Dooneen

What am I looking at? Ships?

Can’t be ships.

A sort of rubble on the horizon. Shimmering. As if a desert.

Can’t be a desert. Not with the scent of earth in my nostrils. A wide damp space then. Perhaps not wide so much as flat. A garden? A field. Hills rolling out to the sea. No. No hills. No sea. A wasteland of plains. A light rain. No rain. A low light. Light, anyway.

I can think of nowhere specific now, other than Dublin. It all boils down to Dublin.

Where am I, Mootie?

That’s what I wondered, for a moment.

Huts then. Small huts in the distance, on the very edge of things. Shapes. Like huts. A low scattering of buildings for example, like a little town. People small as ants—I’m imagining—coming and going. To the dentist. Off to work. To the shops. Tiny intricate bicycles and trams. Railings and accidents, playgrounds and schools. Miniature upheavals by the courthouse steps. What used to be a church. Rooftops, crimes, love affairs, gossip. Those were the shapes I saw. Life, off in the distance. Me on my side with a headache.

Ah Mootie I missed you immediately. In every pause to catch my breath, in every sigh or shift or hesitation. In every interregnum and in every quiet or empty moment from that to this I’ve missed you.

Anyway. I knew where I was, of course. I sat up, straightened up, stood up. The thing is not to sit up in fact, if it’s manageable. The bare ground can ruin the clothing. So I straightened up, I rose, from amongst a ragged clutch of bushes, slapping leaves and dust from my sleeves, knocking soil and earth from my shoulders, twigs from my hair, and I experienced the usual awful tinnitus and a slight sense of disorganisation at a molecular level, as if passed through a sieve. That faded almost immediately, though the headache lingered half the day. And there is a ringing in my ears even now. A permanent alarm. All this time after. I don’t know how long. I’m afraid to ask them. They are unfailingly kind and honest and my fear is that I’ve been here far longer than I’d want to know.

I don’t know where you are.

The spinner in Burgess Park, London deposits its users at Blessington Street Basin in Dublin.

Do you know Blessington Street, Mootie? Did I bring you here? I can’t remember. Lovely little park around the water. A very civilised rectangle. I came out of the undergrowth by the wall on the west side of the reservoir like a creature climbing from the grave. Like Jesus from the tomb. More like Lazarus probably—dilapidated, annoyed. The thing always annoys me. The spinner I mean. I caught a glance of the man who had gone before me, making his way towards the gate, his fat bag hanging across his hips, a hand smoothing his hair, a leaf stuck to his shoe. Nice gait. Can’t remember his face. So much for all that.

It was pleasant weather, Mootie. Better than London. Blue skies, mild. Tufted ducks bobbed on the water and the little wild island in the middle was full and green like it had exploded from the depths. A lovely sight. I cheered up. The air was different too. Cleaner of course, fresher, and the colours seemed brighter as well. Even the leaves of the shrubs where I stood glittered and danced in the little breeze. Even the green grass. Even the black earth.

Ah Dublin, Mootie. I greatly love coming home. I remember thinking that. I always think it, when I arrive. Think it and feel it. Then perhaps, after a day, or an hour, I only think it. And then it’s gone.

I shuffled out to the path when the coast was clear and sensed a dampness on my legs and looked down. My trousers. Ruined. Despite my care, my efforts, my caution. My cheer subsided. This always happens and I always forget. And then it happens again. Stained with mud all over, most heavily on the knees, but the mess was general. The seat as well. I am never aware of being anything other than upright in the spinner. But of course how would I know? A lot of people have the tumbling sensation— well, the name after all. But I’ve never had that. For me, I step in, and the world becomes just one thing—a very serious business. There is a sudden darkness and warmth, a squeezing sort of sensation—not unpleasant at all—and then I don’t know what. A gap. A blur. A momentary absence. Then the release, the arrival, the return to self, and a lazy, funny sort of shyness. I’ve described it to you before. I must have I’m sure. Though I feel. Oh well.

You know Anna in the coffee shop? She told me once that whenever she’s in the spinner she has a very clear picture of her mother. Her mother’s face, smiling at her. Puts her off going anywhere. And Philip told me that someone shakes his hand. Who? I shouted at him, appalled. But he didn’t know. Said no, it wasn’t alarming, it was comforting. He is a handshaker though, by temperament. I’m not. But I have nothing like that. Just gap, and I am elsewhere, if you like, outside myself, or perhaps deeper in, and then I am back where I usually am, but in an entirely different place, and I have arrived.

I really didn’t know what to do about my trousers.

The Burgess Park/Blessington Street Basin spin is easy duty really compared to the Finsbury Park/Ranelagh Gardens spin, where I was laid out once like a drunk for a good half hour. Or Russell Square/Palmerston Park, for which there is always a queue. The loss of connection rattles me though, as you know I’m sure. From myself, a little, of course. But the literal one too. I stare at my device and have to talk myself down. Sometimes there’s an infuriating message. Unable to resolve. Error not found. Please stand by. Sometimes there is a little animation. A nucleus or solar system, jerkily spinning. An ellipsis making and unmaking itself. It’s the price of the ticket I suppose. I have always, I may as well tell you now, been very unsettled by it. It can last for hours. And while it lasts I worry.

