Timothy ‘Bud’ Badyna ran the fastest backwards marathon—3 hours 53 minutes and 17 seconds at Toledo, Ohio, on 24 April 1994. 2 page

I wheeled the fridge around the car park a bit like a sportsman warming up, and it felt good. Me, the fridge and the trolley were going to get along just fine. We would have been the dream team if it hadn’t been for the rucksack. Initiation ceremony out of the way we headed off. Shane had exceeded his initial brief by organising bed and breakfast accommodation for me in an area south of the River Liffey called Donnybrook. He started to relax and we chatted more freely. He revealed himself to be quite amused by my prospective expedition and suggested that I get in touch with a radio show on RTE FM 2 called The Gerry Ryan Show. He said that they liked to get behind wacky ventures and mine fitted the bill perfectly. I hadn’t thought of doing anything like that but as we progressed slowly through the gridlocked centre of Dublin the idea grew on me.

We reached Donnybrook and I paid Shane the £130 I owed him for the fridge.

‘By the way, how much is the bet for?’ he asked.

‘A hundred pounds,’ I replied.

He was confused for a moment, then he rather hurriedly wished me good luck and drove off with a look on his face which suggested that he was relieved that I wasn’t in his car anymore.

§

I was greeted at the B&B by Rory, a young man who looked as if he’d just graduated and was some way from being the middle-aged maternal lady called Rosie who I imagined ran all these kinds of establishments. He had very thick lenses in his glasses and I found the resulting enlargement of his eyes a little disconcerting. He declared that he had no problems on the vacancy front given that he had no other guests staying. Initially he didn’t comment as I wheeled the fridge into his hall, but he surveyed it in such a way as to suggest that he wasn’t confident that his thick lenses were thick enough. A few seconds passed and he capitulated.

‘Is that a fridge?’ he said.

This was an enquiry I was to hear a good deal more in the weeks to come.

‘Yes,’ 1 replied accurately.

He didn’t pursue this line of questioning and I offered nothing further although I could tell that he was curious. I had made a decision before leaving that I would try not to volunteer information about this fridge unless it was asked of me and then I would tell the truth. I was interested to see how many people wouldn’t ask, either through politeness or a general lack of interest. Rory fell into the former category.

Shortly after I’d settled into my room and was embarking on some gentle unpacking there was a knock on the door. It was Rory asking me if I would do him a favour. I carelessly said ‘no problem’ in a manner of which Shane would have been proud. Rory said that he was popping out for a while and would I mind answering the phone if it went, and once again I obliged with another ‘no problem’. Forty minutes and three bookings later, I decided that the best course of action was to go out myself.

I was feeling pretty jaded, with recent sleepless nights and the trauma of the flight taking their toll, but I had two things I wanted to do before I turned in for the night. Firstly, since Shane had pointed out that the RTE studios were fortuitously only five minutes walk away, I saw no harm in dropping a note into The Gerry Ryan Show giving them details of the journey I was about to embark on and leaving the phone number of Rory’s B&B if they wanted to speak to me in the morning. Also I wanted to take a photograph.

On a previous visit to Dublin I’d gone to a nightclub in a basement in Leeson Street called Buck Whaley’s. It was an evening of no significance other than for an estate agent’s sign which had caught my eye. Two doors down from Buck Whaleys another basement club had closed down but the dormant neon light letters spelling out the word ‘DISCOTHEQUE’ remained. Outside an estate agent had placed a board saying:

TO LET

COMMERCIAL PROPERTY

SUIT DISCO

I was impressed. After all that’s what you pay your money for. Without the particular expertise of that estate agent and for his aptly chosen words ‘surr DISCO’, heaven knows what doomed commercial venture an entrepreneur might have considered for that property, carelessly clearing out the bars and breaking up the dancefloor in order to open up a shoe shop.

I got there to find the photo opportunity was denied to me since the board was no more, someone wisely having followed its sound advice opening it up as a disco. Commission well earned by Messrs Daly, Quilligan and O’Reilly.

I dropped my explanatory letter into RTE, ate a disappointing takeaway, returned to Rory’s, took a shower and went to bed. Fortunately I was so tired that it didn’t take me long to fall asleep. If it had, I might have started to become anxious about what the next day held in store.

