"You're gonna meet some headcases on this shift!" said Liam, the
night manager.

I didn't know if this was a threat, a warning, or a promise. It was my first time on the nightshift in the twenty-four hour shop and my main worry was staying awake until eight o'clock in the morning. I wasn't able to really think about anything else.

After a few weeks, I had met most of the headcases. Some were junkies, prowling the streets, looking for sweets from their candyman. Others were gamblers, coming home from all-night poker dens. We also got the lonely bed-sit insomniacs, getting up out of bed and walking all the way to the shop, just to talk to someone, anyone, if only for a few seconds. Then there were the thin, pale students, taking a break from their crammed, night-before study sessions, just popping over for cigarettes, coffee, or energy sweets. Anything to keep them going.

A few of the headcases stick out in my mind.

One was Fr Jameson, as we used to call him. He had what is
diplomatically referred to as a "drink problem". Technically, our off-licence shut at eleven o'clock - firstly because that was the law, and secondly because if it didn't, we'd have all the drunks of the night queuing outside the shop at all hours - but it would stay open for special customers.

Fr Jameson was one such special customer. He was a nightcrawler. He was stationed at the local house of some religious order or other. The first night I met him, he asked for a bottle of wine. A nod from Liam indicated that it was okay to serve him.

As I packed the bottle of wine, Fr Jameson began a story of how the bishop was calling up to the house at eight o'clock in the morning, and was fond of a wee sup of wine, and didn't he, God have mercy on his forgetfulness, completely forget to get in a bottle of wine, and wasn't it the mercy of God that there was a shop still open where he could get a bottle, so His Eminence, God bless his sacred station, wouldn't have to face the day without his little glass, and only he got this bottle, ha ha ha, he could just see His Eminence trying to emulate his beloved Saviour by blessing the water and hoping it would turn into wine, but now, thanks to this bit of God's luck, His Eminence wouldn't have to resort to such drastic measures, and the blessings of God on you, son, and may you never have to spend a minute in Purgatory.

It was when he told me variations on this story four nights running that I realised he had a drink problem. Night after night, Fr Jameson would walk out of the shop cradling his beloved bottle in his arms, looking as satisfied as the good shepherd who had just found the lost lamb.

Another character who livened up our dull hours was Professor Screwball, a once-gifted academic who had somehow slipped off the rails. No one knew his real name; all we knew were the rumours that he had once lectured in Oxford. A highly learned and well-read man, he was one of those eccentric geniuses, the cracked Einsteins, who come across as being totally and utterly insane. He usually came in to buy the early editions of the papers, and to give spontaneous and completely incoherent lectures based on the newspaper headlines. A bizarre character, I was sure there was an epic tale to tell about him.

However, it is not his story I wish to tell.

The person I want to tell you about was the godfather of the headcases, Mad Mick. His real name, I discovered, was Michael McDonald, but to us, and everyone in the area, he was known simply as Mad Mick.

He was about fifty, small and skinny, with slightly greying black hair. He always wore the same faded blue suit. His eyes were perpetually bloodshot, and his face had that whisky expression of bemused indifference. Most nights, a cigarette dangled precariously from his lip, causing one of his long-suffering eyes to droop, shielding itself from the smoke.

I remember the first time I met him. I had been on the night-shift for three weeks. It was a quiet, dead mid-week night, and a bored silence had descended on the shop floor. We were all lost in our own worlds, patiently waiting for something, anything, to happen.

And then it did.

"God bless you all, and protect this hallowed establishment!" roared a drunken voice from the street. In he stumbled, clutching an empty bottle of whisky, smiling to the world in general, and to himself in particular.

"Good evening to you, Mick" said Liam, smiling. "Have you had a good night?"

"A rare night!" declared Mick, with conviction. "A night to remember, if my memory isn't shot by morning. And I'll do it again tomorrow night, and the night after that, and every night until they throw me out of the place. But I'll put up a struggle. I won't be easily beat. I'm not the sort of person who..."

He had just noticed me. He stared in drunken confusion for some seconds.

"You're new here! What are you doing here? I've never seen you before! Where did you pop up from?"

Liam nodded to me, indicating I should answer all Mick's questions, otherwise he'd pester me all night. And it wasn't enough for me to tell him my name. By the time he left the shop ten minutes later, he knew where I lived, where I came from, what my parents did for a living, where I went on my nights off, who I was going out with, what I thought about the political situation, which football team I followed, and how many spoons of sugar I took in my coffee. He was fascinated by everything I said, mentally scratching it down. I thought he'd have forgotten it all by next morning. However, the next night he came in, he was able to repeat everything I had said to him.

