Windsong – Breath of Being (Chapter 28 – The Cat Walks)

CHAPTER DATE

Being The Beginning Sunday, January 23, 2011

Mistral

1 The Exchange Sunday, January 30, 2011

2 bildende Kraft Saturday, February 5, 2011

3 Gossamer Wings Friday, February 11, 2011

4 Nemesis Saturday, February 19, 2011

5 Odd Shoes Friday, February 25, 2011

6 al-Rûh Friday, March 4, 2011

7 A Love Supreme Thursday, March 10, 2011

8 The Three-Cornered Light Thursday, March 24, 2011

9 Serendipity Tuesday, April 5, 2011

10 The Watchman Friday, April 15, 2011

11 The Upright Way Sunday, April 25, 2011

12 Angels Wednesday, May 4, 2011

13 The Cave of Montesinos Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Meltimi

14 Idols Tuesday, May 10, 2011

15 Nightingale Sunday, May 15, 2011

16 The Perfect Square Sunday, May 22, 2011

17 Haunting Thursday, May 26, 2011

18 The Uncontainable Wednesday, June 1, 2011

19 The Ear of Malchus Monday, June 6, 2011

20 Mauvais Pas Wednesday, June 15, 2011

21 Sinan Qua Non Saturday, June 25, 2011

22 Spirit-Level Sunday, July 10, 2011

Sirocco

23 Witness Saturday, July 16, 2011

24 Alcibiades Friday, July 22, 2011

25 Ney Thursday, August 11, 2011

26 Birdsong Thursday, August 18, 2011

27 The Vanishing Point Wednesday, August 24, 2011

28 The Cat Walks Wednesday, August 31, 2011

29 The Approximate Likeness of Being

Becalming Unscientific Postscript

Chapter 28

The Cat Walks

“After realism, decide on the illusion.”

Marie Helvin

Catwalk

Rio pushed open the door quietly. The nurses had told her to go on in and that Joyce had been anxious to see her. Joyce was lying in bed turned away from the door, looking out the window with a thin-legged nurse leaning forward over her as she adjusted an intravenous infusion. There were no flowers in the room apart from a pink-petalled orchid sitting on the windowsill and the room was spartanly furnished, save for a television high on one wall. It was tuned to Fashion TV. For a brief moment her attention was diverted to watch anorexic models as they paraded down catwalks; black pools for eyes; dead light, zombie-like. One life not nine, Rio thought, and coughed to announce her presence.

Joyce turned and she forced a smile when she recognised her visitor. ‘Rio, thank God. How did it go?’

Rio stared at her unable to answer. She had just returned from Phyllis Andrew’s funeral and it was hard to describe the devastation, the desolation, she felt inside. Too many funerals she thought: Gerrit, Crawford, the American and Israeli Ambassadors and their wives, the Danish cultural attaché, one of the library volunteers – Angie’s mother – two of the musicians . . . the list went on and on. She was so tired of it. Joyce looked impossibly thin; her face gaunt, and left eye covered by a bandage. Rio gasped, ‘Joyce . . .’ She started to cry, uncontrollable crying.

Joyce held out her hand. ‘You poor thing! Come over here.’

The young nurse looked concerned and moved out of the way. ‘Is there anything I can get you, Miss?’

‘No, thank you.’ Rio answered.

‘This is Vicky, my new nurse. We were watching to see what bikinis we should wear this summer.’ Joyce laughed.

The nurse smiled thinly and then left.

‘Oh Joyce. I don’t know what to do.’

‘Common. Sit down here beside me. Talking about it will surely help.’

Rio was not sure about that but she obeyed and sat on the edge of the bed, holding Joyce’s hand to her face. ‘I’m so sorry, Joyce.’

‘It’s not your fault, Rio. Phyllis would never have wanted you to believe that,’ Joyce Holden consoled.

Rio looked at her and admired Joyce's courage. In a coma for four days, following the explosion, and then operated on to remove her damaged eye, she still remained caring, concerned. She noticed the flower again. ‘Nice orchid.’

‘Jerome sneaked it into me, past the infection-control sister. Cymbidium he called it. Nice of him.’

‘Yes,’ Rio answered blankly.

‘How are the others? I’ve had no other visitors today to tell me anything,’ Joyce asked.

‘James is doing ok. Lost a good deal of blood, and his spleen, but doing ok.’

