100 Words: The Stranger

Generally speaking, any critique of my writing begins with the words "this could use an edit". With so many things, improvement comes only when challenged and a rather nice writing challenge was laid down recently by Mr. London Street, specifically to write an engaging blog post using 100 words or less.

This is probably the closest I'll get to pared-down prose.

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In gentler times, I might have seen an announcement, formal and nondescript, in the back pages of a newspaper.

These days, everything’s connected. No more shoebox full of photographs for the wistful, late-night life review; now it’s a website with its intangible, swirling starling-cloud of digital pictures, shared and half-forgotten memories.

Hyperlinked together, we’re at a dinner party, laughing. No contact for years, but the tags are still in place at the bottom of the screen next to her thumbnail picture. Even at this tiny resolution, I recognise her face.

What I don't recognise is her name.

Declan

The teacher is recalled to my mind as something of a stereotype: Farah slacks, shirt, tie, tank top or plain-coloured jumper, balding. I remember his cheeks, crazed by a filigree of fine, red capillaries. Above them sat a pair of wire-framed spectacles which, on rare occasions, he would remove and polish on a fold of his jumper as we stared at the vulnerable-looking man revealed.

He was a former member of the Christian Brothers, but at some stage had renounced his vows and become a teacher in the State system. When he became angry, which was a regular occurrence, you could see the tension spread through him. His eyes would open slightly wider behind his glasses and he would flick his chin to one side like a jackdaw. “You fellas…” he would repeat over and over, barely suppressing what was rising within.“You fellas…”

Sometimes, it seemed, he would just give in to his anger and let himself rage, screaming at the room full of children before him. I wonder now if he had initially nurtured that anger so it could be wielded like a weapon when required, but over the years had somehow lost mastery of it and, from time to time, was consumed by it.

There was a kid in my class called Declan who was from a tough part of town. He had close-cropped ginger hair, gelled forward like a working-class Caesar and would occasionally turn up to school dressed in a sateen track suit, apparently on a whim. He was cocky, agressive and noisy and frequently in trouble with the school authorities. At the same time, I remember him as essentially good humoured, with an easy smile and an endless desire to talk about Liverpool Football Club. He had a precocious swagger and a hard edge to his personality and I liked him for it.

Academically, Declan struggled. As part of our homework, we were regularly set passages to read before a public examination the next day. Under normal circumstances, he would speak with that rapid-fire variety of Dublin accent that starts at the back of the throat and seems to be articulated somewhere behind the nose. On those occasions when Declan was asked to read aloud, however, it was as if his personality simply fell away. All trace of bravado was forgotten, and he would falter and stumble as he followed the words on the page with his forefinger, his face creased with concentration.

From these primary school days, a single incident stands out above all other memories. I remember it with a clarity that allows me to replay it again and again as if on a cine projector. Declan, on this occasion, was sitting at the next desk over from me. Once again, his reading was under scrutiny and the text clearly had not been prepared. Declan simply didn’t have the ability to read aloud convincingly without preparation, and so it was obvious when the previous night’s homework had not been done. This was a frequent occurrence.

For several minutes he labored, pointing at the words on the page with his finger, willing the shapes to coalesce into a form that he recognised and could enunciate.

Even though we were expecting it, when it came, the shouted command was startling.

- Stand up.

Declan rose to his feet, his chair scraping on the floor tiles, holding his English reader at chest height with one hand as he attempted to continue, tracing each line with the index finger of his free hand. Each missed word, each stumble became its own mini failure and corrections were barked at him by the teacher whose jaw was already set at an angle against the boy who stood in front of him.

- Did you read this last night? Did you do your homework? 

- Yes, sir.

- Is there some bloody reason you can’t read it, then? 

His voice reverberated against the painted breeze block walls and, I imagine, through the empty corridors of the school.

- No, sir.
- Yes, sir! No, sir! Three bags full, sir! Get on with it, then, sir!

Against the peculiar silence of twenty frightened ten year olds, Declan began again. Some internal mechanism desperately tried to compensate for his misfiring reading process and searched for clues in the context or in the shapes on the page. He was guessing now, almost subconsciously, it seemed; random stabs, each one highlighted by a retort from the teacher. The punishment for Declan’s failure to prepare was to be forced to read in front of his classmates, and his difficulty would be held up to ridicule.

It was hopeless. I could see the skin on his face redden as his embarrassment grew. When reading, he would enunciate his words perfectly with a docile, almost alien voice, as if the reading process was entirely separate from his internal dialogue and his normal way of speaking. Now it began to be infused with a stammer, and it was worsening. The words began to catch, to trip on his building anxiety and shatter before they could be uttered.

