The Shopping Bag

Through Talbot Street people seemed to simply appear, women with scarves, short old polish women, youths with ignorant arrogant looks, and then he appeared from under the green rail bridge. Walking fast although he was not in a hurry he could feel minute -maybe invisible to the eye -perspiration drops between the border of his hat and his forehead; he did not wanted to take out his hat, he had not washed his hair in while, he was too self-conscious as to walk without his hat.
His left hand was getting tired of holding the shopping bag with things he would not eat. While he strangled slowly his fingers with the plastic handle of the bag he was thinking rather too serious on what to do with the contents of the bag, the first and easiest option he could think of was to simply put the bag in the closest dustbin. Somehow the idea of doing such a thing started appearing most apalling and the moral revoltion caused by this idea was creeping in accelerating speed throughout his rather hypersensitive sense of guilt.
The best thing to do then was to give it to one of the beggars in the city centre. The city was very crowded, it was a sunny day, and he had to insert himself into one of the people flows in the right sidewalk of O'Connell street, he felt dragged by the multide thinking that he stopped walking either the movement of the rest would take him somewhere or that he would died runover by too many Dubliners.
He got to cross the river and in the bridge he saw the first beggar, he was sitting on the floor looking down between his knees while holding and empty cardboard cup in front of him. He considered the posibility of giving him the bag for too long and he finally got to a decision it was too late and the people ebb had took him too far, he was crossing the street now, he thought that if he wanted to do that he would need to be quicker in both the spotting of the candidate and the selection of it. He saw an old man with an odd hat sitting in a what seemed to be an empty wooden box of apples or maybe fish, he try to stop but the velocity of the people in front and behind him was to high, he had to wait until he got to the street light in the corner to go back, he saw that the old man had an open suitcase with old random clippings and some even older objects, there was a sign written in a piece of cardboard with a black marker, it was something about being proud of being Irish, or was it that he was praying all the time for the happines of everybody in the world? maybe both, but the words written did not suggested that he was begging, there was the possibilty that was not under any circumstances asking for anything, therefore giving him the bag would become an insult, a sign of prejudism, social paternalism and snobbery that would ultimate upset the poor old man that was just praying for the world and feeling proude of his irishness, he did not want to upset that man, that would upset him as well.
The quest continued with some other unsuccessful attempts until he saw a rather young man sitting on the sidewalk with a dog, that man was certainly not irish he thought so that reduced the chance of running into another nationalist, but again he could not stop, he really tried, there was frustration and guilt arousing, how could an invisible -possibly inexistent -urban force be stronger than him. He had had enough, he stopped turned around, bump into one or two people, ignored some mumbling insults, walk streight in the direction of the young beggar and ask him if he would like to have some bread, apples and milk, before hearing an answer he handed the bag, the young man said something he did not understand well, could have been a "thank you" or a "fuck you", he did not care, he could not be bothered, went into the flow and let Dublin guide him.