1998 - Round Ireland with a fridge

by Tony Hawks; Prefers to remain anonymous

  §

  Most of that day was spent like Sundays should be, sitting around and doing not very much in particular.

  ‘Dave, Karen and Butch, do you want another cup of tea?’ I said. It sounded like I was addressing a 1960s folk band.

  They said ‘yes’, of course. They liked their tea, did Dave, Karen and Butch. Dave, like Karen, was living in the hostel until a boat on which he was planning to take tourists on fishing trips had been repaired. He was a nice chap, but he let himself down by being a little too eager to talk about boats.

  ‘She was a forty-five-footer,’ he would say, ‘with a fibre-glass hull, and running rigging on an aluminium mast. My last boat had standing rigging, but also on an aluminium mast. I swear by them, aluminium masts.’

  He was at his most dull when he was in the act of rolling his own cigarettes, something which Karen also did. For some reason, people who roll their own cigarettes always become mind numbingly boring whilst occupied in that act itself. It is almost as if the intricate detail of the rolling causes the brain to lock in with it somehow, resulting in slow and longwinded sentences. Because they are concentrating on the job, the ‘rollers’ make no eye contact with those on the receiving end of their drivel and therefore fail to notice the extent to which their listener has ceased to be transfixed. There was one occasion when Dave and Karen each simultaneously rolled themselves a cigarette, with excruciating results.

  ‘You know the modern marine diesel,’ droned Dave, ‘is an astonishingly durable piece of kit. The main problem is that it’s underused compared to versions of the same basic engine which more often than not will run for thousands of hours performing their shore-bound tasks in buses, taxis and the like.’

  ‘You’re right, Dave. My Dad had a boat with a diesel auxiliary and he only used it at weekends,’ replied Karen, head bowed over the sacred Rizlas, ‘and he always said that diesels die of neglect—not overwork.’

  Not until the construction of the limp cigarettes was completed, and they were popped into mouths and puffed at, did the conversation stop sounding like a cassette tape for an insomnia cure.

  The subsequent simultaneous rolling of a tenth cigarette drove me to do something with my day, and I borrowed Dutch’s bike and cycled to Curracloe, a six-mile stretch of sandy beach just north of the town, where I got my first glimpse of an Irish traffic jam, as hordes of holiday-makers clogged up roads designed to take a tractor or two and not anything like this wholesale invasion.

  I’m sure that Curracloe beach is stunning on any other weekend of the year, but for this one the tourists had taken it over and done a pretty good job of masking its beauty. Ghettoblasters, litter, ice-cream vans, screaming kids, and snogging couples were distributed along the beach and amongst the dunes. Most people were sunburnt. The Irish sing, talk and drink well, but when it comes to tanning, they perform abysmally. I winced as I watched them parading their grossly uncovered bodies before the sun’s powerful rays—shoulders, thighs and bald patches already a bright rose colour, soon prompting a remark from an equally crimson relative—‘I think you may have overdone it a bit.’

  On the way home I noticed the registration number of the car in front of me:

  HIV966

  Not personalised I hoped.

  As I cycled along I imagined one possible exchange the owner of this vehicle might have with a policeman.

  ‘Is this your vehicle, sir?’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘What’s your registration?’

  ‘I think it’s HIV but I’m not positive.’

  I took Karen to the pub that night. It was like having a date. I had specifically made the invitation to her and not extended it to Dave, who was sat alongside us watching some disappointing television. Two motives had been behind his exclusion: one was a desire to have an evening without any mention of the durability of aluminium, and the other, well—the other was probably to do with ‘the other’. It was foolish, and I knew it, not least because I had only slept a few hours in the last seventy-two, but it was probably the corollary of this that I was too tired to make the sensible decision.

  When we got back to the hostel, I threw in a corker of a line, ‘Would you like to come back to my place for a coffee?’

  Karen laughed.

  ‘Are you really going to sleep in there?’

  ‘16p is 16p. I’d be a fool not to. Why don’t you join me in there for a nightcap?’

  ‘Okay,’ she giggled.

  I was in new territory. I had never invited a girl back to a doghouse before.

