Where the Rain Gets In (2 page)

She aimed to be out the door by
seven-thirty but always found she was sitting drinking her tea at this time,
writing out her own private list for the day. Some of the items featured on the
list day after day, and were copied out from the previous day’s list. So, for
example, exercise and diet were the first two items each day; diet as in to
maintain a healthy diet, not a diet to lose weight. These items were meant as a
reminder to Katie to be conscious of her health and to take care with how she
lived her life. If she could keep a check on her intake of fruit, salad and
vegetables it was a reliable way of looking after her body. Other regular items
on the list were her evening engagements, such as badminton or the cinema. She
preferred to do activities like this straight from work – especially if they
were on in town – rather than come home and then go out again. She liked her
sleep, particularly during the week while she was working – so different to the
old days – but she had nothing planned for this evening except a little
shopping for a few basic groceries. She wrote these down to the right of her
sheet of notepaper.

Katie’s tea was now cool enough to
drink. She fetched her coat from the bedroom and switched off everything that
needed to be switched off. She checked the time, which was now seven
thirty-seven, put on her coat and went out the door. Her apartment was one of
only two on this floor; there were a French couple living in the door opposite
to her own, but they kept different hours to Katie and she rarely saw them.
This was just how Katie liked it – she liked knowing they were there and they
seemed really nice but they didn’t need Katie and she didn’t need them.

She had a woolly hat in her pocket that
she put on her head when she felt the cold morning air. She wasn’t concerned
with how it made her look; keeping warm was much more important – that and the
fact that her hat bore no label or logo. It was a brisk twenty-minute walk to
the DART station each morning, and the thought of missing this train encouraged
Katie to step out briskly. She didn’t want to wait in the cold and the
carriages on the next train would be so much fuller and uncomfortable. There
were a few other regular walkers from the estate – a lovely, private collection
of apartments set in their own grounds – and Katie could judge if she was on time
or slightly late by whom she saw. She knew this was nonsense because the other
residents could be as late as she was, but no matter. She enjoyed the walk each
day and it was only ever spoiled by heavy rain and wind; then she wished she
had a car to keep her dry. On days like today, though, she felt oh so superior
to all the lazy bastards who drove to the station.

Katie’s fellow walkers were the first
test of her anonymity. She loved the fact that what mattered most was the speed
at which she walked – should she pass by this guy on the pavement in front, or
slow down slightly, or cross over to the other side of the street? Were they
both in good time for the train, and, if so, why was that woman running into
the station? These people had no idea about the private Katie back in her
apartment, and they never would have. There was nothing she wanted to know
about them, and there was nothing they would ever know about her – except, of
course, that she liked to catch the seven forty-five train in the morning.

Naturally, there were the same faces
each morning on the station platform, but Katie had found this wherever she
lived. More often than not, she wasn’t waiting long enough at the station to
let it bother her. She could see the light of the train coming towards her
along the track. She chose not to buy a newspaper from the kiosk – trying to
read on the train wasn’t always a pleasure and besides, there was no shortage
of newspapers at work. She preferred to use the time of the journey – just over
twenty minutes or so – to let her mind wander. If she concentrated on anything,
it was on her breathing.

Katie looked up at the route plan for
the DART above the carriage window and smiled. The stations were laid out on a
single straight line, much as they do for the various lines on the London
Underground. Twice every working day, Katie was reminded of a set of questions
she’d seen years ago on University Challenge. The route maps of three metro
systems in Europe were shown in outline on the screen, and the contestants had
to guess the city from the map. While none of the featured cities had quite as
extensive a network as London, they all had more than a single track. Dublin’s
DART system would seem like a branch line for these other cities – something
like the track from Newcastle to Whitley Bay – and not what you’d expect from a
country’s capital city. If you were being kind, you could add in the new Luas
tram system, but it wasn’t as though the trains and the trams were
inter-connected in any meaningful way.

And still no rail connection to the
airport, thought Katie.

When she included this observation in
her weekly column for the
Sunday Independent
, the response was fairly
predictable. First there was the ‘Well, if you don’t like our country then you
can fuck off back to where you came from’ reaction; and second there was the
‘It’s our city and we know it’s not perfect but we love it anyway.’

Katie’s reply in her next article was to
point out that she, at least, had chosen to live in this country and hadn't
just happened to be born here. As such she was in a better position to compare
Ireland with other countries and therefore have a much more informed opinion
than the racist pricks who felt threatened every time their country was
criticised. She also added that she was passing on the more extreme letters to
the Gardai for incitement to racial hatred. The second group of detractors –
the Dubs who were so proud of their city – Katie insisted were part of the
problem. If Dubliners couldn’t see how the rest of the world saw Dublin, then
nothing would ever change.

‘Dubliners are like Scousers,’ she
wrote, ‘and you can take that for the insult I mean it to be. You’ve fallen for
the myths surrounding your city, and this stops you seeing how dirty and unsafe
it really is. You believe that Dublin is the best city in the world, while the
rest of us know it’s a dump. You talk about a hundred thousand welcomes, but
then you stick a knife in any foreigner you don’t like. You say the
craic
is
mighty, but only if you’re white. And you think you’re loved by everybody but,
well, have I got news for you!’

So, of course, there was a whole new
round of correspondence asking Katie just who was the racist now? To which
Katie replied that if they were really interested in racism, they should take a
Dublin taxicab ride – nine times out of ten they’d strike lucky.

