by Marian Keyes
It turned out that she’d invited some people. Quite a few people. People who had no interest in rolling around in duvets, unless it was with a member of the opposite sex and four bottles of champagne. People who wanted to party. People who planned to start shouting ‘TEN! NINE! EIGHT! SEVEN! –’ several days before the off.
Every phone call from her brings more news. She’s bought a floor-length frock, with diamanté shoulder straps for the night that’s in it. Her friend Louise is after acquiring a load of furry toys which, when wound up, shout the countdown in squeaky voices, then dance and wish everyone a Happy New Year. There’s been talk of tiaras, which apparently everyone must wear. By all accounts she’s organized a posse to descend on the house to festoon it with appropriate millennial decorations on the day. And allegedly no party is complete without a fireworks display in the garden.
Over the past month I’ve bumped into people I know only vaguely who’ve thanked me for inviting them to the party-to-end-all-parties on New Year’s Eve. One of them asked me how we were going to manage the link-up.
‘What link-up?’ I asked, scarcely able to believe my ears.
The person shrugged. ‘I dunno, really, but she said something about a radio link-up with New York.’
Strangely, my initial horror has calmed and my sister has progressively eroded my objections to the point where I’m looking forward to it now. Well, sort of… So, Happy New Millennium! (Even though it’s an entirely meaningless concept, as the starting date was simply an arbitrary point in history, yadda, yadda.)
First published in Irish Tatler, January 2000.
BOTH SIDES OF THE IRISH SEA
I left Ireland in 1986 and moved to London. I thought I would stay there for ever. Which just goes to show. In 1997 I moved back to Dublin and love it.
Swinging London
Fourteen years ago, I left my middle-class suburban home in Dublin and escaped to London. Back then Dublin wasn’t the booming, open-minded, latte-ridden, cosmopolitan place that it is today. ‘This is a one-horse town,’ I taunted my mother. ‘And that horse is a Catholic fundamentalist.’ Then I added moodily, ‘No one understands me. Just wait till I get to London.’ Teenage angst is an ugly thing, especially in a twenty-two-year-old.
So off I went on the boat and train, like thousands had done before me. The only thing was, I was different, or so I’d have you believe. I’d had the benefit of an education and I wasn’t coming to London looking for work, I was coming looking for shoes. And clothes. I’d heard a rumour (true, as it happened) that Bodymap (very big in 1986) had a stall at Camden Market where seconds were sold cheap. And I arrived at Euston station at six a.m., one perishing February morning, looking for the balm of anonymity – I suspected that no one belonged in London, so I stood the same chance as everyone else of fitting in. Even at that horribly early hour I noticed that Dublin had existed for me in black and white while London was decked out in all-singing, all-dancing glorious technicolour.
The bag I’d brought was almost unliftable – I’d packed every stitch I possessed and some of Caitríona’s stitches too, because I knew London was a trendy, stylish place and I didn’t want to let myself down. As well as shoes and clothes, I had high hopes of finding lots of men in London. Dublin was so small that all eligible men had been catalogued and bagged, but London seemed a teeming mass of untapped potential. My motto was, There are no strangers, only ex-boyfriends I haven’t met yet.
My poor father obviously had an inkling of this, because he’d taken me aside and given me an oblique lecture before I left – much talk of ‘shop-soiled goods’ and ‘secondhand cars’ and how most men like to play with but don’t like to marry them. ‘Understand?’ he asked anxiously.
‘Certainly, Dad. Why would any man want to marry a secondhand car?’
And his well-meaning advice fell on barren ground, because no sooner was I off the train at Euston station than I moved in with my friend Conor. Conor was a man (this was very bad) who happened to be gay (my Dad was torn – he couldn’t decide if this made it better or worse), and the flat happened to be a squat, on the twenty-first floor of a tower block in Hackney. We had almost no furniture and one cup, which was available to me on a rota basis.
Disasters started to happen to me and I embraced them joyously. I felt that I was living, truly alive for the first time in my life. On my first day as a citizen of Hackney, a Genghis Khan lookalike, his sixteen-inch meat cleaver and his hungry Alsatian joined me in the lift. They both snarled at me until the seventeenth floor, when they politely got out.
