THE BATTER

‘I’m currently eating chorizo from Listowel and Gubbeen cheese on rye in my new gaff on Sitric Road. Lol.’ That was my Twitter status, but it’s true, it’s what I’m doing right now. I moved in three weeks ago. The landlord is my dad’s best friend so I got a serious rate. Whole place to myself. Theo and Ocras came over last week and did the space up with deadly graff, not the stupid cliché tagging shit for thirteen-year- olds – next-level graffiti, loads of hentai-type stuff, with a Die Antwoord vibe, and up on the back wall over the plasma a whopper throw of Kurt Cobain getting sick into a toilet except emojis are coming out of his mouth. We live-streamed the whole thing and Harbo even shared it on Lovin Dublin. Ocras nearly decked a lad for trying to Insta the Cobain piece with a filter on it, fuck off. I had a pizza oven set up, I got it off Amazon for 300 yoyos, and I just started banging out free slices of pizzer to anyone who walked in. Spanish Martá made a tomato sauce based on a family recipe from Seville, and we put gouda and Centra ham on it. Fucking mentaller I am, Italian pizzer base, Dutch cheese, shitty rubber Centra ham, wood-fired but with a Spanish marinara. What are we like? Aoife came over with a set of Technics and we had chewins. Before long someone had hashtagged it #BANTERGAFF and even Kav mentioned it on his Snapchat story the next day and he wasn’t even there, deadly. The guy who runs Body & Soul festival saw the live-feed and now we’ll be curating a pizzer and grazzer space there in June. Ocras graffing up plywood with insane shit and me pumping out pizzer slizzers from the oven like a food DJ, hahaha. Cans of Dutch and loads of K, lol. If you’re from Tipperary or somewhere, you need to know that Body & Soul is only the coolest boutique festival in Ireland. My mate’s dad is a big music promoter and reckons he can get Syd from Odd Future to drop by our space to hang out.

Because of the housewarming going crazy viral, I’m now known as the lad in Stoneybatter who owns the pizzer oven in his gaff, and everyone started dropping in after the sesh. Buzzing. After only three weeks of being here, I can say that this neighbourhood utterly destroys Wicklow, it’s ten times infinitely better, and the ’rents are happy too. They can head over to the Palermo house as much as they like now that I’m standing on my own two feet. Myself and Ocras were totally ripping each other last Tuesday. Ocras said that as soon as Joe.ie mention the oven, we’re throwing it in a skip up by Smithfield and the junkies can have it, hahaha. But even if that did happen and the pizzer oven became old news, I’d switch it up for Body & Soul and do a big giant paella pan instead, get Spanish Martá involved. Make the space a genderqueer friendly zone too, it’s very important to create genderqueer spaces and not label people with the pronouns they were assigned at birth by society. That’s what Sorcha told me and she goes to NCAD.

Things have pretty much been that insane for the past three weeks, non-stop knocks on the door, everyone dropping over, tweeting about it, snapchatting the oven and the deadly graff. I gave one of the Ukrainian bouncers from the Grand Social a bag of green and he looked after the door to keep the dickheads from DIT from ruining it, like that group of engineering students selfieing themselves dabbing in front of the Cobain mural like it was 2016. Dorks. Le Galaxie played a secret gig one Wednesday, the bald guy on the synth and the other just banging pots and pans with a wooden spoon. It was so creative. They did Fleetwood Mac covers and made it sound fresh and uncringey. It was all so whopper.

It’s kind of slowed down a little now though. I blame Síofra Condon with the bull-ring in her nose. She’s in the middle of her Masters in Trinity. She did a Facebook post about why my #BANTERGAFF supported patriarchy, because I’m a man and my pizzer oven was a symbolic representation of a woman’s reproductive organs, and by giving out free pizzer I was reinforcing men’s control over and entitlement to women’s bodies, and my pizzer gaff graff parties were a brothel that condoned rape. It got like a thousand shares, and my phone almost crashed from all the DMs calling me a pig. So I responded by apologising on Tumblr, and also by giving Spanish Martá control of the oven and charging money for the pizzer, and anyone buying pizzer had to ask the oven for consent. Nobody showed up anymore after that, and Evan Fallon called me literally Hitler for being a capitalist. Evan is a Trotskyist and listens to Bad Brains on tape, on a Walkman – he’s really creative – so that hurt bad.

