THE RESURRECTION – Aoife Sadlier
Old Jim surveyed the crab through the porthole opening of the plastic bag. It was wriggling and writhing, as if freshly electrocuted. It was brown and speckled and shiny and hard. He was sure of those basic facts. Less sure was he of how he was going to cook the fecker. Not so accustomed to the black box that was the Internet or Google or whatever they called the bloody thing these days, he’d just have to find out for himself. And there was nothing wrong with that. After all, Jim had been a carpenter all his working life. Of the wood and of the soul. Slave to measurements, open to a little experimentation. And so, regardless of his limited culinary skills, he’d surely rise to the challenge.
While Jim’s prayers to Our Lady offered a constant source of creative inspiration, in this moment he wasn’t feeling particularly insightful. All he knew was that he had a cross to bear: the arduous task of cooking this wriggling creature. A quarehawk if ever he saw it. With its monstrous body, and its grasping claws… ’Twas Malarchy next door who’d gone fishing and come back with the yoke. His long-awaited peace offering, Jim could only assume. Truth be told, Jim would’ve been quite content with a couple of cod. But he wasn’t about to admit any weakness. Best thing was to keep his gob shut and see what happened.
Of course he could ask Malarchy how to cook the crab. But he had too much pride for that since the incident with the apple tree. A full 50.68 percent of the tree was in Jim’s garden – he’d measured it from all angles – so he could do whatever the feck he wanted. He made this point very clear as he got out the chainsaw and chiseled away at the branches.
“Nrrrrrrrrrr-Nrrrrrr-Nrrrrrrrrrrrrrr,” came the grinding sound of the saw, as Malarchy came out his back door with a baseball bat. Jim barely batted an eyelid. After all, he’d once had a pack of Alsatians set on him by a druggie gang when he went to complete a maintenance report on their criminal mansion. ’Twas during his career transition to housing inspector for the City Council. Minister of Shite, that’s what they’d called him.
Malarchy fell to his knees.
“Malarchy, are those tears?!” Jim asked.
“Ya hoor ya, it was little Majella’s tree,” cried Malarchy, cradling the freshly cut logs, like Our Lady carrying Jesus Pietà style. “Little Majella, my darlin’. Oh Mother Mary, forgive me.”
Jim didn’t feel any remorse really; life hadn’t been too kind to him either. Deirdre, the bitch, leaving him for that sheep farmer, and three kids who’d barely talk to him. Said he’d ruined their childhood. Left them with multiple traumas. Ungrateful bastards. His youngest was the latest – but her arguments about boundaries and sentimentality and all that shite didn’t really stand up. It was his house; he was quite within his rights giving away all her childhood stuffed toys. They were just taking up space in the attic, for Christ’s sake. So it was about time Jumbo the elephant with his dirty blue sweatsuit and Hugo the hippo whom she’d swapped a Boyzone doll for at a raffle and all the other little critters of various shapes and designs made their way to the local charity shops. God knows where they were now. Probably buried in a landfill somewhere.
His youngest’s childhood was long gone, so she could stop rambling on about it. Away with the fairies, so she was. What she really needed was to think in more practical terms.
In Malarchy’s case, little Majella should’ve advised her Daddy not to plant a tree so close to his neighbor’s garden – as Jim said, 50.68 percent belonged in his patch. A big enough margin in his books. Nevertheless, Jim recognized when a man needed some peace, so as Malarchy cried into the sawdust-mingled soil, he made a swift exit over the garden fence.
Malarchy pulled himself together miraculously fast. Faster than Jim had thought for a man who’d been so broken. Thereafter followed months of warfare, commencing with Jim throwing some fresh cat shit – admittedly from Malarchy’s cat, Angel, who oh so conveniently had decided to come and shit in his garden every morning since said incident – in the general direction of Malarchy’s front door. He hadn’t meant it, honestly. But the aim was simply too good. From all those years of darts throwing down at the pub. South’s on O’Connell Street. His old watering hole.
