Breakfast on Pluto

by Patrick McCabe

  I was so pleased Vicky was fond of salmon pink. ‘I wore it specially for you,’ I said and gave him a mischief-smile. ‘But we can only play in private! Sweet Puss is shy,’ I said.

  And did Big Vicky’s eyes go – jump – or what! As he winked at all his tattooed friends and led Puss by the hand to show her his big pistol.

  Which he did! O! And did she get excited!

  ‘Gosh! It’s such a great big gun!’ she gasped as she saw it peeping out from behind his great big army jacket. ‘What is it?’ she enquired meekly, for she knew nothing at all about guns. As she informed him with her finger in her mouth.

  And which he was ever so glad to hear, he said, because he’d tell her all about it. ‘Oops! Look! Your tootle is hanging down!’ thought Puss but didn’t dare to say it – for Big Red he might not like it! All of a sudden, maybe, go and shoot poor whoopsies in the doo-doo! But no – he’s too busy taking it out – his great big gun, of course! and stroking it like it’s the most precious metal in the world and saying: ‘Like Dirty Harry says – it’s a Magnum, and it’s the most powerful handgun in the world. You want to see what it can do to a man’s face?’

  ‘Or a girl’s face, Vicky-poosy!’ Puss says, all shivery-shaky at the thought, then pleading with an eyelash flutter: ‘May I?’

  ‘But of course!’ says Big Vicky with a wink, meaning: ‘But I’ve got an even bigger one to show you after.’

  Which he has, of course, as Pussy well she knows, except that there isn’t going to be one, an ‘after’, that is, as Big Vicky knows right now, what with Pussy pulling the trigger and making a huge hole in the middle of his disagreeing face. Disagreeing because it is as if he is saying to himself: ‘You can say this is happening but I don’t agree with you.’ Which didn’t matter very much anyway because before he had any time to continue the argument with himself, or some person whose face he was imagining inside his head, Pussy had gone and done it again – this time aiming at his you-know-what! And not a bit ashamed! Not in the slightest bit perturbed as she flicked a tiny particle of lipstick into her mouth from the bottom of her lip and said: ‘Let’s see what you do with it now, Big Darling! Big big darling, Vicky!’

  Terence Was Right

  (This piece I hate to read because I know Terence was right about forgiveness – and it contains everything he asked me not to feel! But here it is – with old ‘Fly-By-Night’s’ fingerprints all over it. Sorry, Ters. I don’t mean that. Why do you think I keep them? If I hated you, I’d have burnt them long ago, along with every memory I have of you. Some chance!)

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  A Church in Flames

  Father Bernard is busy washing his hands, whistling to himself as he wonders: ‘Have I got everything now?’ for sure as God he would leave something behind him as he did every Saturday night when he went off to the church to hear his confessions – only remembering it, be it his rosary beads or prayerbook or his Silvermints when he was halfway there, having to come all the way back down the hill to the presbytery to get them. ‘No,’ he mused now, ‘I’m nearly sure I have everything with me,’ and, wiping his hands on the towel which his housekeeper, Mrs McGlynn (still with him after all these yars – her only time away being for that short period in the mid-fifties when – No! No! Please!) had delicately, fondly laundered for him as always. Checking his accoutrements one last time – sometimes he hated himself for his fastidiousness – he sighed and, closing the door behind him, set off up the hill to make his way to the Church of the Holy Saviour.

  The first penitent he laid eyes upon was Mrs McGivney, a devout woman in her sixties who, God bless her, had never committed a sin in her life greater than harbouring uncharitable thoughts regarding her neighbours. Close by was P. Counihan, a solicitor of advanced years who, in all his time in the town, as far as Father Bernard could remember, had never once missed his daily Mass.

  To these two kind people, Father Bernard nodded warmly, appreciatively, before stopping at his confessional and clicking open the door, casually wondering to himself who perhaps the stranger might be, the headscarved woman in the drab overcoat who was kneeling over by the side aisle, praying fervently with her head in her hands. He said to himself as he took up his place inside the box that he must say hello to her before he left – if she was still there of course.

