Michael Harding: The pressure of other people made me flee the city

I suppose it’s not a good sign. Solitude gets no brownie points in the secular world of compulsive collectivity

I think it’s the proximity of others that makes me feel alone, because I never feel any pain in the wilderness. I could walk the mountains for hours, sensing only the bog and thistle. The heather and lake are somehow personal; somehow, in their own way, holding me.

But when I try to inhabit cities I fall to pieces. Years ago I lived on Cowper Street, and on Oakley Road in Ranelagh, and in Sandycove. But it was always the pressure of other people that made me flee again to various wildernesses beyond the Shannon.

I suppose it’s not a good sign. Solitude gets no brownie points in the secular world of compulsive collectivity.

I’ve been in Dublin now for two months. Sometimes at weekends I lie in bed, listening to the sound of children’s voices on Grosvenor Square, or the noise of someone cleaning dishes in the apartment above me, or the conversations of old women in the laneway beneath my window, as they push trollies to and from Lidl for bargains.

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Nobody home

One weekend I got so uneasy that I fled to the hills above Lough Allen on a Saturday afternoon, just to curl up in the big double bed in my own home. But when I got there I didn’t feel happy at all, because there had been nobody home for two months and the house was as cold as an empty ruin.

I lit the stove, but I only had a few damp logs and the stove hadn’t been lit for six weeks so the room didn’t heat up adequately.

The mountain wind and rain lashed the roof and I sat on the sofa with my coat on all evening, watching The Good Wife.

I didn’t even want to clean out the ashes. So the following morning I just fled again, back to Dublin, and by lunchtime I was sitting in Starbucks in Rathmines, like a piece of flotsam tossed out of the ocean on to an uncertain beach.

The woman beside me in Starbucks said that there was a grip in the weather. I didn’t know what she meant, but I agreed.

“Yes,” I said, “there’s a good grip in it now.”

I could see a leaflet beside her coffee cup, with an image of me dressed up as The Bull McCabe, and she was staring at it as she munched her blackberry muffin.

Her eyes moved from the leaflet to me a few times before she came to a pause in her mastication and spoke.

“That’s not you,” she asked as she pointed at the leaflet. “Is it?”

I said, “I’m afraid it is.”

“Oh no,” she said, “it’s not like you at all.”

I said, “It’s not supposed to be like me. It’s supposed to be The Bull McCabe.”

Suddenly she looked frightened, as if she ought not to have spoken in the first place, or as if some invisible ghost had caught her elbow and frozen all her emotions.

A terrified mouse

Later I picked up my usual chicken saag and broccoli in the Bombay Pantry and made it to my apartment, where I locked the door, sat at the window and began eating like a terrified mouse.

I could hear a plug connecting into a socket in the next apartment, and I knew she was boiling her kettle again. I have become as familiar with my neighbours beyond the walls and above the ceiling as I am in Leitrim with invisible mice who live behind the walls.

I dug through my iTunes to find some soothing radio, but even a gardening programme from the BBC couldn’t comfort me.

A woman on the phone was asking an expert what she could do with her vegetable patch, which had no shade. The expert asked her could she make raised beds. He said that might help. “And paint the fence white,” he added. “And double-dig the soil.”

The animation of voices in thrall to life in a garden lifted my spirits, but then another woman phoned in to talk about her cherry tree. She almost cried as she described how she regularly hugged the cherry because it had been dying for the past three years.

“Are you on thin chalk?” the expert wondered, like a detective exploring something deadly.

“A barnyard,” she said.

“Ah,” he said, like Sherlock Holmes. “I see.”

I didn’t see, so I turned the computer off and stared out the window at Rathmines, like I used to do, 30 years ago, on Sunday afternoons, listening to someone I will never know, on the other side of a wall, hoovering their carpets.

  • Michael Harding stars as The Bull McCabe in John B Keane's The Field at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, until May 30th