Gavin Corbett - Green Glowing Skull

He would need a weapon. He knew of a butcher’s shop nearby that would have hooks and cleavers and long knives. Perhaps he could persuade the butcher to sell him a hook. Or he might be able to buy a bone, a cow’s shin bone, or a buffalo’s. In the butcher’s shop he found himself behind a line of people. He considered leaving, but then the butcher’s assistant asked him what he wanted. He was aware that the other people in the line were annoyed that he had been asked before they had, but he had a base frenzy about him and they would not make a fuss. He scanned across the platter under glass and saw a mound of purple-brown tongues, outsized tongues that were still furred and glistened with pinpricks of light. A tongue was a weapon his pursuer would understand. He could slap him across the face with it and it would have mystical, symbolic significance. He got his tongue for one dollar on account of how late in the day it was.

He slumped into Duffy’s Tavern on 23rd Street and sat on a stool at the bar in front of the taps knowing he would be challenged soon. The barman would not care for raw meat on his premises. He gripped the tongue between his knees with his nails. He kneaded his head, his hair, and the knots and mounts beneath. He pleased the barman by allowing him to show that he could fix an old-fashioned but now the tongue had slipped from his fingers and hit the floor with a splat. He kneaded his hair with his other hand, the one he had been holding the tongue with, and his fingers were through his hair before he realised. Oh my God, he thought, his hand shaking. He was a delicate man. He feared people — he feared his good friend Denny, this delicate man. That’s what Denny thought, that’s how they all thought of him. A delicate man. He didn’t want that side, the side that was on the outside, to infect him. He was not this delicate man. She had not made this man to be a delicate man. For the love of Christ, if she was to be a man could she not just be a man? She had howled and wailed at this delicate man. She had tried to command him and watched as he failed her, put on airs, apologised for everything. Her words would go unheard, lost somewhere. The voice was tiny. Tinny. Always she was aware of the great breezy gaps in this largely empty vessel — always she was aware she was the occupant of a vessel. One had never, never nearly, fitted into the other. Now the occupant was shrinking from disaster. Jean, he called to herself, from outside to in. Wake up you feisty thing, you big lumbering bitch.

‘Mind if I sit here?’

His pursuer.

Chewing-gum trench coat. Enemy/envoy. Trilby or homburg. The voice was, like his own, an Ulster one. It made some kind of sense to him that this should be so.

He did not look in the creature’s eyes and he was uncertain as to whether he should take the hand that was offered. He fastened his eyes on the floor where his tongue was laid out in black blood like a slug.

‘Oh, Saint Sybil. What’s that? Your dinner?’

He found the Ulster accent placating, like the sudden rush of some mild narcotic.

‘Hey. Allow me to introduce myself. Please.’

He looked at the creature’s knees.

‘My name is Aidan Brown. My friends call me Quicklime.’

The barman dawdled at the taps, waiting for an order. Aidan Brown climbed on to his stool, his trench coat and hat still on him. Clive opened his mouth.

‘Yes?’ said Aidan Brown.

‘Are you a fairy, Aidan Brown?’

‘Quicklime, please … No, I’m not a fairy. My friends call me Quicklime because I’m a sailor and I know the best way to treat scurvy.’

‘Is that true?’

Aidan Brown shook with laughter.

‘No. My friends call me Quicklime because I have pitted thick skin and I’m fast on my feet.’

‘ Are you a fairy?’

‘No, most definitely not.’

‘Have you been sent on behalf of the fairies?’

‘No. I represent only myself and the organisation I represent.’

‘Reveal yourself please and do whatever it is you have pursued me to do.’

‘May I ask, first of all, your name?’

‘Do you not already know?’

‘It’s evaded me, that one, I admit.’

Aidan Brown ordered a pot of coffee. Eventually he took off his hat and got the barman to hang it up for him. He rolled his trench coat in a bundle and sat on it. In the piercing spotlights Clive was able to observe that he indeed had pitted skin. His face was not frozen and palsied now but puffed out and twitchy with tics like that of any regular middle-aged man after taking vigorous exercise. The humanitarian in Clive was glad he had not attacked Aidan Brown in the neck. At the same time he was aware that a game of wiles might have been in play.

‘ Am I to call you Quicklime?’

‘If you like.’

Quicklime looked across the arrangement behind the bar. A grid of pigeonholes was decorated with bunting and each flag on the bunting was a county flag of Ireland. Amid the reserves of whiskey, perry and absinthe was a lead bomb labelled ‘Replica of Saint Patrick’s Bell’.

‘You could feel at home in a place like this,’ said Quicklime. ‘You’re from Donegal?’

‘Yes. Close by Ballyshannon. I left it when I was eighteen to go up to Dublin.’

‘You haven’t lost the burr. It’s softened a bit, mind. But that’s burrs for you. Burrs burr, brogues rattle. I’m from your neck of the woods. The village of Garrison. Caught the wrong side of the border.’

Clive tried quickly to ascertain the layout of Duffy’s Tavern. It was a narrow and deep and typically light-starved single room. He looked for escape routes. But he was somehow assuaged by this mention of a real place, Garrison, and the implication that the listener would understand the nuance in the words ‘caught the wrong side of the border’.

He traced the rim of his glass with his finger.

‘You’re a Catholic rather than a Protestant?’

Quicklime laughed again.

‘You’ve been out of Ireland a long time, my friend. Nobody asks questions like that. I’m a Protestant, as it happens. But a nationalist. My parents named me after the great British way station of Aden. Later I gaelicised the spelling.’

Some moments of silence passed as Quicklime mopped up coffee from the bar with a handkerchief.

‘Look at the two of us here in this pub,’ he said.

‘And you’re not a sailor?’

‘I’m not a sailor, no. Nor do I know the best way to treat scurvy. But I do spend most of the year travelling great distances. This is what I do.’

‘What do you do?’

He reached into his trouser pocket, winked at Clive, and took out a slim silver case from which he produced a card. It said:

BRING OUR BOYS BACK HOME

‘We’re a charity, but as I say to the people we help: don’t look on us as a charity. Look on us as a service, a free service. We’re in the business of repatriation. We help the most valued members of Ireland’s diaspora. The elderly and the wise. Which description are you most comfortable with? Elderly, or old, or aged?’

‘I would say I’m comfortable with any of them.’

‘We help men who left Ireland as hopeful younger men for places like New York and London and are still in New York and London but with the old form of hope long extinguished. If they have any hope left it’s the hope that one day they might return to Ireland.’

He was not looking at Clive as he spoke, becoming absorbed in his spiel, rapping the counter with his knuckle.

‘But that hope is laid to waste by worry about where the next bag of fuel pellets is coming from, or whether the cheque will last them the week. They’ve nothing to be doing only breaking into racecourses and walking the track in the middle of the night. Or mooching in Irish clubs in Cricklewood, say, nursing a pint of sickly English bitter, eyeing that battered box of Cluedo up on the shelf. And they’ll be eyeing it all evening, that box of Cluedo, because they’ll have nothing else to be doing. And they’ll be thinking of all the people they’re not playing Cluedo with and of all the people they once played Cluedo with. Does this sound familiar to you?’