Sliding Rubicons, Crossing Doors And The Serendipity Of Lovely Chance Encounters

You know the way academics and the like go on about stories, and how they give our life meaning and a sense of purpose, and all that deep existential stuff? 

And fair enough. 

But there are times when it’s like you’re just going about your business and a story just seems to write itself around you. It’s like you’re actually in it, and the story just … happens?

Like, there I am just this morning …

I’ve comfortably made the 8.09am train, at Rush and Lusk station. I‘m going southbound, to the next station up, Donabate, for a 9.30am appointment with a dental technician.

With maybe a minute to spare before all the doors close in that synchronised  theatrical way and we pull out, a young, small South Asian woman hops on, a little flustered and panting, slightly.

Morning trains here are commuter hover and pounce time, the seats so hard to find by this point, so we are both standing just inside the door. She glances at me, and I twinkle a ‘you just made it’ smile to her.

You don’t push these things, or I don’t anyway, so it’s like we are both debating in our heads if we will actually speak. But after she takes off her navy wind cheater, muttering something about being ‘hot’, I take my cue and venture, ‘You made it’.

‘Yes, I had to run,’ She smiles a toothy smile as she takes off her rectangular framed glasses to wipe them.

… ’One other morning I arrived and the doors shut in my face,’ she continues, her dark eyes widening.

Nothing if not obvious, I say, ‘Your sliding doors moment’.

She smiles, but from the narrowing of her eyes, glasses restored, she has no idea what I am talking about, and she’s smiling just in case it’s her fault she doesn’t get it

‘The movie, Sliding Doors?, I begin to explain.

‘Well, it’s years since I saw it,’ I go on, ‘but the story is divided in two parts. I forget which happens first, but in the first half, I think, this woman just catches a train, and a series of encounters happen that shapes her life in a particular way.

‘Then, the second part, the same woman, goes to make the same train, and misses it, the doors close just as she gets there … like you the other day … and her life is shaped in a very different way …”

{Those of you who have seen the movie, will know I am making an arse of telling it. Of course, Sliding Doors, being a glossy rom-com movie, everything works out swimmingly for Gwynnie Paltrow, everything comes up smelling of vag … well, she crosses paths with Chris, a singer with Goop, or something, and they have a Moses and an Apple, but then, in part two, she consciously uncouples from Chris — who never gets cross — and she starts a hot business called Coldlay … I mean Coldplay … has her minions make these unusually-scented candles, which make her millions.]

‘Ah, yes,’ my train woman beams, the smile of understanding and relief. ‘There are many books like that … we choose to do something, or something else, and things work out very differently …’

The train is slowing down for Donabate by now, and we exchange goodbyes, and I step out onto the platform.

My wife had dropped me at station on her way to work, as it is several miles outside the town. Grand and all, but it is still only 8.17am, and I have over an hour to kill. 

The dental technician’s place is minutes from the station, so I reckon I’ll chance by and see if he’s open, maybe get an earlier appointment. See if his door is open or closed …

His surgery, or whatever you call it, is squeezed in between the local SuperValu and some shop or other, and the downstairs door is … open!

Serge, the real-life dental technician, is there in his narrow warren of servicable, functional rooms on the top floor of two, the corridor outside scented already by the incense burning in the yoga studio right alongside.

The whole set-up could have been there for years, or it just popped up before I arrived. 

It is my second visit, so I already feel a connection with this tall, wiry, extremely blond, almost white-haired actually, man, I’d say in his late 30s. The hair is thinning and dragged forward, back to front, but the equally white smile is definitely a good advertisement for his craft … real or false, or a mix of both, impossible to tell, and it might be rude to enquire.

There is something in the smile, and his relaxed, certain movements and that wonderful thing when someone gets your humour, and you can relax with them. Well, that’s how I feel with this man with the unusual accent, heavily localised, but with a twist of something, somewhere else.

‘I do have a patient, but I can do it quickly,’ he offers, glancing at his appointments book. 

The first visit had been to repair my dental plate which had snapped in two, and had been kept in place by a mix of Fixadent and fortitude for the weekend I had to endure before the Monday appointment.

Today is about a fitting for a back-up second plate. The one I had been promising myself for … well, years, but now the snapped plate has forced me to act.

Brilliant, Serge can do the job now, so I’ll be nearly back in Rush on the next train by the original 9.30am.

Not quite sliding door serendipitous, but it will do me!

Gently but knowing fingers stuff the gunky concoction deftly up into the roof of my mouth, to make the imprint for my new plate, so my conversation is limited for a moment.

Once removed, I venture to ask him more about his intriguing accent.

‘It’s a bit of everywhere I have been,’ he grins.

‘I came to Ireland 20 years ago, from Latvia, to save money for a wedding … a wife, three children later, I am still here …’

‘How old are they … not your partner, the kids?’

‘Nine, six … and three months … so I’m stuck,” he laughs.

‘So, coming here was your sliding doors moment,’ I offer. 

And he smiles the smile of recognition. I soon tell him about my friend Ciaran. 

We met in a temporary work agency in Breda, Holland many, many years ago.  Sitting there in that place that specialised in casual work for the likes of us then, the young, footloose and pre-ambitious (or already post- in a lot of cases), this cool, long-haired Dub with the combat jacket and hippy beads, and his guitar case on the floor beside him, told us about this American woman he had met, and how he was going to join her there after he had earned a few bob here over the summer.

‘Ciaran still lives in Breda, Holland, retired now and everything’.

Serge’s dental impression thing hasn’t taken properly, so he rolls a fresh lump of greyish damp goop.

‘Yes,’ he continues as he works, ‘it’s like that thing, crossing the Rubicon”.

He is happy with this set and goes to his book to organise our appointment for me to collect the new plate.

‘Yes,’ I smile, ‘now you have the proper impression, we have crossed the Rubicon,’

‘The sliding Rubicon,’ he laughs, revealing those gleaming gnashers again.

‘Yes, it is funny how things happen … I am from Riga … Serge was a very popular name in Russia and Latvia was still part of the USSR until 1992  … things were a lot different then …’

A story for the next visit, methinks.

‘I know Riga, from the football,’ I say, ‘Ireland have played them in the Euro qualifiers, and the World Cup qualifiers too,’ I say.

‘I don’t know a lot about the football … ice hockey was the big sport for me,’ he says.

‘Hardly much opportunities around here for that,’ I say. ‘Maybe at Christmas, when all those ice rinks pop up …’

‘Yes,’ he chuckles, ‘but I did see there recently, there was an ice place for sale in Dundalk … something to do with a debt, or something,’’

I pay and head off for the train station.

Thinking on the way of Riga, and how years ago, as kids, many of us knew all sorts of weird and wonderful places in Europe, purely from the fact they had football teams, with obscure but magical names like Dynamo Kiev,  then in the USSR and latterly of course, in Ukraine, and Upjest Dozsa in Hungary.

And their kits, often so different from the usual red, blue, claret and blue or stripes of the English and Irish sides of the time, All captured brilliantly by that great song from the reliably wonky Half Man Half Biscuit, All I Want For  Christmas Is A Dukla Prague Away Kit 

Alas there’s no Sliding Doors finale to this tale, as the electronic train timetable at the station tells me the next train is in 43 minutes. I guess here’s where this particular story ends.

The short tale of the Tipperary man, born in Dublin, living in North Dublin and married to a Kerry woman who meets a woman from South Asia on a train and goes to see his Latvian dental technician who came here by chance and stayed … true (ish) story.