New Irish Short Stories

by Joseph O'Connor

  2

  It was spring 2006: election season. The windows of the Library looked molten in the light of lengthening evenings. That was where I was spending most of my time, back then: in the Library. I wasn’t a fixer, at that stage. I wasn’t even a hack. I was just a student – and an interested observer.

  I suppose the real beginning of the story is Chris Cooper and his inaugural encounter with the Swizzies. But you’ll need some background, in order to understand why Coop’s first drink with Alan Harper was viewed by so many of us as a troubling development, and why Coop himself was seen as such a crucial figure. (I’ve changed everybody’s name, by the way – but you already knew that.)

  Our Students’ Union elections are held in February every year. The Union constitution mandates that five sabbatical officers – so-called because they take a paid sabbatical in order to fulfil their duties – be elected every spring, to serve during the next academic year. The five positions are President, Deputy President, Welfare Officer, Entertainments Officer and Education Officer. But the only sabbatical position anyone gave a fuck about was President.

  The Union, like all of our student societies, had evolved into a kind of permeable clique. You didn’t need to have been elected, or even to have worked on a campaign, to hang around the Union building and to act like one of the gang. We had a name for hangers-on like this, though: we called them hacks.

  Most of the hacks felt justified in spending their free time in the Union offices because they were affiliated with a political party. Each of the national parties had its campus branch: Labour, Fine Gael, the Greens. And our elections tended to follow the national pattern, which meant that the same campus party had controlled the President’s office for the last five years. This party was Fianna Fáil.

  In February 2006, the President of the Students’ Union was a stocky, red-haired politics student named Barry O’Neill. Barry was also the chair of the Kevin Barry Cumann, the university branch of Fianna Fáil. You tended to find that most of the hacks who hung around the Union corridor were members of the KBC. I once asked Barry O’Neill about this. He said, ‘It’s just the natural order, like. Who runs the show? We run the show.’

  Barry’s triumphalism was one of the things that had got him elected. The other thing was Francis Mulligan, who had been Barry’s campaign manager during the 2005 sabbatical elections.

  Francis Mulligan had been a student for so long that no one remembered what he was supposed to be studying. Every year people would say, ‘Mulligan must have graduated by now.’ But every year, there he was, striding past the sunlit oaks with an armful of freshly bought textbooks, patting the top of his head as if to make sure his thinning hair was still in place.

  Despite the books, no one ever saw Mulligan at a lecture. He had made the Union and the study of the Union the central business of his college life. For this achievement he was widely hated. Once, I asked him how he felt about this. ‘Sure it’s all the same to me,’ he said. ‘What matters is the job.’

  The smallest political party on campus was the Student Socialist Workers’ Party. Grandly, they called themselves the SSWS. Everybody else called them the Swizzies.

  The Swizzies hadn’t had a party member in the President’s chair for five years. Their last viable candidate, Mark Callaghan, had been arrested in the middle of his 2005 campaign when a city-centre bin-tax protest turned violent.

  (The Swizzies were always getting arrested. They saw it as a mark of their commitment to socialist ideals. Their opponents saw it as a mark of the Swizzies’ basic estrangement from the political consensus – this, at least, is how Francis Mulligan would have put it.)

  In February 2006, the Chairman of the Swizzies was a fair-haired sociology student named Alan Harper. Alan had attended the same South Dublin private school as Francis Mulligan, where Francis played rugby and Alan did not. But Alan never mentioned where he had gone to school. Instead, he told you about his father the trade unionist. He told you about The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and The Condition of the Working Class in England.

  Under Alan Harper, the Swizzies had managed to attract a record active membership of ten. To put this in perspective, in 2006 the KBC had an active membership of over three hundred. Alan Harper was not discouraged by these statistics, even though most of the Swizzies who claimed active membership were loafing idealists, content to lounge around their Baggot Street bedsits rolling spliffs on the cover of The Communist Manifesto.

  Alan knew that there was only one point to a political party, no matter how small. And that was to be in power.

