Little Museums of Dublin
2.37 AM. Carnevale in Temple Bar, publicly shut since five after two. Black-cherry dining chairs arse-up-ended on faux-oak tabletops. Baileys-cream tinted slats sealed blind, blacking the exterior as during a blitz. Interior lighting dialed candle-low. Manageress Raquel is mopping the tiled, chessboard floor and whisper-singing something Italian and lonesome only she can hear. Three clocked-off staff and three big-spending customers occupy the row of swivel-topped stools at the counter, backs to Raquel, heads and upper torsos grainily reflected in a light-starved behind-counter wall mirror, a broad antique with flaking gilt frames the owner has years ago strung with tinsel now gapped and dishevelled and strung with bunches of plastic grapes of a lustre-less purple added by Raquel.
Once, much younger, Raquel got drunk with some rich people she hardly knew on a yacht belonging to a Sardinian politician. It was late and moony and windless, and they had anchored between Portoscuoso and the tiny, exclusive Isola di San Pietro, out of sight of both. She eventually couldn’t tell if the floor beneath her listed due to the cocktails or to the small Mediterranean waves. She woke up in a boiling sweat on deck, naked, sun-scored, seasick, grimy, crisscrossed with red stripes and marks as if she’d been netted and reeled from the seabed by multiple tiny hooks, sported with, dumped. Being here among Carnevale’s lock-in customers revived a sense of being incognito and adrift with men in suits waiting to see what happens when the young women blackout, reminded her of that night alone with the rulers of Sardinia, of that petrified awakening. So she refuses to jolly along, she will let them sing and wisecrack as they wish, she knows where it all ends up, if you let go, if you let yourself sink. She dusts and mops and sings down low to herself, trying to remember something else, something better.
Six in an arc at the counter chain-smoking in between grappas in tumblers (it’s like drinking iron and flame, the blood of Vesuvius says Darren) and tulips of red from tectonic Aquila. Alicia, a mojito-eyed Sardinian waitress, all-black clad, seems able to stretch and retract her lengthening neck when, laughing or wining, she frequently throws back her head. Alicia drinks fast and deep and often, easing herself into her new role as companion. A pinhole crater above her right eyelash, ringless. To her left sits Xavier, a silver-haired Belgian, squat, pompous, dapper, Napoleon-shaped. He smokes thin, pungent cigars and sports a flagrant though worn-looking crimson cravat he says he stole from a museum of the Paris Commune. In late night company, he is given to launching without warning into renditions of Flemish fishing songs. No-one knows very much about him. Next to Xavier, a thirtyish waitress called Maria from Blanes, a small Catalonian city. She has a detailed blue-green portrait tattoo on her bronzed, hirsute, muscularly sailor-like arm, a circular tattoo in which Darren sees a likeness of Frida Kahlo. Maria is amiably fondling the strategically generous, garrulous Ricardo, from Naples, - proprietor of Carnevale, her boss. During official opening hours Ricardo sits enthroned upon a black plastic chair by the door. He meets everyone with an artfully open-faced smile and, if you come back a second time, a hearty embrace.
To Alicia’s left, Darren, fortyish, well-travelled, from Ennis, ex-actor, presently magazine-style arts-show host on a private radio channel, short term-contracted. Tops up his income doing voiceovers on radio ads for everything from the Wexford Opera Festival to Vintage Cheeses of the Burren. Beside him slumps Tip, ex-Rugby star, sports pundit, libertine. Tip’s tanned and crinkled face nests in crossed arms on the counter. For the fourth or fifth time since midnight he seems about to fall asleep and perhaps this time, finally, slip from his stool. For the fourth or fifth time tonight Darren gives Tip a subtle but forceful elbow in the belly to awaken him. This time Tip jolts unexpectedly and before Darren can manage to stretch an arm out behind him the one time rugby superpower crashes backwards off the stool onto the chessboard beneath, a felled knight. A shockwave of silence passes through the huddle, then heaving laughter all round. Tip gets up, confusedly, spraying expletives at Darren, gripping the back of his head with one hand, rubbing his tailbone with the other, but soon Tip is laughing too and says Who’s for another round, and all reply, almost chorally, with just a modicum of dissonance, I am, I am, I am.....Maria volunteers for barmaid duty, unstools and slips behind the counter to apportion another two bottles of Sardinian red, carded by Tip, with grappa chasers on the house.
