Short Fiction of Flann O'Brien (Irish Literature) (8 page)

I started off in life with somewhat of a handicap. Only those who were born in Ballyjoesullivan will know what I mean. The kindly caress of a mother’s hand was denied to me from the beginning, as poor Mum had come to a tragic end some two years before I was born, having been fatally shot through the corsage in a saloon brawl. Someone had spoken lightly of a horse-jobber’s name. Poor Dad was worse than useless at this time, having one foot in the grave, and the other, for nine months out of the twelve, confined within the narrow framework of a Thomas splint. I often wonder how I ever managed to survive, but there—let us commence at the beginning.

The ragged storm clouds were veiling the face of the moon on the 3rd of September, 1886. Midnight chimed from the village church, and the sound of the bells had scarcely been whipped away by the fingers of the gale when, high above the soughing of the wind, there was heard the wailing cry of a new-born baby. For that day and hour was I born, much to my uncle’s and aunt’s embarrassment. It is scarcely necessary to add that I was born with a caul, since practically every writer worth slandering was born with a caul, from Dickens down to Shelly. (I don’t mean Percy B. Shelley, but a man named Fonsie Shelly I used to know who did odd pars for the old
Freeman’s Journal
.)

Ah! If I had a mind to tell it, the subsequent history of that little caul would fill a good-sized book in itself. I could relate how, tied up with an old boot lace into a compact sphere, it helped me to win by a comfortable margin the senior hardball championships at Ballymun at an age when most boys are playing with their bead frames. Years later, when wintering in Siberia, it occupied the centre of the stage again. Most of my companions had died of cold and starvation. The very last pair of Russian boots had been ravenously devoured by us after having been converted into the savoury borsch that only the Russians can make. Day after day I could see the red-rimmed eyes of the others straying hungrily to the palatable tit-bit that I was using as a droshky rug. Let me cut a long story short by saying that it was only by sleeping with a half-cocked moose gun under my pillow at night that I contrived to stave them off until help finally arrived. To this very day it remains my constant travelling companion, for, stretched out on a light bamboo frame, it constitutes the highly efficient punkah with which one of my “boys” is agitating the sultry atmosphere even as I pen these few words. However, I must not bore you with irrelevant details.

Where was I? Oh! Yes—I had just been born. Well, no sooner did I divest my chubby little face of its lucky charm than I buried my needle-sharp fangs in the arm of the old midwife who presided at my
début
. This pretty display of temperament won for me the sobriquet of “Ballyjoesullivan Tiger Cat,” a name which clung to me long after Ballyjoesullivan had become nothing more than an unsavoury memory. Little did I think at the time that those small, white teeth would soon enable me to supplement Dad’s meagre earnings as postmaster of that barony, on the site of which a world-famous synthetic rope factory now stands. Like most rural post offices ours was devoid of those little articles of office equipment that make the life of a postmaster tolerable in a hamlet so primitive that the nearest public house was more than 200 yards away. No damp sponge in a delph container decorated the counter. I think it is no exaggeration to say that I was almost a fully-grown man before I could distinguish without hesitation between an all-steel filing cabinet and a patent clip-fastener. The official pen was so rusty that neighbouring farmers used to purchase the sediment in the ink-well for use as a top dressing of iron for their vast onion plantations.

It goes, therefore, without saying, that we had no dentotype stamp perforator. The result was that, night after night, poor Dad and I used to sit up, he steaming open the villagers’ letters with his bronchitis kettle, and I with my tiny incisors making the necessary punctures in the broad sheets of unfinished stamps that used to come down to us by canal boat from the G.P.O. in Dublin. Later on, when his sight began to fail, I took over the task of making digests of such letters as might prove remunerative when the parties concerned would come into the office to lodge something in their savings account. Life was no bed of roses for Dad and me in those days, and it was only by making intelligent use of their infirmity, when blind pensioners came to draw their allowance, that we were able to carry on until the Great War put the business on its feet.

Like many healthy striplings of my age, when I was fifteen I ran away to sea, but having greater intellectual powers than most lads in their ’teens, I soon saw the folly of my ways, and ran back again. There I remained until Dad passed on, leaving to me the post office in his will. The old place fetched a fancy price from the village gombeen man about whom I knew a few things he appeared to want to keep dark. Or maybe he saw possibilities for himself in the little game of “postman’s knock” as played by Dad and me. Who knows? At all events it was with a light heart and with pockets stuffed with blood money and postal orders that I turned my back on my native village never to return.

