Twelve Thousand Days

by Eilis Ni Dhuibhne

  So many taboos, in 1978.

  I turned around and walked slowly away, dragging my legs back towards the bus stop.

  In front of me, the railway station, the sea wall, the sea.

  The blue bay of Dublin. Howth Head across the water.

  Sea looks cold and cruel, when you are sad or anxious. Even blue sea. And even on the best of days the Irish Sea can look cold and cruel. In that sea there is a bleakness, always.

  The sea hurt me. Hurt me in my gut. The oceans of the world tumbled around my heart. Yes, the line in ‘Eveline’ reflects truth. You can feel like that. Like Eveline, I was paralysed by fear of the unknown. Like Eveline, I would go home to the hopelessness that was familiar, rather than the hope that was unknown.

  To my bedsitter?

  To my parents’ house?

  I hated it there.

  They were kind and tolerant parents. Much better than most. And the house was comfortable enough. I shared a bedroom with my sister but I had my own little room to write and study in. The sitting room all to myself most of the time, if I wanted to read or listen to music, since my parents were always at the fire with the television in the dining room. The house was old and pretty, although neither I nor anyone else appreciated that back then. Badly furnished in what I thought was bad taste – 1960s taste. Ugly.

  I hated it.

  How could I tell my parents I was dating a forty-three-year-old man? Foreign. Protestant. Divorced. With a daughter who was almost as old as me – I tended to forget about her because she was living abroad.

  It was the forty-three-year-old aspect that would bother them most, I guessed, correctly. Oliver was Protestant and foreign and that hadn’t mattered. Of course, English didn’t count as foreign. They hardly seemed aware of his religion, There was much more fuss about these differences in fiction than in life, as far as I could see. Or perhaps my parents were just more tolerant than most, more flexible, more loving?

  Age was another thing.

  These reservations, fears, had been slipping in and out of my mind over the past week, at exactly the same time as my heart had been singing with joy. In love, in love, I am in love! My sense of being in love had lightened my heart and my feet and had put my step and my bloodstream in rhythm with the birds singing their hearts out in the gardens, with the sun sparkling down on the slates of the little Dublin houses. But under all that joyous music a dark and heavy chord, like a slow heavy instrument, a cello, the bass violin, played quietly and morosely away, while the harpsichord of being in love danced and pranced loudly on top. The voice of reason and caution.

  Too different. Nobody will stand for it. It will be much worse than hair to your waist, hair to your ankles. They’ll laugh at you, and pass remarks behind your back, and sneer. There was a lot of prejudice about age differences, then. It was always assumed that a young woman married an older man for one thing only: his money, or – since according to the stereotype these matches were mainly made in rural Ireland, or in plays by John B. Keane – his farm.

  Bo didn’t have a farm, or any money, but I could see the faces of those who would sneer. Girls I had been in primary school with. Whose mothers gossiped with my mother. Who had known me when I made my First Communion, got my first period, got the scholarship to secondary school. They were people who looked out for me, and also people who had standards, who kept me on the straight and narrow track.

  The voice of the censor. Under the surface, checking and balancing. These people had said, when I was studying too much, why not get out and enjoy life? They said, when I started my PhD, sometimes men don’t like girls to be too educated.

  They said things that would one day seem outrageous, but some of which made sense. They were wise, in their way. They wanted what was best for me. And the best thing, the easiest thing, is the simplest: conform. Be like everyone else. Fit in.

  There was much more pressure to fit in in 1978 than there is now, I think. And there were only a few ways to do it. Our society was not pluralistic or tolerant, but narrow, restrictive, punitive. Homosexuality was illegal. Divorce was illegal. Abortion, of course, was illegal. Even contraception was illegal. It’s almost impossible for a young person growing up in today’s Ireland to imagine how many restrictions there were on every aspect of sexual life. The legal restrictions were fundamentalist. And, apart from the law of the land, there were many more taboos, imposed by the Catholic church, and by society itself.

  All the thoughts jumbled now, became a physical force that was driving me back to the bus stop, away from Bo.

