From out of the City

by John Kelly

  – You got a cigarette? asks one of the Goths.

  – Get your own fucking cigarettes.

  Then a scream off to the right and, from one of the buildings further up, a teenage boy with yellow hair runs out into the street, taking random diagonals but not getting far. Three other men come after him and knock him to the ground. And as the boy curls up they kick him hard in the ribs and drag him back inside. Schroeder scans the emptiness and listens. Then another scream, sustained and terrible and Schroeder snorts the very thought of it out through his nose. The doings of this parallel universe are best left alone. A place where, almost certainly, he will get his head in his hands. A place where tougher men than him have been disembowelled in the middle of the day.

  I like to cite Loeb in such circumstances. Human activity, just like the movements of plants, is governed by tropisms and the very workings of the mind can be explained by way of the physio-chemical. Certainly that’s what it feels like to Schroeder as he heads towards the Big Star Internet Café and swings open its battered steel door. He’s acting almost in spite of himself and the true sensation, rather than one of courage and nerve, seems to be one of dumb dreaminess. Perhaps some physio-chemical mechanism really is at work, and perhaps everything he has done (and thought) from the moment Chantal flashed by on Westmoreland Street, really has been entirely beyond his control.

  In the darkness of the café she is the only customer, her own phototropic face glowing in the cyber-light, her fingers flying delicately as if conjuring Shostakovich from a Steinway. Schroeder sits down at the unit next to her and she speaks without turning from the screen.

  – You want a picture or what?

  Not French. Irish. Sounds like Galway.

  – Do you have any?

  – None that you’re ever going to see.

  – That’s a damn shame.

  And still she keeps her eyes on the screen, her fingers moving across the keys even faster now, like a hailstorm on a tin roof.

  – You’ve been staring at my arse from the traffic lights at the top of O’Connell Street.

  – You noticed?

  – I’m used to it. I’ve got the best arse in Dublin.

  Schroeder sneezes.

  – I think you might be right.

  Her hair, held in place by the beret, is arranged to hang down loose over one side of her face. It’s glamour of the old school and in whatever flashes Schroeder gets of her eyes they seem like backlit emeralds, as if her mind, her personality, her very self is directly behind them – permanently and powerfully on. Shamelessly he watches her and yet she continues to type and scroll. And as her fingers fly, her tongue begins to tease her top lip – a tongue pointed and long and capable of anything. This is the sort of danger Schroeder is more than willing to embrace.

  – You’re a very fast typist.

  – Is that your best line?

  – Well you are. An extremely fast typist.

  – My thoughts don’t come out of my mouth, she says. They come out of my fingers. Brain to fingertip. Direct. Nothing happens in between.

  Schroeder logs on, a risky business in a place like this, but he wants to prolong his time with her. He half reads the news headlines. A bomb has just gone off in Rome. Just minutes ago in fact. At exactly the time he was reaching for a weapon that he didn’t have. Seventeen dead on the Via Veneto. More self-immolations in China. Twenty-two more species extinct in the Amazon, a chemical hoax causing commuter chaos in Prague and the Élysée Palace finally admitting that French Marines stationed in Antarctica have been using live penguins as fuel.

  – You writing a novel? Schroeder asks.

  – Nobody writes novels.

  – They write novels in Canada.

  – God bless Canada.

  – So what are you doing?

  – Bits and pieces.

  – You’ll get yourself killed walking around out there.

  – Danger sharpens the mind. It’s a form of meditation. It produces a keen sense of agitation. Then I come in here and I write.

  – An interesting technique.

  – Technique is everything.

  – Are you a journalist?

  – Designer.

  – Clothes?

  – Pyramids.

  – OK. Well that’s certainly an ancient profession.

  – Musclemeds over on Middle Abbey Street. I build pyramids of plastic boxes in the window. High protein food for bodybuilders. I just pile the stuff up. In pyramids. And whenever somebody comes in I sell a box and then I fix the pyramid again.

  – So you design and build pyramids?

  She chuckles and Schroeder begins to taste an old confidence again.

  – So who’s minding the pyramids now?