All my life I had wanted to be a writer, so when a magazine advertisement caught my eye explaining how you can earn £10 a week in your spare time writing stories, I immediately sent off one of my postal orders and commenced the requisite correspondence course. This was my first step towards success. Of course, at first, publishing firms declined to pay me the £10 a week which I demanded for my work. But far from discouraging me, this had precisely the opposite effect. Course after course of tuition did I take with different schools, even going so far as to take out a two-term course in personality-development in case I should ever come up against some headstrong publisher face to face. I was very nearly down to my last money order when I paused to ask myself who was making £10 a week out of all this. As the answer came to me in a flash, I rushed off to rent a small room, gave myself a few honorary university degrees, and, on the same day, inaugurated the Royal Literary Correspondence College, the stately buildings of which can be seen in any large city to-day, eloquent testimony to the success which has crowned my youthful literary efforts.

Coming to think of it, I suppose I
have
been fairly successful. Money no longer means very much to me. The self-conferred degrees of my earlier days have been replaced by doctorates and diplomas conferred by the most august universities and academies in Europe. I have been forced to give up living in exclusive hotels because of the hordes of playwrights, authors, and professors of literature who made my life unbearable with their endless toadying, touching of hats and touting for tutorships. I take very little part in the worldwide activities of the College nowadays, beyond an indulgent glance at the balance-sheet which my fellow-directors fake up for me once a year. My home is just wherever I care to drop the anchor of my favourite yacht. Where am I now, you will probably want to know? Well, in case there are any job-cadging littérateurs among my readers, the most I care to say is that I am, at the moment, about 4,000 miles from my native soil. From the shady verandah where I am sitting with a long, cool drink in my hand I can see the natives unloading the brightly coloured bales of cotton from the fussy little steamer, which every three months ties up to the rotten waterlogged old timbers of the jetty.

Just beside the toe of my boot is one of the vivid green, white, and yellow grass lizards which the Krooboys make into tasteful handbags for their womenfolk. I do not raise my foot to crush it. Why, I wonder? Perhaps I am just too lazy to do so. Or perhaps it is because—and here, I believe, we are getting nearer to the truth—the colours of the creature have awakened in me a feeling that I had thought was long since dead. For, whenever I hear a few bars from an old Irish song or have a few glasses of an old Irish whiskey my thoughts go out across oceans and continents to the land where I was born. Through the swirling mists I can picture a little thatched, whitewashed crubeen on the side of a hill. Leaning over the half-door, a leather-faced bonnav-dealer
²
puffs away at his blackened old cruiskeen lawn as he gazes down thoughtfully into the valley. Through the smoky twilight within I see his aged help-meet, or colleen bawn, crouching over the turf fire stirring away at her three-legged poteen of carrageen, pausing now and then to gather an odd sad air from her harpeen. With a heart too full for words I reflect that this is
my
country, and that these people are my own kith and kin, and something like a prayer escapes me as I sob: “Oh! Thank heaven to be away from it all!”

¹
Editors’ Note: This is the headnote to the original story printed in the
Irish Digest
(July 1943), p. 15.

²
An Anglicization of the Gaelic word “banbh,” meaning “piglet.”

Drink and Time in Dublin

by Myles na gCopaleen

A R
ECORDED
S
TATEMENT

—Did you go to that picture
The Lost Weekend
?

—
I did
.

—I never seen such tripe.

—
What was wrong with it
?

—O it was all right, of course—bits of it was good. Your man in the jigs inside the bed and the bat flying in to kill the mouse, that was
damn
good. I’ll tell you another good bit. Hiding the bottles in the jax. And there was no monkey business about that because I tried it since meself. It works but you have to use the half-pint bottles. Up the chimbley is another place I thought of and do you know the ledge affair above windows?

—
I do
.

—That’s another place but you could get a hell of a fall reaching up there on a ladder or standing on chairs with big books on them. And of course you can always tie the small bottles to the underneath of your mattress.

—
I suppose you can
.

—But what are you to do with the empties if you stop in bed drinking? There’s a snag there. I often thought they should have malt in lemonade syphons.

—
Why didn’t you like the rest of
The Lost Weekend
?

—Sure haven’t I been through far worse weekends meself—you know that as well as I do. Sure Lord save us I could tell you yarns. I’d be a rich man if I had a shilling for every morning I was down in the markets at seven o’clock in the slippers with the trousers pulled on over the pyjamas and the overcoat buttoned up to the neck in the middle of the summer. Sure don’t be talking man.

—
I suppose the markets are very congested in the mornings
?

—With drunks? I don’t know. I never looked round any time I was there.

—
When were you last there
?

—The time the wife went down to Cork last November. I won’t forget that business in a hurry. That was a scatter and a half. Did I never tell you about that? O be God, don’t get me on to that affair.

—
Was it the worst ever
?

—It was and it wasn’t but I got the fright of me life. I’ll tell you a damn good one. You won’t believe this but it’s a true bill. This is one of the best you ever heard.

—
I’ll believe anything you say
.