  I didn’t even have to cross the road, to get the bus back to town. It stopped here, a bit up from the corner, where there was a shop that sold bicycles. The traffic flowed towards me, from the south on the way north, towards Ranelagh and Rathmines and town. It felt cold, on the Rock Road, with the fumes and noise of the cars, the bleak bay to the left, the bicycle shop to the right.

  Then I saw Bo.

  In my mind’s eye.

  Waiting in his flat.

  In his tweed jacket, smoking his pipe, reading, looking up, glancing at his watch, wondering where I was, what was delaying me.

  He was not a stranger, but a teacher, a friend I had known for years. He wasn’t a person you couldn’t trust. The complete opposite.

  I saw his happy eyes, his laughing smile.

  The poem he had sent me last week. A love poem written by him, the only love poem I ever received in my life. The other poem he had recited to me when we walked across the field in Belfield, and had given me a book – the poems of Charles D’Orléans. But as he handed it to me he recited one by Yeats.

  When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

  And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

  And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

  Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

  How many loved your moments of glad grace,

  And loved your beauty with love false or true,

  But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

  And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

  (Could there be a more powerful chat-up line?)

  I could not disappoint him.

  At the corner by the bicycle shop I stood for ten minutes. The bus came, the 7, but I didn’t put out my hand. I watched it sailing down the Rock Road towards the city.

  And I turned around again.

  Up the avenue I walked. Past the old houses, and the church and the newer houses. First I went slowly, then speeded up until my feet were flying along the footpath. Past the big pub on the bend in the road the sun was stronger. By the time I reached the apartments, set back a little from the road in a plain green park with a row of saplings by the outer wall, the sun was strong, and the new buildings, glass and white concrete, were bathed in warm yellow light.

  His was number three.

  There were hardly any apartment complexes in Dublin then. This was one of the first on the south side, and it had been built so that the apartments looked like little houses, two storeys high. Each flat had its own front door. Bo’s was on the ground floor.

  An ordinary door with glass panels, and a box bay window beside it.

  I pressed the small black bell.

  He opened the door immediately.

  ‘Here you are, here you are!’

  He opened his arms, embraced me, kissed me.

  There was no reservation in his hug. He smothered me with kisses. He poured endearments over me. My darling, my dearest little darling.

  His skin was warm and leathery, and his tweed coat was rough against my cotton frock. He smelt of pipe smoke and his mouth was large, soft, firm.

  He felt enormous, although I was tall myself, not little at all. But I felt small and cherished, enfolded in those tweed arms, in that warm homespun embrace. He pulled me into his aura, as a bear hugs a cub. He transmitted his energy, his enthusiasm, his optimism, so that I was reinvigorated.

  This was the only possible place to be.

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nbsp; We walked down the avenue, hand in hand – our relationship was to be kept a secret until I had finished my PhD, but the secretiveness had not started yet, on this first night, and indeed someone spotted us! We walked along the seafront to the restaurant where Bo had reserved a table. It was by the harbour in Dún Laoghaire. A big grey stone building without windows, forbidding on the outside, like a fortress. Inside, a luxurious cave. Soft candlelight, white tablecloths, silver and crystal. Too formal, but I didn’t know much about restaurants. Perhaps this was where he always liked to eat?

  ‘I did not tell you! It is my birthday.’

  I was taken aback.

  ‘Happy birthday!’

  ‘Don’t you want to know what age I am?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you feel like singing “Happy Birthday”?’

  He looked around. There was a general sense of hush in the restaurant. A few couples, who looked old, really old, were eating quietly. The women glanced at me, glanced away again, minding their own business. A waiter in black glided around importantly.

  There were no prices on my menu.

  ‘I know what I’m going to have!’ he declared. ‘Prawns provençale.’

  ‘I’ll have that too.’

  I didn’t want to order something that cost more than what he was having.

