Once upon a time an old man introduced me to a blackthorn bush. It was in November. I was fishing near the lake, and, as usual when I got a big pike, I would go to his little cottage and he would take the hook out of the fish’s mouth.
One day while he was pulling the hook, he told me to close my eyes and he said: “Imagine a blackthorn bush.”
I closed them and saw a bush of black branches and white flower in my mind. It was a game he often played. He said that whatever I imagined in my head would eventually appear in the world.
Later, as I was leaving, he pointed to a bush at the gable of his house with yellowing leaves and purple berries.
“Oh, look,” he said. “A blackthorn bush. And it wasn’t there this morning.”
“That’s a sloe bush,” I said.
“Same thing,” he explained. “It changes. In spring it’s drenched in white flower, but in autumn the leaf falls, and, if you like, you can pick the berries and marinate them in gin and drink it at Christmas.”
I stopped fishing, and the old man went to live with a daughter in the midlands. I never saw him again, although I often saw the cottage he left behind, because my father would sometimes walk out there to stretch his legs.
Walks with my father
I liked walking with my father, especially if he went to the bridge that crossed the railway tracks near the woods at Loreto College in Cavan; I could sit on the wall and we would wait for a train to pass.
Sometimes he walked as far as the “derelict cottage”, as we called it.
Derelict was a good word, because it didn’t take long before the goat willows had hidden it from the road, but as long as the blackthorn bushes sheltered at the gable I could always close my eyes and feel the old man was still present.
One day last summer I went out there again, hoping to look in the window and maybe see a rusty Voblex fishing hook on the table, but there was nothing left. The Celtic Tiger had swept the cottage away, and the diggers had scraped off the vegetation, leaving only an empty brown field where the house once stood.
The following day I paid a visit to his daughter, who had written to me after reading my book and who was by then an old woman living in a nursing home.
She was wearing sunglasses in the day room, beside the window, enjoying the heat on her face. She had a blanket over her knees. “Are you not too warm with that blanket?” I wondered, but she just smiled.
Her sunglasses were black and thick. They were more like goggles, and her body was so thin that she reminded me of an insect sunning itself on a rock. She smelled of soda bread, although I have no idea why.
“My daughter comes in the afternoons,” she said, “but she has no connection with Cavan.”
She brought me to her room for chocolates, although I think it was only to get away from the television. Her room was a girly little space relying heavily on lace and 40 shades of pink.
She brought out the box of chocolates. I recognised her father in a photograph on the wall.
“I miss my cats,” the woman said when we were done talking about Cavan and the old days. “I’ll come again,” I promised, as I was leaving, “at Christmas time.”
“That would be lovely,” she said.
Fat purple berries
The next time I was passing the field where the cottage used to be, I decided to search about the ditches and the hedges nearby in the hope of finding a clump of sloe bushes, dripping with fat purple berries.
I promised myself that I would pick every one and let them soak in gin until Christmas Day, and that I would visit her again with the bottle and we could drink a toast to the memory of her father.
But it began to rain, and I sat in the four-wheel drive looking out at the field where the cottage used to be, wondering was I mad in the head. And the rain defeated me. I saw no sloes and gathered nothing, and, if I go to see his daughter at Christmas, I will be empty-handed, but I will ask her to close her eyes and imagine a blackthorn tree full of white flowers, and then I will tell her this story.