The Man with the Teddybear Eyes

 

 The special film on Rte that October Bank Holiday was The Golden Boys with Matthau and Burns.

I scanned the golden cigarette box in trepidation.

Would I have enough to do me?

I have gone from almost having heart failure and knocking somebody down to get more if there was only 9 in the box, to being grateful that there is dust left in the tin.

This was so long ago I actually smoked Benson & Hedges, having graduated from Rothmans, via Major  and would proceed to move onto Marlboro light, along with the rest of the planet.

God be good to the days when there were as many proliferations and varieties of cigarette boxes on bar counters as there were face down drunks.

Wake that lad up there somebody and send him home for the dinner. His wife has me heart scalded walking up and down the hall to the phone.

Find his keys lads, good man, good man. Get up outta that.  

If it wasn’t the wife of a missing drinker that was on the blower,  it was a gang of feral children tapping a phone asking was there any walls there and screeching.

Or it was a lovesick teenager in a stinking phone box standing in a loch of piss, trying not to breathe the fumes from the mouthpiece, as she listened to the barman lying and heard the crowd  laughing before he hung up.  

You’ve just missed him.

The only men in the house that night was Dutch  Tomash, the silent witness behind the door and a drunken bus driver from Waterford named Herbie, pretending to read the “stare” in the common room.

He would pass out over the next hour or so and it was in the very act of sighing with pleasure and relief after a hectic weekend  of hillwalkers , that the brass bell tinkled and I went out to greet the stranger at the hostel reception desk.

He was nondescript really.

Blah  blah average.

 Blah Blah Caucasian.

He had height in that he was not a midget, hair in that he was not bald, and clothes in that he was not nude.

 I would have found it hard to pick him out of a line up.

 The one thing he did have however was an ability to stare that outrivalled my own. Even as I passed him things and got him to sign things, and hand over things, he never broke eye contact, and in this vein, he freaked me out.

His eyes were the pale glass buttons of a teddy bear.

“Would you come for a jar with me?” says he as he changed his mind about staying for the one night into a week.

I liked nothing about him or his question or his pale glassy eyes and was unsettled enough to respond in the negative.

I told him the potted version of the highlights of the village, explaining again that the boat train didn’t actually wait for the boat, and that the conducter, on spying the smoking stacks of the ship at the Tuskar would throw the ring of keys onto the platform, slam all the doors and whistle his way off up the country, without all the hordes of Australians and Yanks aboard all trying to get to Cork.  I told him what I told them about the hotel, and the Southern, and Devs, and that the supermarket closed at teatime but that Moira's chipper would do a terrible burger and frozen chips for him if he insisted.

And then I closed the hatch firmly in his face while he stood with his arms full of linen and towels.

There was Capstan full strength and Players, Woodbines, and Carrolls, Gold Bond and John Player Blue, Silk Cut purple, blue, and ultra on the shelves beside the chicken noodle soup. 

 A persons cigarette preferences and consumption were as unique as their carbon footprint, DNA  or  fingerprint.   

Those are Willy Goff’s fags said Jeff indicating the major and zippo with the tip of his pool- cue, as he nominated  the top pocket and lined up a shot he had to take halfway up the wall.

The painter in the white overalls who lived in the caravan at the end of his wife’s garden laced his shaking hands around the box and struck the Cara safety match on the third go.

Jasus and it’s a poor look out for a man that has to start his Bank Holly Day pulling the rind of a rasher  down his nose  said he in a sour swathe of stout.

Norbert was sitting  animatedly sideways on the stool like a man on a horse, almost in his neighbours  lap.

The emaciated  Welsh man in the black coat pontificating about the whereabouts of  Nicky Wire pushed him back with one tobacco stained finger nail.

Lean on your own lunch bud, says he in his best Newport accent.

The club was so packed you couldn’t turn a sweet in your mouth. 

 Gerry Music Man Meyler was giving it loads on the decks.

We were a decade away from being lampooned in sitcoms with D.J.'s who said shabba and were unintelligible between tracks.

