tempered steel

Coffee with Drusilla.
Her and her regal features and fake classy British accent.
We break bread together about once every five years.
It's too often.
I have no idea what I'm playing at by meeting her.
Today she is Catholic Churching out of her to beat the band.
That is to say, she is accusing the Catholic Church of all manner of crimes.
Obviously she's spent the five year period since our last meeting meditating on the Gospel according to the Irish Times.
Her memories of me seem to have dimmed with the years also.
For she cannot believe I might dare to speak in opposition to the nonsense she is spouting.
Presently I grow weary of hearing this gulpen accusing our ancient and beautiful religion of unspeakable crimes drawn from the imagination of the liberal atheists currently seeking to our enslave our country to abortion culture, atheistic hedonism, the pleasure ethic, drugs and a new religion which involves the idolotrous worship of one Tony O'Reilly.
(Two Tony O'Reillys would be an extravagance. - Ed note.)
"What do you do for a living?" I ask Drusilla as she pauses for a muffin.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean what are you working at?"
"James, you know what I work at."
"I want to hear you say it."
"F--k off James."
She pronounces it focque.
"You're a bank manager, aren't you Drusilla?"
"What's your point?"
"Well you accuse the Catholic Church of all sorts of crimes. And you pretend to care about sex abuse. But you ignore the 99.99 percent of sex abuse cases, the most serious ones, which arise outside the Church as part of the tidal wave of sex abuse engulfing every segment of our society."
"I wonder where you got those statistics, and I still don't see your point."
"But you're a bank manager Drusilla. Do you not see the irony here?"
"No."
"Well whatever number of child abuse crimes you can falsely construe to lay at the door of the Catholic Church, perhaps we can agree that those crimes surely pale, at least in numerical comparison, when placed alongside the number of children you have criminally bankrupted through your fake job at the Irish Bank Of Corruption And Thievery Ltd. I mean you and your bank and the other banks have bankrupted every child in the country. And having bankrupted every child in the country, that wasn't enough for you. You've gone on, and bankrupted every child for the next fifty generations. Just by giving yourselves and your gangster friends loans you could never repay, paying yourselves salaries you never earned, and then compelling the citizenry to foot the bill when the reality check kicked in. You've thrown the Irish nation lock stock and one hundred billion smoking barrels, permanently into the Third World. Some of us think what you people have done in the banks ranks right up there with child abuse. Maybe it's worse. There's certainly infinitely more victims. And those victims will live with the consequences of what you people did infinitely longer, ie for the entire foreseeable future. And you and your banking friends did it just so you could all drive around in silly shiney new cars that you never earned the money to pay for. And so that you could live in silly shiney houses bigger than your neighbours. And so that you could take silly shiney holidays five times a year and style yourselves professionals. Plus your sick leave. And your maternity leave. It's all a con, isn't  it Drusilla? You and your generation's jobs, your lifestyles, your atheistic values, and your attempted criminalisation of the Catholic Church. It's all a balls. Hoo baby. All your money comes from money borrowed by the Irish government to keep your fake Banks afloat on fake rationales and fake work practices. You've got no customers and you've got no business model beyond forcing ordinary citizens to pay your every gambling debt. You people should be in jail. Instead you have the gall to designate yourselves judges over previous generations of Irish people. People who actually worked for a living, aborted no one, didn't borrow the unborn generations into unpayable debts, and never surrendered their children to the whoredom culture you so cherish. You're standing in judgement on them and on the faith that sustained them through twenty centuries as a nation. Bloody hell."
A distant look came over Drusilla's finely wrought features.
"Go f--k yourself James," she said with much more conviction than before.
"How did you get your job in the bank?" I pressed her.
"Why do you ask?"
"I just want to know."
"I've worked for fifteen years to get where I am."
"Ah you didn't really. Not for fifteen. You spent most of it on maternity leave and sick leave and doing part time work, didn't you?"
"F--k off James." Stronger.
"But what I was asking was how you got into the bank in the first place. And I know how. Your Daddy rang up the bank one fine day and said: Give my daughter a job. That's how it happened, isn't it? Now for some of us who refuse to use pull to get jobs, that sort of behaviour amounts to an egregious abuse. Maybe not quite up there with child abuse. But you know. Fairly serious. In the societal sense. I mean for the hyndreds of thousands of people going to job interviews who know in their heart of hearts that the job is already gone to someone whose Daddy rang up that morning and got it for them. It's abuse alright. And the consequences can be as serious as child abuse. Oh they can. If there are enough people getting jobs the way you got yours, and if we're not all Catholic believers, then there's no longer any reason for us to resist the temptations of communism and shoot you people, you who have condemned us to live as farm animals. The Catholicism you despise Drusilla, is all that protects you and your ilk from conflagration. Ironic, eh?"
"F--k off James." Real vehemence now.
She had stood up and was disappearing due west at a rate of knots.
I called after her.
Heads turned in the cafe.
"Hey. Hey you. Yeah you. There she goes. The great arbiter of wrongdoing. You've bankrupted the nation. You've cheated a generation out of a decent livelihood. You've sentenced the unborn millions to live their lives as serfs in an impoverished hell hole. And worst of all you've alienated the poetic, noble, soulful, Irish people from our beautiful, ancient and true religion. You've alienated young people from the one truth that could have saved them from the inferno you have unleashed. And you tell me to f--k off? You... you focque off."