Siege

                                                         

Monday, seven p.m.

Grudge was anxious and alert but far from terrified. His recent blog post on drunkards in the postal service had garnered a lot of angry attention. He had been tracked to the rathole by the vice-president of the postal workers’ union and some of the man’s cohorts. They were banging on the front door of the building asking—most aggressively—of anyone who would listen whether or not Grudge Galmount was at home. The said Mr. Galmount had chosen, at this fraught juncture, silence as his best mode of defence—and, as two extra precautions, he had switched off the lights and bolted the door. These bastards are preying on the weak, he moaned to himself, and to no one else in particular—having lately given up on God.

He lay still, listening to the hubbub of the mini mob as it bayed for his blood only metres away. Granted, fear coursed through the Galmount veins, but there was strong defiance, too, towards these ghastly goons. The line of the poet sprang to Grudge’s mind: “Come on you bastards!”—however, in the interests of diplomacy, not to mention self-preservation, he refrained from roaring these immortal words at the truculent band outside. Let the storm blow over, he reasoned.

That it would blow over, he was certain. These were postmen after all, not paramilitaries or hired killers, or, for that matter, hate-filled religious zealots. They’d been whipped up into a frenzy by their vice-president for his political ends; there was a vacancy coming soon at the top of the union, and the veep had his eyes on that juicy prize. The ambitious agitator would see to it that his people let off steam outside Grudge’s door, but would not allow his charges to stray into breaking the law.

As was the case at any election, there was an image of probity to project. In truth, there was nobody going to breach the citadel, so to speak, of the Galmount hovel. Clever boy that he was, Grudge understood this and knew this evening was just a matter of sitting things out. Let the fuckers bellyache if they needed to; it was all in the game.

His most fervent wish was that those seeking his head would eventually tire of their pursuit and repair to a nearby bar. Once there, while consuming large amounts of alcohol, they could curse the Galmount name to their hearts’ content; as long as it’s not on my doorstep, he thought.

He wondered about the particular propensity for drunkenness among postal workers. It was a long-held view of Grudge’s that such employees were always either drunk, in the process of getting drunk, or working long overtime shifts in order to pay for yet more drink! It was the expression of these beliefs, articulated most forcefully in the contentious blog post, that had led to the present pickle in which Galmount found himself.

But wait: a silence had come about. The din, which had gone on for a good twenty minutes or so, suddenly stopped. Grudge dared to hope that he’d got his wish and that his tormentors had fled to the pub.

In reality, however, it mattered not to where they had disappeared, simply that they had left him in peace. He felt so relieved to be no longer harried and, though it was still early in the evening, he proceeded to fall asleep.

Ah, but—to quote another poet—“what dreams may come”?

First up, on that surreal shore, was Rachel Siam, an overweight colleague of Grudge’s from the coffin factory. In this frightful vision, the looming girl ran towards him, as he hammered away on the assembly line, waving a clutch of papers in her hand. She was angry and in a state of great agitation; a state—it seemed to Grudge’s dreaming brain—that necessitated total avoidance. However, as is the way in dreams, he found his muscles wouldn’t move when he tried to drop his tool and flee the line. Rachel reached his frozen frame and threw the papers in his face. They landed at his feet and he saw that each sheet was an IOU note from Grudge Galmount to Rachel Siam promising sexual favours. By the feel of the dream it was an undertaking that Grudge, to his detriment, had failed to keep and it explained the deep anger of the normally affable Ms. Siam. It was also clear that Grudge’s ego was at work in all of this—revealing a scene where a woman is overwrought at the spurns of a suave Grudge Galmount.

