Absinthe Makes the Heart Grow Fonder

by Twenty Major

Genres: Humor & Satire

Synopsis

It''s just days after the Folkapalooza concert and having saved the world, Twenty Major is looking forward to some R&R but little does he know that his murky past is about to catch up with him ... Notorious Dublin gangster Tony Furriskey is calling in his marker. Years ago he helped Twenty and Jimmy the Bollix out of a hole and the time has come for them to repay the favour ... or end up swimming with the Dublin Bay prawns. Tony''s youngest daughter, is about to marry a man he thoroughly disproves of and it''s down to Twenty and Jimmy to make sure the wedding doesn''t happen. They must follow the young man and his pals to Barcelona where the stag weekend is taking place, infiltrate the stag party and make sure, one way or another, that the wedding doesn''t happen. But will Twenty''s Barcelona past catch up with him? Which one of the group finds true love at last? And can they put down the cheap mojitos long enough stop the wedding? In the city of Gaudi and Picasso, Twenty, Jimmy, Stinking Pete and Dirty Dave are more gaudy and pickarse-o as they try and enjoy the Mediterranean sun while getting the job done.

Release date: July 30, 2012

Publisher: Hachette Ireland

Print pages: 320

Sample

The man came scurrying down the dark street clutching his side. He knew he’d broken a rib or two in the fall, but he couldn’t worry about that now. He had to keep distance between him and the men chasing him; otherwise he was dead. They wouldn’t stop and ask questions. They knew he’d taken the disc and that if it got into the wrong hands, such as the police or any journalist with their wits about them, it would mean big trouble for their organisation. Every stride sent shockwaves of pain through his body, and he tried to think as he kept moving. He didn’t know how to hot-wire a car or to pick locks like people in films. Breaking a window would be as good as erecting a sign outside a building saying ‘I’m in here!!’ and the late hour meant passing traffic in this part of town was non-existent. There was no passing motorist to flag down, no last-minute taxi driver to help him get away.

It was at times like this he wished he’d kept fitter. Joining a gym and going six times in a year wasn’t really good enough. If he got out of this, he promised himself he’d actually carry through some of his New Year’s resolutions. He even promised to go to church every week although he’d long stopped believing in God.

He figured he needed all the help he could get.

Suddenly he found himself caught in the powerful headlights of a car skidding around the corner behind him. He looked back and tried to run faster but there was nowhere for him to go. He couldn’t outrun a car – even if he had gone to the gym he figured that would have been difficult – but his instincts kicked in and he tried to stay as far ahead of them for as long as possible. He knew they were going to kill him whether he had the disc or not so he thought he might as well at least try to get the information out there. Reaching inside his pocket, he felt for the CD case, and, as he kept running, he thrust it through the shutters of a shop. He hoped somebody would find it. He hoped they’d look at the information and see that it had to go to the police. He hoped that by some stroke of luck his actions hadn’t been in vain and his death would at least bring about the demise of the people now about to kill him.

Most of all though, he hoped that the fact his prologue was in completely the wrong book wouldn’t matter too much.

The last thing I could remember before hearing the phone ring was having a discussion in Ron’s with Dirty Dave about why some people, namely me, should be perfectly entitled to kill other people – I had a whole system worked out based on intelligence, education and how annoying a person’s face was. But after that, it was all a blank. After some moments, I realised I was lying face down on my bed. The realisation you’ve made it home but have no recollection of getting there is always the most pleasant part about waking up the next morning. The phone was ringing, and it seemed to be coming from underneath the bed. Those extra three or four pints in Ron’s had my head pounding like a new prisoner’s arse in Mountjoy after his first night behind bars. Then, glory of glories, the phone stopped. The silence was indescribably beautiful. One of those rare moments in life where you can appreciate the beauty of something despite being in terrible pain. Sadly the beauty was fleeting as the phone started to ring again. I pulled myself forwards and hung over the side of the bed, looking underneath. The blood rushing to my head enhanced the pain in the same way that the discovery that your teenage daughter has lost her virginity is made more painful by the fact that it was your best friend who did her. In your bed. And filmed it. And put it on YouTube.

Underneath the bed I saw my pants, a roll of tinfoil, an old slipper and, just within reach, the cordless house phone.

‘Yes,’ I said, rolling onto my back and closing my eyes.

‘Where the fuck are you?’ said Jimmy the Bollix, my best friend. Luckily I don’t have a teenage daughter.

‘I am in a coma,’ I said.

‘Only to be expected given how much you drank. The thing is though, we have a meeting in town in an hour, and you were supposed to be around here half an hour ago to discuss what we were going to do and say at said meeting.’

