Opening Lines

IT’S a lovely word: eavesdrop. I imagine a swallow pretending to spruce up its nest as it skitters along a centuries-old roof-overhang, listening to the conspirators make plans their inside the window.

What does she hear? Who will she tell? Of course more often than not eavesdropping means a man hacking into the voicemail messages of a celebrity.

My eavesdropping is more benign and consists solely of serendipitous snatches of conversation that are audible as I pass strangers in the street.

It is nothing that would attract the interest of GSOC or lead a minister for justice to lose his job.

It can be infuriating for whoever is with me.

We will be talking and then I’ll hear something from nearby and as if it were the trigger word for a hypnotisee, I will go silent. My head will tilt at an angle. I am listening.

Mostly the eavesdropped does not says anything that is mysterious, but now and then a line of dialogue will give me a peak into another world.

A man sitting behind me on the bus a few months ago said “Yeah how’s it going, yeah we’re just out now. Yeah, he got five years so he’s happy enough with that. Yeah could have been caught in Spain and he would have been rightly f..”

I didn’t quite catch the last word as it was my stop.

Even more tantalising are the sentences that leave open a myriad of unanswered questions. Last Sunday, while in Kilkenny, I was walking along the street minding my own [and a bit of everyone else’s] business when two men walked towards me and one said:

“I mean like for feck’s sake who brings a glass bottle to Mass?”

That was all I heard. What could it mean? There were so many questions. First of all, yes, exactly what kind of a person would bring a glass bottle to Mass? How did they know he had brought one? What happened to the bottle, was it broken? Had this happened before? What kind of bottle? What kind of Mass? Who said Mass?

The questions occupied me for the whole day. So much so that I now have the first line for my new novel about ecclesiastical intrigue and scandal called Stained Glass: “The bottle rolled from under the pew and up the aisle. Father Billy Kickham saw it and went pale. He was so transfixed, he haltingly ask the congregation to make the Sign of Peace. Which was strange because he wasn’t a Shake-Hands Priest at all.”

All of this leaves me wondering, what little tidbits are we all leaving out in the ether to be misinterpreted or seized upon by idle minds with big ears? What have we said in conversation, that when taken out of context sounds awful or fascinating?

Now that I am aware, I’ve decided to leave a few more for people to mull over.

The next time I meet someone as soon as they walk up to me, my smile will turn into a grimace and I’ll hiss “I SAID: No police!” and then walk away. A few seconds later, I’ll text to ask them to meet me a little further up the street, where I’ll be standing, underneath the eaves.