Amazon bot has picked up my festive freebie

It seems that Amazon.com's bot has been busy sniffing out folks' special offers. Peril has gone free again on amazon.com, presumably as the result of a bloghop Smashwords freebie offer.

So, if you're an Amazon.com user and haven't already got hold of Peril on www.amazon.com/Peril-ebook/dp/B004TXOOHO, then dig in!


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Profane language? WTF? Don't read on!

(Seriously, if you are offended by profanity then stop here and just go read the Peril or The Baptist pages.)

I recently sent a copy of The Baptist to a friend's work email as a pdf attachment. She didn't receive the email. She did receive an automatically generated message from her employer's Mail Sweeper programme.

This e-mail has been stopped in Profane Messages. 

A report was attached to the message with the MIMEsweeper Analysis results. She printed a copy and took it to tea-break where the content engendered a lot of discussion. Irish tea-breaks are an occasion for great craic. The consensus was The Baptist contained a lot of action but not enough components to perform it. They discussed the parts of speech.

I've listed the report results below and I have to say that, whilst I didn't intend to write a profane novel, I can remember almost exact each and every page where the offending words occur.

It went a little something like this:

The phrase 'arse' was found at location 70126
and so on. I'll just share the count.
arse x 1
balls x 2
bang x 3
bastard x 12 (quite a lot of bastards, one of them capitalised therefore a pronoun?)
bitch x 6
bloody x 8 (how quaint that bloody should be a profanity in this day and age)
blow job x 1 (shouldn't I have hyphenated the blow-job?)
bollocks x 1 (shouldn't there be at least two of those?)
crap x 2 (okay UK and Ireland it's an expletive)
cunt x 3 (I do apologise, it's very rude word but, in my defence, it was, or rather they were, in dialogue. Not uncommon in Ireland.)
fag x 5 (this means cigarette in UK and Ireland and that was the intention)
fuck x 10 (no argument there)
fucker x 4 (I'm getting an idea for a Christmas song now)
fucking x 21 (in fairness, there is a lot of that going on)
penis x 1 (poor little lad, all on his own, but just goes to show it takes only one)
prick x 3 (oh, right ... well)
queer x 1 (surely acceptable as an adjective?)
sex x 7 (the vanilla version is profane?)
sexy x 2 (sexy too)
shirt-lifter x 1 (at least it's hyphenated, if homophobic, but anyhow it's dialogue)
shit x 11 (a fair amount of which was capitalised, perhaps a placename?)
shite x 1 (the Irish for above)
slut x 1 (so few?)
wanker x 1 (there's always one)
white trash x 2 (confused me, is that profane?).

Right, Christmas is on the horizon. So, in the spirit of the season, I offer:

The Baptist Twelve Days of Christmas

(I'll just go to straight to the last verse)

On the twelfth day of Christmas my true love gave to me
Twelve bastards bragging
Eleven shits a fan-hitting
Ten fucks a flying
Nine fucking expletives (cheated, there wasn't nine of anything)
Eight bloody bus stops
Seven sex in the opens
Six bitches barking
Five ... fags ... a ... puffing!
Four fighting fuckers
Three quiet cunts
Two dangly balls
And a slut arse-wanker penis blow-job bollocks.

(That leaves a spare queer sexy shirt-lifter shite white trash, sounds like one of my characters.)

I'm sure we'll be hearing that little ditty on the radio.

All in the name of literary art, my dears.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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Any resemblance is purely coincidental

When I launched Peril (original title The Rise and Fall of Ger Mayes - catchy huh?), a few early readers asked if there was an element of autobiography in the book. They were mostly people that knew me.

Of course there's an autobiographical element in most fiction. It doesn't mean that a thriller writer is a murderer (although it doesn't preclude it either!) but the author does have to have a mind that can conceive the murder. So, am I the philandering, hapless, conscience-free anti-hero Ger Mayes in Peril? If you've read the book then maybe we can meet up for a coffee, go for a few beers, get in a fight, visit a dodgy nightclub. A regular night out in Kilkenny. Then I'll let you be the judge and jury.

A little overseas incident came to mind this weekend and I thought I'd share it. Peril readers might recognise the behavioural traits.

About fifteen years ago I was working as export sales manager for a burglar alarm company in Rochdale, Lancashire. The boss was a millionaire megalomanic who made us park our green company BMWs with the bonnets facing out so he could drool over his fleet. Now, he was probably more Ger Mayes than I am.

