She sat up, went,
“Whoa, what?”
He said,
“We have two guys in common who busted our balls.”
When she said nothing, he said,
“The deadbeat drunk Taylor and his sidekick, a psycho biker named Keefer.”
She was very attentive now, said simply,
“And?”
He got out of bed, stretched, said,
“Those assholes hang out on some version of a ranch or farm outside town.”
He turned, stroked her cheek, said,
“At the risk of mutating an American saying, I intend for them to ‘buy the farm.’”
She stroked the long nasty scar all down his right leg, said,
“Count me in, lover.”
He began to dress, carefully, as if it were important.
Perhaps it was.
He reached in his jacket, took out a long match, handed it to her.
She said,
“Lemme guess: We’re a match.”
An almost satanic look flitted briefly across his face, then was gone.
But
She’d seen it.
As the saying goes,
“Once seen!”
She was Californian, knew her satanic shit, knew it close.
He asked,
“Know what that is?”
Fuck, she thought, this is thin ice, tried,
“A long match.”
He snarled,
“Don’t be frivolous.”
She was just a wee bit afraid but she knew she could break his neck fast; being a prison chaplain has its perks. Letting a trace of edge leak over her own tone, she said,
“It’s a fucking long wooden match, with a red tip.”
She nearly added,
And how drearily phallic.
But bit down.
The guy had cash so she could play it a little, said,
“It’s your calling card.”
Bingo.
He planted a wet kiss on her cheek.
Downstairs, Brid, listening, wearing a T with the hashtag, “MeatToo.”
Spat.
Twice.
“What I would call a supernatural and mystical experience
Has
In its essence
Some note
Of a direct spiritual contact.
Liberties
A kind of flash or spark which ignites an intuition.”
Cynics pointed out that Merton died as the result of an electric fire that flashed or sparked.
A disillusioned ex-priest postulated,
“Did Merton have a final epiphany before he burned
Or indeed
As he burned?”
I was in Ollie Crowe’s bar in Bohermore. The talk was of the murder of Clodagh, a lovely woman in the Midlands. She seemed to have the Irish dream: three gorgeous boys, a devoted husband who was not only a school vice principal but a major figure in the GAA, active in the community.
But.
Beware that fucking but.
He seemed to never leave Clodagh’s side, even went with her and her sister to select Clodagh’s wedding dress.
Creepy, right?
He would never allow Clodagh to have even a cup of tea with her beloved mother without him present. He was, as they say, stuck in everything.
Clodagh, deeply troubled, told her mother that he was in trouble at the school for missing money and something of a sexual nature. He had been wearing Clodagh’s underwear and admitted he watched porn obsessively but Clodagh asserted he was getting counseling.
Yeah, right.
The night before he was due to return to work to, as they say, face the music, he crept up behind Clodagh, who was at the computer, planning a family holiday. He took her head nearly clean off with the ax, then he went upstairs, cut the vocal cords of the eldest boy lest he alert the two younger lads who shared a room; a knife was used, and the coroner stated there were signs of defensive wounds.
Fuck.
He then went into the other children’s room and slit their throats; they were six and four. Back downstairs to transfer his wife’s money into his account, then calmly wrote a five-page letter (that, even three years later, Clodagh’s family have not been allowed to see in its entirety).
Gets worse, if possible.
His brother was to have his car, and he demanded that he not be forgiven.
As Brenda Power wrote in the Sunday Times to that last bit,
“Don’t fucking worry!”
She also added, to the pride of the pub, May he rot in hell.
A-fucking-men to that.
She ridiculed the notion that he’d snapped.
It was obvious he’d been planning for months as, months before, he moved the furniture so that Clodagh would be sitting with her back to him when he attacked her. He was a big man and she a petite woman.
The piss-poor coward.
But what irked her and only one other brave journalist was the
Rehabilitation of the predator syndrome.
This was all the rage, if you’ll excuse the horrendous pun. In this case, the priest praised the killer as a community person, a committed family man (seriously, like fuck that), a pillar of the community.
Clodagh’s mother and sister broke their silence to appear on Prime Time, beg the powers that be (and don’t) pleading for the why of it; his five-page letter still hadn’t been released to them.
Clodagh’s mother revealed in heart-wrenching detail the morning she went to Clodagh’s house, with a feeling of dread, a note on the door, warned,
“Call the police.”
I had to literally shut my ears, it was so agonizing to hear. There was a man sitting next to me. He looked cold, freezing. He asked me,
“Where would I get a hot water bottle?”
I said,
“1957.”
March 4, 2019:
Keith Flint took his own life; the video of his band Prodigy’s “Firestarter” is a sight to behold.
Luke Perry died, from a stroke at fifty-two; his career had recently rebooted with Riverdale.
The inventor of spell check died yesterday. May he roost in piece.
The Children
Children of the Galway miracle.
Bannered the red top papers.
In bold emphatic headlines, they screeched,
Where are they?
Who are they?
Where did they come from?
The journalists had no answers to the above
But
They speculated wildly; it’s their raison d’être.
Later, oh, so much later, they would be known as
“The children of the lie.”
Sara and Salazar were not siblings, but they were related through
Brutality
Pain
Abuse
Torture
Terror.
Sara was part of the above in a sly, subtle fashion.
Sara was sixteen or eighteen but, in the ways of the world, she was middle-aged.
She had developed a chameleon ability to alter her appearance so that she always seemed younger then she was. The drug Eltroxin kept her body as a perpetual girl. No physical development. She found it worked to lower the defenses of the predators and she viewed the world as dominated by the predatory.
She was intent on being the most ferocious of that breed.
Salazar was small and traumatized.
To Sara, he was disposable, as were all the others.
They had been thrown together when a line of refugees were swept up by U.S. border guards then, in a series of errors, they were put on a boat to Europe, landing in Greece, on the island of Kos, where Concern, the Irish charity, rescued a group of children.