Cassandra Voices

Author: Daniel P. Wade

  • Adoring the Artifice of Paul Quin

    Paul Francis Quin has proven himself an approachable enigma. The myriad glamour shots gracing the cover of his upcoming album ‘Life on Earth’ and various assorted publicity materials tend to portray him as otherworldly, a strange mixture of glamorous and uncanny. Nonetheless, he is quite happy to talk, in his wryly calm and personable manner, about any subject, no matter how taboo. In fact, taboo subjects are his speciality. They are fuel to his creative engine, and vital to his artistic expression.

    “It’s been an interesting journey, especially at this point in history,” he tells me over the first of several hour-long Zoom calls we have. “But I can’t deny I’m excited to see these songs released into the world at last.”

    Quin is a Wicklow native, born in Bray in 1971, and his serene, cut-glass accent is still inflected with the earthy intonations of that venerable seaside haven. The electro-pop singer-songwriter and exeperimentalist composer is on a homecoming journey of sorts. At the time of writing [note: this date has passed], his long-awaited solo album ‘Life on Earth’ will see its launch at Dublin’s Peppercannister Church with a gloriously disparate personelle, after a heady 2.5 years (“a slight exaggeration,” Paul purrs coyly) in the making. This represents a definitive return to music following an extended hiatus, although, it must be stressed, not a complete departure from it.

    The designated venue is an interesting one, not least for its former ecclesiastical status. Paul tells me, a few months following the Zoom call and in person this time around, that: “To be quite honest, I was gagging to get on stage in somewhere like the Grand Social or the Sugar Club whatever, and do some live work there. Generally, I don’t sing live very much, I much prefer to work in a studio. But once I resalised I was actually still capable of it, I just pushed myself to get back to it. I’m at least determined to get back up on stage and at least do an album launch, and do a proper show with creative design and costumes and all that. It’s a dream away at the moment, but dreams are how I run.”

    I jokingly suggest he do an alfresco gig, charging people a fiver per head; he politely laughs such a notion off. 

    “I mean, I am also just asking myself where did all the time go, really,” he says, laughing. “I didn’t do much music-wise, really. I mean, I had a nine-to-five job and then I went back to college, and all this time has flowed by. I remember how prohibitively expensive hiring out a recording studio could be back in the 80s and 90s, and I remember thinking I could never re-enter one again. Then again, I remember my Dad, who had a really philosophical take on life, saying to me. ‘You are going to be a very late starter. But you are going to get there’. Not sure where he meant. But I got SOMEWHERE, I suppose!”

    Image (c) Billy Cahill.

    EgoBoo Studios

    Thankfully, such a dismal outcome has ultimately not materialised for him. We are both in the control room of the subterranean confines of EgoBoo Studios on Fitzwilliam Street, having just been buzzed in. Next to me sits Greg Malocks, EgoBoo’s owner and chief sound engineer (and now, musical director of the entire enterprise) working through a series of levels with an air of close absorption. The ensuing conversation is punctuated by occasional clicks coming from the recorder console as he works his digital magic. This is no problem of course, Paul is happy to defer to his expertise. “I need to come into a place like this,” he admits. “In order to work with a more structured environment. Even if I had a home set-up, I don’t think I’d have enough gauge of quality control and I’d never get anything finished as a result. I need to be in an environment like this.”

    Paul himself lounges opposite on the studio couch, a punkish vision in a longsleeve shirt, docs and sleek denim, with long, serpentine Medusa-esque, peroxide dreadlocks and makeup stylishly pale enough to make David Bowie (were he still with us) envious. He is far from blase about the studio set-up, however, preferring it to a more home set-up favoured by many during the last two years.

    “I need to come into a place like this,” he admits. “In order to work with a more structured environment. Even if I had a home set-up, I don’t think I’d have enough gauge of quality control and I’d never get anything finished as a result. I need to be in an environment like this.”

    “You need a second ear, sometimes” Greg chimes in, without taking his eyes off the flashing blues and greens on the monito before him. “When Paul’s singing, he needs to be concentrating, and with a second ear, suggestions about what else he can try come about more easily. It definitely helps.”

    Paul nods. “I think when there’s someone else present, it brings something else out of you as well. There is essentially an audience there, albeit one I can bounce ideas off. The love of stacling harmonies is something me and Greg share. I’ve often worked with producers and engineers in the past who would say ‘I think you’ve enough harmonies now,’ and the fact is, I can’t get enough of them! If possible, I’ll have a full choir of hamrony behind my vocals.”

    A Breath of Fresh Air

    Right now, he’s listening intently to the latest mix of a new untitled song, a pure 1970s disco-tinged track which, as it transpires, is actually for an entirely different project. Despite the studio’s confined, almost windowless space, Paul describes it as ‘a breath of fresh air’, allowing him to experiment with sounds quite divergent from his usual style, which has been nebulously described as very ‘eighties-esque’ in style, tightly syncopated and synth-heavy.

    “People are always saying to me, ‘your music is very ‘eighties’, and no matter what I do I can never seem to get away from that. Or maybe that’s just because of the way I sing, I don’t know. But this other friend [dreampop songwriter Keeley Moss, who will also be opening for Paul at the Peppercannister gig on the 11th] had a track that was a bit more of a disco groove to it, and I thought it’d be interesting just to try to adapt a style that also manages to retain a bit of an indie feel as well.”

    I mention The ‘Weeknd’, and his similar use of synth and uptempo beats in tracks such as ‘Blinded by the Light’ and ‘Save Your Tears’; songs that manage to simultaneously sound retro and futuristic. “It’s almost like a pastiche,” Paul says, “taking that sound and refitting them for a new generation. Even just listening to the instrumental [of ‘Save Your Tears’], you can tell it’s amazing track even when denuded of vocals. I’d have different lyric and vocal ideas for it, but it is a superb piece of pop music. And pop music is often the hardest to do because it has to hit the ear almost immediately. Whereas soul and R’n’B you can let grow on you more organically, but pop must have that instant grab for people. Almost like Eurovision, in a way.”

    I ask why in hell he’d stoop to comparing himself to Eurovision, to general amusement of all present company in the studio.

    “One can always hope,” he smiles.

    https://twitter.com/danwadewriter/status/1337890686029402119

    Behind Closed Doors

    Everything happens underground now. Or at least, behind closed doors, within spaces impounded by our boundaries, with face-to-face communication kept to a minimum, as tablet, mobile and laptop screens now stand in for sociability. We are visible to each other only through screens, our voices reduced to garbled, disembodied transmissions over a Zoom audio feed. Even those of us who may live a few miles away from each other, even short distances, seem, at times, impassable.

    Lockdown has been an atomising experience for virtually everybody: the blurring of the work-life balance, to the government-prescribed restrictions over not being able to leave one’s home, then one’s county, and finally with an inability to fly overseas, as well as the basic need to socialise in large groups (though this slowly but surely starting to change). The daily monotony, shot through with a vague tension of perhaps being next in line to be claimed by the pandemic, was once described in a half-joking fashoin as ‘the new normal’, a phrase many have abandoned as mounting imaptience. A sense of unreality has slipped into the very fabric of reality itself. The very autonomy we take for granted as adults has been brutally curtailed. Many of us wonder when and where we might see our friends and loved ones again. News of the impending climate collapse and a resultant creeping sense that the world is on the brink of an ill-defined but very imminent oblivion aren’t helping.

    A lot of this is doomsday thinking as well: the temptation to fall into it is on the increase.

    At the time of writing, the most recent restrictions have been tentatively lifted – though right now, it feels better to be discussing something, anything, other than the pandemic, lockdown restrictions and vaccines. News of the Delta and other assorted variants make for distressing reading, even with the rollout of a multiplicity of vaccines and much of the populace having received their jab (though, the presence of anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers keeping the pandemic of life support remains an ever-present worry).

    Many artists on the P.U.P. now face having thiers cutoff unless they branch out into separate industries. Impatience with extended closures mandated by the Irish government’s directive to keep all indoor music events effectively cancelled. This was estimated to last no more than a fortnight. Now, nearly eighteen months on, live music in smaller venues remains illegal, with no roadmap for the event industry in sight. For many artists and creatives, ‘first to close, last to reopen’ has become a defining mantra of the Covid era.

    The results of this are manifold. It seems we are at the risk of losing much of what made the nightlife so exhilarating. The unique intoxication that rises not just from a few pints and a spliff but from the very of sociability and togetherness itself, of being in the company of one’s peers and engaging in a shared sense of communal euphoria and solace. Dublin’s streets on a weekend evening are as likely to be deserted as they usually are in the midweek. The possibility that many of us are beginning to forget that unique euphoric rush of fellowship brought on by  is now a horribly real one.

    Of course, it is slight exaggerration, at least in the Anglophone sphere, to call this the apocalypse in easy mode, and there are far more urgent problems at hand than the halting of live performance and msic events. There is also an idea circulating that, post-Covid, there will be a flowering of creativity comparable to that of the Renaissance, which itself came gradually about in the wake of the bubonic plague. A generalised reaffirmation of life may come about from so much isolation, so much togetheness relinquished.

    Suspended Animation

    It could be argued that lockdown is comparable to being in suspended animation. For many people, not just creatives, this has been a strange period of working from home and thereby taking it upon themselves to make a project happen. Dispiriting as the last year and a half has been, many creatives have demonstrated their endurance and the commitment to their art. Moreover, the technological advances of 2021 have permitted many artists to create and work unimpeded by limitations as studio time and costs. Nonetheless, this isn’t ideal either.

    Yet, we are alive. We have survived a pandemic and all its accompanying madness. I consider myself healthily cynical about most things, but I doubt I am naive for being thankful to be alive, with my loved ones still here and my work still invigorating me.

    It’s an overcast afternoon in early July of 2021. Gunmetal clouds lurk sluggishly overhead, the air heavy with the threat of rainfall. Overcast days in the city centre are nothing new or unusual, but for the last year they’d taken on a grimly hazardous feel. Even in summer, flurries of chill air can come blasting out of nowhere, as if to remind the average pedestrian of the universe’s innate precarity even at street level. The vague sense that perhaps one should not be out in broad daylight for too long was constantly hovering at the base of my skull.

    Being out of the city centre for large swathes of time had also rendered it slightly unfamiliar. The buildings that hovered above me seemed alien. I felt like I was passing through a town I’d no previous knowledge of, having to stop every few minutes to check my Google maps and see if I still had the right place – even though a year ago I could traverse multiple streets and backlanes without having to even look up sometimes. The ongoing operatic thrum of traffic and buskers, bike couriers and people generally getting on with their lives had all but ceased, save for a few meagre pockets of people also going about their business.

    Working to a Deadline

    After eighteen months, the album is more or less finished, though with some quite-necessary mixing still underway. Working to a deadline can be as good a motivator as any, and the focus has thus far been sustained toward that goal. As any muso worth their salt will tell you, a spirit of collaboration is key to ensuring any album is the best it can hope to be, and ‘Life on Earth’ is no different, boasting a sizable personnel on a very disparate plethora of instruments.

    And Paul, for one, welcomes the opportunity to be able to work in-studio again. His determination to see the album completed is heartening – as is his (ithin reason) refusal to be deterred by the pandemic and its attendant restrictions. I ask him what, if at all, effect the pandemic had on the albm’s production.

    “I think lockdown actually helped!” he laughs. “It allowed me to focus on one thing (i.e. writing and making a record) without any other distractions like pubs, parties and the need for new clothes, new hair, new shoes. When all the background noise was taken away, it allowed me to hear the music in my head. At the same time you know they say the whole world was in suspended animation and that created it’s own little creative zeitgeist. You plugged in or you dropped out completely!”

    Despite the relative freedom offered by advances in recording technology, enabling   most people to theoretically record, mix and finaise entire albums from the safety of their living rooms, this is no guarantee of a high quality finished product or even of quality control: “I need to come into a place like this in order to work,” he says, “because, otherwise, I wouldn’t structure it well enough, because even if if I was recording at home with all of my equipment set up, I still wouldn’t possess enough gauge on quality control, and therefore would never get anything finished.”

    “Much of the songs are more synth-pop, with some orchestral elements mixed in as well,” Paul tells me. The latter elements, he asserts, is largely the influence of the aforementioned and ever-prolific Aidan Casserly, the maestro behind such recent albums as ‘Incubus’ and ‘Ballads of Sorrow’. Aidan’s hand in co-writing “Be Yourself Girl” has proven vital to ‘Life on ‘Earth’s longevity.

    “I never got to do a full album with Aidan,” Paul clarifies. “Prior to that, we’d done little demos here and there, though I’d alway wanted to do something a little more substantial. This album really started with that song ‘Be Yourself Girl’, which Aidan added both the keyboard and sax to. From there, he hept sending me bits and pieces until eventually it began to take shape.”

    At the time of writing, Paul is currently in the promo phase of putting the album forth, doing the usual round of interviews and trying to see it gain airplay across as many platforms as possible. A Herculean task, some would argue, but also doubly complicated in that he has been trying to do so in the midst of a global pandemic as well. He is certainly far from alone in this.

    In that time, he’s also managed to amass a formidable crew of collaborators and other musicians to join him onstage when the big night finally rolls around. If the measure of a man lies in how his peers speak of him, there is no shortage of  hossannas being directed Paul’s way by his tribe. The aforementioned Keeley Moss is especially forthcoming in her praise of him, telling me: “Paul is a flamboyant force of melodic magic, who delivers a torch song like few others. There’s a lavish grandeur to his Art-Pop that brims with all the tasteful grace of a sonic connoisseur.”

    Meanwhile, Pheonuh Callan-Layzell, bassist and co-songwriter of heavy metal outfit Beyond the Cresent Moon, and Paul’s longtime friend and designer, tells me: “There’s a lot of creative symbiosis with what we do. Paul’s very aware of what he wants and how he wants to present his work, and he tends to be really spot-on with what he’s aiming for. He’s quite magical as well. I mean, the Paul that I know and the Paul that I see, whether on stage or in a music video, say, are to very different people, which is applicable to a lot of artists, I’d say. The Paul I’d chat to and the Paul in ‘show-mode’ if you like, are almost complete inversions of one another.”

    ‘Sebastian and the Dream’ Fame

    As a full-length album, ‘Life of Earth’ originally started production under the auspices of singer, composer, producer, electronica wunderkind and multi-instrumentalist Aidan Casserly, of ‘Sebastian and the Dream’ fame. Of Paul, Aidan tells me: “I’ve always seen Paul as a very unique individual and free spirit/thinker. I’ve only met a few people similar in my life and they always bring out great creative energy in creative people such as I. His humour is pitch perfect and generous and cutting when necessary. I think we may have met in a previous lifetime, but that’s another conversation!”

    If the two have a shared thematic concern, it is with the underdog, the outsider, and anyone generally unmoored from mainstream society, in particular the many upheavals experienced by the queer community and the often-seismic changes that Irish society has undergone in the last three decades. ‘Be Yourself Girl’ addresses such themes directly, insofar as, lyrically, it depicts the struggles of a young trans-woman coming to terms with the vagaries of an increasingly mercurial world. July saw the release of ‘Be Yourself Girl’, the first single off the album, but there is little time to be euphoric. In a seperate track, ‘A Better place’ lyrical approach and the album’s cover, Paul assumes the aloofly compassionate role of a guardian angel, assuring the listener that

    IF I COULD CHANGE THE WORLD
    you know I’d make it a safer place, for you

    As the title suggests, the song is a hymn to love at its most altruistic, and that the hope for a better world is not only possible, but also quite plausible. Despite his often-acidic wit, Paul’s music in fact comes from a place of deep compassion and empathy for such corners of the human experince, corners, that, despite the progress of even the last ten years, still remain sidelined. That sense of being sidelined is something Paul himself knows very well.

    If electro-pop could be deemed culturally subterranean in the contemporary Irish music scene, this is not to say it is not rich in its variety of acts. If it is treated at best as niche genre of oddity or, at worst as a target for critical ridicule, Paul will soon prove otherwise on both counts.

    Covid or not, the work can often feel neverending for most musicians, an endless round of recording, mixing, promo on both social media and regular media outlets (if you’re lucky, that is), trying to land a performance slot at any venue you care to name, as well as plugging the album before, during and after its release. Lack of media coverage, whether in Hot Press or in more mainstream publications, remains another hurdle, though, to Paul’s credit, he has embarked on an interview campaign with as many forums as he can. For his part, Paul has not shied away from this necessary evil. If anything, he has taken to it with a certain dogged gusto:

    “I just wonder how many singles get released every week, but every time you’re doing, you’re trying desperately to be heard along with everything else that’s been unleashed on the airwaves. And it’s been extra hard to grow an audience and excite some interest in your work with no gigs and venues. So basically, all you’ve got is radio and, I suppose, to a lesser extent, the livestream gigs that people are doing at home, although I’m not quite prepared for that at the moment.

    “This time around, putting something out there just feels in equal measure exciting and daunting. You ask yourself, in moments of doubt, is anyone going to be even vaguely interested? And then you realise, you have to make them interested, hence all this social media stuff. And it is very easy to do it that way, but then, of course, so is everyone else, and it’s a tough job. I’m in this first and foremost for the love of it, and the passion I had once before, that has been gobe for years, has been rekindled. I have been extending my pool of co-writers and collaborators, and i now have three or four different songwriters helping out.”

    It must be stressed that none of this is any mean feat. The last few months have seen the restrictions of Covid finally lifted nationwide and a hesitant return to normalcy after two years of lockdown, quarantine measures, and the months of seemingly interminable isolation and uncertainty that accompanied them.

    Paul manages to remain philosophical about the entire ordeal. “Covid seems to have brought people into communicating in a slightly different way,” he muses. “I’ve noticed people have been more open to collaborating than they might have been before. Some benefit has come out it, I’d say.”

    It is these same changes in communication and understanding on a wider social level in the years preceding the pandemic that similarly have influenced Paul’s return to music.

    While advances in music technology and methods have made the recording process comparatively easier when working in isolation, the roadblocks set in place by our inability to work together face-to-face has lessened such opportunities. This is before we even mention inflation, the ongoing conflict in Ukraine and resultant food shortages that have occurred. To be able to see such a bleak period in human history through and to emerge with a fully-fledged work of art on one’s hands is testament to both one’s resilience, the indomitable will to endure, and perhaps even live again once the dust has settled.

    No Stranger to Tests of Character

    Yet Paul is no stranger to such haphazardly-inflicted tests of character. His personal history, a crucial spur to the overall composition and recording of ‘Life on Earth’, is riddled with such tests. Paul is a proud member of Dublin’s gay community and has been so from a very young age; the album serves as something of a songbook for the gay experience as Paul knows it, contemplating the length and breadth of social change that has occured within Irish society over the last two decades.

    After singing at family gatherings and being encouraged to sing his local choir upon his discovery that he had effortlessly perfect pitch, Paul turned his musical attentions to guitar and piano before eventually joining up with John Butler, with whom he formed the electronic synthpop duo BiaZarre. Their first single ‘A Better Place/The Colour of Rain’, recorded in Windmill Lane, was released as a double A-side in 1989. “It did well on the Irish airwaves for most that year,” Paul recalls. “Or, at least, it was on the radio every day for at least a month. We played gigs in Sides DC, Blondes on Leeson Street. We were very influenced by synthpop, all that New Romantic styliings, which, little we realise at the time, was starting to go out of fashion.”

