Cassandra Voices

Category: Fiction

  • Manus in Seomra Spraoi

    Seomra Spraoi was a hub of resistance. The space was located just off the quays close to Dublin’s city centre. It was used to organise campaigns against, Shell oil’s Mayo pipeline, the World Bank and the deportations of non-nationals, among many other worthwhile causes.

    It is hardly surprising Seomra Spraoi was closed down under ‘fire regulations’. It had probably only been allowed to stay open for as long as it did due to a lack of visibility. No one caused trouble, there were no fights and the Gardaí were never called out over loud music late at night, until they were one night.

    When they came over they were not overly-impressed with some of the anti-capitalist and anti-police posters. Perhaps they began to perceive the space as a possible threat. In any event, Seomra was closed down under fire regulations a few days later.

    But that’s just political spiel. Seomra Spraoi was also a social centre. A place where personal stories unfolded.

    *******

    Manus had just finished with a relationship. The woman had moved out and even though he had custody of the child for more than half the week he still felt a yawning gap in his life. Even more so when the child, Shirifa, went to her mothers.

    Mentally, physically, and economically, Manus couldn’t afford the pubs, and while he could pass the time reading and writing, he still craved human contact.

    For Manus, Seomra Spraoi was manna from heaven. A; social club/drop in/resource centre, not-for- profit, non-hierarchical, and run for and by the people who used it. Those were the ideals to which the centre aspired. Of course ideals and humans don’t always get along perfectly together. It’s hard once you’ve invested time and energy into creating and maintaining something to think of it in any other way than as your baby. It may belong to everyone, but it still belongs more to you. Unofficial hierarchies and cliques seem to evolve naturally regardless of ideology. But having said that the centre did its best, and its best was pretty good.

    Sundays had activities specifically catering for kids but it was child-friendly in general.

    Shirifa loved it.  Even when there were no people her own age the older people took an interest in her, made allowances for her and in general showed her the respect we are all due.

    There is an old African saying, ‘it takes a whole village to bring up a young person’, and Seomra Spraoi was as close to a village as could be found anywhere in Dublin. Manus was enjoying bringing her up in the right type of atmosphere. An atmosphere of mutual respect.

    It was in Seomra Spraoi that Shirifa and Manus heard about the protest against the World Bank, and Manus and Shirifa, along with a handful of others, decided to participate.

    ‘We do very well out of it,’ Manus explained to his daughter. ‘It’s  because people in other countries are kept so poor that we are rich.’

    Shirifa nodded her three year old head and looked serious.

    Manus laughed. He wondered about his motivation for attending the protest. There was only a dozen or so people in attendance. Manus wondered about that too. How come there was so few protesting? Did everybody believe the world order was set like concrete and could never be changed? That protest seemed futile. Or did nobody else care that the poorest countries in the world were having to pay the richest countries in the world lots of money, and as a direct consequence thousands of people lived and died with intolerable hardship?

    People’s apathy amounted to criminal negligence. Manus applied uncle Noamy’s example and felt like a German civilian during the Second World War, looking at the smoke coming from chimneys and saying, ‘am I really sure what’s happening in there and even if I was what could I do about it?’

    Manus didn’t feel like he was doing much but he supposed standing in the cold outside a hotel where members of the World Bank were meeting and saying ‘boo’ was better than doing nothing.

    Anyway the protest in Malahide was a day out for Manus and Shirifa.

    After a few hours they headed off for cake and coffee in a café along with two single parent mums and their kids. Manus was a single parent dad and he had to get used to the idea. He had to start looking at other women, or looking for another woman.

    Phrases like, ‘back on the market’, or, ‘on the hunt’, could now be applied to him.

    Mostly he had enjoyed monogamy but he wasn’t cut out for abstinence.

    These women seemed sensitive, intelligent, strong, independent and politically aware lefty types. Manus was pleased to think they existed, and pleased to have their company. He wondered if he would stand a chance with either of them. Either would do, but shouldn’t he have a preference?

    He would have been hard-pressed to decide. He wondered if his need denied him a preference. One of the women appeared more youthful than the other, more impulsive.

    He had vague recollections of other women he had known when he had been younger. Impulsive times.

    Manus wondered what it would be like to live with either of them over a period of years. He had visions of both women wearing completely different faces from the pleasant persona’s they presented at this moment.

    How far away were the faces of anger, resentment  or painful sadness? How long before he would see those faces?

    Manus had made a few quid that morning. It was the first bit of cash he had made in months and he was pleased to have money in his pocket.

    He offered to buy both women their dinners with wine at the café, but they each refused. He didn’t know them that well and they were of a different gender.

    Manus had an easy-come eas- go attitude to money and would have offered to pay for the food and drink regardless. He was pleased to be able to offer and pleased to sit with two adults who brought their kids to protest against the World Bank. But that didn’t take from the fact that he was still a mate-less male and these were two seemingly mate-less females. He wondered if his offer was really him making a play for the women or if he was just being human and wanting to share in his good fortune.

    In any event they had both refused dinner. The single parent mums were younger than him. Everyone was younger than him.

    They all travelled back on the train together. The three lone parents and their three children.

    One of the women told a story about a skeleton that gave one of its bones to make soup, but when the soup wasn’t shared out the skeleton chased the nasty people out and let a poor little boy stay in the house.

    The story kept the kids happy the whole way back.

    Manus couldn’t help comparing the women to Shirifa’s mum Janice.

    Janice was thirty one going on nineteen. She longed for the heady social life of her late teens and early twenties. For Janice things had taken a distinctly downward turn around the year two thousand and one, when she had been twenty-four years old, and met Manus for the first time.

    For Jan the relationship was never meant to be anything more than a cheap thrill for a fleeting moment. The satisfaction of idle and lustful curiosity. But what should have been a passing fling turned into a prolonged nightmare. She felt trapped by her pregnancy too, and her relationship with this man, an older man, someone from another place and another time.

    She had even been unfaithful to him as a ploy to get him to end it. Shagging someone else had always worked before, but not with Manus. He stuck like shit to her shoe. Just to make her suffer she sometimes thought.

    Janice had fought against and in many ways denied the relationship most of the time but for the sake of convenience, and due to economic restrictions, she ended up living in the same space and even sharing the same bed as Manus, for the best part of six years.

    Receiving a bequest of fifteen thousand euro from her grandfather gave her the freedom to re-arrange her life. So Janice and Manus had officially broken up. That is, they no longer lived under the same roof or slept in the same bed, but they still had to deal with each other.

    Throughout the relationship Janice had fluctuated between being churlish and rude to being needy and crying. Sometimes she wanted his emotional support, other times she just wanted him in bed.

    The break up hadn’t changed the nature of the relationship.

    When she needed him or even just wanted him, she had only to ask and he would be over in a flash, panting like a puppy on her porch. Occasionally he might hesitate for a moment, but it seemed so pointless. Why would he lie on his own and deny himself the warmth and pleasure of her body?

    There were a couple of reasons why. After sex she might pat his crutch and say ‘you were always a great shag’. She probably thought she was flattering him, but a part of him would want to quote Billy Holiday, ‘you’ve had the best now why not take the rest, come on, have all of me.’

    But Jan didn’t want the rest and the parts she didn’t want felt lonely and rejected.

    She would never let him stay the night and he would feel like the dog getting put out at the end of the day.

    He would try to rationalize that lots of people would love such a relationship. Sex and then piss off, but for some reason it didn’t always appeal to him.

    Looked at from a certain slant of rationality, Jan was doing everyone a favour breaking out of a relationship she felt trapped in. Manus didn’t always look at it from that particular slant of rationality.

    It’s funny how unrequited love can turn to hate.

    But then life could sometimes be seen as a very funny experience, especially if you are living in the wealthy West.

    And Manus was living in the wealthy West.

    *******

    He brought Shirifa to a protest against deportations. Manus had friends who had been forced out of Ireland. He had felt frustration and anger. He didn’t have that many friends and couldn’t afford to lose any of them. One of his friends was called Addi. They had met in a border town. They both lived in the same housing estate . They both felt very isolated amongst the remnants of die-hard Republicanism, and the alcoholism which seemed to dominate the estate. They met on a regular basis for over a year, never doing much other than smoking African bush weed and talking or listening to music.

    But contacts like this were an oasis of human interaction in his otherwise social desert. Manus felt close to Addi. Then one day Manus got a message on his mobile saying Addi was in prison and asking for help. Manus didn’t know how to help. He never heard from Addi again. Apart from feeling useless and guilty Manus didn’t know what else he could do.

    His friend Okoro was a different story, which ended with Islam Okoro not being allowed back into Ireland, even though he had three kids who were born and living in the country at the time.

    So now the government was having a pre-Christmas round up of Nigerian fathers. They would be deported and their wives and children would follow them back.

    Manus was angry about the loss of his friends and infuriated that the government still used the tactic of separating fathers from their children. If any one for any reason thought they had the right to separate Manus and Shirifa, they were wrong. They had no such right. Manus was sure of that.

    He got himself a bit worked up as he walked down to the protest.

    Shirifa was sleeping in the buggy. He stood outside the immigration office with a dozen others. He was given a placard that read ‘no deportations’.

    He was glad to show some of the people going into the building that not all of the Irish thought it was ok to deport these men.

    Then a racist, a male in his thirties; poor, uneducated and socially deprived, went by and shouted: ‘shouldn’t let the black bastards in in the first place.’

    The words ‘fucken wanker’ erupted out of Manus in a loud and violence-threatening voice.

    It was always impossible dealing with blind ignorance and hatred. Manus had dealt with a lot of it as a child on Belfast’s Ormeau Road. Then it was called sectarianism.

    ‘Taigs out’ would get painted on the walls, and he and others were chased through the streets. Sometimes people were caught and killed stone dead because they were Taigs.

    Manus could never really figure it out. Was it that perpetrators of these types of crime had defects which they tried to compensate for by showing off an ability to hate? Were they acting under the influence of a crowd with a collectively low IQ? Probably a lot of the blame lay with newspapers, clerics, and bosses who told them it was right to have contempt for people even slightly different from themselves.

    As a child Manus could never figure out why people he had never met could hate him. And there would be no chance to talk, to rationalize. These people wanted to stop you talking, stamp out your rationality.

    Manus’s instant and uncontrolled reaction at the racist statement had shocked him by the depth of violence it carried in its tone. By its vicious rage.

    It shocked the racist too, who kept moving for a bit but then decided to come back and stand up for his right to be a loud-mouthed racist.

    ‘Who called me a wanker? are you looking for a fight?’

    Manus followed his breath closely as he took off his shoulder bag full of nappies and wipes, set it gently on the child’s buggy and stepped out to meet his would be assailant.

    ‘You looken for a fight?’, the man repeated.

    Manus felt centred enough, and just tried to keep his eyes on his opponent’s feet and fists. A head butt would also be a danger as they squared up.

    It crossed Manus’s mind as he approached that it might be best to just lash out with a kick. He was glad he wore heavy shoes and if it was going to happen it would be better to get the first blows in. It would end the tension for a start. But how would it look on the camera? Surely they were on CCTV camera?  Maybe Manus could just stand him down. As he drew closer Manus cursed his own stupidity for having brought a blimp of draw with him to the protest. Manus wasn’t the brightest.

    Then he had Shirifa with him and if they arrested Manus what would they do with his daughter?

    Manus squared up to the man. ‘Just leave’ said Manus and luckily for Manus the racist left.

    Pauline stuck a small camera in Manus’s face just as the racist left. She asked Manus how he felt. Manus had felt slightly overwhelmed by the spontaneity and ferocity of his own reaction, but all he could say to Pauline was, ‘I feel too emotional about the whole thing. I just wish they’d stop this shit.’

    He wasn’t even clear what ‘shit’ he was referring to. Racism. Deportations. The main stream press, who’s messages divided people and diverted them from the real issue of the destructive policies and practices of the world’s greedy, wasteful corporations;

    All of the above he supposed.

    *******

    Shirifa woke up hungry and a bit grumpy. After the protest he brought her round to Seomra Spraoi. They boiled rice and ate it with yogurt. Pauline’s daughter played with Shirifa. So did Patrizia. Pauline was about the same age as Manus. Patrizia wasn’t half his age. Both females seemed fit and healthy, and he wondered if either would consider him a potential shag. He seemed more detached about this question than his sexual needs usually allowed. Did detachment come with age?

    Both women seemed worthwhile human beings. Human contact meant a lot to Manus and although he still worshiped sex more than money or any other god, he sometimes preferred it when sexuality took a back seat to a more rounded and fully human interaction.

    Seomra Spraoi was a slightly different social setting to most. Alternative social relations were possible. Manus didn’t feel like he had a need to show sexual interest in any one, nor would he be too offended if no one showed that type of interest in him.

    In truth Manus doubted his ability to go with anyone other than the mother of his child. She was the only one he’d known for six years. He figured he would miss the familiarity and resent the break in intimacies continuity. Maybe he was just scared of the unknown.

    After Seomra Spraoi was shut down under fire regulations Manus felt a terrible sense of loss at the news. He felt isolated again. Where would he go? Where would he bring his daughter?

    With no where else to go Manus called on two people he knew. Unfortunately Seamus from County Clare had returned to smack, while Ghanny from Nigeria had found Christianity again. Manus turned first to alcohol, and then to scribbling.

    Seomra Spraoi would open again, even if it was in another building. It was a place where people could get together and exchange ideas and go some way to creating social norms, maybe even a social revolution that suited themselves rather than their rulers. But that’s just back to political rather than personal spiel.

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  • Stayers’ Hurdle

    His eyes squint as the 6am light reflects off the plastic bags, cans and crisp packets of the Grand Canal. Portobello has never looked so good, as his legs struggle up the incline away from the city. The sound of the water makes him suddenly acutely aware of the thirst in his mouth, the remnants of warm beer long-replaced by an all-encompassing dryness with a sinister chemical edge. His stomach suddenly cramps, and the effort of the walk is now superseded by a fierce clench. Fifty-year-old bus driver shits himself on city bridge – the headline flashes before his fading eyes and a smile cracks out from his parched mouth. But he holds on and continues down towards Rathmines. And as he struggles down the main street past the barracks, the birds high up above the rugby pitch chirp. And he looks at the message scrawled on his hand – ‘Tomorrow the birds will sing’ – the marker still visible along with the minuscule cartoon birds in question. And he knows it to be true, for Dennis O’Kane has never felt this alive.

    Twelve hours earlier, and it’s the 5.15 at Kempton Park. That was the big one. Circled in the Post over his corn flakes, there was some serious value to be had. Those heavy spring showers really fucked up both form book and favourite, and the various weather forecasts he’d seen placed a nice dousing for the greater London area right around 4. Brentford vs Burton would be a good indicator – throw a couple of quid on that, find some dodgy website from the Far East showing it and fire on 50quid on Paco’s Prince once the heavens opened over west London. That would take him right up to 6 o’clock or so, certainly late enough for a few celebratory cans of Lidl’s finest. Premium Pils for a premium Saturday.

    The morning sun bounces off the metallic blue Fiesta outside his window. There was certainly no chance of it moving anytime soon – he’d heard the hippie girl next door come in fairly late last night, and come fairly heavily this morning. Yet another Saturday tradition in Grosvenor Gardens, one of the downsides of this cheaply built 1970s apartment block. The amber shine on the TV nearly stirred something in him, as it always did. Weekends spent punting and pinting in the rain suited him perfectly. Grey days were guilt free for a grey existence. But the sun was far more judgemental. It pierced the trees, emerging from a shadowy blue sky to permeate his ground floor flat and in one swoop of light ask the question – is this it? Is this really it? And the answer for the last ten years had been a yes, an anguished, numbed yes sustained by accumulators and aluminium Ales. An existence that he generally accepted as his destiny, but that stung on those sunny Saturday mornings to the soundtrack of a stranger’s sexual climax.

