A Street in Dalkey

A dapper man. He stoppeth one of one, me. In Castle Street in the County Dublin town of Dalkey. He points at me. Mentions my name, a questionmark in his inflection. He is dead right, spot on. That indeed is my name. And as for his? Well his name is Derek and he is the brother-in-law of my late godmother Dodie. And we chit and we chat and as we chit and as we chat I remember that it was precisely here, precisely here in this spot outside the onetime Gemma’s shop is where I last met Dodie. And I remember how she clung to my arm as she laughed and giggled, and how her lips were blue. Elderly then, the heart was just about to kill her. A few days later she was dead.

An older generation to myself, as godparents tend to be, I never saw her young. Once a chorus girl in the Theatre Royal. I never saw her dance. But there was something in her always dancing. It’s not for nothing there’s a rhyme between words and phrases. Woman’s eyes and  woman’s thighs, all that. Dodie found the world and its affectations ridiculous, and people devious and shallow. We were at id idem. Not that she would have used a pretentious latin tag. Dancers don’t. Whatever, we got on very well.

Derek tells me that his own daughter is an actress now.  Laoisa Sexton. And that she’s acting in the Helix. So we talk about that. And just then a woman catches my eye as she passes. And I reach out an arm and grab her hand and pull her towards me. And I kiss her on the cheek. And Derek says “if I did that I’d be arrested”.

And journalist Mary Finnegan associate-producer-of-60-minutes-for-CBS-News says “don’t worry, one day he will be”. And then she says “I’m rushing to the bank”, and makes vague typing gestures in the air with her fingers. And rushes off to the bank. And I think to myself what’s with this very irritating typing in the air, and decide that she means “I’ll talk to you online”. And then I think why, why is she rushing to the bank? It’s the Ulster Bank. Does she know something? Being associate-producer-of-60-minutes-for-CBS-News? Has she heard it’s going bust, and is she in a rush to get her money out? I mull over all this for a few moments. And realise that no. People one meets in the streets are frequently rushing to banks. And this “I’m rushing to the bank” is a polite way of saying I couldn’t be bothered talking to you now, but may very well be in a different mood later.

That sorted in the mind, I shrug. I’ve known Mary since we were teenagers together. Remember her in a Cluny School uniform. But that was when she was a schoolgirl of course. Which is probably a pity. Point is,  her many moods are no strangers to me. We’ve grown middleaged together. Well, not together, we’ve grown middleaged apart. Passengers in different carriages of the same train.

“That’s a very good looking woman”, Derek tells me, quite unnecessarily. And then gives me technical information about the bone structure of a woman’s face, and how that’s the important thing in a woman. Bone structure. Good to know, I decided, because up to then I’d always thought it was the flesh was the important thing in a woman. Well, that and the female spirit of course. The spirit that makes a woman laugh. And dance. And make very irritating typing gestures in the air. And rush to the bank.

Conan K.