Ballycarson Blues Read online

  How did this unusual opportunity for gain originally come about? Yet again, Councillor Finvola O’Duffy felt that her actions were justified in that she had not manufactured the situation. It had been laid on for her by centuries of history and the topography itself. So, why should one have a conscience when accepting what nature itself presents? Why feel bad about exploiting nature’s bounty and history’s inheritance? Ballycarson was a strategically placed market town. In the mediaeval era it was protected from attack from the south by swampy ground. No army could march across the mire and bog meadow. But, as centuries passed, technology changed and the swamp, in the eyes of the construction cognoscenti, became important as a potential development opportunity. Advised as they were by the holders of such secret commercial insights, it was into this Ballycarson swamp that the Northern Ireland Office plunged. In the stagnant political days of the last Unionist-run Council administration, fifteen acres of the swampy ground was compulsorily purchased by the central government. Their intent? To facilitate the construction of a state-of-the-art production plant for lightweight, fast speed, gull-winged amphibious tractors.

  They say that the characters of nations and towns are shaped by their landscape. This sentiment certainly seemed to hold good for this ambitious business venture. The firm went into liquidation just as, in the view of the shadow supervisors of the design team in Spion Kop bus stop, the lightweight, fast-speed, amphibious tractors would have done if any of the doors had been opened during their operation. In fact, not a single lightweight, fast-speed, gull-winged, amphibious tractor was built. Nor had a single wing of the factory been constructed. It was so lightweight it had never appeared. The construction materials were so fast and speedy that they had disappeared off to other sites within minutes of their delivery to the proposed tractor fabrication site. Indeed, by the time the gates came to be finally shut on the tractor factory compound, no such gates had ever been erected. No single member of the workforce had ever been recruited. All there was to be seen on the ground was a series of small internal roads built up on ramparts to keep the road surface clear of the adjacent and subjacent watery mire. But the plans for future development were magnificent and a few signs had been put up describing parts of the future production plant and announcing that the venture was generously sponsored by the Northern Ireland Office. Because of the absence of sure foundation, all of these signs had been gradually swallowed by the underlying marsh except for the enormous location sign for the “Body Shop”.

  Progress on site is not everything. Off-site there had been some activity – the initial government grant of several millions of pounds had been paid over and over spent. Only after the completion of such strenuous spending efforts did the firm receiving it became insolvent and the project abandoned. All that was left was the embarrassing undeveloped fifteen-acre site and the single remaining “Body Shop” sign. The Northern Ireland Office could not get the site of this financial debacle off their hands quickly enough. To mark the election of the new Nationalist-run administration, it was donated to the Ballycarson Council as the site of the new municipal cemetery. Perhaps the “Body Shop” sign would take on new life.

  Apart from the layout of the internal roads, the swampy site was not well suited for a graveyard. The sale of plots was slower than slow to say the least. Noone wanted to be buried in waterlogged ground. In Ballycarson, one undertaker explained, coffins are not built with keels. In fact, after two years of hard sell by the Council’s department of recreation and interment, only one person had bought a plot to the memory of himself and his wife. As with everything else he had acquired in life, this particular individual believed he had spotted a bargain. But in this instance it was a case of buy cheap, buy dear. The buyer of the grave plot found he had to divert lorry-loads of Council-purchased stone to build up the ground and erect a mausoleum in the style of old New Orleans to provide his wife and himself with a place of peaceful last repose. There, immediately beside the site of the “Body Shop” sign, stood the modest mausoleum. It was a solitary modern folly, in effect the show house for the new cemetery, built by a dead man to himself and his wife.

  The dead man in question was Donald Oskar Gormley. He had consistently cocked a snook at the sophisticated and highfaluting forms of sectarian division in his community by keeping his feet on the ground. When it came to footwear, it was rumoured that he deliberately wore a green sock on his right foot and an orange sock on his left on the basis that if he got knocked down by a Ballycarson bus the local authorities would not know where he was to be buried or who was to carry out the formalities of interment. In truth, he simply wished to be regarded as an individual free to make his own choices even in death. He did not know, however, that this trick had been tried before by a few brave souls. Such individuals were regarded as colour blind and their religion determined by the paramedics tossing a coin in the ambulance and replacing the footwear on the patient by one of the green and orange spare sets of socks kept in the ambulance especially for the purpose of designation of the potentially deceased.

