The Order of the Phoenix Park

by Twenty Major

Genres: Humor & Satire

Synopsis

For three years Twenty Major has written a daily blog. Now though comes a tale so bizarre and abominable that mere words on a computer screen wouldnt have been able to do it justice. These words need to be on paper ...

When Twenty Major''s friend, record-shop-owner Tom OFarrell is brutally shot in the stomach, his dying act was to scrawl the number 60 in blood on his chest and dial Twenty''s number into his phone. When Twenty is called to the scene of the crime he hasnt a clue why Tom was trying to contact him or what the hell the number 60 means. But himself and Tom go back a long way and he vows to find Tom''s killer.

Then things take a turn for the worse: Folkapalooza is announced - a massive free concert due to take place in the Phoenix Park with headlining acts Damien Rice, James Blunt and David Gray.

Something is wrong, really wrong. Why are people obsessed with Folkapalooza? What has turned the Goths outside the Central Bank into acoustic loving drips? Who is the ginger albino and how does it all link to Tom?

Can Twenty, Jimmy the Bollix, Stinking Pete, Dirty Dave, Lucky and even Ron himself, save the people of Dublin and, less importantly, the rest of Ireland, from a fate that is, quite literally, worse than death? And solve a murder along the way?

Release date: August 16, 2012

Publisher: Hachette Ireland

Print pages: 304

Sample

Renowned record-shop-owner Tom O’Farrell staggered from the store room at the back of his shop. Terrified and unable to understand what was happening, he only knew that escape was impossible. He had already locked up the shop, the shutters were secured in place … he had nowhere to go. Nevertheless, he made for the door, frantically hoping that a passer-by might see what was happening and raise the alarm. With the lights off though, that was unlikely, and the darkness caused him to stumble over a display of Tears for Fears Greatest Hits DVDs. He lay on the ground, out of breath, looking desperately for somewhere to hide.

Then a voice spoke, alarmingly close, ‘Stay very still.’

Crouched on all fours, the record-shop-owner shuddered, turning his head very slowly, like some kind of retarded owl. Just 14 feet away, bathed in the light that pushed its luminous tentacles out from the store room, loomed the enormous silhouette of his assailant, who stared contemptuously down at him with shining, pink eyes. He was freakishly tall and built like the offspring of a farmer and a professional wrestler crossed with an old- school East German female Olympic athlete. His skin was so pale it was almost translucent, and from under his flat cap sprung a shock of bright orange hair.

‘No. It can’t be,’ gasped Tom, ‘the ginger albino! It was supposed to be just a legend.’

Christ, this was bad. If only people knew.

The ginger albino pulled a pistol from his duffel coat and pointed it at his victim.

‘You shouldn’t have tried to escape.’ His accent was a mix of nasal American and Wicklow council worker, with a strange northern twang that Tom thought might be Donegal. ‘Now, you know why I’m here. You know what you must do.’

‘I’ve told you already,’ Tom stammered, ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘You lie,’ said the hideous man, his gingerness seeming to ooze from his pores like stuff oozed from teenagers’ faces. ‘You and your brethren know of me. You know what I signify. And now you know that I am not a fabled monster. I am real.’

Tom felt a surge of adrenalin rush through him. Well, he hoped it was adrenalin.

‘I will give you a final chance,’ the towering figure said coldly. ‘Do as I ask, or I shall kill you.’

‘Never,’ said Tom. ‘What you ask is too despicable for any person to agree to. I have spent my life working in this business – apart from that time when I lived in London and I had to do things to get by, but that’s not important right now – and I will not see it destroyed by the likes of you.’

‘Very well. I had hoped you would see sense. What is to come is inevitable. Your pathetic stand against it will make no difference whatsoever. The wheels are in motion. This Rolling Stone is gathering no moss. Que sera, sera, and such. Your death will serve as a warning to the others. They won’t be so foolish.’

In an instant, Tom knew what he had to do. ‘If I die,’ he thought, ‘then it’s all over. There’s no chance for anyone.’

Instinctively, he tried to get up and run for the door. The gun thundered, and he felt a burning heat as the bullet penetrated his stomach. He fell again … battling against the searing pain. He turned onto his back again and faced his attacker, who had the pistol pointed directly between his eyes. The ginger albino pulled the trigger, but there was only the click so reminiscent of the Russian roulette scene in The Deer Hunter.

‘MAO!’ said the man, laughing. He reached for more bullets but then saw the blood spreading across the floor from Tom’s stomach. He pocketed the bullets and holstered his gun. ‘My work here is done.’

