Burn The Bad Lamp

A man walks into a corner shop. He is a nervous man, easily knocked from his groove, and it is a great disturbance to him when he is addressed by a four foot tall chicken.

‘Cluckety cluck,’ it says. ‘Try your luck?’

Ralph Coughlan and the chicken have this encounter six days a week and it’s doing neither of them any favours. He knows there is a motion sensor embedded behind the chicken’s eyes that clocks his movement. He is quite aware that it is an electronic chicken that lays plastic eggs containing trinkets and toys but even so, it leaves him a little shook. It’s got to the stage where he is trying to tiptoe past the chicken to dodge the sensor’s reach. It is a Tuesday, in March, with all that that suggests. Ralph scans the magazine racks as he waits to be served. All the magazines are about extreme sports and cannabis cultivation techniques. The shop is operated by an unpleasantly owl-faced woman. Not once in four years has he had even a suggestion of warmth from this person. He knows that ‘perceived slights’ is one of the key danger signs but there is nothing perceived about it. He is always super-friendly himself, to provide an instructive contrast with her surliness, but you might as well instruct the wall. He buys a sausage roll, a Diet Coke, and a scratchcard. She slams his change onto the counter and eyes him as though to say, more? Is there something more?

‘Ferocious day alright,’ he says. ‘But typical enough for March, I suppose?’

‘Yeah?’

‘That’s a breeze would take skin off you.’

‘Is it?’

He goes to sit on a bench that overlooks one of the river’s drearier stretches. They have some cheek putting a bench down here. It is a most exposed spot and there isn’t a day you get up off this bench you’re not red in the face from wind. There is drizzle and general damp. It’s the sort of town that would give you a chest infection. He eats his lunch. He scratches away the useless card. He wonders about the latest knot in his gut and the new tremble that’s put in an appearance on his upper lip.

Ralph’s is a hard-luck street down by the quays. There is, more often than not, a dead dog in the gutter. A man behind a pram waits for the lights and coos over his baby. Outside the off-licence, some haughty drunks contest the hold of a bottle. It is a place for connoisseurs of the forlorn and the shop fronts are painted in carnival colours. Ralph bins his trash and crosses the road to his place of business. He is subject to seething monotones and moments of glow.

Someone has left a box in the doorway. This bugs him, big time. People think they can treat Coughlan’s like a charity shop. They say hey, listen, okay, what we’ll do? We’ll drop it off with the guy down the quay, the guy with the hair. Ralph drags the box into the shop and kicks it to one side. He becomes philosophical then—at least the box can occupy a segment of his Wednesday. Ralph divides his days into segments, with each segment defined by a designated task.

The next segment is marked down for polishing. They aren’t exactly beating down the door but that’s no reason to let things go. When the customers do arrive, Coughlan’s will be looking as well as it has any right to look. Ralph has a selection of chamois leathers for polishing. He has great belief in the restorative powers of a shammy. He feels a measure of happiness as he polishes but tries not to notice it. Ralph stocks select pieces of second-hand furniture, some antiques, and smaller items that could be classed only as ornaments. He sources from auction rooms, clearance sales and the more distant coves of eBay. Ralph’s shop is in the wrong part of town. It has dawned on him that there isn’t much of an incidental trade for antiques and ornaments down here. He polishes a brass monocular that has been in the shop since day one. It is an excellent monocular, in fine working nick, and well priced. What could be more convenient for the casual birder out for a peep at the oystercatchers in Crosshaven of a Sunday? But there’s a problem, Ralph realises, with monoculars. People feel stupid using them. They feel like they’re playing at being Jack Palance in a pirate film.

Ralph polishes a vintage dairy urn. He is having his doubts about the vintage dairy urn. His initial feeling was that it might appeal to sentimental people who had background in the country, that it would make a talking point in a hall, but there aren’t many sentimental people on the ground lately. He runs a cloth over a very nice telephone table. It is a lovely piece, with a built-in stool and a neat slot for a phone book. It has a racy, late ’50s air, practical yet stylish. You could see an elegant lady sat down at it, with the legs crossed, taking a call. Ralph can almost hear the rustle of her nylons. She’s in a pair of kitten heels and Cary Grant is at the other end of the line.

