Breakfast on Pluto

by Patrick McCabe

  Some nights I’d lie there thinking about that and then see – don’t ask me why! – Caroline and Whiskers standing outside in the rain, drenched, asking: ‘Can we come in?’

  Whereupon I’d chuckle a bit and shrug as I looked at them and said: ‘Sorry, folks! Closed, I’m afraid!’

  Well, poor old Whiskers! Would she be furious about that or what!

  Chapter Five

  Welcome to Juke Box Jury!

  Certain other people, however, would be admitted straight away to my salubrious abode, and in would stomp to marvel: ‘Boy, Braden! What a place!’ as I cried out: ‘Hellay, dahlings! To my castle, welcome, old friends Irwin Kerr and Charlie!’ continuing to make up more posh rubbish for them to join in with – why? Because that was the way we went on and always had. For as long as I could remember they’d been calling down to Rat Trap Mansions, annoying the arse off Whiskers asking her could I come out to play cowboys and war. I met Irwin first when he was in mourning for his brother who was eaten in the Congo by Balubas. He was in floods of tears coming across the square, choking: ‘Bastards! Fucking bastards!’ and saying every one of them would have to die. Except that only three days later, his brother arrived back from Africa with an ebony elephant for everyone in the street and not a bother on him from the day he’d gone off with his kit bag. ‘He was in a fight but . . .’ Irwin said, as we headed off the next day to our hut, which was the headquarters of the famous Kane Gang. ‘Even though I’m a girl, I have to be in charge,’ Charlie said. ‘Otherwise you can forget about the whole thing.’

  Me and Irwin didn’t care who was leader. All we wanted to do was read her comics and listen to the records she played on the battery-operated record player her sister brought home from England. We’d just sit there on the grass, clicking our fingers and going: ‘Fantastic! Fab! It’s just fab, baby!’

  That was how the international modelling shows started. Charlie would bring out her mother’s clothes and start showing all these magnificent creations to fashion-buyers and pop-star managers from all over the world. ‘What do you think?’ she’d say, and I’d frown and cradle my chin as I said: ‘Oo! Magnifique!’ or ‘No! I do not like it!’ in the same French accent.

  The Juke Box Jury Shows just grew out of that, I suppose, and before long there was one every day. As soon as we got out of school, we’d race off out to the hut and get our gear on and Charlie would go behind the plank which was the juke box jury counter and announce: ‘Ladies and gentlemen! You’re welcome to Juke Box Jury!’

  In the beginning, she did some singing too but after a while I did most of it because Irwin said he was too shy and so there I’d be, going: ‘You know you make me wanna shout!’ or ‘Stop! In the name of love!’ by the Supremes as Charlie held up her cards and cried, like the woman on the telly: ‘I’ll give it foive!’ as Irwin shouted: ‘It’s bollocks It’s a load of bollocks! Look at Braden the eejit dressed up as a woman!’

  Which I rarely was, to be honest with you – although not from lack of desire! – and made do mostly with a pearl necklace or one of Charlie’s mother’s blouses. Still – it was better than nothing! And sometimes she’d bring out a perfume spray to squirt all around the hut and make it smell just fabulous! ‘Nothing like perfume for taking all your cares away!’ I’d say and do a twirl. ‘If this doesn’t stop,’ Irwin said, ‘I’m quitting the gang!’, but Charlie said: ‘Oh pipe down, why don’t you,’ and he did, shuffling off and sticking up two fingers.

  It wasn’t long after that anyway that we started the wars as well and that kept him happy, there wasn’t a word out of him about the perfume and the international modelling as long as we promised to keep doing the wars. Which I didn’t mind in the slightest, especially as Charlie clicked her heels and went: ‘Compan-ee-tenshun!’ I loved that, for some reason – her being the boss! As off we’d march behind her, with Irwin looking all around him for British soldiers to kill and shout ‘Die dog!’ at, as he stuck his bayonet in their necks.

  How all that started was that 1966 was the jubilee commemoration of the 1916 rising and no matter where you went in Tyreelin, everyone was waving a tricoloured flag or singing an Irish ballad. Every day there was a different politician in the town and in the pubs at night they were all talking about getting into a lorry and driving across the border to take over the north.

