1998 - Round Ireland with a fridge (8 page)

When we crashed over the bigger ones, I took off, my arse momentarily liberated from all things solid, and I was rewarded with an all too brief taster of unassisted flight. The uncomfortable downside came a fraction of a second later in the form of landing, and was immediately followed by the sharp top left-hand corner of a small fridge impacting at force with my defenceless shoulderblade. On each occasion this happened, which regrettably was about every twenty seconds, I tried not to recoil in pain and instead smiled at the unflinching Jason, unflinching because he had the advantage of knowing where the bumps were, and was spared the fridge slamming into shoulderblade’ pain which I had to endure.

‘That fridge all right behind you?’ said Jason.

‘Yes, fine,’ I lied.

I didn’t want to make a scene.

§

Naturally by the time Jason let me off in what he called Bunbeg and what most of us would call a stretch of road, it had stopped raining completely. Around me there was a hotel, a couple of houses, a lot of open space and a lovely view of a sandy bay. My free accommodation had been offered at Bunbeg House which the radio people had told me was down by the harbour. Enquiries in the hotel produced directions and my first piece of bad news. In polite conversation I had allowed it to become known that I was headed for Tory Island and this was greeted with a shake of the head and, ‘But you won’t be able to get out there until Friday.’

It turned out that once a year the ferry was taken down to Killybegs for a complete refurbishment, and it had gone for this year’s earlier that morning.

The ferry was out of action for three days. Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear. A setback of substantial proportions. Getting to Tory Island was a condition of the bet and just at this moment, spending three days in a stretch of road seemed a bit too long. So I did what everyone should do when their nerves are tested, I sat down and had a good meal. Given the absence of mutton from the hotel’s lunch menu, I had pie and chips and followed it with jelly and ice cream, which was comforting in that it was the kind of treat my mother would have produced in a time of crisis. Jelly. I hadn’t had jelly since Mark Evershed’s party. A strange thing to find at a fortieth birthday bash, but life’s full of surprises. Not least the non-running ferry.

The twenty-minute walk down a narrow tortuous lane to the harbour was to be the stiffest test so far for the fridge’s trolley. Until now it had coped adequately enough with everything that had been asked of it, but this was over a mile and hardly similar terrain to a station platform for which it had been designed. We set off, me and the team of rucksack, fridge and trolley, and soon created an intriguing and not altogether pleasant rattling sound as the wheels of the trolley rolled over the uneven surface of Bunbeg’s Highway #1. The fridge acted like a soundbox, amplifying the noise so as to draw more attention to someone, who without this extra assistance, was already quite a conspicuous figure. It prompted a reaction from an American tourist outside the hotel. At least I assumed he was an American tourist because he was wearing those check clothes that say to you ‘I’m an American tourist’.

‘You got your own fridge with you?’ he said in an accent which confirmed the accuracy of my assumption.

‘Yes, I have.’

‘That’s the way to travel.’

‘It is.’

‘I hadn’t thought of that. That’s real cool.’

I trundled on, unmoved by his facetious approbation, and five minutes down the road reached a spot where the view of the bay to my right demanded a photo. I perched my camera on a fence and began organising myself for a self-timer photograph. This should have been straightforward given that the camera I have is a idiot-proof one on which everything is automatic. However, in the commercial marketplace, the need to produce a camera which is small and simple has run concomi-tantiy with the need to provide extra features. Extra features mean extra knobs and buttons. Consequently the best model on the market is the smallest, easiest camera to use with the most number of buttons and knobs on it. The one I have. So, when I pressed what I thought was the button for the self timer, the film rewound itself back to the beginning and in the ensuing confusion I managed to do something which erased all the photos I had taken so far. Since I’d just had a good meal and therefore had done what everyone should do when their nerves are tested, I did the next best thing and swore.

‘Bollocks!’ I shouted, at just enough volume for the distant American tourist to look over, to whom I responded rather ungenerously, ‘And bollocks to you too!’

There had been no need for that, but the camera cock-up had been my fault and I knew it, so I’d had to look around for someone else to blame and American tourists are ideal for this.

