Page 3 of Our Song

‘Who,’ said Katie, ‘is that ?’

It was a miserable February afternoon and my best friend Katie and I were doing what we always did on Saturdays when we were seventeen.

We’d got the bus into town from Drumcondra and wandered around the second-hand clothes shops of Temple Bar and the charity shops of George’s Street, searching for kids’ T-shirts from the seventies to wear with our Hobo combat skirts.

Then we strolled on to Grafton Street, and that’s where we saw him .

Or rather, them.

‘Why don’t we know any boys like that?’ breathed Katie.

‘Because we hardly know any boys at all,’ I said, never taking my eyes off the buskers.

They were playing ‘Femme Fatale’ by the Velvet Underground, and the tall, lean frontman’s husky delivery managed to convey the melancholy, bittersweet vibe of the original without sounding like a parody.

His short hair was dark and wavy, and he was wearing a Jon Spencer Blues Explosion T-shirt, which showed he had excellent taste in music, and Clark Kent-style glasses, which only served to make him even more good-looking.

This was definitely not true of me and my glasses – at least, that’s what I firmly believed back then.

The band finished ‘Femme Fatale’ to a smattering of applause from the decent-sized crowd, and the frontman smiled in a slightly embarrassed way that made him look even better.

‘Thanks a million,’ he said. And then they launched into ‘The Ship Song’ by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, the most darkly romantic, swoony song imaginable. Even when played by three teenagers on a Dublin street full of busy shoppers in the middle of February.

‘I think I’m in love,’ I whispered to Katie, and I was only half joking.

‘I’ll fight you for him,’ she whispered back.

We stared at the band, enraptured – although, let’s be honest, we stared at him – until they finished the song.

There was another round of applause; the crowd had grown bigger while they were playing and I wonder now if any of those applauding shoppers realised, years later, that they had seen Tadhg Hennessy – Tadhg Hennessy!

– busking on Grafton Street when he was just a kid. Probably not.

I was both totally entranced and, I realised, wildly jealous. When I was fourteen I’d taught myself to play my dad’s old acoustic guitar and ever since then I’d longed to start a band. I’d even started writing songs. The only problem was finding potential bandmates.

‘Why amn’t I in a band like that?’ I whispered mournfully.

‘Because you don’t know any incredibly hot musical geniuses,’ said Katie. ‘Apart from me, obviously.’

‘You play the clarinet,’ I said. ‘We can’t start a band with one guitarist who can’t sing and one clarinet player.’

‘Clarinettist,’ said Katie.

‘The fact that we’re having this conversation proves we’re just not cool enough to be in a band like that,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you learn the drums?’

‘Why don’t you learn to sing?’ retorted Katie, which was fair enough.

I’d long accepted that I couldn’t sing, ever since I was in fourth class and our teacher asked me, as politely as possible, to mime during the end of year concert in which we were performing songs from Mary Poppins .

And I didn’t care, not really. But it meant I knew I could never be a solo musician.

I was always going to need someone else to sing the songs I wrote.

Eventually the band finished their set – the guitar case in front of them was full of pound coins and a fair few notes; they must have earned at least fifty quid – and Blues Explosion Boy addressed the crowd. ‘Thanks a million, we’re the Evil Twins and we’ll be back here next week.’

Which meant, of course, that Katie and I would be there too.

And so we were. And the week after that.

And the one after that. I started wearing my favourite band T-shirts and leaving my coat open in the pathetic hope of impressing Blues Explosion Boy with my taste in music, even though it was early March and freezing cold, so any potential coolness points I might possibly have earned would be cancelled out by the sound of my audibly chattering teeth.

At this stage, the Evil Twins had developed an actual fanbase.

There were now several girls our age standing at the front of the crowd every week, gazing at Blues Explosion Boy with expressions of adoration on their faces; Katie and I told each other we would never be so blatantly obvious.

We told our friends about the cute busking boy and they joined us in the crowd.

It was kind of a joke to all of us – including me and Katie.

But behind the jokes there was something real for me.

Not real love, not even seventeen-year-old me was deluded enough to think that.

But real joy . That’s the thing about a proper crush: it adds a pinch of glitter to everyday life.

It wasn’t like Blues Explosion Boy was all I thought about or all I talked about with my friends.

We talked about books and films and music; we talked about our dreams of college and how much more exciting it would be than school; we complained about sudden skin breakouts and bad period pains (my periods were always heavy and painful, so that was mostly me); we had elaborate in-jokes that no one but us would ever find funny but which made us cry with laughter on a daily basis.

And because we were girls who mostly fancied boys, fizzing with hormones while attending a single-sex school, well, whenever any of us actually found a boy she fancied, of course we sometimes talked about that too.

And fancying Blues Explosion Boy was fun .