  Ever since he had built the mausoleum to himself and his wife, Donald Oskar Gormley was known locally as a “dead man walking”. It was not just because of the threats he might have received because of his reputed ill-matched hosiery. Furthermore, he did not fit the usual category of such condemned individuals. He was not one of those who had been sentenced to death by some paramilitary organisation because of a foolhardy attempt to muscle in on their lucrative rackets of protection, drugs, prostitution or smuggling in or around Ballycarson. Consonant with his relatively sensible attitude to continued life, Donald Oskar Gormley had always been meticulous in engaging in lowkey rackets without lethal competition. But quite apart from his life’s choices, he had simply been lucky. Who else could see a profit in second-hand washing machines or bicycle pumps? They were hardly the currency favoured by the high-rollers of the paramilitary establishment. So if the paramilitaries and local hoods had not caused his untimely demise, who had done it? For Donald Oskar Gormley, it was much more straightforward and closer to home. It was his wife who had prepaid the ferryman and condemned him to a premature pre-planned crossing of the River Styx.

  Rarely, if ever, had this particular matrimonial relationship been harmonious, despite Donald’s best endeavours. Ever since the day he had found out that he was married, he had been meticulous, so he thought, in attempting to foresee his wife’s every concern and was sensitive to her needs. Indeed, every time he had gone off to the town dump for a rummage, he had asked her if she wanted anything brought back. Women, he thought, love that sort of tender solicitation. In exchange for such enquiries all he received was a constant ear bashing. What sort of woman was she anyway? Over time he found himself moved out of the matrimonial home and into the garden shed. His wife was heard to joke to her friends that she had shedded her husband. The ambiguity was not lost on Donald Oskar Gormley. The shed became a tiny cell, albeit a cell located in an open-door jail as the lock on the outside had never been fixed after someone wrecked it when trying to steal the mower. As regards matrimonial visits to the incarcerated, there were none. Contact was kept at a minimum. Donald’s wife knew he was still alive because the daily helpings of food she left at the door continued to disappear and she collected the empty plates. But, even with such a distance between the parties, the rows continued, although at a slight remove, as they scribbled the occasional angry note to each other. The broken-down relationship broke down a little more. The preparation of meals to be left at the shed door became intermittent and what arrived was merely dumped, by means of a shovel, in a small trough left at the door. Donald eventually perceived he was not wanted and sought solace in drink. As he found he could speak his mind, indeed open his very soul, to the bottle of whiskey and it never answered back, the binges very soon got longer. As he continued his monologue with an audience consisting only of alcohol, he disappeared for days, weeks and months at a time. His wife, however, was not completely thoughtless. On the ver
y last day Donald had been seen at the matrimonial home, his wife sent him on his way with a flexible hip flask. “Take this with you and don’t come back,” she shouted as she threw him a purple rubber hot water bottle filled with a liqueur of uncertain provenance. Unscrewing the cork, Donald noticed the liquid had already taken on the purple hue of its container. “Just like a good whiskey and the famous sherry barrels,” mused Donald. But there was a haunting afterthought. “Maybe this liquid has not been in this container for ten years. Maybe it is just methylated spirits.” Who cares? It was drinkable and no worse than much he had swallowed of late. Donald tucked the bottle into his belt and headed off down the road. It was the last time his wife saw him alive. That was indeed what she had always planned.

  After one visit to the land of reassuring oblivion, which had lasted an uncertain but clearly very extensive period of time, Donald came to beside the silted-up Union Canal and felt hungry. The feeling in his stomach told him he had not eaten for several days, perhaps the best part of a week. When he searched for food in the nearest public rubbish bin, he found it to be a source of information and enlightenment as well as nourishment. All the facilities of modern life were laid on at this waterfront site. Following long-standing tradition, the Provincial Enquirer was still used to wrap-up fish suppers acquired at the Iceberg Café. The Council had issued a dispensation from public health requirements provided the newspaper was lined with a special inner liner of paper impregnated with antibacterial vinegar and provided also that the inner liner carried free adverts for the O’Duffy carpet and linoleum factory. As he ate his way down the remains of the discarded fish supper, Donald Oskar Gormley found that the newspaper wrapped round his meal for that day bore tidings of a terrible double local calamity. Not only did Donald read the obituary of his wife but also, right beside it on the very same page, was a similar, albeit rather shorter, eulogy relating to himself.

  Intrigued, rather than distressed at news of this common calamity, Donald read on. He was comforted to know that all the correct policies and procedures had been complied with. Even if he were not actually and physically dead, the announcement of his death was procedurally correct. The paperwork was in order. There was a suitable audit trail. The appropriate boxes had been ticked. With that procedural propriety, it seems, Donald had been finally ticked off. It transpired that after a long period of absence on a drinking binge Donald’s wife had reported him missing to the police. She had also presented them with suitable evidence of her loss. She sent the police an orange sock and a green sock together with an assortment of underwear and items of outer clothing and claimed they had been found immediately beside the swamp forming the proposed municipal cemetery. The clear inference was that Donald Oskar Gormley had deliberately thrown himself into the mire and had been swallowed for good. Well, it was good for her, his wife thought. In response the police had sent out a letter addressed to Donald care of the garden shed. The style of official enquiry letter had been meticulously crafted to seek out the relevant facts. It ran something like the following:

  “Dear Sir/Madam,

  We wish to check the veracity of the report that you are dead. Please return the attached pro forma to us so that our files are complete. Please tick Box A if you are alive. If you are dead, tick Box B.

