Bernard O'Donoghue

He was there again in the small hours: not this time in a dream, but in a dream of dreaming. Even so the two of us looked aside, stuck for something to discuss that was not a matter of life and death, so we fell back on football and the elections. Then suddenly he started talking: talking as he’d never talked in his life. He knew it wasn’t wise to take up cigarettes again at the wedding the day before; and driving back the engine misfired once, or twice. And then I started talking too. I told him about two other recurrent dreams: the first that I was smoking again too, but it was all right because I knew I could give up. Stranger than that, my twilight dream of the car headlights failing — but that too was all right because I knew they’d work again.

All in the half-dark, we watch the dead playing the parts of the living, in roles we have seen before: The Quiet Man, or The Song of Bernadette. A stranger in a blue Thames van came from somewhere to the west as night drew in, to unload the big, flat cans with reels in them and tramp up the unpainted stairs to the organ-loft in the Church Hall. But I don’t remember seeing this film before: which must be right because I can’t recall what happens next, or even whether it has a happy ending.