by B.E. Nugent.
It proved to be a welcome distraction.
One thirty five in the afternoon of Holy Thursday 2022, winding down for the extra-long weekend and a quick check on the news headlines. That was a bad idea. War raging in Ukraine. Environmental collapse nearing irreversible. And then the gruesome murders in Sligo. Christ. These headlines, too, were a distraction, but not in a good way. Most unwelcome, in fact. Time then for a sneaky lunch-time peek at my current short story in progress, whose action is stuck somewhere between scenes one and two. Going nowhere because I’m blocked. I can’t think (therefore I’m not?) and it’s hard to find quiet time in this brand spanking new office. Man, I hate open plan.
My first scene had come together with barely a stutter but, fuck it, transitions are just not my thing. Then there’s progressions, character development, arc, struggle, conflict, resolution or redemption or some fucking meaningfulness to add value and I’m up shit creek, beating myself with the paddle, which really doesn’t help, and I’m typing, deleting, typing, saving, undoing, deleting, typing, drawn at last to the raised voices on the street.
As I say, a welcome distraction.
First floor office near Limerick city centre, it’s a good spot to look down on the world shuffling past. Close to all the amenities. Across the road and down a bit, there’s the fire station with its regular checks and sirens and occasional hurried departure; opposite that, the Courthouse with its frequent and reliable customer base, some of whom will be transported the hundred yards or so to the prison, its high grey walls throwing two hundred-year-old shadows over this street and its occupants. Go further down the street and you’ll find the mostly closed psychiatric hospital that, funnily enough, looks exactly like a Victorian Insane Asylum, currently an administration hub for the health service. Beyond that, you’ll find one of the homeless hostels that picks up the burnt-out debris from the Courthouse, the prison and the insane asylum. And they say city planners couldn’t pick an elbow from an arse!
Yeah, bring on a distraction, I wasn’t picky. Sitting by a window overlooking an occasionally interesting street, loud voices pulled me from the desktop, sounds I’d ignored for a while because there’s many a conversation out there that must be conducted over a broad area. Shouting is often just conversational. This was a bit different. The tone, staccato bursts of percussive barking, met with no response. Same again and still no response. Drawn by the repetitive beat, I swiveled on my swivel chair -what else can one do with such a device?- and planted my elbows on the window sill to watch the show.
Across the street, directly opposite my office, there was a man and a woman, both about mid-twenties, headed towards town. About fifty feet from them, pointed in the other direction, there were two young males, I guessed late teens. One of the younger pair, wearing dark tracksuit bottoms and a light jacket fastened in a way that would make his mother proud, was shouting angrily at the man in his twenties. Both pairs stopped on the street, separated by fifty blessed feet of concrete footpath. The teenager continued his tirade. The older man ignored the encouragement of his female companion to move along and shouted something back. Couldn’t make it out but, like a magnet, it drew the other lad closer, still shouting but now only forty feet between them. These lads were local.
Over the past few decades Limerick has become a city of many accents, but the nasal tones of the natives are fairly distinctive. Every city, I guess, has its own nuance and idiosyncrasy that mark it unique. Helps you find your bearings. In Dublin, you’ll hear “you know what I mean?” in that thick instantly irritating superior intonation that, thanks be to Jesus, rarely ventures outside the capital, but in Limerick, the same sentiment is posed differently. “Jagetme?” (despite the arrangement of vowels and consonants, a single syllable) is so much more than “know what I mean?” if you know what I mean. It’s like a tentative, colloquial hug between strangers. Limerick folk aren’t asking if you understand what’s being said, they’re asking if you understand them at an existential level, an offer of an affirmative, virtual embrace wrapped in plain-speaking, uncluttered clarity. Do you get me? No. Really get me? Limerick is not a friendly city, certainly not feted as such like the places with a hundred thousand welcomes of Cork, or Galway, or Dublin. Céad míle fáilte me arse. No, Limerick’s not at all friendly. But you will make fast friends here who won’t give a shit about your creed or colour or political persuasion or whatever otherness that will mark you permanently as a many-times welcomed blow-in in Cork, Galway or Dublin.
Anyway, that’s not what these two lads were saying to each other. Younger man was calling older man a “rat”, obviously not exclusive to this location, and “handicap”, which is given a very particular flavour in this city. Neither was intended as complimentary. Not a virtual embrace in sight.
