told her a bit about my love life. I didn’t tell her when I first had sex, she didn’t ask me. We talked about who I fell in love with when I was around nineteen. Her name is Emily and she is the mother of my daughter, Maeve. We talked about love and travelling and she wanted to know all about my back pages. How I took Emily down to Milltown Malbay in County Clare, when we were escaping from her boyfriend. Emily was living in a basement apartment with him and she invited me down for breakfast, a boiled egg. Her boyfriend was out, and before he came back, Emily asked me to take her away somewhere. Anywhere away. So that’s what I did, I took her away to Milltown Malbay.
It’s a funny thing, you go somewhere abroad and right away you start talking about home, making connections. It’s mad, isn’t it. You go to Berlin and you end up talking about Clare and Milltown Malbay. She’s sitting in her wheelchair and we talk about how much we both love the west of Ireland, Clare in particular. She has a house there, a small two-roomed cottage where she used to go to work on her books and walk across the Burren with Buddy. When she came back after living in London, she went down to Clare for the first time and she said it was like finding a place on the far side of the world that she had never heard of before, undiscovered.
We talk about the music festival in Milltown Malbay every summer. She remembers the musicians and the listeners on the street because there was never enough room and the pubs were turned inside-out.
I remember a piper sitting on a chair, she told me, brought out on the pavement. Men with their shirt sleeves rolled up to work the fiddle and women with accordions strapped across their chests and the knees going up and down like engines in the machine room of a ship. People bringing out drink and ham sandwiches to keep them going. She said there was always a man or a woman in the audience who got so excited by the speed of the music they would yelp and shout fair play to you, right in the middle of the tune, just to make sure they could be heard listening. And the pub where everybody was suddenly trying to get back in, like it was the only place in the world to be at that moment and there was no way a pub that small could accommodate the amount of people already inside. Where the crowd squeezing in at the door was like the people in London, she said, trying to get on the Underground. Only they were straining to hear a singer who had started up a song unaccompanied, with his eyes closed, holding on to the bar counter to steady himself.
I asked her about that pub, what was the name of it? But she could not remember the name. Was it a pub where women had to go through the kitchen to get to the bathroom at the back of the house, I wanted to know. And there was a big bath in there with all these cracks. A huge bath with a million tiny hairline cracks in the enamel. She said she remembered a lot of bathrooms in the living quarters at the back of pubs and they all had cracked sinks and cracked tiles and mirrors that were gone freckled with black spots and plaster flaking off the ceiling and the geyser above the bath where the water came out boiling.
You must have seen the bath, I said to her. The bath with a million hairline cracks in the enamel.
Not that I remember, she said.
It was in that same pub, I said. I’m certain of it.
I was asking her all that because I was there myself at that festival, the year I escaped with Emily, possibly at the same time, listening to a man of that description standing at the bar, steadying himself on the counter. He was belting out this song with his eyes closed. And then who walks into the crowded bar, only Emily’s boyfriend. I don’t know how he could have known we were there, but Emily said she saw him squeezing his way through the crowd. I didn’t actually see him myself, only that Emily looked up suddenly and said, shit. Then she took my hand and dragged me through the crowded bar, out the back, through the kitchen with the smell of rashers and eggs and tealeaves. As we passed through I saw a range and an armchair in the corner with a holy picture on the wall above. Through the house Emily pulled me, into the bathroom where they had the cracked bath. She locked the door and that’s where we stayed and waited. We could hear the man singing in the bar still, it must have been a hundred verses. You could hear a pin drop, as they say, as if there was nobody out there but the singer by himself alone, just the occasional cough or the sound of empty glasses, you know the way a barman puts a finger in each glass and sweeps them up with a clink, three or four glasses in one go, as many fingers as he has available. Emily was sitting on the side of the bath with the million hairline cracks, wearing a green dress and black boots and a light-brown cardigan with the top buttons open. Her hair was long and she had lots of freckles. She was playing with the chain, swinging the grey stopper around while I was standing with my back to the door. We didn’t say a word. I was not smiling or laughing or anything like that, and nor was Emily, only that she lifted her shoulders as if to say, what else can you do?
I don’t remember how we got out of there in the end. All I remember is Emily sitting on the edge of the bath with all the hairline cracks and whispering to me that maybe there was time to have a quick bath together while we were waiting, only that there was no soap except ivy soap and that was for washing the floor, not for washing your body. What a pity we didn’t bring a candle. And what a pity we didn’t bring our drinks with us at least, Emily added.
There was a picture of Pope John the Twenty-third and John F. Kennedy in the bathroom with us. Maybe the only one left in Ireland. The picture was quite faded with the steam from so many baths. John F. Kennedy had his head tilted to one side and there was a water cloud covering half his face. Pope John held his hand up in a blessing and his white robe was gone brown, buckled up with age. I know that because Emily asked me to look at the picture carefully while she was having a piss.
Listen to the song outside, she said.
And then I ended up bringing Emily for a bath after all, the next day. The seaweed baths. Out along the coast, a place with blue painted doors and blue window frames, where people came from all over the world, men and women from Germany and Scandinavia, in their dressing gowns. The centre for hot seaweed baths. They gave Emily a cubicle to herself with a bath she could not even put her toes into first it was so hot, full of brown seaweed, like brown leather straps. There was steam everywhere and echoes of people splashing water around their bodies in other cubicles, talking to each other in Swedish over the wooden partitions. When Emily eventually lay back in the bath, she said it felt quite slimy at first, a bit like floating in cod liver oil, but she liked it because it’s meant to be good for your health, you’ll never get rheumatism, all those promises going back hundreds of years. Her face was flushed from the heat and she played with the seaweed straps all around her body, making a long brown, underwater dress for herself with seaweed straps around her thighs and seaweed straps covering her breasts and going around her shoulders. You’d never forget the smell of seaweed either, it stays in your memory, you recognize it instantly as soon as you get to the coast. Emily’s skin was very smooth afterwards, I remember, I don’t really have the word for it exactly, so smooth it was almost not there, more like holding your hand under running water. And afterwards, to rinse the oily feeling from her body we went out to the Pollock Holes near Kilkee, Pollies they’re called, these natural pools in the rocks where people in dressing gowns go swimming when the tide is out, because the water left behind in those pools is so clear and warm and deep and calm and full of minerals. And all the time I was looking around me, searching up and down the shore to see if we were being followed.
We had the Botanic Garden to ourselves, give or take. We were like any other tourists, really, looking around, taking pictures. Apart from her being in a wheelchair, the people there would have thought nothing unusual, only that she was not up to walking, that’s all. She kept the cap on, so nobody knew what was going on underneath. We were unseen mostly, apart from a few onlookers here and there, more interested in all that stuff coming to life around us. It was warm, you could feel the sun pulling things out of the earth. The air was full of cross-fertilization.
We brought our own summer with us, she said.
It was spring, in fact, but she did that sometimes, quoting words from a song or a book. I didn’t always know what she meant, because she was not speaking to me directly but remembering a random line that made sense on its own, without