I’d be up and out the door by twenty-five to seven at the very latest. I would take the long road over, the ‘old road’. Fields turned from green to blonde to brown and back in one journey, or so it seemed after the first few years. I once said to John in the yard that I had blinked fourteen years ago and here I am. He laughed, but it was true. Time flies here, in this shithole of a County Council. Time flies, and I was left with nothing to show for my work.
Nothing but clean footpaths and freshly painted bins.
I had my suspicions about our boss, Joe Griffín, since I stepped foot in my lovely stomping ground all those years ago. Joe ‘Bollox’ Griffín we called him. Not to his face, oh no. Behind his back, where it hurt him most. He would come in each day with this walk on him, all high and mighty like, the shoulders back and the head up. The big bollox of a head on him. He had no shame at all. He would call Maura and shout abuse down the phone to her, poor auld Maura. And he giving out to her and telling her what he would have for dinner. He was a spiteful bollox too, our Griffín, and I let the student workers know all about it.
“He won’t like ye.” I says to the boys. “Cos he’s a spiteful bollox. He’ll not like ye cos ye will be up and out of here in six weeks and on to better things. And he can’t handle that”.
“And wait till you see how he treats Maura lads. It’d make you sick.” added Seamus, winking in approval of my warning.
“I wouldn’t say a bad word about anybody” chimed in Daithí, “but I have to say that Joe Griffín is a bollox”.
With lunch over, I went out to pick litter on the Edenderry Road, as I had done every day for fourteen years, returning each day with a full bin bag over my shoulder. I would saunter for about two hours between the yard and the train tracks. Offaly County Council would take it from there. Some said it was tedious work, but I liked it. It gave me a sense of purpose, small as it may be. The messing in the canteen would just about keep me in the job at times, whenever I had my doubts, which to be fair was not that often. I was dubbed to be the new and improved Sisyphus, forever picking litter as punishment for my past sins. I liked this sort of messing, I took pride in the fact that I could always take a joke. I was proud of my work, too, as it was honest work. And it needed to be done.
Now as for that bollox Griffín. With that face on him like he owned us. I followed him home one day after work. I can’t remember why; I was either going to check in on Maura or punch the bollox. Doesn’t matter. What I do remember is seeing rubbish come out of his window as he drove along the Edenderry Road. A bag full of rubbish, mind you, at evenly spaced intervals along my Edenderry route. No wonder his van always reeked of bin juice and wet cigarette butts.
It dawned on me, then and there, that Joe ‘Bollox’ Griffín actually was a bollox. And an even bigger bollox than I had thought he was, which says a lot. As bolloxes come, he was one of the biggest. For fourteen years I had been picking litter up off the Edenderry Road and for fourteen years Joe ‘Bollox’ Griffín had been the one covering it in litter. It wasn’t the teenagers hanging around the tracks, no. Nor was it the people of the town walking by. They probably cared slightly for their town. It was our bollox, Griffín. Fourteen years, lads. I can’t get that back.
So, I did what any man like me would do and I let that anger and hurt and suffering that was rising in me fester and turn worse and worse until I couldn’t take it any longer. Until one day, I walked up to the bollox and I said I was done. I quit. And I called him a bollox, too. To his face and all.
“You! Yeah, you, Griffín! You’re a fuckin’ bollox!” I said.
And then? Well, then I really got my revenge. I would visit poor Maura and, kind soul that she is, she listened to how her bollox of a husband had given me a false sense of purpose in life. For fourteen years.
Maura said she was sick of him as well.
“I’m sick of that bollox” she had said.
“What can we do about it?” I asked, failing to hide the hope in my voice.
“There’s only one thing we can do.” She said.
“And what’s that?” I said.
“Take the damn years back.”
I looked at her then, and smiled. I visited her for a few more weeks, to put in place a plan. To make sure she wanted to go ahead with it. Joe was too much of a thick bollox to realize any of this was happening.
So, after we had it all planned, we packed our things and set off for Berlin with Joe ‘Bollox’ Griffín’s savings in our back pocket. We almost died within the first year with the amount of cocaine we pumped up our noses. I reckon I got a total of a week’s sleep that year.
We hit up Berghain, and somehow I got inside wearing my county council hi-vis. Two yellow punishers later and myself and Maura were on track for a right auld session. Half an hour passed, and I found Maura on the dancefloor. I never knew it before, but I love her. I do. I watch her now, this fifty-year-old Irish woman in the middle of Berghain, on far too much ecstasy, jiving away. My own feet start tapping. I used to think techno was a load of shite, but now I feel the beat in my heart. It is strong, powerful, profound at this minute. It courses through my every sinew, allowing my feet to move and my head to bob and I must look like an eejit but I don’t care. It ebbs into my chest. I close my eyes and see the lights flicker behind my eyelids, dancing to their own rhythm. It makes me present in nothing but here and now. It becomes all I am, the here and the now. It is what I was put here to do, it makes me who I am and it gives me purpose in this very fickle moment. It is a steady beat of a heart on train tracks towards infinity.
And to think I used to give a shite about that bollox Griffín.
