1998 - Round Ireland with a fridge (4 page)

We climbed the stairs in the surprisingly odourless multi-storey car park. I found Shane to be a reticent man but assumed he was more so today because his thoughts were occupied trying to work out the size of favour he would demand from Seamus in return for having done this one. It was certain to be a biggy, along the lines of ‘There’s this man I want you to kill…’ Then I saw the fridge for the first time. Shane had done well. Exactly what I had been looking for, a white cube about two feet square. I patted it affectionately and Shane looked away allowing us a moment of intimacy. Then he produced the trolley and in reverent silence we strapped the fridge to it, respectful witnesses at the birth of a truly symbiotic relationship.

I wheeled the fridge around the car park a bit like a sportsman warming up, and it felt good. Me, the fridge and the trolley were going to get along just fine. We would have been the dream team if it hadn’t been for the rucksack. Initiation ceremony out of the way we headed off. Shane had exceeded his initial brief by organising bed and breakfast accommodation for me in an area south of the River Liffey called Donnybrook. He started to relax and we chatted more freely. He revealed himself to be quite amused by my prospective expedition and suggested that I get in touch with a radio show on RTE FM 2 called
The Gerry Ryan Show
. He said that they liked to get behind wacky ventures and mine fitted the bill perfectly. I hadn’t thought of doing anything like that but as we progressed slowly through the gridlocked centre of Dublin the idea grew on me.

We reached Donnybrook and I paid Shane the £130 I owed him for the fridge.

‘By the way, how much is the bet for?’ he asked.

‘A hundred pounds,’ I replied.

He was confused for a moment, then he rather hurriedly wished me good luck and drove off with a look on his face which suggested that he was relieved that I wasn’t in his car anymore.

§

I was greeted at the B&B by Rory, a young man who looked as if he’d just graduated and was some way from being the middle-aged maternal lady called Rosie who I imagined ran all these kinds of establishments. He had very thick lenses in his glasses and I found the resulting enlargement of his eyes a little disconcerting. He declared that he had no problems on the vacancy front given that he had no other guests staying. Initially he didn’t comment as I wheeled the fridge into his hall, but he surveyed it in such a way as to suggest that he wasn’t confident that his thick lenses were thick enough. A few seconds passed and he capitulated.

‘Is that a fridge?’ he said.

This was an enquiry I was to hear a good deal more in the weeks to come.

‘Yes,’ 1 replied accurately.

He didn’t pursue this line of questioning and I offered nothing further although I could tell that he was curious. I had made a decision before leaving that I would try not to volunteer information about this fridge unless it was asked of me and then I would tell the truth. I was interested to see how many people wouldn’t ask, either through politeness or a general lack of interest. Rory fell into the former category.

Shortly after I’d settled into my room and was embarking on some gentle unpacking there was a knock on the door. It was Rory asking me if I would do him a favour. I carelessly said ‘no problem’ in a manner of which Shane would have been proud. Rory said that he was popping out for a while and would I mind answering the phone if it went, and once again I obliged with another ‘no problem’. Forty minutes and three bookings later, I decided that the best course of action was to go out myself.

I was feeling pretty jaded, with recent sleepless nights and the trauma of the flight taking their toll, but I had two things I wanted to do before I turned in for the night. Firstly, since Shane had pointed out that the RTE studios were fortuitously only five minutes walk away, I saw no harm in dropping a note into
The Gerry Ryan Show
giving them details of the journey I was about to embark on and leaving the phone number of Rory’s B&B if they wanted to speak to me in the morning. Also I wanted to take a photograph.

On a previous visit to Dublin I’d gone to a nightclub in a basement in Leeson Street called Buck Whaley’s. It was an evening of no significance other than for an estate agent’s sign which had caught my eye. Two doors down from Buck Whaleys another basement club had closed down but the dormant neon light letters spelling out the word ‘DISCOTHEQUE’ remained. Outside an estate agent had placed a board saying:

TO LET

COMMERCIAL PROPERTY

SUIT DISCO

I was impressed. After all that’s what you pay your money for. Without the particular expertise of that estate agent and for his aptly chosen words ‘surr DISCO’, heaven knows what doomed commercial venture an entrepreneur might have considered for that property, carelessly clearing out the bars and breaking up the dancefloor in order to open up a shoe shop.