Through all this carry-on Raquel, apart, continues to mop back and forth and sing down low. Ethereally sweeping behind them, apart from them, against a wallpaper background of lemon roses, yet more fat purple grapes, bushels of maize. Images of a plentiful harvest, but also lonesome reminiscences of a once-and-perfect island gone down beneath the oceans of the past. According to Tip, Raquel would like a boyfriend very much but is not interested in one-night-stands. Darren senses a deep-down longing in her, a longing to return to a place she sings about in her folk-songs, a place that no longer exists and perhaps never did except in the form of a song, in the singers and the singing of such songs. A longing to be held by the kind of lover existing only in romantic fantasies, in poems and in ballads which mesmerize in the same way they frustrate, conjuring unrealisable desires. Raquel’s romantic lonesomeness will never end, thinks Darren, not in this world.
When Raquel approaches the counter with her mop Darren can at last make out Bella Ciao. She isn’t a fascist, then. That would be like Iron Maggie belting out Willie McBride, which classic Tip had gotten half-way through brutally executing a little earlier on before falling away into a snooze. And isn’t that where all the dreams end-up - in the half-sung songs of a drunk? Darren knows from experience it’s best to avoid talking history or anything controversial atall in new company and sticks to yabbering of food, wine, sex, music, drugs, visceral sins in which we all, one way or another, indulge. Or you can talk about love, Italians love to talk about love and they love to sing about love. All the same, he makes an attempt to join his voice to Raquel’s and uplift the chorus of Bella Ciao but at the far end of the arc this immediately turns Ricardo’s normally flowing face to stone. Acting quickly, before Ricardo gets a chance to ask where and per causa Darren has picked up the words of this anti-fascist anthem, which Ricardo tolerates in Raquel because she is a good and uncomplaining worker, because she is a woman, because she keeps it down and does not attempt to turn it into a singalong, Darren suggests it is time for some english singing and launches into a medley of early Elvis Presley tracks.
Everyone, Raquel, Ricardo, Maria, Xavier, Alicia, even Tip eventually joins in for this drunken mash-up of Blue Moon of Kentucky, Jailhouse Rock, and Love me Tender. Energised, Darren bounds from his stool, swivels his hips, places his right palm over his heart and rollickingly climaxes - to mighty applause and cheering - in the deepest, loudest Elvis-like notes he can muster. There can only be one Elvis, one Rock-And-Roll King at the centre of such a gathering, and tonight it is himself, Darren. As he retakes his seat, elastic Alicia turns to him sniffing demonstrably while pointing at her nose and whispers:
It’s true that you English call cocaine charlie?
Charlie, yes, yes! we call it that, Darren replies, greatly enthused. But drugs have all sorts of names, like partisans and spies. And, as with those, a drug’s name doesn’t tell you very much about it, or is designed to put you on the wrong track. Nor are any of the rumours about drugs much use. You’ve got to get to know the thing itself. Charlie, Darren rambled vivaciously, is also the name of my deceased paternal Granddad who sold donkeys and supped porter and held general commerce with all and sundry in the town, from gypsies to junior ministers, to go by the rainy mile of tweedy men that stretched behind his hearse. What’s porter? Why, a friend who will carry your baggage a while when you’re tired, of course, and the longer he carries it the heavier it gets and the more you have to pay him when he clocks off. Anyway, have you got some cocaine? If so, sharing is caring, we English say. And especially with cocaine, since giving some of that away is a true proof of selflessness in the modern day.
Alicia smiles - she has good, earthy English, picked up as a waitress and a barmaid here and there, but chooses in the main to say little and communicates just as well with her gestures or lack of gestures. She throws her arms up a little from her lap and apologetically shows her palms, as if to say no, regretfully, no Charlie, but she knows what Darren means about sharing it, about how two people like Darren and Alicia can achieve a life-affirming, long-lasting crescendo of near-fatal intensity in a hotel room anywhere on the planet sharing a couple of grams of high-grade cocaine. Toyko....Montreal...Medellin...
The thought of being alone with Alicia and cocaine makes Darren even drunker and fuller of Saturday joy, even though he has already prised from Tip, before Tip started passing in and out of consciousness, that Alicia has a boyfriend, somewhere, and that she is probably intent on being loyal to him.
