BigBug

Later that day Seamus was sitting up at the bar in Finnegan’s Irish Pub on the Wittenkade, enjoying a curative pint of Guinness just before the Happy Hour. He wrote four names down on a beer mat. There are only the four of them in Holland. Moon came into the pub exactly at the beginning of Happy Hour.

“Eight pints,’ said Moon to Marjolien, the new owner of Finnegan’s, who was working behind the bar. She had, not so long ago, bought the bar from Seamus.

“Eight pints? And what are you today Moon? The last of the Irish octopuses?” She was almost a marine biologist and, according to Moon gossip, believed the world to be a huge aquarium, and the EWAB’s bottom feeders.

“The lads are on the way, Marjolien.” Moon was referring to his clandestine EWAB comrades. Finnegan’s was their battalion headquarters. FINNQ.

“I am so fucking happy I don’t know whether to commit suicide or kill myself beforehand.” Dutch humour. Marjolien pulled a face and started to pull the pints and then before she finished, three more distinguished eco warriors, all decorated, happy-hour-heroes, trooped into the bar. Leather John, Snidey Stan, and Sleepy Joe, all conspiracy conscious foot soldiers in the EWAB. They were all close friends and drinking cronies of their commanding officer Moon. They all took jobs at Schiphol Airport as baggage handlers and where they also watched who refuelled the planes in an effort to infiltrate the MIC agents, chem-trail criminals, who put the poisons in the jet fuel. Marjolien served up their pints. Leather John drank his pint in two swallows.

“Same again Marjolien,” said Leather John wiping his lips. “Four pints, please.”

Marjolien started to pour the pints. By the time she had finished the happy-hour-heroes had finished their first pints. She put the pints up onto the bar. She paused, looked at Moon and his foot soldiers in a funny, mean, Dutch sort of way, and addressed Leather John directly.

“Did you and your friends have your gullets surgically removed or did they just wear out from abuse?”

Sleepy Joe aroused himself from his semi unconscious state. “It’s Happy Hour,” said Sleepy Joe, looking around him, happily surprised he was not at home alone in bed, “so be happy.”

“Go back to fucking bed,” said Marjolien and went off to serve some other customers.

“As long as it’s not with you,” said Snidey Stan who thought his gayness and inherent mild anti-female tendencies were a secret.

Seamus showed Moon some names he had written on the beer mat. “What do you think these are?”

Moon read out aloud, “Uden, Utrecht, Ellemeet, Glanerburg. I have no idea. Some type of Dutch cheese?”

Leather John looked at the beer mat. “They are places in Holland?”

“That’s right, but what do they have in common?” asked Seamus.

“They are all full of fucking croaking cloggies,” offered Snidey Stan and sniggered at his own offensive cleverness, but not too much, lest folk think he was even remotely happy for an instant, within his misbegotten hard-done-by and wretched lot in life.

“They are all here,” said Sleepy Joe. He yawned and looked out of the window to see where they were.

“Marjolien,” shouted Leather John, holding up the beer mat. Marjolien went over to him. “What do these places have in common?” He handed her the beer mat. She looked at it. “And four pints while you are here.”

Marjolien tossed him back the beer mat. “I don’t know. Why don’t you all go there? Some great pubs there. Happy Hour all day long in The Happy Locust which is across the square from The Bankrupt Publican. You can have your own personal barmaid to stand all day long at the pumps and only serve beer for you, at half price of course, and here’s the good bit, you don’t have to pay until the end of the month.” She started to pull the pints. “Heineken and the breweries are so impressed with this business model they have contracted the Royal Dutch Air Force to nuke the fucking places.”

Seamus retrieved the beer mat.

“What the devil is wrong with her?” whispered Leather John.

“She has never been right since puberty,” said Snidey Stan and pointed at his crotch, “and the pussy is probably acting up. It’s Tuesday and you know what it’s like when it acts up on an odd day.”

“She is tired,” said Sleepy Joe, “I know how she feels.”

“So,” Seamus asked, “What do these places have in common?”

“Give us a clue,” asked Moon.

