Róisín Ingle ... on a collision course

The grey-haired woman walking along the road was dragging a small trolley behind her. She was, in appearance, what some people would describe as neat. She had just come off the bus across from the old Screen cinema and was walking to Grafton Street for a few messages maybe, or maybe for just a stroll.

She was in her late 60s or early 70s. She was maybe thinking about the annoying Luas roadworks and how long they were going to be there, or perhaps she was marvelling that the sun was finally shining like someone had, in exasperation, taken a giant humidifier to the whole city.

It had seemed at one point over December and through early January that there would never be a dry day in town again.

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The woman cycling along the path had made a calculated decision. Those stupid Luas works made it impossible for cyclists to fit beside the buses, with the result that she had, on other occasions, come close to being knocked over, so although she knew it was wrong, she chanced it, cycling to her appointment on the broad path that hugs the side of Trinity College.

She was in a hurry and wearing her new bigger than average winter coat, the one that was more like a cape, her Cope she called it. It billowed around her and it had, or she convinced herself it had, the effect of being so big that it distracted from her own body which was also bigger than average.

She was thinking about how she had accidentally and temporarily found herself “on the dry” in January and how being “on the dry” had curbed her appetite and how that was a good thing because she knew that now more than ever, in her 40s, she needed to move more and eat less, as simple and as unachievable a notion as that had always been to her.

She saw the neat woman ahead on the right and as she passed her, keeping to the left, the neat woman let out a shout that everyone around could hear.

“Fatso,” she shouted. “Get off that bike.”

The woman on the bike came to a sudden halt. There was no thinking, only heat and the sound of blood rushing to her head as the slights and slurs hurled over decades crashed through her psyche. She turned the bike around.

The bigger woman on the bike and the neater woman with the trolley began to talk at each other and over each other and through each other in raised and bitter voices.

Bigger woman: “Do you have children or grandchildren or little people in your life and would you think it was OK to talk that way to ...”

Neater woman: “... I had to say it so you would know it was you I was talking to ...”

Bigger woman: “I would have known, there is nobody else around here on a bike ...”

Neater woman: “You shouldn’t be on the bike on the path, you with your weight and if you fell ...”

Bigger woman: “I am on the path because I nearly got killed twice on the road ... anyway I am not engaging with you any more because of the way you spoke to me.”

Neater woman: “You shouldn’t be on the path, your weight and ...”

Bigger woman: “I am not talking to you any more ... you are not a nice person.”

The conversation stopped. The bigger woman, boiling, walked her bike behind the neat woman, noticing that when another man walked his bike past her, she shouted at him too. And the blood in her head had sent her quite mad so she spoke again to the neat woman.

Bigger woman: “So it’s not just fat people you hate. You hate everyone.”

Neater woman: “Everyone with bikes.”

Bigger woman: “You hate everyone with bikes and you hate fat people ... I bet you bring so much joy to the lives of people around you.”

It felt as though the whole of Dublin could hear every word. And the bigger woman with the bike walked on, her face aflame and the neater woman with the trolley walked on and later they maybe both thought about it and told their friends about it and theorised about the whole rotten exchange.

And the thing was, you’d maybe wonder, which of them was to blame? Or maybe you wouldn’t have to wonder for too long.

It only came to the bigger woman five minutes later when she sat wincing at herself in the hairdresser’s mirror.

The truth was the blame lay only with her. For cycling on the path. For losing her rag with an older woman. For cycling on the path. For letting that word wound her so deeply.

(Sticks and stones may break your bones but words will never hurt you. Well, wasn’t that the biggest, fattest lie they ever told you growing up?)

She sat there, thinking about all of this. And for someone so big, she suddenly felt awfully small.

[ roisin@irishtimes.com ]