How Soon Unaccountable
Sean Tanner | Tolka Issue Seven, November 2025
First time away from home, first time out of the country, first working holiday, first time in Newquay, first time in England, first time tooling down Main Street with our backpacks hoisted high, legs and tits and ass everywhere you looked. Two young men, best friends, sworn brothers with the stank of Leaving Cert disappointment still on them. Two young men on the cusp of things. What things? All things, all things.
What did we say to each other that first day, in those first moments? I suppose I might have leaned into Gerry and said, ‘Fucking class, isn’t it? I love the atmosphere, sort of a hippy festival vibe going on.’ And then maybe I’d have said something about the women. Because we were teenagers and we were horny. Horny like only teenage boys can be. Maybe I might have bit down on my knuckle and said, ‘Christ, did you see her?’
And Gerry might have said – what? What did Gerry say? Looking back, I don’t think he ever said all that much. Ger was a quiet lad, certainly not given over to bouts of excited gibbering as I was. He would always listen, though, nodding away at my rants, adding in the odd, ‘Yeah, man’, when he could.
We were young and given over to certain clichés of youth. We had recently discovered drugs and drug music and drug culture, and now, with no college and nothing else to make us feel special, we leaned hard into the stoner vibes. Our heroes were the usual suspects, Jim Morrison, Hunter S Thompson, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Jimi Hendrix, William Blake, Charles Bukowski, et cetera. These were our guys. They were all guys. It was 2004 and we felt absolutely no compunction to cultivate any interest in female artists. We were eighteen-year-old boys; feminism was a joke to us. But to be fair, we did love Janis Joplin, and all she had to do to get our attention was drink herself to death.
Please, hold your disdain, we were young. No eighteen year old thinks they’re young, but now, looking up the arse of forty, I know full fucking well how young we were.
I had been putting ‘man’ at the end of my sentences for a while, but Gerry was only beginning to toy with the idea. He couldn’t commit to it. His ‘yeah, mans’ were always tinged with mockery. As if two young feens from Cork had no business with these wanky Californian affectations. This was a fair point, and I wasn’t blind to it either, but I also knew that if you took enough of these fair points on board you ended up in a very small box made entirely of fair points. Sure, Ger would say things like, ‘Blow it, Jim, blow it to the moon and back’, when we listened to The Doors. We would speak like this in spurts, doing our best to ape the Beat poets of the fifties. But I got the feeling that Ger was just performing it for my benefit. I don’t think he could ever connect or expound in any real way with the things he said. Saturating every poetic sentiment in irony was the only way he could get over his embarrassment.
See, Ger was someway normal, and by normal I mean that he was involved in the GAA and played soccer. There was not a lot of scope for sporty lads growing up in Ireland to express California affectations or enjoy poetry. It was as if he was waiting for his GAA team to show up and ask him what he was playing at any given second. I knew deep down that all he wanted was to fit in. I also knew that it was me who perverted this desire within him.
I had no such reservations when it came to spouting shite. I was quite at home with telling Jim to ‘Blow, man, breathe it like fire, to the moon and back, baby’, probably wearing aviator sunglasses, smoking a joint and thinking about what a cool fuck I was. I wanted to be the stoned hippy guy, the philosophical bullshitter, the wild nut, the drugged-out freak. Fuck the man, ya know? This is bat country – break on through.
I was finally free of school and all the laughing cunts within it. I didn’t have to be who they said I was anymore. Now I could be this new thing. The problem was that I was never sure exactly what that new thing should be. Sometimes I felt like a blind person, or a newborn, just groping around in the dark for a personality that wouldn’t fill me with self-loathing. The problem was the coolness paradox: the harder I tried to be cool, the less cool I became.
Those first few weeks in Newquay, we never settled in one place. The hostels were twenty quid a night and that was too much. So we tramped around looking for cheap places to stay. About three weeks into it we started to run out of cash in a bad way. We got jobs, which was against the spirit of the trip, I felt. They were shit jobs where burntout hippies told us what to do. Scullery slaves and deli slaves and glass-collecting slaves were always in demand.
