Relegated Vessels

[a redraft from the story, A Relegated Ship, Run Aground, included in Strangely Fierce Fables]

She is a rusted merchant ship, the oldest remaining in Ireland, moored to rest along the banks of the Grand Canal. She’s named the Naomh Éanna. Completed in Dublin’s Liffey Dockyard in 1958, sailing in her prime as an Aran Islands ferry, she lays now in her graving dock back in Dublin, overdue for demolition since 1989. Various local councils have petitioned to list her as a heritage vessel with little success. Throughout the competing ideas for restoration, ranging from river ferry to museum to boutique hotel, she waits hopefully, leaning crooked in a muddy embankment. She is enclosed by barbed wire and graffitied walls on a restricted lot of wild grass. Her metal rails are rusted, her bones are frail. This lonely derelict wears a fresh badge of spray paint, pleading simply, ‘Don’t Scrap Me Now.’

Discarded and struggling to remain relevant. You know a thing or two about the feeling, finding comfort gazing upon this old relic, as you take your morning canal strolls. You see Dublin from a distance and mark its many risings and renewals. You arrived here before the Easter Rising centennial, just in time to hear the last death rattles of a collapsing Celtic Tiger. This rusted old ship, laying dormant in a suburb of renewed wealth, is just one of many forgotten ruins humming a lonesome song, patiently waiting for her turn.

He is a homeless tattered man, well tenured on his beat, living off the streets along the Grand Canal. He’s named Paul, or so you’ve been told by local shop clerks who knew him best. Paul scavenges along the South Wall and Ringsend and he lays camp at the protected lot where the Naomh Éanna sulked each evening. No one shares the Naomh’s discarded abandonment better than this man, the rough sleeper who camps under her rusted bones, in just another reclaimed loan-default lot. Paul’s image, from his bulldog walk and mud-caked sweatpants to his scuffed hands and black oily hair, all seem to proclaim, ‘I will not be scrapped.’

Discarded and struggling to remain relevant. You know a thing or two about the feeling. Paul is a phantom on these docks, regarded with small tokens of kindness by some and avoided by many. He isn’t an addict, or a drunk, or a beggar, or a criminal. Maybe a little off-kilter, maybe a bit deranged. Maybe he just sees a world that most people choose to ignore. Everyday he walks the open square by the canal basin, making his rounds, checking the bins, shaking out his demon thoughts, twitching and stammering, often bursting with laughter over something the voices must’ve said. 

Paul shows a quiet respect for his community, always paying for his modest purchases when he had enough change. Unlike the rougher beggars from town, he never harasses anyone or sticks a cup in their faces, clamouring ‘change for the hostel, change for the hostel.’ 

Occasionally, someone like that comes along, tweaking up and down the quays, unnerving the cafe dwellers. Inevitably, it is the apparition of Paul reemerging from his shadows who chases the intruder away. He is the watchdog that keeps the peace, laying down the pecking order in this tidy community. Who gives and who takes.

And you couldn’t help notice, anytime you feel stuck in your own head, Paul would appear. Lost in your own uptown problems, walking off your white collar worries, there he was. Conjured up like a twisted mirror in your face, stirring one single repeated thought every time. That you wish to know him, to commune by any act of kindness. So often you spot him too late, as he slaloms between office buildings and hotel service roads, disappearing before you can rifle for change. Staring down an empty alleyway, puddles still stirring in his wake, you long only to help him feel less invisible.  

The area is named the Grand Canal Dock, or Silicon Docks, in deference to the Silicon Valley companies that hold its borders. Arriving in these recovery years, after the bubble burst, you find a city still scarred. You’re an outsider looking in, seeing the things many ignore. You see the splintering cracks from a tidal wave of tech money. A century ago, a California gold rush beckoned a starving Irish people with the promise of fortune. Now the money is being pipelined back over like broadband to the safe havens of Ireland. This river divided city has become a place for all to come claim their fortune.

There is no stopping the juggernauts, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, from reshaping the city skyline. Banks are dishing out cheap loans again, rebates and free money. Everyone is propping themselves up on precarious stilts of wealth, whilst proudly shaking their fists at history. Crying defiantly, this prosperity will endure, ‘this time it will last forever!’

Commercial real estate blossoms like springtime, as the tech giants rain a seemingly endless stream of money. The famed Irish concrete and construction companies have been busy plastering over the old and discarded. New bridges and commercial highrises stand proudly. The moguls stack hastily assembled apartments and everyone scrambles for their piece of the fast selling pie. 

You move into one of those posh developments, slapped together, promising luxury, but a little slanted at the seams. A grand sprawling vista across the River Liffey, it is not hard to imagine the historical storyboard of the last boom. Reading Dublin’s tale from left to right, west to east, the North Wall Quay, the harp-shaped Samuel Beckett bridge, the pint glass shaped Convention Centre. Approaching Dublin Bay, all the stalled construction plans of Point Square. An empty mall, a desert island hotel, an isolated concert arena. 

