New Irish Short Stories

by Joseph O'Connor

  Barry asked the waitress for another bowl of wasabi peas.

  ‘We’ll also need girls,’ Francis Mulligan said. ‘Get them standing around in their string tops and their little pink shorts, handing out fliers.’

  ‘It’s February,’ someone pointed out.

  ‘They won’t mind.’ Mulligan knocked back his thimbleful of sake. ‘I’m also setting up a task force.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Watching the Swizzies like a fucking hawk. I want to know if they break a rule. Anything that could get them reported. Posters in the wrong place. Graffiti. Financial irregularities. Anything at all.’

  Mulligan looked at Barry. ‘I’ve booked you a weekend course with a public-speaking instructor, Baz. You need to exercise the old rhetorical skills a bit.’

  Barry looked out at Dublin Castle, the old seat of power, with its wainscoting of municipal light. He had finished his third bowl of wasabi peas.

  10

  You have to remember that Francis Mulligan had been around a lot longer than the rest of us, and that he had thought more deeply and more pointedly than anyone else in the Union about how the Union worked and what it was for. When people asked him why he had never run for office himself, he would say, ‘Ah sure, who’d vote for the likes of me?’ But the truth was that Francis Mulligan had no interest in that kind of power. He was after something deeper.

  Francis Mulligan’s paternal grandfather had been a Fianna Fáil TD representing a rural constituency for thirty-one years. When Francis was twelve, his grandfather died, very slowly, in Blanchardstown Hospital. Francis’s parents brought him into the ward half a dozen times, but it was the final visit, the visit before the funeral, that Francis remembered most clearly.

  In the sunlit hospital room Francis’s aunts and uncles sat around on stiff school chairs, wearing plastic gloves and filmy aprons that tied at the back. His grandfather lay in the wheeled bed, curled up like a child, looking up at nothing. Francis stood with his hands clasped in front of him, wishing he could take off the clammy plastic gloves. He looked at his grandfather’s tiny body: the half-closed and glistening eyes, the efforful but regular breaths. There were gauze patches on his grandfather’s head, covering little cancerous tumours that there was no longer any point in treating. The room overlooked a car park and a busy bypass beyond.

  Francis’s mother said, ‘The lavender is blooming, all along the roads.’ She smiled down at the man in the bed. ‘He’d be thrilled.’

  His father stirred and went to the window, his hands in his pockets. ‘That man never looked at a lavender bush in his life,’ he said. ‘If it wasn’t party politics, it didn’t exist, as far as he was concerned.’

  Francis thought about this statement for a long time afterwards. He wondered if it was something that would become true about him, when he was older.

  11

  Before we knew it, the election had begun. The Union, prompted by its own peculiar calendar, emerged, blinking, into the light of popular scrutiny. It was like watching a flower that blooms only at night suddenly open its petals to the glare of afternoon.

  Francis and Barry had briefly entertained the doomed hope that Coop’s campaign would fail to muster the two hundred signatures necessary to secure a nomination. But Coop, wearing a tuxedo the colour of vanilla ice cream paid for out of Swizzie funds, took the entry forms with him to the Arts Ball and emerged from the Burlington Hotel with over three hundred names drunkenly scribbled on the dotted lines. Alan Harper filed for nomination, and the Swizzies, with unprecedented haste, began to print posters, pamphlets and fliers. The posters showed a smiling Coop, in stonewashed jeans and a Che Guevara T-shirt, leaning against a bare brick wall, gazing intently out of frame.

  If you looked closely at Coop’s campaign literature, you saw a small SWSS logo in the top right-hand corner, just above Coop’s stylishly raised aviator shades. But almost no one outside the Union noticed this logo, or seemed to care what it meant.

  The Returning Officer, Richard Lyons, was one of those academically ungifted middle-aged men who cannot bring themselves to leave university. He worked in an office in the Union Building, surrounded by female students who processed Union paperwork part-time for minimum wage.

