The sun was skulking on Saturday morning when I got off the DART (Dublin’s suburban rail), and started walking along the promenade towards Clontarf, to see if I could spot the other me.
I’m never sure who he is (I guess he is still a he). Is he that earnest-looking academic type, coffee in hand, chatting with his husband as they stroll towards town? Is he that be-scarfed Leinster fan heading to Croke Park with his son? Is he (please not) that ruin, wheezing along blearily to see if The Yacht is open for morning pints?
He doesn’t really exist, of course, as these people or anyone else. He’s the counterfactual me, the one who might have grown up and stayed in north Dublin if my mother, Aileen, hadn’t given me up for adoption in 1970. I met her in the 1990s, so have been visiting Clontarf now for more than 30 years. I’ve been going ‘back’ there for longer than I’ve been going back anywhere else. It feels like going back home, but it’s not back and it’s not home.
But still. Every time I am there, I wonder who he/I would have been, how different life might or might not have been. Tough for Aileen in the early 1970s, I guess, when having a child ‘out of wedlock’ was still stigmatised. She would not have been treated as brutally as the working-class women sent to mother and baby homes, but it would not have been easy for her. And what would I have become? Looking like myself – same eyes and chin/s, I guess – but a similar person approached through a different route; or someone shaped very differently by his life and times? A long-lost twin or a distant cousin?
Aileen’s been dead for two years now, and in her absence the alternate me is also fading from view. I miss her, and I miss him too. But if I walk along the promenade to Clontarf, past the bathing shelters and the churches, glancing out at the Poolbeg chimneys and at the waders pecking at the Dublin Bay mud, I can still sometimes catch a glimpse of him.
Richard Brown 