I landed a job at the Atlantic as a kitchen porter, a posh five-star hotel perched on a windswept cliff overlooking the town. I would go to work baked and work away like a limp donkey until one of the managers told me to put some elbow grease into it. I lost that job for missing a shift. I remember my manager’s purple-veined rage as she fired me. I was a little shocked by the genuine hate in her eyes, but I didn’t blame her. She was fifty-odd years old, a lifer at the hotel. I think what maddened her was how lightly I held the job, how little it mattered to me. I knew then that whatever new thing I was striving towards, it was in the opposite direction of whatever sad ride she had taken.
I got another job easily enough.
With the work came a newfound expectation of adulthood. A sense of being entitled to things. A feeling of permission that had not been there before, and it was that energy which charged our late-night conversations, the volume of which would increase by increments with each drink. We’d be sat in the smoking area of some pub called the Red Lion or the Kings Head, drinking that sweet southern Scrumpy, and I’d say something predictably counter-cultural like, ‘Soccer is just something men watch so they have something to talk about, it’s like padding to fill out paper-thin personalities.’ Just a lazy jab at Ger’s connection to normality.
And Ger would return with, ‘No, you don’t get it, man’, the ‘man’ still not sitting comfortably on his lips. ‘Soccer is about family, it’s something that’s passed down from father to son.’
‘Yeah, a social coping mechanism passed down from father to son. Like what would lads talk about if they didn’t have football to talk about? Fucking nothing. They’d be sat there staring into their pints.’
‘So, what’s wrong with talking about soccer, like? It’s an interest. People are passionate about it. They like to discuss it. It’s about more than the score. Every team has its own unique story. There’s age-old rivalries and loyalties. It’s a sort of tribal history. Something that speaks to man’s desire for belonging. Besides, what are they supposed to do? Force out empty talk about the metaphysical nature of society all day? Just straight up pretending to be some enlightened hippie, just endlessly bitching about realness and truth?’
He would do that when he got pissed sometimes – throw the hippy shit in my face. And I’d take another deep swallow of my cider, smiling, beaming, my cheeks full of heat, my eyes bright with fun and my heart brimming with the joy of battle. Because he was right. I was pretending, and so were we all. But the fact that we were even discussing it – these different ways to exist – was the real miracle. And Ger would smile too and quaff a few savage gulps of his own. We would both be happy in our little arguments, the drink filling us up with notions of intellectual grandeur.
Of course, the drunker we got, the less sense we made.
‘Fuck the man, like. The man wants our hearts for his wallet, he wants to cut up our souls into lines and snort them.’ We’d shout at each other and gesture wildly with our hands as we made our demands clear to the universe. Blue veins bulged on our beautiful young necks, beads of salty sweat dangled from our soft lobes.
‘They get you early, when you’re like, six fucking years old, and they put you in school, and you get sorted by the teachers and by the other kids. They put you like a shape into a shape box. Like you’re a triangle. And they push you through the triangle-shaped hole. And they say, “That’s you, now. That’s your box. You stay in that now. And you’ll be fucking buried in it.”’
Then I’d pour some Buckfast into my face and it would dribble down my neck, and I would get a gag reflex and spit some of it up, and we would both laugh. Gerry would say something like, ‘That’s your body telling you not to drink anymore, triangle man.’
And I’d say, ‘Tough shit, body, ’cause you’re getting double for spitting,’ and, later, I’d puke black bile while Gerry laughed, the two sounds mingled and swirled, echoing into the heat of the night like some kind of new wave jazz. Here was youth in all its undying glory: rude red health, perverse and powerful, and dumb, so dumb, dumb as shit, really. But even then, I knew how special it was to have someone you could shout at like that. To shout things you think are true and have other things shouted back at you. All that shouting was a kind of scratching away at the surface of things, and underneath all that was the truth. And it seemed worthy and real and pure to argue about how you could exist in an honest and good way.
We drank the bulk of our money every week and survived on 99p Cornish pasties for breakfast, lunch and dinner. We eventually had to swap from Scrumpy to gut rot wine. The weed had to stretch. The dust had to be scraped from the end of the grinder. Even the stems and every precious leaf went into our mangey joints. It was the hostels that were killing us, the money just wasn’t worth it. I think by then we were having fun, though. The freewheeling spirit of the trip was inside us. There was something to be said for scraping along the bottom like we were. It was kind of freeing, in a way, to have nothing.
