Folk'd Up Beyond All Recognition (FUBAR) Read online

  His room had not exactly been a lady trap. During its glory days, it had been a cesspit of beer cans, well-thumbed magazines from the middle-to-top-shelf range, a PC held together purely on the basis that he shared the house with several nerds and because, as one of them had theorised to him one day, the sheer number of viruses and spyware he’d downloaded on late-night regret-it-in-the-morning browsing sessions had left the machine in a sort of “eye of the hurricane” state; the actual system was being left alone whilst the various invaders fought furiously amongst themselves for supremacy.

  Should any of them ever win this never-ending battle, his PC would most likely exude a small puff of smoke and die. He had the faint impression Flan was taking the piss when he explained all this, but he had been too half-cut at the time to give a fuck and anyway, it had a certain poetry to it.

  But the bed - ah, the bed. His one splash of luxury he’d sprinkled on the room had been to seek and purchase a half-decent mattress upon moving in, and thus for the last three years while his poor deluded housemates had slept, masturbated and had frantic and eye-wateringly noisy sex on their own 6 by 4’s that were about as smooth and lump-free as Stephen Hendry’s face, he had reclined in comfort and style on a posturepedic quadrilateral slice of heaven that more than one member of the opposite sex had commented was the most comfortable thing they’d ever sat on, leaving him open to reply ah, the night is young…

  The bed was gone. His little fridge, his little Pearly Gates, was too. Everything was gone and the room was empty, with only echoes remaining. It had all been lugged downstairs and out into the Sprinter van he’d hired for the day, awaiting only his arrival in the passenger’s seat to set off across the city.

  “Yeah,” he told Steve, tasting the irony in the words. “Yeah, I have everything.”

  He walked down the hallway and past the middle landing bathroom, which in a just and sane universe would have been sealed with concrete long since. He remembered staggering in there one particularly hungover Sunday morning and fumbling for the lightswitch for what seemed like six months or so, cursing his own ineptitude for being unable to find it, only to realise that he had found it and flicked it and that the reason for the lack of light was that the lightbulb was missing.

  Not to be undone in his quest for an urgent hangover-recovery shit, he had pinballed his way back to his room and after only a month or so of searching had uncovered the emergency torch he had squirreled for just such an emergency. With batteries cannibalised from his gamepad, and a small Bat-signal silhouette emanating from the torch (or Bat-torch, to give it its formal title), he had strode back to the bathroom, ready to make sweet, perverted Barry White sphincter-love to that U-bend.

  And so he had. And flushing it away, he had nodded at a job well done. Only for the evidence of his endeavours to stubbornly refuse to shift. After one flush, after ten. He was nonplussed by this; what to do? When his flatmates had awoken, he had consulted them. He hadn’t had to explain the problem much, as time had made it pretty evident throughout the entire dwelling that something in the shit-flushing department had gone seriously awry.

  “Holy, holy fuckin Christ on the fuckin Cross,” Flan had gagged. “Lad, you’re not even human. Oh Jesus. Go and see about yourself will ye, ye dirty dirty fucker…”

  Flan had gone an impressive shade of green, being in the throes of his own four-course hangover had only added to the nausea. Ordinarily he wouldn’t have counted on much in the way of sympathy for this plight from his mates, but every single one of them was approaching hangover shit requirement status themselves and a solution was urgently needed…

  “Here,” Steve said, as they passed the bathroom. “Remember when we found out some dick had wedged a lightbulb in the U-bend?”

  Danny couldn’t keep the faint smile from his face. “I was just thinkin about that lad.”

  “Did ye ever use that coat-hanger again?”

  Danny glanced at his friend to see if he was jesting. He wasn’t. “Um,” he said carefully, not wanting to upset him by speaking his mind at this precise moment, “nah. I weighed up the pros and cons, and…nah.”