Earlier on in the evening there had been another girl, one of Tip’s current squeezes, called Zanthe. She’d made her entrance very drunkenly, almost knocking over Alicia who was precariously bearing impossible arrays of plates of crudo and frommagio through the narrow and hazardous straits between Carnevale’s crowded tables. Zanthe immediately set about trying to shift Tip at the counter which, at that early hour, was very out of place. Tip, for once preferring decorum to notoriety, resisted her pink-lipped kisses, retaining only a tang of fag-ash. Zanthe stormed out sobbing, her leather jacket half-way down her back, revealing an s-shaped blue-green tattoo of a snake with a dragon’s head breathing gold flame up the back of her neck. Earlier on, Zanthe had rung Darren to find out where Tip was and what kind of state he was in. Great, she had said after Darren had given her his nonchalant assessment that Tip was standing up now but by midnight would be made of jelly. As usual, Darren might have added, but Zanthe was straight into telling him how much she loved Tip and how she couldn't - she just couldn’t - leave him go. Darren didn’t want to ruin her night by telling her she was one among many and that he had heard more or less the same thing declared about Tip by dozens of women, drunk women and sober women, black women and white women, women who lived alone in mansions and women who occupied squats alongside fire-jugglers and anarchists and sans papiers. Tip's charms, while they were genuine as his unfading good looks, were intended to create dalliance after dalliance only, dalliance after dalliance to infinity. Thee would never be a long-term, a wedding, a wedding present, a honeymoon, a diamond anniversary, never anything like that. The mono-love Zanthe said she was after was not in prospect. Tip could not abide the inevitable sexual boredom of monogamy. He could not abide boredom full stop. This is why he had tried every narcotic at least once, again and again if he liked them and could afford them. This is why if he found you sexy and convenient he would sleep with you once, twice, a few times maybe. This is why in his youth he had hitched from Barcelona to Berlin to Bucharest to Odessa, staying a night or two in a hundred smaller cities and towns along the way, giving himself a different self-amusing name and personal history at each one, Michael the Gideon distributer, Joseph the football scout, Aloysius the wandering farm-hand, Barnaby the plain-clothes monk... seducing at every pit-stop as if on everlasting sexual crusade.
Earlier, back at Tip’s apartment, four women-in-a-row had contacted Tip to see where he was at, was he coming out to play, would he meet them for a drink. While the two men skulled craft beers and and vaped to a soundtrack of Vampire Weekend, they debated the merits of each of the supplicants. Helen, the 40 year old speech and language therapist, offered the prospect of stable relationship, something Tip claimed to be what, at this stage of his life, he really wanted, making Darren laugh out loud. But Helen wasn’t that good of a bounce, 6 out of 10 said Tip, when you're looking for an 8 at least. They decided Tip should leave her unanswered. He would claim, if he could be bothered to, that he hadn’t picked up the message until Sunday morning, having left his phone at home by mistake, or run out of battery, or whatever. Audrey, the classroom assistant and single mom in her early thirties who Tip had already slept with twice was, on the other hand, a sexual acrobat. However, Tip didn’t feel he could be what she wanted, or what he thought she wanted, which was a substitute father for her two kids, one of whom, the 14 yo Albert, was currently at home on suspension. Fuck getting involved in all that shit, right? Anyway, she was all the way out in Shankill and he would just text back and say he’d had too much to drink and would see her another night. Next they discussed the girl Tip referred to as Offline Brigit, as she was the only recent one he hadn’t met through a date-app, a 21 year old Venezuelan ESOL student. All he had done so far with her was flirt a little and touch fingers across a counter-top in a muggy canteen, where he had gone to go into further details with her after he had given a Tip-Talk on Self-presentation in the media to the Entrepreneurial Society in her little private catholic college. Brigit claimed to be a genuine catholic, wore a silver crucifix presented to her by her Aunt as a going away charm against foreign devils, and spent a lot of time eulogizing Pope Francis. Tip and Darren agreed that it would be better to put her off until midweek, it being unwise to risk a dry run on a weekend night. Which left Tip with Zanthe, a deranged Anglo-Irish folk singer from some half-ruined 19th Century pile in County Carlow - like a mansion in a russian short story, she had boasted to Tip, you've got to see it sometime. Tip had also woken up beside Zanthe several times and knew she would be up for anything (at which suggestion the twining serpent-pit image of a threesome flashed in Darren’s mind). But if Tip took her home tonight he would be stuck with her most of tomorrow as well, and he couldn’t face that. Well, maybe he could. Let’s see how the night progresses. It’s Saturday night and you’d never know…
