The Red Shoes
I never understood Dorothy.
You wake up some days and everything in the photocopy world is black and white. Work, commute, family, friends and all your dour surroundings. Groundhogs give you knowing nods, again, as you stand another day up at the chopping block and take a careless swipe at it.
Then, one morning, much to your surprise, the room is tossed and everything has changed. The window looks out on some strange sky that screams conspiratorially that you’re definitely not in Kansas anymore. Colours you forgot existed flit like cheap fireworks across your eye and the world pinwheels in yellow, emerald and ruby.
Everything’s adventure, even with a version of the same familiar faces you skip and dance a now familiar path and the reward is nothing less than your secret heart’s desire. Which leads you to ask, quite understandably, “Why would Dorothy ever take her heels 3 times and click herself back home?”
The Game
We protect ourselves from certain cultural artifacts from our lives all the time. Things, items, stuff that has a certain meaning, invokes a particular memory, brings us back to a personal square one that only we can find. Usually, it’s easy. We hide away sad photos, destroy items from whole lost lifetimes, burn things up in great big bonfires of farewell. Board games are usually not among them.
It was a few weeks ago I innocently excavated the long lost Scrabble, blew off the dust and set up tiles, bag, board and, half a life away, scoresheets. One in particular. Three players, sixteen years ago. I sat down in their midst just as if they were strangers. Sat down on the floor of that pieced together dump that cost half their tiny wages from the first real jobs they had. Sat down and looked out along the path of decades they had yet to take, a path as unimaginable to them as they drank and passed the time together as the internet would be to Shakespeare.
Sat down and asked myself, well, how did I get here?
Sat down and saw just how unimaginable my path to come must be.
When I was finished I put the scoresheets and the pencil away gently and carefully, vividly aware of their future significance.
Good Buy
It started off as a simple thought once, as so many complex things do for me. When I was much younger I as an accumulator of items, as so many people are. Not essential things like clothes or furniture or wine, I accumulated other things. Books, videos (later DVDs), albums (later CDs), gadgets and everything I believed my heart desired.
One day, I got a sharp blow to the side of the head and woke up with an equation:
work x time = stuff
I was, in a small was as we all do, performing a little magic every time I spent a weekend afternoon in Waterstone’s, HMV or Habitat. I was quietly transmuting time into things. Every 3 for 30 DVD offer represented a chunk of some dull, miserable working week.
It got worse as I looked at my accumulation in particular of piles of books I’d never read and possibly never would. That was time I’d worked for nothing. Nothing but their highly questionable ornamental value on a shelf on I ever looked at.
I remember casting an eye over everything I had, thinking more about the boxes that I had stashed in the attic unopened from 5 moves ago and suddenly, I stopped. Well, mostly, no-one’s prefect.
I started trying to use my pay to buy back my own time; travel, weekends away, dinners, breakfasts I could savour, time with friends. Instead of each hour worked becoming anitem that might sit on my shelf for vast tracts of my life, it became something else.
Every time you spend two days slaving away at a project that makes you want to smash somebody’s head in with a spreadsheet, you accumulate money. Yes, some of it is mortgage or rent, some of it is debt, but some small part of it is yours. If you turned up to your desk and told yourself you were working to breaking point just so a leather bound series of Lord Of The Rings could sit on your shelf, unopened for an age, you’d slap yourself. Rightly so.
In Veggie Veritas
“You should go an have a look at the shallow grave at the bottom of the garden”, she said. It was the kind of dark thing that can only pass between two people who have known each other all their lives. So, I ambled out, unsure as I always am when I go through that particular magic door. Knock, knock open wide…
It was what had sold me on that particular place when I saw it first. A small, well kept little patch of garden half the size of a tennis court that opened up beyond a brief maze of high, unruly hedge into a long, plain, secluded secret garden, just perfect for someone of my disposition. Huge, tall greenery on either side, no flimsy fences ripe for neighbourly heads to pop over for a chat.
At the end, once you got there and if you could see it, was wasteland stretching back out to the main road. Perfect. I settled in. I even bought the most suburban wooden garden furniture I could find for boozy outdoor dinners in the sun and storage in the rain in my old man shed. Yes, I had an old man shed. Not a wooden one, but a real, brick potting shed.
I ate there, lay there, wrote there, drank there, collapsed there on the knobbly path and stared up at the stars whenever I didn’t know what to do.
It’s changed a lot since then, through clutter and a neglect I wilfully started all those seasons ago, but still, it’s always been one of the few physical spots I’ve ever been attached to. All the more so now I’m buried there.
