I’ve not been able to write for a while now. As part of the school’s wishes to expand, some of the new teachers (read: me and three others) have been asked (read: coerced) into teaching extra classes during the lunch hour. The goal, the director told us in his office, was to hook new, undecided students with poor English in and try and sell them a three-week long, ‘essential English booster course’, which we would then use to demonstrate their lack of rudimentary English and convince them they needed a basic, twelve-week long foundational course. I was dismayed by the idea, but I wondered if I could really be charged with exploiting if I myself was also being exploited? (read: I needed a job, even if it was at a school renowned for demanding quite a lot of free labour as well as underpaying and sacking its teachers for little or nothing).

     I was teaching one of these classes yesterday when a young Syrian woman, whose English was better than any of the other students who turn up for the free practice lessons, began telling me about a recent miscarriage she’d had. I had asked her how she liked living in Ireland.

     ‘This was my second miscarriage here,’ she explains. ‘The doctors were very unhelpful. My husband had to calling them to get an update after I left hospital. I am not sure that I like Ireland.’

     The other students in the room were smiling, glancing back and forth between the woman and me. I wasn’t sure if this was out of apprehension or perhaps because they were unable to understand what exactly she was talking about.

    I panicked and told her I was sorry. She asked me why I was sorry if it was not my fault. I explained that I meant I was sorry that this has been her experience of what it is like to live in Ireland, that I didn’t think it was this bad, usually.

     She cocked her head and smiled a little. ‘Not this bad for whom?’

                                                                             *

I remember you showed me that comedian—he’s dead now—who once said he’d do anything for Ireland except live there. I didn’t find it so funny, but it kind of stings now. I am not sure what I am doing still living here. The endless assault of capital has stripped the city of itself. Not of all its goodness, per se, but of what has made it itself, of what made it dear dirty Dublin, and of the many reasons I was first drawn here in my early twenties. A decade ago now, if you can believe it. Maybe you were right, maybe Dublin is decaying, rotting from the inside out. Isn’t a city supposed to be a summation of its history, a representation of the needs of its many and not just the aspirations of the few? When I encounter people who have grown up here, people who have the city in their bones, I get a strange sense that everyone’s chasing a long-gone feeling. As though they’re talking about a place which no longer exists. If a city speaks to us through its people, its architecture, its culture, its art, or even its problems, then I’m no longer sure what Dublin is trying to tell me. Or, if it’s trying to tell me what I think it is, then maybe I don’t want to listen.

     I think I was resentful at first when you left but, more and more, I think you did the right thing. Got out at the right time. Hitched your wagon to the right horse etc, etc,. I can’t keep track of all the places you’ve been. I’ll bump into one of the old gang every now and then and your name will come up. I’ll listen quietly as they casually mention whatever city you’re in. London. Barcelona. Berlin. Rome. Someone mentioned Prague. Did I hear Uppsala, too? I had thought you would have just chosen to stick to the romantic European cities of old—those Mediterranean and Levantine cities in decline. I’m glad you haven’t.

     I’m not sure what you do these days—or, for that matter, even where you are. How have you been? You should write more often.

                                                                               *

I have been teaching English as a Second Language for three months now. Two interesting things have begun to happen.

                    1.  With each month that passes, I am less sure of my ability to understand, let alone teach, the English language.

                    2.  With each month that passes, I am less sure that this temporary gig isn’t going to become a full-time gig.

     The other day, I was teaching the third conditional. According to a co-worker who had been helping me wrap my head around it earlier that afternoon in the staffroom, students often fail to get it right. I had come in an hour early just to try and re-learn it myself. I had a solid grasp of the zero conditional, but as they went up in number and in degree of abstraction—zero, first, second, third, and mixed—my certainty began to falter. My brain was like two cupped hands, trying to stop water from slipping between the cracks.

     I told my students to think of the third conditional as a sort of regret. The third conditional basically asks you to imagine that your life has ended up fundamentally different because of something you did or didn’t do, back in the past perfect, and now have to live with the reality you haven’t created for yourself.

     ‘Once you remember the structure, you can’t get it wrong. It’s like Maths. Like a sum.’

