Puking your guts up at the start of a long drive to the All-Ireland final is never a good idea. I don’t recommend it. I would have done it out the window but when I shouted at Jonno, after he wouldn’t pull in, that I couldn’t open the window – there was some stupid fucking child lock on it – him and Mick ignored me, chatting away to each other, giving out about somebody. They didn’t ignore me when I made pure shite of the back of the car outside Bunratty, I can tell you that. They went fair fucking quiet then, until Jonno started shouting and roaring at me. Mick was giggling; he’s as thick as a ditch, that fella. He barely scraped a pass in the Junior Cert, and he was out the door of Flannan’s like shit off a shovel straight after – he hadn’t a pup’s chance in the Leaving.
To be honest, I was probably still drunk from last night when I got into the car. Wouldn’t have been the first time, says you. Me and Ray had an almighty scourge of drink yesterday. There were two matches on; United were playing Chelsea at one o’clock – that kicked it off. We had a scatter of pints in O’Halloran’s and then we went to a party in some house over in Killaloe. There were a lot of women at the party, some hotties off the boats on Lough Derg too, but by that stage I was more interested in their vodka than what was under their miniskirts. I was clane off my nopper, no two ways about it. I done the dog on the drink all week, starting on Wednesday in Limerick – I was fair poisoned by last night. What happened after is no surprise, really.
Anyway, Jonno rocks up to the front door of the flat around half-seven this morning, flags flying out the windows and the boot, blowing the horn like a man in a bad traffic jam caused by women who won’t pull out on the road and DRIVE THE FUCK ON. As if I wasn’t in enough trouble with the neighbours. He’s an awful impatient man, Jonno, always was, and he wasn’t in the hale of his health this morning, either. He was cranky as fuck, from start to finish. Mick was like a briar, too. He ran out of fags last night at home so he’d a big puss up on him in the car.
If Jonno hadn’t kept blowing the horn and shouting out the window I might have taken a bottle of water or Lucozade Sport or something with me. Maybe even had a cup of tea with a bit of bread and marmalade to settle the stomach, but no. A shower might have helped too, come to think of it, but I forgot to set the alarm.
I think that’s why I puked in the car and we only twenty minutes up the road – I’d nothing to soak up the dregs of the drink in my gut. I told him twice I was going to get sick but he was thick with me because I kept him waiting. Fierce stupid thing, not to pull over, when somebody after a feed of drink says to you that they’re going to get sick in a car. But that’s Jonno, a gowl of the highest order. So ’twas his own fault.
A few weeks ago the Super put me on a month’s unpaid leave and fined me two weeks’ wages on top of it. You’re on your last chance, now, Lonergan, says he, make good use of it, or the force is not the place for you. The big, ugly Kerry bollox – everybody knows what he done to that young girl from Kilmallock, and she only just out of Templemore.
What he didn’t know was the money didn’t matter a fuck, anyway, because I was after remortgaging the house for fifty grand, so I was rolling in it, and I was only delighted with the month off. After Clare winning the All-Ireland I was planning the mother and father of all piss-ups and then I’d head to Listowel to clean the bookies out there. After that, I’d be back on track. I was going to sort it out with Karen, pay the ESB and the gas arrears, put a bit into the mortgage, take it handy on the beer and the gee-gees, look after Kaylee, go back to work, maybe even play a bit of junior hurling, and clean up my act.
I had it all planned out and everything.
Karen lost the head altogether when the electricity and the gas rang on the same day about the missed payments. She clean flipped. I had a couple of bad months after Cheltenham: I probably shouldn’t have gone over there with the lads and I definitely shouldn’t have borrowed that money from Hogan. That was a mistake, I grant you that. First off, guards shouldn’t owe money to scumbags. Second, guard or no guard, he’d break your fucking leg, or your wife’s leg, as soon as look at you – he’s as mad as a bag of cats, the same lad.
