come back panda bear

by Margaret Cahill

The first time I saw him was in Connemara. I’d gone away on my own for a few days and I set out to climb Diamond Hill on my first morning there, which was more mountain than hill, despite its name. I stopped on a stretch of boardwalk on my way up to catch my breath and stood for a while taking in the panoramic view. The upland landscape was a tapestry of Autumnal brown and sloped down towards the coast and the many rocky inlets in the distance. The wind coming in off the Atlantic made it feel colder than the nine degrees my car dash had said, which must have been why the trail was more deserted than I’d expected.

When I turned to continue my walk, there he was: a man in a panda bear suit at the end of the boardwalk. At least I assumed it was a man, given that the figure was at least six feet tall. He was just standing there looking back at me. He was like a mascot you’d see at a children’s theme park, with his furry black and white animal costume and the oversized head with those unmistakeable black patches around the eyes.

He’d appeared out of nowhere. The land was bare grass and heather in every direction. There wasn’t anything to hide behind. I should have been able to see him coming. I glanced behind me, hoping that someone else might be coming up the path behind me but there was no one. When I turned back, the panda bear was gone, just as suddenly as he had appeared. I reached into the pocket of my rain coat for my phone. There was no network, not a single bar. I was completely on my own. Who was I going to call anyway if he reappeared? The guards? Mountain Rescue? The Visitor Centre?

 I told myself that I must have imagined it. I’d been stressed with work the last few months with so many late nights trying to get a big project finished, that’s why I’d taken a week of annual leave when it was finally delivered. I knew I was a bit burnt-out but I didn’t think I was seeing-things burnt-out. I was too unnerved to carry on with my walk after that. The isolation that I’d been looking forward to when I set out that morning, now felt oppressive. I turned and headed back down as quickly as I could, looking over my shoulder the whole way, expecting to see the panda bear behind me again at any minute. I was annoyed at myself for letting it ruin my plans but I wouldn’t have been able to relax if I’d gone on, with every step taking me further away from the visitor centre and the safety of people. When I turned a corner and the car park and buildings came into view,  I finally felt safe again. I stopped at the public toilet before going to my car. When I saw how red my face was in the mirror, I realised just how fast I’d been walking. 

“Maybe I’ve been pushing myself too hard,” I thought, as I looked at my dishevelled appearance. This holiday was supposed to be about unwinding, not winding myself up more. I promised myself I’d take it easy for the rest of the day, and my trip. Back at the hotel, I spent the day in the sunroom, reading and listening to podcasts, then had an early dinner in the bar and watched TV in bed for the evening. I did the same the following day with a couple of leisurely strolls on the beach thrown in. I put the whole panda bear thing down to exhaustion and an over-active imagination and decided it was best forgotten. I didn’t mention it to anyone when I got home.

I had completely forgotten about it by the time I met the girls for a night out in town the following month. We had dinner in the new Italian restaurant by the river and were on our way to a pub afterwards when I saw him again. I was at the back of the group chatting with Sharon when something made me glance to my right, towards the water. He was standing with his back to the river, looking right at us. A couple with a golden retriever passed directly in front of him but they didn’t react at all. Sharon was looking in his direction but she didn’t say anything either. I seemed to be the only one who could see him. As we stepped off the kerb to cross the street, I had to watch where I was walking. When I looked back again, he had vanished, just like the last time.

“What are you looking for?” Sharon asked, as I stopped in the middle of the street and turned around in every direction.

“Nothing...it doesn’t matter,” I said. “I just thought I saw someone.”

I couldn’t concentrate on anything else that night and zoned out of the conversations in the pub. Maybe there was something physically wrong with me that was making me see things, like a brain tumour or something, or maybe I was developing some sort of mental illness. But why would it manifest as a man dressed as a panda bear, of all things? I hid in the lady’s room, googling causes of hallucinations. Nothing suggested they were linked to brain tumours but the lists I found didn’t make me feel any better. It said the most common causes of hallucinations were excessive use of illegal drugs and alcohol, mental illnesses like schizophrenia, neurological conditions like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, and vision loss due to macular degeneration. I didn’t have any of the other symptoms of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or schizophrenia, and they don’t run in our family. The few glasses of wine I had a week couldn’t be responsible for me seeing things. I hadn’t touched drugs since the occasional puff of a joint back in college. I told the girls I had a headache and went home early.

The next morning I got my eyes checked at the opticians. They were fine. That left mental illness the most reasonable explanation for what had happened. I didn’t think I was going through some sort of psychological turmoil, at least not before all this started. Now, I was on edge all the time, worrying about whether I would see the man in the panda bear suit again and what it meant if I did.

