Houdi McCabe - Issue 34

I was born in Clones Co. Monaghan in 1962. At 19 years old I joined DUNNES STORES as a management trainee in Dublin and five years later I ended up in Belfast as a Branch Manager where I meet my wife Carole Robinson from Portrush, where we now live.

I worked in most areas east of northern Ireland  and as an adult student I achieved an MSc in management change communication from Queen’s University in 2001. I have ran 10 marathons and I have a passion for Darts.

I have three grown up children and, now retired after 42 years, spend my time acting on stage, short films, advertisements and writing short stories. These are the activities I never had time to do when working.

And to cap all that my first grandchild Genevieve was born in April this year.                                    

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She's Got Legs

 It’s early 1984. I’m in Dublin having escaped the mundanity of small Irish town life. Twenty-two years old, a trainee manager with Ireland’s biggest retailer, I’m bouncing with nervous energy. George Orwell’s prediction of the totalitarian society is unfounded, and I don’t need Winston Smith. My schooldays relationship with an alluring artist has reached the end of the road so I’m now a free agent on the hunt. A new music entertainment phenomenon has hit Ireland, namely disco bars awash with multi screens and interminable music videos played on a loop. I dance well, and these girls are there for the taking. Like shooting fish in a barrel.

Rainbows Bar in George’s St is the place to be. It boasts a sixteen square foot maplewood dance floor, with overlooking balcony, cocktails, soft drinks and foreign beer on draught. Ubiquitous video screens, even in the toilets. You have to shout to be heard, and the constant beat of the music is adrenaline in the veins. I’m the apotheosis of sartorial elegance in my white suit, black shirt, thin red leather tie and patent leather shoes.  Replicating Michael Jackson’s zombie and moonwalk dances from his monster hit Thriller, I look up at the balcony and she is staring at me. I’m intrigued. I’m tempted.

Heading up to the balcony bar and order a Club Orange, I watch the crowd below dance to ZZ Top, replete with imaginary chest length beards and air guitars. ‘You’re a sharp dressed man’, she says as she pulls at my lapel. ‘What’s that?’, pointing at my drink. ‘I thought you were out of it down there doing your moonwalking. I’m Sinead by the way’. She pulls out a fabric hanky and wipes the sweat from my forehead. ‘Where are you from?’ ‘Monaghan’, I say, ‘Mc Guigan Country.’ ‘The North’, she says and before I can correct her on her geography she’s dragging me down to the dance floor. 

She dances like she’s unfamiliar with the music, a newborn calf trying to find its feet. I notice she has her hair up in a bun like the Protestant women who lived in the house across from us, but has the patois of an Irish traveller but more posh, and a dimple on her chin like the front of a Haig Whiskey bottle. She’s wearing a red trouser suit that surely must belong to her mother, but the colour complements my white. All these attributes seem incongruous with her beauty and personality. As ZZ Top finish giving ‘all their loving’, I make for the balcony. Again, she pulls me back and says, ‘This is a slow one, I love it’. Lionel Richie sings ‘Hello’. I feel her hands which are surprisingly calloused, perhaps like the blind girl in the video of song. 

Afterwards, we head back up to the balcony bar where she orders a gin and tonic and a Club Orange for me. When she asks what I work at, I proudly tell her I could be managing my own store branch within a year. As for her, she’s just graduated in pharmacy from Trinity College, wining the prize for best student, and is now working in a chemist shop in Capel St. My confidence drops like the 1929 stock market when she asks me what I graduated in. I scraped a Leaving Certificate and University was in another universe. My mouth feels like I have just left the dentist. I try to hide my diffidence with a reference to her being a drug dealer. She fires another two gins into her as the lights turn on and the music stops. ‘What happens now?’, I ask myself. My mate lets me know there’s a taxi coming to take us home to Tallaght.

‘I might see you here next week’. She ignores my question but says, ‘Tallaght, I live near there in Templeogue. I can give you a lift on my bike. Let them get the taxi and you come with me’. I’m reluctant to accept her offer as she has imbibed more than a fair share of Cork Dry Gin. But fortune favours the brave, so I tell my mates, ‘I’ve clicked lads - see you tomorrow sometime’. She tells me she will see me outside as she’s going to get her bike. When I enquire about a crash helmet she laughs, ‘Big boys don’t need helmets’. I venture outside to see my mates waiting for a taxi. As I wait for her at the entry at the side of the club I envision being her pillion passenger on her Kawasaki Ninja or Honda Gold Wing. 

To my horror she arrives in full view, in a black pushbike replete with a wicker basket in front for holding groceries. In my hometown that bike was the go-to vehicle for octogenarians. I have never been so embarrassed since Primary school. As my white suit reflects the street lights I watch as my mate Emmet falls on the footpath in convulsions of laughter. ‘Come on’, she says, starting to peddle like Stephen Roache on the Champs-Élysées as I watch my mates form a ZZ Top tribute band singing, ‘She’s got legs, she knows how to use them’. As I jump on behind her, I want the world to end … and it does.