I’m not feeling too good right now, so after I finish tweeting about the chorizo and Gubbeen I take one of the Xanax that my step-mum Caroline gave me. Xanax is so mellow and cute. Even though I can’t stop thinking about the fact that I’m now abso the biggest loser in the Batter, I can’t feel what I’m thinking, if you get me. Does that make sense? Like, if I was watching cats having sex out on the road from my room? But I’ve got really good double-glazed windows, so I can’t hear them screaming, but I can see them? Coz it’s always the sound that’s the most annoying part. That’s what Xanax is like. It turns down the haters.

Ocras totes ignored three texts and a FaceTime request. There’s definitely lots of talk going on behind my back. So I leave the house, wearing my REPEAL jumper with three-stripe Adidas trackie-bots and Docs. Now that everyone thinks I run a rape brothel and am literally Hitler, I have to show face, raise myself up the flagpole and see who salutes. There’s this really quirky pub called J. Morrison & Sons, it used to be a Supervalu. It’s totally like a culchie pub from down the country, but don’t be fooled, it’s really unique and creative. The menu is teeming with outside-the-box ingredients, mixed in with regular Dublin pub food. There’s even some old locals that go there, from back when Stoneybatter was just plain rough. The barman gives them free pints so they don’t leave, coz they couldn’t afford it on the dole anyway, hahaha.

I walk in the door, and it’s so dark. The bar has loads of rare cask whiskeys for the new cocktail menu. Guff the mixologist was washing a glass and talking to the old locals. He’s got this tiny leather book in his breast pocket from America in the ’30s that cost a bomb. It’s all about bartending and he reads it when he’s not serving. His new sleeve of ink is rocking, I better tell him it’s dope, and then maybe show him my back tatt of the triangle. But when Guff looks my way, he defo snubs me. Oh no, he’s turning his back and pressing the volume up on the system. ‘Shame on a Nigga’ by Wu Tang btw, classic old school. I decide to sit down somewhere abso obvious, beside the fire, hoping that if Guff makes eye contact again I can do that Wu Tang W sign with both hands, so he knows I’m down with Shaolin. The fire has actual lumps of feckin turf burning in. Lol, they look like square hairy poos. I mean, where do they even get those up here? So cool. It smells so fragrant and smoky in the pub. Guff told me once that the smell of turf in the pub opens up the palate and complements the notes on the menu. Guff used to slum as a voluntary homeless person in East London before hipsters ruined it and once got into a knife fight with an African guy at a bar in Dalston. He’s, like, thirty. He knows Disclosure from before they were famous, he used to serve them when they were underage because they’d heard of Frankie Knuckles and that meant they were men and not boys.

Guff comes over and says, ‘What will yizzer have?’ He’s not even from Dublin, he’s from, like, Kildare, but he says ‘yizzer’ because he’s friends with the old Dublin characters at the bar. The moleskin notepad is out to take my order and I kind of freak out a little. Guff always sits beside you at the table when you order, like, always. Even if he doesn’t know you, he sits right beside you and says, ‘What will yizzer have?’ That’s what Guff does, he invented the sitting beside you to order thing. They even copy him out in like GBK in Swords Pavilion, yuck. But he’s not sitting beside me today, he’s just standing there with his pencil, looking pissed off.

My fucking nerves made me blurt out, ‘The cheese toastie with house-made jalapeno mayo.’ Yikes, total cringe. What a basic thing to order. I sooo should have gone for the Northside coddle with tripe sausage and Croatian truffle oil. That’s what people who like their palates challenged eat, and I just ordered the cheese toastie like I wandered in from Finglas.

Guff writes it down. ‘Drink?’ he says next.

My face is so warm, which means it’s red, and I hope Guff blames it on me sitting beside his deadly fireplace. My thoughts are all over the shop. I have to redeem myself. I could go for one of the saltwater IPAs, weissbier or a cacao stout? But even tourists drink those now. Guff just sighed impatiently, oh no. I look up at the bar, at the old Dublin characters with their Guinness and Heinekens, and then I take a big risk. I look at Guff and say, ‘I’ll have a Harp.’

Guff pauses, and says, ‘Niiice.’ Success. Only a select few know that even though it’s mass-produced, Harp is actually a really balanced lager with a traditional craft recipe that’s often overlooked.

He puts his fist out and we bump. Then he looks at my pro-abortion jumper and says, ‘Repeal, ya?’ and I say, ‘You know it, bredren,’ and then he says really loudly, ‘Dude, yes, do it for the sisters, show them respect. We got their backs man,’ and walks backwards to the bar with his hand clenched in the air like that black lad on the podium at the Olympics in the ’60s from history documentaries, #blacklivesmatter.