Tom looked down and saw the hole in his Che Guevara T-shirt. As a veteran of the turf wars between the punks, the mods and the Val Doonican fans during his time in London, he’d seen people gut shot before. It was a slow and painful way to die. Worse than being starved to death in a room filled with Phil Collins music while being rimmed by a cat.

His hateful assassin regarded him for a moment. ‘Your pain is as nothing compared to what the rest of humanity will suffer. Be thankful and die well.’

The ginger albino walked calmly over to one of the racks behind the counter, searched for a couple of moments, then took something. The next moment, he was gone, locking the back door behind him.

Alone and dying, Tom O’Farrell knew he had to act fast. Within minutes, the poison from his stomach would enter his chest cavity and render him immobile for the final, excruciating moments.

‘I must warn them. I must find some way.’

Staggering to his feet, he tried to move, but he was too weak. His legs were like jelly beneath him. Close to tears and knowing time was short, he lay down on the floor. An idea came to him. He pulled his T-shirt over his head, wincing in pain, and summoned the last of his strength to do what he had to do.

When he was finished, he grimaced as he found his mobile phone in his pocket and flicked through the address book until he came to the name of the person he wanted. Too weak to make the call, he left the screen displaying this entry as the blackness enveloped him … and Tom O’Farrell died, hoping against hope that he’d done enough.

It was early morning when the call came. I was up and about though. A hangover made sure of that. It felt like there were little brain dwarves drilling holes in the skirting boards of my brain. I hate dwarves.

‘Hello, Twenty?’

‘Yes. Who’s that?’

‘Detective Sergeant Larry O’Rourke, from Pearse Street.’

‘Ah, Larry. How’s things?’

‘Not so bad, Twenty. Long time no speak.’

‘You know me, honest as the day is long.’

‘Yeah. A day in the North Pole.’

‘Ever the card, Larry. What’s going on?’

‘We’ve got a bit of a situation here. Do you know a fellow called Tom O’Farrell?’

‘Of course, Tom owns Vinyl Countdown, the record shop on Wicklow Street.’

‘Owned, Twenty.’

‘Did he sell it? The big corporate monsters and the online world have finally put paid to the little record-shop-owner man?’

‘No, he’s dead!’ He laughed. Larry was never one for subtleties.

‘Jesus. What happened?’

‘Shot in the belly. Bled like a stuck pig, so he did. Bet it hurt like buggery, too. I read somewhere it’s the most painful way to die. Even worse than being starved to death in a room filled with Phil Collins music while being rimmed by a cat.’

‘Christ, that is bad. How come you’re ringing me, though?’

‘Well, it looks like he was trying to call you with his last dying act. Your phonebook entry was on his mobile. There’s something else very strange too, but I can’t go into that now because I’m dying for a piss and a smoke. Yes, at the same time. Can you come down here?’

I told him I’d be down within half an hour, jumped into the shower, had a smoke, then hopped on my Honda 50 and headed for town.



When I got to the station, Larry was standing outside. He acknowledged me with a nod of his head as he carried on his phone conversation.

‘I don’t care what he says. That’s just bullshit. This time that little fucker is going down. He’s not getting away with that shit anymore. We have him bang to rights. Just keep him there till I get back.’

He hung up.

‘Sorry about that, Twenty. The missus caught the young fella looking at porn on the internet. We’ve always suspected but never been able to prove it.’

‘Er … right enough. So what the fuck happened here?’

‘Cleaner found him this morning. Dead as you like on the floor. She’s so shocked she’s talking about going back to Poland.’

‘Jesus.’

‘Yeah. Come in here and have a look though. It’s all very odd.’

I followed him into the shop, and there were all kinds of people in there. He explained the forensics officers had been in already and there was no danger of me contaminating the scene. As we went past the Classical section, I could see some bloodstains on the ground. When we came into the Male A–Z, I could see poor old Tom’s feet.

Tom and I were old friends. He’d grown up on the same road as me and had always been into his music. He had wanted to get into managing bands, but his eye for talent-spotting was like Paris Hilton’s – all crooked and deformed. He’d passed up the chance to manage a young, enthusiastic Northside band, saying the lead singer was ‘a wanky little dwarf cunt with a stupid name,’ and instead chose a punk band from Killester called The Unholy Flaps. It didn’t take him long to realise that he wasn’t any good at decision-making when it came to new groups, so he moved to London. He came back about two years later, looking very thin, and never once spoke about what had happened to him there. I never really asked. When he came to me looking for financial help for his new record shop, I was a bit dubious, despite his earnest promises to pay me back every penny. Had it been anyone else, I’m pretty sure I’d have told them to take a running jump.