    He crossed the Rathmines Road, interactions complete for another day. ‘That’s 6.89, do you have a Clubcard?’ ‘he’s in to 7s now, that ok?’ ’any change?’ A couple of old lads smoked angrily outside Grace’s pub, stale smell of Budweiser and farts permeating out the door. He’d given it a go, become a familiar face for a while, but it wasn’t quite him. Sometimes he could sup away in silence or pass a few comments on whatever was on in the corner. But there’d always be some loud cunt who would ruin it. Always had to get the last word in. ‘I’ll tell you this for nothing…’ That or bring up the missus. Or the kids. And he’d sit there and stare into his pint, pining for an inexistent memory.

    5.18. The muck flies up past the leathery hooves as they approach the second last, Paco’s Prince beginning his charge to the front. The silver can begins to crumple under the tense grip as the heartbeat quickens. The warm pissy beer momentarily quenches the nervous dryness and the world is a distant back marker to the action. Clears the last in second, but the favourite is leggy as fuck and he knows it. The whip cracks frantically but it’s redundant as Paco’s Prince strides past, gliding over the heavy ground. Chuck a bit of rain down and those fancy English cunt horses don’t stand a chance. Paco’s Prince, descendent of some knacker horse and trained in the non-regal Roscommon storms it at 10s. Get the fuck in. And before the high diminishes the door knocks. What the fuck. Who the fuck. Ah sure g’wan the fuck.

    ‘Yes?’
    Confused. Beautiful, but confused. ‘Simon?’
    ‘Eh sorry?’
    ‘Simon, the Airbnb?’

    She’s not Irish, that much is clear. She’s also definitely not here to see him. Nobody looking like this would be standing here to see him. Come to think of it, nobody would be standing here to see him.

    Victorious euphoria beginning to wear off sharply, as sweat forms on his neck.

    ‘I think you have the wrong door. No Simon or Airbnb here.’

    Mild distress, and he notices the case for the first time. Noticed the wet hair as drips formed on his doorstep. Those spring showers clearly weren’t confined to west London, the change in weather having gone unnoticed by him.

    ‘Is not Airbnb?’
    ‘No’
    I’m very sorry for disturb you.”

    The sadness in her eyes. He’d never seen anything like it. Never been captivated by something so instantly, strongly and painfully.

    ‘No that’s ok. I wasn’t up to much. Where were you looking for anyway?’

    Confusion again, but of a different type. The look of someone without a fucking clue what’s just been said. To be fair, communication had never been his strong point.

    ‘Ahhh – can you say again?’
    ‘Yeah where were you looking for? What address? House number?’ Speaking slower this time – fuck does she think I’m treating her like a retard? Sweat building, ads loudly interrupting in the background.
    ‘Ah yes, yes.’

    She took her phone out. It was always these moments she’d mistype her pin. Had to be on some strange doorstep in some strange town, talking to a stranger who was speaking some completely alien form of English.

    ‘One moment’, as she cleared a comically large raindrop from her screen. A mutual laugh
    ‘Bit wet out there – was sunny and all this morning!’
    ‘Oh yes – oh no! I am too late’
    ‘Sure could be back in an hour – you never know’
    ‘Here – Apartment 3, Grosvenor Halls, Rathmines,’ Their heads briefly touched as she showed him the phone, a 21st century fleeting moment. She smelled like heaven, and he was immediately aware he smelled of Lidl Cans, a chipper and a 50 year-old batchelor with a Heinz-heavy diet.
    ‘Right so I’m 3 Grosvenor Gardens, Halls is the other side of the car park.’

    More confusion.

    ‘C’mon I’ll show you.’

    He stepped across the threshold and pointed her in the right direction.

    She made her way across the potholed courtyard, and he felt a sudden urge to keep the conversation going.

    ‘Holiday is it?’
    ‘Yes yes – holiday!’ as she looked back at him through the rain.
    ‘Well you picked a great place!’ the sarcasm clear even through the linguistic border.

    And as she entered into the building across the way she glanced back at him and laughed – ‘So far so good! Thank you!’

    Door closes and for a few seconds he lingers outside. The tv is still on, horses being paraded for the next race. The horses that have paraded round that living room for the last ten years. Those fucking horses. He sits down, reaches for his can and takes a sip. 1m6f heavy going, grade 3. No clear favourite but fuck all value. Her scent lingers. Fuck all value. How many races has he watched with fuck all value. How much of his life has he spent sitting here. Fuck all value. His head is racing, his heart pumping. ‘What the fuck have you done. What the fuck have you done. Fifty years-old and this is it. Fifty fucking years!’ The remote smashing the wall startles him, as the batteries roll across his cheap, dark green carpet. And before he can stop himself the TV is off, his keys are in his hand and he’s gone.

    The Dodder. It hadn’t been the best choice of route to evaluate his existence, as young life and love buzzed back and forth to Trinity Halls, repealing and appealing. But he’d made it to the Dodder, and now he sat and watched it flow. Briefly he thinks of jumping in. Not as a suicide thing – he’d never really been into that. More just to do something. But sure he’d only end up back in the depot in Donnybrook, only this time a wet miserable cunt. One adjective wasn’t going to change much. And then he thought of her. He wasn’t delusional. She must have been half his age, and if he was a Bohs she was a Barcelona. Short of a seriously dramatic injection of funds that wasn’t going to happen. But still. There was something more. Her eyes had so much life in them, so much expression. She was hardly going to fuck him or anything, but he felt she could help him. He felt she had to help him. And as the rain started to fall again to the rustle of wind and leaves he looked around and realised his thirty minute walk to this bench was the furthest he had walked in months or even years. Rocks parted the water as it surged down from the Dublin Mountains, currents merging together again effortlessly on their race to Ringsend.

    Nature made it look so easy, like it was all part of an inevitable process. And for many years he had assumed life was the same. He’d sat and waited for it to happen. Waited for the girlfriend, the wedding, the kids, the grandkids – the milestones that those around him ticked off as they faded further from his life into their own. Friends from his road, lads from school, his brother, lads in work. ‘I met a bird,’ ‘I’ve been seeing that Sarah wan from round the corner,’ ‘lads got a bitta news – you’ll be needing your suits next summer!’ ‘its a boy!’ ‘Fucking Johnny’s got his girlfriend pregnant.’ It had always seemed so natural to them. Breathe, eat, love, live. And as the group left behind got smaller, the comments started to hurt a bit more. ‘Ah sure you just have to find the right one!’ ‘You’re better off without – they’re a fucking a nightmare.’ ‘How about you Dennis – any birds on the go?’ Like a sprinter on a mountain stage, when the peloton dropped you it hurt more. And there’d been the occasional glimmer, the odd hope of getting back on. A few dates here and there, a couple of the sexual hurdles cleared. But then just as he’d grabbed someone’s wheel the pace was cranked up, until eventually he’d let go. The river flowed on and the rock stood still.

    ‘Its beautiful, no? Is the Doo-Der?’

    Jesus. It was her. What the fuck was she doing in Milltown?

    ‘Yeah yeah, lovely. We say the Do-dder though. Not many tourists come here! You get into the apartment ok?’
    ‘Ah yes yes. Thank you again! You come to the Do-dder a lot? Is a nice walk!’
    ‘Eh yeah.. no not too much no. Actually not for years.’
    ‘And today?’
    ‘Eh.. just felt like a walk. Good to stretch the legs I guess.’

    A silence. Normally a silence was welcome – an escape route back to the sofa. But he’d already traded the sofa in for a wooden bench so he pressed on.

    ‘So what has you in Dublin?’
    ‘Holidays. Its not a normal place for holidays?’
    ‘I guess it is, but Temple Bar or the Guinnes Factory and all that stuff. Not really Rathmines and the River Dodder!’

    She laughed. She didn’t fully understand him, though it was getting easier, but there was something comforting about him. His complete lack of sophistication, his honesty – there was no agenda here. There wasn’t going to be a subtle touch of her shoulder, or some invented shit about Brecht or Voltaire.

    ‘Exactly! Everyone goes there. I don’t come here to see more French people, or Spanish or Americans. I come to see Irish people and the… Dodder.’
    ‘Fair enough – sure Temple Bar’s a fucking shithole and the Guinness Factory is just 15 quid for a pint. And you’d get a better one down the local anyway.’
    ‘Local?’
    ‘Ah sorry – a local pub. One with no tourists.’

    Was it technically a local if you hadn’t been in about four years? The place was rammed, the old lads seeking refuge in the passageway between the jacks and the smoking area as the younger crowd milled around the bar. She returned with two more Guinness. It may have been 4 years, but his memory was spot on about the pint Slatterys did.

    ‘Its got to be creamy, but smooth. Kind of velvety.’
    ‘But how can it be good in one pub and not another pub?’
    ‘It just is, but you can tell by looking at a place. No music, old lads and lots of wood – you’re getting a good pint. Pop music, disco lights and a plastic glass you may as well drink your own shite.’

    He regretted the vulgarity but she loved it.

    ‘Ok, we need to compare it. I need to see.’
    ‘You want to drink shite?’
    ‘No! I want to try Guiness in another pub! To see the difference.’

    Another pub, coming up with one had been a struggle. He couldn’t in all consciousness bring her near Grace’s, couple of the ones down in Donnybrook maybe…

    ‘You know the George Bernard Shaw?’
    ‘The writer?’
    ‘No no, is a pub. My friend lived two years in Ireland. Recommended it me. The same person who recommended me Rathmines!’

    She looked him in the eye, almost conspiratorially. Flashes of decades ago, when a girl got that look in her eye. Annie Kelly in the Bleeding Horse, her hand resting on his leg. He’d almost blown his load. He knew this was different – very little chance of a fumble down Pleasants Place – but the glint was the same. And it was fucking magical.

    ‘Richmond Street’ as she showed him her phone.

    That one. Mad looking place. Hipster, I believe the term is. Suddenly he was incredibly aware of his old corduroy trousers and baggy shirt resting on his belly of many years of neglect.

    ‘Ah yeah. You want to go there? Eh… yeah wouldn’t be my style I guess but yeah. sure go on. Bet you the Guinness is shite though!’

    The wind on the street bit at her cheeks and cleared some of the brown, stouty fuzz from her brain. Maybe this was why they drank so much, because the weather smashed you sober. And suddenly the oddity of her situation forced itself on her. She had been in Dublin for a few hours. She was drunk. She was with a fat, old man. Well not grand-pere old, but 50+. 30 years older maybe? Travelling alone always hinted at some sort of romantic possibility, but this was certainly not one of them. This was not a George Clooney, not the mysterious Irish man her friends had joked about. ‘Oh you’re going alone? Interesting… Are you coming back alone?’ But she was having a great time.

    ‘Look I know I’m probably not who you pictured spending your night here with so if you want to head off or have friends to meet, that’s grand. No need to bring me along.’

    The interruption, the silence the street, the traffic, It had thrown him. What the fuck was he doing here ruining this girl\s night? A sudden urge to run back to his comfort zone, grab a bag of chips, let off the fart he’d been sitting on for about 20 minutes.

    ‘No, no – come on! We have to try this other pint.’ She didn’t want him to go. She didn’t want to default to her people. She didn’t want to wander into Dublin, find people who looked like her. Find people who talked like her, thought like her. Find some guy who fucked like her and ate brunch like her. For this weekend she didn’t want that bullshit, the same lines and conversations. Pills and ruminations on Le Pen, house music and start ups.

    He fucking hated this place. For someone who’d spent 4 years in silence watching horses on a moderately comfortable sofa, this was too much, too quick. He lifted his glass and the plastic threw another few millilitres of brown on his hand. Nothing worse than bad Guinness, but they’d hit a rhythm and he couldn’t change. The conversation had mostly been about her and Dublin. She fielded questions on the former, he was the expert on the latter. Twenty-five-years-old. From Paris. No clue who Neymar was and indeed it had nearly killed the conversation. Intrigued by Irish culture and had planned the trip with an ex. Decided to do it solo, hence in the Bernard Shaw with a fat bus driver.

    The basics had been divulged earlier in round one – name, job and marital status. He was Dennis, she was Chloe. He drove buses, she worked in graphic design. He was single. She was single. The latter had segued into rounds two to six. The ex, The idea of Dublin. The mutual break up that turned out not to be so mutual. The drama of the French. Irish drama. Joyce. Behan. The great tradition of the drunken wordsmith, the tragedy settling at the bottom of the glass while the tomes travelled the world. But as the bell tolls for round 7, she lands the first decisive punch.

    ‘Were you ever married before?’ It was funny how rounds did that. A conversation could be halted mid-stream while beverages were acquired, and a completely new one struck up to herald their return. No warning, no context – each pint was its own snippet and this one Dennis O’Kane had been dreading more and more over the last ten years.

    ‘Eh, no. Never walked the plank, as they say.’
    ‘The plank?’

    Fuck. The whole language thing. Sweat pores opened again, clocking serious overtime of a Saturday.

    ‘It’s an expression… but yeah, never got married’
    ‘Did you ever nearly get married?’

    Ah here. That first punch developed into a sequence. Irish people wouldn’t ask you that. Must be a continental thing. He looked at her, her expectant gaze unaware of any faux-pas having being committed.

    ‘Nah, not really. I mean it depends on what you mean by nearly but.. no.. not even nearly.’ It really didn’t depend on what was meant by nearly.
    ‘Is normal in Ireland?’

    Temporary relief, as she starts talking about declining marriage rates in France. How it’s fairly common these days for people to just co-habit. But he knows its only temporary and it’s time to throw in the towel.

    ‘Ah look, the truth is… I never really had anything serious.’
    ‘Serious?’
    ‘I… never really had what you would call a girlfriend.’
    ‘Ah.. you are gay?’ Says it like she’s solved a fucking puzzle or something.
    ‘Ah jaysus no.. I mean not that its a problem.. but look at me, I hardly look it, do I?’

    She laughs, eschewing her default political correctness.

    ‘Well… no maybe not.’

    He wants to leave. He wants to get up, throw his plastic pint over this crowd of young, happy cunts and retreat back to Rathmines. But she keeps looking at him. An expectant smile that knows he will submit. And suddenly he starts telling his story. A few dates in his late teens / early 20s, the odd ride up to his mid 30s and then nothing. Friends paired off and faded away. Those that remained would focus nights out on setting him up, the mortification of being shoved towards some poor girl in the corner to bore the ear off her for five minutes and apologetically move on.

    ‘Why?’
    ‘Eh.. like I said, just never really found anyone.’
    ‘No.. I ask why, not what. Why did you never ‘find someone?’

    The air quotes. The jugular. Shame turns to anger, but still she smiles. There’s no malice there. There’s purpose.

    ‘I guess… I don’t know. I mean… I’m not exactly George Clooney, am I? I watch football and horses, I drive a bus and my diet is oven chips and pints.’

    Silence. The smile, the stare but silence.

    ‘I was never good at talking to people. Like with a group I was ok, I could contribute. But one-to-one… I don’t know what to say. I never knew what to say. A rake of pints used to help, but even then…’

    He trails off. There’s a lump forming in his throat.

    Silence.

    ‘Like.. if I liked a girl I’d get nervous. I’d… I knew I wasn’t worthy. They’d want someone better.’

    Silence. He’s struggling to keep it together.

    ‘Or I’d start thinking about what my mates would say.’ See them all in the corner laughing. ‘Dennis is after scoring some rotten bird – it was the pressure. I… I… I don’t know. I just don’t know.’
    ‘Dennis…’

    She holds his hand. Relief. It’s over – he can sense it’s over.

    ‘If you do not love yourself, you will not love anybody else. If you do not love yourself, nobody will love you.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘You have to love yourself first. Before anything else.’
    ‘This advice would have been nice 20 years ago…’
    ‘Its advice for now. For today. You can start today’
    ‘Yeah… easy to say. Easy for you to say… you have everything going for you. You’re young, you’re beautiful, you’re… happy.’

    Her smile doesn’t waver. Her glance doesn’t break.

    ‘And so are you. You can be beautiful, you can be happy… young… well ok, maybe not young.’

    They laugh. A badly needed moment of comic relief.

    ‘I’m not beautiful though, and I don’t think I’m happy…’
    ‘Are you happy tonight?’
    ‘Tonight… until about 10 minutes ago!’