Seamus pointed his finger in the air up at the imaginary sky. He moved his finger quickly across the sky and said, “Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!”

“Incoming,” shouted Moon and dived onto the floor. His foot soldiers followed his example. “It’s the training,” explained Moon jumping back up. The EWAB unit did the same. The Dutch customers, and there are some left, looked on with some bewilderment, but no surprise, at the off- the- head foreigners jumping up and down off the floor while shouting excitedly to each other in unknown tongue and, at the same time, managing to guzzle many pints of beer. Moon looked at himself in the mirror and imagined he was machine-gunning the Fez people, “The legionnaire training never leaves you.”

“German artillery,” said Leather John, dusting himself down, “these places were all shelled by German Artillery.”

“No.”

“Why not? Everywhere else was,” whined Snidey Stan.

Seamus looked up at the sky again. “What is that? Is it a plane? Is it a bird? Is it?”

“Superman! Superman is Dutch,” said Marjolien placing the pints on the bar.

“So that explains why the cloggies wear their underpants outside their trousers,” said Snidey Stan and looked about the place for some other Dutch person to insult.

Moon recognized at once, upon his enlistment into the EWABs, that Snidey Stan was a NONO character, (naturally obnoxious, naturally offensive), and he ordered him to apply to join the American Diplomatic Corp. Stan was sure to be shortlisted. He was a natural asshole. It would be great to have an EWAB foot soldier on the inside. Snidey Stan was a perfect candidate and Moon could not wait to see him on a cock a doodle do channel standing behind the State Department puzzle podium spouting off, churning out primordial propaganda while they, the mighty EWAB, would know what was really going on in the Whitehouse and all the other houses of ill repute too.

“Are those places associated with meteorites in any way?” asked Col Tom. He was standing behind Moon.

“How did you get in here?” asked Moon glaring at Col Tom with the usual hostility.

“I have been up the back there, for some time, reading the newspaper and doing the crossword. The Times.”

“English or Irish? Doesn’t matter, I’ll bet you have cut a hole in it for spying out at Paddies.” The EWAB suspected Col Tom of spying on them as they went about their duties of saving planet Earth, and if that sounds paranoid, well it is.

“Where is this meteorite?” asked Sleepy Joe.

Moon reached down and took the meteorite out from his French army grenade bag. He hoisted the rock up onto the bar. “This meteorite has nothing to do with you, Hardy, so keep your old public schoolboy enthusiasm to yourself.”

“It isn’t a meteorite,” said Leather John, “You are not that lucky Moon. No one is so lucky as to dig up a meteorite.”

“How did you find it?” asked Snidey Stan.

“I was digging out weeds to plant potatoes in Vicky’s garden. One big weed went down about three foot like the roots of a tree. When I dug it out, the meteorite was just lying there in a kind of little cavity under the roots. I put it to one side and carried on. I had to get them in but I knew as soon as I lifted out the rock, I knew it was a meteorite.” He paused and swallowed his pint.

“Get what in?”

“The potatoes. I was getting the ground ready to plant seed potatoes. Real potatoes. No insecticide, no herbicide, no pesticide and no dung of any kind. Just pure potato.”

“What weight is this rock?” asked Col Tom.

“Haven’t a clue. Marjolien can I borrow your kitchen scale?” asked Moon.

“Get it yourself, I am busy.”

Moon went out into the kitchen and came back with the scale. He put the scale up on the bar and then put the rock on it. It weighed nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine grams. “Almost ten kilos,” said Moon, “I wonder what it’s worth?”

Leather John put a few peanuts on the scale bringing the weight up to ten kilos.

“I’ll give you those peanuts for it. Tell you what? To keep things even, I will even stick them on. Marjolien, got any super glue?”

“If I had, I’d clamp your jaws shut,” she shouted back. Busy losing money you see.

“I’ll tell you what. I’ll give you two bags of spuds for it,” offered Leather John. “Ten kilos of lovely green rotting pig feed Irish spuds left over from the Famine with a few baby bones thrown in to make the soup.”

“You are robbing yourself,” said Snidey Stan.

