DISPLACED IN MULLINGAR:I WAS AT A SHOW last Sunday; a field of horse lorries, chipper vans, portaloos, stalls selling straw hats and tackle, teenage girls in white jodhpurs and riding boots, rewriting Tolstoy's complete works on their mobile phones.
It dawned on me that summer has begun; that Mullingar is hot and sweaty and ready for boogie-woogie; that it is time to push the boat out once again.
All week, young men, anointed with cologne, preened themselves at wooden tables outside mid-town pubs, and girls wore tight summer tops.
I discussed the impending boogie-woogie with a woman from Serbia. "In Belgrade, I could share emotions with anyone on the street," she said. "But money makes people closed."
She was tall, with the slender neck of a dancer. Her nose was long and the grey in her black hair accentuated the dignity and sorrow in her expressive features. She had eyes as dark as cherries in a bucket of water but they never showed me why she left Belgrade. "I never had a car," she said. "In Serbia, there were many buses."
We were trying to make conversation. "In the old days," I said, "there were many trains in Ireland. Women with baskets of eggs could hop on trains that went all over the place."
She smiled politely, but I could see our little chat was going nowhere, so I withdrew, reluctantly, from the gaze of her wonderful eyes.
I live in a dense cluster of houses. The smoke of many barbecue grills reaches me as I hang washing on the line. I don't do barbecues; the garden is too small. And since I won't be invited to the big house this year for wild nights on the patio, after my conduct last year, I was delighted when the neighbours invited me to party with them last Saturday evening.
They said they were off to Majorca. We sat in their back garden, under a big aluminium yoke that is supposed to light up and warm everyone. We tried clicking an ignition button. We tried sticking a burning cigarette into the place where the gas collects. We tried shaking the cylinder. But the big yoke that looked like an aluminium palm tree just wouldn't work.
As the sun sank between the gables of houses in the next estate, we put on jumpers and opened more wine.
I don't envy them their week in an open oven, lacerated by sunrays bouncing off white apartment blocks and swimming pools.
I tried that once, years ago, in Crete. I lay beneath the umbrella of a sunbed for days, reading Zorba the Greek, as if meditating on that icon of heroic virility might induce in me some courage to boogie; all I did was drink myself into a morose stew of cocktails with erotic names.
Eventually I hired a car and went into the mountains to cool down. In Myrtia, a sleepy village of narrow sloping streets, a few old men were drinking coffee as I parked the car, and black cats watched me from open doors and alleyways. It was there I saw cherries floating in a bucket of water on the counter of a shop; cherries as full of juice as they might have been, when the man who wrote Zorba the Greek was a boy wandering those hills, in search of his own boogie moment.
When I was no more than a boy, I boogied in the hills of west Cavan, during a long hot summer when men used to work the hay until midnight, when women laid their bodies on the bonnets of tractors as ballast; their husbands bringing water up the hills in great drums perched on the buck rake at the tractor's rear; water to keep the kettles singing for the young blades home from London, who rambled into their houses when the pubs closed.
The talk was of midges, clegs, and bright moons on the forehead of the mountains. Fiddles lay idle in the back of vans with English registration plates, and white ermine moths battered the windowpane until the music started, and a girl from somewhere far away was always waiting to sing.
And in the scullery stood the buckets of spring water; a dizzy abundance of it in such a drought.
We made boogie-woogie, country style, until the clear light of dawn woke my sweetheart's daddy, who would come to the kitchen only to find out the time, and who never asked who the lovely singer was, or where the cherries might be hidden.