    Meant as a joke, and she takes it that way. More laughter. Then silence. A longer silence and she finally looks away, as if she’s calculating something.

    ‘Ok, I know what we do. Tonight we have fun, and tonight we make you feel happy and beautiful. Wait here.’

    His brain is fried. Piecing together the last few hours. Painfully regretting the last few decades. Pondering the next few minutes. Is she coming back? What’s she got planned? Am I getting sucked off here? The pints have definitely gone to the head.

    She comes back and takes his hand. Something is pressed into his palm. Her eyes dart quickly around the smoking area.

    ‘Take this.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Quickly! Take this!’
    ‘What is it?’
    ‘Ecstasy’

    Drugs and love. Two things he’d never touched. And two things he’d seen consume a fair few mates.

    ‘Ah here, I don’t do that shit. Never have.’
    ‘You don’t go out drinking with young French girls either! Try! It’s not a lot, but you’ll like it. It will help you.’

    She looks up at him, eyes expectant and insistent. He knows this only ends one way.

    ‘Now we can have fun.’

    The thing is so small he barely feels it. If it weren’t for the slight chemical tinge in his throat he wouldn’t be sure he’d taken it. How the fuck does this tiny thing leave fellas on the floor?

    ‘So what’s supposed to be happening to me now?’
    ‘Nothing! It takes time. You’ll know when you know.’
    ‘I’ll take your word for it, but I’m not sure its going to do much to a big lad like myself.’

    Forty-five minutes later and he’s standing at the bar by the dance floor. Warmth is rushing through his blood, words rushing out his mouth. The young lads he’s talking to are clearly loving the novelty of it, the novelty of him. but it’s love all the same. He sips his Becks and savours the surge of hops into his dry mouth. The dryness causes the briefest sense of panic and dread, the briefest moment of apothecary awe. How the fuck is something so small so powerful? But the anxiety is washed away as quickly as it arose, as this newly formed brain trust calculate he most likely drove them to school for 6 years.

    ‘I’m telling yiz, I drove that 16 bus for six years. Fucking hated you lot crowding the corridor in your fucking oversized blazers. Never got how yous were able to chat to any women at all looking like extras from a fucking production of Bugsy Malone.’

    ‘Did you know half of us were sneaking on without paying?’

    ‘Of course I fucking knew, You weren’t MI5 lads! Did I care was a different question. Whether Dublin Bus got their hands on your 50p or not was no real concern of mine.’

    ‘The shit we used to get up to on that top floor… smoking joints, getting hand jobs down the back.’
    ‘We saw it all. There was a few lads in the garage who were known for taking a bit too much interest in the cameras if I’m being honest.’

    The conversation goes on, and Dennis is suddenly an observer, surveying the scene in front of him. The scene around him. The crowd is swaying, if not in unison, in generally asynchronous frantic motions to the music. Chloe hovers around making acquaintances but never moving too far away. And at the centre, there he stands. He knows he stands out. He knows there’s nobody like him, not even remotely like him there. He senses and sees the odd looks and comments from the shadows, the disdainful eye of the dickhead behind the bar. But he doesn’t care. He’s aware it’s the chemicals talking, but he doesn’t care.

    Somewhere just off the South Circular Road. He sinks into a dusty sofa while around him people dance. Tiredness is taking over and the offer of ‘top ups’ sensibly declined.  The smell of spliff, so recognisable from so many routes, hangs heavily in the air. Out of the illicit smoke Chloe emerges from the impromptu living room dance floor. She sinks down beside him.

    ‘So?’
    ‘So?’
    ‘So did you have fun? Do you feel happy?’

    Such a simple question, but he takes an age before answering. His brain struggles with the various computations and calculations.

    ‘I had fun. I definitely had fun. Compared to an evening of betting on the horses I had great fucking fun. But happy?…. It’s hard to say. I mean … yeah I was happy for the night, but like, tomorrow this is just a hangover and a memory. Maybe a story. It doesn’t change anything.’

    ‘Yes.. tomorrow you will feel terrible. And probably the day after that too! Maybe even in the next couple of hours.’
    ‘Cheers for that. Feeling much better now’
    ‘Ha well, you will feel terrible maybe. But you will also feel different. You will think and realise that happiness is possible. Life is possible. If you let your brain see it.’
    ‘So take these things every day?’
    ‘No! I think never take them again. But remember that feeling. Remember how you talk to me, to them, to yourself. Remember the difference to how you talk to yourself this morning.’
    ‘It does’t work that way. I mean I’ve gone drinking and been happy. Woke up the next day and felt shit. I know how this works.’
    ‘Dennis, do you like films?’
    ‘Cinema – do you like cinema?’

    She likes these fucking random questions. Suddenly he’s properly fucking wrecked.

    ‘Eh yeah, I guess. I mean, everyone likes films, no? Look, I think I’m going to head. Leave you to it.’
    ‘My favourite film is with Charlie Chaplin. City Lights. It is a silent film, but there are words in it I never forget. The main character finds a man who is by the water. He is going to kill himself. And Charlie Chaplin, the main character, says this line to him.’

    She takes his arm and turns it over. She has a marker in her hand. And then she’s writing.

    He reads it. ‘Tomorrow the Birds will Sing.’

    ‘Tomorrow the birds will sing. Tomorrow can always be a better day than today. But you have to believe it and you have to make it happen. You will still have horrible days, you will still have horrible moments. But if you keep believing this, if you keep thinking of this message, you will be ok. Listen to the birds.’

    She draws two little birds to complement her quote.

    ‘Do you always do this?’
    ‘Do what?’

    She leans over and kisses him on the cheek.

    ‘Goodbye Dennis. Thank you for showing me Dublin and for showing me you.’

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  • Who Needs a Healing?

    In the inner world, time has a way of standing still long enough so you can come to your senses.  Then you can have eyes that see and ears that hear. My Aunt Jewel taught me this more by example than with words. She had no use for words and she wasn’t really my aunt. Mama, a divorcée from Mississippi, had married into Auntie’s Choctaw Indian family one-day shy of my first birthday. At four feet eleven with a heart as big as Texas, I could always count on her for a kind word and a tender voice.  Learning some of the old ways with her taught me that cause and effect can’t always be foretold much less recognized and controlled.

    My earliest memory of Auntie is the first time she took me to her one room church near the Little Cypress Bayou that flows through the Blue Elbow Swamp, eventually entering the Sabine River near I-10 in Orange, Texas.  The church, a tiny clapboard painted white with a piney wood floor and a few benches, was where the beleaguered believers felt they belonged.

    “Who needs a HEALING” screamed Preacher, a red-faced man in black pants and a cheap white, sweat-soaked shirt that encased his gut, revealing a life time of buttery biscuits and sausage gravy.

    “Nancy Ann, I think ya got a fever” Auntie said aloud as her brown hand felt my white face.

    “No mam – I ain’t got no fever!

    “Yes, you do” she whispered as she firmly took me by the arm and guided me to the homemade dais.  Down on my knees I went with the weight of Auntie’s hand on my right shoulder.

    When Preacher caught his breath long enough to notice he had a child to work on, he began crying and wailed, “unless you change and become like this little child, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”  He held up a small bottle of Jerusalem Holy Oil, so all could behold the glorious healing about to occur.  As I looked up at Preacher, heartburn from that morning’s breakfast caused me mistakenly to believe it needed to be healed.

    “Child, do you want to be healed,” he asked while kneeling to better look me in the eye.

    “I think so.”

    The fears that bumped around in my already wizened seven-year-old psyche were very real.   I didn’t have the faith in the old ways like Auntie did.  My pagan mother had taught me to believe in the evil eye and being cursed and such, but not in the hell that Preacher and Auntie did.  To Mama, heaven was a piece of land, a good scotch with a good screw; something that made this life a little easier to bare.  Hell was in between your ears, right here, right now.

    “Child are you ready to confess your sins,” Preacher asked.

    “I think so.”

    “You think so,” he said with a faint smile.

    “Yes Sir.  I think so.”

    “Do you repent of all your sins, so you can be healed?”

    “Y e s . . . sir” slowly slipped from my lips and with that, I was suddenly looking up at the ceiling as Preacher held the back of my head, while making the sign of the cross on my third eye with his oily finger.  Auntie, already filled with the Holy Ghost, was speaking in tongues. My skinny little body began to swoon as it filled with the divine energy.   The room began to swirl, and I fell back on Aunt Jewel who slowly lowered me to the floor.

    “Praise God” she wailed.

    “Praise God” cried the congregants who were no longer quietly singing and humming along with the makeshift band.  Now they were making a loud and glorious music unto the Lord singing I’ll Fly Away as loud as possible:

    When the shadows of this life have gone
    I’ll fly away
    Like a bird from these prison walls I’ll fly
    I’ll fly away.

    As I lay there on the floor unable to get up and surrounded by all the wonderful beleaguered believers, my heart filled with joy and my nose filled with the scent of the myrrh and sweet-smelling cinnamon used to make the Jerusalem Holy Oil Preacher had used to heal me.  The singing was muffled as if far away,

    I’ll fly away, oh glory
    I’ll fly away in the morning
    When I die, Hallelujah by and by
    I’ll fly away.

    After what felt like an eternity, I was helped to my feet.  Everyone was beaming at me.  Auntie, grinning ear to ear, was hugging me up close and whispering now we got to git ya baptized baby girl.  Now we got to git ya baptized.

    “Yes Lord… I know Lord… Thank you Lord…” Preacher prayed while still on his knees.  His voice just loud enough so everyone could hear he was still conversing with Jesus.

    There was a static electricity in the room.  Every time someone came to hug me, there was a shock.  My hair was sticking out on end the way it does when you pull a sweater over your head in the winter.  But my stomach wasn’t burning anymore, and Auntie was so pleased with me she was promising a Dairy Queen double dip.

    While she was saying her goodbyes, I went outside to stand in the October chill.  It was a clear day with a slight breeze.  Looking up at the sun, I wondered if my heart got healed.  I wondered if a healing was the same as a protection. Mostly, I wondered what if Mama was right?  What if hell really is between your ears, right here, right now?  What then?

  • Sic Transit Gloria

    I learned to drive in a field when I was five, from the same grandfather who taught me how to ride a horse and chew tobacco. At age ten, I took my other grandfather’s El Camino out on Highway 1, the longest road in Louisiana, from church camp all the way to vacation bible school. That spiritual summer, compelled by the power of Christ, I think was the first and last time I truly felt the thrill of being behind the wheel. Once legally licensed, I found myself in a few fender benders, reluctantly dealing with mechanical malfunctions often due to my feminine indifference in the face of minute maintenance. I recall nonchalantly applying mascara in my rear view mirror, moving at about 80 miles an hour, when someone shouted from the next lane, Hey Miss, your car’s on fire! And indeed it was.

    Walking to work one morning, right off Rue Royal in New Orleans’ Vieux Carré, I ran into the Chicken Man, a local voodoo practitioner of some repute. Ebony face smiling out from under his ivory cowboy hat, he stopped to ask me how I was doing, and I answered, I could be better. He offered to help, if somebody put a gris-gris on me. I just shook my head, I don’t know Chicken Man, I’m just sick and tired of my grandma’s old Pontiac breakin’ down on me. You got a mojo for that? 

    He brightened, Pretty Lady, I got a mojo for everything. Come by tomorrow and I’ll have it fixed up.   So I did. At the back of his shop, the cool cat sat, in a candle-lit cloud of incense, amongst a hocus-pocus host of saints and skulls. His pink leather palm presented what looked like any other mojo, a little silk sachet, a kind of bouquet garni, containing some pungent mumbo jumbo botanicals tied up with a cord into a necklace.  I wrinkled my nose, before I caught myself and inquired, with all due respect, Do I have to wear it around my neck all the time or put it under my pillow every night? 

    He shook his head, amusement playing at the corners of his mouth, before suggesting, It‘d be more powerful dangling on that dashboard of yours. 

    What do I owe you, Chicken Man? 

    Averting his eyes, he answered, What you think its worth.  Suddenly sheepish, I gave him the paltry five bucks I had, saying I’d be back with more once the mojo started working, and a week later, I was.

    How’s that old black magic treating you, Gallery Girl?  He knew I sold sub-Saharan sculptures down on the corner and Royal Academy equestrian oil paintings further up the street on Saturdays.

    Well Chicken Man, it’s like this. Wednesday, I was driving up St. Charles on my way to meet a couple of acquaintances, for gin and tonics at Fat Harry’s. And right when I ran that yellow light at Napoleon Avenue, somebody else hit me, seeing red. We spun around, and took out a fire hydrant with us, exploded up like we struck oil, or something. The car is totalled. I just got an insurance check in the mail for thousands of dollars. So I don’t know, you tell me?  He slapped the counter, disgorging a baritone chuckle and said, not without some pride, Yeah, that voodoo is a funny thing, ain’t it? Now that car of yours ain’t gonna break down on you no more.

    Soon I met a Saudi prince who was training in Texas as a NASA astronaut. Before going up in the space shuttle, he spent a weekend in the Big Easy and at a party, took a shine to me. He flew me to Houston and I headed straight for the hotel spa. Four hairy Germans I’d seen on MTV, joined me in the jacuzzi, who turned out to be a band called The Scorpions. They were playing that night. After a massage I met the boys from Deep Purple, by the pool. They invited me on a tour of Southfork Ranch, with the promise of a jigger with JR Ewing on the set of the TV show, Dallas. Alas, I declined, more inclined to stay with my sovereign space cadet, and with no prior training I crash landed the shuttle simulator at Johnson Space Center during something they referred to as, The Hawaiian Scenario.

    Back home, I began to receive boxes by UPS, laden with hand-beaded veils, silk caftans and silver coffee sets, directly from the Arabian Peninsula. The most intriguing object arrived in a velvet presentation case bigger than a shoe box. Nestled within was an extravagant necklace rendered in 24 karat gold, depicting the space shuttle flying over the royal palace at Riyadh, flanked by palm trees and crossed swords, crest of the House of Saud. The Canadian jeweller I worked for weighed the necklace, matching earrings, ring and armful of bracelets, made his calculations, and counted the cash into my hot little hand. He snickered, imitating my Saudi suitor, Desert Flower, sell my love gift to buy a Toyota.

    True, the the transaction afforded a sporty new Japanese import which I drove cross-country to my new home in Haight-Ashbury. There’s an old song about leaving your heart in San Francisco, well that’s where I left my last car. After you go over the Golden Gate Bridge a few times the parking tickets start to slow you down. It was the wild west, and I went to work at Wells Fargo Bank. The South was my stage and the powers-that-be ponied up for a Mustang convertible from which I coached my mostly male confederates to deposit fat checks.

    I left California’s colourful Victorian hilltop houses for Hong Kong’s Victoria Peak, where an outdoor escalator, snaking 800 meters through equatorial territory, exported 80,000 expats in our power suits from well feathered nests, down to towers full of tycoons in the harbour. One day during a typhoon, gliding in gleaming Gucci shoes, I slip on the slippery slope. I flip and finally flop face down. The Prada purse spills open my personal life. My new Nokia cracks and the briefcase breaches the confidentiality agreement upon which my financial future relies. Across the ground I crawl on Armani clad knees to gather a promising career’s required gear. Nearby, Cantonese neighbours watch the other gweilo, (ghost people, foreign devils) march over me with ruthless efficiency, toward their next promotion. When I shuffle in to my office like a wet cat, the Managing Director bellows, Pack your bags, Moneypenny, you’ve been reassigned to Mumbai! 

    My boss at the Bombay Stock Exchange called me the « Secret Weapon », once I commissioned thirty custom-made subcontinental saris. On a tour of the Taj Mahal in an Indian congressman’s propaganda plastered car, we were mobbed by a crowd mistaking me for Sonya Ghandi. She was 20 years my senior and from Lusiana, Italy not Louisiana, USA but how to say that in Hindi? Traffic outside the Taj Hotel was terrifying, with women wretched from profound poverty pressing naked brown babies against tinted windows hoping for a hand out. I went for my wallet, and perhaps to protect me, the chauffeur, from Chennai, activated the child safety lock. If he hit a local, company protocol dictated we speed to Sahar airport to take the first flight exiting Indian airspace. When I did that, the plane set down in the Land of the Rising Sun.