The rhythm of his mind raced on and he was now a penitent in the box, pouring out his sins to an old and nodding priest. The good father was aghast as Grudge told him, with great calmness, of the collapse of the Galmount moral code. He also told the priest that he (Grudge) was slipping, daily, into ever deeper depths of depravity. To give his confession some beef he painted a graphic picture of the goings-on in these murky shadows. After he had finished he waited for absolution but, instead, heard only this:

—“I’m too shocked to make any comment to you, son, about your time on earth,” the priest said. “There’s no point in asking me to get embroiled. I only wish I didn’t understand what you’ve just told me. I’m going to my house now to boil an egg and sleep with my housekeeper. The young whore wants to be a matador. She could certainly cut through your bullshit!”

Grudge’s evening nap continued with a pleasant dream of speaking Spanish to a large audience of nuns; the good sisters would burst out laughing from time to time as he delivered his speech. He enjoyed the feelings brought on by entertaining these holy women—and it was made all the more enjoyable by the fact that he did so while showing complete mastery of a foreign tongue.

He woke a little after eleven and went into the rathole’s unlovable kitchenette to put on some tea and toast for his supper. The sleep had steadied his nerves and he looked forward—once the vittles were consumed and he had updated his blog—to returning to bed for a peaceful night of rest and reverie. Huddling over the grimy grill, he recalled a story his father once told him of his days at sea: a mob of unruly natives had attempted to besiege his merchant ship and divest it of its cargo of whiskey. Most of the crew had fought off the marauding horde from the vantage point of the upper deck; repelling the attack eventually, after several hours of brave fighting. However, some of the sailors—including Galmount père—had sat out the siege in the hold, in the process drinking greedily of the much sought-after whiskey. Victorious, and pissed as newts, they—and their more sober colleagues—sailed out of port armed with a war story to last a lifetime.

The tale trickled down to the rathole tonight, a haunting echo across the decades of his father in his prime. Grudge’s own sense of besiegement from the marauding mail workers was a pale imitation of those heady, seafaring days.

Reminiscing further, he was jolted in his mind to a childhood moment: his father, a lord in his own parlour, downing drams and spinning yarns of yore. To Grudge, it seemed an ancient time: an innocent age when he believed his Pa was a titan who would live forever. Goodness me, I’ve certainly grown up, he laughed to himself, chomping on the last crust of his toast. Pa was gone—a drink-related accident at home had eventually killed him—and so were the majority of Grudge’s prior beliefs; how utterly unsound, in fact, were many of those values he had once held so dear.

He decided to avoid writing his blog that night and instead to return to bed straight after he’d eaten. Words, after all, were not that important—were they? Actually, when he thought about it, an awful lot of meaningless noise tried to pass itself off as serious discourse. Surely, wisdom and tranquillity were found in the silent recesses of the heart alone.

He resolved to remain offline until all this trouble blew over—and, from the way the wind was blowing, he felt that that could be some time.

He knocked out the lights and kneeling by his bed in the place where he used to pray, he performed a series of breathing exercises.

Then, as he climbed into his cot on the stroke of midnight—trying to trace in his mind the things he’d seen that day to make him dream such peculiar dreams—he was startled to hear the mob reassembling beyond the door. More clamorous than before and drink-fueled now, in the glow of closing-time, its menacing tone ignited in Galmount a fresh sense of disturbance.

Still, he would tough it out, just like his father in the hold of that merchant ship all those years before—with one crucial difference of course: Grudge was determined to use dreams instead of whiskey to make his siege more bearable. To this end, he once more adopted deep silence as his foremost strategy, creeping towards the door with all the deftness of a cat burglar to ensure that the lock remained securely bolted.

He reckoned the protesters would be gone by one, instructed by a union rep to return to their shacks and get some rest. For it was true, these rats on the wheel had early morning shifts in a miserable sorting office, not to mention bicycle rounds of the freezing suburbs, to bear in mind.

So, at last, Grudge Galmount lay down on his bed. The ne’er-do-wells could still be heard bellowing his name in the street outside. He inserted some earplugs from his bedside locker—bought when an upstairs tenant began bringing strangers home for sex—and with his defiant head on the feathery pillow, he made an escape of sorts into a world of dreams.

© Brian Ahern 2012