AC INSTITUTE: HERE, THERE AND EVERYWHERE…

Gary Coyle: Death in Dun Laoghaire

Title: Jonniers Dun Laoghaire. Copyright Gary Coyle (2004).

Every Saturday from when I was 4 until I was about 8, my siblings and myself were sent up the street to the playground on Library Rd, all of a minute’s walk from our old house on Wellington St. No doubt it had an official name but I never heard any of the children who went there call it anything other than Jonnier’s. It comprised of maybe 3 quarters of an acre. Surrounded by high walls and wrought iron railings as it fronted onto Library road. It was concreted over and contained some swings, a slide, a sandpit, a rocking horse, and a monkey-puzzle that nobody was ever allowed to climb.

 I fucking hated Jonniers and I dreaded Saturdays when we were dispatched off. Though no doubt it was a godsend to my parents, allowing them some respite from us. I presume it was run under the auspices of some religious organisation or other as we had to address the middle aged ladies who ran it as Sister, and everyday at 6 we had to stop what ever we were doing, form lines and say the Angelus, something we never did at home. Even then that acute sense of soporific boredom tinged with a vague feeling of oppression, which descends on me when praying in public, was in evidence. Half-heartedly mumbling empty phrases, only becoming vaguely animated when the prayers were about to finish. “ Through Christ our lord, Amen”

 One must of course allow for the distortions of childhood but I disliked everything about the place, the metallic taste of the water that we drank from the tap, the home made toilet paper made out of squares of old newspaper which hung on a string. The fact that to use one or other of the games, you had to stand in a line & count time, which had a dual purpose, timing the duration of the other child’s usage and as a by product you would also learn to count. I can still hear the rhythm 5… 10… 15…. 20, ..25, 30..35..40...

But what I disliked most of all, was the oppressive sense of authority which radiated down from the ladies who ran Jonniers, whom with one or two exceptions terrified me.

At this time a healthy newborn baby boy was found murdered here in this lane, one of many which run parallel to the west of the main street, George’s St, a terrible crime. All sorts of rumors circulated. The killer or killers were never found. It was hushed up spoken about in whispers, the shame such a crime brought on the community. From where the child was found it was obvious the killer was a local.

 Many years later I read a piece in a Sunday newspaper written by the person who as a small boy had discovered the dead infant, he wrote about finding it in a plastic bag & thinking at first that it was a doll. By the time the article was written, in the late 1990’s the full story had emerged.  The baby was the result of a rape of a 12-year child, the pregnancy was concealed from the rest of the world and when the child was born, it was stabbed repeatedly with a knitting needle specially sharpened for that purpose. 

We of course had all heard that a baby was found dead, murdered up the lanes, not five minutes from our front door. Obviously adults tried to shield children from such stories, forgetting of course that children sense secrets, that they are drawn to them.  I have no recollection how I found out or who told me. In Jonniers the kids used to sing a song, an awful dirge the name of which I never knew, in fact even at the time I remember thinking  “That isn’t even a song”, it was about a child being murdered and the two have always being linked in my mind. I can still hear and see a group of young girls in Jonniers singing it in unison. Enucating it loudly with gusto and glee like some prepubescent Beverly sisters, and accompanying the words with vigorous stabbing gestures “she stuck the penknife in the babies heart, a weela weela waalya- she stuck the penknife in the babies heart down by the river Sawla”.

Title: Dun Laoghaire Bath. Copyright Gary Coyle (2005).

This is where I first saw a naked woman. We scratched the white wash off the skylight with a coin and peered down below to see what seemed to us to be an ancient antediluvian creature floating in a large bath full of seaweed. We caught glimpses of her saggy pallid dimpled flesh, between the fronds of weed. Present was a 12 year old expert of the female form who pointed out all the relevant areas of interest. “ Her diddys”, which looked like flattened wizened leather bags, “& at her Gee”, the source of most of our fascination- a large mollusk peeked out from beneath a thin coat of mottled grey hair, I was disappointed & more than a little disturbed. It was far too real.

This is where I spent nearly all my summers from when I was 8 until I was 13.

Now it molders away here awaiting its fate, as the site for some Celtic tiger monstrosity. It is astonishing to think that this was Dun Laoghaires’s major recreational site in the mid 1970’s; it has more in common with the 1920’s than it does with today. It difficult to imagine in an era of overweight kids & video games, the attraction of this place. It not only had outdoor pools but also a full Victorian bath complex, complete with seaweed & steam baths.

It was here, that I first encountered the mysteries of human courtship. The combination of sunshine, water and female company still contrives to turn me into a tongue-tied adolescent. It was here also where I first fell in love; I must have been no more than 9. I still remember the exact spot where I stood beside her, along with the confusion, the sheer absolute delight, while simultaneously feeling that this is wrong. There was no explanation offered in our culture for such feelings or desires other than guilt & shame.