  But neither Mulligan nor the Swizzies are where things really began. If you ask me, things really began with Coop, the man that everybody liked.

  3

  Chris ‘Coop’ Cooper was from Illinois – not so much a mark of distinction as he might have hoped, in a university that turned out to be overrun with visiting Americans doing their Junior Year Abroad. But it was not in Coop’s nature to feel overwhelmed. The university housing department put him in a hot, stuffy room in the off-campus residences in Blackrock. Everyone who lived in the rooms around him was American. But Coop hadn’t come to Ireland to hang around with Americans. In his first month, he set out to meet some Irish people. And, very quickly, he succeeded.

  Nobody ever found out a whole lot about Coop’s background. We knew he wasn’t rich. When people asked him why he had come to Dublin, he said, ‘Because all the other European colleges are, like, way too expensive, man.’

  If you had asked us, in September 2005, what would happen to Coop during his year in Dublin, we would have told you: nothing much. Coop was all set to spend his year as one of those Americans who visits our college, makes a few stray friends (charity hikes, the folk group), and goes home with his GPA intact.

  But Coop was different.

  He might not have been rich, but when Coop arrived he dressed in a style we called preppie. He wore slacks, white loafers and short-sleeved shirts with crocodiles on the breast. But less than a month after term began he showed up in the Arts Café one morning wearing Hollister sweatpants, a Ben Sherman shirt and a pair of docksider shoes with the laces untied.

  In other words, Coop now dressed like one of us. And everyone accepted it. Within a couple of weeks, it began to seem that Coop had lived here all his life. And although the more alert among us surely sensed how strange it was that this American had somehow earned our love, we had our reasons. Coop got us, for one thing. He got our jokes. People even started quoting Coop’s jokes, the surest measure, we felt, of the guy’s likeability and charm.

  I suppose I’m making it sound as though Coop was suppressing his true nature in order to belong. But that wasn’t it. Coop liked the Hollister sweatpants and the Ben Sherman shirts. He admired the people who wore them. He wasn’t pretending to be Irish. He spoke about Chicago all the time, as if to remind us that his home was somewhere else. But for the duration of his year abroad, Coop was one of us. And everyone loved him for it.

  Well, I should amend this. In the first few months, everyone loved Coop except the Union hacks, who refused to wear Ben Sherman shirts out of principle and who were regarded by the rest of the students as dowdy, resentful weirdos who had inexplicably conned the university administration into giving them a whole building to themselves.

  So, you see, it wasn’t inevitable that Coop would end up becoming a hack. And that’s why people were amazed when it actually happened.

  Coop’s ascent to the peak of popularity was a glorious thing to behold: effortless, unhindered, like the swift, sure flight of some migrating bird. Coop made friends as if making friends were simply a knack he had been born with, like the gift of divining for water. By Christmas, he was practically living in the bar. And everyone who walked in recognised him.

  The point is this. By the second week of February 2006, when the Swizzies blanketed the campus with posters saying COOP FOR PRESIDENT – VOTE SSWS!, nobody needed to be told who Coop was.

  Every
one already knew.

  4

  All through that year, as I walked through the Arts Block, I saw the same piece of graffiti, written in neat black letters on the wall beside the library tunnel. It said, ‘If you die in college, do you die in real life?’

  5

  The Swizzies drank at the Bachelor’s Inn, a decaying workman’s pub on the north quays. They liked it because of its stained oak panelling and its settled fug of Woodbine smoke. It was here that Coop met Alan Harper for the first time. The reason, of course, was a girl.

  It was January 2006. Coop had by now acquired his first steady Irish girlfriend, a second-year law student named Aisling Moore. People have wondered what Coop saw in Aisling. But to me the thing made sense. The highest compliment Coop could offer was to say that you were ‘real’. ‘He’s real, man, you know? No bullshit.’ And Coop would shake his head in wonder.

  Thinking about this now, it occurs to me that there was no other way in which Coop seemed so profoundly American.

