Smile

—Yes, I said.

  He smacked his stomach – reminded the pub and the women that he was there.

  —We might get the sympathy vote, beyond, he said.—A pair of big orphans.

  He took his glass and stood up. I couldn’t follow him. I wanted to – but I wasn’t sure about that. I wanted to go over, to get in there among the women. I wanted to lean against them, make them laugh. But I finished my pint, grabbed my book and got out.

  4

  My wife was well known. Is well known. Ever since I’ve known her – and it’s been more than thirty years – whenever there’s been a newspaper feature on successful Irishwomen, my wife’s name has been one of the first to be trotted out. The look, the style of the piece is familiar, and so is the list. There is the politician, often a junior minister; an athlete of some sort, Katie Taylor or one of the women’s rugby team; there’s a CEO, a nun or an ex-nun, a woman who has done something big, saved children or animals; there is a restaurant or club owner, and a judge; the recent additions are a black woman or an Asian, a successful gay woman, a woman with a disability, and a gorgeous woman with seven or eight kids. There is always the group photograph. My wife has been in the photographs for more than thirty years and she’ll be in there until she no longer wants to be. It will be her choice.

  When we met, we were neck and neck. We met outside a studio. I was on my way to becoming a successful man. I never became one. But she quickly became the woman who was famous for being successful and she has remained that woman.

  Her name is Rachel Carey.

  Yes.

  I never really came near to be being successful, although in Ireland you can get along for a long time before the truth starts to matter. You’re never off the telly. That was often said to me years after the last time I’d been on television, and years after I’d stopped being a regular on Sunday-morning radio. Two appearances in close proximity make you a regular in Ireland – or, in Dublin. So my three or four panel performances got me there. I was famous for a book I was writing but didn’t write. I got away with that for three or four years. Then I was famous, but less famous, and far less interesting, for being a bit of a mouth. Rachel, though – Rachel was famous for her achievements. And, for a while – a short while – we were famous for being us.

  When we met I was a writer. I’d written some things for a magazine – now gone – called What Now. It sold about eight thousand copies every month and was basically a music mag, with extras. I wrote record and gig reviews, although I actually wrote about myself. We were encouraged to do that.

  —It’s not a gig, the editor, Charles Jacob, told us.—It’s you at a gig.

  So I wrote about a day out in Slane, and Bob Dylan just happened to be there too. He was supporting me. I pretended I was Hunter S. Thompson, but only when I was writing, three days after I got home. In my mother’s kitchen. I’m being hard on myself. I was a kid and, years later, people still told me how much they’d enjoyed that piece, even though they often mixed me up with other writers and that gig with other gigs. But that was what I did. My review of the Smiths at the SFX was an account of me surviving a night in the north inner-city. My review of R.E.M. at the SFX was another dangerous stroll through Nighttown. I gave myself six hundred words; Michael Stipe got two hundred, fifty more than Morrissey.

  What Now was supposed to be what the NME had been in the mid and late 70s, but it had nothing like the bigness. Lou Reed never had an argument with anyone from What Now ; we never got near Springsteen or, really, anyone who’s still listened to today, or even heard of. ‘We’ were four or five young men and a woman who were in and out of the two-room headquarters on Hanover Quay. We were paid very little. I remember getting a cheque for five quid for my review of October, and going into the Bank of Ireland on College Green to cash it. My name was on the review, but it was ‘we’ who wrote it. We sat in a bedsit and scrutinised it, shouted our opinions over the songs, until they became one opinion. I don’t think I ever heard that record properly. But I still called it a classic, or something like that. I had to. We never said it, but we wanted to become indispensable to U2. We wanted to be their friends, and we hated them for that. And we were too late. U2 were gone before we started. So we wrote about the new U2s, as many as we could find, or could find us. We adopted them – championed them, tried to keep up with them, wanted to be them, until it became clear that they weren’t going to follow U2, and we’d move on. To another band, and another couple of months of A&R gossip and freezing rehearsal rooms and schoolgirls doing their homework while they waited for their boyfriends to stop torturing their instruments and notice them.

