“So, um, where did you get the name Tayto?”

It was the question they always asked. Not right after you met them, but after a while. Eventually there’d be a gap in the conversation, the club's music would be between songs, and they’d throw it out there. It had taken this girl about five minutes.
“I don’t know, that’s just what people call me”

One of the lads turns around behind me and leans his drunken head over my shoulder.

“It’s because he can’t stop munching those cheese and onion!”

Ha-ha. That’s very fucking original, isn’t it?

He goes back to the slapper he’s trying it on with and leaves me and the girl alone.

“So you don’t know where you got your own name?”

“It’s not my name, it’s just what people call me”

She looks at me like I’m the biggest eejit in Dublin, and does that little half smile and head-bob women do when they’re not impressed. The music starts up again and we can’t talk for another two or three minutes.

While we’re incommunicado, she starts looking around at the other people in the club, clearly bored out of her tree. I’ve totally blown any chance I had.

Not that it’s my fault, really. I just wish they wouldn’t ask about the name.

When I was a kid, I used to like it. It made me stand out from my mates and not for something bad like having a lisp or a gammy eye. In school there was a Beano, a Dimser and so on, but most of them were just surnames shortened or changed a bit. I had my own line of quality Irish crisps.

Even the teachers called me Tayto. One morning, I was in early and snuck a look at the roll book before anyone else showed up. I was listed there as “Murphy, Brian K.”, but every morning it was:

“Tayto Murphy”

“Anseo”

Of course, I didn’t complain. It got people talking to me, and when you’re a kid all you want is to make friends, so that’s all right. I’m not the most curious bloke on the planet, so I never really wondered where it all started. One day in class, someone down the back shouted out that it was because I liked the crisps, and everyone laughed, and it stuck. Whenever anyone asked from then on, I trotted out the same answer. After a few years, I almost started believing it myself. A few after that, I forgot that it wasn’t true.

That’s how everything started to fall apart, I think; with me forgetting that I didn’t really know where the name came from.

I’m twenty-two years old, and chatting to this skinny blonde who looks fairly rough even with the flashing lights overhead. We’re in the downstairs bar in Bruxelles, and it’s six months since I found out. I still haven’t told anyone. Probably never will.

Christ, I hope Uncle Barry and that wanker Simon take it to their graves.

My mates still wonder why I started asking them to call me Bryan. You can imagine how that went. Everyone else has managed to drop their nicknames since leaving school and starting work, but not me. If I’d never asked they’d probably have stopped in a few months anyway.

Fuck it.

So Barry, my da’s brother. He’s a bit of an arse, sometimes. Especially when he’s had a few, and he comes in, arms waving all over the place telling everyone how much he loves them. He was totally toxic the night he told me about my name.

It was at a party, one of those awful family things where you get a load of relations you hardly know and you’re stuck talking to some cousin you don’t ever remember seeing before about their ma who’s someone else’s sister that you’re supposed to remember.

So I’m talking to Simon, who is Maeve’s son, who is who-the-fuck-knows, making like I give a donkey’s about what he’s doing with his life and wishing I was out on the piss with my mates. I’m listening for about five minutes before it comes up, as expected.

“Tayto’s an unusual name. Where’d you pick that one up, the shops? Ha ha ha”

I didn’t like the fucker before. Now I hate him. Him and his D4 jumper with the shirt collar and cuffs sticking out. I’m not changing that, by the way. He actually said “ha ha ha” like it was three words.

Anyway.

“I used to like the crisps when I was a kid”, I say, not remembering at this stage Anto Dunne (“Dunner”) down the back, shouting that out in class.

He looks unimpressed and does the half head-bob. I think maybe he’s gay.

“Oh, that’s mad isn’t it?”

I think “No, it’s not”, but I say nothing.

So we’re standing there, and I hear a bit of a commotion behind me.

“Excuse me Matthew”, then a pause and nearer: “Excuse me, Pat, Fidelma”.

We’re standing next to the table that has all the bottles of booze on it, and Barry’s slithering his way up to it like a worm coming onto the wet pavement.

“How you’s doing, lads?”, he asks, pretending he was coming over to talk to us and not for the full bottle of Jameson sitting on the table. Two ice cubes are still melting in his glass from the last round, spinning around the bottom while he tries to keep himself standing straight.

“We we’re just chatting about Tayto’s name”

His eyes light up at this and a manic grin spreads across his face.

“Oh were ye now?”, he asks, nodding his head like a pigeon while he looks at me.

“I know that story, don’t I, Tayto?”

I’m surprised he’s even asking me. Everyone knows the crisp story, and it’s only funny the first time you hear it. I’m fed up with simple Simon though, so I humour him.

“Do you, Barry?”

“Oh indeed. Sure wasn’t it me that gave it to you?”

Wham. My mind’s sent reeling. I’m trying to remember what the fuck he’s talking about, but getting nowhere. It’s funny the way it works sometimes. All of a sudden I’m seven years old again, and deciding that it would be funny to go along with the crisp story. Then I remember before that, to when I would just say I didn’t know.

Then I realise that I still don’t know.

“It was? Where did you get it?”, I ask him, curious and worried at the same time.

His eyes are still wide, glazed because he hasn’t blinked in about twenty seconds. His mouth hangs open like a trapdoor.

“You don’t know! I can’t believe you don’t know”

He looks from Simon to myself and starts to laugh. It begins almost as a nervous giggle, but pretty quickly he’s bent double, slapping his thighs.

“He hasn’t a clue. Janey Mac, what a world. He doesn’t know!”

Its pretty clear that something big is on the way, so Simon moves and lets Barry sit down on the chair behind him. Eventually Barry calms down a bit and wipes the tears from his eyes.

I'm in shock, but Simon is looking on agog. Then, piss head smirk on full beam, Barry puts his arm around my shoulder and pulls me down so I’m level with him on his chair.

“It was the Johnnie”, he whispers at full volume, whiskey on his breath.

I shake my head, not understanding what he’s on about, thinking maybe I didn’t hear him because of the music.

“You’re old dad didn’t have a Johnnie on him, so he emptied a packet of Tayto onto the floor and used the bag instead. It ripped, Tayto, and that was you”

He starts cackling again, and this time Simon, who had been listening in, joins him. Everyone’s looking at the two of them now, laughing like a couple of hyenas but, thank god, no-one asks what’s so funny, and I’m spared any more mortification.

I turn around, and leave the two of them to split their sides, and I wade out through the room of people I hardly know. I go home and straight to bed, knowing that Barry wouldn’t have been laughing half as hard if it was all bullshit.

Under the blankets, I think about my ma and da, about Barry and all the bullshit I've had with the name. My mate Stevie Reilly gave a fake name when the guards arrested him a few weeks ago. Swore the same name on the bible in court. You can change your real name just like that. Nobody gives a shag.

A few hours later, there's a knock on my bedroom door, and its my ma.

“Y'all right love? Ye went home very early”

She's standing in the doorway, curlers in her hair with the light streaming from behind her.

“I'm grand, ma. Thanks”

“All right then. Night love”

“Night ma”

She closes the door over with a bang and I'm left alone.

Jesus. A crisp bag.

“Nobody gives a shag about your real name”, I think, and its true. It’s what other people call you that sticks. That's where the stories are.

My birth cert is still in the kitchen drawer, in at the back behind the electric bills and spare keys. The name on that is Brian Keith Murphy. That's the name, five years after I’ve moved out, my ma still screams when I’ve done something wrong. But that’s not what I’m called, and it’s not the name that I’ll be stuck with forever.

In my school, in my group of mates, and even in my family, they call me Tayto.

Tayto Murphy.

And I wish to god I didn’t know why