The only place you gleaned any real information was via pop music. Which is perhaps why the black Soul & disco music of the mid to late 70’s has such a special place in my heart. It was everything Ireland wasn’t, bold and confident, songs that sang of impossible longing, heartbreak, & above all sex. I vividly recall when it all suddenly made sense to me, a moment of revelation, when I realised music’s true importance. I was aged 11 at a dance at the county hall in Mullingar, where my Aunt Ruth was manning the mineral bar; I can remember what I was wearing, where I stood, what was playing as I watched a much older couple grind into one another on the dance floor oblivious to everything and every one else. Even now I can’t listen to many of those songs without my stomach turning somersaults. At how much & how little has passed between then & now.

Image: Dalkey Quarry. Copyright Gary Coyle (2006).

The first time that I had ever heard about Punk was via one of those ITV ads for the Sun newspaper. They were always incredibly lurid sensational, & featured the voice of a near -hysterical man who didn’t so much speak as enunciate in frenzied staccato bursts. “The Britt Eckland story, read.. how… Rod Stewart loved to wear… her underwear on stage….”These ads always invoked an almost pavlovian response in me, making me want to leap off the couch & rush down the street and buy a copy. Sadly, neither The Sun nor any other tabloid crossed the threshold of our Irish Times reading household.

In Dun Laoghaire the focus of all youth culture was the shopping centre. It was here that I saw in the flesh the first manifestations of this new trend. The shopping Center is a ghastly mid -70’s construction of light brown brick, the colour of a sun bleached dog turd, which was dropped into the middle of the town dwarfing all around it. At the time it was seen as a glittering monument to progress & prosperity, with customers coming from near and far, its marble-floored precincts thronged with shoppers, and gawking- hormonally deranged teenagers. Now the shopping center is viewed as a bit of a disaster, a badly designed eyesore, it just about stays open, limping along, ailing. I visit it still; it gives me a kind of perverse pleasure, rather like stubbing your toe. Nobody from those days seems to be around: just some ghosts and me.

 For some reason the vast percentage of the Punks in Dun Laoghaire were actually from Dalkey. I do realise how ludicrous this must actually sound “ Dalkey Punks”. The thought, the notion that a vaguely subversive counter- culture, youth movement might be based, might actually have come from Dalkey, brings a smile to one’s face. But back then in those seemingly more innocent times, before the boom, before the avalanche of corruption, the plague of international celebrities and the apotheosis of Bono, before the property supplements with their Star Property writers & their gushing empty prose about gardens, square footage and sea views, before Dalkey had become a byword for conspicuous consumption, a bourgeois slum spoken about in that hushed knowing reverential tone which Irish people always seem to adopt when talking about money. Dalkey was a quaint but tatty suburb on the Southside of Dublin with its mixture of rich, poor and those in the middle.

The Punks were admittedly mostly working- class, a now endangered species in Dalkey, and came from the Villas on the poorer side of town, a term which is no longer applicable in a place where even the most modest dwelling fetches vast sums. They were overwhelming male and most seemed to sport an exotic moniker “Magoo”, “Eatsie”, “The Buzz”, “Bonehead”, “Pa”. These names were an important feature in attracting the attentions of rebellious Southside middle- class girls for whom the forbidden fruit of the working class male was a traditional rite of passage.

There were boys in school who called themselves punks. They wore virtually the same rig-out as everybody else, the same v necked jumper, a slightly narrower tie, their hair an inch shorter, their trousers slightly tighter, a pair of Doc Martens, a badge of a band, and a few names in Biro scrawled on their army surplus bags and perhaps discreetly peeking out from under a cuff a leather-studded wrist band. They competed to outdo each other, to like & espouse incredibly obscure bands, all the better if they had an unpronounceable name and they could lord it over the less well informed. This was my first experience of the transgressive, the avant-garde, and the snobbery, which I have always found, inevitably accompanies it towards us “squares” who aren’t in the know.

Being a Dalkey Punk brought you to the attention of the marauding hordes of serious thugs which Dun Laoghaire and its environs- had in abundance. For back then, violence was for some not only a fact of life, but also an enjoyable recreational pursuit, a hobby, some thing to be savoured and enjoyed. And Punks, by drawing attention to themselves, became a focus for it.

One Friday night as I lolled around indoors, bored, my younger sister Lisa rushed in breathless, she had been to a party, at a Punk girl’s house, and had fled because it had become so completely out of hand. This news had the reverse effect on me, & I rushed up there as quickly as possible. It was in her parent’s house on one of those posh roads in Killiney that are now slavered-over by property journalists. As I arrived, things were starting to wind down; the police were trying to move everyone on, and the garden was teeming with people. Apparently the Guards had even launched one of their mythical baton charges, which sadly I had missed.