Ralph’s polishing takes on the heat of frenzy. He does a mantel clock he bought from the tinkers in Bantry, then a selection of Ardagh crystal pieces, then some Victorian doorknobs. He squidgees the windows. He has a panic attack of middling intensity—it feels like some cats have got loose inside his chest—and he clutches at a rad for support. He has run out of things to polish. There’s nothing for it but to open the box that was left in the doorway. It is the kind of day a man is well advised to keep busy.

It’s mostly junk. A scratched magnifying glass, old paperbacks, a wooden jewellery case with carved elephants and inside a legend scrawled in black marker—‘Patricia Loves Bay City Rollers’—and he can see her, with wispy hair and a gammy eye, her spectacles held with cellotape in 1974. A figurine of a pissing boy, an imitation Wedgwood plate, more paperbacks, but then a nice old oil lamp, with a brass frame surrounding a smoky brown glass. Ralph fills it with the paraffin he keeps in the shop for just this purpose. Nostalgic people like oil lamps, and he has sold a few. The wick takes nicely but the flame shows up some smears on the brown glass. Ralph takes a shammy to the glass and polishes it carefully.

A genie appears.

The manner of the apparition is much as we have been led to expect. There is a puff of purple smoke and a male figure floats up out of the lamp in a comfortably cross-legged sitting pose, like a man who has put the hours in on the yoga mat. But then the smoke clears and the genie separates from legend. There are no tapered slippers nor flowing silks. He wears no turban, nor fathomless expression. He wears a pair of troubled chinos, an overcoat with fag burns on its lapels, a pair of scuffed Nikes and a leery, self-satisfied smirk. He’s one of those small butty fellas, fortyish, thinning up top, and the bit of hair that’s left could usefully be introduced to a bottle of Head ‘n’ Shoulders.

‘How’d you like this for caper?’ he says.

‘Listen,’ says Ralph. ‘I can’t be dealing with this kind of messin’. I’m on tablets, like.’

‘Relax,’ says the genie. ‘Just try and calm yourself, okay? The last thing we want is you on the flat of your back outside in the Regional. Have a sit down, Mr Coughlan. Take it easy.’

The genie sits at the telephone table. He primly lifts an imagined receiver, with his pinkie finger cocked.

‘Hallooo?’ he says. ‘Halloooooo? Coughlan’s?’

He takes out a packet of Rothmans, lights one, then lets up a terrible, wracking cough.

‘It’s these fuckers have me nearly murdered, Ralph,’ he says.

Ralph goes behind his counter and pops an emergency beta-blocker.

‘You want to clear out of here now,’ he says, ‘or I’ll call the guards.’

‘And you’re going to say what, Ralph?’

Ralph’s eyes water up. His voice becomes scratchy and gasped.

‘What are you doing here?’ he says.

‘Come on,’ says the genie. ‘You know the script, Ralph. I’m after floating out of a lamp, aren’t I? You know what comes next.’

‘But why are you here?’

The genie grins, and he begins to pace the floor, with his hands held casually behind his back.

‘It’s nearly always a lamp with me,’ he says, ‘but then again, I’m one of life’s traditionalists. There are others who have taken a completely different approach. You can understand how a young man coming into the field would be keen to adopt his own method. There’s one guy who pops up out of a toaster. There’s another fella appears like an air bag if you brake suddenly at a certain junction on a particular country road. Now if you ask me, that’s acting the maggot. You could give someone heart failure. And between myself, yourself and the wall, there’s been a couple of very sad cases.’

‘You mean to tell me,’ says Ralph, ‘that people have actually…’

‘All I’ll say, Ralph, is that our health-and-safety record isn’t all it could be.’

