‘That’s right,’ puts in Cormac, my companion, ‘and you see the big spike thing over there. .’ he indicates a seventy-five-metre-high bodkin plunged into the urban pincushion, ‘. . it’s the Millennium Spire. When they were putting it up they had a giant crane sited right in front of Cleary’s, the department store, then when they were finally finished everyone walked round town singing “I can see Cleary’s now the crane is gone”.’
It’s a fitting entry to the westernmost cockpit of European literary modernism, this dinky-ville, in the grip of a painful dialectic between Catholicism and hedonism, and hence preoccupied with dualistic punning. The youthful populace of Dublin are being sucked out of the churches by the ideological vacuum; on to the streets, then into the bars and restaurants which have colonised the city centre. Where once burly men in soutanes enforced the creed, now burly men in black overcoats enforce the guest list. The curly plastic pigs’ tails dangling from their bruised ears presumably allow them to hear the word of the nightclubbing god.
It’s the brink of Ireland’s presidency of the European Union and a cavalcade of pols are in town to jaw-jaw. At the mouth of every side street in the city centre steel barriers have been placed to provide leaning room for Gardai. So every car journey we take — and we take many — proceeds at the stately pace of a sedan chair. ‘There’s roadworks in St Stephen’s Green,’ Vivian vouchsafes. ‘They’re putting in the new light railway line for the Luas.’
‘Luas?’ I query.
‘It means something in Gaelic,’ Cormac interjects, ‘possibly “light”.’
‘Possibly,’ Vivian continues, ‘although most people call it the Lose, because so much bloody money has been spent on the thing.’
Money: this is the true Blarney Stone of Dublin — kiss it and you’ll talk all night. The city is awash with wonga. The old public housing in the centre of town is being siphoned off, and the inhabitants poured into the big housing estates out by the ring road, which Dubliners don’t hesitate to call ‘ghettos’, estates that are also home to black and brown faces. Immigrants to Ireland! The world is turned upside down; a country that’s been sucked dry for four centuries is finally filling up again. Meanwhile, desirable residences are changing hands for astronomical figures: 450,000 euros for a tiny terraced house. Yes, the Eurotrash are in town, and one of the old Dublin city bosses is under judicial investigation — together with his pals — for taking kickbacks from developers going back to the 1960s. It’s a friendly visit from Big Corruption to Little Graft, to show them how it’s done.
Out at the headquarters of RTE they’re shooting First City, the soap opera that keeps the state broadcasting network afloat. In among the anonymous four-storey blocks of knobbly concrete and green-tinted glass, the set is a coruscating notch. Bright lights pick out the frontage of a typical Dublin ’burb: a convenience store, a betting shop, and Phelan’s, the bar that’s the focal point for the drama. ‘The fictional location is called Carrickstown,’ Cormac says, ‘but I’m pretty sure it’s meant to be Crumlindrumagh down on the coast to the south of town.’ It’s a nice architectural prolepsis, this set: the old Dublin community lost in the concrete canyon.
That night we breast the rivers of light that the city streets have become. I remember being here in 1980 when the roadways were dark troughs after 11.00 p.m. Is it my faulty recollection, or were there also horse-drawn carts jolting over the cobbles? Now we sit in an echt eatery, inhaling Thai seafood. The couple beside us pay their bill and leave. ‘See that woman,’ Cormac says. ‘I was at college with her. I kept trying to catch her eye, but the man with her wasn’t her husband.’
‘Yes,’ puts in Peter, a fellow journalist who’s dining with us, ‘ours is the first Irish generation who’ve been able to commit adultery. We have the facilities, we have the opportunities. Still, in a town as small as this you’re mad going to a restaurant.’
‘Mad,’ Cormac muses, contemplating the terrifyingly tiny world of the urban adulterer that Dublin’s been dragged into.
The Hot Spirit of the Caribbean
In Montserrat the hills mounted up to the volcano in a series of green gushes: plantations of bananas and sugar cane were interrupted by the painterly strokes of field terraces. This was a veritable Trevi Fountain of a Caribbean island, with at its summit a burbling fumarole which emitted a sulphurous stench, as the Devil tossed and turned beneath the earth’s crust, farting off his evil business lunch.
I say was, because, of course, since I was there twenty-eight years ago the volcano has blown its top and submerged two-thirds of the island in its fiery dung. Gone is the miniature capital with its dinky colonial buildings, gone are most of the dusty hamlets I remember caroming through with my mother in our hire car; and, while we’re at it, gone as well is my mother. I concede I can’t make too much of this annihilation of a month of my adolescence by an earthy eructation, but there is something peculiarly distancing about the past no longer being another country, but instead a barren land.
I think back to the black volcanic sand beaches of the island that toasted the soles of my feet and can hear the jingle of the local radio station well in my inner ear: ‘Got a feeling deep inside / It’s a feeling I can’t hide / Feel the spirit, feel it! / Feel the spirit of the Ca-ri-bbe-an / Radio Antilles, the big RA!’ It was my mother’s brother, Uncle Bob, who brought us to Montserrat. A one-time bigwig advertising man on Madison Avenue, Bob was responsible for — among many other things — the creation of the Pilsbury Dough Boy. A bakery burnout, followed by a triple heart bypass, drove him into early retirement. He and my aunt lived in a beautiful bungalow in one of the white retirement cantonments that studded the eastern shore of the island.
Uncle Bob may have furred up his ticker with fatty deposits but he wasn’t subdued by guerrilla surgery. Without wishing to impugn his memory, I think it fair to say that Bob remained spectacularly choleric. Aged fourteen, I was set by my uncle to clean the leaves from the gutters of the bungalow. After doing the back of the house, I moved to the front and saw him circling the poolside below, long-handled net in hand, as he fanatically removed particles of detritus from the pristine water. The inevitable mischievousness ensued: I dropped a single leaf from the roof into the pool and Bob swooped on it. I dropped a second and he swooped on this as well; a third followed and then a fourth. Finally, his hooded eyes tracked the path the leaf had followed back up to where I crouched, skinny on the eaves. With an almighty bellow of rage he smashed the pool scoop against the French windows, raced through the house, leapt into his Mini Moke and hurtled off into the hills.
But apart from these eruptions my uncle was a benign presence. The heart surgery hadn’t stopped him smoking either, and he turned a blind eye as I swiped packets of State Express 555 from the yellow and gold cartons that were scattered about the house like flammable ingots. On Radio Antilles the advert went something like this:
‘Daddy, why do you smoke State Express 555?’
‘I smoke them, son, because they’re the taste of success.’
‘Daddy, when I grow up I’m going to smoke State Express 555.’
‘You do that, son.’
With my State Express 555s well secreted I would be dropped off at the beach for a day’s snorkelling. Flipper-flapping out over the ruched seabed, imprisoned in my own portable, aquamarine diorama, I would dive down twenty and even thirty feet for sand dollars. Then I’d swim out still further and round the point until I reached the reef. Multicoloured fish would explode from its gnarled contours, while in the periphery of my vision I could see blunt-nosed barracuda, tracking the incursion of what to them must’ve been a curious white amphibian. I don’t imagine I’d be as sanguine now, but at fourteen I swam far out into the sea, revelling in the sight of manta rays the size of billiard tables, with their lethally poisonous queues-for-tails.