I heard a woman playing the flute in Donegal recently. She sat as straight as a sally rod with closed eyes, and her breath in the barrel of the instrument made a sound as beautiful as the beginning of a new universe.
“Bhí mé faoi draíocht,” I said, when she arrived at the bar. We were attending the Scoil Gheimhridh Gaoth Dobhair.
“Oh,” she said, “it’s good to be here.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “Or as the great Cavan guru once said – it’s good to be anywhere.”
I could see she was weighing up whether to take her drink back to the circle of musicians, or have a break and lean against the counter and share time with me.
“It’s good to be anywhere,” she said, repeating my words. “That’s a good one.”
“It is,” says I. “It’s a good one.”
What would happen next? No one could tell, but I was beside myself with anticipation. I lost my enthusiasm for flirting a few years ago, when I was depressed, but she was looking at me with such a curious smile that I dared be bold.
“I’ve been watching you closely,” I whispered.
“Are you a guard?” she whispered back.
“No,” I replied, “but I drive a Citroen.”
She thought that was funny because she didn’t understand it, and fortunately she didn’t ask me what Citroens had to do with guards, because I wouldn’t have had an answer. That’s the lovely thing about flirting; you can say the first thing that comes into your head.
“Do you fancy a mountain in the morning?” I wondered.
“No,” she replied. “I don’t think so.” And then she walked away to the circle of musicians with her pint of stout, like a chieftain’s daughter turning her back on a stable boy.
The following morning I pulled myself together at the bathroom mirror, acknowledging a sense of shame at having drunk too much, and then I went walking alone.
I walked up beyond the city of villages that constitutes west Donegal, into the high rocky hills where I could see the scree of Errigal almost touching the clouds above me and the shadow of Tory stretching below me along the rim of the ocean. Only a few ugly windmills marred the view.
At the bar that evening she stood close to me and said:
“Do they have peanuts?”
“Only dry roasted,” I said, munching at the nuts in a little silver bowl.
“I hate the dry roasted ones” she said.
It’s not that there’s anything erotic about peanuts, but what makes flirting work is spontaneity and the unimportance of the subject. It’s like playing tennis without the ball.
Crisp sandwiches
“Do you like crisps?” I wondered.
“Only in a sandwich.”
“Ah yes,” I said. “There is nothing to compare with a good crisp sandwich.”
The rapport had returned. And then she expressed her longing for salty peanuts in pornographic detail. I was experiencing a kind of sudden-love moment. The sentences were floating between us without any boundaries. As if we were a single mind.
I suppose everyone is looking for that sudden-love moment when you meet a stranger and feel that you have known them for a thousand years. When the ego dissolves into a fog of spontaneity and you feel at one with the other. And when everything you say seems to be funny.
“Talking to you is like taking down the fences and letting the sheep mingle,” I declared, perhaps just a tad overexcited.
But she didn’t get it. She just laughed as a big man in an Aran sweater, who really did look like a guard, came up behind her, holding two pints of Guinness, and said, “I have a seat in the corner; are you coming?”
And she didn’t even introduce him. She just went. Showed me the back of her head again and walked away. I suppose there’s nothing as sad as a flirtatious comment that falls flat.
But I stood my ground at the bar, and listened later as she lifted the flute, and blew long mellow notes out of it, her back like a sally rod and her long hair flowing all over the place. And I listened with reverence, until the music dissolved the entire lounge. And the fences, and the windmills and the sheep, and even my shame and her beauty all dissolved into a mellow unity.
The following day I faced myself in the bathroom mirror again before breakfast and it occurred to me that it might be time to give up the drink for a while and acknowledge that Christmas is finally over.