Life's A Beach

Sitting under palm trees on a beach in Venezuela where the waves gently kissed the shore, eating a bowl of freshly grown organic fruit, Socrates logged onto the Internet and found out that he was dead. He’d been dead for a long time, reborn in this prelapsarian paradise where it never got cold and no-one wore shell suits or listened to techno music or drove SUVs, where there was no McDonalds or no Tescos, where children who lived the way they’d done for hundreds of years worshipped him almost as a demi-god from a Conrad novel, but now it was official, his old life in Ireland, where he was born as James, was now over, after his wife had dealt with the media she could quietly sneak off to join him and they could fuck like rabbits like they used to.
Not being able to tell anyone of this and knowing no other way to celebrate, he ran into the water and splashed around like a child who’d never seen the sea before. And then he realised the absurdity of what he was doing and rose from the water like our distant ancestors did and asked himself some serious questions.
How did it come to this, this absurd, Kafkaesque paradox that he needed his existence to be negated for him to really live, under a pseudonym on the other side of the world? Was this what he wanted for himself, or some fate thrust upon him by some mischievous omnipotent gods or by the chaotic randomness of the universe? He sat back, watched the waves ripple, and tried to recall the story of the events that brought him here.
He wouldn't remember it all. His memories would be blurry and subjective, like one of those old home movies that he appeared in the early eighties. But this was the way that it appeared to him.

Doors of perception

It started, as many things do, with a knock on the door. The person on the other side didn’t look like a Deus ex Machina or a Joycean epiphany, just like... well, I’ll try to describe him in a while, when I do, perhaps you’ll understand why I deferred that moment for so long. It had been a Friday night much like any other for James, that was the name he gave himself, and didn’t think he’d have any cause to change it before that fateful knock. He’d been at a benefit concert in the centre of Cork, the cause was one close to his heart, a piece of land precious to the people of Cork had been sealed off and the people were fighting to get it back. Some bands played, some were talented , some should be grateful that they had day jobs to got to, which they probably had, as this was 2001, and the Celtic Tiger was still roaring. He would have been up for a trip to the mosh-pit in his nightclub of choice, but he’d had some inoculations in his shoulders as he was planning an exotic foreign trip in a few months time. Why? He hadn’t really thought about it that much, what it was he was looking for, perhaps he was obeying some atavistic urge to beat out a new path, though his eagerness to make his mark was less pronounced... leave nothing but footprints let {insert destination here} change you, not the other way around, he didn’t want to repeat the Lonely Planet clichés too much in case the became just that. Anyway, he had a couple of sore arms and didn’t want to make them any sorer. So he thought he’d have an early night in. It didn’t seem like that momentous a decision, perhaps it wasn’t, maybe all the ensuing events would have happened anyway, who knows?
The streets of Cork, didn’t seem like a vortex that would change his life forever, just the same streets he’d been walking down for years. To many, the city was a point of entry, a transit stop for middle-aged tourists, and more recently refugees from ugly foreign regimes. To him it was home, heck, he’d been living in the city for almost ten years, all of his adult life. He’d spent his childhood in a nearby small village which, much to his disdain, was being sucked into the sprawling suburbia around the city. He’d never thought about why he’d moved, it just seemed like the natural thing to do. Not that he wasn’t a thinker. Truth be told, he had a head full of ideas that would have driven him insane if... I’ll tell you later. He thought too much, such men aren’t dangerous, except possibly to themselves.
Right now, he just wanted to go to bed, though a fifteen minutes walk through Cork’s Bacchanalian streets separated him from it’s warm embrace. They got so cold in the winter, with the polar ice caps melting and it’s cold waters challenging the Gulf of Mexico to some apocalyptic duel... the stellas he passed on the street didn’t seem that bothered, drunkenly shouting abuse at each other while the bitter Atlantic breezes snapped at their mostly uncovered legs. Perhaps all the layers of make-up on their faces kept them warm, the way the war-paint would have sheltered their Celtic forbears. The drunkenness bothered him, not in a reactionary, things-were-better-in-my-day sort of way, he was only 29, after all, he just wondered if life was meant to be that way, work all week, drink all weekend, till the pressure on your arteries became too much and... maybe some higher power was trying to tell us something, that there was something beyond the finite continuum of work and consumption.
He wasn't a drinker himself.
He crossed the bridge across the putrid waters of the Lee and most of the noises off the city started to dissipate. The smell of malted hops wafted over from the brewery, pervasive as the smell of fried fish in a Thai market. He passed the abandoned buildings that had gone back to nature with growing from their walls, reflected, in his typically melancholy way that every other building would one day be like this, for whatever the amoeba evolved into after we were gone to ponder over.
He reached the top of the hill where his house afforded a pretty good view of the city and the lush fields beyond, he’d actually seen a couple of Japanese tourists here one day, no shit. It’s the sort of vista that someone of his febrile mind could look over and reflect of the number of people that were sleeping, fucking, masturbating, watching late night TV, drinking, smoking pot or just sitting on the toilet bowl wondering how their lives ever turned out the way they did. But he was too tired, so he just unlocked the front door of his house, climbed up the stairs and entered his bedroom.
It wasn't Home and Garden material. Even some of his bachelor friends had expressed horror at his lack of concern for personal hygiene. He was always philosophical and would say that it was more important to be healthy on the inside, and that he was someone who tried to look beyond the surface of things. So if other people chided him for leaving newspapers scattered on the floor, he would ask them to look beyond the veil of Maya (a concept he didn’t understand all that well) and point out how they showed what an inquiring mind he had, or how the printed word was sacred to him, what a great gift literacy was. Either that or that he was waiting for paper recycling facilities to arrive in Cork. He’d tried to brighten up the gaff a bit by putting some posters on the walls but when he’d started to do his laundry by hand and dry it on the heater the room would become full of steam and they would waft like falling leaves. Only the books on his shelves gave any visitors a clue to what sort of person he was. Perhaps the overwhelming impression was of someone who wanted to live simply, a room that seemed to ask a visitor to accept it’s tenant just the way he was and not try to change him. Of course he realised that change would come, there was no stasis in the universe, all was flux.
He made some Camomile tea, which he knew he probably wasn’t going to drink, took off most of his clothes and then went to bed. He was a little prone to insomnia. He lay in bed, waiting for Nature’s soft muse to lull him with the sound of softest melody and steep his senses with forgetfulness.
Then the knock came. He’d ponder for the rest of his life what would have happened if he’d chosen to ignore it, though he’d always conclude that much the same course of events would have ensued. He got up and answered it. On the other side was the boyfriend of Maude, the young girl downstairs, or at least that was his understanding. He’d been friends with her but, seeing the simian slope of her boyfriends shoulders and the psychotic, schizophrenic glint in his eyes, had advised her to give him a wide berth, as all her other friends had. She ignored them all, and they’d moved in together. His name was Dick. He was English. He stood outside James’ door, looking for all the world like the second or third guy on the left on one of those “ascent of man” diagrams and said in his slurred, inebriated tones, something that was completely incomprehensible to James.
James looked puzzled and said, “I’m Sorry?”
“Gimmedanznumber” was his slightly more coherent reply.
Eventually he discerned that what he was looking for was the phone number of Dan, the ex-boyfriend of Maude. James had no idea why he might want such a number, but gave him the number of Niall, who was a friend of his. The troglodyte left without thanking and James went back to bed. If it had ended then there wouldn’t be much of a story to tell, but he was back ten minutes and he brought a friend with him, someone who looked a little more advanced on an evolutionary scale but who substituted his mad, unfocussed rage for the sort of cynical love of violence you only see in members of Germanic races. He could’ve been a member of the SS in it’s early days, intimidating people with that evil stare. As it was, he was just a hired thug. I say “hired” though he was probably doing it for free, taking advantage of an opportunity to hurt someone. And when James saw that look in his eye, he knew that he was the person who was going to be their victim. They ordered him, with that Teutonic arrogance I mentioned to “Get Dan” or else they would “Get Him”. They pushed a mobile phone in his face, arrogantly blew smoke in his face and ordered him to ring Niall and get Dan’s number, though they’d just tried to do the same thing themselves and failed. He asked Niall for the number, and futilely, knowing the bind he was in, asked in desperate tones. Niall told him the best thing to so was not to get involved, Dick was psychotic, keep away from him. He put the phone down, and awaited the terrible beating he knew he was going to get.
If anybody else in the house heard the terrible screams as their heavy boots hit James’ face and ribs they didn’t do anything about it. It turned out, though that the mobile phone had been switched on. After the thugs had left making some remarks about the state of his room and warning him not to tell the police in terms that seemed more than a little paranoiac, he heard the doorbell ring. It was the police, he buzzed them in, told them which room they were looking for. He got up, wiped some of the blood off his face and went downstairs, not wanting to spend any more time in this house with these monsters. He saw the impression he made on the police, thin, partly dressed, blood streaming from his part-Jewish face through his long curls and his scraggly beard, seeping from his thigh which they’d sadistically scraped with a nail scissors.
He knew that they would understand what thugs they were. It seemed they knew this already, it wasn’t any big secret. After they’d let the thugs escape through the back door and run away somewhere, they explained to him that Dick had been beating Maude so much that she’d had a miscarriage and, having been thrown out of her family’s house, went back to Dan. He encouraged her to tell the police, much to the anger of Dick, who’d “hired” the Nazioid thug from England to beat up Dan, and Maude’s father just for good measure. They’d been trying to ring Dan in an effort to intimidate him into dropping the case. Perhaps they thought James really could get his number, most likely it was an excuse to administer another savage beating.
James spent the night in Niall’s house. He went to the hospital in the morning. It was Saturday morning, the A&E ward was full of cases from the night before. The doctor told him, not very helpfully, that it could have been a lot worse. Then, deciding he had little choice, he rang his mother and asked to stay with her for a while. It wasn’t an easy decision. Knowing what a disappointment he’d been to her, and her West Brit inclinations, he knew that she would not be that sympathetic. While the rest of his family grasped his situation relatively easily, she could only repeat with rosary-like regularity, “It must be something to do with drugs” It infuriated James that she couldn’t accept that two nice English boys could do such a thing to her son without some external agency being responsible, but he knew that that was the groove she had settled on, there wasn’t any point in trying to change her. These were dark, melancholy times, particularly when he found out that the thugs had been let out on bail and would be free to escape back to foot-and-mouth land. In his traumatised state, he thought the promises his family and their friends made to sort out the thugs might have been more than posturing, macho bravado. It seemed destined that they were going to escape justice.