Anyhow, I was secretly waiting on work permission for another job in Switzerland and tried to wangle some german language lessons out of my boss on the strength of needing to boost our sales there. He, being the smart business cookie that he was, did a spot analysis of export markets and concluded that I needed to improve my french instead of my german. So I found myself at the lovely Isabelle's language school and we happily conjugated together for a few blissful weeks.

The boss endured this as long as he could and then registered me for a local Chamber of Commerce business trip to France. It was all in modest northern style - take the train through the Chunnel, stay in a budget hotel, visit as many potential business partners as possible and bring back the wonga. My compatriots in the Chamber posse tolerated me as a young upstart, not quite fitting into the group profile. I didn't come from old merchant money (or any money, in fact), spoke with a slightly posh accent, didn't smoke and had all my own hair.

On the day of the adventure I woke up early to a sharp frost. The windows of my car were thick with ice so I let the engine run to warm up and defrost. After three minutes of scraping the outside of the car I heard a click. The doors had locked themselves, the key still in the ignition, engine warming up nicely. I didn't have a spare key.

It took a bit of pacing around the car for me to realise that there was only one option. I bunched my fist and gave the rear quarter-light window a sharp karate punch. There was a crack, but not of glass, of knuckle. My arm felt numb from finger to elbow. I picked up a rock from the flower bed and smashed the window with it, using my other hand. There wasn't too much blood.

The train journey went smoothly, thanks to a few cans of beer and some painkillers. I kept my swelling hand under a newspaper, read a book and made small talk when necessary. The guy next to me spent the entire time playing with some kind of gadget that he called a Nintendo.

'I've never read a book in my life,' he said in between games. 'I can't concentrate long enough.'

We hurtled down to the south of England and through the newly built tunnel that linked Blighty with the old foe. It was a strange feeling, travelling through a tunnel under the sea. The thought of terrorist attack or some kind of accident was never far from our minds.

Lille was our end destination and the hotel lived up to expectations. Greyish linen, small hard soaps and a breakfast to cry for. But at least the weather was like home - a constant, driving rain. I put up my British brolly and ran around the corner to the car hire place from which my boss had rented me a nice little Clio, the cheapest thing on the menu.

At that time there were no toll roads in the UK and the idea of paying to drive on a motorway was anathema to me (ergo my boss too). I drove up to the entry barriers in my entry-level Clio and pondered the situation in the ongoing downpour. My breath was steaming up the windscreen so I played with the air controls until it cleared.

There, at the side of the last, unmanned booth, was a narrow gap between some bollards. It looked small, too small for my BMW, but I managed to squeeze the tiny Clio through without scraping the bodywork. The road opened out in front of me, the sky cleared and I was free to ride the highways. All the way up to the next city where my first business meeting awaited.

At the required exit I came to another booth. This time there was no gap to sneak through.

'Billet, s'il vous plait,' the monsieur said.

Isabelle, help me now, I thought.

'Je n'ai pas le billet,' I said, hopefully, naively and then desperately.

'Impossible! Impossible!' the excited cashier shouted.

So, the company credit card was charged with the entire length of the Autoroute from wherever to wherever. I resolved to wear my gumshield and groin protector for the debrief with the boss back home.

The meetings went off okay that day and the next. I chattered animatedly, wanting to impress with my grasp of language and panicked by my lack of comprehension when my would-be business partners started to respond in their native tongue.

On the second night the entire Chamber posse got hopelessly drunk and I told my Autoroute toll story with great embellishment (unlike here, which is the bare bones).

We rose the next morning to find that a French lorry had caught fire in the Chunnel, blocking our exit from the country. Twenty-three hours wait for a place on a delayed ferry in choppy seas, then the slow train to London and on to Manchester.

These days I approach the Irish motorway toll booths with trepidation. I have a barely controllable urge to find an illegal way through. If I see a car parked with its engine running I have a strong urge to break the window with the nearest rock. And I've never been back in the Chunnel.

So, yes. I guess I am Ger Mayes, in parts. I've often found myself in some kind of peril.

But I'm definitely not The Baptist!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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He's here.

