In the whiteness of snow, there is always a hint of death. It erases all previous marks and makes a space empty again and ready for new beginnings

ONE EVENING during the snow the news on the television carried a story about the difficulty a bride was having getting to the altar for her wedding. When I went to bed that night I fell into a disturbing dream about a woman in a white gown walking towards me through the snow and then putting her fingers on my lips until I was burning up like a fire.

I woke up sweating and full of anxiety, but then I realised that I had left my new electric blanket on. So I presume that is what caused the dream. At least that’s what I told myself the following morning as I opened the shutters and looked out on the white fields and the frozen trees enveloped in fog.

The phone rang in the hallway downstairs. It was a friend calling to say his mother had been taken into hospital and, since he lived too far away, he was wondering if I would go over to Cavan and turn on the heating in her house. He feared she might have turned it off when she was leaving.

I drove through Edgeworthstown and Granard, and arrived at the semi-detached house on the outskirts of Cavan without any bother. I opened the back door, as directed, with a key that is always left under the mat.

I entered and switched on a Dimplex heater in the kitchen. I turned the thermostat gauges in the two front rooms to max.

The house was cluttered with things that conjured up the absent woman: a radio, a Sunday newspaper, a purse with old pound coins in it, a set of rosary beads, a half-empty box of Celebration chocolates, Lemsips, a packet of Panadol, her coat, draped on a chair, and a scarf of purple mohair on the floor.

In the dining room there was a sideboard of silverware, an armchair and an old-fashioned television set where the lady may have spent many hours because the cushions retained the imprint of her body.

I too use the television as a refuge from pain. It numbs me with a noise that is not my own. I am released from the zone of my own anxiety by absorbing daily doses of soap opera, and the deadening narrative of American movies.

As I stared at the empty chair I imagined the old lady as a white ghost sitting there gazing at her television, her eyes moving occasionally from the television screen to me. It was her whiteness that unnerved me.

I drove home through the fog past fields of snow as white as the whale that Captain Ahab pursued with such diligence.

Whiteness, the author of Moby Dicktells us, wipes all colour from the earth. It takes the life and vitality that the world has and freezes it over. In whiteness there is always a hint of death. The new bride’s gown and the infant’s christening shawl are white because an old self has been abandoned. Whiteness erases all previous marks. It makes a space empty again and ready for new beginnings.

That night I made the same mistake again: I forgot to turn the electric blanket off. This time I dreamt I was in the visitors’ gallery at Dáil Éireann sitting beside a newsreader in a wedding gown.

When I looked into the chamber, all the deputies were in long white robes with white hoods covering their heads so that their faces could not be seen behind the gleaming cloth.

“Why are they covered?” I wondered.

The bride from RTÉ said, “It’s payback time, baby. You should never have put a motorway through the Tara valley.”

Then I saw a minister rising, resplendent in his white robes, like some imperial wizard, as he stood before the throne of the ceann comhairle.

“Behold,” he mumbled. “I stand before you as the most innocent, among a legion of white-robed innocents. Yet it must be accepted that the axe is already at the root of the tree. The White Whale has triumphed. The White Hag has returned to the white bush.

“Cathleen has sprung once more from the ashes of the GPO and, through me, she now summons her children to attention and strikes them without mercy in retribution for the sacrilege at Tara.”

“Jesus protect us,” I shouted, as I woke up, sizzling like a rasher on a frying pan and disturbed by a sense of foreboding, though I consoled myself that it was only a dream.

Cathleen has sprung from the ashes of the GPO and, through me, she now summons her children to attention and strikes them without mercy in retribution for the sacrilege at Tara