“You better hope the Drugs Squad is not looking in the window. We will all be arrested for dealing drugs,” said Col Tom. “That looks just like a whacking great lump of Afghani hash.”

“What?” said Marjolien, “are you talking about? Hashish? What is that?” She pointed at the rock in the scales. “That better not be dope.”

“Would they be so lucky to dig up ten kilos of black dope,” said Leather John most wistfully to Marjolien. “I cannot afford a solitary spliff. No, whatever it is, it is not hash.”

“What is it then?” asked Marjolien.

“It must be an ancient fossilised Celtic Druid turd,” decided Leather John. “They were big men in those days. Very fond of snake. Ate them all. None left.”

Marjolien gave the rock a tap with a coffee spoon. The rock reverberated in D major. “It’s made of iron.”

“The Irish grew great spuds in the old days,” said Snidey Stan, whose granny was an Irish nun, and, by the way, Garda Malone, that is how he got the passport from Dublin, “not like the mushy shit we get these days. The frozen chips are not even made out of potato. They are made from some type of dried out dung. The recipe is so vile all the worlds’ governments have signed an accord, at the Fast Food Convention in Disneyland, to keep the formulae secret.” He sighed and sneered at the same time. “Forever.”

“You can use that rock to tune your guitar, Moon.” No one can remember who said that. They were all drunk at the time.

“It’s a meteorite,” insisted Moon, “A ten kilo meteorite!”

“A meteorite?” scoffed Marjolien, “You lot are mad. Put my scale back.”

“Four pints when you are there Marjolien,” ordered Leather John.

She turned around and glared at him “Belly leaking again is it? Or, is the beer flowing out your ass John? Ah yes, the fountain of wisdom.” She went off to pour the pints. She was not happy with the happy hour heroes of the illustrious EWAB. Not happy at all.

“What’s wrong with her?”

“She thinks,” said Col Tom, “you are taking the piss, exploiting the ethos of the Happy Hour, drinking eight pints each, during the Happy Hour and then staggering off up the road to the next Happy Hour.”

“We come here to get pissed,” said Snidey Stan, “are we supposed to be depressed in Happy Hour? Are we expected to be sober? Why doesn’t she change the name to the Depressed 60 Minutes and charge everyone double? We are her best customers.”

“True, true,” agreed Col Tom.

“Col Tom is right,” said Seamus holding up the beer mat. He had the attention of all the other locals as well now. “Only four meteorites have ever been found in Holland. They are all named after the places they fell, or were found, and here they are, the Uden, the Utrecht, the Ellemeet and the Glanerburg. You can see them in the Natural History Museum at Leiden. To find a meteorite in Holland is very, very rare and this one here,” said Seamus, “weighing in at ten kilos, is heavier than the other four combined. It could be worth a fortune. Gentlemen, the Amsterdam meteorite!”

“If it is a meteorite,” said Leather John, “it will be confiscated for alimony.”

“Can’t be a meteorite,” said Sleepy Joe, “no one wakes up and finds a fortune. It is only in the dreams. I know. I know.”

“That’s no reason to lie in bed most of the day,” said Marjolien. She knew Sleepy Joe only got out of bed for her Happy Hour. “It might, it just might be worth a fortune.”

“Not a chance,” said Snidey Stan, but they were all staring at the rock and all wondering the same things.

Is it a meteorite? How much is it worth? Could it really be worth a fortune?

“It’s an old piece of rusted railway track or something like that,” said Leather John.

“It is a meteorite,” said Moon emphatically.

Bigbug would come to agree with this. Not any old meteorite but a DATA rock.

“It might be an old unexploded shell,” says Snidey Stan.

“Thanks very much Stan. You are a treasure. Drink me dry at my expense and empty the pub with a bomb scare before you piss off to the next Happy Hour.”

“It’s not man made! Look at it. It is a meteorite.”

“Most objects people think are meteorites do turn out to be manmade,” said Col Tom. “Slag from the steel works or old slag from a local ironworks. It could even be a piece of slag used for the ballast of a ship.”

