Times when life seems so brutal and forlorn

“There’s boys come out at night in cars and throw things in the river. And then burn the cars. I often wonder what makes boys so angry. What do you think?”

I OFTEN HEAR people talking about the past as if it was a brutal loveless place. As if the present were more civilised; as if all the chaste bachelors in Leitrim’s glens remained alone because of some terrible damage done in their childhood.

Yet I keep meeting old people, married or single, whose childhood was full of innocence, whose courting was full of tenderness and whose homes were full of love; widows and widowers who still have a spring in their step, or single men who sit contentedly by the fire, and talk to the dog.

An undertaker once told me that he was called on to remove a corpse from a bed in a country house. As he lifted the remains from the sheets he could see two distinct hollows in the mattress, where the deceased and his wife had slept side by side for many decades. On the day of the funeral the wife collapsed and died in the graveyard; the bond of love between them unbroken, even in death.

I met a woman last week, walking on a country lane, whose bond of love was with a dog. She wore curlers under her headscarf, and her eyebrows were plucked and lined with black pencil. I stopped to admire her dog’s long ears.

She said she had only just got the puppy, and she was still grieving for her previous pet.

“He died of a heart attack,” she said. “He was under the kitchen table for weeks, moaning. And I thought, ‘I can’t leave him there in pain,’ so I got the vet to take him, and then on Monday night the vet called me and said I must come in and say goodbye, before they sent him to heaven. And when I went in he was wagging his tail and I started to cry.”

Then she told me that someone was robbing underwear from the line of some posh lady’s house in the vicinity.

“Of course the young people are out of their heads, nowadays,” she said. “There’s boys come out at night in cars and throw things in the river. And then burn the cars. I often wonder what makes boys so angry. What do you think?” I didn’t want to get too deep into that conversation so I just patted the dog on the head, and walked on.

At night in Mullingar it’s not unusual to see young boys sheltering in the dark corners of every housing estate, or heading for the railway tracks to have a few beers and a smoke.

And it’s not unusual to see young girls stumbling after them. For teenage girls with no education, an engagement ring can be a comprehensive solution to the future.

I was in a house recently where an old woman lives with her son. The place was a shambles. There was loose tobacco on the coffee table, and tins of lager all about the floor, and her son lay on the sofa, stoned and half conscious.

One night the mother was leaning into the fire, for warmth, and the son came behind her and threw a cigarette lighter into the grate; it exploded, striking terror in the old woman and burning her face. “It was a joke,” the son said, but she didn’t laugh.

And I was in a pub recently as a young man beside me knocked back pints of lager with the enthusiasm of a suck calf at a bucket of milk. I was alone and so he latched on to me, and offered to buy me a drink. I declined. Then he asked me would I buy him a drink, because he had no money. I said, “You’re already drunk.”

He said, “I know that; I was drinking all last night and the day before.” It sounded like an achievement.

“I’m a karate master,” he said. “My father taught me to fight. My father’s the hardest man in this town; but I don’t want to hit anyone; I just want a drink.”

I was on my way to catch the Dublin train one morning last week, when I noticed beer cans strewn about near the old Athlone line, where the trains don’t run anymore; Miller, Harp and Bavarian beer cans, a used condom, a packets of biscuits, and the remnants of a fire.

The sky above was blue and birds flew overhead, but the world around me seemed brutal and forlorn.