Kitty Takes The Zoomo

A little delve into my book in progress. Working title - Ben.
Kitty Whelan strode like she meant business, up into the holding area in the space between the outside tunnel and the entrance into the Shaft City. She waited along the Red Line until the Zoomo came hurtling down the rails like a charging bull. 

It stopped, expanded some brief air into the warm cold night and mixed with a trace of blackened petrol it hissed white steam into the air. As the double doors to the side wheezed open, Kitty caught the draft and pulled the collar of her dark bomber jacket up around her neck, trying to stave of the last dying degrees of the cold chill.

The Zoomo was full of compressed bodies, some Younglings, holding onto the handrails above them, others, Shaft Rats hovering like small flies in-between their heads. And the Ockras sitting in the seated area, jelled bellies globed together like pieces of soft dough and their eyes receding and then emerging from their faces.

Altogether not a particularly nice way to travel, thought Kitty. But remembered the alternative had been the ride offered on Fitz’s Chariot and she had no intention of getting into another situation she could not get out of.

She was just about to step onto the Z train when she heard the honk of the horn. Turning around she saw Fitz sitting in the driver seat of the Chariot, across on the other tram lane. He rolled down the window with ease.

“Ride for the lady?” he shouted over to Kitty.

“Sorry! Already on board here!” she shouted back, and put one foot onto the train, watching from inside, as the doors shut tight in front of her face.

Fitz smiled and rolled up his window, giving her a wink. The last Kitty saw was the Chariot taking off at speed into the night, just before her breath fogged up the interior of the Zoomo, and just before she was to feel the cold clammy wet padded paw of the Earthling to her left.   (c) 

She's Going To Secondary School

I am not sure if the dog can actually ‘take this in’ – but he seems to be doing a good enough job listening to me and giving me that sorrowful look with his big brown eyes. Which are rimmed a bit with blood-shot red, which by all accounts is a sign of a great storm. 
Which is what we apparently are having today with the lashings of rain outside and the fear to go to the shop even for an emergency bar of chocolate. Which I need, right now.

Because my daughter is singing in her room, and she keeps appearing in front of me saying – “I literally, cannot, (little jump up) wait!”

I literally, (pretend smile on face), can. It's all too soon.

Aoise who is 12 and almost 13 any day now, is going to Secondary School tomorrow for the first time.

I have spent the day distracting us from the actual thought of it, but as I write this evening, I have blurted the news out to some unfortuantes who've happened to lend an ear, and who were rather stuffed with anxiety for me about it all.

The young fella in the Credit Union was very supportive. “What’s your main subject?” he asked as if it was the ultimate thing to say. “Home economics,” said the daughter proudly and rightly so because she is a great cook, and bakes amazing muffins, pancakes and such likes that I – on the contrary – do not bake – but eat. I don’t even (hands up here) cook – much, and when the children were little I had to disguise every meal produced, with foreign and exotic sounding names in the hopes that they would be fooled into eating them.

Chicken Towers With Cup Of Rice – Chicken Surprise (said in French accent). I was banned from using the word ‘Pie’ in reference to any meal, as it made the little son heave. So, Chicken Yum Yum.

I blurted out during the course of the day, a forlorn - “Aoise is starting Secondary School tomorrow.” As if that would cover every reason why my life today has turned into something, that if it was a graph on a sheet of paper, would look like a rather spiked mountain, followed by spikey smaller valleys and rounding up by evening time as enormous spike off the Richter Scale.

I've tried to iron on the iron-on name tags, which I did not manage very well and had objections to them from the word go when I wrote her name in Irish – hoping to give her a bit of a booster.

I briefly left the son to his own devices and found him in his room putting stickers on his pens and totalling up the money in his piggy bank. Another visit from the Tooth Fairy – left him a €2.76 cent. Oops.  Such is the level of distractedness in here.

