The Blindboy Podcast - The Donkey

Episode Date: July 24, 2024

A short story about a Donkey and complicated grief Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ben the Kestrel you sweltering Emmets. Welcome to the Blind By podcast. If this is your first episode, consider going back to an earlier episode to familiarise yourself with the lore of this podcast. It's the 24th of July. The sun hasn't shined in Limerick City for the entire month. For all of July, it's been overcast and rainy and hot which I don't really mind because I can trust that weather. It's the sunshine you can't trust because you don't know when it's going to disappear and when the sunshine does come it's so rare that it's kind of difficult to enjoy. A clear sunny day in Ireland. You can't mindfully enjoy the sunshine because you spend all your time worried about

whether you're enjoying it enough. Should I go to the beach? Should I wash all my clothes and dry them in the sun? Should I be having a barbecue? Should I be at a party? Fuck it, I'd love to play a video game. Am I wasting the sunny day? So I much prefer the predictable grayness of July. It's completely overcast. You can still wear a t-shirt. It might rain, but the weather's asking nothing of you. You just have to accept it. Joe Biden is no longer going for President of America, and it's looking like Kamala Harris is gonna be the Democratic nominee. I don't know how I feel about any of that. Like I definitely don't

want Trump. But at the end of the day, America is a colonial empire. And they're left to choose between the people who are evil, who pretend they're not evil, and the people who are evil, who don't care if you think they're evil. And that's about the bonds of it. Joe Biden is supposed to be the not evil one, but he's fully funding and supporting the genocide in Gaza. Obama was supposed to be not evil too, and he used to drone strike weddings in Pakistan. If Trump gets into power, there's

still going to be genocide in Gaza, but Trump will be more obnoxious about it, rather than pretending he's not doing anything evil. And if Kamala Harris becomes president, I don't think much is going to change either, although she has a very friendly demeanor. She has a very friendly demeanor and a hearty laugh. She's quite funny and witty. She's very assertive too if you see her arguing with people. So she'll be excellent at doing evil things and then engaging in the performance of not being evil. I mean it's empire, it's power. The supremacy of America is dependent upon the subjugation of the global south and we in the global north all benefit from it. I mean do I have any reason to believe that Kamala Harris, who she became president of

America, is going to behave fairly or compassionately? Well no, not if you look at her track record when she was attorney general in California. She was attorney general in California back in 2011. The US Supreme Court ruled that California's prison overcrowding problem violated the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. So that was the US Supreme Court saying to California, your prisons are overcrowded. What's happening is a violation of human rights. And Kamala Harris, as attorney general of California, said, I hear you, Supreme Court, but we need all those

prisoners because of cheap labor. See, in America, private companies can take out contracts with prisons where they can effectively exploit the cheap labor of prisoners for profit. Indentured servitude, basically. Prisoners get paid about 8 cents an hour for the benefit of private companies. I mean big private companies like McDonald's has contracts with US prisons. McDonald's has used the incredibly cheap labor of US prisoners to make their uniforms, to make the beef patties that go out into McDonald's restaurants and turn into burgers, Victoria's Secret. They have contracts with US prisons to make lingerie, or lingery, as I thought it was

called for years until I heard it pronounced. I'm still gonna call it lingery, and I'm gonna call them croissants. I've tried croissant. I'm not doing it. Apologies if you're French. I can't do it. Do you want a croissant? Are you sure you don't want to put a t-shirt on so you don't get croissant crumbs on your lingerie? You sure about that? It's lovely lingerie. You don't want croissant crumbs on it. Or flakes. Croissants don't crumb,

they flake. AT&T, they use prisoners as cheap call centers. Starbucks, Starbucks have contracts with US prisons, or they have in the past, where like their milk cartons or their cups are being made in US prisons. And people who defend this system, they make the argument that, well you know, these people are in prison, isn't it good that they're earning money and acquiring skills and passing the time while they're in prison? But if you look at the bigger picture, there's a huge amount of money to be made when private prisons use the near free labour of prisoners. And when that becomes systematic, which it is, it is now systematic in American prisons, it incentivizes judges to give longer

sentences because then that benefits the coffers of private companies. So now the entire ethics of the justice system is compromised and an ethical fair justice system is a cornerstone of the freedom and democracy that America is supposed to represent. And even in 2014 there was a judge in New York who was found guilty of accepting millions and millions and dollars of kickbacks from companies so that he would send children, juveniles to private prisons and give them longer sentences so that the kids being sent to these juvenile detention centres are getting longer sentences and then making more money for the private companies that are exploiting prison labour. So if one judge is taking kickbacks to give people longer sentences to service the interests of corporations, well that's just one judge that's been caught.

