Friendly hands may repair my grave, friendly hands may raise my monument and friendly voices may sing out my requiem hymn. Temple Brandon’s clay is the clay of my people! The sacred clay of my Zion …
But there isn’t a Kelly to be found in Gallagh, nor a Mannion in Menlo, or any one of the McGraths to be found anywhere, otherwise my heap of bones would not be left rotting in the unwelcoming clay of granite, in the unfriendly clay of hill and harbour, in the ungenerous clay of rock and rubble, in the unfertile clay of bindweed and seaweed, in the unconformable clay of my Babylon …
— She gets very bad when the madness hits her …
— Hang on there now, you, wait ’til I finish my story …
—“The speckled hen started croaking along the street as loud as her voice would carry: ‘I laid an egg! I laid an egg! Fresh hot on the dung heap …’ ‘Go away out of that, and don’t bother us with your scutty little egg,’ clucked one tough old hen who was listening. ‘I’ve had nine generations, four clutches, six second clutches, sixty stolen eggs, and a hundred and one shell-less eggs since the first day I started crowing on the dung heap. I was done five hundred and forty six times …’”
— It’s a real shame that I wasn’t there, Peter! You shouldn’t let any dirty heretic insult your religion …
— I drank forty-two pints one after the other. You know that much, Peter the Publican …
— I’m telling you, there were no flies on Fireside Tom …
— Are you trying to tell me I don’t know that …
— You have your glue with your rubbishy romancing. And I hadn’t a clue at this time that your one wouldn’t gift the fat land to the eldest son and to the daughter of Tim Top of the Road …
— … “Big Martin John had a daughter …”
— … The murdering bastard gave me a bad bottle …
— O Holy God, as you’d say …
— I am the old man of the graveyard. Let me speak …
— Qu’est-ce qu’il veut dire: “let me speak? …”
— I was just putting my hand in my pocket and emptying it out …
— It was your clogs, Joan, you piece of crap …
— … O, Dotie, my darling, I am really worn out by this election. Quarrelling and quibbling all the time. Votes! Votes! Votes! Do you know, Dotie, that an election isn’t a bit as cultured as I thought it would be. Honest, I didn’t. The language is awful. And insulting. Honest! And full of lies. Honest! Did you hear what Peter the Publican was saying about me? That I used to drink four or five pints every day aboveground. Honest! Stout! If he had even said whiskey. But not stout! The most uncultured drink you could find. Agh! But you don’t really believe that I drank stout, Dotie. Agh! Stout, Dotie! It’s a lie! Dirty filthy yucky uncultured stout. It’s a lie, Dotie! What else. Honest Injun …
And that I got drinks on the never never … It’s a disgrace, Dotie. A disgrace. And that I was on the bum. Agh! All lies and rubbish, Dotie. Who would ever have thought it of Peter the Publican to say such things? I was well got with him, Dotie. There were cultured people in and out to see him … Throwing dirt, that’s what cultured people call it. The natural thug that’s hidden in the corners of our thuggishness—“the old man,” as Saint Paul calls him — he can be forgotten about during elections … I feel that my own culture is melting away since I took up with those plebs …
Fireside Tom, Dotie? Peter said that also. He said that there’d be no problem going to see him except when Fireside Tom would be there with him. It’s easily seen what he was trying to say about me … Honest, Dotie, I had no need to go after Fireside Tom. It was he who came after me. Honest. There are people, Dotie, who are destined to be romantic. Did you hear what Kinks said to Bliksin in The Purple Kiss? “Cupid made you, you sweety pie …”
There was never a time when men didn’t plague me and have the hots for me. When I was young in the Fancy City, as a widow in Gort Ribbuck, and now right here, I am involved in an affaire de coeur, as he calls it, with the Old Master. But there’s no harm in it: it’s Platonic, and cultured …
Dotie! The sentimentality! Forget the bright fields of the Fair Meadows. You should really get this in a way that you dumped every prejudice and preconceived notion out of your noggin. It is the first step on the road of culture, Dotie … I was a young widow, Dotie. I married young also. The romantic bug again, Dotie. Fireside Tom didn’t give a fiddler’s fuck for me when I was widowed:
“I’ll tell you one thing for nothing,” he’d say, “but I have a nice warm cottage. Not a truer word, and land to go with it. Cows and sheep. I’m still hale and hearty. But it’s hard for me to do everything: cattle, sowing, thatching. The place is going to ruin for want of a good woman … You’re a widow, Nora Johnny, and your son is settled in the house, what good is it for you to be in Gort Ribbuck now? By all that’s holy, marry me …”
“De grâce, Fireside Tom,” I’d say. But there was no point in saying “de grâce” to him, Dotie. He was following me everywhere like a lap dog. As Pips puts it in The Hot Kiss: “The pangs of unrequited love have no borders.”
He’d be stalking me and then crawling up to me in the village trying to cajole me in for a drink. Honest! “De grâce,” I’d say, “a drop of drink never passed my lips …”
Honest, never, Dotie … and the things he would sing to me about love, Dotie …
“I’ll marry you my Nora Johnny …
You’re my star of sunshine, my autumn sun,
My golden treasure ’til kingdom come …”
Honest, Dotie, he’d sing that. But I knew full well that it was only the fine summer of our romance that was talking, and I’d say:
“O moon, O small moon of Scotland, you will be heartbroken tonight, and tomorrow night, and for countless nights after that, strolling the lonesome sky beyond Glen Lay, seeking the loving haunt of Naoise and Deirdre, the lovers …”
He came over to Gort Ribbuck three weeks before I died with a bottle of whiskey. Honestly, he did. He was like a donkey in heat. I might even have encouraged him, Dotie, if it wasn’t for the pangs of unrequited love. It was then I said to him:
“The little moon of Scotland will never discover our loving haunt,” I said. “It is not written that Naoise and Deirdre will ever again encounter one another in a loving haunt, or taste the sweet joys of passion on the gentle rocks of Glen Lay of the lovers.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” he said.
“The pangs of unrequited love,” I says. “Other people get what they want, but I and my true love are separated for ever. We will never have a lovers’ haunt except the lovers’ haunt of the graveyard. But we will live out the sweet joys of true passion there, for ever and ever …”
It nearly broke my heart to say that to him, Dotie. But it was God’s truth. Honest, God’s honest truth. Caitriona Paudeen came between me and my true love. Small bitchy things. She never wanted to see anybody else darken Fireside Tom’s door. She was looking for his land for herself. She didn’t leave one thing the sun shone on for him. Honest …
— You’re lying, you old hag! I never robbed nor swiped anything from Fireside Tom, or from anybody else. You thundering bitch! Secretly supping and deviously drinking in Peter the Publican’s snug. Drinking on the sly! … Drinking on the sly. Don’t believe her, Dotie! Don’t believe her! …