    As it turns out, the first of that single, ‘A Better Place’ is making something of a comeback along with its maker: it has received a full reimagining and recording on ‘Life on Earth’. There is a poignancy to this development, however; John Butler’s untimely death in 1998 is what the song pays ultimate tribute to.

    Much more than just a collection of songs, the album stands as a social document,

    Artifice has long been a part of Paul’s aesthetic and personal philosophy. While mostly an aesthetic choice, it was also in part a consciously-developed survival and defense mechanism The album, therefore, is coming thirty-plus years after he left music behind and when attitudes toward LGBTQ+ people began to undergo quite the seismic sea change, from decriminalisation to eventual acceptance in the form of the 2015 Marriage Equality Referendum, which saw same-sex marriage fully legalised within the Republic. In an op-ed for Northern Irish political weblog Slugger O’ Toole, written several days after that historical day, Paul writes:

    Those I had held in check for at least a couple of decades came freely and easily. Without any sobbing. They were simply tears of relief. And joy. It was now safe to cry. What had once seemed impossible was finally and unarguably here. Yet taking it all in was practically impossible… After a dirty tricks campaign against equality that must surely have reminded every LGBT person in the land of both the latent, and the blatant, homophobia that had followed several audible paces behind them through their lives, honesty and decency had won. The people of Ireland had seen through the thick smog of lies, distractions and fear mongering to the dawn of a new day.

    This is not to say equality for queer people has been fully achieved: at the time of writing, the homophobic double-murder of Aidan Moffitt and Michael Snee in Sligo in mid-April still confounds the nation. Such an act of brutality serves as an unfortunately harsh reminder that small, if insidious, pockets of ignorance continue to blight Ireland’s supposedly enlightened socio-cultural landscape. Renewed calls for a comprehensive Hate Crime legislation have been made by organisations such as LGBT Ireland in the wake of the murders.

    Violent Homophobia in ’80s Ireland

    For Paul, the spectre of overt, violent homophobia, so prevalent and normalised in Ireland throughout the ’80s when he first came of age, seems to once again rear its head, as if in a gesture of grotesque reminding: I haven’t gone away, you know.

    In the aforementioned article, Paul writes: ‘Back then, the fight for expression of identity was a huge battle that I personally had waged upon my world and theirs. The heterosexuals. The grand majority. Aged seventeen I was now illegal but I wore my queerness like a suit of armour. Making myself highly visible and inscrutable all in one smart move. And it worked for me. But only up to a point. One had to run the gauntlet of a very real series of dangers, threats and annoyances. People mumbled discreetly about the young man [Declan Flynn, who was gay-bashed to death in Fairviw Park in September of 1982] who had been beaten to death in a park just a few years before. Ireland was a place entrenched in a deep mire of homophobia and gay love truly was consigned to the shadows. Love was not fit for public consumption, if you were queer.’

    This same darkness, very real and very destructive, is one he wishes to stand against with ‘Life on Earth’. Paul remembers a time when the process of coming-out was (and for many, remains), a deeply painful experience; when the homophobic stigma endured by gay men of his generation was the norm. Ireland in the late ’80s was a far cry from the world of today where the first openly gay Taoiseach was elected into office and rainbow flags adorn virtually every shop front during Pride month.

    The shame of being fundamentally unloveable over a perceived sense of difference is quite a universal one, but one felt acutely by many LGBTQ+ people, past and present. Arguably, it is actively manufactured by a society still slowly unloosening itself from the socially conservative trappings of the Church.

    It must be noted at the time that homosexual activity remained illegal in Ireland. Reprehensible as its existence may seem to the contemporary mind, the infamous the Offences against the Person Act, 1861 (“the 1861 Act”) and the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1885 (“the 1885 Act”) threatened a life sentence of penal servitude and a decade-long sentence of same respectively (itself an outdated concept and judicial practise even by late twentieth-century standards) for what each referred to as acts of ‘buggery’.

    By the mid-80s, according to Paul, these acts of legislation were not very effectively enforced. Speaking on the Extraordinary Souls podcast, hosted by Mark Haslam, he elaborates: “When I first started going to bars, they would have been raided by the guards and so forth. So men were not supposed to be having sex with men. The act was considered to be illegal on the statute books. That said, I don’t think the law was enacted very strongly. But… for a long time, myself and my friends were technically illegal by our very existence. At least, what we were doing and the gatherings we had were, technically speaking, illegal, because of our desire for one another. It’s simply another version of the many ways society moulds and shapes sexuality.”

    Conversely, he also was never a stranger to that subterranean world that arose in covertly defiant response to the aforementioned laws: a world where queer people could mix and mingle freely, without fear. Moving through Dublin in the mid-80s, a city and era both markedly different to now in terms of attitudes to queer people, he discovered it was also home to a vibrant-if-underground gay scene, with queer-friendly nightspots such as Flickers, Sides DC and the George [the former two now long since gone]. Paul described such a scene as: “A tiny little world of lingering stares of furtive glances. Apparently, I was home. I had no idea what to make of my new home, but there I was, regardless.”

    Velvet Rage

    In his fascinating 2005 book The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing Up Gay in a Straight Man’s World, clinical psychologist Alan Downs, himself an openly gay man, writes: “One cannot be around gay men without noticing that we are a wonderful and wounded lot. Beneath our complex layers lies a deeper secret that covertly corrodes our lives. The seeds of this secret were not planted by us, but by a world that didn’t understand us, wanted to change us, and at times, was fiercely hostile to us.”

    Paul knows this hostility, which, as Downs points out, was and remains systemically enshrined across much of the western world.  As with many an artist before him, whether gay or straight, Paul’s own wounds feed into his work. Shame and pride go hand in hand for him, but it is not simply limited to his own experience. His track “Everything I Loved I Lost (That Day)” is a paean to his his long-dead father who, Paul movingly avers, did everything he could to ensure his children grew up knowing they were loved.

    “My dad was consigned to a 1940s industrial school in Glasnevin,” he tells me, “and only after he died did we discover the extent of his physical and psychological and other trials, simply because he was a poor child with no parents or guardians. Instead of turning his heart to stone, my father channeled all his terror and rage into ferociously loving and protecting his family. His heart turned to gold. Having lost both of his parents by the age of seven or eight his greatest fear was not being there for his children. And he always was. He stayed young both inside and outside and died swiftly without any fanfare and with tremendous dignity. I think he knew very well what it was to suffer adversity from all sides, but to keep going in the hope of a better day.”

    This same desire to keep hope ever-enkindled and passed on to any and all who need it is one of the chief driving forces behind the album; at the same time, the wounds it seeks to remedy are rarely ever so easily healed. I am reminded of a line in a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, No Worst, There Is None, that I think applies to this question:

    O the mind has mountains, mountains of fall:
    Frightful, sheer, no man fathomed:
    May hold them cheap who never hung there.

    Essentially, it’s very easy to be cavalier, dismissive or even outright contemptuous of someone’s perceived vulnerability (“may hold them cheap”), especially if one has never undergone or been made aware of the other person’s struggle. Whether grief or worry or depression or extreme anxiety (“mind has mountains”), an inevitable toll is taken upon one’s emotional state, in turn affecting how they interact with the world.

    Returning to Downs, he clarifies his point by saying: “Velvet rage is the deep and abiding anger that results from growing up in an environment when I learn that who I am as a gay person is unacceptable, perhaps even unlovable. This anger pushes me at times to overcompensate and try to earn love and acceptance by being more, better, beautiful, more sexy – in short, to become something I believe will make me more acceptable and loved.”

    With ‘Life on Earth’, however, Paul will see the wounds caused and exaserbated by such rage finally overcome. My only hope is that it is the beginning of something better.

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    Feature Image Image: Billy Cahill

  • Peter O’Neill’s Henry Street Arcade

    Covid-19 has perhaps spelt a temporary death for, amongst many other things, flaneurship – that is, the practise of being able to wander throughout a city freely and unobstructed, making observations as one goes. Peter O’ Neill’s latest collection addresses the flaneur directly. With a background in translation, academia and his long- avowed admiration of Beckett and Baudelaire (to whom the flaneur label is most regularly attached), O’ Neill puts his own unique slant on Dublin, and he is not alone.

    Henry Street Arcade is a bilingual edition, with O’ Neill’s poems in English appearing alongside their French translations by French novelist and poet Yan Kouton. This is an indicator that O’ Neill is a poet who must, out of necessity, operate always between dualities.

    Henry Street Arcade forms the end of his Dublin Trilogy, a triumvirate of poem sequences centred around Dublin, which include The Dark Pool and Dublin Gothic. The collection’s title comes from the name of a commercial passage located just off O’ Connell Street, built in the style of a Parisian arcade. A loose sequence of a single day in Dublin is gradually formed, in the title which directly addresses the arcade, O’ Neill asserts:

    It evokes the cave which according to Vico,
    In Scienza nuova, Plato singles out as the origin
    Of civilisation.

    Like Baudelaire and Joyce before him, O’ Neill’s aesthetic lies in transplanting ancient, iconic mythologies into a contemporary setting, underscoring its timelessness with regards to the human condition. In his case, it is a freewheeling mix of classical and literary understandings, now set to the backdrop of Dublin’s streets and architectural mismatches, that frames his poetry. He gives us a city in a state of uncertain but unstoppable transition, one in which the ideals of Ireland’s revolutionary past seem to hold little relevance to the social ills that continue to plague the very city – itself in the grip of lethal capitalistic freefall – in which they were first enacted. This constant collision between mundane, everyday reality and the author’s eye for both myth and observational capacity lends it a finely-tuned tension.

    In ‘Portrait of a Woman on a Train’, he writes: “Her handbag/Hangs from the gentle scaffold of her arm/The murderous black leather having been tattooed/With bolts of burnished gold, also bearing/The holy runes of some designer’s name. What inside does the urban Pandora bring?’

    O’ Neill almost seems to revel in this dualism. His own philosophy can perhaps be surmised with a line from the poem ‘Portrait of a Woman’: ‘Beauty must always be contrasted with banality.” His continual pairing of the two also becomes a way of interrogating whether making sense of the city is even a worthwhile endeavour.

    As an ultramodern metropolis of cosmopolitan glamour and multicultural receptivity, the social blights of homelessness, poverty, addiction and waste also remain on full display. Even a crushed coffee cup: ‘The premium of price per individual coffee/Reflecting back the macro environment of the/Property world which the cafe finds itself in.’ – is indicative of a society in extreme disrepair.

    A later poem, ‘Heraclitus’, describes: On the high street, in broad daylight, Bordello chic is promoted in plain view. And for all to see – though they pass by unseeing! Our age is one of casualised distraction – the ubiquity of screens, whether from phones, laptops, tablets in the majority of peoples’ lives, necessary for both business and pleasure – conference calls and dating sites, social media as well as the commercial necessity for businesses to have and maintain an ‘online presence’.

    Running through Henry Street Arcade is a desire for a sense of mystery – arguably essential to the poetic imagination – to be returned to an age, as O’ Neill describes it, ‘of blinding all-seeing, all knowing/All encompassing… nothing!’ He urges the reader to ‘Reappraise/The splendour of the shades and the shadows.’ This is not a call to return to a state of benightedness – it is a call to acknowledge that there is still a place for beauty in a world that seems to be increasingly accelerating.

    By Peter O’ Neill trans. Yan Koutan. Editions Du Pont de L’Europe, 95p, €12.00 ISBN: 978-2-36851-573-0

  • Niall

    Dublin, 2015

    Four hours after his head gets kicked in, he’s wheeled into the A&E on a gurney. Splayed, supine, he looks like a crash test dummy; blood soils his tracksuit. Only the saliva oozing from his lower lip tells them he is human.

    His breathing is shallow but steady, hence why none of the nurses see him. They think he’s sedated from the morphine. He is still dazed, but resurfacing. He keeps his eyes shut and listens, sneaking the occasional glance around the room to which he’s been brought. Best not draw any more attention, he tells himself.

    The corridor they leave him in reeks of piss. He reckons it always does. Dried pools of blood splatter the floor; someone has recently tried to haphazardly mop them up. Bodies and scarring lie in both directions; from outside, the wail of sirens say yet more will soon come crashing through the door, battered and gory as he. Wearing blood-speckled gloves, nurses ricochet between patients, administering drugs and wrapping bandages. He hears a shrill bleeping noise followed by a monotone voice crackle over the intercom: “D reg to resus, please.” Passing around packing gauze or tubes, orderlies and paramedics shout to one another. A girl lies on the gurney next to his, frayed mini-dress blanketing her fractured limbs and her face smeared in mascara. On the other side, a man is awake, his shirt torn off and draped in IV wiring, a white tube bandaged to his wrist; he looks as if he is doing his best not to scream. Opposite them are a pair of lads covered in blood; some aul’ one wailing that she wants to go home, the drunk in the next stretcher making stifled gurgles, while a phlebotomist with panic in his eyes works hard on pumping his patient’s stomach. Wailing fills the air as a senior doctor stands at the centre, clipboard in hand, under the laser-like arc lights.

    He doesn’t expect anyone to take much notice of him, because in the grand scheme of things, his injuries are minor. He’s probably one in a thousand that night at St. James’ Emergency Ward, and with a number like that, far more pressing concerns than his bloody mug go on around him. In rooms like this, blood is everything. It has to be preserved, or rinsed clean of whatever disease threatens to pollute it. And yet, for the nurses and medics, like antibiotics or stale coffee, it remains just another part of the job.

    He must’ve been unconscious for hours. At first, he wonders what difference the initial injection makes. He is quiet, probably the only quiet patient in the entire ward. The pain, an insistent throbbing in his head, thuds at a low intensity, unlike before, when it had been the sun and the moon, the sum of all life, a rogue wave flooding his body, burrowing into every limb and pore, robbing him of even the sense to scream out. Or was that just his hangover, stinging vestiges of the cider he’d skulled back at the hall? But to be able to breathe normally again was a relief.

    Niall Keane remembers nothing since he left the Dark Horse Pool Academy. He wasn’t brought here in an ambulance; that’s dead certain. Someone drove him here, in a van; someone whose face he can’t quite recall. No one knows he’d been out at the Dark Horse; not his ma or brother, nor even any of his mates. It might have been one of them who’d driven him here, someone who bolted the second they pulled up. But he shrugs that thought off.

    The hospital personnel aren’t worried about him dying. If they were, they’d have seen him by now, wrapped his head in fresh bandages like a teenage mummy, and sent him home. That’s a good sign. He thinks.

    He feels in his pocket; the solid square lump of his phone is a reassurance. Ma’s going spare, he just knows it. He sees her compulsively dialing his number and, once it goes to voicemail, leaving nervy, sob-wrenched messages for him to call her. The sound of his voice will calm her down, but only for a sec; she’ll bombard him with questions about where he is, and he’s in no humour for that.

    All the same, as he takes the phone out, he curses under his breath: the black screen tells him the battery is gone. More so than letting ma know his whereabouts, he wonders again who dropped him off here in the first place.

    Unmoved by all the chaos whirling around her, the senior doctor flip through her clipboard,. She has her eye on him. And with one eyelid open, Niall watches her turn to stride out toward the waiting room. None of the nurses seem to notice her leave. His vision is blurred; everything is unclear, fog-bound. Maybe she didn’t leave; maybe she hadn’t been there at all. He looks around; though he’s sure the noise in the room was close to operatic, he barely hears anything. Every agonized wail, every shout, every door-slam or slapping footfall from out in the corridor, amounts to a garbled drone in his ears.

    How the fuck did y’end up here, Horsebox? Who brought yeh?

    His brain swirls. He can’t concentrate; flares of light and sound, voices and faces he doesn’t recognize, drift and tangle through his skull like kelp, before sinking back into the ghostly murk of his subconscious. He’s unsure if he’s thinking to himself or babbling aloud.

    Well, sure, in a place like this, does it really bleedin’ matter?

    Damo’s voice rustles in his head. As it always does in moments of crisis.

    He wonders how many people in the ward will die tonight. No matter how hard the medics try, how much they inject or cut or bandage, he knows he’s sharing a room with a few soon-to-be corpses. Perhaps the nurses and medics know who’s doomed and who isn’t before they even set to work on them.

    But we’re all soon-to-be corpses, Horsebox. No-one gets a pass from tha’ queue.

    Rapid and fleeting, a shiver of panic, cuts through him: will he die as well? Can you die from a headwound that isn’t a bullet?

    So I believe, Horse. Depends on how much blood you’ve lost.

      How many others in the room have head wounds like his? Is he the worst to roll into the A&E that night? No, he couldn’t be. At least he’s sentient. He hasn’t forgotten his name. He’s not knocked out cold; the concussion didn’t kill him. But he’s going to vomit any second.

    It’s then that he remembers how he ended up there.

     

    *

     

    The usual shite of a Wednesday evening kicks off, but in a different place this time. The place being the Dark Horse, the time being after dark. It’s one of those pubs tourist manuals make a point of ignoring. Every county in Ireland has at least twenty of them. The boozers that time forgot.

       It’s a kip, an ancient kip. Despite the smoking ban, a tang of stale nicotine still ghosts it. Niall’s been inside three times already. It huddles at the end of Talbot Lane, an unwashed relic refusing to die well into the new millennium. Walking through its doors is like entering a filthier end of recent history, when people were masters at being skint and cheerless. The same five or six aged pissheads sit slumped over their pints, on any given night, with only the ticking of a clock for company. Des, the place’s lone, unsmiling barman, eyes all newcomers like he’s a hawk. The Clancy Brothers or Wolfe Tones or something similarly lachrymose blare harshly from the antique jukebox. Beams of dusty, slender light ooze through the lace-curtain window. The cigarette machine by the jacks glimmers for a euro. Cracked photos of everyone from Connolly and Pearse, Michael Collins, JFK, Archbishop McQuaide and Yeats, along with grainy, archival shots of Dublin from the early twentieth century, clog the wall like a hall of withered fame. There’s no cash register; an old jam jar half-full with coins and rumpled banknotes, placed beside the beer taps, waits for the night’s earnings.

        It doesn’t even have that aura of dangerous glamour that such places reputedly have; it’s just a kip. ‘Strictly over 21s!’ reads the sign above the entrance, but no-one’s ever bothered asking for his ID. One look inside tells him that things like late licenses and IDs aren’t a major priority in the Dark Horse.

        The more Niall is warned against going in there, the more his curiosity grows.

       It’s the pub’s poolroom, below in the converted basement, that gets him. It’s where the younger crowd goes; it’s where the billiards and dartboard are. They stay here after hours. They congregate at the table, arrange the red and yellow balls in a perfect triangle under the lamp.  Once the cue clacks off the white ball to scatter them, the game starts in earnest. Of curlicues, ricochets and pensive maneuvers, scores are vigilantly kept. Like sharks in a tank, you and the lad you’re playing against circle each other, choosing your targets, knowing the others will watch your every move. Every time you sink a ball or miss a shot, roars of approval or mockery bounce off the walls like a war-cry. But pool isn’t a yob’s game – you need to have a plan. The games usually go on long after midnight, closing time is never too strictly enforced, and there are usually girls around.

       No girls tonight, sadly. On a Wednesday, there never are. Felt most keenly by the lads, their unaddressed absence is an overwrought dearth that sinks into each boy’s bones, sullying the air like the cigarette smoke they exhale.

