Over Our Heads

Occupations

Before Mallorca, I’d spent six years running the City Lounge on Dawson Street for a Kildareman named PJ Nolan. The heir to a horse-breeding empire, PJ collected pubs and restaurants up and down the country, and sometimes further afield, but he didn’t concern himself with our operations so long as we made him money. I was hired to be the head barman but ended up doing everything: ordering stock, rostering staff, paying taxes, booking Christmas parties — plus I pulled pints twenty-six nights out of the month. I spent my days off planning VIP events. The skin around my nails was chapped and smelled of slops. Half my pay went straight to my landlord. I was thirty-three.

I sold my car, took out a loan and bought the lease on Molly Malone’s, a cantina situated just off the Paseo del Mar in Palma Nova. For years, the pub had served a pair of package holiday resorts that now were going to be redeveloped into higher-end timeshares. It was a hokey enough place but it had potential, with the promise of strong foot traffic to come and a view — if you leaned over the patio wall and craned your neck — of the glimmering skin of the Med. I ripped out the useless copper piping from above the bar, tore down the vintage Lisdoonvarna posters and Galway street signs, installed onyx tables and leather banquettes and hired a tapas chef. I worked seventeen-hour days, slept in a windowless room upstairs and learned just enough Spanish to shout at tradesmen. I was happy, I think.

But supplier delays and red tape meant that we opened too late to make the most of the high tourist season. And then, when the developer defaulted on payments to the city the following March, the whole district fell into a kind of un-redeveloped limbo. First, the binmen stopped coming and the bags piled up in stinking heaps at the back door. Then, the postman stopped coming and we missed notices from the electricity company and were without power for a long weekend. Finally, my handful of steady off-season customers stopped dragging their pink expatriate flesh from their villas to my stools. I was left with little choice but to shut the doors, sell on the lease for a pittance and return home sorely chastened and deep in debt.

When I called PJ to see about going back to work for him, it turned out that he’d run into problems of his own. He had gambling debts, he said, and problems with the Revenue, but he was still in the game and said he’d be in touch. While waiting for his call, I got drunk on the dole for a few months before I ran into Declan Watts, an old mate of mine from school who was on his way to Australia. He told me that he’d been driving a van for the Department of Justice, ferrying lads around and supervising graffiti removal. ‘I’m getting out of here while I can,’ he said, ‘but if you like, I’ll put in a good word for you.’

A week or so later, I got a call offering me an interview. I bought a suit and passed the test for my category D licence. Then it was up at six o’clock Monday to Friday and into the van and off to Mountjoy or the central pickup place on the quays near Tara Street station, where anywhere between two and seven dishevelled-looking lads would be shuffling their feet waiting for me. They’d pile in, I’d call the roll and off we’d go to Fairview or Cabra or wherever the docket said. I had a bootful of chemicals I topped up at the depot each week, as well as a collection of buckets and gloves and overalls. We’d pull up to the site, I’d hand out the gear and the lads would get changed and start scrubbing away at spunking dicks or swastikas or misspelled paramilitary rubbish. It was nasty work, freezing our holes in the wind and the rain — but it was steady.

The lads were eejits mostly, prone to backchat and a little given to skiving, but I didn’t mind them. Generally, they were grateful they’d avoided a custodial sentence. What had they done? Little stuff: too many unpaid parking tickets, shoplifting, public drunkenness. There were also car thieves and small-time drug dealers who would have been locked up if the jails hadn’t been so overcrowded. And there was the odd white-collar fellow too, a banker or a lawyer who’d fudged his taxes and got caught out or missed too many upkeep payments to an ex-wife. I dealt with them all the same way: took no messing, listened to no excuses, intervened in no arguments unless I absolutely had to. Of course, it helped that in the back of each of our minds was the sure knowledge that if they took liberties there’d be a report to the parole officer, and that report would almost certainly land them in prison.

During my third or fourth month on the job, the Department rotated me and three other lads out to an unfinished office building on the quays. With me were Tony, who had been an accountant before the recession (and a divorce, a breakdown and a drink-driving charge); Graham, a general delinquent whose uncle, he said, controlled half the heroin in Dublin; and Kevo, a pillhead and serial pisser-in-public — all three of them had been on my crew for a fortnight. The office building had been intended for some tech or consulting outfit. It was little more than a concrete shell, with two glass walls overlooking the Liffey and the bridge, and two blind walls at the back. A few lads had broken in one night and painted it top to bottom. But this wasn’t your usual smash of ugly letters. These guys were out to create.