Not that Karen knew about Hogan, nor ever will, hopefully. But she did know about the four missed payments because the ESB and the gas company rang the home number, the stupid bolloxes, instead of doing what I told them to do which was to ring me on the mobile – I gave them the number specifically for that purpose. Now they might have rang me and left some messages, and I might not have answered or rang them back. But sure the whole thing was only a blip, only a bit of a hiccup, and I’d sort them out as soon as my luck turned. There was no need to ring the bloody landline and tell the wife.
Karen checked the bank account and saw that my wages weren’t going into it any more. I was using a different account for that. I told her that I was just diversifying the banking and that TSB had a way better interest rate, anyway, but she didn’t see it like that. So she gave me the road. I probably didn’t put up much of a fight, to be honest. I might have even been glad to see the back of her nagging.
I know this is disgusting, but there’s sick and there’s sick, right? Big difference, too. It’s one thing eating a bad bit of fish or something out of a chipper like Karen did in Kilkee that day and throwing it up straightaway. It’s messy and all bitty and everything but it’s still fresh food. But what I puked up in Jonno’s car? Ah now. I was after eating it yesterday, or maybe even on Friday, and it was well digested by then, I can tell you that. With a lash of porter and vodka thrown down on top of it and some other kind of shots, and God-only-knows-what in the house after. Not a good mix at all. I made a right dog’s dinner of the car, lads – and the amount of the stuff! I couldn’t believe it.
When Jonno eventually pulled over – he wasn’t worried about stopping on a motorway now, though, was he? – I was able to get some of it off the mat on the floor and he had a couple of old jerseys in a gear bag in the boot that wiped more off the back of the passenger seat. My own jeans were fucking destroyed altogether but I took them off and put on a manky tracksuit bottom that was all covered in dried mud. Got a few beeps off cars on the road for that striptease, I can tell you. Of course cleaning up gave me a bad dose of the retches – the two boys as well. Typical Jonno, he hadn’t a drop of water in the car to wipe anything down, or wash out my mouth. He’s some tool.
At this stage his face was after going a bit purplish and he was marching up and down by the ditch, roaring like a bull, the big thick. ‘You’re fucking cleaning up this fucking car, and you’re fucking paying for a full fucking valet in Shannon tomorrow,’ says he, spitting fire. ‘Getting the fucking smell of puke out of a fucking car is next to fucking impossible.’ He stuck his head in the back door and recoiled. ‘Fuck’s sake.’
‘I told you to pull over. I told you to open the fucking window,’ I said back, in between retches. There wasn’t much said after that, on the way into Limerick, with all the windows down, and we breathing through our mouths, our lips puckered like young ones looking for kisses.
I wouldn’t mind, but when we pulled in to the Maxol at the Ennis Road roundabout, the place was jam-packed with cars stocking up for the journey. Saffron and blue all over the place and lads coming and going, full of the joys. Just what I needed, this morning, and the state of me.
Jonno hopped out and went to the jacks. Or went to queue for the jacks; it looked like a lot of fellas had left home in a hurry. Mick went into the shop for fags. I bought a big bottle of water, a packet of tissues, some wet wipes and a bottle of Dettol spray cleaner, and I went at it. I got some looks in the shop, with the pointy tan shoes and the muddy tracksuit pants, but I stared the fuckers down.
Of course, as I was leaning into the car and spraying and wiping away with the door open, who walks past only Tommy fucking O’Gorman from Sixmilebridge, the self-righteous prick. He stopped and looked at me, like I was dog shit stuck to his shoe, his face all wrinkled up. And the same man all over me like a rash not so long ago. I couldn’t get rid of him the night we gave Cork a right good trimming in the League semi-final replay – down in their home patch too. And me after winning man-of-the-match and keeping O’Sullivan scoreless. Anyway, I told the cunt to go fuck himself and I went back to the spraying and wiping. And retching.
I dropped the bottle of Dettol and the wet wipe then, and punched the inside of the door. I hit it a right few digs, nearly took it off the hinges, until the panelling cracked. Jonno and Mick were still chatting in the queue for the jacks, so I went back into the shop and got some glue – they have everything in those garages in fairness, even if they are desperate robbers – and I stuck the bits back together.
