This street vibrates at a crossroads. A heat exchanger for the city. Social groups pass over and through one another. Strange alchemical reactions occur here. Odd growths and mutant strains of Dublin flourish and cross pollinate.

A startlingly camp young man served me in a shop. He looked about fourteen, I guess he must have been older. He actually shrieked with joy at my choice of hair goop. How refreshing change can be sometimes.

Two young gurriers stand in the street, being studiously ignored,  as they scream at long haired, middle class teenagers. ‘Heeyar! Heeyar hippy! HIPPY!’ ‘Heeyar ye fuckin’ ginger fuck! I’ll fuckin’ batter yeh!’ I give them the Face Ov Doom. Some things never change.

At Jervis street I pass a man I may have worked with once, but he does not notice me and I walk on.

Mary Street is transformed now, akin to a London backstreet. All life is here. A Polish shop offers ‘30% off Jars’, electronic phone repair shops with menus entirely in foreign tongues, Cyrillic alphabets and Chinese logograms. An asian family emerge from ‘Asian Market’ passing four immaculately dressed African men heading on into town.

One of the asian girls laughs in reply to a sibling, ‘Janey mack, you should have seen the state of him!’  The Dublin accent rolling off her tongue is pure inner city, shaded by the East. The idiom is Dublin to the bone.

On Capel street a short, middle aged man passes me. Bald, with a close cropped grey beard, he wears pale blue crocs, a huge pair of square diamond earrings and a short purple skirt. People lean out of doorways to stare. Love to know where he’s going.

On Abbey Street a figure emerges from the Garda Ombudsman building. An angry slouch, thin shoulders poised in an attitude beneath a hoodie. Cigarette, mobile, gold hoops, one blade haircut. Slouching along in that rolling, open crotched, alpha-male waddle so beloved of the city gurriers, she passes me, bellowing away into her phone.

The city is playing with me today.

On I go, I pass a woman I knew as a child. Twenty years or more have passed. She does not notice me and I walk on, lost in a web of memories strung amongst the familiar streets.

THE GURRIER and THE GIN LADY sit at a table, drinking coffee. A conversation drifts over the quiet hubbub of the cafe.

LADY 1: Yeah, I’m gettin’ mink eyelashes put on.

LADY 2: Mink?

LADY 1: Yeah, they’re mad expensive so they are, like €200.

LADY 2: €200?

LADY 1: Yeah, I want the pink ones though.

LADY 2: Pink, mink eyelashes?

LADY 1: Yeah.

THE GIN LADY: (O_o)

THE GURRIER: (O_O)

THE GIN LADY (whisper): How do they get the eyelashes off the mink first?

THE GURRIER: (@_@)

Oh local newspapers, how do I love thee.

This article appeared in the Blanch Gazette and I quote from it liberally as no comment is necessary.

Suspended sentences for identical twins

Drug-addicted identical twin brothers who hid their faces with tea towels when they robbed €42 worth of Easter eggs on April Fool’s Day last year, have been given suspended sentences.

Mark and Ciaran Cummin carried a bucket and a screwdriver and claimed they had a gun when they demanded money, but only got away with the Easter eggs and chocolate. Staff at Brady’s Service station, Navan road, secured themselves in a back office and watched the raid on CCTV by what Gardai described as “an unlikely pair of criminals”

But their criminal enterprises do not end there:

In addition to pleading guilty to “criminal damage of a hatch window at the Shell Garage in Mulhuddart, earlier that same day, Ciaran admitted he was the getaway driver on April 7 2006, in which staff at Hickey’s Pharmacy in Tyrrellstown, Dublin 15 reported that “a little fat man shouted repeatedly  while his trousers kept kept falling down” before making off with €1,000 cash and an assortment of drugs.

Irish Hybird Cars

They run on dead pigeons.

(image by John Picken)

In the long forgotten depths of prehistory when the internet was run on steampipes and hand cranked babbage machines, there existed a site known and feared amongst publicans throughout the land. That place was BeerandLoathing. The men who laboured alone and unloved in that bleak place are now long dead. The Dublin they cast their rheumy, hate filled eyes upon consigned to the wrinkled pages of history.

But now a new generation rises. Fella’s with iPhones and bluetooth enabled beer goggles. Hairy faced code monkeys remotely pricemapping the filthy city’s sheebeens and dives via realtime googlemashups. Behold www.pintofplain.com. See how your local Dublin pub fares in the rip off stakes. See who’s charging €6.00 for a pint of Guinness. See which local publican deserves to be tarred, feathered and nailed to the back of a tractor-trailer. Take a gander at who is charging a fair price and calculate the damage from a round of drinks with the handy round’o'meter.