  To tell you the truth, we didn’t care that much for the wars in the end. But Irwin – he was going clean mad over them! He had even taken to wearing his James Connolly rebel hat around the town and going off over the fields on his own to practise drilling. To keep him happy, we kept on saying the wars were great and then running off back to the hut to put on the Beatles and go absolutely mad as we clicked our fingers and jived in and out among the sheep and cows, singing: ‘Try to see it my way! Do I have to keep on talking till I can’t go on! We can work it out! We can work it out!’ until we couldn’t do any more and just lay down there holding hands and staring up at the sky. And which we kept on doing, and had no intention of stopping, right through secondary school and everything!

  Chapter Six

  Most Popular Adolescent Boy

  Which at times must have been difficult for Charlie, for let’s face it, what with the famous ‘smalls’ and other similar episodes which I shan’t bother going into here, as time went on, it became abundantly clear that I wasn’t exactly growing up to become Mr ‘Most Popular Adolescent Boy’ around the town! Not that it seemed to bother her, mind you! ‘Oh, who cares, Braden!’ she said. ‘The sooner they blow this kip up and be done with it, the better!’

  Something that – now that we were a bit older and had started noticing these things – didn’t look like it was going to take very long at all, for every time you picked up a paper, someone else had been shot or maimed for life. Of no consequence to me, of course, for, as I said to Charlie, I really wouldn’t be hanging around for very much longer. ‘You’re fucking right,’ she said. ‘And as soon as I get my exams, I’m gone too!’

  Charlie was doing her Inter Cert now and I was in my final year at St Fucky Good-For-Nothing’s. Her and Irwin were the only people I could be remotely bothered with. ‘You’re out of your mind!’ Irwin said. ‘Breaking into shops to steal cosmetics! You’re a Head-the-Bail, Braden!’

  ‘Indeed,’ I said. ‘No doubt your Provisional IRA friends will be around to sort me out!’

  ‘Don’t worry your head about the Provies!’ he said. ‘The Provisional IRA have a lot more to do than be bothered with dying-looking bastards the likes of you, Braden!’

  Chapter Seven

  A Real Soldier and a Work of Art Delivered

  Quite how Irwin ever managed to get around to conceiving of himself as a real soldier really must be classified amongst the great unsolved mysteries of our time, for the silly little idiot wouldn’t have been able to shoot a crow! But now, of course, nothing could stop him, it being 1971 and with the balloon in Northern Ireland having gone up in earnest, it was his bounden duty and his chance at last a real soldier to become, to take up arms and: Tuck anyone who gets in the way!’ He was hilarious when he got started!

  I, of course, was much too preoccupied with my own personal revolution to be bothered with anything so trivial. As my dearest father was soon to discover when, having made my decision to once and for all take my leave of sweet Tyreelin, I decided to pop in his letterbox one of my more recent (and somewhat obsessive there is no doubt!) exhaustively crafted compositions!

  Chapter Eight

  Breakfast is Served

  ‘Ah, God bless us, it’s yourself!’ remarked randy old Father Bernard on a grand soft day in February as he opened the door to reveal the young girl who bore a startling resemblance to a very well-known film star standing on the front step of his residence. ‘It is indeed,’ replied the young girl. Who, on account of her coming to work for the local parish priest whose dicky she knew would be only, given the slightest encouragement, too eager to start stirring and getting up to mischief, had gone out of her w
ay to take precautions and camouflage herself – with the result that she looked just like any old ordinary priest’s housekeeper you might see shuffling along the road with her shopping basket or ferrying a plate of rashers and eggs across the floor to her employer. And most definitely not a perfume-sprayed vision called Mitzi Gaynor with a head of gorgeous bubble-cut curls that would make any man’s privates go – sprong! – never mind that of a poor deprived clergyman!