  The lads had gathered by the front door. Not in an obvious deliberate way a group of girls would have to see off a girl leaving the house, with hugs and tears, gifts and promises. . That wasn’t how lads worked. It looked for all the world like he’d just happened to catch them when they happened to be loitering near the door, bit of a coincidence that, but here, since we’re all here anyway, may as well do the needful…

  “Well lad,” Flan said. Chris “Flan” Flanagan was a ungainly, lanky streak of piss, and quite clearly a sexual deviant, but Danny loved every sick bone in his body. “Best of luck like.”

  Best of luck. Coming from Flan, even in his somewhat depressed current mood, that elicited a half-smile from Danny.

  A week earlier, they’d been travelling across the city via black taxi. Unlike black cabs in other parts of the world, Belfast’s versions were not private and acted as little mini-buses, ferrying six hardy souls at a go – five in the back in a 3 vs 2 seating arrangement, and the sixth sat beside the driver and thus fair game to be subjected to whatever matters of grave import currently floated at the top of the shared consciousness of taxi men. World affairs and economic crises all paled into insignificance next to Arsenal’s baffling decision to go with 5 at the back in a home game.

  Coming back from 5-a-side toward the city centre, Danny and Flan had clambered dutifully into the back of a passing black hack, and ended up sandwiched together on the 3-person rear seat. As it was an all-in-one type of thing, the “3 person” population limit depended entirely on the girth of the three people sitting. This was why, currently, Danny found himself limited to one opportunity to exhale every time the 20-stone munter sitting to his left deigned to do the same. As if her width wasn’t enough, the bovine-featured idiot had just bought eighteen months worth of dinners from Iceland. A bagful of 12-inch pepperonis was currently causing Danny to lose all feeling in his left calf.

  “Told you we shoulda got the fuckin bus,” he hissed at Flan to his right. Flan wasn’t much better off, to be fair. If he’d been pressed any more firmly to the window he’d have been a tax disc.

  Mere moments later, though, his ire was cooled several hundred degrees when, in the space of seconds, the two nondescript types sitting opposite he and Flan on the 2 pull-down seats both exited, and just as the doors closed and the taxi began to move off…

  “Stop! Stop mister!”

  With a giggle and an explosion of perfume and tanned flesh, two mini-skirted lovelies had replaced the faceless automatons. Noting the presence of two lads of around the same age, they immediately pretended not to notice them in the most ostentatious way possible, looking at each other, out the windows, and every three seconds tugging futilely at hemlines so high up on their legs that Danny wasn’t sure that if their legs weren’t crossed properly, he’d get a glimpse of panties or pancreas.

  If they were pretending not to notice Danny and Flan, Flan had no such compunctions in return. He was franctically elbowing Danny’s ribs until Danny was forced to wrench his neck to the right and give his friend a YES, I FUCKIN SEE THEM look.

  Pre-Ellie, in this situation, Danny would have considered making some chitchat with his wingman about the 5-a-side, trying to get a bit of banter going, trying to crack a few gags that might – if he were lucky – elicit a “yes I’m eavesdropping” giggle from the two, which would then serve as a perfect in for a throwaway icebreaker.

  The darkness in the back of the taxi was semi-illuminated at that moment by a small screen somewhere to his right, and Danny knew, knew at that moment, that they were fucked.

  With eyes that started off wide and desperate, and then morphed into simply filled with fascination, he watched. Watched as Flan shot through phone menus with Olympic sprinter speed, watched as the camera options screen flashed up, and as the “shutter noise” option was turned securely OFF. Watched, as Flan lined up the pe
rfect knicker-shot, whilst giving off waves of “composing a text”-ness, a performance filled with fake button-presses and casual I’m-not-zooming-in-on-between-your-thighs facial expressions that would have had Laurence Olivier on his feet proclaiming that here, in the humble backwaters of Belfast, here was a true genius of the craft.

  As Flan’s moment arrived, as one of the girls adjusted her posture to account for the cramped conditions of the taxi and those long legs moved, and his finger had already stabbed down on the crucial button to capture the image like a mosquito in wank-amber, Danny quickly realised that his friend in his quest for the unnoticed snap had forgotten one vital piece of information about cameras asked to take pictures in small, dark areas.

