Motoring into mid-summer
A few more weeks of school and then Maxine Jones will bundle her boys into the camper van and set off for France
Driving to the supermarket I was impressed with how easily I handled the van. The first few weeks after I bought it I was terrified, going miles out of my way in search of parking or turning places. Finding first gear was still a little tricky, but I used both hands and generally got it first time.
The supermarket had camping chairs on special offer. I bought a couple and was given a card to fill in my name and phone number for a promotional draw. That night I had a phone call to say my name had been picked and I had won a €25 voucher. The pleasure I felt was disproportionate to the amount.
What I'm really looking for in France is a holiday from myself, yet in a seemingly contradictory way, a chance to be myself. The children are hostages to fortune. Sam, I know, foresees a better time at home. He is drifting away not only from me but from his two younger brothers as well, lashing out at them, calling them stupid. His sunny disposition clouds over and his face shows scorn and then anger with himself. Only in his mobile phone does he find solace.
The sun stays late in the sky, dripping over the heavy swaying trees beyond the back garden. Some days it rains – steady, day-long summer rain, which leaves paths and pavements strewn with juicy slugs, and snails crunch underfoot.
I drove 15 miles to a newly opened German discount supermarket and filled up the van at a fraction of the usual cost. Next to Norway, a survey has it that Ireland is the most expensive place in the world to shop. I loved the simplicity of the German supermarket, with boxes piled high and no attempt to woo with loyalty vouchers or artistic displays.
Unpacking the van back home, a neighbour said hello. When I mentioned where I'd been, she said she'd visited a similar store in the inner city. "I'll tell you what put me off", she said, "I was the only," she hesitated, "...the only European there. I felt quite threatened.' This woman is in her 60s and up until recently would never have seen a black person on her home turf. Later I noticed the sticker of a fundamentalist Catholic group on her car.
Another neighbour called round for money for the local Catholic church. I said I didn't like the Church's attitude to women. She didn't seem to understand.
"I don't think it's fair that only men are allowed to be priests", I said.
"Oh", she said, looking surprised that anyone should object, "but men are so much more steadfast than women".
The food from the mammoth shopping trip is lasting a long time. Unusually, I have well-stocked cupboards, fridge and freezer. The food tastes good – continental. The rocket salad and dressing transport me to France already, as do the big ripe vine tomatoes and the huge yellow pears. These were eaten quickly but there's still salami, prosciutto, smelly cheese. I calculate that I won't need to do another really big shop in Ireland until September.
I find it amazing that I have lived in this house for so long and so little has happened to me. I've watched neighbours' children grow and leave home; the dog next door, who used to leap the dividing wall, is fat and matted and can barely put one foot in front of the other. I have likewise deteriorated. My babies in nappies are now at the centre of their own intricate social systems linked by ring tones. I am a usurper in their lives, throwing indifferent meals together, which they eat politely.
I've bought several DVDs for the France trip, planning to put up the table and secure the laptop to it with Blutak so it doesn't slide to the floor at every corner.
A fly is circuiting the room with a high-pitched, flinch-making buzz. I duck and swear as if targeted by a doodlebug. The ants near the back door dive down into underground tunnels, which I fear may make the house unstable. Can ants do that, or is it only termites? If the summer is hot in Ireland, I worry the whole house and garden will perish into rottenness and decay.
The longest day is almost here and already the summer is loosing its bloom and beginning to go to seed. The grass is brown in patches, a result of the weedkiller spread over it by an enthusiastic young lad I paid to mow the lawn. The cordelines – exotic palm trees that thrive in Dublin, surprising English visitors – have developed carbuncular pods grouped in giant tan-coloured clusters. On a closer look, they are made up of tiny flowers with miniature pink-tinged leaves and yellow stamen.
Under the garden wall, where climbers have gone out of control, drifts of down are deepening, the woolly seeds of some unidentified plant. In the newly tamed part of the garden at the back, weeds fight their way up through the decorative bark. Despite my plans to have the garden tended, I fear a wilderness will greet me when I return.
A few more weeks of school and, in bed late because of the bright nights, the boys find it almost impossible to push back the duvet in the morning, emerging bleary and disoriented with hedgehog hair.
Bloomsday soon, when James Joyce fills every bookshop and newspaper front page. Funny that England is so reticent about its writers – can't imagine a Shakespeare day. Then midsummer's day. Even a rainy one holds at its core an elemental mystery. The longest day, the centre of the year, the mid-point of summer when we've hardly acknowledged summer's arrival – an intimation of how death will sneak up on us. The sound of birdsong drowns out the traffic and the busyness of insects outdoes our own schedules. Television is forgotten in the prolonged daylight. On midsummer's day anything could happen and the day would absorb it.
Then the decline. Autumn will roll in, dead leaves and spoiled apples a sodden mass on the lawn. Stark twigs will replace the swaying leaves, now whooshing with sea sounds, and frost will offer a reprieve from growth and decay. The children will fold themselves into their routines, embracing the excitement of Halloween and Christmas, and I will sulk and plan for summer when, as now, they will not particularly want to go anywhere.