The only thing that kept him going during these times was the prophylaxis that walking his dog through the fields provided. His area wasn’t the sort that drew tourists from all over the world, it’s beauty didn’t make anyone’s jaw drop. It didn’t have the awe-inspiring topography of the Cliffs of Moher or serene majesty of the Lakes of Killarney. it didn’t even have that much flora or fauna, though he would catch the odd lark or pheasant now and again. But it was his space, his heimat, the place where he could commune with nature and be with his thoughts. And his dog. Ageing but still full of energy, she was ignorant of the trauma he had been through, but no worse for it. In any case her loyalty and her support was unconditional, a contract they had implicitly signed over years and years of treks through the countryside and tonnes of surreptitiously filched vol-au-vents. He felt a bond with her that he could feel with no human being... once someone had asked who he was closest to and he said... well, more of that anon. He’d reacted tetchily when he’d been on the phone to Dan who’d described the thugs as “animals” James knew that the only animals who indulged in such gratuitous violence were his own species, with their politics and their ideologies and their illusions of being created by some higher power in their own image. If there was a god, he wouldn’t look and talk like Dick.
He felt especially grateful for the repose walks with his dog offered him, as he was too petit bourgeois, too self conscious, and though he’d never admit it, too Catholic to ever try anything like meditation. He valued solitude, almost at times to the point of being a solipsist, but there was never that much refuge inside his head. Perhaps when he travelled, he could shake off the middle-class coil of his upbringing. Yet he considered little of what separation anxiety the dog would feel, as if, unconsciously he felt the dog had been put there just for him, as if the Garden of Eden anthropocentric myth was still ingrained in his brain somewhere.
He lived like this for a month or so, patiently accepting his mother’s wild illogicities, reading his father’s old books, and taking his dog for walks. Then one day a bombshell hit him. Metaphorically, I mean. If you’re not from Ireland and only know the country from watching CNN... Oh, never mind. he found out that while the Nazi had fled, Boorman or Eichmann-like to England, Dick had stayed in Ireland and faced the music. It turned out, however, that the judiciary had decided to play him a much gentler tune than might have been expected, a six month suspended sentence. Yes, you who philosophise disgrace and criticise all fear, bury the rag deep in your face, now’s the time for your tears. James didn’t cry, though, too shocked and dismayed, too violated, almost. He wondered what would have happened if the opposite had happened, if it was an Irish Krusty that had done this to an English girl in England. it would probably never even have made the courts, as the perpetrator would have been killed by an angry mob, egged on by the Sun, the Mail and the Telegraph. Was the shame at being Irish that he saw infecting his mother like a cancer also sucking the reason out of the justice department? Not the way they told it. As far as they were concerned, Dick wasn’t really their responsibility and they thought if they hassled him enough, he’d go back to the putrid little cesspool in England from which he came.
James didn’t think much of that strategy. He did what he thought was the one thing open to him. He went to the IRA.

Political Animal

It wasn’t an easy decision. His formative years had been in the late ‘70’s and early ‘80’s, when anger about the treatment of Catholics in the North and the horror of Bloody Sunday had given way to shame about the couple of hundred English people killed by Irish terrorists - one for every ten thousand people that starved during the Irish famine. His mother, like I said was the queen of the west Brits, later, later... no, I can’t say it. His father had been more complex, a teacher of Irish, he had initially bent over as far backward as he could to show how anti-IRA he was. Then when he used to go over there working, he would realise how the British media exaggerated the conflict to demonise a racial other within there own society... it wasn’t that long since the last “No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs” signs came down. Though he didn’t see any point in agonising about the few dozen English people who’d died at the hands of IRA bombs, many more people, he reasoned, died as a result of the British arms trade abroad. Yet he couldn’t shake the notion that somehow, there was something fundamentally scary about the people he was going to deal with.
The Sinn Fein office in Cork was just across the river from the centre of town. Never before had the pedestrian bridge, named for a legendary 18th Century altruist, adopted such a symbolic, Rubiconic quality, it’s urine-coloured waters symbolise such a paradigm shift in his life. He knew where the office was as he’d passed there so many times before, he used to live on the same street of old, red-brick industrial houses, now filled mostly with students, never thinking that much about what went on behind the green, white and gold posters and the pictures of the hunger strikers. With characteristic diffidence, he stood outside the door like he was waiting to ask a girl to dance but couldn’t quite summon up the courage. Eventually he started to notice people looking at him, or so it seemed to him, and decided he would better go inside.
He was greeted with a combination of a smile and a sort of inquisitive, chin-rubbing gaze, he didn’t think about it too much at the time, he probably thought they were wondering if he’d being looking for the peace alliance or the organic food store down the road. In any case he was more preoccupied with looking around the office at the various propaganda on display, he couldn’t help thinking of the Cyclops chapter of Ulysses. Signatures of all things he was there to read. The person behind the desk with the quizzical expression seemed not to care too much, as if he was giving him the run of the place. When James had had his fill of reading, he turned to the person behind the desk. He was asked “well, what can I do for you?”, in a sort of refined rural accent, West Cork or South Kerry thought James, though he was no Henry Higgins. Basically a heavily spin-doctored voice is what you need to know, representative of the new, inclusive Sinn Fein party. So reflective was he on the quality of his voice that he forgot for a second what it was he actually did want. It wasn’t that he didn’t know what he wanted, just how to ask for it. He felt an immediate pang of empathy as he embarked on this meandering, circumlocutory journey.
“Well, I’ve been given to understand that, since, y’know the cessation of hostilities in the North, you’ve been trying to broaden your support base in the south through an emphasis on social inclusiveness, better health care and...” he lowered his voice “a more, um, what shall I say, hands-on solution to the problem of violent crime.” He was starting to sweat a little. It was a tendency of his. Not sure if I’ve mentioned it before. For his part the person behind the counter just kept looking intrigued, as if he wanted to know where this was going.
“Well, I’ve been the victim of a violent assault myself and...” he rubbed one of his scars nervously, “and the Gardai haven’t been much help, and nor have my family, and to be honest I don’t know who else to turn to.” He swallowed quite a lot of phlegm, bit his upper lip a little, not so much that it hurt. The person behind the door seemed slighted more than anything else, James had made it sound, he just realised that this was a last resort. Which, he reasoned, it was.
“Who did you vote for at the last election... Sorry, I didn’t ask your name?”
James decided it would be better to tell the truth, which was that he voted for the greens.
“And... did you give us, perhaps, a transfer?”
The sweat now glistening on his forehead, he started to breathe heavily, with palpable unease. Sensing the award position he had put his interlocutor in, the person behind the counter moved with some dexterity to resolve the impasse, as it were.
“It doesn’t matter if you did or not, really. After all we were electoral pariahs until a few years ago... still are, to an extent, the media is still dead against us. But hang on, there’s someone else I need to bring to discuss this.”
As he went out into the back office, James thought of running out the door down the street and never setting foot in this office again. Then he thought that this would leave him with two people on the streets of Cork that he want to avoid like a dose of gonorrhoea, and there were enough of those already, so he bade his time, read some more propaganda, and awaited the arrival of the mysterious stranger. When he came, he bore the look of someone who’d been disturbed from translating an old Celtic text into English and needed to return to it as soon as possible. Yet when he saw James he seemed a little less preoccupied. He nodded approvingly at the guy who James met first and whose name he hadn’t caught. This put the fear of God into James, who was wondering about what he got himself into.
“James, this is Caomhin, and, sorry, I never introduced myself. I’m Cormac.”
“James, eh”, responded Caoimhin, in a voice that was slightly gruff and not without an element of condescension, seeming to roll his name around in his head. “So, James”, he went on, resting his chin on his fingertips, “tell us what happened and how you think we can help.”
So he told them the whole story, deliberately neglecting the one detail that he knew they would like to know most, as if saving the best bit for the encore. It didn’t take much effort to maintain a look of wounded innocence, as, he imagined, it wouldn’t have done for the Catholics in the north prior to ‘72, the year of his birth, incidentally. With his naturally fragile voice and his obviously real words, and the basic honesty of what he was saying, he would have been a wet dream for a pushy lawyer in a more litigious culture, like the US.
“And so, where were these lads from, that did this t’ya?” James could sense his tone becoming more amicable. Without trying to appear to make too much of a point of it, he replied in a tone that was as neutral as possible, simply “England”. He watched the look in Caomhin and Cormac’s faces, noticing their eyes raising almost imperceptibly and casting a brief but knowing glance at each other. As if it were a mere bureaucratic appointment, like being in the social welfare office except with people of better interpersonal skills, Caomhin said, “We’ve got a good bunch of lads who do this sort of job in the city area. We’ll need some details of course, where we can find them, some photos would be good, we can have it done as soon as possible, BUT, there’s something you might be able to do for us in return.” Seeing the fear on James’ face, he moved to reassure him. He reached out his hand to James’ shoulder, which briefly intensified the fear, “don't worry, it’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s just... well, come round here 8 O Clock Sunday night and we’ll discuss it. Of course I don’t need to tell you that you’re not going to discuss this with anyone, need I?
