Seedling 23: The Frog
Landing back in London after a trip to Donegal is like landing in a tropical paradise. Even in January, the temperature difference is astounding. Once that cabin door opens on our little forty-seven seater, the warm air pours in and I half feel like I should be wearing Persols and a giant Hawaiian shirt as I descend the finest(and steepest) of Stansted’s rolly stairs.
It’s the first of January, the day I normally fly. Plane was suitably empty. It’s not just the Irish who fear being hungover on a New Year’s Day flight; no matter where or where from you’re flying this is always a chill day to travel. Well, it hadn’t been ideal going into Derry, to be fair.
We got off to a late start. I always wake up a bit too early, but functioning without coffee and a real breakfast is not my strong point, so I make sure to factor that in. But, we were depending on Colm for the ride out to the airport, obviously. By the time he and Daniel were furtively gazing in the kitchen window, it was only ten minutes from go-time. Still, Mum couldn’t bring herself to not offer tea and scone to the two of them and that ten minutes was quickly eaten up. I tried not getting too mental about it all, busying myself double-checking my hand luggage and making sure there were no stray cords left in sockets.
Daniel was spending most of those fifteen minutes walking from kitchen to bathroom. He was weighing himself. It was my cousin’s new obsession. He was always transitioning from one compulsion to another - not uncommon for someone with Aspergers - nevermind just being a teenager. I ran into Daniel in the hallway, on his way back from the fifth or sixth weigh-in. He nodded and said my name, not making eye-contact. Mum is quite worried about him. I am less concerned, this time around. Daniel had always been a bit heavy and there are worse things than committing yourself to staying thinner - healthier - even if the behaviour was a bit sudden and strong.
I already had my coat on and was grabbing a pre-packed sandwich from the fridge when I turned and saw Colm munching through another chunk of soda bread, his giant belly wedged in between the table and the kitchen wall, his breathing laboured, that same mustard-stained tee pulled to its limit. Daniel’s obsession seemed justified, from where I was standing.
I looked up at the kitchen clock. It was quarter past five in the morning and we were fifteen minutes late leaving at this point.
‘I’ll drive’.
*
Honestly, I felt a little bad seeing my mother tumbling back and forth in the rear seat while I was racing down through Ramelton; skirting corners, ploughing straight through roundabouts and dragging the bottom of the Renault over a couple speed humps. I glanced at Daniel in the rear view mirror. He was staring back at me, stone-faced.
By the time I roared into a silent Letterkenny, Mum was holding on a bit tighter and our headlights were the only illumination for miles.
‘Mind you there’re no drunks on these roads’.
Colm was talking about drunk pedestrians, not drivers. But, by this point, I hadn’t seen another living soul in fifteen miles.
My mother must have been relieved by the time we were on the wide main road for the border. She unbuckled her seat belt and leaned between the seats to continue an argument with Colm in the front passenger seat.
‘You’re talking nonsense, Colm’.
‘I am telling you, Katie, that lane used to take you flat out to the Tillydush where your Aunt Fanny was born and where her cousin Fern was left the land that caused that whole break in the first place’.
‘Auch, Colm, it did no such thing! It always ended up before The Folly. Lanes don’t just disappear for feck’s sake’.
‘I am telling you, I was no more than three years out of secondary school when the council came and told them your man Seamus they were taking part of the family land for a bypass up to the mountain road and that there’s your reason Tillydush is cut off from the town’.
‘So you’re telling me, Colm, that that there wreck of a road that the workers use to reach the windmills is some council attempt at a mountain road connection, that’s what yer telling me?’
‘That’s what I am telling you, Katie, as God as my witness that was the council and that was the break and that’s why your woman Fern isn’t welcome in the parish co-op since Father Desmond took up after Father McDevitt was sent to the clinic’.
This went on until we got all the way to Coshquin. There were a few moments of silence as we crossed the border and I tried to adjust my kilometer speed to miles-per-hour speed. Then Daniel, man of few words, spoke.
‘What exactly is it that you do in your job, Paul?’
It never occurred to me that Daniel had probably never even heard the word ‘sommelier’.
For the few miles that remained, I explained the basics; even more the day-to-day I was experiencing. I guess I have to admit I might have gotten caught up in relaying some of the absurdity of it all - the personalities, the dysfunction, the woeful home life I returned to. But, when it’s your relatives you’re speaking to, you endeavour to make light of it, give it a comic spin, even. I wasn’t one-hundred percent certain it was coming off so lighthearted.
‘Watch yourself on the right’.
Colm’s terse warning pulled me from my daydreaming. It was a young man, maybe nineteen or twenty walking what would be against the direction of traffic, had it been more than just us. He wore a white v-neck tee, soaked through in the early morning rain. His dungarees sank under the weight of collected water but he strode across the Foyle Bridge, arms above him, high in the air, as if he owned the world. The Renault’s headlights blanched his face as we crested the bridge, his eyes brilliant blue but sunk into his face. I’d expected him to turn to us as we drifted past, but he stayed steady, gazing up into the rain and the sky as if he was entranced. I shuddered to think of being that wet and that exposed in January in Ulster. But I suppose the same way you can put a frog in water and turn up the boil, you could just as easily do the same in reverse.