Gavin Corbett - Green Glowing Skull

‘— and now these rock and rollers have come along, and the folks are lapping it up. And you can’t bear it seeing Pádraigín Cruise (what’s he calling himself now? Pádraigín O’Clock?), you can’t bear it seeing Pádraigín getting in on it. The girls falling at his feet!’

‘Beastie, Beastie. Janey, man,’ said Billy. ‘You’ll finish poor Denny off.’

‘Sure it’s not making a dint on him,’ said Beast Features. ‘Look at him. His head down like bloody Dropjohn. He’s a heap. The man is a shambles. You’re a shambles, Denny, at thirty-one years of age. I’m telling him this for his own good. It’s a tragedy. Had a fine young voice, took a wrong turn with it, and too proud to admit he had. Rejected, not the pride nor the strength of character to regroup, try something different, move on from his stupid romantic notions. He could be a minor operatic star by now, if only he’d stuck it out in Italy. Or be doo-wopping and fingerclicking Pádraigín off the stage. But he’s not. He’s a drunk. A flailing and bilious drunk. And he’s shredded his voice with that poison. No — that won’t ever come back.’

Denny listened to every word, and Beast Features was right — not one of them made a scratch, because they amounted to nothing he didn’t know himself. But still in his dampened and sedated state he could rouse himself to spar. He lifted his head.

‘Well, you don’t understand me and the force that animates me. I was born a long time ago. Oh but that is how I feel. Have you heard about this idea from other religions of the transmigration of souls? This is how I inherited mine. And my soul is as green as the essential green chlorophyll of Ireland.’

‘The only thing green in you is the bile in your gullet,’ said Beast Features. ‘And what cod! It’s painful to listen to you. You claim to know yourself, but do you have any idea how you appear and sound to others? Is this what poor Aisling has to put up with at home?’

Aisling! The word cut through his toxic shield. Aisling! These things — they were the kinds of things that Aisling herself would say to him. Like when he would try to tell her that she was beautiful, and she would tell him to please be himself, to stop with his film-star talk.

‘I am bilious, it’s true, Beastie. I am bitter. What’s happened to Ireland these last few years … at least it gave me hope that the youth would clear out. Till only recently I used to will them to the boats. Be gone and good riddance, I used to say. I hoped for a cull. I hoped the poverty would ossify the country. I hoped that every pregnant young girl would queue up outside of Mamie Cadden’s abortionarium. I thought: Leave the place to the old and old in spirit now! Because the youth were ruining the country with their alien ideas. Still are. I passed the statue of Lord Ardilaun on the Green this morning’ — he looked at a bottle of stout on the adjacent table — ‘and I cursed him, I did, for ever having given confidence to the primitive, because we’re seeing the fruits of that now in the swagger and slouch of these wild apes with their rock-and-roll music and their sex mania.’

‘You’re only a scut yourself, Denny, give it up!’ said Beast Features. ‘And if it wasn’t for Ardilaun and his likes you’d still be in the jungle. Didn’t you need a scholarship to get into school? Another tragedy — you got to your airy little niche by talent alone, and only talent was going to keep you there. The rest of us bob along nicely on daddy’s largesse no matter the damage we do to ourselves.’

They fell into silence for a moment, before Billy said, ‘So, America, Denny. You’re not serious about this?’

‘Of course he’s not serious,’ said Beast Features. ‘But he’ll say that he’s serious, watch him.’

‘I am serious,’ said Denny. ‘The country’s gone to ruin and there’s no going back. The rot has set right in deep now.’

‘And you’re off to the land of modernity and rock and roll itself?’ said Billy.

‘A point well made, Billy!’ said Beast Features.

‘America’s the shining light of the world,’ said Denny, ‘even more so now than before; too big to be tarnished by the rubbings and scrapings of a few skiffle musicians.’

‘A hopeless romantic! Beastie’s right about you,’ said Billy.

‘Would you call the Jews who built a country out of the dry rocks of Palestine hopeless? Would you call the Germans who took the dream of Deutschland to south-west Africa and made it real hopeless?’

‘Steady on with that talk,’ said Beast Features.

‘You’re going to build a new Ireland in the Mojave Desert, are you?’ said Billy, sniggering.

‘First things first. I’ll land in New York, same place that McCormack made his name.’

‘You’ll find a few dewy-eyed descendants might indulge you there for a while all right!’ said Billy.

‘Good enough for him!’ said Beast Features. ‘And does Aisling have a say in any of this?’

‘She does. She can say that she’ll come with me.’

‘Or say that she won’t?’

‘Indeed.’

‘You’ll put her up to it?’

‘If you like. But she’s my wife, and she’ll come.’

‘She’s had enough of your pipe dreams. She won’t budge, and so neither will you.’

‘She has every reason to come. She could have a career in singing herself.’

‘She would have had it by now if she’d really wanted it. Denny, she lives in the modern and real world — what she wants is for you to settle down and do what husbands do.’

‘I think you misinterpret my attitude to modernity. I don’t accept what’s become of the world, but I am a modern man! I am a modern man! Just because I take from the past doesn’t mean that I’m not a modern man.’

‘You take from no past that’s ever happened! You take from the dream world!’

‘Well there you have it! The mark of a modern man is someone who wants to change things by the force of his dreaming, and to lead by his own example!’

‘The most you’ll do in the way of action is walk as far in the direction of America as the James’s Street fountain, take a gulp of water to sober up, and turn around for home again, stopping in every pub along the route.’

‘We should open a book on it,’ said Billy. ‘Five pounds that he’ll make it as far as Saint Patrick’s loo-lah hospital!’

‘So you’ll land, anyhow, in New York,’ said Beast Features, ‘helped down the gangplank by Marlon Brando, and you’ll be straight into making the big bucks at the Met Opera House, this Great Bard of Ireland, Denny Logan, with Aisling dangling off your arm, and you’ll be living it up in grand style on Fifth Avenue?’

‘Well, no, not exactly.’

‘No, I shouldn’t have thought so.’

‘The plan is, that I will go ahead on my own for a while to test the waters. There’ll be some hardship, of course there will, initially.’

‘And you’ll tough it out in some dosshouse or the YMCA, will you?’

‘No. I’ve joined a club. An uncle of mine down in Waterford has some connections in that way, and I’ve joined a club. And I’ll write to their members in New York, and they’ll take me in. The Davy Langans, they’re called. Men and women after my own heart.’

‘The Davy Whatkins?’

‘Langans. True cultural and political revolutionaries. Or rather, half-revolutionaries. Revolutionaries come right the way back around to where they started from. The Davy Langans seek to flip the world one hundred and eighty degrees.’

‘It gets better, Billy!’

‘I’ll go over, Beastie, and I’m telling you, a year from now you’ll be calling me a visionary.’

‘A double visionary!’

‘Hoo hoo!’ went Billy, nearly slipping under the table.