- What’s wrong with you? We’ve already met that word.

He tried again, panic rising, forcing the words out, never raising his head to meet the gaze of his teacher. Eventually, it was all too much and I could see him shrink slightly as his resolve melted away.

- Did I tell you to stop? What’s the next word?

His head down, Declan stared silently at the book in front of him. His free hand faltered, dropped from the page, then returned to point at the place where he had left off.

- What's the next word?

Standing on his own in the classroom, facing an adult who was shouting at him, Declan lost his fight against the tears. He turned his head to the side as we wiped his cheek with his cuff, eyes fixed firmly on the floor.

- The next word. You know it. “Brother”.

The awful, fearful silence continued unbroken.

- "Brother!" Say it!

We watched as Declan formed the word in his mouth, pressed his lips together, pointed at it with his finger, performed his habitual, physical ritual of reading which now had lost its effect. The sounds would not come, his breath trapped in his chest.

- Say it! Just say it!

The teacher was screaming now. Somehow, the prism of anger through which, at that moment, he was viewing the world, had distorted the scene before him, and Declan’s torturous silence became one more aggravating detail in an imaginary tableau of defiance. The sides of the child’s mouth fell as his breath began to come in heavy sobs that shook his shoulders

- I…. can’t.

- What do you mean you can’t? You’ve read it before. What’s wrong with you?
- I … can’t. I have a...
- You what? You have a what? 
- I have... a…. stutter.

To this day, I remember the effort with which he pronounced that final word, forcing it up from somwhere deep down in his chest, up and out from amongst the panic and the tears, and the sobs and the shame. I don’t remember much about my own feelings as I watched, no great sense of empathy or injustice. I have a recollection of a classmate voicing a protest - "Sir, he can't, he has a stutter!" -  but I can't be sure that haven't invented this to assuage my adult guilt at not speaking up on his behalf. My primary concern, I think, was to avoid becoming the focus of the teacher's anger; I remember little of his reaction after Declan’s tearful, plaintive plea, save a fleeting look of confusion. Of the resolution of the situation or the moments that followed, I remember not a thing.

Recently, I was reminded of the incident during a discussion with a friend who has taken up teaching as a second career. A fellow Irish expat, he is sometimes baffled, sometimes amused by the differences between the school environment we had gone through and the reality of state-run schooling in London. I told him the story of Declan and the teacher, and he was appalled. “That just wouldn’t happen now”, he said. Moreover, he told me, teachers were all too aware of how students, when faced with the insidious combination of a conflict-filled school environment, their own learning difficulties and an indifferent family background can quickly end up on the wrong side of the law. Teachers can see the slide beginning and gaining momentum, but were often powerless to prevent it. I immediately thought of Declan and decided to find out what had become of him.

It didn’t take me long. A cursory Google search of his name returned a slew of archived national newspaper articles, one of which was accompanied by a photo. It was a simple square-cropped head shot and slightly blurry, but the features – and the haircut – were the same. In December 2001, three months after 9/11 and while I was busy drinking my way around Australia on a working holiday visa, Declan received two consecutive sentences for membership of the Real IRA and possession of bomb making equipment. The reports indicated that he was thought to be a senior member of the organisation.

For those of you unfamiliar with the more difficult parts of recent Irish history, the Real IRA is a hard-line IRA splinter group which, in 1998, filled a Vauxhall Cavalier with 500lbs of explosives, drove it, on a busy Saturday afternoon, to the town of Omagh in Co. Tyrone and detonated it, killing 29 people, including seven under the age of 16, and injuring over 300.  That bombing represented a significant milestone in the history of the conflict in Northern Ireland, and one which marked the point when all sides found themselves saying “no more”.

I have no idea of the nature of the path that Declan took when our ways diverged in June 1989. It’s as impossible to quantify how he was affected by his time at school in Dublin, a time which I shared with him, as by the other significant periods and events in his life which I did not. Given the nature of the organisation of which he became a part, and that terrible act in Omagh which that organisation carried out, it's not unreasonable to wonder what made its members who they are, how they justified to themselves what they were about to do and what bloody reasons they had for what they ultimately did. I can't suggest answers to those questions, but I can tell you that they take on a certain poignancy when you realise that you once knew one of those men when he was a child, already struggling with what life was laying out before him.

Even before I read the articles, the recollection of the ten-year-old Declan would, from time to time, be called by some event to my mind, along with an attendant feeling of unease tinged with sadness and sympathy for that boy. An aspiring Dublin hard case he may have been, but he was a child who loved Liverpool FC, had challenges that I never had and, because of those challenges, was one day humiliated to the point of tears by a grown man.