I felt a bit better in the car after Limerick, except for the splitting headache and the sore wrist. I was after washing my pants in the garage jacks, gagging away the whole time, but I thought by then that everything that could come up had come up. I was wrong about that too. I had a good shit and that didn’t do me any harm, and I settled into the other side of the back seat with my bottles of water and 7up.
And that’s when I saw the envelope.
There it was, a little splinter of brown peeping out of the pocket in the back of the passenger seat, exactly in the place where I seen it a few weeks ago, when we went up to the semi-final against Waterford. It was the only picture the family had of Jonno’s mam and dad’s wedding, and Jonno was supposed to make copies for all his brothers and sisters for the mother’s month’s mind the following week. He’d obviously forgotten about it. I leaned over slowly and slipped it out of the pocket, keeping it low. The brown envelope was stained with vomit and just as I was about to remove the photo to wipe it, I had another idea. I quietly folded the envelope twice and put it into the pocket of the shitty kaks that Jonno was after giving me.
We came into a lot of traffic outside Portlaoise where the two motorways meet. We were crawling – it looked like those cocky Cork fuckers were coming up in numbers. Probably thought it was going to be a cakewalk. I fucken hate that crowd, I have to tell ye now; they think they’re God’s gift.
So Jonno loses the rag. Like I said, he hasn’t a jot of patience. He got the brainwave to pass on the inside, on the hard shoulder, to make up some ground on the langers. Fuck it, says he, and pulled the car sharp to the left, but he forgot to look in his wing-mirror, so he didn’t see the Avensis bombing up behind. The Avensis braked, but too late, hitting us a right slap and slamming my nose against the driver’s headrest. I don’t like seat belts at the best of times.
In all fairness, the boys from Cratloe in the Avensis took it well, considering it was Jonno’s fault out-and-out. Of course it helped that I jumped out of the car screaming blue murder and came the heavy, waving my warrant card around the place and threatening to have the driver put off the road. It probably wasn’t a bad thing either that blood was pumping out of my nose – I must have looked a right sight, all the same.
Jonno was in the wrong, no question, but so were they driving up on the inside like that, so ’twas a no-win situation for everybody. We’d have sorted out the whole thing in a few minutes only that a squad car from Roscrea pulled up and a pernickety Tipp sergeant insisted on writing it up. There wasn’t hardly any damage to the cars and my nose gets bloody whenever I get a slap. The worst of it was that, after I calmed down a bit and the Cratloe boys backed off, I got another fit of the gawks and these were the bad ones.
Basically your body is a one-way system, right? From the mouth down through the belly and out the hole. And it doesn’t like any traffic going the opposite direction. It’s bad for business, I suppose. So what happens is that the further down in the gut the stuff is, the harder it is to bring it up. This fair fucking hurt. You think of funny things when you’re in physical pain; mostly you just want it to go away. But all I could think about on my hands and knees, there on the side of the road, were the smirking faces of those Cork bastards and they crawling past a few feet away, no doubt enjoying the spectacle. All I had left in me to puke apart from the water and 7up was a bit of dirty orange-looking bile, hardly worth its while coming all the way up, but it did anyway – and good fucking riddance to bad rubbish.
When that was done, I stood back up, wiped my mouth with my sleeve, sat into the car and slammed the door after me. None of the others said anything, including the Tipp sergeant – they knew that much, if they didn’t know much else. I opened the car window and spat onto the road. I put some tissues up my nose to try to stop the blood and it worked, but there was no getting the stains off the upholstery and my shirt. I did what I could with the Dettol and the wet wipes and I closed my eyes and tried not to think about the last few years of my life. I tried to get some sleep. I did too, eventually.
We motored on after that and by half-twelve we had stools at the counter in Quinn’s on the Drumcondra Road and I was ready for action again. The jeans were nearly dry when I put them on in the jacks – still a bit smelly but better than that stupid tracksuit bottom. I tore up Jonno’s mam and dad too and flushed the pieces to fuck down the toilet. I was probably out of order doing that – ’tisn’t a bit like me, to tell you the truth, ask anyone. But you know what? The fucker had it coming.
Anyway, now the day was rightly looking up. Nothing like the end of a hangover, and putting another in its place.