I am trying to hold it all in (crying wise) until she goes to Secondary School tomorrow morning. I know she will be fine. But her father, brother and myself will not. It's a new chapter and metaphorically speaking, it is a new blank page in our family's life.

“I’ll have nobody to stick up for me!” said the son this morning, standing opposite her in the kitchen. He was kind of half glad. But also kind of glum. They'd spent the past six years "minding" each other in the school playground and making good friends together. Not that he'd ever had any cause to use the strengths of his sister in a melee. The Richter Scale's needle was quivering. “Yes, you’ll just have to get on with it,” she replied diffusing the stand-off, matter-of-factly. I meanwhile, will just focus on the positives and keep talking to the dog. He's moved out into the hall now, huddled near the front door. And I don't blame him. More storms may not be too far away.

Good Luck Aoise - we love you X

Bad Manners Near The Croissants

First bad point of the day – Bad Manners near the Croissants.

I gave a bit of a snort and a sniff. It would never happen in Paris. You wouldn’t get a one like her, as by those types, small-petite- feigning helpless- blouse and short skirt variety, standing in front of you – in actual fact between you and your croissant. You just wouldn’t get it. It would not be on.

I was just about to use the mechanical contraption akin to a pair of large blunt scissors – to choose my favourite croissant, when she had stood right in front of me and had begun rummaging around the doughnuts area.

To make matters worse she didn’t even offer up a feeble – excuse me. No carried on hovering her hand the odd time over a perhaps chosen item, then shaking her head and moving on, and then listfully gazed to the man on my right and asked how did you cut the loaf of bread.

And he took her loaf as if it was a baby in a blanket and gingerly placed it into the crumb filled cutting machine and both of them gazed in awe as it sliced the life out of the dough, in thick chunky segments.

I must have had the scissor yoke aloft menacingly in my hand because my dear daughter appeared to the left and told me we’d better get on. It was not like her to tell me anything like that, especially around the confectionary area.

And then all feeling went out of my face when I looked at her and realised her speech was slurred and her eyes rolling a bit too jolly in her head. Panic for a moment as I gazed over her shoulder and watched the man tidy up the little loaf and with his other hand run air into a plastic bag, flapping it like it was a flag. Until it billowed out and he shoved the loaf through it like it was a train going through a plastic tunnel. Reminding me of the George Pompidu Centre.

The daughter tapped me on the shoulder, she was not in any peril thankfully, just had popped a bit of croissant into her mouth and had been chewing it for a brief while.

Second bad point of the day – the Croissants Were Chewy.

So I dutifully picked the milk from the furthest end of the store as they always place them (left corner, furthest back) ruminating with the unusual yoghurts no on usually goes for.

I headed back up to the conveyor belt with murderous intent to cause alarm if anyone stepped in my way. With images of spilt milk and adjectives like that coming into my head. Thundering on, swinging the milk with my daughter darting out at tangents to look at bicycle pumps and tent equipment, I thought, save me from all unnecessary evil and plaster a smile on my face today.

SO I did, and the guy at the check-out was so jovial and full of the joys that when he said – it’s warm out this morning – I didn’t have the heart to tell him it was 50 degrees, I was contemplating wearing a thermal vest and in Paris, right now I would be consuming three authentic croissants and an espresso – sur a canvas with the side of the Arc de Triomphe to my left and the weight of the world off my rounded shoulders. But I didn’t and just got on with the business of bagging the croissants and taking a bite out of one, as we passed through the exit doors and I saw petite miss turning the last aisle towards the cashier.

But at that stage I was too busy chewing on my croissant to really care and looked forward to driving past the only plaqued connection to the City of Romance, the birthplace of the man who had helped to build the Pompidu Centre. Any Parisian connections and crumbs were very welcome. Forgive me for my grumpiness, it will - my husband has told me - run itself out by the weekend.

Myself and the children - Aoise and Edward outside the Centre de Georges Pompidu, Paris - engineered by Dundalk born man Peter Rice RIP, among others.

