Кен Бруен - Galway Girl

Realized the gun was still in his hand.

Fuck.

Careless.

Then noticed a girl leaning against the far wall, smoking a cig, dressed like a Goth punk. He raised the gun, thought,

“Shite, only five bullets left.”

The girl pushed away from the wall, gave a malicious smile, said,

“Gotcha.”

On her second line of coke, Jericho said aloud,

“First dumb fuck selected.”

I was coming out of McCambridge’s, having bought a six-pack of Lone Star, the longneck brand. Rachel, lovely girl who works there, asked me,

“Is that a good beer?”

What to say? I said,

“Makes me long to go to Texas.”

Which was kind of true.

Outside, I paused, lit a Marlboro Red, hitting all the U.S. notes. A guy passing said,

“Where’s your ash?”

Threw me. WTF, did he mean on the cig?

He indicated his forehead, which had a gray smudge. The penny dropped.

Ash Wednesday.

Where does the time go when you’re in fucking bits?

I wanted to stay in U.S. mode, snarl the American term for sex.

“Getting your ashes hauled.”

Or maybe some literary quip on T. S. Eliot, but I couldn’t be bothered, said,

“Forgot.”

He eyed me, then,

“Let’s hope the Lord doesn’t forget you.”

Sweet Jesus.

A Holy Roller.

I snarled,

“God forgot me somewhere in the middle of the Celtic Tiger.”

I went to Freeney’s, truly your old-style Galway pub, no frills, no hen parties, no newly rich on paper gobshite with the narrow suits, skinny ties, and those crocodile brown, long shoes that were, as O. J. Simpson had once termed his own footwear,

“God-ugly suckers.”

If you have to quote Simpson in any context you are fucked beyond any reckoning. Freeney’s even have fishing tackle on display in the window and hooch in earthen jars. I see that, I long for a childhood in bygone Ireland that I think really existed only in the pages of Walter Macken.

How do you live when your child was murdered?

You try to read the papers, the headlines engorged with the furious debate raging on... Repeal the Eighth Amendment.

You had:

Pro life,

Pro choice,

The Church,

Fundamentalists,

And bitterness fueled with ferocity that had opposing placards

Like this:

Baby killers

Who owns women’s bodies?

The world had somehow survived the first year of Trump,

If barely.

At the Winter Olympics, saw the incredible:

A handshake between North and South Korea.

Phew-oh.

I initially tried to struggle through my grief by immersion in darkness, read the books of ferocity:

Chris Carter

Herbert Lieberman’s City of the Dead

Joseph Koenig

Derek Raymond’s Factory novels

Drew the line at actually watching the Saw franchise but I was that close to out-and-out weirdness.

A student wandered in looking lost, wearing a Donegal GAA jersey and a dazed expression. The bar guy, great ole Galway trouper named Mac, intercepted him, barked,

“Park it elsewhere, son.”

A relatively new trend in the city:

Donegal Tuesdays.

The students, dressed in the counties’ T-shirts and jerseys, drank like lunatics and generally terrorized the town. Oh, and despite the freezing February weather, they wore no coats.

I was told,

“It’s so uncool to wear coats!”

Not to mention fucking idiotic.

By all that is wonderful in insane Irish logic, this week of Donegal Tuesdays coincided with the Annual Novena in the cathedral.

Church bells intoned three times daily and hawkers from every nonreligious pocket of the land set up stalls selling

Padre Pio relics,

Scapulars blessed by various popes,

Medals to ward off all save misery,

And enough bottles of holy water to stop a zombie apocalypse.

Drunken students, cowed pilgrims, lashing rain... what’s not to love?

A young man stared at me from the counter, dressed in a fine suit, had the look of a furtive apprentice accountant. I snapped,

“The fook you looking at?”

The bar guy gave me the look that said,

“Chill.”

The man slipped off the stool, sauntered over, gave me an appraisal not unlike an undertaker, as in,

“How big need the coffin be?”

He asked in a Brit accent,

“You Jack Taylor?”

I nodded.

He sat, took a long draft of his pint of cider, said,

“You were a friend of my dad’s.”

Jeez, that covers a multitude and very little of it good. I stalled, tried,

“And he is/was?”

The name he gave shattered me.

Years before, this name had been my best mate until...

Until...

I drowned him.

The name he uttered:

“Stapleton.”

I don’t do friends well.

It starts out okay but they soon tire of the drinking and my temper.

Stapleton seemed the exception.

As the Americans say, “He had my back.”

Until I realized he was slowly but surely planting a knife there.

We’d ended up on Nemo’s Pier, the scene of so many of my worst moments.

In the midst of a ferocious storm.

Not quite as fierce as the storm in my heart.

I threw him into the water, knowing he couldn’t swim, and despite the wind I thought I heard him scream.

My own scream was,

“Fuck you.”

I was still reeling from the revelation of Stapleton’s son. Stapleton had been one of the best friends I’d ever had.

But

I ignored the old chestnut

... keep your enemies closer.

He was a force of malignant nature. His past included:

Paramilitary time,

British army,

Sundry mercenary black ops.

Or so it was rumored.

In Galway, he’d reincarnated himself as an artist.

If you want to pose as an artist,

Wannabe poet,

Author,

Galway is your nirvana.

All you have to do is declare yourself so,

Carry a copy of Joyce/Beckett/Heaney—

The more battered the copy, the more convincing—

And, best of all, you never have to read the fuckin’ things, just go

“Ah,”

Shake your head a lot,

Take deep breaths before answering a question,

And, most vital,

Scratch yourself

A lot.

Oh, a combat jacket and scuffed Docs add to the portrait.

And be on the dole as you avail yourself of all the arts council grants.

Attend the lit parties.

Network like a frenzied banshee.

Stapleton fooled me for a long time, I truly believed he was my mate.

Phew-oh.

Turned out to be one of the most cunning ice psychos I’d ever had the bad karma to meet. When I drowned him, I said with utter conviction,

“Good fuckin’ riddance.”

Meant it then, mean it now.

I stood outside Freeney’s, lost in the past. A guy passing said,

“Hey, Taylor, have you been to the new pub in Bohermore called Harry’s, like some Hemingway vibe, you think?”

All this dark remembrance needed some serious drink, so I went into Harry’s off Water Lane, a new boutique pub.

Yeah, God help us.

Translate as,

“Locals not welcome and we have fierce notions.”

In I went, ordered a hot one. The bar guy had a ponytail — clue one to hostility.

He asked in a beat above disdain,