Bullseye.
The shit hit the very center of the gleaming white door, slathering itself down the front in a wet brown streak.
“What’re you at, ya bollix?” shouted Malarchy, charging out his front door.
“Well, that’s no angel, I can tell ya,” shouted Jim, pointing towards Angel, who was grooming her tawny prize mane from behind Malarchy’s living room window pane. “You can take your shit and eat it! Oh, and they call me Minister of Shite for a reason.”
“Well then, shit just got real,” shouted Malarchy, slamming the door in Jim’s face.
Jim wasn’t such a big fan of ambiguous comments. Shit just got real. Now whatever the hell did Malarchy mean by that? Some act of retaliation, he could only guess. Bingo. Malarchy responded by putting a series of homemade stink bombs through Jim’s letterbox, each more disgusting than the last. Jim could detect wafts of cough syrup and rotten fish, and dare he say it, cat shit. Malarchy must’ve spent weeks experimenting to produce something so vile. Must’ve been addled in the brain, thought Jim. Jim resorted to sleeping in the garden shed for a few nights. But at least he could light a log fire with the remnants of the apple tree. The final showdown came when Jim staged anarchy in the frozen pea aisle of their local Tesco where Malarchy worked a few shifts to pay off the sizable debt he’d accrued. They said it was from some ill-judged affairs with the local druglords. Jim used a cleaning sign as a battering ram, as he charged towards Malarchy.
“Take that, ya hippie tree hugger bollix ya,” shouted Jim, poking Malarchy with gusto.
Malarchy fell to the floor, rolling onto his back and flapping his limbs crab-style in his best efforts to ward off Jim. Meanwhile, he called out for his mother: his long-suffering wan, Jacinta, and the holiest of them all – Our Lady of Grace. Security quickly arrived on the scene, prizing the battering ram from Jim’s hands, as Malarchy bellowed:
“Enough is enough. Let’s just leave it.”
After the supermarket incident, a harsh reality dawned on Jim: a truce was needed. Or else this treacherous war would never end. One of us needs to be the grown-up here, thought Jim.
As fate would have it, one afternoon Jim found Malarchy sprawled across his front lawn.
“What a lazy so-and-so,” Jim muttered, shuffling towards the body. Lo and behold, upon closer inspection, Malarchy appeared to be having some kind of seizure. Would ya g’way outta that. Didn’t know the fecker was quakin’ that much in his boots, thought Jim.
Jim had trained as a first aider on numerous occasions. ’Twas part and parcel of working with wood and saws. And so, he found himself loosening the neck of Malarchy’s tightly buttoned gaberdine shirt, cushioning his head with a tweed jacket, and placing him on his side.
“Don’t go dyin’ on me now, ya poor old fecker,” said Jim, as Malarchy continued convulsing. Meanwhile, Angel piously watched from her windowsill perch, licking her paws. Jim saw her jump from the sill and sashay towards his garden. He knew what she was up to. But just this once, he decided to let it go.
Fiddling with his rosary beads, Jim began to recite a prayer to Our Lady.
“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death…”
The divine intervention worked its sweet magic, for in a matter of seconds, Malarchy came to. Jim kissed the beads, making the sign of the cross as he rose and genuflected.
“Our Lady, you’ve never failed me yet,” said Jim.
“Well… I…” said Malarchy, as he awoke to a confusing array of emotions. “Well you… I don’t know what… I think you… saved my…”
Jim snapped his braces. “Let’s just stop acting the maggot,” he ventured.
“Let’s… shake… on… it,” wheezed Malarchy.
“Jaysus, ’tis the fall from grace,” Jim cursed, as he lowered himself gingerly to the ground, and they made a quick conciliatory handshake.
’Twas as firm as it could be for that quakin’ nutcase, thought Jim.