So that's a deeply fucked up system they have gone on there in America. And also it's a system that disproportionately impacts groups of people who are marginalized, usually by race. So Kamala Harris, when she was fucking attorney general in California, the US Supreme Court is saying, California, your prisons are overcrowded. This is violating human rights. And Kamala turned around and said, sorry, lads, there's just too much money being made from the indentured servitude of these prisoners.

That doesn't strike me as the actions of a compassionate human being. We know Trump is a bollocks. I don't have to explain why Trump is an absolute prick. So America has to choose between the people who do evil things, then pretend they're not doing evil things, and the people who do evil things and then brag about doing evil things. And when I saw that Biden dropped out, and it's most likely gonna be Kamala Harris, who's gone for the presidency, I was initially really happy. But then I had to interrogate that happiness.

I had to ask myself, why are you happy about this? And the reason I was happy was it was for such fucked up reasons. It felt like when you're watching a TV show and it gets a little bit boring, you're at about episode 5 of the new season, it's getting a bit boring, and you're kind of thinking, fuck it, will I give up on this series? And then boom, they bring in a new character who's going to shake everything up and you're invested again. And that's what I felt when they announced that Biden was quitting and Kamala Harris was coming in. I felt entertained. I felt entertained. Oh, I can't wait to see her debating Trump because she's fucking she's smart She's funny and she's very assertive. There's gonna be some good debates

so because politics and the news is presented to me as entertainment Consistently presented to me as entertainment Engaging content when I don't use critical thinking, I find myself getting excited, getting excited about this piece of entertainment, this theatre, when really, this is people's lives, this is the climate, this is Gaza, this is Ukraine. Politics should be boring. Politics is supposed to be boring and serious and important. Look at presidential

debates from the 1970s. They're very boring. They're very boring. It's two people who want to become the most powerful people in the world being asked incredibly serious complex questions. And you see it begin to change with two things Ronald Reagan in the 1980s because Reagan Reagan was a Hollywood actor he was a Hollywood actor who entered politics this was crazy at the time. Reagan and also 24-hour news when 24-hour cable news became a thing in the early 80s news shifted from being about delivering important information to needing to justify being on 24 hours a day. So it pivoted a bit towards entertainment. And now the vast majority of nose that I see is actually entertainment,

even bad nose. It's presented as entertainment. And one piece of news today that's been presented as entertainment all over the internet is the headline, Kamala Harris is a descendant of an Irish slave owner in Jamaica. Now multiple news sites all around the world have run with that headline, most of them putting the article behind a paywall so you can't actually read it for context. And the headline is doing what it's supposed to do. It's creating conflict, emotionally driven conflict.

You've got right wingers happy because Kamala Harris is descended from a slave owner. You've right wingers that are happy because Kamala Harris is descended from an Irish slave owner, then you've got Irish people really paced off because it's like hold on a minute, that's not the full context. Now a lot of the context is presented in the articles. A lot of people don't read articles and as I mentioned,

huge amount of articles online these days, they're paywalled. So all you see is the headline unless you subscribe to the newspaper. So you get arguments in comment sections and these arguments just drive up engagement. The more arguments, the more interaction, the more people see the article. That's entertainment. That's a form of entertainment. Even if that entertainment involves unpleasant feelings such as conflict and arguing. But I want to speak a little bit about the context behind Kamala Harris's great-great-great grandfather, who was apparently an Irish slave owner. Like we're talking the 1700s here or the early 1800s a long time ago more than 200 years ago and still we're seeing all the echoes of these

events today in the very fucking presidential election that Kamala is going for. So Kamala Harris's great grandfather was born in County Antrim in the north of Ireland and his name was Hamilton Brown, not a very Irish sounding name. He was born in 1776, so his parents would have been colonizers, Protestant colonizers in Ireland, where Protestants from the lowland Scottish areas were given land in the north of Ireland by the British to deliberately colonize, deliberately colonize and to eradicate the native Irish Catholic population, a form of ethnic cleansing. So this Hamilton Brown fella, So this Hamilton Brown fella, he probably didn't identify as being Irish, or if he did, his Irish identity, he was a planter, he was a coloniser.

