Voices: An Open Door Book of Stories

Gruyère in the Desmond

Blindboy Boatclub

‘The Greeks would want a word with themselves now with their hard cheeses.’ That was the Chin’s reaction to the halloumi, having previously tasted the feta. To which he asserted, ‘I don’t need to be hearing my food squeak inside in my head like a rat.’

The Desmond Arms was a grand pub. Nothing fancy – not manky either, though. It was grand. Bang of lemon cleaner off the jacks floor seats. It would normally be a quiet pub, too, until we would take out the cheese in front of the Chin on Tuesdays. Guppy would travel from Tesco with a selection, and there would be a blindfold for the Chin, made out of a tea-towel. And then Guppy would impale the little piece of cheese on a cocktail stick and hover it in front of the Chin’s open mouth. You would see little flickers of terror in his body, jiggling the fat belly, jolts, fear of the surprise of something new. The whole pub beyond our group, even the real old lads, would have their heads in their pints, but in the way that they would have one ear towards the Chin. Waiting, like it’s a penalty shoot-out, to hear the reactions out of him. He would take the cheese on the tongue and surrender it in, crumbs around the lips and all. And you would watch his face dragging and pulling. Head on him like a terrier with a ball. A groan would be let out. I don’t think there was ever a cheese he liked. And when the groan surfaced, we would all howl – the whole place would scream laughing. Bellies all over the place.

Guppy would say, ‘Out of ten, Chin, what is she out of ten?’ and the Chin would say, ‘She is a four. What did you call her again?’ ‘Gruyère,’ Guppy would say. ‘Gree-yair.’ The Chin would purse the lips again, and you would know the pokey tongue was searching around the gob to assess the situation. ‘She is like a Kerry-man’s dustbin.’ And the pub would shake from men’s laughter. Guppy would go up to the dartboard and write on the slate: ‘Gruyère 4/10, Kerry-man’s dustbin’. The blindfold would come off the Chin, and he would be clean into a Carr’s cracker and his IPA to wash down the cheese.

Gruyère was the last cheese the Chin tasted before they found him hanging against the door of his upstairs bedroom. He had taped off the bottom of the stairs with a full roll and stuck a little cardboard sign on the tape barrier that said, ‘Do not come up the stairs, just phone the guards. I am sorry’, so as his daughter Ciara would not have to see his body.

Stilton, Gouda, provolone, Munster, Cheddar, pecorino, Camembert, mozzarella, Havarti, ricotta, Edam, Manchego, Roquefort, Emmental. You might as well have been carving those names into gravestones up in Mount Saint Kenneth.

We started the group in 2015. There were sixteen of us. By 2019, that was down to eleven. Jarlath Purcell, 53; Ger ‘Rusty’ Riordan, 48; Caleb ‘Elbows’ Wallis, 52; Finbar Kinsella, 49; and Bernard ‘the Chin’ Collopy, 50. All dead men.

The Brothers of Gatch was a weekly meet-up of some old pals from school. A gatch is a way of walking, a stride on you, like an ‘I am not here to start hassle but I will finish it’ kind of a gatch. The group began with myself and Guppy in The Desmond Arms, 24 March 2015, for two reasons.

The first reason was the situation with the taps. The Desmond, I knew, for thirty-odd years, had only ever four taps: Guinness, Harp, Budweiser and Bulmers.

But then they brought in the craft beers to draw a few students – at first in bottles and then on tap. The students never came. But men get curious. And you would have a Saltwater IPA or a Saison or an Oyster Stout – studied sips, then hungry gulps, before realising you had been missing out all along. And four taps turned to twelve, and two taps would have a guest beer each month.

The second reason we started the Brothers of Gatch was the new selection of cheeses below in Lidl and Tesco. Mad quare beige lumps with names that sounded like they fell off buses. One night, myself and Guppy were drinking a pair of sour grapefruit ales, and he said, ‘Sure, this is like wine. We might as well have cheese too.’ So we did. I strolled over beyond to the Tesco across on Mallow Street and plucked a few odd cheeses out of the fridge. Brought them in the door of the Desmond, placed them on beer mats and we ate them with fingers on us. Started ordering different beers out of the taps too, and tasting them with new cheeses, mix-and-match, like, and it was powerful. It brought something to the pub, to myself and Guppy’s friendship. I do not know what it was, but it was not just pints anymore. It was not dark.