       Niall’s surprised there is no Garda van parked out across the way. Though he’d never admit it, the lads intimidate him with their pugnacity, their arch and profane banter, their predatory laughter at seeing him in their zone. They’re not unlike the lads at school; but these are men. Lords of the late hours, afraid of nothing and no-one. They make most of the cunts he has to call peers look like choirboys. Under their words seethes real danger, and he wants to join in. Finally, he dares himself to head out there, slipping down the laneway like a man going undercover.

       On a crisp March evening, bag sagging off one shoulder and resolve in his eyes, he stalls it into town on a DART. He gets off at Tara Street and shapes across the river to the northside, cutting down the side street which winds past Marlborough Lane, gulping from a can of Karpackie. Sporting his hoodie and Reeboks, he looks as dodgy and feral as any seventeen-year-old with no street smarts can hope to, in that part of the city. His phone’s switched off and no-one knows he’s here. The few mates he does have probably think he’s at home, spliffing it up by himself. His ma thinks he’s at evening study; she’s better off being left in the dark.

       In a week’s time, he’ll be sitting the first of his mock exams for the Leaving Cert; he’s done fuck-all study, and has fuck-all intention of starting. The life’s being slowly but surely sucked out of him with each day he spends hunched over one of the flaked and graffiti-slathered desks, trying to get his head around maths, geography or whatever they advise he fills his brain up with, in order to pass the year. Evening study, past papers, CAO applications; his head is wrecked by it all.

       Mainly, he does it for his ma,; to keep her happy and off his case. But if he were honest with her, in a way he knows he never can or will be, he’d say he wants out, that school’s a waste of time, that he’d just love to get hold of an Uzi and several pipe bombs and detonate the place, teachers and students alike, out of existence. He loves his ma, but since Damo fucked off to Australia, he’s now the centre of her world. All her hopes and dreams rest on his shoulders.

      “When you’re older, son,” she’ll say, eyes proudly glazed, “you’re goin’ to be huge. Brains to burn, so y’have.” And the way she says it, elated and satisfied, as if she’s witness to a heaven-sent miracle, really gets on his wick. Like it’s a sure thing, done and dusted. If he’s heard her say it once, he’ll hear her say it until his ears bled. These past two years, she’s been like an Antichrist about the whole thing. 

      Her thinking is, he’ll go on to pass his Leaving Cert, then get into college and earn a degree guaranteed to land him a good job, with generous wage packets and a good pension at the end of it. If this happens, he’ll be the first in the family to ever go to college. What he’ll actually study when he gets there, he hasn’t a clue, and nor does she. English or Art or History, maybe, because they’re the only subjects he’s ever been any good at; they’re also the three most useless degrees he can hope to pursue. Or so Damo always tells him. Better off doing Engineering, or Computer Science; at least they’ll get him somewhere job-wise. 

       But Niall doesn’t want a job. Or good marks, or a decent Leaving, or prospects, or any of that shite adults keep insisting he should want and have. He’s a different future lined up for himself.

      He isn’t like his brother Damo, who left school in fifth year and immediately went to Sydney for work. Ma had high hopes for him, too; but Damo was too thrill-seeking, too hungry for adventure to  remain in Ireland and was always more outgoing, more eager to throw himself into the scrum of life than Niall had ever been. He probably laughed to himself when the recession hit; the only man in Ireland to do so. It gave him the perfect excuse to get out. Most of his mates expected him to leave soon; and Niall was no different.

        After overstaying his visa, Damo was living illegally in Sydney for two years; he’d ended up doing three years on FIFO work in Perth. A few of his mates had already been arrested and flown back to Ireland when their own visas were overstayed. 

        Most of this he told Niall late at night over Zoom; Niall’d watch the fuzzy image of his brother on the laptop, the day-glo sheen of Damo’s work-jacket stinging his eye. At the other end of the world, his brother is just up and getting ready for work. The conversation always ends with him having to leave. Damo treats these sessions like he’s a Delphian master-guru, sacred and sage, and Niall is a pilgrim seeking his counsel. 

       “I don’t wanna come back, man. It’s buzzin’ down under,” he’d declare, in the cheerfully defensive tone he took when trying to avoid explaining himself. “I’m free out here. And sure look, you’re wasted on the aul’ 9-to-5. ’Course, the aul’ 9-to-5 doesn’t even exist anymore, but how and ever. Y’aren’t meant to be bolted up in some shithole office, firin’ emails back and forth all fuckin’ day. That’s just the dead end, man. No, you’re better and smarter’n tha’. Smarter than me, you. Better off bein’ your own man. There’s fuck-all else y’can ever be.

       “Lemme ask yeh somethin’, Horse,” he says, lacing up his work boots. “You’re a big boy now. Have y’no plans for yourself, no? No job lined up for the summer, even?” 

      “Ah, man, don’t start this again, I’m not in the humour,” Niall wants to snarl, but even over the crackly monitor, Damo’s stare commands a response.

       He says, “Dunno what I want to do. Maybe head out there and join yeh. Lookit, I’m just tryin’ to keep Ma happy. It’s not like she’s got anyone else. I’m goin’ for the grant to get in as well –”

       “Y’are in yer bollocks,” Damo cuts him off. “Ma lives in a fuckin’ dream world, man. They’re only exams, like. They won’t get yeh anywhere, not anymore. I know they tell yis all this, that yis need to get by in life. Believe you me, they fed us the exact same shite in school, but lookit. I’d no Leavin’ comin’ out here, but here I am, workin’ away in the sun with any number of mots to ride on any night of the week. Spendin’ cash like a mad thing, me. Would y’not join me, Horse?”

        Niall peers at the screen. “Y’know I would, man. But Ma needs me around.”    

       “Y’need to break free of her. For yourself, like.”

      “Ah, but I am. I’ll be headin’ off to college, sure. It’s what I want to do.”

     “Is it, though? Or has Ma just been drillin’ into your head all these years that it’s what y’want?” 

      Niall’s teeth clamp. Deep down, there’s a germ of truth to what Damo says. But Niall won’t give him the satisfaction of staying quiet. He tries to keep his voice even and low, so as not to wake his Ma in the next room.

      “It’s far better than fuckin’ off to Australia when things get rough.”

      “Here, I’m glad I fucked off! I’m after makin’ a shaggin’ life for meself, Horsebox. What was I at before this? Beyond pissin’ about on the streets of Dublin? No cash. No future and no fuckin’ prospects. You tell me what’s worse, yeah? Gettin’ the fuck out ’cos there’s nothin’ to live for, ’cept waste away on the dole, maybe?” 

       His breathing crackles over the monitor. Niall gives him a moment. “So why’d y’leave?”

      “To improve, why’d y’think? For the fuckin’ scenery?”

      “Well, no, but – ”

     “Everyone I was in school with either fucked off like me, or else stayed back there to rot. Hopelessness, man, it’s a disease. Bad as the fuckin’ cancer. I was browned off in Dublin; I felt like an eejit with no life. I was an eejit with no life. And I wasn’t alone, believe you me. People act surprised that the suicide rate’s goin’ up. Doesn’t surprise me at all. Y’lose hope, so y’do. Ma’s kitchen knife starts to look like the right answer when y’can’t see nothin’ ahead. But not me. I didn’t want to rot at home, hopin’ things’ll get better, ’cause we both know they won’t. I’ve more experience now. And you should start doin’ the same.” Then, before signing out, he flashes a gleeful little smirk and asks: “So, ’mere to me, Horse: how’s the oul’ LC gettin’ on? Studyin’ hard, yeh?”

      This time, Niall decides to cut him off. He leans forward and says, casually as he can: “Tell us, d’you know where I can find Oren Collins?”

      The smirk disappears. “Whajusay?”

     “Where’s he? I’ve a thing I’d like to run by him -”

     “Here, you’re not to be hangin’ ou’ with him. He’s a fuckin’ dirtbird, tha’ chap!”

     “I thought he was yer mate.”

     “Yeah, was me mate! ’Til I got wise to him. Man, look, stay away from the likesa him. He’s not worth the shite on your boot heel!”              

      It’s at that point that Niall hits the ‘end call’ button and logs out.

     

    *

     

    “D’yeh know who he is?”

    “No. Never seen him before. He’s just some kid’s after ambled in. Shouldn’t’ve even been there, like.”

    “But y’brought him here in the van.”

    “Course I did. Coulda been my kid, man. Or yours, or anyone’s. Couldn’t just leave him there to bleed, like.”

    “Yeah, true enough.”

    “But man, every night in tha’ fuckin’ place, a few digs do be always gettin’ dished out.”

    “Who else was there?”

    “Oren fuckin’ Collins. He did this.”

    “Well, of course he was, and of course, he did. Holdin’ court, as per fuckin’ usual.”

    “And sure, when is he not? Only the king of tha’ kip, so he is.”

    “Not after tonight, he won’t be.”

    “He’s been in a bad way recently, from what I’ve seen. Ever since his brother died.”

    “Mmm. Heard abou’ tha’. Topped himself, didn’t he?”

    “He did, yeah. And it was Oren who found the body.”

    “Hard thing to do. To bury someone tha’ young, I mean. Wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”

    “Doesn’t excuse any of this, though.”

    “Jaysus, no.”

    “Gas thing is, he says he’d be doin’ fine, though, tryin’ to just get on with it, y’know? Not that I’d ever ask him about it, mind.”

    “That was how long ago now?”

    “The funeral was only a few months back. He wasn’t at it, I heard.”

    “Fuck. And how was he tonight?”

    “Ah, sure, y’know Oren. Full of piss and vinegar. Givin’ it loads tonight, so he was. More’n usual, if I’m bein’ honest.”

    “How do you mean?”

    “Well, he was playin’ against Niall, and he must have missed a shot, ’co Niall started takin’ the piss out of him. Only havin’ a laugh like, anyone could see tha’. But, before y’know it, he gets a dig in the head with the bottle.”

    “Fuck. Are y’serious?”

    “Yeh.”

    “That’s just not on.”

    “I know. Oren’s after goin’ too shaggin’ far this time. He was always well able to look after himself, but it’s not a man he’s after bottlin’ here. It’s a kid, man! And that kid’s now lyin’ in that A&E over there, with his head in fuckin’ bits.”

     

    *

     

    His arms shake in tiny, fitful jolts. He can’t stop or still them – they move on their own, mutinying against the rest of him. Niall’s blinks are rapid, in an attempt to clear his vision. Again, his skull has begun to boil and, as if in time to his ever-quickening heart, that  scar on his cranium throbs threatenening to unsew the crumbly, discoloured stitching that like a track-mark, trails down his face. Along with his body, the gurney’s rocking slightly as his fingers quicken and curl into claws.

    Now unglued, Niall swims  in and out of an ether where colour and noise bubble and erupt at him. If he was even able to scream out, in fear, more than any kind of pain, he  doubts it’d make any difference.

      Say that again, y’little shitebag. I fuckin’ dare yeh.

      He knows that voice, and never wants to hear it again, least of all in his head. Reaching  up, he  runs a shaky finger over the wound where his flesh was punctured. Beneath the gauze, he feels the dried crust and somehow, the bandage has come undone so that the blood is soaking through. Life is seeping out of me, he thinks. Like bilge from a ship, torrents of vitality ooze down his jaw, in oily teardrop, and with every heartbeat, another wave of it leaves him.

    I’ve no problem breakin’ your skull, pal.

      Fighting isn’t his bag, and, he reckons, never will be.  He’s always known better than to fire his gob off. Enough lads in his year have gotten their heads kicked in for less. He keeps to himself. For the full six years he’s been there, school is still a jungle. The lads rule the tarmac roost, smoking out in the lane and getting their pick of the girls. During lunch, when they’re all off playing football on the waste patch behind the prefabs, he retreats to the library, barricading himself among the shelves and dust-gathering spines where he knows no-one’ll find him. A will to survive drives him to do this, hammered into him by years of taunts, threats and clenched fists. He knows what an easy target he is, what ripened prey he makes for the hounds. He’s sick to his back molars of being afraid, of walking the gauntlet formed by their stinging tongues and casual cruelty, of always falling for whatever wind-up they drop. He’s determined to demonstrate, if only to himself, that he can run with the lions. The real hard men, the ones that even his schoolyard tormentors fear. Any funny looks and they’d gladly dance on your head. All of them sound as a pound one minute, raring to hit you a box the next. Too much hassle hanging out with them, his mates’d say. Fuck them all, he thought. Half of them’ll be locked up or dead before they reach thirty.

    Do yourself a favour, son. Don’t slag off a fella y’don’t bleedin’ know.

    What the fuck did he say to set him off? Had to have been something. Niall knew he wasn’t being cheeky; he hadn’t been trying to make a show of Oren, he was only having a laugh. Oren had a temper, but he wasn’t a headcase. At least, not before tonight he wasn’t. Niall knows none of the lads really like Oren very much, but Des lets him hang around the Dark Horse because he keeps them in line. Des is a decent skin. No way would he have let Niall lie there and bleed.

    By now, the ether is rolling over him. The nurses don’t notice him drift off. He wonders if Oren even said half the things he remembers him saying.

     

    *

     

    More than anything, he could do with a spliff. His brother’s words thud through his skull. He clears his throat.

         “Fuck up, Damo,” he says aloud.   

       His nerves crackle steadily; he wishes he’d a few cans more. The Karepckie wasn’t enough. He suddenly remembers to slow his footsteps, let his arms hang more freely by his sides, and loosen his schoolbag’s buckle. Even with the gargle in his veins, he doesn’t feel any braver.

      Down the lane, the Dark Horse looks like it’s waiting for him. A red-gold neon shimmer bleeds from the doorway, flanked by garish signs of ‘Strictly Over 21s!’ and ‘BYOB’. Niall is glad no smokers huddle outside. His eye is drawn to a battered Honda 600, padlocked to a nearby pole. He knows that bike; knows better than to go near it. 

      The hand painted sign tacked to the entrance grabs his eye: a horse’s silhouetted head against a burnt-gold background, flanked by two pool cues crossing one another, and the place’s name stenciled in bulky, Germanic lettering: Dark Horse Pool Academy. The low pulse of grind music throbs in his ears, like a heartbeat. It gives him little spur to linger.  

       Niall glances up and down the lane, alert for anyone. He makes for the door, aware that somewhere above him, a security camera is monitoring and storing away his face, his clothes, his shuffling movements, before he stops in his tracks.

      He finds himself standing there for a long time. He keeps his eye off the bike. Once or twice, someone walks down the opposite direction; seeing him on his own, in the soiled flicker of the hall’s entrance, and they pause, before carrying hurriedly on. Each time, he tries to catch their eye and hold it; they glance warily at him before quickening their pace. A junkie shambles past and eyes him for a second before shuffling back off into the nighttime crowds.

      He’s prepared for tonight. As Damo’d say, “Never go anywhere without a plan.” There’s only one way to get in with Oren – shoot a nifty game of pool. Niall knows he couldn’t play pool or hit the rails for shite, but that’ll soon change. With more dedication and enterprise than he’d ever shown in his life, he gave himself a month to hone his skills. Then he’d seek out Oren.

       The excuse he spins his Ma is, he’s either still at evening study, or else staying over at his mate Dalty’s gaff. During that full month he claims to be studying for his mocks, he’s trawled the halls, every evening and weekend  well spent sharpening his skills. A quick google search tells him where all the best tables are to be found. He’s played pool in Ryan’s, Fibbers, and even the Hideout – but the Dark Horse is where the real action is.

      He keeps an eye on his phone, so he can get home in time without arousing suspicion. Away from her prying eye, he’d wander in and see who he could get. The money she gives him for food ends up going on a game or a practice session – if there were any takers to his offer. He just hopes she doesn’t get worried and ring up the school to see where he is – that’ll be the end of him.

      Both games and practice are vital. He found he enjoyed pool; took to it more naturally than anything else in his life. Most of the lads he played against were men, with jobs and lives and experience, some of them just in for a quick after-work gargle and a game. He ran balls, sussed out which tables were good for a hustle. At the very least, it was better than being trapped in evening study or gurning over Facebook at 3am.

      The owners realized he wasn’t looking to get served or even cause hassle, just to shoot a good game; they left him to it, mostly. Niall didn’t drink when out there – he knew better than to expose himself. Kept himself confined to Cokes or Fantas. He had to, especially in the Hideout. The men who played there took full advantage of the BYOB policy, downing several cans to his single coke. Niall noticed this made them less steady on their feet, and no matter what their billiards skill was, less capable of pocketing balls with quite the same level of dexterity. He knew better than to feel shame if he lost – everyone likes a graceful loser, after all – and it wasn’t as if they were playing for champion-hood. If anyone got suspicious, he could run for cover elsewhere. Better off if he stayed quiet. 

       Gradually, Niall began playing a better game. His natural reticence allowed him to sharpen his eye to an opponent’s skills: his means of maneuver with a cue, the speed of his hits, how he handled defeat or the fact that he was losing to a kid. Soon he was playing as many as five, six or seven games a night, and winning most, if not all, of them. They were quiet games, and he knew better than to bet with cash he didn’t have or to shoot his gob without being able to back up his claims. He learned and memorised both the written and unwritten rules of 8-ball and 9, one-pocket or bank. The glare of overhead lamps. 9-foot-tables. A ball that isn’t struck by a cue tip meant a foul. Feel free to shark if you want your head kicked in.

        He wasn’t aiming to be champion – it was just a means to an end. 

       Still, Niall knew staying quiet meant they’d distrust him – the fact that he looked younger than he was, not even shaving yet, still made them write him off. Anywhere else, this would have melted his head – but in poolrooms, it could be underestimated and used to his best advantage. Once or twice some hothead he’d just bet hauled him off the floor by his shirt-front, and others rushed to his defence.     

        Finally, he pours the dregs of his can into a drain, throws his shoulders back, and heads inside.

       There’s no-one behind the bar. The pissheads don’t look up; he trundles past them to the door at the far end, down the narrow stairway leading to the poolroom, Reeboks clumping on each steel-edged step. Music rises to meet him, Dropkick Murphys blaring raucously from a jukebox somewhere. He pushes open the door. 

       Standing in the doorway, carrying a tray loaded with empty pint glasses, is Des.            

       Niall halts.

       Des the barman doesn’t even blink as he takes him in. Of everyone there, he doesn’t look like he belongs. Niall expects any employee of the Dark Horse to be a tattooed, anabolic-fuelled gouger at the very least, with a hurley stick at the ready for anyone who dares order a white Russian, not this lean, balding fella of nearly sixty, wearing a black work shirt with the hall’s logo stenciled on the breast, who strains a little under the weight of his tray and stares hard at him and his schoolbag. Des’s specs make him look more like a scholar of Jesuitical philosophy than the night manager of a northside shithole; half-moon, they catch the dim light. Just over his shoulder, Niall sees the place’s logo again, the silhouetted horse and crossed cues, framed and nailed to the far wall. A pool table stands in the centre of the room, like an altar. Suspended above it is a low-hanging lamp, spilling a harsh radiance over its green, faded cloth. A cluster of lads are gathered at it, talking, laughing, sculling pints. Two are engrossed at the baize, several rounds in. Their abrasive chatter eddies in a cavernous, nonstop clamour.

      “Here, what’re you at?” Des barks.

      “I… I’m just here for a game,” Niall replies.

      “No games for y’tonight, kid. G’wan home to yer mammy.”

      Niall looks at him, hating the feeble, snivelling quality his voice has taken on. “Here man, I only want to have a game, like. Could y’not gis a chance, no?” 

      Des jerks his head with a sage click of the tongue. “Y’shouldn’t be down here. There’s nothin’ for you, kid. ’Mon, out.”

      “Ah, man, are y’serious?” 