  Which indeed she was! After all, you are hardly going to come all this way to do something and then at the last moment, turn around and not do it. At least, the dark, dreaming Avenger wasn’t! Not after all that she’d been through!

  Which was why she was as giddy as a young goat! Remember – it was the first time she had seen her father since before being expelled from school and going to England! And before that had seen precious little bar the tail of a soutane as it went flapping by, or a shy smile as Daddy quickened his step on the street and thought to himself: ‘O no! It’s him! My twilight zone son! And he’s going to come over to talk to me!’

  Which begged the question, of course – what did he mean – him?

  ‘What do you mean – him?’ it was Pussy’s plan to say – and then open her coat at that precise moment!

  Obviously, it was going to be a little bit of a shock! After all, you don’t see someone in an old housecoat and headscarf in the mid-fifties and then suddenly meet them again in 1974 sporting check yellow blouses and Mitzi Gaynor Capri pants! Of course you don’t!

  Is it any wonder he’d cry, poor Father Bernard, ‘Who – who on earth are you? And what are you doing in my church?’

  *

  Which, of course, would be quite enough, for by now and would you blame her, Puss would have had just about as much of that particular line of questioning, not to mention: ‘What are you’s!’ which she’d also to endure and it really was as much as she could be bothered with and why she scratched his face and scratched it again and he cried no no no. ‘O no!’ she hissed, ‘I’m not your son, correct, my father, because what I am’s your daughter or hadn’t you noticed you gorgeous man in lace and serge, you’ve passed me on your journeys,’ raising her hand to gouge his eye as back across the candle flames he fell and begged for mercy just as ‘Ah!’, poor Saviour on the cross, did plead for some, but none it came I fear, not one scrap was to be found, as out in the night a bad bitch burned and burnt it to the ground, with petrol splashing about its doors and into its heart a bluelit taper thrown as out across the valley all her madness – for what else could you call it now – like a cackling nightbird of the blackest hue took wing, as the flames they licked the sky and in her wild and daring eyes, flesh melted on an old man’s bones.

  ‘You fucking bastard!’ she squealed, bad gremlin on a fern-furzed hill. ‘You fucking fucking bastard! Never will I forgive you! Never never never!’

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  A Sudden Burst of Gunfire

  There is not much happening in Mulvey’s. The crowd generally doesn’t appear in until nine or thereabouts. Which is why there is no commotion at all apart from the newscaster repeating details of some murders in the north and requesting keyholders in Ballymena to return to their premises. ‘Ho hum,’ sighs Dessie as he washes the glasses under the tap. As one of the customers puts his Major tipped cigarette to his lips and takes a long, deeply satisfactory drag. Just as the pebbled glass of the front window comes in and a tongue-shaped shard knocks the ciggie out of his hand, almost shearing the side of his cheek off into the bargain. For a moment or two, Dessie is on the verge of saying: ‘Ah now, lads! Stop this!’ But soon thinks the better of it as a harp in a glass case – fashioned by a prisoner in one of the country’s top high-security prisons – falls to the floor and breaks in bits. The customer, still, ridiculously, on the high stool, is thinking to himself: ‘What is this – the end of the world or what?’ as another burst of gunfire rakes the walls and from outside is followed by a wicked, girlish chuckle. For it is Puss, of course – who else – now retreating in the dark, giddy and sweating all over and sad that she has had to do it – even though she
knew she would – watching the Church of the Holy Saviour, as it once was, light up the entire valley, nasty flames so tantalizingly weaving as if to say: ‘You weren’t expecting this, people of Tyreelin!’

  Free!

  At which point her eyes snapped open, vengeance totally incomplete! ‘O no!’ she cries. To find there – Routledge! – with a big tin mug of steaming tea and a beaming smile that said: ‘You’re free!’

