Grand Canal Quay

I’d been living at the Iveagh Hostel in Dublin since breaking up with my wife six months before because of my drinking. This was back in 1974. I was three weeks sober, flat-broke, drawing the dole. Every day, I checked the newspaper for jobs. One day I saw an ad in the Irish Times for a Superintendent of the Dublin Cats and Dogs Rescue Shelter on Grand Canal Quay. So, I called and a few days later my interview took place in a posh section of Dublin: Merrion Square, a Georgian redbrick townhouse. I was ushered into a big room where a group of genteel-looking middle-class men and women, retired professionals, sat around a large oak table. The interview was informal. Nobody mentioned a resume—which I didn’t have anyway. They just asked me some questions:

Why are you the best person to do this job? What experience do you have minding cats and dogs? Are you prepared to inspect and assess the home of any person wanting to adopt a dog and decide if the home is adequate? Are you prepared to deal with the public—over the phone or in person—and answer questions about lost animals? You will be required to live on the premises—how would that suit you?

I told the committee that I’d grown up around cats and dogs. My father and mother—my entire family—loved animals and they were an important part of our lives. I described some stray dogs and cats I’d rescued. How my wife and I had two Siamese cats—Mowgli and Gyr—that I’d bought for her as presents. (I said nothing about being separated and my wife having the two cats). Yes, I told them, I’d have no problem checking that the homes of people who wished to adopt a dog met the requirements. And yes, I’d be quite willing to live on the premises—and so would my wife.

Normally, I hated job interviews. However, that day, after I walked outside, I knew I’d left a favorable impression. It was a lovely late spring day, clear blue sky, leafy trees throwing shade along the sidewalk. I had a few hours to kill, so I wandered about. On Lower Baggot Street I passed by Doheny and Nesbitt’s and O’Donoghue’s—pubs the likes of which you’d only find in Dublin. I was tempted, but didn’t venture in. I had other things on my mind.

Before long I found myself at the north entrance to Saint Stephen’s Green. If I’d crossed the road, I’d have been standing on the bottom of Harcourt Street—a-few-minutes-walk from the National Film Institute where my wife worked. I hadn’t seen her in over six months. Should I stop by and surprise her? No—a better time would come. First, I needed to find a job and a decent place to live. I’d best wait and see what came of my interview.

A week passed. Every day I checked my mailbox at the Exchequer Street P.O. Nothing for me. I had nearly given up hope, and then one day a letter from the Cats and Dogs Committee lay in the box.

“You have a job and apartment?” my wife said, when I dropped in to see her a few days later at the Film Institute. She looked happy to see me. First time in six months.

“It’s above my office and overlooks the compound where the cats and dogs are kept. Would you like to see it?”

“I might.” She was sitting at a desk in front of a typewriter and a framed picture of two Siamese cats, one a seal point, the other a chocolate point.

“I miss seeing Mowgli and Gyr,”  I said. “How are they?’

She smiled, glanced at the picture. “Oh, they’re fine, the little scamps—just fine.”

“So—when can I see them?”

She stood up and walked across to where I was standing at the counter. “Well, first I think I’d like to see your place.”

Later that day, after she saw the spacious, furnished apartment, she said to me, “Well, aren’t you going to ask me something? Isn’t that why you brought me over here?”

We were standing in the upstairs kitchen. “I want us to be together,” I said. “I miss you and I love you and I think about you all the time.”

She didn’t say anything for a minute. She leaned against the sink, facing me with her arms folded. “If I decide to come back—and I’m not saying I will—then you’re going to have to treat me better. You realize that, don’t you? You just can’t carry on the way you did.” She unfolded her arms and stepped towards me. “I won’t put up with it. All that drinking—you made me so miserable—”

I nodded. “Forgive me,” I said.

She stood before me, tears in her eyes. I wanted to put my arms around her. I said, “I’ve packed in the booze. You’re looking at a new man. It’ll be the way it was in the beginning. The way we were when we first met.”

“Don’t say that unless you mean it.”

I put my arms around her. “I do,” I said. “You’ll see.” 

She took a step back. 

“I promise I’ll be good, and I’ll make you happy.”

“Well—I don’t know.”

“Won’t you give me another chance?”