    “Out, now! I won’t tell y’again.” The sudden ferocity with which the bald, spindly man speaks is quite jarring.  

      Before he can answer, Niall hears the squelched gurgle of a toilet flushing, as one of the lads skulks out of the jacks, wiping his hands on his trousers. He clocks Des at the door and pauses. He sees Niall, narrows his eyes.   

      “Here, are you not Damo Keane’s brother? Fuck me, y’are! How’re y’keepin, kid?”

      Niall looks up at the newcomer.

      “Alrigh’, Oren. Whatsa crack?”

      He doesn’t notice Des’ head whip back to Oren, nor does he see his look of concern as Oren approaches Niall, pumps his hand up and down in a single grasping shake.             

      “Jaysus, man, lookat ye. All grown up since I seen y’last.” Oren’s teeth flash. “Yer a right little hard man now, wha’? Last time I saw yeh, y’were barely outta yer nappies. Niall, isn’t it?”

      “It is, yeah.” Though he’d never admit it, a flicker of pride that Oren remembers his name hits Niall.

      “Nice one, kid, fair fucks. Great t’see y’doin’ your brother proud. So what’sa story anyway? What has y’down these parts?”     

      “Well, thing is, I was lookin’ to head down and just, y’know, have a few games. Don’t think yerman over there wants me in, though.”

       Oren stares at him for a second and then at Des, who’s watching with stern-faced discontent, and smirks: “Don’t mind him, man, y’can have mine, sure. And anyway, no better place for a game than here. I’ll be shootin’ a few balls meself with onea them tossers now in a sec. ’Mon over, sure, let’s get mouldy.” He turns to Des: “Here, Dessie, bring us down two pints there, will yeh?”

        It’s a command and not a question. Des walks upstairs, shaking his head. 

       “There’ll be some craic had tonigh’ kid, donchu worry.” Oren steps in, prowling for the table. Niall scuttles after, nearly tripping over a loose shoelace as he goes.

      “Gis a shot of yer cue there,” Oren barks at no-one in particular. One of the lads promptly hands him the one he was using.

     

    *

     

    “So, what happened after?”

    “Well, Oren stood over him, breathin’ hard like he was after runnin’ a marathon. He stared at all of us, and at Des. Next thing y’know, without a word, he drops the glass and legs it outta there like a hot snot.”

    “Yis were all reelin’, I’d say.”

    “Man, no joke, I kept askin’ meself, did he just do that? I mean, it just happened so fuckin’ fast, like. And lookit, I’ve seen Oren do damage before, but this is diff’rent.”

    “Then what?”

    “Well, Des, fair play to him, was the first to snap out of it. He checked Niall’s pulse and then he told me to put him in the van and bring him out here. No time to call an ambulance. Your man’s pumpin’ blood out’ve him like a mad thing. I was too in shock to say no. And anyway, if Des gives y’an order, y’ don’t be askin’ questions, y’just work away and do it.”

    “Well, fair balls for mindin’ him. And y’didn’t just fuck off after y’left him?”

    “Well, how could I, man? I’ve to make a statement of some description soon enough.”

    “Will the guards be in, d’yeh think?”

    “They will, yeah, for all the fuckin’ good they’ll be. They’re great for the aul’ secrets in that kip. I know I won’t be sayin’ a word to them.”

    “Will y’be here for much longer, d’yeh think?”

    “I’ve to make a statement. For when the guards arrive, like. And it’ll take a while. I just know it, man.”

    “Fuck’s sake…”

     

    *

     

    Oren slips a twenty-cent coin into the table’s side-slot and presses it. There’s a hollow rumble as the balls slide up to the return box from the collection chamber. Rollie tucked behind his ear, Oren reaches gently inside, the leather stitching on his forearm twisting as he draws the balls out in twos and threes, like plucked fruit. As he racks them up, Niall can’t help but notice he’s grinning at him, a whetted incisor jutting over his lower lip. In the lamp’s buttery glare, Oren looks like a leering, unshaven prince.

       “So tellus, how’s yer bro? Been fuckin’ yonks since I seen him last.”

       “He’s sound,” says Niall.

      “He still down under?” 

      “He is, yeah. Fucked off to work out in Sydney. Might end up havin’ to follow him out there someday soon. Leave this fuckin’ kip behind.”

       “But he’s never been back since, no?” says Oren, frowning. “Not even to visit, like?”

       “If he has, no-one told me.”

      “He still bummin’ lads?” Oren peers at him and grins, but a nasty crease tugs at his mouth. He snorts. “’Monly messin,’ Soldier. He’s sound, your brother. Always was.”

      “So I believe.”

      “And so, c’mere, it’s just you and him, yeah? You’ve no other brothers, sure y’don’t?”

      “I don’t, no. Just me and Damo flyin’ the flag.” 

      Oren smirks. “Good man. And c’mere, how long’s it been since I see y’last?”

      “Few years now, it’s been.”

      “’Wan outta tha’.” 

      Oren is on the reds, and he’s soundly beating Darren, the fella whose cue he took, who now leans on his own, keeping watch. Oren stoops warily over the top rail, elbow drawn back as he readies his shot. The cue strikes the ball in a clean, straight hit; there’s a clack and the ball rolls from the left cleanly into the corner pocket. Oren throws his arms wide messiah-style.

      “Ah, fuckin’ whopper!” he howls.   

      “Nice one, Oren, fair play to yeh,” Darren, beaten, says timidly.

      “Skills, bud. They can’t be bought,” Oren replies, moon-dancing back and forth.

      “Yeah, good man, Oren,” Niall tries calling out, but no-one’s listening.

      The others give various approving grunts and mumbles as Des returns with Oren’s round. Oren hands him a folded-up tenner as he places two frothing pints on the rail.

      “’Man, Des, you’re a star,” he says. “Dig in, Young fella.”         

      Niall takes his pint with both hands, ignoring Des’s owlish glance. So far no-one’s said a word to him, or even made anything of his presence, but Niall’s fully confident that, from now on, getting served in here should be a doddle.

      The poolroom smells of disinfectant, with the residual reek of BO hovering in the air. Des keeps the place in good nick. Every square inch is scrubbed and polished to the point of sparkling. From doorway to table rail to ‘Exit’ sign, there’s no dust or spillage, not a hint of a stain anywhere. Even the scuffed floorboards are well-swept.

        Niall sips his pint, grimacing at the creamy flow of wheat on his tongue. One or two lads, he notices, look his own age, which boosts his confidence a bit, but not too much. He listens to scraps of conversation: one of them loudly boasting about some Estonian bird he claims to have shagged in a hostel down in Kerry, another talking bollocks about joining the Foreign Legion, hardest bastards in Europe, maybe the world, while his mate scoffs and tells him to fuck off with himself.

      They shoot pool like they’re born for it. Some for cash, others for pride or thrills; there’s no sole reigning champion. Anyone might wear the crown. And if girls are there, which may well be the case later on, the stakes are acutely higher for everyone.

       Niall keeps an eye out, but especially on Oren. He’s dangerous, his own man. Always has been, ever since he hung out with Damo in school. Oren was in Damo’s year, but got expelled long before he even did his Junior Cert. Ma never liked him.

      Them and their mates used to get gee-eyed on cans up in Damo’s room. Niall remembers lurking out in the hallway, feeling puny and inane, wishing he could join in, the scent of hash and the sound of lads’ stoned grunts seeping from under the door as they played Xbox to the hammering boom of Tupac or NWA or The Game, or else madouaveh in the field behind the estate.

       Oren owns the Honda parked outside, but Niall remembers him tearing up and down that field on his old scrambler, a mucky roostertail spurting up from the grass behind him, its abrasive buzz echoing for miles. Now, it seems, he’s graduated on to even louder, shittier things.

      Oren was a mad cunt, even then; in the breadth of a spark, things’d go from grand to haywire whenever he was around. There were lads four, five, six years older scared of him. The few times Niall met him, he always seemed to have a new black eye. Once, he saw Oren headbutt one of his mates just for asking if he’d a spare smoke. He didn’t know if it was the lads’ tense laughter, or the blood jetting from your man’s nose when he finally picked himself up off the floor, that shook him more. The last Niall saw of him was at Deco’s going-away piss-up before he left for Australia, three years back; he ended up getting barred from the pub they were in, for hitting the bouncer a dig. A few months ago, Niall friended him on Facebook, purely, he’d told himself later, on a whim. That was how he first heard of the Dark Horse.

      Most lads in Damo and Oren’s year ended up either on the dole or jabbing their veins full of gear; Damo got out by going to Sydney; Oren somehow avoided it. Throwing shapes and headed nowhere fast, he couldn’t give a single flying fuck. In fact, right now, he’s sucking diesel. When in the Hall, he always is, but everyone knows not to set him off. The lads surround him while he hogs the table and banter, scabbing smokes or coins and always at the top of his lungs. He’s the closest the place has to a bouncer. Even when standing still, he’s either tapping his foot or darting his eyes around the room.

      Whatever deformed home life he comes from, he makes sure only his most trusted mates know. No Leaving Cert, no qualifications. He works part-time as a bike courier for one of the smaller city-centre firms, whenever he’s not happily pissing away his dole on mots, pints or the Dark Horse.

      And he’s only just in from work now: his biker jacket still clings to his torso like armour, even though the Hall’s roasting; his helmet rests on a stool.

      Niall takes a longer sip. He gasps and splutters, grips the bar to steady himself. Oren suddenly notices and eyes him with malign glee.

      “Here you, Youngfella, d’yeh fancy a game?”       

      All conversation dies down; it’s as if the volume of the place has been suddenly shut off.

      “Yeah, no bother,” Niall says, doing his best to sound nonchalant.

      “Fuckin’ whopper,” replies Oren, handing him a cue.

     

    *

     

    “Darren, is it?”

    “Doc, howiya. ’S he alrigh’?”

    “He is alive, fortunately -”

    “Ah, thanks be to fuck.”

    “- but I’m afraid he’s still falling in and out of consciousness. We’ve notified his mother and she’s on her way down here now.”

    “Ah, Jaysus. D’you know when he might wake up?”

    “I’m afraid there’s no telling with this kind of trauma. He took a fairly hard blow to the head.”

    “I know, sure. Wasn’t it me who brought him here?”

    “Well, yes, of course. Anyway, I just want to inform you that you’re not yet free to go. I have a few forms I need you to fill out first.”

    “Will the guards be along, d’yeh reckon?”

    “They usually are, in cases like this. They’ll want a statement off you.”

    “Ah, here. They’ll be a long time waitin’.”

    “Why’s that?”

    “I was just told to bring him here. I saw fuck-all with what happened him.”

    “But weren’t you on the premises when it happened?”

    “I was, yeah. But I was in the jacks. I saw nothin’ after tha.’ I swear.”

     

    *

     

    “Alrigh’ Ginger, how’s tricks?” one of the lads slurs in his direction as he pockets a yellow ball. 

      “Grand, y’mad cunt, and yourself?” he hears himself holler back. The words just slip from his lips, clean and blunt and natural, as if he’s been one of them all his life. He doesn’t bother waiting on the surly reply; he’s not going to prance in and fire his gob off right away.

      Meanwhile, Oren’s giving it loads, his concentration divided between the game and the row he’s having with Darren about recent Irish history. He’s switched from Guinness to cider, and talking faster and louder. Niall chalks his cue, waiting for his shot. His own half-drunk pint, gone flat, lingers on a nearby counter. So far, Oren’s barely acknowledged him throughout the game, instead addressing the entire room. 

      “The Irish brought terrorism to the fuckin’ table, boys. Invented it, we did. There’s ragheads out in the middle of the desert right now usin’ Irish methods of blowin’ shite up.”

      “Yeah, themselves,” some other cunt says and they all laugh.       

      “Fuck up, you. Here, it’s my shot.”

      Oren takes his measure. He shoots well, with the cheery confidence of a victor. He’s impossible to shark. Knows every trick, and how to counter them. Even when arguing with Darren, he sinks balls with a fluid, crackshot ease. For his part, Niall reckons he isn’t doing too badly himself. Still and all, he’s happy to let Oren win. If only this once.

       “Two shots to you, soldier,” Oren says grudgingly, as his shot misses.

      Niall steps over, sees a stray yellow ball that lies over the right. He knows to keep his eye on it, but he’s more aware of Oren circling nearby, about to abruptly laugh or whistle or break into harsh, tuneless song. He leans in and cuts it. The ball reels in a slow, steady arc, somehow doesn’t collide with any of the others, and plunges headlong into the right side pocket. He gives himself a second before leaning back, his face calm.

      “Good one, man,” says Darren.

      “Yeah, fair play to yeh,” one of the others says.

      He doesn’t know if they’re acknowledging a decent shot or muting their approval, but he does his best not to grin.

      Then he hears his own voice, reedy and alien in his ears, say: “The mighty Oren Collins, gettin’ his arse handed to him by a kid. Never thought I’d see the fuckin’ day.”

      There’s a split second of silence. Oren’s jaw hardens. And then, out of nowhere, the others break their shites laughing.

      “This the beginnin’ of the end, boys?”

      “Didn’t see tha’ comin’.”

      “Won’t be showin’ his face in here again, that’s for sure,” giggles a fat lad seated at the table’s far end.  

      “Shuddup you, y’thick,” Oren spits. “Sure y’can’t even hit off that shaggin’ rail, never mind get the hole!”

      “Oh, d’yeh mean like when y’got your hole with tha’ fat bird outside the Czech Inn? Lovely big tits on her, and tha’ was it. Must’ve been like ridin’ a fuckin’ whale, man!”

      “’Least I got me hole that night. Couldn’t get yer hole in a room full of halves, you!”            

      The others laugh, but Oren’s eyes shimmer dangerously. Then, out of nowhere, he smiles.

      “He’s righ’, though, boys. Even great generals have their defeats. Must be losin’ me touch after all, wha.” 

      He turns to Niall, who stays quiet. Darren’s eyes dart between them, and round the back, Des stops whatever he’s doing and paces warily out from behind the bar, his mouth tight. The laughter dies down.

       But all Oren does is grin, and hit Niall a dig in the shoulder, a little too hard.

      “Nice shot, Soldier,” is all he says, and angles his cue back over the rail.

      Niall stays quiet. He’s resolved to keep his mouth shut from now on. But he might be accepted, almost like one of them. He just doesn’t hear Darren’s sharp exhale of relief, or see Des upend one of the fake leather stools over the bar and fix one of its fractured legs with wood-glue, eyes narrowed to the task. He does it freely; no more pints ’til the game ends.     

      Oren’s gone back to laughing and slagging, but his eyes are still lit.

      Des disappears down to the cellar to change kegs. Now that he’s gone, the lads’ voices grow louder than they had been, their banter more urgent. Last call isn’t far off; a crackle of resolve sizzles in the air. One or two have since left in order to catch the last bus or LUAS home; but most stay, eager for whoever and whatever the night might bring. The Guinness and cider roil through his belly, and all Niall wants to do is gulp down more. Wherever the boys are heading off to next, he’s determined to follow.

      AC/DC’s ‘Hells Bells’ plays; its snarling riff twitches at his muscle memory. He jerks his head back and forth in rhythmic, mesmerized bobs. Oren just sips generously from his Bulmers, mouthing the words. The final shot’s now in sight. He draws his right arm back in a triangle, his left stays even and parallel to the cue. Once more he leans over and sends the white rolling to strike the last red. It misses by an inch and recoils back towards the centre. Oren grits his teeth. Niall avoids his eye.

      “Listen, c’mere to me,” Oren says, out of nowhere. “Be thankful for Damo, yeah? Be thankful he was there. We don’t all have brothers. And yours was a decent skin. D’yeh know what I’m sayin’, like?”

      It occurs to him that Oren is far drunker than he realized. He wears a feral expression, eyes radiant and bulging and locked on Niall, and his knuckles have paled as he grips the table’s upper rail. He breathes heavily, grunting almost, as if working himself up for something.

      Niall realizes he’s waiting for an answer, and tries to conjure up a quick reply.                

      “Cheers, man, thanks. That means a lot. Really, it does.” 

      “Yeah, no bother,” Oren slurs, softly. His eyes drop to the floor.

      The others ignore them. Oren is the only man speaking softly amidst a sea of shite-talk and invective. And right now, Niall’s in no humour for solemnity. He doesn’t know what’s come over him, but he suddenly takes a step forward, throws a laddish arm around Oren’s shoulder and cackles in his face:      

      “And, sure look, Damo always said y’were a shite pool player, anyway.”

      He turns away and sees Des, who has since re-emerged from the cellar, gawp in sudden alarm, his half-moon specs glinting as he sees something beyond Niall’s shoulder.

      But Niall doesn’t turn around in time, and he doesn’t see the others freeze in shock, or Daly’s head snap up in confusion from his phone. All he hears is glass shattering and boots thumping clumsily as Oren cracks his Bulmers over the table and charges. He hears the brief interim of silence as ‘Hells Bells’ finishes and ‘Unforgiven’ by Metallica starts up. He doesn’t see Oren, broken pint glass in one hand and a mouth full of venom, roaring at him to say what he just said again. The glass clouts off bone, Darren blurts out the single word “Jaysus!” and silence wafts like mist through the Dark Horse Pool Academy. All Niall sees is a brief, blinding starburst of light as he hits the floor.   

    Image used by kind permission of Graeme Coughlan (graemecoughlan@yahoo.co.uk)
    www.graemecphotography.com

  • Heart of the City

    On the LUAS, she counts thirty cranes spiking the skyline. She hasn’t seen this many since 2007. The entire journey into town, she keeps her face visible; she doesn’t care who sees the scar snaking from her cheek to the bridge of her nose. Under her jacket, she grips the hunting knife, reassuringly heavy against her rib.

    She gets off at Westmoreland and heads across the river to the northside, cutting down a side-street that leads to the Pro-Cathedral. The cathedral, or the heart of the city, Gavin once called it. She keeps her head up and her pace brisk, ignoring the eddy of activity around her and the odd looks she gets for the scar.

    On O’ Connell Street, rush-hour crowds pitch and roll at traffic lights. She ignores seagulls screeching from the boardwalk, convoys of buses and LUAS clangs, Deliveroo cyclists dodging cycle-lanes, bouncers invigilating in doorways, the fluorescent glare from Supermac’s, haggard junkies lurching between double-yellows and taxi ranks. Under the GPO’s bullet-bejewelled portico, she spots a young girl huddled in a sleeping bag, forlornly holding out a styrofoam cup like an offering. Homeless in her hometown. She leans and drops a few coins in the cup, then keeps on walking, barely hearing the weary “Ah, thanks, Love” the girl murmurs after her. Two guards turn to watch her pass. They notice her scar, but she ignores them. Their high-vis jackets sting her eyes.

    The heavy timber doors creak open, puncturing the silence within. Gavin stands rock-still up near the altar, a bar of garish light spilling slantwise over him from the beaten-gold apse above. She recognizes his stance. Barefoot and stripped to the waist, his prized kukuri knife slung across his torso from a scabbard, he looks like some sort of urban savage. Even that far away, she can feel his gaze on her, assessing her face and movements. He could be grinning; he usually does when he sees her. Forcing the door shut, she mutes the city’s roar.

    The Pro-Cathedral is more like an art gallery than a place of worship. Gavin told her he hadn’t set foot in it since he was a kid. He’d hated the smell of incense, the bone-white texture of the pillars. He doesn’t mind it too much now, though; grim-faced statues of saints and garish Stations of the Cross seemed to console him. She’d never been inside it before. As she moves among the pews, she sees they are alone.

