Emerald Germs of Ireland (34 page)

It seemed as if no time had passed at all, Pat having been returned to his bedroom with “Foley” lying beneath him on the bed (he had just arrived back only moments before, having forgotten his keys), Pat’s hands suddenly clutching the policeman’s neck as he throttled the life out of him. There could be no denying the lack of restraint behind Pat’s eyes—unshamed, vindicated.

“You’re a liar!” he cried. “You don’t know what you’re talking about! How dare you insult my mother!”

“Pat! Pat you’re strangling me!” the sergeant gasped, a little intoxicated, only now becoming aware of the gravity of the situation in which he now found himself.

As he composed himself, already sensing the first pigments of discoloring on his throat, he looked up to see Pat rummaging frantically in the wardrobe. A holdall was discharged, landing with a thud at his feet.

“Pack all your things and get out, Foley!” he heard Pat cry. “I know what you’re doing! You think I don’t know? Making all that stuff up to drive me mad! To get me to confess! That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Oh yes! Oho but you’re the smart fellow!”

“Confess? But confess to what, Pat’#x201D;

“The donkey man! The Bannion women! What? I don’t know! The germs! Ha ha! The germs—what else?”

“Pat—are you on drugs?”

“No! I’m not on drugs! And well you know it! Maybe you are! Coming in here with your cock-and-bull stories!”

“Cock-and-bull stories?” gasped the sergeant, stroking his throat.

“About the stadon being burned down. What kind of an eejit do you take me for?”

“Pat—before you go any further might I remind you that anything you say may be taken down in evidence—”

Pat’s eyes leaped.

“Evidence! Ha! Prove it! Just prove I laid a finger on Mammy! Or that eejit from Ardee either! Or Tubridy! Old fatarse! Prove it! Go on—prove it about any of them, effing germs!”

The sergeant sighed.

“Pat—I’m not talking about eejits or their donkeys,” he said. “I’m talking about assaulting an officer of the law. Which you have just done, Pat. Do you know what sentence you might expect from even the most lenient of judges for that?”

A number of fingers encircled themselves about Pat’s wrist.

“I—” Pat began.

You’ve made a big mistake, Pat!” the sergeant said. “A big mistake!”

“It’s your fault!” cried Pat shrilly. “You didn’t have to whistle! If you hadn’t started whistling it would never have happened!”

The sergeant shook his head.

“I wasn’t whistling, Pat,” he said in calm, measured tones. “Pat—I was below in Sullivan’s—remember?”

Pat’s eyes narrowed as did his lips until they were as a piece of three-inch-long string drawn tightly across his face.

“You did!” he hissed resentfully. “I heard you! I know I heard you!”

The policeman’s countenance wore a sad and pained expression.

“Pat—are you sure you’re okay?” he pleaded. “Look at me, Pat. Tell me, what sort of whistling did you hear?”

There was no reply and no immediate indication that one was forthcoming. This was because the very moment the sergeant had ended his question, Pat’s perception of him had begun to dramatically alter, to the extent that the features of “the sergeant” or “policeman” effectively
now no longer existed, having been supplanted by those of “Pat’s mother,” whose pallid, slightly hirsute face now seemed to melt across the sergeant’s and become seamlessly interwoven with it, her frail voice issuing now through faintly lipsdcked lips as she said, “Don’t tell him, Pat. Don’t tell him a single thing.” Then, almost imperceptibly, the sergeant’s face returned, his hand placed his hand on the back of his neck as he said, “What sort of whistling, do you mind me asking, Pat?” The tone of voice this time was unmistakably authoritative, stentorian.

“He’sjust like them all, Pat,” Pat McNab was then shocked to hear—his mother’s voice quite vivid now—”just out for himself! Don’t tell him a single thing or you know what will happen!”

In that instant, Pat heard the clang of cell bars and beheld himself in a coarse frieze suit festooned with the heads of arrows.

His mother continued:

“They’lljust take you away and I’ll never see you again. We’ll never be able to have our litde chats like we used to. Maybe I could have brought you up better, Pat. But I loved you. You know that, don’t you?”

A large knot formed in the base of Pat’s throat.

“Yes, Mammy,” he said, swallowing hard.

“Pat!” the sergeant’s bass voice demanded. “Do you hear me talking to you?”