     I write the construction on the board and move my hand across it like I’m a conductor in a symphony. ‘This plus that equals this. If + subject + past perfect, … would + have + past participle. This plus that equals this. It’s like Maths. Like a sum. This plus that equals this. It’s about regret, what you didn’t do. Like, when I look back on my entire twenties, I think in the third conditional.’

     No one laughs.

     I call on Eddie, a young guy from Pueblo in Mexico. The joker, the entertainer. He is sitting with his arm across his chest. His hand is stroking his stubble contemplatively.

     ‘If I had listened to my father...’ he says, slowly, like he’s feeling his way slowly out onto a frozen lake.

     ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Good, go on.’

     ‘If I had listened to my father… I wouldn’t be in this stupid, rainy country.’

     The whole classroom erupts into laughter. Eddie is smiling, knowing he’s nailed it.

     I want to point out that he is in fact wrong, but very close. The sentence was a third-to-second mixed conditional. I have, as usual, failed to explain the grammar point correctly but everyone in the class, for once, is happy.

                                                                          *

I was walking down O’Connell Street past the GPO earlier when I noticed a long line of people, stretching around the corner to Henry Street. They were queueing for food. Several women were standing behind a series of tables, handing out foil containers of hot meals to the people in line. I saw that some people had prams; others with small children balanced on their hips. I noticed one child in a pram, not crying, just staring into the white light of his mother’s phone which he held holding sideways. The volunteers, mostly women in their forties and fifties, wore shirts bearing the name of a familiar charity. I made a mental note to email the charity and find out if I could somehow help out. I recognised two students from my school queuing for food so I crossed the road in the opposite direction. I passed beneath Big Jim Larkin, covered in bird shit, arms aloft, screaming silently, and headed for Madigan’s.

                                                                          *

I sometimes wonder if you regret leaving. I read an essay recently about exile and literature and the writer wrote that, in their early twenties, they made what they felt at the time to be a fairly unimportant decision: the decision to emigrate. Now, in their early fifties, after having a child in their adopted country, and after multiple trips home, they said they hadn’t realised how “strangely departure would obliterate return.” We leave and expect things to stay the same, for our old lives and the people we knew to remain embalmed as they are in our memories. If return is inevitable then so, too, is disappointment.

     Our memories of the past seem as fragile as they do real. Sometimes I walk down specific streets just to catch a glimpse of the past, to catch a glimpse of the faces I’ve known, loved, or wasn’t able to. Of their shadows. There have been times, passing across Grafton Street, or outside Trinity, when I thought I saw your face in a crowd.

     On good days I admire Ireland; on bad days I think it prepares us to expect nothing more than what it can offer for us, which can often be very little. There’s a scarcity mentality deep within the fabric of this island. What was it Joyce called Ireland—the sow that eats her farrow? I always liked that.

     So, having never properly left here, I patiently await my departure in the hopes of one day obliterating my return. In the meantime, send news from the continent.

                                                                           *

I have begun volunteering for the homelessness charity I mentioned. I spend two Monday nights a month driving around the North Inner City and farthest reaches of North Dublin giving food and clothes to people. It’s not much, but it’s something. On my first night, I worked with John, a guy from Scotland, who told me he has been doing charity work for thirty years. He used to spend his summers building houses in Africa until his father got Alzheimer’s and he had to move home and take care of him. After his dad passed, he moved to Ireland, where he got a job as a computer programmer. I am not only amazed by how much of his spare time he gives to volunteering, but also how humble he seems. I wonder what leads a person to do so much voluntary, unpaid labour.

     There is a designated route we follow and we call each of the homeless people on our list to see if they need anything. We visit industrial estates. Parks adjacent to train stations and football pitches. We visit a woman who lives behind a bottle bank in the corner of a park overlooking the Irish Sea. Four men living in a car near The Phoenix Park. An elderly couple living in a tent on the site of a former graveyard, in front of Collins’ Barracks. Stretches of overly ambitious, undeveloped land in which everything we no longer want to think about can exist. Most just want a Pot Noodle or a soup and a sandwich. Some just want to chat. Many ask if we have chocolate, or when they ask for tea or coffee, they want four or five sugars, which John told me is to keep their energy up.

