“OK,” I said anxiously. “Spit it out Marco. Omit no detail, however small. What exactly is this ‘we are fucked’ business? And I sincerely hope by the way, that the expression is a gross over-reaction on your part to something that’s in every way no more than a piddling trifle or innocuous storm in a teacup.”
Marcus seated himself in the armchair directly across from me and was in a clear and ardent state of distress.
“OK so, well you know my brother Geoff right?” he said restlessly, standing up again and pacing the room back and forth. And then going over on his arse. “That goddamn FUCKING CARPET” he spluttered before taking a seat once again.
“Marcus,” I repeated, in a markedly sterner tone than before. “Will you PLEASE get to the fucking point? How exactly are we, as you've been alluding to for the last gazillion years, ‘fucked’?”
“Geoff stole the tickets,” he blurted out, shielding his eyes with his hand as if to defend himself perhaps from possible physical censure. “And the vodka too, the bollocks!” he continued, noticeably more apoplectic now, and from what I could gather from his increasingly puce coloured features, just about ready to explode.
“WHAT??” I shouted angrily, realising now the seriousness of our situation. Marcus’s older brother Geoff was a total and utter fucking plague. How could he let this happen? It was no wonder he was expecting a slap.
“For fuck sake Marcus, how could you be so fucking dumb?” I continued. “I mean Jesus Christ, you know your brother! He’s a total and utter fucking plague! You do realise I suppose that he’d bar code your grandmother if he thought it’d turn a profit? Why the fuck didn’t you hide them somewhere safe? Bloody hell Marcus, you know what the fucker’s like!”
“I know, I know,” said Marcus, apologetically at least. “But I did hide them dude, really, really well actually! But you know what he’s like, you’ve said so yourself. He’s such a sneaky bastard. He waited until I was out and then ransacked my room and found them. I sewed the envelope with the tickets into the underside of my mattress and wedged the naggin of vodka deep down into one of my wellies. Seriously pal, what more could I do?”
He had a point to be fair. Nobody can legislate for a brother who’s an Antichrist and Professor Moriarty all rolled up into one. So I gave him a break. The key thing now of course above all else, was to identify a solution to our immediate problem and forget about apportioning blame that would serve no purpose.
“Alright Marcus, alright, it’s not your fault,” I said, as even temperedly as I could under the circumstances. “But we have to sort this shit out! Seriously dude, there is absolutely no fucking way I’m missing this concert, no fucking way in the world. I’ve been looking forward to it for months!”
“OK Johnny, OK, I know. But what we can do?” he answered despairingly. “Neither of us has enough cash to get there and even if we did, how are we supposed to get in? More importantly even, what about gargle?”
Once again, a pertinent observation.
As it was so, we were going nowhere. Our fastidiously planned drunken and musical odyssey was slipping through our fingers. ‘Fuck this’ I thought though, straining the old grey matter for a solution. “I’m not giving up the ghost yet. There HAS to be a way!”
So even though it admittedly wasn’t the best idea in the world, I reasoned that the best and only way we might possibly find money as quickly as we needed to, was to turn Marcus’s house over completely there and then, without further delay. To ransack it basically, in case something might turn up in some nook or cranny somewhere. It was a long shot I know, but we had no any other options. And I wasn’t hearing any better ideas from Marcus's side of the room. I put the idea to him so, and to say he wasn’t best pleased is a bit of an understatement. In the end though I managed to convince him, and promised him that once we’d turned the place inside out and left no stone unturned in our quest for dough, we’d put everything back in exactly the same way as we’d found it before, nothin’ surer, absolutely guaranteed. Which was a total lie of course but fuck him, I didn’t lose the tickets! Or the vodka. If he ended getting grief from his old dear then so be it I thought, well deserved I’d say for being so complacent in the first place. I’d already given him a break by not going through him for a shortcut, but every now and then there comes a time when you just have to call a spade a spade and not an earth excavating implement. His present misgivings so were inconsequential.
