Two Walls and a Roof (51 page)

In 2003, after an eternity of partings, I finally picked JoAnn up in Shannon Airport
,
bringing her home at long last. Having had some idea of what she had gone through over the previous months, I didn’t expect a model to arrive out the gate, but the person who did come out was almost unknown to me.  She looked terrible, and as she took my little bunch of flowers, the
first thing I noticed about her
was ho
w cracked and broken her finger
nails were
. T
he second was that she had trouble even holding my flowers, as h
er poor hands were bent inwards
and it was very painful for her to grip anything
,
even my few roses. I was deeply shocked,
feeling in some way responsible
for what had happened to this once beautiful woman that I had met in St Louis not too many years earlier.

She began to shiver physically as we left the terminal
,
and even though it was a cold
,
damp
,
dark morning, I believe the weather was not the reason for her discomfort. I am quite sure that on her sleepless journey across the sea, she had asked herself a thousand questions, and every answer must have filled her with self doubt, and an anxiety for what might lay ahead for her.

My JoAnn had left her two small children, her two older ones as well, her family and numerous friend
s for a man she barely knew
who was living five thousand miles across the ocean. She had no idea when
,
if ever
,
she would see her family again, and as well as all that, she was then immersed in a bitter divorce with her husband. As if that was not bad enough, she had no friends to turn to here if it all went wrong between us
. N
or had she any money, and finally
,
she could not even drive here.  She sat into my car and began to cry uncontrollably. Nothing I said or did was of any help to her, and between sobs and tears we drove home to Mallow to begin our new life together. As we drove
,
it dawned on me very quickly that the woman I had planned to marry loved me far more than I had ever imagined, and as a result of that love and the terrible sacrifices she had to make, she had become a physical and emotional wreck.  I believed too that I was responsible
,
in part at least, if not in full
, for it all. T
here and then I made a promise to love her even more, and so as to show her I meant it, I would give her a little flower every single day for the rest of our lives
.
I have kept that promise, never missing a day in years. When she is abroad I draw squares on a sheet of paper, adding my flower and my thoughts for the day to the square
. T
hen when she returns she has my flowers to h
elp her get over the
homesickness.

An hour
or so
later
we drove into Mallow
,
and I soon put her to bed where she slept for almost a day. Next day she rose up, transformed. It was as if a long dark dream had ended
. W
hile there was still a very long way to go, especially in overcoming the pain of missing her children and her homeland, she began to transform another woman’s house into her very own little home in Avondale Park.

By 2004
,
with both our divorces finalized, we were at long last free to marry
. We decided to wait no longer and go
t married in the Caribbean island of Jamaica. It would be just the two of us
. A
ll we wanted was a simple ceremony, and a break from all the stress of the past number
of years, so we set off in late
April
for
Montego Bay, Jamaica. The first person we met outside of the airport terminal, and even before we got on the transit bus, openly offered us drugs. I almost fell over with surprise, but politely refused. That night we went to bed early and slept through one of the worst tropical storms ever to hit the area, and we never even heard a sound. Next day the roads were all gone and the beach was deserted as a cleanup began. This was a stormy beginning to one of the most amazing holidays I have ever had in my life.

We hired a driver and a car
,
and he took us to see Kingston, New Seville, and Rick
’
s Café, one of the most famous bars in the world. There
,
every evening
,
thousands of tourists come to see the cliff divers who are insane enough to
dive from death-defying heights
into the sea for money. I saw some Americans do it as well, and figured that the only way they were mad enough to try this stunt
was because
they too had met the same guy we did
,
and did not refuse the drugs. It was wonderful to sit in the sun
,
hear the Bob Marley music playing and just chill out
, then
ultimately buy the t-shirt.

Our wedding day came and was as simple as it could be. The hotel prese
nted us with a bottle of c
hampagne and a complimentary horse and buggy ride along the torn up roads. After a bit of unnerving driving
,
the Jamaica
n driver, probably also on the g
anja, decided that he and the horse had had enough
, so he tried to wheel the horse
around in the middle of the main road and return home. This was almost the end of us, as none of the cars
would stop for him, so he had
no choice but to make a mad burst across the road
,
whipping and shouting insults at the poor horse, who was surely as scared as we were. In this mad lurching forward we almost fell out the back of the buggy
,
e
nding our honeymoon, but
we just collapsed laughing. I gave him the bottle of champagne as a token of our thanks for the ride, and he almost hugged me, probably believin
g we too were as high as he was
and didn’t know the value of the drink.

Next day we headed off for an amazing adventure to a place called the Dunns River Falls. Here you hired river shoes
,
and
if you were ‘quite mad’
you entered a waterfall under the strict supervision of a local guide, and began your ascent about half way up the falls. From that point on, you literally climbed your way to the top of this huge cascading waterfall which is at least two hundred feet above the sea floor below. The challenge is to do this climb from within the actual waterfall, carefully picking your steps, and trying not to slip to your death way down in the sea. It is an exhilarating experience and everyone should try it at least once in their lifetime.

