Once upon a time there was a young man who became an heir to a massive, if unexpectedly bequethed, fortune. Unexpected, only in it being so sudden. The heir, Sebastian, was an only child.
Among many other things, he inherited a very large country estate in the improbably sylvan valleys to the north of the city. With the estate came a lifelong servant / butler / groundskeeper / cook / nurse / handiman – who was called: – it doesn’t matter; Sebastian never used the man’s correct name and merely refered to him as Paddy…
“Go blow dry the fucking lawn, Paddy,” he bawled down the phone, from his bath, one morning, “I’m going to throw a fucking party, okay.”
Continue reading ‘Jaguar versus ostrich’
Once upon a time there was a village, a very respectable village with straight dirt roads and peaceful farmhands and obedient goats and children. The most respectable man in the village was Stefanos the lodgekeeper. The second-most respectable man in the village was the deposed and supposedly disgraced Baron, who acted very respectably regardless, and went around lazily wagging his finger and puffing on cigarillos.
However, more respectable by far than either of these figures was the Aristocrat Regent, whom nobody in the village had ever seen. The Aristocrat Regent had a terrible curse: his face was hilariously disfigured. It was made up of a braying donkey muzzle on the bottom part and a top half like a frog’s with his eyes perched on each extreme of the forehead.
Continue reading ‘A brief account of the travails and exploits of a respectable village’
My brother owns a second home by the sea. When I go there, I run, most mornings, along the beach that arches, grandly, for a mile or so to some rocks. If I feel good and strong, I run on the dry stuff.
One morning I was running. It was grey, misty, still and the sea waves broke and ran listlessly. It had not been raining, but the whole place was wet, as if a low flying cloud had grazed along the coast and forgotten a piece of itself; before it was pushed up over the mountains. On my way back along the beach I saw a large piebald cow stuck, knee deep, in the surf. It was struggling and looked like it would topple at any moment. I ran over and tried to lead it out of the water. It didn’t want to go. I slowly urged it back up the strand to the dunes, then onto some grass where there were other cows grazing.
I started walking back to the house. I looked over my shoulder and there was that cow again, shitting and lumbering straight back down the strand to the sea. I walked on a few steps, then turned and ran back. I got myself between her and the sea, trying to cajole her the other way. Like this, we slowly zig-zagged our way across and down the beach, toward the sea – me shooing, the cow changing direction – until I found myself stomach deep in water, leaning, with all of my useless strength, against her dark, heaving chest. Then she pushed me over; I was submerged and sea-deafened. By the time I got back up, she was past me and almost neck deep in water. I stood there and watched her disappear; then I walked back to the house.
Continue reading ‘The only woman I can say for certain that I satisfied’
Walking to work, forward, looking forward, never backward – I hear the sound of a girl approaching on a bicycle with poorly inflated tyres. It sounds like she is wearing black and has that nice light brown hair so common and yet so frequently dyed a more extraordinary shade. She passes and I realise I am right. She continues (apace). I never see her face.
At work, 8:15, an office, I call Marty.
“Could I start a religion?” I say.
“It’s too early,” he says, and hangs up. I would say Hello? and look at the telephone receiver, but I hear the tone. I do work; work so dull it is perfect. Perfect like a coma, but more useful. Daydreaming is infinitely better than dreaming. Dreams are the floor-sweepings of the brain.
Continue reading ‘Is this regression? Or, Break-up break-down break-dance breakfast: mental notes, Or, A lounge in space 193′
I heard the next day he had given her an almighty stab to the temple with a slender knife, which he left protruding from her head. It came as a surprise to me when the police officer, whose name was Schuster, told me what had happened and asked what I knew.
I told him: I awoke to a sound; awoke out of a clear dream, in which I had called in on two old friends who’d moved away with their wives. I was sad in the dream, because I had nothing to say to my old friends.
“So, Officer, did they have a family?” I asked.
“Who?” he answered.
“The man. The man who killed her, and the woman. Do they have a family, or did they?”
“Let us continue, Mr Gallagher.”
