Another Story

(i)

He crossed over from the Green to Newman House. The doors were open. It was over twenty years since he’d been inside. Table tennis had been his passion then but he liked to think that something of Joyce and Hopkins had rubbed off, not to mention the Great Apologist himself. Belfield hadn’t made a gentleman of him. A porter in the window eyed him curiously as he skipped up the steps, glancing quickly at a notice of the day’s events.

‘Hello there, can I help you?’

‘Hi, I’m looking for the Linguistics Association meeting.’

‘Down the hall, second door on your left.’ 

‘Thanks. I’ll wait until this session ends. Can you direct me to the toilets please?’

He could still manage a gentlemanly tone when required. Thanking the porter again, he set off as advised.

Ah! The Big Room was still the same, a huge oak table in the middle with elaborately carved chairs set around. Portraits of several artists as old men still glared down fiercely from the walls. 

‘The other side, just down a bit.’ 

Ooops! Rumbled. Just as well he had resisted an urge to go straight up.

‘That’s great. Thank you.’ 

‘Just keep on straight. You can’t miss it.’

Smitten by remorse at the man’s helpfulness, he really did want to go now. 

He found it easily, just past a room where the linguists’ refreshments were being laid out. The idea of a gentleman figured neatly in silhouette on the door. Transported, he imagined an earlier Joyce pissing contentedly on that very spot. 

Why was there no plaque? James Joyce went to the bathroom here 1898-1903; or Gerard Manley sweeping his cassock aside, if he wore such a thing. Great frothing bubbles frothily froth-bedecked/ patristic pullulations da-da-da-aah! That felt good. It was good to be back, marking his territory like a rational animal.

He liked to think of Joyce spouting Aquinas less than a mile from where Nana lived, down Cuffe and Kevin Streets to the flat over the corner shop, Glennons of New Bride Street, because that was where the front door used to be. 

He remembered working that out for the first time. And even though the great man had been long dead by the time of those first memories, he liked to think of it all happening in a kind of benign synchrony, as if he hadn’t been reared all that far from harmony, clarity and integrity. 

Fry’s cocoa and spaghetti in tins. Nana drank Ireland coffee. God was sending a little brother for Hugh to play with. He didn’t like the warm feeling when you woke after wetting the bed. May her wed wothe blothom, twa-la-la-la-la.

He walked back along the corridor feeling robust and alive, glad to have stolen in from November cold. He had even remembered to wash his hands. John Henry would be proud. The gurriers of this island were steadily being brought to heel. 

Then he was back in the Big Room. He had always liked the light here. The high ceiling made the most of what little there was today. He felt an urge to sit in all the chairs and was about to start when he saw that he wasn’t alone.

A woman was sitting in an armchair on the other side, close to the window. Low sun streamed in, lending a coppery sheen to her dark hair. She wore a brown skirt that had lost its battle with the contours of her chair, revealing the most magnificent legs he had ever seen on a linguist, for such he imagined her to be. 

She was poring over a folder, oblivious of dignitaries staring down ambivalently from above. He was about to leave when she looked up.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘You are late also?’

‘I was born late,’ he smiled.

She had a striking face, generous and noble. Her green-brown eyes matched the colour of the sweater she was wearing.

‘They were already started when I got here,’ she said, gesturing towards the linguists. ‘I did not like to go in while someone was speaking.’

‘Me neither.’

‘You are a linguist then?’

‘No, I’m a chancer.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘I look for open doors and then step through.’

‘I see.’

Her English was subtly accented but she seemed to know what he meant.

‘You’re making a presentation?’ he said, pointing to the folder.

‘Yes, I was just checking that everything is in the right order.’

‘Would you like me to leave you alone?’

‘Not at all, I was actually finding it quite weird with all these rather ancient gentlemen looking at me.’

‘I used to think they were following me when I first came.’

She asked him when that was. He told her about James Joyce, table tennis and Aquinas. They looked out the window at an icy sun. The back of the National Concert Hall lay just behind. It was once the hub of UCD but had housed only Medicine and Architecture in his time. His name was Hugh. How had she come to be here? A short version would suffice.

She was originally from Germany but had attended university in England before coming here to teach. She was presenting a paper to this morning’s meeting called ‘Sex and Gender: Lost in Translation?’ She smiled as she spoke these words. 

He felt strangely excited that she came from Germany and imagined going there with her. Where in Germany? Bavaria. He liked the sound of that: high mountains and tall trees, a trans-human landscape, before and after Empire. 

They heard a burst of applause from the nearby room. Soon linguists could be seen charging discretely for toilets and caffeine. Good, they weren’t wearing badges. He asked Christa – that’s what she said her name was – if she wanted coffee. ‘No sugar please,’ she said, smiling as he went to join the queue.

