With Your Feet In The Air And Your Head On The Ground

I had lunch in the gallery today, then took a walk around to look at the paintings. You have to, really, don't you. You can't just get the large salad plate in the café and sit there reading your book with your sunglasses on your head and then fuck off to the park with a takeaway coffee. And you really can't eat in the café and then browse in the gift shop and fuck off to the park without visiting the art. So I did. I was more interested in the other visitors than in the masterpieces on display. I watched them carefully, especially the ones who looked like they were there alone and hadn't just come there to kill time before their hospital appointment. I tried to spend as long as they did in front of each painting, looking to see what they saw. But the only one that caught my eye was William Orpen's portrait of John McCormack. I have an eye for older men, grey-haired, creased, soft around the middle. 

I like the bathrooms in the gallery. I took my time in the ladies', washing my hands, looking at myself in the mirror. The new freckles that smudge my cheeks and upper lip complement my curly hair and the heft of my hips. I look healthy.

I spent a while browsing in the gift shop but I didn't buy anything. I picked up each of the notebooks in turn, admired their beautiful covers and the texture of the paper inside but I have shelves of notebooks at home, all empty. Too busy hanging the shelves to fill the notebooks, I thought to myself, but that's not true. 

I fucked off to the park then, with my takeaway coffee, and sat down on an empty bench. I sat right down the end of it to show the world that I am happy to share, and after a minute an elderly man in sandals with plastic shopping bags stuffed into their soles sat down beside me and offered me a cigarette. "No thank you" I said, though I really wanted one and I really wanted him to like me. "But please have one yourself. I'll be asked in a little while if I smoke and I have to be able to say no and mean it." He nodded and lit his cigarette. "It's nice here" he said "much more peaceful than Stephen's Green." We sat there quietly for a bit. He told me that he was waiting for his friend, Mary. That she'd gone for the cancer check and he was wondering how she'd got on. I told him that they can't tell you right away, that it takes eight weeks sometimes. "Is that right?" he said "she won't like that at all."

I stopped to photograph some flowers on my way out of the park. A cherry blossom tree and a broken street light, a bed of bright pink tulips. I knelt on the grass to take a picture of the tulips but it was damp and soaked through the knees of my grey leggings. The cold wet on my knees was such a surprise that I forgot to take the photo. The damp patches were another thing to explain to the nurse. She won't ask, they never do, but no sooner am I in the consultation room than I'm offering excuses for my knees, the mayonnaise on my dress, the yellowed bruises on my shins and thighs, the abnormal cells I expect they'll find again on my cervix. Because at the root of this is my fear that I am rotten, that something I have done has led to me having to present my self here every six months, making small excuses for this flaw at my very core.

Sinéad introduces herself and asks me for my date of birth and the correct pronunciation of my surname. She is impressed that I know the exact date of my last period. She notes it in my file and then recognises her own handwriting among the previous entries. "You're back on Thursday for the gynae clinic" she says. "I'm so sorry, if I'd realised then I could have spared you the trip and we could have done both on the same day." But I tell her not to worry. I needed the day out, the afternoon off. To have a smear done and then to sit and talk with a doctor about how I might someday somehow have a baby when I'm not sure I want to would be too much all at once, I say, and as I do a creeping rash crawls up my neck and flushes my cheeks and she looks at me with such sympathy that I think I might cry. She does the smear test, assisted by the tiny nurse who always enters the room like she's arriving at a party, and then afterwards she tells me that if this one comes back negative, I'll be able to attend the GP again instead of the special clinic. She tells me this while I'm standing there with no pants on, and I am grateful to her for not leaving the room while I get dressed, as if that might spare my dignity. "See you on Thursday" she says. 

And so I left there feeling quieted. 

Back on Merrion Square I passed a crocodile of students from Hedley Park, twelve three-and-four-year-olds tied together with string, the girls in straw boaters and the boys in school caps. People smiled to see them pass and to hear their chatter. They were like something from Madeline. I wanted to take a photo but of course I couldn't. Not of other people's children. So I took a seat on a bench instead and started writing on the back of the only paper I had to hand, a letter for a neighbour from VHI Healthcare mistakenly delivered through our door that I'd been meaning to repost for the last week. It seemed important to capture the image of the Hedley Park kids as they made their way up the street, the black leash wrapped around their wrists and bunched in their chubby little fists, the way they bumped into one another when their teacher stopped at the lights. I ran out of space on the envelope, and of reasons to stay sitting on a bench in the park. I called Andrew to see if he'd finished work. "Hi" I said "will you walk me home?"