  We made two coffees in the kitchen, carried them out to the garden, and climbed into my lodgings.

  ‘Hey, it’s surprisingly cosy,’ said Karen.

  And it was too. Before leaving the pub, I had filled it with cushions taken from the living room, and unzipped my expensive sleeping bag and laid it out like a bed cover. I was glad it was getting some use at last, even if it wasn’t quite fulfilling the lifesaving role I had envisaged for it.

  ‘What you need in here are some candles,’ remarked Karen.

  ‘Yes, I haven’t got the lighting quite right.’

  It was almost pitch darkness.

  ‘Ill go and get some,’ she said keenly.

  For someone with 16p at stake, she was almost acting irresponsibly.

  The candles almost completed the transition of doghouse to love nest The rest was up to me. Karen was showing all the signs of someone who wasn’t going to slap my face if I leant over to kiss her. I decided to have a go. I took a deep breath and attempted to swivel round so I was facing her, but cracked my head on the low part of the pitched roof. Not unnaturally, it hurt quite a lot but I made a snap decision to try and complete the kiss regardless. It was made difficult by the fact that Karen had begun laughing uncontrollably. I stopped short of her mouth, and suddenly saw the funny side myself, breaking into fits of giggles. The moment of passion had been hijacked by hilarity. I hoped that this wasn’t going to be a feature of all my future lovemaking.

  The laughter subsided. There we were, inches apart, directly under the apex of the roof, so with ample headroom. Surely now the kiss was inevitable. Slowly I moved my mouth towards hers. She closed her eyes, I closed mine and we waited for my gentle forward momentum to bring us together. Until a voice outside halted it.

  ‘l THOUGHT I HEARD SOME VOICES OUT HERE—SO HE’S REALLY GOING TO DO IT THEN?’

  Dave had arrived.

  He got down on to his haunches and peered inside whilst I hurriedly threw myself back into a non-kissing position, catching my head on the same bit of roof as I did so.

  ‘I’ve got the kettle on. Do you want a cup of tea?’ Dave asked.

  ‘Yeah, okay,’ said Karen.

  Yeah, okay? What did she mean ‘Yeah okay’? The answer was surely an unequivocal ‘NO’. ‘NO, DAVE LEAVE us ALONE, WE DON’T WANT TEA, WE WANT TO KISS EACHOTHER, NOW GO AWAY.’ Not, Yeah, okay.’

  ‘How about you, Tone?’ he added.

  ‘Yeah, okay.’

  He was a difficult man to say no to.

  Dave wasn’t an insensitive man. After only forty minutes squashed up in one end of an already crowded doghouse advocating the advantages of a steel hull over a wooden one, he realised that there might be something marginally more exciting going on between Karen and I, and made a remark which I might have welcomed a little earlier. ‘I’ll go in a minute and stop cramping your style.’

  Neither Karen or I made any protest. There were no entreaties of, ‘No, please Dave, you hang on here for another hour or so, it would be interesting to find out more about how seriously rotting wood can lead to a cracked bilge stringer.’ We were unambiguously in favour of him going away.

  Our silence ought to have been a cue for Dave to leave immediately, but he just hung on and hung on. He kept looking like he was going to leave, even teasing us with the actual words ‘I’ll go now’ from time to time, but the problem was, he didn’t correctly understand the meaning of ‘now’. Half an hou
r later I was on the very brink of saying, ‘Dave, will you please, please piss off,’ when, for some inexplicable reason, he pissed off of his own accord. Perhaps he was getting tired, and had finally begun to pick up on telltale signs that he wasn’t that welcome—little things like Karen and I no longer responding to a word he said.

  I moved closer to Karen, taking care not to bang my head this time.

  ‘I thought he was never going to go.’

  ‘Me too.’

  And we kissed. Almost in celebration.

  It lacked passion. The past hour had taken its toll. We continued kissing though, initially through a lack of anything else to do, but as the minutes passed the desire began to return. Hands started to make their first exploratory moves. Tentative forays were made beneath garments and it soon became apparent that the need to be tentative could soon be abandoned.

  Things were hotting up.

