Waking up the neighbour

Displaced in Mullingar: Dreams of water and scuba diving lead to a disturbed night in a Sligo hotel, writes Michael Harding.

There was a large man at the bar, enjoying his glass of Guinness.

"Are you aware," I said, "that there are more sub-aqua divers in Westmeath than anywhere else in the country? Being landlocked," I said, "it becomes a matter of utter importance to find water in which to submerge."

He asked me was I a diver.

"No," I said, "But I dream."

"Dream what?"

"I dream about the water," I said, wistfully, "but I've yet to go under."

He said, "You're some boy!"

"I dream that Mullingar is an island," I continued. "And the ring roads are the ocean lanes. The lorries are the ships."

He offered to buy me a drink, but I said no, because I had to drive to Sligo in the morning.

I used to frequent Sligo Trades Club years ago - an upstairs room of boney old flute players. Beautiful women singing lonely ballads. Irish speakers and communists in tweed jackets and corduroy trousers. Packie Duignan, Josie McDermott, and Mrs McNamara.

That was long ago, when gawky young people, with jobs in the health services, or the banks, used to hang out in flats on the Mall, and stare into each other's eyes, singing Help Me Make it Through the Night. Getting melodramatic about the possibility of sharing a bed. "I don't care what's right or wrong. Let the devil take tomorrow, for tonight I need a friend."

Last week I took a single room in a small hotel in Sligo, and, in the dead of night, I got up and went to the toilet. I blundered my way from bed to the en suite bathroom with the delicacy of a dizzy elephant, and loosened my bladder with unfettered abandon.

Suddenly, I heard noise coming from a closet beside the bed. It resembled the sound of a dog drowning. I identified it instantly as the snores of a middle-aged man. The question was, what might he be doing in the closet? I tried to open it but it was locked. Then it dawned on me that I was sharing a suite of two adjoining rooms with a stranger.

The snoring stopped. I could hear him jump out of bed, woken by me trying to open the door. He called out: "Who's that?"

I stood shivering. Said nothing. The handle moved. I wondered was he naked, on the other side, or was he wearing pyjamas. I was naked. So I imagined him naked. The door between us was like a knife, slicing the silence and the rage. It was a moment as intimate as it was unpleasant.

Back in Mullingar the following day, I found refuge in an open-space cafeteria doing lunches. A little girl of four or five, at the next table, looked at me and shouted: "Who's that?"

Her teenage minder, a girl who looked as happy as a basket of unwashed laundry, told her to shut up.

The young minder was eating a bun and drinking coffee. A buggy stood idle at her side. The little girl meandered around the open space, lost in a dream, waddling like a scuba diver on the floor of the sea. But the teenage girl was having none of that.

"Over here," she barked. "Now!"

"I want to go to the toilet," the child said.

"You know where it is. Hurry up." The child went off to the toilet. Wasn't long gone. Came back and leaned on the table.

"Did you wash your hands?"

"No."

"I told you to wash your hands," the teenager hissed.

She didn't even look like she was enjoying her muffin.

"Sit," she said.

The child wasn't for sitting now.

"I want noodles," the child said. A reasonable request. I was nibbling a fresh cod. The girl was wolfing down a big bun.

The only one fasting was the infant.

"I know what you'll get if you don't do what your told," Miss Muffin warned. "You'll get a good slap on the arse."

The child surrendered, and sat down, her hands unwashed, and her fingers plucking things out of her jumper.

"What were you playing with, this morning?"

"Play-doh," the child said.

"You have it all over your clothes," she said, as if Play-doh was a health hazard.

Eventually the teenager dragged herself away from the debris of the bun, shoving the empty buggy down the Mall, as if it was a ton of coal. The child waddled behind, sometimes casting a wistful eye towards glittering things in shop windows.