When I looked at how all this was done, I felt that we should do it ‘right’ and literally climb these falls from where they enter the open sea
. U
nlike the others, we would begin in the waves and climb up out of it.  No one was doing it this way and I felt that they were a lot of ‘ould women’
,
and we would do it the way Irish men did it. There was no need to bother with an expensive guide, and of course I’d ignore all the warnings about drowning and falling hundreds of feet, or slipping on rocks like glass. All of that was for wimps and old people, and against her better judgment I persuaded my new wife to fol
low me upwards
. We would scoff at the millions of gallons of water pouring down upon
us and climb like the Irish did
;
we would climb from the sea up
.

It was an amazing experience to walk out across a beach
,
then into the sea
,
and start where this torrent fell down upon your head. I
’
ll never forget it. We climbed and slipped and laughed and held each other close and almost suffocated often. I believe I drank well over a gallon of water that day but cared nothing, and feeling quite invincible
,
I pushed and pulled JoAnn up through the Dunns River Falls
. After an
hour of struggling we got to the area where the ‘quite mad people’ used t
o begin their trek. By then
we
,
the certifiable lunatics
,
were seasoned veterans, well over the worst of it and we almost flew to the top.  I was exhilarated it was so exciting and dangerous, and I wanted to redo the whole thing again, but JoAnn began shaking in t
error when she looked back down
and saw where we had come from, and she flatly refused.  Aside from the wedding, that falls adventure was the highpoint of our holiday for me, and even though we did do a lot more fun stuff, nothing could compare to the sheer terror of
possibly
drowning or falling from a great height into the sea below.

We reluctantly left that wonderful romantic island of Jamaica
,
and on landing in Cork
,
we discovered that once again my bags had gone missing. When they were finally delivered, all our clothes were ruined because we had bought some bags of Blue Mountain Coffee in those same mountains, and I believe they showed up on the x
-
ray machines as drugs. It
’
s quite likely that the security services just stabbed our coffee bags to see the contents and didn’t bother to reseal or bag them, so we had no coffee and no clothes, but we were married at long last and who cared about clothes after that.

In the mid nineties Ireland had spawned a Celtic Tiger that we now know was fuelled by a combination of political corruption from the highest level to the lowest, and a banking business that thrived on pure greed. Our little country was booming
.
U2 were the best band in the world
, becoming
Ireland’s musical ambassadors
,
Riverdance and Michael Flatley
’
s dancing phenomenon had captivated the whole world, and being Irish was just about as great as it could get.  JoAnn and I partook in this great wave of prosperity, and we went on many trips abroad, as well as her going back to the US frequently.  Fortunately we did not go into the insanity of the
property boom, but at the time
all boats were rising
,
including ours, and we spent our extra cash on creating memories stored up for the future.

I had always longed to see Rome
,
and for our first wedding anniversary I had secretly planned to take JoAnn there and show her
‘
the
a
ngel pictures’
;
her strange name for the Sistine Chapel. This was supposed to be a great surprise, and I had it all booked with a travel agent in Cork. Not having heard from them as the day approached, I rang them to discover that they had got the month wrong. All they could then offer at such short notice was a trip to Malaga in Spain. I was really annoyed and disappointed
,
but it was either we take it or got into a long battle over money.  By then our day would have passed
. B
esides
,
I had got a feeling to just run with it, so somewhat disappointed we landed in Malaga and began a weekend break in the sun.

With nothing planned and time to
spare, we decided on a whim to
cross Spain to Seville
for a day, revisit the c
athedral and marry each other all over again. When we arrived there the beautiful church was being refurbished
,
and the day we arrived turne
d out to be quite special. The c
athedral had been closed to tourists for the previous weeks and would be closed again for a similar time from the next day onwards, but by some unseen pow
er it just happened to be open
on the one day we got there to remarry, so we did, and thanked God for all that we had
. T
hen we returned to Malaga excited and exhausted.

Our hotel was outside Malaga and had a beautiful beach at the end of its grounds. We loved our time there laying in the sun, reading books and eating their strange foods. On the night before we returned home, we took a taxi into the centre of the city for a last look and got lost right away. It was wonderful to walk around that ancient Roman city and feel the atmosphere of bygone days. We took in the sounds and the smells, and the smiles from Spanish people who could see we were very happy to be there. Then one of the many really strange things that happen to us happened that evening. We were walking along as lost as could be, when all of a sudden I got a really strong
feeling of certainty inside me
that I would be guided to what I used to call ‘my window’.

This was the front window of an art shop located down a small back street somewhere in the city
,
and I have no idea where it is still. However, fifteen years earlier I had been walking alone in Malaga one evening and came across this particular art shop window. It had nothing special in it at all, neither did anything unusual happen there, nor did I go into the shop, but that day for some reason I had stared at the window for a long time
,
memorizing every detail. It had an easel with a blank canvas, a stick figure, paints and brushes in a pottery jar, as well as some drawing books on small shelves over to one side.  For years after that day and quite at random, this window would return to my mind in perfect detail, but I never knew why. It was as if it had some great significance that I was not being allowed to forget.