Short Story: Death of Me

Here is my entry for Donna's Ramones short story challenge. I should probably let it gestate for a couple of days rather than posting the first draft, but what the heck. The Ramones were pretty rough and ready, just like this story. The song can be accessed below if you want to sing along.


Death of Me

Johnny had reached his limit. He stormed from the kitchen, defeated and fuming. Her parting words screeched at his back: ‘Fuck you, Johnny. My mother was right – I could have done better than you!’

Mary Wallis wrecked his head. There was no two ways about it. Arguing with her was a complete mind fuck. It didn’t matter what he said, she’d found some way of twisting his words, making everything seem like it was his fault. She dug out remnants of conversations from years ago and spliced them with recent events to create a fictive world in which every misfortune that been bestowed on them was a result of his ineptitude, fecklessness, and lack of ambition.

He stabbed at the stereo, a choppy guitar and crash symbols blasting from the speakers. He joined in, yelling rather than singing.

‘Da-da-da-da, Da! Da! Da-da-da-da, Da! Da! Der-der-der-der, Da! Da! Der-der-der-der, Da! Da! We've got to stop this crazy carrying on, it's gonna be the death of you. Stop this crazy carrying on, it's gonna be the death of me. It's gonna be the end you see. It's gonna be the death of we.’

‘For fuck’s sake, Johnny, turn it down,’ Mary yelled from the doorway.

He carried on singing: ‘If we don't stop this crazy carrying on, it's gonna be the death of you.’

Mary twisted the dial, the song dropping dozens of decibels. ‘Jesus, Johnny, when are you going to grow-up? Is that what life is to you, a fucking Ramones song?’

Johnny snorted a laugh. ‘There was a time when fucking to Ramones songs was all we did.’

‘Yeah, when we were like sixteen. If you lasted as long as one song it was a fucking miracle. Now you’re so impotent, it’ll take you a whole album just to get it up.’

‘Not a surprise, you looking like that,’ he said, defensively, still playing air guitar. ‘A blind man would find it difficult to get aroused for you these days.’

‘At least he might give me a good time. When was the last time you did? When Joey was alive?’

‘Don’t bring Joey into this.’

‘What? He was a singer, not you’re fucking brother or something.’

‘He was a god!’

‘He sang in the fucking Ramones!’

‘Yeah, exactly.’

‘For god’s sake, Johnny we only saw them twice. Anybody would think you were married to them, not me.’

‘More’s the pity. I seem to remember you thought they were the dog’s bollocks. You spent half the night flashing them your tits.’

‘I did not! We were jumping up and down.’

‘Jesus, Mary, what the fuck has happened to us? We used to have a fucking great time. Always having a bit of craic. A few drinks, concerts, nightclubs. Now all we do is fucking argue.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Yes, you do. You want more than this.’ He gestured at the tired looking room, old furniture and crappy knick-knacks. ‘More than I can give you. You want a new life.’

Mary shrugged. ‘I don’t know what I want. I just know it has to be better than curry and chips, cheap lager and the Ramones every Friday night.’

‘We can get Chinese instead if you want,’ Johnny said factitiously.

‘I need more than the memory of the Ramones, Johnny. Things we did twenty five years ago. We can’t live on memories.’

‘We’re still together aren’t we? Been together half a life time.’

‘And we’re still locked in the past. We’ve gone nowhere. Absolutely nowhere. I need to feel alive again. Like I did when I was twenty.’

‘We can’t turn the clock back. This is it.’

‘Well, it isn’t enough. When was the last time we went on holiday? I mean a proper holiday. With a beach. Some sun?’

Johnny shrugged. ‘We can’t afford it, you know that.’

‘I’m going out,’ she announced flatly, heading for the door. ‘I ... this can’t go on, Johnny. Things have to change.’

She closed the door behind her. They’d been together since school. Now they were barely civil to each other. Whatever magic had been there had been revealed as the cheap trick it had always been.

In the living room the volume jumped again. He’d skipped back to the same track, singing along in his best American drawl: ‘Stop this crazy carrying on, it's gonna be the death of me. It's gonna be the end you see. It's gonna be the death of we.’