I sacrificed him there one winter night on the holiest of grounds, to me. Late, after a cigarette, unceremoniously, knowing I had nowhere else to go. I smashed a spade across his flat, shovel face, the stupid, vain, fat fuck, bawling for his life like it was worth something, when all that he had left was fear alone and his tide that had long, long since gone out. It was either him or me.
No-one heard it, no-one witnessed, no-one really cared, no-one mourned his absence much but me. Now my tics and rattles and my first lost poison heart fertilise the veggie patch for free. I hear they’re delicious.
The Ark Of The Covenant
In a golden box, unnoticed in a drawer with my socks lie the relics I buried for my passage to the next life.
One bracelet that I once asked someone to make especially for me, two wedding rings, three floppy discs untouched for years and some foreign currency.
Game Over
If only life were like The Sims.
If only you could walk through the world knowing that when you came across the one for you, or the one closest to being for you, they would have a huge green crystal floating just over the top of their head.
Simple.
No more guess work, no more indecision, no more finding out someone is clearly not for you after a date or five or ten, or a decade or two. No more torturing yourself that Julie from reception is the lost love of your life while you wile away the bright nights of insomnia writing angsty blog posts or composing heartfelt texts you’ll never send. It’s not her. No crystal. See?
Instead there would only be love at first sight, just like the movies tell us it should be, yet so rarely is in the unscripted lives of mortals. No more commitment-phobic men, no more playing hard to get, just an endless world of blind romantics scanning every room, perching on high buildings to get a greater view, chartering helicopters by the gang, looking for something they still may never find.
Anchors
In the beginning, we run. We run as fast as we can because we’re desperate to get where we’re going, wherever that is.
As time passes we start to throw anchors over our shoulders; vast dark rusting hunks that hold down ships, their chains arc like power lines, flowing in our wakes, bracing against just how unstoppable we are.
Measure by measure they slow us down as we fling them periodically to ground. Anchors of work, anchors of responsibility, anchors of our passions and our faults. Most willingly are anchors thrown of love. They are the shiniest to grasp, the fanciest in flight, the ones you want to take hold in the earth. The crucial ones.
Eventually the chains stretch out like long shadows in your wake, slowing down your present, marking out the edges of your past. They are a bridal train made of who you are, who you’ve been and who you have collected in the past.
Til one day, an anchor comes, you fling it to the sky, and everything around you comes to halt. Finally.
Boom, Click, Boom.
There are things you most definitely should say to other people, and things you most definitely should not. We practise juggling with them in our heads in quiet moments, randomly like spots of rain. The braver of us whisper them while walking from the bus stop or drown them in the clatter of the late night washing up.
The more suicidal of us write them down in diaries or scrawl them out deliberately in letters from the deepest, dark within, usually to be shredded at the first sign of a pointed pair of eyes.
I played my own niche game of technical roulette. I texted. Open a frame, then a name, then the unspeakable. Wherever I might be, I’d sit and roll it gently in my fingertips; a pinless hidden hand grenade just waiting to go off. Sometimes on the bus, sometimes at a party, often just before the lights went out I’d play my petty round of personal roulette just to see what it’d look like.
A sentence born of hatred or of secret, or of love, glowing in the gunpowder flicker of a technicolor white. Ready to explode.
One night in a crowded room and much the worse for wear I pressed send instead of clear and it went off in my hands, eventually, decisively.
164 / 701
It’s the closest thing I have to home. Vast and wooden with huge white windows to the crass, dull, working world outside. I’m staring absently at the purple rain when she creeps up on me like a mistress, still invisible, the soft breath of a cello kissing gently on my ear. She has a sweet taste too; hard and dark and promising at first, softening to a safe familiarity that’s almost now a part of me. I cradle her soft, white porcelain cup while I think away into the distance.
All I need is her, a quiet space and time. Everything else is trivia. It’s always been that way for coffee shops and me.
A few weeks ago I turned off a wet Westmoreland Street onto Fleet Street on a dull Sunday afternoon. Something I’ve done countless times since 2004. This time was different. I have a quality that people around me find mostly infuriating; I see tiny details around me others choose to ignore, or rather that other people’s subconscious choose to see as inconsequential. I don’t find anything inconsequential. It’s not a deliberate thing, I’ve just always been wired that way.