    Taxi drivers in Tokyo wore pristine white gloves. So did subway staff who pushed people, politely sealing them like sardines inside trains, avoiding delay. They bowed deeply during departure, except in the event of a suicide. Seppuku on the tracks is second only to finishing yourself off in Mount Fuji’s forest. On 9/11, I watched a Japanese TV presenter fly two paper planes between his thumb and index fingers in to a tiny origami model of the Twin Towers. Turning off the television, I crumpled my job contract for a fledgling hedge fund. The entire hiring team in New York had died.

    I ride the Red Line from Tallaght to town and something about the announcement Next Stop- Hospital makes me uneasy. It was Monday morning, when I was last on the LUAS, Gaelic for Speed. A gargantuan guy fell asleep, his head heavy on my shoulder, tinny tunes belching from his ear-buds. A teen turned abruptly, his backpack exfoliating my face. I felt faint and rose rapidly toward the doors. Scurrying ahead was a small Muslim in a tightly tied violet headscarf, set on getting out, when without warning, she collapsed into my arms. The scrum scattered, leaving us like lepers in a circle of stares. Uncaring, the train resumed its route to Smithfield, while the corolla of fair freckled souls muttered advice at me. When the doors slid open, I locked her armpits in the crook of my arguably larger limbs, and dragged her to the wet sidewalk. Asking her name, I examined her pupils for dilation. Finding a phone in her plethora of packages I wondered if ABDUL was her husband. Sweating, tears tumbled down her dampening cheeks. Pedestrians paused to diagnose diabetes or epilepsy, and someone called an ambulance as she stammered, I’m pregnant. Her fine boned brown fingers fluttered in mine until the Fire Brigade arrived.

    Before anyone asked, I blurted out, This is Annie, she’s 24, 14 weeks pregnant and she hasn’t eaten today. She’s a social worker for people with disabilities. The medics nodded, like bored horses, installing her inside the ambulance. The doors thumped shut and it sped away, along with that part of me that wanted to take care of her and her baby for the rest of their lives. I could have been a grandmother by now, but I forgot to have kids. Standing there in the wind, I worried about her, and then about me, before closing my coat. Lighting a cigarette, I quickly cut across the square.

    I’m a little uneasy, loitering at bus stops. Secretly, I become that seven-year-old that was nearly snatched by a creep who coaxed me into his Cadillac while waiting for the school bus. With local law enforcement’s « Stranger Danger » lecture fresh in my head, I fled just like Officer Friendly said. I fled as far as I could go on little legs made of marshmallow. Now I’m not bolder but older and yawning under a Dublin donut shop’s awning advertising, Aungier Danger. In relentless rain I rearrange my mane, bonding with a distinguished blonde delighted I’m from across the pond. The boisterous bus whisks us to Wicklow. It’s full of familiar faces further back, but we flock together up front.

    As the miles go by, my mobile Mona Lisa smiles, slipping off shoes, distracted, detaching clip-on earrings, the way women do on long bus rides. We fuss about budgets, discuss what’s distressing, and she’s …undressing. She fidgets a bit with her scarf, her wig, all her self-possessed feminine grace going whirligig, in to a big bag between her feet, like a grinning sheela-na-gig. Her prominent profile petrifies when she presses the pink plastic button to signal her stop, uttering huskily over the clitter clatter in the dusky half light, This is me, and bolts off the bus. Clearly, a chrysalis doesn’t need a Chrysler, because as if by sorcery, only a lone man can be seen in the tail lights, marching on the motorway. I watch through the window, as he grows smaller in the gathering gloom, then look back at the button, but I don’t dare press it. Lunging in the lurching double-decker, I hang on tight to tell the driver in a hoarse whisper, This isn’t me. Briefly he beams, then turns to stare straight ahead, his two shafts of light searching the night. His foot finds the metal gas pedal and we careen down the dark tarmac to a faster moving future.

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  • Hello Julian Assange

    It was sunny outside. Manus still felt something akin to minor guilt at lying in bed on a sunny day. Just having the option carried a guilt. He had spent most of his life not having to get up in the morning, not working, living off social security benefits.

     There was a certain amount of guilt involved but it was easy to rationalize away. In a world that accepted the waste of half of its food production each day, and for thousands of kids to die of hunger each night, rationalizing guilt away came easy.

    He would have liked to fight against the injustices of the world but it seemed like a global system with no head to cut off that wouldn’t pop back up immediately. Manus had not spent his life researching and exposing corporate crimes or hacking computers. He wouldn’t know where to begin with research and when it came to computers he was technologically challenged.

    His lifestyle choice to just take drugs and scrounge off the state as much as they would allow had been as proactive a revolutionary stance as he could manage, which the less enlightened members of society failed to understand, instead viewing him as a lazy good-for-nuthen-opportunist-bum, but Manus didn’t hold it against them. ‘There but for fortune’ after all.

    No, regardless of mainstream social exclusion, condemnation and relative poverty for someone living in the privileged sector of the planet, Manus had often enjoyed his choice: to lie in or get up.

    This morning, however, he had allowed himself to be robbed of all enjoyment.

    This morning he was cursed with the knowledge that he had pushed a young woman away from him.

    She liked to keep her options open and he had texted her more or less demanding that she give him a definite date for their next meeting. In a ‘normal relationship’ this might well have been acceptable but this was not a ‘normal relationship’. In fact this was not a ‘relationship’. Avril had insisted from the start. She didn’t want a ‘relationship’. She liked to call round. Once or twice a week. Just for sex. And sex had nothing to do with anything. So Avril said.

    But after a few months, Manus got used to her and when she didn’t call for a week or so he was pushing her for rights he didn’t have.

    It was in the contract. She was younger than him by over two decades. All she wanted was a bit of fun and instead of being grateful he had pushed the last woman who would ever fuck him away. Now there was guilt.

    He didn’t want to get out of bed all day. He was stupid and now he was condemned for his crime. Sentenced for the rest of his life to be alone.

    (It wasn’t really true as his thirteen year old daughter who lived with him seventy-two hours a week every weekend would have been quick to point out. But this was the other ninety-six hours of the week, and he was alone.)

    Ah the suffering and the pain.

    He would lie with it all day. No, that might have been excusable had he been thirty or forty years younger, but he wasn’t and though he was very tempted to visit an old favourite familiar haunt, he was just too old. He knew he didn’t have that many days left to waste, no matter how favoured and familiar an old haunt it might be.

    And he had things to do.

    It was Assange’s birthday for a start. Manus was to meet people at Saint Stephen’s Green at a quarter past one. They were going to deliver a letter to the Australian embassy. Originally they had just talked of making a cake and Manus had thought to hassle a friend or two over to play guitar, and maybe see if they couldn’t get something like a small street party going. But that had been before Avril had ditched him. Since then Manus was lacking the strength or enthusiasm to hassle anyone. Yet again his broken heart had got in the way of political activism, or positive action of any kind.

    Ciaron O’Reilly had instigated the protest.

    Amongst other things Ciaron had taken a hammer in his hands and damaged American war planes that would otherwise kill or harm the poorest people in the world.

    Acting like a responsible citizen had earned Ciaron hard time in high security prisons, and Manus’s respect.

    So perhaps it was for Ciaron, as much as for Julian, that Manus would get out of bed and make his way into town. Manus imagined Julian Assange wouldn’t be overly impressed with their protest. Nobody could be. There would be half a dozen people, a dozen people at the most.

    Most passers-by wouldn’t know who Julian Assange was.

    Against a tsunami of banners and all the technology money can buy, which told people that what Julian Assange was doing just wasn’t important, Manus and a few others would stand with a single banner saying ‘free jullian assange’. The few standing with the banner, if they got noticed at all, would look like weirdo nutters. Manus was going to go, perhaps just to show some solidarity with the weirdo nutters.

    Around 11a.m. George Kirwan called for Manus.

    George was one of them smart ass bastards from a fairly privileged background; a former chairman of a Trinity debating society, who would come up with a nuanced argument against anything you said. Manus was one of those dumb ass fuckers from a fairly unprivileged background, where debating skills ran from shouting to yelling personal threats, to physical violence.

    Manus asked George why he wasn’t going to the protest. George said he didn’t protest anything because he thought it was ineffective. Manus asked if all ‘protest was ineffective’ then should we do nothing? George backtracked saying ‘he very seldom protested and saved his energy for the ones he felt were important, which did not include Assange.’  Furthermore, George wasn’t sure Assange was his political ally since Wikileaks had, ‘not just published, but directly funnelled leaked documents to the Trump campaign first’; George continued: ‘directly dealing with a dime store Hitler was naïve in the extreme and a wrong act’.

    It didn’t ring true for Manus that Assange or Wikileaks would be dealing directly with the Trump campaign, though as usual he hadn’t done much research and couldn’t say with any certainty. George as always was certain: ‘there was a server in Wikileaks communicating with a server in Trump Tower’, George swore it with rather more venom in its delivery than the truth needed. Trinity’s training got lost and George could be as emotive as any uneducated thug when he defended a false position.

    Manus said that since he had started speaking for Assange he had heard all kinds of negative fact and fiction. All of which for Manus sidestepped the main issue.

    Publishing the crimes of the powerful should be applauded, not a punishable offence.

    For none of these other reasons, fact or fiction, would Assange be imprisoned.

    Wikileaks was known all around the globe for telling the truth. It had an effect on the way the world was perceived, with potential to affect how it’s citizens and environment were treated.

    Allowing the Wikileaks founder to be imprisoned would send a clear message ringing around the world. Exposing government and corporate crimes would not be tolerated.

    George lost some of his evangelical zeal against Assange and relented with, ‘their wasn’t enough evidence against him for a conviction, but enough to lose him the support of the left.’

    George spouted on then about some group in America who used to fight legal cases for poor black communists to have the right to preach communism and then they fought for rich white fascists to have the right to preach fascism. Then they decided they didn’t have enough resources to fight for both and decided to just fight for the Commies. Not that he was saying Assange was a fascist.

    How had the so-called left gone along with this crap? How had the most effective exposer of corporate and government crimes been turned into the left’s enemy, or person of no worth, or person they least wanted to defend? The answer was obvious, corporate power had attacked Assange because he exposed their crimes and the corporate media swamped the world with their attack, but it was the left’s acceptance of such obvious diversions and spurious attacks that bothered Manus.

    Manus had a frazzled brain. Too much: drugs, drink, punches to the head. He couldn’t always take in a lot of info and he could retain less. George hadn’t done half as much drugs or drink and had probably never been punched in the head in his life. Manus wasn’t fit for arguing with him.

    The two were friends of a sort. They had both protested against the Dublin Housing Crisis; they had both helped out at a social centre. They helped each other sometimes. For all their differences they had things in common.

    George had brought his three-year-old daughter Paulina. Paulina and Manus had gone through a number of high and low points over the three years of her life. Manus had been a fun distraction one night while both her parents had sneaked off but when Paulina became aware of the dirty trick that had been played on her she screamed all night. It had taken a long time but Paulina was gradually forgiving Manus. She got Manus to flush the toilet for her. Which Manus did again and again and again and again. Paulina was delighted. It was nice for Manus too, to perform a task that seemed a worthwhile and appreciated service.

    Nick phoned and arranged to meet Manus on Saint Stephen’s Green. Like Manus, Nick came from the North. Like Manus, Nick had been called names and spat at a lot when he walked the streets as a youth. They both shared the experience of gangs of loyalist thugs throwing bricks and bottles and chasing them. Manus was a taig in a mostly prod area and could run for one of the taig streets. Nick was actually a prod in a totally prod area but his family would have been the only black family in his whole estate. Loyalists in the North of Ireland were known for their sectarianism, but Nick’s family gave them a chance to prove they were just as racist. Nick developed fighting skills whereas Manus was just a great runner. Manus figured Nick had always tried and usually managed to beat the bastards at their own games. He could fight better, play sports or chess better and stand at the bar and talk bullshit about football better than anybody.

    Nick was over six feet tall and when he let his dreadlocks out of his big hat they came down to the floor.

    Manus and Nick had coffee, sat on the grass on Saint Stephen’s Green. Manus babbled about his own child’s graduation from primary school and how it looked like an American teen movie. And how he felt depressed since he had just pushed that woman away. And how he hoped to get a ‘coffee with Chomsky’ van together which would permanently play Chomsky speeches or Democracy Now! episodes or CounterPunch news, or any alternative to corporate news and views of the world. Everywhere you looked there was a corporate message. One small screen wasn’t going to achieve much, but it just might keep his personal sanity.

    Nick loved the idea. Nick was a cobbler by trade but still hoped to build a studio and record his own music. He had two grown boys up North who visited regularly, but Nick at fifty years of age now lived in Dublin with his new partner and their five year old son Thor.

    Nick babbled about his partner going to some medium who had said Thor was a really old soul. Manus’s mother used to go in for that type of stuff. Nick also went on about how England was still in the World Cup and how Manus, even though he wasn’t into football or nationalism, had to join in the world’s prayer that England couldn’t win the World Cup. The world would never hear the end of it. They still hadn’t shut up about their win in 66.

    At least, thought Manus, Nick didn’t repeat the football being more serious than life or death crap.

    Manus and Nick met May O Byrne at the main gate outside Saint Stephen’s Green. Nick had to go to pick up his kid but Manus introduced them anyway. Telling Nick: ‘come on and meet this one she’s cool.’

    ‘Nick this is May she’s an activist. May this is Nick he’s not stopping today but he’s one of us.’

    Nick went on and May and Manus stood alone.

    May had the petition letter, but said she wasn’t that pleased with it because it quoted Obama. The fact that Obama had been responsible for so many deaths in his time put May off.  Manus shrugged. He didn’t reckon the Australian government would give a shit what the letter said. They were never going to protect Assange. What government in the world was going to thumb its nose at America?

    May was even older than Manus. She said her husband wasn’t well enough to attend. He was eighty-five. Her hubby had been a newscaster in Australia. She said he could see the telexes that came into the news office which never got read. After a while he found it impossible to put on a face that looked like it believed what it was reading and so he lost his job.

    May said there was another Australian coming. A woman called Kate. Manus tried to check himself from his ridiculous notions of finding a partner, long or short term, in Kate. At his age looking for a partner. How long did he think he had left? Still his mind ran on. She would probably have rolls of fat hanging over her pants and a squashed up ugly face. He was shallow.

    She turned up. Fit-looking and highly attractive.  When May went to shake hands Kate insisted on a hug. Manus got a hug too. A bit of much needed physical for Manus. She had been visiting her parents. Catching a flight back at the end of the week.

    Just right for a non-committal shag on a holiday thought Manus.

    Kate said she had emigrated to Australia on her own in the seventies. Had Manus heard that right. Emigrating in the seventies on her own made her around his age. Was that possible? Had he found an attractive woman from his own age group? Could she feel attracted to him?

    Youth went for sexual gratification, age expected accomplishments or at least a place in society. Manus was the least accomplished person in the world, with the lowest place in society.

    He had to stop with the negative self-image. It was that Avril ditchen him thing. It was the getting no nouky. Being the least accomplished person in the world or his place in society didn’t bother him so much when he was getting laid.

    Kate had been shoe-shopping. ‘Well shoes are just so expensive in Australia.’

    Believe in the corporate portrayal of the world or not you still had to live in it.  And despite his own choice, he understood that being a bum was not a popular preference.

    Sid turned up with his bowler hat, scarf, waistcoat and corduroy trousers. A talented singer song writer. Sid and Manus were close enough in years. They talked of Ciaron O Reilly’s unceasing efforts. They both did little bits now and again but Ciaron was full time, twenty-four-seven, year-in year-out. They talked of their kids. Sid’s daughter, born when Sid was in his twenties, was in her forties now. Sid said he had been there when his daughter was a child but he may as well not have been. Sid didn’t drink now but he had been a hard drinker. Manus was coming on fifty before a woman had decided not to abort his kid. Age must have granted him some semblance of sense then, as he had stopped drinking and hard-drugging in order to look after his daughter.

