Free Mondo Desperado by Patrick McCabe Page B

this alone I had been spending my time spreading the wickedest of rumours, and slandering his name at every available opportunity. At various conferences, I have become
aware of this innuendo – mutterings of ‘mad because of his popularity’ and ‘because he hasn’t it in him himself, you see’ spring to mind. It is with a heavy
heart I acknowledge that such asides and corner-of-the-mouth insinuations persist to this day. Only last week, it was my misfortune to overhear a colleague assert his opinion that ‘having got
the bishopric you’d think he’d have enough without bad-mouthing a good priest like Packie Cooley’. There can be little doubt but that he has succeeded in performing his work well.
The talk of him succeeding me here in the palace (his sights ultimately being set upon the highest ecclesiastical office in the land, of course!) has already begun and rarely a night goes by but I
envisage him leering at me from the corner of the room, waving coyly as he adjusts the red silk cape and rakishly tilts his cardinal’s hat. And thus it is destined to continue – there
is an infuriating inevitability about it! – night after night until (to begin with!), he has himself firmly ensconced here by the fireside, with Mrs Miniter innocently providing him with
scones and teacake as she once did me.
    No, for me there is no option now but to bite my lower lip and pass on. Pass on, my only company on the solitudinous peregrinations that are to be my lot. Heavily – unbearably –
burdened within by the sad knowledge that only I possess. The sad knowledge that the most influential clergyman in all of Ireland today is none other than the Devil himself and, even sadder still,
knowing in my episcopal heart and soul that, for every drug addict and degenerate sex baron brazenly disporting themselves about streets once a paradigm for all civilized society, there is no one
to be deemed responsible but me.
    After all, readers – I ordained the fucker.

The Hands of Dingo Deery

For many years I have lived alone, within the four grey walls of this narrow room, the tremulous silence intermittently broken by the tube trains which cut through the
tar-black night with their cargo of ghostly, pallid faces, as if in relentless, heartbroken pursuit of something lost a long time ago, just as the peaceful harmony which once pervaded my entire
being has been bitterly wrested from me.
    How many years have I paced these accursed floorboards, imploring any deity who cares to listen to return to me the bountiful tranquillity which once was mine and end for ever this dread torment
which greets me like a rapacious shade each waking day!
    And now, as I stand here by the window, watching with leaden, emotion-drained eyes, directly below me, a single line of mocking, waltzing calligraphy; at last they confront me, the jagged
ciphers which, all this time, I have feared would one day rise up from my blackest dreams like wicked flares from the pit of hell: T HE S ECRETS OF L OUIS L ESTRANGE : C AN YOU SURVIVE THE 1,137 W HACKS ???
    *
    My nightmare began some thirty years ago in a small town in Ireland, not far from Mullingar and quite near Dundalk. I had come to Barntrosna to spend the summer with my uncle,
who was the headmaster in the local school. He had of late acquired some measure of fame as an ornithologist and it gave me great pleasure indeed to accompany him on his regular lectures in various
halls and venues throughout the county. It is not my intention to imply that my duties were in any way onerous for, in truth, beyond the simple erection of the screen and the operation of the slide
projector, there was little for me to do. I carried the briefcase containing my learned relative’s notes, it is true, but such was his erudition that he made little use of what he termed
‘needless paraphernalia’, and it was of such insignificant weight that it could have been comfortably borne to the Temperance Hall (in which