“SHE’S a targe,” was never a compliment in our town. But recently I’ve been channelling my inner targe. Believe me, there were those in our neighbourhood who were targes. We were sick scared of them when we were children.
There were teachers who battered you with iron bath rails and wooden rulers sellotaped together for going out in the rain at break time or not knowing their favourite saint.
There were priests who ranted and shouted you out of the pitch dark in the confession box: “God gave you a tongue and you use it to say bad words! Shame on you... five Hail Marys and a Glory Be.”
There were shopkeepers who fixed you with a beady eye lest you should nick a midget gem. I knew that the fires of hell were never worth a single midget gem.
And there were old women too with tongues sharp as razors who hunted you with harsh words.
But you never see yourself as a targe. You never see your inner harpy until she sneaks out unexpectedly and shrieks loudly.
“Face it,” says my old friend, “We’re women of a certain age whom younger men dismiss as ould wans not worth paying attention to.”
I was telling her about an altercation where I got very cross and spoke my mind. Not cross so much as upset – so upset that I burst a minor blood vessel in one eye and gave myself a nice set of palpitations.
Maybe it’s the pace of life, I said, sitting in her garden, drinking her coffee and looking at the flowers all around – Angels’ fishing rods, the last roses of summer, white daisies smiling up at you.
We had the sun’s last kiss in September and how could you not be at peace? But still, I said, I never thought I was that targe.
“Moi, little old moi?” I said to my best friend.
Even she, gentle as she always has been, finds she has her moments. But in the garden, with the birds darting about, it ceases to matter.
On the days when I rounded the corner of the street and waltzed around our back to find my mother wearing wellies, old trousers and a battered straw hat kneeling with her arms deep in the soil, then I knew all was right with the world. She found solace in that garden.
Life gets to you sometimes and even years of yoga come to nothing when you’re desperate. Besides, being gentle is over rated. I grew up being gentle and it got me nowhere.
I listened to a young man in a bank once telling me life was tough when I asked him to waive the fee after I was accidentally overdrawn by a few pounds for the first time in 20 years. At that stage, call it the baby blues, but I dropped my head and took the slating.
Sometimes you’re just too worn down to fight. But not any more.
Last week, when my car conked out at the traffic lights and the light turned green and the fella behind started honking his horn, it was all I could do to stop myself sweeping out, tapping on his window and saying: “Pardon me, was I holding you back from open heart surgery, son?”
Now I am up off my knees. Now I am a lioness.
“Cross you, I wouldn’t cross you,” someone said in work – and maybe it’s not such a bad thing.
“You don’t suffer fools,” says my friend.
My mother is heading for her 90th birthday and the garden that was always her saviour can’t serve that role any more. But she lives by the poetry she has always loved. She has a fierce light in her eyes and she will never, ever “go gentle into that good night”. Maybe I’m a chip off the old block.
I have to keep my inner harpy hidden but she leaps out from behind my back sometimes and snaps. Like the other day at work when I spied someone nicking what I thought was the last of the milk for their tea.
“Are you robbing the last of the milk,” I shrieked.
“Don’t you waggle your finger at me!” he cried back.
And it was true. I could have cut that finger off.
Still you can’t keep a good targe down.
Or perhaps it is that when you have lived long enough and seen enough, sometimes, in the immortal words of Lulu, it makes you wanna shout!
