A man spat at me on my way home from work yesterday afternoon.
I was sitting in traffic on Bolton St. listening to the radio. I had my window down, my handbrake on and my eyes on the traffic lights up ahead. I wasn't minding the van that pulled up alongside me. On the radio, Enda Kenny was accusing Joe Higgins of being a supporter of Osama bin Laden’s, then recanting mealy-mouthedly and reassuring the Dáil that Higgins is "a good Christian man". My knuckles whitened on the steering wheel listening to him but I said nothing, I just sat and waited for the lights to change. I heard the passenger in the van alongside me hock up a load of phlegm, just as the cars at the top of the queue started to inch forwards. There was a wet, sticky thud as the gollyer he spat splattered on my door, just below the open window. "Ah fuck it" he said "I missed the cunt" and he brayed laughing. I glanced across, already easing my foot off the clutch and heading for the green light on Church Street's corner. He looked my age; broad, blond, good-looking. The kind of fella who wouldn't look twice at me in a nightclub. The kind of fella who still has his mammy make his dinners and buy his jocks and who thinks it's alright to spit out the window of his mate's white van at passing cunts in the afternoon traffic.
I rolled up the window once I'd rounded the corner and drove the rest of the way home feeling bullied and ugly.
I was sitting in traffic on Bolton St. listening to the radio. I had my window down, my handbrake on and my eyes on the traffic lights up ahead. I wasn't minding the van that pulled up alongside me. On the radio, Enda Kenny was accusing Joe Higgins of being a supporter of Osama bin Laden’s, then recanting mealy-mouthedly and reassuring the Dáil that Higgins is "a good Christian man". My knuckles whitened on the steering wheel listening to him but I said nothing, I just sat and waited for the lights to change. I heard the passenger in the van alongside me hock up a load of phlegm, just as the cars at the top of the queue started to inch forwards. There was a wet, sticky thud as the gollyer he spat splattered on my door, just below the open window. "Ah fuck it" he said "I missed the cunt" and he brayed laughing. I glanced across, already easing my foot off the clutch and heading for the green light on Church Street's corner. He looked my age; broad, blond, good-looking. The kind of fella who wouldn't look twice at me in a nightclub. The kind of fella who still has his mammy make his dinners and buy his jocks and who thinks it's alright to spit out the window of his mate's white van at passing cunts in the afternoon traffic.
I rolled up the window once I'd rounded the corner and drove the rest of the way home feeling bullied and ugly.