‘What about Aengus FitzHenry?’

‘It’s unlikely that he will come out of his coma. His family, I think, are considering withdrawing intensive care. Probably for the best! It seems . . .’

‘It seems what?’ Joyce quizzed.

‘This is not easy Joyce but Paddy Hayes, Gerrit’s second-in-command, called to see me yesterday. It appears to the police investigating team that it was FitzHenry and Ahmed Al-Akrash who planned and executed the original robbery. FitzHenry was being paid by some fundamentalist Pakistani organisation to keep an eye out for the Book, and also on Ahmed, who was considered a loose cannon. They think it was FitzHenry who drugged Phyllis with chloroform from my solvent cupboard and who probably then arranged to have her killed.’

‘Oh God. Not Aengus,’ Joyce wailed.

Rio nodded. ‘Needed the money it seems. FitzHenry had a secret life. He was being blackmailed… a large cocaine habit and a liking for rent-boys it transpires.’

‘Christ! And Ahmed?’

‘Ahmed Al-Akrash was supplied with explosives by a dissident terrorist group and the main reason for his suicide-bombing, it seems, was revenge.’

‘How do the Gardai know all this?’

‘Ahmed left a note for Mac, along with the missing page of parchment, explaining his reasons, his involvement with FitzHenry and the terrorists, and finishing with a verse from the Sura 6 of the Qur’an: “We have witnessed against ourselves.” It turned up yesterday. Found amongst the last bit of rubble being cleared from the café.’

‘Why to Mac? Why should Ahmed send him a note.’

‘They were friends in a way, although the police now suspect, from information Jerome has given them, that following old Prof Symmonds' death, the word was out about the Book of the Messenger and Ahmed was put in place in the museum to keep watch. He befriended Mac to glean any information he could.’

‘Where is Mac? He hasn’t called to see me,’ Joyce asked sadly.

‘No sign of him!’ Rio shrugged, feeling a heavy weight on her shoulders. ‘Not since the explosion anyway. He was uninjured, as I was, because we were in my lab at the time. We had both turned back to get the Durer for the presentation. I hope he’s not on a binge. Marie hasn’t heard from him either.’

‘Poor Mac!’

Rio hesitated for a moment. ‘We all pity the pain of alcoholics yet never stop to ask what made them drink in the first place. Was it pleasure or pain that drove them there? And if it was pleasure do they then deserve our pity? We all have ways of separating ourselves.’

‘You’re right Rio. For me, right now, it’s trying to decide what bikini to wear with an eye-patch.’ Joyce smiled.

‘I love you, Joyce.’ Rio leant forward and hugged her tightly.

‘How’s your uncle by the way?’ Joyce enquired.

‘Always in the right place, that man!’ Rio laughed. ‘He was protected from the main force of the blast because he was waiting in the doorway for us. Some deafness only.’

‘A little good-luck, at least. Give him my best.’

‘In the chaos the Book has gone missing again,’ Rio said, shaking her head, but not really caring.

‘Good riddance,’ Joyce almost spat. ‘What will you do now Rio?’

‘I’m not sure. As you know, the building is badly damaged. Thankfully little or no damage to the exhibits from the explosion, but the fire brigade managed to inflict some serious destruction with their water hoses in the archives. Once I am happy that is being taken care of, I’ll head away, with Jack.’

‘Probably for the best.’

‘What about you, Joyce?’

‘Another week or so here, then home. You never know, they might want me to act up as Director, supervise the rebuilding.’

‘No better choice.’

‘Thank you sweetheart.’

Rio Dawson leant forward and kissed Joyce on the cheek. ‘Take care, Joyce. I’ll call again before you get home.’

‘You too, Rio.’

Rio got up from the bed, turned and headed for the door. On the TV she watched a model’s legs go on forever, down the catwalk. One life, she thought again, and closed the door behind her.

Homo Sacer: Ampersands, Immolation and the Arab Spring

RATM Album Cover incorporating Malcolm Browne's picture

of Thích Quảng Đức's self-immolation.

On December 17, 2010 Tareq al-Tayyib Muhammad Bouazizi, a Tunisian street vendor, self-immolated in protest at his humiliation by agents of the Tunisian state and died from his horrific burns 18 days later. It was the ‘spark’ that lit the regime-shattering Arab Spring of Tunisia and Egypt and the Summer of Libya. It was also the ‘spark’ that may yet herald the Autumn winds of change in Syria and Yemen, and a further Winter of discontent in Bahrain, Morocco, Algeria, Iran and possibly Jordan.

