I step out of a swirling grey wind into the hospital lift, and two figures step in after me. I catch sight of the almost-blue bags under my eyes in the mirror lining the back of the elevator. Christ, I think.
“These mirrors!” the woman says to me in the mirror. She is shaking her head in a way that makes me think she is trying to fix her hair, but her hands are full of a variety of bottles and takeaway cups that I cannot take in. Her frizzy yellow hair is topped with dark roots. She has more energy than I do.
“They shouldn’t be allowed to put mirrors in hospital lifts,” I say, a beat too late for the conversation to take flight.
We each reach to light up a button in neon orange, three, four, five. The other occupant is pushing himself up against the wall of the lift as if trying to disappear. His skin is pink and dry, and he keeps his eyes peering over his belly at his shoes.
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“Everyone having a great day, yeah?” The woman breaks the brief silence as we are pulled towards the wards. We both glance up at her, taking longer than we should to absorb her sarcasm, and taking too long to summon the required vigour to respond. The doors open, and she floats out of the lift, leaving smiles on our faces.
Hers is the kind of small talk I can get behind. I wonder did she get the lift back down with her hospital comrades, battered from hours of watching loved ones suffer and announce, “Well, this is sh**e, isn’t it?”
I might try it myself next time, because I find benign jibber jabber unbearable. I meet my friend every Tuesday for lunch in a canteen where we pay €12 for a compressed cube of battered fish and a shovel full of boiled carrot discs. We have 50 minutes together in a long hall where the noise reverberates, and we have to speak loudly. I love him, but he loves small talk. He needs time to warm up, approximately 49 minutes, as it turns out. It is when we are putting our plates back on the trays that he comes out with something personal, and I say, “You’re after yammering on about the GAA for nearly an hour and you’re telling me this now, when we have to leave?”
We meet one Tuesday for 25 minutes. Twenty, actually, because he’s always late. I warn him that I won’t tolerate traffic chat. He tells me he cycles on Tuesdays, so we’re okay there. He says hello and brings up the name of a politician who is in the news. He confirms, when I ask, that, yes, this is what he wants to spend our time talking about. I roll my eyes and get stuck in. As we put our cups in the bin, he comes out with something that actually gives me some insight into his life.
[ ‘In the loneliest country in Europe, I’ve started chatting to strangers’Opens in new window ]
We meet the following Tuesday. He asks me what I think about the politician. “Are you taking the Mick?” I ask. “We talked about her last week.” I tell him we can talk about the politician again, and when we are dropping our cups in the recycling, I ask for his opinion on an ethical dilemma, but it will have to be homework on his part because our time is up.
When I am part of a seemingly meaningless conversation, I look for loose threads, which I will pull when no one else would dare. Don’t mention the weather, tell me more about how you can’t be the vixen your husband wants you to be. Don’t bleat on about holidays, tell me about your teacher lifting you off your feet by your throat as a young boy. Shut up about your dream and tell me about your brother’s last breath. I’ve never talked to anyone about this, people often say to me, even though they have dropped something in the conversation that I have merely lifted and offered back to them.
Normally, these opportunities come up with people I know, but it also happens with strangers, under shop awnings where I’m waiting for the rain to pass. A lot happens in the rain. One day, it is bucketing down so hard that I am surprised that it is a bus that shows up rather than Noah’s Ark. I look down the barrel of the bus for the least wacky seatmate. I teeter at the edge of a seat so as not to soak the much smaller, much older woman in the window seat. “That’s some rain,” she says. Here we go, I think. “Atrocious,” I say with my back to her, a puddle forming at my feet as the water drips off my rubber raincoat.
[ Good chat? Only when you leave Ireland, you realise it isn’t universalOpens in new window ]
As the bus trundles on, she points through the condensation on the window at a large, oppressive-looking block. “That’s my old school,” she says. “Oh?” I ask, and when I have to get off eight stops later, I pull my hood up and hold her bony arm and tell her I wish I could stay on to talk to her more. “I hope I see you again, Rita,” I tell her, honestly, and I think about our small talk for days.
