I had just put a €2 coin into the supermarket trolley. It was stuck there in a slot designed for €1 coins. I was standing there waiting, I don't know, for a trolley technician to appear when I saw her. "Hello," she smiled. "I put the wrong coin in," I replied. Like I needed to say that. Like she needed to know.
I hadn't seen her in years. We stood there, her handsome husband, their beautiful little boy, and we two acquaintances from another time. My stomach squirmed as snippets of our briefly connected lives came back to me. She was a friend of a friend in primary school. We hung around together for a while and when I went to Irish college she came, too. I'd been to this Irish college a couple of years in a row so I knew the scéal. I was a noisy regular, a reigning Swingball champion. She was quiet and intelligent and she was new.
Naturally she presumed that as a friend, or even a friend of her friend, I'd be looking out for her. Helping her fit into a strange place. It was probably one of the reasons she chose that particular Irish college. She thought that knowing someone like me would make life easier. She was wrong.
I don't think I have thought of it once since then. But here, beside the trolleys, I couldn't help but remember. I was not a good friend. Worse, I was a bully. I made her life in Irish college miserable. I made her open, friendly face twist into a worried frown. I wondered how she could be so nice to me now, so friendly. I smiled back and asked about her little boy but inside I felt sick.
Later, I rang a friend to tell her. I knew she'd had an experience with a former tormentor recently and that she would understand. What happened was that she saw this woman walking down the street and every nasty thing that person had ever done to her in school came flooding back. She had to cross the road to avoid her. She was a grown woman but in the presence of this person she felt like a defenceless child.
She told me not to be too hard on myself. It was hard though because in truth, I knew the girl in the supermarket was not the only person I had been unkind to around that time. That night I was too sorry to sleep much. I'm sorry now.
Trying to understand, I looked back and realised the kind of pain I caused that girl had been doled out to me in the past - but the abused becoming the abuser seemed too neat an explanation.
All those abusive friendships where I spent my time trying to please and being punished when I got it wrong don't tell the full story. And anyway, I had been serially mistreating my little brother way before that. I'll never know how he grew up to forgive me but I'll always be grateful that he did.
I think some people must be born with a bullying gene. You see them in your work. In your home. Out socially. People without the bullying gene find it hard to cope. They don't know how to react to bullies. Reformed or potential bullies know what to do when it happens to them but mostly it doesn't happen because the wise bully stays away from them, preferring softer targets. Like the woman in the supermarket when she was a girl.
I keep hearing this ad on the radio, an announcer asking: are you being bullied, do you know someone who is being bullied? Funny thing is, I bristle madly with the injustice of it now. When another friend of mine, an adult man, was being bullied recently, I ranted and raged and wanted to take the matter into my own hands. At his request I didn't. When I see his bully, also an adult man, I can taste his cowardice, his arrogance and his ignorance as though it were my own. I want to shake him. Show him the damage he is doing, mostly to himself. But I don't. Somehow I can't.
All I can do is look back and in looking back try to understand. I am wearing white ankle socks with red pom-poms, too-tight red canvas slip-on shoes, a bright blue polyester ra-ra skirt and a matching top. I had begged my mother to buy this outfit from Penney's for our school big day out. I am standing on sloping grass on the grounds of a castle, proud as anything in my pom-poms. Everyone else is wearing jeans and T-shirts.
People I thought were my friends are laughing at me and my outfit. I pretend not to notice and I laugh to myself, as though I've just made my own hilarious private joke. I am alone. I don't fit this slot. And, not for the first time, I don't know what to do.
• Fr Tony Byrne is currently running Consulting Bullying workshops in St Michael's College, Ailesbury Road, Dublin. Contact 01-8380157