Short Fiction of Flann O'Brien (Irish Literature) (11 page)

Then followed more days of terrible tension. My own landlady called one day, inquiring about me of “Kelly.” I told her I had been on the point of calling on
her
to find out where I was. She was disturbed about my disappearance—it was so unlike me—and said she thought she should inform the police. I thought it wise not to try to dissuade her. My disappearance would eventually come to be accepted, I thought. My Kelliness, so to speak, was permanent. It was horrible, but it was a choice of that or the scaffold.

I kept drinking a lot. One night, after many drinks, I went to the club for a game of snooker. This club was in fact one of the causes of Kelly’s bitterness towards me. I had joined it without having been aware that Kelly was a member. His resentment was boundless. He thought I was watching him, and taking note of the attentions he paid the lady members.

On this occasion I nearly made a catastrophic mistake. It is a simple fact that I am a very good snooker player, easily the best in that club. As I was standing watching another game in progress awaiting my turn for the table,
I suddenly realised that Kelly did not play snooker at all!
For some moments, a cold sweat stood out on Kelly’s brow at the narrowness of this escape. I went to the bar. There, a garrulous lady (who thinks her unsolicited conversation is a fair exchange for a drink) began talking to me. She remarked the long absence of my nice Mr. Murphy. She said he was missed a lot in the snooker room. I was hot and embarrassed and soon went home. To Kelly’s place, of course.

Not embarrassment, but a real sense of danger, was to be my next portion in this adventure. One afternoon, two very casual strangers strolled into the workshop, saying they would like a little chat with me. Cigarettes were produced. Yes indeed, they were plain-clothesmen making a few routine inquiries. This man Murphy had been reported missing by several people. Any idea where he was? None at all. When had I last seen him? Did he seem upset or disturbed? No, but he was an impetuous type. I had recently reprimanded him for bad work. On similar other occasions he had threatened to leave and seek work in England. Had I been away for a few days myself? Yes, down in Cork for a few days. On business. Yes . . . yes . . . some people thinking of starting a natural museum down there, technical school people—that sort of thing.

The casual manner of these men worried me, but I was sure they did not suspect the truth and that they were genuinely interested in tracing Murphy. Still, I knew I was in danger, without knowing the exact nature of the threat I had to counter. Whiskey cheered me somewhat.

Then it happened. The two detectives came back accompanied by two other men in uniform. They showed me a search warrant. It was purely a formality; it had to be done in the case of all missing persons. They had already searched Murphy’s digs and had found nothing of interest. They were very sorry for upsetting the place during my working hours.

A few days later the casual gentlemen called and put me under arrest for the wilful murder of Murphy, of myself. They proved the charge in due course with all sorts of painfully amassed evidence, including the remains of human bones in the furnace. I was sentenced to be hanged. Even if I could now prove that Murphy still lived by shedding the accursed skin, what help would that be? Where, they would ask, is Kelly?

This is my strange and tragic story. And I end it with the thought that if Kelly and I must each be either murderer or murdered, it is perhaps better to accept my present fate as philosophically as I can and be cherished in the public mind as the victim of this murderous monster, Kelly. He
was
a murderer, anyway.

After Hours (1967)

by Brian O’Nolan

At ten o’clock on week nights, at half-nine on Saturday the tide ebbs suddenly, leaving the city high and dry. Unless you are staying at an hotel or visiting a theatre, you may not lawfully consume excisable liquors within the confines of the county borough. The city has entered that solemn hiatus, that almost sublime eclipse known as The Closed Hours. Here the law, as if with true Select Lounge mentality, discriminates sharply against the poor man at the pint counter by allowing those who can command transport and can embark upon a journey to drink elsewhere till morning. The theory is that all travellers still proceed by stage-coach and that those who travel outside become blue with cold after five miles and must be thawed out with hot rum at the first hostelry they encounter by night or day. In practice, people who are in the first twilight of inebriation are transported from the urban to the rural pub so swiftly by the internal combustion engine that they need not necessarily be aware that they have moved at all, still less comprehend that their legal personalities have undergone a mystical transfiguration. Whether this system is to be regarded as a scandal or a godsend depends largely on whether one owns a car. At present the city is ringed round with these “bonafide” pubs, many of them well-run modern houses, and a considerable amount of the stock-in-trade is transferred to the stomachs of the customers at a time every night when the sensible and just are in their second sleeps. . . .

