By Peter O’Neill
White was sitting behind the cash register in the basement of Stones and Water, the most upmarket bookshop in Dublin at the time. It was a Wednesday evening, and, while he leafed through a very expensive coffee table book by Robert Parker, on the wines of Bordeaux, he couldn’t help but keep an eye on the proceedings above his head.
There was a reading taking place on the top floor in the Arts department. Conor MaCarthy, a rather tall pencil thin chap with permanent stubble and curly brown hair, glasses, bad pullover…the whole ‘I’ve studied literature at either UCD or Trinity, am left of centre politically, read The Guardian and The Irish Times and pride myself on my numerous rainbow coloured multicultural LGBT friends’… had, as usual, organised the monthly reading, but this time for Richard Ford.
The American novelist was doing a world tour promoting his latest novel Independence Day. It was, of course, a huge deal. The whole bookshop was in an even heightened sense of alert than usual, all the booksellers swarmed about MaCarthy whenever they could. He was like the star bookseller in the place, as he had actual access to the pantheon of literary gods who, at times, would venture to read in the accursed place.
White tried to look bored. It wasn’t difficult as he had been relegated, in almost stark contrast to MaCarthy, to the hobbies section in the windowless basement where he would scan the various gardening books for the browsing customers, typically middle- aged women who were looking for a good bargain. White had been feeling as motivated as a turd floating in the slipstream in his own present situation; recently divorced, as yet unpublished, and with absolutely zero prospects of anything appearing on the horizon except ever mounting
cascades of his own shit!
He glanced down at the Geological Map of Bordeaux. The mighty Gironde poured into the land like a great sluice, dividing up the surrounding vineyards into two luscious banks. On the left bank you had the litany of names that once uttered, or even seen, were enough to send anyone into an almost mystical trance: Médoc, Saint Esthèphe, Paulliac, Saint-Julien, Listrac, Moulis and Margaux. One had to merely utter these sacred names on the tongue to summon up the corresponding tannin, terroirs, and of course, the sun!
Further down, unknown yet to White at the time, would come other lesser- known names such as Mérignac, Pessac, and Pessac-Léognan. How oblivious he was then, poor White, to the terrible wounds that he had yet to face, and which he would feel in his mind and soul whenever he was to hear or see those very same names again!
Oh, but back then, sitting there in that all too comfortable chair behind the cash register in the basement department at Stones & Water, that very evening when Richard Ford was probably up in The Lord Mayors Lounge in Kildare Street in The Shelbourne sipping on a fine old claret, himself, while awaiting on his host, the one and only Cormac MaCarthy to come and take him away so that he might evoke the gods of Parnassus, if only for a day! It was always the same, White’s mind moaned eternally. When will my time ever come? And, that is when the idea had first come to him, sitting in that dour basement leafing through Parker’s Wine Atlas of France, contemplating the great vineyards of Bordeaux. What if I were to return?
Yes, on the face of it, it was a totally mad proposal. He had only, just some months ago, returned to Ireland after recently splitting up with his French wife having spent over five years living with her in the suburbs of Paris, mainly Versailles of all places!
It had been hard to shake off the gallic side of him off. He was still smoking Gitanes living out some kind of bohemian ideal drinking till all hours in the morning in a small French wine bar only a few hundred meters or so from the bookstore. Jesus, what was with that? Could he not extricate himself further from his workplace without falling into the first wine bar that he came across?
It is true, White was having difficulties settling down. Only that weekend he had gotten absolutely shit-faced, the only term that could at all accurately describe the absolutely drunken and debauched nature of the events of the day in question. As usual White had retired to Le Cave and had both drunk and danced till the early hours of the morning, his last memories were sipping some vintage port with one of the booksellers, who, like White, had some kind of literary pretentions. Oh, bookshops were full of them. This particular prick had a fetish for Dame Francis Yates. That is all White could recall, Dame bloody Francis Yates and the constant eulogising about port. What a proper British wanker, White thought seeing the conniving face appear within his mind once again.
That escapade had almost cost White his job as he had arrived into work almost two hours late and that is when he had been relegated to the basement. Before that he had been shovelling Trollope off of the ground floor shelves, volumes and volumes of the stuff.
“Who in the name of God has been ordering all of the Goddam Trollope?”
White was standing there filling box after empty box full of Trollope and then he quickly started replacing him with the collected works of Friedrich Nietzsche. Totally radical, man! This had caused utter consternation between the two floor managers who were supposed to be overseeing our boy White. Jesus, the innocence of him. Can you see him standing there, stinking of caporal, looking kind of suitably hip, and shagged!
He had only been in the place three days, and, he was already in trouble! All of the Trollope that he had tucked away under the stairs, after first getting the okay from one of the cleaning ladies, had to be reshelved. That was the first of a number of very public humiliations. Until, eventually, after coming in late on a Saturday morning, the assistant manager, a rather corpulent man in his mid-thirties with short hair and, once again, a rather atrocious jumper and another pair of glasses, handed White a Spearmint gum and told him to stop breathing wine fumes all over the customers.
The manager at the time, who was very fond of White, could only look on sadly as he himself
was a newbie too, and he didn’t want to be going up against the local power structure. The floor managers were like the civil service, they were going nowhere while the store managers were rather like the government, they would just come and go.
White looked back down at the map.
“Entre-Deux Mers!” he pronounced with his best gallic accent.
It sounded vaguely prophetic.
The Importance of Arts, Culture & The Creative Process
Art is often considered by so called business people to be the adoptive daughter of the other sciences, when will they realise that this is simple bad economics and utterly ruinous for the colloective environment.
What was the inspiration for your creative work?
The Muse = Women
Tell us something about the natural world that you love and don’t wish to lose. What are your thoughts on the kind of world we are leaving for the next generation?
History! = human consciousness
