DISPLACED IN MULLINGAR:I WAS LISTENING to the Tánaiste talking to Cathal Mac Coille on the radio
one morning. She used a word unfamiliar to me – percentile. Was it a slip of the tongue, I wondered. Perhaps she meant to say “percentage”.
So I looked it up. I like to look up words in the dictionary while I’m eating my Weetabix.
Apparently percentile means: “each of the one hundred equal groups into which a population can be divided according to the distribution of values of a particular variable.” But by the time I found the definition, I had forgotten the sentence in which the Tánaiste had used the word, so I was none the wiser about anything.
As I was leaving the bin out for collection the starlings on the oak tree were squawking like demented rats. I suppose the slurry must have made them drunk. The slurry spreader was out the previous day, in a field across the road. It was a green sloping field, but now it’s brown. The little blue tractor with a red tank crawled up and down the hill in straight lines all morning, until the field was entirely covered with the stuff.
Crows followed the tractor. And there was a seagull as well. I talked to the man on the blue tractor, at the gate. He smoked a cigarette and left the engine running. He said a seagull this far inland was a sign of bad weather.
I said the forecast on the radio was for a good dry day, with high pressure.
“Well,” he said, “maybe the seagull doesn’t listen to the radio.” I was aware of the forecast because I had the jeep booked in for a service. I usually put the bike in the jeep, drop the jeep off at the garage, and cycle home.
It’s a bike I bought when I was living in Skehana in east Galway years ago. I would cycle into Mountbellew to buy a little meat and a few carrots every day. In those days I was poor, lonely and lived with a black-and-white television set. I always tried to get out of the house once a day. And I always ate my dinner before it got dark.
I developed a bad habit of talking back to the radio. I would have long arguments with politicians. Somebody warned me that it wasn’t a very good sign of my mental health, and so that’s when I developed the practice of listening to the radio with a dictionary; instead of shouting at it. It was fun, sitting there with my ear cocked, listening for odd words. It was kind of like fishing, only I was inside a house, listening to a radio and there wasn’t even a fish in the fridge.
After leaving off the jeep I cycled across town and stopped at a shoe shop. There were signs in the window saying Massive Sale, but inside it was empty, except for a man behind the counter who was staring out the window as if he had just seen an apparition of the Blessed Virgin on the street.
He said, “Things are getting bad.” I didn’t disagree.
He said, “You’re the first customer in here all morning.”
I said, “It’s bad all over.”
“Don’t talk to me about it,” he said, “there’s hundreds of houses in this town that should never have been built.”
I said, “Leitrim is worse. Carrick-on-Shannon was cemented over with apartments. Clusters of houses were built in the middle of nowhere. Terraced houses went up in swamplands, and on the sides of mountains.”
I bought a pair of walking shoes for €20. They were made in China.
“They’re going to save me a lot of money on petrol,” I quipped, as he was wrapping them. I was trying to cheer him up.
“The Tánaiste was on the radio this morning,” I said, “and she believes things are not as bad as they seem. She said that if you look at all the percentiles, then it’s clear that we’ll all be on the pig’s back again in another few years.”
“Wait a bit,” he said, “who said all this?” “Mary Coughlin,” I said.
“The singer?” he inquired.
“No,” I said. “She’s the Tánaiste.” “What’s that?” “It means – deputy chief!” I declared, triumphantly.
Of course I knew, because I had looked it up in my Irish dictionary.
