How the Crazymad Writer Got His Name

Before I was the Crazymad Writer, I was Gerrard Wilson. In Ballykillduff, where a man can go forty years without anybody finding a good reason to call him anything else, I had every hope of staying that way.

Then I lent Jimmy McGroggan my notebook.

He wanted to copy a recipe for brown bread that I’d written on the inside cover. What he actually did was leave the notebook open on his workbench while he tested a machine for drying turf. A drop of something fell from the machine and landed on page seventeen.

Page seventeen contained the beginning of a story about the old stone bridge. I had given the bridge legs because I thought it might be tired of standing in the same place. I hadn’t decided where it would go.

The bridge, it turned out, had.

At half past three, Mrs O’Meara saw it pass her kitchen window. It was making for the village hall, stepping very carefully over her cabbages and dragging a length of river behind it.

By the time I got there, it had one foot through the hall door. Inside, the committee were setting out cups for a tea dance. A man carrying a tray of buns met the bridge coming in and, with the manners for which Ballykillduff is rightly famous, stood aside to let it pass.

“Get your bridge out of here,” said Mrs O’Meara.

“It’s the county council’s bridge,” I said.

“It was the county council’s bridge when it stayed put.”

Jimmy arrived with the notebook. We tried writing The bridge went home. The words dried, curled up and fell off the page. Jimmy suggested putting the bridge into reverse. I asked him where he thought the reverse gear might be. He went round the back to look.

Then I heard the band warming up inside. Whenever the accordion struck a note, the bridge lifted one of its enormous stone feet. I looked down at my notebook. There, in the margin beside my unfinished story, was a line I’d forgotten writing.

In two hundred years, nobody had ever asked the bridge to dance.

I went up to the parapet, took off my hat and held out my hand.

“You’re crazy,” said Jimmy.

“He’s mad,” said Mrs O’Meara. “Look at him. He’s bowing.”

“Would you care for a waltz?” I asked the bridge.

It lowered one corner of its parapet into my hand.

We had three goes at getting the first step right. A bridge has four feet, and this one liked to use all of them at once. On the fourth go, we managed a complete turn. The accordion player followed us out, still playing, and I waltzed the bridge down the road, past the cabbages and back towards the river. At the bank it gave me a surprisingly graceful curtsey, settled into its old place and let the water run under it again.

When I got back to the hall, the committee had put aside a bun for me and drawn up a bill for the door.

“Who do I make it out to?” asked the treasurer.

“Gerrard Wilson,” I said.

“Put ‘the crazy mad writer’ on it,” said Mrs O’Meara. “There are two Wilsons on the books and the other one pays on time.”

The treasurer was writing on the back of a raffle ticket. He ran out of room and squeezed crazy and mad together. I put the ticket in my pocket, and by the following morning I had a name that took considerably longer to pay off than the door.

I still walk over that bridge most days. It has behaved itself ever since, though if there’s a dance on at the hall, I take the long way home.

I’ve only the one good pair of shoes.