Good luck to you my friend, ’tis a noble, but thankless task you have taken up.

The message scrawled on the door reads:

‘Now my finger is dirty’

and below,

‘So’s your mot‘

(Searching for a link for Mot, I came upon this lovely gem: ‘A Mouth like a Malahide cod’ – someone who never shuts up.)

‘Hand us them gloves.’

‘No way, I’m not touchin’ them yokes!’

‘Jaysus will ye ever just givvus the bleedin’ gloves.’

‘No. No way I’m not touching that yoke or them gloves.’

‘Listen here you. I’ve been scrapin’ shite and puke and God knows what off these streets for twenty five years and I’ll not have some chiseller giving me the lip. So pick up them gloves and give us a hand with George here.”

‘George?’

‘Yeah this is George, he’s a mark II model 1983. You’ll get used to them. George and Matilda over there are both mark II’s. They have a good capacity but tend to jam up on bank holidays. Ye need to jig around the lock a bit and they have a bit of an infestation problem too.”

‘A what?’

‘You’ll see’

The older man produced a worn key, more a lump of metal from the chain on his belt and approached George. He wrestled with the lock for a moment muttering under his breath and stepped back. There was a creaking sound, George seemed to shudder slightly and then with a slow creaking groan of relief like a man loosening his constipated bowels the front section burst open and vomited its overstuffed contents into the street.

‘Oh I’m going to puke. Jaysus the smell. Is something dead in there?’

‘Dead? No not dead’ said Jamesy taking an exploratory poke at the rubbish with the tip of his shovel. ‘Not yet anyway’ he said smashing the flat of it into a sluggishly mobile pile of rubbish. ‘Rats’ he said grinning. ‘Have to be careful of them. Little bollixes will bite right through them gloves there. Right lets get this lot loaded up.’

‘Ah janey mister I only after startin’ yesterday. Give us a break will ya. Look it I’ll clean up all them dead birds and broken bottles there beside Clerys. I just don’t want to touch that, that stuff.’

‘Don’t want to touch it? Don’t want to touch it! What are you afraid of then. Sure aren’t ye out here with me, Jamesy O’Donnell a fella who’s been sweeping the streets o’Dublin be the last twenty five years.’

‘Jaysus what’s that black stuff leaking out the bottom?’

“Deadly!’ said Jamesy producing a battered plastic petrol can from his cart. ‘That,” he said “is ‘Dublin Relish’ a substance both greatly feared and much sought after around these parts’

‘But what is it though?”

‘Well not being a man of science I wouldn’t expect you to comprehend but I am given to understand that the said substance is created by a form of compaction and reduction and the application of generous amounts of heat and water. ‘

The young fella stared at him perplexed.

‘It’s made from burgers. Layer after layer of burgers, chips, kebabs, ketchup, cheese, milkshakes, sweet wrappers, big macs, coke bottles, broken pint glasses, cans of budweiser cigarette ash, dead pigeons and lard mostly. The kind of stuff a Dublin bin is full of. The weather does a spot of watering, let it sit for about a week and you get around half a gallon of the lovely black stuff. Phwooar get a whiff of that!’

“Oh God help me.’

“No, no, givvus a hand here this stuff is worth a few quid”

The younger man looked on in abject horror as Jamesy began to tip the foul liquid contents of the bin into the petrol container. It slid from the metal bin in a slow black ooze. It smelled of very bad things.

“Christ who do you sell it too?”

“Oh you’d be surprised. Loads of fellas want a bit o’ the Dublin Relish. There’s a little Chinese lad up on Parnell street. He buys buckets of it from me so he does. Rubs it onto the arses of the rich ladies who visit him for the Shiatsu massage. Says it does wonders for the sciatica. Another fella out beyant in Finglas he’s a plumber. Sez the stuff’ll shift blockages faster than caustic soda. Then there’s another young chiseller in Raheny, big load of brains on him. He bottles it up and sells it to the Yanks over the computer. Heh, calls it ‘Jamesy’s Special Relish. A Taste of Dublin’. Fierce clever so he is.’

‘People eat this?’ the young fella’s mouth hung open and his eyes were wide as headlamps.

