or Twister when they’re full of energy. I whisper goodbye, straighten up and head south to D’Olier Street. I cross at the lights, follow the curve of the college around to College Green and stop outside an ivy-covered house at the edge of the college, facing the hotel that used to be a bank. I imagine a kind of everyday Santa Claus and his wife living in this house, plotting ways to rid the world of its problems. The ground floor is a control room, with lots of maps and gadgets and wires and devices all connected to enormous screens. Everyday Santa and Everyday Mrs. Claus wear headsets and hold remote controls and joysticks to give the superheroes the coordinates of their missions: “Delta Spiderman, bike thief on the quays, Roger that” or “Oscar Superman, girl weeping in front of Central Bank, bring tissues, stat.”
I leave before I catch any detail that would sully my imaginings, and walk up Grafton Street, turning right onto South King Street and into Zara. I take the escalator up to the first floor and walk to the left, to the opposite wall. I pick up a shirt from the rail and drop it like a hot mistake. Then I kneel down to pick it up and catch sight of the small door in the wall. I saw a shop assistant step out of that door some years ago, and I’ve kept it on my list of thin places ever since. Inside that door I picture a kind of candy-laden paradise, a combination of the Hansel and Gretel house made of sweets, the mountain the Pied Piper led the children into and the chocolate factory that Charlie visits. I put the shirt back on the rail and leave before I can be disenchanted by a glimpse of a non-chocolate reality.
I head west along St. Stephen’s Green and down Kildare Street, passing Leinster House and a small band of protesters outside carrying posters of foetuses or foxes. A man wearing a cycle helmet walks up and down holding a small black-and-white sign on a stick, a paper lollipop that says “Close Sellafield.”
I go into the library, leave my bag and coat in the locker, and climb the stairs to the reading room with my pencil and notebook. At the bottom of every recessed bookshelf lining the room is a small wooden door coated in mesh. I pretend to look at a Welsh dictionary and bend down and peek through the mesh. Behind these doors I picture a maze of tunnels that house living examples of creatures believed to be extinct. There’s a dodo, of course, and an auk and an Irish elk, along with others I have written in my notebook: “Pygmy Mammoth, Stilt-legged Llama, Shrub-Ox, Pocket Gophers, Dwarf Elephant, Cave Bear, Spectacled Cormorant, Heath Hen, Golden Toad, Cebu Warty Pig, Caspian Tiger, Gastric Brooding Frog, Sharp-Snouted Day Frog, Pig-Footed Bandicoot, Toolache Wallaby, Laughing Owl, Narrow-Bodied Skink, Big-Eared Hopping Mouse, Indefatigable Galapagos Mouse, Chadwick Beach Cotton Mouse, Christmas Island Pipistrelle, Scimitar-Toothed Cat, Giant Aye-Aye, Quagga.”
They have duped the human race into believing they’re extinct, so that they can live un-pestered by zoos and breeding programmes, animal versions of death-faking tricksters.
I sit down and open my notebook on a fresh page. I read somewhere that the words “month,” “silver” and “purple” cannot be rhymed with. I stare hard at my silver pencil and try to come up with rhymes, but I can only invent words:
Pilver: To quietly steal from one’s wealthy hostess.
Bilver: A dry retch at the end of a vomiting bout.
I try “month.” The problem with “month” is that I pronounce it “munth,” so my definitions are:
Bunth: A collective noun for a group of flags.
Thunth: The noise a jaw makes on contact with the bottom step of the stairs.
They don’t quite reach the essence of the thing, so I have a go at “purple”:
Gurple: The sound of a baby post-feed when it’s full of wind and joy.
Vurple: The chief of a fox clan with jaunty taste in clothes.
I could keep inventing words, but that is not my place. I stare at the backs of the other library users. They seem to know what they’re doing and are getting on with doing it, instead of making up words that will never be used. I stare up at the domed ceiling. The coloured ceiling panels run from white through peppermint to old-library green, like a swatch of paint-colour charts.
When my stomach rumbles, I gather my belongings and head downstairs to the café. I sit at the table nearest to the cash register, from where I can see the inner workings of the café. I see the waitresses spill milk when they pour it into the coffee machine, and I see their faces get red and tense when lines of lunchers form, demanding all manner of breads I have never heard of. Where do they hear about such breads, and why does it matter so much? Bread is beige or white fluff that will be swallowed in as much time as it takes them to complain. I like seeing the mismatched delph scattered about the perfectly matched Tupperware tubs of dry foodstuffs: a tinge of disorder in an ordered system. I don’t want to seem nosy so I act as if I’m staring thoughtfully into the middle distance, then I scribble some words in my notebook. But the words I write are just “mischief mischief mischief,” over and over again; “mischief” should always be spelt with a lower case “m”—it seems more mischievous than its sensible big sister, upper case “M.” And “mumps” should never be capitalised, but “Measles,” its spottier cousin, should. “Rubella” works either way. We should be allowed to choose when to use lower and upper case letters; having to use a capital letter at the start of a sentence is like saying the firstborn son gets all the money, no matter how vile he is. Some words should be spelt entirely in capital letters: TORRENTIAL, BELLOWS, RIPPED, FLED, GLEEFUL. And if letters have capitals, why don’t numbers? I could invent capital numbers, but schoolchildren would hate me for increasing their learning-load and they would throw eggs at my face. My brain has got carried away with crossover branches and twigs, all grabbing and twisting and outgrowing each other, and my hand can’t keep up with writing these knotted thoughts, so I finish my food and leave the café. I’d like to be the type of person that calls a cheery farewell to the café staff, but I settle instead for a skulk.
I make for the Liffey. As I wait to cross O’Connell Bridge, I see a sign at the bottom of a tall red-brick building with a curly roof on O’Connell Street saying: “Witches’ Attic.” I look up and see a man wearing jeans and a grey T-shirt in the attic window, near the weather vane. I wish he was wearing a cape and a pointy hat, but maybe the modern warlock needs to go undercover. When I enter my house, the waft of myself hits me. I sniff around me, turning my nose to different pockets of air. The smell from upstairs is strongest, because I haven’t changed my sheets for a long time. I like them to smell properly of me, and I like to find papery shards of foot skin and debris from my body in the bed-nest. I heard on the radio that the rise in asthma is caused by an increase in the use of cleaning products, and I don’t want to get asthma. If I have to get a disease, I want one that contains multiple syllables and a range of vowels. I tuck my nose into my jumper and sniff. A pleasant sort of lived-in smell comes from my body, of meat and sweat and damp newspaper. I sit at the kitchen table and map my route and trace it onto greaseproof paper. Today I walked a slice of batch loaf with an aerial poking out.
I LOOK OUT the kitchen window at the giant pear tree in the back garden. I don’t like pears, so when the fruit falls in autumn it rots, and the garden is full of wasps and squelches. Now that the tree is bare, it’s as if pears don’t exist and autumn never happens. I open the back door and go outside to look at the treetop. I once read a children’s book about the magical lands at the top of a tree in an enchanted wood. I swing one leg onto a low branch and hoist my other leg up. I climb up a
