Brendan Nolan's Blog, page 5

A fallen man

Not everybody lying on a city street is dead.
I exit a 300-year-old city centre building, with other people, following a meeting.
We are in that laguna where you just want to walk away from these people until the next time; but are compelled to make small talk, at least until a city bus arrives.
The man's head faces the door and we have a clear view of his untied shoes at the extremity of his body.
He's dead, someone says. No, he's only sleeping, says another.
Kick him in the belly, to see what happens, says the man in the blue suit who said nothing at all at the meeting; but who wants to say something now, so we know he was present.
I walk around to the man's shoes and see his belly is rising and falling with life.
I press his shoe where his big toe should be.
He wakes up and asks what happened; he fell asleep in the sun sitting on the step waiting for a delayed bus.

I have started to tie his lace in an absent minded way because that is what I did with my children, lest they fall over.
I look up and the man is embarrassed at having another man tying his laces on a city street in the summer heat; but these things happen when you are waiting for a bus to take you away and the meeting is over.
Storytelling here

A hard rain

I go on holidays to Florida and spend a week with my family doing Orlando.Week two, we are miles away at a beach where we expect to relax and recover from last week's awesome rides.



Except, we grow weary of blowtorch sun and lizard-like seeking of shade, after a while.
We will take an all-day trip back to Orland to see something we missed the first time.
At dawn, we pile into an air-conditioned coach and travel to a large car-park to meet other coaches where passengers and coaches are swapped with the frenzy and enthusiasm of a key-party of blessed memory.
We are approaching blast-off when a small man presents himself at the foot of the stairs and asks our driver if it's going to rain?
He gets our attention. Rain?
The driver says no; the man asks where the driver is going?
You see, he says, I have been here for two weeks and wherever I go it rains.
We whisper to the driver to close the door; shun him, the rainmaker.
But the man is at the wrong coach.
He boards another and it pulls away. We make signals to the passengers on that coach to get out now.
It's going to rain, we signal.
But they think we are mad.
Maybe it's the sun that makes people mad, we say, as we lash on the sun barrier cream.

Old clothes

I buy a waistcoat that was old when I was born. I consider buying a hat to match but think it might be seen as pretentious.
Besides, few men wear a hat that does not say they may be bald underneath, to some extent, or, thinking of going bald. I am not, though I have a high forehead since childhood.
So a waistcoat it is, that piece of men's clothing the Americans call a vest, whereas for Europeans a vest is an undershirt.
But few enough people are wearing waistcoats these days as straightforward clothing; mostly they are statements.
Some men with ponytails and ugly noses wear them to show they still believe; after all these years.
I decide a badge or two might change the lie of the garment. I see a few protest badges for sale for a single coin each.
Perhaps the Ban the Bomb one would look well; but then I realise I will be answering questions to younger people as to which bomb I mean.
Nuclear Power No Thanks is a nice combination of yellow and frightening red, made before we all woke up to the delights of Chernobyl fallout. It seems redundant somehow.
So I settle for a single button , made by Anne, before she left us.
It says:
Just Peace, Please.

Hello

People keep ringing me up to say nothing.
The phone rings. Who does not pick up with some anticipation: be it of fight, flight, frolic, or fantasy?
Or, wrong number. Failure.
Silence.
A new system sets up a cold sales call while the caller is ending the previous chat.
You are queued for a buying conversation you did not ask for.
It's like being asked to wait in line on a street to be processed by the beggar at the head of the line who badly needs a bed for the night, a cup of tea, or, assistance to get to somewhere else.
Next?
You can tire of the silence and break the connection; but then you miss bonding with the caller who is intent on getting you to buy something from him so he can have a bed for the night, a cup of tea or his taxi fare to the airport of his choice.
I've given up waiting for human response when I say hello to silence.
It might be a wrong number from a fool seeking random conversation with a voice on the other end, not a sales call at all.
Hello?
Hang up.
Storytelling here

Man not found in wardrobe

I tell a story in Barking Mad, Tales of Liars, Lovers, Loonies and Layabouts about a married lover almost caught by the husband he has cuckolded. The husband arrives home from gaol early. The lover hides in the wardrobe until the man greets his wife and leaves the bedroom, after a while.
I would never say who the man in the wardrobe was, though he told me the story himself, when he was 84-years- old; one day when we were sitting on a wall.
However, since the book came out: no less than eight men were positively identified as the man in the wardrobe. None were correct.
Now, two women have begun to befriend me and ask me where I found that story. They have assured me they are not the wife in question.
I never said either of them was.
Am I missing many more stories here?
Or did the 84-year-old get around a lot in his earlier decades?
I don't know; for he passed away in a bed not his own, with a smile on his face, last year.
I cannot now sleep for want of knowing.
Storytelling here

