I was having a good soak because I had to see the doctor, and I never know what part of my anatomy is going to come under scrutiny
I WAS sitting in the jacuzzi of a Nama hotel talking to a beautiful woman from near Ballymote. She said her sister and the husband had separated.
“They had a business,” she said, “and built a huge house during the boom, and they have a girl of 19 and a boy of six.”
I said: “That’s a big gap.”
She said: “The second clutch kills the clocker.” I didn’t understand, so she tried to explain.
“The high spirits of the boom encouraged them to build the big mansion, and expand the family. But now the business is bust, the taxman is after him, and they can’t cope with a young child; so they’ve separated. “Although,” she added grimly, “they’re both still stuck in the one house.”
I was having a good soak because I had to see the doctor, and I never know what part of my anatomy is going to come under scrutiny.
It was 6pm when I got to the doctor’s waiting room, and the radio was on. Matt Cooper was asking the presidential candidates if they believed in God, but the radio wasn’t tuned properly to the station so it was impossible to hear their answers. An old man turned to me and said: “I’m surprised to see you out; we heard you had taken to the bed.”
“Not the bed,” I said. “The stove; I have taken to the stove.”
Years ago, people suffering from depression often took to the bed, because houses were damp, and there was no central heating, and there was no peace to be had in the kitchen because it was an industrial zone; kettles sang on the range, women peeled potatoes, drying sheets hung like flags from the rafters, and children picked their noses under the table and tried to learn Irish words from schoolbooks.
So if a man wanted to fall into the soft silence of his own psyche for a couple of years, and escape the intellectual paralysis of the new Free State, he took to the bed. If a woman, after years of childbearing and washing nappies, in the days before Pampers, wanted to escape the emotional wilderness of rural Ireland in the rain, she took to the bed. The bed was the warmest place to be alone and to rest, away from the turmoil of being either Irish or married. It was either that or stand in the turf shed and stare out at the rain for years or contemplate some watery end in the local river.
Nowadays people can afford to heat more than just the kitchen, and when a person wants to escape the maddening world, they can go into another room, close the door and light a fire.
In the morning I clean out my stove. I brush the ashes onto a shovel and drop them in a bucket. I fill a wicker basket with turf briquettes, and place it in the corner. I stand six briquettes inside the stove, mounted on a firelighter, ready to be lit, whenever the urge takes me.
After that my day has begun. Everything is possible. It is what my therapist calls a safe place; a place where I can explore all sorts of exercises in mindfulness, as I lie on the couch.
The old man in the doctor’s waiting room told me that his father took to the bed for years. “Even at Christmas when we were children,” he said, “my father wouldn’t budge from beneath the blankets. He was a bitter man.”
One morning his wife brought him up a boiled egg as usual for breakfast, perched in an egg-cup, with a plate of toast and a mug of tea on the same tray. The egg had been sliced but not well, the shell around the sides was shattered. He looked at it with contempt and said: “You must have hit that with a sledge-hammer.”
“I can still see the hurt on my mother’s face, when she came back to the kitchen, with the offending egg in the pocket of her apron,” the old man said.
And then the doctor called him in, so I was left with the voice of Gay Mitchell saying something about God, but I was still thinking of the lovely woman in the jacuzzi, and her unfortunate sister, with an unemployed husband and a young child; a couple formally separated, but yet still stuck together in the one house, because of the recession, and probably boiling their eggs in separate pots.