‘It’s a great album’ says Shaun, ‘a huge departure for Adamson. He’s better away from that troublemaker Jobson’. That was a reference to The Crossing, the debut album from Scottish band Big Country plus the acrimonious split from his previous band The Skids. I feign full knowledge of the internecine musical squabble, although with superficial knowledge of The Skids from my previous incarnation as a punk rocker at the turn of the previous decade, I never possessed anything near the level of esoteric musical discernment of my unloquacious friend from Leitrim; the coolest man I had ever encountered in all of my twenty two years. He had the physiognomy of the actor Kevin Kline complemented with the upper body physique of Sylvester Stallone, which was surprising as the only physical exercise he engaged in was with the remote control switch for our rented TV.
He takes the disc from the sleeve to inspect it for dust or imperfections before placing it on the turntable stating that ‘Adamson and Watson achieved a hint of a bagpipe sound by working the guitar with an MXR pitch transposer, especially in the track Fields of Fire’. Not wishing to be ultracrepidarian, or indeed just foolish, I stay silent nodding my head in agreement as my mouth dries up as if chewing cranberries, should he take this conversation further. Adamson and Watson could have been inventors of a mechanical digger or characters from a detective novel, such was my inanity. My only response is to repair tout de suite to the tiny kitchen to hide, ostensibly brewing tea, hoping he would have moved to a different subject on my return, but wishful it’s not to The Blue Oyster Cult or his dissertation on their record Don’t Fear The Reaper, again completely alien to me.
We lived along with four other trainee managers, in a semi detached house in Ireland’s biggest housing estate in Tallaght west Dublin, a conurbation of relocated inner city centre residents, the corollary of a gargantuan social engineering programme, with a population of 70,000, but with no municipal facilities such as a community centre or ballroom. The only other entertainment apart from vinyl records or cassette tapes were principally the aforementioned rented TV consisting of three channels and Radio Nova, a pirate radio station that captured the zeitgeist of the time. Of course it provided the ubiquitous pubs and girls. Loads of them. For him, not for me. They were attracted to him like pensioners around a one bar electric heater in a train station waiting room. He discarded girls like pistachio nut shells. All I could ever seem to do was try and pick up some of his discarded carapaces if they thought it would provoke an envious reaction from him, which it never did.
At the weekend we would take the 49A bus into the city centre to the new disco bars which had developed with the emergence of MT-USA hosted by RTEs Fab Vincent Hanley. Rainbows bar in George’s street was our regular haunt, a spacious building with a 12ft dance floor replete with TV screens circulating the bar blasting the invasion of music videos. I was by the standards of the time a good dancer, occasionally assisting me ‘pull’ but whilst the lothario had the movement of a friesian heifer it didn’t impact on his attraction as the girls were hypnotically attracted to him by his demeanour lying against the pillar smoking at the side of the dance floor, as if adorning the front of an LP sleeve. Most nights I went home alone on the ice cold 49A without the lothario who regularly appeared the next afternoon wearing a lavallière of ostentatious love bites. With informed enthusiasm he told us of his nocturnal exploits, which we listened to riven with a mixture of awe and envy in equal measure.
We all worked considerably long hours then, especially if we had to carry out stocktakes and audits. When this happened it was an excuse to have an extra special celebration in the city centre at the weekend (Sunday trading was prohibited for large shops in the 1980s) so we had the day off to recover from a very late night. This particular night near the end of the month with very little money we headed into the city. The lothario, replete with his ubiquitous khaki green ‘threads’ said he might be meeting some ‘blade’ no need to hang about waiting for him. She didn’t turn up and despite my schadenfreude at his rejection he remained unperturbed and within a half an hour he was regaling an audience of three girls who were were buying him drinks whilst being oblivious to me despite my Rudolf Nureyev turn on the beech rectangle. I go to the toilet.
On my return the lothario has vacated the premises but left a message with one of the two unlucky girls that he would see me tomorrow at some stage (mobile phones were not in vogue in the eighties). Again, I head for home alone on the 49A, me, the Jimmy White, the gooseberry, the nearly man, to drown my sorrows with Lyons tea and digestive biscuits while Stuart Adamsons’ bagpipe guitar reverberated from the turntable, some Harvest Home I’m living in Stuart I think, as I reach my last two tea bags and three digestives. With no pay until two days time I conceptualise lothario, like Elagabalus being flogged by a dominatrix, simultaneously being fed peeled grapes in a Stillorgan penthouse.
The next day I am awakened around noon by a repeatedly impatient doorbell ringer. I quickly dress in a tracksuit and scurry to the door to be presented with what could only be described as a veritable stunner, six feet if she was an inch. I recognised her from a previous night out with lothario. She was a Bangharda, replete with handcuffs he had teased us at the time. In a guttural, gravelly north Dublin accent she enquired ‘Is Shaun dayre?’ Her voice totally incongruous to her countenance, Tom Waits with breasts. ‘No he’s not’ I said, ‘but do you want to come in as I’m sure he will be home soon, we were in Rainbows last night‘ ’I know,I was there last night- he asked me to call out today to see him’ as she makes herself comfortable in a sofa with so much discarded food embedded in the fabric, it should have a use by date.