    Mass has long since emptied out. Not a lone parishioner left; she expects to see some still scattered amid the pews, heads bowed and hands clasped. There isn’t even anyone lighting a candle at the back. No danger of being seen or heard. It’s better to meet in places such as here, where no audience can assess them. He walks down the nave, meets her halfway. Coils of scarring – mementos from previous duels such as this – ripple on his chest and arms. Some she’s dished out to him personally, little welted tokens of her dexterity and skill. Of course, there are others she doesn’t recognise, fresher and angrier-looking; clearly given to Gavin by opponents who aren’t her. She notices him smiling as he advances.

    “Howiya. Fancy seeing you here. How’s that keepin’?” He nods at her scar.

    “I’m still here, aren’t I?” She stares and his smiles broadens.

    “And I’m glad y’are. Thought I scared y’off there.”

    “You wish, Gavin.”

    “Y’have what we agreed?” She nods, unzips her jacket to reveal the leather sheath slung across her waist. The pommel of her Damascus steel blade catches the light. He eyes it.

    “Let’s get to it, so,” he says finally. She glances up at the light pouring through the apse and walks backwards, keeping her eye on him. He turns and walks thirty paces back down the aisle, drawing out the kukuri as he goes. He seems to fill the entire cathedral, his movements tight and regimented like a soldier at parade and a flicker of misgiving darts through her. He almost seems to be planning each move as he snaps the kukuri this way and that.

    The kukuri hisses cleanly and flashes in the dim, dusty light and as he cleaves the air, the blade’s white arc blurs with the whirl of his strokes. She expects he’ll either accidently cut a notch off one of the pews’ varnished oak or dislodge it, but he’s too nimble.

    As long as she’s known him, Gavin has jealously guarded the kukuri. He’s owned many knives in the past, some new and some antique, some acquired locally or online, and others collected in far-off regions where knives rank as works of art and skill with them is in high demand. She’s seen his full armamentarium of Bowies and Swiss Armies, butterflies and sharpfingers. He often takes better care of these implements than he does his own body. He once boasted that, if he’d the time and resources, he could ensure his knife collection would last for centuries after they’re both gone.

    But the kukuri is his pride and joy. He keeps it in a handcrafted leather sheath, and no one, not even her, is permitted to touch it. It’s a combat weapon, trademark of the Nepali Ghurka tribesmen who made it famous. The blade is stainless steel and razor-sharp, hand hammered to a black, thermoplastic hilt. It can be cleaned, sharpened and repaired. Formidable in its simplicity, it can cut through any material she cares to name. Even when it’s no longer suitable for the job, Gavin will not discard it. The kukuri cost him a mint when he bought it online, and a single slash from it could lop her head clean from her shoulders.

    She has been careful in her own choice of weapon: the Damascus was bought second-hand from a vendor in town, its bone hilt smoothed to fit her grip. Her collection of blades isn’t nearly as extensive as Gavin’s, but she’s taught herself well with each of them. After much consideration, the Damascus is her best bet against the kukuri. She’s spent each evening of the week practising in her flat, once she is sure her flatmates have all fallen asleep. She is loath to go anywhere without it now.

    He faces her, and his grip tightens with a neat flick of the wrist. His other hand is held out, open. She removes her jacket and shoes, to leave them bundled on a nearby pew; her own scars, mainly on her arms and ribs, are now in plain sight. She shivers a little at the chill wafting over her. She scans the nave, calculates how limited her movements are actually going to be. Then she draws out her own blade, raises it, and walks up to face him. Of the two of them, she has the longer reach while Gavin has speed. He also has an exposed forearm, the tendons waiting to be severed. She notices them first.

    They meet like this once a month, and never in the same location. That way, neither of them is at an unfair advantage on familiar ground. Once they duelled at the end of the pier in Dun Laoghaire, at her suggestion; another time it was in a building site behind Gavins house. Once they agree on the place, there is no going back. Under no circumstances will either of them withdraw.

    Their rules are few and fair: there are only ten minutes to fight. He will fight with only his kukuri, and she with her Damascus steel. No nails, fists or teeth allowed. No point in even trying to emerge unscathed; getting cut or sliced is inevitable. The wounds must be inflicted cleanly and whoever draws the most blood wins.

    The last time they duelled, she’d been a hair too slow dodging his slash, and he’d given her the scar on her cheek. She remembered how he stood back, eyes glazing, in admiration of his handiwork, even as blood dribbled down her face. He helped her dress the wound afterward. She went home and practised knife moves in the dim of her flat, swearing to herself she wouldn’t make the same mistake again.

    This is their strangest arena so far. It’s always been out in the open until now. Manouvering will be difficult, unless she manages to back him up towards the altar. She sees her chances of that as being about even.

    He lunges, lightning-quick as a dancer, swinging at her forearm. His body becomes a fever of movement, limbs snaking and dashing at her, the force of his attack bringing her to heel. Were she still a novice, it would have happened too fast for her to even react. But she’s trained herself hard, and well. His curved stroke narrowly misses her. He chops at the air, butchering dust. The kukuri falls hard and heavy, and Gavin gains ground.

    She parries with the flat of her blade, blocking his blows and stabbing, to drive him back somewhat. Their steely clangs and clatters echo through the cathedral like the shrieks of ill-fated souls. To anyone else, that sound is murder on the ears. To her and Gavin, it’s sweet as an aria.

    She lashes out in between his blows, her blade nicking his sternum. It’s not a deep cut, certainly not enough to warrant victory for her, but enough for Gavin to grunt and stagger backward, dazed. He glances down, and his free hand locates the laceration as blood starts seeping down his chest and onto the tiles. The splashes, too, echo loudly and they both stand back, appraising each other and the damage. She sees his smile is askew and can hear his heavy breathing. Holy through his own blood, she thinks.

    “Nice one”, he says, with something like approval in his eyes, and raises the kukri to resume the salvo. But his strokes are sloppier and his breathing has gotten heavier. He tries hacking again, in a downward arc, but she dodges and his blade is stuck fast, lodged in a pew near the front. He wrenches his knife free, but a few noticeable notches are left behind in the wooden bench. Gavin grits his teeth and spits, approaching her with fury in his eyes.

    He’s starting to break one of his rules, the one he told her when she first picked up a blade: never get angry in a duel. It blurs concentration, makes you clumsy and more likely to be beaten. He’s no less dangerous for it, though. Droplets from the cut on his chest spray over the pews and floor; his feet leave prints in his wake as he swings and keeps missing. He flails now, aware slightly that a shift in the air has occurred and he is no longer at an advantage. Weakened, he wards off her advances on him, blocking her riposte somewhat, but it’s not enough. He forces her back a bit, but she charges, and he lists against a pew, grabbing on to it to catch his fall. With raspy breath and mouth agape, Gavin steps forward, blade lowered, staring wildly at her. His empty hand finds the nick and the blood pooling around it stains his fingers. The cut runs deeper than either of them thought. His face now registers something alien, for he has no facility to fathom defeat.

  • Nimbus At the Green Border

    Cyprus, 1965

    The lads of the 42nd Infantry Battalion sat slumped on the Land Rover’s steel floor as we lurched over dirt tracks; shade from the tarpaulin kept them cool as they spoke quietly together, in Irish. Since arriving in Cyprus, they’d spoken no other language. I knew most of them had joined up at barracks straight from the Kerry and Galway Gaeltachtaí. There was no one from Wexford, apart from myself. The Irish was oddly soothing to hear, if I ignored their wary tone.

    I sat in the driver’s seat, sunglasses shielding my eyes, and kept the Land Rover shuffling at sixty miles an hour. Its engine growled and sputtered, leaving smoky exhaust behind us.

    Beside me, Byrne, the company sergeant, lit a fresh Woodbine and rolled down the window. He spoke into the Land Rover’s vehicle-mounted radio, grunting our location back to HQ. His FN rifle lay across his lap, the barrel aimed out at the land. He paused, glanced over his shoulder.

    “Still talkin’ the Irish, lads? Too browned off with us Jackeens, yeah?”

    No one replied. He smirked and blew smoke out the window. Turning to me, he said, “Jaysus. The fuckin’ state o’ that shower, Ned. Thinkin’ we can’t understand ’em. Not as if we can’t hear ’em. Tell y’one thing, if they were as smart as they thought, it’d be them runnin’ the show, not me.”

    I made to reply, but a crackled squawk from the radio cut me off.

    “Infantry. 42, this is HQ, do you copy? Over.”

    “Yeah,  go      ahead       there,      boss,”      Byrne       responded       into      his       handset.

    “Don’t stay too long in Lefka, righ’. Just head in, get what yis need, and get out. Time’s not on your side.”

    I stared out of the windshield and kept going. Our convoy was led by my Land Rover. Two armed personnel carriers travelled behind us, along with the main vehicle of officers and heavy equipment. We were on the coast road, which uncoiled ahead of us.

    It was late afternoon. We were a patrol unit from the Irish branch of the UN Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus, with three weeks left of a six month tour of duty. We’d been sent in to maintain peace, following violent clashes between the island’s Greek and Turkish populations. For the last five years, the bloodshed had become too frequent to ignore. Greeks had been shot en masse in the grainfields. A crowd of Cypriot Turks had been massacred on the border of Limassol Province earlier in the year. At Famagusta Harbour, Greek-Cypriot guerillas had been discovered receiving arms shipments. Many inhabitants on the mainland fled their homes under cover of darkness after being looted.

    We were the UN’s fourth Irish deployment, taking over from the 7th Infantry Group, who’d left just before we arrived.

    Our orders were to refuel in the small village of Lefka, before continuing on to our outpost up in the Troodos Mountains, a neutral zone. Cyprus is an island of peaks. Driving an armed convoy through this landscape was a challenge I hadn’t expected.

    Byrne pivoted his head to look at me for a minute, before snapping it back towards the windshield. “Ned, how far off are we?”

    “Five miles to go, sir. I doubt the heat’ll let up anytime soon.”

    “Ah, stop. Last thing I need is more fuckin’ mosquitoes comin’ between me and my sleep.”

    “That’s true enough, sir.”

    Since leaving HQ in Nicosia, I’d been on edge. All of us were. We’d plenty of ammo and supplies. Our radios were all in working order. But even with every strategic position dotted around Cyprus, none of us really knew what to expect. So far, we hadn’t fired a single shot, but we knew the guerrillas were out there, crouched in wait of unwary targets. Snipers kept cover in eucalyptus groves and the vineyards. Gunfire might erupt on us from a roadside gully; there was nothing we could rule out. Turkish or Greek, it didn’t matter. How were we to know the difference between ambush and accidental discharge?

    On top of that, it was our stop-off point had us worried. We were briefed that while Lefka was a Turkish enclave, Greek-Cypriot cadres ranged the surrounding hills; we’d have to be especially vigilant passing through.

    Everything we needed to know was relayed to us the day before deployment. I remember being briefed with the entire battalion in the departure lounge of Dublin Airport by a stocky drill sergeant from the US Air Force. A tour of duty in Cyprus, he said. Peacekeeping operation for the UN. Troops from other nations taking part. Fatalities to be expected. For most of us, it’d be our first time leaving Ireland. Might as well have been the other side of the world to me, or Shangri-la, for all I knew about it. I remember boarding the Globemaster, the first time I’d ever set foot on an aircraft. Ann, my wife, had blinked back tears at the viewing lounge by the terminal. Maggie and Nicola, our two eldest daughters, held her hand and watched me leave. All around us, the lads were saying similar goodbyes. All of us were in uniform, as crisp as we could hope to be for the entire mission.

    “Look after yourself,” Anne whispered to me as I held her. I assured her I would, not really believing it. I kissed her and our daughters, promised them they’d see me soon. We’d five nippers by then; our sixth was on the way, shortly. I knew I wouldn’t be home in time to hear its first gurgles. I hoped that whatever apprehension I felt wasn’t showing.

    We’d been married for nearly a decade by then. Ann had had to leave her job after we got together, as the law dictated at the time. Whatever money we had came out of my army pay.

     

    The Land Rover moved quietly enough, but I was worried about giving away our position. Every so often, we’d pass through farming country. No checkpoints or OPs, no need for papers or passports, no furnishings of order we could resort to. The only people we saw were the hunched, black-clad figures of women at work in the vineyards. Men rarely ventured out in broad daylight, for fear of being shot; they’d stay indoors, drinking coffee. Only the women could move freely outside, picking grapes off stalks, their scythes flashing in the heat. I noticed they didn’t stop working, even when our convoy trundled past. A few would glance up and stare after us until we had vanished from sight, but none waved, or even stopped what they were doing. The sight of an armoured lorry, bristling with artillery and fatigue-clad men, didn’t seem to faze them. The few children we saw sat on the roadside, watching us wheel by without fear or amazement, their faces stretched down to hungry, staring masks.

    Our first time out on patrol was during harvest season. We took our position just outside Pergamos, setting up a small base-camp on the vineyard’s edge. Throughout the night we kept watch, scanning the dark horizon on all sides, until the order to head back to base came through.

    “Should we not be looking after them?” I’d asked Byrne, nodding at the hunched, slow moving figures that shuffled amid the grapevines at dawn. “We might save more if we hang on here.”

    “Save ’em from what, Private?” Byrne replied. “Have y’heard any shots since we arrived?”      “No, sir, I haven’t.”

    “No, well then. We’re not here to save anyone, Ned. We’re to keep an eye things. And you’ve to just keep your eye on drivin.”

    I didn’t reply, and closed my fingers around the small gold ring in my pocket. It was my wedding ring; I took it off whenever I was off base. I was too afraid of getting wounded or killed, and havin it stolen. Both me and Byrne were two of the few married men in the entire squad; most of the troops weren’t even shaving yet. At night, Ann swirled through my dreams, her dark hair brushing her shoulders, her eyes sea-green and inviting, her voice a soothing whisper in my ears. The longer I was away, the more she’d visit me in my sleep, until I swore I could smell her perfume and tasted the soft curl of her lips long after I awoke, surrounded by the wheezy snores of the others. The ring was the first thing I made sure I had on me, before my rifle or bullets or dog tags, every morning at parade. And I kept seeing her everywhere. In the rear-view mirror, on the roadside, amongst the women in the fields.

    A mile off, I saw the asphalt coil away into a tangled cluster of fields. The mosquitoes were out in force. I cursed to myself. For all the heat, I noticed the grass was far lighter than in Ireland. White dust swirled on the roadside, whisked by wind. Heat fumes wriggled a mile off. Roads snaked every which way, as though trying to confuse me or render the map superfluous. Sunlight glinted off gunmetal. Beside me, Byrne grunted.  “Them mosquitoes must be takin’ orders from the Greeks. Fuckin’ relentless so they are, Ned.”

    “Yes, Sir. I suppose.”

    “Like rats in the desert, wha’? Fucked from here to there, says you.”

    “Sir?”

    “We’ll be grand, sure. ’Nother five miles never killed anyone.”

    “Yes, Sir.”

    I wasn’t in the humour for small talk. In my head I was thinking of what I’d put into my next letter to Ann, my wife. I’d be seeing her and our children soon, once the month was out. I wrote her every week, detailing everything as best I could in a way that didn’t get her worried. There was plenty I kept out. Mostly I talked about the sea’s lustrous aquamarine, the roads, faces of people I saw. In every letter, I was careful not to call Cyprus a battle zone. Right now, there was nothing to tell her.

     

    For all the Cypriot heat, it was a relief to finally be away from Dublin’s grey brickwork. I didn’t miss much about the old town. Beggars flung crumbs for the seagulls like feed, before shuffling off to drink the few bob they had in the early houses. Roadsweepers hauled refuse laden carts down the sidestreets; steam and coal dust choked the air around Britain Quay where the ships offloaded. On the Liffey, Guinness barges steamed to and from the brewery; slimy green strips of algae smeared the quay walls at low tide. Every second building seemed marked for demolition; the knock-down gang swarmed over them with shovels and pickaxes. On O’Connell Street, Nelson’s statue gazed skyward from its column; a year after I got back from Cyrus, it’d be blown to kingdom come.  Before signing up, I’d worked as a busman, driving Leylands for the CIE; City Hall to Dame Street, Phoenix Park to Dun Laoghaire. Mini cars and lorries swarmed around me as I stopped and started on the morning drive, all the way from depot to terminus. I saw so many faces on my routes and got to know the city so well, the rooftops and the lampposts, that I just got sick of it all. People were reckless crossing the streets then.  And before we tried keeping the peace in Cyprus, a different sort of peace was being bartered back in Dublin. The unions were on the warpath. I’d marched at the front of each picket line. Better pay for a better job. We’d earned it.

    In the end, the unions felt I was strong enough to speak on their behalf. I knew I was not. I’m not John Wayne, much and all as I wished I was then. In the end, it was me they wanted to be General Secretary. I said I wouldn’t do it. I’m not a leader. I never have been. The men needed someone who could stand for them, and wouldn’t be converted by bribery or coercion. I’m just not that kind of man. I could only be so outspoken until I’d be looking at the sack.

    Every man has an enemy against whom he’ll never win. That’s a lesson that never comes easily. If you’re anything like me, kindness is the enemy you know you’ll never beat. I’d heard and seen enough union men killed off with kindness, sniped by possibility of a better job, better pay, more decent living for them and theirs. And they always took it. They abandoned their men very quickly. I knew that I’d be going down that road as well, if I became general secretary. And my son had only just been born. It couldn’t be abandonment for him. Where we lived in Dublin, there were plenty of young fellas who grew up never knowing their fathers. A boy needs his da, I’ve always believed. Walking out the door to go and play soldiers out in Cyprus was a hard choice. He needed me there, to see my face every day and know who I was.

    Then again, Cyprus was the only choice I had left. After the Union, the jobs I could easily have taken seemed to vanish. Maybe I’d more certainty back then. Didn’t seriously think I would die out there. But the ten bob I made with my busman’s pay wasn’t enough. And now I wanted to see my son’s face again. In dreams, in the Land Rover’s rear-view mirror, in the faces of the starving children of that country, children the same age as him. Some of them did wave, mind, but they were far and few between. It was around then that I started having nightmares of my son, naked and bleeding, and chained to a paling post in a deserted field, crying. Crying with a child’s distraught frenzy, for me to come and rescue him, to cut him loose and keep him safe. I’d see his face, red and swollen with tears, and I’d lose sleep, wondering why I’d ever left Ireland. I should be at home, I’d repeat constantly to myself. I should be watching over my son.

    If there was a message to be found in any of the dreams I had, it was this: why did you leave him? Why did you leave your boy? He’s suffering now and you can’t help him. A father helps his son while he’s able.

    When I finally applied to re-join the army, one of the questions on the form held the caveat that I may very well die if sent into a battle zone. Was I willing to make that sacrifice for Ireland, they asked. Far as I was concerned, Ireland was a grey-green boil on Europe’s left arse-cheek. But I needed the work. So I went on basic training – seventeen weeks of hell in Wicklow, firearm drills at barracks, orienteering. I was able for it all. The only Irish I learned to speak or understand were the drill commands at the barracks: “Deas iompaig!” (Turn right). “Cle iompaig!” (Turn left). “Iompaig thart!” (Turn around).” “Seasaig ar ais.” (Stand at ease).