In the end, Tip and Darren got so stoned they forgot all about women. Changing the CD to a Best of the Doors and lowering the volume from megaphone to undertone, they drifted off into discussing some of the interesting items of art and memorabilia decorating Tip’s apartment. These were nothing to do with Tip, but had been collected by his late, childless, unattached and ever-inebriated Uncle, the roaming film producer and Lothario, Sean M. In a calculated insult to all the sensible and responsible members of the clan, Sean had willed his fellow black-sheep Tip the city-centre apartment and all its valuable contents collected over a lifetime of obsession with the romantic dead-ends and florid lacunae of Irish history. Newspaper illustrations and original letters were a particular favourite, along with paintings by artists well-known and obscure. There was a sketch of James Connolly laid out crippled on his prison bed in Kilmainham the day before his execution, drawn by a medical orderly. A typed letter signed by Leon Trotsky to the one-member Irish section of the Fourth International, outlining the tasks of the Irish working class in the forthcoming world revolution. A large canvas by Leonora Carrington depicting hybrid female beings engaged in some kind of ceremony in an oak wood lit up by moons of various sizes, colours, and phases. A signed photograph of Uncle Sean with a grizzled but youthful George Best, both of them smoking Cuban cigars. A signed photograph of Uncle Sean with a wide-eyed, smoke-shrouded Phil Lynott in a Nightclub which, without any evidence, Darren always imagined to be The Stardust. A telegraph from Che Guevara to the Cuban embassy in France, announcing his safe arrival in Ireland. Four postcard-sized sketches by Jack B Yeats of fishermen at work on Lough Corrib.
All gave Darren and Tip plenty to talk about, not least their possible value at auction, but Darren’s favourites were two items from the 19th century. The first was a colour illustration from the July 1872 issue of Blackwood’s Magazine, depicting the American clothes designer Amy Bloomer speechifying from a bandstand in Stephen’s Green about the advantages of her eponymous trousers over the cumbersome - if ornate - long, broad skirts of the day. The encircling crowd, mostly middle-class women, appear in various aspects of disbelief and derision. Bloomer was laughed out of Dublin, and, a week after that, out of London. Nobody wanted her ridiculous frontier trousers. The idea that female fashions could have a practical and not purely decorative element, whatever discomfort and inconvenience such decoration might cause, was untimely. Thirty years later, when aspiring young ladies became ‘sporting’ and took up Tennis en masse, Amy Bloomer’s bloomers became all the rage.
The second framed item, presumably close to valueless because so damaged, was the only one Darren was ever strongly tempted to steal. This was a seditious leaflet from 1812 which had been torn apart and discarded unread by the passer-by it had been forced upon, Darren imagined, and then, who knows how or why, recovered and stitched together, minus a few unrecovered segments. The text was, for the most part, illegible, and whoever had kept it had foolishly tried to complete it by replacing the missing segments with interpolated segments in their own handwriting, in smudgy blue ink as opposed to the black typeface of the original. The handwriting had decayed and the black print had, to a great extent, faded. It was an absolutely worthless piece of garbage except for the name Percy Shelley, which could be made out on the bottom section in a larger typeface, underneath the main body of text, and was clearly part of the original document. Inspired by events twenty years previously in France, young Percy had arrived in Dublin full of revolutionary zeal and with the intention of gathering forces from among the oppressed people of Ireland for an uprising against the Crown. The Leaflet was one of hundreds containing an abbreviated version of his Address To The Irish People which Shelley had handed out on the thoroughfares, thrown from rooftops in bunches, deposited in the lobbies of courthouses, inserted through the windows of carriages, all during a brief, disillusioning stay in the United Kingdom’s dilapidated and doom-laden second city. The poor, anxious, post-98-massacre citizenry had in general not even stopped up long enough to laugh at the bold Percy. Take care then of smooth-faced impostors, who talk indeed of freedom, but who will cheat you into slavery, he had warned, advising resistance of the mind over resistance of the body.
