When we first met in Cork city in the early 1980s she was a recent graduate, working in a vintage clothes store and riding around on a Heinkel scooter, wearing second-hand cotton nightdresses and biker boots. I, meanwhile, was working as an unqualified teaching assistant in a brutal residential institution. In the mornings, I used to sit on the stairs of the rented house I lived in and shake, then hitchhike to the facility and begin my day.
We were very young, barely in our 20s. I didn’t know how to make things different, but I knew after I met her that things didn’t have to stay the same. Forty years of friendship ensued, our lives criss-crossing, veering off, colliding, like the map of a subterranean transport system — vital, barely visible. Recently she flew in from another city, where she has lived for decades and has a successful, hard-won career. Dublin that weekend was balmy. With half a day to ourselves before work commitments kicked in, we began to walk.
On Merrion Square, young families strolled with pushchairs and babies were fed on a bench next to Oscar Wilde’s shiny statue. Stretching out his marble leg and apparently observing as grated carrot and organic couscous were decanted into a ferociously busy toddler; the man of the aphorisms looked less than entertained.
We kept walking. On Baggot Street the pavements were warm, sticky with the previous night’s revelry. On Fitzwilliam Square the sun glinted off polished door knockers and the brass plates of clinics offering aesthetic treatments. Wisteria bubbled over Georgian doors. On Adelaide Road the gothic Lutheran chapel dozed in sooty shadows.
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In the beautiful Iveagh Gardens, the trees, so recently threatened with felling (to make way for a civic plaza and a four-storey museum), rested easy, having been saved, heroically, by individual and community action. Someone had turned the fountain on, its watery roar submerging the sounds from the streets.
I brought my friend to MoLI (Museum of Literature Ireland) in the historic UCD Newman House on St Stephen’s Green. It was too warm to concentrate on the exhibits or to listen to Joyce’s prose. We went outside to the garden cafe and drank tea from big blue cups. I told her how much teaching had mattered to me over the past six months. I told her that during my fellowship in Trinity College it felt as if the city was buoying me up. In the MoLI gift shop we wandered past esoteric fridge magnets, then went back out into the sunny streets.
In St Stephen’s Green the leaves on the lime trees seemed to be in conversation with the light. Ducks glided on trout-brown water. There were people everywhere. Another toddler, or maybe it was the same one, impatient with being ignored, shouted at the duckies to paddle his way. They glided on past, feathered royalty diplomatically ignoring the nappied interloper.
Apparently, during the 1916 Rising, hostilities ceased daily at an allotted time to allow the park-keeper to enter the green and feed the waterfowl. In the keeper’s reports he wrote that “the ducks were very little perturbed by the bullets flying over their heads”. I wonder if the current generation feel the same way about the incessant music of mobile phones.
On Grafton Street a soulful young man, sitting behind an unlikely baby grand piano, belted out his songs of sad romance. Up and down the street, girls in belly tops ate pinkish ice-cream and boys with speculative beards watched their wet mouths.
My friend and I lent over the railings outside Trinity College to inspect the rewilding. “That feels hopeful,” she remarked. We entered Front Square, where wedding guests were gathering outside the chapel, waiting for the bride. We peeked inside at the cool marble and the sombre pews.
“This is a marvellous place,” said the man from the college’s Estates and Facilities office as we left. “There’s only joy here — we don’t do funerals, you know!”
We walked across campus to my temporary college accommodation, where we looked out of the window at the flats opposite, emptying now of their occupants at the close of the semester. We raised a coffee cup to the city, to unfamiliar weather, to the retracing of familiar journeys.
“It’s lovely to be here,” she said. “Will you miss it?”
“I’m so grateful to have had this,” I replied. “All those years ago, I could never have anticipated it. One of the good things about getting older is that sometimes you get surprised by joy.”