The Key - an Eochair

by Máirtín Ó Cadhain

  First Dalkey Archive edition, 2015

  First published in Irish by

  Sáirsóal agus Dill / Cló Iar-Chonnacht, lndreabhán,

  Co. na Gaillimhe, Éire-Ireland.

  © Cló lar-Chonnacht, 1953, 1977

  Translation © 2015 Louis de Paor and Lochlainn Ó Tuairisg

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ó Cadhain, Máirtin, author.

  An eochair = The key / Máirtin Ó Cadhain; English translation

  by Louis de Paor and Lochlainn Ó Tuairisg.

  First edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-56478-443-8

  I. De Paor, Louis, 1961 - translator. II. Ó Tuairisg, Lochlainn,

  translator. III. Ó Cadhain, Máirtin. Eochair. IV. Ó Cadhain, Máirtin.

  Eochair. English. V. Title. VI. Title: Key. VII. Title: Eochair. VIII.

  Title: Key.

  PB1399.O28E5813 2015

  891.6’2343--dc23

  2014036377

  The Key received financial assistance from the Arts Council of Ireland.

  This hook was partially funded by a grant by the Illinois Arts

  Council, a state agency

  www.dalkeyarchive.com

  Cover: design and composition Mikhail Ilinrov

  J. was a paperkeeper. Any honest person will admit that this is the most responsible and difficult position in the Civil Service. Because the Civil Service is paper, every size, every shape and make, every colour and class of paper. Huge bulky memos that cast long shadows, taking up space like slabs in an old cemetery. Thin tattered receipts like slime on a rainswept rock, a sign that a snail or something like it had slid past and left a trail in its wake. Acts, Orders, statutory instruments side by side, armed and numbered, ready for the fray. Sacred memoranda, about which it was said that they regularly went as far as the secretary of the Department before descending again to his underlings; rumour had it that some of them may even have been touched by the Minister’s hand. Then there were the labels, small pieces of named and numbered paper stuck to every document, their ultimate adornment, like lipstick. But they were far from that. They were as indispensible as the files and the memoranda themselves. For without labels, how could one file be distinguished from another? It was hard to believe the files weren’t alive, or like tinned cans of flesh and blood. But they didn’t have the outer attributes of living things, arms, legs, eyes, hair, tails, horns. No one had ever heard of a file that was lame or blind or short-tempered, that was ill or sinful, or of a file that was a doctor, a priest or even a civil servant. It was as if they belonged to another order of creation, separate to ours, and dwelt among us without being noticed. It was easy to imagine that a file and its label had its own faith and afterlife. Some of them, no matter how far back they were shoved into the darkest recesses, managed, somehow, to make their way back to the light. And those that were left out in the light weren’t happy unless they were in the dark. It was obvious that they held grudges and fought with each other as well. In the morning a file might be found dented, or the head of one might be butting another. There were even civil wars between files. Especially when His Father’s Government put out His Friend’s Government. People swore they heard squealing, battering, thumping and wailing of files in the cabinets. Files were found crumpled, stabbed, torn, tattered. The old files couldn’t stand the new ones and vice versa. To preserve the peace, they had to be kept apart. No one knew when a file, a particular file and not just any old file, might be sent for. If the wrong file was sent up, it was as if a civil servant had been sent to administer the last rites to a dying person. The more you thought about it, the more you realised that the files were a world unto themselves, a world that was all around us but not part of us. Every file, with its own unique label, proof of its integrity, was a living thing. The smallest puff of wind might carry a label off. They were fragile, short-lived things. A label might be swept under or behind a cabinet, down behind a file inside a cabinet, or out one door if it was ajar, then another and yet another and finally out through the outside door. It was like the host being stolen from the tabernacle. A label could be murdered, too, thrown out a window or up a chimney or into a fire. Luckily, there was neither window nor chimney nor fire here in the files room. There was hot water in the pipes in winter and the electric lights were always on. But accidents will happen. A label might be mysteriously abducted or any number of other misfortunes might befall it. It might end up in the wrong file, like a weed or a thieving cow, where it had no right to be. Or it might find itself mixed up in the wrong pile of papers where it wouldn’t be found for years, by which time its name and title would have been forgotten. Then, of course, there were the stray files and memos, drifters which had wandered in from other departments, other countries, even, and no one knew how or why they had come to be there. But they were accommodated even though no one really knew why. Probably because no one knew who to send them back to. Or, more importantly, the correct procedures for sending them back. J. never understood how, in a place as well run, as well organised, as spick and span as the Civil Service, these cuckoos were tolerated. Paperkeepers firmly believed in ghosts; ghost labels, files, even memoranda, that were occasionally seen after they had been destroyed or murdered or thrown out years before. It was said that certain places were more file-haunted, label-haunted, than others, and paperkeepers avoided those places. The file on Secret Service monies under His Friend’s Government had been destroyed years ago but it was still regularly sighted, its red ink seeming more like the colour of blood every time, if the stories were true. Of course there were other stories, too. There was one about a label in another department a few years before. It was supposed to have been stuck to the file of a Ministerial Order, pursuant to powers granted under the Act to prevent the spread of wild herbage, weeds, overgrowth and other unwelcome invaders in cemeteries and other places of interment, Civil Service premises and the nation’s schools excepted. To pass the time one day, a paperkeeper, a junior like J., started blowing the label up into the air, flicking it around, having great fun as he watched it somersault through the air before falling, slowly, lazily, like a dead thing, to the ground ... Suddenly it was gone and there was no getting it back. At that very moment, the file was requested. The paperkeeper owned up. He was found guilty and dismissed in the appropriate manner. Years afterward the label was found on a wreath on the Minister’s coffin. Were it not for a quick-thinking principal officer who was present ... But that kind of thing could only happen in that particular department. The Department itself had been given a proper burial a long time ago, which reminded J. that some of the paper flotsam of the Department’s Last Will and Testament had washed up in his own office. He felt his lips twitch suddenly. Why his lips, he wondered. The twitch began on the top of his head, came down his forehead and along his nose, which prompted him to blow his nose into a clean handkerchief, before the twitch twisted the middle of his lip. Bleary thoughts fluttered like bats in the belfry of his mind. You couldn’t convince his Old One that a person who only handled paper had a tap in the world to do. If he were handling coal or hoovers or, God save us from all harm, children. His Old One couldn’t accept that it was paper that made the world go round; if a memorandum disappeared it would be the end of department, government, law and order, and justice. It was no use telling her what the Senior paperkeeper, S., in the outer office, said: without a label there can be no file, without a file there can be no civil servant, without a civil servant no hierarchy of grades, without a hierarchy of grades no section, without a section no department, without a department no Civil Service, without a Civil Service no secretary, without a secretary no Minister, without a Ministe
r no Government, without a Government no State. The label is the nail for want of which the kingdom would perish! ‘Look after the labels and the State will look after itself.’ One missing link in this hierarchy would mean utter chaos, humanity reduced to the level of animals. J. had read that in a magazine on the administrative officer’s desk the one and only time the Senior paperkeeper, his ‘boss’, had sent him over there with a file. The Senior would have gone over that day, too, if it wasn’t for that woman. Bloody women! All jokes aside, isn’t it amazing how they understood nothing, ever. His own Old One regarded all paper as if it were a pox in the house, unless, of course, it came in the form of banknotes. She never stopped complaining that J. wasn’t bringing enough of that kind of paper home with him for all the attention he was lavishing on paper. And he agreed with her, in a way. Paper should be kept in sealed rooms. Suddenly he realised that those bleary thoughts had been battering his skull for the past five minutes, that he had been daydreaming, as the clerical officer two offices out would say. There was nothing in particular to do. But he was in the habit of wandering around with a file tucked under his arm, or fingering a paper here and there, retrieving a file and then returning it, or looking up and down and carefully scrutinising the cabinet shelves. The closer he looked the less he saw. Even J. would admit that it was a waste of time. What use was it to a paperkeeper to see a collection of files, a kind of abstraction, when he wasn’t looking for a particular file or files? Not that any one had instructed J. in this matter. He had figured it out for himself. The Senior, the Boss, had a habit of opening the door suddenly and sweeping into the office without warning, as if, God forbid, someone had let off a stinkbomb. J. thought S., the Senior, didn’t like him. The first thing he had forced him to do was give up the cigarettes. Not that he said anything directly. That wasn’t his way. He’d come in every evening before he locked J.’s office, poke about, stick his hoover of a nose into corners and between cabinets, and say: ‘I seem to be getting a smell ... of cigarettes. Almost as if ...’ Finally, for his own peace of mind, he had to give them up, in case he was ever tempted to light up at work, where there was so much paper. But, by all the puffs of smoke in the world, it gave him something to do. Now, instead, he ate enough for three, and spent the whole night tossing and turning. That first night his Old One had said: ‘If it’ll give my poor old hip a rest, stick that cigarette butt in your gob and start puffing. I never saw such high seas in this boat before.’ Even now, looking back on it, J. was remarkably determined, crushing the cigarette butt and throwing it down the toilet. S. the Boss was constantly dropping hints, too. It wasn’t enough that he had gotten in through influence. To be promoted, you had to be qualified. Minding paper was the most onerous duty in the Civil Service, because the Civil Service was paper; he hoped he wouldn’t have to repeat himself on the subject. ‘Watch yourself,’ he said to him one day. ‘Look at the state of that file, and there’s every chance the administrative officer might send for it at any time. It might even be today, this very moment.’ J. had let a file drop while retrieving another one. ‘You’re a man like any other. You only have two hands. Never take up a second file until you’ve laid down the first one.’ J. hated the way S. hung around every morning while he was signing in, one eye on the clock and the other on the movement of the pen, like a rower lifting one oar out of the water and plunging the other one down in order to turn the boat. And then there was the day S. noticed the military service medal on his lapel: ‘This isn’t a jewellery museum. What kind of a fool are you that you haven’t noticed that neither the clerical officer nor the staff officer nor the executive officer nor any administrative officer nor assistant secretary nor the secretary nor even the Minister himself wears a die-die like that. Next thing you know, you’ll be wearing a Fáinne.’ When J. answered that all he had was the cúpla focal: ‘True for you. You only got in here because you had pull.’ And this wasn’t the only thing S. complained about: more help was needed; one person couldn’t possibly look after all that paper ... J. would be free of S. now for a fortnight and then his own holiday would begin. For J., S.’s being on leave from dinner-time today was like taking off a hair shirt. For the next fourteen evenings, he wouldn’t come into the office announcing: ‘Five minutes to five. Finish up there so I can lock up.’ The first part of his spiel was so listless, so casual, compared to the violent rattle of keys with which it was completed, that J. often thought that S. wouldn’t mind at all if J. was locked into the office. J. would go out into the Senior’s office. The Senior would follow him out and lock the door between his own office and J.’s. Then he would place the key deep inside a pocket he had specially sewn into the front of his trousers. When he’d take it out in the morning, with great reluctance it seemed, J. always thought that he’d rather put it back in his pocket and not let J. into the office at all. Even now, this made J.’s blood pound in the hollow just under his ear. He could never figure out why the throbbing was always just under his ear. Of course he did have a habit of pushing his thumb and index finger in there as if his ear was a keyhole. He got up and danced, or tried to dance, a little jig before he realised what he was doing. This was his first year here. For the next fourteen mornings and evenings, he would let himself in and out of that office. He would be responsible for that little key, for locking his own door that led into S.’s office and locking S.’s office from outside. For all S.’s power, he wasn’t permitted to take the paper-key with him while he was on leave. But where would J. keep the key? It had never occurred to him to get a special pocket sewn into his trousers. When he bought his suit, he never imagined he would ever be responsible for something as valuable as that key. Someone sitting beside him on the bus might slip a hand into his pocket. You could never rule out pickpockets; the world was full of them. Could he put it in his outside pocket and sit in the aisle seat on the bus? But how would he know where he might have to sit? And it wasn’t as if he could switch the key from pocket to pocket once he was on the bus, like millionaires switch women in America, if what S. said was true. What about his trouser pocket? A woman in a pub had tried to put her hand in his pocket once. When he caught her, she was all innocence: she only wanted to jizz him up, that’s what she said, to jizz him up, rise him, that’s right, to rise him, to get him worked up; yes, she was worked up herself, in top gear, so she was. That’s what they wanted, herself and the likes of her, a key that would open the lock to the good life, pubs, food and drink, soft beds, the lap of luxury. Of course that was before he became a paperkeeper. The key might easily fall from his breast pocket if he bent down. And a hip pocket was the easiest one to pick. Should he hang it around his neck on a string? What if the string snapped? He wouldn’t feel it fall down his chest, along his belly, out from under his trousers and on to his shoe. The most likely place for it to fall would be into the toilet while he was struggling to do up his trousers. Down the toilet, indeed! Lately, he had begun to feel itchy as well. His Old One used to say she was suffering enough with her rheumatic hip without J. bringing whatever rash he had caught from smelly old papers down on her into the bargain. To grip the key tightly in his hand, in his glove, that was the safest way. Then suddenly it came to him: just in case anything happened, he could get a copy made, two copies, that very evening. That should do the trick. But was that against the rules? He hadn’t heard of any such rule, and, since he hadn’t heard of it, there could be no such rule. But there was such a thing as procedure, which was just as important as any rule; he heard the clerical officer say one day that the Civil Service had as large a corpus of Tradition as the Church did. It was all convolution. He could just as easily lose the copy, for any scut to find. The more copies he had, the greater the danger of scuts. He’d be better off putting the copies out of his head altogether and not to lose the key. That would be the worst thing that could happen. An inappropriate, and, therefore, unauthorised person might come in, do as he wished with the paper, even set it alight, God forbid. It used to make him shiver, as if a flood tide was
coursing through his veins, to see his Old One lighting papers. When he asked her one day what they were, she replied, ‘Old love letters from a sweetheart who betrayed me long ago,’ and she stuck her tongue out ... J. heard the telephone blare in S.’s office outside. He rushed to the door and turned the knob but it wouldn’t open. He turned it again, right and left, put his knee against it, set his shoulder to it but the door wouldn’t budge; it was as stubborn and obstinate as a statutory instrument which could only be repealed by an Act that had already been repealed itself erroneously. J. had to collect and file the bleary thoughts crashing around in his head. Where the hell was the key? He had been in cloud cuckoo land all the while, sending hares hotfoot out of bushes where there was no sign of them! The door was locked from the outside, the Senior—it was always spelled with a capital ‘S’ and every time he spoke the word J. felt it fill his junior mouth— the Senior was gone on holidays to the Isle of Man since dinner-time and J. was locked in a room with no other exit, no window or chimney, no skylight or tunnel or ventilation shaft, a worm in a paper mausoleum, as an unneighbourly and far from educated shopkeeper once told his Old One when they were haggling over the price of black pudding. But where was the key? He couldn’t see it through the keyhole on the outside. J. didn’t realise that right away. The telephone outside rang, fell silent and rang again, tormenting him, each ring a nail driving into his brain. There was a telephone on his own desk inside, but he wasn’t allowed to use it without S.’s say-so and S. had never said so. In fact, he had been quite specific about it. He had given J. strict instructions that if his telephone ever rang, he was to lift the receiver, call S. into his office, go out to S.’s office shutting the door behind him, and wait until S. returned. It was the Senior who dealt with important tasks like telephone calls: that was the procedure. J. might never have done what he did if it hadn’t been for the sudden fit of itching. God damn and blast that same itch. Always at the wrong time. It came on him the other day as the staff officer was walking towards him. He looked at J. suspiciously. While J. scratched himself furiously with one hand, the other hand reached out of its own accord and had the receiver to his ear before he knew it: ‘Mr S.’ ‘He’s not here,’ he said. ‘He’s on leave.’ The tremble in his voice stirred every syllable like a poker so that his speech ignited to an unintelligible sheet of flame. ‘Speak into the telephone. I can’t hear you.’ ‘Mr S. is on leave.’ ‘On leave! Isn’t it well for some! When will he be back?’ ‘A fortnight from tomorrow at half past nine.’ If J. had to write a memorandum about the conversation, he couldn’t have said for sure whether the caller was male or female. The incident was so strange that he was completely thrown by it, like someone who had ventured too far out to sea and was swept away by the current. Not to mention the raging itch that was keeping his hands busier than they had ever been when handling files. But he couldn’t mention the itch in a memorandum. Whatever else happened, nothing out of the ordinary could happen in the Civil Service. If he had to write a memorandum or if he was questioned about the ‘Isn’t it well for some!’ remark, what would he say he thought it meant? When he was on the telephone he should have said that he was locked in. Of course, when the horse has bolted ... he had to catch hold of the edge of the desk to keep himself upright. His mind was churning like a mill-wheel. He made his way along the cabinets to the door, tried it again, examined the lock, went down on his knees to examine the keyhole, like he used to do as a child, looking at those crosses that had the church at Knock inside them. Although he did have a military service medal, it was from the FCA and he had never been locked up before. Now, for the first time, he began to think seriously about locks. He knew very well that when you did one thing it locked, and that when you did something else it unlocked. But the crux, the very heart of the matter, at the end of it all, eluded him. He tried to visualise the inside of the lock but all he could see were lobsters and crabs and claws. He felt itchy again. Had S. locked the door at dinner-time after J. left, as he did in the evening every other day? Then he remembered that S. had been in the outer office after he himself had returned from his dinner. One thigh and the side of his belly were well scratched by now. Officially, S. was not on leave until five, although he had special permission to leave that day at two. That was referred to as privilege leave. J.’s stumpy legs, fiat feet the FCA had been unable to cure—as soon as one was straightened, the other was as crooked as before—jerked up from the floor, without touching each other. S. was not officially on leave yet, he was on privilege leave and J. had just said officially on an official telephone that he was on leave. What he had been instructed to say in such cases was that he had stepped out of his office for a moment to take a file to another office of the Department and if the gentleman / lady wanted to leave his / her number ... But J. had said that S. was on leave, thanks be to God he hadn’t said ‘in the Isle of Man’ or he would have made shite of everything. The scratching had now reached the hollow of his groin, on the lee side ... Of course, S. had been in his own office when J. came back from lunch. He went over S.’s detailed instructions in his mind: to be on time, to note the correct time in the book, to answer the telephone, to note the date and time of the call as well as the number of the caller in a little book S. had for that purpose next to the telephone; not to scratch himself or cultivate any other coarse habits in case he might be seen; if he was seen, it would be said that that was what the junior did when the Senior was absent; to watch out for matches, files, letters, the difference between a private and an official letter; and, for the love of God, never to answer any question the cleaning lady might ask; to turn off lights 1 and 2 when he was at the farthest end of the office outside; instructions—S.’s word—concerning memoranda, in the unlikely event that one might be requested when he himself was absent. He repeated every single word as S. had delivered it. He felt vaguely that this was the part of the religious instruction that would stamp its spiritual seal on his soul forever: Who made the Civil Service? God. What does the Civil Service make? Civil Servants. What are you? A Civil Servant. Why were you created? To be in this office. What is the purpose of this office? To serve paper. ‘What is the purpose of paper, and memoranda? To serve the Civil Service. What is the purpose of the Civil Service? To serve the State. What is the purpose of the State? To serve the Civil Service ... Suddenly he pricked up his ears, but that tiny bubble of memory vanished like an eel under a rock. There was something else, if only he could remember it. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it ... Hang on! S.’s final words had been to the effect that if the clerical officer, that Cú Chulainn who stood guard over the Department in the outermost office, if he got as much as a hint of alcohol—even if he only imagined it — from J.’s breath, that J. would be sacked on the spot and all the friends J. had in the entire jurisdiction wouldn’t be able to bring him back. J. had noticed that the clerical officer’s nostrils weren’t the most reliable when it came to such detective work. He had only been there a few days when the officer remarked to him that he was surrounded by a haze of rose attar and pointed to J.’s hair. The cleaning lady explained to J. what rose attar was. J. wore Brilliantine in his hair. One morn-ing, after J. had signed the book, the officer, thumb and index finger clamped tightly across his nose, pointed after him and said: ‘That exhaust pipe is working overtime.’ J. was a few minutes in his own office before he realised what had been said and that the officer’s nostrils were mistaken as to the source of the smell; S. was the culprit, on the other side of the officer. But there is no ‘provision’, no ‘appeal’—S.’s words—possible with regard to an officer’s faulty nostrils in the Civil Service. His Old One’s nostrils were more reliable. J. would often be sucking a bullseye when he went in home to her ... S. spoke of J.’s pay. How to make sure he got it. If J. went home to his Old One without it, it would mean the end of her hip for once and for all and she’d throw him out on the street, which was unseemly for a Civil Servant ... What else had S. told him? Something about leaving the office. Leaving th