    It had clearly been the better buzz.

    Liam arrived. Almost in his forties, with a twenty-one year old son that he had fought for and gained joint custody over when the child was young. A clean cut man from a stable background. Manus and Liam had put the movie Underground: The Julian Assange Story on in a social centre before Assange’s sixth year in detention. They were useless at getting an audience. They got the usual suspects: June; Sid; Manus; Liam; Dave; and Brian (Brian couldn’t stay though, he was no spring chicken and probably didn’t enjoy the music plus, any talk of computers confused him. He had never used one). There had also been a new face, a Polish girl who actually came to the protest the next week. Liam had remained upbeat and positive. The Polish girl was a new convert. One at a time huh? Even if he was getting laid, getting paid and had a place in society other than lowest, Manus’s optimism couldn’t turn the idea of one person into the possibility of victory. Liam was realistic enough too though. Like Manus he saw no victory possible through their pathetic efforts. And like Manus he didn’t know any other tactics. And while the effort and its lack of effect made them feel useless, not to make the effort made them feel worse.

    Paul arrived. Manus didn’t know much about him. Seen him at a few protests. In his thirties maybe.

    He lived down the country somewhere, but if he was in the capital and something was happening he would go. He looked a solid, stubborn sort that would be good to have beside you in a line against thugs in uniforms.

    Ann arrived. Manus had never met her before. She was writing a piece for a Russian magazine. Younger than Manus by a few decades. In a flouncy dress. Manus’s attention switched. Them flouncy summer dresses always got Manus.

    Sometimes he could be such a letch.

    They walked through the park. Manus asked Sid if he had had much success as a singer-songwriter. Sid said, ‘No. Thank god.’ ‘Why? Did you not want success?’ asked Manus, to which Sid replied ‘my head’s so big already it would have blown up completely. Sure I’d a had to get myself a new hat and everything.’

    Manus understood how difficult it would be to cope with success. And agreed with Sid’s sentiment, but in actuality he could have done with a bit of it.

    They walked through the park and after a wrong turn or two found the embassy.

    Martine was there with his two kids who were both under ten years old. Martine had thought of becoming a priest, but had backed out at the last minute. Thank fuck.

    The letter requesting that the Australian government start looking after Julian Assange’s human rights, signed by two and a half pages of Australians living in England and further afield, was read. Photos were taken. Manus held a banner: ‘free Julian Assange’.

    That was it.

    Martine and his kids went off.  Everyone else decided to go to the park for coffee and tea and small buns with a single letter of the birthday boy’s name on each one. Thirteen buns.

    They had the banner spread out in front of them on the grass.

    Free Julian Assange.

    Kids were still starving to death while half the world’s food production was being destroyed. Ecological and nuclear disaster threatened the planet like never before while the corporations’ need for constant profit kept pushing us all towards said disaster. And Julian Assange was hold up in some room in London, threatened with life imprisonment for publishing the truth.

     And it was a beautiful sunny day in Dublin’s Saint Stephens Green.

    The group talked and exchanged phone numbers. Manus didn’t offer or ask and wasn’t offered or asked for a phone number.

    Sid called to him as though the two should walk off together, but Manus stalled. He wanted to walk with Sid but what was Kate doing?

    Liam was showing Kate where the museum was. Manus went too. Perfect, Liam would walk off and Manus could show her round. It was almost too pat. Walk and talk round a museum with an attractive woman he had met at a protest. Engaging conversation and curiosity glances. They would get some food. Time would pass and she would have to get the last bus back out the country unless she wanted to stay in Dublin for the night.

    As usual his mind ran on fantasies. but his mouth said nuthen.

    Liam hugged her goodbye.

    Manus hugged her goodbye too.

    On their walk through town Liam asked Manus if he would like to write a letter to Julian. Manus kina shrugged his laugh. Manus had spent his life trying to ignore or block out what he thought he could do little about. And now he wanted to write to Julian and say he supported him. Hopefully there were better more effective supporters than Manus.

    Did you know that Cassandra Voices has just published a print annual containing our best articles, stories, poems and photography from 2018? It’s a big book! To find out where you can purchase it, or order it, email admin@cassandravoices.com

  • Casino

    Part I

    You know your father used to go to school next to the Casino at Marino, him and his friends would play around it.

    For years I would ignore my dad’s connection with the Casino, it was too incongruous a pairing to stick. Two histories known to one site but held discordant in my mind and never sitting side by side—always one leaving as the other entered. One is a topic of the history books, with its subject clearly delimited through Italianate paintings and Enlightenment-era discourse. An illustrious period of history, as we are taught, basking in the light of privilege. The other is closer to the bone, a murky memory passed down a generation. A privation I didn’t know in detail, in language, but rendered visible over time as his years crumbled away into tragedy.

    Only later when studying the history of art would the two discrete worlds surface once again in my consciousness. Following the official account propagated by the history books and further confounded by the classroom teachings, the image of my father was conjured up and left floundering, left groundless against the staunch record that preceded him.

    A casino is traditionally a small house designed for leisure and entertaining, a folly for the upper-classes typically built on the grounds of a stately home. The Casino at Marino, as artefact, took up just a snippet of the curriculum. Its teaching, however, echoed the rehashed idealism of neoclassicism, where a masterly imitation of nature was replaced by a masterly display of the idea, of the rational mind or idealised subject. The Casino at Marino was taught as any phenomenon set steadfast in the history books; its features analysed; its fashion surveyed; a few connections to important men told. I am history, it said.

    As the record goes, for about two hundred years after Poussin, Lorrain, and Rubens, the institutional practices of the academies would nurture a host of painters across western Europe and, in turn, would see them ossify in their galleries and studios, regurgitating one mythological tableau after another. ‘History painting’, after the Latin historia, meaning ‘story’ or ‘narrative’, was the most hallowed genre of painting at the time. This ‘grand genre’—so admired for its glorified rendition of myth or historical event, or a blending of the two—justified a return to old styles and a retreat from the present.

    At college we studied the revival of classical architecture as fashioned in the homes of the landed classes in Ireland. The gentry lined their great houses with columns and pilasters, their halls with Roman busts and figurative sculptures set back in niches, an erudite display cultivated from their travels on the Grand Tour. Of the Casino, I learned that it commenced construction in the 1750s and it remains one of the most admired examples of neoclassical architecture in Ireland. I learned that it was the seat of Lord Charlemont, James Caulfield, an important figure in fashioning the tastes and minds of Dublin’s high society at the time. And so on.

    Such a history—stagnant, impervious to change, insisting on grand narratives—called for a re-examining. Looking askance, I learned that the land on which the casino resides used to be called Donneycarney, but as a sense of place is so tied to a sense of class, on acquiring the estate its new owner necessarily rechristened it ‘Marino’ after his beloved Italian destination. Thus, in one stroke, it was lifted from a locale that seemed too provincial, too mundane, and repositioned in the mind’s eye of its landlord. It earned a kind of classical placelessness, a new lofty trans-setting. In their world, everything became ‘grand’: the ‘grand genre’ of history painting; the ‘grand tour’ of Europe to sites of classical history; the ‘grand style’ of Michelangelo or Raphael, to be assiduously copied by academicians.

    Over a hundred years after the Casino was founded, with that golden light of the leisure classes waning, the estate came into the ownership of the Christian Brothers—a brotherhood of lay disciples who set out to get those poor-ragged boys off the street, offer a ‘basic’ education and to prepare them for industry, but most of all to teach them the ‘value’ of ‘hard work’ and religious observance. Their institution spread worldwide, as did the abuse.

     

    Part II

    Apparently he used to write poetry when he was younger but one day decided to burn it all. He said he used to write it spontaneously, squeezed into the white spaces of bus and train tickets.

    The Casino at Marino—in a cinematic turn, as I envision it from a history lesson that breathes so close to me—was then recast in an altogether different light. Snapped out of its delusion only to confront a stark grey reality. Those inner-city boys, my father included, playing around the Casino were shunned both literally and ideologically from the gold-lit world of the Casino’s origins. That beam of enlightened thinking, so preciously preserved in the history books, entirely bypassing generations of poor boys living on the very property. For those boys who chose to notice it, I imagine, the Casino lingered about their playing grounds like an apparition — an idealised past further haunting the gloominess of their present day.

    Allegations of child abuse against the Christian Brothers would start to emerge around the 1980s. Starting with a handful of easily dismissed complaints to an outpouring from the Brother’s global institutions. In a rare and reluctant admission of guilt, in 1996 the Christian Brothers released a statement starting with the line: “There are signs of that death in our congregational story.” It continued,  “Such signs include undue severity of discipline, harshness in Community life, child abuse, an addiction to success, canonizing work to the neglect of our basic human needs for intimacy, leisure and love.”

    “Signs of that death”, a phrase that both acknowledges the insidious force of clerical abuse whilst averting a direct collision with the issue. “There are signs of that death”, a clumsy sentence, weak and faltering in its expression of something so horrid. But it is a haunting set of words all the same. Clamouring, clasping at an expression that might hold the full weight of its implications.

     

    Part III

    Like flints from a fire History sparks into being. It wilfully shoots and splinters, enlightening some and leaving others in the dark.

    Through the telling of this oft-repeated story of history, as I experienced in the classroom that day, I saw the elaborate structures of ‘history-proper’ crash into the shadow it cast upon my father and family. I was told his story without his name being mentioned. I became the child I might have been, proud of her father, and, despite everything, in defence of him. I thought, his story can be told, maybe shame doesn’t have to bury it and uncertainty doesn’t have to muzzle it. I felt the staggering height and glory of the Casino’s tale owed something to my father’s life, or perhaps, owed something to mine. Where history fell silent was the moment it laid claim to my life.

    To see him, to talk to him, is to relive that death, not a sign, but an aching reality.

    I am beginning to see my life. I am beginning to see the forces that shaped it, that weighed upon it, and nearly snuffed it out. I am beginning to see my life from the position of the end, from the imprint of a negative allowed to fester for too long, stumbling through histories and plaguing generations, fusing many to the same struggle.

     

    Leah Reynolds is an art writer based in Bristol. Her latest piece explores the genre of auto-fiction, combining her academic background in the history of art with a personal narrative.

  • My Fellow Americans – A Short Story

    When I first moved to Dublin, I thought there were a lot of out-of-shape athletes living in the city. I later learned that my misconception was the same as the basis of a joke that had been topical fifteen or twenty years before I got there.

    The joke was about a politician opening a shopping mall but not having been properly briefed by his PA first and thinking that he was opening a gym. I was never told the proper wording. But when I made known my little athletic observation one time to George Sexton, that’s what he told me: “Oh, that’s the same as this joke about the Square in Tallaght.” It wasn’t like him to be dismissive like that, so it emerges from time to time out of the settled silt of the memory of our less remarkable share of moments.

    I’d come to Ireland for my Junior Year Abroad, in the early years of the new century. My explanation for going there was simple: I wanted to live in the city of James Joyce’s Ulysses. That’s what I told myself at the time. In retrospect, I know I was looking for love.

    I preferred the works of William Faulkner to Joyce but Faulkner’s city of Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha County don’t exist, so Joyce’s Dublin seemed like the perfect alternative. I made my application and was accepted at Trinity College.

    I arrived in the rain in late September and as I struggled to figure out the best means of getting into the city I felt the full and cold lonesomeness of solitary travel. Eventually I found a big blue bus, which took me right to campus, where I’d be staying for the year.

    It was on the bus ride in that I first saw the athletes. So, this is Dublin, I thought, looking out the window at the people in the brightly coloured shell-suits, ambling round O’Connell Street looking to score drugs; and I was feeling ever more confused and lonely.

    After getting settled in my room, I set out that evening to try and find some of the local character for which Dublin is famed.

    *******

    The next day, the school had organized an orientation day for us American Juniors and our European equivalents. It wasn’t the kind of thing I’d normally have gone to but when the time came, I was quite relieved. My bar-hopping adventures on the first night had not exactly gone to plan – most of the people to whom I spoke seemed surprised that I would try and make conversation with them.

    And when I arrived at the lecture theatre, there they all were: my fellow Americans. It wasn’t so much that I thought I wouldn’t like any of them, it was more that, that wasn’t why I’d come over. I’d declared that I was going to Ireland, to live amongst the Irish. I was looking for something different. Determined though I was, for almost the first three months I spent there, I hung around almost exclusively with two of these orientation-day Americans: Dave and Eddie.

    They were there that first day, at the library, like me, looking conspicuous amongst the sensibly dressed Europeans and kids from the Mid-West.

    “You guys about ready to bail too?” I said on our way out of the introductory talk, when I saw them diverge from the tour.

    They were roommates it turned out and so had met already. Dave, from Southern California, had even managed to source some weed too, so we went back to their room to get high.

    A lot of our time there was spent like that, smoking weed – back in my place usually – listening to old jazz records and discussing literature. Often, as evenings wore on, Eddie, who was a Whitman nut, would end up declaiming impressively lengthy sections of Song of Myself; be it in a bar, a party, or even back in one of our rooms. I always felt a little embarrassed, but Dave encouraged it with such seriousness that I never dared reproach or make known my uneasiness. All this was before Eddie lost his marbles and his father had to come get him.

    *******

    It was the week before we were due to break for Christmas that we first met George Sexton.

    George? It seemed so strange a name for an Irishman – it still does: George. But he was Irish all right, that’s for sure.

    The name of the bar was Doyle’s, if I recall, a dive joint not far from the college. George was there wearing a cravat with funny little dogs on it, which themselves were wearing cravats and his eyes had that wild look they got sometimes. Eddie had met George in a class once, which prompted him to come over.

    “I remember you from that tutorial I went to,” he said by way of greeting as he sat down. This surprised us, as it was unusual for any of our Irish classmates to initiate engagement. That evening we were there with a mixture of English kids, which may have had something to do with him coming over, I guess.

    The four of us talked a while on the edge of the group. He asked a lot of questions – interesting ones – his brow stern with thought throughout.

    He was silent for a time then and I’d almost forgotten he was there when all of a sudden, he leapt up and roared in this guttural Pan-American brogue, “Butter up my eyes, Shove tin-foil in my Ears, Tell me lies about Vietnam!”

    It sounded like those old recordings of Nixon, oddly.

    Dave said, “That’s the most dramatic thing I’ve ever seen!”

    And then he was gone.

    Three days later I was on a plane back home for the holidays. Two weeks of family and snow. But all I could think of was George Sexton. It frightened me a little. I would have to meet him again when I got back.

    Which was easier said than done. On my return, I called Dave. He and Eddie had stayed in Ireland over the Christmas period. Dave sounded a little out of sorts when I spoke to him but glad to hear from me nonetheless.

    As soon as I met them, it was clear that Eddie was unwell. Dave hovered about nervously, looking to me for a reaction. I tried to suggest to Eddie that he’d maybe had enough to drink as he went to refill his tumbler again. He became angry immediately, spitting poison at me.

    His drinking got worse as the weeks went by. He became increasingly messy and had completely given up going to class. Dave, who was quite a bit upset by the whole thing, kept apologizing, saying he hadn’t seen it coming, that suddenly one day he was just like that, drinking whiskey out of his pocket, like a secret, eyes like an injured dog.

    They’d spent a deal of time while I was away hanging out with George Sexton, but nobody had seen him much since I got back. Then out of the blue one day, he appeared. He’d heard about the hospital, he said, and tried to visit Eddie but had been told that Eddie had skipped out already.

    Things had gotten completely out of hand and of course, Eddie’s father had to come for him in the end. Dave and I were unable to say a word to the man as he looked from us to what had become of his son.

    George called by that evening. He was unshaven by a couple of days, which served to accentuate his lips, which were full and red like an open wound amid all those shocking black bristles. I felt repulsed but couldn’t look away from it either – George’s mouth.

    “Hello again,” he said to me quietly before asking after Eddie. Eddie – who had already left my thoughts, like all he’d been was a portent of George.

