ONIONEERING
‘It is not enough that you should see the mountain,’ the wise man once said. ‘You must also climb it.’
There were no magic eggs to make the mountain from. Hard work was what was needed. That and cheese; cheese, hard work, some oil to stop things sticking. And eggs. He could never forget: the eggs. If he forgot those, the mountain would not be worth eating. Not with all the cheese and oil in the world. That would be poor. There would be no point in eating if it was only oil and cheese.
ONION KING
‘Gone go to Onion King for us,’ James Hendry would say.
Everyone learnt to ignore this refrain. Or become very, very irritated. Onion King is a disgusting mess of a meal. Exactly the kind of virtually nutritionless slop that you want to rub into your ugly physog when blasted out of your usual tiny sphere of semiconsciousness. People never appreciate how supremely important it is to have solid organic matter between your teeth, proteinous, carbonous, lipidous matter.
Thoughts tended to be scattered everywhere like the rain blasting against the window. Sometimes one of those drops would be suspended in the air and you’d spend your evening staring into its everlasting reflections. Then was the virtue of Onion King whose compacted meat gristle gave you the solidity required to keep your own house firmly in order.
When Hamish Carlin became the origin of the “gone go” locution, everything in the house became a pale, whistling shadow in comparison. Hamish’ broad tones, his gone go, his surly evenhanded goodness, his ready poise to accept any state of affairs presented to him, all of those things, was the explanation. Without his solidity all the rest of the house was a brittle glass bubble inside a vacuum. The slightest ping shattered all illusions.
Hamish sat on the sofa for six weeks waiting for a job to go past. Was it so that we wouldn’t have to suffer? Then, he got arrested and underwent the ignominy of going home to look for a laptop he knew he hadn’t stolen. He did it. He did it so that we would not have to.
It was remarked upon that when Hamish spoke, then for days or even weeks later one’s own personal thoughts were usually voiced in Hamish’ country-Derry accent. Neil noticed it; Erwan saw it; Levin experienced it.
The Onion King was a burger superstore. It sold lumps of minced gristle and muscle to inexperienced early-twentyers and teenagers, as well as the old, the young, the disheveled, the neatly dressed, and the good looking. The people who worked there were mostly sixteen years old. They had never cooked before. They quickly grasped the basics of cooking fast food. Cook it fast; don’t let it burn; stop customers from puking in the shop; change the chipfryer oil once a month; offer the extras and trimmings that a customer may need. Give them too much, that way they’ll always come back for more.
Emmett heard it. Hamish was his cousin. They’d grown up together. They’d discovered Sabbath simultaneously, one glorious day in the basement of their uncle’s house. If anyone knew Hamish it was Emmett, Levin, James, Barry, MacHill, Erwan, Neil. They knew him. It was Hamish that had introduced them to the concept of living. He had shown them how to wait for a job. He’d explained to them how to stretch out when getting into a cold bed because there was no heating. Stretching out was essential; to lie scrunched up was fine at first, but you’d have a cold bed all night.
James was an entirely different proposition. Dark, moody, a complex man with sadistic pretentions who could not abide cruelty, a man whose fundamental optimism was at war with a bone-arsed laziness that could not be compared, his Machiavellian mind was always on the look out for some favorite ruse. His vision of the perfect world was not explicit but instinctive. His preferred band was The Beatles; his greatest film was Airplane!; his best song to play on the piano when wasted was Debussy’s The Little Nigger. He was genuinely in love with music. He missed deadlines (by weeks) out of a kind of modesty. He threw a bin bag of rubbish across the kitchen floor simply because other binbags were there; and he also did it to express that fact in an ironic way. Maybe we should describe that.
Levin, Erwan and Neil were discussing philosophical things in the kitchen. It was late January. James Hendry was upstairs, doing something in his room – writing an essay, or thinking about it. More likely watching TV. Levin was arguing about such-and-such or something similar. James Hendry appeared at the kitchen door. He had a bin bag of rubbish from his room. He seemed to consider everything for a moment; perhaps what decided him was his awareness that they were watching him. In any case he drew the bin bag back and sent it in a perfect underarm sailing across the kitchen where it hit the floor. It slid neatly and nestled against a brimming and three-weeks-overfull dust bin by the back door.
Levin, Erwan and Neil looked at him, all slack-jawed in amazement.
James Hendry gave a cheeky grin and then went back upstairs to his room without saying a word.
Levin, Erwan and Neil remained amazed for several hours.