I got there to find the photo opportunity was denied to me since the board was no more, someone wisely having followed its sound advice opening it up as a disco. Commission well earned by Messrs Daly, Quilligan and O’Reilly.

I dropped my explanatory letter into RTE, ate a disappointing takeaway, returned to Rory’s, took a shower and went to bed. Fortunately I was so tired that it didn’t take me long to fall asleep. If it had, I might have started to become anxious about what the next day held in store.

§

The next morning I was woken by Rory knocking on my door. I
thought
, ‘Oh God, I suppose you’re going out again and you want me to man the telephones and make my own breakfast?’ but
said
, ‘Yes?’

Not such a good line but it came a close second.

‘Phonecall for you,’ said an excited Rory, ‘it’s
The Gerry Ryan Show
.’

‘Oh. Right.’

Having been awake only a matter of seconds I wasn’t exactly on top of what all this meant I opened the door and Rory handed me one of those cordless phones which nearly always get a bad reception however much the manufacturers promise otherwise. I put it to my ear.

‘Hello?’

‘Hello Tony, it’s Siobhan here from
The Gerry Ryan Show
, I’ll put you on hold’and you’ll be through to Gerry in a minute.’

Gerry? I don’t know a Gerry. And why can’t he talk to me now? Before I could say anything I found myself listening to Chris Rea and the whole thing dawned on me. Oh no, I was going to be on air after this record! What about my hair? I cleared my throat several times in an effort to make it sound less like I’d just woken up. I tried to ignore Chris Rea’s lyrics; after all the thought of being on ‘the road to hell’ was disturbing enough first thing in the morning, but when you were about to embark on a venture like mine it was almost as if the bastard was taking the piss.

Gerry Ryan’s voice cut through the fading record.

‘Now, I’ve got Tony Hawks on the line. Good morning Tony—now you’re about to make an interesting journey—would you care to tell us about it?’

I can think of easier things to do one minute after you’ve woken up.

Actually I didn’t do a bad job of explaining what I was up to and why, even managing to be faintly amusing from time to time.

‘I’ve no idea if I’ll stay this jolly,’ I said to Gerry at one stage, ‘it’s only because I haven’t started yet that I sound this happy.’

‘Well, I think maybe if the weather is good for you, you’ll probably get a very good response, and indeed knowing the way the national psyche of the people in this country works, you’ll probably be made extremely welcome—and it will be a great thing for the peace process.’

‘Well, I hope to be passing through Northern Ireland later today, so if I can do anything to smooth things over up there I’d be more than happy—maybe we should all get round the fridge. People have tried getting round tables and it doesn’t really work out, the whole body language thing behind a table is all wrong—so let’s all get round the fridge.’

‘I think you may have hit on something there, Tony—that could be our motto for the peace process—‘Let’s get round the fridge’.’

We must have chatted for six or seven minutes, which surprised me because I was so used to English radio where they want a few quick soundbytes from you before they whack on another record. We even took a call from a pub landlord offering to throw a fridge party’ when I got to Cork. I thanked him and promised to take him up on the offer, but wondered if he had any idea as to what a fridge party might involve. It didn’t seem to matter.

In Gerry Ryan I could tell I was dealing with a very accomplished broadcaster who had mastered the art of calmly coping with four things happening at once whilst talking at the same time. He also seemed to be genuinely intrigued by the absurdity of my undertaking and wound up the interview by saying, ‘This is exactly the kind of thing that we like to keep an eye on—we will put the full weight of RTE behind you, will you call us tomorrow?’

‘Absolutely, Gerry, I’d be delighted.’

‘Good morning.’

‘Good morning.’

§

I sounded happy and indeed I was. But only because I hadn’t woken up properly, both in the physical and metaphorical sense, to the reality of what lay ahead of me. Furthermore I hadn’t looked out of the window so I was blissfully unaware that it was sheeting down with rain.

Through the phone’s earpiece I heard Gerry’s summing up, ‘Good luck to Tony…well, you have to say it’s a completely purposeless idea, but a damn fine one.’