§

The next morning I was woken by Rory knocking on my door. I thought, ‘Oh God, I suppose you’re going out again and you want me to man the telephones and make my own breakfast?’ but said, ‘Yes?’

Not such a good line but it came a close second.

‘Phonecall for you,’ said an excited Rory, ‘it’s The Gerry Ryan Show.’

‘Oh. Right.’

Having been awake only a matter of seconds I wasn’t exactly on top of what all this meant I opened the door and Rory handed me one of those cordless phones which nearly always get a bad reception however much the manufacturers promise otherwise. I put it to my ear.

‘Hello?’

‘Hello Tony, it’s Siobhan here from The Gerry Ryan Show, I’ll put you on hold’and you’ll be through to Gerry in a minute.’

Gerry? I don’t know a Gerry. And why can’t he talk to me now? Before I could say anything I found myself listening to Chris Rea and the whole thing dawned on me. Oh no, I was going to be on air after this record! What about my hair? I cleared my throat several times in an effort to make it sound less like I’d just woken up. I tried to ignore Chris Rea’s lyrics; after all the thought of being on ‘the road to hell’ was disturbing enough first thing in the morning, but when you were about to embark on a venture like mine it was almost as if the bastard was taking the piss.

Gerry Ryan’s voice cut through the fading record.

‘Now, I’ve got Tony Hawks on the line. Good morning Tony—now you’re about to make an interesting journey—would you care to tell us about it?’

I can think of easier things to do one minute after you’ve woken up.

Actually I didn’t do a bad job of explaining what I was up to and why, even managing to be faintly amusing from time to time.

‘I’ve no idea if I’ll stay this jolly,’ I said to Gerry at one stage, ‘it’s only because I haven’t started yet that I sound this happy.’

‘Well, I think maybe if the weather is good for you, you’ll probably get a very good response, and indeed knowing the way the national psyche of the people in this country works, you’ll probably be made extremely welcome—and it will be a great thing for the peace process.’

‘Well, I hope to be passing through Northern Ireland later today, so if I can do anything to smooth things over up there I’d be more than happy—maybe we should all get round the fridge. People have tried getting round tables and it doesn’t really work out, the whole body language thing behind a table is all wrong—so let’s all get round the fridge.’

‘I think you may have hit on something there, Tony—that could be our motto for the peace process—‘Let’s get round the fridge’.’

We must have chatted for six or seven minutes, which surprised me because I was so used to English radio where they want a few quick soundbytes from you before they whack on another record. We even took a call from a pub landlord offering to throw a fridge party’ when I got to Cork. I thanked him and promised to take him up on the offer, but wondered if he had any idea as to what a fridge party might involve. It didn’t seem to matter.

In Gerry Ryan I could tell I was dealing with a very accomplished broadcaster who had mastered the art of calmly coping with four things happening at once whilst talking at the same time. He also seemed to be genuinely intrigued by the absurdity of my undertaking and wound up the interview by saying, ‘This is exactly the kind of thing that we like to keep an eye on—we will put the full weight of RTE behind you, will you call us tomorrow?’

‘Absolutely, Gerry, I’d be delighted.’

‘Good morning.’

‘Good morning.’

§

I sounded happy and indeed I was. But only because I hadn’t woken up properly, both in the physical and metaphorical sense, to the reality of what lay ahead of me. Furthermore I hadn’t looked out of the window so I was blissfully unaware that it was sheeting down with rain.

Through the phone’s earpiece I heard Gerry’s summing up, ‘Good luck to Tony…well, you have to say it’s a completely purposeless idea, but a damn fine one.’

I hoped that the rest of Ireland would feel the same.

On my way to the B&B’s dining room I was intercepted by a beaming Rory.

‘So that’s what the fridge is for, you madman.’

He led me into the kitchen and sat me down at a table where I could watch him prepare breakfast. Presumably this was an honour bestowed upon guests who had just been on national radio. In the next few minutes Rory really opened up to me, telling me about his studies, travels and his business partnership with his father, all at the expense of my bacon. He didn’t mind. He simply tossed the burnt rashers away and extravagantly produced some fresh ones. All at the expense of my eggs. He wasn’t very good at this breakfast business and it might have been easier for me if I hadn’t been coerced into watching. It didn’t bother him though, he was too busy telling me about the Five-year Economic Plan he and his Dad had worked out.

