One of the drawbacks of living on the edge of a city centre is being woken in the middle of the night by people on the way home from pubs and nightclubs, shouting or singing their heads off.
But at least those tend to pass quickly. Whereas the other night, at 3.45am, I was roused from my dreams by the more insidious sound of a stationary conversation in the street below.
Neither speaker was drunk, clearly. The dialogue was quiet enough that I couldn’t follow it. Even so, they were talking as if it were the middle of the day. And it was loud enough to have banished sleep.
Then a rueful recognition dawned. Hours earlier I had watched from the same window an illegally parked car being clamped. I should have known that, whatever about the owner, this would come back to haunt me.
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Now, sure enough, clamper and parker were united. But strangely in the circumstances, they were having a friendly chat. About what exactly, it wasn’t clear, although I heard the phrase “my wife” at one point.
As I peered out, the clamper hunkered down to unlock the chain and even paused in doing so to make a point, like a workman leaning on his shovel or a farmer on his gate, while the car driver stood listening benignly.
I thought about opening the window and shouting: “There are people trying to sleep here, you know.” But I just went back to bed instead. Maybe they both needed to talk.
Anyway, they were gone soon, although so for the moment was sleep. As happens when you wake in the early hours, I was now oppressed by the thought of all the things I had to do tomorrow, and next week and for the rest of my life. It must have been about 5.30am by the time I went under again.
***
A contrastingly annoying thing about living in cities is that, while out and about during the day, you’re exposed to snippets of conversation that, often, you’d like to follow but can’t.
I was running laps of St Stephen’s Green in Dublin one day recently, for example, and briefly found myself in the middle of a political debate between two men: one Irish, aged about 70, and the other, maybe 40, who had long hair, a beard and an American accent.
They weren’t deliberately talking across the path: I think the older man had just crossed over to put something in a bin. But as he turned, he declared: “Engels was a fool.” To which the bearded American, with an air of some reluctance, said: “Probably.”
Then, as I passed between them, the original speaker repeated, with added emphasis: “Engels was a fool.” And regretfully, it seemed, the American agreed: “Engels was a fool. But...”
Unfortunately, I had run out of earshot by then and could hardly double back and run laps of the two men to get a better sense of the conversation, although I was now very curious to know what Friedrich Engels had done to disappoint them.
His whole friendship with Karl Marx aside, the only thing I could remember was that Engels lived successively with two Irish sisters, Mary and Lizzie Burns, and avoided marriage as a bourgeois convention until wedding Lizzie on her deathbed out of respect for her religious beliefs. But that hardly made him foolish.
***
My street is also popular with tour-groups, it being an area dense in history. One of the regular stops is near where that car got clamped. So deliberately or otherwise, I often find myself eavesdropping on guides’ patter and sometimes have to resist the urge to correct or add to their stories.
One day I heard a familiar voice and looked out to see if it was the person I thought. Sure enough, it was an occasional acquaintance from the conference circuit, who has since become one of the regular guides.
And she tends to be very well researched. Still, I often have the urge to wait for a quiet moment and shout down: “That’s all lies” or something such. I haven’t succumbed to the temptation yet, but, if not the guide, I’m sure the tourists would love it.
***
I’m reminded that back during one of my attempts to learn to swim, I used to frequent a certain municipal pool in the city centre where, to get value from my €6 entry, I would also sometimes use the sauna.
It was an eavesdropper’s paradise. If some of the other listeners weren’t undercover gardaí then they should have been because criminal confessions were not unusual. Just before Christmas once, for example, two middle-aged locals fell to reminiscing about their early parenting days and how they acquired presents.
One spoke of breaking into shipping containers at Ringsend. The other had aimed higher, in every sense. With an air of sadness for glory days past, he reflected: “I used to know the roof of every shop in Henry Street.”
