Chapter 3
AL
Shafted. He’d been shafted. Tara and Walter, Wally, had absolutely shafted him. He tries to block out his thoughts with music, covers his ears with a pair of Beats.
He stands on the Luas, Dublin’s tram system, on the way to work, gripping the pole in a crowded tram.
Heads, armpits, too much perfume, sweat, all around him, it’s like a game of Twister.
He’s grateful to be taller than most, nose closer to the clearer oxygen.
It’s a longer journey to work than he took four weeks ago.
He used to be able to walk from his house.
He used to have a house. He used to have a fiancée.
The song ends and it immediately begins again for the fifth, maybe sixth time.
It’s the mood he has decided to be in today and he chose the song to suit.
He is aligned with the music he plays every day.
Each day a new song, the same song all day.
Like a daily anthem that guides him through this shitstorm.
Ian Curtis understood what Al is going through.
The torture, the pain in his voice, the almost hypnotic loop of despair mirrors what’s in Al’s heart and head.
The absolute certainty of the statement.
Ian knows that love will tear them apart, and he’s telling, no, warning everyone.
It’s a lecture. It’s the student commencement speech Al would give any university if he was ever asked to part with his knowledge.
Al gets off the Luas, the song still playing all the way through the streets of Dublin to his office, Bridgespan: Ireland’s Bridge Management System.
In his sadness he feels buoyed by Ian’s truth – he and Ian know what others don’t.
Love is a con, it’s fake. He’s not distracted anymore by love.
The mushy-gushy, oohey-gooey Al is dead and gone.
Tara left him.
And she left him for Walter.
Wally.
When he’d told Walter that someday this would be him, he didn’t mean with his fiancée! When he said someday Walter would feel what he feels, he didn’t mean being inside his fiancée!
He punches the button for the elevator and when it doesn’t come to the ground floor fast enough he abandons it and takes the stairs in twos, using the rage-fuelled adrenaline that’s coursing through his body.
He wants to shout and roar. He wants to punch the walls. He wants to tear Walter to shreds.
His best friend. His fiancée! His best friend and his fiancée.
Al had felt sorry for Walter, throughout their lives.
Al had lived with him since college, had known him since childhood.
He’d trusted him with everything. Walter knew Al’s first crushes, his first kiss, his first time having sex, they’d drunk together, puked together, and been in detention together.
They’d partied in Ibiza, and had suffered sunstroke working on beach sunbeds in Miami together for a summer.
Al had held Tommy Brown down while Walter punched him after calling Walter’s mam a prostitute, who was actually a book-keeper and had businessmen visiting the house.
How he’d like to hold Walter down now and throttle him.
The run upstairs does nothing to quell his anger. He feels like making an announcement in the open-plan office. Love is a con! Walter is a cock!
He’d even gotten Walter a job right here at Bridgespan.
They needed an in-house ecologist. Al had pushed for Walter, prepped Walter for the interview and they’d hired him.
Because of Al, Walter had a proper paying job instead of floating as an assistant ecologist for a non-profit eel organisation.
Walter is now making just as much as Al is.
He had legitimised Walter, dragged him into adulthood.
He’d helped him change his stupid Oasis haircut that even Oasis stopped wearing and he lost the Converse and T-shirts.
He wears suits now, he has his own office.
And now Al is forced to see him every day.
How much Al wants to flatten Walter’s nose against his face.
Every morning Walter gets out of the bed that Al shared with his fiancée, that he bought with his fiancée, in a house that Al shared with his fiancée and was kicked out of, and goes to his job that Al got for him.
‘What?’ he snaps aggressively, removing his headphones as his office assistant Natasha waves her pink fluorescent fingernails across his face.
Natasha, twenty-four years old, amateur boxer, looks like she’s stepped out of a fashion magazine.
She has a total of thirty-one piercings – according to her special skills section in her CV – she is petite at five feet tall, she is more metal than skin.
She wears a blunt blonde haircut with strips of pink, with pink train tracks, and usually one or all items of her clothing are pink.
She is refreshing, and deserved the job, but he’ll admit, sometimes intimidates him because nothing intimidates her and, despite their height difference, she could probably knock him out in seconds.
‘That music is so loud, Al, I could hear the song from here.’
‘I like it like that,’ he says sniffing, feeling self-conscious that he played it multiple times on repeat in the crammed tram.
‘It can’t be good for you.’
Love isn’t good for you.
He removes his bag and coat and enters his office. Everybody else is open-plan but the offices around the edge of the building are private.
‘Helen Hanratty is here.’
‘I don’t know who Helen Hanratty is,’ he says, sitting down. His office looks out over Dublin’s River Liffey in the centre of the city. All around him a new Dublin has emerged from the docklands, glass buildings for living and working in.
As head of bridge maintenance in Leinster, he feels pleased that he can see at least most of the bridges over the River Liffey.
Al is closest to the newest bridge in town, the Samuel Beckett Bridge, named after the Dublin-born writer, a cable-stayed swing bridge that joins Sir Rogerson Quay to Guild Street and North Wall Quay.
The shape of its spar and cables evokes the image of a harp on its side.
At night the strings are lit up and move, sometimes acting as a screen for animation.
There are over twenty bridges spanning the River Liffey and instead of doing the twelve pubs of Christmas, which entails visiting each of twelve pubs on Christmas Eve and having a pint in each, he and Walter had attempted the bridges of Christmas.
Loaded down with cans in their bags they’d embarked on their adventure.
He couldn’t remember how far they’d gotten but he’d woken up at home, with an empty bag of cans, sharing a bed with Walter, with a fuming Tara who would barely look him in the eye the next
morning.