Her Red Hair Falling Like The Sky

I bought two bottles of red hair dye last week. I'm not really sure why. I was in Derry, in Superdrug, testing the cashier to see how many packets of non-prescription painkillers she'd allow me to purchase before referring me to a pharmacist or asking me to leave, and they just had this amazing display of endless possibility, a whole aisle dedicated to hair dye. 

So I bought two. Two of the same dye, that is. They were on special. 

I haven't used them. I put them on top of the bathroom cabinet, but then I worried that anyone who saw them there might assume that my hair is dyed when it's not, so I put them into the press under the sink instead. I took one out the other day and opened the packet and spread its contents out on the kitchen table and read the instructions and then piled it all back in again and hid it again among the spare toilet rolls. 

It's not that I'm going grey (though I am). It's just,

I am worried that I will destroy the bathroom. I own it, you see, along with Andrew. I've never owned a bathroom before. It's stressful, owning your own bathroom. It cost us a fortune and, for a month, a cat. I don't want to streak the bath, the pristine white grouting, the badly-laid lino, with red hair dye. 

I am worried that I will look brassy, and I am worried that brassy is the wrong word to use. I worry that I will not look like myself and that I will look better, not worse. I worry too much about things and I always have.

When I was fourteen years old it was all I wanted in the world to be allowed to dye my hair. My parents forbade it. My looking to be something or someone other than I was before I'd even grown into myself worried them. And they owned the bathroom. "Give me one good reason" said my dad. So I gave him ten. He kept them, all these years, and he gave me his permission. I spent a year dyeing my hair and the tips of my ears and then at fifteen, shaved it all off.

Now, at thirty two, it's crept back down to kiss my shoulders and I'm not sure what to do with it. I have two bottles of red hair dye and a reminder from my fourteen year old self that I should allow myself some frivolity and that I am still very loved. 

Thank You It Was Great Let's Make Another Date

Working from home on a Wednesday morning and having no pressing reason to stay in bed, I got up early and took a walk around Stoneybatter. I needed to go to the shop for milk, but I went the long way around because if all you saw of Stoneybatter in the morning was Tesco on Prussia Street then you'd never leave your room. I walked down through the houses with Andrew, kissed him goodbye on Manor Street and then walked back up the hill, past the shuttered shops and the kids on scooters, headed for school. Prussia Street was quiet. There were three men sat on the cold ground outside the post office, waiting for it to open. "Hello there lady!" said one and he gave me a gubby smile. I said hiya and smiled back and his comrade dug him in the ribs with his elbow. "She likes you, she does! Oh, she likes you!" I could hear him hoot as I walked on towards the supermarket.

I was the only customer in the shop. I walked through the carpark on the way out rather than back by the post office. The three men waved, calling me over. I waved back and kept walking. I stopped at the lights to cross the road just as the man who drinks at the bus stop on Hanlon's Corner walked out in front of the traffic. He had his 2 litre bottle of Diet Coke in his hand and his beanie hat perched on the crown of his head, the same expression on his face as he does when I pass him at half five every evening and he shouts hello and asks if I'd like to smell his finger. The traffic slowed for him and I braced myself for conversation, but he just crossed and kept on going.

The Valentines I Never Knew

"You look like you've lost a lot of weight" my boss said, eyeing me up. I am dressed today in a cerise pink jumper dress and a pair of black leggings, and I am sweating slightly because underneath the jumper I am still wearing the vest that I wore on the ride in to work this morning. I wore the same vest in bed last night. I've been doing that a lot this winter. Taking things off only to put them back on again. I like the residual heat and the comforting smell of sleep that clings to the cotton. 