Continue reading ‘Tough about your legs’
Tim’s uncle Harold is as ribald as they come. What is so ribald about him? Well, he’s just a dirty old man, but he is also bald – so, ribald. You ask: Why not just call a spade a spade? Because sometimes spades get so polished by the earth they are digging through – by its abrasive nature – that they become silvery and almost soft to the touch. How can a spade be soft? Well not soft, as in yielding, but soft like a woman’s face. All women’s faces are soft – but you’d never say an old woman who’d been out in a gale for eighty years had a soft face, yet if you actually touched her face, of course it would be soft, as in yielding. But you wouldn’t say, My, what a soft face you’ve got there Mrs -
Harold was touching Tim’s face one day because Tim had a hickey on his neck. He grabbed Tim by the face and twisted his head.
Continue reading ‘Unfilmable epic’
The first time Ernest and I got drunk together, I tried to kiss him and he threw me into a Starbucks shutter and split my forehead open. I couldn’t really see with the blood in my eyes, and I lunged at him, and we both fell to the ground. I scrambled back up with my shirt still gripped in his fist, and kicked him in the head. It didn’t connect properly and I felt my big toe wrench to the side. I went to the hospital and they fixed it up, and I hobbled around a few weeks. Ernest didn’t remember the next day.
He was beautiful and terrible with women. It happened that we both recently had fallings out with respective friends, and had no one, apart from each other. The next week we stood in the streets and drank cans and smoked weed. The city centre is a very communal place in the summer. Everybody talks: the street performers; the junkies; the tourists; the Spanish kids; the Emo kids. And there were things to look at: the dealers with nylon tracksuits walking past us on their mobiles; the satellite dishes on the stone balustrades; the junkies with Dutch Gold, tabulating cigarettes. At night the empty churches were lit by floodlights from beneath, and they looked like they were floating in light. We walked to his place. On the way, a homeless man screamed at us until we came too close to him. Then he fell silent, like he had to tell a secret.
Continue reading ‘How I hated that rabbit, and how it hated me’
I sat in a café wearing a smart suit. I felt conspicuous and normal. I never wear suits. I waited for Eric, who would also be wearing a suit. To someone who wears suits regularly, wearing suits is unremarkable – but worn seldom and judiciously, a suit empowers and upgrades the wearer to a level infinitely above that of the regular suit wearer. It’s subtle. Nobody can know a suit is not your usual get-up. I was the subtle overgod of café patronage.
I could describe the café, but I won’t. What I will describe is my suit: it was dark grey, with a fine white pinstripe that you wouldn’t notice from other side of the room. I don’t know many things, but I know that grey is the only colour that goes with every other colour. This may not seem like a great discovery, but to me it seems the truest thing I ever heard. The colour of my shirt, shoes, and tie is therefore irrelevant, but to better paint the picture, they were white, black, and army-green, respectively.
Continue reading ‘In suits with Eric’
I met a man on my way home from work. He was out walking his dogs, enjoying an early burst of good weather before the gloom of the summer set in. He was standing at the corner of Slattery’s. The sun had brought a crowd to the front of the pub. All the chairs were occupied, and the steel tables were covered with drinks. The dogs were like a pair of Jacks, but with longer hair.
I came across the older of the two first, straggling behind. He was black and brown but his coat was greying. He stopped on the pavement, shaking, his back leg in particular. He looked up at me as I passed. Catching up with the man, I asked, “How old is he?”
“Sixteen,” said the man.
“Sixteen,” I said in amazement, though I had no idea how old that was for a Jack.
Continue reading ‘Wet season’
My uncle had a goat once. It was a treacherous cunt of thing that would eat the shorts right off your arse. It thought it was the mightiest goat around. It used to climb, with great assurance and pomposity, hills that were not hills but irregularities in the lolls of fields. How did it look? It looked like a goat – it had white fur and a smig. But it carried on as though it was the most fantastic creature of all time. At no stage did anyone point out to this goat that it was just a goat and nothing more and nothing less.
I suppose, therefore, the goat was not solely to blame. My uncle, a balding singleton with no interest in anything really, hauled the goat around as though it was a dog and not a goat. It got, in this way, preferential treatment. More so than anything else that was about the place. It was the summer, a dry one if I remember correctly, when I first came into contact with the goat. It was in the shed, upon some bails, and when I came looking for dry hay it simply refused to budge.
“Don’t go near that goat,” said my uncle, when he saw me lining up a kick. “If you know what’s good for you.”
Continue reading ‘Goat’
