I get off the bus on O’Connell Street, and turn left onto the quays. I pass the Custom House, where men with red faces and soiled clothes drink from cans and shout to one another. The stone heads above the windows don’t seem to care what I’m doing or where I’m going. The woman’s head over the door looks out at me, bald-eyed and unseeing, but the clock tells the right time. Just before the convention centre—that giant tin of beans gone slant—I turn left and head towards Emerald Street. The disused Emerald Dairy on the corner doesn’t look like the Emerald Palace; it’s shuttered and grey with boarded-up windows, but if I were wearing green-tinted glasses, it might appear green. I listen hard for the clank of the Tin Woodman or the rustle of the Scarecrow’s straw or the growl of the Cowardly Lion, but I hear nothing, not even a ghostly moooooo from the dairy (which I presume produced green milk). I take out the plastic bracelet and the Emerald sweets, and place them under the street sign, opposite the dairy. A man with a bald head and tattoos covering his arms walks by with a small girl. I peer closely at the man’s face.
“What are you looking at?”
He juts out his face. Now I can examine it more closely.
“I’m looking for wrinkles—the wizard had a wrinkled face. Are you old?”
“What the fuck kind of a question is that?”
“I’m looking for a little old man with a wrinkled face,” I say. “I know what you’re thinking—wizards have long white hair and beards, but this one is a bit of a chancer.”
“Are you taking the piss?”
His voice is like the scrape of steel wool across a saucepan. I don’t know what to say; there are not enough words for these kinds of explanations. He looks over at the small girl—she has found my emerald pile.
“What’s that, Shannon?”
The girl holds up the bracelet and the sweets. The man turns back to me.
“What’s the story with them?”
He moves his face closer. His teeth are packed tight, like a story with too many words.
“I’m looking for the Emerald Palace, do you know where it is?”
“Do I know where what is?”
The “what” is so complete in itself, it could be framed.
“The Emerald Palace from The Wizard of Oz—it’s made of green glass and emeralds. But we might need green-tinted glasses to see it—you know, the ones that Dorothy wore.”
“Are you touched in the head or what?”
“I don’t know,” I say, “but I was hoping you could tell me how to get back. To where I come from.”
“Are you a foreigner?”
“I’m not sure.”
My voice comes out sideways. I need to get away from this man and his menace of questions, I’m not a person with answers. I turn my body around—this will surely put my voice to rights—and walk as quickly as my baggy silver shoes will take me, towards the quays. Near O’Connell Bridge, a sign reads: “Taxis to Airport €19.” I walk up the rank and get into the first taxi.
“Airport, please,” I say, “and step on it.”
This is what busy people in films say. The driver takes off at a roar and looks at me in the rear-view mirror.
“Late for your flight, love?”
“No, I’m not taking a flight.”
“Ah, picking someone up?”
“No.”
“Why are you going to the airport, then?”
“I’m looking for something.”
“You’re a copper?”
“No.”
I’m out of answers, so I stare out the window. The radio is squeezing out big deep notes, notes that make me want to dance even though I don’t quite know how. We’ve left the city by now and we’re in the port tunnel. A loud whoosh, with an undernote of engine thrum, makes me think that if death is to happen, it must surely happen here. The driver is a motorised Pied Piper, leading me inside a mountain. But there’s no magic here, only harsh lighting that reminds me of a mortuary.
“Mortuary,” I say.
The driver looks at me in the mirror.
“You want to go to the airport mortuary?”
“No, thanks,” I say. “Which word do you prefer: ‘mortuary’ or ‘morgue’?”
“Couldn’t tell you, love.”
“I prefer ‘morgue’ because it’s softer, but the G doesn’t smack of slabs and gurneys and fluorescent lighting the way that the harsh ‘T’ in ‘mortuary’ does.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” he says.
When we come out of the tunnel, I look at the cars around us.
“Do you ever wonder where these cars are going?” I ask.
“Some of them to the airport, I reckon.”
“And then where?”
“On their holidays, I suppose.”
“But where on their holidays, and why?”
“Couldn’t tell you, why don’t you ask them?”
