Call Me the Breeze (49 page)

‘OK, Joey! Take off your clothes!’

‘Hooray for Hollywood!’ sneered Boyle, sniffing again.

The blood rushed to Joey’s cheeks as he tried to steady his fingers, unbuckling his belt.

Transgressive films, of the type specified by Hoss, are generally expected to be affairs of an extremely shoddy nature, blurred and grainy with shaky hand-held camerawork and hopelessly indiscriminate editing.

The Mangan video, which I’d watched after they’d gone, proved to be very much that, its hideous texture and content heightened, if anything, by the fact that I was close to exhaustion while viewing it.

The tracking for some moments was slightly askew. The exposure, predictably, was bad. The frame blurred into a washed-out umber then ran into leader tape. There was no sound. A hair on the lens remained in shot throughout. There was a hand visible on screen — it appeared no less than three times; I wasn’t sure to whom it belonged. There was a lot of wind noise and a couple of shots photographed from a half-cocked angle on the floor where everything was happening on its side.

Then, out of nowhere, the old tinker’s chalk-white face loomed into the frame.

There was a leather belt fastened around his neck and they had affixed wooden clothes pegs to his nipples. There were congealed blots of candlewax spotted all over his chest and his face throughout was contorted in extreme pain. A pair of anonymous hands gripped his wrists and the camera homed in on a pair of pliers. Two fingernails were expertly, almost lovingly, removed as he writhed in agony — in complete silence. The entire thing didn’t last more than three minutes. It was only when you thought it was over and were expecting the tape to fade to black that you heard the sound of a cord being chucked, realizing that it was an electric drill, buzzing eagerly away out of shot.

They didn’t use it on him, however. They didn’t have to. You could hear the faint sound of laughter — I suspected it was Hoss — as the camera closed in and tracked along the golden yellow trail where you could see he had lost it. I covered my eyes, then sat by the bunk to hold on to Mangan’s hand, consoling him as best I could. Every so often he kept repeating, as some fearsome, abstracted mantra: ‘They said if I opened my mouth about what they were going to do to you, if I said anything at all, that they would come back! Joey, I thought they were really going to do it! They were laughing, Joey! All the time they kept laughing!’

I whispered: ‘It’ll be OK, Mangan,’ coughing up all sorts of phlegmy black shit and trying my best to sound convincing. The only things I’d been able to find to cover myself were a torn old jacket and a pair of enormous corduroys. I went over to the window and looked out at what remained of the caravan. Coils of black smoke were roiling up into the reddened sky. The air was thick with the smell of gas — the cylinder had exploded not long after they’d set the blaze. I started back instinctively as the entire structure groaned then slumped a little more before eventually caving in on itself, a ravaged cripple of broken glass and scorched galvanized steel. All of a sudden a great twisting funnel of black toxic smoke swept up out of nowhere, bloating into the acrid air as yet another window blew out. The PVC sheeting peeled like layers of crackling skin, the poisonous stench of melted polystyrene close to inducing a faint as my stomach succumbed to vicious cramps, a roof-support beam crashing to earth as the video ended abruptly and immediately began to rewind.

Out of nowhere then, large as life, none other than Oprah Winfrey appearing on the screen!

‘I’ve just got one question to ask today,’ she said. ‘Do you think the world is in trouble?’

The answer in my case being a definite ‘
Yes
!’ when, a very short time afterwards, I picked up the the
Scotsfield Standard
and there — to my relief! — given pride of place in the ‘Local News’ section, discovered my letter of resignation, advising all the good people of the borough and its hinterland that I would not, regrettably, be standing after all as a candidate in the forthcoming elections. And that the ‘New Spring Manifesto’ and ‘New Spring Party’ could henceforth be considered ‘effectively disbanded’.

I was just about to put the fucking thing down when a photograph tucked away on the inside front page happened to catch my attention. I gaped in astonishment for I truly could not believe my eyes. Yes, there he was, smart and dapper as ever, Boyle Henry, council chairman, senator, financial speculator, hotelier, presenting a bursary cheque to ‘local boy’ Johnston Farrell in recognition of ‘continued good work’ in the ‘field of the arts’.

‘Perhaps you should do the script of his next movie, Johnston,’ I found myself muttering bitterly.

Again, it had been Hoss’s idea. He stood in the middle of the caravan floor, stroking his chin, with the camera swinging by his side.

