been kneeling down, weeding the garden.
“Ah, Vivian, there you are!”
I think, Where else would I be? And I stand still and clenched, waiting to soak up her paragraphs. She speaks whole troughs of words, words about the priest who upped and died in the middle of his sermon and the neighbour who had a stroke and the other neighbour who’s been diagnosed with cancer and the jobs that aren’t there and the foreigners that are taking the jobs that are there and the social welfare benefits the foreigners are getting and the benefits the likes of me and you aren’t getting. Her sentences leave no gaps for me to fill, so I take advantage of the word-torrent and start to creep further and further away until she is shouting louder words about the government cutting her pension and my feet are walking down the street away away away and I am free. “Poor Vivian,” I’ve heard her call me, but she is the poor one, with her rage and conniptions.
I walk through Phibsborough and head down towards Constitution Hill, passing King’s Inns Court. Some letters have been blue-ed out so that it reads “K_N_ _ _O_RT.” “Knort,” I say aloud—a lovely word, but only if the “K” is silent and reassuring. One arm of the “T” has been blue-ed out—it looks like an upside-down and back-to-front “L”—so I try saying it some place between a “T” and an “L.” I turn left onto Western Way, and then right onto Dominick Street. I don’t go into the church today, because I’m too unsettled from Bernie’s ravings to enjoy the silence. I have no religion, but I like big silent echoey buildings with seats all facing one thing. I would like to believe in that thing they are facing. I would like to believe in something so much that I would turn myself inside out for it. I wave at the carved stone heads staring down from the church spires. Some of them look quite serious, as if they don’t approve of my doings, but one of them looks like she’s on my side. I call her Caroline, a nice open name with a gaping “C,” like a gum-filled toothless grin. I cross Parnell Street and head onto O’Connell Street. The statues this end of the street have outstretched arms—Parnell, Larkin, Jesus at the taxi rank—all have arms agape in half a hug. I walk down the middle island of O’Connell Street, by a group of taxi drivers chatting at the rank. When the first driver on my left gets into his car and drives around the island, the other drivers go to their cars, open the drivers’ doors, grip the insides of the cars and push them forward to close the gap. They might be birthing calves or playing tug of war or straining against the weight of an automated world.
I cross at the Spire onto North Earl Street, passing the statue of James Joyce with his legs crossed. He looks easy to topple and, if I had to read Finnegans Wake, I’d probably try to topple him. I skip the bustling café on the corner—it’s all show-face and windows—and go into the long narrow café a few doors down. I order coffee and a chocolate eclair. The staff here know me and are kind; they greet me with short sentences that end in “love.” I like living in a city where I am mostly unknown, and going into small places where I am known. There are metal knives and forks in the cutlery holder but only plastic teaspoons, probably to deter the masked spoon thief who steals spoons from the city’s cafés to build a gigantic spoon tower. I sit at the table nearest to the toilets, at the back, and take out my notebook, which has kind blank pages that don’t scream at me to stay within the lines. I make a List of Things That I Like: “Conkers, Sherbert, Gold Ingots, The Smell of Petrol, Dessert Trolleys, Graveyards, Sneezes, Terrapins, Scars that Tell Stories, The Number 49, The Smell of Pencil Parings.”
Now I imagine I can smell pencil parings, so I sniff deeply. The man at a nearby table turns to look at me. He has three mobile phones laid out like playing cards on the table in front of him. One of them rings and he turns back to answer it. I continue with my list: “Donkey’s Tufty Heads, Marshmallowed Silences, Butter Lumps, Elephants, Zoos in Winter, Pencils that Write Sootily, The Name Aloysius, Anything Egg-Shaped, Moths that Think They Are Butterflies, Hospital Noises, Liquorice Sweets in the Shape of Pink Toilet Rolls, The Smell of Garden Sheds, Damp Canteen Trays, Marbles with Coloured Swirls.”
I’ve smeared some chocolate from the eclair onto the page, so I include “Chocolate Eclair,” with an arrow to explain the stain. The man in front of me is still talking on his phone. I take out mine and put it on the table. There’s a greyish tint to the screen: I have a message! I open the message and an unfamiliar number appears. It reads: “Hello, Vivian, I am Penelope. Can you meet me in the tearooms beside the hardware tomorrow at eleven?”
As I re-read the message, my belly feels like a pot boiling over. I have a new friend called Penelope who spells out her numbers; it just can’t get much better than this. Now I decide to make a List of Words That I Like. I start off with “Propane and Butane.” I want to go on a camping trip just so I can use these words. I don’t know exactly what they are, but I imagine myself saying to the person in the next tent, “My propane’s running low, mind if I borrow some?” Or I could show off my camping experience with an abbreviation, “I’m all out of bute, have you any to spare?” I’ve written down “Propane and Butane” because they go together, but now it looks like “and” is one of my favourite words, which would be like saying that flour is my favourite food. I scratch out “and” and write: “Propane, Butane, Smear, Pufferfish, Trodden, Eiderdown, Plethora (but only the way I pronounce it, pleh-THOWE-ra), Beachcomber, Mischief, Bumble Bee.”
I like the words “Bumble Bee” so much that I once said them over and over until they stopped making sense as words, and became meaningless babble. I drain the last of my coffee—I love meals that are all puff and froth and little else besides—and walk up North Frederick Street, my knees crunching like overcooked biscuits. If I have biscuit knees, maybe I have chocolate blood and a blancmange brain, a Hansel and Gretel house of a body. When I get home, I trace my route. Today I walked the shape of a head with a hollow scooped out of the back, and a quiff of hair blown flat to the front. I place it on the kitchen table, next to yesterday’s route.
To celebrate my success in finding a Penelope, I pour a dash of my great-aunt’s wine into a mug. It tastes sweet and sneezy but it isn’t cold. There’s no ice in the freezer so I drop some frozen peas into mug; now it looks like a diseased pond. I sit on the blue velvet armchair, the kind of chair an off-duty policeman might sit in, and drink with my lips pursed to keep the peas out. After some large gulps, I feel garrulous and wine-smug. I don’t want to waste this fruity connected feeling, so I call my sister.
“Hello?” She whispers the word, as if the phone has threatened to bite her ear.
“Vivian? Hi, it’s Vivian,” I giggle.
Never has this sentence sounded funnier.
“Vivian? Is everything alright?”
“Everything is better than alright,” I say. “I tried to make thunder, and I advertised for a friend.”
My sister sighs, a sigh so long that I snatch it up in my mouth and spit it right out again.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m cancelling out your sigh.”
“Oh, Vivian.”
Her voice sounds like it’s coming from another century.
“How are Lucy and Oisín?”
“Oh, they’re great. Lucy is … Oisín is …”
Her voice has plumped up again, and she sends a clatter of words down the line. In between sups of wine, I say words like, “wow, ooh, mm, really, oh, aren’t they great, ah that’s nice.” The small words seem to be the most important, but I’m not sure if they count as actual words.
“I’d
