Laura Cassidy’s Walk of Fame

by Alan McMonagle

  ‘Lana.’

  ‘Ah, so you like the platinum blondes. Another excellent choice. Are you sure you haven’t been in the movies before?’

  Another shrug.

  ‘OK. Bogart and Lana are the stars of our movie. This is a first, let me tell you, never been done before. So Lana is not a happy camper. She’s fed up at home. There’s nothing much happening in the town she lives in. She needs a little excitement in her life.OK. So what is she going to do? Hmm? What happens when women need a little excitement?’

  He looks crossways at me.

  ‘Bogart happens! OK? So Bogart appears and guess what he and Lana are going to do. Go on. Guess.’

  ‘Get married,’ he says, looking my way and not batting an eyelid.

  ‘They most certainly are not getting married,’ I say a little too dramatically. ‘They shoot up the bank, empty the safe, steal a fast car and hightail it out of town like there is no tomorrow. Guess how much they find in the safe?’

  Another shrug.

  ‘Only about un millón de dólares. That enough for you? Good. So Bogart and Lana have robbed the bank. And now the cops are gunning for them. Especially the chief of police who just happens to be Lana’s sister. She also likes Bogart, so she’s doubly mad because he skedaddled with Lana and not her. Luckily, she’s useless at her job and not as foxy as Lana. But she’s not going to give up the chase. Now all we need is a name for her. Any ideas? Her name is . . . Lydia . . . Perfect. Her name is Lydia and she is not going to stop until she finds Bogart, locks up Lana inside a prison cell and throws away the key. Any questions?’

  He looks at me, uncertain. Then says, ‘What happens next?’

  ‘I’ll tell you in a few days. OK? We’re partners in crime now, you and me. Comprende? Good. Alto cinco, partner.’

  I raise my hand and he high-fives me, and this time accepts the proffered Chipsticks – just as Jennifer appears, shimmering and daisy fresh.

  ‘Look at you two,’ she says when she joins us, already eyeballing the fist of Chipsticks Juan is clutching.

  ‘We’re the best of friends, me and Juan,’ I say, patting his curls.

  Jennifer approaches, takes the Chipsticks out of Juan’s hand and halts her boy as he makes to grab another handful out of the bowl. Juan gets out of his chair and wraps his arms around his mother’s waist, and gestures to the snacks she has taken from him. Jennifer shakes her head, sorry, no can do. Juan frowns the frown of someone who has been denied the only thing that matters.

  ‘They won’t kill him,’ I say.

  ‘Listen to the expert.’

  Again, Jennifer turns to her boy. Behind her back I stick out my tongue and fan my hands.

  ‘I have to go as far as the bank,’ Jennifer announces.

  ‘Off you go. Myself and the little fellow will hold the fort.’

  ‘I won’t be long. Tell mam, will you.’

  Without waiting for an answer she leaves us be, one more time warning Juan away from the Chipsticks. And giving her hair an elaborate flick as she opens the gate, off she goes.

  ‘I just thought of something,’ I say to Juan, watching Jennifer walk off towards town. ‘About Lydia. The chief of police. She can fairly go on once she starts. Like one of those wind-up toys. Or a demented turkey.’

  I stand out of the deckchair and do an imitation turkey-walk about the garden, while at the same time emitting out of me an ever-escalating litany of gobble-gobbles.

  Juan regards me as though I really am a turkey.

  ‘OK, little man. Because you are such a good listener and your mother has abandoned you, I think a little reward is the order of day. And so I am going to put the pan on, cook up one of my very special breakfasts. Now, tell me. What would you like? Beans and black pudding? That is another excellent choice. Come on then, and here, you can read the paper. Before too long you’ll be reading all about me.’

  I leave him in the sitting room, in front of the TV, and for the next few minutes I join mother and her friends in the kitchen. Mother half looks at what I am frying up. ‘It’s all for me,’ I say, chopping up the pudding.

  A few minutes later I am in the sitting room and have slapped a plate of beans and black pudding down in front of Little Juan. He looks at the plate. Then he picks up a piece of pudding as though he has never before seen anything like it. Then he looks at me.

