CC 102: Legacy Fidgets
By sean mcnulty
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‘Look, Emer,’ I said, standing with my arms stretched out in front of the Pirate Byrne’s Folly. ‘It’s our castle.’
‘It’s not ours,’ she laughed back.
Nobody lived inside. Cuchullain’s Castle, or the Pirate’s Folly, or Castletown Motte, or whatever you wanted to call it, was just something to be looked at, maybe admired, maybe not even that. It wasn’t Mellifont Abbey, or Clonmacnoise, or the Hill of Tara, or anywhere famous like that, and not as significant as any of them in the annals of history. To the people of town however, it was a record of their own place in eternity, for although it was in ruins, it was still standing there, watching over everything, with modesty and grace. Lore and legacy. That’s what it meant to them. But they wouldn’t have told you that. That would have been too sappy for the people of Dundalk, who were well-used to their vestures of cynicism, a defensive tactic that came with being from a town with a bad reputation. The nation’s scoundrel. That grubby town. The IRA town. Gundalk. The people had been toughened by years of disregard, infamy,and neglect. The underdog pride made them have their guards up, and their tongues sharp, to conceal the sweetness and tears.
We walked around the top of the mound for a bit, reminding ourselves of the layout. There wasn’t much to it anymore. Around the old building, there remained stonework where walls had once been; perhaps they’d been courtyards, or even extended parts of the folly at one point.
We sat on one of the ex-walls, at the back, facing the fields and Dundalk Bay in the east, where we expected the dawn to arrive soon. I hoped it would hurry up. Prayed Emer would stick around as long as possible, but realised, in all likelihood, if the sun was slow to rise, she’d get fed-up and fuck away off.
‘Shit,’ said Emer, rustling around in her quilted purse. ‘No cigarettes left.’
‘I have some tobacco, I think,’ I said. I reached into my back pocket, and happily there was a little warm and flattened bag of Golden Virginia to be had, and a ravaged Rizla packet with some skins left in it.
‘Oh, you legend,’ she said.
I began the process of rolling cigarettes, making sure to weigh down the papers with tobacco as fast as I could to ward off the wind. Emer meanwhile flung her purse on the grass as if she was disgusted with it, and lifted her head to the sky, in a mooning way. Once I had the fags built, I went back to the pockets to look for a light, and found to my surprise three little machines of fire which hadn’t been there before. Deadly. You were one of either two kinds of people after a party: one with lots of lighters in your pocket, or one with none at all.
‘Take off your glasses,’ Emer said, after the first drag from her cigarette.
‘Why?’
‘Come on.’
I took the glasses off, and she looked into my eyes analytically.
‘The redness is going away.’
‘Oh, really? It’s gone?’
‘You can still see a little, but it’s mostly gone. You’ve been having sleep issues again? ‘
‘Yes, but it’s not as bad as it was. And for a while, I was absolutely grand. But it started again a few months ago.’
‘Maybe it’s these things,’ she said, holding up her cigarette. ‘You always used to smoke so late in the evening. Kept you up all night.’
‘Could be. Another reason to be done with them.’
‘Are you still scratching your arse at night?’ she sniggered.
‘I wasn’t scratching my ass – how many times do I have to tell you that?’
In the last year, both of us had been plagued by my sleeping problems. I’d be up all night gyrating in the bed, sweating, and scratching myself. Couldn’t get a fucking wink. I would lie there fighting with the brain and the body for no good reason. An anxious itch in the middle of the night begot further feverish itching all over. Sometimes ass and balls too, as it goes, but not exclusively those. Emer would sometimes wake up.
‘What are you doing?’ she’d ask.
‘Can’t sleep.’
‘You’re not scratching your ass, are ya?’
‘No.’
‘That’s disgusting. Don’t be putting your hands near me if you’ve been scratching your arse and balls like that.’
She’d drop back to sleep again, with uncanny urgency, no effort it seemed, and I’d continue to lie there, and resist scratching, until some other aggravation came along. Like Emer’s warm sleeping breath on my face. I missed it now, but for a time, it would provide additional irritation in the night. Her breath would tickle my forehead, and I’d have to rub it, and that would send an itch to my neck, which would then travel to my belly, then my legs, and suddenly my whole body was a tempest and I was furiously clawing away at it, and shouting at her in my head, unreasonably, ‘Stop breathing, woman.’
‘Are you allergic to me, is that it?’ she would ask the following day.
‘Of course not,’ I’d say. ‘I don’t know what it is. I’m hypersensitive at night.’
It distressed me at the time, but at one stage I truly feared that it did have something to do with Emer. With her being there beside me. But I couldn’t understand how there had been no problem before. Seven years sleeping in the same bed, and there’d been no disturbance whatsoever. The pleasures of lying beside her had succumbed to disquieting fidgets and sweat. Intimacy brought its sameness and the tingles of dominion. The sex between us had fizzled out by then, so our bed was a war for proprietorship, which she continually won. There was only too much solidarity one could take.
‘I bet Cuchullain didn’t scratch his ass half as much as you in bed,’ she said.
‘Not half as much, but I’m sure he did it.’
We could hear the wind blowing through the castle, raising ancient drones from the void, the immortals in their slumber. Cuchullain, tossing and turning, talking in his sleep.
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