“It’s just that I didn’t expect to see you!” he stammered. “I didn’t expect to see you, Mammy!”
His mother’s voice seemed to him a mixture of velvet and honey.
“It’s all right, Pat,” she said, “it’s all right. I’m here now. Mammy’s here.”
In the days and weeks that followed, Pat was well aware that there would be people who would say, “Well well! How do you like that! Auld McNab turning up out of the blue like that! Letting on she wanted to look after her grandkiddies! Her that couldn’t hold on to her husband or rear her only son without putting him mad in the head!”
Pat knew that this weis what would be said and, even as he thought it—was! He could hear the voices plain as day as if they were speaking directly to him, right there in his living room. But he also knew what rubbish it was! Complete, total, utterly unadulterated rubbish that should be put out that very night for the refuse men! For not only was his mother willing and able to look after the grandkiddies—she was a genius at it, for heaven’s sake!
“Do it again, Gran!” the children would yelp as she bounced them on her knee, a little tear forming in her eye because she had been reunited with her son, something she had been dreaming of for so long.
“Give us a litde gooser!” she would exhort, exultantly rejoicing as their moist lips smacked against her cheek.
It was a very happy grandmother (and mother!), consequently, who lay in bed in the small hours of the night now as the door opened softly and a thin shaft of light slanted inward at a perfect forty-five-degree angle.
“Mammy?” Pat whispered, fingering the cord of his pajamas. “Psst! Mammy?”
“Pat?” he heard her reply. “Is that you?”
“Yes, Mammy,” he answered, continuing. “Can I come in and talk to you?”
“Of course, son,” he heard her say, “but of course. Of course, love.”
Outside, the whole universe seemed asleep. As he sat on the bed, Pat twined his fingers and affirmed, shyly, “I just wanted to say I’m sorry, Mammy. I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”
He felt her fingers curling around a lock of his hair as she said, “Pat?”
“Mm?” he said, choked.
“Pat, love? Can I say something to you?”
“What, Ma?” was Pat’s reply.
“So am I, son. So am I.”
With those words, it was as though the synthetic curtains became somehow swept apart and a ludicrously orange sunburst filled the entire room with its light. As though a cymbal had crashed and Pat had, mysteriously—magically!—magnificently!—donned his suit of velvet plum with the dashing waistcoat as he triumphantly pulverized the air, his sophisticated yet ample and comforting parent clapping her hands and crying, “You haven’t changed! You haven’t changed a bit, our Pat!”
To which her red-cheeked son replied, with a delight that almost approached falsetto, “And neither have you, Mammy! Neither have you!”
As, employing the suspension of the bedsprings to the full, the woman who had carried him for nine months sailed buoyantly through the air, crying, “Give me that wee hand of yours this very minute, you litde divil you!”
What can one say of what seems two tiny figures such as might be glimpsed on a wedding cake as they waltz in time, framed against the sloping black velvet backdrop that is infinite space? That they seem the very essence of tranquility—a veritable ocean of it, indeed—as galactically they tumble, ringed around by stars and planets. Together forever, singing:
Fly me to the moon
And let me play among the stars
Let me see what spring is like
On Jupiter and Mars!
In other words, hold my hand
In other words, darling, kiss me!
As Pat lowered his head and murmured, “I love you, Mammy!”
To which his elated mother replied, “And I love you too, wee Pat McSkilly McNab! Sure we don’t need her, that Lee one! She’s not even from Gullytown!”
Pat’s muffled laughter into his hands was as a spear through the heart of Lee Stravoni as alone she lay in the master bedroom, for her the beam of the moon’s “benevolent” light as a javelin bisecting her ventricles.
