Brian Staunton had a willowy wolfhound that he brought into Murphy’s each day wearing a cloudy Dundalk F.C jersey. How he managed to stretch the shirt over the magnificent body of the wolfhound was anybody’s guess, and how he managed to survive a mauling while doing so prompted additional guesswork. I saw Taafe trying to avoid Staunton’s typical look of contempt as he sat at the bar scratching his head over the cryptic crossword.
Here’s the pub: A dry warm mahogany cave advertising the delights of prolonged ‘moments’, warped everydayness, and a place to grumble quietly or not so much, depending on your finances. We the grumblers sit single-file along the bar, shooting back and forth declarations and conclusions and statements and judgments and positions and suspicions. There is always one of the men there cursing at the television while his wife is breathing her last in the hospital.
‘Watch he doesn’t slobber over the floor again,’ said Taafe, without looking either at Staunton or the wolfhound. ‘I near slipped and broke my hole last time.’
‘You mind your own slobbering, eh?’
Taafe turned away from the cryptic crossword – it was angst he could postpone. McDaid noticed this and laughed in Taafe’s direction, a noise like an alien’s claw scratching at him.
‘You’ll never get there. You’ll never beat the master.’
I jumped in to change the topic immediately, going back to something McDaid had been trying to tell me earlier about a riot in the town in the eighties. With cryptic crossword failure being the newly-introduced theme, I didn’t want to be reminded of my own performance issues.
‘I never heard tell of it before,’ I interrupted. ‘When exactly did it happen?’
‘Well, I remember it proper,’ he said. ‘1986, I think. Paisley came to town. Peter Robinson was up in the court house for some antics out in Monaghan. The whole town went bonkers-mad. And most of it happened right outside here. I swear, this place was like Hamburger Hill. Bricks and sticks flying. The guards running around, didn’t know what the fuck was happening.’
‘A riot?’
‘A right old riot! Most of the town was closed. Everyone wanted in on the protest. It was a special day in town, you know. Like the Maytime festival or the American president visiting. We had to work that day though, I remember. But we clocked off early enough in time for the action, and came straight down here to join the petrol bombing. Still, I’m glad the Paisley one’s lightened up now in his old age. Imagine an alternate universe with that fucker the way he was back in the day in charge of the lot. He’d have declared nuclear holocaust on us all.’
‘These days, he’s on the Late Late Show sucking up to Pat Kenny. Fucking twisted world, eh? Anyway, I’ll be leaving you folks.’
‘Oh, you’re off. And I was just about to relate to you more tales of violent disapproval on the borderlands.’
‘Yeah, I’ve to go to McManus’s to meet the wife. She’s there with a few friends.’
‘Jesus, the rest of us are going home to see the wives quietly and have our dinners quietly and yous two are raving it up. Life’s fucking grand for you lot, isn’t it?’
Peach sky up. 6.30. I walked along Chapel Street towards McManus’s considering the length of my legs. Way too short, my legs. Compared to most sets of legs. In front of me as I walked, a man, must have been sixty, carrying a Superquinn bag full of briquettes, and I couldn’t help but notice how long his legs were. As long as the metre stick, like some kind of geriatric ostrich coming home from the shops. If he caught me looking at his legs, he could only have been flattered, such a deserted street as it was. I said hello to him.
‘Hello.’
‘Well hello there.’
‘Nice evening.’
‘Ah, it’s grand, you know.’
I was glad to be meeting Emer in McManus’s. It would be good to get out of the house for a change. We hadn’t been out in a few weeks. Staying in that house for too long with only each other for company was a fucking head-wrecker. I couldn’t stand it. We’d be killing each other over everything and nothing and all the rest of it. And arguments never worked in my favour. She was always running away with the last word, and I was always running after her and that last word, chasing the argument like an aimless mongrel on the sniff. We’d take a tour of the house with those disputes; sometimes we’d even see a dirty spot somewhere and start cleaning it together while still going at the fight. Last time, she used our clean-up diversion in the bathroom to clout me on the face with a soggy mop. Even intellectual disagreements, not so fierce, demanded much running around. For example, that very morning, the discussion of child-rearing in the kitchen:
‘I don’t want to raise my child under church guidance. It’s all bullshit.’ (She leaves the kitchen)
‘Well, what else will we do? (I follow her saying) Imagine this baby of ours suddenly appears tomorrow.’
