A Christmas Carol
Dublin city on the night before Christmas was a corpse preserved in formalin, glowing with the sickly phosphorescence of decay. It glittered, yes, of course it did, but like a coin in a drain, like the foil wrapper of a Kit Kat chocolate bar, like the ocular fluid of something long since scraped off the tarmac. You could stand on Dublin’s quays and let the whole spectacle wash over you: the cranes, subservient metal birds pecking at concrete edifices; the glass towers sweating cheap LED lights; the cranes again, because repetition is the only truth we have. People read in their numb hands, emails from the HR zombies insisting that everyone is like a family, queuing for buses that would take them to the distant, overpriced edifices they call home. Social media addicts hardly able to afford the privilege of their own misery.
In the back of a government car, a leathered husk observed the dystopian panorama. Ebenezer Scrooge. Older, but not wise; his flesh had settled into the comfortable grooves carved by power, his suits tailored to hide the absence of a noticeable political heartbeat. Minister for this, Minister for that. A veteran of the crash, which is to say, a man who had learned to drown others to keep his own head above the rising unworthy. The papers called him sagacious. The markets called him reliable. He liked both words; they were clean, surgical, devoid of the stink of human needs. A politician of “tough but necessary decisions.” The words washed over him in soothing technocratic foam: stability, competitiveness, investor sentiment, fiscal prudence. A kind of Gregorian chant for people who own second homes.
That afternoon, in the animalistic colosseum of Dáil Éireann, Irelands Parliment, he had pronounced: “We are the envy of Europe.” The words had the same meaning as a secret garden that has turned invasive. Record employment. Record investment. Outside his moving window, a shape bundled in a sleeping bag shuddered in a doorway, beneath a poster for luxury one-bedroom apartments “from €650,000.” Scrooge did not see it. Or he did, and his optical nerve transmitted the image directly to the back-end unit of his brain, where it was catalogued under Regrettable. Unavoidable. The cost of doing business.
His house was a neat, quiet tomb on a street where the trees were polite and the silence expensive. The only visible sign of the housing crisis was the price someone had paid for the house next door. No Christmas tree, no lights, no sentimental clutter. Just the unform tick-tock of a Swiss clock measuring out the remaining grains of his existence, and the distant, navel hum of the city he fed upon.