  Torturing their instruments – the language of an old man. That wasn’t what they did; it wasn’t what I heard. They were brilliant and I envied them all, because I couldn’t do it. I could write a bit. I’d seen a woman laugh at something I’d written; she’d looked up and smiled at me. I could put a word beside another word and make them surprising; I could imitate the men who wrote in London and New York. But I could never stand on a stage or even in a corner of a rehearsal room or garage. I tried it a few times. I sidled into a space and hoped the band wouldn’t notice that they’d gone from four to five, or hoped they would and wouldn’t object. They’d give my backing vocals the thumbs up, or nod and grin as I shook new sounds from a tambourine. But I’d always crawled away before the hope had time to form. No one told me to. I just couldn’t do it. Expose myself. Open my mouth, let noise come out. I was shy.

  There was a time when writing was more important than the music. That was long before I started, but I was happy pretending to be Dublin’s Lester Bangs – much happier than Lester ever was. I didn’t really do the drugs and a little man inside me slapped the walls of my stomach whenever I tried to go past four pints. I was happy and miserable, a fraud who objected to being one, and I was quietly honest with myself. I didn’t want to be the one who wrote about the music and that was what gave the words their energy and zip. I drank while I pulled the pint away from my mouth. I hated and loved, and envied and sneered.

  A singer stood in front of me once, and cried. His name was Gerry Finglas. It was his real name. He found me in a pub near the Ha’penny Bridge. I was there spending the eight quid I’d been paid for reviewing his last gig.

  —Why? he asked.

  I looked up at his face and knew he wasn’t going to hit me. He was a softy off the stage. I’d grown up with lads who hit you. I knew the body language, and the eyes. I was safe here.

  —Why what? I said.

  I wasn’t alone; two other guys had cashed their cheques with me.

  —Why did you write that?

  I’d seen him swinging a mic stand in a packed basement, people on the stairs, right up, out to the street. He didn’t see the heads in front of him, or care. I remember a girl’s screech above the other screeches.

  —Fuck me!

  She meant it and she wasn’t even looking at him. She couldn’t. And here he was in front of me, crying. Jim Morrison meets Joe Dolan. He could never get that out of his head, and it killed him. He accepted it. I’d turned him into a joke he told himself every time he stood at the side of a stage waiting to go on. Because I envied him. No one else had paid much attention to what I’d written. They laughed at it – Jim Morrison meets Joe Dolan – but thought it was quite affectionate, an Irish thing, and forgot about it. More and more people were coming to watch him sweat. But the sweat was Joe Dolan’s now and he tried to stop it. He started to wipe his neck with a white towel. I’d called him ‘a better, taller Bono’. I wrote that his band, the Liffey Snakes, had ‘crawled out of Them’s grave’. I said he didn’t sing about sex; he was sex. He was Jim Morrison. Meets Joe Dolan. He was perfect and I made him ridiculous. He died ten years ago.

  I meet them sometimes, ex-members of ex-bands. I meet them accidentally; I’ve kept in touch with no one. It started at the school gates, waiting for my son to come out. I’d be stan
ding beside someone I’d known years before. We’d smile before we remembered who exactly we were. And we’d keep smiling as we caught up with ourselves.

  —For fuck sake – is it you?

  —You still playing?

  —No.

  It’s funny – those words, ‘years before’. There were nine or ten years between the brat with a borrowed typewriter who lived at home with his mother and the stay-at-home (sometimes) father, and between Dublin’s hottest bass player and the self-employed tech consultant (or something), both waiting for their children to come out of their Educate Together school.

  —How many have you?

  —Just the one – yourself?

  —Three.

  —Jesus.

  —I know.

  Those nine or ten years yawned – a gulf, a different time and world. But the twenty years since feel like a couple of months.

  I feel so far away.

