Country Days (12 page)

B
EFORE
I
OPENED
my eyes, I knew that I had slept it out. Living as we do on the side of the hill leading up to the school and within hearing distance of the main road, we learn to gauge the time of day from the traffic sounds.

There was no great traffic on the hill, so that meant that the school cars were gone, and as well as that the morning had a late feel about it. I opened one eye and looked at the alarm clock on the bedside table. It was ten o’clock. I closed my eyes again and sank down under the bedclothes, hoping that the day would go away. The previous days had seen a writing blitz late into the night, and now every muscle along the back of my neck ached in protest and my mind had gone on strike.

I was surprised that nobody had put their head around the door to see if I was dead or alive. I thought of a friend who maintained that he could be dead for three days and if he did not have the keys of the family car in his pocket nobody would miss him.

Then I decided that I needed a day off. Once the decision was made, the day took on a whole new
meaning. It was an occasion to be welcomed with open arms. I jumped out of the bed and looked into the mirror, only to recoil in horror at the image that confronted me. I recalled the occasion a few years previously when I had been going through a painting epidemic. So filled had I been with oil paint fever that I had withdrawn into the attic for days to the detriment of the house and all and sundry. One evening my sister called to be met by a greasy-haired, paint-spotted derelict. Sternly she informed me that I was going to seed.

If she were to see me now, her remark might not even be as kind. So I withdrew into the bathroom and emerged an hour later a new model to all outward appearances, but still in the need of internal restoration.

I did not even look into the kitchen for fear that I might see jobs waiting to be done. Instead I sneaked out the side door and up the hill with no specific destination in mind. The hill was steep so I was puffing when I reached the top, but once there the wind got behind me and helped me on my way. It blew my hair in all directions and the cobwebs out of my head and whipped my blood into circulation. I began to feel alive.

There is nothing like a walk on a windy day, and I will always be grateful to the friend who told me that walking releases the “happy” hormones. As I arrived at the first crossroads, the wind made the decision of which road to take. We blew along together and I
could feel the relaxation creep across the back of my shoulders.

After a few miles I found myself at the back gate of St Patrick’s Upton, a home for adult mentally handicapped people who are cared for by Rosminian priests and Drishane nuns. Many of “the lads”, as they are known locally, live in bungalows around the grounds with house-parents in charge, and some are in the main unit. It is a large complex with many workshops and a farm attached, and some of the lads are trained to help in the workshops. Some of them are better able to cope than others, and a few months previously four of them had moved into the back lodge where they were living on their own, with an eye kept on them from the main house. The lad in charge, Joe, had several times invited me for tea in his new home.

Now I looked in over the hedge and saw that they were sitting inside the window having tea. I pushed open the small black gate and walked up the narrow path between two neat green lawns. I had always loved this little lodge, with its small, deep windows and high-pitched roof. Before I had time to knock, Joe opened the door with a big warm welcoming smile on his face.

“Come in, come in,” he said. “You’re just in time for the tea, but I’ll show you our house first.”

It was like a birds’ nest. To the left of their small front hall was a comfortable sitting-room with easy chairs and a warm fire and to the right their fitted
kitchen where they were eating. In the corner an old-fashioned high stairs led up into two bedrooms, which were fitted out with twin beds and every facility they could need. Behind their kitchen was an open utility area and a large bathroom. Joe opened the back door and led me across a little yard to a small house which held a washing machine and
tumble-dryer
, with which they could do their own laundry. Joe was as proud as Punch of his new living quarters and so were his companions.

One of the lads was called Noel and he had Down’s syndrome. I had known his mother many years before, and her one worry had always been Noel’s future: he was an only child, so there were no brothers or sisters to help out. She had worried about what would become of him when she and her husband were gone. As I watched him, so happy in this comfortable corner, I thought that she could not have wanted more for him.