  Aisling Moore suited Coop just fine. She wanted to be a human-rights attorney. She wasn’t one of those law-yers-in-training who trawled the bars wearing a T-shirt that said ‘I Can Get You Off’. She preferred to sit in the Library and read up on Japanese whaling activities or the rights of Muslim prisoners in Guantánamo Bay.

  The general response to Coop’s relationship with Aisling Moore was one of semi-tolerant bemusement (the girls) and dissimulated envy (the boys). Dozens of Abercrombied rugger-huggers sniped at one another about how ‘boring’ Aisling was and how Coop could totally have done, like, so much better. The boys, most of whom had wanted to fuck Aisling Moore for years, understood Coop’s interest in her – or thought they did.

  What matters at this point in the story is that Aisling Moore had been the secondary-school girlfriend of Alan Harper – a union that was widely held to have made total sense, given Alan’s predilection for earnestly hectoring the student body about Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn and Aisling’s interest in what Barry O’Neill once described as ‘hippy-dippy pinko-liberal bullshit’.

  They were still friends, Aisling and Alan, which explains why Aisling took Coop to the Bachelor’s Inn one night in January 2006 and how Alan and Coop had that fateful first pint together.

  6

  Alan Harper’s father worked as a fitter for the railways. He had served, Alan said, for thirty years as shop steward for the transport union. When Alan was a child, his father would take him every now and then into the Works in Inchicore to see the big refit sheds where he worked. The sheds were cold and full of the clanging sound of heavy machinery. Men in overalls with sooty faces, perennially unoccupied, stood around like striking miners. Alan’s father assured him that these men were indispensable to the continued running of the national railway service. ‘Good union men,’ his father said. Outside the sheds, in the maintenance sidings, dormant rolling stock waited, the battered carriages uncoupled from their engines and seemingly rusted in place on the tracks.

  Later, Alan’s father was promoted out of the refit sheds and began to work in an office located on the top floor of a small cottage that stood on a weedy patch of ground between two warehouses. ‘This,’ Alan’s father told him, ‘is the real nerve centre of the operation.’ In the cottage people sat at desks and pecked at computer keyboards. To Alan it seemed much less interesting than the refit sheds. But his father, after he moved into the administrative cottage, began to hum with a new and contented energy, as though he had finally worked his way to the secret heart of things.

  What Alan liked best about the cottage were the maps on the walls. The largest showed the Irish railway network as it had existed in 1952: the green teddy bear, with its pencilled veinwork of iron causeways. It gave Alan a sense of power to stand in front of this map and to broodingly survey the country’s train routes. He felt like a general, pondering the ground over which he would dispatch his infantry. But what excited him most about this map was the sense of connectedness it gave. The map showed that every town in Ireland, no matter how small, was connected to every other town. And even if you started from the most insignificant place you could still get anywhere in the country you wanted to go.

  7

  In the foyer of the Students’ Union building was a large wooden plaque on which were printed in gold leaf the names of every president the Union had ever had. The most recent name, of course, was Barry O’Neill’s.

  It was generally agreed that Barry was a pretty okay president. He welcomed invited speakers with flattering introductory rambles. He chaired the weekly Union meetings with bluff efficiency. He gave statements to the university newspaper about the Islamic Society’s right to free expression. And these, by and large, were the only duties that Barry, or any Students’ Union president, would ever be expected to perform.

  That the presidency of the Union was a sinecure was our university’s best-kept open secret. What made the job worthwhile was not what you did while you held it – any Union president who wanted to effect real change quickly found himself stuck in an administrative dead end, tied up with memos and protocol. No, what made the job worthwhile were the things it could do for your career, especially if you were Fianna Fáil. Union presidents who were also KBC loyalists were looked upon with interest and encouragement by the national party. They were seen as rising stars. ‘It looks good on your CV,’ was Barry’s stated reason for his presidential run. ‘It’s all about building the CV, man. Know what I mean?’

  This, more than anything else, was why President was the only sabbatical office anyone gave a fuck about. It would do more for you than any number of diplomas or degrees, and, in return, all you had to do was get yourself elected.

  And everyone understood this to be true.