James shook his head, thinking only of what another terrible bind he had probably got himself into. Caomhin for his part simply asked for details of where they could be found. When they heard that one of them had escaped back to England they seemed disappointed, James didn’t ponder on why that might be. He’d already had a key cut for the front door of the old house to, well, what would you say, facilitate the dispensation of justice. He put it on the table, trying not to look too dramatic about it, gave them the address, and a careful description. They shook hands, James was reminded to come back on Sunday night. While the tone wasn’t threatening, he felt he could sense enough menace to suggest it might be better to do as they suggested. He left the office with his head spinning like a teenager who’s had his first kiss. He wondered how he would react if his passed Dick, who he’d rechristened “The Cunt” on the street. Would he be able to resist a smug, you’re-going-to-get-what’s-coming grin? Probably not. Then he wondered what he was going to tell his mother. Not the truth, obviously, but it might be hard to keep this thing out of the papers, and she might get suspicious. For the next few days he eagerly read the Irish Examiner, poring over it’s pages with the ardour of a student of Russian history looking through gulag records, trying to find out if any English krusties had taken a very bad beating. On one occasion his mother asked why he was so desperate to read the paper. He gave her an evasive response, which didn’t really incur her suspicion. He was always evasive with her, they’d never been able to communicate all that well. There were all sorts of reasons for this. All his visits to the tackily laid out pages of the Examiner proved futile, however. He thought for a while that he knew how a woman who’s trying to get pregnant feels when she has her period. Then again, he thought, probably not. He’d have to make up some story about where he was going on Sunday night as well, after all, sometimes the truth hurts, doesn’t it? He settled on going to see an arthouse film that he knew she wouldn’t have heard of, and if she did ask any questions he could download some reviews off the web and quote them. It wouldn’t be the first time that had been done. Amazingly, it seemed he had a choice of arthouse movies to pretend he was going to see. That wouldn’t have been the case even three or four years ago. He felt a surge of civic pride. Sunday came and there was no mention of any incident such as he thought might have happened, no editorialising about the dangerous growth of vigilantism as he had fantasised about from the gaggle of West Brits in the Irish Independent. He felt a sense of betrayal which he thought it would be better to keep to himself in his visit to the cinema later. After all, he’d compromised himself, risked alienating his family forever, it seemed, for nothing.
Sunday night came. He’d run out of food, as he always did when he stayed with his family for more than a couple of days at a time, the rest of them weren’t vegetarians like he was. He ended up doing like his ancestors did and boiled a big pot of potatoes for himself. Bizarrely apposite, he thought. He felt groggy on the bus up to the city, he was in the habit of going for a rest, chilling out, putting on a bit of music after dinner and travelling on a full stomach made him a bit disorientated. Not the right condition to be in for such an encounter, he thought, but there was little he could do to change that now. He approached the steep walk up to the office with the apprehension of a young private visiting a brothel for the first time, or so he imagined. He had an eye for a simile, and he had studied literature in college. When he reached the office it was locked. He knocked tentatively on the door, not before the thought of leaving briefly crossed his mind. Cormac let him in, led him through to the mysterious back office. To his surprise, there were six or seven people sitting around a table, of various ages and trichological states. All were male. Caomhin was one of them, the rest were new faces. Around them were shelves covered in books. A few caught his eye, the mammoth New History of Ireland had a prominent place, it was a collection he’d dipped into in his college years. The people sat round three sides of the table, and he was offered a place on the other, which made him feel like he was on trial.
He sat down, was introduced to all the other people around the table. He couldn’t possibly remember all their names, of course, but nodded politely all the same.
After a few seconds, Caomhin said, “I suppose you want to know what happened to those thugs, then?”
A little taken aback, James nodded, and said, in his usual diffident tones, that he would. He couldn’t help noticing the other people around the table observing his every gesture carefully, almost making mental notes, it seemed. But then he focused his mind on what Caomhin had to say. Which, in a tone casual enough to disconcert James quite a bit, was this:
“Well, we’ve got to say it was a bit easier than you made it sound. You gave us the impression that they were really dangerous thugs, but the fella our lads saw is such... such a snivelling little coward. It didn’t take them half an hour to find out the address of where the other lad lives in London.”
James’ eyebrows raised. He’d actually given up the ghost on finding the thug who’d fled, so this was a pleasant surprise. He didn’t really know what to say, so he let the inquisitive look on his face speak for him.
“Our lads over in London are looking for the lad right now. Of course if it turns out that lad Dick gave us false information...” The sinister stare in his eyes suggested something that involved baseball bats, tweezers, possibly some electrodes. Such was the miasma of different emotions running through James’ head, Caomhin took the liberty of anticipating his next question.
“He’s down in a place in Kerry. We’ll keep him there until we see what happens. We took most of his stuff, so the landlord ‘n the cops’s’ll assume he’s fled the country like the other fucker. We’re actually a little surprised it was so easy ourselves.”
In a flash he could see why people were turning to vigilantism rather than the Gardai, whose main talents seemed to be bullying immigrants, beating up peaceful protesters, and persecuting small time drug dealers. Then he reflected on his own Machiavellian logic, which allowed him to reconcile his own liberal inclinations with the crypto-fascist methods that his interlocutors had used. Then he felt a sort of patriotic glow, thinking that not only were his nation richer and generally better off than their neighbours, they were better at a British speciality, violent thuggery. Then he thought he was becoming the citizen in Ulysses. Then he wondered if they would allow him to go down to Kerry and do something humiliating to Dick, even something small, like spitting in his face. Then he looked around the room and felt all of a sudden that the people around him were less jurors than members of a brotherhood into which he had been initiated and, somewhat frighteningly, might never be allowed to leave. Then it occurred to him that some display of gratitude might be in order.
“I don’t know what to say”, he began, with more honesty than anyone else in the room knew. “I was just chancing my arm coming here, to be honest, it was a last resort. The cops were so useless and... you guys were so effective. I really can’t thank you enough.” He saw the looks of satisfaction on their faces and knew he’d never have seen such a face in the mirror after correcting a pile of student’s essays, or even after writing that novel that he’d always meant to begin work on. He understood the visceral, atavistic urge that led men to lives of violence. He knew, in a way he’d never fully realised before, that this meant the world would never be a perfectly safe place.
Caomhin broke his Joycean, or perhaps Proustian train of thought with the following offer: “If you want to come down to Kerry to see those lads suffer, just ask. It think t’would be better if you waited until after the other lad is brought back which might be a little tricky. If not, we can probably just sort him out over there.” James admired the direct, unspun honesty in Caomhin’s words. No “collateral damage” here. Then he felt trusted, which is always a good feeling, and then realised that he was in no position to betray these obviously very dangerous men who knew roughly where he lived. Then he wondered what sort of Faustian bargain he had entered into. Then, as if by some Druidic clairvoyance, Caomhin, in whom he’d never noticed any difficulty walking, leaned back and said:
“Well, I’m glad that we’ve been able to sort all this out for you, we can’t make any promises about the other lad, but, well, we think, as you probably know, that the English have done enough damage in this country already, so we were especially glad to help in this case.”
James knew this was leading somewhere, but where that was was a mystery.
“Normally when we do this sort of thing, we ask something in return. A donation to the movement, perhaps, if people are unemployed, can’t afford it, they do some work for us, put up posters, that sort of stuff.” He scanned James’ face, which was motionless as a poker players. He wasn’t much of a card shark, but had been claiming unemployment benefit for the last few years. Whatever you say, say nothing.
“In your case, though, we think, well maybe there’s something that, how would you say, might be mutually beneficial. You’re unemployed right now, did you say?”
Sensing no degree of judgement in his tone but wondering where this was leading, James nodded. “Well, as you probably know, there’s an election coming up next year, and you might have seen the opinion polls...”
James’ mind drifted back to when he went canvassing with his dad for the labour party when he was a child. One memory stood out, the time when he was seven or eight, when his dad had asked him to hand out leaflets supporting striking butchers to passers by when they were both marching down Pana. He thought of how he would to himself now, with his carefully brushed curls and his short pants exposing his scrawny, pink legs and the high-pitched mongrel accent he had back then... this incident might have contributed to his being a vegan today.
When he came out of this reverie Caomhin had not finished talking about electoral strategy, poll demographics, policy initiatives and the like, in short, he hadn’t come to the point, seeming, like James often did himself, to put as many words as possible between himself and what he wanted to say. Which, as if James’ head hadn’t been fucked with enough for one day, was this:
“... and so, to cut a long story short, we think we have a serious chance of snatching a seat in this constituency, but we need someone who’s young, attractive, well-spoken, will appeal to middle-class left wingers and fuddy-duddy green types, doesn’t have a criminal record... You don’t have a criminal record, do you, James?”
He tried to maintain that look of studied composure after it dawned on him what he was being asked, but he could see the shock on his own face reflected in the discomfort of those around him. Then, though it would have been political, and, in all probability, literal suicide to admit it in the coming months, the first thing that entered his head, a head honed by years of Spartan living into a the calculator of a financial consultant for people on low incomes, was that, if he became a TD, he would live simply for five years, assuming the next government lasted that long, save up enough money to go and live on an island off the coast of South-East Asia, or perhaps Goa, or Latin America forever. But all he could say in response was: “You want me to stand for the Dail?”
“Yes”, said, Caomhin, “I suppose we do. There’s a few things we need to iron out first, of course. How well up are you, for example, on the situation up North at the minute?”
“Ah, I try to keep myself informed”, he replied, in the sort of casual, diplomatic tone that he thought was the quality they were looking for. He went on to answer a more similar questions, in much the same way, without ever really answering, a little surprised at his own ability to segue so seamlessly into political discourse. He’d read that acting was something that came naturally to children, and to adults as well, particularly now, when our jobs, our roles and our views could shift so quickly. And politics, surely, was the job that needed the best acting skills of all.
Caomhin then asked him how much he’d read about Irish history. He couldn’t tell the truth, which was that he’d studied history in college, but that he’d always found the sad story of his own little island a horribly depressing one. He said, in a reply calculated to repel any awkward follow-up questions, that what fascinated him most about Irish history was the analogies between Britain’s exploitation of Ireland and the exploitation of the west of the third world today, their apathy about the environment, their obliteration of local cultures. It was an answer calculated to give an impression of someone who cared about big ideas and not little trifles like names, dates, and the like. Not that he couldn’t remember at least some of the dates that had been drilled into his head in primary school, 432, 1014, 1798, 1847, 1916, 1922... it’s just that there were some cloudy periods in between. Sensing, but not wanting to say this, Caomhin praised him for his insights and offered him the run of their extensive library on the subject. James responded by thanking him and scanning the shelves all around him. Then he asked when he would know when the decision about his candidature would be made. One of the people around the table, who must have felt himself to be a passive observer, and, in truth, would be played by an extra if this were a movie, coughed and said, “Well, these things take time. We’ll have to discuss it with head office.”
Caomhin merely nodded assent, but the last two words bore a hole in James’ brain. Head Office? Did they mean the world-famous names who’d been on the run from the police for years and years but now were dining in the White House and appearing on the cover of Time and Newsweek? Yes, they probably did. Then it occurred to him that these were the same names that would whip his mother into an indignant frenzy. How would she react to all of this? He projected the following trajectory: Shock, Horror, Anger, some more Anger, Shame, Disappointment, Acquiescence, Acceptance. He fantasised that one day, perhaps on her death bed, she would reach the “Pride” stage, but before any of this could happen, the lads in “head office” would have to make their decision. Before that, the people around him would have to make theirs. When Caomhin again suggested that he take some books before he left, he knew he was politely being asked to leave so everyone in the room could talk about him.