‘Oh fuck. Fucking fucking fuck.’

‘See you in twenty, Twenty. Hurry up.’

‘Right, right. See you then.’

Fucking fuck. Why were there always meetings on the mornings you had the worst hangovers? Normally I would have been quite content to stay in bed till the afternoon but this wasn’t the sort of meeting we could be late for, let alone not turn up to. I suppose I’d been living it up a bit since the Folkapalooza adventure when we’d managed to prevent the entire population of Dublin and, less importantly, the rest of Ireland, being turned into permanent cabbages who loved the music of Damien Rice and his ilk. It had been quite harrowing at times and, given how close we’d come to not managing to save the day, I had a bit of the old Lorenzo de Medici about me. I was eating, drinking and being merry – for who knows what some cunt might try and do tomorrow.

I reached out for the bottle of water I always keep to the side of my bed. I unscrewed the top and took a big mouthful of dry air. Mmmm, empty. Fuck. I got up, threw on a big dressing gown, took four painkillers from my bedside drawer and made my way into the kitchen. I swallowed the tablets with a swig from a carton of orange juice in the fridge, put the kettle on, then opened up the back door. My dog Bastardface emerged from his kennel to greet me.

‘Hello, big fella,’ I said before reaching into the pocket of my gown to take out my cigarettes. We stood there smoking in silence, the dog and I, before I went inside and drank a cup of coffee. There was no sign of the cat, Throatripper, just yet but that wasn’t unusual. Sometimes he liked to stalk his prey for miles before pouncing.

I took a quick shower, trimmed my beard, buzzed my nose hair with this little contraption that was so ticklish it was all I could do not to titter out loud in a high-pitched voice, and got dressed. The dog was buzzing around expectantly, as if he wanted to go to the park, but the clean-up from the Folkapalooza concert was still ongoing and I couldn’t go back to the scene of a crime. Not so soon anyway. The Phoenix Park is the only one big enough for Bastardface. People just think it’s a particularly ferocious-looking deer they’re seeing race across the gallops. Anyway, I didn’t have time. I had to be round in Jimmy’s in ten minutes. I promised him I’d take him out later on, and he looked at me as if I’d just said Ryan Tubridy was going to sit and keep him company for five minutes but there was nothing I could do. I put him out the back with his breakfast (a suckling pig with the apple in its mouth and everything) and locked up the house.

I live on, or close to, the South Circular Road in Dublin. I have an old Victorian cottage quite near the city centre, and I love where I live. Jimmy lives about two minutes around the corner in a house which is surrounded on both sides by houses converted into flats. For most people this could cause problems as they have to deal with noisy tenants, but nobody would disturb Jimmy. The landlords tell the people who occupy the flats that border his walls that if they make too much noise then Jimmy’ll come round, and any blood they spill on the carpet or that gets sprayed onto the walls will make their deposit non-refundable. I think it’s the idea of losing their deposit more than the fact the next-door neighbour might make them bleed that keeps them quiet.

I strolled around, nodding at some of the locals. Asad and Habib, the two Muslim lads from up the road. Mad for the pints and bacon sandwiches they were. Old Paddy who drinks in Ron’s and who you don’t want to get into conversation with because there’s no way out of it. Words, edgeways and all that. Bald Susan who runs the graphic design company. I call her Bald Susan because all her hair fell out and her name is Susan. Big Jim who works down the road in the local shop. You can always tell what he’s had for breakfast because there are generally bits of it stuck in his enormous moustache. He’s the kind of man you want to stay upwind of at all times. Trampy the tramp, with his bushy grey beard. He’s all right, and I give him a few bob now and then even though he once threw a Cadbury’s Creme Egg at my head. He spends it all on cheap hooch so at least he’s not wasting it. All the colour of the local community.

I put out my cigarette underfoot before walking up the path to Jimmy’s and ringing the doorbell.

‘Ah, there you are!’ he said with the smugness of one without a desperate hangover.

‘Stop talking so loudly,’ I said. I dry-swallowed another couple of painkillers.

‘No time to come in,’ he said, grabbing his coat and closing the door behind him, ‘we’ve got half an hour to walk into town.’

‘Walk? Are you mad? We’ll get a taxi.’

‘No fucking chance. You need the walk to clear your head. You’re not going into this meeting without at least some of your wits about you.’

‘I have to warn you that I may need to stop and vomit along the way.’

‘You’ll have your pick of the gardens then.’

