Leaning on the fence that lines the walkway to the park, as Bella and Lily sniff and paw through wispy wasteland scrub, I am lost to the birdsong and the present, for I am back in The Summer Of Billy.
I was 12, and he was 13 … I hadn’t even known I was a know-nothing small town country lad until I met Billy.
A London boy, Billy spoke like a film character, but he didn’t act like this made him special, just me feeling limited for the first time as he talked of teeming London, even if that’s hardly how the 12-year-old me would have put it.
That boy just marvelled at the idea of football matches with thousands jostling and chanting on heaving terraces, singing naughty songs about Tottenham or West Ham when they were playing Billy’s beloved Arsenal.
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My London: the swirling Thames, flaming lamplights in those old black-and-white smoggy Sunday afternoon telly movies about Jack The Ripper. Nifty sports cars and Barbie-doll women, Michael Caine. Royal castles, Beefeaters and pearly queens. Thwocking cricket bats and cockney rhyming slang.
Billy couldn’t tell me what his dad worked at, but that he earned a hundred pounds a week… sure only film stars made that kind of money…
And Billy, this child of that mythical metropolis, happy now in our boring little town, beating thistles and beheading dandelions with a gathered stick as we wandered out the bog road, or snorting as we tickled wonderful old Pluto, who had his own chair in two different houses, and Billy laughing himself silly the day I coloured Pluto’s eyebrows in with black polish.
Billy’s parents were from our town, but had met in London. They would eventually move back here and open a pub.
Billy couldn’t tell me what his dad worked at, but that he earned a hundred pounds a week… sure only film stars made that kind of money … no wonder he was able to buy a pub.
The thwock of pebbles against the bedroom window, and a grinning Billy – always grinning Billy – below, in the only shirt I ever remember him in, short-sleeved, kind of military olive, with those epaulette things buttoned down on the shoulders.
We were off to climb the Devil’s Bit mountain three miles out the road – stopping off at that funny old shop on Barrack Street, behind the Garda depot, which only opened when you rang the door bell.
The white-haired lady in her frilly shop coat and glasses on a string, as we bought two bottles of warm RC Cola and had a little brown paper bag filled with golfball chewing gums and sweet cigarettes.
Feck knows what we talked about as we skittered along… maybe that was the day he told me my first knock-knock jokes… “Knock, knock” – “Who’s there?” – “Euripides” – “Euripides who?” – “Euripides trousers and you’ll have to buy me a new pair”.
Billy and I were soon at the summit, only a grassy hill after a gambol up through swishy grass on a well-trampled path, to the two rocky outcrops up top – the Long Rock and the Small Rock, and the gap between them the Devil himself made when he bit into the mountain and spat it out to form the Rock of Cashel, ancient seat of the High Kings of Munster.
I didn’t know why, but it was important to me that this funny, friendly and exotic boy from swinging, swaggering London was hanging out with me
The huge, mildewed, once-white Marian cross on the summit, visible for miles around, looked puny up close but we were the real Kings of Munster now as he whooped and hollered out over our mighty kingdom – you could see the Counties of Kilkenny, Tipperary, Limerick, Offaly and Laois, we were told in school.
Being one of six – four boys – and always in a gaggle of brothers or cronies, hanging out with Billy was my first intimation of exclusivity in a friendship.
I didn’t know why, but it was important to me that this funny, friendly and exotic boy from swinging, swaggering London was hanging out with me, came pegging stones against my window in those enchanting early hours, when the world was young and gleaming, the days long and full of possibility.
[ Enda Sheppard: Who’s the absolutist then, Dad?Opens in new window ]
Summers end, and all too soon Billy was back in London.
There were no letters, or any of that stuff in novels – I wasn’t capable yet of looking beyond the now and the immediate tomorrow, so there was no lamenting a boy I had never even called a friend to his face.
Just as the leaves turn red and russet, and fall away to allow the next buds to begin, Billy would be back again in his season.
No preparing me, then, for the news that Billy had drowned in that same rapid Thames of myth and poetry.
We only heard about it weeks after, so no funeral or florid farewells, just a delayed and gnawing shock and sadness.
Maybe my naivety protected me from the worst excesses of grief.
Still, I think of him so often. Now.
[ All at sea with a hormonally turbo-charged teenage daughterOpens in new window ]
The loss, of course – snuffed out possibilities, the bewildering banality of this smiley, cheerful fellow – my friend – so casually and pointlessly discarded long before his time.
And how Billy’s family were marked by his passing.
They moved back to our town eventually, and I hung out with Billy’s brothers at times, and his mum and dad were lovely – but I never felt the same connection I experienced that one summer with Billy.
I moved on, knowing they never did – not really.
We’re back in the house and, presently, I retire to my little writing den – to wallow once again in the Summer of Billy.