Like Europeans who colonised North America, they didn't identify as being Navajo or Choctaw or a native tribe, they just identified as, I'm American in this new country that I've invented. I'm a colonizer. This is mine now. So Hamilton Brown, he would have benefited from the system that was set up for the rolling colonizing elite in Ireland by the British. He worked as an accountant on an Irish plantation house in the north of Ireland, earned a good bit of money and was then granted land in Jamaica, another British colony. He went to Jamaica, did the same shit his parents did in Ireland, colonised Jamaica, started a plantation house and started to run a sugar plantation and then acquired a

lot of enslaved African people to work on his sugar plantation. So calling that man an Irish slave owner requires a lot more context. Ireland was being colonized and a system of ethnic cleansing was happening and the penal laws existed as a form of apartheid. So this man, Reedy, he probably identified as Scotch Irish. Scotch Irish was an identity that emerged in North America and in the Caribbean where Irish Protestant colonizers, when they went to the quote unquote new world, they wanted to differentiate themselves from the poor Catholic Irish. So they call themselves Scotch Irish. I'm not one of those poor Catholic bog-trotting paddies. I come from good Protestant Scottish stock. So Hamilton

Brown when he was on the British colony of Jamaica became a massive landowner. He had over a thousand slaves working on his sugar plantation. He had children with over 30 of his slaves. I believe Kamala Harris has descended from one of those unions and historically something that's very important to point out Historically when slave owners it was not consensual It was usually rape slave owners were deeply evil people who engaged in in chattel slavery This meant that the people who they enslaved were slaves in perpetuity. They were never ever free nor were their children because the slave

owner did not consider these people to be human beings. And that's what makes chattel slavery unique. The same British system, system of colonization, that was enacting ethnic cleansing and apartheid, which eventually led to the famine in Ireland, that same British system was also colonizing Jamaica and the Caribbean and then enslaving people from Africa. Hamilton Brown, he benefited from both of those things within that system. He exploited it. By 1833, slavery was abolished in the British Empire. Hamilton Brown was furious about this. He tried to stop it because he's a very wealthy slave owner. He's got a huge sugar plantation.

What's he gonna do now? How is he gonna make money off his sugar plantation if he can't have the free perpetual labor of the enslaved? Because now slavery is going to be illegal in Jamaica. Well the British government in 1837 brought in the Slave Compensation Act, which sounds like a nice thing. It sounds like reparations for the enslaved. No, the British government paid off all the slave owners because they were going to lose a lot of money now because they couldn't have slaves anymore. So the British government gave millions. Hamilton Morris was paid the equivalent of £11 million because he couldn't have slaves

anymore. Now where did the British government get the money, which is around two billion pounds in today's money. Where did the British government get this money to pay off all the slave owners? Well, they took out a loan from a fella called Nathan Meyer Rochchild who belonged to a wealthy banking family. His great-grandson brought about the Balfour Declaration in 1917. A declaration which pledged British support for a Jewish national home in Palestine, the creation of mandatory Palestine. Israel as we know it today. Or as the Brits called it in 1919, a little loyal Jewish ulster in the

heart of potentially hostile Arabism. So long story short, Kamala Harris's great great great great grandfather was paid millions by the British government to compensate for all the slaves he lost in the 1830s. The British taxpayer didn't pay that off until 2015 which meant even more fucked up. People from the British Caribbean, Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad, when these people emigrated to England in the 20th century and worked and paid taxes. They actually paid taxes all their lives to compensate slave owners that owned their grandparents. So back to the early 1840s, what did Kamala Harris's

great-great-great-great grandfather do with the money that the British government gave him for losing all his slaves. Well, what was happening in Ireland in the 1840s? The famine was starting because the years of apartheid and ethnic cleansing as a result of colonisation. So he used his slave compensation to bring loads of Irish people to Jamaica to work as indentured servants on his sugar plantations, because he couldn't use enslaved Africans anymore. But he did that as a form of colonization, because he was worried about previously enslaved African people

