Sex in the City--Dublin Page 6

  And two weeks in this dump.

  Jesus H. Christ.

  I threw my backpack on the unmade bed and headed out.

  Get a pint.

  That was the Irish way.

  So my Lonely Planet Guidesaid.

  Found my way to a pub called Mulligan’s, supposedly where James Joyce drank.

  A Ukrainian barman.

  By now, I was so freaked out, I almost didn’t give a flying fuck.

  The taps of

  Bud Light

  Coors

  Miller

  Weren’t helping.

  I ordered a pint of Guinness.

  I’d heard the real pint took about five minutes to pour, let the head settle, build up to a real sense of Ireland.

  Nope.

  He poured it straight and pushed it over, said

  ‘Eight Euro.’

  I asked him for a wee Jameson, trying to still retain my dream and he said

  ‘We?’

  I said

  ‘Whatever.’

  Seemed to be the national response.

  I was sitting with my miserable ruined pint, the dregs of a bottle of Jameson in a dirty glass and feeling as crushed as The Yankees when Rodriguez blew it on the last innings.

  Half thinking to cut me losses and just cash in my ticket, get the fuck outta Dodge.

  Heard

  ‘Can’t be that bad?’

  Looked up to see a vision of bliss.

  A girl in her twenties, dressed in jeans and a tight-fitting black T-shirt, auburn hair to her shoulders and oh Thank you Jesus, a real Irish accent.

  I said

  ‘Not a great day.’

  She sat on the stool opposite, said

  ‘You’re American.’

  I asked

  ‘It shows?’

  She laughed, gorgeous teeth, to match her gorgeous blue eyes.

  I’m a Jersey guy, sorry but I thought

  ‘Hooker.’

  Why else was she talking to a loser like me.

  She said

  ‘Let me guess, your first day, you’re probably staying in Temple Bar, the seventh circle of hell and the famous Ireland of the thousand welcomes isn’t exactly in evidence?’

  She’d been reading me mail.

  I said

  ‘Exactly.’

  I was already in love with her brogue, that soft lilt, almost like a song. She said

  ‘And you’re thinking … I’ll go home.’

  Before I could answer, she put out her hand, said

  ‘I’m Catherine, you can call me Cathy.’

  Like there’d be a future?

  I wiped my hand on my damp jeans, took her hand, said

  ‘Ted, Ted Newton, outta Jersey.’

  She gave a wonderful laugh, said

  ‘Ted, way too much info, rein it in.’

  And that’s how it started.

  She showed me the real Dublin

  The Liberties

  The old Quays

  Where Lizzie had their first gig

  Stephen’s Green, the back part where U2 had released the sheep when they were made freemen of the city

  Three whirlwind days of bliss.

  The third night, she came back to my hotel, the bed had been made (by me) and we made slow lingering love despite the crescendo of noise from Temple Bar in full roar.

  Jesus, I was in love.

  The dream was not only possible, it was happening.

  She was a great listener, seemed interested in all me stories of construction and Jersey, even asked me if I’d ever seen Bruce.

  I had.

  One time on the Jersey shore, walking his kids, he’d nodded hello and she was impressed, asked

  ‘What’s he like?’

  I said

  ‘A working stiff, you know, blue-collar.’

  I wanted to riff on Thin Lizzie, but if she liked Springsteen, ok.

  Asked me my favourite song of his, I said, even though Tom Waits wrote it,

  ‘Jersey Girl.’

  She gave a deep sigh, and we made love all over again.

  She was it.

  The reason I’d worked all those hours out on the ledge, the high winds blowing like banshees, the money I’d saved.

  I’d found her.

  She was Irish

  Seriously gorgeous

  And

  Appeared to be into me.

  So I proposed.

  Nuts … right?

  She seemed shy then asked

  ‘Will it mean I get a green card?’

  Hello?

  Duh.

  I said

  ‘Am, I guess so.’

  She was up on her elbow, we’d made love twice in one afternoon, with room service to act as pit stops, and she never looked so beautiful, she asked, in a more serious tone,

  ‘You’re not sure?’