‘Nobody is addressing what I’m saying –
that Dublin doesn’t work as a city. It doesn’t function well, it’s dirty, and
it’s unwelcoming. Try walking the length of O’Connell Street – Dublin’s Champs
Elysées! Or try waiting as a pedestrian to cross O’Connell bridge – this is not
a safe city. And Ireland’s capital shitty has no striking features to take your
breath away. You can pay at the Guinness Hop Store to look out over the city
skyline, but there’s nothing there to see. So please, don’t be offended by what
I have to say – just do something about it. After all, you keep saying it’s
your city.’

This provocative style was why the
Independent
asked Katie to write in the first place. She had originally
written a letter to
The
Irish Times
, asking why Ireland should be
such an expensive place to live – what were the benefits; where was the payoff?
Other expensive countries could point to an excellent system of social welfare,
or a superior standard of living – what did we get for our money in Ireland?

The letter was printed on a day that
Katie attended a training seminar at the Irish Management Institute.

“Is that you?” asked the woman in the
seat next to Katie.

“I’m afraid so,” said Katie, and smiled.

The woman was a features editor at the
Sunday
Independent
and was delighted to learn that Katie worked as an account
manager in the Financial Services Centre. Over dinner that evening, she asked
Katie to expand her letter into a full-length article.

Katie’s article –
What does that have
to do with the price of fish?
– caused the kind of stir that newspapers
like, and also turned Katie into something of a celebrity. The normally
reserved and hidden world of investment banking was suddenly news because a
young, successful and good-looking woman had dared to question the government’s
economic policy – what’s more, she’d done so with a rigour and authority that
made people smile. Katie was asked to contribute on a regular basis, but she
initially declined.

“I’m not sure I have anything else to
say,” she told the features editor. But of course she did, and Katie was soon
contributing a weekly column to the paper. She broadened her subject matter –
it was hard to be consistently entertaining about economic policy – and more
often than not it was the failings of Ireland’s infrastructure that she wrote
about.

‘What’s the point in digging a tunnel if
you don’t go under the river? It’s one of the most perverse ideas I’ve ever
heard. They claim they’re going to take all this heavy traffic out of the city
centre, but to where? Are all the truck drivers for Galway and Cork really
going to head north in a tunnel to the car park they call the M50? So they can
queue and pay a toll for the bridge across the river?’

Katie enjoyed her observations on the
absurdity of modern life in Ireland. Her column was an irritant to the
government, and being a thorn in their side is what made Katie such a success.

‘My friends in England often ask me how
the health care system works in Ireland. I tell them we pay a Social Insurance
levy as they do in England but also pay each time we visit the doctor – they
don’t believe me.’

Katie enjoyed the provocation,
especially when she forced readers to reveal it was her Englishness they
couldn’t handle, and not her argument. For the most part she believed her own
rhetoric; she really did care and behind everything she wrote was a genuine
concern for life in Ireland to be better.

‘Would it be too difficult to hold a
national debate – say, every two years – on the percentage allocation of
government spending? Wouldn’t it be nice to specify where our money goes? My
guess is that government jets and new ministerial buildings wouldn’t make the
cut. Having a say would ease the pain of handing the money over in the first
place and, who knows, perhaps it would make the government feel more
accountable? Let’s get away from this silly idea that the Minister of Finance
is somehow better qualified than we are on how to spend our money.’

During her first TV appearance, she
referred twice to Bob Geldof’s reason for leaving Ireland in the seventies – he
couldn’t stand the mediocrity – and Katie claimed that nothing much had
changed. And yet she still chose to live in Ireland; this, for Katie, was the
proof of her sincerity.

It was appearing on television that
transformed Katie into a national figure; writing for the
Independent
was
all well and good, but television made her name. On the one hand there was this
tough, sexy babe, not afraid of using her looks to unnerve the men in suits
across from her. You could see how Katie disarmed them – try as they might,
they couldn’t resist letting slip the occasional ‘good girl’, and it was then
that Katie moved in for the kill. She dismantled her opponents’ arguments and
left them for dead. They knew they’d been had but it was too late; they’d been
made to look like gombeens on national television.

(Just as once in a mixed badminton
match, Katie’s male opponent had complained that she’d deliberately not worn a
bra to distract him. There was no way he could win his argument; he looked like
a lech and Katie still won the game.)

So here was Katie, who valued her
privacy and yet wrote for a national newspaper; who had more reason than most
to keep herself to herself and yet appeared on national television. These were
just the extreme examples of the contradiction in Katie’s working life; simply
stepping outside her front door was enough to set the contradiction in motion
for the day. Her fellow commuters didn’t know her; her work colleagues didn’t
know her; and the readers of her newspaper column didn’t know her – they were
all just different points on the same scale. A long time ago, she had a choice
– whether to stay at home or to go out into the world – and this was her way of
living with that choice.

The journey into town gave Katie a
further opportunity to prepare for the day ahead. By the time the train arrived
at Connolly Station, she had become the public persona she projected. It was a
short walk to Katie’s office – a huge building shared by several companies –
and she deliberately slowed her pace for this final leg of her commute. She
hated turning up to work hot and bothered from walking too fast and besides,
there was no need; she was in good time. It was an easy trip each day, all
things considered; the only way it could have been easier was if she chose to
live in the city centre, but she preferred the remove of Monkstown.

Katie showed her pass to Charlie the
security guard. This wasn’t really necessary – it was the scanning of the bar
code that let her in – but Charlie had been a fixture on the door from long
before Katie’s time, and knew most of what went on in the building.