rebelling and getting revenge. So the dirt poor Irish Catholics arrive on the sugar plantation, on Hamilton Brown Sugar Plantation, and now they're presented with the concept of whiteness for the first time, because they're deliberately treated better than the people of African heritage. Like, sorry, Paddy, I know back home there's a famine and you're dirt poor and everyone dying, and your grandparents weren't allowed to own land or vote or receive an education or speak the Irish language. Well Well actually here in Jamaica you're almost as good as us because your skin is white and you're

actually better than those people over there with the darker skin. You're better than they are. You're entitled to more than them. That's the new system here Paddy and then they become overseers and then they themselves become plantation owners and now those themselves become plantation owners and now those Irish become the colonizers and become very loyal to people like Hamilton Brown who are now Jamaican politicians and they completely forget that Hamilton Brown was a colonizer in Ireland and then today 2024 we're still dealing with knock-on effects. Kamala Harris is being critiqued because American prisons are effectively using indentured servitude.

And Kamala, as Attorney General of California, appeared to rule in favor of the private corporations that are profiting off that indentured servitude. And there's a very solid argument to be made. Because of the racism within the American system, the unfairly harsh sentences that are handed out to black people, the poverty and community trauma and marginalization that black people face in America, which you can trace to Jim Crow, to slavery, there's a solid argument to be made

that the private prison industrial complex in America is a more subtle continuation of those systems of oppression. And then the other big issue of Israel and Gaza, the money that the Brits used to pay off slave owners that wasn't repaid until 2015 by the British taxpayer, that same money comes from the same family that alongside the British colonized Palestine. A very complex history and the common thread is wealth and empire and colonization. And that's why people from Jamaica or Barbados or Trinidad sound a little bit Irish when they speak. It's probably why Guinness is so popular in the Caribbean. And also the Jamaican phrase,

Búaíach a sé. Búaíach a sé comes from the Irish phrase in the Irish language, Búaíach a slidhia, which means glory be to God. So the accent and phrases like that, those are little traces of when the poor Catholic Irish indentured servants intermingled and mixed with the people of African ancestry in Jamaica to form a kind of a common culture until the British colonizers in Jamaica introduced the apartheid of whiteness

and racism of which the Irish benefited. And that's not to say as well that there weren't Catholic Irish slave owners in the Caribbean. There were some rare circumstances of that happening, especially Catholic Irish working within the administration of like Spain and Portugal who were also slave-in-colonizers. But that Hamilton Brown fella being Kamala Harris's Irish slave-owning ancestor, there's way more context to that. During the transatlantic slave trade Ireland was being colonized and subjected to ethnic cleansing and apartheid. And why do I even, how do I know this much information about a fella called Hamilton

Brown from over 250 years ago? How do I know how many slaves he owned? How do I know how much money he was paid by the British government as compensation for when slavery was abolished. How do we know this? Because of Daniel O'Connell, the great emancipator, the great liberator. Daniel O'Connell was our Martin Luther King. He emancipated Irish Catholics in the 1800s. He removed the apartheid. He made it possible for Catholics to sit in the British Parliament to become politicians to vote. After years of the penal laws and Daniel O'Connell was an abolitionist, he fucking hated slavery. He brought Frederick Douglass, the freed slave and abolitionist, to Ireland on a speaking tour to educate the famine Irish about what

slavery was. To say to the famine Irish, I I know you're dirt poor but if you go to America and you support slavery then don't consider yourself Irish anymore he said that with Daniel O'Connell our emancipator it's the reason you've got an O'Connell Street in nearly every fucking city in Ireland when the British government abolished slavery but then in 1837 introduced the Slave Compensation Act where they borrowed two billion and paid a load of money to slave owners. They tried to do it all secretly and Daniel O'Connell, the Irish Catholic, he was an MP, he was a member of Parliament and he

said no fucking way. If you're gonna pay off slave owners, which is ridiculous, if you're gonna fucking do that then we want to see names. We want these people shamed on the record for having participated in such evil acts against other humans and that's why we know today what British people owned slaves, how many slaves they owned and how much money they were compensated. Daniel O'Connell is the reason those records exist. And they're essential if the descendants of slaves are ever to get reparations. Reparations you said? That sounds mad.