After about five minutes – masso speedy service, I know – he returns with the toastie, which is amazing, by the way. The bread is plain Brennan’s sliced, toasted golden, but the cheese is really creamy manchego made with ewe’s milk from La Mancha, melted perfectly. It washes down well with the Harp, which totally sets off the jalapeno mayo. The old Dublin characters are at the bar shouting and burping about the Luas workers’ strikes. Guff tells them that his grand-uncle taught James Connolly how to play hurling in Edinburgh, wow, and that when Guff was younger, he thought about joining the INLA but was talked out of it by a Catalan anarchist. Double wow. Then he pours the old Dublin characters another round of free pints.

I’m feeling pretty good, all things considered, the Xanax has even worn off, giving serious thought to planting myself up at the bar, getting Rothmans or John Player from the fag machine, and chatting with Guff and the characters for the day. Imagine the stories they’d have? Maybe later they’d invite me back to one of their flats, and their wrinkly wives would feed me stew or Crispy Pancakes or something. Then the fucking unthinkable happens. I get an email on the iPhone from Body & Soul saying they’re cancelling my pizzer and graffiti space because it would make patrons feel unsafe. That they’d read Síofra Condon’s post about my ‘patriarchal pizzer oven’. My throat drops. I feel stunned, and my face is freezing and wet. I’m having a full-blown panicker. Sitting here on the stool with my half-drank Harp.

Oh fuck, now Guff is calling me up to the bar with the old Dublin characters. I cannot let him know that I get anxiety attacks. The song ‘Inside My Love’ by Minnie Ripperton comes on over the system, vintage ’70s soul/funk, but I prefer the original by Leon Ware. I get up off the stool and walk sideways towards the door like that crab I saw when I was eight, on the rocks in Portrane Beach with Uncle George. I pinch the chest of my REPEAL jumper with both hands and pull the fabric out like tits, because Minnie Ripperton died of tit cancer and I abso have to let Guff know that I’m familiar with her music. He looks at me with a bit of a confused look as I leave, but I’m sure later he’ll understand what I meant.

I run out the door of the fucking pub. Oh shit, there’s Conor on the unicycle who got an interview for an acting job in the Abbey. I hide behind a delivery van. My chest is pumping. I legger down Sigurd Road, noticing noise from Dúsallaigh Ó Ceallaigh’s open window. I look up. My God, he’s playing Limp Bizkit really loudly, they are due to be cool right about now. Go Dúsallaigh, ironic as fuck, dude. I scarper down an alley and curl into the shape of crumpled paper, where I can have my panicker in private. I feel myself up, looking for one of Caroline’s Xanax. I find it, it’s beside my condom in the pocket of the trackie-bots. It’s raining hard. I cup a hand of rainwater from a puddle and slurp it down with the pill and wait for it to stop the shame. Ya, I know I’m fucking drinking out of a puddle like a crow, but it doesn’t matter once the xanny kicks in.

It kicks in. I am level. The cats are screwing but I can’t hear their screams, lol. I sit down on a bench and watch the sheeple on the Luas with their normal uncreative boring jobs. The concrete has that oil smell that rises when it rains for the first time in weeks. They look so upset and pale, huddled together, scowling at each other like they all just want to vomit into the air. Stuffed on the tram, each person is the other’s ugly reflection, and they hate the guy across from them and themselves. Forced to stare ahead in a wet moving bin full of mutual failure. Gross.

I’m devo about my Body & Soul space getting cancelled. Dad told me last month that I’d have to get a job in Dublin, that he’d ring one of his ad agency buddies because they always need highly creative people like me. I asked him to chill the beans a bit, because I had something big planned for the festival that was probably going to make me famous like Andy Warhol. So he agreed to keep topping up my account with a few grand every month until I had that sorted. He was already impressed with #BANTERGAFF and how I’d proven my ability to curate a space. He bragged about it to all his friends in Palermo, especially Aidan Holmes the economist from Foxrock whose son Zach got addicted to coke and now has a colostomy bag and can’t even go to college.

