Of course I cannot and do not at all agree with Linnane and His overdetermined universe. For one thing, I have always wanted a bright red funeral vehicle, ever since I fell in love with a bright red tin lorry that Santa (in whom, incidentally, I still believe) brought on my fifth Christmas. Henry Ford, Linnane, God and the cosmos be damned: I intend to go out in style. If I believed in a Linnanean level of determinism, I think I'd kill myself and have done with it all. That'd teach The Powers to make plans for my later life!
Which brings us neatly to the topic of topping oneself: a subject on which, as it happens, Linnane has been known to pronounce at some length. I remember us discussing self-ending at the funeral of a mutual friend many years ago. When I say "discussing" I mean, of course, that Linnane talked and I listened (or not, as the case may be).
The suicide of young males is notoriously common in the rural milieu from which both Linnane and I managed to emerge physically, if perhaps not mentally, unscathed. The typical case is in his late twenties or early thirties. He's a model young man, the life and soul of the many parties he attends. He has a good job, a fine house, a lovely car and girlfriend and is, to boot, something of a local sporting hero. One night he's doing the conga, the rhumba, the cha-cha-cha in the most pleasant company imaginable. The next morning he's doing the rope dance, all by himself. His loving, grieving family cut him down, the black hearse arrives, and the speculation begins: what in God's name made him do it?
What, indeed. My own theory is. . . boredoom. His life is on rails, all mapped out before him. Everything under control. Under too much control. He'll be married, have children and grandchildren, ease on up the promotional stairway to heaven, grow portly and prosperous, watch his investments (children, portfolio) pay off. Maybe all that drear predictability is too much for him. Maybe he wants out, and lacks the nerve or imagination to walk away from it all alive. (In the kind of places Linnane and I come from, people are not, in general, noted for their imagination. Anyone who has any is well advised to keep it well hidden, giving it free rein only in the matter of hazarding a guess or bet upon the possible outcomes of sporting contests.)
Linnane, as you may well imagine, begs to differ. Here He is, at that particular funeral I referred to. He begins by stating His own personal preference should suicide seem advisable.
"I'll tell you how I'd do it. Hanging? No. Too painful, and too undignified. It's what they used to do to major criminals, and still do in some parts. A shot in the head? No. Men have been known to miss and spend twenty brain-dead years in a wheelchair or institution. Shotgun in the mouth? No. All that blood and subsequent mess-cleaning. Drowning, in river or lake or sea or ocean, with weights added? No. Ugly and painful, and it might take much time and trouble to find the body. Car crash? Racing unseatbelted into a rural wall or tree at 4 a.m.? No. Terrible waste of a car, and people might think it was an accident.
"This is how I'd do it, should the doc's die-agnosis or the debt-collector's wolf at the door render palatable a premature exit. I'd book Myself into a nice hotel, with a TV in the room, in good time for El Clásico: Barcelona v. Real Mad. Or, should such a fixture be currently unavailable, I might settle for, let us say, Scunthorpe versus Yeovil in an FA Cup third-round replay. Anyway. Television. A six-pack of Guinness. A bottle of aspirin. That should do it, nice and easy, easing drowsily into The Big Sleep. No dramatics. No blood-and-guts anguished howling. No hang-gliding from the rafters. No sleeping with the fishes. Just, simply, getting down with The Man Morpheus. Exit, pursued by a care, but that's about it. Way to go, I tell you."
All very plausible-sounding, if you didn't know Linnane as well as I do. I know Him well enough and long enough to know that the above little soliloquy is theatrical, a lie. Linnane's ideal exit would, in fact, be other. Suicide is no part of His psyche. Linnane would like to die, utterly unexpectedly, of a sudden, massive heart attack at the very climax of The Love Act, mounting the excitement of a beautiful, magnificently-endowed and extremely nubile young professional lady paid in advance for her services.
One imagines the trauma for the young lady concerned would be very considerable, particularly if it were to be her first such occurrence. The strain of extracting herself from beneath the full rigidity of Rigor Mortis. The subsequent in-house and police and medical shenanigans.
In the long term, however, the girl would, almost certainly, learn to wear the episode as a proud badge testifying to the extent of her charms and professional proficiency. One fondly imagines the amused titterings as, cleavaged and micro-skirted among her colleagues, she recounts the climactic events while they await, cocktails in manicured hands, the first clients of the evening. It is, undoubtedly, how Linnane would love to be remembered.