  The light of the flash lit up the back of the taxi like the detonation of a small nuclear device.

  Everyone had remained silent and frozen for a good two to three seconds afterward.

  “What,” the would-be model said, “the fuck, d’you think yer fuckin doing…?”

  Afterwards, nursing the bruise on his cheek and the shiner coming up a beauty, Flan had asked Danny miserably what was best for treating black eyes.

  “Isn’t there an app for that?” Danny had replied.

  Back in the moment, Vic was chiming in his agreement with Flan’s banalities. “King” Vic was tiny and ginger and thus, inevitably and quite rightly, actively despised this world and all who lived within it; there were rumours that he’d once nutted a bouncer one and a half times his height. Presumably some sort of stepladder had been involved. But when it came to Danny, Vic’s ire was seldom raised. In fact Danny had been forced to avert a Vic “intervention” on his behalf several times towards people the wee fella had perceived had been looking at Danny the wrong way.

  “Am…how long’s she to go?” Vic asked, tasting the question even as he said at and clearly not knowing what to make of the flavour.

  “Three weeks,” Danny said.

  Eyes widened. Three weeks was a crazily short amount of time by anyone’s standards. It was also the bare minimum he’d been able to justify to himself before moving out of this house.

  Standing on the front doorstep now, catching the eye of the hired driver sitting tapping his fingers on the dashboard of the big white van containing his entire footprint of existence on this life, Danny wanted nothing more than to turn and walk back in and sit down on the communal sofa and make ratty comments about the music channel someone had chosen, or complain loudly about someone’s tactics on Xbox Live, or just sit and down a few tins and debate the venue of choice for tonight’s pints.

  A step outside this door and all of that ended. A step back inside the door and he was a cunt. There was no middle ground, no third option, no grey area. He had morals. If he turned his back on this, if he pretended it didn’t happen, he knew the lads might have their opinions on it but he also knew they’d deal with it and not mention it.

  But just because they wouldn’t talk about it wouldn’t mean he wouldn’t know.

  He still hated maps. Still couldn’t look at one. But Jesus Christ, he couldn’t be responsible for a child’s misery after what he’d gone through. He couldn’t be someone else’s biggest letdown. And a step back inside this house and into the carefree life of beer and randoms would leave that fate…mapped out.

  The words rose within him, as they always did at the worst possible time.

  And I’m glad I did.

  “Well lads,” he said. “Cheerio. Keep in touch and all that balls.”

  Of course we will, they chorused. Flan punched him on the shoulder. Vic shook his hand with a look on his face that said thank fuck it’s you and not me.

  “Lad…” Steve said, when the rest had drifted off. There was something in his best friend’s eyes, Danny realised, something that if it wasn’t Steve before him Danny would have taken for genuine emotion. “Just wanted to say…I know it seems daunting and all that but…well, there’s some out there who might envy ye.”

  “You feeling alright?” Danny replied. “Last week getting rid of all the Liverpool posters in your room, now this? I think I’m gonna put you in for a brain scan, lad.”

  “Ach fuck ye,” Steve replied, and gave him a brief and manly hug, before walking off.

  Danny pulled the door closed behind him and walked to the van, figuring that he might as well get this over with and stop with the long goodbyes and the parting glances. After all, this baby wasn’t fuckin likely to vanish into thin air anytime soon, was it?

  More’s the pity.

  **

  Mag Tuired, Ireland, 94 BC

  He should have been dead. Everyone around him was. Thousands of his people, of their finest warriors, slaughtered where they had stood…and later where they had ran. He had been one of the runners. What choice did he have? These people - these Tuatha, curse them, curse everything about them - had magics beyond anything he and his kin could hope to match.

  Running, running, running - and a flash of silver - and he tasted dirt, and felt the strangest sensation that only a few moments later could he identify as the feeling you get when a blade amputates your legs clean off at the knees. Not having anything to compare it to, it was some seconds before the incredible pain had kicked in and he had actually bitten through his own tongue with the agonies of it.