He looks at me in the mirror.
“You sure you’re not a detective?”
“I’m sure.”
I would like to be Miss Marple or Poirot or Columbo, because even though they seem to dither, they are quietly certain. The driver turns off the motorway.
“Terminal one or two?”
“There are two?”
He looks at me in the mirror, his eyes narrowing.
“The nearest one,” I say quickly.
He drives up to a huge silver building with two short legs, like the silver shorts of a sleeping giant. I want to go under the gusset, but he parks under an enclosed footbridge that’s the giant’s intestines, spurting out indigestible people. I pay and get out. Everyone else stepping out of cars and taxis is carrying huge quantities of luggage; I feel bald and empty with only my handbag. I walk into the building and head for the newsagent, to buy bags of popcorn and crisps. When I put them in my bag it swells, and no longer looks inferior to the massive suitcases.
I watch what passengers do when they enter the airport. They go straight to the departure board and then move off purposefully. I walk over to the board and look at it. There are flights to places that exist, even though I’ve never heard of them. The flight codes start with letters and end with numbers. I look down the list of letters and spell them out. They don’t make any word that I know, but maybe it’s an anagram. I take out my notebook and write the codes down. I try jumbling the letters, but I can’t make English words. A man in a suit walks quickly to the screen, looks at it, extends his arm in an air-punch and reads his watch. He tuts and sighs, and walks away. I should do something airport-appropriate like this, so I go back to the newsagent and pretend to look at the magazines. A woman is buying a newspaper; I don’t understand why she is buying the news of a country she is leaving. I wait until all the people at the departures board have moved off, and a new batch has arrived. Then I walk quickly back, look at the screen for a few seconds, make a tuh noise, sigh and walk away. I search for the tutting businessman and find him in the bookshop. He reads the back of a book, and when he brings it to the till, I pick up the book and read the blurb at the back: “body has been discovered…” I write the first and last sentence of the blurb in my notebook, but there is no code or anagram, even when I add all the first letters of each word together. I follow the businessman out of the bookshop. I know his taste in books and his walk from behind; we are something close to friends. He walks quickly to the departure gates, which puts a full stop to the trail. Now I walk to a green sign saying: “Meeting Point” and wait under it, but nobody comes. A woman with a hard face and a jagged haircut passes by, wielding a wheelie suitcase like a sword, and I step back to spare my toes. I leave the terminal because it has no centre, and it unmoors me. The airport is for people who are clean and efficient, people who dress like people they are not, people who know where they are going and why.
I walk to the bus stop and get on a meandering bus into town. I sniff the used, lived-in smell of the bus, the smell of warm upholstery and passenger breath, and whisper “safe safe safe.” I need to be where bus
es are, so I decide to go to the bus station. I get off on O’Connell Street, and walk down North Earl Street onto Talbot Street. There’s a rattle and a clatter up ahead, the sound of an uneasy ghost clanking his chains. A man with a face so grey it matches the footpath tugs at a bicycle locked to a lamppost. The lock isn’t giving up easily, and he yanks it with a force that rattles the earth, his face pure bug-eyed frenzy. A small boy walking in front of me with his father stares at the bike thief.
“Da, the man’s trying to rob the bike.”
“Don’t be looking, son, turn the other way.”
“But, Da, he’s breaking the lock.”
“Lee, don’t make me tell you again, turn the other way.”
I do as Lee does, and keep walking. I stop at the pub with the carved heads in the brickwork. The stone lady over the door looks serene and welcoming. I call her Anna, because a symmetrical name would go with a calm face. The stone man with the conical hat looks full of mischief, I call him Timmy. (He’s Timothy when he’s not messing around.) I turn right onto Talbot Place, and walk around to the front of Busáras. It’s a merry-go-round of a building with a corrugated wavy roof and circular glass walls, but instead of wooden horses there are metal buses. I step over the bags of a group of men wearing football scarves and jerseys, and go inside to look at the departures board. I’m glad that I’ve heard mention of all the cities and towns on it. I buy coffee and a muffin from the café, and sit on a wooden slatted seat to eat. The muffin is a regret—it always is. The overhang is appealing, the sense of there being too much, but the consistency is bathroom sponge with an after-cleave to the teeth.