I don’t know what had caused the conversational floodgates to open but I suppose there must be something about knowing why someone is travelling with a fridge that sets your mind at ease, however irrational the reason may be. Overnight Rory may have felt that he had a dangerous psychopath as his only guest but now he knew the truth. I was a good-humoured eccentric for whom care with breakfast wasn’t a priority. In fact he lavished a service of complete neglect upon me; he disappeared off to answer the phone three times and his prolonged absence necessitated my self-promotion to breakfast chef. Not a problem, for I was a better cook than him and I was pleased he was getting more bookings. Last night’s level of occupancy wasn’t in accordance with the Five-year Plan.

Rory returned from his last phonecall just as I was completing my first meal of the day.

‘Good breakfast?’ he enquired, making no apology for his lack of involvement in its creation.

‘Lovely. Thanks.’

§

Twenty minutes later I was in a taxi taking me to the bus station, Rory having charged me half price for the room.

‘Ah, if you’re staying in guest houses for a month you’ll need to save money,’ he had said. A nice gesture—or was he trying to tempt me back there to work full time?

The taxi driver had helped me in with the fridge but had failed to see anything in it worthy of conversation. He had his own agenda and he wanted to chat about traffic congestion in the city, unnecessary roundabouts and the mindless introduction of one-way systems. Taxi drivers are the same throughout the world—great levellers. Never mind that Nelson Mandela, President Clinton or Michelle Pfeiffer has jumped into the cab, they’ll get no specialist treatment, none whatsoever. The driver will bore them just as shitless as you and me.

At the bus station I was to discover that pulling a fridge on a trolley wasn’t easy amongst large numbers of people who were in a hurry. Cornering was harder than I had imagined and going down stairs was a particularly hazardous business. I knew that in the course of the next few weeks I wouldn’t want to find myself in a hurry too often. Selfconsciously I made my way to the ticket office taking care not to injure small children with my cumbersome load. I was aware now of the heavy rain outside and was approximately at the mid-point of a mood swing from jolly to despairing.

I bought a ticket to Navan where I was to start hitching. I would be happy if I could make it as far as Cavan by nightfall and then take on the potentially difficult journey to Donegal the following morning. As far as I could make out from the map, the roads leading to Donegal dipped in and out of Northern Ireland, and I was anxious not to find myself hitching in that part of the world. Apart from the fact that I’d been told that drivers very rarely stop for hitchers there, I was conscious of the interest a small white container might hold for the security forces. Of all the romantic and heroic ways to leave this world, being part of a controlled explosion with a large kitchen appliance rated very poorly. Folk songs and poems were unlikely to be written, and not just because fridge’ is a very difficult word to find a rhyme for.

The bus driver, a balding middle-aged avuncular figure, helped me load the fridge into the vast luggage compartment at the rear of the bus. There were no other bags in there and I was concerned that it would slide from side to side every time we went round a comer.

‘Isn’t it going to slide from side to side every time we go round a corner?’ I asked the driver.

‘Ah no, ifll be just fine,’ he assured me authoritatively.

There were no views to be enjoyed on the fifty-minute busride because the heavy rain meant that the windows had steamed up. I don’t understand the physics behind why that happens but I do know that it does little to improve your state of mind. My personal mood swingome-ter had now left ‘jolly’ way behind and was nudging ‘despair’ with a fleeting stop at ‘mild wretchedness’.

We ploughed on through the rain towards Navan, five of us dotted around the bus, either reading or, like me, indulging in painful self examination. There were no conversations to distract me from my immediate fate, the only sounds were the hum of the engine and that of the fridge sliding from side to side every time we went round a corner.

Finally we arrived in what I took to be Navan. We went up a hill and on my right I could just make out a sign saying ‘NOBBER MOTORS’. Excellent—this cheered me up—a secondhand car dealer’s called Nobber Motors. Where the salesmen really screw you.

I could fathom two other things from peering through the smudge I’d created in the window’s condensation; it was now raining harder than ever, and the town centre of Navan was no place to start hitching because everyone here was either shopping or going to the bank. Thinking there may be a suitable stretch of open road north of the town, I decided to consult the driver.