In the horror of his immolation Bouazizi’s death is reminiscent of that of Thích Quảng Đức a Buddhist monk who on the June 11 1963 in Saigon self-immolated in protest at the oppression of Buddhist monks by the then South Vietnamese Government, a sacrifice that ultimately brought down that government.

Each of these men in their way, had once existed as part of the body politic or society but because of oppression by their sovereign powers, they had decided to remove themselves from that power by self-sacrifice and by moving, as we say in Ireland ‘beyond the pale’, they effected change from without. They are or were what could be called Homer Sacer or sacred men. Men who according to early Roman law could not be sacrificed (Latin: immolare) by the State yet, if they were killed by a citizen, that citizen would not be punished. They were men subject and yet free of sovereign power, men at the intersection of individual human existence and the body politic.

I am reading at present the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s Homer Sacer – Sovereign Power and Bare Life to try and get a considered perspective on where, in 2011 CE (1432 AH, 1727 Coptic, 5771 Jewish, 1381 Zoroastrian) we as individual human beings exist in relationship to ourselves and our societies, and where this is taking us for the future. Agamben argues that the very success of the development of the model of western democratic process was because it had to contend with certain individuals, refugees or exiles from society, who were beyond its rules. They could not be sacrificed by the Sovereign laws of the State but could be killed by a citizen of that State with impunity. He places the homo sacer at the polar opposite to the Sovereign.

I am not certain. These sacred men like Bouazizi and Thích Quảng Đức had both zoē, the primordial exceptional essence common to all individual living beings (men, animals or gods) and an acute awareness of the bios, the way of living within society. Yet they were prepared to deceive that society by self-sacrificing their individual being without sacrificing anyone else, as is the case with suicide bombers. They, by the very nature of that deceit, then became the ferrymen of democratic development and the embodiment of the protagonist/hero of a post-apocalyptic perspective. These sacred men ‘ignited’ a belief in the potential of a democratic process for their societies, a belief system that we in the West have allowed to congeal.

Agamben goes on to conclude that because modern democracy has allowed every exception to become a rule, and has in sovereign terms been determined to fuse the zoē of the individual human being with the bios of the society, that the outside and the inside have become indistinguishable and that we no longer live but are interned. He relates that there is no language to describe this fusion of the zoē and the bios, the subjective and objective being, and in a reflection of how language has texted (transformed) I can only comprehend the indistinguishable point were our inner and outer lives fuse as the Ampersand, the logogram &, the “and per se and’ or the “and &(symbol) which by itself is and.”

There is no doubt that the current discontent in Arab countries relates to the frustration, the exile of individuals existing in societies where control is despotic, where wealth is concentrated in the hands of an elite minority, and where the sovereign power has seized the outside, the Ausnahme. A seizure it must be said that was facilitated by post-enlightenment European colonial ambition and impotence and which in our ‘democratic’ societies has been by stealth.

I was listening to a spokesman from the Libyan Transitional Council speaking on the radio this morning dismissing the 1 million euro bounty placed on Muammar Gaddafi’ s head by Benghazi businessmen as a sideshow. Instead he reiterated the LTC’s ‘golden opportunity’ offer to one of Gaddafi’ s companions to either hand him over or kill him with a guaranteed impunity for all past crimes. In an ironic twist, Ben Ali in Tunisia, Mubarak in Egypt and now Gaddafi in Libya have now become the homo sacers of our western democratic process and conscience. They cannot be sacrificed (thankfully the International Criminal Court does not impose the death penalty) but they may be killed, like Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

Uncontained population explosion however, unemployment, disenfranchisement, an ‘internment camp’ political suppression, exhaustion of the mineral wealth that currently encourages despotism and the insatiable demands of India and China will, soon for most other Arab nations and a little later for western democracy in general, obliterate our capacity to re-invent ourselves.

Mad Max is waiting in the wings.

And &……..

