hamlet without the prince

The meeting was over.

I had opened fire with all weapons, wit, sarcasm, derision and a soupcon of ranting, just to let them know they were in a ball game.

Nothing personal in it really.

And of course they hadn't taken it lying down.

Sneeran had been pathetic enough in his attempts to answer me.

But Stewart could counterpunch alright.

The encounter had been moderately entertaining even if it might ultimately cost me my job.

I looked back as I was leaving the room.

I wanted to look them in the eye for the last time.

I wanted them to see my indifference to their existence.

I had no intention of giving them another rematch.

This would be our last encounter.

Mick Sneeran then editor of the Leinster Leader and Ian Stewart then Managing Director, sat silently at the table.

Sneeran looked cowed and cowardly as he always did in the shadow of his master.

Sort of like Grand Moff Tarkin beside Darth Vader.

Yet he certainly hadn't been defeated.

For Sneeran it must have seemed like he was approaching the successful end of a long campaign.

He'd spent eight years colluding with others to get me fired.

Cowed or not, the scent of victory was in the air.

There couldn't be much future for me after the drubbing I'd just given them at the meeting.

A drubbing of words.

The kind that feels good but ends the career of the guy doing the talking.

It was the eve of the takeover of the Leinster Leader by a British conglomerate called the Johnston Press.

Sneeran must have been thinking that with any luck I might be gone before the Brits arrived.

Stewart, a rheumy eyed and billious Scotsman, known to the business community as The Flying Haggis, was indifferent to the rights and wrongs of the situation.

He had his eye on the ten million quid the new owners of the newspaper were giving him for his shares.

Nothing else mattered.

It's what passes for morality down Scotland way.

This meeting had been Sneeran and Stewart's last chance to get rid of me before the arrival of the Brits.

They had failed in their immediate objective but only partly so.

I was still hanging on.

By a thread.

But considering I was now no longer willing to sit in the same building with either of them, how long could I expect to continue at the same newspaper?

I looked back at the dishonorable pair.

Just for a moment.

The firstlings of a sneer traversed my handsome preraphaelite features.

And suddenly.

I thought to curse them.

From the depths of my heart.

I thought to say: "I wish you... Cancer."

I paused.

As I stood there I remembered a scene from Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Hamlet's father had been murdered.

Hamlet was listening in on the prayers of the man who had murdered his father.

Hamlet was ready to kill the murderer in revenge.

But Hamlet was halted by the sound of the murderer praying.

And Hamlet said: "No I won't kill him now. I won't kill him while he's praying. Because if I kill him now while he's praying, God will have mercy, and his soul will go to heaven. I want to kill him when he's spurning God once more, when his guilt is upon him, when he is riotous in his unrepentance, so that his soul will go straight to hell."

This is an amazing scene for a Catholic audience.

The Prods don't get it at all.

It changes the whole meaning of Hamlet's revenge.

Up to now Hamlet has been justly angered by the actions of a murderer.

Up to now, all we've been worried about is how Hamlet will overcome the baddies.

But at this moment it is no longer the murderer's soul that is in question.

It is Hamlet's own soul that is in play.

For any man might take a violent revenge and perhaps be forgiven.

But a man who seeks to deliberately cut off another man from God's mercy, to wilfully and wantonly send another human being to eternal darkness, why such a man can only damn himself.

Yes.

It is the greatest scene in Shakespeare.

The proof for those of spiritual insight that Shakespeare was Catholic.

Well you know.

I stood at the door looking at Sneeran and Stewart.

It was a Hamlet moment.

But I could not curse them.

I would not curse them.

I chose not to curse them.

I gave them a curt nod, which on a dark night you might have mistaken for respect, and departed.

 

***************************

 

The first thing the Brits did when they took over the Leinster Leader was to ease out Stewart.

The second thing they did was to get rid of Sneeran.

I buried them both.

It was a full eight months later before the Brits got round to firing me.

That had to sting.

 

****************************

 

After my own firing, a sympathetic management executive at the Leinster Leader rang me.

He told me that he had news for me about two old friends.

He informed me that both Sneeran and Stewart had cancer, Sneeran in the face and Stewart all over.

I had no way of knowing if he spoke the truth.

I was shaking like a leaf.

In my heart of hearts I knew.

I had once again only barely eluded the snares of satan.

 

****************************
The Brits fired my management executive spy a few days later.

And then the entire advertising department.

And then John Whelan the editor who had replaced Sneeran and who, as a new boy barely in the door five minutes, had tried to demonstrate what a big man he was by putting his name on the firing letter to me.

And then Ron Baines a printer who had been on the staff for fifty years and who was given just a few hours notice that he was finished forever.

The good and the bad perished together.

But ah.

That's another story.