Free Mondo Desperado by Patrick McCabe

‘Stop that! Stop that, your grace! Stop it now, I tell
you!’
    I apologized profusely to her and seated myself in my Chesterfield as at last I felt a cool, refreshing calm descending over me. A cool calm that whispered: ‘This time you’ll have to
act. You know that, your grace – don’t you?’
    It is not with any pride I report that barely five minutes after my foot touched the surface of the main street of Bunacash, in the county of Cork, I found myself propositioned by a gum-chewing
teenager in a blouse or shirt so flimsy that it barely seemed to exist at all, who promised to show me one or two things I would have only read about in books, and it was all – God forgive
me! – I could do not to slap her face right there and then to bring her back to her senses as I held her against the wall and cried: ‘What is going on here! Who put you up to
this!’ But I could see that she was so high on drugs that I would succeed in prising no information of any worth out of her. I knew there was nothing for it but to make straight for the
presbytery to confront my quarry once and for all. Discarding my shrieking, giddy charge, I hastily gathered my skirts about me and stormed uncompromisingly down the main street.
    I was heartened by my firm sense of purpose and resolution, or at least I understood myself to be until I flung the front door of the presbytery open and there to my horror beheld what I had
long feared and suspected – a sight so repellent that I can scarcely bring myself to describe it here. There, before my very eyes, draped across the chaise longue – like some hideous
oriental puzzle of flesh – in a pose which can only be described as ‘grotesque’ and exuding a seductive lotus-eating lassitude, were any number of nubile young women in various
states of undress, blearily laughing their heads off and clearly under the influence of some soporific narcotic. Enthusing pathetically as the Devil himself, sporting a clerical collar but bereft
of any other form of human garb or clothing of any kind, blasphemed wildly as he sprang wildly about the room in an abominable, mocking gavotte, his smoking manhood lividly erect before him.
‘Say you worship me, my sweet ones!’ I heard him cackle. ‘Worship for ever He Who Destroys!’
    The sight of those once innocent eyes as they slid to the floor before him was more than I could bear. ‘NO!’ I cried, leaping into the air and catching him firmly by the horns,
falling across the coffee table (upon which were casually discarded any number of glossy magazines happily displaying further preposterously interlocking combinations of pink-hued female flesh). I
– from whence I found my strength to this day I do not know – I began to pummel him furiously without restraint about his charcoal-coloured razor-toothed visage, crying hysterically
– for it is no lie – I was close to losing my reason – ‘No, Cooley! No more, you hear me! You have destroyed enough lives! This for you is the end of the road! Do you hear
me? Do you hear me – Emperor of Hell!’ With all the resources I could humanly muster, I continued to lay forcefully about him, using his horns as a grip whilst I brought his head into
contact with the floor. Had he been but human my work would, within minutes have been complete. But Packie Cooley was not human. Indeed, he was so far from that condition that the mortal mind can
only begin to imagine it, as I discovered when I looked up from my handiwork only to find, with a gradually growing sickening sensation of hopelessness, that he was standing virtually unscathed
adjacent to the drinks cabinet sipping a brightly coloured viscous liquid, as though some deranged lounge-lizard, enquiring with one raised eyebrow as to whether I was finished yet. Such was the
feeling of despair – not to mention physical exhaustion – that my head slumped lifelessly to my chest and I could bear no more of his understated taunts, his limp-wristed,