‘Excuse me, but is there a bus stop north of Navan?’

‘Where are you headed?’

‘Er…Cavan.’

‘Well, this bus goes to Cavan.’

‘Yes…er…yes…but the thing is…I want to get out at a spot which might be suitable—’

‘You’re going to Cavan you say?’

‘Yes, but-Well, this bus is going to Cavan.’

‘I know that, but—’

‘Where are you trying to get to?’

‘Er…Cavan.’

‘Well, this bus is going to Cavan.’

I sat back down again, in absolutely no doubt as to where this bus was going. It was going to Cavan. From my point of view the exchange with the driver had been an abject failure. All I had succeeded in doing was confirming beyond any doubt whatsoever something that I already knew, and I now had a problem with regard to getting off the bus, the driver seemingly now having taken it upon himself to make sure that he delivered me to Cavan. Any attempt by me to try and get him to stop and let me out on the open road would result in his insistence that it wasn’t Cavan, and that his bus was going to Cavan.

Now I could have insisted he stop and let me off; it was after all my inviolable right as a passenger, and what was more, I had already travelled further than the validity of my ticket permitted. But I was suffering from the English disease of not wanting to make a scene. like most English people I fall into the category of those who will suffer a third-rate meal at a restaurant with sloppy service, and then, when faced with the waiter’s question ‘Is everything okay, sir?’ will simply say ‘Yes, fine thanks’. Better that way than making a scene. The last thing you want to do is make a scene.

Somehow I had to find a way of not going to Cavan on this bus. Without making a scene. I decided to try and sneak off at the next stop, hoping that there would be a reasonable amount of cover created by passengers getting on and off. It was a long shot but it might just work. Fifteen minutes later we stopped on the outskirts of a small town and a few of the people who had joined us in Navan got up and started to make their way off the bus. It was now or never. I quickly jumped to my feet and slipped between an old man, and a woman carrying a baby. It was touch and go whether the driver would see me out of the corner of his eye but I skilfully used my rucksack to obscure my face. I was good. I was very good, and I found myself descending the steps of the bus with freedom in sight. Such was my feeling of elation when I hit the ground and started to move off that I was untroubled by the driving rain which greeted me. Suddenly I stopped in my tracks. The fridge! I’d forgotten the fridge!

I turned round to see the bus doors closing. I scrambled back to the bus and just managed to slam my fist again in the closed door before the bus pulled away. The driver looked down and recognised me. He opened the doors and said, ‘This isn’t Cavan yet.’

We were back to square one.

‘I know. It’s just that—’

‘Jump back on, this bus is going to—’

‘Cavan, yes I know, it’s just that I thought I might spend some time here first.’

‘In Kells?’

He looked a little surprised, a desire to spend some time in Kells not being a preference often expressed. Looking around me, all I could see was a pub, a shop and the reason for the driver’s surprise. Then I became conscious of the rain. Hard driving rain. I remembered my comfortable lifestyle at home and it occurred to me that I needed to be somewhere where there was a pub, a shop and a head doctor’s.

I responded to the driver’s bewilderment, ‘Yes, I like the look of Kells. Very much.’ I might have been overdoing it. ‘I need you to open up the back for me to get my stuff out.’

The driver obliged, but with a lack of enthusiasm bordering on disapproval. He didn’t buy this whole ‘wanting to spend some time in Kells’ yarn and as far as he was concerned I’d let him down badly by not staying on his bus as far as Cavan. He helped me out with the fridge, treating it as if it was a perfectly ordinary piece of baggage, and said ‘Goodbye now’ with a hollowness which reflected his deep disappointment in me.

Oh well, sometimes you’ve got to tread on a few toes in this world.

Rain, Mud And A Jack Russell

This was it. My reason for being here, the apogee of a dream held dear for so long and the inception of an unlikely and unpredictable voyage of discovery. I had arrived at the point of no return. I had my rucksack, I had my fridge and I had my desire. Nothing was going to stop me now.

Except the rain.

Look, I know it sounds feeble, but it really was raining too hard. To my mind there seemed little point in starting off the whole thing absolutely wet through and miserable. Okay—all right—and I needed to acquire some courage of the Dutch variety.

