Alfie

One of the  windows I shout at Men  from

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 me spectacular views of the streets.

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

It may have been constructed entirely from plasterboard and spiders webs  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.

C-  To inform all and sundry that the place was perishin’ and I would get the galloping consumption.

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 around, a solitary watchman sitting under a floodlight with a generator grinding  and juddering all night, the streets torn up and paths broken , and  because the lighting was 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 pavement at all hours of the day and night, 

snatches of conversations that merged with the next group of voices, 

the noise from the opera people trouncing past to the Thomas Moore Tavern,

 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. 

 You couldn’t throw a cafolla rissole without hitting at least 7 characters.

 A pair of women, one saying howya mam  and calling everyone  Mrs  Malone , the other asking  of any random  passing stranger was she alright now

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 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”. 

 Pushed to the pin of my collar to keep  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 discern the wavy heat actually leaving the building or turning to condensation and running down the sill. 

So I slept on a massage table in the middle of the room wrapped in piles and piles of throws and patchwork quilts, staring at my breath as if froze. One persons breath who never froze was Frank S.  My tiny budget  was exhausted  so I went nowhere when the snow came and contented myseIf with playing long convoluted games of TEX HOLD EM where I always made a balls of the big blind, but could read the tells and thus won enough to keep myself in scented tealights and tulips.

Frank was a permanent fixture on Mary’s Bar window sill where he smoked and rasped and expectorated  and shouted HOW YA 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 was 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 hill falling like nine pins but they couldn’t hear us from such a great  height and even the rubber neckers fell, and then when the ambulance came for a man who had  a spectacular head bashing fall - -- (we had crawled across the ice like people on an Alaskan frozen 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 warm) even they opened the back door of the ambulance to get the trolleys and collapsed in a hoop., the trolleys flying down the hill onto the Cornmarket Rounabout . We can’t do this they said from their supine position on the ice and when they could get their legs under them again, as gangly and as skittery as new born foals , rang the Fire Brigade to come and rescue THEM.  

 The Fire Brigade fell as well.  

 Gerwhoonlytalkstomen wandering by with his feet at ten to three, sometimes pushing a bicycle up a hill, sometimes 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, passed up 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 off the ice on my way to buy my Father a cooked chicken and could not be seen as the ambulance could not travel, and a taxi was out of the question.

It’s not rocket science says the Care Doc on the phone. You need to have that elbow plastered.

The Burger eating champion of all Ireland was already plastered but he still didn’t fall.

Frank had rung again to ask when will  I wash Alabama.

“Give his yoke a twirl of a cloth, Mee chell, will you?”

My life flashes before my eyes.

One hand washes the other.

A certifiable lunatic is washing the blind dog of another.

Kill me now, Lord, I thought as I turned on the tv.

Frank  is on his bench singing and yodelling and conjecturing which of the males in his orbit are closet homosexuals. Passive or Active.  He is dismissive of his older brother.

“You should see the body on him, ..............actually no-one has seen the body on him. I doubt he came out of me Mother. He looks like he came out of a wardrobe.”

I hang my head out the window to roar at him on his arse shaped window sill outside Mary’s Bar.

“Keep it down to a dull roar dude will you, I can’t hear the telly up here with the roars and bawls of you”

That’s what she said last night Mee chell.........

Mee shell come down for a pint, or a coke, or tea and crisps.

Even over the roars of Frank I can make sense of what channel 4 have presented as entertainment. 

Some Tarquin Regington Fossington Smythe has come up with yet another formula for making people like Me watch. 

 Let’s have people who hate cleaning and live like bonyeens in a sty meet up with germophobes who use 86 toilet ducks a day and  who wash their hands about 107 times an hour and make them live together and clean up a house.  Ok, now let’s make them do up a house and try to flip it, or bring all the neighbours in to have a gander at the avocado toilet and the curry stains on the wallpaper, and when they have stopped laughing, tell you a hundred ways to make it better, that involves knocking down supporting walls without an RSJ, finding rising damp all over the kip, and running out of money  19 times during the build. Or filming an entire street on the scratcher, sitting on sofas drinking cans and talking shite outside their front doors, while the kids run amok  getting  asbo’s and the mothers get neck  tattoos and pregnant.

Oh, I know, says Tarquin at an interminable production meeting where he was listlessly stirring the foam off his half caff decaff frappaccinno cupachino icantbelieveitsnotchino beaker. Let’s do a programme about really ironical couples, like an acid house clubber into bondage and a soulful vegan poet into planespotting or .......... like she’s a hedge fund manager who shops in Sloane Square and parties at St Tropez and listens to Lilly Allen because she thinks it’s music and he lives in a caravan eating nettle soup, climbing into bins and playing his guitar in the moonlight. Yes, let’s make them hang out, we’ll call it dating the enemy or something trite.

Dating the Enemy was a programme. 

I watched it. 

Oh, she SOOOOOOO doesn’t get him I sighed as she straightened her suit and marched off in her high heels  to luncheon in Covent Garden while our hero looked all misty eyed and abandoned and heart stoppingly beautiful,  with his chocolate eyes and his bum fluff.

 I’D get him I thought as I ran down the stairs of the flat to purchase yet more packets of Amber Leaf  and family size bars of Goldencrisp.. I walked straight into him  outside a coffee shop around the corner, where he was handing out fliers about Christ outside the phone shop.

Hello Alf, I said to him and he blushed charmingly.

He is even nicer in the flesh. 

 His friend who was handing out cd’s outside Dunnes was another fine thing and so it behoved me to bring them home and cook up a storm for them and then hand them everything in the house that was not nailed down when they were leaving.

Lord Alfred of Monteque is a peer of the realm, son of a baronet, and a qualified psychologist who practiced in rooms in Harley Street. 

He studied under Richard Dawkins at Oxford, with his own mother in the same class, and following argument and debate with the former about the existence or otherwise of a Divine Being, broke the heart of the latter by running off to become a disciple. 

He has spent the last number of years driving around the world in a beat up van, digging wells in Saharan heat, carrying children across rivers, eating whatever is handed, offered or found, and generally being all cool and froody and aware .

How very bohemian of me I thought, as I looked at our bare feet on the rug, the six pack we split 3 ways standing by the speakers, and watched the sunset over the spires. 

Last night I watched him ON my tv, 

 a Freegan Jesus freak who dumpster dives behind Tesco and now he is sitting cross legged beside it playing Northern Sky. 

I helped them carry the contents of the cupboards out to the van while Frank watched from the window sill.

Who’s your MAN Mee shell he roared in a cloud of Marlboro stuffing his fags back into his torn pocket.

“Sweet Lord Leppin’ Lantern a Jasus there’s nothing in this fridge but the light” says hewhomustnotbenamed when he bends to put his tiny milk carton in later when he gets off the bus.

I told him the truth too, for a change.

Next week I expect to spend an afternoon in Maggie Mays with the gay hairdressers and the hand holding dipso’s from #gogglebox .

And the truth shall set you free.

Massage BED

M.D.M. April 19th 2014