DISPLACED IN MULLINGAR:A Latvian woman came to clean the house. She was blonde, with a wide smile and sad eyes. The first day she arrived, we haggled, writes Michael Harding
I said: "What about €10 an hour?" She said: "No. Fifteen." I said: "All right. Fifteen." I left her in the house and went off to town for a walk.
A young boy passed me on the way. He carried a dirty grey school-bag with broken straps.
He had a mohican haircut with lots of gel and his school uniform was dirty. Most striking of all was the body odour mixed with crude aftershave that trailed in the air behind him.
He stopped just up ahead of me and gawked in the window of the Meteor shop, and began to pick his nose, with unbearable care and attention.
I wanted to tell him he should have a bath. Otherwise he might never find anyone to fall in love with. He might never in his life find anyone to mind him; and he looked like he needed a lot of minding. Instead, I crossed the street, in pursuit of a morning coffee.
I am reconciled to the fact that boys are dirty and pick their noses.
There's nothing can be done about it. I dare say that most men pick their noses, occasionally, when no one is looking.
The woman with the sad eyes did a mighty job all morning with mops and buckets. I paid her €45 for three hours, but I told her I couldn't afford her service every week.
She said she had children in Latvia. Three hours a week on a regular basis would suit her. She would like to be in Riga minding her two sons, but she needed the money she earned in Mullingar.
I felt guilty that I could not mind her. That she could not mind her children. That there was a teenager wandering around the town with revolting aftershave picking his nose and clearly being minded by nobody.
I felt despair. A thing I first experienced when I was 13, on Wednesday afternoons, sitting on an upturned tea-chest, on the floor of a sweetshop, smoking cigarettes I bought from the man behind the counter for three pennies a time.
There was a bunch of us; nose-pickers with black goo embedded under our fingernails.
"Quenchers and Fizzdabs and three fags, please, Mr O'Rourke."
"How was school?"
"Bad."
"And are the teachers good?"
"No. They're bad."
"And what makes them bad?"
I'd smoke half a cigarette before tapping it and putting the dead butt in my sock for further consolation at home in the bedroom, with my head stuck halfway up the chimney so no parent would ever know.
When the shop was quiet, and the philosophical discussion about goodness or badness in the teaching profession was exhausted, the old man would gaze out at the open windows of the surgical hospital across the street, from whence came the clatter of bedpans, nurses giving orders, and patients occasionally moaning in agony.
"It's all go in there today," he'd say.
Those windows fascinated me and a few years later I got a job as a night porter in the medical and maternity unit where I developed an unusual relationship with sterilising fluid.
The smell of beeswax polish on a floor, or detergents under the sink, or Domestos in a toilet bowl, are fragrances that have little effect on me, but Milton Sterilising Fluid I find powerfully nostalgic and vaguely erotic.
I think the reason is that I never quite got over the sight of young women slightly older than myself, in white masks and rubber gloves, keeping vigil in the nursery over oodles of babies with warm bottles, all snug in their cots.
Nurses floating through the medical ward at six in the morning, with squeaking trolleys. To me they were angels, making the universe sterile and clean, as they whispered to patients, fetched hot drinks and reassured old men about the state of their chests.
Everyone was minded; nobody left alone on the pavement, or picking their nose.
I miss my lady of the sorrowful eyes. The bathroom sink is a disgrace, and things mount up in the hot press and on the floor of the bedroom. I sometimes fall over in the middle of the night, en route to the toilet, and utter obscenities that the neighbours must surely hear through the thin wall that divides my little world from theirs.
