The Deportees

• About the Author
  
• By the Same Author
  
• Title Page
  
• Copyright Page
  
• Dedication
  
• Foreword
  
• Guess Who's Coming for the Dinner
  
  • Chapter 1 Larry Linnane Loved His Daughters
    
  • Chapter 2 A Black Man on the Kitchen Table
    
  • Chapter 3 AIDS, War, the Works
    
  • Chapter 4 A Gorgeous Smell
    
  • Chapter 5 Spuds
    
  • Chapter 6 The Naked Chef
    
  • Chapter 7 Two of Them
    
  • Chapter 8 That African Stuff
    
• The Deportees
  
  • Chapter 1 The Real Slim Shady
    
  • Chapter 2 Northside Deluxe
    
  • Chapter 3 Wigs in the Window
    
  • Chapter 4 The Hardest-Working Band
    
  • Chapter 5 The King
    
  • Chapter 6 Finger-Food
    
  • Chapter 7 The Tracks of My Tears
    
  • Chapter 8 Vigilante Man
    
  • Chapter 9 Dust Bowl Refugees
    
  • Chapter 10 Smells Like Teen Spirit
    
  • Chapter 11 Civil War
    
  • Chapter 12 Fat Gandhi's Back Garden
    
  • Chapter 13 Drugs and Christianity
    
  • Chapter 14 Spirit of the Nation
    
  • Chapter 15 I'm Checkin' Out, Go'om Bye
    
• New Boy
  
  • Chapter 1 He Is Very Late
    
  • Chapter 2 The Finger
    
  • Chapter 3 You're Definitely Dead
    
  • Chapter 4 Milk
    
  • Chapter 5 The Bell
    
  • Chapter 6 Robbing a Bank
    
• Part 57% Irish
  
  • Chapter 1 Robbie Keane's Goal
    
  • Chapter 2 The Minister
    
  • Chapter 3 Soft Rain
    
  • Chapter 4 The Fáilte Score
    
  • Chapter 5 The Minister II
    
  • Chapter 6 Moroccan Chicken
    
  • Chapter 7 Old Mister Brennan
    
  • Chapter 8 My Little Apparatchik
    
  • Chapter 9 The Toblerone
    
• Black Hoodie
  
  • Chapter 1
    
  • Chapter 2
    
  • Chapter 3
    
  • Chapter 4
    
  • Chapter 5
    
  • Chapter 6
    
  • Chapter 7
    
  • Chapter 8
    
• The Pram
  
  • Chapter 1
    
  • Chapter 2
    
  • Chapter 3
    
  • Chapter 4
    
  • Chapter 5
    
  • Chapter 6
    
  • Chapter 7
    
  • Chapter 8
    
• Home to Harlem
  
  • Chapter 1
    
  • Chapter 2
    
  • Chapter 3
    
  • Chapter 4
    
  • Chapter 5
    
  • Chapter 6
    
  • Chapter 7
    
  • Chapter 8
    
  • Chapter 9
    
  • Chapter 10
    
• I Understand
  
  • Chapter 1
    
  • Chapter 2
    
  • Chapter 3
    
  • Chapter 4
    
  • Chapter 5
    
  • Chapter 6
    
  • Chapter 7
    
  • Chapter 8
    
  • Chapter 9
    

THE DEPORTEES

Roddy Doyle was born in Dublin in 1958. He is the author of eight acclaimed novels and
Rory & Ita,
a memoir of his parents. He won the Booker Prize in 1993 for
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.