We set about our task then, with Marcus taking the ground floor and myself upstairs. I started in the main bathroom, which was particularly foul I really must report. And oddly enough also, not as a direct result of unhygienic male bathroom behaviour that you'd no doubt assumed was the main reason behind the gruesomeness. I was searching the place as exactingly as I could, but it’s difficult to remain focused when every conceivable middle aged lady's girdle type imaginable is there to accost you at every turn. The worst thing about it though was less tangible. An ‘old lady’ talcum powder odour, that unbearable stench. A lazy stench. A stench that screams ‘Yes, I’ve washed my geriatric bones with an old flannel cloth this morning, but I will not shower and will not bathe. I will endeavour instead to disguise my languid mustiness with cheap lavender talc that some favourite niece or other gifted to me last Christmas.’
Another pal of ours, Phil Dowd, took this job once in a city centre hotel and the stories he imparted to us regarding the rancid nature of the ladies toilets were unbelievable. There was a nightclub attached to the hotel, and as part of his duties as Night Porter he was required to clean out the toilets there afterwards, as soon as the last of the patrons had finally departed the club for the night. Up until around 3.30am every night so, he had the fairly easy job of meeting and greeting guests at the front door and in reception, and permitting them in and out of the establishment as required. Once everything had settled down though and the lion’s share of the hotel guests had retired at last for the evening, he’d disappear through a door at the back of reception to a small utility room situated towards the rear. There he’d retrieve the cleaning products required for the next part of his job. The ‘gents’ were a breeze he told us, just a simple wipe of the hand basin areas up and down first and then a quick shine of the mirrors with Windowlene. After that he’d mop out the general urinal area and cubicles also, before finishing up with a mopping of the tiled bathroom floor from the back of the room to the front. A few squirts of Domestos into the toilet bowls then, and if there were toilet rolls, hand towels or soap dispensers that needed changing, then he’d get on with that too before he left. Beyond that there was nothing much else of any great consequence to take care of, so it was never really that grim or unpalatable a task. With the exception of an odd drunken party goer with bad aim, it was usually a benign enough mess to clean up.
The ‘ladies’ however were an entirely different proposition. The owners of the hotel had made a bit of an effort a year or so before, to make the place look that little bit more plush and highfalutin. As far as Phil could see though, this had been a total and utter waste of time and money. No amount of fake gilding to decorate a mirror or bathroom fitting, or thick piled pink carpet laid opulently on a floor underneath could hide the heinous collection of disgusting debris that these ‘ladies’ deemed reasonable to leave behind. Spent lipstick and mascara tubes thrown wherever they cared, and as much pink and red stained cotton wool and tissue littering the floor as to render its original hue practically indiscernible. Near the wash hand-basin area, soggy make-up stained tissues and spent cigarettes were thrown lazily into the sink, with the lipstick stained butts of the latter either half-finished or barely started. As a result Phil said, of either ‘Rock the Boat’ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfBwsG8ubFw or Dancing Queen http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFrGuyw1V8s commencing outside, with the fags subsequently flicked into the sink without a second thought for the poor bastard coming in later to sort out the mess. The shrieking coven would storm the bathroom exit then that led back out to the dance floor, frantically intent it would seem on ascertaining if the rest of the shoulder padded fraternity in the establishment tonight did indeed, have the notion.
The cubicles were the worst, Phil said. Used sanitary towels and tampons littered the floor next to the bowls, even though perfectly decent and fully working sanitary dispensing units were situated to the right of all of them. He found a diaphragm there once also, I mean seriously, come on! Was there no shame? It came to light some time afterwards anyway, that most of the female patrons were actually aware that the toilets were cleaned on a nightly basis by some poor young bastard from the north side, and that they were leaving their disgusting anomalies everywhere deliberately just to, you know, take the piss. Why they’d started it is kind of hard to know for certain, but Phil was convinced that it was to do with some disgruntled receptionist who’d worked there previously, being unceremoniously (and unfairly) dismissed for fucking the Banqueting Manager in the servery. She’d made no efforts to conceal her fury afterwards apparently, and had let everyone she knew know about the injustice of the situation with a good degree of consternation; resulting in most of the ladies who came to know of her plight venting their disapproval in the only practical way they knew how. They had a point though to be fair, and when you consider the complete misogyny that was going on in the place at the time (i.e., the receptionist got canned and the banqueting guy was promoted to Deputy GM a month or so later), well you'd definitely have to agree that it was probably no more than the hotel deserved. And even though it had had nothing to do with Phil as such, he was still viewed in an unsympathetic light and in real terms no more than collateral damage in the grand scheme of things. A loser basically, who’d just got caught up in the crossfire. In the end he had enough of it anyway and handed his notice in after no more than a week or two in the job. This was less to do with the toilet ‘situation’ however, and related more so to him falling asleep on the Dart every morning on his way home. And being poked awake every morning also by the driver of the train at the end of the line in Howth. Which was three stops past Howth Junction, his actual destination of choice. The final straw was probably the morning when the driver didn’t bother to wake him at all (to teach him a lesson I suppose) with the train and him eventually ending up in Bray at the totally opposite end of the line. Which was about an hour and fifteen minutes away from where he was actually meant to be. By the time he came to his senses and realised exactly where he was, he knew that he’d have the same trip back again to get home, with the overall journey time by the time he returned, having taken well over two and three quarter hours from start to finish. In the end he resigned himself to the fact that night work just didn’t suit him, so he took up a job in the civil service in Rathmines instead. The way he reasoned it he’d have all the time in the world to sleep there, wherever and whenever he desired.