  Until a voice outside cooled them down.

  ‘ARE YOU GUYS REALLY IN THERE?’

  Butch had arrived.

  ‘DAVE SAID YOU WERE IN HERE.’

  Cheers Dave.

  ‘MAKE WAY FOR ME, I’M COMING IN,’ he shouted.

  I hoped the neighbours weren’t hearing all this.

  Butch was impressively drunk. He treated his reluctant audience to an embittered diatribe, the main theme of which was the present unsatisfactory state of his love life. It was very funny, and even in these circumstances, he had us both laughing. But funny or not, we still wanted him to go. He seemed blissfully unaware that his tirade about unsatisfactory sexual liaisons was preventing the initiation of a new one.

  ‘Oscar Wilde summed it all up,’ he railed, ‘‘What is love? It is when two fools misunderstand each other.’’

  I thought yes, and will you please bugger off and give the two of us a chance to misunderstand each other. We’ve been dying to misunderstand each other for the past hour and a half. In fact the only thing we have been able to understand about each other is that we’re desperate to do a bit of misunderstanding. Understand?

  Eventually he left, but not before wheeling the fridge up to the door, saying, ‘I’ve brought the fridge along to keep an eye on you both.’

  Yes, yes. Very funny. Now GO!

  There is a reason why people don’t make love in doghouses more often. Dogs don’t even do it. They would rather suffer the indignity of doing it outside with people watching than do it in a doghouse. To our credit though, Karen and I had a go, and under the circumstances I think we did pretty well. One of the main problems was that the doghouse was too short for my body, and my feet had to stick out of the door. With this particular evening being a clear and chilly one, this meant that I had cold feet throughout the entire proceedings, in more ways than one. Because of this need for exterior feet dangling, the doghouse had to be left open, and this allowed occasional gusts of cool breeze to penetrate areas where one wouldn’t normally welcome a rush of cold air. The lack of headroom also proved problematical on occasions, and if either of us lost concentration or momentarily forgot where we were (difficult, but hey, I like to think it could happen), then we were all too quickly reminded of our immediate vicinity with a blow to the head. (It is with some regret that in presenting an accurate depiction of the night’s events, I have been unable to use the words ‘blow’ and ‘head’ in anything other than their purest sense.)

  All in all, the artificial obstacles which we had to overcome made the whole encounter feel like an event in It’s A Knockout. (The mini marathon, I like to think.) We had represented Banbury as best we could, but it was unlikely that our performance had been enough to nudge us ahead of Kettering and on to further competition in Europe.

  I woke in the morning and looked outside. There was the fridge looking back at me. It was jealous, no doubt about it, but that was understandable enough. After all, it had never been plugged in, and now I had.

  And I had a splinter to prove it.

  23

  Triumphal Entry

  (A title I had consideredfor the previous chapter)

  Today was a bank holiday Monday. If it had been a Sunday I might have gone to confession. After all, I had something to confess now, praise the Lord.

  ‘Father forgive me, but last night I slept with a girl in a doghouse, in full view of a fridge.’

  I wonder how many Hail Marys you’d get for that It probably wasn’t on their Sin-Penance guideline chart.

  As a matter of fact, any confession I might make would have to begin with the words, ‘Forgive me father, for I’m not actually a Catholic.’

  That was definitely not on the Sin-Penance chart.

  After the emotional highs of a short ceremony overseen by Dave and Butch, in which Karen coughed up her 16p and we all taped the coins to the side of the fridge, I began to feel exceptionally tired. My dwindling energy levels needed to be replenished by the calories which a cooked breakfast could provide, so I walked down to a café on the Quays which Butch had recommended. As I tucked into my scrambled egg, the truth dawned on me that my journey was almost over, and that Dublin was only a few hours’ drive away. Feelings of both relief and sadness were overtaken by concern. I might only be a day away from a huge anticlimax.

  Up until now, the policy of ‘just seeing what happens’ had served me well, but now there was a definite case for forward planning. I felt strongly that the finale to such an epic journey required some ceremonial commemoration, and by the time I had finished my breakfast I knew what had to be done.