Lovely, you might think, less so when you’re out for a walk with me and ten minutes later I’m still examining the angles of a statue, or when the cinema is empty but I have to see the name of that bit-part actor I thought I recognised in a fleeting shot an hour previously. My beloved has limitless patience.
This day it was a hole in a small pane of glass just above eye level that I had to stretch up to look into. No ordinary pane leading into no ordinary room. To the right of Fleet Street at that corner, just before you come to the Temple Bar Hotel is the huge pseudo-stained glass window from the main room in the old, now long-since disused Bewley’s of Westmoreland Street. My first seductress, my Mrs. Robinson, the one that got away.
I lived there as I do here now, notebook, bag, student coat, just with much, much darker hair. If you were never there you’ll never know what it meant to me, to us. Bewley’s was that last safe refuge of eccentrics, lost tourists, students, the elderly, lads in jerseys up on match days for a feed. It was the legendary lofty clattery cafe with a pew for all on drizzly days as most of them seemed to be.
It was the hideout for the unintentionally interesting, stacked facing back on mismatched wooden chairs and multicoloured marble table tops. A place where the lonely looked inconspicuous, hiding behind books or the Irish Times, fine dining on breakfast at twenty five past four. Sticky buns and earl grey were the order of most days, beside open fires or underneath the leaves of the famous indoor tree. Anything but coffee. The coffee was like piss.
£1.40 could kill an afternoon with a friend, spreading out towards each other in an old red velvet booth, framed in papered orange by an oriental sky. It was as corporate as Beckett and making half the sense, a multi-chambered heart of collective memory. No matter the angle you sat at, the world would surely soon come into view.
Like the last day I was there; the shabby little lady with the green parka, red scarf and plastic bags. One from Dunnes, one from the Van Gogh Musuem. She made perfect sense. I sat there far too long with cold tea, knowing it was time for us, feeling guilty at how little I’d been there in her last, receding years.
I remember turning round to say goodbye, stopping still, looking back. And there, through the missing pane of simple, plain stained glass was me. Looking back into our abandoned cathedral to slowly spending time, a religion old as voodoo and equally as lost.
Framed
If only you could look out from a photograph.
You never think about them when they’re taken but someone, somewhere, somewhen, again and again over decades and possibly even centuries is looking in every time you end up in the frame. They squint at you, laugh at the way you’re dressed or take sharp intakes of breath. Sometimes you make them weep, sometimes you’re a secret treasure, sometimes you’re the evidence hiding in plain sight, none of which you’ll ever know.
Every time you see a flash the frames fracture through the future; a magician fanning cards. Take your pick. There are your kids, your grandkids and every step of you, staring from a dozen different lives. It’s the same for everyone.
The two of you get married, the two of you break up, the two of you link fingers in the dark.
You’ll become the best of us, you’ll get hooked on smack, you won’t make it out of here alive.
Next time you hear the click, smile. Your audience awaits.
Inspiration
She bounds across the room,
An awkward perfect mess of
Tousled bed-red hair and
Soft, pale, speckled skin.
Sitting for a second drink, still, I drink her in,
Black runner boots, black turn-up jeans and
A belly flecked with soft, electric hairs,
Rising to a short black velvet top,
She pours herself across the sofa while we talk.
Smiling quietly her eyes hold my helpless schoolboy stare
Asking “Have we met before?”
And wonders what I’d look like as an ape.
Squinting slightly she redraws me
As the stumbling self-caricature
She’s just made me become.
Later that evening I feel a tug,
Apparent as I leave the ground,
That I’m Clark Kent flying home.
2001 / 14-05-09
The Launch Code
There is a combination of magic words that can incinerate us all. They are unique and individual to me and fairly innocuous in the mouths of others, but, if I were to say them aloud and in the right combination, everyone goes up in flames.
The child of the Cold War in me knows them to be a launch code. A simple sequence of communication that, once set free, inevitably leads to lots and lots of little smouldering cinders. They’ve been changed over time, of course, but the effect would always be the same.
Why have this one at all you might ask? Well, it was made because of me so now it’s my responsibility. Seven words that can never see the light of day. I speak them in my head, they hover in the empty paper just beyond my pen, I’ve whispered their existence here so you can think of yours.
It’s selfish to have one in an era of detente, I know. But I’m also sure I’m not the only one.
The Knot
I was told recently that I’d been the topic of conversation in a group who were out drinking one night, some of whom I knew.
Some present were trying to unravel things I’ve written here. I wasn’t sure how that made me feel. A few different things, I supppose.