How far can such a danse célèbre be from the prone figure of Pat McNab as he lies bruised and battered in his long black tattered coat by the briars and whinbushes of the Gullytown district? Any number of light-years and, at that, a very conservative estimate indeed. And growing ever the further distant as, at last, his left leg begins to stir and his hand begins its first tentative journey toward the environs of his right eye above which a pain which can be adequately described as “intense” is adding to his general sense of dislocation and lack of equanimity. From nowhere, a tidal wave of melancholy seems to sweep over him and the empurpled bruises upon his forearm make themselves startlingly, uncompromisingly clear. The memory of the “assault stick” with which he was brutalized is so vivid it is as if he is at that moment enduring a reenactment. But, as he raises himself up to find himself bathed from head to toe in a familiar milky light, realizing that this is not the case, shaking his head at the idiocy of the thought, for his assailants have long since fled, now crying, “Of course they’re gone! They’re hardly going to attack the universally acclaimed Pat McNab! Ha ha!” An assertion which he is about to repeat before being loudly interrupted by a series of what in Shakespeare are often referred to as “alarums and excursions” some degrees south of the large sycamore tree near Brennan’s field. To wit, cries of, “There he is! We’ve found him at last!” Dazed though he might be, Pat at once recognized Timmy Sullivan’s voice. Within seconds, they were upon him and Pat could see that his companion was none other than Sergeant Foley, who laid a comforting hand on his shoulder and said, sympathetically, “Jesus Mary and Joseph! So this is what they did to you, Pat? Did you know them, Timmy? Did you get a good look at their faces?”
Timmy shook his head wistfully.
“No, Sergeant,” he explained, adding regretfully, “I think they’re from the north.”
“I’ve got to get to the Copacabana Club,” continued Pat in a strange, almost toneless voice. “I’m playing in the Copacabana tonight, you see! Yes!”
Timmy Sullivan took him by the arm—he regarded Pat as an extremely valued patron—and said, “Of course you are, Pat. Come on home now like a good lad.”
The whole of Pat McNab’s body—his being, indeed—seemed washed in a sad, ineffable blue light.
It was some weeks later as Pat was sitting at the counter in Sullivan’s listening to what could fairly be described as the worst band in the world—a Casio organ and drum-machine combination—surging toward the chorus of a rapturously received number, oblivious of the fact that they were, along with Timmy Sullivan the proprietor, responsible for the almost lapidary grayness that seemed now to film itself across the eyes of Pat McNab as he contemplated his perspiration-saturated and heavily fingerprinted glass of Macardles Ale.
“Oh, aye!” continued Timmy Sullivan, flicking his tea cloth across his shoulder, obliquely, with arched eyebrow, observing Pat, whispered, “Gave him a right bloody going over too! Hasn’t been the same since it at all. Couple of nights back, couldn’t shut him up! Literally, couldn’t shut him up! Him and the moon! Wanted to talk all bloody night about it! And now, if you mention it, he just looks at you.”
Timmy Sullivan wiped a glass and stared (futilely) once more at his lone, silent patron. “Doesn’t want to talk about it at all!” he asserted. “Funny the way people are, isn’t it? What do you say, Josie?”
Josie Jones considered for a moment or two but in the end made no reply, simply turned the slim tube of his cigarette in his fingers and raised it to his lips. The band—the Two Lads—were about to conclude, but the resurgence of enthusiasm for their efforts persuaded them otherwise, the dinner-jacketed lead vocalist gathering a handful of air and sending his microphone skyward as from the depths of his throat unfurled each word, a sputnik coursing spaceward
> Fill my life with song
And let me sing forevermore
You are all I hope for,
All I worship and adore!
as Pat McNab made no move, in his eyes reflected the tepid bubbles of a Macardles Ale which might have been all of three hundred and eighty thousand kilometers away.
