Reaching out beyond steamy encounters

Something new and healthy is gathering in my bones like the hint of daffodils pushing themselves up through the gravel beside the shed

AT CHRISTMAS I went to a fancy-dress party as Charles Dickens. Monica from the pastry shop was there, in her 17th-century outfit. She wears the same dress to all such parties, but each year she claims to be a different person. She has been Marie Antoinette, Elizabeth I, Emily Brontë and even Grace O’Malley. It all depends what movies are doing the rounds. I’m always commenting to my Beloved that Monica is great crack, to which my Beloved always replies, “I know that. You told me before.”

This year Monica arrived as Margaret Thatcher, and I said, “Thatcher didn’t wear 17th-century dresses,” but Monica wasn’t bothered discussing such refined points. She was far more interested in Tommy Cassidy’s kilt, and what was underneath it. Tommy was dressed as a Scotsman in tartan with a red wig and beard, and a large salami-shaped sponge dangling between his knees. Monica couldn’t be parted from it all night. So on the dance floor Tommy did Highland flings, Monica chased the salami, and I chased Monica. My Beloved appeared in the middle of the night and took me home.

I don’t know where she came out of, but it was probably for the best, because Monica had lost all sense of decorum and I had been experiencing unspeakable urges every time I looked into her eyes.

In fact since Christmas I have been experiencing a particularly intense urge to reach out to other people. Something new and healthy is gathering in my bones like the hint of daffodils pushing themselves up through the gravel on the western side of the galvanised shed.

Last week, in a Galway hotel, I had a sauna with a woman who was crying. I’ve never seen anyone crying in a sauna before. The leisure centre was empty except for the two of us, so it didn’t matter, and I had the urge again to reach out and talk to her.

“I can barely get out of bed in the mornings,” she said. “I don’t know why.” I said, “Perhaps you have lost interest in what is on the outside because you are so unhappy on the inside.” “My God,” she said, “that’s exactly it.” And she stopped crying.

It was a posh hotel, the kind of place where ladies arrive in white Mercs because their husbands are in Nama.

As I towelled myself in the changing room, I thought the lady in the sauna might have more to say, so I waited in the lobby and offered to buy her a coffee when she emerged. She was delighted.

“Do you know,” she said, “that signing on is the most horrible thing? The shame I feel is terrible. I brought letters in my hand the first morning, so that people would think I was only there to post them. But I knew the fellow behind the counter. And he was so shocked to see me signing on that he couldn’t count my money straight.”

“So how can you afford the leisure centre,” I asked, “if you’re on the dole?” “I got three months’ membership as a Christmas gift from a friend,” she explained. “I was run-down. And my friend discovered that there was no nutrition in my blood at all, and she does the Chinese pulses, so she made me up a diet of mung beans, rice and coriander. It feeds the blood. And she booked me in here for three months.”

She asked me why I was chatting her up. I said, “I’m not chatting you up.”

“So what are you doing?” she asked.

“I’ve been having these urges to reach out to people,” I explained. But she didn’t get it.

So I drove home, up the N17 and then all the way through Roscommon, Elphin and Carrick-on-Shannon, demented by urges to reach out and embrace the Beloved. I was remembering how astonishingly beautiful she looked up a ladder, painting the ceiling in 1985, in a room long since derelict and cobwebbed. But back then I couldn’t take my eyes off her buttocks as I held the ladder while she at the top reached for the ceiling with an old paintbrush.

“Any news?” I inquired when I arrived home. “Yes,” she said, “Your friend Monica phoned. She’s organising a party for Valentine’s night. She wanted to know if we would go.” “Ah now,” I said, “sure that would be wonderful.”