We walked down through the Blackpitts, up past that old school that has been turned into a bar, onto Clanbrassil Street, up the road and down the side of the old Meath Hospital, across onto Camden Street and onwards to town. I smoked as I went. Jimmy didn’t smoke because he doesn’t smoke. I did feel slightly nauseous at one stage but managed not to vomit. I think that’s because I didn’t actually have any food in my stomach to chuck up. I’d eaten a sandwich at lunchtime the previous day but nothing since. I thought I should probably get a piece of fruit or something because my stomach makes very weird noises when it’s empty but I didn’t trust myself not to regurgitate it during the meeting. And that would be bad.

‘Right,’ said Jimmy, ‘what’s our plan?’

‘I’m not sure we have a plan. We don’t even know what he wants.’

‘Hm, good point. He’s going to ask us to do something for him though, isn’t he?’

‘Yes, I believe that’s the whole point of calling in your marker on someone.’

‘Har har. Look, you know me. I don’t mind the old ultra-violence or action but I do not like risk. I don’t want to be set up for a fall.’

‘Well, me neither, but I don’t think it’s going to be anything like that. How would that benefit him?’

‘Another good point. You should do more of your thinking when you’re hungover, not drunk.’

‘I’m not doing it on purpose… . Oh, I think I need a shit.’

‘Save it till afterwards. It’ll keep you on edge.’

‘It’s times like this I’m slightly jealous of Colostomy Chris.’

Ah, old Bumtum himself. Anyway, leaving aside men who crap into bags, let’s agree on one thing before we go in.’

‘What’s that?’

‘That Phil Collins is a cunt.’

‘Agreed.’

‘Right then,’ said Jimmy, stopping outside the door on South William Street, ‘let’s do it.’

He rang the buzzer, and a couple of moments later we were on our way upstairs.

We walked up two flights of stairs and came to a door on the top left of the landing. Outside was a brass plaque, which was blank. Before we could knock, the door opened. A burly man beckoned us inside to a kind of reception area, with potted plants and a leather couch but no receptionist. He gave us both the eye but said nothing. There was another door open to our left and from inside another guy, who looked like he could have been a professional gladiator, was dragging, by the collar, an unconscious man whose face appeared to have made repeated contact with a very hard surface. Just then a voice rang out. ‘Twenty. Jimmy. Come on in.’

I don’t even know how he knew it was us. I looked at Jimmy. He looked at me. I gulped slightly, and in we went.

‘Ah, there yiz are,’ said Tony Furriskey from behind a solid mahogany desk. He was rubbing a towel over his hands, and it was immediately obvious that the hard surface the unconscious man’s face had made contact with was Tony’s fists. ‘It’s been a while.’

‘It has that,’ I said, thinking in my head, not long enough though.

Tony Furriskey is in his mid-forties and one of the most vicious and powerful criminals in Dublin. His ‘family’-run business makes millions each year from drugs, smuggling, protection rackets and armed robberies. His manor takes in Crumlin, Dolphin’s Barn, Kilmainham, Rialto and Drimnagh on the south side of Dublin, and, while there are newcomers to the gangland scene in recent years, Tony is undoubtedly still the kingpin. When you read about pipe bombs and gang wars between Crumlin and Drimnagh, these are the smaller players because nobody in their right mind would trample on Tony’s turf. His reputation goes before him, and he is a genuinely scary man capable of acts of incredible violence. While other bosses like to send their lieutenants out to do the kicking, punching and strangling, Tony still enjoys the ‘dirty work’, so to speak. Physically he’s not the tallest, standing about five foot nine, but he is stocky and powerful with the kind of forearms that would make Popeye jealous. He has enormous hands, battle-scarred from so many fights and punch-ups, his knuckles are grossly misshapen, and, when clenched, his fists could punch holes in a steel door. His hair is cropped short, his eyes just slightly too close together, and his face adorned with a scar that runs from between his eyes, across his nose and down his left cheek. He got jumped in a bar when he was younger, slashed by a rival in a surprise attack. The old joke ‘Yeah, but you should see the other guy’ was Tony’s favourite because nobody ever saw the other guy again. Well, not in person anyway. The legend goes that he was taken to the mountains and tortured for hours, with the whole thing recorded on video. Tony then called a meeting of the other gangsters, sat them down and showed them the film just so they’d know what they could expect if anybody tried that kind of move again.

Nobody ever did.

The true measure of his fearsome reputation came when a feckless, self-important tabloid journalist, famed for making up Batman-style nicknames for Dublin’s criminals, rather unoriginally labelled the barrel-chested Tony as ‘Fat Tony’ in his column one Sunday. Despite the fact the journalist had twenty-four-hour garda protection, it was made very clear to him that should he ever repeat that slur he would live, for a short time, to bitterly regret it.

He never did.

