DRACO

My dear associate Deccy Badbuzz has a cat who once got caught in the space between a coal bunker and a concrete wall. It was one of those old bunkers from the ’70s, when people used more coal. The Saudis figured out that they could knock the chess-pieces off the board by refusing to sell oil to the rest of the world. It caused a fair bit of hassle. Most Irish homes started to freak out about the price of fuel and upped their coal consumption. That’s the reason Deccy had one of those big grey metal jobs out his back garden. It was due to his grandparents overreacting to the events of the Arab–Israeli conflict of ’73.

It was about the size of three washing machines stuck together, but a bit more stout in its vertical projection. Its odour was rusty and coaly and it sounded like Cú Chulainn coughing when you closed it down. You’d never stick your hands in it fully due to spiders. If you didn’t cover the lid with old sacks, the rain would corrode away at it, and little holes would form. In the summer, wasps would violate those holes and start making their small paper nests that look like counterfeit Chinese sliotars. Of course because you’d never go near a coal bunker in the summer, you wouldn’t really know – there’d be no need for a fire. In the hot months, the wasps and spiders would battle it out inside, big spiders, wolf spiders and hard-men spiders like false widows with skulls on their backs. The wasps would always win, and you’d sometimes hear the whisper crackle of dried-out spidery exoskeletons when you threw the coal in the stove come September.

You judge the severity of a wasp problem in a coal bunker not by the number of tickets sold at the door, but by the smell and the dirt on the tarmac underneath the nest-hole. Wasps don’t have humility like bees, they eat meat and fish and all sorts. And they stick their arses out of the nest to take shits, which smell like homemade bottles of ammonia from a country hardware shop. I found this out the day Deccy’s cat got caught in the gap between the bunker and the garden wall. The cat was named Tiesto. He was tortoiseshell in pattern, one of those cats that look like marmalade and Nutella spread over a slice of white pan. We first heard an unmerciful howling, then a deep grumbling that rose in pitch at uneven increments. When we took a gander at the commotion, we were accosted with the coal-bunker stench of the wasp shite.

Poor ould Tiesto was caught bad. The entirety of his body was down the back of the bunker, with his little head mashed up against the side of the wall, and one paw stuck under his chin. The available exterior of his fur was crawling with wasps. Wasps have a novel way of selecting the areas on a victim to sting: they only attack dark areas. They had concentrated themselves on the black and brown areas of Tiesto’s tortoiseshell coat.

Deccy was in bits, because he was fiercely fond of Tiesto. Without one thought, he galloped towards the back of the bunker and grabbed Tiesto by his head, dragging him out and holding him in his arms. The wasps frenzied at this new attacker. Tiesto was still being stung, and worse still the suffering creature in his ecstatic pain began to sink his claws deep into Deccy’s cheek and lower lip. The cat hung from Deccy’s jaw, as they both received innumerable stings. Blood ran freely from Deccy’s wounds, down the cat’s arms and into his mouth, and the cat licked the blood between bawls. There was a very gentle empathy to it in fairness, a frantic union of fraternal agony.

All of this happened, I should say, because Tiesto was incredibly overweight. Deccy was also overweight. Ould Dec was pure fond of greasy chips from Donkey Ford’s takeaway inside in town. Gorgeous salty chips fried in old cheesy beef fat, 50p battered sausages, and not those big yokes they have up in Dublin that feel like biting into a condom full of dong. Proper small soft Sheahan’s breakfast sausages dolled up in fluffy batter. Pink Limerick pork, sliced from Sarsfield’s arse. Square cod that burns your leg with hot oil through the bag. Batter burgers with red sauce. Garlic mayonnaise that transubstantiates translucent if you don’t give it a prompt quaff, and grated fake amber cheese that melts like God’s spit. Deccy fucking loved it, and so did Tiesto. Deccy wouldn’t go near the chipper without ordering double for the cat. Tiesto was about the same size as an A3 office printer, and as heavy as Sunday morning hangovers. Deccy had to groom him with his ma’s hairbrush because the poor lad couldn’t lick himself anymore. His sleeping breath was a broken kettle that huffed out squeaky steam through a buckled nozzle and would ruin the quiet bits in Breaking Bad when we were watching it with a few joints.