Above me, in a far corner, two men in fluorescent vests sit inside a glass control room, like rare yellow-backed creatures on display. When I see one of the controllers’ jackets hanging on a hook, I feel like I’ve caught a secret glimpse of the inside of the man’s wardrobe. A bus pulls up outside one of the gates and people decant onto it from the queue. Beyond the bus stands the green-glass financial centre; it looks like Oz’s Emerald Palace, but I don’t think I’d find a way home among debits and credits and ledgers. I stretch out my legs. I could belong here, with the dingy off-whiteness of it all, the head-bobbing pigeons wandering around, the piles of oddly shaped bags. There are more edges and corners here; the airport is all middle with no pigeons. I watch the luggage being stowed away in the belly of the bus, and wonder if there are life jackets and whistles on buses that travel by the sea.
After I walk home, I map my route. Today’s walks were splintered into fits and starts, the shape confused by doubling back and a taxi ride and a bus ride in the middle. I covered three different shapes: a slightly misshapen floor lamp minus the bulb, a tub with one side bashed inwards and a jagged peak with an oversized footrest at its base. I can’t find any connection between the shapes or any way of linking them; it’s up to the taxi driver and bus driver to map their own routes.
I TURN ON the television to a hidden camera show, in which an actor jumps out at shoppers in a supermarket from under a pile of apples. I find it very soothing to watch people get frights. A documentary comes on next. The presenter is driving a car and talking to the camera. If she had an accident, they could show the crash and make it into a documentary about road safety. The presenter is trying hard to teach me something, something I will never learn, so I change channels to a film. Two cars are racing through narrow streets lined with stalls. The cars plunge through the stalls, people scatter, tables of fruit and vegetables and meat and fish are knocked and sprawled and squashed and smashed. I want to see the film about the cleanup, the film about the people who are injured by the cars, the film about the people whose livelihoods have been ruined by a man in sunglasses who values his life above all else. I feel like I’m the only person rooting for the fruit seller instead of the hero.
11
I CAN SEE the bus stop from the queue for the ATM. A bus arrives and picks up passengers and leaves (oh no), another one comes and goes (oh no), and I’m still waiting. When I reach the ATM, I request €20. The machine chugs hard, it might be printing and slicing the notes for all I know, and I take the money and walk to the newsagent.
“Can you give me four €5 notes for €20?” I ask.
The man behind the till shakes his head.
“We don’t give change, you have to buy something.”
“Okay.”
I rummage in my purse for some coins, take a chocolate bar from the pile near the counter, and hand the coins to the man along with the €20. He stares at the money.
“I can’t break the €20,” I say. “I can’t give three people €5 notes, and one person leftover coins.”
“Okay, okay.”
He takes four notes from the till, and hands them to me with my coin change.
“Thank you,” I say, and I wave, but the man doesn’t wave back. I get on the next bus into town, and sit midway down. I look out the window. Elderly people huddle in menacing twos or threes outside the church, plotting all manner of I-don’t-know-what. Last night, I had an unpleasant dream about losing something I really shouldn’t have lost, and it was a relief to be evicted from the dream. The bus takes on more passengers in Phibsborough. Seats fill up around me, and I know the one next to me will be the last one filled, if it is filled at all. I haven’t looked at my face in a mirror in a long while—I don’t know what other people see that keeps them away. A woman shuffles onto the bus outside the hospital, and sits beside me with a whoosh of coat flaps.
“Cold enough for this time of year, isn’t it?”
“It is,” I say. “It’s so cold that I’m going to buy a hoodie.”
“Ah, that’s terrible, we were promised a good summer after the bad winter.”
She says it like she was personally let down by the weather forecast.
“It is terrible,” I say, but there are no more words in me. She starts talking to the woman in the seat across the aisle; it disappoints me that I couldn’t maintain the weather conversation, or progress to another topic. I press the bell on O’Connell Street.
