Mind the Gap

In the quiet early morning kitchen I strapped the dog into his fur coat and followed him out the door. Through the dark streets he snuffled and pissed and croaked like an asthmatic pensioner.

It is excitement - I tell passing strangers who surely must think they are about to be set upon by a gang before we round corners.

 I sneak into my Father’s house like a jewel thief, easing the key around in the cold brass lock.  I deliberate about dropping and running or calling up the stairs, but he is deaf and I cannot bear the thoughts of waking him, of seeing his sleep rumpled face, his white fluff  standing on end, the blue striped pyjamas, explaining again that I am off to the City.  

Despite composing a number of emails in my head, offering apologies and downright lies in equal measure, I am apparently ignoring the self sabotaging voice in my head and in an altruistic move -  am leaving the building.

The sky is navy velvet with a faint frill of turquoise lace and I stand on the platform awaiting the sound of the train. It is a treat for me to go anywhere, let alone by train, and so I am travelling as Oscar Wilde might have done, with a number of items of hand luggage, a book and a diary.

And  alone.

People run for the moving doors but I remain fixed, knowing they will come to me, fingering my ticket like a talisman, feeling my phone, my purse, my keys, in a repeating mantra like a Buddhist with beads. I get a seat with a table and spread my possessions around me in a ring, like a small boy building a fort.  Then I open my book and try to ignore the hysterical toddler who is inconsolable in the seat opposite me. 

 I will move at the next stop I think.

In the morning mist from the lilac fields, the town with the Castle is shrouded like Brigadoon. I wonder  idly about Hewhomustnotbenamed and for  a brief moment imagine that he might board the train, and then there is the whistle, slamming doors and the rhythmic moving of the train again  and I pick up my book sighing.

 When he plops into the seat opposite me I think I must have conjured him up out of the fog.

I knew you’d come   says I  - although I didn’t.

I came to mind you says he.

I offer my hand across the table, to touch him, to ascertain the reality of him, and he is frozen. He has been up all night with a toothache. They’ll have to knock me out to get at it says he.

He watches me in the window as I read but when I look up to smile, he looks away.

The coast unveils itself piece by piece like a jigsaw lit with a torch  - till there is a burst of sunlight and a gleam off the shining sea. We are lit in the carriage -  He and I -   it is impossible to see -   his dappled silhouette - against the blue of the seat, the sky, the water, his eyes.

Na bi ag cur do chosa ar na suiochain  le do thoil  says the automated voice in 2 languages every time we stop.

 Mind the Gap it says.  

Mind the gap.

 I sway my way down to the toilet. There are so many signs in the small smelly  stainless steel room that I don’t know whether to obey or ignore them and am caught like a rabbit in headlights - 

Lock – Unlock / Open –Close/ Hot –Cold/ Vacuum Flush/ Talk to the Driver.

Talk to the Driver?

Surely he can’t be that bored up there that he has a button in the jacks for people to get in touch for the chat. I wonder should I press it, and just have a little dialogue with the driver. Like the constipated mathematician who worked it out with a pencil, I wonder if he is a friendly ear for the hardbound citybound passengers. Maybe this is confession for the naughty noughties. 

Then I think  it is possibly for emergencies.

“There is a button in the jacks for talking to the driver” says I to Hewhomustnotbenamed.

He sprays scalding tea around the table.

In the terminal where I have to navigate my way across the city, a prospect I find terrifically daunting as there are only 2 types of Dubs – the heart of the rowl and the ones that would skin ya – but usually it is impossible to tell them apart as they play both  parts simultaneously . Hewhomustnotbenamed is shepherding me to the steps of the Luas and I am in a cold fury because he has told me to keep my voice down.

Go fuck off I say and storm up the ramp.

The instant it is said it is forgotten but he has been swallowed up by the throng.

I step on board and an old woman  advises me to zip up my bag and keep my hands in my pockets and in between stroking her cheek, I get the heads up about history, houses and handbags  and how many times she has been mugged on the street, or robbed in the house. This is our main thoroughfare, says she as we ding across O Connell Street, the cops are afraid to come on here - but I am thinking not of robbers and muggers, but of the pale man with his fingers pressed into his jaw, left behind on the platform 7 stops ago. I turn my phone over and over in my pocket to feel for the minutest vibration, for the message that says where are you now?

When I alight, already dialling, he is standing on the platform with his arms crossed.

 He knows me so well.

Dublin simmers.

It literally hums with an energy that is palpable and with an air of barely suppressed danger and excitement. Everybody is rushing - to and from, on and off, running as the doors slam, racing down the white tiled corridors , ear muffs over their headphones, they don’t look left or right, they don’t engage. They press themselves in and out, staring into the middle distance, or at the blue screens   in their hands, listening to the ooontz ooontz ooontz as they make dinner reservations on the Dart, make dates, make and break promises, shout and roar and eat and  drink.   

