Hanging with the Elephant (20 page)

‘Oh, no,’ a senior boy explained in the schoolyard. ‘The express is a new type of bus. It’s like a train. It doesn’t stop anywhere and it will go all the way from Dublin to Donegal. In fact, the only place it
will
stop is Cavan, so that they can cool the engine and people can go to the toilet. It won’t even stop in Navan,’ he added gleefully. He was a real encyclopaedia.

In those days, there were still boys who wore dickie-bows and little grey suits at school to distinguish them from the lower classes. Nobody knew what an express looked like and we wondered why it would be called ‘an express’. Once again, it was one of the posh boys who enlightened us.

‘The express is not its name,’ he said, sneering at us. ‘In fact my daddy says it’s going to be called the Cú-Uladh. It’s named after Cú Chulainn’s dog, who was quite a fast dog.’ Smart boys were smart because they had parents who knew
interesting things and they always started sentences with phrases like, ‘My daddy says …’

I was very proud of this bus to Dublin. It assured me that Cavan was on the world map and that I lived in a place of significance.

‘It was called the Cú-Uladh,’ I said to the girl with the scarf.

She had never heard it called that. But then she’s from another generation. And it is unlikely that we would have spoken to each other at any other time of the day. She would be trapped in her own little world and I would be trapped in mine. A young woman and a middle-aged man is a poisonous cocktail, according to the ancestors. Though in the darkness before dawn, we were only shadows, and the other tables were occupied so the possibility arose for each of us to escape our restricted worlds and have a little chat.

‘I’ve seen you before,’ she said. ‘Are you from Cavan?’

‘Yes, I grew up on Farnham Road,’ I explained.

The dregs of her coffee remained in a plastic cup on the table between us.

‘I hate this time of year,’ she said, hugging the cup with both hands, and gazing sideways out the window at a taxi man having an argument with a suitcase.

‘And I hate waiting for buses,’ she added. ‘So I better head off and hitch.’

‘I’m always waiting,’ I said.

‘What? For the bus?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘For nothing in particular. I wait for letters a lot of the time. And I wait for the phone to ring. And I wait for good news that I always believe is just around the corner. In fact, one of the pleasures of being a writer,’ I said, ‘is that I get lots of time to wait.’

‘You’re up early,’ she said. ‘I thought writers lay in bed all day, with hangovers from the night before.’

I said, ‘That’s a tourist’s idea of writers.’ She was fidgeting again with the scarf around her neck.

‘I better go,’ she said.

But there was something sad about her. As if she was missing someone.

‘The mornings are getting very dark,’ she said, as she sighed and looked out the window. ‘I don’t like the dark.’

You can’t tell nowadays if young people know anything about religion, so I didn’t bother telling her that such mornings remind me of the days when I was an altar boy, my nostrils alert to candle wax and my belly rolling with hunger in anticipation of a good breakfast after mass. Days when old men and women shuffled into their pews or muttered prayers to the Virgin Mary on the side altar so loudly that all their anxieties rattled around the painted ceilings. That might have been too much information for a young woman in these secular times. So I asked her if she would like me ‘to freshen her coffee’, a phrase I first learned from waitresses in American diners.

If I had said, ‘Do you want another coffee?’, she might have said no. But the phrase made her smile. And then it dawned on me that she might not refuse a breakfast either.

‘Can I treat you to a full Irish?’ I wondered. ‘It might help you if you’re hitching.’

‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘But really, I’m OK.’

‘It’s a very dark morning,’ I persisted. ‘Forecast says we might even have snow later.’

‘OK,’ she said, and smiled.

And when I returned with two breakfasts on a tray, she had taken out a book with ‘Business Management’ written on the front cover. I reminded myself of advice I once heard from a Japanese actor in Paris.

So I ate my sausage and pudding and spoke as softly and wisely as I could, declaring that a happy life sometimes depends on embracing the dark.

‘Enjoy these short days!’ I said. ‘Enjoy the cold wind, and the flames in the fire, and the promise of snow!’

‘Are you mad?’ she asked, with the affection that only Cavan people can give that question.

