Danny Moonshine takes a walk

Danny Moonshine (not his real name), a moniker given to him by the locals, locked up his front door with a clutch of keys and walked down the ill-tended path. He pulled the aged iron gate behind him and loped across the road.

He was a whippet-thin man of indeterminate age draped from head to foot in black. Danny always wore black whatever the season. His forward stoop seemed to propel him, beneath his battered baseball cap, his features were compact, blending with the pitted, broken-veined pallor of an alcoholic. 

Danny Moonshine - Daniel Bradley, had never married and lived alone. An only child, he had lived with his parents until they died and inherited the house. It was a shambling wreck that faced onto endless lines of greenhouses that blazed at night. Danny Moonshine was a denizen of the market gardens of Ireland. He had no cousins, no next of kin. 

His walk, to his slow-burning chagrin, coincided with the leaving cert students hurrying to the exam halls of the nearby secondary school. Amid the procession of blue uniforms, e-scooters and bicycles, Danny's skeletal black wove amid them like a loose, terminal thread. Opting to walk along the road with the clap of his boots, he only mounted the pavement when the agricultural machinery nudged past the on-street parking like skeletal dinosaurs.

Danny eschewed supermarkets his intense national pride forced him past the Tesco, Lidl and Aldi, past the Polish-run coffee shop and Indian takeaways to the small family butchers and general store along the main street. As well as victuals and a vegetable stall, the pavement outside the doorway with its hovering flies had a side hustle of big gaudy garden ornaments. Elvis in his comeback special black, stood beside the Virgin Mary, St Bernadette and Jesus, flanked by donkeys, realistic Labradors and Dobermans and Dutch-looking windmills. Danny's pace was slowed as he negotiated the plaster chicane of ornaments and vegetable boxes. He waved in to the family slicing sides of meat in aged white aprons and without breaking a beat took the sharp left that led to a warren of side roads that led down to the sea.

The June sun was unusually warm. His boots, the lace-up variety with steel toecaps, clumped along past construction vehicles that were popping up commuter estates as fast as the fungus that sometimes appeared in Danny's kitchen. Negotiating grassy rat runs he'd know since childhood, Danny found himself on the South Beach and stopped to inhale the saline air. Removing his cap, he ran his fingers through his sweat beaded hair and shook himself into action.  

It was a Tuesday morning, The beach was all but deserted. The commuter belt had walked their dogs early before they started their cars and filtered into the town's never-ending gridlock. Danny had never owned a car. Never saw the point. Fishing a black tote bag out of his jacket pocket (an army surplus jacket he had owned since his twenty-first birthday) , he shook it out and began his search.

Amid the uncovered dog faeces, seaweed, flotsam and flat shiny jellyfish, Danny had timed the walk to the retreating tide. Seagulls hovered nearby. Pulling on his cap, Danny Moonshine began his treasure hunt.

The guileless commuters, the city folk that had bought houses around here dropped things walking their dogs. In their rush to get it over, settle their animals and hop in their cars, to do the school run, to go to work, they were careless. Time was like mercury through their fingers, their Fitbit's beeping out emails, alerts and blood-pressure readings. The morning walk wasn't a joy but a soulless chore.

By midday as the tide began to turn, Danny had filled his bag with rings, earrings (snagged when wresting with leads), a mobile phone, a Revolut card, necklaces, sunglasses, the kind that women sported like tiaras and glittering bracelets. He dusted off the sand and photographed them from his phone. Although he didn't believe in working, he did believe in social media.

Later when he was home and cracking open a bottle of Guinness, Danny would post his discoveries on the two local FB groups - 'DM me for a reward', and more often than not, the rubes and marks were happy to revolut over payments. Danny never negotiated - do youse want it back or not?  

That set Danny up for the week and his perch at the small bar-cum-takeaway where he drank and ate alone. 

[ To find out more about my writing, see below ]

https://www.robert-cravenauthor.ie/