It’s early 1984. I’m in Dublin having escaped the mundanity of small Irish town life. Twenty-two years old, a trainee manager with Ireland’s biggest retailer, I’m bouncing with nervous energy. George Orwell’s prediction of the totalitarian society is unfounded. I don’t need Winston Smith. My schooldays relationship with an alluring artist has reached the end of the road. I’m a free agent on the hunt. A new music entertainment phenomenon has hit Ireland, namely disco bars awash with multi screens and interminable music videos played on a loop. I dance well. These girls are there for the taking. Like shooting fish in a barrel.
Rainbows bar in George’s St is the place to be. It boasts a sixteen square foot maplewood dance floor, with overlooking balcony, cocktails, soft drinks and foreign beer on draught. Ubiquitous video screens, even in the toilets. You have to shout to be heard. The constant beat of the music is adrenaline in the veins. I’m the apotheosis of sartorial elegance in my white suit, black shirt, thin red leather tie and patent leather shoes. Replicating Michael Jackson’s zombie and moonwalk dances from his monster hit Thriller, I look up at the balcony and she is staring at me. I’m intrigued. I’m tempted.
Heading up to the balcony bar to order a Club Orange, I watch the crowd below dance to ZZ Top replete with imaginary chest length beards playing air guitars. ‘You’re a sharp dressed man’ she says grabbing my lapel, ‘what’s that?’ pointing at my soft drink.‘I thought you were out of it down there doing your moonwalking, I’m Sinead by the way’. She pulls out a fabric hanky to wipe the sweat from my forehead. ‘Where are you from?’ ‘Monaghan, I say Mc Guigan Country.’ ‘The north’ she says. Before I can correct her on her geography she’s dragging me down to the dance floor.
She dances like she’s unfamiliar with the music, a newborn calf trying to find its feet. I notice she has her hair up in a bun like the Protestant women who lived in the house across from us, but has the patois of an Irish traveller, but more posh. A dimple on her chin like the front of a Haig Whiskey bottle. She’s wearing a red trouser suit that surely must belong to her mother, but the colour complements my white. All these attributes seem incongruous with her beauty and personality. As ZZ Top finish giving ‘all their loving,’ I make for the balcony. Again, she pulls me back exclaiming ‘this is a slow one, I love it’. Lionel Richie sings Hello. I feel her hands which are surprisingly calloused, perhaps like the blind girl in the video of the song.
Afterwards, we head back up to the balcony bar where she orders a gin with tonic and a Club Orange for me. When she asks me what I work at, I proudly tell her that I could be managing my own store branch within a year. As for her, she’s just graduated in pharmacy from Trinity College, winning the prize for best student and is now working in a chemist shop in Capel St. My confidence drops like the 1929 stock market when she asks me what I graduated in. I just about scraped a Leaving Certificate. University was in another universe. My mouth feels like I have just left the dentist. I try to hide my diffidence with a reference to her being a drug dealer. She fires another two gins into her as the lights turn on. The music stops. What happens now? I ask myself. My mate lets me know there’s a taxi coming to take us home to Tallaght.
‘I might see you here next week’. She ignores my question but says ‘Tallaght, I live near there in Templeogue. I can give you a lift on my bike. Let them get the taxi. You come with me’.
I’m reluctant to accept her offer as she has imbibed more than a fair share of Cork Dry Gin. But fortune favours the brave so I tell my mates ‘I’ve clicked lads – see you tomorrow sometime’. She tells me she will see me outside as she’s going to get her bike. When I enquire about a crash helmet she laughs ‘big boys don’t need helmets’. I venture outside to see my mates waiting for a taxi. As I wait for her at the entry at the side of the club I envision being her pillion passenger on a Kawasaki Ninja or Honda Gold Wing.
To my horror she arrives in full view, on a black pushbike replete with a wicker basket in front for holding groceries. In my hometown that bike was the go-to vehicle for octogenarians. I had never been so embarrassed since an incident in primary school. As my white suit reflects the street lights, I watch as my mate Emmet falls on the footpath in convulsions of laughter. ‘Come on’ she says, starting to peddle like Stephen Roache on the Champs-Élysées, as I watch my mates form a ZZ Top tribute band singing ‘she’s got legs, she knows how to use them’. I jump on behind her, I want the world to end. It does.
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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