1998 - Round Ireland with a fridge (37 page)

From the callbox, John gave me the thumbs up. How was he going to deal with this situation? Compared to what was happening at the ILAC Centre, in fact compared to anything anywhere, our march was an abject failure. How would John handle this? I soon found out.

‘Oh Gerry, I’m so excited. This man has been going all over Ireland for the last three weeks and two days and he has made a profound impression wherever he has gone. I came here today with my humble kitchen mop and my ice tray, so I am a man prepared. Although, having said that, nothing could have prepared me for meeting the Fridge Man. First of all I should tell you that he has a tan which makes him look like he has been camping in the outback of Australia for the last three weeks, it’s amazing. His fridge has been autographed by hundreds of people who are wishing him well and saying how much they enjoy and love his fridge, and now his fridge has come home. We have a bagpiper here, Christy Riley is here to welcome him and I think in the background you can hear him starting to play again…’

John had clearly french-kissed the Blarney Stone. He had chosen to describe the scene, to borrow a word from the politicians, disingenuously. The rest of us call it bullshit. What a day! It began with horseshit, now it was bullshit—I was just pleased there were no elephants on the march. I looked into the callbox and saw John frantically signalling to Christy to start playing. ‘…Christy has been entertaining the crowd here with his bagpipes for the last hour or so—ah, there he goes! It’s a very loud, full sound Gerry, and it’s drawing lots of attention. We’re about to start our procession, but I thought maybe first you’d like to have a word with Tony.’

It was my turn now to be waved at frantically. I moved forward and took the receiver as John handed it to me.

‘Tony, how are you?’ asked Gerry. ‘Is the excitement mounting?’

‘Gerry, it’s at a fever pitch here. I can’t tell you the excitement there is around the place.’

What the hell, I thought I might as well play ball. A bit of mythologis-ing never hurt anyone. Well, apart from the millions of victims of cruel and repressive fundamental religions. It hurt them a bit.

‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen a people like it,’ I suggested, ‘I have captured the hearts of the Irish people, no question. I am overwhelmed by the response here.’

‘I think it now behoves us to prepare for you to continue on your triumphant march,’ announced Gerry, silkily leading the show into a commercial break. ‘Caesar enters Rome, ladies and gentlemen.’

§

And so the march began. It wasn’t the exact scene I had pictured in my mind’s eye over breakfast in Wexford the previous morning. By now though, my initial disappointment had subsided and I was beginning to draw some perverse satisfaction from this pitiful response to my radio appeals and rallying cries. I had now decided that for a march which was truly pointless, it was entirely fitting that it should be met with such spirited apathy.

I took a moment to observe John, and saw that he wasn’t remotely surprised by the lack of numbers on the ground. He had expected as much. I had been naive. Of course, it had been a form of naivety which had borne me so successfully to this point, but this was Dublin, and Dublin was reality. Dublin was to be the big slap round the face. This was a thriving city of commerce, and it was a Tuesday morning just after eleven o’clock. People had work to do, lives to lead, mouths to feed and, thank God, radios to listen to.

Radio listeners were sharing in one of the more spectacular and strangely moving days in their capital’s history. There was however a substantial gap between the listeners’ perception of what was going on and the events which were actually taking place. For those tuned into RTE2 on FM, whether they were in Donegal, Galway or even up in Tory Island, this event was an emotional climax to a touching story, as throngs of well wishers lined the route, tossing garlands and waving to their hero. For the marcher, just setting off from Connolly Station, it was difficult to view it quite like that. There were three of us. Myself, a roving reporter with a mop, and a pensionable bagpipe player who didn’t have the first clue what was going on.

We made our way down Talbot Street and into a pedestrianised shopping zone. Dublin’s busy shoppers, sadly out of radio contact, looked on with stunned bemusement. Were we making our way to a fancy dress function? Why were a man with a fridge, a fellow holding a mop, and a bagpipe player, marching proudly through a shopping precinct?

