A carnival of drunks and misbehaviour on the rails

Displaced in Mullingar: Travelling back from the early-morning tumult in Tipperary, Michael Hardinghas an intimate encounter on a train.

I was in Hayes's Hotel in Thurles, on Saturday night. By closing time the street outside was a carnival of drunks. One woman in high heels, a tiny skirt, and a white blouse screeched at her partner, and thumped him on the head. His arms were tattooed and his head was shaved. He certainly wasn't someone I would want to mess with.

Two young gardaí tried to quell her rage, but she turned on them too. And they couldn't be bothered, because the entire street was a sea of little riots and arguments.

Inside the hotel, a disco was in full swing. A young woman in a black party dress waited placidly beside the exit, as blood streamed down her face from a cut on her head.

Hayes's is an old hotel. Age has sloped the corridors upstairs, so it's like walking through a listing ship, and there is an ancient bannister leading up to the third floor, on which one could imagine the toffs of Thurles ascending and descending in fine Edwardian style.

Thurles was probably the bee's knees in the 19th century for stimulating conversation, but I didn't have a hope of stimulating anything at three in the morning, in the war zone around the disco, so I headed for bed.

From my window I watched teenage lovers, and a pack of angry and disturbed young males quit the disco and stagger into the night, leaving the alley derelict, but for a scrawny black cat.

In Leitrim I used to walk a dog around the hills, but we never connected. We lived at opposite ends of the same leash, and made little effort to maintain a relationship during our long morning walks.

The cat of my life was Miss Daisy; a slow dreamy black creature. She bumped into the glass patio door so often that I thought she needed glasses. And she gazed compassionately at mice, as if she were contemplating deeper metaphysical issues. I wondered was she perhaps a nun in Mongolia in some former life. Or perhaps she was a donkey, because she loved the donkeys in the German's field next door, and would often mooch around them for hours on a sunny day.

When she died of old age, and the cumulative damage done by fast tractors, her place was taken by a long-haired thing called Fudge. Fudge got renamed Tarantino, for the gratuitous manner and frequency with which he slaughtered every baby bird that hatched in the hedge. And Tarantino is still there, in the hills above Lough Allen, big and fat, with steady amber eyes that never showed mercy to a mouse.

I returned to Mullingar on Wednesday, by train, and felt like a mouse, as I watched a slim and elegant lady, with an aquiline nose and dark vigilant eyes, rummage through a table-top of figures, and flow charts, and balance sheets. Sitting across from her was an intimate experience; like being in her private office. Though her firm approach on the phone made me glad I didn't work for her. "What is this money for? Look at page four. Why are the hotel cheques in the out file?" At Maynooth she closed her black Motorola mobile.

Great, I thought, silence at last. But a few miles down the track she opened it again and connected to her secretary.

"Hi," she said, firmly, "can you check my e-mails." There was a long pause. Obviously she gets a lot of e-mails.

"And could you send Monica a reply? Good. I'm here until Monday," she said. "I wanted to be here for the planning meeting, but I've heard nothing back from them. If you hear anything, let me know. All I can do is keep chasing them." She was not the kind of person I would like chasing me, unless the circumstances were extremely romantic.

Then she smiled. The business bit was over, and she was having a little gossip. "No," she said, "I was in London yesterday, and it was glorious. But I didn't get a chance to misbehave in my usual fashion." Her eyes sparkled as she listened. "Oh," she said, "I'm so jealous. I always wanted to do that with him." I got the impression she might be wild, when she goes out on the town.

And I was dying to ask her was she ever in Thurles.

But she didn't see me, though she stared straight through me. She was gazing upon something beautiful in her mind, and I was invisible.