But, to Pat, there was only one voice audible, that of a sixty-five-year-old woman, who, through false teeth, continued:

“With horrible people coming around here to say those awful things about me. You heard what they said, didn’t you, Pat? Pat, they’re not true, those things. It’s just so they can get you and me separated, you know that, don’t you? Because that’s all they want. All he wants. Pat, do you remember when you had something hard to do, I used to say, ‘Petals, darling, it’ll be all right,’ when something was really hard?”

Pat intertwined his thumbs.

‘Yes, Mammy,” he replied.

“Pat! Are you listening to me?” the sergeant’s voice boomed—it seemed to emerge from the darkness of an oil drum.

“I love you, Mammy,” Pat said.

“Pat!” rasped the sergeant, shocked, as an odd, thin, sergeantlike smile appeared on Pat’s lips.

“Pat,” rasped the sergeant, bunching his fist unconsciously, “if you don’t listen to me, I’ll…

Without warning he found himself staring at the tears which were coursing copiously down Pat’s cheeks.

“Why can’t you leave us alone!” erupted Pat. “Why couldn’t you just arrest me if you think I’m a bad man! Why couldn’t you just come and say, ‘Come with me!’ instead of going on and on until you drove me—it wasn’t my fault they all ended up in the garden! They were germs! Every one of them, filthy, taunting, humming, singing, sickening-green-maggot germs! They made me! And I’d do it all again, if—”

Within seconds, the crimson-headed sergeant had Pat locked in a half-nelson. His captive squealed, “And you! Why did you have to say that about the dance hall! You had to say it, didn’t you? You all have to say things!”

“Jesus Mary and Joseph, Pat McNab, the things you’ve done! You know what’s going to happen now, don’t you?”

There was a faint clicking of indeterminate bone as Pat, sniffling, replied, “Yes, Sergeant,” before adding, “sergeant—may I have one last request?”

The car park was overgrown and the old sign was more or less gone now, part of it flapping loosely above the drab, paint-flecked double doors, that had once opened on so many star-bright nights in the summers of long ago to admit the throngs of optimistic, apple-cheeked, jitterbugging innocents, Pat’s mother among them. “The Merryland,” sighed Pat to himself, turning to the older man and saying in a voice shot through with deep melancholy, “Can we go in, Sergeant? Just for old times’ sake.”

The sergeant stiffened.

“Oh, very well, then,” he said, “but if we do—I want a full confession from you below at the station. You hear?”

Pat nodded meekly.

Yes, Sergeant,” he agreed, adding, “I’ll sing like a lark.”

The interior was equally desolate. Slumped forward in despair from the walls hung a torn poster displaying the lost and yet somehow hopelessly optimistic expression of a scallop-collared combo called Gerry and the Black Dots. Angled precariously above their heads, a splintered, gap-toothed mirror ball. There was a faint smell of urine long
swept away and dried. Pat extended his index finger in the direction of the northwestern corner.

“That’s where she used to dance, Sergeant—isn’t it? Right up there by yon corner.”

The sergeant replied, litde emotion evident in his voice, “Aye. That’d be it,” he phlegmatically replied.

“With the boys all saying, ‘Would you look at that. Would you look at that! I wouldn’t mind—’#x201D;

The sergeant jerked his charge firmly.

“Come on now—hurry up!” he instructed firmly.

But Pat continued.

“The same boys who said I’d my trousers on the wrong way round and that you could tell by the way I walked I was—”

Suddenly Pat’s eyes lit up. Animation is a word which perhaps approaches a description of his quite unexpected emotional transformation as he exultantly cried, “Look! Look there, Sergeant! It’s a guitar! Just like the old ones! It’s like the bands never went away!”

Without warning, Pat had leaped up onto the stage, the sergeant gazing in near disbelief as his captive positioned himself behind an old-fashioned microphone which for many years had stood sentinel in the abandoned palace of dreams long faded, crying, “Oh, Sergeant! Look at it! Look at it! Isn’t it fabulous?”

Pat’s booming voice ricocheted from wall to perspiring wall.

“Ladies and gentlemen! Welcome to the Merryland Ballroom!”

The sergeant cupped his hand over his mouth and called out, “Come on now! That’s enough!”

“Oh wait, Sergeant! Please!” continued Pat—there was a slight whisdtlng sound—”And look! There’s spodights! I wonder do they still work? And would you believe it! An old-fashioned Grundig tape recorder! It’s fantastic! Oh, Sergeant! Just one song before we go, I beg you!”

