I cruise the Philosophy section of Hodges Figgis, watching, waiting. Like an old-fashioned spy I stand there on the third floor, book held up high for cover, my eyes glancing left then right over the top of it, solicitously. There are a lot of people around this afternoon; the rain has brought them in. For a while now I’ve been watching them hovering politely by the shelves, and it perturbs me to see them wanting to appear so proudly aloof from one another. Separate, despite their intimacy. Lonesome, despite their shared interests. Private and untouchable: that desperate middle-class nervous thing. The worst side of bookishness. I go back to my book, the alluring title of which is A Lover’s Discourse, and I read a few lines: the lover’s discourse is today of an extreme solitude. But before these words have time to sink in, a young woman, an attractive student-type, comes and stands next to me. Her jaw-length reddish-brown hair is wet from the rain, and she curls a strand of it back behind her ear as she tilts her head, browsing. Beneath her damp, navy denim jacket she wears a black shirt, open at the neck. Scanning the shelves, she moves closer to me, and I have to take a step back to let her reach in for what she needs. The proximity is unbearable. I curl my toes down hard into the soles of my boots and squeeze them there, tightly, in order to dissipate the tension, to savor the self-restraint. I glance up and see her lift a copy of Jacques Derrida from the shelf. She takes a step back to her previous mark, turns a little towards me, and smiles. I catch a glimpse of her thin dark lips, the sparkling darkness in the amour fou of her eyes. I have a type, I admit it, and she fits it perfectly. When she opens the book the front cover glares at me: On Touching. I look down at the page I am reading but I can barely follow a sentence. She’s picked up that book in order to signal to me. My mind races. I look over at her now. She does not return my gaze. Desperate to tempt this further, I prepare myself for a casual remark. But before I can cross that stunning divide, she closes the book, places it back between the others, turns, and walks away. With no parting sign or invitation to follow the whole ritual falls asunder. But still, I can hardly contain myself: Touch me. Soft Eyes. Soft soft soft hand. I am lonely here. Quiet here alone.
Tag: Andrew McEneff fiction
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Ode to the Christmas Pub
– A seasonal riff on the opening paragraph of Moby Dick –
Call me Andy. Not long ago – never mind how long precisely – having little or no money in my purse and nothing particular to interest me amongst mortal company, I tended to sail about a little in Dublin City, brought hither and thither on impulsive winds to see the more ignored though not necessarily unexplored taverns of this dirty old town. It’s a way I have of driving off the spleen, of regulating apathy, of cracking through the thin yet heavy crust of my autopilot’s baked-in habits. Whenever I feel myself grown grim about the spiritual loins; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; when I find myself involuntarily pausing before a coffin warehouse, or randomly bringing up the rear of every Stag or Hen party I meet (before being politely asked to leave); and especially when my temper gets such an upper hand of me, that it requires a Herculean moral effort to prevent myself from deliberately stepping out into a road of oncoming traffic, or to move myself on from idling beneath a city crane’s precariously borne weight of 50 tonnes of devastating concrete, or methodically pushing people’s children into the street – then, I account it high time to retire to the nearest, most obscenely and prematurely festively decorated Irish pub, as soon as I can: least I be, gentle reader, the tragic cause of some senseless tragedy done. The Christmas pub is my substitution for the poison and the noose. With a philosophical flourish I can throw myself upon the white rails, on the mirror and the razor-blade. And I quietly take to the drink. For I hunger and I thirst not for the brittle unconsecrated words of the Living but for the grave-bitten guidance and the admonitions of the Dead; for those same words with their different sense are only spoken to me from the lipless mouths of the ghosts of my Christmases past, future and present. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men, in their degree, sometime or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the fairy-lit darkness of this time of year.
Feature Image: Daniele Idini