OK, so enough of all that; back to the ransacking of Marcus’s gaff. I eventually finished in the bathroom but found nothing of interest or note. Except woollen toilet roll covers. I mean what the fuck are they supposed to be? Covering rolls of tissue paper that people will soon be using to wipe theirs arses with? With decorated, woollen, tea cosy type gizmos? I’m sorry folks but I’m just not getting it. So anyway, I think that Marcus was under the impression that our search would be rudimentary enough, but nothing could have been further from the truth as far as I was concerned. While he was downstairs turning over cushions and sifting through magazine racks, I was a plundering Viking upstairs, raping and pillaging my way through everything with the zeal of a newly unleashed Jehovah’s Witness on a never before visited housing estate. Clothing hems were ripped apart and wooden panelling prised apart. Pillows were torn asunder and hidden compartments in jewellery boxes identified, with their contents summarily retrieved once open. And although Marcus was initially dismayed at the state of the place when he saw it, he certainly wasn’t displeased with the fruits of my labour once I brought them to his attention. There they were the little beauties, lodged tightly at the bottom of one of Delia’s sumptuously decorated fake Fabergé jewellery boxes. Her ‘rainy day’ nest egg perhaps? Secreted underneath a bundle of what seemed to be a collection of clandestinely penned love letters carefully tied together with twine. Received in a previous life by one she might have eloped with? Or more recently acquired maybe, the saucy old minx! Anyway, not relevant. There they were, nestled snugly, staring up at me, solitary and alone. Pleading to be liberated. Six of the most alluring notes of legal tender you might ever wish to see, just pining for a purpose and looking for fun. Six multiplied by fifty equates to three big ones, oh yes indeedy, three hundred cast iron reasons to believe that once again this could, and would, be a day to remember!
I’d called Marcus up to the room, taking care first of course to replace the cover on the secret compartment in his mother’s jewellery box before he arrived. I was happy to purloin the cash, of that there was absolutely no doubt; but lighting the touch paper to a family break-up? Not me. I’m not a monster. The love letters would stay where they were and I’d tell him that I found the cash under her mattress. He arrived a minute or so after I'd called him up, and we sat down then on the side of his parent’s bed to review our overall situation. At this point so I really must say to you that it’s a totally excellent thing to have people like Marcus in one’s life. He sees it as it is, so is in a way not overly dissimilar to myself. He takes life on with pragmatism and a jaunty spirit and although stressed out for sure, from time to time every now and again, his adventurous spirit more often than not wins through over any initial apprehension he might have been feeling at the time. So after a brief appraisal of the situation it should come as no surprise to you that it was the work of no more than a moment for me to convince him that the cash should be appropriated, and then after no more than twenty or so further moments, for the two of us to be high tailing it down Swan’s Nest Road in the general direction of the train station. With I might add, a hundred and fifty of the best lining our respective pockets. The thoughts of putting everything in the house back as it had been was a problem for another day, and as far as I was concerned not one that required any dealing with there and then. The senior Q’s were off sunning their fat arses in Spain anyway, so if the lady of the house did eventually realise that her carefully concealed readies had been recently misappropriated (before we’d had time to return them safe and sound that is) then so be it; we’d cross that bridge when we came to it. Given the incendiary nature of the missives the cash had been lying underneath however, I was fairly confident that Delia might not be overly vocal about the theft if it did ever come to light. Marcus might want to replace the cash at some point in the future himself of course, which was fair enough. But I certainly wasn’t going to be giving the matter a whole lot more thought myself. For Marcus to not even bring up the fact that I’d totally thrashed the upstairs of his parent’s house also, indicated to me very clearly that he was in an unusually good mood today, and almost certainly looking for action.
