TD 1
first by county, then country. It was the kind of
mindnumbing work that required very little conscious thought and almost no effort, other than placing tremendous strain on palms, wrists, and my right ear, since that was the unfortunate organ facing my immediate neighbour Vinnie. My first impression had been that Vinnie wasn’t a particularly thoughtful person, but I was quickly disabused of this notion when I discovered that he had lots of thoughts, and an ungovernable passion for converting every single one of them to breath. He was fond of combining two pieces of faulty information he must have read too close together, turning them into a single, widely improbable factoid; like his belief that the combined mass of spiders you eat each night constituted one of your five a day, or that MI6 blocked the astronaut Michael Collins from leaving Apollo 11’s landing craft because his name would have been bad PR for Britain. “The ‘RA? In space? They’d never allowit,” he said, as if MI6’s motives were known to him, and should be presumed by us. Worse were the times I found myself agreeing with him. “You never see female skeletons,” he said to me once, as if we were on that very subject. “In cartoons, or horror movies, or whatever. Just a normal skeleton, not one in a dress, or given long hair. I mean just your standard skeleton. Women have skeletons too, so why are they always blokes in films?” Vinnie was an amateur boxer who played drums in a Velvet Underground tribute act, although any discussion of the band or their music quickly hit a dead end because he “wasn’t a fan” himself. “We only started doing it because our da has the van,” he told me, “so it just made sense.” Three or four nights a week, I learned, Des Brown’s red Talbot van ended up delivering not carpets, in-lays, and carpet and in-lay fitting materials, but the brazenly indifferent sounds of Felt Groove: A Velvet Tribute to pubs and community centres throughout Dublin and the South East. It’s said that few people bought The Velvet Underground’s records at the time, but everyone who did formed a band. It was perhaps comforting to learn that the same was true of those who bought carpet vans. Nevertheless, when the chance arose to ditch the sorting area for a trip doing mail rounds, I jumped at it with both fags. While Cardiff Lane collected all the post from Dublin each night, it collected every single letter to Santa from the entire country. These were ordinarily sorted by a guy called Cyril, as an adjunct to his full-time job as a postman. This role was coming to an end, and when I joined Cyril on the final pick up of that day, it was for his last ever route, about which he was evidently emotional. Cyril was a kindly sort, large and portly with a reddish-grey beard, set upon a face so pleasingly red, and cheeky of expression, he looked like the recipient of regular, hearty smacks from an unseen Victorian governess, forever catching him pinching apples from her pantry. I too was feeling sentimental, but this was because I’d stayed up too late with Mick the night before, who had just been dumped and needed some encouragement. I hadn’t meant to stay up so long, of course, but he was in a bad way and it just seemed like the Christian thing to do was to take the acid with Mick, which was still now floating through my bloodstream as me and Cyril hit it off so famously. Some kids asked for things Santa couldn’t give. I mean, a lot of them did obviously, even just when it came to bikes, but I here refer to other, more meaningful things. A few asked for parents or grandparents to come back from the dead and at least one asked for a dad to be broken out of prison. Many asked for celebrities to be their boyfriends or girlfriends, and some settled simply for the ardent love of the girl across the street. I would tell Mick all about those letters, cos the night we took that acid, I’d found him on the floor of his flat, quietly sobbing in a tangle of Christmas ornaments I presume he’d ripped off the tree, which now lay flat on its back in the other side of the room. He had obviously thrown it about the place in a fit of emotion, but I remember looking at the scene in front of me and thinking it looked like he’d ripped its lights off in erotic fervour, and had frantic sex with it, before propelling it away from himself in post-coital disgust. His pain was heartfelt, no doubt, but since he would have had to stand up to buzz me in, it was hard not to detect some degree of performance when I found him like that just 90 seconds later, sniffling as he listened to 1950s ballads. Faron Young’s 1955 hit It’s A Great Life If You Don’t Weaken, a song I’d never heard before, was on repeat, an odd choice for someone whose musical taste, up ‘til now, had been whatever was playing in Spar that week. It was, he said, something to do with his granny, although I intuited that his song choice had more to do with the Giant’s Causeway of crushed cans that lay beneath his coffee table, and from which he now extended like a soppy, inebriated Fionn mac Cumhaill. I wasn’t accustomed to seeing him like this. It was, after all, more emotion than I expected from a guy who had the Godfather theme as his ringtone, and we soon decreed that the only thing for it was some acid trips as a livener. The in-jokes of our evening quickly became too in34