The Trib

by David Kenny

  When Larry Murphy was spotted on Friday evening at Heuston Station and then later at Kevin Street garda station, the public, and the media seemed to breathe a collective sigh of relief. Simply knowing where he was had acquired major significance. But it remains to be seen whether Murphy can again give the media the slip. The danger with this is that hounding someone as potentially dangerous as Murphy can force them underground.

  ‘No-one has to worry. He might be able to give the press the slip but he cannot give the gardaí the slip; the general public can be assured of that,’ added the garda source. ‘But how long can he put up with this? Larry Murphy must be feeling so much pressure right now. He must be at boiling point.’

  ARTS

  JOHN BOYNE

  Shorts column

  John Boyne is the author of seven novels, including The Absolutist and The House of Special Purpose, and two for children, including The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. A collection of fifty short short stories appeared in The Sunday Tribune during 2006/07.

  Gazebo

  7 January 2007

  It was almost ten years since Maggie had last sat by the bay windows, overlooking the garden, and her eyes moved slowly as she surveyed the damage that her husband’s whore had done to it since replacing her in a bloodless coup, shortly after her fiftieth birthday. The laburnum had been trimmed back to almost nothing, while the pale blue gillyflower had withered and died. Worst of all, however, was the disappearance of the aspidistra that she had nurtured from a cutting gathered in the Himalayas during her honeymoon.

  ‘Tea,’ said Susan, appearing beside her suddenly with a cup and saucer and placing it by her left hand, her good hand, the hand that still worked. ‘I thought it might cheer you up.’ Maggie stared at it with contempt before looking away; it would spill down her blouse and scald her if she tried to drink it; a simultaneously thoughtful and thoughtless gesture.

  Being here was an unwelcome stopgap but she had been offered no choice. The hospital had kept her for eight weeks after the stroke but they needed the bed. And so, until her daughter had time to prepare her flat, she was back in her husband’s house for the first time since she had been forced out of it. The irony of it was that it had been Susan’s idea. He had insisted she was nothing to do with him anymore but the whore had said that they owed her this at least.

  ‘Aspidistra,’ said Maggie, raising a cautious finger and pointing out the window. ‘Where?’ These days, her words came out like a series of grunts and spits and shattered sibilants and she tried to limit herself to the bare essentials. A noun, a verb when necessary, an adjective if she had the energy. She who had once recited the whole of Paradise Lost, word perfect and without the text, on the stage of the Abbey Theatre. She who had called her husband every name she could think of when he told her what had been going on.

  ‘Kids,’ replied Susan, shaking her head. ‘One night when we were asleep. They ripped it out by the roots and threw it on the roof of the gazebo, the little vandals.’ Maggie watched her face, wondering how she had the temerity not to blush when she said the word ‘we’. ‘You brought that back from Singapore, didn’t you?’ she asked, leaning over her now as if she was a child.

  ‘Himalayas,’ said Maggie, grunting out the word; it didn’t even sound like English to her.

  ‘What was that?’ asked Susan.

  ‘Himalayas,’ she repeated, and this time the four syllables ran into each other like a crash on a motorway. She stared at the younger woman, knowing that she still hadn’t understood, but chose not to repeat herself again; instead, cold and resentful, she turned back to the peace of the garden.

  Gazebo. She couldn’t even imagine what would happen if she tried to pronounce that.

  Oil

  21 October 2007

  The car won’t start and you walk around to the front, lift the bonnet and peer inside. You might as well be looking at a schematic for a rocket-ship for all the sense it makes to you, but still you touch things and hope that inspiration will strike. Your neighbour comes out and sees you standing there but you pretend you don’t see him. He kissed your wife once at a party. You saw him do it. You lost your way trying to find a bathroom and there they were, kissing in a bedroom, her hand pushing his away from her breast. You did nothing about it because you didn’t know what to do. It wasn’t a movie, after all; it was a party.

  ‘Problem?’ he asks and you look across at him. He’s not as tall as you. And he’s not as good-looking either. He wears a cheap suit. Still, she kissed him. You tell him that the car won’t start and he offers to take a look for you.