On the pillars on either side of the gaping entrance, they’d painted potted plants stretching their thin branches towards the ceiling. They’d painted architecture, furniture, and they’d painted people too, dozens of them criss-crossing the lobby walls on their way to and from their offices with ID cards on lanyards swinging from their necks. On the rear wall there was a bank of lifts, the doors of one of which were being held open by a tall man for two young women. And beside that there was a high reception desk where three girls answered phones and typed at computers and conversed with visiting conference delegates.

We climbed the stairs, our hands touching those of painted fellow-climbers. On the walls of each floor we found row upon row of desks with computers and in-trays, filing cabinets, photocopiers, printers, water coolers and partition walls cordoning off the offices of managers. Sitting at each of the desks or walking in the aisles between cubicles with cups of coffee in hand or portfolios of papers under arm were people dressed in business suits. They were very thin and very tall. Their faces were blank but you could tell from the way they carried themselves that they were successful and confident and that they worked well as a team, that they were happy doing their work in the time allotted them to do it.

‘Suppose all this is familiar to you,’ I said to Tony.

He rested one hand on his belly and stroked his loose jaw with the other. ‘Not so much, no. Ours was a boutique firm.’

‘Yeah,’ said Graham, ‘and three-dimensional too, I’d imagine?’

‘We worked out of a Georgian townhouse in Sandymount.’

‘Go ’way.’ Graham’s dirty hand slapped the shoulder of Tony’s polo shirt; Tony winced. ‘I robbed one of them once. Tell me now, did yours have double glazing?’

‘I think so, yes.’

Graham licked his wispy moustache. ‘See, that’s what’s known as a false economy, there. You put in double glazing to save money on the heating but the old frames just can’t take them. Shoulder-nudge and they pop right out.’

The lads struggled into their overalls and Graham and Kevo had a last smoke. In each of their buckets I poured chemicals from a plastic jug with a black X on its side, turning my head against the fumes that rose to my eyes and stung. I took brushes and scouring pads from the van, found a water main and attached the hose. The lads sprayed down the walls and started scrubbing. I took the ladder from the van so they could reach the higher-up parts. Graham climbed and Tony held the ladder steady. Kevo stood off to one side to hose and mop the run-off.

‘All set?’ I said.

‘Leaving us again?’ said Tony.

I’d learned quickly that these lads worked well together if I wasn’t around and there was no authority to challenge.

‘I trust you,’ I told them.

‘Big mistake,’ Graham said and flashed me an evil smile.

I went for a walk down the quays as far as the old Point Depot, looking in along the way at all the new and empty buildings. I had a smoke, passed a pub, thought about going inside but decided against it. Since Mallorca, I was often gripped when passing a pub by an urge to go into the warm dark, order a pint and sit and watch the place in motion: the barman taking stock, pulling pints, conversing; the floor girls bustling about with orders, flirting for tips. I’d study the set-up, note the spirit selection, eye the menu if they had one. I’d trace the grain of the wood and test the give of the upholstery, try to absorb the ambience and figure out what had gone wrong for me.

On the second day I gave in to the urge and spent the morning in an early house. I came back furry-mouthed and light-headed to find Tony and Graham carrying on a shouted conversation from either side of the second floor. Kevo was working away by himself. I gave him some money and told him to run and get the lunches.

‘Rolls okay, lads?’ I said.

‘Grand for me,’ Graham said. ‘Tony’d prefer sushi, though.’

‘Shut up, you,’ Tony said with a chuckle.

‘In more of a tapas mood, is it?’

I put on a spare pair of overalls and took over from Kevo.

‘We were just talking about the Chauvet Cave,’ Tony said. ‘I saw a documentary about it.’

‘And me too,’ Graham said. ‘No cultural slouch, this one. Did you see it yourself?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Mad film. 3D. See it whacked if you can. Bonkers.’

‘A great piece of cinema,’ Tony said with a sage nod. ‘Werner Herzog.’

He was a man who liked to think of himself as a connoisseur of the finer things. In two weeks I’d already heard him discourse on Californian fusion cooking, German philosophy and Chinese opera. He loved hearing himself talk. But whenever he got going you sensed trouble, since most topics led him inexorably to the subject of his ex-wife, with whom he used to go to the theatre and the RHA and the restaurants on Merrion Row. As well as the house and the kids, she’d got the season tickets and the memberships.

