Dublin city, bicycles and women in the rare aul' times

Displaced in Mullingar After a freewheel down memory lane, Michael Hardinghears a passionate treatise on two types of modern man

I was in Pasta Bella restaurant with an old friend. He had a grilled fish and I had fettucini, and then we both had tiramisu and coffee. We drank only one bottle of wine between us, so a little sambuca seemed appropriate, as a digestif, to round off the evening.

We talked about Dublin in the old days, when everybody we knew was poor, in love, desperate for sex, and cycled home at midnight. A time when people still indulged in the now-extinct custom of codding with the guards.

I remember cycling home one night through Ranelagh with a nurse on the carrier, who was back from Saudia Arabia and heading for her home in Donegal. She planned to stop in Dublin for a few days; but the nightlife was so good that she stopped for years.

I often chained my bike to lamp posts all around the city centre. The Flowing Tide across from the Abbey and the lamp posts near Grogans on Castle Street were favourite spots.

Some nights, I went home without the bike, and in the morning, I'd go into town on the top of a double-decker, all trepidation, wondering would my lovely Raleigh still be there.

It was a delight to turn a corner and find it standing where I had left it; and to see that no one had buckled or robbed the wheels.

I lived on Oakley Road, where I shared a bathroom with eight others, and I paid through the nose for a dilapidated room with no bed. Upstairs there was a man in a grey suit who lived alone, and wore a cap, like someone in a short story by John McGahern.

His Raleigh was a heavy, black machine. The chain was hidden in black casing, and he never talked to anyone.

One day he and I got stuck in the narrow front hallway; he was trying to get his Raleigh out, and I was trying to get my flashy, modern mountain bike in. When my pedal got caught in his spokes, I knew he would have to say something. We both froze. And I waited.

He said, "The apples are very bitter this year." I said, "Indeed they are." I didn't know very much about apples.

I shared this memory with my friend in Pasta Bella, and we both agreed that the melancholic cyclist from God-knows-where, gripping his old-fashioned bike in the middle of a Dublin suburb, was a play in itself.

Later in the evening, my friend and I stopped into Danny Byrne's for a nightcap on our way to his hotel, and we gazed in admiration at the young revellers - gorgeous girls in party dresses, and boys with gel in their hair.

Some boys swaggered about the lounge with great style, while others were as shy and wary as foxes, flitting about in the shadowy corners, in search of eye contact with some beautiful woman.

I was getting on quite well with a young lady at the counter, and so I ventured to seek her opinion on the subject of the Mullingar male.

This perplexed her at first, but gradually she got dug into the subject.

"There are men," she declared, "who simply love women, who listen to women, who like women, and for whom each individual woman is the most important person in the world. Men like that have a sense of humour, and they never talk about themselves."

I suspected that she was thinking of someone in particular.

"And they pay complete attention to the woman they are with," she continued. "Are you with me?" "Oh yes," I said. "I'm with you." Her face darkened as she continued.

"On the other hand," she said, "there are men who just need women. They want women. But they never ask themselves do they really like women. Do you know what I mean?" After that, our relationship petered out. She drifted away, my friend vanished, and I walked home.

I didn't sleep much that night. I woke at three and looked out the window at the jeep, trying to remember if I'd locked it. Eventually, I got the keys and zapped it from the window, only to discover it was already locked. Now it was open. So I had to zap it again.

I was still thinking about the countryman with the old Raleigh who found the apples bitter. Maybe he woke sometimes on Oakley Road, full of anxiety, in the middle of the night, wondering if he had locked his bike.