Punctuated deadcenter along the timeline, a derelict tower planned to be headquarters for the Anglo Irish Bank stands alone. This embodiment of the collapse stands naked, stripped bare and exposed. Like the Spire of Dublin before it, stretching unshakably to the heavens during surging times, the ruin serves a sober summons against the impulse to overreach. It is the last remaining piece of the city’s stalled timeline, this unassailable bank.  You notice the yellow cranes being assembled around it now and can see it’s finally back in development, recommissioned by the Central Bank as their headquarters and being refinished with a gilded wink at the sky.

The city seems to flow both ways like the Liffey itself. When the ‘work from home era’ promises continuous wealth through the pandemic, jobs are booming again. When the tech companies over-speculate on the trend, they pivot with massive layoffs to appease shareholders. The Naomh is there throughout, watching idly, as the tide comes in, then back out, over and over again.    

Like any assembly line stalling hard and speeding up, the boxes fall off the belt, and people get left behind. You are like everyone else, moving from job to job to jobless. Squeezed between twenty-four displaced middle-aged men, all with the same defeated look. We sit patiently through an unemployment presentation, feeling invisible in a city failing to keep up. Each forlorn face betrayed by the city’s invitation to fortune, whispering ‘Don’t make us beg for our scraps.’ 

During lockdown, Paul had disappeared, his presence still traced in those tucked away alleys. A tattered sleeping bag twisted in the wild grass by the Naomh Éanna. But as a rejuvenated bustle returns to the canal square, so does his shadow begin to linger a bit longer. Mingling amidst the sun loving crowds, grabbing a park bench seated quietly between them, no longer keeping his distance, just blending in. 

You’re surprised to spot him wearing a matching navy tracksuit that looks brand new, but for the grass-stained knees. His thick tousled hair has been shaved to a fresh fade. Instead of his usual scurrying, you see him sleeping in the shade of the theater building, curled up like a child on a concrete slate bench. There is an unexpected calmness washing over you now at the sight of his silhouette lingering in the open. Something that lulls your squirrely mind to rest too.

A small crew of builders are taking their lunch break and start gathering in a circle around him. They are prodding each other to take selfies, snickering at his piss stains. You want to holler out in a fit of rage, to teach them their manners, to show Paul the respect he deserves. Before you can even ball your fist, Paul rocks himself upright and begins slapping his head in a wild tantrum. Stammering, sputtering, spitting, he is in a fit of possession that freezes the young mob, and you halt your approach too. They lose their nerve and begin to scatter, chuckling uncertainly at the scene. You’re left there now alone, standing abandoned, leering and exposed.  

Paul’s fit washes over him and he rolls to his feet, marching head down and swifty at you. You brace for a collision when he stops shy of your quivering knees. His averted gaze softens over you and his chapped lips stammers out your name. Or was he telling you his own? Your name is one of many things you share. Alongside this one tiny moment, that precious spark of recognition that he knows you. That he knows you know him. 

When you call out his name, you’re calling out your own. But you’ll never hear his voice again in the days that followed. Every day after, you waste no time gathering the spare change you have.  He doesn’t look you in the eye again. He only slows to let you catch up, then moves on without a word. You forget why it was ever so important that he should know you. You recall the faces of those twenty-five displaced professionals. You can no longer summon those old feelings of blame, or self-pity, or contempt, because you’ve never seen it on Paul’s face. 

Despite the city’s latest revival, the Naoimh Éanna unexpectedly falls over, demanding attention from the local news. The attempts to salvage her have been deemed a failure. An eyesore, inconvenient to our gentrified square, the city council eventually calls for her removal.  

You’re reading this news from a cafe along the docklands and can’t marshal the grief it deserves. You spare a thought for the voiceless, those daring to defy irrelevance. After so many ebbs and flows, you’ve come to realise no one is untouchable, anyone could have their worst falls ahead of them. But the defiant ones never stood still. Depravity or despair, which comes first? Ask Paul, ask the Naoimh, ask those twenty-five job seekers. 

Today the Liffey is swelling high again. You make your way over to the sunken harbour where the old merchant ship is moored. You see all the summer kids in wetsuits, jumping off the Naoimh’s bow into the water, kicking around a twisted up sleeping bag. Their summer fun will be spoiled when the wrecking crew rolls in. For now, you take a seat by the water and imagine the Naoimh in her prime, carving deftly through the open Atlantic.

You hear ghosts across the choppy water haunting us with cries to do better.  Pleas to the city, to the people on top, to those tall glass towers casting shadows from above, ‘Don’t scrap us yet.’