It's dark outside, the evenings are drawing in. You want to snuggle up with a loved one but they're away, out of reach. You open your kindle and decide to scare the hell out of yourself instead. Well, here's something fit for purpose. The Baptist has launched on Smashwords, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com


More about The Baptist on the page up top.

Right, enough selling and back to the blog...





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Heirloom - an extract from The Baptist

Wind whipped the rain against the window like someone throwing gravel.

He picked up a chair from the kitchen table, removed the cushion and squeezed the loose crossbars of the legs together. Then he placed the chair before the high press. The wood creaked under his weight. He brought down an ancient biscuit tin and took it to the table.

The tightness of the tin lid held in an aroma that hadn’t changed over the years. Sweet shortbread and something else sour. Inside was a cloth that further protected the contents.

All the way from America. You can see it’s genuine. Not like those new-fangled ones made of plastic and whatnot.

His father’s words, God rest his soul.

Elegant simplicity, classic. None of the modern fussiness. It deserved to be on display, not tucked away. That wasn’t an option, though. Word would get out and some reprobate would steal the thing. More importantly, Brid wouldn’t tolerate it. She hated it. They’d argued about it over the years. She wanted him to sell it to a collector but respected it as a last remnant of his father, so they maintained a position of detente on the matter.

Ugly thing, she’d say, Put it away, Séan.

The front doorbell rang. He wrapped the cloth carefully around his heirloom, closed the lid and then walked heavily to the door.

‘Mr McCarthy, how are you?’

‘Come in, come in.’ He took her dripping raincoat, gave it a shake and hung it on a hook behind the door. She smoothed down the skirt of her nurse’s uniform.

‘Well, Jean. Tea?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. I’ll only be a few minutes. Okay, if you’re forcing me.’

Having completed their habitual exchange, she went through to Brid in the front room and McCarthy returned to the kitchen. He moved the old biscuit tin to a corner and covered it with a tea towel, then went about his splashings and clatterings. He could hear them talking.

‘How are we today, Brid?’

There was a beep from the morphine drip.

‘Not long now, Jean. I won’t be needing you much longer.’ Brid’s voice was clipped.

‘Nonsense! Tough old bird like you, you’ll probably outlive us all! Now, that looks sore. Let’s get a new vein for you.’

‘I don’t feel a thing, dear.’

‘Well, that’s what we want, isn’t it?’

McCarthy brought the tray in and placed it on a table next to the door. Nurse Jean removed the empty bag of morphine and attached a new one to the stand. The dispenser emitted a number of tones as she pressed the control buttons.

‘Here you go. Have a seat.’

McCarthy handed the nurse a teacup and saucer. His hand trembled and the spoon rattled. She took it and sat on the sofa.

‘Thanks, Mr McCarthy.’

They sipped tea and McCarthy offered Nurse Jean a plate of biscuits.

‘Oh, jammy dodgers, my favourite. You’re too good to me, Mr McCarthy.’

‘Séan, call me Séan.’

They looked each other in the eye for a few seconds. McCarthy could hear his own heavy breath.

‘Oh!’ Brid said. She was looking at the television. A picture of Joe flashed up on the screen.

McCarthy reached for the remote control and turned up the sound.

‘The State Pathologist conducted a post mortem on the remains found buried in marshland near Bagenalstown, County Carlow. It has been confirmed that they are those of Joe McCarthy who disappeared from the area eight years ago. Cause of death is as yet unknown but it’s believed that the remains have been there for several years.’

McCarthy pressed the mute on the remote and pursed his lips. The teeth felt slack in his gums.

Brid shrank slowly into her chair and gave a low groan.

‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ Nurse Jean said.

The drip dispenser beeped.

‘I’m so very tired,’ Brid said and gave a painful whimper.

When her tea was finished, Nurse Jean kissed Brid on the forehead.

Brid clutched the nurse’s hand with her own claw and they parted without words.

‘There’s no numbing grief,’ Séan said as he helped the nurse put on her raincoat. ‘Eight years of hope. Eight years.’

‘Mr McCarthy.’

Nurse Jean O’Dwyer couldn’t bring herself to call him Séan. She shook his hand and left.

He watched her run from the doorway in the swirling rain and until her car had rounded the corner and left Cypress Grove. The wind eased and a gap opened in the clouds, letting the sun brighten the drenched garden. Raindrops shimmered like diamonds on the leaves of clover that had started to grow on the lawn.

