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."

encounters with evil 3 oh come on

The dulcet Spring of that fateful year 2014.

Visiting for the first time Gwen Healy (no relation of mine) at her home.

She showed me around her house.

Something troubled me.

Something nagging at the edge of my senses.

For some reason I was in fact quickly and quite completely appalled.

My host's manner was gracious.

There was nothing wrong with the house.

It was perfectly fine, bright, airy, spacious, well appointed.

But I was appalled.

I checked myself.

What on earth am I feeling here.

I gazed around me.

There were no Christian images in the house.

Could it be that?

No.

No.

It's a bit incongruous for someone who claims to be such a down the line Christian but not everyone expresses their faith in decor.

And houses don't usually overwhelm me just because there's no religious symbols in em.

What then.

I'm feeling something terrible.

What is it?

It's sadness certainly.

But I'm not that delicate.

Sadness doesn't faze me.

Seriously though bold readers. You wouldn't know it from this blog but I'm actually quite nice. I can sit with someone who's suffering for any amount of time and I will feel only honoured to be there. I can reach out. I can empathise. I can blah blah blah.

Seriously though.

Sadness is not my enemy.

In the mystical sense, sadness can be a gift from God.

The sadness of mourning.

The sadness of pain.

The shared sadness in defiance of any tough circumstances.

So what in tarnation was this?

It was none of the above.

I called it sadness but it wasn't any category of the positive Christian grace that can be sadness.

It was desolate and desolating.

My soul shivered.

Oh come on.

I thought to myself: Well she's in a wheelchair. Maybe that's what I'm feeling. But I've known her for three years and I never got this.

This.

This desolation.

This.

This absence.

Yes.

Absence...

That's it.

Absence of what?

The answer came back instantly.

The absence of joy.

There you go.

That's what was hurting me.

Bear in mind this woman had pretended to be Christian with me for three years. I still didn't really suspect she was anything else. I'd never doubted her faith, or her claims of miraculous experiences.

But ah.

I do regard joy as the keynote of Christianity.

So this experience in her house was quite seditious of my sentiment.

All my life whenever I meet someone from whatever background or life style, professional or unemployed, aesthete or drug addict, whom I believe to be close to God, joy is the common denominator.

It is a sign of the true presence.

And I wasn't getting even a smidgen of it here.

That's why I was so bowled over.

Here in a house with a woman I thought a true believer, I felt no sign of the presence of the Lord.

Let me say it again.

The sign you'll feel when Jesus is present in even the teensiest weensiest way bold readers, is joy.

I steadied myself.

Okay.

Maybe her family aren't sympathetic to the Christian faith.

That could be a bit sad for her if she's a believer.

But desolating?

No.

What I was feeling was quite distinct.

It was simply and solely the desolation of evil.

The palpable presence of evil in the form of an absence of good.

The absence of good.

The absence of joy in any form.

It was horrific.

Horrific not spectacular.

Can you see?

Nothing spectacular.

No voices coming from the walls.

No taps leaking blood.

No evaporating ghosts on the second floor.

Just the banal absence of joy.

It scared the living shit out of me.

That's satan's calling card.

He can't do joy.

He can do drugs or sex.

He can do cash or carpets.

But he can't do joy.

Oh Stanley Kubrick and the eejits who made the Amityville Horror may have sensationalised evil into an entertainment.

But it is not an entertainment.

It's just sad.

I mean the kind of sadness without the redeeming presence of joy.

For those who have truck with it thinking to obtain power thereby, it is nothing less than a tragedy.

A boring, joyless, deceitful, tragedy.

I sat there stirring one of my trade mark cups of coffee, growing ever more troubled by what I had discerned.

I broke with her a few months later but only after she had made the decision inevitable through more blatant acts of evil.

Once I'd broken with her, I didn't see her again for a long time although her husband would occasionally buzz me in traffic in his Pat Healy Plumbing van.

Using the family business vehicle for harassment.

What a fucking get.

Needless to say I do not endorse this service.

A few years went by and one day I was in the Newbridge Silverware cafe with my 82 year old American Aunt Eileen.

We were queueing at the counter.