“It’s not slag! How could you make something as beautiful as that?” said Moon patting the rock affectionately. “It’s definitely extra-terrestrial, and the vibes it gives out are out of this world. It’s an off world rock.”

“It might be a meteorite but all I am saying is that nine hundred and ninety-nine per cent of all objects that people find and think are meteorites, turn out not to be meteorites. Those are the statistics.” Col Tom made a gesture with his hands to say - those are unfortunately the facts.

“And where did you get all this disinformation Hardy? On the cold waterline from Whitehall? Black Ops? Fuck off and nit-pick someone else’s dream. It is a meteorite. I can see it all now. Breaking news, worldwide news. Fifth Dutch meteorite found.” Moon held the heavy rock above his head. “Ladies and gentlemen, dames en heren, the Amsterdam Meteorite discovered by yours truly. The one and only, just like the meteorite, Jude the Moon Noonan, formerly of the French Foreign Legion and the deadly, dangerous, diseased ridden, hot countries.”

“Well, we will soon know,” said Seamus. “I made an appointment for us to go down to the Sterrenwacht Mercurius Observatory in Dordrecht so an expert can take a look at the rock.”

Seamus knew the Dutch security services were listening in. They had Finnegan’s bugged as well as every other Irish pub in Holland. The Brits frightened and browbeat the Dutch into believing that the Irish were such a dangerous sub-species of humanity that all the places they met or congregated, anywhere there were more than one Irish person, irrespective of age or sex, should be placed under surveillance. No problem to the Dutch. Geld is geld. It is all money in the paranoid pot. Seamus could hear the massed choirs of the Brit Army singing as they marched off to the war to start all wars. The enemy was near at hand. Watching and listening. Forever listening.

Moon was in his element. He held the meteorite up by the window, letting the light fall on it while he peered wisely at it. He held the rock high above his head ensuring everyone in the pub would notice it and himself too. He was a one-off one-man show. Moon looked like a young Victor Mature with a beer belly. He was dressed in his Levis, Legion T-shirt and combat jacket.

Seamus wished he could paint. He would have loved to have sketched and painted these happy-hour-heroes, these Ewabs, these distinguished foot soldiers, of the EWAB. He had no talent at all in this artistic field, but this desire, this great longing to paint enabled Seamus to make a dramatic digression from the reality of now, and a performance is staged in the Mind Theatre.

I am not Seamus.

To find the door, that magical portal, to the Mind Theatre is never easy. The mind is a maze and it makes a different pathway through for each performance, but there it is, burning bright. A literary lighthouse. It is shining bright and beautiful above the ignorance and brutality of the bigots and the censors, these green glowing neon letters, Cead Mile Failte. I bow and the door opens for me. Indescribable gratitude and relief. I owe Moon so much for this gift. This is such a special space, such a magical place, where a blessed wind blows. O what a wonderful breeze. I float over and take my seat for the performance. We are in the great hall at Buckingham Palace.

Curtain up.

General O’Blood-Guts-Boil, a cyber warfare crusader, and the world’s foremost expert in electronic surveillance, is down on one knee in the great hall, waiting to receive his medal and his knighthood. The General is looking up and casually chatting to Her Majesty. The Queen is wearing green wellies and has her shotguns lying at the side of her throne, cast in the form of a gigantic golden pineapple, donated by the President of Zebra because it didn’t fit in his hut of clay and wattles made. Her Majesty wishes to go shooting and is anxious to get away least any of her little handfed birdies escape or be eaten by a horrid fox or even a cat! Yes, a common cat! The general mumbles up the Queens regalia.

“I say bug all the buggers regardless your majesty. All I say. Every one of them. Aye, man, woman, child and ye gods.” He hears a pleasant gurgling echo.

Prince Philip shoves his long fore fingers up through his nostrils and they exit through his ears. He waggles the fingers and pretends he is a small deer. “Forewarned is fore skinned,” he shouts at the General. “Don’t forget to feed the horses, O’Blood-Guts-Boil,” and goes back to sleep.