‘I’m from out the road,’ I said, which explained everything.

Her eyes lit up and she said that there was one thing she
had loved about early mornings when she was a child.

‘My mother used to make pancakes,’ she said. ‘I used to love that.’

‘Does she not make them anymore?’ I wondered.

‘No,’ she replied, very quietly. ‘My mammy died when I was twelve.’

And she stared straight at me with a lovely gaze.

‘You’re sure you don’t mind me sitting with you?’ I said, for no particular reason.

‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s kind of nice.’

So we ate our breakfasts with relish then, two orphans in the November mist, and afterwards I paid the bill to the woman behind the counter who was already sliding layers of lasagne into the oven for the dinners later in the day. I dropped my companion at the road for Dublin where she might hitch a lift and I headed back to my mother’s house.

T
HERE WAS A time when every Cavan woman was my mother. In the old days, Cavan women had a tendency to force-feed other humans. Perhaps it was due to poverty in the Drumlin region, a place of small farms and millions of chickens. There was a shadow of hunger and famine on the drumlins, which women compensated for by stuffing as much food into other people – particularly children – as they possibly could.

Or perhaps this compulsive behaviour in Cavan women was the effect of the Reformation, brought to the region
by John Wesley, Presbyterians, and a variety of strict Christian sects, which repressed all urges of the flesh and created in Cavan people a tendency to express affection by way of verbal insults, accordion music and pinching each other on the bottom. In Catholic marriages, Cavan people’s vanity was intensely policed by the clergy and this resulted in a society of plain hairdos, unvarnished nails and lips without rouge. When young adolescents in Cavan emerged from the time of the bottom-pinching, they found themselves in marriages where affection could only be legitimately expressed with large plates of bacon and cabbage.

Or perhaps the condition is endemic across the nation. Perhaps all Irish people live unconsciously within the force field of the eternal mother, the great Mammy.

For instance, Glangevlin in west Cavan is intrinsically linked with the Myth of the Green Cow of Gevlin who provided milk for all Ireland every day, until a witch came to her owner and said, ‘I bet I can find a vessel that the cow will not fill.’

The witch took out a sieve and placed it beneath the cow. ‘Try that,’ she said.

They milked the cow for three days and nights until she bolted across the hills, her udder dragging behind and creating a gap in the Cuilcagh Mountains. And the cult of the great Mother endures. Young women in petrol stations and Gala shops and Centra cafés all around the country
feed dinners to large, rugged truck drivers every day, in the name of the great Mammy.

It’s something I can’t avoid when I’m travelling in the jeep, from Kenmare to Belfast, or from Letterkenny to Ballycotton, in and out of Birr, Athlone and other midland towns as I round the roundabouts and zigzag up and down the country when I’m doing readings, giving talks, telling stories and generally acting the cod for a living. Everywhere I see the same thing – grown men standing in queues, like little boys, as some young woman from Kraków or Gda
ń
sk feeds them braised steak and asks them do they want gravy on their spuds. The great Mammy incarnates and is made manifest in a thousand different women behind the nation’s counters every day, all aproned for business; a vestment that can transform anyone into Mammy. A woman may be from Lithuania or Russia, or she may be only sixteen years old, but once she dons the apron she assumes matriarchal authority, and every middle-aged man on the road waits in line with the excitement of a ten-year-old child.

Coffee, walnut and chocolate cakes, apple tarts, vanilla cheesecakes and banoffee pie. And soups. And ovens of roast pork, bacon or beef, and garlic potatoes. Teachers phone in their orders. Students queue and swarm around the hot pots, and old men from the hills, who have lived alone since their wives died and who can no longer bear to cook alone. Meals go out the highways and byways of rural Ireland six days a week, tens of thousands of dinners every
day, and even more on Wednesdays when the local papers appear in the shops.

I used to bring my own mother to such a food counter in Cavan every Friday, for many years, and we’d take the food back to her kitchen and eat it.

‘Isn’t this wonderful?’ she’d say.

And I’d say, ‘Yes, Mammy.’

And she’d say, ‘Sure, you couldn’t cook as good as this.’