When I wheeled the fridge into the pub, the head of the little old man at the bar span round immediately.

‘Is that a fridge?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I replied, growing quite skilled at this response.

There was a silence as the old man surveyed my baggage pensively.

‘Sweet mother of Jesus, I’ve never seen a man come in here with a rucksack and a feckin’ fridge before,’ he said. And the’n smiled, ‘Have you got a bomb in it?’

I explained about my bet and he shook his head in amazement, but then conceded, ‘It’s a very neat little fridge—everyone should have one.’

I agreed and then raised the question of whether there was any possibility that someone might appear behind the bar to serve me a drink.

‘Ring the bell and he’ll be with you in a moment. He’s busy doing stocktaking—counting bottles or something.’

I rang the bell and in the ten minutes it took before it provided any kind of result I learned most of what there was to know about the old man’s life. His name was Willy, he lived in Kells, had spent the years between 1952 and 1962 in London, had fought for the British in the second world war in North Africa, was now spending his army pension money on one of his favourite hobbies—whiskey, and his blood group was ‘Rh Negative’. I didn’t even know what my own blood group was, but already I knew Willy’s. He’d just come back from Navan where he’d been giving blood and he was rather proud of the fact that there weren’t very many ‘Rh Negatives’ in Ireland. Lucky him, he had the privilege of being born special; some of us had to lug fridges around to achieve that status.

The landlord eventually emerged from the bowels of his own pub, unflustered and unapologetic, and I ordered a drink.

‘He’s got his own ice,’ said Willy to the landlord, who didn’t get the joke because he hadn’t yet seen the fridge at the foot of his bar. Still Willy laughed, and I smiled supportively.

‘Do you do food?’ I asked the confused landlord. He shook his head and mumbled, ‘No.’

‘Oh.’

‘Next year.’

‘What?’

‘Next year. We start doing food next year.’

I really was getting quite hungry and I figured that next year wasn’t going to be soon enough so I nipped over the road to the shop to buy a sandwich.

When I returned the pub was considerably busier and there was much excitement and raised voices. The atmosphere was transformed, the only constant being that for the landlord, the counting of bottles was still taking priority over the selling of them. Two middle-aged couples had come in and Willy was undergoing a rigorous cross examination. As politely as I could, I struggled between them to rescue my pint and sat down to listen in until I had enough information to ascertain exactly what was going on. The newcomers were two sisters, originally from Kells but now living in Canada, and their Canadian husbands. The sisters had left Kells in 1959 and hadn’t been back since. Each disclosure of a Kells character that Willy and the two sisters knew was welcomed with a cacophonous enthusiasm which was visibly starting to piss off the husbands. They were already more concerned than their wives at the lack of any tangible barman. An almighty clamour greeted the discovery that the sisters’ mother used to do Willy’s mother’s hair many many years ago. Other discoveries of a similar magnitude followed until the atmosphere was suddenly punctured by a raised and irascible Canadian voice, ‘How does anyone get a drink around here?’

Willy gently explained the protocol, the bell was rung and the reminiscing continued, but at a slightly more acceptable volume. It also entered a new domain.

‘Do you remember a little woman, auburn hair—a wonderful dancer…Rosie…lived beside the church?’

‘Yes, of course we do.’

‘She’s dead.’

‘Oh dear. Mind, she must have been a fair old age.’

‘That she was.’

‘What about her sisters?’

‘Dead.’

‘And the brother?’

‘Dead.’

The next twenty minutes saw the establishment of who was alive and who was dead from the 1959 population of Kells. The only high point was the appearance of the landlord which soothed the nerves of the Canadian contingent and saw my pint glass replenished.

Then the ladies were furnished with two important new facts. That Willy was an ‘Rh negative’ and that I was travelling with a fridge. The sisters thought the latter was hilarious and it even caused some amusement in the long suffering Canadian camp.

‘You’re carting a ruddy fridge with you—for what?’

I told them about the bet.

‘Who the hell is going to give you a ride?’

I told them it would fit in a four-door saloon car.

‘Well, I hope you’ve got good walking shoes and a good ruddy mac.’