Most nights, he was in good form. He'd have some bizarre story to relate, or some mad theory to explain. Some nights, he'd tell us about his friends, some living, some dead, some apparently both. Other nights, he'd repeat the banter that had flowed in the pub a few hours ago.

Other nights, politics would be on his mind, and he'd give a cynical begrudger's summary of the political situation. He rarely talked about his childhood, though. He often had Zen-like debates with Professor Screwball, the two of them getting irretrievably lost in the own meandering streams of consciousness. I thought his memory probably could not extend back that far. Other nights, he would be less agreeable. He would get into arguments with staff and customers alike.

One night in particular I remember. It was during the ecstasy scare in Dublin. The papers were full of reports about the latest teenage death from the drug. A middle-aged, respectable-looking woman got talking to me about it. She blamed society.

"Society, is it?" roared Mick. I hadn't noticed him coming in. I could see he was in a bad way; there was a thunder cloud on his face and it had to rain on someone. The middle-aged woman was the unfortunate candidate.

"Society is to blame?" he ranted. "That's all you hear today. Let's all blame it on society. There's something wrong with society. Everything is society's fault. Who the hell is society? I'd love to meet him, give him a piece of my mind. He's got a lot to answer for. Why don't they arrest him, if he's guilty of so much? Why don't they stand him in the dock. 'Society, you stand accused of everything! You are guilty of every crime that has ever been committed. I sentence you to death!'

"Don't give me that rubbish about society! It's people who are to blame. It's people who commit the crimes, and it's people who now get away with them. No one is accused of anything anymore. No one ever has to stand in the dock. All because everyone blames society. To hell with society!"

The middle-aged woman scampered out of the shop, never to be seen again.

Mick was obsessed with religion. At times, I got this image in my head of Mick being some fire-and-brimstone preacher gone to rot. He'd always bring up religion. He believed that he had a personal contract with God. "Don't worry about me, son, God will look after me. He'll make sure no one hurts me. No one!"

He was fond of quoting the bible whenever he felt he was on the defensive. He knew his bible well, and loved to tell the stories about the outcasts, the lepers, the prostitutes, the tax collectors, those for whom Jesus had a special love. "When no one else loves you, Jesus loves you. He'll carry you across the sand!" God looks after his children!"

I couldn't help thinking that if God had to spend all His time looking after Mick, He had His work cut out.

Ironically for someone so fond of the bible, Mick had a particular hatred of priests. He'd run to the other side of the street if he saw one approaching. It was a sort of hatred mixed with terror. The Christian Brothers he hated most of all. We never took this quirk too seriously. We would often rouse Mick by telling him there was a Christian Brother hiding down in the store-room. That always guaranteed some entertainment.

"Come out and face me, you coward!", Mick would roar down the shop. "Is it a Christian Brother you are? A brother of Christ? You are a liar. Christ had no brothers! He was an only child. Does the bible mention any of Christ's brothers? You do not know your religion, sir. You are a lying hypocrite!"

Sadly, as the months wore on, Mick began to get more and more difficult. I heard that the drink was beginning to take its toll on his liver, and he was in constant agony. He ignored the doctors and began drinking more than ever. It was obvious that he was on his way out, an old building about to collapse in on itself.

The constant pain meant he was always in foul temper. Gone was the loveable drunk. He became unbearable, forever roaring abuse at all and sundry. You couldn't say a word to him without him biting your head off, eating you raw.

Even his insults became more bizarre. "Brother Gerald will get you yet, me boyo! He'll belt that smile off your smug face. He'll give you bruises that will never wash out!"

It became clear that Mick had gone from being eccentric and harmless to being insane and dangerous. People avoided him on the street. No one made eye contact with him; it was too risky. His mind had become unhinged. He was always snarling to himself, haunted by some particularly vicious ghost. He could be seen throwing thumps at these invisible ghosts as he ran down the street at night. "I'm not beat yet! You'll never beat me!" Soon the ghosts were Mick's constant companions, forever tormenting him.

For us, the final straw came one Thursday night. Fr Jameson was getting his bottle of wine just as Mick came bellowing into the shop. Mick was too busy yelling at his ghosts to notice the priest. It wasn't until Fr Jameson was leaving that Mick set blazing eyes on him.

At first, Mick just roared abuse at the poor priest. Then he tried to attack him, throwing chocolate bars and mineral cans at him. Fr Jameson was soon crouched down in the corner, whimpering. We managed to restrain Mick, and throw him out. Liam chased him down the street, warning him never to set foot in the shop again. Mick went running into the night, still shouting unholy insults against the priest.