As he scanned the shelves, he could sense them shuffling awkwardly, waiting for him to leave, though when one of the bit players saw his fingers drifting towards Roy Foster’s Modern Ireland, he strutted and fretted the words, “Don’t read that revisionist crap. I don’t know what that shit’s doing there.”
“Always good to be aware of the opposing point of view”, James averred, contritely, though he left Foster’s tome on the shelf and picked up some books called Explaining Northern Ireland and Northern Ireland: A Comparative Analysis instead. He got some approving looks and asked when he should come back. Caomhin looked around the room and received some more nods, leaving James with the sense that they had so much to say about him that they were saving their breathes. He left flirting with the notion of listening outside the door so briefly that I don't even know why I mentioned it. As he walked through the dark, dank streets of Cork, the fear of what he would say to his mother loomed larger and larger in his head. His Celtic ancestors and the North American Indians might have called the Earth their mother, but he would face one of Gaia’s most tempestuous storms, walk through her most arid deserts or coldest glaciers than face the wrath of the woman who’s womb he had emerged from if he told her he was considering becoming a candidate for Sinn Fein in the next election. If only he could put it off until after he had been elected, when pride at his status might mollify anger at his politics. And election was only an outside chance. Was it worth the gamble? Once the election campaign was underway, he wouldn’t be able to keep it from her, unless... a thought came into his head which he shooed away like a terrier pissing on his shin. But little did he know that it would be an idea whose time, too, would come.
As he rode the bus home he wondered why he hadn’t asked someone for a lift. He thought, if the last couple of hours had really happened and there really was a possibility of him being a TD, he would have to learn to drive, to do all that boring constituency work and stuff. Then again, since it was mostly an urban constituency, he might be able to get by on his bike. But that seemed more like a sanctimonious, Green Party thing. Then he thought that, unless there was some paradigm shift before the next election, he would be fighting for the last seat with the Greens. They might be forced to say nasty things about him and he would have to say nasty things back. Vituperation was a modus vivendi in Irish politics, as someone who’d studied Latin in school about as hard as he’d studied economics in college had once said. But the greens were his tribe, the people whose earth day and anti-globalisation marches he’d been on, not the 1916 commemoration or hunger striker anniversary marches. He’d heard of politicians crossing the floor in Westminster or Capitol Hill, of Commander Zero, the Nicaraguan rebel without a cause. But, this it seemed to him, was a deeper, more fundamental line to cross, which went deeper than political allegiances and deep into the core of what he wanted himself and the world to be like. He reassured himself that he was only doing this for the money, and hey, in spite of their short hours and low workloads, TDs positively rolled around in it; and promised himself that after five years he would do something positive with the money, build an organic farm, something like that, far from the reach of...
He had reached the last corner before his home town had come into view. The lights were reassuring, familiar from so many day trips as a youngster; Salthill, Lahinch, back then it seemed the country was one big amusement park. The dog welcomed him with her familiar febrile panting, his mother with her regular cautious distance. She asked about the movie, he said it was Okay, a little hard to get into. He thought of adding that the subtitles were a little hard to read, ‘cause they didn’t have a black outline around them but didn’t think it worth the bother. She nodded and said she was going to bed, he breathed an imperceptible inner sigh of relief. With something less than valour, he went out to the room they called the library, though it had a TV and Computer as well as books, and took the dust covers off copies of the works of Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde and draped them over the books he had borrowed from the Shinners. He might have to face up to his mother some time, but why put off ‘till tomorrow what you might be able to avoid altogether?
Once again he felt in a strange, liminal limbo, waiting for people to make a decision which would change the course of life. He’d been to similar places, waiting for exam results; he’d only just scraped into college but when he got there he’d found in the comparative academic freedom the same sensation that he must have when he was allowed to leave the incubator. (He’d never really forgiven his mother for giving birth to him prematurely) His head still wasn’t clear enough to read that much right now, so the feeling of immersion in a new subject was an exhilaration that was still some way off. Instead he’d take his dog walking through the doomed, beautiful fields around his house. He didn’t know the names of all the trees and flowers, as his father had; with characteristically twisted logic he argued to himself that nomenclature of flora was an anthropocentric fallacy. It was an argument that made sense to him. Yet though he enjoyed the walks through the forest to the sea, Epi oinopa ponton, check, our great sweet mother, check; scrotumtightening? hell, yeah, he always felt restless and wanted to return to the city. He tried to reason why this was, the best he could come up with was that his need to obey his instincts as a hunter-gatherer were better served by window-shopping in the city than by walking in the country. After all, it wasn’t like he ever went looking for wild berries to eat did, he? Like I say, it made sense to him. He could understand why people made the opposite journey to the sea to be chastened and given a sense of their insignificant place in the universe etc. but he’d never felt that urge himself, having constantly been reminded of his inconsequentially by his mother. Yet though he’d appeared to have settled into the life of an urbanite he’d felt little difficulty readjusting to life in the country. As a teenager he’d never had any money for the bus fare so he’d spent his weekends walking along the rocks on the coast. As a result he’d become such a child of Pan that he’d wobble a little when he tried to walk on a flat surface like a footpath, still did, a little bit. On the plus side, the dexterity he’d developed seemed to serve him well on the dancefloor, where he’d always gotten compliments for his terpsichorean ability, most of them, tragically, from males.
It occurred to him briefly that this was hardly the sort of life he should be leading if he wanted to be a politician. There were leaders who’d needed to find repose in nature before, Churchill, Gladstone, Bismarck, but these were people with vision, people who’d be working for think-tanks today while the nominal leaders pressed flesh and did TV interviews. Pressed flesh? Was that expression still au courant, post-Lewinsky? He hadn’t missed it if it wasn’t. Then he started to reason that it was perhaps his shyness, his introvertedness, his reticence that might make him an electoral asset, setting him apart from the sort of garrulous gurriers who got elected for the Civil War parties.
Why did he have this relentless need to explain everything? It was something he’d picked up from his father, who never got tired of being asked “Why?” by his children, as James was led to believe most parents did. It was a need that the punishing grind of Science class in School had wounded but not quite killed, with it’s endless days of clock studying and existential dread and nights of repeatedly writing out jejune, lifeless formulae.
When he finally got around to reading those books that he’d been lent, he was disappointed not to get the same frisson he got when he started studying literature in college. He hadn’t expected it, just sort of hoped vaguely for it, but was still disappointed when it didn’t come. Maybe it was a little much to hope for, as most people in this and the neighbouring island turned off their TVs when something about the situation in the six counties came. So why were there over three thousand books on the subject, one for every person who’d been killed? It didn’t really matter, he was confident in his ability to feign interest in the subject next week. One night he managed to feign interest in the life of Oscar Wilde, when his mother, who was in a relatively affably mood engaged him in conversation about the subject. He knew that it was a while since she’d read Richard Ellman’s biography and managed to bluff his way through on bits of half-remembered information from the movies and sweeping, generalisations like the following, made in rasping, faux-indignant tones:
“Y’know, mother, the one thing that strikes me about his life was that the only way for an Irish person to succeed in British society at the time was to reinvent himself as a camp, homosexual dandy. It seems nothing much has changed since then.” It was a remark calculated to annoy her, as she was the queen of the anglophiles and, if not exactly homophobic, not exactly fully reconciled with the idea that some men wanted to have sex with other men. Right now, his mother’s face just reverted into vituperative mode, she yelled something about him being anti-social, and left the room in a huff. Later, he reasoned that this was not the time to try to develop an amicable relationship with her, as he could get cut off completely from her in the near future. In truth, he would miss his dog more than her, his loyal hound who was there, looking up at him reading intently, surely wondering what the hell he must be doing, staring at pieces of pulped wood for hours on end. Would the rest of his family disown him as well? Funnily enough, his grandparents, despite the dogmatism of their catholic beliefs, were always able to rationalise his actions a bit better than his mother was.

Sunday Evening came at the same time it would have done no matter what he’d been doing in the meantime, there was nothing he could have done to make it arrive faster or slower, he asserted to himself with Kantian certitude. He used the excuse which had served him so well the week before, and made his nervous way up to the city. When he got inside the office he was greeted with looks of familiarity that were appropriate in only one or two cases, but made him optimistic about what their decision may have been. It made him recall a scene in that old Robert Redford movie, The Candidate. As that was a film about a young underdog who wins a seat in the Senate, perhaps a good omen. He was beckoned to sit down next to Caomhin as he had been last week, and, it increasingly seemed he would be again in the future.
Caomhin asked him about the books he’d been lent, James was much more forthcoming than he was when his mother tried to talk about Wilde, but he got a sense that he was just being put through the motions, as if this was just a final confirmation of their decision. It was a little like some of his meetings with his supervisor when he was writing his master’s thesis, except maybe there was more shared interest. As he watched the reactions of those around him, he could sense a mixture of admiration for how quickly he could get his head around the subject, plus a certain degree of nostalgia for their own formative years, and the inevitable concomitant condescension. It was the least of what he’d have to deal with if they’d made the decision that he thought they probably had. He knew that they weren’t going to tell him without talking some more, so he discussed the various theories he’d been reading about, the Marxist theory, beloved of Left-wing British academics, which pitted Protestants and Catholics against one another in a classic case of divide and rule, the Cultural theory, the post-imperial theory. He noted the nods of assent, trying to make as much eye contact as he could, remembering something he’d heard as a first year psychology student. He tried to smile as well, not too Blairishly, just in a kind of flirtatious, George Clooney way. Funnily enough, he’d never really been that good at chatting up women, always hoping that whatever good looks and dancing ability he had would attract the new, assertive spice girl types to him. He obviously had a high oestrogen level, in a nativity play at his all-boys school, he’d been asked, after the teacher made a show of thinking about it, to play the Virgin Mary. Perhaps it was this new man quality that made him a possible candidate.
He’d just finished off a spiel about Unionists gerrymandered constituencies up north and then claimed to be standing up for democracy, when he noticed a look in Caomhin’s eyes, genorous, paternal in a way his own father’s never was.