Ralph eyes this genie carefully. Ralph has a couple of difficult years put down, a time when his old certainties went tumbling, and anything that smells of opportunity he views balefully now, a once-bitten man.

‘Listen,’ he says, ‘do you always deal with local cases yourself?’

‘Mostly,’ says the genie. ‘The odd time I knock up and cover for a guy in Tipp. He comes down bad with hay fever around May, June, when they’re turning up fields. And I tell you, Ralph, it’s no joke dealing with the crowd up there. The country people have turned most avaricious in recent times.’

‘So what exactly is the deal here? I get three wishes, is that what you’re saying?’

‘Correct.’

‘And it doesn’t matter what they are?’

‘I wouldn’t go that far. I can be as disappointed in people as the next man. And if I’m disappointed, who’s to say that I’ll perform my duties in as careful a manner as I should? Try not to disappoint me, Ralph. I hate to be disappointed in people. Would you believe I’d a guy wishing for a long-term parking space convenient to the South Mall? I had another fella looking for a 48-inch plasma screen. I looked at him, Ralph, and I said what do you think you’re dealing with here, an Argos catalogue?’

The genie becomes irate. The pitch of his voice rises.

‘You give people a chance!’ he says, balling a fist and slapping it into his palm. ‘You give them a chance to transform their lives! You give people possibilities! You give them every fucking opportunity. And what do they do? They look at you like you’re crazy. Don’t disappoint me, Ralph.’

‘I wish,’ says Ralph Coughlan, ‘that I had a singing voice.’

The genie stops short.

‘I see,’ he says. ‘And how long have you been having problems at home?’

Ralph pales:

‘What do you mean?’

‘All the old spark gone out of it, killer?’

This Coughlan case, thinks the genie, is a no-brainer. When a man starts wishing for the power of song, it is a general fact that he is trying to impress women.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ says Ralph. ‘Look, can you do it for me or not? What I’d love is a good, solid tenor, one that’ll hold through on a note, but if that’s too much to ask, maybe you could just do me something that’s kinda… husky?’

The genie holds up a warning palm.

‘Wait,’ he says. ‘Let me think this over.’

The genie settles on a seventies sofa chair of brown corduroy, crosses his short legs, and considers the ramifications of Ralph Coughlan’s wish. You can’t just suddenly give someone a singing voice and forget all about it. You have to consider what they’ll do with this gift because our talents, coldly used, can be deadly as knives. The genie notes that Ralph is a dapper sort: he is well-turned out, carefully groomed. Also there is the fact of the hair. The genie has to be careful. This could be like turning a young Engelbert Humperdinck loose on the northside of the city. There wouldn’t be a marriage safe for miles.

It is in this way that the genie’s job sometimes has a high stress level. You will already have met genies, at flotation centres, at reiki workshops, haunting the backs of chapels, trying everything and anything as they attempt to ease their anxieties. You will see them slumped over tables in sad dockside bars, or waiting on prescriptions in late-night pharmacies. Many avail of early-retirement packages but even if they leave the service at fifty they are already, in many cases, broken men. The manipulation and shaping of dreams can really take it out of you.

‘Well?’ says Ralph.

‘Un momento, por favor,’ says the genie.

Rush hour thickens on the quay outside. There is general belligerence. Men parp their horns at each other. Seabirds jacked up on weird emissions from the chemical plants downriver stand with deranged eyes on the quayside walls and seem to waver in the light breeze and they watch it all go by.

Now what if a singing Ralph proves to be a force for good in his community? The genie pictures Ralph appearing at fundraisers for Nigerian refugees, or launching into feel-good John Denver numbers on Sunday morning visits to the terminally ill.

Ralph waits. He looks at the genie with a coolness now. This genie, it is Ralph’s opinion, could use a good wet shave. Ralph will never present himself to the world with an unclean jaw. He will appear to a room with a suave smile and a small bow, in a well-pressed suit, with lightly dressed hair, and he will begin to softly croon. The room will be packed with doe-eyed lovelies. They will all but have to be shovelled out of the seats.

