60 Years Of The Puumaja Crew- No. 10

It's not often here at the PMC that we review a book, still less that we review some reviews of a book and then have an excerpt afterwards. So, jumping forward somewhat in our chronological trawling of past posts, here is a review from 1996 of a novel which was all over the place at the time, and which now noone in their right or wrong mind would look at twice...

First published March 27th 1996

One, two, three, you can’t catch me!

The new novel from Francis M’gannanagan

Critical acclaim for M’gannanagan’s last novel, Cassie’s lips:

‘Brilliant…gripping…dynamite…”

TV Extra magazine

‘A tragic and often so very moving canter through the very soul of what it is and what it is not to be brought up in the most desperate of environments. M’gannanagan knows humanity, he knows suffeing, he knows what it is to feel fear. Death is his closest confidant, his most trusted servant. The reader is transfixed in a house of paranoia, loathing and confusion as M’gannanagan jolts them through life, laughing at the unlaughable-at, thinking the unthinkable, doing the undo-able. Here is a man who has dipped his ladle deep into the barrel of his soul and come up with a load of bits from the bottom, becoming dizzy with the sheer force of the horrors of his upbringing, a man who hangs on by the slightest sinew of hope, a man who walks a tightrope literally made of barbed wire. This book is nothing short of a work of art, a thing of beauty which will bring tears, laughter, reflection and silliness in equal measure. Mr M’gannanagan, I salute you’.

Diarmuid O’ S.

Irish Histrionic Review

‘Bleak, gritty, unputdownable and f*cking good. A vivid portrait of life on the edge’

Martin Chines, author of ‘You, You Prick, I’ll Smash Your Eye Off’ and ‘You C*nt’.

“Second only to Roddy Doyle in encapsulating the sheer tragedy of what it is to be alive. A triumph’.

Silly Blenkinsop, the Daily Times review of literature.

Part One

―‘Gie’ it us’ she said.

My dad was out and I was wearing my brand new t-shirt. It was brown.

― ‘Ah sah’d gie’ it uz’.

Sandy was three years older than me, but seemed somehow smaller, as though her head had been compressed inside a Swan Vestas matchbox.

― ‘ye basa – ya’ nae ge i’ us ah’ll telt mez’ granna, man..’

Shite. I’d been hiding the jazz mag under my new t-shirt for the last two hours. But my fingers were giving out. The agony was shooting through them like a forest fire being fanned by the downdraughts of hell.

― ‘Ye friggin’ jack basa – lik’ a’ wha’ ye ben deein’ man’

An awful tearing sound rent the air, like an invisible head being torn from unknowing shoulders. Sandy had the mag now in her sticky hands, and was waving it around now, above her head and beyond my reach, her lank, greasy red curls tumbling over her eyes, copper-sulphate blue eyes, as blue as neptune’s arse.

― ‘aieeeeee! Ye basa’ – ah’ll telt mez’ granna av ye.a’ swore ah’ll telt mez’ granna. Uh’ll geddat yuz fa’ this an’ ye’ll lorn’, man’

I’d delivered a stinging kick to her shins, either the right or the left, it doesn’t seem relevant any more, with my steel toecapped winkle pickers. They were the smartest winkle pickers on the estate, I used to parade up and down in them, a ghetto peacock, making all the other kids jealous. Billy Childers who lived on our estate said he was going to take them off me. Billy Childers’ dad was in prison, for murder they said, though noone said it to his face. He had a hair lip. My mam said he was a meanie kid, but I didn’t know what that meant.

― ‘ma shinnies…tha’ ficked – ah’ll fickin’ blat ye, ye basa, man!’

Sandy was bent double in agony on the playground floor. I stood over her, proud, triumphant, and now could hold the jazz mag in front of me, unmolested.

The school was old and grey. Part of it was closed now. There were two separate entrances, one saying ‘girls’ and another saying ‘boys’, but noone bothered with that any more. Sandy said that when her granna was at the school they used those different entrances, but that was in olden times. And they had the lash. Her granna was lashed 200 times once, she said, but I didn’t believe her. She was always lying. They still had the cane, but they didn’t use it as much as they used to, and you needed a special form. Once Dereck Bockerty was given one of those forms but they let him off because his dad was destroyed that day down at the shipyard, by a big falling thing. Noone like Dereck Bockerty. He smelt of cabbages.

A thick, black smog, such as you only got in our part of Garyford, hung in the air the night our Carlton ran away. Not the modern kind of smog, which is gone by lunchtime, but the old kind, which was much much thicker and blacker. We didn’t know about emphysema then, even though half the babies born in the infirmary had it. By the time people got to working in the yards they had the full blown version. There was a particular type of cough you used to associate with someone who was a long termer at the yards, like a combination of a borborygmatic lawnmower and a broken turkey on formaldehyde. My dad had that cough but he used to pretend that he didn’t. The night our Carlton ran away he forgot to pretend not to have it and started having it again. All night he went on, and by morning he could only just breathe, and then the breathing sounded like a mouse trying to attract somebody’s attention.

― ‘wha’s uz Cazza, man?’

I asked my mother the next day. She didn’t reply. She was picking oakum in the kitchen, the frail strands of unpicked flecks softly falling to the ground, describing a circular pattern as they did so, miniature parachutists in the ether of domesticity.

― ‘ah sa’, ah’d, wha’sz uz Cazza, man?’

― ‘Layz’ isz’ ooz’, man, Frankiesz, man, boy, man’

It was my other brother, Paul, two years older than me. He had been playing with the broken peg he had been given two Christmases ago.

― ‘Bosz whecz’s eesz, man?’

Paul looked furtively over to where my mother was working. She’d stopped now, her fingers lying dormant like an abandoned crematorium. I watched as a single tear accumulated in the small depression that was formed where the corner of her eye met the huge mole that dominated her face. It hung there for a moment, it seemed like an indefinite period which could have been anything from three seconds to thirty two seconds, before falling to the oakum-littered floor, exploding in a fragile crystalline coronet of sheer miniature daintiness. I was afraid.

. . . . . .

― ‘uz Cazz’sz niezs’ cuzmnz’ bacz’ man’.

Paul explained to me much later.

‘ee’s duz gannsz runszwascz taez t’navyz, man. ’llz nzz’ co’ basz. Sae jisz’ fogezzabooscsz’ ‘eezz man’.

I didn’t know where the Navy was or even what it was.

‘czklzz czsz wieczsz sczcz. Szczsc tzszcs, man’.

It was at this point, the point at which my family had started speaking to me in Polish, that I realized that a part of my childhood had been irrevocably taken from me, like a traumatized, half-dead bird being snatched from the fangs of a very ugly cat. Nothing would be the same again. I watched as an undulating froth of thick, basalt smoke relentlessly fanned out of chimneys that loomed, defiant, and satanic, over our street. In the distance the ululating screech of the factory siren pierced to my very essence, a disgraced Japanese soldier committing seppuku after a particularly bad day.

More edge-of –the-seat stuff next week (or not as the case may be) when Francis tells us more about life staring down the end of a belt buckle, more tragedies, and his special birthday present of a bucket of sand and a bucket of vinegar.