    Like all the others, I was stationed at the Cathal Brugha Barracks in Portobello. Of course, our actual experience in combat was negligible. It wasn’t until after I entered the barracks that I actually held and fired a gun for the first time. The weight of it in my hands was a shock. By the time I finished up, I was a top-notcher, instructing the newest recruits in weaponry. You name a gun, I was the man to talk to. I could give you detailed specs on an MK 4’s muzzle flash, a Gustav m/45’s blowback, or the recoil of a Browning semi.

    Before that, though, there was basic training. I’d my own induction among the lads. It was in the barracks barber shop. My name was barked out as I stood in line.

    “Private N. Wade, you’re up next!”

    I sat in the chair, while your man got his clippers ready. He grazed it over my skull, my locks fell to the floor. The fella in the next chair caught my eye.

    “Here, what did he say your name was?”

    I glanced over. “Eh, Private Nick Wade, sir. HQ Company. You?”

    “John McCormack. They call me the Count.”

    “Yeah? Y’much of a singer?”

    He smirked. “Am I fuck. Voice on me like a bleedin’ engine, so I do.” He peered at me.

    “Wade? Do I have tha’ righ’?”

    “Yeah.”

    “Like Ned Wade? The hurler?”

    “Eh, yeah. No relation, though.”

    “Ever seen him on the pitch? My jaysus, can he do damage. Rakes in the silver, he does.”

    His rapt expression told me I was already in his good graces. My surname could shore me up, come whatever may.

    “I don’t really follow the GAA. But I know of him.”

    “Well, they’ll find somethin’ for you right enough. A fella by the name of Wade does be needin’ somethin’ to keep himself occupied.”

    And that was that. I was Ned now, no longer Nick. Whenever I was introduced to one of the lads, or called on to give my name at parade, I called myself Ned. Some of the Gaeltacht lads even called me Eamonn. But most of the battalion never even found out my real name. The entire time we were in Cyprus, I went by a name that wasn’t my own.  After a while, I stopped being annoyed and just got used to it. Byrne told me I was better off calling myself Ned, anyway. “It’s good for morale,” he’d say. “Some of the lads used t’play hurlin’ before they signed up. If they know Ned Wade’s on their team, it’ll keep their spirits up.” But I’d never swung a hurley or hit a sliotar in my life.  I was an oddball, detached from the run-around nature of army life and yet oddly respected for it. Of course, I chatted and laughed with the others, engaged in the jokes and slagging, but on the whole, I kept quiet. The reason being that, during training, it was discovered that I was an excellent marksman. Snipers would be sorely needed in Cyprus.

     

    The water hurdled past my ribs as I plunged in, cold and heavy, soaking my fatigues. I dug my boot-heels into riverbed, waited for my balance to return against the current. Wind hissed through the grassy bank. Heavy grey clouds drifted overhead, grazing the shoulder of Lugnaquilla’s foothill. My weapon, which I’d slung to my shoulder, was a 7.62 FN MAG, an open bolt, long-range sniper gun with its own folding bipod, capable of taking a man’s head off a mile and a half away. If it was aimed right. Even in a high wind blowing downward, my eyeline smudged with dust and my target a thousand or so yards off and moving fast, I’d still manage to take it down.

    But it wasn’t a man I was scoping for, not today. The target was hidden amongst the trees, on the far bank. You needed a hawk’s eye to see it. I could just make it out through the scope, a skeletal little carving of a Celtic Cross, its silhouette black amongst the fronds. A thousand yards off, I heard a buzzard squawk.

    There was a rock mound jutting up further upstream. I sloshed a little deeper into the flow, until it lapped at my chest, clenching my teeth against the cold. The rock mound came up to my shoulders. I leaned forward, close enough for the water to brush my jaw, and shut my left eye to get a better look. Fastening the bipod to the gun barrel, I propped it on the rock. Before aiming the FN downrange, I put my eye to the scope.

    The world shrunk into a single, black-rimmed sphere. For a second, nothing existed but the curve of the trigger off my fingertip, the fine crosshairs and the target’s tiny outline. It lurked amidst a knot of gorse, nailed crudely to a tree, its nimbus spread wide. If I fired now, the bullet would zip through the air for a good half-mile before it hit anything. If the target moved, even the slightest motion would give it away. I always pulled that trigger slowly. Once I locked on it, I’d relax. Under those clouds, the surface of the water looked pitch-black. Despite the river’s heavy flow, there was barely a breath of wind. I was lucky to have kept the FN dry and above water. I took a breath, and squeezed the trigger back.

    The bullet spat from the barrel, a flurry of white smoke wafted over me, and through the scope’s ringed lens, I saw the cross fracture and drop before the echo faded away. It was a near-perfect hit, the nimbus cracked right down the middle. Lowering the FN, I trudged back upstream and into declared my headset: “That’s a hit, boss.”

    “Affirmative. Right under the crossbar. Ned Wade strikes again.”

    After that, I couldn’t ever look at a Celtic Cross, or any cross for that matter, and not think of a target.

     

    By the time we reached Lefka, the stench was unbearable, even with the windows open. I slowed to a halt at the checkpoint by the village entrance, which was nothing more than a long, striped pole extending across the road. Beside it was a makeshift medical depot, its grey walls riddled with cracks, while in the distance the golden-brown mountains loomed. Byrne signed us in to the sentry, who lifted the pole in the air, and the convoy snaked down the bumpy road into Lefka. Once we reached the centre, I parked and killed the engine outside a small cafe.

     

    “We’re not stayin’ here long,” growled Byrne, and he spat out the window. I’d gotten used to deserted streets, but Lefka was thronging. It was market day. Stalls were set up in the main plaza, and a steady stream of people, women mainly, drifted from street to street, haggling loudly. Dogs slept in the long, jagged shade of palm trees. Every building was boxy and whitewashed, coated in stucco. Depending which side of the border we were on, we usually saw either the Greek white-and-blue stripes, or the scarlet, star-and-crescent emblem of Turkey. Here, there were no flags, not even outside the depot or the mosques. Soldiers in UN stripes were dotted around, standing their posts or else pacing about absentmindedly, their rifles cradled. Guns and fatigues were now part of normal life in this village, it seemed. In the cafe, a group of men sat in the terraced shade, arguing amongst themselves. When they saw our uniforms, they waved us over.

    “You hang on here, Ned,” said Byrne. “I’ll find yeh a min’ral or somethin’. He climbed out of the Land Rover, sloped into the cafe. He’d be in there for a good while, I knew, downing cup after cup of dark coffee with the local head man. It was a show of hospitality that he, as patrol commander, couldn’t refuse.

    I lay back against the headrest and shut my eyes. I thought about my wife, mouthed the first words I’d say to her when I got back to Dublin.

    A screech came piercing up from the plaza, jolting me upright. I could tell when I saw the woman, from the way she moved, something was wrong. I would have noticed her anyway, had she not been wailing to the heavens. The sun’s glare stopped me seeing her properly, but even at a distance I saw she was groping for something to grab onto. The street was crowded enough, but everyone, soldier and civilian alike, walked right past her, without even turning their heads. As she neared, I saw she was young, about my wife’s age, with dark hair. Her threadbare shawl, drawn up like a monk’s, told me she was Turkish. Only when she reached my passenger door did I see why she was stumbling. Her eyes were covered in cuts. She was blinded and bleeding heavily.

    My fingers closed instinctively around my wedding ring in my pocket; my spine tensed. Had there been an attack? We’d been briefed not to interact with Turkish women; their culture forbade them from talking with us. But I had to do something. I flung the door open and sprinted round the front of the Land Rover. She had tottered rearward and was now sloping against the café terrace, gasping for breath. None of the men took any notice. Almost as if they didn’t hear her. A part of me hoped Byrne would step out of the café to see what the noise was. Her wails still soared over the noise of the street. I approached her as I would a small animal caught in a snare. She flailed her arms limply, trying to grab hold of anything she could. I reached out, managed to grip her hand and shoulder, and hold her steady. She fell to me, huddled tight against my shoulder, squeezing my hand.

    She smelled of eucalyptus.

    “Can… can I help you, Miss? Hospital?”

    Once she heard my voice, her howls quieted to a scared whimper. Her free hand reached up, fingertips brushing over my nose, lips and jaw. Both her hands and wrists, I saw, were crisscrossed in deep scratches. I glanced up and saw several of the men in the cafe watching me, curious to see what I might do. Their expressions were blank. One of them blew smoke. Another swished around the coffee in his cup.

    I’m not one to disobey orders. But the medical depot was only a mile back up the road. I took a breath and lifted the woman into my passenger seat. Then I bolted back behind the wheel, and revved the engine up.

    She kept whimpering, heaving out words I didn’t understand. I think she was praying. But she also quietened a little once I shut the door, sensing now that she was shielded. I pulled out of the parking space and drove for the checkpoint, where the medical depot was. If any of the lads saw, or if Byrne ran from the cafe, bellowing at me to get back, I didn’t hear or notice. I kept one hand on the steering wheel while she held onto my free one. Her hands felt small and coarse on mine, and with her head resting on my shoulder, I saw and felt the blood more clearly. It oozed into her shawl and dress, and over my sleeve.

    It was then that I started wondering what colour her eyes had been. What was the last thing on earth she had a good look at, before her eyes were taken? Did she see a wayward eucalyptus branch snap back and plunge the world into stinging darkness? Or worse, a blade, swung at her? There was no telling what had happened to her.

    The soldier at the checkpoint flagged me down and, as I pulled up, looked ready to tell me off for speeding. But his expression changed the moment he saw her huddled beside me. All he did was nod and let me park at the depot entrance. One or two of the other sentries watched us climb out, but they made nothing of it.

    All this time, she didn’t let go of my hand. I led her under the low canopy, into a crumbling foyer. Stretchers were laid out in rows on the hard stone floor. A young medic, also wearing the UN beret, rushed over to us. He pointed me to the nearest mat, and filled a bucket of water. I knelt and tried to guide the woman down but she flailed madly, her hand still clenching mine. The blood on her cheeks was starting to crust. She tugged at my sleeve, until she was sure she lay on solid ground. It took me a moment to let her go. When I turned to leave, I saw the medic place the bucket of water next to her, and kneel down. The last I heard of her was the sound of her wails, echoing off the flaked wall.

    Outside, the sentry offered me a cigarette, which I declined. I was going to drive back to the village, I said, and he needn’t worry about any more irregularities. He gave a wordless nod and let me climb back into the driver’s seat. I turned the key once more and headed back down the ramp into Lefka. I hoped I hadn’t put the 42nd Battalion too far behind schedule.

    I turned down the main street. Byrne, his lips stained with coffee, stood outside the cafe. He glared at me behind his sunglasses as I got out and saluted. A few of the others were with him, some carrying sacks and boxes of supplies. “Nice day for it,” he said. “Enjoy yourself up there?”

    “Sorry, Sir.”

    He took off his shades. “I’m not havin’ you flutin’ around without my leave. That’s not what we’re here for.”

    “No, Sir.”

    “Make sure y’don’t do that again.” He turned to address the lads. “Right, men, let’s go. ’Mon, hurry!”

    There was a scramble as everyone piled back into the trucks. Byrne climbed into the passenger seat beside me.

    “Tell me why y’took the vehicle without notifyin’ me.”

    “Sir, with respect, a woman was badly hurt, and no-one else seemed to be helping. I acted on instinct.”

    “Ned, I’m only lettin’ y’away with this once. Pull another stroke like that, and you’re on half rations. From now on, y’don’t do a thing without my say-so. Am I clear?”

    “Yes, Sir. Crystal.”

    “Good. Then let no more be said about it. Get us out of here, Ned.”

    “Yes, sir.”

    I turned the Land Rover out of the gate and drove us west, out into the mountains. The lads went back to whispering in Irish, or sleeping. Byrne drank from his canteen and stared straight ahead. The radio crackled with static and blurry updates. An hour later, we’d reached our compound, and would be settled in by sundown.

    Image by Michael Klajban of Forest road in Troodos Mountains, Cyprus (wikicommons).

    Daniel Wade is a Dublin-based author. He was awarded the Hennessy prize New Irish Writing in 2015, and his poetry has appeared in over two dozen publications. Follow his progress on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

  • Poetry – Daniel Wade

    Rooftop Blues

    I could go for a quick smoke on the roof,
    the steel vent pipe snaking
    its lobed edges toward the window,
    hear the incidental music of engines snarl up
    from Richmond Street, relentless as diesel.                    
    Maybe, just maybe, I see people for what we are
    and want no part in it? Spilled lighter fluid,
    a puddle of technicolour, swirls like marbled
    paper where a lit match was dropped, and where
    flames now spasm. A dove, olive branch
    gripped in its beak, is shot down by tracer-bullet
    in the lull of sundown, and, like me, bouncers
    light up down laneways. Beats from a DJ throb
    from an emergency exit to remind me that escape
    is no longer possible, not now, then or ever,
    and that I am moored, permanently, to here.                           

     

    Rope Jockey

    A text from the agency tells me
    when and where to be
    and what tools to have on-site
    (though I know that already):
    harness and gloves, high-viz
    and hard hat. On the Luas,
    I watch Dublin hunker in March rain,
    her blue-black skyline tightened like a toolbelt
    and head into the site at 7 on the dot,
    with an Americano
    from Frank and Honest
    and a heart attack sandwich
    (that’s a breakfast roll to you)
    to keep me going.
    The site is knotted, impassable as a jungle:
    a cluster of skeletal cranes loom
    in the sky, statically iron,
    set in stone or steel, balanced against all weather,
    jibs shredding cloud as the wind’s high grip
    rattles through bony lattice
    and chain-sling as they slowly swivel
    to lift granite slabs to the roof:
    pulleys and outriggers and bolts set in a concrete base,
    concrete vomited from mixers, giant rust-
    scuffed boxes stacked high
    with rollers and chains, corrugated ridges.
    I wonder how soon it’ll be
    before funding gets pulled and it’s left derelict,
    not even a quarter of the way finished:
    the rich weight of industry, injurious as scorn. 
    Secretly, I’m grateful for the job,
    that I get to work on this building
    destined to be a hotel
    or some tech firm’s HQ,
    I.D. card swinging and bleeping me in,
    my serial number memorised like girl’s name.
    Rung by rung, I climb 
    as if towards heaven, past girders and I-beams
    slung low in ruled, russet mesh,
    my wings soaked in caffeine and blood,
    numb to the view 
    nestling far below me, steel-grey morass
    of roofs and webbed pavements, traffic
    an arterial drip-feed. I sit in the cab controls
    like a pilot becalmed in mid-air,
    grip the levers and manoeuvre the crane into life,
    harnessing it to come ‘round full circle,
    as if in slow motion
    with a conclusive thud. Load follows load,
    lb follows lb, and I’ll do
    as many as thirty, forty lifts a day
    if I have to, the back jib
    and counterweight locked in their waltz,
    ’til a voice on the radio confirms:
    “Yeh, she’s all clear, boss.”
    And time isn’t measured by my watch
    but by the rise and sink of the sun,
    a solar disk in tiled and black in slow hurtle
    across the glass cages,
    reddening my face by degrees. It’s mad
    how dark it gets in the space of a few hours,
    how much the city looks like a crime scene,
    how unstoppable it all seems.

     

    Daniel Wade is a Dublin-based author. He was awarded the Hennessy prize New Irish Writing in 2015, and his poetry has appeared in over two dozen publications. Follow his progress on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

  • The Confidence Man

    ‘I say the word ‘forever’ less and less, the more I understand it.’

    It’s a good line. I might get it tattooed on my chest. Or carved on my tombstone.

    During the heatwaves and increased storm warnings of the summer, I felt my heartbeat for the first time in a while. The seasons change so rapidly now; I can barely keep up.

    It’s quarter to five on a Friday evening. I’ve been awake since twelve, but only forced myself to get up an hour ago. I sleep in my clothes more and more nowadays. Eventually I’ll stop writing and try and tidy the house up. Or at least shower, and shave. Sometimes I want to jack the writing in, and put a bullet in my mouth. Other times I wake up ready to hold onto life like it’s all I have – because it is all I have.

    I also know I have a talent, but it’s not a very useful one.

    I barely sleep anymore. I can’t concentrate on anything. The noise in my head is never still. I have what could be charitably described as a ‘rich inner life’. My brain keeps snaring itself into knots; I go from wired to exhausted in a matter of minutes.

    I have my wins, I have my losses; living with both requires skill.

    Christ. I sound like I’m scribbling down ideas for a GQ op-ed.

    On the Beach

    ‘Though my problems are meaningless/That don’t make them go away.’

    As always, Neil Young says it better than I or anyone else can. All this year, I’ve had his ‘On the Beach’ album on repeat. The title song’s jangling bassline and weary falsetto are good reminders that at least my life has a belter soundtrack.

    That phrase ‘toxic masculinity’ keeps coming back to me. A quick Google search of the term yields over 10,100,000 results. Every time there’s a mass shooting or an assault or even a film or a comedian that arouses controversy, it’s listed as among the chief factors. A lot of us, myself included, engage in it.

    I don’t doubt or deny the concept or its validity. But it also sounds like a good name of a beer to me. Like a stout or an ale or even an IPA. Occasionally I half-joke to myself: if the writing doesn’t work out, I’ll start my own microbrewery, and the Tox-Mas IPA will be its premium product. Blonde, red, unfiltered. Whatever you want.

    Being alone is natural, yet people don’t know how to be. It’s not a skill they teach you in school, or during office hours. We’re tired of living with the inner cavity, of the disappointment, and of letting each other down. Yet the disconnect that’s become so prevalent in recent decades is now the norm. People seize up just texting each other. The more we anchor ourselves to our hope, the more let down we inevitably feel. The let-downs, both the ones you’re responsible for and the ones visited upon you, pile up and you start measuring them. I don’t live without hope, but I don’t wholly rely on it, either.

    Loneliness

    Loneliness is considered a mental-health problem nowadays. As most aspects of the human condition are. It’s a symptom of being Irish, I suppose; the inability to countenance that someone or something is worth loving. Whatever suffering I’ve faced in this life is fairly minor compared to that faced by most people I know. I’ve lost friends to suicide, and others to their own inner demons. Because I can’t afford therapy, I turn to language.

    I am often alone, but rarely lonely. Loneliness is inevitable; it cannot be escaped. Loneliness rarely means being alone. It usually means no-one caring.

    Overfed with an endless scroll of stories, posts, newsfeeds, articles shared from newsites blasting the latest cause for concern. Some call it an overpopulation issue; others say it’s the pervasive influence of technology and social media in everyday life. Actual face-to-face contact is declining. At any given point our eyes are glued to some sort of screen. Mass disconnection – is it any wonder?

    The hackneyed, social-media friendly refrain of ‘love yourself!’ rings hollow when people seem to care little about each other. The constant reminders to put oneself first, of the paramountcy if one’s own immediate happiness and gratification, how if should always take precedence over the needs of one’s family and friends.

    Being involved with someone for a long period of time has only increased my worries and knowledge of how bad I am. I don’t need anyone else finding that out.

    Low-level exhaustion

    I wonder if all this intensity is necessary. Or if I am over just over-enthusiastic and say yes too much, too quickly. I follow the reformed alcoholic’s recommendation, and take each day as it comes, work on what I have to: scripts, reviews, my novel, my poems.

    This is new for me; the low-level exhaustion that simmers quietly at the back of each day. In college, I used to churn out multiple three-thousand-word essays, poems, and playscripts. I badly needed a girlfriend then. Confidence, too. If I had more confidence, my life would be very different.