     Later that night, we met a woman sleeping on cardboard boxes at the entrance to one of the city’s busiest shopping centres. I made small-talk with her as John prepared a mushroom Pot Noodle and packed a bag with sandwiches and snacks. That was her first night sleeping alone. Her partner, with whom she normally sleeps, had a seizure earlier on in the day and had been taken off the streets whilst she was taking a shower at a women’s hostel. She told me she doesn’t feel safe sleeping alone. So many creeps, she explained. The way she looked at me when she said it.

     I asked her if she would consider checking into a hostel whilst her boyfriend is in hospital. I tell her we can help her get one, but she tells me no, no way, that she’s never going into a hostel after the last time. Absolutely not.

     I glanced at John, who was stirring the Pot Noodle, and he gave me a look which suggested that I don’t want to ask about the last time.

     As we pull away in the van, I look back through the wing mirror and see her sitting stiffly upright against the doors of the shopping centre, alert and unblinking.

                                                                              *

I was standing in the teacher’s kitchen earlier today, waiting for the kettle to boil, staring at an advertising poster for the school which read: ‘No one speaks English like the Irish’. In one sense, this is true—nowhere else in the world does speak Hiberno-English. In another, more meaningful way, it’s implying that we speak English better than other countries, and it’s drawing—albeit unawares—on an age-old idea of Ireland as a kind of quasi-mystical and quasi-exceptional country in the hopes of attracting students to study here.

     Below it, they had the same sentence written out in a dozen languages. The background picture they had chosen was of a diverse group of very attractive students looking out over the Cliffs of Moher, smiling out at the horizon. I wonder why they’d chosen to have the students look out at the sea, away from Ireland, as though Ireland was a place merely to be suffered through until they got to the next part of their journey, the place they’d wanted to be all along.

Across the hallway, in the central office, the marketing team are doing deals with agencies in Italy, Brasil, Austria, Mexico, and Spain to send over more students. It is widely understood that we are in the worst housing crisis in the history of the State and here we are, funnelling in more students, throwing more petrol on the fire.

                                                                                 *

The students have been laughing at me.

                                                                                 *

I was in the canteen at lunch time and a Brazilian student who I had never seen before was pointing at a gash on her arm, explaining to a group of other students that she had fallen off her bike the night previous when a group of teenagers threw a bottle of piss at her. I turned around, apologised for inadvertently hearing her story and asked if she was okay. She said she was and explained that it had happened in a suburb of North Dublin now well-known for the fact that delivery drivers were being attacked there. Another student at the table told me that something similar happened to him two weeks ago.

     They are starting a union for all of the delivery drivers. They told me that they just want to be able to work in peace, to cycle down the road and not have rocks, bottles of piss, or racial slurs, lobbed at them whilst they deliver food to the people too lazy or too busy to cook it themselves. I asked if they all work as delivery drivers.

     They nodded.

     ‘All of you?’ I repeat, taking in the seven, eight, nine of them around the table.

     They all nod.

     I told them that if they need help writing a letter to their bosses, or a post to share on social media to encourage other delivery drivers to join, I’d be happy to do it. They smile and thank me, and, as I’m leaving, another student pulls up a leg of his trousers and shows the others a large cut on his calf

     ‘They threw a firework at me and I fell off my bike…’

     I took my coffee and left.

                                                                                  *

I was teaching my students about Ireland’s history of migration today. They were fascinated because most said they hadn’t learn much about Irish history in school. It made me realise that most of us end up having our conception of our place within the world and its history limited by the lottery of birthplace. I tell them about how when workers from Eastern Europe—namely, Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania—came to Ireland in search of work during the Celtic Tiger, Irish people, for all of their long memories full of pained, historical struggle and suffering, didn’t show very much kindness to them. I explain how resentful Irish people became during the recession when they had no work and how the jobs that the Eastern Europeans had been working for much of the past decade, mostly low-paying jobs—that the Irish people living through this period of grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre, and unprecedented wealth felt they were too good to work for—became all of a sudden quite attractive.

