October is in, Put your clouts back on.

The massage table like the Princess and the Pea

Once upon a time I lived in a duplex apartment in the very heart of town  at the top of 4 flights of stairs. It was all very Carrie Bradshaw -

 leather sofas, angled lamps, beaded curtains, bamboo blinds.

It had an open plan living room with 7 windows that afforded  spectacular views of the streets.

It was colder than a witch’s teat on a Siberian ice floe.

It may have been constructed entirely from plasterboard and was icy enough on a mild day to inspire my Father  -

A-    To refuse to remove his coat when he came for dinner

B - To send men from Joyces up the impossible  stairs with a Super Ser and a cylinder of gas.

"That place is perishin', she'll get her death up there" he informed random strangers sagely.

I watched in disbelief as the car park across the road was turned into a building site, and then immediately back into a car park, and then  immediately back into a building site, and then the foundations of a library, which then ground to a halt post haste with hoardings and notices all over it, a solitary watchman sitting under a floodlight with a generator grinding and juddering all night, the streets torn up, the paths broken ,the streetlighting gone, making  it akin to bunking down in Beirut.

I was peeping out the window in a parka and a parade of hat and glove combinations, watching him watching nothing. 

All he could see was the hoardings advising people to keep out and/or wear hard hats.

All I could see was everything.

The town wall, the church spire, the crooked streets, the whitewashed graveyard, the hardware store, the people falling up and down the broken pavement  at all hours of the day and night, snatches of conversations that merged into the next, the noise from the opera people trouncing past to the Thomas Moore, functions in The Tart Centre, Dinners in Whites, The Selskar Abbey, where you had to know where the man lived to get the key.

All the livelong day a parade of humanity passed by far below my eyrie hermitage and of course no one ever thought to look up for  the source of the  manic laughter. 
Every town has its characters and we seem to be blessed with a veritable plethora of same. You couldn’t throw a Cafolla rissole without hitting at least 7. First there was M and Scoochie, one saying howya mam  and calling everyone  Mrs  Malone , the other enquireing of any random  human was she alright now?

She was far from alright. Night after night she walked the roads shouting into a mobile phone “how’s your lil wife doe, how’s your LIL wife doe? Where’s my money, where is MY money?"

I was more confused that she had credit on the phone to call and harangue various males at all hours of the day and night.  I DO have a heart and not a swinging brick, but night after night this shit  got old, and I could feel myself heading the same way, old and cold. I did not have credit to ring anyone
let alone men  to enquire about their spouses and the thorny subject of money,  and  so conducted every opening salvo of a telephonic conversation with the three immortal words “ring me back”.  
Then the snow came. 
Pushed to the pin of my collar  keeping  myself in cylinders of gas and woolen knits, my only entertainment was watching the nightwatchman watching me watching him.
I resorted to putting on more clothes going to bed than I wore in the Baltic streets. It may have been remiss of me to engage a property on how pretty it was and not if it had any discernible heating. In the landlords defense there was one storage heater under the small window, where one could actually see the wavy heat  leaving the building or turning to condensation and running down the sill.
So I slept on a massage table in the middle of the livingroom wrapped in piles and piles of throws and patchwork quilts, staring at my breath as if froze.
One persons breath that never froze was Frank S.  I  was stretching my tiny budget to breaking point so I went nowhere when the snow came and contented myseIf with playing long convoluted games of TEX HOLD EM at the 8 seater table  where I always made a balls of the big blind, but could read the tells and thus won enough to keep the lights on and buy tulips and scented candles .

Frank painted by M.D.M. 2012

 Frank was a permanent fixture on Mary’s Bar window sill where he smoked and rasped and expectorated  and shouted HOW YA (insert name here )like a foghorn at any and all passers-by and engaged them in all manner of banter as he adjusted his fork, and banged his wellington boots up and down in the driven slush. The road was like glass and  knocking pedestrians over like skittles. He who must not be named also stood at his own window, and had a birds eye view of the people coming up the hil,l falling like nine pins but they couldn’t hear us when we tried to shout warnings down from such a great  height and even the rubber neckers fell,  as they were watching others fall.  When the ambulance came for a man who had  a spectacular head bashing fall -  we had crawled across the ice like people on a frozen Alaskan  lake, using my quilts as purchase and leverage, turning him into the recovery position and supporting but not moving his head and wrapping him up warmly,  they opened the back door of the ambulance to get the trolley and collapsed in a hoop on a road that had become impassable, the trolleys flying down the hill onto the Cornmarket Roundabout. 
We can’t do this they said from their supine position on the ice and when they could finally  get their legs under them again, as gangly and as skittery as new born foals,  they rang the Fire Brigade to come and rescue THEM.    
 Gerwhoonlytalkstomen wandered by with his feet at ten to three, trying to push a bicycle uphill, dragging a plastic bag with a brown soda loaf and a few slices of cooked meat flopping around in the bottom,through the church yard, in his hob nailed boots as if he was about to climb the north face of the Eiger. 

Betty with the teeth like Agrajag and the pale blue Legion of Mary coat was standing in her doorway wailing and I looked at the 2 and 8 of the street and all the lunatics taking over the asylum and decided to move to a tiny country cottage by the sea. I slapped spectacularly off the ice on my way to buy my Father a chicken and busted my elbow and could not be seen as the ambulance could not travel, and a taxi was out of the question. I meditated the pain away.
I know. 

I moved around the corner,  to a house with a fireplace. But I am still neighbours with  the nutballs and personalities who count me among their number. 
Of course the first person I met up here was Jimmy the Cough. 
Whaddya gonna do? . 

MDM  Oct.. 2013