Larry Andersen’s son Lawrence was also a joker, and one day he arrived to our workplace with a huge rubber lizard. It was the most lifelike creature I ever saw in my life. He had a long, floppy jaw with red, bloody teeth and a real long tail. He would tremble at the slightest movement and was truly frightening to look at. I immediately saw potential for this monster and asked to borrow him. Above us in the flat was a real old busy body called Mrs Franklen. She knew everyone’s business and took pleasure in spreading the bad word always. If it wasn’t bad enough, she added her own version of things and suitably embellished the whole event. As I was travelling to and from work I had time to plan my lizard incident, but first I needed a test of its reality. The train journey was the obvious place to try out the lizard’s capabilities, and so I placed him on the seat beside me and pretended nothing. Naturally he shook like a mad thing with the train’s motion, and even I began believing that he could be real. I got such fun from seeing people on the train do a double take as they passed in the carriage. Their looks of shock and disbelief made me smile, as they thought they were seeing things. One old woman actually attacked my lizard with her walking stick, taking a swipe at it in terror. I had to rescue him from the beating saying he was a pet. She said, “You’re a danger to society and I’m going to complain you”. I was delighted as I took him home in my bag; my lizard had passed the first test.
Our bedroom was located in the front section of the flat, and you had to pass through it to go into the living room and kitchen. This bedroom developed out of a modification I had earlier made to the flat. To give us extra space I put up a wall and painted the ceiling black. I painted it black because I believed that it would make the ceiling appear lower and cosier. In fact it had the opposite effect, as after I finished it always appeared to be night there, and the room seemed more like a cave than a bedroom. There was war with the landlord when we left the place. Apparently it took them weeks to repaint the black ceiling and he threatened law, but we were gone and I didn’t give a damn at that stage.
When I arrived home I immediately placed the lizard on Etta’s side of the bed and covered him over with the bedclothes. Now it was time for the story to begin, me figuring on a repeat of Lill’s snake incident. I knew Etta would be getting the dinner ready and never had much time to look at the news on TV, so I started to tell her that I was late because of all the activity down the road. When she asked what was going on, I slowly and nonchalantly told her that a really dangerous pair of green African Mamba lizards had escaped on their way to the Fota Wildlife Park due to a car accident. I thought the ‘Mamba’ word would signify danger for her, and it did. She was biting nicely at this news when I added that they had only caught one of them and were still looking for the other one. The road to Fota Wildlife Park passed right outside our front door. Then I dropped the subject completely for about half an hour. This was really working well. Soon she asks me to describe the lizard and I do a brilliant job of it, since he is sitting in her bed only ten feet away from us. After my detailed description she became really scared and was afraid to go out for her cigarettes, so I volunteer to go, warning her to quickly lock the door in case he should run in for ‘the heat’. While I am out, Mrs Jennings arrives for a chat and Etta tells her the whole story, unknown to me. She tells it so well that by then Mrs Jennings is also scared, and she rushes off to her own rooms to tell her husband Mick all about the lizard. When I came back in, Etta wants to know if all is safe and I pretend it is, with me doing a real bad job of it. This so-called lying frightened her all the more. By then she wants me to completely check our flat. It was becoming an exact repeat of Lill’s snake days, as she was then too scared to go to bed. So I do the checking. I make a big play of searching under and over and all around the bedroom and pronounce it all safe. Etta starts to ask what should be done if you’re bitten and was it really that dangerous, and again I’m in like a flash with the bad news. I tell her that a lizard first trembles his tail like a rattle snake just before striking, then he spits poison and blinds you like the King Cobra snake does. While this is happening he goes for the throat with a sharp bite. A really agonizing death would usually follow soon after a bite, but again I advise her that he is not in our flat, and that we are near a hospital with an antidote, if they have one of course, but that’s unlikely it being a ‘Mamba lizard’. I know she has no idea about snakes or lizards, so I can lay it on thick and I’m loving it all.
