Authors: Niall Griffiths
Plastic surgery on my face. My face needs plastic surgery.
Oh Christ that bastard. Totally fuckin uncalled for. This is my life now changed for ever nothing will ever be the fuckin same again ever ever ever EVER
That talk we all had last night about
The Matrix
when we were all stoned on that oil an Michelle she said that them brothers who made the film had taken the blue pill and are in the know an thee made that film to warn us all it’s more of a documentary than just a movie an we all went wow an we an we an an an an an
an fuck that how
pathetic
it was, me
Me, how fuckin
pathetic
I am goin on about
The Matrix
my fault this is all my fault I must be shite for him to wanner do this to me for him to hate me so fuckin much I must be shite this is all my fault this wound this pain no life ever the same again
all my fuckin fault
my face needs plastic surgery it is
that
bad
That’s how
bad
my face is cut up is damaged thee need to reconstruct it
The Matrix oh aye we live in The Matrix reality is
This
is reality
This
is fucking reality
Me, lying on my side an I can feel one half of my face slipping over thee other half an I can taste my own tears as they trickle through the hole in my cheek into my mouth mixing with the gushing blood an that should never be allowed to happen cos
cos
In reality my face is whole
In
reality
it should not be
PLASTIC FUCKING SURGERY WHAT SCARS WHAT SCARRING PAIN BLOOD AND MY FUCKING LIFE WRECKED THIS IS REALITY THIS IS REALITY THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS FUCKING
FERDIA MAGUIRE AND FAMILY (WHAT’S LEFT OF IT): 1849
The fog bank is a whitewashed wall a mere stone’s throw from the shore rising sheer from the grey sea like something more solid than fog. Little waves emanate from it to lap the sand and shrieking gulls drift through the milky vapour like wraiths or souls unmoored, recently released but if that is the case then the entire sky would be black with them and the sound of their screeching would burst ears. Ferdia stands and waits for those little waves to swell, to tell of an approaching boat somewhere in that fog and bound for the shingle shore on which he stands.
Shelagh is a shape close to him, a dim figure asquat on the sand-and-stone beach and attended by three
smaller
shapes like familiars. She has been weeping for days, it seems, weeks. One of the smaller shapes bends double and coughs and retches. Aoife again. Any more of this and she’ll be spewing up her own lights.
—That Aoife once more? Ferdia’s voice is gulped by the fog, as is Shelagh’s affirmative murmur. —She still bringing up the blood?
More murmuring, more retching. This could be the loss of child number 3 in as many weeks but what is a man to do with a child so hungry and wasted that its lights and liver can be discerned as dark patches beneath the stretched skin like the transparency of a sprat? Feed it more grass the likes of which only bring on the dysentery? Or visit the Hollow of the Blood again where the vein of a calf can be slit open and famished mouths can be pressed slurping to that awful spigot? Chances must be taken. Death must be defied glutted as it is here, now with cairn-topped mass graves carbuncling the fields, uncountable new ones every day.
The retching stops. Aoife cries loud.
—She well?
—She’s not. She’s ill and will die and her soul is claimed like yours and mine and all. They’re only childer, Ferdia Maguire, and damned them you have.
—Ach, would ye ever shut that hole? Ferdia spits then reflects that to swallow that mucus may have provided some nourishment. —Sure and don’t we need money? You know of a man alive who’ll take us off this island without a coin, do you?
Shelagh shakes her head and reaches and gathers her children to her, three where there was recently
five
, three where there will soon be two. —Not alive, no. All charity in this place is sunk in the earth. Those who live and breathe belong to Lucifer and there is nowhere to go from here. We exchange one Hell for another and nothing more there is to it.
Ferdia sucks on a shell. For the salt, for the salt. The pain in his stomach is vile and howling and there is a wailing in his head too as there has been for months since this began, since the dark cloud passed over the country and infected the people with an evil just as the prátaí were infected with the blight. But then the occupiers were of an evil anyway with the evictions and the burnings and the potatoes on the other hand hid their rot beneath their unblemished skins and they came up from the ground as they always do tumbling like pebbles and only revealed their black hearts when cleft. All goodness gnawed at, eaten away. Tiny cankered animalcule and the apocalypse they can sow. A mere blink of time to scrape people down to the bone, to suck muscle and flesh into the horrible hollow air which alone can sustain no life.
—One Hell we exchange for another and no way out of it there isn’t, Shelagh mutters again and then sinks her head into her bundle of children and begins to mutter a prayer in the old tongue. Soft sibilants and rolling plosives beneath and akin to the small crash of the waves.
