‘What did it mean to her, this thing she called life? Oh, it was very queer. Here was So-and-so in South Kensington; someone up in Bayswater; and somebody else, say, in Mayfair. And she felt quite continuously a sense of their existence; and she felt what a waste; and she felt what a pity; and she felt if only they could be brought together; so she did it. And it was an offering; to combine, to create; but to whom?’

Virginia Woolf- Mrs. Dalloway

You walk the dog three times a day to get out of the house. You pass plenty on the lanes. Lockdown has fellas out of their houses you never saw before. It feels like those summers when you were young and people were everywhere, talking over hedges and shouting out car windows and tinkering in each other’s fields and lives. You realise there are neighbours in the houses that surround you. You pass them on the road and you want to stop but you’ve forgotten how to talk in the old way. Instead, you follow them home in your head. That’s the new thing now. You wonder about them, the things they say to each other in their kitchens and the secrets they keep and the dreams that haunt them at night. You watch them and you make up lives for them because the ones they are leading aren’t enough.

As you come round the blind bend you see an old Astra with a Limerick reg pulled in on the verge of the road. You get closer and see a blonde-haired woman in the driver’s seat. There’s nobody else in the car. She’s on the phone. It looks like she’s crying. You know you shouldn’t be staring but you can’t help it.  She’s looking straight ahead as she talks but suddenly she turns and catches your eye there’s an unguarded moment when you both see right into each other, just a moment, because you pull away and walk quickly past the car with your gaze on the road.

You take the moment and what you saw with you. There was something in her face. Was it guilt? Oh what have you done? Let’s be having you. You pass the field with the old metal bath and the field with the standing stone and the one with the rushes and you watch the dog chase a snipe, every muscle in her body engaged in the pursuit of this thing. You see her do this every morning and every morning you know for sure she hasn’t a hope of catching the bird but you keep watching and she keeps chasing.

You round the blind bend and see three black bags of rubbish dumped in the next field, white butterflies dancing around the mess. You think of the woman in the car. You know she threw them there. As you put one foot in front of the other it comes to you that she is a single mum whose partner ran off and that she can’t afford to pay the bin charges, so in the night, when finally the noise of Grand Theft Auto subsides from their room, she knows her boys are asleep and she loads her rubbish into the boot of her partner’s car that’s left rusting in the under-ground car-park. She can’t afford the insurance or tax on it but she takes the chance she won’t meet any guards out this time of night. She’s been doing this every couple of weeks since lockdown and when she first started, she said to herself that she would just drive outside the city and find a field and dump it there, but once she got in the car and started driving she couldn’t stop. She drove all the way to the coast, to a seaside town and stopped there in the car-park and got out and walked the dark beach breathing in the ocean and soothed by the sounds of water she couldn’t see.

She got back into the car and drove into the hills behind the town and found a little bend on a small road with grass growing up the middle of it with no houses or life in sight and she grabbed her rubbish and flung it over the ditch into the field. On her way home she felt new and free. It was getting bright as she approached the city and she looked in the rear-view mirror and said to herself that things were possible outside the life she had at the moment. She feels guilty about the cost of the petrol but she needs to have one thing for herself, so every two weeks she takes off with the rubbish and she says to herself that she could be spending it on worse things like other mothers she knew who drank and smoked and popped pills to escape.

You pass the farm at the top of your road. The farmer that lives here is a bachelor. He’s in his fifties. You’ve been in his house once. You called up to borrow a ladder when you moved to the area first. He made you a coffee and apologised because he had no sugar. Doesn’t keep it in the house, he said. He had a jar of fresh honey and gave you a spoon of that to sweeten your coffee. Seen too many farmers my age let themselves go, he said, too fond of the pan, he said, old greasy rashers and sausages and fried eggs, fried bread and potatoes, everything fried. Fried food, fried heart, he said. Got to look after the ticker. And the place of his was kept lovely, not like a man’s house at all, nothing fancy, lino down on the floors, but clean and smelling nice and in his sitting room on one wall he had the sacred heart and on the other a whole shelf of movies and when you looked through them you saw Cinema Paradiso and Casablanca and Dr. Zhivago and Gone With the Wind and he wasn’t one bit shy and told you that Casablanca was his favourite movie of all times and that he’d seen it over a hundred times and told me then that he watched a movie every Sunday night and to call up anytime if  you wanted to get a bit of peace and quiet from the kids. But you never did, and now you can’t in case you give each other something more than company and you often look up the hill to his front window on Sunday nights and see the purple wash of the movie splash gently over the sitting room walls.