The Queen of England scratches her ass with a Zulu spear and speaks. She is on high. Yes, but what is she on? She reads from a script prepared by the finest speechwriter in the realm, the Editor of the loyal right wing Daily Plum Pudding, Sir Ramrod Pie.

“Arise, Sir General O’Blood-Guts-Boil. We are pleased to award you the Paddy Cross, the PC. By your ceaseless, unwavering vigilance and mass surveillance, you have saved England from these foreign, fanatical, hoards of emerald green marauders with their nuclear-tipped shillelaghs and poison gas potato pistols. Your relentless dedication to snooping has saved us from these infernal Irish, a race of cowardly people who have never had the guts to declare war on anyone, a people who prefer to live in peace and who so, don’t you all know, have never invaded any other country. Not a one. Not even on an unreasonable, bogus, pretext. They have never,” she gasps unable to come to terms with the words she is uttering, “declared war. On anyone!”

The Queen pokes Philip with her Zulu spear and whispers to him.

“You are supposed to be a badger today, dear. Get it to-fucking-gether.”

The royal portrait artist, Sir Horsehair Jockey Allbum Ringworthy, enters stage left, bent over and walking backwards, desperately hoping his dreams will come true and he will be raggled by a royal. He paints the Duke, badger black and white. The Queen turns her attention to business at hand. She is angry. She raises her voice in anger.

“The Irish are, we declare, a race of people who have no desire or capability to wage war. They prefer instead, as most Celtic crumpets and pacifist paddy poofs do, to spend their money on education, health, art, culture and the welfare of their common cannon fodder folk pool.”

The Queen stands up and stamps her wee foot.

“We cannot and must not let this squandering of tax revenue prevail or it will be the end of war, God forbid.”

She waggles her finger up at God.

“These cunning Irish are a horrible seditious race, hiding away at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, pretending to live in peace and harmony with their European neighbours and in doing so, have avoided conflict. Do they think we are going to let them get away with it? Do they think we are unaware, that we do not know what they are up to? I decree, bug them all regardless! Arise from the shadows, Sir, General O’Blood-Guts-Boil, PC and bar.”

The massed bands of the highland regiments start to march past the pipes playing the Scots national anthem, Knees Up Mother Burns. They then break into slow time, and sing the regimental march as they tick tock, kilts swishing one way, their thistle sprouting testicles the other, in perfect military order, “Bug them all, bug them all, especially the ones who play Gaelic football … There is more but no one can remember. You can make up the rest yourselves and do not forget to copyright it before you let it out of the house. I close my eyes and begin to silently pray. My lips move on impulse.

“Wake up there you insolent Irish peasant,” shouts the Queen and throws her Zulu spear at me. It misses and kills a Corgi. The royal spin vets declare it to be collateral canine damage.

“How dare you fall asleep at giving out the gong’s time and it’s no use whispering,” declares the Queen kindly, “I can hear the grass grow.”

Curtain falls.

I applaud in case they try to kill me. The performance is lampoon and is performed in speech surreal but it is an artistic language that changes propaganda into truth. It is true alas that not only can Big Mother hear the grass grow but she can also watch the grass grow. Satellite satellite on the wall, who shall we save when the missiles fall? I love lampoon. ILL.

I leave the Mind Theatre.

Seamus returns to Finnegans, to the narrative, to the now, to the happy hour.

“Where did you get this meteorite?” asked Marjolien.

“He stole the rock from some ones grave,” said Leather John.

“Don’t call it a rock. It’s a meteorite,” emphasized, Moon, putting it back on the bar and polishing it with the sleeve of his combat jacket. “Ok, so these star gazers, these scientists want to have a look at my meteorite, do they? All right then.” He gloated at Col Tom and gave him the fingers. “When are we going down, Seamus?”

“We leave tomorrow. We have an appointment at two o’clock at the Observatory. In Dordrecht.”

“Dordrecht? Dordrecht? Who the fuck is Dordrecht?”

This pub scene was all duly transmitted and recorded by the BWD, the Dutch Secret Service. Fortunately, for Seamus and Moon it had not, as yet, come to the attention of DATA and Bigbug.