Fuckwit this, fuckwit that. And with that, more fuckwits. One by one, they began to pile into McManus’s. They all knew Emer well, probably better than me. Páidí and the rest of them. They only acknowledged me because I was her husband. When we were growing up, they all hated my loud-mouthed gob. With them was Serena Hearty who I’d shared a house in Glenwood with when Emer was in college in Dublin. There were five people living in the house at the time, all of us sacks of shit. Serena thought she was better than everyone though, and found my being there especially objectionable, for some indeterminate reason. She made living in that house a thoroughly uncomfortable experience. It was as though she felt that the things her refined intelligence had to deal with during the course of one day far outweighed anything the rest of us experienced. She’d also had a death in the family when she was younger. Her brother. She told me about it just after we met for the first time and I felt really sorry for her. But then I suspected the only reason she probably told me about it was so that I would have it close to thought when she was being a bastard. That was her excuse for being a bastard.
Serena was a civil servant, and was nobly in favour of non-violent communiqué. She campaigned for world peace, mostly in public, but I’m not sure if she was campaigning with the same gusto in her head. My view is that it’s perfectly fine to be nobly in favour of non-violent communiqué if you’re a pleasant and engaging individual. Serena’s unpleasantness was like a long snake that slithered around on the living room floor all day. Each time I went into the room I had to step over that fucking snake and every single time it sprang up suddenly and hissed at me.
Think here ill of me, if you will. I’m not a particularly pleasant sort myself, but I’ll keep that unpleasantness on the hush mostly. You won’t find me bleeding the heart out of myself any time soon.
I first started to quietly voice my hushed loathing of those living conditions by very subtly moving all of Serena’s cutlery, which she kept in a special drawer away from the rest of us. The forks were always neatly arranged with the forks, the spoons with the spoons, the knives with the knives. So I started very slowly, taking one fork and putting it with the knives, taking one knife and putting it with the spoons, taking one spoon and putting it with the forks. A few hours later, I checked the drawer and, sure enough, things had been changed back to normal. The fork was back with the forks, the knife was back with the knives, the spoon was back with the spoons. So I changed them back again. Except this time, the fork with the spoons, the knife with the forks, and the spoon with the knives. Next morning, I checked the drawer and, sure enough, they’d been changed back again – fork with forks, knife with knives, spoon with spoons.
‘The fuckwit to do away with all the other fuckwits was the boss I had when I worked in Sweden.’
Geary lived in Gothenburg for two years. All I know about it really is that he sat in an office all day arguing with people on the internet about how awfully bad a thing Christianity was.
‘They drink the heads of themselves over there, as you know. But in their own homes, you know. And just to get drunk. They’re not as big into the social thing like us. So I went out one day and got plastered and had a bit of a whiff of the stuff on me the following day. Next thing you know, this fuckwit was visiting me in my flat to have a serious chat about something.’
‘He went to your flat?’ Carol.
‘Yeah,’ Geary.
‘Fuckwit,’ Carol. ‘What did he say?’
‘He handed me a fucking AA card.’
‘No way.’
‘Yeah, I swear. He was all concerned. Just because it got around that I’d been on a session for most of the day, you know. Figured I was an alco just because of that.’
‘Fuckwit, what did you do?’
‘I grabbed a bottle from my desk and handed it to him. Here, I said, knock yourself out when no-one’s looking.’