Bloody camera. As with all new purchases I had completely ignored the accompanying booklet with ‘Please read these instructions carefully’ boldly written on it, and had jumped in at the deep end, confident that common sense and a healthy slice of good fortune would be enough to ensure a long and fruitful relationship with this particular piece of Japanese shite.

‘Bollocks, bollocks, bollocks!’

The American tourist was beginning to feel relieved that he hadn’t pursued our relationship beyond a light-hearted exchange. I sat down on my fridge, angry with myself, the camera, and the world’s desire to make things smaller, failing to appreciate that it was the world’s desire to make things smaller which had afforded me the very luxury of sitting on a fridge.

A car pulled up and a window was wound down. ‘Whereabouts are you headed?’

Oh no, the driver thought I was hitching. He must have registered my look of disconsolate despair and perceived it to be that of a marooned hitch-hiker. I tried to let him down gently.

‘Well, I’m not really hitching, I was—’

‘You’re the guy who’s bringing a fridge round Ireland, aren’t you?’ I could only manage a nod. ‘I heard you on the radio yesterday, now where are you heading?’

‘Bunbeg.’

The man, in his forties and a smart suit, hesitated for a moment. ‘But this is Bunbeg.’

‘Is it? Splendid, I’m done for the day then.’

‘What are you doing in Bunbeg? There’s nothing here.’

‘I’m going to get the ferry out to Tory Island.’

‘I don’t think it’s running. Isn’t it in Killybegs being re—’

‘—furbished, yes. I think it is.’

It suddenly occurred to me that there might be little point in my staying here, Tory Island was inaccessible and that was that It wasn’t as if Kevin was going to hold me to the very letter of the bet. I elected to find out whether this fellow, who looked like another travelling salesman, could be any help to me.

‘Where are you headed?’

‘I’m heading down to Dungloe and then I’ll be going on to Donegal Town. Jump in, I’ll give you a lift.’

My journey was a celebration of the ridiculous, and I the champion of it, but even given that proviso, I couldn’t accept the absurdity of having spent an entire day hitch-hiking only to end up by nightfall at exactly the same spot where I’d started in the morning. It was for this reason, and this reason alone, that I decided to hang on here and see if there was any other way of getting out to Tory Island. I thanked the driver and he drove off looking at me much in the same way as the Cavan bus driver had. I felt surprisingly free of guilt My goodness, life on the road was making me pretty damn hard, I just didn’t mind who I rubbed up the wrong way.

The sun almost came out as I hauled my load down a small hill and made a right after a pub, admirably shunning its hospitality. I was now on a particularly quiet lane, the reverberations of a fridge in transit echoing through the surrounding hills in an audio tribute to incongruity. I turned a corner and there in the distance was a derelict house with what looked like two ladies stood painting at easels in front of it I drew ever closer becoming more and more fascinated by what their reaction might be to the bizarre spectre with which they were about to be confronted. They looked up, startled by the distant rattling sound and, as I edged closer, their interest in the subject of their paintings became secondary. Finally I drew up alongside them, one elderly and a younger attractive lady.

‘Good afternoon,’ I said. The more senior of the two looked at me in disbelief.

‘My, oh my, a gentleman travelling with a refrigerator,’ she said in an American accent.

‘Not so. I am just part of a surreal dream you’re both having.’

‘I can believe it,’ said the younger one in an accent which sounded distinctly more local. She had beautiful eyes.

I caught a glimpse of their canvases and witnessed their interpretations of the derelict house before them. Oh. Now I don’t know much about art but I know what I don’t like.

‘I’m trying to find the harbour,’ I said, astutely not mentioning how much I didn’t like their work.

‘Just round the corner and go to the bottom of the hill and you’re there. It’s lovely.’

