" Have you ever considered you might be a cunt? "

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Settle down there now. Settle down. Triggering title I know. With a little mischievous duality thrown in for good measure, for the times we live in - don’t you know. As a rule of thumb, I try to avoid usage of foul language as much as possible in my writing. Especially, with regard to this particular word. Yet, the word was once in common Irish usage and I have a story to tell you about it.

I’m not sorry for its demise, although it was used mostly, it must be said, by males addressing other males and in my experience it had very little to do at all with women or sex. Or maybe it did in a darkly subliminal way who knows. This word popped up as a thought bubble during a conversation I was having earlier in the week and I thought I’d share the teenage experience for want of anything better to do on this fine Sunday. In 1980s rural Ireland and in the rural village pub scene the most important day of the week, from an economic standpoint, was Friday. Because Friday was pension day. During the summers of 1988 and 1989 my job in the family pub business was to man the fort from 10:30am to 6pm until my father finished work.

It was considered a busy Friday if one hundred pounds had passed into the till by the end of the Six O’clock News. The post office was about fifty yards to the right of us, a strategic advantage over our competition on pension day, and a butcher shop adjoined us to the left. Friday mornings were usually busy in the village. On most fine mornings I’d cycle to work and on a Friday there’d be three or four high nellies or a couple of Ford Hunters queued up waiting for my arrival - the bikes lined up against the front wall of the pub. All auld bucks gossiping with Mike the butcher and lightly swinging white bageens of lamb cutlets or stewing beef in the breeze. Idly waiting for the double doors to shoot open.

By lunch-time the bar counter would be lined with 12 or 13 old fellas lamenting the tragedy of a country that no longer stopped as often to drink during the day anymore. By three the place was often cleared out as daughter-in-laws docked in to collect the patriarchs of the local family farms and deposit the bikes in the boot of a car or the back of an old jeep. The bachelors would linger awhile longer and pocket 20 Sweet Afton and a naggin of Powers for the road ahead. Shooting off on their High Nellies secure in the knowledge that swearing off women was entirely the correct decision for men with a fondness for drink, and a small cottage, twenty acres of land and only a few cattle and sheep. Not likely to relinquish lightly the freedom of howling at the moon in joy or anger whenever the hell they liked.

It was in this dead-zone between the early pension day traffic and the beginning of the weekend proper a few hours later that an old alcoholic used to land into us. His morning spent in another public house but once his welcome was worn out there he’d chance his arm and come into us. Safe in the knowledge that the innate softness of my auld man would ensure that while he too would ask him to leave the premises at a certain point during the evening, that he’d also throw the bike in the back of his van and deposit him home safely too.

Anyway, on this day, one lodged in my memory, John O’ The Hill, as we used to call him arrived in to an empty front bar. I suspect he liked it that way more often than he didn’t. The pain of his addiction was writ large on his features. He’d often order a half one of dark Rum and a bottle of Guinness together to start. He could both curse you into oblivion but also reveal the most intimate details about himself and the mistakes he’d made in his life. I can still remember the redness around his eyes and the coarse nature of his weather beaten face. He’d been handsome in an earlier time and place, no doubt about it, but a hard life had much of the beauty bet out of him. You might stumble upon anything or nothing in his deep blue eyes. Occasionally a tranquilized nothingness. Other times sadness, pain, wild joy, tenderness and sometimes, like on this fine summer’s day, he might be fighting demons and much inner darkness.

He didn’t seem much in the mood for conversation on this pension day, and he spent a good thirty or forty minutes looking me up and down as I pottered about behind the counter. Kinda staring at me like he had something harsh to say about my being. Yet, most conversation starters were met only with a grunt in reply. After a time he’d moved onto pints and I eyed that the ring of froth on the inside of his pint glass was inching dangerously close to empty.

“ Will I stick on another Smithwicks there for you John? “

He nodded his head and there was a hint of malevolence and hatred in his eyes. He looked at me. Really looked at me and then he spoke. Softly but with an undoubted trace of malice towards me and self loathing towards himself.

“ Have you ever considered that you might be a cunt? - A real bad one like. “

It was a question that hit me like a bolt from the blue that pierced past my teenage defenses. For yes, yes indeed, I did spend quite an amount of my youth and later still, contemplating this very question. And just how big of one I might well turn out to be in the end, when the singing and dancing of my life was finally complete. John seemed to sense this I suspect.

Now, I can’t for the life of me remember my exact response to the question but I do know we spent the next window of time pondering the darkness of ourselves together. Sometimes with words and sometimes with silence. His tongue unknotted itself and he shared that he had been in love once with a nurse. He spoke of the intimate details of her. Not of beauty or brains. But of the way she held a brush and swept a floor. The way she moved and glided across the fields moving cattle.

“ What happened why didn’t you marry her? “ I blurted out impatient for a happy ending though I knew none was coming.

“ Sure, I never told her. I couldn’t ever let her marry a cunt like me “

I understood profoundly and nodded my head slowly at the sound logic. The logic if not quite grasping the wisdom. Soon, the door brushed open and a new customer entered our private domain and our whispered confessional came to an abrupt halt. I felt sorry for John O’ the Hill that afternoon and in a way felt sorry for myself too.

I wonder do any of our politicians and drivers of narratives stop to ask themselves that specific question. Have they ever explored and examined where the light ends and where the darkness begins inside of themselves. The winding pathways in and out of it. Probably not too deeply, if at all, I’d suppose. And can you ever hope to amount to anything much without facing down these possibilities and probabilities within yourself especially when you chase power so aggressively?

“ Have you ever considered that you might be a cunt? - A real bad one like. “

Some people consider it too much and more not nearly enough.

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