"I haven't lost any" I tell her. I am not uncomfortable with our conversation, just practiced and a little resigned. She is interested in diet and exercise and discipline and control. I am not. We have had this conversation before. I have this conversation with a lot of people. This one and the baby one. Most of the time it's fine. I am open and frank and working on dropping the self-deprecation, which is as tired and unflattering as this bobbled cerise pink jumper. I haven't lost weight, is the truth of it. Not recently, anyway. I'm a little fitter than I was. "I've been cycling" I tell people, and then I bore the tits off them with tales of my triumphs over adversity on my bicycles. I have two now. Andrew thinks one of them is his. 

My boss' comment on my weight is intended as a compliment, because she knows that I am self-conscious and that I would like there to be less of me. I have never told her that I hate being overweight, that I have always felt fat, that it has inhibited me socially, sartorially and sexually all my adult life. She can see it in how I stand, arms folded, or sit with a cushion clutched to my soft belly. It's stitched into the empire lines of the dresses I wear. Even if she couldn't see it there, she could presume. Because being fat is something to be ashamed of, isn't it? I don't know. I haven't read Fat is a Feminist Issue. I don't really read non-fiction. I would like to read a novel where the protagonist doesn't lose weight but feels better anyway. Some day I will write one.

I try to say "thank you" when someone tells me that my hair is nice or that my dress is lovely. I have a lot of hair and a few lovely dresses and anyone who compliments me on them does not really need to be told when I last had a haircut or where and for how much I bought my dresses. I hold compliments close and commit them to memory, turning them over and tickling their bellies when my own feels exposed and I need to feel soft fur under my fingers. And I try not to say "thank you" when someone tells me that I've lost weight.

I Gag My Mouth To Stop The Badness Coming Out

"I don't like films about the end of the world" says Ann. Ann is the office secretary, a sweet-natured woman who practices reiki and prays to angels. We are very different.

I tell her that I like films and books about the end of the world because they remind me that I'm not the only one who thinks about it. "So long as the films aren't jumpy" I say "I hate jumpy ones." The end of days should approach with a slow, dreadful creep.

Ann can't understand why I would think about things like that. But there is comfort to be found in stories where people face unimaginable horror and loss. They are about how people manage. All kinds of unlikely people. Even when sometimes everyone dies at the end.

I don't know how well I'd manage, I tell her. I cannot run far or fast. I'll eat nothing but cereal if I'm left on my own for too long. I am not brave. 

Ann doesn't think that I need to think about these things. "Nothing like that will happen to us" she says. I believe her. I don't really think the world will end while I'm in it. I just can't see it happening. I haven't watched Climate Change is Simple even once. Maybe it's because I don't have children. I have a separate bin for recyclables and I bring my empty bottles to the bank on Prussia St., but I don't care that much, really. I like flattening cartons and the satisfying smash of glass. I don't think anything I do makes a difference. 

What I think about and try not to wait for is my end of days. Not the day I die, though I think on that too, but the day I am left bereft. The days. How will I cope then? I imagine, in the best of all scenarios, that I will eat a lot of cereal. 

Our cat, Butters, strayed. He's home now so this part of the story has a happy ending and you can read on in confidence, but for a full month he was missing. It's been cold and wet and I went to sleep most nights imagining him curling himself into a tight ball and breathing his last and being no more. And it hurt me so much to think about that I could hardly breathe myself. I slept, though, and I got up in the mornings and microwaved porridge and made Andrew get out of bed and eat it in front of the SAD lamp. Because those were the things I could do to make a difference. I suppose that's how some parents feel about recycling. 

I listen to Shelly Kagan's Yale course on Death and am reassured on the matter of my own, but I haven't stopped fretting about yours. I worry about being left behind. About not having anything to look forward to. I don't believe in heaven or hell or reincarnation or in any other life but this one. I haven't come to the chapter yet on how to live given the certainty of death. I don't want to skip ahead. 

My sister boarded a flight to Glasgow last year where a little boy, about six years old, turned to his mother and roared "WE'RE ALL GAUNNAE DIE, YA STUPIT BITCH!" as everyone on the plane fastened their seatbelts and prepared for takeoff. His mother gave him a packet of crisps and he settled down. He'd said his piece and was content with his lot. 