She was with colleagues when he returned but excused herself on seeing him approach. She would be speaking first in the next session. He was welcome to join her if he wished. She would have to sit through the second paper to take questions but hadn’t planned on staying after. He said he would be happy to wait. 

They moved into the conference room. Most of the linguists were women but their President sported a prolific beard and gold earring, hunched behind stacked copies of the Association’s journal. He deferred graciously to his next speaker as she let it be known that she and her guest would be unable to stay. She’s a bit of a chancer herself, Hugh thought, nodding to the Main Man. 

As a speaker’s guest Hugh was entitled to sit in the front row. He took Christa’s coat and congratulated himself on becoming a groupie. ‘Roadie’ was more dignified. She was busy checking out the projector. 

He pictured academics as rock stars, going ‘one two, one two’ before their gigs. They’d probably use complex numbers. There was no microphone. The linguists were slowly drifting back. It felt strange to be here, waiting for this new woman to speak. New-woman House! She caught his eye and smiled. He smiled back.

The President asked people to take their seats quickly. The first session had already overrun and they must at least ensure that the second didn’t put them even farther behind.  Christa stood calmly, her notes neatly arranged. He clapped as if he had known her for years and then composed himself to avoid becoming a distraction. She spoke warmly, engaging her audience confidently and without fuss.

Her paper incorporated a feminist critique of translation practice. She cited clever examples of translations her students had made across English, German and French. He had little interest in the content of her talk but admired her energy as she paced easily throughout, sharing information with ingenuity and charm.

She finished to an enthusiastic wave of applause and sat down beside him, smiling. He wondered if this wasn’t a dream. Words of congratulation passed. Someone touched him from behind and asked him to say she had been brilliant. He did and almost fell into her eyes.

When he turned back a middle-aged man was fidgeting nervously on the floor. He was unique among the morning contributors, he explained, because he was a Trinity graduate. He worked in Belgium in a large translation school but liked to get home as often as he could. He was fluent in French, German and English, obviously. His Dutch was passable but not fluent. He didn’t propose to be polemical as the previous speaker had been. We know little about the cognitive processes involved in translation activity but that would be the focus of his talk. 

Christa joined him at the table when he finished. All questions were addressed to her. She answered deftly, displaying an awareness of political issues that had only been implicit in her paper. She wasn’t a chancer! He waited while people hung around to quiz her when the session ended. Whither then? She presumed he didn’t want to stay for the afternoon papers? Life was too short. They left Newman House and turned left towards Nana’s.

(ii)

They paused at Harcourt Street corner, intending to cross towards the Green. He had passed this way a thousand times with the Brennans when he was too young to come over by himself. Once when he was three he had fallen into the pond and been wheeled back wearing one of Joseph’s nappies. 

‘There’s nothing coming.’ 

Her eyes were asking why he didn’t cross.

‘That’s what they said at Pearl Harbour.’

On the other side he told her of his memory. He could almost feel the impact where the buggy jolted off the kerb.

 He pointed towards Kevin Street and the window of Nana’s toilet that used to be. He had been thinking of the view from that window earlier, before they met. In his mind, it was associated with the bells of Christchurch and St Patrick’s; seagulls screeching through frosted glass, angrily contesting scraps that Nana heaped up on the sill. The toilet smelt of carbolic that seemed pleasant to recall. There was a little light you turned on by twisting the bulb. When he climbed up on the bowl, he could see to where they were standing now. He imagined waving back across the decades at himself waving out.

‘How can you remember this so vividly?’

‘I haven’t been around here for a long time. I guess location stirs memory. Also, I like to remember.  It makes me feel kinder and more alive.’

‘Do your parents live around here too?’

‘Passed.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Dead, they’re both dead.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘Thank you. My father died a long time ago, my mother just last year. I’ve been writing stories since to aid remembering. I finished last week and came here to see how it would feel.’

‘You would not prefer to be alone?’

 ‘It’s OK,’ he smiled, ‘I already walked a lot this morning, before linguistics called. I remembered a huge amount so I feel kind and tender, and very much alive.’

‘You would like to go in this park?’

‘Yes thank you, I would.’

*

They were sitting on a bench. He had climbed the tallest tree in Stephen’s Green when he was eight. Walter Doyle got them a bad name by passing water on innocent pissers by. Then passing Walter charismatically pissed off, abandoning him to a right rollicking from the gardener. He remembered straining not to piss himself through the harangue. Christa said she had cycled through a park like this for years on her way to school without mishap. 

‘Doyler never made it to Bavaria.’ 

She laughed. They fell silent. After a moment she turned directly to him.

‘There is something else that you would like to say?’

He looked at her appreciatively before answering.

‘My father died suddenly many years ago. He had been on holiday and I was away so there was no chance to say goodbye. It took years to find a new relationship with him.’

She touches her heart.

‘My parents are still very much alive.’