After Deccy pulled the cat from behind the bunker, we hopped on the back of his Kawasaki Ninja motorbike. It had a tiny engine but looked pure fancy. Deccy’s ex Stacey did a PLC in Art and she painted a green dragon on the side of it that looked like it had the gawks. Deccy tucked the suffering cat into his racing jacket, which made him look heavily pregnant. I sat on the back seat, smoking a John Player, with my arms around Deccy’s leather Tiesto-filled belly. We booted it down the road in the direction of the vet’s clinic near Johnsey’s shop in Killeely, and hauled the cat into the emergency room. The vet had a mullet haircut and began to administer antihistamine injections to Tiesto, who had gone into shock from all the wasp stings. Rod Stewart was on the radio, singing that song ‘Do you think I’m sexy?’ I was feeling fair nervous for the poor cat and distracted myself by imagining that Rod Stewart was singing ‘Do you think I’m cunty?’ and the music video was him dressed as a racist-looking minstrel drinking cans in the Sistine Chapel while vandalising a Caravaggio with a golf club.

Tiesto was handed back, worse for wear but alive. The vet suggested to Deccy that he put him on a draconian diet or else the misfortunate character would die of a fat liver. Deccy didn’t know what this meant, but didn’t ask either in case it made him look thick. He assumed that a draconian diet was what dragons ate when going about their daily business. After scouring the internet, he came across an article about pet dragons and their fondness for dragonfruit, that mad-looking morsel you get in Asian markets for about three quid a pop. They look like glamorous red testicles with class designs and flames on them, and their insides are emulsion-white with little black seeds. Open one up and it’s the dessert-bowl of a man who’s gone apeshit and put a load of pepper on his custard. You’d never think they were named that because dragons ate them but fuck it, they are and all. Tiesto was fed nothing but dragonfruit for a fortnight, until he eventually got so sick from the scutters that he died. We buried him behind Donkey Ford’s in the cemetery of Saint John’s Church, in some Protestant prick’s grave, lad who died in 1874. Deccy was heartbroken. He took a bread knife and scraped Stacey’s green dragon with the gawks off the petrol tank of his Ninja, as a mark of respect. All the boys bought him a pint when they saw that.

After this experience, I couldn’t stop thinking about that word ‘draconian’. It would pop up in my head at odd times. So I said, fuck that, and went and learned what it meant and where it came from. Turns out there was a Greek lad called Draco. He lived in Athens 2,700 years ago and was the first person to write a law down on a sheet of paper, or whatever craic they wrote on back then. Athens squeezed out the origins of modern democracy from its arid gant. Demoskratia, the people rule. Before Draco, laws were oral, passed around by mouth like fairy-tales, open to interpretation and bent out of shape to suit each individual case. If some gomey robbed the door off your house or something, you could just fabricate that the punishment was to have him killed and made into a door, and no one could prove you wrong. This oral law was mostly exploited by the aristocracy. They’d use it fuck over people less wealthy than them, or to start blood feuds between themselves. Draco sorted all that out, he evened the playing field. He enacted the first homicide and manslaughter laws, and he introduced a council of magistrates. Granted, nowadays we look back on Draco’s laws as being pure harsh. They weren’t too far off sharia. If you robbed your neighbour’s apple, the penalty was death. If you owed some cunt money and couldn’t pay it back, you became their slave. Shitty circumstances indeed. That’s why we use the word draconian these days to refer to something that’s strict or unforgiving. That’s what the vet meant when he said ‘draconian diet’ – it had nowt to do with dragons.

Draco’s laws were toned down eventually by a lad called Solon, who is considered to be the father of western law. But without Draco, there’d be nothing. It’s hard to think it, but the man who’d have you killed for robbing an apple was considered a hero of his time. The people of Athens adored him. Why? Because his laws created a culture of certainty – a harsh certainty sure, but they removed the existential anxiety of ambiguity. If there’s one things humans crave more than the ride, it’s a sense of certainty. We hunger for it. Which brings us to how Draco died. The people of Athens loved him so much they held a testimonial for him in 590BC. It was on a small island, called the theatre of Aegina, and thousands gathered, unreal fanfare, like a Rod Stewart concert. Draco arrived by boat. Back then, the highest expression of respect that you could give a person was to take off your jacket and your hat, and throw it on the worthy party. So the audience did that, loads of them, fucking their hats and coats at Draco, for about an hour. The clothing encased him, the pile growing larger and larger, until it was nothing but a hillock of fabric. Draco suffocated and died from jackets. They buried him on the spot.