In Memory

The sun was already sinking into damp western fields when the red and cream CIE bus pulled out of the Long Walk car park. It was the 4.20pm service from Dundalk to Galway, via every village in between. This was the mid-eighties, long before the motorways that came to represent the Celtic Tiger had been built. The trip was scheduled to take four hours but that was merely a fantasy in a statisticians head. A double-parked car in Moate could add twenty minutes to the trip and there were at least thirty similar villages to pass through.

I was with my mate Dave. We’d hatched the travel plan in the pub on Thursday night. We had a friend at college in Galway who had regaled us with tales of wild drinking sessions and sing songs by open fires with the Atlantic roaring outside. Galway had a reputation as the coolest place in Ireland. We were huddled on the opposite coast in a town that had many reputations, none of which could be described as tepid, never mind cool.

After a few pints of Harp, we resolved to head West the following afternoon and stay with our mate for the weekend. There was one small problem. We didn’t know his address and it being the mid-eighties, we had no phones either. We communicated back then by letter. A charmingly Dickensian process that didn’t really work in last-minute spontaneous decisions.

But Dave was an adventurous sort. He had history in the Scouting movement and I trusted him to deal with the practical side of things. I imagined he could furnish up a sleeping arrangement out of moss and twigs if we got really stuck. I was in a low paid job at the time, while he was surviving on a small college grant. We did a quick budget in the pub on Thursday and figured out how much we’d need for two days of drinking, four takeaway meals and the possible price of entry to a disco. We never even thought about allowing for accommodation costs. A B&B back then would have cost as much as ten pints of beer and that wasn’t a trade-off we were willing to entertain.

Plan A was that our mate would be in a particular pub in Salthill. That was the whole point of our trip. On a previous visit to Dundalk, he had regaled us with tales of this mythical drinking establishment. By all accounts, it had the best Guinness on the Western seaboard. The best traditional musicians. The best view out into the Atlantic. And the best looking girls from the Arts Faculty at UCG. We were convinced that we would find him there.

We travelled light, as we always did back then. A couple of pairs of socks and jocks and a spare shirt wrapped up in a paper tin sleeping bag. Anything else could be carried in the numerous pockets of our Parka Jackets. But that hardly stretched beyond a toothbrush and a dog eared paperback novel.

We stored our sleeping bags on the overhead racks and settled in for the long ride. We were just outside Mullingar when Dave brought up the possibility that Plan A may not work. What if our friend wasn’t there? We quickly put our minds to thinking of other possibilities. There were a couple of other pubs that he had mentioned. Plan B and C covered this. We did think about just getting back on the bus and spending four hours driving east. That was plan D.

Throwing ourselves at the mercy of Church-run homeless services was considered as was breaking into a church itself and kipping on a pew. As we passed through the brooding town of Ballinasloe the bronzed dome of St Bridget’s Mental Hospital peaked its pernicious nose through the evening fog. Plan X was to affect a twitch and to talk in tongues in an attempt to get a night’s stay in that scary institution.

We had made it to Galway by the time we had dreamt up plan Z. I’m guessing we walked from the city centre to Salthill. Our budget certainly didn’t stretch to Taxis. We found the pub and to our immense relief, our mate was parked at the bar, Guinness in hand and holding forth to an attentive audience. We went on to have a wild weekend and budgeted perfectly so that we had just enough for the bus ticket back to Dundalk on the Sunday afternoon.

On the 1^st November last, Dave packed his bags for the last time and headed off on a celestial journey. The cancer he had battled for six years finally got the better of him. He had faced that challenge with the same resilience and dark humour that accompanied all our teenage adventures.

When I was 17 I spent every Tuesday night at his house listening to Simon & Garfunkel records. He brought a letter from my first girlfriend telling me that she was taking our relationship on a journey and I wasn’t invited. We stared out of the school window and he gently put his arm around my shoulder.

I spent my first holidays away from my family with him when we camped all over Ireland and then Europe. He was my first flatmate when we moved to England. I stayed at his house in London when I needed a stopover when my life took a left turn and I required an escape.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few weeks thinking about those teenage years. All the great events of my life between 15 and 25 had Dave at its core. He was the best of friends and the best of people and it breaks my heart that I wasn’t there to say goodbye.

It was the garden of the golden apples,
The half-way house where we had stopped a day
Before we took the west road to Drumcatton
Where the sun was always setting on the play.