An extract from William Keohane’s forthcoming memoir, Out There (And Other Stories).
Leaves cast shadowed patterns on the pavement and the boardwalk planks. Seagulls perch along the railings by the water. I can see, before the Ha’penny Bridge, the stop for the big green bus that runs between Limerick and Dublin, which I’ve taken, Jesus Christ, I couldn’t even say how many times. Everything important is in Dublin. Even famous people come here, or so it felt to me when I was younger, when I came up for my first concert, at fifteen. My friend Sarah brought me to the concert, although technically her father did too, since he was the one who chaperoned us, let us off to wander around the city together. Dublin felt massive to us both back then, the kind of place you could get really lost in.
Strobe lights cut through the artificial fog in the arena. Heart-shaped crêpe paper rained down from the ceiling. Confetti strips landed in our hair and on our clothes. You couldn’t count the people in the crowd below us. We left the venue right before the last song played so that we could find her dad and beat the traffic back to Limerick, and in the darkness on the motorway towards home, we told him all about the concert, still so full of adrenaline that we couldn’t fall asleep.
However long later, we were back on that same motorway, only this time Sarah was the one driving, and we were headed to the wedding of some college friends, the first pair among our group who decided to get married. On a foggy afternoon, a gang of us piled into Sarah’s small white car. My suit was hanging in the back, her dress was in the boot, and her phone was propped up on the dashboard between us. Since I was in front I got to choose the music, naturally. You know the way it goes. Our friends in the back were forced to tolerate the songs we loved when we were teens.
Amber flecks of distant houses were scattered through the dim black fields. By the time we turned off the motorway and began heading towards the Wicklow mountains in search of the wedding venue, the blue dot on Sarah’s maps app had turned grey. We had no idea where we were.
We found the entrance eventually. As we drove in through the open gates, a string of fairy lights were twinkling up along the pebble lane, stretching towards the accommodation. They were beautifully arranged, the lights. They seemed to move along with us as we drove in. Closer, I could see they weren’t lights at all. They were eyes. It was a herd of deer, caught in the glare of Sarah’s headlamps. Startled by the sound of our arrival, their freckled bodies bounded off into the mist.
All these memories are coming back to me as I walk along the Liffey. A sign fixed to a building tells me I am now on Ormond Quay, which is where this boardwalk ends. Strung to poles on both sides of the river, different flags move limply in the wind. You know, it’s funny, I can remember standing once on a balcony, over there, looking out at where I’m standing now. I knew a couple who lived in an apartment by the water. For a night one summer, I slept over on their couch. I still remember the address. Their building was called Isolde’s Tower.
It was June, at the time, and the poles had other kinds of flags. After I awoke on the couch at their place, we stood together on their balcony drinking mugs of steaming tea in the briskness of the morning air. One of them pointed at a waving flag with three bright colours on the far side of the river and said: ‘Look! There’s yours!’
And there it was.
That morning was some time ago now. I don’t think they’re together any more.
We arrived in Wicklow and the next day was the wedding. The bride and groom had moved to Ireland to go to university, so they needed to be careful with their official documentation. Months before their wedding day, they’d gotten married, legally, signed the paperwork elsewhere, and brought their proof to an immigration appointment. This small ceremony of maybe forty, fifty people wasn’t legally binding, but it was the celebration.
I did something similar after I changed my name. Something small to celebrate. If I wanted to change my name on official documentation, I would need a deed poll, a legal declaration of my name change, and I would also need to ask someone to be my witness, someone who would sign an affidavit in the presence of a solicitor before the deed poll could be enrolled in the High Court in Dublin.
I’m about to pass the High Court building now, it’s almost right in front of me. I can see its blue-green dome from here, covered up with scaffolding. I guess they’re doing some repairs. Right beside the courthouse is the print shop where I signed the papers. There’s a sign up saying it’s To Let. The windows appear empty. The facade’s been painted over.
My friend Sarah was my witness. I asked her, she said yes, and we took the bus to Dublin. In the print shop beside the courthouse, we printed out the forms and signed them under the guidance of a solicitor who offered Sarah a Bible to swear on. She was asked by the solicitor to swear that she would serve as the subscribing witness to the execution of my deed poll wherein I declared that I would renounce, relinquish and abandon the use of my old name, that I would hereafter be called, known and distinguished not by my old name but by my new name, in all records, deeds and documents, and any other writing and in all actions, suits and proceedings as well as in all dealings, transactions, matters and things whatsoever, upon all occasions.
