Me Auld China

A short story about friendship, Ronnie Drew, and a questionable grip on reality.

 “Giz over that kitchen roll, I’m after spillin’ tea all over Ronnie Drew’s face”, said Maura with genuine urgency. Teresa delicately peeled off a single sheet of the thick two-ply paper from the roll.
Still holding her teetering mug of milky tea unnaturally aloft in her left hand, Maura snatched the duty-bound sheet of kitchen roll from Teresa’s fingers with a franticness more sensitive souls might have considered rude. Laying the single sheet into the puddle drowning the face of her favourite Dubliner, she relaxed and dropped her shoulders as the paper towel soaked up the milky brown and yellow. It reminded her of the arty time-lapse video her eldest daughter made of an apple-core turning rotten in 2002.

“There yar now, Ron”, she told him, her words surfing upon her exhalation of relief. It was her favourite tea-coaster now. A kind of dirty pale, sickly green square with rounded corners and a rush of blues in the centre, vibrant and dark and beautiful, depicting the portrait of the man himself,  perfectly capturing the mischievous glint in his striking eyes, the turned-out bottom lip and top teeth of his unmistakable, slightly agape mouth - a grotto harbouring the most razor-sharp tongue that ever gave birth to a witticism.              
Beneath his blue beard are the words ‘Me Auld China’, words Ronnie would lovingly deliver to Maura in his sexy gravelly croak every time she’d sit for a cup of tea with him.  

A short, sharp laugh from Maura startled Teresa, the kind of jolt that kills hiccups. “What are ya laughing at?” she questioned, her tone coloured with annoyance.
“Ah, he just said it was just as well, he was in need of a wash”, said Maura while she wiped around the bottom of her mug, being careful not to spill any more, it still at an awkward height. She inhaled a good slurp before resting the mug down on her favourite coaster, Ronnie giggling from the warmth of it on his little face.
Teresa didn’t respond, instead pursing her lips as she took up her own mug for a gulp. “How long have you had that now, Maura, the tea coaster?”, she asked once the warmth in her gullet had subsided.
“I only got it last Saturday”, answered Maura contentedly. “Sure, you were with me, in the sale of work above in Hughes’ barn in aid of the school”. “Yeah, and, d’ya not think it’s getting a bit old now?” Teresa quizzed curtly.
“Old? Sure, four days is hardly old”.
“No, I don’t mean the coaster, I mean this talking to it and all. It was funny enough at the beginning, Maura, but, Jesus, you’ve been doing the same gag now the last three days. It’s getting a bit fuckin’ annoying to be honest with ya, love”.

Teresa and Maura have been best friends for all their lives, having been born in the same hospital ward within twelve hours of one another sixty-four years ago. Teresa was the older of the two, those twelve hours taken very seriously by her in early youth, leading her to adopt a sort of big sister role to Maura, neither having any siblings.
They grew up within a mile of each other, five minutes and forty-four seconds door to door on Teresa's Raleigh bicycle, or six minutes twenty seconds on Maura’s mother’s High Nelly – a deficit Maura always attributed to her legs not being quite long enough to allow her sit up properly on the saddle to maintain optimal pedal-power. It was actually quicker on foot diagonally through Liam Heffernan’s fields, just four minutes on the nose, but they’d decided not to venture into the fields since the Sunday morning Liam Heffernan made a holy show of them both in front of the parish outside the church gate, berating them for making gaps in his ditches and worrying his pregnant ewes.
They both married Bord Na Mona men and ended up living side by side in the Bord Na Mona built worker’s houses in the village, next door neighbours and best friends. They “raised each other’s childer”, as they say themselves, and their husbands worked and drank and threw darts together.
They were both widowed the same day. Their husbands in the same car going to work as many a morning before it. A twenty-one-year-old wooden cross at Delaney’s bend marks the day their Renault 19 smashed into a BMC Dairy Tanker full of milk fresh out of Delany’s farm.
The two have grieved together ever since. Hardly a day has gone by without a visit. In later years, the routine has become that Monday to Friday Teresa calls in to Maura after the one o’ clock news. They chat and drink tea and indulge in digestive biscuits, Mikados, a Battenberg or scones until ten past two when they watch Countdown together. After the conundrum, Maura usually wants a snooze and Teresa rinses the mugs in the sink and lets herself out without ceremony. On Saturdays, they drive into town for lunch and shopping, and on Sundays Teresa hosts Maura for dinner and dessert.
Countdown has been a bit of an irritant for Teresa these past few days though, now that Ronnie Drew keeps piping up with seven letter words, all via the mouth of Maura, of course. Teresa can speak frankly with Maura, a benefit that sixty-four years of close friendship has afforded them, but she has put up with this backward ventriloquism not out of tolerance, but out of love for her friend. Maura was getting so much enjoyment out of the whole thing that she’d been reluctant to vocalise how unfunny and tired the joke had become - until just now, that is.

