Chapter 13

They were back again in Dublin, walking down Moss Street in the direction of Pearse Street Station.

It was Saturday.

The streets were thronged with those glad to have one day off to waste it looking for something special for themselves or their presumed loved one.

The two men crossed the road and walked steadily alongside the back wall of Trinity College.

Up along Pearse Street and then on to College Street where they stopped to take a quick piss upon the gates of the fair college.

Nothing wrong with that.

They gazed at the traffic and the hubbub which passed them by.

—What has happened to our fair city?

—Our capital!

Cars and trucks; horses and trap.

The stink of shit and smog. It was a proper city now, hustling and bustling with everything for the rich and the poor. Bastard children, half dead beggars, an abundance of homeless: it was not unlike Paris or London.

—Pint?

—Sure, why not.

In front of them, on Westmorland Street, a traffic warden was busy composing. He was more woman than man, a slight, slender thing of unknown age. He grey uniform spoke of so many things of the Free State: censorship and totalitarianism, links to the Nazi party even.

Sure why not.

Have we not harboured enough of them?

They walked over to him and stopped, leaving just enough distance between them and him to instil some small sense of equivocation, some type of torment that would most likely emerge in the other man’s mind.

The traffic warden turned quickly around, but then quickly turned back again, seeing they were nothing but misfits: a fat man and a thin degenerate.

That is what he thought.

What else would he think?

—Do you know what, Burke?

—What that’s, Hare?

— A cadaver, corpse or lich is a dead human body.

—Interesting.

—But before it’s dead.

—Before?

—Its just a body. A normal body.

The traffic warden had been expecting this, some trivial comments, a little bit of banter, composed of nonsense, and generally spoken to the back of his head. For what was his life but a series of empty insults mounted with false aggression towards his civic self? It was he who was in the right. It was he who was the upholder of the law.

Sinn Féin.

To march out into the full sunlight of freedom, rather than remain in the shadow of a base imperialism that has brought and ever will bring in its train naught but evil for our race.

What nonsense.

Ourselves alone.

It was these and other thoughts that swirled and twirled around his head as it entered the passenger side window of the car that he had, just moments ago, been composing his tenth ticket of the day.

It had been a record.

And his day, until this point, had been but one triumph over another. He had refrained from giving a ticket to a lovely auburn haired girl outside the National Gallery.

And she had taken him.

Blown him a kiss through her delicately gloves fingers, which were long and slender.

Oh God!

Anna was her name.

So graceful.

But now it was all different.

Now half his body lay inside the car, while the other half hung out over the door, its feet trailing of the ground. Blood and glass abounded; lay scattered on the road and sidewalk. There was little movement of any kind from the traffic warden, and the thin one took advantage of this, while the fat one looked on with a pleased and approving satisfaction. He took from the traffic warden his wallet and his ticket book.

—Shall we have some fun?

—I think there is a lot of illegality abounding in this city at present and we should do our best to curtail it.

—Certainly, Burke.

They walked on, away from the traffic warden, who was still alive, but did not move, for fear of reprisals; his seemingly lifeless corpse a message to all those who wanted nothing other than to hide away from everything until the day they died.

Let that be a message to you.