There wasn’t a hint of self consciousness about the three of us. Why should there be? Presumably Christy dressed up in his kilt and went out with his bagpipes several times a week; I had spent an entire month in the company of a fridge; and waving a microphone about was John’s chosen metier. As for the mop, well I think we’d all forgotten about that, and John was using it as a staff to assist his marching gait. For a few minutes we all chatted freely, oblivious to our surroundings and the alleged momentousness of the occasion.

As we crossed O’Connell Street and made our way up Henry Street, Christy told me a story of how an irate wife, who had grown tired of her husband’s sloth, had hired him to come and play the bagpipes outside their bedroom window at the crack of dawn in order to get the idler out of bed. The man hadn’t appreciated the joke and had pelted him with shoes, perfume bottles and whatever was to hand. Christy pronounced it the worst gig he had ever had. I hoped that after today it would still occupy the number-one slot.

For a while the fridge had seemed heavier than usual as I dragged it on its trolley behind me. Perhaps fatigue was setting in, because for almost the first time, it was beginning to feel like the burden I had expected it to be at the outset, but which it had never become. Then I looked behind me and saw the reason. A small boy on roller blades was rather cheekily hitching a lift, holding on to the handle of the fridge door and allowing himself to be pulled along. I smiled. Although he was getting heavy, I didn’t tell him to let go.

This was fitting and proper. This was a gesture I was happy to make, a symbolic repayment to all of those who had given me rides in the last month and made my journey possible.

Just before the junction of Henry Street and Upper Liffey Street, I noticed that we had lost a third of our marchers. John was nowhere to be seen. This was slightly worrying since he was the only one who had any idea where we were supposed to be going. The numbers now involved in the Triumphal Entry had plummeted to two. As if two people marching triumphantly wasn’t embarrassing enough, Christy and I might soon have to suffer the further indignity of asking directions. Biblical comparisons were no longer appropriate.

As I stood on a bench looking back down the street to see if there was any sign of John, I could hear in one ear Brenda Donohue’s voice coming from the earpiece which was relaying me
The Gerry Ryan Show
.

‘We have a huge crowd here in the ILAC Centre and we’re all desperate to see Tony. We were hoping that he might have made it here by now, and we seem to have lost all contact with John, so we simply don’t know where they are…’

A few hundred yards away I could just make out John running towards us, his mop looking like an oversize relay baton. When he caught up with us I asked where he had been and offered my available ear for the answer.

‘Sorry about that, Tony, this guy called me on my mobile and it would have been awkward to get rid of him,’ explained John.

‘Couldn’t you have told him that you were involved with a live nationwide radio broadcast?’ I enquired.

‘Well, it wasn’t that easy. You see he’s in prison, and he said that this was the only time he was allowed to use the phone.’

I didn’t bother to find out any more, thinking that it might be better not to know.

Interruptions from convicts behind us, we were now ready to complete the march to end all marches. With our numbers once again bolstered to three, we were feeling pretty good about ourselves. I was just considering introducing the ‘What do we want? We don’t know’ chant—when Christy launched into a spell of uplifting bagpipe music. This certainly made us the centre of attention.

John gave Gerry another update, which I could barely hear over Christy’s now slightly jarring bagpiping. Brenda O’Donohue was interviewing people who had brought along domestic appliances to the ILAC Centre. Amongst the paraphernalia was a hairdryer, washing powder and some dirty laundry, a tin opener, a whisk, some curling tongs, and one woman had turned up insisting that her friend was a charlady she had brought along specially.

‘That’s marvellous, Brenda,’ said Gerry. ‘Stay tuned, fridge followers. I don’t think since the Eucharistic Congress of the 1950
s
, have we seen such an outpouring of love for one man returned back home.’

He was upping the ante at each commercial break. This was going to take a lot of living up to.

‘I think we’re going to have to hurry now,’ said John, on returning from the callbox where he had reported in to Gerry. ‘If we don’t get a move on, we won’t reach the ILAC Centre until after twelve, and then the show will be over.’

The show will be over. I felt a pang of sadness. For me too, the show would be over. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted it to be.

‘Come on!’ said John, with surprising urgency, ‘I think we’re going to have to run.’

Dublin’s shoppers were treated to a new spectacle; that of the three adults running through the city centre with their burdens of eccentric and assorted accoutrements. Christy wasn’t a natural runner. He was in his sixties now, and had probably not had any reason to run anywhere for twenty years or so.