  I can’t seem to believe, or cling to, much of what I know I’m remembering, even though I know it happened. I was bored – I remember that. I was sick of being the observer. There was never any sex. I was too shy and too stupid. I never knew if I was attractive. I didn’t object when I saw myself in a mirror, in my mother’s house – I hadn’t started to think of it as my mother’s house; I still lived there – or in the rare pub toilet that had both a working light and a mirror. But I began to hate hearing myself, and I stopped talking. I was tired of being angry too, sick of it. Because it was never the real thing. I’d gone to UCD, University College Dublin. It was miles away from where I lived. Across the city, across the river, across a border of expectation. I was the first in my family, both sides, to have any kind of third-level education; we didn’t know what the phrase, third-level education, meant. I was years out of college before it occurred to me that that was what I’d had. And I never felt proud of that, and not because I didn’t graduate. I was just angry – and vain. Angry. Always angry.

  Later on, I blamed the Christian Brothers. But back then, I’d forgotten all about them.

  I didn’t finish the degree – History and English. I didn’t drop out. I just went less, and less. I’d been published. I didn’t have to write my final-year dissertation or sit the exams. I was already a writer.

  I wrote two record reviews and sent them in to What Now. Both were accepted. I discovered that when I bought the latest edition, Bob Marley on the cover, and opened it. There was the first one, my three hundred words on Remain in Light, in the top left-hand corner of the first of four pages of album reviews. ‘Talking Heads have reinvented themselves. And reinvented music.’ That was something I’d heard someone say, in someone else’s kitchen. We were listening – half listening – to a bad tape of the album. The second review was right below the Remain in Light one, thirteen words on a twelve-inch single by a Dublin band called Dresden Playground. I remember it by heart, because I read it so often. ‘See review of Remain in Light, above, and place “not” before every verb.’ I knew Dresden Playground. Their drummer was in my history tutorial, in first year. I’d gone to their second gig, upstairs in the Merrion Inn. They were good; they were grand. But they were there because this was their neck of the city and their parents had bought them their instruments and gear, and there was talk of a van for the UK tour. But that wasn’t why I hated them, because of all the spoons I put into their mouths. I didn’t hate them. I envied them, and that was far worse. They could do it, and I couldn’t. It was the start of my career, and I tore into them with thirteen words. It was the making of me.

  I went into What Now the day after I’d seen my first words in print. I wasn’t sure if I was going to be paid. But I was – six quid. I watched the girl behind the desk go into a room and come back out with a docket for me to sign, and a small pile of records for me to review. There were ‘Not for Sale’ stickers on them and I immediately felt chosen. I showed them to my mother. I showed her the reviews. She read my name at the bottom of each and that was enough for her. I showed her the cheque for six punts. She laughed. She kissed the cheque, like she’d seen it done on television.

  —Your dad would be so proud of you, she said.

  Was that true? I didn’t know. He had died only five years before, but I didn’t know him. My mother had reacted exactly as I’d known she would but I had no idea how my father would have looked at me or what he would have said. I saw his photograph every day but I could never hear his voice or see him move across the kitchen.

  I’d had three more reviews in What Now when I decided that it was what I needed to do, much more than I needed to finish a ten-thousand-word dissertation which I’d been calling What if He Hadn’t Been Shot? James Connolly’s Death and the Irish Revolution. I’d made a girl laugh and touch my arm when I’d told her that I was thinking of rewriting it as a musical after the finals. But I couldn’t look at her while I spoke. I could look at her, briefly, and say nothing. Or I could make her laugh while I looked over her shoulder or at a wall. I couldn’t do both. But I could write. I’d seen my name in print, so I could call myself a writer. I’d seen others do it and they wrote fuck all. A published poem could get you ten years. I wasn’t greedy; I just wanted a couple of months. I got that, and a bit more. It was exciting. For a while. It’s the phrase that seems to capture everything about me, then and now – ‘for a while’.