‘Yeah, it’s good all right,’ Graham said, ‘but the paintings were a bit rubbish.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Tony said, his nose wrinkled as though he’d smelled something rotten. ‘They’re thousands of years old. They’re documentary evidence of man’s earliest artistic attempts.’

‘Exactly.’ Graham was working away. ‘So imagine how much better we’ve all got since then.’

‘Art buff, are you, Graham?’ I said.

‘Sure these —’ he gestured to the walls. ‘These are better than that.’

‘My arse,’ Tony said.

‘Course they fucking are. ’Cause they’re up to date, you know? And they’re about things you’d recognize. What would I give a fuck about cows and mammoths and shite for?’

‘But can you appreciate,’ Tony said, ‘the poetry in that? In the very act of describing animals, man proves to himself that he is greater than they, that he is something different, set apart, with a soul and maybe a destiny. It’s the fact that they’re old that makes them interesting, Graham.’

‘It’s the fact that these are interesting, Tony, that makes them interesting.’

Kevo came back with our rolls. I took the portable radio from the van and we listened to it as we ate. I liked to save the radio for the afternoons, since the best work always got done in the mornings but only without distractions. In the afternoons, everyone got restless and likely to slow down. Then the radio helped things move quicker; it kept us all focused and honest.

‘So, who do you think made them?’ Graham said.

‘Students,’ Tony said. ‘Somebody like that.’ He was frowning, circling some silent pain.

‘Like an anarchist collective?’ Graham’s eyes were wide and wondering. ‘A syndicalist cadre of counter-cultural freethinkers?’

‘Someone like that.’

‘Mad.’ Graham chewed a hunk of bread and chicken goujons.

‘And what does it mean, do you think?’ I said.

‘It means nothing,’ Tony said irritably, his voice rising.

‘It has to mean something,’ Graham said.

‘Why does everything have to mean something?’

When we’d finished eating, I sent the lads back to work and bundled up our rubbish. I took the stairs down to the street, found a bin and stuffed in the wrappers and bags. I was just about to go back inside when I felt a presence, someone watching me. He was standing across the street in the gloom of the bus shelter against the Liffey wall: a tall, thin man dressed all in black. I couldn’t see his face.

I’d never noticed before how much graffiti there was in the city. But now I worked for the Department it was inescapable — I saw it everywhere. There was the street-art stuff: a grey wall in an Inchicore estate, say, with a big hole painted in the middle through which you could see a picture-perfect Connemara field. Or the two young, red-eyed cops smoking bongs on a Cow’s Lane hoarding. Or the little girl in the polka-dot dress suspended by an umbrella halfway up the wall of a Lidl, either falling or flying, the expression on her face the perfect balance of terror and delight. Then there was the advertising masquerading as art on the hoardings near Richmond Street bridge. There were the pub doors on South William Street with recreated Andy Warhols, and the U2 shrine on Windmill Lane whose appeal I’d never understood. Whenever I got the train to see my mother, I’d look out along the red-brick bridges towards Maynooth and try to decipher the tags, peer into the patches of waste ground near Howth Junction and read the faces of abandoned shipping containers. And on the sides of every community centre, on every alleyway wall, on the fences of every electricity substation, on the glass of every bus stop, I’d see the dregs: the tricolours, the Burn the Rich, the X is a faggot, the Y waz ere.

‘It’s all just so impotent,’ Tony said. This was on Wednesday afternoon.

‘You are,’ Graham said. ‘Will you hold that ladder steady?’

‘Who’s your favourite?’ Kevo said.

We were on the third floor, the lads working away at erasing a desk full of executive toys and framed photos of blank-faced children.

‘Favourite what?’ Tony said.

‘Favourite one of these here pictures.’

‘Don’t make me laugh. They’re rubbish, the lot of them.’

Graham thought for a while. ‘That girl over there,’ he said and pointed behind him. ‘The one with the short skirt and the tight stripy shirt. She’s a cracker, a real goer. You can see it in the way she carries herself. I’d bend her over that desk and give her —’

‘She’s a drawing,’ Tony said.

‘A drawing who wants it. You can see it.’

‘She doesn’t even have a face.’

‘You have to read between the lines.’

‘She’s only lines!’

‘I liked the lobby,’ Kevo said.

‘What about the lobby?’ I was mopping a pool of water and paint that recently had been two cubicle walls and a narrow work station.

‘Just the whole thing. It was nice. I liked the way it felt.’