When Clare were making their way through the championship the last few years I knew straight away that I wanted them to lose. My own county – and I wanted them to lose. Even to Tipp. Even in the final against Galway last year. Outside, of course, I was shouting ‘Up the Banner’ with everybody else, but inside I was hoping the fuckers would get hammered. A desperate terrible thing to admit, but there you have it.
And I couldn’t go to matches either. Not a hope. I couldn’t go near a pitch; I didn’t have the stomach for it. I watched them all in the pub. That’s what I was planning today too, before the shit hit the fan.
I had a few quick pints to get things going and they stayed down, no bother at all. Jonno and Mick were in flying form, giving mighty stick altogether to the Cork langers in the pub about the hammering we lashed into them last year and how we were about to repeat the dose.
I was starving after the pints so I went around the corner to a little chipper and horsed down a couple of chicken and chips. Nothing to write home about, but they did the job. Here’s another thing: with only a few hours to go before the match, I had a right dose of the jitters. Remember when I said earlier that I remortgaged the house for fifty grand? Well, most of that was already gone. I had to fix up with Hogan, the headcase, for starters, and of course he screwed me with interest, not that he’d even know the meaning of the word, no more than the man on the moon; but he screwed me, anyway, in that shithole of a house of his, on the Island, with his mad-looking brothers in their scanger outfits with their pit-bull terriers and their ’tashes and tattoos. So that was thirteen gone. I had to pay back the brother the five I owed him, too – that’s a long story: I don’t want to talk about that now. Then I did a stupid thing and blew another ten in Galway, and that was after promising Karen I’d never go back after what happened at the cocaine party last year.
With a few other bits and pieces of eejitry, I looked at the App on the phone one day and saw the balance at only €18,056. So what did I do? What do you think I did? I put fifteen grand on Clare to win the All-Ireland, that’s what I did – this was before the semi-final and I got 7/2, to win the bones of 70K. Great odds altogether. I was all set to clean up; the win was guaranteed. Sure with McMahon and the lads flying and Cork in a heap in their back line, there could only be one result. Adding to the winnings with what I’d make in Listowel, ’twas happy days are here again and show me the way to go home.
But a bet’s still a bet, even when it’s a dead cert, so I was a bit nervy. And if I was in my right mind I probably would have ignored Jimmy Dolan when I saw him in the crowd outside Quinn’s on my way back in. But I didn’t.
Jimmy is one of Limerick’s finest little robbing scangers, and that’s saying something – there’s strong competition around there, I can tell you that. He’s one of my regular parishioners and he knows better than to go to a match in Gaelic Park or Cusack Park where he’d be spotted. The little bollix thought he’d be safe enough up here with the Cork crowd, but the thought made a fool of him. Or me, as it turned out.
I grabbed him by the collar and started dragging him over to a couple of our lads in uniform, who were directing traffic, to lock him up. But when I took a hoult of him, he peeled out of his jacket and shot off up the road like a rocket. He probably had a lash of money and phones on him, even though they often pass on their takings to somebody else. Anyway, I took off after him, like I wasn’t seventeen stone and after two feeds of chicken and chips and after a scourge of drink the day before and a dose of the gawks and me with a bad knee and not after training for two years.
But you know what? When I was sprinting up the road after the bould Jimmy I felt so alive that I started shouting. I was fucking flying, lads, and all the Clare and Cork fans cheering me on. I was back! There I was, belting up the road like the clappers in my pointy tan shoes, my smelly jeans, my bloody shirt, letting fly: yahoo, this is the life, boys, up the fucken yard, I have you now, Dolan, ya Limerick cunt ya. I was gaining on the little maggot too. I was.
I might have actually caught him but the next thing I knew I was on the ground in a heap on a bit of grass beside a tree. People gathered around me, leaning over me, saying stuff I couldn’t hear, and me looking up at them like a fool, gasping for air like a fish on a boat.
