Read by Jamie Laird (6th story in podcast, at 1hXXmin, here)
While Tom Phelan froze to death out the back of his pub on Christmas Eve, Tom Phelan became not too happy with the story of Tom Phelan, Tom Phelan unable to comprehend just whatinthefuck happened. One minute he’d bought a thriving pub back when small pubs thrived, was proposing to the prettiest girl in Ballybalt on its opening night as Phelan’s, and a minute later, all of a sudden, Tom Phelan was back from honeymooning in Rome and the whole town was sniggering at him and fucking his wife, Tom Phelan sleeping on sheets crusted with the spunk of every man from Dungarven to Carrickbeg.
‘Is Veronica in, Tom?’ they asked the young Tom Phelan and Tom Phelan, unable to look any of them in the eye, would say he didn’t know as he served them their pints—that he’d go and see.
Tom Phelan was too young back then, too embarrassed as he became the most cuckolded man in history after the father of Christ. He hid out back in the snug most nights, leaving the main bar to Veronica and her gentlemen callers. And as was the end of many a publican, Tom Phelan became his own best customer. And he was a messy auld drunk with the snivelling and the crying.
‘Tom Phelan can’t drink,’ they said.
‘I can drink,’ Tom Phelan said in his defence. ‘I just can’t stop.’
Veronica Phelan interrupted her husband’s breakfast pint one morning when she was up unusually early. Johnny Badmanners, a dumb-ignorant man too fat for his own haircut and snored when he was awake, stood next to her carrying a suitcase. Tom Phelan was glad to see it. He thought for a second he was free of her—no separation, no divorce, no scene. Tom Phelan could say she simply left one day with Badmanners and a suitcase.
‘That’s right,’ Veronica Phelan said. ‘Have a drink when there’s work to be done. No wonder this place is going under.’
Veronica Phelan returned a week later with a reupholstered vagina. ‘A vaginoplasty,’ Veronica Phelan announced to Phelan’s from up on her stool. ‘To tighten everything up and enhance sexual pleasure.’
Ballybalt had never heard the like of it. ‘That beats all,’ they said. ‘That absolutely beats all.’
Veronica Phelan paid for it with a re-mortgage on the pub that Tom Phelan was none the wiser on, and so with the flick of a pen, Tom Phelan became the silent partner in a tricked-up super-cunt, never laying eyes on it but hearing it receive nightly poundings from Badmanners through the ceiling.
With Veronica Phelan’s buzzer heard ringing all the way from Cloontyprocklis, she set her sights on the world of business, determined to turn Phelan’s into an exquisite dining and drinking destination for a higher class of clientele. The sheep-shite farmers and weekday wasters could bog off. She wore shoulder pads and glittery mini-skirts. She wore sunglasses in January. She threw disastrous cocktail nights, shouting at those who showed up that they weren’t buying enough cocktails. Her food was God-awful. The Dungarven vicar found a teaspoon in his panini and after complaining, Veronica Phelan banned all those of the Protestant faith from Phelan’s.
Next were beauty days for the women of Ballybalt who would not have signed up for a Veronica Phelan Beauty Day for all the sheepdip in Tinryland.
The years spun on and Veronica Phelan turned mean and bitter. She upped prices to counteract the customers they lost. She went away with Badmanners on more occasions and spent more money on tummy-tucks and face-lifts to counteract all the champagne she guzzled. They returned after one such trip with Joker Farrelly having been invited into the extramarital fuck-party. Joker Farrelly was a scrawny well-digger from Tullerone with dirty clothes and a pencil neck and it just wouldn’t do for Veronica. She bought them tailored wardrobes and a couple of wristwatches worth a month’s takings.
Tom Phelan watched the bills pile up and realised he was ruined.
Tom Phelan drank himself stupid.
Veronica Phelan had to work behind both bars because Tom Phelan hadn’t the capacity. It then dawned on Veronica Phelan that her husband was lucky to wake after all the drink he was packing away. He was fattened with drink, sloppy, and had blood red eyes on him. If he kept going the pub would be hers.
At the start of the Christmas season Veronica Phelan began to ply Tom Phelan with so many pints every night that Johnny Badmanners had to prop him up at the bar so it didn’t look like they were pouring drink into his unconscious mouth. Which they were. Johnny Badmanners pretended the drooling and dribbling out of Tom Phelan was Christmas carolling. ‘Have another, Tom.’
‘It’s good stuff.’
‘That’s right, Tom. Good stuff. Here—have another. Happy Christmas!’
Veronica Phelan, Joker Farrelly and Johnny Badmanners carried Tom Phelan to the pub floor every night, wrapped him in tinsel and expected never to see him alive again. This went on for all of December. And Tom Phelan would rise every morning, sit back up at the bar, saying all the while that he wanted a large whiskey. ‘I need a large one.’
‘Some constitution on the cunt,’ Johnny Badmanners said.
‘We’re not giving him enough,’ Joker Farrelly said.
‘I can’t funnel it into him,’ Veronica Phelan said which only gave them the idea to funnel it into him. Tom Phelan spent days drinking pints into a stupor and after closing time, Veronica Phelan took a funnel and poured whole bottles into him.
‘Here, Tom. Isn’t it Christmas!’
It was all to no effect. Murdering Tom Phelan was taking a lifetime and they couldn’t take it any longer. On the Monday before Christmas, Joker Farrelly produced a bottle of methylated spirits.
‘It needs to look accidental,’ Veronica Phelan said.
‘He was so drunk he accidentally drank a bottle of methylated spirits,’ Joker Farrelly said and down Tom Phelan’s gullet it went.
The next morning Tom Phelan almost looked the better of it.