Somewhere there’s a rainbow thought McCarthy as he pushed the door shut.

In the sitting room Brid was motionless, eyes closed, as UK Gold played an ancient sitcom on the TV. McCarthy ran the fingers of his hand down Brid’s cheek and kissed her forehead.

‘I’m ready,’ she said and opened her eyes to look at her husband.

‘Yes, love.’

He looked at her eyes, so small, the lashless lids covering all except the pupil. Then he turned his attention to the motorised pump of the drip and adjusted the controls. The dispenser gave a beep and then another, a succession that took up the pace of a metronome.

‘I’ll see you on the other side, dear,’ Brid said sleepily.

McCarthy kissed his wife on the lips for the first time in many years. Her small mouth puckered with a firm desperation and then slackened as the morphine coursed through her veins. He took her hand and sat on the arm of the chair.

‘Joe,’ Brid muttered as her breathing began to slow.

This was the painless, quick end that she had wanted. When he was sure that she had passed, he adjusted the controls of the drip back to how the nurse had left them. Then he collected the tea things on the tray, took them out to the kitchen and washed them up.

The water was hot on his hands and the sun that had broken the storm shone through the window. He held his hands up to the light and they were trembling. A moment of nausea caught him unawares and he grasped the stainless steel of the sink. Then he reached for a tea towel, revealing the old biscuit tin, and dried the crockery.

Each cup and saucer had a rightful place in the press. Brid was very particular about that. He had maintained her ways long after she had given up the mundane household chores and taken up residence in her armchair. It pleased him to have everything in its place. That was the way that he kept his tools in the shed.

The air was crisp and fresh in the garden. McCarthy walked along the concrete path and turned an old key in the padlock on the shed door. Inside the familiar odours put him at ease. Cut wood, plant food, old paint and thinners, creosote. He saw his reflection in the little mirrored door of the old bathroom cabinet fixed to the shed wall and allowed himself a smile. In that smile he saw Joe. And Eugene. Never forget Eugene.

The key to the cabinet was on a hook behind a shelf of plant pots. He unlocked the cabinet, opened it and pocketed a battered cardboard box.

Back in the kitchen, his father’s voice came to him as he handled the contents of the biscuit tin.

This is more than what it seems. This is a symbol of our struggle and the birth of the Republic. It’s a weapon for good and evil. Depends on whose hand it’s in.

McCarthy had never fired the thing and wondered if his father had either. It looked new, unused, just dulled by age. He had loaded it once, in the shed soon after Eugene’s scant remains had been interred, ashamed afterwards of his own melodrama.

The old cardboard box was tattered but the bullets looked in good condition. He pushed them into the revolver, chamber upon chamber, and clicked the mechanism back together. The thing felt heavy, violent. Morphine would be a better way, but he didn’t know how to do that for himself. Count down slowly from ten and the morphine would carry you away.

McCarthy held the barrel to the side of his head and began to count.

Ten, nine. Perhaps the bullet would glance off his skull and not penetrate. He’d heard of such things. Divine intervention, it would be a sign.

Eight, seven. He couldn’t stop now. A vein in the side of his temple throbbed painfully, the cold of the gun’s muzzle pushing into his scalp through thin, white hair.

Six, five. Heaven or hell, he had no patience for this.

McCarthy pulled the trigger hard. A double click and then nothing.

He pulled again more gently and there was a another click as the mechanism moved to the next chamber. McCarthy let out a little laugh. He should have got hold of some new bullets. Fifty years in a damp shed must have spoilt them. And he should have learned how to use the gun properly. Here he was, playing Russian Roulette with himself.

What if, like the bullets, Messrs Smith and Wesson’s engineering also hadn’t withstood half a century of inaction? It could explode and blow his hand off. He put the barrel in his mouth and coughed. Séan McCarthy’s finger jumped on the trigger and the gun fired.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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If they ain't heard it then you ain't said it!

Those are the words I remember from a presentation on communication skills by a man named Harvey Thomas. Let's turn back time to 1999.

