The pink flamingo appeared mysteriously on the sludgy banks of the Castletown River sometime in the 1980’s, fuelling much wonder and excitement in a town which was at that time quivering faintly with a growing low self-esteem. I never saw the thing myself. My father took me down to the docks to have a look at it, but it wasn’t there. So my father, being one inclined to follow through with a tale, pointed at a gimpy moorhen and told me it was the pink flamingo. I’ve travelled my lifetime picturing that moorhen whenever flamingos come up in conversation. The unlikely appearance of such a bird had a good effect on the town. Its brief residence influenced many Dundalk artists to embellish the phenomenon – songs were written about it, paintings, poems – one of course penned by Emer’s father.
‘Pink legs
Along the black marsh
Waiting’
That’s all I remember from it.
Time having passed, most have come to acknowledge the radioactive constituents of Dundalk Bay, it being something like Sellafield’s backyard pond, so the flamingo is now believed to have been a deviation of nature, a pink and stretchy mallard maybe. Or as many others have it to be, simply a shared hallucination brought on by chemically-charged air gripping the entire population of Dundalk at that time.
I’m mentioning this only because that’s what the conversation in McManus’s turned to before heavy metal and the arrival of John Carroll.
‘I’m telling you, the whole town was tripping with that shit,’ Geary. ‘They were all seeing pink flamingos, wearing pink pyjamas and seeing pink everything fucking else too, probably. The bloody thing didn’t exist.’
‘How do you know?’ asked Emer. ‘Did you see it?’
‘I was too young for drugs back then.’
What a prick.
I watched Emer as she smiled dizzily. She didn’t smile at home anymore. The smile was lost somewhere in her sleep. I first noticed its absence in the mornings. It would be gone tomorrow too, especially with the hangover in place. What was she doing with that smile when those eyes closed? I couldn’t help wondering what was happening as soon as she closed them tight, shutting me out every night, and sometimes considered having her followed by a detective into her hidden hours if that would do it. I’d heard of a detective working out of Faughart. Said he managed to photograph some sorry Joe’s wife sandwiched between John Wayne and Nick Faldo at a bloody big orgy in the Fair Green. Emer noticed me noticing the smile, so covered her face with an upturned glass, swallowing back the giddiness, showing me that reserved derision she knew drove me up the wall. She’d been laughing when I arrived, but now she was just used to me again, so back to normal.
Slayer started playing. It shocked me because up until then the music had been all reggae. I knew the song. Dead Skin Mask.
‘This is the one about Ed Gein,’ Geary.
‘Fucking shite,’ Carol, stubbing her cigarette out.
Then, John Carroll.
‘There’s John Carroll,’ Geary.
Carroll was an asylum attendant in Ardee, his daily business was lunacy. I was told once he boiled his socks in a kettle for the purpose of making his tea smell like feet. I wasn’t sure if this was true or not. He was an ugly being, cursed with some horrible skin condition which made him appear scaly and awful, and bent a nasty detached character out of him as a result. A few months before this scene I’m about to describe insufficiently, he jumped off St. Patrick’s cathedral, and landed on the roof of the bishop’s car, miraculously walking away with only a broken arm. He vigourously denied it was a suicide attempt, claiming it to be some kind of new extreme sport that was doing the rounds on the internet. Rumours were adrift that his head wasn’t right anymore however, that he couldn’t join all the dots together, build and connect concepts rationally. The poet of course had something to say about it.
‘Down, down, down
On top of the bishop’s Toyota’
That’s all I remember from it.
The rumours of his head-stroll were flying high since he was seen apparently playing Scrabble in made-up languages with the nutcases in the hospital and arguing with one of them about lexicography.
‘What do you think about the pink flamingo, John?’ I asked him. ‘Do you think it really existed?’
‘Of course. I wrote an episode of The X Files about it.'
He smiled. It was all a big joke for him. We were all pretty certain he hadn't written that particular episode.
‘How are you, John?’
‘I’m good.’
‘That’s good.’
‘And you?’
‘All good.’
‘Good.’
McManus’s breathed the same as always. John Carroll, Geary, Carol, Slayer. I wanted release. The place never changed. The drinks never changed, the people never changed. The heads occasionally grew new ears and eyes and whiskers, but conditions and positions remained, outliving bodies, keeping the apparatus intact, the flow going forever.