The older guy looked disturbingly unflustered and stood his ground. He said little and didn’t raise his tone, so couldn’t be heard across the road on the first floor through an opened window. He seemed unfazed to be called a rat, not a term of affection as mentioned, and appeared to deny the allegation, though this was more evident in the repeated and increasingly irate delivery of the younger man.
The distance closed some more. The younger chap left his pal well behind and approached while the other pair stood motionless, not moving towards but not moving away, either. Twenty feet. Now ten. The second part of the younger pair remained where he was, the young but slightly older pair held their ground and the scrawny, skinny teenager moved closer and closer. Now five feet but still shouting like there was fifty between them. Shoulders pulled back, long, skinny neck pushed forward, vitriol pouring like effluent through a waste pipe. Still, the older man looked entirely unmoved.
Closer again. Shit, now within touching distance. Older man standing mostly still, younger beginning to circle, neck extended, shoulders back, arms rigid by his side down to the little balls of fists. The woman stepped between the two, her hands on the chest of her companion, willing him to move away but laws of science and nature hold sway and gravitational attraction means that the all too close distance between the antagonists neither shortens nor lengthens. Too close for comfort. Within striking distance but any blow that might be delivered will necessarily go through the woman. Collateral damage. Can you still say that a man shouldn’t hit a woman? Not to suggest it’s ok to hit a man either, but, even in these days of equality and fluidity, the other is surely more grievous? Maybe you can’t say that any more. Whatever. Whether you can or can’t, it’s still not ok.
“Please don’t have a knife.”
That was P., my colleague, also drawn to the window and the audible disturbance. She joined me at the observation post, looking down to the street at this circular dance between men. Real men. I don’t like this open plan office. While I like my colleagues, I still hanker for our recently abandoned workplace where I could sneak a look at my stories in progress even when it wasn’t lunch time with only a lonely alley outside my window. Definitely not a fan of open plan. I do like P. though. She’s as nice a person as I’d like to be.
No knives came out. No slaps were thrown. Whatever was going on, it just simmered without boiling over. This was not at all helpful. Stuck between scenes one and two, trying to figure out the transition, to progress the conflict and the resolution and the character arc, these two gobshites were most uninspiring. The younger character walked away, all tight and inexpressive, back towards his companion. Anger, threats and then…nothing. Real people are really disappointing for aspiring artists.
The other man and the woman remained where they were, chatting quietly together, leaving me to wonder what they were saying. It looked important. Quiet words of grave import, one might say. Maybe, you know, the war in Ukraine that featured prominently in the headlines? That could have been on their minds. Covid? No, we’re well done with that. Sick to death of talking about that. Not Covid, not global temperatures, not imminent threat to life as we know it. As I say, something important was on their minds. Maybe those gruesome murders in Sligo a few days ago, three men viciously attacked, two brutally murdered and the third with life changing injuries? Maybe they were speaking about how we thought we had left those days behind, back in the bankruptcy of the eighties? Back when you could be imprisoned for adult consensual sex if you and your partner happened to be men at a time when there was nothing in the statute books that recognised rape within marriage. Sex between women was permitted. That wasn’t criminal. Not because of any great tolerance for the lesbians in our communities, more because women simply weren’t sexual, or, when they might be, only in relation to men and childbirth, when we voted time and again to restrict their reproductive choices, even as far as the right to travel out of the country if they happened to be pregnant. Fuck’s sake. Hard to believe but, at least we, as a nation, enshrined a constitutional right for women to leave the country, even if they happened to be pregnant. Which was nice of us. Yeah, we’ve moved beyond all that. And then Sligo.
Sligo? Small town Ireland where everyone knows everyone else and two gay men are brutally murdered and a third barely escaped? Lucky to have only horrifying injuries. Weren’t we done with this? We voted by a massive majority for marriage equality. We voted for an openly gay Taoiseach. The same Taoiseach who met with Mike Pence in the White House while holding the hand of his partner. I wonder what they talked about. Something about evolution and divesting of old bigotries? Possibly their views on changing mores? How about homosexuality and the criminal law? I’m sure our Taoiseach and Mike Pence would have lots to discuss there. The mind boggles. Maybe, just maybe, they had strong views on how to progress transformational conflict on the streets of Limerick? I should give them a call.
I threw a glance back at my screen and the blockage that was halting the progress of my little story. Then back to the street. The younger fella had been walking away. Now, he stopped again. Shouting again. Approaching again. Circling his antagonist. Again. Act two lads! Ye can’t just repeat the same shit and expect the audience to stay interested.
