On the Dart on one of last summer’s few sunny evenings, a man whose eye I had caught – a drug dealer, judging by his telephone conversation – shouted at me as I went to the door. “F*** off, you f***ing c***!”
The next day when I got on the Dart, there was a strong smell of Coco Chanel perfume. Two tanned, blonde women in their 40s with stretched soft speckled skin were twisting huge diamond rings, swinging their crossed legs, jabbing pointy high heels high into the air.
"They've done a dreadful job with Marie…with the face lift."
“You’re right, now that you say it, her face is very taut.”
"Fierce taut."
*****
I've had a year of the Dart, of following the crescent of Dublin Bay back and forth, watching the Pigeon House chimneys, through dark mornings, pink sunrises, grey clouds and blue skies. Those chimneys are the only things that have stood still since I swapped Dar es Salaam for Dublin.
My husband, Maurice, worked for an Irish NGO, and we had spent five years in Zambia and nearly two in Tanzania. I had struggled in Dar es Salaam. The prices of accommodation, electricity, petrol and food were being driven up by an influx of oil-multinational staff. It was intolerably hot, and I couldn't take the kids out of the apartment between 10am and 4pm because of the searing sun.
And it was very lonely.
Although I had always wanted to come home, our time as an expatriate family was finally scuppered by the price of education, with international schools costing about €15,000 a year per child.
Against every expectation I got a job at a human-rights organisation that I had long admired in Dublin, after several Skype interviews. I sold everything we had and packed our suitcases, coming home with Juno and Milo three months ahead of Maurice, while he finished work.
I found a house to rent and bought a car from a dealer in Ballyfermot who, during the test drive, leaned in from the passenger seat and told me with a grey smile, “Drive it like you stole it.”
I was excited to start living the way I had longed to for seven years, to start living again in Ireland. But it has been a mess of a year. Within weeks of arriving home and starting his new job, my husband discovered, and had a procedure to remove from his throat, a benign tumour the size of a potato.
At the same time, we were trying to negotiate with our bank to get a trade down negative equity mortgage so we wouldn’t have to pay rent on top of the mortgage for a one-bedroom apartment we can no longer live in. During the process, we discovered we owed Revenue €14,000 for Tax-Relief-at-Source that we had been receiving on our mortgage, not knowing we weren’t entitled to it while we were living abroad.
Our landlord is selling the house we are renting, and we can find nothing affordable in the area, or a school place for our daughter in other areas. The adrenaline I had been running on up to that point finally ran out.
My head fell apart, my job fell apart and stress coursed through our bodies and our home every day. We have never been such slaves to money. There is a lot of rain and a lot of ironing.
I still don’t miss Africa, and I never wish myself back there, but I am overwhelmed with the guilt that I forced our family “home” after seven years away, and failed to deliver on a promise of happiness and feeling settled and secure.
I worry that my husband will resent me for pushing us back here to Dublin, away from a hot climate and a grassroots job, to look at a stack of coins on the kitchen table and wonder if it will be enough to last the weekend.
“Do you want to hear some good news?” he said to me on a low day, opening his arms out to me. “I don’t want to move away again. I want to be here.”
The conversation had come up between him and some friends about opportunities abroad, and he had thought about it and decided in favour of Ireland. It was such a relief.
What we have had to let go of is the vision we had ten years ago of what we thought our lives would be now. I feel like we are trees that have started growing roots here after being stuck in pots. Even though above the ground all the leaves might be gone or branches snapped, this is where we are, and we will grow until we are strong again.
It has been a savage year, but I love it here. I love being able to see my family, to see the kids growing up with their grandparents and cousins. I love Juno learning Irish at school. I love being around Irish people, on Irish streets, by the Irish Sea. I love the craic. I even love being called a c*** on the Dart.