    Now, I just need a job. Or at least, something to keep me occupied. I don’t care about forging a career or drafting up five-year plans. A job is just a way of keeping afloat, so I can write.

    I should still teach myself a few new things, though. Like how to make fire from kindling, without matches or a lighter. Manage my finances better. Jog, cycle, lift weights. Programme a computer from scratch. Things that are quite necessary for a life of competence, and which don’t engage me in the slightest.

    I need no-one and no-one needs me. Is that a strength or a weakness?

    Warped Version of Adolescence

    I’m now back living in my parents’ home, and leading a warped version of my adolescence again. The dynamic with my parents and younger sister is closer to that of roommates than a family unit. We lead our individual lives, work our own jobs, and interaction remains minimal, even under the one roof. We are either too busy or don’t care. We just lack the energy to care. Hence why I rarely speak or expect anything from them. The bond of blood ties everyone, but I’m not sure.

    My father’s boots clumping on the wooden floorboards, the shower’s hiss and the extended sigh of the kettle boiling, the scorch of black coffee at the back of my throat. These are the reminders of how things can change and remain the same.

    They say adulthood is just the slow realisation that all the wisdom fed to you since infancy is categorically false.

    I am single, and yet I am not isolating myself anymore. When I was with my ex-, she was my priority.

    Putting other friendships aside seemed like a virtue, as it meant I was prioritizing my partner. This is what men do in relationships, apparently. When the breakup happens, they find they’ve no mates to turn to. I’m not in the humour to be anyone’s boyfriend now; I lack the energy to care about being with someone.

    Women moving faster

    I keep thinking about women, as always. They seem to move faster than me, their footsteps ablaze with purpose. I look at their hands more and more, to see if they wear rings. Most of them aren’t. It’s not something I ever thought I’d do. It’s become another reflex, like checking the time or my emails.

    Do all men do this?

    Occasionally I look my exes up online, like the creep I am. I don’t go on dates that much.

    There’s always the need to impress, and I rarely feel that impressive. I’ve no business being someone’s boyfriend.

    I was someone’s boyfriend for three years; in all that time, I never quite believed that she loved me. I couldn’t see any reason why she would. But she did. And I loved her back.

    She used to look at me as if I was a god. I knew it was only a matter of time before the reality of what I am would become clear. I could only keep the masquerade up for long, and then she’d want me gone. As she eventually did.

    Every woman I’ve been with I’ve inevitably let down.

    Most blokes seem to make it their life’s work to pester women until they either give in or set their brothers on them. I’m more willing to take ‘no’ for an answer. Usually, I expect it.

    I’ve never felt wanted anyway. I’d say I’ve been out of the game for too long, but that would imply I’ve even been in the game in the first place.

    The beginning of things are always exciting. Once I see the ambit of work that must go into something, I lose interest.

    I don’t know if I have a stunted capacity to feel or recognise love, or am just incapable of feeling it.

    I’ve also trained myself not to get sentimental anymore. To the point that major losses or setbacks don’t hit as hard as they should. The mawkishness is repulsive to anyone who witnesses it.

    News thump

    More and more in my newsfeed about Brexit, climate change, the housing crisis here, banking layoffs in Germany, mass drownings in the Mediterranean, multi-millionaire men of the people taking selfies at Everest’s peak, immigrant detention centres at the Mexican border. The inevitable and deserved comparisons to Auschwitz and Dachau. There’s no ignoring it anymore.

    Armageddon, Ragnorok, Kali Yuga, Al-Qiyammah, the Anthropocene. Every society, in every era, puts a name to the inevitable, to the moment of its collapse. It continues to this day.

    I remember chatting up this girl once, in the smoking section in Workman’s. Whether she fancied me, or was just bored, I couldn’t tell. I never can. She was confident in the way only young people are.

    A man sitting alone in a pub is usually best avoided, but she came up to me and got the conversation going. I say we had a conversation, but really I just let her talk about this upcoming art exhibition she was about to have in Amsterdam. Its overall theme was about body image, how men and women perceive theirs, for good or for ill. Five years ago, this would’ve impressed me.

    She asked me did I like my body, the way I looked, did I feel comfortable in my skin. I didn’t really have an answer for her. If she was waiting for me to make a move, she was sorely disappointed. Not that I didn’t want to, I just didn’t know when. It’s a very delicate dance, and I have very heavy feet.

    I know I am far less than what I could be. I don’t need a self-help guide to realise that.

    The mind is a cave; the brain peels back. I can’t be alone for very long without the craving for a cold beer breaking the surface. I need to stay numb. I need to forget that I exist.

    I want to be somebody else. I’m tired of being a burden to everyone. But this is the flesh I am sealed into.

    Only a few days ago, I was invited to go on a hike through Glendalough. Sweat on my torso and mud on my boots; feeling the winds at such a high altitude, overlooking the swirl of black water that is the Upper Lake in the valley, scrape at my face. Strangely enough, it cleared my head.

    At home, I got back to work. Wrote and felt the old strength come back. I know the value of hope now, the necessity of keeping going. I still know better than to rely on it, but it isn’t unwelcome for now.

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    Daniel Wade is a Dublin-based author. He was awarded the Hennessy prize New Irish Writing in 2015, and his poetry has appeared in over two dozen publications. Follow his progress on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

  • Leah’s Gaff

    I was born in Dublin, but I don’t know where I’ll die.

    The early summer of 2011 was schizoid. I walked for hours in a soft downpour, the sun crawling in and out the haze, getting the best of both climates.

    I kept my pace relaxed, cocooned in my anonymity, just the way I liked, the streets uncoiling before me. I carried my old sportsbag slung over my shoulder, within which was concealed the noxious implement for Leah’s death: a helium canister. The strap felt disarmingly light in my hand against my neck.

    There was little cause for worry, though. Outside the city centre, Dublin was quiet that day. Both people and traffic were sparse. I ignored the familiarity of Harcourt Street, the LUAS snaking past, crammed with punters, clanging as it went. I tried not to think too hard about what I was about to do.

    It was the 23rd of May. In just a few hours, Barack Obama was due to give a major address in College Green to a crowd of thousands, after being helicoptered up from Moneygall, the alleged hometown of his ancestors. The city centre was filled to capacity, or so I’d heard. The papers had been wanking with delight over the tenuous connection the American president had to the old sod, with headlines about roots and ancestral pride and the potential economic recovery that might happen as a result of his visit to Ireland. RTÉ live-tweeted the event as it happened, from Air Force 1 landing in Dublin Airport that morning to the pints of Guinness being supped by the President and First Lady in small-town Offaly pubs. To read all this, and how the majority of people spoke of it, you’d think the nation was about to undergo some sort of cosmic rite of redemption, after several years of bailouts, austerity, unemployment and the I.M.F., by Obama’s presence alone. Part of me believed it would, too.

    Guards were swarming all over the city and traffic was halted for the day. A raised platform and speaking podium stood in front of the Bank of Ireland’s stone portico. Periodic hollers of ‘Yes we can!’ ricocheted all around the square. Actors, pop singers and politicians pranced one by one out onto the stage in a flurry of speeches and light effects. The crowd took up every square inch of the plaza as I passed the security railing: starry-eyed students who still believed Obama was some sort of 21st-century messiah, Secret Service agents in suits and shades overseeing security, photojournalists jostling to and fro, trying to snap the best shot, parents holding kids aloft on their shoulders, all waiting to be wowed by the Presidential homily. Everyone I saw was making in some way or other for the city centre.

    I was probably the only man walking in the opposite direction. I could walk that route blindfolded, I knew it so well: the sickly neon light, the uphill curve of Harcourt Street, the glaring and swollen dome of Rathmines church, redbrick side-streets and electricity in my heels. The wrought-iron gate leading down to the door. The dim glow of the low-wattage bulb in the ceiling that kept the place lit. The promise of seeing her with each footstep. This was the route I took on the day Leah planned to die. For the last time, I knew.

    *

    I’ll bet you’ve never played Stoned Olympics, no? Ah man, it’s a fuckin’ scream, so it is. What you do is, you smoke your spliff down in one go, and then you try standing on a skateboard; you can’t take either of your feet off it. You then try manoeuvring it around the room and do a sliding jump over the sofa. Extra points if you manage not to break your back or your leg. I was never much good at it.

    Leah came up with that game, though she never actually took part. She just sat on the scaldy-looking armchair in the corner, blowing smoke rings, while me or Jay or whoever tried to snap the board tail back with our heels and leap into the air, falling on our arses in the process. She was the only girl I knew who could blow smoke rings.

    I knew her through Jay, who’d been my mate since primary school, and from whom I now bought most of my hash. I didn’t, and still don’t know, any other girl like her. Anyone else, and the lads would’ve told her to fuck off back to the kitchen, but they never did with Leah. They wouldn’t have dared. She’d this way of making you listen, of commanding your attention without even trying. Even her flatmate Lorcan, who spouted a bottomless river of shite, shut up whenever she spoke. You just wanted to hear more off her; know where she was taking you.

    ‘Everyone treats mass protest in this country as a joke,’ she’d say. ‘Guards, students, everyone. It’s all just a big day out for them.’

    ‘Well, can you blame them?’ Lorcan’d counter. ‘What normally happens when a protest is held here? Full power of the State falls down on you. That’s what it means to protest in this fuckin’ kip.”

    ‘Then why play along with the socially-acceptable form of protest at all? I mean, you see all these marches for abortion, with pink ribbons and signs and all that shite, and it just reinforces the idea that women are whining their way into getting what they want. It’s just government-sanctioned protest, to my eyes. No more effective than writing a letter to your local TD. It’s just so fucking quaint, and pointless, too. I mean, start a full-on riot if you want to get anything done. The last time women wanted something as significant as abortion was suffrage, and that was violent as fuck.’

    She was on a roll, and, stoned as we all were, we knew better than to interrupt her. She was entrancing like that; you just knew she was onto something. She just didn’t give a fuck who heard or disagreed.

    Lorcan encouraged her, grinning like a mad thing: ‘So, what do you suggest should be done?’

    ‘How do you mean?

    ‘Well, for starters, how would y’deal with the pigs? They shut down all the cop shops out in the backarse of nowhere because ‘there’s no funding’ for them. So, why are they always out in force whenever there’s a protest on?’

    Leah inhaled her spliff and carried on: ‘Me, I’d treat it like a state of emergency. Get in their face, make it impossible to get into Dáil Eireann. We’re talking literally blocking the doors, and filling up Government Buildings. That’s how you get something done. Make it impossible to do their jobs until they deal with it. Make it impossible for them to live their daily lives. If you’re not willing to get a nightstick to the head, then just get out the fucking way. If you’re out on the street, it should follow that you’re passionate enough to get in someone’s face. You need to scare the shit out of people.’

    ‘And how would you scare the shit out of people, Leah?’

    ‘I’d get every woman in Ireland to fill up water balloons with their period blood, and lob them at Government Buildings. It’d take months to clean off. And I wouldn’t do it on a fucking Saturday either, when the government aren’t in session. I’d do it during the week, so they couldn’t ignore it.’

    We were all laughing by now. ‘What do I know,’ Leah shrugged, cracking open another can of Tyskie. ‘It’s just one my sick fantasies.’

    Her flat, just off on the crumbling laneway of Oxford Road, always reeked of hash, before she’d moved in, even. The more I went over there, the more I liked it. She found it after a nightmarish house-hunt which ended up costing her nearly a grand in phone bills, over several hundred emails, and her sanity. There’d been a sharp increase in rental prices that year. Leah was only in her second year in college at the time, but she’d lied about being a young professional on her application; Dublin landlords hate students the way neo-Nazis hate immigrants and travellers. She took the flat because fuck-all else was coming her way.

    The guy she was renting off was an ex-garda, ex-garda detective no less, and he never checked his accounts, or his property. He owned six more houses around Dublin, his official tenants having all moved out. He still put up for rent on the sly for unsuspecting students, dole rats and lowlifes; the only time he’d ever call around was to collect the monthly cash Leah owed him. Far as I know, he did absolutely nothing to repair any of the hazards afflicting the place. He just didn’t give a fuck; so long as he got his rent money, he was happy enough.

    And yeah, it was a shithole – a garden-level basement under a stock-brick Georgian townhouse, germ-infested and cramped, low-ceilinged and airless, reeking of unwashed clothes and the hovering, organic reek of hash, dried piss and cider cans, no insulation and the carpets speckled in a decades’ worth of dust – but it was warm. When Leah moved in, it could only ever have been a student’s gaff, frayed Breaking Bad and American Psycho posters festooned the living room, along with the lurid smear of graffiti on every surface.

    Leah shared the place with three absolute spacers: Lorcan, an ex-architect (or so he claimed) and aspiring DJ with twenty-five grand in redundancy pay and fifteen grand’s worth of musical equipment in his room; my mate Jay, the closest we had to a ladies’ man, despite his potbelly and acne scars; and Olly, last of the Celtic Tiger Cubs, who described himself as an ‘earth-warrior.’ The four of them fucked off to Body and Soul one weekend, leaving me with several stacks of mould-smeared dinner plates to wash up.

    How Leah put up with us, I’ll never know. Her and Olly was the only ones paying rent, for starters, while we were just glorified squatters. She’d put in a day’s work in college and usually had a job or an internship going somewhere; Jay and me were officer-class vets in Ireland’s standing army of the hardcore unemployed, drifting between bullshit FAS courses to occasional nixers on film sets as extras, all the while collecting your hard-earned tax dollars from the dole office and using them as beer vouchers.

    I’d nowhere else to stay then, so thank fuck for the mates I had. On the rare occasion Leah or the lads couldn’t fix me up with a couch to kip on, I’d wander the streets of Dublin until my legs couldn’t take it anymore, or else I found somewhere I could lie down for the night. Usually I’d end up on the grassy patch under the bridge at Charlemont Street. Or else in a doorway somewhere, or down some shadowy laneway. I’d huddle into my sleeping bag, the cold sucking at me, listening to the water seethe in the dark. Then I’d get slowly out of it on my own, if I was able. The vodka and hash coursing through my system made me think I could endure anything. It dawned on me one night that I kind of liked living this way. It was only a miracle I didn’t fall into the canal and drown.

    I was never officially living there, but Leah and the lads didn’t mind having me over too much, either because they were usually too drunk or stoned to care, or because I always knew when to make tracks. All I had to worry about then was paying Lorcan a tenner back for the odd Dominos we’d order. Whatever dole money I had went on cans, anyway.

    I got the couch whenever I was over. The number of times I woke up on it after a night on the gargle is too much to count. It began to smell like me and moulded itself to my shape.

    It was dead handy, having posh mates. Lorcan and me got our dole on Tuesday; Jay got his on Wednesday. There was a pub next door, so we were never stuck for a few cans. The barman there was sound; he gave us take-outs after the off-license closed, just because he knew we lived next door. We’d pool whatever we had into a six-pack each and as much hash as we could afford. Usually, I’d only my lighter and a packet of skins to dish out. We’d head back to the flat to get doggedly, religiously stoned in the front room, talk shite and play Gears of War 3 on the Xbox, while 2Pac or Aphex Twin blared scratchily on Lorcan’s poxy stereo speakers. We used the rear wall and a photograph of one of Jay’s exes as a dartboard. Other times, we’d bitch about austerity and the government disbursing the dole money that we blew on weed every month. And, despite the lack of insulation, we never got any complaints about the noise. Maybe the neighbours were too afraid to complain.

    That was my life for a good while, counting the hours until dole day and taking cover at Leah’s gaff. Spliffing and swigging cans with Lorcan and Jay whilst Ollie hid in his room and Leah lost herself in her headphones. Gurning away at nothing as the volume was turned up and her head fell back and she was off in her own little nirvana once again.

    Ollie was sound enough to lend me his laptop if I ever needed to check emails. Sometimes, if they were all out at work or college, I’d let myself in with the key under the mat, make myself a cuppa and lie back on the sofa. Or spend hours online, sucking up the net’s boundless wisdom. Unanswered emails. Facebook updates. Other times, I’d log onto Leah’s Netflix account, killing the hours with American crime dramas or art films, obscure documentaries on the Dark Web and Islamic terror groups, whatever the algorithms were able to dredge up for me. Go over endless paragraphs of vitriol, mutual friends arguing about whatever in the comments section. I could on like that for hours. Until someone arrived home and we got down to spliffing.

    The welcoming pall of smoke never seemed to settle or lift, which was fair enough for everyone. Deep down, we knew the country was well and truly sunk and we were the rats left clinging to its driftwood. No-one had the ambition or even the energy to get angry about it. All we really wanted was weed and beer vouchers, and to enjoy our twenties while we still could; finding a job could fuck right off. The hassle with the banks, the endless plummet into national disrepair, the spike in suicide rates, was all I ever seemed to hear on the news. I actually gave up listening to it, I was that sick hearing about it all. I didn’t need to be reminded; everyone I knew was either skint or emigrating. Basically, the country was in a heap. I didn’t need the airwaves to keep rubbing it in.

    So, for a full year, Leah’s gaff became our little fortress against it all. The discoloured brickwork, too-low ceilings, Lorcan and Ollie’s bikes chained to the railing outside, the relentless damp and mould-caked jacks we all had to share; bound together like a unit of survivors, we were cordoned off in a warm, wasteful cocoon of nihilistic lassitude. Or, as Jay put it, ‘ridin’ the state, doggie-style!’

    But my main memory of that year was how cold it was; so cold, the canal froze over. The pavements were strewn with yellowed, crinkly leaves. Sheens of sugary-looking frost crusted the grass in the dawn air. Streetlights glowered in harsh, pelting blurs of misty rain. I walked far slower out of doors, still stoned from the night before, because any second I knew I might lose my footing and crash hard on the icy asphalt, the loveliness of winter abruptly shattered along with my elbow or kneecap. My face often felt like it was being scalped off me as I made for the dole office on Richmond Street.

    Any family I had by then was lost to me. My aul’ pair had kicked me out, my sister Lily had gone to live off in Canada. My dealings with her were limited to the occasional email and at least one late-night catch-up session on Skype each month, if I was able to get my hands on a laptop. No Leaving Cert to show, a virtually non-existent history of employment. I wasn’t too hassled by any of this, though. I preferred being closer to Leah.

    You never got the feeling she was as idealistic as she made out; she was at an age where one is usually ablaze with left-wing zeal, the first pangs of social conscience gnawing at the mind and heart. She repeated all the usual quixotic slogans declaiming equality and progress, but I don’t think she really meant any of it. She said them almost with a tone of bitter mockery, as if the systems of egalitarian belief picked up in lectures dedicated to feminism and intersectionality and post-colonial social theory had zero chance of survival in the real world. She earnestly lectured us on our male privilege, telling us time and again to check it, and then laugh off her own words after. She could seriously wreck your head that way; you never quite knew where you stood with her.

    And she was far wilder than any of us, and I don’t mean in a good way. She didn’t need drink or yokes to feel the thrill. If she felt like it, she’d get her kit off, and I mean, we’re talking tits and gee on full display, and her and Olly would race each other down the full length of Oxford Street to the canal, whopping and wailing like mad things. And this was during the daytime! In fairness, it was a great laugh whenever they did that. Worth it for the look of pure shock on some yummy-mummy’s face from over on Mountpleasant Square who decided to jog down our way.