  I was mellow, the afterglow of the love making, her beside me, the room service of BLT’s and Hot Toddies had made me beyond chilled, I said

  ‘What’s it matter?’

  Her face changed, she nigh spat

  ‘I get a green card or not, I mean I fucking marry you, I get a green card, don’t I?’

  It got a little heated after that.

  I won’t go into the details as they are ugly as I was hoping to tell this as a love story.

  But …

  … Wait

  All was not lost.

  We agreed to meet beside the statue of Phil Lynott the next day, I’d have bought the engagement ring and ensured she’d get a green card.

  I’d ring the embassy, check it out.

  Next morning, I woke late

  My wallet was gone.

  And my mom’s Claddagh ring, I’d left on the bureau, gone.

  That was a time ago.

  I went into freefall for I don’t know, some weeks I guess.

  The money ran out and the hotel, they ran me out.

  Most days, I stand beside Phil’s statue, ask for handouts, foreigners are especially kind.

  Go figure.

  There’s a busker down the street a bit, he only ever plays

  ‘Love is the drug’

  I was never really a Roxy Music fan but you know, it kinda grows on you.

  My wild Irish yearning has faded.

  I don’t mind.

  Too much.

  I know Catherine will show, she just got delayed.

  And I have a green card.

  It says

  Joe’s Pizza, take-away, 24 hours a day.

  And call it intuition but, I kinda know, Joe will keep his word.

  Sounds like a blue-collar type of guy.

  About the Story

  I WROTE THE STORY by trying to channel Maxim. I asked myself, if Maxim were American, came to Ireland and is the lapsed romantic I’ve always suspected, what would he write?

  And that’s the genesis of the story.

  All apologies to Maxim for transforming him into the poor soul depicted here.

  Maxim of course is nothing like the character and the sadness is of course, purely fictitious … well, mostly!

  Picking Apples in Hell

  by Nikki Magennis

  ‘Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone’

  – William Butler Yeats

  IT WAS NEARING DUSK. Students, socialites and Europeans gathered below a broody August sky, drinking wine and staying very carefully blasé about each other. I blended right in. Frank didn’t. Yes, he may have been a native son, but after so many years something had changed. I couldn’t work out if it was him or Dublin.

  ‘So what’s dragged you back, Frank.’

  ‘Oh, c’mon now. Can’t a man visit his home town without good reason?’

  ‘Don’t try telling me you were missing the ole place,’ I said, keeping my voice nice and flat.

  What I didn’t say was: ‘tell me you were missing me, tell me you couldn’t forget me, tell me you’d cross the sea just for one more shot of that filthy, mind-blowing fuckin
g we used to do.’

  Frank looked around the plaza. He shrugged. The leather of his jacket was so worn it didn’t even make the ghost of a creak. Lines were folded deep into the hide, like the crow’s feet at the corner of his eyes. Oh, there was a glimmer of the same old Frank. Eyes as black as ale and as potent. Skin the colour of rain-washed bronze.

  ‘I can hardly recognise the place,’ he said, shaking his head kind of sorrowfully. ‘It’s just as full of shiny shite and fecking foreigners as any other city.’

  We were sitting out in Meeting House Square, watching a film they were playing on the wall. I couldn’t tell you what it was, other than it had subtitles and real sex in it and took itself deadly serious. I was trying to show Frankie how different it all was now, how I’d changed and the city had changed and how I was no longer the kind of woman ye’d fumble with in the back of some spit and sawdust ole pub. How we were sophisticated, you know, and avoided talk of politics and religion and all those embarrassments.

  ‘Christ, would you look at the state of that,’ Frank said.

  Beside the art gallery, a gaggle of Liverpool girls screeched. One of them was throwing up in the corner. They’d matching pink cowboy hats with fluffy trim, and bras over their T-shirts, and they were shedding glitter in cascades.

  Inevitably, it attracted the attention of a handful of local lads, who stood and catcalled oblivious to those of us pretending to watch the movie. A chorus of tutting tourists couldn’t put a dampener on the boys’ spirits, and the to and fro of young lust continued as bawdy and desperate as ever.

