encounters with evil 4 a little light relief

This happened a few years ago.

Sitting in the Tearman Cafe talking to a character styled Tom McCarton.

He's a tough, wiry fellow with a reputation as a Christian, a raconteur, storyteller who has lived a storied life, congenial in spirit with a capacity to dispel gloom for those who are suffering, aged maybe in his seventies but I would still emphasise the word tough.

As you join us gentle readers, I'm telling him about the phase of the harassment involving the Maloney gang.

Tom McCarton says: "If Peter Maloney had something on me, I wouldn't go up agin him. He's very cunning."

Agin is Irelandese for against.

I look at him.

I say quietly: "Are you a friend of Peter Maloney's Tom?"

He says: "Well I used to live beside him."

"Was your son a friend of Jason's?"

"He was."

I try to keep my face in neutral.

How many years have I spent listening to this old fart's wearisome regurgitated self indulgent reminiscent shite, shite, shite.

And when he was sick I'd stormed heaven.

If someone he cared for was sick, I put on sack cloth.

If someone he loved died, a part of me died too.

And now he's saying the classic line: "If Peter Maloney had something on me, I wouldn't go up agin him."

A friend of Peter Maloney's.

Bloody hell.

Well it's all coming to an end.

Lord if you'll allow it, I take back all those prayers.

You can smite them seven ways from Sunday and I won't have a problem with it.

Where do I go for a refund.

And such a load of old cant I'd listened to in those recycled maunderings that he hacks out in conversation.

What a gip.

Me sitting there doing my Saint James Of Compostela routine patiently listening, nay hanging onto every word, from Peter Maloney's friend.

Ho hum.

I can tell you one thing.

I'll never listen to him again.

This is what I was thinking.

Don't get angry.

Steady James.

I still have a cup of coffee.

Don't storm out.

Don't add to the legend.

I can dally over a cup of coffee for half an hour with Beelzebub if need be.

I never have to see this guy again.

Don't fall out with him.

We're not hiring for new enemies at the moment.

We've got Kinneavey, the Maloneys, the Hutch gang, and the clan gang that operates out of the Alke Babish chipper and associated food outlets run by Zeytoun Restaurants Ltd.

All vacancies at the Heelers Diaries for lifelong enemies are closed.

The positions are filled.

Next!

So I pass another half hour with him on the mystical understanding with myself that afterwards I will never have to so much as look at him again.

My coffee finished, our conversation reached its natural end and I bid him a civil adieu.

A few days went by.

I met him a few times in the street by chance but didn't trouble myself overmuch about such unfortunate unintended encounters, simply hurrying away wordlessly each time.

When about a week had passed I was sitting in the Tearman again and he entered.

I held up an Irish Times in front of my face and pretended to read it.

The bloody Irish Times.

I ask you.

What have they reduced me to.

Hiding behind this anodyne Bolshevick anti Catholic abortionist excuse for a newspaper.

Tom McCarton approached my table.

"James," he said, "I want to talk to you."

I did not look up, engrossed as I was in pretending to read the Irish Times.

"For some reason you're not talking to me," Tom McCarton said ingeniously, "and I want to know why."

I maintained my pretended concentration on the rag in hand.

The charge of his sudden and electric fury reached me nonetheless through the flimsy shield of newspaper which is, let it be said, a flimsy enough excuse for a newspaper to begin with.

I felt it before I heard it.

"There's something wrong in your head," he snarled as the invisible waves of his fury almost seemed to buffet the newspaper in my hands. "You're walking around Kilcullen with your head down. You need to get it fixed."

Still without looking up from the Irish Times, I said in a Mini Mouse type voice the classic line: "Naughty, naughty."

He clenched and unclenched his fists. He seemed to be labouring beneath a grand pression. I could see the fists clenching and unclenching out of the corner of my eye. They were not an appealing vista. He is known as a fighting man. For a moment there was silence. He was searching for le mot juste.

"It's not naughty naughty," he roared, stomping away.

His stomp unfortunately didn't carry him too far away.

He sat at a nearby table.

For the next half hour (I always give people threatening to kill me in a cafe half an hour just in case they might get confused at my leaving immediately and think I actually was scared of them. In this instance I wasn't a bit scared. I was absolutely fucking scared shitless.) I sat there pretending to be ensconced in the Irish Times occasionally hearing muted gutteral expressions from the nearby table with a vague aura of threat such as: "I'll show him naughty naughty," or "he's gonna learn the hard way," or "I'm going to give that lad a baitin," or when another diner had informed him helpfully: "If you give him a baitin, his Uncle Bernard will give you a baitin," the answer "I'll give his Uncle Bernard a baitin too."

Baitin is Irlandese for beating.

Sources agree. McCarton knows how to do those.

When honour was satisfied, that is to say when the inclement threats to my life had delighted me long enough, I folded up the Irish Times, tossed it indifferently on the table and left the cafe.

Not young, and not renewable, but man, as the ghost of poet Thomas Kinsella whispered in my ear..

About a month later the aforementioned Uncle Bernard heard a rumour around the town and demanded to know if I had fallen out with Tom McCarton.

"Fallen out is such a strong term," I answered eliptically and broke off.

The Uncle was not pleased.

"WIll you admit," he grated out, "that Tom McCarton is a nice man?"

I weighed my answer carefully.

Whatever about falling out (in the interests of show biz) with Tom McCarton, I had no wish to fall out with the Uncle.

But we had always been frank with each other.

"If you think someone is a nice man," I said softly, "look at someone who lives in their shadow. And then come back to me and tell me he's a nice man."