I don’t know, maybe I should abandon this make up bullshit, record just what I see, as I see it. I could build a whole portfolio of wry and pithy reflections on those crazy things people do and leave a plethora of satisfied readers thinking to themselves something like “you know when you think about it…” It wouldn’t be unique. Not by a long stretch. Very well-regarded writers, hall of fame writers, have plundered personal miseries to bolster their fictional worlds and earn a dishonest buck. Joyce did it. Hemingway did it. Jeffrey Archer probably did it. Well, yeah…but didn’t Bukowski write more than one “novel” that scurrilously exploited his sexual misadventures with the women in his life? I could do that. I could write a thinly fictionalised drama about sex and sexual adventure, deep and meaningful, using my own experience as inspiration. Damn right I could. But then…but then I imagine my wife with that arched eyebrow posing that innocent question. “How much does micro fiction pay these days?” And the way I imagine her saying micro, like the word belongs in the same sentence as sexual adventure. Even there, in my imagined hubris, with absolute control over the content and course of the conversation, I can think of nothing clever to say. Until I get home and, with no lead up, I’ll blurt out, “yeah, but every time I sit down to write, you choose that moment to drag a piano up the stairs.” And God love her, she’ll look at me and wonder if that inevitable search for a nursing home should specify a locked ward. I’ll start to explain the imaginary exchange we had earlier, failing completely to assuage her concern. Definitely making it worse. Christ. We’re not even a musical family. I’ll have to borrow a piano for the purpose of this remonstration.
And so I’m left in doubt. The characters in my story won’t get their shit together and develop their conflict, the two lads on the street are slowly circling each other again, no slaps thrown and no knife produced, the woman between them, the shouting for the whole world to hear and…
Shit, I don’t know. Writing short stories and bits of fiction is a tough grind. True stories, though, would they be any better? Where would they be welcomed? Do newspapers exist anymore? Writing for social media really holds little attraction. I could do a Blog if it didn’t put me in mind of a visit to the bathroom after a feast of Guinness the night before. That never occurred to you? Maybe now it will. Twitter? They didn’t have to call it that. As an enterprise with that as its chosen name, it doesn’t even try to disguise its contempt for its contributors. No to social media, thank you very much.
More shouting. These lads just wouldn’t quit and showed no regard for timely progression. Locked in some kind of loop, shouting and shaping. Then nothing. Again. Come on lads! If it doesn’t move the story forward then maybe ye should just drop it.
Some time ago, we spotted an elderly woman walking from the city on the same side of the road as our little drama, carrying a rather large shopping bag that, given her carriage, seemed to contain a rather large but lightweight item of shopping. Steadily, but slowly, she approached the young older man, the teenager and the woman between them with the other young fella in the distance. The young fella, shouting, straining his sinewy neck and shoulders and scrawny arms contrasting with the inaudible, couldn’t give a fuck attitude of the quiet man. “Cross over.” That was P. again, whispering an entreaty to the elderly woman lest she be caught up in something when fists might be flying. The old woman paid no heed to the aggro on the street, trundling step by step, not wavering, not diverting her eyes from her path. Straight ahead. Where home was waiting, where she could drop the shopping bag and put on the kettle. The antagonists paid as little attention to her as she to them and, eventually, she passed that part of the street and, step by step, carried her shopping and her palpable dignity on her road for home. P. exhaled a sigh as the woman left behind the potential crime scene.
Things sped up a bit after the elderly woman reached clearance. The teenager broke free of his enemy’s gravity and wandered away towards his companion who was gone on ahead at this stage, occasionally turning to shout more expletives, though all parties seemed to have lost interest. His last effort was drowned by the wail from the fire engine as the equipment was given its afternoon check-up. P. returned to her desk, I swiveled back to mine. Enough of that shit. Nothing of any use there.
It’s hard to believe it’s not broken. We are stuck, static and stagnant. Blocked. Europe is at war again, the bigotries we defeated long ago are winning. It’s all cracked and broken and I’m really not so sure the shards scattered around let in that much light. Sorry Mr Cohen, Mr Hemingway even, but they don’t. I’ve to get back to work. Later on, I’ll have a story to complete with a stubborn blockage on the transition from scene one to scene two and no clear conflict, progression, character arc nor resolution in sight.
I’ve got to unblock it. Fuck it, I’ve got to give this meaning.