  ‘Ah, you’re going to try the pudding. Made from the blood of swine. Around these parts it’s considered a delicacy. Get it into you. It’s full of blood. And swine.’

  He takes a nibble. Then decides he likes it. So much so that I end up giving him my share. He has shoved the twelfth or thirteenth piece inside his gob by the time mother gets involved and a look on her face that says Good grief, what are you trying to do to him? She whips the plate away from Juan, muttering something about toast and butter as she returns to the kitchen.

  Home from the bank and Jennifer’s VISA card still isn’t working. None of her cards are. There has been a hitch at the Spanish-speaking end – apparently she should have told someone in the bank she was travelling abroad – and now she must wait for some bank located in some impossible-to-get-a-hold-of corner of Mexico to transfer some money. ‘I badly need to get some things. I need to get some things for Juan,’ she announces dramatically, throwing out her arms for added effect. Again she looks at her no-good cards. Again she wonders what is wrong with the faraway bank, shakes her head as though it is a travesty of epic proportions, and, uh-oh, I’m thinking, here come the waterworks. But before they do, mother has said the magic words. ‘Let me help.’ And let me help too, I want to scream. Let me march straight out the door and all the way out to sea as far as my offshore account. Here you go, Jennifer. It’s all for you.

  I do no such thing. I haven’t stirred from the kitchen. And now Jennifer is on about her luggage. It still hasn’t turned up and she is running out of clothes. She has some summer things, loose-fitting linens, singlets to show off those lovely arms, a light skirt or two. But nothing that is any match for an afternoon of the west wind. Today she is wearing one of mother’s woolly jumpers. It’s a loose fit, completely shapeless, not at all what she has in mind, I’m sure, when presenting herself to the outside world.

  ‘I don’t know what is keeping my things,’ I hear her say, doing my best to slide towards the front door and out of the house without being seen. Besides. What does she want from me? An Ave Maria? Too late. Mother has spotted me and is waving me into the sitting room and talking up how Jennifer and Little Juan are going to stay with us for a little while and would it be too much trouble for me to be more sisterly.

  ‘They’ve already been here a little while,’ I say.

  ‘Well, they’re going to be here another little while,’ mother says.

  ‘How will the suffering world survive without her?’ I say to that, and mother gives me one of her long looks.

  ‘Jennifer is having a bad time of it, Laura,’ she says next. ‘Try to be more understanding.’

  ‘I understand she’s well able to flick her hair at buildermen.’

  ‘Have you anything better she could wear?’

  ‘Like what?’ I say.

  ‘What do you mean, like what? Your sister’s luggage has been delayed. Until it arrives she needs some clothes. If it is not too much to ask, could you find something.’

  I am about to point out the complete and utter futility of this, any fool could take a look at luscious Jennifer and spindly me and see that we are a mismatch, but I can tell anything I have to say will travel straight through mother’s head.

  ‘No, I can’t,’ I settle for, heading for the door.

  ‘What does that mean, no I can’t?’

  It means I would like a sturdy boatman to row you and Jennifer far away out to sea. This is what I want to say. ‘It means I have to go to work. Goodbye, see you later,’ I say instead, and I am out of there.

  12

  For the past few months my hiatus from the theatre has provided ample time for
my stint as a guide offering walking tours to the lorryloads of terrorists who, without fail, rock up every summer and seem to forget to go home again. The group I have to meet right now I am reliably informed is to be a mixed bag of nationalities. As per usual, our meeting point is by the fountain at the top of the Square.

  Fleming is already there. Since making him aware of my temporary career he tags along as a pretend terrorist. At some point, upon receipt of our prearranged signal, he will start into a combination of daft, interesting and provocative questions, the idea being that my elaborate and thorough responses will supplement my meagre wage in the form of above-the-going-rate gratuities from our impressed assemblage. These spoils are shared. Some for me. Some for Fleming. Though Fleming’s share always seems to have an unhappy knack of finding its way into his brothers’ pockets.