I’d always been a great sleeper but I suddenly found myself waking up at five or six every morning. I thought about going to the doctor but the idea of sitting in front of the very practical, no-nonsense Dr. Mangan and telling him I’d seen a man dressed as a panda bear twice in random places was more than I could stomach. I couldn’t tell anyone about it. I knew how mad it sounded. You can’t un-say something like that and it would change the way people saw me, for good.

A couple of weeks later, I got a frantic phone call from Mom to say that Dad had collapsed. The ambulance was already pulling away by the time I got to their house. I followed them in my car and met up with her in the A&E. She said she’d come downstairs and found him lying on the kitchen floor. She couldn’t wake him up. She’d even tried the thirty-year-old bottle of smelling salts from the faded biscuit tin that serves as a first-aid box. When nothing worked, she rang 999 and then me.

A CT scan that evening showed that he’d had an aneurysm that had ruptured and bled into his brain. It was likely to have caused brain damage. They wanted to try to stabilise him and repeat the scan in twenty-four hours before deciding if there were any viable treatment options. We knew from the doctor’s tone of voice that he was preparing us for the worst. I drove Mom home and heated up some soup neither of us wanted but ate anyway, while we tried to make a list of things we should bring into hospital for Dad the next day.

I couldn’t get to sleep that night at all. The sagging mattress of my childhood bed held no comfort for me. At quarter past four, I tip-toed down to the kitchen for a glass of water. As I turned the tap on, a movement in the corner of the garden caught my eye. Shit, it was him again, the man in the panda bear suit, this time on Dad’s bench under the Magnolia tree in the corner. Suddenly, water from the tap started spraying all over me as it hit off the glass in my hand. I grabbed for the tap to turn it off. I only glanced away for a second but when I looked up again, just like the other times, he was nowhere to be seen. Now, I was really scared. I couldn’t keep going on like this but I didn’t have the time or energy to deal with whatever it was, not with Dad so sick in the hospital. I was going to have to do something about it when he got better.

I was on my way back upstairs when the landline in the hall rang. It was the hospital. They said Dad’s condition had deteriorated and they suspected he’d had a massive stroke. They were doing everything they could but we needed to get their straight away. He was dead by the time we got there. He was probably already dead when they called and they didn’t want to tell us.

Having to look after Mom was the only thing that kept me going. It was like a dream, with everything blurred around the edges. The familiar momentum of the wake, the funeral and cup of tea in the community centre afterwards carried us forward. I slept at Mom’s, dealing with all the visitor, calls and cards. I did my best to avoid even looking at the garden, afraid of what I might see out there. After a week, things started to quieten down. People moved on with their own lives, as they do, and it was time for me to start thinking about going back to my own house.

My last evening at home, we were delving through boxes of photos, looking for a nice one of Dad for his memorial card when Mom suddenly erupted into a fit of giggles.

“What?” I asked.

“Oh god,” she said, looking at the photo in her hand. “One year, it was before you were born, your father promised he would be Santy for the scouts at their Christmas get-together. He was supposed to get a bag of presents from the Scout Leader, McCabe I think his name was, and then go in and give them out to the children. Well, you know your father and the way he’d leave everything to the last minute. By the time he went to the fancy dress shop, they were all out of Santy outfits and he had to make do with the dregs of what they had left. It made no sense at all. It hadn’t a thing to do with Christmas.”

She wiped tears of laughter from her eyes as she handed me the photo. My hands shook when I saw it. It was a man dressed in a panda bear suit, just like the one I’d seen.

“Can I keep it, Mom?” I asked, my voice trembling.

“Of course you can, love.,” she said, patting me on the arm. “It’ll remind you of what a great big eejit your father was.”

When I got home that night, I stuck the photo on my bed-side locker.

I haven’t seen the panda since. Now, I wish I hadn’t been afraid of him, that I’d gone to him, talked to him, done something other than freak out.

“Please come back, panda bear,” I silently plead every night, before turning off the light and when I wake up in the morning. “Next time, I won’t be afraid.”

*"This story was inspired by an image from artist Niamh McCann’s video work Furtive Tears, Salomé’s Lament (2018), in which a man wearing a giant panda bear suit appeared on a mountain overlooking Belfast city."

Photo of Margaret Cahill

BIO: Margaret Cahill is a short story writer from Limerick, Ireland. Her fiction has featured in the Irish Independent, Frazzled Lit, The Argyle, Loft Books, Roi Fainéant, Bending Genres, Idle Ink, Bulb Culture Collective, The Milk House, époque press, The Ogham Stone, The Honest Ulsterman, Silver Apples, Crannog, The Galway Review and Headstuff.org. She was short-listed for Best Short Story at the Irish Book Awards 2024.