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ecotone99 · 5 years

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[RF] Day Off

Thursday morning. I got ready for plans I knew my friend would cancel on. He wasn’t feeling up to it he eventually said after talking about bills that had just come out. ‘That’s grand, no worries’, I said half meaning it. He would often cancel closely held plans at the last minute, and I knew why but he never spoke about it unless he had 2 or 3 pints in him. Even then, they were soundbites.

I sat on the edge of my bed with one sock on, yesterday’s contents of my bag strewn across the duvet. But I felt defiant. Emboldened. I finished getting dressed, threw a few things into my bag and left the house. I was in a mood that was alien to me. I had only felt it a handful of times in college and never knew what to do with it. A kind of hollowness radiated from my chest, but I had new eyes and I didn’t care what happened anymore. I was going to have a date with myself in the city because I can, because I never could. I figured I would have a lot of days on my own in the city when I moved to New York in the summer, so this would be good practice. Dublin is more a town than a city anyway; a friendly introduction to cities.

Rain was lightly spitting, just enough to force your eyes to squint and blink a lot the way broken sunlight through sparse trees on a motorway would. I walked through my tiny town that was only recently a village. But for a handful of people going from one bookie to another, and some parked cars, the town was dead. I ended up in the new housing estate for rich people that was probably 15 years old, and took the walk it had down along the Liffey. I had decided I was going to meditate by the river. I walked along its bank for about 5 minutes searching for the best place to be and not be. I found a felled tree and put my bag on it and found myself quite comfortable. I scanned from the top of my head to my toes. My back ached. I opened my eyes after about 10 minutes and there was no red in the world. The river, the bank, the field, the sky, all hues of yellow, green, blue. Then my eyes adjusted and red crept back in. A little bird on the opposite side of the river was washing itself in the water and having a great time. So was I. I thanked it, gave a half-smile-nod to the river and collected my bag and left.

2 minutes down the river, I took out my joint and smoked half and checked the buses. I missed it. Next one was 30 minutes away. Fine, no rush. Why rush? I put on my headphones and heard the muffled rain get thicker. I felt the half joint start to hit pretty hard when I put a podcast on and my phone died. ‘Oh, well. Wait, no. I’m going into the city. I need my phone. Maybe it would be nice to be without it? I’m definitely going to get mugged and not be able to call home. What’s the time?’ I felt no grounding in time. The conversation in my head took about 10 minutes but I had only walked a few metres. My heart began thumping. ‘Fuck if I’m getting a whitener off half a joint. Fucking Chinese weed. The bus is half an hour a way, and the journey then is an hour. That’s grand. I’ll be grand by then. And I’ve been in town many times on my own for college. But fuck talking to a bus driver. What if I puke my ring up on him? Should I just go home? I can’t see my mam like this. Just walk and breathe.’ So I did, feeling more and more like someone you’d tell your kids not to talk to by the second. I was sure either my heart would break my ribs or I’d pass out before it could. Then I got on the main road. Cars. Dog-walkers. Civilisation. I can breathe again. At least if I pass out here someone will notice. The walk was entirely automatic from there which was good for feeling a bit more normal and safe but also bad because it got me back in my head again. I stood alone at a traffic light and pressed the button. No cars anywhere. No Green Man. Just rain scattering by a glowing Red Man, carrying his glow a little further than he could alone. People entered and exited the Tesco opposite. They must think I’m strange: no traffic, so why just stand there? I could feel their eyes on me, their eyes that were clearly nowhere near to looking at me. I crossed the road when the rain’s trail went from red to green and, as if as soon, the rain dried up and roaring hot sun belted down. April’s weird. The light blue with white clouds above me was besieged on all sides by angry, dark blue-grey clouds and no bees.

At last, I could see the bus stop. I made it, and with 4 minutes to spare. Success. Then it came and I hopped on after an entirely normal interaction with the bus driver that I didn’t even need to replay in my head. I sat upstairs in the front two seats on the left. It was far too hot but I made it and there was a plug socket by my seat so I charged my phone. Just like the blue sky that opened up amongst the dark clouds, I could feel my whitener anxiety leaving me. I put my ‘Pure Class Tunes’ playlist on and watched the sunny journey in my new stoney glow.

Being in the city for any length of time always gives me dry lips and a headache. It always feels like there’s grime or dust on my face. I can feel it in my nose. The Japanese tourists got it right wearing those medical masks about the city. They wear them if they have a cold or a flu or some kind of ailment so as not to pass it on. Something the West wouldn’t think to do. It’s different in the Far East, their society evolved differently. They’re much more communal, a mind for each other. Still though, I like to think they wear the masks because of the pollution, as if it vindicates me, nodding knowingly in my mind to any Japanese people I walk by wearing one.

I always wash my hands and face as soon as I get home. Wash cloth, roasting hot water, exfoliating passion fruit face wash. The city always forces its way into my home so I have to scrub it away. My face would be flush red afterwards but I could breathe again. Then into comfy clothes and on with the kettle for a cup of tea.

It was the bus in particular that felt the dirtiest. When you’re on a Bus Éireann in the early evening, when the sun goes kind of golden, when it gets lazy before it sets, the light shines through the manky greyed out windows, tiger-striped by god-knows-what, at an angle that reveals all the tiny particles of dust flying around that you don’t normally see. If you smack the chair in front of you, there’s this little mushroom cloud of dust that follows your hand up from the recoil of the impact and joins the attacking barrage of dust. It’s hard to breathe after you see that. Little sips through the gaps between your fingers, not big bellyfulls. Fresh air is a privilege, not a right, in the city. That’s why I always feel the dirt in my nose.

