Uptown Local and Other Interventions (20 page)

A horrified, frozen silence followed.

“F
me
,” said the leprechaun at last, when he could speak again. “It’s the Celtic Tiger….”

*

The Old People met again late that night in the Long Hall, after chucking-out time had officially been called and the mortals pushed (or in select cases, thrown) out into the street. The Old Folk, for their own part, pay no attention to licensing laws, having little to fear from them. There’s s no point staging Garda raids on pubs open past “time” when between the first bang on the door and the forced entry, everybody inside literally vanishes.

Many of the Old Ones were afraid to say the name of what we’d seen. The idiom had become popular in the early 90’s, adopted as inward investment boomed and the economy became the fastest-growing in Europe. It had become a favourite phrase and image for Irish people everywhere, a matter of pride, turning up in countless advertisements. But no one had foreseen the side effects, perhaps not even the Old People. They were seeing them now.

“We should hunt down whoever coined the F ing name and make their last hours unpleasant,” said one of the Washers.

“Too late for that now,” the Oldest Leprechaun said. “The damage is done. Give the thing a name and it takes shape. They gave a name and a shape to the force that’s always hated us. It’s everything we’re not. It’s New Ireland, it’s money for money’s sake, brown paper envelopes stuffed full of bribes—the turn of mind that says that the old’s only good for theme parks, and the new is all there needs to be. It’s been getting stronger and stronger all this while. And now that
it’s
more important to the people living in the city than we are, it’s become physically real.
 
It’s started killing us to take our strength from us, and it’ll keep killing us and getting bigger and stronger… until it’s big enough to breed.”

A sort of collective shudder went through the room. I shuddered too, though it was as much from the strangeness of the moment as anything else. There are no female leprechauns, but nonetheless there are always enough younger ones to replace the old who die. Power in Ireland does not run to mortal’s rules, either in reproduction or in other ways. If the Folk said the Tiger could make more of itself, it could. And when the food supply ran out in the city, the Tiger’s brood would head into the countryside and continue the killing until there were none of the Old Folk left…and none of Old Ireland. What remained would be a wealthy country, the fastest-growing economy in Europe, then as now: but spiritually it would be a dead place, something vital gone from it forever.

“I think we all know who we need now,” the Oldest Leprechaun said. “We need the one who speaks to the Island in tongues and knows all its secrets—”

A hush fell. “We don’t dare!” somebody said from the back of the crowd.

“We
have
to dare,” the Eldest said. “We need the one who died but did not die, the one of whom it was prophesied that he would come back to the Island in its darkest moment and save its people. We need Ireland’s only superhero!”

A great cheer went up. Everybody piled out the doors of the Long Hall, carrying me with them.

That’s how we wound up heading down College Green in an untidy crowd, around the curve of the old Bank of Ireland and past Trinity College, heading for the river. Across O’Connell Bridge and up O’Connell Street we went, in the dark dead of night, and latenight revelers and petty crooks alike fled before our faces, certain that we were an outflow of ecstasy-crazed ravers, or something far less savory. Past them all we went, nearly to the foot of the grayly shining quarter-mile-high needle of the Millennium Spire, and then hung a right into the top of North Earl Street, catty-corner from the GPO…and gathered there, six deep and expectant, around the statue of James Joyce.

*

Dubliners have an ambivalent relationship, at best, to their landmarks and civic statuary. Whether they love them or hate them, they are given names that don’t necessarily reflect the desires of the sculptors, but certainly sum up the zeitgeist.

The first one to become really famous had been the statue of Molly Malone at the top of Grafton Street. Some well-meaning committee had set there a bronze of the poor girl, representing her wheeling her wheel barrow through streets broad and narrow; and popular opinion had almost instantaneously renamed this statue The Tart with the Cart. Within weeks, the bright brass shine of the tops of her breasts (as opposed to her more normal patina elsewhere) seemed to confirm as widespread a friend’s opinion that Miss Molly was peddling, as one wag delicately put it, “more than just shellfish” around the streets broad and narrow.