  Chapter Fifty

  Lynsey de Paul

  Which was a bad thing, of course (from now on I think I’ll just be honest and write for myself – somehow I have this sneaking feeling my doctor won’t be in this morning – ha ha!), because although I did dream a lot of nutty stuff and get real vengeance thoughts and trails of retribution into my head, at least in jail the sedatives weighed me down a little and I didn’t feel like I did the very minute I got outside – yes! – stuffed into a ballista and sent rocketing a couple of million miles across the sky with not the faintest idea as to where I was going to land, and worse still, knowing when I got there, my legs would be like string again and there’d be someone there to say: ‘What do you want here?’

  But, try as I might, my protests came to nothing, with the result that Routledge and Wallis, they literally had to push me out of the station, dressed like Gilbert O’Sullivan, the pop singer, in a pile of old ex-prisoner’s hand-me-downs they’d found in a locker and saying: ‘You stay off the game now, you hear us, Pat?’

  Which of course they knew I hadn’t the slightest intention of doing, not only because I had to earn some fast cash to do myself up a treat (I felt horrible in those rags!) but I think because I was secretly hoping that one of these days I’d look up and there they’d be, Routledge and old Wallis, suddenly bursting into a run and going: ‘After him!’ dragging me back to prison to make me feel cosy and rooted and snug and always on hand, my two custodians to say: ‘Well, at least he can say we know him!’

  *

  As off I went about my business – to ply my trade, in other words – and you should have seen the face of the city gent when he saw me in my trousers!

  ‘Why it’s like making love to Charlie Chaplin!’ he says and as I took the crisp notes, assured him I had to agree.

  Quite what I was doing entertaining so many baldy chaps to get the money for my fare home to Tyreelin, there is no point in me trying to explain because I was as high as a kite and that was all there was to it! I think my prison dreams had turned my head and I was seriously beginning to think I was about to embark on some crazy hallucinatory vengeance trail!

  *

  One thing was certain – I definitely did look a treat, for the fellow who was sitting beside me on the aeroplane (Yes! I said – why not! Blow the ugly ferry! As I’d made an absolute fortune in just one week!) couldn’t do enough for me, leaning over nearly every minute asking me was I enjoying the flight and would I like something, another drink perhaps and what did I think of London and God knows what else! What didn’t occur to me, so excited was I by everything and the speed with which it seemed to be happening, was that I was long out of the ballista spoon and indeed had been fired a lot higher and further than I had ever dreamt of, even in my giddiest and most anxious moments! For although I knew that the act I was putting on for him, fiddling with rings and batting lashes and so forth, whilst I might have done it in hotel-room privacy with a customer, up until then, would never have, in a million years, in public, never never never! (At least I’d had that much sense!) Now I just couldn’t sit still, plucking at my nylons, my earrings. And the puckering! Then when he said: ‘You know something?’ You look just like Lynsey de Paul.’ (I had pencilled in a beauty spot!) – why it drove me absolutely wild!

  Chapter Fifty-One

  I Become a Bit of a Busybody!

  And why in a way I was possibly the worst person Charlie could have got in with at that particular time, because I was completely – I don’t deny it – obsessed with myself – changing my clothes three times a day for heaven’s sake, sometimes so busy drawing lip-lines I wouldn’t hear a word she said.

  But in another way that isn’t true – it isn’t true at all in fact! Because only for me, she wouldn’t have had anyone, never mind a place to stay! Who was it went to the auctioneers and rented out the bungalow? The poor man couldn’t believe it when he saw the amount of money I had! The eyes nearly popped out of his head! ‘Who do you want it for?’ he said, as he counted out the notes. ‘Oh, just me and Charlie,’ I said, not passing the slightest bit of notice, which I soon regretted when I saw the way he looked at me but fortunately I had the good sense to, straight away, interject: ‘Oh – and a few others too – bank girls!’

  Which I’m sure he didn’t believe, of course – as indeed why should he when it was naught but a pack of lies! I knew no bank girls! But what I did know was that Charlie Kane needed somewhere to live and quick too because if she stayed out any more nights, the silly cow would die of hypothermia!

