An extract

Mark O'Halloran

Setting: A hospital room, with bed, table, etc ... Red is seated at end of bed. He is wearing pyjamas of some kind and sports a large bandage on the crown of his head.

My arrival in hospital this last time was some hoopla. Not like before when I was just a no one left on a trolley with a few broken fingers and a bit of concussion. Maybe in overnight for observations. Whose observations? I wasn't asked for mine ever.

This hospital is a shit hole and is an epidemic waiting to happen - I'd've said if I'd been asked but I never was.

Oh but this time it was different. I was head boy, top of the class. I parted the people at casualty like Moses at the Red Sea. People gasped and screamed, blessed themselves ‹and one junior doctor when presented with me turned white, got sick in my lap and passed out. There was no two ways about it‹I was a class A fucking star specimen.

Did I tell you what was wrong with me? No.

Well, you see, my wife had stabbed me through the top of the head with an 8 1/2 inch stainless steel carving knife with a beautiful ornate wooden handle which now protruded through a hole in the top of my cranium. The knife had been my Christmas present to her. I'd gotten it from a catalogue. I think that's what hurt the most. Emotionally that is. Obviously getting stabbed in the head hurts like fuck. But emotionally I'm saying. To have used my Christmas present to her as a weapon against me. Well I thought it was rather thoughtless is all. And I shudder to think what would have happened if I'd bought her a cardigan.

But as can be seen I've made a full recovery. I've always been lucky I guess.

As for herself. Don't think the worst of her. I drove her to it. She didn't have much choice. We've always brought out the wilder side of each other I suppose. Maybe we should never have stuck together, I dunno. It's all academic now anyways.

Mary.

Boys oh boys, it's some temper she has. I'd spotted her ages before we started going out and christened her Mary Motorhead because she was so mad and the name kind of stuck around the town and that's what everyone calls her now. We met when we were in our late teens, nineteen or something. She was a fine looking thing back then, strong and fiery. And although I'm no Quasimodo here‹I had the majority of my hair til my mid-twenties and was a bit slimmer then. Still. I felt that maybe I was getting the best of the bargain here. That she was settling for less. And that annoyed the shit out of me for years. Drove me mad.

We had what you'd call a long courtship. I don't know when we started going out. We kinda fell into it.

Talked about nothing.

Years of weekends in lounge bars and fairgrounds.

Always harbouring the thought that maybe this isn't right for either of us but we just kept going.

Occasionally Mary Motorhead would start ragin and roaring and would peg a huge rock at me or something and I always managed to get out of the way.

I should have read the warning signs I suppose. We even tried splitting up once. A ferocious row outside a chipper during which she called me a useless 5 foot stack of shite and stormed off. We didn't see each other for two weeks and - and I think I fell apart a bit. I felt a black nothing inside me and there wasn't anything new or beautiful and I stopped eating and terrified everyone in town by driving me Cortina too fast.

She apparently was the same.

Like living with a briar - her mother said. Stopped washing, nearly lost her arm to a machine at work. There just didn't seem any reason for anything and it was obvious to everyone that no matter how bad we were together, we were worse apart.

I spotted her the following weekend at the dance and I looked over and they were playing Do You Think I'm Sexy by Rod Stewart and I wiggled my arse over at her and she broke her shite laughing and that was that. We got married by the end of the summer. I guess that's how I asked her - I wiggled my arse - cause neither of us popped the question or anything. We just presumed.

The wedding was a disaster from start to finish. It had been the wettest summer on record and all our photos look like shots from the trenches. Mud to our armpits. It was a small do. About 30 people. Aunts and uncles that neither of us knew and a few close friends. Later, for the afters crowd, there was a band called 'Country Fever' but by that stage me and Mary Motorhead were so legless we couldn't have cared what they were called. And then fights broke out and the Guards were called - not the right way to start.

We woke up in our room the following morning and the place was in tatters. Everything was spilt or broken and there was an empty wheelchair there in the corner and to this day we have no idea where it came from and apparently we had thrown most of our clothes out the window into the garden below. The hotel crowd had picked them up and put them into a bag for us. And when the owner was handing it over, when we were leaving like, she just looks down her nose at us and says - Ye're nothing but Tinkers.