  I ordered a second pot of tea and called the office of The Gerry Ryan Show from the mobile, and outlined my idea. They loved it.

  ‘Well call you back in ten minutes, Tony,’ said Willy, one of the show’s producers, ‘this is worth interrupting our bank holiday special for. We’ll work out exactly how you should do it and then get you to talk about it to Gerry on air. We’ll have you on as the first item tomorrow morning too, just to give the thing a big build-up.’

  Just the response I was looking for.

  Gerry waxed lyrical, as ever.

  ‘I have on the line, Tony Hawks, the Fridge Man, who on his journey round this fair isle has been taken into the hearts of the Irish people, and he has been showered with the kind of hospitality normally saved for a national hero, and he’s sunk a bevy or two along the way too. How are you this morning, Tony?’

  ‘Oh, I’m fine, Gerry.’

  ‘I believe that you are about to complete your epic journey, well done. Congratulations to you. Now how do you intend to round off a trip like this?’

  ‘Well, I want to march into Dublin with my fridge and I want people to join me as I go.’

  ‘Good idea, a kind of triumphal entry.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Well, you know Caesar never brought his legions into Rome, but I think on this occasion we can make an exception—you can bring the fridge into Dublin.’

  ‘And I thought it would be a good idea if people joined me on this march with a domestic appliance of their choice.’

  ‘Even better idea. Some friends for the fridge.’

  ‘Exactly, because it’s not just about fridges this, so bring a kettle, a toaster or whatever, because there are all kinds of appliances which need liberating from the confines of the kitchen.’

  ‘You heard him, folks. The man is talking sense, so unplug your kitchen or domestic appliances and join Tony on the march tomorrow, be it with a kettle, a toaster, an iron—or even a cooker, a fridge freezer or microwave.’

  A microwave. I should have done my journey with a microwave, I could have done it in a third of the time.

  ‘Now Tony, listen closely,’ continued Gerry, ‘whilst I outline the planned route for this march. We want people to join you with a kitchen appliance of their choice at Connolly Station at 11 am, and having gathered there with food mixers, spatulas or whatever, the procession will then move, in triumph, up Talbot Street, up Henry Street, and then into the ILAC Centre in May Street where we will have an extravaganza beyon
d imagination awaiting you there, for you finally to lay this whole trip to rest. So come on everyone—we want to make Tony’s entrance into the capital city a spectacular Disneyesque-style Roman entrance, we want him to be borne, if not on a real chariot then at least on one in the imaginations of the Irish people. Tony, you rest up now and I’ll talk to you tomorrow.’

  Good. That was a bit of a result. One phonecall over breakfast and the country was being mobilised in my support. It was going to be difficult to re-adjust to life back in London.

  I was rather pleased with the plan, and another pot of tea was in order. I had just begun a daydream in which I was picturing myself being cheered along Dublin’s thronging streets, when a vaguely familiar voice hauled me back to reality.

  ‘So Tony, how’s the form?’

  It was Jim, one of Tom’s mates who I had met in town on Friday night I told him how the form was, and exactly how exhausted I was becoming.

  ‘Why don’t you stay at ours tonight? Jennifer won’t mind,’ he said generously.

  It was an offer I couldn’t refuse, although I suspected that failure to do so, mightn’t meet with universal approval.

  §

  I needn’t have worried. I had been flattering myself to think that Karen would be remotely bothered one way or the other.

  ‘God, I wouldn’t want another night in there,’ she said, after I had explained my intentions, ‘besides, I really need to get some sleep tonight too.’

  I decided that Karen was a cool girl. That’s not to say that my pride hadn’t taken a slight knock. A part of me had clearly hoped to find myself in the doghouse, for not being in the doghouse.

  It was time for me to present her with her gift.

  ‘Here, these are for you,’ I said with a smile.

  ‘Wow, fantastic. Are you sure?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Thanks a lot, Tony, I really appreciate that’

  They were too big for her, but the red shorts would give her something to remember me by.

  The next morning Jim very kindly got up early and dropped me by the Dublin road at 7 am. This gave me four hours to complete the distance which I had been assured was little more than a two-hour drive.