  Early in the campaign, Francis Mulligan went to Richard Lyons and proposed that the party logo on the Swizzies’ posters was small enough to be in violation of an obscure rule governing the design of campaign materials. Mulligan also tried to interest the campus paper in this theory. But nobody was buying.

  We arrived on Monday morning to find the concourse commandeered by roving hacks. Overnight, buildings and noticeboards and lecture theatres had been plastered with campaign bumf. From a thousand glossily monochrome posters, Coop and Barry looked down at you, soliciting your love.

  Barry’s posters featured the Fianna Fáil logo, prominently displayed. Francis Mulligan had also convinced Barry to wear a three-piece suit for his campaign photos and public appearances. It was a very expensive tweed suit, with a gold watch-fob dangling beneath the crisp lapels.

  Sabbatical candidates were given two weeks to campaign. Their teams set up tables in the faculty buildings. They wore gaudy T-shirts emblazoned with their candidate’s name and picture. Lecturers were importuned to delay their classes while the candidates unfurled their rousing spiel.

  From adjoining tables in the Arts Block, Alan Harper and Francis Mulligan plotted their campaigns. Although they worked within ten feet of each other every day for a fortnight, they seldom found a reason to speak.

  Three days into the campaign, it became clear that Coop would be our next Union President. Because the campus paper appeared too infrequently to conduct useful polls, the campaign managers organised their own. Hacks conducted vox-pop interviews with students on their way to class. Francis Mulligan and Alan Harper urged their party’s class reps to find out, informally, which way their friends were planning to vote.

  ‘Be subtle,’ Francis Mulligan said. ‘Just bring up the election casually in conversation and see what people say.’

  ‘Tell people to vote for Coop,’ Alan Harper said, ‘and see what they say.’

  By these imperfect methods, Alan and Francis became aware, more or less simultaneously, of what Francis called ‘the state of play’. The students who planned to vote were planning, overwhelmingly, to vote for Coop.

  Alan began giving Coop some books to read. He gave him American Power and the New Mandarins and The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

  Francis bought Barry a new suit.

  Both parties engaged in what some people referred to as dirty tricks. Francis Mulligan directed his task force to request an audit of Swizzie finances. (The Swizzies had no finances to speak of, since society funds were allocated on the basis of membership size. Alan had practically bankrupted the party when he bought Coop the ice-cream tuxedo.) Mulligan also instructed teams of KBC hacks to raid the campus at night and tear down Coop’s posters.

  In retaliation, the Swizzies collected Barry’s fliers and dumped them in the Secret Lake, a small pond hidden behind the Agriculture Building.

  But it was the Hustings Debate, held at the beginning of the election’s second week, that convinced us Coop was headed for a landslide. Under the lecture-theatre lights, Barry sweated in his suit and blunderingly deployed the Mister-Speaker orotundities he had picked up at debating camp. And Coop – well, Coop fired off zinger after zinger, to the raucous approval of the crowd.

  ‘How much longer,’ he demanded, ‘do we have to put up with a president who once referred to Temple Bar as “the West Bank of Dublin”? I mean, come on guys,’ he said, flattening his palms on the lectern. ‘I’m American. I know what it’s like to have a moron for President. I feel your pain. And I’m here to tell you that you can do better!’

  ‘It’s a no-brainer,’ Alan Harper said when the Hustings was over and Coop was hugging Aisling Moore in the centre of a stage filled with fallen streamers. ‘This thing is down.’

  Barry O�
�Neill sloped over to Francis Mulligan. ‘How do you think it went?’ he asked.

  ‘Fine, Barry,’ Mulligan said. ‘It went fine.’

  On the Tuesday morning that followed the Hustings, Alan Harper walked up to the Union Building to talk to Richard Lyons. His ostensible purpose was to collect documents for Coop that explained the duties of the President of the Union. In fact, Alan was interested in discovering the limits of whatever authority was about to accrue to his party. He told himself he was doing something no Swizzie had ever done before: he was preparing to seize power.

