On The No. 4

*ding*

"I like the sound that the new bells make!" I said to the driver.

Two glasses of wine.

"I fuckin' don't" he muttered. And the bus shuddered to a stop.

"Go on then" he sighed. "You can press it again."

*ding*

I Saw Your Reflection

There was a homeless man stood outside the shop this morning. He was stroking someone else's dog, which was tied to the post by the door. The Labrador had a sleek, glossy black coat. His was green, filthy and full of holes, it looked sick, scabbed, sore. He had a huge bushy beard, stained yellow around his mouth. The dog liked the smell of him, but people coming out of the shop started back when they saw him and sidestepped him, making every effort not to look like they were doing so. He looked up from the dog and saw me coming, then drew himself up by what was left of his lapels and gave me a big wide smile. "Hello!" I looked behind me, in case he was talking to someone else, and this made him laugh. He told me to have a lovely day.

I got a no. 15 from Nassau St. As I walked down the aisle, a man in the back seat bellowed at me. "Ah, hello!" I didn't look up. He sounded delighted to see me. I knew he meant me - I was the last to board the bus and the only one in the aisle. I had my headphones on. I pretended not to hear him and shuffled into a seat. "You're looking very well, anyway!" The woman sat beside me shifted slightly, afraid to make her sideways stare too obvious. She was looking at me, not at him. I could smell him from my seat two rows up, stale sweat and sour clothes. I didn't begrudge her the gawk, I'd have done the same. The curiosity is not the madman but the object of his shouty affections. He stopped talking then, maybe watched people getting on and off. That's what I did. He wasn't quiet. He beat an out of time tattoo on the floor with his feet, stomping to the beat of his own discomfort.

When I stood up to get off, he shouted again. Top of his lungs, which were filled with enthusiasm.

He told me to have a lovely day.

I'm Not Above Using My Blog To Cheat At My Homework

I am to present, next Tuesday, a 700 word interview with myself. Because I am not quite self-absorbed enough. I am to ask (and answer) a minimum of six questions; none of them are to be about writing. It should show me as both entertaining and vulnerable, and reveal something about the nature of my Self (pronounced with a capital S).

Is there anything you'd like to ask me?

Review: The Secret Of Kells

Brendan and Conan Drumm

I liked it, and so did the kid sitting beside me (though he thought the wolves were very scary and he had to sit on his daddy's lap for that bit). My dad wasn't there. So I watched it with my mam and my nana and went home to sit on the Jaffa Cake's lap instead.

Review: Bronson

Tom Hardy does Chopper

It had a humour and horror that Watchmen lacked, and an ugly humanity too.

Oh, and some fine moustaches.

Wednesday Wears Monday's Mask

My third trip to Aldi today, and Agnetha gives me a pitying smile. Agnetha never smiles at anyone. Once, she buried her nose in a bunch of roses and smiled (to herself) before fucking them into my trolley. Two trips too many today.

I have to ask the pharmacist where the earplugs are kept. "What are they for?" she asks, because she is nosy helpful. "Snoring" I sigh, and she gives me an empathetic smile. I dislike her a little for it, and I can't help myself. "I snore like a pig. I'm keeping him awake at night". She gives me the little yellow ones that look like cigarette filters, 80 cent a pop. Instead, I spend a fiver on three coloured pairs from Paris, France, in a little box that he'll fiddle to open. I'm trying to make them look like a present.

Back on the Rathmines Road, a man in a suit lumbers awkwardly towards me, lurching this way then that, briefcase and knees grazing lampposts and pillars. He catches me watching him. I'm lumbering too, unbalanced by the messages that are hurting my hand though I've only just left the shop. His palsy is catching. I smack the shopping bag into Domino's windowledge and hear the eggs crack. "Well well!" he shouts. "Well well!"

I'm better balanced by the time I reach the canal bank. There's a guy walking towards me, brown face, red jacket, pale girl on his arm. He's laughing, and he gives me a big hello as I pass. I met him the night I first met the Jaffa Cake. I didn't think he liked me then. I wonder if he likes me now? I wondered then if it was because I'm a girl. Maybe now I get a smile because he has a girl of his own.