So shall it be written

I miss the tactility of a subscription magazine falling through my letterbox, once a month.
I miss the excitement of seeing my name on the address label even though I paid to have it there.
Someone has sent me something, someone is thinking about me, even if it is a machine. Do machines think, do they have feelings? I don't know but I would not like to hurt their feelings just in case, so I say nothing.
Wrappers changed over the years, so in the end you could read the front cover without unwrapping anything; but so too could anyone else in the human chain.
No private hugs of knowledge when the old brown paper wrapper came off.
No wonder at the news from afar from the welcome mat in your home.
Now, no physical pages to turn, no flicking at speed from the back forward, no seeking the favoured page. No glimpsing for the first time.
It's online now and who cares what the content is or what a time-filling designer has decided today's site will look like.
They have missed the point, the new marketers.
They have swapped my physical relationship for an online image that fades when the new machine is unplugged.
Can machines feel that; being cut off?
I hope not.
Storytelling here

Made up doctor

I sit in the main corridor of a television station waiting for interview.
I will talk about my new book Dublin Folk Tales.
We are three guests. Two female and a male. We get made-up one at a time, this I resolve not to tell anyone, though I am told by make-up that it is to take glare from my skin in the studio lights.But she does something to my lips that reminds me too much of the taxidermist's dark arts. I look in the huge mirror but can see no difference.I wonder what the camera will see.Back in the corridor a programme worker calls me doctor.I am a storyteller, I explain, not a doctor; but if she has issues I will listen to them and tell her a story on that very issue. It might help.
She declines and is nice, I would have liked to tell her a story; but the woman doctor appears and they vanish into a studio.
Then I am on and my lips with the make-up move and I forget about it until I am driving home and remember that I am a male driver travelling along alone with make-up on.
I hope nobody sees me.
Storytelling here

What Did He Say?

The man on the bus says he will not speak to the caller on his mobile phone. Then, there is silence from him while the caller asks him why not?He says you hung up on me, last time. This is not acceptable behaviour.The conversation ends with no more words and we all agree with the victory for civility and the consequent quietness on our journey.Later he speaks again, to someone else who has called him on his silent phone.English is not his first language and he is precise in what he says.He explains to a new caller that he will not speak to the first person; even though it is a business call. He says she is foolish and she should not put herself above another person.
He had helped her, he said, by giving her food, and a place to stay which was all she wanted of him, and sex, he adds, using the word but once; but she should not have hung up the phone on him.
The second caller is thanked politely by him for their nice call and manner and the conversation ends.
Leaving everyone else wishing for once that this call had gone on a little longer.
Foolish?
Storytelling here

Heal Thyself

It is very easy to create a false impression.
My doctor tells there is nothing wrong with me when I walk in to see him.
Of course he is right, this time.
But the last time I saw him he told me I should have died the winter before of a virulent winter chest cold.
I thought you were going to die, it's nice to see you, he says. I lost four men of your age from this practice, with the very same thing you had.
Why didn't you tell me that then? I ask, after I sit down.
Would it have made any difference? You would have continued working in spite of me.
This is why I stick with him. He only worries about lunch.
I need a health check for insurance purposes. He runs through the details and enquires if there are many patients in his waiting room?
I say not a lot, so he says: stay and we'll chat.
He takes a flask and a pile of sandwiches from his desk, where he keeps the prescription blanks.
I tell him some stories, he tells me some more, we laugh, and I leave when he sweeps the crumbs up.
His waiting room is full now with anxious people with coughs.
Lots of people have been asking me ever since if I am terminally ill.
Aren't we all?
Storytelling here

Blue Paper

I ask the shop assistant if they stock blue paper.
She says they are a stationer's not a hardware store.
I repeat the word blue louder this time and add that it's a colour, so she understands my predicament.
Most printing paper is never ending white so the odd sheet of another colour serves as a marker.
I need to make sure that when a writing client flicks through the finished pages he pauses at the correct places.
Blue, I say again.
She asks if I did not see the display of blue typing paper at the shop doorway when I came in, fool that I am she says without speaking.
I hasten to the front door from the bowels of the shop where they sell coloured card, but no paper unless it is white.
I see mountains of reams of blue-wrapped paper that turns out to be white inside.
I look for her, but she has faded into the stationery.
She has taken refuge in the magazine section where products come in all sorts of unbelievable colours.
I resolve to travel to the next town on the morrow in search of blue paper, blue.
Such are the ways that a writer goes quietly mad.
Blue.
Storytelling here