Urban Blackberries

The truck pulls away and he's left there on an open space, closed in by four massive blocks, just him and the six foot roll of yellow piping, and a handful of local kids darting around. This is as foreign from his small town background as the moon, and indeed the ground is pocked and pitted, littered with shards of glass and scorched circles where fires burnt into the earth. This section they've unloaded onto is tarmacadam, but tar so old and weathered the weeds straggle up through. At one end a basket-ball frame with the net long rotted away, the metal ring split and curving out in a hook.

Mister, the kids are saying. Mister, Mister in their little grown-up voices.

Eoin's not used to city kids; he moved here six weeks ago from the borderlands. He's not afraid of them, no. The young men of his town - and sometimes not so young - would make light of the weekend scuffles outside the pub. "You'd be better off just walking away," they'd say, nursing a bruised eye. "But the fecker just annoyed me so much -"

Fear does not occur to him when he walks at night through the city fringes. Not for these hard-jawed cider-drinking youths, or sticky-eyed youngsters who look out from under malicious eyelashes. Girls too, with pockmarks on their cheeks and hair straggling into their mouths. Their eyelids damp and heavy. Heroin, he thinks, sucking the life out of them. He hears their bawls: I'll fuckin' kill you, I'll give you a boot up the hole, get over here. But they're all mouth and little action. It doesn't occur to Eoin that these straggly forms hunched under a doorway are the same that other people regard with frank terror as they hurry to a taxi-rank.

Things were slack in the small towns both sides of the border. But you don't need any reason to move to the big city. I'm going to Dublin, he announced to one and all, Pain in me arse sitting around here. Nothing lined up yet, he'd see what was on offer. That's what he'd said, and said it three Friday nights in a row until the barman slapped a hand on the counter: are we running in a loop here?

He got a job with the gas company on his first day. Through friends of friends, it goes without saying. Among working people of course it's not a Dubliners' city at all. Almost to the last man they're all from the country in the gas contracting firm he's with. A few Dublin girls doing the office work, and some Poles and Chinese on temporary. He's only encountered the hardcore Dublin accent as a shout on the street.

The first week he handled despatches. A truck had just loaded and the bay doors were left open. He had not yet acquired the compulsive habit of closing every door, bolting every lock. The word 'security' had a different ring to it in the border area he came from. Eoin had a vague contempt for the placid security guards - usually foreigners - who sat around for ten-hour shifts. It's no wonder it costs so much to build anything, with money being dished out just to stop people injuring themselves.

Alone in the depot, Eoin saw a small kid looking at the stacks of coloured pipes. Just a kid wandered in off the street, of a size that makes you speak in baby-talk.

"You'll have to go back out, we're working here," he said gently. "Come on now," he offered his hand. The child pulled away and ran off between the racks.

"You can't stay in here." He catches up, takes the boy by the hand, leads him up towards the steel doors.

They walk a few steps, him leaning down like a giant to hold the little wrist. It's taking an eternity to reach the exit; he mutters oops a daisy and lifts the child up to carry him, just scoops him up in his arms. The kid screams, kicks him in the ribs.

"Hey, well okay then you can walk if you like," he says and lowers the boy again. He stares dumbfounded as the kid runs straight over to a few loose connectors and starts kicking them for all he's worth. Kicking the hell out of them.

It takes a few slow seconds before he figures it out. The boy is doing his best to destroy. The intention is there but the flesh is weak.

"Come away from that," he says uneasily. Then Cormac comes out, what's all this, yer mammy is waiting outside, and takes the child by the hand. Cormac knows what to do.

"They do come in and run rings round you if you give them half a chance," Cormac says.

A couple of weeks training and he was sent out with the crew. Gas was being piped to all corporation blocks. These were always named after exotic saints. St.Lucia's, St. Justin's, St. Salvator of Horta.

This one is a complex of four blocks. A high wall topped with broken glass seals it off from the surrounding roads of residential three-bedroom houses. There is only one access road to the complex. Eoin leans back against the compressor and waits for the truck to return. Shallow balconies overlook him. He wonders about the kind of people live here, disconnected from the country, from the rest of the city, their lives unfolding inside one of those boxes. Wet clothes draped over the balconies. It looks foreign to his eyes, this piece of the universal ghetto. He'd met men from every county: farmers, teachers, lawyers and liars, but never anyone from inner city flats. Geometrical rows and columns of windows, two for each family. This is home for somebody. He scuffs a shoe at at the black scorch rings.

"Mister, mister," the kids call out. One lifts a clamp in his hands. "What's this for? Mister?" They jab questions at him.

"Leave it down," he says, trying not to sound annoyed. "I said put it down."

"I'm not trying to rob it," the boy says indignantly. "I'm only holding it my hand you know." He holds it there, challenging Eoin to call him a thief. He's got a piercing look, you want to make him laugh to take the edge off it. It's a borrowed look, he can only keep it up for so long, then he'll be distracted, find something else to look at.