And I’d say, ‘No, Mammy, I couldn’t.’

And I can’t. Which is why, when I was staying in Cavan after her death, I went back to the same café every day at lunchtime for dinner, and often purchased an extra soup or a breast of chicken as well for my evening meal. I slept in the back room and spent the days sitting on the chair my mother had sat on and staring out the window at the cathedral spire in the distance, the hill of young ash trees and the copper beeches in a neighbour’s garden, wondering all the while what my mother had been thinking about as she had watched that view for almost forty years.

A week later I was still in Cavan. The girls that forecast the weather on the television were promising snow. I played Chopin in my earphones and a pallid light folded the streets in ambiguity as if the world were dead. The trees were bare. The same old radio programmes persisted. The same old politics. The same old economy. Even the garden was dead. And it was the same old garden in which I had caught bees as a child. Even the young children on
the streets going to school were the same – just another wave, another generation, another cluster of cuddly boys and girls in uniforms who think that their moment in time is unique.

I went to Dunnes Stores and the post office and various places that I used to frequent with her when she was still mobile. We used to go to Bridge Street and I would tell the staff in the Roma Restaurant that they had the best chips in the world, and I’d get two bags and two fish and I’d explain to them that my mother was outside in the jeep.

She would sit in the passenger seat, eating the hot, salty potatoes from a brown bag, relishing them, chip by chip. And relishing the view from the jeep. The same Bridge Street where she had grown up, minded her little brother Oliver and chased a cat.

But now I went to the chip shop alone and asked for a single bag. And they said nothing. I returned to the jeep beside the river, and stared out at the empty car park hoping for snow. Not that it snowed much that winter. It was mostly cold and wet.

I did see snow once. It was on a Thursday afternoon, and I had already seen the cold, blue flame in the fire the night before.

The first of it fell from a grey sky, a low cloud in the winter light. There was a luminosity in which a single flake fell and then another; one at a time, one every twenty minutes as I stood at the front door of her house. I imagined a soul
flying upwards to another life as each flake fell down and each single flake was the crust that those departing souls left behind. Then the big snowflakes arrived. Unexpected. Like love letters. And they whispered when they met the grass on the lawn. Each flake singularly. It was almost possible to hear their promises as they met the blades of grass. And then the real snow came in the dark. Whorls like salt that flew around in wind pools. Then came the snow that fell when I was sleeping and covered the roads and ditches, folding them into a silent, crinkled wonderland that, in the morning, bounced so much light onto the ceiling of my bedroom that I woke as happy as if Mammy had returned from town in a big blanket. But it didn’t last. By lunchtime, it had dissolved to slush. The rain fell. I cleaned out the ashes, and drove into town to comfort myself with another hot dinner from the Gala café.

But Glenasmole wasn’t going to dissolve any time soon. That house was made of bricks and mortar. It existed on paper, in folios, and I hoped that the probate would soon be completed and the titles changed and I would become the new owner and she would fade from it forever.

That house must have been the crowning glory of her young life. And like many semi-detached houses in suburbia where women pottered about in 1950, it was a lonely little castle, into which she accommodated herself with stoic silence. And she never got tired of it. Although when she was seventy, after a decade of widowhood, she
began going on foreign trips. Sick of her lonely fireside, she began travelling with Active Age groups to Brussels and Copenhagen and the Aran Islands, where she took photos that nobody ever looked at only herself and that were still in the drawers in the front room when I opened them; moments on piers or in restaurants or standing outside famous churches with widows from all over Europe.

By her eighties, she had reached a state of equanimity. There was no more travelling and no more pretending. She sold the car and there was no escape from what lay ahead.

She would look around the front room while I was sitting with her, and Alex Higgins was still alive and potting all the blacks, and she’d say, ‘What will become of this place when I’m gone, this glen of thrushes?’

And she could still wash her own clothes when she was eighty-five. I remember seeing her in the kitchen on a stool, staring at the clothes tumbling in the machine, as if she was watching television, the unresolved grief for her husband’s death still lingering. And she ate out of a saucepan, the same soup for four days.