Harvey Thomas presented to us on the Strathclyde MBA in St Gallen, Switzerland many years ago. He taught us TV interview skills and about communication in general. Harvey had been an advisor to Margaret Thatcher and one of his nuggets of advice to the young female Prime Minister was that she should lower her voice by an octave. The rest is history. For his involvement he earned a bed that flew through the air during the 1984 bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton, Sussex. Harvey was saved from death by his huge bulk and lived to find God. A strange but true story. Anyhow, his book If They Haven't Heard it, You Haven't Said it!: Guide to Better Communication is languishing in obscurity, but my copy is on the 'signed by author' bookshelf. He shared many truisms with us in Switzerland for which I am truly grateful (no party political component to my views on that).

So why am I banging on about the above? because Peril just received a review that reflects exactly what I intended when I wrote it. Someone heard what I said:

'Ger Mayes is one of those types of guys who make some women try to tuck him beneath their wing so they can take care of him. Others will follow along and pray he gets exactly what he deserves. Whichever kind you end up being, you're sure to have a blast following this womanizing idiot as he gets himself into one bad mess after another, each one just slightly worse than the one before it. I didn't know whether to laugh, or groan and slap my forehead, thinking it a good idea to pull him by the ear in to see the shrink and glue him to the chair. It's hard to believe one man can make so many bad decisions and get into so much trouble and yet find a way to talk himself out of it. Or does he? You'll have to read PERIL for yourself to find out. Ladies, you may want to hide this one from your husbands. You wouldn't want to give them any ideas. Don't worry about the slow start in chapter one. Once Ger gets the ball rolling, he sets off an avalanche that no one can stop, not even Lady Luck herself. If you like a fast-paced thriller, PERIL is a fun ride I'm sure you'll enjoy.'

My gratitude to Denna Holm. I knew of Denna on YouWriteOn.com but only from a distance. Denna has managed to explain for me some of the mystery of why ladies like PERIL.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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Declan Burke gets inside my head for a few minutes





Here's a blog Q&A that I did for Declan Burke on his blog about Irish crime authors. As well as yours truly he has some interesting stuff on there - crimealwayspays 


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An extract from The Baptist

Alice reunites with John, her partner from their years in the asylum. She has wrestled and defeated Mary, her alter ego.

I’m in love with him. From the first moment I saw him, way back when.

He didn’t love me the first time round. I was there before him, older and dominant. He was innocent, apart from what he’d done to get there. I was crazy, in a bad way. Now, I’ve evolved into a completely different person.

I know what I am, who I am. I know who Mary is, what part of each other we are. Her special powers versus mine. My hope is based upon the knowledge that these things don’t stand still. Before, we were one. Then we split. I think that’s part of the reason why John hasn’t made the connection with our first time.

With John’s help, with our love for each other, I will banish Mary forever and remain me. We have no need of her anymore, never did.

I’ve set John on the road to County Clare, that great windswept expanse of romance. There’s a place I know, an ideal getaway, where we can nestle and hatch our plans.

The Rock of Cashel looms up ahead.

“Shall we stop a while?” John asks.

“No, best not. There’s always someone local on a visit. We need anonymity.” I squeeze his thigh. “Head on towards Tipp, next exit from the motorway. I have somewhere in mind.”

The mobile is in my backpack. I take it out, look up a number and make a booking. They know me. My working at the tattoo parlour has brought me some good friends and the occasional lover. Alice has a life, unlike Mary.

“That’s us all set, baby. We’ll take a few days out until things have died down a bit.”

John nods in agreement. The muscles in his leg flex under my palm as he changes gear around the twisting roads. I think about all the things that I will do to him, all the things I like and anything he asks. I have to have him totally in my power for what I will ask on our return.

His sedate driving suits this route. We reach the village of Golden.

“Let’s take a break here, John. I’d like to see the river.”

“Good idea.” He pulls the car over just before the bridge. “This looks like a handy place.”

We step out to the sound of crows in the trees. I take John by the hand and lead him across to the middle of the bridge where the castle ruins stand on the river island. We clamber over the wall, past the bronze bust of Thomas MacDonagh on his stained pedestal and amongst the mossy medieval stones of the keep.

I know John’s story. When he stands on the promontory of the island, facing upstream, a warm breeze in his face, I know what he’s thinking. The green and golden weed undulates below the glassy surface.

The flow of water is cool but slow as I step into it. My sandals sink down to the river bed of the shallow Suir, wetting above my knees but not yet cleansing our union from the station. The weed strokes my calves, I imagine in the way that my hair strokes his body in bed.

