Kev the Vampire

by Phillip Donnelly

Chapter 3: Exodus

Kev the Vampire synopsis

‘The blood is the life! The blood is the life!’ That is all the mysterious Patient K would say at first. Dr. Mac Pherson gradually pieces together the story of K’s life: his gruesome school days at the Holy Bleeding Pelican; his drug- and alcohol-induced visions; his wars with Social Welfare zombies, and his attempts to use his meagre housing allowance to rent a castle. Dr. Mac Pherson learns of K’s romantic misadventures as a dishwasher in Bavaria and how comically difficult life can be for the quixotic would-be vampire in the 21st century.

Education, like youth, is wasted on the young. But let me not digress into its failings in general and instead focus on how it failed our protagonist, K.

The only testimony available of the following event, since K. has no memory of it, consists of the written confession of Bob Brennan, who was called upon to write a confession by the school’s headmaster and the police.

He initially denied all knowledge of the event and claimed to have been in a snooker hall at the time, but his alibis could not be confirmed.

Unbeknownst to Bob, there was, in fact, an unseen witness; and stationed behind a bedroom window, the aged and infirm Mrs. Súil Amháin summoned the police, but by the time they arrived, the assailants had left.

Unaware of the poor eyesight of the witness and eager to ferment his image of a ‘hard man’ prior to his entry into the criminal underworld, Bob confessed all and appears to have told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth in his statement, which I have included below.

While I have taken the liberty of correcting the spelling and adding some rudimentary punctuation and paragraphing, I have otherwise left Bob’s rambling diatribe and coarse vernacular intact. I feel it offers a chilling insight into the mind of K.’s nemesis; and it is to be hoped that in better understanding him, we may better understand K. To know a man, examine both his friends and his enemies.

I trust that the reader will not take exception to the vulgarity of Mr. Brennan’s tone, or to the violence of his expression. As I mentioned before, I aim in these memoirs to show life as it really is, to hold a mirror up to nature; and while a certain repulsion towards this self-styled urban warrior is perhaps inevitable, it is necessary that we see him as he is. Monsters do not disappear when we close our eyes.

Bob Brennan’s Police Statement

Why I Did What I Did

by Bob Brennan

Right, Bob knows you want me to play the bleedin’ heart, to suck up a bit and beg for forgiveness, like, say sorry and all that bollix. You want me to say I won’t do it again and that I wish I didn’t do what I done. But that’s not the way Big Bob does things, see? Captain B’s gonna tell it like it is. So here’s the skinny, like’s it or not.

Kev’s a wanker! A total class-A douche bag. When they was handin’ out brains and dicks, he was in the bleedin’ library looking up books on being a fag and that’s why he’s not worth the steam off me piss and why he had it coming. If it wasn’t me, it’d of been some other citizen.

Anyways, this is what went down. We was in class, noddin’ off to that old tosser Geesong, whining on about Shakespeare’s Sister, or Sister Sledge, or some other croakers from me Ma’s record collection.

Ole Geebag was goin’ on and on about some dead fart called Humpme Hamlet, and this fruity junkie, by the name of Ophelia. I’d feel her ‘ee’ ‘ah’ alright, but Hamlet said he’d wanted to screw her up the arse in a nunnery, coz he was a total pervo, and then she goes loopy woopy and gets big time into the smack. Bit of a council-estate skanger, she was.

One day, she gets so wasted that she lies down in Brook Canal, coz she thinks it’s her own gaff, like, and she’s pawing around there in the slimy water looking for young Hamlet’s Willy Willow.

I said to me mate, Bogey Clark, that maybe her sausage merchant Hamlet was a bit of a fag, coz he was always off kissing Horatio on the deck of a ship or summint, couldn’t get it up to plonk it in the middle of the strumpet’s favours, like, know what I mean.

These old plays is full of queers. They was all fags and fag-hags in the past, like, specially in sassy Sassenach land. It’s the public schools what does it. That and the lack of fearsome vigilante fagallantis like me and me mucker, Macker the Smacker. A swift kick up the hole never did no fag no harm, I say and shows them that yer arse is a one-way street.