To go back to the city: it appears that the poor man does not always go straight home at ten o’clock. If his thirst is big enough and he knows the knocking formula, he may possibly visit some house where the Demand Note of the Corporation has stampeded the owner into a bout of illicit after-hour trading. For trader and customer alike, such a life is one of excitement, tiptoe, and hush. The boss’s ear, refined to shades of perception far beyond the sensitiveness of any modern aircraft detector, can tell almost the inner thoughts of any policeman in the next street. At the first breath of danger all lights are suddenly doused and conversation toned down, as with a knob, to vanishing point. Drinkers reared in such schools will tell you that in inky blackness stout cannot be distinguished in taste from Bass and that no satisfaction whatever can be extracted from a cigarette unless the smoke is seen. Sometimes the police make a catch. Here is the sort of thing that is continually appearing in the papers:

Guard —— said that accompanied by Guard —— he visited the premises at 11.45
P.M.
and noticed a light at the side door. When he knocked the light was extinguished, but he was not admitted for six minutes. When defendant opened eventually, he appeared to be in an excited condition and used bad language. There was nobody in the bar but there were two empty pint measures containing traces of fresh porter on the counter. He found a man crouching in a small press containing switches and a gas-meter. When he attempted to enter the yard to carry out a search, he was obstructed by the defendant, who used an expression. He arrested him, but owing to the illness of his wife, he was later released.

Defendant—Did you give me an unmerciful box in the mouth?

Witness—No.

Defendant—Did you say that you would put me and my gawm of a brother through the back wall with one good haymaker of a clout the next time I didn’t open when you knocked?

Witness—No.

Justice—You look a fine block of a man yourself. How old are you?

Defendant—I’m as grey as a badger, but I’m not long past forty. (Laughter.)

Justice—Was the brother there at all?

Defendant—He was away in Kells, your worship, seeing about getting a girl for himself. (Laughter.)

Justice—Well, I think you could give a good account of yourself.

Witness—He was very obstreperous, your worship.

Witness, continuing, said that he found two men standing in the dark in an outhouse. They said they were there “for a joke.” Witness also found an empty pint measure in an outdoor lavatory and two empty bottles of Cairnes.

Defendant said that two of the men were personal friends and were being treated. There was no question of taking money. He did not know who the man in the press was and did not recall having seen him before. He had given strict instructions to his assistant to allow nobody to remain on after hours. There was nobody in the press the previous day as the gas-man had called to inspect the meter. The two Guards had given him an unmerciful hammering in the hall. His wife was in ill-health, necessitating his doing without sleep for three weeks. A week previously he was compelled to send for the Guards to assist in clearing the house at ten o’clock. He was conducting the house to the best of his ability and was very strict about the hours.

Guard —— said that the defendant was a decent hard-working type but was of an excitable nature. The house had a good record.

Remarking that the defendant seemed a decent sort and that the case was distinguished by the absence of perjury, the justice said he would impose a fine of twenty shillings, the offence not to be endorsed. Were it not for extenuating circumstances he would have no hesitation in sending the defendant to Mountjoy for six months. He commended the Guards for smart police work.

Not many publicans, however, will take the risk. If they were as careful of their souls as they are of their licences, heaven would be packed with those confidential and solicitous profit-takers and, to please them, it might be necessary to provide an inferior annex to paradise to house such porter-drinkers as would make the grade.

Slattery’s Sago Saga
OR
From Under the Ground to the Top of the Trees

[An unfinished novel by Flann O’Brien, c.1964–66]

P
ART
O
NE

1

“A bleeding Scotchman, by gob!”

Tim Hartigan said the words out loud as he finished the letter and half turned in his chair to look at Corny, who lifted his head sideways and seemed to roll his eyes.

