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.