Today's title comes from Joe Chester's beautiful I Always Think You're Leaving Me. We saw him play in the Cobblestone last night. "Trevor Hutchinson really is dreamy" Andrew said. The whole gig was. But I know what he means. 

Whatever Happened To Shanice, Baby, I Love Your Smile?

When I noticed it first I thought the cat had scratched me. He’s taken to kneading at me through the duvet at night and sometimes if his claws catch right through the thick tog I am left with small circular marks on my skin. The kneading is new. Otherwise I’d never have let him into the bedroom in the first place. The other cat, the kitten, went missing over a month ago now and though he never seemed to like him much, he must be lonely without him. And so he kneads. 

‘Why do cats knead?’ I asked the computer. Because really, who else can you ask? I’m hardly going to call the vet. I’d already called to report him missing, even though he’s chipped and they’d be calling me if they’d heard anything. “Buh? Buhtters? Bootehrs?” said Tony when I called. “No” I said “Butters. Butters.” Tony and I have this conversation every time. Tony answers the phone in the surgery and makes small conversation with people and their pets in the waiting room. He wears a nurse’s tunic, thick glasses and two hearing aids and looks like there might be something wrong with his face. He likes to ask people what age their pets are. He knows what age they’re likely to live to. He is in mourning for his spaniel which died three or so years ago and he has told me twice now how he has kept all of her little outfits. Tony is perpetually wet-lipped with ghoulish compassion and I cannot stand to be around him, even over the phone. 

Cats knead for comfort, apparently. Kittens do it when they’re sucking at their mothers’ teats. Adult cats revert to juvenile behaviours when under stress. I am reduced to Yahoo Answers.

I keep picking at it, this little red spot on my left middle finger, expecting it to flake away like a little scab. It’s slightly raised, when I run my thumbnail over it the skin around it puckers and I can feel a little pop when I scrape the nail over its surface. It’s not sore, or even sensitive. It’s just there. 

I have others. I have one on my right breast, also red, larger than this new one on my finger. You’d need to be looking for it but if you were, I’d hope you’d notice. I have a cluster of black ones on my right temple. My pen freckles, I call them. I like to be kissed there. I have lost count of the number of times someone has told me that I have ink on my face, or wet a thumb and scrubbed at it, like I’m a grubby child. 

‘What are red freckles?’ I ask the computer. ‘Cherry angiomas’ it says, and their number and size increases with advancing age. They’re also called Campbell De Morgan spots. I think pen freckles sound better. 

My best friend in primary school was a boy called Shane who lived in our estate and liked dinosaurs as much as I did. Shane had a lot of freckles too and sometimes smelled a bit funny and could be just as cruel as other little boys but when it was just us or, more often, just us and my younger brother, he was quiet and kind and I liked spending time with him. We’d play Dinosaurs of the Lost World or read our books. My brother hated books, thought dinosaurs were stupid and was bored by the afternoons we spent with Shane. I’ve spent all my adult life seeking out the same easy, quiet company. But when we were put sitting beside one another in school, we’d draw on each other with markers. I was an unusually quiet student; diligent, conscientious, shy. The teacher could not understand why my hands, arms and legs were covered in multicoloured dots. Pen freckles. 

Long after Shane and I parted ways, I kept drawing freckles onto my hands. In my twenties, unmoored from the bland relationships that had kept my confidence afloat during my teens, I started to mask my insecurities with mindless chatter. Like Tony and his dead spaniel, texting, tweeting, bleating, pressing up against your leg under the table and sliding my fingers into your palm. Embarrassed by myself, I’d ink a black dot onto the back of my hand to remind me how good it feels to be quiet with someone, to be silent and content in their company. I still do it, sometimes, to remind me of something I need to do, or to say, or to be. 

When I Am An Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple

I could hear an engine idling outside. A low thrum. We were in bed. Warm. Intimate. He was talking to me, whispering in my ear, but I was distracted. Couldn't be outside our house, my car is there. And that's not my car. It sounds newer. But who sits with their engine idling outside Mrs. Brady's house at this hour?

I began to rehearse what I'd say to the ambulancemen.

