Benchcrawl

The benches came first.

Then the town began moving between them in groups of four. Not officially. Not intentionally. Just… naturally.

Soon nobody could remember when benchcrawling had started, only that you were noticed if you stopped.

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Scalinis.

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The benches come first. It's what people forget now or try to. There was no committee for bench crawling. No WhatsApp group, no logo, no grant application with the words community activation stuck to it like feathers on a wet hen. This was the early aughts. This was how it was done. The council put in a number of benches along the river walk after the old wall was repaired. Some more out on the road to the edge of the woods. Each one seating four, though four Irish people will never sit naturally on a bench unless two are related and one is leaving shortly. At first there were only benches. A widow sat there after mass, lads ate chips in them. A Polish man working at the power station smoked there with the seriousness and equanimity of a philosopher. A teenager carved initials into the pain, and then all teenagers were accused with no evidence at all by everyone over fifty. Then one Sunday, after a week of rain, when the promised sun finally arrived, people began walking between them. Not together, not officially, a pair would sit at the bridge bench, talk about the price of cigarettes, then rise and drift to the post office bench. A mother and daughter would leave the chapel bench and find themselves at the playground bench, where two retired guards with drinkers' noses made room without being asked. After a while there was always two or three or four moving together, sitting, rising, crossing the town in small conversational tides. Somebody called it bench crawling as a joke. The name stuck because jokes are how a town gives birth to laws without admitting it. By spring, Saturday evenings and Sunday afternoons belonged to it. But nobody really was having that. A walk has direction, bench crawling has sequence. Bridge, chapel, post office, river bend, playground, famine stone. Some tried to reverse it, but not often. The reverse route was considered showy, and moreover was contrary, though none could say quite why. It was good at first. That's the important part. It got people out, old men who had been kept busy sinking into their armchairs were seen laughing beside girls with nose rings. The Nigerian nurse from the nursing home learnt who had the land above the old road. The solicitor who usually moved through the town like an unopened letter, spent twenty minutes beside a plaster and came away knowing how to fix his own shed roof. Although he never did. The benches were democratic in theory. Four places, no more. If a fifth came somebody stood. If no one stood, the fifth moved on. It made a small courtesy of exclusion, which is one of our natural gifts in my view. Soon the benches acquired characters. The bridge bench was for beginnings and endings. There were people spoke of weather, digestion, football, and who had died without warning. The chapel bench drew apologies, not formal ones, but remarks like I was sharp with you that time, or your mother was good to mine. Little golden reconciliations where the slight was forgotten, though the rift that followed it hadn't been. The post office bench was for money, grievances, pensions, planning permission. The river bend was for rumours. The playground bench for memory. The famine stone was where silences accumulated. No one decided it. Everyone knew it. By summer you couldn't avoid the practice without it being noticed. If you stayed home two Sundays running, someone would say we didn't see you out, which meant, in that quite rural grammar, that your absence had entered the public record. The first strangeness, if you want to call it that, was Michael Hines. He was seventy eight, a man of fixed roots and little known tenderness. One Saturday he sat at the chapel bench with three others and spoke for nineteen minutes about a brother he had not mentioned since nineteen sixty four. A brother gone to England or America, or into the ground, depending on what version you had heard. Michael cried, it was said. Not much, just enough to make everyone present wish the river would rise and take them. Afterwards he said he had no memory of seeing it. People accepted this because memory at seventy eight is allowed its own weather. Then Roshin O'Dee, aged thirteen, sat at the famine stone and calmly described the inside of a house demolished before she was born. She said there had been blue plates over the dresser, and a crack in the heartstone shape like a hare. Her grandmother heard of it and went pale, then claimed the child must have seen the photographs, although no such photographs existed. Still, the town couldn't stop, if anything, attendance improved. There is a hunger in people to be drawn out, even by force, provided the force is polite. The benches began to look warm by August, too worn. The wood darkened where hands rested. The iron arms shone on the curve. On damp evenings they smelled of rain, warm coats, cut grass and something faintly mineral, like stones lifted from a stream. The conversations changed too. Less weather, more confession. A teacher admitted she had once altered exam marks. A farmer said he had buried a calf by the old fort and lied about it for insurance. The priest on the riverbend bench laughed for so long at nothing anyone else could hear that two women walked him home and didn't speak of it again. By autumn, people walked in their groups with a certain care. Two or three or four, never five. They no longer chose companions entirely. You'd leave your house intending to meet your sister and find yourself beside a man you had avoided for twenty years, both of you turning towards the chapel bench because your feet had agreed before your mind had been consulted. Some said it was good for the town. You couldn't have said they were entirely wrong. Fewer people drank alone, old quarrels loosened. The doctor said informally that loneliness was down, although she'd no measure for it and therefore could not prove the miracle, or write off to the journals. But peace has its own appetites. That winter the council removed the bridge bench for repairs. It was gone one Sunday. Only four bolt holes remained in the concrete. Dark with rain. Nobody bench crawled that day. There was something different. The circuit seemed frozen. They gathered near the absence and stood in twos and threes and fours unable to begin. Cars slowed passing the river. A dog barked once and then hid under the parked van. At dusk, Mrs. Walsh, who had never led anything beside Rosaries, lowered herself into the wet concrete where the bench had been. Three people sat beside her, not comfortably, not sensibly, but in the correct number. The next morning the bench was back, the council denied replacing it. Perhaps some local men had done it quietly. That would be like local men. Perhaps it had never been taken away at all. That would be like the town. I only know it's there now, darker than the others, with new bolts already rusted red. And if you visit on a Sunday afternoon, you will see them moving still, small groups under the Atlantic light, sitting and rising, speaking and falling silent, as if the town itself was being wound slowly around six wooden spools. Four at a time, never five. The practice isn't compulsory. Nothing here is compulsory. But if you sit they'll make room. And once room is made for you, it's discourteous not to stay.