Even now, literally decades later, I can remember the sparkling thrill of having something to look forward to every Saturday, the pleasure of thinking about him during the rest of the week, blissfully imagining how our eyes would meet during his rendition of ‘The Ship Song’; how I’d be walking away alone (both my friends and his band were mysteriously absent in this fantasy) when I’d hear him call ‘Hey!’; how I’d turn around and realise that yes, he really was calling after me; how he’d run up to me, slightly awkward but clearly determined; how he’d tell me he’d noticed me in the crowd every week and how instead of being tongue-tied (which is what would definitely have happened if this extremely unlikely event had taken place in real life), I’d tell him how great the Evil Twins were and that I played the guitar too and he’d be really impressed, and we’d realise we loved all the same things and form an instant bond and then he’d ask if I wanted to go for a coffee and I’d say yes even though I don’t like coffee, and it would all end, hours of intense conversation later, with him kissing me passionately at the number 16 bus stop on Westmoreland Street and the two of us living happily ever after.

But of course, when I finally talked to Blues Explosion Boy, it wasn’t anything like that.

Easter was coming up, and Katie and I were heading to County Galway for the holidays with our friend Sarah.

The three of us had been to the Gaeltacht three times before to improve our Irish-language skills, attending a pleasingly free-and-easy summer college in West Cork, where they weren’t exactly sticklers for the whole ‘speaking Irish all the time’ thing.

But now our Leaving Cert exams were approaching, and we were starting to wish we’d gone at least once to one of the stricter coláistes .

Not too strict, obviously. Not the infamously dreadful one where they made you, like, march around an exercise yard and salute the flag every morning.

Then Sarah remembered that her elder brother had gone to a special Easter course for sixth-year students in a Connemara coláiste called Coláiste Laoise.

It worked the same way as the usual summer Irish sessions – staying in the houses of local families, doing Irish classes in the morning and various activities in the afternoon, a céilí in the evening.

No speaking English, ever. But there was also a proper music room with guitars and a drum kit, which sparked my interest. We’d be able to spend our afternoons playing music there.

Maybe I’d actually be able to play in a band.

It was just two weeks. But it would be better than nothing.

Before we went to Coláiste Laoise, I finally got contact lenses.

It took a lot of persuading before my parents agreed to give me my birthday present four months early.

It wasn’t as if I actually needed contact lenses.

I could hardly tell them it was pure vanity, based on the hope that Blues Explosion Boy might be more drawn to someone who wasn’t a fellow specs-wearer.

I had never kissed anyone else who wore glasses before (full disclosure: I had only kissed two boys ever) and I was worried two pairs of specs might get in the way if my fantasies of bus-stop romance ever came true.

It was safer to be glasses-free, just on the off chance we somehow ended up shifting over some guitar pedals in Music Maker one Saturday.

I didn’t say any of this to my parents, of course, because I wasn’t insane. I just thanked them for the early birthday present.

‘Don’t expect me to get you anything at all,’ growled Annie. ‘Ever.’ She had just turned thirteen and was, I thought patronisingly, from my lofty position as a seventeen-year-old, ‘going through a difficult stage’.

A week later, on a cold April afternoon, we were in the car park of Galway’s main train station being herded onto one of several buses marked Coláiste Laoise.

We didn’t have time to get a good look at most of our fellow students before we were crammed into our seats, heading out of the city towards Connemara.

We were, of course, meant to be talking solely in Irish at this point but, under pressure, every word of the language seemed to have vanished right out of our heads.

‘I wonder what our house will be like,’ I whispered to Katie in English, and a shiny-haired girl sitting in front of us turned and glowered through the gap in the seats and hissed, ‘ Gaeilge! ’

Eventually the bus stopped in a car park in front of a sprawling one-storey building, across the road from the wild Atlantic waves.

As we stood, a little awkwardly, beside our bus, more students started getting off a vivid yellow bus a few metres away.

I wasn’t paying much attention to them but then Katie grabbed my arm.

‘Ow! What’s wrong?’ I said. ‘I mean, cad atá ort ?’

‘ Féach! ’ she hissed. ‘No, not over there! Look there !’

I followed her gaze. And I gasped.

‘Oh my God!’ I breathed.

‘I can’t believe it,’ said Katie. ‘I mean, ní thuigim . No, hang on, that’s “I don’t understand”. What’s “believe” again?’

I didn’t answer. Because standing beside the yellow bus were none other than the Evil Twins’ drummer and Blues Explosion Boy. His dark locks were tousled and he looked, if possible, more handsome than ever.

I genuinely thought I was hallucinating. It seemed impossible that he was there, with us, in this remote place. As we were all shepherded into the main building of the coláiste , I nudged Sarah.

‘Sarah,’ I whispered, nodding my head in the direction of the yellow bus. ‘Is that …?’

If Sarah could see him, he was definitely there. She didn’t fancy him enough to hallucinate him.

She glanced over and then grinned at me and raised her eyebrows.

He was real all right.