The Wild Laughter

An excerpt from The Wild Laughter by Caoilinn Hughes, 2020 First published by Oneworld Publications:

Before the bubble burst, the conditions were set in by which the Chief would have to work his dying day, tilling his grave in the fields with the heatless sun hung low in the sky. Until then, we wouldn’t know the goings-on of his mind, never mind the spoiling meat of him. To think of the foreign things he let eat him alive for he wouldn’t leave his sons a worse debt than what he’d already accumulated. The foreign things we’ll get back to. First, how did he get so sick as that, as if his lips had been stretched round a chimney flue? By association. Haven’t we the Black Death and the well-fed crows and the Famine Roads going nowhere to teach us that in Ireland? Many a friend the Chief had despite his being largely silent. When he had something to say, he knew how to open the chamber of his throat and come out with something brief but mighty, so that everybody heeded him and the principles he lived by—hard-earned learnings. The stories he told were local in the sense of being local to the soul, not to the landlocked midlands culture. But primarily, he was a listener.

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One day in the height of the country’s delirium, he listened to a subsidy-suckling sheep husband by the name of Tony Morrigan, whose palms convened round a pint of Guinness of a Sunday morning. With a necktie he must’ve tugged up from his grand-father’s grave, he’d come to our house midday midweek to show the lazy hours of a sheep-farming property owner (he’d hired shearers) with the advice of the centuries: ‘There’s azy money to be made off bricks and mortar. Spain’s past its best now, so you’ve to know what you’re at. I’ve four bought off-plans in Bulgaria. I’ll keep one and dole out the rest to my pals with only ten percent atop the price I got them. Going up sure as escalators. More reliable even. Stairs! I’ll be having me ease retiring before my own father, I’ll tell you that for nothing. There’s a ticket out of this slog, Manus, and here’s me handing it to you on a platter.’

I won’t make excuses for the Chief—he shouldn’t have heeded such an infested-arseholed skiving prick, but they’d copied each other’s algebra sums on the school bus, so why shouldn’t they copy each other’s assumption sums on the train to Dublin? The way you come to trust a thing you’ve known your lifelong is the way you come to trust the sea, until one day you’re napping in your La-Z-Boy and a tsunami rolls in and wakes you with the lungful of salt water and the shame of dying without your feet on the floor. Like that, he wound up with an apartment in Malaga and the plan for one in Sunny Beach—the portent of it—on the east coast of Bulgaria by the time Morrigan had jellied him up like an aul sow in muck and introduced him to the creditor—citing the Chief ’s land for leverage, his cultivator, seeder, sprayer, the harvester he’d been prompt in his hire-purchase payments for. The three of them sipping lattes and our father who never had a latte in his life—who drank milky tea only. Our father who didn’t have an atlas to look up where Bulgaria was besides—not for stupidity or naivety, but he was a working man with no time for atlases or affogatos or amortisations.

Read more: Guernica