Babbling Brook (5)

They used to say of his grandmother, as she scoured pots below stairs in the big house, that she believed in pluck, endurance and devotion to duty for duty’s sake. It was written all over her - especially on her red raw hands.

He dreamt of casements opening onto the foam and a feeling he was going home.

His trip was beginning to wear him out. Four weeks away interpreting the hieroglyphics on the obelisks of Luxor.

She maintains to this day that there was a night in the nineties when a driverless bus passed her on the North Circular Road. People scoff and say: “You were stoned!” but she knows what she saw.

She was attending a psychiatrist by the name of Golvan Schlagman. She told him of a rave she had been to once where the youths were so drugged up they ripped the heads off pigeons. Schlagman’s speech was peppered with the chilly phraseology of the polished practitioner. He was no help at all. She paid him his hundred quid and went home. While chowing down on noodles for supper, she googled “How did Shirley Jackson die?”

The following week, unable to bear Schlagman again, she headed instead to a pub called The Drowned Spider where a DJ named Rigor Mortis was playing an afternoon set. Afternoon turned into evening and Anna Swan, the Nova Scotia Giantess, fetched up on the stage as an exhibit. The night ended blissfully in a haze of hug drugs.  

Egypt was behind him. He told his brain not to go down that old road again. He was taking a bus to town to start his shift at the pet crematorium. He had been working there for several months now. Of a sudden a black man stood up and starting preaching the word of God. A hush descended on the upper deck. The preacher finished his sermon by singing a hymn from the Plymouth Collection.

A colleague was ranting about a programme called “Gypsies on Benefits and Proud”.

They sent a card around for another colleague who was due to leave the crematorium shortly. He longed to write on the card: “Have a short and unhappy retirement” but opted instead for “Good luck”.

Yet another colleague, a vegan who occasionally ate pork, boasted of the sexiness of his Muslim girlfriend Karen.

Back in Schlagman’s waiting room—the hug drug comedown had nearly driven her to suicide—she stumbled upon the following piece of poesy while leafing through a soiled magazine: “Star light, star bright, First star I see tonight, I wish I may, I wish I might, Have this wish I wish tonight.”

Her eyes lit up as she read of “long-robed, bare-legged, ragged Muhammadan vagabonds from Tetuan and Tangier.”

She thought of the generations to come imbued with the doctrine of Transhumanism. Her philosophy was simple: seek good and hate evil.

He decided the best thing to do would be to resign from the pet crematorium. He would set up in business as a rose-deadhead inspector. On long afternoon walks he had come across countless examples of petals withering on the vine.

He envisioned a higher, warmer altar, an attic altar.

In the sky above O’Connell Bridge a giant laser-wielding, internet drone loomed.

He considered writing a book. He already had the title: Selfie Nation.

© Brian Ahern 2015