‘That’s the way I want it,’ he told us, ‘like the ones they’d show in The Ritzy. What’s this you call him, your man? They often showed them for a laugh.’

He clicked his fingers, staring over at Sandy, who gazed insouciantly back.

‘Search me,’ he replied. ‘I never bothered going out there much.’

‘Oh, bollocks! You know him, Boyle! Riding the women and climbing out windows!’

Boyle paused for a moment or two.

‘You know, I think I know who you mean,’ he said.

‘Course you do! What’s this you call the fucker? Robin Askwith! That’s him!’

‘Now you have it!’ beamed Boyle, and returned to his stash, rewarding himself with a sizeable pinch.

‘Do you mind him, Joey? There wasn’t a woman in the town but he’d given a poke! Do you think you might be up to it?’

I said nothing. I could see Jacy through the corner of my eye. I turned away. I felt sickened.

‘Well, you’d better be, that’s all I have to say! After all, this movie will be getting major distribution! Isn’t that right, Mr Henry?’

‘Oh yes!’ Boyle said. ‘There’ll be very few in the town who won’t be getting to see this little baby at some point or other!’

‘I’m sure they’re all looking forward to it.’

‘Especially Mrs Carmody,’ said Boyle, sneezing. ‘Oops!’ he laughed.

‘I’d just like to see her face when she sees Tallon’s todger going inside this!’ chuckled Hoss as he dragged the doll over and threw it on the bed. ‘There she is, the star of the show!’ he trumpeted.

Her long black wig had almost fallen off, her mouth wide open in a pink oval ‘O’.

‘We’re ready now, Joey, so chuck your plonker and let’s
go, go, go
! Jacy, get over there and tidy the bitch! Look at her, for the love of fuck!’

Jacy came over to the bed and was kneeling so close to me that I almost fainted. I closed my eyes tightly and prayed for it to be over. It was then that I heard her whisper: ‘I’m sorry about this, Joseph. I’m sorry that it had to happen. I didn’t want to come here. I’m sorry.’

When I looked again she was standing over beside them, but when I tried to catch her eye, she looked away.

‘Get over here, Jacy!’ Boyle Henry called, before growling disgruntledly when she refused the coke: ‘I seen the time you were glad of it!’

She raised her voice then — a thing I never thought I’d hear her do —to him.

‘Well, that was then, Boyle! This is now!’

I don’t know what she said to him then. I couldn’t quite make it out. He kicked the chair away and stood up, paling.

‘Don’t you fucking talk like that to me! You hear me? After all I’ve done for you!’

Her voice trembled.

‘What have you ever done for me? You’ve never done anything for me in your life!’

‘Shut your fucking mouth! I’ve done plenty for you, you ungrateful bitch!’

He glared viciously at her. Then over at me.

‘What the fuck are you looking at, Tallon? Have you got something to say? Huh? Have you got something to fuckingwell say?’

Hoss laughed heartily and put his arm around my shoulder.

‘Don’t mind those two, Joey! Sure you know what they’re like! Bickering away and the next thing you know they’ll be like lovebirds again! Hey,
lovebirds
! That’s a good name for our little movie! Isn’t that right, Boyle? It sure is, buddies! OK then, Joey! Whenever you’re ready! Ladies and gentlemen — it’s —
The Lovebirds
!’

‘Slap her in there, Tallon!’

‘Ride her, Joey! Ride Mona crossways!’

‘You have her now, young Joey! You’re home and dry with Mona!’

‘He’s home now all fucking right! Would you look at the big fucking pimply arse!’

I never went into Doc Oc’s again, so whether they ever did get a copy of the video in there, to this day I still can’t be sure. But plenty of people saw it all right — you could tell by the looks I was getting. The nudges and the winks and the guffaws: ‘
Look! There’s Tallon, the fucker
!’ even more pointed than before. I didn’t stay around too long after that. It’s just a pity I hadn’t left before I did. Then I mightn’t have been sitting in the bar of the Scotsfield Hotel, my ears pricking up as soon as I heard her name.

‘Jacy? You mean Boyle Henry’s bit of fluff? Oh, she’s gone back to the home place in Wicklow, I hear. Got fed up being rid, shouldn’t wonder.’

