The concept of a warm bed is incredibly appealing providing any warmth has been generated by one's own body or the body of a loved one, writes John Butler
ONCE UPON A time I attended a university lecture entitled "The Space of Poetry" because I had to, and I did so with the arched eyebrow of the sceptic, and the misplaced poise of dumb youth. "The space of poetry? Such nonsense. What space? How could words on a page be said to have a space?" I can still recall the exact conversation as we sloped into the lecture hall and it pains me now to think now about how my mind remained closed at the very point in life (college days) when it should have been crow-barred open to its widest aperture and gorging itself on the wisdom of those smarter than me (everyone).
It only took a few minutes in that lecture hall for me to be bowled over, and by a very basic notion, too. To illustrate the idea of space and how we react differently to inanimate objects based on what space they occupied, the lecturer used the example of saliva. The average human swallows roughly one point five litres of spit every day, yet were you to spit into a cup, the idea of raising the cup to your lips and swallowing even this tiny, fractional amount would be a radically different proposition altogether. We hadn't yet begun to discuss the space of poetry but already I had begun to learn how little I knew.
This idea of the space of things returned to me many years later when a friend and I drove to a summer jazz festival in the midlands. Bands of all kinds were playing in the pubs around town, but the entertainment hub was the local hotel. We had assumed we would find a room there without prior notice, but were disabused of that notion before we had locked the car. Inside, plates of sandwiches were being passed over the heads of committed, enthusiastic social drinkers. A Dixieland outfit were playing somewhere, but we couldn't move anywhere to see them.
The woman at reception guffawed at our request for a room, and a heavy-set waitress in her fifties with a tray of decimated vol-au-vents caught the tail-end of our exchange. She swiftly offered us a room at her place, and following on from this kind gesture, there began a flurry of horse-trading. She kicked it all off.
- Two rooms, one-forty.
- One twenty.
- One forty.
- One thirty.
- One forty, boys.
- We don't have one forty.
- Can yiz share?
- We can.
- One room, one hundred.
She didn't invite further bids. She was due to finish her shift in half an hour, so we had a drink and waited in the bar, and when she re-appeared, we drove into the countryside, convoy-style, one Mitsubishi Colt trailing a Nissan Primera. The house was buried in the farthest recesses of the midland boonies and before we had reached it I was lost and utterly convinced that never again would we be able to find it.
Finally, we pulled into the driveway of a bungalow, and inside, the bean-an-tí showed us to a twin room. Through the window, we could see two heavy-set men making their way towards a tiny caravan on breezeblocks at the bottom of the garden. One of them was wearing a dressing gown and the other one scratched his head as he lumbered down the path. After she showed us the bathroom and we got our bearings, it became abundantly clear that the bungalow contained two bedrooms at the very most and, back in the bedroom, it took the briefest sit-down to realise the two boys skulking to the caravan had been occupying these beds moments before.
At this exact point, the lecture about the Space of Poetry popped into my head. The concept of a warm bed is incredibly appealing providing that any warmth has been generated by one's own body or the body of a loved one, and not the body of a dubious, heavy-set man-child sulking resentfully in a caravan at the foot of the back garden. Our plan had been to take a disco nap before the night's revelry, but now this was out of the question. We left our €100 warm beds, bid our farewells in the hallway ("No nap? I thought you were dying for a bit of shut-eye") and drove back to the hotel. On the way, we tried to figure out what would have happened if we had found the money for two bedrooms. The whole lot of them banished into the caravan? Surely not.
Once we tunnelled our way through the crowd and found some friends and the source of the Dixieland jazz, the evening began in earnest. It was one of those nights of many distinct stages; the bit in the bar, the bit in the ballroom, the bit in the hallway, the bit on the landing, the bit in the garden, and so on. Then incredibly, it was 8am, the night was over and we had to find our way home. We had paid good money for two beds and we were more than ready for them.
In the car park waiting for our taxi, a Nissan Primera hove into view, the outline of three shapes visible through the front windscreen. This was not our taxi. The Nissan parked, the bean-an-tí got out of the driver's seat, and from the back seat, two lumbering guys in waiters' uniforms emerged, the faces of all firmly set. If not angry, the bean an tí seemed disappointed, and had little enough to say to us. It appeared that neither of the men had slept all that well either, and conversation was brief all round. At that point we occupied very different spaces.
They went in to work and we fell asleep in cold beds.