#
Cold water. He figured that was the best plan. The water was in the pot. The ring was on. Would take a while to heat up, but ah shur, it’d be grand. He put the crab in, pushing the lid gently down, as he muttered a silent prayer. He heard the creature scrambling around inside, its claws scraping at the primeval metal of the pot. There was a gentle humming from underneath. The water was coming to a quick boil. Quicker than usual. He pushed the giant rock he’d found in the shed down on the lid. But the crab was lively.
“Kerssshherrrrk.”
Amidst a rattling cacophony, the creature upturned the rock and lid, like Jesus emerging from the tomb and appearing over the mountain on resurrection day. Body submerged, two pairs of legs extending over the rim of the pot. The crab was grasping for life. Whatever was left of it anyway. Jim faced the wrath of its mottled claws, striped deathly black at the edges. They came at him from all angles, clacking like castanets.
“Ta-ta-TA, ta-TAAAA.”
Sounds a bit like a pair of skeletons copulating on a tin roof, thought Jim, as he simultaneously imagined the pincers poking at his flesh, hellish daemon style.
“What the bejaysus?! Get back in there, ya divil!” he shouted, using a coal shovel to redirect the crab towards the pot, before pushing the lid firmly down, and covering it again with the rock. The pot was now trembling more and more ominously, like the elixir in a witch’s cauldron on the Sabbath.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph… I need a breather,” muttered Jim. He took a few moments to remove his tweed cap and smooth his greasy combover. He then wiped the excess water from the lid down his green corduroy slacks, through which a trickle of fresh urine had also begun to seep.
“Feck my old boots!” he exclaimed.
As Jim’s attention shifted to the urine seepage, a fresh upsurge came from the pot. The lid went flying. The crab’s snapping pincers shot up, flexed and ready to pack a punch. Like a world-class featherweight darting around a boxing ring. And it was in these not so rosy circumstances that Jim found himself wrestling with the crab. An elegant wrestling, mind you – not like the scrappy warfare with Malarchy. Almost like an invitation to the dance.
It was many moons since Jim had done a slow dance with a Lady, but this is what it started to resemble as one hand latched onto the crab’s left claw, the other clutched the crab’s right side. A Lady. Yes. And although she was still mostly wearing a course brown material, much like a nun’s habit, in his mind’s eye he saw her transforming into a siren in red taffeta. Somewhere in the background, he heard Chris de Burgh warbling on:
“Lady in redddddd.”
The crab’s pincers now clutched at Jim’s left arm. The arm of his frequent blood pressure checks and occasional blood donations. He’d an unusual type they were in desperate need of, apparently.
“Top-quality blood, that, you lucky divil,” his GP had said, as he gave Jim the blood test results. And Jim had smiled with pride. Even more so at the blood donor clinic: when they’d wrapped the inflatable cuff around his arm and he’d felt the gentle pinch of the needle. But in this dance-cum-wrestle with the crab, pincers manically clutching at his flesh, it wasn’t such a happy union.
“J-A-Y-S-U-S-S-S, what’s that bleedin’ thing doin’?” shouted Jim. “Ouch!”
The crab was gaining the upper hand. As Jim attempted to rest against the kitchen sink, its pincers began clutching at his ears.
“Ya thunderin’ hoor, ya!” he cried.
But Jim wasn’t going to be defeated. With the renewed swagger of youth, he pushed the crab in the general direction of the pot. Miraculously, it landed in the water, very much boiling at this stage.
“Stay down, ya hoor! Whist!”
Jim used the rock to push the lid down a final time and clutched it hard. He wondered why he hadn’t done the same with Deirdre. That two-timing bitch. But alas, time also has its pincers. Sometimes it moves slowly, like an hourglass filtering the salt from one side to the other. But most of the time it engulfs you before you know it. A few months ago he’d reached boiling point – the blood pressure had shot right up. Most of the time these days, he felt like he was stuck on an active volcano from which lava continually flowed towards him. He found himself darting inside holes, cowering for cover. The human equivalent of a hermit crab, some would say. He might as well be the one in the pot there.