‘No rush, genie,’ he says.

The genie retains some sympathy for his client. He’s just one of these big handsome fools, the type of man who believes that if he keeps brushing his teeth and thinking pretty thoughts, it’ll all turn out gravy.

‘Okay. We’re going to do it, Ralph. You can sing.’

Ralph emits a small, delighted gasp and gets to his feet. The rolodex in his brain flips over and over and searches through all the easy-listening finger clickers he’s ever been partial to and stops at the Ws: he selects ‘Can’t Get Used To Losing You’ by Andy Williams.

‘Guess there’s no use in hangin’ rouuuuund,’ he begins. ‘Guess I’ll get dressed and do the towwwwn.’

He still sounds like something off a turkey farm. The genie is sombre.

‘I can hear where you’re coming from, Ralphie.’

‘What’s the story, like?’

‘Not always instantaneous,’ says the genie. ‘Relax. The docket is gone in. A lot of these things we can do on the spot but there are others that take a little time. You’ll know when it’s there for you. Trust me.’

‘I’m starting to have my doubts here,’ says Ralph Coughlan.

The genie’s superiors consider the case. They raise their eyebrows. They know that for the Ralph Coughlans of this world, things can go either way. The slightest intervention and your Ralph Coughlan has a suitcase on the bed and a taxi called for the station. He’s thinking, will I bring a towel or will they have towels there?

Ralph and the genie observe the city groaning past outside. The traffic is choked, and it’s warm for March, the car windows are rolled down and you can hear all the radios. A headbanger on a death metal show responds to a texted request: Sorry, girl, he says, I got nothin’ with me by Slayer.

‘Let’s do it again, Ralph,’ says the genie. ‘Let’s do it so we can get home to our teas.’

Ralph Coughlan is troubled. Small worms of concentration wriggle on his brow.

‘Listen,’ he says. ‘What kind of thing do people ask for?’

‘Open your mind to it, kid. That’s all I’d say to you. Imagine where I could send you. There’s no end to the possibilities. But at the same time, don’t be ridiculous. I mean, I get fellas looking at me, in all seriousness, and asking for the control of their thoughts. And I have to tell them straight, Ralph. Behave, I say. Get real.’

Ralph seems downhearted.

‘But look,’ says the genie, ‘let’s see if we can’t rustle something up.’

The genie sketches a fresh design. He rethinks Ralph Coughlan. The new Ralph will have enough salt in him to meet a crisis head on. The new Ralph will parade the intimate streets with a sense of vigour and purpose. The lease on a new store will be arranged. It will be an elegant space in one of the nice laneways off the Mall, with Deco-style frontage. It will be high-end, without a brass monocular in sight, and handsome Ralph will tool around town in a low-slung Mercedes. Almost always as he rides he will get the run of the lights.

‘All possible, Ralph,’ says the genie, ‘with just a wish or two. You see, one thing leads to another. This is how it works out. You make your fortune, then your fortune will make you.’

He paints a beautiful picture, this genie, but Ralph has had enough.

‘No,’ he says. ‘We’re going in the wrong direction here. As it happens, I’ve no great interest in material wealth.’

‘Don’t be distracted by the surface details,’ says the genie. ‘Surface is surface. All I’m asking you to do is to live intelligently.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘The only way to live a life elegantly, Ralph, is to live it with intelligence. And if you’d just use what you’ve already got, there is no reason why you can’t do that. I can’t tell you what to wish for. But I can tell you that each and all of us have boundless possibilities and if you know where to look, if you know where to search, if you reach deep within yourself and…’

‘Genie?’ Ralph interrupts. ‘If you don’t mind me saying, this is all getting a bit Whitney Houston.’

‘Change or perish, Ralph.’

‘Now what’s that mean?’

‘It means you have two choices.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Cluckety cluck. Try your luck.’

‘You’re… who the fuck are you?’

‘Eat the world up, Ralph. Make a meal out of the place. Stop hiding in a junk shop down a filthy fucking quay. Get on with it! And name for me your second wish, please.’