‘Thank you. My mother spent weeks in a coma, clarifying inwardly before she passed. That happened last year. I spent hours with her every day.

‘The medics were still trying to help but I knew she wasn’t coming back. All her organs needed artificial support. She was made tough so intense physical processing was needed to break the toughness down. 

‘One day only, near the end, her eyes opened. They were like a baby’s, clear pools of pale blue, as if she had been crying all that time. She could never cry before but on that day she looked completely purged. I even saw a look of love in her eyes. 

‘I asked if she knew who I was. Somehow she managed to convey ‘yes’. It wasn’t a physical answer, more a sheer act of will. I am absolutely certain about this. 

‘I asked her if she knew that she was going Home: another ‘yes’. No stress or panic, just knowing and acceptance. I sensed that she was ready then and had returned just to say goodbye. 

‘This moment brought healing to many hard times that we had known. I saw a depth of infinite compassion in her eyes. They closed then and two days later she was gone. I gave permission for her life supports to be turned off.’ 

‘That sounds very beautiful.’

‘It was, in the end.’ 

‘Thank you for telling me.’

‘Thank you for listening. I hadn’t found a way to tell that story.’

‘It is my honour.’

‘It seems we need death for life to thrive. That one became a kind of inspiration.’

‘That sounds very beautiful also.’

‘Maybe but there must be more beautiful ways to realise things.’

‘We must live and we must learn.’ 

‘I agree.’ He paused. ‘I think I’m ready to move now. Is that okay?’

‘Of course.’

Linking arms, they resumed their walk, past flower beds, over the bridge and along the lake towards Grafton Street. It felt strange to be sharing these places with a new woman. He had practically grown up here. And now? What was he doing here now?  He couldn’t say. He had been much given to reverie in this place. Christa didn’t seem to mind. If she wanted to say anything she would. He had that sense about her.

(iii)

They entered Grafton Street, the Mecca of Dublin’s shopping classes. It had become interesting since it was pedestrianised a few years before, especially on weekends when there was lots of music. Christa said she liked to come here for the shopping. 

Of course she knew it already. Still, this was his city and he felt like it was being given back to him today. He would let it reveal him also. He had never been this way with Christa so it felt like a new place, familiar and yet not.

He remembered Phil Lynott walking past in days when he could still be heard for 3/6 at the Crystal. Christa had heard of Thin Lizzy. He wondered how her life had been before music was admitted to this street. He marvelled that they must be a similar age and had a sense of worlds converging as they walked. 

*

Today’s musicians were posted at regular intervals. The first set comprised three girls, early teens, a cello and two violins. The cello was pouring out the rich bass line of Pachelbel’s Canon. The violins joined in. Familiar harmonies diligently rendered. 

The young musicians seemed surprised when people started gathering. They focused on their scores, trying to look impervious. One smiled when Christa threw a coin into their hat. All grinned broadly when others followed suit.

‘I think you’ve just made them professionals.’

She smiled.

‘C’est bien mais est une piece excessivement connue,’ remarked a Frenchwoman to companions as the piece came to an end.

‘That was lovely girls. It wasn’t Vivaldi by any chance, was it?’ said an elderly man laden with plastic bags.

The linguists laughed. Hugh put his hand lightly on the back of Christa’s neck. She leaned towards him and he smelt her hair. Her hand touched his waist. Their bodies brushed as they continued down the crowded street. 

An evangelist exhorted them to stop and think. They stopped and bought ice cream that she said wasn’t real. He recommended Plato on the subject.

‘You’ve read Plato?’

‘No, but I saw the film. Sylvester Stallone.’

‘Let me think … Scorsese?’

‘Sorry, Oliver Stone. The critics said his feminism didn’t work and that Plato was miscast. A bit thick …’

‘I have learned to prefer men thick.’

‘To ensure disappointment?’

‘It is easier at the beginning.’

‘You think I was made for you?’

‘You are not my type.’

‘Book early to avoid me.’

They kissed lightly in the street. 

Outside Woolworth’s they heard an uncannily arresting sound.

‘This piece is not excessively known.’

The young men responsible were squatting on the pavement, lost in music they were making, ignoring the rapidly growing crowd that it attracted. One was blowing into a home-made didgeridoo, ingeniously fashioned from a thick plastic hose inserted into a wooden box. The sound it made was eerily authentic. 

The second played a bodhran with a metal stylus rounded at both ends, beating insistent rhythms from rapt concentration, eyes closed and body swaying as its pulses discharged. His companion was equally intent, furiously channelling his breath into soaring sweeps and stabs too raw to be melodic. Spit dribbled from the hose and his cheeks swelled with exertion.

Their music was primordial; a rude sequence of wayward explorations, at once tentative and bold, noble and desultory, each blowing itself out as another rose to carry lingering traces farther past solider, immemorial rhythms of the thumping bodhran. No trimmings or adornment, just energy and pattern, breath and pulse. That was what made it so elemental. 