They fall down the stairs like drum kits.

The pin striped arse of the suited man is in the air and he has landed on his head, still holding his case, and he is righted by the crowd and leaps aboard the train before I can process the fact that he toppled down 2 flights of stairs like a piano, and landed at my feet. 

It takes me so long to process the information that I am standing at a platform cafe on the way home,  watching a crow so big you could saddle him, eating a Panini.

The crow is eating the Panini.

I have had a mince pie the size of a 5 cent piece in the Kylemore, where I have cleared, re-set, queued for and purchased coffees bantering  with the Ugandan  security guard , while staring longingly out the window at the teeming people, the top heavy  buses careening around the corners and the statue of James Joyce leaning on a stick.

“Member the falling man” I ask and watch as he exhales a plume of smoke and a sigh.

 

 It has been a long day.

Before this day dawned I had visions of myself skipping around a Dublin that resembled an Austrian street market, all log cabins and cinnamon, hot chocolate and white bearded strangers, and where random passersby would press orange tulips and Yankee candles into my willing hands. There may or not have been skates involved in this halcyon vision. And rosy cheeked children waltzing hand in gloved hand across the ice, under a tree as big as Macys, with twinkling lights.

And  Carol singers.

In reality I am an extra in Love/Hate.

Here are the shell- suited baseball- hat wearing  young fella’s sprawled across seats adjusting their crotches,  here is a woman like Morticia with white roots to her shoulders and black hair to her waist, moving her entire belongings in plastic sacks in a pram shouting an annyway  at the gang running alongside, here is the man roaring on his mobile about hostel accommodation while he goes into the bookies, a folded paper pleated into the pocket of his brand new cheap denim jeans.  

 I want to follow them or listen to them and stare open mouthed while Hewhomustnotbenamed pulls me up the street. The Christy Brown boots may have been perfect for holding forth in a carpeted hotel, but they are not ideal for pounding the streets in rush hour in a delirious throng of Christmas shoppers and gougers.  

There may have been a taxi in my vision too.

Name a Jayzuz,  stop taking photo’s. They’ll reef that phone out of your hand says the tall man beside me, the one who looks around at every crossing to see that I am keeping up and not jaywalking, the one who exhales and rolls his eyes as I stare into the sky at the lights, the one who tempers his 7 league boot march, so Humpty Dumpty can keep up.

When I worked the Dublin run on the ship, I drank in early houses with hookers and bakers and nightwatchmen, the smell of bacon grilling in Valance and McGraths mingling with porter  as the Guinness shoooshed from the taps, and in the Paycock with the bars on the windows and the cross eyed giant, while an army of shoplifting women with ponytails and hooped earrings, doled  out perfumes from the jacks.

I am used to making friends with strangers.

There is a man under the Spire selling souvenirs of the Spire for a fivah.

They are knitting needles stuck in Mala.

A man with a toddler on his shoulders breasts him about the cheek of him and the entrepreneur shouts  -  fuck off oua dat, or I’ll stick it in your bleedin’ het .

I want to shout “I’m up from the country, you know” as I did once when I flung the contents of my handbag at a surprised bus driver , having run across 5 lanes of speeding traffic and hurled myself aboard the wrong bus to end up at the wrong funeral in the wrong church.

I had to sit mortified in the bucket seat facing the entire bus in disgrace all the way back.

Instead, I pretend that I am au fait with this city, that I am one of the million who call this place home, who can run around with such aplomb  and savoir faire, making their way in and out and on and off and up and down as if it was all so easy. 

 

“Get  yezer  childrens  Uggs now, the last few Uggs now, Uggs and slippers  now “  the hawker calls on Jervis Street. I contemplate purchasing childrens  Uggs to navigate a little easier, but am given the hairy eyeball by the tall man.

Instead, I ask the man beside him  how much the toy dogs are, the yipping yapping toy dogs on leads who walk and beg.

Oh Christ says Hewhomustnotbenamed slumped in a shop porch.

Walter -  we chime in unison.

The man is murderously attacking the belly of the dog with a screwdriver and roots in a bag with a thousand mismatched batteries and jams them in. Its eyes light up like Beelzebub.

“Oh, not with the eyes, give me one with no eyes, the craythur will have a heart attack” I implore.

“They’ll fade, Mizzuz, they’ll fade”

His mate joins in. Oh, they’ll fade, love. Couple a hours and they’ll be gone.

It is time for us to be gone and I cast a glance at the man who got up early, showered  and shaved and dressed in the cold kitchen to mind me today. 

He gets me and my doggy bags back aboard the last train heading home.

“Will you light your fire when you get home?” I ask innocently as the train slows in Bray.

He cracks the knuckles on both hands and stares out the window into the darkness, the warm carriage lit from within, counterpointing the contrast between out there and in here.

It might be too late, he says, I’ll see how I feel.

Mind the gap, the automatic voice repeats at all the stops.

 Mind the gap.