It was obvious that Joe was the man in charge as he poured out tea and cut cake for the others. Sitting around the table with them was like going back into the uncomplicated world of childhood; they had no expectations of me, and in life that is a rare enough experience. As I walked along the avenue afterwards I felt strangely soothed by their company.

The wind bent the avenue of trees before it, the branches waved in protest and I was almost blown around a corner into the courtyard between the tall buildings. I was glad to close the back door of the
monastery behind me. Inside it was quiet with an echo of distant voices. There is always in Upton an air of great order, and even though it houses over a hundred mentally handicapped, it still gives the impression of being a family home. It runs on the oiled wheels of good organisation and the welfare of the people in care is the first priority. No matter what hour of the day or night one walks through Upton, Bob, who has been here for as long as I can remember, will put his head out through some door or window to say hello. Now, as I put my foot on the bottom step of the stairs, he popped his head out through a door down the corridor and called up to me, “Alice, you’re mad to be out in this weather.”

“Bob,” I told him, “I like a stormy day.”

“You’re going up to the prayer room,” he said.

The small prayer room, boasting only a tabernacle in the corner and a few chairs and praying stools, was enveloped in the sound of silence. When I opened the door, I saw Fr Jim sitting on a chair with his legs on a stool and his eyes closed, a picture of total relaxation. He was on his lunch break and having a few minutes’ communication with his boss. Hearing the door he opened his eyes and grinned up at me, his dark face full of merriment. Neither of us spoke because this room was all about silence. It took me a while to adjust myself, but gradually I wound down. I knew by the regular breathing from Fr Jimmy’s chair that he had drifted off to sleep, and the same thing must have happened to me, because when I looked
at his chair again he was gone. As always in this room I was reminded, “Be still and know that I am God.”

As I walked down the front avenue on my way home, I met one of the lads who told me that he was going picking sticks. It was something that we had always done as children, but it was a long time since I had met anybody doing it in recent times. We sauntered together chatting and parted at the gate, he to the wood and I on the road home.

Coming down the hill back into the village, the grey-white church steeple towered over the dark trees and welcomed me back. It had been a grand walk and I felt that all my happy hormones had been released.

M
Y HUSBAND TURNED
the key in the ignition and the engine gave a long, soft growl like a dog who had no intention of getting off his backside. He tried again and the growl grew fainter.

“Blast it,” he said between gritted teeth, and I silently echoed his sentiment. He tried again and again and the whirr grew fainter and fainter.

“We’ll take Mike’s car,” Gabriel decided, in a tone of voice that did not invite comment.

“Oh God,” I thought, “the wheels could fall off it half-way to Dublin.” But it was no time for open and frank discussion, so I swallowed my misgivings.

Gabriel was already at the wheel of our son’s sports model, which roared into action like a young lion. The sound brought our son’s head out of an upstairs window.

“Where are you going with my car?” he demanded of his father.

“To Dublin,” he was told sternly.

If Mike did not like the idea, neither did his mother. But my concerns about having to drive a
strange car when Gabriel got tired were the least of my worries.

Earlier that morning I had woken up to find my nine-year-old daughter by my bed.

“Alice,” she had whispered, “the birds are awake.” And sure enough the dawn chorus was just starting, and as I listened for a few seconds, I thought that this would be a lovely day, but then my brain cleared and reality hit me like a cold shower.

“Oh, Mother of God,” I groaned, “the Gay Byrne Show!”

“That’s why I called you,” my daughter said practically; “it’s time to get up.”

“Len,” I implored her, “will you say a prayer for me today that I don’t drop down stone-cold dead on live radio?”

“You’ll be all right,” she assured me comfortingly. “Mildred Anne will take care of you.”

It had taken my sleep-muddled and terror-stricken brain a few seconds to work that one out. Mildred Anne Butler was the artist who had painted the threshing scene on the cover of the book which I was going to talk about on the radio show. She had gone on to heavenly scenes, but the thought that she could be with me in spirit had seemed strangely comforting.