Sadly, however, it is unlikely to happen in such romantic fashion. Life has a way of rarely, if ever, fulfilling our fondest hopes and expectations. Linnane is simply not heart attack material. He's as thin as a stick insect, a praying mantis who, incidentally, happens to be an atheist. So, when He eventually kicks over The Great Milk Pail In The Sky, it's more likely to be because of The Big C, if you see what I mean. The man has always smoked like a Chinese factory chimney, and He's almost as famous for His cough as for His horse-laugh.
He is, nevertheless, like the rest of us, entitled to His dreams.
On the whole question of health, in fact, Linnane is an almost-interesting specimen, both physically and verbally. Constitutionally incapable of putting on weight, He refers disdainfully to salads as "rabbit food", and eats -- on the relatively rare occasions when He does -- whatever the hell He fancies, provided only that it's available. Invited to choose between the smoked salmon salad and the longlife smorgasbord, He'll have the double chicken burger and wedges in tommy sauce every time. His concept of healthy and parsimonious sipping is not a 200 ml plastic bottle of mineral water. It is, rather, what He Himself refers to as "a feed of pints". His health guru is the late Arthur Guinness. The Black Stuff brings down the velvet curtains of His nights just as often as His days are spent wreathed in cigarette smoke, swimming in batter, the toast of cheap greasy-spoon joints up and down the hedonistic and dissolute capitals and mass-tourism resorts of this fun-loving planet.
Despite His late-life millions, Linnane remains true to His non-cordon-bleu roots. He achieves culinary lift-off, not at some fashionable and ultra-priced Paris bistro, but in any old backstreet Eddie Rockett's. He thinks the whole idea of fruit-eating is simply bananas. He's more interested in undressing the waitress with His dim eyes than in chatting her up about the merits of a soupçon of the soup du jour.
He laughs, savagely, at obesity, safe in the knowledge that fatness will never enfold His skeletal frame. His is the smugness of the late-night television-watcher or cinema-goer sprawled in comfort and security while the on-screen protagonist dies a thousand gory deaths.
Lizard has more than its share of pallid, obese waddlers from all over northern Europe: people as broad in the beam as the cruise liners they're partial to; good burghers from Leeds and Hannover and (whisper it) maybe even Oslo and Malmö, partial to the odd burger or three between ample meals. Linnane calls them "the hippo people", and never ceases to marvel comically at the run-of-the-mill, big-arsed world He imagines they inhabit at home. This is, according to Him, a world of premature hip replacements, unsuccessful liposuction, extra-large clothing stores and helpings, and frequent trips to IKEA to replace down-in-the-mouth beds, sofas, settees and armchairs.
He recounts a plane journey home from Canada during which He was, according to Himself, all but suffocated by the flowing flesh of the lady in, supposedly, the neighbouring seat, whom He described as "a kind of human glacier: shapeless, slow-moving, gravity-impelled to enfold entire landscapes". As He tells it (and He often does), He was lucky to survive the trip. Such people should, He feels, travel by cargo plane or bulk-carrier ship.
Gross obesity is, He claims, a form of terrorism. The guzzlers are, He feels, always in our faces, acting fatly, hamming it up, throwing their weight around, tipping the scales against the ordinary lightweight punter. Linnane laughs loudly and long at the absurdity of well-meaning but pusillanimous anti-obesity measures by those He calls "the hoors-that-be". "Reduce starch and sugar in soft drinks by twenty per cent!" He scoffs incredulously. (Cue horse-laugh, reverberating along the narrow, canyon-like, white-painted, sun-dazzled walls of Lizard's principal resort.) There's only one humane way to deal effectively with the hippo people. Round them up in the dead of night, using a fleet of low-loaders and some heavy lifting gear, and transport them to an island with abundant fresh water, but no food. Leave them there for a few months, allowing them re-entry to the sad civilisation they built themselves only when they're able to prove they can fit through a standard doorway."
"A tad Hitlerian, that," I venture, but He ignores me. "I realise (He goes on) that such measures might take time to organise, so, in the meantime, the hippo people should be encouraged to wear WIDE LOAD signs slung on their backs, forced to buy a row of seats on passenger flights, and enrolled in government-funded flab-fighting classes consisting of of a psychologically-approved mix of anti-fat propaganda and simple physical exercises, such as walking. Newly-built fast food emporia should be prevented by the planning laws from installing double doors. Certain streets, malls and other urban zones should be out of bounds for those over a certain designated weight, with public scales installed at access points, and stiff fines for transgressors, the resulting income to be dedicated to dedicated fat-reduction programmes.
"There's even a sporting equivalent of all this, you know," He goes on. I feel my eyebrows rising. "What? Sumo wrestling?"
"No. No. Football, actually. Let me take you back to that grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented footballing season 2015 - 2016, in the Anguish Premier League (here insert the name of the appropriate bank or other shady finance house sponsoring the thing at the time.) Apart from the usual half-hourly sackings of managers, who then go on to swop clubs, blazers and ties, what else do we have?