‘Yeah, grand,’ Sarah said.
At the Central Office of the High Court on Inns Quay we entered a prefab security building where officers checked to see if we had any dangerous items. We didn’t, so they let us in, and the two of us wandered through the ornate courthouse halls until we found the queue and stood in line. When my place came I handed over my documents, then was redirected to another building where there was another fee to pay, a stamp duty, €60, if I’m remembering correctly. Then they told me to bring my documents back to the initial queue and wait again.
It was a Thursday. The desk was only manned from 12 to 2 p.m. so I was trying to get everything done as quickly as possible because I didn’t want us to miss the time slot and have to travel back up to Dublin again, but the lines were moving slowly and the hallways seemed to stretch endlessly as I walked back and forth between the buildings. Sarah walked along beside me. While we walked she poked fun at all the long-winded names on the plaques of the offices of various Right Honourable Mr Justices.
‘C’mon. Is that not a bit much?’
Back at the first desk we’d been to, I handed over my freshly stamped papers. In a few weeks, the clerk told me, the courts would post me the enrolled deed poll. After that I could start making progress with the other things; I could reissue my birth certificate, apply for a new passport, change my college transcripts, bank cards, phone bill, every other thing that ever had my name on it. Doing all of it would take me years. I hadn’t even gotten used to my new signature yet. There it was, next to Sarah’s, unfamiliar, on the sheet of paper that I handed to the court. People already knew and called me by my name. Now, in legal terms, it was official.
We left the courthouse, walked along the River Liffey into the city centre as the old and young grey seagulls rose and dove above us in the air, and we stopped into a place, right before O’Connell Bridge, to get something to eat. To celebrate, we ordered pizza, with pots of garlic mayonnaise to dip our crusts into.
At the wedding there was cold, leftover pizza which we devoured drunkenly and messily, not even bothering to heat it up, sometime around 2 a.m., after the drinking, and the dancing, and the cigarettes we’d bummed from someone in the smoking area, hours after the bride had walked the aisle and they had kissed and we’d applauded, hours after we’d all sat down together, heard the speeches, eaten the dinner, had some cake, and after the bar sold out of every drink except for cider, and someone offered me a sip of theirs, so sweet it brought me back to school results night, the night I got drunk properly, for the first time, at seventeen, and threw up on my shoes.
Hours before all this had happened, as I was getting ready with the other men, straightening my tie, folding a pocket square—someone had to find a YouTube video to show us how to do it, since none of us knew—Joseph, the groom, came up to me and asked if I would read over his vows.
There was noise and movement all around us in the room, so we found the only quiet space we could, a cramped windowless bathroom beneath a stairwell, and there, Joe handed me his vows, we stood together, and I read them.
Was it nervousness, I wonder, that made him think to ask me? Was it that he wanted reassurance, just to know someone else had seen them before he shared them with his wife and with the room? Or was his asking something more for me? A gesture, a way to show he valued my opinion on the words?
Maybe the answer doesn’t matter. We stood there, in that tiny room, beneath a single bulb of light, and I read over his vows. I told him they were perfect, which they were.
Though there are no perfect words. You never really get it right. Before I ever said it, I rehearsed what I would say many times. It never came out quite the way I’d hoped. I thought of my mother’s tears when I told her. Was she crying out of worry? For my safety and my future? For the kind of life she thought might be in store for me? Or were her tears made up of other feelings? Shame about me, failure? That was how I felt back then, as if I’d failed, by turning out the way I had.
Some people couldn’t understand it. Others seemed purely curious, the way a child might be about a changing body or an unfamiliar name, full of endless and exhausting questions that I didn’t want or know how to answer. Some didn’t want me in their life any more, after. Fine so. They could leave. I’d be better off without them. Wouldn’t I be? Right?
Not long after it happened, and I told them, it was over. I didn’t have to say it any more. In my suit, at the wedding, I looked like any other man. There were people here who didn’t even know.