“So what do you think you’re going to do about this when you’re a TD?”
James thought he’d been prepared for this moment but he’d expected drama, rituals and fanfare of some sort and not this sort of subtlety. He raised his eyes and couldn’t help giving Caomhin a hug, wondering briefly if Unionist politicians in the north were ever tempted into such tactility. Then he said, “Thanks so much. You won’t regret this.” He thought about adding how hard he would work to try and win the seat, but thought that too much of a Hollywood cliché.
Caomhin, while not disconcerted in any way by the hugging, felt compelled to add a note of caution.
“What about your family. Will they have any regrets?”, he asked, scratching his beard.
His face dropping a little, James replied that it might be better not to tell them straight away. Caomhin responded with a look of stoical acceptance, as if this wasn’t the first time he’d come between someone and their family. He breathed deeply and asked some other, more mundane questions.
“So, you realise you’ll have to cut your hair, wear suits and everything?” The irony wasn’t lost on James, who knew that the ancient Celts always wore their hair long, and that the modern suit was a relatively recent, English invention. He merely replied, guardedly, “Not ‘til I’m on the campaign trail, though, right?”
“No, I suppose not”, replied Caomhin, then, noticing the ambivalent glances around the room, though he should reassert his authority over his young ward.
“We were just talking about your name, and well, we think, y’know `James’ is a bit too, too... English, basically. How would you feel about being called `Seamus’?”
A little taken aback, he only replied that his family would still want to call him James. Caomhim drowned out the laughter around the room by telling him his family could call him bollocks breath if they wanted, but that the name on the election posters would be “Seamus” James mulled over it, thought back to Barthes and Derrida in College, decided that names were essentially meaningless and agreed. Did it really matter that much if he had an Irish or an English name? At the time it was the idea of his face blown up to two feet high and stuck to telephones all over the city that struck him more. It would be one way of breaking the news to his mum.
They discussed a few other things, whether he should move back to the city. He said he’d only moved back down to the village because of that incident, which had been at the back of his mind until now. He almost sounded casual when he asked how that was going. Through their network of contacts in London they’d almost tracked down the thug, Seamus was told, prompted images from The Long Good Friday to appear in his head. Getting him back to Ireland would be a trickier proposition, even today, when human beings were becoming a commodity to be bought and sold like Cattle. But they were working on it. They’d also found a place for him to stay, with the sort of space he would need to pursue the sort of work he’d need to do. With a knee-jerk, pavlovian reaction that the name change did nothing to alter, he asked if the landlord accepted rent allowance.
Caomhin replied that no, they didn’t, but they’d be able to pay for it out of their funds. He could repay them after he’d been elected, if not, well, they’d work something out. They asked him if he wanted to come for a drink, to their surprise, he said he didn’t drink and anyway he needed to pay for the bus home. They offered to pay for a taxi ride but he made his excuses as diplomatically as possible. Some other night, perhaps.
He moved out a few days later. His mother seemed more relieved than anything else, his dog, not knowing how long he’d be gone or when he’d be back, was characteristically melancholy.
It was indeed an excellent new place. It was in the northside, in an area which used to be entirely working class but now had areas of yuppie flats peppered around. He met the landlord, took a look round, and knew he liked the vibe. He often thought why he spent so much time in the house, inconsistent as it was with his image of himself as nature-boy, child of Pan. As a child he’d always wanted to go and walk in the woods, but his parents would never let him go out, warning him there was a “murderer” around the place. (This was before the term “paedophile became so commonplace) As a teenager, he wasn’t allowed go to disco’s as they feared the grim reaper of alcoholism might come and take him away, as it had many members of his family. He could never shake off the reclusivenss they engendered, though now, being a potential public figure, he would have to try. In the meantime, before he went proselytising people, he would have to find out about what he was talking about first. I guess he wanted to break the mould of Irish Politics.
Knowing how ill-stocked the city library was, he rejoined the college library as an external reader. The college had changed a lot in the few short years since he’d left it, new buildings mushrooming everywhere, the students, all of whom had mobile phones, were getting their education and their net access for free. But from the snatches of conversation he caught in the Library, they were still struggling to get by, with greedy landlords sucking as much money out of them as they possibly could. It was the students’ own fault, of course, for not shopping around, but you still had to feel sympathy. Other things were still the same, booze pushers still hawking their free drinks promotions, the atomic waste and the statue of Queen Victoria still buried under lawns. He hadn’t had a very good time in college, never having had enough money until his postgraduate years to do anything but eat and study. The air quality and ventilation in the library and lecture theatres were generally so piss-poor that he’d spent most of his time there in a miasma of ‘flu and nausea. So he was one of the few people for whom studying was the most enjoyable part of college. But, knowing the nostalgia would be too painful, he decided he’d just take books out and read them at home.
He dragged the heavy back of hardbacks across the river and into the northside. He’d had to get a taxi to move his stuff in, so reluctant was his mother to enter the area. Yet though her bourgeois fears weren’t entirely without justification - when he applied for rent allowance he queued in a room that was also used by narcotics anonymous - the area was gradually becoming rejuvenated, throwing up the weirdest if-thou-be-born-to-see-strange-sights incongruities. Cybercafes, gyms and tanning salons would sit next to decaying shops with 80’s signs in the broken windows. Six-lane motorways ran past the disused factories, now converted to call centres or nightclubs. And, beyond the liberal homilies, it genuinely was becoming more multicultural. One shop he passed on the way home was run by some West Africans. It sold budget household furniture as well as being a laundrette, cybercafe and call shop. He marvelled at their ability to come from Africa and pick up the notion of multitasking so quickly. But then, he reflected, division of labour was such a recent phenomenon, even more recent, he thought, trying not to be racist, for these dudes. It probably wasn’t so long since their ancestors were providing food, shelter, clothes and entertainment and whatever else was on their hierarchy of needs for themselves.

He sat down, in an environment he’d tried to make as conducive as possible to study, and started to read. Gradually, he felt some of the buzz he got when he started college come back. Being the news-hound, info-junkie he was, he kept seeing analogies between the history of Ulster and contemporary politics. James I, the man who probably didn’t write Shakespeare’s plays, had carved up the province and parcelled it out among his cronies, much as Mugabe was doing in Zimbabwee today. They’d embarked on a massive plantation, similar to the Israeli building programme in Palestine now. The people who were planted were driven by the same Calvinist zeal that motivated American foreign policy. The Catholics, both North and South were forced into a system of dependence similar to the one that bound Africa to the West in the modern era, except then the method was land ownership, not debt. The Guerrilla war that freed the south started inspired millions of oppressed, and some not-so-oppressed people around the world. When the country was partitioned, the Catholics were abandoned, like the people of Palestine, East Timor, Tibet... the list could go on. When they campaigned for civil rights, they were inspired by their black counterparts in the US. The Protestants responded with their own Kristallnacthen, the British army got dragged in as the Americans would in Somalia and Iraq... this was where he came in, when history and current affairs morphed into one another.
When he read up on history , he realised why the conflict was presented the way it was internationally, why he’d have to explain to so many Americans in the future that he didn’t come from a place where he had to dodge sniper rifles and walk around bomb craters to get to the supermarket to buy some toilet roll. To create stable societies, leaders would always unite their people by demonising a racial other. For Hindus it was the Aryans, for Greeks the Trojans, for Rome the Carthaginians, then the Germanic tribes. For the British, and later the Americans, it was the Irish. Seamus tribe were everything they were not, lazy rather than industrious, undisciplined rather than incontinent. We were the pilose, simian wretches of the Punch magazine caricatures, they were the bowler-hatted gentlemen that Ulster Unionists still tried to be. When their society changed, their image of Ireland had to change with it. In the second half of the twentieth century we suddenly became the priest-ridden conservatives, eager to escape to Swinging London only to find “No Irish, No Blacks No Dogs” signs everywhere we went. Then the oil crisis came in the ‘70s’ and Arabs started to be demonised with the same sort of xenophobic fervour to which we used to be subjected. But no-one told CNN, Fox News, the Daily Telegraph or the Daily Mail, the newspaper that Goebbels propaganda department was based upon, that Arabs were the new Paddies. They were equally happy spewing their rancid bile at either of us. So, for them, the conflict in the North wasn’t a legacy of four centuries of imperial theft, it was two sets of Paddies fighting each other, with the British army and the RUC trying to mediate. But, like everything else, the right-wing British press served a purpose. Every time he would start to question what he was doing with his life, wonder if the English weren’t so bad after all, he would pick up a copy of the Telegraph, and, after his blood had stopped boiling, he reflected that these were hardly the sort of people you wanted running part of your country.

Be it ever so humble

The people in the Sinn Fein office noticed his growing radicalism, and at first approved, as if he was a Tabula Rasa on which they’d successfully imprinted their own weltanschaaung. Then they started to become a little uneasy, warning him that he would have to tone down the nationalist rhetoric, at least when he was campaigning in certain areas. At one meeting in Caomhin’s office, his host brought out a map of his constituency, pointed out where the working-class and middle-class areas were. He acted like he felt patronised, giving the air of someone who knew the city quite well, thank you, though many of the areas being pointed to had probably never seen his scrawny, pilose form. Caomhin, for his part, leaned over the table pointing at certain areas of the map, looking for all the world like a World War II General discussing plans for the invasion of Normandy. Seamus had yet to ask him what he had done when the Troubles were really troubling, but just at that moment he could sense a nostalgia for the days of heavy-duty paramilitary activity. Inner city areas were fine, lots of support there, take no prisoners. In the suburbs, however, he would have to use terms like “commitment to the peace process”, “inclusive settlement” and the like. And throw in a few vapid, non-committal words about improving the health and education services. People out in the suburbs may be able to spend quarter of a million on a house, but they still wanted the state to pick up the tab when they got ill, Caomhin reflected, ironically.
Seamus, for his part looked at the map and pondered that, though there might have been no barbed wire or security checkposts, people here were just as divided as they were in the North. He wasn’t sure who to blame, it could have been the government with their slavish devotion to the “Free Market”, it could have been urban planners, who boxed people into areas from which it would be almost impossible to escape the viscous circle of unemployment, drugs, and early pregnancy. Fuck, maybe right-wing economists were right and it was the poor’s own fucking fault they were poor. In his current state of mind, though, there could only be one culprit: The British. Didn’t they invent the class system, the ancient Anglo-Saxons with their wergild, the Norman families who’d owned the same massive estates for almost a thousand years? How could we destroy in a mere eighty years what it took them a lifetime to construct? Right here, right now, the logic was compelling. That democracy, their new chosen means to achieve power was also a bequest from the British remained an unspoken, unconsidered truth as they surveyed the map together.
