Jaywalking with the Irish (4 page)

Fearing the conversation was only beginning, and sensing that the boom was about to lower on the price of this guy’s golden jackets, I slipped outside. A shadowy half-open door across the road boasted a gnomic sign, saying Hi-B.

“Hi-C and -D, too,” I thought.

The dark stairs, with the first landing resembling a Giant’s Causeway of beer kegs, looked dirty enough to harbor specimens of interest to bacteriologists. Painted in a sickly maroon, it was straight out of the dour old Ireland of decades past. But some un-usual aura beckoned and I vowed to investigate another time.

For now I turned my back on the place, returned to collect the family, and we continued to wander the streets of our new home. The high, scrubbed northern light shimmered a soft magic on every edifice. From a recent sea-brilliant month in West Cork, from a honeymoon foray into Kerry’s mountain fastnesses, and from other visits, the cool tranquillity of this light had lodged indelibly in my memory, as transfixing as a scent suddenly recalled from decades past. I asked myself whether it was right to have moved us all to Ireland, and replied “Yes.” Definitely, yes.

How could one not love the place’s unceasing oddness? On Oliver Plunkett Street – named after the saint whose pickled head now stares out of a glass case in a church in Drogheda north of Dublin, while one of his arms reposes in Cork’s North Cathedral – shopfronts shouted of glassy and chromium modernity. Mannequins preened in skimpy tight skirts and shocking lingerie – one shop was even called Undies – that not long ago would have
set passersby to making disapproving signs of the cross. In fact, an earlier Cork bishop decreed that, to prevent lustful thoughts, curtains must be drawn over shop windows when mannequins were undergoing a change of clothes.

Clearly, the world had changed. There were bookshops and boutiques and flash cafés exuding aromatic coffee smells. Coffee? That was a rare luxury in Ireland a couple of decades ago, when pots of loose-leaf tea were protected against the chill by wool caps known as “cosies,” and the road crews employed a specialist in a tin hut who kept the brew fresh for work breaks that recurred all day long.

The tea brigades had long vanished, departed forever along with the thatched cottages, donkey carts, and quiet roads where old geezers on bicycles pedaled timelessly, with blue curls of smoke wandering out of their ancient pipes.

What kind of place, I wondered then, was this modern Cork City – or for that matter, this jumped-up new Ireland? Was the country the one I imagined that I understood?

Or was ours a journey into nostalgia, an indulgence a hundred times worse than purchasing a yellow convertible? The question worried me. No priests or nuns negotiated the sidewalks. The Cork grannies with black shawls had given way to fifty-somethings in bright American tracksuits, and stylish young women with carefully tended manes, gaudy jewelry and glittering Irish eyes flashing seduction in a glance. Here and there one saw old men with timeworn Irish faces and tweed caps tapping canes on the sidewalk, still seeming to have all the time in the world. They looked like people who held the ancestral memory of their race in their eyes. What would happen when they were gone?

I kept eyeing the stampede of Cork’s jaywalking whimsy. People of all ages were cavorting in the traffic, dipping and diving into its flow like surfers probing waves. A sign said “Live Traffic Ahead” and I wondered if this place had dead traffic, too. A laborer strode between a truck and a bright red sedan, called a “saloon car,” as opposed to a station wagon, which is called an “estate” and never mind that a modest housing development is known as an estate also. The Gypsy trumpets echoed and people ambled with a
remarkable nonchalance. The weight of years began to slip off my shoulders. There was laughter in the air and loud shouts of “How ar’ ya dere boy.” No, it was not America yet, hardly. Not like any city I’d ever known.

We entered a quiet pub and ordered a round of toasted “specials,” which turned out to be ham, cheese, and tomato, the same as every other toasted “special” in Ireland. Customers may ask for any kind of sandwich they wish to be toasted, but these other mutant varieties will never be billed as “special.” The pubs always serve a soup of the day, questions about which are pointless. “It’s veg.” But the stuff is invariably fresh and delicious, so we ordered that too and savored our every drop, while listening to the conversation close by.

“Did you know that the sun is a nuclear weapon?”

“I never heard that, no.”

“Well, it is, and if you are against nuclear power, you are then against the sun, and therefore you want to be dead.”

“The only time I want to be dead is when I am listening to you.”

“In fact, if you think about it, there are all kinds of people with nuclear energy radiating around their heads now, because they use the microwave so much and the mobile phones are dripping with it too.”