They say time is a healer. For him, it’d only been an excuse to become a cantankerous old bastard. No wonder his youngest had bought him that “Beware, Grumpy Old Man” wall hanging last Christmas. And this crab was the last dredge of it all. Rubbing salt into the wound. Adding insult to injury. It simply took the biscuit. Come to think of it, the boiled crab could be nice with some of those oatmeal biscuits he had in the cupboard there. He imagined dousing the meat in pepper and lemon juice, spreading it decadently on the biscuits, and slurping it all up with a mug of milky tea. Mmmm, now that would be sweet satisfaction.
Jim thought everything was rosy again. The rattling from inside the pot was subsiding, and there was a moment for a little tenderness. He surveyed a black and white photo of yesteryear, hung on the adjacent wall. Taken that day he and Deirdre had gone to the local fair – he’d won her a teddy bear at the darts station. And then they’d found themselves in this happy pose. His hands around Deirdre. Right arm resting delicately on her shoulder. Left arm hooked around her arse (lamentably, out of shot). Her smiling with a horsey grin, him with a glint of mischief in his eye. Very much in love.
For a moment, his grasp on the lid became gentler, more compassionate. Love, sweet love, that’s what makes the world go round… Love thy neighbor, love thy foe, love all creatures, big and small... As these sentiments forced themselves into Jim’s consciousness, for a moment just, he softened and empathized with the crab’s plight. It too had suffered and struggled on.
Suddenly, with a vociferous force that seemed to have been summoned from the high heavens, the crab gave one last spurt of life. Jim scalded himself and fell to the floor as the crab jumped from the pot in a rush of bubbling water and steam.
“J-A-Y-S-U-S-S-S! Ya bollix… Malarchy, yer not gettin’ away with this,” he hollered, grasping his reddening left arm. But at the same time, Jim was beginning to experience some quare sensations. Very quare sensations indeed. A strange music was stirring in his soul. He heard a low warbling voice, accompanied by beating bodhrán and clacking castanets. It droned on, relentless; reeling him in… Until he found himself entering a dark tomb, located on a high hill, in an indistinct time and place. Everything was closing in around him. Maybe he was finally becoming that hermit crab. Through a small hole in the entrance, a shard of light poked through. It sent an electrical energy through him, convulsing, but offering a steady pulse. Before the tomb’s entrance rock was suddenly pushed back, the lava rolling towards him on an incline.
There, half way splayed across the monochrome tiles, Jim found himself in a subterranean world. He could hear his heart beat, but from a distance. Somehow the sound was amplified:
“Bawk-baaawwk-bawk. Bawketty-bawk.”
Almost like the sound of one of those fake mechanical chickens at the entrance to a low-grade butcher’s.
Lost in that tinny chorus, Jim entered a boiling broth immersion. His ears hissed, his body steamed, his skin roasted red. Half dead, half alive, but still wriggling. Only just.
One more look in Deirdre’s direction.
“My sweet girl, my sweet darlin’. I’m sorry. I love you. C’mere to me, my sweet. Let’s dance…”
Jim imagined planting a kiss on her cherry red lips, de Burgh still wailing in the background, as his heart gave one final glug.
“Bawk–bawk–bawk.”
Silence. Old Jim lay dead.
The crab scuttled by him.
“The old fool,” she said. “But at least he tried. And God loves a trier.”
And as she clawed her way through the upper shutter, she said: “It’s the story of life. An endless uphill struggle. And in the end, even when we rise up, we’re already half-baked.”
***
Aoife Sadlier is an Irish fiction/creative non-fiction writer, musician, dancer and academic. Her work has been published in journals such as “Sexualities,” “Life Writing,” and “Emotion, Space and Society,” and in an edited collection titled “Cultural Memory and Popular Dance: Dancing to Remember, Dancing to Forget” (Palgrave Macmillan, Ed. Clare Parfitt). She is currently developing a short story collection, inspired by magical realism, which traverses multiple realities and worlds. She is also writing a novel about a young queer woman’s search for joy in the midst of loss, narrated by a motley crew of myth-busting animals.