There was a good fat roll of money in there — all tied up with an elastic band. Consummate cattle-dealer style.
Away I went in the direction of Piccadilly. I turned a corner and there it flashed — CINZANO, on-off.
I stood there looking at it — truly mesmerized. The reason for that was, it was on our mantelpiece at home. As a matter of fact, it was the last thing I had laid eyes on before departing.
“You’re a bad boy, Emmet,” Daddy had said.
I had expected the entire town to turn out to bear witness to my leavetaking. They didn’t. It was, I’m afraid, a damp squib of an event.
I just pulled the door after me, and who comes flying right off the fanlight but his holiness — the Infant of Prague.
For the benefit of English people who never go to Mass, the Infant of Prague is a holy young boy who stands guard over doors with a gleaming golden crown and a sceptre in his hand. Sadly, on this occasion, his head had got broken. Which upset Mammy because she loved him so.
“Don’t come back!” I heard her shouting.
Then I saw Daddy glaring from the shadows.
“Don’t worry,” I told him. “You’ll be able to give her a proper kicking now.”
He had always been very fond of football — especially whenever the ball was Mammy.
He always liked a game at the weekend. And maybe, if he’d the money, after the pub on Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays — and Tuesdays.
I went into the great big neon-lit shop. A rubber girl, Rita, who’ll never say no. A woman in a mask belting the lard out of a crawling-around city gent clad in a bowler.
“I’ll teach you some manners,” she says, and she means it.
“Oh no,” he says, “please don’t do it, but do it.”
That would keep me warm, I thought, a good skelp like that, as I retired to my chambers along the banks of the Thames.
I thought of them all the way back there at home — all my turf-molded fellow country-compatriots. By now they would have realized my featherbed had not been slept in. And great consternation would take hold in the midlands.
Little would those gormless fools know just what the true nature of my visit to London was to be. I shivered gleefully as I thought: The London Assignment. A British cabinet minister is gunned down by an IRA assassin. It’s a race against the clock and one false move will be enough to leave him dead before he reaches his target.
I lovingly stroked the butt of my Smith & Wesson.686—four inches, with Hogue grips — which lay nestled deep in the pocket of my jacket. My shiny jacket of soft black leather — standard-issue terrorist fare, perhaps, but comfortable and stylish nonetheless. What the well-dressed volunteer is wearing this autumn in the mid-1970s.
“Get out of the car,” I heard myself say, “I’m requisitioning this vehicle on behalf of the Irish Republican Army. One-Shot Emmet, they call me, friend — for one shot is all it takes.”
There was a big fat moon swelling above the gasworks, looking like the loveliest floaty balloon. The old man knew a song about that moon. I remembered it well. It went: When the harvest moon is shining, Molly dear.
Once I had heard him singing it to the old lady. One night in the kitchen not long after Christmas. Long ago. Or at least I thought I had. Then I fell asleep with my hotshot volunteer’s jacket pulled good and tight around me.
So off I went — puff-puff on the train. All the way to Epsom in Surrey. What a spot that turned out to be — a hotel, a kind of club for dilapidated colonels. How many Jimmy Edwards moustaches would you say there were there to be seen?
At least, I would estimate, seventeen examples.
Big potted plants and women like vampires, Epsom Association Dawn of the Dead.
Sitting there yakking about gout and begonias.
“You’re not very fond of work, are you?” says the boss. He had apprehended me sleeping under boxes.
I took in everything in the office. The barometer on the wall reading mild, the bird creature on the mantelpiece dipping its beak in a jar. Lovely shiny polished-leather furniture — with buttons.
“It seems quite extraordinary but you don’t appear ashamed in any way.”
I was going to tell him nothing. Mahoney — my officer-in-command — had always said if arrested to focus your attention on a spot on the wall.
He fired me. “Get out,” he says. Well, fuck that for a game of cowboys.
By the time I got back to London I was edgy and tired.
Outside a Wimpy, I saw a woman with blood streaming down her face being led away by a man in a raincoat. For no reason at all I stood there for a minute looking in the window of a telly rental shop, and there on the screen is this fellow saying: “I was just coming out of my office when I heard the most frightful bang.” The policemen were still shouting: “Will you please clear the area!” All of the pubs were closing their doors. I heard someone running past, shouting: “Murdering bastards!” I hid my face and found a hostel. The London Assignment was the name of my book. The book I’d invented to get me to sleep. I was on the cover in a parka — looking dark and mean. Behind me, a mystical pair of old-country hills. The old-timer next to me said: “What time is it now?”
It’s the time of Gog and Magog, my friend, when the cloud covers the sun and the moon no longer gives forth any light.
I’d read that in a Gideon’s Bible some other old tramp had left on my locker. He must have been unhappy for I could hear him crying.
I don’t know why his whimperings should have done it but they got me thinking about Ma and Da. I got up to try and stop their faces coming. Then I saw the two of them — him just standing there with his hand held in hers.
“Ma,” I gasped, “Da.”
They were dressed in the clothes of all the old-time photographs. There was a picture on the hostel wall of a dancehall in London and somehow it all got mixed up with that. It wasn’t a modern dancehall — one from the ’40s or perhaps the early ’50s. It was called THE PALAIS — with its string of lights waltzing above the heads of the fresh-faced queue. You’d think to see them that they’d all won the pools. I’ve never seen people look as happy as that. I could see the inside in my mind — palm trees painted over a tropical ocean and the two of them waltzing. Him with his hair oiled and her with a great big brooch pinned onto her lapel.
“I love you,” I heard her say.
It was in those couple of years just before I was born. In the time of the famous detective Lustgarten, when all the cars were fat and black and nobody said fuck or visited dirty neon-lit shops. When everyone was happy because at last the war was over. We hadn’t been in the war. Eamon de Valera kept us out of it. The old man revered de Valera. Talked about him all the time. He was probably talking about him now — to her. But she wouldn’t want to hear about history. She’d simply want to be kissed by him. The history of that kiss would do her just fine. She needed no more than that to look back on.
The doors of the dancehall were swinging open now and assorted couples were drifting out into the night in the loveliest of white dresses and old-style gray suits with big lapels.
Ma was lying back on the bonnet of a car. She put her arms around him and said she wasn’t worried about a single thing in the whole world. Her laughter sailed away and I heard her saying that history was a cod, that the only thing that mattered was two people loving one another. He asked her would she love an Englishman, and she said yes she would just so long as it was him. Which was the greatest laugh of the whole of all time — the idea of her husband, Tom Spicer, being an Englishman.