Season 1 - Episode 2 

Handy Andy Takes The Test

I suppose the first thing we should do, like, is a bit of “scene setting”.

It’s Monday, December 2nd, 1985, 36 days after the Zombie Corkcopalypse. Or ZC+36 as they say, and “de shamblies” (the zombies) and “de nonzos” (the non-zombies) are co-existing happily — for the most part — in this alternative Cork universe.

To be precise, it is 10:48 on a typical manky, grey, and wet morning in Cork. We’re “out da” Driving Test Centre on the Sarsfield Road, where Willie Turner, the principal nonzo protagonist of this ongoing soap opera, works as a tester.

To be honest, although he’s a nonzo Willie looks “a bit of a zombie”. He is a rake-thin, sickly lad with bulging eyes, thin lips, prominent gums, and a hairline so far back it reaches last week.

He’s a quiet lad, just turned thirty, who wouldn’t say boo to a fly. The type who worries about everything, but as our story unfolds, we’ll see he has a lot more to worry about than most.

Completely lacking in self-esteem, in this day and age he’d probably be regarded as a bit of a “pussy”. If he was on social media, he’d be the guy with no friends and no likes. But I’m getting sidetracked here. Back to the story.

Willie, wearing a navy anorak, the freshly laundered white polyester shirt his wife ironed for him that morning, and a clip-on tie, is in the waiting room, reviewing the paperwork before taking his next candidate — a zombie named Dave “Handy Andy” Crummie — out on the road. In Cork everyone has a nickname. Some nicknames are more obvious than others. You’ll learn how Dave got his later.

He’s fairly well preserved for a shamblie. If Dave was a sausage you’d say he was at the “well-past- the-best-before-date” rather than at the “stinking-up-the-fridge” stage.

Willie’s colleague Leonard Mackey, A.K.A. “Lenny the Mac”, comes into the waiting room slamming the door behind him. He’d just finished conducting a driving test, clipboard under one arm, Da Paper under the other. Lenny is a complete langer.

“Boy! I wouldn’t have given that fella a licence to push a pram, let alone drive a car,’ he quips.

“Oi, Morehead,” he barks at Willie, “I’m going to the jacks. If my 11 o’clock arrives, tell him I’ll be delayed until I achieve splash-down.” He then disappears chuckling behind a door marked “Staff Only.”

“I thought your name was Turner?” Dave asks, confused.

Willie gives a dismissive shrug without looking up from his paperwork.

“I've me licence for years, but they're makimg all zombies do the test again.”

It’s a common complaint. Willie hears every other day.

“Dave, I know this. I’m a Driving Tester.”

“Blind discrimination. Dat's what 'tis. D'ya know, like?” Dave protests. “Never mind the fact that me insurance has gone ballistic!”

“Yeah, well, statistically zombies are more likely to be involved in accidents than normal people…”

“Ah, that’s a load of ol’ bollocks,” Dave barks. “It’s just a money racket. Discrimination and exploitation, like!”

“Look, I get it, Dave. Seriously. My wife and kid are zombies.”

“Wha'?! Jeez. I didn’t know that. Sorry, boy. I wasn't givin' out to you. I was just lettin’ off steam,” Dave said, a bit embarrassed.

"S'alright, Dave," Willie nods.

Lenny emerges from the jacks. Clearly it was a false alarm.

“Yeah. Turner’s a corpse jockey,” he remarks smugly.

The term referred to a rather seedy aspect of the Corkcopalypse, whereby sex tourists from all over the country, and indeed from further afield, were coming to Cork to ride zombie women and indeed men. Not having the distinctive Cork genetic defect, these people were immune to the zombie affliction and could not be turned. They were viewed as predators and known locally as “Corpse Jockeys”.

Willie had worked in Ford’s as a fitter before they shut down in 1984, and used to get an awful time from his workmates. They were always taking the piss out of him for his premature baldness, his big ears, his funny nose, or his massive feet. He just wanted to be accepted as one of the lads, so he kept his mouth shut. But deep down it hurt like hell. They thought they were just having a laugh and Willie seemed to take it all in his stride. In this day and age it would be called workplace bullying.