By then I am almost in tears with the potential laughter, as she has fallen for this beyond all my expectations. She decided that she would go to bed and I say I’ll follow later as I’m reading. I have my head down in a book to hide myself from exploding. She put on her nightclothes and pulled back the sheets, and then suddenly she sees the lizard trembling in the bed. She let out this huge wail and leaps clean into the air, totally terrified and stretched out against the back wall. She had literally jumped about four feet in shock and fell back against a cabinet on Jennings’ wall, knocking it over with a huge crash. As things began to fall and Etta continues to scream, in burst Mick Jennings waiving a sweeping brush and shouting, “Where is he, where is he? I’ll kill him, I’ll kill the fucker”. Etta is glued to the wall in terror and pointing to the bed where the monster had moved a foot or so. Then Mick starts to beat at the bed with the brush. As he beat at the bed the lizard leapt up in the air, and the more he beat it, the more it leapt. This was just awesome to see and my lizard looked really alive. I saw all this happen as I leaned against the wall trying to keep the laughter in but pretending I was petrified, just so that I could see all the fun.
Etta began running around the flat screaming as Mick flails away at the lizard. Then losing all control, I fall on the floor with the laughter. I literally collapsed; I was almost sick it was so funny, and even as I write I can still remember thinking that that was the best joke I had ever played on anyone. While still on the ground I looked up and there was Mrs Jennings peeping in around our front door while her husband, half in terror and rage, was still trying to kill the un-killable. After some minutes Mick noticed me laughing and realized it had to be a joke. I just couldn’t speak I was so sick with the laughing and Etta was still shaking with terror. We all calmed down but she wouldn’t speak to me for days over it and probably never forgave me for it either.
A few days later I happened to go into our local shop and was standing behind the upstairs busybody, Mrs Franklin, who had heard all the commotion that night. She was telling the cashier her version of events. She said she saw it all. Poor Mrs Cahill had been bitten by some class of foreign beast and had to be rushed to the hospital. She said that Mick Jennings had to kill it and rescue her as her no good, useless husband just fell on the ground in fright. Then she added quietly, “I never liked him anyways, he was always a bit strange if you ask me”. All I could do was to pretend I hadn’t heard her, and as she was leaving I said, “Oh hello Mrs Franklen, how are you today?” “Oh grand Mr Cahill, it’s a great day isn’t it”, and as she’s leaving she gives me a big smile heading out the door. The cashier, who knew Etta well, deserved an explanation, so I told her that it was just a practical joke and I described the events. We both laughed all over again, with her saying it was one of the best jokes she had ever heard in her life, and if I was her husband she would probably never speak to me again after such a shock.
The lizard met with an untimely end though. I played a good few jokes with him on other people, but when I took him to Mrs Connolly’s butcher shop in Buttevant he finally succumbed to her son’s meat cleaver. The shop was crowded and when no one was looking I placed him near a big lump of meat on the chopping block, and I started to chat to Mrs Connolly. Suddenly there was a scream from a woman customer who was near the block, and John Connolly, with the speed of a Samurai warrior, drew a massive swipe at my lizard with his clever, chopping the head clean off. The head flew into the air, landing on top of the woman’s boobs and she immediately fainted. Consternation soon reigned, with customers fleeing out t
he door in panic. I had the devil of a job explaining to all that it was just a joke gone wrong, and that I was really sorry for making her faint. That ended the lizard’s life, but he gave good service and travelled many a mile with me, giving me hours of laughter while he lived.
We lived on the Lower Road in Cork for quite some time, but in the end I succumbed to Etta’s constant nagging that we should leave and find a nicer place. She found us another flat overlooking Cork city, and we began to move our stuff in dribs and drabs. By then I had bought the bomber off Larry for 20 pounds and it had got even more unique under my ownership. As a start it had a modified steering wheel which was now the size of a dinner plate. Hayes had convinced me that it gave better ‘control’ when driving fast, and by then he had infected me with his speed madness to the point of insanity. Next the doors were held in place by six inch nails acting as hinges, (I was keeping the father’s nails tradition alive) and its brakes constantly leaked brake fluid, again nothing unusual in that as the Cahills’ cars rarely had good brakes, and early on I learned to pump the brakes like someone stomping out a fire.