  In spite of her inexperience, the clergyman’s new employee found herself to be quite relaxed about the position she was about to take up, her situation rendered much less intimidating than it might have been because of the fact that in those times, almost as if there was a church-employed quartermaster somewhere to whom one could apply for the standard uniform, one had no difficulty whatsoever in acquiring a washed-out,1 pale blue housecoat with a ringpull zip, a pair of tan stockings the colour of tea kept in the cup for twenty years or thereabouts and an old hairnet which when you squashed your hair under it made it look like irregular handfuls of rabbit’s droppings. All of which served the purpose for which it was intended – of saying to the mickies of all those whose duty it was to bend the knee and wear black serge: ‘No mickies today! Off with you and say your prayers for no tiddler stands for girls like these!’ Callous as it might now sound, inserting one’s wee man into these rasher-frying ladies – well, it simply wasn’t on! You couldn’t do it, dearies! ‘Go in!’ you’d cry to Peter but I ask you – could you do it?

  Let us consider for a moment that melancholy sound which, at crucial moments in the world of animated cartoons is often to be heard: after so much labour and literally lakes of perspiration, all the efforts of Tom the woebegone pussycat have all but come to naught – no, have in fact, and there he is, his entire body corrugated from head to toe, bludgeoned, his tattered soul in disarray – only – despite the fact that he thinks nothing further of an adverse nature can possibly befall him – to find that a large anvil has appeared above him, making its way towards him at great speed, all the better his poor bewildered head to flatten. What is that sound upon which we now attend, appropriate to this dicky downward-going moment so familiar to housekeeper-retaining clerics all across the land? Why, three groaning notes upon a cello played – waugh! waugh! waugh! – as flump goes Mr Prawn the dicky-doodle man!

  Or so perhaps was hoped! But what if this is not the case and inside those black pants a riot is about to start? No! It simply cannot be! Mickey is devious, mickey is naughty, but drab old housecoats, shuffly slippers and stockings of cold tea must surely ensure he minds his manners and stays where he belongs.

  Which is exactly what our hero thinks. And goes on thinking it right through his breakfast, the contents of which he is consuming with great gusto, pausing intermittently to magnanimously observe: ‘God, but them’s great sausages altogether!’ and ‘I’d do jail for another slice of that fried bread!’, thinking to himself all the while just how lucky he is to have found a replacement as good as this for Mrs McGlynn who had become indisposed at such short notice. ‘Ah, Mrs McGlynn,’ said Father Ben, ‘God love her! Slipped and fell outside Pat McCrudden’s gate!’ as he advances upon a crispy rasher with his fork, smiling away contentedly to himself.

  His new housekeeper is thrilled by all this of course! As indeed, why wouldn’t she be? After all – this extra money will be buying not only Perry Como’s latest record but also perhaps – if Mrs McGlynn (‘God forgive me!’ she whispers softly.) stays out sick for long enough – the complete, long-playing soundtrack of South Pacific! You could hardly believe that in an ordinary, unspectacular presbytery in a small village in Ireland that no one had ever heard of, that the sun could rise and singing angels practically fill the air when someone thinks of such a little thing, but in that moment, that is almost what did happen: on her first morning in his kitchen, Father Bernard McIvor’s new housekeeper flapping her arms and in her mind skipping along the sand with a straw hat on her head and Rosanno Brazzi calling after her: ‘Wait for me! Wait for me, you silly girl!’

  What might have happened if she had not leaned, for no reason other than to fork some more rashers onto Father Bernard’s plate – thereby permitting her housecoat and skirt to ride up just a little, not a lot, but just enough – must remain forever in the realm of conjecture. Was she herself aware of the fast-moving developments occasioned by this oversight on her part – the metal suspender of a white girdle gleaming in the gritty sunlight – why, of course she was! Which was why she remarked: ‘Oops! My skirt and housecoat are riding up! Better abort this task at once or we could have an explosive clergyman filling the air with pent-up sexual energy thanks to God knows how many years’ abstinence!’

  O yes – but of course she said that! I mean – what else would you expect? Because, like Father Bernard, thwacking penises and salty sweatbeads running down your face were never off her mind! Well, excuse me, Father, but don’t make me laugh – please don’t make me fucking laugh – you know? For that sort of thing she doesn’t think, actually. That sort of thing she doesn’t say. She doesn’t say because she doesn’t care. She doesn’t fucking care, you see!

