Read by Paul Clarke
London. August. 1979
Mac and Kevin stood in the Young Ireland Ballroom and studied the strange gyrating creatures. There was nothing even remotely attractive to the eye in the posturing and prancing and posing, but that didn't matter because Mac and Kevin hadn't come for the dancing, nor to pick up heavy girls and transport them into a state of blissful matrimony; they were certainly not there for the music. They were looking for one particular inbred face in a vast sea of many.
“Testing, testing, testing…”
The dancehall in Harlesden was run by a pea-faced priest called Father Hegarty; a breeder of hard working man-horses, he poked and prodded his sires into action on Friday and Saturday nights. The whole romantic enterprise was based on the fact that half the Paddies in London hoped to marry a fat little nurse from Mayo, a flush cheeked bosomy creature with a forgiving nature and a functional knowledge of fellatio. It was more grapple than dance, with men and women drunkenly whirling about the floor like disparate, desperate items of clothing in a tumble dryer:
Micks and Match.
The Queen of Irish Country Music stood in front of an old slide projection of an Irish street scene, circa 1950: A retarded population, scared in equal measure by God and fashion, their clothes made from rags dipped in bog water, their cars the mechanical biscuit tins inherited from the English: Morris Cowleys, assorted Cambridges and Rileys, and the never-faithful Austin 10. - What do you call a British car owner? - A fucking pedestrian.
Mac said something and Kevin nodded; they both focused on the same ugly, misshapen man on the other side of the dance-floor.
Mandy McKenna was not a pretty sight. He had pork chop ears and a beak for a nose. He was the brother you preferred not to talk about, the uncle you rarely saw, the child you hoped you'd never have. He was the foetus that somehow made it past the coat hanger. He nodded at Mac and Kevin, and then stepped out onto the worn maple floor where most of his business transactions took place.
Her Royal Highness, The Queen of Twang, tightened the knob on the microphone stand, and then snapped her fingers with an amplified clickety-clack. The band pranced onto the stage, all indigo costumes and fat calloused hands. They looked less like musicians and more like the stokers on some queer cruise ship. Some old spit was drained from the water key on the alto sax and a mewling tone was pulled from the sagging lung of a button accordion.
“How’ya?” Roared the Queen.
“Grand!” The crowd roared back.
If you thought the worse thing the Irish ever did to London was put a bomb in Harrods, then you never heard Mary McCrory's Mistical Men, or Danny Driscoll and his Mullingar Moonshiners or Chipper O'Neill and the Boys from the Barracks as they gang-raped the Nashville songbook.
"Testing, testing one-two-three".
Mandy had taken his name from the Irish tradition of calling a man after his chosen profession; for instance, Martin "mini-bus" Brennan, "The Plumber" Foley, "Whore-master" Dooley, and so on. Mandy was a retailer of Mandrax pills; what the Sun newspaper referred to as Randy Mandies and the Americans called Quaaludes. He sold them for a quid apiece.
Mac and Kevin waded through the roughnecks in their Bri-nylon shirts, and pushed through the stench of Brylcreem Original that hung in the air like Zyklon-B.
"Testing, testing seven-eight-nine".
The pair cut deeper through the crowd, into the ugly heart of the mob where the fight was most likely to start.
"Well, Lads," Mandy said when they came face to face, "Well, well, well, well, well".
He was a fountain of wells.
Money was handed over and Mandy yelled through cupped hands: "You’ll have to go and see Paudie now. Paudie has the gear. You know Paudie, don’t yiz?”
And everyone knew Paudie. Paudie hailed from some pit in county Roscommon where they made pies out of sick children. He talked through a scattering of crooked teeth and his words came out in short, mangled sentences.
Mandy disappeared into a hedgerow of corduroy jackets and shiny-arsed gabardine pants. Kevin pushed forward until he too was swallowed, but Mac found his path blocked by a giant in a dung-coloured three piece suit. The monster wore a necktie with a knot the size of a clenched fist; his clenched fists were the size of bowling balls. The only reason he had developed opposable thumbs was because he needed them to operate a shovel.
"Excuse me," Mac said, but the monster refused to budge.
“Wha’ are you doing here?” The monster bellowed, and it was a reasonable question because Mac did not look like he belonged anywhere: Ramones jeans, Sharkskin jacket and a knock-off Westwood T-shirt that said "Heroin Only Kills The Weak". His hair was spiked and prickly to the touch, his eyes darkened by sleepless nights and bad romantic judgment.
He always carried a knife.
A tortured note rang out from the stage and the three-piece drum kit kicked into life. ‘Kish-Kish’ went the hi-hat.
"I asked ya' a question,” said the monster.
The bass guitar climbed to a cruising altitude where it would remain for the rest of the night, repeating the exact same phrase, something that sounded like the words "Humpty-Dumpty, Humpty-Dumpty", over and over again.
“Kish-Kish.”
“Humpty-Dumpty.”
“Kish-Kish.”
The Queen of Irish Country Music started to sing and her Donegal accent crept through the air, a dissonant flatulence, gassing a song that had four words, three chords and no earthly reason for existence.
“I’m not goin’ to ask you again,”
Mac looked up into the eyes of the side-burned, sociopathic sister-shagger and saw a walnut-sized brain and a forty-watt bulb with one illuminated thought: "When the band starts playin', the fightin' starts." For one short moment Mac felt a twinge of sorrow, not for the monster and the terrible tragedy that was about to befall him, but for the loss of his own musical youth.
