When I was invited to address a conference marking the centenary of the birth of a distinguished Irish essayist, I was gratified; the lineup of speakers included several well-known names in whose company I was proud to be numbered, the venue was in a cathedral city I was curious to visit, and I had long revered the style and ethos of the man who was to be our subject. In the event, nothing disappointed; it was a weekend of physical and mental wellbeing. On the train down from Dublin I met some wits and poets I knew, veterans of the convivial circuit of arts festivals. We the honoured guests were met at the station and conducted to a grand eighteenth-century townhouse that had been converted for the purposes of civic hospitality without cramping its dignity; my bedroom must have been thirty feet long and proportionately broad, with a semicircular bay of windows looking across a formal garden to handsome stable buildings, beyond which the battlements of a medieval castle rose into the blue and gold of sunset. At the official dinner that night I was introduced to members of the family of the writer whose excellence had brought us together; they all, I observed with appreciation, shared his inheritance of patrician bone-structure and sensitive features. That family had been a part of their county’s social fabric for many generations; in fact the subject of my own lecture was a historical study the writer had undertaken out of his deep love of the locality and its traditions. At the end of our two days of lectures and discussions we were privileged to visit the family home, a Georgian farmhouse a few miles out in the countryside, for a reception. We admired the lovely river-valley it overlooked and the horizon punctuated by the ancient spires and towers he had written of, and when the evening grew cold we drank wine and looked at dark-varnished portraits in fire-lit drawing-rooms and read the spines of books in studies that wore their learning as comfortably as old slippers. Then, having been for a time so graciously made part of a long-continued dwelling in home and city and land, we dispersed with mutual esteem and promises of return.
There was a strange man among the crowd waiting for the train next morning. I instinctively moved away from him as from something suspect. A shadowiness about him, and his incomprehensible brief addresses to people pushing by, who ignored him, made me wonder if he was a refugee from eastern Europe. He might have been in his late thirties, wore a dark blue anorak, and carried a large black plastic bucket. A few minutes later in the train, while I was taking off my coat and locating my reading-matter before taking my seat, he came along the corridor with his bucket, repeatedly darting one hand up into the air in an odd greeting. He had a gentle little smile, and, assuming that he was begging, I dropped a few coins into the bucket. He stopped in surprise, said, ‘You’re decent!’, gave a low bark, and continued past me.
When he shortly reappeared and sat down opposite me I sighed inwardly; I had already opened a book that demanded close reading. ‘There were three sets of twins in the family‚’ he said. ‘My father took off.’ He put his head down and barked two or three times. ‘I have Tourette’s Syn … Syn …’ he explained. ‘Ah, I’ve heard of that‚’ I replied, ‘I read about that in a book by …’ He went on straight away: ‘It’s a circuit in my brain. When I see a taxi I have to put up my hand and say ‘Taxi!’ even though I don’t want a taxi. It causes trouble. They sent me home from the Christian Brothers, I was cursing and cursing, I couldn’t help it. Nobody understood. My mother didn’t understand. I was born with a club foot.’ He reached down to his leg and twisted it up to show me the hump on his foot. ‘I was in hospital for a long time with the foot. My mother came once a week. She was bawling every time when she went. So was I.’
I asked him where he was from, and he named a small town in Waterford. He said he had slept rough the previous night, in a park; I was not quite sure this was true as his anorak didn’t look damp and he was clean-shaven, but it could have been so. He had a rather appealing face, with wistful grey-blue eyes and a tender little pursed-up mouth. His nose looked as if it had been knocked crooked and there was a little scab on one side of it, but otherwise he was quite neat and clean.
‘I got the bucket out of a skip, cleaned it up, put some old cloths in it‚’ he said. ‘I went to McDonald’s to ask if I could wash the windows. They said they had their own staff for that. I’m going to Dublin now, wash a few car windows. Get myself some gear, clothes and that. I might go to Liverpool.’ He obviously had nothing with him apart from the bucket and the rags in it. He fished my coins out of it and counted them. ‘One pound forty – it’s a start!’ he said brightly. ‘I can’t stay at home under my mother. Something makes me take off. I went to Belfast once, went into some places, they wanted to beat me up. It’s been a hard life, sometimes I wish it was over, just go to sleep, get some peace. When I ran away to Dublin the first time I was bawling in the station, I didn’t know where to go. I was frightened sleeping rough at first. And in the hostels with the druggies. I got mugged once. I had one hundred and seventy-three pounds saved up. This man gave me a lift in a taxi. I thought it didn’t look like a proper taxi but I got in. These other fellows got in and they took me somewhere and bashed me with …’ – he sketched some angular object in the air with his arm – ‘They said not to look round when they were going away. But I can look after myself now. When we get to Dublin I’ll ring the Homeless and they’ll tell me where to go.’ He got up suddenly and went off down the corridor, barking, saluting people on either side. I sat back, and decided I might as well give myself to this encounter.
