Free Emerald Germs of Ireland by Patrick McCabe Page A

that appeared to come out was lies. “Oh yes!” Pat turned suddenly and cried, pointing his finger at Mrs. McCrumley, who was now making her way up the hill with her shopping bags, “Oh but yes, Mrs. Mac! Oh but yes, you see!”
    Pat had already strode onward when Mrs. McCrumley eventually lost her balance and collapsed over a stone which had been positioned directly in front of her.
    The large hand lurched toward the hour, 8:00 P.M . “Ah, time for a cigarette,” thought Pat. He was sitting in the sitting room, tapping his thumbs together and thinking things over. As he puffed on his smoke, he fancied himself explaining his thoughts to a psychiatrist of some sophistication who had been dispatched for the very purpose of conversing at length with the sole occupant of McNab Mansions. “Hmm,” continued Pat through a cloud of smoke, “you ask me how come I live in Town of Liars, Hektor?” (for that would be his name). “Well, for a start—I was born here.”
    The psychiatrist’s subject examined his nails.
    “My mother—Mrs. McNab, wife of Victor (how alike your names are!), carried me in her stomach, you understand—and before I knew it, here I was! Surrounded by people who wouldn’t know what the truth was if it came up to them and sat in their lap, shouting, “Hello! Truth calling!” Or perhaps you didn’t know that, Hektor? What—I’ve told you before, have I? Hektor—I do apologize. But it annoys me, you see! It really does annoy me, you see!”
    Without realizing it, Pat was leaving deep indentations around the rim of his cigarette with his teeth. There were two or three tiny beads of sweat which had just appeared over his right eyebrow as he drew a deep breath and said, “And as for Mammy—my own mother—you can imagine what it must have done to her!”
    There was about one-half inch of actual cigarette remaining as Pat rubbed his forehead and Hektor proceeded to meticulously inscribe notes in his lined, spiral-bound notebook. Pat sighed as he saw his mother (in his mind’s eye, of course!) approaching the telephone in her slippers once again, deep anxieties etched all over her face as she tentatively removed the receiver from its Bakelite cradle.
    “Hello?” she said, with an unmistakable catch in her voice, simultaneously tapping her chest with her hand as if mimicking the flapping of a trapped bird’s wing, before seeming to fold like a piece of crumpled paper tissue, saying chokingly, “Oh dear God no!” then adding hopefully, but without conviction, “But maybe it wasn’t him, Sergeant!”
    His mother stood trembling in the middle of the floor as she saw it before her clear as day, the small, dome-shaped haystack erupting, theflames as flickering fingers reflected in a pair of wild and dancing eyes. Eyes which were set, unmistakably, in the scorch-streaked face of her son, Pat McNab!
    The howls which continued throughout the beating which Pat received as a consequence of that particular incident may only be described as pitiful. “Mammy!” he screeched, “I didn’t do it! I swear! They’re all against me because they don’t like me!”
    His mother raised the strap anew (it was the belt from one of her husband’s army uniforms).
    “Don’t lie to me!” she snapped harshly. “Don’t lie to me, you rapscallion you, lie to your own mother! I’ll tan you within an inch of your life!”
    The tears hurtled from Pat’s eyes and smacked against the floor like pieces of broken glass.
    “It’s not me!” he pleaded, but in vain, adding, “It’s them, Ma! It’s them that’s lying! It’s all they ever do!”
    As he sat there now finishing his cigarette, the sound of his bedroom door closing and the key being turned that evening was as an open hand laid firmly across his already burning cheek.
    It was 9.30 P.M . Pat rose from his chair and repaired to the drinks cabinet. “You see, Hektor,” he continued, as he liberally poured himself a measure of Bols Advocaat, “what makes