I live in a village outside Moycullen, overlooking the lake. This is the best kind of place, far from perfect, as the best places are.
Here, neighbours watch out for one another. They arrive with crutches when you are sitting willing away a lump as big as a tennis ball from your injured knee with the aid of a bag of frozen peas, because anything is better than Casualty, until nothing is.
Like most Connemara people, I need the city, as well as the country.
“The form of the city,” Baudelaire writes in his poem The Swan, “changes more quickly than the human heart.” The city, brutal and humane, lovely and depraved, alive, shifting, growing, has always drawn the artist in.
Tired of hearing how Galway has changed, and secretly wondering if it hasn’t, perhaps, changed enough, I resolved to get to know the place again, by walking. Solvitur ambulando. Walking solves it, sorts it out. I walk three miles most days. I have walked much of Paris, Lisbon, New York. I love cities at night, the lights, the dark rivers, the endless subterranean hum.
I scheduled my little odysseys for September, a month I love. Then I fell and couldn’t, in the beginning, even get up. This is why the first walk was short.
Hobbling into Casualty, I asked weakly for a crutch. Health and safety forbade it, so I hopped to the most treacherous terrain in an alien landscape, the toilet in A and E. The floor was wet, the cubicle looked temporary, and the germs we were warned about spreading were in no danger of extinction.
If there is a guiding intelligence in the HSE, somebody might suggest it consult the psychology department. You enter through a sound loop telling you not to contribute to spreading germs by washing your hands. Surely it is the hospital staff, not the public, who are responsible for incubating infection. Next you face a barrage of notices telling you not to be violent to the staff because they will not tolerate it. Most of us looked in no state to hold ourselves upright, much less attack the nurses, and all seemed remarkably restrained, if not cowed.
I was, in the fullness of time, x-rayed, the x ray was read and the nice doctor made sympathetic noises. Armed with health and safety approved crutches, alarmed by the queues of beds wisely hidden behind the double doors of the ‘triage’ section, newly ensconced in a cast, I nearly broke the rest of myself getting through the carousel doors and made it to freedom, vowing that I would never come back and never get old.
Merlin Park is a haven of calm by comparison, even though the three o clock appointment is a few hours off the mark. Once you reach the inner sanctum there are ordered cubicles, an efficient friendly sister or matron checks that I am being looked after and Mr Shannon soon appears and confirms that the ghastly object on the screen is my knee, which is fractured but not shattered.
Off with the cast.
“Does that mean I can go sailing on Tuesday?” I know Spain is out, but the trip to Tory isn’t to be missed. Mr Shannon is polite, very efficient, and courteous, so he didn’t laugh or raise his eyes to heaven but it became clear I was going nowhere. I was given a brace, with a kind of dial. Black, but not this year’s black.
In one fast trip, I have become a tourist in the town, an explorer in my own house, nervous as a child newly learning to walk, but not so brave. For two weeks my world shrank to the dimensions of three rooms, friends’ cars. I stare at the rain and the autumnal palette of my knee.
A week later, Ophelia arrives from France ‘to help.’
I teach her English, she makes the tea and carries things. She is like a younger Carla Bruni, with legs up to her elbows.
“Oh get rid of her, this weather is depressing enough,” an English friend advises. Ophelia has never seen rain, not really, not like this. We do a lot of vocab. After five days, we both have cabin fever. A lift is arranged, we are deposited outside the library. From there we make our way through Corbett Court. We shop. I make for the chocolate. I take several bars of the dark one with orange. “I need it,” I say.
Ophelia brightens. “Yes, it is necessary. For the morale,” she says and picks her favourite. We bond, despite her cheerful “I do not cook,” and head for the smoked salmon and cheese. At the bread counter, there is dismay, so we pass.
“I do not like zis bread.” We move to the wine. You get very practical in a leg brace.
This is the longest I have ever spent in a supermarket. Slowly, carefully, I make it across the tiles, over the wet pavement to the car, feeling helpless and a little afraid. An hour and a half in a grocery store, how has it come to this?
Two weeks later, Ophelia is leaving. We have seem the sun, like one of Ted Hughes’ thoughtfish, lurking at the bottom of a pond, only to disappear again before we are sure we haven’t imagined it.
We get a lift into town, to have breakfast. But first she must shop.
We set forth in the rain on the epic journey across one side of the square and into Marks and Spencer. We cross to what used to be the Great Southern, and back. Miraculously, I survive the badly laid paving, the pools of water, the whole disastrous minefield that cost nine, or is it eleven million, and make it, exhausted but triumphant, back to Corbett Court. It occurs to me that much of new Galway, for all its health and safety warnings, has been designed by a coked up cosmic joker, so that only the nimble footed and sharp sighted will venture out.
Back at work, the university fire doors are heavy and almost impossible to open. There are lifts. Small lifts. The tiles are slippy.
I have always been interested in ceramics, but now I am obsessed. Who designs the surfaces in public spaces? Will I ever find a safe floor? I am learning to look where I am going and the view is disappointing. Tiles, paving stones, concrete. No toilets, few seats, little shelter. The tiles in the Galway Shopping Centre are lethal. The flooring in the hospitals lacks grip. Crutches slide on wet surfaces, they aquaplane in the Square and the area outside the Courthouse could have been designed by a lawyer with a special interest in civil suits.
My temporary inconvenience is a way of life for many. How do they manage?
I was in all ways dependant on being mobile, then my world collapsed. Friends saved me, fed me, kept my spirits up. The young especially, were chivalrous, particularly young men. They opened doors, chatted, helped. Strangers were and are, mostly kind. There is a gender divide. Women are determined and practical, less impressed by the pain: “You can’t drive,” they say, cutting to the chase. Men, on the other hand, know your pain. They admire broken bones, and me for having them. “It wasn’t shattered,” I say modestly, not wanting to take undue glory.
“Sore, though.” I agree.
“You look helpless,” one said.
“Sorry,” I said, as if I’d done something unforgivable. “Ah no,” he said, “it’s nice.” Friends.
Ophelia texts that she is sunbathing near Nice.
The following Saturday, I walk down Shop Street and hear the silvered piping of Eugene Lambe, engaged in his spot of ambassadorial busking. ‘The Munster Cloak’ a stately tune. He tells me it isn’t much played any more. I stop and listen for 10 minutes.
If walking solves it, music heals. Down Quay Street a lone guitar player is singing a laid back ‘Country Roads’, reminding me of a different version of the same song, by a lot of good musicians, high in the Blue Ridge Mountains of West Virginia.
Today the town is transformed. The streets are full of the young, gold and golden in the unexpected sun. Everyone is stopping, talking, laughing. The market is full of life. People greet one another, smile, move on. I count five tourists and two women in wheelchairs. A young man on crutches nods in recognition.
Walking down over the Wolfe Tone Bridge that evening, I am tired. I lean, as I have done since arriving here in the 1970s, with my back to the city. The sun is going down, the streets are full, there is water behind me, below me and out beyond Nimmo’s Pier, the bay stretches towards escape. I am moved by its beauty, shook out in the clear evening light. Few towns are so blessed in their location. How could they risk this, the new merchants of greed? I move on slowly towards the waiting taxi.
• Aideen Barry’s talk on public art takes place in the Siobhan McKenna Theatre in NUI, Galway’s Arts Millennium building on Tuesday October 7 at 8pm.
The creative writing workshops led by Mary O’Malley take place every Wednesday at 7pm in NUI, Galway, room AM 104.
