The following day, the General drove me into the hills, for a cure – to a place where donkeys were roaring behind the ditches, writes MICHAEL HARDING
ON HALLOWEEN the General said, “You look green.” I said, “I feel green.” He said, “You should never take chances with fish; they’re all radioactive, and half of them feed from the sewage that flows into the sea. They’re almost as dangerous as salad.”
The General prefers lumps of raw meat, even for breakfast. His position on salad is, “If you can’t cook it, you shouldn’t eat it.”
“Rats empty their bladders on vegetable patches,” he warned.
My tummy upset had nothing to do with fish. It was simply that I ate too many jelly babies. I was in Cavan on Saturday, and I wanted to buy some sweets for my mother, so I stopped at a filling station on the way out Farnham Road.
When I was a child my mother often cycled that same road, and returned with groceries on the back of her bike, and she always brought a copy of the Beano for me, so I suppose a few jelly babies is a fair exchange.
But I ate too many.
Later, in Mullingar, I sat in the kitchen, fiddling with a witch’s broom and hat, which I got in a clearance basket in Tescos for €1, and I toyed with the idea of venturing into town and rubbing haunches with all the young people that dress up as witches, nurses, nuns and other lewd characters, on Halloween.
In the end I opted for a mackerel, pan-fried in far too much butter, which was a tragic mistake after the jelly babies.
I made a real effort to enjoy the X-Factor, although I cannot bear much reality, and it's gaudy glee only further depressed me.
There was a time when Halloween was a door into the other world, a portal into the mysterious realm of angels and demons, but not anymore. Nowadays, everything is real. It’s almost impossible to believe in anything metaphysical. Ghosts are just rubber masks on sale in shop windows.
When the General arrived, he was horrified by “John and Edward”, and the fact that I had eaten an entire mackerel.
“You need to get out more,” he said. “You are unwell.”
To him, solitude is a disease, like TB. And melancholy is an unacceptable shadow, like the congress of crows that haunt the beech trees around his house, and at which he regularly discharges his shotgun.
I was as green as a parrot when he turned on the lights.
The following day he drove me into the hills, for a cure – to a place where donkeys were roaring behind the ditches, and the rushes grew on the rocky slopes of a mountain.
We drove up a lane so narrow that the bramble ditches grazed the jeep on either side.
A poitín still is a beautiful sight; the blue plastic barrel, the spiralling worm of copper pipe, the upside down wok screwed into the top of a Guinness barrel and a flaming gas ring beneath it all.
The Guinness barrel was full of water, yeast and sugar. The steam ran through the worm, and drops of liquid, with which a man might kick-start a 747, dripped from the end of the worm into a glass bottle. All the while I did Tai chi exercises in the kitchen, in order to have an alibi should we be surrounded by police.
Later we drank the fire-water and talked nonsense.
We expressed our disapproval at the Bishop of Meath, who recently dug up a Franciscan monk in Multyfarnham and had his bones brought back to the cathedral in Mullingar. We expressed our relief that the Queen of Heaven had chosen not to appear at Knock, and we all agreed that Michael Jackson must certainly be in Heaven.
“This is All Souls Eve,” the General remarked. I told him my mother used to leave a jug of water on the hearth, for souls of the dead that might return to the house on the eve of All Souls.
The General was taken by the idea, and in a similar act of reverence, he went outside to the lawn and poured a glass of poitín on the grass. “Your good health,” he declared, as he raised his empty glass, and the full moon cast shadows before us, and every door in heaven opened wide above us, and angels danced and long-dead lovers held hands in the inky night around us.