  Outside the office of the Student Executive Forum, he ran into Francis Mulligan.

  ‘Hey Francis,’ Alan said.

  ‘Morning, Alan,’ Francis said. He paused. Then he said, ‘I meant to ask you something. You know on the nomination form, right? Where it says, The candidate must be a recognised student of the college in good standing?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You lads ticked that, right? You had to tick it.’

  ‘I ticked it,’ Alan said.

  ‘All right so,’ Francis said. ‘Sure I’ll see you on Friday.’

  Friday was Election Day.

  Alan lingered outside Richard Lyons’s office for a moment. Then he went inside.

  Francis Mulligan went home early that afternoon, leaving Barry’s campaign in the hands of the KBC hacks. Rumours spread that Barry’s manager had abandoned him, that his campaign was, in the words of a rival staffer, ‘holed below the waterline’.

  At Coop’s table in the Arts Building, someone opened a bottle of champagne, which was immediately confiscated by campus services. At four o’clock, Coop went to the bar to meet Aisling Moore. He was greeted at the door by a round of applause.

  *

  12

  And now it is time for me to enter the story, at this late, last minute, when everyone knows the state of play and our ending is all but a foregone conclusion. I can give you the exact moment, if you like. It was a February morning, very early, eight or nine. The campus was quiet, like an airport at dawn. The concourse was deserted. Dew glittered in the shadowy grass. And Francis Mulligan came over to me and asked me for a favour.

  ‘We need you to call your dad,’ he said.

  And I knew exactly what he meant.

  13

  On the eve of the election, Richard Lyons called Alan Harper into his office and said, ‘We have a problem.’

  Alan sat in the chair in front of Richard’s desk. It was eleven o’clock in the morning.

  ‘What’s up?’ Alan said.

  ‘Coop’s not Irish,’ Richard Lyons said.

  Alan was prepared for this. ‘There’s nothing in the Constitution that says you have to be Irish to be a sabbat,’ he said.

  ‘This is true,’ Richard said. ‘But the university administration feels that Chris Cooper doesn’t reflect the student body as a whole. In the sense that he’s a visiting student on an exchange programme.’

  Alan was silent.

  ‘It came to their attention,’ Richard Lyons said, ‘that a Junior Year Abroad student was running for President of the Union. They consulted with Chris’s home university in the states, and it was agreed that …’ Richard looked at the floor. ‘Coop’s own college isn’t happy with him running for a non-academic office in another institution. The administrations of both colleges feel that if Coop wants to run for a sabbatical position here he should register with us as a full-time degree student.’

  ‘But there isn’t a rule,’ Alan said. ‘It’s within the guidelines.’

  ‘The administration is framing new guidelines.’

  Alan thought about this. ‘The Union will have to vote to approve any new guidelines.’

  Richard turned down the corners of his mouth. ‘You know that’s just a formality, Alan,’ he said softly.

  ‘The election is tomorrow,’ Alan said.

  ‘We’re having new ballots printed. Coop’s name will be replaced with RON.’

  RON stood for Re-Open Nominations.

  Alan knew what he had to do. He had to get everyone who had been planning to vote for Coop to vote for RON instead. He left Richard’s office and raced down to the campaign table in the Arts Block. But even as he ran he knew he would be too late.

  14

  The decisions that affect our lives most deeply are so often taken by other people, in contexts that seem, at first, to be quite distant from our own experience. So it was with me, at least.

  He was an old friend of mine, Francis Mulligan. We were in school together. ‘We need you to call your dad,’ he said, and in those words I discovered something new about myself, a sense of purpose, a sudden clear awareness of the course my life would take.

  So I did what he asked. I called my dad, and he called some friends, and they called some friends, and the outcome of our university’s 2006 election for Student Union President was decided by people who had nothing whatsoever to do with it.

