fortunes of war

 

The forest is idyllic in my memory

There's a bunch of us rampaging in the undergrowth.

I suppose we're about four or five years old.

My family has just moved to the countryside and the novelty hasn't worn off yet.

I'm playing in the woods with relatives who've always lived here and know the lie of the land.

Up ahead I hear the voice of my cousin Vinnie raised high in vexatious disputation.

I race into the clearing to find him toe to toe with a kid called Joey Dirrane.

Joey is originally from the Travelling community. He's been accustomed to throwing my cousin out of the woods when he finds him there.

Vinnie is shouting: "We're not scared of you. We've got James Healy."

Sheer ****ing madness.

Joey Dirrane may be four or five years old but he's built like a Sherman tank. He looks like whatever the 1972 version of super bad ass is. He's got that tradional Irish aspect with wiry frame tending mostly to red hair and freckles. Scary shite.

And I've arrived just in time to hear Vinnie volunteering me to fight him.

For ****'s sake.

You don't want to mess with those guys. They're wrecking machines.

I mean I'd sooner fight thug ex cop Stephen Kinneavey.

Or Pat, Pete and Vince Maloney's drug gang.

Or the clan gang that operates out of the Alke Babish chipper.

Or the Hutch gang.

Or the Kinahane gang.

Or the IRA itself (ie not just its shitty little Hutch Kinahane Tinker affiliates.)

In adult life my cousin Vinnie became a professional gambler, presumably seeing off mobster creditors with the classic line "we've got James Healy," whereupon the mobsters would laugh so hard they'd let him off the debt.

As for me, you might say that between the jigs and the reels I did end up fighting all of the above one way or another.

I didn't fight Joey Dirrane though.

I may be mad but I'm not ****ing stupid.