24 hours on O’Connell Street - the small hours

THE SMALL HOURS

Outside Kylemore a group of twentysomethings laugh as a friend breakdances ineptly. One of them, Charles Nielson, has an A3-sized laminated picture of Marlon Brando hanging around his neck but doesn’t say why. The break-dancer, Karl Nolton, tells a rambling shaggy-dog story. We all laugh. The street seems slightly less bleak.

I FEEL FRIGHTENED

Adam walks up and asks to use my phone. I ask him where his friends are. “They weren’t my friends,” he says. “They were drug dealers.”

He asks me for my phone again. I offer to buy him some food. He considers this for a moment. “I’d like some food,” he says.

We go to Burger King because he’s barred from McDonald’s. Adam walks directly into traffic, holding his arm up to stop the cars and gesturing impatiently for me to follow.

“I’m not comfortable with that,” I say.

“If you come with me, there’s ways of doing things,” he says. “Rules.”

We go into Burger King, where he wants chicken. I don’t think he can read, because when I point at the different meal deals he gets very confused.

“When my girlfriend comes she’ll sort us out with a hotel or something,” he says when we sit down. He seems to have forgotten who I am.

I ask him if he’s feeling okay after being stabbed. He doesn’t seem to know what I mean. He shows me some stitches on the back of his head from an older wound. He asks for my phone to ring his girlfriend. I tell him that it’s dead. He says not to worry. When his girlfriend comes she’ll have a charger. Very little of what he says makes sense.

He says, “It’s good chicken.” Five minutes later he says, “This is sh*t,” and he throws chips on the floor.

He taunts me. “Why have you got a schoolbag?” He points at my backpack in a derisory way.

He becomes aggressive. “You’re a bit of an eejit,” he says, staring at me darkly.

Then he becomes conciliatory. “Ah, you’re all right.”

At this point I feel both sad for him and frightened of him. I leave. From up the street I watch him come out of Burger King, look up and down and wander off, a forlorn figure. I don't see him again.
1am
I talk to a man from Mongolia, standing with several other men outside the last, now derelict, Georgian house at the north end of the street. He doesn't have much English; just enough to say they were in "the casino" – Ned Kelly's Sports Club – and that it was "okay".

Some well-dressed young men are punching each other really hard on the face outside Clerys. I approach them. “Hello, I’m a journalist writing an article . . .”

“Do you know Christopher Hitchens?” says one of them, unexpectedly.

“Wait,” says the other. “He’s not a f***ing journalist. Show me some ID. He could be any weirdo.”

“Americans love Christopher Hitchens,” says his friend, who is intent on having a totally different conversation.

“And he loves c****,” shouts the other man, pulling his friend away, and then turning back only to make a lewd gesture. It’s a bit much to be called a weirdo by someone who likes getting punched in the face.

I chat to five brightly dressed Venezuelans who are coming home from a friend’s flat. Luis Munoz is here visiting his daughter and her friends, who are studying English. “It’s a beautiful city,” he says, waving his hand across the street.

The woman ahead of me at the bank machine keeps trying to press the illustration of buttons on the screen rather than the actual buttons. I show her how it works. “Sorry. I’m drunk,” she says . She is not Irish, but she used to live in Dublin. “For a long time O’Connell Street felt like home. It is my home,” she says, and she looks sad.

I go into Eddie Rocket’s, where I nurse a Sprite for a bit. “Bye bye, love. Bye bye, happiness. Hello, emptiness,” sing the Everly Brothers. Outside, gardaí are writing tickets for taxi drivers on an illegal rank.

An Argentinean called Mariano is playing lovely violin music in front of the GPO. He wears fingerless gloves and a scarf tied up high on his neck. “That song is from Peru,” he says. He likes to play at night because it’s more peaceful.

“When I was a young fella there was a Garda sergeant called Lugs Brannigan,” an taxi driver called Jim tells me. I meet him at the Savoy rank. “He’d go into dance halls with the leg of a table, and if you were misbehaving you got a whack with it.” He laughs. “I think we need more Lugs Brannigans.”

The area near O’Connell Bridge is filling with groups of young people again. Despite some conspicuous drunkenness, most are loud but well behaved. At the junction of Abbey Street is a parked Garda car.

A man is wandering outside Supermac’s with his underpants and trousers around his ankles. “Way-hey!” he cries. I wonder what Lugs Brannigan would do to him.

I flag down Akihito Nakasuga, a cycle-rickshaw operator from Okinawa, in Japan. He’s a student, trains children to play football at weekends, lives with a host family and does this in the evenings. “It’s a hard job,” he says, and he seems amazed by Irish nightlife. He takes me up and down the street one last time.

Nakasuga pedals furiously. It’s nice to feel the air in my face. I’m going home. Goodbye, Daniel O’Connell, I say. Goodbye, Austin Cregan’s news stand. Goodbye, Sir John Gray. Goodbye, GPO with all your evangelists. Goodbye, Funland. Goodbye, grotty fast-food restaurants. Goodbye, tasty Beshoff’s. Goodbye, Father Mathew the temperance priest with broken fingers. Goodbye, Akihito Nakasuga. Goodbye, O’Connell Street. Goodbye, Carlow. Goodbye, Adam.