“So this is where I hand my principals in at the reception”, Seamus said, pointing to the area where the old red-brick houses turned into semi-detacheds with garden gnomes in front.
“Principals are a burden for any politician to carry around”, said Caomhin, not making much of an effort not to sound pretentious. Seamus knew politics was a dirty game, and reflected that it was not so long ago that he was planning to only do the job for five years and then leg it to Asia. He’d once read something about Adolf Eichmann, who’d joined the Nazi party just to get a good, well-paying pensionable job and ending up organising the holocaust. Was the same thing happening to him? He’d read his Camus, like every other Arts student, and the idea that all values were arbitrary was one he couldn’t shake off completely. Perhaps he should go and buy a copy of the Telegraph. Before he did, he asked Caomhin when he thought the election campaign might actually start. He replied that the government would wait until the very end, so they would start campaigning months before, though officially it would only be about three weeks. That would give him roughly two months to prepare his speeches, cut his hair, get some nice suits. And tell his mother.
“So you haven’t taken that great leap yet?”, asked Caomhin, when the subject came up. Seamus, who to her was still James, just shook his head, tensely, as if the problem was a fly he could just shoo away.
“So why is she such a West Brit?”, Caomhin felt he’d reached a sufficient level of intimacy to ask.
Seamus took a deep breath, didn’t answer in the sense of conclusively resolving the issue, just offered the same speculations that he’d offered himself when he directed the same question inwardly.
“I guess I’d be a psychologist and not an aspiring politician if I could answer questions like that. It’s hard to say what occurrences, what genetic factors, make us the way we are. Hell, I wouldn’t be here unless... well, you know. The funny thing was, her dad was a Fianna Failer until he fell out with the local TD over some freakin’ inheritance, then he became a blueshirt.” He paused, would have taken a drag of a cigarette if he was a smoker, looked over and saw that Caomhin wanted him to keep going.
“I’m not sure if that’s the whole reason. She grew up in the 50’s and 60’s, when this country must have been a pretty bleak place. No contraception, the marriage bar, unemployment, emigration... it’s easy to see why she might have thought the grass was greener on the other side of the Irish Sea. Of course, the country’s changed, almost beyond recognition, but she hasn’t. It’s hard to change your view of the world, after you reach thirty...” He reflected that he was going to reach that milestone himself in a year or so.
Caomhin told him that the only reason that Ireland became so conservative was the famine, which he believed the English deliberately engineered. After that, people starting marrying later, sex outside marriage was forbidden, deference to church leaders grew exponentially. Before that, we were pretty free and easy, mixing elements of Christian belief with old pagan customs. Hey, the population was almost eight million before the famine. Seamus nodded, having read that theory already, but felt a little short-changed. He’d opened his heart on the subject of his family history, he wanted to know a little of Caomhin’s own past, how he got into all of this.
“Two words: Bloody Sunday.” He reflected quietly to himself on the atrocities of that day, as if no words could do them justice. Then he went on, “They were dark times alright. In the days and weeks that followed, people like myself were queuing up to join the movement. When I was asked why I wanted to join, I said it was so I could go across the border and kill the RUC and the British Army. That was the way I felt at the time.
“We used to meet down in a disused farmhouse in West Cork. The owner, who was pretty old even by then, claimed to have hidden Michael Collins in the same place. Who knows, he might have done. He had some guns that’d been there ever since the war of ‘22, said we were welcome to use them. Even if we could have gotten them ‘cross the border they probably would have been too rusty. I and most of the other lads wanted to go up north, but the leadership wanted to attack targets in Britain. When that started happening there was a backlash and everyone started to drift away. I got promoted fairly quickly after that, and for some reason they decided I would be the right person to import some explosives from Czechoslovakia.” He grew more reflective. “God, Prague was beautiful back then, not the tourist circus ‘tis now. I could have stayed there forever, but the more I talked to the people there, their struggles against the Hapsburgs and the Russians, the more I realised why I was there. I actually ended up staying there too long, as I met this girl, beautiful, beautiful creature she was. Back in those days westerners had to spend a certain amount of money every day, so didn’t I run out. I knew if I didn’t come back I’d draw suspicion on myself, so I wired the army leadership council for money. It turned out that the government were monitoring their bank accounts.”
Seamus gulped, seeing where this story was going.
“I got extradited to the UK first, so I needn’t tell you I knew what it’s like to take a beating from British thugs as well. Thankfully, they agreed to let me be tried in Ireland, so I spent five years in the Long Kesh. I did a lot of reading inside, of course, Gramsci, Althusser, Marcuse. They were heady times, when I came out everyone’s hair was dyed green and purple, safety pins in their noses. I thought I was on another planet. My parents never came to visit me. I haven’t spoken to them since.”
Seamus didn’t know how he could possibly respond to that tale of doomed romanticism, the first thing it occurred to him to ask was if he’d ever seen the girl again.
“Oh, Lord, for about ten or eleven years I couldn’t get anywhere near Czechoslovakia, I sent letters to all my contacts over there, they were all intercepted. Then the wall came down, I booked a ticket to Prague first chance I got. I went to the place where Tanja used to live, it had been knocked down and a luxury hotel was going up. I went to the restaurant where she used to work, it was being converted into a McDonalds. It seemed they’d swapped one form of imperialism for another”, he added, reverting briefly to political mode.
Seamus, who’d become more intrigued with the human interest aspect, asked if he ever caught up with her.
“I don’t even know if she’s dead or alive. To be honest, I don’t even know if she felt the same way she did about me as I did about her, I might have just built her up into something she wasn’t when I was in jail. I must’ve masturbated about her every night for five years. That’s a lot of dead sperm” He concluded, in a doomed attempt to lighten the mood.
Seamus could only ask if he’d reconciled with his family.
“I was at my father’s funeral two years ago. My mother shook hands with me, but that was all. So I know what the pain of being alienated from you’re family is like. I’ll understand if you back out of all this.”
Seamus was always infuriated when older people, especially his grandparents talked down to him, assuming they knew more than him simply because they’d been around longer. Yet here was someone who genuinely had seen it all, and could talk about it without even a hint of condescension. He moved to reassure Caomhin that he wasn’t going to back out. Caomhin, still emotional from having told that story, reached over and clasped his right hand in a tight embrace, told him he hoped he wouldn’t regret it. Though he never told anyone, he felt a tear drop onto his shoulder.

He wasn’t going home that much anymore, as his dog was getting older and didn’t really want to be taken for walks anymore, and soon their beloved fields would be gone. He thought of using his new-found political influence to try to stop this process, but knew that without help from the local community, who were more interested in the money the “development” would bring, there was no dice. In any case, the planning process was being increasingly centralised and taken out of the local government’s hands, which made him laugh bitterly when he heard unionists and their apologists in the south accused his party of being anti-democratic. Anyway, he knew that when he did come home, his mother would know he was there for something important.
His tactic was usually to make it look like something worse had happened, and where his personal mishaps were concerned, there was no limit to her gullibility. This time, though, it would be hard to think of something worse from her viewpoint.
He decided to telephone her first, tell her he had something to tell her. He still hadn’t gotten a mobile phone, though the people in the party were constantly pressing him to get one, certainly before the campaign started. He still wasn’t convinced that they didn’t cause brain cancer, though. So he went into a call shop, one of many which were springing up around the city. He called her, made the usual pleasantries, then told her he had something to tell her. He told her he’d rather tell her to her face, to which she responded “Why do keep manipulating me like this?” in a voice so shrill he had to hold the receiver away from his ear, and look furtively around to make sure no-one else could hear. He told her he was Okay, there was nothing to worry about, which he knew would only make her worry more.
When he got home there was no-one there, but the dog, who leapt up on top of him with the usual fervour. It wasn’t uncommon for the house to be empty, as the rest of the family had lives down here, a network of friends, activities that he had given up when he moved to the city. So he took the dog for a long walk, the sort she hadn’t been for since she was a pup. The dog sensed that he was being unusually affectionate towards her, rolling around on the grass, impervious to the dew and the possibility of horseshit as he was to the whole ecosystem deeper beneath his feet. Perhaps the dog was self-conscious enough to realise that she herself wasn’t long for the world and maybe she thought that this was one last long walk before she died. In any case she was appreciative and didn’t sense his tension.
It was spring and the nights were getting longer. When he got to beach people were starting to fish. He’d never had any time for blood sports, being a vegan and all, and had always grimaced when his father or people he used to work with on building sites when he was a student told him stories about the subject. Did fish feel pain? He’d once gotten into an argument on that subject in college, which somehow degenerated into an argument about how carrots reproduce. (Why was it always carrots, never turnips or asparagus? Because they were so phallic, he reasoned) Anyway, his interlocutor insisted that if you stuck a carrot into the ground, other carrots would spring forth from it, eventually forming the sort of bunch that you buy in the supermarket. He got a good laugh when everyone else told him that carrots eventually went to seed, that you ate the root of the carrot and the seed of the potato, but when he reflected on the story, he asked himself how could someone from a small town be so alienated from the land?
He would reproach people for fishing if he thought it would do any good, but he reflected that it was big factory farms that were fishing the sea dry and wrecking havoc with the natural balance, and not a few daytrippers with forlorn rods. He walked right along to a place that hardly anyone but he and his dog went, as the rocks were so jagged and the danger was so severe. He used to swim here naked, such was his confidence of not being intruded upon. Perhaps, he thought, he was feeling the same urge that led people to sign up for 35-year mortgages when he came to this almost exclusive place. In the summer before he started college, he spent hazy afternoons reading Madame Bovary or Death in Venice , glittering, iridescent portals for the world he was going to enter. Then he’d go and swim naked, thinking, the way nineteen year olds who’ve read a few “great” books do, that he’d reached some sort of Nietzscean plateau where he could ignore conventional morals. By now his belief in the redemptive power of literature had waned, and nature alone was enough to draw him there.