  ‘Aren’t you a botanist?’ you ask, refusing to move.

  ‘I understand cars,’ he says, pushing you away and looking down at the oily black engine and all those things, those things you don’t know the name of, that surround it. He strokes his chin for a moment and mutters something to himself before tightening a few caps and squeezing a couple of wires. ‘Try her now,’ he tells you.

  You sit in the car and put the key in the engine. You have an important meeting in an hour. A lot of things could come from that meeting. A lot of very good things. But still, you hope that the car won’t start.

  ‘No luck,’ you say, stepping back to the front.

  ‘I thought I had her,’ he tells you before looking down again and shaking his head.

  ‘I can handle it from here,’ you tell him.

  ‘It’s no problem,’ he says. ‘I understand cars.’

  You watched them for longer than you should have and when she stopped pushing his hand away and let him touch her, you got hard and wanted to see what would happen next. It wasn’t like being at a party after all; it was like watching a movie.

  ‘Battery’s dead,’ he says finally. ‘You leave your lights on all night? That’ll do it every time.’

  ‘Thanks for your help,’ you say, slapping him once on the back of his white shirt as he turns away, a gesture of friendship, two buddies talking engines. He walks over to his own car, which is smaller than yours, the dark imprint of your hand, black and greasy, perfectly centred on the back of his white shirt, the fingers stretched wide, the middle finger pointing north.

  Friends

  11 February 2007

  The day I met Neil Armstrong I was already teetering on the edge of sanity from a life gone wrong. A week before, fearing that I might take a scissors to my throat, I confessed my secrets to a doctor, who went pale and said ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph’ before writing a prescription. I didn’t cut down on the gargle though and the two mixed badly. In fact, when I showed up in Tralee that morning I was more than a little unsteady on my feet and was starting to see triple.

  A large crowd had gathered and when I asked a young girl what they were there for, she grew very abusive and accused me of molesting her. The situation was turning violent so I turned on my heels and before I knew it I was standing in front of a man who shook my hand and thanked me for coming out to see him. I hadn’t a clue who he was but later that evening in the pub, I picked up the local paper only to see the two of us standing together, and a headline announcing that my new friend was none other than Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon.

  ‘Can you believe it?’ I asked the barman, who had once been a friend of mine but who had fallen out with me over a nag. ‘I’m a celebrity.’

  ‘You’re an oul’ bollix,’ he suggested. ‘You always were and you always will be.’

  I retaliated and he hit me a slap.

  The next morning I woke up in a hospital bed and a nurse, one of them foreign bits, told me I’d overdosed on my medication and collapsed on the street. She said she needed the name of my next of kin.

  ‘I’m an unmarried man,’ I explained. ‘There was a woman, once, but she left me because of my ways.’

  ‘Family then?’ asked the nurse.

  ‘No one. Not any more.’

  ‘Well, we need a name,’ she said with a shrug.

  ‘I don’t know what to tell you,’ I said. />
  ‘Sir, I’m sorry, but we have to put someone down on the form. In case you die.’

  That gave me a fright, but still nothing came to mind. I looked away from her and saw the local paper folded up on a chair.

  ‘Neil Armstrong,’ I told her then. ‘We’re not close, but –’

  ‘He’ll do,’ she said, signing the form. All she wanted was to get away from me on account of my stink. I could smell it myself. I was rank.

  ‘And I have photographic evidence of our relationship, should it be required.’

  ‘It won’t be,’ she said. And for a moment or two, I felt happy. On account of my having a friend. Someone who would look out for me. Someone who would see that I was taken care of.

  In case I died.

  Memory

  17 December 2006

  It was three months after William’s death before Caroline could even think about clearing out his closets. His demise had been sudden and unexpected and she found herself fighting the urge towards depression on a daily basis. Their daughters, both grown-up and married now, had taken good care of her in the intervening time and one grandson in particular had outdone himself with his many kindnesses.

