I was in Cork. It was fairly early in the morning, so I was on the hunt for a coffee to jerk me fully awake. I still think of myself as a tea drinker; after lunch that’s all I have. But it’s become my habit, or mild addiction, to have a coffee or two after breakfast. I don’t feel fully awake otherwise.
A young man approached me.
“Can I ask you something?”
In my blurry state it took me a few seconds to fully register this; to understand what he might want to ask. But that’s because I hadn’t given him the visual once-over we all give each other, especially in cities: the way they are dressed, they way they hold themselves, the look of mild desperation in the eyes. It almost tells you their life story. It certainly tells you what world they inhabit: one that is mostly on the streets, where there’s addiction, mental illness, sleeping in hostels or on pavements. There’s occasional violence and regular brushes with the law.
‘I never know when the Dart will arrive. And Irish Rail doesn’t seem to know either’
‘When the cinema lights came up, we all hugged, and I wondered why, on this day, the magic worked for me too’
I hate running. I tried it and it didn’t do me any good. I can’t be alone feeling like this?
If we don’t expect an improved Government, we won’t get one
This young man displayed all those signs, so I gave my default response. I told him I didn’t have any cash. I haven’t carried cash since before the pandemic.
But he waved my response away: to indicate that this was outside the usual terms of an interaction between someone like him and someone like me. Instead, he launched into a slightly garbled story about how he had been involved in a fight the night before. His father and his girlfriend had also been involved. He pointed to a fresh cut over his right eye. The gist of what he was telling me was that he needed to contact his girlfriend. Her number was written on a piece of cardboard torn from a packet of cigarette papers. He was also carrying a small roll of what looked like American dollars. And because we both understood the terms of an interaction between someone like him and someone like me, he said I could hold the money while he used my phone.
It’s not to my credit, but what went through my mind right then was how people might react to this story when I told them about it afterwards. If I handed over the phone and he ran off with it, then I was a trusting eejit. If I refused, then I was a pearl-clutcher, too scared to perform even the smallest favour for another human being, simply because the world he inhabited was alien and frightening.
None of that happened. I did take out my phone, but the scrawled number was so indecipherable we couldn’t make any sense of it. He said he’d find another way to contact her. He walked off, back to his world. I walked off to get a nice coffee.
Later that day, I interviewed James Leonard who, among many other things, is one half of the The Two Norries, a podcast that speaks a lot about addiction issues: because for some years James too inhabited that twilight world, one defined by the circular routine of getting the money to buy drugs, taking the drugs, waking up in Garda stations or on pavements. There were arrests and a stretch in prison. Depression and desperation.
After many attempts, he eventually broke out of the cycle, and today is a hugely impressive character. You can google his story and its notable how many articles about him use the word “redemption”: an explicitly moral term; as if James had inhabited an underworld populated by sinners, but eventually returned to a place of virtue, where the rest of us live.
For those of us who have houses and jobs and families and comfort, we might like to think we deserve the lives we have. But perhaps that’s to distract from a darker truth of just how tenuous those lives are; that we are where we are due to blind luck.