‘Excuse me now. I’m a bit of a nut. Been nineteen years in Grangegorman. Let out an odd weekend now and again to be enjoying a pint of stout among normal people like yourself. But I was once meself a gas meter reader. And a devout Catholic. And if you don’t mind me saying it’s a disgrace that the likes of that Buster and a worse friend of his, Danno, should be allowed down here in the vicinity of the holy happening of the apparition. I’m reformed now. And haven’t made an impure suggestion to any mother superiors on the doorsteps of their convents when I’d come a calling in me guise as a monk. And that’s a fact. And hear that roaring and drum pounding now. That’s Danno. And he’s coming in here by the sound. And I can tell you sir, I’m going. Goodbye to you. And thanks for your kindness to me.’
Emerging from the dark passage, a massive figure, sweat pouring from his brow. Yellow and black rotted teeth in his yawning open jaws. As he grins and holds up a half full whisky bottle in one hand and beats his other in a fist on a great drum strapped to his shoulders. Lurching in to stand next to Buster the Beastly.
‘Me name is Danno, when I’m not abroad under me nom de plume of the Reverend Felix de Gascoigne Dilettante, blessing nuns up the bifurcation with me genuine beeswax candles. Shut up now. The bunch of youse. I am here waiting for your emotional attention. And youse now, with a belch out his arse, just heard me friend here in the shoes too short for him give you a fucking valuable piece of his mind. Give us your wet kiss of fealty youse whore British debutantes. While I’d be playing football with the preserved head of Cromwell youse would be playing football with the head of the Blessed Oliver Plunkett off his altar in Drogheda and kicking the last dry old tooth hanging from his cheek out of him. Dehumanized now he may be. But by god he’ll be canonized yet. And if any of youse don’t have faith in me predictions or so much as mildly offend me friend Buster here doing his fucking utmost to entertain you, I’ll stuff the lot of your heads in the fucking Wicklow gap. Listen now while I beat me Lambeg drum I took off an Orangeman. I’m a mental and physical demolitionist. To the animate and inanimate. Pull the fucking lead pipes out of houses. And before pawning them would wrap them around youse necks who don’t pay attention and listen to me while I’m telling you. I have just come from singing Ave Maria up there at the top of Nelson’s Pillar. With a pint of stout in one hand, me prick in the other. Pissing down one hundred and thirty eight feet on top of the populace waiting for the tram to Dalkey and them all thinking it was a spot of rain. That will give you just an introduction to the fact that I am the most evil scoundrel that any of youse ever met. I am an itinerant. And betimes I am a hospital porter. Humping the female corpses. The breath out of some of them would kill you. When I don’t like the look of someone dying in the bed, I give the undertaker measurements six inches too short for the coffin so’s the legs have to be broken to get the dead bugger in. When it comes to living and breathing women I am mad on them graduates of the higher institutions of learning. When I am not fucking a woman in peace then I am at war and am given to violence of a violent nature. I am an unreformed informer. Sentenced to death in the absence of my presence, by the high command of the Irish Republican Army. I would beat an old defenceless lady out of two pence. Ah, you’d ask, what is there good about me, I’ll tell you. As a true example of the native treachery and viciousness I could be a great tourist attraction. And a living warning of the villain that you’d do well to keep well away from.’
‘You should be put in a cage.’
‘Who said that. Sure behind me drum with this bit of chain now I’d undo round me waist I would remove the head off the fucker in this room who said that. That’s a threat. I am only just after lifting a publican up by the scruff down there on the Aston Quay and stuffing his grey old head in his own brown old shit bowl. No one will tell me I’m barred from a premises. And don’t any of youse use the wrong tone of voice with me.’
‘No Danno, I’m Buster your friend. Put away your chain, give us a beat of the drum and tell us about the holy revelation you encountered down there on the quay.’
‘Me friend here now in that suggestion stated a fact. Never mind the apparition in this place. Didn’t I down there on the quays a June summer evening passing a tree look up in the branches to see the Blessed Virgin herself. She said hello Danno. Instead of saying hello or praying back up to her asking for a fucking miracle on the spot, didn’t I look up her sky blue habit instead. By god by the look of youse faces listening, if I said she had no knickers on you’d dance out of your minds with rage at the blasphemy. And be next asking me to swear on a stack of bibles the height of Nelson’s Pillar, that the immaculate lady had no cunt. And that I swear. She did not have one. And she said, go Danno from this holy spot and spread the news from Inchicore to Sandymount. And now here’s a recent poem now I wrote meself.’
Sure as
Me name is Danno
I’m a fucking terror
To trust me an inch
Is a mile of error
While some ladies love me
I’m still held in dread
For the rest of the hypocritical bunch of you
Would fucking love to see me dead
A figure emerging from the shadows of the passage. Stepping up behind Danno with a bottle raised and swinging it downwards smashing on the back of Danno’s head.
‘And that’s the way you’ll be by god you disgusting insult to religion.’
A fist flying catching Danno mid nose as he falls forward like a giant tree. His face crunching and bouncing off the side of his drum. Whisky splashing and broken glass scattering across the floor. Buster the Beastly rising slowly on his toes and turning to look down over his shoulder upon the horizontal unconscious body.
‘Ah me flattened friend, most prostrate. Sucked every sup your mother had to give you from her breasts. The poor woman in her consternation watching you grow from a babe in arms swinging from her apron strings, into the big violent whore you are lying there. I will give you another poem now, an epitaph commemorating you in case you are coffin stretched ready for Glasnevin cemetery where they’d have to deconsecrate the ground to lie you in it.’
Behold
Many times and oft
In the course of his life
Was he sad
But it was nothing
Compared to the times
He was mad
And absolutely nothing compared
To the times
He was fucking bad
Sound of bagpipes outside. The door opening. A voice calling attention. Six tweed capped macintoshed gentlemen, their coats bulging, stepping in. Another shout of command. And the platoon taking up positions over the prostrate Danno. A hand reaching to turn over the unconscious face.
‘Commandant, he’s in no fit state now to be executed.’
A seventh gentleman appearing in the doorway. Wavy curly hair above a domed forehead, taking a butt of a cigarette from his lips and crushing it on the floor.
‘In that case remove that fucking criminal’s body from the room and if he wakes up, keep him under close arrest.’
The body of Danno carried disappearing into the back passage. Conversation and voices seeping back into the hushed gathering. O my god, that broad skulled curly haired visage, the very gunman whose kinky head I baptized with the leg of some piece of furniture one night in Lois’s studio as he was waving both his prick and his Polish nine millimetre Parabellum about the room. Still wearing the same mustard coloured sweater I remember so well. And he’s walking straight towards me.
‘And what have the tweedy likes of you got to say for yourself. Is it nothing. Well keep it that fucking way. Now the rest of you bunch of British homosexual bollocks here gathered, hear this. Ireland integral is Ireland free. And no one is to touch another bottle of stout on that table which is of this moment commandeered until my men have had their fill. Pass me a bottle of stout, put out that electricity and let’s have a candle or two.’