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Insistently the old woman put her claws on my arm.“The trains it is, I’m meaning. Like worms, like snakes, running through the bowels of the earth. Look there, a paper on the ground—” And leaning over she scooped it up. It was the wrapper from a chocolate bar. She read the logo ponderingly, “Mars,” she breathed.Not for the first, I confess, I, too, considered the notion of a chocolate named for a planet or god of war. A delicious smell rose from the wrapper—but died in the wall of alcohol that hung about the old woman and now me. Everyone else, of course, stayed deep in their books, papers, thoughts. They weren’t going to see the old woman. She was my problem.

For a moment I wondered where she had come from. Had she been on the tube all this while, and just got up and come staggering along to me on a whim? She spoke in the musical lilt of the green land, but I do not, for I’m only an Irish Londoner.

Then off she goes again.

“What’s there in your bag? Is it of use? Sure, it looks nice to me. A rosy apple and a bottle of green glass.Well, we’ll be dancing, then.”

We?

I read my paper, the same paragraph, over and over. And she kept up her monologue. It was all about me, and the bottle, and what the train was like, and how it was a snake, and that we would soon be home, so we would.

Well, I thought of calling the police on my mobile when I stepped off the train at Russell Park, and she came lurching off with me, clutching my free arm to steady herself. Should I ease away? Should I push her, shout at her—or for help? No.Nobody would pay attention, besides she was a poor old inebriated woman, in quite a good, clean, well-made, long coat, and boots of battered leather.And her long grey hair was a marvel, thick as wool and hanging to her waist; and if it was all knotted and tangled, no surprise, she would need to groom such a mane every day, like a Persian cat, to keep it tidy, and obviously she’d had other things on her mind.

Before I could think, we were on the escalator, riding up toward the street, and her still on my arm as if we were close friends, going to the cinema in 1947.

Embarrassed, I looked around and noticed two or three Goth girls were on the escalator behind us. They had the ferocious, look-at-me beauty of the very young, all in their black, and liquid ink of hair. They wore sunglasses, too, the blackest kind—all the better not to see us with. I only gave them a glance, relieved really they’d have no interest in me or my companion.

“Where is it you need to get to?” I asked her, politely, as we arrived in the ticket-hall.

“Here I am,” she said.

“No, I mean which station do you need? Or is it a particular road here you want?”

“Branch Road,” said she, in a stinging puff of whisky.

Oh my Lord, I thought, oh my Lord.

But it wasn’t until I went through the mechanical barrier with my ticket, and she somehow slipped through exactly with me, which is impossible, emerging the other side—not till then that I began to see. But even then, I didn’t. I just concluded she was criminally adept, though drunk as a barrel.

So out we go on the street.And the dusty summer traffic roars by, and she clicks her tongue in fascinated disapproval.

“Well, now,” she says,“well, now, cailín, let’s be going where we’re to go.”

Then she winked.Her eyes were blue, but as she closed one in the wink, they gave off a flash of daffodil yellow. So then, I had to know, didn’t I. It was only seven days before, mind you, I had found and read Colum’s book and talked to him in my dream.

OUTSIDE THE FLAT, the trees in the street were a green bloomed by dust and pollution, but they filled the front windows like flags of jade. All was as I had left it, messy, cleaned four weeks ago and not since, the washing machine full of washed and dried washing, the cupboards fairly bare.

I put my bag down and watched the Speir-Bhan as she pottered around, peering into this and that, craning into the tiny bathroom, lifting the lid of a pan of baked beans left on the stove. When she managed to undo the washing machine and most of the load