seemed pretty much the same though: the exhausted, threadbare carpets, the brown leatherette seats split and slashed and oozing foam, the jukebox playing, still, unbelievably, “Hotel California.” A haze of patchouli oil, cheap perfume and sweat hung in the air. Despite a ban on all smoking in pubs, the smell of tobacco and dope still clung to the walls. Dazed-looking people in plaid shirts and bikers’ leathers sat drinking abstractedly, as if they were waiting for something to happen. Two women with tattooed arms and un-focused eyes drank pints of cider and spoke to each other in intense whispers while three grimy infants swarmed on the disintegrating rug beneath their feet. A party of teenage Goths in green-hued whiteface, all spiked hair and black velvet and lace and crows’ feathers, were nursing identical sticky dark burgundy drinks — rum and black currant, I guessed — and stroking pale blue packages of French cigarettes. None of them spoke, or even looked at each other.
The barman brought me my whiskey. I sploshed water in, drank half of it, and asked him for a pint of Guinness. By the time my pint was ready, I had finished the Jameson, so I ordered another.
“Another double?” the barman said, looking me in the eye.
“Yes, please,” I said.
“Drinking to forget?” he asked.
“I can’t remember,” I said.
I chased the second whiskey with the stout and had to stop myself from nodding my head and clapping my hands. The booze was doing its work, throbbing its adrenaline backbeat at the base of my chest, shooting its crystalline connections around my brain. For a brief moment, I was exactly where I wanted to be: sitting on a barstool in the narcotic blear of Hennessy’s lounge, in plain sight and completely invisible.
Hennessy’s had always been Bayview’s little secret. Never mind the drugs and the underage drinking, Hennessy’s was simply where you came if you didn’t fit in. Daddy’s little princess never came here, but her sister did, and she came with something to prove. It was the one place guaranteed to be free of rugby, golf, of competitive sport of any kind, and of the people who played it. Hennessy’s clientele was pretty ambivalent about basic functioning, let alone competition. Now, when Bayview was being transformed into a theme village of real estate agents and overpriced restaurants, of art galleries and bijou shops selling designer chocolates, New World wine, French furniture and Italian shoes, Hennessy’s was more than ever an antidote to the piss-elegant gentility of it all.
From where I stood I could see across the gantry to the public bar, as it would have been called years ago. Little more than a broad corridor, the bar in Hennessy’s made the lounge look like a Holiday Inn. It was in part a class thing. When my old man moved out of the council house in Fagan’s Villas and bought his own home, he vowed that he would never be seen in Hennessy’s bar again. He was leaving all that behind. But it was also a no-class thing. The bar had always had a bad reputation. We grew up hearing of it as a place full of people who would stab you for looking at them. I remembered it lined with sullen, beaten, vicious men, their faces purple and grimacing from alcohol and cigarettes and hopelessness. It didn’t seem much different now. Gusts of joyless laughter drifted across the gantry. The man I was looking for stood with his back to me, at the center of a ring of snickering sycophants. He was broad-shouldered and thick-necked, and the muscles in his overdeveloped back and massive arms rippled beneath his tight white T-shirt. He wore a white baseball cap, and every inch of visible flesh was sunburned and tattooed in those Celtic designs that look like a lattice of black metal tridents.
I must have been staring, because one of his cohorts nudged him, and he turned around and looked at me. I hadn’t seen his face for a long time: the pig eyes, the snub nose, the oversized mouth, the
The barman brought me my whiskey. I sploshed water in, drank half of it, and asked him for a pint of Guinness. By the time my pint was ready, I had finished the Jameson, so I ordered another.
“Another double?” the barman said, looking me in the eye.
“Yes, please,” I said.
“Drinking to forget?” he asked.
“I can’t remember,” I said.
I chased the second whiskey with the stout and had to stop myself from nodding my head and clapping my hands. The booze was doing its work, throbbing its adrenaline backbeat at the base of my chest, shooting its crystalline connections around my brain. For a brief moment, I was exactly where I wanted to be: sitting on a barstool in the narcotic blear of Hennessy’s lounge, in plain sight and completely invisible.
Hennessy’s had always been Bayview’s little secret. Never mind the drugs and the underage drinking, Hennessy’s was simply where you came if you didn’t fit in. Daddy’s little princess never came here, but her sister did, and she came with something to prove. It was the one place guaranteed to be free of rugby, golf, of competitive sport of any kind, and of the people who played it. Hennessy’s clientele was pretty ambivalent about basic functioning, let alone competition. Now, when Bayview was being transformed into a theme village of real estate agents and overpriced restaurants, of art galleries and bijou shops selling designer chocolates, New World wine, French furniture and Italian shoes, Hennessy’s was more than ever an antidote to the piss-elegant gentility of it all.
From where I stood I could see across the gantry to the public bar, as it would have been called years ago. Little more than a broad corridor, the bar in Hennessy’s made the lounge look like a Holiday Inn. It was in part a class thing. When my old man moved out of the council house in Fagan’s Villas and bought his own home, he vowed that he would never be seen in Hennessy’s bar again. He was leaving all that behind. But it was also a no-class thing. The bar had always had a bad reputation. We grew up hearing of it as a place full of people who would stab you for looking at them. I remembered it lined with sullen, beaten, vicious men, their faces purple and grimacing from alcohol and cigarettes and hopelessness. It didn’t seem much different now. Gusts of joyless laughter drifted across the gantry. The man I was looking for stood with his back to me, at the center of a ring of snickering sycophants. He was broad-shouldered and thick-necked, and the muscles in his overdeveloped back and massive arms rippled beneath his tight white T-shirt. He wore a white baseball cap, and every inch of visible flesh was sunburned and tattooed in those Celtic designs that look like a lattice of black metal tridents.
I must have been staring, because one of his cohorts nudged him, and he turned around and looked at me. I hadn’t seen his face for a long time: the pig eyes, the snub nose, the oversized mouth, the
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