    The three of us sat up a while then, trying to remember signs or indications which might have warned us about our friend’s decline. By turns it seemed obvious, then not at all, that things would wind up the way that they did.

    “We should meet again,” I said as he got up to leave late on.

    “Sure…” he replied, his eyes indecipherable. The thought seemed to impede his ability to put his arms through his sleeves; he stood still, his shoulders pinned back by his heavy coat. “Yes,” he answered finally, poking his hands free.

    After that, we saw quite a bit of each other. We’d meet daily at coffee shops, and talk, sometimes for hours. George studied French and Art History. He knew what he liked when it came to literature but it was Art about which he felt most strongly. He dressed impeccably but not just like an old-school dandy or flâneur, learned from a book. He had genuine style, consistent and inimitable. And he moved with such effortless grace. I never felt as oafishly American as I did when I was with George.

    He had come out of a relationship just before Christmas time, having broken the poor girl’s heart seemingly. He had no interest in getting tangled up in something like that again, he kept saying. And the offers were always there: it wasn’t just that he was handsome, people just generally wanted to be around him. Always.  Everybody loved him. I’ve never met anyone since who had the same effect on people as George had then.

    He could be generous and good-natured and had a capacity for asking piercing questions which had a way of making you feel that he already knew you better than anyone else you’d ever met. He was perceptive, in a way that people took personally – almost as a point of pride. But there was something else too. A certain fatalistic fearlessness which made him frightening from time to time. In moods like that, he could disappear for days on end.

    I’d ask him where he’d been and he would just smile and say, “No-where,” hiding a bruised knuckle or even a limp. And he’d be back to his normal self then, buying drinks and generally being the object of everyone’s attention.

    “Delicious to see you George,” they’d say.

    George’s response was always non-verbal. He’d smile his mischievous smile, full to the brim in his eyes, while his mouth danced around between smirk and genuine delight.

    *******

    It was just after exam time. Which, of course, meant a party. It wasn’t the very last time I saw him, but it was nearly so. My heart was heavy with the knowledge that I would soon be leaving but I remember feeling dizzy too about that night and what it might entail. The sense that my time was coming to an end made it exciting – an end-of-days feeling.

    The afternoon was warm and mostly dry. George suggested that we have a barbeque at this perfect little beach he knew about before going to the party. Just the two of us. We locked our bikes at a nearby Dart station. George led the way and between the two of us, we managed to secure our haul of beers and charcoal to our destination.

    The sun went in and out behind the clouds, like it was in a ritualized dance of courtship with the sky. George lit the fire: he was practical like that, yet he always had such neat hands and dress. He went down to the shore then, to wash the coal off, and after, suggested we go for a swim. “It’s nice,” he claimed. I was reluctant, I remember, and pointed out that we’d already lit the fire and that I was hungry.

    We ate, and drank beers cooled by the sea, lying on the grass.

    The sky cleared after a time and George was adamant then, as it warmed up: we had to swim. We stripped to our briefs and went in search of a spot from where we could jump straight in, neither of us courageous enough to wade in from the sand.

    “Here will do,” George said, standing on a rock above the placid sea. It didn’t strike me as being terribly safe but I didn’t say so, I just followed George’s leap into the blue.

    I was completely unprepared for the shock of the cold. I thrashed madly, gasping and looking all around me for the quickest way out. George just floated and laughed at the sight of my antics. The relief of being out of the water was enormous.

    After a quick swim, George got out too – rather more graciously than I – laughing still and shaking his head.

    We sat quietly then, smiling and watching the sea as we dried out in the sun. The delicate make-up of his features was echoed in the neatness of his torso; his taut narrowness glistened.

    *******

    When the sun weaved its way in behind the cloud cover, the cold air touched our skin all over and I remember all the while that I was all atremble. It was the most exquisite feeling and it’s then that it happened. That’s when George said to me the thing that I’ve thought about ever since. It was so silent by the sea, I could have willed that moment to last forever. When George whispered to me, “Phillip, we’re all alone now, you know? It’s just the two of us.” It had been just what I was thinking, and it made me stop dead. George was looking at me expectantly and for a second, I couldn’t be sure whether he had said it or if I had just imagined it. I froze. I didn’t know what to say, I was so full of longing and dread. I could feel my heart thump like it was trying to escape.

    “George, I know…” I started to stammer, considering his confident gaze as he edged closer to me.

    “Why are you trembling Phillip?” he asked.

    I closed my eyes.

    And then my phone rang.

    I answered it.

    It was my older brother, Paul, calling to say that he’d pick me up from the airport in a week’s time.

    When I got off the phone, George was looking at me still. But I looked away then.

    “It’s getting late,” I said. “We should get going.”

    “Whatever you like Phillip,” George smiled back. “Whatever you like.”

    *******

    The party was at a run-down, three-story house on Leinster Road, with the whole place rented as one. We arrived at around nine or ten and it was alive already. We were quickly separated in the throng of chit-chat about summer plans. Everybody oozed that invincibility which flares so brightly towards the end of college life before reality snuffs it out. Everyone had something to say. And more than ever, I wanted to speak only to George.

    Dave was there. He seemed happier than I’d seen him in a while. Round about midnight we fell in to talking about our wild first term. Eddie was doing better, he told me. I said I was glad and we discussed what our respective Senior Years held in store for us and what we might do afterward.

    A guy he knew passed then and he introduced us, explaining that his friend, John, played the trumpet and that he thought I’d very much enjoy hearing his band play.

    I tried to put George out of my mind for a while as John and I got caught up in conversation. We had the same obscure records and he talked about music just the way I felt about it. Dave left us to it, saying he’d see us later. I wanted to ask him to look out for George but didn’t know how.

    John, from Connecticut, was over in Dublin full-time, studying music and math. He’d had a band called the Ice-Cream Men the whole time he was there. He tried to keep the band members as American as possible, for authenticity, he said.

    It was getting late by then and I was worried about where George had gotten to. An urge to rush out and find him, to see him before morning at all costs, washed over me. I had to ask him about what he’d said on the beach earlier, and thought that if I could, it might all still come right.

    I didn’t know how to abandon John, while he rummaged in his bag, looking for an eighth of whiskey he had. He re-emerged excited, showing me a record he’d bought earlier that day.

    “I completely forgot! We have to play it!” he said, his eyes aglow, “There’s gotta be a record player here somewhere.”

    “I’ll go search the place,” I said, jumping at the chance to look for George. John followed after me.

    We bled back into the party, pushing through the other bodies. Hunters in a wood of flesh, John bearing his LP; me, seeming to be searching for a record player, while really I searched for George.

    Nearing the top of the building, I’d pretty much given up hope.

    There were two rooms off the top-floor landing. It seemed utterly pointless at this stage but we persevered nonetheless.

    John made for the room on the right, so I went to the one on the left.

    I reached for the door-handle and out popped George.

    “Hi,” he said shyly, a little breathless. A girl, smiling, stood behind him.

    “…Phillip, this is Cathy.”

    His face had that same inscrutable smile as it had on the beach earlier, like he knew just a little bit more than everyone else.

    *******

    I don’t remember what album it was that John was trying to play.

    The week after the party, I went to see The Ice-Cream Men. That’s where I met Trudy. We were married the following fall.

     

    Donal Flynn was born and grew up in Limerick. He lives in Dublin and works in retail. He has a story in the current edition of The Honest Ulsterman. 

  • Spirit Animals

    ‘I had a dream about you last night.’

    Sarah, stuffing wet tuna into pitta pockets and wondering if she could just put the same tangerine, uneaten from yesterday, back into Noah’s lunchbox, stiffened. The now-familiar tightening of her neck, shoulders and arms at the sound of Juliette’s voice went through her like one of those lock-and-load scenes in shoot-em-up movies; a rippling of ‘click, click, click’, on and on until everything tensed.

    ‘Me?’ Noah said. He put down his spoon. ‘What dream?’

    ‘I dreamed first of a snow fox, then of a snow wolf.’

    Sarah could hear Juliette settling into herself, into her dream and her visions. She leaned closer to the little boy. Her voice dropped; mysterious, revelatory. ‘The snow fox was running and leaping through deep, white snow, glad to be alive. Then the snow wolf appeared and at first it hunted the fox, but then they became one and together they were more powerful than before.’

    ‘Where was I?’ Noah asked. ‘In the dream.’

    ‘You were the snow fox, but then, when the wolf came, you were the wolf too. So I know now – a snow wolf is your spirit animal.’ She paused, for drama. ‘And Noah, it’s an incredibly powerful spirit animal. It means you have an appetite for freedom.’

    Sarah wished there was a polite way to tell someone who sat in your kitchen, lived in your house, to shut up. Not someone though, Juliette. Juliette, who had the word ‘fearless’ tattooed on the inside of her arm, and ‘I was not built to break’ in curly script under her hipbone. Juliette, who marked herself before life could do it for her. As if that could stop anything.

    Juliette. She had been christened Juliet, had added the final ‘t’ and the ‘e’ herself, ‘because it sounds better,’ she had once explained to Sarah.

    ‘But they’re silent,’ Sarah had protested.

    ‘Not entirely,’ Juliette had said, smugly. ‘They draw the sound out at the end, just enough.’

    Enough for what Sarah had wondered? Enough to be incredibly annoying?

    That was before Juliette, after yet another failed relationship, another failed attempt to live ‘a meaningful life’ – meaning she seemed to find only in weird diets and crystals, Sarah noted, never in work or anything useful – had come to live with them. Now, Sarah tried not to remark on anything she said, in case doing so prolonged conversations she didn’t want to have.

    Are you finished in the bathroom? Can I change the channel? Those were the realms where she wanted conversation with Juliette to stay.

     

    ‘What is a spirit animal?’ Noah asked, not unreasonably Sarah thought. She closed the lunchbox with a snap.

    ‘Noah, finish up. You need to hurry,’ she said.

    ‘Your spirit animal is the shape of your soul,’ Juliette said, ignoring the urgency in Sarah’s voice, the urgency of a Wednesday morning, with school and work and time-pressure – all the things Juliette had decided not to bother with. ‘It’s your guide and helper, in this world but also in the other world.’ She dropped her voice low on ‘other’, drawing it out long.

    ‘Noah, come on.’ The irritation Sarah felt seeped into her voice, making it sharp, so that Noah looked up too fast and said ‘What’s wrong?’ too loudly.

    ‘Nothing. Nothing’s wrong. Just that we’re going to be late.’

    ‘Ok.’ Then, ‘what’s your spirit animal,’ he asked Juliette.

    ‘A black panther,’ Juliette said.

    ‘Of course it is,’ muttered Sarah to herself as she grabbed Noah’s coat. Of course it bloody is. Funny the way no one ever had a mouse or a rat as a spirit animal. Or remembered past lives in which they were filthy, flea-ridden serfs; always Egyptian pharaohs or high-born ladies. Was it only the very powerful who reincarnated, or did every crackpot suffer pathetic delusions of second-hand grandeur?

    ‘We’re off,’ she called from the front door. ‘See you later.’ She wondered would Juliette clear away the breakfast things, or leave them there for Sarah to do when she got back from work. It could go either way, she knew.

     

    ‘She’s supposed to be looking for a job,’ Sarah had complained to Brian only the day before. ‘But all she ever does is meditate and cook horrible desserts made with barley malt and cocoa powder.

    ‘I know,’ he had said, rueful, but not angry, ‘I buy the ingredients. They cost a fortune.’

    ‘So stop buying them. Say we can’t afford it. She can buy her own. We’re already not making her pay rent, because she’s your sister and you feel sorry for her.’

    ‘Sarah, she can’t afford to. You know she can’t,’ Brian had said gently. ‘That’s why she’s here. I know it’s hard, but it’s only for a while, until she gets herself sorted out.’

    ‘It’s been months, and she doesn’t show any signs of ever leaving.’

    ‘Just give her time. She’s good with Noah. He loves having her here.’

    ‘That’s the worst of it. She fills his head with nonsense. She talks to him about such rubbish – his aura, the healing power of the mind, how he can do anything if he visualises it.’

    ‘But he likes it.’

    ‘Maybe, but it’s not good for him. He pays it too much attention. You know he does.’ They didn’t talk about Noah that way, so she veered off. ‘He should be outside, playing with other kids, not in with her painting pictures of his aura.’

    ‘It won’t be for much longer,’ Brian had said.

    ‘You keep saying that.’

     

    In the car on the way to school, Sarah tried to do what the teacher had suggested to her at their last talk: prepare Noah for the day ahead so that he understood what he would be doing. In its own way, she saw, this wasn’t unlike Juliette and her ‘visualising.’ Except that this was practical. Had purpose. And so it was nothing like Juliette.

    ‘You’ve got your hurl and helmet,’ she said. ‘It’s hurling practice today.’

    ‘Yes.’

    ‘And you’ve got reading in the morning, before Little Break. You’ve done your book report for that.’

    ‘Ok.’

    ‘And I’ll pick you up, same as usual.’

    ‘Ok’

    Every day, his resignation hurt her more. She felt she was driving a small, scared prisoner who had learned not to thrash or fuss. Had learned that no help was coming. She imagined him counting hours the way prisoners counted days in the old films; vertical lines scratched on a wall: one-two-three-four-five-six then a diagonal line through them for seven; another week gone. Noah, counting hours until she came to pick him up: first the morning session, then Little Break, then the middle bit, then lunchtime where the trouble might come, then the last bit, then home.

    Every day, he was waiting for her, bag hoisted on his shoulders. Around him, other kids played, wrestled, jeered each other cheerfully, begging for five more minutes to play. Not Noah.

    ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

     

    ‘Juliette says my spirit animal is a snow wolf,’ he said now, proudly. ‘And hers is a black panther. What’s yours?’

    ‘I have no idea,’ Sarah said airily. ‘I don’t really believe in that stuff. It’s just stories.’

    ‘But if they’re true?’ he persisted. ‘What would you be?’

    ‘I don’t know, maybe a chicken.’

    ‘You wouldn’t be a chicken,’ he said, offended on her behalf. ‘Maybe Juliette knows what you are.’

    ‘It’s just stories,’ she said. ‘Juliette doesn’t know.’

    ‘Juliette has pink hair,’ he said then.

    ‘She dyes the front of it pink, yes,’ Sarah said. Then ‘You have art today as well. You like that.’ Even though she knew he didn’t. Not in school anyway. It was one of the ‘relaxed’ classes where children were free to wander around the classroom. Wander and linger and question and prod. ‘Your smock is in your bag.’

    ‘Ok.’

    At the gates, she slowed down. ‘Do you want me to park and come in with you?’ she asked. ‘Carry your helmet?’

    ‘No thanks,’ he said.

    ‘I love you, darling, see you later. Have a good day.’

    ‘See you later.’ He never said he loved her at the drop-offs, although he was vocal about it at other times, especially before he went to sleep. ‘I love you so much mummy. You’re the best mummy in the world.’

    ‘And you’re the best son in the world,’ she would answer, rubbing his nose with her nose.

    But in the mornings, he wouldn’t play that game. Instead, he started shutting down as soon as they left the house, so that by the time they got to school he was the silent, reluctant child his teacher described.

    She watched him now, squaring his thin shoulders beneath the heavy bag as he walked across the playground. She wanted to run after him, grab the bag from his back and say ‘not today! Let’s not go today. Let’s go somewhere else, just us.’ She wanted to hold him tight; be the person who protected him, instead of the person who abandoned him every morning to a fate she pretended she didn’t understand. How much longer would they give it, she wondered as she drove on to work, lurching from red light to red light, speeding up, slowing down, stopping, going. Another month? A year? Til he was in First Class? And then what?

    ‘He’ll settle,’ Brian had said, after that first awful meeting in junior infants, where the school suggested they have Noah “assessed” so they could “give him the support he needs”. ‘He just needs time,’ Brian had said. ‘He’s young for his age.’

    Sarah had agreed ‘Of course he will. He’s nearly the youngest in the class…’ even though she knew that Brian didn’t understand that it wasn’t just being babyish that set Noah apart. It was something else, something that was in him. A weakness the other children sensed through smell or instinct, that made them turn and want to hurt him, not help him.