Nobody was to be seen as we drove down through our village; the only sign of life was a black dog in the middle of the road scratching behind his ear with his back leg. He was so intent on relieving his
itch that Gabriel had to drive around him, which did nothing for my husband’s already frayed patience.

We left Cork behind and drove along the quiet, early morning roads. I tried to brainwash myself into forgetting the ordeal ahead, to concentrate on the sun lighting up the Galtees and to admire the colour variations of the summer trees. Normally I love
long-distance
driving early in the morning when the countryside is fresh and the dew is glistening, but on that particular morning my concentration span cracked every few minutes as I remembered what lay ahead. I had never before been on live radio and the prospect gave me mental paralysis. At least, I comforted myself, people won’t be able to see me. All I will have to do is open my mouth. But then, I thought, maybe no sound will come out. The first croaking, gasping interviewee on radio! A Natterjack toad being interviewed! Then I tried to convince myself that maybe nobody might be listening anyway. I had told nobody in the village that I was going to be on and had warned my children to tell nobody, at least until I was gone to Dublin.

Mike had said, “You’re crazy! How do you think that you can be on the Gay Byrne Show and nobody hear you? The whole country listens to that.”

One side of my addled brain knew that he was right, but in some strange way I felt that if my friends and neighbours did not know that I was going to be on, they would have no expectations of me and then no matter what kind of a mess I made of it I would
not feel so bad about it.

We were making great headway on the quiet roads and I comforted myself with the thought that at least we would have plenty of time to find RTE. I had located the radio station on a map, but I was not the most accomplished of navigators, having been known in the past to finish up in places far from the proposed destination. Beside me Gabriel was silent and intent on his driving, his nose a little out of joint after being let down by his own car.

Suddenly he swore, “That bloody fool!”

I looked around but there was not another motorist in sight.

“What bloody fool?” I asked in confusion.

“Mike!” he said in exasperation.

Getting no reaction from his dim-witted wife, he pointed to the petrol gauge. I turned my eyes in horrified fascination to where his finger was doing a barn dance on the glass in front of a small black pointer that was well down into the red section.

“Sons!” I thought. “There should be a law against them. They never have full petrol tanks, and if they get a loan of your car, it always comes back full of thirst.”

Straight away I decided that I could not afford to indulge in the luxury of panic. I remembered reading somewhere that if you were going to talk on radio a prior period of calm was absolutely necessary. So panic was out of the question. Meanwhile my husband was rehearsing what he planned to say to
his first-born when he got home that night.

“We must not get excited now,” I said, which of course was the wrong thing to say.

“Who is getting excited?” he asked tetchily.

I decided to try a more meaningful tactic.

“What are we going to do?”

“Find petrol,” he stated grimly.

We were out on the open road without a house, not to mind a petrol station, in sight. “Mildred Anne,” I asked silently, “where are you now?” I had thought that I would not need help until my arrival in the studio, but things were going wrong ahead of schedule. Suddenly a small town loomed on the horizon and I felt like shouting “Land Ahoy!” Where there is a town there is usually a petrol station, but there are exceptions to that rule and this was one.

We continued, and suddenly we were rewarded by the sight of pumps in the distance. The closed sign glared at us, but I felt that we could not be this near to petrol and not be able to get at it. I was wrong. We knocked on the doors and we blew the horn but the whole place was like a graveyard. Valuable time was ticking away, so we decided to take a calculated risk and continue. As we drove out of that petrol station I felt like a man on a desert island when a liner passes by on the horizon.

At this point I was wondering if Gay Byrne had plenty of records to put on when guests failed to turn up. I could understand then why the producer had wanted me to stay in Dublin the night before.
But of course I had known better and had wanted to come up from home in the morning.

As we drove along, expecting that any minute the car would grind to a halt, I could feel tension crawl up the back of my neck. Then I got a brainwave: I would do my yoga exercises. At home I did them to the sound of a tape on the floor of an upstairs attic, but now I decided that I would do them in my mind. I closed my eyes and recalled the soothing voice on the tape saying slowly: “You are lying in the corpse position, so you should be nicely relaxed and ready to begin your yoga session”.

