A glitch in the fairy tale of meeting the princess

While waiting for important people he would compose tales with happy endings – but the lines between daydreams and reality sometimes blur

HE WAS a man who always fretted about lunch dates, especially with important people. Would the other person ever arrive? Did he get the time wrong? Or the date? So to calm himself, as he sat outside McDonagh’s on Quay Street, he passed the time reading the menu and composing fairy tales with happy endings in his head.

Once upon a time, he thought, there was a princess who lived with her parents in the windy hills. She went to playschool and primary school and she used to have teddies in her room and sometimes at night if she couldn’t sleep she would call out to her father downstairs, to bring her up a glass of milk. And sometimes he would manipulate the Eeyore teddy and make it talk.

“Oh, can the princess not sleep?” Eeyore would say in a funny voice. “Perhaps if I sit down here beside her pillow it will help.” And then Eeyore would sit beside the pillow and the princess would turn on her side and clasp Eeyore’s paws, and sleep would descend on her before her father could tiptoe out of the room.

But in time, the princess grew up and did her Leaving Cert and got her points and went away to college.

And while she was getting into the swing of things at NUI, stocking her fridge, putting air-freshener in her room, so that she could study in comfort, and walking around the campus wondering who she might fall in love with, her father was walking around the hills of Leitrim in a grey drizzle.

He felt alone. The house seemed empty. He walked the mountains, remembering his own college days and, apart from the same sheep each morning, sheltering beneath bare hawthorn bushes, he rarely met anyone.

On one occasion he met a man with a stick, and a dozen dogs, swaying in the wind with a fierce red face, but they exchanged no words.

On another day he met a woman with a dog. The dog attacked him, leaving bite marks on his leg. The woman had the dog put down and ever afterwards when he met the woman he felt guilty about the dog.

One day walking on the desolate hills, he noticed that only one windmill was churning the wind, and making a great aching noise. And that night in a bar in Drumshanbo, he spoke about how extraordinary it was to see seven windmills standing still in a strong wind, but the barman stared at him as if he wasn’t living a real life.

And that’s why he went to Galway for the day, to cheer himself up, and to meet other human beings. But everything reminded him of the past. Near the AIB bank, a performance artist in monochrome silver was replicating the statue of Padraic O’Conaire that once stood in Eyre Square; which reminded him of the first time he had seen the O’Conaire statue, when he was 10 years old.

And O’Conaire, a wild and passionate man, who died before he was 50, reminded him of friends who also died too young; an artist who used to drink in The Bunch of Grapes, and a schoolmate who used to sell oysters at the top of Mainguard Street, and John O’Donohue who used to pore over the books in Kenny’s bookshop.

He remembered them all, though like O’Conaire, they too were gone.

He had a mid-morning latte outside Fat Freddy’s on Quay Street and later sat outside McDonagh’s fish and chip bar, staring at the menu. Every young person on the street reminded him of the princess, each with their own secret joy, as they wandered in and out of the shops and talked on mobiles along the street.

And then he saw her. She was walking towards him, and she waved, and the sun was shining, and a rainbow was falling from the clouds and in its light she was radiant.

But that is where the fairy tale ended. He reminded himself that it was only a daydream, and looking at his watch he realised it was almost two o’clock and the waitress was getting impatient because he sat alone and ordered nothing.

So he told her he wasn’t hungry any more, and he left €2 on the table and walked back up the street, and suddenly a voice bellowed at him from a table just outside Fat Freddy’s.

“Dad,” the voice called out, “Where were you? I’ve been waiting here for the past hour.”