She looked at me, and I could see how she struggled, uncertainty in her face. Neither of us said anything for a moment. She drew in a breath. “Well, all right,” she said, finally.  “I will. I’ve missed you, too.” She stepped closer, looked into my eyes, touched my arm, and we kissed long and slow. 

We kept Mowgli and Gyr inside the apartment, upstairs. Didn’t want them mingling with other cats because some were feral and vicious. You see, back in 1974, Dublin had hundreds of stray cats and dogs running wild in both areas of the city: North and South sides of the River Liffey.

Calls came in every day, and my job was to dispatch a driver and van to catch and rescue these animals. Sometimes, however, people would bring in cats or dogs they had adopted as puppies or kittens. Now fully-grown, the owners had tired of looking after them, wanted them off their hands, out of their lives. Sometimes even destroyed. 

First, all cats and dogs were examined by a veterinarian. If healthy and disease-free, they were put in holding pens. People came each day and looked them over. Some searched for lost pets and others wanted to adopt. However, many animals remained unclaimed or adopted. That was a problem I had to deal with. A problem never mentioned during my interview. A problem that broke my heart and kept me awake at night. I had to destroy these unwanted animals. Put them to death.

Methods were primitive. Cats I exterminated in a large metal box the size of an old-fashioned travel trunk. I’d douse a wad of cotton wool with chloroform and place it in an air-vent on the lid and side. Seal the vents. They succumbed quickly, silently.  

Not so much the dogs. Many sensing what lay ahead snarled and frothed at the mouth, fangs bared, had to be tranquilized and dragged by the scruff of the neck onto a tray of water. There two workers clamped metal clips to the dogs’ ears wired to an electric generator about the size of a small washing machine.  

Sometimes the bigger dogs—Alsatians, mastiffs, sheepdogs and the like—turned docile, licked my hand, drooped their tails, trembled and whimpered. By week’s end, there’d be a mountain of dead animals heaped in the backyard enclosure away from the public eye. Legs rigid from rigor mortis sticking out at grotesque angles. The air after a warm spell carried the odor of rotting corpses, and the enclosure’s high walls were embedded with shards of broken bottles that would cut an intruder’s palms to ribbons. Every other Saturday a Dublin Corporation lorry came by, scooped up the dead, and took them to an incinerator. 

“All those poor creatures,” my wife said to me when she found out. “Those beautiful cats and dogs—and you’re killing them. This place”—her hands flailed in the air—“it’s like fucking Auschwitz.”

I hung my head, said nothing.

“You know what you have to do?” She jabbed her fingers into my chest. “Don’t you?”

“Well—I can’t just quit—can I?”

She lowered her hand, eyes filled with tears. “You can’t keep doing it.” Her voice became shrill, packed with revulsion. “I’ll wind up hating you.”

I knew I had to get out of there and find another job. The killing of cats and dogs would go on, no matter what, and I was powerless to change that.

When I brought up my misgivings with the two workers who helped with the killings, they’d look at me and shrug. “Ah, sure, they’re only animals. They don’t feel pain like we do, and you’ll get used to doing it after a while.”

These weren’t cruel men. Killing was all part of the job—like it was for men who worked in slaughterhouses. They’d grown accustomed to it, took it in stride. Went home to their wives and kids every evening, led normal lives, watched television, read the newspapers, dropped into their local for a pint, and took their own dogs for a walk.

I lay awake at night. Couldn’t stop thinking about the stricken way dogs looked at me—their sad beseeching eyes full of pain and betrayal—as I reached for the generator switch. One jolt of electricity. They toppled dead at my feet. 

One morning a distraught middle-aged woman came in looking for her cat that had disappeared while she was on holiday. I studied the picture she laid before me on the counter: a common variety black-and-white tuxedo cat. Her boyfriend had been taking care of the cat, but it’d run off and been missing for over a fortnight. 

Had I seen her beloved Fursey?

“I’ll keep an eye out and tell the rescue drivers,” I told her. “If your Fursey shows up, we’ll call you immediately.” Then I put my hand on her arm, and said, gently, “Don’t give up hope. Stray cats turn up all the time—sometimes even weeks later.” 