I’m defo fucked. There has to be a solution. I gotta think of something so big that Body & Soul simply cannot ignore it, and has to reconsider giving me a space to curate. I need something huge that will go sooooo viral, something on trend, but risky, and not like other stuff that content-creators in the Batter go for. Something that Huff Post or Broadly would pick up. Maybe I could, like, do video profiles of all those old Dublin characters up at the bar in J. Morrison & Sons? Like, follow them around for the day and profile their lives. Give them GoPros and they can vlog. Follow them with a drone. I bet they were all molested by Christian Brothers or GAA coaches when they were kids, and they don’t even know it. Like, I could interview them, about their gritty lives drinking Heineken, watching soccer and smoking Rothmans, and get them to start crying on camera and talking about when a priest had sex with them when they were five, or how their dads used to beat their mothers in front of them or something. I’d use Freudian stuff to get them to remember all the ugly incidents that happened to them. Do it in black and white and show their little flats in Smithfield with Thin Lizzy and Aslan music playing over it, but then switch it up and add like Burial or Autechre tracks too. That could be fucking huge. Like La Haine, but with ould lads. It would be such engaging content and really heartfelt, and I’d be like a new Ken Loach but better. Then maybe Ocras could, like, sketch their faces up like anime characters and we could graff those on the window-display of Brown Thomas, and I’d hand out free paella. Caroline is a manager there, she could swing it. Body & Soul could not walk away from that. It’s subversive community-based art and branding in one, so creative.

But what if it’s dangerous? What if I got one of the old lads to confess that he’d been molested on camera, but then his son didn’t understand art and came to try and kill me for putting family secrets on videos? Threw me into the boot of a stolen car and burnt it out in Darndale? The boot would be like an oven, it would probably be the hottest part of the car, so it would turn me to ash, vaporise me. I heard on Breaking Bad that when it’s that hot your teeth explode like popcorn and you can’t be identified. There’d be nothing left of me, I’d actually totally disappear and never be found. Oh my God, what if that happened and then everyone thought I’d committed suicide? Like, jumped in the canal and that’s why my body wasn’t found? How morto would that be? People thinking I’d topped myself and then anytime my name would be mentioned at a party, you’d have to go quiet and change the subject. Oh no, Ocras would totally do a suicide awareness video about me if that happened, he’d defo do that, the snake, and that’s all anyone would remember me for. I’d be remembered as a loser.

I take a third Xanax. I chew this one, it tastes like hairspray. But I absolutely can’t do the video with the old Dublin lads just in case, bullet dodged. My brain is overloading with creativity, so I take out my iPhone and open Facebook, which I hardly ever do because it’s just for dads these days. My young cousin Conlaoch had been online. He plays Xbox for days on end, and his profile photo is that meme of Pepe the Frog wearing a red Trump hat. He’s a self-confessed alt-right shitlord, a total racist sexist little dick, but he’s a good kid at heart and mostly does it for fun. He’d been sharing conspiracy theory videos that he makes on his timeline. It’s just him shouting into a camera, while gaming with his headset on, then lots of loud noises and memes. One was called ‘SHILLARY CLINTON TO REDUCE EUROPEAN POPULATION THROUGH AIDS CARRYING RAPEFUGEES’, self-explanatory. Another was about lizards building the pyramids and using them as broadcast towers to control radios inside our heads. It was called ‘LIZARD BRAIN RADIO CUCK PROOF. EYE OF HORUS. CHILD DIES ON CAMERA AT THE END’. He has tonnes of these conspiracy videos, crazy stuff. But holy shit, he’s getting, like, 80,000 likes a post. I click on the Hillary Clinton video, and wait a bit for the YouTube app to open, not long though, 4G around here is super-fast. Suffering shitballs, it has 15 million views and comments are streaming in. That is totes insane. How is Conlaoch getting all these views? Some of these comments are from, like, South Africa and America. I DM Conlaoch immediately.

Me: Hey cuz, watsup dude, how you get so many views. Rad stuff. *smiley emoji* *black clapping-hand emoji*

Conlaoch: Reeee. I hear you’re Lord Cuckington in Dublin? Seen those feminazis shut you down. Should have doxxed them IRL. *laughing-crying-face emoji*

Me: I know dude, total buzzkill sluts. Lol. I fucked most of them anyway, don’t worry. How you get views? *100 emoji*

Conlaoch: I search the most googled words that week for males aged 10 to 25 then use those words in the YouTube titles. That’s it. *laughing-crying-face emoji*

I start devouring Wikipedia articles on conspiracy theories. I could totally bring something new to this genre, something quirky and outside the box. There’s lots to take in: 9/11 conspiracies, Saddam Hussein owning a Stargate in the dessert, Obama controlling weather to invent climate change, the Hollow Earth theory, celebrity Illuminati puppets. But this is all basic shit. But seriously though, ‘Yo, what would I do if I was early ’90s RZA from Wu Tang Clan and I was about to make a dope beat that changed hip-hop production forever?’ I wouldn’t copy trends, I’d sample classic soul, stuff that’s still there in musical consciousness but hasn’t been touched yet by hip-hop, then mix that up with some contemporary gangster shit to keep it relevant and gritty. YESSSSSS, that’s it. The fucking ‘moon landing was fake’ theory. The Robert Johnson of all conspiracy theories, the originator. No one talks about it anymore, no one thinks about it. That’s what I need to do.