Strangely she doesn’t seem anywhere near as uncomfortable sitting on it as I am. Cognisant that I only have two tea bags and three digestives which is my supper, I diffidently enquire if she wants a pot of tea. Unfortunately she responds in the affirmative. She’s not offered any digestives. As I fill the kettle the doorbell rings again, not quite as vigorously as previously, but still authoritatively. I was greeted by another striking beauty, albeit more compact and bijou, but alluring, reminiscent of Lizzie Borden. She didn’t have an axe but did have an infuriating Corkonian twang, exclaiming as if as a statement ‘hellomynameisannisshaunthere’ while I decipher what she is saying she brushes past me in the hallway I figure she is another lothario groupie so I make no objection to her intrusion. She sits on the matching armchair that has less food content than the sofa. She accepts my offer of tea but wants to know if it is Barry’s Tea. I tell her it is to humour her but she isn’t offered any digestives either.
I go out to the kitchen to boil the same teabags to make them stretch for another pot. The doorbell sounds yet again. I answer to be greeted by a girl I am familiar with as she was privileged to be on the arm of lothario going to the cinema a few weeks previously, when he left me with his popcorn but no girlfriend. He called her Niki Lauda. She spoke with an assertive posh Dublin 4 patois. Like the other two girls she was was pulchritudinous, despite the extreme eczema or psoriasis on both her ears which was red and flaking. ‘Hello Niki, how are you? I suppose you are here for Shaun?’ She looks at me like I handed her a positive pregnancy test in her mother’s name responding ‘yes I am, I met him in the store on Friday and he asked me to call out today, but I’m Yvonne, not Niki’. She sits beside the Bangharda coincidentally accepting my offer of stewed tea, but again, no digestives are offered.
To say that I was anxious at this remove would have been the understatement of the decade. For the moment the three individuals had no idea that they were all there to visit the lothario from Leitrim. They were chatting about Al Pacino’s performance in Scarface. Was it fair that F. Murray Abraham was dangling from a helicopter? Was he really an informer? I was fretting about what would happen if lothario arrived home to find them. How they would react. I was no Javier Perez de Cuellar but having three weasels eviscerating him in my living room wasn’t the vista I wanted on a Sunday afternoon. The best I could hope for was for him not to come home. That they might just all leave. But my stomach falls quicker than the Dow Jones in 1929 when I espy a Kevin Kline silhouette through the frosted glass. I open the door before he reaches it and pull him out of earshot explaining that there are three girls in the living room waiting on him and it could get quite explosive. He nonchalantly replies, ‘ oh I must have messed up, I had quite a lot of Harp last night, don’t worry I will sort it’.
He casually strolls out into the living room. The three girls look at him as if he is a host of a game show contemporaneously exclaiming ‘hello Shaun’. I watch askance as he announces that he had imbibed a substantial amount of alcohol consequently getting his dates or times mixed up. He was very sorry for the inconvenience he caused them but he would make things right for them in the near future, but in the meantime one of them could stay. At this stage, the penny had dropped with the three contestants. They hear him repeat ‘which one of you want to stay?’ I’m nonplussed at his laissez-faire mien.
I observe the changing visage of Tom Waits, she’s apoplectic, with teeth of grinding millstones, as she springs up uttering ‘ ur nuttin but a prick from the bog lands of Leitrim’ throwing the pot of lukewarm tea into his ubiquitous green shirt, and he doesn’t even flinch as she storms to the door. I race to get a tea towel. On my return Lizzie Borden slaps him hard on the face calling him a ‘atwotimingbloodyhoorfromleitrim’. He has the temerity to correct her elucidating it was in fact three timing as there are three of them involved. As Borden exits the house quicker than Norway at the Eurovision Song Contest, Niki Lauda/Yvonne raises her hand in the air sheepishly as if answering a question from a teacher ‘is it ok if I stay Shaun?‘ .’ Oh I suppose you can’ he says reluctantly, as I recover the discarded tea pot retreating to the kitchen trying to comprehend what I have just witnessed.
Then lothario performs the coup de grace: he goes to the turntable, drops The Crossing, heads to the kitchen to make a fresh pot of tea with my last two teabags, takes the three digestives, nods Niki Lauda in the direction of the stairs. As he moves up slowly, step by step, he looks at me ‘that track Chance is the best one on the album, it’s all about loss and longing’. Astonishingly, he isn’t joking, as Niki Lauda races past me up the stairs like I was James Hunt. For the rest of the evening they don’t even take a pit stop. As I stare blankly at the record player the vibrations from the bedroom above drop lumps of Artex on top of Stuart Adamson as he sings
‘watch Canute and his bride’.
Originally from Clones Co. Monaghan, Houdi McCabe is a legend in his own mind. He worked as a Branch Manager with Dunnes Stores all over Northern Ireland for 42 years. Retired, he now writes and acts on a full time basis, with over thirty films/plays within his oeuvre. Some of his stories have been adapted for short films, by himself and with other collaborators. He is a regular performer at literary events TENX9, Soundwaves Portrush, Pub Poetry Causeway Coast, First Drams NI and Flash Fiction Armagh. Resident in Portrush Co. Antrim he is married to local girl Carole Robinson.
They have three adult children and one grandchild, Genevieve. Houdi doesn’t have any pets as he loves himself too much.
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