*
What Darren had told Zanthe over the phone, while strolling down a twilit Thomas Street towards the rendezvous in Tip’s gaff - fag a juddering firefly in his other restlessly circulating hand - was that love is the only thing worth living for and that she should just go for it with Tip, no matter what her fears of exposing herself were, no matter what the consequences. Love is a derangement, a disturbance caused by the object of your love that you must then try inflicting back on them. You aren't in love if you aren’t disturbed and inflicting disturbance Darren told her. There is nothing tranquil or relaxing about love. You have to be upset by it, you have to be knocked out of balance, you have to be disordered by your love. All those couples up and down the country pursuing a stable existence, planning a wedding, popping out children, paying into a mutual pension and all that, they’re not lovers, they’re not in love, they’re the zombies of passion, and that’s all. There’s no settling down involved in true love, Darren said, no jointly managing your finances. True love signs no papers and it burns all its traces. Bureaucrats and institutions don’t get anywhere near it.
Darren had forgotten that any of this was meant to be intended for Zanthe and was enjoying leaving the soliloquy speak to itself when, out of the ether, she cut back in about having made a fool of herself already and that she was afraid of making an even bigger fool of herself if she went ahead and did what she was planning to do tonight. Darren told her that she could only prove her love by making a fool of herself and that the bigger a fool she made of herself the more in love it would prove her to be. If it’s really really really love, Darren said to her, you’ll throw everything at it, for how often does true love come around?
He was being charitably full of shit, doing her a favour by pressing her to force the issue with Tip. Darren knew Tip would in a short time reject her and then both Tip and her would move on and that would be that, another fart in the wind.
*
That Alicia has a boyfriend, that she is loyal, that she know she’ll never sleep with Darren, that she knows that Darren knows she will never sleep with him inflects their conversation with a melancholy that is also a kind of glory, a kind of saintliness in the knowledge that their love will be brief and pure without any physical element to it. They look deep and lingeringly into each other eyes, smile into each other’s smiles, laugh into each others laugh, in short engage in every kind of airy, inconsequential intercourse in the knowledge that none of it is a prelude to a weightier intimacy.
Darren tells Alicia, eyes of green oblivion, that, circa cinque anni fa, he performed at several Sardinian locations as part of an island-wide minority languages theatre festival. Alicia doesn’t believe him until he shows photos on his phone of him on stage in Bosa in a rustic, clownish get-up, playing Bottom in an Irish language version of Midsummers Night Dream. Amazing! Did you like Sardinia? He tells her he loved it.
Why you loved it?
The same reason I always love foreign places that have nothing to do with me, because I didn’t belong there, I couldn’t belong there, I had no influence and so I couldn’t be responsible for anything. I could remain a pure spectator, completely uninvolved in the show, completely guiltless. But this is too abstract a conversation for Alicia to properly follow with her counter-girl english, so he shifts topic.
Do you love Elvis Presley?
Yes, I love him, she says. You?
I love him loads. He’s my favourite poet.
But he is a sing-er no?
No, he’s a poet. Shall we put on an Elvis song?
Yes...but which one?
Which one do you prefer?
I like Always on my Mind as my favourite, she says.
I like that too but my tops is Suspicious Minds, the really long Live in Las Vegas version... How about we put on both our favourites? Alicia nods, smirks. Darren strolls to the laptop, now in Ricardo’s position in the black plastic chair by the door. He checks if it is properly hooked to the restaurant speaker system, performs the requisite youtube searches, presses play on his favourite version of Suspicious Minds. Casting a glance over at Tip, Darren sees that the famed sports expert and emerging philanthropist is now definitively asleep. Soon there might be no waking Tip, who, drunk, would sleep beside the amps at a heavy metal concert. Darren will have nowhere to kip. Alicia or no Alicia, it is time as soon as Elvis is finished serenading them all from beyond the grave from an eternally vanished comeback Gomorra of 1972, to go home.
*
On the way out Darren hugs and cheek-pecks everyone with proper affection. Instead of it being the first and most probably the last time they all meet, it seems to Darren as if they have just been holding the latest reunion of a cohort that’s existed for centuries and meets up on Saturday nights once a year or once a decade in different cities and venues all over the globe, all participants under different names and in different bodies each time, but always the same ease and same open-heartedness, the same camaraderie, the same slurred and hackneyed balladry from the Tip of the particular night, the same garrulousness from the proprietor, a friend to all, and the powerful beauty of the women intoxicating always. The last thing Darren proclaims while exiting is We will all meet up again in 3012, in a city of billions yet to exist. They all cheer and belly-laugh until the door shuts and silences all.
