One way or another, my life has changed. I suppose it happens to everyone, writes MICHAEL HARDING
I HAD lunch in La Guitarra, in Mullingar, last week, with a woman and her daughter. The woman told me she had gallstones. “I was in Leenane in August, sitting in the pub,” she said, “eating crab sandwiches and drinking pints of Guinness when the pain started.
“And do you know how they get at the gallstones nowadays?” she asked.
I said, “I don’t.”
“They go in through the belly button,” she said, “to avoid making a scar.”
“That’s amazing,” I exclaimed, “the wonders of modern medicine!”
Her daughter had chocolate mousse after the pasta, and we all got spoons and ate from the child’s dish.
“Are you still depressed?” the woman asked me.
I said, “I have some good days.” She looked at my face and concluded that this was not one of them.
The truth is that I am sad because I am sick. Or maybe I am sick because I am sad. I don’t know which came first. But one way or another, my life has changed. I suppose it happens to everyone. One day we’re galumphing along, as if we might live forever, and the next day something terrible happens; a car crash or a serious illness, or a death in the family, or the loss of a job, or the departure of a child for Australia.
Or it might be just a sudden midlife sense of loss that makes us realise we are ageing, and ever afterwards our desire for sex is subtly replaced by a desire for death.
The child was licking her spoon. Her mother stared at me nervously.
“You’re reading too much Samuel Beckett,” she said.
“No,” I said, “but I went through the first half of life unconscious, holding flowers under the nose of the beloved, climbing balconies, and gripping the world with relish. This summer I got a bang. And now I realise that I must step deeper into life, and into its impermanence.” I looked again at the child’s empty ice-cream dish. The child looked at me. Her mother leaned over the table.
“So tell me,” she said, “what was the bang?” And then I told her my story.
Earlier in the year I was touring the country with a theatre show, when I got a severe infection. Rather than give up on the tour, I kept going, munching antibiotics, painkillers and steroids, until eventually I ended up one night on a trolley in Mullingar General, with colitis, which thankfully has cleared up since, though the entire saga has left me exhausted and depressed.
The wife had to come to drive me home, in my own jeep, like a broken Don Quixote, to Leitrim, where I’m recuperating, among all the windmills in the hills above Lough Allen. All day I sit in a chair and stare at the lake and the shoreline, where soon the mining companies will be fracking away like billy-o.
“What’s fracking?” the child with the empty ice-cream bowl wanted to know.
Actually I didn’t know what fracking was until I arrived back in Leitrim. I was posting a letter in Manorhamilton one day when I saw an old friend on the far side of the street, outside a cafe drinking hot chocolate. I went over and we hugged, and she said, “I hear you had colitis.” I said, “Yes.”
“Well,” she declared, “believe it or not, so did I!” It was a moment of enormous intimacy, to think that I, and this woman, had shared in our bowels a common distress. And then she said, “What do you think about the fracking?” And I thought she was still talking about my intestines.
I said, “What’s fracking?” She said, “Fracking is an engineering technique they use nowadays to release gas.” I said, “But I don’t have gas.” She said, “No no, fracking is what the mining companies are planning for Leitrim. Fracking is a technique for releasing gas from under the ground.”
The child laughed. “Gas,” she said, “is an American word for farts.” Her mother laughed too. And then I laughed, because for a moment it was funny to think of a mining company extracting farts from the earth.
But then the woman got a pain in her side, from laughing, and I wondered was it the gallstones again.
“No,” she said, “It’s only wind.”
Later I drove back to Leitrim, as the evening light faltered on the slopes of Sliabh-an-Iarainn, and on the shoreline of Lough Allen – a beautiful lake as yet unscarred by mining drills.