Nope.
Such Gods there are gave us the Moveable Feast. Glorious freak spring weather. We had a lovely hotel close to the Irish Institute and were but a Bonjour from the Luxembourg Gardens, where we spent most of our time. I was nervous as a cat, so long since I’d been in a bed with a woman, a woman I hadn’t paid for, that is. My scarred body, I dreaded she would be repulsed by it. The opposite, she seemed to embrace my hurt and pain. Whispered as she ran her fingers along one lengthy scar,
“No more beatings Jack, OK?”
Worked for me.
In Hemingway’s beautiful memoir, pastiche, he writes of the miraculous time he and Hadley had and how they felt it would last forever. And… wood was all around them and he never touched it for luck. I said that to Laura, she answered,
“You touched my heart, that’s all the luck we need.”
Would it were so.
Sweet Jesus.
I’d sworn that despite Paris and their customs, you’d never catch me eating food in the park, I’d never be that uninhibited to grab a French roll and eat it as I lay on the grass. I did, loved it, a bottle of Nuits- Saint-Georges, the French amazing sandwiches, wedges of cheese, the almost warm sunshine, and Laura. Jesus, it was heaven. I even rolled up my shirtsleeves. Made her laugh out loud, she said,
“My God, you heathen you.”
Like that.
We did all the tourist crap and relished it. Got our photograph taken on Boulevard Saint Michel. I carry the photo in my wallet and never, never now look at it. I can’t. But it’s there, like the blessing I once believed I’d be granted. Went to the Louvre and again made her laugh when I said the Mona Lisa was little more than a postage stamp.
In Montmartre on the second-to-last day of our holiday, drinking cafe au lait in the early morning bistros, she reached across the table, took my hand for reasons not at all, said,
“You make me happy.”
Jesus, mon Dieu, me, to make anyone happy. I was fit to burst. Our last evening, in a restaurant on the Left Bank, she literally fed me escargots and I thought,
“Fuck, if they could see me in Galway now.”
And then her idea:
“Jack, if my next book deal comes through, would you consider living here for six months?”
Was she kidding? I’d have just stayed there then.
In bed that night, after a slow lingering lovemaking, we were entwined in each other and she asked,
“Are you content to be with me Jack?”
I told the truth,
“More than my bedraggled heart could ever have imagined.” After I got home and we were arranging for Laura to come to Galway, I went to the church, lit a candle, pleaded,
“I’ve never asked for much, but if it doesn’t screw with some inflexible Divine plan, could I please have this woman with me, could Paris be, indeed, A Moveable Feast?”
And, I don’t know, the candle flickered, went out.
An omen?
Maybe.
My drinking. She was aware of it, Jesus, how could she not? But seemed to think there was hope.
I abetted the illusion. No doubt, I’d fuck it up. Sure as the granite on the walls of Galway Cathedral. But if this were my one last day in the sun, then I intended to bask.
My odd times friend/accomplice/conscience was Stewart. A former drug dealer who’d reinvented himself as a Zen-spouting entrepreneur. He’d saved my life on more than one occasion. I was never sure if he actually liked me but I sure as fuck intrigued him. I could hear strains of Loreena McKennitt carried on the light breeze from somebody’s radio. Worked for me, till my mobile shrilled.
I answered, heard,
“Jack.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s Stewart.”
Before I could snap off some pithy rejoinder, he said,
“Malachy has been badly hurt.”
Father Malachy, bane of my life. Close confidant of my late mother, he despised me almost as much as I did myself. Stewart still clung to the notion I could be redeemed. Malachy believed I had no future and my present was pretty much fucked too. His ingrained hatred of me was fuelled by the fact I’d once saved his clerical arse. He could have been the poster boy for “No good deed goes unpunished.”
But I took no joy in him being hurt, unless I was the one who did the hurting. He was part of my shrinking history and I clung to the battered remnants like an early morning wino and his last drops of rotgut.
I asked,
“How?”
Pause.
Stewart was trying to phrase it as delicately as he could, gave up, said,
“He was mugged.”
I nearly went,
“But he’s a priest.”
The awful fact wasn’t that priests were mugged in our new shiny country, it was that more weren’t.
Stewart said that Malachy was in UCHG, the University Hospital, in intensive care. I said I’d get up there straightaway. He said, hesitantly,
“Ah Jack, go easy.”
Then a thought hit me.
Hard.
Steel in my voice, stiffening my question, I asked,
“You think I did it?”
“Of course not.”
I eased, said,
“Well, least you think I have some standards.”
He shot back,
“If you mugged him, he wouldn’t be in the hospital.”
“What?”
“He’d be in the morgue.”
And he clicked off.
Reluctantly, I left Eyre Square. Was it my imagination or was the sun already receding? The recession was in full bite. We’d buried the Celtic Tiger ages ago. The papers carried daily dire forebodings of worse to come. The specter of emigration was looming all over again.
And yet.
A huge new outlet for TK Maxx had just opened. “Designer clothes at affordable prices.” The Grand Opening a week before, people had queued for seven hours. The line of recession-proof people had stretched from the statue of Liam Mallow, our Republican hero, past Boyles Betting Shop (free coffee for punters!) along Cuba’s nightclub pink facade, and of course the inevitable off-license (ten cans of Bavarian Lager for ten euros) to the very doors of the new shopping mecca.
On the great day, a local had invoked St. Anthony’s Brief:
…flee you hostile powers….the lion of the tribe of Judah The root of David, hath conquered…Alleluia.
Saint Anthony wasn’t available that day, the only alleluias we were familiar with were mangled versions of Leonard Cohen’s classic by X Factor wannabes.
Recession my arse.