On my second day, a man flashed at me on the Tube. You wouldn’t get that happening to you in holy Catholic Ireland, I swaggered.
On my third day, I got stuck in the lift for an hour and a half and was liberated by firemen, who had to come down the liftshaft, remove the roof of the cage and hoist me out. I was passed like the lightest football from hunky fireman to hunky fireman until I was back on terra firma. Conor almost wept with jealousy and accused me of staging it.
Everything and everywhere was exciting. I met so many people, from all over. Leicester and Glasgow, Brighton and Cardiff, Leeds and Taunton, Jamaica and Canada. Not too many native Londoners, though. I bought myself a Bodymap frock (red, tight, hole cut out in the thigh) and a black, sealskin coat in Kensington Market, and I reckoned I cut a fairly impressive dash on the dance-floors of Taboo and Heaven. (The only people I knew in London were gay; I became a fag-hag by default.) I had boundless energy and partied all night. Then got the night-bus home to sleep most of the day, waking at five in the evening for a breakfast of toast and Dairylea.
Some days we roused ourselves in time to go and stroke sweaters in expensive clothes shops. Conor was well up on all kinds of names that I’d never heard before – Valentino, Joseph, Azzedine Alaia. He’d bring me into a small, bare emporium and stand in tearful reverence before a tight, white, double-lycra dress.
Another day he took me to the King’s Road and I was overwhelmed by the iconic nature of what I was doing. I insisted on buying something – after all, it wasn’t every day that a girl from Ireland got to go down the King’s Road. And I did buy something – a chicken breast from Safeway, for my tea.
Escaping from parental control and what I felt was the goldfish-bowl syndrome of Ireland was immensely liberating. I could be anyone I wanted to be. Hell, I could even be myself. I made full use of the fact that I no longer had anyone breathing down my neck to go to Mass. Every Sunday was spent savouring the freedom of Not Going To Mass. And I could do the Walk of Shame anytime I wanted in London and no one turned a blind eye. Whereas in Dublin if I’d returned home at seven in the morning, wearing last night’s clothes, my knickers in my pocket, I was convinced it’d get on the evening news.
On the rare occasions that I rang home, my mother always enquired tearfully, ‘Have you a job yet?’ ‘No, Mam,’ I boasted. Then, bursting with pride, I outlined the current state of play. ‘I. Am. On. The. Dole.’
‘Oh Sacred Heart of Jesus,’ she muttered and I knew she was blessing herself. ‘You’re able-bodied and you’ve an education and what if you get caught? And have you any furniture in that… whatever it is… skip you’re living in.’
‘It’s a squat, and yes we have. We have an armchair, which I’m allowed to sit in when Conor isn’t around.’
Vaguely, I toyed with the idea of looking for a job. Unlike Ireland, where there were literally no jobs, London was bursting with an abundance of them. And I was in the privileged position of having a degree in law. But my few forays into employment agencies yielded little fruit. And even fewer job interviews. A degree was no bad thing, seemed to be the general consensus. Better than, say, a criminal record. But a degree from an Irish university wasn’t regarded as much cop. I wasn’t disappointed, I wasn’t even surprised. I wouldn’t have had it any other way, to be honest. After all, I’d grown up in the shadow of Britain, where everything in Ireland was regarded as a second-rate version of the British equivalent. The only th
ing we’d ever given to the world which the world had seemed to want was Irish coffee. Our pop groups were toe-cringingly derivative, our few magazines were low-rent rip-offs, even our slang seemed shamefully poor – why would anyone in their right mind ever ask ‘How’s it going?’ when they could enquire, with an East Enders inflection, ‘Alright?’ (Of course, I know things are very different today, when there is no greater hipness than to be Irish – actors, stand-up comedians, writers, pop groups instantly acquire a sexy, whimsical charm the minute they lay their hands on their Irish roots. If you’d told me then what it would be like today, I would have felt really sorry for you.)
So when I’d been shown the door by yet another employment agency, I felt I could relax with impunity into my life of bohemian, state-sponsored indolence. It went on for a few more fun-filled months, however all good things come to an end. Middle-class guilt coupled with Irish Catholic guilt is a fairly irresistible combination, and eventually all that not working and enjoying myself took its toll. I had to get a job and actually, when it came down to it, there wasn’t that much available to me. I couldn’t type, my accent wasn’t the right one for a receptionist, and unfortunately I wasn’t a man so I couldn’t become a brickie.