I wonder does either of the two, more than twenty years later, remember that child also.

Anatomy of a Recidivist Songwriter

I was reminded just yesterday by Mr. London Street in his rather wonderful blog of a long-lost world once inhabited by me, and of the path I took which resulted in music being an important part of my life. Here is a link to that blog entry, and here is what it reminded me of...

******************

My early flirtations with the world of music ended badly. My willingness to spend thirty minutes hiding in a cupboard in order to avoid my music teacher did not bode well for my career as a pianist. At thirteen, however, my brother handed me his electric guitar and sat down opposite me, arranging the fingers of my left hand in an approximation of an E-minor chord.

There had been guitar lessons available in my primary school; Mr. Kennedy used to teach a class of four or five on Wednesday evenings and, this being Ireland, they would be wheeled out to accompany religious sing-songery, which they did with consummate smugness. To this carry-on, my levels of indifference were almost supernatural. What I was holding, though, that afternoon with my brother, was something altogether unrelated. This was a shiny, black Fender Lead II, with knobs and pickups and I could turn it up as loud as I wanted to.

As an adult, I recognize something of the obsessive in my teenage self. Socially speaking, I was a disaster. I was self absorbed, surly and withdrawn, generally disinterested in my peers. They repaid my disdain in kind. My evenings were spent sitting on the edge of an armchair, lifting the arm of my record player, placing the needle in the right groove on the spinning black vinyl. Sitting alone in a room, still wearing school uniform, bending light steel wires: rewind, listen, repeat. I would let the room grow dark around me, lit by the carbide glow from the streetlights outside my parents’ house.

Around age seventeen or so, my interest swung towards the acoustic guitar. I began to love the feel of the vibrating wood, the sensitivity that could be extracted from bronze strings by my fingertips. I would practice in front of a mirror watching my hands move, developing an admiration for the elegance of difficult chord shapes and patterns.

During my final year in school, a girl began to show an interest in me. She was small, pale and delicate with unusual, arresting features; maybe not beautiful, but with the kind of face that you might catch yourself staring at on a train. She was interested, she let me kiss her, and then, in the manner of teenage girls, she wasn't interested any more. I was devastated. Something in my gut decided this was a catastrophe, and that something was a physical, knotted presence for weeks.

One evening, after school, I dug up a vinyl copy of Inside Out by John Martyn from the pile of my brother's LP's. Lift the arm, needle in the groove. Last song, side two: So Much in Love with You.

I remember that song, the whole moment, clearly; the sound of the master tape coming up to speed at the beginning of the track, Martyn’s stumbling, yawning vocal, at times brittle and fracturing, at times a roar of frustration; Danny Thompson’s double bass with its nonchalant, sauntering counterpoint; Steve Winwood’s piano cadence like an absent-minded ellipsis.

I decided to learn to play and write.

And write I did. Awful, angst-ridden, introspective stuff at first, until life became more textured. I started going to songwriters’ nights where I met earnest, intense people who sang lyrics that were sometimes profound, often ill-considered and occasionally just bizarre.

There were individuals who would strap on their guitars and smile beatifically, raising their eyes to the rafters before unleashing torrents of ineffable crap. There was a gentleman called Ernie who each week would produce the most magnificent guitars, hand-crafted beauties all of them. Ernie had a playing style that revolved around almost punching his instrument as if he were trying to beat the music out of it. He would regularly include a song rather magnificently entitled "You're Just a Prick in a Volvo".

There was a lawyer who wrote wonderful lyrics and would express frustration to any who would listen that he was known as a musical barrister, rather than a musician who practiced law. Another character would brutalise his own songs with a passion that would hold the attention of everyone in the room like a vice. A strange woman of a certain age in a kaftan and chiffon scarves would sing in eerie, reedy tones like a musical saw before coyly acknowledging the applause from the floor.

There was gold there too, though, in those pubs on the Southside of Dublin. Little bits of poignancy and soulfulness leaked through the dross. Once, I followed a skinny, young Damien Rice to the microphone and wished I hadn't bothered.

Most of the magic was supplied by a man called John who was in a different class to the rest of us. At the time, he worked in a bank on the Quays. In the evening, he’d go home and craft beautiful songs, suffused with lightness and depth, that you’d swear you’d heard before. On Tuesdays and Thursdays he’d deliver them in a voice made to be listened to late at night. John spotted something in my playing, and would invite me to sit in and play part of his set with him. He tolerated and encouraged me, though in truth, I was pretty poor.