 I heard the strains of Here comes my Happiness again through the door of the members only function room as the coins dropped into the fag machine in the hall. 

There was a smell of channel blocks and beer and a fug of smoke and the steward dealt out another dozen steaming glasses onto the draining board from the glasswasher and said - you’ll have a pint.

I said I will not.

I’ll be here till closing time again says I picking up the cigarettes and he leans across the counter and places a wet hand on my arm.

Have you any mankind below tonight?

He proceeds to tell me about the strangeness of the customer he had in just before me  who said he had met the woman he was going to marry that night.

It’s her eyes, he had said. There’s something in her eyes.

You don’t say says I, pulling the stool out from under someone’s arse and ordering a gin and tonic.

An hour later, I remember the film and leave.

The sky was floodlit from the pier, the hustle of the heaving highsided trucks,  

the orange glare lighting up the pot holed path back down the road,

 and it was this starry sky I was staring up at when I opened the black wooden door and saw the swinging legs.

He had looped a belt around the wrought iron chandelier and jumped from the landing.

I pushed him up and held on while I shouted for help.

Tomash leaped  from his space behind the door and ran up the stairs to take the weight, to loosen the buckle, to save the day.

Between us we brought him to the common room and laid him on the couch.  He seemed to be keen to breathe and not suffering any major ill effects, apart from a purple face which we could not ascertain was from the hanging or the rescue, but he was in a perfect storm of a temper.

Yez bastids  he shouted as he jumped up and ran around the room in a frenzy, attacking the coke machine and hurling the tattered  copies of the Da Vinci Code and the Diceman to the floor,  smashing the  shell sculptures off the shelves.

Tomash watched with an open mouth, out of which he was not about to actually let words fall, aside from -  have you a plaish for dish night -  every evening for a year and going to the wrong Killarney on his holidays.

I called the cops from a mobile as big as a Bord na Mona briquette.

They had to come out from town as the station in the village closed at teatime too. 

The Gardai were a double act of Yin and Yang, a tall thin boy with eyes like Paul Newman and a small Ban Garda with very red lipstick and a way of walking that announced she folded her pants over the back of a chair every night, and that the clips were too tight in the mane of her coiled hair.

 She looked out from under the brim of her peaked cap like a kitten in a jug.

“Well we can’t actually DO anything “  says she closing her notebook  while Paul Newman tried to calm the hanging man down. He was running amok in the kitchen hurling bags of  carefully labeled pasta around  the counters and screaming “I’ll do it again, you know, as soon as you’re gone, I’ll do it again”.

Are you fucking codding me? says I

You can’t leave me here in this place with a lad who wants to top himself.

 What if he decides to set a fire in the middle of the night? 

What if he brings us all with him says I - dramatically gesticulating to  include  the Lumberjack shirted Tomash and the dormitory  upstairs where Herbert was sleeping in the arms of Bacchus.

“You’ll have to section him” says Paul Newman.

I used to think you got money for putting a lunatic in an asylum.

 It had become the stuff of myth and legend that sometimes unfortunate craythurs were sectioned for the few bob and sometimes the person who was to retrieve them collapsed and died from drinking the fee or simply forgot them and they were left there for evermore.

The way kids check for tattoos now must have been something similar, like taking the kings shilling full of rum and waking up chained to oars in the hold of a galleon, an alcoholic madman who was normally as sound as a pound could wake up in a room with bars on the windows, wearing someone elses dressing gown and staring ruefully down the drive from the attic.

How does it work says I?

Yin and Yang explained I would have to sign papers and a Doctor would be called to assess and evaluate the psychological condition of the accused. I would have to accompany him to the Barracks though - in the squad.

Christ, I’m missing the film says I as the kitten watched me stuff his belongings back into his rucksack.

The 2 men sat in the front while the kitten and I took up our perches in the back.

Jasus, look at me now – I thought as I stared out at the speeding fields flying by.

At teatime, I was planning on watching something interesting and amusing and here I am at midnight haring off to town in the back of a police car, to section a psychotic chef.