But you know what sounds fucking mad? Compensating slave owners in 1837 and paying so much money that the British public didn't pay it off until 2015. That's fucking mad. What about actual reparations? So I'm gonna have an ocarina pause now shortly. I wasn't gonna do so much of this week's podcast about that subject. But the more I researched, the more threads unraveled. Last week's podcast was about...

Storytelling. I spoke to the magnificent Claire Murphy about storytelling. So I wanted to read you a story this week. One of my own short stories from my book Topographia Hibernica. A short story called The Donkey, which began as a story about a donkey. A comedy story. It began as a comedy story about a donkey. But as I entered the kind of dream-like flow state that I can get into when I'm writing, the larger theme of the story emerged. And really, it's a story about complicated grief,

grief that gets intertwined with pain and becomes stuck and has to find an irrational outlet. So let's do an ocarina pause and then I'll read you a short story. Here's the ocarina, the big base stone ocarina, which I still can't play. Picture this, you're at a picnic with pals and bam, you suddenly feel unwell. But going to the clinic? Not the ideal weekend plan. Well, those days are over. Maple's Virtual Care has got your back, with 24-7 access to licensed doctors and nurse practitioners within minutes.

Need a diagnosis or prescription? Sorted right from your phone, right in time for your next picnic. Download the Maple app today and have more summer this summer. Fuck's sake. I need to practice with this cotton thing. Beautiful bass ocarina. It smells like smoke when I blow on it. Whatever they've done to it.

Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener via the Patreon page, Patreon.com forward slash the Blind by podcast. If this I'm struggling with my words. It's very late. It's very late here. It's three in the morning because I was gigging in Cape Kenny last week for two days. So that's two days gone that I'd usually use to research this podcast. So I've had to be working very hard with the available days I had left.

So I'm fatigued. So listen, if this podcast brings you marth, merriment, entertainment, distraction, whatever the fuck, as you listen to this podcast, if you enjoy it, if you consume it regularly, if you show up each week, please consider paying me for the work that I put into the podcast, because it's my full-time job. This is what I do to earn a living, it's how I rent out my office, it's how I pay my bills. Patreon.com forward slash the blind buy podcast. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month, that's it.

But if you can't afford that, don't worry about it. You can listen for free. Cause the person who's paying is paying for you to listen for free. Everyone gets the exact same podcast. Right, upcoming gigs. Edinburgh Book Festival, right? If you're in fucking Edinburgh,

come along to my book festival gigs. I'm at Electric Picnic. I'm doing a very big stage at Electric Picnic, so please come along to that if you're there. I want... it's a fucking huge gig at Electric Picnic, so I'd love people who actually listen to this podcast to come to the gig and get up to the front row to create a buffer. A con buffer. A buffer from the cunts. Because what happened is, it's a massive tent. And you get all these people in who don't know what my fucking podcast is. Go, oh there's that fella from that song from years ago with a bag on his head.

These are the people who throw things up on stage and shout, I'm gigging 20 years. I know crowds. So if you are at Electric Picnic, turn up and see me and sit up front as a cunt buffer. Then what gigs have I got? Kark podcast festival in September in the Opera House. 15th of September come to that. Then this gig in Clare Morris in Mayo. I didn't mean to shit on Mayo last week, I was just, I didn't know that gig was there, I was surprised to see it. But yeah, I'm gonna be gigging Clare Morris in Mayo.

In when's that? November I think, I dunno. No, yeah November. And then I have a Vicar Street in November. I'm shit at promoting gigs. I don't like doing it. It always seems to work. I haven't had many live podcasts yet that haven't been fully sold out, so it is working. Alright, I'm gonna read you a short story now. And this short story is called The Donkey. I hope you enjoy it. It's from my book topography,

