The liberal intelligentsia of the city was out in force and anyone who spoke against the spectacle would be trolled to death.
A man in an oubliette was reading Winter's Heart from memory. At a window in a motorway motel, a pair of curtains closed. The red door of the City Arms pub opened onto the January morning. Plain trails and a crescent moon adorned the sky. He spotted nests in the bare trees. Lord Viscount Avonmore, Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer, passed by in his limousine.
She headed down to Foshbury Palace to see Walking to the Graveyard. It was back by popular demand. After the show, she bedded down in the cave of the seven sleepers. "Depart thou to Hades," she told the clamper the next morning when she went to get her car. She was sick to the back teeth of redundant bureaucratic practices and duplicative functions.
One morning on the bus he conceived of a comedian whose catchphrase would be: "Ooh, me nerves!" He overheard someone say that Bang Bang was buried in the deaf and dumb home in Dundrum.
She was the lead singer of a band called Killer Jacket, very attractive but men found her resting bitch face a little scarifying. At home, she listened to her music on an old-fashioned simon-pure record player. Floating about the house, she coughed humbly and said: "Mirrors bring out the best in me." She read her seventh magazine article on the Ebola virus. Every man is the king of somewhere, she thought. A sentence caught her eye: "You have no doubt heard some of the vaporings of the opposition to the effect that Irish horses should be confined to Irish racecourses." She felt as lonely as a Christmas tree in June. Her heart, what was left of it, was in Franz Josef Land.
As he walked along Straight Street trying to stay pure, he spotted Ulick Fairbairn-Stamp looking like a baboon escaped from a menagerie. He was searching for a saint. Ulick was known to read the Guardian in public for effect and had made it his life's mission to find a cure for the YouTube virus.
He often fell victim to the soporific effect of TV in the evening and would miss crucial plot points on drama shows by dozing off on the couch. The systematic falsification of history really got up his nose. Not to mention emotional nationalism.
He looked from Dan to Beersheba and saw only pain: rockets, burqas, starvation, death, and men as false as Judas.
My God will hear me, she told herself. Micah 7:7 had always been a favourite of hers.
He envisioned a lecherous Charles Dickens character called David Cop a Feel.
To his utter chagrin, he became the victim of a sustained campaign of harassment by an insurance company to get him to take out life insurance. One of their customer care agents took to phoning him each morning with sales patter. He was also receiving texts and emails on an almost hourly basis. The whole thing became an intolerable nuisance.
It was January so for breakfast she juiced fresh ginger, spinach, cucumber, kale, green apple, lemon and celery. It went down - eventually. She was as uncomfortable as a Green politician in a McDonald's drive thru queue.
For the first piece of sculpture he ever made he used a chisel honed from reindeer antler. On one of their first dates he quoted an Elston Gunn lyric to her along the lines of: "You're gonna need my help, sweetheart, You can't make love all by yourself!" "Oh yes I can," she'd replied, with a wicked smile.
© Brian Ahern 2016
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