We've only just moved in, I'd say, but then I'd ramble. Well, we moved in just before Christmas (two weeks before Christmas) but you know yourself you're in and out and then one of the neighbours had told us she was very elderly and sick and just out of the hospital so we didn't want to... and then I'd trail off because by then the neighbour who told us, Susan, would have heard my excuses from three doors down and she'd be out in her dressing gown and slippers and not a towel and a hoodie and a pair of Andrew's boots, and she'd be helpful, writing down emergency contact numbers for Mrs. Brady's nephew and her home help whose name I don't know. I've met her a few times, the home help, smoking on Mrs. Brady's doorstep. Happy Christmas! I said and I gave her my biggest smile when I ran into her on Christmas morning as I was leaving on my bike to visit my nana. I still feel the compulsion to tell people that I cycle places. Like they'll be impressed. Mrs. Brady's home help wasn't. Happy Christmas, she said, only I have to fuckin' work, don't I? I didn't know what to say to that so I just smiled a bit wider and pedalled off. On my bike.

What? Andrew asked. My gawpy kisses gave me away. I sat up in the bed. I'm just going to check outside, I said, I can hear a car. It's been there a while. It might be an ambulance. For Mrs. Brady. I spoke in a low voice and short sentences, the better to convey the gravity of the situation. Our elderly neighbour had just died, after all, and we'd never even bothered to call in and introduce ourselves. Now we'd have a dead old woman either side of our terraced cottage (Dolly died nine years ago in the house to our right and nobody has lived there since). Andrew cocked an ear. Do you mean the buzzing noise? he asked. Yes, I said. It's not a car, he said. You dropped your thingy on the floor. It's still buzzing. I reached a hand down and groped around in the dark, found it and switched it off.

Mrs. Brady lives.

Life Is A Lesson To Learn In Our Time

As I cycled up Mobhí Road this morning I passed a man smoking a pipe and the smell of it and the smile he gave me made me wobble off my bike. I hurt my shin but it was fine, I was wearing my helmet.

The smell of the pipe smoke and the smile reminded me of my grandad, who died four years ago last March. I miss him and I don't. And I miss him. I am reassured by how life has gone on without him just like it will go on without you or me, and knowing that makes me swell with hope and feel terribly sad all at the same time. I miss him for my nana. Her love doesn't live with her any more and I think of how impossibly hard it must be to dress yourself every morning knowing that. And yet she does it. 

I miss him for my mam, who misses her dad. I miss him for my dad, who he was a second father to, long years after his own father died. I never knew him.

I miss him for my husband, who he never met. He'd have liked him. He liked kind men and I can imagine how he'd have sat me down to tell me how much he liked Andrew and how proud he'd have been to see me marry him. He liked to sit me down to tell me things. He wrote me a letter just once, telling me why I shouldn't smoke. It was important to him. I smoked anyway, and didn't keep the letter. I really wish I had.

I'm crying now. Quietly, so that the secretary won't notice. It'd be too hard to explain to her that I'm crying because a man smoking a pipe smiled at me this morning and my grandad died four and half years ago. 

I borrowed a bike from him in 2007. It was a loan; he was ill by then and couldn't cycle but he wasn't done with it. He never had a car. He learned to drive a delivery van when he was young but he and nana spent fifty-odd years going anywhere they needed to on bikes. This one, a silver Trek, was as good as new. I rode to work on it a few times. I locked it up in the underground car park of the apartment block where I lived and forgot about it like you would a promise to meet up soon, no really, let's not leave it so long next time. Next time was in 2008. I went to the car park to get it so that I could loan it to a friend but it was gone. I never told nana. I felt too ashamed, not that it had been stolen but that I hadn't noticed, or cared.

I bought a new bike last November, and started riding it to work this summer. I told nana about it, forgetting in my excitement that I'd never told her about losing grandad's one. She's been very encouraging, and will be very proud of me when I ride across the city to see her tomorrow and arrive with a pink flush in my cheeks and a heart bursting to show her how well I am, how well I've done, how far I've come, how much I love her. How I've a bruise on my shin from wobbling off my bike on Mobhí Road. She will understand why. 