Hibernica. The Donkey. There's a donkey selling Christmas trees off the roundabout, looking like a prick in the frost with a green elf's hat on its head. On journeys to visit my father, I'd find myself stuck in the five o'clock traffic, forced to witness the bleedings. I'd wipe condensation from the window and see the red tears of blood drooling down the donkey's face, and the bye in the baggy high vis jacket swiping in the night, the long stiff wire of a coat hanger in his hand. Every time he'd hit the donkey, he'd look up to the traffic, and I'd see a confused fear wash over him. Then he'd grit his teeth and hit the donkey again. As if baiting it was something he had no control over, the jacket falling off his shoulders,

his fluorescent arm pinging like a hot green laser into the side of my eye. Impossible to ignore. The cruelty of it. Hee haw, hee haw. God help us. I'd see a new car parked with red hazards blinking. Cheerful husbands

buying Christmas trees from the buy. Loading them into hatchbacks without a fuck giving towards that donkey. Cunts with no hearts. And my father's head was rotting above in St. Camillus's fuck giving towards that donkey, cunts with no hearts. And my father's head was rotting above in St. Camillus' nursing home, full of dirty knots that threw terrors at him that made it all the worse.

He was gradually being replaced by a new man, a man I'd never met who had never met me. I put him there last June, I was eating from the guilt of doing that. But I still enjoyed the traffic and the abuse, once a week, to visit him. I'd make sure the nurses had attended to his dignity, changed his pajamas, washed his body, this rude stranger, melting in a bed. I did everything the way that I was supposed to. And then on the drives home,

I'd have a decent fucking cry. Fierce dramatic. The ones that start in the belly and boil hot on the forehead. I'd even go for the guttural roars. In private car darkness. No heat on so the windows fog and Ronan Keating full blast on the radio. I'd howl in a way I hadn't done since I was three. I'd blubber that he was gone but still there. I'd call him Daddy to the windshield and bawl for the shock

of what he'd have just said to me. At this hour of the rot, my father could look through me with a polite formality, parsing his lips as if I was serving him at a till, or he might be a wordless newborn looking to suckle at my tit, or other times, he'd grit his teeth with the venom you'd have for a robber in your home, and he'd reach for a mug at his bedside to assault me with, terrified and vicious, and I didn't have words or pictures for the weight of the feelings I'd get from that. These were no feelings that hadn't been invented yet. But the tears and the shouts stood to me in those first few months. stood to me in those first few months. My fists choke in the steering wheel. The cries I'd have in that car would make some sense of the chaos in my belly and that'd be the end of it then for another week when I shut that car door that was

it out of me, up the driveway into the house off to bed. Waking up and eating breakfasts, videos of best goal compilations, cuddles with Maeve, even a few laughs with the lads in the office. I could clear through a two-foot pile of photocopying without any intrusive images of him clawing the sheets. Until the donkey got involved.

Hee-haw, hee-haw. And the tears became effort, it was like trying to piss with someone watching. Who was I to feel sorry for myself when a donkey's getting battered off a roundabout? So this one evening, I wondered to myself if my father would even notice if I was late. Would it be a better use of our time to try and intervene with the poor donkey instead? Maybe the story of it might star something in him. I reversed my punto up onto the carb and put my hazards on. I behaved like a man who was buying a Christmas tree.

The boy in the high-vase jacket was studying me the way an adult would. He was eleven or twelve with the look of parents who drank, and to his left was the poor fucker of a donkey. It had short rope around its neck, the cheap blue cord that's made from plastic fibres, tied around the hair. Her throat looked like someone slashed at it once a day. My heart burst acid down into my belly as I took in the landscape of her cuts. Way for thin sandwich ham, flittered pink skin. She had a head like chopped wood, pocked around her face were wounds of different ages, some healed and some scarred, others new, open and wet, glistening back at the frost, winking

with movement. Up close, I could see the stupid little green hat stapled to her ear, dangling down around her cheek. I lifted it up with my baby finger. There was a colourful smell. The yellow flesh around the staples was septic and angry. Her ear was in a most unmerciful state. My donkey inspection was making the boy fierce and uncomfortable. He turned his back to me and began sparring with the night air. Someone had trained him to box like that, making uns uns noises with his mouth, darting like a pissed off wasp, the wire coat hanger poking up from under his high vis jacket. I expected a flinch or a jock from the donkey when I touched her ear, but she didn't seem to care, too accustomed

