The Wake - Table of contents

The Wake - afters (10)

“What are you on about? I’m only here twenty minutes. Why would I be heading?”

“Naw, I was just thinking —”

“I was in Tracy’s there and some musclebound thug on the door turfed me out and all I was doing was talking a bit of politics with this arsehole in a tweed jacket. Tweed fucking jacket. What would you say about a man wears a tweed jacket?”

“I don’t know. Maybe talking politics isn’t the best thing to do when you’ve drink in you.”

“What the fuck you talking about? Sure that’s all they do in this place here. Religion and politics. I'm getting out to fuck anyway. Heading to Manchester after Christmas. Did you know this? Did you ever know this? The absent presence of God’s supposed to be the thing keeps the churches going and it’s nothing but an absence of course, all it is is a pretence of a presence that isn’t there at all. The whole thing’s a political smokescreen with vestments on. And the politics they talk here in this bloody town isn’t so much politics as shite. And you’d think to listen to them they were over on the left bank of the Seine. Some of this crowd think they’re real bohemians, you know that? See them two over there?”

“Who?”

“Right behind you, them two you were talking to a minute ago.”

He turned his head to look at Aisling’s table and all astir I followed his gaze. The black leather was tight on her breasts and shoulders. She was in rapt conversation with her friend and her face was so pale and her eyes were bigger and bluer than I’d ever seen them. Why was that? Was it the short hair did it, made her eyes look that way, gave her the waif look? Maybe she wasn’t eating.

“Listen to them, they’re still at it. I could hear them every time Cole drew breath. They’re all for justice and they wouldn’t know what it was if it hit them up the fanny. Say nothing, just listen to them.”

I said nothing and listened. I listened to her voice and tasted her again.

“I always thought it was a work in progress but Audrey kept saying it was a betrayal of socialist principles.”

“See what I mean? Shite.”

“Shh. They’ll hear you.”

“It was just the way we were treated differently from the permanent ones, you know, the kibbutzniks. They’d all these privileges. But Rome wasn’t built in a day. I tried to tell —”

“Aye,” said Pearse swinging round to glare at her, had more than enough of it from the look of him, “and it’ll take a few more days for the bastards to wipe out the rest of the Palestinians so it will.”

Aisling turned her head in our direction. I lowered my eyes.

“Sorry, were you talking to me?” she asked. She was shaken but she wasn’t going to let it pass.

“Naw,” said Pearse, “I was talking about you.”

“Oh?”

“Aye, oh deary me. I couldn’t help hearing your sanctimonious claptrap. You and this Audrina one that were in the kibbutz splitting hairs over the rights yous were given, out there following the fashion with your phoney do-gooding. Social equality, isn’t that what the thing’s supposed to be about? What the hell were yous doing in that bloody commune when the ones that worked their land in Palestine for hundreds of years have no equality at all? How would you like your olive groves that have been there for yonks cut down every turnabout? How would you like your house knocked down and your land and water taken off you? How in under fuck can you sit out there in a fucking kibbutz that’s supposed to be about Marxist principles when the Palestinians are treated like shite? I never heard anything so fucking ridiculous in my life.”

Aisling’s eyes flashed. “Who do you think you are to be making judgements —”

“I’m someone can see the wood for the trees, that’s who.”

“Have you ever been there?” she demanded.

“Don’t have to go. Would I want to go to South Africa when I know what the whites are doing to the blacks? Naw, and I wouldn’t want to go to your precious Israel either. Listen missy, can you name me another country that’s not an island that hasn’t got a border?”