Flattered that what I write is conversation worthy, eager to know what people thought, terrified that someone will figure out what it all means.
Heaven Is A Place On Earth
She sat, perched perfectly on the aisle, invisible the way other 11 year olds can only dream of.
Bobbing her tousled, brown boys hair she held tightly to a bright red ribbon and a set of rosary beads. Back and forth and fifth and sixth she rubbed them constantly, mostly for the texture and the secret way she made them dance, not that anyone else could see.
Gently, not for the first time that day, her mother wiped the drool from her smart yellow t-shirt as she handed her a mug with a leaf on, brought from home, special for her travels.
Later on I listened guiltily to her imaginary phone calls and melted as she softly sang in whispers to the cloth-eared carriages. All that afternoon the assembled adults all avoided making eye contact with her, seeing her for the royalty she was, I suppose.
Later, just before we disembarked, she precisely put her jacket on and waited patiently with her pink suitcase on wheels, perched perfectly on the aisle, invisible the way other 11 year olds can only dream of.
Something Old, Something New
I’ve been swapping notebooks recently, something I’ve done dozens of times since I was a teenager but something I’ve never done because I’ve reached the end of one. That’s never happened, I get too impatient.
Occasionally, as in this case, somebody buys me a new one that just demands to have the combination lock on it broken and be filled with all the shiny but ultimately worthless trinkets you might one day try to pawn off on your unsuspecting friends and strangers. Other times I buy a new one for myself.
Every now and then I’ve started one that just doesn’t work. A book that refuses to be part of what you do and that you simply can’t, for reasons unknown, write in. Sometimes it was the wrong size, occasionally the wrong colour, every now and then it was just a personal psychosis that made the difference. Either way each of them has their own personality and, like any relationship, your time with them blossoms or runs its course or presents itself as a bad idea very quickly.
The only reason I ramble through all that is that every time I move on, I go back. Back through every page I’ve written to establish if I need to transcribe anything unfinished into a new home. If notebooks are relationships and each, inevitably, has its break-up, then this is when I go through the bookshelf and the DVDs and decide what’s coming with me.
Some of my unloved orphans are persistent. I’ve rewritten the notes I originally took on whatever it was word for word over and over again through book after book. I can’t let them go and just because I couldn’t finish them off into something 9 years ago doesn’t mean I won’t be able today. Honestly though, with some of them, it’s just sheer bloody-minded persistence at this stage.
This time though, I looked at them differently. Maybe, now that I have here, they can finally be let out to play, so I’ve brought my unloved orphans with me one last time.
Like the girl on the train.
The Fractional Numbers Of Fate
What were the actual odds of it happening that night? Slim. That she’d be there to grab him just as he toppled off the drop? Tiny. One of the fractional numbers of fate.
He’d never been there before; she knew he was by accident, the sort of sharp, sheer chance that predestination sometimes calls its own.
Beforehand she drank for courage, he drank just to drown though neither found out ‘til much, much further on. She walked up, in the last incomplete moments before they met, paused, then introduced herself as the clock ran down to zero, the one that had been ticking all their lives.
He embraced her inappropriately, as if she were a liferaft, and she was.
Some people are dark corners, the sort of places you should avoid if you want a quiet life. Some people are bright, shining stars, illuminating everyone with their relentless light and energy.
The bright star needs the shadow for somewhere safe to hide.
The shadow needs the star because it’s lonely in the dark.
The Secrets Of The Circus
My family has a missing link.
Not many people can say that, and few, I imagine, would want to. Secretly though, I’ve always liked it a little. I found out properly a few years ago when one day the lovely lady who I’d always been very close to and assumed to be my favourite aunt turned out not to be. She wasn’t my father’s sister, as had always been the story, she was his mum. Thus, as you might think, after decades of believing my family tree looked a certain way, a little automatic pruning had to take place.
My aunt became my grandmother, my grandmother (who had passed away before I was born) and my grandfather, who had died when I was young, both became great. My father, all of a sudden, went from being the youngest of 5 to being an only child.
Prune, prune, tie back, prune.
To make things even more complicated my (now) new granny’s husband isn’t my father’s father; he met her many years later when she was waitressing up in Dublin to send money home while her parents raised my dad as one of their own. So that makes him my step-grandfather.
I think.
