“Can't turn back the tide...” Tom Waits sings mournfully in Grapefruit Moon, and his words echoed for me after Storm Éowyn mowed through Ireland last Friday.
I had been warned, a warning I had glibly chosen to ignore, and I paid the price.
It wasn’t the weather reports on TV, or the radio, or the ear-splitting phone alert that caused the consternation: it was Genghis.
He had called round in his van on Thursday morning with a trailer carrying a long ladder and heavy-duty ratchet straps, and stood at the door silently.
“If you’re looking Fionnuala she’s not here.”
I barely looked up from the form I was filling in for little Dermot’s playschool.
“I’m looking you. Have you a pair of boots?” He looked at my loafers as though they were ballet pumps.
“I might have. Why?”
But he was gone. He had a deplorable habit of evaporating after asking a question and then starting whatever it was he had asked you to help with, immediately and sternly.
It brought “passive-aggressive” to another level and I was flabbergasted at how rude the man was. No wonder he was still young, free and single. Well, free and single anyway.
When I first moved to Tyrone, I had dismissed any slagging my Belfast friends proffered about cavemen from the country, with dreadful clothes and heart-breaking haircuts. They’re no different to us, I’d counter – don’t be so narrow-minded.
But Genghis had me doing a re-think. I’d never met anyone like him: a slab of inscrutable and unpredictable marble.
If ever you woke up in a chair, cable-tied, with a whiff of chloroform in the air, surely the figure in the shadows would be Genghis; a fag in his mouth and a hammer hanging in his hand. You’d know he wouldn’t speak as the torture began.
I looked out the kitchen window and saw him eyeing up the playhouse at the bottom of the garden.
He glanced up at me, his eyes like slits. How did he know I was watching? Coincidence probably, but I turned away.
What was he at? It must be this storm that was coming. Fionnuala must have rung him and asked should we batten down the hatches and, of course, he said yes. Why hadn’t she mentioned it to me?
Or had he called her? Better safe than sorry and all that. Still, she should have said something.
I was prowling around the kitchen, growing more and more indignant, when he appeared at the door.
“Get going here, I haven’t all day.”
“All day for what?”
“We’re gonna strap down the playhouse. It’s a two-man job.”
“It’s a no-man job because it’s not happening. Are you saying a bit of wind coud lift that big playhouse? This isn’t The Wizard of Oz, Genghis.”
He looked up from the floor as the sun came out behind him, not a breeze in the air.
“I’m not asking again.”
“Good,” I said, emboldened. “Because whoever concocted this should have consulted me first. It’s my house after all.”
But he was gone again and I rolled my eyes. Good God, some people have nothing to be at.
Funny, Fionnuala didn’t mention anything when she got back, and apart from the odd concerned look out the window – at the playhouse? – she was placid. Later, I heard her reassuring Imogen in bed about the storm and that we were safe in our house. “Like the three little pigs.”
It was about 5am when a loud bang woke me up. Was I imagining things? Fionnuala was sleeping fitfully beside me and I crept out of bed and listened to the gale.
It was like a machine, like the wind had been weaponised. Like a gigantic circular saw was trying to slice through our bricks and mortar, and I dared not look out into the garden for I knew I would see Genghis looking up, a fag in his mouth and a hammer hanging in his hand.