People Watching Part 25 - Joey's on the Street Again
He
stood almost motionless at the end of the mailboat pier, staring out across the
dark water. It had been raining for
hours and the cold night air seemed to hang over him like a heavy blanket,
soaking him to the skin. In one hand he
held a cigarette and in the other he toyed with a single wooden drum stick…….at
that moment, this relic from his past seemed more important than anything else
in his life. Somehow it represented the
good times that he couldn’t help feeling he’d thrown away.
The
drumstick had once been part of a pair. In
a fit of bravado many years ago, he’d nicked them from a band that had been
playing in one of the clubs in Boomtown.
Then whenever he wanted to get into the club without paying, he’d pull
the sticks out of the back pocket of his jeans and wave them at the bouncer, as
if to show he was part of that night’s band.
Even to this day he was surprised it had worked so often.
Things
didn’t tend to go as well once he got inside though. He was a bit of a loner and although that had
earned him a reputation with the neighbourhood kids, it meant he’d spend most
of the night leaning up against the wall, one hand in his pocket and the other
nursing the single pint of Guinness he could afford, given the prices they
charged in there. As the night got older,
the Guinness became warmer and as flat as his mood.
Although
he’d never been good with names, he had a good eye for faces and as he nursed
his pint he’d gaze around, noting how the same groups tended to take up the
same spots night after night. There were
the bowsies over by the bar, the corner boys in the dark where no one could see
what was going on and the eternally optimistic hanging around the edge of the
dancefloor, hoping to score. He’d never
been able to relax among women and most of the girls in Boomtown seemed to be
drawn to the ‘cool’ lads rather than to trouble like him. Inevitably, most nights ended with him downing
the last of his pint and trudging off home through the cold wet night….and with
those memories he was brought right back to the present.
He
glanced again at the drumstick in his hand and despite the cold and the chill
from the rain, he smiled broadly as it reminded him of the night he’d met his
wife. Hers was not one of the faces he
recognised and as he glanced nervously across the darkened club, he caught her
smiling back at him. She’d asked about
the drumsticks and that’s how their life together began. Their wedding was modest but with her he
really thought he’d found his happiness.
By
the time they’d had their third child, most of that happiness had drained
away. For many years he’d refused to
take the blame for the way their relationship soured but looking back he
realised he’d just been drifting through life and hadn’t really made an
effort. Still, it had taken several
brushes with the law before she started to lose patience with him and by the
time he realised how badly things were going, it was probably too late. Even at that stage, deep down he still craved
the happiness they’d felt in their early days…those endless nights in the
Italian Café, drinking coffee, eating cake and making each other laugh. In one last ditch effort to save their
marriage, he managed to land a job – the only job with prospects he’d ever had
- but his boss was a gobshite. After
about six months of that he hated being at work as much as he feared going home
at night.
And
so there he sat. Alone on the mailboat
pier in the cold and the wet, without a clue as to what to do next. Sooner or later, dawn broke and with it came
the realisation that he had to get away.
He couldn’t just leave though – he owed her some sort of explanation. He sneaked in the back door and wrote her a
note “Take care while I’m away” and as he folded it, he slipped in a tenner
from his wallet. He paused in the
doorway, wishing he could do more – the useless note gave her no idea whether he
planned to come back and the money wouldn’t last a day for the four of
them. But there were no grand gestures
he could make. As he turned to look back
for what was possibly the last time, his greatest regret was that he’d never
managed to find that second drumstick.
She
was sorry to find his note. The sorrow
was not so much because he’d gone but because she felt that she’d wasted so
many years on him. Sure, they’d had some
good times….those endless nights in the Italian Café, drinking coffee, eating
cake and making each other laugh, but that seemed such a long time ago. In the first weeks and months, she half expected
to get home from the school run or the shops to find him sitting at the kitchen
table with his single drum stick next to him, as if nothing had happened…..but
no. The neighbours sometimes said they
thought they’d seen him and her blood ran cold when news of a body drifted up
from the docks – though deep down, she’d known it wasn’t him.
After
about a year, she realised that she hardly thought about him anymore. The kids had stopped asking where daddy was
and slowly, imperceptibly the void he left closed over and they all settled
into a new rhythm. Without him to think
about, she started to tackle the other things that had always troubled her -
the dirty alleys and the brickwall gravestones in this part of Boomtown were no
place to bring up three kids. And with
that came the realisation that like Joey, they needed to get away - somewhere
new where they could make a fresh start and maybe she could find someone new to
share the rest of her life with.