So what larks my friends, what larks? Before long the mid-summer sun was reddening our skin through the yellow windows of the morning train, and the day was stretching out before us like a red carpet. It was Saturday July 11th 1987 and the bell in the steeple at the top of St. Benedict’s church in Kilbarrack had just struck ten.
Chapter 8 - An Altering of the Mind
We arrived in Molloy’s at just before 11am and with the exception of some old codgers stooped over pints or small ones here and there, the bar was by and large empty. Some concert-goers had congregated in the lounge area on the other side of the pub but the way I see it, if you want to drink in an environment that’s not unlike a nursing home’s recreation room then drink in the lounge if you want to. Marcus and I prefer the bar.
Our stage was set so for a session and a half. A ray of piercing sunlight shot through a small stain glassed window near the ceiling, which cast a thin film of light from it down to the floor; an incandescent tubular playground created fleetingly for lazy summer dust particles to dance around, flittering here and there with every exhalation of smoke or passing of patron through door; blue first, then gold and silvery, then bluish grey, before disappearing as quickly as it had arrived as the sun hid moodily behind a transient cloud. It would return again soon enough though, and the carnival would start over. Tranquillity and harmony shimmered timelessly, and the world was at peace in this monosyllabic enclave. That was how it was at this hour. Conversations not far away but a discarding of cobwebs from the previous evening required first before any semblance of social interaction could take place. The ‘hair of the dog’ as they say. Hence the gloomy silence and overall disinclination for discourse.
Molloy’s of Talbot Street. Where civil servants and barristers rubbed shoulders with vagrants and drunkards. Everyone equal and everyone welcome. Décor wise it hadn’t changed much over the preceding forty or so years, with the cracking flakes of paint on the walls a decaying reminder of the passage of time. And let's not forget some of the more regular patrons also, many of whom might well have been stationed there for as long ago as that last lick of paint had been applied. The place was not without its old school charm of course but as with all of these charming pubs you’re only ever as good as ‘your pint’. And by ‘your pint’ I do of course mean ‘your Guinness’. But I’m assuming you got that. Some pubs on occasion make the mistake of taking less care about the quality of their 'pint' as they should, which when you consider the veritable glut of excellent pubs that serve perfectly decent Guinness all over the city, is nothing short of a gilt edged invitation for your loyal and trusted patrons to take their leave. Why would they stay? No self-respecting Irishman of any mettle will remain in a pub that serves bad Guinness. And the morning after? An arse is like a bullet wound my friends. A dragon’s nostril. And it's so easy to get it right as well that wrong is just inexcusable. It can be as easy as ensuring that the gas pressure is gauged correctly or the pipes are running cold. So no excuses really as I said. If for instance you’ve decided run a pipe behind a fridge in the kitchen out the back, you might possibly think that this is OK. It’s just a fridge right? Well it’s not. The elements at the back of the appliance heat up so much that they heat the liquid in the pipes as its passing on by, rendering the end product damaged beyond palatable consumption.
However I digress. The pint in Molloy’s was always good so we'd nothing to worry about here. Except getting served, which taking into account that whole age issue once again, was more often than not another ordeal in itself. There were ploys you could employ however to assist you in getting past this inevitable and persistent problem.
So here’s the deal with Molloy’s. If you get one of the younger barmen, that is, one of the guys in their twenties or early thirties, they'll usually serve you without hesitation. If you’re unlucky enough however to catch the eye of an elder lemon, or just have your timing wrong for whatever reason, you could quite conceivably be sent on your way sharpish, with a flea in your youthful ear and a kick in the arse out the door. The idea therefore is to walk in at just the right time and catch the eye of one of the younger chaps as soon as you can. If they happen to be serving someone else just then however, you need to busy yourself surreptitiously for a moment or two until they eventually became available. Taking off your jacket very slowly usually works well enough, and tying an imaginarily untied shoelace is good too. Until such time as they become free again and you can attract their attention at will. It was a game of timing and skill so and a lot was at stake. We could always sojourn to the Nep if it came to it but that was another ten minutes’ walk up the road and we wanted to be closer to Busáras and the off licence in Store Street also. More than that though, it was the principle of the thing. We were seasoned players at this stage however, so after a second or two of furtive and semi-suspicious dawdling, we eventually attracted young Declan’s attention and mouthed a covert order to him for two of the best at his leisure. He imperceptibly nodded his acquiescence while his bosses, the older barmen, were talking to some other coffin dodgers at the opposite end of the bar. Meaning that we were home and hosed now and ready to rock and roll. And once there’s a pint in front of you they’re unlikely to fuck you out afterwards, unless you’re a troublemaker which neither of us was. So it was all about getting that first one in. We could be there for as long as we wanted to be after that, safe in the knowledge that no matter what else happened, we knew where the next pint would be coming from for at the least the next couple of hours. Even the older barmen would serve us now, once we already had at least one that was half finished in front of us.
