It is a bright and breezy spring day on Bertra beach. The outline of the holy mountain is as clear as an Egyptian pyramid piercing the sky. Like all the other drowned Drumlins in Clew Bay, John Lennon’s island, Dorinish, sits with its backside towards the prevailing winds. There is a big strand: it is low water during a spring tide and it feels like the ocean has taken a massive yawn.
I’m on the edge of the rasping waves: striding along while thinking about whether I deserve a flapjack with my takeaway coffee at Westport Quay. I need to add spinach and mouthwash to my shopping list, I’m telling the brisk breeze when I see a man waving at me in the distance. He is up near the dunes and is walking in the opposite direction.
“Great day for it, Roie,” he shouts. “You’re at it earlier than usual.”
“I sure am,” I shout back, even if my name doesn’t happen to be Roie and I haven’t a bull’s notion who he is.
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I chuckle to myself as I make my way to the end of the beach. It is not the first time I have been called Roie, even if my name is Áine, Gerardine, Angela, Georgina.
It all started a few months earlier as I walked along Bridge Street in Westport, and was suddenly greeted, hugged, confided in about a fascinating personal detail, by a young woman who was attired in what I concluded was upmarket hippiness. Her earrings were exceptional.
Throughout the interaction, I scratched my head metaphorically and nervously concluded that I was losing it.
My memory is shot, I’m thinking as my accosted gushes: “Must rush. Great to catch up, Roie. Love your shades.”
Thus began the tale of me and my Doppelgänger with whom I happen to be acquainted but up to that particular encounter had always defined myself and herself with separate identities.
That isn’t to say Roie McCann and I do not share certain similarities: we are about the same height and age; we happily abandoned the shackles of hair-dyeing during the pandemic; our love of quirky and colourful clothes could be considered as fashion statements by the older woman.
However, it is our ability to be philosophical, even stoic, about repeated identity confusion that defines our maturity.
Indeed, at this advanced point of our merging personae, I imagine that for many of the residents of Westport and beyond we are simply the one entity. Think of Demi Moore walking out one door of the Friends set and Courteney Cox walking in another one. Would Chandler have known the difference?
Or what about Isla Fisher and Amy Adams deciding, just for the craic, to swap roles during the filming of Nocturnal Animals (2016). After all, Fisher got away with superimposing a picture of Adams on her family Christmas card with hubby Sacha Baron Cohen and their children.
She confirmed afterwards that none of her family or friends noticed it wasn’t her.
“I was like, it was a joke it’s not me, it’s Amy,” Fisher told interviewers.
That is what I’m thinking as I stand at the end of the beach – as is my wont – reflecting on the meaning of life and the tireless energy of a battalion of Sanderlingers foraging for mole crabs and amphipods.
I’m well on my return journey when I spy your man who had mistaken me for Roie earlier hurtling back in my direction.
He is walking like the hammers of hell, so I naturally assume he is on some post-heart operation fitness regime and under doctor’s orders regarding his cardio fitness.
As it happens, it is not the case.
“I’m so, so sorry,” he is saying when within earshot. “I was sure you were Roie McCann when I passed you about a half an hour ago. Honestly, I nearly dropped dead when I got back to the car park and met ‘you’ again getting out of your car.”
He explains that she is his neighbour up the road in the village of Murrisk, and that she walks the beach regularly.
“No need to worry at all, my name is actually Áine,” I say.
“I felt I had to come back and apologise to you,” the poor divil says, still looking shook.
“It’s not the first time we have been mistaken for each other,” I say. “I met a fellah the other day who was standing in the queue at a wake here in Murrisk, as it happens, and he told me he’d had a full-blown conversation with me even though I wasn’t there.”
At last, he looks relieved and we part company as I continue my constitutional along the edge of the ocean.
At least the next time there will be no need for a double-take if he passes me and my other half as the wind howls and whispers on this shape-shifting tombolo.