More laughter. All of this wasn’t instilling me with confidence. The banter was all good natured but it was undermining my already fragile state of mind.

I looked at the fridge and saw a toy machinegun.

§

I hadn’t hitched anywhere for about fifteen years. I was hoping the thumb hadn’t lost the old magic. I’d hitched alone in America, my obliviousness to the danger somehow making me immune to it On one triumphant day, I’d made it from Niagara Falls to New York City in a quicker time than it took the Greyhound bus. I had met a lot of nice people and experienced much kindness. One guy, seeing that I was hungry, insisted on buying me a huge lunch and when I thanked him for his kindness, he simply said, ‘Pass it on.’ I liked this selfless concept—repay me by rewarding someone else entirely with a generous-dollop of goodwill.

The only slightly dodgy experience was in France when I was picked up by an elderly man whose second question to me was what did I think of nude bathing? Having originally said I was headed for Lyons, I immediately revised my destination and insisted he let me off in Chalon-sur-Saone. As I got out of the car he said something in French which I didn’t understand but I assume meant something equivalent to, ‘But this bus is going to Cavan.’

I hauled my load slowly to a suitable spot by the roadside, noticing with some concern that cars were coming by at alarmingly irregular intervals. In a physical and emotional state close to numbness, I arranged myself by the roadside and tried to force myself to feel optimistic. Although the rain had eased off, it was still spitting and the clouds on the horizon suggested that it wouldn’t be long before the waterproofs would have to come out. I surveyed the surroundings with which I hoped I wouldn’t become too familiar and saw that I had chosen a bleak unwelcoming stretch of road on which to begin my journey. It wasn’t ugly and it certainly wasn’t attractive; it was just a dull stretch of Irish road. Electricity pylons, a couple of fields and the back view of a sign pointing the other way which, with any luck, read ‘NO SCOFFING AT THE HFTCHER’. I put the fridge a little way in front of me and leant the rucksack against it trying to create an impression of normality—that a fridge and a rucksack should be seen together, and I stuck my thumb out.

A Ford Fiesta sped past. Then a Vauxhall Cavalier. A Renault next, and then a red car whose make I couldn’t fathom. That was four cars and none of them had shown any sign of stopping. What was going wrong? Had they not seen that my thumb was out? Were they not intrigued by the sight of this fridge? A Citroen, a large truck, a Ford Escort and a BMW later I sat on the fridge for a moment and gathered my thoughts. Eight vehicles had been past and I had been there ten minutes. I realised that this was less than one car a minute. I checked the second hand of my watch, and waited a minute. Oh dear. Nothing. Things were going from bad to worse. Even less than one car a minute. I tried to escape from this statistical mire by giving myself a pep talk in which I resolved to think positively for a quarter of an hour or so. I got up off the fridge and attempted to stand in such a way as to present myself as a strong, positive man with an air of vulnerability about him, thinking that this might give me the best ‘across the board’ appeal to oncoming drivers.

This gave me cramp. So I sat back down on the fridge and wondered how I could have been so naive as to have expected a steady flow of traffic on a main road. Maybe I should have got a piece of card with my destination written on it. Maybe I should have got a card and written ‘ANYWHERE’ on it. Maybe I should have recognised the difference between a funny idea and the practicality of attempting to act it out. Cars passed with an infrequency which left me having fantasies about traffic congestion. The numbness which I had felt when I began had long since disappeared and instead I now found my emotions lurching from one extreme to the other. Each time I could see a car or truck on the horizon I would become filled with expectation, ‘This is it! This is the one!’ As it drew nearer I would allow my hopes to rise to such an extent that when it sped by I felt bitterly rejected. Twenty minutes and seventeen bitter rejections later, I was beginning to feel a little low. Three or four weeks of this kind of torment would leave me in need of expensive counselling. My thoughts turned to the bet. I could handle losing a hundred pounds, and the knock to the pride would be considerably less than a daily dose of what I was having to suffer now. Contemplating giving up after less than an hour was not the start I had envisaged. No doubt about it, I was on the ropes. Actually I was on the canvas with the count having reached about six.

Occasionally a couple would go by and I could see what looked like the beginning of a conversation starting between them.

Date: 2015-04-20; view: 818