“Did you see the look on Father Martin’s face?”
“I know, it was priceless!”
The sun beat down on a glorious day in May as their car barreled down the winding roads of the Donegal wilderness, their laughter punctuated by every bump and dip in the road. This was it, the moment they had been dreaming of for years now, a culmination of dedication and sacrifice leading to this – the ultimate escape. They felt like teenagers again, both of them. It hadn’t felt this way in such a long time. The drudgery, the church meetings, the book clubs. The dull dinner parties over at the McGettigans’ every Thursday night, hearing the same dull stories time and again. The same faces and the same lame jokes. All of it, now over, now worth it. Finally free.
“And that old trout Mrs. Carr, oh I bet she’ll be loving this! She’ll have a story to tell for the next forty years!”. He takes a bottle from his jacket pocket and after a healthy swig, hands it to Margaret, who leans back in her seat and sips at her leisure, looking out at the rugged landscape, the wilderness she for so long had craved.
“She does look like a trout, doesn’t she…”
After a brief pause, they both erupt with laughter again, drinking heartily from the bottle and passing it back and forth, doing fish lips to each other, and other impressions of the neighbours they had come to loathe as symbols of everything that had kept them trapped in a confession booth of conformity for so long. And the laughter trails off, leaving smiles of contentment on both their faces. Derek with his eyes on the road, Margaret wistfully watching the mountains and hills as they go by. And then they look to each other. Margaret puts her hand on Derek’s knee and he takes it in his. “We’re free”, she says, “…we’re free”.
The communion party had admittedly become unmanageable quite early on, with the drinking starting well before the wains were even dressed. But that’s to be expected from a repressed community given permission to let loose in the sunshine, albeit under the watchful eye of the local priest. Omnipresent as Father Martin was though, he could never have seen this coming. Of course, Derek and Margaret had always been somewhat different from the rest of the community, a little bit off, some would say, behind closed doors and lace curtains. There was the time at the Christmas Nativity a number of years back, when Derek had the bright idea to punt the baby Jesus over the pub and had to be tackled to the ground. Or the incident at the christening, with the cocaine. But this time was different. It wasn’t so much that he nearly drowned Father Martin in the holy water, or that Margaret showed her arse to distract the congregation while Derek grabbed the pile of communion cards. No, it was that they actually did it. They actually broke free.
The neighbours of course gave chase, but they lost them somewhere outside Kilmacrennan. There’s no tractor in all the land could keep up with two love struck drunkards with seven hundred pounds a dream of a better tomorrow.
“Where are we going to go?”, Margaret asks.
Derek stares at the road in front of him, a slight smile on his lips. After a brief moment, he says, “…to a place where the sun never sets. A place where no one knows us, where we can start over, be anything we want to be. A place with endless opportunity, where gold litters the streets and wine and whiskey flows like pish from a heifer’s arse…”
Together they say it, because together they’ve dreamt it:
“Bundoran…”
Derek suddenly pulls the car into the side of the road, and almost in a frenzy he grabs Margaret by the hands, looking her dead in the eyes. She’s caught off guard, almost surprised, but totally with him.
“Marry me”, he says to her.
“But we are married”, she responds.
“Then marry me again!”
Taken aback, she pauses for a moment, then throws her arms around him and shouts “Oh Derek! Yes! Yes yes a thousand times yes!”, and they make love there and then, by the side of the road somewhere in Donegal, absolutely hammered the pair of them. And they fall asleep in each other’s arms.
The day turns to evening as they sleep in the car, dry seats turn to wet, and the carefree attitude of the morning’s revelry turns to pounding heads and foggy minds. A lone sheep grazes on the rocky roadside, a lone witness to the two rousing lovers.
Margaret is awoken by the slow approach of an old Massey Ferguson crossing the bog next to the road, the sun almost set in the sky and the purple light of dusk over head. Groggy and confused, she shakes Derek to wake him too.
“Derek, Derek wake up. DEREK!”
“What what what, what is it? Where are we…?…is that pish?”
“Ah Jesus Derek, I think we did it again”
Rubbing his face with both hands, a very rough looking Derek tries to gather himself and assess the situation.
“Ah Margaret. What are we doing way out here…?”
“I think it was the communion…”
Derek pats himself down and reaches into his inside pocket, and pulls out a stack of brightly coloured envelopes, each with a different child’s name written on it, each in a different handwriting. He looks up at Margaret, who looks equally as shook as he does.
“…ah fuck”