. . . on a lost weekend
MY OLD FRIEND texts me to say The Singing Poet is doing a gig in her back garden. She doesn’t even know how much I admire The Singing Poet when she sends the text from her tiny country village where the river runs wide and roses dance around her garden gate.
I manage to wangle a free pass. Two whole days and nights absolved of parenting duties. Soon I am on a train down the country with bottles of Prosecco clinking in a bag. There’s a funny taste in my mouth, a heady mix of Iarnród Éireann sandwiches and freedom. Every now and then you need a lost weekend.
There are two hen parties on the train, one in each carriage. I choose the one without the ghetto-blaster. The train breaks down for half an hour at Ballygosomewhere. The two nearly-brides meet on the platform, posing for pictures in veils and L-plates. Percy French would have loved it.
My friend meets me on the platform. It has been too long. I am wearing my hat with the feather printed on it and I am holding a tent. She laughs and says “You look ready for Glastonbury.” At the house she puts me to work folding forks into napkins and hanging pink and orange paper lanterns on the trees. I sit with the younger people talking about photography, drama and cider. These are the kind of younger people that don’t make you feel like an older person. I tell them how much I like The Singing Poet. They laugh. With me, I decide, as opposed to at me.
The Singing Poet arrives. I literally don’t know where to look. Afterwards the younger people say I went puce. But I think it goes alright. We chat for ages. He tells me how he came up with his most famous song and says he’ll be singing some of his new stuff tonight. He sings in English and in Irish and when he sings, nobody speaks and you can only hear him and the birds, the ones who are late going to bed and their song sounds exactly like . . . youlickteeth, youlickteeth, youlickteeth.
Later the same night, I think I am looking cool in my leather jacket and my feather-printed hat. Someone I don’t know remarks that I look like Van Morrison. They don’t mean it as a compliment. My old friend’s husband says, “You never have to pack a gobshite when you travel, there is always one wherever you go.” That’s the one, I think. I go up a grass verge to the young people, sit around a camp fire, eat wasabi crisps and drink Devils Bit.
A younger person takes pity on me and offers up her bed. I’m glad I don’t have to sleep in my tent. I only brought it for show, not wanting to lose sleep on my lost weekend. I surface at noon. The luxury of it. There’s another bit of a session going on in the shed, and fair play to me, I get the guitar and I sing a song made up from my own imagination. The Singing Poet does backing vocals and he says he likes it and I don’t really care if he is just being kind. He goes to shake my hand when he leaves and I give him a hug instead. He is my friend. He just doesn’t know it yet.
I am supposed to get the train back today for housework purposes; that’s the domestic deal. There is one at 2pm, but then that’s gone and the Prosecco is cracked open and then the 4pm train has left the station and the next one is at 7pm. I mull it over in my mind, wondering whether I can get back in time to clean the house if I take a train at 10am the next morning. After a while, I tell my old friend I will stay the night. “I know,” she smiles.
We spend much of the day in the nearest pub. The owner’s phone ringtone makes animal noises. The furniture is basic, the fireplace huge and ancient, but the toilets are like something out of a five-star hotel.
In another pub down the road I meet a man who says he used to be a leprechaun. He tells me his mesmerising story and, as he talks, I stare at his ears, which seem pointy and leprechaunish. I believe him.
I make the morning train. I think about how lovely it was to hang around with them again; my old friend and the old me, that person who likes to sit on bales and in front of camp fires, who turns pink with admiration for poetic strangers. I drag my tent from the luggage rack when we pull in to Dublin. I am nearly at the taxi rank when I realise I’ve left my hat on the train. I don’t look back.