It took great mental concentration to block out the present trauma and to imagine myself relaxed on the attic floor listening to the velvety voice of the instructor, and just when I was almost there, a voice far from velvety jolted me back.

“What’s wrong with you? Are you sick?”

Another town appeared on the horizon and the first house at the edge of it was a garda barracks.

“We’ll ask here,” Gabriel decided; “they always know the lie of the land.”

Sure enough, the tall, heavy guard who answered our knock stretched his arms above his sleepy head and said, “A few miles down the road is a garage that will be opening in about twenty minutes. Have you enough to get there?”

We prayed that we had, and as we crawled into that station, I felt a load lift off my shoulders. But with the solving of one problem, we became more
aware of our second one. We were now running out of time. Leaving the petrol station, I clung to my seat as Gabriel put his foot down.

I was imagining Gay Byrne’s voice announcing on radio, “Alice Taylor, who has just published her first book, was to have appeared on this show this morning, but unfortunately they are now scraping her off the Naas dual carriageway.”

Eventually we arrived in the suburbs of Dublin and I took over, giving frantic directions to Donnybrook. When I saw water-hens swimming serenely on the canal, I envied them their tranquility in the midst of traffic bedlam. For a fleeting moment, a picture of the little river we used to cross over on our way to school flashed across my mind, but I was jerked back to reality by a terse voice.

“Where next?”

“Turn right here,” I instructed.

“There is no right turn here!”

I stared in horror at the no entry sign.

“Mother of God,” I thought, “will anything go right this morning?”

“Well, there is a right turn on the map,” I insisted.

“We’re not driving on the map.”

“You’re on your own, so,” I told him, throwing the map on to the back seat.

Gabriel’s in-built sense of direction took over and eventually we spotted a sign for Donnybrook. But finding RTE remained a problem.

“Look out for a mast,” Gabriel instructed; “there
must be a high mast in RTE.”

I put my head down and craned it forward like a goose drinking water and peered out through the windscreen to view the chimney-tops of Dublin. Then I tried the back window, but the bearded man in the car close behind gave me a baleful stare. Not a mast in sight! We were crawling at a snail’s pace through early morning traffic and my blood pressure was clocking red like the patrol gauge earlier on. My desirable period of calm prior to going on radio was well and truly shattered. The minutes were ticking by, reaching ever closer to the time I had been instructed to present myself in RTE.

Then suddenly I spotted a mast and it was like manna in the desert.

“It’s over there!” I shouted.

“Where?” Gabriel demanded.

“Over there,” I said, pointing vaguely.

“You should have been a ship’s captain,” he told me; “maybe your sense of direction would have been better at sea.”

But I knew that we were headed in the right direction when he made a fast turn towards where I had seen the mast, and then we could both see it without dislocating our necks.

“I hope to God this is not just a telephone exchange,” I said as we drove in the unmarked gate.

“Is this RTE?” I asked the surprised security guard.

“Well, where do you think you are?” he smiled and
directed us to the radio centre.

I jumped out of the car and ran up the steps just on the dot of the time that I had been told to be there. As I collapsed into a chair in the lobby, the researcher arrived.

“You are not on for a while yet.”

I sighed with relief at the prospect of having time to gather my thoughts and achieve some semblance of calm. But before I had time to relax and gather my wits, another girl dashed in waving a sheaf of papers in the air.

“Come on,” she ordered, “change of plans: you’re on now!” And she ran off down a long corridor with me hot on her heels. At the end of the corridor, she opened a grey door into a tiny, windowless cell and I saw at last the object of my journey, Gay Byrne, seated at a large table with wires sprouting out of his head. Panting a little, I sat into a chair at the table, and almost before I knew it the interview had begun. For all the hectic anxiety of the drive, I was so relieved to have arrived that I forgot to be worried.