We called Molloy’s ‘the pub that time forgot’ and with good reason also. As I mentioned before its décor hadn’t changed in perhaps forty years, so it definitely had that unmistakeable authenticity that comes with age. There was little or no care taken in the upkeep of the place however, and beyond mopping up spilt beer or a rudimentary cleaning out of an ashtray with a cloth that's seen better days, there wasn’t a whole lot else the barmen did by way of cleaning. It mattered little to anyone who worked there or frequented the place though, as organised chaos suited the place very well. By way of conveying to you so how haphazardly the venue was put together, here’s a general run-down of the random objects collected for no apparent reason behind the bar. Objects that remained unchanged from day to day, month to month, even year to year. There were two shelves at the back of the bar with one at eye level and another just below, where the spirit and whisky bottles were stationed. Directly underneath these was another shelf for glasses and on the counter beneath, an old fashioned push button cash register for transactions. Cereal bowls to the left of this were filled with recently sliced lemons and limes, and a half-finished bag of sugar and bottle of recently opened milk, with its foil lid half open and protruding upwards, was situated next to a half pint glass full to the brim with cloves. An old plastic kettle and toaster sat there also, whilst other miscellaneous bric-a-brac and humdrum items populated the remainder of the surfaces in the vicinity; objects which, it seemed to us, had no discernable use or reason to be there, least of all in a bar that had no other purpose beyond the purveyance of products related specifically to the copious consumption of alcohol. A Scrabble box for example, with what looked five year old dust collected upon its surface ; a mini magnetic chess set with some of the pieces quite clearly missing; a stack of Messengers, Boy’s Own magazines and Evening Heralds to the left, and an oversized Stein from an Oktoberfest festival long since passed, with any number of useless and random items deposited into it and then forgotten about; half spent pool chalks, odd buttons, a mini scissors, assorted red and black markers, an old pair of spectacles with a lenses missing; things to be honest that most normal people would have fucked out long ago. But not in Molloy’s. Hence its charm.
We drained our first pints so and motioned to Declan for two more of the same if he very much didn’t mind. After providing the needful, he stopped with us for a moment or two for a chat. His bosses were nowhere to be seen so he could be himself now a little bit more than before.
“Story boys,” he said cheerfully. “What’s happenin’?”
“Nothing strange Deco,” I answered. “Except of course a day trip to Slane for the concert! WEHEY!!!”
We whooped and hollered and childishly high fived. Which was kind of dumb-assed in hindsight, I mean Deco was the hand that feeds here so our actions were definitely dubious. We knew him well enough though, so beyond our present foolishness, there was a reasonable degree of mutual respect there already; enough thankfully for him to ignore us and take our good natured piss taking on the chin. That didn’t take away from the fact though, that he could just as easily have told us to fuck off out of it at any time he wanted to, if for arguments sake he was in a bad mood on the day and pissed off with us for rubbing his nose in it like that. But that’s the gargle for you, you know? It turns everyone into an arsehole and we were no exception. Deco was on a double shift that day also, so the last thing he needed as to be hearing details of our plans for raucous revelry later on. But he was OK about it anyway as I said, and even though his present countenance was screaming silent resentment, we knew he’d wish us well on our way in the end.
“Really?” he said, cheerily enough considering as I said. “Ye jammy bastards! So how are you getting there? Car or bus?”
“Ahh the bus will do us Deco,” I said. “At least that way we can gargle as much as we want on the way, know what I mean?” I continued.
He nodded agreeably, before placing the