Hugh whispered his amazement, rejoicing. 

Christa rejoiced in his rejoicing. 

‘You are really feeling this?’

‘I am.’

The musicians were unkempt but not unclean. Both had sandy hair erratically shaved on top, with long frizzy strands coiled into dreadlocks that ran down their backs, bound tightly with crimson bands that made it look like they had tails protruding from their skulls. 

Both were dressed in nondescript khaki, post-aboriginal exiles from the Dreamtime, wrapped in blankets that might once have been ablaze with starry lore. Consumers paused, caught between fascination and disdain. These scruffs were capturing the spirit of Grafton Street and somehow challenging it at the same time. 

Many of those gathered looked uneasy, unsure if they could safely remain. Most seemed repelled but also drawn. Enchanted. A woman in a fur coat turned warily from perusing high end leathers and, casting a cold eye, hurried off.

Meanwhile bags from Pamela Scott, Switzers and Brown Thomas, Guccis, Wranglers, Levis and Adidas continued to pile up. The street was almost blocked! Admen and Trinity toffs rubbed shoulders with the merely fashion-conscious, all helplessly enthralled. 

Managers and security staff viewed the growing crowd with alarm. They were prepared to tolerate buskers as long as access to entrances and windows was preserved but this pair looked distinctly uncouth. There was something strange, almost threatening, about the sounds they were producing and the mood of their audience wasn’t right. 

Something extraordinary was going on.

Two policemen stopped to inspect. The older itched to intervene. Before a pedestrian zone was decreed, the players would have been shifted long ago. Now their music continued to pour out, haunting and unabated, breath amplified by pulse, its savage declarations tempered only by limits of the straining frames through which it flowed. 

Manic improvisations began to emerge. These lads weren’t turning profit but they were shaking their mesmerised audience to its core! Then improvisation gave way to an explosive cacophony of shrill, insistent repetitions that built to an impossibly rapid crescendo before halting abruptly, leaving the scene adrift in a resonant hum of pregnant silence.

Spectators lingered uncertainly before starting to disperse, as if a spell had suddenly been broken. Hugh looked at Christa, who looked transported. He only noticed then that she had taken his hand. He freed it gently and threw money on the musicians’ invitingly spread coat. She followed his example. Theirs were the only contributions so far. 

‘He did it all in one breath!’ the percussionist exclaimed, jumping to his feet. ‘A round of applause for One Breath. Thank you, thank you. Any contributions towards food and fuel would be greatly appreciated!’ Someone tossed 5p on to the coat. ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you so very much.’

The percussionist’s tone was mocking.

Their music over, the players looked like they might be animals on show, a relegation they weren’t inclined to suffer. ‘All contributions towards food and fuel would be greatly appreciated,’ echoed One Breath, detaching the hose from its box as he stood up. 

‘Would anyone like to blow my didg? Here,’ he offered the spit-covered plastic to a young woman with wild hair and ripped jeans, ‘would you like a blow?’ 

She recoiled in horror. What remained of the crowd began to scatter. 

Soon there were only two linguists facing One Breath, who sat down saying that he must get back to work. They musnt’t hold up busy Grafton Street any longer.

‘Thank you for your gift of spirit.’

One Breath looked up.

‘We’re always happy to entertain on busy Grafton Street.’

‘You also know that everything is an expression of One Breath.’

One Breath looked down at the ground.

Christa squeezed Hugh’s hand and drew him back to the road. 

‘Come Hugh,’ she said, ‘this is too much for the young man.’ 

Hugh let himself be led but repeated ‘Thank you’ over his shoulder as they turned to leave.

‘Cheers man, thanks. I’ll see you around.’ 

They turned again. One Breath grinned, waving curtly. Then he knelt and re-attached his hose, now drained. The percussionist looked up also, nodding briefly by way of salute. The linguists smiled and resumed their walk.                       

Crowds were flowing easily again. Managers relaxed in their suits and security men let walkie-talkies idle at their sides. The police resumed their authoritative stroll. A well-dressed group at Bewleys played folk on polished instruments. Their music felt oddly out of place. 

A young man in black gesticulated frantically to sounds only he could hear. There was a ravaged look on his face as he played imaginary guitar. A message scribbled on rough cardboard said that he was homeless and needed a flat. People were tending to avoid him. Christa left three pound coins in his cap.

They passed a harpist, two jugglers and a young acoustic duo singing country. Hugh felt himself carried still on waves of One Breath as Christa nudged him into Wicklow Street.

There was a very nice restaurant here, she said. She had made translations for the owner who invited her to dine there anytime, with a friend. Would he like to join her?

Was this a date?

November second, she believed.

He would love to.

Yes!

2011