‘Yeah. Whats wrong with that. Sure I’ve seen worse’ The auld fellas eyes lit with a dark glee. “I’ve seen tings so I have. Terrible, terrible tings”

“What kind of things?” said the young fella gripping the handle of his shovel and twisting it in his greasy hands.

“Turrible tings” said Jamesy blinking his rhuemy eyes and grinning, revealing rows of yellowing teeth punctuated by the occasional gap.

“I’ve seen tings in bins that it make your average fella go mad so I have.”

“Tell us,’ said the young fella now gripped with a terrible need to know what awful things the ancient caretaker had seen.

“Ah no, ah no. Arra shure yer only a chiseller. It ‘ud not be for me to be telling ye tings that yer mammy wouldn’t want you to be hearin’.’

“Ah go on mister. Go on. I won’t tell me Ma I swear.”

Jamesy looked up O’Connell street at the crowds of shoppers and tourists milling about and leaning forward on his corporation shovel whispered “C’mere, do ye go to mass?”

“Wha?”

“I said do ye go to mass, do ye say your prayers?”

“Yeah when me Ma makes me.”

“Right so, well don’t be tellin’ the priest any of this in confession do ye hear”

“Confession?”

“Shurrup, do yeh want to hear the story or not?”

“Yeah, yeah go on.”

‘Hand us them gloves there and I’ll get started’

—————————————————————–

Better late than never. This weeks Flickr Fiction was inspired by this photo from Flickr user Donina and Dublin’s bins which really do leak that hideous substance known as Dublin Relish. Participants this week are Teaandcakes, Elimare, Tadmack and Aquafortis. Click on the links to read their versions.

The family home is in the south inner city. In twenty five years there it has exposed me to many of the seedier sides of Dublin life. Countless breaks ins, handbag snatches, muggings, car thefts, home invasions, drug addicts, drug dealers, escaped convicts, murderers on the run, brothels, prostitutes, pimps, pet murderers and enough broken car windows to glaze a cathedral. That’s nothing special I might add, I claim no badge of honour. I did not grow up on the mean streets of the ghetto or believe I had it tough or any other such tiresome posturing. There are many, many people who live in real ghettos in Dublin and confront crime, poverty and violence everyday and I do not wish to put on the poor mouth or imply that I am special. Nevertheless casual crime is merely a fact of life if you live in a large city. I grew up on the South Circular road that’s all and this has been my experience.

Denizens of cities develop a sixth sense for trouble. In reality it is a heightened sense of paranoia that ultimately is fruitless but deep in your heart you think one day, one day I will catch one of those bastards and then there’ll be a reckoning. That’s how I used to think growing up. When you’re a kid and powerless, sweeping up the glass from another broken window or seeing your parents work hard to give you a better life and then some gurrier comes along and decides to burn out your car or kill your pets or steal your bike because they can, because the narrative of their life says this is what you do. Break windows, steal things, kill things whatever.

It was not a daily occurrence but it is a wearing, grinding thing, a low level trauma that never leaves you. I slept lightly because I always assumed the worst. The least noise was someone trying to break in, to smash, to vandalise, to attack. A sound outside would have me peering out on to the road looking for the cause of the trouble. Inevitably it was a drunk or other inebriate wending their way home. The casual crime would happen when you were asleep at three in the morning and what could be done by the time you woke up? Always the victim deals with the consequences and wishes they could have been ready, been there to alter the course of events.

Once I woke up and spotted one, just once. A gurrier trying to break into my fathers car, I banged on the window and he ran away. Once in twenty five years. That was it, through several generations of criminals. Enough to fill half of mountjoy with scumbags and I catch one skanger trying to break into my Dad’s car. Until today.

Myself and the Brother are upstairs chatting away. Then of a sudden there’s almighty ructions from the dog downstairs in the kitchen. She’s a Jack Russell pup and it sounds like she’s being murdered so we tear down the stairs thinking she’s dropped a steam iron on her head or done herself some other injury.

The gurrier is standing in my parents kitchen when we come through the door. The dog is making such a racket he doesn’t hear us approach until we burst in. He turns and sprints into the garden and I am running now. I hear shouting and realise the noise is me roaring at the top of my lungs. “GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY HOUSE YOU FUCKING BASTARD, YOU FUCKING BASTARD GET THE FUCK OUT MY HOUSE! BASTARD! And I’m running and I can see him, I can see the bastards face, I can see his fucking face and he’s every toe rag fuckwit who ever stole from my family in twenty five years and he’s halfway up the tree now and I’m so fucking close I can see the hairy tache on him and the fear in his eyes and and I’m still screaming and I realise I’m going to catch this bastard, I’m really going to catch him, I’m going to catch one of these fuckers at long last and then I’ll, I’ll, then I’ll, shit what the fuck am I going to do if I do catch him?