‘You want to open a second-hand and rare items record shop on Wicklow Street, do you? Well, I suggest you think again because it would be a disaster,’ I might say as I sent them away and turned to the window, silhouetted in the late evening sunshine, individual hairs from my beard shining as if under spotlights.

Tom was different, though. As kids we’d been through a traumatic experience together when, as part of somebody’s idea to instill religion in children, we had been sent to a monastery on ‘retreat’. When we got there, it was horrible. It smelt like a hospital. Well, a hospital whose walls were scrubbed with Jeyes Fluid and still-warm semen. Tom and I had to share a room. He got the top bunk, which suited me, as I really don’t have much of a head for heights. After being told to go to bed very early we were still full of energy, young innocent scamps emboldened by the strange surroundings. So, we did what any typical lads of that age would do. We sneaked out of the dormitory room and went exploring. The corridors were dark and narrow, and the floors had diamond-shaped black and white tiles. We had no idea what might be around the next corner, so we moved as slowly as a government inquiry into anything that might be vaguely its fault. Soon, we found ourselves in a kind of atrium with a number of large doors leading left and right and the continuation of the corridor straight ahead. Not quite wanting to risk going in a door where we might find a tableful of monks, their helmets on, sitting around a table playing gin rummy or spin the bottle, we decided to go straight on. It was the worst decision we ever made in our lives.

We had just turned the corner when, from behind us, a voice spoke and stopped us in our tracks.

‘Boys.’

We looked sideways at each other, gulped, and turned around to see a very ugly monk standing with his arms folded. He had the blackest hair I had ever seen, heavy stubble and shaggy eyebrows that almost met in the middle. When he spoke, you could see that his top gums were larger than his actual teeth, making him look like some kind of Hallowe’en mask. He had a strange, sickly sweet smell, and the look of him put chills down my spine. Even at an early age, I knew this was not the kind of person I should be around.

‘You’re here with the retreat, isn’t that right?’

‘Yes, Mr Monk,’ said Tom.

‘And you were told to go to bed and not come out of your rooms until morning, weren’t you?’

‘Yes, Sir Monk,’ Tom stammered. I was now even more nervous as I watched the smile, small as it was, begin to spread over his face.

‘Well, that means you two are in serious trouble. Your teachers will have to be told, then your parents, and Lord knows what they’ll say when they learn how you have disrespected a house of God.’

Tom’s parents were particularly religious, and if they discovered he’d been up to mischief in a monastery, they’d redden his backside for him and no mistake.

‘Oh Jesus!’ he said.

‘Now you take the Lord’s name in vain?’

‘I was praying. I swear!’

‘That’s not what it sounded like to me. That’s even more trouble if they find out that. Oh now, that’s made you look very worried. Well now … what if I told you that there was something you could do that would make sure you didn’t get into any trouble at all? Would you be willing to do it?’

‘Oh yes,’ said a now-panicking Tom. ‘Yes, we would. Wouldn’t we, Twenty?’

‘Erm …’

‘Well, that’s settled it then. You two come with me, and I’ll make sure you don’t have any problems.’

He steered us towards a door that was almost hidden in the corner of the dark passageway. My nerves were screaming at me – every part of me knew this was wrong, this was a mistake, this was something I’d regret for ever, but I just walked on, too young to prevent it happening. I cursed myself for leaving to explore in the first place. If I’d just stayed in the room and played Top Trumps, none of this would have happened. I’ll never forget the click of the door as it shut behind us, and we were made sit on a rock-hard sofa. The monk went into another room, and when he came back in, he efficiently but lengthily took our innocence.

I’ll never forget his fingers opening the clasps, then rubbing up and down, then gripping the shaft before starting to strum gently. That bastard played folk music at us for over an hour, singing songs about idiot people who seemed to be far too fucking miserable to bother paying any attention to. The corny lyrics, the lethargic performance, the closing of the eyes when singing … the whole thing was just utterly traumatic. When he escorted us back to our room and bade us goodnight, we both lay in our beds, rigid, violated, hollow inside.

After a long time, Tom spoke. ‘Twenty. Would it be okay if we never talked about this again?’

‘That’s okay with me.’

‘Epic. Goodnight, Twenty.’

‘Goodnight, Tom.’

I’m not sure either of us slept, though.

Years later, with the money I provided, he was able to open his record shop and it became one of the most popular in town. If you found the door on Wicklow Street, hidden away on the curve, behind it you’d find a wonderland, specialising in rare vinyl that nobody else seemed able to get. Tom paid me back within the year, and I still got a small percentage of the annual profits for my trouble. Tom insisted, and I’m not a man foolish enough to turn down cash in my hand. Tom and I had a history. A good history, a history that could fill a bargeful of kegs. A history that ended now and went on for ever. Tom was dead.