  – Nobody. I just close the place up whenever I feel like it and I come here instead.

  – What about the bodybuilders?

  – Fuck ’em.

  Then Schroeder chuckles. He likes her style. She’s the beautiful, wild-card stranger and perhaps there’s a little redemption in the darkness after all? An exotic chocolate egg in return for all the Lenten grief.

  – I thought perhaps you were a stripper.

  – Is that good?

  – When you turned into Fleet Street I mean … an exotic dancer I mean.

  – Sorry to disappoint you. Although I know all the moves.

  Schroeder sneezes hard three times in a row and pretends to check his email. All the usual stuff. Updates, circulars, threat assessments and traffic info on King’s visit – details of road closures, restrictions and information on how long the airports will be shut. In the middle of it all he notices one from Walton. He’s not thinking straight and foolishly he opens it. One simple nudge and there on the screen is a clip (with audio) of an orgasmic blonde in full Sheelana-Gig display. It’s Jakki Jack and yes, on this vivid evidence, she really is a screamer. And in this place, alone with the chanteuse, it’s the most terrible sound. Chantal looks across at the screen and then at Schroeder. Schroeder looks at Chantal and then at the screen. There’s nothing he can do but click it off and stare at his feet. Chantal sweeps the hair from her face.

  – Something you want to tell me?

  – I’m really sorry, says Schroeder. It’s my friend. He thinks this kind of thing is funny.

  – Hilarious.

  – Well, it’s not my thing.

  – And it was all going so well too.

  – No. Look. It’s this guy I know. He’s in a wheelchair. I think he’s an addict. Honestly. And she’s famous apparently. Estonian.

  – I think you’ll find she’s Ukrainian.

  And with that she logs off with extraordinary speed and before Schroeder can think of anything intelligent to say, she’s off into the light. He sits there stunned. He has blown it completely. Or at least Walton has, thanks to his wailing pornstar from Kiev. By now Chantal will be freewheeling towards Trinity, relieved at her very lucky escape from the perv about to pounce. And he doesn’t even have her actual name.

  On the blinding plaza some kind of new chemical murk has descended and even the Goths are clamping on their surgical masks. To get in out of the stench Schroeder heads for a cramped Dame Street dive, there to curse his luck and wait for what seems like some internal incendiary to explode in his guts. His hangover is back. Headache, nausea and all the trimmings. He could kill Walton for this. He was almost there! With Chantal the chanteuse and her desolate songs of old Pigalle. Nothing for it now but a few angry jolts of hooch. He’s about four shots in when Roark seems to burst up through the floorboards like a bamboo rat.

  – Hello horse. Fancy shooting yourself at all?

  – What have you got?

  – Glock. Old school. Every home should have one.

  – Stolen?

  – Jays, clean as a whistle.

  – How much?

  – Cash only. 150. Dollars are best.

  Schroeder peels off three fifties and pockets the pistol.

  I appreciate th
at there are elements of the thriller now creeping into the narrative – a femme fatale, a gun, etc. – and indeed there will be more heightened scenes soon, but again I refer you to my opening remarks. This is not a thriller in any shape or form. I am simply telling the truth as best as I can by employing the methods outlined at the get-go. And again I repeat, this is not about the assassination of Richard Rutledge Barnes King. This is about dysfunction, anhedonia and perhaps, if I can possibly find a place for it, redemption. There seems to be an absolute insistence on it as far as publication is concerned. And if these pages are to get out at all, it will have to be there somewhere, presumably at the end. I don’t believe in it but there it is.

  ELEVEN

  THE DART IS BLACK with people and Schroeder cordons himself off immediately, securing his privacy and hoping that the Murakami will get him as far as Grand Canal Dock / Dug na Canálach Móire. But as the city passes by he cannot concentrate and he gazes hard into the high-rise huddles rolling past – the flimsy Dublin-sized skyscrapers where citizens sip wine and twist nightly on futons, listening to their neighbours floss through thin apartment walls. Urban culchies, Schroeder calls them, for he is the most terrible snob when it comes to these apartment dwellers, the interchangeable units of the corporate scheme of things. I know what he’s thinking, for it’s a very old whine of my own that their ancestors bred in these very same high-rises at the end of the 20th century and at the very beginning of this one, to produce this slow-witted host of drones – identical generations of headhunted cliff-dwellers, auks and puffins, huddling together for warmth and company of sorts.