Waka Waka
Waka waka waka waka waka
Waka waka waka
Waka waka waka waka waka
Waka waka waka
Waka waka waka waka waka
Waka waka waka
Waka waka waka waka waka
Waka waka waka
Waka waka waka waka waka
Waka waka waka
There are so many theories with regard to “perception” and the relationship one might contrive with the “ineluctable modality of the visible” that if we were to go into it here in terms of attempting to understand Pat and how it affected his life around this time, it is likely that we would be expostulating until the proverbial “kingdom come.” Suffice to state, perhaps, that the “bending” of reality or the realignment of the world around him in a peculiarly familiar yet unfamiliar way came about as a result of the recurrent, almost tropical weather conditions which had been prevailing in the area, the heat at times so thick you could almost slice it into large gungy slabs, his consequent fondness for alcohol, and the residue of slightly dislocated, pleasurable yet uneasy feelings which remained in his psyche some months now after his “Mexican adventure” with the redoubtable Pasty McGookin and his associate Honky McCool. Which may go some way toward explaining why Pat was smiling to himself—a jerky, elastic smile, it has to be acknowledged—as he came past O’Hare ‘s Bush one ordinary unspectacular evening in June. Muttering to himself glumly—for that was how he felt, regardless of any expressive, seemingly optimistic gesture—”Ho ho. Welcome to Gullytown. The famous metropolis where things can get so exciting you have to be careful in case your heart might stop on the spot!” He shook his head and laughed at nothing in particular. For the tiniest of seconds he fancied he espied a small bird sporting startlingly technicolor plumage singing in the heart of the oak tree up ahead, but when he looked again there was nothing to be seen. “No! Nothing at all!” he continued. “After all, what do you expect? I mean, we are talking about Gullytown here!” Such conversations—effectively with no one, or thin air, perhaps—might seem pointless, but they had the effect of cheering Pat up slightly, and he was on the verge of extending and expanding upon the subject—virulent denunciations of his native heath—when suddenly he found himself distracted by the sharp squeal of brakes and to his amazement out of a cloud of dust not a hundred yards from where he stood (close by Hudie Maddens barn) descried a large American car (a polished black sedan in fact) shooting toward him. He could not be quite sure whether someone had shouted “Look out!” or “Move, buddy!” or whether it had been his own reflexes which alerted him in the nick of time, but as he composed himself and climbed—twig-specked and not a litde muddied—out of the ditch into which he had been thrown, he instinctively crossed himself, realizingjust how lucky he had been, steeling himself as best he could to assimilate the bizarre tableau which had now begun to assemble in front of his eyes. For a split second a wave of feverish, almost exasperated lassitude comparable to that which had become a frequent visitor of late in the hot, troubling nights threatened to overcome him once more with its oily, insistent whispers: “You’re at it again, Pat—imagining things.” As did the fleeting, phantom figures who now passed across his subconscious—Pasty and Honky McCool—nestled in each of their palms a deadly, pulsating root. No less significant in this regard the shocking screech of the sedan’s brakes as they slammed into the base of the oak which only minutes before Pat had passed!! It soon became clear that this was no tenebrous shadow play upon the stage of a wounded, ultrasensitive psyche. As Pat reflected, in literally a nanosecond from his vantage point, close by the ditch, “Anybody who thinks that it is is going to wind up dead! History!” A huge plume of steam was rising now from the crushed bonnet of the car—it had folded like paper—and leaping from die interior and rolling over before landing expertly on two feet was a large man in black glasses clutching a revolver in a frantic, two-handed grip. Within the vehicle, the remaining passengers, including the driver who was clutching a black briefcase firmly (also frantically) to his chest, were as spectral masks pressed to the window.
“Step out of the car!” the gunman cried (yelled). “Step out of the car!”
Another man—smaller, attired in a silk suit and a porkpie hat, which became dislodged and subsequently rolled into a cowpat—fell from the car and shouted, “Take him, Jacy! Splatter his brains all over the tree!”
“Shut the fuppag! You hear me? Get the fupp over here!”
The door swung open and the driver appeared still clutching the briefcase to his chest. Behind the hedge, Pat’s face was drained of all color.
“Now hold it, Jacy! There ain’t no need for this. You don’t think we can work something out? Why, sure we can!”
Two sharp reports from the unmoving revolver ended both the sentence and his life. Pat could not believe the amount of blood that gushed from his mouth in a great big crimson arc. It was the most crimson blood Pat had ever seen. The other man ran to the corpse as it fell to the ground.