e office to use the toilet: if the clerical officer was there before him, to beg his pardon and leave, and not go back until the officer was finished. And not to have his exhaust pipe working overtime in the toilet any more than anywhere else, in case it made the officer turn around. Not to go to the toilet more than twice a day, once in the morning and again in the afternoon. And if he got the runs ... Yes, indeed, if he should get the runs ... But it was unlikely that that question would arise, as S. was wont to say, in the near future at any rate. May he come to a bad end, there was something else, one more item on the list ... And it came to him like a pay rise or a promotion. The key! He opened the desk drawer. There it was, ‘a beautiful mysterious goddess’, as he had overheard the clerical officer say to S. one day about something or other on J.’s solitary afternoon trip to the toilet. He was so shaken by S.’s barbed warnings—most of them blunt—that he had almost forgotten where the key was kept. He shouldn’t have said that about S.’s warnings, not even to himself: everything in the Civil Service was important. S. had hung a notice in English in his office, on the door leading to J.’s office, where J. couldn’t avoid seeing it every time he entered: ‘Perfection comes from small things, but perfection is no small thing.’ J. was able to say it backwards, and many’s the time he had. But his thoughts were so scattered that the sense of these things always escaped him. S. had left the key in the drawer, like he said he would. He must have another key, or a copy, because the door was locked. J. had heard him say before that that was the Senior’s privilege. J. examined the key closely. The shaft was slender, very slender for such a powerful instrument on which so much depended. He lifted it up slowly and pressed it against his face. As soon as the steel touched his skin he shivered, remembering a story he’d heard from a relative of his from the country about the fairy lover’s death-kiss. But he had the key in his hand. He strode confidently towards the door and inserted it. The lock was stiff. J. had never seen anyone oiling it. Who was responsible for oiling it? J. had never heard of such a ‘provision’. He tried to turn it gently. It wouldn’t turn. He took it out again. It went in easier than it came out. Was the lock broken? It was an awkward sort of a lock. You’d think there’d be some provision for oiling it. It wasn’t broken. The key slid in again easily and nestled snugly inside. Please God, everything would soon be all right. The lock would turn. He turned it to two o’clock— the time S. had gone on leave—privilege leave, of course. He applied some more pressure. The key wouldn’t budge past two o’clock, as if sticking there like that was an act of loyalty to S. J. was getting a bit impatient until he remembered hearing the administrative officer say to another man on the day when J. was bringing him the file: Patience, man! For something that can’t be helped, patience is best. Therefore, patience is essential here because the entire Civil Service is full of things that can’t be helped.’ He’d be better off trying to coax the key. He brought it back to five o’clock. He pulled it out and tried to put his little finger in the keyhole. It wouldn’t go in very far. He inserted the pencil he used for ticking the numbers on the files and rattled it up, down, in and out. The pencil wasn’t as strong as he thought; either that or he forced it too hard, because it snapped, and the stump stayed inside the keyhole. Sacrilege. Using a pencil for a purpose other than that for which it was specifically intended: ticking numbers on files. The more he tried to winkle the pencil stump out, the further he pushed it in, beyond his reach, into parts unknown, like S.’s aeroplane which would be on its way to the Isle of Man by now. He tried using the head of the key. It went in reluctantly. The whole thing reminded him of his Old One’s rheumatic hip. A bone must be off-kilter in her hip too. The two things were very alike: the hip was a large, locked, lumpy, bony, joint, creaking and groaning in his Old One. The key to women was their hips; he had heard that during those days when he used to sit beside women in pubs. He wouldn’t allow himself to remember who had actually said it. He felt a hot itch right in the small of his back, where he couldn’t reach except by rubbing against something. He jumped up from the floor and hit against the key so violently that it went in under the pencil stump and around it. Bang! The shaft fell away in his hand and the entire head remained inside, cuddled up with the trapped pencil stub. The shaft was a useless piece of steel, a mere corporeal vessel for the magical part, the head of the key, the soul, that remained imprisoned in the keyhole. He had just killed a key, a living thing, murdered it, a Civil Service paper-key. He was a clumsy fool, as his wife, and S. and the woman in the alley behind the pub had said, to hell with her anyway! But he had never been this clumsy before. He broke another piece off the pencil stump. He broke the tip of the paper scissors, something he should never have used anyway if he was in his right mind. But his right mind was away in the clouds, like the aeroplane. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be emptying the contents of a file to see if the tag of the file cover could fit into the hole, if it could be called a hole anymore, it was so stuffed. Papers tumbled from the file, scattering every which way like a messy topsy turvy haggart, like unbound sheaves of corn, unhelpful and disobliging, just like his thoughts at the moment. He stopped when he noticed that the tag of the file was bent. It reminded him of the flexibility the clerical officer kept going on about and which, he claimed, was the holy grace of the civil servant. But just before he gave up completely, the corner of the file broke off and remained in the choked keyhole. The word ‘sack’ was a constant drone in the Senior’s mouth when discussing the future of junior paperkeepers. He could hardly mention the word ‘junior’ without ‘sack’ trotting along like a foal on a tether after it ... He spent an hour rearranging the papers in the dog-eared file. You’d think they had got mixed up just to annoy him. The dog-ear would hardly be noticed in the middle of this bundle of files. Even if it was, he could always blame the fights or civil wars that took place amongst the files. Even if S. himself noticed it, he couldn’t deny that such things happened. J. was a wretched creature—he told himself as much—tasting again the forbidden fruit. He looked at the file. Applications for army pensions, from riflemen on the side of His Friend’s Government and riflemen on the side of His Father’s Government. Perfect! ‘Looks like the gunmen are at it again,’ he’d say. ‘Skelping each other’s ears again.’ Even S. would have difficulty contradicting that. And it would be harder again for the clerical officer. He considered showing the file to the officer and saying ‘the exhaust pipes of the civil war ...’ The clerical officer liked a joke, funny stories, that he could repeat to the staff officer and to the blonde one. J.’s leg was inching away, itching to start dancing, when it was stopped in its tracks by the sudden insistent ringing of the telephone in the office outside. Maybe a memorandum was needed? Strange the clerical officer couldn’t hear it. But he spent most of his time wandering around the section and even into other sections. J. picked up the receiver of his own telephone, but dropped it again as quickly as if he had accidentally picked up the clothes of a plague victim; then he marshalled his thoughts. Hadn’t he answered the telephone before? Why else was it in his office if not to be used? He couldn’t believe a system such as the Civil Service would leave useless articles in offices. And if there was such a thing in this office, would the same not apply to other offices, all the thousands, the hundreds of thousands of offices in the Civil Service. The only offices J. could imagine now were Civil Service offices, where Civil Servants worked during the day and slept, exhausted, at night, stretched out beside frail, protesting hip bones. Certainly, long ago, there was a third kind of office, but he couldn’t let himself ... The telephone outside was shrill. J. lifted up his own receiver but all he could hear was a noise like the rumbling of his Old One’s stomach, an omen of protesting hips. Then he timidly imitated the Senior. ‘Hallo! Hallo! A paperkeeper speaking. A junior paperkeeper.’ He thought he heard an answering Hallo from the corner of the cabinet—the dog-eared file, of course. He was so startled, he dropped the receiver. He looked in the cabinet, but all he could see were files. No matter where he looked, a
mong the files, he saw neither sight nor light of any Hallo ... The telephone outside was silent. He made a circuit around the office to examine it more closely than he had ever done before. Up till now he had trained his eyes to look without seeing. Now he made up his mind to see. Walls, strong sturdy walls, as sure of themselves as his own direct gaze. There was only one way out: through the locked door. He had heard of someone else, another J.,—the priest had spoken of it from the altar—who had been trapped inside the belly of a whale. But, because it was God’s will, he survived. God’s will. But there was also the Civil Service’s will. It was obvious that this lock was the one key to his salvation. The only way out, whatever about the Civil Service’s will, was to dislodge the lock in one go; as easy as a hussy might slip her hand into your trouser pocket. Just to get out of this prison. Once he was out, he could find some way to solve the problem. He got down on his knees again and inspected the keyhole. A blocked hole, stuffed with his own sins, blocking the light of God. He pressed as hard as he could at the inner face of the lock, trying to push, twist, bend, wrench, pull, anything that would make it budge. But it stayed there, a huge tick with strong claws clutching the skin of the door. Was that what reminded him of the tick he had picked up one night in the pub? Maybe it wasn’t in the pub at all? Bad cess to it but he had picked up a tick and it had made a meal of his blood for a long time after. The itch had never quite gone away. That was typical. Everything dumped on the fellow at the bottom of the heap. How come no administrative officer or departmental secretary or even a Minister ever picked up a big fat tick. But he shouldn’t think like that ... How had he not thought of it earlier? His Old One used to say that it never occurred to him, or that he wasn’t able, to take off his trousers on his wedding night, and a big lump of a button sticking out and boring into her hip was what had started her rheumatism ... He could try knocking. Yes. He’d knock ... Quietly, politely, at first. Maybe the clerical officer in the outer office might hear him. His knocks grew louder. Then he started kicking the door. But the doors and the offices were as deaf as an appeal in the Forgotten Files. What if the clerical officer wasn’t there at all? Maybe he was away on privilege leave? Office gossip had it that he gave typing classes in the evening to the blonde girl on the second floor. J. had often seen them leaving together at five. God bless the mark, she had the same hair and melodeon-arse as the one that had put her hand in J.’s trouser pocket. In spite of himself, J.’s thoughts began to get the better of him. By God, that blonde one on the second floor wasn’t as young as you might think. Her face was a suit that had often been sent to the cleaners. She had that same trick: the hand fondling your thigh, probably before sliding down gently into your pocket. Damn the women anyway! It was around that time that J. had picked up the tick. The officer was on a privilege. As strong as the door was, J. thought he was stronger, and could probably break it down. The same broken key whose head was stuck in this door would unlock the Boss’s door outside, which wasn’t usually locked except at night. Still, it had been one of those days. If the clerical officer wasn’t in and the doors outside all locked, there would be a whole row of doors—strong doors—to break down before he was free. How many? Were they all locked? He didn’t know. The Civil Service’s doors were as much a mystery to him as its papers. Apparently, there were people who were authorised to lock them and to open them, and others who weren’t. Surely, there must be a provision, a procedure, even a Tradition, regarding such things. It would never have crossed the clerical officer’s mind to think of J. before leaving. Maybe he forgot that S. wasn’t in his office as usual. Still, J. shouldn’t be thinking about breaking down Civil Service doors, any more than he would think of ripping up its papers. Imagine the consequences of tearing up a single page. Such an evil deed was probably unforgivable. It would be as bad as murder, maybe worse. The Civil Service was a closed system, like the office J. was in, an unbreakable nut, shelter against wind, sun, light, noise, robbers, etc. Total protection and security for paper. If he went around breaking down doors, he would be breaking the seal ordained by the State and, therefore, by God, as he had once heard the clerical officer telling the Senior. He had made enough of a mess of the ten commandments as a young man. The clerical officer attended some big college in Eccles Street. It was said, too, that the blonde woman went there. They probably sat side by side. The likes of her would offer her other thigh to some other buck and then she could prey on two men at once! Light fingers! He wasn’t too far from the same college himself. His Old One was always at him to go there, to get out from under her feet so she could finish her cleaning, burning old papers and other rubbish. ‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘you might meet some hussy who might offer you her thigh. It would give my battered old hip a break at any rate.’ For all her mocking, it would be a good thing for a paperkeeper to go to college. When he mentioned it in passing one day: ‘You should go to Trinity College and do Celtic Studies. You’re much too good for a place like this. If nothing else, it might cure your itch,’ said the Senior. ‘To Hell with the Senior.’ As soon as he said it, J. rejected that fate as unsuitable for a civil servant and amended his curse appropriately from Senior to S. As soon as he got himself out of this mess, he’d go to college! More women than men went there, it was said. He would learn something there. Who knew what it might lead to? A promotion. Stranger things had happened ... J. went back to the desk. His mouth and throat were dry and his lips stuck together. There was a jug of water on the desk which the Senior permitted him to bring in from the toilet every day, saying, ‘He who only drinks water is never drunk.’ J. drank deeply from it. Now he could start thinking again. He would have to get out. There was only one way out now: through the telephone. He’d pick up the receiver and explain his predicament to the telephonist. Ordinarily, he couldn’t do such a thing, but he would have to because he was locked in. He lifted the receiver anxiously to his ear and heard a hissing sound. He would wait five minutes or so, then start calling out. He didn’t notice he was shouting. Suddenly he realised there was no one at the other end of the line. She had gone out. She did that from time to time. He had heard the Senior and the clerical officer complaining. ‘It appears as though the Postal Department and the Board of Works have come to an agreement and that the exchange will now be located in the the toilet ...”How can there be a department or a Civil Service with such a weak link.’ ‘You mean an extension, S.; a telephone is an extension. It’s an extension of another kind entirely in the toilet. Well, an extension is an extension ...’ The extension in the toilet, they called her. S. repeated what the clerical officer said, as though he had said it first. Surely she’d be back by now. He picked up the receiver again. Nothing. He’d give her another ten minutes or so; she’d have to be back by then; unless there was a major operation underway in the toilet. She had no notion of coming back ... The thought alarmed him as much as if he had misplaced a file. She had gone home! The clerical officer had gone home, or to the college, or to a pub with the blonde melodeon, or wherever a clerical officer goes. The Civil Service had repaired to their second set of rooms, to rest. J. had often heard the Senior taking off the clerical officer, saying the sun never set on the Civil Service. Certainly, they retreated, departments and offices were abandoned, in order that the Civil Service remain as it should be, an otherworld of files. He’d seen it himself every evening at five o’clock. Did S. and the officer mean that there were microphones hidden in the walls? That was said about the police. The Senior had often warned J. not to talk to himself while going through the files, that you never knew who was listening, that the walls had ears and the whole place was an echo chamber. Who’s to say the voice that had answered his Hallo a few minutes ago wasn’t one of those eavesdroppers? For all that was said about S., maybe he was smarter than he was given credit for. You could tell as much from the neatly-trimmed little tuft of a moustache he wore. J. had started to grow one of his own in his second week as a paperkeeper. As soon as the faintest hint of fuzz was visible, S. had said sarcastica
lly, smoothing his own between thumb and forefinger: ‘Aren’t you the clever one, acting the Senior already.’ J. shaved it off at dinner-time. Where was S. now? On the Isle of Man probably. He was going there by aeroplane. If he said it once he said it twenty times. You’d think travelling by air was going to put him on a different level to the rest of them when he came home. But you could hardly be made a clerical officer or a Senior just by going to the Isle of Man by aeroplane. J. had an idea where S. might be by now. S. was a bit of a lad. One morning, as J. went through S.’s office to the toilet, he found S. with his fingers spread out across the large beehive breasts of the cleaning lady, the youngish one that had only stayed a fortnight. She could easily have trailed her right hand down over her impressive bosom, over S.’s hand, taking advantage of his eagerness to dip her other hand into his pocket. Hands were untangled in an instant. S. shoved his own guilty hand deep into his pocket: ‘Don’t you have anything to do in that office?’ he demanded of J. furiously, foam flecking his lips. ‘Or have you been promoted? Or maybe there’s a bookies’ in the toilet?’ And he spent a long month in that same sarcastic vein. ‘You’d better stay away from large-breasted women, with that itch of yours. The files have caught it from you. I saw a file in there the other day trying to scratch itself.’ ... Finally J. admitted to himself that there was no chance of making or taking a call; the telephone just kept gurgling like someone choking on his food. His Old One at home would never leave bits of paper around without tearing them up or burning them—receipts for rent, rates, radio, gas, or electricity. She’d be sure to ring the Guards. But he hadn’t done anything wrong. Apart from the lock. That was an accident. Could they flat have made a stronger key? The keys, really, were the weakest link in the Civil Service. He had forgotten, of course, that the cleaning woman would be in in the morning. It was the Senior who let her into J.’s office every day. Even if she did have a key, there was all that rubbish in the keyhole. But he could call out to her and explain everything. The telephonist would arrive soon after that. But the Senior always complained that her trips to the toilet were as much of a ritual as her morning prayers. And the executive officer, a very learned man, had told S. that to pray originally meant to wait, to sit tight. Between the two of them, anyway, freedom was in sight. He wouldn’t notice the night pass. He’d leave the lights on and stretch out on the floor. And even if he didn’t sleep, what harm? It was only one night. Now he had another problem. The toilet. Blast that water he had drunk. Nature overcomes the strongest will, as S. used to say, a roundabout, lazy excuse for the fact that his hand had been caught handling something other than paper. J. thought about doing it out through the keyhole, letting the cleaning woman mop it up in the morning and blaming S. for it. But he didn’t need to examine the keyhole to realise that it would come back into his own office. And even if he was sure it would go out, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. What about the desk drawer? He could bring the drawer out and empty it into the toilet when the doors were opened. But that’s where the key had been. It was a place where keys were kept. Even if the key was faulty it was still a paper-key all the same. He surveyed the office ‘to that end’, as S. might say. What about an empty cabinet? Even if it was empty, he couldn’t do it in a place that was—he almost said consecrated— to paper ... He’d be better off doing it on the floor, somewhere he could pull the lino up, preferably in under the pipe in the corner of the office. If need be, he could help the cleaning lady mop it up, but she was just as likely to clean it herself without knowing what it was. Either way, she’d be sympathetic. Most women were understanding, apart from the odd one like his Old One, who regarded paper as something to fill bins with. Even if the cleaning lady didn’t understand, they wouldn’t come down that hard on him, because nature overcomes the strongest will, or, nature will take its course, as S. was fond of saying, mimicking the clerical officer recalling a scandal which was supposed to have happened long ago in some department which had long since been dissolved, and whose name was all but forgotten in the Civil Service. J. had heard talk of a Civil Servant who had made a funnel from a paper signed personally by the Minister, and pissed through it. Then he had made it into a Christmas card and left it on the Minister’s private desk. J. couldn’t believe such things had happened, or could happen. What J. planned—S.’s word—was necessary but harmless. Every scrap and fragment of paper would be as safe and clean as though nothing had ever happened. He’d swipe some Dettol, Jeyes Fluid or the like from the Old One at home. That’d put it up to S.’s dredger nose to sniff anything when he returned. If necessary, he’d bribe the cleaning lady, although that was against the rules. But it would be in the form of a tip, a gratuity, which wasn’t against the rules. Was it any worse than S. being cleaned out by that cleaning lady? What had happened to S. was worse, because he needn’t have done it ... J. settled in for the night, in the corner furthest from the mess. The crosspiece of the desk was too hard under his head. In the end he had to get up, fetch a file from the top of the cabinet, the top shelf, ‘the forgotten files’ S. called them. He had to get a second one to make his pillow more comfortable. Ever since joining the Civil Service he had said his prayers diligently. The parish priest saluted him these days. His Old One reminded him every night to pray for her hip. She was forever lighting candles and threatening to go to Lourdes as soon as he got a pay rise: ‘Our Father who art in heaven,’ began J., ‘... Thine art the keys. If they broke in the great lock of Heaven ... Thy will be done on earth as it is in the Civil Service. Did Peter have a big deep pocket in the front of his trousers?’ It was no use. There was a bell tolling in the back of his head, like the day he couldn’t find the memo the executive officer wanted, and S.’s nose trained on him like a gun. There was only one light on. He’d have to turn on the other one or turn this one off. There was a constant stream of memoranda relating to power conservation circulating around the Department. He’d turn it off. He couldn’t help thinking that he was in a cave, that the filed papers were goats and sheep and that the light was the one and only eye of Polyphemus watching him constantly. An old paperkeeper who was there in the time of His Friend’s Government and had since retired, had recommended that he buy that ‘marvellous book’. When his Old One saw it, after he came home, she wanted to burn ‘that tatty old bundle of paper’. He did his best to try and explain to her that the book was a different thing entirely from files, memos or memoranda ... but they were all the same to her, all rubbish ... He spread his coat out under him because the floor was cold and the lead pipes this time of year were cold, like files without covers. He spent the night tossing and turning trying to silence the ringing in his head. The night of his second day here in this very office, it was this constant tossing and turning which led the Old One to turf him out of the bed. ‘Out you go,’ she said, ‘you can exercise away to your heart’s content on those old chairs and boxes. My hip’s bad enough as it is with the rheumatism’ ... Finally, he fell into an uneasy sleep. That was even worse than the tossing and turning. He had bad dreams: women sticking their hands in his pocket, stealing the keys and making off with them; St Peter losing the great key of Heaven and the celestial Civil Service frantically searching for it while J. and a long line of others were kicking at the door trying to get in. Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name, Thy keydom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in the Civil Service ... The Military Pensions file came toppling down on him and paper battles, ambushes, killings, murders, parricides, civil wars raged over his head and all around him. The forgotten files cabinet bent over until it covered him, gobbling him up, until he was trapped inside it as if he was inside an upturned coffin. The cabinet lifted him up and transformed into a file, another forgotten file. He was a forgotten file but he remembered everything perfectly, especially a broken key, a dog-eared file, and an inexcusable mess in the presence of files and memoranda. He was convinced he was a file, that he was made of paper and he had got lost when the Minister’s secretary asked for the memo that he