In the absence of any other opportunities I became a waitress, and actually I had a whale of a time. I was young and energetic, and doing menial work still had great novelty value. It was the matt-black eighties where people flung money around like snuff at a wake. Tips rained down on me, even though I was possibly the worst waitress ever to fling burgers in front of people. Other waitresses could carry a dozen laden plates up each arm. The most I could manage was two. In total, that is. Other waitresses remembered to bring customers their drinks. I didn’t. Other waitresses managed not to spill hot-pepper sauce on to customers. I didn’t.
On account of my waitressing skills, I was promoted. To the office. To do the sums. Despite hating maths at school, I appeared to have a strange aptitude for accounts work. Lo and behold, it seemed that despite my best efforts I had somehow got respectable. I railed against my new image for a while, but the gig was up. Surrendering to my fate, I said goodbye to the squat and moved into a flat which had more than one cup and where I was required to pay rent.
But that wasn’t the end of the adventure. Oh no, that was just the start of it…
First published in Cara magazine, November 2000.
Do You Know the Bus Stop in Kilkenny?
When I was living in London, I was misfortunate enough to work with someone who loved to ridicule the illogicality of the Irish. He regularly came into my office and did diddley-idle impressions of Irish people giving directions. Stuff along the lines of ‘Do you know where the road forks to the left? You do? Good! Well, don’t go that way. Go past the house that used to have the yellow door, past where Murphy’s shop used to be before they knocked it down. And when you get to the end of the road and there’s a pub at the bottom of it, you’ve gone the wrong way, but so what, you might as well have a drink, anyway.’
‘You Oirish!’ he’d wheeze, doubled over with mirth. ‘You’re so daft.’
‘Ha ha,’ I used to deadpan. ‘Stop, you’re killing me.’ Then I would file his expenses claim in the paper shredder, or ‘mistakenly’ put him on the most savage tax code known to mankind, or manage it so that he was tragically omitted from the monthly payroll. Working in an accounts office can have its small yet intensely pleasurable compensations. (Paydays were an especial joy – the building echoing with screams of gibbering terror as an offender opened his payslip to find his take-home pay was a big fat zero.) But since I’ve moved back from London to live in Dublin, I have to admit that my colleague might have had a bit of a point – and that it’s no bad thing either. Giving directions is an art form in Ireland.
For example, if a Londoner invites you to visit them at their home, naturally enough you’ll ask them where they live. And they’ll reply – let’s just say – ‘Jefferson Road, in Fulham,’ or ‘Shirland Road, in Maida Vale.’ Efficient and effective.
In Ireland, however, it’s a different kettle of fish. Shortly after I moved back, a native of Dublin invited me to his home. And when I asked where he lived, instead of saying Marlborough Road in Donnybrook – which is what his address was – he replied obliquely, ‘Do you know the taxi rank in Ranelagh?’
‘Yes,’ I said, wondering what it had to do with where he lived.
‘Let me see,’ he said thoughtfully, his eyes narrowed to help him visualize. ‘As you’re coming out of town… now hold on a while! Will you be driving or getting the bus or walking?’
I said that I wasn’t sure yet, that I wouldn’t be sure until I knew where exactly it was that he lived…
‘We’ll pretend for the minute that you’re driving,’ he interrupted. ‘OK, as you’re coming out of town, the taxi rank is on your right. Go past the flower shop. Do you know the flower shop? Just past the taxi rank?’
I didn’t. And I suggested that if he gave me the number and name of his road, I could look it up on the map and there was no need for these directions…
‘Well, do you know the Spar in Ranelagh then?’ he said, ignoring me.
‘Yes, but…’
That pleased him, but when I once again made reference to a map, his derision was excoriating. ‘A map!’ he laughed scornfully. ‘What do you want a map for? Where do you think this is? The foothills of the Himalayas? Right, do you know the dry-cleaner’s in Ranelagh? Just past the flower shop?’