And the moment is gone and so is he.

Rationalising after the fact I come to the conclusion that it was probably the best outcome. He stole nothing, got a bad scare being chased out of the house and almost caught by two angry men and a dog, we felt we achieved something in defending our parents home and most importantly no one was hurt including the dog.

The male thing kicks in of course and you think well I should have liked to give him a few lumps but in the end I’m philosophical about these things. Having physically defended my family from aggressive invaders on a previous occasion (a tale for another day) and dealt with the physical and emotional repercussions of that I can safely say that discretion is the better part of valor.

Still I got a finger to him. The native Americans call it counting coup. Only another twenty five years to go before I get another run at it.

Heytesbury street and its environs are, like most places in Dublin’s inner city, awash with bits of literary history. Brendan Behan died in the Adelaide and Meath hospital in whose shadow our encounter occurred. A couple of hundred years earlier Jonathan Swift kept his horse in a paddock and had a garden on what is now the hospital grounds, in his day the boul Oliver St John Gogarty was a member of the hospital staff. George Bernard Shaw was born up the road and the author Cornelius Ryan was born in number 33.

Synge Street C.B.S Alma Mater to a slew of Irish celebrities and public figures spills over onto Heytesbury street. There’s a line or two from the Joyce fella’s book as well but sure there’s barely a street worth mentioning that isn’t. Clinton had a pint in Cassidy’s one street over on his visit in ’95 and I’m probably missing out a geansai load of other trivia.

Heytesbury Street has its own Wikipedia entry surely a sign that one has arrived as a person, place, or thing in these times.

During a stint as a relief postman for An Post the corner in question lay on the very farthest edge of my route. For me it marked the turning point in the day. Once I reached the end of Arnott street I was into the home stretch. Mary Black or Mary Coughlan or Mary some singer or other lives around the corner. She would receive square boxes from her record label that needed to be signed for and always had nice decorations in her window at Christmas time.

The Adelaide and Meath hospital is closed now. Subsumed with several others into a mega hospital complex out in Tallaght. It’s used for offices or some such thing one presumes on a temporary basis as prime development property of its kind is a rare bird in the city centre in these times. I had occasion to visit the A&E (that’s ER American friends) there some years back. It was 1996 I think, before the current health crisis peaked, when a visit to the A&E meant only a wait of roughly ten or eleven hours before being seen. My girlfriend at the time had taken a fall at work badly damaging her knee and aggravating an old injury. I remember the bed she was lying on was covered in someone elses dried blood and a drunk kept running in and out through the double doors and screaming he was going to kill all the doctors.

—–

This rambling post was an experiment in how much information could be gathered on the net and from memory about a random street corner in Dublin. Not bad, I think. I wonder if I tried this experiment again in another five years just how much more information would be available.

‘Get me a drink Paddy. I need a fucking drink just to look at you’.

It was too much. I had to get out of there. Shut her up with cheap gin and cooking sherry. It meant a trip to the shopping centre but there was no getting around it. It was gin or violence and today I had the stomach for neither.

The shopping centre. What circle of hell is reserved for the makers of shopping centres. Slumped against the M50 like concrete roadkill, a massive manmade turd steaming in the bright sunlight. Filled to bursting with terrifying heaps of mangled humanity, gurning freaks gobbling septic chicklegs, pigeon chested gurriers in ridiculous pants and neon painted Toyota Sparrowfarts, hatchet face young wans with jam and snot encrusted childspawn. Acres of sunburned flesh wobbling in the artificial light. Blanchardstown shopping centre, mall of the damned. People get stabbed here, people get murdered here, people buy crap here. Lots and lots of crap.

As I pulled into the carpark child midgets on bikes circled the cars looking for an easy mark. I parked and counted out my greasy tenners. The rent would have to wait, gin was needed. It was time to enter the fleshpits of Blanchardstown and purchase some booze.

Inside the heat was worse. A suffocating, clammy humidity pressing against my face. The place was rancid with sweaty teenagers and bored looking pramfaces. Just let me get to the Boozepile and it will all be ok. Five minutes and I’ll be in and out. Head down I pushed my way through the crowds. I could see the entrance now just a few feet away. I could see my goal, row after row of tramp label gin waiting inside the door in the bargain bins of Boozepile. It was then, mere inches from safety that my luck ran out.

