I focused on the passing chimney stacks, struggling to keep a neutral face at that most Irish of existential conundrums. The newcomer shuffled onto the seat beside me.
‘Oh, would you look!’ she beamed back, clumsily arranging her coat tails and wheelie bag with stiff, swollen fingers. ‘Mary, love! How are you?’
‘Oh,’ Mary shook her head knowingly, secretively at her newly-arrived confidante. ‘Another day, another day. But tell me,’ she reached forward and clasped her friend by the hand, ‘how are you?’
‘Ah now, you know yourself,’ the other lady replied, ‘this weather, you’d be perished with the cold.’
She gestured vaguely toward the window, where crisp winter trees stabbed frostily into a surprisingly bright November sky. Mary nodded solemnly.
‘Ah, sure don’t I know it. It’s desperate, though, Pat, isn’t it?’
‘Oh, it is. Desperate.’ They both shook their heads in an agreement of hopeless despair. ‘But I suppose we can’t complain,’ added Pat mournfully.
I held my face straight with some effort. This was the same baffling logic I loved in my grandmother, whose way was to punctuate every sentence with a silent, implied “but sure on another day we might all be dead with the hunger, so at least we’ve got that to be grateful for” or similar such grim optimism. I tried to place their accents – not Dublin, anyway. Closer to my part of the country, I was almost certain, or somewhere out west, at any rate. No-one else speaks like that here. I could have closed my eyes and been on a bus in Cork or, oddly, Westport; there’s something in those two accents I cannot tell apart – a melody like rain, or at least the reliable expectation of it.
‘And look, would you,’ Pat went on, ‘it’ll be Christmas soon! Where does it go!’
‘God, I always wonder!’
‘Desperate!’ They shook their heads at one another in another fit of delighted horror. A moment passed, and Pat’s beaming face relaxed to a gentle smile of enquiry. ‘And today, so? You’re… you’re off again out St. James’s way, then?’
‘I am,’ came Mary’s slightly strained reply. I glanced over at her, suddenly small again under her scratchy-looking overcoat. She blinked once, twice, her watery grey eyes steady and a slightly less full smile fixed on her pale face. I noticed for the first time the shadows on her skin.
‘Good, good,’ Pat nodded. ‘You’ll be changing at Connolly Station so?’
‘I will.’
Pat nodded again.
‘Good, good,’ she repeated, as though her friend’s solid travel arrangements to the hospital were a source of relief and happiness to her. ‘That new Luas tram is only fantastic, isn’t it?’
‘Oh, it is,’ Mary shook her head yet again, this time with genuine awe, ‘Oh, it’s fantastic, so it is. Sure it’s only ten minutes or so to James’s now.’
‘Is that all?’ Pat pressed her hand to her cheek. ‘To think!’ she whispered, wide-eyed, ‘‘twould have been a good hour between buses before. What city are we in at all!’
‘Oh, stop. An hour at least, with all the waiting and the traffic. But the Luas only flies through it all. You’d be out there before you know it.’
‘And so you get more time from the day there then.’
‘You do.’ Mary’s smile was waxy again, though her voice was rock-steady. ‘You do, exactly. Although,’ she went on, a firmer set to her mouth, ‘wasn’t I telling you before: they only allow two hours for visitors these days. Just the two hours!’
‘No!’ said Pat, shaking her head, horrified, then added, ‘you told me, I remember you telling me, all right. It’s desperate isn’t it? It’s the unions, I suppose?’ Her nod was encouraging, expectant.
‘Not at all,’ replied her friend. ‘It’s the swine flu they’re worried about. One hour in the afternoon and one in the evening. That’s all now. The swine flu, you see. That’s what.’
‘No!’ Pat was still horrified by this familiar news. ‘It’ll be the end of us all.’
‘It will too,’ said Mary, satisfied.
‘But she’s well, yet, is she?’
Mary’s lips pressed into a tense, perfectly horizontal line and she nodded once, twice, firmly.
‘She is, she is. Of course, she’ll… But she’s well.’
‘Good. She’s a good girl.’ Pat leaned forward slowly, lifting a heavy hand to pat with arthritic deliberateness her friend’s knee. They nodded at each other for a long ten seconds.
‘And they’ve a grand restaurant out there now, and a coffee shop,’ added Mary. ‘So there’s no need to come home between times, you see.’
‘Oh, they do?’
‘They do. Hot and cold counter and plenty of seating. Very comfortable really. We’re lucky to have it.’
‘Ah, sure that’s grand then. You can make the day of it.’
‘The day, exactly. With the paper, and that. Sure the day flies between the hours.’
‘Well, that’s good,’ Pat said again.
‘It is, it is.’ Mary’s smile was genuine but practiced. ‘And himself?’ she went on, her eyes widening with the question, relieved, her hand steady on the wheel now. ‘Did he telephone last night?’
Pat made an exasperated noise.
‘Not a bell. Sure didn’t I say it?’ she sighed, half-amused.
‘You said it,’ Mary agreed.
‘I did too. “Sure they’re all about their big jobs over there,” says Tony to me. “You’ll see him when you see him,” he says. “Unless I’m dead first,” says I.’ Pat snorted and the two women both chuckled conspiratorially, for all the world as though they might well both just go and die to show him, with his notions and his ways.
‘Oh would you look!’ said Mary then, glancing out the window as the train slowed. She reached for her handbag and umbrella. ‘’Tis Connolly. This is me.’
‘It flies these days, this train.’
‘It does. Go on,’ said Mary, although it was she who was standing up. ‘I’ll leave you go.’
‘Do. You take care, Mary.’
‘And you. See you on Friday, God bless.’
They clasped hands for a brief moment and parted without another word. I wondered for a long time afterwards about language; about the texture of words on the fabric of friendship.
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