  And yet Schroeder envies them their simplicity, their anonymity and their endless bored promiscuity. Most of all he covets their lack of fear. They do, for a living, whatever it is people do in places like the Financial Centre or any of the other little Manhattans that reach once more into the skies along the quays – redesignated business zones that still look exactly like architects’ models, their windy thoroughfares desolate but for the odd figure strategically placed. And then, at close of business, evacuated by Metros and walkways, the auks and the puffins head back to their colonies and abandon all to the sewer rats and the wild cats which eat them. And yet they all seem somehow contented. Well turned out and happy in their own skins. I know what he’s thinking. I always know what he’s thinking.

  I also know what he’s doing. He’s distracting himself. He’s meeting Claude Butler today and he’s diverting himself with rage, imagining himself spraying the windows as he passes. Glass shattering. Plaster flying. Culchies dropping. An old sub-machine from the Raoul Walsh movies. No use popping off the Glock at a target quite so big as this. A question of scale surely. And of suitability. For these people have destroyed the city. Every hotel, restaurant and pub built in Dublin for decades has been designed in their image – without taste, without soul, without history and without real Guinness. And all to facilitate their dullard vows of ambitious obedience. Not one of them knows anything about anything. Not even the slightest clue of the ghosts which surround them as they sleep. De Valera’s men armed to the teeth and crouched behind thumping bags of flour in Boland’s Mill.

  If a revolution was to happen these days, Dev would be as well to give the Mill a miss and maybe go for some superpub in Stoneybatter. Not much point in Connolly smashing out the windows of the General Post Office to take potshots at soldiers all sandbagged in front of lingerie stores – the heads of dummies dressed as pornonurses exploding behind them. They’d be better advised to go capture Chucho’s of Grafton Street or maybe the Bank of Shanghai. Pearse might read the Declaration at the Mountjoy Mall, from the top of a jammed escalator. Or, more symbolically, he might actually be on the escalator, ascending through the ranks of shoppers descending on either side of him with their giant bags from GAP.

  Schroeder, God bless him, gets worked up by things like this. He once caught his bedside alarm flashing 19:16 and he huffed for a week because the reference was lost on Francesca. She knows no history either. A trait which situates her on her very own planet and makes her so very good at her job. But that’s all for later. Our present scenario sees a somewhat stressed Schroeder arriving in the city centre by DART in order to meet Claude Butler from across the street. And as the train pulls into the bright green and yellow conservatory of Pearse Station / Stáisiún na bPiarsach, Schroeder refocuses on the very thoughts he has just been trying to banish. Thoughts of Claude. Of priestly people. Of Holy People. God’s chosen people. Come in Father and have a cup of tea.

  Somewhere between Pearse and Tara Street / Sraid na Teamhrach a dark palm with inky lifelines appears at Schroeder’s chin. It’s a Roma woman asking for money with a desperate pleading, as if she urgently needs her fortune told as much as any clink of loose coins. Cash has been illegal for years but it hasn’t stopped her asking.

  – No change, Schroeder mutters.

  She asks again and, not even looking at her this time, Schroeder shakes his head.

  – No.

  He doesn’t mind giving a few illicit dollars to the Roma women now and again, or to the limbless vets lined up in Talbot Street, but not every day of the week. Dublin has made him cold (made everybody cold) but why should he feel bad? This woman came to him with her hand out. She to him. Yes, there was a time he would have given her something and made a point of smiling but not any more. He has hardened like an artery. Miserable in the meantime, he’s like Frankenstein’s monster. Make me happy, he thinks, and I shall again be virtuous.

  He couldn’t find the letter anywhere this morning but he’s pretty sure it said three o’clock. And so he’ll show up on time, get it done and get it over. He’ll wish Claude well and hope he clears off back to Liverpool and forgets all about him for another decade or so.

