OPINION:The middle classes are seething – seething I tell you . . ., writes BRENDAN LANDERS
I HAVE this friend and you know what, the other day, he broke the law and burned his garden. It was a lovely sunny morning and we were both out the back, taking advantage of the good weather to spruce up our respective gardens before the rain returned. We’d said good morning, exchanged a few pleasantries and gone about our business – weeding, trimming, pruning and generally pottering about as gardeners are wont to do.
After a while I took a break, went into the kitchen, made a cup of tea and drank it. While I drank, I watched him through a window as he stalked around his garden raking up debris. He’d trimmed his trees and bushes the week before and there was a sizeable chunk of dead wood and dried shrubbery about and he gathered it all up together in a large pile in the middle of his garden.
As I watched him at work, misgiving pricked at my consciousness. My friend was a meticulous fellow and he approached each and every task with a military precision. He was also a creature of habit. You could set your watch by him.
His standard operating procedure for garden waste collection was to measure the land off in six squares and therein carefully place six piles of waste. I knew this because to my mild amusement I’d observed him do it on countless occasions. My friend’s meticulousness was one of those idiosyncrasies which, when we’ve observed them over a long enough period of time, become something of a comfort through their very familiarity.
He’d make his stacks of waste and then he’d fetch a green plastic bag, fill it with the refuse and place it in his brown recycling bin, ready for collection on the appropriate day. I’d never before seen him stray from his course. Now here he was, piling dead shrubbery into one large pile in the middle of his garden. Something was amiss.
He went into his house and in a moment re-emerged. He was carrying a firelighter and a box of matches. He carefully lifted one corner at the bottom of the pile of waste, placed the firelighter inside and lit it. In seconds flat the pile was blazing and a plume of black smoke was curling up into the sky.
I was stunned.
My friend, a conscientious citizen and a stickler for abiding by the rules of man and nature, was breaking the law. This was totally out of character and I worried for him.
I finished my tea and went back out. I went over to near where he stood and leaned my elbows on the fence. I nodded at the fire and asked him was he an anarchist now. I put a friendly, jocular smile on my face to assure him that I wasn’t planning to report him to the cops or the county council.
He sighed. He came over, leaned his elbows on the other side of the fence, just opposite me, and asked me if I’d ever seen the movie Taxi Driver. I told him I had. Years ago. He said he’d never thought he’d see the day, but for the first time in his life he was beginning to understand the motivation of Travis Bickle, the psychopathic character portrayed in the film by Robert de Niro.
Then he leaned in close to me and, in a voice that was soft with the man’s easy-going character but sibilant with a forlorn, desperate passion, poured out of his mouth, like a long-lost chapter of Ulysses titled “The Torment”, a torrential stream-of- consciousness invective that would have been a credit to James Joyce himself:
Do you know what, the Irish nation is stuck in a bubble of absurdity I got notice in the post this morning that my mortgage interest rate is rising we’re stretched right down to the wire as it is and looking down the line at property taxes and water charges, and electricity and gas costs are increasing it’s the death of a thousand cuts and I’m taking home two-thirds of what I was two years ago in wages I don’t know what I’m going to do, politicians lie through their teeth to get elected promising change and delivering more of the same Republic my arse I feel powerless, patronised and taken for granted my wife lost her job and is drawing the dole and the welfare Minister, a Labour TD would you credit I ask you, in a strident voice giving out about dole spongers and by accident or design tarring all with the same brush, adding insult to injury and further crushing the wife’s morale that’s all she needs and her a person who never so much as littered a street I dunno how much more of this the poor woman can stand there’s only so much a body can take, those men in suits who rule the roost and pretend that they know what they’re doing and pay themselves through our noses they know only mediocrity, conformity and there they are talking about what to wear in the Dáil God help us all they really don’t know their arse from their elbow and I wish they’d admit it instead of treating us like eejits, they’ve landed us deep in the doo-doo and they carry on regardless leading us into debt ever after amen but digging a hole isn’t progress sometimes it’s wise to toss the spade but try telling them that, my eldest boy just entering Transition Year, mad eager about the imminent trip to Rome that the school has planned and looking up the Coliseum and the Sistine Chapel on Google, and I haven’t the heart to tell him that he won’t be able to go on the trip because the family can’t afford such luxuries any more cherish the children how are you, and my widowed sister’s only son and his wife and their children gone to Australia and her house now quiet as the grave where once there was noise and hubbub and the happy-clappy madness of family life and now she just sits there on anti-depressants and sighs and rubs a wistful fist against Australia in the atlas feeling all alone and abandoned I don’t know what’s to become of her and Ahern and Cowen drawing down pensions of €3,000 a week for pity’s sake, and the judges postulating injustice fighting their corner with mind-numbing arrogant avarice God almighty what about us for Heaven’s sake the mind boggles and the rich get richer the dice is loaded and across the Irish Sea the story broke big about phone hacking just a few weeks ago and already the bodies are falling and inquiries on the telly and here we are three years after the scumbags bankrupted the country and not one person brought to account and the Greeks are rioting and we’re not, what on earth is the matter with us, and we’re all afraid to get sick in case the hospital will kill us it’s insane and getting worse, for the first time in my life I’m ashamed to be Irish I don’t know where it’s all going to end, I don’t know what the point is any more can you tell me, please, can you tell me can you can you?
He looked at me and a glint of mute desperation shone bright as a diamond in his eye as if beseeching me to put forward an argument or a theory that would persuade him out of the abject funk in which he’d become embroiled.
I searched my soul for a sentence, a word, an idea, a touch of brightness that would offer the man a morsel of comfort. I said nothing.
Then I went into my house. Fetched a firelighter and a box of matches.
Brendan Landers is a Dublin-born freelance writer and journalist. In 1984, he went to Canada where he was a magazine publisher and editor and then in 2000 he thought it would be a good idea to come home . . .