Escaping the dole in Galway

My father only left me as far as Bray. I didn’t want him to bring me any further. I wanted to do this by myself.

“You’ll hitch the rest of the way, is it?” “Yeah, I’ll be grand.” I was 22 and was off to Barcelona to get a job teaching English as a foreign language. I’d done a wee course and was somewhat qualified. I didn’t have any work sorted over there, but was told that there was loads going. “This’ll do. Good luck.” Side of the road then, with the thumb out.

A housewife and a dentist helped me down the coast a bit, and then a born-again Christian in a massive Mercedes. He seemed very depressed for a man talking about the joy of being ‘saved’.

The plan was to get a lift with a trucker who’d be heading deep into Europe, and eventually make me own way to Catalonia. I didn’t have much money — the double dole and the Christmas bonus, plus a few extra quid I’d got from winning a pool tournament in Salthill. Daddy gave me an extra 20. It felt like more than enough.

I met no trucker and got into Rosslare with the notion of saying hello to one on the boat. I went into the cafeteria and asked around. A big burly dude reluctantly said he’d drive me as far as the Pyrenees, but when we were coming into dock in Le Harve, he was nowhere to be seen.

“Phuck it,” I said. “I’ll get the train into Paris, sleep there the night and then get the bus to Barcelona in the morning.” From feeling surrounded by familiar faces and tribal connections on the boat, I went into the strange and indifferent when I sat on the train. That feeling of being an outsider, friendless and alone.

I had thought that I would just hop out of the train station in Paris and that there’d be loads of places to stay. There weren’t. It was midnight, and in the little square beside the station, they were all either closed or full.

OK. I’ll stay awake on a bench and sleep on the bus the next day. A voice called out. A North African man. I’d been into his small hotel already and he didn’t have a room then, but now he declared that he had. He led me up to it.

“One condition. If someone knock on door and ask who is in, you must say ‘Abdul’. You must; very serious. Pay cash now.”

“No problem,” says I. I handed over the cash and he left. I was tired and nervous. I felt in danger, but I was glad of the shelter.

I pulled back the cover on the bed, and it looked as if Abdul had been frying eggs in the bed. Grand. I’d sleep hovering above it like a levitator.

True enough, deep in the night, there was a bang on the door, and I shouted out, “Abdul”. Whoever it was was not satisfied at that, and shouted something back in at me. I used whatever nervousness and exhaustion I had to declare, as strongly as I could, “Abdul!” It might have been the hint of the Navan accent that convinced my interrogator to leave me alone.

To say I got up early would be wrong, because I never really got down enough to be in a position to get up from. Let’s just say I continued out of there at the dawn, and walked about 11 miles looking for the bus to Barcelona.

I settled into the window seat, wrecked. Seventeen hours and we’d be there. We drove through the night, stopping only at the border. Black African men were hauled off and detained. They did not protest or complain. They expected it. Like men so used to defeat and prejudice that it doesn’t alarm them any more. Men who were trying to traffic themselves into a dream of a comfortable life. I felt lucky.

At 6am the following morning, we arrived. I took a subway train to La Rambla, the long pedestrian street that heads down toward the water. There was a youth hostel there that I was going to stay in. I came up from the undergound and was blown away. The fresh air, the colours, the smell of Spain. Parakeets, flowers, a hint of southern heat. I was high on it.

Four years on the dole in cold Galway, wondering exactly when and how my adventurous life was going to begin. Here I was, living it. That which seemed so impossible and far away in the rain in Ballybane, was now real. I threw my bag into the hostel and went walking.

An hour later, I was in tears and desolate on a bench. I’d been robbed. Worse, actually. I’d allowed myself to be conned out of all of my money by a bunch of Moroccan hustlers playing the pea-and-three-shells game. They fool you into thinking that you’re smarter than they are. They play on your prejudice, your European arrogance. The way the trick works is that they phuck it up over and over. Right in front of your eyes. You can’t help but think that it’s easy money. They pounce on your naivety and then laugh in your face.

I wept. I had enough money left to either eat or phone home. I phoned home.

“Tom! Good man. You made it there OK?” “I did.” So do I tell what actually happened, reconfirm his suspicions of my uselessness, or bluff it? And bluff it serious, I had no job and no money. “And how is it?” he asked “It’s great. I’ll call you during the week when I get settled.”

I wanted to do this by myself.