The Wrong Side of an Argument

I met Andrew on the wrong side of an argument.

We had planned to meet in Dublin, at a church converted into a pub. The elements of the church were all there : you entered through heavy carved wooden doors into a cavernous room, and at its center sat a long oblong bar shaped like a racing track. Below, shelves stocked with glasses and the ordinary hardware of a bar. Above them, running racks holding rows of stemware upside down like something between chandeliers and gallows. Above that again, bottles of every shape and label, rising toward where a ceiling should have been humbler. Great taps rose off the oblong table, piped down to barrels below. My favourite, Guinness, was flowing freely.

The bar was full. Friday evening. Beyond it, on the raised platform where a priest would once have given his sermon, a live band now played, flanked by speakers the size of confessionals.

The setting was perfect : music and voices braided together into something loud enough to drown any single voice in it. Remarkably, one of the many bartenders heard us over the noise and got us our drinks. The evening had begun.

He was Irish, over six feet, lean, a ruddy complexion under flaming red hair, green eyes. Someone later told me quintessential Irish, as if the phrase explained something. A practicing Catholic, he rarely missed Sunday Mass and often turned up for sermons midweek besides. Confession was a constant feature of his life, which I did not yet know would matter.

He was sitting at one end of the oblong bar, a pint of Guinness in front of him, looking lost in some thought I hadn’t earned the right to ask about yet. As I walked toward him he gestured to the stool beside his. I sat. We began exchanging notes : he worked for an aircraft leasing company I was visiting to understand the product, and we’d agreed earlier that day to meet here, socially, so he could give me a feel for the locals. It seemed all of Dublin had descended on the place that night.

Conversation was impossible beyond barely heard syllables. I leaned in to catch one of his sentences, and as I did, someone from behind knocked into me. I went down, the stool overturning under me. Before I could get up, Andrew was already off his seat, and had slammed into the man who’d shoved me.

The band did not stop. That was the detail I kept coming back to afterward : fists everywhere, glass somewhere, and above it all the same three chords looping on, as if the room had decided the music and the violence belonged to two separate evenings happening in the same space. I stayed on the floor. It seemed, in the moment, like the wisest real estate available.

A few minutes later, it was over. Everyone, Andrew included, was back on their stools, drinking as though the interlude had been exactly that : an interlude, nothing personal, already filed away. Conversations resumed mid-sentence. Nobody so much as glanced toward the man Andrew had gone after.

When his pulse had settled and he’d had a few sips, I asked him what had just happened. He picked up his pint first, looked at it for a moment as if checking how much had survived, and took a long drink before he answered.

Andrew shrugged, as though no further explanation were necessary. He pointed to a man further along the bar wearing a wristband with a cross on it. Protestant, he said. That was enough. A group of them had walked into a Catholic pub and worn their belief on their wrist, in plain disregard of who else was drinking there or so it looked to Andrew, in the ten seconds he’d had to decide before his fist was already moving.

They were all Irish, though, so once the fists had settled it was back to the Guinness, as if the entire exchange had been a formality that both sides understood and neither much minded repeating.

A little after midnight the band gave way to a single singer, a woman with a voice too clear for the room she’d been given. She sang a ballad about love and forgiveness, nothing more complicated than that, the kind of song that has been sung in every pub in Ireland by someone who meant it. And the room, which had not gone quiet for the fight, went quiet for her.

I looked for the man with the wristband. He was still there, two seats down from where he’d been, a fresh pint in front of him. Andrew was looking at him too. Neither of them raised a glass or said a word across the distance, but something passed between the two of them anyway, some small private acknowledgment that the argument had been real and the song was also real and both could apparently be true in the same room on the same night.

The singer finished. The band came back. Everyone returned to being exactly who they’d been an hour earlier.