To add to its uniqueness, the starter key switch was also broken. This meant that the only way to start the car was to go out to the front and raise the bonnet a little, then carefully stick your hand in under the bonnet, press the manual starter switch, then rush back in before the car rolled off, as it had no handbrake either since Larry had broken it years earlier while teaching me to drive. This car-starting was Etta’s usual job, and we just got used to people pointing and laughing at our novel way of starting the car. The car had numerous other idiosyncrasies such as no wipers, no locks on the doors, but it did have a ‘racing’ engine. At least it was built for speed. Its most endearing characteristic for me though was that I could just lift the seats right out onto the road if I liked, because they were never bolted to the floor. This was real handy for transporting our stuff.
On one particular Saturday I had made numerous transporting trips to our ‘new flat’ and I was completely sick of it in the end, so I say to Etta, “Look lets try and do it all in one last go this time”. She wasn’t for it at all and we get into a heated argument on the street in front of our old flat. I took out the seats and had them on the footpath, then filled the car to bursting point. I crammed in everything I could see; books, a small dresser, cups, plates, and clothes. Then I put a mattress on the roof, and then another on top of it. By then I was seeing the end in sight, so I persuaded Etta to help me load a wardrobe on top of the two mattresses. She did help, and then encouraged, I put all the cutlery, records and tapes into a drawer in the wardrobe. Finally I managed to string a bit of a rope all the way round this stuff on the roof. The plan was to pull the rope through my window and tie it to my seat before Etta got in to her side. My weight would then act as an anchor, and with the rope around the wardrobe, it would come in Etta’s window where she would keep a strain on it. I believed that she could hold it all easily if I drove slowly. I had forgotten about the big hill though and the basic laws of physics. As we left we looked like a moving version of Leaning Tower of Pizza.
We took off down the road slowly with cars beeping me and making signs to get going faster, as we were holding up the traffic. Initially I ignored all of this, but then the hooting and shouting became worse, and then the on-lookers on the street began pointing as well. I was getting madder and more embarrassed at this and was blaming Etta for always being on the move, swearing she was secretly a gypsy. She was pulling hard on the rope and I had no choice but to speed up, as I couldn’t take this racket to my rear any longer. We got to the place where the steep hill began and tempers were now high as I made a run at the hill. Suddenly she starts shouting, “Slow down, slow down will you for God’s sake, I can’t hold this rope”. Her pride wouldn’t let her say it earlier. “I can’t hold on, tis gonna go, ahhhhhh”. All I could now see was the wardrobe and mattresses begin to slide off the back of the car and hit the ground. Then I see all the spoons, forks, knives books, and records go flying in all directions as well. I screech to a halt. Etta’s seat now topples over and she has fallen backwards into the clothes, becoming buried and cursing like a sailor. I jump out just in time to see a car roll over my favourite Pink Floyd album The Dark Side of the Moon, and then I become like a lunatic. I ran onto the road and started jumping up and down, screaming and roaring at the fucker who just drove over my pride and joy. By then there are cars whizzing around me in all directions, trying to avoid me and our stuff. It’s a wonder the cops weren’t called.
Etta is also raging by then, calling me stupid for ever thinking that she could hold that rope, and we became worse than any tramps at each other’s throat. All the passers-by either make off quickly to avoid us, or fall around laughing at us. It took two further runs to recover our household goods. The wardrobe never recovered. We just left it by the side of the street in bits, and I was swearing I’d never again help her to move. The disaster was so bad that we didn’t speak to each other for a few days. It made no difference to Etta though, as it wasn’t long before she got the itch to begin the final exodus to our next flat in Mallow, and subsequently our new home in that town.
