DISPLACED IN MULLINGAR:MY HOLIDAY ENDED in the Ice House in Ballina; a big glass-windowed world overlooking the Moy. I lingered for an hour in the steam and the tropical shower, in the dry room and the hot tub, softening up my flesh in preparation for a full body Swedish massage.
"Most people have the massage first, and then food," a big blubbery man observed, as we sat in the steam room.
I didn't want to talk to him. I was trying to focus on Radovan Karadzic, that scoundrel from the heart of darkness who brought hell to our television screens, and then went away to diet on spring water, hazel nuts and raisins, and remake himself as a monumental icon of New Age therapy.
The blubbery man asked me was I on holidays. I said, "Yes."
"Where is home?" he asked cheerfully, in a broad American accent.
I wanted to say Mullingar; but the word stuck in my gullet.
When I came there two years ago, I rented an apartment with paper-thin walls. The washing machine didn't work. It took three months to get it fixed.
But I survived that first year, and am now in a dainty house not far from the centre of town, so I looked the blubbery man in the eye and said, "I live in Mullingar; but it is not home."
"Oh," he said, "I understand."
"Actually," I said, "I find living in an urban area very lonely; and the most difficult time is summer, when all the countryside is green."
"Do you have friends?" he asked.
"Yes I have. Of course! I am surrounded by a great collection of greengrocers, musicians, poets, photographers, horse owners, graphic artists, students, and film-makers, all of whom have evolved into a company I call 'good friends'. So I am not alone. And besides, Leitrim is not the rustic dream it used to be. The brutality and greed of property developers has scarred every village in the county. So why do I still feel displaced and uneasy in Mullingar? I don't know."
Like all good therapists he kept his mouth shut and gazed at me with a bewildered expression.
"Perhaps it is just because of age," I continued, "and my ever-enlarging prostate, that I have become melancholic? The blood is colder now; and sex never quite wipes out the rest of the day as it used to when I was 21; and for the over-50s, no ecstasy can completely sweep away the mind, because there are no ecstasies left untried."
I had a tuna steak later in the swanky restaurant downstairs and my new friend had a bowl of chowder.
Radovan Karadzic gazed at us from the front page of the newspaper on the table. We talked about Serbia, and the European Union, and the high density of alternative therapists in rural Ireland.
Later, I drove east along the coast to Ballisodare, and then headed south on the Dublin road, towards Boyle, the midlands and Mullingar. But going over the bridge in Carrick-on-Shannon, I had a weakness for remembered things, and turned left towards Drumshanbo and the hills above Lough Allen.
I drove out along the lake, and then up the Greagh road towards the top of the mountain, and into the townland of Timpaun. With each mile, my grip on the steering wheel tightened with tension, as if there was a danger that the lovely world might not be there anymore, when I turned the final corner.
But it was there alright; billowing with green leaf and wild rose; the downy and the silver birch, the weeping and the frugal willow, the mountain ash and the wild cherry.
A laburnum drooped at the front door, a pagoda tree sheltered in the ditch and the bushy bay tree that I got from the playwright Tom McIntyre over a decade ago stood sentry at the gable.
I strolled about for a while, admiring the little forest. I planted all those trees in one single month, in the very same year that Radovan Karadzic wiped out thousands of men and boys in Srebrenica; and all those trees are blooming yet, innocent and lovely; and all those boys are dead.
"Will you stay long?" the beautiful woman in the garden asked me.
"No," I said. "I'll just stay the night. I must go back to Mullingar in the morning."
mharding@irish-times.ie