I managed the poverty better than Ger, who I caught in a phone booth crying to his mother one day, and it was a shock to see him broken down like that. Ger, who was usually so stoic, who was the stable one, missed his mother. Whereas I missed nothing. I was enraptured by this headlong flight away from my family and all the failures I’d left in my wake.
It was after I had lost my first job that we made the decision to sleep rough. We had a nice spot in mind, a small bird-watching gazebo out on the cliff, about half a kilometre outside town. It was a hexagonal structure with benches on the sides and an overhanging roof. It was out a ways on the headland, beyond the looming Atlantic hotel. Perfect for bird-watching and rum drinking. So we took the forty squid we would normally have used to pay for our hostels and we bought a bag of weed and a bottle of rum. We lay wrapped in our sleeping bags looking out over the ocean at the stars and listening to the howl of the wind and the crash of the waves against the rocks below us.
I remember harping on about the stars because there was no light pollution. Maybe I’d have said something like, ‘Seriously, though, I cannot get over them stars. Were there always so many?’
‘I know, it’s fucking honreal, isn’t it?’
‘Hon-fucking-real, like. I’ve never seen it so clear. Where’s the Plough? Is that the Plough?’
‘No, I think that’s the Plough there.’
‘Oh, fuck it, yeah. Christ, look at it. And the Milky Way, was the Milky Way always like that, it’s fucking luminous. It’s, like, purple and shit.’
‘Honreal.’
‘Yeah, honreal. Is that the North Star there?’
‘I think it’s that one there.’
‘Oh yeah, could be right. I haven’t a clue, to be honest. How come you know so much about it?’
Silence. Then Ger cleared his throat and started to speak very slowly.
‘When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns
before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide,
and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured
with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.’
The silence rang out. I blinked in my highness, then said, ‘What the fuck was that, you absolute fucking legend of a man?’ Because we were young, and all the world was new, and all of art was there and yet to be eaten, all the livid poems we were only just now brushing up against, and they filled us both with wonder and lust and aching wants. What a thing it was to be alive under those stars that night when we still called each other brother.
Ger smiled because he loved it when I called him a legend. He took a drag on the joint and, with a lungful of smoke, squeaked out, ‘Walt Whitman, bro.’
Well, fuck you, too, you fucking cunt. You can’t just casually whip out a poem like that, on a night like this, with weed like that and rum like this. I mean, where the fuck do you get off destroying a man’s soul, just shredding it to absolute fucking pieces with such razor-sharp purity, with such abominable purity, where the fuck do you get off, ha? Fucking hell. You dirty filthy fucking legend.’
Laughter, probably. Ger pretending to apologise, even though we both knew full well he probably googled ‘poems about stars’ before he left home just so he could roll it out at a time like that. Even then we were still casting half winks to each other about the pretentiousness of even looking at the stars in the first place, we weren’t old enough to just look at them.
I’m sure we did commend ourselves, but half jokingly, because we knew we were pretenders. The reality was that we were two middle-class Cork boys doing our best to replicate something that resembled the magic of the sixties and the energy of our heroes, and that was an embarrassing acknowledgement. Two lads who had never been popular in school, reaching now for some sliver of elevation.
I think this self-awareness must have been amplified by the joints. It was often the way with weed. It could convolute even something so simple as looking at the stars.
We lay there watching the sky, smoking and drinking as we liked.
‘Can’t wait to tell the lads back home about this,’ said Ger.
We both laughed because it was exactly what we were both thinking.
‘Do you think, maybe, we are only out here so we have a story to tell the lads back home?’
‘I dunno. Maybe.’
‘Yeah, I dunno either.’
‘Stars are nice, though.’
‘Yeah, that’s it, like. It’s not like the stars aren’t nice. I mean, look at them, and look at us. But the story about this happening, or maybe even just the achievement of having had such a great night is almost better than the stars, you know.’
‘Fuck, I know like. That’s kind of sad, isn’t it? That the story we will tell about the stars is more exciting to us right now than—shooter!’
‘Ah, fuck, I missed it.’
‘Keep watching, man, they’ve been blasting all night. Here, give us a gat of that rum. Do you want to skin another?’
‘W J D.’
What would Jim do.