Teresa's words seemed to cut Maura. “Gag? I’m not having you on, Teresa. The man speaks to me”, she said softly, avoiding Teresa's eyes. There was something in Maura’s voice that affirmed this, at least affirmed that she genuinely believed this to be the case. Teresa knew in her heart that Maura was sincere, she knew she didn’t need to ask the question, but she wanted desperately to be wrong, so she asked anyway.
“Ronnie Drew speaks to you. Through that drinks coaster?” 
Maura’s eyes met Teresa's, showing not a naivety but a sense of innocence Teresa had not seen in her friend before. “Are you sure, Maura?” she asked nervously, wanting the answer to reveal some misunderstanding that meant the conversation wasn’t so bat-shit crazy after all.
“You don’t believe me” replied Maura, her brow furrowing and eyes narrowing, her tone sharp, indicators of annoyance replacing the innocence. Teresa was glad of this, for it granted license to revert to a defensive position rather than one rooted in compassion. Maura’s anger at Teresa's doubt justified going straight for the absurdity and illogic of it all.
 “You can’t be serious, Maura. Give it over now. Don’t expect me to believe that Ronnie Drew is talking to you and you talk to him. It’s nonsense and I want you to stop it” Teresa snapped, putting her mug down on the coffee table with a firmness as if to serve as an exclamation mark at the end of her sentence.
 
“It isn’t nonsense, Teresa” said Maura with a purposeful calmness in her tone, meant for claiming the moral high ground; being heavy-handed with mugs and losing tempers didn’t make someone right in her house.
“Then it’s all in your head” Teresa barked, her arms crossed, and eyes set like lasers on the Countdown clock. The percussive ticking, like the clacking of a bull’s rib bone off another. The final note, that dull, resonating gong brought with it both a tense silence in the sitting-room and a near-devastating realisation upon Teresa; if it is indeed all in Maura’s head, then she was losing her dearest friend.
“So, when you talk to your Phillip every night, talk to his photo on the bedside table, tell him about your day and ask him his advice about things, doesn’t he answer you? Is that all in your head? Is that not nonsense?”, quipped Maura.
“That’s very different, Maura, don’t be crass”, replied Teresa. “How’s it different?” asked Maura. Teresa didn’t answer. The answer was too big to explain without pondering a moment and Maura had already tacked on a bonus question, “indeed, sure, when you talk away with God almighty isn’t it all in your head?”
“It’s different. That’s praying. A prayer or a chat with God is perfectly acceptable, Maura, and you know it is. It’s like a universally accepted truth or whatever ya’d call it”.
“Many universal truths are accepted as truth and there’s not a bit of truth in them at all” said Maura dismissively. “What? What are you on about? Tell me one universal truth that isn’t true so then”, Teresa challenged.
Maura thought for a moment as the tea-time teaser appeared on screen. “The sun rises in the east and sets in the west” she said. Teresa tutted. “How is that not true? It’s one of the fundamental truths of the world for fuck’s sake” she said, exasperated.
“No”, replied Maura, “it isn’t true. The sun doesn’t rise in the east or set in the west at all. It never has. And what’s worse is you know it well. The earth spins around the sun. The sun never moves aer a bit. And you’d swear blind it does all because it’s a universally accepted truth”.
“Ah semantics is all that is”, said Teresa vexed as she rose from the couch and marched out of the room.