I step off the path onto the muddied track that leads to Leeson St. bridge, making way for a runner. He's broad-shouldered, long-legged, beautiful. I asked him out once. I knew he was heading away to Australia but he didn't use that as an excuse. He just said no, thanks. So I look to the traffic and he watches where he's going and neither of us nod. There's a sweet tang of his sweat in the air, trailing like cartoon perfume.

My bag of breakfast, lunch, dinner and tea is making my shoulder ache. I walk from bench to bench - my version of bus stop to bus stop. One bench before Kavanagh's I fade, and take a seat. My fingers have swollen with the bag, and the thick ring I can't quite get used to wearing is gnawing at me. I slide it over my knuckle and let the clammy skin breathe. There is a man I pass every day, walking his three terriers. They're old, and take it in turns to get a carry. Every time I see him I'm touched by his affection for them, but I'm scared to say hello. I don't want the responsibility of sympathy, because I'm sure that one day soon there'll be a mutt too few when they pass me.

So I sit, there, dawdling. I miss smoking at times like this, because it would give me a sense of purpose. I don't even have my notebook. My post is written in one word sentences on the back of a Rathmines Pharmacy receipt.

I gave up on this last week. I had things to do. The internet is boring. I took a gentle poke and wrapped it up in vanity, then played a solitary game of pass the parcel until all I could see in my blog was the worst excesses of my attention-seeking. I put up a post about not putting up posts, now I'm posting about why I post at all. I want to make the minutiae of my day matter, to me.

Review: Watchmen

THERE IS NO GOD! OR THERE MIGHT BE! IF THAT BLUE CHAP IS ONE, THEN IT'S YOUR FAULT! AND HE THINKS YOU'RE ANNOYING SO HE'S MOVING TO MARS!

OH, AND WAX YOUR BIKINI LINE!

Yeah. That's mostly what I took from Watchmen.

A Concession

"It's affectation, compensating for a lack of content."
I was going to post that short story I wrote for my class last week, the one with violence and poetic impulses. I copy-and-pasted it into Blogger, removing the "dint" that my tutor had red-penned as SILLY. He wrote that my line about the shirt was "stupendous" and though I think stupendous is a silly word, it was a balm for last week's critical burn.

I check his notes for more dints. Corny. At least that isn't in caps. I wonder if it might be a little presumptuous to publish a short story on a personal blog. Stu pen dous - I roll it out, syllable by syllable. Dous pronounced dus? All of a sudden I lose confidence in that too.

"It looks more like you than the others."
Annie emailed me a photo of myself, lying in the bath. My hair is immersed in the milky paint, my curls creeping back in, black dark against the white water. My face is in profile, a small chin and a pointy nose, and my right breast and shoulder are exposed. It's black and white and beautiful. I want the world to see me looking like that. I want to compensate for all the days when I don't.

I think he's right, that it does look more like me. It feels more like me, at least.

But I don't want to publish it on my blog either.

Of Course It's A Test

When you've a seat to yourself on the bus, do you sit by the aisle or the window?

Plus ça change

Selected quotes from my 6th year English essay copy:

Wonderfully, refreshingly alive! Very annoying - why oh why did it end so quickly?

Excellent work. I would like a longer essay, Rosie. That is the reason for the B grade: LENGTH.

I could clobber you with a blunt ice-pick! You write exquisite essays but like Wilde's cigarette you leave your reader unsatisfied - wanting MORE!

Some day you will write a full-length quality essay (I hope).

Brevity may be the soul of with but your essays are altogether too brief. You are a wonderful writer - extend yourself!

Then, I had a problem. Now, I am sitting at my desk trying to shove another 300 words up the arse of the short short story I've written for tomorrow night's class. I'm frustrated and bored, much like my teenage self was by titles such as The end of a friendship, Censorship should be abolished. Agree/Disagree, The ideal school and my personal favourite, A letter to God. Rereading the essays themselves, I am struck by how little I liked myself as a teenager, and how little I like my teenage self. And so, my múinteoir's closing comment made me smile.