Living By The Edge In Paris

Living By The Egde In Paris

Let’s call her Anna. She was absolutely positively brimming with wanting to tell me all. And I was going to let her. Pour out the happiness she had felt while the bottle of water dispensed from the machine at the Departure Gate for the Aer Lingus flight home from Paris.

It had been amazing, life-affirming and beyond the beyonds.

Didn’t they get to see the Mona Lisa and Donal, her husband who was sitting a tad lonely by the by-side near the other Departure Gate, had gotten his photo taken and here she was going to show it to me and there he was.

She had set up a Facebook account just for the week, and put the photo on. Donal’s face in the foreground and a tiny Mona Lisa in the background. It looked lovely.

Yes, I had also seen it but not this time around, and yes it was small and you didn’t get to spend much time loitering in front of it due to the queues and the amount of foreign tourists who took snap shots of it and made the experience fraught with angst, and not the enigmatic moment it should have been.

But all the same, it was worth seeing.

I also told her, I’d cut off all access to Facebook, Twitter, Blogs and the like for the duration of the week and had really not missed a beat about it. Which made me wonder why I was using them all in the first place. I had wanted to get out onto the edge.

But yes, I had also been to the Musee D’Orsey with its collections of Monet, Renoir and the like and it was a bit more civilised. What with my children and all, it was more doable.

I omitted to tell her, the children had been exhausted and the husband very tired with the previous days walking up and down the right and left bank and so on.

So I just kept it short and to the point. We had seen the main things. I of course, in my own heart did not want to take it out and say how I was struck almost dumb and rooted to the spot with The Dancer, and also Monet’s Blue Waterlillies and a few other choice pieces. I also didn’t mention the trance I fell into shuffled alongside a group of tourists, all geared up in the tourist head gear for listening to the commentary in front of Renoir’s Dance At The Moulin De La Galette.

I was watching their tour guide an elderly lady with the largest perm I’d ever seen, sweeping her arms in motions in front of the canvas – just inches away from a sunlit dappled scene.

I also did not mention the arrogant male tourist who stuck his head in front of me, leaned into my space and began talking to a colleague tourist who was listening to his loud whisper and then she said: “you gotta tell her what’s happening.” Indicating – her – was the tour guide. The spell was broken. I slinked away and rotated around the glass containing Degas’ The Little Fourteen Year Old Dancer – and wondered at the sadness of the little girl’s ballet dress material, never having swoshed into a dance formation, and the large ribbon in her hair, almost falling out, as if she had completed a pirouette and looked, what I thought, was a bit smug at it all.

Anna began again – with the tale of the Palace of Versailles. Didn’t it look amazing? It did, it had and now it was consigned to memory. I began saying I’d thought we should have been treated to a look a t the Opera Room and the other rooms that contained Ministerial Documents and such like. But thought twice when Anna fluffed up the gardens appeal and the lakes and the fountains.

I listened forgetting to tell her how my little family had climbed the steep lintel of a window to the back of an outbuilding and gazed in through the semi-dark at a statue of a man, marble, consigned to a basement palace of his own.

And as we had jumped for a photograph in the gardens I also did not bring up the sore point of why we were not treated to a fine display of rabble rousing villagers – battling on the golden gates and descending in a riot into the bedchamber of Marie Antoinette. So I just recalled how we had eaten our little pan-au-chocolates sitting on a ledge in the courtyard and gazed up at the balcony belonging to the King’s Bedroom and I had imagined a little man opening the huge glass doors and lots of hangers-on fluffing around him, putting his wig on and stuff like that.

And then it was time to go, and I remarked on the price of everything, how you had to keep an eye with the children, on what you ate and where you decided to sit down, otherwise they would charge you an arm and a leg for it.

But wondered how much of Anna’s heart she was actually leaving behind, like mine, and what other experiences she had shared, just like me and if she had taken precious time to live life on the edge.

Renoir's Dance At The Moulin de la Galette.