A long day’s journey into the lives of three women

In a Dublin guesthouse one morning a girl with red hair came to my table with a plate of scrambled eggs and a jug. The jug fell from her hand and splattered my trousers with milk. She was devastated. I told her not to worry and I asked her for the wifi password.

“Did you not get it last night?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “I arrived late. And there was no one at reception.”

But she was so busy cleaning the floor that she forgot about me and the password. At reception later she was behind the desk.

“You’re running the entire establishment on your own,” I declared.

“Please put your credit card in the machine,” she said.

She looked like she might shatter if her anxiety was stirred much further.

“Where are you from?” I wondered.

“Romania,” she replied.

“Ahh,” I groaned, as if Romania was the most beautiful place in the world. “Are you enjoying Ireland?”

She thought about this for a moment, returned my credit card with a receipt and said, “No.”

I saw the tears welling up in her eyes and it struck me she was hardly more than 20.

“Are your parents alive?” I wondered.

She didn’t reply. “I will go home soon,” she said, though it didn’t feel like she was talking to me.

Outside the guesthouse a handsome young man with dark skin and chestnut brown eyes was cleaning the footpath with a deck-scrub and a bucket of detergent.

Bombay mix
Later in the day I met another interesting woman, the daughter of a friend. She needed a lift to Mullingar, so that evening I picked her up outside a Gala shop near Dún Laoghaire where I bought a bag of Bombay mix for €2. The snack was so stale that I wanted to go back into the shop and complain. But I didn't bother.

My passenger arrived, a thin slip of intellectual frenzy in blue Doc Martens, with dishevelled hair, an iPod and earplugs that she kept in place to avoid any threat of conversation.

I threatened nothing although I offered her Bombay mix on the M50. She nibbled some and said: “They’re stale.” That was about the limit of our interaction.

My beloved is in Warsaw and our cats just talk to themselves now that the heating is off. They used to fight for the bedding under the range, and I was always sorting them out, but now that the kitchen is stone cold they’ve made peace with each other and ignore me completely. They gaze out, confused, from a single basket in the scullery. Clearly the rising price of oil is a concept beyond their little minds.

When I got home I noticed a light on in the outbuilding and realised I must have an intruder in my study. Someone who knows where the key is hidden and who feels at ease enough to sneak in and wait for me. She was sitting in the corner with no light, so I could just make out her figure in the dark.

She’s a twilight creature who comes when she wants to, without invitation, and sits in the corner and nurses her wounds and whispers her worries in a coded fashion to anyone who will listen.

So I listened as she chastised me about the dirt of my room and the corruption in my lifestyle and I made no defence of either, because I suspect it was all projections of her own stuff, as my therapist would say.

“Where’s your wife,” she asked.

“Poland,” I said.

“So we’re alone?” she concluded.

“Yes,” I agreed. “There’s only the two of us, this evening.”

There was a long silence and then she said: “Tell me about your day.”

Well, I said, “I’ve had a very interesting day. I met three wonderful women. I met a woman this morning who is very lonely; a woman this afternoon who is mad about music; and now you!”

She looked out at the moonlit lake for a while. Then I remembered the handsome man with the dark complexion cleaning the footpath outside the guesthouse, a man for whom someone might gladly break jars of ointment, or bathe him in oil and drench him with perfume if he were to emerge from a bath and ask for a towel.

I asked her what she was doing for Easter. She couldn’t say.

“Religion sucks,” she hissed.

“Absolutely,” I agreed. “But my weakness is that I keep re-imagining Jesus.”