Luke Kelly and the Red Leather Purse

I was so FAT when I was 30 my belly button echoed, and my boyfriend carried around a photo of the girl who came with his wallet.
My boyfriend at the time was a doppelganger of Luke Kelly who had a tattoo of his ex’s name on his arm. He got it covered by a flower, a rose, which was unfortunate in that her name was Rose.
I was not allowed to be going out with a man with a tattoo as only sailors had them back then.
 At the Twins 21st on a scorching  bank holiday Monday, having been sent to the bar with a warchest of notes to buy the round for the entire table, he skidded on a piece of ham and  landed on his back with a tray of about 35 drinks and mixers  on his chest,  drenching himself to the bone with beer and ice and minerals. The Barman pulled him up out of the crowd and kicked the broken glasses and bottles under the table and took him down one of the pub promotion t-shirts that were always hanging behind every counter.
To a stout drinker, it was sacrilegious and mortifying to be parading around in a Carlsberg t shirt that was at least 4 sizes too small.
 It would have done a communion child.
 And it also displayed his rose tattoo to the nation.
My Mother squinted through the smoke at the head of him coming back, squeezed into the tiny t shirt, his jeans soaked and the artwork on his arm gleaming in the sunlight.

 I had gone back to work in the  Harbour  again, this time wearing the uniform of the Irish Tourist Board, with a knotted silk scarf and a waistcoat and telling lies as fast as a horse would trot to tourists.
"Michelle, please don't be asking the clients for lifts home and then bringing them out to the pub with you" says my supervisor before she left the office.
Her car is not gone out the gate 30 seconds before I am standing on the opposite side of the road in Kilrane, hitching the big rigs to get home to the man who looked and sounded  like Luke Kelly, the man who called me Babby.
"Sure, she's no bigger than a babby" he would inform before he led the crowd into a rousing chorus of Raglan Road, bursting the strings off the guitar with gusto.
A powder blue VW camper with flowers painted on the side, pulls lazily into the side of the road and I brought the stoned Frenchman named Thierry home to Luke Kelly. He parked on the Quay outside our flat in The Wrens Nest, and rang the bell next morning to invite us down for cafe au lait and french toast.
In the van.
With the door open onto the busy quay, while we sat knee to knee,  I threw the milky coffee over the woodenworks when he was faffing about with sugar -   -  and brazened out the stares of the rubber- neckers who looked in at the trio of us breakfasting, in disbelief.
"That "Mahon" one is living in a van below on the quay with 2 men" the old lads with the terriers nodded sagely to each other.
I had to ask him to go after a week.
There was only so much Luke Kelly could stand.
Luke  would hang out the window smoking roll ups, listening to Neil Young,  the cowbells on the mussel dredgers with the bacon and cabbage on a plate of hot water, and my blouse hanging up in the steam.
I was reversing down the 6 steps of the high cab of the 18 wheeler that had brought me home, while the driver slammed the door and honked his way off up the N25.

I was having my 30^th birthday party in Mrs Cullens of Kilrane .

The owner laid on a bus to collect all the parched punters from town and 70 or 80 or 200 of us got on the 50 seater.

A wee man from Donegal would slam the door of the bus not once or twice but 3 times on Luke Kellys hand although he was so drunk he could not feel it. In the morning his arm was stretched out on the bed like Popeye’s and the doorbell was ringing. I hung out the window with a head like Holyhead and saw wee James cowering against the spray from the water. He had come to apologise to Luke about slamming his hand in the door, which was the first he heard of it.

 We went to the boat club where the water was running down the cavity blocked walls with the sweat off the band and the dancers, and I got into an altercation with a man who wouldn’t stand for the anthem. 
That lad better be on crutches says I to Luke who was drinking 4 pints of stout simultaneously, as the bar was closing.

I’d rather be looking at it than looking for it, says I nodding at the porter, and working on the premise that a real drinker is drinking one, ordering one and letting one settle I went to the bar with my red leather purse.

I only know what day of the week it was then by what clothes I was wearing.
 If I had the foresight to leave them out that is, as I was employed as a tourist information officer, a shop assistant, the chef in the Goal Bar and a medical typist simultaneously. 
And was sharing the flat with a Ban Garda  also called Michelle, which would cause untold kerfuffle when Catherine Nevin did for her husband and they told ME to  go to Wicklow with the forensic team. 
I saw the other Michelle on the 6 one news in a white paper suit sadly  raking the grass .

 So I had a fair skelp of money in the purse. 
When the bouncers finally flung us out we walked across the little humpty backed bridge while I patted my pockets.

Mother of God  Almighty and all his  divine angels and blessed saints me fucking purse is gone says I to Luke.

We went back in past the bouncers to the room with all the full lights on and the sweating barmen carrying the dead men out the back.

They were also picking up empty bottles and gigantic ashtrays stuffed to the hilt with the butts of Major and Carrolls and John Player Blue.

The barman looked at me innocently when I breasted him.

“The little liar” I thought as he swore blind and on his mothers grave that he hadn’t picked up the little red leather purse when he cleared our table. 
Luke was on his knees looking under the table.

We were hoyed back out into the carpark at 3 am with everyone gone, the night still mild and warm, the boats bobbing quietly on the water, lapping at the pontoon.

The enormity of the loss struck me.

All the hours, the phone calls, the medical reports, the lasagnes and chips, the directions given, the tourists lied to, the trucks hitched, the thieves watched, the roll of money, the waste, the waste.

“NOOOOOOOOOOOOO” I shouted to the sky, maudlin and dramatic and full as an egg.

A  sudden wind took up and rustled the leaves in the trees above us, bending the branches, whipping my hair across my face, till I stopped in surprise, like a hysterical woman being administered a slap.

What the actual .................. says I and looked at Luke.

He was looking at me.

And we were both looking at something floating in the air between us.

The red leather purse.

Hanging. Hovering. Suspended.

And then it fell with a soft thud.

We bent to look.

Neither of us would pick it up.

Luke reached out a tentative finger and poked it.

“I thought it would be hot” he says as he picked it up gingerly and opened it.

I knew exactly what he meant, though I couldn’t possibly have  even known till he spoke.

He fell to his knees and started to cry.

Me Da, he said between sobs, Me Da done this.

In the 20 years since this incident occurred I have wondered many times how to explain it.

It is your call whether you believe it, whether you believe in quantum physics, astral projection or a depth of emotion that  would provoke a sentient presence to materialise a missing object is your call.

My job is simply to tell  you the story.

 
Luke, would run away with a young one he met while he was painting his Mothers gates, then party like it was 1999 at a barndance so that he collapsed and was rushed to hospital. I stood at the bedside  looking at the lovebites on his neck and listened to him telling me that he was sorry, never knowing she was waiting in another room.
Dear reader, he married her.

15 years after he sneaked home when he thought I was at work to collect his hedge clippers  meeting me on the stairs where we re-enacted the entire film of Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf with me playing 3 of the roles and him ducking the plates, I would meet him again in a breakers yard in Blackwater.

 Due to my Fathers parking  - be grand  for a minute! – I had to run a mile through dilapidated machinery and tractors to call my Da for the keys and I ran past Luke Kelly who almost brained himself with the hood of a Volkswagon as he stood up.

“Your dinners in the dog” I smiled as I jogged by.

I believe his new wife gives him down the banks on any given Sunday which  just goes to show you , 
you should always  be very very careful what you wish for.




MDM October 22 2014