What made me think of New York?

Silly question. How can I forget New York when every time I strip off and see my scarred belly, run my finger along the still tender flesh, I want to scream?

‘Shithead bastard motherfucker fuckface gobshite.’ My vocabulary is limited, but I feel better after that small explosion.

I will pour myself a good glass of Côtes Roties, right up to the brim and …

There it goes again.

Mother.

‘Hello, Mother.’

‘How did you know?’

‘Second sight. I was in the bath.’

‘Are you all right, dear?’ Shade of anxiety in the voice.

‘Fine. I went for a walk and got very wet. I just thought …’

‘Sensible.’

‘For once.’

She laughs.

‘I just wondered if you’d like to pop round and have a bite to eat. I seem to have an awful lot of food.’

Bingo!

‘Thanks awfully, but I’m afraid I can’t.’

‘What are you up to?’

‘Oh, ah … nothing much. I just arranged to meet a friend for a drink.’

‘Ah.’ She doesn’t believe me. Sensible woman. She’s known me too long. ‘Don’t tire yourself out, dear.’

‘No. I certainly won’t do that.’

‘Well …’

‘Thanks, Mother.’

‘That’s all right. I’ll see you in a day or so.’

‘Yes. Bye.’

Perhaps that is what I will do. In my dry clothes I will walk up to the Druid’s Chair, drink my glass of red wine there surrounded by living human beings and get back here in time for Morse. I really am beginning to feel restless. I must ask the doctor when I may leave again; even begin to make plans. Sometimes plans are better than the reality.

Take New York, for instance: I certainly didn’t plan that bloody debacle.

My planning was absolutely top hole; a year’s lectureship at NYU and a flat, excuse me, apartment loaned to me by an acquaintance called Jodie who was taking a year’s sabbatical travelling round India, in Morton Street, just a hop, skip and a jump from the university. Love never came into my plan at all. The odd delicious ‘affaire’, possibly; I had certainly not planned for love and its consequences.

Just get out. Open the door, snatch your brolly, get out of here and go up the road to the Druid’s Chair rather than down that road of ridiculous remembering, that well-trodden road. A circular road that ends always where it began, never changes and always has the power to make me cry.

Out, woman!

How I love Irish rain. It gives us our soft skin and our luxuriant hair, or that’s what they used to tell us anyway; I doubt if they say so any longer. I was so full of the belief of this that I used as a child to run out into the garden when it rained and turn my face up to the sky, allowing the drops to break on my skin and run in streams down my neck and shoulders. Someone always put a stop to this innocent pleasure quite quickly. It makes me laugh when I think of what fourteen-year-old kids get up to nowadays.