And then, one day, I wasn’t. I had written a new song, putting the finishing touches to it on the train, and decided to try it out. I disappeared a little bit when I was singing. I finished the song and there was a roar. They were mostly songwriters themselves, undeniably over-supportive, but they whistled and applauded. I didn’t know what to do, so I sat down and finished my pint.

I often think of those characters, some ten, twelve years behind me. They were oddballs, but then again, so am I. It wasn’t about the playing, or even about the song; it was a kind of good-natured, non-invasive primal scream for the creative urbanite. I would beat myself up over a fluffed chord change or a forgotten lyric; they sounded as if they were making it up as they went along, and I'm pretty sure that at times, they were. I've no doubt that nearly all of them would have been prepared to die for their art; I just suspect they’d have drawn the line at doing a bit of practice. Those nights were like some through-the-looking-glass X-Factor, where the eccentrics take to the stage, sing badly for five minutes, then politely tell the judges to go fuck themselves.

Performance, by its nature, invites critique and criticism. The open-mic community wasn't a real audience, but one which offered what amounted, at least publicly, to unconditional support. For the most part, we had songs only a mother or or hobbyist songwriter could love, and every week we would sing them for one another. I still perform, and every so often I disappear again. 

Songwriting gives me a certain self-awareness, a perspective that allows the ability to be bemused by my own folly. I still practice and I still write, sitting with pen and paper and the occasional bottle of whiskey, hunched over my guitar, letting the room grow dark as the carbide glare from the street light outside my window is caught in the raindrops and speckles the glass with points of orange-yellow light.

A Sunday in July

Had there been anyone else other than me there, you might have said that the comment was intended for nobody in particular.

- Jeez, boy, it's awful quiet, isn’t it?

I look up towards Richmond Bridge from my spot near the slipway. The guy in the ice-cream van looks bored. It’s a Sunday evening in July and there are not a whole lot of people here at all.

- Could make a cameo at The Ship, I suggest.

Eddie’s already half way up Waterman’s Lane. He has that look in his eye. We don’t quite make it to the train station; he’s spotted one of his landlord buddies and the doorway is only very briefly darkened before he makes his presence felt inside.

- Alright Eddie! Bloody quiet, ain’t it?

- Ya! We were just down by the water. There’s nobody around at all.

He rubs his hands together and it's not long before he's in full flight. I get them in and don’t get involved.

I mind the gap as we’re getting off at Wandsworth Town. We negotiate the traffic and McDonald’s car park, sidle past the bus depot, hang a left down toward the cement works and wonder how the crowd at the end of Jews Row ever managed to find their way here in the first place. 

Someone has spread out a Persian rug on the tarmac in the middle of the roadway outside the pub. On it a couple of leather couches sit within Pimm’s pouring distance of each other. I turn to pass comment to Eddie, but I've been abandoned. I just manage to catch sight of his chrome dome disappearing into the pub. I follow him and make it inside in time to see him nip through the doorway into the main bar. By the time I make it through, he’s already chatting to Charlie and Phil.

- Howaryiz, lads, says Charlie. Jeez, it’s a bit quiet isn’t it?

I look around. There are a couple of tables left inside. Some kid in skinny jeans is in the process of moving one of them to replace it with a couple of guitar cases and an amp. Outside, it’s standing room only on the rug.

- Quiet for here, maybe, Charlie. I think you’ve got just about the entire London pub trade. What’s the story with the carpet?

- Ah, ya know. Thought it might be a laugh. Had a couple of lamps and a TV out there earlier but took them in because we thought it might rain.

I’m not sure if he’s serious. He scampers off behind the bar and starts polishing something, grins back in our direction. Phil tosses his hair and wafts off somewhere. Eddie’s beaming. He nods towards the bar.

- Pint bottle of cider. No ice.

It’s getting dark, now. The place is buzzing. I’m buzzing. Eddie’s being controversial about something and I’m pretty sure he’s winding me up. The band can’t decide between posing and rock-and-rolling until the guitarist starts the intro of Sex on Fire. Emma’s sitting on other side of Charlie’s exterior living room arrangement. She has beautiful brown eyes and she’s a writer. That doesn’t seem to do it justice though. Writeuse, maybe... I tell Eddie I’m going to the jacks and skip over to say hello. I don’t make the grand and witty entrance that I merit, though. Mind you, I never do. I’m back a few minutes later.

Oisin arrives for a late one. He’s amused at what his staff have been up to with the carpet and the couches. It seems everyone else is too, particularly the Brylcream and GHD couple who are sprawled out in full pizza-and-DVD mode. It starts when you get to the top of Jews Row and you realise you’ve stumbled upon the place where those red tour buses live. By the time you get to the bottom, it’s all a bit lively and you feel a bit like you’re doing something your headmaster wouldn’t have approved of.