Larry was speaking again. ‘Look, the reason we asked you to come down wasn’t just because of the phone thing. People get shot in Dublin all the time. Normally though it’s one drug dealer shooting another, and we don’t really care about that. If you had a kitchen full of cockroaches, and one of them ate another one, you wouldn’t be upset, right?’

‘Right.’

‘Well, this is different. Tom O’Farrell was no cockroach, and he surely wasn’t eaten by another cockroach.’

‘Police work is complicated, eh?’

‘Joe,’ he said, talking to one of the crime-scene guys, ‘lift up that sheet and let Twenty have a look at the body.’

Joe did as he was told. There lay my old friend, his stomach caked in dried blood, bits of his guts hanging out. It was an ugly sight.

‘Now, Twenty, this is why we brought you down here. As well as the phone with your address-book entry, it seems he left us another clue. Look.’

I moved closer to the body, and on his chest, with his own blood, Tom had written the number ‘60’.

‘Any idea what that means?’ asked Larry.

‘Not a clue. Sorry. Maybe it’s the start of a phone number, or the number of a house?’

‘It could also be a registration plate, a time, a file in a numerically organised filing system, somebody’s position in a list, the price of something, the number of times he’s eaten steak-and-kidney pie. It could be anything. We were hoping it might mean something to you.’

‘I wish I could help, Larry, but nothing springs to mind. Tell you what, I’ll check with the lads, see if they can come up with something.’

‘Fair enough. Keep it quiet, though. We’re not releasing that information to the press. We need to keep something back to weed out all the lunatics who’ll ring up and claim to have done it.’

‘Does that really happen?’

‘Nah. It’s just a good line. Get in touch if you figure anything out though.’

I walked out of Tom’s shop, my head spinning. What was it that he’d wanted to tell me? Who would want to do something like that to old Tom? And why would they want to do that? If I could figure out those three questions, then we’d be closer to finding out what really happened in there.

I knew there was only one place I could go.

I dropped my trusty motorcycle back home and wandered around to Ron’s bar. Ron’s is my local. I’ve been going there for years. It’s not like your achingly trendy superpubs, it’s not even like a normal pub, it’s an old-fashioned bar. There’s no carvery lunch or Mediterranean fusion food. You’re lucky if he’s remembered to stock up on Tayto, and even then he never has Smoky Bacon flavour. There are no plasma TVs, just one old set bolted to the roof in the corner. We did make him get Sky in, though, so we could watch the football. That’s his one concession to the modern world.

Ron and I have an understanding. I pay him money for my booze, and he lets me smoke in his bar. He’s never liked being told what to do, and the smoking ban, to him, was just another cunt telling him he couldn’t do something. He would hold no truck with that. Once a busy little man came around, claiming to be from some government department, and told Ron he could lose his licence for letting people smoke. Ron paid him no heed, and nobody ever saw the busy little man again.

Me, I’ve been smoking since I was six. I had my first cigarette when Johnny Scanlon robbed three Sweet Afton from his grandfather’s box. He said he’d never realise and he was right because it turns out he had Alzheimer’s disease and died a few months later. Not from Alzheimer’s disease. He contracted a serious case of gastroenteritis and, given his already weakened state, quite literally shat himself to death one afternoon when the rest of the family were out. They had to move house in the end, unable as they were to remove the stench of death shit from the walls. Anyway, me, Jimmy the Bollix and Johnny Scanlon (who would later become a heroin-addicted chef that added his arm scabs to his sauces) were hanging around down by the canal in Kilmainham, we had a box of matches, and we all had our first fag together. We coughed, we spluttered, we did our best to inhale, we puked. We thought we were cool. When I went home, I told my mother that the reason my T-shirt was covered in vomit and I was grey in the face was because I saw a man get his head run over by a bus. The simple lies of a child.

Ron likes his bar the way it is. Traditional. Quiet. Unclean. A while back, some Trinity students decided they’d start drinking there because it was so different they thought it made them cool. I don’t know how they even found the place. He tolerated it for one night, but when even more of them came back the next night, he knew he had to act.

Up to the bar went the scarf-wearing, blazer-sporting student with the ripped jeans and the weird spiky hair. ‘Foive points of Hoyno,’ he said.

Ron poured the five pints, placed them on the bar, then said, ‘That’ll be sixty euro, please.’

‘Sixty euro? Are you, loike, out of your moind or something?’

Ron assured th. . .