1965 The Rolling Stones appear at the Adelphi Cinema, Dublin to a rapturous reception.
Trivia: Vegetarians should not eat jelly. The gelatin within is extracted from boiled masses of cow and pig hides, hooves, bones, and connective tissue.
17:17
Blank Bastard.
The marketing is all worked out. Tagline = "The most important work of shlitrature since James Joyce's 'Ulysses'" Fucking, lecture circuit.
There's a twee denial of the absolute insanity of the nation. There is an insular self-regarding thing about paddy-dise. There's this neutrality buzz. There's this a nice place to live lie. There's all of this, the government that on the radio. But it's all because we're living a safe lie and turning our face against the truth.
There's this IRA buzz. There's this Fianna Fail and democracy and justice plink plonk. We'll take a break. We'll bitch when we come back. In the meantime buy some insurance. We call it a callsave number but it still costs a whack load of money to have a phone in the first place. That's how we know we've gotcha. In order to exist, you must pay us, your government, and through the nose.
It isn't some random act of violence by some randy scion in one parish. Fucking kids in the arse goes on in every parish. If you're a punk from the back of the bicycle shed in Co Mayo you get run out of the village by the Guards and off to England with you. If you're a priest rapist in Wexford you get protection. There's no such thing as 'The only gay in the village' around here. No such thing.
In the townlands, boys and girls prey on each other in particular and others in general. It's called 'great craic'. Sincerity is only felt through the evacuation of the stomach with truth. In the pig farms and chicken lanes of the capital shitty we hunger for prey. Cannibals. The Cannidubeese.
Mr. Wark took a quark on a walrk thru d purlk.
- Whatcha say, mullet head?
Rouw-nawn, my child is mussing.
- What's the beeper say?
Pulls out a handset. Shows 2 dots on a screen, together, inside the house, red ring around them, safe. Playstationing, I'll wager. Nintender. Greyed out 3rd icon bottom left. Baba symbol, but no baba on the network.
Plidahawk duurgy dawrk, leftafuveyrolld she's gone!
She's gone. Icon says she's five.
- Ok let me synchy pinky the handsets here. Bleepity bleep. Ok, I got them on radar too. Which way'd she go?
Huurly doorly gurly hurburt parlk.
- Ok, she's gone through "Pervert Park"?
Lllul. HHEuurburt plark
- Ok. Eh, which way is that?
His mullet freezes and turns rigid as his head swivels ever so slightly and slowly. I see myself like the piece of shit that he thinks I am to him. His arm raised off over there somewhere, behind the Church of Ireland, disdainfully.
I figure I could open a conference call on VoIP because his handset is WiFi connected, but he probably don't know that. He probably thinks is a camera-phone. It really doesn't matter, as I don't think I could talk to him. I know I have to so something and I'm ten steps into my plan before anything is agreed.
- Gimme your card. I'll find her and bring her back.
He produces this alligator skin chimono teramino classic Italiano leather snap case, Thomas Brown guff, proffers me gilt cardboard on bleach 120g stock with no little pride.
- Signoff.
I hand him the stylus and grasp his hand. It's shaking. I say, earnestly, whites-of-the-eyesing him "Click here". He assents with a blink. He's afeard and reliant, natch. I insist him to tick the box. If I'm gonna rescue this little girl, I gotta make sure I'm not vulnerable to personal insurance claims. "Click OK".
"OK"
So I take the stylus back and pouch the phone.
- I'll bring her back.
He's got nothing behind the eyes. First thing to do is boost my range. By jacking several mobile and WiFi networks through a warez server in my rooted device, I gain a wider area to see. The normal range of these things is about 5 kilometers. I can see 25k which is most of the greater Dublin area.
She doesn't appear to be anywhere on the southside with that electronic KinderTracka dogtag she's wearing. I call her on her iPhone. It rings behind Hugo in the garden. He picks it up mournfully. She herself is totally offline.
I fetch Hugo's KT log off his smartphone. It records the most recent activity, everything that happened. The rest backs up to his home network. All the kids wear a transmitter. They're on his family radar system all the time. Which is fine, until he gets distracted. Something tells me he only has a vague notion of the power of all this equipment in his home.
He can connect the KinderTracka from anywhere, including his iPhone and thats when he ran out on to the street and I met him in a panic. I check the intercom. It seems to be working. I test it.
"Hello, who is this?" Trying to sound like a police officer. Kids respond to that usually, if they're young enough. I put on my widest culchie accent and a deep voice.