“Excuse me,” I say to the woman, but the sentence sounds abrupt and unfinished. I don’t think I can call her “love,” but “missus” sounds rude and “chicken” sounds wrong, when she’s more of an old hen. Maybe my voice was built for a different language, one with words for every conversation. I walk down North Earl Street to the discount shop that’s bursting with children’s clothes and men’s workwear and bedding and long pastel-coloured nightwear. The overflow spills from wire baskets out front. I walk up the orange stairs and look through the rails for cardigans with pockets. Then I take four thick, spongy-feeling cardigans into the changing room, a poky cubicle beside the till, and slide a €5 note into the pocket of each cardigan, making sure the money is well hidden. I come out of the changing room, put the cardigans back on the rail at evenly spaced intervals and walk downstairs. I feel anxious until I get out of the shop; it would be hard to explain to the security guard behind the screen at the door that what I was doing was the opposite of stealing, the back-to-front of stealing: “gnilaets,” I’ll call it. I hope four people without much spare cash for treats find the money and use it to buy cakes or peaches, and not bread or apples.
I walk to Eason’s to look at the books. Its clock tells the right time. The new books are too brightly covered, the titles too looped and swirling, so I go downstairs to the books with quiet, straw-coloured covers of people dressed in old-fashioned clothes, and run my hand along the spines. A man with a long ponytail is reading aloud from a classical novel to a woman with short hair. He waves his arms in sweeping circles, like an actor on television pretending to be an actor on stage. His vowels take in entire continents, and his consonants are liquid silk. The girl looks impressed. He passes the book to her and she starts to read aloud. The man corrects her pronunciation of the French words, and she apologises. If only I could impress people, or be so easily impressed by them. I walk the shelves, but no book makes me want to stop and p
ick it up—they’re too new and alphabetically ordered and they smell too clean. I need a chaos of books, so I leave the shop, cross the river and walk along the south quays. I turn onto Parliament Street and go into the second-hand charity bookshop. The books here are different shapes and sizes and feels, they smell of their previous owners in the same way that dogs look like their owners or undertakers look like corpses. I buy a large hardback book with watercolor drawings of birds and a softback book about how to get things done. I would like to get things done and ticked off of lists; some of my projects are endlessly roaming like lemmings without a leader.
On Dame Street I stop to buy a bottle of orange juice and a bar of chocolate, and walk through the front arch of Trinity College, across the slippery cobbles to the benches facing the arts block. The benches are empty because they’re wet. I swoosh the rain away with my sleeve, and sit on my bag. I drink the orange juice and eat the chocolate, making sure not to mix the two in my mouth because that would be like eating orange-flavoured chocolate, a scourge of a food. The inscription on the bench reads: “In Memory of Theodora Bevan Née Tichborne 1920.”
Theodora should have kept her surname when she married—Theodora Tichborne sounds like a stage actress or a good witch or a fairy godmother in a children’s story. I wonder what you have to do to get a bench named after you—either donate pots of money to the college or die young and horribly from a starting point of great beauty. When I’ve finished eating I head into the arts block to go to the toilet. There are messages written on the door and walls of my cubicle. Next to “Phoebe + Jess” is written: “YOU ARE NOT STUCK.” I write that in my notebook, but it seems wrong that I have to write it with hands that are tainted with toilet duties. Underneath that is written: “Exams aren’t everything,” to which someone else has added: “Exactly! Thousands of children starve to death needlessly every day. Perspective.” This is followed by a picture of a smiling face, but thousands of starving children is more of a sulking matter than a smiling one, so I use my pen to turn the basin of a smile into the mound of a pout. On the door is scrawled in marker: “If you have to ask, she is not your friend.” I wonder at the certainty of these women: how did they acquire beliefs so definite that they needed to share them with others in print? The message I like best, the message I write hugely over seven pages in my notebook, the message I want to tattoo—no, etch, no, BRAND—onto my left arm is next to “Louise loves Connor.” It says it’s a quote by François Rabelais via John Green: “I go to seek a Great Perhaps.” I would like to write this quote all over the city myself, but then I would be ripping off Rabelais, Green and the toilet scrawler. I close my notebook and open the cubicle door. I could do worse than live by toilet-door wisdom.
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