  So far this season Fleming has been an overly zealous Ruud from the Netherlands wanting to know in great detail about all the efforts to keep tidal water out of Flood Street. His impersonation of a sailor from Lithuania nearly landed everyone in hot water when he suggested a side-trip down to the docks and invited us aboard the gunboat he assiduously assured us he was assigned to. His attempt at a drunken Australian copper miner was foiled by a member of the tour group called McGelligot who, from Adelaide himself, was taking an enforced sabbatical from the mines of his homeland and had decided to visit the old country. And I had to summon layers of diplomacy I had no idea existed inside me when, in the guise of a Mexican boxer, he a little too convincingly took offence at the pair of Texans who made the mistake of referring in glowing terms to a certain wall a certain presidential candidate has been banging on about. I can’t believe they thought you were Mexican, I would later say to Fleming while divvying up the extra cash dollars. He nodded his head and said he couldn’t believe they thought he was a boxer.

  Of course his own personal favourite was the occasion he pretended he was a television producer from Berlin scouting locations along the Wild Atlantic Way for a television mini-series involving a teenage assassination squad. For that particular walking tour he shaved his head and introduced himself to everyone as Fritz Schmelling. Pity for Fritz that we had Dieter from Düsseldorf and Heinrich from Hamburg along for the ride that particular afternoon – they knew more about the Wild Atlantic Way than myself and Fleming and everyone else put together.

  Today we have agreed that Fleming is to be a visiting professor from some eminent British university with a healthy yet thorny interest in all things historical and Irish. He has an accent he is dying to try out on his unsuspecting targets, and he has been practising by constantly repeating aloud to himself the line To Hell or to Connacht. Now, standing at the top of the Square in the moments before today’s group turns up, he keeps massaging with his thumb and index finger the ends of an imaginary handlebar moustache.

  The group arrives in twos and threes. As promised, an eclectic bunch, and I get quick introductions from Bjorn from Sweden. Abelardo and Mercedes from Spain. Lisa from Canada. A minuscule woman from Minnesota whose name I don’t catch. A cigar-chewing colossus from Boston. A trio of Nikon-wielding youngsters from Shanghai. And a doddery-looking fellow from Brooklyn in corduroy shorts and unbuckled sandals who prefers to give his profession – painter – rather than his name. Following the painter’s example, Fleming steps forward and in his best accent introduces himself as Professor Emeritus out of Oxford.

  ‘Oh? You don’t look old enough to be retired,’ the painter says and Fleming twiddles the end of that imaginary moustache.

  I begin with my usual guff about where we are and tell them about the speech JFK made in this very spot. ‘If you look that way on a clear day you can see all the way to Boston,’ I declare, pointing off vaguely. ‘Right,’ guffaws the cigar chewer. ‘Hey,’ I say, holding up my hands. ‘It was Kennedy who said it, take it up with him.’ And I beckon them to follow me.

  ‘So,’ I tell them when we pause at the Browne Doorway, ‘we are just outside the old city walls. And on this very spot they used to carry out public executions.’

  ‘What?’ asks the cigar chewer, summoning a surprising level of incredulity.

  ‘How did they do it?’ asks Lisa from Canada.

  ‘How do you think they did it?’ snaps the minuscule woman from Minnesota. ‘They strung them up and chopped their heads off. Isn’t that right, miss?’

  She looks to me for affirmation.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ I say, happy to corroborate. ‘They had a wonderful gallows. Could drop eight people in one go. Top-quality rope too. Back in the day, this town was considered one of the places if it was a good hanging you were after. And,’ I go on, mostly for the benefit of those eager for some added gore, ‘there was a huge cauldron they used for parboiling heads.’

  ‘When did they stop the public executions?’ Abelardo from Spain wants to know.

  ‘At approximately six pm next Tuesday,’ I say and nearly everybody laughs.

  From there I take them the short walk to the recently installed statues of the two Wildes – Oscar and Eduard – and because I haven’t been bothered finding out anything about the other fellow concentrate at length on the sad story of Oscar and his tragic demise. I pause at Lynch’s Castle and tell them the story about what Judge Lynch did to his son. I show them the King’s Head bar and tell them how it got its name.

  ‘There sure is a lot of death on this tour,’ observes the cigar chewer.