Anyways, turns out this Hamlet shyster was rollicking some English rentboy’s rosy krantz on the SS Homo, friggin in the riggin, like, when Ophelia drowns in her own puke after some bad skag.

And what does the Hamlet, Pufter of Denmark, do when he finds out? He tries to mount her in the cemetery, to prove he’s still a man, like. Bleedin’ weirdo!

And then Geesong asks me, all sarcastic like, to tell him how the amadain of a droog had changed after coming back from Britland.

I tells him straight that he came back soundin’ like a West Brit, and the class breaks their shite laughing, coz I can be a funny bastard when I wants to be.

And then Geesong asks that pisspot Kev what he thinks, and Kev the Wanker pipes up and starts giving us some ole crap about Hamlet being a vampire and trying to show everyone up with these big ole dead words. Trying to hide the fact that he’s a total fag, more like.

And I sees his head bobbing up and down, like some child-molester priest giving a choir boy a blow job, and he’s wearing black too, just like always, flaunting the fact that he’s as bent as a bishop.

I can sniff out an arse bandit at a hundred paces, me. They all stink of shite!

And now Kev’s slurping away. He’s trying to sound like some young Mr. Geesong, he is, sticking his tongue up the teacher’s arse, cleaning out sewer sir’s tonsils with it, he could have, he had it inserted so far up the prof’s backside. Make you sick to see it, it would.

So, there he was, playing the smart-ass, and I nudged Brennan and made the sign of the fag, and I made me mind up then and there to show Kev what happens to fags when Bob’s on patrol.

And I’d warned him about it before, y’know, warned him about looking down his nose at the salt-of-the-earth Dubliner, told him to shut his cakehole if he knew what was good for him. But shites like that need a bit of fist-learning fore they get the message.

Well, I’m going on a bit, amint I? I’m a bit of a bard meself when I gets going, y’know. Should hear me on the whizz! I could talk the arse off a bull, I could — assuming Kev wasn’t shagging it at the time, of course! But I wanted to show that I was well within me rights to give young Kev a bit of a Steven Segal. He was asking for a hiding.

So, to the nub of the knob-beating. After school, me and me mate Macker was down this lane foggin’ fags and who happens to scoobie round the corner only the Big Prick himself. Right, I says to meself, this is fate!

I nudges Macker and we clock the dickhead droopin’ down the lane toward us, starin’ at the cracks in the pavement like he was looking for worms or summint, and I gives Macker the sign that it was time for a bit of fisticuffs, mashin’ me fist into me paw likes.

Macker’s all on for it, coz he never like the bleeder either, even though he’s never met him. Just didn’t like his face. Great judge of character, our Macker. He’s as hard as nails too and got the scars to prove it. ‘Battle wounds’ he calls them. He smiles back at me and we knows we’re in for a bitta fun.

“Hey Wanker!” I says to Kev, and the wanker looks up, like that was his name.

“Rosy Cats and Giddy Stern,” he says, like he’d been gobbin’ down some kinda magic mushrooms.

Me and Macker don’t hold with drugs, cause they make ya stupid, so our blood’s really beginning to boil at the dirty hippy’s antics.

“You callin’ me a pussy, ya shitehawk? I’m gonna learn you a bitta respect, knackerbreath. I’m gonna rearrange your freckly face for ya, free of charge” I says and gives him me most evilest grin, all teeth and snarly lips, like.

The young pup starts looking a bit sheepish then, so he does and has a quick shifty to see if anyone else’s around. The chicken’s coming out in him, but the lane’s deserted and there’s just the three of us. Macker clocks the scumbag looking for help.

“Who you gonna call, Kev, Geebag Ghostbusters? The Asshole A-Team? Wonder Wanker?” Macker says, moving closer to the wee pubeface, his glass eye getting all jiggly, the way it does when he gets excited.

“To run or not to run?” the eejit says.

Macker wasn’t taking no chances, so he pulls back his arm and gives Kev a knuckle kisser on the smacker.

