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“JJ!” he shouted. “JJ!” He put his hand under his chin and turned his face up. “JJ . . . !”
JJ just sat there wreathed in smoke and I saw that the hair on the side of his head and across his scalp had been badly singed.
“Stand back, let him have some air.”
Maureen pushed into the crowd, shoving us aside. “Get him something to drink. Owen, get him a glass of water.”
JJ was sitting there with no sound out of him. There were these long weals along the backs of his hands but they didn’t seem to be giving him any pain. Maureen took his hands, turned them over and lifted his face so that she could see the marks on the side of his head.
“This child needs the hospital,” she said. “These hands are going to blister. Get this black thing off him.”
Anthony sat in the back of the car with JJ on his knees wrapped in a coat. Maureen sat in beside me and I put the boot down. We were lucky it was a Sunday afternoon—there wasn’t any traffic on the road and we pulled into casualty about thirty minutes later. The nurses whisked JJ away with them and Maureen strode off behind them telling them she was his aunt.2 I was alone in the corridor then with nothing to do except get a cup of tea and try to read the Sunday papers. There were only a few people in the coffee shop—a few patients going around in dressing gowns and a few gasúrs running about the floor with bags of crisps and ice lollies. Maureen and Anthony came back after about two hours. They looked a bit happier in themselves.
“He’s settled now,” Maureen said. “He’ll sleep for the rest of the day.”
“What did they say?”
“They said he was a lucky lad. Just his hands and his hair. They think he might have some scorching on his lungs but they’ll do tests on that tomorrow.”
“Did he say anything himself, did he talk?”
“He said a few words. Just that his hands were sore and that he had a hot feeling in his chest. But it doesn’t seem to be troubling him too much. I think they are more worried about the shock than anything. They bandaged his hands and put something on his head. He’s sleeping now.”
Anthony pulled in beside me. “I’ll come over in the morning to check on him. I suppose there’s nothing else we can do for him this evening. The nurse said he would sleep till morning.”
“There is nothing we can do,” Maureen repeated. “I’ll come over with you in the morning if you like.”
I could tell Anthony was glad she’d said that. He drew his hands across his face and clasped them on the table in front of him. Then he spread them wide and looked at both of us. “Of all the things. And in a church too, of all the friggin’ places.”
I had no answer to that nor did anyone else either I’d imagine. I gathered up the paper and made to go. “It’s just one of those things, Anthony. Nothing you or I or anyone else could have done.”
Maureen and Anthony walked ahead of me to the car. A red-faced man with a little girl in a red dress was coming the opposite way. She was struggling under the weight of a big bunch of flowers. I asked the man how the game went. He threw his eyes up to heaven.
“A draw,” he said. “They threw it away.”
________________
1 The images are by now familiar, part of the nation’s dreaming. Shot in real time and relayed across five countries and four time zones they come across, even in memory, as pure theatre. Solemnised and ritualised, the live transmission shows them walking down the slipway in single file. Spaced at three-yard intervals and moving between the guards on the pier side and the soldiers in the slipway.
Point man is twenty-four-year-old Swede Haakan Luftig. One-time leader of Doctrinal Corpse and boy soldier in the Scandinavian death-metal wars of the early nineties, he now stands convicted of four charges of copyright infringement. Six foot four, goateed and expressionless, his long-distance stare is fixed on a point somewhere in the middle of the fjord. His T-shirt, stencilled in fifty-two-point Day-Glo Gothic, tells us that Christ is a Cunt.
Behind him comes Emile Perec, twenty-four and convicted in Lille of seventeen driving offences while in charge of a public-school bus. In the grey light Perec has the pallid look of one who has spent too much time under artificial light—a snooker player or lab technician perhaps. Beneath his outsize shirt, however, is the greyhound physique of a man who at one time represented the future of French middle-distance running.
Third up is Jimmy Callanan, a twenty-six-year-old Scottish nationalist, sentenced to fifteen months at the Old Bailey for driving a white Mercedes bearing diplomatic number plates and tax and insurance discs registered to the Republic of Pictland—a two-acre field of scrubland outside the town of Arbroath.
Second last is Didac Jorda. Sporting the colours of FC Barcelona, he is the only one with a smile on his face. His career as a locksmith with los servicios sociales de Cataluña is on hold while he serves out an eight-month sentence for carrying a concealed weapon inside the Bernabeau Stadium.
Last up is JJ O’Malley. Eyes fixed to the ground, he moves with a stiffness which has everything to do with an easy sense of embarrassment at being the focus of such drama. The clueless onlooker would pick him out as the one carrying the most grievous sin. It is all the more ironic therefore that he is the only one of the five not carrying a criminal conviction. His very innocence, in fact, is one of the conditions of him being here as he is.
2 They drift in from the wings, rotating through six-hour shifts, the supporting cast of neuro-ICU nurses. Moving in the hyphenated time-lapse motion of the webcast there is something of the crisis apparition about them. Their white uniforms, fluorescing on our screens and moni tors beyond accurate definition, lend them this aura of electedness.
A hand-picked elite, lured here by professional curiosity and a time-and-a-half pay deal, they shepherd their charges one on one through the cloudless echoing topography of this three-month interregnum. Their own essential cluelessness, the impossible empathy gap, proves no hindrance to the essential tasks of provisioning and orienting their subjects through the staging posts of this journey.
Confidentiality clauses bind them into their supporting role. However, like any elite happy in their work, they have their own anthem. Stitched together from snatched phrases off the webcast, in five-part harmony and to the tune of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” . . .
MRIs wing through the skies
On broadbands straight and true
Drawn down to LEDs
Plasma monitors too.
PETs and encephalographs
All our readings true
Oh-oh tidings of comfort and joy
Comfort and joy
Oh-oh tidings of comfort and joy.
It needs work but it’s to their credit that they’d be the first to admit it.
GERARD FALLON
The altar boy from hell?—yes, I remember that. Don’t ask me who put it on him but from what I remember it was on him the first day he came to this school. The funny thing about it is that he never really was an altar boy. That day he went on fire and was nearly destroyed—that was his last day ever in a church as far as I know. But that’s how it is in a small town like this, an incident like that can mark you in more ways than one.
I’d say in thirty years