You have reached the end of your copy. Please retain this anthology of wonderful work somewhere safe and reread it in ten years time! It will be like reading letters from a friend you have lost contact with.

Indeed.

That's Two Saturdays In A Row Now

"Toss a coin." We stopped on the corner of Clare Street, squinty with alcohol and indecision. He took a ten cent piece from his pocket and we examined it for clues. "Which is heads and which is tails?" "The harp is not heads" I offered, ever helpful but entirely unable to remember what the side that is not heads is called. "But on an English coin that's where the Queen's head would be, so that must be heads!"

I couldn't argue with such flawless logic. So he tossed the coin. I thought he would catch it and flip it over onto the back of his hand as boys do, but he just threw it in the air and watched it fall onto the footpath. More squinting. "What was heads again?"

"Abra" I suggested, hopefully.

The Odd Couple

I noticed him at the traffic lights in Portobello. It was the little bag of jelly babies that caught my eye - everything else about him was cigarette coloured. His slicked-back hair made me wipe my hands in my skirt, greasy just at the thoughts of touching it. He wore jet-black jeans in that slim fit favoured by cats of his vintage, with black loafers and a beige bomber jacket. The fag hanging from his mouth set his tone. He was the kind of ratty-faced louche I'd avoid at a bar. He looked like he might hit on you.

She had a crown of curls; thick brown ringlets that made me want to bury my fingers in her hair, that made me want to bury my nose in it to see how it smelled. She had a friendly, open face and a gloriously round, full arse. It was a pleasure to follow her up the path. She took his hand in hers and he was transformed. I was transfixed. I followed them to Charlemont Bridge. They left for the Luas, I took a seat on the canal bench. To capture their moment.

As I sat scribbling in my notebook, I saw a kid coming my way. He was wearing an emerald green tracksuit, and had ding-a-ling ginger hair. His freckles had been pencilled in, and the rosy bloom in his cheeks made him look like he'd been sketched in technicolour. The city seemed drab by comparison. Writing faster now in an effort to draw him in nouns and adjectives without losing sight of my odd couple, my script turned to scrawl. I laughed.

Go home, Rosie, you fucking weirdo.

An Scríbhneoir

I've taken up a class. My Ego persuaded me to sign up for the intermediate level, because she thinks I am a Great Writer. But my Ego and I need to sit down and have us a talk, I think, because I am all aflounder. I sit quiet as a mouse in class, hoping that the others might think I'm mysterious. Or clever. They just think I haven't done the homework. I find myself too timid to form opinions until I've heard some of theirs, and then too polite to interrupt the flow of their discussion. I apologise profusely for bumping elbows and dropping pens, I dread the five minute break when my classmates talk amongst themselves. I sit and smile awkwardly through their conversations, penned in place by the uncomfortable seating arrangement.

Last week, I sought refuge in the jacks. A piss, a sense of purpose, my nerves poking insistently at my bladder. There was no toilet paper left. "Good job I had a tissue up my sleeve" I announced to the queue as I stepped out of the cubicle. I didn't. I needed them to think that I did.

On Tuesday, the tutor invited us to the Hop House for a drink after class. It had been arranged the week before but I had missed the memo, presumably too busy being embarrassedly self-involved in a corner somewhere. "Please come" he said, "even if it's just for a glass of water. It's important that we're comfortable with one another before the workshopping begins". I made up eleventy elaborate excuses in my head, each ridden as raw by cliché as the prose I'd just turned in. Pressing appointments. Poor health. Dependent relatives. I shuffled my papers, put on my coat and made for home.

A Little Warmth On A Cold Walk Home

As I was walking down Sussex Terrace this evening, an elderly man tapped me on the headphones. "Her feet must be freezing" he said, smiling at me and nodding at the swan. "I'd say so" I said, caught short conversationally. "I know mine are". Happy to have gotten that much from me, he shuffled on.

He had such an ease about him that I envied him. It was something my Crash Grandadicoot would have done. This Saturday we'll celebrate the 76 years of his life, and mark a year since his death. The night in James' Hospital seems like aeons ago, but I still miss him like it was yesterday.

A Fun Place To Watch The Rugby

Doheny & Nesbitt's