This was the kind of man that James was. He said the Devil made him do it. This probably wasn’t true. He was very tall and lanky. He had a habit, when taking an inhalation of a joint, of turning the joint and looking at it while he held the smoke. He often took pills, particularly with Emmett, who was master of the pill. Many a time was spent chewing inner cheek to pieces in Vico’s. Neil Steed also attended these occasions. Levin and Erwan took one pill each soon after Chris Bole moved in and played chess in the livingroom. James Hendry’s usual motive in taking a pill was to transform himself thereby into his claimed alter-ego: the ‘music man’.
James avidly read every Daily Mirror on weekdays and on Sundays liked nothing better than to kick back with a long journey into The Observer. Many of the greatest articles on the Wall came from his efforts. He smoked cigarettes without complaining about it. He was kind, sensitive, allowed people to mock him without caring unduly about it, paid careful attention to how he marked manuscript paper, was fleet of thought, enjoyed satirical comments, and was a keen supporter of Manchester United. This last fact will make it difficult for some readers either support James Hendry in his adventures or to consider him the villain of the piece. We should not have mentioned it.
Hamish thought carefully about dropping out of university. He was shrewd enough to see that he wasn’t going to get anything out of it. Having settled the issue was easy. He then simply stopped attending. He conserved his student loan well enough to see him through the waiting game. Michlobb and Radio Failté fulfilled his earthly needs; that and a free Muddy Waters cd from a send-away Michlobb promotion. He also played snooker with Levin, Erwan and others.
Snooker was a devilish sport. Played on a green measuring 18 acres in length and 12 in width, the aim was to use a slender piece of stick to emphatically tap many-coloured balls into one of six pockets. The winner was the person who failed to humiliate themselves most miserably. Erwan, Levin and Hamish developed primitive superstitions to explain their seemingly cyclical periods of success and failure in this activity. One myth was that of Murph, the omnipotent deity whose digestive musings would often rain upon one in the centre of the vortex of a frame. Murph’s motives were plain, unusual for a deity. His tickle was to upset the carefully laid plans of mice and men. He also preyed upon the falsely confident.
His activities were the basis for a minor religion. He afflicted you the more you believed in him. This led to a vicious cycle of despair and failure. The only compensation was the flourish with which Murph warped your destiny.
Erwan had mentioned Murph a number of times to Sheila, and then she told him that her dog was called Murph.
‘He’s called Murph,’ she explained. ‘He’s a small, half-blind terrier with rickets. He’s also gay, according to a test-your-dog personality quiz I found in a magazine. You’ll meet him when you come up.’
A shining light of recognition came down upon Erwan. Of course this was the malevolent deity. There was no better physical shape He could take. Erwan endeavored to be as pleasant to the dog as he could. Whether or not this had any effect on their ability to play snooker, was
difficult to say. Sometimes their own incompetence was hard to separate from supernatural intervention.
Levin and Erwan and Hamish went to play snooker.
They took turns in a three-way game that totaled 18 points in fair gain and 157 points in foul shots. Erwan was marginally in the lead. Hamish needed a tricky red not to come last.
The eyes of the world were glazed as they looked upon this moment without comprehension.
Hamish lifted his cue high and then gently lowered it, bending himself to the table in a fluid, easy motion. He sighted down the cue, making minute and simple changes in the direction of his play and aligning the three objects with unconscious precision, tip, cue ball, object ball. He moved the cue forward and back, forward and back; sensing the right moment, waiting for it, ready to play when the moment came, and not before. He felt the moment; it was like a glue that stuck to him. He tapped the ball with just the right force. Everything in his body told him this shot was straight and true. The cue ball glided down the table in perfect harmony with the universe and hit the cushion just next to the object ball. It bounced off, with equal speed but opposite spin and identical angles of incidence and reflection. The cue ball span brilliantly to the opposite cushion, struck it, bounced with an extraordinary conservation of energy, to strike another cushion some yards away. Then the ball proceeded to sail straight down the table again, edging inch by inch closer to the object ball, looking exactly as if God were commanding it with all his might to make it hit that object, to give that satisfying clink of acrylic striking acrylic, to send the red ball spinning off into the hemisphere, the white in an opposite direction, with all the orbits and the celestial cosmos intact and doing as they ought.
Murph spat upon God’s creation and caused the straight line to miss the object ball completely and utterly for the second time. The cue ball gently hit the cushion and drifted to a stop.
Levin, Hamish and Erwan were utterly amazed. They had never seen anything like it. (Levin and Erwan had not yet seen James Hendry throw a bag of rubbish across the kitchen floor.) Agog they waited for their hearts to resume, and then slowly broke into applause. They excitedly discussed Murph’s brilliance. They agreed not to play snooker any more.
Such was the experience of snooker that these young fellows brought into their lives.