  8

  Coop kicked at a frayed corner of the ancient, foul-smelling carpet of the Bachelor’s Inn and revealed that one of the reasons he had come to Ireland was his disillusionment with America’s right-wing corporate world view. He wanted to see how things were done in Europe.

  ‘You guys have, like, socialised medicine and shit,’ Coop said.

  ‘That is so not true you don’t even know how not true that is,’ Alan said.

  ‘But you know what I mean, right?’ Coop said. ‘Back home, it’s all like, “Fuck you.” But here, you have this system that actually, like, looks out for people.’

  Alan thought about this and then said, ‘I know what you mean.’

  If I reveal at this point in the story that Coop was a socialist, you might not believe me. And you’d be right, in a way: Coop didn’t become a socialist proper until the next day, when Alan Harper signed him up as a member of the Swizzies. It seems clear that, by the time this happened, Alan had already convinced Coop to run for Union President on a Swizzie ticket. The way Alan achieved this was to make it sound like fun.

  ‘Think about it, man,’ Alan said to Coop. ‘You love it here, right? This way, you get to stay another year. And they pay you to stay.’

  ‘Okay,’ Coop said, and smiled his heartbreaking smile. ‘It’ll be a riot.’

  We were, all of us, stunned by this development.

  ‘What the fucking hell,’ people wondered aloud, ‘is Coop doing hanging out with the Swizzies? They’re such unbelievable losers.’

  And other people murmured things like ‘It’s Aisling’s influence, obvs,’ and moved uneasily on to some new topic.

  I think that Coop’s decision to join the Swizzies had less to do with his own desire for some kind of authentic political engagement and more to do with Alan Harper’s ability to read people, to divine, in a single conversation, their true political nature. Like most people who hold deep political beliefs, Alan had a keen eye for ideological positioning. And he immediately pinned Coop as a fellow traveller.

  There was also the fact that it was almost election season, and the Swizzies had no presidential candidate. Alan had even considered running himself. But he wasn’t thrilled at the idea of being beaten by whatever candidate Fra
ncis Mulligan was managing. Alan needed a candidate who was already popular. He needed a candidate who might actually win.

  Coop was the solution to Alan Harper’s problems. And so Alan presented himself as the solution to Coop’s.

  When the barman called last orders in the Bachelor’s Inn, Alan went over to Aisling Moore and said, ‘Have you slept with Coop yet?’

  ‘Not yet,’ Aisling said.

  ‘You should,’ Alan said.

  9

  Francis Mulligan called a crisis meeting in a sushi bar on Dame Street. The KBCers gathered round a long table and looked out at Dublin Castle and City Hall. Barry O’Neill sat at one end of the table in silence, glumly eating a bowl of wasabi peas. He didn’t like sushi.

  Mulligan made a short speech during which he did not mention Coop. Then he said, ‘We’re running Barry for a second term.’

  This decision did not meet with universal approval.

  ‘Can we really run Barry against Coop?’ someone asked. People began to murmur things about Coop and how popular Coop was.

  Francis Mulligan leafed through pages in a ring binder. ‘You’re never stronger than when you have incumbency on your side,’ he said. ‘If George W. Bush can get reelected, then so can Barry.’

  Barry looked up from his bowl of wasabi peas. No one met his eye.

  One of the freshers spoke. ‘What I can’t understand,’ he said, ‘is how come Coop isn’t running for us. Not for President, obviously’ – he nodded at Barry – ‘but for, like, Ents or something.’

  People agreed that Coop would be a natural candidate for Entertainments Officer. ‘He’s so popular, like,’ someone observed.

  Francis Mulligan ignored this and began to hand out photocopies. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘Here’s the plan. The returning officer will have his team of observers keeping an eye on every little thing. So we have to win it through a fair fight. We’re going to need everyone campaigning at full strength going forward. Get your friends involved. Use your society connections.’ He peered down at his notes. ‘We’re actually going to try to let Barry off the leash as little as possible this time around. The last thing we need – with all due respect, Baz – is you going around shouting about how you run the show.’