Her working away to send money back may seem strange now but my granny had my father at a time when birth outside wedlock was still something that brought worlds tumbling down. I was told my great-grandfather sent her away to another county to have the baby and insisted on her giving him to an orphanage. Thankfully, his wife, strong rural woman that she was, had none of that and beat him down on an issue for once in her life and possibly saved my dad from a fate worse than who knows what. It’s only because of her that I’m here today. I never met her, yet I owe her the greatest debt of all.
However, the real rub in all of this is the missing link. I don’t know who my father’s father was. When I was told initially I asked but was waved away my grandmother was so upset, and I’ve never found myself able to broach the subject ever since either with her or my parents. To be honest, it didn’t seem that important at the time.
In recent years thought it’s gone from being an idle curiosity to being a point of interest to more. Two steps back, a quarter of my genetic heritage is blank. It becomes even more relevant with questions like “Is there a history of heart disease in your family?” There’s no box to tick for “possibly”
I’ve always wondered why every time the sun hits my skin, no matter how early in the year it is, I go dark brown. I’ve taken to joking he was a millionaire Mexican aristocrat on a world tour.
It’s why someone once nicknamed me Slitty Eyes. She claimed I had them from my grandad, who must have been a Chinese acrobat who was passing through in the circus. Stranger things have happened.
She’s still alive, my granny, but I can’t bring myself to pry now at her age. Who she slept with when she was 22 is no more my business than my youthful indiscretions would be hers. My mother once told me that my dad had never expressed an interest in finding that part of his family, and with him that was the end of the discussion.
Some information is meant to be taken to the grave, some stories are not to be told, some secrets travel on with the circus, never to be seen again.
The Ritual
It’s always the same. Same coffee shop, same spot along the wall, same time. Same black coffee and a muffin for later, same lullaby of preparation.
I lay the plate, napkin and mug in a small semicircle at the far side of the table. My phone goes there as well, on vibrate. I’d rather it didn’t disturb me but I can’t completely disappear either. Black hardback notebook, black pen and the tiny, soft ideas notebook from my right inside jacket pocket.
Then, I’m ready.
I write a little something functional like this, just to give my pen some downhill momentum and off I go, blanking out the mothers and the frantically rocking babies, the check-shirted men intensely negotiating the carve-up of what’s left of the world, with diagrams and the Fear.
The Fear of today, writing day, coming away with nothing. I angle my chair out slightly towards the room.
Not today.
One Day Like This
He looked over to me from the stage, finally, after all my gentle nods of head as I tried to catch his eye and he smiled as the applause washed over him again.
I bowed to him, without thinking really as he smiled again, broader this time, disconnected for a moment from the extraordinary circumstance surrounding him.
Then I started to cry, finally. It had been threatening all night. Tears have always come so easily around him.
Not tears of sadness, or joy, but tears of infinite possibility. From shadows just like these I’ve watched him sweeping all before him through spheres of smart and sport and social obligation, unlike anyone I’ve ever met.
Afterwards he clattered over to me with a hug like I’m the only person in the room, and for a beat, I am.
I am the shadow of his glory, the dust trail in he wake of his vast sweeping horizons, his transport to the worlds he’ll surely conquer, and for me that’s enough.
The Call Of Four Floors Down
The first time it was shampoo.
Stupid, I know, but I was a teenager and wildly over-hormonal and viciously betrayed at the time. It was called Polytar and I was using it for dandruff and something on the label said that it was poisonous. It seemed the sensible way to go. Things got better, so I never did.
Over the following decades, it changed. Never slashing, I was too afraid of pain, or pills, they were too slow and, according to every movie I’d ever seen, too unreliable. Same with drowning even though I couldn’t swim. If I were ever to choose to go it wouldn’t be a “cry for help” kind of thing, I needed something instant and final.
For a while, it would have been the car. I worked it out; somewhere quiet, no seatbelt, the right amount of speed and a nice, hard wall to it and most importantly somewhere no-one else would get hurt. For me it was still too unreliable though, there were too many variables. Things got better, so I never did.
For a brief while, it was going to be a train. Some express hurtling through, no chance of failure or ending up in a coma for years. However, the guilt of what the driver would have to go through always got me, even though I’d never know him. Things got better, so I never did.
The last time I was in a different place and didn’t car about anyone. It was going to be a swandive from the balcony of a shopping centre. I’d yell first, obviously, to clear out the crowd down below. I’d even found a bullseye I could hit. It would be cinematic, spectacular, a final way to go.
Once, I almost did.
These days I don’t need the option, but I’m smart enough to know it’s always there and I doubt it’s gone forever. The need to plan, to always sit somewhere close to the door, the call of four floors down.