She stopped by again the very next day. Fursey had given her so much love and joy—she broke into heart-rending sobs—and now she’d probably never see him again. I listened to her woe, her hopelessness, and her grief. But I had no words to comfort her. All I could do was walk her outside to her car. 

The day was bright and sunny. A Saturday around midday. A group of runners—their singlets emblazoned with numbers—came racing along the Grand Canal towpath past a stone-arched bridge that reflected in the water. We crossed the street towards where her car was parked. I could see the somewhat-blurred shape of a man behind the shadowy-leaf-dappled windscreen. “You haven’t met Fergus, my boyfriend,” she said, and opened the driver’s-side door.

There was something wrong with the way the man looked at me. I was taken aback because the look in his eyes—cornered, undone—reminded me of what I’d seen in the eyes of dogs I’d destroyed. Did I know him from someplace? Before I could say anything, he whipped a pair of sunglasses from his shirt pocket, placed them on his face, and stared out at the runners racing by.

“Nice to meet you,” I said, cautiously.

He paid me no heed, turned to the woman, and said, “Ah, for Jaysus’ sake, will yis hurry up and get in the bleedin jalopy?” 

A faint flash of cognition flickered in my brain. Before I fully grasped its meaning, she had switched on the ignition and was pulling away from the curb. I wanted to call after them, but by then more runners were milling past me in the street, and the car had sped away. A few minutes passed. I walked to the nearby lock gate and stared at the swans paddling in the still waters. They looked so noble and graceful, aloof, not a bother on them, impervious to the churning in my stomach.      

The woman would return tomorrow. What would I say to her? Your boyfriend brought in Fursey while you were on holiday.  He told me the cat was savage and dangerous and wanted it destroyed. I’d put Fursey to death. Should I tell her all that? Maybe—I wasn’t so sure. I felt horribly guilty, ashamed of myself, a gullible fool.

When I got back to the rescue shelter, my wife asked if I was feeling all right. “I’m fine,” I said. “There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m fine.” Later that evening, we went to see Roman Polanski’s Chinatown at the Carlton on O’Connell Street.   

The following week she called me from work. The phone company was hiring. “You’d better apply right now,” she said, before putting down the phone. “It’s a civil service job and pays well with benefits.”  

I mailed in my application. The Department of Posts and Telegraphs needed Male Night Telephonists. Women worked the daytime shift. Back in those days if you spoke Gaeilge—the Irish language—you stood a reasonably good chance of landing a civil service job when vacancies occurred.

I’d grown up speaking Irish. My parents were fluent, and Galway, my hometown, is the gateway to Connemara and an Gaeltacht—the Gaelic speaking region in the West. I’d also spent time on the Aran Islands—Inisheer—where the natives all spoke Irish, and English was frowned upon.  

Three men conducted the interview. The first two asked me questions in English. The third, a short bald man, with a gold fainne in his lapel—an Irish speaker’s ring—asked me questions in Irish. 

Ce’n caoi a bfuil to inniu?

Maith go leor. 

Agus ce’n ait a rugaigh tu”

Cathair na Gaillimhe.

Tá do chuid Gaeilge go h-anna mhait.

Go raibh míle maith agat—nîl agam ach cupla focal. Tá se go leir caillte.

I got the job. My wife and I found an apartment—a flat on Grosvenor Road in Rathmines. Dublin’s flatland. I never did tell her about the pitiful woman, her lost cat, or the boyfriend who had brought in the cat, claimed to be the owner, and wanted it destroyed—and that I had done the deed.  

Why had I kept mum? You see, I was slowly working my way back into my wife’s good graces, staying away from booze, regaining what love and trust I had lost, and telling that story would have caused her immense pain—and, besides, I was already burdened with remorse over the entire sordid business. Now, having found another job, I truly believed that soon my days spent at the Cats and Dogs Rescue Center would recede into memory and hold no power over me. 

I never did tell the distraught woman about her boyfriend. Today when I think about that time, I see you can’t always walk away from things that happened in your past. Dreadful half-forgotten things that lurk in the dark recesses of your mind, and rarely surface, but sometimes do with all the harrowing force of buried guilt and shame–unleashed, fierce and raw, potent as ever. No, it isn’t that easy as I have found out.