Step back in time…
Posted in Old blogger by Twenty Major on February 15th, 2006
My parents were ordinary decent folk. My mam was a housewife while my father was a burglar. Well, he was once. I know this because the house he burgled was the next-door neighbour’s and he brought me along as a look-out. I was ten years old.
What happened was Da was good mates with Mr Lynch who next door. They used to go to the local and drink pints together in the front bar which they loved because women weren’t allowed in. They’d talk over the garden wall about football and they both used to go and watch Shamrock Rovers together. I’m not 100% sure what happened to bring about the falling out but all of a sudden the two men went from being best of friends to the most brutal of enemies. My mother told me years later that they had a disagreement over the merits of Johnny Giles as a midfield ball winner, an old friend of Da’s told me it was because Mr Lynch and my Da were planning a business venture together – importing some kind of spices from Colombia he said – and my younger brother said he heard from a friend of his that Mr Lynch was getting it on with the wife of another of their friends and that Da had seen Mr Lynch performing cunnilungus on their mutual friend’s wife while she inserted a lard covered digit up his hole.
“There’s that prick now!” my father would exclaim if saw Mr Lynch. It didn’t matter if he saw him over the wall of the garden, in the local shop or in the street. Till my dying day I’ll remember Da shouting ‘Siddown ya cunt!’ at Mr Lynch when got up to go to communion one Sunday.
I don’t know what life was like in the local but there were times when Da would come home after a few pints and bemoan the fact that Mr Lynch hadn’t dropped dead, been brutally murdered and buried in a shallow grave or had a terrible accident which left him a drooling vegetable and a drain on his family.
The entire Lynch family, that was Mr and Mrs, and their three sons Shane, Hugh and Arseface (his real name was Alan but we called him Arseface because of his Kirk Douglas type chin dimple), always went out on a Sunday afternoon to visit Mrs Lynch’s family who lived in Naas. So one Sunday afternoon when they’d all piled into their car he climbed in the back window and stole Mr Lynch’s prized possession, a stuffed dog which he’d had since childhood.
He once told my Da that the little West Highland White terrier was his best friend in the world when he was growing up. He didn’t have any brothers or sisters and his parents were strange and austere people who believed a child should not only not be heard it should very rarely be seen either. They bought him the dog to teach him about responsibility and also to give him a companion because there was no way they were going to have more children. Anyway, Mr Lynch and his dog, Dermot, went everywhere together. When he went for a game of football Dermot would snuffle around while the game was going on, sometimes sleeping behind the goal, sometimes joining in the game but he stopped doing that when Mark Walsh booted him in the bollocks as he was nosing the ball towards goal one day.
He’d had the dog about five years or so when the tragedy happened. He was walking home with Dermot trundling along happily behind him, stopping now and then to urinate at a tree or a gate-post (the dog, not Mr Lynch) when all of a sudden he heard a strange yelp. He turned around to see Mrs Flynn’s Burmese mountain dog – and those fellas were a rarity in Dublin back then, let me tell you – attempting to impregnate Dermot. Obviously Mrs Flynn’s dog was pretty indiscriminate about where he put his mickey. Firstly there was no way he could get Dermot pregnant because of his lack of womb and ovaries and secondly he didn’t have a dog-gina. It didn’t matter to Bentley, as the giant Burmese was known, who pounded away at poor old Dermot’s dog bottom.
The young Mr Lynch tried to separate them but there was no stopping Bentley when he got going – as Richard Clarke found out to his eternal shame one day a year or so later – and the rutting continued until the big dog had shot his load. Sadly for Dermot it was all too much and he lay as dead as dead can be on the ground. The vet said later that it was a simultaneous heart attack and stroke brought on by the vicious raping he’d received. Young Mr Lynch was traumatised though. He refused to let go of his best friend’s corpse and wouldn’t even entertain the idea of burying him. He brought him up to his room and wept. Even his normally unflinching parents were the tiniest bit shocked.
Luckily Mr Lynch senior knew a man was a keen taxidermist and when he put forward the idea of having poor old Dermot stuffed young Mr Lynch put aside his sadness and recognised the opportunity he had to have his friend with him forever.
So naturally when he arrived back from Naas that Sunday evening and discovered his house had been burgled and Dermot had been stolen he was distraught. I was under strict instructions not to say anything to anybody about what Da had done, not that I would have anyway. I understood the unwritten rule. You never tell tales, especially not on your friends but especially not on your own family (unless you hate the cunts and you have an ulterior motive).
Mr Lynch even put aside his contempt for my Da and came around asking had we seen anything suspicious at his house that afternoon.
“I know we haven’t been friends for a while, Gerry (for that was Mr Lynch’s first name), but I hate the idea of anyone breaking into your house,” said my Da, lying through his teeth. “If I’d seen anyone I’d have battered the spineless gobshites,” he spoofed.
Mr Lynch went from house to house, put up little posters for his lost and extremely dead dog, put a reward notice in the local shop (£10 for anyone with information leading to the return of Dermot) but nothing worked. He never saw him again and died less than 9 months later a broken man. Not even the love of his good wife and three sons was enough to keep him going.
All the while Dermot sat in a box under the stairs in our house. He’s still there for all I know. Maybe one day I’ll go up and leave it on Mr Lynch’s grave for a laugh.