When I’d resignedly admitted to knowing the dry-cleaner’s, the chipper, the pizza take-away place, the chemist, Burchills the pub and most of the other businesses in Ranelagh, his face suddenly clouded over with doubt. ‘Of course, you could do this a completely different way,’ he said. ‘Do you know the bus garage in Donnybrook?’
A few days later it happened again. I was going to see an old schoolfriend who was married and living in suburban affluence somewhere in the Raheny area. ‘Give me your address,’ I said firmly. ‘And I’ll look it up on the map.’
‘Right,’ she said agreeably. ‘Do you know Fairview Park?’ She then took me through the three-mile journey from Fair-view to Raheny, navigating with reference to almost every pub, chipper and SuperValu en route.
But it was alright. By then I’d become completely Irish again. It had taken a couple of days to settle back in, but I was firing on all Hibernian cylinders once more. Well into what my colleague in London called Irish illogicality and what I call Irish lyricism.
Giving people detailed directions is all part of Irish hospitality. Expecting people to find their way with a map is tantamount to inviting people to dinner and expecting them to bring their own food. Which is why an Irish person can almost never say ‘I don’t know,’ when asked for directions. In the same way that they’d give the visitor all their food and do without themselves, they’d rather say something – anything – than say nothing.
Which can sometimes bring about interesting results. Take the bank holiday Monday last October when the Dublin City Marathon was on. Myself and Himself were walking down Baggot Street and we encountered a few of the marathon participants panting and heaving themselves towards us. From their accents and their giant T-shirts proclaiming ‘Milwaukee Dentists’, we deduced that they were Americans. They were loudly complaining that the directions for the marathon were hopeless. ‘Which way do we go now?’ they demanded of each other, looking at the canal. I hadn’t a notion, but I was quite happy to stop so that they could have a good complain at me. When out of nowhere a voice shouted, ‘Left. Go left!’
We all turned to see a benign-smiling, flushed-of-face, pint-holding man standing in the doorway of the pub by the canal.
‘Hey, thanks!’ the runners yelled, their faces beaming, obviously deeply charmed by this human signpost, this stranger taking an interest in their welfare. Instantly they were mentally tearing up all the letters of complaint they’d written in their heads. Instead they were rehearsing the glowing praise they�
��d heap when they got back home – ‘In our city we got computerized signboards, but in Eyorland they got real people.’ Whooping and ‘Way to go’ing and ‘Nice piece of work’ing and generally being Americans, they burst into a sprint along the canal.
‘I don’t think it’s left,’ Himself muttered to me. ‘I think that man has sent them the wrong way.’ There was no point berating Himself for not entering the ‘Which way to go’ debate. After all, he’s English and middle class and is therefore genetically incapable of giving directions to total strangers without first having being formally introduced. Instead, I turned to the man in the doorway. ‘Are you sure it’s left?’ I anxiously asked him.
He gave me an aggrieved look. ‘Sure, I had to say something,’ he said defensively.
The poor Yanks are probably still running.
First published in Irish Tatler, April 1998.
The Early Bird… Catches the Host on the Hop
It’s a while since I moved back to Ireland, after living in England for eleven years. A big move, further complicated by the fact that on my return to the Emerald Isle, I imported Himself, an Englishman. Though he’s highly pro-Irish, naturally enough I worried that he might get homesick, so I resolved to monitor closely his car-washing, DIY and other acts of Englishness. Secure in the knowledge that if his yearning for his homeland got really out of hand there was somewhere I could send him to – a small part of Ireland that will remain for ever England. I speak not of the six counties in the North, but, of course, of the Jervis Street Shopping Centre.
‘Leave that shelf,’ I’d say. ‘You’ve put up enough, we’re running out of wall. Go on off and have a wander around Boots, Argos, Dixons, Debenhams, Waterstones and all the rest, and pretend you’re perambulating the highways and byways of Hemel Hempstead. Get everything out of your system! Have a pot of Earl Grey while you’re out there and don’t come back until you’re happy again to be living in Ireland.’ It invariably worked, and Englishman usually came back all aglow, having overheard some strange Irish phrase that caught his fancy. ‘What does “Take it handy” mean? What exactly is an oul’ segosha? Animal, vegetable or mineral?’
