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Rating: I enter a squalid hole of a place, teeming with lost souls wrapped in sadomasochistic black leather and brutal racehorses, grotesquely excited by lethal mixtures of peat whiskey, Shannon water, and carefully macerated pages of Swift.
As soon as I set foot beyond the threshold, a handful of muddy sludge assaults my right eye, hurled by a toothless guy, insulting and obviously soaked in Guinness. Seven other heretics raise the discordant voice of the wretch, merrily cursing a normal burial in favor of one in the marshes. Images of deceased women combing their hair on coastal walls battle with epic accordions while carcasses of captains with uncertain sexuality cling to the back of the fool who mumbles on the stage of boards. A preacher bursts in, threatening punishments against the attendees, just in time to place two pounds on Bottle of Smoke, given twenty goddamn five to one, and catches an empty mug straight in the right ear. Damn, he says. Damn, I say, the atmosphere is beery, certainly alcoholic, even drunk.
As I ponder, the evanescent ghost of Kirsty MacColl, whom I thought dead for years, approaches me smiling. I gulp and think, what's so wrong with trying it on with such a charming incorporeal being? I barely have time to offer her a Kilkenny when she ethereally rises onto the boards and starts singing with the toothless poet a piano elegy about some sweet Christmas seasoned with memories of cold drunks and various you're a lot of scum, a queer, a dying whore. The subsequent blasphemies vomited by the eight scarcely touch me as I am busy pounding on a recruiting sergeant who proposes, while tapping his snare drum, that I join some tribal army, while at the same time observing a graceful girl who whispers something to the toothless MacGowan, who responds with a lecherous grin and wishes that she be taken away by night by angels and not by those pesky little ghosts who stretch their hands.
I'm offered yet another Ale of the evening, just as MacGowan tries to put that brute of his nephew to sleep, but since the tale narrates, fiercely and impressively, about ghosts inhabiting tree circles that will induce colics, cramps, and other delightful physical symptoms to the unfortunate who encounter them, the kid doesn't want to fall into Morpheus's arms and heads towards me. You know, I hate children. As soon as he's within reach, I wink at MacGowan and toss the brat into the cider barrel. It's the end.
God decides to punish the pagans gathered in that dive, recombining zither, mandolin, tin whistle, banjo, and the same toothless bard into a monstrous emaciated prophet who gloriously staggers towards the specters populating the room, towards the prostitutes, the racehorses, the bettors, the drugged zombies, and the high-alcohol-content child. But then, the buxom barmaid sacrilegiously sprinkles both God and his prophet with mead. It's the end, I tell myself, I'll burn in hell with Burzum, when he's dead. No, wait a moment, I tell myself, it's not the end, when I see God dancing gleefully a mad jig embraced with Kirsty MacColl and his prophet who, drunk, plays the dulcimer with his teeth.
Dazed, I step out into the cold night: nothing will ever have the same gray hue again, I think, as I greet Aqualung lying on his freshly repainted bench.
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