now was. Not only did he feel imprisoned, he felt every part of his body was under lock and key, and the key missing. The tongue was the last to be locked. When he tried to unlock it, he swallowed the key and a door would have to be opened in him to retrieve it ... He woke with a start. It was as if his itch was a needle and he was being stitched up. His heart was racing, his head pounding. It took a while for him to experience himself as a living thing, then a human being, and longer again before he could get used to his own personality, let alone his own thoughts. It was a ferocious struggle to recover his identity, steal it back from a shapeless cloud where there was uproar and commotion and put it back in its proper place ... He switched on two, three, four lights. There was no clock in the room and he had no watch. The public clocks were usually enough for him. He could remember clearly his own ravings, but nothing had changed except that he didn’t hear the refrain he usually heard in his sleep: ‘There’s a lot of noise in the boat tonight.’ As soon as he put the pillow back in the forgotten files cabinet, he imagined it had become itself again and was grateful to him for paying the appropriate fees ... He was shivering with the cold, his heart beating as hard as it had the day he was interviewed for the job of paperkeeper. He was so worried that day, the military medal was shaking on his chest, as if his body was betraying some form of cowardice in him. And yet, he knew today was different. Occasionally on the day of the interview, his heart had fluttered like a butterfly on a grassy hillside. Today he was more like a cow he saw once on his holidays struggling to wrench itself out of a boghole. He spent a while scratching himself carefully, vigorously as a prissy cat licking its fur ... He heard the commotion outside. The cleaning lady. He went to the door: ‘Hallo there,’ he yelled out through the blocked keyhole. ‘Hallo there, Mrs L. ...’ he said. ‘Oh, my God! ...’ He heard her scream through the door, the cleaning equipment being dropped and the uncertain scurrying of arthritic feet. ‘Mrs L.,’ he shouted as loud as he could. ‘It’s me J. J. J. I got locked in by accident; it was an accident. I’m in here.’ He heard the shuffle of feet approaching the door: ‘I thought it was a ghost or something awful, God help us. It’s hard to know what might be living in that dungheap of paper, God between us and all harm! By accident! Poor J. ... Alive and kicking and locked in ... Christ Almighty, all night! ... With nothing to eat or drink, and nowhere to sleep ... Were you scared? I have no key for that room, Mr J. Mr S. has it. He lets me in every morning. He gives it to me so I can let myself in. When Mr S. used go on holidays, Mr V., the man that was here before you, used to have it and he used to let me in. None of my keys will open this door, Mr J. ... The lock is jammed anyways. We’ll have to wait until the clerical officer comes. Isn’t it terrible that such a thing would happen to you, Mr J., you of all people, a good decent man ...’ J. had a lot on his mind but he’d have to keep it to himself until the officer came. He began running his finger up and down the spines of the files in the cabinet. He took one down. Unusually for him, he didn’t put it back. He started reading. It was about an incident a long way from the city, in the Wild West. An officer from the department had visited a tomato grower, and recommended a change of soil. There was another letter following a second visit, but the soil had not been changed in the glasshouse. An obstinate man, J. said to himself. Suddenly, he remembered S.’s mantra. ‘Don’t let on you see even the specks of dust between you and the light in this place. Hear nothing.’ He had never told him to do nothing. But he had told him not to say anything: And if you have to say something, say it properly according to the rules, procedures, provisions, intellectual acumen and dexterity of mind that befits a civil servant. For your own sake, for your own good I’m telling you: be tough with the weak and kind to the strong. Watch the way the wind is blowing. If your right eye should catch sight of something by accident, I’m not saying I will order you to pluck it out as a giver of scandal. That would diminish your ability as a civil servant, as a paperkeeper. But let not your left eye see what the right eye has seen. Let your mind not comprehend it or dwell on it. And above all else, never breathe a word of it.’ S. was over in the Isle of Man, groping the large breasts of some scarlet woman who had rifled his pockets. J. continued reading. He was consumed with curiosity about the departmental officer and the tomato man, like he used to be about the stories of the Wild West when he was at school. The man had threatened to hit the officer! To hit a departmental officer! Someone like the clerical officer, or the executive officer, or the administrative officer, or S. himself. There was even a letter from the minister saying how seriously he viewed the man’s behaviour towards the departmental officer and, if such behaviour occurred again ... By Dad! By the next letter, the tomato man had struck the officer. Another letter from the Minister. Any assault on the officer was tantamount to an assault on the Minister himself. J. thought that was worth remembering. The Minister could not turn a blind eye to such behaviour. The glasshouse would be confiscated immediately ... J. put the file back in the drawer abruptly. ‘Yes, sir ... Yes ... The key broke ... Yes ... Oh, one night isn’t much ...’ The phone rang outside in S.’s office and the clerical officer answered it. A moment later he was back at the door: It’s Mrs J. asking if you’re here. I told her what happened. She said it’s a long time since her rheumatism has had such a rest. She wanted to know were you drunk to make such an eejit of yourself ... But if you weren’t drunk, J., why did you lock yourself in? ... But you broke the key ... It’s not Christmas, you know, and it’s not like there’s been a change of government to say that people can just lose the run of themselves like this ... Mrs J. wanted to know should she bring you in your breakfast or would you prefer a feed of moth-eaten paper? I’ll have to tell her my superior will have to decide if it’s permissible to bring breakfast into the department ... Okay, I’ll tell her to ring back in half an hour.’ He must have done exactly that and was back again at the other end of the keyhole almost immediately: ... ‘But if you weren’t drunk, how did you get yourself into this mess? Breaking the key in the lock! I’ve always said it: you need to start young in this business. It was like trying to break in a mule in your case —you were too old when you started. “A brittle rod will get no budge from a mule.” The young jockey is best over the fences ... Do you hear me, J.? My key isn’t the same as yours. God knows where S. hid his.’ J. was suddenly afraid that it had been picked from his pocket by now somewhere on the Isle of Man. Bad cess to those women anyway, always watching, coveting what’s not theirs. Two thoughts handcuffed themselves together in J.’s mind: that he should tell the officer about the blonde woman, and (this is the one he spoke aloud) to call S. in the Isle of Man and tell him to send back the key by registered post on the next plane. J. had no intention of waiting till the key came to let him out, but was anxious that the key be safe. Who knows—if S. couldn’t carry out that instruction, J. might be promoted in his place. ‘There’s no precedent for that,’ said the officer. ‘Precedent?’ said J. He had often heard the word before, but he never quite understood it the way he understood what a rule or an injunction was, or a file, or label, or memorandum, or a key, hips, blondes, women’s hands groping in your trouser pockets. ‘Yes, precedent,’ said the clerical officer. ‘I’ve never heard of any precedent for such an eventuality and if there was a precedent, I would have heard of it. I started here when I was young and I know the Civil Service. I have to call the Office of Public Works. They’re the Custodians of the Keys, the St Peters of the Civil Service. Petrus, rock ...’ With all of the breathing through it, and the rush of talk, and the manhandling on both sides, it was possible to speak quite clearly through the keyhole. ‘Hallo!’ said the officer outside. ‘Hallo! Clerical Officer. Paperkeeping. The Board of Public Works please ...’ He was back at the keyhole again: ‘What was the number on the broken key? ... There’s no number on the shaft ... We don’t know about the head except that we must assume it’s in the hole here ... You don’t know the number? Like I said before, there should be ... The Board of Public Works is responsible for hundre
ds of keys, thousands, even ...’ He was at the door again: ‘What number is the room? ... How would I know where the number is? ... It’s none of my business. That’s a matter for the Office of Public Works. One moment ... Hallo! Public Works! ... Look on the left-hand side above the door, J. You can’t see any number there? ... You’re the one who’s supposed to be looking, J., not me. Do you know how to read at all? I’ve said it time and time again, there should be ... There must be a number there; if the Board of Public Works says there’s a number there, then it must be there. If there wasn’t ... scrape off the paint ... Now, madam, calm down! ... Hey J., there’s a woman here who says she’s Mrs J. and that she has your breakfast. In the absence of written permission from my superior ...’ ‘Where is he? ... Is it in there you are, J., my poor old coochicoo? The best night’s sleep I’ve ever had. My hips feel so good they’ll take that lice-ridden door off its hinges ... Why don’t you do it then? ... The desk, of course! Let you ram the table against it from that side and I’ll do the same on this side. I’ll flatten it with my arse. What a pig does with its snout, a woman can do with her arse! Yera, what are you saying, you bullock’s waters? ... Poor J. inside there, hungry and thirsty ... Out of my way, you heap of snot ... What do I care, you slimeball, what the Board of Public Works will do? What are you saying, J.? Put a pile of those filthy papers against the door and set them on fire. See how quick they let you out then ... Yera, the devil take your hooter of a runny nose, yourself and your police ... What do you mean, be patient, J.? Do you want to die of hunger and turn into a big pile of paper inside there? So this fella could dip his pen in his dripping nose and start writing a report on you with his snot ... So what about the job? Wouldn’t you have my fine friendly hips for company to ride as much as you like. Never mind the job, J., you’re coming out whether you like it or not as soon as I break down this door. Do you hear them and their hallos? Guards! Damn ye ...’ Just then J. heard a fierce commotion in the room outside, shouts and insults flying, swearing and cursing, everyone wishing each other to hell. Through the uproar, J. could hear her: ‘Ye pack of bastards, mind my hip! Ye shower of gobshites, only God can separate me from my husband, my lawful husband. The priest said we were the one flesh although many’s the time I wished there was a customs checkpoint between J.’s withered bones and my poor old hip. Ye pack of bastards, ye shower of shits. Up the IRA ...’ J.’s mouth was parched, his lips sticking together like hot wax. He gulped down what was left in the water jug. He heard the clerical officer’s voice outside again: ‘Happy days! They’ve put her out, this woman who claims, rightly or wrongly, that she and you are one lawful flesh ... okay then, legitimate. But I have made provision’—another mountain of a word that J.’s mind could only climb as far as the exposed ledge in front of him—’for her violence and bitching from here on in. Begging your pardon, I can’t help my language at this crucial moment in the glorious history of this office. Just because you’re legally joined together in body doesn’t mean I should believe that you and she are the same in every detail. The Guards will deal with the situation from here on in ...’ ‘But do you mind me asking, sir, when I will be let out of here?’ J. asked politely. ‘Let out? I can’t make any immediate arrangements in the matter. It is now in the hands of the Board of Public Works, and that is a considerable step forward. I would go so far as to say that it represents the step forward. It was passed on through the appropriate channels from me to the staff officer, from him to the administrative officer, to the assistant principal officer and then to the principal officer and unusually—a new precedent—to the assistant secretary. How’s that for progress! The assistant secretary deferred the matter, quite properly, to the Board of Public Works since there was no key and no right way of ...”How long will it take the Board to get here, sir?’ ‘I can’t answer that question. The matter is out of my hands, out of the hands of this section. I would go so far as to say that it is out of the hands of this department. A matter cannot be taken out of the hands of a particular department unless it is passed on to some other person or party.’ In J.’s mind, the idea of matters-in-hand was like trying to pick up mercury with his fingers. God be with the good old days—he could understand what it meant to take a woman in hand, but he couldn’t allow himself to dwell on such things. The only thing he could think to say was: ‘But isn’t this room part of the department, sir?’ ‘As a result of a proper decision having been taken, and, for present purposes only, that room is temporarily the responsibility of the Board of Public Works, that is to say, in a limited sense only and for the purposes of opening the door; the room can therefore be seen as physically a part of this building, but, for the purposes of the Civil Service in this instance, a part of the Board of Public Works, without prejudice to the jurisdiction of the Department in respect of rights of entry from without and other statutory rights that are reserved by this department and that cannot be transferred without several acts and orders being repealed. The Board of Public Works will have no entitlement to rent or rates as a result of its temporary possession of the room for the aforementioned purpose, and you yourself will be subject to neither rent nor rates. There is no precedent for such ...”Sir, I’m parched with the thirst and famished with the hunger. I need to go again soon, sir, and this time I’m thinking it’s a major operation.’ The pub-talk of the old days was shuffling around in J.’s mind, unbeknownst to him and in spite of him. ‘As you know, these matters have nothing to do with the protocols of the Civil Service. As a fellow human being, if I can distinguish between my existence as a human being and my responsibilities as a Civil Servant, you have my sympathy. I regret, as things stand, that I can do nothing except fulfil my duties here as a Cú Chulainn of the State. En passant, I must point out to you that, in my opinion, as a human being—and this is not an official decision—in your present circumstances, you have ceased, for the time being, if you follow me, to be an acting civil servant ...’ J.’s blood was a whirlpool, a donnybrook ... ‘It requires an act of violence to break down a Civil Service door and no individual and no corporate entity has the right to do that, except the Board of Public Works. And when they perform an authorised operation that would be termed an illegal act of violence if perpetrated by you or me, it is no longer a violent act but an appropriate intervention ... I don’t know, my good man, when they will do it, or how, but one must presume that they will do what they will do in due course and in the appropriate fashion.’ J. had to sit down on the chair. He hadn’t the strength to stand by the keyhole any longer. He stayed like that a long time, half asleep, half awake, half dead, and half alive, he thought from time to time. Someone knocked at the door, almost as politely as J. did whenever he had to go in to S.: ‘I’m the man from the Board of Public Works ... What number was on the key? ... Do you know who or where they got it from or when the lock was put on the door? ... What number is the room? ... I can’t find anything in this file unless I have the details to guide me ... I’ll respond to this memo and send it on to my supervisor.’ J. recognised the particular tone of the man’s voice: that was exactly how the clerical officer had spoken when he said that J.’s situation had been handed over to the Board of Public Works, that it was a step forward, the step forward. His case was gathering momentum now, climbing up as far as the supervisor. J. sat down again. He had lost all track of time. The phone rang. He gripped it tightly with shaking hands: ‘A call for you, Mr J. ... and please tell your wife to stop abusing me. There’s nothing I can do. I only look after the switchboard ...’ God Almighty! It was a good omen to get a phone call. A whirlpool of blood surged into his ears. J. felt as if there was a woman materialising through the receiver: skin, bone, flesh, hips and all: ‘You’re not even half a man. You’re nothing. I’ve told you before. Giving in to them snotty bastards. Throw every top-heavy filing cabinet in the place against the door and make flitters of it. If you wait much longer, you won’t have the strength to do it. I’ll get on to the papers, and the Bishop. May that bitch on the switchboard get my rhe
umatism, and my bad hip—’ The line went dead ... A minute later, the telephone rang again. Today it was ringing as often as S.’s. ‘Mr J.... The Board of Public Works ... Supervisor number nine here. What number is the key? ... How long has the lock been there? Have you any idea of the year, even? ... The room number? All I can do is send a memo to Supervisor Number Eleven.’ Slowly but surely, his situation was climbing onwards and upwards. But even the sun was slow to rise sometimes. J. had to go to the toilet again. He thought of using the jug but the jug belonged to the Civil Service in a way that the floor didn’t. The jug could be moved about like a file or a memorandum. He was in mid-flow when the phone rang. Oh, my God, would it ever stop ringing! ‘Is that you, Mr J. ... The Little Irelander here. Our sources tell us you’re locked in. Will you do an interview with me? If we don’t make the evening edition, we’ll put it J. informed him that no one could get in or out of the room. He was thinking on his feet, trying to find a good excuse for not talking. The voice on the other end became smooth as new milk from a cow’s teat: ‘But you can answer my questions right now on the phone.’ J. nearly dropped the receiver. But paperkeepers were honour bound to be civil. And yet, the first commandment of the Civil Service was: ‘For the benefit of the State and your own peace of mind, never answer a question about yourself, your work, the Civil Service, no matter who asks, but especially a journalist.’ But the reporter coaxed information from him as gently and skilfully as a woman coaxing milk from a cow: that he had been locked in all night with nothing to eat. He came to his senses all of a sudden and would give no more information, even if his life depended on it. He was sweating again. He felt as dry as hot sand from his lips to his belly and not a drop left in the jug. He tilted it to one side to try and gather whatever few drops were left and then raised it to his mouth. The telephone rang. He was getting more calls than S. the busiest day he ever had. It was Number Eleven. He had no precise details concerning the key. Since they couldn’t get the original one they would have to try whole bunches of them, an eternity of keys, and there might be a slight delay since every key in every single key-room would have to be acquired, requested and acknowledged in the appropriate fashion. The same diligent care would be required for this operation as finding a single flea in a barrel of fleas. To hell with him and his fleas, J. was itching all over again! They’d hardly get the job done before dinner. But they’d be back by half two, three, anyway, and they should have got as far as the door by four at the very latest ... Things were slowing down, as per usual. Although he was not very experienced in the ways of the Civil Service, J. knew there was an unwritten rule that nothing should ever be done in a hurry. This putting things on the long finger, or, indeed, not doing them at all was a defence mechanism, a guarantee that things would be done properly, eventually. Not to do something at all was to ensure that it was not done incorrectly. That made sense. A lot of sense. It used to be said that the human element, and even the weather, could not be discounted in the work of the Civil Service. If a memo was written on an overcast day, it was usually held back until a fine day for revision and correction. There would at least be a flicker of hope in that particular version. But then that version might be considered excessively optimistic, so the gloomiest person in the office would be set to work, and still the matter would have to be deferred. J. felt, therefore, he could hardly complain when what was happening to him was something he believed in and, in all likelihood, participated in every day in the Civil Service. The phone was ringing again. How many times was that? More than S. ever got anyway. It was the parish priest. Who’d have thought it? The ways of the Civil Service were strange, the priest said. J. had a ready-made response—like the ways of God. The priest had phoned TDs, Ministers, even, and was expecting a result without delay. He was confident that J. had the necessary spiritual resolve to endure greater tribulations than this. When J. asked if his position as a paperkeeper was safe, he answered that he would see to it and that he could rest assured on that count. Mrs J. could hardly be blamed for being a little out of sorts and telling anyone who would listen that all she wanted was to have J. back home. It didn’t require much effort on J.’s part to imagine what his Old One had actually said: that it would be a great comfort to have him back in the bed beside her practising for the Civil Service sports on her hips. The clerical officer spoke to him again, on the telephone this time. That he should contact J. by telephone was a promotion in itself. It was quarter to four. Why had J. given an interview to a newspaper? A stop-press edition had been printed. A scandal in the public service, a service the general public thought of as efficient and considerate. The story had already travelled the length and breadth of the country. The English papers would have it tomorrow. The Opposition would exploit it. And the Six Counties. It was no use J. muttering that any damage to the Service was like a wound on his own body. For all the talk of scandal, J. couldn’t conceal his desperate need: ‘A drop of water on my tongue. Even a single drop ...”How do you propose that we do that? ... Stick a funnel through a jammed keyhole! ... Nurses have instruments for relieving patients that are constipated ... I’m not a nurse and I’m not from the Board of Public Works. An assistant secretary came to the door in person a while ago. That was a first. He put on his glasses and examined the lock, but, bien entendu, declared it a matter for the Board of Public Works ...’ J. hadn’t heard the assistant secretary at the door. Nonetheless, he had to take it on trust that he had been there, that he had gone to such lengths for his sake ... In the Civil Service, one had to believe certain things without seeing or hearing them. The Civil Service itself was an act of faith, as indeed, was every civil servant. ‘I can’t hurry the Board of Public Works. It’s up to them. You must appreciate, J., that they have other responsibilities besides opening jammed locks. Their responsibilities are considerable. Opening gaps. Closing gaps. Putting furniture into new offices and sections that are born to the Service every day. Providing a new desk for the Minister’s office. Replacing the doors of the State prison that were broken by the political prisoners during a riot. They would have to give priority to the prison doors over all other locks and keys. And there are other jammed locks, hundreds of them, perhaps, throughout the Service ... The Board of Public Works are unlikely to be here before half past four ... Yes, J., I do realise that that is very close to closing time ... I don’t know whether or not any provision has been made for such an eventuality ... I’ve never heard of a civil servant breaking a key inside a lock before. If there were a precedent, but since there isn’t ... Keep moving your tongue; that will moisten it for you ...’ J. decided to do something drastic. He lifted the receiver and called the girl on the switchboard. ‘Number, please.’ ‘The Archbishop.’ ‘The Catholic Archbishop? Do you know his number? ... I’ll be finishing my shift here in a couple of minutes ... There you go ... You’re through now.’ He was through to the Archbishop’s Residence but His Grace was in Rome. They had been advised of his situation and were monitoring it closely. The nuns were praying for him. Mrs J. had nearly demolished the Palace with a furious shower of curses. She could hardly be blamed ... It would be a great comfort to everyone if His Grace were at home, but he wasn’t due back until Friday. They would telephone him later. With the help of God ... God’s help was always at hand ... It hadn’t occurred to J. that the telephone would be cut off. The clerical officer came back to the door with the executive officer and the assistant secretary. ‘We’re trying to get the Board of Public Works to put the skids on,’ said the assistant secretary. ‘Skids ... on ... ,’ J. repeated after him without thinking. The assistant secretary was still speaking: ‘I think I’ve got them to agree to stay on after hours. They’ll be here presently. Goodbye now. I’ll be back later.’ J. got the message: the assistant secretary was going for his tea, or a pint, maybe, two pints, even, to the corner pub. He had gone in to the corner pub himself after work last Christmas Eve but as soon as he saw the assistant secretary leaning against the counter, he turned around and left. Who knows what the
assistant secretary might have thought if he happened to bump into him with a belly full of porter? That J. might be selling files, memoranda, white papers? J. had heard of a paperkeeper who swiped from a Minister’s desk an advance copy of a Government white paper on restricting the migration of swallows, sold it to those parties who were agitating for its amendment, and had his ill-gotten gains stolen from his breast pocket by a woman in a public house. The assistant secretary was gone. Tea. Porter. Water. Any liquid at all. Just the tip of a pin’s worth of something wet on his tongue. He went to get the jug. His legs made their own protest, getting in each other’s way, out of control. He had often had too much to drink but his legs had never let him down in quite the same way before. He put the jug to his lips. There was some remnant of dampness trickling from it but his arms refused to do as they were told and it ended up running down his chin. Although his finger was no more obedient to his will than his arms and legs, he ran it along the inside of the jug, then placed it on his tongue that was dry as paper ... He was half asleep, semi-conscious, when he came to with a start. His heart skipped a beat. They were knocking at the door. ‘It’s me ... Patsy Fitzprick, your local TD. You know me well, I’m Fine Fáil? I’ll have you out of that hole in less than an hour, sooner, if I can ... It’s a disgrace. But it’s no wonder: the Boss made one mistake, understandable enough in the circumstances, when he left a shower of Fianna Gaelers in the Office of Public Works the time we went into Government. That gave them control and since they know you’re Fine Fáil—’ ‘But I never said ... which party ... I was for ... civil servants ... are not permitted ...’ J. couldn’t go on; every word from the other side hit him like a blow from a blade-bright sword. ‘I can’t believe that a man of your intelligence, who has learned the ways of the Civil Service would be a Fianna Gael man.’ ‘I didn’t say—’ That was as much as J. could manage. ‘I’ll be back.’ He heard the footsteps retreating like the mercy of God, who couldn’t open a Civil Service door ... The door shook on its hinges! Someone had given it an almighty kick on the other side: ‘Do you hear me in there, you eejit? There I was, sitting down to my tea. Do you hear me? ... The phone rang. The Old Lady came in to me. “Supervisor N. wants you, A.,” says she. “Supervisor N.,” says I. “It’s a strange time for Supervisor N. to call, while a man is having his tea.” “Don’t look at me,” said the Old Lady, “but he says it’s urgent, really urgent.” “Bad luck to him anyway,” says I. “Look here, boy,” says N. “You’d better go down to where that clown is locked in, bad luck to him, anyway,” says N. “Bad luck to him is right,” says I. No word of a lie. D’you hear me? “No sooner was I in the door from work,” says N., “than the Chief Supervisor of Urgent Affairs was on the phone.” “The Assistant Secretary from Public Works,” says Urgent Affairs, “had that driveller of a TD Patsy Fitzprick on to him” ... I’m telling you there’s no Patsy Fitzprick out here. Maybe that was him I passed on my way in. “Leave it till tomorrow. I’ll look into it first thing in the morning,” says the Assistant Secretary for Public Works. “Bad luck to him anyways. Maybe the clown will have taken the high jump if we wait till tomorrow,” says Patsy Fitzprick. “It’s a coffin you’ll need for him then.” “Public Works doesn’t provide coffins,” says the Assistant Secretary. “That would be in breach of Private Enterprise.” “Well, you have to do something,” says Fitzprick. “But I’m no longer on duty,” says the Assistant Secretary. “All I’m asking is that someone open the lock; that’s all, to open the lock. It’s worth two, three, five votes, maybe, for me to get that door open,” says Fitzprick. “If you don’t do something, and send someone down with a hammer and a pair of pliers and an axe immediately—” “An axe! God forbid! Are you suggesting that a door, a Civil Service door—” “I don’t care if you do it with your prick, so long as you do it right away,” says Patsy Fitzprick. “First thing in the morning.” “Don’t mind the morning; do it now, right this minute, as quick as a goat would shit on cow dung,” says Fitzprick, “or I’ll bring it up in the Dáil—and you with it.” “But what kind of fool is he that locked himself in? ...” “That’s beside the point,” says Fitzprick. The Assistant Secretary rang Urgent Affairs. “Bad luck to him anyway,” says Urgent Affairs. “Bad luck to him is right,” says the Assistant Secretary, “but it’s your responsibility as Chief Supervisor of Urgent Affairs. I am formally handing responsibility over to you; it’s in your hands now ...” “But I’m off duty,” says Urgent Affairs, “and I got no memo about the matter. I couldn’t take a feather to that door without a memo.” “With or without a memo, I’m instructing you to deal with it without further delay ...” Bloody Patsy Fitzprick. He’s about to be made a parliamentary secretary. What do you bet he’ll be put in charge of us here in Public Works. We’re like a hospital for every gammy leg of a parliamentary secretary, every useless eejit in the Government. He’s making public statements about new brooms and all that, cleaning the place up ... I’m revealing departmental secrets now, J. To hell with them. We’re tradesmen here in Public Works, not like the fat lumps of blotting paper that pass for Civil Servants. We couldn’t care less about those sourpuss pen-pushing pansies ... Anyway, Urgent Affairs called Supervisor N. “A memo,” says N. “Memo or no memo,” says Urgent Affairs. “The first job on the list for tomorrow,” says Supervisor N. “Immediately,” says Urgent Affairs. “Patsy Fitzprick, the next Parliamentary Secretary in the Works ...” That’s when Supervisor N. rang me, A. That was what had the Old Lady in a tizzy and me in the middle of my tea. “What sort of eejit would lock himself in,” says I. “Eejit is right, you can say that again,” says Supervisor N., “but go over anyway, A., and take—” “No one said anything to me about it,” says I. “Things have to be done right. What’s the world coming to at all? Soon there’ll be no memos. I’m going to the Bingo tonight. First thing tomorrow morning ...” “Look,” says N., “this Patsy Fitzprick ...” “Bad luck to him anyway,” says I ... No word of a lie ... “But where will I get the tools?” says I. “The tools are locked away. That fella with the gap between his teeth, U., will have to open the store. He’ll need written permission from B. to do that. Not only is he deaf, he’s the kind of fella who, if he had the pen, he’d be missing the ink, and if he had both, he’d be missing the necessary forms. Anyway, the pens, ink, and papers are all locked away since five. In order to obtain permission—” “Look,” says N., “you’d need at least a day to wade through the shitload of forms and the whole shebang.” “This is an emergency.” “I thought the emergency finished at the end of the war,” says I. “This is an emergency,” N. exploded like a megaton bomb. “Urgent Affairs. Patsy Fitzprick. Get a screwdriver and a hammer, I don’t care if you have to steal them, A. Take off the lock. Let the clown out of the locked room. Break his neck for all I care once he’s out, or drill a hole in his back and give him a good kicking, unofficially of course. We can cover it up in the memo by saying you were helping him out of the room when he fell and broke his neck. There isn’t a doctor in the Civil Service who will contradict you. We’ll all go to the funeral. A half-day in the Office. Only put back the lock again so it looks like it’s been fixed. It doesn’t matter a damn if it falls apart again as soon as someone touches it with the tip of a wet finger, so long as it can’t be said it was the Board of Public Works that broke it, or left it broken after them ... You’ll have to go over there right away, A. Patsy Fitzprick! ...” Can you hear me in there, J.? I won’t break your neck, but make no mistake, if you insist on staying in that room, I have the authority to use all necessary force to evict you from a place that is, for present purposes, appropriated by the Office of Public Works. Do you hear me? ...’ A voice as harsh as a saw cut through A.’s voice outside. ‘It’s me ... your local TD, Benny Fartling, Fianna Gael, who else? Yes, another example of Fine Fill’s incompetence ... ‘When we were in Government, no individual, no matter how hard he tried, could lock himself in like this. It’s no wonder! You only have to take one look at that Patsy Fitzprick ... Let’s see now.
I’ll put this in the public domain. I will. You’ll get compensation. I’ll see to it that the Dáil and the Seanad are forced to sit within four hours. An emergency sitting ... But this has gone beyond politics. It has nothing to do with you personally, except to the extent that your welfare is now inextricably linked to the welfare of the country. Leave it to me ...’ It seemed as though Benny Fartling and A. had both left. Fartling must have chased A. away as soon as he arrived. J. was trying to collect his thoughts, like someone trying to make out a shape shrouded in darkness. Benny Fartling had got rid of A. so that no one else would share the credit for getting J. out. J. had lost all control of his limbs by this stage. He groped his way as far as the pipe. As soon as he touched the cold living lead his whole body began to tremble. It was summer and there was no water in the pipe. Maybe there was, only it was cold water. He could break the pipe. No, he couldn’t. Breaking a pipe was an even worse crime than breaking a door. Anyway, how could he break it? The pipe ran through the whole service like a transport system, an artery that circulated authority. He felt helpless as a fly caught in the grip of that strong pipe. If it had anything resembling horns, J. could well believe he was in the same room as the devil; it was black as hell. He began picking flakes of plaster and paper from the wall and sucking them to try and keep his mouth moist. Then he remembered that there must be a wet patch in the corner. He had heard it was poisonous. At that moment he would gladly have swallowed anything wet, even poison, if only he could bend down far enough to reach it. Why hadn’t he relieved himself in the jug? There wasn’t a drop left in his body. He thought of the hair oil on his head but it had dried out and his hair was a mess after the night. He chewed the mildewed cover of one of the forgotten files in the corner of a cabinet, leaving only the label with its title on it. He felt reckless—tempted—the pipe was the cause of it all—in a way he had never felt before. He started on a second file that wasn’t as mildewed as the first one except that this time the mildew was on the musty papers inside the file. The commotion outside drew him back to the door. ‘I’m Paschal Lambe. Your Independent TD. An intolerable injustice has been done to you and I give you my word there’ll be hell to pay ... You want me to break down the door from this side? ... I’d be delighted to, only I can’t ... It’s like one of those huge rocks you see balanced on a hillside back home. The slightest touch will topple it but a small army wouldn’t put it back where it was. It’s typical of the Government and the Opposition, a way of trapping people and undermining them. They’ll have bribed the coroner’s court to say it was an accident and that no one could be held responsible. Then the Government can say that emigration figures are dropping. I’ve raised numerous questions already in the Dáil about these inquests. The last one was about the big wall the Board of Public Works left ... The Minister said it was a dirty black lie, that I had spoken strongly against moving the wall last year, that tourists wanted to see it. Of course, what I actually said was that moving the wall would be dangerous, a public hazard. But the Minister twisted my words, saying that wasn’t what I meant, and that he didn’t have the statutory power to grant the widow a pension ... This door is a job for the Fire Brigade. I’ll call them right away ... Could you not set the place on fire? Can’t you set a match to a bundle of papers, and the whole place smothered with paper ... Now, now ... a little fire will do you no harm and you’ll be rescued right away. The Fire Brigade is fully authorised to rescue people and property. It’s the easiest way through this “chevaux-de-frise” of protocol—that’s the term the Minister kept throwing in our faces last year, trying to pull the wool over our eyes on the Archaeology vote ... A plague on this paper! It won’t light. Too damp. Government neglect ... God Almighty tonight, J., do you know what it is, the Record of Dáil Debates with my speech about the wall. No wonder it wouldn’t light. May God preserve the truth, now and forever ... I’ll call the Fire Brigade. It’s all the same, so long as there’s a smell of burning. As soon as someone smells burning, the Fire Brigade can take action as quickly as if there was a conflagration for all to see. They can smash windows, demolish walls, break down doors ... A smell is only a clue, a kind of philosophical attribute. What stinks to heaven for one person is perfume for another. They say that what the sensory perception of one person’s nose deciphers as foul-smelling according to its faculty of discernment, the next person’s nose will translate as sweet perfume ... I’m surprised you never heard that, J. The Dáil Bar is a great education. I’m not saying the drink now ...’ J. crawled on his belly to a damp patch on the wall that had been left behind when a cabinet was moved. He began licking the spot frantically, all the way up the panelled wall as far as he could reach on his knees. There was a knocking at the door again and he crawled back to it: ‘Your corporation alderman Ernest Bellowes here. They weren’t going to let me in. The Minister had to be called. There were only twenty votes between me and his own yes-man at the last election. Do you see now, J., how little respect they have for you in this miserable little country. And you a martyr to your duties. In any other country, you’d be a hero. In Russia—and believe me I’m no Communist, I’m a Catholic—you’d be made a hero of the Soviet Union; they’d give you a hundred thousand roubles as a prize, a pension right away, a villa in Moscow and free time every day to visit Lenin’s mausoleum. I’ll raise blue bloody murder. I’ll go out on the streets, door to door; I’ll get you a full pension right away ... Well, okay, a promotion at any rate ... We’ll make you a Senior, no problem. I’ll be in the Dáil after the next election, or by-election, maybe. Mr Silver-tongue, the Fianna Gael candidate in our constituency, has a dodgy ticker. Every voter in the place knows that Buckley, the Fine Filler from the East of the City will kill himself some night with his drink-driving ... You want a priest? I’ll bring him in myself. What would you prefer? A Franciscan? A Carmelite? A Jesuit? I prefer the Jesuit myself. He always notices the blisters on the working man’s hands and looks at them closely, sympathetically, you’d think ... Yera, fuck that for a game of soldiers, they’ll have to let the priest in to you. If they don’t, I’ll shout it from every rooftop in Ireland that this is a pagan country, with a pagan Government, worse than Russia, that its soul is blacker than Africa, and it has twice as many sins as that cesspit London ... Oh, you don’t want to create a fuss? You get nowhere in this place without making a fuss; it’s the last refuge of the poor and the weak. It was by making a fuss that I scared the shit out of that Sullivan fella in the paper scandal. As you know, he had the market cornered and sold half the paper in the country to the Jehovah’s Witnesses for books of sermons ... Well you’re the only one who doesn’t know it then. If you knew anything at all, you wouldn’t be turning to dust inside there. D’you know what I’ll do? I’ll go out into the highways and byways; I’ll leave no stone unturned, no possibility unexplored. I’ll turn your predicament into a national emergency. They’ll have to bring in the army like they do when the buses are on strike. ... Yera, there’s a fear of them ... The army’s engineer corps. They’ll have it sorted in half an hour, an hour at the most. Nelson’s arse was a greater challenge and it didn’t take them long to blow him up. There you have it. The Army.’ J. stayed exactly where he had fallen by the door, clutching the handle with his left hand, like a drowning man. The voice of Deputy Rush, from the Sweat Party, shouting at him was like the distant crash of a wave against a cliff: ‘You give them the last drop of your sweat and they grow fat on the back of it. Big houses, big cars, big women, big jobs, big bellies from the sweat of the underfed. That’s it: fat cats pay no heed to famished mice. They’re up there right now in the Castle eating and drinking on the sweat of the poor, and their wives beside them with their big bellies, big arses, big hips, big breasts, big thighs. Would it happen anywhere else under the sun only in this misfortunate country of ours? I brought a bill before the Dáil to protect workers from catching colds from their work-mates. Do you know the latest thing that medical research has discovered about colds? That the smell of sweat can spread it, or t
he smell of a fart. The Minister claimed there was no evidence for it and threw out the Bill. I introduced another Bill to control the prices charged by prostitutes and asked that the matter be referred to the Fair Prices Commission. Between ourselves, it would help to provide equal opportunities for the man who earns his living by the sweat of his brow, but I had to say the opposite in order to get what I wanted. What I said was that as soon as illicit pleasures, traditionally the preserve of the well off, became available to everyone, that demand for such dubious delights would decline. Do you know what the Minister said? That there were no prostitutes in Ireland, and if there were, the police could deal with them. All they want is to keep all the perks for the rich. Look at the injustice that is being done to you ... You want a priest? With all due respect, the bill I proposed would have benefited the clergy. As soon as prostitution had lost its attraction, the priests could divert their energies into opposing something else; communism, for instance. I’m telling you it’s not just you that’s suffering from injustice, but others like you as well. The last time your wife came to my clinic complaining about her rheumatism, she said the worst nights were when you started twisting and turning in the bed like Christy Ring scoring a goal. Wouldn’t it be a great relief to your poor crippled wife if every now and again you could get out of a Friday or a Saturday night, into a public house, like they do in Spain, another Catholic country ... A priest, you say? Do you know how many priests there are in Spain? The most Catholic country in the world, they say, and the one with the most prostitutes. I’m not speaking from personal experience here because I was never in Spain ... Of course you’re trying to get out of here! Didn’t I read it in the papers and hear it on the news? I was very sorry to be out when your wife called in to me at home. She nearly killed my own missus, chasing after her with her walking stick. Is it any wonder she was spitting and cursing, the poor woman. Look, you’ll be out as quick as a whore would rob a drunk man, the kind of thing my bill would have put an end to. Wait till I go down to the Liberty Lounge, the party’s drinking hole, and get my brother Mickey Rush. He was a locksmith by trade before he was elected secretary of the union. He opened the lock on a door for a friend and colleague of mine the other day. Just between the two of us, it had nothing to do with politics. There was a woman with a room on the other side of the wall from my friend, same as if she was in this room here now and you on the other side of the wall. A lock can close or open all kinds of things, as the fella said. I won’t be—’ J. slumped down against the door. He raised his knees but got little relief from the pain ... He was sufficiently conscious to hear the shouting and abuse outside. The Sweat Deputy had come back with the locksmith Mickey Rush and all his equipment. He was laying in to the door when the Guards stopped him, on the instructions of the civil servants who had taken advice on the matter: ‘A private locksmith cannot interfere with a door such as this unless requested to do so by the Board of Public Works. Do you have written authorisation from the Board of Public Works? No. Where is A.? If you give the equipment to A., he can do it ... A. is not available?’ The outer room was a watchtower sounding all kinds of alarms. For a long time Sweat Deputy’s voice nestled comfortingly in J.’s ear, but even that didn’t last. The Army was the best and least complicated solution, all things considered. The Government issued an emergency order that was taken to the Minister for Defence in the Castle to sign and pass on to the Chief of Staff, who had to be followed from Headquarters to the Castle. He, in turn, informed the Director of the Engineer Corps, who was found in the Castle after he was discovered not to be at Headquarters or at home. The engineers were either asleep, on marital leave, or other forms of leave. Telephones were ringing, messengers on motorbikes going back and forth, transport being arranged. A warrant was issued by the Board of Public Works that kept a tight grip on that part of its authority until the bitter end. Two Senior Supervisors were present which meant that the secretary himself had to be woken at an ungodly hour as he slept like an old ruin after his day’s work in the Castle. It was said that Patsy Fitzprick was mostly to blame in the end for the delay. He was deadweight, in the way, an obstacle to the urgent matter in hand. He insisted to anyone who would listen that if it wasn’t for him the army would never have been called in and that J. would have died in that hole for want of assistance. In the heel of the hunt, he managed to slip into where the action was, in between the two Senior Supervisors, something no other public representative had managed to do. Dawn was breaking when they finally reached J. His knees were raised up as straight as was possible for a man with flat feet and stumpy legs, his dishevelled hair covering his eyes, his head to one side against the bottom of the door, and the cover of a file in his mouth as if he was kissing it. It is rumoured that it was one of the forgotten files and that they were unable to get it out of his clenched mouth without cutting it. The priest gave J. conditional absolution. Patsy Fitzprick said a rosary single-handed and produced four mass-cards that he always carried in case of such an eventuality. It was the considered opinion of the independent doctor that Sweat Deputy, Benny Fartling, Paschal Lambe and Ernest Bellowes insisted be admitted, that coronary thrombosis was the cause of death, precipitated specifically by hunger and thirst, along with palpitations brought on by anxiety and trepidation. A Civil Service doctor disagreed with those findings but demanded permission to reserve his evidence until the coroner’s inquest. The Board of Public Works managed to salvage something from the episode, the two pieces of the Broken Key.