When the cheese and the craft beers were brought in, it felt like a game, and you would be excited for it every Tuesday evening. So we invited more men in, fine men – clerks, joiners, engineers, men we knew a long time – and we would all have a new craft beer and a new cheese each week, and we would talk about it, hop ball, write reviews on the dartboard, and it was like being back in sixth year of St Clement’s again.

There was a third reason we started the group. We never spoke about the third reason. Even though the third reason is more powerful than the first and second reasons.

There is a blackness that comes over men. It’s a dark fright. And you cannot look straight at it, and you cannot say out loud that it’s there. But you know it when you feel it first thing in the morning and you just cannot figure out what the point of being alive is. The thought of that brings this sharp dread and after that, I suppose, an olive sadness – no, a green loneliness, a feeling of being trapped purely by just being awake or alive. And it will slowly take away all the things you would normally enjoy, like a film, or a match, or a song. And it will slice bits off of you until you need a pint to clean the wound. And not even the pints would sort it, they only numb it. That was the third reason we started the Brothers of Gatch. In from the hovering grey cold of Tuesday nights.

The third reason would only be noted over Emmental or a cloudy cider, through purple skin under eyes and red noses. Little yellow glances at each other. Never words. Just gestures. Through slags and pats on backs and digs in shoulders. I knew. He knew. They knew. This was never about cheese or craft beer. It was an unspoken contract. Turning our faces away from the forever pull of the solitude. It was an agreement. We all suffered under the same loneliness. Not the loneliness of being alone, it was not that – sure, we all had our families and wives – but the mystery emptiness of feeling alone when you are anything but.

On nights with pints I would stare up at a bottle of Cutty Sark above the bar – the yellow and black label with the ship would draw me in. It had about twenty sails, and I would think of myself at the helm, and all around are little islands, and I’m searching them for the man I used to be. He is lost, but in the heart of me, I know he is gone. And I sail on the big mad nothing sea that screams wind in my face. I investigate from island to island. I find feck all. I still wander into the dead bony forests and shale rocks. And one day, I will go so deep into one of the islands that I cannot see back to the ship. On that day, I’ll lie down against a tree and let death have me. That is a balls of a way to be.

And if I ever got that look on me, staring up at the Cutty Sark, one of the lads would draw me back and ask me what I thought of the Stilton. They were like a lighthouse. Just something glimmering off in the distance for me to reach towards. Something different than the empty islands.

Lüneberg, Nut Brown, Herve, Red Ale, Danish Blue, Weiss, Clonakilty Swiss, Blond. In the map in my head, the islands became a cheese or a beer with each expedition.

We began to notice our own little dark rituals – the moment that your head would leave the pub and you would entertain the dread. The thousand-yard stare, I suppose, but we had never been to war. For me it was the bottle of Cutty Sark. After Caleb Wallis was found below in the river, God rest him, Guppy went back on the John Player. If he went outside and took too long, you would see him standing and gazing, the fag long with ash down to the butt. Him drifting in towards the empty. I would want to ask him what he saw when he stared, but you could never ask that. And you would shout, ‘Come in before Jarlath eats all the Roquefort you eejit.’ And we would laugh and he would come back into the pub, and then you would have saved him.

For John Paul Noonan it was when he would start picking at the label off his beer, so you would get him a pint glass. Eddie would take his jacket on and off like he was leaving. Finucane might go to the jacks for a very long piss. Christy Walsh would touch his chest and ask what the symptoms of a heart attack were. Andy Fitz would get a blank stare and snap himself out by starting an argument with you. The Chin, the poor old Chin, would have pink eyes with tears over them, and that is when we would give him a blindfold and give him laughter. These were little devices, unique to each of us, that would let the others know that you were staring at the emptiness. And we would all know this, but we would never say it, and we would save each other every Tuesday night.

‘Go for a run,’ my doctor would say to me. ‘Have you tried meditating?’ ‘This happens to men of your age. I will book you in for a prostate check.’

The Brothers of Gatch knew what was wrong without words or diagnoses.

That Special Moment

Dermot Bolger

This childhood memory is so slight that I ask myself why I recall it so well. I think it is because it was the moment