  However it was another teenager, a boy called Joe who lived on the second floor of their building, who she asked to help her carry the bags of clothes downstairs for the Goodwill on the morning she decided that it was time and he had said he would be glad to help. She spent the first hour of the morning dividing William’s clothes into two bundles – those to give away and those to keep, just in case. At some point during the second hour she realised that there was no ‘just in case’ left in her life and she swapped the idea of two bundles for more black bags.

  When Joe arrived she hoped that he wouldn’t notice her tear-stained cheeks or, if he did, he would have the sense to ignore them. To his credit, he simply glanced at the bags that surrounded them both and asked, ‘These are all to go, right?’

  ‘Yes,’ she replied, hesitating, unsure whether she was actually ready to give them away yet after all. ‘These are all to go. Just give me a moment, will you?’ she added, disappearing into the kitchen to compose her thoughts.

  When she stepped back into the bedroom a few minutes later, Joe had picked up her husband’s old army jacket from the sofa and tried it on. William had worn it on almost every date they ever went on before they were married and had held on to it for nostalgic reasons; it was the kind of jacket that now, forty years later, kids were wearing again.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Joe, startled and embarrassed. ‘I shouldn’t have –’

  ‘Please,’ she said quietly, stepping towards him and staring at him for a moment. She put her hands out and felt his slender arms in the sleeves that had encircled her body so many times when she was a young woman. The jacket smelled of William still and she breathed him in. Unable to stop herself, she closed her eyes and leaned forward, her mouth finding Joe’s quickly, her lips softening against his as they kissed, this old woman who’d been young once, this young boy who’d grow old sooner than he knew.

  A moment later she stepped away from him and looked at the floor for a moment, resisting an urge to laugh. Instead, she turned her attention to the bags again. ‘It will take at least three trips, I think,’ she said, nodding her head. ‘What do you think, Joe, will three do it? Can we do it in three?’

  CIARAN CARTY

  Faster Pussycats

  Quentin Tarantino’s back. And, true to form, his new film is full of sexy women and fast cars.

  9 September 2007

  The temperature is topping thirty degrees even in the shade on the Martinez Beach in Cannes. Zoë Bell is so flimsily dressed she mightn’t be dressed at all. The safest place to look is into her eyes, which isn’t difficult.

  Whenever things got really nasty in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, she was the stunt double for Uma Thurman, the ‘bride’ in pursuit of vengeance for the killing of her husband on their wedding day. She impressed Tarantino so much that he asked her to turn to acting in Death Proof, his exuberant tribute to gory slasher movies of the 1970s. ‘What if I’m terrible?’ she said. ‘You’re not going to be terrible because I don’t make bad decisions,’ he told her.

  She shrugs, the thin strap of her silk chemise almost slipping off her shoulder. ‘So what could I say?’ she asks me. ‘OK, I told him, I’m going to be amazing.’

  Amazing she is, clinging to the hood of a car travelling at 100 mph in a duel to the death with a psychopath – played by sinisterly appealing Kurt Russell – who stalks young girls, involving them in fatal crashes for his sexual gratification.

  ‘The really fun thing about Death Proof is that it changes so much,’ says Rosario Dawson, who makes Zoë seem almost overdressed and talks even faster than Tarantino. She plays one of a bevy of female characters who get to kick ass. ‘My character is a little shy; she’s not as promiscuous as the other girls, but then she has a sudden turn. It’s interesting to see a character turn into a person she never would have imagined being able to see in the mirror.

  Although Reservoir Dogs gained Tarantino a foul-mouthed macho reputation, his movies invariably feature tough sexy women, whether Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill or Pam Grier in Jackie Brown. Perhaps it comes from being brought up with his sister by a single mom, Connie, or his childhood addiction of the 1970s exploitation movies that pioneered black women superheroes. ‘I have male friends, ‘ he says, ‘but I’m fascinated by the dynamic of a bunch of girls who hang out together, like a posse. A lot of my characters come from that.’

  Tracie Thoms butts in. ‘We were having a conversation one night, and I was going, “I’m just saying, I’m just saying,”’ she says.