“Jesus, Jacy!” he cried. ‘You’ve killed him! What’s Bobbie-Ann going to say?”
Jacy slid his gun inside his pocket and spat.
“Fug the shut up!” (Pat wondered, initially, was he hearing it right, but then became satisfied that these indeed were the words uttered.) Jacy continued, You listening’ to me? Since we left Mary’s, that’s all you been sayin’! You got nothin’ else to say? You know what I think of Bobbie-Ann? You know what I think of that fuccamackin’ cockamacka? This is what I think!”
Pat winced as two more shots found their way into the chest of the already dead man. Jacy fell to his knees and, flicking open the catches on the briefcase, began to marvel at its contents—numerous stacked wads of pristine dollar bills—crying ecstatically, “Ha ha! See how you like this, Bobbie-Ann! See who’s Jackass Fughpig No-Dick now! Ha ha!”
In his excitement, Jacy had forgotten about the sole remaining occupant of the car, whose hand was now slowly moving inside his coat as he edged his way across the upholstery. You slimy fuggerball!” he cried as he rolled out onto the road.
The metal of the gun barrel gleamed sprightly in the sun.
“No! Don’t, you fool!” cried Jacy and his henchman instantaneously.
More metal shone.
“Don’t!” shouted Jacy.
But it was too late. Three whistling reports left three bodies lying in the sun. A slight wind flapped the crisp banknotes in the glittering shaft of a dead afternoon sun.
It seemed to Pat that in that moment the beat of his heart had slowed down to about one-third of its normal pace. It was as if the whole world behind the hedge had become a giant, vibrating heart going bump bump over and over. He felt his forehead tingle with sweat. Tiny needles. He gasped. All around him everything had changed. It was as if the entire world had been given a new coat of paint. But a paint that could blind you. His heart beat again and there was a strange taste in his mouth. He knew he was faced with a stark choice. Briskly, he began his walk toward the open briefcase.
The figure bursting through the underground in Mackie’s Wood a mile from the town might have been some hunted, feral creature. Resonant in its ears the sound of pounding feet, the relentless staccato of fuzzbox guitars. There could be no denying now the sweat which rolled down Pat McNab’s face. Tiny needles no longer. In large, coursing rivers it wound its way, until his entire mouth seemed filled with perspiration. Upon his face, great streaks of mud, his hair aloft as like some startling regiment of twigs. “No!” he cried as he raised his forearms, to protect himself, as he thought. But there was no one to be seen. Pat’s heart beat again. “What have I done?” he repeated as he fell behind a tre
e (a large, spreading tree, fortunately, affording him much cover). “In God’s name what have I done?”
For Pat to avail himself of some “mushies,” as Pasty and Honky McCool had been known to refer to them, a neatly ordered assembly of which conveniently presented themselves to him as he rested himself beneath the spreading boughs, would have been foolhardy in the extreme, for surely he needed all his wits about him. But this is, in fact, what he did—and in what might be considered reasonable quantities, to boot. His subsequent rationalization of his actions involved such thoughts as, “Sure I need to eat something” and “It can’t get any worse!”
This perhaps explains why, despite the gravity of recent events—he had after all witnessed a fatal shootout which had left a normally tranquil country road literally stuffed with corpses, not to mention absconding with a briefcase filled with money which did not belong to him—he now willingly gave himself to hopeless chortling which, it would seem, to the independent observer at least, to possess a sort of willful abandonment, which might be expected from a three-or perhaps four-year-old.
However, as Pat was amusing himself deep in the sanctuary of Mackie’s Wood beneath the cool shade of that expansive elm, what he did not know was that some considerable few miles away, in an establishment called Mary’s, a certain gendeman whose name was, in fact, Mary, had just received some information which was not having the effect of making him feel that all was well with the world in any respect whatsoever. As the person on the other end of the telephone had known for quite some time now. Mary was a large man of about eighteen stone in weight. He wore an orange shirt festooned with bending purple palm trees. His head was fat and, inside it, his eyes were stony and dead.