Fact of the matter is that drinking and gambling is great fun. Hard to beat it really, lads, and that’s the God’s honest truth. When you’re on the batter or you’ve a ton on the nose of a horse, life is fucking mighty. Why do you think people do it if it isn’t the bee’s knees? Jesus, it costs enough, ’twould want to be. And here’s what it does for you: when you’re on that high nothing else in the wide earthly world matters a damn. Nothing. The past never happened. You were never dropped off the Clare panel, missing out on an All-Ireland; you didn’t do your cruciate, put on four stone, fall out with your club, give the best part of 120 grand of your money to those bastarding bookies; you were never thrown out of your own home, breaking your wife’s heart; you were never on the verge of losing your job; you never lost interest in your only child or defaulted on the mortgage that was putting a roof over her head; no, you never fucked up one single thing in all your born days. Now isn’t that nice? Isn’t it?
There’s one drawback. Well, more than one, but the main one is this: while you can forget about your past, you can forget about your future too. The next drink or the next bet is the only future you have and the only one you’ll ever want. Nothing else comes close. That’s the price you pay, and every last man in the pub and the bookies knows it. Don’t tell me they don’t – even if they wouldn’t admit it in a month of Sundays.
And I don’t go in for all this malarkey about drinking or gambling or any of that being a disease. I just don’t buy it. That’s a cop-out if you ask me. Diabetes is a disease, cancer is a disease, malaria is a disease – something makes you sick and you have to treat it. Drinking is a choice – you either do it or you don’t. You don’t choose fucking lung cancer, I can guarantee you that, but you do choose to go into the bookies.
There’s the bookies, right? Across the road, or whatever. If you don’t want to go into it, you won’t. If you do want to go into it, you will. And if you want to bet the wages or the farm or the car or whatever, you will. Simple as. It isn’t a disease that made you do it. You wanted to do it. Same with the drink. There’s the pub, go in or don’t – it’s up to you. But don’t go blaming a disease you caught off your father or your uncle or whoever. Gimme a fucking break.
And going to those meetings and telling your troubles and all the terrible things you done to a bunch of losers and strangers? Sorry, now, no fucking way. Taking the twelve steps to recovery? A load of old shite. There’s only one step you have to take – step away from the bookies and the bar. Step into your own life.
Now, you have to keep taking it, I’ll grant you that. But ’tis only one step, and it’s up to you whether you take it or you don’t.
So anyway, they’re working away on me, on the side of the Drumcondra Road, doing CPR and all the rest. A young one is on her knees beside me, giving me mouth-to-mouth and pumping away on my chest. Fair play to her, a Cork woman too.
It’s quare out, lads. I’m still in my own body, yer wan blowing away into my mouth and pounding on my chest. But I’m outside it too, looking on, kind of above the whole thing. It reminds me of the time I took those acid tabs with that nutter from Armagh at the semi-final against Kilkenny last year.
I think I hear an ambulance in the distance getting closer, but it’s all a bit weird, d’ya know?
I do know one thing, that’s for sure. I want to live. Fuck it, but I want to live. I don’t want to die here on the ground, like a big, fat, useless heap of shit, and all them people looking down at me. I want to see Kaylee grow up, and I want to get back in with the club. Jimmy Daly mentioned to me the other week that they want someone to mind the Under 14s next year and I’d love to give it a go. I’d love to have another baby with Karen, if she’d take me back after what I done to her; she’s not the worst, and wouldn’t that be something – a little lad for Kaylee to boss around and for me to put a hurley into his hand?
Jesus, that feeling in a dressing room before a Munster final. Where you’d go through the wall to get at the fuckers, there was no need for a door. That’s the way I feel now. Christ, but it was mighty. Or waking up the morning after beating Tipp, and me after playing a blinder, my man not even scoring, thinking: ‘Wow, that really happened, that was me.’ Sore after a few belts, maybe, but with such a sense of purpose running up and down my veins that I could do anything I wanted. Anything.
Lose weight? Piece of piss, I done it before. Step away from the pub and the bookies? You may be fucking sure of it.
And I want Clare to win too. Not because of the bet, I couldn’t give two shits about that. I want Clare to win because it’s my county, my people, my jersey.
Up the Banner!
Up the Banner!
Up the Banner!
This isn’t over. It doesn’t end here, by Jesus, it doesn’t.
No fucken way.