"Who's there? I said, who's that? Where are ye going?"
Nothing. I leave out the whole "Who's your father/ Who's your mother?" subroutine for now. Select another kid/node on the network to test the basic functionality of the system.
"Hello boys."
Blondie little chaps. Rouge blond. I'd say 11 and 8 years of age. Glistening mops in the half light of the bedroom theatre. I split their plasma screen in two with a back door hack and grab some attention.
KID 1 (smaller): Hello.
ME: What game are you playing?
KID 2: Halo.
ME: Have you seen your sister anywhere?
KID 1: She's outside, playing.
Somehow I didn't get the wary vibe. She's ok, I vibed. But we better find her. Streets like snakepits sometimes. Not too sure about around here, though. Something strange about this place. Something nice. Houses got flags. Lots of flags. Whoa! Fucking Union Jacks! That's going to be controversial. There's Ukromania and Croserbia and all the rest. Embassys.
Oh, I'm lost.
There's an undercover filth on bodyguard detail with a bootjack haircut going absolutely insane in his car. Listening to music loud, shaking his head, rocking back and forth. Bored senseless watching over the set salubrious mansions of the Dublin 4 district, 12 hours at a time. He must have done something wrong so I don't have much sympathy for him.
I trot down the leafy street, scanning through the pictures of his kids I hacked off Hugo's server. Special software allows me to select only the most useful pictures from his archives when I input the parameters, so that I don't have to flick through them all.
I pick the most likely kid (female, five years) from the pick list and it loads in about ten shots of her. I cross check out the other two kids for comparison. I don't get to see the rest. Cousins and all. I don't want to. Not because I'm not nosy, but because seriously, I don't give a shit.
My liablity is limited because every move is logged and the whole lot is uplinked in realtime as a DUBSML file and printed out on PDF by a script and stored remotely. Paper trail, oh hail. Let's keep it out of court.
So I trot along, eyes kept open looking for pods of dogshit, as usual. None. Lots of thoroughbred canines pull along in pairs but no doggie poop anywhere. Not even a-peeing on the posts. Just groomed and straining at the leash, dogs dying for a good lunge. Big beautiful dogs need big beautiful wallets.
Can't believe the no doggie poo. This is great. I speed up, using my highly-evolved springy step to ply from brass- to copper-augmented leaf instead of pinkerting like a ballet dancer between dry patches on the pavement.
Entering the Pervert Park gate I'm thinking, 'Wow, look what a budget can do!' Granite steps and sweeping embankments, gazeebos galore, borders, fountains, well-tended hedgerows and level playing pitches up in there where there are a lot of lads in clean teamwear doing an awful lot of standing around. One of them sparks the only ball languidly to a goalkeeper who barely responds.
I hack in to the mobile networks and download a list of all the phones in the locality.
These guys are obviously waiting to begin their game. I zing them and everyone in the area a certified emergency multimedia message with my League logo and all included. In it there's a little slideshow with simple spiel about a girl missing in the area, a picture of her, can you please help, ask for a kid called Melldbulul. Contact :-
"Me. I'm from the Department of Justice, League of Ordinary Gentlemen, District 7."
And then I'm over to them. They, of course, are touting their phones in their shorts. I knew that. I now have a football team for a search mob in a flash.
I give them 5.4 seconds to at least partially digest the situation. Then I speak again.
"Right lads, you got the message. It was me who sent it!"
I expect them to at least know what the basic situation is. The League of Ordinary Gentleman is an established, certified private security firm with Department of Justice approval pending.
Nonplussed, most of them start to ring and message someone to tell them that some 'randomer' had just sent them a League of Very Ordinary Gentlemen message. "Hold it lads! I'm still talking . . ."
General mooing.
"Now, there's a man back there who's daughter is missing. We have to help to find her. Look for Oluwuuyin. She's a little girl of five. Red hair. Last seen wearing a strawberry dress. You got that?"
It's like five point four seconds. I wait. This is a little trick I picked up from W. Bush.
"Let's divide up into groups of three and spread out in every direction. Search the park for the kid. We have to find her, fast. It's getting late. You and you, with me. Are ye right lads?"
Fucking blank bastards. I'm gobsmacked. It's like, none of it is going in. Flick on my langooTM translator and play it back to them through the mini-speakers I carry everywhere. I code the message through the translation tool which then speaks the text in the appropriate local language.