*
A good charm dissolves, a wicked one sets into motion. The lighting changes. In Carnevale it was low, warm, unified, tending towards disclosure, affirmation, combination. Now jagged interrogatory light slicing city-centre streets at 3AM, paranoia-light. Drunken disputes and tensions all around, paddy-wagons prowling along cobblestones, arteries jammed with taxis bearing only the wolverine scowls of the drivers as they scan the sidewalk for incipient fares; secret solitary gays in shades and hoods heading towards or away from the triple-doored pump-houses; lost Welsh hen-women weeping into gutters strangled with buttends and grease, pleading for directions to hotels with un-recallable famous names; kerbstone beggars sacked inside rorschach-stained sleeping bags asleep or dead who knows; diabetic gear-dealers in wheelchairs tying black plastic bands around accordioned note-stacks, enumerating profits; wasted fatherless teenagers puking half-hidden in alleyways, pissing with mini-skirts pulled up, scarlet toes and yellow knees showing forth at the far side of unmindful bins, whale-jawed bins overstuffed with disgorgings of convenience stores, catering muck. Toyko....Montreal...Medellin... An eternally-recurring puppet show, the participants an audience paying not to see themselves. All the human detritus of a night on the town. Everything as predictable, as pre-set as the scenic background and the filler characters in a sleazy video game in which mortal threat lies waiting in every dank shadow, in every sneaky sideways glance from a passerby who’ll turn out to be a centaur with a sub-machine gun, a starman with a paralysing stare. Nothing beautiful here, nothing innocent, nothing embraceable, nothing to be eulogised. Such a relief that they are only five minutes from Tip’s. Nothing can really go wrong.
They pass the derelicts from the wet hostel who mass every night of their Seven-Saturday week at a corner in view of Tip’s, gatting all night and dying in public. Darren envisages cannibal savages who will, at any provocation or none, glass the two lads to shreds and drink their blood for the alcohol content. Even so, Darren is made brave by the reassurance that they are very nearly there, very nearly there. In a few moments they will be putting on one of the few bands or musicians they both can jive to (The Stone Roses, Led Zep), blazing An Píopa, and dancing round the living room like the carefree sots that they are.
*
Ah shit, my keys, what’s happened to my keys? Tip shovels around in his jacket pockets, his jeans pockets, his shirt pockets. The instant he finishes checking a pocket he begins suspecting he has not checked it thoroughly enough. An instant later he forgets he has checked it, and shortly after that he forgets the existence of the pocket, only to rediscover it a few moments later as his fumbling, roaming hands come suddenly, unfamiliarly upon it.
What am I looking for again?
Yer front door keys, ya gobshite.
Right, my keys. Jeesus I’m elephants. What the hell were we drinking back there?
Grappa.
Grappa?
Yep. And vino. Lots of Vino my friend. Entire south-facing Sardinian slopes of it.
Jeesus I’m elephants.
Darren watches Tip going through the rigmarole with his pockets several times, Tip getting more and more irritated and confused, showering obscenities upon himself and the world, upon all his lost keys, upon all the irksome practicalities of his life. Now and then, upon fingering some key-like object among the many obscure keepsakes of his pockets, a flash of joy will crack across his marbled cobalt eyes, but these eyes, these eyes which are like the sky cracking open in a painting of the assumption recloud in dejection soon after as Tip drunkenly realises that he is in fact fondling a hairpin, an USB stick, a camping spork...in short, anything but the keys needed to get them safely in off the street.
The wet-brain platoon have noticed their delay at the door and, it seems to Darren, are beginning to slouch towards them. First they will chant for change and fags, and then...
Tip habitually loses or misplaces all detachable accouterments over the course of a night - lighter, fags, cards, phone, keys. He curses himself wildly for this, the inconvenience, the cost, the plain foolishness of it, but surely there is also some secret intention, some seething urge to be left utterly possessionless, mindless, a body alone, without consciousness, without accessory. What draws him so unfailingly towards the blackout zone at weekends? No memories hold there. Only nameless, placeless sensations ever return. Like death or a very bad accident but temporary, transient, allegorical. A fictional dying. Story-less, image-free fiction of death. Ritual immersion in an inward abyss. Resurrection by way of a minor overdose of effervescent codeine. Death and resurrection once or twice a week, as if it were unavoidable, part of the inner structure of time on this besotted, oceanic island, all upon her whirled around and around in the unceasing carousels of a dipsomaniacal wind that is not of the north or south or east or west but of the unsorted chaos predating and outliving directions.