When he took his seat again, his legs had a minute-long spasm of kicking, during which he stared out of the window. ‘Ride that horse!’ I said with a smile. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked, when stillness returned to him. I told him my name, and he looked off into space. ‘Names go in one ear and out the other,’ he said rather forlornly. ‘I went to London once,’ he continued his story. ‘I had a job in a pub, cleaning the floor. The North London Tavern, do you know it? I went into a church there and lit a candle in front of the statue of Our Lady. I felt a deep sense of peace.’
‘Was that the big church on Quex Road?’ I asked.
‘How did you know that?’
‘I’m a thought-reader!’ I joked. He asked me what I did, and on hearing that I was a writer he said, ‘You’re intelligent. Did you write that book?’ – putting his thumb on the book in front of me. ‘No, that one would be beyond me,’ I said. (It was a work by the American philosopher Hilary Putnam.) ‘But I should be writing down your story,’ I said. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Mattie Laffin. I’ve had a sad life. When I was a kid I got a job in a hotel, but they said I was disturbing the guests. They wanted me to work in a dark shed at the back. I’m afraid of the dark ever since my brothers came at me with Hallowe’en masks. I went off to Galway. I took an overdose in the Cathedral, ended up in the Regional Hospital, that’s where they diagnosed me.’
‘I know the Regional, it’s very good‚’ I said.
‘It’s lovely! I was five and a half weeks there. I didn’t want to leave, but they had to put me out in the end.’
At this point the ticket inspector appeared alongside us, punched my ticket, and with a slight smile made some pretence of punching a ticket for Mattie, who whispered to me, ‘They don’t bother me on the trains.’ Then the refreshments trolley arrived and I bought him a sandwich and a coffee, which he enjoyed, but without urgency. We joked about the book I could make out of his life. ‘I fell in love with a girl called Cynthia once, but she took off‚’ he told me.
‘How long did that last?’ I asked.
‘Four weeks!’ he said, and we both laughed ruefully. ‘Do you have a family?’ he asked.
‘Just my wife‚’ I said. ‘We don’t have children.’ He sighed so compassionately that for a moment I even felt sad about the matter, which in fact hasn’t troubled me for thirty years.
‘Can you write?’ I asked.
‘Yes, I can write, I went to school till I was fourteen or sixteen.’
I gestured at the compass-rose logo on his tee-shirt; ‘Could you write down for me where you’ve been?’ There were some blank pages at the back of my book; I pushed it over to him, and he began to write. He had to ask me the spelling of many words, but his script was quite neat. When he had summarized his past he smiled and said, ‘Where will I go next? I’m a wanderer!’
‘We could call it “The Wanderer”,’ I suggested. He agreed, and I wrote it in above his text.
Here is Mattie’s itinerary so far; I have changed one or two names only:
Matthew James Laffin
Waterford General Hospital.
Went to CBS scool Waterford
11/2 years Royal Hotel main st waterford
Then work in the County Council on the Rd. works 12 months
Then work in ANCO Training course machine operator
Then went to Dubin stay in S.A. army Hostel
Abrakadabra Restaurant I year
Then went to england
work in the nort London Tavern for 12 months.
Potsmoit South See.
Stay in a hostel.
Work in the Harbour Restraunt on the sout pir Potmoit.
Then came home to Waterford
The left again went Drachea [Drogheda] and stay for 7 month.
Then went to Belfast for 3 days. Then went to Clonmel. stay in the goodshead for
6 month then went to london Hostel S. V. De Paul Hostel for 9 weeks
Then Dublin
On my reminding him, he added:
went to Galway
Took a overdose end up in galway Reg Hospital
in for 5 weeks.
By the time he was finished the train was coming into Dublin. Two young American women in the file of people passing along the corridor hailed Mattie with ‘Come on down here, we’ve got something for you.’ He followed them, and came back smiling. ‘Look, they gave me some food in a bag. Cheese and bread and stuff. That was decent of them, wasn’t it?’ In the meantime I had fished in my wallet for a twenty-pound note for him, and had also decided not to give him my address, imagining him turning up on the doorstep of our orderly life unexpectedly. (Later I was ashamed of that decision.) He took the note with a nod: ‘That’ll get me started!’ We shook hands and parted. ‘I’ll have a rest in the station, get a snack, before I go anywhere‚’ he said as he went off ahead of me. Later, as he wandered around with his bucket and I filled in the hour before my connecting train was due by visiting the paper stall and the bookshop, and going out to lean on the parapet and watch the idle dirty river water for a bit, our paths crossed two or three times, and he nodded to me cheerfully. I expect and hope that he took the evening train back to where he had come from.
When I had settled myself in the Galway train I opened my book. Unnoticed by me, Mattie had written a dedication into the front of it. ‘god Bless you always – Matthew James Laffin‚’ it said, just under the book’s title, Realism with a Human Face, which, I now saw, would do well enough for the extra chapter it had acquired.