Ignis Reliquiae

Kitsch, my hole, added Phyllis.  It might be worth a bit now, and I know the father was fond of it, but seriously I’d trade that piece of shit for even just one or two of the tapes and discs we lost.

          I’m still not sure what all is gone, said Oran.  I just know we lost a lot.  Nearly everything that was in here.  Pinpointing individual things is difficult.  That’s the trouble with having so much.  You won’t know what you’re missing until you go looking for it.

           I was also unsure which titles had officially perished.  Especially after looking over the inventory Oran had drawn up, a work of sloppy itemisation.  Not that this was any different from the original manner in which things were filed because nothing in the living room had been in alphabetical order.   The vinyl records survived as they were safely stashed away in a cabinet at the front of the room, far from the fire’s reach, but many of the more valuable books, along with an enormous quantity of videotapes and DVDs, had lived closer to the back and had been sadly seen to.  The list of survivors was depressingly short and rendered on paper by the dullest of all pens in the saddest of all writing styles, with all items going under the heading: Ignis Reliquiae (I knew of Oran’s predilection for Latin phrases when wishing to express an inconvenience, a habit which was also no doubt shaped by his extraordinary ostentation).

 

IGNIS RELIQUIAE

 

FILMS + SHOWS

         

The Loved One (VHS)

Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em – The Job Interview/George’s House/Love Thy Neighbour (VHS)

Fawlty Towers – The Psychiatrist/The Builders/The Wedding Party (VHS)

8 Million Ways To Die (VHS)

Ripping Yarns (VHS)

Conan the Destroyer (VHS)

Oliver! (VHS)

Frankenstein (VHS)

Blade Runner (VHS)

The Curse of the Werewolf (VHS)

Weird Science (DVD)

The Quiet Man (DVD)

Frank Capra Collection (DVD)

Sunset Boulevard (DVD)

The Fortune Cookie (DVD)

Sudden Impact (DVD)

Satyricon (DVD)

Ace in the Hole (DVD)

Manhattan (DVD)

Thunderball (DVD)

Total Recall (DVD)

 

 

BOOKS

 

C.S Lewis, Mere Christianity

Robert Graves, The Greek Myths 2

Encyclopaedia Britannica Vols 1 – 4

W.B Yeats, Autobiographies

Arthur Ransome, Swallows and Amazons

The Collector’s Guide to British Dolls since 1920

Comus and Shorter Poems by Milton

Bronte Collection, Wuthering Heights/Jane Eyre/The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Derek Wright, The Psychology of Moral Behaviour

Dea Birkett, Spinsters Abroad: Victorian Lady Explorers

Peter Tate, A Century of Bird Books

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

James Stephens, The Crock of Gold

G.R de Beer, Sir Hans Sloane and the British Museum

Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey

R.W Trine, In Tune with the Infinite

Reader’s Digest Treasury of Wit and Humour

Michael Tierney, Education in a Free Ireland

French One-Act Plays of Today

Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull

The Catalog of American Antiques

George Gershwin: His Life and Music

Andre Maurois, Fattipuffs and Thinifers

W.T Stearn, Flower Artists of Kew

J.R.R Tolkien, Tree and Leaf

William James, Pragmatism

Collected Poems by Philip Larkin

The Films of Akira Kurosawa

Walter Allen, Tradition and Dream

Dorling Kindersley World Atlas

The Complete Prophecies of Nostradamus

Chauncy D. Harris, Bibliography of Geography Part One

Frank O’Connor, Dutch Interior

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

Jack Higgins, The Eagle Has Landed

H.J Eysenck, Know Your Own I.Q

The 7^th Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories (Edited by Mary Danby)

The Best of Saki

The Most of S.J Perelman

T. Crofton Croker, Irish Folk Stories for Children

Doris Lessing, The Grass is Singing

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals

H.G Wells, The War of the Worlds

Joseph Connolly, Modern First Editions

Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

Jackie Collins, Hollywood Husbands

A Dictionary of Foreign Words in English

 

It was a compelling list of artefacts but knowing they were scraps was enough to bring a tear to the eye.

 

It didn’t look like anyone was coming back for another go at burning their house down.  The Gullivers had for all intents and purposes stepped away from the spotlight, to the good fortune of one and all, let’s be honest.  Everyone in the vicinity seemed to forget about the whole thing.  As did the police, for there was barely any follow-up from them, save for some officers going round to have a brief chat with the victims a few days after.  They didn’t visit long enough to sit down.  No answers to be had, no suspects under scrutiny, no law to be immediately enforced.  And so Oran and Phyllis got back to the usual business of sitting around, with only minor changes to their routine.  One change that occurred subsequent to the housefire was that Phyllis started to go out more, not just for her singing group in Monaghan, which only met every second month.  There were now more strolls on her behalf to Dunnes Stores to get the messages and less visits from Risteárd as a consequence.  I worried for her though, remembering the incident at the vigil.  On one occasion I offered to accompany her out in case someone meaning harm went up to her and she near bit the head off me for the gesture, saying I wouldn’t be much good if she needed help and had I looked at the size of me lately? 

 

Of the pair of them, Phyllis was the one who distrusted the town most of all, which made it all the more jarring that she was now the one more inclined towards excursion.  All she’d shared until now about the actual contents of her long-gestating play was that the bulk of its drama concerned some disagreements with the neighbours – not her nearest neighbours, just neighbours in general, a whole statement on her conflict with Earlship.   Now that I’d seen that map of the old town in her room, I believed she held on to romantic notions of the region’s past which she was not able to align with the current thinking.  I’d experienced her displeasure with the townsfolk many times, including hearing regularly about a theory she had that somehow something mind-altering had gotten into the food supply and fouled dispositions further, either through the batch loaves or the macaroons, the only items so wide in popularity that they might get to every nook and gob in the town.  The people of Earlship already operated at normal levels of human imperfection so whatever the drug was it didn’t have to be anything too powerful, just something with enough bite to put them over the edge.  Notwithstanding the prominence of these sinister theories in my ears, I still had faith in my neighbours, even knowing right well the spite they were capable of.  I didn’t believe there was something in the food.  I also ate those loaves and macaroons and was okay for the most part.  I wasn’t particularly bitter towards anyone.  I only despised one or two of them.

 

One morning near The Martlet I saw some cleaners on the street.  They had Hi-Vis coats on and wore friendly smiles on their faces like the absolute best of citizenry.  They came in a multitude of shapes and ages and were busy completing various community-serving tasks, such as emptying the bins, picking up litter, cutting weeds at the kerbside.  One of them was an older woman who smiled warmly at me as I passed.  There was a spirit of kindness in the air.  It was only when I saw the parole officer standing nearby that I realised they were all in some way or other criminals out doing their part to please the courts.  There was no doubt in my mind that if I’d recollected this scene to Phyllis, she’d have nodded her head in a told-you-so way.  The macaroons, she’d probably say, rolling her eyes.