Taking the voters' pulse with a Tweedledum from Wonderland

DISPLACED IN MULLINGAR:WALKING AROUND Mullingar can raise the blood pressure sometimes, especially if one gazes too long at political posters.

Political posters usually resemble pictures of little boys who ate too many sausages for dinner. Except for Sinn Féin’s national gallery of young ladies, who have cheerful faces, and are bright-eyed and happy-looking, and are generally far too young to have ever spent time in those dark, smoke-filled rooms that Sinn Féin used to hire in Fermanagh hotels years ago, when they were organising the future of Ireland.

And then there’s Declan Ganley, who shines like a beacon of hope from lamp-posts. I’m hoping to take his picture home after the election, and hang it over the mantlepiece, to find out if his eyes follow me around the room, like the Sacred Heart I bought in Rome years ago.

Last week I was trying to avoid the posters when I saw four boys eating lunch on a wall beside Auto Care. They looked as if butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths, until a fragile old man with bushy hair and the gait of a dandy passed by.

“Is dah a man or a woman?” one of the boys roared. The others jeered.

I walked on, towards the town park, where I tried to awaken my Buddha mind beneath a chestnut tree.

But even there my peace was disturbed by a phone call from an acquaintance who is a candidate in the local election; a Tweedledum from the political Wonderland, a rustic boy of the local cumann, who loves to strut the fields of Westmeath with a stick, pointing in all directions and saying: “That’s mine over there!” A man so local that he thinks Longford is a foreign-policy issue.

He wanted to know where I was.

I said: “I’m in the park.”

He said: “I’m canvassing. But I’ll join you in a jiffy!”

Which made me wish I were on the moon.

Earlier, outside McDonald’s, a large woman in a purple blouse and faded denim jeans had been talking to an old man, who had red blotchy skin and white hair. Both of them were drunk. She ran her fingers through her hair, the way young women do when they’re flirting, though she was not young, and she staggered from foot to foot.

A schoolboy with a heavy schoolbag waited for her, at a distance. He kept his eyes downcast, kicking his shoe against the postbox outside Fagans shop. He was probably terrified that any of his schoolmates might come along and see him.

As I was waiting for the candidate, the same woman came into the park and sat down on the grass not far from me. She looked older than the chestnut tree, and her face was a pallid and battered shell, as empty as the moon.

She was in a daze. She fell on the grass. Then she sat up and lit a cigarette. Her hand moved to and from her mouth in slow motion. She found it difficult to lodge the cigarette between her lips.

The boy just waited, threw pebbles at the swimming pool wall, broke a stick from a tree, and started beating the tree trunk.

The candidate walked towards me, his eyes fixed on the woman in the purple blouse.

“The Americans are at it again,” I declared.

“Where?”

“Pakistan.”

“Well,” he said, “at least it’s not Kinnegad.”

I said: “Did you know that they never went to the moon?”

And then I explained how the American excursions to the moon were actually photographic tricks.

“Why does no one go to the moon today?” I asked.

He couldn’t answer.

I said: “It’s only yokes the size of vacuum cleaners that are sent up nowadays.”

“That’s true,” he admitted.

“In the old days they could produce a few grainy pictures of a desert, with a pair of eejits suspended from wires, and pretend they were hopping around, like March hares, on the faraway moon.”

I suggested that, since many multinationals were pulling out of Westmeath, and the US was becoming unpopular, it might be opportune to highlight the lunar issue in his election campaign.

He considered the situation in silence for a moment.

“I wonder does that one in the purple top have a vote?” he asked aloud, as he gazed at her bare white belly, and her four outstretched limbs.

He didn’t even notice the boy.