And lovely it was. But it was hardly a harbour. It was no more than a narrow inlet with five fishing boats, three in the water and two in dry dock being painted. The quay was flanked by two buildings, one a hostel which was closed and the other Bunbeg House, a bed and breakfast guesthouse and the reason for my being there. I rang the bell and went through the motions of adjusting my clothes and generally preparing myself, but then gave up when I realised that I didn’t know what I was preparing myself for. It didn’t matter anyway because no one was there, which was a novel approach to running a guesthouse but not one that was altogether unexpected. I then noticed a hand written note in the window saying ‘BACKSOON’, which suggested to me that I was dealing with people who had their fingers on the very pulse of entrepreneurial commerce. ‘Back soon’ had an ambiguity about it which worried me a touch though. ‘Soon’, by any reasonable interpretation, would be a couple of hours, but this was Bunbeg, County Donegal, and there was no guarantee that this didn’t mean somebody would be with me by mid October. I was in the middle of nowhere with no accommodation, no reason for being there, and no bright ideas.

I decided to forget about my agenda and allow myself to wind right down to ‘local speed’, so I dumped my rucksack and fridge outside the front door and embarked on the twenty-minute walk to the pub. If the proprietors of Bunbeg House were ‘BACK SOON’ they would see the fridge and be in no doubt as to who was going to be their extra guest for the night. As calling cards go it was effective, if a little bulky.

On the way back I passed my two lady painters and the younger one called out ‘Where’s your fridge?’ and I went over and explained. Naturally enough they wanted to know more about why I had a fridge with me; in fact, I suspected that they had talked of little else for the past ten minutes. I tried to make the explanation quick but they kept firing questions at me like ‘What sort of people are stopping for you?’ and ‘Do you keep food in the fridge?’ and before we knew it we’d been chatting for half an hour.

Both women had a groomed scruffiness about them which seems to me to be the trade mark of artists. Lois was a distinguished woman of mature years who I was surprised to learn had a gallery on New York’s 57
th
Street. I realised she must be an artist of some renown because I knew you didn’t get a gallery automatically on leaving art school. Elizabeth, who was much younger, was married and lived in New York, although she was originally from West Cork. I guessed that she was less successful but may have been Lois’s protege, perhaps a budding star for the future. I learned that for the last two days it had been chucking it down with rain and that the ladies had decided to sketch a barn which they had discovered at the end of a mudtrack on some farmland. They were sat in their cars with sketchpads on their laps drawing this barn when they saw, in one of the wing mirrors, an old farmer standing very still and watching them from a distance. To him it must have appeared that two women were sat in a car directly in front of his barn, staring at it Elizabeth and Lois explained that he would come back every two hours or so to see if they were still there—the women who were staring at his barn. Continuing rain the next day meant a return for .completion of the sketches, and the fanner was even more perplexed by the women!s decision to put in another full day’s staring. ‘Who are they? And why are they staring at my barn?’ These were obvious questions which he chose not to ask. Instead he just built a two-hourly check on the ‘starers’ into his day. He never found out why these two women had come from nowhere to stare at his barn from a stationary vehicle and I expect he probably never even spoke to anyone about it. Therein lies the difference between elderly farmers from Donegal and…well, everyone else.

In the course of our conversation I must have demonstrated my complete ignorance of the area because Elizabeth and Lois announced that they would cut short their painting for the day in order to take me on an informative sightseeing tour. There was clearly something about travelling with a fridge which brought out the best in people.

Elizabeth, who was doing the driving, pointed out a brochure of Lois’s work on the back seat which I quickly flicked through. The paintings were superb and I censured myself for my initial cursory dismissal of her work. It just goes to show—you should never judge work in progress. I wanted to articulate what I liked about her style but was unable to, so I glanced at the brochure’s text to see if its writers had managed any better. ‘Lois’s art, in its engagement with the question of realism, fits into larger debates about the privileging of abstraction and its viability for a world in conflict.’

Exactly what I had thought although I probably wouldn’t have put it like that. Instead I said that it was ‘great’, shut the brochure quickly and steered the conversation round to an area where I had much more to offer.

‘So Lois, the weather has improved a good deal, hasn’t it?’

‘Believe it or not, this is the best day we’ve had,’ she replied. ‘You know what they say up here, ‘If you can see the mountains it’s going to rain, if you can’t see the mountains it’s raining already.’’