For Present Company

These streets and their cigarette butts.  They lie dead in the puddles like forgotten men.  They’ll be gone soon in the coming slush.  Winter’s assignment is to give us all a good wash, person and paving alike.  We could all do with a scrub.  This place.  It’s the same.  More or less.  Certain tree-shapes and wall-tops send me, in bursts, back to the thought-gone past but I can’t stay there because it is night and it is quiet and not entirely safe and one is after all alone.

Not long out of the station when I’m confronted by the ultimate perversion of our times, an army truck.  Tans maybe.  It’s inert, parked near the old saw mill on the corner of Adelaide Street.  That driver up front is much too young to be Irish, the Irish his age being too old to be English.  Still, fresh and perturbed as he is, I do not wish to attract any attention so lift my head when walking past, affecting a distortion of my face in case one might recognise me like on the train; luckily my scrunch goes well with the falling snow. 

Apart from crown lackeys, these streets are as quiet as they stay in my memory, as far as my memory of them at this time of the day can offer.  Only a few public houses open to provide the shouts and chatter of humans in action.  You can hear them in Flannery’s.  In Hargadon’s.  You’d think everything was dandy in the world.  And I suppose that is the role they serve in our deeply upset society.  That wall-top near Hargadon’s.  I’m sitting there with Emmet Whelan. We’re drinking a whole bottle of vodka.   

The house is just over the bridge and would have a nice view of Bulben to the north if it wasn’t for the thick brush and hedge crawling over the fence of the front garden.   Always been that way.  She’s not had it pruned back in twenty years.  Or if so she’s had someone shape it to permanently cloak the building for I cannot recall a view of our celebrated hill since early childhood. 

Ah, there she is, she goes, when the door opens.  It’s an embrace I was not anticipating and the warmth of it overwhelms.   My eyes are forced to allow wetness.  A gentle wetness, I wouldn’t call it tears.  They do not flow out of me as they would if I’d been in a weeping or sobbing sort of way.  An old sentiment seizes me.  The kind people have all the time but go unnoticed generally.  I’m very happy to see her and I tell her that.  I am so happy to see you.  God love you.  God love us all.  And my condolences, love.  Oh, heavens I can’t believe they took him from us.  Lord God Almighty.  The filth.  And framing that poor beggar for it.  Well, I sniffle, there’s not much we can do about it anymore.  Jesus, you’re dosed.  Get in there right now and get a tea inside you.  I’ve soup I can heat.  How long is it, love?  Since you were here.  Christ, it’s been a long time.  Three years, I go.  Three years?  Three.

It’s not a big house, though it’s got a stately bearing beside the more humble cottages in the area.  A grey semi-detached property in the Victorian style.  And when inside I’m comforted again by how bright it is.  The wallpaper.  Yellow.  The carpets.  Yellow.  The staircase.  Whitish.  But you know white when surrounded by yellow.  It begins to have aspirations.  Having just left darkness, all that yellow is to me yellower because of the magnificent lighting, lamps and wall sconces and modern ceiling fixtures that I have not seen even in some of the fancier places in Dublin.  She was a protean woman, my mam, I’d watched her alive in many phases.  Seamstress, suffragist, French teacher. And now she is every inch the brilliant hostess, an authority in the game.  After unpacking, we go into the sitting room, where her pear-shaped silver teapot awaits.

I just wish I had got to see him.  Why oh bloody why didn’t yous get back to us here?  It was on the cards, I say.  These are hectic times.  We had so much on.  So much all the time.   I don’t doubt that, she goes, just wish an opportunity had shown itself.  And how have things been with you?  I ask.  Grand, grand.  I keep quiet and to myself.  I get visitors from time to time, old friends, an occasional tenant for the room upstairs, more frequently in the last while as it happens, so I’m not lonely.  Not a bit.  Only lonely for present company, a stóirín.  That pleases me, I say to her.