We finally left Cork for a flat over Larry Andersen’s TV shop in O’Brien Street. By then Larry had bought another shop across the street and this also had a flat over it like his original one. This newest move was Etta’s idea as I was quite happy living in Cork, but in reality I didn’t care where we lived as long as we were happy. She fortunately saw that the money we spent on rent could be put to better use in saving for a deposit on a house. I think she and Larry concocted a scheme together whereby he would let us live in the flat in lieu of no increase in my wages. The plan was that when we finally decided to move out, he would return every cent of the imaginary wages I was to get. Basically he was doing us the greatest favour possible and true to his word, when the time came to put a deposit on a house, he returned every penny, but that was still some years away in the future.
Our flat over the shop was something else. It had a tiny bathroom and toilet, which was shared. The bath was so old and rusty that I used to hate having baths in it. We had no shower so we just had to make do with the odd bath. The living room, which was on the first floor, looked out onto the street. It had two huge windows and I made a shelf unit to divide the room from the kitchen. The kitchen section had a counter top covered with linoleum for effect. It was never finished. The wiring was also never finished. A lot of the wires were left sticking out of the wall with no sockets attached. I was continuing in the well known Cahill tradition of ‘doing it tomorrow’. We had started with a kitchen in the top of the building, but this soon came to a halt as I needed to have my own space for inventing things. We had our bedroom on the top floor facing the street, and in the night we used to hear cracks happening in the front wall. Etta began telling me that the wall would collapse one day and we would be killed. All of this I dismissed as her usual nonsense. She was far closer to the truth than she knew though, because while Larry and I were refurbishing the shop beneath us we sawed through a support beam that we were advised not to cut. When the building didn’t collapse on top of us then, Larry pronounced it safe. Fortunately for us, one Sunday while we were out walking, the front wall did partially collapse bringing down the ceilings and filling the shop front with rocks from the wall. Larry had to have steel girders installed in the wall to prevent a total collapse, so Etta was right and once again we escaped an early demise. The building still stands to this day and seems to have changed little in thirty years; a tribute to steel girders and amateur builders.
The flat was a happy place in general, but I saw long term difficulties as we had to go through our TV shop below to get upstairs to our home. Taking shopping and coal up a steep stairs, as well as humping drums of gas, was very difficult, but all of this paled into insignificance compared to when our first baby, Adrian, arrived. The very large rats were a problem for us too, and Etta was scared to death of them. One day she wa
s sitting on the toilet and on hearing a noise she looked across to the side of the bath where Larry and I had nailed a wide board to keep the rats in. We neglected to tell her that we had seen a large rat come through the wall there some weeks earlier. That rat had brazenly walked across the room right in front of us, so we took the easy way out and nailed an old board to the wall feeling that this would keep him at bay. As she sat on the toilet she thought she saw a rat out of the corner of her eye, but dismissed it as sheer imagination. After all, we had assured her there were no rats at all in the place. Then a rat’s head appeared from behind the board. It seems that in the intervening weeks he had eaten through our defences. As she stared in disbelief, the rat got braver and eventually leaped out from behind the board, landing beside her with a thump. She took off out of the bathroom screaming, “Rat, rat, rat”, trying to keep her jeans on as she did so. She dashed into the kitchen, slamming the door behind her. Larry’s father, a man we called Kelly, saw her fly past and tried to console her by saying in through the door, “What’s wrong with you girl, sure tis only an ould rat”. Etta was not impressed at all and when I came in she was like a wild woman. She then demanded some solution, or she was moving again. My easy answer that time was to get a cat, but that solution turned out to be far worse than the rats ever were. We got a small female cat. Etta called the cat Kizzy after some character in an American TV series called Roots. Kizzy was a kitten and had this bad habit of deliberately finding my clothes and pissing on them. I am certain she liked my musk, as it was always my clothes she chose to piss on. No amount of booting her in the ass did any good either and I was going wild at the smell. She must have been pissing on the floor too because soon there was a constant smell of cat’s piss around the flat, and as time went by it got stronger and stronger. Cat’s piss is an amazing thing as it’s impossible to get rid of it. I used to think that there was a definite invention in it if I could only turn it into a perfume of some kind as it would last for days, but I never had the time to investigate that idea properly.
Two Walls and a Roof Page 30
