They say men ought not to cry

Now, whenever I open my Facebook home page it’s like looking in a window at a warm world of companionship where I don’t belong

I’M SO happy it’s January again, and I’m already looking at the bare trees and imagining them green with buds. And I’m noticing a stretch in the evenings and a little extra light in the afternoon sky. I spent last week walking the canal again, watching all those lone men in their 50s who walk dogs, and stop to look at the water, just long enough to avoid eye contact with me, as I pass them by.

Not that there’s anything wrong with me, but men crave solitude, and when they find it, even on a canal bank, they are loath to be drawn out of it by the mundane greetings of another promenader.

When I was young, I used to talk to God a lot, which kept loneliness at bay, but that day is long gone, and there’s no solitude to compare with the derelict sanctuary of a heart with no hope; an interior of endless tears, falling for no reason, like the rain in Leitrim.

They say that men ought not to cry openly, but to me it always seemed quite natural. I was never ashamed of being unmanned, even by something frivolous, like the sight of young ladies in period costumes on the BBC, as they rose up in rebellion against Mr Darcy or other such patriarchs, with the surprise of larks.

I caught the General in tears recently. I was getting water from the tap in his yard one afternoon during the cold spell, when I noticed that the snow all about me was stained with blood, where they had shot a horse on Christmas Day.

“He slipped on the ice,” the General said, “and we could do nothing for him.”

The General’s eyes watered, and he looked at the empty snow with such confusion, that no one could doubt but that he loved the beast.

For a moment he reminded me of the time Foot and Mouth swept the country, and big farmers from Monaghan and Louth were seen on the television weeping like little boys; though the General hides his emotions rather better.

I too keep my sorrows to myself, and cry alone whenever I must. I avoid Facebook, which only makes me lonely because initially I claimed friendship with far too many people that I only knew remotely, and now, whenever I open my home page it’s like looking in a window at a warm world of companionship where I don’t belong.

When I was young I was feckless with intimacy. I told my love stories to barmen. I confessed my dreams of the future, not to my girlfriends but to their mothers, in the mineral bar in Glangevlin Hall, when I had too much to drink. I’d come into the storeroom behind the counter, where all the crates of beer and boxes of Tayto crisps were stacked, and where the women sat drinking mugs of tea and eating sandwiches, when the bar wasn’t busy. I would climb up on the crates and stretch myself out.

There was a Cork woman, who met a Glan man in London in the 1950s, and returned with him to live happily in West Cavan for many years, and who helped in the mineral bar. She would often scold me, saying I should be out dancing and not slumped on the top of the beer crates, in a drunken stupor. I would sit up and tell her all my troubles; who I loved, and how I couldn’t figure out how to woo a woman well. She never tolerated my self-pity. She would say, “You look like a rooster, perched up there; come down and dance!”

After many years of dancing I found a companion, and my pillow became a village, where my beloved and I met every night and talked about the world, and the flowers in the garden, and how many trees we should plant near the quarry, and how magical it was to see the child on Christmas morning gaze in awe at snow from Santa’s boots, all across the carpet.

The General too was in awe of the snow, as he stood beside the iced-up tap in the yard, from which I was trying to extract water, so I said to him, “You’re not in good form General,” and for a moment our eyes met and that was a kind of intimacy, and I saw again the abyss in him, which feels like a closed room where a little child has lived alone and untouched for far too long.