Liam apologised to Fr Jameson, who was by now a nervous wreck. He said that he hoped we could still enjoy the pleasure of his custom, despite this unfortunate little incident. As a peace offering, Liam gave the priest a small bottle of whisky for free, "just in case His Eminence might fancy something a bit stronger in the morning."

Soon after that, I quit working in the shop, and never saw Mad Mick again. I assumed that the drink had killed him, that his ghosts had got the better of him.

One day, reading the newspaper, I discovered that Mick was still alive and kicking, and as mad as ever. The paper carried an obituary on a local priest who had died, a Brother Gerald O'Toole, aged eighty-seven. The obituary was the usual nostalgic whitewash. An old man devoted to his vocation. A learned scholar, and once a well-loved teacher. Author of two books on local history. At one time, active in the G.A.A. Very fond of living life to the full. As he got older, he retreated from the public eye, spent his days in quiet solitary devotion and scholarly study. Will be missed by all who knew and loved him. R.I.P. May God have mercy on his eternal soul.

A few days later, I came across a report on his funeral. A bizarre event it turned out to be. It had been pouring rain that day. The sign of a happy corpse, they say. This particular corpse had little to smile about.

As the priest was giving his graveside blessing, a stone suddenly hit the coffin. Everyone was taken aback. Then rocks began raining down on the coffin. A small man, who had been hiding behind a tree, was throwing the stones at the coffin. He was drunk. Hopelessly drunk. He was shouting, raving.

"May you burn in hell, Brother Gerald! Don't think you can escape me. I'm afraid of you no longer. Where's your leather strap now? You can't belt me now! I'll get you yet. You'll never rest in peace. You'll be bawling in your coffin for eternity. You'll be turned away from heaven. They won't let you in. They'll slam the door in your rotten face. The camel cannot pass through the eye of the needle!"

A group of mourners managed to restrain him. He was arrested, and eventually committed to a home. Such was the sad end to Mad Mick.

Or so I thought.

A few months later, Mick re-appeared in the papers. A journalist had been curious about Mick since the fracas at the graveyard. After much harassment, and patience, and hard-neck determination, she finally won his trust. By then, he was a dying man, no longer perpetually drunk, just calm and exhausted, ready to give up the game. It took her many visits to prise him out of his haunted world, and tell his story. And it was some story. Worth all the hours of verbal abuse and sulking. A hard-won story, but one worth winning.

"Haunted For Forty Years" ran the headline over her feature article. A well-written piece about years of systematic mental and physical abuse in a Christian Brothers' boarding school down the country. One priest in particular, Brother O'Toole, had subjected Mick to torture for seven years, making him a nervous and physical wreck.

Although the piece was prone to sensationalism - "dark years of silent screaming"; "men of God doing the work of Satan"; "boarding house chamber of horrors"; - the horror of those years, years that had permanently unhinged Mick's mind, came across. The ghosts that had haunted Mick all these years, that had made him flee to the bottle, had their origin in that boarding school.

Seven years to breed a lifetime of ghosts. Stronger men could have coped with it, could have beaten their ghosts. But Mick was weak. That was why he suffered so much at the hands of Brother Gerald. It was easier to beat the weak ones, the loners; they put up no resistance, were not strong enough to, and suffered in silence. Years and years of silence until the pain became literally unspeakable, so vague and overpowering it could not be expressed or understood anymore. It was always just there, always haunting. Eating into him, as silent as an earthworm, as deadly as a viper. The weak boy battered grew into the weak man broken.

Mick got one of his wishes, though. Brother Gerald would never rest in peace now. His name became a curse. Everyone was so shocked. He was such a nice man. So learned. So loved. Didn't anyone know about what he had done?

Mick knew. Others knew. But no one listened. No one was blamed. No one had to stand in the dock. No one was answerable for anything.

Soon after the feature was published, other former pupils came forward with similar tales. Too many accusations to be ignored any longer. The people were finally listening to Mick.

Some time later, Mick died. The damage to his liver had gone too far. There were too many complications. Nothing could be done. He was a ruin.

At least, in those final months of physical pain, Mick must have found a sort of inner peace. He had told the forbidden story, roared out the unspeakable. He had finally beaten his ghosts. For the first time in his life, he was truly alone.

No one threw stones at Mick's coffin when he was being buried.

No one would deny him access to heaven.

He would rest in peace, slumbering alone in his grave.

Unburdened.

Unfettered.

Unhaunted.

THE END