The theory goes that the moon landing was faked by the US to put the shits up Russia. That it was filmed by Stanley Kubrick in a Hollywood back-lot, and the sheeple ate it up because it was on TV. What if I proved the moon landing was fake, but not faked because of the Cold War, faked to distract us from Islam taking over Europe? Yes. It was fabricated, and Islam was invented in the ’60s, under our noses, but we were too busy looking up at the moon to notice it happening. The CIA, KGB, Mossad and M15 rewrote all the history books and invented this big religion, to enslave us and keep us in fear, all because in the ’60s we got too woke from taking acid and listening to Hendrix. Shit, maybe they killed Hendrix because of that? Jim Morrison and Marley too. Mainstream media has fed us this myth, this fake religion that was made up while we were obsessed with exploring planets and building rockets. You put a dude on the moon, it’s so mind-blowing, you can feed the world any bullshit lie. Why not?

What else happened in the 1960s? The first mass immigration of Islamic Algerians happened in France (hired actors). Israel started throwing its weight around (anything with Jews is great). Peak oil from Saudi Arabia (follow the money). The roots of the EU were sown (one-world government). Think about it. Those countries were just Arabs before the ’60s, like Aladdin and stuff. They went around rubbing lamps on camels. Look at the film Casablanca from the ’40s, it’s in Morocco, you see any Muslims in that? No, just Arabs rubbing lamps and wearing turbans and smoking hash. No Allah, no burkas, no jihad, no sharia. Now all we care about today is Islam this, Islam that. They tell us that Islam is a threat, and what do we do? We shit our pants and obey whatever the one-world government wants us to obey, like good sheeple. It’s made up. It all ties in. This is all an easy sell. I’d believe it. It’s perfect. That’s that gangster shit, that Wu Tang shit. The moon landing is the obscure soul sample, the Islam stuff is ODB’s gritty lyrics about selling crack. Damn, this is so creative. This will get eaten up. If I just throw the right soundtrack on it, maybe Erykah Badu or Death Grips, I can get Huff Post sharing it, BuzzFeed, Lovin Dublin, fucking Vice would share it. They don’t care what they share so long as it gets views and has the appearance of being woke.

Those alt-right edgelords who normally make conspiracy or Islam stuff are just computer dorks. They get the branding wrong every time, using basic system typefaces, bad editing, awful soundtracks. I’m the Marshall Jefferson to their Kraftwerk. Those pricks at Body & Soul will beg me to curate a space, and I’ll show everyone. Ocras, Aoife, Guff, Síofra Condon, the total cunt. I heard she sucked off a guy at Irish college and isn’t even a real lesbian, she just pretends so people don’t call her privileged. My hands have that twitch they get when they want to shake with excitement but can’t because I took three Xanax today, lol.

As I slump on that shit bench by Smithfield Luas, the Dublin clouds over the Liffey look like black tyre smoke, blocking the faggot sun that whimpers out a mushroom colour. The sun is such a dry shite loser. I could even stare at it directly because it couldn’t penetrate the cloud. It looks like a crap Penney’s lampshade behind a curtain in a student flat. The sun over Dublin is a pathetic weak asshole, too scared to express its true potential. Always asking permission from the rain to shine, letting the stupid drizzle get its way every time. Puffing out passive-aggressive UV rays through the mist that would give you freckles on your nose and you’d never even know what caused it. Not like the one on the continent, or in Croatia or something. It’s probably the reason everyone around here are such buzzkills. They catch loser off the sun. I should move to Croatia after the moon-landing video.

I fix the brim of my paddycap and make my way back to the gaff, with the sun tapping me on the back like an old woman telling me I’ve too many items in my basket for the queue I’m in. What are the logistics of getting this video made? I’ll need to borrow Dad’s 4x4 Land Rover and round up my film equipment. Two Canon D7 cameras, zoom mics, tripods and maybe a few strong lights on stilts. All sorted, only Dad’s in Palermo and has the keys to the Rover.