  Tara Street / Sraid na Teamhrach is a crush. Young dopes from all over the European Alliance are massed at every train door, at the top and bottom of every escalator and at every entrance and exit. Dumb-eyed youth adrift with no notion of thoroughfare are hanging onto each other, hands hooked in each other’s pockets, talking shite on their cells and clogging up the station with their vacant selves. Schroeder swears through gritted teeth but all they do is stare, their rucksacks and backpacks and bumbags taking a violent pummelling from Schroeder’s angry progress. Like the stupidest herd of stupid calves they just gaze in silence as he ploughs through them for breath. Clear the fuckers out. Hurleys and baseball bats. Bus the bastards to the airport and render them high into the clouds over Europe. Whatever it takes.

  – Fucksake, would yis fucking move!

  The ticket collector is Scandinavian and he has a way of saying thank you that surprises and cheers Schroeder slightly but when he finally pushes his way out into the glare he’s hit by the full reek of the Liffey and all the airborne poisons that make the river gloop like platinum. A small boy tap-dances, bottle-tops jammed in his runners, and Schroeder’s mood plummets further. A man playing a hornpipe on a concertina stares with sadness at the passing legs of citizens just landed, in no mood for music or the open sea. Addicts trail off for methadone on Pearse Street, named for An Piarsach, aforementioned executed leader of 1916, son of an English stone mason and monumental sculptor of Great Brunswick Street, not far and parallel. Gangs of scurrying hoppers hiss hashish! and then come the offers of coke and heroin and Schroeder pretends not to hear. He knows never to raise his eyes from the ground. Not at a deadly junction like this. A black hole. A death-trap.

  Another deep breath and he launches himself into the multitude on Burgh Quay, named for Margaret Amelia Burgh, wife of John Foster, speaker of the Irish House of Commons and now the constipated gateway to the city, and begins to dodge his way westwards. A fat woman with a two-seater buggy crammed full of tinned dog food seems to have the sidewalk all to herself and everyone has to go around her, taking their chances with the traffic swinging around the one-way system. I know he hates this section of the quays. Everybody does. It’s clogged and stinking. Dirtbags, pushers, ban
dits and the odd brace of cops with their sad-eyed, black and tan dogs.

  Across the Liffey, Schroeder sees the phantom Spire shoot cloudwards. It was of course inevitable that, sooner or later, like the Pillar before it, it would be felled. Not that anybody cared. And sure what was it anyway? A status symbol? A folly? A vanity project built for the Millennium at a time of crazy prophecies from madmen who, as it turned out, were not too far off the mark? So little remains now of the Dublin Schroeder was born into and, in mockery of it all, he blesses himself as he passes the caged parking lot where the old Abbey Theatre used to be – closed for lack of money twenty-five years ago – a skeletal reminder that Dublin is now neither the second city of the Empire nor the first of the Republic. That in truth this city is just another hub of global dealing – a worn-out commercial capital of a state which is serially bought and sold with one treacherous stab of a keypad after another. A place so deep in debt that all sovereignty has been gone for years. A country which should have changed its very name back in 2010. Rebranded itself in the hopes that the world might have forgotten the details by now. My suggestion back then had been Anhedonia. And it still is.

  I watch Schroeder cross O’Connell Street, named for the Liberator, formerly Sackville Street, named for Lionel Cranfield Sackville, Duke of Dorset and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. He checks himself when a man in a bright red anorak steps out to confront the traffic. Everyone immediately hesitates. An anorak in these desert temperatures immediately marks the man out as a danger and a red anorak (with the hood up) even more so. A bus bouncing southwards over the bridge is refusing, on principle, to slow down and horns are blasted and arms are raised. The man in the anorak stands his ground and pulls at his hair. The bus rumbles on. The driver is getting out of the main strip as fast as he can and nothing will stand in his way, especially some crazy-head wearing a girl’s coat. Only at the very last moment does the man twirl his body aside so that the bus can roar on in solemn triumph towards Trinity. It’s a very close thing.