Hanging with the Elephant Read Free Page A

compassionate with myself, and how to find a mindful path out of depression, and how to survive in the swamplands of the soul.
    And when she came home, I would make a great splash. I would give her a great welcome. It would be like she was meeting a new man. And we would have a banquet. I would feed her one of Mister Scollan’s finest chickens in a soup of fresh vegetables.

W E HAD BOTH ended up in a panic the morning she was heading off. I had booked the same hotel as we had stayed in on the night my memoir had received the Irish Book of the Year Award at the end of 2013. On that occasion, I had squeezed myself into a dress suit and clipped a dickie-bow round my neck with inflated pride, as if writing a book and winning an award were of some significance or that they might protect me from death. But when we returned to the same deluxe room of that Ballsbridge hotel four months later, itwas being refurbished, and the painters’ ladders lay in the corridor and the dizzy prize-winning ceremony seemed like it had all happened years earlier.
    The award had been a transient moment. The book was nothing more than the tracks of an animal or footprints on a beach long since rearranged by the tide. The morning after the award ceremony, the blue glass trophy was sitting in the bath, for some reason I can’t remember. We shared breakfast in bed, and then I did a radio interview and then we drove home.
    But now I was lying on the bed with a terrible hangover, and the heating had been on all night, drying my tongue to the texture of sandpaper.
    She was gone. She was on the plane. ‘Thank Christ,’ I said with relief, speaking to my own image in the mirror across from the bed. ‘The panic is over.’
    Those were the very words I used. I was still in the hotel an hour after she had rushed from the room. I was looking at the message she had texted from the boarding gate:
    Just about got here in time.
    We had decided to go to Dublin the day before the flight and stay over, rather than drive from Leitrim in the middle of the night. We’d had a Chinese meal in a very swanky restaurant near the hotel, early in the evening. The dumplings we had for starters were hand-made. Theywould have made a meal on their own. The soy sauce just sprinkled on the rice was fit for emperors.
    I suppose the restaurant would have been full during the boom. I could imagine government ministers on their way home dropping in, or bankers with grey hair and gold cufflinks entertaining their mistresses, or journalists swapping jokes with the oily-skinned bosses of corporate Ireland. It had the air of a film set where great things had been enacted. Where historical events had been dreamed up. But the good times were over. The pile on the carpet was still thick and soft, and the lighting was just as delicate and the white tablecloths just as starched, but there was nobody there. They even had an early bird menu so that ordinary folks like us could afford to eat between five and eight, but even with a special offer of won ton soup, noodles and a choice of three main courses for €23, the place was empty. A famous journalist with grey hair and a cream linen suit sat at a table across from us reading a book. I kept trying to see the title, but I couldn’t.
    The beloved and me are used to each other, so we don’t need to make much idle talk when we’re in a restaurant. I look at her sometimes and I don’t know what goes on in her head. The closer we get, and the longer we are together, the more mysterious she becomes. And the more transfixed we are by a shared silence. Of course she is used to my appetite for other people’s conversations. I’m nosey. Not that I was eavesdropping on the journalist, though he did take uphis phone once when it buzzed, and I stopped chewing in order to listen, but it was only a text and he didn’t reply. The beloved was lifting her full spoon from the won ton soup at that moment – when his phone buzzed – and she too stopped.