Haunted by the Grim Reaper and a disturbing tale of depression

DISPLACED IN MULLINGAR:RECENTLY A MAN collapsed as he stood in a stable yard holding the reins, while his horse was being shod.

The farrier was attending to the horse’s hoofs, and remarking on the weather as he worked. Then he heard a noise – the other man had hit the ground in mid-sentence. He survived a few days in hospital, but never regained consciousness.

They say the recession is beginning to bite.

And somewhere in a housing estate a teenager was babysitting recently, and every so often she’d go up to check the baby in the cot.

She was uneasy, because there was a life-sized mannequin lying limp in the corner of the room – a clown with a red wig, and a white smock and frilly cuffs. It seemed so real that the babysitter was terrorised.

On one occasion she thought that the mannequin had shifted position. And so when the parents phoned midway through the evening, to inquire if everything was okay, the babysitter mentioned the garish doll.

The parents wanted to know what she was talking about. They said there was no mannequin in the bedroom. They said she should get the child out of the house immediately.

So up she went again, and this time the clown was leaning against the wall, and he was staring straight at her.

When she took the child out of the cot the clown’s eyes followed her, but she got the baby safely down the stairs, and out of the house, and in the meantime the parents had called the guards, and when the guards arrived the clown was in the back garden, gibbering away in a foreign language. Apparently he was suffering from depression.

I walked through the same housing estate one morning last week as a teenage girl walked ahead of me on the pavement, with a shy, lanky gait.

She was wearing a cream skirt her father might have described as a handkerchief. She had long white legs and pink plastic shoes, and her hair was blonde. But it was the Grim Reaper that surprised me; a tiny tattoo smiling straight at me from the nape of her neck.

I’ve never had the courage to get a tattoo; to modify my body permanently with ink and needle, to stain my flesh with icon or mythic beast. I would be terrified I might discover, in moments of intense physical ecstasy, that my limbs and torso were not just flesh and blood but dragon’s wings or angel’s teeth.

I was at a funeral the day I saw the Grim Reaper. I sat in the back of the church, as the evening sun threw shafts of light across the coffin. The deceased was an old lady who used to run a sweetshop when I was a child.

I remember her handing me the threepenny wafer across the counter and, as I proffered my coin, she smiled and said: “Put that money back in your pocket.”

I can't count the amount of funerals I have attended over the years, most of them for old people. In Glangevlin, children used to sing a hymn called Going Home, in the loft, as the coffins were being wheeled in the church door.

It was a haunting melody by Dvorak, which I remember hearing years later on a television commercial for Hovis bread.

Master McGinley drilled his pupils well, with good hymns. I used to pass the schoolhouse on my way to work, and in May their voices would travel in the wind across the fields of Tullycasson, singing: “O Mary, we crown thee with blossoms today,/ Queen of the Angels and Queen of the May.”

It was a school that once hosted an Irish college, where students learned the language from native speakers in what was, up until the 1930s, a Cavan Gaeltacht. Now there are only nettles and weeds between the rocks, and no song is sung in any language.

The death of a language, or a community, or even an old lady, is not a mystery, because in time everything falls, as the leaf falls from the tree.

But there is no answer to why a young man falls beside his horse, or why a clown from eastern Europe creeps into the bedroom of a sleeping child, or why I wake in the night, and sit by the window for hours, with tears in my eyes.