Presently I turned around and saw that Gwen Healy had rolled up from the side and was introducing herself to my aunt.

The dimmest satanist in the coven knows they're not allowed approach me in public.

I thought to myself: We can't have this.

I reached out and unclasped her claw from my Aunt's hand.

Then I physically seized the Aunt by the shoulders and turned her back towards the counter, whispering firmly: "Be strong Aunt."

Then I turned to Gwen Healy and said in that much loved fake British accent I adopt in moments of confrontation:"Off with you now. There's nothing for you here."

The wheelchair bitch decided to try a bluff.

"Are you serious James?" she said in her dreadful Dublin accent and then again with even moe faux incredulity: "Are you serious James?"

She said it about ten more times as we stood at the counter with our backs to her.

And each time I rebuked her in declamatory tones like something from The Exorcist or maybe the Benny Hill Show: "Off with you now. There's nothing for you here."

At one stage I turned and gave the wheelchair a bold transgressive push.

The big wheels performed a barely perceptible rotation.

It moved about a centimetre.

In the Benny Hill Show it would have raced along the aisle, careened through the exit, and we would have heard a loud satisfying crash from off stage.

Ho hum.

I gazed around the cafe.

A hundred of Nathalie Collins' mid morning diners had paused so as not to miss a word.

I supposed they were each in their way mulling over the conundrum as to why that terrible man was being so mean to the nice woman in the wheelchair.

Then I thought: No, wait a minute. Evil is never as invisible as it thinks it is. There will be some people here who are looking at this and know exactly what's going on.

The wheelchair bitch had wearied of the pantomime.

She turned to go, calling back with raucous mockery over her shoulder: "Maybe I'll just ring your Uncle Jim."

Without looking up I answered fake British accentily: "I'm sure he'll be thrilled to hear from you."

I got just that top spin of inflection which in the good old days used to drive Michael Sheeran and Ian Stuart, former editor and managing director respectively of the Leinster Leader newspaper, bonkers in the nut.

She was gone.

I addressed Aunty Eileen thusly.

"I hope you won't let that spoil our lunch."

Her eyes were wide and round.

"James I'm 82 years of age," she said. "I've known you all your life. And I thought I'd seen it all."

In the evening I recounted the story to an acquaintance familiar with my foibles called Rowena Baines.

Rowena said: "Did the Captain arrive?"

I said: "Who's the Captain?"

Rowena said: "That voice you use in confrontations."

I said: "You've given him a rank?"

Rowena said: "He deserved some recognition after all the work he's put in over the years."

I said: "But surely he'd be a Colonel at least."

"No," said Rowena firmly. "He's the Captain."

encounters with evil 2 the skangening

This happened in July 2014.

Sitting in the front room of Margaret Roche's house in the town of Newbridge.

The widow Roche had just served me a cup of coffee and a plate of sandwiches.

I ate and drank.

My mind began to swim.

Reason and context went hither and yon.

Time ran into treacle.

As my head lolled on my shoulders, I realised she had drugged me.

I could see her watching with a basilisk stare.

I had time to wonder: What will this thing do if I go unconscious?

My mind focussed on a table where she had on display an array of kitschy religious objects.

Little varnished wooden crosses, plastic statues of the Blessed Virgin Mary, prayer cards, rosary beads, a model of Padre Pio, some figurines of the Lord.

In the middle of all these objects was an obscenely genitally explicit statue of a naked woman in orgiastic ectasy pleasuring with an object.

I hadn't noticed it before.

Right there in plain view.

"That's quite a statue Margaret," I murmured as my faculties began to shut down.

"Oh my daughter gave me that," she said, her voice coming from far away. "I don't know what it's doing there."

I gathered my strength, stood up, walked to her kitchen, splashed water on my face, and left her house.

It took about a week for the effects of whatever she'd given me to wear off.

Then the withdrawal symptoms kicked in.

Withdrawals symptoms means I was hooked.

I describe those symptoms as being the feeling that every cell in my body is screaming for something and I don't know what it is.

There was a good deal of good old fashioned pain involved too.

Of course I didn't know what she'd dosed me with.