Inside the house, amid much chaos and drunkenness, broken windows, up-turned furniture, broken crockery, cigarette- scorched carpets & spilt drink, I saw a much older man wearing a cardigan whom I took to be the hostess’s father looking on in a state of deep shock and disbelief at what had occurred to his home in a few short hours. It had been sacked. He was completely powerless, overwhelmed by sheer numbers and by the calibre and quality of some of their guests. I recognised some seriously frightening people hanging around, drinking from cans and laughing at the sheer fucking fun of it all.

Even the bathroom had been thrashed, toilet and sink smashed to smithereens. I remember seeing one bloke nonchalantly rifling through our hostess’s underwear drawer and pocketing anything, which caught his fancy. She too looked shell-shocked, mechanically washing glasses at the sink with a glazed expression on her face, as chaos raged all around. No doubt wondering how everything had spun so completely out of control.

A ghoul whom I vaguely knew sidled up & gleefully informed me how he and several other blokes had had sex with a very drunk & helpless young girl, whom he pointed out to me, dressed in black, lying slumped in a heap on the floor. Do you know what we call her now, he asked? “ 7 up”, he laughed that ghastly Dublin hyena laugh, which you only ever hear used at someone else’s misfortune. I felt nauseous & left. 

One day one of the Dalkey punks appeared, working in Blackrock train station, sweeping up and collecting the tickets. I can still see him on the job wearing his crisply ironed green combats and his black Fred Perry shirt. I can feel his eye’s looking at me; I can see his thickset head with his cropped red hair and freckles. We would sort of acknowledge one another, a difficult area of etiquette in Dublin, and one I have never mastered, knowing people but never having spoken or been introduced to them.

Several months later in school, I remember being told that he was dead, that he and the rest of the Punks had been drinking, in the castle at the top of Dalkey quarry when part of it collapsed, killing him. Thinking about it now, it must have been terrible, a dark winter’s night the nearest road quite some distance away, the chaos and the panic. I remember at the time expressing disbelief and shock, and almost instantly forgot & thought no more about it for years. But then, in that inexplicable way that songs resurface and stick in your brain, I found myself unable to stop thinking about him, a person to whom I had never spoken a word, & who I’m sure never gave me more than a nano seconds thought.

I found my self imagining what he would be doing, if he were still alive. Perhaps he would still be working for C.I.E and our paths would occasionally cross, maybe he would be in the ticket booth behind glass. Me grayer & marginally wiser, him a little fatter, possibly married. Would he still be a punk? Would he be like the ex-teddy boy who worked for the corporation as a road sweeper?  When he first started I was a child and I would see him enroute to school. How could you miss him? Sweeping the streets in his full rig, drapes, drainpipe trousers, brothel creepers and D.A. haircut, and over 30 years it all faded slowly away, until at the end, all that was left was a faint but poignant quiff.

He would now of course be wearing his compulsory regulation uniform, the fruit of C.I.E.’s corporate image consultants. Bright green polyester V necked jumper complete with C.I.E. logo emblazoned on its chest, his grey shirt, always with top button open striped tie always slightly askew, a symbol both of his bondage & resistance. We would probably grunt an hello at one another or maybe, or if I had missed the train into town & the next one wasn’t due for another few minutes, we might chat clumsily about the football until that familiar clunk & rumble of the rails signaled the train was coming into the station. And I walked down the platform to meet i

Image: Forest. Copyright Gary Coyle (2005).

All my life I have been fascinated by death, in all its guises, I have worried and picked at it, like a scab, which, though it hurt’s, you can’t help but nag & tweak. As a very young child as soon as I learned to pray I immediately put my new skills to work, praying fervently so that neither I nor anyone close to me would die. When I would watch TV & I saw someone famous I found myself wondering, when will they die, what will they die off? Often when I get up in the morning, I find myself thinking is it going to happen today? Again & again when taking my daily swim in the sea I often find my self-musing, am I going to drown this time? I rarely travel in a car without imagining it crashing, or see a plane flying, without thinking is it going to fall from the sky. For years I have obsessively gathered media images & newspaper clippings of & to do with death in all its forms, the bizarre, the tragic, the ludicrous, the mundane & the murderous. However I don’t think that I am afraid of death, in fact it’s the reverse; sometimes it would be a most welcome relief.

My funeral is already planned. I have never liked the idea of being buried underground, slowly decomposing into rancid ooze. So instead, after a trip to the crematorium, I want my ashes thrown into the sea, around the back of the Forty Foot in Sandy Cove on some warm gentle summers evening. Hopefully a few friends and members of my family will still be present, and they will pop a bottle or two and remember me fondly.

