This is what comes of reading Michael Collins' Emerald Underground (Phoenix House, trade paper, $19.95 Cdn.) at the same time you're re-reading Three Men in a Boat (Penguin, paper, $9.99 Cdn.).There were four of us – George, and that bollocks William Samuel Harris, and myself, and that shite Montmorency. We were sitting in my room and smoking and talking about how bad our health was.
George and Harris were talking shite. As a fox terrier Montmorency didn't talk at all but if that little bollocks did talk it'd be shite, nothing but shite. I was telling the truth, though.
My health was bad. Sweat was collecting on me like condensation on the cistern in the lav, but explaining that would have been wasted on George, since apparently Mummy had left him enough money that he never had to visit the lav but instead paid a manservant to bear his shite away upon a silver salver after deferentially giving the patrician Georgian arse a good wipe with an Old Master sketch or such like that was lying around. As for my sweat, either the bed lice had caused it or Celeste had – but knowing which it was would be no help at all, me being in the country illegally and all.
"What we want is rest," said Harris. I needed rest, for sure, but I did not understand how Harris could get tired from collecting a few grand weekly in return for travelling to the City every day and gift wrapping shite for the investing classes.
"Rest and a complete change," said George, although I did not understand how rest would be a change for him, or how any change from his constant round of cock and candyfloss could in any way be restful. Neither, I suppose, did he understand, but because he was a complete bollocks and pillock he wouldn't be bothered by that.
I nodded as if in agreement. The two shites had me by the bollocks, metaphorically, so I had to appear to agree with them.
"If you want rest and change," said Harris, "you can't beat a sea trip." Oh, shite, I thought. What rest and relaxation we'll get as great Niagaras of vomit are ejected continually from our guts. You can't step on a seagoing vessel without the capacity of the guts to eject great Niagaras of vomit increasing about a thousandfold.
I spoke up. "George," I asked, "wouldn't that make you just the teensiest mite apprehensive about the prospects of the old mal de mer?" (I asked this of George because he'd filled half the Regent's Park basin with vomit the last time he'd dared to go out for a scull). George replied that personally he wouldn't be worried about himself, but he would worry about us. You, I thought, worry about us as much as you worry about the starving Mexican girls who worked themselves into early graves to make Mummy's third husband a pile of money as broad as County Wicklow and higher than Da at a quarter to closing.
George pretended to think, if you can be said to pretend to think when you haven't got the tiniest idea of what thinking is, then said: "Let's go on a car trip."
I thought about the dream I'd had the night before, about Da and Montmorency going to the All-Ireland hurling final in a giant limousine made entirely of crisp, hot fried potatoes while I had to stay home and eat a slap-up feed of Ma's shite pie and fried bollocks. While Jesus and his bleeding heart stared down at me from the wall.
Harris said a car trip would suit him to a T. "We'll take the Jag."
Oh, how sporty! A trip in Harris's bollocking Jag with no leg room and me afraid to fart lest I harm the luxurious buttery leather of the seat coverings and enjoying the conversation of Himbollickingself with that bollocks George as they tried to figure out why this car trip had turned out to be so unrestful after all and the yapping and whining of that stinking loose-bowelled shite and bollocks of a fox terrier. I was outnumbered, though. I accepted. I could hear their feeble brains creak as they tried to figure out how much money they could extort from me for the trip. If I'd known things would turn out this way I certainly wouldn't have beat up that old granny back in Ireland. I would have tried not to, anyway.
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