The convention swiftly took hold in Dublin, as all things do that give the finger to propriety. The chimney of a former city distillery, turned into a tourist attraction with an elevator and a glassed-in viewing platform on top, became The Flue with the View. The attempt to put a millennium clock into the river had overnight become The Time in the Slime. And the bronze statue around which we now stood, the natty little man in his fedora, standing looking idly across O’Connell Street toward the GPO—the wild-tongued exile himself, the muse of Irish literature in the twentieth century, James Joyce himself had been dubbed the Prick with the Stick.

And so here we stood around him, none of us insensible to what everybody called the statue—and by extension, the man. We’d
all
done it. And now we needed him. Was this going to be a problem?

The Oldest Leprechaun raised his hands in the air before the statue and spoke at length in Irish, an invocation of great power that buzzed in all our bones and made the surrounding paving-blocks jitter and plate-glass windows ripple with sine waves: but nothing happened.

Glances were exchanged among those in the gathered crowd. Then one of the Washers at the Ford raised her voice and keened a keen as it was done in the ancient days, though with certain anarchic qualities—a long twelve-tone ululation suggestive of music written in the twenties, before the atonal movement had been discredited.

And nothing happened at all.
 

The Oldest Leprechaun stood there thinking for a moment. “Working with effigies isn’t going to be enough,” he said. “It might be for one of us…but not for him, a mortal. We’ve got to go to the graveside and raise his ghost itself.”

“Where’s he buried?” said another leprechaun. “We’ll rent a van or something…”

“You feckwit,” said another one, “he’s not buried here.
 
He was never at home after they banned his books. It was always Trieste or Paris, all them fancy places with faraway names…”

Finally I could contribute something. “Zürich,” I said. “It was Zürich. A cemetery above the city…”

“We’ll go,” said the Oldest. “You’ll come with us. And one or two others. We’ll fly to Zürich tomorrow…wake him up, and at the very least get his advice. If we can, we’ll bring him back. Until then,” the Oldest said, “everyone travel in groups. Stay off the streets at night if you can. We won’t be long.”

*

Leprechauns still have some access to gold, or at least to gold cards: we flew out on Swiss after lunchtime the next day, the direct flight to Zürich. That evening, about five, we were on the ground, and nothing would satisfy the Eldest but that we go straight to the grave, right then.

I’d been in Switzerland once or twice, and I was against it. “I’m not sure you should do that,” I said. “The Swiss are really big on not going into places after they’re officially closed…”

The Eldest gave me a look.

As a result we immediately took the feeder train from the airport to the main station, and the Number 6 tram from the main station tram depot to the Zürichbergstrasse. At Zürichbergstrasse 129 are the gates to Fluntern Cemetery. We got out, and found the place locked and apparently deserted behind its high granite walls; but there was a little iron-barred postern gate that was open—or at least, it opened to the Eldest Leprechaun. We went in.

The cemetery is beautifully kept, and we headed around and up several curving pathways, climbing, for the cemetery is built against the slope of the Zürichberg mountain that leans above the city. Finally we found the spot. Under a stand of trees, in a sort of semicircular bay, were some tasteful plantings, a bronze of Joyce sitting on a rock and admiring the view, a plaque in the ground saying who was buried here, with dates of birth and death, and a stern sign in German, French and Italian saying WALKING ON THE GRAVE IS FORBIDDEN.

The other leprechauns took off their hats. Once more the Eldest raised his arms and spoke that long, solemn invocation in Irish. All around us, the wind in the aspens and birches fell quiet. And suddenly there were three men standing there; or the ghosts of three men.

One was tall, one was short, and one was of middle height. They were all wearing clothes from the turn of the 20
^th
century—loose trousers held up over white shirts with suspenders. They looked at us in some confusion.

“Where is James Joyce?” said the Eldest Leprechaun.

“He’s dead,” said the shortest of the three.

The Eldest Leprechaun rolled his eyes. “I mean, where is he
now?”

“He is not here,” said the middle-sized figure. “He is risen.”