  ‘Sure some things never change, eh?’ Frank said, smirking. I wondered if he was looking at my haircut, the exact copy of that I’d seen on Cate Blanchett, only not as blonde on account of my scalp trouble; my shoes that were knock-off Louboutins from eBay and only a little scuffed around the heel, and the red shift dress I’d put on to look casually thrown together, after changing, of course, forty or fifty times over in the effort to hit on the look that would show just the perfectly right mix of indifference and old-fashioned allure to ensure a night that satisfied not only my loins but my tender, hopeful ego, too.

  I expect it was mostly lost on Frank. He was more of a split-crotch panties man, after all. I watched him checking my tits to see if they were still there. He chewed his lower lip. His knee was jiggling twenty to the dozen, and I didn’t miss a furtive glimpse at his watch.

  I tossed my hair.

  ‘You’d be surprised, Frank. Some of us are different people now.’

  ‘S’that right? Well, yer eyes are still as blue as the sea, Niamh.’ He leaned in close. ‘And I’ll bet your sweet cunt’s still as wet between your legs.’

  I’d have kissed him or slapped him, no doubt, had the crowd of young lads not distracted us at that moment, shouting out sing-song taunts at the cinema ushers, playful like, but with that ragged edge that meant anything could go pear-shaped at any moment.

  Friday night in Temple Bar. Oh, it was dressed up with fresh paint and flower boxes in the windows and the bartenders may polish the fecking cobblestones daily, but when the night drifted in from the docks and the beers started to flow there was little you could do about the panhandlers and the prostitutes and the skangers loitering with intent and the overall tide of floating human flotsam that wash up in a city looking for the craic, and possibly crack if not absolute gallons of strong drink, and, at last at the end of the night, looking most intently for the solace of a nice warm crack to sink their dirty flutes into – whether it belonged to man, woman or something in-between.

  A couple of Garda rocked up and tried to skirt around the fracas without actually getting overly involved, and Frank decided it was time to retire somewhere with a better view, that is, somewhere he could smoke one of his foul European cigarettes without being coughed at.

  ‘Come and see where I’m stayin’,’ he said, and I smiled.

  ‘Somewhere nice?’ I said. Him an international traveller now, I’d visions of room service perhaps and clean sheets. He’d try it on, of course, expect to have me on my back within ten minutes. No doubt I’d be happy to oblige.

  We walked down towards Trinity, skirting buskers and drunks, the backs of our hands grazing occasionally, casual, like. Even that was enough to make my heart beat like a pattering clock, and the fact of us, Niamh and Frank, walking together again through the old haunts. Those streets, they were layered up with so many half-remembered stories they were like fly posters pasted over one another, dissolving pictures I caught out the corner of my eye.

  How fine we looked back then. Me with my Madonna-bleached hair and his leathers brand new and shiny. Our legs scissored alongside each other’s in perfect time, when we were running from Grafton Street up towards the Green. We always seemed to be running.

  I could hear echoes, too.

  Us laughing, spraying the sound all over the cobbles like frothing beer. The thrum of his old scooter’s engine, the fury in his voice. The high breaking note in mine as I shouted after him. All the anger that rained down around us.

  I can hear, still, the silence the day after he left. The long, endless grey hush of it drifting in from the quay – The air so soft that it smudges the words.

  ‘Brings back memories, eh?’ Frank says, and he was smiling into the breeze like he knew exactly what I was thinking. Cocky shite. Always had been. But I’d always fallen for it, likewise. As he grabbed my wrist and pulled me out the way of a stray skateboard outside the Central Bank, I got that roaring all over, the itch and the hunger for him. To be enfolded in him. Jarred by him. To scrape against the rough of his cheek and to fire up the blue in his eyes and to taste the diesel, the cigarettes, the other women on his fingertips.

  We pushed through a crowd of miserable-looking black-haired, black-eyed teenagers and I glimpsed them turn to look after Frank. He’d trouble written all over him, you see. Irresistible to the young and foolish. And part of me must have still been those things, buried under my well-educated, socially mobile, culturally aware self. Yes, part of me was still the culchie, redneck girl from the bogs of Galway, entranced by the street lights, by Frank, by everything in the great, dear, dirty city. Blushing despite myself as he ran one finger over the pale skin on the inside of my wrist. Reading my skin like Braille.