ALSO BY RODDY DOYLE

Fiction

The Commitments
The Van
The Snapper
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
A Star Called Henry
Oh, Play That Thing
Paula Spencer
The Woman Who Walked Into Doors
Non-Fiction
Rory & Ita
Plays
Brownbread
War
Guess Who's Coming For Dinner
The Woman Who Walked Into Doors
No Messin' With the Monkeys
For Children
The Giggler Treatment
Rover Saves Christmas
The Meanwhile Adventures

RODDY DOYLE

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

ISBN 9781407013435

Version 1.0

www.randomhouse.co.uk

Published by Vintage 2008

4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3

Copyright © Roddy Doyle 2007

Roddy Doyle has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

This electronic book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

First published in Great Britain in 2007 by Jonathan Cape

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A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library

ISBN: 9781407013435

Version 1.0

To the students and staff of
Greendale Community School
(1975–2007)

These stories all appeared first in
Metro Eireann.
In its finished, but slightly altered, form, 'Guess Who's Coming for the Dinner' appeared in the
New Yorker
under the title 'The Dinner'. 'The Deportees', 'New Boy', 'The Pram', 'Home to Harlem' and 'I Understand' were published in
McSweeney's.

The author is grateful for permission to reprint material from the following:

'If You're Irish Come Into The Parlour' Words and Music by Shaun Glenville and Frank Miller © 1919. Reproduced by permission of B Feldman & Co Ltd, London WC2H 0QY. 'Tracks of My Tears' Words and Music by William Robinson Jr, Warren Moore and Marvin Tarplin © 1965, Jobete Music Co Inc, USA. Reproduced by permission of Jobete Music Co Inc/EMI Music Ltd, London WC2H 0QY. 'Inner City Blues (Makes Me Wanna Holler)' Words and Music by Marvin Gaye and James Nyx © 1971, Jobete Music Co Inc, USA. Reproduced by permission of Jobete Music Co Inc/EMI Music Ltd, London WC2H 0QY. 'Singing in the Rain' Words by Arthur Freed. Music by Nacio Herb Brown © 1929 EMI Catalogue Partnership and EMI Robbins Catalog Inc, USA. EMI United Partnership Ltd, London WC2H 0QY (Publishing) and Alfred Publishing Co Inc, USA (Print). Administered in Europe by Faber Music Ltd. Reproduced by permission. All Rights Reserved. 'I'm Checking Out – Goo'm Bye' Words and Music by Duke Ellington. Music by Billy Strayhorn © 1939 EMI Music Publishing Ltd, London WC2H 0QY. Reproduced by permission of International Music Publications Ltd (a trading name of Faber Music Ltd). All Rights Reserved. 'Where? When? Which?' and 'Let America Be America Again, from
The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes
by Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad with David Roessel, Associate Editor, copyright © 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. 'Passing' from
The Ways of the White Folks
by Langston Hughes, copyright 1934 and renewed 1962 by Langston Hughes. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. 'Get Up, Stand Up' Words & Music by Bob Marley & Peter Tosh © Copyright 1973 Embassy Music Corporation/Fifty-Six Hope Road Music Limited/Odnil Music Limited/Stuck on Music, USA. Blue Mountain Music Limited (93.75%)/Campbell Connelly & Company Limited (3.12%). Used by permission of Music Sales Limited. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. 'Vigilante Man' 'Dead or Alive' and 'Do Re Mi' by Woody Guthrie and 'Blowing Down This Road Feeling Bad' by Woody Guthrie and Lee Hays. Reprinted by permission of TRO Essex Music Ltd., Suite 2.07, Plaza 535 Kings Road, London, SW10 0SZ. 'We Shall Be Free' by Huddie Ledbetter and 'So Long, It's Been Good To Know Yuh' by Woody Guthrie. Reprinted by permission of Kensington Music Ltd., Suite 2.07, Plaza 535 Kings Road, London, SW10 0SZ. While every effort has been made to obtain permission from holders of copyright material reproduced herein, the publishers would like to apologise for any omissions and will be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgements in any further editions.

If your name is
Timothy
or Pat
So long as you come from Ireland
There's a welcome
on
the
mat.

Maybe it was
Riverdance.
A bootleg video did the rounds of the rooms and the shanties of Lagos and, moved to froth by the sight of that long, straight line of Irish and Irish-American legs –
tap-tap-tap, tappy-tap
– thousands of Nigerians packed the bags and came to Ireland.
Please. Teach us how to do that.