‘They don’t make places like that any more,’ Tony said.

‘They never did,’ Graham said. ‘They started to, but they didn’t finish.’

‘Still,’ Kevo said, ‘it feels like a shame it had to go.’

We’d rubbed out my own favourite that morning, in a dark corner away from the windows: a man at his desk, shoulders and feet square, a cup of coffee beside him, a briefcase by his feet. He was unremarkable in every way. He was just carrying on with his work. I’d felt a twinge as Graham applied the solvent and his head began to drip.

The office-building job was meant to be a week-long affair, but we got ahead of schedule. We worked hard all Thursday morning and packed it in by lunch, leaving the final floor, the top one, for the following day. I asked the lads not to tell anyone I’d let them go early, then spent the rest of the day walking around and drinking. I was restless for some reason. I hadn’t been sleeping well. I kept thinking I saw someone I recognized in crowds or in the shadows.

On the side of a hotel on Amiens Street, I saw a figure that bore a striking resemblance to the ones painted in the office building. Like them he was faceless, like them he was thin and tall. He was obviously relaxing after a hard day. He wore his collar open, his tie loosened, and held his jacket over his shoulder. Where would he be going? I wondered. Home to a wife and kids? Or, like me, off aimlessly into the night? I decided that he did in fact work at our office building, and giggled at the thought of him and his co-workers clocking off when we did and heading out into their lives, bedding down for the night in their cosy homes and getting up earlier than us and beating us to the quays.

By seven o’clock, I’d crawled for miles between the pubs around the docks and over the river and back home to Irishtown. I had six or seven pints in me already by the time I pulled up a stool in the Oarsman. This was a classic pub, full of walnut wood and thick carpet and heavy optics and brass fittings. Over the course of my wanderings the cold had got in between my bones and skin, and something like nerves was making my mind feel scratchy. I added whiskeys to the pints for the sake of heating and anaesthetic and stayed in the pub until closing. Then I fell up the street, puked my ring in the bathroom sink and conked out with my cheek pressed against the cold tiles.

Friday morning I felt unsteady on the road. I scared myself with the way my hands shook on the wheel.

‘Long night?’ said Graham, climbing in. He looked a little worse for wear himself. His eyes were baggy, and he was wearing the same clothes he had worn the day before but now there were red blotches on his shirt and scuff marks on his knees.

Tony had brought coffees for everyone.

‘You’re a lifesaver,’ Graham said.

‘Just to mark my last day. Tomorrow I’m a free man.’

Tony’s face was clear and open, his eyes bright. He was freshly shaven and had a new, clean haircut.

‘Is that right?’ Kevo said.

I looked at the docket. ‘That’s right.’

‘Don’t go easy on him now just ’cause he’s nearly done,’ Graham said. ‘Work the bastard.’ He sipped his coffee. ‘This is grand though, Tone. Cheers.’

I drove us along the quay, with the windows open to air out my head. Glass buildings caught the light. Pedestrians jostled in the intersections drinking coffees from takeaway cups. And for a moment I felt as though we belonged among them, that we were part of a society, heading off to our jobs to make our humble contributions.

I parked the van and the lads hauled the equipment into the lobby. That vast, empty space swallowed the city’s hustle and honk. The building felt embarrassed, like somehow we’d caught it off guard. We shouldered our bags and climbed the stairs, peering in at each landing to the open space and the walls we had cleaned. Just before the fourth-floor landing, we noticed a crumpled body painted on the stairs.

‘Was that there before?’ I said.

Kevo moved ahead. ‘Someone’s been in here,’ he called back.

‘Ah, for the love of fucking Jesus,’ Tony said.

Graham pushed past me. ‘Not much hope of you getting off lightly today, Tone.’

The branches of the potted plants by the windows now appeared broken. A litter of leaves and splintered wood had been added to the ground. The screens of desktop computers were smashed and their towers turned over. A printer lay on its side. Sheets of paper hung in the air. We looked into the faces of the office workers and saw new expressions of horror. The women were on their knees, hands up, begging. The men were frozen running or slumped against the walls. Bodies lay broken on the floor, their limbs folded at skewed angles. And everywhere there were messages, their letters scrawled and dripping. Help us, they said. Please, they said. Don’t do this, they said. I turned and looked back the way we’d come and saw, painted on either side of the stairwell door, two masked men dressed all in black.

