedly. He turned his collar up against the driving rain and donned his hat anew, settling into a hunch-shouldered march in order to gain the dry sanctuary of his home as quickly as he could.

People are odd, he considered, with many a rueful head shake. In this little village of 200, he was still looked upon as an outsider, although he had lived here for nigh on 20 years. A west-brit, a jackeen, that’s what they called him, just because he had had the misfortune to study and live temporarily in halls at Trinity. This fact did not go down well among the locals who saw his way of talking, nay, his whole way of life as an unnecessary affectation. Emmitt had only one desire in this life and that was to live, where possible, as much like a gentleman of leisure of yesteryear as he could.

Upon his thirtieth birthday, he had inherited a substantial sum of money from his father’s estate; his father had died when he was five and his mother during his teens so that he had largely fended for himself from the age of fifteen. The death of his mother had released him from a suffocatingly religious upbringing and he had been doing his best to reconcile his hatred of all things divine ever since. To this end, he had completed his schooling and moved to Dublin from his native village of Gubsheen in order to study philosophy. In his third year, he had been expelled for setting up a student political movement which had advocated militant criticism of the theology department of Trinner’s university. After a failed attempt to subvert the sermon of the archbishop of Dublin one Easter Sunday, he was informed that he could have an honorary degree if he would never set foot on campus again. Wisely, realising that he was on a hiding to nothing, he accepted the terms of his surrender and went on his merry way, all the while castigating the teachings of the catholic church in an effort to show the “true spirit of revolution” as he termed it.

After bumming around most parts of the country for a couple of years, stumbling from one form of depraved excess to the next began to pall, so Emmitt decided that it was time to expand his horizons and do a year abroad, in order to find himself. He fell in love with the first flaxen-haired lovely before he had even left the airport at Munich. Waltraud, for that was her name, showed him all around Bavaria and especially her home town of Passau. Several months of contented sexual satiation followed, in which he showered her with gifts and she repaid him in kind.

However, little warning signals prevented Emmitt from ever fully letting his guard down, and these signals became more pronounced the more the relationship evolved. Looks pregnant with emotional instability seemed to become more prevalent among the repertoire of the teutonic totty. When Emmitt was introduced to her father as the love of her life and potential suitor that definitely greased the wheels of his speedy departure. He ventured farther southwards and looped his way back up to France via Spain without arousing any such depth of emotion in any of the more passionate climes.

Travel was all well and good, he concluded, but you can’t beat living where you know every nook and cranny intimately. Nevertheless, he did feel a certain hankering every now and again to escape the occasionally stifling life within a small community. Knowing the place intimately did not amount to the same thing as having every inhabitant of that place know you to the same degree, he concluded with a sage nod of his head, precipitating a stream of precipitation down the back of his neck. He tucked his neck further into the recess of his shoulders, turtle-like, as he marched crabwise diagonally back and forth across the narrow boreen, in a determined but drunken effort to reach the warmth and refuge of his roaring fire. He prayed to a god in which he didn’t believe that his housekeeper Mrs. O’Neill had had the prescience to leave him a snack before bedtime.

In response to the thought of food, his stomach gave out an almighty growl, reminding him rather urgently that nothing solid had passed twixt his lips since lunchtime the previous day. For Emmitt was not a man of adventure, he knew little of the darwinian struggle for survival that other members of his species had to cope with every day. He rarely ate, unless food was presented to him; so much so that his body had had to learn to cope with a most irregular intake of nutrition.

He pondered further his life story thus far and concluded that the time had come for him to take stock of his lot and do something worthwhile; never having had anyone to push him much he had rarely started one project without envisaging all the work that lay ahead and immediately resorting to a more laid back, sometimes horizontal, approach to life. His mother had been more concerned with the state of his afterlife in a way which he had always found far too morbid to contemplate when he was sober, for this reason he had “lacked the mentor which he required to push him to the limit of his potential”, a phrase lifted directly from the report card of one of his more tolerant and benevolent teachers at secondary school.

With this firm resolution met, and with the nagging realisation that it would be under severe scrutiny come the light of day and the standpoint of relative sobriety, he clanked his way gracelessly over the cattle grid and marched purposefully up the avenue to his house. After an inordinate amount of pocket searching, he triumphantly held aloft his Yale key and squinted uncertainly at the unreasonably small lock. Five minutes of fruitless scrabbling brought him no closer to admittance into the warmth which awaited, tantalizingly close, on the far side of the old oak door. Shrugging, he took a few steps back and launched himself at the door with all the power he could muster. He scrunched his eyes closed at the thought of the impact upon his shoulder which, in fact, never came, instead he dashed across the threshold and came to a stumbling stop in the middle of the hallway.