The withdrawal symptoms and constant pain of cold turkey ended after four days.

Then I had another three weeks in a kind of spiritual limbo, a feeling of detachment not unlike the effects of shock.

During this period I read from the New Testament every day. Sometimes a whole Gospel. Sometimes a letter of Saint Paul. I have heard claims that these accounts contain the truth of the universe and I figured it could do no harm to have that in my head along with any poison Margaret Roche had put there. The hope was that the truth of the universe would outweigh and then dissipate the poison. So it proved. On the day I reached Saint Paul's Letter to Philemon, I was symptom free.

As the veil lifted an interesting rather rueful reflection came to me. During the past three years, I'd engaged in public polemic with a young Independent Newspapers feature writer called Ian O'Doherty.

At one stage his employers suspended him and even considered firing him as they were worried he had left them exposed to a libel suit by identifying me in his column to his readers.

He was restored to the pages of the Irish Independent only after I made it clear I had no intention of sueing the newspaper group, and nor did I have any wish that Ian O'Doherty should lose his job.

Fortunes of war.

But how much of my vituperation during that fairly rough and ready polemic was me and how much of it was Margaret Roche's drugs doing the talking?

Addicts have told me that my experience with withdrawal symptoms indicates she'd been poisoning me with her drugs regularly over time not just on one occasion.

Some of them have even suggested that the narcotic she gave me may have been towards the extreme end of the spectrum of illegal drugs.

We'll know on judgement day.

A few years later I was at a church service for a young woman who had died in tragic circumstances.

At the end of the service the congregation stood and I heard singing from a few pews behind me.

I thought I recognised that particular soulless warble.

I turned.

It was her.

Margaret Roche kept singing but favoured me with a mocking smirk.

Slowly, deliberately, letting as many of the congregation who cared to notice, see precisely what I was doing, I sat down.

I don't stand for scum.

encounters with evil

 This happened in the year 2014.

I was sitting in the kitchen of the home of a character styled Marion Bruce.

She and two other women styling themselves Margaret Roche and Gwen Healy (no relation of mine) had engaged in a false befriending operation with me on behalf of third parties during a particularly vulnerable period of my life after the death of my mother.

For three years they had insinuated themselves into my world, engaging in the practice of pyschological undermining known to professional clinicians as gaslighting.

On at least one known occasion, one of them had administered a narcotic substance to me in a gift of food.

The three women were clustered in a sort of coven around a supposed Catholic priest called Ruairi O'Domhnaill who had self identified to me as a member of what he called a significant IRA family.

I have no proof that O'Domhnaill was aware of what the women were doing to me. But I do not endorse him as a Catholic priest.

Now here I was in Marion Bruce's kitchen, still little suspecting the extent of the false befriending operation that had been underway for three full years but about to find out a whole lot more about it..

Marion Bruce had just served me a cup of coffee.

Almost absent mindedly stirring the coffee, I said: "Tell me again why you pulled out of that pilgrimage to Medjugorje."

In late 2013 I had asked her to book me into a September pilgrimage to Medjugorje. I was supposed to be travelling in secret. She had told my brother who was in on the secret that she would go along to Medjugorje to keep an eye on me. At the airport just prior to departure, she had informed me she wasn't travelling after all as she had realised she didn't have enough annual leave and would need to take holidays later in the year.

Two thugs had also been booked on the pilgrimage, a boxer and a brain, that is to say a fellow to keep an eye on the boxer, with the intent of giving me a beating or worse at Medjugorje.

The beating hadn't quite worked out.

But in the months since my return, I had twice asked Marion Bruce to tell me again why she'd pulled out of the pilgrimage at the airport. Each time I'd rather enjoyed watching her squirm.

This time she didn't squirm.

Her face suddenly contorted with pure hate.

Her eyes flashed with spite.

The effect was quite interesting because she had spent three years never letting the sweet as pie routine drop for a moment.

At this moment she knew her three year infiltration of my life had failed and there was nothing she could do about it.

She knew I knew what she was.

There was nowhere to go.

And she wanted to hurt me.

All this I registered still stirring the coffee perched on a stool in her kitchen.