Opening lines

I haven't done an opening lines post for a while, and I've managed to leave Dave Zeltserman's excellent Small Crimes at work changing my plans to write a review. Here are some crackers:

'He knew at once it was a human bone, when he took it from the baby who was sitting on the floor chewing it.' Arnaldur Indridson, Silence of the Grave

'There used to be a writer by the name of Merle Miller, who wrote that people in Hollywood were always touching you - not because they like you, but because they want to see how soft you are before they eat you alive.' Steven Bochco, Death by Hollywood

'The frozen lake and the black vacuum sky and the dead man pleading for the return of his remaining days.' Adrian McKinty, Fifty Grand

'It was the sort of sound you hear in the distance and mistake for something else: a dirty steam barge puffing along the River Spree; the shunting of a slow locomotive underneath the great glass roof of Anhalter Station; the hot, impatient breath of some enormous dragon, as if one of the stone dinosaurs in Berlin's zoo had come to life and was now lumbering up Wilhelmstrasse.' Philip Kerr, If the Dead Rise Not

Review of Operation Napoleon by Arnaldur Indridason (Harvill Secker, 2010, published in Icelandic 1999)

In the middle of a fierce storm at the tail end of the Second World War a German bomber crashes into the vast Vatnajokull glacier on Iceland. One man sets off for help, the pilot and five passengers remain with the plane, slowly being covered with thick snow and being swallowed by the ice. Forty four years later and the melting glacier starts to give up its secret. The American secret service sends in a team to try and salvage the plane without alerting the Icelandic government of its mission. However, their presence on the glacier is discovered by two young mountain rescuers out on a training mission. Elias manages to briefly phone his sister Kristin, a lawyer for the Foreign Ministry, before he is surrounded by soldiers. Not only will he have to die to protect the secret of Operation Napoleon, but so will his sister. But when two American operatives force their way into her apartment she manages to escape. Fearing a conspiracy between the American and Icelandic governments she doesn’t know who to turn to, all she knows is that her brother is in trouble and quite possibly dead, and the American’s want her likewise. On the run, she resolves to find out the secret of the crashed bomber.

Operation Napoleon was originally published in Icelandic in 1999, Indridason’s third book after the first two, as yet untranslated, Detective Erlendur novels. Unlike his police procedural novels, Operation Napoleon is a thriller. The strengths of the book are the characterisation and the pace. Kristin is well penned and her back story well elaborated, and the other characters have sufficient depth to be memorable and credible. Indridason keeps the pace high throughout, with sufficient tension to keep the reader turning the pages. Where the book suffers, however, is with respect to the story. It starts well enough, with Indridason setting the characters and back story in place, but from the minute Kristin ends up on the run it is difficult to believe in the story. It’s interesting, and at times exciting, but never really credible. The minute I start to ask, ‘but why didn’t ...?’ or ‘how come ...?’ questions a story is in trouble. I was asking these questions every twenty pages or so. And the ending is simply ludicrous. I won’t say anything to avoid spoilers, but however history would have unfolded it would not have resulted in this ending. Given the pacing, the book lacks the introspection and philosophical elements that are the real strengths of the Erlendur novels. Overall, a fairly entertaining book as long as you’re prepared to suspend your sense of realism.

Lazy Sunday Service

A bit of a blizzard week tied up with commenting on the housing crisis. Tuesday gave a talk to the country's county engineers. Wednesday gave a talk to business students in Dublin. Thursday and Friday I was in Northern Ireland, but spent a lot of time on the phone talking to journalists and doing some radio interviews about the new Dept of Environment's survey of unfinished estates. They announced that there are 2,846 unfinished estates in Ireland consisting of 121,248 units, 43,053 of which are vacant or underconstruction. This is not the full extent of the level of oversupply, but rather the overhang of brand new, unsold houses in estates (doesn't include one-off housing or vacant secondhand housing). In a country the size of Ireland, 2,846 unfinished estates that are have little to no finance to be completed, and have issues of health and safety, security, anti-social behaviour, bonds, building control and planning permission compliance, is a sizable problem to deal with. See posts on Ireland After NAMA for more info. All of this meant I neglected this blog and my reading, missing my Forgotten Friday slot for 'Halo in Blood' by Howard Browne (writing as John Evans). I finished that yesterday morning. In the afternoon I bought 'Operation Napoleon' by Arnaldur Indridason and finished it this morning. Now onto Dave Zeltserman's 'Small Crimes' (and my MIT proofs).