to humans in her space. I had suspected for weeks that the donkey was female. I could just tell, in that soft way that you can gender an animal by its eyes. Tart the euro for the small trees, and I'll do you two for fifty, and we'll have no bother getting her into the back of your punto either," the boy says to me. "'I'm here about this poor donkey,' says I. You were sliced up to bits, I've seen you with that codhanger snakeing it off her face. What need is there for that? And the boy took on a Conor McGregor pose, with his tongue out like he'd fight me. No care that I was

in my thirties. You know nothing about her, he says. She's stone mad she gets them cuts herself inside her pen, baiting her head off the walls. I've no coat hanger. Search me if you want. I'm only selling Christmas trees. The donkey is for the cars. She's an advertisement. Well looked after," he said, pointing towards a plastic bucket of orange straw in the frozen mud. I felt the type of justified anger at the base of my spine above my arse, the one that makes you do good things, as if something beyond drove my tongue to say words.

"'I'll give you two hundred euro in cash now,' I said, if you hand that donkey over to me. I'll take her, and I'll bring her to the donkey sanctuary on the north side, and she'll have a length of grass and happiness. A pause and a squint from the by.' And he dug his little raw sausage fingers up into his mouth and bit on the tips. Held on a second and I ringed the boss, he said.

The boy took out one of them tiny black phones that are bought for throwing away and disappeared into a shadow. I moved closer to the donkey. She clapped back twice and turned orange under a street light. I could see her entire body now. The injuries from the coat hanger were mostly on her face and neck. There were no cuts on her torso, but her fur was matted and knotted from neglect. There's an accountant in work called Froggy with a salpidine addiction, and the donkey's tail reminded me of his posture, a sad little tail, weighed down by cakey dung. The steam from her nose rose high in the ice. I met her gaze, as if I had a telepathy. I was hoping for something back, her voice in my head,

and understanding that I was saving her. It wasn't there. She was empty from the mistreatment. I had reached a point of no return. It was 5.25pm on my watch. The Christmas traffic was very bad. If I was to opt out now, I'd never get up to my father anyway. I felt a strain of relief. The boy returned from the far side of the

roundabout. The McGregor facade had lifted and he displayed the enthusiasm of a child his age, like someone had just called him a good son. The boss says you can take her for 400 euro, chirping, with the palm of his little hand out. I paused. 400 euro was a lot of money. I had it, but spending it on a fucking battered donkey two weeks from Christmas? That would require a lot of explaining to Maeve, and she had been very understanding. I slapped the buys Pam in agreement. Hold on and I go across to the ATM. Don't move from here, I told him. I'm going nowhere, he said.

The wind was blades on my face as I walked across two lanes of traffic. Cars don't really stop at that hour of the evening. People drive around you, distracted. Already have their heads on their couches with dinner and Netflix. Maybe they're all crying. The screen of the ATM showed a balance of €580. You sure what was another €400 with the money I'd spent on my father's care over the past two years? I withdrew the cash and returned to the buy.

Feeding an adult donkey into the backseat of a two-door Fiat Punto is difficult, to say the least, though not impossible. I could talk about how easy it would have been if I hadn't sold the Range Rover, but I won't. I felt the traffic slowing down to watch as I pushed her big grey arse past the gear stick. Hee-haw, hee-haw. Conor McGregor grabbed her legs to stuff them into the back seat. We found a balance, with the passenger seat fully reclined and the donkey's head up front with her chin on the dash. There was very little room for me, but the door closed with the donkey inside, and the sanctuary on the north side was about thirty minutes

of traffic away. I said to the boy, What do you call her? Susan, he said. I heard a voice behind me shout, only in limerick. It was a stubbly yob with his window rolled down. His green lit up turkeys in the dark. He was recording me on an iPhone. I wanted him to see a good man. A caring man. A man who took the time out of his evening to stop and rescue a misfortunate abused donkey at Christmas of all times. Only in Limerick. Was this a joke to him? Did he think I was having a laugh? The donkey and I crawled along Mulgrave Street as I fought the strain on the chassis. Driving

became as physical as a cycle. The accelerator pushed back on my foot. The gear stick rattled and the metal undercarriage squeaked against tarmac. My chin was on the steering wheel. The donkey's heartbeat thumped against my spine like a Ronan Keating song. Her lagging jacket lungs heated the car and exhaled a dripping condensation that was pointless to wipe away. You don't fully appreciate how large a donkey's head is until it's beside you in a fiat Punto. The view in my mirror was furry and violent. I was driving blind and the car took on a barnyard stink.

