I got off the 45A somewhere around the new estates.
And I was going to the house at the top of the world.
Brian Carroll lived around here somewhere, and after school I'd sometimes go back to
his place and sing with his brother Dermot.
He knew all the Motown songs.
Sometimes I'd think about him, and I heard that he's a civil servant in Cork, which is
funny for a guy who used to sing Motown songs.
Then I'd come to the Leopards Town Dual Carriageway, it was the first dual carriageway in Ireland,
and it was 100 yards long.
I liked the name.
I don't remember a town being there, and I certainly saw no leopards, but I had to cross
an alleyway to get to the house at the top of the world.
Everyone thought the dual carriageway was great and modern, and every Saturday the Bowsies,
the Yahoos, gutter snipes and corner boys would empty out of the pub to scream like
wild Saturday night leopards, drunk and fast and delirious for that blessed hundred yards.
People were always getting killed, but I ducked and weaved, and it was fun, and I made it
over and up the small road past the Silver Tassie, along the riverbank past the Plotty
Church and off left up the lane to the house at the top of the world where you lived.
Your mother in her sensible shoes and your father in his tea-cozy woolly hat, bright
eyes and a room full of old hoarded yellowing newspapers and 1920s photos of the burn, and
you, busy in the kitchen, half-glad to see me, half-nervous with your parents around.
Take me for a walk around the field and down the lane, and when the evening fell your father
would light the peat fire and show me pictures of the West taken in the twenties, and then
he'd go to bed, and the night was full of you, and the evening, and the peat fire, and
the house on the top of the world, and then it was time to go and risk death again in
the dark of the Leprestown Jewel Carriageway, and on the way back I felt I could just jump
the whole bloody thing.