Last Monday morning I lit the stove, put on some music and stretched on the reclining armchair that I bought at a car boot sale in Carrick-on-Shannon for €5 one Sunday morning last summer.
I was happy until a builder knocked on the glass door. “Writers have a great life,” he observed. He had come to replace a cracked tile on the roof.
I had been remembering an old friend whose mother was an inmate in the Poor Clare orphanage in Cavan about the time of the fire in 1943 in which 35 children perished. She survived, and years later she married and had a son, who turned out to be a bit wild. I remember one night he showed me a pellet gun.
“What will I hit?” he asked.
It was dark and the street lamp was shining above our heads.
“What about the light?” I suggested.
He took me at my word, raised the gun and fired. The light went out with a burst of exploding glass.
“What will we do now?” I wondered.
“Run like f***!” he suggested, and off we went in opposite directions.
Although I had not pulled the trigger I felt like an accessory, and for months I lived in terror. I began to avoid my wild friend. It was as if he carried a wound in his psyche and could never settle at school or at work, and there were no limits, either to his courage or to his folly.
Villain to hero
Then he drifted out of town and wasn't heard of for years, until one day I opened a newspaper, and there he was, stretched in the back of an ambulance. He had almost died in an attempt to save two women from a burning house in Wales. It was another excessive act of courage, but he saved their lives and now he was a hero.
He had no limits, which may be why he clung to drink so much, and why he tried suicide with a gun on one occasion. I visited him in hospital when he was recovering.
I could see where the shotgun had peppered his chest with small wounds. I asked him why he did it, but he didn’t seem to know.
Although the next time he tried, he made no mistake. And so his life ended, and whatever transgenerational trauma he had carried in his heart was never expressed.
I always wondered was he thinking of his mother and the flames in the orphanage as he braved his way into a burning building to save two old women so many years later. Or what did he brood on as he clung to the high stool, drinking into the early hours, in the years before he took his own life.
Saying more to say nothing
I drink a lot too sometimes and I know I cling to other people when I'm drunk. It's a particularly Irish weakness; we fear the abyss of silence and we fill it with any old blather. I can never go home after a few glasses of wine. I can't leave the bottle down. I need to say more in order to say nothing.
Over the years I’ve ended up in some strange places with odd bedfellows. I’ve slept in cars with dogs, in caravans with no electricity, on sofas in apartments that belonged to people I had never met, and in a tent in Clare after a music session one time, with a huge banjo player.
I told him that I had a tent big enough for the Bothy Band, if he wanted to join me for a few whiskies. But I was lying and he was so big that I couldn’t get into the tent after him, so I slept in my father’s Austin A40.
That was the week my father died. I had gone to Clare after the funeral to grieve because he once worked as an accountant with Clare County Council, a job he got despite one county councillor protesting that the position shouldn't go to a stranger from Dublin, and that the Clare council should only give jobs to their own people.
So that’s how I spent Monday, stretched by the fire remembering stuff like that; stories that are painful because nothing is ever quite forgiven or redeemed in history and stories that are beautiful because they are so impermanent.
As Milan Kundera says, everything is ultimately forgotten. And if I didn’t remember them, who would? But I didn’t try to explain that to the builder. He was far too busy all morning on the roof, looking for broken tiles.