Sitting on the edge of Maura’s bathtub, Teresa could hardly contain her grief. She had experienced waves of anxiety on occasion, indeed even floods of anguish in the years following her husband’s death; but this was a tsunami, surge after surge of agony, angst and sorrow, each crashing against and spilling over the futile barrier of clasped hands across her mouth. Through smothered groans and muffled wails, Teresa tried desperately to catch her breath and compose herself. She felt a fizzing behind her nose, a sting of citrus in her eyes as warm tears began streaming down her face. With each thought came a convulsion of weeping and sniveling; how am I going to tell Jennifer her mother is losing her mind? Is it a psychosis, schizophrenia, dementia, or what? How are we going to get her seen by the doctor? Will she be able to stay at home? Maybe she can stay with me, or Jennifer can move back home? Oh, what if she’ll have to be institutionalised, the poor lamb, she always swore she’d stay in her house ‘til the day she died. Maybe it’s just a phase, just some delayed trauma or post-traumatic stress or something from the accident, a disorder they can treat, medication, she’ll be fine. She’ll be fine.
It felt like hours, but it was only all of two minutes and six seconds in the bathroom before Teresa reassumed her big sister role, reminding herself that Maura needed her, perhaps now more than ever. She’d go back and sit with Maura, treat her with the dignity she deserved and if she says Ronnie Drew is speaking to her via a tea coaster on the coffee table then that was the truth of the matter, at least for now. She would phone Jennifer when Maura dozed off for her nap and take it from there.
She stood up and took stock of herself in the mirror, her cheeks streaked and eyes red from tears. And she thanked God for those tears, for it was a reminder of the unbridled love she had for her dearest friend.
 
“I’ll prove it to ya, Teresa!” said Maura confidently upon her friend’s return to the sofa. “That’s okay, Mau, love. I believe you. I’m sorry I just couldn’t get my head around it at first, but ya have nothing to prove to me”. The adverts finished and the answer to the teatime teaser was revealed.
“No, it’s alright, Teresa. I want to” said Maura. “You can’t hear Ronnie because you’re not open to him communicating with you, and that’s perfectly alright, but I want to prove to ya that he talks to me”.
Teresa relented sportingly, wanting to appear open to the idea. “Sure, go on so”.
Taking the remote control, Maura muted the TV. “I’ll turn my back to the telly”, she said as she propped the tea coaster bearing Ronnie Drew’s likeness up against her mug, facing the screen, “so there’s no way I can see the letters that come out, and Ronnie will tell me what words he gets”. Shifting her cushions and turning around as much as she could on the couch, Maura starred dutifully at the blank beige wall. “And I’ll not turn back around until you tell me to, Teresa, okay?”
“Grand so, Mau” said Teresa, having already decided to play along and marvel at whatever word her friend would come up with, and not have her turn around until the actual letters were well gone.
Teresa watched as Rachel Riley pulled out consonants and vowels one by one in muted silence. F, N, O, P, E, A, T, R, I. Teresa read the word PEAT and was reminded of their late husbands, how they would appear home from long summer days harvesting peat and covered in the stuff, with a taste of cold cider and tobacco on her Philip’s kiss. It was a happy memory that made the current happenings all the sadder.
“Profane” announced Maura after eighteen seconds. Teresa was about to launch into her pre-determined act of surprise when she suddenly realised the word was, in fact, there among the string of characters spanning the bottom of the screen. “Seven letters. He thought he had operation for eight, but there’s only one O” said Maura.
Teresa remained silent, quickly scanning her brain for a logical explanation. There were no mirrors or even glass panes or picture frames in Maura’s field of vision or peripheral that could have reflected the television screen. Maura had better hearing than Teresa with her hearing-aids in, but the sound was certainly muted, not just turned down low – the speaker symbol with the line through it was still in the top right corner.  Had Maura figured out you can rewind the television nowadays?, she thought to herself; perhaps she’d rewound it when she heard me coming out of the bathroom and timed it all just right. This was unlikely, she’d never seen Maura navigate the technical aspects of the new age of television in all their recent years goggling the box together. Nevertheless, she reasoned this was the only plausible explanation. That, or Ronnie Drew had indeed just proved himself to be embodying a painted square of cork bearing his likeness. That was something Teresa was still unwilling to believe, for, despite the apparent wizardry of what had just occurred, it would do away with all she valued as sensible. Rewound television it must be. Besides, it didn’t matter – Teresa had decided in the bathroom that Maura’s version of the truth was the truth for now, she’d not be the cause of any further distress until she’d have to make the call to Jennifer this evening.