The next morning, I’m forced to book a bus ticket on Bus Éireann, which is the worst service known to man. The drivers are ungrateful and smell like dried-in sweat, the floors on their buses are filthy, and I know someone who got tetanus from sitting on a fingernail that was jutting out of a seat. All the camera gear packed up in two big rucksacks. Feeling a bit shit because I took two more Xanax before bed so I could get to sleep. I had to take one when I woke up too, to stop feeling like shit. The bus is leaving at 11 a.m. So I get an Uber down to Busáras near the Liffey. I’m going to west Clare by the way, to this place called the Burren. There used to be this fridge magnet in Mum’s kitchen, on the fridge obviously. I always hated her shitty apartment. She lived there after her and Dad split but it was only bought so Dad could rent it out to Polish people. So I despised it when she had to move in. I was like eleven, she’d just stay up in her room, whimpering and drinking. It was the first time I ever got depressed or scared. I used to stare at the fridge magnet of the Burren, to try and pretend I couldn’t hear her cry-drinking in the next room. This little photo of a pale stony desert, I couldn’t believe it was in Ireland. It was just grey rock, for miles and miles. I was the one who found her body. I thought she was just having a lie-in, but when I walked into the bedroom, her skin was violet and she had puke all over her face. She was naked too, which was even worse. I stared at that fridge magnet of the Burren while I waited for the ambulance to arrive, and it’s the last thing I remember from the apartment before I left to live with Dad and Caroline in Wicklow. The Burren looked like a different planet. It looked like outer space. I couldn’t think of a more perfect place to nail this moon-landing video.

I’m halfway through this bus journey and need to piss furiously. It’s one of those regional services that takes about a bajillion stops in the most isolated areas. It’s basically just going left from Dublin and stopping in every sparsely populated ditch that has people with green teeth, hurling jerseys and that muck-savage look of confusion that conveys a fear the British will be back at any moment to steal their spuds. Actual human cows who have sex and fight at the same time to a Kings of Leon soundtrack. I never even knew Ireland could get this rural.

The bus climbed shitty purple mountains for, like, a half-hour, those mountains that don’t even have grass, just short brown stumps that are always wet. Like in the film Braveheart where Mel Gibson is dressed as a smurf. This whole place is a Jameson advert for thick Yanks. The driver goes up these mountains, only to pause at a fucking pole in the middle of nowhere and not one person gets off. The bus stops themselves haven’t even been changed since the ’70s, they still have the old logo of the red setter. This is why these Bus Éireann pricks need to be privatised and replaced with actual hard workers who want to get up early. They’re wasting everyone’s time, going to bus stops that no one is getting off at. The way down the mountain tickles my bladder, which swells to a whopper aching sting as the bus descends more. When you need to piss this bad, you get an intense pain on top of your dick and then think about dying. I take three Xanax there and then. There’s no way I’m getting him to stop this bus, just so I can piss, and then everyone can look out the window at me pissing and I become the guy who pissed in the grass for the rest of the journey. The other passengers would probably film me pissing against a rock on their bogger Nokias and put it up on Bebo or whatever they use, and then everyone up in the Batter would see it, and they’d call me piss tourist. I’m not being the guy who pisses on the floor of this bus either. I’m just going to have to pretend that the next stop is my stop, and then wait for the next bus.

It’s at least another twenty minutes of tiny isolated road before the driver stops and shouts, ‘Polagoona, anyone for Polagoona?’

There’s two elderly women and a man with Down Syndrome left in the cabin. I get up off my seat with the utmost care, and grab my sack full of gear. I’m tip-toeing down the aisle with scrunched knees, my stomach pushing my belt because it’s so full of piss. The engine vibrations cause the piss inside to swirl around but the three Xanax make it feel tolerable.

‘This is my stop,’ I say. The driver doesn’t give a fuck and he smells like dried-in sweat.

On the roadside, I wait for him to drive away, then watch until the back of the bus is far off on the road. I pull my pants down around my ankles and try to push out a piss. I’ve been holding it for so long that it shocked my bladder or something, because it’s not coming. No matter how hard I try, I can’t piss. I try thinking of a river, I try squatting, I even drink some of my water. No piss. I can’t fucking believe this, so I take one more Xanax. If I can relax a bit more, the piss will just exit naturally.

