The Wake - Table of contents

The Wake - afters (6)

I'm in the City Hotel five nights a week now. Turning into a bit of a habitual drinker. But sometime she'll come. She has to surely, she has so many friends in Derry that she'll want to come back to see, she'll have to come. And until she does there's always company, no shortage of company. Doesn't fill the void, but still. Marxist suicide marchers, other left-wing allsorts, Nationalist party stalwarts, Citizens' Action Committee celebrities, spongers, sex-seekers. Sometime she'll come.

Thursdays and Fridays I sit at home with Mammy and look at TV. A man could grow old this way. On Friday we watch the Late Late Show. Stupid name of course because it's not late late, it's not even late. It starts at half nine and ends at eleven or so when the night's only starting . Anyway, I was sitting watching it with Mammy this time and they were discussing the pope's encyclical about birth control and of course the Pill had to be brought into the conversation. There was a theologian on about the spiritual dangers of using it and then a lady doctor started explaining how it can harm a woman's health or maybe even kill her.

Mammy always switches over if there's anything to do with sex on but this time she turned the volume up. You wanted to hear it. Breast cancer, cervical cancer, blood clots, gall bladder disease, liver tumours, bad cholesterol, infertility, genital warts and all these other sexually transmitted diseases, everything but ingrown toenails and maybe those too if she'd had the time to get round to them.

Mammy was nodding away at her head the whole way through it and I sat thinking, Typical! - that's Telefís Éireann all over, just giving one side of the story. Now this boy Gay Byrne's the presenter and he made a bit of an effort to act as devil's advocate but you'd have thought by the end of it he was the devil himself the way some people in the audience were going on. He was lucky he didn't end up tarred and feathered.

Then as a bit of relief they brought on these Irish dancers. It's a funny thing about Irish dancing. There they were, the girls highstepping and you could see their legs right up to their panties and beyond if you looked hard enough and their hands were dead stiff by their sides and the boys dancing next to them weren't going near them and they had their hands down the same way. There may as well have been a sign up saying Don't touch, this is Ireland, this is Irish culture, don't go on the way depraved ones do with their jiving and slow dancing and miniskirts. It's no wonder most of the country's screwed up. Short shrift to short shifts. Priestridden Ireland. No, that doesn't sound right.

It was supposed to be one of my drinkfree nights but I thought, What a ridiculous country and I told Mammy I was going out for a walk. She said something, sounded like she wasn't happy about me going out for a walk on one of my nights in, but I wasn't listening.

I headed down Creggan Hill levitating for the length it took me to pass Aisling's flat. A quiver in the waterworks. I paused at the top of William Street and peered through the dark.