And so I have been worrying now a long time. I lost it. It’s gone. I don’t know when or where. It distresses me to think of all the messages from you it may contain. It distresses me greatly. Perhaps the police ripped it from me that time on Merrion Square. Perhaps I left it in the hotel in a moment now erased from my memory. Perhaps in the tunnel in the dark. Or on the run through the streets from the beast. Little glimpses there Mootie of all the things I want to tell you. Perhaps it was in the last disaster in that small misshapen park, the figures on the roof, the night collapsing, and the rain and the stones. Who knows? Maybe it was on the long journey here, during which I was mostly carried, and my clothes, inevitably, removed and replaced to disguise me or to dress my wounds. It’s in a gutter or a ditch somewhere. Or an opportunist pocket. It doesn’t matter. I can’t allow it to gnaw at me or there’ll be nothing left. It doesn’t matter anyway. There is rarely a signal anymore they say, and no one has heard from London in a month.

I’m here at least a month then. A month at least, since the events I’m describing. Time though, has gotten away from me. As has my narrative. I’m sorry Mootie. There is a lot to get through. I’ll do my best. Bear with me.

My trousers.

I tried to clean my knees at least, but only made it worse. And I’m standing there on a footpath in a public garden slapping my legs, amusing the strollers no doubt. People look at you here more than they do there. I decided I’d have them cleaned at the hotel. And wear the other pair. Bloody nuisance obviously. Embarrassment. Should I include it in my expenses? I’d have to itemise it—one pair of trousers, soiled. I briefly considered finding a private place somewhere in the bushes and changing right away, but there was no guarantee that I wouldn’t then be left with two pairs of muddy trousers instead of one. And in any case, the shrubbery of Blessington Street Basin is thin. Oh Mootie you’re laughing of course. You have sympathy, but you think it’s funny. I know you.

I don’t know what sort of detail you will need.

The situation is urgent, but it’s moving very slowly.

As I write I often pause, and my mind wanders. Outside is the ocean.

I don’t know where you are.

Behind me there was a curse, and I turned to see a woman, two bags, stumbling down to the path, looking towards me and shaking her head. No mud on her. I walked a little faster. Nothing worse than people who want to compare notes. But by the time I got to the gate and glanced back she was nowhere to be seen, and I stopped by the railings and looked at my device. Nothing at all. Just a dimly lit screen and a little heat at the back. I switched it off. And either I put it in my pocket or in my bag. My bag I suspect. That small inner pocket with the zip. I cannot remember seeing it again.

They’ve put a clicker in on Blessington Street. Ridiculous. You know the clickers? You must know the clickers. They would have been here when you were. Although I feel. Oh well. Moving footpaths basically. They ripped up half the city putting them in. Odd sort of project. A lot of propaganda, with a great whiff of corruption to it but I could never find anyone who could explain the money to me. Public contracts. Subsidies. Various ministers with various connections to various unsavoury items. German tank manufacturers, I seem to recall. Construction contracts in Saxony and Thuringia and some very contented Irish developers with nice new villas on the Italian coast. Murky waters. The usual, Mootie. Very basic over most of the city, very elaborate along the main thoroughfares. A lot of them don’t work at all. But when they do, people like the click.

This one runs from just outside the Basin down to the junction with Dorset Street. What’s the point of that? Can people not walk anymore? My father hates the clickers, all of them, without exception. Insidious, he says. He makes a great show of never using them, of walking parallel, pausing now and then to look at nothing in particular, but taking his time about it. My mother, sometimes still talking to him, used to stride off into the distance on the clicker and had to wait for him then, furious. Now she walks beside him, silently.

I entertained the notion that if I had a working device I’d call him. I’m on Blessington Street Dad, and you’ll never guess. Impress him with my disdain. Like father.

But I had decided of course to avoid the family.

*

A child in a window was pointing a stick at me. I’d have thought it was all offices now on Blessington Street, but this child can’t have been more than 10 years old—up at a second floor window on my right, a grimy net curtain draped over their head and shoulders like a shroud. People live here, then. Grubby Georgian. Like a Nabatean cliff face Mootie, do you remember? Maybe it was a toy gun. They were pointing it like a gun in any case, one eye closed, one hand on the barrel, one on the trigger, their thumb up as a . . . whatever that is. I know nothing about guns. I decided that when they fired their imaginary shot I would jump back a pace clutching my chest, and fall slowly to the ground. They’d be astonished, delighted. I’d roll onto my back and lie still. Perhaps they’d think they had really shot me, that they were guilty of summoning up some terrible magic, and would run away. What would they do? Go tell their mother? More likely they’d say nothing. Not mention it. Be a good child, do what they’re told, be the best child, a tremble in their hands, say nothing, tensed for the knock on the door. Ruined, for months. Years maybe. A terrible thing to do to one so young.

They pulled their trigger and I just stared at them. They looked neither surprised nor disappointed. They found another target somewhere further down the street. I looked to see who—there was a family standing still on the clicker being carried slowly, regally, towards me—a mother and father, a little girl, a baby in a pram—all of them quiet and front-facing as if a moving pathway was a very serious thing, and entirely their due. When I looked back at the window the child was gone.

I took the clicker to the corner and caught a tram.