As time passes I find myself pondering more and more about the actual nature of my demise, the how where and when of it. Will it be of old age, languishing in one of those ghastly old folk’s home’s that stink of death and boiled cabbage? Slowly at first, and then quicker and quicker your friends and acquaintance’s start to drop off, you try and ignore it, block it out but it gets ever closer, nibbling away at your life, striking in the most unlikely places. You find yourself strangely moved by the death of someone you hadn’t seen for years, and largely indifferent to that of a close friend, merely relieved, thankful that it wasn’t you. Your body starts to fail. It becomes harder & harder to manage, and your life as you have lived it up to now slowly starts to unwind and a new one reveals itself. And before you know it you end up incarcerated in an old folk’s home, in Bray.

Alone, immobile, wild-eyed & incontinent, shouting the occasional obscenity, wearing a nappy, fermenting in your own excrement. On occasions you would be lucid, aware of what was going on, and gagging for death to come and claim you, take you from a world that has shrunk to this. From time to time I would be visited by doleful children, depressed by your surroundings and the state of you, guiltily hoping that you die before all the loot is swallowed up & wasted, in keeping a useless bag of bones like you alive.

Possibly, I will die in a hospital; rigged up to all sorts of machines that flash beep and hiss. Doped out of my mind but still in pain, conscious of what’s happening and utterly terrified of what’s next, begging, pleading for my life, with a deity, whom up to now, I have completely ignored, promising all sorts of atonement for my neglect; if he would only just save my sorry ass.

Or then again maybe I’ll die at home, ravaged by cancer (at this moment lung or throat Cancer being the most likely candidate). It starts off as a faint ache, you pay it little heed at first, and then as you become ever more aware of it, you tell your self, its nothing to worry about, but none the less you do, you don’t want to go to see a Dr, since to do so is to acknowledge that the pain exists, but none the less it gnaws away at you. Eventually after months of denial & procrastination you go & get checked out, it’s almost a relief. The news is bad and gradually you enter into the world of the sick, until your life becomes completely dominated by the disease, your every waking hour is spent dealing with or thinking of it, to’ ing and fro’ing from Doctors and hospitals waiting rooms, surgery, treatment, small mountains of tablets, pretending to your loved ones that everything is going to be fine, and above all hoping.  After months or perhaps years of struggle, false dawns, resistance, pain, fear & worry, I would finally be resigned to my fate. Waiting for the inevitable, fading & fading & fading but still managing not to die, becoming a mere husk of my former self; your life utterly changed by what you have experienced. Avoided by family & friends, whom when you do meet, you can clearly see in their eye’s the fear of their own demise.

Then again sometimes I think perhaps I am going to go out with a bang, a sudden massive heart attack accompanied by an unbidden rush of fear and excruciating pain, leaving you with no time to think about anything else. At the moment I think the most likely cause of my death will be in some form of transport accident since it’s the closest I have come to dying. I have lost count many times I have Absent-mindedly wandered out on to a road without looking left or right or bothered looking at all, and just missed being flattened by car’s buses & motorbikes. After the initial shock you quickly forget what nearly happened, you think little of it since nothing actually occurred. You gloss over how precarious your grip on life is, the narrowness of the thread, which keeps us all in this world.

Possibly knocked from my bike by some arsehole who opened their car door without looking, or pulled out on to the road with out checking. I will fly in slow motion through the air, turning arse over tip to smote the ground with my head, cracking open like an egg, never to resurface. Or maybe be I will be crushed beneath a truck like that cyclist whose legs I once saw, protruding from under the wheels, outside Oscar Wilde’s house on the corner of Merrion square, one gorgeous warm summer’s afternoon. His blood flowing into the gutter, a few bits of what at first glance looked like raw hamburger, flecked about on the hot tarmac, the fire brigade trying to hose it all away.  Across the street, a large crowd of office workers on their lunch break, were compelled to hunker down, to get a better look, couldn’t help it.  The sudden crunch of bone, being pulverised like an insect beneath a heel and offering up about as much resistance, the taste of blood in my mouth, the realisation that I am rightly fucked and surprised by how unafraid I am.

I have imagined many more deaths for my self, being mugged & shot, tripping & hitting my head on the pavement, choking on my own puke, a brain tumor, an aneurysm, a drug overdose, electrocution, choking on a piece of meat, throwing myself in front of a train, blowing my brains out, a house fire. Legionnaires Disease, swallowing a wasp, a slate falling from a roof, a tsunami. Tetanus. M.R.S.A. Ebola or Sars

To many I am sure this seems sick, an unnatural activity, thinking about your death, as opposed to suppressing any thought of it, hiding it deep inside you, storing it all up until you are old, burying it all beneath a mountain of distraction & desire, denying it, however I find thinking about it strangely comforting.