You’re not sure if it’s his land but you know that he wouldn’t like it at all if he found a load of rubbish in one of his fields, the bags pecked open by crows and shite strewn all over the grass. Probably he’d curse under his breadth then and go about cleaning it up and forget about it until two weeks later when he finds another bag and two weeks later again and now it really begins to bother him and he goes through the bags and tries to find something that would identify the perpetrator, but there’s nothing only Findus Crispy Pancakes and Hula Hoop wrappers, not even a shopping receipt. He lies awake at night thinking about it and waits for the two weeks to come around again and sits in the ditch in the dark, waiting for the car to pull up. The headlights sear the hedgerow and the car door slaps and he waits until he sees the arc of the bags like dark clouds falling out of the sky and he jumps out of the ditch and all his anger boils over and he lets out a roar and grabs the figure in the shadows and is ready to clatter whoever it is when she lets out a cry and he gets an awful shock that he nearly hit a woman as a woman was the last thing he expected to encounter on the side of his hill in the dark of this night.

Later, back in his kitchen, she sits at his table and he puts a mug of tea in front of her and offers her some honey to sweeten it. He stands by the sink. He sees the worry in her face and chances a smile. She smiles back and stirs the honey into her tea even and though there is silence now and I can hear the clock ticking between them, I know one of them will say something soon but that’s not my concern because I’ve introduced them and it’s up to them after this.

Love set you going like a fat gold watch. 

The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry

Took its place among the elements 

-Sylvia Plath

The body is rooted, but the mind, the mind travels constantly, back and forth through places and moments and memories, with scant regard for time or space, borderless and often rudderless. It can be a smell, a sound, a touch or simply the leafy dance of the sun on a wall that sets it off. I’m in the maternity hospital in Limerick. In my arms my hour old son. I’m looking down at him and my wife Liz sits on the metal bed opposite. The ward is wearing a snug quietness. Lunch has been served and visiting hours are over, mothers and babies resting in the aftermath of childbirth, sun streaming through the leaves that dance at the window and dapple the walls. There’s the distant din of traffic from the city and the place has the air of a field hospital behind the lines, a sense that war wages elsewhere but here there’s a brief reprieve. As I look down into my son’s eyes, I hear a piercing anguished cry from down the ward and an echo washes over me, and the mind is off on its travels. Places like these, human institutions where transition has long settled are warrens of echoes.

I’m in a classroom in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Here too there is a stillness. There is a suggestion that a city moves outside the grounds but this place is not concerned with the sounds of life moving on. Long fingers of sunlight caress the walls through iron bars on the windows. The building is ordinary from outside, flanked in front by a row of palm trees, manicured lawns and assembly areas. Once children played here. Now it is the Tol Sleung Genocide Museum. Liz and I are on our honeymoon and we are visiting between cocktails, out of duty more than anything, it being, as it seems, one of the places one visits when in the city. During Pol Pot’s revolution twenty thousand people were brought through these school gates for their lessons, only three were left out after class alive. Everything here is as it was found, metal skeletons of beds in the classrooms, manacles attached trailing on blood stained floors, thousands of black and white mug-shots line the walls. Some of them are smiling. Here is a place where inmates were sliced open and had organs removed with no anaesthetic, others were attached to intravenous pumps, every drop of blood drained from their bodies to see how long they could survive, others skinned alive. Electric shock, disfigurement, burnings, the jailers here dug deep in the pit of depravity till they could dig no more. Here is a place so soaked in atrocity you wear it afterwards like soiled skin and I’m here with my son in this place. I look down at him and I want to put him back inside. Back into his mother. And then I say to him, I’ll never let something like this happen to you, you’ll be neither prisoner nor jailer in a place like this. Even as I say it I know this is a promise I cannot keep, the world has him now and will do with him as it wishes.

Briefly, I’m back in the maternity ward, I look away out into the corridor. Here comes the next echo. I’m in another classroom, my old alma mater, Ard Scoil Ris, just down the road from the maternity in the leafy Ennis Road suburbs. Again we have the sun pawing at the windows, the corridors are empty save for the smell of floor polish and piss and the weather is good because it is exam time, and the weather is always good when you are doing exams. I’ve finished my last exam of the leaving cert. All the other students have gone. It’s my eighteenth birthday. I should be elated, but I’m not. I don’t know how I feel as I walk the corridors alone. For the first time I look at the old class photos that line the walls. Some of them are smiling. I start at one end where they are black and white and walk along taking in every face, the black and white soon becomes colour and I’m swimming in faces but can’t stop until I come to last years photo and the faces have run out and there is a blank spot on the wall where our picture will be soon, where my face will sink in a soup of faces. I stand in the hallway and I want to scream so that my scream fills this place and never leaves, that my scream levels the walls around so that I’m standing in a pile of rubble. I want to scream out into the hollowness with a defiant roar. But I don’t and the scream curdles inside of me and I walk out the gates of the school an adult.