  There was a cluster of buskers planted on every corner and we were serenaded along the streets by fiddles, bodhrans, an out of tune guitar and a chorus of straining, echoing voices, the rough edges of them chafing my ears. Frank’s hands slid around my waist. I only pulled away for a moment before I gave in and let his hip bump against mine. It felt good.

  We passed the woman with the harp at the empty spot where King Billy used to stand. Frank let his hands drift lower. He traced the outline of my knickers through my skirt, lightly, like he was playing the stringed harp himself; it could have been almost angelic the way he twanged that elastic against my arse.

  ‘Light-fingered, still, are you?’ I said to him, but I couldn’t help smirking as we swerved and slid down a wee lane, heading towards a squat, grubby pink building. Yes, now he’d pulled me off the street and away from the traffic my heart was beating a jig in my chest and I thought for a moment he might push me up against the wall like he used to, fire into it straight away. Have me with my back to the graffiti, under the blue streetlights, one leg lifted and my well-oiled crack swallowing him gladly.

  But there was something nervy about him. He looked all about as we reached the corner and I thought to myself: first, where the hell is it we’re going; and, second …

  ‘God, are you ashamed to be seen with me? You, Frank McAuley, a once-upon-a-time pony kid from Finglas with dirt under your nails?’

  I was about to shout him off when he tugged me into the narrow gap between the germolene-pink roughcast and this big ungainly crate of a van that was parked arse backwards on the pavement.

  ‘Hoy!’

  The voice, spraying out of the darkness, was dog-harsh, and all my skin swarmed with sudden fri
ght. But Frank was patting me down and nosing towards the sound. For a moment I wished he were less of a swaggerer. He’d always been inclined to get us tangled up in mischief, and never one to shy away from a bare-knuckle scrap, either.

  ‘S’dat you, Eddie? How’s it going?’ Frank sounded oddly cheerful.

  There was a low grumble, and the sound of someone clearing their throat and howking a great gob into the gutter.

  ‘McAuley. Where the fuck’ve yow been?’

  The voice was fat, and as my eyes adjusted I saw that it belonged to an appropriately gigantic great fucker standing in a doorway. One of those that manage to menace just by the set of their shoulders. Frank shrugged.

  ‘Oh, just catching up with me old friends, Eddie. All work and no play, Eddie, know what I mean?’

  Frank smacked me then, hard on the behind, and I yelped before I could stop myself, despite the fact we hadn’t agreed to that kind of a scene, not yet at any rate, and that Frank was giving a lewd, guttery chuckle that made me want to snap the fingers off his hand. And I would have too, if I hadn’t been so wary of the sumo wrestler standing but six feet from us and stinking of bad news.

  ‘Niamh, meet Eddie,’ Frank said, pushing me reluctantly forwards until I could smell the man’s breath. I got a whiff of blackcurrant throat sweets under the stale smoke and black coffee. Eddie breathed on me a bit more, assaulting me with halitosis, before turning back to Frank.

  ‘I don’t like you hanging around here, Frank. And you’ve parked your knacker’s wagon too fucking close.’

  ‘Can’t grudge a fella a few scoops and a quick ride, surely, Eddie? Hold your hour, eh?’

  Eddie glowered.

  ‘You’ll be on the last ferry, Frank.’

  ‘Aye, course I will. Swear on my grandmother’s grave.’

  Another grunt, and the man-mountain receded into a doorway that was a patch of darkness against the wall’s vivid pink.

  I could almost hear Frank’s shoulders relax. There was a glint in the dusk that might have been a flash of his teeth if he were smiling at me, and he moved up against the side of the caravanette. A moment of him fumbling and swearing, and I realised that he was fiddling with keys. He swung open a dwarf-sized door and held out his hand.

  ‘Want me to carry yer over the threshold?’ he asked, and he had that quirky grin on his face, the one he used to use when he’d been out all night and was in the mood for playing up. He’d meet me outside my bedsit and drag me off into the dark, soot-blackened labyrinth of the city, talking a mile a minute, eyes shining with speed or lust or whatever devious scam he was working on at that present moment.