Dublin features in my novel, Eggshells, almost as a character in itself, a sometimes magical but occasionally sinister character. For Vivian, the protagonist, Dublin is the place she hopes will show her how to live, where to go, how to be. Her hopes for a city are too high. Vivian maps the routes she walks onto greaseproof paper, in a vain attempt to discover where she should be. As someone who doesn’t quite fit in, Vivian is a drifter, an observer. She’s not part of the rush-hour speed-walkers, not part of the pram-pushing slow-walkers, not part of any group.
Because she walks alone and spends so much time inside her head, Dublin becomes as alive to Vivian as a human. She takes street names and building names literally in an attempt to read some sort of meaning into her life – scratching a scratch card at Prosperity Chambers expecting wealth, mimicking the sound of thunder at Thundercut Alley, looking for a hobbit in Middle Third to show her the way. Dublin is so real to Vivian because she doesn’t have the kind of friends that other people have. She projects feelings onto buildings; she names the stone faces above doors and under bridges and gives them personalities; she views statues as almost human. Vivian engages with fruit-sellers and people who aren’t all there and people asking for money in a way that most people don’t. She walks into situations that most of us avoid.
There was a part of me in Vivian. Before I wrote Eggshells, I was one of the rush-hour sprinters, killing it to get to my desk for 9 o’clock. Unemployment slows you down, rearranges your day, and eliminates you from this group. The group you become part of meets monthly to sign on, but there is no talking in this group. Having no idea of where I was going, or how to get there even if I knew where there was, led to my wanderings around the city in Vivian’s character.
My own relationship with Dublin is ambivalent. I’m a first-generation Dub. I can’t claim to be True Blue; I support Mayo football even though I’d have a much better chance at Sam if I veered towards the blue end of the spectrum. I roared myself hoarse for the green and reds at the Mayo v Dublin semi-finals in Croke Park this summer, and then cheered Dublin against Kerry a few weeks later.
Dublin grew legs for me when I was writing Eggshells. I couldn’t walk into town or take a bus across the city without looking to see what street signs had their letters partially blued out, and scrabbling for a receipt or shopping list to jot the letters down. Even now, a couple of years on, I can’t help but notice when different letters are blue-ed out of the street signs, or when I pass a strange building with a small portal-like door. When you start noticing all the stone faces above doorways, they suddenly seem to be everywhere. Vivian’s eyeballs are right behind my own and pop out sometimes.
I read Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown books as a teenager. It was a thrill to see Dublin represented raw and real instead of sanitised and cosy. Although Barrytown is fictional, it felt more real than many real settings in fiction.
I read James Joyce’s Ulysses a year after finishing Eggshells. I was relieved that I hadn’t read it before writing my book. I wouldn’t have had the nerve to send a character trekking about the city if I had read Leopold Bloom’s more complex wanderings. While I was reading, I itched to map Leopold’s routes around the city onto greaseproof paper and see what shapes he walked.
These days, I work in housekeeping in Trinity College. I walk to work at 5.30am, when Dublin has not quite yet begun, and I can’t help but see the streets through Vivian’s eyes.
Near the Mater Hospital, a dodgy streetlamp flickers off as I pass; I feel like the Voldemort of the early shift, the Mr Bean of Berkeley Road.
I pass the 24-hour convenience store where drivers of taxis and buses and lorries gather for coffee. I walk by in great hurries, imagining them sorting out the world before it has gotten started.
If I’m on time, clean laundry is being dropped off at a hairdresser; if I’m late, the dirty laundry bags are being taken away.
Buses head for their routes; at this hour you’d be forgiven for thinking ‘Entering Service’ was a popular destination in the city.
Men wearing headlamps unload crates of milk at a local primary school; a man in a shop-coat delivers bread to hotels and guesthouses; a newsagent unlocks a metal box outside his shop and takes out batches of newspapers. Vivian would love these secret errands and hiding places, but I feel she would make a nuisance of herself chatting to busy people.
It’s not all magic and portals. Like Vivian’s Dublin, there are harsher elements to the city I’d rather didn’t exist. On both sides of the weekend, people are still making their ways home from nights out. Seeing the makings of a fight is unpleasant after a few pints; after breakfast it’s just bizarre.
One morning, a young couple argued loudly and shoved each other before joining forces to scoop the coins out of the paper cup of a sleeping man. I stopped, wondering what I could do, and got a What the fuck are you looking at and a face thrust into mine. Alcohol smells stronger when you’re sober.
At 5.50 in the morning of the Budget that disregarded their needs entirely, I counted seven individuals in blue sleeping bags under the GPO. One man had just gotten up and was folding his sleeping bag in a gesture that was devastatingly close to making a bed. By rush-hour, they will have packed away their sleeping bags and be going about their day in a less visible, more convenient way.
Vivian, for all her faults, sees these people as equals. She makes conversation, however awkward, with other misfits. But she’s no saint; when she realises she’s marginally more together than a woman she meets getting on the bus, she puffs up with pride. “I say ‘Leeson Street, please’ in my most superior voice because for once I’m not the mad one, I’m the person who puts mad people on buses and pushes them off again.”
Eggshells by Caitriona Lally is published by Liberties Press
