In early 1985 my days as a trainee supermarket manager in Dublin had reached the end of the line. The company offered me a very substantial position as assistant manager in their biggest ever store, but there was a sting in the tail. It was located in West Belfast. It was a progressive step in my career but I was nervous about entering the killing fields of: if you are a Catholic, the north of Ireland, or if Protestant, the Province.
In truth, I had enough of Dublin, having spent four years there, long before the Celtic Tiger was even a kitten.
I agreed to go.
My housemates in our rented house in Tallaght said they would bring me into the city centre for a valedictory party. A party that was in fact a simple Wimpy burger meal. Stomach lining for a pub crawl throughout the city. As midnight approached, I being the only one of the group teetotal, suggested we go back to the house. Shaun, the playboy, the lothario from Leitrim had another plan. Despite my protestations we ended up in Abraxas nite club in Sackville Place. This was really a glorified disco bar that jumped on the MT-USA bandwagon with the place saturated with video screens with only a tiny dance floor. In the eighties, late night entertainment clubs had to serve hot food, any type of hot food, to get a late night alcohol licence. Most circumvented the legislation by serving soup and a bread roll or basic chicken and chips on disposable plates. The food cost had to be included in the admission ticket price.
This Abraxas nite club was different. Upstairs in the lounge it offered a new concept dish. A kebab, the brainchild of its owner a Turkish immigrant. He roasted a giant slab of compressed lamb on a spit in full view of the customers serving it in a thing called a pitta pocket, which was unleavened bread split open like a ladies purse, layered with sliced iceberg lettuce, adorned with complementary tomatoes dressed in garlic sauce.
When he served it up I hesitated.
I had never seen or heard of a kebab before.
Any type of kebab including this variety, a doner kebab.
Another thing I had never seen before was a lesbian.
I had heard of them.
I stared at it like it just emerged from John Hurt’s stomach in the movie Alien.
The kebab, not the lesbian.
There were two of them kissing at the bar.
Lesbians that is.
They only gave you one kebab.
I’m looking for cutlery or even chopsticks. One lesbian, with a swarthy complexion in a break from her oral exercise observes this she shouts at me.
Yah use ur han’s mister!
Stuffa inta ur mou
Yah don’t nayd cuttlewee!
I’m all embarrassed but I think she would know because she’s very well nourished but her ghoulish pallid partner doesn’t get any, as she’s thinner than the chopstick that I can’t find.
She kept looking at me, arms folded like an Italian materfamilias, the kebab trembling in my hand urging me to bite into it. I was afraid she’d ask the elephantine bouncer, with his oversized radio and ostentatious earpiece, to defenestrate me should I not obey her. She might even be strong enough to do it herself. I asked her if the kebabs were nice, to be informed she was a vegetarian, rendering me utterly conflicted. I bit into it, showering both of us in thick garlic sauce, destroying my white jacket, with a white wriggling worm moving down her cheeks onto her leather jacket.
Ah Jaysuuus ya poisoned me, ya poisoned me.
As she pounded her way to the ladies’ room the band ABC was on the video screen above her singing shoot that poison arrow through my heart. We disappeared from the lounge quicker than Norway from the Eurovision Song Contest to hail a taxi back to Tallaght.
The next morning the lads made me breakfast. Well of sorts; it was supermarket own brand cornflakes in lukewarm milk but it’s the thought that counts. They also bought me a luggage case with wheels that held all my vinyl records along with the few clothes outfits I possessed. Later on I caught the 49a into the city to get the Belfast Express. On the bus, the radio announced that nine RUC officers were killed in a mortar attack in Newry. The highest death toll ever suffered by that police force.
I stared out the window.
Numb.
Wondering what the hell have I done?
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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