I was driving a woman I know to her job as a cleaner. She was sitting in the back of my car, eating a chicken sandwich. In the decade or more that I’ve known her, she has never sat in the front, at least not while I’m driving.
She’ll happily ride pillion in the passenger seat if my husband is at the wheel, presumably trusting that the presence of an Adam’s apple and five o’clock shadow will protect her from being hurtled through the bleedin’ windshield.
She doesn’t trust my driving at all. Me, with my flaky mascara and chipped nail varnish and propensity for singlehanded gesticulation while barrelling through the lights – I am obviously going to kill her before she reaches her appointment with Mr Sheen.
She seems to believe manliness is a prerequisite for working any kind of machinery you don’t plug in. (I mustn’t have told her about the day, all those years ago, when my spouse forgot to put pressure on the brake while parking, because he was listening to something soulful on the radio, and rolled straight into the wall of our downstairs flat.)
She is a woman I happily call a friend, although we’ve never really had an intimate conversation. Not because I don’t trust her, but because language is a barrier. I don’t speak a word of hers, and despite living in this country for more than a decade, she struggles with mine. Nobody talks to her, she explains slowly, painstakingly, they just leave the bleach out for her on the draining board and the ironing wrestling in the laundry bin.
Over the years of our acquaintance our communication has developed, despite language, without language. We point, we hug, we smile, we mime and moan about our fickle waistlines, we share photographs of our children.
After a recent trip home to Romania, she brought back a present of a Romania-shaped fridge magnet and some glossy postcards of a choppy lake; photographs, too, of her aged farmworker parents, standing side by side, grim, weatherbeaten in sturdy braces and cotton headscarf.
She sat at my kitchen table when her sister died, white-faced, dry-eyed, her hands blue and cold. “Cancher,” she said, pointing at her stomach. “Cancher.” My own sister was seriously ill at the time, but her treatment saved her. “Thank you, God,” she said when I told her my sister was coming home from hospital. “Thank you, God.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”
Satan’s stance on marriage and yoga
Given that we hobble by on a vocabulary of a couple of dozen words, it was probably not such a fantastic idea to try to explain to her why I voted Yes in the marriage equality referendum.
“No Yes!” she exhorted through a mouthful of chicken. “God very, very sad. God send water!”
“Flood?” I said. “God will send a flood?”
“Yes.” She nodded approvingly.
“No,” I said. “I mean, I don’t think he will send a flood. I don’t think, should he exist at all, that he would have any problem whatsoever with lovers being allowed to marry. Man woman. Man man. Woman woman. Happy happy.”
“Satanic,” she said, glaring at me in the rearview mirror. “Satanic.”
Her English was better than I thought.
“Rubbish, satanic,” I said, pumping the accelerator to get through the amber light.
“Yoga,” she said darkly.
Yoga has been an ongoing feud between us ever since she caught me reading a leaflet about some local classes. Yoga apparently lies at the root of all evil. It’s those old downward dogs, getting their yappy yogi teeth into holy mother Ireland and shaking her by her virgin throat, that has us all in the mess we’re in, don’t ya know.
“Satanic,” she growled, backing away from the innocuous photograph on the flyer of a nice vegan-looking lady in a modest leotard.
“Balls,” I said, and got a clip around the ear for my trouble.
I dropped her off outside a pretty house; wilting rhododendrons, sleeping car. She’s terrified of the burglar alarm, so I waited outside until she keyed in the code, until the high-pitched warning subsided, until she came outside again to wave me away. I was revving up the galloping horses under the bonnet when she came towards me, down the manicured path, and knocked on the window.
“God bless you,” she said.
“And God bless you,” I replied.
I don’t mind conjuring up a healing God every now and again, a soothing God to bridge the chasm of expectation and opportunity that divides us. She probably doesn’t need to know that my God wears yoga pants.