“Radioactive Irishmen?”

“Yes, just like yourself.”

As spellbound as the children were by this mad talk, it was time to put their jet-lagged bones to bed. A long row of cabs awaited fresh fares from a halting lane in the middle of the broad Patrick Street, but we noticed that, for some reason, no one ever approached the first taxi in the queue. Some hopped in the sixth or the seventh or even the eleventh, but not a soul ever progressed the few feet toward the first. Wanting to join in with the local spirit, we jaywalked across the street, dodged a bus marked “No. 1 Orbital,” and climbed into a taxi at the end of the line.

“Is there a system here?” Jamie asked naively.

The elderly driver cackled in disbelief. “Would this be your first visit to Cork?”

Return to beginning of chapter

His travel-exhausted mother and siblings had collapsed into their new beds, but Owen refused to sleep and instead followed me into the lane outside our house. Everything was quiet, even the birdsong had grown melancholy as the clouds thickened. I wondered about the scores of people who lived in the terrace houses across the way, and the transformations awaiting us after leaving a neighborless life deep in the Connecticut woods.

A boy on a bicycle appeared, then slowly pedaled away and returned, three times. There seemed to be an Alice in Wonderland aspect to whatever was happening – illusions and dreams that could take us down any wishing well into which we happened to peer. The boys locked into their mutual sizing up.

“Time to start making new friends,” I whispered to Owen.

“I don’t need more friends. I already have Myles,” he said of the soul mate with whom he had shared complete comfort and happiness, and the severance from whom broke his heart.

“Well, you can never have too many,” I replied and asked the scrutinizing kid his name.

Thirty or forty seconds passed and the two boys slipped into our garden. There they kicked a ball. Then other children – two, three, and now a fourth – began to materialize like young deer out of the shadows.

The father of one of these introduced himself. He was in his early thirties, dark-haired and slender, more Corsican than Celtic-looking, just as are a great number of Corkonians, thanks to the genetic contributions of so many invading Normans, shipwrecked Spanish sailors, and Moorish pirates washing up on the southwestern Irish coasts. His head had been nearly shaved to the scalp, in a ubiquitous style inspired by the county’s revered soccer star Roy
Keane of Manchester United fame (who would later walk out on Ireland’s World Cup team in a classic Irish tantrum). But he smiled in that slightly canny way Cork people have, as if forever dwelling over the unspoken next thought.

He was called Diarmuid.

Dermot?

Diarmuid.

Once, people in Ireland were called James or Mary, Francis or Margaret. But the man’s son was Feidhlim, and a girl in the garden below was Aoife (pronounced “Eeefa”) – the most popular Irish girl’s name at the moment – and the simple “Michael” is often pronounced the Irish way as “Me-hall,” while Rory has reverted to Ruairi. The native Irish tongue – spoken by 90 percent of Corkonians 150 years ago – may be dying out, but people from Dublin to Donegal are christening their kids and pets with phonics-defying concoctions of vowel disorders. There are Aoifes beyond counting, and Ann has morphed into Aíne. How Aodhagan is pronounced is anyone’s guess. Perhaps to help people figure such things out, dozens of schools have cropped up where all instruction is conducted in Irish, even though almost no graduates will speak it in their daily lives. Diarmuid’s children attend one of those. In fact, all Irish children study their ancestral ancient tongue for twelve years and develop some appreciation for the irreducible poetry of Gaelic, although most rarely utter a word of it afterward, despite the fact the government spends countless millions duplicating forms and signage in a hopeless dream of reviving the country’s dying native language.

“Did you just get in, like?” asked Diarmuid.

Our past connections and fresh hopes were described.

“Ye have moved to an excellent park,” he said, using the peculiar Irish-English expression for culs-de-sac. “You’ll find no trouble here. It’s very safe, and there are heaps of kids who get along just grand, like.”

It sounded too good to be true – would in time prove far too good to be true – but it was what I wanted to hear, because surrounding the children with a web of reassuring intimacy was our first goal.

Diarmuid went on to explain that the sizable terrace houses in Bellevue Park were built for ascot-wreathed army officers who once were deployed in keeping ever-defiant Cork, the Rebel City, under the imperial English thumb. Field Marshal Montgomery, who would become famous for vanquishing Rommel’s panzer divisions in North Africa and leading the Allies’ northern pincer into Germany, began his military career there, as did Lord Percival who presided over the ignominious fall of 130,000 British and Allied troops to the Japanese in Singapore.

