Having received my second Pfizer shot at the Helix Theatre in Dublin, I was waiting in the foyer, under the benign gaze of a couple of medics, for the obligatory 15 minutes in case I sprouted wings or keeled over. Sitting there, I was struck once again by the oddness of being cheek by jowl solely with one’s own age cohort, with no other connection between us all than our shared year of birth.
Earlier, in the conga line for vaccinations (the queue moved really fast this time, so I was done and dusted in about 40 minutes), I’d spotted a man I thought I recognised.
He was wearing a cloudy blue shirt, a couple of leathery wristbands and an expression of hard-won forbearance. (Yes, of course he was also sporting trousers and shoes, otherwise I would have said.) There was something about his face under the now-grey hair that seemed familiar.
I think I might have danced with him in the Grove about 45 years ago. It might even have been a slow set. I’m Not in Love might have been playing. (“I keep your picture / Upon the wall. / It hides a nasty stain that’s lying there, / Oo-ooh, oo-ooh, oo-ooh.”)
Hilary Fannin: Our wedding story? Met, got a bit sloshed, missed last bus, had two kids
‘Get through your 50s in good shape and you could well live to be 90’
Hilary Fannin: I came into town on a mission to buy books and bras
Hilary Fannin: Camille? Julie? Amber? Whatever happened to plain old Spot the dog?
Maybe I scrawled his name all over my homework notebook, looking out of the tall school windows at the shedding trees
Maybe we even snuck outside and briefly shivered together in our cheesecloth shirts, away from the prying eyes of the bouncers. Maybe we shared a flattened Grand Parade from a pack of 10 crushed into the pocket of his Levi’s. Maybe we drank from a naggin of vodka, pilfered from his father’s drinks cabinet.
Maybe we arranged to meet the following week to go and see Jaws at the Carlton or Saturday Night Fever at the Savoy. Maybe I scrawled his name all over my homework notebook, looking out of the tall school windows at the shedding trees.
And then again, maybe I didn’t.
Mercifully for him, the social restrictions in operation at the vaccination centre prevented me from leaping over the barrier and asking him if he still had his Bay City Rollers socks and his Gerry Rafferty tape and if he still wanted his life to mean something, to really really mean something.
The line moved towards the cubicles and I lost sight of him.
The nurse who administered my second injection was lovely. My left arm was her last shot before her tea break.
“Anything to report since your first jab?” she asked.
I thought about telling her that life hadn’t been all that easy in the last while actually. I’d recently lost a brave friend to a remorseless illness; another was battling a major health crisis. I thought about telling her that on the cusp of my 60s I felt unexpectedly vulnerable. I considered saying that I felt a little bit ambushed by the past, by roads not taken, words not spoken.
I could then have said that I knew it was nothing special, that I knew plenty of people who were feeling depleted after the endless Covid winter. Mainly, though, I wanted to tell her that I was profoundly grateful to be here, in this little white room, with a needle hovering near my oxter.
“Everything has been absolutely fine,” I said, and stuck out my arm.
Maybe my one-time dance partner had something terribly urgent to do concerning wind energy or reforestation or alpaca farming or the restoration of a once-important landmark
I don’t think my leather-braceleted friend waited the full 15 minutes for clearance at the end. I looked surreptitiously around the foyer for him, while pretending to read the leaflet on side effects (none of which occurred). It was an area largely populated, it seemed to me, by patient, comfortable-looking men in well-ironed short-sleeved shirts (all the better to receive the elixir), their little badges of cotton wool and tape visible on their freckled arms.
Maybe my one-time dance partner had important business elsewhere. Maybe he had an anxious dog waiting for him in the car, or a 27-year-old girlfriend with a butterfly tattoo on the small of her back, strumming her fingers over her phone in a waterfront apartment, sunlight rippling on the glass.
Maybe he had a wife pacing the floor of a solicitor’s office. Maybe he had a tax accountant rubbing his knuckles into his eye sockets while he waited for his client. Maybe he couldn’t wait around because of work. Maybe he had something terribly urgent to do concerning wind energy or reforestation or alpaca farming or the restoration of a once-important landmark, the kind of edifice we thought would never crumble. I suppose I’ll never know.
My 15 minutes were up. I stood, thanked the watchers and left, armed, for now, against the future.