  ‘Don’t you worry,’ I say, injecting a little levity into my voice and giving him my sincerest smile. ‘I have a feeling you will live to tell all the tales to your buddies back in the Big Apple.’

  ‘I’m from Boston,’ he says to that, rolling his eyes in Fleming’s direction. Fleming nods and twiddles some more.

  We move on to the Spanish Arch, where I let them wander about the open spaces of the harbour, and it is while I am waxing lyrical about the Armada and the awful things that happened to the shipwrecked Spaniards that Fleming comes into his own.

  ‘This arch is not Spanish,’ he intones crisply, getting busy with his fingers. ‘In fact, I’m not sure it even qualifies as an arch.’

  ‘Architecturally, it is not Spanish,’ I say, taking my cue. ‘It is in fact an extension of the medieval city walls built by the Normans. Because of its Western European location, this little city of ours has always had a close trading relationship with Spain and Portugal. Back in the day lots of Spaniards took up residence here. And so the arch was named in honour of our Spanish brethren.’

  Abelardo and Mercedes are thrilled with this piece of news. ‘I’m pretty sure I have some Spanish blood in me,’ the cigar chewer adds for good measure. I can see Fleming reckoning his share of the tip coming our way.

  ‘Does anyone else have a question?’ I say before hauling them to the tour’s next venue.

  ‘What do you do when you’re not doing this?’ asks the woman from Minnesota.

  ‘I’m an actress,’ I say. ‘Like my daddy before me.’

  ‘Goddamn, I knew it,’ harks the cigar chewer. ‘Do something for us.’

  Just at that moment it starts raining and from somewhere I hear what I assume is someone’s attempt at a Michael Caine impersonation.

  ‘The rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain.’

  I am vaguely disturbed upon discovering that the someone is in fact Fleming, whose handlebar moustache, along with his Oxford accent, has suddenly disappeared.

  ‘Hey, that’s pretty good,’ says Bjorn from Sweden.

  ‘Thank you, my good fellow,’ Fleming says, his accent – to my relief – back in situ.

  ‘Hugh Grant, yes?’

  Bjorn turns my way to supply the confirmation that Fleming has withheld. But I myself have been diverted. I have spotted Stephen Fallow. My director. He’s walking slowly along the quay with a young woman, with whom he appears to be in deep conversation.

  ‘This way, ladies and gentlemen,’ I announce, and to the bemusement of Fleming, for one, I lead my group in the direction St
ephen and the woman are taking.

  The rain decides to hold off and Stephen and his ladyfriend continue along the river as far as O’Brien’s Bridge, where they veer off in the direction of the Town Hall via Market Street. They cut down by Bowling Green – precisely the route I would eventually have taken my group along, as it so happens, and, ensuring that I have Stephen in my sights, I signal for people to pause outside the row of terraced dwellings – where Stephen and his ladyfriend have also paused.

  ‘Good heavens,’ Fleming declaims, his accent becoming ever more clipped. ‘What class of wretched sod has to endure living conditions such as these?’

  ‘So this is where Nora Barnacle lived,’ I say, shaking an admonishing finger at Fleming and then pointing to the plaque on one of the lesser-kept dwellings. ‘Before, that is, she became muse and inspiration for the great monologue at the end of a book called Ulysses.’

  ‘We would certainly like to hear an excerpt from this monologue,’ Fleming says, looking around at everyone. ‘Wouldn’t we, people?’

  ‘Oh, yes!’ says the woman from Minnesota, clasping together her minuscule hands.

  ‘Well said!’ Fleming intones. ‘Come on then, give us a flavour.’

  At which point Fleming twiddles the end of his moustache and, noticing that Stephen has lingered, Yes I will so, I tell my expectant audience and off I go into the sorry saga of many’s the suitor to have walked me along the nearby river path set me down on the grassy bank plied me with a litre of fortified wine said i was his north south east west his sun moon stars entire universe plied me some more said he was going to take me to a special place oh what’s the rush i said ply me some more he plied implored beseeched said i was his best dream his favourite place his only wish i set his heart racing his head spinning his blood charging at which point he lunged so desperate was he his jaw collided with the bottle is your head spinning now i asked him there was no reply he was out cold