And truly it has been a Hell, a deathscape designed by demons in finery. After the crops failed and the grain was removed to feed others away over a sea and the clergymen called wrath down on the heads of those who sought to seize the corn and Trevelyan
withdrew
whatever meagre aid there was all Mhaigh Eo it seemed walked the storm from Doo Lough to Louisburgh. All Mhaigh Eo, with the rain and the lightning and the never-ending hunger taking children and the old and the cairn-crowned graves appearing along the trail in bog and sudden pasture and running roadside and in uneven lea where the great forests once stood now tree-stripped to make the navy of a malign alien race to ferry away that very commodity which could lend respite to this vast ravage. And then in Louisburgh these marchers drenched and dripping and semi-naked skeletal were poked and inspected by the Poor Law Guardians who instead of declaring them official paupers and allotting them three pounds of meal per family unit instructed them all to be at Delphi Lodge, the private fishing lodge of the Marquis of Sligo and ten miles distant at 0700 hours. Without stint the rain fell and under a tree denuded of leaves the youngest Maguire died and rage would have grown then had not pain and exhaustion swamped it although some among the wanderers there were who spoke of redress and revenge yet such words in the mouths of such scarecrows wet and emaciate provoked only sobs from hollow stomachs. And then the march to Delphi Lodge which exposure took more of the very young and very old, some left sitting upright at roadsides like milestones calibrating the distance to Hades and when this legion battered, bedraggled arrived they found the Guardians at breakfast and would not be disturbed. And so a wait followed. A long wait. And unwilling to be interrupted at table the Guardians sent the ragged horde on their
way
home. Home to a barren farm and empty shell of a house from which soon they were to be dragged for non-payment of rent.
And tumbrils laden with grain and other crops and livestock too under armed escort traversed the empty land to the docksides where great ships laden with such produce took it elsewhere. From those who would die without it to those who didn’t need it.
So fury
did
grow, as it must; those who starve amid substance can in their gurgling guts find rage. Can as they consume themselves from within find that they have strength enough still to make a fist or fling a rock which is precisely what Ferdia Maguire did on his way to Westport harbour; providence offered him one of Boycott’s Ulstermen broken-legged at the roadside, having been tossed by his horse, and it was easy to brain the beseeching bastard with a rock and steal the effects from his pockets which comprised but a clay pipe and a pistol with no shot and some money. At the first blow of the rock Shelagh began to bewail the fate of their immortal souls and she continued in this vein without cessation all the way across to Westport sands, through deserted village and past burning barn and fields of wooden stumps and fallow pastures reeking with the dead and patrolled by the black birds who eat such moribund flesh. Wept she did in ditch and under hedgerow as they concealed themselves from government patrol and from weapon-wielding indigents, animate skeletons crazed and with furnace eyes. And when the second child died and his grave was just a scrape in the earth and down into the Hollow of the Blood they went where a man accepted
money
to open a calf’s vein and in turn they knelt to suck and she stood blood-faced and weeping in that hollow beyond the gaze of Redcoat or Guardian indeed like her they all stood, thick blood clotting on chins and cheeks and most of them weeping and the calf lowing too. And secretive down into Westport harbour with the youngest child carried and vomiting blood not her own not even of her species over her weeping mother’s back and as a family of famine they entered the harbour, a clan of want among the jetties and pilings. Ferdia bought four small fish from a man in a coracle and these were eaten raw and quickly, ungutted and unboned. A man approached and said that for a fee he could carry the entire family safely over to the great port of Liverpool where so many countrymen have fled that they say it outrates even Dublin for sons of Erin and that any man can find paid work on the docks there. Ferdia asked the man the fee. The man asked how much money Ferdia had. Ferdia told him and well then that’s the fee the man said.
So Ferdia and family Maguire wait hungry on the white sand and shingle surrounded by the white fog. Shelagh bawls still into her remaining children held and huddled to her but Ferdia, Ferdia … there is an energy alive in him from somewhere. From the gulped blood or the raw fish or even from the shell-salt he is swallowing, there is an energy from somewhere within his weakly beating chest. Maybe from the Boycott Ulsterman rotting now and skull-split at the roadside like so many before him and them undeserving and he most assuredly not. Maybe it is that
man
’s stolen spiritus now that throbs in Ferdia and distils here on this fog-cloaked empty littoral into rage. A rage in this blood and seed and in whatever other blood and seed they might produce and down further through the bloodline to the many childer he will generate and nurture and to their issue also and for ever on so far that Ferdia cannot see it. Can see only a heaving metropolis somewhere over the sea where those of his blood will possess proud power and never suffer in this way again or want for anything other than perhaps what the blight and breaking of this world can never give.
—Not coming, Shelagh says, a grey shape in grey vapour. —Stranded here we are. All die on this beach we will and –
—Hush it, woman, Ferdia snaps. —I’ll be dead from your screeching if nothing else kills me. Sure isn’t there enough suffering to fight without you making it worse?