  So we talked about Provence. The troubadours. The love poem he had written for me was a rondeau, based on a kind of rhythm used by Charles D’Orléans, who was not, of course, a troubadour as such. But Bo liked the idea of Provence. He had gone there for a holiday during the Christmas break, alone, the year after his divorce.

  ‘What was it like?’

  He reflected.

  ‘Absolutely horrible,’ he said.

  I laughed.

  ‘It would probably be better with a friend.’

  ‘Much, much better, my dear darling!’

  A thing I did not know then – anyone would know it now – was that provençale, attached to food, means tomato sauce. Prawns in tomato sauce with rice. They were okay, but I hoped not terribly expensive, since they weren’t all that special and there weren’t very many of them. Six or seven prawns in tomato sauce. Like so many things, prawns were more exotic then than they are now.

  We got a taxi home and I spent the night with him, on the blue sofa that could be made into a double bed. Making love with him was easy, as easy as going for a walk – mainly because, not being Irish, he just took it for granted that it would happen.

  DAY 11,991

  Halloween

  I listened to the news on Radio 1 as I tidied up the cottage. There had been a fatal collision on the road between Monaghan and Castleblayney. I clocked it with the second of dismay one feels on hearing this commonplace news, wondered who had been killed. Some young man no doubt, speeding on that stretch of road, where we would drive later. Death is an everyday occurrence, obviously, visiting families as often as birth or marriage. But it was not knocking on my door that day so I ignored it, as we must do to get on with life.

  We locked up at about ten, and set off, stopping on the boreen to deposit the plastic sacks of rubbish with a neighbour, Charlie, as we had pre-arranged. I had cleaned out the freezer, which had been full of food years past its sell-by date, and so there were a few black sacks. Bonnie, Charlie’s dog, was not outside, which was just as well, because the sack would have driven any dog crazy. It stank to high heaven: overnight the frozen contents had melted, and were clearly rotten. The pong lingered in the car and on my hands for some hours, and I worried that I had left it to Charlie to dispose of the disgusting stuff. I was still in the zone where one worries about small offences, or possible offences. The zone of the normal.

  On the way back, we stopped at a restaurant attached to a garden centre on the outskirts of Monaghan town and had lunch. Bo ordered a prawn sandwich once again, to my amusement: he was being reckless with shellfish, probably because he was still feeling a sense of relief thanks to his recent clean bill of health. We lingered in the garden centre, which was, to our surprise, already stocked with Christmas decorations and paraphernalia. I bought a small white tree that took my fancy. It was beautiful, and looked like a birch tree covered in frost. I knew exactly where I would put it, when we decorated the house for Christmas, although it seemed premature to be thinking of such matters before Halloween had even passed. ‘No harm in being prepared!’ said Bo, comfortingly.

  Normal time.

  Not far outside Monaghan the motorway between Castleblayney and Carrickmacross was closed, cordoned off, gardaí directed us to a side road. I remembered the fatal accident I had heard reported on the radio that morning. So they were still examining the scene. I sighed. What did I feel? Frustration, mainly. What a waste – fatal accidents happened frequently on that stretch of road. I couldn’t imagine anything else, who he was, how his family felt. Needless death, and an inconvenience for us. We took the detour, which brought us along a narrow country road for several miles.

  We got back to Dublin at about seven o’clock in the evening. The house was dark and cold.

  Bo complained of a sore toe.

  When we were going to bed, I had a look at it. The third toe on his right foot had a white blister on the tip, with a black centre. The toe was swollen.

  ‘I think you should go to the doctor tomorrow,’ I said. ‘That foot specialist you saw two or three years ago told us we shouldn’t hang about if anything went wrong with your feet.’

  Bo had been worried about his feet for a long time. He often got severe cramps in his calf, and the circulation to his feet was very poor. The blue veins that criss-crossed his uppers like maps disturbed him, and he was often convinced that there was a problem. The podiatrist, in the Blackrock Clinic, had assured us that there was no real problem, apart from poor circulation, and told us not to worry. ‘But if you cut your foot or anything like that, go to a doctor straight away – don’t waste time.’