The development of the Ampersand & from ET

Windsong – Breath of Being (Chapter 27 – The Vanishing Point)

CHAPTER DATE

Being The Beginning Sunday, January 23, 2011

Mistral

1 The Exchange Sunday, January 30, 2011

2 bildende Kraft Saturday, February 5, 2011

3 Gossamer Wings Friday, February 11, 2011

4 Nemesis Saturday, February 19, 2011

5 Odd Shoes Friday, February 25, 2011

6 al-Rûh Friday, March 4, 2011

7 A Love Supreme Thursday, March 10, 2011

8 The Three-Cornered Light Thursday, March 24, 2011

9 Serendipity Tuesday, April 5, 2011

10 The Watchman Friday, April 15, 2011

11 The Upright Way Sunday, April 25, 2011

12 Angels Wednesday, May 4, 2011

13 The Cave of Montesinos Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Meltimi

14 Idols Tuesday, May 10, 2011

15 Nightingale Sunday, May 15, 2011

16 The Perfect Square Sunday, May 22, 2011

17 Haunting Thursday, May 26, 2011

18 The Uncontainable Wednesday, June 1, 2011

19 The Ear of Malchus Monday, June 6, 2011

20 Mauvais Pas Wednesday, June 15, 2011

21 Sinan Qua Non Saturday, June 25, 2011

22 Spirit-Level Sunday, July 10, 2011

Sirocco

23 Witness Saturday, July 16, 2011

24 Alcibiades Friday, July 22, 2011

25 Ney Thursday, August 11, 2011

26 Birdsong Thursday, August 18, 2011

27 The Vanishing Point Wednesday, August 24, 2011

28 The Cat Walks

29 The Approximate Likeness of Being

Becalming Unscientific Postscript

Chapter 27

The Vanishing Point

“This sacrifice, in essence, of two things

Consisteth; one is that, whereof ’tis made;

The covenant, the other.”

Dante

Paradise; canto v

“Every instant is autonomous. Not vengeance nor pardon nor

jails nor even oblivion can modify the invulnerable past.”

Jorge Luis Borges

A New Refutation of Time

DI Gerrit Flatley stood near the door, watching. Many of the invited diplomats were already inside, gathered in the foyer drinking champagne and fizzy drinks for the non-imbibers. From where he was positioned he could see Brigadier Crawford, as he hovered on the margins of the crowd, ghostlike and Prof. Aengus FitzHenry looking flustered, his check jacket flickering in and out of the forest of sombre suits and floral dresses. Above him Joyce Holden and James Somerville were standing on the lower crosswalk, listening to Albhar – a traditional group composed of Moroccan, Galician and Irish musicians – as they entertained the guests with songs from their Atlantic Shore suite. Flatley’s mobile phone vibrated into life in his breast pocket. ‘Hello. Flatley here,’ he said quietly as he moved outside to a small seating area, near the entrance doorway. A group of laughing and giggling schoolgirls, on a tour of the Castle, walked past him. One was licking an ice-cream, with real relish and he smiled at her.

‘Gerry, it’s Paddy Hayes. We’ve found her.’ His senior sergeant announced.

‘Phyllis Andrew?’ he asked, but knew the answer. He was feeling more disappointment than he usually did.

‘Yep! The sub-aqua unit dredged her up, still strapped into her wheelchair, from the reservoir,’ Hayes said with a dead-pan voice.

‘Shit!’

‘The post-mortem is scheduled for 02.00 pm.’

Flatley looked at his watch. It was 11.30am. The presentation in the Museum was due to start at any minute. ‘I’ll be there,’ he said.

‘Right. Oh. Gerry.’

‘Yes Paddy.’

‘What about your man, Flanagan? He’s still in the holding cell. We cannot hold onto him much longer without a formal charge being brought. What do you want to do?’

Flatley had brought Flanagan in for further questioning 24 hours previously, more out of frustration with a lack of progress in getting any leads to the missing Phyllis Andrew than anything else. It was the second time since all of their returns from Istanbul. Flanagan had realised this and fully cooperated. ‘Let him go, Paddy. But hold onto his passport.’

‘Right. See you at 1400.’

Flatley hung up, replaced the phone in his pocket, and walked back through the glass doors into the Museum. He paused as he scanned the foyer for FitzHenry wanting to inform him about finding Phyllis Andrew as soon as possible. He saw Jack Dawson and Rio exiting, from the corridor where her lab was situated, onto the upper crosswalk. He realised then, that even when out-of-sight from him, he could sense her movement, her presence. He tried to attract their attention but they didn’t see him. He watched as they abruptly stopped at the top of the stairway, gesturing to each other as if they had forgotten something. The Durer etching for the presentation, he suspected. He had delivered it back to Rio earlier. She quickly turned back and retraced her steps. Jack waited, his body only half visible as he held the outer corridor door open.