  What happened, you see, was that after Irwin’s murder she was so bad she’d missed all her exams and then when she went back to repeat the year got involved with drugs which they found out about and asked her to leave the college – after which there was another furious row with her parents, ending up with her being thrown out of the house. It really is hard to believe that’s how it happened, just as it was to believe that the half-scarecrow I’d met tumbling around the village with a bottle of vodka was the same old Charlie I’d known all my life – but it was!

  You should have seen the face of her mother when we went down looking for her belongings! She turned as white as a ghost when she saw me and backed off as if I was going to assault her or something. ‘Is that you, Patrick?’ she said. ‘Patrick Braden?’ and when I said yes, dropped her voice and said, shakily, but still looking me up and down: ‘I’ll get them for you.’ I just stood there on the doorstep, adjusting my skirt and twisting buttons on my blouse, waiting for her to invite me in – which she didn’t!

  The best thing I ever did for Charlie was buying her the dog to keep her company because it worked like I knew it would – it really did. He was a little cross-bred terrier (Pomeranian and Jack Russell, they told me) with bat ears that she called ‘Squire’, after Chris Squire who played bass with Yes, and who, before the wicked bastards killed him, had given her hours and hours of pleasure!

  Because that’s what they are – wicked! Wicked, wicked, wicked – all of them – to do a thing like that!

  No matter, like I said to Terence, what misunderstandings there might have been about Martina Sheridan, and these things can happen – everyone knows they can! – they’re one thing! But to do the like of that – strangle a poor little dog with barbed wire!

  Except that, as Terence got me to see – how much I have to thank that man for, I can’t begin to tell you – it makes no sense to keep going: ‘Them!’

  (Was it the whole town who had it in for you and who arranged to do such a terrible thing to the dog?)

  Of course it wasn’t! A small minority was responsible for that – the sort of people who weren’t happy themselves and seemed to have nothing better to do than dedicate their lives to making sure no one else was either. What is particularly sad is that up to that, myself and Charlie were having an absolute ball – we were having a wonderful time, we really were! Night, noon and morning I’d spend scrubbing and polishing the place until it was absolutely spotless, then sit down and read my magazines and have my coffee or whatever.

  Despite the fact that we were having what I have described as a really good time, it was still very hard to get really what you might call an awful lot of sense out of Charlie because she was still drinking you see and sometimes, to tell you the truth, I would have to go upstairs and tell her to turn off the record player, one time actually losing my temper so much I shouted: ‘I think we’ve had enough Yes for a while, Charlie, don’t you think we’ve had enough for God’s sake!’ After which I was sorry because she looked at me with those hurt, bewildered ey
es.

  Which means I must have been on edge, I suppose, without realizing it, and maybe, with so much time on my hands – I mean, most of my housework was done by midday – did, perhaps, as Terence suggested – and I don’t blame him for doing it because he was only trying to help me – become a bit of a busybody.

  All I can really remember about those days is sitting there by the window, suddenly seeing a spot on the Venetian blind and running out to get a cloth to clean it and suddenly bursting into tears whenever I took my coffee up again. What this was all about, I hadn’t the faintest idea because, as I say, I should have been as happy as Larry – it wasn’t as if I’d been through anything like Charlie, having to look at someone I loved with a hole in his head that you could put your fist into. But still I couldn’t stop feeling weepy.

  Maybe that explains why I couldn’t get Martina Sheridan out of my mind. If it’s all just an excuse and if I was only using her as an excuse to take my weepiness out on, I don’t know. All I know is, I didn’t mean to shout at her, or poke my nose into her business, I just wanted to help her. To make her see what she was getting into. I knew Tommy McNamee cared nothing for her. He was a married man and whenever he’d got what he wanted would just leave her there, probably not even remember her name. But she couldn’t know that. She was too young, how could she have known? She couldn’t understand!