There’s no need for me to call his attention. He steps down from the rock island and takes me around the waist, looks into my eyes. I manage a nod, close to swooning. He sweeps me off my feet like a child and plunges me below the surface. My limbs are inert. I open my eyes and see his rippling face above me, settling into a clearer picture as the water calms. He looks grave, messianic. Then, the pressure of his arms on my body and a strength that I couldn’t fight if I wanted to.

He lifts me back up into the air. The cotton of my blouse and skirt clings to my skin. I’m cleansed. John’s arms envelop me and I hug him around the chest.

“Hey!” a fisherman calls from the far bank.

John waves a hand to the angler and then leads me back up onto the island.

“Sit here in the sun and I’ll fetch your bag from the car. I won’t be a minute.”

I slip off a sandal and remove strands of translucent weed, entangled in the straps. The thrill of my baptism is still keeping the chill at bay. Water trickles from my hair, down between my breasts.

“Here, sorry I don’t have a towel.”

I take the backpack with one hand and place his palm on my wet throat, sliding it down.

“In there. I’ll get changed in there.” A stone doorway behind him leads to a small chamber in the ruined castle.

Dog roses climb the walls of the keep and yield their pink scent to the late spring sun. John blocks the doorway for privacy. I unpack a simple blue cotton dress and lay it upon the ancient stone table in the room. Then I roll the wet blouse over my head and unfasten the wrapped skirt. It’s very cool out of the sun and my skin turns to gooseflesh.

His hands are warm on my skin as he gives up his guardian post and I pull him to me. I raise a leg, place my foot on the stone table and let him taste me there for the first time since my rebirth.

It’s not all about sex. It’s also about death. But I leave the knowledge of the dead to Mary, and Mary has left us.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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Renée and the whole weight of everything

An extract from Peril by Ruby Barnes
They tell me nothing can be done. I had already sensed it. I’ve long expected the return of my old enemy.

In the dusty corners of my mind there’s a vague recollection of mum and dad having a particular argument. It would have been before I started school. The exact words elude me, so I’ll fill in the blanks.

‘Not now, Andy. For Christ’s sake, not now of all times!’

Dad says nothing for a while but his silence is like a great wet towel, laid upon us. I’m in my bedroom, kneeling on the bed and listening hard through the wall. I hear a wardrobe door opening, the clatter of coat-hanger hooks and then two clicks. He’s going on another trip and that brings a smile. Presents, he always brings me presents after a trip.

‘For pity’s sake!’

And then comes dad’s voice, impossibly deep and deliberate compared to mum’s shrieking. Not that her shrieking alarms me, it’s commonplace in our house.

‘Linda, we both know it would be better if I went. Better for all of us.’

‘Run away then. Go on. Leave the whole weight of everything on me.’

The last phrase is verbatim. For a long time I imagined mum was lying on the bed, underneath something heavy, and she needed dad’s help to get the heavy thing off her. Like the way people were tortured, in olden times, by placing heavy stones on their chest until they betrayed their king or confessed to witchcraft or died. I had to endure my own personal torture before realising the whole weight of everything was actually me.

‘Your father’s gone on a trip.’

‘He’ll bring me the swing-ball this time. I know he will. He always knows what I want. I love daddy. And you mummy. But daddy brings me stuff.’

‘Yes sweetheart. I don’t know about the swing-ball. It’s not the season.’

‘What does season mean?’

It was a season of sickness that fell upon me like Autumn. First a chill and a damp feeling in morning’s first breath. Then, like the leaves, my hair began to fall. A common nightmare for children and adults alike is their hair comes out in clumps when they brush it. For me it’s a memory. My flaxen strands were all over the house.

‘Mummy, what’s happening to my hair?’

‘Don’t worry sweetheart. Our bodies change. Look at James next door, his teeth are falling out. Doesn’t that look funny? But he’ll grow new teeth and you’ll grow new hair.’

My body changed. The little fat tummy dad used to pat and say ‘chocoholic, just like your mother’. My tummy vanished as if dad had taken it with him. My appetite for chocolate and just about everything else left me for good. Perhaps the trigger for hunger had been surgically removed, along with the tumour, from my four-year-old stomach.

In teenage and adult years I was often mistaken for anorexic and then later, when the trend in popular disorders changed, bulimic. Even today, eating remains a mechanical task I can easily neglect.