Flatley decided to go around the back edge of the crowd. Ahead of him he saw FitzHenry mounting a small podium that was set to one side of the projection screen of the ground floor theatre and testing the microphone. There was polite applause and then silence.

‘Your Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen,’ FitzHenry began. ‘Once again I wish to extend my sincere gratitude to members of the diplomatic community and their continued support of the Library. In particular on this occasion I would like to acknowledge the magnificent generosity of the Embassies of the Kingdom of Denmark and the United Kingdom for helping us to mount an exhibition of legal and ecclesiastical manuscripts associated with Viking Dublin and the Danish kingdoms on the east coast of England.’

There was more polite applause which FitzHenry allowed to subside before he continued, ‘No doubt as many of you are aware it has been a very difficult time for the Library lately but it gives me great pleasure to announce a recent discovery . . .’

Flatley hesitated. FitzHenry’s speech faded into the background as suddenly, to his right, an unusual movement catches the policeman’s eye. The door of the toilet for disabled visitors had opened and the figure of a man, dark skinned, with a red chequered scarf around his neck, exited. The man was smiling – a detached frightening smile, the policeman thought. The man began to move forward towards the podium but hesitated by the door of the museum shop. He seemed to be having difficulty opening the zip of his jacket.

Gerrit Flatley looked up and began to wave urgently in the direction of Rio who had reappeared on the crosswalk. Behind FitzHenry, projected on the atrium screen, the image of the Dürer etching appeared.

FitzHenry droned on and used a laser pointer to throw a red dot on the screen to his right, ‘Thanks to the conscientiousness of one of our staff members, Dr. Rio Dawson, a new, previously unrecorded Dürer etching entitled the Paraclete has been identified and validated. We are deligh –’ There was an abrupt pause in the flow of words. Aengus FitzHenry had looked up from his notes, and suddenly saw the man standing by the shop. Flatley threw a quick look in the direction of the podium. The colour had drained from FitzHenry’s face. His mouth was open but no words were coming out. FitzHenry was holding out his arms, flapping them wildly. Then a scream came, a scream that reverberated around the enclosed space of the atrium. ‘Oh, God! No, Ahmed. No!’

The audience turned as one from the screen in the direction of FitzHenry’s extended arms. Everything appeared to be happening in slow motion. A gust of wind blew through the open doors behind Flatley and he saw the tassels on the red-chequered scarf flutter. He lunged forward. He could see the man’s hand as it moved towards his chest, pulling open his shirt. The man tugged at a silver-coloured draw-ring. Nothing happened.

Flatley was nearly up to him.

‘Al-Awda, I am witness,’ Ahmed Al-Akrash shouted, and looking directly at the onrushing policeman tugged down on the ring once more.

There was a blinding flash, and a blast of wind first sucked in and then roared out from within the Museum shattering outwards the doors of the entrance. Some 50 yards away, the schoolgirl licking the ice-cream was impaled by a scimitar of double-glazed glass to one of the park benches.

And then the screaming started . . .

Windsong – Breath of Being (Chapter 26 – Birdsong)