“That is remarkable”, exclaimed Teresa. “Do you believe me now?”, asked Maura.
“I do, Mau, and I’m sorry again for doubting you”, replied Teresa. Maura breathed a sigh of relief. “That’s alright, Teresa love. I know it sounds cuckoo. Shall I turn back around now?”. “Oh yeah, course” answered Teresa. Maura shifted herself back around in laboured movements before sinking into her original position with an exhalation of breath. She lobbed her hand out onto the vacant middle cushion of her three-seater sofa, Teresa taking it in hers. The two old friends looking at each other with fond affection on their faces.

“Do you want to know how he ended up here?” Asked Maura. “I do. Tell me, Mau” answered Teresa.
“Well”, began Maura, “it turns out the Buddhists are on to something, they’re kind of half right about what happens in the afterlife. You see, Ronnie told me all about what happened when he passed on. He found himself in what was like a waiting room, and there were people arriving in droves he said, and people being ushered up to kiosks with officials in them. It was all proper hectic he said”.
“Jaysus”, said Teresa, “it doesn’t sound like my idea of Heaven”. “Well, that’s just it”, replied Maura, “Ronnie’s turn came and he was beckoned up to a window and a young fella there asked him his name. Ronnie Drew, says Ronnie, but can you tell me where am I at all. The young lad told him this is the waiting room for heaven. Purgatory? Ronnie asked him. There is no Purgatory, the lad tells him. Really, says Ronnie, sure this is like the dole office on payday, it doesn’t feel much like salvation. And the young fella tells him, this is the agnostic’s waiting room”.
“Lord, I may say a few more Hail Mary’s so if that’s how it is”, said Teresa jokingly as Maura picked up her mug and slurped the remnants of her now cold tea into her mouth.
“Right, says the young lad to Ronnie” continued Maura, “your place in heaven awaits – do you want to go in now or would you like to be reincarnated first? Poor Ronnie wasn’t expecting this. Reincarnated? He says. Aye, says the lad, you can go back as anything you like except your former self, or any person, with whatever abilities you like, wherever you like. You can only be reincarnated once though, but for as long as you like and whenever you want you can appear back here and spend eternity in heaven”.
“And he chose to be reincarnated as a tea coaster in your house?” Quizzed Teresa with an unintentional, not-so-subtle hint of sarcastic ridicule. “Ha, well no, not exactly” laughed Maura. “He told me that right then at that moment his memory brought him back, as vivid and clear as any day he ever spent in his right mind, to a conversation himself and Barney McKenna and Luke Kelly had over pints of porter at a lock-in in O’ Donoghues pub in Dublin in 1962, when they were discussing this very thing – what happens after you’ve died. They pondered various scenarios and they made a pact that if they could come back at all, they’d all meet up right there in O’ Donoghues at the bar as beer mats”.
“Beer mats?” asked Teresa through a sudden burst of joy and laughter that prompted Maura to laugh with her too. “Yes, isn’t it hilarious, can’t ya imagine the three of them?” said Maura. “Well that is just gas now” said Teresa, still sniggering at the thought. “Well, wait ‘til I tell ya” continued Maura, “Ronnie told me if they could come back as beer mats they’d always have a place at the bar and they’d be sure to get a good few gulps of Guinness because the barmen were notorious for pulling pints that spilled over so a trickle would run down the outside of the glass. So, Ronnie says to the lad, who’s in heaven already there? The lad rolled his eyes at him and told him his mortal mind wouldn’t be able to comprehend the number. Right, says Ronnie to him, can you tell me if one Luke Kelly reincarnated himself, or is he in there in Heaven or where is he? The young fella’s patience was starting to be tested at this stage, and he says, Mister Drew - I’m sorry, but it’s manic here and I don’t have the time to be consulting the database looking for who’s here and who’s not.”
“Now, said the young lad,” continued Maura, “if you do indeed choose to be reincarnated in the mortal world, Mister Drew, I must warn you that things will have changed. You see, the ticking of time is quite different here than it is there. Here, a mortal minute like you are used to is the equivalent of approximately six months there. You’ve been here almost twenty-two of your minutes so, if I were to reincarnate you now, you’ll be back on the earth sometime in the year 2019”.
“Ronnie thought about it for a moment”, explained Maura, “and reasoned that, at that rate, he’d be reunited with everyone he’s ever loved in no-time anyway whenever he’d go on into Heaven. So, he decided he’d pop back to O’ Donoghues and see for himself if Luke was there, and sure if not he could always head back into heaven. Well, says Ronnie, how do I get back if I am reincarnated for a bit? The young lad told him he only need to wish it. Right so, says Ronnie, to the young lad, I want to go back to O’ Donoghues bar on Merrion Row, and I want to be a beer mat and I want my face on it so Luke will know me, and I want to be able to taste drink and talk to and hear whomever and whatever I like”.