The tallest of them checked his watch. “And since it’s the time that’s in it,” he said, “why would he still be here at all? He’s in the pub.”

The leprechauns looked at each other.

“We should have known,” one of them said.

“Pelikanstrasse?” the Eldest said to the three shadowy figures.

“That’s the one.”

“Thanking you,” said the Eldest, and we went straight back out of the cemetery to catch the tram back down the hill.

At Pelikanstrasse is one of the bigger complexes of one of the bigger Swiss banks. There, in a little plaza by Bahnhofstrasse, you see a number of granite doorways, all leading nowhere; and past them the street curves down into what seems at first a nondescript arc of shop windows and office doorways.

“Those three guys—”

“They’re something from
Finnegan’s Wake,”
said the leprechaun who was walking next to me, behind the Eldest. “Three guys always turn up together with the initials H C and E. Never got into that one, too obscure, don’t ask me for the details. But the pub’s in there too, and in
Ulysses…
.”

He told me how once upon a time, the bar had been the Antique Bar in the first Jury’s Hotel, in Dame Street. There, at a corner table, a little man in round-framed glasses and a slouch hat could often have been seen sitting in front of a red wine and a gorgonzola sandwich, when he could afford them, relaxing in the dim pub-misted afternoon sunlight, while other languages, other universes, roiled and teemed in his brain.

“But someone had a brain seizure,” the leprechaun said. “Jury’s sold off their old property in Dame Street, and arranged to have the hotel knocked down. Urban renewal, progress, all that shite. They wanted the money for the land: that was all. And, they said to themselves,  we’ll auction off the innards and get a few extra bob for it. If not, we’ll just throw it all in the tip, and in any case we’ll build a much better bar somewhere else, in a nice new hotel, all covered with lovely Formica.”

The leprechaun grimaced. “But then along came, would you believe it, the head of the Swiss security services. He was afraid the Russians would invade his country, and he was looking for a safe house in Ireland where the Swiss government could hide if that happened. And wouldn’t you know he was a Joyce fan. He found out about Jury’s auctioning off the bar, and he got one of the big Swiss banks and some people from their government to buy the whole thing. And then the Swiss came along and took it to bits and numbered every piece, and put it back together in Zurich, and here it is.”

The leprechaun lowered his head conspiratorially toward mine.

“The Swiss,” he whispered, “are Celts, did you know.”

I nodded. “The Helvetii,” I said after few moments. “They made cheese. It’s in the
Gallic Wars.”

“And why wouldn’t they have,” the leprechaun said with relish, “seeing that the furious and bloody Queen Maeve herself was killed by being slung at and hit in the forehead by her stepson with a great lump of the Irish version of Parmesan.” He paused. “…Or it might have been Regato.”

We came to the door of the bar—a simple wooden door, nothing exciting about it—pulled it open, and went in.

An Irish country-house chef I know once described Zürich to me, under his breath, as “a kick-ass party town.” And so it is. It has many sleek, slinky bars, jumping with the sound of the moment, well hidden from the tourists whom such relentless buzz would confuse. But here, in that busy and congenial city, is something completely different—a corner that is forever Ireland, all dark wood and gleaming brass and painted tile a hundred years old and more. Here Irish-strength cigarette and cigar smoke tangles (ever so briefly) under the lights before being sucked away by the relentlessly efficient Swiss ventilation system. Here voices converse at Irish volume levels, nearly enough to curl the turbine fans on a Concorde. Here Irish craic (if there is such a word) seeps out of the teak-panelled, glinting, polished walls.

And here we found Joyce. He was dead, but he didn’t mind, for he was in his local.

He sat at the back corner table, by himself; amazing that the rest of the place was practically groaning with people, but this one island of quiet remained. His hat lay on the leather banquette next to him, his cane leaned against the table, and a glass of red wine sat on the table before him. He looked very much the dapper young man of a statelier time… though there was something else about him, something in his eyes, that brought the hair up on the back of my neck. It was more than just being dead. Words are power, and against some words even Death strives in vain.