After that, things weren’t so good, I have to say. It was as if the earlier days in the prison had returned now with a vengeance. Only for Boo
Boo I don’t know what I’d have done, for I’d nowhere else to go. He gave me the run of his flat in Dublin, and for weeks on end I never went out, drinking and toking worse than ever before but writing away like a lunatic. It was the only thing I felt I had left, with pages by the score shooting out of the printer. Hoping against hope that what I’d come up with would make some kind of sense. Never expecting for a moment that the manuscript would be published. Much less become a runaway success, for whatever reason!

Although, looking at it now — I have the reworked manuscript here, or at least a good portion of it — I suppose some of it is, in a way, quite funny. A chapter or two, at any rate. ‘Rollicking’, as they’d described it. ‘Full of irreverent Irish whimsy!’

But, as for the rest, I find it impossible to read. Too fucking painful, if you want to know the truth. In the end this became the final title:

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF DOUGHBOY McBLOB

A NOVEL
by
Joseph M. Tallon

‘You know, I’ve been thinking!’ said Mrs McBlob to herself. ‘I’ve been worrying myself about nothing, maybe! Perhaps when I get home the neighbours
won’t
be saying: “That old Mrs McBlob! She’ll be coming home soon with a heap of junk wrapped up in her arms! A pile of old rubbish put in her by her husband, that no good, round-shaped human that goes by the name of Jamesy Tallon. A shawlful of blobby old rubbish that will end up just like its father, no good for anything only playing cards and drinking and riding anything that comes about the town. The same as he did to Mona that tossed herself in the reservoir.’”

She paused and placed her index finger on her chin, striking an attitude of quizzical contemplation.

‘How am I to know for certain that those are the words they’ll use?’ she asked herself. “They might not say those things at all. They might say absolutely nothing at all along the lines of that big fat lump” or “stupid big hunk of lard letting on to be a baby”! For all I know they might say the nicest things before looking into the cradle to smile. And say: “He’s a lovely wee baby, this ba you’ve brought home. After all you’ve been through, you’ve done Scotsfield proud in the end! Why
we can’t wait now just to see him grow up and roam about in his lovely wee shirt and tie.”

‘Yes,’ she heard other neighbours say, ‘in a gorgeous starched white shirt and a lovely little neatly knotted red tie. Who’s to say that he won’t be like that? And why wouldn’t he be when there’s nobody to make him go bad! In other words, now that that other useless fucker’s long gone, on a slow boat to China with his fat arse slung behind him!’

‘Yes!’ she heard a familiar voice agree — it belonged to one of the neighbours but she couldn’t quite place it — ‘Daddy Doughboy gone to sea, never again to come back and see me — not that we care, the ne’er-do-well auld cunt!’

When all those thoughts that had begun to gather gradually in her mind had consolidated themselves as she sat there in her pink lambs-wool bedjacket, Mrs Dough was as a woman transformed.

Even all the nurses would soon be remarking on it. ‘Do you know,’ they would say over tea during lunchbreak, ‘I can’t get over this fantastic new attitude that Mrs Dough has begun to manifest. When she came in here first she’d a face on her that would sharpen a hatchet! Looking at you this way, looking at you that way, thinking:
Youse all hate me and call me Mrs Stink! Don’t think I don’t know that that’s what youse’ve been saying! All because I have a little bit of pudge around my hips and my thighs and because I’ve lately succumbed to the nerves and have been scoffing far too much porridge
!’

‘And us not saying a word!’ the nurses would protest, with expressions of the purest distilled innocence. Before adding: ‘Sure it doesn’t matter now, for all of that is past. Now you wouldn’t know her if you happened to skip past her bedside. Why, she’s a woman aglow, that Mrs McDough! And the way she looks at her baby! Do you think you’ll catch her grimacing now, grinding her teeth and muttering darkly: “He hasn’t a chance! All he’ll ever do from the day we leave the hospital is get fatter and fatter and stink the place out! Baba McStink the stinky baba-pie! That’s all
he’ll
ever be known as!’”

You most certainly would not, and all of the nursing staff knew it. As indeed how could they not when they stand there at the foot of her bed, sighing almost dreamily as they attend to her exclamations. Mrs Dough-Dough
in excelsis
!

‘I love him!’ she cries as the baby googles there like mad. ’I have nobody to blame for my silly old nerves, only myself this past while, going and imagining all those silly stupid things! Why, my neighbours
all along were the best in the world! It was Daddy Blob Jamesy who was to blame for it all! He’s the one that did it! It was him going away made me think all them things and then start shaking with the cold in my own wee private kitchen, even on the hottest of summer days!