DISPLACED IN MULLINGAR:IF I WAS a truck driver in Wyoming, I could talk to myself all day, because I'd be so high above the road that nobody would know what I was doing. Even in the Mitsubishi jeep I can blather away to myself, so long as I keep driving.
The embarrassment occurs when I stop for diesel and continue talking, and someone notices that I’m chattering away, at a mile a minute, and no phone in sight.
But I do enjoy a good old chat, when I am alone. And it always feels as if some ghostly other is listening. Native Americans used to let their horses gallop for hours, without direction, as they fell into a trance and ghosts whispered in their ears.
I remember my father brought me to Bray one time, and I went on a ghost train that moved through the dark, as figures from the other world brushed past me, and skeletons danced in the air above me, and screeches ripped the darkness. I was not scared. I was delighted to know that the other world was so available.
Last week I was stopped at a Topaz petrol station on the Ballinderry Road, and a girl was eating a Magnum outside the door. She was a big girl, and she had a T-shirt that didn’t quite get down to her trousers, and her trousers didn’t quite get up to her waist. So there was a gap. And in the small of her back was the top of a tattoo, so that I presumed her entire rump had been patterned with a dragon.
It provoked me to observe aloud that the country is truly banjaxed when people want to tattoo their bottoms.
The window was open and there was a man filling a Toyota with petrol.
He smiled, thinking I had been speaking to him, and he said: “In India the young ladies are very fond of adorning the foot. They wear bracelets and small rings on their ankles, but of course the tattoo is also fashionable. I suppose we are all the same.”
I said: “Perhaps we are, but I think the sari is easier on the eye than a bare bottom.”
“Ahh,” he said, “you have been to my country.”
“Yes,” I said. “Ten years ago.”
I remember sitting outside a bar in Mumbai called On Toes, on a balmy evening in November, with a woman in a sari, and her husband in pyjamas, and their grey-haired uncle, and everyone smoking and wearing sunglasses.
Four-wheeled jeeps parked up. A jukebox playing The Cranberries. A man on the pavement, selling bananas, which he carried on a pole. He struggled to keep them aloft on his shoulder as he dragged himself along in flip-flops. When his eyes met mine, I shuddered.
Someone said: “There is more suffering in India.” I said: “There is more fun in Ireland.” Someone said: “There are more people in India.” I said: “There is more alcohol in Ireland.”
So it went on. Non sequiturs making a tapestry of idle chatter.
The grey-haired uncle used to fly a taxi-plane in and out of the Native Territories in Canada. They had no drink in the territories. So he would smuggle hooch in once a week, on the pretext of bringing people to the doctor. As he flew through the snow with white above and below, he eventually could not tell north from south or east from west. Could not tell vertical from horizontal.
“I relied on the clock readings,” he said, “and I tried to talk to someone on the radio to keep from going crazy. Otherwise I was flying in the white. It became abstract. As if the plane was not moving, or was just floating through a dream.”
The woman dropped her cigarette on the floor and stubbed it out with her sandal and I noticed a beautiful spider tattoo on the calf of her leg, beneath the sari.
But that was a long time ago.
The Toyota man, at the Topaz filling station on the Ballinderry Road, clipped his petrol tank closed and went into the shop to pay.
I drove off. Heading through the midland bogs, like a ship sailing, or a Cheyenne warrior on horseback, or a truck driver in Wyoming, or a child in a ghost train in Bray, all ears open to the whisperings of the wind.