It’s closing time, and I’ve almost a full pint left. No rush - nobody’s going to swipe it and tell me to go home and iron my shirt for the morning. I look across to the writeuse and I formulate the witty observation or bon mot that I’ll leave until too late to deliver.

A few days later the phone rings, and a few days after that I’m stepping out of an airport into a blast of hot air that makes me turn my face away. Utah. No footpaths. Off licenses run by the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control. Can I see your ID, sir? The locals don’t recognise my accent and politely ask me where I’m from.

- Ireland, I say.

- Iowa?

- No, Ireland.

- Oh! Yeah... Is it as hot there as it is here during the summer?

In these parts, they have greeters at the supermarket who offer you a mobility scooter with built-in basket to carry your Cheerios and tell you that they miss you already as you leave. There's a Mexican restaurant where the staff ring a brass bell and cheer when you ask for extra cheese on your burrito. They’re mannerly and courteous and I might as well be from Mars.

I couldn’t face the palaver tonight. I’m in my apartment drinking light beer from a can and watching the sun go down over some scrubby sun-burnt hills.

I could do with a pint. In a glass. In a pub.

That Rodeo Feeling

It's 10:45pm, but I've got that 2am feeling. I'm slugging from a bottle of Sam Adams that I bought in a State Liquor Store. Anywhere else, it's low-alcohol beer, so adopting a Liquor Store-based procurement policy is the only way you can be sure that the contents of your beer bottle aren't promising maudlin, Wednesday evening good times while surreptitiously trying to keep you sober enough to praise the Lord and love Uncle Sam. I had intended to have just one before bed, but then Spotify threw John Martyn and Jerry Douglas at me and now those bottles seem awfully small. Too tired to raise hell, but just lonely enough to try to pull heaven down by the tail to join me here on the couch in this little piece of the American Dream.

I went to a Rodeo this evening in all its dusty glory. Hot dogs and ten gallon hats and giant turkey drumsticks with honey sauce that they wrap up in tinfoil and let you eat like some sort of medieval lord. Skinny cowboys spit and mosey back to their gate whether they have an eighty-four or a no-score and mud on their chaps.

After the broncs come the bulls. No cowboy hats - they wear helmets for this one. They sit in their traps, seven, eight, nine men making unseen, arcane, vital adjusments while the cowboy hauls at something out of sight as if he were trying to start a lawnmower. Got to wait till the bull stands up, the barker says, and the cowboy's leaning back as if he's on a sun lounger. The trap opens and a tasseled, bechapped body is immediately rag-dolled into the dust, bashing his head off a horn on the way down. He sits up and, for a second, a very long second, he's face to face with the bull, noses inches apart. The clowns wave and jump, distracting the bull as the cowboy gets up and saunters back; moseys, even. Didn't manage to score, ladies and gents, but he sure put it up to that bull.

The cowgirls arrive and do a kind of slalom around tar barrels, sprinting from one end of the ground to the other, all long legs and denim, silky hair flowing out from under their Stetsons. Each one of them looks hand-picked to be willowy and talented and wholesome. The crowd is mostly families, munching away and keeping half an eye on their mini cowboys clambering over the bleachers and peering out from under wide brims. There's a hard core of locals standing over the corrals at the ends, one boot each up on the concrete ledge below the rail stanchions, all wearing blue jeans and boots and white, straw hats. From where I'm sitting, they're part silhouetted as the sun goes down behind them and I just know they wouldn't be much for talking.

I meet a girl from Kansas and tell her I don't think we're there anymore. She asks me where I'm from.

     'Iowa?', she asks.
     'Ireland', I reply.
     'Oh.'

She smiles politely, coquettishly, holds my gaze just longer than necessary before turning away.

It's Slack at the moment. That's the qualifying round. Nobody's too interested. Not in the show, anyway, though the food sellers are doing stiff business. The sun is going down over a sea of cars, mostly pickups, and the car park, the parking lot, is spattered with yellow pinpoints of stellar glass and chrome. Some of the Dodge trucks have wheels up to my waist and one of them, parked just below where I'm sitting, is painted with green flames stretching back along the side panels. The front windscreen has day-glo green lettering across the top: Michael Jackson 1958 - 2009.

There's a ten year old girl in full cowgirl regalia riding what may or may not be a Shetland pony at full speed to the delight of the crowd. Kansas is wandering back toward her seat with a giant blob of candy floss. I look down and notice that my cowboy boots are beginning to look broken in. We're not in Kansas anymore.