Emerald Germs of Ireland - By Patrick McCabe Page 0,2

squealing with delight at times as he cried, “Come on, Mammy! It’s your turn now! Sing one we all know!” as she would hit him a playful slap and cry, “No! You, Pat! It’s your go!” and between the pair of them they would be as happy then as that very first day he popped out from between her legs so many years before that final day when her son swung a saucepan and pitched Maimie McNab into the black unending pitch of all eternity.

Which—and let us not mince words here—makes Pat McNab a perpetrator of that most heinous of crimes, the taking of another person’s life, and earns him the reprehensible, odious appellation of “murderer.” But not just any ordinary murderer, either, for quite how many people ended up covered in a carpet of leaves in the environs of Pat McNab’s garden even now it would be impossible to state with any degree of accuracy. Suffice to say that a conservative estimate might be around the fifty, fifty-five mark. That is not, however, to include the various fly-by-nights and assorted drifters who turned up unannounced at the McNab household (a gray, parsonage-type edifice two miles outside town), never afterward to be seen again, the only evidence of their ever having been in the vicinity the faint strains of an Irish ballad or obscure “pop” or “show” tune with which Pat commemorated their untimely passing, a new vitality entering his life as he, by dint of sheer experience and a sense of “warming to his task,” gradually found himself becoming as efficient in this heretofore undiscovered arena as any “cleaner” or “regulator” one might encounter in the world of Hollywood action pictures.

It was, perhaps, inevitable then that Pat might—simply through the sheer force of his newfound excitement and sense of achievement, something previously utterly unknown to him—gradually begin to perceive himself as one of these individuals—a sort of long-coated, mysterious loner whose dedication to his career (“termination with extreme prejudice”) was fierce and shocking in its simplicity. Even to the extent, for a time, of finding himself convinced that he was bearing with him throughout the village of Gullytown a special, custom-made briefcase which contained the precision instruments essential to his trade, including a Walther PPK pistol and a sleek night rifle which could be assembled in a mere matter of seconds. This was all sheer nonsense, of course. Pat was the possessor of no such instruments, or briefcase, for that matter. The only similarity between his persona and that of the cinematic regulators might be said to have been located in his coat, being as it conferred upon him, in its blackness and inordinate length, a mysterious, shadowy quality—although, in the case of the fictive regulator, the garment would have been almost certainly expertly tailored and unlikely to hang baggily about his frame, flapping disorientedly, almost apologetically, around the knees. Indeed, to be honest, Pat’s garment appeared not so much as something that had been purchased in a leading Paris fashion house at absurd cost to the professional assassin, but something hens might have slept in and, in fact, if the truth be told, most likely had.

This is all of little consequence, however, for these early fancies and delusions thankfully did not persist (Pat was intelligent enough to know that he was simply attracting unnecessary attention to himself), and within a matter of weeks he was more or less what you might describe as “back to himself”—the perfect disguise, of course, for any regulator!—smiling away to his neighbors and greeting them with saluations such as “Not a bad day now, Mrs. O’Carroll!” and “There you are now, Mrs. O’Hare! And Barney! Turned out nice again, thank God!”

Thus proceeded the first 365 days of what might be called Pat McNab’s “postmatricide” year. Pat, who, it seemed, now spent many of his waking hours sitting by the window of his old dark house and nibbling abstractedly on fingers of toast, every so often experiencing a slight twinge of remorse as he considered, “Why did I have to do that—go and murder my own mother, the woman who looked after me and attended to all my needs for almost forty-five years?” But it would pass, almost as if it had never existed, and as he finished the last of his toast, a small smile would begin to play on his lips, and he would find himself consumed by the strangest warmth, as if he had just been that he had won a