Andrew Fox - Over Our Heads

Before Mallorca, I’d spent six years running the City Lounge on Dawson Street for a Kildareman named PJ Nolan. The heir to a horse-breeding empire, PJ collected pubs and restaurants up and down the country, and sometimes further afield, but he didn’t concern himself with our operations so long as we made him money. I was hired to be the head barman but ended up doing everything: ordering stock, rostering staff, paying taxes, booking Christmas parties — plus I pulled pints twenty-six nights out of the month. I spent my days off planning VIP events. The skin around my nails was chapped and smelled of slops. Half my pay went straight to my landlord. I was thirty-three.

I sold my car, took out a loan and bought the lease on Molly Malone’s, a cantina situated just off the Paseo del Mar in Palma Nova. For years, the pub had served a pair of package holiday resorts that now were going to be redeveloped into higher-end timeshares. It was a hokey enough place but it had potential, with the promise of strong foot traffic to come and a view — if you leaned over the patio wall and craned your neck — of the glimmering skin of the Med. I ripped out the useless copper piping from above the bar, tore down the vintage Lisdoonvarna posters and Galway street signs, installed onyx tables and leather banquettes and hired a tapas chef. I worked seventeen-hour days, slept in a windowless room upstairs and learned just enough Spanish to shout at tradesmen. I was happy, I think.

But supplier delays and red tape meant that we opened too late to make the most of the high tourist season. And then, when the developer defaulted on payments to the city the following March, the whole district fell into a kind of un-redeveloped limbo. First, the binmen stopped coming and the bags piled up in stinking heaps at the back door. Then, the postman stopped coming and we missed notices from the electricity company and were without power for a long weekend. Finally, my handful of steady off-season customers stopped dragging their pink expatriate flesh from their villas to my stools. I was left with little choice but to shut the doors, sell on the lease for a pittance and return home sorely chastened and deep in debt.

When I called PJ to see about going back to work for him, it turned out that he’d run into problems of his own. He had gambling debts, he said, and problems with the Revenue, but he was still in the game and said he’d be in touch. While waiting for his call, I got drunk on the dole for a few months before I ran into Declan Watts, an old mate of mine from school who was on his way to Australia. He told me that he’d been driving a van for the Department of Justice, ferrying lads around and supervising graffiti removal. ‘I’m getting out of here while I can,’ he said, ‘but if you like, I’ll put in a good word for you.’

A week or so later, I got a call offering me an interview. I bought a suit and passed the test for my category D licence. Then it was up at six o’clock Monday to Friday and into the van and off to Mountjoy or the central pickup place on the quays near Tara Street station, where anywhere between two and seven dishevelled-looking lads would be shuffling their feet waiting for me. They’d pile in, I’d call the roll and off we’d go to Fairview or Cabra or wherever the docket said. I had a bootful of chemicals I topped up at the depot each week, as well as a collection of buckets and gloves and overalls. We’d pull up to the site, I’d hand out the gear and the lads would get changed and start scrubbing away at spunking dicks or swastikas or misspelled paramilitary rubbish. It was nasty work, freezing our holes in the wind and the rain — but it was steady.

The lads were eejits mostly, prone to backchat and a little given to skiving, but I didn’t mind them. Generally, they were grateful they’d avoided a custodial sentence. What had they done? Little stuff: too many unpaid parking tickets, shoplifting, public drunkenness. There were also car thieves and small-time drug dealers who would have been locked up if the jails hadn’t been so overcrowded. And there was the odd white-collar fellow too, a banker or a lawyer who’d fudged his taxes and got caught out or missed too many upkeep payments to an ex-wife. I dealt with them all the same way: took no messing, listened to no excuses, intervened in no arguments unless I absolutely had to. Of course, it helped that in the back of each of our minds was the sure knowledge that if they took liberties there’d be a report to the parole officer, and that report would almost certainly land them in prison.

During my third or fourth month on the job, the Department rotated me and three other lads out to an unfinished office building on the quays. With me were Tony, who had been an accountant before the recession (and a divorce, a breakdown and a drink-driving charge); Graham, a general delinquent whose uncle, he said, controlled half the heroin in Dublin; and Kevo, a pillhead and serial pisser-in-public — all three of them had been on my crew for a fortnight. The office building had been intended for some tech or consulting outfit. It was little more than a concrete shell, with two glass walls overlooking the Liffey and the bridge, and two blind walls at the back. A few lads had broken in one night and painted it top to bottom. But this wasn’t your usual smash of ugly letters. These guys were out to create.

On the pillars on either side of the gaping entrance, they’d painted potted plants stretching their thin branches towards the ceiling. They’d painted architecture, furniture, and they’d painted people too, dozens of them criss-crossing the lobby walls on their way to and from their offices with ID cards on lanyards swinging from their necks. On the rear wall there was a bank of lifts, the doors of one of which were being held open by a tall man for two young women. And beside that there was a high reception desk where three girls answered phones and typed at computers and conversed with visiting conference delegates.

We climbed the stairs, our hands touching those of painted fellow-climbers. On the walls of each floor we found row upon row of desks with computers and in-trays, filing cabinets, photocopiers, printers, water coolers and partition walls cordoning off the offices of managers. Sitting at each of the desks or walking in the aisles between cubicles with cups of coffee in hand or portfolios of papers under arm were people dressed in business suits. They were very thin and very tall. Their faces were blank but you could tell from the way they carried themselves that they were successful and confident and that they worked well as a team, that they were happy doing their work in the time allotted them to do it.

‘Suppose all this is familiar to you,’ I said to Tony.

He rested one hand on his belly and stroked his loose jaw with the other. ‘Not so much, no. Ours was a boutique firm.’

‘Yeah,’ said Graham, ‘and three-dimensional too, I’d imagine?’

‘We worked out of a Georgian townhouse in Sandymount.’

‘Go ’way.’ Graham’s dirty hand slapped the shoulder of Tony’s polo shirt; Tony winced. ‘I robbed one of them once. Tell me now, did yours have double glazing?’

‘I think so, yes.’

Graham licked his wispy moustache. ‘See, that’s what’s known as a false economy, there. You put in double glazing to save money on the heating but the old frames just can’t take them. Shoulder-nudge and they pop right out.’

The lads struggled into their overalls and Graham and Kevo had a last smoke. In each of their buckets I poured chemicals from a plastic jug with a black X on its side, turning my head against the fumes that rose to my eyes and stung. I took brushes and scouring pads from the van, found a water main and attached the hose. The lads sprayed down the walls and started scrubbing. I took the ladder from the van so they could reach the higher-up parts. Graham climbed and Tony held the ladder steady. Kevo stood off to one side to hose and mop the run-off.