That's not the way good things start.

We did have good times though, oh Jesus we did. Our pre-marriage course was a case in point. A weekend retreat with nine other couples and Fr Padraig. Now I'm not being mean here but Fr Padraig -- if gay was an Olympic sport, he'd win gold for Ireland. Bent as a hook. And here he was trying to teach ten couples, who'd been riding each other on the sly for years anyways, how to have sex. Mary was priceless that weekend. Drinking and singing and cursing and taking the piss and saying the word vulva every chance she could in front of the poor little priesteen. Sure, he didn't know what to do with himself. And I think we still get Christmas cards from one of the other couples every year. Happy Christmas from Pat and Nancy. Or something like that. I wonder has either of them stabbed the other?

So, we settled into a small flat near the Post Office field and got on with our lives. She had her job in the factory until it closed and I did odd jobs. Or to tell the truth I sat on my arse and watched the telly. These, now, were the golden years of mass unemployment when daytime television was top notch. Oprah was in her prime and the future was certain.

Shite but certain.

We went out to the local about four nights a week and on special occasions and I played pool with the lads and Mary sat at the bar, like the queen of the silver dollar and took the living piss out of everyone in town.

We'd go to the cinema about once a fortnight, depending. Adventure stuff and anything with himself in it.

Mary was never one for the films really. She'd get bored easy and often slept right through them. Just to spite me I reckon. That had become our favourite pastime - spiting each other. The more I liked a thing the more Mary decided she disliked it and visa versa. Pushing each other into frenzies of loving and loathing. It appeared that we were beginning to define ourselves in opposition to each other. And so the more I loved films the more she hated them. The more I hated Gay Byrne, the more she thought the sun shone out his arse.

And the more time she spent reading books the more I realised that they were near enough the root of all evil.

I never really got the hang of it. Reading. Never really took to it that easy I suppose. At school there was always some little Christian Brother hanging over my shoulder just waiting for me to be stupid so he could lay into me and consequently books have always given me the heebees. Just the size and the feel‹just holding one and I'm immediately back in that little classroom and the auld smell of dry rot. And I don't know what else. Books have always been used by people to make me feel bad about myself or that I don't belong and I explained all that to her and the next thing is, she's reading for Ireland. Rubbing my nose in it. Watching Folio on the telly‹which without doubt was the most boring programme RTE ever made and that's some claim to fame. But sure as time goes by it gets worse. Books everywhere. I'm sick of it. And the worst of the lot, the one that really gets me going is James Joyce. You'd swear he'd invented a cure for TB the way some people go on about him. They have Joyce cafés and Joyce days and museums and recitals and parades. They've even gone and named the largest car ferry in the world after him. The Ulysses. Twice daily between Dublin and Holyhead.

Rather apt when you think about it really because the only thing he ever did for his country is leave it. No sign of him in the GPO in 1916. Oh lord Jesus no. Too busy sitting on his hole in Italy, tanked up, living off handouts and writing dirty books about his wife's arse.

But try saying that out loud. Bord Fáilte would have you lynched.

And no one has read the damn thing anyway‹except for your man in Dublin, David Norris and sure, that's the reason he's a celebrity.

No, I don't read. I can't. I can't be bothered.

So when people come around saying:

Have you read such and such, it's fabaless.

No, I says, I'm waiting for the movie.

Auld books. Auld dry rot.

And so time ambled on. The two of us beginning to grate on each other. Spending our time either going to the local or sitting at home, her reading a book and me watching the telly with the sound really loud so as to put her off or else me at the cinema, on my own mostly since she discovered literature.

And then one weekend it arrived and changed my life forever. The greatest film ever made, starring the world's greatest actor: The Hunt For Red October.

Mark O'Halloran is from Ennis, County Clare. An actor and playwright, he wrote and starred in the award-winning film Adam and Paul in 2005.