When he got laid off, Willie retrained as a driver tester and got a job at the test centre in Sarsfield Road. By pure coincidence his chief tormenter from the Ford’s days also worked there. The aforementioned, Lenny Mackey, and for a year and a bit the unrelenting piss-taking continued day after day after day. Lately, Lenny’s snide remarks were about  Aggie, Willie’s zombie wife, or The Tot, his freaky little zombie kid.

(Find out more about how Willie’s wife, Aggie, and his kid got turned in the upcoming episode — “How the Tot was Begot.”)

This time Lenny had gone too far. Willie snapped, like!

“Lenny,” he said, “if you so much as mention my wife or kid ever again, I swear to God I’ll stick me foot so far up your hole you’ll be tasting toe-jam for weeks! D’y hear me?”

Willie normally spoke in a soft monotone voice. Perfect for a driving tester: “turn-left-at-the-next-traffic-light, pull-up-to-the-kerb, mind-that-open-manhole.” So when he raised his voice like this it was very dramatic. Lenny was rocked on his heels.

“I was only joking, boy. Take it easy.”

“I said, did ya hear me?”

By now he was right up in Lenny’s face and Dave thought he was going to deck him.

Lenny went white as a sheet. Like he might have dropped that shit he had just postponed in his underpants. Now, that would have been some splash-down!

“Yeah boy, I’m sorry Willie. Seriously.”

“Right,” Willie said. “Now feck off.”

“And your fly’s open!” he shouted after him, as Lenny sloped off to the car park fumbling with his zipper.

Our Willie might be a bit of a pussy, but when it comes to his wife and kid, he’s a feckin’ tiger. God bless him!

Dave was impressed. He could barely keep the smirk off his face.

“Right, Dave,” Willie said in his monotone, as if nothing had happened, “are you ready to go?”

“Sir! Yes sir!” Dave responded, clicking his heels and saluting.

Minutes later they were on the road, and Willie quickly recognised that Dave was a perfectly competent driver. Dave was right — making zombies redo the test was a money racket.

“Pull in at the next left please, Dave, and we’ll execute a three-point turn in the cul-de-sac.”

Dave checked his rear-view mirror, flicked on his indicator, and took the turn.

“Right, Dave. In your own time, can you please do a three-point turn for me?”

“No problem, boy,” Dave said, and went through the motions. Now, back in the late eighties, power steering was not fitted as standard on most cars, so making a three-point turn required a fair bit of physical effort. Besides that, Dave was driving a battered 1976 Ford Escort. He hauled the wheel one way, then the other, and finally straightened her out. On the last twist, Willie heard a distinct crack and noticed Dave wince slightly.

“That was perfect, Dave,” Willie said. “Are you alright, boy?”

“Yeah, I’m grand. No worries,” Dave replied. Clearly he was not, but off they went.

Nowadays Cork is full of roundabouts, including the notorious magic roundabout on the Kinsale Road, where lanes seemed to appear out of nowhere and disappear just as suddenly. Back in the ’80s there was only one roundabout in Cork — “De Wilton roundabout”. Learner drivers dreaded going on it. If you made a mistake on De Wilton roundabout, you’d fail the test. Plain and simple. It was not a mandatory part of the test, and whether or not you had to go on it came down to the tester on the day. On this day Willie had decided to make it part of Dave’s test. De Wilton roundabout held no fear for Dave. He’d been around it before — and after — he became a zombie, a million times. For Dave, it was a piece of piss!

“Right,” said Willie in his monotone voice as they approached the entrance to the roundabout, “I’d like you to go around the roundabout please, giving the correct hand signal as you go.”

“No problem,” said Dave. He wound down the window and put his right arm out to make the hand signal.

“Shit!” said Dave, slightly perturbed.

“Everything OK, Dave?” Willie asked.

“Eh, not really. Me arm fell off,” he said, taking his arm back in the window and showing what was left of it to Willie. Dave was wearing a blue polo shirt, and Willie could see the arm had broken off just below the elbow. He could see the shattered bone, the snotty clots of gunk and the stringy sinews hanging off it.

“Holy Mother of God!” Willie exclaimed, not in his usual monotone.

Dave gestured to the rear-view mirror. Willie looked up to see the arm lying in the middle of the road, in the rain behind them, traffic — including the Wilton bus with its freaked-out driver — desperately swerving to avoid it. Then suddenly the fingers sprang to life, dragging the arm across the tarmac and two lanes of traffic in a desperate attempt to reach the grassy mound at the centre of the roundabout. To poor old Willie, the whole thing reminded him of the crawler from the Alien movie!