     ‘Why do you think Irish people don’t remember what it is like to struggle in another country?’

     ‘Because it no longer fits the narrative we like to tell ourselves.’ I wrote the word ‘narrative’ and its definition and uses on the white board.

     ‘It’s kind of like what is happening now, like how we are treated,’ Daniel, a young guy from Uruguay, said.

     ‘It is. I don’t think we have learned much.’

     ‘Look at how they treated them, and they’re white,’ Cintia, a Brazilian, pointed out.

     The students looked at me and laughed.

     ‘What hope do we have,’ said Jefe, also Brazilian.

     ‘Why are many Irish people shit to us, then?’ asked Cintia.

     ‘I’m not sure, I tell him. ‘I think it’s to do with the fact people always want another group of people below them, who they can look down on. Like they need another group to point at so they can tell themselves, or fool themselves that things would be so much better if only this group weren’t here.’ I write ‘fool’ on the white board and explain its noun and verb uses.

     ‘That’s not true,’ Cintia said, ‘and it’s not fair to think like that.’ 

     ‘I know, Cintia,’ I tell her. ‘Ireland hates poor people in the same way Brazil or America hates poor people. We’re very similar, when you think about it. Except maybe that we’re much more used to having poor people who look identical to us.’

     I turn and write‘ Identify your country’s most vulnerable groups and discuss common attitudes towards them. Synonyms: underprivileged; economically disenfranchised; forgotten; underserved communities; discriminated against’ on the board and then pair off the students, ensuring that no two students from the same country are talking to one another.

     I wander around the classroom, watching as students whisper to one another and jot down the names of their country’s poor and forgotten. There are a lot of ways of talking about the same thing.

                                                                               *

I want to help. I am not helping.

                                                                               *

I was at a bar around the corner from school on Friday afternoon, sipping a pint with one of my students. We were on high stools, either side of a large barrel that’d been co-opted as a table, in the smoking area of the pub, which was effectively fifty per cent of the available footpath on the street. Traffic is pouring past and the sound of the city is one of cheery, end-of-week optimism mixed with gross indifference.

     My student is Mongolian and is only here for six months. He is an absolute beginner so he’s in an intensive class. Multiple lessons each day. He had asked me for a pint during break—mostly through gesture—and I agreed because I happened to have the afternoon off. And because, of course, I felt bad.

     He is showing me a picture of his wife and daughters, who are back in Mongolia. His house looks beautiful. It’s huge, if a little gaudily decorated. His children look as though they are dressed in their Sunday best, although perhaps this is just what his children wear every day. I realise, whilst staring at his phone, I know absolutely nothing about Mongolia, about what it is like to live in Mongolia, or to be Mongolian. In fact, I am momentarily terrified, as I sink another mouthful of my pint, that if someone put a gun to my head and asked me to find Mongolia on a map, I’d soon thereafter be lying dead in the street.

     The student is older than me by two years. He arrived in Dublin three weeks ago and, through someone he is sharing accommodation with, immediately found a job as a line cook at a restaurant where he dices vegetables from 4 to 10pm each night. When I ask him if he likes it, he shakes his head quickly likes he’s just eaten something sour or rancid.

     We converse through Google Translate which reminds me of just how bad a job I’m doing at teaching him English. Using his phone, he shows me that his name means ‘eternal happiness’ in Mongolian. He asks what mine means and I consider how long it will take to explain its meaning, plus all of the potential layers of misunderstanding we’ll encounter, so I just tell him it means nothing.

     He raises his eyebrows in surprise.

     ‘Nothing,’ he says, gently, staring down into his almost empty pint.

                                                                             *

I have never before met and interacted with so many homeless people in the space of a few weeks. In fact, I never interact with homeless people except on the rare occasion I have coins in my pocket. Even at that, interact is a stretch.

     One night recently, my co-volunteer and I were coming to the end of our shift. Outside the Custom House, we saw three other volunteers, talking to clients. We stopped and asked if they need some help wrapping up their route. It was approaching 2a.m. and they still have a few streets on the North Inner City to cover. They thanked us for offering but told us that they’d manage.

