And the Street went Blind

Labourers don't spit for the same reasons as the rest of us. Granted theirs is thirsty work, work which demands the regular clearing of the mouth and throat; but their spitting is also a salutation, an ice-breaker, a ritual of friendship. I tried to remind myself of this as they spat upon my arrival by taxi, spat upon my approach across the hazardous stew of mud and stones which comprised the site, spat as one of the younger ones forced his last cigarette on me. We puffed in silence, wondering what to make of each other. An old woman and her dog linked past where we stood in the sun, surrounded by the half-demolished buildings of an area which my memory insisted was home.

'Ten minutes,' said a tall one whom I presumed to be the foreman. He spat uncomfortably. 'It's just that we've got our orders.' And he walked over to where the others had gathered for a tea-break, absently tapping a spoon which he'd produced from his pocket against the side of his leg.

'C'mon,' they were shouting impatiently, while one or two had already sugared and stirred with the handles of screwdrivers or whatever.

The foreman stopped and turned:

'Ten minutes, mind.'

'Spoon, spoon, spoon,' they chorused, banging their tin cups on the oil-drum table.

It had been my father's place--an optician's, if you could call it that--in the beginning anyway. Pieces of broken spectacles lay covered in dust in the big window which was shaped like an eye. At one time the whole city recognised it, commented on its aptness, would discuss the peculiar feeling of finding one's own reflection in the glass, as if the city were constantly watching.

We'd started out a long time before, selling spectacles--OK, we'll call them glasses--which we kept in a shoe box on the counter of our general store. The glass was already in them when you arrived. You simply selected the ones you felt you could see best with from the range. If one of the lenses was damaged (as was often the case), or simply unsuitable, my father would switch it with one from another pair. No problem. Frames with both lenses damaged he gave to an army of old beggars patrolling the inner-city streets, who seemed delighted to stumble about, crashing over dustbins. In the beginning he had simply removed the useless lenses and given them the unwanted empty frames, but they had felt deceived and were, in any case, happier to suffer what they obviously felt to be 'strong medicine'.

My job, charging in from school with a mouthful of sherbet, was to keep the precious lenses clean and, if possible, intact after their often severe handling. There was also the important duty of keeping all convex lenses out of direct sunlight in case we should all be burned in our beds. How my dad thought the sun might shine so brilliantly at night I never questioned. Not that it mattered: I never fully understood the difference between concave and convex anyway, and arbitrarily divided the lenses into the ones I liked the shape of and those I didn't. And the place never burned down.

Eventually my father had a young girl come in, and the presentation and care of the glasses became more elaborate, even baffling. She produced rolls of a material which she called chamois, but which wasn't to be found in any dictionary I examined. We used it to wrap the glasses for protection--a move which I felt was not gentle to the sensitivities of our customers. Heavy or dirty objects were forbidden in the area used for preparing new frames, and she had the walls decorated with black and white pictures of girls wearing ornate and ugly 'high-fangled specs' which she claimed were all the rage. And she even stayed late once in a while to touch up the pictures with crayon so they looked all modern and special.

But the task of cleaning the lenses, the delicate things now kept under the counter that important task remained mine.

By this time many people began to insist on some form of examination before parting with their money, so my dad asked around and eventually came up with one of those letter charts--big letters on top, small letters subordinate. It was the only parable he used.

After a time he got to enjoy his endless pacing back and forth in front of that chart (sometimes with a pointer in his hand!), tut-tutting at each error or hesitation, which was, of course, designed to throw the customer-stroke-patient into a wild panic where only the best glasses would suffice. Though, of course, he was too kind a man and too generous with his sympathies to allow an ageing neighbour to depart distraught.

'A cup of hot tea. The only cure.'

Nevertheless, the shoe box of old reliables remained under the counter for those older members of society who preferred to trust their own judgement in the matter of selection, and leave scientific advances to the next generation. Perhaps it wasn't possible to see the Dublin they knew through the modern lenses....

Standing before the window, I watched the reflection of the labourers grouped around their stove as if it were the middle of winter. In the corner of the window I could see the wrecking ball, the bull-dozers, the trucks waiting to carry the rubble away. But, more importantly, I felt the window was watching all of this, too. I felt the desire to go inside and look out, to see the world again from its perspective.

By the time my father passed on, the area was already in decline and, though the two events were in most ways unconnected, they seemed together to herald somehow the end of an era. Slowly things vanished; neighbours moved off; the bus stops in the street were re-arranged to make way for the expected increase in traffic. Old buildings came down in clouds of dust; sometimes new, concrete things went up in their places, sometimes nothing--empty spaces guarded by hoardings, splattered with rock concert posters or pictures of smiling politicians, their lips touched up to tantalise babies.

The eye looked out on a town disfigured, a street with its teeth kicked in.

'Four o'clock,' said the foreman.

I used to get home from school about now, dash across the street into the doorway, tidy my hair, chuck my satchel into the cupboard and begin polishing glasses, polish until tea-time.