Dad did visit me in the hospital. I think he did. That’s the way I remember it anyway. Mum maintains he didn’t, he was too busy chasing young skirt, enjoying his new-found freedom. She remained bitter about him up to her death last year. Had I ever managed to persuade her to visit a psychiatrist, I think she would have finally articulated the thoughts that had buried her motherly love. Dad left because of me. She lost her youth and beauty because of me. It was all my fault. Then she’d have seen it wasn’t, and we might have had peace with each other.

When I came home from hospital, dad wasn’t there. But he did visit and he did bring the swing-ball and set it up in my bedroom, much to mum’s disapproval. I watched him bat the thing around like a maniac and laughed for the first time since he had left.

The next year I started in school and the whole weight of everything placed itself on my shoulders like a greatcoat.

‘My mum says you had cancer.’ It was Tim Steele in the playground. An over-energetic lad was Tim, these days probably diagnosable with some anachronisable syndrome.

Most of the other kids looked at me like I was a leper, but I carried on skipping and chasing with the two girls who lived in my street. They knew it wasn’t catching. Tim caught up with me after school the next day, just the two of us in an alleyway between brick classrooms.

‘Renée? What kind of a name is that? Your dad foreign, is he? My mum says he lives in another country.’

Tim seemed to have more information about my family circumstances than I did. I said nothing but didn’t run away.

‘Mum says they cut it out in the hospital.’ He pointed at my stomach. In hindsight, I’m not sure Mrs Steele had my best interests at heart. ‘D’you have a scar? Can I see?’

For the first, but not the last time, I unwisely bared myself. The girls’ uniform was a grey jumper with a white blouse and I also had on a vest. I pulled the whole caboodle up and over my face.

‘Those are called nipples,’ Tim said, the tip of his cold finger touching on my chest. ‘I don’t see a scar.’

‘There.’ I put a hand down and pointed to the one-inch line to the right of my belly-button.

‘There? Does it still hurt? Can I touch it?’

‘It was a bit sore for a while but not now.’

He ran the pad of his thumb over the smooth scar. I lowered my clothes and he gave me a smile. Then he punched me in the stomach and ran off.

‘That’s what boys do when they like a girl,’ mum explained after I had run home crying. ‘The more they like you the more they try to hurt you.’

‘Does daddy try to hurt you?’

‘Your father has hurt me, sweetheart, and I’m not sure it’ll ever get better.’

She was being melodramatic, I realise now. At the time I thought the noises I had heard, the quiet whimpers and the mysterious rhythmic thumping that used to come from my parents room when dad had lived there, must have been dad punching mum repeatedly in the stomach.

Tim Steele and I became school-friends. He sat next to me on my table in class. His mother may have had the loosest tongue in Cheshire, but Tim never shared what we talked about. It was through talking to Tim I came to realise dad had left because of me. I donned the whole weight of everything without question. Mum didn’t do much to alleviate the misconception.

 It suited her to blame the failed marriage on my cancer rather than on her relationship with dad.

When I reached my teens dad began to talk to me in earnest. He had moved to Ireland and I was visiting him in Waterford when he first broached the subject, in a café on the quay.

‘You do know why your mother and I split up, don’t you?’

I had been trying to elicit some disclosure from him but now he was about to tell me to my face I was the cause I baulked.

‘I don’t really want to talk about it, dad. At least, not now. Maybe when I’m older.’

‘You are older, Renée. Listen, your mother and I were having problems before you got sick. You mustn’t think we split up because of your cancer.’

‘I don’t. Don’t be silly, dad.’ But I was crying into my milkshake.

‘I know it looks like I did a terrible thing, leaving you at that time.’

‘Yep.’ I could hardly speak without totally losing it.

‘You’ll find out for yourself, not all relationships are forever. Your mother and I, well, we reached the end of our respective tethers long before then.’

I looked out of the café window at the old-fashioned high masts and furled sails at their moorings. It was Waterford’s turn to host the Tall Ships Race. We were there for dad, he had an interest in sailing.

‘You mean your relationship had run its course? What, before I was born? So why did you have me at all, then?’

It was worse than I thought. My painful existence had been unwanted from the start. Why hadn’t mum had the unborn me removed like a tumour?

‘No, no. We began to drift apart a couple of years after you were born, when I started to travel with the job. Some things went on. I’m not proud of my behaviour, but your mother was no angel.’

It sounded like I was about to get a full and sordid confession but I managed to halt it with a raised teenage hand.