Darren reaches into his barrel-buttoned duffel-coat’s inner-pocket and retrieves keys for Tip’s he had cut one Tuesday afternoon in Pearse Street DART Station, while Tip slept off a mega in the apartment. Darren keeps them in reserve for their nights out together - out of their five most recent outings this is his third time requiring them. Such keys are expensive - Uncle Sean had three double locks installed to prevent burglars and art thieves - but cheaper and less hassle than trying to get into a hotel at this time of night or taxiing all the way back to Kildare. He slips the keys into Tip’s jacket pocket. Tip, whose chin has fallen down onto his chest in despair, doesn’t notice in the least. Darren waits out another round of pockets and curses until the glee of finally fingering the keys brightens Tip’s face like a miniature sunrise - he isn’t the moron he has been accusing himself of being after all.
Tip leans against the low-set front-door as he’s readying the keys and falls forward face first into the hallway. How can this be? Darren can clearly remember Tip triple-locking and alarm-setting as they were leaving earlier. He steps over Tip into the living room, where all the lights are blazing on an unexpected scene.
Get up Tip. Get up quick man. You’ve got to see this. This is amazing.
Tip grumbles. He would easily sleep here for hours, if he were let.
Tip, you’re in deep shit. Get the fuck up.
Tip gradually unfurls himself from the ground up, smoothening himself out as he goes, discovering for the first time the nature and placement of his limbs, a self-assembling robot. He glances round. Suddenly, astounded, his gaze roots into one or other of an array of unbelievable sights, then shaking his head, moves on to the next. His tan is swallowed up in the bloodless, sunless paling of an horrible realisation. He stumbles. He bends double. He wipes his forehead, his eyes. He mutters something, obscene or magical, a prayer, a hex, something. He raises himself up to look again, to unsee what he has seen the first time. But nothing has changed. Every painting in the living room’s has had its frame smashed and been stabbed, ripped. James Connolly’s been torn from the wall and lies humpty-dumptyish in irredeemable fragments on the floor. Shelley’s declaration has been crumpled and discarded like snot-rag. The photographs too, of Lynott and Best, confettied. Trotsky communique’s been burnt through a dozen times by a cigarette end, machine-gun bullets through the whitewashed wall of a Mexican villa. On the far wall the phrase I AM NOT A FUCKING FISH is scrawled out in huge pink-lipsticked capitals.
Darren returns to Tip, who is gaping, muttering, shaking his head, shellshocked. He worries Tip might be getting the stroke his GP often predicts, or at the very least that he is suffering a breakdown. The infernal challenge of a public hospital A and E on Saturday night is impossible for both of them. Trying to calm Tip and bring him back to the world safely Darren grabs him by the shoulders and swings him round. Darren looks into Tip’s eyes, his blue eyes like the sky in the background of a painting by Di Cosimo, melancholy, retreating to infinity, evoking a cosmos descending from a distant, lonely God, but one who eventually, after every fire has been gone through and every last flame has died down, assume us. He shakes Tip a little to make him return his gaze. Darren wants to kiss him, deeply, finally. But instead he says What are you going to do now Tip, call the Gardai?
At that they both burst out laughing, laughing, laughing, uncontrollably laughing together until Darren’s laugh is coming out of Tip’s mouth and Tip’s laugh out of Darren’s. Even when they shut their teeth or gasp for breath the laughing goes on, and even gets louder. The apartment laughing, the destroyed art and literature laughing, James Connolly laughing, Percy Byshhe Shelley laughing, Amy Bloomer and Phil Lynott and Frida Kahlo and Leon Trotsky and the inmates of the wet hostel chorally laughing until Darren knows again it’s only the two of them laughing and whether it is the weed or the wine or the night’s excessive cheer refluxing they remain laughing uncontrollably for a long, long time, until at last they keel over in one another's arms, like two men in a barrel going over Victoria Falls... dropping together into a chasmic, dreamless sleep, a sleep like Raquel’s that night on the boat, the door still wide open and the blood-drinking chain gang shuffling forwards into the foreground of the frame.