The ghosts of times past haunt three sad men encountered on Midsummer's Day – though once the music starts, appearances prove deceptive, writes MICHAEL HARDING
‘YOU WON’T find fairies where we’re going,” the driver said to me. We were on our way to the Dublin Fruit Market at 4am on the morning of Midsummer’s Day, and I had mentioned that fairies usually appear around this time of year.
But the driver was right; Fyffes’ loading bay is a mundane world of trucks and men in hard hats and yellow jackets, whizzing around on forklifts, carrying produce to the lorries.
One old merchant showed me where the fish market used to be.
“I was here the morning they demolished it,” he said, pointing at a car park. “There was even an air-raid shelter in that corner, and it took the demolition squad ages to smash it. It makes me cry to think of what they destroyed.”
My friend loaded up the lorry with pallets of fresh vegetables, for Mullingar, and on our way home we stopped in Smithfield for a coffee and a few muffins with a stout Italian merchant who works in the market.
“For me, midsummer is a romantic time,” the Italian said. “I’m 30 years married, and each year I bring the wife for dinner. Nearly all the restaurants she liked in the early days were Italian, but most of them are gone now.”
His teeth sunk into a bilberry muffin, and then he intoned their names with great reverence. “The Monaco. The Cafolo. Fortes. The Green Rooster. The Broadway.”
He finished his bun and wiped crumbs from his lips.
“The Mayfair. And the Lido. And the Maple Leaf. And the one down Abbey Street – what was it called? – the Ritz.”
He looked wistfully into the blue sky. “Bernardos! Quo Vadis! La Caprice! Caesari!” He sounded like he was praying in Italian, and when we left him he was almost in tears.
“That’s two sad men we met today,” the driver said. “I bet we’ll meet a third before nightfall, ’cos things always come in threes.”
That evening we had a barbecue, burgers on the lawn beneath the beech trees, while the neighbours sipped wine on the patio and young people made a bonfire from wood they wheelbarrowed out of a farmer’s shed – though the farmer wasn’t amused.
Then everyone circled the blazing bonfire and the music began. One woman brought her bodhrán and a bag of whistles. Each time the guitar man changed key she’d reach into her bag for another whistle, like a mechanic poking for a different wrench.
She told me her grandfather was the first bodhrán player with The Chieftains. One freezing November evening in the early 1960s, Paddy Moloney drove down to Westmeath to meet him. But the man’s wife hated the bodhrán with a passion and banned it from the house. She said he was only a fool to be playing an old drum. So he used to hide the instrument in the rafters of the barn.
When Moloney arrived, the old man had to sneak out, unbeknownst to his wife, collect the bodhrán from the shed, and go to a neighbour’s house to play it. We were all laughing at this when the fiddle player arrived. A gentle giant from a distant parish, who takes his emotional burdens out of bed each morning and carries them around all day, like dead fish. A quiet man who reeks of sorrow, and who, according to those that know, can sigh as loud as a donkey brays.
He grew up in a cottage, but when his father died, he built a bungalow along the roadside, “so the mother would be nearer the church”. But they say that for years afterwards he’d often go up to the derelict cottage and just sit in the kitchen and stare at the wall. For a while he sat on the patio, listening to other guests with mighty attention; he was like a haystack, absorbing any amount of emotion they threw at him, and no matter how much sniping or whingeing went on around him, he just listened and nodded, and looked at the ground.
My friend nudged me and said: “That’s another sad man; I knew we’d find the third.”
But appearances can be deceptive because, when eventually he took the bow to his fiddle, the music that came out was so fierce that one could only conclude that the fairies had arrived for Midsummer’s Day, and that they were dancing wildly, somewhere inside him.
mharding@irishtimes.com