And now I’m down the road in the hospital again, child in my arms, looking into the innocent ink of his eyes, we’re two strangers meeting for the first time, I know nothing of him and he of me, I have no idea how he’ll be or what he’ll be or where he’ll end up. But we clamour always for certainty and security and I want to promise him something concrete, a promise I can be sure I’ll keep. The nurse is here, pulling back the curtain and the world is at our doorstep, waiting. Liz holds out her hands to take him back. Women are angels. They have more respect for life having experienced the pain that bears it. I look up from my son and over to Liz. She is beaming at us, face saintly with a sheen of love, a balm from her soul that is soothing the memory of the pain and torture of childbirth. She has no idea what I’m thinking or where we were. This is good– mothers of sons shouldn’t have to think on such things. I hold him tight and look in his eyes, all I can promise you is love I say, maybe you’ll be my echo little man, you’ll be my echo?

Taking down the decorations used to depress me, the sight of the naked tree in the corner, taken out then and left on the road for collection, pathetic strands of tinsel hanging on for dear life.

­­We have tested and tasted too much lover

Yep! the post Christmas hangover always hurt, you’d be dragging the arse out of it after New Years, the 2^nd the 3^rd the 4^th tracking the week into January with anxiety, until little by little no trace of Christmas left, no excuse for excess and there you were staring at the shorn tree in the corner like the emperor without his clothes.

This year I took on the role of spectator a little bit, treating Christmas like a parade and letting it pass me by, enjoying the spectacle of it but not getting swept away

The last bite of the Christmas dinner wasn’t down the throat of my Grandmother, God rest her soul, but she’d say that’s it now, ‘tis as far away now as it ever was. There was a glee about her as she’d say it, revelling in it, longing for the return to normality. She’d been around long enough to know the bliss of routine.

Wherever life pours ordinary plenty, won’t we be rich, my love and I

That’s where things are at the moment.

Trying to forge all the different strands of life into one routine, so there’s no peaks and troughs just even keel.

It’s like trying to plait a wild gypsies hair into one neat ponytail, but it will come eventually I’m sure, all rivers learn to meander and mellow the nearer they get to the sea, knowing I suppose that they’ll get there anyway.

I have finally finished the edit for ‘Clíona’s Wave,’ my first novel that will be released in the Spring. What began as a frustrating experience ended as a rewarding one. You see, I’m a lazy fucker. I’d put the book away, shelved it and started another one. Then when Indigo Dreams said they were going to publish it, they assigned an editor to me, and she went to work, and it was painful. Editing a book you thought you were done with is like lying in bed after an ill-judged one-night stand, smoking cigarette after cigarette when all you want to do is get out of there and move onto the next conquest.

Last night however as I read over it I was glad of the time we spent together over the last couple of months, at least I can move on from it now and say it’s finished or at least that it’s more finished than it was. I don’t know if a story can ever really be finished, there will always be the regret that comes with hindsight. I am hoping to launch it at the Doolin Writers’ Weekend at the end of March and also planning a launch in Union Hall(where the book is set), so the next few months will be busy promoting Clíona’s Wave and trying to finish my second novel Leap of the Foals. We have our third child due in April so the goal is to get the second novel finished before the new arrival and the start of the busy season in Doolin. A short piece of fiction of mine was short-listed for the K Award judged by Claire Keegan, you can read this piece here https://donalminihane.com/2014/09/04/dead-priests-house/

Even though it’s January there’s a lot to look forward to but I’m trying to learn that the trick isn’t to look forward to something, or to look longingly back, the trick is to enjoy the moment, each one as we move along, easier said than done, especially in January I hear you say. But you know what, I got up this morning in the dark. I looked out the window. It was a bar-room brawl of a morning, nasty, dirty, bad tempered, shutters outside the windows clattering with a hollow thud off the wet stone, trees, wind and rain pulling out of each other, tugging and tussling, only the few houses were still on the landscape, motionless like petrified bar-maids caught in the melee. I pulled on my boots and coat, called the dog and headed up the hill. It’s never as bad when you get out in it. The weather is like most things that confront us. The day had dawned proper when I got back to the house, the kids were up and the porridge was on and the fire was lighting. The tree waited in the corner. I put it out before breakfast.