When he got back the car was outside and he could hear the TV in the living room, but he waited for her to come and greet him. He made a cup of herbal tea and sat down to read that day’s Irish Times. An article caught his eye by a member of the Labour party claiming that Sinn Feins’ sudden reincarnation as a caring, altruistic party of the left was bogus and opportunistic. Almost instinctively, the counter-arguments started brewing in his head; that Labour were ossified dinosaurs who were completely out of tune with the needs of the modern electorate, and would probably go into coalition with Adolf Hitler for a brief taste of power. He clearly had more flair for politics than for personal relationships, though he had chosen to study English rather than History at postgraduate level. But then, he reflected ruefully, we don’t always make the decisions that are in our best interests, do we?
He heard the TV show his mother was watching break for advertisements, and her footsteps approach. She seemed in relatively good spirits as she greeted him, then asked him, with the stolid resignation of a teacher who’s been teaching the same texts for a generation, if he had any news. Clutching, rather than rubbing his dog’s neck, he looked up briefly from the paper and told her the truth, that he was standing in the next election for Sinn Fein, in a tone that was bland and apathetic. With obvious incredulity but deep disdain, she replied, in the shrill tones she reserved for the many people who’d got on the wrong side of her;
“You probably would do something like that, just to annoy me.” She walked back out to the living room, and Seamus (or “James”, as he was here) reflected that though it was too late to go back to the city, he should leave early in the morning. Or else stay out of her way by taking the dog for another long walk. The dog looked up at him, with the same unequivocal affection in her eyes, not knowing what a pawn she was in this dark, Quasi-Oedipal conflict.
The next morning was Sunday, and, as usual, his mother’s spirits were higher. When he got up, she was making breakfast, his sister and two of his brothers were sat round the table. The foul smell of frying eggs and sausages permeated the air the way it would in hell if there was a hell, sentimental gibberish resonated from the radio. Seamus sat down, poured some Soya milk over some muesli, picked up the sport section of one of the papers, and hoped to be left alone to read it in relative peace. His mother wasn’t going to allow this.
“D’y’know, everyone, James has finally got a job.”
His bother Darren, as close to being Seamus’ antithesis as it was possible for a brother of his to be, almost choked on his cornflakes. Darren had left college to become a carpenter and didn’t see eye to eye with Seamus on many things, particularly his being a slacker. His sister Joan looked took her head out of the lifestyle section and threw a quizzical look in Seamus’ direction. Before he could respond, his mother interjected with: “He’s going to stand for the Dail. For Sinn Fein.” She nodded her head when pronouncing those last two words, which was a quirk of hers.
There was shock, then laughter at such an outrageous proposition.
“Why did you tell her that?”, asked Joan. “Was it just to annoy her?”
Looking over at his mother, waiting for a response in her classically pugnacious, hands on hip style, Seamus tried to formulate an answer that would neither confirm nor deny his candidacy. “I was interested to see how she’d react alright. After all, she’s always telling me to get a job, she doesn’t seem to care what it involves doing.”
At this his mother’s mood took a negative swing. She breathed deeply, causing his siblings’ heads to cower as if anticipating a tropical storm. “If you think you can manipulate me that easily, you’ve got another thing coming. But if I find out that if you - or any of the rest of ye - have as much as voted for Sinn Fein, then by god, you’ll be banned from this house forever.” Her face, red like a rose but not nearly as sweet, she picked up some of the papers and stormed off into her bedroom.
“Can you go one day without making mum lose her temper?”, asked Joan.
He couldn’t tell her to her face that he probably wouldn’t be able to come down for a while, perhaps never again. He just mumbled something about her having some serious issues to resolve and then took refuge inside the newspaper. Feeling the tension almost too much to bear, he gave the dog some petting and let her follow him out the door, ‘till she realised he wasn’t taking her for a walk but going back to wherever it was he spent most of his time. He made a cursory valedictory gesture to his siblings, it was reciprocated in various degrees.
On the bus journey up his head was spinning in a way it hadn’t done since he was a teenager. He’d had confrontations with his family before, but never caused any wounds that time couldn’t heal. More recently, Darren had been threatened with eviction after extensive treks to the top of the Bacchanalian mount, as it were. Yet, like a volcano, her rage would always subside. This, though, was different. Not only his mother, but his grandparents as well, might disown him. He seriously thought of telling the people in the party that he wanted to resign, but knew that they had done so much for him that they would want something in return, returning to the old, idyllic life he’d had in the last years of the twentieth century now seemed impossible. In blood steeped so far... It wasn’t the right frame of mind to be in as he faced the image consultants who were to groom him for the electioneering process.
The first thing he did was go for a haircut. The women in the salon looked at his long, scraggly curls as some new and daring challenge, something they’d give to their most experienced staff. He had a habit of twisting his hair repetitively and ripping it out, particularly in times of angst, with the result that his hair length was a sort of barometer of his psychological state. Right now, there were bald patches emerging at the back, which he fought a losing battle to conceal, while in other parts his hair was twisted into platts that it would be impossible to separate. Looking at the hairdressers face in a mirror, he tried to look sympathetic, but the dread seemed to be equal on both sides of the scissors. She tentatively started running her fingers through the convoluted trichological nest that kept his cranium warm, wondering how he had ever got it into such a state. Perhaps it was paranoia, but he kept thinking he saw her turn to her colleagues and exchange looks of disdain, shaking their heads the way mechanics look at each other when they see gullible motorists bring in their cars. She seemed to be looking for a place to start, as if this were a chess game and not a primitive grooming ritual. It was hard to imagine a situation where two people could be so close physically and have such contempt for each other, she for letting him get his hair into such a state, he for her choosing what he considered a superfluous profession. Eventually she got his hair into some sort of order; he paid and thanked her with all the conviction of a prisoner thanking a state-appointed prison psychiatrist, and left for the party office, feeling violated and confused.

Thankfully for him, he was usually able to project an outward appearance of calm, as he was when he was greeted at the office by Cormac, who blinked a few times before recognising him. The haircut, and the tie he’d bought in a charity shop and tied round his neck, yet another Madeleine that brought back memories of groggy mornings getting ready for school, compounded the impression of good sense he strove to project. Cormac shook his hand and told him the consultants they’d hired were waiting inside. Seamus apologised for being too late, Cormac dismissed his worries, in that peculiarly Irish, ah-sure-it-doesn’t-matter way, and beckoned him inside.
The consultants were wearing armanis, hair slicked back, one of them had a carefully trimmed goatee beard. They both carried clipboards, a PDA rested on the table in front of them. Seamus never saw them use it, but it did look impressive. They greeted him with the words “So, you must be Seamus”, in a sort of nauseating Dublin 4 accent that always annoyed the fuck out of him, particularly the way they drew out both syllables in his name. He reflected on the bitter irony of people who’s mission it was to get Britain out of Ireland recruiting Irish people who tried to talk like English people, as he smiled tentatively and shook their hands. Cormac and Caomhin looked on, Seamus wasn’t really focusing on them, but he sensed that they could feel the same discomfort.
“Basically we’ve got two exercises today, yah. First we’re going to do a radio slash TV slash newspaper interview. Then, we’re going to take you on a virtual campaign trail, as it were, going door to door and meeting people from different perspectives, yah. So if you like, we can start with the interview right away. Time is money, y’know.” He tapped his watch and gave a slight self-congratulatory laugh. Seamus, who thought he couldn’t be surprised any more, shook his head and wondered if all this was for real. As they didn’t go away or metamorphosis into naked women, he assumed he wasn’t dreaming and beckoned them to start.
“Right, so we have with us here Seamus McIonnrachtaigh, candidate in Cork North Central for the Sinn Fein party. Hope I pronounced your name right, Seamus. It’s rather a mouthful. So, Seamus, have you ever been a member of the provisional IRA?”
“No, I Haven’t.”
“What about the Real IRA or the Continuity IRA?”
“No, Neither organisation.”
“Ever been involved in any vigilantism?”
“No, Can’t say I have.”
“Got a criminal record”
“No, thankfully.”
“So what’s nice, law-abiding young man like you doing standing for Sinn Fein?”
Seamus gulped at this question, but felt he could handle it.
“Sinn Fein are a democratic party committed to bringing about a socialist, 32-county Ireland by democratic means. We want this country’s prosperity to be shared among all it’s people, with decent health care, education and public transport for everyone. The focus on our alleged links with the IRA says more about the media’s bias than it does about us. No-one ever asks members of the Civil War parties how many of their members are also members of Opus Dei. No-one asks members of Fine Gael in the border counties if they’re members of the Orange order. It’s time the media in this country grew up and accepted that a large proportion of the population of this country are disillusioned with politics in this country and are turning to the only party that provides a progressive agenda, and that’s Sinn Fein.”
He glanced over at Caomhin, who appeared to approve. The consultant, though, didn’t feel he’d tested his ability under pressure to the full.
“I’m sensing a little paranoia here”, he responded. “Members of your party always seem to blame the media for your lack of support, but I think the fact is that such a small proportion of the electorate vote for you is that they know about your links with paramilitaries. You say people are turning to you, but you only got about four percent of the vote at the last election.”
“The latest opinion polls show that we’re likely to get double that in the forthcoming election. And, considering how conservative voters are in this country, that’s quite an accomplishment. If we continue at this rate, we could be holding the balance of power soon. The establishment parties will have to stop condemning us as hooligans and start negotiating with us.”
“That sounds rather like an ultimatum to me.”
“Oh, please, grow up. If the governments of Britain and the US accept that our party has got nothing do with any terrorist organisation, why can’t you?”
“Moving on, you say you want a socialist Ireland, so how do you feel about members of the executive in the North approving the use of private finance schemes to fund new schools and hospitals?”
This was a question Seamus had asked himself, and wasn’t able to give a satisfactory answer to. Caomhin looked on nervously as Seamus breathed deeply and said:
“I think that’s a matter for the executive members themselves. You’ve got to bear in mind that in the United Kingdom taxes are extremely low and it’s possible that there may be no other source of income available; I don't know, I’m not that familiar with the situation there. What I do know is that we are committed to providing decent public services here by increasing taxes on high-income earners and corporations to the European average.
“So you don’t approve of Private Finance?”
“I think I’ve made my position clear.”
“Right. So what’s your position on crime?”