“Twenty-one bullet holes are lodged into these houses from one skirmish with the Irish Republican Army,” my new neighbor told me. In minutes, because Diarmuid is a talker, I learned that history’s ghosts lay all around.

A thousand feet up Military Hill from where we stood, the rank-and-file occupation troops had been housed in a sprawling barracks that has since been renamed after Michael Collins, the charismatic leader of the 1920–21 War of Independence. As the rebellion intensified, the British filled the place with hit squads of roving irregulars, including a thug-like group known as the “Black and Tans.” In one brutal episode, a drunken Tan shot a sixty-five-year-old Cork priest through the forehead. His mates also murdered Thomas MacCurtain, the first duly elected lord mayor of Cork (and a commandant in the Irish Republican Army). The replacement mayor, Terence MacSweeney, was duly arrested and promptly went on a seventy-four-day hunger strike, culminating in his death in October 1920.

IRA guerrillas got even by tossing a petrol bomb into a car full of Black and Tans outside the barracks, killing one and wounding several others. The next night, December 11, the Tans undertook a booze-soaked rampage, burning nearby houses before proceeding into the city center where they torched half of St. Patrick Street, the public library, and the town hall, beating pedestrians, kicking priests, killing two men in their beds, looting, and destroying shops by the dozen.

A disgusted participant wrote his mother in England shortly afterwards:

Suddenly a shout arose from the children playing on our newly rented lawn, and a soccer ball went careering past our heads.

“Notice that your garden there is a perfect rectangle,” Diarmuid observed. “That’s because it once served as a tennis court for Montgomery and the other Brit scoundrels. But, ah sure, no one will hold that against ye.”

My new friend laughed and walked off with a smile, but I wondered.

The next morning boasted an astonishing display, for Ireland, of brilliant sun. I found the boys fast asleep in their bunk beds, with their treasured blankets from infancy lovingly tucked by their sides. At the top of the ladder to Owen’s perch, a favorite stuffed bear, handmade by a friend, kept a tender guard. At the bottom rung, two pairs of slippers waited, toes out in perfect symmetry, while photographs from earlier good times stood reassuringly on their dresser. Already, Jamie’s protective touch of order had transformed their new room. It would clearly not take her long to cast an aura of belonging over our new home.

Feeling blessed, I walked to the top of our lane where another neighbor quickly put out his hand, introducing himself as Pat O’Neill. Not Paddy, but Pat.

He had keen blue eyes and a gaze that left the recipient nowhere to hide. It became apparent that Pat O’Neill had watched our arrival closely. He said he had worked in New York and California and loved America, thought it was the best country in the world. Really? In Ireland, one tends to take such grand statements, in fact assertions of every kind, with a grain of salt. This is because many times a cheerful pronouncement actually is but a lure to draw a
person out. Pat next warned us to watch ourselves because it was very different in Cork, that everybody minds each other’s business constantly.

“They call it the valley of the squinting windows,” he explained, as children not seen the day before began lingering curiously outside our green gate.

Another neighbor introduced himself as Shaun Higgins and, with a barely concealed smile, asked if I was a journalist.

And was he a bloody espionage agent? True, the
Irish Times
had just published a humor piece I had penned from the U.S. about certain peculiar Anglo-Irish expressions, and I planned on doing more magazine and newspaper writing about our adventures. But I hardly thought the whole country would be placed on red alert with my first offering, much less peg me on sight.

“I saw ye get out of the taxi yesterday and couldn’t help wondering if ye might be the person who wrote the newspaper article about moving from America to Cork, and I don’t mean to be forward, but I was just curious, because it was funny. Ye don’t have to tell me of course.”

Like hell I didn’t. In Ireland, they can still coax information from your pores, can charm and entice typically overly frank newcomers into revealing all manner of things. In Ireland, fresh information is treasured like pearls plucked from an oyster. One man may have a wallet choking with fifty pound notes, another a slick new car, but he who has collected the most secrets will in some way feel the richest at the end of the day. Pat O’Neill pretended to be refinishing his iron fence – he never stopped chipping away at that thing as the months passed – but he was listening to every word, not wanting Shaun Higgins to mine the fresh ore before he did.