CHAPTER DATE

Being The Beginning Sunday, January 23, 2011

Mistral

1 The Exchange Sunday, January 30, 2011

2 bildende Kraft Saturday, February 5, 2011

3 Gossamer Wings Friday, February 11, 2011

4 Nemesis Saturday, February 19, 2011

5 Odd Shoes Friday, February 25, 2011

6 al-Rûh Friday, March 4, 2011

7 A Love Supreme Thursday, March 10, 2011

8 The Three-Cornered Light Thursday, March 24, 2011

9 Serendipity Tuesday, April 5, 2011

10 The Watchman Friday, April 15, 2011

11 The Upright Way Sunday, April 25, 2011

12 Angels Wednesday, May 4, 2011

13 The Cave of Montesinos Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Meltimi

14 Idols Tuesday, May 10, 2011

15 Nightingale Sunday, May 15, 2011

16 The Perfect Square Sunday, May 22, 2011

17 Haunting Thursday, May 26, 2011

18 The Uncontainable Wednesday, June 1, 2011

19 The Ear of Malchus Monday, June 6, 2011

20 Mauvais Pas Wednesday, June 15, 2011

21 Sinan Qua Non Saturday, June 25, 2011

22 Spirit-Level Sunday, July 10, 2011

Sirocco

23 Witness Saturday, July 16, 2011

24 Alcibiades Friday, July 22, 2011

25 Ney Thursday, August 11, 2011

26 Birdsong Thursday, August 18, 2011

27 The Vanishing Point

28 The Cat Walks

29 The Approximate Likeness of Being

Becalming Unscientific Postscript

Chapter 26

Birdsong

“There is enough evil in the crying of wind.”

William Butler Yeats

He Reproves the Curlew

Phyllis Andrew could hear the man moving around in the background, filling a kettle, pulling plates from a cupboard, searching in a drawer for cutlery. This bothered her, the thought of him searching amongst knives and forks. Unable to see she tried to stop imagining a knife in his hand, his finger running along its edge testing the sharpness; stealing closer to her, behind her, pulling its edge across her neck . . .

‘Would you not take off the hood?’ she asked yet again, anxious to see what was in his hands.

‘No.’ The voice was metallic, high pitched, slurred.

It reminded her of her own father’s mutated voice, only much younger. Her father’s throaty voice, that had to be transmitted through a small handheld microphone he had to hold close to where his vocal chords had once been, before they were destroyed by cancer. ‘Please,’ she pleaded, tears forming.

‘Shut the fuck up,’ he rasped.

The words cut through any hope she felt. The room felt icy all of a sudden, and his words echoed and echoed against its walls. Phyllis felt frightened, more frightened that she had ever been. Her wrists were sore, bound down too tight by plastic cords to the armrests of her wheelchair. 

Why now, she wondered.

Phyllis remembered waiting in the lobby of the museum, and then sensing a sudden movement behind her. She remembered the cloth being pressed against her face, her gagging, her wanting to be sick, and then nothing. She then remembered as she regained consciousness in the car, being lifted out of the car and then being tied into her wheelchair, her head covered in a hood noosed tightly around her neck. She remembered with absolute clarity that first day, the silence of the man, a silence broken only by the twittering of early season wagtails and a kettle boiling; its whistling; its water being poured; the stirring sound of a teaspoon inside a cup and the moment she had felt her left hand being released from its binding and bringing it automatically to pull at the hood. The man had grunted and immediately slapped her hand down and roughly positioned it around a hot liquid-filled mug before he pulled at the hood just where her mouth was positioned and began to cut at the fabric. She had felt the point of a knife glance off her teeth and had squirmed. He then had put a hand on her neck and push her head forward. A tube, a straw, had come through the small tear the hood, up into her nostril before eventually finding her mouth. He had then pushed her head down further, towards her hand and the mug it held. “Suck” he had said, his first and only word that day. Food had been given to her the same way; liquidised through the straw. That first day also, after she explained her needs the man had been attentive, removing her underwear so that she might empty her bladder. He had waited close by while she inserted the catheter she carried in her pocket and held an old basin to catch the flow. But that had been the first day and the attention did not last. She was more often left hungry, thirsty and sitting in a pool of her own urine, her bladder having overflowed. ‘My name is Phyllis Andrew. What do you want with me?’ she asked again, desperate to engage him.

Silence.

Phyllis had plenty of time to think about the possible answers to that question when left alone. She wondered what had happened to Joe and whether he was ok? Was it bad luck or fate, she questioned, that she happened to be in the Museum when they came to rob it? Was it bad luck or fate that her back was broken all those years ago by a drunk in a car and she could not escape without help? Even before the kidnapping she had often thought about death, her own death. She knew she had fulfilled her duty to herself after the accident, to survive, to desire happiness, to achieve happiness; luck or fate had nothing to do with it. But each year the physical disability was having greater impact, and she knew she needed to make plans. She had seriously considered moving to Holland, taking up the offer of a job in Amsterdam. She had followed the arguments on euthanasia and how the Dutch Supreme Court had determined that in order to assess suffering it must be abstracted from its cause: from bad luck or fate. How the Court had held that unbearable being: existential suffering, the absence of any perspective on the duty for happiness, could not be entertained as a legal justification for assisted euthanasia because no doctor, no person, is an expert on the true existence of another.

