The Wake - Table of contents

The Wake - afters (30)

I kept my two dates at the City Hotel. Aisling was waiting outside for me and I kissed her so long and held her so tight people were looking.

“Oh thank God. You smell lovely Jeremiah. Are you all right?”

Red mouth to her red mouth, washed against her unwashed and the smell of last night still off her.

I took a breath. “I’m fine. What about you? I was so worried.”

“You know me. Survivor. I’ll tell you later. Will we go inside for a bite to eat? Unless you want to stay and listen to the speeches?”

Some girl speaking through a sound system outside the Guildhall was calling Derry the capital city of injustice. Clever that. Bit of an exaggeration but still, speechmaker’s licence.

“Naw, we’ll go in, is that okay? I’m starved with the hunger.”

Inside I found Frank Gogarty and gave him his keys. He had a neat professional bandage on him like a white skullcap and was looking not bad considering, feeling reasonable. I did the introductions but they remembered each other anyway. From the Grandstand. Smiling pleasantries, car’s in Bridge Street, do you want me to show you, not at all, I’ll find it, pleasantries again, thanks, handshakes, goodbyes. People that pass in the night.

“That’s a really nice man,” said Aisling.

“Amazing man. You wanted to see the courage of him. He actually owns the civil rights banner that was carried on the march you know.”

“Owned. I saw it being burned.”

“Aw dear. Tell us, how long has Frances to stay in?”

“Two days at least. She’s lucky when I think of it. If I hadn’t seen her and dragged her away it might have been too late you know.”

“Will we ask for a menu? That food smells lovely whatever it is.”

We heard trouble as we lay together that night. Sometime before we went to sleep it died away. In the morning we listened to the Radio Eireann news about the police invading the Bogside at half two in the morning singing Hey hey we’re the Monkees and beating people up. A man came on saying he rang the police to tell them the RUC were in the street outside kicking in doors and breaking windows and could they send someone.

But all this was months ago. There’s another kind of chassis now because the prime minister Captain Terence O’Neill had to resign for being too moderate and another branch of the aristocracy has taken over don’t you know, chap I hardly heard of before called James Dawson Chichester-Clark. Aisling reckons he’s going to go at it with both barrels. The place will be like Dawson City, she says, before this cowboy’s finished. She showed me an interview Terence O’Neill gave the Belfast Telegraph after he resigned. I can nearly rhyme it off it’s that good. It’s frightfully hard to explain to Protestants that if you give Roman Catholics a good job and a good house they will live like Protestants because they will see neighbours with cars and television sets. They will refuse to have eighteen children on National Assistance. If you treat Roman Catholics with due consideration and kindness they will live like Protestants in spite of the authoritative nature of their Church.

Ah, our Church. He got that right anyway. The authority of the Church that has us bending the knee handed down by boys like Augustine who for the best years of his life got up on everything that moved and rumour had it some things that didn’t and then turned to God for something that would do him for when he was past it. Father of the Church now, biggest slagger off of women ever born after spending half his life shagging them shitless, declared marriage a necessary evil, evil because it involved a dirty three letter word ending in X, necessary because how else were the numbers in the Church going to get any bigger? God’s ways are not our ways and all that, but what can you do? And who’s this else there was? Of course, their royal highnesses Solomon and David, who when they weren’t writing psalms and stuff for the bible were having it off with whatever took their fancy. Lecturing to the chosen people and lechering with whomsoever they chose.

And now that I’m on a roll there’s Paul the Sixth in his marble halls in the Vatican popetificating to women that are dying in childbirth and of course our bishop Doctor Farren in his palace across the street from Mickey MacTamm’s barbers with its twenty-five rooms, the palace I’m talking about here, Mickey only has the one if you don’t count the toilet, honouring us with his presence on Corpus Christi and Easter Sunday and the like as he lords it down the middle aisle soaking all and sundry with holy water. And the priests. Hourigan. Swindells. Cullinan. Finucane. My God, how many bad apples does it take to make a barrel rotten? Or is it the barrel that makes the apples bad?