Philadelphia Weekly

Illustration by Karen Klassen

Saturday afternoon and Grafton Street is a sea of humanity, as always. Knee-high boots and hard rolls of fat perched atop overstuffed jeans. Shambly young men with sardonic mouths and messy hair. Teenage girls in flouncy miniskirts and no tights, stout little women with thick middles and no hips. Couples holding hands, women pushing prams. Construction guys in fluorescent orange vests, their bodies solid under layers of warm winter gear. Little groups of Irish rugby supporters in green jerseys and Welsh ones wearing the curly toed red dragon, all getting geared up for the big match tomorrow. That man playing his drum with a brush in front of the Molly Malone statue, her round metallic boobs near to popping out, perpetually near but held back, just.

I leave the shopping area and walk aimlessly toward Trinity, not eager to get caught up in some sports-related street party. Maybe I'll sneak in and read in the library again. But then a few yards away on the street opposite me I see a wooden barricade and about 10 pink-faced policemen; why do all the cops in this city look like they're 12? Behind them are two scrubbed-looking dark-haired young guys holding a tricolor that flaps and snaps in the wind.

"Go home! We don't want you here!" one yells, leaning toward the blocked entrance to the street. Seems like a lot of anger, even for rugby hooligans. And these two, with their shirts tucked in and their eyes burning bright, don't look the part.

"What's the crack here?" I ask a woman with a dog, trying to be funny. That one usually gets a laugh when said in an American accent.

"They're marching today. It's a march," she tells me as she keeps moving. I blink, confused. A match, a march. Match, march, matchmarch. "Do your business and get out of town, love. That's what I'm doing."

Just then I hear the flute and drum music, and everyone's head turns. I push up onto my toes and squinting between two heads get a glimpse of dark pant legs moving in unison. Oh, a march. A north/south thing. A Protestant/Catholic thing.

There was some political demonstration back in October, with piping flutes and maudlin banners with painted-on faces I didn't recognize. I'd gotten off the tram to meet a friend from school so he could copy my notes and ended up in the middle of that too, excited and confused. When we met I asked him what the parade was for. "Silly people from up north," he said briskly, and in a way that didn't invite further questions. What the hell are these guys doing here?

When the flutes get louder, closer, the boys with the flag stand on the stairs. The bars of green, white, orange stretch between them. "Go home!" they both yell this time. I overhear a cop telling a woman not to walk through the center of town.

"There's protesters down there too, so avoid it if you can," he says, his toothy smile a tiny rebellion.

A thick knot of people has formed a few hundred yards up. The protesters want to get to the marchers but the cops won't let them, and they're angry. There's a crackling of what must be firecrackers but sounds, for that first nasty second, like gunfire.

I walk a little closer to the noise, gingerly picking through the loose crowd, and that's when I see the smoke. Either someone tells me or tells someone else or I just know, absorbing the information by osmosis the way you do in a crowd when things turn ugly, that they've lit cars on fire. On fucking Nassau Street, which is lined with tourist shops selling Donegal tweed and Kilkenny pottery. Where I used to line up to get the bus out to UCD. Most of the glass storefronts on my side of the street are smashed, some with spider-web cracks emanating from fist-sized holes, others broken in completely except for a few jagged stalactites. "EPE" (CREPES?) is all that's left of the smoky writing on the glass front of someone's lovely coffee shop.

Hot tears prick my eyes. I shouldn't be on the street, but the shops are all closed or closing, shopkeepers or young people left in charge for the afternoon pulling the gates halfway down with a harsh, hasty rattle, and I don't know where else to go. I step back into a doorway and watch the people, most of them milling around in mild confusion, the rest taking pictures with their phones. Honestly, this world, as John Banville says in his novel The Sea, the one that won the Booker Prize for Ireland. This country.

When I decide to get moving again I continue down Nassau Street, where chunks of pulpy something in the street are smoldering or giving up tired little flames. I come upon the car then, charred from the inside out, a black shell like a beetle. I keep walking toward the guesthouse where I've been staying, hoping the disagreeable woman who runs the place is okay, when I see the other car, this one completely burned out too, but upside down on its roof in the middle of the walk.

Awed by the car's size and wrongness up here on the sidewalk, I remember the story my friend Paul told me about the day three killer whales-a mother, a father and a baby-got stuck in a narrow channel of the River Lee, which flows through the middle of Cork City. He said it was the most startling thing he'd ever seen, that he'll never lose the image of those massive creatures rolling just under the surface of the river he'd been looking at all his life. It didn't occur to him to wonder how they'd gotten there, so much; he just remembers feeling afraid they'd never find their way back.