In the theatre, it was snowing on stage but when he emerged into the harsh lights and sights of night-time Dublin, all was dismal and grey, writes MICHAEL HARDING
I WAS at a play in Dublin recently, about China. During one scene it snowed on stage; an illusion so beautiful that I began craving for the white snowy streets of a faraway city.
The rain-drenched streets of Dublin were no consolation when the play was over; crowds were walking away from a soccer match, in silence, and soggy tri-colours were carried under arms or abandoned in puddles on the wet streets.
A black Mercedes floated through the crowd, with a young Asian woman in the back seat, glossing her lips, and staring out at all the dejected Irish, and I wished I was in Beijing, or at least in the back of the Mercedes; anywhere other than the streets of Ireland where it never snows.
If I ever leave Ireland, it will not be because of clerical oppression, or sexual repression, or economic depression; it will be because there is not enough snow in our little country.
This wasn’t always the case; I know it snowed for James Joyce. On the way back to my hotel, I passed the house where Hilton Edwards and Micheal MacLiamoir gazed out their bedroom window at the snow falling on the Rotunda Hospital, one winter long ago.
But since the earth is now so warm that even the memory of snow will soon be erased, for millions of lifetimes, as the earth is dragged into the heat of hell, or the boiling sun, I would like to find some snow now, while there is still time; my paradiso would be a snowy mountain where I could sit all day on a balcony, in the frosty air, reading the poems of Du Fu, and other masters of the Tang dynasty.
In fact, I myself write little poems, as if I was a simple poet of the Tang dynasty. Poems like this: His mother is sick now — she is old — and she waits at the window for him to come./ She says, “Where were you?” if he spends too long in Dunnes Stores, getting the messages. She says, “I was beginning to get worried.”
Not that I know much about poetry, or China.
I grew up at a time when, as young boys, we put posters of Mao on the walls above our beds. When our fathers opened the doors all they could see was the big chilly smile of the dictator, radiating with toxic humour.
We just did it to annoy Daddy.
None of us realised then that Mao had a life-long obsession with his bowel motions, and suffered from constipation, and sat up all night in his bed, fermenting ideas as nasty as farts.
The morning after the play I had breakfast in a small hotel that doubles as a nightclub after dark. It was Sunday, so I ordered two poached eggs with toast, and tea.
I knew it doubled as a nightclub because the neon signs were still flashing. The stairs to the toilets were still sticky with last night’s fun, and the psychedelic lights in the alcove were turning my lovely white eggs green, then purple, and then green again.
The eggs were served by an Asian girl with black hair and a pale thin body that would have done as a pull-through for a rifle. I suppose she has served at least a million tenderly poached eggs, in the neon world that never sleeps, between here and Shanghai.
As I was leaving, Sky News announced the death of Stephen Gately, and outside on the streets, homeless Irish boys in Nike shoes, and hoods, strutted about with crucified faces, and carried plastic cups and marched through the rain with terrible defiance.
A stag party from England nursed hangovers on the corner of Parnell Street; their Hawaiian floral wreaths drenched in the sheets of rain. Outside the Gresham Hotel a crowd of yankees queued for a one-day tour of Wicklow, as forlorn as geese gathered for slaughter.
I thought there could be nothing more sorrowful in the world than a bus of yankees meandering through Wicklow in the rain; that is, until I arrived back in Mullingar, and went to Xtra-vision where a woman in the queue was passing cash over the counter for a movie called Drag Me to Hell, which, according to the blurb on the box, is “the scariest movie of the decade”.