That was the night we met Ronnie. Ronnie was the homeless man who slept on the other side of our gazebo. He was old at fifty. Red-faced and purple-nosed, a spider web of varicose veins and all that shit. He slept in an old tent someone gave him, or, rather, he slept with the old tent wrapped around himself like a blanket. Then he would snug himself under the bench. He was from Newcastle, he said, and you could hear it in his accent. He was drunk when he came over to chat with us. We gave him a smoke, and he told us his life’s story. Again, there was the awareness, a kind of glee that came with the attainment of such a unique experience, even as the conversation was unfolding we were both aware that it was another great story for the lads.
‘I used to be a kitchen porter. That’s my trade. I did an interview at the Atlantic, but the bastards never got back to me. But it doesn’t matter. My brother’s coming up to get me soon. He’s coming up next week. I’m going home then. Can I have a drink of that?’
Next week Ronnie was still there. ‘I’m not an alcoholic, ya know. I know I drink a bit, but I’m not an alcoholic. My brother’s coming up to get me.’ He’d come chat with us most nights. ‘Ye are good lads, a good pair of lads.’
One day he came over his face all lit up. ‘Lads, you will never guess what I found.’ His eyes were wide. ‘I was walking along Towan beach, just walking along and I sees this wallet in the sand. I just sees it lying there, and boys, you’ll never guess how much was in it.’
‘Jesus, Ronnie, how much did you find?’
‘You’ll never guess, boys, you never will.’
By the way his face was lit up with sheer amazement, you’d think the man had found a few grand.
‘Ninety pound!’ he whispered it.
‘Ninety pound?’
‘Ninety. Pound!’ He could barely speak for the excitement.
‘Wow, Ronnie, that’s great, man, a real find.’
‘I can’t believe it. Ninety pound! Ninety pound, boys.’
We stayed there another week and Ronnie was still there, no sign of his brother, though he assured us he was coming, and he assured us he was not an alcoholic.
Then one night, Ronnie came back from the town late. It was a wet night, no stars, and no money for rum. We were laying there dully sober, trying to sleep. Ronnie came over, absolutely mouldy drunk. ‘Yis are good boys. I says to the lads in town, that yis are a nice pair. Offt, lads, I was coming home and I seen all them girlies coming out the club with their lovely tits out, ooh, lads. We can get some rope, lads, tie them up, bring them back here. Yis are good lads, aren’t ye, lads? Tie them by the legs and around the ankles, good strong knots and a gag for the mouth. I’m good with knots, lads.’
I tried to laugh it off. Like maybe he was just joking around. But he just stood there waiting. ‘We’re just going to try and get some sleep, Ronnie.’
He stood there swaying in the wind, like some ancient pine about to topple. ‘My brother’s coming to get me.’
‘OK, Ronnie.’
The drinking lost some of its lustre then; so did sleeping rough. We bought a tent and started camping around the fields and the mountains for another week or so, but the cliffs were too cold and we had nowhere to wash, and shitting in the high grass of a dewy morning, mind fucked with a hangover, was stressful. So we decided to fork out for a campsite, and it was there we would spend the rest of our summer.
It was a nice spot just outside of town. It had flower pots and friendly geese that wandered the grounds. It had hot showers, washing machines and an on-site internet café. There was even some kind of cabaret across the road. I seem to remember feeling relaxed there. It was a relief not to have to worry about being moved on, about the rain, about someone nicking your stuff. We still drank and smoked, but our sessions had lost some of their initial savagery.
I saw Ronnie another couple of times after that. Wandering about the town, his face bloated and beet red. His cracked lips silently mouthing some secret mantra to himself over and over. I watched him, wondering if early on in his life, somebody had told him who he was, maybe his parents or his teachers or the laughing cunts at school. Had they put him in a box that he’d never quite managed to find his way out of?
I waved to him from across the street, but he didn’t seem to notice. He just kept on walking, his mouth working, his eyes glued to the ground, searching for that next miracle.
‘How Soon Unaccountable’ was first published in Issue Seven of Tolka (May 2024). You can subscribe to Tolka for a year for €22.
Sean Tanner’s work has appeared in the Irish Times, the Irish Independent, the Stinging Fly, the Moth, the London Magazine, and others.
