Castletroy Words

  (North Earl Street Series). It's you I miss most. Sometimes I see someone in the street who looks a little like you, and I feel a pang before I remember they are not you. You belonged to North Earl Street and Dun Laoghaire, the mixture of places, the way I am a mixture too. You fed the birds. You fed the swans. All life mattered to you. You were gentle, laid back, yet always thinking thoughts that seemed to travel somewhere I could not quite follow. You told me stories: about dogs, about people in your life, about things I never expected to hear. You said I didn't go to boarding school because I don't eat as fast as you. You said weak tea gives you fleas. The logic escaped me, but the sentence remains. We would sit in cafés, drinking tea, and I was bewildered the first time you asked me to be Mother, because I wasn't used to it, because nobody had asked before, because somehow it mattered. You liked ethnic food, strange ideas, and conversations that wandered wherever ...

  (North Earl Street Series). You have a style some call creepy... running after people in the street with a little sign that says Jesus . I'm fine with it, though you frighten some people. I know when you'll be there, and I watch you evangelise, then wander over and we talk about the same things we always talk about. It's good to catch up. Around us, Saturday crowds stream past the Spire, people stopping to stare at the Portal... the "idiot crèche," we call it. Dublin hums with Saturday: shoppers, buskers, tourists, and no shortage of preachers. But you always stand out. The others stay in place, preaching, handing out tracts, waiting for someone to listen. You move. With your little sign that says Jesus , and your habit of chasing strangers, you become impossible to ignore. And despite it all... or perhaps because of it... it's always a joy to see you. I look forward to meeting you again soon.

(North Earl Street Series). Before they put that frigging portal there, that was your spot. You would park your Harley, set up your game, and invite people to play. I would sit on the step and watch the world go by. You always had a Werther's Original for me. You believed in Werther's Originals. Not casually. With conviction. You swore by them, and because of you, they became a small kindness I looked forward to. I remember the days after the riots. The protests stretched along O'Connell Street. The lines were drawn. The others stood on one side. We stood on the other. And the Gardaí formed a boundary between us. While everyone else seemed caught up in tension and arguments, you were sitting there chatting away to a young Garda from Monaghan as though you had known him for years. Then you embarrassed me. You told him I had been on television. I wished you hadn't. You were delighted with yourself. The sign had read: "Peace in Dublin. No to violence. Stand together....

  (North Earl Street Series). Speed of Light He was here in Limerick today, and with him came memories of North Earl Street. Years folded in on themselves. For a while, Dublin and Limerick occupied the same space. He does here what he did there: preaching God's word, standing on a street corner, speaking to whoever will listen. Now he has Jeffrey beside him. Jeffrey preaches. He preaches. And for a moment it is as though nothing has changed. We used to call him the Speed of Light. Not because he's superhuman, but because the moment he stopped preaching, he vanished. One minute he was there, the next he was halfway up the road, hurrying towards the next place, the next conversation, the next person. Always moving. Always going somewhere. Today, after the preaching was done, he stood and talked with me. We remembered North Earl Street. Old faces. Old stories. Times gone by. The years between us seemed to shrink. There was laughter, recognition, and that strange feeling that comes...

(North Earl Street Series). Mr. T. You are a dote. A soft heart in a world that is not always gentle, caring so openly, so innocently, that people sometimes took advantage. I never did. Instead, I watched you go to extraordinary lengths for people, more than most ever would. You told me you were a survivor. You told me how long it had taken to go to the guards, and how much it had cost you to finally speak. I understood. Some wounds do not end when the telling begins. You have a place in my heart. I even wrote a character for you in one of my novels, because some people deserve to live on in stories. I remember how you loved your little dog, your baby. You worried as he grew older, as though love itself could hold back time. For so long you had no home. Then at last there was a place of your own, a small space for you and your dog, a door you could close, a home at last. The last time I saw you, you were heading to Dalkey, going to your mother's for a fry. It is such an ordinary me...

(North Earl Street Series) You appeared behind us just as I was being robbed, a cigarette glowing in the dark, anger already in your voice. You drove them away with a cold fury that left no room for argument. Then you sat down in a cloud of smoke and started explaining the world to me. You were like me, but turned up too high, every feeling amplified. Angry at the world, confused by it, afraid of it too. But where I went quiet, you spoke. You used your fear to argue with the world, to challenge it, to demand better from it. You shepherded me through difficult days, fed me when I had little, tried in a hundred small ways to make my life better. You would stop in the middle of a street to tell the world off. Sometimes it felt as though you were carrying on a lifelong argument with existence itself. I remember the chicken you cooked for us, and the guards calling around, wanting to know why you were so cross. I remember being badly sick, nothing helping, and you sat me down with noodle so...

(North Earl Street Series).  You used to toss me a two-euro coin, but I had to catch it. You walked unsteadily and told me people thought you were drunk, though it was your balance, not the drink, that made you sway. Your smile, your greeting from across the street, could brighten a difficult day. I remember you taking me to the casino for warm scones and jam, yet worrying I might start gambling as you had. I never did. You were a warm part of my life, one of us, part of the North Earl Street gang. The years passed. I left Dublin, but there you still were, talking to strangers on O'Connell Street, greeting me with surprise, as though no time had passed at all. More frail now, leaning against a wall to keep yourself upright. You told me how easily it could have been you in that terrible accident. I had feared it was. He was your age, one of the gang too. Sean, some people leave their mark with grand achievements. Others do it with a smile, a greeting, a remembered kindness. You were...

(North Earl Street Series).  I remember you preaching in the dark on Henry Street, shouting the word of God into that echoing alley by the GPO, as if one lost soul might hear. I remember you spotting me sitting in the shadows. "A ghost," you called me. Perhaps I was. People hugged you, kissed you, heckled you, argued with you, but you never seemed to mind. You told them of salvation. I watched. We became friends gradually, you unsure, me wary, talking a little more each time our paths happened to cross— me scuttling about on mysterious errands, you proclaiming God's love to anyone who would listen, and many who wouldn't. We spoke of faith, of Dublin, of the desperate state of the State. We sat on steps and put the world to rights. It nearly ended when you asked me out. I loved you as a brother, never as a lover, and it could never be. Yet somehow we carried on. And then one evening, without expecting it, we found ourselves holding a life together. A desperate stranger...

(North Earl Street Series). I was thinking of you today, sis. I miss you. I remembered how we used to sit and watch the world go by from our favourite café, describing people, stories, possibilities, making a universe out of passing strangers. I remembered one of our happiest days— when I came back from Galway and we sat outside Ann's in the sun. People drifted over and joined us, then drifted away again, while we stayed at the centre of our own small world. I was telling you about him, his strange proposal, how everything had changed. We knew each other so well then, taking turns to fetch the tea, the buns, returning to continue conversations that never seemed to end. We chatted with everyone, watched Greedy Bob terrorise the neighbourhood, laughed, dreamed, and wandered through the past and future in French, English and Irish. And then I remembered the beginning. That day long ago when you appeared in my life with yogurt and granola. A small thing, an ordinary thing. Yet somehow,...