“You fecking eejit, I’m telling you there should be a law against the like of you!” Mrs. O’Neill glared at him, the night cap restraining her mop of dyed hair and dragging the skin on her forehead and around her eyes tight in such a manner as to render her more terrifying than usual. Drawing on his last reserves of dignity, Emmitt drew himself to his full height and took a step towards her and promptly tripped over himself.

“Yeah, you’d want to watch that spot, it’s deceptively flat there.” She muttered sarcastically, folding her arms in an effort to retain some of the fury she had so lovingly stoked in preparation for his arrival.

“Dear, dear Mrs. O’Neill, what is your first name? Never mind! Irrelevant at this juncture. While you are up you wouldn’t be a dear and fix us something quick to eat and maybe a cup of tea.. perhaps with a small drop of whiskey to warm me up after my long, wet and weary walk home?”

Aghast, she looked at him. “Who the bloody hell do ya think y’are? Am I here to fetch and carry for you all the sodding hours of the day? Ha! All so that Lord bloody Muck can fall in here at 1 o’clock in the morning demanding food as if this was a bloody kebab shop! Bugger off with yourself.”

“I was merely requesting a favour, I would never be so high-handed as to demand anything of you. A little sustenance for a weary traveller would not go amiss. And believe me if this backwater ever had the open-mindedness to allow turkish cuisine, I would have partaken of it before returning. But, alas, this is not the case, hence my asking you as politely and humbly as I could if you would be so kind as to prepare something.”

“Well, you’re lucky, now that I’m up, I’m hungry and I’m not so churlish as to make just for myself. If I was of meaner character, I’d give you such a kick in your arse as to send you somersaulting the whole way up them stairs to bed.” She turned and, continuing to grumble to herself, waddled into the kitchen.

“Your character is beyond reproach and you have saved me with your kind actions which belie the heat of your words!” Emmitt replied with a laconic grin.

“Bugger off with your plum arsery!” was the terse reply.

After contemplating this fortunate turn of events, he shrugged off his sopping jacket and hat and left them in a steaming pile on the floor before turning and heading for the study. He plonked himself down in his leather armchair with a contented sigh and raised his feet onto the footstool to warm his feet before the raging hearth of the fire. The room was bereft of any other furniture save a small desk in the far corner. From floor to ceiling on three sides, the walls were obscured by books. Books of all kinds, from fiction to fantasy, from philosophy to philately were ranged in no particular order, in untidy piles. Emmit had not even begun to read the half of them but he had spent his entire life buying books and adding to his collection. So, now, he had a quite impressive array of titles from which he used to randomly select a tome and read it voraciously before moving onto the next until the time came for him to fulfil any duty, be it social or otherwise. He was working his way slowly through “Europe: A History” at the moment and reached for it with a small sigh of anticipation, as he squinted at the page the words seemed to jump erratically into nonsensical forms under his intense scrutiny, so much so that he had to discard this worthy tome and search around the room for another form of entertainment easier on the senses. He had a TV but he rarely watched it as he found the drivel that was broadcast from it more painful than he could bear. The thought of watching anything at this hour caused him a great deal of discomfort.

“Imagine watching a bunch of irrelevant, illiterate ignoramusses stuck in a house. God almighty! Entertainment - yeah right! I’d rather stick my own thumb up my arse!” he grumbled as he staggered towards his record player for inspiration. He placed the needle and very soon the soothing sounds of “Take 5” by the Dave Brubeck Quartet filled the room. He collapsed in a heap back into his armchair and slowly subsided into a snoring stupor.

Mrs. O’Neill nudged the door open with her foot and manoeuvred her way with some skill into the room, bearing a tray laden with scrambled eggs on toast and a pot of tea. As she kicked the door to behind her, her eyes fell upon the now supine figure of her employer, who had slid to the floor in a heap with his chin now resting on his chest, he was emitting tortured, stertorous eruptions of air from between his flaccid lips.

“Well, Christ on a bike! I’ll slice you up you cheeky little beggar! And me going to all this trouble, I’ll split your bloody useless crown.”

With that she dropped the tray on his crotch and marched out of the room in high dudgeon. Emmitt returned to consciousness with alacrity and stared in disbelief at the mess about his nether regions before his mind registered the burning sensation in his trousers which, being still wet, absorbed the flood of piping hot tea. He jumped with a yelp of surprise to his feet and began to frantically beat about himself in an effort to dispel the pain which was now coursing through his most tender of physical attributes. A few moments of this showed him the futility of his chosen course of action and he struggled to undo the buttons of his fly. His trousers and underwear he kicked with his last vestige of dignity into the corner before he cupped himself lovingly in an unmanly fashion and rocked back and forth, keening gently.