She prays again. Buries her head in her children and prays again in Erse and does not see the waves swell nor the small boat drift out of the fog towards them nor hear the slap and drag of oars on water.
Ferdia sees it. Ferdia hears it. And sees also the rope cast out towards him and sees the city over the sea where there is a life to be lived and money to be made and food to be eaten and sees in that city the yet-to-be of his blood and the might in them he will cultivate like he once cultivated potatoes and he will tell them and instruct them to tell their childer too and so on and so on into the next century and beyond that it is not by hoe or spade or rake that a man
survives
but by a rock. And by his willingness to use it.
CRACKHOUSE
Built as part of a terrace out of Shropshire brick and Blaenau slate shortly after the First World War and largely by veterans of that conflict, the first tenants of number 18 were the Jones family, stonemason patriarch employed on the construction of the Anglican cathedral, with wife and small child and two further children born under that roof. In 1929 Mr Jones fell eighty feet to his death from scaffolding and Mrs Jones took her three now fatherless children deeper into Cheshire, to be closer to her parents. The house lay empty for three months and was then occupied by a single old lady whose son had made much money in the armaments industry and had purchased the house specifically for her to age and die in which she duly did, shortly before another global horror sent flame and steel shrieking from the sky to obliterate surrounding houses, seeking to destroy the ack-ack guns which had been stationed in the streets roundabout, one of whose crew lived in the house for much of the war and, like the house itself, survived it with only minor damage; an eye here, a window there. After hostilities ended the local council bought up many of the houses in the locality and number 18 was rented out to a convalescent nurse from North Wales who had entered the city initially to be in service but was now employed as a carer for soldiers mutilated in both body and mind. Kate was her name,
and
her heavy drinking led to a neglect of her civic duties and she was soon forced to vacate number 18 after long periods of rent-avoidance and she was replaced by a Jamaican family who had been shipped to the port on a sister-ship of the
Windrush
at the invitation of the Attlee government with the promise of paid work in the restructuring of bomb-damaged British cities. The head of the family was employed as a labourer on the reconstruction of the docks centred on the site of the
Malarkand
explosion and his wife worked in service for a family on Faulkner Street whose forefathers had made their giant fortune through using people of her skin colour as a mere barterable commodity. Relentless hard work allowed this couple to save enough money to move out to a more desirable property on the northern outskirts of the city and they were replaced by another Jamaican family whose stay in the house was brief, swiftly driven out as they were by the small but viciously vocal group of locals who were offended by their melanin. From 1970 to 1972 a Chinese family occupied the house, newly come from Shanghai, but they drifted down dockwards where for several centuries their compatriots have gathered and still do. Three Irishmen then moved in, two of them employed on the underground rail system then being extended and the third remaining in or close to the house to attend to the various outlaw Republicans who had been invited to use it as sanctuary; he kept them company, offered support, maintained a watchful eye at the window. These men moved out when the exigencies of their secret calling demanded that they should, to break
any
possible trail, and were replaced by a docker recently made redundant who lived alone and who, in 1981, watched in terror and awe from the overgrown back garden as Toxteth burned, the flames so high that they spat above the roofs of the Coronation Buildings below the only just completed cathedral. Disappointment and depression and a form of free-floating fear led this man to a reclusive existence in number 18 and in the late eighties he became the second person to die in the house in a static storm of horded and rotting items of a thousand sorts. He lay undiscovered for three weeks. The clean-up operation took days and after it the house was thought unlettable so it lay empty apart from the various junkies and drifters who used it for shelter until the doors and windows were replaced by thick boards and it was bought for a quarter of its original worth by a man called Herbert who had accrued much money from dealing in illegal drugs and owned several such places scattered around the city and its environs and he is there still and is at this moment attempting to subdue the rage and hysteria that has followed an horrific facial wounding in the house’s main living area. Shurrup, he is shouting. You’ll attract the fucking bizzies. The wounded man has been driven to the hospital and his attacker has long fled into the city and there is bloodspray on the walls and TV screen and it will remain on the walls turning blacker then greyer for two years until Herbie will be shot dead in an altercation along Granby Street and the ownership of the property will revert to the council, Herbie of course dying intestate, and the council will sell it
and
others like it to a multimillionaire from Ireland who will renovate them all extensively and impressively and will make more millions selling them to those who will relocate or return to the city in 2008, drawn there by the City of Culture celebrations and the global attention they will receive. A family will be made in number 18,
two
families in fact, the second of which will be forced to flee during the Peace Riots of 2011 when the house and its immediate neighbours will be firebombed and will be so damaged as to warrant demolition and they will be flattened and will be no more.