Saturdays make me panic at the thought of being alone

I’VE BEEN LYING in bed listening to the BBC a lot recently. I love their accents, their vowels and their soft voices. I love waking up to a world where music matters, rather than politics.

Although politics gets through on the BBC as well, but it’s more global. It’s a bigger picture.

Listening to Arundhati Roy speak on the plight of poor people in India moved me deeply last week, and I forgot for a moment about the Irish economy. It’s just shocking what goes on in the world: the suffering, the injustice. And I do nothing about it.

I just lie in bed gazing out the window at the green trees that line the canal, and the far hills and hardwood trees along the sloping ditches.

On Saturday afternoon, there wasn’t a breath of wind, and not even the slightest movement in the trees. And the canal walk was empty. There were no old men with their dogs, or ladies in tracksuits panting along.

Nowadays everybody spends Saturday in supermarkets dreaming up how to make Sunday magical, how to chill out and what to drink.

But for me Saturday is still the unbearable empty space it was when I was a child. It’s a place where nothing happens. It’s like being locked by accident into a room, and hearing all the voices fade in the distance, as I panic at the thought of being alone forever: Saturdays do that to me.

So I lay in bed. My beloved went to the festival of flowers at Belvedere House, wearing a hat in the shape of a flower and carrying my mother’s umbrella. She walked around among the flowers all day in that magnificent garden and brought me home a yellow rose.

It’s a huge stump of a rose bush and the bloom on it seems healthy. She brought it up to the bedroom in a pot to show it to me.

When we lived in Leitrim, we had lots of roses, but we found that the yellow ones didn’t take well in the acidic soil, so we always potted them, rather than sink their roots in the hostile daub.

And so the beloved left the room and went downstairs. I dozed, and dreamed again of the hills above Lough Allen, the vast sweep of Cuilce Mountain, and Sliabh an Iarainn. There is some sense of permanence in a mountain, some sense that it was not human power that made it, and that when one’s own power dwindles in life, then being before a mountain may not be as lonely as being locked in a room.

Not that I am locked in a room. But being in hospital did seem a little like prison, despite the kindness of the nurses. I was there for only 24 hours, but the experience was unforgettable.

Trying to sleep with a syringe in the back of my hand. Antibiotics being poured into my veins in the early morning. Not being free from the drip even in the toilet.

The sound of other patients in pain. The sound of nurses comforting them. The silence after an injection. The helmet on top of a stretchered youth after a bike accident. The 95-year-old man from Arva with brown hair, blue eyes, an eagle’s nose, and a deep voice, who bellowed from behind his curtain after his operation, “Well that wasn’t so bad after all.” And the nurse in casualty who told me she had a child that was seriously ill.

So there I was in bed recuperating, after the hospital, when I saw a man in the distance walking by the canal. He was so far away I could not make out any details. He had fishing tackle with him and a fold-up chair. He sat on his chair and cast with his rod.

If he looked up, he would have seen a big house in the distance. He would not have known that I was behind the window, watching him.

After a while he stood up and walked about 20 metres to a tree. Beneath this tree, he took out a cigarette and smoked. And he looked up at the sky a lot.

When he was finished, he returned to his seat. He did the same thing every 20 minutes. Always smoking at the same tree. Always looking at the sky. I don’t know what he was thinking of. He didn’t know I was watching him. And yet it was a comfort to me that he was there.