    Other times, Leah might vanish for a week without so much as text or a call and then arrive back at the house out of nowhere, claiming with a flippant grin that she’d slept in the bedsit of some fella she just met at the Bernard Shaw, or had ended up in a rave out in Brittas Bay that got shut down by the guards. If what she told us was true, it was a miracle how she somehow always managed to emerge from these mis-adventures alive, or at least, relatively unscathed. She was mad. I know you’d have liked her.

    Of the five of us, she and Lorcan were the only ones who’d finished college. Somehow or other, despite all the lunacy she got up to, Leah always managed to pass the year with flying colours. She stayed in her room, assiduously drafting essays on state power and Thomas Hobbes, all the while making plans to apply to masters’ courses overseas once she graduated. She’d get them, too. I knew that in school, she was a model student, always studying, destined for a great Leaving Cert and a place in Trinity. I’m sure teachers and parents and bosses, even her college professors, loved her, thought her mature, sensible, hard-working, a shining example of industriousness to her more wilful peers. But I’ll bet none of them ever saw her gurning off her face at three in the morning at a session on Baggot Street, or running naked through the general campsite at Knockonstockon in the early dawn air, wailing like a banshee. Leah was smart enough to know that, if you’ve the tiniest smidgen of respectability that comes with attending one of the A-list private schools and colleges in Ireland, you can get away, more or less, with whatever you want. I liked the way she always dyed her hair a different colour, usually over the space of three or four days. She dressed all in black, outsized sweaters and second-hand Doc Martens. She could deck herself out in a shredded bin-liner for all I cared. I’d still have fancied her.

    Perhaps I was just hardwired to. But I’ve known from any early age to keep love buried in taciturnity. It fosters itself, like heat in a boiler, swelling until my lungs are in bits. I said nothing about it, so it wouldn’t be contaminated. I felt both free and taken hostage. My nights were sleepless, endless cigarettes burning themselves out between my fingers as I contemplated her face, watched her sleep, staved off the biting urge to grab and hold her to my torso. I’d have gone cold and without food just to kiss her throat.

    There were nights when, unable to sleep, I’d get up from the couch and stand on the landing outside her bedroom door. Just stand there for hours, listening to her breathe and dreaming of climbing in under the sheets with her, letting her warmth and scent wash over me. The only thing stopping me from going into her was the dead certainty that I’d never be welcome in her gaff or near her ever again.

    Not that I’d a prayer of getting with her. I’m better off on my own, anyway; I decided that about myself a long time ago. Aside from the lads, I can’t imagine who in their right mind would ever have me for a friend. Or as a boyfriend. Or even as a fuck-buddy, come to that. But I’d grown to kind of like not having to answer to anyone, bar the cunts in the dole office where I signed on. Relationships just really aren’t my bag. I’m happy enough with just my hand, my prick and my imagination.

    But I wasn’t alone. All the lads fancied her. Soon as she left the room, they’d talk about her in vexed, fascinated tones, commenting on the fact that she was clearly insane and yet still seemed somehow able to function; they’d all insist in the same breath that they saw her as a sister at best, not as a girlfriend, nor even as a friend with benefits. I knew that was bollocks; she’d gotten off with all three of them at different stages in the past, and yet, miraculously, the equilibrium in the house remained more or less the same. No rows, no sour looks or split blood, no avoiding each other, no awkward silences, no fistfights, no-one moving out. She’d been with Lorcan the most, and still occasionally got into bed with him when she was really off her face. Plenty of our mates who’d come for a session tried it on with her; a good few succeeded. But of the three living there, only Ollie seemed to really ignore her, after the one night he’d shagged her when he was pissed on cider. I don’t think she even took much notice of me.

    I can say with only the debatable clarity that retrospect brings, that none of us knew how ravine-like her depression really was. Living in that house definitely didn’t help. The more I stayed there, the more I noticed the white plastic tablet containers that she left lying around, as carelessly as she would her cans or her lighter. Towards the end, her hair, still lined with dull blonde highlights, grew more wiry and unwashed, her flat stare underscoring the pale outline of her bones.

    I never saw her cry, but there were plenty of times when I’m certain I heard her sobbing to herself from behind her bedroom door. I’d glimpse the trail of ashen scars tapering down her shoulder if her blouse sleeve came loose, and say nothing. If any of the lads noticed, they never said.

    ‘She’s a fuckin’ looper, man,’ Jay said. ‘I mean, don’t get me wrong, she’s a ride and all, but I wouldn’t want to give it to her twice.’

    ‘Bit too intense for my likin’,’ Ollie agreed.

    ‘Too much baggage,’ Lorcan slurred, lobbing his emptied Tuborg out the back door where it landed with a dull clatter.

    Things began to go wrong for us, as they so often do, almost innocuously. We went one afternoon in March for a few pints in the Bernard Shaw and ended up staying out the entire evening. As we staggered back down Oxford Street after closing time, Lorcan’s beer munchies kicked in, specifically for a popcorn chicken snack box from KFC. Lorcan’s need for KFC chicken was more or less the same as Jay’s need for gee: once he got a craving, it didn’t let up until he got it, and it usually ended the same way, tearful and unsatisfactory and discarded in some back lane somewhere.

    Anyway, we ended up in the nearest chipper, and immediately started rooting around in our pockets for loose change. Some knacker was lurking at the end of the counter, hunched over what looked like a sherbet dib-dob. He eyed us all as we rolled in, and kept staring at us as we made our orders, before slithering over to Jay and whispering, ‘Here, lads. D’yis want a dip?’

    We copped the small box in his hand. ‘What’s that?’

    ‘It’s 2C-I-,’ he whispered encouragingly.

    We laughed. ‘Is in me hole,’ Lorcan grunted.

    ‘I’m not messin’ wit’ yis lads, it really is,’ the kid insisted. He sounded like he was pleading.

    Ever the daredevil, Lorcan said, ‘Alright, so, let’s prove you wrong,’ dipped his middle finger into the box, scooped a bit of the stuff out, and licked it. Ollie, Jay and I followed suit, dipping our fingers in and placing it on our tongues, waiting for it to dissolve.

    Bang. Turned out it was 2C-I- after all. That, or it was flour with hairspray laced in, because it had a horrible stingy taste to it. Went down fairly well with the spice burger and chips I ended up having, though. We all had only the one dip, and already we were flying. Lorcan, on the other hand, kept horsing loads of it into him, the grin on his face getting more and more gleefully stupid by the second. He’d be tripping hard for the next few hours, we knew.

    By the time we got back to the flat, it really started to kick in as we lit up in the front room. We were still carrying on like normal, skulling cans and slagging and laughing like a troupe of gee-eyed clowns. I forget where Leah was that night; her absence, as always, was strongly felt, even under the loved-up haze we were all in. It didn’t stop me laughing at everything. The room, the chairs, the ways the lads seemed to be melting before my eyes; it was all such a fucking scream to me. I felt like I was on the verge of pissing myself, I was laughing that hard. I needed a new lung the morning after.

    Anyway, Jay had split up with his most recent girlfriend at the time, and Lorcan was talking non-stop, trying to offer him some dubious advice on the matter.

    ‘Don’t let her bring y’down, man,’ he spluttered. ‘Sure, we all know she left yeh ’cause you’ve a tiny mickey anyway.’

    ‘Fuck up, you,’ Jay retorted, but not angrily. He was too out of it to be angry or maudlin about it. Besides, it wasn’t really like him to get hung-up on his exes.

    ‘Sorry, man, but it’s true. Sure lookit, don’t be worryin’, yeah? Plenty more fish in the sea, as the fella says.’

    ‘Suppose,’ Jay muttered. He was the most wrecked of us that night, so he turned and made like he was heading off to bed, passing by the chair where Lorcan was sitting.

    ‘Night so, Tiny Mickey,’ Lorcan called after him. Jay stopped, stood behind him, looming in. Lorcan was so out of it by now he didn’t seem to notice or care. Next thing I knew, Jay had unbuckled his belt, grabbed him by the wrist and shoved his hand down his trousers, cheering sarcastically. We laughed. Lorcan grimaced loudly in revulsion, trying to wrench his hand away. But Jay was the stronger of the two, so he managed to wiggle Lorcan’s hand around for a bit before allowing him to snatch it away. Then he turned and shambled out of the room as if nothing had happened, leaving his belt undone and his cock still hanging loose, his boots clumping down the corridor.

    ‘Y’ fuckin’ wanker!’ Lorcan yelled. ‘You’re a bleedin’ dirtbird, Jay, so y’are!’

    Jay was in the habit of sleeping in the nip, even when it was freezing. So, an hour later, when Ollie had gone to his own room and I was left nodding off on the couch, Lorcan had gone scurrying up to Jay’s door. He’d crept up to the bed, threw the blankets off, grabbed Jay by the leg and tried dragging him out. Jay awoke and leapt up like a gorilla, roaring madly. He chased Lorcan out of his room and all around the gaff, still in the nip. Lorcan stumbled back to the kitchen, where I still was, laughing. Jay wandered blearily back to bed, locking the door this time.

    That was when the trip got worse, as it always did with Lorcan. He just didn’t have the head for yokes. With him, you just never knew if it was going to be a good buzz or a nightmare. Trouble seemed to follow him the way fleas follow a dog. Off my face as I was, I’ll never forget what happened next.

    Lorcan told me afterwards, he started thinking he was Johnny from Grand Theft Auto: The Lost and the Damned; he needed to get to the casino fast, or else he’d be shot. All I know is, he walked back into the kitchen, and started to violently bang his forehead repeatedly off the counter, convinced the bullet was coming at him. That just made me laugh even harder, the way his skull seemed to erupt into little bloody shards and then put itself back together again every time he slammed it off the Formica surface.

    After a few minutes of this, Lorcan decided to smash the kitchen up. He opened the cupboard and smashed up every dish we owned, tossing them on the floor and letting the fragments build up around his feet. I was still sitting on the chair on the corner, laughing my hole off. It really was that funny to watch. Lorcan was on a mission that night. When he got bored with the counter, he put his foot through the oven door.

    By now, he was really paro. He thought someone had nicked the last bit of hash he had in the house, when it reality, he just couldn’t find it. So between the loss and the hash, which, it eventually turned out, was just under his bed where he always kept it, he started smashing things, looking for stuff apparently. He wanted everyone to wake up and help him find his hash. He fell into the living room, and tried smashing the TV with his skateboard. He ended up breaking it clean in two. My heart sunk when I realized we wouldn’t be playing any more Stoned Olympics after that.

    Lorcan took no prisoners. He shattered the windows, and ripped the smoke alarm off the wall. He broke the toilet and the cisterns. If the house was a glorified hovel with at least some chance of being cleaned up when I first arrived, it was an untenable kip by the time Lorcan was done with it.

    He apologized afterward, but we’d no food for a week. We were reduced to eating crisps from the shop on the corner. Leah fairly tore him a new one about it. She was pretty scary when she was pissed off. The landlord suddenly remembered they all existed, came round, took one look at all the damage, and booted all of us, bar Leah, out. Jay found himself another squat, Lorcan seemed to have some sort of epiphany and jacked in the spliffing and sessioning for good, and I don’t know or care what happened to Olly. Leah told me I was still welcome to stay on the couch as long as I kept quiet. She had a plan, as it turned out, and a far better use for me in it than the others.

    I’m not trying to be elusive, just to draw you in. I have a story to tell, and all I ask is that you listen. It runs as unevenly in my mind as it will in yours, like an unmapped stretch of road.

    *

    Over the course of the year she’d lived in that kip, Leah’s depression inflated, cloaking her like a veil, stilting every conversation we had, leaving me almost as fatigued and distraught as she was. When and how that funereal condition first took hold of her, I can’t say. I only know it got unbearable by the time I was around.

    Leah was unable to find anyone else to share the place, and an eviction notice was promptly slid through the letterbox. Her immediate reaction was to wolf down a capsule of pills and wait for the long darkness to engulf her. Had it not been for one of Jay’s stoner mates, who was lying on the floor but still somewhat lucid, and who panicked when he saw her body sprawl next to his and quickly phoned an ambulance, she’d have been dead already. When she was finally let out of hospital, I was the man who she asked to help her give up the ghost. I wasn’t surprised by the request; had in fact been waiting for her to make it. She wanted to die still; and she wanted to do it right this time.

    ‘I want to die, Dara,’ she’d said, exhaling smoke. ‘I want to go away from here. I want to die and leave this world behind me.’

    I held her gaze, trying to keep my voice steady, praying I’d misheard her.

    And why do you want to die, Leah? You’ve plenty to live for.’

    She looked at me with narrowed eyes, her eyelids obtruding like bruised fruit. I remember how raw they looked. I knew then that she wasn’t play-acting or trying to disquiet me. Outside, Oxford Street glowered under a streetlight. Leah leaned forward and joined her hands on the table.

    ‘I’ll be needing your help with this, Dara. I’ve always been able to trust you,’ she said.

    ‘My help with what? With toppin’ yourself?’

    ‘Call it what you like. I’m asking you, just this once, to not argue, and just help me. Can you do that for me?’ Her voice was slow with a weary infuriation, as it only did when she was very drunk or very forlorn. ‘You’re one of the few men I know who hasn’t fucked me over…’

    ‘Leah, you’re stoned and talkin’ shite. Y’have my sympathy and all, but I’m not stayin’ here if you’re goin’ to be like this.’ I grabbed my jacket from the couch. I hated when she got like this.

    ‘Dara, please…’

    ‘No, Leah. This is just fuckin’ ridiculous. I’m after doin’ the nice-guy routine with you, saw you in hospital, bought you your shopping, picked up your pills from the chemist, came over and listened to you when y’were down. Come to that, have you taken your Sertaline yet?’

    ‘I don’t feel like taking it tonight,’ she murmured.

    ‘Fuck’s sake, Leah!’ I didn’t mean to snarl at her. But patience isn’t my strong point. I strode for the kitchen, looking to find the pills and make her take them. The hash was starting to wear off. It was the only time I think I ever raised my voice to her.

    She followed me and grabbed hold of my arm as I stood over the sink. Her hand felt claw-like, digging into my bicep. Her eyes were full of appeal.

    ‘Don’t do this to me, Dara. I need you here, alright? I need you here.’

    ‘There was a crack in her voice, frantic and trickling through her usually mumbling tone. She spoke those words with such quiet despair I felt my resolve weakening. So I sat down and listened to her. This was no false show, I knew, no childish bid for attention or pity. She sincerely wanted out.

    I remember her eyes, how narrow they were on that final, cheerless day. They were the eyes of a woman who couldn’t, and wouldn’t, dream anymore. She lay face-down on the rug, her body rippling with winded sobs. Her hair long, unwashed and uncombed, her face raw and her voice roughened from crying, her fingernails plastered in dried blood. All her confidence, all her poise and calm seemed to be robbed from her. The frailty of her hands as I helped her into bed. Her fingers tightening on my bicep the entire time, as she pleaded with me not to go.

    She said she wanted to go out on her own terms. Hers would be a painless death, coasting out of this life, hopefully with no imprint or even patent proof that she’d once existed. She spent the next few days drawing up her plans, as meticulously as she did her C.V. or an essay for college. She had a week to go before she was turfed out of the flat. So her death would take place on the day of Obama’s visit, as that way Ranelagh, as with everywhere outside the city centre, would be more or less drained of people. The landlord himself was going to the celebrations, so the building would be effectively empty. No suspicion could fall on me when her corpse was discovered. It would be taken for the suicide it was, and nothing else. I’d walk away knowing I’d helped her, without any weight on my conscience. There was to be no blood, no viscera, no carnal element to her demise. She would die cradled by the temperamental whisper of a city falling to sleep. I imagined her body’s paleness, how tranquil she’d make death seem.

    You’re probably wondering why I let myself get sucked into this macabre plan. I’m just too weak-willed, to be honest. At the time, I thought helping Leah commit suicide would be a sign of my friendship and loyalty, a silent means of demonstrating my love to her, even. I could have just told her to sleep it off and come to me if she’d any problems, but I wasn’t thinking straight. Also, I was afraid that if I walked out of the flat, she’d either do it there and then, or else get someone else to help her. There was no talking her out of it; at least, not with me, there wasn’t. She wanted my help and my help alone in her dying. I was to go in and dole out the last rites.

    The number of suicides used to belong just the Central Statistics Office. Now a victim of suicide gets their own memorial page on Facebook. There wouldn’t be one for Leah, though. I knew it.

    As I crossed the bridge onto Richmond Street South, I noticed a drunk pissing in the canal before trudging off toward the LUAS stop. Despite the early hour, a crowd was already gathered on the canal lock just outside The Barge. Young office types in suits, drinking cans or glasses of white wine. The weekend was only just beginning. The willows lining the canal bank caressed the water, which swarmed with froth and crushed cider cans sunk on its muddy floor. The bellow of traffic, now muted to hard-edged hum. The first indigo morsels of night seeped over the sky. If the city was powered by some vast subterranean engine, then I knew that engine was slowly deactivating for the night. I sloped down the narrow alleyway by the scrap yard, trailing my hands along the wall.

    I knew that Leah waited for me. I was reliable; I’d show up right when I said I would. When I reached it, I stood for a moment outside her door. The paintwork on it was flaking. Leah had given me the only key to the flat, just to ensure everything went smoothly. When I walked in, the gaff was a mess, as per usual. I don’t know why I felt a little shocked walking in though; a part of me thought she might have cleaned the place up as a means of imposing some semblance of finality to her last moments. But of course, what did it matter, really?

    The adrenalin fizzed in my gut. I knew that whatever happened today, I’d carry with me for the rest of my life. As I entered the front room, I saw Leah splayed on the couch, her hair loose and spread-eagled like a net. I stopped dead in my tracks, put the sportsbag down; for a second I thought she’d gone ahead and done herself in without me. When her eyes fluttered open, I exhaled in relief; her eyelids were swollen and red, but a filmy glint still sparked under their weight. She smiled a little at me; she looked relieved.

    I didn’t waste time on pleasantries. I asked her, already knowing the answer, whether she still wanted to go ahead with this. She nodded and then kissed me, for the first and last time. She then lay down on the bed, eyes on the ceiling, and held my hand. A part of me was convinced she just might change her mind, even now on the void’s cusp. But she took the nozzle in her mouth and inhaled deeply. I held the canister for her and left her to it, glancing constantly out the window, conscious of anyone who might be moving around outside. She sucked on the venomous fumes in short, sharp huffs for a full minute, her hand still tight in mine, before finally lying back on the couch, her breathing sounding ever-more stifled. Her limbs seemed to stiffen before finally relaxing. I watched her body until it stilled. She was dead in matter of minutes.

    I sat back in the chair, and breathed in. My head felt clear, wiped clean of all confusion. I didn’t mind that there was now no turning back from all this; I’d find a way to ride it out. But to do that, I had to act fast.

    I pinned a note she’d written with the words ‘Good night and joy be with you all. Leah’ on the table beside her, as per her instructions. I then deleted her number and every text she ever sent to my phone, along with the ones I’d sent to her. I wiped my fingerprints off the gas canister and door-handle, and finally, from her hand. Her flesh still felt warm, tantalizing, against mine. I found myself holding onto it longer than I meant to.

    I then stood up and silently prayed for that cunt of a landlord of hers to keel over in shock the second he saw her body. Before leaving, I took in the sight of her again, calm and shut-eyed and unbreathing. I wondered how long it’d be before she was found; probably until the time came to be evicted. But there was no taking her away from this place now, I knew; not even after it was shuttered-up and sold-off and bulldozed and replaced by another building where a fresh throng of fruitless lives could be stowed away.

    It was dark by the time I left the flat.