“Are ya following me so far”, Maura asked Teresa. “I am, it’s feckin’ wild, Mau, but I’m with ya, go on” Teresa answered. “Right, well”, continued Maura, “something was banjaxed along the way anyway because next thing Ronnie finds himself, in his current state as a drinks coaster, in Donna Hughes’ barn on Marian road above, in a box of brick a brack with an action man doll sitting on his face”.  
​        
Teresa's laughter grew from chuckle to chortle in an instant, as did Maura’s. The two women gripped each other’s hand tighter as they filled the room with their gleeful guffawing, that same laughter they had shared together for decades. “He just said it’s not that bleedin’ funny, girls!” said Maura, barely able to pronounce the words through the frenzy. This drew a secondary explosive eruption of howls and hysterics from the two women, Teresa frantically wiping away tears from her face. They were happy tears, but tears of great unspoken sadness too.
“Ah, Jesus, Maura, that is a good one alright”, said Teresa, “and tell’s, why didn’t he just tell you all this in the first place?” she continued, her sentence interrupted by stifled sniggers. “Well I just saw him in the box on our way outta the barn and took a liking to the tea coaster, so I popped a euro into the girl’s hand and popped Ronnie into my bag. God love him, sure he could have been shouting away at me and I wouldn’t have heard him at all”.
“It’s a wonder he didn’t say to hell with it and wished himself back to Heaven’s door” posed Teresa. “Well”, said Maura, “when I had him on the coffee table that evening and we got chatting, he told me what had happened and he asked me if I’d take him up to Dublin, to O’ Donoghues, to see if the two boys are there waiting for him. Will you come up with us, Teresa love, we could go up tomorrow on the train”.
Teresa stared lovingly into Maura’s bright eyes. “I will, Mau”, she said, “we’ll go up in the morning”. 

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