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.