Chips were down until fish came to the rescue

The Chinese woman in the fishmonger seemed to have the answer to a back problem but in the end it was a fish in the wild that smoothed out the issue

LAST WEEK I was in Mulranny in Mayo to take part in a movie. The rain was soft and the ocean was gentle, and we spent two days in the bog, with a crew of 12, and a load of cameras and sound equipment.

The film is about a young man looking for silence, so he wanders about in the wilderness of Mayo, until he is disturbed by a daft writer, called Michael.

I played the daft writer wandering the bog, which was challenging enough, even though I am a daft writer who often wanders up and down the countryside.

But the difficulty was the pain in my back. I had a chest infection recently that kept me in bed for weeks, and one day I got up and felt fully recovered so I walked into town. I had breakfast in a cafe and then walked home again, along the canal.

I was on an adrenalin high but when I got home my back froze as rigid as old rope on a winter’s night. Clearly the weeks in bed had weakened the muscles and the sudden rush of exercise had now landed me with a new problem.

So there I was in Mulranny Park Hotel, last week, crippled with pain, hoping that the director of the movie wouldn’t notice anything unusual.

Being in a movie could very well constitute my arrival in the fast lane at last, and I didn’t want to blow a golden opportunity; so I brought my laptop case on location, filled with aspirin, Nurofen, paracetamol, Brufen, Biofreeze, and some black liquid called Wood Lock, that I got from a Chinese woman the previous day.

I met the Chinese woman in the fish shop in Mullingar. A group of Filipino women were ahead of us. They were buying mackerel. The fishmonger, following their instructions, gutted each fish but left the heads intact, a process which took a long time and so myself and the Chinese woman got chatting as we stood waiting.

“You have a bad back,” she said.

“How did you know that?” I wondered.

She said, “I see the way you are standing; like a ship listing to one side.”

Later in the day I called to her house and collected a bottle of Wood Lock. She told me that the black liquid should be applied with the finger, in very small doses, but of course I didn’t take her seriously. Instead I went home and poured half the bottle across my buttock. It began to burn severely and I thought, “well that’s good, it must be working”. So I poured more on, and in the morning I was due in Mulranny but I could barely climb into the Jeep.

So there I was in the bog, beside a black river, talking to the other actor, an elegant young man from Donegal. There’s an awful lot of standing around involved in being a film star, and so we had lots of time to look into the beautiful river.

The Donegal man looked into the water for a long time. He said, “When the salmon moves in still water, he leaves a trace on the surface.”

I too looked into the water and for a moment imagined my spine as a river and the salmon running up my back, and leaving soft ripples of grace in my muscles.

Then I gazed at the far mountains. “Is that a waterfall in the distance?” I wondered.

“Yes,” he said. “That’s Scardan waterfall.”

I said, “In Leitrim there is also a waterfall called Scardan, where I used to do Tai Chi for years.”

The Donegal man said that the precise meaning of the word scardan is “mist that comes off a waterfall as the water rushes down”. And for a moment I imagined my spine as a waterfall and a soft mist rippling though my muscles.

And so we got lost in the lovely meaning of words, and the breath of the bog, and the healing power of nature. And then I heard a cry of pain and looked around and realised that the director had slipped and sprained his ankle. I rushed over to him and said, “I have brufen, if you want some.”

He said, “It might be too hard on my stomach.”

“I have Nurofen as well,” I said, “and paracetamol, and some weird Chinese stuff. Please,” I said, “take them all. I don’t need them any more. I had pain this morning but I think I’ve been cured by a salmon.”