—In the morning I brought the wife down to Kingsbridge in a taxi. I wasn’t thinking of drink at all, hadn’t touched it for four months, but when I paid the taxi off at the station instead of going back in it, the wife gave me a look. Said nothing, of course—after the last row I was for keeping off the beer for a year. But somehow she put the thing into me head. This was about nine o’clock, I suppose. I’ll give you three guesses where I found meself at ten past nine in
another taxi
?

—
Where
?

—Above in the markets. And there wasn’t a more surprised man than meself. Of course in a way it’s a good thing to start at it early in the morning because with no food and all the rest of it you’re finished at four o’clock and you’re home again and stuffed in bed. It’s the late nights that’s the killer, two and three in the morning, getting poisoned in shebeens and all classes of hooky stuff, wrong change, and a taxi man on the touch. After nights like that it’s a strong man that’ll be up at the markets in time next morning.

—
What happened after the day you got back at four
?

—Up at the markets next morning
before
they were open. There was another chap there but I didn’t look at him. I couldn’t tell you what age he was or how bad he was. There was no four o’clock stuff that day. I was around the markets till twelve or so. Then off up town and I have meself shaved be a barber. Then up to a certain hotel and straight into the bar. There’s a whole crowd there that I know. What are you going to have and so on. No no, have a large one. So-and-so’s getting married on Tuesday. Me other man’s wife has had a baby. You know the stuff? Well Lord save us I had a terrible tank of malt in me that day! I had a feed in the middle of it because I remember scalding myself with hot coffee and I never touch the coffee at all only after a feed. Of course I don’t remember what happened me but I was in the flat the next morning with the clothes half off. I was supposed to be staying with the brother-in-law, of course, when the wife was away. But sure it’s the old dog for the hard road. Drunk or sober I went back to me own place. As a matter of fact I never went near the brother-in-law at all. Be this time I was well into the malt. Out with me again feeling like death on wires and I’m inside in the local curing meself for hours, spilling stuff all over the place with the shake in the hand. Then into the barber’s and after that off up again to the hotel for more malt. I’ll give you a tip. Always drink in hotels. If you’re in there you’re in for a feed, or you’ve just had a feed or you’ve an appointment there to see a fellow, and you’re having a small one to pass the time. It looks very bad being in bars during the daytime. It’s a thing to watch, that.

—
What happened then
?

—What do you think happened? What could happen? I get meself into a quiet corner and I start lowering them good-o. I don’t know what happened to me, of course. I met a few pals and there is some business about a greyhound out in Cloghran. It was either being bought or being sold and I go along in the taxi and where we were and where we weren’t I couldn’t tell you. I fall asleep on a chair in some house in town and next thing I wake up perished with the cold and as sick as I ever was in me life. Next thing I know I’m above in the markets. Taxis everywhere of course, no food only the plate of soup in the hotel, and be this time the cheque-book is in and out of the pocket
three or four times a day
, standing drinks all round, kicking up a barney in the lavatory with other drunks, looking for me “rights” when I was refused drink—O, blotto, there’s no other word for it. I seen some of the cheques since.
The writing!
A pal carts me home in a taxi. How long this goes on I don’t know. I’m all right in the middle of the day but in the mornings I’m nearly too weak to walk and the shakes getting worse every day. Be this time I’m getting frightened of meself. Lookat here, mister-me-man, I say to meself, this’ll have to stop. I was afraid the heart might give out, that was the only thing I was afraid of. Then I meet a pal of mine that’s a doctor. This is inside the hotel. There’s only one man for you, he says, and that’s sleep. Will you go home and go to bed if I get you something that’ll make you sleep? Certainly, I said. I suppose this was about four or half four. Very well, says he, I’ll write you out a prescription. He writes one out on hotel notepaper. I send for a porter. Go across with this, says I, to the nearest chemist shop and get this stuff for me and here’s two bob for yourself. Of course I’m at the whiskey all the time. Your man comes back with a box of long-shaped green pills. You’ll want to be careful with that stuff, the doctor says, that stuff’s very dangerous. If you take one now and take another when you get home, you’ll get a very good sleep but don’t take any more till to-morrow night because that stuff’s very dangerous. So I take one. But I know the doctor doesn’t know how bad I am. I didn’t tell him the whole story, no damn fear. So out with me to the jax where I take another one. Then back for a drink, still as wide-awake as a lark. You’ll have to go home now, the doctor says, we can’t have you passing out here, that stuff acts very quickly. Well, I have one more drink and off with me,
in a bus
, mind you, to the flat. I’m very surprised on the bus to find meself so wide-awake, looking out at people and reading the signs on shops. Then I begin to get afraid that the stuff is too weak and that I’ll be lying awake for the rest of the evening and all night. To hell with it, I say to meself, we’ll chance two more and let that be the end of it. Down went two more in the bus. I get there and into the flat. I’m still wide-awake and nothing will do me only one more pill for luck. I get into bed. I don’t remember putting the head on the pillow. I wouldn’t go out quicker if you hit me over the head with a crow-bar.