‘Data-free vegans incoming by taxi,’ I texted the builder boyfriend, to alert him to the possibility of triple trouble. Quadruple really, for they were also American.
The young eco-tourists from the West Coast didn’t want to switch on roaming on their phones, for they were interrogating me about the route by text while at the airport. I knew they were lefty environmental types because when the girl booked she told me she was travelling to Europe to learn about ‘natural building’. After the course, she and her boyfriend would be heading to Ireland for what she called ‘some misty time’.
I don’t know whether that was a euphemism for sex. She would be too young to remember the jazz standard by Erroll Garner, or the Clint Eastwood film Play Misty for Me. That featured a bunny boiler, so the phrase put the wind up me.
She sent me a small picture of a map after landing at Cork, asking me to confirm this was my house. Lord knows, I thought, squinting at the tiny picture. The young people refuse to do as they’re told and put my postcode into a conventional satnav, because that would cost them data roaming.
They download Google Maps using the wifi at the airport, then they set off on the notoriously misleading routes Google comes up with by using satellites in space to send people over mountains and through farms. They arrive many hours later in a terrible state, complaining about having to reverse back down single-carriageway boreens as tractors hurtle towards them. But the Americans didn’t even have a hire car. She sent me a taxi booking confirmation. They would be some time.
In the village supermarket, I picked up some soya milk, then put it down, then picked up the oat milk, then put it down. I settled on coconut milk. Get over it, I told myself. But I felt terrible.
‘These people who drink this stuff, eh?’ I said to the rosy-cheeked cashier, apologetically, for I was embarrassed buying it. ‘Oh I know, it’s mad all right!’ she said, nodding to her friend in the queue behind me. ‘So good luck with that anyway!’ she said, moving me on, wanting to have a gossip with her friend, probably thinking what a prat I was for even entertaining the idea of buying fake milk.
They’ve worn me down. I cannot argue with these herbivores any more
But they’ve worn me down. I cannot argue with these herbivores any more. I cannot have another row about milk.
Late afternoon, a taxi pulled into the back gate, and a confused-looking Pakistani driver got out, having driven nearly two hours from the airport, clocking up several hundred euros on the meter, and opened his back door. She all but fell out of the car and limped her bag into the house. She was on her own, but I didn’t ask why.
I liked her immediately. She was very slightly built and pale, but she had a nice smile. This one can’t help it, I thought.
She said the woman running the natural building course had made them build her a sauna. Yes, I thought, she saw you coming. What did you build it out of? Cob, she said, referring to the retro practice of using hands and feet to form lumps of earth mixed with sand and straw.
She was wearing a light linen shirt and loose linen trousers in the Irish rain. She said all her clothes were filthy. She looked like an orphan from a Dickensian workhouse.
She didn’t emerge from her room for a day and only then began to explain that her boyfriend had not been on the course, but had flown to Dublin to join her afterwards, and they now realised Dublin wasn’t Cork. And Cork wasn’t West Cork. And so on.
She was stuck down here, thinking this was Cork city, and he was four hours away in Dublin, thinking that was Cork city, or as near as damn it, and he had just had an unfortunate incident. Oh? I said. Yes, she said. He went out to get a sandwich and some youths surrounded him and took him to the cashpoint and asked him to get €50 out and give it to them. And when he wouldn’t, some more youths appeared, so he thought it best to give them the €50 and then he ran away. She looked disappointed, as though he had just been overcharged for his sandwich.
‘I’m pretty sure your boyfriend has just been robbed,’ I said.
The thing was, she said, softly, he tried to hire a car at Dublin airport but his licence had expired. How would they ever meet up? She was going to call an Uber, she said.
Listen to me, I explained, the only taxi here is the funeral director, and he won’t come for a week, unless you’re dead. She stared at me, almost in tears before saying: ‘Why is Ireland like this?’ Dear lord, I thought, these poor herbivores need to get back to the la-la land of the West Coast and away from reality as soon as possible.
She said she would have to hire a car and that meant getting back to Cork airport. I offered to take her but she said she couldn’t possibly put me out. I gave her some breakfast, while this was being discussed, and it turned out she took real milk on her granola. She didn’t seem to understand why.
Later, wearing one of my riding jackets, she came with me to the village shop to choose some dinner and bought a Pot Noodle, into which she tipped a can of cold beans, like prison food.
The next morning, she said she had managed to hire a car from the airport, so I dropped her at the bus stop in the nearest town, and by that, I mean I spoke to the driver of the bus as I put her on and said: ‘This lady is from America’, and winked. And he, a jolly sort, said: ‘Oh I’ll make sure she gets off at the right stop for the airport!’
And then I hugged the little herbivore, not wanting to let her go. ‘Thank you for making me your pet project,’ she said, as she got on to the bus, and I watched the bus disappear into the distance, feeling a strange pull at my heartstrings.
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