"Hi goys, like it take it from me the ol man hugo odoonnels youknowtheguyoukno wful mullet and may doogie hoogies kaapeemgee seniour poortnoor's youngest herbaline is gone missing, like and her hugo is a doogo gonemadman, oh rooight so hwere's whert were gowrn do whiss sprud ul like a see if e cuun fined hu.”
Elevn, at once. "Oh royal ite. "
They trot off smoojely and shapelin in very-ing doorections.
(Switch off that shit.)
They look like they're running along a beach, not urgently searching for some poor missing kid. Going instinctively to all the obvious spots to start looking. At least that way we can rule them out and cover the ground. I'm not so sure, but, hurry up ta fuck chuck. I'm scanning my radars and ringing Huge-o. Flick on the langoo/babel fish application.
'Mr Ooo Donnell, has your fuuond your dowter yet?'
"No. Wurldy wurildy neighbours wullrs turrellers." The Langoo hangs. He's broken the machine. Damn. I speak loudly and slowly.
'Please log on to your Neighbourhood Watch network and see if she appears on any of the networked security cameras, ok?'
Blank bastard.
'Hit the blue button on your tridiephone.' :)
I'm a-hacking it of course, using the infinite Internet. We'll take each network as it comes. Right now I'm on 3G using the power of messaging to speed organise these Gucci footballers and alert the whole neighbourhood as well as the police using the minimum of data overhead, because the network is quite shit.
They have these cameras on every street in the locale and everyone has a camera pointing out on the street. The deal is, every subscriber can get a look in everyone else's camera. You can get a look at the whole streets around here if you're on the loop. It's hush, hush but we all know, at least, some of us do, that it's going on.
These guys are super rich and have a stinking nice network. Fast. Microsoft Windows OS, blinking fast. Which is hard for Microsoft but it has been known to happen. Takes megawelly computing power and somebody who knows what to do to set it up right.
I can see most of the hood in hi-res hi-speed high colour. 48 channels. No sign of the kid.
Now the cops have started to arrive. The lunatic in the embassy car stops gurning, turns down the stereo and hops out of the car. Bibs are on. Lights a flashing. Caps peaking. Helmets wagging. The boys are out to play.
What a fool I was to go and break the trust she gaveI can see the football team reach the reaches and edges of the park and I decide to head up the darkest street I can find. Ok so we searched the park already. She's not here or above the surface anyway.
it's the one regret iLL carry with me to my grave
but they'll never never taker her love from me
I can see a load of doggy luvvie goons walking around the place. There's even a couple of drjunkies on the south west of the park. Not too much camera work down there. Cottages. My map says 'Dingsend'. Not so many big cars. I shake a leg.
Along the way I Google Hoogo. Turns out he's a cashier in a bank. Only kidding. His wife wrote him a letter once because he's been married twice and this is his second family and clan. He's from a long line of mullet-head O Donnell's, carrots of flame is to blame for their gull like lingo wheeling amidst the fortunate cliffs carried on updrafts to dizzying heights.
I sure hope the kid is sitting upstairs in her bedroom. The bibbies can check it out. I'm a lout. I'll go out and see if she's about.
He's in diamonds or something because he owns two houses in the area. One, he's renovating and one, he's living in while the other one is getting fixed up. I don't see any reason to think that, just because he's rich, he's any less a family man and he's concerned about his missing sprog as a normal person would be. I mean, he might be posh and horrible, it's true and I hate posh twats at least as much as anything else I hate. But at least he's not a scumbag.
It's time to change. Finding a suitably large shrub, I slip on me best bling - bracelet, necklace, two rings on each hand, take me tight blue Dublin GAA t-shirt out of a haversack, pin the LOVOG badge on my chest, blue tracksuit bottoms, white stripe, white tracksuit top, blue stripes. Shitty white shoes like the rain hates their whiteness, slick me hair down, tuck in me tshirt into my waistband. Mobile phone. Hurley keyring, can of cider.
Ready for action. Me new version. Dub 7.0 is ready to go. New release. Y'know? Upgrade.
And not forgetting the underpants. Blue and white stripes. In me pocket for now. with the sliotar. I'll play it cool now for a minih. Pull dem on later. When I go into attack mo-wude, y'know?
A posh dog walker in a suede jacket, brown shoes and courduroy jeans sees me emerge from my hedge and gapes at me.
"What are yew bleedin' lookin' at ye bleedin' tosser?"
The disguise is perfect.