Punk rock arrived in '76 and departed in '77. The anthems could now only be heard after midnight, radio echoes, zombie love-calls rippled with static: The opening scream of Neat, Neat, Neat mixed with the broken china cup piano of Piss Factory: White noise rising over the airways and disappearing into the darkness of time. Punk was dead and yet this shite was alive. Out with the new and in with the old. There was no justice in the World of Song.
“Answer me," Roared the monster, rapping Mac's chest with a bowling ball fist. Some frothy saliva spun out from his face, a liquid question mark that accompanied his violent curiosity.
"Kish-Kish."
"Humpty-Dumpty."
"Kish-Kish."
The din was gnawing into Mac's head like a hungry rat. He thought of the chip shop in Wood Green and the juke box full of "Rock Classics" - Johann Sebastian Zeppelin and Ludwig Van Bachman Turner Overdrive – and the little Greek girl behind the counter who used the phrase "my love" in every single sentence, in a soft voice that sometimes gave him an erection.
A stiffness of diction, you might say.
"Would you like salt on that, my love?" and then she would dip her delicate hand into the heated glass case that contained the thick, juicy sausage of kings.
"A squirt of ketchup on your saveloy, my love?"
One day he might ask her out, but he had very little exposure to Greek women and was concerned about their genetic predisposition towards facial hair. - One did not want to fall asleep beside Melina Mercouri and wake up next to Freddy Mercury.
"I'm talkin' to YA!" howled the monster.
The crowd pressed in and the knife sneaked out. It was an old American Shur-Snap with a black tar handle and a sweet stiletto blade, not yet extended; it was easily concealed in a hand.
Mac looked past the forty-watt fight bulb, into the shallow pool of the big man's knowledge. He saw a grey soup filled with republican songs; decades of the rosary; pictures of Elvis Presley and Padre Pio; secret homosexual longings; recipes for rasher sandwiches; Gaelic football scores since '62 and last, but by no means least; the list of fake names used in different labour exchanges for fraudulent claims.
"Kish-Kish."
"Humpty-Dumpty."
"Kish-Kish."
Mac pressed the button and the blade swung out, a sharp secret hidden by the passing movement of bodies.
He had already picked his target.
The monster's belly looked like a laundry sack filled with wet cement; it heaved, swayed, and rolled from side to side. It rubbed against a Rayon shirt, generating static, forcing short hairs out through buttonholes where they became charged tendrils, arcing and sparking against a belt buckle the size of a hubcap.
Mac smiled.
The monster opened his mouth to say something loud, noxious, and fearsome, but the words never came. Instead, his eyes turned to water, his knees bent and his shoulders folded in like butterfly wings. He descended into the quicksand of pain with a twisted face and quivering lips and when he hit the ground, it was with a sodden thump.
"Kish-Kish."
"Humpty-Dumpty."
"Kish-Kish."
And Mac was perplexed because the knife still hung at his side, bright and shining and clean as a whistle. The belly of the beast was still intact with no guts, no gore spilled on the floor.
Something else entirely had brought about the dramatic collapse of Goliath: A boot had cut through the tangle of chancers and dancers and slammed into the monster's shin, crushing it like a one stem vase caught in the path of a ball peen hammer. The boot belonged to Kevin. His face bobbed into view for a second, bright, tight, and energized.
“Somebody bashed Dinny!” The call went out.
"Tell Danny, somebody bashed Dinny"
Danny and Dinny? A pair of brothers of a comedy duo?
A woman screamed. A glass shattered.
“Who bashed Dinny?”
The crowd searched itself for the enemy within, the basher of Dinny. Bouncers took to the floor, four abreast, like minesweepers. Father Hegarty, his bald head speckled with rainbow dots from the mirror ball, put down a bottle of warm 7Up, rolled up his black sleeves and waded into the mayhem.
Kevin's hand reached out and dragged Mac through an opening in the swirling chaos.
Paudie leaned against a column, not even vaguely interested in the war raging all around him. When he saw Mac and Kevin approach, he pulled a plastic bag from his pocket.
“Quare sport, the fuck,” he said, making sense only to himself.
His hand touched Kevin’s hand, and the deal was done with speed, accuracy, and near-invisibility.
Mac and Kevin headed for the exit. The Queen of Irish Country Music crooned into the vortex of raging testosterone, a tale of happy girlhood spent in buttercup pastures. The accordion player stepped nervously back from the edge of the stage. The drummer scrunched up and made himself a smaller target for flying bottles.
"Kish-Kish."
"Humpty-Dumpty."
"Kish-Kish."
Mac and Kevin made it to the door without further adventure and, just as they hit the fresh outside air, a young lady arrived, the original of the species, the puffy little full-breasted Mayo nurse herself, all handbag and hairspray and hope. When she caught sight of two young men departing, two fine catches, she moaned in abject disappointment. Unable to contain her woe, she watched them go into the black London night, and her voice was small and helpless, the involuntary words almost lost in the racket and riot coming from inside the ballroom.
“Ah lads, you’re not leaving already?”
(c) Barry McKinley, 2013
Barry McKinley was nominated in 2009 for Best New Play in the Irish Theatre Awards for his play Elysium Nevada. He is currently editing a collection of short stories drawn from his late 1970s London diaries. He attends the National Film School in Dublin where he is studying for an MA in screenwriting.
Paul Clarke trained at the Central School and always got cast as a baddie or a monster. Or, for a bit of variety, a bad monster. Now a photographer, technologist and occasional performer, he finds the League's stories islands of relative sanity in his life.
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