‘It’s unfortunate we came to a crisis point just when you were diagnosed.’

‘Unfortunate? UNFORTUNATE?’

The few other customers in the shop looked around at us. They saw a father enduring a tantrum from his teenage daughter. I saw a bastard that had abandoned me in my hour of mortal need.

‘Please, Renée. I’m trying to explain.’

I could only nod.

‘I think I made a mistake in going when I did.’

‘You think you should have stayed with us?’

‘I should have taken you with me. No, that wouldn’t have worked. Your mother would never have….’

He was confused about how he would have rewritten history.

‘Listen, dad. I haven’t had a bad childhood. I hardly remember the cancer. I missed you when you weren’t there but that made our times together even more special. I have friends at school that have lived through terrible divorces. For what it’s worth, I think you did the right thing.’

‘You’re probably right. You’ve a wise old head on young shoulders, Renée.’

It’s what comes of carrying the whole weight of everything.

‘Did you never think of getting back with mum at all?’

‘No. We still had some feelings for each other but, well, no.’

I had blurry recollections of mum and dad having stomach-punching sessions, post-separation, on one or two occasions, such as at Christmas time. It made me shudder. At thirteen, sex was lurking menacingly in the shadows.

‘Sorry, Renée. The point I want to make is this. I didn’t leave because of you. I didn’t leave because of your cancer. I left because your mother and I didn’t want to live together any more, under any circumstances.’

I put my hand over his and forced a smile. Even through the lens of puberty, I knew my mother could be difficult. And I knew there had been an Uncle Jim and, later, an Uncle Pat, neither of which were blood relatives.

But dad seemed under the illusion he had taken the burden from my shoulders and thereby healed any damage. His motivation for our little chat may have had an element of selfishness.

Years later a psychiatrist explained to me the lasting damage that had made my character ‘needy’, as she called it. An ancient peasant becomes bent and stiff from years of pulling his primitive plough through the unyielding soil, but if you retire that plough then the peasant remains bent and stiff. Then, in order to make sense of his stature, knowledge of the plough is required. Even then the peasant might never fully regain his posture. ‘Needy’ is also the word Ger uses from time to time when I say we don’t see enough of each other. I haven’t told Ger about my personal plough.

~

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The above is an extract from Peril.

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Ger Mayes is born.

This is where it all started, the whole Ger Mayes / Ruby Barnes / Turnip carry-on. Heuston Bridge over the River Liffey in Dublin, 2007. First week of a new job in the capital. The ideas for a novel that had been swirling around in my head were catalysed by an Eastern European beggar with one shoe and a crutch. The other foot, in a big woolly sock, displayed as a lure for alms. On the next day he had swapped over feet. I wanted to laugh out loud, this was the worst beggar I'd ever seen. But I gave him five euro. Everyone else walked in a big arc around him and I soon learned that was what you did. Eyes straight, step aside, don't get run down by the tram.

Then there was an argument between the socked beggar and a drug addict beggar who wanted the pitch. Guards appeared to calm the fray (Garda Síochána  = police). The Irish addict prevailed.

On the next day the Irishman appeared with a badly beaten face and the day after he didn't appear at all.

People wash up, down river, or disappear never to be seen again. Beggars step into a big old Mercedes after a day pleading for coins at the traffic lights. There's an underworld in the cities.

The novel came gushing out, like the urgent flow of the Liffey after a rainstorm. Gerard Mayes (Ger, pronounced Jer, common name in Ireland). A man like any other. No, an anti-hero. Self-serving, a slacker like the Big Lebowski but with a day job. Then he kills a street dweller and life falls apart.

Why did I write this novel as Ruby Barnes instead of Mark G Turner?

Because:

• Mark Turner is a world famous jazz saxophonist Mark Turner (jazz saxophonist) 
• Mark Turner is an academically renowned cognitive scientist, linguist and author Mark Turner (cognitive scientist)
• Mark Turner is a very common name that means hammer woodcraftsman
• I'm one, only one, of the three above. Ball pein, my wife says. Her puns always hit the nail on the head
• as a tribute to my late grandfather, Robert 'Ruby' Barnes
• to throw folks off my scent!

You may be right, I may be crazy. But I just might be the lunatic you're looking for (thanks BJ for that immortal line).

~~~~~~~~~~

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