Veronica Phelan fed him raw chicken for dinner and dumped nail varnish into his stout. Joker Farrelly found paint thinner out back and served it up to him. Johnny Badmanners asked Tom Phelan to test out a bottle of new rum he’d made for Christmas, a stinking mix of juice from oysters long expired, pissed-on urinal cake and antifreeze. ‘Have a bit more, Tom,’ Johnny Badmanners said, tipping it up as Tom Phelan drank, and the trio watched Tom Phelan glug on the bottle like it was warm milk and Tom Phelan a winter lamb.
Tom Phelan woke the next morning with a big, thick head on him, his murder a non-starter and his murderers at their wit’s end because there was no end.
‘There’s no end,’ Tom Phelan told them from beneath a stupor and this sent the hapless murderers over the edge. Tom Phelan’s life without end was a living Christmas Hell.
They needed a fucking end.
Christmas Eve was the coldest night of the coldest year ever recorded. Veronica Phelan, Joker Farrelly and Johnny Badmanners carried Tom Phelan out back to the pub’s barrel yard. They laid him down in a puddle and made sure to get his clothes soaked through, their story going to be that in some act of drunken idiocy, Tom Phelan stumbled outside for some fresh air and froze to death.
Veronica Phelan looked up to the mountain looming over them and felt the westerly wind crack across it.
Phelan’s pub was all but hers.
‘Goodnight, Donkey Tom,’ she said and placed a kiss on Tom Phelan’s cheek. ‘And Happy Christmas.’
And while Tom Phelan froze to death, Tom Phelan became not too happy with the story of Tom Phelan.
‘Donkey Tom,’ they’d say. ‘Harmless auld bastard.’
There was hate in Tom Phelan’s hurting heart and cramp in his toes. It brought him lucid out of the dark. There was anger in the hate. There was terror of an eternity as Donkey Tom in the anger. It terrifically raged through his veins and burned in his hurting heart and puddle ice cracked around him.
Tom Phelan moved out of his state with his face split from the cold and a crunching pain in his toes.
‘My pub,’ Tom Phelan said, sitting up, frozen to the marrow in his frostbitten barrel yard on Christmas night.
He tore hinges off doors as he raged through them. ‘This is my pub.’
The bodies in his bed were pink and warm. They woke dozy and scared and Johnny Badmanners told Tom Phelan to get the fuck out. There were only flashes next—flashes of screaming and choking, kicking and shouting, boxing, scratching, skin tearing, nails, cock, tits and hair, snot, spit and blood.
Joker Farrelly was holding fast to the bed. Tom Phelan bit down on the bastard’s fingers until Joker Farrelly had to decide whether to let go of the bed or lose his fingers.
The two men pleaded for no more. Tom Phelan threw them through the front window of Phelan’s to land them naked out on Bridge Street.
Outside they picked the glass out of their arses and stared back at the pub for the longest time. They called up to Veronica to throw them down their trousers—that it was fuckin freezing. When no response came it was assumed they jogged naked back over the mountain to whence they came, sightings of them in Dungarven over the years, reports of them finding many more wives, some of which were their own.
Tom Phelan got the hammer and nailed his wedding photograph to the wall of the pub, the nail driven right between his own eyes. Afterwards Tom Phelan lumbered behind the bar and put the kettle on to make a cup of tea before he went to hospital where he would lose three toes from frostbite.
Not one word was exchanged between Tom and Veronica Phelan ever again. For absolutely essential communication in the years thereafter they used a small blackboard at the bottom of the stairs. Tom Phelan never went beyond the blackboard and Veronica Phelan never again stepped foot inside the pub.
Tom Phelan never drank again.
But he was no picnic in sobriety.
Tom Phelan became the snarkiest, donkey-headed, ready-to-bite-your-throat-out, furious bastard you ever had the displeasure of meeting, like a briar, cantankerous in the pits of his sodden pub. And while Wi-Fi arrived into pubs everywhere else in the country, the rafters of Phelan’s rotted, looking barely capable of supporting a noose if any of the egomaniacs with inferiority complexes drinking at the bar had the gumption to make one. The front of the pub, where groceries were once bought, became a hollowed out poolroom, and through the small door and down to the snug, the corner of doom was carved out by men on the brink, a corner in which they could keep life at bay with fuck-off stares. Splatter and gunk built up in every corner that the mop couldn’t reach, and one day arrived a stink of lives gone by and no life of any world to come. The clocks all stopped and the one-time sense of grandeur looked like it had been beaten down for decades with the carcass of a mange-ridden sheep, the pub becoming the arsebucket of nowhere when the mart finally closed, and Tom Phelan, drinking his tea, gripped his knuckles white to those mugs over the years as he became the nasty apothecary, an arsehole of the deepest dye, the purveyor of misery and destroyer of your life, the dry-drunk publican serving you up pints as penance for his past inactions, all to nail you to the wall when you were spent from the cirrhosis, but by God, and Christ, and all the Donkey Toms in Heaven, did this new story of Tom Phelan stare you down with both eyeballs as you were told it.
(c) David McGrath, 2023
David McGrath won the 2023 Bryan MacMahon Short Story Competition & the 2023 Cill Rialaig Residency which he used to complete a novel set in a pub in rural Ireland. Also this year he has been published in The New Writers edition of The Stinging Fly, won a mentorship with the Irish Writers’ Centre & been shortlisted for The Manchester Fiction Prize. In the past he’s won the Bare Fiction Prize & has been Most Valuable Player for Liars' League London twice. "Donkey Tom" is an extract from his new novel, The Crack.
Jamie Laird is a Scottish actor who trained at Drama Studio London. He is currently appearing in Channel 5’s The Good Ship Murder, and will shortly appear on stage in Lucy’s Pharmakon (Open Handed Theatre). For more details, see http://www.jamielaird.com
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