CC 58: A Prayer for the Toasted

The town was giddy for October 31^st with the kids hopping about hissing scares through the slats of their plastic masks and the delinquents down alleys setting off bangers and building schemes for suburban offensives.  Young adults, spilling from their offices, were gleefully anticipating a carnage-filled party in the evening.  Decent girls seeking scandal and escape from the state of grace, out to swap the gladrags for next to no rags on the anointed night for theatre and sex; and the men, young and even older, leaving the offices behind them rubbing their mitts together.  Not to mention the elderly coming from the cathedral with beads still in their hands and rosaries for the dead tinkling quickly on their lips, and happily waving the young ones past, thinking Ah, let them be young, for in days to come, they’ll see beyond all this frivolity as the loved ones in their lives become the stuff of remembrance. 

I walked up past Roden Place and the cathedral towards the centre of town slowing for a moment to listen to a man shouting all shades of abuse at the shuttered up shopfront of a local pawnbroker and second-hand dealer.  There was an old toaster on the ground beside him which he’d tried to trade in to get a naggin of vodka but was rejected on account of the appliance having none of its strength anymore.  The pawnbroker must have thrown a round of bread inside to test its toasting faculties and the old contraption had failed to deliver.  Maybe.

‘It works, you cunt,’ he shouted.  ‘It fuckin works.  It’s a good toaster.  It’s the best fuckin toaster, ye asshole.  Go back to England, you British bastard.’ 

The pawnbroker was from Newry, about 14 miles over the border.  Sense evades.  Old divisions, however misguided, were always at hand whenever a long-suffering insufferable needed to give voice to his or her maverick oppression.  Anyway, the man was shouting at nothing at all.  The owner had either closed for Halloween, or locked up shop to fend off the blubbering nutjob.  He looked like one of the town carousers who you’d often see around Bridge Street or hanging around the Fair Green with huge torpedos of cider dangling from the arms.  They usually looked harmless, a sneaky menace in their eyes sure enough, but too frail to get up from their drinking to inflict significant damage.  But this man outside the shop with his toaster was different.  He was big, looked strong.  A mother shuffled nervously past him and yelled Hurry Up to her wee lads who lagged behind playing with their pound shop pirate swords and sparklers.  (Even with the euro, many folks still called them pound shops.  The border wasn’t strong enough to interfere with language games long levelled in the land.  You could call your bargain store Eurosaver all you liked, but there were many who still couldn’t get their heads around the sound of it.)

I picked up speed myself as the man’s roar got louder and hoped the devil inside him would be dealt some pardon in the coming winter; and I thought about his dead toaster, and prayed it would toast again powerfully in the Otherworld.