I run the tap as hot as it goes, filling the room with steam, to try and detox my lungs from the fallout. Deep breaths. In-two-three-four; Out-two-three-four; In-two-three-four; Out-two-three-four. I like to imagine the hot steam purging my trachea and bronchioles like rinsing a soapy J-cloth; the more you ring it, the more suds wash out, the clearer the water gets. It was almost uncomfortably hot, like when the boiling hot air hits the back of your throat in a sauna, but it would always do the job. I looked forward to that routine, as countryside became city outside my manky greyed out bus window.

I got off at Ha’penny and it was raining again. I didn’t mind because my pre-whitener mood had returned and I felt unstoppable. Just me alone in the city. I could do whatever I wanted. The Jehovas outside the GPO looked like a good place for a chat, but I didn’t. The vignette that being stoned places over your peripheral sight only allowed a few people in at a time. I heard the scream of Luas wheels and languages I couldn’t place. I could’ve been anywhere in the world and I could only have been on O’Connell Street.

I went to book shops and lost all track of time in the 2nd hand sections. How many people’s lives were here? How many generations? How many sold as a last resort, how many yellowed and dog-eared had once been someone’s bestfriend and where are they now? Book shops are other worlds entirely. The outside world tried to get in with bestsellers and 2-for-1s but it remained somewhere I could really breathe. Everyone seemed to know it, too. The college students that I no longer was, the first years looking blankly at the Philosophy section as if expecting the right book to reveal itself to them. Sartre, de Beauvoir, Deleuze. Towering names that would become poorly attended morning lectures. The hollowness in my chest made sure I knew it was still there. I bought 6 books, 4 by Irish writers, 4 by female writers. I felt good about that. The rain had stopped.

I wanted to get a coffee or some lunch but all I could see were international chains. Starbucks, Insomnia, Costa. You could imagine kids on playgrounds trading cards with those names. I thought about these chains and prison chains. That’s profound. I congratulated myself. Walking up Dawson Street, passed busy, well-dressed people, I studied the buildings. Centuries old. Entirely out of place against the backdrop of hybrid cars, suits on bluetooth phone calls and the Luas. Dublin is an afterthought. If I looked hard enough at the Victorian and Georgian buildings, I could see cobble streets, heavy coats, peak caps, black smoke, workhouses, laundries. A steampunk film set establishing itself around me. Architecture is the most overlooked art, I thought. I congratulated myself again. In the end, I got a bottle of water and a Nutri Grain bar in the Londis on Grafton Street; it’s a chain but at least it’s an Irish one. I couldn’t find any small or family-owned businesses in that part of the city, rent’s too high. It was cold now.

I wandered into Stephen’s Green and sat on a bench by the ducks and seagulls and pigeons. They were all flocked around an older woman dropping breadcrumbs out of one of those thin opaque plastic bags you get your croissant or a couple loose lemons in. The last time I sat watching the birdlife in the Green like this I saw a great big heron overlooking the pond. I was still in college then. I couldn’t see the bird now.

I dug through my bag and found the small conical tube I stored the remaining half of my joint in, and smoked it while walking around the park, making sure not to light it until I was beyond a small group of kids. A tour guide spoke to a gathering of Spanish students in heavy read coats about this particular area of the park. I couldn’t see what she was talking about so I waited around til the group moved on. The Three Fates. I had never seen it before. Three faded-bronze-green figures, one in front of the other, the first kneeling, all with their hands held in some Christ-like position. It was a gift from the Germans after World War 2 for all we did for refugees after the war. The figures looked ancient and Celtic, like the Germans were acknowledging a shared history; family looks after family. Then I thought about the internet and direct provision and your uncle who spits bile about refugees in the comments of an article he hasn’t read and then calls the Famine a genocide. And then I remembered I’ll be leaving for New York in the summer, like millions of Irish before me and how, at one stage, Manhattan was one third Irish. And then I put my roach in the bin.

It started raining again, but this time it meant it. Everyone lifted their jackets over the heads and put on hats and opened umbrellas and run-walked towards trees and gazebos. The rain drops on the mud and tarmac smelled like scrapes on your hands and knees in playgrounds. I played ‘Rain’ by the Beatles in my headphones and walked the labyrinthine paths, taking no care over whether I turned right or left or carried straight on. I could feel my steps landing on the steps of Victorians and Georgians long ago. I saw a bench with a golden inscription on it so I stood by the mossy saxifrage, and under the tree, opposite it to see what it read.

IN MEMORY OF LOUIE BENNETT, 1870-1956, BUILDER OF THE IRISH WOMEN WORKERS’ UNION, WORKER FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE, WORLD PEACE AND THE UNITY OF IRELAND, HER SYMPATHY AND LOVE FOR HUMANITY KNEW NO BOUNDARIES

Of all the people I could have had lunch with on this day, I was glad it was her. I stood with her for a long time, staring at her bench, thinking of the internet, pulling off small lumps of Nutri Grain and eating them. After a while, after I had become present again, the rain tried to ease off, so I walked back to the pond to feed the ducks with the end of the bar.

On the bus home, my inevitable dry lips and headache came on in full force. I tucked my knees into my chest and thought about the summer, being in New York, leaving home, friends, family, memories, childhood. The football pitches opposite our house was being developed into a new housing estate. Just like that, a new future was made. A new past. All the houses looked the same; fresh red bricks, newly muddied pavement, almost-grass lawns. I hated that the children of those homes would never know the forest adventures down the lane that was now to be someone’s back garden. They’d never know skipping school on hot days in May, when everyone was allowed to take their jumpers off and undo one or two shirt buttons, when you should have been studying for your Junior Cert., to lie in those pitches as the only people in the world and talk about boys and girls and flick bottles caps at each other and play World Cup Doubles. What would their stories be? Where would they take place? We’re running out of fields! Why does progress always look like a clean-up crew at a bomb site? When I got home, I opened my suitcase and didn’t know what to pack.

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