That was the kind of guy Tony was. If you were told to do something and you did what you were told then you wouldn’t have any problems with him. If you challenged his authority, then you could expect his full wrath to wreak down upon you, and that was never a good thing.

‘So,’ he said, ‘did yiz get caught up in that painful shite the other week? All that acoustic bollox? I was out of the country but I do read the papers online and that.’

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘we got caught up in a bit all right. Poxy thing. Can you imagine a world where Damien Rice was the nation’s favourite?’

‘Doesn’t bear thinkin’ about. Still, he’s dead now, and the men that did it should be honoured like soldiers. Fuckin’ heroes they are. How’s the dog?’

‘Vicious.’

‘I’ve always liked that dog. Reminds me a bit of meself. Powerful, aggressive, relentless and a massive fuckin’ tail! Wha’?! Hahaha.’

We laughed. When Tony makes a joke, however terrible, you laugh, unless you’re feeling brave. And that was a two-out-of-ten joke.

‘Story with yeh, Jimmy? Heard your brother died.’

‘Yeah,’ said Jimmy.

‘Congratulations.’

‘Cheers, Tony. It’s been a long time coming.’

‘Was he in a lot of pain?’

‘The doctor told me afterwards that it would have been worse than having a large thistle inserted down your mickey then pulled out really slowly while having to read the Sunday Times and listen to David McSavage’s attempts at comedy.’

‘Ouch. What goes around comes around, right?’

‘It sure does.’

‘Speakin’ of which …,’ he began. I looked at Jimmy, Jimmy looked at me. ‘Yiz won’t have forgotten that little favour I did yiz a while back.’

‘How could we forget, Tony?’

‘Too much booze, a stroke, hypnotherapy, wha’?! Hahaha.’ We laughed again, a one-out-of-ten this time, but Tony wasn’t renowned for his joke-telling as much as for his pain-inflicting, torturing, killing and general meanness.

Some time back, Jimmy and I had found ourselves caught up in a situation outside our normal scope, and the people we were dealing with had become quite, shall I say, agitated at our presence. That there were many of them and only two of us put the odds very much against us. It was over pints in Ron’s one afternoon that we figured we had to ask for help, and Tony was the only one we could think of. Tony and Jimmy and I go back some years. Not that we were exactly buddies, but our paths had crossed enough times for us to be on reasonable terms. Sometimes Tony might outsource a bit of work to us – some collections, some driving, some merchandise that needed to be shifted – and we always, true professionals that we are, did a good job of it. I think he always appreciated the fact there was no nonsense with us, no problems, so we asked him if he might be able to get these people off our backs. In typical fashion, he gave his help on the proviso that we now ‘owed him one’. So there was no question of us turning him down, whatever it was. In fact, even if you didn’t owe him a favour and Tony asked you to do something for him you’d be best off agreeing to it if you didn’t want to wake up dead.

‘Right, well, here’s the story. Yeh know me youngest, Cynthia?’

‘Of course. How old is she now?’

‘Twenty-two and beautiful as her mother was at that age.’

‘Stunning so,’ said Jimmy. ‘How is the lovely Imelda this weather?’

‘Ah grand. Got her a membership up at one of them Ben Dunne gyms. Old Ben owed me from that time I stopped that thing with that other thing getting in the papers. She goes every day, but the lady just likes to eat cakes. She’s a diamond, a great, enormous diamond of a woman. Wouldn’t change her for the world. Anyway, Cynthia hasn’t developed the same addiction to cake as her mother, but she’s involved with a fella that’s no good as far as I’m concerned.’

‘That can be a tricky situation, Tony.’

‘Don’t I know it? Can’t say anythin’ directly because she’s smitten as she is and she’ll just side with him if I give out, and the one place I want happiness is in me own house.’

‘So what’s his problem then? Drugs? Robbings? Gangs? Chelsea fan?’

Ah, if only it was somethin’ like that, I could bring him under me wing. I never had a son, Twenty. Three girls but no lad to take over the business when the time comes. I’ve got me nephew Portobello Jack, but it’s not the same. I always dreamed of a son. I could teach him the old ways, how to do business, mark the territory, gouge someone’s eye out without gettin’ bits under the fingernails, all that shite. I thought maybe one of the girls would marry someone with a bit of street to them, but it didn’t happen.’

‘What about the other two?’

‘Well, Laura married a fella who works for Eircom. As dry as an Arab’s arsehole, and he doesn’t like football.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yeah. Proper fuckin’ weirdo. And Bernadette ended up hitched to an American called Randy.’

‘Does he like football?’

‘He pretends to, at least, but he’s as honest as the day is long. He knows what I’m about, doesn’. . .