     Before we pulled off, I overheard one of the two homeless people talking to one of the volunteers.

     ‘This,’ he said, smiling and gesturing his arm out in the direction of the city centre, ‘this is all temporary.’

     The third volunteer was speaking to this man’s friend, who is wrapped in a foil sleeping bag and nodding off beneath one of bridge’s pillars. The volunteer was clearly concerned for the man’s wellbeing.

     ‘Can you imagine all of us, looking back at this moment in Heaven, our hearts warm with joy, laughing?’ His eyes were full of wonder, and he noticed me looking at him but his eyes glazed over me.  ‘Remember this moment,’ he added. ‘Remember it.’

                                                                               *

I was thinking about how sometimes, when we are presented with abstraction, it is harder to care, harder to draw on our empathy. There is a direct line between abstraction and objectification and an even shorter one to diminution. You and I never really talked about any of this. I would love to what you think now. At the minute, I’m not really sure what my own thoughts add up to.

                                                                               *

I was in the East Wall late on Monday night on service. We were waiting for an Eastern-European sounding couple who called us and asked for food and clothes. When my co-volunteer and I saw them round the corner, we got out to greet them. We showed them everything we had and asked them what they would like to eat.

     I asked the woman if she needed clothes, toothpaste, deodorant or anything like that. She says yes to everything and follows me round to the side door of the van. As I’m filling the bag of toiletries, the woman makes a sound and I turn to see her pointing at something. Tampons.

     ‘Sure,’ I say. In an instant I am overcome with guilt that I hadn’t thought to ask her if she needed tampons.

     ‘How you say?’ she asks me as I empty out an entire box of tampons into a waterproof ziplock bag and give them to her.

     ‘Tampons.’

     ‘Tam-pons,’ she repeats. ‘Thank you.’

     At the back of the van, my co-volunteer has given the guy bags upon bags of non-perishable food, and two large containers of hot food. The woman asks if she can place an order for pants, jeans, or tracksuit bottoms, which it turns out we have already run out of.

     As they speak, I ask the man she is with, who I get the impression is her boyfriend, where he is from.

     ‘Lithuania,’ he tells me, shivering.

     I want to ask them how they ended up here, living on the streets of one of the most deindustrialised parts of Dublin. Instead, I asked him where they sleep.

     He looks apologetically at me and recedes into himself a little. He looks for his girlfriend, who is talking with the co-volunteer. ‘English,’ he says, shaking his head and wincing.

     I raise my hand, smile, and nod, trying to put him at ease. He is still shivering so I go and and rummage through the bags of clothes. I find a large coat which I show it to him, and his eyes light up. I hold all of his bags whilst he tries it on. It’s a little big but it fits. He is nodding and smiling and then says something to the woman, who says thank you very much.

     As I hand him his bags, I ask if they will be able to carry everything back to where they sleep. They look at me as if to say yes, managing to get it back to their tent was not a problem.

     In the van, my co-worker filled out a report sheet to ensure that whoever is on tomorrow will bring the woman some pants. I watch the couple, with their bags of clothes and food, drift down the street, glancing hopefully at one another. On the radio, a late night radio DJ is speaking to a caller. The man man is defending his decision to oppose proposed plans for high-rise, social housing in his neighbourhood, which he claims would would destroy its ‘feel’. We’re only an hour into our route but already I’m exhausted.

                                                                              *

I think of the excitement of first arriving in Dublin over a decade ago. It was a long, lonely year, that first year before I met you and everyone else. I remember those moments of excitement and the possibility I felt walking the streets late at night with you. The city both foreign and exciting to me, less so to you, having grown up in it. But right now, I feel trapped in competing visions I have of Dublin—suspended between an unreal past, an almost unlivable present, and a completely unimaginable future. The thing about this city is that it gives you just enough to keep going, but not enough to plan. Privilege, in a real sense, is being able to plan, to have options, isn’t it? It’s having the luxury of being able to say yes or no to something—it’s being able to choose which Dublin you see. My thoughts are half-baked at best and my feelings have become unmoored by these past few months. At night I walk the same streets we used to walk to calm myself down, to get out of my head, to get out of this place, however fleetingly.