Paul Newman opened her up on the N25 and it was at the very moment that I was watching the speedometer creeping higher and higher that the man with the teddy bear eyes flung open the door and tried to jump out.

The car swerved all over the road with the rush of air and Paul Newman executed a move he may have been trained for over a period of years in Templemore, notably the old grab and punch routine. After catching him by the collar , he landed a haymaker in the centre of the angry man’s face in one fluid movement and I sat in the back wondering why there was no grille and pondering an acquaintance who having been picked up one night for falling around the roads, demanded to be allowed to make a phone call.

“You’ve been watching too many films, boyo” said the jaded Guard.

In the Garda barracks there seemed to be a little confusion as to whom exactly was being arrested or sectioned and they took the shouting man with the teddy bear eyes off to a cell to scream and roar for a number of hours.

And that is exactly how long it took for the Doctor on call to be contacted, aroused from his slumber, explained stuff to, and agree to come down and have a goo.

The Doctor -  who bizarrely was my previous employer and when I had tendered my resignation there and told him I was moving to the house behind the cliffs, had remonstrated with me and said –

 I simply beg of you to reconsider. The last time I was out there I had to section a woman who had moved all the furniture into the garden in the middle of a breakdown.

I passed the time waiting for the eye rolling by alternately flirting with and telling yarns to the cops. I was sitting on a desk like Shirley Temple, wearing one of their hats, and recounting again for the newcomers some of the tamer events that make up my average day.

You could sell tickets boy says one Garda to the other and then the Doctor came.

At 7am as the ambulance drove up School Street, I let myself into my parents home in the Square, and my Mother, hearing the door click, padded softly down the stairs, belting her dressing gown.

“Where have you come out of” says she and I told her, and she didn’t turn a hair.

I got a taxi back and continued meeting the characters that played bit parts in the rich tapestry of the house –

 -  stoned hippies and travelers, Cyclists, Campers, children,  Thin Lizzy Tribute bands, bearded buskers and bikers, wasters and gougers, chancers , alcoholics and Nuns.

-  And the  96 year old French woman, who when she lost her  husband  in her 80’, took up backpacking, travelling alone,  much to the despair of her 70 year old son.

 She  closed the shutters on her apartment in Paris and took to the roads with a bag, deciding she had better get busy living or get busy dying. She passed me his number on a tattered piece of paper, and I heard the relief in his voice, in the catch of his throat as I passed the phone to his Mother. 

She had spent 2 nights sleeping on the beach but her bedding was wet and she needed a shower.

- And  the Canadian  underwear model,  who banged on my door for his RayBans for a solid  hour before the ship sailed in the morning

The Australian couple who sailed in to port  on the first day of their  month long honeymoon and sailed out again never having actually gone anywhere else -

(“Name of God, who are these?” says someone holding the photo of them at the trad festival  up to the light one day )

The phone would ring occasionally from the man with the teddy bear eyes and these calls freaked and unnerved me. He started being quite lovely and apologetic and asking me to write to him, but as time wore on became belligerent and downright ornery, accusing me of wreckin’heez head until I put the phone down and called the Admissions  Desk.

Of course you will be informed when he is in PDU – says the Nurse.

 We have your chart red flagged here, so you don’t have to worry out there on your Jackie Jones.

One night, a few months later, I was sitting in a pub on the quay with an outrageously handsome, highly unsuitable, younger man.

 Our afternoon conversation had covered the great American novel, Hunter S. Thompson, the movies of the Coen brothers, Art Malik, pitches of imaginary scripts to Hollywood agents and hangovers. 

The pub had 2 doors which explains how I could be sitting at one and the man with the teddy bear eyes could walk in the other.

I almost swallowed the glass.

Come on, come on, come ON!! I whispered urgently  as I ran out the other door, my companion furiously draining his pint in 2 mouthfuls and grabbing his manbag.

Bastards never even rang me I screeched as I tottered up the woodenworks in my sandals. 

The man with the teddy bear eyes lives in this town now, 

with a woman,

 and I have never laid an eye on him since.

.Thankfully, I have always just missed him.

MDM 28^th March 2014