  Incapable of anything but moaning, bleeding to death, he had seen them pass above him, jutting their weapons into any of his fallen brothers who yet moved, wiping the injured from existence, completing their victory. He saw their own injured and fallen be thrown into a large cauldron produced from somewhere, and with vision that was growing fainter, he saw them rise again, restored and whole. Not a single Tuatha would die today. The Formorians had been slaughtered for nothing.

  The realisation gave him strength from somewhere, and when he detected the movement near him, his fingers curled around his axe and with one last, desperate heave of defiance, he reared up on his leg-stumps, choking blood, and saw the Tuatha before him start in surprise and start to swing his weapon in reprisal, but too late - oh too late! - his axe met flesh and the hateful Tuatha roared in pain. Blood fountained.

  A spearhead emerged from the forehead of the Formorian a moment later, the shaft passing through in its entirety such was the force of the throw. He was dead and on the ground seconds later, the last of the Formorian warriors to have come to Mag Tuiread that day to know the release of oblivion.

  The Morrigan arrived on the scene with great bounds, her eyes wide with grief. “Nuada,” she choked. “Nuada, no…!”

  Nuada was cradling his right arm. Blood soaked through his clothes at an incredible rate. He stared glassy-eyed with shock down at the grass below, where lay his right hand, still curled around the silver sword, struck off by a Formorian too stupid to know when he and his kind were doomed.

  The Morrigan extricated his arm from where he cradled it, examined it closely. She bellowed for healers, knowing that the Cauldron could not be called upon to heal anything short of a mortal wound, or death. This was neither.

  “You will live,” she told her thirdfather.

  “Aye I will,“ he replied, his voice empty. “More’s the pity.”

  Standing nearby, unseen while hearing these words, Danny couldn’t help but flinch. The memory he had just relived still burned hot within him but try as he might to stay away from its intensity, he couldn’t help but go back to it again and again, a masochistic moth to the flame.

  “Consider it granted,” he murmured to himself.

  “Did you say something?”

  “…no,” he said, glancing at the Morrigan, surprised she was paying attention given the scene unfolding before them. Her younger self was beside herself with anguish as Nuada stood on shaky legs and was led away. She tried to go to him, to help him, and was waved away angrily, leaving her to stand and look on. His attitude had imploded since the wound.

  “What’s wrong with your mate,” Danny asked. “He’s still alive isn’t he? Could’ve been worse.”
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  The Morrigan shook her head. “No. It couldn’t,” and she sighed. “My people believed in purity. Spiritual, mental…and physical. We couldn’t have a one-handed king.”

  “Tsk,” Danny clucked disapprovingly. “Disability Action’d have had a field day with that. So that’s oul Nuada out on his ear is it?”

  “Yes,” she said, and for a wonder, she had tears in her eyes. That brought him up short. “This was the beginning of the end for us.”

  He was ready for it this time; and when she reached for his arm and the world was sucked through itself and he was pushed through the pinhole opening that remained, he had braced himself, for as disconcerting and debilitating as these bounces through ancient prehistory had been, compared to the trip down Belgravia Avenue he’d just taken, they rather faded in comparison.

  Sensing this, the Morrigan felt hope surge within her. Maybe this plan of theirs was going to work after all.

  * * *

  The Washerwoman

  Now

  “Danny! Danny, HOLD ON! DANNY!”

  Steve shouted and screamed but it was no good. Trying to resist the force sucking his friend away from him and down into the ground was like jumping into the air and trying to stop yourself coming back down again. He could see Danny’s eyes, wide with surprise at the fate that was befalling him, even as he was pulled inexorably closer to the subterranean event horizon-

  He spared a glance at the old woman standing at the far edge of the hole Danny had dug. She was watching Danny’s descent with rapt attention, an almost worshipful look on her face. “HELP ME!” he screamed at her, desperately, even as he lost Danny right up to the waist. “HELP ME YOU STUPID OUL FUCKER! HELP ME!”

  She didn’t so much as look at him; her eyes never moved from Danny, though he fancied he could see her lips move. He gave up, dug his heels in, pulled more, and once more his eyes locked with those of his friend’s.