Two
Joining the Gardaí Siochana, the Irish police force, had been my lifelong goal. There was never a Plan B and everyone knew it. Detective Freckles is what they’d called me in our final year.
Ms Meadows the career guidance teacher had tried to push me into doing a business degree. She thought everyone should study business, even the art students who went in with their creative bendy thoughts and came out like they’d had electroconvulsive therapy after being preached to on the advantages of a basic business degree. Something to fall back on, it was always said. Business made me think of a mattress. I was hopeful about my future, I wasn’t contemplating failing never mind planning on falling back. She couldn’t convince me to change my mind because I saw no other place for me in the world. Turns out I was wrong. My application to the Gardaí was denied. I was stunned. A little winded. Embarrassed. With no mattress to fall back on I did some recalibration and found the next best thing.
I’m a parking warden with Fingal County Council. I wear a uniform, grey pants, white shirt, a high-vis vest and patrol the streets, not unlike a garda. I got close to what I wanted. I work on the side of the law. I like my job, I like my routine, my route, my beat. I like organisation, and order, rules and clarity. The rules are clear and I uphold them rigorously. I like that I’m fulfilling an important role.
My base is Malahide, a suburban village outside Dublin city, beside the sea. A pretty spot, an affluent area. My home is a studio flat above a gym in the back garden of a mansion on a leafy road bordering Malahide Castle and Gardens.
She, Becky, does something with computers. He, Donnacha, works from home in his art studio, one of those nice garden rooms, doing fine art ceramics. He calls them vessels. They look like bowls to me. Not for cereal, you’d barely get two Weetabix in the base and it doesn’t have the depth for enough milk, especially with the Weetabix absorption levels. I read an interview with him in the Irish Times culture magazine where he describes them as definitely not bowls, which is a description that brings him great insult, the bane of his professional life. These vessels are receptacles for his message. I didn’t read far enough to get the message.
He talks a curious kind of prattle with a faraway look in his eye as if any of his agonising wonderings mean something. He’s not a listener, which I thought would be typical of an artist. I thought they were supposed to be sponges absorbing everything around them. I was half-right. He’s already so full of shit he can’t make room for any more absorption, he’s just leaking it all out now on everyone else. Artistic incontinence. And it costs five hundred euro minimum for one of his tiny bowls.
Also five hundred euro is my monthly rent and the catch is that I be available for babysitting duties for their three kids whenever they ask. Usually that’s three times a week. Always on a Saturday night.
I wake and turn to look at my iPhone: 6.58 as always. Time to process where I am and what’s going on. I find being one step ahead of my phone first thing in the morning is a good start to the day. Two minutes later the alarm rings. Pops won’t own a smartphone, thinks we’re all being watched. He refused to have me vaccinated, not because of the health dangers, but because he had a theory they were inserting chips into humans’ skin. He once brought me to London for a weekend for my birthday and we spent most of the time standing outside the Ecuadorian Embassy calling Julian Assange’s name. The police moved us along twice. Julian looked out and waved and Pops felt something monumental passed between them. An understanding between two men who believe in the same cause. Power to the people. Then we saw Mary Poppins in the West End.
At 7 a.m., I shower. I eat. I dress. Grey trousers, white shirt, black boots, raincoat in case I need it for those little April showers. In this uniform I’d like to think I could be mistaken for a garda. Sometimes I pretend I am. I don’t imitate a garda, that’s illegal, but in my head I do, and I speak like I am. That air that they have. The aura. The authority. Your protector and friend when you need them, your foe when they think you’re acting the maggot. They choose which one they are at any given moment. It’s magic. Even the new fellas with chin-fluff can do that stern disappointed old-before-their-time look. As if they know you and know you can do better and Jesus why did you have to let them down. Sorry, Garda, sorry, I won’t do it again. And the girl ones, you wouldn’t mess with them, but you’d definitely go on a session with them.
My hair is long, coarse, black, so black it has a blue sheen, like petrol, and takes an hour to blow dry so I only wash it once a week. It goes back in a low bun, cap on and low over my eyes. I wrap the ticket machine over my shoulder. Ready.