"They're for putting in the gas," says Eoin.

Satisfied that the tone shows more respect, the boy sets it down.

"Where are you from?" they ask him, "you're a mullah." The others are using sections of pipe as a setting from some arcade game. So he guesses, but he doesn't recognise the words they use. They laugh at his ignorance.

"C'mere what bog are yeh from?" He doesn't want to tell them, he's a busy man. Has to adjust the angle brackets and line up the cross sections.

They look on at him, not fooled for a second by this activity. They stand watch, the one with black eyebrows and the greasy-haired one, waiting for him to tire of this charade.

"Hey," the black-haired one with a piercing stare says. "Hey you! Mister!" not going to say anything more until he has full attention.

"What is it?"

"Can we help you?" he asks. Eoin can't decide if he's being mocked. This kid makes him nervous.

"Go on, let us give you a hand. We can get all this spread out before the van comes back with the rest of the gear." He's talking on the level, coaxingly, look-me-in-the-eyes honesty.

"Do you want a hand or not?" Now the kid is getting indignant, offended by the hesitation. So Eoin lets them at it, unrolling the big reel, stacking the connectors in a ready line. The kids stand on the loops and unroll the pipe to the farthest block. He's got a pain in his gut from the constant state of wariness, keeping an eye on all of them at once. Their jokes wear him out. (Hey mister, he's after robbing that orange thing, he has it in his pocket. Hey mister, how much did you say we were getting paid for this, hey mister). He's got a tension in the backs of his eyes from watching their hands. The foreman will think he's gone weak in the head when he gets back.

A woman shakes out bath towels on the first floor balcony above. She leans out to look at him. Everybody likes a working man. She leans there, fully entitled to look at him for as long as she wants. Though it is not at all warm she wears a ruffled top that exposes her bulging midriff.

"You've got your little helpers there," she calls down. He laughs with her. The kids are all right, probably sound, if they could just stop the piss-taking jokes. If they could just move less jerkily and not always have a sneer in their voice.

"Mister," said the one with shiny black hair - the one who can't help himself, he probes and provokes with the way he juts his chin to ask a question. "Mister, look at that little fella." He points at a five-year-old clambering under the pipes, humming away to himself. Just two feet from the open manhole. "Mister, if he falls into that hole we can sue you for twenty grand." It's a straight fact, right out of yesterday's newspaper. The teenager is standing there smirking.

"Ah Jaysus get out of there, watch yourself." Eoin grapples the kid away from the manhole. The black-haired boy is laughing, a genuine laugh like he wants the whole world to join in. What a creep, Eoin thinks. There's something not right about this kid. You want to not disappoint him, to show him you're not a cold bastard. Or else you want to slap his upper lip. The blood goes to Eoin's face. "What's up with you smart arse?" he says. "Do you think it's funny if he falls in?"

"What's up with you?" retorts the boy. "I was only trying to warn you."

Eoin ignores them all then. They ask him about the gas and if it's true it's a liquid when it's in the pipes and a gas when it comes out. They ask if it comes from Cork and is it true it can make you high. And can a pipe that small supply the whole place? And what would happen if a spike was hammered into the pipe?

It's a while before he realises they are not always taking the piss. What's up with their faces, he thinks to himself, that they look like they wash every morning with gravel. Sharp freckled face, the small one in the cardigan, swings a length of piping so the others skips over it.

"Do ye have to laugh like horses?" asks Eoin, because he really wishes he could like these kids more. When he was eight or nine, and that's not too long ago, he'd run loose on the roads himself. But he hadn't laughed like that. Not that dry scorning cackle.

The kids have bored of the equipment. They drift away to find something more interesting. He asks the youngest what those stains on his clothes are.

Three other kids round the corner of the block, their faces all smeared purple, fingers stained to the subcutaneous. They wipe their hands across their T-shirts and spread the violet colour.

"Where did ye find the blackberries?"

Eoin follows them through a gap between two blocks, past a burnt-out car, alongside a redbrick wall and by a pair of humming electricity boxes, to some place at the back of the hospital grounds where lines of traffic zoom by on the other side of a tangled wasteland of briar and nettles.

Blackberries, mouth of seeds, bitter clusters by the side of the road. Leaves dusted with leaded exhaust. Gritty sour taste. The boys have purple-stained cheeks and hands, woad-painted savages swarming to recover the wild.

Eoin reaches out and tries a few. It's been a long time since he used go blackberry-picking on the boreens of Fermanagh.

A little boy emerges with a fistful, his bare arms traced glistening red from the briars. The others squirm under the thorns, their thin bodies skewing between the branches to seek out the choicest clusters.

The berries must have some vitamin in them, he thinks to himself, that their badly-nourished bodies crave. How else can it be that they crawl through nettles and briars to get at them when they are so very very bitter?