  Yours faithfully…”

  A lack of response had indeed held up the official process for several months as a senior officer of the constabulary expressed reservations that there was no Box C dealing with a response from absent parties. Without clear-cut evidence from a completed box-ticking exercise, the police remained unconvinced for a considerable while. However, after continual badgering of the authorities, Donald’s wife managed to have him declared dead following a lengthy absence. Both forensics and common sense had confirmed that no man in Donald Oskar Gormley’s position would have left his socks and clothing behind if he had intended to come back. In any event, the same senior officer who had previously expressed doubts noted that the ancient manual of standard policing practice indicated “When he dieth, he shall carry nothing away; … naked he came into the world, and naked he must return”. So, that was the matter put beyond all doubt regardless of what might be cast up by any further spurious scientific enquiry. Thereafter developments were fast but perhaps unfortunate. The very day of the judicial declaration of death, Donald Oskar Gormley’s wife was found dead at the foot of the steps leading from the Register of Births, Deaths and Marriages. She had just recorded Donald’s deemed death and had started to walk away in jubilation clutching an official certificate of the declaration of death. She was a free woman again. It was as if, having achieved her life’s ambition of ridding herself of her hapless spouse, she had nothing more to do. Her purpose in life had been fulfilled. She had a massive fatal heart attack with the stress of the less than quiet celebration.

  The reading of this tragic tale assisted Donald Oskar Gormley to sober up. He had been dead to the world for what must have been years and now it was official. Released from this earthly life’s constraints and armed with knowledge of the contents of his own death certificate, Donald Oskar Gormley set about arranging the erection of a suitable memorial to himself and his wife. From the ashes of his matrimonial disaster arose the architectural marvel of the mausoleum in the swamp. Like the local poet William Butler Yeats, Donald Oskar Gormley had obtained the signal distinction of writing his own obituary. But he had surpassed the beloved bard in several respects. Donald had written the obituary not only for himself but also for his wife and their relationship. Moreover, Donald had achieved all this after his own death. For all his flirtation with theosophy W. B. Yeats had not managed that! The touching words of tenderness above the front door to the modest “Gormley” mausoleum – the very first in the Ballycarson cemetery – read as follows:

  “Death appeared in lovely form

  to bring the peace and still the storm.”

  For the tiny mausoleum there was a back door too. “You always need an escape route in a crisis. You never know when you might need it,” were Donald’s instructions to the bemused funereal architect employed by the undertaker. “Make sure the back door has a notice saying ‘no parking in front of exit: passage required on a 24-hour basis’.” As if to symbolise calmer waters at the end of the booze cruise of a troubled life, Donald quit the drink and went back to looking for gainful employment. The citizens of Ballycarson, long reverential of old traditions, adhered strongly to the principle that one should not speak ill of the dead. Consequently, doors opened widely to Donald Oskar Gormley as no-one could give him a bad reference. That was how he got the job of his choice – lost property officer at the Council. Indeed he was the ideal man for lost property collection as it was recognised that Donald was already in some way lost to the world.

  On the day immediately before the anticipated American presidential visit, Councillor Finvola O’Duffy was down at the municipal graveyard on the small manmade isthmus of land forming the site and surroundings of Donald Oskar Gormley’s mausoleum. Councillor Finvola O’Duffy was personally supervising the completion of the construction work for the extension of the Peace Wall into the Ballycarson municipal cemetery. The top of the new wall stretched out like a six-foot-wide highway into the site of the future Necropolis. All that was needed now as a final touch was an opening official parade.

  As she signalled her satisfaction with the finished work, Finvola noticed the door to the Gormley mausoleum was secured only by a knot of rough bailer twine. Even in rural Ireland, that was an odd way to keep the living and dead apart. Surely the thread of life should be stronger than that? Respect for the departed kept her out; curiosity led her inside. There was no coffin to be seen. The small structure was so full of washing machines, builders’ supplies and materials that it was clear Donald’s wife had been buried elsewhere. “So this is why he bought the place.” The councillor smiled. The mausoleum was a front for one of Donald Oskar Gormley’s many commercial operations. Finvola smiled to herself again. She was n
ot going to close this place down. What was the point in that? She could use this place to her advantage. It would be the site of her proposed deal with Big David.

  The scene was now set for the trade-off between the rival political and commercial forces facing each other in Ballycarson. But the actors themselves had roles to play. The last phone call between Big David and Councillor Finvola O’Duffy confirmed the details. Secrecy was the watch-word, so the whole matter would be carried out in public and in plain sight. Who would then suspect that anything underhand was going on?