At the hairdressers like a pair of beached whales

When a hairwash in a Mullingar salon puts memories in your head

ONE MORNING last week I placed seeds on a wall for the birds, as usual, while about half a million starlings watched me from a single bush.

Then I went for a haircut. I always need something to cheer me up at the end of January, because I become exhausted in the dark, so I made an appointment for a wash and cut. My uncle Oliver always fed the finches and robins in January. But he never liked starlings. When they landed on the garden table he would rush outside with a sweeping brush.

“Vermin,” he called them, “flying rats.” They were bullies, and he didn’t like the way they spoiled everything for the smaller birds. Oliver never married, but I often suspected that he had a secret love one time that failed.

My hairdresser is beautiful. She is tall and has long brown hair.

I said, “You’re looking great.” She said, “I never felt better,” as she anointed my head with water.

I sat in a chair enjoying her hands all over my scalp and the sting of hot water, rinsing out the suds, as we chatted about robins and wagtails.

Suddenly the woman at the sink beside me said, “I know that voice.” I was flattered, thinking she meant she had heard me on the radio.

“Do you not know me?” she asked.

Her head was covered in white goo and curlers and there were towels over her shoulders, but she was staring sideways at me, with the same big blue eyes that once gazed at me on a pillow in a tent at the Ballisodare Folk Festival, in the mid-1970s.

“Of course I remember you,” I said. “How could I forget?”

Then we both fell silent, realising that we were not together on a pillow, but at separate basins in a hair salon and the staff and other customers were agog for the next revelation.

Stranded whales on a beach could not have seemed so forlorn as we two middle-aged fogeys; our enormous bodies hidden beneath matching floral smocks, and our heads stretched backwards and upwards towards the ceiling.

For an entire weekend I had been in love with her, while Paul Brady and Midnight Well rattled out love songs from my flashy new cassette player.

And it all seemed alarmingly like yesterday. The pillow drenched with perfume, and walking on the strand at Rosses Point, and sitting on the purple bog beneath Ben Bulben, and eating ice cream cones with our jumpers tied around our waists.

We had no airbags but it didn’t seem to matter in a tent made intimate by Joan Baez and the scent of her body, from her shampooed head to the patchouli on her toes, as we stretched beneath the sky.

And it all came back to me and saddened me, in the basin of a Mullingar hair shop.

She said she had three daughters, and that she was still with “himself” meaning the man whose arms she fell into when we decided to part, on the bridge that straddles the Garravogue, above where the swans sheltered, in Sligo, in 1976.

When my wash and cut was done, I headed briskly for the door.

She called after me.

“Do you hunt?” I thought she meant did I still go to discos, but then I realised she was talking about horses and hounds.

I could just imagine her standing beneath the winter trees, as her girls galloped off into the fog, tallyhooing around Westmeath, while she and her bald husband ate sausages and drank poitín in their four-wheel-drive Land Rover.

I confessed that I didn’t know one end of a mare from the other.

When I got home I found a dying bird in the cat’s claws. As I rescued him she swiped off his tail feathers. I placed him in a sock, and placed the sock in a shoebox, hoping that a few hours of darkness and warmth might carry him over the trauma. But his beak was open and he was in terrible pain, and though he slept a little with his head tucked into his feathers, he died in the afternoon.

I spent the rest of the evening on YouTube, surfing songs from Stockton’s Wing, and Midnight Well, and singing along with them – “The train from Sligo moves too slow/And-my-oh-my/It’s taking longer than it ever did before.”