‘What, like a virgin birth?’(She walks upstairs)
‘Just grant me this little piece of hypothetical, will you.’ (I follow saying) Imagine she’s born tomorrow.’
‘She?’
‘He, she, whatever. Picture us waking up tomorrow and there’s a little baby. What are you going to do?’
‘Raise him. (She grabs a cloth from the ironing board on the landing and begins wiping a nearby windowsill saying) Be a mother.’
‘But have you ever thought about how you’ll raise your child?’
‘He’ll be raised a good atheist.’
‘He?’
‘She, he, whatever.’
(I start re-folding some clothes that are lying on the ironing board saying) ‘We can’t do that. How do you begin to give a child a strong moral framework? You can’t just make it up as you go along. I don’t think it’s as simple as showing them ‘this is good’ and ‘this is bad’. You’ve got to back it all up with some solid foundations, with stories and the like.’
‘You’re talking shit. (She walks downstairs again saying) People do it all the time. They don’t need the bloody sacred heart.’
‘Yeah, but…(I follow her downstairs saying) There’s a wider education involved, isn’t there?’
‘You’re getting worried in your old age. (She stops in the hall to adjust a framed photograph of Pont du Gard on the wall saying) Afraid of damnation, eh?’
‘No way. (I follow and stand beside her saying) But damned in our doings anyway. (I begin to adjust a framed photograph of Sagrada Familia next to Pont du Gard on the wall saying) My life is streaming screaming damnation, I’d say, and there’s only so much of it you can take in a living minute.’
‘A living minute? You should accept your damnation will be much longer than that.’ (She disappears into the kitchen)
‘Thank God we’re not pregnant then, eh?’
Outside McManus’s, there was a blue car with three young lads buttressing themselves against it, eyeing passers-by purposelessly, posing with their fags and cans. I could have read the pointlessness of their intentions from a mile off, so I anticipated their words of passive intimidation, and went into a stance known as Crane Wildly Pecking The Wind as soon as I was within distance. They just shrugged, and told me to Fuck off. Another success for the martial arts.
Inside McManus’s, it was dopesmoker’s night, with dub and roots reggae rumbling over the chattering heads. I walked around looking for Emer, amazed at how the place just never seemed to change in all my memory of it. Some of the very first social encounters between Emer and I had occurred in this place, when we were 6th years at school, both doing the leaving cert, her at the Lughaigh, me at the De La’. Our schools were right next to the other, the ultimate Catholic joke – single-sex schools slapped right beside one another, scores of frustrated boys and girls divided by a wall or two, libidos restrained, globules redirected. Once when we were here together, Colin Garrett was spotted rummaging around in the front of his trousers while looking at the Marilyn Monroe poster on the wall. He got some awful abuse for it, but all the poor lad was doing was violently disapproving of the sexual division imposed by the educational system. Marilyn was still there. The place hadn’t changed a bit.
I found Emer outside in the beer garden amongst a number of old heads that were merely footnotes to McManus’s in my brain. Some heads are filed away in the brain, others exist only as minor reference points. I was probably a footnote for most of them too, but that’s no fucking concern of mine.
‘Oh, here he is, back from Church Street,’ Emer called out, laughing, drunk.
‘Hey, how are you?’
‘Grand, yourself?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Oh, yeah?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Ah, right so.’
‘Right so, I’ll get a drink.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Okay.’
‘Oh, and would you like anything?’
‘Nah, I’m alright for now.’
We all have to take that seemingly forsaken and fretful journey to the bar some time in our lives, while at the same time trying to avoid the wagging fags and thrashing elbows of day’s end.
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