Thoughts about ruthless luck and ravaged hope

'All the neighbourhood kids loved him. He was calmer than a breeze. He would take his pocket money from my father and give it to me. Everyone loved him. His friends came and he went with them to school. They went out running like butterflies, flying off the ground . . . like the world was created for them." (Ashraf A Sossi, The Gaza Monologues)

I was shredding lettuce in the kitchen, leaning against the counter top. There was a shiny red pepper on the chopping board, and some red onion, tomatoes, a couple of those dwarf cucumbers, and a tin of unopened cashew nuts next to the salad bowl.

The evening was heavy, purplish, cloudy; the air felt bruised, hot and cold and grey and pink. Rain, of course, was threatening. Midsummer in Ireland, rain is always threatening.

Usually we get away around this time of year, go to Spain, bus around a bit, paddle in big seas, poke around dark cathedrals and darker bars, end up in the small house in the mountainous village that crouches in the crook of the blue Alpujarras, where my stepmother-in-law (if such a term even exists) used to live.

We lost her this year, to cancer, and somehow it just feels too difficult to make that familiar pilgrimage right now. Anyway, there are work commitments, and recalcitrant children who are no longer children anymore, with plans of their own. They have dust of their own choosing to kick up, waves of their own to skim. It’s fine with me; I’m not feeling a whole heap of wanderlust this year.

Pallets would do

I have a home to stay at home in. I have a small, pebbled back garden, with a fatsia plant that thinks it’s a tree, and a climbing hydrangea, and a couple of pots of lavender. I have a long, wide stone step to sit on, and vague plans to maybe make some garden furniture out of wooden pallets (if I could find a pallet).

I even have a belly-shaped barbecue, on a tripod, that my sisters gave me a couple of birthdays ago. I barbecue most nights now, under the bruised sky, more than once under an umbrella. It’s summer, after all.

I was shredding the lettuce, about to start on the pepper, waiting for the barbecue flames to die down so I could throw on a couple of burgers, when a bird flew into the kitchen through the open back doors. I’d watched it dart around outside, glide over the fatsia, swoop down to dip for crumbs. It looked tiny under the mottled sky; trapped indoors, it seemed huge, terrifying.

My grandmother used to say that when a bird flew into the house, death soon followed. I left the kitchen, closed the door behind me, waited for it to find its way back out.

Theatre of sorrow

Death and sorrow, loss and fear, had felt very close that afternoon. I had just returned from a small hot theatre in the city where I’d watched a dozen or so young Irish actors perform

The Gaza Monologues

, a play written more than five years ago by Palestinian teenagers as part of a drama-therapy initiative. The monologues have since been performed worldwide, each story reflecting the disturbed and often shattered lives of the children of Gaza.

It was a moving and sobering afternoon for the scattering of us who attended the performance, who bunkered down in that small dark theatre, while outside the fickle sun tried to steal the show.

Standing in my kitchen scattering leaves into the bowl, I had been thinking about the stories I had witnessed, the sad, raging articulacy of those young writers, their words rising out of Palestine like a flare.

One teenager wrote about his little brother, who was running to school when he was blown sky-high by a rocket aimed at a car full of wanted men. Collateral damage. A collaterally dead butterfly, “calmer than a breeze”.

Another writer, a young woman, described Gaza as a place without tenderness. “Our future,” she wrote, “is unknown. We’re on a boat without a captain in the midst of a raging sea.”

I was thinking, in that incidental moment as the bird flew inside my quiet kitchen, about random, capricious, ruthless luck. About the more than 500 baby’s vests that had been stretched that morning across Sandymount Strand, representing Palestinian children who died during Israel’s offensive in Gaza 12 months ago.

I was thinking of ravaged hope, and my own inestimable fortune to be preparing food in my kitchen, fearing little more than a downpour.