She answered my question with these precise words: "I bet your mother got fierce fah before she died. I bet she could barely walk."

That was a Kodak moment right there.

It was like the moment in the opprobrious television cartoon Southpark when a congenial young man is buying lemonade from the children and he says "ooh nice lemonade," then his voice changes to a tone of pure malevolence and he adds "You will never defeat us you know. Cthuhlu has arisen. The dark lord has come. All hail Cthuhlu."

Or it was like the regular sensation scenes in Battle Of The Planets when Zoltar would throw off his disguise and jeer the orphans with a cry of: "Nyah, ha. ha, Gee Force."

I don't know how he kept a straight face because the orphans beat him every week.

But I digress.

Now picture it bold readers.

I'm still stirring coffee in this woman's kitchen.

There's no one else there.

I'm sitting in her kitchen.

I've just heard the words: "I bet your mother got fierce fah before she died. I bet she was barely able to walk."

Fah is Dublinese for fat.

And this is what I'm thinking.

I'm wondering if I make a run for it, can I make it down the corridor to the front door if this woman tries to stop me. For a woman so pass remarkable about her betters whom she's never met and is unlikely to meet in the next life, she's a bit fah herself.

And what if she calls her husband.

What if Big Al is in the next room.

Waiting.

He's a bit fah too.

How would I manage the two of them.

And what if she grabs up a carving knife?

All this I was thinking while still desultorily stirring the by now most stirred coffee cup in the history of, well, in some history of something with a lot of pathos in it.

"Ah she wasn't that fat," I answered quietly. "She was alright really."

I stayed until I'd finished the coffee.

Can you believe that bold readers?

I think I even said a Hail Mary with her before I left.

Years later she came to me in a dream.

The instant I saw her I said: "Go to your devil."

She answered: "When I go to my devil, he will embrace me."

And I woke up.

Scary shite.

advertisement for broadcaster journalist author brian byrne's super soaraway website

 TONIGHT

On Brian Byrne's blog...

There will be absolutely no report, indeed mention, of the Hutch gang moving into Kilcullen and establishing our town as a new gangster enclave (just like Moyross in Limerick) as they flee Dublin's inner city which they have already rendered utterly unliveable for the rest of the people of Dublin.

There will be no report on lowlife thug former police officer Stephen Kinneavey's ten year harssment of James Healy.

There will be no report on the Maloney gang's half a century of drug dealing to the children of Kilcullen.

There will be no report on the circumtances surrounding the death of the Decker Berney.

INSTEAD

There will be an exclusive report on how nice Kilcullen is with unicorns gambling on main street and comely maidens dancing at the crossroads.

There will be a report on a so called People Of The Year award presented to thug Stephen Kinneavey by an unnaccountable organisation styling itself Kilcullen Community Action or some such nonesuch. Our on the spot report of this presentation will omit the fact that at the ceremony when the award was announced there were boos and jeers and that the recipient didn't even have the courage to attend the event. There will be no speculation in our fearless penetrating report about one of Kinneavey's hoors arranging the award and writing the award citation.

There will be a hand wringing report and photograph of the latest Kilcullen suicide victim with kind hearted hypocrites erecting a monument to the victim without ever so much as considering getting together to drive the drug gangs (Maloneys, Hutches and the clan gang operating out of the Alke Babish chipper and associated food outlets run by Zeytoun Restaurants Ltd) out of our town. There will be obituaries published whenever one of the Maloneys pops his clogs which at no time mention the origin of the Maloneys' scratch that is to say their fifty year income stream from poisoning the children and adults of Kilcullen with drugs and porn movies.

Music Break.

As the ad concludes, the Norwegian pop group Aha sing thusly:

"Hold me

Close to your hea-r-r-rt

Touch me

The sun always shines

On TV

Hold me

Swimming in pious hypocritical shi-i-i-i-te

Touch me

The sun always shines

On Brian Byrne's useless arse of a website."

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

Foot note

Heelers Diaries Internal Memos not for publication.

Ed note: Shouldn't those unicorns be gambolling?

Heelers note: Nah. In Kilcullen the unicorns gamble to keep their minds off the pain. Lotto tickets and Poker mostly.