Can I not park here, he asks.
I shake my head and even though I’m not imitating a garda, I am being one in my head. Gardaí don’t always have to give reasons.
He rolls his eyes, pulls his leg back into the car, and as he’s securing his seat belt and starting the engine he looks around at the signage, confused and irritated.
I stand there until he drives away.
It’s only 8 a.m. Pay-and-display begins at 8.30 a.m. No legal reason why he can’t park here.
But she always parks here.
Every day.
It’s her spot.
And I protect it.
Four
Nine a.m. to noon it’s mostly parking offences. Cars in loading bays preventing van deliveries, causing mayhem on small village roads. Parking tickets for cars left over from the night before, drinkers getting taxis home and not getting back to their cars in time the next morning to pay their parking fees. Busier with that today than any other weekday, with Thursday night being a popular night out. Parking is free on Sundays. They can do what they like then.
I’m kept busy.
I walk by the silver BMW outside the hair salon. In her spot. You’re welcome. Parking all paid up. Business pay-and-display in the correct place on the dashboard. Correct vehicle for the correct disc. Good woman. Most people forget to alert the council to their change of vehicle. Which is an offence that they get ticketed for. The BMW is all legal. Six hundred euro for that annual disc. She’s doing well. Her own little hair salon. Only has six seats inside but it’s always busy. Two shampooing stations, three chairs before a mirror. And a little desk and chair at the window for nails. Shellac and gel. She’s always there. I notice when her car’s not there, wonder if she’s okay, or the family, but I assume I’d know from the look on her staff’s face if something terrible had happened. Her parking credentials are always above board, but still I check. No one is infallible. Disc in the dashboard, a booster seat in the back.
That captures my attention for a moment.
At noon I walk down James’s Terrace, a cul de sac of terraced Georgian houses, now all businesses, facing the tennis courts. I admire the view ahead of me, right across to Donabate, fishing boats, sailing boats, blue, yellows, browns and green, reminds me of home. Home is a marina town too, not exactly like this, but the sea air is something to connect me, and it’s as close as Dublin gets to home for me. Cities make me feel claustrophobic and this suburban village has given me more breathing room.
Home is Valentia Island, Kerry, but boarding school was Thurles. I went home most weekends. Pops worked in Limerick University, a professor of music until he semi-retired a while back. He plays cello and piano, taught them on the weekend and during summers in our house, but his main job and obsession was talking about music. I could imagine his lectures, him full of joie to vivre about his favourite subject. That’s why he called me Allegra, Italian for fun and lively, but really from the musical description allegro, a piece of music that is played in a fast and lively way. The best instrument of all was Pops’ humming. He could, and can, hum the entire four minutes thirteen seconds of Marriage of Figaro.
He worked in Limerick Monday to Friday while I was at boarding school and I would catch a train to Limerick on a Friday evening. He’d collect me from the station and drive us home to Knightstown, Valentia Island together. It should have taken three hours to get home but took dangerously less with him behind the wheel, a speed limit being just another way for the government to control us. As soon as I saw home on Friday night, that moment when the bridge from Portmagee brought us from the mainland to the island, that’s when I felt peace envelop me. I was as excited, if not more, to be home than to see Pops. It’s home, isn’t it. The seemingly invisible things that go right to your soul. The feel of my bed, the pillow just right, the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall, the way a patch on the wall looks at a certain time of day when the light catches it. When you’re happy, even the things you hate can become the things you love. Pops playing Classic FM too loud. The smell of burned toast, until you have to eat the burned toast. The way the boiler roared every time the tap was running. The sliding of the shower curtain rings against the rail. The sheep in the field behind us on Nessie’s farm. The crackle of the coal in the fire. The sound of his shovel scraping the concrete in the coal shed out the back. The tap tap tap, three times, always three, against his boiled egg. Sometimes I ache for home. Not here by the sea when I’m reminded of it, mostly I ache when I see nothing around me that reminds me of it at all.
Apart from the yellows of the sand and island I see another familiar yellow. The canary yellow Ferrari is parked outside number eight James’s Terrace. I’m guessing in advance that there’s no paid parking disc in the windscreen, as there hasn’t been for two weeks running. I check all the cars leading up to it but I can’t really concentrate. I need to get to the yellow car before someone gets in it and drives away, before I get to issue the ticket. I’d feel cheated. I give up on the other cars and go straight for the yellow sports car.
No disc in the windscreen. No ticket either. I scan the registration. No online parking paid. It’s the second week the car has been parked here, in the same place, more or less, and I’ve given it a ticket every single day. Each fine has cost the owner forty euro, which increases by fifty per cent after twenty-eight days and if it’s not paid a further twenty-eight days later then court proceedings are initiated. Forty euro every day for two weeks isn’t cheap. It’s practically my month’s rent. I don’t feel bad for the owner. I feel angry. Agitated. Like I’m being deliberately mocked.
Whoever drives this car must be a wanker anyway. He’d have to be. A yellow Ferrari. Or it could be a woman. One who leaned in a little too fucking much, fell over and banged her head. I issue the ticket, bag it, and tuck it beneath the windscreen wiper.
For lunch I sit on the bench down the lane behind the tennis club and scout club overlooking the sea. The tide is out and the muddy stones are revealed, a few plastic bottles, a trainer, a baby-soother peer up unnaturally from the slippery seaweed bed. But even in the ugly there’s pretty. I take out my lunch box from my backpack. Cheese sandwich on granary bread, a Granny Smith apple, a handful of walnuts and a flask of hot tea. More or less the same thing every day and always in the same place, if the weather is relatively good. During bad weather I stand under the protection of the public toilets’ roof. Rainy days are usually busier days, nobody wants to run to a pay-and-display machine and back to their car in the rain. Cars will pull into loading bays and double park, hazards on, to get in and out of the weather quicker. But my rule book is the same in all weathers.
Sometimes Paddy joins me for lunch. Paddy’s a parking warden too and we split the zones in this area between us. Paddy’s overweight, with psoriasis and flakes of dandruff all over his shoulders, and he doesn’t always hit the zones by the right times. I’m happy most days when he doesn’t arrive. He spends the entire time talking about food, how he prepared it, and cooked it, in painstaking detail. Maybe a true foodie would appreciate his conversation but it feels odd to hear about twenty-four-hour simmering and marinades when he’s scoffing an egg mayonnaise sandwich and cheese and onion Tayto crisps from the petrol station.