As I ran, fridge rattling noisily behind me, I glanced at him, flushed and bathed in sweat, and felt pretty confident that he was experiencing something which would push the ‘waking the lazy husband at dawn’ gig down one place to number two.

We turned a comer and ahead of us I could see my unlikely and unglamorous journey’s end—a shopping mall poetically called the IIAC Centre. With the end in sight, we moderated our sprint into a more dignified jog, and made our way into the centre, not knowing what lay in store. A huge cheer greeted us, emanating from a much larger crowd than I had expected. Okay, it wasn’t as huge as Brenda had made out, but there must have been about a hundred people all gathered in the central concourse of the shopping centre. A woman with a microphone was waving me over. This must be Brenda, because her mouth movements were synchronised exactly with the words I was hearing in my earpiece.

‘Gerry, Tony has made it! We’ve got the fridge! We’ve got John Farrefl, we’ve got our piper—my, he looks a little tired, and we’ve got this huge crowd who I’m sure are going to show their appreciation for Tony and his fridge who after a month of travelling round the country have made it here to the ILAC Centre in Dublin. So, let’s hear it for Tony!’

Another huge cheer went up as I bowed before them. John signalled to poor Christy to start playing, but he was woefully short of that most precious of faculties for a bagpipe player—breath. He .collapsed exhausted on to a bench next to two old ladies and did his best, desperately trying to puff air into his instrument’s windbag. He looked like a dying man. All he could manage was a sound which resembled a police siren struggling to run on a dying battery. In the studio, someone had the wisdom to feed in more of the rousing
Ben Hur
music to drown him out. Brenda ushered John over to the microphone.

‘Before we talk to Tony, John Farrell, what was the journey like for you?’

‘It was a real religious experience for me Brenda, because I had no idea how much people’s lives were affected by humble domestic kitchen appliances. But the Fridge Man has let me see the light and I see it in the faces of all the crowd here. It’s been a wonderful, wonderful day.’

‘Brenda,’ said Gerry back in the studio, ‘get Tony over to the microphone, I want to ask him how he feels.’

Right on cue I joined Brenda at the microphone.

‘Tony, you’ve done it, well done,’ said Gerry. ‘You must be very proud. How are you, and how is your fridge?’

‘We are both absolutely thrilled. As you know this fridge was christened Saiorse, which means freedom in Gaelic, and everyone has recognised that it is a free fridge, free to do what it wants, free to go where it wants and free to be what it wants, and if a fridge can achieve that, then what are the limits on us?’

‘A profound thought indeed, Tony. Tell me, would it be fair to say that this fridge is the closest thing in the world to you?’

‘Yes,’ I laughed, ‘that’s my own personal tragedy, thanks for highlighting it’

‘Now in a minute we have a little ceremony to perform but before we do that perhaps you’d like to say a few words to the crowd there—Tony Hawks—your final thoughts.’

It was time for another impromptu speech. I wanted to do this moment justice.

‘Gerry, I can’t tell you how moved I am by the response here—there are literally thousands of people, possibly. They go back for—if not for miles, then for yards, well a number of feet anyway. I just want to pay tribute to the people of Ireland and to the people who have given me lifts along the way. This fridge here is the first fridge to have hitch-hiked round this fair isle of yours. Presumably it won’t be the last, I expect there to be a lot of copycat incidences, people taking different domestic appliances out on the road with them, and I’m proud to have opened up that avenue for them. There have been highs on this trip, like taking the fridge surfing in Strandhill, and there have been lows, like when the fridge kept falling off its trolley on the long walk through Galway town centre, but throughout it all there has always been someone on hand with a friendly word and more often than not, a pint of beer, and for that I just want to say a resounding thank you.’

A warm round of applause greeted my words. Gerry wound things up, ‘Well, it only remains for us to complete this odyssey with a special ceremony. Brenda has with her
The Gerry Ryan Show
fridge magnet mayoral chain of office to bestow on Tony, complete with a selection of fridge magnets specially sewn on. Brenda, over to you.’