Chapter Twenty-Four
Just as Rosie and I were sitting in the car, ready to off on our West Cork odyssey, a text from Red.
Call me
But I couldn’t because Rosie was with me. She had had her first counselling session the previous day and had walked to school and home again, no bother on her. ‘The counsellor has given me advice about how to deal with a panic attack,’ she had said, carrying herbag to the car parked on the road, as we packed up ready to head off to West Cork. ‘It’s all about staying calm. Not letting your thoughts spiral. Focus on one thing, one object.’
‘That sounds like good advice,’ I said. ‘And you don’t mind leaving Dublin for a night. You’re not worried about six hours in a car with me and Granny?’
‘As long as you talk nicely to each other,’ she said and smiled.‘I’m glad we’re going. It feels like the right thing to do. And it sounds ridiculous, but it helps that you’re going to be with me. I’m meant to be grown up.’
‘It doesn’t sound ridiculous,’ I said. ‘It sounds normal.’
‘Wait. What?’ she said, in mock surprise. ‘You called menormal?’
‘Oh, out of all of us, you’ve always been the normal one.’
She grinned at me. ‘Normalish,’ she said.
‘That’sall any of us can ask for. Today West Cork, tomorrow the world. All right?’
But just then, out of the corner of my eye, there was a flash of light. I looked behind me and I thought I heard footsteps, someone running away.
‘Hey!’ But he was gone. Was it another photographer, someone trying to capture Clodagh at her low ebb? Hopefully, looking old and haggard and past it.
‘Come on Mum, let’sgo.’
And I forgot all about it.
*
Nora, in her usual jubilant mood, talked the whole way down, turning around in the front seat so Rosie didn’t miss a second of the stories from the Mizen Head camp.
‘It was such a great time,’ she went on. ‘We were all so free, it was beautiful, all of us young and idealistic. Now I’m justoldand idealistic.’
‘What was the aim of the peace camp?’ Rosie said.‘I’ve always wondered.’
‘They were just dropouts,’ I answered for her. ‘Desperate to sing songs out of tune and slip around in the mud all day.’
‘The aim, Tabitha,’ Nora said, ‘and you should listen to this, Rosie, dear, the aim was to create a movement, an energy, an idea that life shouldn’t be about living unconsciously, but that that there were other ways of living that didn’t involve thenine to five or the daily commute or the office job. That we could take time out of our lives and create a sense of unity and strength. I’d like to think that we were like the old Celtic people. The pagans. Living in huts and making fires and singing. I taught myself the melodeon and I composed a few songs. I’ll try and remember them now and teach them to you, Rosie...’
‘Please don’t. I beg ofyou. Please don’t,’ I implored.
Nora ignored me. ‘It was possibly one of the most transformative things I have ever done. I wish we could have lived there permanently, instead of a month here and there.’
‘Why didn’t you, Granny?’ said Rosie.
‘Well, I had little Tabitha,’ she said, ‘andshe, Rosie, in case you haven’t noticed, is not cut out for tent life. That was very clear from an early age.She liked everything neat and tidy.’
‘Don’t blame me,’ I said. ‘Anyway, I don’t think your free spirit was curtailed too much by me. You practically spent my entire teenage years down there.’
‘I didn’t,’ she insisted. ‘You must be imagining it. As far as I recall, it was a week here and week there.’
When we finally entered the county of Cork, after hours of driving and stops for loo breaks,tea breaks, leg stretching, Nora sat up, like a farmer’s collie and rolled down the window and sniffed the air.
‘Ah, it’s good to be back,’ she said.
‘In Blarney?’ We were driving past the castle at that moment.