That sugary blend of fresh shit and hay. There was a powerful blast of cheese too. The elf's hat stapled to Susan's ear was tickling my face. And a maggot from a sword dropped down on my jacket and I did gawks from the thawed of fried rice. Hee haw, hee haw, this was very difficult, but the suffering was necessary. I did not regret this decision, even when the cars were overtaking me and beeping in frustration. And a business-looking man, in a beamer, rolled down his window,

with a what-the-fuck-are- the fuck are you playing at face but he never got them words out when his eyes met the donkey behind the foggy windscreen. He rolled the window back up because this was none of his business. I tried to have a little cry but it wouldn't come. It must have been all the adrenaline. And I felt the ghost of my dad's brain wibble inside my skull where my brain was. Because my father was the type of man who'd have rescued a donkey in his time. A vet he was.

Who'd take his work home with the size of his heart. He never ate meat. He would scatter bread out for robins when the ground was hard. Stepping over snails. Mouth to mouth on an epileptic rat. He'd draw a litter of kittens to the back door and put himself out of pocket feeding them. Our childhood dog was a nervous larcher called Flap who had a grin like a smashed seashell. He had crawled into the arse of

an engine for warmth because the mange took his coat. A zombie looking dog who frightened me. My dad nursed a wiry far back onto his gooey skin with love and patience and he would have been in this car with an abused donkey and not a fuck giving towards what anyone else thought of it. But this man was not the usurper above in St. Camillus's nursing home, gum sloppy with sausage and black pudding from the fingers of a nurse, and him calling me a paedophile priest and a dirty pervert. This twisted new man who spoke about thumbs up arses and spit on tits. This sex man who shat hatred and

unfounded accusations at me whenever I'd visit. In September, he thought I was a Brent ghost and tried to repair my beak. I resisted, and he howled until an orderly would stick their head in the door like I was harming him. And the red face on me, this man who hated his son, that rude stranger. If I ever get that way I want to be put down," he said to me last year. I turned to Susan and said, "'Do you think you took a bad turn because I couldn't afford the private nursing home any more? Did the shock of that cause the dementia knots to twist?'

And hee-haw, hee-haw," she replied, and the wound on her neck opened up. It winked pinky shiny, and I felt her voice vibrate through my hands on the steering wheel. The hot tears were forming behind my eyes, but they still wouldn't come. I thought about the video I'd seen online, where a squinty old American woman briefly regained her personality when they played her songs from her youth. She smiled at her daughters and they smiled back. We haven't far to go, I said to Susan. You'll have no worries in the sanctuary. They'll clean you up and you'll never be hit with a coat hanger again. No more selling Christmas trees. You'll frolic in a long garden with the other donkeys, like a donkey heaven, but you'll be alive. You're very lucky in a long garden with the other donkeys, like a donkey heaven,

but you'll be alive. You're very lucky you met a kind man like me, Susan. I'll tell himself all about you. It might stir something up in him." And she didn't respond. And her black pudding eyelids reminded me of my father above in the bed. Susan, at what point do you accept that the person you love is dead, even though their body is still here? The air of the north side tasted of the peat-smoked bite that it gets in December. Toothy little tenements and Fanta orange clouds over a trolley in a ditch. And the woman who came to the gate of the donkey sanctuary had the face

of someone who had forgotten whether they liked donkeys or not. I'd been expecting a different face. And aren't you a kind man for taking the time out to rescue a donkey in its so-closed Christmas face? We pulled Susan from the Punto and they caught off her green elf's hat with pliers and replaced it with a plastic tag. Will you find her a good home, I asked. I didn't all love. Its face is half septic. The vet will decide what happens to it, she said. And Susan said, hee-haw, hee-haw, clop, clop, as they walked her into a concrete pen.

The passenger seat of the Punto was fucked, busted backwards on a permanent incline. There were no tears left at the bottom of me. Did everything the way I was supposed to. I was selfless. And this one evening, this evening with the donkey, I wondered to myself if my father would even notice if I ever went back to visit him. Hope you enjoyed that. Rub a dog, wink at a swan, filet a carnetto. This is an ad by BetterHelp. How often do you compare yourself to others?

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