I joins in rightaways and punch his lights out with a swift left hook, and then as he bounces against the wall — bang! The knock-out punch! Straight on the nose with me whole body weight full behind it, right smack bang on the nose. Cracklecrunch! Schlock! The beautiful sound of bone scrunching and breaking! Time always slows down for me right at that moment, so I can enjoy that sound in all its gory glory. It’s better than sex, I tell you!

The laymo’s seeing stars and he keels over like a pist-up fish, and then he’s lying on the ground, blood spewing from his gob and his snout, and he’s not so smart now, is he?

We’re still in the mood, so we’re laying into him with the doc martins, bruising him up a bit, making sure the memory of a ‘Bob and Macker Finger-Licker Kicking’ lasts good and long. He’s curled up like a baby, and I tell Macker to ease off a bit, coz he’s already up for GBH, so we don’t want to get him hospitalised or nothing. He’s not worth it. There’s a whole city full of pervs and degenerates to deal with first.

We light up a John Player Blue to get our breaths back and stand over our conquest, like the hunters we are, taking stock of a good afternoon’s beating.

I notice the loser’s eyes opening up as he re-enters the world of the living, and he’s no too happy to see us standing over him, I can tell you.

Then I looks into Smasher’s eyes and they’s pure evil.

He leans over, real slow, like, and he’s bringing the lit-up cigarette closer and closer to Kev’s eyes, and there’s a grin on Macker’s face that’d curdle milk and make it run back up the cow’s udders for protection.

Kev’s still too out of it to know a burning fag end from the sun.

“Let’s use this fag on the fag, Bob. It’s poetic justice, innit. Let’s blind the arse poker, so he won’t know what arse to poke.”

“Now hang on a mo, me aul Mackeroonie,” I says. “Iffin he squeals, it’s us who’ll be up the pokey, fighting off some real nasty gang-banging arse bandits.”

Macker’s beginning to see reason, but those eyes of his tell me he could still go apeshit at any moment.

It’s the glass one that’s really freaky, cause it’s always the same, snot-green and calm as a granny’s crotch, but the other one’s bursting with gory lust, straining to stay in its socket.

“Let that be a lesson to you, Kev! Keep your gob shut and show some respect to yer elders and betters, or else we’ll have to give you another lesson in manners. And if anyone asks what happened to yer faggot face, you better tell them nothing. Tell them Norman did it, right?!”

“Right!?” Macker yells, giving Kev a swift kick to drive the point home. “Next time, we won’t go so easy on you, dirtbag. Next time, I’ll bring Barry the Blade and he’ll turn your balls into ear-rings for the Gay Pride day. Gorrit? So, who you gonna say did it?”

“No-man did it,” he says, showing he’d got our meaning alright.

End of Bob Brennan’s Police Statement

This was the last K. saw of his erstwhile schoolfellows and he never set foot in The Bleeding Pelican again.

His hasty and unexpected departure, only three months before his Leaving Certificate examinations, was, I believe, the direct result of this bloody confrontation.

It also, I suggest, accelerated his descent into madness, since the world of fantasy he started to construct for himself became far more palatable than the threatening world outside of it; a world full of flesh-and-blood dragons that he could not hope to slay. Unable to control the world without, he invented a second world within.

Abused and confused, Kev’s whereabouts for the following twenty-four hours are unknown, even to himself, but he does have vague memories of lying in sand dunes, staring up at a cold sky and colder stars. If his ‘vampiric epiphany’ occurred here, on the Road to Dollymount, then it is not known to Kev; and since revelations must be revealed to the person who experiences the epiphany, I feel we can assume that this assault did not, in itself, lead to madness, but that it did definitely unhinge his mind.

Teacher G., who visited Kev’s house shortly after the events and tried to encourage his return to The Bleeding Pelican, found him distant and distracted. He seemed unable to focus and unwilling to communicate. His downcast eyes, Teacher G. felt, had the air of melancholia about them, and his taciturn nature and repeated monosyllabic replies to his queries eventually forced him to leave K. alone.

He remembers him thus, sitting in his bedroom, staring into nothing, with the curtains drawn against a world he did not want to see.

Kev O’Donghaile was dying and Kev the Vampire was waiting to be born.

To be continued...

To Challenge 452...