The Sunday Independent’s apology to Liam Lawlor’s family

Posted in Old blogger by Twenty Major on October 31st, 2005

You have to laugh:

To the many readers of the Sunday Independent, over one million of you, our deep apologies are offered, too.

Oooh, good job you managed to sneak in a little snippet about readership figures in there, Aengus. God forbid you might just apologise without the PR or backslappery.

It reminds me of the time me and Jimmy were sent to have a word with a bloke who was distributing goods in a territory he shouldn’t have been. ‘Teach him a lesson’ we were told as we were handed a piece of paper with an address.

So we drove out to the estate in question and sat a couple of doors down waiting for the target to come out. We smoked a couple of spliffs made from some mental grass that Dirty Dave’s brother, Shiny Simon, had posted back from Amsterdam and listened to the radio. That late night talk show cunt on FM104 was on, Chris Barry, what a cock he was, quite literally, and some twats were blathering on about some crap.

I suppose we were there a couple of hours when his front door opened and he walked out. Me and Jimmy got out of the car and interecepted him as he made his way towards him.

“Hey, we need a word”, I said.

“What about?” he said.

“As if you don’t know”, Jimmy said.

“No, really, I don’t”, he insisted.

“Does this refresh your memory?” I asked as I smashed him across the knees with an aluminium baseball bat.

“Arrrrgggghhhh”, he said. I wasn’t sure if that meant his memory was refreshed or not.

As he lay on the ground Jimmy kicked him in the ribs and there was a satisfying crack. He huddled up into the fetal position, his hands covering his face. I brought the bat down right on his hands and I could see his fingers start to swell immediately. Jimmy rolled him over onto his back and as he gurgled smashed his fist into his mouth. Once. Twice. Maybe five times. Yer man spat teeth.

Jimmy rolled him over onto his front then and twisted his arm behind his back like a bully used to do to you at school.

“You know why we’re here. Stop meddling in other people’s business. Understand?”

“Fnarghh, blurgh, urf, glomp” the bloodied mess mumbled as he ate pavement.

“That’s what I like to hear. Now, just so we can be sure you know we mean business…..” - at that Jimmy wrenched the arm upwards and across, dislocating the collar bone and snapping the elbow.

“Arrrrrrrrrggggghhh”, said the repetitive victim as his wife, followed by his two young kids, came running out of his house shouting at us to stop. Which was a bit of a problem because the guy we were supposed to be dealing had no family whatsoever which was what made him such a devil-may-care criminal.

Not our fault though, when you have an estate such as ‘Lionville’ (not real, merely an example) and within that there’s a 34 Lionville Place, 34 Lionville Road, 34 Lionville Grove, 34 Lionville Manor and fucking countless other 34 Lionvilles it’s no wonder a couple of guys can get confused. Turns out this bloke was a marketing manager for Kraft. Whooops. At least he’d have plenty of margarines to aid his recovery.

I looked at Jimmy. He looked at me. We both looked at the bloke with the mangled arm, teeth like Shane McGowan and knees as useful as Stephen Hawkings bleeding all over his pretty wife’s white blouse as his kids wept plaintively.

“Erm, sorry about that”, I said. Our apology meant about as much as the Sunday Indo’s.