After spending thirty-five years as a ballet dancer, a few early ones as a boxer, and working the stage in Dublin and on Broadway, Shaun had a gift for fast conversational footwork. A great character, he was born at the other end of the terrace from where he now runs a bed-and-breakfast with his equally engaging wife, Breda, at that moment eyeing us from behind a curtain. Running a B&B seemed like an occupation from Ireland’s earlier era of modest expectations. But hold on, it turned out that Shaun and Breda
pocketed enough from all those rasher, tomato, blood pudding, and egg plates, to holiday for four months every winter in Florida or Australia, or both. Did they need an assistant?

“Well, I wish ye the very best here with us, and if there is any way we can help, please ask,” Shaun offered warmly. It felt as if we were being welcomed into a village, rather than some anonymous foreign city.

In search of food, I found my way to a prodigious supermarket whose offerings would have once filled a hundred corner shops. In fact, it was about ninety times larger than an early Irish prototype I used to visit on Dublin’s north side, back when such emporia were as exotic to the island as string bikinis. That sleepy bazaar had proffered such delicacies as dirty spuds, burly cabbages, and fatty mince, along with tinned kippers, tinned steak and kidney pies, and tinned tongue, the latter foodstuffs having virtually disappeared since. Back in 1973, food was not something with which the Irish pampered themselves, nor was much of anything else. The ancestral memory of the Famine still hung over the land.

But behold now. A shivering chill pervaded this cavernous new supermarket, and the engines of its refrigeration systems rumbled as if a Boeing 747 might be advancing down aisle eight or nine. Gauntlets of frozen dinners and pizzas gave way to seemingly infinite varieties of potato chips, called “crisps.” Plain, cheese and onion, salt and vinegar, smoky bacon, barbecue, steak sauce, garlic, pickle, sour cream, prawn cocktail, cracked pepper, pizza: endless fantasy flavors beckoned in the place of the kettles of boiling spuds that once graced every hob and hearth in the land. The adult Irish clearly still adore their spuds – only the trendiest restaurants would think of serving a meal without heaps of them, one fried or mashed and the other baked and saturated in some form of goo. Potato skins, potato wedges, potato salad sandwiches, potato pancakes and soup – all are freely available too. Yet Irish chip shops now import all their spuds, and a dinner partner would soon bemoan that his children were losing track of the potatoes in their souls. “There was no pasta in this county when I was a boy. Pasta is not Irish. Rice is not Irish. But that’s what the kids want now. Who knows where this country is headed?”

In any event, the aisles of crisps gave way to walls hung with plastic garden chairs, cappuccino machines, and black brassieres of a shocking scantiness. Another department offered choice single malt whiskies; Finnish vodkas; Hungarian, New Zealand, Chilean, South African, and even Lebanese wines – wine from about every sun-blasted country on earth. In the 1970s, a person asking for wine in Ireland would have been regarded as a boarding-school prat. But now people in a working-class suburb were tickling their tongues at delicate tastes from free sample bottles.

With a groaning cart, I proceeded to the cash register and an object lesson that Ireland, despite its eager strides into the “never-never,” as they used to call a life built upon debt, can still entail curious time travels. As my purchases were added up, a frown settled upon the cashier’s face. “I’m afraid your total comes to £117. We have to clear all credit-card charges over £100 with our central office,” she said in a somnambulant tone that suggested this drill was repeated often. “Won’t be a sec’.”

People back in the queue, evidently long inured to the practice, began to sag their heads and age visibly as the clock ticked. And ticked. Finally the clerk returned from the far ends of the store.

“I’m very sorry, sir, but you have a foreign credit card and it won’t go through. Credit cards are meant to be used in their country of origin.”

Was this a signal to drop one’s spuds on the floor and head for home? I had told our friends I knew Ireland inside out, but I suddenly didn’t know where I had brought my family at all. Clueless, I pulled out another equally foreign credit card, whispered hocus-pocus, and jettisoned some nonessentials – the bottle of Bordeaux hurt – to bring the total under 100 punts. Voila!

After sharing a fine lunch with the awakening family, I set to other organizational vicissitudes. And here came another rendezvous with Oddness Abroad. In addition to the usual government bureaucracies, a newcomer to Ireland must cope with several huge and Byzantine monopolies that might as well be called One and Only Electric, Amalgamated Phones, and Go Away Insurance. None, I’d been warned, would talk to potential customers unless
they had first established a checking account, which sounds simple enough until one discovers that, on this logic-defying island, this is about as difficult as wresting top-secret clearance from the CIA or MI5.