Ralph pales.

‘Is this about my wife?’ he says.

The genie sighs, and throws his hands up. Why is he always given the fuckwits? Ralph Coughlan comes out from behind the counter and stalks the floor.

‘I have you now,’ he says. ‘I have you now! And you know what, genie? You’re absolutely spot on! That bitch is the bane of my life! She’s ground me down! So okay, fine, right, let’s do it. I wish that I…’

‘Ralph? Oh, Ralph. I really didn’t take you for that type of client.’

‘But you’ve brought it all home to me!’ says Ralph, ‘Jesus, do I ever need to have that weapon out of my life!’

The genie shrugs and takes a seat. He has heard it all before.

‘She’s sat on the couch above in Luke’s Cross,’ says Ralph, ‘and the whole thing has her fucking mangled. If I hear another word about ovaries! And she isn’t going to go anywhere, is she? Unless you can actually overdose on Chocolate Hobnobs, she isn’t going to go anywhere, is she? So can you do anything for me there, genie? Can you do anything about that situation?’

‘You’re being sentimental, Ralph.’

‘How so?’

‘You’re asking me to send you back. You want it to be all fluffy and lovely again, you want to turn the clock back.’

To when they’d walk on the long evenings to the Esso across from the brewery. They’d buy Cornettos: mint and pistachio for her, original flavour for him. They’d walk by the river, feeling pretty jaunty, because you’re self-important with it when you’re young, you carry it like a small dog carries a stick. She says, I hear there’s going to be a heat wave. Yeah right, Brid. The windows of flats are left open and people play records—dub reggae, all the crooked-smiling dopeheads with their elbows on the sills—and the angles of the rooftops lean in on you. They make plans. They cross the shaky bridge and go up to one of the pubs in Sunday’s Well. She gets amorous with a couple of drinks in her. The walk back home can be eventful and when you come outside, in the night-time, it’s like you spiral, you spin out, and your lungs fill up with the cold-starred air. She says, do an Elvis, and he curls his lip and does the thing:

‘Aw-haw-huh.’

‘Okay,’ says Ralph. ‘Fine. You got me. I wish I could go back to that place. Can you send me back there?’

‘You just been.’

The streets are thinning out. The traffic has started to bolt free of itself, atom by atom. Shadows slide down from the rooftops.

‘You’ve one left, Ralph.’

‘I’d just like an outstanding day. Alright? How about one outstanding day for me? And no fucking about. I wish, genie, for an outstanding day.’

The genie smiles.

‘I’ll do that for you now,’ he says. ‘Take it easy, killer.’

He clicks his fingers and is gone. He has given Ralph what’s left of a dreary Tuesday in March. Ralph douses the bad lamp and drags a sweeping brush across the floor. Tomorrow might bring nostalgic people or at least somebody with an open-minded attitude to monoculars. He locks up and walks with squared shoulders down the street. He nods to the white-haired old dude pulling the shutters on the second-hand bookstore.

‘How’s business, Ralph?’

‘Rockin’ altogether. I’m beating ’em back with my bare hands.’

He steps into the corner shop and gets down on the floor and unplugs the chicken. He looks at the woman behind the counter and he says:

‘I hear this asshole again, he goes in the river.’

He cuts across town to catch a number eight. He has it timed perfect. Just as he reaches Eason’s, an eight pulls up. He pays for his ticket and goes upstairs. He takes a seat at the front, top right, overhead the driver. He’ll be in at twenty past six for the tea. If there is any kind of God at all, it won’t be the Shepherd’s Pie. He wonders if he should try a few notes. Or give it an hour? The bus takes off and crosses the bridge and revs itself up to ascend into the northside… Oh where are the angels? Where are the trumpets? But all we’ve got is the teatime traffic, and the grey stone hills of the place, homicidal, and a deranged gull flies low over the water, then wheels away downriver for Little Island, Haulbowline, and points south.