"Well, what we have are some -- indeed, several -- patent anomalies. We have the previous season's champions, Chelsea, languishing lowly in bottom-half mediocrity. We have Mighty Manchester City stuttering along, win-lose-win-lose, trying desperately to cling on to a top-four place. We have lowly, unheralded, unfashionable and unsung Leicester City cunningly winning the thing, to the chagrin of the polished toffs at Arsenal and Tottenham.
"There is a reason for Man City's woes. That reason is Belgian colossus Vincent Kompany, a mightily-muscled centre-back who looks as if he has spent every waking hour since early childhood in the gym. The problem isn't exactly Vincent: the problem is Vincent's frequent and prolonged absences, which cause City's defence to become somewhat unhinged, and to play in a manner mightily resembling headless chickens.
"Vincent's muscles are so large, and there are so very many of them, that he's always injuring one or more of them. At the moment we're squeaking of, he's on his fourteenth calf injury. As for his groin, let's not even go there.
"Let us now turn what passes for our attention to Leicester. What is it that has them flying so unexpectedly high? More precisely, who? Two main culprits spring immediately to mind: Jamie Vardy and Riad Mahrez. Vardy and Mahrez together weigh, quite possibly, about the same as Kompany. Vardy scores goals for fun, shattering long-standing records with gleeful abandon. Vardy is never injured. There's nothing there to injure. He is simply a skeleton dressed in football gear. He has no muscles, hamstrings, tendons or other Achilles heels. He looks very like a man whose vocabulary has never included the word 'gymnasium'.
As for Mahrez, he doesn't really exist, so slight is he. He is, in fact, a ghost. Kick him and you connect only with thin air for, by the time your leg swings, he has long gone. On and on and on he plays, game after game after game, turning despairing defenders inside out, scoring occasional impossible goals, and endlessly setting up chances for Vardy.
"Both Vardy and Mahrez look very much like kids who learned their football in the street and never went home in time for tea, and who are still playing for the sheer joy of it. Don't mention the word 'gym' or the phrase 'extra training' to either of them. Send Vardy off to get fish and chips, and Mahrez for a kebab. Both look as if they need the nourishment. And expect to see both of them on top of the league table rather than atop the treatment table.
"The point I make (says Linnane) is that the wiry shall inherit the earth. You get, and stay, good at footie by playing it endlessly, and loving it. Never mind your heavy-lifting gym sessions on the hour, every hour. Never mind your diet supplements, your extra feeding, your extra training. More is often less (except when we're talking drink or football, in which cases more is always more). Less is very often more.
"Look at Me. I never suffered from any medical condition in my life, except plenty of woman trouble. Here I am on a sun-splattered balcony on the Martianly-beautiful island of Lizard in the Budgie Islands, flower-patterned shirt warm on My slim shoulders, Tequila Sunrise in one hand and aromatic spliff in the other.
"Greed is God, but it is not Good. Turn the God of Greed around arseways, and what you get is Dog.
"Once in a blue mood, the cruel, unblinking eye of the cosmos blinks, and a long-suffering woeman's ship comes in on the spring tide, his ever-losing paradisiacal number comes up in the lottery, the bitch Lady Luck flashes her white teeth and her even whiter knickers at him, and all of a sudden he's a dumbly-grateful animal in clover."
"Squeak for Yourself!" I at this point pointedly huffed.
"I am, I am!" He said. "I am," He repeated. Linnane has always had an annoying way of extrapolating from that much-abused foot-soldier the particular, to the general, and the promotion is, all too often, as inept as it is inapt. A man who has half his face eaten by a camel spider while sleeping, or who marries The Wrong Woman, or whose ship comes in with a cargo of plague rats, is hardly to be legitimately compared to your unaverage lucky sod.
Take Linnane and me, for example. Compare and contrast, as they say in literature exams and essay specifications. I worked for everything I have, and I have nothing. Small wonder I never worked. Linnane has been known to insinuate that, had I worked for a living instead of writing, I might be better off.
Though I have always tried never to over-associate with people who work, I have, from time to time, had reason to know such characters. Their work always seemed seriously to interfere with their lives. It cut down their drinking time, and caused them to feel obliged to make, and keep, The Wrong Kind Of Friends. Above all, it caused them to accumulate property and, therefore, debt.
My average working acquaintance had a palatial home tastefooly furnished with a wife and 2.4 children, drove A Very Respectable Car, and lacked an arse in his trousers, being forever in need of bridging loans and suchlike from The Bank Of Bloodfromstone.
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Kieran Furey