     

    ‘Let’s go,’ Noah said that afternoon. He was, as she had known he would be, waiting. But before they could escape, Ms Ryan was upon them.

    ‘Can I speak to you quickly before you go,’ she asked, a hand out towards Sarah’s arm.

    ‘Yes, of course.’ Sarah’s heart sank. ‘Noah, wait here for me, I won’t be long.’

    The classroom smelled of chalk and feet and cheap disinfectant. The smells of Sarah’s childhood. More and more, the smells of Noah’s childhood.

    ‘There was an incident during hurling practice,’ Ms Ryan began quickly. She looked shifty, so that Sarah decided that this one would be complicated. Sometimes they were, sometimes they weren’t. ‘I didn’t see how it started,’ Ms Ryan said, ‘But Noah hit another boy with his hurl.’

    Complicated.

    ‘I see.’ Sarah waited. Experience had taught her that it was better to wait. Let them fill in some of their own blanks.

    ‘As I say, I didn’t see what happened first, and Noah did say that the other boy started it, but I asked the other children, those who did see—’

    The officious little girls, Sarah was willing to bet. The ones who brimmed over with ‘Miss Ryan, Miss Ryan, Noah spat his lunch at me.’ ‘Miss Ryan, Noah said Johnny was a pig.’ ‘Miss Ryan, Noah isn’t doing his work, he’s just drawing pictures on his copybook.’

    ‘—and they said that the other boy didn’t do anything physical.’ No, Sarah thought, he wouldn’t have to. Not at this stage. The groundwork had been so effectively laid.

    ‘Noah wouldn’t hit anyone without provocation,’ Sarah said. ‘Even then, there would have to be considerable provocation.’

    ‘I’m sure that’s true,’ Ms Ryan said, ‘but at this school we have a policy of no tolerance for hitting.’ Of course you do, thought Sarah. Anything easy, you have a policy for. Where is your policy for protecting a child for whom every day in your care is confusing and lonely, and now dangerous?

    ‘I was wondering,’ Ms Ryan continued, ‘if you had thought any more about an assessment?

    ‘I haven’t.’

    ‘Perhaps you should. At the moment, I am left with no choice except to take action in accordance with the school’s code.’ Give me an out, she was clearly saying. Give me an excuse, a piece of paper that says ‘spectrum’ or ‘disorder’ so that I can use it and spare us all from this.

    ‘I’ll think about it,’ Sarah said.

    And she would have to, she knew. Even though she didn’t believe that whatever it was about Noah could be pinpointed by an ‘assessment,’ or helped by bending the school’s policies in the light of it.

    Whatever it was about Noah, it was more, and less, than could be detected by the kind of process they described.

    ‘Let’s go.’ She took his hand on the way to the car because the playground was empty now, and he let her. She led him to the car, hand held tight, wondering would he ask what Ms Ryan had wanted. He didn’t but he was more silent than usual on the drive home. Normally, the self that he put away on the journey to school – the funny, curious boy who chatted to her about what he saw and thought – would slowly re-emerge on the trip back. But today he stared out the window and said nothing until they reached the house. Then ‘what day is it today?’ he asked.

    ‘Tuesday,’ Sarah said. ‘Why?’

    He didn’t answer, but she knew he was calculating in his head: if it’s Tuesday then tomorrow is Wednesday, then it’s Thursday and then Friday, and then the weekend.

    It was what he did. Broke his week into bits so that he could manage it, always striving forward towards weekends and holidays.

    They went into the kitchen where Juliette was baking. She had cleared the breakfast bowls but there was cocoa powder on the pale wooden countertop and some of those red goji berries that she ate. They stuck in her teeth, like she’d been gnawing on raw meat.

    ‘I’m making chia brownies,’ she said, to both of them. Then ‘do you want to help?’ to Noah.

    ‘Yes please,’ he said. ‘Can I stir the bowl?’ She pulled a stool out for him and lifted him onto it.

    ‘Of course you can stir. It’s hard work, because of the chia seeds but they’re incredibly good for you. They have loads of protein to make you strong.’

    Sarah watched them, the boy’s head bent over the bowl, wooden spoon in his hand as he stirred the thick mixture. It looked disgusting, she thought, with bits of black in it like flecks of soot, and was clearly thick as mud because he could hardly get the spoon round. But Juliette put her hand over his, to help him, and together they stirred the sludgy mixture.

    ‘That’s good, Noah,’ Juliette said. ‘You’re getting so strong.’ And Sarah, just as she had known that the concern in Ms Ryan’s voice was fake, heard that the love in Juliette’s voice was real.

    ‘Tell me more about Noah’s spirit animal,’ she said suddenly. ‘It’s a snow wolf, right? So what does that mean?’

    ‘It’s a really powerful sign,’ Juliette said. Noah stopped stirring and turned his head to look at her.

    ‘Go on,’ Sarah said, pulling out a stool.

     

    Emily Hourican is a journalist and bestselling author. She has written features for The Sunday Independent for 15 years, as well as for Image magazine, Conde Nast Traveler, Time Out and Woman and Home. Her first book, How To Really Be A  Mother was published in 2013, followed by The Privileged in 2016 and White Villa in 2017. Her latest novel, The Blamed, is out in June 2018. Emily grew up in Brussels, where she went to the European School, then studied at UCD. She lives in Dublin with her husband and three children.

  • Westerlywind – A Short Story

    Worthless. Humiliated. Deeply uncomfortable. Skin crawling. Awful. Shitty shit shitty fucking horror shit shit cock horror. Hate. Disdain. Awful, awful. Sad. Afraid. Unwelcome. Outside. Other. Ugly. Repulsive. Grotesque. Agnes. She wondered how, every time she appeared to be enjoying her time in Greenpoint. How, when things seemed like they were generally ok, she ended up with this gut-wrenching awareness that she was a gorgon who smelled of menstrual blood and dirty clothes.

    Her old friend Derya is turning 25 and Agnes arrives at the apartment at the weird hour. The hour of semi-sobriety, of eyes open to who is coming and going at a party.

    She heads for the punch before she attempts to talk to anyone. Everyone is preoccupied and ambivalent. The initial vague panic sets in. Agnes moves from the punch and rejoins the group with whom she arrived. Her husband Jen and Jen’s buddy, Martin. They’ve been hanging out all day at this stage. They drove in together. They ate BBQ together. Their day has already happened. She feels shame for having fought with Jen in front of Martin twice and was looking forward to getting away from the two of them upon arrival. As they have all run out of ways of making jokes or poking fun or having any kind of laugh together, there are a lot of silences and looking around. They have been hanging out for eight hours. Five of which involved a drive. How could they be expected to like each other at this stage. Jen tells a terrible story about drinking insane amounts of Red Bull in college and burning a wooden deer in a parking lot. Martin laughs hard even though Jen has told this story one hundred times and Martin was there when the event occurred. Agnes widens her eyes in disbelief and decides to brave the party room, thinking, I married a total asshole. She slams back her punch and ventures out for more, pressing down the mounting fear that builds within her.

    There is a place Agnes revisits when a fissure appears in her emotional fabric. It’s buried deeply inside her heart. When she feels a certain way in a certain mood in a certain environment, it is back there she goes. It is a darkened cloak room in a Catholic school. St Pius X. It is a year after her father has died. She is 12 years old. She is confronted by a group of girls about her odour. She pretends to not understand that she does indeed stink. She pretends that her classmates are simply identifying her smell and trying to ‘help’ her in the same way that her condescending delusional mother tries to ‘help’ people on her case load as a social worker; only she knows these girls are meaner, because they are 12. They have not properly learned how to pretend to be kind just yet, or, they have not been properly trained in the art of transforming their dysfunction into judgement about other people’s pain. Professionally.

    Party. Panic attack worsens.

    The Dan Crowleys and Robert Roberges are plentiful in certain Brooklyn zip codes, at certain launches and parties. She is reminded of her station in life each time she visits this fucking place. Agnes epitomizes the very visible invisible. The wrong frame of mind and intrusive thoughts abound, corroding her ability to make the smallest conversational effort.

    “So, what else…” falls out of her mouth, an involuntary verbal spasm. Stopping her. Turning her to melting, pointless garbage. She is so easily embarrassed by herself. Her own words, or lack of words in this case, cause her very innards to burn. Her mouth, dry now, presses its lips to the glass in her hand. She is reminded of a high school assembly when an alcoholic and a drug addict came to speak to her 11th grade class. She is standing near the punch table yet again, as she is reminded of this. Then she thinks of what the alcoholic hilariously stated was her past self-abuse motto. Agnes decides this is a great way to break the ice with the man to her left fumbling with cracker crumbs on his shirt. She conjurs her best raspy Rhode Island accent to re-enact the remembered phrase to the stranger. POOR ME. POOR ME. POUR ME ANOTHER DRINK. She says as she smiles at him, directing her eyes toward her glass in a knowing manner. He moves swiftly away from her, pretending to have heard nothing. Hey, do you have the time? She yells after him in an attempt to recover from the obvious rejection. Just then the host of the birthday party appears. Fucking finally. DERYA!! Says Agnes. Agnes. Says Derya. They hug and kiss. Some party! Says Agnes. Derya has to go check the stove. The moment of affirmation ends abruptly.

    Astounding paranoia is the accomplice to this sorry state. Imagine someone walking through life wincing. That is an Agnes smile. That. All the time. Her husband, Jen, does not understand why she gets mad about things that are of no great importance. Why she feels affected by the slightest discomfort. Why her twinkle is infrequent. A callus formed over time. A hardness. A protective layer. And when a crack appears it reveals a heartache so great, no person could take it. She tries to keep it to herself. And sometimes at a gathering here or there her oddness takes hold. Her choking self-hatred rears its head, and she runs out of her external self. Her inner life surfaces, paralysing her. Reminding her of the collective experiences that have corroded her spirit. A lack of kindness can erode a person. Cause them to burn alive. Faces red from embarrassment. Faces red from too much wine. The tale is worn and it ages, as pain will. It wears through the skin. Hardship surfaces. It becomes apparent eventually.

    Smell.

    Agnes stands by the punchbowl and the peanuts and cheese and crackers, and reckons she is really quite okay with talking to nobody. Her inebriation is nearing wistfulness: in the company of old friends, she is forced to remember old friends. She remembers the cloakroom confrontation after prayer group with the Shultz family. George and his very religious mother, Ellen. She smells her sweater the entire way to the cloakroom. They all know she smells. So does she. She says goodbye and scurries away from them, and pretends she lives in the house next door to where she actually lives. The beat up old mansard hellhole. When they walk away, after she’s hidden in a backyard bush, and once the coast is clear, Agnes moves over to the apartment building she actually lives in. On the second floor. Where a dachshund named Boru has led the other creatures in a revolt involving copious amounts of waste on unread newspapers. The floor is regularly soaked with piss and shit, so much so that there is now no way of getting the smell out of the wood. Toxic and right outside her bedroom door. She climbs the apartment stairs, goes to the kitchen and toasts two bagels. She then smothers them with Philadelphia cream cheese and moves to the living room to sit down on the blue recliner purchased for her dying father and watch Gargoyles. A cartoon about gargoyles. Something stirs within Agnes. She gets up and goes into her older brother Stephen’s room. Has a look around. It smells like teenage boy. She goes to the kitchen and grabs a pile of papers. She re-enters Stephen’s room, places the Providence journal on the floor and pulls down her pants and takes a shit.

    This party is hilarious, Agnes slurs to Martin. Martin nods. He is a quiet person. Martin. Have you seen my purse? I just had it. Have you seen it? I just had it. I just had it. Where’s Jen? I want to put my new lipstick on. I want to. Oh Martin, let’s play that game where we look around at every appalling person at a party and decide if they would be a Nazi or a member of the Resistance. Where’s Jen, says Martin.

    Booze is a noose around our Agnes’ neck. A boring old piece of fraying rope that used to have a pleasant function. That rope was once integral to a tyre swing placed over a river. It wore down over time and has been left in a pile of leaves. To rot. Agnes picked it up. She made a knot. That ancient rope around her neck. Alcohol. A misused piece of rope. That once held a tyre and simple pleasure that is now a shabby lariat looking for a lighting fixture.

    Agnes has found herself a party stranger to talk to momentarily while Martin rubs Jen’s shoulders. Long drive my ass she thinks to herself. Oh me? I’m just down visiting. I’m here for Derya. You know? Quarter of a century the old gal…anyway. What do I? I work in a deli called Hudson St., we make grinders. That’s what we call sandwiches in Rhode Island. Have you ever had an Italian? GRINDER. Italian Grinder? Ahahaha. What is wrong with me? AHAHHAHA. It’s funny. You’re not laughing. An Italian grinder consists of provolone cheese, capicola (pronounced like this: gabeegole), oh you’ve seen The Sopranos? Well there are a lot of Calabrese and Sicilians in Providence. Ahem. So, what else… salami, boiled ham, lettuce, tomato, red onion, oil and balsamic on the bread and oh no go right ahead. I have to go to the bathroom, too. No you go first. You work in a magazine. I’m better at holding my pee in. AHAHAHAHAAHA!!!! You know. Well, lunch rush has taught me a thing. It was nice meeting…She is now standing alone trying to look unbothered by the fact that she thinks, where did I put my glass? It’s in my hand. More liquid. More liquid it is. I would drink toilet water if it had a splash of vodka in it. Look at me.

    There were these games. These games that they would play at St. Pius the X. The 12 year olds. These old games that they were too old to play imbued with new meaning. She understands them. Too old was she. There were no playmates any longer. Games meant so much more when you understood that you were a fat girl with braces and a wen on your nose. Games were meant to humiliate if you were not a pretty little figure. BUT HOPE. SWEET HOPE. Laughter. Kinship. Joy. She jumps in. Red rover, red rover let Agnes come over. RED ROVER RED ROVE’R LET AGNES COME OVER.

    There are seven of her classmates in a row. Holding hands. Creating a chain. She runs right for the hot spot, at the boys she hopes to astonish with her comedic genius thus winning friendship from them and respect from the rest of the class. Ryan Roberge and Daniel Crowley. She runs in SLOW MOTION screaming HEEEERE IIII COOOMMME. She should of added YOUUU STUPID MOTHHHHERFUCKERRRS. That was one of those verbal expressions of frustration that came later in life accompanied by the finger when someone overtook her on the highway. But alas she was a reasonably good-natured 12. In the absence of resolution to childhood trauma the world is a rage canvas. Oh you stupid motherfuckers. Agnes runs in slow motion and she slowly breaks through with everyone laughing. Victory!! Victory, she thinks, until she realises that Crowley and Roberge pretend to have broken arms almost before she gets to them. As she pierces through their false union with all her husky hope that crushing feeling envelops her. She is the joke. The joke on TOP of her fucking joke. Extra funny. The game is for the other children soon to be teenagers gaping at one another. That game of breaking the flesh gate is for them at that moment. They get to play a child’s game all but for the chance to touch in front of the lay teachers.

    There is an extra benefit to humiliating one tubby fool. The moment keeps recreating itself for the entertainment of the other children. They played that game of Agnes breaking arms for 30 minutes that day, and 30 minutes the next. And the next. And the next. It was just so funny, and then the joke got old. She was the rerun of a live sitcom for the week. Agnes didn’t stand up in frustrated defiance against her peers. She just let the pain of every recess wash over her, and then it stopped one day. Something else replaced it.

    No such thing as victory. Life’s beauty is reserved for the beautiful. Is it possible to be that child and then become a proper, fully-formed adult? She feels more kinship with pigeons than she does her fellow man. That’s why she has found herself outside Derya’s birthday party. On the fire escape, watching from above as some hammered suit flings change at cabs. Agnes glasses him.

    Moira Brady Averill (1983–2016) was a writer, comedian, and self-described “career waitress” from Providence, Rhode Island. She married a Dubliner, the composer Gareth Averill, and became a central figure on the offbeat fringes of Ireland’s comedy and theatre scene. For the Tiger Dublin Fringe festival she co-wrote and performed the shows Very Rich Hours and Flemish Proverbs, which won the award for Best Design in 2015. She created and MCed the script-tearing variety night Meat Scandal, and through the collective Change of Address she collaborated with artists in direct provision. Alongside her comedic work, Moira left behind many pieces of short fiction of a more serious tone, in varying states of completion. ‘Westerlywind’, in which her recurring semi-autobiographical anti-heroine Agnes goes to a birthday party in Brooklyn, is one such piece.