Tim was wise in a Timmish way. It had perhaps not been wise to have stuffed the letter into his back pocket five days earlier and forgotten about it but that was because he was not used to getting letters and anyway he had been on his way to feed the pigs when Ulick Slattery, the postman, handed it to him. On this morning a strange enlightenment made him think of it and it was wise of him, when he pulled it out at breakfast, to examine first the stamp and postmark very carefully. Yes, it read Houston, Texas, U.S.A. It was also correct of him when he tore the letter open to look at the end of it immediately, to verify that it was from Ned Hoolihan.

Abstractedly, before reading it he had propped the letter against the handsome pewter milk jug and from the little rack of solid silver with 22-carat gold filigree (an article thought to be Florentine), he picked a slice of dry toast, generously buttered it, and rammed a piece between his solid nerveless molars. He lifted his cup of blackish tea and swallowed with echoing gulps. His bland life, he suddenly feared, was about to be disturbed. Could he handle this stranger?

Tim Hartigan, left an orphan at the age of two by his widowed mother, had been adopted when he was four by the high-minded Ned Hoolihan whose cousin, Sister M. Petronilla, was Mother Abbess at the Dominican Home of the Holy Refuge at Cahirfarren. Hoolihan had taken a fancy to the little boy, and that was all about it. He was a wealthy man and brought his new prize home with his baggage to his mansion, Poguemahone Hall. And himself ever of plain habits he had sent Tim not to a college but to the local National School, with a housekeeper at the Hall to look after the boy’s other needs.

Before returning to Tim that morning and his letter, it is right to add here a little more about Ned Hoolihan. His money had been mostly inherited as a result of a fortune his father had amassed from automotive and petrol-engine inventions. Indeed, it was a family tradition that Constantine Hoolihan, B.E., had been shamelessly swindled by Henry Ford I but that, through his invention of a primitive computer nourished with a diet of stock-market minutiae, the resourceful engineer from Bohola, Mayo, had managed to get together a sum even bigger than that of which he had been deprived. His only son Ned did not follow this example of thinking out new things, machines, devices, fresh ways of mechanically alleviating the human lot: he was serious, studious, took an early interest in the countryside, God’s opulent extemporising, and the great mystery of Agriculture. His doctorate at Dublin University was won on a dissertation (never published) entitled
The Stratification of Alkaline Humus
, thought to be a system of providing natural fertiliser through the deliberate cultivation of fields of weeds for the production of compost and silage, a scheme of tillage in which stray growths of wheat or leek or turnip would be a noxious intrusion.

When he bought Poguemahone Hall, a late Norman foundation of fairly good land in the west, his role became that of gentleman farmer and experimenter in root and cereal crops, aided by his stepson (for he called him that), Tim Hartigan. But after Ned Hoolihan had become an accomplished and scientific seedsman, he found the small farmers and peasants all about him an intractable lot. Instead of sowing “Earthquake Wonder,” a Hoolihan seed-potato of infinite sophistication and vigour, made available to them for almost nothing, they persisted in putting down bastardised poor-cropping strains which were chronically subject to scab, late blight, fusoria, and dread rhizoctania canker (or black scurf). The mild, intellectual agronomist almost lost his temper with them outright. But after some years of tuberose planting and preaching to little effect, his patience finally did give out at their rejection of his miraculously healthy and bounteous seed-wheat, “Faddiman’s Fancy,” for which he had received a citation and praemium from the United States Government. The peasants simply preferred seed of their own domestic procurement, regarding outbreaks of black stem rust, bunt (or stinking smut) as the quaint decisions of Almighty God.

Ned Hoolihan put his affairs in businesslike train, appointed Tim Hartigan his steward at a decent salary, and emigrated to Texas. There he bought 7,000 acres of middling land, ploughed and fertilised most of it, and put in under Faddiman’s Fancy. The rumour was (though never confirmed to Tim in a letter) that he had married about that time. When the young crop was coming up nicely, several dirty black eruptions disfigured the farmlands. Vile as this discolouration looked, it was found on closer inspection to be oil. And Farmer Hoolihan had become unbelievably wealthy.