Seamus knew where this was going, and replied, as tactfully as he could, “There’s definitely been an increase in violent crime in the last few years, and everybody seems to weigh in with their two cents about the causes. Many blame alcohol and drugs, and they may have a point. But we’ve got to look at other things, at the horrible inequality that the recent years of economic growth have caused. We’ve got to look at the educational system, and how it treats people who aren’t cut out for third level. We’ve got to look at people’s diets, and how they affect behaviour patterns. All these things ultimately make a difference.” “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime, eh?”
Seamus bristled, both at the platitudinousness of that quote, and the association of him with New Labour. “I think if and when we get into government, we’ll have to make some tough decisions, we won’t be able to keep all our promises, we’ll have to make compromises. We may have to coalesce with people who’re much better at getting people to vote for them than they are at running the country. But we’ve got a lot of talented people working for us and we know that if we are elected, we’ll do all we can to make this a better country. For Everyone.”
“Seamus MacIonnractaigh, Thank You very much.”
Seamus breathed a heavy sigh of relief trying at first to run his fingers through his hair but finding only a spiky bristling epiderma where his thick curls used to run, while Caomhin looked on with pride at the smooth-talking homunculus he had created. The consultants had a few reservations, however.
“Right, Yah. Your ability to turn the subject round your viewpoint is like, really impressive, and we think that that interview would work really well on radio or for a magazine. But we think you need to work on your visual cues a little more. For example, you need to hold your head up more, and look people in the eye more. And raise your voice a little, maybe modulate it a bit more, yah. Oh, yeah, and we love that bone structure, we can really see the female voters going for that, but you’re a little... skinny. If you could work out some, or failing that, get some shoulder pads. We can work on all these things when we do our next exercise. So right, basically, yah, we’re going to stand on the opposite side of the door there, you’re going to knock on the door, persuade us to vote for Sinn Fein, yah?”
Seamus wanted to persuade them to go back to the gay bars in Temple Bar, but he gritted his teeth, told himself not to be homophobic, and played along.
The first persona that the second consultant, who up to now had been pretty quiet, adopted was that of a traditional anti-nationalist, not unlike his mother. Seamus didn’t know this before he knocked on the door and asked, “Dia is Muire Duit, I’m Seamus MacIonnracthaigh, standing for Sinn Fein in the next election. How would you feel about voting for us?”
“I don’t think I’ll be voting for a bunch of murderers like you”, was his terse response.
“Sinn Fein is committed to a peaceful resolution of this country’s problems. If you’d like to look at our manifesto...”
“I don’t think that’s going to be happening”, he said, and slammed the door.
Seamus thought part of the test was to try and keep going, so he intercepted the door with his foot. “You seem like a reasonably open minded person... if you could just...”
“As the only thing you people seem to understand is violence, I’m going to squeeze your foot in this fucking door until it bleeds. I’m giving you the chance to take it out, which is more of a chance than you’ve given all those innocent men and women.”
Seamus took his foot out of the door, the consultant said, “Right, next one”
He thought he knew what “being thrown in the deep end” meant now.
He knocked on the door again and on the other side found the first consultant doing a very bad impression of a someone from the Northside of Cork.
“Right, Bouy, how’s it hangin’?”
“Uh, Good, thanks. Tell me, are you registered to vote?”
“Course I am, bouy.”
“And who did you vote for last time?”
“Sinn Fein, bouy”
“And will you be voting for us again this time?”
“No, bouy, I think you’ve fucking sold out with this Good Friday agreement. It means we’ll never have a United Ireland unless it’s what the unionists want. What happened the spirit of 1916?”
“We still want a United Ireland. If our tactics have changed, it’s because the circumstances have changed. Bear in mind that there’ll be a nationalist majority in ten to twenty years...”
“Will you tell that to an old man in Belfast whose been waiting his whole life to be freed from those Proddy scumbags?”
“Well, if you don't vote for us who are you going to vote for?”
“I’m not votin’ for anyone. I think you’re all the fuckin’ same. Fuckin’ politicians.”
The door was slammed again. Seamus looked over at Caomhin, who remained impassive. The door knocked again. This time the second consultant was impersonating a female in a way that wouldn’t win any Oscars.
“Hi. I’m campaigning for Sinn Fein. Do you think you might be able to vote for us in the next election?”
“Oh... I don’t really know... Would you like to come in and have some tea?”
“Well, I’ve got a lot of places to see today... If you could just tell me what your regular voting preference is and why...”
“I’m what you might call a floating voter”, he replied, tossing his hair back.
“Well, here’s a copy of our manifesto remember I called to your door personally.
The door closed more gently this time. Caomhin clapped his hands and said, “Game Over.” The two consultants reentered the room, both shook Caomhins’ hand.
“That was pretty good for a first timer. It won’t always be as difficult out there, but there are a lot of weirdoes around, right. A few things to pick up on. Don’t waste too much time with the decides. Concentrate on the waverers. Time is money, yah. And, yah, never ask anyone if they’re registered to vote. It always sounds patronising. If someone says they’re not, you give them information on how they do. And of course, you know, never accept any sort of sexual advance. We figured you’d already have got that.”
“Just our little bit of fun, really”, the other consultant confessed.
“Um, yeah,” said the first. “We’ve got to say we’re generally pretty impressed. The one thing we’d say is to try to put on some weight and talk louder. Appear more alpha, yah. Oh, there’s one more thing we have to do. He took a screen from his briefcase and looked around for a place to hang it on the wall. He gave it to his colleague and then took out a fancy-looking new digital camera. “Some photos, for the campaign poster”, he explained. Seamus hadn’t looked at a mirror all day but imagined that the events of the last few days must have left him looking pretty frazzled. But, if the camera lied, maybe it didn’t tell the whole truth. There were six or eight cameras in Ireland during the famine, but no photographs in existence of the millions who starved. So it was a powerful implement the consultant had in his hands, and Seamus wasn’t thinking about the pixelation.
Acting strikingly like David Hemmings in Blow Up They got Seamus to strike a variety of poses, first whatever he was comfortable with, then “aloof”, “affable”, “serious”, “statesmanlike” “modest” and “a good listener”. They looked through them themselves on the viewfinder, then showed them to Seamus, asked him which one he preferred. The one where he had his head held high, his chin thrust forward (it must be “aloof”, he imagined), had that otherworldly, Che Guevara look, exactly what he was going for, funnily enough. It didn’t look like someone who was worried he’d never see his family again. But he knew the pain was showing, somewhere inside, behind the Mayan veil that would be draped on Telephone polls all over the city.
The consultants left, thanking everyone profusely, if not all that sincerely, for their time. Seamus didn’t think time had any inherent value, but smiled anyway. As soon as he knew they were out of earshot, Caomhin shook his head. “I don’t know why head office sends down those freaks. Mick Collins didn’t need no spin doctors nor no focus groups neither. But that was back when leaders led, rather than let public opinion lead them.” Seamus reflected on the irony that he himself was chosen for stylistic rather than substantial reasons, but didn’t want to make an issue of it, so just asked, “What’s it really like on the campaign trail?”
Caomhin scratched his beard and said; “It’s changing a lot. Up ‘till quite recently almost everyone voted for the party that their parents voted for, so generally we - and the other small parties - were flogging a dead horse. Now, people are moving form rural areas into cites, and they don't have the same attachment to family that they used to. But they still need something to be attached to, and that something can be nationhood, which is where we can appeal to people.”
“Don't Fianna Fail have something of a monopoly on that?”
“Fianna Fail.” He snarled those words with the bitterness of someone who regarded the taking of the oath to the Queen in 1927 as some sort of personal betrayal. “I don't know how they can present themselves as a nationalist party when they hitch our country’s future so ineluctably to the whims of American multinationals.” As Seamus had been brought up to despise the Soldiers of Destiny with the same virulence that he now hated McDonalds and Coca-Cola, Caomhin was preaching to the converted. Seamus was interested to know if this was something he could make an election issue of. Caomhin looked invidious.
“I don’t know if you’re old enough to remember the ‘80s, when unemployment was so high and everyone was emigrating, and everyone working, except the very rich were being taxed up to their sideburns. Most people who have a job now don't care where the money comes from as long as they don’t have to emigrate.”
Seamus remembered the 80’s alright, when a generation grew up for whom it seemed there were no jobs, and everyone scrambled over each other to get visas for the land of the free, while on the other side of the social ladder, yobbos joyrided or got hooked on smack. Back then, he thought it was tragic, being brought up in a consumer culture by parents who wanted nothing more for him than to be richer than they were. At the time, he blamed the church, and their obstruction of contraception which left Ireland with higher birth-rates than the rest of Europe. He hadn’t backtracked on that position, but now he saw that industrialisation of agriculture was part of the problem as well; consolidation of land into big, Texas-style ranches was forcing many onto emigration boats, just like after the famine, except this time they were being forced to leave by their own government, who’d never find their decision coming back to haunt them in the form of semtex explosions. Of course if they’d sent all those unemployed people back to the land to grow organic potatoes there’d never have been the Celtic Tiger economy, but then Seamus was no longer one to worship blindly at the altar of economic growth. If someone could spend a months wages for an Indian farmer on a dinner for two, did it really mean they had a higher quality of life, that the increased urban sprawl, the endless traffic jams and escalating violence were a price worth paying? He didn’t relate any of these musings to Caomhin, just asked: “Well, can we at least point out that their jobs are so insecure, just how tenuous this whole Celtic Tiger thing is?”
Caomhin’s smiled a little at his naiveté. “No-ones going to vote for someone who tells them they’re going to lose their jobs. That’s why we’re putting all the emphasis on health, education and public services.”
Seamus thought how ironic it was that New Labour’s saccharine tentacles had found their way into the Sinn Fein policy department, but thought it better left unsaid. He just asked, “What about the environment?”
“That too”, Caomhin replied, with a distinct lack of conviction. They could both sense the fatigue in the other, so when Seamus offered to let Caomhin ago he acquiesced, but first reminded him that he needed to go and get the nominations for his candidacy some time soon. Seamus promised to return and start work on it in the morning, Caomhin, rubbing both his eyes at once, said there wasn’t that much of a hurry, but tomorrow was as good a day as any. Just as he was leaving, Caomhin asked, “Oh, By the way, how’d it go with your family?” Seamus gulped and said he didn’t really want to talk about it right now., knowing that a seed had been planted in his brain that would bear fruits of angst before the night was out.