  • At the Timber – A Short Story

    George waits in the parked van. His mind is somewhere between sleep and the wood and the few hours that have passed since he tried to tell her it was over. Somehow he couldn’t pluck the words. The diesel cab reeks fags. The fan heater lifts condensation from the cracked windscreen. Usually these matters fizzle out of their own accord. They slip back due to various pressures. Time passes, wounds heal, George moves on.

    Dandy lives three houses in. The estate has no name. Merely: ‘The Houses’. Dandy still has the box room, filled with the same comics and football posters, a childhood he hasn’t quite moved on from. George beeps the horn and the light goes on. Dandy is idle to the bone. Always has been, though he’s a way with the horse and without the horse George has no means of drawing timber off Mucklagh ridge. Dandy’s mother has him spoiled: the flask and lunch bag ready, heels cut from the sambos.

    George puts his hands to the fan and surveys the sorry row of houses: cracked cement and blocked gutters, slipping tiles and rusted cars and the half-cut green filled with burst footballs and broken prams and speckled with every brand of rubbish. She lives fifth house in, two houses on from Dandy, and the light is on. She’ll be flicking channels for the young one, brewing tea, trying to get up and out before the husband wakes.

    “Morning, George.”

    “Morning.”

    “Bite to the air, George.”

    “It’d cut you.”

    The road meanders up and out of the village with the contours of the river. First grunted pleasantries exchanged, Dandy leans into the passenger window and feigns a few precious moments of sleep.

    Next pick up is the ‘Trap Byrne’ or ‘Trapper’ as he’s known. Trapper’s homeplace is an asbestos slate cottage on a bend three miles out. Trapper keeps a handful of heifers on the couple of reed-strewn bog acres below the road. They cost more to keep than he’d ever hope to earn out of them: but he lives for the beasts. They give meaning to his little world, keep him in touch with the land. The Trapper works dog-hard on the Husqvarna, the saw-like an extension of his arm. Though you’d be wary enough of him. Just last week George had to have words. Trapper has a fondness for the young ones. Only these are his cousins, and they live in the adjacent cottage. It was the Dandy whispered it to George down by the stream out of earshot.

    “You might put a stop to it, George, or there’ll be trouble, so there will.”

    George caught up with Trapper refuelling the saw and he took the words to heart. At least he said he did.

    “Won’t do it again. You’re right. It was only talking anyways.”

    Trapper didn’t question how George might have heard or seen him, just nodded. Trapper needed a tight leash and as his employer George reckons himself the man to do it. Trapper listens to George. The trouble is, he doesn’t drive and seldom gets into town; but for Paddy’s of a Friday evening, he has little touch with a world beyond the cottages and the few bog acres.

    Trapper waits at the gate and jumps in, pushing Dandy to the middle.

    “Morning, Trap.”

    “Morning, lads.”

    “Bite to the air,” Dandy grunts.

    The cab goes silent as the van pulls out and moves up the last few miles to the wood. The lads have taken George’s mind off of her and the husband and having to tell her it’s over and he thinks timber.

    Harvesting machines, the size of small houses, rule the hills round here. There was a time when it was only men and horses and lorries but now the tree-swallowing harvesters are more economical. George has one of the last bands of men and they’re used for cutting the slopes and cliff faces too steep for the machines to travel. He has four men and a horse, a piebald cob called Trigger, ox strong and good to go from dawn till dusk. Sure as the lorries come, Trigger has the stacks ready.

    They leave the lane at Mucklagh and Trapper jumps down to unlock the yellow bar. The van groans under the weight of men and saws and fuel cans and a big bag of oats for the horse. They pull in at the top where the lorries load, light three fags in unison, wait for Jack and Chiseler to arrive.

    Jack is quiet and steady, did a spell in the army, though he gave it up, missed home. He’s a decent fellow, Jack, though he’d take any old word as gospel. The lads have him wound up to ninety. Tell him George’s hasn’t him registered, that any day now the suits will be up looking for his stamps. George has to watch what Jack’s cutting, make sure every last tree is marked, save he doesn’t venture over into the Douglas or the Larch.

    Two fags later the car pulls up behind them. Jack jumps out with a smile and a nod and helps Trapper lift the saws and fuel cans from the back of the van. Dandy goes into the wood to untether the horse with a bucket of soaked oats and George is left, face to face with Chiseler.

    “George.”

    “Chiseler.”

    “Heard you were out late, George?” His voice is high-pitched and nasty and he lifts himself from the car with a rat-like slither.

    “None of your business.”

    “None of my business? Isn’t she my family?”

    “That’ll do, Chiseler. Leave it at that, we’ve work to do.”

    “Only she’s married, to my nephew, did you think of that before you got to work on her?”

    “I said that’ll do. Now you can get up into that wood or you can turn round and go home. I’m paying the wages here and my word is the last word.”

    The Chiseler lights a fag and opens the boot of his car. He’s short and wiry, pock-marked skin and weasel-tongued though he can work a saw quick as any and he’s light on the steep ground.

    “There’ll be trouble, George. He’ll fucking lynch you.”

    The threat is spat from a distance. A weasel taunt, though Chiseler knows George won’t rise. Knows as long he gets up quick sticks and starts felling, George won’t go near him. When the saws start nothing is heard anyways and George walks on. It is to be expected, he tells himself. Chiseler is only doing his duty. Only marking his gob-hacked ground. Letting him know where he stands. Firing the warning shot across the bow. George pulls the saw and lets the angry oil-glistened bar bite into the first spruce. Two quick incisions into the foot-deep trunk leave hinge enough and he turns to the back to finish it. There is no need to shout, the sound of the saw caution enough. The trunk tips on the hinge and the spruce rustles free from the plantation and lands with one loud crack.

    “Timber,” shouts Trapper, coming up behind with a black-toothed grin.

    “I’ll start over here, George. Fell ’em down into the gap there.”

    “That’ll do,” though George’s mind is elsewhere. He’s thinking of the Chiseler’s nephew, a mean little low life. Sort of chap to catch you when you least expect: make it look like an accident. Usually George wouldn’t get too hung up on dropping a young one. Only this one is a tidy piece and she’s had a hard enough time of it. The Chiseler mightn’t know it but the nephew has been taking the back of the hand to her. She hides it well and the nephew’s measured enough to crack her where it won’t be seen. She knew what she was getting herself into when she married into them. We all make mistakes.

    Dandy tacks out Trigger by the van, bridle and chains and blinkers and the cob swooshes her tale at the horse-shit flies that hover round in one endless cloud. Trigger gave into them long ago and stands motionless in her infested misery as Dandy lathers himself with Deet. It is not an easy set, the rain has muddied the ground and the horse must pull each tree three hundred yards from the spruce clinging to the ridge, down through the stream where the diggers have cut a ford, and up to the lorry pull in. Trigger would pull eighty trees of a good day and is worth every bucket of oats. At night they leave her tethered in the larch where the fresh grass grows and the fresh wind keeps the flies at bay. George has had Trigger ten years now. He bought her off a tinker on the Gorey road. He’d been seeing one at the time who was into the horses and she put the tinker on to him. George heard later that the tinker was killed in a car crash, the bald tyre horsebox jack-knifed coming down off the gap. The one went back to her husband like everyone said she would and it is only Trigger that’s lasted from that summer of midnight car parks and hot flush horse yards.

    Ten o’clock tea is an institution. Thirsts, headaches and appetites are quenched and all little worlds crash together in one slag-drawn sorting shop symposium that riddles the measure of each of them.

    “How are the cattle, Trapper?”

    “Still rubbing their arses off of the new fence. How many times have I to drench the worm-riddled bitches? They’ve it near down and then it’ll be war when they get in on the nursery.”

    “Would you not get a strand of electric?” Chiseler taunts. “I’ve an old battery I’ll lend you.”

    “Good man, Chiseler, you and your old batteries, like the one you swiped from me car when I left it outside of Paddy’s.”

    “Didn’t I save you from the checkpoint? What? You can thank old Chiseler you didn’t go trousers down into that one, no tax or insurance, no license, drunk as a fiddler’s bitch. Besides, I’d say the walk home did you good. Saved your Mammy the trouble for once.”

    “Good man, Chiseler, an answer to everything what?” and Dandy pours his tea and looks out on the horse, munching its way through a second bucket of oats.

    “We’re making an impression now, George.”  Jack tokens, his head nodding toward the ridge.

    “Getting into it, all right,” George agrees.

    “Not the only thing you’re getting into, is it George?” Chiseler bites.

    “That’ll do from you.”

    There is a gentle under-snort all round. Usually it is open chat and George’s liaisons the underlying belly laugh of teatime banter: but this one is different. This young one is a little close to home and the boys know Chiseler isn’t happy. Knows he’s not going to let this one go.

    “I’d say there’s two more weeks in it,” Jack continues.

    “Two, handy,” Dandy agrees, eager to move on, nobody likes a fight, not at teatime. The small talk ebbs with fags and milky sugar-brimmed teas and the banter is soft deflections around Chiseler’s iceberg.

    They make quick work of the ridge and the light pours in on the quartz-glinting outcrop. There is no talk when they work, each man knows his place in the small band and the sound is the drone of saws, a file scouring a blunt chain, the crack of a falling tree, their thrill and deafening harmony. The horse has cut a mud hoof track up to the lorry pull in where the neat-stacked piles wait for the trucks and the potholed road to Aughrim. The lorry men are a different creed: overalls and humming engines and the long hydraulic arm lifting the timber into place.  They’re paid by the load and move with a wire-eyed efficiency, conceding little more than a back-handed wave from air con cabs.

    George has arranged to pick her up at eight tonight. She says the husband will have gone back to the garage by then and she’ll be able to slip out for an hour or two. Says she’ll meet him down by the river. She wouldn’t be George’s usual type. It happened at the back of Phelan’s lounge one drunken night a couple of weeks back.

    “I’ve had enough. Feck him!” slurred surrendering words.

    The husband worked late and it was just a few short hours of rough cat tumbling and long drawn-out sobs before she slipped back to her sister sitting in on the child. Though it is all too close to home. George has told her that. He’s worked with the Chiseler a lifetime and he isn’t out to rile him. Nobody ever liked the nephew. George didn’t imagine Chiseler did either: he was just making his point, drawing his line in the sand. That dirty little maggot with a bite like a terrier, and he was a lousy mechanic, and when George saw the bruises on her it made his blood boil. It would be easier just to leave it but the damage was done now. People knew, it was no secret: nothing ever is round here. There’d be no sympathy for her, not now. Usually George would ride it while the going’s good. It never lasts. They always go back in the end. In many ways they never leave.

    The day passes in a haze of sap and oil and the slope has tightened thighs and blistered toes and the midges have started. Trigger drags a last log up to the pull in and Dandy untacks her by the van. They gather by the stream for a final fag and debrief. The horse takes deep sups from the brown water lapping at their toes and the flies cling mercilessly to her raw harness-rubbed flesh.

    “I’ve to go, Jack,” Chiseler shouts from the car, as he changes from boots and sap-stained jeans to a pair of old slacks.

    “Coming, see ye in the morning, lads,” and they watch as Jack leaves his gear by the van. They wave as the car pulls past and Chiseler, fag lit in the passenger seat, points his index finger to George like a loaded gun. The boys stay quiet. There is nothing to be said.

    Dandy tethers Trigger in the fresh grass larch and Trapper helps George load the van. They have laid waste to another acre of spruce and all eyes settle on the branch-strewn wasteland of fag buts, thrown out lunch wraps and empty oil cans. They’re making progress. Another week the wood will be beaten to a corner.

    Dandy sits in the middle and fiddles with the tuner. Rare the radio finds a station but this evening he’s caught some daft pop song and he leans back, miming the words and eating a bar left over from his lunch box.

    “Where are we after this, George?” Trapper asks.

    “Ballycoog. There’s a ridge there they can’t get the machines on.”

    “Much in it?”

    “A week or two: I’m going this evening to take a look.”

    “I’d say you are,” Dandy interrupts with a snigger.

    “That’ll do from you,” and George jabs him in the ribs as they move round the bend.

    “Weren’t you seeing some young one out of Ballycoog. Last year was it?” Trapper is too far across to jab and George looks ahead.

    “One of Murphy’s was it? Do you remember? She came up to Phelan’s one night and got more than she bargained for. What happened her?”

    George looks ahead unflinching. It is the usual going-home banter and Dandy sniggers.

    “Course he remembers,” and he lets another groan as George jabs him in the ribs a second time.

    “Seriously, George, you’d want to leave Chiseler’s one alone. That nephew of his is a madman. He’s done time so he has. Bottled a lad out of Avoca one night over pool. You wouldn’t know what he’d do, he’s an angry little shite.”

    “That’s right, George, you won’t win favours going round with her.”

    A contemplative silence descends over the van and the pop song crackles out and fags are lit. They’ve had their say. Got it off their chests and they all stew in small familiar thoughts. It is a good little team up in the wood. No one wants the boat rocked. No one wants trouble.

    Trapper steps out at the asbestos slate cottage. His cousins are stood out on the lane, skirts and school bags, but the Trapper turns to the cattle shed.

    “Leaving them alone, Dandy?”

    “You nipped it in the bud there, George.”

    “He’s not a bad sort, Trapper. A few short, but not a bad sort. Sure what do you expect sitting up here, three miles out of nowhere, it’s a sorry little life.”

    George leaves Dandy at the bottom of the Houses. He can walk up. Do him good to stretch the legs, have a last fag before he gets in to the mother. George shuffles back in the seat and turns for his sister’s. He has a mobile home set up there behind the sheds. It does for now. It’s dry at least.

    He stops on the bridge and looks down at the debris caught in the buttress: branches, tyres, an old green mattress wedged by a fallen tree. The river is violent here, ripping down from the hills, plucking the banks and smashing against this, the last bridge before the big weir. It is a wonder it still stands and George’s mind drifts to Chiseler’s finger pointed like a gun. He will tell her this evening. It has to end.  Next week and there’ll be on to a new wood and a fresh start. He’ll tell her it is for the best. Somehow he will pluck the words.

    George gets it in his mind to look over the wood at Ballycoog before settling down for the evening. He’s only putting off the inevitable but the drive will do him good, sharpen his mind for telling her. The ridge at Ballycoog feels vertical on tired legs and he steps out the distance to the track. They’ll need a tractor and winch: even Trigger will struggle on this angle. Though George knows all this, he doesn’t need to look, the timber is merely a distraction.

    “Go home, George,” he says to himself. “Go home and tell her. She might slip back. They both might forget it. Life goes on. These things never last.”

    When George pulls up to the mobile home he finds Chiseler’s car parked outside. His stomach turns. This is unfamiliar ground. He jumps from the van, heckles up. This is his patch. The door is ajar and George pushes through.

    “Chiseler?”

    George steps back. Chiseler is stood by the sink, arms folded, and there’s herself sat on the couch, the little boy on her lap, and her face all bruised and battered and tears running down puffed red cheeks.

    “Well, George, you started this mess, you look after her,” and Chiseler lights a fag.

    “What? I’m not, I started nothing,” but Chiseler interrupts.

    “You’re not to worry now, George. That nephew of mine won’t go near you. I’ve him marked. But you listen to me, George. That women and that child are in your care. You watch them, or I’ll be marking you same as the nephew.”

    The evening has drawn in and the dark has mustarded the yard and blackened the bare glass. Chiseler’s car pulls out and the headlights shift across the torn linoleum floor. The stark beam catches all eyes before turning to the road and plunging them into the bleak uncertainty of the night.

    Rory MacArdle lives in the Wicklow hills, where he stores peculiar poems and fiction badly in need of editing and rejigging. He works in construction, likes gardening, heritage buildings and walking in quiet places.