The twins share a room. They wear gypsy skirts and elegant dresses with tiny polka dots and they are not slaves to any fashion except that of their own imaginations.
In their bedrooms, plastered with photographs and theatre posters and scraps of paper which bear no meaning in the world except to them, their personalities explode onto the walls. The drawers and trunks hide bargains from thrift stores in Paris. They have given up their room so I don't have to sleep in a tent. They know I am here, so it doesn't feel wrong to lie on a single bed looking up at the sloping roof getting lost in their 17-year-old world.
I used to know these two when they were little girls. Their mother, an old friend, has invited me down to her cottage by the mill for a party. The years have passed and their mother now looks like she could be their older sister and she laughs when I tell her this, not from any faux-modesty but because she knows it's true.
Dublin is all very well but we feel ourselves relax at first sight of the thatched cottage, the smoke curling from the chimney, the scent of all those flowers we can't name. Everywhere my friend goes - Greece, Croatia, Kilkenny - she creates an oasis of comfort and beauty. After one visit you want to curl up on the sofa and never leave. Fires roar, wind chimes tinkle, strange garden fruit hang in orange bunches and outside there are orchards heavy with pears and apples and, thanks to the desperate summer we've just had, there are so many of them she has decided to make cider. It's a place of mosaic mirrors, dangling hearts and starry tiles all thrown together without any apparent effort, and on this chilly night it feels like home.
Someone fires up the stereo and the adults start dancing. The teenagers traipse in for food and visibly wince at the shapes being thrown around the kitchen. It's not hostile, this cringing, just the natural order of things. The twins and their friends fill up plates with lasagne and noodles and salad, and disappear quickly into another room, another world.
The adults are still dancing. I move into the next room, drawn by the mystery of their youth and unselfconscious beauty but desperate not to look like an older person trying to get down with the kids. I hover on the edge of the room, looking like an older person trying to get down with the kids. They sit there, giggling while banging expertly on bongos, or coaxing tuneful noises from a harmonica or experimenting on the bodhrán. The shared glances and unpredictable laughter are like a code I cannot crack so I don't even try. Feelings bubble up. What's that? Jealousy. Faint but unmistakeable.
At 17 I was racked with self-doubt, insecurity, self-loathing. These young women hold themselves with such a quiet maturity and self respect. But there is something else. Relief. I am relieved. These days all you hear about are teenagers buckling under the pressure of this new Ireland, who live to shop, roaming about in packs wearing uniforms of American leisure wear and taking hours to make their hair look like they just got out of bed. But there are plenty of others, putting on plays, drumming their hearts out, busy finding out who they really are instead of who the rest of the world tells them to be. My friend, I can't help thinking, has done a good job. Gradually the older people colonise the sitting room and the sofas.
My favourite kind of evening unfolds: singing and playing and storytelling, and someone says, "100 years ago it would have been like this". At one point, somewhere between Bob Dylan and Sinead O'Connor, it's noted that the younger ones have gone again, slipped out the back door. So the adults dance loudly into the next-door cottage with guitars and drums to seek out the young ones, have them join our sing-song, maybe blur the lines between two parties divided by something as flimsy as age. And there they are, as the fella said, gone.
Someone suggests they might be down by the river. With these words I feel a slight chill of apprehension until I remember that at 17 I was busy being locked in an east London flat by a driving instructor who was keeping me and my friend prisoner. We found the key, escaped and laughed it off and now the experience is filed in the drawer marked Mad Adventures. Here in the countryside I have this sudden urge to go down to the river. To see if their adventures might by osmosis seep into mine. But it is too late. For me, anyway. Content and sleepy, I go to bed instead. roisiningle@irish-times.ie