‘You do know Helen Hanratty,’ Natasha says, snapping him back to the room. ‘She’s from the No Locks Association. She’s been contacting you since before Christmas.’
Before Christmas. Before his life crashed and burned.
‘Ahh, my friend Helen. They’re not an official association. She’s just one nosy local with an equally nosy friend.’
‘Well now they’re an association.’ Natasha hands him a document showing its creation, signed by Helen Hanratty. ‘They’re in the meeting room.’
‘Who let them in?’
‘Walter. She’s meeting with him about the river water. People throw their padlock keys into the river. Maybe they choke turtles or give fish concussions.’
‘There aren’t any turtles in the River Camac.’
‘Well whatever,’ she says with a shrug.
Al is raging. He had successfully avoided a meeting with this nutter for months and now Walter had gone and granted her a meeting which would give her the illusion of legitimacy.
Lovely sweet Walter, unthreatening Walter.
Demure third-wheel Walter who makes you feel sorry for him and then stabs you in the back.
He holds back on saying the nasty Walter insults aloud, which takes all of his inner strength.
Walter and Al have managed to keep what has happened private.
Al had returned to work in the New Year expecting everybody to know everything, for the office to be awash with gossip, but nobody knew that his engagement was off and so, at least at work, his life was unchanged.
He would tell them eventually, not that it required an announcement, but he would not outright lie the next time somebody asked him about Tara.
‘Okay. Tell Helen Hanratty that I’ll meet with her for ten minutes.’
‘Great,’ Natasha says happily. ‘Pedro and I have a lock on that bridge, so don’t you dare get rid of it. It’s two padlocks connected, gold, engraved, got our names on them. PG. Pedro García, like the shoe designer. And I’m NK. Natasha Kelly. You better not do anything to our locks,’ she warns him.
‘I know your name, and I’m not going to go near the locks,’ he says, shuffling paper work around on his desk, fighting his rising anger. ‘What’s the point of putting a lock on a bridge anyway? It just ruins a good bridge.’
‘It symbolises connection and promise. And don’t look at me like that, you’re one of the mushiest fellas I know.
I heard all about your proposal to Tara, with all those soppy romantic film quotes, so don’t even pretend you don’t have a love lock on a bridge somewhere in the world. It’s probably your profile pic.’
‘I don’t.’
But she’s not listening.
‘You’re just trying to wind me up and it’s not working,’ she says, wound up.
Al watches Walter in the boardroom, a glass box in the centre of the room, a human sweat box, transparent for all to see.
If it was designed that way to ensure meetings are short then it was a genius idea.
Walter’s expression: concerned, attentive and caring.
Small mouselike features, small eyes, small nose, small lips, big unruly curly hair.
Rodent. Girls always thought he was cute, while Al was sexy.
Walter was awkward and approachable, girls got to him to get to Al.
Walter listens to the two women and occasionally takes notes.
Moments later the meeting ends and Walter holds the door open for them. Natasha is quick and jumps out of her chair to greet them. They leave, red cheeks and coats over their arms, flushed from the heat in the room. Walter looks over at Al, then away again quickly, afraid.
Yeah, be afraid, Al thinks, glaring at him, hands in his pockets, balled up in fists. Walter gathers his paperwork and scuttles off to his desk at the other end of the floor.
‘Good morning, ladies,’ Al says. ‘Welcome to my office, it’s nice and cool in here. Would you like some water?’
‘Oh yes, please,’ Helen says, pulling at her polo-neck sweater.
‘Natasha, could you, please?’
‘Of course.’
‘Please sit.’ He sits behind his desk. ‘How can I help you?’
‘We’re here about the Grace Plunkett pedestrian bridge.’
‘I’m familiar with it.’
The Grace Plunkett Bridge, erected in 2016, one hundred years after the Easter Rising, is a pedestrian bridge over the River Camac which runs behind Kilmainham Gaol museum where she once resided, and where she wed her husband Joseph Mary Plunkett hours before he was executed for his involvement in the Rising.
‘Contrary to beliefs, we are not anti-love,’ Helen Hanratty says with a smile. ‘I have been married for fifty years, and Mary has been married for forty-five. We realise that this No Love Locks campaign can be seen as anti-love.’
He sits up, actually interested, because he is very much anti-love and would support any campaign that would weaken its popularity. Maybe Ian Curtis would be interested in this topic.
‘There are a few factors to consider. One, it’s not aesthetically pleasing. Tourists are mostly to blame of course, they are the acts of selfish visitors who feel the need to leave their mark on a city instead of enjoying it.’
‘They’re a normalised form of vandalism,’ Mary says sternly.
Al nods along in total agreement. Stupid people in love, smearing their love in people’s faces. They should grow up and keep it to themselves.
‘Secondly, there’s the environmental issue, we spoke to your colleague about that, people snap on the lock, throw the key in the river, as a sign of their unbreakable devotion to one another.’
He rolls his eyes along with them. What are people in love like?
‘The keys can block drains and lead to floods. And it’s an area prone to flooding, as you well know.’
He nods along, enthusiastically, already wanting to get rid of these dangerous love locks.
‘Thirdly. Danger? There’s the potential collapse of the bridge. Or of the panels beneath the railings at least. They look to be bending from the weight of the locks. Love locks or not, they’ll tear the bridge down.’
‘You’re right,’ Al says, in full and total agreement. ‘Everything you said is right. I’m going to go there myself as soon as I can to visit it.’
They’re surprised by this quick response, after weeks of him ducking and diving to avoid them.
Ian Curtis said it. “Love Will Tear Us Apart.”
And these damn love locks will tear down the bridge. They’ll have to go.