“Hang on,” said Dave calmly, steering with his left arm and the stump of his right. “We’ll go round again.”

Dave made a second circuit of the roundabout, and as they came around, they could see the arm had made it to safety — and the hand was giving them a thumbs-up!

“A1!” Sighed Dave in relief.

“We’ll have to get it back,” he said, turning to Willie.

“How are we going to do that?” asked a frantic Willie. “It’s the lunch-time rush. Traffic's insane. It’s pissin’ rain! We can’t stop on the roundabout — someone’ll be killed!”

“I’ll go round again, and you snatch it into the car while we’re still moving,” Dave said matter-of-factly.

“How the hell am I supposed to do that?” Willie exclaimed.

“Easy. You lie across me lap. When we reach it, I’ll open the door and you grab it. We won’t even need to slow down!” Dave grinned. To him, the whole thing was great craic!

And so off they went a third time round. The sight of a battered ol’ 1976 Ford Escort going round the Wilton Roundabout with a nonzo man in the passenger seat — his face buried in the lap of the zombie driver — must have looked a bit suspect!

One irate motorist spotted them and rolled down his window. Angrily shaking his fist, he shouted, “Get a room, ya corpse jockey!!”

They ignored him. They had to concentrate on their mission — the pick-up point was fast approaching.

“Get ready. Get ready. NOW!” shouted Dave. Steering with his stump, he unlocked the door with his good hand. It violently swung open and Willie reached out. If you could have taken a picture, it would have looked like that section of the Sistine Chapel where God reaches out to touch the hand of Adam! Dave’s dismembered hand reached up right on cue and clamped on to Willie’s outstretched fingers, and he snatched the arm into the car. Dave gave a short, sharp stab on the brakes, much to the annoyance of the fella in the Fiesta Ghia behind them, and the door slammed shut. Bam! It was all over in a second, and they barely even slowed down.

Willie lay there in Dave’s lap, clutching his detached member, his heart pounding like the clappers. Dave looked down at him with his bulging yellowy eyes, a massive zombie grin on his face.

“Dowtcha, boy!” he laughed.

Willie would later speculate that the Zombie Tot must have overheard the phrase when he recounted the story to Aggie, and that’s why “Dowtcha Boy!” became the baby’s first and only words.

A few minutes later, they were back at the test centre.

Dave was still buzzin’. Willie had just about calmed down.

“Era, It felt a bit loose during the week, but hauling the steering wheel around for the three-point turn did the real damage.”

“That’s desperate,” Willie said sympathetically.

“Naw, boy, it’ll be grand,” he said, holding up his severed limb. “I’m just glad we got it back before it was rolled over by some lang-ball in a Hi-Ace van!”

“See? Doesn’t hurt a bit,” he said, wriggling the fingers even though the arm was no longer attached to his body. That always freaked Willie out, though he’d seen it many times before — how a severed zombie appendage still functioned after it parted ways from its owner. It was, like, remote control or something!

At least this story had a happy ending. Willie had a sudden flashback to a few weeks previous. A zombie driving test candidate failed to bend down properly when entering his vehicle, cracked his head off the door frame, and sent it tumbling off his shoulders down the test centre car park. That episode did not end so well. Just as the rolling head came to a halt, much to the relief of its owner, another driver returning from his test drove into the car park and over the head, squashing it like a grape — squirting zombie juice all over Willie from head to toe.

It was the first recorded zombie death in Cork. Once the brain is destroyed, that’s it — a Category 1 Zombie Terminal Event, the coroner would call it at the inquest. For everyone who witnessed the event that took a bit of getting over. Willie was still having nightmares..

“When I get home, I’ll lash it back on with a bit of electrical tape. It’ll be fine.”

“Ye sure?” Willie asked with concern.

“Yeah, boy, no worries whatsoever. It’ll all be tickety-boo,” he said with a shrug and a click of the fingers on his severed hand.

“Ah, that’s good so, Dave, ’cause it pains me to say this, but… I’m gonna have to fail ya.”

“Seriously?”

“’Fraid so, Dave.”

“Why?”

“Failure to make a proper hand signal at a roundabout.”

“Yer feckin’ joking me!”

Willie tore the form off his clipboard and, after a brief deliberation, stuffed it into the hand on Dave’s severed arm.