“Are you the fugitive!”
The woman had a face like a butcher’s elbow and a mad glint in her rheumy eyes.
‘Oh Jesus they’ve found me,’ I thought. ‘They know what I’ve done! Act natural you fool, feign ignorance’

“What?”

Her grip on my arm tightened. She looked insane, glancing around I saw she had allies in the crowd. Huge bulbous women slathered in orange make up pressed in closer to hear my answer. Christ how did they know?Who told them?

“Are you the 98FM fugitive?”

“Jesus no.”

“You have to tell me if you are. Have you envelopes?”

She made a grab at my envelope of greasy tenners. She wanted the booze money! The landlord I could deal with but The Gin Lady would murder me if I lost the cash supply for the booze.

“No!” I shouted. “Get away, I’m not the fugitive, I haven’t done anything.”

I pulled away from the mad woman, frantically stuffing the tenners into my pants.

“Is he the fugitive?’ an ancient blubbery crone wheezed from a bench.

‘He says he not,’ said the madwoman eyeing me with suspicion and naked aggression.

I staggered away the mission for booze now forgotten. Something was wrong here. Very wrong. The atmosphere was violent and murderous. Bad things were brewing. A place like this could go up at any moment. Behind me I heard a voice shouting.

“ARE YOU THE 98FM FUGITIVE!”

“No, for the love of Jesus, no.”

“You have to tell me if you’re him. Have you envelopes?”

This woman was enormous. She looked like a shaved gorilla. Huge sausage fingers grasped at my shirt.

“Are you sure you’re not the fugitive?”

Crumbs of chicken burger were stuck to my chest.

“Madam please I beg you. I’m not well, can’t you see. I need my envelopes for booze. Have mercy on a broken man please. I need these envelopes.”

“The envelopes have the prizes,” she muttered to herself releasing me from the sausage grip.

This was too much. The place had gone hysterical. Everywhere deranged women were accosting single men. ‘Are you the fugitive, are you the fugitive,’ they wailed. I had to get out of here. These women were desperate. Horny for criminals with cash stuffed envelopes. I had no chance here amongst these people, they would have me stripped naked and dead in a flash.

Then I saw it, my redemption. A bookshop. I’d be safe there. Safe from the crazy harridans. A bookshop would give me respite from these people. I stumbled in and then the screaming began. The shop was filled with them.

“Look its him. ITS HIM!”

“Go on get ‘im, get ‘im!”

I grabbed a book and pretended to ignore them.

“Are you the fugitive?” the familiar refrain came.

Maybe if I ignore them they will go away.

“IF THE FUGITIVE IS IN THE STORE WILL HE PLEASE OUT UP HIS HAND”

Oh God this was it they had me cornered. Behind me a gaggle of book assistants approached blocking off the aisles. I turned to flee but two women with buggies ran into the shop. They glowed with oranginess.

“I don’t fucking care I’m going to ask him,” said one who resembled a leathery tangerine.

“Are you the 98FM fugitive?”

“Please, for the love of God ladies I am not he. I am not the one you seek.”

I felt a tugging at my trouser leg. Looking down I found myself staring into the jam coated face of an urchin who had escaped from his mobile prison. The urchin looked up at me plaintively and said.

“Are you my daddy?”

I fell back mouthing oaths, that was it, I was doomed. Doomed to die here in this place of evil.

There was a scream from outside the shop and the harridans turned as one.

“I FOUND HIM. I FOUND THE FUGITIVE!”

There was more screaming and a frenzy of scuffling.

“He’s not the fucking fugitive,” said one of the orange goblins shoving me aside and racing out into the scrum of women. Their attention elsewhere I made good my escape.

Outside the shop a mob had gathered whooping and hollering. Nothing was visible, if that poor bastard was in there, there was no hope for him. I saw the gorilla lady wading into the centre of the fray, sausage fists a blur of motion as she pounded anorexic stick ladies into ground beef. The madwoman was there too clutching a blood stained envelope and grinning triumphantly. I caught a glimpse of the urchin gnawing on a string of lumpy intestines as the leather tangerine stuffed a pair of bloody trousers into her handbag.

The Gin Lady would have to make do with lighter fluid cocktails today it was time to leave booze or no.