  ‘And Quentin laughed. A week later, we shot a scene outside a store and my line was, “I’m just saying”. That’s what’s great about him. If something comes up, he goes with it.’

  Although famous for an infectious enthusiasm on the set, Tarantino has his down moments. ‘Maybe in the course of a long shoot I might have a couple of days when I’m a grumpy bastard,’ he says. ‘There’s this crazy movie people have never seen called Hollywood Man by Jack Starrett. It’s about the making of a motorcycle movie. They’re on location and they’re having a production meeting in the kitchen of a motel that they’re staying at, and the director is being told the bike is not working, the stunt’s going to cost too much, and this that and the other, and at one point he goes, “That’s it, I’ve had it, I’ve f**king had it.” I watched that movie after Kill Bill and I laughed so damn hard. I was like, that is the perfect, perfect expression for a director to say, because that’s what it is. You’ve had it.’

  It happened to Tarantino twice on Kill Bill. ‘I just got sick of making this f**king movie. I got sick of getting up so f**king early every morning, working so goddamn hard. I got sick of not having a life other than this one f**king thing for a year. I just got f**king sick of it. I got sick of answering f**king questions. Now, here’s the thing. At a certain point you realise, Aw, poor Quentin, you get to live your dream, you get to be an artist. Aw, isn’t life terrible. That makes you snap out of it.’

  It happened again later, shooting a night scene with Zoë.

  ‘I’d told her she had to start thinking like an actress. It’s not just jumping through a window to get stunt money. She’s not a void here, she’s playing my f**king character. So she wasn’t used to that. She’s very unpretentious. She kind of chuckled a bit but realised I was serious. So she tried to do it. She started really getting it. I’m playing a character. If I put on that costume, I am the bride.

  ‘Now during that night we were shooting the scene where the bride is on the motorcycle with the helmet. I’m in my little “f**k this” mood. People are scared of me. Somebody comes up. Umh, Zoë needs to talk to you. So I walk over. She’s sitting there in her yellow jump suit. I go, Zoë, you want to talk to me, what about? She goes, well you know, I’m scared to do the scene, you know, actor-wise, is there anything
you want me to know, anything you want me to think about? Oh, she’s thinking this way now. She’s an actress. Even though there’s a helmet on her face and we can’t see her face, she wants to be thinking what I want her to be thinking. And suddenly I wasn’t grumpy any more.’

  Like John Travolta talking about a Big Mac in Pulp Fiction, Tarantino can’t open his mouth without going into a riff about something. More than anything else it’s what makes his movies so gripping – not the sex, or the cursing or the violence, but the talk. ‘My whole thing is dialogue – that’s what I do,’ he says, sitting with me on the beach, his open-necked black shirt flapping outside his trousers.

  Born in Knoxville Tennessee in 1963, but brought to LA by his mom when he was two, he grew up on television and movies. He got his name Quentin from a Faulkner novel she was reading, The Sound And The Fury. He watched Carnal Knowledge with her when he was five. When Art Garfunkel tried to talk Candice Bergen into bed, saying ‘Let’s do it,’ he piped up, ‘What’s he wanna do, Mom?’ He has an IQ of 160, but dropped out of high school at sixteen to be an usher in a porn cinema and then a video clerk at $4 an hour. The video store became a film school where, between acting classes, he wrote True Romance and Natural Born Killers. ‘In every movie I’ve ever done I’ve been criticised for having long boring dialogue sequences, with the exception of Kill Bill Vol 1 where they kept complaining I didn’t have any dialogue,’ he says.

  ‘You can’t be a fan of mine if you don’t like my dialogue. Where I’m coming from it’s the same thing as going to a Tennessee Williams play or a David Hare play and saying, what’s all that f**king dialogue? Am I a playwright? No. But I could be. Reservoir Dogs could be a play. Actually when I was writing the first half of Death Proof, I was thinking if I want to go where I want to go with this I could make it a play, a kind of exploitation Eugene O’Neill play.’