I’m staring at the yellow-with-condensation times on the bus stop, there’s no second bus coming after the one I’d just gotten on. Typical. I’m stranded in some gaff called Polagoona, in what I can only assume is either Galway or Clare. It’s starting to get dark and a bit cold. There’s a cluster of lights a few miles away in the distance that defo has to be a village. I’ve got my credit cards. If I can just get as far as there, I can get a hotel or something, relax, maybe have a pint. It’s going to be fine. Everything will be OK. I’ll be laughing about this later in bed. I’ll head to the Burren tomorrow and shoot the moon-landing video then. This whole situation makes for a pretty masso tweet anyway – people will think I’m fucking loopers, down here in boggerland.

‘Lost up a mountain, in a secret location, working on an exciting new project,’ I type. No fucking reception on the phone though, literally not one bar, so it doesn’t send.

I look up from my phone and it’s gotten darker still. The road that leads down the mountain to the lights is snakey and convoluted, with no streetlights. This is scary. Well, like, it should be scary, but not really because I’m very dozy from all the Xanax. It’s going to be a pretty long journey down that road, and it’ll get darker with every step. I’ll probably be hit and killed by some in-bred culchie driver who’s after drinking paraffin out of a tractor engine.

Those lights in the distance aren’t going anywhere though. It’s probably shorter to literally go straight for them across the field. Like, a beeline. Just walk straight at the lights, across that big field. It looks pretty flat and uncomplicated as fields go. No big hedges or anything. My stomach is still so inflated with piss that I have to completely open my jeans. But that kind of hurts when I walk so I’ll just take the jeans off. Better take my underpants off too to be safe. This is the biggest erection I’ve ever had. When you need to piss this bad, your bladder expands and stimulates your prostate, and that gives you a piss horn. I’d read that on Google on the bus. We must have been in, like, Kildare when I looked that up because that’s the last time I had 4G internet on the iPhone.

I’m determined to get to those lights. I don’t care that I’m walking through a field with no pants and on a boner. There’s no one around anyway. This ground underneath is pretty mushy. My leg got stuck a few yards back so I pulled it out with my arms. Got mucky hands. Good job I’m not wearing pants because it would make this way more difficult. There’s this odd smell the deeper I walk. I’ve definitely smelled it before. It’s kind of cheesy and earthy and eggy. Where do I know this from? This is worse than trying to name a song, why can’t there be a Shazam app for smells? OMG, that’s so creative, I better patent that when I get back. What the fuck is that smell? Oh shit, I know. Guff’s fireplace, in J. Morrison & Sons pub. The turf. The ground smells like the bucket of turf beside Guff’s fire. I must be walking across a peat bog. Mum used to tell me stories about these when I was a kid. She was a blow-in from Clare, but she went to college and met my dad in Dublin and never went back. She used to tell me about cutting turf in the summer with her dad.

It’s too dark now but I’d love to see what this bog looks like. Maybe I could get some turf for Guff and bring it back. I’ll take out the iPhone for the torch and point it at the ground. It’s all brown and wet, but crazy spongy, like a bouncy castle. I’ll walk around another bit, look for a good patch with the light, and then rest the phone on my bag. Fuck it, I’m here anyway, why not? I’ll dig a bit of turf for Guff and bring it back in the rucksack. Might as well. How cool would that be? Who the fuck up in Stoneybatter would just wander into a pub with their own turf that they cut, lol? I can get one of the tripods from the sack and use it like a kind of shovel to dig bits up. It’s really cool, the stuff gets spongier and less like earth the deeper I go, the eggy smell is way stronger when I dig. I’ll keep digging for a bit. Shit, I think I hit something?

With the iPhone light shining I’m seeing what’s like this strand of dark leather. I pulled loads of muck and turf away, and I can make out a long thin shape. Call me nuts, but this looks like a weird skinny leathery black leg. Oh fuck, no way. It’s a fucking bog body. Oh shit. They’ve only ever found like six of these in Ireland. I can’t believe this. We studied these in Leaving Cert, they even took us into the National Museum to see them. Irish mummies, my teacher called them. So basically, these dudes, like, kings or something, would, like, get murdered or die thousands of years ago, and then they’d get buried in a bog and their bodies would preserve perfectly, until they get found by legends like me. This is such a me thing to do. If ever there was proof of what a total ledgebag I am, I fucking step foot into a bog for the first time in my life and find a fucking bog body. Ocras is going to hate me.

I reach into my rucksack to take out the 7D camera. I have to start vlogging this discovery immediately. Fuck the moon-landing video, this is history. I just discovered history. Holy shit ... what if I claim the body as my own? I should do that. Fuck giving it to a museum, he’s mine. I could like take the bog body back to Stoneybatter and put a cool hat on him. Maybe take him to Body & Soul and put him behind a set of decks, call him DJ Bogger. Fuck ya. A bog-body DJ? That’s next-level. Daft Punk can shove their robot helmets up their hoops. DJ Bogger is what’s happening this summer.