  Rosanno say: ‘Darling?’ and kiss her full on the lips? Of course! Frank Sinatra in a nightclub tilt his hat and croon to her alone? Yes! And yes a million times! But trembling, veined stalks so invasive, angry? I really do not think so, Father! I really do not fucking think so!

  But to Father Stalk – as he shall thenceforth be known – such considerations were immensely academic, of course. As Mr Mickey in his fury now reminded him. Tick tick goes time bomb in the parlour. ‘Oo!’ he cries – old Mick Micks – ‘would you look at that! Not often you see a foot of thigh so creamy in this place we call the presbytery, is it, Father? It certainly is not! By golly! Is this a surprise or what!’

  As indeed it was and could not be denied. But nothing – absolutely nothing – when compared to the one experienced by the merrily-humming help in the housecoat when, through the air, out of the corner of her eye, she perceived what she took to be a flying man: (Newsflash! Priest grows wings in latest miracle!) and was about to giggle: ‘Gosh, Father! How did you do that!’, when she found herself enveloped by her own skirts in the manner of a parachutist who has just effected one of the most unsuccessful jumps in the history of aviation. At first, she really was one hundred per cent certain that it was a joke (albeit, it has to be admitted, one a little more daring and outre than one might expect from the store of Father Ben, who, as a rule, contented himself with stories along the lines of ‘Peanuts at Confession’ – in which the confessor asks the penitent boy: ‘And did you throw peanuts in the river too?’, only to receive the side-splittingly hilarious reply: ‘No, Father, I am Peanuts!’ (It was one of his favourite stories and he rarely missed an opportunity to tell it when he and his colleagues were relaxing at conferences and so forth.) But – she thought it a joke nonetheless! Which made her go: ‘Oh, now, Father!’ and ‘Eek!’ and ‘Oops! That hurt!’ until all of a sudden she cried: ‘Ow! I’m being split in two!’, and there was so much squirty stuff all down her she thought that maybe Father Ben was playing more games – squidgies with the Fairy Liquid washing-up bottle that she’d often seen the kiddies doing. It was only when he fell back across the room with a Hallowe’en mask on him that she really became confused, thinking to herself: ‘But it’s not Hallowe’en!’ How long it was before she realized that it was in fact her employer’s actual face she was looking at – and not a whey-coloured Egyptian mummy-type papier mâché affair – it is impossible to say but she eventually did, realizing too that the Fairy Liquid – it wasn’t Fairy Liquid at all! And that thing – that glaring red thing with its malevolent eye – what was that?

  You see, in those days, girls didn’t really have any experience of boys and their electric little tootling flutes! To be perfectly honest, I don’t think they even knew they had them. To them, what was between a boy’s legs was the little snail-type fellow your brothers had. Not an insatiable, unreason
able trunk of a thing that reminded you of some illogical version of the song that you heard regularly on the radio, except now going:

  It was a one-eyed, one-horned flying purple weenie-poker

  One-eyed one-horned flying purple weenie-poker!

  instead of the correct words. And who would obviously stop at nothing now until he had you destroyed with sticky stabs and practically broken you in two into the bargain! All she could think of as she lay there on the table with the small moist map forming on the fabric of her housecoat was: ‘Rosanno wouldn’t do it!’ and ‘Neither would Vic Damone!’ (Whom she also loved.)

  All of which made her break down in tears – and is it any surprise! Why, it was as if into the spoon of a ballista she’d been placed and unto the outer reaches of space propelled!

  Are you aware, dearest Papa, that did from nothing spring me – but mysteriously has forgotten! – that a song telling of all this once was sung, echoing out across the birdcalling day as beneath the skies once more we did entwine, a girl called Charlie Kane and me? ‘Go anywhere,’ we sang, Daddy, ‘go anywhere without leaving your chair/and let your thoughts run free/ Living within all the dreams you can spin/ There is so much to see/ We’ll visit the stars and journey to Mars/ Finding our breakfast on Pluto!’

  It’s a beautiful song, isn’t it, Father? You could be a dandelion seed floating out across with the world when you hear a song like that.

  Do you think that was what she was as she laughed all the way out there on her own, Daddy? A dandelion seed in a happy childhood song?