A Lifetime of Bollocks

EPILOGUE

‘There were no saints looking down on the world that day, that’s for certain.  Not that I’d be expecting them to – just a figure of speech I thought I’d employ to help you better understand.  Sure I’d proffer that the saints, if they’re in the position to look down at all, wouldn’t have done much to stop the events of that day. If you take into account all the dreadful things they’ve let come to pass before without lifting a bloody finger.  What was that poor fool’s name again?  The one who got himself grabbed by the law for wrestling with a pensioner, was in the business of making his own grave?  Carroll, was it?  Well, I’d feel more sorry for the shitehawk if what he’d done had been in league with commonsense.  There was not an ounce of wit to whatever he was thinking.  What the hell was he doing crawling around under old Daly’s bed?  You say you know what he was looking for – I say he was off his rocker knowing Martin Daly as I knew him.  Even sick and old in the bed, he’d tackle a pride of lions to protect what he owned. He topped the list of Scrooges in this town for most of the time he was alive and, as that tragic muppet well discovered, he was ferocious to the last. So, to get right to the story I heard and that I want to relate to ya now,if that young fella Vinny Daly inherited anything of substance at all from his granda, it was the greed and the bullhead. Generations of arrogance led to that creature, but old Martin at least had his cultured side.  He was involved in the arts and heritage and all that shite the rich ones have hours and means to be clowning around with while we’re sitting here with our crosswords.  But all the same you have to hand it to Martin for having some kind of an interest beyond his moneybags.  Not so, our Vinny.     

There are too many of them out there who can’t see the finer things in life, you know – they wouldn’t piss on a flaming Picasso, and you’d know that about Vinny Daly just by looking at him.  Just from the shirts he wears.  Only cunts wear shirts like that.  What?  The shirts?  I don’t know how to describe them.  Cunts.  That’s the best I can do.  Anyway, I was glad that when old Martin died, Vinny didn’t get his mitts on any of the wealth. It all fell to the daughter.  And well for her.  Darina is a lovely woman, and her side have always been a cracking bunch.  But her brother, Vinny’s father, Joey, old Martin didn’t get along with him so much, a loose cannon, as they say. Passed away a few years ago.  There was hardly a blink in the family when it happened.  Sad.  So Vinny was never much of a grandson to Martin anyway, I heard.   Never bothered to go see him in the hospital or anything.  Money can poison a family.  Apparently some of that money trickled down to Vinny at various times and that’s how he was able to get his own balls rolling in the business end of things.  And that’s why we have these godless shitholes all across the town now that have opened this past ten years.  He goes about in his big car, wearing his cunty shirts, and taking pictures for the newspaper whenever he opens one of these fancy new restaurants, but we all know he’s still raking it in from those scum-ridden hellholes he’s got where they’re slashing each other with blades every other night.

Anyway, sorry, I know I go on and on, so I should get to the story at hand.  Here’s what I heard anyway.  So Vinny was asked by the solicitor to go in and see him after Martin died.  The whole inheritance had already been sorted out before this happened, so Vinny had reason to be surprised.  Now as it turned out, and who knows why he did it, old Martin did leave something in his will for Vinny.  Though none of the moolah, as I said.  The old fucker bequeathed to him whatever it was he had underneath his bed all that time, the thing that led to all the kerfuffle, and the two coffins.  I’d love to have seen Vinny’s face when the solicitor pointed at this box of old papers, a load of old rubbish, and said, ‘There you go, and that’s for you.’  Just a big old cardboard box filled with loose pages that had a load of scribbling on them.  A lifetime of bollocks to get through.  There’s no telling why Martin left that to him, and there’s no telling what the hell it was either, as it turns out.  Because Vinny walked out of that solicitor’s office carrying that box of pages with a right dirty head on him.  He wasn’t a happy bunny.  It was a fierce windy day, and when he got to his flashy automobile, and tried to get to his key, sure what the fuck did he go and do but drop the box.  The pages went flying everywhere. There were thousands of them apparently, or so it’s been reported to me.  The streets were filled with these white sheets flying this way and that way.  Nuts.   And what do you think he did?  Young Vinny.  You think he started chasing after them like a gobshite?  Not on your life.  He got into the car and drove the hell away from there.  The whole incident was just a bloody nuisance for him.  He had a meeting to be attending.  He wasn’t going to start chasing a bunch of loose pages around on a windy day. And it was very windy.  The gales were blowing so hard that they sent those pages out on a tour of the county Louth – they might well have even made it further down the country for all we know, landing here and there, wherever the wind took them.  Maybe they were picked up and looked at, and maybe they weren’t.

Now you might say you know what was written on those pages, and others will probably choose to believe something else.  But I’ve been alive in this place for many a year, and I can tell you that there’s more gets swept away than saved.  More gets muddied up than wiped down. The words you’ll hear in a bar one day will have changed by the next time you hear them. And the man telling you won’t even realise how and where and why the change occurred.  And why’s that?  Why?  Stardust, that’s why.  It sounds silly, I know.   But that’s the way it is.  No joke.  Like the pictures or the poems when they try to show you what stardust does.  The tiniest stars all spreading out into the universe, heading off in different directions with completely different stories to tell.  It’s like that song I love.  ‘We are stardust.’  I can’t remember who sung it.  But she was a wise woman.  Because we are.  Stardust.  And I’ve met some quare particles of the stuff in my time, I can tell you.  Under this very roof we’re under right now, in fact.  So those pages.  They’re stardust too.  And whatever’s on them is stardust.  And whoever wrote on them is stardust.  And there’s no point in hunting for them.  They’ll come to you or they won’t.  And what if they do, and there’s nothing there to bring peace to your search?  Someone down the country probably found one of those pages and read what was on it and all they did was make a face like someone just stuck a sharp pencil in their arse.  At the same time, if you do find one of those pages, give it a read, at least.  Don’t just leave it to be taken by the wind like Vinny Daly did.  Don’t just throw it away.  If it’s a load of shite, you can throw it away after.

Anyway, that’s what I heard.  I don’t know how much of it’s true.  And I couldn’t care less, to be honest.  But there it is anyway, as it was reported to me.  I wouldn’t go looking for a second opinion because someone will only tell it different anyway, and you’ll drive yourself up the wall.  Better to let those pages go the way of stardust.  I don’t let myself get caught up with shite like that.  I’m a simple man, you know.  Ask anyone in here.   All I need is a new crossword everyday to keep me happy, and my intellectual wires buzzing.  So as long as someone keeps filtering out those wee headscratchers, I’m happy until the moment I die.  Oh, and the drink, of course.  I need that too.  We need to keep lining up the pints.  Anyway, what do you say about it?  Fancy another?   It’s your shout.’