Andrew Fox: Over Our Heads

‘All set?’ I said.

‘Leaving us again?’ said Tony.

I’d learned quickly that these lads worked well together if I wasn’t around and there was no authority to challenge.

‘I trust you,’ I told them.

‘Big mistake,’ Graham said and flashed me an evil smile.

I went for a walk down the quays as far as the old Point Depot, looking in along the way at all the new and empty buildings. I had a smoke, passed a pub, thought about going inside but decided against it. Since Mallorca, I was often gripped when passing a pub by an urge to go into the warm dark, order a pint and sit and watch the place in motion: the barman taking stock, pulling pints, conversing; the floor girls bustling about with orders, flirting for tips. I’d study the set-up, note the spirit selection, eye the menu if they had one. I’d trace the grain of the wood and test the give of the upholstery, try to absorb the ambience and figure out what had gone wrong for me.

On the second day I gave in to the urge and spent the morning in an early house. I came back furry-mouthed and light-headed to find Tony and Graham carrying on a shouted conversation from either side of the second floor. Kevo was working away by himself. I gave him some money and told him to run and get the lunches.

‘Rolls okay, lads?’ I said.

‘Grand for me,’ Graham said. ‘Tony’d prefer sushi, though.’

‘Shut up, you,’ Tony said with a chuckle.

‘In more of a tapas mood, is it?’

I put on a spare pair of overalls and took over from Kevo.

‘We were just talking about the Chauvet Cave,’ Tony said. ‘I saw a documentary about it.’

‘And me too,’ Graham said. ‘No cultural slouch, this one. Did you see it yourself?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Mad film. 3D. See it whacked if you can. Bonkers.’

‘A great piece of cinema,’ Tony said with a sage nod. ‘Werner Herzog.’

He was a man who liked to think of himself as a connoisseur of the finer things. In two weeks I’d already heard him discourse on Californian fusion cooking, German philosophy and Chinese opera. He loved hearing himself talk. But whenever he got going you sensed trouble, since most topics led him inexorably to the subject of his ex-wife, with whom he used to go to the theatre and the RHA and the restaurants on Merrion Row. As well as the house and the kids, she’d got the season tickets and the memberships.

‘Yeah, it’s good all right,’ Graham said, ‘but the paintings were a bit rubbish.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Tony said, his nose wrinkled as though he’d smelled something rotten. ‘They’re thousands of years old. They’re documentary evidence of man’s earliest artistic attempts.’

‘Exactly.’ Graham was working away. ‘So imagine how much better we’ve all got since then.’

‘Art buff, are you, Graham?’ I said.

‘Sure these —’ he gestured to the walls. ‘These are better than that.’

‘My arse,’ Tony said.

‘Course they fucking are. ’Cause they’re up to date, you know? And they’re about things you’d recognize. What would I give a fuck about cows and mammoths and shite for?’

‘But can you appreciate,’ Tony said, ‘the poetry in that? In the very act of describing animals, man proves to himself that he is greater than they, that he is something different, set apart, with a soul and maybe a destiny. It’s the fact that they’re old that makes them interesting, Graham.’

‘It’s the fact that these are interesting, Tony, that makes them interesting.’

Kevo came back with our rolls. I took the portable radio from the van and we listened to it as we ate. I liked to save the radio for the afternoons, since the best work always got done in the mornings but only without distractions. In the afternoons, everyone got restless and likely to slow down. Then the radio helped things move quicker; it kept us all focused and honest.

‘So, who do you think made them?’ Graham said.

‘Students,’ Tony said. ‘Somebody like that.’ He was frowning, circling some silent pain.

‘Like an anarchist collective?’ Graham’s eyes were wide and wondering. ‘A syndicalist cadre of counter-cultural freethinkers?’

‘Someone like that.’

‘Mad.’ Graham chewed a hunk of bread and chicken goujons.

‘And what does it mean, do you think?’ I said.

‘It means nothing,’ Tony said irritably, his voice rising.

‘It has to mean something,’ Graham said.

‘Why does everything have to mean something?’

When we’d finished eating, I sent the lads back to work and bundled up our rubbish. I took the stairs down to the street, found a bin and stuffed in the wrappers and bags. I was just about to go back inside when I felt a presence, someone watching me. He was standing across the street in the gloom of the bus shelter against the Liffey wall: a tall, thin man dressed all in black. I couldn’t see his face.

I’d never noticed before how much graffiti there was in the city. But now I worked for the Department it was inescapable — I saw it everywhere. There was the street-art stuff: a grey wall in an Inchicore estate, say, with a big hole painted in the middle through which you could see a picture-perfect Connemara field. Or the two young, red-eyed cops smoking bongs on a Cow’s Lane hoarding. Or the little girl in the polka-dot dress suspended by an umbrella halfway up the wall of a Lidl, either falling or flying, the expression on her face the perfect balance of terror and delight. Then there was the advertising masquerading as art on the hoardings near Richmond Street bridge. There were the pub doors on South William Street with recreated Andy Warhols, and the U2 shrine on Windmill Lane whose appeal I’d never understood. Whenever I got the train to see my mother, I’d look out along the red-brick bridges towards Maynooth and try to decipher the tags, peer into the patches of waste ground near Howth Junction and read the faces of abandoned shipping containers. And on the sides of every community centre, on every alleyway wall, on the fences of every electricity substation, on the glass of every bus stop, I’d see the dregs: the tricolours, the Burn the Rich, the X is a faggot, the Y waz ere.

‘It’s all just so impotent,’ Tony said. This was on Wednesday afternoon.

‘You are,’ Graham said. ‘Will you hold that ladder steady?’

‘Who’s your favourite?’ Kevo said.

We were on the third floor, the lads working away at erasing a desk full of executive toys and framed photos of blank-faced children.

‘Favourite what?’ Tony said.

‘Favourite one of these here pictures.’

‘Don’t make me laugh. They’re rubbish, the lot of them.’

Graham thought for a while. ‘That girl over there,’ he said and pointed behind him. ‘The one with the short skirt and the tight stripy shirt. She’s a cracker, a real goer. You can see it in the way she carries herself. I’d bend her over that desk and give her —’

‘She’s a drawing,’ Tony said.

‘A drawing who wants it. You can see it.’

‘She doesn’t even have a face.’

‘You have to read between the lines.’

‘She’s only lines!’

‘I liked the lobby,’ Kevo said.

‘What about the lobby?’ I was mopping a pool of water and paint that recently had been two cubicle walls and a narrow work station.

‘Just the whole thing. It was nice. I liked the way it felt.’

‘They don’t make places like that any more,’ Tony said.

‘They never did,’ Graham said. ‘They started to, but they didn’t finish.’

‘Still,’ Kevo said, ‘it feels like a shame it had to go.’

We’d rubbed out my own favourite that morning, in a dark corner away from the windows: a man at his desk, shoulders and feet square, a cup of coffee beside him, a briefcase by his feet. He was unremarkable in every way. He was just carrying on with his work. I’d felt a twinge as Graham applied the solvent and his head began to drip.