It became our secret catchphrase. I hoped that my homage to Hunter tonight would propel her back to those giddy early days of illicit cider and snogging; the first sweet breaths of our awakening love. In fact, I was counting on it: things had grown strained between us lately. Waiting didn’t agree with me.
Before I set off, Mum felt compelled to issue those classic Irish maternal warnings.
‘Don’t drink too much now,’ was self-explanatory. ‘No messing,’ she said, which meant no fighting. ‘And no carrying on,’ she added, which meant no shagging.
She cupped my chin: ‘Think once, think twice, then think M-A-M-M-Y.’
I nodded and smiled. I couldn’t believe I was hearing this for the last time.
‘Be good now, and be careful,’ she concluded.
‘Oh I’ll be good, Mammy,’ I quipped, setting off on the bike, ‘it’s up to her to be careful.’
Where the bungalows ceased between Clara and Tullamore, a blood-red sun sank behind the cooling fields, turning sleepy cows into steaming silhouettes. Chirpy birds made their racket on the crooked black power lines, distant African heat urging them onwards. I felt strangely gloomy, unsettled.
Discontented air nibbled at my skin; that damp heavy Midlands air that slides inside your clothes and your bed sheets and chills your bones. I squinted at the winking downtown lights in the distance, trying to picture where Eve’s bungalow sat in the Tullamore ground mist. But the drifting white steam kept deceiving me.
As I dumped the bike behind the tree in her front garden, I assumed she was still waiting for the right opportunity to break the news to her mum. This, surely, could be the only remaining obstacle to our new life together.
Eve answered her front door, a knockout in a Viking helmet, tiny animal-skin mini dress, fishnets, a leather hip holster sporting a shiny little prop dagger and a whale bone on a string around her neck.
‘We can’t stop here, this is bat country,’ I said, in my best American accent.
The Viking heroine looked me up and down, her face crumpling in disdain.
‘You know who I am, right?’ I pleaded.
‘James Joyce?’ she ventured, her top lip curled in disgust.
‘James Joyce? What, on a Caribbean cruise?’
She looked set to burst into tears.
‘Hunter S. Thompson,’ I announced, OD’ing on indignation.
‘Jesus, Donal, you could’ve made a bit more effort,’ she said, shaking her head, then stomping back into the house.
I hauled myself through the front door, wincing at the Dire Straits track booming out of the sitting room to my right. Someone must have commandeered the hi-fi. ‘Twisting by the Pool’? Twisting by the fucking neck would be preferable. I couldn’t resist a smirk of superiority, watching these musically illiterate morons bouncing around the room to this shite. I walked on into the hallway, soothingly dark save for some randomly-draped strings of white fairy lights, giving it a grotto vibe.
‘Good,’ I thought; easier to hide.
The dressing down I’d just received for not dressing up had stripped me of party spirit.
But guilt soon burrowed its way to my frazzled nerve endings: Eve was right, I should have made more of an effort. I thought about going to find her, to say sorry. But, recently, her hair-trigger outbursts were taking longer to pass. I decided to beg for forgiveness later, when the party would be jumping and she’d be less stressed.
I headed to the refuge of the kitchen at the back of the house. To my horror, it was packed too, everyone yelling at the same time. The smug Uni-bound crowd were enjoying one last gleeful blast of ‘points’, ‘grades’, ‘retakes’, and ‘grants’ before tomorrow’s life-defining results. A bottle of gin grinned at me from the top of the fridge. I snaffled it all for myself and headed to the little utility room, tucked away next to the back door. I kept the light off and poured a kamikaze measure. ‘Make it better, Beefeater,’ I demanded, downing it in one.
Sometime later, with Beefy half-empty and me half-cut, a pair of disconnected white eyes suddenly sprang through the doorway. I recoiled. My eyes adjusted to take in a trilby, a checked dickie-bow and pristine white gloves. My brain finally made sense of it: Choker, the mad bastard, being so politically incorrect that it surely constituted a hate crime.
Tony ‘Choker’ Meehan, blacked up as a minstrel. Or was it Al Jolson? Either way, he’d somehow transcended gloriously offensive. As he wallowed in near-the-knuckle notoriety, I pulled a mug off the shelf and poured him a large one. Better to appease him, a fact I knew only too well …
Choker had been brought up by the Jesuit Brothers in the town’s orphanage – as it was still called. Legend has it that, aged four, he saw his dad murder his mum with his bare hands. That’d certainly explain his penchant for strangulation. In primary school, he used to sneak up behind kids and wordlessly throttle them. Some of his victims actually passed out. He even got hold of a pair of black leather gloves, which he touchingly christened his ‘stranglers’ – a development that spread mild alarm through the entire town.
Unchecked, his levels of violence spiralled. A few months ago, he jumped off a stage at the local community hall disco and scissor-kicked a complete stranger in the head. The victim spent three months in hospital, two of them on a liquid diet. Meehan’s solicitor played the ‘poor orphan’ card in court and the judge acquitted him of GBH.
We should have universally ostracised him after that, but we didn’t. We couldn’t. Any group of Irish male teens needed a psycho to call on occasionally, either on the Gaelic football pitch or outside the chippie.
Even the Gardai seemed wary of him, and turned a blind eye to his pot dealing. Some put this down to Choker’s close relationship with Father Devlin, a senior Jesuit who trained the college football team and, reputedly, liked a fiddle with teenage boys. Acutely aware of this, none of his players ever went down injured.
Eve, a true crime nut, was obsessed with the murder of Meehan’s mother. She asked my brother Fintan – a newspaper reporter in Dublin – to get cuttings on the case. I refused to read them. It was difficult enough facing Choker without knowing about his homicidal genetic disposition.
‘Mr Aaaal Jolson,’ he sang, to the tune of ‘Mr Bojangles’ while jazz-wafting his enormous white hands. I stared speechlessly, trying to decide if it would be safer to join in or just carry on feigning delight.
‘Who are you supposed to be?’ he demanded accusingly.
‘James Joyce,’ I said, wanting to keep it simple.
He shook his head mournfully: ‘Jeez, you could have made some effort.’
Then, seemingly out of nowhere, he produced a bottle with no label.
‘I was gonna save this for later,’ said Choker, ‘but I bet you’d like some right now.’ His tone suggested that I should like some, right now.
As the Incredible Hulk-hued green liquid glugged into my glass for way too long, I heard myself warble: ‘What is it?’
‘Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder,’ smiled Choker, sounding like Shank would, if he’d been brought up in a bog.
I took a sip and fought back tears. Choker nodded, so I took another.
‘The really fit birds love fancy dress, don’t they?’ declared Choker. ‘Gives them a chance to strut their stuff. Put those swotty heifer lumps back in their hay boxes, what?’
He could tell I didn’t follow.
‘All those chubby bitches banging on about their As and Bs and which Uni they’re going to? When they see a woman like Eve in an outfit like that, puts them right back in their place, doesn’t it?’
He grimaced at my confused face, strutted towards