It’s 6am in Dublin. Already light since 4. I’d wandered the town earlier for lamb kebab and a guzzle of wine before crawling into bed and then serenaded by a thousand Dubs singing Wonderwall by Oasis, apparently directly under my window. Well finally the fledgling bards rest, and I’m waiting for my ride by the Liffey. A taxi man strides across the tarmac to meet me. If Grant Mitchell and Phil Mitchell from the English soap Eastenders had a baby, he would be the result.
For reference: those delicate Mitchell brothers
Big lad, skin the colour of good bacon. A lot energy for so early in the morning, seventies I would guess. I still have the bitter taste of instant coffee from the hotel in my mouth and shuffle zombified into the back seat. We pass through the familiar streets of James Joyce, Ronnie Drew, Sinead O’Connor, Phil Lynott. I’m expecting silence. He hears I’m British.
Terrible thing you did to us. Terrible.
Pardon?
With the potatoes. That was awful of you.
Not ‘the English, or ‘the Empire’, but you.
He’s talking about the famine, and I’m on trial. It’s oddly refreshing. There’s a spotlight on me and he’s expecting a response. His green eyes are drilling down into me from the driver’s mirror.
How do you live with it?
I thought it was a great question; the challenge was which part of me was to respond.
The acceptable thing to do would be to shudder into a quite natural contrition, to gruntily heft the 19th century Irish potato famine onto my born-in-1971 shoulders. The Hunger they call it. A horrible, eviscerating thing, the consequence of which is riven large in all sorts of elements of Irish life. It could be a religious act to take on its enormity, to accept the dark grandiosity of the taxi driver’s singularity of questioning. To gobble the sin of it.
It was me and only me that did this to Ireland.
I would confess all, get the cab to pull over, and run mad through the streets, then barefoot through the open fields, barking mad as Sweeny till I get to Brú na Bóinne where a priest with spiral tattoos and a pale knife would cut my wicked heart from my chest. Take what was inside and make it outside, expose my throb-throb-throb to the soft rain and the assembled tribe.
Lads, we may be out of potatoes, but we’ve got this fecker’s heart.
So I could have fallen onto the grovelling plastic floor of the taxi and suggested something like that. That would have been all right, I think.
All of that, in about a second and a half, came to mind.
But the other response was this:
I have something to do with it, but not at all in the way you expect.