Always practical, Phyllis had many times on dark nights, driven out to the old docks and after getting out, wheeled her chair to the edge, always at the same place, an old disused quay that had once berthed the coffin ships. She had gone there so often she knew the sounds and smells of the place and the rhythm of the tide that slapped against the disintegrating wooden piles. She had become part of those rhythms, no longer an intrusion and looking down into the waters she knew what she wanted to do was neither selfish nor selfless. She had changed her mind when Joe had asked her to marry him. She had said yes. That decision had been their secret for two months.

‘What are you going to do with me?’ she asked again, quietly.

‘Shut the fuck up.’

She listened to the kettle boiling, whistling, water being poured, then, a stirring sound – a teaspoon inside a cup. At least its not a knife, she reasoned, reassured by the apparent normality. Tried again to imagine what he is like.

‘Please let me go,’ she whispered.

His footsteps got closer. She felt her left hand swing free and the mug being placed. The straw poked through the hood. She started to bend down but then suddenly threw the cup, in the direction she thought he was at. She spat out the straw.

‘Do that again and I’ll stick you,’ he warned.

‘Please let me go,’ she pleaded.

The silence returned as he tied her hand to the wheelchair again.

‘Oh God no. Please don’t,’ she whispered.

A mobile phone rang at that point and kept ringing. The man’s footsteps receded and Phyllis heard the door opening and then close again.

‘Don’t go. Don’t leave me here,’ she shouted after him. Somewhere above her head there was the sound of birdsong: two wagtails calling out to each other, familiar. And in the distance she could hear two voices. They were muffled but also sounded strangely familiar. ‘Please come back. I’ll do anything,’ she shouted again. ‘Please.’

A motor bike engine started up.

‘Please come ba . . .’ She broke down at that point and tears began to course down her cheeks, dampening the hood.

The door opened. Phyllis cried out, ‘Oh. Thank god. What’s happening?’

Footsteps approached. They sounded different. Heavier. She sensed him draw up beside her, very close as if he was examining her. She felt his breathing near her ear.

‘My name is Malachy MacGaoth and I have a message for you,’ a bittersweet voice announced.

Phyllis wondered why there had been a change in her jailer. ‘What? Who are you? Are you letting me go?’

‘In a matter of speaking, yes,’ MacGaoth said calmly.

‘Oh God. You’re going to kill me,’ she said as she realised.

‘Yes, but as kindly as I can.’

‘Why?’ she asked.

‘Because I choose to.’

‘But why would you want to kill me?’

‘Your living or dying makes little difference to me,’ MacGaoth dismissed. ‘Somebody else wants you dead.’

‘Who? Why?’ Phyllis was angry. It was all she could be.

‘No reason that I can think of Miss Andrew but that I’m being paid for it. And his name is irrelevant, as he has not the balls to be here himself. He is nothingness. Only you and I matter now, Phyllis.’

Suddenly, something that she had increasingly desired was now being offered, but it was not at a time of her choosing. She started to cry. ‘Please get a message to Joe Reilly. Tell him I love him.’

‘The security man Joe Reilly is dead, a heart attack, as unfortunate as you are, Phyllis. Bad luck or fate, who knows which!’ MacGaoth said matter-of-factly.

‘Oh Christ!’ she whispered, and the tears flowed again.

‘I’ll try to make it as easy as I can.’

‘I want . . . want to see your face,’ she sobbed.

‘No point! There is nothing to be seen.’

His words were not harsh but understanding. Phyllis knew then that he knew and that he has given her back a choice. ‘In that case do what you have to Malachy MacGaoth . . . and God save your soul.’

‘Unlikely!’ he laughed.

Malachy MacGaoth's footsteps moved behind her. They shuffled and suddenly his hand was on her forehead, pulling her head back. The hood over her nose felt wet and she felt liquid dripping onto her skin, stinging. Phyllis tried to pull her hands up but the ties cut into her wrists. She thought of the waters of the old dock and of drowning. She kept her mouth closed and tried not to breathe in the wet. He pulled up against her jaw, forcing the wet patch tight against her nostrils. Nausea began, and she gagged against the cloth as she began to retch. Then suddenly she relaxed and inhaled deeply. At that moment she heard the wagtails again, but this time they were urgent calls, an ecstatic song variant as if mobbing a sparrow hawk. She felt dizzy and then . . .