The statue by Dublin's Screen Cinema offers perceptive analysis over a drink in the pub, writes MICHAEL HARDING
AND SO at the end of the year I went for a drink with a statue – Mr Screen, the cinema usher that stands outside the cinema on Townsend Street in Dublin. He has a big nose, fierce teeth, an enormous moustache, bushy eyebrows and a peaked cap, and sometimes he reminds me of Saddam Hussein, as he points his torch at nothing in particular.
He’s a small statue, and he’s been standing there since the days when I used to bring the girlfriend to the movies on wintry afternoons, and watch films through a plume of smoke. Sometimes, to avoid distracting other punters with my cigarette lighter, I would light a fresh cigarette from my partner’s butt; sucking the fire from one cigarette to the other was a gesture of delicate intimacy.
Anyway, me and Mr Screen always enjoy a drink at the end of the year, and a little chat about the old days. I asked him how he got over the Christmas, and he replied in a broad Dublin accent, “How do you think I got over it? I’ve been stuck out here in all weathers, me teeth chattering like a penguin!
I was going to tell him that penguins don’t have teeth, but just then a black Land Rover drove past, which caught our attention. It was driven by a woman with blonde hair and a high forehead, and she was laughing, or maybe she had the radio on, or was chatting on a hands’ free phone.
Mr Screen feared she was laughing at him. “They all laugh at me. They think I look funny.”
I assured him that women are very attracted to small men who have a sense of humour, and I dismissed the possibility that anyone would make fun of him.
“She was probably born with a smile and a jolly temperament,” I said. “She might even be English.”
Mr Screen agreed that the English often seem to be unnervingly jolly. He himself has a melancholic grimace common to many Dubliners. A grimace which reflects their pessimistic view of life, and which endures into old age, when they eventually clutch either drink or religion as the final life raft in an ocean of misery.
I said, “Put the torch away and we’ll go down to Poolbeg Street for a drink.” In the pub I mentioned the old days when myself and the girlfriend smoked in the cinema. He informed me that there’s less fuel in cigarette lighters than there used to be. “They improved how the cigarette lighter looks,” he said, “but they reduced the fuel that is inside. It’s a scam to make more profit.”
“You have an amazing mind,” I told him. “I just don’t get this level of perceptive analysis in Mullingar.” Mr Screen struck a match and lit his pipe. I said you can’t do that nowadays; it’s illegal.”
He said, “Don’t worry; they can’t see me!” Then he enquired about his friend, the Joe Dolan statue. “I hear he disappeared from his plinth and ran off with a floozie in a Jacuzzi.”
I said, “He disappeared alright, but it’s because he hasn’t been well. They took him away because he had a few screws loose.”
“Why didn’t they make me as big as James Connolly,” he said, “and put me in O’Connell Street, on top of a pillar, like Parnell, or me ould friend Admiral Nelson, and I could have shone me torch on the GPO, to represent the common man, shining his light on the Irish Republic.”
Before we left, I went to the toilet, though Mr Screen, being a statue, doesn’t have a bladder. “At least you don’t have to worry about the prostate,” I said, as we headed out. “You should come to Mullingar for New Year’s Eve,” I suggested, but he said no.
“A man’s got to do his duty,” he declared, as he took out his torch again and climbed up onto the raised level, outside the cinema, and positioned himself for the night. I got into a taxi and from the rear window I saw a homeless hoodie squat on the pavement, beneath the statue, his plastic coffee cup outstretched. Mr Screen moved his left arm and dropped €1 in the cup, and then glanced at me and winked, as if to say, “I’m looking after him.”
Then he resumed his austere pose before anyone noticed; pointing his torch, like he does every New Year, at nothing in particular.
I assured him that women are very attracted to small men who have a sense of humour, and dismissed the possibility that anyone would make fun of him