My posts this week
New 'Map Reader' cover design
A 22 cent headache
We need to get past the denial phase - tax breaks did fuel the housing bubble
Key housing statistics concerning vacancy, oversupply, unfinished and ghost estates
Review of Wasters by Shane Ross and Nick Webb

Review of Wasters by Shane Ross and Nick Webb (2010, Penguin)

Wasters is an account of the misuses of state funds, poor governance, organisational failure and cronyism in public bodies in Ireland. It includes chapters on the growth of semi-state agencies, cronyism and political patronage, ministerial expenses, FAS, HSE, CIE, DDDA/NAMA, PPPs and other ‘bad deals’, and social partnership. It’s often fascinating, but suffers from a sense that one is reading little more than a name and shame list. In fact, there is very little narrative beyond an indignant list of issues and their cost to the taxpayer, and the ordering of chapters seems to be somewhat random (in fact, they could be re-ordered and it would have little effect on the read). At one level this is fine, and provides a useful service, but at another it is a significant shortcoming.

There is very little attempt to explain why the present state of affairs exists beyond a general lack of appropriate governance and oversight, cronyism, corruption and propensity to establish semi-state agencies and public entities. Analysis is left purely at the level of the implicit and empirical. I was not expecting a detailed academic explanation of the operations of the Irish state, its political economy, and its underlying ideology – this is after all a general readership book – but I did expect some attempt to make sense of the situation (as with Fintan O’Toole’s Ship of Fools, for example) and to provide a nuanced portrait of the public sector. In Ross and Webb’s account all public bodies exhibit the same poor governance, and the same levels of waste and inefficiency. This is clearly not the case. There are plenty of examples of bodies that do a very good job on limited resources, where senior management have a sense of responsibility and desire to deliver quality services, and do not treat the entity as their own personal piggy bank and jolly expense account. They also display the same level indignity for all expenses, regardless of whether they are legitimate or not, and the scale of expenditure, with scorn poured equally on a couple of euro for a coffee as for millions of euros on inappropriate property ventures where there are clear conflicts of interest.

More problematic in many ways is that the book makes no suggestions as to what should happen to address the various problems that they identify. It is simply not enough to say ‘here is the problem and its scale, and it should be dealt with’, as if there is one, obvious solution. In my view Ross and Webb needed to conclude, not with a sideswipe at the Office of the Comptroller & Auditor General, but rather with a path forward that they would like to see implemented to address the various inter-related issues.

Overall, Wasters fulfils a role in setting out the governance and accountability issues that affect a number of public bodies in Ireland. Some of the examples will make your blood boil and Ross and Webb provide a great service by exposing some of the excesses and waste. As a read, however, it really lacks a narrative that seeks to explain why such a system exists and how it should be changed. In that sense it is a missed opportunity. For a longer review, see here.

A 22 cent headache

I'm going to post a review of Wasters tomorrow, a book about the mis-management and mis-use of public monies. I'm all for proper auditing and accounting and I get annoyed when I see the flagrant abuse of funds. That said, oversight can often go too far and add significant costs to an organisation's operation. Today we spent time trying to deal with a very small accountancy error (not committed by us). 22 cent to be precise. 22 cent out in an account of half a million is pretty good, I think. The funding agency has asked for the accounts to be re-prepared, re-run through an audit, and to be signed off by four sets of relevant offices to account for the missing 22 cent. All this work costs significantly more than 22 cent. Based on my base salary, I've already spent more than 22 cent's time on this. This is just bureaucracy gone mad. I'm not sure where the cut off is 2.20, 22.20, 220, 2200, but above .22!

New 'The Map Reader' cover design

Thanks for your comments re. the first draft designs of The Map Reader. We've now been sent a revised version. I imagine we'll be going with this one.