I suspect it was more complicated. It was about jobs and the E.U., and infrastructure and wise decisions, and accident. It was about education and energy, and words like 'tax' and 'incentive', and what happens when they are put beside each other. It was also about music and dancing and literature and football. It happened, I think, some time in the mid-90s. I went to bed in one country and woke up in a different one.

That was how it felt, for a while. It took getting used to. I'd written a novel,
The Van,
in 1990, about an unemployed plasterer. Five or six years later, there was no such thing as an unemployed plasterer. A few years on, all the plasterers seemed to be from Eastern Europe. In 1994 and 1995, I wrote
The Woman Who Walked Into Doors.
It was narrated by a woman called Paula Spencer, who earned her money cleaning offices. She went to work with other working-class women like herself. Ten years later, I wrote
Paula Spencer.
Paula was still cleaning offices but now she went to work alone and the other cleaners were men from Romania and Nigeria. In 1986, I wrote
The Commitments.
In that book, the main character, a young man called Jimmy Rabbitte, delivers a line that became quite famous: —The Irish are the niggers of Europe. Twenty years on, there are thousands of Africans living in Ireland and, if I was writing that book today, I wouldn't use that line. It wouldn't actually occur to me, because Ireland has become one of the wealthiest countries in Europe and the line would make no sense.

In April 2000, two Nigerian journalists living in Dublin, Abel Ugba and Chinedu Onyejelem, started publishing a multicultural paper called
Metro Eireann.
I read an article about these men in the
Irish Times,
and decided that I'd like to meet them. Three or four years into our new national prosperity, I was already reading and hearing elegies to the simpler times, before we became so materialistic – the happy days when more people left Ireland than were born here; when we were afraid to ask anyone what they did for a living, because the answer might be 'Nothing'; when we sent our pennies and our second-hand clothes to Africa but never saw a flesh-and-blood African. The words 'racist' and 'racism' were being flung around the place, and the stories were doing the rounds. An African woman got a brand new buggy from the Social Welfare and left it at the bus stop because she couldn't be bothered carrying it onto the bus, and she knew she could get a new one. A man looked over his garden wall and found a gang of Muslims next door on the patio, slaughtering an Irish sheep. A Polish woman rented a flat and, before the landlord had time to bank the deposit, she'd turned it into a brothel, herself and her seven sisters and their cousin, the pimp. I heard those three, and more, from taxi drivers. I thought I'd like to make up a few of my own.

I met Abel Ugba and asked him if I could write for
Metro Eireann
and, while we talked, the idea for the first story came to me. An Irishman's daughter brings home a Nigerian boyfriend – enough to get me going. Abel suggested 800 words a month; the paper was a monthly. (It's now weekly.) I had the title, 'Guess Who's Coming for the Dinner', before I got home. Since then I've completed eight stories. There's a love story, a horror story, a sequel, sort of, to
The Commitments.
Almost all of them have one thing in common. Someone born in Ireland meets someone who has come to live here. The love, and the horror; excitement, and exploitation; friendship, and misunderstanding. The plots and possibilities are, almost literally, endless. Today, one in every ten people living in Ireland wasn't born here. The story – someone new meets someone old – has become an unavoidable one. Hop on a Dublin bus, determined to sit beside someone who was born and bred in Dublin, and you'll probably be standing all the way.

The stories are all written in 800-word chapters. It's a restraint, and a good deal of the fun. I once read about a character in a U.S. TV daytime soap who went upstairs for his tennis racket, and never came back down. No one missed or asked about him; daytime life went on. The stories in this book have their tennis-racket moments. Characters disappear, because I forgot about them. Questions are asked and, sometimes, not quite answered. The stories have never been carefully planned. I send off a chapter to the
Metro Eireann
editor, Chinedu Onyejelem, and, often, I haven't a clue what's going to happen next. And I don't have to care too much, until the next deadline begins to tap me on the shoulder. It's a fresh, small terror, once a month. I live a very quiet life; I love that monthly terror.

Dublin – December 2006

www.metroeireann.com