  Late on Friday evening the Returning Officer declared that Barry O’Neill had been elected to a second term by a comfortable margin, ensuring that the Presidency of the Union remained in the hands of the KBC for another year. It wasn’t a landslide victory, by any means, since voters abandoned the polling booths in large numbers when they found they could no longer vote for Coop. All in all, five hundred and ten people voted for Barry, and a further two hundred voted for RON. Of the more than twenty thousand students in our college, that’s how many voted, in the end: seven hundred and ten.

  15

  A few months after he graduated from college, Alan Harper found a job at an American investment bank that had its European headquarters in the Dublin docklands. He worked there, short-selling stocks and bonds, for two years, until the bank went under during the financial crisis and was bought out by a competitor. He was then hired as some kind of consultant by the Department of Community, Rural, and Gaeltacht Affairs.

  Aisling Moore broke up with Chris Cooper just before Coop flew home to Chicago at the end of May 2006. She and Coop spent their last three months together helping each other study in Coop’s overheated Blackrock dorm room. Nowadays, according to the last report I heard, Aisling works in Japan, teaching English to salarymen on weekends.

  Barry O’Neill became a Dublin City councillor in the local election of 2009. I run into him occasionally, now that we work in the same field. He tends to have the harried, unkempt air of a man who is afraid he will miss his flight and cannot stop to talk.

  Coop went back to Chicago. In his final year of university there he formed a band that attempted to fuse hip-hop with grunge-metal. They came close to a record deal, or so I was told. He kept in touch with Aisling for a while. She was supposed to go and visit him, as we are all supposed to visit the long-distance lovers we meet and lose in college. But I heard she never did.

  As for what Coop is up to these days, I have no idea. He has fallen out of the range of my interests, and I am content to leave him there. But I’m grateful to him, nonetheless. We should always be grateful to the people who help to make us what we are.

  Francis Mulligan studied law for a year at King’s Inns and then became a policy adviser for the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party. I see a lot of him, too, in various offices and corridors, at racetrack meets and committee breakfasts. He’s getting fat, these days, and his hair is thinning out and turning the colour of old straw. His manner has grown bluff and reminds you of the old-boy bonhomie that used to distinguish Barry O’Neill – the very quality, some would say, that had gotten Barry elected President in the first place.

  Occasionally, as in his Union days, someone asks Francis Mulligan if he has ever considered running for office himself.

  ‘Ah sure,’ he says, ‘who’d vote for the likes of me?’

  And he laughs, and slaps you on the back, and moves on.

  The News from Dublin

  Colm Tóibín

  THE CHILDREN HAD GONE UPSTAIRS so they had a few minutes together as Maurice ate his breakfast.


  ‘You woke at four,’ Nora said. ‘You know that.’

  Maurice did not look up from the table.

  ‘I asked you to wake me,’ he said. ‘That’s all I asked.’

  ‘And you tossed and turned for about half an hour,’ Nora continued, ‘but even when you stopped moving I knew you were still awake.’

  ‘Forget about it,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to worry about it.’

  ‘You just can’t go down there, that’s all. I asked Dr Cudigan, and he says it’s highly infectious. The others have probably become immune, but if you are not used to being in the house with him …’

  Maurice glanced up at her. He needed to change the subject.

  ‘All the teachers will have ashes on their foreheads and most of the boys.’

  ‘When I saw you sleeping soundly, I didn’t want to disturb you.’

  ‘It wasn’t your decision to make, it was mine.’

  He put his hand over the cup when she offered him more tea. Once the children had come back downstairs, she went to the kitchen and returned with porridge for them. They seemed preoccupied and subdued. Maurice knew how much they hated getting up in the morning. He had been the same, he remembered, when he was that age. He realised that if he did not say something now he would find himself in bad humour throughout the day.

  ‘I don’t have ashes on my forehead, and the rest of the school will. The rest of the school will have been to eight o’clock mass.’