Janis Pity

I spent a week working in the Grand Canal Hotel recently, sitting in on some stuffy workshops in an airless room, flogging a lame old horse. On the final evening I left as soon as was polite and took a walk down by some of my old haunts. Lower Mount St., Grand Canal St. and the basin, Love Lane, where I spent three years of my life. I don't feel that I really lived there. That I had any more substance than my reflection did on that Friday evening a week ago, flung back at me as I walked past the glass-fronted buildings.

I rented a room in an apartment there, in a soulless purpose-built apartment block where I knew the neighbours only by the smell of their dinners in the empty hallways. I'd just started in my first full-time job, just moved out of home. "Don't call me every day" I said to my mam. "I won't have any news and you'll think I'm just not talking to you." I was 24.

I made a point of not going home at weekends. I didn't want to make a habit of it. The apartment I shared was a charmless place, with cheap furniture and a bathroom mottled with mold. I hung fairy lights, sprayed it like a tomcat with Penneys-bought soft furnishings. Played at being houseproud. When I wasn't drinking or sleeping off a hangover, I rearranged the furniture. My dad started referring to the apartment as my "home" and I felt grateful and betrayed.

He and my mam visited me often, making as much of an effort to recognise my independence as I was making to establish it. I took them walking down along the cobbles on Clanwilliam Place, through to the new square that was being built at the Grand Canal Basin, and I felt proud then that I lived there, amongst all those new buildings, the steel and glass and money.

Most of the time, I didn't feel very proud. I felt like a fraud. I was lonely and greedy and young and I didn't know how to go about making a life for myself, a happier one where I didn't feel like I had to stay out all night or wax off all my pubic hair to prove that I was on top of everything and having the best time. I felt like things were running away from me. And so I started a blog.

I wanted attention. I wanted to capitalise on what I thought of (and still think of) as one of my more attractive abilities; my skill in framing a story. I told Regan about my walk back through those years over a cup of tea last week, and how all the suffocating loneliness I'd lived with there came bouncing back at me off every shiny surface I passed. He said he'd hate to live there. "I'd be on Grindr all the time" he said. "I know" I said "sure, I was".

I was referring to my blog, though there was that time I put an ad on Gumtree. I'd had a look at online dating sites but I wanted something honest. I got hundreds of replies, all of them pictures of penises. Well, maybe not all. I didn't look at them all. Some of them might have sent me photos of their wives, or their cats, or their faces.

Keeping a blog didn't change anything for me. I just blogged about staying out too late and getting too drunk and having all the hangovers and waxing off my pubic hair and having the best time. But I was taking the time to sit down and think about it, to put words on it. I wrote about myself in a flattering light, with just enough self-deprecation and vulnerability to be likeable. I left out the bits about destructive friendships and drunken text messages to ex-lovers, about comfort eating and penis photos from Gumtree.

But keeping a blog did change things. Getting older changed things too, getting sense and making friends and falling in love. I began to hold myself to account. I stopped writing as often on my blog. I began to live a little less like everyone was watching.

Walking back along Grand Canal Street last week, crossing the cobbles on Clanwilliam Place, ducking under the bridge and across to Grand Canal Quay, I remembered bringing my parents on a walk there not long after I'd moved to Love Lane, and being so proud of it. I feel embarrassed by it now. I feel embarrassed too by many of the posts on the blog. Well, I would if I had the stoutness of heart to reread them. Each time I'm tempted to delete it, I remind myself of the dearth of photos of me as a teenager. I'm old enough now to appreciate a few pictures of me as I was then, with my shaved head and bald confidence.

I noted the old streetnames as I walked along the quay, towards the river and the bridge to home. Misery Hill and Lazer Lane, Lána na Lobhar, lost now in amongst the elegant new buildings. Once the last refuges of lepers and lost souls hoping to make the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, nowadays you pick your pilgrim's passport up at the brewery.

Review: The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists

Some pun on the dodo's name - Polly - and the film being a "cracker"

Yet another film in which Hugh Grant plays a scurrilous cad with questionable morals and floppy hair. But lo, they stuck a beard on him, and I loved it.

Andrew did too. He wants a manpanzee.

Mr. Bobo.