The click of the switch was considerably amplified as Pat’s thumb found its mark and the first familiar, crackling strains swam out into the hall—inevitably!—

The lights which filled the hall then might have been beamed from the eyes of Pat McNab as breathlessly he cried, “Oh, Sergeant! If only my mother was here now! Ladies and gentlemen, welcome here tonight! Pat McNab is going to sing a special litde song for you! Called ‘I wore my trousers on the wrong way round’! Ahem! ‘I wore my trousers on the wrong way round/I wore them in the country and I wore them in the town/And all the boys would say, “Yes, here he comes again/Here’s trousers-on-the-wrong-way-round walking down the lane!”’#x201D;

The sergeant’s patience by now was at an end and he leaped forward and gruffly set about Pat.

“Okay! That’s enough!” he snapped. “Let’s get going.”

Pat seemed to go limp in his arms.

“Yes, Sergeant,” he said, adding, “Sergeant?”

“What?” the policeman responded.

“Just for old times’ sake—can I sing one last litde song? Just for Mam?”

“No!” the sergeant firmly replied.

Once again, tears began to appear in Pat’s eyes.

“Sergeant! Please!” he pleaded. “Please! Just one last number!”

The sergeant’s cheeks seemed inflamed.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake! Go on, then!”

Pat gingerly approached the microphone stand and wet his lips, coughing slightly as he brought his knees together, crossed his hands over his groin and began:

The sergeant’s eyes twinkled slightly, despite himself.

“And here was me thinking you didn’t like that song, Pat!” he called.

“I don’t, actually, Sergeant!” Pat replied—in a surprisingly chirpy tone—before curling his hand about the cold metal of the mike stand, suspending it for some brief seconds before delivering a steady, measured blow to the side of the sergeant’s head, an action which he continued to firmly and insistently repeat, all the while shrilly crying, “That’s right! I told you I didn’t like it! But you had to whistle it! You had to come along and whistle it! And say bad things about Mam! Why!
Why, germ! Tell me, guard germ! Tell, policeman of emerald-green rottenness!”

A
thupp
sound was the consequence of yet another firm blow, this time to the further temple. It was only a matter of time before the now considerably bloodied officer of the law fell to the floor of the stage, issuing only the slightest of moans, as Pat clutched the scarlet-stained microphone stand, wiped his eye, and pleaded, “Why couldn’t you just stay in the station and sing ordinary songs? Why? Why did it have to be an Emerald germ?”

There is a smile on Pat’s face as he opens the curtains and admits the sun’s rays to the morning kitchen, placing a bowl of potpourri on the window ledge. Tying his apron string at the back just he hears the doorbell. “Hmm! I wonder who that could be now!” he muses to himself, placing an index finger upon his lips. Quite unaware that he is humming “I’ve counted the raindrops/I’ve counted the stars/I’ve counted a million of diese prison bars!” he opens the door, and there to his amazement sees standing before him the most dashing looking man he has ever laid eyes on, resplendent in brown camelhair coat and silk scarf, his beautiful Italian shoes spotessly polished.

“Hi! I’m Dexy McGann!” the stranger declared. “I’ve been down London way—wo! this past twenty-one years now! I was wondering could I come in? I’m an old boyfriend of your mother’s, you see! Herself and me danced a few steps—back in the old days!”

That a gust of Arctic wind passed between them in that very instant would be very difficult to prove empirically—the assertion even futile, perhaps. But there can be no denying the dramatic altering of Pat’s features and the sudden departure from the region of his eyes of what is commonly known as “human feeling” or “sympathy.” Something which, sadly, perhaps due to a corrosive urbaneness which had over the years seen off his natural rustic qualities of instinct and alertness, blithely striding in as Pat smiled and held the door open, blissfully unaware of the word “germ” which issued almost inaudibly from the side of his host’s mouth, behind him swinging shut an outwardly unremarkable, old-fashioned wooden door which, had the insouciant Dexy McGann but known it, might equally have been fashioned of the most ungiving, hyperborean steel ever struck in the flaming deepest furnaces of the blackest pits of hell.

P
ATRICK
M
C
C
ABE
is an internationally renowned literary novelist born in Clones, County Monaghan, Ireland, in 1955. He has published six other novels—
Music on Clinton Street, Carn, The Butcher Boy, The Dead School, Breakfast on Pluto,
and
Mondo Desperado.
He cowrote with director Neil Jordan the screenplay
The Butcher Boy,
and has again teamed up with Jordan to write the screenplay for
Breakfast on Pluto.

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