I hoped that the rest of Ireland would feel the same.

On my way to the B&B’s dining room I was intercepted by a beaming Rory.

‘So that’s what the fridge is for, you madman.’

He led me into the kitchen and sat me down at a table where I could watch him prepare breakfast. Presumably this was an honour bestowed
upon
guests who had just been on national radio. In the next few minutes Rory really opened up to me, telling me about his studies, travels and his business partnership with his father, all at the expense of my bacon. He didn’t mind. He simply tossed the burnt rashers away and extravagantly produced some fresh ones. All at the expense of my eggs. He wasn’t very good at this breakfast business and it might have been easier for me if I hadn’t been coerced into watching. It didn’t bother him though, he was too busy telling me about the Five-year Economic Plan he and his Dad had worked out.

I don’t know what had caused the conversational floodgates to open but I suppose there must be something about
knowing
why someone is travelling with a fridge that sets your mind at ease, however irrational the reason may be. Overnight Rory may have felt that he had a dangerous psychopath as his only guest but now he knew the truth. I was a good-humoured eccentric for whom care with breakfast wasn’t a priority. In fact he lavished a service of complete neglect upon me; he disappeared off to answer the phone three times and his prolonged absence necessitated my self-promotion to breakfast chef. Not a problem, for I was a better cook than him and I was pleased he was getting more bookings. Last night’s level of occupancy wasn’t in accordance with the Five-year Plan.

Rory returned from his last phonecall just as I was completing my first meal of the day.

‘Good breakfast?’ he enquired, making no apology for his lack of involvement in its creation.

‘Lovely. Thanks.’

§

Twenty minutes later I was in a taxi taking me to the bus station, Rory having charged me half price for the room.

‘Ah, if you’re staying in guest houses for a month you’ll need to save money,’ he had said. A nice gesture—or was he trying to tempt me back there to work full time?

The taxi driver had helped me in with the fridge but had failed to see anything in it worthy of conversation. He had his own agenda and he wanted to chat about traffic congestion in the city, unnecessary roundabouts and the mindless introduction of one-way systems. Taxi drivers are the same throughout the world—great levellers. Never mind that Nelson Mandela, President Clinton or Michelle Pfeiffer has jumped into the cab, they’ll get no specialist treatment, none whatsoever. The driver will bore them just as shitless as you and me.

At the bus station I was to discover that pulling a fridge on a trolley wasn’t easy amongst large numbers of people who were in a hurry. Cornering was harder than I had imagined and going down stairs was a particularly hazardous business. I knew that in the course of the next few weeks I wouldn’t want to find myself in a hurry too often. Selfconsciously I made my way to the ticket office taking care not to injure small children with my cumbersome load. I was aware now of the heavy rain outside and was approximately at the mid-point of a mood swing from jolly to despairing.

I bought a ticket to Navan where I was to start hitching. I would be happy if I could make it as far as Cavan by nightfall and then take on the potentially difficult journey to Donegal the following morning. As far as I could make out from the map, the roads leading to Donegal dipped in and out of Northern Ireland, and I was anxious not to find myself hitching in that part of the world. Apart from the fact that I’d been told that drivers very rarely stop for hitchers there, I was conscious of the interest a small white container might hold for the security forces. Of all the romantic and heroic ways to leave this world, being part of a controlled explosion with a large kitchen appliance rated very poorly. Folk songs and poems were unlikely to be written, and not just because fridge’ is a very difficult word to find a rhyme for.

The bus driver, a balding middle-aged avuncular figure, helped me load the fridge into the vast luggage compartment at the rear of the bus. There were no other bags in there and I was concerned that it would slide from side to side every time we went round a comer.

‘Isn’t it going to slide from side to side every time we go round a corner?’ I asked the driver.

‘Ah no, ifll be just fine,’ he assured me authoritatively.

There were no views to be enjoyed on the fifty-minute busride because the heavy rain meant that the windows had steamed up. I don’t understand the physics behind why that happens but I do know that it does little to improve your state of mind. My personal mood swingome-ter had now left ‘jolly’ way behind and was nudging ‘despair’ with a fleeting stop at ‘mild wretchedness’.