‘Dear God,’ Tony said. ‘This is meant for us. What sick —’

‘Anarchists,’ Graham said, grinning.

‘Christ,’ Tony said, his eyes closed, ‘will you ever just fucking shut up?’

Graham licked his lips and took a calm step forward. Tony was a solid guy — he’d been a rugby player in his student days — but I could tell that he was frightened. The look in Graham’s eyes scared me too: it was not just that he wanted to inflict pain; he was eager to be hurt himself.

‘Lads,’ Kevo said, stepping between them. I helped him pull them apart and sent Tony to the other side of the floor.

‘Careful,’ I said, ‘the both of you, or I’m writing you up.’

I listened to Tony’s footsteps echo, and wanted desperately to leave, to make a run for the stairwell and to fall into a pub. Graham elbowed Kevo off and spat on the floor in Tony’s direction. He picked up a bucket.

‘Are we working or what?’ he said.

Graham and Kevo started to scrub the walls. I suited up and helped them. We erased the furniture and the messages, the twisted faces, the groping hands. I held the ladder for Graham and took turns hosing the run-off with Kevo. We worked right through lunch with no talk and no radio, but at three o’clock Tony took it upon himself to go out for sandwiches. Graham accepted one soundlessly, and we ate them as we worked. We continued into the evening long after we were obliged to do so, and when the light began to fail I fetched torches from the van and we took turns holding them. It was nine o’clock by the time we’d finished and packed the van. We stood around outside, each of us wanting to leave but needing first to say or to hear something meaningful.

‘Sorry about this morning,’ Tony said.

‘You will be,’ Graham said, but there was nothing in it.

‘Listen.’ Tony looked at me from the tops of his eyes. ‘Will you —’

‘We’ll say no more about it.’

I stood for a while and looked up and down the quays. The office blocks were dark but for the desk lamps of a handful of midnight-oilers. The river was high, black, and pulled with it a biting wind.

‘But you two,’ I turned to Graham and Kevo. ‘I’ll see you on Monday.’

I set off in the direction of human voices and found myself, some hours later, slumped on a high stool in a pub in Temple Bar, hating the expensive drink and the baseball caps for sale, the faded international currency pinned behind the bar, the dickhead playing Oasis covers over a jangling PA.

‘We should all be ashamed of ourselves,’ I said to no one in particular. I pointed myself in the direction of a greasy-haired manager who was leaning on the hatch talking to a floor girl. ‘This place doesn’t deserve to exist,’ I said. ‘It’s a fucking fake.’

The manager frowned and puffed out his chest. The floor girl came shuffling over.

‘You should go home,’ she said.

In the ensuing months, I got flung out to Blanchardstown and Balbriggan and Clonskeagh and Kilcock. I’d drop the new lads off, head to the pub and come back for them five or six hours later. More than once, one of them had to drive us back to Dublin, and when they stopped showing up in the mornings I knew I couldn’t report them.

One morning there was no one waiting at all and so, sick from drink, I drove to the assigned site, pulled on the overalls, poured the bitter chemicals and scrubbed away all day by myself. I drove back to town, dropped the van at the depot and walked home along Pearse Street studying my hands. The pigment I’d pulled from the wall had soaked into them and darkened. My skin was grey, its creases black at the knuckles. A mark like that of high tide scummed the balls of my wrists.

When I got to the Oarsman, I found Kevo behind the bar. I was surprised and happy to see him, though at first I didn’t recognize him. He looked like a new man: cleanly shaven rather than stubbled; wearing a black shirt tucked into black trousers rather than overalls or jeans; and with his hair grown out, waxed and parted rather than shaved to the skull or hidden under a baseball cap.

‘What are you doing here?’ I said.

‘Is this your local, is it? Just started last night.’

I ordered a drink and watched him pick a glass from the shelf, hold it at a perfect angle beneath the spout and pull the tap. The dark liquid crashed into the glass, rolled back on itself and rose. Kevo pushed back on the tap at the precise moment I would have done. He set the pint aside to settle and leaned across the bar. He smiled, and I realized how young he was, how possible it might be for him to do something. I asked about the other lads. He told me what he’d heard. That Graham finally had figured out how to hotwire a car, which he’d driven around for a night before slamming it into an eighteen-wheeler. That Tony had some cockamamie plan to open up his own firm, but was still and probably forever would be working out the details.

PJ Nolan, incidentally, bought three restaurants from a bad bank for one euro apiece. The last I heard, he’s doing reasonable business.