  ‘For a while’, now, means the twenty-first century. But when I try to remember myself at twenty or twenty-one, and the excitement that came with being thought of as a writer, ‘for a while’ was a year and a couple of months. ‘For a while’ was the months before the final exams I didn’t do, and the summer, up to Christmas and the new year, across the anniversary of my first published review, and the slow acceptance that it wasn’t enough. As I became more savage – the word seems daft, but it’s accurate – it gave me less. There was an honest bit of me that wouldn’t let me get away with it, even as I was getting away with it – just about. I was doing nothing.

  It wasn’t how I’d been reared. My parents had worked hard. After he died, I was told again and again – I knew – my father had always worked hard. Everyone I’d grown up watching had worked hard. The people I knew and loved worked hard and talked about it, and ate to do it and slept to be ready for it. I don’t recall ever thinking that this was bad, or a waste, or an injustice. I remember my mother stretching, straightening her back after she’d been bent over, putting sheets and pillowcases through the mangle that was attached to the washing machine, and smiling at me. She’d groan too sometimes, picking up my sister or pulling the pram up the steps into the house or, later and more frequently, just doing things around the house. She kissed my father and listened as he ate his dinner and told her about the kind of day he’d had and she told him something about her own. They worked hard and loved each other. That rhythm still seemed to be there after he died. I grew up with hard work.

  It got to me, finally. I was suddenly terrified, and miserable. I’ve no idea how I would have ended up. I’ve often seen myself on a park bench, trying to sleep. It’s a waking dream; I’m not sure if I’ve dreamt it while asleep. I’m trying to sleep, I’m freezing and wet, dawn is crawling over me. I’m curled up but my legs hang over the side of the bench. I’m rigid. Caught. I think I’m in London. Ridiculous, I know. Self-pity, I know. And sentimentality. I think if I’d let it roll a bit further, I’d have sat up and taken a notebook from my jacket pocket. I’d have started writing notes, even fully formed sentences. I’d have turned into George Orwell, if I’d let myself. Because it’s bullshit. It scared me the first time but I grew to enjoy it. I even told a woman about it once, and she cried – and burped.

  I was savaging kids who were getting younger than me by the month. I’d become a bully. The something – the resolve – that had let me send in those first pieces, put them in the envelope and post them; that resolve – it was something like that – or ambition; whatever it was, it was gone. Ambition was a deci
sion, not a trait. There were no more decisions. I couldn’t think of anything that I could do. I’d run out of friends and their bedsits. I noticed – and I still can’t quite accept that it took me so long to see it, although I’ve never been quick – that when I thought of ‘we’, it had become ‘I’. ‘We’ were still there but ‘they’ had actually moved on. They were writing about football now too, and politics. Or they moved to London, even New York. They were actually writing. I’d no interest in politics and I’d moved far away from football. They intimidated me, and I dismissed them. I told myself I didn’t care; I forced myself to believe that. But I think of it now, and I realise it hurt.

  I got drunk alone one night. No one came near me. I smiled – I think I smiled; I remember I did, or tried to – at a woman. I remember the tightness around my mouth. I remember trying to cop myself on. I remember trying to decide to stand and bring my pint across to her.

  I saw her years later.

  I was with my wife in the car. It’s not that long ago.

  —I went with her once, I told Rachel.

  —Who?

  —Her – at the pedestrian lights, look. She’s pressing the button.

  She was almost thumping the button. But I didn’t know why she was demanding permission to cross the street; the traffic wasn’t budging and she could have strolled through the cars. I didn’t point this out to Rachel; she didn’t like me demeaning people, especially women.

  —Which one? she asked.

  I saw now that the woman was with a teenage girl. They both looked angry. The girl was looking away from her mother – it was definitely her mother. There was another woman – she was about forty. This other woman was behind my fictional old flame and her daughter, trying to work her way past without touching them. That was who Rachel meant; she wasn’t sure which of the women I’d meant. The woman, my woman, looked a bit unhinged, as if she was in a world she didn’t know. She was thin and overweight. She wore Uggs like her daughter’s.