  I googled ‘feet’ – perhaps I googled ‘gangrene’? – and saw images of toes that looked a bit like Bo’s. I wondered if he had dry gangrene. Creeping gangrene? I determined to go to the doctor first thing in the morning.

  This was my first mistake, a wrong diagnosis based on googling.

  I had a busy schedule on Thursday. At 6.30 p.m., I was due to launch a children’s book, The Secret of the Sleeveen, by Brenda Ennis, in the Irish Writers’ Centre, and later, at 9.30 p.m., I was performing at a big ‘concert’, an event in honour of the National Folklore Collection, and a fundraiser, which was taking place in Liberty Hall. I was doing a short presentation on the Urban Folklore Project. Although I had written my book launch speech and my presentation for the concert in Donegal, I still had some phone calls to make, to ensure that the clips of sound recordings I wanted to play at the concert had been collected from the Folklore Archive, and that all was well. I had left a DVD with the recordings for collection in the archive on Friday, before we went to Donegal. But somehow I anticipated a glitch. And a glitch occurred – nobody had collected the DVD and at this stage nobody knew where it was.

  We went to the medical centre. The doctor we usually saw was not available so we saw another GP. On visits to consultants, of which there had been many, I usually went in to the meeting with Bo. But on this occasion I stayed in the waiting room. Why?

  I know exactly why.

  Three weeks earlier, we had been in Bruff in Limerick, where Bo was giving a lecture in memory of his colleague and good friend, Dáithí O hÓgáin, who died of cancer in 2011. Bo gave his talk on Friday night. On Saturday, there was a packed schedule of lectures and presentations, followed by an outing to Lough Gur in the afternoon. Bo went to all the lectures. I took a break from the final session of the morning, and met him and others for lunch in a pub before the Lough Gur outing. Everything ran late at this event so by the time Bo got to the pub we had about fifteen minutes to spare for lunch, before the bus was due to depart for the trip. He had to go to the loo. While he was gone, a wai
tress took the order, and I ordered my own sandwich and exactly the same for Bo – since I knew he wouldn’t be fussy and, of course, know what he likes to eat. I noticed, or thought I noticed, one of his colleagues giving me a sharp look, suggesting that I was being disrespectful, patronising, not considering that Bo might like to place his own order. It occurred to me that yes, I could be too bossy.

  That’s what influenced me that day in the waiting room. I was still feeling guilty about that sandwich. I thought it would be good for Bo to be alone with the doctor, that he didn’t need me around all the time.

  Bo came out of the doctor’s office in cheerful mood. The toe problem was just gout, not anything serious. Bo has had gout for about twenty years – he first got it when we were on a camping holiday in Italy in 1993. It recurred periodically, and was treated with Difene, an anti-inflammatory, which usually cured it very quickly. The gout always affected Bo’s big toe, however, not any of the others, and that is why we didn’t recognise it this time. I wondered about the white blister on Bo’s toe but thought it might be the result of a cut, by the neighbouring nail.

  Gout. Not gangrene then. What a relief!

  ‘He prescribed a new kind of medicine,’ Bo said, by which he meant one he himself had not used before. ‘It’s very strong and can have side effects but I’ll try it.’

  We collected the pills in the local pharmacy and drove home.

  I had to phone the young woman who was organising the evening’s concert to discuss the fate of my sound recordings. I also needed to buy sweets and nuts for the children who would call to the house that night, because it was Halloween. And I had an appointment with the hairdressers.

  Too many things to do on one day.

  Bo’s toe was still sore. So he went back to bed. I was cross with him, and told him he shouldn’t have eaten all that shellfish – which had almost certainly caused this gout. I felt pressurised, and wondered how I would deal with the schedule for the night – the thought of pulling out of either of the two commitments was unthinkable – which shows how silly we human beings are. The book could easily have been launched without me – there were if anything too many speakers. The concert in Liberty Hall had a packed programme and was also far too long – in fact, by the time I appeared on the stage, at 10.30 p.m. that night, some people in the audience had already left to catch their buses home.