Carefully I put my hand on the door handle. It felt strange to be reaching down. The door opened like the lid of an old school desk. I went in, closing it behind me, shutting the present outside. The floorboards had rotted. I could taste sherbet on my lips. My father's three-legged stool lay on its broken back. Jewels of spectacle glass winked in the dusty spotlights of boarded side windows. Under the counter I found the shoe box, exactly where it had always been, now full of skeletal remains and broken glass, the epitaph 'spectacles' on the side in my father's clumsy script, faded by years--my years away from Dublin, of not stopping long enough to remember.

I had forgotten the pictures of the ladies which could stand unsupported on the counter. Perhaps they had been put there during my father's period of illness when the business had started to fall apart unsupervised.

A car pulled up outside and I went to the window.

The youngest labourer was pointing to his watch.

'Four o'clock,' he mouthed.

Someone who appeared to be important walked over to where the workmen were relaxing. They pointed to the window and dug their heels into the gravel. The foreman bit his lip. Others of them spat.

I didn't have much time.

Down in the bottom of the window I noticed a pair of black-framed glasses, their arms folded almost in waiting. Under a constant drip one lens was clear, the other an opaque grey--a piece of slate. My father would stand at that window, his hands clasped behind his back, bobbing up and down on his toes, so that his head always moved but his tan-coloured shopcoat hung motionless around him. He always had his bi-focals (which he didn't need) perched down on the end of a nose which he likened to Agatha Christie stories--'finely crafted with a sudden twist on the end'. I'd look up his long face and find his eyebrows magnified into wild bushes while his eyes might appear like tiny green peas. Sometimes he'd jab a hand into my hair, point to the shoe box, and I'd slouch over to the counter, pretending to be his prisoner. He'd stamp his heels like an angry captor, and then, if someone came, in he'd look totally confused as he tried to remember how he should behave as an optician. I'd drag my feet around trying to make him laugh as he magnified people's eyes so that they looked like giant insects in his darkened laboratory.

I took the glasses from the window, and wiped the grey lens on my sleeve until, still semi-clouded, the world appeared like a daguerreotype, the edges of vision fading off to a blur. The men were still talking, some of them smoking, the new arrival with his hands folded high across his chest. Like the glasses. Behind them was a tower of as-yet empty offices whose mirrored windows reflected the chaos of the street, threw back the image in rejection. The reflections made the new building almost invisible in the wilderness of rafters and rubble.

The top of the shop counter was made of a substance I used to call 'Moonstone'. It seemed to be formed by green crystals, like slab of coloured ice, except that it was not particularly cold to touch. Around the edge was a band of metal which held the Moonstone in place. The corners of it were buckled into little lips on which we often snagged our clothes, and sometimes our fingers.

I lightly made a fingerprint in the dust. It looked as though the finger had been there for years, and was being lifted only now to reveal this tiny green island in a sea of ageing. And in a way it had been there all those years, and I wasn't so much revisiting as leaving home for the first time.

I opened the door.

A football sped down the street, bouncing along the footpath with me in pursuit, so that sometimes I went left and it went right, the two of us like characters from the musical Oliver, dashing through the school-children, past the coloured shopfronts, the polished brass of hall doors, women pushing prams, girls skipping, someone sweeping the footpath outside his house, old Abraham collecting scrap metal in his little pram, until, with some fancy footwork, I trapped it and brought it back to our game at the other end of the street where a cigarette break had been called in my absence.

Standing there in the doorway, I saw myself as a boy with a ball dash past....

The daylight dazzled me a little. The workmen were already standing by their machines like racing drivers. One or two even had coloured hard-hats on. A group of young children tossed stones about in idle expectation.

An ice-cream jingled by, heading for the new suburbs.

They watched it go.

And a woman pointed, holding her toddler by the hand as he strained to reach a muddy puddle with his lollipop.

The machines moved, inched forward, gravel whizzing from their tracks in all directions, ringing off the stacks of scrap-metal fittings and corrugated iron--'luvly bits of metal' old Abraham would drag away to his little flat off South Circular Road--if he were still around.

I shut the door behind me, walked past the schoolkids who thought they were seeing a ghost appear from the condemned building.

Labourers stood about, spitting and nodding to one another through the dust, as if they planned to attack in rehearsed formation.

The taxi I had come in was still parked in the same spot, the driver stripped to his string vest, leaning against the bonnet of his old Anglia and licking an ice-cream which, through no provocation of mine, he explained he had bought when an ice-cream van had to stop to avoid hitting a chicken.

'No, no, honest to Jaysus, a chicken. Strolling across the road.'

I sat in to his car. With a gulp he had finished his ice-cream.

In the wing mirror everything looked small. It was like sitting there watching television, the same feeling of distance. The engine started somewhere behind us. I turned to see the big ball take aim, swing back and punch its first great hole in the walls. Rafters groaned, glass shattered; the big eye-window tumbled in on itself. The building squinted, briefly. And the street went blind.