I don’t fucking believe this, where is my 7D camera gone? I think I placed all the cameras in the other rucksack, I must have left it on the bus because I was so distracted by needing to piss. For the love of Jah. OK, one more Xanax before I flip out. I still need to piss. Do not even tell me I’m not getting this act of ultimate ledgebaggery on camera, and my phone battery has just about enough to use the torch a bit more. If I even chance the iPhone camera, the battery will go, and then I’ve no light. FML. Maybe it’s for the best. I’d have to vlog with no pants on a piss horn, that would take hours of keying a blur in on Premiere. It doesn’t matter. I’m already planning on digging this ancient fucker up, throwing him on my back, and making it down to those lights. I can ring the bus company and get the cameras back in the morning, although what if that Down Syndrome lad stole them? No time to think like that.

I get down on my knees and start pulling the turf away from around the body while I still have light from the phone. I can make out little details the more I pull. The legs are real skinny and mashed together with rope around the feet. This rope looks like it would fall apart if I touched it. His dick is tiny. As I scrape away more turf, I can see that his stomach is, like, ripped open and even his gut casings are intact, all black and leathery. This is fucking incredible, dude is perfectly preserved, except for his nipples that have been cut off. He defo had a gruesome end. Someone really hated this guy, he must have been a total asshole.

As I dig further up, where his neck should be, my hand slips and I fall forward on my stomach, on top of the body. I reach with my fingers and realise that I’ve obviously been lying just at the edge of a ledge. I grab the phone to shine some light ahead of me. There’s a big sinkhole and I’d almost fallen in, close call, but now I’m lying on the rim of it, on top of this bog body. Couldn’t see it in the dark obviously. The rest of the bog body is protruding from the wall of this sinkhole. It must have been recently sunk, and that’s what budged him to the surface.

My chest is on his, as I poke my face over the ledge and shine the light. Looking down, I can see his head sticking out from the wall of the sinkhole. He’s got a big mouth full of teeth grinning up at me and this baldy head with one tuft of red hair. He would look so cool DJing at Body & Soul, my God. I’d put a tank-top on him, with an LGBT rainbow. There’s easily a ten-foot drop underneath his head, with water at the bottom. I could pull his legs, that might drag him from the hole’s wall, but his head would probably come off if I applied any pressure. He’s no good to me without a head. I’m defo going to have to climb down that hole and clear the mud around him that way. Shit, this will be difficult, but not impossible. I place the phone on the ledge, so that the light points into the hole, and I climb over and kick my feet into the soft wall to get some footing. Good thinking, very Bear Grylls, so creative. If I can just dig the mud out from around his head, I can take the whole body and then bring him down to the village.

I’m making good progress, but it’s starting to rain, which is when my leg fucking slips so I grab onto the head and hang off it. I clamber with my other hand to reach the ledge, but it’s too fucking wet and the rain is getting heavier and washing all the mud down into the sinkhole. I can feel the bog body starting to loosely slip towards me and out of the wall, with me on the end. It’s stretchy and leathery, like a dog’s chew toy, but it can defo hold my weight. I have him headlocked, but he’s just pushing out of the wall of that sinkhole like a difficult shit exiting a rectum. The rain looks fat in the blue light of the iPhone on the ledge. This is so slippy. He comes free and we both splash ten feet below. Thank fuck this water is only reaching as far as my knees, but the hole is filling up with rain and mud pretty quickly. I try to think of how I can get back up to the surface, but then the light on the phone that’s illuminating us goes and I’m standing in pitch black, down a hole, holding this bog body, with nothing but the sound of rising mud around me. I hadn’t told anyone back in the Batter that I was going to Clare. No one knows I’m here. My only hope is that someone will find me in the morning, someone walking up from that village in the distance.

I remember Mum’s stories about the bogs. About lights known as will o’ the wisps that flicker over turf when gas is released. How these lights lead people off their paths. There is no fucking village. There are no people. This is the middle of nowhere. Just me down a hole, with a bog body, getting ready to drown in muddy turf and be dug up in another ten thousand years. Cradling this cunt who died a millennium or so before me and I’ve no pants on. I want more than anything to feel fear, regret, doom, panic, I want to fight for my life, to feel anything at all. But I’m too numb from Xanax. I feel nothing, I can’t feel my last moment. But at least I can finally take a piss.